The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Mengestu, Dinaw. (2006). The beautiful things that heaven bears. New York: Riverhead Books.

 A wonderful read.

Mengestu has a fine ear for the way immigrants from damaged places talk in the sanctuary of their own company, free from the exhausting courtesies of self-anthropologizing explanation. He gets, pitch perfect, the warmly abrasive wit of the violently displaced and their need to keep alive some textured memories — even memories that wound — amid America’s demanding amnesia. Mengestu understands the threats these men face, not least the threat of expectations. Ken can finally afford to buy himself some dental work that would help him assimilate upward, but he chooses not to: “ ‘You can never forget where you came from if you have teeth as ugly as these,’ he said. He grinned once more. He tapped a slightly brown front tooth for effect.”

Sparely described, yet fully so, Joe from Congo and Ken from Kenya are magnificent characters that round out the male side, and the African side, of Stephanos.

What more potent setting is there than Washington for a novel about the architecture of hope and memory? As Stephanos wanders, Bloom-like, down back streets and broad avenues, he takes in both the neglected statuary that attempts to do the official work of remembrance and the anonymous heroisms of ordinary people, unnoticed by anyone but a neighbor or a storekeeper or a child. Mengestu also widens his canvas by giving the novel a romantic turn, reviving an old plot device: a stranger comes to town.

All they ever share, physically, Stephanos and Judith, is a kiss; spiritually they are reluctant to get closer.

It’s rare that a novelist who can comfortably take on knotty political subjects like exile, memory and class conflict is also able to write with wisdom, wit and tenderness about the frisson of romance. Mengestu skillfully sketches the precarious attraction between Stephanos and Judith, but his portrait of the bond between Stephanos and Naomi is even more extraordinary. In our culture’s rigid judgment, a friendship between an 11-year-old girl and a 36-year-old man is creepy by default. The bravest thing about Mengestu’s novel is the way he pours such deep, nonsexual yearning into this relationship, which is life-saving for Stephanos and Naomi alike.

It is a beautiful relationship that has substance and elan.

Again and again, Stephanos’s story makes us consider what it means to be displaced: from a local community, from a distant nation, from a love you had hoped to settle into. In Mengestu’s work, there’s no such thing as the nondescript life. He notices, and there are whole worlds in his noticing. He has written a novel for an age ravaged by the moral and military fallout of cross-cultural incuriosity. In a society slick with “truthiness” — and Washington may be the capital of that — there’s something hugely hopeful about this young writer’s watchful honesty and egalitarian tenderness. This is a great African novel, a great Washington novel and a great American novel.

Amen. 'Tis indeed.

GW was a mason

Brown, D., (2009). The Lost Symbol. New York: Doubleday Books.


The Lost Symbol. By Dan Brown
Doubleday, 509 pages, $29.95



The reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, Charlotte Allen,is contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute's Minding the Campus Web site. [The Manhattan Institute is something of a conservative organization.]
She does not seem overly impressed with the book; her review's title puts it: Still More Secrets - Together again, an exciting thriller and a tedious sermon.

She does grant: As District of Columbia resident, I must say that Mr. Brown does a first-rate job of delivering a Cook's tour with duly sinister overtones of Washington's famous sites. I specially enjoyed Langdon and Katherine's narrow escape from the CIA by riding the book conveyor belts of the Library of Congress.

And then she gives herself away: A video unearthed by Langdon depicting numerous highly placed Washingtonians including two Supreme Court justices! wearing full Masonic regalia and participating in a ritual that involves faux-human sacrifice and the drinking of wine from a human skull reminded me of the "Stonecutters" episode of "The Simpsons": "Who controls the British crown? Who keeps the metric system down? We do!"

Ah, the Simpsons as a great cultural institution.

It's when Mr. Brown interrupts his storytelling to deliver one of his many lectures on Christian intolerance with pointed digs at the American religious right that "The Lost Symbol" becomes a didactic bore.

The reviewer for the New York Times entitles her review Fasten Your Seat Belts, There’s Code to Crack. She does not seem particularly thrilled with the book, either, though she does not criticize the author's lecturing. In fact, she does praise him, some.

Separate from critics and reviewers, the book sold a million copies today, its first day in the marketplace. And, in the Nassau County OPAC, it has 823 holds on first copy returned of 388 copies, 227 holds on first copy returned of 48 copies (for Large Type), and 120 holds on first copy returned of 19 copies on the CD book.

One-Vehicle Presidential Motorcade

"Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure"
By Matthew Algeo
Chicago Review Press, 262 pages, $24.95

973.918 A

When Harry and Bess Truman took their vacation, they were part of a growing American pastime: the automobile vacation. Postwar prosperity, brand-new highways and an itch to see the country made road travel popular with the middle class. In the golden age of the American family vacation, Detroit's Big Three auto makers manufactured family-friendly cars that were both roomy and affordable. The price of gas was 27 cents per gallon, and uniformed attendants filled up the tank and cleaned the windshield. Motels -- where you could pull right up to the door of your room -- were a new phenomenon.

27 cents? A gallon of regular gas went for 29.9 cents in 1970, 1971.

In keeping with one of the book's conceits, Mr. Algeo makes a pilgrimage to the Grand Ballroom of Philadelphia's Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, where Truman spoke. "I was standing in the very spot where Harry had stood exactly fifty-five years earlier, front and center in his white dinner jacket, under the blazing klieg lights, measuring an imaginary fish, and giving Ike hell." Through such vignettes Mr. Algeo takes us back to a time, despite Cold War anxieties, "of unbridled optimism," then brings us forward to our supposedly more cynical age.

Truman was criticizing Eisenhower for the latter's proposal to cut defense spending. A rich irony.












Harry Truman drinks a Coke at a service station in Frederick, Md.

The author retraced the Trumans' trip in stages from fall 2006 to summer 2008, hunting down the service stations where the couple bought gasoline, the diners where they ate a square meal and the hotels where they stayed the night. He even tracked down eyewitnesses who remembered the Trumans passing through, including one man who had saved the Coke bottle that Truman drained at a Gulf gas station in Maryland. The station owner asked the former president to take his mechanic to task for being a Republican, Mr. Algeo reports, but Truman replied that it was "too hot to give anybody hell." We even see the former president polishing off the soda in one of the many charming snapshots of the traveling Trumans that Mr. Algeo unearthed.

Former President Harry Truman unloads his car's trunk at a motel in Decatur, Ill., on June 19, 1953.








The small-town America that Truman visited -- where he seems to have been enthusiastically greeted by folks eager to thank him for his service -- is of course much changed when Mr. Algeo arrives, following in the president's footsteps. Those same towns are now generally in a decline that began a few years after Truman passed through, when President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 and created the interstate highway system that sent travelers whizzing past towns where once they might have stopped for gas or a meal or an overnight stay. As Mr. Algeo reports, the Parkview Motel in Decatur, Ill., where the Trumans stayed in 1953, is now owned by the Illinois Department of Corrections, home to prisoners finishing out the last year of a sentence.







Harry Truman speaking in Philadelphia

New book on Washington and art

The Painter’s Chair: George Washington and the Making of American Art.
Howard, Hugh (author).
Feb. 2009. 304p. illus. Bloomsbury, hardcover, $26



Review: How fascinating it is to read about the creation and impact of portraits of George Washington, the first U.S. president, after the first African American president was elected on a tidal wave of digital images. Howard, the author of books about architecture and the Founding Fathers, tells the many-chaptered story of Washington’s patient sittings in the “painter’s chair” for his 28 ambitious and observant portraitists. By looking through artists’ eyes, readers gain a new, intimate sense of the dignified and disciplined farmer, general, and president, and learn how Washington “fostered nothing less than the birth of American painting.” And what a cast of striving artists Howard profiles. John Simbert mounts America’s first art exhibit in his Boston home in 1730. Charles Willson Peale, the first to paint Washington, served with him at Valley Forge. Painter John Trumbull creates a series of Revolutionary War paintings, and Gilbert Stuart paints the sensitive, unfinished portrait the world knows best. Presidential iconography is a fertile subject, and Howard’s foundational contribution to the field is as thrilling as it is invaluable.— Donna Seaman