Ex Libris

Adichie has a heat-seeking eye for telling social and emotional details, and she uses that gift to convey Ifemelu’s experiences with extraordinary immediacy while satirizing both the casual racism of some Americans and the sanctimony of those progressives eager to wear their liberal politics like a badge.

As a foreigner, Ifemelu notices the myriad oddities of American culture with wry humor. She notices that Americans tend to stand around and drink at parties, instead of dancing; that many “wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall” to send the message that they are too “superior/busy/cool/not-uptight” to bother looking nice. She notices that they call arithmetic “math,” not “maths,” and that academic types can get bizarrely incensed over matters like “imported vegetables that ripened in trucks.”

As the years scroll by, Ifemelu achieves success with her blog called Raceteenth or Curious Observations by a Non-American Black on the Subject of Blackness in America. She is confident in a way she hadn’t been before, and after a breakup with a wealthy white businessman she settles into a perfect-on-paper relationship with a black professor who teaches at Yale.

But Ifemelu cannot stop thinking about Obinze, “her first love, her first lover, the only person with whom she had never felt the need to explain herself.” And she realizes that “the cement in her soul” that she often feels is a kind of homesickness—for Lagos and her family. And so, after thirteen years, she decides to return home—a journey that proves as jarring as her voyage to America. Her experiences, so powerfully recounted by Adichie, become a story about belonging and not-belonging in a world where identities are both increasingly fluid and defining, a story about how we are shaped by the places where we grew up and the places where we come to live.

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

A Memoir

(2015)

Elizabeth Alexander

In this haunting memoir about love and loss and grief, Elizabeth Alexander describes the shattering emotional aftermath of the death of her beloved husband, Ficre Ghebreyesus, and how she and her two sons, Solomon and Simon, consoled one another and guided one another through a dark corridor of sorrow and back out into the light.

One night at bedtime, she recalls, thirteen-year-old Simon asks her if she wants to come with him to visit Ficre in heaven:

“Yes, I say, and lie down on his bed.

“‘First you close your eyes,’ he says, ‘and ride the clear glass elevator. Up we go.’

“What do you see? I ask.

“God is sitting at the gate, he answers.

“What does God look like? I ask.

“Like God, he says. Now, we go to where Daddy is.

“He has two rooms, Simon says, one room with a single bed and his books and another where he paints. The painting room is vast. He can look out any window he wants and paint.”

When it’s time to leave, they take the elevator back down. “You can come with me anytime,” Simon tells his mother.

Alexander—an award-winning poet and a former professor at Yale University who is currently president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—communicates the raw grief she experienced in losing her husband of fifteen years. Her book is really a love letter to him, and it leaves us with an indelible portrait of Ghebreyesus as husband, father, and artist. She brings his brilliantly colored paintings alive on the page. She describes how they met. And she remembers how they fell in love, cooking together, writing haikus to each other in a shared notebook, listening to Ahmad Jamal, Betty Carter, Abbey Lincoln, Randy Weston, and Don Pullen, “geniuses of the African diaspora we both celebrated.”

Just as her poetry (American Sublime, The Venus Hottentot, Antebellum Dream Book) explores the connections between the present and the past and the complexities of identity, so this memoir memorializes the strange twists of fate that can bring two people together. Alexander and Ghebreyesus, it turns out, were born within two months of each other, on opposite sides of the globe—she in Harlem; he in war-torn Eritrea, which he fled at the age of sixteen, making his way to America by way of Sudan, Italy, and Germany.

In the wake of his death, Alexander feels their house suffused in sorrow. She feels she “can wait forever for him to come back”; she will “leave the light on in the living room, the light that faces the street.” She dreams of his returning, improbably, on a skateboard. She thinks, “I am getting older and he is not.”

She realizes she does not know how to operate the DVR because it made no sense for both of them to learn how. She continues to pay his cell phone bill for a year and a half afterward, because she didn’t want to lose the text messages. She avoids bookstores because she imagines seeing him in the history section or the art section or the gardening section.

Alexander and Ghebreyesus met in New Haven and raised their two boys there and in nearby Hamden. Writing as both a poet and a longtime resident, she perfectly captures New Haven’s “mixed-metaphor landscape of New England trees and industrial detritus,” as well as its unexpectedly excellent food and the mixed rhythms of college life and street life.

Alexander’s book ends with her and her sons leaving New Haven for New York. They plan to stop by Grove Street Cemetery to say goodbye to Ficre, but they are delayed by a doctor’s appointment and don’t make it to the cemetery before closing time. It’s okay, her son Simon says: “The grave reminds me of Daddy’s death, but I want to remember Daddy’s life.”

Just as her poetry explores the connections between the present and the past and the complexities of identity, so this memoir memorializes the strange twists of fate that can bring two people together.

MUHAMMAD ALI

THE GREATEST: My Own Story (1975) Muhammad Ali (with Richard Durham)

THE MUHAMMAD ALI READER (1998) Edited by Gerald Early

KING OF THE WORLD: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (1998) David Remnick

THE TRIBUTE: Muhammad Ali, 1942–2016 (2016) Sports Illustrated

He said it best, of course: He was “the astronaut of boxing” who “handcuffed lightning,” threw “thunder in jail”; the dazzling warrior “with iron fists and a beautiful tan”; “the greatest fighter that ever will be” who could “run through a hurricane” and not get wet.

Muhammad Ali not only rocked the world with his electrifying speed and power in the ring. He also shook the world with the force of his convictions: his determination to stand up to the racist rules of the Jim Crow South and to assert his freedom to invent himself—“I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.”

“I am America,” he proudly declared, decades before the Black Lives Matter movement. “I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.” He stood with Martin Luther King, Jr., for freedom and social justice. And he stood up against the Vietnam War, refusing to be drafted in 1967 on religious grounds as a conscientious objector—a decision that would cost him his boxing title, three and a half years of his career at the peak of his powers, tens of millions of dollars in prize money and endorsements, and for many years his popularity.

Ali was a larger-than-life figure: not just an incandescent athlete dancing under the lights, but a man of conscience who spoke truth to power, as well as a captivating showman, poet, philosopher, performance artist, statesman, and hip-hop pioneer, a man compared to Whitman, Robeson, Malcolm X, Ellington, and Chaplin. Writers were magnetized by his contradictions: the GOAT (Greatest of All Time), who vanquished some of the baddest men on the planet but became one of the world’s most revered humanitarians; a deeply religious man who loved practical jokes and practically invented trash talk; “a radical even in a radical’s time,” as President Obama put it, who became so beloved by Americans across the political spectrum that he was featured in a DC Comics book in which he teamed up with Superman to save the world.

Over the years, Ali has also inspired an uncommon amount of arresting writing, from Norman Mailer’s classic account of the boxer’s stunning victory over George Foreman in Zaire in 1974 to David Remnick’s King of the World, a powerful account of Ali’s emergence as a transformative figure in American politics and culture. There is also a plethora of memorable essays about Ali by such gifted writers as Joyce Carol Oates, George Plimpton, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Roger Kahn, many of which can be found in a terrific anthology, The Muhammad Ali Reader.

As for iconic photographs of Ali, many appear in Sports Illustrated’s Muhammad Ali, 1942–2016. They are photos that capture what the fighter José Torres called “his prodigious magic”: the famous photo of a victorious Ali, standing over the fallen body of Sonny Liston; a violent action shot of him catching George Foreman with a hard right in the Rumble in the Jungle; and one of him locked in a grim face-off with an exhausted Joe Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila. There are also images of a skinny, twelve-year-old Cassius Clay learning to box, and a solemn Ali, surrounded by reporters, explaining his opposition to the Vietnam War.

These books remind us that perseverance was one of the consistent themes in Ali’s life: coming back after his government-imposed exile to reclaim the world championship in 1974 by toughing it out against Foreman in Zaire; coming back to beat Frazier twice, after losing their first arduous matchup; and coming back against Leon Spinks in 1978 to win the world heavyweight championship for a third time. As Ali once observed, “Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them—a desire, a dream, a vision . . . the will must be stronger than the skill.”

When Cassius Clay was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, the town was segregated, and even when he returned home from the 1960 Olympics with a gold medal around his neck, he was turned away from a luncheonette. He would return to the Olympics three and a half decades later in Atlanta in 1996 as its final torchbearer; by then, he’d become one of the most revered human beings on the planet.

Ali died on June 3, 2016, and as his funeral motorcade made its way through the city, mourners showered his car with flowers and rose petals. All along the route, the Louisville Courier-Journal reported, lawns had been mowed and driveways freshly swept—out of respect for the Greatest on his final journey.

EXPERIENCE

A Memoir

(2000)

Martin Amis

What is it like to grow up aspiring to become a novelist, when your father is himself a well-known novelist? Martin Amis’s 2000 memoir, Experience, addresses that question with great humor and affection, and creates a moving portrait of a father-son relationship animated by clear-eyed literary insight, enduring love, and a novelist’s ability to animate the past with remarkable emotional detail.

The literary kinship between Martin Amis and his father, Kingsley, has long been clear to fans of both writers’ work. Both got their start as angry young men with a dyspeptic gift for satire and biting humor. Both wrote classic novels featuring feckless, self-deluded heroes (Jim Dixon in Amis père’s Lucky Jim, and John Self and Richard Tull in Amis fils’s Money and The Information). And both fluently lived up to Amis senior’s credo that “any proper writer ought to be able to write anything from an Easter Day sermon to a sheep-dip handout.”

Over the years, Martin Amis’s books leapfrogged over his father’s in terms of innovation and ambition. London Fields (1989) was a dark satire set in a decadent, apocalyptic world, while the powerful House of Meetings (2006) addressed the daunting subject of the Soviet gulag. If such novels spoke to his willingness to tackle huge, historical subjects and experiment with voice and genre and technique, Experience brought a new warmth and depth of emotion to his writing.

It could not have been easy being Kingsley Amis’s son. The elder Amis’s acidic memoirs, published in 1991, not only settled dozens of literary scores but also drew a self-portrait of a prickly and unsparing curmudgeon. Kingsley Amis gave interviews characterizing his son’s books as unreadable, his politics as “dangerous, howling nonsense.”

EXPERIENCE creates a moving portrait of a father-son relationship animated by clear-eyed literary insight, enduring love, and a novelist’s ability to animate the past with remarkable emotional detail.

“My father never encouraged me to write, never invited me to go for that longshot,” Martin Amis writes in Experience, “he praised me less often than he publicly dispraised me.”

The younger Amis suggests that some of his father’s more provocative political statements were simply exercises in “winding me up,” and in Experience he conveys the bantering, comradely quality of the relationship between his own younger self—“a drawling, velvet-suited, snakeskin-booted” adolescent cultivating a ridiculous “plumed and crested manner”—and Kingsley in his prime, a tireless womanizer, drinker, and raconteur, an inexhaustible “engine of comedy” within his own household.

Years later, Martin would take his two young sons to lunch at his father’s almost every Sunday, and also joined his father for a garrulous midweek meal. When he left his wife for another woman in 1993, it was his father he turned to for solace and advice. “Only to him,” he writes, “could I confess how terrible I felt, how physically terrible, bemused, subnormalized, stupefied from within, and always about to flinch or tremble from the effort of making my face look honest, kind, sane. Only to him could I talk about what I was doing to my children. Because he had done it to me.”

Kingsley had long suffered from nyctophobia (fear of the night) and monophobia (fear of being alone), and in the wake of the collapse of his marriage to Elizabeth Jane Howard (for whom he had left Martin’s mother) Martin and his brother began to take turns “Dadsitting,” promising him that he’d never have to spend an evening alone.

In Experience, Martin Amis writes persuasively about a lot of things—literary friendships and disputes, the disappearance and murder of a beloved cousin, the horrors of dental surgery. But what’s most indelible about this book is his writing—“for once, without artifice”—of the “ordinary miracles and ordinary disasters” of daily life, of what it means to be a son, and of what it means to be a father with children of his own.

WINESBURG, OHIO

(1919)

Sherwood Anderson

It’s hard to think of an American work of fiction that’s been more influential than Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 volume of interlinked stories about the lonely residents of a small, fictional midwestern village.

Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck all paid tribute to Sherwood Anderson. Works as disparate as Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, Hemingway’s In Our Time, Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man, and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried would work variations on its innovative structure, while the fiction of Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor would be populated with outcasts and eccentrics reminiscent of the lost, the lonely, and the dispossessed in Winesburg. You can also count George Saunders, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Russell Banks, and Tom Perrotta among the many contemporary writers who have written stories or novels that owe a direct or indirect debt to Anderson’s classic.

Like Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), the stories in Winesburg all take place in the same town, and they draw portraits of ordinary people whose ambitions have gone unrealized, whose dreams are receding in the rearview mirror. Winesburg depicts a small-town world where the sense of isolation people feel in their day-to-day lives reflects some of the larger dynamics at work in early twentieth-century America. It anticipates a changing social landscape in which more and more young people are leaving small towns for big cities and their suburbs, and the rural-urban divide is growing ever wider.

Anderson’s stories share the twilight mood of Edward Hopper’s paintings, and they similarly depict solitary individuals whose lives seem defined by missed connections and forfeited opportunities. Among the more than two dozen characters in the book, there’s Doctor Reefy, an aging doctor and widower, who scribbles his thoughts on little pieces of paper that he puts in his pocket and eventually throws away; a lonely young woman named Alice who’s unable to get over a boyfriend who moved on and moved away; Wash Williams, the telegraph operator, who hates life “wholeheartedly, with the abandon of a poet”; the Reverend Curtis Hartman, a minister who spies on a pretty woman through his window and asks for deliverance from temptation; Kate Swift, the schoolteacher, whom the minister lusts after and who encourages the literary aspirations of the book’s young hero, George Willard; and George’s mother, Elizabeth, the ailing proprietor of a shabby hotel, who has invested all her hopes and dreams in her son.

The story of George’s coming of age provides the through line in these stories. A reporter for the local paper, he is the person many of the other characters confide in, and he becomes both a conduit for their stories and a kind of surrogate for Anderson, who himself grew up in a small Ohio town.

After his mother dies, George decides he is going to “leave Winesburg to go away to some city where he hoped to get work on a city newspaper.” He does not want to become trapped in Winesburg like so many of the people he knows; he does not want “the spark of genius” his teacher saw in him to be extinguished. Like many bildungsromans, the book ends with the hero’s departure from his hometown as he boards a train headed west—presumably to Chicago—“to meet the adventure of life.”

THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

(1951)

Hannah Arendt

As Hannah Arendt observed in her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, two of the most monstrous regimes in human history came to power in the twentieth century, and both were predicated upon the destruction of truth—upon the recognition that cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power. “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule,” she wrote, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

What’s alarming to the contemporary reader is that Arendt’s words increasingly sound less like a dispatch from another century than a disturbing mirror of the political and cultural landscape we inhabit today—a world in which the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, does a high-volume business in lies (three years into his White House tenure, The Washington Post calculated, Trump had made 16,241 false or misleading claims), and fake news and propaganda are cranked out in industrial quantities by Russian and alt-right trolls and instantaneously dispersed across the world through social media.

Nationalism, nativism, dislocation, fears of social change, and contempt for outsiders are on the rise again as people, locked in their partisan silos and filter bubbles, are losing a sense of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social and sectarian lines.

This is not to draw a direct analogy between today’s circumstances and the overwhelming horrors of the World War II era but to look at some of the conditions and attitudes—what Margaret Atwood has called the “danger flags” in Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm—that make a people susceptible to demagogues and dictators, and nations vulnerable to tyranny.

Here are some of the fundamental points Arendt made about the “hidden mechanisms” by which totalitarian movements dissolve traditional political and moral understandings, and the behavior evinced by totalitarian regimes, once they come to power.

 One early warning sign is a nation’s abolishing of the right of asylum. Efforts to deprive refugees of their rights, Arendt wrote, bear “the germs of a deadly sickness,” because once the “principle of equality before the law” breaks down, “the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status.”

 Leaders of totalitarian movements, Arendt observed, “can never admit an error,” and fanatical followers, suffering from a mixture of gullibility and cynicism, will routinely shrug off their lies. Hungry for simplistic narratives that explain a confusing world, such audiences “do not trust their eyes and ears” but, instead, welcome the “escape from reality” offered by propaganda, which understands that people are “ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived,” because they “held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

 Because totalitarian rulers crave complete control, Arendt pointed out, they tend to preside over highly dysfunctional bureaucracies. First-rate talents are replaced by “crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” Often there are “swift and surprising changes in policy” because loyalty—not performance or efficacy—is paramount.

 To ratify followers’ sense of belonging to a movement that is making progress toward a distant goal, Arendt added, new opponents or enemies are repeatedly invoked; “as soon as one category is liquidated, war may be declared on another.”

 Another trait of totalitarian governments, Arendt observed, is a perverse disdain for both “common sense and self-interest”: a stance fueled by mendacity and denial of facts and embraced by megalomaniacal leaders, eager to believe that failures can be denied or erased and “mad enough to discard all limited and local interests—economic, national, human, military—in favor of a purely fictitious reality” that endows them with infallibility and absolute power.

The Origins of Totalitarianism is essential reading not only because it reminds us of the monstrous crimes committed by Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union in the twentieth century but also because it provides a chilling warning of the dynamics that could fuel totalitarian movements in the future. The book underscores how alienation, rootlessness, and economic uncertainty can make people susceptible to the lies and conspiracy theories dispensed by tyrants. It shows how the weaponization of bigotry and racism by demagogues fuels populist movements built upon tribal hatreds while undermining the long-standing institutions meant to protect our freedoms and the rule of law and shattering the very idea of a shared sense of humanity.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE

(1985)

Margaret Atwood

Enduring dystopian novels look backward and forward at the same time. Orwell’s 1984 was, at once, a savage satire of Stalin’s U.S.S.R. and a timeless anatomy of tyranny that foretold the rise of the surveillance state and the “firehose of falsehood” spewed forth daily by Putin’s Kremlin and Trump’s White House in efforts to redefine reality. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World reflected its author’s worries in the 1930s that individual freedom was threatened by both communism and assembly-line capitalism, and it anticipated a technology-driven future in which people would be narcotized and distracted to death by trivia and entertainment.