bard of overlooked California<\/a>,\u201d and \u201cSacrament\u201d proves the praise. Straight\u2019s African American ex-husband and three daughters; her Latino, Filipino, white, Native and mixed-race neighbors; and her immersion in overlooked California bring new meaning to the advice \u201cwrite what you know.\u201d Straight\u2019s personal and literary missions extend to who she knows.<\/p>\nIn \u201cSacrament,\u201d Straight turns her singular focus to a handful of nurses camping in a wagon train of funky, sweltering trailers near the hospital they call Our Lady. Separated from their spouses and kids \u2014 \u201cSix feet apart or six feet under,\u201d Larette\u2019s son Joey chants \u2014 Larette, Cherrise, Marisol and their colleagues are themselves underprotected from the virus, which they eventually contract, and from the domestic dramas that seep from home into their pressure-cooker days. Fearful that her mom will die, Cherrise\u2019s teenage daughter, Raquel, convinces Joey to drive her to the hospital from the date farm where Raquel has been deposited into her Auntie Lolo\u2019s care. The drive should take two hours, but the teens are MIA for two nightmare days. Having narrowly escaped a would-be captor, Raquel remains haunted by her near fate. \u201cThe fingers in her hair pulling so hard her scalp felt like it had tiny bubbles under the skin. Wait till I pull your hair for real, bitch. She heard him even now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Diving deeper than the quotidian insults of her characters\u2019 loneliness, poverty and fear, Straight brings us inside their exhausted minds. Attempting a nap, Larette lies on the break room cot, eyes closed, to no avail. \u201cGhost fingers in her left palm. Her right hand holding the phone on FaceTime for the wives. The husbands. The children who were grown,\u201d she writes. \u201cAll their faces. Stoic. Weeping. Biting their lips so hard.\u201d Later, Larette tells her husband, \u201cEveryone you see on TV, banging pots and pans, everyone doing parades, it\u2019s so nice. But then I have to be all alone with \u2014 their breath. Their breath just \u2014 it slows down and it\u2019s terrifying every time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perhaps most painful among the nurses\u2019 many miseries is their isolation: the secrets they keep in hopes of sparing their loved ones an iota of extra suffering. \u201cNone of us are telling anyone we love about anything, Larette thought. She hadn\u2019t told [her husband] anything true in weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Straight\u2019s work invariably does, \u201cSacrament\u201d challenges the prevailing notion that the overlooked Californians she centers in her work and in her life are less worthy, less interesting, less human than their wealthier, whiter, more visible urban counterparts. Programmed to equate \u201crugged independence\u201d with success, many advantaged Americans first appreciated human interdependence (berries in our cereal, test kits on our porches) in lockdown. In Straight\u2019s world, raising each other\u2019s kids, feeding each other\u2019s elders, keeping each other\u2019s secrets, mourning the dead and fighting like hell for the living is not called exigence. It\u2019s called life.<\/p>\n
\u201cSacrament\u201d broadens the reader\u2019s understanding of community beyond flesh-and-blood friends, family and neighbors. The love and care that flow within her community of characters draws the reader into their bright, tight circle, making the characters\u2019 loved ones and troubles feel like the reader\u2019s own.<\/p>\n
Spoiler alert: The nurses\u2019 sacrifices, strengths and foibles; their families, robbed not only of their moms and wives and daughters but also of any shred of safety; and their patients \u2014 who have tubes stuffed into their urethras and down their throats, blinking their desperate last moments of life into iPads as they take their final breaths \u2014 will likely make the reader see and respect and love not only these characters, but the consistently brilliant author who gave them life on the page of this, her finest book.<\/p>\n
Maran, author of \u201cThe New Old Me\u201d and other books, lives in a Silver Lake bungalow that\u2019s even older than she is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Book Review Sacrament By Susan StraightCounterpoint: 352 pages, $29 If you buy books linked on our site, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":248332,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,135599,15388,135600,1075,135597,6461,88,29084,135596,271,135598,35166,135595,135601,135594,19500],"class_list":["post-248331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-california-nurse","tag-character","tag-cherrise","tag-community","tag-covid-nurse","tag-daughter","tag-entertainment","tag-husband","tag-larette","tag-life","tag-raquel","tag-reader","tag-sacrament","tag-son-joey","tag-susan-straight","tag-wife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}