Recent Reviews
The Bohemians by Jasmin Darznik
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on April 11, 2021.
We all struggle to see other people. Distraction, fear, prejudice, and apathy blind us. But every so often, someone brings strangers into sharper focus, and we are able to really see them. In her new novel ‘The Bohemians,’ Jasmin Darznik has written a compelling story about the legendary photographer Dorothea Lange. Darznik imagines how Lange refined her skills in 1920s San Francisco and went on to create piercing, iconic images of powerless people enduring the hardships of the Great Depression. Her photographs helped Americans, in that perilous time, to see each other in a new way.
The novel begins in 1918 when twenty-three-year-old Lange arrives in San Francisco from the East Coast. Afflicted by polio as a child, Lange develops a deep sense of empathy toward others. She also learns to pay attention to what she sees around her. These traits serve her well as she cultivates her craft as a photographer. Once in San Francisco, Lange dreams of opening a portrait studio. Her talent becomes well known, but financial backing for women is scarce. Indefatigable, she eventually strikes a deal with a businessman who loans her money. She opens her studio a block off Union Square and befriends a group of Bohemians that include other respected women photographers. These non-conforming writers, musicians and artists widen the lens of Lange’s evolving social consciousness.
Around her, diverse social forces are competing for power in San Francisco. At the bottom of the social structure are Chinese Americans. Laws restrict where Chinese Americans can live and work. Lange employs a Chinese assistant in her studio. (This woman is known to history only as “Ah-yee” or “Chinese Mission Girl.) In the novel, Darznik envisions a business partnership and authentic friendship between Lange and her assistant, whom she names Caroline Lee. This propels the plot forward and allows Lange to see firsthand the discrimination, bigotry, and disregard Lee encounters. Few repercussions exist for police brutality, human trafficking, or unjust labor practices toward Chinese Americans. Another character is based on California Senator John Phelan, whose 1920 campaign slogan was Keep California White. It is as if Lange is stunned by the photo developing in her darkroom. Soon she stops snapping pictures of the wealthy elite and starts taking pictures of ordinary people.
Though ‘The Bohemians’ focuses on Lange’s formative years, the story does touch on Lange’s later contributions. In the early 1930s, with the Depression in full force, many Americans lack food, shelter, and clothing. Lange and her artist husband, Maynard Dixon, decide to document the suffering they see. Lange takes a shot of a breadline in San Francisco which she titles White Angel Breadline. Her skill enables her to reveal the story of those she photographs. Lange says, “I had to make myself useful. Somehow, I had to get people to see.” Eventually, Lange’s images of unemployed fathers and weary migrant mothers appear in newspapers. People who had been hidden become visible to politicians and policymakers.
I would have liked to hear more about the decades after Lange’s pivot from the privileged to the poor. That said, Darznik delivers an immersive story of an era that resonates with our own. Her characters live through the Spanish Flu, anti-Asian hostility, and xenophobic deportations. As we struggle with our own pandemic, Darznik reminds us that this is a painful pattern. By writing about a woman who helped the world see hardship and injustice, Darznik inspires us to truly see the others in our own time.
At The Edge of the Haight by Katherine Seligman
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on February 28, 2021
https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/novel-insightfully-looks-at-the-lives-of-homeless-people/
The homeless are more often discussed than understood. No doubt that’s why Katherine Seligman’s ‘At the Edge of the Haight’ received the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her absorbing novel introduces us to a group of young people living in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. We learn their names and family backgrounds. We witness their daily trials and become immersed in the odyssey of their lives.
Maddy Donaldo, the narrator and protagonist, is a twenty-year-old woman without a home. When she was young, her truck driver father abandoned the family. Her mother found work as a cashier at Safeway but then suffered a psychotic break. After Maddy aged out of the foster care system in Los Angeles, she boarded a bus to San Francisco.
In San Francisco, she learns how to survive in the Park and nearby streets. She finds a group of young people with whom she feels some connection, especially a young man from Arizona named Ash. In the Park, they hide their sleeping bags on tree branches by day and sleep under trees at night. The individuals in the group seem both detached and dependent on one another. With no notice, they disappear and reappear in each other’s lives. Their choices are frustrating. Many are emotionally wounded and use drugs and alcohol to ease their pains.
Though Maddy sometimes sleeps at a Haight shelter, she feels safer in the Park. She does, however, take advantage of the shelter’s showers, clothing, and free food. Police harassment and threats of violence from other homeless people make each day a challenge. Given the persistent emotional isolation Maddy has endured, she has few expectations for her life. She is tough and resilient but also tender and vulnerable. Her dog Root, whom she found when she first arrived in the City, is her most reliable companion.
Maddy’s life changes dramatically when she follows Root into a cluster of bushes in the Park. There she sees a young man on the ground bleeding to death; his assailant stands nearby. The plot develops as Maddy struggles with the aftermath of this traumatic incident. The police want Maddy to testify, the dead boy’s parents want to adopt her, and the murderer wants to make sure she doesn’t tell anyone what she saw. Navigating these conflicting demands causes Maddy to expand her thinking and imagine alternatives for her life.
As the story unfolds, Seligman shows the many causes of housing instability for young adults. Many young people are thrown out of their homes. Some have mental illnesses. Some come from poverty, but not all. Sometimes their parents have their own financial troubles and emotional afflictions. Other parents can no longer deal with their child’s behavioral or neurological differences. But whatever their prior struggles, all these young adults share the belief that they have no other place to go. To complicate matters, many are wary of help. Maddy wrestles with such feelings before fate turns in her favor.
‘At the Edge of the Haight’ is not a political polemic or policy paper; rather, it is a book about people living on the edge. Seligman’s skills as a journalist are evident in the story’s realism. Her detailed descriptions allow the reader to imagine the harrowing day to day lives of those living with constant housing insecurity. Seligman has created characters for whom the reader feels empathy and engagement. Without being heavy-handed, she is challenging us to understand, rather than ignore or condemn. When Maddy was young, her mother said to her, “You can’t judge people because you just never know why they do what they do.” Katherine Seligman has written a novel that does not judge but instead offers insight.
Deacon King Kong by James McBride
James McBride’s compelling new novel Deacon King Kong feels like a sociological study merged with a heartbreaking and hopeful saga. His colorful cast of characters which include Sportcoat, Hot Sausage, Deems, Pudgy Fingers, Elephant, and Bean, provide poignant perspectives of African-Americans living in a NYC housing project in 1969. The novel entertains while illustrating the effects of persistent and systemic racism. Though many characters engage in ugly acts of violence, the story elicits empathy as we learn about each characters’ backstory and life circumstances.
In the first paragraph, seventy-one-year-old Cuffy Lamkin, known as Sportcoat, has shot nineteen-year-old drug dealer Deems Clemens, another Causeway Housing Project resident. Everyone in the Cause knows Sportcoat, a well-liked church deacon who is often drunk on King Kong, a homemade brew. They also know Deems, a talented young man who has been sucked into dealing drugs. But why did Sportcoat shoot Deems? It took me several chapters to discern McBride’s intent as the narrator’s tone initially seems unaffected and whimsical. Yet, soon, the book’s more profound aim becomes evident. Yes, levity and laughter grace these pages, but within a broader context of suffering and sorrow. The book delivers a compassionate account of the Cause residents, the local gangsters who control the drug trade, and the cynical police who lack understanding or power to change the situation.
As the narration unfolds, the history of Sportcoat and Deems and the other characters is revealed. The story speaks to their complicated lives of poverty, loss and alienation. Many residents, like Sportcoat, crack under stress. Others like Deems scratch out a living while their dreams diminish by the day. This unjust housing system allows people to live in wretched conditions. Fortunately, the presence of the Five Ways Church enables Cause residents moments of joy, love and connection. But drugs, liquor and violence haunt this housing project. The narrator states, “And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder.” With cruel irony, the Cause residents glimpse views of the Statue of Liberty in the distance.
As more violence ensues, a crowd gathers to hear Sister Gee, the pastor’s wife, give an update. McBride’s fury is felt, “They stared at her with that look, that projects look: the sadness, the suspicion, the weariness, the knowledge that came from living a special misery in a world of misery. Four of their number were down -gone, changed forever, dead or not, it doesn’t matter. And there would be more. The drugs, big drugs, heroin were here. Nothing could stop it. They knew that now. Someone else had already taken over Deems’s bench at the flagpole. Nothing here would change. Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still, New York blamed you for all its problems.”
Miraculously, Deacon King Kong ends with a modicum of hope and happiness. And while James McBride’s celebrates the resiliency of the human spirit, the novel is also a searing indictment of the persistent racism that unjustly torments our fellow citizens.
