Being made of myth and materials, the suburbs are a hard place about which to tell stories. In the last century of American literature, only a handful of good novels unfold there. Even fewer plays and poems. Shaped by restrictions, built on erasure, the suburbs seem tailor-made for horror films. Tales that turn the racial covenants and landscape destruction—that also made the suburbs—inside out; these stories typically speculate through monsters what all that control over the suburbs is meant to keep at bay.
There is, however, at least one great book to have emerged from the suburbs. It is Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, D. J. Waldie’s slim 1996 work, an orchestrally paced ode to the town of Lakewood, the planned city of 80,000 in Los Angeles County where Waldie has worked for the city since 1977. Unfolding in 316 short, numbered sections, Waldie’s book loops through the town’s founding, his family’s story, and the urban history of the West, mapping each upon the other with harmonic grace.
Ours is a haunting time, haunted by restless pasts, by memories that refuse to be forgotten, by ghosts demanding justice. Sometimes the ghosts surprise you, lurking as they can in the smallest objects, the tiniest bits of ephemera that you almost forgot about.
It turns out that regular cells—not just highly specialized brain cells such as neurons—have the ability to store information and act on it. Now Levin has shown that the cells do so by using subtle changes in electric fields as a type of memory. These revelations have put the biologist at the vanguard of a new field called basal cognition. Researchers in this burgeoning area have spotted hallmarks of intelligence—learning, memory, problem-solving—outside brains as well as within them.
For much of the book, these threads of inquiry proceed in parallel; when they synthesize, they truly sing. "Both manners of living with uncontrollable events required me to let go of any sense of an ending," Martin writes. The Last Fire Season eschews a redemptive arc in favor of witnessing and sitting with the discomfort of reality, with understanding that, as Martin puts it, "what happened to the land would happen to me."
But what is extraordinary about “Aednan” is not so much its beauty as its restraint. Lesser writers might have indulged more in the dramatic sweep of this story, but Axelsson is content to let its particulars speak for themselves — the sudden strangeness of sedentary apartment living after ages on the move, the shock of the harsh Swedish residential schools, the grimness of a life alienated from one’s origins and the awakening of later generations to a new, assertive Sámi political identity.
While basing a novel on actual events can be an easy out for the writer, who, freed of the trouble of constructing a plot, bops around episodically, producing a book that reads like a series of blog posts rather than a coherent whole, histories, personal or otherwise, can also be turned into inventive and intelligent narratives. David Winner’s “fictional memoir,” Master Lovers, is the latter sort. Note, however, that he didn’t write his own memoir (although his presence in the narrative is all but ubiquitous); instead, he both discovered and subsequently imagined a life for Dorle Jarmel Soria, a great-aunt who outlived the 20th century: born in 1900, she died in 2002.
Does a writer need a garden to write? Obviously not, but The Writer’s Garden: How Gardens Inspired the World’s Great Authors suggests that having one is a mark of success. Written by Jackie Bennett, with stunning color photographs by Richard Hanson, this is a handsome coffee table book sure to spark interesting conversations among those who leaf through its thick pages.