book reviews

Laura Johnson Memento Vivere

CABIN BEAR BOOKS

In Memento Vivere, a tiny volume of rebellion against death, Cedar Rapids poet Laura Johnson creates a still life of delights and damages reminding both herself and the reader: Remember you must live. (For those missing the reference, “memento mori” is a commonly used phrase meaning “remember you must die.”)

In the introductory poem, Johnson introduces us to her dying father. “He is thinking of immigrating: a final, / permanent move, according to / Mother. But Dad and I know / his step over will be a first move / into a new kingdom.” She follows this poem—full of feathers, flight and ailing birds— with a short calendar of fragments, seeming to tell its readers that any moment can be a sign of life.

While the repeated imagery of birds, feathers, eggs and flight often appear to be literal vignettes from real life, they also serve as anchoring metaphors between the difficulties of grief both personal and abstract. The book makes several references to 2020, COVID-19 and isolation, as in the poem “Two Thousand and Twenty, Anno Domini”: “These days offer little cosseting. / We search for health and hope– / a scavenger hunt we did not want. / Today, I startle, greeted by a fluttering of parental wings, / in the nest, a small clutch of eggs.”

Journeying through Memento Vivere with 2020 in mind is a helpful compass. We can see the narrator slowing down (“no longer a luxury but an imperative,” she writes in “Two Thousand and Twenty”), questioning priorities and observing the domestic anew. Some texts of reflection and documentation covering 2020 have been hard to read, leaving the reader feeling hopeless and reliving their own traumas. Memento Vivere is full of hope and awe, revolving around reflection, always erring on the side of stoic, as in “Tornado Warning”: “Rebuilding felt easier now / that trust had fled and left us, / leaving no reparations.”

I WaNT TO PaIr THIS COLLECTION WITH a CHEaP WINE, SOMETHING THaT HUrTS TO SWaLLOW bUT LEaVES yOU WarM.

I want to pair this collection with a cheap wine, something that hurts to swallow but leaves you warm. There’s a slow creep to the sadness weathered by the narrator. Everything comes out soft and hopeful, but we can see Johnson training to speak in silver linings. My favorite poem, “Half Life” (the last in the book), puts words to this in-between place with these phrases, “The house: half decorated,” “Poems shiver half-naked,” “I find myself half-orphaned,” “White mug: half-empty” as the author sits “half-hearted” to “try / to write warmth into being.”

Memento Vivere is a eulogy for 2020. So much of its composition is built as epitaphs trying to notice how beautiful the scenery is. Johnson claims, in “Autumn’s Benediction”, “No secrets are revealed / this autumn morning and I am an / observer to these magic majesties / as countryside transforms.” If Johnson is bearing witness to this year, she is also our guide through making meaning of our shared hardship, reminding us to live.

Lan Samantha Chang

The Family Chao

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

Family can be a tricky balancing act.

Lan Samantha Chang, in her newest novel, gives the central family the surname Chao, making them collectively, of course, the Chaos. There are a couple of sections early in the book where she really locks the reader into what seems like an obvious analogy: “‘We Chaos, who are full of passion and inner chaos!’” one character says on page 52. And then, in a description of a party on page 63, “... food, drink, loud talk, and laughter, children running, shrieking, breaking things, chaos, more chaos …” As an editor, I am still pondering whether I’d have advised Chang to keep those almost heavy-handed moments.

But as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Chang is not taking this choice of naming lightly.

In physics and math, chaos is not used like the colloquial term meaning “complete disorder and confusion.” Instead, it is used to describe a state that balances precariously between order and randomness. It examines systems that may seem random or disordered, but are in fact deeply deterministic and respond with sensitivity to conditions set at their origin. Our universe, for example, is not random, or neatly ordered, but chaotic. Like family.

There is chaos in the way family traits are passed down. When Chang describes the Chao brothers’ dismay over which of their father’s characteristics they each possess, she deftly conveys the inevitability and predictability of that inheritance, yet also the way in which it is never clear at first glance, the way it tempts each recipient into denial. Chang expertly reveals the fractal chaos in the way families grow into communities, independent yet interconnected; in the way immigrants grow into Americans; in the spread of rumor; in the ebb and flow of faith.

More than simply the subtle truth that all families are C/chaos, though, The Family Chao is about other feats of balance—is, itself, such a feat. As a story of first generation experience, it captures the precarious path that children of immigrants must navigate between fulfilling their parents’ dreams and crafting their own, between embracing the culture their parents gave everything for them to be part of and becoming too American for their parents to recognize.

Chang describes how a spirit “wandered quietly between the living and the dead,” how a character “exists in a liminal space bridging his old self to a future self he can’t yet grasp.” The novel explores duality by examining that liminal space of neither and both, and it does so while existing in its own liminal space between weighty family drama and wild, unpredictable mystery. (And, without spoilers, I’ll say that the novel’s coda is exquisitely set in possibly the most truly liminal, and the most quintessentially American, place that exists: Las Vegas.)

Did all paths lead inevitably and predictably to The Family Chao’s inciting event? Is the hope of self-determination that brings so many immigrants to the U.S., and which ultimately condemns these characters, merely a pervasive American myth? Are we all trapped in a deterministic chaos? Chang doesn’t, of course, offer answers. But as each possibility buds, then blooms into its own fractal path, Chang’s clear and driving prose makes the questions a delight to contemplate.