Not being among the literati, reviewing a book is hard work - difficult for me. That's why, although I normally read at least three books each week, you don't often read about them, here. (My last review, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, was in August 2018.) Every once-in-a-while, though, a book strikes me as begging to be shared - so - here we go.
John Kenney was not a name familiar to me when I found his Talk to Me novel among the new acquisitions at our local library. Among the two books listed in an overleaf was Kenney's Love Poems for Married People. Again, that would have meant nothing to me except that I remembered having read a few of the poems from the book in an issue of The New Yorker (to which Kenney is a contributor) published last fall. On the basis of having read the poem, I checked out the novel.
The blurb on the jack is a good place to start.
"It's a story that Ted Grayson has reported time and time again as a network TV anchor: the public downfall of those at the top. He just never imagined that it would happen to him. After a profanity-laced tirade is caught on camera, his reputation and career are destroyed, leaving him without a script for the first time in years."
The first chapter has Ted Grayson making his first (and, to his plan, last) parachute jump - with his jump instructor who jumped, separately, with a GoPro on his helmet - to capture what he thinks will be a routine first jump. [One thing that bothered me about the whole jump scene is that Grayson's rip cord was not attached to a static line in the airplane. Too, back in 1979-1980, after my short parachuting stint (4 jumps), when I was privileged to (once!) fly a Cessna T303, it would not have occurred to me that it would be used to lift parachutists to altitude, as was described in the chapter.]
The main point of the chapter was to set the scene of Grayson's being a distraught man, ready to die. Of course, the death scene gets deferred to....? The second chapter begins a flashback to three weeks prior to the jump, which occupies most of the remainder of the book.
What strikes me most about Kenney's writing is how brutally honest his presentation of human beings seems. In his writing, no person (as most of us may recognize) is all good or all evil. Each person has warts and grace and usually fails to recognize what is within him/herself. Kenney excels in presenting the dynamics, the changing dynamics, within Grayson's family, friends, coworkers, and strangers. At times I was astounded by how true his prose rang. He critiqued our modern world.
Setting: Grayson has been told by his boss that he is being fired. He asks "Why?" After a bit further dialogue, she soliloquizes. Below are a couple of paragraphs excised from the soliloquy.
"You're right," she finally said. "You didn't kill anyone. And you have served this network with honor and distinction for twenty years. And for that we owe you an enormous debt of gratitude. And I wish you could have continued to sit in that chair for a few more years, go out on your own terms, a special final evening where we review your finest moments, create a banner with its own typeface and theme song, run a full-page ad in the Times. But what's happened, what you did, while not murder, was, in the year 2016, a kind of murder. You killed yourself. You killed your brand. You might as well have killed someone. Ted, we might have a better chance of putting you back on the air if you had committed vehicular manslaughter. If, in other words, it had been an accident, something that the angry masses could understand. But you...you screamed at an innocent young girl, a hardworking immigrant, someone's daughter, and you called her a Russian whore. The internet...the world today...and the world is nothing if not the internet, Ted...it never, ever forgets. Or forgives. There is no mercy anymore, Ted. Because we can see it again and again and again, as it happened. Not a story in a newspaper but that actual event. And it makes us angry. And we want you to pay. Not the we in this room. We want you in that chair, wooing viewers, bringing in pharma marketing dollars. We want steady as she goes. But they...the foaming-at-the-mouth anonymous commenters...they want you to pay. Deep down they're excited because it's not them. They know it could be any one of us. They know. But it's you today. And you have to die."
….
"The world changed, Ted. Everything changed. Letters to the editor? Picketers? Boycotts on the sidewalk? Coups d'état? Please. Do you know what the most powerful force in the land is? It's not Congress, those useless, spineless wankers. It's not the soulless hedge fund boys in Greenwich or the pond scum on Wall Street or the C-suite who will do anything for a profit. It's the comments section on any story, any tweet, any video. It's comments, Ted. Comments rule the world. Do you think I control this company? Or the board? Because we don't. Not really. There is a new power. This company is controlled by anonymous posters. Grimy, possibly nude, portly men sitting in dark rooms, posting comments late at night after a long evening of vigorous masturbation to exceedingly filthy online pornography. They comment and comment and incite other comments and foment the anger. Do you know how angry these people are? They have a petition with...wait for it...almost four million signatures. Do you know what kind of comments we're getting? I don't know, either, because it was so astronomical that our website crashed. Nuance is dead. In its place, we have judgement. Instant Judgment. That's the world we're living in. There's no truth. There's no fact. There's only what you can get to trend. And it's only getting worse."
In the third-from-last chapter, This is Cassini, over and out, Grayson gets to soliloquize during his ultimate broadcast.
"This is my last broadcast as anchor of the nightly news. It has been a privilege being a small part of your evening five nights a week. I hope this broadcast and the remarkable women and men who make it happen each evening have helped you, in some small way, see the world more clearly. If not, if network news has failed you, then I have failed you as its managing editor. A few months after I first sat in this chair, something extraordinary happened at Cape Canaveral, Florida. A twenty-two-foot-high space probe called Cassini-Huygens rocketed into orbit for a twenty-year journey. It orbited Saturn, the second-largest planet in our solar system, for thirteen years. It had course coordinates, a detailed plan of work, a script by which to go. But, of course, that's not how life works. We can plan but we cannot see what lies ahead. In my almost twenty years here, we have gone by a script each evening. But who among us could have imagined in 1997 the world we would see. Cassini traveled 4.9 billion miles since its launch. In that same time, we, as a nation, as a world, as individuals, have traveled a great distance, too. We live, today, in a world radically different than just twenty years ago. We have seen extraordinary advances in technology, communication, medicine, transportation. There is, contrary to so much of what we see and hear, remarkable hope. But something fundamental has shifted in America. The advances of technology are extraordinary. But we are living in a new, digital wild west. A world yet to be fully formed. A world lacking rules. So what now? We have a choice. In how we use technology to advance humanity. Kindness. Generosity. It is easy to become a skeptic sitting in this chair night after night. To become callous to the beauty and possibility of the world. My job, the media's job, isn't to share the news. It's to share the worst. To horrify you. Imagine it was different, though. Imagine if the job was to inspire? Educate? Instead of show you the worst of who we are? If I have a regret--and I have many--it's that we didn't do that more. Demand that from the news. Demand that from the media--social and otherwise. I am a kid from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, who never thought he would grow up to sit in this chair. It has been my honor and my privilege. Thank you for the opportunity. This is Ted Grayson. Thank you. And goodbye."
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