→ March 19, 2025
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So Much Blue.

So Much Blue may be one of Perceval Everett’s lesser-known novels, as it hasn’t received a film adaptation or any major awards, but I suspect also because it doesn’t have any of the speculative or fantastical elements of his more famous or popular works. His prose and characterization translate beautifully to the realist mode, which isn’t surprising, and in this pensive work about a middle-aged painter dealing with the weight of memories and past failings Everett gives the deepest exploration of a character I’ve seen in the four of his novels I’ve read.

Kevin Pace is a painter, married with two kids, living what would appear from the outside to be a comfortable upper-middle-class life with the usual problems you’d expect to find in a story about a suburban family. Everett intertwines that present-day narrative, which includes a secret painting that Pace won’t show anybody, not even his wife or his best friend, with two narratives from the past: one from 1979 where he joins his best friend on a dangerous trip to El Salvador to try to find and rescue the best friend’s ne’er-do-well brother, and one from ten years before the present day where Kevin had an affair with a French painter about twenty years his junior.

The 1979 narrative is by far the most compelling of the three, as it’s part thriller, part buddy comedy, and is driven by the uncertainty of how it’s going to turn out beyond knowing that Kevin and his best friend survived. Yet the depiction of the affair is the most interesting because Everett avoids the two typical ways of writing about that topic: he doesn’t judge Kevin’s actions, and he certainly doesn’t condone them, but lets the character’s words and behaviors speak for him and the reader to do the judging. Kevin knows he’s doing something terrible, but he does it anyway and has to live with the consequences.

Those consequences are the real theme of the novel – what happened in 1979, where a ridiculous, foolhardy endeavor that starts with good intentions and eccentric characters ends in violence, and what happened in Paris both weigh tremendously on Kevin, with their impact threatening to unravel his marriage and family and to stall his career. The present-day narrative also has a significant event that forces Kevin to make a choice, and he makes the wrong one, again, even though in that case it seems like the right decision at the time, after which he has several chances to set things right and can’t bring himself to do it, a subplot that especially resonated with me.

Everett’s development of Kevin as a character across three time periods, each of which sees him change and grow in some sense (even if it’s not always positive), shows a level of craft I at least hadn’t seen in the other three novels of his I’ve read. There’s a depth of understanding of Kevin as a person, as a man, as a middle-aged man, and as a very flawed man who is still reeling from events that happened thirty years earlier, that rivals the character development in just about any contemporary novel I can recall. Whether you agree with Kevin’s choices, including the decisions he makes to keep things secret, or his own assessment of those choices, Everett’s depiction of all of Kevin shows incredible insight into the character and how people think and feel about complex situations.

As you might expect from the title, color is a recurring motif and symbol in So Much Blue, with that particular color coming up repeatedly, as the secret painting in Kevin’s shed contains various shades of blue, and he refers more than once to the fact that traditional Chinese had just one word for blue and for green. Blue itself can carry multiple meanings in art, from the  most obvious one, depression (is Kevin depressed? Is he hiding his depression from his family?), to the way painters use blue to represent distance, using more blue to show that buildings or other objects are farther from the viewer. Blue is also the color we associate with the unattainable; the sky is blue from the ground, but when we ascend a mountain or a building, we don’t get any closer to the blue, as it remains beyond our reach. The ocean is blue from a distance, but when we’re in the water, it’s clear. Kevin expresses an ambivalent relationship with the color even as he fills his hidden painting with it; is that a representation of his unfulfilled desires, a depression he wants to keep locked away, or his attempt to create distance between himself and the things he doesn’t want to remember?

Everett is approaching Ann Patchett as my favorite living American writer. She crafts incredible stories with beautiful, lyrical prose, filling the pages with believable and three-dimensional characters, while he ranges from the wildly inventive to biting satire to compassionate character study. It’s hard to believe all four of the books of his I’ve read all came from the same mind. He’s some sort of wizard.

Next up: I just finished Cho Nam-ju’s Saha and started Antonio Padilla’s Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Journey to the End of Physics.

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→ March 11, 2025
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A Song for a New Day.

Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day depicts a United States in the near future where people are compelled to stay at home and avoid any kind of public gatherings in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks and a pandemic that killed some unknown part of the population. She published it in 2019. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel on June 1st, 2020. I am going to say I think this one might have included a little bias – this is a perfectly cromulent novel, but I don’t think it’s really up to the historical standard here, even though that wasn’t a great year for sci-fi/fantasy novels.

A Song for a New Day follows two main characters, both queer women, through plot lines that intersect, split, and intersect again, with one of the two jumping forward in time. Luce Cannon (say it out loud) is a singer/songwriter whose band happened to play the last concert before the world shut down; Pinsker tells her chapters in first person, and begins her story with that final show before moving forward to the future time when live music is essentially banned. Rosemary Laws (no relation) is a young naïf who lives with her parents and works for the everything-store SuperWally (subtle) in customer support, dealing with users through a sort of virtual reality that works through wired hoodies. Through a small coincidence, she ends up getting a job with StageHoloLive, a company with a monopoly on recorded music and that streams ‘live’ shows to the SuperWally user base, again through virtual reality. Rosemary becomes a recruiter, going out into the real world in search of underground music venues to find new bands for StageHoloLive to scoop up, which eventually puts her in the crowd at one of Luce’s shows. Rosemary is, naturally, a true believer that these conglomerates are benevolent and that their services really help people, while Luce and her counterculture friends and acquaintances have other ideas – or, they just have ideas, and they help Rosemary come up with some, too.

The best parts of A Song for a New Day don’t revolve that much around the characters, neither of whom is that special or memorable, or even that tangible off the page – it’s the music, as Pinsker must be a dedicated fan of music, especially live music, to be able to evoke the sense of watching a great band in person just through her descriptions. Some of the music she describes is a little too far-fetched, as we’re talking maybe fifteen years in the future, not two hundred, but the descriptions of just being there, hearing it, feeling it in your bones, recognizing a song but also hearing it in a new way because it’s live, are the real standout here. There’s some fun and intrigue in the narrative around Rosemary’s attempts to find these illicit shows and scenes; it dovetailed nicely with my watch of A Complete Unknown, where Bob Dylan and some of his peers get their starts in little coffeehouses and other underground (albeit legal) venues in New York.

Pinsker also takes aim at Big Tech dominating more of our lives, a philosophical view I happen to share, but she lays it on so thick that it loses some of its bite. The company names, like many of the character names, are too obvious, and there’s the usual blame-the-consumer part going on – I can never blame people who simply choose the cheapest option, regardless of the hidden costs, or people who say yes to same-day delivery of something for no extra fee. That’s rational economic behavior. It’s also not in our natures to consider the externalities of anything we do; you have to learn those behaviors, like separating your recycling from your trash to keep it out of a landfill or breaking down those cardboard boxes so you’re not making more work for someone else. The blame should fall on the complicit governments that allowed these companies to get so much control over our lives and our economy – and now our Administration – but not on the consumers.

Even from my spoiler-free description, you can probably guess most of where the plot of A Song for a New Day ends up. There were virtually no surprises in the story or the development of Rosemary’s character – I don’t think Luce’s develops at all, except maybe for one sentence near the end of the book that hints at something further – so while it’s pleasant, it’s not as compelling as it could have been. The novel functions much better as a paean to the power and beauty of live music than anything else, and maybe that’s good enough for most readers. I just wonder if it would have won the Nebula if it hadn’t had a pandemic baked into the back story.

Next up: I just finished Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown and started Ursula Le Guin’s Nebula-winning YA novel Powers.

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→ February 26, 2025
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James.

Percival Everett has been writing novels for over twenty years, but he’s having a moment right now: his 2001 novel Erasure was adapted into the film American Fiction, which won its screenwriter Cord Jefferson an Academy Award; and his latest novel, James, won the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction while making the Booker Prize shortlist. (It should have won that too, but lost to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.) James retells the story of Jim, the escaped slave who accompanies Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain’s novel, from Jim’s perspective, completely reimagining the character and most of the narrative, in a book that is far more of an adventure than the novel that inspired it while also giving its protagonist far more humanity than his creator ever did.

James narrates Everett’s novel, and does so in an erudite voice that, of course, has nothing to do with the slave dialect the character uses in Twain’s work. In this novel’s universe, slaves know how to speak as well as or better than their white tormentors, but they feign all manner of ignorance to make the whites feel better about themselves and thus try to improve their own odds of survival. The plot starts out on the same track as in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with Huck faking his own death to escape his abusive father while James runs away to avoid being sold and separated from his wife Sadie and daughter Lizzie. (Twain mentioned Jim’s wife, but didn’t name her; Everett is following the convention of other writers who’ve used these characters.) The two flee upriver, with James seeing the corpse of Huck’s father but not telling the boy, Huck witnessing the murderous feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, and the two encountering the con men who call themselves the King and the Duke and who eventually sell James to a local slave owner.

Everett fills in the blanks in Twain’s novel by following James rather than Huck, giving James’ dialogue with other slaves – all in proper English, generally more proper than what the white characters use – and his own inner monologue on his life and on philosophy. He’s visited in dreams by Locke and (I think) Rousseau, reads Voltaire and John Stuart Mill, and eventually gets a hold of a pencil at great cost so he can begin to write some of his thoughts on paper. James’s narrative diverges from the original when the King and Duke briefly leave him with a third man, who sells him to a traveling minstrel group, where James meets a man named Norman and escapes with him while looking for Huck, who’s still with the two bandits. This arc returns James to their home in the end, without an appearance from Tom Sawyer, and leads to a conclusion that is far more satisfying than Twain’s, if less realistic.

James, or Jim in Twain’s work, is just not a well-developed character in the original stories, even as Twain wrote him in a far more sympathetic manner than just about any of his contemporaries did when writing of slaves or even of Black people in general. Everett’s James is intelligent, sure, but the difference is that he is whole: he has fully-developed thoughts and ideas, values, a sense of justice, empathy for others, and a desire for even a little agency over his own life. It stands above nearly every other continuation or adaptation of a famous novel I’ve ever encountered, with the possible exception of Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s similar retelling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of the madwoman in the attic – but Everett’s novel is angrier and wittier and much better paced than Rhys’s.

Everett also mimics Twain’s use of the picaresque format both for its thrilling elements and its satirical ones, although here the satire is subtler than it is in some of Everett’s other works, like the absurdist Dr. No or the violent fantasy of The Trees, the other two of his novels I’ve read so far. James reads like Everett was trying to stay authentic to Twain’s work as much as possible until he veered away from the plot in the last third of his own novel – and it works, because of the familiarity of the original (one of the few novels I’ve read twice, and the only one I had to read in high school and in college) and because of how well-structured it was in the first place. Everett is brilliant and wildly imaginative, so his restraint here isn’t just impressive, but makes the whole work more powerful in the end. I have read very few works of great literature with this sort of haste, because the story and the character are so compelling I never wanted to put the book down.

Next up: Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day, winner of the 2020 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ February 17, 2025
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A Stranger in Olondria.

Sonia Samatar’s first novel, A Stranger in Olondria, first crossed my radar because N.K. Jemisin recommended it – many years ago, maybe close to ten at this point, enough so that I don’t remember even what Jemisin said beyond praising the book. It is an unusual work of fantasy literature, with a real emphasis on the second part: Samatar’s prose and narrative are smart and challenging, taking the reader on a vast, epic journey through a new world of literature, poetry, religion, war, and bigotry, all in service of her hero’s quest to give solace to the tortured soul of a girl who died without a proper burial.

A Stranger in Olondria starts in another place entirely, and seems almost mundane by comparison to what will follow. We meet young Jevick, the second son of his strict, wealthy merchant father; his older brother was born simple, and thus was a disappointment to their father, who wanted an heir to his trade. Jevick’s father hires a tutor to help Jevick learn the Olondrian language and some of its culture, a choice that turns out to be timely as Jevick’s father dies suddenly, leaving his son to take over the family business without any direct training from his father.

On the ship he takes with his small retinue to get to Olondria, he meets a couple with a young girl, Jissavet, near his own age, who is dying of a form of curse, the true nature of which will become apparent in very small slivers as the story progresses. Jevick reaches Olondria and is overwhelmed by the luxury and iniquity of the big city, but soon afterwards he is visited by a ghost, that of the young girl, who promises to haunt him until her body is found and cremated in accordance with her culture’s norms. These visitations mark Jevick as a holy man, as the Olondrians believe her ghost is an angel, and drops him directly into a simmering religious/political conflict (really, when are the two ever separated, in life or in fiction) that will eventually put him on the run even as he tries to assuage the ghost and find her body for a funeral pyre.

This is a work of depth, in almost every way. Samatar is writing for people who read literature, using words typically not found in contemporary fiction but more common in British literature of the 19th or early 20th centuries, and crafting a layered and unsimple narrative that demands your constant attention. This is not merely the story of a haunting, which would have given us just a rote adventure as Jevick and whoever his companion or the moment might be have to flee from one spot or another while also trying to figure out where Jissavet’s body is. Samatar has instead laced the story with epic, narrative poetry, and built a world beneath the plot where unseen forces are simmering just below the boiling point, an uneasy peace in Olondria that Jevick shatters simply by being there and confiding in one person that he has been visited by a ghost. (That person was his landlord, which shows you that you should never, ever trust a landlord.) Rather than populating the novel with idiosyncratic side characters, Samatar populates it with flashbacks, stories, and myths that further build out the world and explain different aspects of the various cultures in this world she’s created. It feels scholarly, unsurprising as Samatar is a professor at James Madison, and a poet, and the daughter of a Somali scholar/historian of some renown as well.

In December, I read Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, which won the 2023 Nebula Award for Best Novel, but I never reviewed it in large part because I couldn’t decide what to say. Chandrasekera has also built an incredible, immersive world in his novel, one with political and religious undertones, but in the end, it’s unclear if the building was in service of anything other than itself. The story doesn’t really resolve – the bright doors of the title are a Macguffin, I’d argue – and the protagonist is in some ways a pawn, lacking the agency we expect in a main character. I liked the book as I was reading it, but then felt let down enough by the ending that I punted on a write up. A Stranger in Olondria helped me articulate why: If you’re building a fantastical world, I’m probably going to get sucked in fairly quickly, but you still have to pay it off in the end in the plot and/or the main character’s arc. Chandrasekera didn’t do that; Samatar did, and the Jevick who returns home at the end of her novel is an entirely different young man than the child who left it only some months earlier. It deserves a wider audience – and that’s probably why Jemisin was talking it up whenever she did.

Next up: I’m reading Robert Walser’s peculiar novel Jakob von Gunten, after which I’m going to try to tackle W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

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→ September 25, 2024
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The Unstoppable trilogy.

Charlie Jane Anders won the Nebula Award for her first novel, All the Birds in the Sky, which revolved around two teenaged protagonists who grew up together, saw their lives diverge, and then came back together in a soaring conclusion. Over the past few years, she published a young adult trilogy, Unstoppable, that was also largely built around two teenaged protagonists, although here the story is more madcap, the threats much larger, and the relationships between characters more front and center. I won’t pretend to be objective here, as I’ve met Anders and I read these books because she sent me an autographed set of the trilogy, but I thought the books were a blast.

The first book of the series, Victories Greater than Death, starts out pretty normally, both playing into and gently satirizing some of the tropes of the form, with its main character, Tina, a teenager who happens to be the Chosen One to save the galaxy and lead its Royal Fleet against its enemies, although in this case she knows the first part because her mom told her. She’s just waiting for the call, literally, as she has a beacon in her torso that will light up at some point when the aliens come to take her home. Of course, even that doesn’t go off without a hitch, as her best friend Rachael, who is a talented artist and was bullied badly enough that she’s now home schooled, ends up along for the ride into space. Unfortunately for, well, everyone, the forces attacking the Royal Fleet are very determined to make sure Tina doesn’t get back to space, and they don’t seem to care if they blow up Earth in the process. Tina does get to her ship, and not long after – with a brush with death included – she ends up part of a motley crew of teenaged humans on board who help avert the catastrophe, after which they head off into the heavens to fight crime, or, well, the bad guys, of which there turn out to be more than one. By the time we get to the second book, the stakes are much higher than they first appeared, as this is no longer just one tyrant’s power play, but an unseen and unknown force threatening to put out every sun in the universe.

Because this is a young adult series, and the main characters are all teenagers, there’s a lot of interpersonal drama amidst the intergalactic drama, both the romantic and friend varieties. Tina becomes involved with Ella, a trans girl from Brazil who ends up in the pipeline to become one of the Princesses atop the sprawling intergalactic monarchy, although the job is a lot less glamorous than the name implies. Rachael falls for another crew member, Damiani ends up with a non-human partner, and so on. Life on board a spaceship, or multiple spaceships, gets complicated.

The story itself absolutely flies, with a pace that’s almost manic at times, with very short chapters and rarely more than two or three pages without some sort of action, whether it’s a battle between starships or between people. The initial villain has an origin story that involves Tina’s alter ego, and it’s quite intricate and plausible at the same time, with Anders integrating it well into the main story through flashbacks and through the residue it leaves in the contemporary plot. Tina and Rachael share the lead roles by book two, and both are well developed, showing growth over the trilogy, with Tina reckoning with a past she didn’t know she had and Rachael learning to find her voice in multiple ways as the situations demand more of her.

The most notable part of the prose is Anders’ decision to have all characters introduce themselves with their pronouns, which is only notable the first few times before you become habituated to it and stop noticing – which, as someone who uses he/him pronouns and lists them in his bios and on name tags, is kind of how it should be. The only time it threw me was the character whose pronouns were fire/fire; I know about neopronouns but I just can’t get my brain to read them as such, so every single time Anders referred to that character by pronouns I’d have to stop and re-read the sentence. I’m guessing my kids would have less of an issue with this, but my brain isn’t as plastic as it used to be.

Dr. Katherine Mack, better known by her social media handle of @astrokatie, advised Anders on the mysterious forces threatening to end all life in the universe, and I won’t pretend I really followed it. I did sort of feel like it was the Marvel movie problem, where the stakes are just always so high that you can’t really adjust your thinking – I ended up way more invested in the individuals’ storylines than any part about saving planets or the universe as a whole. That, of course, may have been Anders’s entire intent; science fiction that leans too much on the science and doesn’t give enough time to its characters is pretty dreadful. I was good just spending more time with Tina and Rachael, and to a lesser extent their other friends, although some of the alien characters on the ship still felt, well, a bit alien to me. (The Grattna race, by the way, are my favorite creation of Anders’s here, as she gets to delve into philosophy and linguistic relativity in a wholly organic way that ends up affecting how Tina and her friends interact with them.) My only reservation about the books is that there’s a lot of death, not out of violence but out of spaceships blowing things up, even the occasional inhabited planet, and that’s at least out of the ordinary for YA fiction in my experience, so I might recommend this for slightly older readers, but Anders does have Tina et al grapple with the consequences of their actions as they become increasingly pacifistic over the course of the last two books; even the death of a dangerous nemesis has moral repercussions. It’s just a joy to read, even in its most morbid parts, and even as Anders tackles broader themes like discrimination, gender theory, utilitarianism, cultural sensitivity, and much more. And I hope I would say the same even if I had come by the books some other way.

Next up: I’m about to finish Dr. Cassie Holmes’s Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most.

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→ 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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→ January 22, 2024
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Babel.

R.F. Kuang won the most recent Nebula Award for Best Novel with her first novel for adults, Babel, a long and intense fantasy story that upends many of the conventions of the ‘youth goes to magic school’ subgenre while also attacking serious questions of colonialism and privilege. It’s dark and riveting, and perhaps its best feature is how unsentimental it is about its subject and characters.

The book’s full title is the unwieldy Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, which I think makes the book sound boring when it’s actually a thriller for the majority of its 500-odd pages. Set in the 1830s, it follows a Chinese orphan who is adopted by a strange English academic and brought to Oxford to study at its translation school, which is the most powerful institution in the country and perhaps the world. In this alternate history, translators can create powerful objects from silver by taking advantage of the meaning gaps between words in different languages that might have the same denotations but that have cultural or other contextual differences not captured by a word-four-word translation. These silver bars power much of the world at the time, but Oxford is their only producer, making England the world’s most powerful nation and allowing them to dictate the terms of trade with their partners … and to leave much of the non-European world in a state of underdevelopment because they refuse to share the technology. The orphan, who takes the English name Robin Swift, finds himself torn between the comfortable world of his academic setting and his own values, including his ties to China, which drive him to fight the ivory tower and try to bring silver-making to the broader world.

Kuang begins her novel with a familiar trope – the orphan is plucked from poverty by a mysterious (white) person who brings them to a school that reveals hitherto unknown talents and opens up a world of power and possibility to them. Robin is fluent in Mandarin and becomes so in English, while his professor-benefactor, who takes him in as a ward until he’s old enough for Oxford’s Linguistics Department, drills him in other languages to better prepare him for academe. Once there, Robin becomes fast friends with a few classmates and acclimates quickly to a life of privilege and sudden respect, as the linguistics tower is the jewel in the Oxonian crown, and those ticketed for its top floors – where the silver-making is done – are the Big Linguists On Campus. (I’m not making that other joke, sorry.) The plot begins to diverge from the archetype shortly after Robin matriculates, as an outsider attempts to recruit him to a shadowy, decentralized activist group that wants to pilfer silver bars from Oxford to share them with the developing world. Robin doesn’t choose his fate immediately, although he ultimately chooses – or is forced to – side with the rebels, opening up the second portion of the book, where Kuang continues to explore the same themes of exploitation and social justice, but shifts the style from Magic School Wunderkind to a spy thriller with tons of action and many, many surprising twists.

As a straight read, Babel is a smart and clever thrill ride up to the very last page. The gimmick around languages, using what gets lost in translation as the proxy for magic, is incredibly clever and a credit to Kuang’s intellect and her own linguistic prowess; it feels like the sort of idea you’d have if you’re fluent in several languages without much or any relationship and have tried to translate something but found the words lacking. That alone won’t power a book, but Robin is a superb protagonist, principled but cautious, anxious yet willing to make bold decisions, flawed but ultimately heroic in his own way. His friends are fun side characters, perhaps not as fleshed out as they could be other than the Indian-born Ramy, but this book is already long and giving any of them more time would probably just pad the length.  

This particular subgenre has many smart and entertaining books in it, but I can’t think of an other example that is this serious at its core. At heart, Babel is an angry book, based loosely on the leadup to the Opium Wars and the English crown’s exploitation of both its colonial empire and of China after it subjugated the latter by use of superior weaponry. It’s also a metaphor for the two centuries since then, where the West has seen enormous economic advancement, leading to longer life expectancies and better health outcomes, that it has not shared with the developing world. Some Asian countries – the so-called “Tigers” – have caught up, but did so by selling to the west and undercutting labor costs, while a few western financiers played God with their currencies and nearly killed their economies in the process. The same imperialist-capitalist philosophy that leads fictional England to keep silver-making to itself drives nations and drug manufacturers to charge market rents for treatments or cures for diseases that are devastating sub-Saharan Africa. Over 90% of the children with HIV and over 90% of the pregnant women with HIV in the world live in that region. People with HIV make up over 2% of the population of Africa as a whole. The virus is driving a co-epidemic with tuberculosis. The developed world has not stepped up with sufficient funds to stem the spread of the virus and reduce the death rate through antiretroviral drugs. Even ignoring the potential economic benefits of helping a continent with over a billion people fight an epidemic, isn’t there a moral imperative to help people not die of a disease that is 1) mostly preventable and 2) mostly treatable, just because they don’t have the money or even a way to get it?

Robin’s answer, ultimately, is yes. How he gets there, and what he and his friends end up doing to try to topple the tower, literally and figuratively, makes Babel one of the smartest and most thought-provoking page-turners I’ve read in years. I can even see why readers who’d read this first might have been disappointed by her next novel, Yellowface, which feels insubstantial by comparison. Its ideas are also important, but Babel creates a universe to call out universal ills, and forces you to reckon with its themes by plunging you into a story you won’t want to put down.

Next up: Currently reading Daniel Mason’s North Woods.

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→ November 3, 2023
→ By

Nettle & Bone.

T. Kingfisher (the nom de plume of writer Ursula Vernon) won this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel for Nettle & Bone, a light fantasy novel that subverts many tropes of the genre while adhering to others as it follows its protagonist on a quest to save her sister, the Queen of the North Kingdom. It is a blast to read, with some wonderful side characters alongside our hero and a great balance of humor and darkness, although I’m not sure it has the thematic depth of some of the best winners of that honor.

Our hero is Marra, the youngest of three sisters in the tiny Harbor Kingdom, a city-state located around the midpoint of the coast between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms, protected by its strategic location and the desire of both neighbors to avoid having it fall into their rival’s hands. As the story begins, Marra’s eldest sister, Damia, is married to the young Prince and heir to the throne of the Northern Kingdom, but she dies in an equestrian accident before she can produce a son, so the Prince then marries the middle sister, Kania. When Marra goes to see Kamia as her sister is about to give birth, however, Kania gives her a cryptic warning, and subsequent events cause Marra to realize her sister is the victim of a violent husband. She finds a dust-witch to try to obtain a way to kill the Prince, which ultimately leads her on a journey across two kingdoms with a party that grows to four, not counting the chickens, and ends with a showdown in the royal chambers.

Nettle & Bone is a quest novel, and we get a classic adventuring party of a cleric, a fighter, and a couple of mages, roughly speaking, where the pleasure is in the interplay between these characters as well as the world-building. Kingfisher has a Gaimanesque knack for crafting weird and creepy magical realms, with more delightful settings here than I can count – very reminiscent of a well-crafted RPG campaign, but with the detail of a Neverwhere or Among Others, where you’re immersed in the scene even as the writer asks you to believe any number of impossible things. The goblin market is an obvious homage to Gaiman’s work, among others, but Kingfisher gives it enough unique flourishes that it stands on its own merits.

I absolutely tore through this book, and I’ve already recommended it to two strangers who asked about it when I was reading it in public. That said, I have two major criticisms of the book, although only one of them affected my enjoyment of the work. That one is straightforward – Marra is not that interesting of a character. Kingfisher sure as hell tries to give her some personality, but beyond making her a worrywart, she doesn’t have much to distinguish herself. She’s the observer of the action, a Nick Jenkins (from A Dance to the Music of Time), but all three of her companions on the quest are more compelling characters. Marra’s whole family is boring, honestly; Kania’s a cipher, her mother doesn’t even have a name, I think, and her father is somewhere else. Kingfisher’s strength may lie in creating side characters, which is a real skill and not something I wish to diminish, but the time we spend with Marra alone forms some of the least interesting pages in the book.

My second criticism of Nettle & Bone is an academic one, which is that I don’t see much of a theme here – and for many readers, that won’t matter at all. It didn’t affect my pleasure in reading the book, either; it’s great fun, I laughed quite a bit, and I enjoyed a lot of the time I spent with these characters and in this world. I usually don’t think much about deeper themes or meaning until a book is done, after which it’s often all I think about – what is the author trying to say? What might they want the reader to take away from the book? Marra is a strong female lead, and her world, like ours, is patriarchal, while two of her three companions on the quest are also women, so there’s no question the book has a feminist bent. Beyond that, however, I couldn’t discern any greater themes here. That’s fine for the average reader, maybe for the vast majority of readers, but if we’re comparing books for the purpose of an award like the Hugo, I think questions of theme and meaning do matter. That said, I haven’t read any of the other nominees yet, so I have no opinion on whether this book was worthy other than to say I loved every minute while I was reading it.

Next up: Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a self-published, Kickstarted novel from 2014 that has spawned three Hugo-nominated sequels. I’m on page 10.

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→ September 29, 2023
→ By

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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