All Heart and No Fist at Peter's

Peter's Dinner 

Oh, what to say about a man who assembles his menu from the Food section of The New York Times even after enduring its less-than-flattering portrayal of the Man Book Club?  Poor Peter.  He simply couldn't shake his affection for Melissa Clark's timeless recipes.  Fortunately for us, her curation and Peter's execution last Tuesday of a one-pan entrée of roast chicken, potatoes, and arugula, paired with roast carrots and Brussels sprouts, made for an almost perfect springtime meal. 

The only misstep came at the end.  Thanks to a minor oversight, the organic berries were topped with crème fraiche instead of vanilla ice cream.  Most of us would never have noticed the substitution had the cold vanilla-flavored cream not been dispensed from refrigerated Three Twins pint cartons! 

Our 2016 Quiz

Before we turned our attention to Yapa's debut novel, we all submitted to the Man Book Club 2016 Quiz, which was designed to test how closely we've been listening to one another since our last quiz in 2008. 15 questions were administered, with three guys given chances at each unanswered question.  (Paul was absent; he'll get number 16.) 

The questions were challenging, but men you should still be ashamed!  How many times have we heard Armando talk about his other men's group and George talk about US Rowing?  Maybe our poor performance will make us more sympathetic the next time we see our children's progress reports.  Kudos nonetheless to Terry and Glenn, who showed real test-taking mojo, and honorable mentions to Roy and Doug, whose correct answers to some questions kept them from disgracing themselves.  The rest of you ARE disgraced, so start taking notes.  I'm not waiting 8 years before administering the next quiz.

Other Acknowledgments

We should also acknowledge Peter's daughter, Lulu, whose presence during dinner tempered our outbursts and improved our table manners.  While only an 8th grader, she can already outrow George and outswim Larry.  A low bar, but impressive.  Speaking of impressive, John's daughter Ali was named CWPA player of the year as Michigan headed into the NCAA tournament earlier this month.  John was too shy to share this, so I'm giving Ali the plug she deserves.

Our Review and Discussion of Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

Sunil Yapa's 2016 novel about the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle had us polarized from the start.  Perhaps it was his ambition (the same event witnessed simultaneously by 7 different characters) or his craftsmanship (there were more than a few clunker sentences--"florid" according to Doug), but his street-level narrative didn't quite work for many of us.

It's hard to summarize Yapa's novel without trivializing his efforts.  The story centers on 12 hours of scripted yet chaotic protest and an ineffectual and at times violent police response.  Through the lens of his various characters, Yapa opines on globalization, illegal immigration, poverty, drugs, family dysfunction, homelessness, and much more.  And therein lay the problem for many of us.  Was the book as simple as its title suggested--an examination of the conflict between love and violence?  I posed the question but no one saw it in such easy terms.

Instead, we argued about Yapa's self-conscious character study and split over whether Victor, Julia, John Henry, Park, et al. were principled in their passion (Peter and Terry seemed to think so; I didn't), reflected a black-and-white clarity (Tom felt they did; Larry felt they didn't), presented as vivid and compelling (John) or muddled and unresolved (Larry and Jack). 

Most of us conceded the novel had its moments, especially in the way its shifting points of view reflected the chaos surrounding the characters (Armando) and captured the same events seven different ways (Glenn).  But if his characters' anguish was palpable, so was Yapa's prose.  He caromed between casual unfinished sentences and digressive high-pitched ones, often in the same scene.  In the hands of a surer stylist, it might have worked.

Rating the Book
 
Rarely has our post-discussion rating been so polarized.  With two 8's (Peter and Armando) and two 4's (Stan and George), Yapa squeaked by with a passable 6.0 and our grudging recognition of  his undeniable talent.  As Terry noted, if we rated on discussion quality alone, Yapa's number would have risen considerably.

Next Up: The Moonshine War by Elmore Leonard

Roy offered us an interesting set of choices for our reading in June.  Bill Bryson's sentimental favorite A Walk in the Woods was first, followed by Emily Mandel's much-touted Station Eleven, and finally Elmore Leonard's 1969 mass market classic, The Moonshine War.  Many of us had already read Bryson's comedic Appalachian meditation and a few bristled at the idea of reading Mandel lest it be taken as a conciliatory gesture.  Our misgivings were mooted when Roy promised a fine selection of distilled spirits if we chose Leonard's Prohibition era narrative.  An easy choice indeed.  We'll convene next month with our used paperbacks and shot glasses in hand. 

Dinner at the Orphanage with Larry

Acknowledgments
If Larry's intent last Tuesday was to serve us something that approximated--in tone or taste--the cuisine of Adam Johnson's North Korea, he did a terrible job.  There was no fresh bird's breast, no toxic peaches, no purloined shrimp, and thankfully no ox secretions.  Larry instead took us south of the 38th parallel so we could feast guilt-free on bulgogi, salmon, rice, kimchi (homemade), and mochi (also homemade).  Well-nourished, and with guest Stuart at our table, we looked across the DMZ and wondered about the strange world that inspired The Orphan Master's Son.

(A special acknowledgment is owed to Tom and Dean, who transported Stan and his new wheelchair to Larry's and back.  Stan's recent motorcycle accident in Mexico and his return odyssey--10 hours to the border in the back of a pickup, and another 9 to the hospital in S.F.!--are quite the story.  Stan, we wish you a fast recovery.)

The Book
Johnson's 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is, on its surface, the story of an Everyman character (named Jun Do) who while navigating the absurdity of modern-day North Korea becomes a symbol of its extremes.  Born to an orphan master, raised among orphans, and later working variously as a kidnapper and an intelligence officer, Jun Do's early years are full of the contradictions of North Korean society.  Johnson ups the ante in Part 2 of the book when the reader realizes that the Commander Ga character from Part 1 has disappeared and Jun Do has assumed his identity.  No longer Everyman, Jun Do's real identity is open to question (literally, as his interrogation spans all of Part 2).

Our positive rating (7.6) belied the mutterings of some (Roy and Dan, I'm talking about you), whose forward progress suffered during the book's transition to Part 2.  With its confusing character changes and relentlessly shifting point of view (back and forth from a literarily omniscient third person to a politically omniscient second person--speaking from a state loudspeaker--to the first person Interrogator posing as our protagonist), not everyone was impressed by Johnson's virtuosity.  Nor was everyone satisfied by the novel's fanciful detour to Texas and that state's later role in the story's climax.

We were all, however, entranced by the many sordid DPRK details extracted (or manufactured) by Johnson.   Replete with gulags, prison mines, foreign kidnappings, widespread hunger, self-criticism sessions, and several Potemkin-style communist paradoxes (e.g., the handmade vintage Mustang using a Lada chassis and Mercedes engine!), Johnson's imagination soars.   Yes, the story is dark (Dean), dystopian (Larry), and surreal (Peter), the narrative saunters (Stan), the "truthiness" quotient is high (thanks for that Colbert reference, Glenn), and there's more than a little misogyny (duly noted by Paul), but many of us thought Johnson did a superb job in grappling with our often conflicting notions of truth, identity, and the nature of power and relationships.  As Doug also noted, Johnson beautifully fictionalizes a society whose reality is already stranger than fiction.   For Terry and me and a couple others, The Orphan Master's Son landed at or near the top of the MBC booklist. 

Next Up
Peter challenged us with his offerings for next month.  With two (!) titles about racism and a failed criminal justice system, another about disease and mortality, and a fourth about Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, we shuddered and instead picked Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist.  A novel centered around the WTO protests in Seattle, YHMSF has landed on many recent Best Picks lists.  We'll see if it makes ours.

John's Immortal Evening

Acknowledgments
The meal John prepared on Tuesday would rank among our top five--if we had such rankings.  Aided by Dean, Tom, and Mark, John prepared and named the following courses, each reflecting a different sentiment evoked by our book:

Blood, heart, and liver.  Essential to our circulation, blood was transfused as bloody martinis, served from a hanging IV drip bag.  Our most important muscle, heart was rendered into skewered calves hearts sourced from a grass-fed beef producer in West Marin.  And liver was transformed into a foie gras brought in fresh from Sonoma and served on toast. A fine starting course.

Eat Your Veggies.  With this life-enhancing mandate, we weren't allowed to be choosy.  John served us a soup pureed from his own selection of organic vegetables from the farmers market.

Last Supper.  When confronted with one's mortality, only the best will do.  John obliged with a filet mignon, sous vide, accompanied by mashed cauliflower and bacon jam and smashed potatoes with caramelized shallots.

Brain Brownies.  What else but scratch brownies and vanilla ice cream topped with a bourbon and orange bitters drizzle?  Well, here's what else: for a touch of verisimilitude, mini brain lobes in the form of walnut halves atop each brownie.

Thank you, John, and we hope you enjoy your well-deserved trip to Iceland.  We also owe thanks to Paul (and his ever-patient and absent wife Jane) for allowing us, our guests, and a photographer to take over his beautiful home for a night. 

The Book
Atul Gawande's Being Mortal is one physician's attempt, in plain English, to expose our frequent resort to aggressive medical intervention as we approach the end of life.  Whether through experimental therapies, life-sustaining assistance, or institutional confinement, we too often seek to extend life without understanding the implications or the alternatives.

Gawande's presentation was disturbing and enlightening at the same time. I felt that his book was a barometer (measured by one's level of unease while reading it) for our readiness to make the hard decisions that lie ahead. Almost everyone shared his own story of family illness and death to illustrate our collective discomfort with what may be an unclear or even false choice as the end nears (i.e., quality over quantity).  While Armando, always the naturalist, read Being Mortal as a field guide to getting old, the scientist in Roy wasn't persuaded.  He found Gawande's prescriptions premature in a world of constant innovation and advancement.

Gawande's recurring question to end-stage patients is:  what do you most want and what are you willing to give up in order to get it? Illustrated by the stories of his patients, Gawande claims that quality of life is desired most and that, surprisingly, less intervention can prolong rather than shorten life.  We discussed his premise and the anecdotes sprinkled through the book (guest Mark declared the book a sales pitch for hospice care; guest Keith noted his personal connection to Sara Monopoli, one of Gawande's featured patients).  In the end, Paul pronounced Being Mortal the "most relevant" book we've read given its insistence that we set clear expectations for the end of our lives.  Tom then exhorted us to have our affairs in order by year end (with a current estate plan and advance healthcare directive).  Amen, Tom!

More disturbing than the book's focus on mortality (and Glenn's recent brush with same) was the tragic coincidence that longtime MBC friend and guest, Charlie, was killed and his wife Dorothy injured in an auto accident that same afternoon in New Jersey.  Present at our progressive holiday party in December, Charlie was a thoughtful, artistic man whose presence will be sorely missed.  Recover quickly, Dorothy.  Charlie remains in our thoughts.

RIP Charlie Kleiman

Next Up
For April, Larry made us choose between several outstanding writers: Adam Johnson (new to MBC), Annie Proulx (gasp! a woman!), E.L. Doctorow (the title--Andrew's Brain--gave it zero chance), and David Lipsky (recounting his five days with David Foster Wallace).  We went with Johnson's 2013 Pulitzer winner, The Orphan Master's Son. Here's to an evening of political and social repression, Pyongyang-style.  I trust Larry, our Dear Leader for the evening, will not visit famine upon us.

Dean Delivers, Mongolian Style

Acknowledgments
Tuesday's dinner was an impressive act of culinary celerity.  Dean rushed back from a father-son ski trip at Kirkwood to research and prepare an all-Mongol feast. (Meaning the food, not the guests--or not all of them anyway.)  With Mongolian beef and scallions accompanied by buuz (those delicious steamed dumplings) and a Mongolian carrot salad, Dean met his own--and our--high standards.  The Tsingtao beer and San Marino Cellars washed it all down nicely.

The only false note, Dean, was the pure butter shortbread in your yogurt dessert.  Unlike the rest of your menu, it wasn't home-made and its provenance was disturbing.  (Did I see a Walker's box in the trash? You know Genghis never made it past Gaul!)

The Book
Jack Weatherford's history of Genghis Khan makes a bold claim:  that as Khan and his progeny advanced westward, and established their dominion throughout the Caucasus, the Middle East, and into central Europe, their ideas and technology helped produce the Age of Enlightenment.  Who knew that this barbarian on horseback had such a civilizing effect?

We didn't, and so we questioned Weatherford's thesis and wondered if his research was as rigorous as it purported to be.  (His constant references to the so-called Secret History and his refusal to footnote any of his conclusions didn't inspire confidence.)  Our most reliable cynic--who shall go unnamed--offered an alternate sub-title:  "...and the Great Mongolian Blow Job."

Cynicism aside, we were treated to a litany of fun facts by Weatherford.  The Mongols were the first all-cavalry warriors and their speed accounted for much of their success.  They were the first to use gunpowder and shrapnel-laden projectiles in war.  They invented paper currency and standardized monetary units of measurement throughout their empire. They institutionalized diplomatic immunity, eschewed torture, guaranteed freedom of religion, created a professional class of administrators, and offered advancement based on merit not family. Among those they conquered, they decapitated the aristocracy and created new democratic structures loosely modeled after their khuriltai.  They invaded and united China, laid out modern Beijing, and built the Forbidden City.  Whew! But, as Larry notes with ethnic pride, they never conquered Japan.  (Editor's own ethnic observation:  nor did they take the Philippines, leaving that task for Larry's ancestors some 500 years later.)

Weatherford posits that the Mongolian empire was brought down by the lowly Chinese rat and its rapid transmission of the bubonic plague.  Wait, what?  Oh, who cares.  A fascinating story--albeit one laced with repetitive details and dubious scholarship--prompted us to give Weatherford a decent 6.5.

Next Up
John hosts us in March and, in light of his mother's recent diagnosis, asked us to select from several titles about the very difficult subject of death and dying.  We picked Atul Gawande's Being Mortal.  Until our next meeting, we'll continue to keep John's family in our thoughts. 

2015 Redux

Redux notwithstanding, I'll start with our early January 2016 ski trip.  The point is, after years of terrible conditions, we finally had enough snow for good skiing.  A day at Sugar Bowl and, for some, a day of cross-country at Royal Gorge, were appropriately exhausting.  They were also necessary, as they provided the spacing between Tom's lasagna, Peter's ribs, Dean's chicken piccata, and endless bottles of wine. Below, we tuck into that famous lasagna....

(L to R: Moguls, Aussie, Crash, Steeps, Hydro, 2XC4US)

Apologies to "Crash," who finally made our ski weekend only to have his wife's beautiful red SUV scarred by an errant (but honest) snowplow driver.

Our ski trip was only slightly consumed with reading.  We had a too-abbreviated conversation about Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of the Poets.  Proposed by Terry, and inspired in part by our appreciation of Walter's short story, Anything Helps, Walter's novel about one man's midlife travails was a comic if bittersweet glance back at the Great Recession.  His protagonist felt a little too like any of us:  middle-aged man (check), with kids (check), and beautiful wife whose fidelity is suspect (hmm...not going there), making bad decisions (sometimes), aware of those bad decisions (always), and with an epiphany at the end (time will tell).  We truncated our discussion to avoid spoiling it for those who hadn't yet finished.  But the consensus seemed to be one of great ambivalence.  Sort of funny, sort of painful, sort of true, sort of compelling.  An emailed rating later of 7.0 was surprisingly good for all the sort ofs.

In December, after a 6-year hiatus, we reprised our progressive holiday party. As before, we started at Larry's for appetizers (thank you for the fried lumpia, Larry!), had our entrees and sides at yours truly, and finished with dessert, mulled wine, and more at Terry's.  As usual, every man did more than he was asked to pull off this moving feast for 35 guests.  Special thanks to Tom (two days spent preparing Julia Child's boeuf bourgignon!), Peter (who, too sick to attend, still dropped off his slow-cooked ribs), and John (whose flourless chocolate cake was to die for, but who also sent each of us home with an individually-wrapped persimmon loaf from his kitchen). 

We traveled up to Petaluma in November for a midday meal with Glenn.  Ostensibly, we were there to discuss Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but most of us were happy touring Glenn's new/old house and listening to his plans for the barn (built, we were told, before Conrad penned his magnum opus).  Since he had no recipes from the Congo, and since Belgian food is French food ruined, Glenn turned to Apocalypse Now for inspiration and prepared an excellent dejeuner Indochine. With guest Rob contributing, we shared our thoughts on Marlow's tale of his quest for Mr. Kurtz. Despite the fact that everything has already been said about this story (most of it by college freshmen), our discussion was lively. Was the journey simply one long acid trip (Rob, speaking metaphorically, I think), intentionally purposeless (Terry), exploring darkness in the map's white spaces (Glenn), an indictment of corporatism (or was that mercantilism, Paul?), or just a vehicle for terrific writing (most of us)?  Regardless, our own quest to find Glenn up in Sonoma County left us amply (ful)filled. Enough so that, for the second month running, we lifted a title into our current top five, with an 8.4 rating.

In October, we repaired to Dan's for dinner al fresco and an opportunity to discuss one of the more original works we've read to date.  Violating our selection protocol by offering us only one title, Dan had us read Christopher Moore's Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.  The title was incongruous, but the book managed to capture our collective fancy.  Whimsical, comic, irreverent--none of these does justice to Moore's re-creation of the Christ story with Biff as his cartoonish narrator.  Like Aslan's Zealot, Moore's Lamb acknowledges that so little is known about Christ's upbringing.  But in Moore's telling, absolutely anything is fair game.  Our comments ranged from "sophomoric" (Doug) and "juvenile" (me) to "refreshing" (Peter) and "meaningful" (Tom).  Quibbles aside, almost everyone found Moore funny and highly creative.  And that, to my surprise, propelled Dan's solo title into our current top five with an 8.7.  Creativity was also to be found on our vino, courtesy of San Marino Cellars' Label Division:
 

Dan and his Disciples

 (P.S.:  Dan, your Jerusalem-inspired meal of lamb and chicken shawarma more than compensated for your rules violation.  But don't tell anyone I said that. Otherwise, I'll let the world know that your own guest, Miguel, confessed that while Lamb may have been funny, it had "no depth.")

We convened in September wondering what Paul had in store for us.  In fairness, we'd been warned that our book's title should be taken literally.  And it was.  Paul's dinner dropped us right into the onion field described by Joseph Wambaugh. Seated outside and in the dark, we all took notice of the table's centerpiece, which was an artful arrangement of planted onion bulbs.  To make sure we got the point, each part of our meal featured onions, starting with an onion dip, then onion soup, and continuing with a delicious onion quiche.  The food unfortunately outdid the book.  Perhaps we were spoiled by Truman Capote, but everything about Wambaugh's true crime account suffered in comparison to In Cold Blood.  Most disappointing was the writing.  Plodding and tedious, the book's best moment was the actual homicide in the onion field north of Los Angeles.  While we all decried the writing, Larry further complained that the story had no protagonist worth caring about.  Indeed, had we cared more, we might not have been content to rate The Onion Field a 5.5.

Our Appointment at Jack's

Acknowledgments
As Dean observed, Jack treated us to the "two-fifty dinner" last Wednesday with his chopped iceberg salads and surf and turf entrees.  The ambience was further enhanced by the bottles of Speakeasy beer and small batch rye whiskey that made the rounds.  With a black tie optional dress code, it was as close to O'Hara's fictional Lantenengo Country Club as this group will ever see.  Special thanks to Jack's guest, also named Jack and also a Cantab, who good naturedly played along--sartorially and otherwise.

(Note to photo ed.: Photoshop trousers onto Jack R before publishing)

The Book
Published in 1934, Appointment in Samarra was John O'Hara's first novel and was an immediate literary and commercial success.  With both the Great Depression and Prohibition as its backdrop, O'Hara's novel exposes the social pretensions and economic friction of Gibbsville's arriviste country club set by charting the tragic downfall of its protagonist, Julian English. His demise is foretold in the book's title, which is taken from the book's epigraph by Somerset Maugham.  (Thanks to Doug for letting us in on the licensing fee O'Hara paid, and then passed on, in order to use this excerpt from Maugham's 1933 play, Sheppey.)

Despite my misgivings that O'Hara might read as a lesser Fitzgerald, none of us felt let down.  Instead, we enjoyed dissecting the social stratification at the heart of the novel and, as Tom put it, found a little of everything for the Man Book Club.  Several noted that the principal characters were irredeemable (Jack, Doug, Tom), and Paul--with his commentary about deception--found a suitably twisted/misogynistic cast of characters among the Lantenengo set. I was struck by the anti-Catholic bias that animated much of the story (and suffused so much of O'Hara's later writing). For Stan and Terry, it was the setting (Depression/Prohibition) that was especially vivid.  For Larry, it was Julian's impulsive act with the ice cube.  As the novel's set piece, this breach of decorum sets in motion the events that lead to Julian's suicide.  Finally, in a shameless display of male sensitivity, our guest noted that O'Hara's story features unusually strong, sexy female characters.  I'd accuse Jack of pandering, but who among us didn't love Caroline?!

There were some protests (our host openly admitted he liked Ten North Frederick better and George walked out when we told him the ending), but unlike one critic's headline reaction to O'Hara's next novel (Butterfield 8), our consensus 7.7 rating showed no "Disappointment in O'Hara." By the same token, none of us was willing to agree with Stan's conclusion that Appointment in Samarra is our best read to date. (But it was better than Hunger, Stan!)

Next Up
We read next Joseph Wambaugh's powerful true crime work, The Onion Field.  Paul couldn't persuade us to orient our moral compasses thru martial arts, nor could he nudge us back to Afghanistan with The Kite Runner.  So we will meet in September to discuss Powell and Smith's notorious 1963 police kidnapping.  Extra credit will be awarded to those who also watch the movie, starring James Woods and--in his film debut--a young Ted Danson.

Love Requited, at George's

Acknowledgments

George deserves kudos on several fronts.  First, when his proposed titles were challenged, he promptly offered us an alternative that met with our approval. Second, the title he proffered had so much personal meaning that he had us close to tears when he recounted why.  Finally, his eggplant parmesan would have joined Fermina Daza and her mother-in-law in gustatory harmony, and his chess pie might well have convinced Dr. Juvenal Urbino that dessert is better than the game itself.

The Book

If One Hundred Years of Solitude put Gabriel Garcia Marquez on the map, Love in the Time of Cholera cemented his stature as one of the greatest novelists of the 20^th century.  Our 7.9 rating confirms how easily we were persuaded by the exquisite storytelling that is the hallmark of Garcia Marquez’ writing.  Set in a fictional city on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, Love in the Time of Cholera tells the compelling if convoluted story of unrequited love, with Fermina Daza at the middle of the triangle formed by her husband, Dr. Juvenal Urbino, and her first love, Florentino Ariza. 

Despite our collective thumbs up, our individual reactions were anything but uniform.  Indeed, many were quite cryptic—according to my paltry notes. Here are some examples:  the book “wrote itself” according to Larry, who nevertheless labored to finish it; the female protagonist wasn’t sufficiently endearing and neither were the long paragraphs (Jack); the plot benefited from “parallel male characters” (Doug, to whom I do no justice with this paraphrasing); the book “mesmerized” Roy until he reached the halfway point (or was it the halfway point of his family vacation in Southeast Asia?); the repeated use of symbols fascinated Stan, who still puzzled over the significance of the birds and refused all of our explanations; and, finally, the book seduced Glenn from the very first paragraph, even though he’d read it before. As for me, yes, I spiked the ratings with a 10, but I had to.  The characters are unforgettable, but it was the extraordinary dialogue—with all of its insight into human relationships—that had me from the beginning.

Next Up

Jack gave us the chance to step further back in time and read one of the few American novelists who compares closely (and favorably) to F. Scott Fitzgerald.  We'll see in July if John O'Hara deserved the accolades he received upon the publication of his first and arguably best novel, Appointment in Samarra.