When ‘Ted Lasso’ Meets ‘Grapes of Wrath,’ ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,’ and My Unfinished Novel
During the school year, I’m a crossing guard — an hour in the morning, and an hour in the afternoon — and twice every weekday I walk to and from my corner, which adds up to five miles, more when I swung by Coyote Coffee to sit outside and schmooze with the regulars.
Now it’s summer and I’m off, along with the students and teachers, and I also have this nerve pain in my left leg — sciatica, I think — so I’m cutting back on my walking, and instead I’m bicycling to libraries or coffee shops with my laptop. I’m retired, but busy — I have a couple of paid gigs, like designing a book about “dying gladly” by a man who’s dying. And I’m writing, in fits and starts, the last two chapters of my comic novel about the houseboat wars in Sausalito, tentatively titled Showdown in Sausalito: Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery True Story.
(The novel is based on a play I wrote and directed this past spring for our local community theater troupe — Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery, which you can see here. Or scroll to the bottom of this post.)
Which brings me to “Ted Lasso” and the two audiobooks I’ve recently listened to — Grapes of Wrath and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The paid gigs, the novel I’m struggling to finish, the shows I’m watching, and the books I’m listening to — these things have converged by accident, not by design.
The theme of June so far seems to be “the end.” End of the school year. End of life. End of a TV series. End of books.
I know I’m late to unpack the final season of “Ted Lasso,” which, if you’ve recently crawled out of hibernation, is a popular streaming TV series about an American college football coach hired to coach a professional soccer team in England, even though he has no soccer experience. The team owner, Rebecca Walton, hires him because she hopes to sabotage the team, which used to be owned by her ex-husband, but Ted, who is goofy and cheesy and overly optimistic, turns out to be a successful coach.
The third and allegedly last season recently ended, and I was in tears during the final few episodes. In a good way. It was schmaltzy, to be sure, and the writers trotted out plenty of well-worn tropes, but it was also laugh-out-loud funny and touching in a way that didn’t feel manipulative.
What I appreciated about the “Ted Lasso” ending was how, over the last several episodes, we see the end of a journey for so many of the characters, even minor ones. Like Nate, the underdog former kit man turned boy genius coach turned villain. He quits his high-profile West Ham coaching gig because it turns out he has principles after all.
There were some touches I very much liked in the series, like the “Diamond Dogs,” an impromptu men’s group that Ted and several others convene in their office as necessary to discuss intimate issues like relationships. In the last episode, the sneering, always-swearing, tough-guy coach, Roy Kent, who has previously left the room whenever the Diamond Dogs gathered, says he wants in.
The last episode follows the usual sports story formula, with the team winning a pivotal game, but “Ted Lasso” manages to scratch that itch, without buying into the idea that winning it all is the only honorable end.
The mania that a team can stir up is real and it was fun to watch the watchers of that last game, like Sharon, the former team therapist, jumping up and down on her bed, and Ted’s son and ex-wife, watching from their couch in Kansas City, lumps in their throats.
Which brings me to Grapes of Wrath, which I read fifty years ago and barely remember. But I remember the ending, which was shocking then and still shocking now.
Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family as they leave their drought-stricken, dust-bowl, bank-repossessed farm in Oklahoma, during the Depression, and head to California, where they hear there’s plenty of work and you can pick oranges to eat right off the trees. Of course, when they arrive, there are more workers than jobs, the wages are low, and the farm bosses are cruel. The migrants set up camps along creek beds in little Hoovervilles, and struggle to make enough to feed their families.
As the book draws to a close, Tom Joad, the prodigal son who starts the book returning to his family’s abandoned farm after a stint in jail for killing a man, has gotten himself into trouble again and is hiding from the police. The rest of the family has worked a few days here and there and now there’s no more work and winter’s coming and the rain falls for days and the camp is flooding. Meanwhile Tom’s younger sister, Rose of Sharon, who is pregnant, whose husband has recently abandoned her, delivers a stillborn baby in the migrant camp. The floodwaters keep rising and Ma Joad is determined to get the weak Rose of Sharon to higher ground. They find a barn that’s dry, and inside meet a young man and his starving father. The father has been giving what little food he has to his son and now he’s dying. At Ma Joad’s urging, Rose of Sharon feeds the dying man her breast milk. That’s how it ends. She pulls his head to her breast and smiles.
But there’s no resolution to the rest of the story. None of the main characters’ journeys are tied up. We don’t know how the family will eat or find work or what they salvage from the flooding, or what will happen to Tom, who is on the lam from the law.
Amidst this bleakness, however, there is this glimmer of hope, in Rose of Sharon’s act of kindness, saving the man’s life with her milk. It’s an affirmation of the human spirit.
I’d forgotten how strident and outspoken John Steinbeck was about the oppressors and the oppressed, the evil capitalists and humble and virtuous Okies like the Joad family. Some say he oversimplifies and paints the world in black and white, and maybe so, but there’s plenty of truth in his words and he tells a memorable and almost mythological story. Highly recommended.
I listened to Grapes of Wrath in two spurts, because my library audiobook loan period ended when I was three-quarters of the way through and I couldn’t renew it because another patron had it on hold.
Looking for another audiobook, I stumbled on On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous, an achingly poignant 2019 autobiographical novel by Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong. It could not be more different than Grapes of Wrath, except that, coincidentally, the protagonist, “Little Dog,” was briefly a migrant farm worker — picking tobacco as a teenager in Connecticut.
The novel is a letter from Little Dog to his illiterate mother, who left Vietnam when he was a baby, with her mother, who had survived as a prostitute during the Vietnam War. It’s poetic and nonlinear, occasionally difficult to follow, but brutally honest, emotionally powerful, and dazzlingly written. Little Dog recounts how he is treated abusively by his traumatized mother, who works in a nail salon, and discovers he is gay as a teenager when he works on the tobacco farm and meets a young white man, Trevor, whose grandfather is the owner.
Vuong jumps back and forth from the nail salon to the tobacco barn to the apartment in Hartford where he lives with his mother and grandmother, to the bar in Vietnam where his grandmother meets an American soldier. Often, because I was listening instead of reading, I lost track of where we were.
This book also does not end as much as stops, after Little Dog’s grandmother Lan dies and he accompanies his mother back to Vietnam to bury Lan’s ashes. That night, Little Dog wakes and goes outside to see music and dancing in the streets, and remembers a conversation with his mother, and how she laughs, but he doesn’t remember why.
Like Grapes of Wrath, there’s plenty of tragedy, and the book doesn’t ends with a plot climax, but more of an emotional epiphany.
Listening to these books, mostly while walking, created an immersiveness that was almost more intimate than reading. Ocean Vuong narrates his own book, and does a admirable job, though not like the virtuoso narration of Grapes of Wrath, by Dylan Baker, who delineates the many characters’ voices masterfully.
(By the way, I still read books, print and digital, but lately, the only books I’m reading are about writing. About endings, in particular.)
This brings me, finally, to my own unfinished novel and since I’ve written more than 1,500 words here already, I’ll keep it brief.
Here’s my synopsis of the story: Hippie squatter houseboaters resist greedy developers. Then someone gets stabbed. The story is made up, but based on true events from the late 1970s, a few miles from where I now live.
I’m struggling with my ending now, and while I’m aiming for the “Ted Lasso” wrap-up, I can’t stop longing for an ending like Grapes of Wrath, something readers might remember fifty years later, like I did.
There are only so many kinds of endings, though endless variations. There’s the happily-ever-after ending common to romances, where everything is resolved. There are the unresolved or ambiguous endings, where the reader can only speculate about what happens next. Like Grapes of Wrath. There are the unexpected endings, the gut-punches, which often rely on a plot twist, and I love those, especially when they surprise me and at the same time seem inevitable. But it’s daunting to come up with a twist that’s new and fresh.
There are also endings that circle back to the beginning. Like when the last line is something like, “so I wrote it all down so everyone would know.” I enjoy those too, but as with the twists, it’s hard to avoid sounding stale. In On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Little Dog circles back to the beginning. With memories, laughter, and celebration.
Most mysteries end with the identification of the killer, but I’ve made my life more difficult by telling two overlapping stories — the showdown over the shantytown houseboats and the murder that comes out of that fight. I could end once the police chief baits and traps the murderer, but there are other stories I want to resolve.
Then there are epilogues, which show the reader where the character(s) end up, months later, even years later. It might be a brief scene, or, like in some movies, there’s a list of characters and where they ended up, who they married, when they died.
My three previous novels ended with epilogues, which were several pages and jumped months ahead and tied up a few loose ends. I’m happy with them, and that was my leaning with this work-in-progress. But because I have nine characters narrating chapters from their points of view and I’d like a satisfying ending for as many of them as possible, and I want some twists, I have ended up three epilogues, which are too long and have too much action to be epilogues. They are more like “false summits” — that’s when you approach the top of the mountain peak only to find that it’s not the peak, that, oh no, there’s more steep climbing ahead. That’s not what I want readers to feel at the end.
Of course, when I do write the ending, I won’t be finished. I have to go back to the beginning and edit and rewrite the whole manuscript at least one more time before it’s ready. Which gives me plenty more time to percolate on the ending.
Here are two videos, one inspired by Grapes of Wrath — The Ghost of Tom Joad, by Bruce Springsteen — and the other the play I wrote and directed earlier this year — “Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery.”
Here are some highlights — in case you don’t have time to watch the whole thing. 🙂
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