Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns is as advertised: extraordinary, brilliant, lyrical, even "magisterial" (even though it's blurbed on the cover — incidentally kind of strange being that the source material is neither from the Times' Sunday Book Review review nor the weekday Arts review [notable books get both] but rather from the lead sentence in a profile about Wilkerson — I actually think it's an odd pullout word of praise; the dictionary definition is something along the lines of "authoritative" but with a little baggage of "doctrinaire" and other negative connotations; it certainly sounds like a good word to use though).
The book is a sympathetic, thorough and wide-ranging telling of the migration stories of three ordinary African Americans during the Great Migration, the era roughly between WWI and 1970s when millions of blacks moved out of the South. I don't think it's a big stretch to say that most of our understanding of this history is perhaps limited to Jacob Lawrence, in which case Wilkerson's hugely readable and thoroughly engaging text is important. Even though Wilkerson interviewed 1200 people during research for the book, the focus is on the three individuals — a woman who migrated to Chicago in the 1930s, a man who migrated to Harlem in the 1940s and an educated man who migrated to Los Angeles in the 1950s — working on the macro and micro levels by weaving in the larger story about the Great Migration.
The effect sucks you completely in — their lives are deep and textured and indicative and emblematic without sacrificing individuality. That part is amazing. Along the way Wilkerson notes some boldface Americans who traveled similar paths across the country and it all makes that much more sense. Her subjects are fully formed characters, with flaws and tragic sides and hubris, which is necessary: you might be tempted to dislike a subject at times — at the same time her subjects never come across as perfectly outlined or too rooted in pathos; they're not victims. Which is where you start to discern Wilkerson's narrative: she makes the point over and over that these migrants are more like immigrants (in the pre-2016 Alexander Hamilton kind of way) than you might think. She cites studies and statistics, which you sort of gloss over, to support this idea. And the three people she profiles are all successful — not always American Dream successful, and not always when it came to their children — but for the most part successful: home-owning, reaching a comfortable retirement, vital to their respective communities. For sure, how fraught their gains are (or were — she writes about two of the characters' deaths; those parts are tear-jerking in the extreme) is always hanging over the book, but the statement is unmistakable — these are the stories of survivors. It's big and even lyrical, but it's a bold choice, too.
Another conscious flourish that you'll notice is how repetitive the stories are: not from subject to subject but in the same person — even just pages apart. It's noticeable and obviously on purpose: I'm guessing it is meant to evoke someone telling a story, what with the repetition in that and circling back and emphasizing this or that. Not sure if I like it (Suns is over 500 pages) but I understand it on that level at least. Another part that reveals itself but which isn't — or shouldn't be — a big issue is that old pitfall of oral history, that being how much of the story is actually 100 percent true. I don't think it matters, especially when it comes to motivation to move to find a better life, which is by its nature internal (at least in part) (by which I mean that perceived or real matters little when it comes to a person's motivation; the motivation is the story). But Wilkerson never really says anything either way (which is kind of an interesting choice when you think about it); somewhere along the way you wonder how this is all factchecked — not that it necessarily has to be (but if it is I'm really impressed) (but if it isn't I think it's OK to at least account for that somehow, too) (this falls by the wayside when you get sucked into the book though).
As Moore expresses it, the world was fascinated by radium's otherworldly glow — its luminescence captivated people, and doctors even used it to promote healthy living. It was in high demand during the war for, among other things, radium-based paint for glow-in-the-dark watch dial faces. With so many men off to war, the usual gender roles were disrupted and many young women entered the workforce. This was true for the watch dial-painting industry, and the newly, upwardly mobile women enjoyed well-paying and relatively high-status jobs. The job itself, requiring some skill, was viewed as an almost artistic vocation. Part of what made a watch painter skillful was honing a very fine point on her paintbrush. The easiest way to do this was to lick the tip of the brush, then dip it in the paint, paint the watch dial and repeat over and over
(known to the practitioners as "lip, dip, paint"). Which is how these women poisoned themselves with radium.
Radium, they eventually discovered, not only has a very long half-life but also collects in the bones of human beings, meaning that over time the women's bones would become brittle and actually disintegrate — that (which is horrifying) but then also with the devastating consequences of having radiation trapped in one's body: various cancers and whatever else. Basically terrible, horrible and (after some digging) happening with the approval/negligence of those in charge, making what started as a tragedy that much worse.
The story of what happened is not unknown — it was big news as it was happening, and the story passed down — but in The Radium Girls the author Moore set out to really look at the lives of the women, putting faces to stories. She set out to do this, she explains in the Author's Note, after Googling "great plays for women" and finding a play about a group of the women that she decided to direct. Then she decided to write a book about it, and in the way she did, because when one is telling someone's story "you have a responsibility to do justice to those whose story it is," emphasis hers.
Clearly that's correct — do justice to those whose story it is. In other words, Moore specifically zeroes in on the victims, to a somewhat lesser extent the wider story (though the case is revealed) and to a much lesser extent the wider import of this specific workplace health scandal. The only thing is that you read the book, and read and read, and at some point it's not especially clear why you care about the actual people who endured this horrible fate: even in the telling, they're notable because they're just like any other young, fresh-faced person. It's tragic, and horrible, and unfortunately their stories aren't particularly interesting, or at least are only relevant because they happened.
A small word about objectification: I understand underscoring the striking, salient detail that these young, energetic sometimes beautiful women became shockingly disfigured and physically devastated by this powerful element but at some point it starts to wear thin and you almost see her treating the women as objects that lose their beauty. It's a cumulative effect, and it's "true" but somehow it starts to fatigue you and you wonder if the author (or even "we") would see a different group, class or ethnicity in a similar way. I could be imagining it (my expectations, hurrumph) but flipping through just now, it's there — page 19, for example: "She was an extremely attractive woman with large gray eyes and long dark hair; she considered her pretty teeth her best feature." One of the earlier signs of radium poisoning was that the women lost their teeth. I'm not complaining about this tack — it's certainly salient — but as the stories pile up, it starts to become rather noticeable.
Radium Girls stays interesting because it is an interesting episode in history but the book also reads a lot like the interpretive text for a museum or memorial. And the author is explicit about this: she sets out to tell their stories. She also sacrifices a lot in doing so — if you're only vaguely aware of this story you might not know that these cases changed workplace safety laws. They also contributed in big ways to how we understand the effects of radiation. These things are brought up in the epilogue; had they been there in the introduction you might have been more invested. Knowing that at least some of the women who survived the poisoning were self-sacrificing and even heroic by continuing to be tested and studied over the course of their lives actually solves the earlier problem with seeing the women as interchangeable victims. In other words — and it sounds terrible when someone sets out to write something so justice-seeking — the epilogue was more compelling than the story as it unfolded in real time; it doesn't take long and you don't need much detail to understand that 1) radium was deadly, 2) these women had no idea it would kill them and 3) the people in charge conspired to keep the truth from hitting the light. By telling the full, true, big, lifelike stories of the women at the core of Radium Girls, the author almost perseverates on this pathetic (in the true sense of the word: arousing pity) lens; every page reminds you that these youthful women are dying in the worst ways. It's relentless (in the not good sense of that word).
A wider observation: it seems like there's a move toward storytelling at this human "granular" level. You can always find examples of someone but there's that whole forest-trees conundrum. The way current news topics play out fall into this trap — thousands of stories of people losing health coverage or being summoned to a hearing or getting hit by a drunk driver. Those stories seem like they're more often designed to pull an emotional string than contribute to an understanding of a policy proposal or something similarly wide-scoped. And it's mostly bad. Similarly, and as it relates to Radium, it may feel good and right to right wrongs and tell stories but it doesn't necessarily make for a compelling book.
The one time in my life I've bought a new car — or at least a pre-owned vehicle but actually purchased from a dealership — we sat in a small, squat, glassed building in the sprawling lot and waited for whatever requisite paperwork had to be conjured up and assembled. The dealership was classy and anticipated needs, so they thoughtfully had a bank of flat-screen TVs (I'm actually assuming they were flat-screen TVs instead of actually remembering that fact, since that would be a touch they clearly had to fulfill) playing music videos.
I suppose someone somewhere must be on the hook for curating what music videos get played in the sales area of a car dealership; I don't think I'd want to be responsible for this. It's obviously a tricky task: nothing too edgy, for sure, but something would be called for that would encourage one to buy — or at least something upholding the virtue of car ownership or lease holding. I remember not much about what was played other than it was the same five or six videos played over and over and over and over. And of those I remember only one: Deep Blue Something's "Breakfast At Tiffany's."
To paraphrase the song, I think I remember the tune!
The song is kind of simple — the persona in the lyric is marking the dissolution of a relationship and remarking that even though they're seeing things differently and things are apparently over the two actually liked Breakfast at Tiffany's — or at least the counterpart of the relationship "remembers the film" and, well, that's one thing they've got.
It's a little bit of a bank shot — in the sense that we're supposed to pencil in a lot of stuff (or presumably) from this one detail — and then a little one-note in the sense that the entire fucking goddamn song is this one fucking tiny observation, but whatever: it's catchy.
And I don't totally understand how it's meant to reiterate the positive benefits of car ownership but whatever: interest rates for car loans are pretty low, and over the course of a five-year loan you're only spending another couple hundred bucks if you luck into a one-percent APR so cue up that '90s heyday and feel empowered . . . you deserve this . . . and now it's suddenly time to consider an extended warranty.
So in the video the lead singer is holding the book. Now about that book . . .
I actually couldn't remember if I had read the book before. In the end, I'm pretty sure that I did but I don't really have a firm memory of reading it. I blame the movie for this, of course. It's not really Audrey Hepburn's fault, but rather the machine that makes Audrey Hepburn. She made that role transcend the role, which is deft, obviously, but about that role . . .
Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's is an odd novella — seeming romantic but rug-pulling like the worst Springsteen excesses. Which is to say, knowing what we know now about Audrey Hepburn's big sunglasses, it's hard to square the "Moon River" la-de-la-de-la of the film with the character in Capote's book, who comes off as kind of a cross between Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle and, I don't know, maybe this lady or something.
Which is also to say, Did you realize what an unbecoming piece of shit Holly Golightly really was? The book is basically her maligning random races and ethnicities through the eyes of a somewhat sympathetic narrator, who people then go on to assume is a homosexual because of 1) Truman Capote and 2) the two characters' chaste relationship. To go back to her unbecomingness, Capote does a nice job creating this character who is not just unmoored from society (in an quasi romantic way) but also a stupid fucking hayseed of an idiot who is at turns racist and then goes and prostitutes herself to prolong a runaway's lifestyle in the big city.
In other words, she is nowhere near Audrey Hepburn, and the dissonance a reader experiences in encountering this character is not the fault of the writer but rather the Hollywood-Industrial-Complex that glosses over and makes anodyne complicated real characters.Americ
In the book, Holly Golightly is gross. In the movie, she's unflappable romantic, who would only deign to name a pet when she feels at home. In the book, she's a nasty narcissistic animal abuser who neglects her cat and then ditches the thing somewhere in Harlem before leaving the country. "Golightly" indeed, you fucking Eric Harris wannabe.
Why does this matter? It matters because of the outsized impression Audrey Hepburn makes on America — through no fault of her own, mind you — when the source material is so 180-degrees opposite. You can be excused for feeling confused reading the character in Capote's book with that fun-loving adorable manic pixie prototype in the film in mind. And you shouldn't need to square the blithely racist commentary of that character with her 1960s expression thereof.
I don't know (and don't really have time to Google) Truman Capote's response to how the moviemakers interpreted that story — in some ways, it's impressive that they did what they did. But they did a huge disservice to the book. And that's not even getting into Mickey Rooney's cheap, gratuitous laugh lines, which are legendary in their own right.
The book is a wartime-era dystopian view of American society, bent on criticizing the obvious deficiencies of the America of the time. Think about it: choosing to set a story during WWII and focusing on laze-abouts and various ne'er-do-wells is wonderfully transgressive. The movie picks up this thread and basically makes it the final season of Girls. And then you wonder how you get Mickey Rooney.
Another word about interpretation: I feel like people were making something of the main character's alleged sexual orientation, which in their minds hewed to Truman Capote's orientation. This seems a) facile, and b) not in line with the point of the story, which was that the main character wasn't that taken with Ms. Horry Gorightry as were others. Which is also to say, less Deep Blue Something and more "You Got It (Keep It Out of My Face)":
