Believe Care Invest: Aladdin

Hey, where’s Marvel Reread Club?? Well, after overwhelming you guys with podcast content last week, I’ve decided to do one podcast a week. MRC will appear this Friday morning and will now be bi-weekly every other Friday from this point on. The next Friday, we will have a new Secrets of Story Podcast, then a new MRC, etc. Hopefully we can maintain both podcasts on a bi-weekly schedule, alternating with each other. In the meantime, let’s do Aladdin!

• A merchant trying to sell us a lamp tells a story: First we see Jafar try to get something from a magical cave, then he says he must find the “diamond in the rough.” Cut to Aladdin who has stolen a piece of bread and leads the guards on a merry chase around the city, singing a song. He gets away with the bread, but decides to give it to some starving kids. He then protects the kids from the whip of a prince going to the palace.

Why Aladdin might be hard to identify with: No real reason, he’s tremendously lovable.

Believe:

• We begin with a song about his culture and the setting.
• He has a distinctive outfit.
• He has a gap between his exterior and interior: When he’s alone, he sings to himself, “Riff-raff, street rat, I don’t buy that, if only they’d look closer, would they see a poor boy? Nosiree. They’d find out there’s so much more to me.”

Care:

• He’s an orphan: The people in the streets say, “I’d blame parents but he hasn’t got ‘em”
• He’s poor: “I steal only what I can’t afford – That’s everything!”
• He’s envious of the prince.
• Needlessly insulted: “You are a worthless street rat. You were born a street rat, you’ll die a street rat, and only your fleas will mourn you.”
• He falls in unrequited love at first sight.

Invest:

• He’s great at running away. After he dives off a building and swings down a series of clotheslines, the guards say, “You won’t get away so easy!” and he says, “You think that was easy??”
• He has a reputation. Women think he’s adorable. “He’s rather tasty!”
• He has a resourceful monkey assistant.
• He’s kind: he gives bread he’s stolen away to poor kids.
• He’s badass: He protects kids from being whipped by grabbing the whip away from the prince.
• He’s good at improv with the princess when he has to save her from having her hand cut off. They “yes and” each other.

Believe Care Invest: The House on Mango Street

• Pre-teen Esperanza moves with her family to a modest house on Mango Street and looks for friends.

Why Esperanza might be hard to identify with: It’s an unusual format. The short book essentially consists of 150 one-page short stories, with only a small amount of interconnectivity. Obviously, scenes don’t go very far in depth and not a lot of momentum builds. There’s very little dialogue.

Believe:

• She talks about, “windows so small you’d think they were holding their breath.” Always good to personify things
• We always like vivid but unexpected smells: “Mama’s hair that smells like bread.”
• We have all, in our odder moments, experienced bits of synesthesia. I remember as a child thinking “red and green make brown because red is 5 and green is 3 and brown is 8”, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world. Giving your hero a bit of synesthesia makes them feel oddly real: “In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.”
• Odd sensory information: “At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth.”
• Let your characters relabel themselves: “I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do.”
• Unlike some Hispanic authors, Cisneros doesn’t sprinkle in much Spanish, but she does have culturally unique syntax: “Two girls raggedy as rats live across the street.” Different characters have different culturally unique syntax. One says, “but me I’m Texas.
• Not a lot of dialogue in the book, but what we do get has lots of personality: “People on the bus wave. A very fat lady crossing the street says, You sure got quite a load there. Rachel shouts, You got quite a load there too. She is very sassy.”
• Vivid sound description: “Our laughter for example. Not the shy ice cream bells’ giggle of Rachel and Lucy’s family, but all of a sudden and surprised like a pile of dishes breaking.”
• Unique similes: “It’s like all of a sudden he let go a million moths all over the dusty furniture and swan-neck shadows and in our bones.”
• There are lots of chances to tie the book in to specific cultures, but there are also details like this not specific to their culture, implying that there are some aspects of culture that cross over, just because they’re great songs. “She can’t come out—gotta baby-sit with Louie’s sisters—but she stands in the doorway a lot, all the time singing, clicking her fingers, the same song: And we always love song lyrics. Apples, peaches, pumpkin pah-ay. You’re in love and so am ah-ay”

Care:

• They had to move hastily because the pipes burst in their old home and their landlord refused to fix them. Decisions made under pressure are always good ways to launch stories.
• The opening humiliation of the story is often the moment when a hero first realizes how others see them: “You live there? There. I had to look to where she pointed—the third floor, the paint peeling, wooden bars Papa had nailed on the windows so we wouldn’t fall out. You live there? The way she said it made me feel like nothing. There. I lived there. I nodded.”
• She arrives in her new neighborhood and has to go through the humiliating ritual of asking kids to be her friend. One replies, “You want a friend, she says. Okay, I’ll be your friend. But only till next Tuesday. That’s when we move away. Got to. Then as if she forgot I just moved in, she says the neighborhood is getting bad.”

Invest:

• This book is about Esperanza getting wised up to the true nature of the world: “I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this isn’t it. The house on Mango Street isn’t it. For the time being, Mama says. Temporary, says Papa. But I know how those things go.”
• As with all semi-autobiographical novels, we invest primarily because of the fact of this book, which, because we’re reading it, proves that the hero broke free and made her place in the world (though the author and heroine have different names). All of the Believe examples above show both Sandra and Esperanza’s exquisitely perceptive eyes, and we like good eyes.

Believe Care Invest, Comics Memoir Week: Persepolis

• Marjane Satrapi recalls being 9 years old in 1979 when the Islamic Revolution takes over Iran. The next year, the girls at school are all forced to wear veils. The girls play with their veils at school. She recalls wanting to be a prophet as a child, even before the revolution.

I’ll break my rule and do just one book in translation. The author is an English speaker who supervised the translation, so I’m going to let myself get away with it, and I just love it too much not to use it.

There’s no reason not to love Marjane, she’s intensely sympathetic. Let’s look at some of the reasons we Believe in her:

• She acts recognizably ten when she takes off and plays with her veil at school, despite her religious bent.
• She’s got beliefs and she’s written them down: “I wanted to be a prophet because our maid did not eat with us, because my father had a cadillac, and above all, because my grandmother’s knees always ached.” Her grandmother says to her, “Come here, Marji, Help me to stand up.” Marjane helps her and says, “Don’t worry, soon you won’t have any more pain, you’ll see,” then reads to her from the Holy Book she’s written: “Rule number six: Everybody should have a car. Rule number seven: All maids should eat at the table with the others. Rule number eight: No old person should have to suffer.”
• The book captures how children process things: Marjane is told that her communist grandfather was put in a cell filled with water for hours. That night she insists on taking a long bath. “I wanted to know what it felt like to be in a cell filled with water. My hands were wrinkled when I came out, like Grandpa’s.”
• She’s stubborn: When she tells her teacher she wants to be a prophet the other kids laugh at her and her teacher says to her parents, “Doesn’t this worry you?” They tell the teacher it’s fine, but she still decides to lie about it, even to them. Her father says, “So tell me, my child, what do you want to be when you grow up?” She thinks, “A prophet,” but says “I want to be a doctor.”
• She’s imaginative: she has an amusing relationship with God, who talks with her long into the night.

As with most of our other examples, Marjane is caught up in a historical tragedy, so she’s easy to Care for:

• She is forced to wear a veil she doesn’t want to wear. Her co-ed French school is shut down and she is sent to an all-girls religious school.
• She is caught between the shah and the revolutionaries, both of whom are horrible. Her parents are political, so she has even more reason to worry about them. A picture of her mom taken at an anti-veil protest goes global, putting her life in danger. “She dyed her hair, and wore dark glasses for a long time.”
• When she chooses Marxist revolution, she finds that her friend God no longer visits her at night.

There are lots of reasons to Invest in Marjane:

• She’s got a pretty badass attitude for a ten year old: “I wanted to be justice, love and the wrath of God all in one.”
• She’s precocious: “To enlighten me, they bought books. I knew everything about the children of Palestine, about Fidel Castro, about the young Vietnamese killed by the Americans, about the revolutionaries of my own country… But my favorite was a comic book called ‘Dialectic Materialism’”
• She dresses up with a (presumably toy) machine gun and bullet sash, then marches around in her garden: “Today, my name is Che Guevara! Down with the king! Down with the king!”

In the end, Marjane will not lead the revolution, but we trust in the opening pages that she could.

Strength / Flaw: Fiery / Heedless

Believe Care Invest, Comics Memoir Week: Maus

• This book has a very similar structure to “March”: Begin with an emblematic incident from the hero’s youth (In Rego Park, New York, in 1958, young Art Speigelman skins his knee and goes to his holocaust survivor dad Vladek for sympathy but gets none) then we jump forward to a modern day framing sequence (In the late 70s, Art visits his dad for the first time in years to get out of him details of his life for a holocaust comic about mice) then jump further back into a harrowing past (Vladek tells of dating a poor girl in the 30s, then leaving her for a rich girl)

Neither Art nor his father are very easy to identify with. Art is an unsuccessful underground comic book creator, which isn’t any reader’s favorite profession. He hasn’t visited his father in two years, until he decides to come pump him for comic book material. He smokes constantly and gets annoyed when they get annoyed that he’s ashing on their stuff. Vladek is not a great dad in the 1958 sequence, unkind to his new wife in the modern day framing sequence, and a bit caddish and mercenary is his flashbacks. So the book has some hurdles to overcome with BCI.

Let’s do Art and Vladek separately. Here are some reasons we believe in Art:

• In 1958, Art has an object unique to the time: Skates that attached to your shoes.
• We get just a brief mention of Art’s French-American wife Francoise, but we can tell that such a wife makes him unique in Rego Park.
• He has a signature piece of clothing: The vest he always wears.

There are lots of reasons to care about Art.

• In 1958, he’s abandoned by his friends: “I-I fell, and my friends skated away w-without me.” His father responds, “Friends? You’re friends? If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week…then you could see what it is, friends!” We instantly get that it would suck to have to beg sympathy from someone who compares your suffering relative to the holocaust.
• In the present, Art’s mother has committed suicide.
• His father doesn’t respect his job: “Better you should spend your time to make drawings what will bring you some money”
• His father is exasperating, telling him great stories and then insisting they not be in the book. We’re glad Art breaks his promise to leave them out.

As for Investing in Art, the quality of the comic itself is the ultimate testament to his skills. His goal of commemorating the holocaust is noble, and he does push to get it against resistance. Neither Art nor Vladek can suspect that this comic will make Art one of the first comics artists ever to become rich and famous. His stepmother correctly points out, “It’s an important book. People who don’t usually read such stories will be interested.”

Okay, let’s look at why we Believe in Vladek:

• He has very distinctive syntax: “It’s a shame Francoise also didn’t come.” “I don’t want you should write this in your book.”
• In the flashbacks, he’s got a nicely mundane job buying and selling textiles.
• He knew his current wife back in Poland before he met his first wife, which is a nicely complicated situation.

And of course, there are many reasons to care, even before we get to his time in the concentration camps:

• His wife has committed suicide, an ironic death for a holocaust survivor.
• He doesn’t get along with his new wife.
• He has a unique complaint “A WIRE hanger you give him! I haven’t seen Artie in almost two years—We have plenty WOODEN hangers.” Shades of Joan Crawford!
• In the flashback, he finds his girlfriend more attractive than the richer girl he actually wants to marry, which is a caddish problem, but we still sympathize.

So why do we Invest in Vladek?

• Crucially, he rides an exercise bike while he tells his son of his past. We love exercise and bikes!
• When we get the flashback, he’s a great lover, “I had a lot of girls what I didn’t even know that would run after me. People always told me I looked just like Rudolph Valentino.”
• Always a good superpower: When the hero understands a second language and then others use it around them, not knowing they understand it: “The next morning we all met together. My cousin and Anja spoke sometimes in English.” The cousin asks, “How you like him?” Anya replies, “He’s a handsome boy and seems very nice.” Vladek explains to Art: “They couldn’t know I understood.”

Speigelman is acutely aware of the ironies of this story. He overcomes the urge to present his late, longsuffering father as saintly, and instead presents him flaws and all. He worries aloud to his stepmother that unflattering aspects of his portrait will seem to some to confirm some of the racist caricatures that triggered the holocaust in the first place. But ultimately, he has to trust himself. The more three-dimensional the story is, the more powerful it will be, and the more it will impact every reader.

Believe Care Invest, Comics Memoir Week: March

• We begin on the Edmund Pettus bridge in 1965. John Lewis and Hosea Williams lead a group of marchers across the bridge and get attacked by the local police. We then jump to the morning of Obama’s inauguration as a much older John wakes up and prepares for his day. He goes to his office, where a family peeks in and he offers to show them around. He tells them about speaking at the March on Washington. One of the boys asks why he has so many chickens. He describes growing up in Alabama as the son of a sharecropper who eventually bought his own farm.

Obviously John Lewis is one of the great American heroes of the 20th century, so we certainly admire him right away. You might think that his monumental edifice might make him hard to identify with (as MLK is in stories about him), but Lewis is delightfully humble and human here, allowing us to Believe, Care and Invest right away.

Here are some reasons we believe:

• First and foremost, his iconic, odd outfit on that bridge: He was wearing the standard suit and tie of the movement, but over it he had a trenchcoat and a backpack, which emphasized his young age and his preparation for going to prison.
• We always love song lyrics. As he gets ready for his day on the morning of the inauguration, he sings in the shower: “You can take my freedom, oh yes, you can take my freedom, oh, yes, but you cannot take my dignity.”
• Distinctive syntax: He says of his family’s cabin, “My father bought it in the Spring of 1940 for $300. Cash.”
• He’s got odd kid logic: “When the hens began laying their eggs, I’d mark each one with a lightly penciled number to help keep track of its progress during the three weeks it took to hatch. The numbers were always odd. Never even. I had been told never to put an even number under a sitting hen. It was bad luck.”
• His dreams are represented by an object: “I always hoped to save enough money for an actual incubator, like the $18.95 model advertised in the Sears-Roebuck catalog. We called that our wish book.” 

 As far as getting us to Care, this book does the classic trick of beginning with the most brutal moment in Lewis’s life, getting beaten on the bridge in 1965, then we jump forward to the framing sequence where he’s a comfortable congressman on a happy day for the country, then we jump back further to his hardscrabble childhood, having established both the highs and lows he’s heading toward. We fully care at this point. Let’s look at other reasons we care:

• In the opening vignette on the bridge, he could not be more trapped, the bridge behind him is filled with marchers pushing him forward, and they discover a club-wielding mob waiting for them at the far side of the bridge. Williams nervously asks him, “Can you swim” He says “No.” Williams responds, “Well, neither can I, but we might have to.”
• He’s viciously beaten.
• In the past, he was very poor, going to substandard “separate but equal” schools using the broken down, discarded bus of the white kids, and their discarded old school books as well.
• He’s forced by his parents to eat chickens he loves.

Obviously, Lewis is easy to Invest in. He’s tremendously badass.

• When they realize militarized cops are waiting to beat them and he just says to Williams, “We should kneel and pray, Hosea.” This infuriates the cops who swarm and attack them.
• In the present, he certainly has decision making authority as a congressman (in a party that now controls all three branches of the government, starting on this day.)
• He’s a precociously smart and determined child. He can read the bible on his own at age five. On the days when his father tells him he must stay home from school to help on the farm, he hides until the bus comes by and then bolts for it just as it’s leaving, getting away to school before his father can stop him. “When I got home, my father would be furious. I was certain he would tan my hide. But he never did whip me—not over that.”
• He’s a uniquely sensitive child: “No one else could tell those chickens apart, and no one cared to. I knew every one of them by appearance and personality. There were individuals to me. Some I even named.”

In seminary, Lewis tells of coming across the story of MLK told in comic book format, and what a powerful tool that was. He published his memoirs in prose form (as “Walking With the Wind”, which is also well worth reading), but then he chose to reach out to another audience with this comics version, and the result is a stunning success.

Believe Care Invest, Comics Memoir Week: Fun Home

• Alison Bechdel tells us of her memories of her life before and after her father’s death by suicide in 1980. Her father spends all his time renovating their house, and also runs a funeral home (The central irony: They shorten “Funeral Home” to “Fun Home”)

Bechdel is a passive hero. Her central action in the story is getting a phone call telling her that her father has died. She will find out some of her dad’s secrets before his death, and some after, but she mostly learns them because her mom drops them unexpectedly, not because she’s actively pursuing the mystery. This book’s primary value is that it’s thoughtful. She has, in retrospect, given a lot of thought to her relationship with her dad and now she’s got 242 pages of fascinating insights. That’s not an easy sell, but the book turns out to be easy to love simply because it’s so well written (and drawn, but the art’s not the main focus).

She could have structured the book by building up to the shocking reveal of his death, or the shocking reveal that the seemingly-accidental death was probably suicide, or the shocking reveal that her father was pursuing affairs with adolescent boys, but all three of those facts are mentioned very early on. We sort of move outward in concentric circles from these central facts, adding a series of layers to the narrative.

So Bechdel had a lot of work to do with BCI. She had to get us to connect with a passive heroine on an inner quest that doesn’t build to any catharsis in real time. How did she do it?

There is no shortage of reasons to believe in this character and this world. Bechdel has the ideal material of every memoirist: She kept extensive diaries as a girl and still has them. That means she has hundreds of details ready at hand. The diaries themselves are fascinating: She became increasingly unsure of herself and started to add a qualifying “I think” in tiny letters after every sentence. Eventually she just creates a shorthand symbol to express this, and soon she’s just scrawling the symbol on top of every word.

Some other ways she gets us to believe:

• Characters usually reveal themselves in what they compliment in others, but her backhanded compliments towards her father show what she doesn’t value: “He was an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of décor.”
• In response to her unloving father’s obsession with interior design, she develops a motto: “When I grow up, my house is going to be all metal, like a submarine.”
• Sense memory always makes a character come alive. She remembers one of the few times she felt close to him: “My mother must have bathed me hundreds of times. But it’s my father rinsing me off with the purple metal cup that I remember most clearly. The suffusion of warmth as the hot water sluiced over me… …the sudden, unbearable cold of its absence.” Later, she has to remind herself, “He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence steaming off the wallpaper digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials, smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne.”
• We see the books he’s reading and often they’re red flags to his secrets.
• Her grandmother has unique syntax: “Why he was all over mud, dears.”

Obviously, the main reason to jump ahead and reveal her father’s death early on is that it makes it easier to care about her right away. If she had waited to wallop us with it later, we might not have gotten as involved with the narrative. Other ways she gets us to care:

• Foreshadowing through the use of parallel characters: In a moment that is fairly typical of the book’s philosophical bent, she remembers her father lifting her up on his feet, and tell us that she now knows that it’s called “Icarian Games” in acrobatics. She then talks about how Icarus and Daedalus became parallel characters for her and her father. (And then this leads to a discussion of Joyce’s character Stephen Daedalus)
• Her father cares more about restoring the house than playing games with her.
• Her father calls a room he’s decorated “slightly perfect.” Nothing is ever good enough for him.
• Her father insists on pink and flowers for her room though she hates both. She hasn’t figured out yet that they’re both gay.
• Her father hits both her and her mother, and at one point she flees the house in fear of violence.
• “I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children and his children like furniture.”
• Everything is a risk, “If we couldn’t criticize my father, showing affection for him was an even dicier venture.”

We never fully Invest in Bechdel to solve the book’s mysteries. In the end, she gives it all a lot of thought, and reaches some fascinating conclusions, but she has no big breakthroughs or catharsis. It’s a gentle, melancholy book. Nevertheless, here are some reasons we invest:

• She’s defiant: “I was Spartan to my father’s Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his Nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete.”
• Rides a bike: “I bicycled back to my apartment, marveling at the dissonance between this apparently carefree activity and my newly tragic circumstances.”
• She’s brave. She comes out to her parents as soon as she figures it out, though she has reason to suspect they won’t approve.
• She’s a classic book-taught amateur: She decides she’s gay totally hypothetically, comes out to her parents, then reads every book ever written on lesbianism (braving potentially-disapproving librarians), then launches into her first relationship fully informed.

Ultimately, Bechdel forges a universal story out of observations that are very specific to her odd circumstances. It’s the ultimate testament to this story’s fundamentals that it was able to be translated into a hit Broadway musical, despite having none of the elements one generally associates with musicals.

Believe Care Invest, Comics Memoir Week: El Deafo

Hey guys, we’ve been talking about comics on the new podcast, but we’ve never really done any story analysis on comics on this blog! So let’s go ahead and do Comics Memoir Week! Let’s start with one of the best, El Deafo.

• In the mid-70s, four year old Cece Bell gets meningitis and loses the ability to hear. She soon gets a powerful hearing aid and decides that she is now a superhero called “El Deafo”.

Why Cece might be hard to identify with: It’s a little hard to identify with a four year old, since most of us have lost all of our memories of that age. It’s pretty odd that it seems to take her days or maybe even weeks to figure out she’s gone deaf—I believe it, because this is obviously a very honest memoir, but it just makes me think, “how could a four year old not notice that? They’re so weird!”

So I think that this book may have the best one two punch of believe and care that I’ve seen. Here’s the first page:

 
So right away we’ve got six reasons to believe:

• First and foremost, she always wears the same two-piece swimsuit, every day, even when other people are dressed in normal clothes. Distinctive wardrobe choices really help us believe, and, to the extent that we remember being four, that’s so perfectively indicative of that age’s peculiarities.
• Then we have five individual memories: In the first, she draws on her mom’s vanity mirror with lipstick, which is believable enough.
• Then she watches Batman on TV with her siblings, which establishes the setting and her family situation.
• Then she rides with joy on the back of her dad’s bicycle. We love to watch people enjoy things fully.
• Then she finds caterpillars with her friend. Always good to give them friends and give them an activity to do with that friend that we haven’t seen a million times or more.
• And finally, song lyrics! We love song lyrics, and singing into a cardboard tube makes it tactile and unique.

So boom: We totally believe in this four year old hero in one page. Then what happens on page 2?

 

She almost dies! This specific song we all love is interrupted and she’s rushed to the hospital. Because we totally believed on the first page, we now totally care on the second page! (And superimposing the car on top of her mother’s words makes effective use of the medium.)

At the hospital, she’s taken from her parents and has a needle put in her back. We hear (but she doesn’t) the doctor tell her parents: “The fluid from her spine tells us she has Meningitis. Her brain might swell--” Her mom replies, “But she’s only four!” Cece wakes up in pain. She notices that the other girl in her room got ice cream and she didn’t (and only much later figures out she didn’t hear when they offered it to her.) When she tries to get up, she can’t stand or walk.

Of course, she’s only four and quickly becomes very helpless, so we don’t invest right away, but we finally get the chance to invest starting on page 22, when she gets a hearing-aid and starts to realize that this makes her kind of a kick-ass bionic woman. Then she goes to school and gets a super-hearing-aid. At first, she feels self-conscious about it, and enters a “bubble of loneliness”, but then she realizes that she can hear so much more than the other kids. She can hear her teacher going to the bathroom, and gossiping about the kids in the teacher’s lounge (“That Jimmy Malone is making my life HELL!”) She thinks, “I have amazing abilities unknown to anyone! Just like Bruce Wayne uses all that crazy technology to turn himself into Batman on TV”. Once she lets her secret be known, she becomes a hero to the other kids. She now sees herself as a superheroine called “El Deafo”. The bubble pops (though it will return intermittently as we move through several years of story.)

Strength / Flaw: Resilient / Self-conscious

Believe Care Invest: A is for Alibi

In the present, private investigator Kinsey Milhone is trying to process that she’s just shot and killed someone, then jumps back to three weeks earlier, when she was hired by a woman who had just gotten out of jail to find out who had really killed the woman’s husband. Kinsey goes to the cops for information, but they inform her that not only is the woman guilty, but they suspect she also killed another victim and never got caught.

Why Kinsey might be hard to identify with: She’s hard to identify for the same big reason that we…

Believe

• Her work is fairly mundane and her attitude toward it is rather bland, even this more-interesting-than-usual murder case. This is all just a job for her, no different from her other small jobs: “I had to go take some photographs of a crack in a sidewalk for an insurance claim” She’s not engaged, so we also find it hard to engage.
• Her terse, hardboiled voice gives her individuality. And she’s got some fun observations: Of the head cop: “He looks like he would smell of Thunderbird and hang out under bridges throwing up on his own shoes.”
• The case has lots of unique details, such as poisoning using oleander.
• What we compliment in others shows our values: She says of the cop: “his powers of concentration are profound and his memory clear and pitiless.”
• After the cops sends her to a side room to read about the case, she returns to his office: “I leaned on the doorframe, waiting. He took his sweet time ambling over.” Good capturing of how people communicate and express conflict just with body language. She sends a message by leaning, he sends one by ambling.

Care

• She’s had to kill someone in the flashforward, and that’s roiled up her placid exterior. “The day before yesterday I killed someone and the fact weighs heavily on my mind… Killing someone feels odd to me and I haven’t quite sorted it through.”
• She has a hardscrabble background: “I’ve lived in trailers most of my life, but lately they’ve been getting too elaborate for my taste, so now I live in one room, a ‘bachelorette.’” She drives a dent-covered ’68 VW.

Invest

• She’s just killed someone, and the cops don’t seem to mind very much, so she’s badass.
• She can traverse different worlds, and she’s satisfyingly rebellious: “That’s why you didn’t like being a cop yourself, Kinsey. Working with a leash around your neck.”

Strength/Flaw: Professional / Dispassionate

Believe Care Invest: Go Tell It on the Mountain

John becomes aware on the morning of his fourteenth birthday in 1935 that he does not want to become the preacher that everyone expects him to become. He imagines cursing his abusive father on his deathbed. He goes down to breakfast and worries that no one has remembered his birthday.

Why John might be hard to identify with: For modern readers, no real reason. He’s an intensely sympathetic character.  White readers in 1952, of course, were not primed to care about black, possibly-gay masturbating teenagers, but Baldwin didn’t give AF.  

Believe

• It’s always good to differentiate siblings right away by having them react to the same thing in individual ways: “John and Roy, passing these men and women, looked at one another briefly, John embarrassed and Roy amused.” Even the baby has an individual personality: “The baby, Ruth, sat in her high chair banging on the tray with an oatmeal-covered spoon. This meant that she was in a good mood; she would not spend the day howling, for reasons known only to herself, allowing no one but her mother to touch her.” Every character comes alive when they have secrets, even babies.
• Semi-autobiographical novelists have a ready-made store of the sights and sounds of their childhood: “the sisters in white, heads raised, the brothers in blue, heads back; the white caps of the women seeming to glow in the charged air like crowns, the kinky, gleaming heads of the men seeming to be lifted up—and the rustling and the whispering ceased and the children were quiet; perhaps someone coughed, or the sound of a car horn, or a curse from the streets came in; then Elisha hit the keys, beginning at once to sing, and everybody joined him, clapping their hands, and rising, and beating the tambourines.”
• There are lots of song lyrics. Baldwin has abandoned his religious upbringing, but he knows it provides him with lots of good material.

Care

• The opening quote says of the faithful: “They shall run and not be weary”, but that’s never true in Baldwin’s work, where weariness is never far behind. Later, he says: “Her full lips were loose and her eyes were black—with shame, or rage, or both”. In Baldwin’s books, rage often becomes shame and shame often becomes rage.
• John is burdened by an unwanted legacy: “EVERYONE had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.” Begin at the moment the longstanding personal problem becomes acute and undeniable.
• Everybody feels misunderstood, though some of us think of ourselves are better than we’re regarded and some of us think of ourselves as worse. John is tortured by secret shame: He has “sinned with his hands” in the night, looking a shape on the ceiling that looks like a naked woman. (And he also seems interested in the body of the boy who plays the organ at church, which is presumably even more likely to bring him feelings of shame)
• Shades of Sixteen Candles, he’s worried that his whole family has forgotten his birthday: “His first thought, nevertheless, was: ‘Will anyone remember?’ For it had happened, once or twice, that his birthday had passed entirely unnoticed, and no one had said ‘Happy Birthday, Johnny,’ or given him anything—not even his mother.”

Invest

• He has decided to defy God, which is pretty badass: “The darkness of his sin was in the hardheartedness with which he resisted God’s power; in the scorn that was often his while he listened to the crying, breaking voices, and watched the black skin glisten while they lifted up their arms and fell on their faces before the Lord. For he had made his decision. He would not be like his father, or his father’s fathers. He would have another life.”
• He remembers being praised by his principal at his school and sensing what that might mean: “That moment gave him, from that time on, if not a weapon at least a shield; he apprehended totally, without belief or understanding, that he had in himself a power that other people lacked”
• He is beaten for his individuality, but he knows it’s a superpower: “it was his identity, and part, therefore, of that wickedness for which his father beat him and to which he clung in order to withstand his father. His father’s arm, rising and falling, might make him cry, and that voice might cause him to tremble; yet his father could never be entirely the victor, for John cherished something that his father could not reach. It was his hatred and his intelligence that he cherished, the one feeding the other.”

Strength/Flaw: Self-aware / Guilt-wracked

Believe Care Invest: Slaughterhouse Five

In the first chapter, Vonnegut tells us that this is a mostly true story and he was actually there for the bombing of Dresden. The second chapter introduces us to Vonnegut’s alter ego Billy Pilgrim, who is convinced that he’s unstuck in time, and has been abducted and put in an alien zoo, in addition to his own experiences in Dresden. In the war flashbacks, he has to deal with a psychotic fellow soldier named Roland Weary.

Why Billy might be hard to identify with: The first chapter gets us to invest in Vonnegut, not Billy, then it’s a little awkward to shift to the fictional character. Once we meet Billy, we never really believe his perceptions: He’s got PTSD from the bombing and he’s recently had a head injury from a plane crash. In the Dresden flashbacks, he stresses that he was totally incompetent, which usually keeps us from liking a hero. Even worse, he “wouldn’t do anything to save himself.” Traditionally this makes heroes pretty hard to care for, but Billy is an exception. I think it has something to do with the recurring phrase “So it goes”. The book gets us into a different, more philosophical mood, admiring the character who is learning to let himself be carried along by events, and despising the character fighting so hard against the Nazis with his own weaponry

Believe

• An abundance of detail that Vonnegut actually witnessed: the bizarre equipment of a chaplain’s assistant, for instance. “While on maneuvers in South Carolina, Billy played hymns he knew from childhood, played them on a little black organ which was waterproof. It had thirty-nine keys and two stops- vox humana and vox celeste. Billy also had charge of a portable altar, an olive-drab attaché case with telescoping legs. It was lined with crimson plush, and nestled in that passionate plush were an anodized aluminum cross and a Bible. The altar and the organ were made by a vacuum-cleaner company in Camden, New Jersey-and said so.” 
• His life as an optometrist is believably mundane.
• His son is fighting in Vietnam, tapping the novel into real life national pain. To a certain extent this whole book is about Vietnam, where America was already creating a lot of new Dresdens. Vonnegut is saying, “Even the ‘good war’ wasn’t all that good, so what does that say about our current entirely-unjustified war?”
• Vivid similes throughout: “Billy was preposterous-six feet and three inches tall, with a chest and shoulders like a box of kitchen matches.”

Care

• He’s “cold, hungry, embarrassed, incompetent.” We care for characters who are cold, hungry, and embarrassed. We usually ask that character not be incompetent, but we accept it here.
• He’s totally humiliated: “A chaplain’s assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the American Army. Billy was no exception. He was powerless to harm the enemy or to help his friends. In fact, he had no friends. He was a valet to a preacher, expected no promotions or medals, bore no arms, and had a meek faith in a loving Jesus which most soldiers found putrid.”

Invest

• It’s hard to invest in him because he’s so hapless, but his meek faith will serve him well: God seems to be watching out for him throughout the novel, as he survives against steep odds through no effort of his own.
• No matter how much he blundered into it, that doesn’t take away that he survived being a prison of the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge, so that’s still pretty badass.
• We do admire the way he spars with Roland Weary by refusing to engage with Weary’s psychosis. We like heroes who don’t let themselves be baited, and let big talkers hang themselves.
• ‘How’d you-like to be hit with this-hm? Hmmmmmmmmm?’ he wanted to know.
• ‘I wouldn’t,’ said Billy.
• ‘Know why the blade’s triangular?’
• ‘No.’
• ‘Makes a wound that won’t close up.’
• ‘Oh.’
• ‘Makes a three-sided hole in a guy. You stick an ordinary knife in a guy-makes a slit. Right? A slit closes right up. Right?
• ‘Right.’
• ‘Shit. What do you know?’

Strength/Flaw: Zen / Helpless

Believe Care Invest: Insecure

On her birthday, Issa gives a talk as youth liaison to a class of high schoolers, but the kids mock her. She then reports back to work at her non-profit, where she’s the only black employee. She goes to a birthday dinner with her best friend who tells her she’s been dumped. Issa admits she’s thinking of breaking up with her own boyfriend, but doesn’t admit she texting an ex.

Why Issa might be hard to identify with: Her white co-workers ask her what “on fleek” means and she responds, “I don’t know what that means.” Then, in voiceover, she tells us “I know what that shit means, but being aggressively passive is what I do best.” Passive aggressive heroes can get frustrating.

Believe:

• The kids react to her unique hair and clothes.
• She has a good friend who she laughs with, telling her, “I think your pussy’s broken. No, I read about it, it’s like, pussies breaking everywhere. It’s sad, it’s had enough, if it could talk, it’d make that sad Marge Simpson groan.”

Care

• She’s too white for the black world and too black for the white world: The first question a student says, “Why you talk like a white girl?” When she responds, “You caught me, I’m rocking blackface,” the students and teachers are uncomfortable.
• Second question: “What’s up with your hair? My cousin can put some tracks in it…unless you like it like that?” Other questions: “Are you single?” “Why ain’t you married?” When she says she didn’t want to settle for less, a student calls out to the class, “Her outfit settled for less!”
• She fears that she’s just a token at work. She says in voiceover when she’s back at work: “My boss founded a non-profit to help kids from the hood, but she didn’t hire anybody from the hood.” Her boss says, “I’m torn between the Booker T. method and the Debois method. What would James Baldwin say is most beneficial for people of color?”
• She still hung up on an ex.
• She lacks confidence: “How different would my life be if I actually went after what I wanted?”
• She confuses work and personal life, “I think these kids need permission to explore on their own,” she says, really talking about herself.

Invest

• She’s not easy to invest in because she’s pretty hapless.
• She has a creative outlet: “I used to write a journal to vent, but now I just write raps.” Her raps, however, are just okay, as she well knows.
• She does her best with the kids and with her friend.

Strength / Flaw: Trying to do the right thing / Insecure about it

Believe Care Invest: Nomadland

Aging drifter Fern empties out her rented storage space and throws most of the stuff out. She hits the road, peeing by the side of the road when she needs to. She goes to work at an Amazon warehouse. She shows off her van to one of her co-workers. Amazon lays everybody off and she’s back on the road.

Why Fern might be hard to identify with: We’ll come to realize that, while she’s clearly suffered unjustly in various ways, she’s ultimately chosen to be homeless, which is ironically a very white-privilege thing to do.

Believe

• Ironic song lyrics to sing for someone with few possessions: While Shepherds Watch Their Flocks by Night.
• She doesn’t have a lot of stuff but what she has is fascinating: Her little stove, her Santa lamp, etc.
• The job she gets in an Amazon warehouse is believably mundane.
• Signature object: She’s named her van “Vanguard”

Care

• She’s very much suffering real life national pain. We begin with a title: “On January 31, 2011, due to a reduced demand for sheetrock, US Gypsum shut down its plant in Empire, Nevada, after 88 years. By July, the Empire zip code, 89405, was discontinued.”
• It seems as if one of the items in storage might have belonged to her dead husband, from the way she hugs it.
• She has to pee standing up by the side of the road.
• She’s embarrassed to run into a woman with kids she used to tutor, who is clearly concerned for her. “If you need a place to stay, you can come over and stay with us. We’re worried about you.” “I’m not homeless, I’m just houseless. Not the same thing, right?”
• Parallel character: A woman in a similar situation talks about getting near suicide.

Invest

• We just invest a little. We don’t have much reason, because she really can’t take care of herself or anyone else. But we admire her ingenuity with her van, “The guy who had the van before he just had a mattress in the back but I didn’t want to keep it that way, I wanted to built the bed up so I could have storage underneath. You see that? This was my husband’s old fishing box, I put this little latch on it. Open it, the stopper holds it and creates more counter space.”
• We find out she taught the girl Shakespeare, so she’s upsetting our expectations of drifters.

Strength / Flaw: Self-reliant / Can’t find a home

Believe Care Invest: Soul

40 something would-be jazz musician Joe Gardner teaches talentless middle-schoolers and gets offered a full time job. He visits his mother’s tailor shop, where she orders him to take the job. He agrees, but then an old student calls him and offers a chance to audition for one of his favorite musicians, Dorothea Williams. He passes the audition, and he’s excitedly telling a friend about it on the phone while walking home when he falls into a manhole and seemingly dies. He finds himself in “The Great Beyond.”

Why Joe might be hard to identify with: He’s a bit of a loser, still having his mother wash his underwear (with holes in it.) He insults his kids’ playing to the principal.

Believe

• Externalized emotions: He looks at his wall of great jazz musicians and wants to be one.
• Signature wardrobe: turtleneck and hat.

Care

• His students are terrible and check their phones in class.
• Ironically, good news is the last thing he wants to hear: “I wanted to deliver the good news personally: No more part time for you. You’re now our full time band teacher! Permanently!” He winces to hear this.
• His mother doesn’t want to hear about his dreams: “After all these years, my prayers have been answered: A full time job.” “Yeah, mom, but” “You’re going to tell them yes, right?” “Don’t worry, mom, I got a plan.” “You always got a plan. Maybe you need to have a back-up plan too…We didn’t struggle giving you an education so you could be a middle-aged man washing your underwear in my shop. With this job, you’ll be able to put that dead-end ‘gigging’ behind you…And just think, playing music will finally be your real career.” It’s painful to hear.
• Dorothea Williams gives him a withering look. “So, we’re down to middle school band teachers now?”
• He seemingly dies on the day all his dreams were coming true (after telling his student, “I would die a happy man if I could perform with Dorothea Williams.”)

Invest

• Despite the fact that his students aren’t very good yet, we can tell from his lecture and the way he plays for them that he’s a good teacher. And one student is good: “Connie got a little lost in it. That’s a good thing.”
• He’s good enough to pass the audition. He gets in the zone.

Strength / Flaw: Great musician who gets in the zone / zoned out

Believe Care Invest: House

Okay, I know you’re tired of these, and believe me when I say that I’m tired of them, but the book’s still not done, so I did one last batch, and I figured I might as well share them. I do have future plans for good content for this blog, of various kinds.

It’s network TV so we begin, of course, with a cute young white woman in trouble. A teacher starts speaking nonsense to her classroom, then has a seizure. A few months later she ends up under the “care” of a misanthropic doctor named Gregory House, who refuses to actually talk to her. He meets with his team and they decide to run some tests, but his boss tells him he’s not allowed to run any further tests, because he hasn’t been doing his clinic hours.

Why House might be hard to identify with: He’s even more of an asshole than most TV asshole heroes. About his patient: “The one who can’t talk? I like that part.” He finds out it’s his friend’s cousin, but still responds, “Brain tumor, she’s gonna die. Boring.”

Believe

• Jargon: In response to a list of symptoms: “None of which is even close to dispositive.” Later: “Differential diagnosis, people, if it’s not a tumor what are the suspects?”
• He has a unique POV, literally: The camera zoom up the patient’s nose.
• He has mottoes: A team member asks, “Shouldn’t we be speaking to the patient before we start diagnosing?” “Is she a doctor?” “No, but--” “--Everybody lies.” “Dr. House doesn’t like dealing with patients.” “Isn’t treating patients why we became doctors?” “No, treating illnesses is why we became doctors. Treating patients is what makes most doctors miserable.” “So you’re trying to eliminate the humanity from the practice of medicine?” “We don’t talk to them, they can’t lie to us. And we can’t lie to them. Humanity is overrated.”
• Token items: cane, pill bottle.

Care

• He’s disabled and self-conscious about it: His first line, as he limps along with a cane: “They all assume that I’m a patient because of this cane.” “So put on a white coat like the rest of us.” “I don’t want them to think I’m a doctor!” “You can see where the administration might have a problem with that attitude.” “People don’t want a sick doctor.”
• His boss keeps humiliating him: “I was expecting you in my office twenty minutes ago.” “That’s odd, because I had no intention of being in your office twenty minutes ago.” “Your billings are practically non-existent.” “Rough year.” “You ignore requests for consults.” “I call back. Sometimes I misdial.” “You’re six years behind on your obligations to this clinic.” “See, I was right: This doesn’t interest me. It’s five o’clock, I’m going home.” “To what?” He has no snappy answer to that last one.
• Later, his ability to do tests is taken away, and she’s humiliating him more effectively. He yells at her: “You showed me disrespect. You embarrassed me, and as long as I work here--” “--Is yelling designed to scare me, because I’m not sure what it is I’m supposed to be scared of. More yelling? That’s not scary. That you’re going to hurt me? That’s scary, but I’m pretty sure I can outrun you.”
• We will eventually find out he has a pain killer addiction.

Invest

• We can see he’s very good at his job, albeit not the “bedside manner” part.
• His friend says sarcastically, “No wonder you’re such a renowned diagnostician, you don’t need to actually know anything to figure out what’s wrong,” but we can tell he means it about the renowned part.
• His boss tells him: “Your reputation is still worth something to this hospital.”

Strength / Flaw: Sees the truth / Misanthrope

Believe Care Invest: The Order of Odd-Fish

Faded Hollywood starlet Lily Larouche throws a blow-out Christmas costume party at her palace in the desert. Thirteen years ago, she found a baby in her laundry room with a note saying “This is Jo. Please take care of her. But beware. This is a DANGEROUS baby”. Now Jo is the responsible take care of her “aunt”. A mysterious Russian named Korsakov gets in a dust-up with a teen in a hedge-hog costume, who comes back with a gun. A package from the sky lands on the teen’s head and he accidentally shoots Korsakov. The package says “to: jo larouche, from: the order of odd-fish”

Why Jo might be hard to identify with: It’s always a little tricky having a hero who wants to shut the party down. Certainly we get the sense that Jo is not James’s own favorite character. But the three authors that seem to be the biggest inspirations here, Dahl, Juster, and Adams, all have in some of their biggest books party-poooperish heroes surrounded by wilder, more fun-loving characters. (Matilda is an exception)

Believe:

• If there’s one thing this book does not lack, it is an abundance of vivid details. The Ruby Palace comes alive instantly with sights, sounds and smells (Jo closed her eyes and inhaled the familiar smell of Aunt Lily’s parties: the lemony smoke of tiki torches; the clashing, flowery perfumes; the warm musk of cigarettes . . .)
• Every member of the ensemble is strongly characterized, with not just strong personality traits, but unique syntax.

Care:

• A classic trick: She overhears herself being criticized: “Did you see?” whispered the eggplant. “Lily’s gone nuts again.” “Cracked as a crawdad, and worse every year,” said the UFO. “The woman’s going to hurt herself.” “It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the poor girl. Do you know, I’ve never even seen her?” “I heard she’s some kind of freak, actually,” said the UFO. “Remember what the newspapers said about her being ‘dangerous’?”
• We care about introverts in party situations. Once parties get wild enough, we’ve all felt that way: “Nobody noticed her in her plain black dress, but she preferred it that way. She hated attention.”

Invest:

• Like Harry Potter killing wizard-Hitler, Jo is already bad ass as a baby, for some reason nobody knows. We like dangerous characters.
• She’s volatile and scrappy: “Jo didn’t have time for this; her heart was beating too hard, she had to find Aunt Lily—but she heard herself shout, ‘Hey! Get back here!’”
• She can throw someone’s words back at them, which we always like: “‘I have dispatched my partner, Sefino, to patrol the grounds for suspicious characters.’ ‘You’re the most suspicious character I’ve ever met.’”
• We always like spies: “Jo never talked to Aunt Lily’s friends, but she loved spying on them.”

Believe Care Invest: Jane Eyre

10 year old Jane, whose parents died of Typhus, lives with her aunt and cousins, all of whom despise her. She finally fights back, and is sent to a creepy room to await punishment.

Why Jane might be hard to identify with: No reason. She’s intensely sympathetic.

Believe

• She slips off to read, and we get a snippet of the verse she reads.
• We see glimpses of her vivid imagination, including “a black, horned thing, seated aloof on a rock.”
• Pop culture of the day is name-checked, including “Pamela”

Care

• “Why was I always suffering, always brow-beaten, always accused, forever condemned?”
• She feels she deserves her abuse on some level: “She really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented, happy little children.”
• Her reading is interrupted and insulted, which obviously, since we’re currently reading, is going to bond us to her.
• He has vivid fear of further abuse: “every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of flesh on my bones shrunk when he came near.”
• She’s poor: “You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mamma says; you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mamma’s expense.”
• She fears she’s the monster at the end of the book. In the mirror in the red room, she sees herself as “the strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit. I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessie’s evening stories represented as coming up out of lone, ferny dells, in moors, and appearing before the eyes of belated travellers.”
• She’s over-punished for everything while her peers can get away with anything.

Invest

• Her aunt insults her for being “a questioner”, but we like that about her.
• She fights back physically. “I resisted all the way: a new thing for me.” It’s always good to begin a story at the moment that longstanding problem becomes untenable.
• “I was conscious that a moment’s mutiny had already rendered me liable to strange penalties, and, like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths. ‘Hold her arms, Miss Abbot; she’s like a mad cat.’”

Strength/Flaw: Defiant / disagreeable

Believe Care Invest: The Firm

Mitch McDeere, graduating third at Harvard Law, interviews with a tax firm based out of Memphis. They make him an offer so generous he can’t refuse. He goes home and tells his wife they won’t be poor anymore.

Why Mitch might be hard to identify with: He has a passion for tax law! Not exactly getting innocent people off death row. Sounds terribly boring. He’s also easily seduced by money and doesn’t notice or care that the firm only hires white men.

 
Believe

• The bald-faced racism and misogyny of the firm feels startlingly real.
• The details of Mitch’s life create a believable working class portrait.
• The author is a lawyer, and there are lots of real details: Mitch says in his interview, “I enjoy research.” Grisham then tells us, “They nodded and acknowledged this obvious lie. It was part of the ritual. No law student or lawyer in his right mind enjoyed research, yet, without fail, every prospective associate professed a deep love for the library.”

Care

• He falls into this trap because he and his wife are very poor at the moment, with a Mazda hatchback they have to jump-start every time they use it. It’s a big deal when their wine has an actual cork.
• He’s clearly had a pretty traumatic life: His dad died in a mining accident, his mom remarried a bad man, a brother died in Vietnam, his other brother he won’t discuss, he had to quit football due to a knee injury.
• He’s been a second-class citizen at Harvard, having been to a weak undergrad school and not having the money the other kids have.
• We get little hints (that Mitch misses) this may be a very evil firm, killing partners who try to leave. “It is a rare, extremely rare occasion when a lawyer leaves our firm. It is simply unheard of.”

Invest

• He’s hungry, and we like that.
• He’s full of tricks and traps at the interview. He doesn’t know who will be interviewing him, so he memorizes the alma maters of all 41 partners. When one of them implicitly criticizes him by saying “I don’t imagine Western Kentucky is much of an academic school,” he responds by saying “Sort of like Kansas State.” They’re impressed that he could respond that way.
• He’s willing to keep secrets (the whereabouts of his living brother) even in situations where he’s got huge incentive to tell all.

Strength / Flaw: Ambitious / Greedy

Believe Care Invest: Catch-22

Air Force captain Yossarian malingers in a military hospital in Pianosa, Italy. He and his friend Dunbar goad and mock a Texan who thinks only certain types of people should vote. Yossarian is required to censor mail to and from the enlisted men, does so in bizarre ways, and signs his work “Washington Irving”, which results in an investigation.

Why Yossarian might be hard to identify with: He’s refusing to fight Hitler, which is different from trying to get out of Vietnam. He says he’s madly in love with the chaplain, but we sense that Yossarian is not really capable of real friendship. He’s dead inside. He writes sadistic letters to his loved ones at home. He falsely accuses the Texan of murder. We already get a sense here in these early pages that his attitude toward women is terrible.

Believe

• Dozens of ironies make the world real to us. He signs the letters “Washington Irving” out of boredom, then a C.I.D. man checks into the hospital to investigate, but they can tell he’s an investigator because he finds censoring letters too boring and refuses to do it. Then we they all decide to check out of the hospital so they don’t have to be around the Texan anymore, only the C.I.D. man remains behind because he’s caught pneumonia in the hospital.
• And of course, looking past these ten pages, we’ll find out about Catch-22: You can get out of the army if you’re crazy, but if you’re trying to get out of the army, that proves you’re sane.

Care

• Everybody wants to kill him. We don’t really get a sense of it yet in this first chapter, but he’s almost killed by enemy flack every time he goes on a bombing raid (a fellow flier will painfully die is his arms in a scene we get flashes of over the course of the book) and the glory-seeking Colonel keeps promising they can go home after a few more missions and then endlessly raising the number of missions. 
• We also eventually find out that the men are killing each other in various ways, so Yossarian is in constant danger.  One by one, all of his friends will die, in increasingly absurd and meaningless ways.  

Invest

• He hates the Texan’s bigotry, so we can tell he’s basically a good person, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary.
• He’s funny. He and Dunbar mock the Texan together with good “Yes and” comic timing. The many bizarre ways he comes up with to censor the letters are increasingly funny, and a parody of writing instruction.

Strength / Flaw: Witty / Dead inside

Believe Care Invest: Invisible Man

An unnamed Black narrator in 1952 lives underground in Manhattan in a room lit with 1,369 light bulbs, powered by stolen electricity. He remembers various incidents from his life, including a time he threatened a white man with a knife for insulting him, and a time he tried reefer while listening to Louis Armstrong. As the first chapter begins, we flashback to a time he arrived to give a speech to white rich people, only to find he was expected to fight other young black men first.

Why the unnamed narrator might be hard to identify with: He doesn’t have a name. He’s bizarre. He’s a quitter. He seems equally disdainful of everyone, black and white.

Believe

• He’s coyly hiding secrets from us that he promises to reveal later: “I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century, which I discovered when I was trying to escape in the night from Ras the Destroyer. But that’s getting too far ahead of the story.”
• The 1,369 light bulbs make for great imagery, and provide a lot of meaning. Of course if you’re surrounded by light bulbs in every direction, then you’ve still got black skin, but you don’t cast any shadows. The hero’s goal seems to be blackness purged of darkness, and he’s visualizing that problem, making it come alive for us.
• He’s a man of particular tastes: “Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin.”

Care

• Long before he abandoned society, he was told by the world that he had no place there: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
• He tells us that the more he tried to fit in, the more he ironically felt like a traitor. Because his grandfather told him on his deathbed to feign subservience and then betray the white man, then every time he tries to do what white people want him to do, he worries that he’s just following his grandfather’s dictum and he’s secretly a traitor.
• He’s disconnected and self-conscious: “Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around.”

Invest

• He’s hiding from the world now, but he claims that he was once a total badass: “One night I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name. I sprang at him, seized his coat lapels and demanded that he apologize. He was a tall blond man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he struggled. I pulled his chin down sharp upon the crown of my head, butting him as I had seen the West Indians do, and I felt his flesh tear and the blood gush out, and I yelled, “Apologize! Apologize!” But he continued to curse and struggle, and I butted him again and again until he went down heavily, on his knees, profusely bleeding. I kicked him repeatedly, in a frenzy because he still uttered insults though his lips were frothy with blood. Oh yes, I kicked him! And in my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right there beneath the lamplight in the deserted street, holding him by the collar with one hand, and opening the knife with my teeth”
• But he admits that this is not the personality he will display for most of the book: “Most of the time (although I do not choose as I once did to deny the violence of my days by ignoring it) I am not so overtly violent.” It’s common to get us to invest in a reader by giving a brief flash of their bravest moment, even if they won’t be that way for the rest of the book.

Strength / Flaw: Defiant / Disaffected

Believe Care Invest: Moby Dick

A young man who asks us to call him Ishmael gets sick of life in NYC and decides to head up to Nantucket to take work on a whaling vessel. He arrives in town and finds a place for the night, but he’s told he’ll have to share a bed when a mysterious harpooner.

Why Ishmael might be hard to identify with: He’s not telling us the whole story. It’s unclear if that’s even his name. He gives us so many reasons that he’s going to sea that it seems likely that none of them is the real one.

Believe

• He paints Manhattan and Nantucket vividly.
• He conveys his economic situation compellingly.
• Lots of objects speak of the doom coming up: “The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon—so like a corkscrew now—was flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump.”

Care

• He’s depressed and out of sorts: “Whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
• He’s estranged from himself: “I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs.”

Invest

• He seems to be a competent sailor, but we don’t have much reason to invest in him, and indeed he will be pretty hapless throughout the novel. He will be the only survivor the mission, but only by sheer luck.
• But we do like that he’s an enthusiastic storyteller: “But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land.”
• He’s funny: He self-mockingly imagines where his sea voyage will be listed in the book of fate, hidden between bigger events: “Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. “WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL. “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.”

Strength / Flaw: Observant / Passive