→ May 4, 2021
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The Martian.

So, I haven’t actually seen the movie The Martian, because I told myself I really wanted to read the book first, and 2015 was one of my in-between years when I didn’t see all the Oscar nominees. (I did see Spotlight, all five animated nominees, Ex Machina, and The Force Awakens, and nothing else from that year until we watched What Happened, Miss Simone? last year during the lockdown.) And then … I never read the book, until a few weeks ago, when I got the book on sale as an e-book, and I actually read the book. I suppose now I should see the movie, because the book, while flawed, is pretty good.

The book, which came out in 2011, is a perfect exemplar of hard science fiction: Author Andy Weir spends a significant portion of the text getting the science right, but it is mostly in service of the greater story. Mark Watney is one of the astronauts on a manned mission to Mars, and a series of accidents on the surface, spurred by a massive dust storm, has Watney left on the surface, presumed dead, while the ship takes off without him. Of course, he’s very alive, and has to find a way to survive until the next manned mission arrives – and get himself to that site – or, possibly, communicate with NASA to let them know he’s still alive. Eventually (mild spoiler), NASA figures it out, and they arrange a rescue mission that captivates the world.

There’s a lot of technical detail in The Martian, especially for a novel aimed at a popular audience, enough to give me some bad Red Mars memories, but Weir manages to keep those details from bogging down the text too much by putting all of those specifications in Watney’s voice. The narrative settles quickly into a rhythm where Watney conceives a plan, goes through the details (for the reader), and then executes it. Some plans work, some don’t, and in the latter case we do the whole thing over again. It only works, though, because Watney is a smart-ass, with plenty of the smart and, especially once he starts communicating with others, plenty of the ass, too.

What works a little less well, however, is the way that Weir throws one obstacle after another in Watney’s way, which might work in some contexts but here does become repetitive, in a “not again” sense – just when it appears that he’s on a path that might lead him to a rescue, even though you know even that will still be arduous and difficult, Weir pulls the threadbare rug out from under his main character. Later in the book, after Watney has reestablished a bare minimum of communication with NASA, which helps the text tremendously – there is no actual dialogue involving the book’s protagonist until that point, since he is, obviously, alone on a whole planet – Weir cuts it off. It’s not that the rescue thus becomes more difficult and unlikely; it’s that the text benefited so much from having Watney involved in even limited dialogue with another human.

In the end, though, it works, because Weir has created a great lead character in Watney, and that carries the story – not the technical details, as accurate as they may be. (There’s a bit of a Terraforming Mars vibe, here, although that game was directly inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.) Watney is a wiseass, and the wit helps balance out the dry (pun intended) details for the long stretches where it’s just him, alone, trying to figure out how to survive long enough to get to the next step, and maybe keep himself alive until the next planned manned mission arrives on Mars. I don’t think The Martian is for everyone, but if you can hang with the technical stuff, there’s a smart, occasionally fun Robinson Crusoe-in-space story here that I enjoyed quite a bit.

Next up: I’m reading an advance copy of Elizabeth Hinton’s America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, which comes out on May 18th.

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→ February 14, 2021
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The Shadow King.

Maaza Mengiste’s 2020 novel The Shadow King was nominated for the Booker Prize last year, making the shortlist before losing to the Scottish novel Shuggie Bain. An epic war novel that also comes across as deeply personal – which, it turns out, it is – The Shadow King also tells a forgotten story of the roles women play in wartime, roles that are not limited to staying home waiting for the men.

Set in Ethiopia in 1935, the main narrative revolves around Hirut, an orphaned girl taken in as a servant by a neighboring couple, Kidane and his wife Aster, as well as the nameless cook who also works for them. Kidane was friendly with Hirut’s parents and agreed to care for her, but Aster sees her as a romantic rival, and becomes increasingly abusive to Hirut through the novel’s first section. The cook has her own complicated, longtime relationship with Aster, and now tries to protect Hirut, as the two share cramped quarters while the vain Aster appears to live in relative luxury, demanding material rewards from Kidane and clutching them like heirlooms.

Then war arrives, in the person of the Italian fascisti, as the Italian tyrant Benito Mussolini attempted to annex the kingdom of Ethiopia, which they had tried previously to control via two prior wars and a disputed treaty. Their arrival leads Kidane to head off to war, but rather than waiting behind, Aster also grabs a gun and departs separately, also intending to fight, bringing Hirut and the cook with her. While at the front, they meet Minim, a poor man who happens to bear a strong resemblance to the Emperor, Haile Selassie, who ruled from 1930 to 1974 and was the last in a dynasty of rules that dated back to the 13th century. Selassie had fled to England, where he was ruling in exile (and comfort), so the leaders of the Ethiopians’ untrained army, with simple weapons and no armored vehicles (compared to the Italians’ modern weapons and tanks and highly trained soldiers), realize that seeing their king would help motivate the soldiers, so they use Minim as a stand-in so the fighters would believe Selassie had come to join them at the front.

Mengiste sets you up to think Hirut will be the downtrodden heroine with whom you should sympathize, with Aster the antagonist, but the novel isn’t that linear in plot or purpose. Aster takes on a new role when the war begins, while Hirut also just becomes less central, and Kidane turns out to be less a protector than Hirut originally thought. Mengiste also introduces a second subplot around the Italian photographer Ettore, a Jewish man who is serving a government he knows may choose to end his liberty or his life at any time, and that he learns has likely killed his parents, even as he continues to document the war and the army’s killings by photographing every Ethiopian they execute in their final moments. His story and that of the women will, of course, intersect before Ethiopia falls and the novel ends.

This is a war novel, and a feminist one too, but in no way does Mengiste let the latter mitigate or soften any part of the former – her women are strong, and unwilling to be limited by any social customs that keep women from fighting when the country’s existence is at stake. The Shadow King is brutal and violent. Her descriptions invoke the dry, hot, dusty climate where the soldiers gathered to plan guerrilla attacks and futile defenses – the Ethiopians fought for about 16 months, but succumbed in 1937 – and where Minim takes on the role of body double. They also add to the sense of desperation around Ettore, a noncombatant in the service of a country that views him as less than human and that will, soon enough, be willing to send him to his death, but who is every bit the stranger in a strange land in Ethiopia and visibly an intruder and enemy to the native population. The juxtaposition of the stories can be jarring, certainly incongruous, but their intersection is one of the novel’s most powerful moments, combined with the return of Haile Selassie from exile and the aftermath of the Italian occupation. I haven’t read Shuggie Bain and can’t comment on whether this is better, but I easily understand its nomination.

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→ October 23, 2020
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Mumbo Jumbo.

I can’t believe Ishmael Reed’s 1972 Mumbo Jumbo escaped my notice until just this year, when I grabbed it for $2 for the Kindle. It would have fit perfectly in the class I took in college called Comedy and the Novel – which, as great as it was, did not include a single book written by a woman or a person of color – and should be in high school curricula around the country. It’s postmodern yet largely accessible; it’s funny, yet incredibly serious; and it deals with timeless topics of race and culture. It’s also about a nonlethal pandemic, making it an interesting read in the time of COVID-19. There were certainly parts I didn’t follow, some of which is a function of my cultural illiteracy, but the end result is an important and very compelling work of magical realism and postmodern fiction.

The pandemic at the heart of this story is called “Jes Grew,” and the primary symptom is the desire to dance and have fun. Needless to say, the white powers that be can’t abide this, and the Knights of Templar (who still exist) team up with the shadowy Wallflower Order to fight it, while various Black leaders, many of whom are voodoo clergy, work against them. The story twists and turns while incorporating major historical events from the first half of the twentieth century, placing great emphasis on the 19-year U.S. occupation of Haiti, with appearances by a cornucopia of real-life figures, including President Warren Harding, dancer/author Irene Castle, and W.E.B. Dubois.

In the world of Mumbo Jumbo, voodoo is real, but its history has been suppressed by white people (as have many elements of Black culture), and the true history of Judeo-Christian religions is quite different from the one we’re given today, involving a gallimaufry of spirits and prophets going back to ancient Egypt. The voodoo priests are led by PaPa LaBas, a voudou priest who is named for one of that religion’s spirits known as loas, but the characters themselves are secondary to the “anti-plague” of Jes Grew, a fairly obvious metaphor for the spread of Black culture and white efforts to stop it and, when they can’t, their efforts to appropriate and assimilate it. The story winds through jazz clubs and speakeasies, including Harlem’s famous Cotton Club, and art museums housing stolen art from the developing world. It works in the search for a mystical text from the goddess Osiris that may explain the origins of Jes Grew and hold the key to stopping it. Reed even works in the since-debunked story that Harding was part Black.

There’s plenty of intrigue here, including several murders by the warring factions, a demonic possession, and a tense hostage scene, which was more than enough to hold my interest for its scant 200 pages (and something like 50 chapters). There’s a lot of subtext here that I know I missed, though, from Black cultural history to voodoo and spiritualism, caused by gaps in my own education, that I’m sure limited how much I could understand and appreciate what was going on in Mumbo Jumbo. I understood his points about Black culture and the long history of white attempts to suppress it, probably because I’m at least old enough to remember mainstream resistance to rap music – and more than one adult telling me in the late 1980s that rap was “a fad” that wouldn’t last – and how it was characterized. The levers of power in the entertainment world are still controlled by white people, mostly white men, which is why Tyler Perry had to finance his own productions, and why some people of color have to produce and direct films in which they star. That’s part of why I said Mumbo Jumbo should be taught in schools – that aspect of the book is still extremely relevant – although I think this is also a text that would reward the closer reading of an academic setting, with guidance on some of the book’s allusions that I probably missed. It was rewarding enough as is, but I think reading it in a class would be even more so.

Next up: I just finished Graham Swift’s new novel Here We Are and am about halfway through Dr. Alan Kazdin’s The Everyday Parenting Toolkit.

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→ September 30, 2020
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Fight Club (novel).

The first rule of Fight Club is … oh, enough already, you know the joke.

I saw David Fincher’s acclaimed film adaptation of Fight Club back in 2011, and nine years on it hasn’t left me, even though I have yet to rewatch it. The three leads are all so good, and as disturbing as the film is, I think I needed some time to process what Fincher and the book’s author, Chuck Palahniuk, were trying to say.

Since I hosted a livestreamed event with Palahniuk earlier in September, I decided to read Fight Club, Palahniuk’s first novel and I think still his most popular. The film’s script adheres reasonably closely to the story in the book, but the novel has fewer clues to its ultimate twist, and the ending differs substantially, with the written one far creepier and paranoid.

The novel is narrated by the main character, never named, who has already met Tyler Durden, the primary antagonist who exerts a Svengali-like influence over the protagonist. We jump back in time to where the narrator spends most of his time attending self-help groups for people suffering from or dying of rare diseases that he doesn’t actually have. He meets Marla, who’s doing the same thing, and ends up in a battle of wills with her that ends with them splitting the groups they attend and, somehow, also leads to her meeting Tyler and sleeping with him. The narrator and Tyler go on, of course, to create a fight club that attracts other disaffected young men and eventually becomes a social movement focused on self-reliance and the overthrow of the modern state.

The violence inherent to the story plays out less shockingly on the page than on film; Palahniuk is very comfortable delving into the darker side of humanity, and doesn’t shy away from the physical damage of the fights, but it’s less lurid here than in Fincher’s version – without being less visceral. You are drawn into the page by that violence but kept there primarily by the narration itself. The protagonist isn’t quite right, obviously, and Palahniuk’s best trick in the novel, even aside from the ultimate twist, is how he voices the narrator’s inner monologue so that we get the sense of his mental descent without him making it explicit.

The twist, if you don’t know it, is the same here as it is in the film, but the two diverge after that point when the narrator tries to stop what he’s set in motion with the cult he and Tyler have created. The movie ends on a more hopeful note, if you can believe it, while the book emphasizes how the narrator has been trapped by his own creations, without the way out he gets in the film. The book also spends less time on Tyler’s character, and he’s more three-dimensional in the film, not least because of how Pitt portrays him.

There’s a whole body of literature on the meaning and themes of Fight Club the book and the film, which I won’t even try to rehash here, not least because they aren’t my own thoughts. Reading the novel now, in 2020, well after seeing the film, I couldn’t avoid seeing it as a prescient depiction of incel culture before that word even existed. Young men, feeling emasculated by society, oppressed by late-stage capitalism, and rejected by women, turn to violence and a movement that purports to restore them to power. These same young men would be wearing MAGA hats fifteen years later, or carrying tiki torches in Charlottesville. Palahniuk doesn’t so much blame society for their existence as observe them as a consequence and follow one of them in particular to the bottom of his slippery slope. There’s an anti-consumerist message here but it was much weaker than it is in the film, replaced in part by mockery of upwardly mobile consumers who will pay more for a product that they see as “natural” or that carries other socially desirable traits.

Marla isn’t much of a character in the novel Fight Club, which is disappointing given how much more real she is in Helena Bonham-Carter’s portrayal. Palahniuk has faced criticism for his views on gender, and Marla is enough of a stock character here, despite a very promising introduction, that it becomes a weakness in the novel – never mind the Bechdel Test, which this novel fails immediately, but this is a novel about dudes who just want to be dudes. It’s a Real Men™ thing, and you ladies wouldn’t get it. Palahniuk is a satirist on some level, but there isn’t a strong sense of condemnation of Tyler Durden’s acolytes here, and Marla was his best chance to provide that within the novel if she’d been a stronger character.

When I’ve read a book and seen the movie adaptation, nine times out of ten I come down in favor of the book. Fight Club is in the latter category. Jim Uhls’ screenplay smooths out some of the rough edges in Palahniuk’s novel, while Pitt and Bonham-Carter bring their respective characters to life with far greater detail and texture. The tradeoffs are an ending that might be too positive, and more overt clues as to the coming twist. There are huge tells in the movie that aren’t there in the book, and it’s at least a fair debate whether that’s to the film’s detriment. I figured it out while watching the film, but I don’t think I would have figured it out if I’d read the book first. In some ways, that’s a recommendation for the book, but on balance, I think the film is just better.

Next up: I’m reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, probably 35 years after I first heard about the book in social studies class.

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→ September 18, 2020
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The Invention of Sound.

I was the host for Chuck Palahniuk’s live-streamed Q&A event through Midtown Scholar, an independent bookstore in Harrisburg, PA, last Friday night, discussing Chuck’s new book The Invention of Sound. I’ve just gotten into Chuck’s oeuvre, having read that and Adjustment Day and just starting Fight Club, so I was simultaneously shocked and entertained by his newest novel, which is violent, dark, often funny, and extremely thought-provoking.

The Invention of Sound pairs two narratives that we learn early in the novel are going to intersect. One is that of Gates Foster, a father whose daughter, Lucinda, vanished from his office building about ten years earlier, leading to the demise of his marriage and his own downward spiral into obsessively hunting for her image in online pedophilia and child-porn communities. The other is that of Mitzi, a sound engineer who crafts and sells blood-curdling, realistic screams to movie and television producers, a business she inherited from her father and that she has built further with the help of Schlo, a successful producer who buys some of her best screams. We’ll also meet the wonderfully-named Blush Gentry, an actress on the downside of her character who sees a chance to boost her profile with Gates’ help – and who was the actor on screen when one of Mitzki’s most potent screams was used in a B-movie many years earlier.

Palahniuk was a great interview, and one of the best answers he gave me, which I think is instructive for all readers of fiction and for would-be writers as well, was that he uses violence as a way to bring the reader into the text and make the events on the page more visceral. (He said that drugs and sex also work in the same way.) The violence here is mostly implied, at least, rather than described graphically, as it was in Adjustment Day, but it’s there, and the specter of this violence lurks on every page – it raises the tension, but I read this with a good amount of fear that I was going to turn the page and find something that would turn my stomach.

Under the veneer of violence and depravity, however, are deeper explorations of questions like grief, especially when you’re grieving without closure; and of the power of fiction to move us, for better or for worse. Gates’ methods of dealing with his grief are not exactly evidence-based, but they do tell us something about the kind of open-ended horror of losing a child without knowing what happened to them – a rare occurrence, but among the most horrifying things any parent can conceive – and serve as an explanation for some of Gates’ more irrational or just plain dangerous choices.

Mitzi’s story is less successful than Gates’, although it’s just as compelling to read; it’s just hard to understand why she carries on with this business, knowing its personal toll on her, even when Palahniuk offers us a trauma in her past that might explain some of her risk-seeking behavior. She’s on her own death spiral, almost literally, but the more we learn about her character the harder it is to fathom why, more so because she goes so far out of her way to try to save her friend Schlo from almost certain death closer to the end of the book. She’s a villain, but also a victim, which makes her complex but ultimately inscrutable.

This might be too much of my own interpretation, but if I didn’t know Palahniuk’s work or reputation, I might have thought The Invention of Sound offered a sort of condemnation of horror films and other works of art that aim to please an audience by distilling and serving up the pain of others. There’s a whole genre of horror film that I won’t watch, where the violence is itself the point and the audience is supposed to root for the killer(s); Mitzi’s screams, and the industry she serves, feel like a satirical rendering of that kind of exploitative, misanthropic cinema. Why exactly do so many people enjoy watching the suffering of others, fictional or real? Would there really be a market for screams as realistic as those Mitzi sells, where no one asks how she manages to produce them? And is there tragedy at the end of this pursuit of greater horrors?

I’ll spoil one thing that probably should be obvious from the start of The Invention of Sound – Gates isn’t getting a happy resolution to his story, although he gets … something, certainly. The pleasure of reading his narrative is the multiple surprises that Palahniuk springs on us in the last few pages, twists for which he laid clues but that I at least missed while reading. It’s brilliant in several ways, and incredibly disturbing, but I can’t quite put my finger on what Palahniuk might be trying to say.

Next up: I’m reading his Fight Club, although of course I’ve seen the movie already.

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→ July 9, 2020
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The Dutch House.

Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House was one of the three finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, losing the top honor to Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys. The honor was long overdue for Patchett, who received a Pen Faulkner award and what is now called the Women’s Prize for Fiction for Bel Canto and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Commonwealth. She’s in the uppermost echelon of American novelists, and worthy of more critical acclaim than she’s received. The Dutch House isn’t her best – that would be Bel Canto, a more ambitious novel that Patchett says was her attempt to write her take on The Magic Mountain – but it’s something different from her, a return to the narrower character studies of her earlier career but with greater emotional depth, informed by the wisdom of a quarter-century of living.

 The Dutch House tells the story of Danny, the narrator, and his older sister Maeve, who live in the colossal estate that gives the book its title, in the northeast Philadelphia suburbs. Their mother left the family several years earlier for unknown reasons, leaving them with their real estate mogul father, who, as the novel opens, is about to marry Andrea, a much younger woman, and then brings her and her two daughters into the house. Andrea loves the house and the status it confers, but has little use for Danny or Maeve, and eventually casts them out when the opportunity presents itself, starting the siblings on decades of acrimony and grief for what they lost, emotions and memories they process by parking outside the house, often for hours, over the ensuing years.

Danny tells us the story, but Maeve is just as much a central character here, better developed than Danny is, and the most influential figure in Danny’s life. (As an aside, I couldn’t help but picture Maeve as Emma Mackey, who plays the character by that name on Sex Education.) Maeve has the memories of their mother that Danny lacks, and has just enough of an advantage of age to be wiser and more perceptive than her brother, which serves them both well when Andrea arrives on the scene. She’s a diabetic, which becomes significant at multiple points in the book, and appears to sacrifice some of her future to help Danny – although it’s possible her motives are mixed up with nostalgia and an unwillingness to leave the area where she grew up.

The story jumps forward and back in time, so we see Danny as an adult, after medical school, then find out how and why he ended up pursuing that academic path from the point where we first saw him as a kid who played basketball and loved going around with his father once a month to collect rent and see properties, but didn’t have a ton of use for school. The relationships between the siblings and their distant father, and the siblings and the two older women who work in the house and end up helping raise the kids – at least until Andrea kicks them out –  form part of a foundation for both Danny and Maeve as they mature into adulthood. The problem they encounter is that the void left by their mother’s departure, which they’re told was so she could go help the poor in India, leaves the foundation incomplete, and their obsessive, nostalgic attachment to the house, even after there’s no one living there who truly matters to them, seems both symbolic of what they’ve lost and a sad testament to how the past can prevent us from moving into the future.

I had a hard time reading Danny’s voice for at least a solid third of the book, continually ‘hearing’ the narrator as a young girl, probably because I know Ann Patchett’s style so well (and know that she’s a woman), and can’t recall her writing in the first person for a male character before. That sensation faded as Danny grew up in the first half of the novel and his voice became more distinctive, while he also felt like more of a participant in the action rather than a passive observer (to whom many things happen, however). I think this also arose because Maeve is a much more clearly defined character from the start of the book, while Danny starts out as unmolded clay and grows into adulthood before the reader, a maturation that comes in fits and starts and doesn’t end up where you – or Maeve – expect it to finish.

Of all contemporary authors whose work I know, Patchett might have the most empathy toward her main characters, no matter how flawed; only Andrea, who is a bit of a one-dimensional plot device here, misses out on this, while her two daughters, Maeve and Danny’s mother, and the nanny who was fired when Danny was just four all reappear in some form before the novel is out to get resolution, if not actual redemption. You can probably see the main plot event at the book’s conclusion coming, but I was neither surprised nor dismayed to see it happen, because in Patchett’s better novels, the pleasure of reading is in the journey. These two characters are so richly textured, and so realistic, that I was willing to buy into the less believable aspects of the story, just to get to the end of Danny’s arc, and to read more of Patchett’s prose.

Next up: I just finished Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland yesterday.

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→ May 7, 2020
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The Parable of the Sower.

I’ve read a lot of science fiction authors, including at least one book by every winner of the Hugo for Best Novel, but had never read anything by Octavia Butler until I read The Parable of the Sower last month. Butler, the most prominent woman of color in sci-fi and a direct inspiration for the highly decorated author N.K. Jemisin, was the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur “genius” grant, and published 14 novels in her career before her untimely death at age 58 in 2006.

One thing often absent from science fiction novels and short stories, especially those written in the first few decades of the genre, are realistic women characters, something that inspired Butler to start writing her own stories. The Parable of the Sower is narrated by a young woman of color named Lauren who is a “sharer,” born with a condition called hyperempathy syndrome, so when she sees anyone else suffering physical pain she’s hit with the same pain even though she didn’t suffer the injury.

Set in the United States in the 2020s in a post-capitalist collapse that seems like it might have inspired the Purge movies, The Parable of the Sower follows Lauren from her poor but protected compound in southern California on her flight north while she develops her belief system, which she calls “Earthseed.” Her father is a pastor, which is a rare source of guaranteed income in this dystopian economy, but she finds herself unable to believe in his traditional Christian religion, or even in its conception of God, instead writing down verses and descriptions of humans as Earthseed, driving towards a heaven in the stars where man colonizes new planets now that he’s destroyed this one.

The Parable of the Sower is grim and unflinching, especially in its depiction of women as an oppressed underclass in this still-patriarchal facsimile of a society. If you leave the protection of the compound where Lauren and her family live, you put your life at risk; if you do so as a woman, especially alone, you are extremely likely to be sexually assaulted, and Lauren sees multiple women who appear to have been victims of brutal rapes whenever she heads outside of the commune’s walls. In a world where so many people have too little to eat, and very little to lose, and the police are worse than useless, theft is almost expected, and everyone is armed to protect themselves and their property. Butler also adds the wrinkle of a new drug, nicknamed ‘pyro,’ that causes addicts to light fires so they can be mesmerized by watching the flames. This isn’t our world today, but Butler’s prescient writing about the impacts of increased income inequality and food insecurity on top of a country already armed to its teeth feels a lot more possible right now than it would have when she wrote it in 1993 – even before you layer on a global pandemic and the rise of an entire political movement ready to discard tens of thousands of citizens just to goose the stock market.

The Earthseed belief system, which revolves around the idea that God is change and holds that man’s destiny is to colonize the stars, gets some treatment within this book, but the specific tenets are less important than Lauren’s development of the system, and how she uses it to try to build a fledgling community around herself while in flight to northern California. The core idea of Earthseed that God is malleable, and humanity can shape God, conflicts on some level with its idea that God shapes the universe, which I assume Butler would continue to address in the sequel (The Parable of the Talents); even within this book, Lauren is challenged by the people in her ragtag band of followers, who range from ardent skeptics to curious adherents, to explain this and other paradoxes – or even explain why anyone should believe at all in the face of such widespread misery and existential dread.

I read Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts about a year and a half ago, and was constantly reminded of that book, which also has a young female protagonist struggling against multiple levels of oppression in a dystopian environment, while reading Parable; searching now, I see multiple references to Solomon and their novel as a ‘successor’ to Butler’s work. The connections are undeniable, but it also seems like a reminder that voices like theirs and Jemisin’s remain uncommon in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy writing, and thus these themes of sexism, racism, inequality, and othering are also underrepresented, even as they become so much more prevalent in mainstream literature (e.g., with Colson Whitehead winning two of the last four Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction with novels about race and racism). Butler also wrote with a gritty, unflinching realism that existed in that era but was, at least, outside the more genteel strains of sci-fi that won awards and garnered more attention, a style that probably put her twenty years ahead of her time. It’s a particular shame that she died so young when, if she were alive today, she’d have seen her influence spread so far, and have seen the world of science fiction expand to include voices and styles like hers become not just accepted, but lauded.

Next up: Still reading 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid, by Willie Mays and John Shea. John will be on my podcast next week to talk about the book.

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→ March 20, 2020
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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous made the longlists for this year’s National Book Award (won by Trust Exercise) and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction (won by Lost Children Archive), both in the same year that Vuong earned a Macarthur Foundation grant. A grim, epistolary work of auto-fiction, On Earth is a difficult and unsparing read that’s probably better from a critical eye than it would be in the eyes of most readers (mine included).

Written as a series of letters from the protagonist, Little Dog, to his abusive mother, now that Little Dog is an adult, On Earth goes back to Little Dog’s childhood, to stories his mother and grandmother told him from before they left Vietnam, and to his adolescent years, when he first fell in love with a local boy named Trevor who became addicted to opioids. Little Dog is closer to his grandmother, Lan, who helps take care of him and tries to protect him when his mother becomes violent, and who helps him get to know an American veteran, Paul, who became her husband and Little Dog’s surrogate grandfather. The novel bounces around in time between those three settings – Vietnam, his childhood, and his relationship with Trevor – but hurtles towards multiple deaths that define the end of the novel, and the way it’s constructed, the story unfurls as a tapestry that weaves grief and memory together for a somber and often depressing read.

Entangled with those themes is Little Dog’s three-pronged intersectionality – he’s an immigrant, a person of color, and openly gay, all of which are true of Vuong as well. Little Dog also arrives in this country unable to speak English, and he becomes the first member of his family to learn to read, which makes the entire conceit of the novel as a series of letters to his mother more poignant or a little bit farcial. On Earth is more interesting as a new entry in the long tradition of immigrant fiction, especially given how many variables are different – how extreme the fish-out-of-water aspect is when his family ends up in Hartford, Connecticut; the added challenge of his sexual orientation at a time when society was more bigoted than it is now, and with a mother who doesn’t really understand it; and his mother’s work at a nail salon, a haven for exploitation of women who’ve immigrated here from east and southeast Asia.

There’s plenty to dissect in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, but Little Dog himself is too much of a cipher – even with all of the details we know about him as a person – to make this slight book connect with me. I sympathized with him, but never empathized with him; perhaps it’s the nonlinear narrative, perhaps it’s the dispassionate way in which Vuong writes, which always seemed to keep me at arm’s length. There’s a scene in the novel where Vuong describes something in explicitly physical terms, but never grapples with the emotional impact of it, during or after. That seems to be emblematic of the work as a whole. In the end, Little Dog seems to forgive his mother, to arrive at some sort of understanding, but I still wasn’t sure how he got to that point even with 240 pages leading up to that point.

Next up: I finished Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s short story collection Sabrina & Corina and started Jo Walton’s Lent.

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→ March 13, 2020
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Everything Inside.

Edwidge Danticat’s short story collection Everything Inside just won this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction on Thursday night, her second NBCC win (her memoir Brother, I’m Dying won the NBCC’s Memoir/Autobiography award in 2007) and the most notable award she’s won yet for her fiction. Each story in this slim, beautifully-written volume revolves around Haitian immigrants to the United States, the cultural shifts they experienced, and the challenges of settling in a country that still has racism and xenophobia in its DNA.

Born in Haiti, Danticat emigrated to the U.S. at 12 years old, and every story in this book revolves around that immigrant experience, especially those of Haitians who emigrated to Florida and move back and forth between the two countries, either physically traveling between them or feeling the pull of one from the other. (Danticat’s Wikipedia entry says that “Although Danticat resides in the United States, she still considers Haiti home. To date, she still visits Haiti from time to time and has always felt as if she never left it.”) Every one of these stories in Everything Inside feels drawn from something very personal to Danticat, as if they’re not just conceived and written but lived-in, so while there will always be a comprehension gap for readers like me (white, Anglophone, U.S.-born to U.S.-born parents) who don’t share her experiences as an immigrant or person of color, several of these stories still pack enough of an emotional punch to connect.

“Dosas” revolves around a home-health nurse whose ex-husband calls in a panic because his new wife – and former affair partner – has been kidnapped in Haiti and he can’t raise the ransom. (In Haiti, a ‘dosa’ is a girl born after twins.) This complex web of relationships, between the protagonist and her ex and between the Haitian diaspora and those who stayed behind (or move back and forth between the countries), colors her decisions and threatens her job as a live-in nurse to an elderly patient with kidney disease.  “Sunrise, Sunset,” originally published in the New Yorker, contrasts two women, a mother and her daughter who has just become a mother herself, as the former faces creeping dementia while the latter grapples with a stark postpartum depression, which culminates in a terrifying moment that confronts the erasure of memory, individual and across generations. “Without Inspection,” the closing story, follows the thoughts of a man who has fallen on a construction site and is heading to his death, during which he thinks about the family he leaves behind and the improbable way in which he arrived in the United States, saved on a beach by a Haitian woman who goes there each day to try to help migrants who barely make it to the shore when their transporters dump them to swim the last mile.

“Seven Stories” is the standout in the collection, perhaps in part because it’s so different from the other stories here. The Haitian-American protagonist, Kimberly, visits an old friend who is now the wife of the Prime Minister of an independent island in the Caribbean, where the elite live in luxury, abetted by corruption, amidst shantytowns and abject poverty. The story of how her friend survived the assassination of her father, himself once Prime Minister, and returned to the island unfolds over the course of the story and diminishes the dichotomy that first appeared to Kimberly when she arrived on the island. The story ends with a wedding and celebration in a village called Maafa – which I assume is an allusion to Ma’afa, a term referring to the “black Holocaust” where European and Arab peoples enslaved Africans and continued to oppress them through colonialism and imperialism – and Kimberly reflecting on how her friend’s life has been anything but simple despite her evident privilege, while Kimberly herself is an outsider (on an island where there’s prejudice against Haitians) viewing the island’s injustices through a different lens.

I’ve read four of the five books shortlisted for the NBCC Award for Fiction this year, and would have voted for either The Nickel Boys or Feast Your Eyes over Everything Inside, but with the caveat that I know there’s an aspect to this collection that I likely can’t fully appreciate because of my background and identity. (I’d vote for this book over The Topeka School.) It’s still a worthy winner, just not my top pick.

Next up: About halfway through Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

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→ March 12, 2020
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Feast Your Eyes.

Myla Goldberg’s latest novel Feast Your Eyes, shortlisted for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction,employs a novel narrative technique – or gimmick, depending on your point of view – to tell the stories of two women, mother and daughter, whose lives were both affected by a few very specific choices they both made. The mother, Lillian, was a photographer who made headlines when a series of photos she took led to an obscenity trial; her daughter, Samantha Jane, is the narrator, and tells the story of Lillian’s life in a series of essays and quotes as she writes the catalog for a retrospective of her mother’s work. It is an unusual way to tell a story, and has a long ramp-up until it truly gets rolling, but when it clicks it zooms by – puns intended – as Goldberg has created a truly memorable, compelling, complicated character in Lillian, and wants to talk to readers about just how monumental and important a woman’s right to choose can be.

Lillian grew up outside Cleveland in modest but not poor circumstances, and fell in love with photography at an early age, deciding not long after high school that that was how she wanted to make her living – or, at least, to make art, and hope to find a living to support it. She moves to New York, becomes pregnant while still young, and goes to have an abortion, only to bail at the sketchy and unsanitary circumstances. That baby is Samantha, whose very existence alters the course of Lillian’s life, mostly for the better, although the artificial/societal conflict between motherhood and vocation becomes explicit – pun intended – when Lillian publishes a series of photos called Mommy is Sick, which shows a half-naked, prepubescent Samantha handing a glass to Lillian, who is in bed, bleeding after a completed abortion. Samantha was the subject of some of her mother’s photos before that series, but when it lands Lillian and the gallery owner in jail, and eventually goes before the Supreme Court, Samantha’s life is permanently changed as well, as she is now The Girl in the Photos and later switches to her middle name, Jane, to try to avoid the unwanted notoriety the photos have given her.

We know early in the book that Lillian has already died young, but Goldberg still makes her death pack an emotional punch because of how Mommy is Sick drove a permanent wedge between mother and daughter, and from how Lillian never quite grasped its impact on Samantha. Lillian is a reluctant feminist, progressive for her era but less so even to her own daughter, writing just twenty years or so later, especially as Lillian never wanted the First Amendment fight she sparked; for Lillian, it was about making art, and that was enough. Samantha clearly feels like she was often second to that desire to make art, but also strives to understand her mother through her photographs, and interprets the photographs (and thus her mother) for the reader through the series of essays and comments, interspersed with remembrances from several major people in Lillian’s life whom Samantha contacted for the catalog. She resents her mother for making her a symbol in her photos, and for choosing a lifestyle of working poverty that allowed her to keep taking photographs, but also accepts the sacrifices her mother made for her, especially when Samantha has an abortion of her own and considers how that choice changed the course of her mother’s life (and created her own).

You have to buy into the narrative device to appreciate Feast Your Eyes, and I imagine some readers simply won’t be able to get on the book’s wavelength for that reason. For the first few pages I wasn’t sure if I would, but it started rolling for me maybe 20-30 pages in as the story itself began to grab me and the titles of the photographs or series faded into the background. Goldberg’s best trick here is that she pivots within each comment or essay from the photo right into something larger from Lillian’s past; there actually isn’t that much detail about photos that we never see, which could have been dreadful to read. It also works here because Goldberg manages to tie the fabricated photographs to times and places that spur different recollections, by Samantha, or former friends or lovers of Lillian’s, that explore more aspects of her character, and sometimes of Samantha’s as well. Even without the two overarching, feminist themes – how society pressures women to choose between motherhood and career, and how essential a woman’s right to choose is to her agency elsewhere in life – Feast Your Eyes would have been a strong character study, but those additional layers give it impact beyond most of the 2019 novels I’ve read so far.

Next up: Another novel from last year, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

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