Marlena by Julie Buntin

As a girl, I'd had a friend who died. We were close. I didn't talk about it. When you grow up, who you were as a teenager either takes on a mythical importance or its completely laughable. I wanted to be the kind of person who wipes those years way; instead, I feared, they defined me. from Marlena by Julie Buntin

After reading Ohio by Stephen Markley and Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell, books about Midwest small towns, drugs, abuse, and growing up, I decided it was the right time to read Julie Buntin's Marlena. The novel focuses on Marlena, a teenage girl in Northern Michigan caught in a web of poverty and drugs, and the lasting impact Marlena had on the narrator, Cat.

Buntin's novel caught so many things for me. The painful nostalgia for a moment in time, the haunting loss of a loved one, how in youth our naivety blinds us to darker realities.

I want to go home--a phrase that's stuck on a loop, that I hear before falling asleep, waiting in line for my coffee, tapping at the elevator button and rising through the sky to my apartment, worrying the words like a lucky stone, and yet my desire is not attached to a particular places--not to Silver Lake, not to Marlena, not to Mom or Dad or Jimmy. I want to go home, I want to go home, but what I mean, what I'm grasping for, is not a place, it's a feeling. I want to go back. But back where? from Marlena by Julie Buntin

The narrator, Cat, is living in New York City with a good job and a loving husband. She is an alcoholic. Cat tells the story of being the new girl in a small Up North town, looking for a new best friend. She develops a girl crush on a charismatic and beautiful older teen who lives next door. Cat, fifteen, wants to be like Marlena--cool, daring, exciting, experienced.

After her dad left them, Cat's mom moved the family from Pontiac to her childhood vacation spot, Silver Lake. Silver Lake is a half hour away from the school and Walmart and the nearest mall is ninety miles downstate. It is also down the road from the mansions along Lake Michigan where the 1% come to play, and a historic, elite Methodist enclave. Cat's mom has a drinking problem and with no job skills is lucky to get a job cleaning a summer estate.

Catherine had been on scholarship at a private school, a good student, college-bound, a bookish loner. Her older brother walked away from a college scholarship to help take care of his mom. Moving is a chance to reinvent herself as Cat, an edgier and more risk-taking girl.

Marlena's mom disappeared years back and her addict dad has a meth lab in the woods. Marlena cares for her younger brother as best she can, but he is often alone with no food in the house. Already at seventeen Marlena is an alcoholic, she trades sexual favors to obtain drugs, and although smart she skips school.

For eight brief months, Cat became a part of Marlena and her world-- the 'best days ever'-- with a group of friends who accepted her, her life with filled danger and excitement.

****

By July we, like twenty percent of Michigan's population--Mom loved that statistic--were on food stamps. from Marlena by Julie Buntin

Michigan ranks 4th in the country for drug problems, with heroin and cocaine in Detroit and opioids everywhere else. An estimated 20% of Michigan adults drink to excess and 24% of young men are binge drinkers. Beer is everywhere; the state ranks number 10 in the number of IPA breweries in the country.

The Pere Marquette River in Baldwin, Lakes County, the poorest county in Michigan

Michigan has its urban centers mired in job loss and poverty, the racist legacy of redlining and 'urban renewal' with its wholesale destruction of African American neighborhoods. Pontiac, Cat's hometown before they move to Silver Lake, has a poverty rate of 34%.

But the rural Up North communities also are impoverished. I just returned from a trip to Lake, Roscommon, and Ogemaw Counties with poverty rates over 28%, higher than the state average of 24%. Michigan ranks as one of the worst six states in the nation for the number of children living in poverty--one in five.

There are also pockets of great wealth located in Oakland County where I live, including Bloomfield Hills, one of the top 20 richest cities in the country.

Meadowbrook Hall, the second largest private home in America, built in Oakland Co, MI by the heir to the Dodge fortune

The city where my grandparents lived in the 1960s is now one of the ten wealthiest cities in the state, where I grew up is number 15, and my current city is number 30. These suburbs were built to house workers in the auto industry, from the top brass to the union workers like my dad. Their playground became the small 'Up North' towns--modest cabins for the middle class, posh resort homes and yachts in a marina for the 1%.

My dad's cabin

These remote villages and towns became dependant on tourism, the hunters and fishers and snowmobilers and skiers and family vacationers. So that side by side, for a few weeks each year, the very wealthy live amongst the local poor. And then the economy plummeted, and the working and middle classes could not afford the cabins and vacations Up North.

Summertime transformed northern Michigan. Kewaunee swelled to twice its normal size. from Marlena by Julie Buntin

Pentwater Lake

We spent two years in a resort community on Lake Michigan. Between July 1 and the end of August the town was filled with campers at the state park and the Methodist campground, cottagers, bed and breakfast tourists, and people living on their sailboats in the marina. At summer's end, everything closed. Anyone who had enough money left town for their winter homes in Texas or Arizona or Florida or even Metro Detroit. Several bars were open, and the bank and post office. The one grocery store that catered to the marina kept half the store open for basics. In winter 193 inches of snow fell.

Years before we lived there, we used to go to the Methodist family camp. We were impressed by the beauty of the lake and marina, the channel feeding into Lake Michigan with its gorgeous sand beaches.

The beach at Pentwater

One day when I was in town checking out the tourist shops and ice cream parlors I remarked to a teenager that it must be a beautiful place to live. He scowled in answer. It wasn't until we lived there that I realized how isolated and boring a place it had to be to grow up in. Graduation class sizes were in the teens, the entire K-12 school system had about 260 students.

Lake Michigan at Pentwater

When we left Philadelphia when our son was two I thought a small town would be a wonderful place to raise our son. It turns out that Mayberry doesn't exist. Maybe it never did exist.

*****

As I read Marlena I wondered how much I had missed, all the different places we had moved and stayed a few years, never really understanding the community that deeply. I worked with teens but what did I know about their lives? One boy in the inner city of Philadelphia told me I did not understand real life. Pacifism did not work on the streets where one didn't get mad, one got even. In a small rural town, our son would ask why classmates could not read, had no telephones or books at home, or why their dads were in jail.

I remembered 'my' Marlena, a gregarious and confident girl from a well-to-do family who took the 14-year-old me under her wing--I was the new girl in school--and encouraged me to be outgoing, lose weight, have fun. She dropped me, age 15, and a year later I saw her going through the school hallway, her books held close against her chest, eyes straight ahead, slightly leaning forward in a fast walk. She put purple chalk on her eyelids in the restroom before school. She had changed. Years later I stopped by her home. Her brother told me she had married three times and lived in an Up North small town; her mother didn't remember which one, but it started with an M.

Cat is filled with nostalgia for that moment in time when she first felt alive and a part of something. And she is filled with survivor's guilt and regret. She struggles with alcoholism which might destroy the life she has built. What she experienced was horrendous; she saw the destruction of a smart and beautiful and courageous girl, a girl she wanted to be.

Just one girl, one fictional girl.

How many thousands across Michigan are we losing today? To human trafficking. To opioid addiction, meth, heroin, alcohol. To poverty, sexual abuse... How many across the country, the world?

What impressed me about Marlena was the story and the voice and the Michigan places and the heartbreaking REALNESS of it all. I am glad I finally read it.

We all have one story...the only story

"Don't expect too much of me."from The Only Story

My mother warned me. She was thirty-eight and I was nineteen when she warned that it happens to all lovers. My aunt once pondered, "What happened to us?" while reflecting on her first love and failed marriage.

We see it all the time, famous couples in the news, the couple next door. We expect everything, throw ourselves into young love trusting that the connection shared is timeless and everlasting.

It is our 'only story' of love, that first love when we are young and hopeful. We think we are different from the others.

"Somehow eternity seems possible as you embrace." *

I was excited to finally read Julian Barnes after hearing so much about his books. I was not disappointed. I do love a quiet, introspective novel with beautiful writing and a deep understanding of the human condition. The main character, Paul, tells us his 'only story' from the vantage of fifty years, recalling his first love in all its happiness, and later pain.

Paul is nineteen when he meets Susan, almost thirty years his senior. They play tennis at the local club during his first summer home from university. In a fluid, organic way, without pathos or introspection, their relationship becomes intimate.
Paul becomes a fixture in Susan's life, even coming into the home she shares with her alienated husband. When Paul turned twenty-one he took her away.

After recalling his early innocent and idealized love, we learn that Susan was a victim of spousal abuse. Paul recalls Susan's slipping from him into alcoholism, and lastly considers all the implications of cause and effect, culpability, and his inability to move past Susan.

The novel left me heartsore. For days.

I have a cousin who in her fifties slipped into early dementia from alcohol abuse. Her husband, her first love when they were teenagers, installed her in her own home, unwilling to watch her destroy herself. Of course, I thought of her.

Our only story, the one great love of our life, may end when one beloved partner dies first, or it may end in disaster, heartbreak, a crippling of the emotions. We may be left to relive happy memories or to wonder how it all went wrong. Paul agonizes: did he let go of Susan, let her fall, or did she pull him down with him?

Regardless, Paul is left damaged by his only story. And as a reader, I mourned with him.

I received a free ebook from First to Read in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

*from Second Elegy, Duino Elegies by Ranier Maria Rilke, trans. David Young

The Only Story
by Julian Barnes
Knopf
Publication: April 17, 2018
ISBN-10: 0525521216
ISBN-13: 978-0525521211

Memoirs of Eugene Gochenour: The Story of a Friendship

Dad finished his Chrysler stories with the story of his friend's tragic end.

"Russ C.

"I worked at Chrysler Engineering at Highland Park, Michigan, from 1964 to 1992.

"Chrysler had a plant in Huntsville, Alabama, and another at Sterling Heights, Michigan where engineering and building of major portions of the Redstone, Jupiter, and Saturn rockets were done for the U.S. Space Agency. When the contract with the government ended, many of their engineers and managers moved to Highland Park. This must have been hard for them, leaving modern plants with the latest technology and going to work where the buildings and equipment were ancient. Pat McI., Vic A., Al P., and Russ C. were a few of the good people that joined our lab. At that time we were the Air Conditioning and Heater Lab.

"Russ had been a foreman at the Van Dyke facility in Sterling Heights, MI and when he came to Highland Park he was made a technician. Even though he did not have a degree I thought he was the best engineer I had ever seen.

"Russ and I became good friends, and since he lived near by and his house was on the way to work I would pick him up. He was always ready and waiting when I came. Russ had a wife named Joyce, like my wife, and she was a very fine person.

"One day Russ told me he was going to sell one of his cars. it was a 1967 Plymouth Satellite convertible. I knew Russ had always taken excellent care of his vehicles and I bought it from him for $800. Joyce and I enjoyed riding around the town with the top down in the evening during the summer. Eventually, I gave the car to my son Tom when he left high school.

"Russ and Joyce had a cabin in the northern lower peninsula on Lake Bellville near Traverse City. One winter right after Christmas, Russ, Ron H., Dick D., Terry H., Bob P., and I drove there to do some ice fishing. The cabin was a beautiful log structure and it had a clear view of the lake.

"When we arrived the snow was fairly deep, but the lake had not yet frozen. Dick and I had brought our shotguns along, so the next day we decided to go rabbit hunting. As we loaded the car, a neighbor lady called over and told us we had better not shot the bunnies that lived in the swamp in front of her cabin. We assured her we were not hunting near by and left.

We drove a few miles and found an area that looked promising and parked. After tromping through the snow in the woods for a while, and not seeing any bunnies, we left and went back to the cabin.

"While we waited for the ice to freeze we played cards and drank apricot brandy. Then the ice froze enough for us to set out tip-ups and begin to fish. It was very cold and one day after we had set up our tip-ups we went back to the cabin and sat by the window so we could watch them.

"We had not sat there long when we heard a knock on the door. When we opened it, standing there was the game warden. We asked him in and then he asked to see our fishing licenses. Lucky for us we all had bought them and set up only two tip-ups each, so we were legal. But he told us that he could have given us a ticket because the lines were unattended. But he overlooked it because we could watch from the window. We did not catch a lot of fish, but we had a great time.

"At work, when Russ brought me a work order it was always well thought out and he always provided me with everything I would need to complete the job. Russ was liked by everyone. He was one of the finest people I knew. But things were not well at home. Joyce left him, and only then did I find that Russ was an alcoholic. I never had a clue that Russ had a drinking problem. I did not know that he had joined Alcoholics Anonymous until one evening when he called my wife and I to tell us and relieve his conscience.

"Russ missed a few days of work, and one evening I went to his house and knocked on the back door. Russ only opened the door because he had ordered a pizza and thought I was the delivery man. I was shocked to see the condition he was in. He had not shaved, his hair was uncombed, and he looked like he had not changed his clothes in days. When I entered the kitchen I noticed all the clutter on the table and counter. This was not like the Russ I knew.

"We talked for a while and I listened as he told me that his wife had left and that they should have had kids, should have moved to a different house, and other excuses, avoiding the real problem--his drinking. I tried to build up his ego by telling him that everyone I knew thought very highly of him, then eventually left.

"After Joyce left Russ she would occasionally call my wife to tell her what was going on. She said she had joined Alanon. They told her an alcoholic will not stop drinking until they hit bottom, and that is why she left Russ.

"One day Russ's wife Joyce called me at work and asked me to meet her at their house at noon so she could talk to him. So, at 11:30 am I left work and when I got there I saw police cars and fire trucks surrounding the house. I parked and asked someone what had happened, and they said Russ had committed suicide. This was a shock to me, and when I looked toward the garage I saw the door was open and the interior was all black from a coating of carbon.

"As usual, Russ had done a meticulous job. He had bought some flexible metal tubing which he taped to the tailpipe of the car, some duct tape with which he sealed the doors and windows of the garage, then he started the car engine and sat in the front seat.

"Russ had called his wife Joyce and asked her to meet him at the house. When I talked to another close friend of Russ's I was told he thought Russ had planned for Joyce to arrive before he was asphyxiated because when the garage door was opened, they saw that Russ had left the car, as if he had changed his mind, but it was too late.

"And so I lost my good friend Russ. Not too long after, Joyce sold the house and moved to be near her sister. We still write Christmas cards to each other every year."

A Doubter's Almanac by Ethan Canin

In the Woods of Michigan 
It was serendipity; I was Up North in Michigan, a stone's throw from a spring fed pond, two hours away from Cheboygan--reading a book whose character's life took him from Cheboygan to a cabin on a small inland lake in Michigan. The character also lived in Lansing, where I lived for many years, in a small Ohio college town similar to where we lived when my husband was in seminary, a half hour's drive from OSU, and in Princeton, a half hour's drive from where we first lived in Pennsylvania. The landscape was all so familiar.

The book was A Doubter's Almanac by Ethan Canin  who also wrote America, America which I read several years ago, an impressive book which has stayed with me. When Canin's new book appear on NetGalley I immediately requested it and was pleased to get an ARC.

The book revolves around an unforgettable character and the son who struggles to understand him. It is about the search for one's father, a quest to understand life and how to live, an exploration of existence.

A Savant from the Woods
In the 1950s Milo Andret grew up fifteen miles inland from the resort town of Cheboygan. His parents were insular and joyless. Milo spent his free hours in the woods surrounding his home, preferring to be alone than with people.

On the Straits near Cheyboygan, MI

When Milo was thirteen he found a beech tree felled in a storm. Inside the tree he envisioned an interlocked, continual chain and he spent the summer carving it out. Over 25 feet long, each link twisted upon itself like a Mobius strip, he secreted it away in a hollow tree behind a cover with reversed screw threads. It would be his life's great work.

He eventually showed the chain to his shop instructor who warned that no one would believe he made it. The year the freighter SS Carl D. Bradley sank along with the fathers of many of his classmates Milo was targeted and beaten by bullies who had heard of his remarkable achievement. His father's response was, "Welcome to the world."

A teacher identifies Milo's special ability and pushes him into a mathematics competition; his winning would bring fame to the school. He won.

Milo attended university in East Lansing and after years of pumping gas in Lansing is accepted into U.C. Berkley. It is the 1970s and Milo discovers love and ambition, addiction and competition.

Pressed into topology by his advisor Milo solves a mathematical problem and finds fame and a position at Princeton. Milo is expected to conquer another mathematical question. His days are spent deep in thought, imagining and testing and failing to find another big idea. His life becomes a slow dance of unraveling into darkness, alcoholism, and decline. He loses his position at Princeton and slides down the scale until he is at a small Ohio private school. Milo has won the Field Medal in Mathematics but his theory is challenged. As Milo tells his son, mathematicians are destined to lose, never able to find what they are looking for.

The Son, Fellow Mathematician, Addict, Lonely Yet Ever-hopeful Soul
The first part of the novel is Milo's early story; in the second part we learn his son Hans has related the story as his father told it to him. We now view Milo through the eyes of the son who desperately wants to understand his father and we learn about Han's own struggles with genius and addiction.

When Hans was thirteen his father takes the family to a wreck of a cabin on a muddy Michigan lake. It was in the Michigan woods that he completed his first great work, the continual chain of wood. He thinks that here he will find his way again. Nature surrounds them. The children watch a pair of red ants drag their prey across the sand and realize the truth about life.

Milo is incommunicative and prey to his demons while his wife plays Pollyanna, looking for the bright side, trying to make choices right. But she is wearing out, ruing the loss of the glamor of being married to an important man, living in Princeton. Her bitterness is expressed in wise insights. When Hans remarks that the Mayflies seem to be committing suicide in pairs she responds that he is right: they are mating. And later when daughter Paulie asks why clean a rented house her mother replies because that's what life is--cleaning a rented house.

The story ends with Hans returning to the lake cottage to be with his father who is in his last days, Everyone who ever believed in Milo, for however short a time, and everyone who ever doubted him, for however long a time also come. It is a time of reckoning.

On a lake Up North in Michigan

*****

Milo Andret is not an easy man to live with, and I mean both within the novel and for the reader. While I was reading The Doubter's Almanac I would wake, at night, and in the morning, puzzling over Milo and wondering if he would solve the questions tormenting him.

It is a dark novel, a hard story. Milo is a failure. He dies over a long time, beginning with the first drink he takes at grad school. Unable to meet his own high expectations and the expectations of his mentors he lashes out indiscriminately. It isn't easy being a genius; people hold them to unreasonably high standards. He holds on to his alcoholism more ardently than he does his lovers.

Days have passed since I finished the novel but the somber and sorrowful feeling lingers. I think of the alcoholics of my family. I think of my father's slow death from cancer, and how my mother asked for morphine knowing she'd never wake again, but unwilling to suffer any longer. After such things sorrow remains, and the questions of life's meaning or lack thereof. I wonder if having a special ability necessitates extraordinary achievement. Had Milo chosen his own path would he have been dissatisfied and driven? I want to read the book again. It is deep and rich and revealing.

The novel offers hope: one can learn, we can become wise, we can choose a good enough life, we can decide that fun and happiness are more enduring than awards and prizes.

Never give up, Milo has instructed Hans. What is it we should hold to, to not give up? Our decision will form our life.

I received a free ebook in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

A Doubter's Almanac
Ethan Canin
Penguin Random House
Publication Date: February 16, 2015
$28.00 hard cover
ISBN-13: 978-1400068265

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Read excerpt from America, America from NPR at http://www.npr.org/2008/08/26/93722689/writer-ethan-canin-tackles-the-american-dream

"I've been reading Ethan Canin's books since he first burst on the literary scene...I thought he could never equal the power of...America, America, but...With A Doubter's Almanac, Canin has soared to a new standard of achievement. What a story, and what a cast of characters. The protagonist, Milo Andret, is a mathematical genius and one of the most maddening, compelling, appalling, and unforgetable characters I've encountered in American fiction..." Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides