→ October 10, 2021
→ By

Stick to baseball, 10/10/21.

My only content for subscribers to The Athletic this week was my contribution to our playoff predictions, where I pointed out that the evidence says playoff predictions by humans are probably no better those by than a dart-throwing monkey. I only got one of the wild-card winners right, and at the moment one of my four LDS picks is down 0 games to 2. Anyway, I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the semi-cooperative horror-themed board game Deranged, which I found too derivative of games like Arkham Horror without offering enough new ideas or mechanics.

On my podcast, I spoke with Jeremy Booth, founder of Program 15 and the Future Stars Series, talking about the 2022 draft’s deep high school class, player development in the majors, and more. You can subscribe to my podcast on Spotify or iTunes. I will not have a new episode this week due to travel, but will return on the 18th.

I’ve been better about sending out my email newsletter this past month, although I held off sending one this week with nothing immediate to promote. And, as the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: The best thing I read this week was this Guardian longread on how the Booker Prize works – how judges are chosen, and how in turn they choose the shortlist and the ultimate winner. The UK’s rough equivalent to our Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Booker confers financial success on nearly all of its winners, often changing the courses of their careers.
  • Ed Yong writes that we are unprepared for the next pandemic as we refuse to learn lessons from our mishandling of this one.
  • A “dead” oil tanker that has been moored at a Yemeni port for 45 years is in danger of falling apart, sinking, or blowing up, all of which would lead to a massive humanitarian and environmental disaster, with minimal plans to prevent this catastrophe and no help from the Houthi forces that control western Yemen and its Red Sea ports.
  • Students who were victims of sexual assault at Moody Bible Institute, an evangelical Christian college, found themselves blamed and punished while their abusers often escaped consequences. The same school fired a professor who helped students file a Title IX complaint a few years ago. Just like Jesus told his followers to do!
  • You read about the bad art friend, right? You should read about the bad art friend.
  • Kellogg workers are on strike, after months of being forced to work 7 days a week, 16 hours a day, and now threats to outsource their jobs. You may choose to join me in avoiding buying their products while their workers are fighting for basic rights.
  • Case reports continue to show the risk of death and severe illness in children who contract COVID-19, such as the 8-year-old girl and 7-year-old boy who died of cerebral edemas due to COVID infections.
  • Yet another ivermectin/COVID-19 study that claimed to show a benefit has serious problems with its data.
  • Writing in The Cancer Letter, the newsletter of the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Arthur Caplan, who has written several books on the policies of Nazi Germany called out the non-virologist Dr. Vinay Prasad’s recent comparison of COVID-19 mitigation measures to fascism, calling them “fundamentally racist.”
  • Moderna is prioritizing profits over public health, keeping prices for its COVID-19 vaccines out of reach of many poorer countries. Is the global benefit of curtailing the pandemic enough that wealthy nations should subsidize vaccinations in poorer ones?
  • “Pro-life” Missouri Governor Mike Parson (R) declined to stay the execution of a man with the mental capacity of a small child, because nothing says you believe in the sanctity of life like signing off on a state-sponsored murder.
  • The vice-chair at the Fed shifted his portfolio towards stock ahead of a big announcement last year, as did two other Fed officials, which should make you ask why people in those positions are allowed to trade in equities at all.
  • The “Evolved Apes” NFTs turned out to be a scam. Color me shocked that a new, unregulated market is rife with fraud and con artists.
  • The Biden Administration says they want science advisers, but they haven’t been listening to them when it comes to policy choices.
  • I know very, very little about this topic, but thought this piece from Matt Yglesias on the “mobilization delusion” of progressives was well argued.
  • Literary Hub has a piece on how Rush’s lyricist/drummer Neil Peart helped lure young listeners over to the “dark side” of Ayn Rand, the terrible novelist.
  • Board game news: Asmodee imprint Space Cowboys announced a new edition of the out-of-print game Jamaica, a popular family game
  • The Kickstarter for Mythwind, a cooperative, asymmetrical game, is over $666,000 as I type this, and keeps going up, with 21 days to go.
  • Board & Dice announced Tabannusi: Builders of Ur, a heavy worker placement game co-designed by Daniele Tascini (Tzolk’in, Teotihuacan).
  • The Kickstarter for North Star Games’ new Alice in Wonderland-themed game Paint the Roses will open up on October 12th.
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→ August 12, 2021
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The Old Devils.

Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim is one of my all-time favorite comic novels, incorporating humor low and high, with lots of the excessive alcohol consumption that would characterize much of Amis’ fiction (and non-fiction, and perhaps some of his own life). Thirty-two years after the publication of that book, his first, he won the Booker Prize for The Old Devils, which still has his voice and humor but is far less frivolous, as it covers a quartet of older Welshmen and their long-suffering wives as they face old age, mortality, and the disappointments of lives less than well-lived.

The author/poet Alun Weaver and his wife Rhiannon – oh, that’s just the beginning of the Welshness here – are returning to Wales after many years away, and their arrival has stirred up many old friendships, rivalries, and secret romances among their group of old friends, including Peter, Charlie, Percy, Malcolm, Gwen, Muriel, Sophie, Siân, and Angharad. Rhiannon and Peter were old flames; Alun appears to have slept with several of the others’ wives, and resumes doing so straight off the train; and there’s a tremendous amount of drink, interrupted by brief meditations on alcohol’s deleterious effects on health and waistline.

While there’s obvious humor to mine from scene after scene of men drinking themselves into various stages of stupor, often finishing at one pub only to have one of them suggest that they repair to another one, or to his apartment where there’s more strong drink to be had, the tone of The Old Devils is unmistakably darker. The sun is setting on these men in various ways, none more so than Alun, who gets an unwelcome sense of how slight his popularity is when there’s barely any media at all attending his arrival, and who finds himself constantly in the shadow of the poet Brydan (a stand-in for Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, whom Amis apparently disdained).

I rattled off those names to make a small point about Amis’s writing here. The men’s names are mostly bog-standard, recognizable then and now other than the ‘u’ in Alun’s name. The women, on the other hand, have the more traditionally Welsh names, none more so than Siân (pronounced a bit like “she-AHN”) or Angharad (“an-KHAR-ad,” although the kh sound is softer than in Hebrew or Russian). Men are ordinary creatures in this book, while women are inscrutable. There’s a clear difference in their depictions, and while none of the men other than Alun is easily distinguished from any other – Charlie is afraid of the dark, of all things, and that’s what counts as a character trait – the women are even more two-dimensional, if you could even call them that. Muriel is a bit of a shrew, and there’s a running gag about Angharad and whichever fellow is her husband, but the women especially blend together because by and large they are props, not characters.

The Old Devils works when Amis aims his eye at the men at the story’s heart as they contemplate where they’ve landed in life. Alun is hardly a sympathetic protagonist, but his own difficulty accepting that his literary legacy is less than he wished it to be – did Amis harbor the same doubts about his own? – is one of the most haunting threads in the book, even if we’re not sorry to see Alun get his ego dented a few times. Peter’s unhappy marriage to Muriel is compounded by his own financial dependence on her – he’s squandered years where he might have forged a career of his own, and now that she’s threatening to sell their house and leave him, he has an uncertain financial future and no real identity of his own. Each of these men has wasted a good part of his life, and they all seem to be approaching old age with the plan of drinking their way through It, until the inevitable happens to one of them and the rest have to deal with the aftermath.

I probably enjoyed the Welshiness of the novel more than anything, as my in-laws are both Welsh natives and I’ve been learning some of the language on Duolingo, enough to catch a number of the Welsh words Amis slipped into the dialogue. He taught for many years at Swansea University, on the south coast of Wales, and described his time there as some of his happiest years, which is probably why the novel seems so understanding of Welsh language and culture – this at a time when the language was still not taught in schools – and derogatory towards those who dismiss it as parochial, or just as a nuisance, as when road signs appear in Welsh to the confusion of the main characters. Even as Amis gives us drink as an inadequate escape from life’s sorrows, he can’t avoid showing some affection for the novel’s setting or background people, or, of course, for the drinks themselves. (Except Irish cream, which he properly treats as the treacle it is.) I can see why Amis won the Booker for this book, but I did miss the madcap humor that made Lucky Jim such a treat.

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→ July 30, 2020
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The Famished Road.

Nigerian-born poet and author Ben Okri won the Booker Prize in 1991 for his sprawling novel The Famished Road, which now sits as the start of a trilogy of novels about the spirit child Azaro, who moves back and forth between the spirit and material worlds until he decides to stay with one family in a nameless African country until he can make his mother happy. Okri’s prose is stunning and the book is replete with the magical realism common in postcolonial literature, but even a week after finishing it I still can’t quite decide what, if anything, this book was about.

Azaro, short for Lazaro (since he has seemingly returned from the dead multiple times), is the only child of a couple in a small African village where citizens are getting by, but where the mere appearance of a car or a radio is notable. Representatives of two political parties, the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor, visit the village, where the hub of activity is the bar owned by the mysterious Madame Koto, who lets Azaro hang around during the day while his mother hawks goods at a local market and his father does … well, a lot of nothing. Azaro’s father chases various chimeras throughout the book, at one point deciding he’s going to be a boxer and at another that he’ll be a politician, never doing much to earn money to feed his family (and, while he’s a boxer, eating more than his share, so Azaro and his mother go hungry). There’s also a blind man in a wheelchair who seems to just wish evil on Azaro and the other kids in the village, a photographer who runs afoul of the political thugs and begins to document the strife they cause in the village, and various incarnations from the spirit world who want to pull Azaro back to the other side.

Okri is a beautiful writer, and even descriptions of ordinary events and moments sparkle. Azaro is probably around eight or nine years old, but uses phrasings and imagery of a wizened adult – or, perhaps, an ageless being from the spirit world: “The only points of light were the mosquito coil, its smoke spiralling to the ceiling, and his cigarette. In a way I came to think of Dad as a cigarette smoked alone in the dark.” Even scenes of violence take on a mystical quality that lessens their graphic nature, which makes some of the rioting – a not infrequent event in The Famished Road – a bit easier to navigate as a reader.

I love both magical realism and postcolonial literature, but something about this book didn’t hit the mark with me, primarily because I couldn’t connect with whatever its underlying themes might be. It seems like Okri writes at a figurative level, but perhaps without the metaphorical meaning beneath it. If Madame Koto represents someone or something, or Azaro’s father does, I missed it completely, perhaps just because I lack the historical context (what I know of Nigerian history is fairly limited to their civil war), but even his depiction of the two political parties felt a little facile; if the message here is just “all politicians are corrupt,” well, sure, but I think we already knew that.

Because of Okri’s prose and the incredible imagery throughout the book, The Famished Road flies by, even at 500 pages, and even with a plot that meanders substantially. Okri sets a scene, creating a vivid environment with a clear atmosphere, but what happens in these scenes is murky and I was left with a constant sense that I didn’t really get what he was trying to express. It reminded me of Ng?g? wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, which seems thematically similar, but is more grounded in the concrete and, as a result, has a more powerful and evident metaphorical meaning as well.

Next up: I’ve finished Tara Westover’s Educated and begun David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue.

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→ December 26, 2019
→ By

Girl, Woman, Other.

The Booker Prize committee ignored the rules of their own award when they gave the 2019 Booker to two titles, claiming they couldn’t break the tie. The co-winners, Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, the sequel to her prescient novel The Handmaid’s Tale; and Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, are both ardently feminist works that attack serious cultural issues of our moment in time, the former going after our deteriorating political environment, the latter the singular experiences of women of color, especially those who are also LGBTQ+. I haven’t read the former yet, but the latter is at the same time a thoughtful and engrossing set of intertwined tales of a dozen women spanning multiple generations, and a pretentious bit of prose gimmickry that often reads like a student parody of e.e. cummings.

Girl, Woman, Other is a novel of intersectionality – every character in it fits into at least two cultural minority groups, usually women of color, but also with several characters who are lesbians, trans, or otherwise LGBTQ+, and several of whom are or grew up economically disadvantaged. Evaristo depicts this through their own stories, which vary from the tragic to the darkly comic, which themselves intersect with each other in varying ways, sometimes rather slightly while at other times deeply woven together. Each of the stories, however, at least attempts to depict some aspect of women’s experiences in a modern world that is at the same time the best situation in modern history for women of color and for LGBTQ+ people and also still full of barriers and challenges, often all the more frustrating for how needless and outdated they are, to anyone who isn’t straight, white, male, and well-off.

The hazard of a short-story novel like Girl, Woman, Other is that the form rarely gives the reader time or depth to connect with any individual characters, and I think that is generally true here since characters appear prominently in their own stories and mostly vanish beyond them. Amma, the black lesbian playwright of the opening story and whose major production serves as the connection point for many of the stories herein, is the strongest and most fully developed character, but her own history is more of a foundation in the book than a compelling story in its own right, while that of her ex-girlfriend Dominique, who follows a domineering militant lesbian vegan feminist to a commune in the United States, is the most interesting for plot but also maddening for her own inability to recognize when she’s being gaslit and abused. (Not that these things don’t happen regularly in the real world.) The most balanced stories are those that reach back into the past and follow a character from youth to her old age, such as the teacher Shirley, who is disillusioned by the school where she works and the declining efforts of her students but dedicates herself to working with any student she thinks has the potential to move beyond their current circumstances.

The real downfall of Girl, Woman, Other, however, is the prose style, which mimics stream-of-consciousness poetry but becomes extremely tiresome over 400+ pages. Far too much of the book comprises sentences fragments, missing punctuation or capitalization, or half-finished thoughts, which might work well for a single chapter here but becomes overbearing by the end of the book. Evaristo is trying to imitate a style of thought, but these twelve women can’t possibly all think the same way, and giving them all the same voice through one hackneyed device serves to diminish their individuality as characters when the entire point of the book seems to be to celebrate the uniqueness of each of them, and of every reader as well.

I did fly through the book, since several of the chapters were fascinating and read like strong novellas, and because the prose style leaves so much white space on each page that the book isn’t as long as the page count might indicate. Maybe the cultural import of the book, the exposure of intersectional issues to the wider audience, was enough to justify it winning the prize (along with what sounds like a lifetime achievement award for Atwood). Maybe as a straight white male reader, I didn’t get some of what Evaristo was trying to express. I believe, however, that I understood enough of the points of the novel to know that the way in which she told the story was what kept me at arm’s length from its content.

Next up: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven.

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→ November 27, 2019
→ By

Bring Up the Bodies.

Hilary Mantel was the first author to win the Booker Prize for two novels in the same series, and the first woman to win the award twice, taking the 2009 honor for Wolf Hall, then winning again three years later for the sequel Bring Up the Bodies. (The third book in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, is due out in March.) While Wolf Hall was long and a bit arduous to read, it was full of plot and intrigue, and ultimately rewarded the effort required to get through it. Bring Up the Bodies, however, is just as tough to get through, without the plot rewards, with really just one thread through the book, and that one not a terribly compelling one.

Thomas Cromwell remains the protagonist, and Henry VIII is still the king, but now Anne Boleyn is the queen and Katherine, her predecessor, is in exile in the country. Henry still doesn’t have a male heir, however, and his patience grows thin just as his ardor grows for Jane Seymour, Medicine Woman. It falls to Cromwell, as always, to find a solution, but this one is far bloodier than the one he cooked up to help depose Katherine from the throne. Anne was eventually accused of adultery, including sleeping with her own brother, and beheaded, although the charges are poorly substantiated in historians’ view and in Mantel’s retelling, where it seems clear that she thinks it was all cooked up by Cromwell at the king’s behest.

The fundamental problem with Bring Up the Bodies is that that is the entire plot. There’s the same backbiting from the first novel, but the development of additional characters is gone. Cromwell’s son Gregory and ward Rafe Sadler are barely here. The members of the royal retinue are all replacement level, simpering and obsequious with one face, vindictive and Machiavellian with the other. Anne’s character is also not interesting enough to work as the primary antagonist; she’s very one-dimensional, less flirtatious than in Wolf Hall and more plotting and desperate as she realizes her place is slipping. She, too, fails to provide Henry with an heir – maybe his boys can’t swim? – and miscarries more than once in the course of this novel, which would explain the deterioration of her character but also makes her far less interesting in the retelling. Cromwell himself is also less three-dimensional here now that he’s widowed and his daughters are gone, all dead of the “sweating sickness” that affected London in the 1400s and 1500s.

Mantel’s habit of referring to Cromwell merely as “he,” only clarifying that she means him when it would be impossible to discern to whom “he” referred, grated on me in Wolf Hall and here it’s just exhausting. There are still lots of men running around, many of them with similar enough names and variable jobs, so that it’s not easy to keep them straight; I know Mantel didn’t make up the names, but a Cranmer and a Cromwell who is sometimes called “Cremuel” by the Francophone characters, plus a bunch of Henrys and Harrys and Thomases, is a mental burden not justified by the story around them all.

This won the Booker Prize because, in the words of the chairman of that year’s judging panel, Mantel “has rewritten the rules of historical fiction.” That may be true – it seems like Mantel works to stay within what we do know of the era and its personalities, creating a story with plausible details and a compromise in the dialogue that makes it readable – but it doesn’t make the story gripping, and I’m not clear on whether she rewrote those rules of historical fiction in this book or the first time she won the prize.

Next up: Jasper Fforde’s Early Riser, his first novel in six years.

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→ September 2, 2019
→ By

Wolf Hall.

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall won the British author her first Booker Prize, and the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, earned her her second a few years later, with the two novels also becoming a six-part BBC miniseries under the former’s title. Wolf Hall is an achievement, an incredibly immersive, precise work of historical fiction that, unlike so many reimaginations that feel untrue to their times, puts the reader completely into the mode and culture of its time period. It’s a long go, at 600 pages and somewhat dense with scenes that set mood rather than advancing the plot, and Mantel has some stylistic quirks that made reading it more difficult than it needed to be, but on balance the journey was worth the effort.

Wolf Hall is the story of Thomas Cromwell, with a brief prologue on his youth but primarily focused on his time in the royal court, advising King Henry VIII during the period when Hank was trying to divorce his wife Katherine so he could marry Anne Boleyn. The hitch, of course, is that in the 1500s the Catholic Church did not recognize divorce – oh, wait, they don’t recognize it now, good job fellas – yet they were still the quasi-official faith of England until the King broke with them in 1533 over this very issue. These were fraught times politically; the price of exclusion or expulsion from the King’s circle could be imprisonment in the Tower of London or execution, often after torture. Cromwell was successful at navigating these waters, both in terms of saving his own hide (during the time covered by this novel, at least) and pushing his personal agendas, often involving personal enmities against the likes of Thomas More or Stephen Gardiner.

Mantel is operating in tricky territory because these are all real historical figures and there’s a fair amount of existing material on their actions, but she manages to create compelling, credible characters out of many of them, notably Cromwell and the King. Even secondary characters like More, who is insufferable in his own idiosyncratic way, become interesting in Mantel’s depiction because she gives them enough depth to make them more than stock figures. It’s really the Cromwell and Henry show, though, with Cromwell the clear lead for multiple reasons, not least is how Mantel takes his own personal sorrows – the death of his wife and several of his children in the still unknown epidemic of the “sweating sickness” that hit England in many summers over a 60-plus year period. (Wikipedia cites one hypothesis that it was a type of hantavirus, a form of infection largely unknown until an outbreak in the American Southwest 1993.) Mantel manages to incorporate that thoroughly into Cromwell’s character and inner monologues without relying on it too overtly or allowing it to become his dominant feature.

The book is long, by which I mean it’s long even for 600 pages – it’s wordy and Mantel tends towards Dickensian descriptions. There are scenes here that are entertaining enough to read but don’t need to be in the book; they’re superfluous to the plot, even though they fit with the rest of the material. Mantel also rarely refers to her protagonist by name; Cromwell is usually just “he,” or is quoted without any pronouns attached for attribution. If you see a “he” without a nearby name to which it might connect, then that’s Cromwell. It’s a clear stylistic choice on Mantel’s part, and I found it incredibly annoying, because no matter how often she did it I could not get to a point where I would read an unattached “he” and assume, by default, it was Cromwell. In scenes with multiple speakers – which occurs frequently – reading the dialogue without Cromwell’s quotes tagged with his name was like listening to an old vinyl record with a small scratch on it. I often had to re-read a few lines once I realized Cromwell was in the conversation and hadn’t put his quotes into his ‘voice’ in my imagination.

There’s also too much mention of various couplings and proposed marriages among tertiary characters, exacerbated by the similarities in so many of their names. Mantel’s hands were tied on the latter point, but I’m also not sure if we needed details on the various schemes and affairs among non-core characters – even Cromwell’s children and wards, whose acts may have affected him but didn’t matter to the plot of this particular book.

I’ll certainly continue to Bring Up the Bodies, especially since it’s shorter, since I enjoyed Mantel’s storytelling and her prose isn’t actually a problem even though it’s not the style I prefer. (The third book, which I assume will move directly on to the shortlist for the Booker Prize, is due out in March.) I’m curious if any of you have seen the miniseries, which boasted a very impressive cast and earned great reviews and multiple awards.

Next up: Elizabeth McCracken’s novel Bowlaway.

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→ July 23, 2019
→ By

The Ghost Road.

Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road is the third book in a trilogy, but the first I’ve read since it won the Booker Prize and I wasn’t even aware it was the third book in a series until I picked it up to read it. I was expecting something bleak, even dreadful, given the description on the back of the book – it’s set during World War I (humanity’s deadliest), and involves two men, one a psychiatrist evaluating soldiers who’ve returned from the front, one a soldier who has returned and wants, against all logic, to go back. It’s surprisingly brisk, even dryly funny, even though the book doesn’t shy away from war’s horrors and the denouement is just as grim as you’d expect; it compares quite favorably to Evelyn Waugh’s war trilogy, written several decades earlier and from a very different point of view.

Rivers is the psychiatrist in question, based very much on a real doctor of that name, while Billy Prior is the soldier, surrounded in war by real historical figures, and himself based on Barker’s own readings of historical documents of soldiers’ experiences at the front. Rivers is presented regularly with the absurdity of war and its effects on the men who fought it, including hysterical conditions that we’d recognize today as post-traumatic stress disorder but that were dismissed at the time as a sort of dubious madness. He treats Prior as one of his patients, and is more frank with this particular soldier due to some shared experiences, owning up to the pressure form above to clear as many soldiers as he can to return to active duty.

Prior is strangely eager to get back to the fight, even though he’s long lost any faith in the reasons for the war – I imagine this is one of the great separators between those who fought for the allies in World War I and those who did the same in World War II – and knows that the more tours of duty he does, the more likely he is to die there. He’s engaged to be married, finding out just before his return that his fiancée might be pregnant, but is hoping to be absolved of that responsibility one way or another, because he, like Rivers, is gay.

Ghost Road doesn’t set out, at least, to be a novel of gay men in a war of masculinity literally gone toxic – wars are always begun by men, and World War I seems especially to one of the more pointless of all wars, a battle of egos that cost millions of young men their lives. Instead, it seems that Barker creates a parallel between the alienation of men fighting someone else’s war and the isolation gay (or bisexual) men would have felt in a time where homosexuality was criminalized in much of the world, including the UK where the novel is set. The sexual encounters described in the book are matter-of-fact, furtive trysts that are entirely devoid of emotion, let alone any sense of intimacy – fitting for a war that seemed to reduce men to their barest selves, sentient beings powered by rage or controlled by their survival instincts.

Rivers is the stronger character, even though Prior gets to fight and thus has a good bit more to do on the page. Rivers, however, gets to observe and interpret for the reader, and the reader in turn sees more of the turmoil inside of him, especially as he knows the futility of his work – that he’ll be sending men back to the war who have no business returning to the battlefield. His interactions with patients also provide the bulk of the book’s humor, without which it would be the tenebrous slog I feared it would be. At the same time, Barker’s characterization even of these two men falls more on the technical side than the emotional; the descriptions of their internal monologues even tend towards the precise, perhaps lacking some of the depth of feeling you’d expect of characters facing the effects of wartime trauma and the guilt involved with surviving or believing you should go back.

For those of you who’ve read this far, I wonder if it would surprise you to learn that Pat Barker is Patricia Barker – that a novel about two gay men in World War I, a novel with no female characters of any substance whatsoever, was written entirely by a woman. It certainly surprised me, not in the sense that I thought a woman incapable of doing so, but that I thought a woman might be less interested in telling a men’s story in a world of men’s stories. There’s apparently some reason behind this – that, early in her career, Barker was tired of praise that was always tempered by commentary that her books were about or for women – but it’s still fascinating to me that she made this choice, and then executed it so well.

Next up: about 2/3 of the way through Laura Cumming’s The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th-Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece, which is just $1.99 on the Kindle right now.

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→ July 17, 2019
→ By

G.

John Berger’s G. won two of the biggest literary honors in the Commonwealth after its 1972 release, taking home the James Black Tait Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize; at the ceremony for the latter, Berger tore into the sponsoring company, Booker-McConnall, for exploitative practices, then gave half the prize money to the British Black Panther movement. G. was just the fifth winner of the Booker Prize and was considered “experimental” for its time, just as Berger, an outspoken Marxist, was seen as a sort of curiosity. Perhaps this book was revolutionary in its time, but nearly a half-centiury it feels dated and irrelevant, more notable for the author’s prurient obsession with women’s genitalia than for anything that happens in the book itself.

G. is the book’s protagonist, set on a dissolute course from childhood – he’s the illegitimate son of an Italian philanderer who made his money in canned fruit, but was raised by a mother who refused to let his father have anything to do with the boy – and growing into a heartless, wanton libertine who seduces women just to have them, even for a single tryst, with no regard to what happens to them afterwards. His escapades culminate in the simultaneous pursuit of two women in Trieste on the eve of World War I; he inveigles a Slovene servant girl into coming to a major, upper-class ball as his date promising her his fake Italian passport in return, so that he can also jilt the wife of a major local official, a move that, unbeknownst to him, marks him as an Austrian agent (which he’s not).

The novel was sold as a picaresque, which it certainly isn’t. If anything, it’s a thinly veiled commentary on the class structures of western societies that existed prior to the first World War and, with some obvious changes in who’s in the upper echelon, persists today. It is a scene from the class struggle, told about an idiot who was born into privilege and keeps failing upward until the war finally stops him. It’s also wildly out of date: We still have class distinctions, but where once a person was born into a class, now the distinctions are more of income inequality, or race, or their intersection. The Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts are gone, replaced by other families, but their names lack the power of the earlier leading families; it is their money that speaks, and their money that explains the different treatment they get at every step in their lives.

Berger comes off as a Marxist, for sure, but he comes off even more as a pervert. The book is replete with descriptions of genitalia, primarily women’s, but in a gynecological way, not an erotic or even pornographic one. It’s as if Berger was obsessed with and disgusted by a woman’s sex at the same time, so he describes the vulva and vagina in the basest way to try to diminish the women themselves. Indeed, the women G. pursues here are mere props in the story; G. doesn’t care about them and Berger doesn’t give the reader any reason to care either.

I’d enjoyed a bunch of more recent Booker winners, which led me to decide to read most or all of the previous winners, but some of the pre-2000 titles just aren’t that good. I bailed on James Kelman’s How late it was, how late before I reached the quarter mark, as its stream of consciousness prose was maddening, the main character hadn’t moved more than about half a block in all that I read, and the heavy use of the c-word was really grating. I read but never reviewed Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, about an author of romance novels who has fled some embarrassment in England and takes a room at a seaside hotel in Switzerland where she meets the usual cast of eccentrics and learns things about herself. It’s a trifle, not as funny as it would like to be and nothing you haven’t seen before (Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont covers similar ground, and better). I’m not sure who was picking Booker winners before this century but I’m at least glad they’ve upped their standards.

Next up: Like a moth to a flame, I’m reading another Booker winner, this time Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road.

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→ April 17, 2019
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The Inheritance of Loss.

Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize in 2006 for her novel The Inheritance Of Loss, a slow-burning tragedy set in the Darjeeling district of northeastern India, near the border with Bangladesh, that covers distinctions of class, gender, and language, but never establishes a single compelling or central character anywhere in the novel’s 350-odd pages. It’s an oddly dispassionate novel given how much the passions of individual characters factor in the story.

The most central character in the novel is Sai, the suddenly orphaned daughter of an Indian engineer who is killed while in Moscow training for the Soviet space program; she arrives, without warning, at the home of the judge, a curmudgeon who has distanced himself from the rest of his family, living on his estate with the man known only as the cook. The cook’s son, Biju, has gone to America to make his fortune, but instead works his way through a series of entry-level jobs in various restaurants in New York City that rely on undocumented labor to run their kitchens.

These stories play out against the background of the rise of a Gurkha self-determination movement in the district that continues today. The Gurkhas, Indian natives who speak Nepali, have been agitating for their own state within India for over a century, and a more militant group, the ominously-named Gurkha National Liberation Front (styled after numerous insurgent groups, nearly always with communist leanings, around the developing world), sprang up in 1986, leading to a lengthy general strike depicted in the novel. Sai falls in love with her tutor, Gyan, who joins the GNLF and who makes a decision that affects their budding if likely forbidden romance as well as the lives of the judge, the cook, and other family members who have lived in privilege in a region where the ethnic majority has been subjugated.

There’s some beautiful imagery in the book and some recurring metaphors that would probably be worthy of a deeper dive – vapors appear in various forms from the first page onward – if I cared one iota about any of these characters. I’ve generally enjoyed fiction from South Asia, whether translated or originally written in English, probably because the setting is so different to me and because that part of the world has an ethnic and cultural diversity that lends itself well to complex stories, with many writers with south Asian backgrounds incorporating myths or magical realism into their works. Desai’s style is dry in just about every way; the prose is uninteresting, the characters unmemorable and unlikable. The judge’s back story, for example, explains his grim, misanthropic exterior, but in a way that will make you loathe him for his cruelty. There’s a parallel between his upbringing and what the cook hopes for Biju, certainly, where Biju chooses family and emotion over the sort of materialistic ambition that defined the judge’s life. Perhaps I would have felt more invested had Biju’s story resolved a little sooner, but Desai has us watch his debasement a little too long before anything of consequence happens in his story, and the novel ends before his story gets any sort of answer.

I still can’t decide what Desai was trying to depict in The Inheritance of Loss or what aspect of life she wanted to explore, which could be my failure as a reader rather than hers as a writer – but whatever it was, I didn’t get it, and that’s a pretty rare experience for me at this point in my life. I may not always like novels I read, but I’m rarely this flummoxed. That puts this towards the bottom of the two dozen Booker winners I’ve read so far, at least.

Next up: I’ve just started Richard Powers’ The Overstory, which just won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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→ April 16, 2019
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The Sea.

John Banville won the Booker Prize in 2005 for his novel The Sea, a slim, introspective novel on death and grief, written from the perspective of a middle-aged thesaurus. It’s a demanding read that brims with ideas and contains many sparkling turns of phrase while simultaneously maddening with the narrator-protagonist’s bloviating style and endless desire to show off his vocabulary.

Max Harden is a retired art historian who has recently lost his wife, Anna, to some sort of aggressive cancer, after which he revisits the seaside cottage where he’d spent time one summer and had first encountered death and loss, although exactly how that occurred is saved until the very end of the novel. (The reveal is similar in tone to that of another Booker winner, the marvelous The Sense of an Ending, but the latter book does it far more effectively.) He splits his meandering narrative across three separate timelines – the end of Anna’s life; the summer he spent with another family, the Graces, at their cottage; and the present day as he’s returned to the sea and found connections to the past.

There’s a profound sense throughout Max’s story that he’s still struggling to process his own grief in the face of several shocking losses, something he seems to cover up through his own dissembling, almost in parody of the British stiff-upper-lip stereotype, the man who can look at and even identify his feelings but refuses to engage with them. The reader never gets to know Max at all; he’s the astute observer, in the style of Nick Jenkins, but lacks any discernable personality traits of his own, other than, perhaps, his ability to keep his own grief off the pages. The only real indication we get that these deaths have affected him comes near the end, when a bout of drinking leaves him with a head injury and eventually brings his adult daughter around to try to coax him to come live with her, especially as she’s afraid he may have tried to take his own life. Even then, he can barely conjure up the emotions any father should feel for his daughter, not least the reversal of roles that comes when your children have grown and begin to wish to take care of you.

I mentioned the novel’s vocabulary above; Banville may have all of these words at his immediate disposal, but just because you know a word doesn’t always mean it’s the right choice for that situation. Here’s a sampler of esoteric words I encountered in the book, most of which I didn’t know previously: rufous, immanence, minatory, eructations, aperçu, anabasis, expatiation, putative, vulgate, refulgent, vavasour, plangent. I looked up all of the words on that list (and more) that I didn’t know, or of which I was unsure, and yet have forgotten most of them in the book’s wake. Former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani called the book stilted, claustrophobic, and pretentious, while referring to Max as a gloomy narcissist, and even though I clearly liked the book more than she did (low bar, I know), I can’t argue with her criticisms. The occasional use of a twenty-dollar word in lieu of a ten-cent one can be fun for writer and reader, illuminating the page, signaling a shift in tone or sparking a thought in the reader’s mind, but when you’re regularly reaching for the OED, using minatory when menacing would have sufficed, you’re trying too hard.

Banville had been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize once prior to this win, for the superior The Book of Evidence, a twisted novel in both senses of the term, one that also has a narrator writing at some remove from his emotions but does so in a way that heightens the tension rather than suffocating it. His win in 2005 was not well-received, as The Sea beat Kazuo Ishiguro’s marvelous Never Let Me Go and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, both of which would have been better choices, as well as highly-regarded novels by Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. It does, however, illustrate one of the criticisms of major literary awards – their tendency to reward their own, to be slow to recognize cultural and stylistic shifts, and to excessively honor works that draw heavily on or even mimic the classics of the western canon. I could live with a little pretension if the book took me on an emotional journey, but The Sea seemed to prefer to send me to the dictionary instead.

Next up: I’m just about finished with Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, another Booker winner, after which I’ll turn to this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, Richard Powers’ The Overstory.

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