Tag: Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

The Essential Twain

The life of America’s premier writer

By Stephen E. Smith

Most Americans — and a generous portion of the literate world — probably consider themselves experts on Mark Twain, even if they have never read a word he wrote. After all, the white-suited former riverboat pilot was his own best PR man. The cottony hair, drooping mustache, bushy eyebrows and cutting one-liners were all a product of his unrelenting quest for fame and fortune, and his physical and intellectual attributes remain ingrained in our national character. His knack for producing quotable and acerbic squibs has left us with the impression that he was an urbane 19th-century Yogi Berra. Which is reason enough to read Ron Chernow’s latest biography, Mark Twain. In 1,000 pages of beautifully crafted prose, Chernow explores in excruciating detail the life and times of America’s premier writer and consummate self-promoter, setting the record straight, for the time being.

Nothing about Twain is simplistic or straightforward. He was endearing, irascible, temperamental, plainspoken, mean-spirited, sentimental, generous, loving, neglectful, conscientious, lazy, etc. And he lived a triumphant and calamitous existence as a typesetter, riverboat pilot, journalist, failed businessman, stand-up comedian, world-renowned author, inventor, book publisher, political wit, and staunch campaigner for racial equality and against jingoism and imperialism. To his immense credit, he was the bane of every benighted politician, from presidents to school board members. He was also guilt-ridden, holding himself responsible for the fatal scalding of his younger brother in a boiler explosion and the death of his 19-month-old son, Langdon, whom he had taken out in inclement weather. He buried his wife and two daughters, and during his later years, his behavior was often problematic.

Chernow manages to include every significant detail of Twain’s life, and he supports his occasional judgments with meticulous research, including 180 pages of endnotes and citations. He also energizes the most mundane elements of Twain’s existence with his talent for narrative pacing and a prose style that reads effortlessly. It makes little difference if the reader is a longtime Twain aficionado or a superficial fan who learned of Twain’s achievements from Cliff Notes; Chernow’s narrative is so enthralling that his copious text seems vaguely insufficient.

More than half the book details Twain’s Horatio Alger years, his ascent from Hannibal to Hartford. The halcyon days of his literary success and blissful family life make for pleasurable reading, but the latter years of Twain’s existence — his descent from Olympus — will likely be a challenge for the casual reader.

The last quarter of the biography, which covers the three periods of Twain’s life that are the least fascinating and most disquieting, is not an easy read. His obsession with his “angelfish,” girls ages 10 to 16, with whom he surrounded himself, requires a lengthy and convoluted explanation that is likely to strike contemporary readers as, well, a trifle creepy.

After the death of his wife, Olivia, Twain sought out the company of young girls. These visits were frequent, occurring almost daily. In his 40s, Twain wrote, “Young girls innocent & natural — I love ’em same as others love infants.” Twenty years later, he said, “Nothing else in the world is ever so beautiful as a beautiful schoolgirl.” Twain didn’t find these liaisons embarrassing or shameful: “I have the college-girl habit,” he confessed, and when he visited Vassar to speak at a benefit, he surrounded himself with 500 college girls and noted that almost all were “young and lovely, untouched by care, unfaded by age.”

A few biographers have claimed that Twain was a latent pedophile, but Chernow maintains that Twain “had an insatiable need for unconditional love and got it from the angelfish, not from his daughters.” His daughters regarded the angelfish camaraderie with a mild degree of jealousy, but Twain had, over the course of his later years, intentionally disengaged from his grown children. Susy was dead at 24 of bacterial meningitis, Jean suffered from epilepsy, and Clara avoided her overbearing father by pursuing a singing career.

There is never a hint of sexual involvement with any of the angelfish. Chernow notes: “If Twain thrashed himself with guilt about many things, he never had regrets about the angelfish. Far from being ashamed, he was positively proud of this development and posed with the girls for the press.”

Twain’s writing and lecturing made him rich, but he was an incompetent investor. He poured money into the Paige typesetting machine, a device so complex that it never functioned correctly. He also lost money investing in a publishing company. Having made a small fortune by issuing the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, he frittered away the money on foolish projects. Eventually, the publishing company failed, and Twain went bankrupt and had to embark on a world lecture tour to repay his creditors. Chernow manages to untangle Twain’s complicated finances while holding the reader’s undivided attention.

Later in his life, a disconcerting soap opera entanglement developed within Twain’s household. After his wife, Olivia, died, he and his surviving daughters relied on Isabel Lyon as a stenographer, confidant and household assistant, and an ambiguity arose regarding Lyon’s position in the household. Was she an employee or a family member? Had she assumed the position of Twain’s late wife? As Lyon gradually took over Twain’s affairs, her attachment to Jean and Clara grew strained. She eventually contrived to have Jean hospitalized, and her relationship with Clara collapsed. Twain fired Lyon for misappropriating household funds and became embroiled in a series of scandalous and exasperating lawsuits.

In setting the record straight, Chernow tarnishes Twain’s carefully crafted image, revealing a human being who could be greedy and vindictive, but also a writer whose words are as fresh and clear today as when he first wrote them.

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

A Day at the Beach

When everything goes wrong

By Anne Blythe

If you’re one of those people who like to walk on the beach and dream up scenarios for what might be happening in some of those homes looking out over the ocean, Kristie Woodson Harvey has a whale of a tale for you.

In Beach House Rules, the Beaufort-based author takes readers inside a massive two-story oceanfront home enveloped by “the salt air and rhythmic shush of the waves” in fictional Juniper Shores, North Carolina. Harvey’s 11th book, which she describes as “an ode to female friendship,” also has mystery, a touching exploration into what makes a family and, of course, a love story or two — many of the elements for a breezy, easy beach read.

Inside Alice Bailey’s massive beach house is the “mommune,” an intriguing co-living situation that — because of a variety of individual crises — brings a cast of women and their children together. Charlotte Sitterly and her teenage daughter, Iris, are the newest “mommune” residents, having found themselves in need of shelter, hugs and support after being locked out of their five-bedroom, four-and-a-half bath shorefront home by the FBI.

Bill, husband of Charlotte and dad of Iris, is in the local jail, accused of a white collar crime that thrusts their family into the glaring spotlight of an anonymous gossipy Instagram account that revels in “sharing bad behavior and delicious drama in North Carolina’s most exclusive coastal ZIP code.”

Charlotte, Bill and Iris came to Juniper Shores during the height of the pandemic, refugees from a locked-down New York City. While snuggling on the wide-open beach during what was supposed to be a temporary visit, soaking up the orange glow of a Mayflower moon and watching their daughter make friends with a neighbor girl, Bill suggested they build a house there, miles and worlds away from their hectic and confined city life. Charlotte leaned into her husband and quickly said yes.

Fast forward to Charlotte’s meltdown in the lobby of Suncoast Bank, three days after coming home to a swarm of police cars and FBI agents combing through her dream house. With the family’s financial assets seized, Charlotte needed a job. Her work history was in finance, so she thought she would try the local bank, but convincing a bank or investment firm to take on the spouse of a man accused of stealing large sums of money from his clients was a tough sell.

Alice, known around town as the woman with three dead husbands in 12 years, offered Charlotte a supportive ear and refuge at her former bed-and-breakfast where women and their children facing hardships comprise the “mommune.” With only enough cash to afford two more weeks at a modest hotel, Charlotte agreed. Her mind raced as she walked into the Bailey house. What if Alice was a creepy killer who’d offed her husbands? Was she a lunatic or a saint? And always in the back of her mind, what if Bill had, indeed, committed the financial crimes he was accused of? Charlotte tamped down those questions as Alice took her through the unlocked door into a haven with a chef’s kitchen, an open-plan dining room, a living room that stretched across the entire house and an array of comfortable bedrooms.

Through the alternate narratives of Charlotte, Iris and Alice, Harvey weaves in the many side stories. We learn about Julie Dartmouth, Alice’s niece and a dogged reporter who was the first woman to take up residence, along with her children, in the Bailey house. Before Charlotte and Iris arrived she “seemed to absolutely revel in writing about Bill’s arrest.” But “beach house rules” changed that.

Grace, Julie’s best friend and an Instagram influencer who has gained a large following sharing her recipes on “Growing with Grace,” was the second mom to join the so-called “lost ladies club.” She moved in after her husband split to Tokyo, leaving her with a mortgage to pay and children to raise, one of whom is a star high school quarterback and heartthrob, an added bonus for Iris, a 14-year-old navigating the highs and lows of teenage years.

Elliott Palmer, Alice’s former boyfriend who wants to reignite their love story, has the potential to upend this makeshift family. He’s not deterred by Alice’s wake of dead husbands or other claims that she’s cursed. “You’re not going to kill me,” he tells her over a bottle of Champagne and a remote table for two overlooking the water.

Harvey weaves all these storylines together, thread by thread, mystery by mystery, to an end that reveals whether or not Alice — who, not coincidentally, had taken a financial hit from the white-collar crime Bill is accused of — had ulterior motives when she invited Charlotte and her daughter to stay with her.

While there are dark clouds that hang over the many mysteries within this mystery, the romance and light fun make it more about community and the friendships that can unexpectedly occur when it seems like everything is falling apart.

According to the Beach House Rules, setbacks can be blessings in disguise.

2025 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

Duck and Cover

How to keep your personal information safe

By Stephen E. Smith

When my mother was a teenager, she was the only all-night operator in a town of about 2,000 souls. The hours were long, so she eavesdropped on private conversations. When she got home, she shared the latest gossip with my grandmother, and within a few hours, everyone in town knew everyone else’s business.

In theory, it still works that way, except, of course, that our personal data is managed by computers — our iPhones, laptops, tablets and the clandestine eavesdropping monsters that lurk in the mystical ether — which speed up and amplify the collection process while disseminating our confidential information globally. The result, however, is the same: There are no secrets, finally or ever.

This is why Lawrence Cappello’s On Privacy: Twenty Lessons to Live By is a timely little book (151 pages) that’s surely worth the few minutes it takes to read it. It won’t be the most exciting book you’ve read, but it might be one of the most important.

Cappello is a professor of U.S. legal and constitutional history at the University of Alabama. He’s the author of None of Your Damn Business: Privacy in the United States from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age, and he’s a certified information privacy professional. He’s on top of this data collection stuff, and his advice might help you sleep a little more soundly.

We’re hammered daily by claims that the equity in our homes is being stolen, our bank accounts plundered, our reputations besmirched, and our children driven to suicide. And then there are the endless scams that pop up on our screens (I consider everything a scam until it proves itself otherwise, and then I know for sure it is a scam). And now the government — who should be protecting us — has gotten into the info-distribution game via the unsupervised plundering of heretofore confidential databases.

On Privacy is written for those who are fearful about the disclosure of their personal data but who are reluctant to toss out their electronic devices. Cappello cuts through the noise and confusion and enumerates in short, sensible steps the necessary safeguards we need to adopt to be secure in the digital age. He offers practical insights into why privacy matters, how it shapes free societies, and how it rules our lives in an increasingly interconnected electronic world.

What Cappello doesn’t do is bombard his readers with terrifying stories about unfortunate fellow citizens who’ve suffered life-altering internet crimes. Horrifying examples only encourage despair. Instead, Cappello begins by addressing the requisite rationalization, “The Nothing-to-Hide Trap,” in which we maintain that if we are full-time do-gooders, we have nothing to fear from those who’d access our personal data. “Our personal information exists in snippets,” he writes. “When taken out of context, the private details of our lives . . . too often paint a picture of us that is skewed and not entirely true,” and thus we are often misrepresented. Since first impressions matter, we should focus on what computers collect and, more importantly, the distribution of our personal data.

Cappello breaks down the threats to our privacy into easy-to-read chapters that present the problems and suggest solutions. After a brief discussion of “Privacy Is Essential to Mental Health,” he appends suggestions on “How to Talk About Privacy’s Mental Health Benefits,” followed by “How to Protect Your Mental Health Through Privacy.” It’s all very straightforward.

He claims, for example, that we have the right to be forgiven our youthful transgressions. We make mistakes. “Unfortunately, the mistakes we make in life will remain instantly accessible,” he writes, “to any stranger inclined to take thirty seconds for a quick online search.”

Moreover, we are constantly under surveillance; our movements are tracked by our phones, computers and cameras on the street. If that’s not intrusive enough, outside sources can read your private electronic communications. He offers a solution: Secure your email with PGP encryption, a popular tool that scrambles your writing so that only the intended recipient can read it. The same is true for texts; encrypted text messaging apps are readily available and require only a quick download to your phone. These email and text apps also have an automatic delete option. And he recommends you buy a Faraday bag, a small pouch that blocks all signals; otherwise, you can be tracked by your phone even if you turn off your GPS.

Not only are we surveilled by private entities, but the government has, for many years, been poking into our business. Surveillance is the enemy of free expression: It discourages people from participating in political movements by instilling the fear they’ll be arrested for speaking out against the powerful, which inhibits the right of free assemblage as guaranteed by the First Amendment. Cappello reminds us that the “belief that the surveillance powers of the state must be constantly kept in check is a cornerstone of what it means to live in a free country.”

Most of Cappello’s recommendations are simple and easily implemented: “When in doubt, log out,” delete apps you aren’t using and any accounts associated with them, tape off the camera on your computer, clear your browser history, get rid of caches and cookies, turn off and lock your computer when not in use, and purchase your own Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which makes it difficult to track your online activity. And those are just a few of the suggestions that might save you money and safeguard your reputation.

Of course, the obvious way to protect your future information — there’s little you can do about the past — is to disappear or “go dark,” as folks are wont to say. This would necessitate the destruction of all your electronics — computers, streaming devices, tablets, phones, smartwatches, etc., and all storage systems — thumbnail drives, hard drives, data stored in the cloud (the global network of remote servers that functions as a single ecosystem), old floppy disks, credit cards, etc. Everything. All of it. Then disappear. Forever.

2025 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

Mountain Thriller

Murder in the Grove Park Inn

By Anne Blythe

If you’re someone who likes to armchair travel through the pages of a good book, Terry Roberts, a native of the North Carolina mountains, has a thriller of a journey for you.

In The Devil Hath a Pleasing Shape, Roberts transports his readers to the luxurious Grove Park Inn, a stately and historic resort in Asheville that serves as the dark yet alluring backdrop for a murder mystery that exposes the tiers of a justice system that doesn’t always treat the wealthy and the poor equally.

The book starts with a bang when a nameless man standing near a tousled bed pulls out a pearl-handled derringer, shoots a naked college girl and leaves her on the thick, soft carpet to die in a pool of her own blood.

We quickly meet Stephen Baird Robbins in his home in Hot Springs, 30 miles downriver from Asheville. He’s a twice-married, once-divorced and once-widowed man who has stood trial twice for murder and been acquitted both times.

It’s October 1924, and Robbins, a retired investigator with a reputation for solving seemingly unsolvable crimes, is living a somewhat relaxed existence in a rental home with Luke, his 3-year-old son whose mother died in childbirth. Life had dealt them some wounds and bruises, but Robbins and his two neighbors were optimistic that together, they could raise Luke to adulthood.

When Robbins received a letter on fancy stationery from Benjamin Loftis, owner of the Grove Park Inn, trying to stir him out of his secluded piece of the world, he balled it up and threw it in the fireplace. Loftis persevered, first with a telegram telling Robbins his “presence is required due to a matter of some urgency,” and then with a personal follow-up in a chauffeur-driven trip to Hot Springs.

Loftis, a “newspaperman, chemist, pharmaceutical manufacturer, self-styled architect and — this is important —hotel man,” gave his pitch to Robbins. The hotel’s renown was in jeopardy after a college girl was found dead in one of the plush rooms.

“So in sum, you have a murder on your hands, and not just any murder, but the worst kind — a supposedly innocent young woman,” Robbins responds to Loftin. “The publicity is killing you. Two weeks have gone by and the sheriff hasn’t been able to nail anybody for it and you are getting desperate.” Robbins, a character who has appeared in two previous books by Roberts, let the hotel owner know from the start that he might not like the results.

“I want the murderer caught and punished, so that the inn’s reputation will remain unsullied,” Loftin responds.

Thus begins a tale that takes Robbins, who describes himself as “hill born and runaway” with “rarely two bills in my wallet to rub together,” to a resort where a man of his socioeconomic background is rarely a favored guest. Given wide access to the large granite stone inn described as “the finest pile of rocks ever built,” in October, “when fall began to wrap its cold hands around the mountains,” Robbins checks into the third floor hotel room next door to the murder scene.

The cast of characters includes an array of hotel workers and well-heeled guests such as judges, politicians and other townspeople who want to mingle and be seen among the wealthy travelers seeking retreat.

The hotel workers, its dining room servers, front desk managers and dutiful housekeepers are an interesting lot. The hotel itself, with all its corridors, luxurious amenities and nooks and crannies, becomes its own character.

Then there are the “girls” — the young women brought in to “keep the party lively” for events that might draw mostly men and a few bored wives. Robbins, a tenacious investigator with a knack for building rapport with the working people, has no qualms about standing up to the powerful. He is determined to find out who killed Rosalind Caldwell, or “Rosie,” as the locals called the young woman found dead in the hotel.

“Perhaps only Stephen Robbins could do what must be done here,” Roberts writes in his acknowledgements thanking the character for yet another appearance in one of his books. “After all, this is a book about prostitution and politics — a timely topic — and it required a hard hand and true voice to find justice.”

The Devil Hath a Pleasing Shape is about social status, privilege, racial injustices a wrongful arrest and a forthright observation that things are not always as they seem, even if that’s what the wider community wants you to believe. In fast-moving, descriptive prose, Roberts takes readers on a pursuit filled with danger and love that reveals the deaths of two other young women found lifeless in circumstances eerily similar to Rosie’s.

These were not the sort of women whose deaths would typically draw big headlines in Prohibition Era Asheville, Robbins notes. Their bodies were not discovered in a fancy hotel, nor did they come from the well-to-do neighborhoods of the town’s rich and famous.

Even if there are enough clues to figure out the likely killer long before the story ends, Roberts is adept at pulling his readers through to the conclusion to find out whether or not there will be justice for these victims. It’s an entertaining pursuit, a journey to another place and another time well worth taking.

2025 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

Coin of the Realm

The history of Rome in loose change

By Stephen E. Smith

If you believe the ancient Romans had little to do with your life, look at your feet. They gave us the concept of left and right footwear. They also left us their checkered history, of which there’s too damn much. If you’ve tackled Gibbon’s unabridged The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, you know that a manageable history of ancient Rome requires a framing device that places events and characters in perspective.

Historian/numismatist Gareth Harney has devised an agreeable gimmick. He has selected what he believes are the 12 most significant coins minted during the Empire’s 800-plus years, and he’s written A History of Ancient Rome in Twelve Coins, connecting the coinage to the emperors and events that influenced their minting.

Roman coins were struck from alloys of gold, silver, bronze, orichalcum or copper — materials that gave them resilience — and they are discovered still in Welsh fields and Polish barnyards. You can buy a pile of uncleaned Roman coins on eBay for $30.

First introduced in the third century BCE, Roman coins were used well into the Middle Ages, and during a denarius’ existence, it would likely have passed between millions of hands. Many of the coins are worn smooth, obscuring the profile of the emperor or god whose likeness was meant to ensure political stability and economic security.

In crisp, energetic prose, Harney opens each chapter as if he were writing historical fiction. “The vision was surely his alone,” he writes of Constantine’s moment of conversion. “Yet the confused shouts of his soldiers seemed to claim otherwise. As the marching column ground to a halt before the spectacle, men raised their arms to the clear sky, calling out to their emperor to witness the unfolding miracle. It took shape, by all accounts, in the rays of the midday sun. A glowing halo surrounding the solar disk, sparkling with additional rival suns where it was intersected by radiating horizontal and vertical beams — all shimmering like jewels with spectral color.”

Harney guides the reader through the history of Rome from Romulus, suckled by a wolf on an early Roman coin, to the last emperor, who was deposed by the German general Odoacer in 476 CE. In the early years of the Empire, coins illustrated mythical scenes and various gods and goddesses, but that changed, as did much of Roman life, when Julius Caesar issued coins bearing his likeness. “Even in an age of giants — Pompey, Cicero, Antony and Cleopatra — Caesar would tower above all,” Harney writes, “bestriding the world like a colossus.” The appearance of Caesar’s profile on the Roman denarius in 44 BCE is acknowledged as a transformative moment in Roman history. The new coin violated ancient law, tradition, and the sacred delineation between military and civic authority. Caesar went so far as to order the minting of a denarius with the likeness of the defeated Gallic leader Vercingetorix, an enemy of the Roman Republic.

The Julio-Claudian dynasty receives its due — Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Vespasian, et al. — and Harney explains the events leading to the coinage produced by each emperor. Bits and pieces of Roman excess and debauchery are reviewed in tolerable detail, and readers are occasionally treated to new depravities, of which there was no shortage in an empire populated with leaders who were murdered almost as quickly as they took power.

For many of these upstart emperors, assassination was often a merciful escape. In 260 AD, for example, the emperor Valerian was defeated by King Shapur I and was taken prisoner. He lived out his years in slavery, falling to his hands and knees to act as a step for Shapur to mount his horse. The emperor of Rome had become a human footstool for an enemy king who later had him skinned, stuffed and placed on display.

Harney’s discussion of the various currencies makes the constant shuffling of Roman emperors slightly less confusing, but the devaluation of Roman coinage is his most significant and timely lesson. The emperors, unable to pay for Rome’s defense, lessened the amount of silver or gold in each coin. “By 270, the ‘silver’ coins of Rome held less than 2 percent precious metal. Nothing more than crude scraps of copper rushed out of the mint, without a thought of quality control. A thin silver wash on the coins only served to insult the intelligence of the Roman people, and quickly wore off to reveal the depressing base metal below.” Any belief in a reliable gold or silver standard vanished from the monetary system. As coinage ceased to hold its value, Romans returned to barter as a method of exchange. When new coins were issued, they dulled more quickly, and they felt light in the hand, signaling debasement. Each degraded coin is part of the puzzle whose final piece reveals the complete collapse of the Roman state.

A History of Ancient Rome in Twelve Coins will appeal to a broad audience. Excluding the rare reader who has a comprehensive knowledge of Roman history and the numismatist specializing in Roman coinage, the majority of readers (those who saw an episode or two of I, Claudius or the movie Gladiator) will find Harney’s history well-written, informative and sophisticated — high-end Monarch Notes for Gibbon’s six-volume Decline and Fall. They may even feel inspired to start collecting Roman coins.

Harney doesn’t claim that his research offers profound insights into our contemporary political divisions or the teetering state of our democracy, but readers will likely infer whatever lesson appeals to their politics. One truth, however, is inescapable: Empires rot from the inside out.

2025 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

The Heart of Appalachia

Discovering a long-forgotten love

By Anne Blythe

Appalachia and its resilient people have been in the news digging out from the path of destruction carved through the mountainous region by the powerful remnants of Hurricane Helene. Vice President JD Vance rose to political prominence, in part, based on his 2016 depiction of the region in Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. Isabel Reddy, a science writer based in Chapel Hill who has turned her hand to fiction, tells another story of Appalachian life in her debut novel, That You Remember.

Reddy takes readers to the fictional Otter Creek Hollow, a Kentucky coal country “holler” full of men with “miner’s mascara” — that perpetual dark smudge of coal around the eyes — and the cast of women who rile, nurture and support them. Reddy, herself the daughter of a former coal company president, brings the miners, company executives and townspeople to life in a poignant page-turner about love, self- discovery and impending catastrophe.

The story starts when Aleena Rowan Fitzgerald receives a box from her brother with her deceased father’s desk diaries enclosed. It’s 2019, and Aleena, the mother of two college-age daughters, is in the midst of a divorce that has forced her to examine who she was, who she is, and who she wants to be.

Aleena’s dad, Frank Rowan, spent much of his working life away from their Connecticut home, either at his New York City office or on the road. “Here was a man who, from looking at his desk diaries, could schmooze with politicians and owners of large conglomerates, who flew all over the place and dined at the most fashionable hotels and restaurants,” says Aleena. After the family company bought Otter Creek Mining Company, an acquisition Rowan initially described as “another truck mine teetering on the edge of bankruptcy in a backwoods ravine,” Frank visited Otter Creek Hollow often, trying to learn the lay of the land.

As Aleena flips through pages about her father’s work life, including his trips to Otter Creek, she finds a slip of paper with the name “Sara” scrawled on it three times. If it had been only once, it might not have piqued her interest, but three times sets Aleena on a journey from her Connecticut home to Kentucky coal country. “I wondered what Sara was like. If there even was a Sara,” Aleena adds.

Frank Rowan and Sara Stone come to life as Reddy blends the past with the present, taking readers down into the coal mines with the clanks, rumbles, smells and signs of peril while fleshing out the characters who live their lives above ground in the restaurants, homes and businesses. They are not the caricatures of Appalachia so often portrayed in modern literature and art. The people of Otter Creek Hollow are warm, giving and protective of one another while often exhibiting a hard-won, home-grown worldliness. The protagonists are multilayered and complex, much like the geography of the region itself. They offer pearls of down-home wisdom, and encircle one another during their trials and tribulations. Reddy crafts them with sensitivity and an understanding gained through her own trips to Appalachia, and the conversations she had with the people who live in the hills and valleys there.

Sara has an enigmatic air when the mere mention of her name in the beginning pages of Reddy’s novel opens the door to Aleena, inviting her into the narrative. But when she and Aleena come face to face and Sara invites her into her home, Reddy flashes back almost 50 years to 1970, before Otter Creek Hollow is obliterated by a Thanksgiving Day dam breach that sends a 30-foot tidal wave of black, fiery slurry and debris through the hollow, scooping up homes, people, cars and infrastructure in its path.

It is long ago, before the disaster, when Sara and Frank meet at a fishing hole, two people caught in a world they don’t necessarily want to be in. Dead-set against getting romantically involved with a miner, Sara has dreams of leaving the valley, going to college and finding a more fulfilling job than being a waitress. Frank is a fledgling executive entrenched in a family business that seems more focused on profits than the safety of the coal country communities.

Their bond is quick, but both want to keep it secret. He’s married, with an alcoholic wife and three children (including Aleena) at home. She has brothers who would not be so warm and inviting if they found out she was being romanced by an “operator,” the generic name for the owners and operators of the mines.

The novel is loosely based on Reddy’s discovery of her own father’s work diaries and the 1972 Buffalo Creek mining disaster in West Virginia that killed 125 people and left nearly 5,000 without a home after three coal waste lagoons failed and sent a 30-foot wave careening through a 10-mile hollow at 35 miles per hour. The fictional Otter Creek Hollow disaster also left 125 dead and nearly 4,000 homeless — a cataclysmic event still very much on the minds of survivors 50 years later, when Aleena finally meets Sara in the flesh.

“This long journey, which seemed so foolish, had such a surprising result,” Aleena concludes at the end of her hunt. “I felt like I’d been given the father, the one I’d always wanted, my dad. He was a complicated man, but a loving one.”

Reddy’s writing is as fast-paced and vivid as the dam break she describes, tugging and pulling at the hearts and sensitivities of readers as they go along. The disaster looms as large as the love story, half a century old. “Your father was a unique man, I’d say,” Sara tells Aleena of the brief affair. “I suppose there was that tough businessman side of him, but that’s not the side he showed me. Our time together was kind of separate from the world.”

Then after a pause, Sara adds: “He had a good heart.”

That You Remember does, too.

2025 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

Endless Fascination

The troubled life of F. Scott Fitzgerald

By Stephen E. Smith

In his 1971 memoir Upstate, literary critic Edmond Wilson grouses about college kids knocking at the door of his “Old Stone House” in Talcottville, New York. “They want to know about Scott Fitzgerald and that’s all,” he writes. Wilson was Fitzgerald’s classmate at Princeton University, and he edited Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up and the unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon.

If you’re a reader of literary biographies, you can understand Wilson’s peevishness. Bookstore and library shelves are lined with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald bios. Matthew Bruccoli’s Some Sort of Epic Grandeur is the definitive work. Still, there are many other bios — at least 30 — that are worth considering: Scott Donaldson’s Fool For Love, Arthur Krystal’s Some Unfinished Chaos, Niklas Salmose and David Rennie’s F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography, among others.

Robert Garnett’s recent Taking Things Hard: The Trials of F. Scott Fitzgerald contributes significantly to the material available on the Jazz Age author and will be of particular interest to Fitzgerald aficionados with a North Carolina connection.

Garnett, a professor emeritus of English at Gettysburg College, is best known for his biography, Charles Dickens in Love. His Fitzgerald study is less inclusive than his work on Dickens, covering the final 20 years of Fitzgerald’s life, but his research is meticulous and reveals aspects of Fitzgerald’s personality that other biographers have ignored or overlooked.

During his most prolific years — 1924-1935 — Fitzgerald’s primary source of income was his short fiction (he published 65 stories in The Saturday Evening Post alone), and he was paid between $1500-$5,000 per story when a Depression-era income for a high-wage earner was $1,000 a year. Garnett focuses on the better-known stories — “The Ice Palace,” “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “The Intimate Strangers,” “Babylon Revisited,” “One Trip Abroad,” etc. — to explicate the romantic themes and ineffable mysteries that defined Fitzgerald’s checkered life.

The story “Last of the Belles,” written in 1927, exemplifies Fitzgerald’s return to the familiar theme of romantic infatuation and lost love. The story closely parallels Fitzgerald’s time in Montgomery, Alabama, where he served as a young lieutenant during World War I. He incorporates his courtship of his future wife, Zelda Sayre, into the narrative and transforms her into the character of Ailie Calhoun, “the top girl” in town. The narrator, identified only as Andy, is smitten by Ailie, but she becomes enamored of Earl Schoen, a former streetcar conductor disguised in an officer’s uniform.

“The Last of the Belles” plays off Fitzgerald’s strong sense of class, his longing to recapture youthful romance, and his grieving “for that vanished world and vanished mood, Montgomery in 1918 . . . a living poetry of youth, warmth, charming girls, and romance.” “The Last of the Belles” is Fitzgerald’s final attempt to recapture the South of his youth and its alluring women.

A close reading of the stories opens a window into Fitzgerald’s thematic preoccupations, allowing the readers to glimpse aspects of his thinking that are not readily apparent in his less spontaneous, more ambitious novels. But it also presents the reader with a challenge. Garnett provides a synopsis of the stories he cites, but to fully comprehend his explications, it is necessary to read the stories in their entirety, an undertaking that casual readers might find laborious.

Fitzgerald’s North Carolina sojourn is at the heart of Taking Things Hard. In the Fitzgerald papers at Princeton’s Firestone Library, a personal journal kept by Laura Guthrie, a palm reader at Asheville’s Grove Park Inn, draws an intimate, none-too-flattering portrait of Fitzgerald during his saddest period. “The 150-page single-spaced typescript follows him closely, day by day, often hour by hour,” Garnett writes. “Most Fitzgerald scholars are aware of it; few have read it through, fewer still have mined it.” Garnett believes Guthrie’s journal “is the most valuable single source for any period of his (Fitzgerald’s) life.”

In the early spring of 1935, Fitzgerald fled Baltimore for Asheville. He rented adjoining rooms at The Grove Park Inn, where he wrote a series of historical stories for Redbook. Garnett describes these stories as “wooden, simplistic, puerile, awash in cliché and banality, with ninth-century colloquial rendered in a hodgepodge of cowboy-movie, hillbilly, and detective novel.” These amateurish stories were the low point of Fitzgerald’s writing career.

Guthrie became Fitzgerald’s confidant, constant companion and caregiver. He and Guthrie were not physically intimate, but she was enamored. Of their first dinner together, she wrote, “He drank his ale and loved me with his eyes, and then with his lips for he said, ‘I love you Laura,’ and insisted, ‘I do love you, Laura, and I have only said that to three women in my life.’”

The story Guthrie tells is anything but inspirational. Fitzgerald was intoxicated most of the time — she recorded that he drank as many as 37 bottles of beer a day — and he insisted that she remain at his beck and call. “He is extremely dictatorial,” she wrote, “and expects to be obeyed at once — and well.” As the summer progressed, his drinking grew worse, and he eventually turned to gin “with the idea,” Guthrie noted, “that he had to finish the story and that he could not do it on beer, even if he took 30 or so cans a day, and so he would have to have strong help — first whiskey and then gin.”

In June, Fitzgerald headed to Baltimore and detrained briefly in Southern Pines to visit with James and Katharine Boyd. His conduct while visiting with the Boyds was such that he felt compelled to write a letter of apology when he arrived in Baltimore.

In late 1935, Fitzgerald took a room in Hendersonville, North Carolina, and wrote his self-deprecatingly “Crack-Up” articles. Published in Esquire in 1936, these revealing essays marked the end of his career as a popular novelist and short story writer. He would eventually move to Hollywood, spending the remainder of his days toiling for the dream factories and outlining a novel he would never complete. He died there in relative obscurity in 1940 at the age of 44.

A century after its publication, The Great Gatsby remains a mainstay of the American literary canon, and critics and scholars continue re-evaluating Fitzgerald’s life. No matter how many times they retell the story, it will never have a happy ending.

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Finishing Touches

How Katherine Min’s last novel came to be

By Anne Blythe

The story about the making of The Fetishist, Katherine Min’s posthumously published novel, is almost as interesting as the book itself. It has been touted as a novel ahead of its time — a comic, yet sincere, tender and occasionally befuddling exploration of sexual and racial politics.

The story is told through three main characters: Daniel Karmody, a white Irish-American violinist from whom the novel gets its name; Alma Soon Ja Lee, a Korean-American cellist, who’s only 13 when the first of many fetishists she encounters whispers “Oriental girls are so sexy”; and Kyoto Tokugawa, a 23-year-old Japanese American punk rocker who devises a madcap assassination plot to avenge the man she believes to be responsible for her mother’s suicide.

The novel starts 20 years after the estrangement of Alma and Daniel and ends with them reconnecting. In between, readers get to see Kyoto’s zany failed assassination attempt of Daniel and subsequent kidnapping. They’ll learn of his dalliances with a cast of women — many of them musicians, such as Kyoto’s mother, Emi — while he longed for the excitement and thrill he felt with Alma.

The intertwining of the narratives of these protagonists and the intriguing significant others in their orbits lead to alluring plot twists and a timeless appraisal of the white male’s carnal objectification of Asian women. But let’s start with the end of the book and the touching afterword by Kayla Min Andrews, Min’s daughter, a fiction writer like her mother, who explains how The Fetishist came to be published.

It almost wasn’t.

Min was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014 and died in 2019, the day after her 60th birthday. She was an accomplished writer who taught at the University of North Carolina at Asheville for 11 years, as well as a brief stint at Queens University in Charlotte. Her first published novel, Secondhand World, a story about a Korean-American teen clashing with immigrant parents, came out in 2006 to literary acclaim and was one of two finalists for the prestigious PEN Bingham Prize. During the ensuing years, Min worked on what would become her second and final novel, The Fetishist, reading portions to her daughter over the years.

“My new novel is very different from Secondhand World,” Min told her daughter during a phone call Andrews details in her afterword. “It’s going to have many characters, omniscient narration. Lots of shit is going to happen — suicide, kidnapping, attempted murder. It’ll be arch and clever, but always heartfelt. I’m gonna channel Nabokov. And part of it takes place in Florence, so I have to go there as research.”

Min completed a draft of The Fetishist sometime in 2013, her daughter writes. “I assumed she would pass it to me when she was ready,” Andrews wrote. “But she was still revising, polishing.” Then the cancer diagnosis hit.

Although fiction had long been Min’s forte, she stunned her family shortly after getting the news, letting them and others know that she no longer was interested in what she had been writing and instead found purpose in personal essays examining her experiences with illness and dying.

“She never looked back,” Andrews wrote. “When anyone asked about The Fetishist, Mom would say, ‘I’m done with fiction,’ in the same tone she would say, ‘I’m a word wanker,’ or, ‘I’m terrific at math.’ Matter-of-fact, with a dash of defiant pride. She didn’t refer to The Fetishist as an ‘unfinished’ novel. She called it ‘abandoned.’”

And that was that.

As Min’s life was coming to an end, she and Andrews discussed many things, such as where she wanted her “remaining bits of money” to go, and how the playlist for her memorial service should include The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” DeVotchKa’s “How It Ends,” and Janis Joplin’s “Get It While You Can.”

“What we did not discuss in the hospice center was her abandoned novel. Or her essay collection. Or anything related to posthumous publishing,” Andrews wrote. After several years of grieving, therapy and a new celebration of her mother, Andrews and others saw to it that The Fetishist, found nearly completed in manuscript form on her mom’s computer, would be shared with others. Andrews helped fill in the story’s gaps.

“I am so happy Mom’s beautiful novel is being published; I am so sad she is not here to see it happen,” Andrews wrote. “I’m happy The Fetishist’s publication process is helping me grow as a writer and a person; I’m sad Mom’s death is the reason I’m playing this role. I suppose I no longer conceptualize joy and sorrow as opposites, because everything related to The Fetishist’s publication makes me feel flooded with both at once.”

Sorrow and joy are among the emotions that flood through The Fetishist, too. Min had it right when she told her daughter her novel would be “arch and clever, and very heartfelt.” The author’s note at the beginning of the novel sums it up well:

“This is a story, a fairy tale of sorts, about three people who begin in utter despair. There is even a giant, a buried treasure (a tiny one), a hero held captive, a kind of ogre (a tiny one), and a sleeping beauty,” she advises her readers. “And because it’s a fairy tale, it has a happy ending. For the hero, the ogre, and the sleeping beauty, and for the giant, too. After all, every story has a happy ending, depending on where you put THE END.”

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After the Amber

A novel of disappearance and guilt

By Stephen E. Smith

A startling buzzing blasts from your phone or TV, followed by a high-pitched whine, and a detailed description of a missing child inching across the screen. It’s an active Amber Alert — a child abduction emergency. We experience these alerts too often, but we rarely learn what becomes of the missing child or how such a disappearance affects the child’s family, friends and the community in which the child lives.

Marybeth Mayhew Whalen’s 10th novel, Every Moment Since, is a fictional exploration of the emotional forces that wear on those who knew and loved 11-year-old Davy Malcor, who went missing for over two decades. The narrative opens with an early morning phone call informing Sheriff Lancaster that Davy’s favorite jacket was found in an abandoned building near the small North Carolina town of Wynotte. The burden of Davy’s disappearance is still very much in the public consciousness, fixed there by a bestselling memoir written by Davy’s older brother, Thaddeus, who had been responsible for watching over Davy on the night he vanished. On that tragic evening, Davy’s parents were attending a cocktail party, and Thaddeus ditched Davy so he could drink beer with his buddies. Davy wandered in the darkness with a mysterious new friend until headlights flickered through the neighborhood and Davy was gone. What happened that night transformed the characters’ lives and, years later, one question haunts them all: What might I have done differently?

Whalen has provided an intriguing cast of characters. Tabitha, Davy’s mother, is divorced (a byproduct of her son’s disappearance) and lives alone in the house where Davy was raised. She devotes her time to advocating for the families of missing children. Thaddeus is profiting from his family’s misfortune with a bestselling memoir. Aniss Weaver, the last person to see Davy alive, works as a public information officer for the local police. Gordon Swift, a local sculptor, is the prime suspect in Davy’s disappearance, although there has never been adequate evidence to bring charges against him. We have all the ingredients for a suspenseful mystery.

But Every Moment Since isn’t your typical whodunnit. The plot is a trifle too straightforward: a boy goes missing, his family suffers, the community agonizes, a body is eventually found, and the mystery, albeit a slight one, is solved. There are too few plot twists or complications in the early stages of the narrative, and much of the expository information in the first 180 pages of the 363-page novel focuses on the minutia of the characters’ day-to-day lives. Throughout the story, there is a nagging need to “bring on the bear.”

Whalen’s focus, the moving force in the novel, is guilt, which the characters suffer to various degrees. Tabitha rebukes herself for having left Davy in Thaddeus’ care so she could spend an evening socializing. Aniss Weaver is troubled by her specific knowledge that Thaddeus is blameless. And Thaddeus, more than any of the characters, is troubled by the financial success of his memoir about his brother’s disappearance. Gordon Swift, although innocent, suffers from doubts about his sexuality and the community’s suspicion that focuses on him as the likely culprit.

Whalen employs various third-person points of view that are not arranged chronologically (think Pulp Fiction). And the chapters range from excerpts taken from Thaddeus’ memoir to Tabitha’s daily bouts of regret to pure narrative segments that nudge the story forward. Even Davy, who has long since disappeared from the immediate action, has a third-person limited view in parts of the novel.

If this sounds like a lot to keep straight, it is, and the reader is required to focus his or her attention on what is happening to whom and when. The only question that needs answering is why the narrative is presented in this disjointed fashion, which becomes apparent in the novel’s final chapters.

The reader might reasonably conclude that the novel was written with the audiobook in mind (available as a digital download through Kindle). Chapters featuring the various personas written in the limited third person achieve degrees of separation and distinction when read by voice actors representing the various characters. For example, book chapters about Tabitha contain too few distinctive hooks that the reader can employ to establish an ongoing connection with the character, and one’s attention must remain fixed on who is doing what and when. Read aloud, the connection is immediate and continuous.

Every Moment Since is not recommended for anyone suffering from ADHD or for casual readers who will likely put the novel aside for days and expect to pick up the narrative line without rereading. The shifting points of view will not detract from the novel’s impact if the reader remains focused.

Whalen creates believable characters and has a true talent for dialogue — and she is to be congratulated for taking on a challenging and complex subject. The disappearance of a child is a horrifying possibility for any parent, and the crippling emotions suffered by a family that has experienced such a loss are almost inconceivable. Every Moment Since is a reminder that we should take careful notice of the Amber Alerts that come blaring across our TVs and phones. They aren’t works of fiction.

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Putting the Pieces Together

Frances Mayes takes a tour of marriage

By Anne Blythe

Ever wonder what it takes to make a good relationship great or how to keep a great relationship from becoming average? Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun, gingerly guides readers through such questions, and more, about the nature of relationships in her new novel, A Great Marriage.

The 84-year-old author has generated an extensive list of bestsellers in the nearly two decades since her memoir about purchasing, restoring and living in an Italian villa became the basis for a Hollywood movie starring Diane Lane. Her forte — travel and food writing — is evident in A Great Marriage, a love story based largely in fictional Hillston, a North Carolina town with similarities to Hillsborough, where Mayes and her husband spent many years in a historic home along the Eno River.

Whether it’s through a Lowcountry seafood boil on fictional Indigo Island, a pub meal, too much Scotch on a drunken night in London or accounts of homes, streetscapes and waterscapes scattered throughout North Carolina, South Carolina, New York, San Francisco and London, Mayes’ descriptions have transportive power.

A Great Marriage opens in Hillston at a lavish dinner party celebrating the whirlwind romance and engagement of Dara Wilcox, a well-to-do aspiring law student who grew up in the quaint town, and Austin Clarke, an affable young British architect working temporarily in New York. The two met at a New York art gallery when Dara was visiting from Washington, D.C., for the weekend. “They looked at the contorted, deflated gray balloons glued to a manhole cover for a full minute, then at each other,” Mayes wrote. “They started laughing.”

While it depends on which character is doing the storytelling to be sure who picked up whom, there’s no question that Austin and Dara are drawn almost instantaneously to each other. They fall feverishly in love, determined to make their lives together work even though they live in different cities and are at different stages professionally.

When a glass of red wine is spilled at the bountiful meal Dara’s parents prepare for their spirited daughter, her genial and well-mannered fiancé, friends and family, it does more than make a mess. Not only does the wine stain the white tablecloth and napkins, it splashes onto Austin — and portends turmoil ahead.

Shortly after that night, Austin gets tumultuous news from London that changes his life and the trajectory of the romance that had seemed destined for the wedding aisle. He’s about to be a father. Adding more drama to the mix, the mother-to-be of the child conceived after a night of heavy Scotch drinking has a potentially fatal medical condition.

Suddenly the engagement is off.

Austin moves back to London, unsure of what fatherhood will look like for him.

Dara is gobsmacked and seeks solace from her parents in North Carolina, her grandmother on the South Carolina coast, her good friends in San Francisco, and a crew of artists with whom she spends a summer helping to give new life to an old seaside motel.

There’s an assemblage of characters that Dara and Austin call on as they go their separate ways; some better fleshed out than others. We meet many of them in the opening pages during the engagement celebration, but sometimes it can be difficult to take them all in. It can feel as though you’re at a dinner party where you barely know the hosts or the guests and you’re constantly trying to figure out how they’re connected to one another.

Stick with it. As the story unfolds, the connections become clearer and it’s easier to distinguish the incidental characters from those who are key to the plot line.

Dara’s mother, Lee, a university professor in Chapel Hill who spent her career writing a book about William Butler Yeats, and her father, Rich, a journalist who gets plum travel assignments, have one of those marriages that seems in balance. Dara’s grandmother Charlotte, or Mimi, as she calls her, has had more than one marriage, but is so well-versed in the trials and tribulations of the institution that she has written two books on the subject — The Good Marriage, which sold millions of copies; and The Good Divorce: It’s Never Too Late, also a bestseller. Austin’s father, Michael, and his sister, Annsley, are booksellers in London who come to his rescue as he ponders life without Dara.

Life lessons are dished up throughout the book about the meaning of marital vows and what makes a great marriage. Mayes is deft at showing the many angles of the predicaments Austin and Dara have found themselves in, making it possible for readers to empathize with each one.

Some might find it difficult at times to relate to Dara, who has the freedom to stay with friends for weeks at a time and travel here and there, seemingly without responsibility. There’s a bit of a fairy tale feel to the book.

But if you’re in the mood for some armchair travel and a glimpse into a world where people have the luxury of hopping across a country or an ocean in search of happiness, A Great Marriage offers a great escape.

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