Book review: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin: Not Quite the Sum of Its Parts

It's taken me a while to get around to this review, as I've really needed to cogitate on how I felt about this book.

I really loved aspects of this novel - quite a few aspects, actually - but overall I liked rather than loved the book as a whole, and it's taken me some thought as to work out why.

First off, the things I really liked: I loved the characterisation. I loved the premise. I loved the way Jemisin played with tropes - especially the Lovecraftian aspects, a thing that is very much in the zeitgeist at the moment with Lovecraft Country and Victor LaValle and others. I loved the social commentary, even when it was far from subtle (the whiteness of the Enemy and the threat of gentrification chasing out the "real New Yorkers". The whole problem with Staten Island being part of New York, but separated - more because of White Flight and racism than a stretch of water.

But there was something that, for me, prevented the whole from coming together satisfactorily. I know it is the beginning of a series (although it follows on from the excellent short story The City Born Great) so that may be part of my issue with the structure, but it still seemed somehow lacking.

This book is very much a love-letter to New York City, to its resilience and culture and vibrancy, to its melting pot invention, its ability to absorb all comers and make them New Yorkers whilst allowing that diversity to add to its strength (not unique to NYC, of course; London is very much the modern prototype of this kind of metropolis).

I listened to the audiobook and must give a mention to the performer, Robin Miles. This is simply one of the finest readings of a book I have ever encountered, a full performance of character and subtlety and strength, aided by some superb production with the barest use of effects and music.

I may well amend this review - the book is clearly staying with me - and may well listen to or read it again before the next instalment.

A moment in time

I took this photo around eleven years ago. I’d been struggling with depression for a few years, leading me to lose my job. I’d been suicidal, had ups and downs, but been unable to pull myself out of the mire.

I had a wonderful girlfriend, who I’d met through work, and was living with her. She supported me, looked after me selflessly, and let me be a house husband and a step dad to her fantastic son.

But I couldn’t push the darkness away. I felt increasingly worthless and I’m sure some of that came out in my behaviour to her. Worse, I felt the depths returning - whether it was just the fluctuations of my brain chemistry, or the pressure of trying to be the good person I knew I needed to be but felt that I wasn’t.

I began to get terrified that the darkness would engulf me and this time take me, and one day she’d come back from work, having picked the boy up from school, and they’d find me bleeding out on the kitchen floor.

So, instead of trying to fix it, fix myself, I ran away.

I don’t know if she saw if coming, but one day I’d packed a bunch of my stuff into my backpack and waiting for her when she came home. I told her that I had to go away, for all of us, that I felt broken and couldn’t be there any more. I’d done it before but she didn’t let me go. This time she must have know I meant it, or just couldn’t take it any more.

“I’d have done anything for you,” she said.

I croaked out “I know.” I wanted to say but I don’t deserve it, I don’t deserve you but that would have felt like begging to stay, and I really didn’t deserve that.

So I hurt her and the child who had come to see me as his father because I was hurting so much.

The next couple of years are hazy. I probably spent a lot of time laying on the floor trying not to feel anything. Somehow, I stayed alive.

I had a few lucky breaks that came along at times when I was able to take advantage of them. I connected with someone online who became a good friend, a nourishing relationship. I inherited a dog (on the second attempt; my sister had tried to get me to look after one dog that needed a home but I was far too angry with myself to be a good dog dad; the second time I was just up to the task, and the relationship, having to care for this other creature, helped me look after myself).

That lead to another thing. I’d joined a gym with my sister (again, thanks sis!) to try to regain the fitness I’d lost from all that lying around on the floor. We joined together so that we’d be letting someone else down if we didn’t go. She stopped after awhile anyway, but I really got into it (I’d always hated gyms). When I got my dog I thought “well, I walk him two or three times a day and never manage to burn off his crazy terrier energy. I’m sure running outside is just like the treadmill; let’s try that a couple of times a week!”

For the record, running outside is much harder than on a treadmill - especially as where I live “flat” is an alien concept - and I initially hated it. I stuck with it and, after about a month, something clicked. I became a runner, addicted to that endorphin lift and the trails and even the hills. I now run a half marathon at least once a month, have run a full marathon and, since I turn 50 next year, I’ve decided to run a 50k at some point to mark the occasion.

Then another thing cam along. I’d applied for hundreds of jobs and rarely got any response, bottled the few interviews I had because I was so nervous and unsure and afraid. Then one job I applied for gave me a callback. It was an emergency recruitment for a call centre who needed to take on a lot of staff, and didn’t have time for the normal interview process so were doing group assessments. Somehow, I came across as friendly and personable and competent and smart, and was hired on the spot. It was a sales job - inbound at least - but it was a job, and I found I was really good at talking to people on the phone.

Then, within a month of joining I was asked if I wanted to move to a more technical customer facing department. “It’ll be much more complicat-” I barely let my new boss finish the sentence “Christ, yes! Sales is making my brain leak out of my ears!” How had I come t believe in myself so quickly?

Life hasn’t always been easy. I had a couple of relationships that I wasn’t able to commit to. through fear. The depression and anxiety waxes and wanes but has never been as bad as it was eleven years ago when I took this picture.

I feel that I was so lucky. Firstly, that I survived this condition that came so close to killing me, that my sister did so much to help me (and the woman I hurt, and others), that my dog came along a point when I could return his love (he’s still with me and even though he likes to think he has the energy of a pup, his joints mean our outings are limited to walks), that a job fell into my lap and demonstrated that I had skills and intelligence and worth. There have been times I’ve almost been in tears when a customer has thanked me for going out of my way to help them.

I’m with someone else now. It’ll be five years next summer since we met at a comedy club. We don’t live together (partly as she has a cat and I have a crazy terrier) so maybe there’s less pressure, but sometimes I’m still terrified that I’ll hurt her. Early one she told me that she has a good bullshit detector and zero tolerance for it, though, so I count on that instinct.

So, if anyone reading this is going through any stage of the hell that is severe mental illness - as I once read, depression and anxiety together is its own special kind of hell - know that if you hold on things can get better. Unexpectedly, wonderfully, randomly - things can improve. Every day that you make it through is another chance to find light, to find joy, to find yourself.

You owe it to yourself to survive, and to those people who love you, and those people you don’t know yet who will come to love you.

( originally posted as an answer to a question on Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-is-that-one-picture-that-describes-the-lowest-point-in-your-life/answer/Paul-Perry-6 )

Book review: Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth: Rethinking the economy

 While I say that as well as fiction I read non-fiction, really I typically only read popular science, ancient history and some travel. One area that I never expected to be reading is the wannabe science of economics - but, as with politics, you might not take an interest in economics but it will take an interest in you.

There have been a slew of popular progressive economics books in recent years - from examinations of our broken system like John Lanchester’s Whoops! and Grace Blakely’s Stolen, to those that are more focused on looking at how we build better systems (The Spirit Level and Utopia for Realists), to the more hardcore economic theory (I swear I’ll get round to reading Thomas Piketty and Yanis Varoufakis!), and Kate Raworth’s book may be the best I’ve read at both outlining the problems and offering potential solutions in clear, straight-forward language.

It is an idea she has been presenting and working on for almost a decade. While her degree is in economics she was disenchanted by the blinkered, systematised thinking that shackles the discipline (as she points out early on, and again at the end of the book, while other social sciences seek out an encourage different ways of thinking, economists are taught that certain core principles are not to be questioned - no, more than that; they are indoctrinated into the mindset that there are no other ways of thinking.)

The idea of the doughnut is simply this: the hole in the middle is the lack of human dignity - insufficient food, water, shelter, healthcare, education. Those basics that we should allow to all people as a right.

The outer circle is the limit to which we can live with the finite resources of minerals, energy, food production, clean air, clean water.

The doughnut, therefore, is the space between those, where we as a species, as a culture, can provide a decent standard of living for every individual for the long term, without threatening the environment that we rely on for our survival.

It seems like almost too simple an idea - and an even simpler diagram, however she begins by pointing out how important visual signifiers are to us - the iconic map of the London Underground, Copernicus’ illustration of the heliocentric universe - the rising curve of progress and Paul Samualson’s simplistic Circular Flow diagram, picturing the economy as a closed loop that is taught in Econ 101 to this day. Raworth references sharing the ‘doughnut’ diagram with activists who respond effusively stating “YES! That is EXACTLY what I’ve been trying to say!”

And if that was all this book was, it would be no more than an interesting idea. I am sure there are many who are happy to scoff exactly so without engaging, but Raworth both delves into the history of and problems with economic theory, and outlines ideas - both conceptual and real-world ideas actually being implemented - for how we can, and must, do things differently.

She points out how so many of the great economic theorists of the past are selectively understood - Samuelson knew his diagram was a simplification ad absurdum, of use as only the most broad idea for non-specialists; when Simon Kuznets came up with GDP as a measure of productivity, he specifically warned that it was necessarily a narrow measure that should not be used as a benchmark to gauge progress; back to John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith (I always find it remarkable that most people who quote Smith appear completely ignorant of the half of his work in which he talks about social responsibility and warns against the dangers of subverting everything to the acquisition of wealth).

She thoroughly dismantles the consensus idea of economics that growth is the Ultimate Good (quoting a respected economist whom she doesn’t name, when asked why perpetual growth is possible simply responds “Because it has to be!”) to a more thorough debunking of some of the assumptions and models that underpin a pseudoscience that has come to dominate both public policy and public consciousness to a degree that neither the public nor policy makers feel they can question it.

On top of this, the author outlines the generalities of what we need from a new economics and gives examples that work in the real world, along with concepts that should be used in general. 

But this is not a utopian exercise; Raworth makes sure to state that change will be far from easy, and requires some extremely difficult choices. Nonetheless, the tenor of the book is ultimately hopeful, pointing out possible routes out of consumption-driven catastrophe to a future that is not only survivable and sustainable but equitable and regenerative, where we are not merely ameliorating the damage we do to our life support system but actively improving it.

I mostly consumed this via the audiobook, while dipping into the ebook - hence the sparsity of notes. I feel I need to go back for a closer read, to fully embed the ideas. I should do the same for some other books - the ones mentioned at the start of the review. For all the economics is a pseudoscience, it may be the most important factor in how we cope with the coming decades, impacting on everything from our jobs to the welfare state to climate change and alleviating mass extinctions, to production of food and energy and technology.

A must read, and must act on.