→ June 5, 2016
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Honeydew.

I was totally unfamiliar with the American short story writer Edith Pearlman until earlier this year, when I saw her name and her latest collection, Honeydew, on a list of likely candidates for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (eventually won by Thanh Viet Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer). Honeydew didn’t end up on the short list, but I’d already bought it and I’m stubborn like that. Most of the stories in the book run around 10-12 pages yet manage to create totally believable, well-rounded little worlds, usually with at least one three-dimensional character, yet with a very light touch that keeps the prose moving.

Pearlman’s stories focus on some little detail of ordinary life and exploring its effects on one or more of the characters, but all seem to tie around the idea of finding enough happiness to get by. Several stories are set in or around an antique shop in the fictional Massachusetts town of Godolphin, owned by the slightly eccentric Rennie, who lives by a very specific code in dealing with her clients, but seems less able to apply similar rules and limits on her own life. We experience her shock, when, for example, the wife half of a couple who frequently shop with her falls ill and requires hospice care, and the husband refers to Rennie as one of her closest friends. But is this the sadness of a woman who was simply without friends, or is the problem Rennie’s for failing to recognize the meaning she held in someone else’s life?

In “Hat Trick,” four teenage girls are mooning over boys when one girl’s mother, a bit drunk and bitter, concocts a game where the girls put the names of various boys on slips of paper and place them in a hat, to be drawn at random but never revealed; each girl then must pursue the boy whose name she drew. It is a realistically-drawn fable; the girls take the pledges seriously, or at least three of them do, and the results, while hardly what the reader might expect, feel real. Each girl pursues happiness and finds some – the “happy enough” bit I mentioned above comes directly from the mother in this story – even though her fate was determined by a sort of rigged random draw.

“Castle 4,” one of the longest stories in the book, has a bit of a Hollywood ending, but the core character, the introverted anesthesiologist who rejects copious advances from women (dude, what are you doing), is so alienated from other people that you can feel cold just reading about him. He drifts through the job and social functions like a shade, making only the barest minimum of contact with others, yet his story resolves when he falls for a patient whose back pain turns out to be terminal, stage 4 cancer. The conclusion is forced, but his attraction to a woman who has been forced into an isolated state by circumstance fits with the way Pearlman has defined his impalpable character.

The title story ends the collection but was one of my least favorites in the book, as it’s less realistic and uncharacteristically overwrought. The headmistress at a girls’ prep school in New England is concerned about an anorexic student, yet is having an affair with the girl’s father, and is six weeks’ pregnant with his child. None of the characters gets the full development of those in other stories, although Pearlman does write brilliantly about the eating disorder itself, and there’s the whiff of the hackneyed in the setting itself.

There’s a bit of dry wit in many of her stories as well, which helps keep the stories moving even when the themes could be depressing, none more so than in “Blessed Harry,” in which a Latin teacher at that same prep school gets an out-of-the-blue invitation to speak at a conference in England on “the meaning of life and death.” The teacher’s kids, sporting varying degrees of cynicism, all immediately suspect it’s a hoax, while he at first allows himself to soak in the feeling that he’s wanted, that he’s been more of a success in his working life than he actually has. It’s a bit more respectable than a 419 scam, but Pearlman milks it for humor before the teacher begins to realize where the success and meaning in his own life lie. These little moments of grace or insight in an existentialist context, coupled with her ability to quickly define and fill out her characters, carried me through Honeydew as if I were reading a single, gripping narrative.

Next up: Connie Willis’ Bellwether.

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→ December 10, 2015
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Language Arts and my year of 100 books.

Stephanie Kallos’ 2015 novel Language Arts first crossed my radar over the summer when I saw that Paste named it the best novel of the first half 2015, shortly after which I spotted it for $2.99 for the Kindle and picked it up to save for … well, the MLB winter meetings, as it turned out. It’s a bit sentimental with some purple prose, but the story itself is engaging and thoughtful, tied together by a surprise near the novel’s end that, with hindsight, makes clear so much of what was going on beneath the text in the first three-quarters of the book.

The center of the story is Charles Marlow and his autistic son Cody, whose sudden withdrawal as a toddler precipitated the breakup of Charles’ marriage to Alison and triggered a long-dormant memory of Charles’ childhood friendship with a developmentally disabled classmate. Through staggered flashbacks and shifts in present-day scenes from Charles to Cody (living in a group home) and a nun suffering from dementia that has caused her to revert to her young adulthood in Italy – a few too many abrupt shifts for me – Kallos unfolds what is really the story of Charles overcoming a series of mental obstacles to find some way to connect to his son.

While florid language often gives the book the feel of pop literature – the moon as a “melting scoop of vanilla ice cream” was a metaphor too far – Kallos invests the three mentally infirm characters (Cody, the nun, and Charles’ classmate Dana) with the complexity normally reserved for the not-disabled. While Cody is, of course, limited in expression and cognitive powers, he’s still given a broad range of emotions and treated like a whole person, both by other characters and by Kallos herself in describing his movements, habits, and attempts to communicate. Charles himself is the most fully fleshed-out character in the book, but there’s a hint of a sad-sack cliché about him, whereas Cody is one of the most refreshing, novel (no pun intended) portrayals of a developmentally disabled person I’ve ever seen.

Whereas Kallos’ phrasings often detracted from the book, she avoided many obvious plot pitfalls that would have turned this into a Hallmark movie of the week. Charles wrote an award-winning story as a fourth grader that resurfaces when his elementary school is slated for demolition; at a reunion with other students from that Langauge Arts class, he meets up with one of the other prize students, who’s also divorced, and … nothing happens. It would have just been too easy to have them date, or sleep together, or fall in love and give Charles a well-rounded, happy ending, but Kallos doesn’t go there, just as she doesn’t give Cody a miraculous recovery or reunite Charles and Alison or choose any of a dozen other easy ways out. The cathartic climax of the book is of the small kind, and it feels genuine, the kind of tiny miracle that can happen any day through nothing more unlikely than the kindness of others.

There’s a hint of pop spirituality, a sort of false ecumenicalism, running through Language Arts that did ring a bit off-key for me; it’s certainly true that we see many people turning away from organized religion while retaining some kind of spiritual belief system, but here Kallos wants to ask the Big Questions without doing much more to address them than point out that we’re all looking for answers. Between that and the prose, I could never quite get over the disconnect between the intense, thorough characterizations and the feel that Kallos was talking down to the reader – not from a point of intelligence looking down on the less clever, but the way we might look at a self-help guru dispensing empty platitudes. I can forgive quite a bit for a story and cast this compelling, where the conclusion delivers in a huge way without diverting from the book’s relentless realism.

–

This was the one hundredth book I’ve read in 2015, a peculiar goal but one I’ve wanted to reach for a very long time. I was on track to do it back in 2002, my first year working for the Blue Jays, one where I spent a lot of time on my own in Toronto (and prowled many of that fine, fine city’s many used bookstores … I remember a wonderful one near Little Italy where I went nuts), and read 75 books by early September. It was Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises that stopped me cold; I’ve tried so much Hemingway before and after that, but his prose is so cold and his depression so thoroughly reflected in his stories and characters that I’ve found his work more of a chore to read even than the labyrinthine language of Faulkner. That year I just hit a wall, and went as long without reading anything as I have at any point since then.

The year that my daughter was born (2006) was, naturally, another low point, although I still got to about 50-55 books read that year; I didn’t travel between spring training and the Futures Game, which cut down on reading time, and of course if I tried to read when my daughter was an infant I’d just fall asleep wherever I sat. But I’ve steadily ramped back up the last few years and read religiously for an hour or more just about every day. My therapist back in Arizona encouraged me to do it when I expressed some reservations about devoting time to such a solitary activity when I had a family and a job and, like everyone, a million other things I “should” (dangerous word there) be doing. She insisted I consider it part of my “self-care” regimen, the way I would meditation or exercise or getting enough sleep or eating well. So I have, going through 70 to 80 books a year most years since my daughter started sleeping through the night.

This year’s been an exceptional one though, even though I’ve had my share of longreads, because of my daughter. She’s supposed to read for a half an hour every night, so our deal, when I’m home, is that we read together, usually sitting next to each other on the couch (or her lying on top of me, which was a lot easier before she got to be more than half my weight), although if she’s annoyed at me for making her do her homework she might exile herself to the other side of the couch. She’s even been cheering me on towards the 100-book goal, which is wonderful encouragement, and delights me to see that she’s acquired some of my own yearning for achievements, no matter how arbitrary or meaningless to anyone but myself.

This year’s list of books has been suitably eclectic, with everything from Ngugi wa Thiongo’s epic Wizard of the Crow to Jasper Fforde’s two most recent Chronicles of Kazam books (which I read to my daughter a chapter or two a night), from books on quantum entanglement to the last two-thirds of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. The list included fourteen Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners and one for Non-Fiction; ten Hugo Award for Best Novel winners; and two titles from Nobel Prize for Literature winners. (I didn’t like either of those two.) Three books were collections of works from various authors; of the other 97, twenty-two were written by women. Eighty-seven of the titles were works of fiction. Eight were audiobooks to get me through the drives to and from Bristol or the occasional bout of yardwork. I read four titles each from Agatha Christie and Rex Stout; three by Waugh; and two apiece from Fforde, Neil Gaiman, Philip K. Dick, and P.G. Wodehouse. And one was by an author I know personally, a rare pleasure and a case where I didn’t bother to feign objectivity.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve just begun John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (just $5 on Kindle right now!) and you’re keeping me from my reading…

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→ August 7, 2015
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The Buried Giant.

I held a Klawchat on Thursday, and I reviewed the Spiel des Jahres-nomianted family boardgame Broom Service for Paste.

Kazuo Ishiguro wrote two of my all-time favorite novels, the very British stiff-upper-lip story The Remains of the Day and the brilliant dystopian tragedy Never Let Me Go, along with a handful of lesser books that featured his gorgeous prose but couldn’t match the two peaks for storycraft. His latest novel, The Buried Giant ($5.99 for Kindle right now), is a welcome return to form for the English author, offering a plot of simple scenes that lends itself to vast philosophical interpretation, in an unfamiliar milieu that blends beautifully (if anachronistically) with his classical prose.

The Buried Giant takes place in pre-medieval England, where the Saxons are gradually taking over from the native Britons and the land is shrouded in a mist that has caused all people enveloped within it to lose access to many of their long-term memories. An old couple within one settlement, built into a hillside network of caves, sets off on a journey to visit their son, who has moved to another village for reasons no longer clear to his parents, Axl and Beatrice. The pilgrimage goes awry quickly – unsurprising, as the pair don’t even know where their son might be – as they’re co-opted into a larger endeavor involving the warrior Wistan, a mysterious orphan Edwin, the Arthurian knight Gawain, and a dragon whose actual existence is unclear until the very end of the book.

Ishiguro’s Victorian phrasings are stilted in the mouths of his Germanic and Celtic characters, but the language seems to fit his fabulist aims – and, of course, an accurate rendering of their language would leave the book unreadable. Fable it is, however, without the pedantry of traditional fables, instead opening up ruminations on the weight of cultural trauma, coming to grips with the sins of the past, and our individual and collective abilities to move on with or without those memories. Is our ability to forget, at least at a superficial level, an asset or a liability? Is there true reconciliation without reckoning?

Axl and Beatrice end up in between two forces taking contrary approaches to these questions, one seeking to lift the fog, the other to preserve it, and are given the choice of sides to support, knowing that neither option is perfect. Choosing to lift the fog may advance the cause of the people of the region, but expose dormant conflicts between the two of them that have been lost to the mist. It’s the question every country’s leaders face after some horrible internal conflagration or genocide: will the long-term gains from a “truth and reconciliation” commission exceed the short-term pain and renewed enmity from reopening wounds so recently closed?

Ishiguro paints his characters in broad strokes here because the mist he’s created all but demands it; the characters feel round but vague, as if the mist itself is between the reader and the page. The precise, modern English in which the characters speak only adds to the perceived distance from us to the action – and there is action, by the way, not just a Tolkienesque walk through New Zealand landscapes with a lot of talking. Ishiguro plays with his narrative prerogative, shifting his view at times away from Axl and Beatrice, although they remain at the heart of the book, such as scenes that serve to emphasize the objection entrenched forces might have to any reexamination of the past. Oligarchy takes a beating here, but The Buried Giant is no polemic, so while Ishiguro concludes the book with a firm decision by the main characters, the ending is neither happy nor straightforward, much as post-war authorities must struggle with the question of lifting the fogs over their battered nations and dealing with the sins of the recent past.

Next up: Anita Okrent’s book on artificial langages (like Esperanto and, yes, Klingon), In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius.

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