Libby's Books

A friend recently recommended to me the book All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley. Like me, she’s a writer, and we periodically share our good reads. We’re also both freelance editors for a major publishing house, so our personal reading hours are precious, and we don’t often waste time on books that don’t grab us. We feel no guilt when putting down a book after reading only a portion.

So when she suggested this nonfiction tome, I immediately thought it was likely to be a good read, even though its subject wasn’t one I’d normally feel drawn to. It’s not that I don’t like great art (a big part of the narrative of the book). It’s that I’m not fond of ponderous paragraphs describing it in gushing tones.

But that’s not what All the Beauty in the World is about. Yes, it tells the story of the author’s ten years as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and, yes, it includes his descriptions and thoughts on many of the artworks he’s privileged to visit with every day. Those descriptions and thoughts, by the way, are…beautiful. And fresh. As if someone were seeing art for the very first time.

The book is much more than that, though. It’s a meditation on grief. Mr. Bringley’s brother dies at the age of 25 from cancer, and this spurs him to give up a prestigious job at the New Yorker, unable to see himself at a desk day in and day out after experiencing the toughest loss in his own young life.

So he ditches that work and becomes a guard at the Met. While he may have thought of it as a waystation along the rough road out of the land of his sorrow, he ends up staying on the job for ten years. During that time, he rediscovers art he knew, comes upon new items he finds depth and joy and beauty in, and eventually finds the light that leads him out of his mourning.

I’m surprised by the meaning I begin to find in even small interactions with guards and visitors. A favor asked, an answer given, thanks proffered, welcomeness assured…There is a heartening rhythm to it that helps put me back in sync with the world. Grief is among other things a loss of rhythm. You lose someone, it puts a hole in your life, and for a time you huddle down in that hole. In coming to the Met, I saw an opportunity to conflate my hole with a grand cathedral, to linger in a place that seemed untouched by the rhythms of every day. But those rhythms have found me, and their invitations are alluring. It turns out I don’t wish to stay quiet and lonesome forever. In discovering the cadence with which I meet people, I feel as though I’m discovering the kind of grown-up I’ll be. Most of the big challenges I’ll face in life are also little challenges I confront in daily interactions. Trying to be patient. trying to be kind. Trying to enjoy others’ peculiarities and make good use of my own. Trying to be generous or at least humane even when the situation is rote.

Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World

His growing self-awareness, not just of the meaning of the art around him but of the relationships he’s forging during this decade, make for an art all its own. I especially enjoyed his realization that had he stayed at the New Yorker, he never would have encountered such a diverse workforce — in ethnicity as well as social class.

I highly, highly recommend this book. Despite its gentle tone and serious underlying topic, it’s a page turner. Keep a smartphone handy, though, if you read it on Kindle as I did. You’ll want to look up images of the artworks he describes to appreciate them as fully as he does.

I’m happy to announce that my novel Daisy, a refashioning of The Great Gatsby from Daisy Buchanan’s point of view, is now available in paperback. You can find it here if you’d like to buy a copy (and I hope you do!). It was previously available in hardcover and Kindle versions as well as on Audible.

The critical reaction to Daisy has been wonderful. You can find review snippets at my website: www.LibbySternberg.com .

I’m reposting below a blog piece I wrote on the anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby this past spring. You might find it interesting if you’re as fascinated by the book (and its author) as I am!

ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE PUBLICATION OF THE GREAT GATSBY: April 10, 1925

Maybe he wrote it because he, like the former slave Trimalchio—which F. Scott Fitzgerald favored as a title for The Great Gatsby—seemed to be the man who’d made it big but didn’t fit in. After all, he hailed from a middle-class family in the Midwest, and always felt like “a poor boy in a rich town.”

Maybe he wrote it because his adult life seemed to be an endless search for the girl who got away, like Gatsby’s quest for Daisy. Fitzgerald’s biographer, Matthew Bruccoli, wrote that it allowed him “to dramatize the most powerful experiences associated with his love for (his wife) Zelda.” After he wrote Gatsby, Zelda drifted away from him on the deep sea of mental illness.

Maybe he wrote it because he needed the money and the continued fame—he always seemed to need more money—and he wanted to deliver something sweet and tragic in a world filled with raucous glitz and glamour.

Whatever his reasons, today many consider F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, published on April 10, 1925, to be “The Great American Novel,” a story of striving for the American Dream of riches and status that ends badly, but is beautifully told.

Yet when it was published, Gatsby was not a best-seller. Copies of its print run were still in the publisher’s warehouse when Fitzgerald died. By that time, it had sold only 25,000 copies.

Only later did it rise to the level of best-seller, the reasons for which the writer Maureen Corrigan does a great job chronicling in her book So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.

Gatsby is short (barely 50,000 words), so it’s perfect for the limited attention spans of students and ultimately made its way into classrooms. It also made its way onto free GI book lists during World War II. Both helped speed its popularity after Fitzgerald’s death.

It’s so well-known today that it even turned up in a prison book discussion scene from the television series The Wire where an inmate sums up Gatsby’s ultimate failure at trying to buy his way into a higher social class this way: “’cause (Gatsby) wasn’t ready to get real with the story, that sh** caught up to him.”

I sometimes wonder if the reason Gatsby didn’t soar during its launch phase was because audiences were growing tired of Fitzgerald’s type of tales, of his flirtatious Jazz Age heroines and dapper beaus.

At least two of that year’s best-selling novels are historicals—E. Barrington’s Glorious Apollo, a fictional biography of Lord Byron, and Rafael Sabatini’s The Carolinian, a Revolutionary War tale whose author was already famous for Scaramouche and Captain Blood. The list also contains a smattering of tales that sound like coming-of-age stories, some melodramatic. Only one classic novel makes it, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith.

If readers weren’t buying, some critics had issues, too.

H.L. Mencken praised Gatsby’s writing but called the story a “glorified anecdote” in his 1925 Chicago Tribune review.

Time magazine’s review was a snarky summary of the plot, beginning with the line: “Still the brightest boy in the class, F. Scott Fitzgerald holds up his hand (to tell Gatsby’s story).”

Yet, like boats against the current, we are borne ceaselessly back to our collective love of Gatsby.

Why?

For me, the novel ignited a sense of intense longing, of Sehnsucht. I read it as a young teen, on the cusp of adulthood, when undefined emotions crowded out rational thought.

Youth is the time of constant Sehnsucht, though, and every chapter of the book seemed drenched in that yearning for what could have been if only, if only…

Even the scenes where Gatsby and Daisy played no roles carried the melody of bittersweet possibilities.

A whole novel that pulls together one single strong emotion? Yes, I was in for that. And so were many others, after poor Fitzgerald had floated away from the world.

Today, readers might look for deeper meanings in every phrase of this great novel, but for me, it represents a fierce yet unrealized desire, a sense that we can devise second acts for ourselves, if only we can figure out the right way to plot them. “Poor boy” Jay Gatsby plotted his second act by achieving the American Dream, but it was in service to a greater goal—a great love. If only it had lasted.

If only…

Libby Sternberg is a novelist. Her novel Daisy tells the story of The Great Gatsby from Daisy’s point of view and has been hailed by Booklist as “original and charming.”

Many people might not realize this, but Johns Hopkins Medical School admitted women from its opening in 1893, due to a smart Baltimore philanthropist who insisted both men and women be allowed in on equal footing.

This and other pieces of the history of women doctors played a role in my novel Cora’s Secret Engagement.

The inspiration for this book, though, came from a wonderful work of nonfiction by Wendy Moore entitled No Man’s Land, which tells the true story of physicians Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson, and the military hospital they set up in London during World War I. Staffed entirely by women, it attracted help from around the world, including from the United States.

I began to wonder, as I read that engrossing story, what the experience of working in that hospital might have been like for young women from the US and how they would fit back into society after their duties were no longer required.

Thus, Cora Finch Montague, my heroine, was born in my imagination. As I researched this novel, I encountered the equally phenomenal story of Baltimore philanthropist Mary Elizabeth Garrett who, with several other women, helped provide crucial funding for the founding of the Johns Hopkins Medical School. She gave the money, however, with one caveat: the school must admit women equal to men.

It took many years, of course, for true equality to take hold, but my heroine, Cora, though fictional, has struggles that mirror those of many women in the medical field at the time.

Even as late as the 1930s, in fact, women were discouraged from going into nursing because it would expose them to the male anatomy and was deemed an unseemly profession. Nonetheless, they persisted. Another source of information on women in medicine (nursing, in this case) is the book If I Perish about nurses in World War II.

My thanks to Andrew Harrison, an archivist at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, for sending me the actual catalog and admission requirements for the medical school in 1919 and for pointing me to an online biography of Mary Elizabeth Garrett.

A more comprehensive look at her life can be found in Kathleen Waters Sander’s book: Mary Elizabeth Garrett: Society and Philanthropy in the Gilded Age.

A wonderful read about the medical school at Johns Hopkins and ten individuals—several of them women—who helped shape it into a world-class facility of education and healing is A Scientific Revolution by Ralph H. Hruban and Will Linder. It’s an engrossing and accessible read filled with inspiring and some heartbreaking stories.

As of this writing, men still outnumber women as physicians—64 to 35 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. And women doctors only outnumber men in the same specialties they were forced to work in back in my fictional character’s time—pediatrics and obstetrics/gynecology. But things are changing. According to statistics from the Association of American Medical Colleges, in 2019 women outnumbered men for the first time in medical school enrollment.

Pioneers like the two women doctors at the Endell Street Hospital helped break that ground, and I hope my fictional story of an aspiring female medical student inspires as well as entertains.

I’ve been delighted to see my latest novel, Daisy, receive some glowing reviews online and many four and five-star ratings. But like all authors, I’ve also had a couple (literally two) one- and two-star ratings on Goodreads. These are merely ratings with no review attached, no explanation for the bad opinion.

I will admit this bothers me, and here’s why: It feels mean. Cruel. A low-star rating tells readers nothing about the book, only that the rater disliked it. In fact, they disliked it a lot, enough to want the world to know in what low esteem they hold the book.

All authors have to deal with critical reviews, however, and I’m not complaining about those. I received one from Publishers Weekly years back for a rom-com of mine where the reviewer took me to task for some plot lines they thought were too madcap to be credible.

I was okay with that. In fact, I nodded my head to that less-than-stellar review. My book wasn’t the reviewer’s cuppa, but they’d done a thoughtful job of explaining why it didn’t work for them, highlighting elements of the story I’d deliberately made incredible. In the process, this “bad” review also gave readers useful information about what kind of book I’d written, and I knew some readers might nod their heads and think that novel sounds like something they’d enjoy.

I’ve bought books after reading similar reviews, where the critic wasn’t a fan but whose thoughtful analysis informed me of elements that I’d find appealing. Book reviews are, after all, opinion pieces, and good reviewers give you a basis for their opinions, allowing you to pass judgment on your own.

One-star ratings (with no review attached) do none of that, and it’s hard for authors not to feel some of those low raters have a personal issue…with the author or the topic of the book or something entirely unrelated to the quality of the novel itself. While review-less five-star ratings feel as if a crowd is joining in applause for a good performance that critics have also praised, one-star ratings feel like a tongue stuck out or a middle finger raised and little more.

Don’t do that, book raters. Those lone-star rankings tell readers nothing about the book you’re rating. They do, however, tell readers a little bit about you, and it’s not very flattering.