→ May 24, 2024
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Night Watch.

Jayne Anne Phillips’ newest novel Night Watch was, as far as I can tell, a surprise winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in two senses: I saw nothing that anticipated its win, and I think it sucks. It is a ponderous, pretentious, pointless, predictable piece of fiction that was an absolute chore to finish and offered far too modest a payoff for the effort required to complete it.

The setup to the plot of Night Watch is far more complex than the plot itself, as if Phillips knew she had a scant concept and decided to mask it with time-shifting, insufficient use of quotation marks, and avoidance of pronouns. A man takes a woman who has stopped speaking for several years and her 12-year-old daughter to a West Virginia asylum several years after the end of the Civil War, cautioning the girl that he is not her father and telling her the story she needs to relate at the asylum to gain admittance for herself and her mother. The girl’s actual father went to fight in the War but never returned and the family received no word of his fate. From there, we jump back and forth to find out who the man was, why the woman stopped speaking, and what happened to the father, before we get to a conclusion that you can see coming from the first fifty pages, if not sooner.

This book thinks it has a lot to say, and that might be its worst attribute, even beyond the leaden, torpid prose and the meager characterization. (It also contains a long, graphic scene of sexual assault that stood out as one of the only scenes in the novel that has that level of detail about anything happening to any of the characters.) There could be a larger point here about the treatment of women during and in the aftermath of the Civil War, and how conflicts tend to save their worst impacts for the most vulnerable populations, such as women and children, which would seem to have a rather apt parallel today in Gaza. There could be something here about the poor treatment of the war wounded and the insane of that era. There could be any number of themes here if Phillips had the insight into the subject to lead the reader there, but she doesn’t. It revels in the misery of its setting like Andersonville, another Pulitzer winner about the Civil War – the judges for that award just can’t seem to resist that setting – without saying anything meaningful about any of it.

The characters are the book’s second major failing, as Phillips seems almost determined to prevent the reader from getting to know any of them. The man never gets a name beyond “Papa,” a sort of cruel joke in the circumstances. The father gets a name that isn’t his own, only after he’s wounded and loses his memory. The mother and daughter each have two names, their own and the false identities they assume when they enter the asylum. There’s also a woman and a horse who are both named Dearbhla, in case you weren’t confused already. They’re all thinly drawn enough that they exist only as one-dimensional villains (Papa) or victims (the mother and father) or sort of impossible fairies (the daughter). The daughter, named ConaLee but known at the asylum as Miss Eliza Connolly, is the closest character here to a protagonist, and is certainly its hero, yet she is a cipher inside her outlines: We only see her as her world has made her, never as who she is as a person.

The sum of these disparate parts may leave you rooting for any sort of happy ending for the central characters, and of course Phillips could not give you one – nor does this novel need one, to be clear. She simply chose the cheapest way out, rather than resolving the plot’s various threads in a way that actually says something about their lives or their time or, as is written in the guidelines for the Pulitzer committee, “dealing with American life.” That this was chosen over North Woods or Tom Lake is appalling, the second massive whiff in three years by the Pulitzer committees for the fiction award after 2021’s mind-boggling selection of The Netanyahus, which really hasn’t aged well. A great novel will justify its existence through its story, its prose, and its characters. Night Watch does none of the above.

Next up: Oliver Roeder’s Seven Games: A Human History.

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→ January 24, 2024
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North Woods.

Daniel Mason’s North Woods is the story of a house. I mean, it’s the story of the people who live in it, and some who just pass through, but the only constant in this peculiar but beguiling book is the house, located on what becomes an apple orchard in western Massachusetts. The house becomes the site of a number of tragedies – there’s a lot of death in the book, some comic but others just sad – and some truly eccentric characters who remind us of the transience of life and the things we leave behind.

The house, described as lemon-yellow and assembled piecemeal over many years, first goes up in the 1760s and sees everyone from young lovers to Revolutionary soldiers to a woman kidnapped by Native Americans to an escaped slave and the slave-hunter trying to abduct her and more, although none leaves more of a mark than the Osgood family. Their patriarch discovers an apple there he calls the Wonder, becoming an evangelist of the strain and developing the giant orchard that envelops the property and that his spinster daughters will eventually make their livelihood – at least, until one of them finds a beau. Much of the action in the book is botanical, as apple seeds, acorns, beetles, and fungal spores also leave their mark on the house, its environs, and thus the people who inhabit it. Eventually, we enter the 20th century, with a woman whose son believes he can hear the voices of the dead people who previously lived in the house – which leads to his diagnosis with schizophrenia – and the house’s decline into ruin.

Mason challenges the reader twice over, once with the unusual structure and once with his use of the supernatural in a subtle but central way. The book’s many sections vary in length and style, with interstitials that come in the form of letters, pamphlets, a real estate listing, poems, and more digressions from the prose format. Some work – the real estate listing is one of the funnier bits, and it’s just a single page – but there’s a sense of Mason trying harder than he needs to in a book that is in and of itself a creative marvel. The poems especially do not work, not because they’re bad poems – I am not in a position to judge their merits – but because they add nothing to the novel as a whole. They take up space without advancing story or character, and unless I’m missing some great Parnassian achievement here, I’d have preferred he omit them entirely.

The supernatural elements are harder to understand, but also more essential to the novel. Without spoiling what those elements are, they appear slowly, without much in the way of warning or foreshadowing, building as the novel progresses until they are woven thoroughly into the fabric of each story. By the time we reach the final character to visit the house, it’s easy to see where that chapter will end, because each successive tale has leaned a little more on the supernatural elements to complete its narrative. North Woods could exist, and excel, without the interstitial bits and style variations, but it could not exist without the spirits. (As an aside, I did not catch that the twelve chapters were supposed to represent the twelve months of the year, later reading that in the NPR review of the book. It’s another clever trick that, in hindsight, was also quite effective because of its subtlety.)

That last character refers to the world as either “a tale of loss” or “a tale of change,” and North Woods does not seem to take sides in this debate. The characters themselves experience loss, sometimes plural, often unexpected and unfathomable. The house and the land persist, but their denizens change, as do the ways in which the humans use the building and the trees. And all of the death begets new life, even, in its way, the eventual death of the house by fire, which we know can regenerate the land (e.g., certain morel mushrooms fruit well after forest fires). Death is not final in Mason’s novel, which is obviously a spiritual view that readers may or may not endorse, but he uses this as a device to connect the dozen stories and characters, as one death often sparks the series of events that lead to the next character or chapter in the house itself. It’s an unusual novel, and a slow one to start, but Mason’s lithe prose and gift for characterization ultimately wins out, even with some distractions in his literary flourishes.

Next up: Bryan Stephenson’s Just Mercy, which my daughter had to read for school last year. (He’s a Delaware native.)

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→ September 29, 2023
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Tom Lake.

Ann Patchett remains one of my favorite contemporary novelists; I think she’s only missed once, really, with Run, which was too heavy-handed in its political allegory, and Taft is probably the weakest of the remainder even though it’s above the line for me. Bel Canto remains her magnum opus and one of the best works of American fiction since World War II, reimagining The Magic Mountain through a fictionalized version of the Túpac Amaru hostage crisis, and other than Run she’s been on a roll this century with State of Wonder, Commonwealth, and The Dutch House, the last of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, losing to The Nickel Boys.

Patchett’s run of success continues with Tom Lake, which returns to the motif of reworking a classic of literature into a modern narrative, while also seeing her return to themes of family history and mythmaking, this time through the lens of a family matriarch telling her life story to her three grown daughters. Lara is in her late 50s, but the bulk of the story she’s telling her girls is about the few years when she played Emily in a community theater production of Our Town, which led to a summer gig playing the same character in the western Michigan town of Tom Lake, where rich people would spend a few days or a week at the lake and often drop in to see a prestigious actor or two on the stage. While there, Lara has a fling with a young actor named Duke who would later go on to great fame in Hollywood, first as a heartthrob and later as a more serious actor. Lara’s daughters have known about her affair with Duke, with very little of the details, but the pandemic throws them all together on the family cherry orchard, giving them plenty of time together to talk, and for the kids – the eldest of whom, Emily, was once convinced that Duke was actually her father – to grill their mother.

Lara is right about the age Patchett was when she was writing Tom Lake, and this novel feels like her second attempt at an autobiographical work, this time perhaps more inspired by the way we reconsider our lives as we cross the half-century mark (which I did earlier this year). I’m not aware of Patchett having a summer fling with a future movie star, but Tom Lake reads like someone reckoning with their past, contemplating paths not taken, maybe thinking about the role chance plays in the paths our lives take. So much of Lara’s story comes down to these seemingly tiny details of life, such as the way she lands the first role as Emily, how she ends up at Tom Lake, or how that summer ends.

At a certain point in your life, if you’re lucky enough to live long enough, you become an observer as well as a participant: you live with your memories, good and bad, and in retelling them you choose what to include and what to omit, especially when telling your children. Lara makes those choices, holding back some information for the pleasure of surprising her daughters with the reveals, and then holding back some information forever, including the last time she saw Duke before the pandemic hit. (It’s also the one sour note in the novel, certainly the least realistic moment, and a drastic tonal shift from what’s come before, although it’s possible that that was an intentional contrast between the sepia-toned filter of our memories and the harshness of reality.) We curate our pasts for our children, much as we curate our lives for social media. Lara’s daughters are all adults, each unique and each very well-drawn, yet she still only shows them a portion of herself and is thoughtful about what she excludes.

As always, Patchett has created a whole cast of fully-realized characters; the three daughters each have their own personalities, goals, and values, each sharing a little something from their mom and yet also baffling her in ways in which they differ both from her and from each other. If she were Marilynne Robinson, another of my favorite contemporary novelists, each of these girls would get her own spinoff novel, but alas, Patchett has never (to my knowledge) revisited any of her prior creations. Lara’s husband appears a little later on, a little less three-dimensional than the women in the family or the Duke of Lara’s memories, although that’s also clearly part of the point – he’s the steady man Lara married after her dalliance with the unreliable bad boy.

I’ve read all of Patchett’s novels, and Bel Canto is the clear leader for me, still, but I could at least make an argument for Tom Lake to be in the #2 position. After a week or so of pondering this, I came down at Commonwealth second, The Dutch House third, and Tom Lake fourth over State of Wonder. At her best, she gives us a cast of wonderful, realistic characters, and wraps them up in a plot that’s realistic but compelling. Tom Lake might show her in a more mature, meditative mood, but her prose and her characterization is as strong as ever.

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→ September 15, 2023
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Yellowface.

R.F. Kuang caused quite a stir earlier this year with the release of her fifth novel and first outside of sci-fi/fantasy, the scathing satire Yellowface, which bites the very hand that feeds her – the publishing world. The title hints at the secondary themes of cultural appropriation, racial identity, and who has the right to tell what stories, but the engine that drives this book and its self-justifying protagonist is sheer disgust at how the book sausage gets made.

June Hayward is a young white woman who has written one published novel to scant sales and mediocre reviews, while her college classmate and sort-of friend, Athena Liu, has vaulted into literary stardom in a manner not entirely dissimilar to Kuang’s history. Athena is Chinese-American and is working on her magnum opus, a massive historical novel about the use and abuse of Chinese workers in World War I, when she suffers a fatal accident in front of June … who grabs the manuscript to the unfinished and unsubmitted novel, The Last Front, and decides to clean it up and submit it as her own. June’s agent can’t believe it, shopping the book to a larger publisher, where the marketing folks suggest that June use her middle name, Song, instead of Hayward, ostensibly to get away from the failure of her first novel, but it’s hardly a coincidence that that Song could come across as an East Asian surname, is it? June’s happy to go along with all of this, even when a junior publicist at the firm pushes back on the whole scheme and questions the authenticity of some of the content, but after the book comes out to rave reviews and massive sales, the backlash begins, and eventually enough dirt comes out that June’s authorship becomes the subject of public scrutiny.

June is an anti-hero, an unreliable narrator, and a con artist, where she herself is one of her own victims: She’s so desperate for commercial and critical success that she dupes herself into doing and believing things that will obviously harm her in the end. She’s part Becky Sharp, part Maria Ruskin, and maybe a little Anna Delvey, but in the end she’s willing to do and say whatever she must to get ahead and stay there. That also means that anyone who gets in her way is an enemy and must be dealt with, which is when June becomes either ruthless or just so wrapped up in her own needs – and I think to her, this is about safety, rather than material gain – that she goes on the attack, or wants to, even when doing nothing is the best option.

The level of scorn that Kuang has for the industry is truly something to behold, and it provides some dark humor, not the laugh-out-loud sort but the “I can’t believe she’s writing that” kind. It’s not even a satire that exaggerates the truth to its limits to get its point across; Kuang does little more than sharpen a few details, letting the stark reality of things shock the reader instead. The outsized roles of Goodreads and social media sites, the emphasis on an author’s identity rather than their work, the control the Big Four publishing houses have, it all looks worse under the microscope. I doubt anyone still has the illusion that it’s the merits of a book that determines whether it’s a best-seller, but Kuang makes it clear just how far down the list of factors a novel’s quality sits.

The novel’s title refers to the history of white performers in stage and on screen pretending to be east Asian, such as the teeth-grinding cringe of Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. We’ve seen it in the publishing world as well, such as the white poet who submitted poems under a Chinese name because he claimed it increased his odds of getting published and another white poet who fabricated an entire persona of a Japanese survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima to publish his poems. Is June guilty of “yellowface” here? She takes on an Asian-sounding surname and doesn’t go out of her way to disabuse anyone of the notion that she has east Asian heritage. She takes on Athena’s novel, but makes substantial edits and rewrites, some before submitting it and some with the help of her editors. Is the mere fact that she’s telling a story about Chinese people, with references to Chinese culture and history, enough to say she’s committed this transgression? Is this cultural appropriation? Who can tell these stories – and if only an Asian writer can tell a story about Asian people, then does that mean Asian writers can only tell stories about Asian people? Kuang grapples with this last question at some length, including it in discussions of Athena Liu’s legacy, how the publishing world saw and used her, and how she felt as a token woman of color in what remains a white-dominated space where many decision-makers are still men.

I discovered Yellowface through several reviews and a Times article about the stir it caused in publishing circles, so I’m familiar with some of the criticisms. I do think it’s fair to ask about the quality of much of the prose, even though it’s told in Hayward’s voice, and while she presents herself as an underappreciated writer, she’s also extremely unreliable and likely overstates her abilities. It’s a novel that’s more readable than literary in that sense; the prose moves, and it’s evocative, but the wordsmithing here is unremarkable. What I do not understand or agree with is criticisms of its satire being insufficiently sharp, especially from writers, because I think making the satirical elements more overt or blatant risked taking the reader out of the story. Kuang could have made this funnier, but it would have come at a cost of veracity. This story rings true based on my limited experiences in and knowledge of the publishing world, which made it work for me even when the prose was a little thin.

For some comparisons, if you’re interested, you might want to read this very even-handed review by Hugo winner Amal El-Mohtar or you could read this incredibly nasty, juvenile review in the Cleveland Review of Books.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s latest, Tom Lake.

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