Book review: Is everything really going to be OK?

Newspaper columns, written on deadline in short bursts of inspiration and last-minute fact-checking, reflect our lives as we live them day-to-day. They’re timely distractions at lunch, on a train or bus, or on a screen just about anywhere. But how meaningful are they?

Poetry can make your heart sing or crush your soul. Fiction can conjure up insights and emotions that shape your world. That kind of writing is here to stay. But newspaper columns? They tend to evaporate in a day or two.

Unless they don’t.

Take Georgia Garvey’s new book, Everything Is Going to Be OK (Until It’s Not).

Once an Evanston resident (and now a RoundTable editor), Garvey really does have her head on straight, if cocked at a slight, charmingly quizzical angle. Fact is, her syndicated columns have been quizzically charming readers on the local and national scenes for three years: reporting, writing, editing, and, yes, I’m happy to say, pontificating. The Boston Globe. The Chicago Tribune. The Pioneer Press. The Los Angeles Times.

If it had been released in the spring instead of the fall (just this September, as a matter of fact), Garvey’s book would have made a splash as the best kind of beach reading. In winter, it will do nicely as light, curl-up-by-the-fire enlightenment.

‘Humor, heart and honesty’

The back cover promises “humor, heart and honesty” and a “raucous ride.” Yes, you’ll get humor, heart and honesty, no problem. But “raucous” riding? Not so much. Besides, such glibness shortchanges the writing’s easy slides from comic to contrary to caring and back again, sometimes in the same column.

Oh, there’s some pretty funny stuff here, alright. But not I-laughed-so-hard-I-cried funny stuff. It’s more knowing smiles or gentle nods of the head or surprising ah-hah’s. A thread of irony ties it all together, with occasional flickers of joy or disappointment or anger. The columns stop short of the meaner side of satire. “If You’re Giving Away Bailouts, I’ll Take One, Please” inflicts sly, side-eye pain on power. But you can’t say it’s mean.

Sampling a few headlines reveals a range of topics and perspectives: “Fake Eyelashes, First-Grade Math and Other Problems.” “Why Are We in Quarantine? We’re Saving the Lives of People We Will Never Meet.” “Leprechauns? Fine. Two Dads? Too far.”

Yia-Yia provides support

The book’s first and last entries do bite, but differently. Each offers insights into Garvey’s spirited principles, where they come from and where she hopes they’ll take her readers. Then there’s that spirited language.

In “A Birthday Gift, From My Grandmother, to the Boy She’ll Never Meet,” Garvey invokes the spirit of her tough-loving Greek grandmother Katerina (her Yia-Yia) – “a dreadful champion” – to do battle for her during a long-sought but difficult pregnancy. In surgery, she takes strength from knowing that “Yia-Yia was breaking kneecaps for me in heaven.” Finally, after her tiny son is whisked away to the NICU, she imagines Yia-Yia’s likely admonition: Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Your firstborn is “more than you should have hoped for . . . and far more than many get.”

The book’s final entry is true to Garvey’s can-you-believe-it take on the world and exposes a darker exasperation. “No Real Point to Arguing About ‘Try That in a Small Town’” takes aim at an internet-powered hit song by Jason Aldean, a previously little-known country music performer driving his own fame, perhaps, as Garvey implies, via “manufactured controversy.” She disapproves.

Reading this book is a meandering journey, a simple pleasure. The 93 weekly columns take their sweet, and not-so-sweet time, spreading out across 315 pages. They’re grouped by topic in five sections, beginning on March 25, 2017, and concluding on July 22 of this year. One section is “Pandamania.” You can guess what that’s about. Another is “The Firing Squad.” That one you’ll just have to read.

Probably not yet at the library or local bookstores, but – duh, Dad – Amazon has it: $12.99 paperback, $9.99 Kindle.

Finally, resist binge-reading this book. These clever reflections of the day-to-day are unlikely to evaporate no matter where you do your reading, so give them a little time and thought. When winter does come, I myself plan to use them to fend off the cold. Then it’s time for the beach.

Garvey will read from and sign copies of her book at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 18, at The Book Stall, 811 Elm Street in Winnetka. For more information, to buy copies of the book or to register, visit The Book Stall’s website.