Steve Darwall
- September 13th, 2014
I am pasting in below Michiko Kakutani's review in the New York Times of Marie Brenner's book Apples and Oranges about her relationship with her brother and our classmate (who, to me, is just recognizable in it).
Dying of cancer, terrified of becoming an invalid and reluctant to give up his strenuous life, Carl Brenner — a former trial lawyer turned apple grower — prepared to take his own life in early 2003. He returned home to Texas, took his computer hard drive to a garbage dump on the other side of San Antonio, and filled his car with every piece of paper that might tell anyone anything about his life. He invited friends and cousins over to cart away his possessions — his guns, his fishing tackle, his books and prints. And for good measure, he spent several hours erasing all of his last appointments from his calendar.
“He is possessed by his mission — to erase every trace,” his sister, Marie Brenner, writes in this extraordinary memoir. “He will see to it that there is almost nothing left to draw upon. No files of flirtatious letters from ex-girlfriends or diaries or e-mails that have the slightest degree of intimacy. He will, he decides, simply try to vanish without a trace.”
Thanks to his sister’s new book, “Apples & Oranges,” Carl Brenner did not succeed in vanishing without a trace. Rather, his life, with all its startling twists and turns, and his singular, sometimes maddening personality are magically conjured for us in these pages, as Ms. Brenner uses the prism of her love and grief for her brother — and her bewilderment too — to create a haunting portrait of him and their family. She has written a book that captures the nervous, emotionally strangled relationship she shared with him for the better part of their lives, a book that explores the difficult algebra of familial love and the possibility of its renewal in the face of impending loss.
Ms. Brenner is a reporter — her Vanity Fair investigation of the tobacco industry, “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” became the basis for the 1999 movie “The Insider” — and her initial approach to the story of her brother and their family is that of a journalist. She reads books about sibling relationships and interviews psychiatrists about brothers and sisters. She rummages through her family’s archives, perusing old diaries and letters, and she diligently researches the apple business that Carl has become obsessed with, learning about types of apples, the history of apple growing in Washington State, apple diseases, the secrets of apple cultivation.
All this research, of course, is a defense mechanism of sorts, a way of sidling up to the forbidding subject of her brother with the tools of her journalistic trade, a way of maintaining distance while searching for a pattern in the carpet and an answer to the riddle: Why has their relationship been so fraught with silences and arguments? Why has it been so difficult for them to communicate?
Ms. Brenner writes that her mother used to call Carl and her “Apples and Oranges,” and the two could not be more different. The Texas girl, who wore pink pantsuits and a fall in college, would become the quintessential New Yorker, who wears lots of black, lives in “a wind tunnel of paper” and sneaks Zone bars in the afternoon, worrying about the 200 calories. As a reporter, she knows “whom to call in Afghanistan to get a fixer and who can take you into the troubled mosques in the banlieues of Paris.”
Carl, who belonged to the John Birch Society as a teenager, praises George W. Bush as “a great man,” and accuses his sister and her “A.C.L.U. friends in New York” of not understanding “how the people in this country think.” He regularly listens to Mexican radio “to keep up his Spanish” and takes tango lessons, “moving awkwardly around the floor in his Brooks Brothers shirts and penny loafers.” His decision at the age of 35 to give up his career as a trial lawyer and become “the Howard Roark of fruit” is regarded with astonishment and derision by his family, who refer to him as the “Apple Man.” “Carl,” his father says, “Jews don’t farm.”
Not only is Carl obsessive-compulsive — his shirts are color-coded; the title of every book he owns is recited into a tape recorder — but he’s also demanding, petulant and deeply, persistently annoying. When he sends family members boxes of pears once a year, their arrival is accompanied by a series of nagging questions:
“Were any of the Asians bruised?” “Are you sure?” “Did you open the box yourself?” “What time did it arrive?” “Did you keep the slip?” “Can I demand a refund from U.P.S.?”
Carl starts many of his conversations with his sister with “I am going to give you a quiz.” And when she questions him, he retorts: “I’ve noticed that you are asking me questions and not realizing that you have asked them before. That could be an early sign of dementia. You know it runs in the family. Not Alzheimer’s, but what Daddy got. The senile dementia.”
After Carl is diagnosed with adenocarcinoma, an aggressive cancer , Marie decides to spend a few weeks with him at his apple farm in Washington State. It is weeks after 9/11, and she is both running away from New York and running toward her brother in hopes of reinventing their relationship before it is too late. Carl is predictably impossible: He stops to check his employees’ mail to see if they have any letters from bill collectors, explaining: “You have to check on people all the time. If they are getting notices, it means they could steal from you.”
As his sister describes it: “He’s got the Carl machinery in high gear, acting as if he is ready to scold me, to turn the blowtorch in my direction.”
But gradually, working alongside Carl in the packinghouse and the orchards in this lovely, pointillist landscape of crimson and gold, Ms. Brenner begins to appreciate her brother’s arcadian dream — his Gatsbyesque vision of apples “as a sign of America and its possibilities down the long stream of history, of apple fairs and cider orchards and contests for the best apples of the year.”
She comes to understand what he has created on his 200 acres of Galas and Braeburns and Goldens and Jonagolds, and his dream of mastering a new breed, the magical Honeycrisp. And for the first time, she begins to see his achievement “as a person who made himself part of an entirely unknown world.” At the same time, as she and Carl begin to connect, she realizes that she is going to lose him, that a new miracle drug is not going to come along, that time is running out.
In the process of recounting the story of her relationship with her brother, Ms. Brenner also gives us a wonderfully vivid picture of her uncommon family: her grandfather Isidor, who made and lost and made five fortunes in Mexico and Texas; her father, Milton, who always sounded “very Texas, boastful and confident as if he’d been born in a uniform”; her mother, Thelma, who as an organizer of San Antonio Mothers for Peace made plans to confront Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara in his hotel room (“If I look chic, maybe he’ll let us in”); and her Aunt Anita, who posed for the photographer Edward Weston, interviewed Trotsky and hung out in Mexico with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and José Clemente Orozco.
Ms. Brenner tracks the leitmotifs that run through their lives, the patterns — of sibling estrangements, of fresh starts and do-overs — that have stamped their family tree, and in doing so she has given us a beautifully observed and deeply affecting memoir, a book written with the unsparing eye of a journalist and the aching heart of a sister who learned in March of 2003 that her ailing brother had killed himself.
In a note to her, he asked her to forgive him for taking his life. “Please turn off the air-conditioning,” he added. “I send you my love, now and forever. Carl.”