Anthem by Noah Hawley: A review

This is either a polemic about the unsettled nature of modern society or it is a book about a ragtag bunch of teenagers out to save the world. Maybe it is both. Frankly, it is really hard for me to say just what it is. The main story is fiction and yet the author keeps interrupting himself with personal observations, explanations, and apologies. He can't seem to just let his fiction speak for itself. In one of his personal interjections, he writes: "First of all, your author would like to apologize for the world he has created. He knows it is ridiculous. The fact that the world he lives in is also ridiculous is no excuse. The author's job is to make sense of the senseless." Well, yes, that is sort of the writer's job description and in this instance, Hawley has failed miserably.

The chief failure from my perspective is that the book has too many characters and we never really get to know any of them. It was extremely hard to keep them all straight and, after a while, I didn't even try. Also, the narrative jumps around, starting in 2009 as we see 9-year-old Story Burr-Nadir singing the national anthem during a school recital in Brooklyn. But then it leaps ahead by several years to a time that is after the Covid pandemic when the latest fad among teenagers seems to be committing suicide. Suicide becomes performance art. Hawley writes that it is as if the species were giving up on itself.

The only ones of those multitudinous characters that we even halfway get to know are Simon Oliver and Louise Conklin. Simon is the son of the chief executive of Rise Pharmaceuticals and he has an older sister named Claire. One day young Simon discovers the body of his 17-year-old sister who has committed suicide in their parents' bathroom by ingesting an overdose of the pills that her father's conglomerate sells. Before she died, she wallpapered the room with "small foil packets of oxycodone." It's hardly surprising that walking in on such a scene served to cause Simon to become somewhat unhinged.

The parents' response to Simon's traumatic experience was to send him to a psychiatric facility for children of the fabulously wealthy, a place called Float Anxiety Abatement Center. There he meets Louise and a boy who is called Prophet, plus a bunch of other traumatized teenagers of wealthy parents, but, again, at this point, I was having a really hard time keeping all these people straight.

It was just about at this point that the story really began to go off the rails for me. We've got multiple plotlines shooting off in different directions. There's Story Burr-Nadir, now 22 years old, who has gone missing. Meantime, her mother, Margot Nadir, is being considered for the position of justice on the Supreme Court. There is a character called E.L. Mobley, aka the Wizard, who is another of those fabulously wealthy people. He is a sex addict and his hobby is kidnapping adolescent girls and impregnating them. He has an employee called the Troll who finds and captures the girls for him. One of the victims is a girl called Katie, aka Bathsheba DeWitt, who the Prophet is obsessed with setting free from the Wizard's compound in West Texas. (Of course, it would be in West Texas!)

The gang of teenagers from the Float Center escapes their confines and sets out to save themselves and, incidentally, the world. Catastrophes pile on top of each other and the pace of the novel's action becomes quite herky-jerky and scattered. Chaos ensues and the outcome is left ambiguous for the reader to decide.

In 2016, I read Noah Hawley's previous book, Before the Fall, and I loved it. It was easily a five-star read for me, so I went into this one with very high hopes and expectations. Sadly, those hopes and expectations were not to be realized.

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Poetry Sunday: Don't Hesitate by Mary Oliver

How about we share another Mary Oliver poem? After all, you can never have too many of those. In this one, the poet seems to acknowledge that it is often hard to simply live in and enjoy the moment, perhaps because we are afraid it can't last. She urges us to give in to that moment and fully experience the joy. Although "much can never be redeemed, still, life has some possibility left." Don't Hesitate by Mary Oliver If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is no...

Poetry Sunday: Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney

My mother was a farm wife and a prodigious canner. She canned fruit and vegetables from the garden, even occasionally meat. But the best thing that she canned, in my opinion, was blackberry jam. Even as I type those words my mouth waters! Of course, before she could make that jam, somebody had to pick the blackberries. And that somebody was quite often named Dorothy. I think Seamus Heaney might have spent some time among the briars plucking those delicious black fruits as well, so he would have known that "Once off the bush the fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour." They don't keep; you have to get that jam made in a hurry! Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust ...

Poetry Sunday: Hymn for the Hurting by Amanda Gorman

You probably remember poet Amanda Gorman from her appearance at the inauguration of President Biden. She read her poem "The Hill We Climb" on that occasion. After the senseless slaughter in Uvalde this week, she was inspired to write another poem which was published in The New York Times. It seemed perfect for the occasion and so I stole it in order to feature it here, just in case you didn't get a chance to read it in the Times . Hymn for the Hurting by Amanda Gorman Everything hurts, Our hearts shadowed and strange, Minds made muddied and mute. We carry tragedy, terrifying and true. And yet none of it is new; We knew it as home, As horror, As heritage. Even our children Cannot be children, Cannot be. Everything hurts. It’s a hard time to be alive, And even harder to stay that way. We’re burdened to live out these days, While at the same time, blessed to outlive them. This alarm is how we know We must be altered — That we must differ or die, That we must triumph or try. ...

The Nature of Things

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