Maybe that was an escape from dreaming about what it would be like to live it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A book that\u2014let’s get some CWs out of the way up front\u2014contains both terminal illness and<\/em> suicide (separate patients). A book that made me think a lot about both. I want to encourage everyone not<\/em> to commit suicide, to get help if you have the ideation. I’ve been there, you’re not alone. Also a book that made me go “goddamn right” about a thousand times, in regards to parenting. A book that presents certain visions of how to be a strong man, and a book that presents how strong men are often also weak, self-absorbed, and scared. A book, in short, with range. I’m talking, of course, about Telephone<\/em> by Percival Everett. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Telephone<\/em> by Percival Everett: <\/strong>an accidentally appropriate year-end book, expanding on a lot of what I have been thinking about this year. If the secret police come to your city and start kidnapping your neighbors, straight-up abducting<\/em>, and your response is nonviolent intervention when you can, it\u2019s hard to know how much you\u2019ve actually accomplished. When your friend gets sick in a way that you can\u2019t directly help with, but you can be a support, you can babysit the kids sometimes, it\u2019s hard to know how much you\u2019re actually doing. Yes, those two examples are explicit references to my life, but they are almost one-to-one comparisons of what the narrator of this novel has to deal with. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Our narrator is Zach Wells, an often-accidentally cranky paleogeologist with a distant but functional marriage and a 12-year-old daughter he adores. One day, after opening a jacket he got off of eBay, he finds a note pinned to the collar reading \u201cAYUDAME.\u201d Another purchase from the same seller\u2014return address in New Mexico, a few hours from the El Paso\/Cuidad Juarez terror zone\u2014sees another note reading \u201cthey are not letting us go.\u201d Oh, and his daughter gets diagnosed with Batten Syndrome. If you, like me, don’t know what that is, suffice to say that it’s an ugly, terminal, untreatable disease. If you, like me, have been trained on triumphant Hollywood movies where the hero\u2019s journey completes itself in a satisfactory way? I am sorry, but you are reading a Percival Everett novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am fond of saying, after reading 10% of his published works, that Everett writes the best endings in the business. This one is tough. \u201cUnsatisfying\u201d is a description I bet Percy would own up to, but just like The Trees<\/em>, the ending is meant to redirect your thoughts. What you felt like the plot was is actually somewhat secondary to what the book is about. Even more than The Trees<\/em>, this book withholds the conclusion you believe must happen. You reach the last page and are left wondering, “wait, what did<\/em> I think was going to happen? Am I sure I wanted to see it? Will it matter to the narrator tomorrow?” What good is it, if we act? What good can one person do? What about one person and five people from a poetry workshop? What about one person and their estranged partner?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Zach has a refrain of not knowing what he\u2019s doing. There\u2019s a scene where he turns down speaking at a campus protest event not because he doesn\u2019t believe in what the kids are protesting, but because he doesn\u2019t believe his action will do anything. Any time he does act, it\u2019s not that it goes wrong, it\u2019s just abundantly clear that not only is he not a hero, but real life doesn\u2019t care about heroism. So what do you do? Zach eventually does act, and we don\u2019t see the results. Personally, I understand where Zach is coming from, but also? I see Zach as something<\/em> of a hero1<\/a><\/sup>, both as a father and whatever he is in the second half of the book. If living in Chicago in the fall of 2025 has taught me anything, it\u2019s to value the action more than the result.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n LINKS!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Something to listen to while you browse? Reading Telephone<\/em> has me thinking about being a parent. I also, this week, started Molly Lambert’s podcast Heidi World<\/em><\/a> (yes, the feed is now called Jenna World<\/em>, but I haven’t listened to what the feed is calling “season one,” and it seemed prudent to start with Heidi). That led to a mini-Wikipedia tour of 1960s and 70s perverted men\/bad fathers, like John Phillips. I also have been listening to HI STANDARD a lot lately. It is highly likely that I’ve linked to their excellent cover of “California Dreamin” before, so here’s “Fighting Fist, Angry Soul.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Telephone](\"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/IMG_6779-768x1024.jpg\")