Our Missing Hearts (book)

Pengo's 2022 Summer Book Club

“All the King’s Screenwriters, 1946: A drama of how Fascism might even come to this country.”
- Firesign Theatre, "Dear Friends"

First, a quick update on my health; I’m good. It’s difficult to see out of my left eye, which looks like a disgusting bloody mess, but it feels fine, a little sore for the additional use. A friend came over yesterday and we watched Magnolia. Man, does that thing hit different once your parents are dead.

But, okay. So. On June 24, 2022, the day Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, a playwright on Twitter recommended all those who were moved to write about this disastrous historical event concentrate on the future, not the present. Two wit; write about the effects this will have on people in the future, not about what is happening today.

Which is to say, speculate. Speculative fiction.

Recently, my fourteen year-old niece was reading The Handmaid’s Tale, the 1984 novel that surged with attention after the 2016 election and the Hulu television adaptation that followed. Author Margaret Atwood created an America in the not-too-distant future in which conservative politics and a very real calamity in the human birthrate combine to create a nation where women are regarded primarily as chattel for breeding.

If you could imagine such a thing.

The success of her work, and stories like this, is in its believability. It is grounded in a reality based on laws which have passed, behaviors which have been exhibited, things that have happened.

Dystopian fictions like 1984 (1949, or did I just confuse you) are extreme in their depiction of the future and so lean more into the realm of science fiction, with their guesses at future technologies. As if you can imagine a world where there are screens in every room which watch you just as you watch them, or that screaming at one would be limited to two minutes a day.

With It Can’t Happen Here (1935), novelist Sinclair Lewis set the events of an authoritarian America in his present. With Mussolini’s reign firmly established and Hitler on the ascendant, Lewis sought to shake the United States from the naïve assumption that our democratic systems take care of themselves and that we would never willingly elect a tyrant.

Art: Hartley Lin
The New Yorker, July 31, 2022

Philip Roth put a spin on Lewis’s novel with The Plot Against America (2004), a revisionist history in which the charming hero and Christian Nationalist Charles Lindbergh runs for President in 1940 and wins.

Imagining an alternate Roth family based on his own, this tale centers on an American family that suffers under the Antisemitism which, previous expressed in more subtle and one might say normative manner, is unleashed in naked fury by an American populace emboldened by their new leader.

If you could imagine such a thing.

This summer I had the opportunity to read an ARC (advance review copy) of Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng, which will be released in October. As described in advance promotional materials, Ng has created an America which has been “governed by laws written to preserve ‘American culture’ in the wake of years of economic instability and violence.” 

Reading this on the beach in North Carolina the the days immediately following Dobbs v. Jackson, in a season when inflation and gas prices may have more effect at the polls than the daily revelations of just how far our former President went to subvert the 2020 election, her work might also have the more immediate title, It Is Happening Here. Or that it has.

It’s the kind of book I would like to imagine being added to the middle school curriculum of every middle school in the nation, if we weren’t living in a land where the reading lists are currently being culled rather than expanded.

Penguin Random House releases "Our Missing Hearts", a new novel by Celeste Ng, on October 4, 2022.

Everything I Never Told You (book)

Brief, solitary air travel lends me the opportunity to consume books with great speed, which can be greatly disorienting as one novel can color an entire journey. As I was preparing to travel to St. Paul for the Twin Cities Marathon, I noticed to my surprise a copy of Celeste Ng's debut novel, Everything I Never Told You sitting on my wife's bookshelf.

I was surprised because I had just been thinking of that book. I was thinking of that book because I had recently heard Ng interviewed by Dee Perry on Sound of Applause. When I heard her interview on Sound of Applause I wondered why her name was so familiar.

It didn't take long before I remembered she had written an award-winning play for Marilyn Bianchi's Kids' Playwriting Festival, and that I had directed that play.

This is why I wanted to read her book, and between flights and trying to calm my mind before the race at bedtime, completed the entire work over the weekend. It left me shaken and sad, but also gave me a great deal of clarity and focus.

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet."

The first two sentences of the book filled me with a morbid, horrible curiosity. I have a niece named Lydia, but I have to be honest and state that didn't have anything to do with it. While I was in St. Paul, I told my wife about the book and that it was worming through my thoughts in advance of the race and that I was even afraid to continue and she suggested I put the book down for a while but I insisted I needed to know how it ends.

This is the thing. Perhaps you have noticed that I do not actually post private information on either this or my running blog. There is personal, and there is private. Arguments happen in my house with great shouting, and if you are standing outside you may hear them, but I won't share the details here.

It is enough to state that I have a daughter - have while she is mine - age twelve going on thirteen and while I cannot impart any intention on mine or my wife's part to impress upon our daughter the need to succeed, speaking only for myself I have presented a model for anxiety and concern for my own efforts in the public arena which may in part explain (other than impending adolescence) an overwhelming preoccupation with achievement coupled with almost absolute inability to enjoy what success she achieves. This last is certainly a fault she has acquired from both of us.

Ng's book includes layers of difficulty for its family of protagonists with which I and my family do not need to cope, external pressures to succeed in matters personal as well as professional, many of which arise from issues of race ... but also gender, and that does affect us very much.

Details in the family dynamic, between father and son and also between mother and daughter, do not (necessarily) parallel ours, though I can see clearly the judgment between the males and the yearning between the females and that is not unfamiliar. Ng's parental characters rise above the portrayal of many parents in YA novels, for example, in that we receive a complete back story in which we root for their success before receiving them as the parents who so entirely misunderstand their teenage children. Even in this, we understand them.

My wife and I do not shape our children to be what we wish them to be. We follow their lead, as best we can, with support and encouragement, and try very hard not to judge. And that is hard.

But how much of my daughter's perfection anxiety is based on her understanding that in order to move forward, to go to the places she yearns to go, to be the person she most wants to be, she must accomplish more than we have done.

For three years I managed Dobama's Night Kitchen and my final production (as artistic director) was what we called Marilyn's Festival: In The Night Kitchen.

This annual performance of award-winning, children-written plays did not include all of the winning plays, only about half of them to create a two-hour, two-act event. Most of those chosen for performance were the fanciful elementary or middle school plays. with one high school play (often fifteen minutes long) plunked into the middle of the second act, like a brooding, unhappy teenager at a six year old's bouncy house birthday party.

In honor of the 20th festival in 1998, we would produced an hour's worth of high school written plays as a separate production.

In my notes from the selection process I called Shaker High senior Celeste Ng's short play The Fishbowl "very funny and insightful" with a strong message, and gave it my highest rating.

The premise of The Fishbowl is of a man in a psychiatric hospital who insists on using certain familiar words in place of other familiar words. For example, he consistently refers to his room as a fishbowl. Two doctors debate whether he requires either medication or understanding.

In its basic debate between two doctors who have two very different ideas over treatment of a patient who may or may not be delusional it reminds me of the play Blue/Orange by Joe Penhall, only that play debuted in 2000. Ng wrote The Fishbowl two years earlier.