Liz Moore's Novel LONG BRIGHT RIVER - Beth Macy's NonF "DOPESICK

Hunter College in NYC is offering online talks during this pandemic.  A recent video concerned our country's opioid overuse & overdose problems. The informative talk and Q&A was between Liz Moore, a Hunter alum & novelist & award winning journalist & Non-F writer Beth Macy.  Moore's recent novel LONG BRIGHT RIVER is a crime, mystery with a female protagonist, police officer, Mickey. Mickey is searching for her younger sister Kasey whose life took a downward path to self-destruction through heroin & prostitution to feed her habit.  Macy's DOPESICK examines the origins of the pain killer Oxycontin & traces its havoc of destruction & pain.  Moore draws us into the drama of a "good cop" Mickey, v. "bad cop" drug addicted sister.  Their estrangement turns to frenzy for Mickey to find Kasey amidst a flurry of homicides of prostitutes that "worked" the same beat as Kasey.  Moore develops a mystery of fitting together puzzle pieces to fit in solving Kasey's disappearance.  It's also a story of familial love between sisters & Mickey's love for her young son.  The story does take an unsurprising twist of corrupt cops promulgating drugs & prostitution for profit.  Still, it's a stirring & prescient novel that both entertains & proselytizes the deadly & overpowering opioid addiction.  Macy's DOPESICK cogently explains Oxycontin's billion dollar industry growth while knowingly pushing Drs. to overprescribe.  Both writers reiterate the self-loathing & omnipotent hold wielded by opioid use.  Those who become addicted are most likely to be ruled by the addiction for the rest of their lives and more than likely to die from an overdose.  Side affects include depression, memory loss & the need to fulfill the cravings through illegal, self-destructive behaviors putting themselves & others in harms' way.  Moore & Macy make clear the morphine override in an addicted person's brain is to avoid the psychological pain of withdrawal avoiding dopesickness at any cost.  Macy's tells a David v. Goliath story; taking down the Purdue Drug Co.  The hero is Dr. Van Zee, a local small VA town Dr. who became distressed burying young people whom he cared for & helped to bring into the world. His motivation not being financial gain but punitive measures aimed at Purdue to terminate their criminal behavior that resulted in so many deaths and take away their financial incentives to continue. Interestingly, Giuliani acted as legal counsel for Purdue brokering behind the scenes deals to mitigate fines & rebuff jail sentencing.  Giuliani propagandized he wouldn't take an assignment with a Co. he felt acted improperly {hah!}.  America remains a nation where becoming addicted is far easier than receiving treatment for addiction.  "People with promise, people dependent & depended upon, people loving and beloved, one after another, in a line, in a river...a long bright river of departed souls." (Moore)  Opiod Addiction becomes a lifelong & typically relapse laden disease & the only avenue to achieve remission is through medication-assisted treatment.

Lily King's WRITERS and LOVERS - Is a Novel I Loved

"Writers & Lovers" aptly & cogently titled by award winning author Lily King (b Amer. 1963) is a crafty novel.  Basically her story is about a writer and her relationships with lovers & other writers.  Casey, short for Camilla, is a post graduate literary student, aspiring writer while working as a waitress who totters balancing her anxieties, her lovers and diminishing checking account.  There's little doubt this novel semi-biographical.  King denotes her travels and writer's worries.  Her previous novel "Euphoria" is representative of the life & travels of Margaret Mead.  "Euphoria" was listed a Nat'l Bk Critic's Circle Award Finalist.  "Writers & Lovers" is a delirious delight allowing us to venture into writers' narcissism & neuroses.  Casey's mundane quotidian activities traverse  waitressing in an upscale restaurant on Harvard's campus, writing for the 6th on her great Amer. novel and navigating 2 prospective lovers.  Casey's affections waffle between Oscar, an older, established writer and widow with 2 young sons and Silas, one of Oscar's writing students.  Casey's abode is the potting shed of her landlord.  Her astringent habitat is meant to funnel her writing habits & about all she can afford.  Her observations while waitressing are priceless.  She serves up an amusing assortment of characters; both guests & staff.  It's at the restaurant she meets Oscar under precocious circumstances.  She becomes sidetracked by her electric feelings for Silas, an erratic & charming suitor.  Casey is overwhelmed with mourning for her mother who died recently &  unexpectedly.  While Casey's life seems stagnant, there are subtle changes and an inner strength that keeps the reader glued to the page.  King shows off her bibliophile predilections for certain authors. Casey notes, "You get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you."  She also opines, "nearly every guy I've dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny...but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny."  King's majestic writing is magical.  It's hard to discern any machinations in her narrative.  You're taken along on a ride without realizing you've arrived.  WRITERS and LOVERS in addition to being about writing and its craft is also about love and its fathomless expanse of emotions.  "All that love.  All that love has to go somewhere."  Casey surfaces from a consortium of cynicism to a future with guarded optimism.  "For a moment, all my bees have turned to honey."   King's storytelling smatters with golden moments.

TRUST EXERCISE by S Choi - Nat'l Bk Award '19

Susan Choi's novel "Trust Exercise" received the 2019 Nat'l Bk Award for fiction.  It's an excellent choice for its skillful & surprising story-telling and its prescient issues.  Choi proffers keen abilities to inhabit the lives of high school adolescents in a profound and unforeseen manner.  The novel is set in a school for the performing arts where students have an edge over other teens in sensing what they want to do in life. But, as with all adolescents, they possess intense emotions & strong capabilities meshed with impetuous behaviors lacking in sound judgement and life experiences.  Still, ardor of youth has fervor, lust and oftentimes misdirected aims to please & seek approval.  Sarah is the main character in the first half of the book; or first Act.  Choi's ingenious construct in a select performing arts high school examines the precociousness of ego & amplified pathos.  Many drama students come with their own heightened drama & desire to stand-out.  Sarah & David meet their first semester during a "trust exercise" for actors.  The students are prone & situated in a darkened space to intensify their tactile senses & feelings.  Mr. Kingsley, the drama teacher adds fuel to a combustible mixture of adolescent hormones & adult bodies.  The torrid sexual & emotional relationship between Sarah & David takes center stage.  Kingsley is a brutish, Svengali drama teacher adapt at coercing students through hurdles of self-flaggelation.  The 2nd half of the book; Act II, takes place a decade later and focuses on a minor character from Act I, Karen, a former "friend" of Sarah's.  The story is now told in flashback to traumatic events in Karen's life that were shrouded in secrecy.  The narrative style makes a mysterious twist and the reader is unsure of whose directing the storylines.  There's also an added play within the "play" of Act II.  "Trust Exercise," in its truest sense  is about power in relationships.  There are power shifts amongst peers and more odious, abusive power plays enacted between inappropriate adults and vulnerable adolescents.  This emotionally penetrating coming of age novel is keenly perceptive.  Choi captures the passions of youth combined with emerging sagaciousness garnered with age.  As an adult Karen contemplates, "Why should another be injured by choices I make for my Self?"  She realizes "You're choosing for another when you make choices.  We overlap.  We get tangled.  You can't help but hurt."   Trust me.  Susan Choi's "Trust Exercise" is exceptional.  Although, "Thoughts are often false.  A feeling's always real.  Not true, just real."

Craig Brown's 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret-Glib Gossip

Craig Brown (b UK 58) is a critic, satirist and journalist.  Brown's " Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret" does not constitute a biography.  The book is laden with tidbits of gossip gathered from numerous "insiders" to the Royal Family.  To call these rambling, remote anecdotes titillating is a droll understatement.  For Anglophiles or the parasocial public obsessed with celebs & the Royal Family, they will likely lap up every ludicrous and seemingly lascivious morsel of immoral or inappropriate behaviors of the Royals.  Perhaps the common folk feed of what the no so simple folk do.  Princess Margaret being #2 as like her nephew Prince Harry @ #2 behind his older brother (and #3 behind Charles whose never gonna get his spot on the throne) they have similar reasons for being naughty and not nice.  But did anyone not already know about her affair with the much older married equerry, Capt. Townsend and then chucked him when it came down to being cut off at the purse strings.  I didn't know of the supposed lust of Picasso after the Princess.  But, who knows since they never met.  At least 5'4" Picasso would have towered over the 5' petite, Princess with a purported 18' waist and bodacious bod.  E-god, why share Picasso "could picture the color of their {Queen Elizabeth & Princess Margaret} pubic hair." The mini-series "The Crown" may have rekindled or captured a new generation of fans who desire a voyeuristic foray into aristocracy and the Royal family.  Anglophiles will lap this mishmash of incoherent references.  Brown's 99 glimpses are self-indulgent insider name droppings.  I critique this critic's work as a rag tag frivolous mixed bag.  "Ninety-Nine Glimpses..." will garner Royal groupies and readers of the NY POST who love its cover (as do I) and page 6.  I command you to 86, 99.