For Christmas, our son gave me a brace of books -- carefully
boxed together, a kind of electron-positron pair. He conceived them as forming, not a mere set-theoretic
union, but a tensor product of two Hermitian conjugates, intricately linked. These are:
J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A
Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2016)
and
Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight
Years in Power: An American
Tragedy (2017).
BLUF: both
excellent, and “better together”.
To comment on their sociopolitical content would be beyond our brief. But a literary note on the structure of
the latter.
An anthology of articles spanning years is problematic. At the worst, it can be a gaggle of
op-ed pieces that turn out to be
less than the sum of their parts.
Eight Years is notably successful in this respect. It reprints the original (memorable)
pieces of essay-reportage, from The Atlantic (these have aged very well),
and embeds them successively in the skeleton of a memoir of those very years. The personal/reportorial dialectic
proves energizing.
Historical footnote:
As most who have even heard of him know, Mr Coates champions an old idea -- Reparations -- whose
current status in the zeitgeist resembles that of a letter-bomb. Some perspective, from a
wide-ranging book of psychosocial history, which begins in Colonial times and concludes with a chapter called “Native
Sons”:
Faced with expanding black claims,
resistance and repression may become more bitter, even, than in the past. … A
more equalitarian ideology might
itself increase savagery if repression occurs, given the tricks guilt plays in
the human mind.
-- Wilson McWilliams, The Idea
of Fraternity in America (1973), p. 613
Orthoepic footnote:
Mr Coates’ puzzling prénom put
me in mind of Nefertiti; but adepts
assure me that it rhymes with Tallahassee. Thus, it is not exactly “pronounced
the way it’s spelled”, but then neither is François.
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