→ September 15, 2023
→ By

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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→ August 21, 2023
→ By

Trust.

Hernan Diaz shared this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his second novel, Trust, after his debut novel In the Distance was one of the runners-up for the same honor in 2018. In the Distance was a surprise honoree, as Diaz was an unknown author at the time and the book was published by a minor house. Trust comes from a Penguin imprint and had much higher expectations coming in, and while it did win the big honor, it reads far more as a literary exercise than a compelling narrative or a coherent novel.

Trust comprises four parts, each of which tells part of the story of a very wealthy New York City couple between the two wars, the husband a financial wizard who profits handsomely from the 1929 crash, the wife a woman of taste who gets them involved in the arts and philanthropic works until illness overtakes her. Part one is a 1937 novella about the couple called Bonds, a metafictional account of their lives that depicts her illness as a mental one and his demeanor as unfeeling and robotic. Part two is the half-finished memoir of the actual financier, his intended rebuttal to the best-selling novel that upended his life. Part three tells the story of Ida Partenza, the writer he hires to ghost-write that memoir. Part four is the diary of the wife, all fragments and contradictions. In each succeeding section, Diaz undoes what he did in the previous one(s), so that by the end it’s unclear what’s actually true, and the whole work feels like that aforementioned exercise, a way of undermining the reader by demonstrating the imprecision of memory.

Part of the problem here is that the main character is the financier, and he’s unsympathetic but also boring. He’s not an anti-hero. He’s not misunderstood, or tragic (even his widowhood fails to rise to that level). He’s just kind of a jerk, and his wife’s attempts to make him more of a human don’t really pan out. Even finding out how much the novel may have wronged him doesn’t make him a more interesting central character, and certainly the descriptions of the story from the ghostwriter’s point of view paint him in a worse, if different, light. (I was all set to rip Diaz’s bombastic insufferable prose when I reached the second section and realized that that was the prose of his fictional novelist.)

It was hard not to think of the similarly titled book Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi, which explored similar thematic ground in a much more straightforward and readable fashion. (I was also reminded of it when I went to save this file on my laptop and the review for the earlier book popped up.) Choi’s book delved into the unreliability of memory and the way other people can remember the same event in different ways because of memory discrepancies, perspectives, and prior lived experiences, and it did so in a way that also made you care about or at least invested in some of the characters. I haven’t even named the main characters in Trust because they don’t matter enough. I didn’t give a hoot about the husband, the wife, or really even the ghostwriter, because Diaz didn’t give me reason to care.

The Pulitzer committee never reveals much about its thinking, but its one sentence on Trust referred toits “linked narratives rendered in different literary styles,” and that tells me this was writers responding to a feat of writing craft – which is, to be clear, a good reason to give a book a literary award. They likely weighed that more than the novel’s lack of direction or what I at least found to be kind of a boring plot with poorly drawn characters. It’s nowhere near the novel that its co-winner, Demon Copperhead, is, perhaps choosing a higher level of difficulty – although Barbara Kingsolver didn’t go easy on herself – without that other novel’s compelling lead character or well-paced, intriguing plot. I’d put it more towards the middle of the Pulitzer pack, certainly ahead of 2022’s awful choice The Netanyahus or a good chunk of early winners that haven’t aged well, but nowhere near the best that the Pulitzers have honored in recent years.

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→ June 11, 2023
→ By

Demon Copperhead.

Barbara Kingsolver shared this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – the first time the honor was split among two books – for her novel Demon Copperhead, which shared the honor with Hernan Diaz’s Trust. Demon Copperhead borrows its structure and characters from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, transplanting the whole story to a poor mining county in the Appalachians, narrated by its title character from his early childhood to adulthood as the opioid crisis devastates his community, family, and his own life.

Demon is born to a single mother in Lee County, where the mining industry employed nearly everyone and then left them underemployed, injured, and increasingly addicted to painkillers. Demon, whose real name is Damon but acquired the nickname “Demon” early in life and had it stick, never knows any stability from the word go – his mother is a recovering addict, marries a local tough guy who terrorizes her and abuses Demon, only to have his mother die and his stepdad toss him out into the hands of social services. His path takes him through two foster homes, including the con-artist McCobbs, then to his estranged grandmother’s house, then back to Lee County and the high school football team, only to have a knee injury push him into the bottomless well of oxycontin. It’s a parade of tragedies interspersed with dark humor, leading towards eventual small triumphs, told by one of the most memorable narrator characters I’ve ever encountered.

If you know the bones of David Copperfield, from the book or perhaps from Armando Iannucci’s faithful 2020 film adaptation, then you’ll know the general plot outline of Demon Copperhead, as it adheres to the former book’s major story beats right to the end. Almost every character here has a clear analogue in the original – Demon is David, the McCobbs are the Micawbers, U-Haul is Uriah Heep, and so forth – that also provides the foundation for the modern versions, although they’re fleshed out enough to feel different from the originals. You could see U-Haul becoming Demon’s main antagonist early on, especially once you connect him to Uriah, but the way in which this plays out is different enough from the original to make it seem new.

This novel’s real strength is Demon, though. Kingsolver has given him a unique voice that combines the wisdom of his experiences through the story, the naïveté of his place of birth, and layers of empathy that appear at surprising times throughout the work. Kingsolver has used interesting narrative techniques before, as in The Poisonwood Bible, but here she does so with a single character who is thoroughly developed, who grows and learns throughout the novel, and whose flaws are right there on display even in his own telling. David Copperfield is someone you root for throughout Dickens’s novel because he’s so inherently good, and his travails are the result of encounters with terrible people and the extreme economic inequality of England in the early 1800s. Demon is more complex, making poor choices, sometimes to the point of treating people who care for him quite badly, even missing out on opportunities and lifelines. It’s a little harder to root for him, although ultimately I came down on that side, bearing in mind that it was clear where things were all going to end.

Dickens’s work was a social commentary on that inequality and the abysmal treatment of the poor, especially children, in his era, a theme he’d first covered in Oliver Twist and would return to many times in the later parts of his life. Kingsolver does the same here, with two focal points – the opioid epidemic and its main drivers in Purdue Pharmaceuticals; and the abandonment of rural people by nearly every stage of government, from counties and school districts up to the federal level. It’s not subtle by any means, and that’s been a criticism of the book, but I don’t know how you can be subtle about the harm that opioids have wreaked on these parts of the country. Kingsolver delivers the commentary in the most granular fashion, by showing the epidemic’s impact on individual characters and their families, most notably children neglected, abused, or left orphaned by those addicted, with scant discussion of policy questions or legal maneuvers. Purdue gets its mention, but mostly because Demon’s Aunt June briefly dates a guy who’s a sales rep for the company, and for the rest of the book they’re an offscreen villain, while every form of government is asleep at its respective wheel. It’s very Dickensian in a contemporary way, trading the workhouse for rehab, sharing its disdain for the central government’s failure to protect its most vulnerable charges.

It’s an arduous read because of all of the slings and arrows Demon suffers along the way, but Kingsolver does it more concisely than Dickens, and with such a compelling voice as the narrator that it’s both quicker than its page count would imply and more enjoyable than you’d think for a story where people do horrible things to each other and themselves. The adult Damon’s wry, wise telling of his own life is what truly powered me through the book so quickly. And with such a distinctly American plot and setting, it’s a worthy winner of the Pulitzer honor.

Next up: Susanna Hoffs, one of my favorite musicians of the 1980s and early 1990s, just released her first novel, This Bird Has Flown.

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→ April 14, 2023
→ By

The Hero of this Book.

Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway was my favorite novel of 2019, an intoxicatingly humanist novel that loved its characters in all their eccentricities. The Hero of this Book is her newest novel, her first since then, a brief but dazzling work of autofiction – a charge the narrator denies – as McCracken uses her gift to grapple with her grief after the death of her mother.

The narrator is McCracken, or it isn’t, or most likely it’s both, and she takes pains to convince us both ways, but regardless, her mother has died, and she has gone to London to revisit some of the places she’d been with her mother, and some new places, as she remembers her mother’s life and deals with her own grief. The narrator’s mother was a fascinating woman in the retelling, coming in just a shade under five feet tall, facing physical difficulties through just about her entire life, marrying a difficult man, and, as far as I can tell, getting her money’s worth out of life even with everything it threw at her. She sounds like a real kick.

The trip through London, which all takes place in a single day within the book, is part framing device but also parallels the peripatetic nature of memory, especially how your memories of a parent may span decades (if everyone involved is so fortunate). The narrator walks around London, Joyce-like, while dancing back and forth between the present and her memories of her mother, the way a painter might move around a canvas without apparent purpose, only for a complete picture to emerge once the painting is nearly finished. Her mother appears to have been an extremely interesting person, a Jewish woman raised in Iowa with a twin sister, often confused for someone from all manner of ‘exotic’ origins due in part to her vantablack hair. The portrait of her mother arises as an accumulation of these details, how she looked, how she walked, things she liked, things of which she didn’t approve. Her mother liked cats. She told the cats she loved them. She almost never told her daughter that. You should already feel the outlines of the character forming just from those three sentences. It’s a clinic on character development – and McCracken, who teaches writing at the University of Texas-Austin, throws in many little notes on how to write better characters, as well as other tips for the would-be author, even after telling readers not to trust any writer who does such a thing. (She also offers this wonderful, pithy quote that I haven’t been able to stop pondering since I read the book: “An unpublished book is an ungrounded wire.”)

McCracken’s own mother hated memoirs as well, and the author had promised her mum that she’d never turn her into a character in one of her books, so what exactly The Hero of this Book is remains an unanswered question. It’s fiction, so it can’t be a memoir; the details of the narrator’s mother adhere so much to the details of the author’s mother that, well, isn’t it a memoir? “A narrative composed from personal experience,” sayeth Merriam-Webster, which, if not the authority on the meanings of words, is certainly an authority, and the one with the best Twitter account. Then this book is a memoir. I prefer the term “autofiction,” although the narrator here not only rejects the term, but salts the soil beneath it with her scorn, saying it sounds like something a robot would write – if only she knew that ChatGPT was coming. Or perhaps she did. It wouldn’t surprise me.

That elusive quality is The Hero of this Book’s strongest feature – it is brief, and yet it manages to confound you in a delightful way. It doesn’t try to bounce between genres, but exists between them, occupying spaces you didn’t realize existed. With McCracken’s lovely prose, which once again shines with wit and heart (“I have no interest in ordinary people, having met so few of them in my life”), it’s a delight from start to finish. I have no idea what’s even in the running for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which will be announced in about three weeks, but I’ll be pulling for this one to win.

Next up: Percival Everett’s Dr. No, itself a Pulitzer candidate and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Fiction award last month.

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→ March 24, 2023
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The Rabbit Hutch.

Tess Gunty won the National Book Award in 2022 for her debut novel The Rabbit Hutch, the title of which refers to a low-income housing complex in a declining Rust Belt town called Vacca Vale that is home to a broad cast of peculiar characters. It’s a compelling read and the prose is lovely, although the stories of the various characters don’t tie together that well, giving the book the feel of a series of nested short stories rather than a single, coherent work.

The most prominent characters in The Rabbit Hutch are the four young adults who have just recently left the town’s foster-care system, including 18-year-old Blandine Watkins, the star of the show in more ways than one. She’s beautiful and eccentric, unknowable in many ways, bewitching at least one of her three male roommates (Malik), delving into all sorts of mysticism and woo while redefining who she is as she enters adulthood. Those three roommates are all just a little further into their majority, none of them doing very well at adulting, which is why, we’re led to believe, they so easily fall into a bizarre pattern of ritual violence against animals. Gunty also gives us an extended flashback to a former student at the local high school, Tiffany, who becomes the subject of the school’s 42-year-old music teacher’s advances and eventually his victim as well; and a long digression about Elsie, who was once the child star of a TV sitcom called Meet the Neighbors that’s beloved by one of the Hutch’s residents, and whose son, it turns out, hated her guts and is completely out of his mind. He doesn’t even live in Vacca Vale, and the thickness of the thread that brings him there by the end of the novel could be measured in nanometers.

It’s a disjointed novel, but Gunty has a real knack for crafting characters and describing her settings so that the reader observes from both the bird’s-eye view and from up close, putting you right there in the action through her use of both detail and metaphor. She refers to a dowdy 40-year-old woman named Joan who moderates the forums on an obituaries web site as having “the posture of a question mark (and) a stock face,” which only underscores the woman’s insignificance in the town and to some degree in her own life. She speaks of an older man failing on dating apps as hating women “an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument.” Even when the plot was all over the place – and it was, a lot, especially when Gunty jerks us out of Vacca Vale to follow Elsie and her idiot son – the prose carried it through.

The novel opens with a passage where Blandine “exits her body,” which is going to lead readers to assume she’s been killed and they’ll have to wait the whole book to find out how and why. I’m going to spoil this right now, because it’s a dumb gimmick: She is alive at the end of the book. There’s more to it than this, but I can’t tell you how irritated I was even when I figured out before the midpoint that this was a scam – and it’s just not necessary. The progression of the story around these characters, and the way Gunty brings together the various subplots, is more than enough to sustain the narrative greed here. The strong implication that Blandine is dead, boosted by some other hints throughout the novel, only to reveal at the end that she’s not is cheap and unworthy of the rest of the book.

The Rabbit Hutch follows in the Richard Russo tradition of profiling dying industrial towns through their residents, here with less humor but with far better-written women than Russo ever provided. It also reminded me of J. K. Rowling’s poorly-received novel The Casual Vacancy, her first novel for adults and one that received a lot of criticism because it wasn’t Harry Potter. That book was set in a fictional town in southwest England that also seemed a bit down on its luck and followed a very broad, and in that case more diverse, cast of residents in the wake of the death of a parish councillor, working in themes of income inequality, racial injustice, drug policy, and more. I liked that book more than critics did as a whole, and think it’s a fair comparison here, with a more ambitious plot but inferior prose to Gunty’s.

I can’t speak to the National Book Award for last year, as I haven’t read any of the five other finalists, but The Rabbit Hutch feels much more to me like a promising rookie season that points to superstar potential than a “best of the year” sort of work. I enjoyed it, I loved the prose, I thought some of the subplots worked but as many didn’t, and there was too much manipulation of the reader’s interest for a novel this serious. I hope and expect that her next work will play more to her strengths, and dispense with the stunt writing.

Next up: Percival Everett’s The Trees.

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→ January 25, 2023
→ By

Blacktop Wasteland.

S.A. Cosby’s 2020 novel Blacktop Wasteland takes the one-last-job gimmick into the back woods of North Carolina, where Beauregard “Bug” Montage, a getaway driver of exceptional skill who has since retired from the larceny game, finds his legitimate business threatened with bankruptcy if he can’t come up with $20,000. Coincidentally, a thief who cost him a huge payout the last time they worked together shows up with the promise of a six-figure score if Bug will drive him and a buddy to knock over a jewelry store in Virginia. Needless to say, the job does not go as planned, leading to a high body count and a mostly predictable ride down the highways and back roads as Bug tries to save himself, his family, and maybe his business too.

Bug’s life is not conducive to being a getaway driver, as he’s now living with his wife and two kids, while he has at least one daughter from a previous relationship, and takes some care of her because her mother is an addict. This, of course, leads to some fairly obvious complications, where anyone involved in the heist gone wrong can threaten not just Bug but any members of his family. His garage is failing because one of his many nemeses in their small town has opened up another, new garage and siphoned off a large portion of his customers – but that garage conveniently burns down, and its racist white owners decide to pay Bug (who is Black) a visit. And the planning of the heist itself turns out to be less than ironclad, as what Bug’s confederates are stealing belongs to someone else who will be very unhappy to see it lost, while the two men he’s working with turn out to be less than worthy of his trust.

It’s a lot, and I don’t mean that in a good way; it feels like Cosby is artificially ratcheting up the stakes as much as he can to produce a specific level of high tension and a dire situation for Bug to escape. While the plot itself isn’t predictable, the plot’s destination is. There’s only one way this can all end, really, and you can paint in broad strokes how Cosby is going to get us there, and who’s likely to be left standing when the story ends.

That’s not to say Blacktop Wasteland is boring – it is tense, and sometimes exciting, and never slow. There’s one particular car chase that is about as well-written as I’ve seen, where Cosby translates the speed of the chase and Bug’s dexterity behind the wheel into prose without breaking the spell of the scene with extraneous descriptions. I’m not a car guy, but Cosby seems well-versed in engines and what cars might be capable of doing in the hands of someone like Bug, who is both expert driver and mechanic. I’m also not immune to the type of narrative greed created by a plot where one man is targeted by just about everyone else in the story except for his own family; Cosby pulls the rubber band as far as it can possibly go without breaking, and when he lets it go, it’s effective, even if you can guess the general outline of things to come.

In the end, however, Blacktop Wasteland felt too familiar, and in some ways too derivative of other heist novels, such as the Parker novels from Richard Stark (a pen name of Donald Westlake). Cosby may have been trying to touch on some larger themes here, especially of race, but if so, it doesn’t achieve that goal – there’s only the story itself, which is enough to sustain the read but not enough to recommend it.

Next up: P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn, winner of last year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ November 6, 2022
→ By

How High We Go in the Dark.

Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark was one of three finalists for this year’s inaugural Ursula K. Leguin Prize for Fiction, losing the ultimate honor to Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust. Nagamatsu’s work is a short story novel, a series of connected anecdotes that involve related characters, all of it set in a dystopian but easy to foresee near future where climate change is melting permafrost, thawing out a virus that causes a horrifying global pandemic. Each story after the opening one explores the ramifications of these two events, ranging from the ridiculous to the tragic, but always returning to the humanity of their characters.

The initial story sets up everything that follows, as we meet Dr. Cliff Miyashiro at an archaeological dig site in eastern Siberia where his daughter, Clara, fell and died shortly after discovering the remains of a possibly-Neanderthal girl who died of mysterious causes with strange markings on and near her body. It emerged as the ice melted due to climate change, which also activated a virus in the corpse that quickly infects several members of the camp. By the start of the second story, it has become a global pandemic, and, in almost direct contrast to SARS-CoV-2, it is far more deadly to children, which leads to especially perverse ideas – like an amusement park where parents take their gravely ill children to be euthanized on a rollercoaster.

Within a few stories, Nagamatsu has reshaped society around the pandemic, making funerary companies the most valuable in the world that also control the cryptocurrencies that take over the world’s economy. It goes a bit too far – the company that manufactures the spaceship that heads out in search of another habitable planet is Yamato-Musk, which seems especially embarrassing for Nagamatsu after the last week – but that’s clearly his concept, pushing every idea to the farthest possible boundary and then exploring how his characters respond to it. In that sense, it’s very Philip K. Dick, but less insane, with at least some grounding in actual science, at least to the extent that he’s anticipating readers’ first objections to some of his concepts. There are a pair of stories that broke my suspension of disbelief, but even in those cases, I could go with it because they were both well-written and focused on the characters rather than the impossible facts.

Nagamatsu eschews easy answers, and one possible reading of How High We Go in the Dark is as an  extremely bleak outlook on the near future of our planet and our species, that climate change is inevitable (true) and we are totally unprepared for its impact (partly true), that our current pandemic, which isn’t mentioned in the book, is a harbinger of more and larger ones to come (likely). I didn’t read it that way, as grim as the subject matter is. Nagamatsu’s characters all look forward and try to find not just ways to survive, but reasons. There’s just one direct suicide in the book, and some euthanasia of the very sick, but the vast majority of the characters here are fully engaged in living. Even Dennis, a character in multiple stories who would probably have been equally at odds and ends in a non-catastrophe world, is still striving for something, even if he has no idea what it might be.

Even with such dismal subject matter, How High We Go in the Dark is one of the most compelling and fastest reads I’ve had in ages. Nagamatsu’s prose is clear and unadorned, hitting the right amount of detail when he’s delving into science or his speculations. There’s so much more focus on people than ideas here that the work rises above most cli-fi or other stories of realistic dystopias, up to the level of Station Eleven, a novel that turned a global pandemic that crumbled civilization into a story of great beauty around humanity, kindness, and the enduring power of art. Nagamatsu deals more with the personal tragedies of his characters and how society might grapple with mass deaths that involve far more children than our current pandemic, where the world has largely shrugged at the deaths of 1 in every 1000 people. It’s a remarkable novel and thought experiment, one of the best things I’ve read this year.

Next up: Jess Grose’s Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood. I have an advance copy so I can read it before Jess comes on my podcast in two weeks.

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→ June 26, 2022
→ By

The Enchanted.

I picked up a copy of Rene Denfeld’s debut novel, The Enchanted, just because I liked the look of the cover – it was one of the Harper Perennial Olive editions, with smaller dimensions and some subtle but lovely art on the cover. I’m rarely so suckered in by good artwork on a book, maybe taking one off the shelf but almost never just plain buying the book because of it; I figured at worst it would look nice on the shelves (and it wasn’t expensive, since it was a gently used copy from Changing Hands). And my God, am I glad I did. What a wonderful, ethereal novel, one that pulls hope out of the depths of its setting’s despair.

The narrator of The Enchanted is an unnamed prisoner on death row who cannot speak, and who views the world around him through a magical lens of sorts – not as something unreal, but as a world of possibilities, with hope and promise for other people even though he has no chance of either for himself. He explains the story of one of the other men on death row, known just as York, and the investigator, known just as the Lady, who works for York’s lawyers and tries to find information on his past that might earn him a reprieve from the electric chair. Within these stories, the narrator talks about one or two other denizens of the same ward, the incredibly brutal life in the prison, and, very obliquely, about how he came to be on death row, although he never explains what his initial crime was.

The prose starts out seeming a bit precious, what with the lack of proper names for most people in the book, but it suits Denfeld’s incredible gift for storytelling. The narrator’s view of the world comes through in the faint unreality around everything in the novel, even the graphic violence that appears quite frequently, as is fitting for a prison of this sort, where prisoners are killed and raped – and sometimes guards are as well – while no one on the outside really cares, because one more dead prisoner is one fewer mouth for the taxpayers to feebly feed.

The real narrative greed comes in the Lady’s story – her quest for answers about York, about how he came to become a brutal killer who’d get the death penalty, but also how she came to pursue this job, and what wounds this particular search opens up in her. She has an uneasy bond with the defrocked priest who serves as the chaplain for the death row inmates, if they choose to utilize him, which forms a weirdly sweet undercurrent in a novel of so much sorrow, even though her story turns out to be quite dark. Her efforts for York are complicated by the fact that he wants to die, and has asked his lawyers to stop making efforts to spare his life, so when she learns information that might be enough to get his sentence commuted, she has to decide whether to use it or abide by his wishes.

Denfeld worked as a chief investigator for a public defender’s office, often on death-row cases, and shows incredible empathy for her characters here, recognizing that there is humanity in everyone. Even the people who do the worst things might still have humanity in them. They’ve often have had the worst things done to them. Maybe that cost them their humanity. Denfeld isn’t writing them off. Neither is the Lady. And where it all ends up is quite something – perhaps I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t, not really, and the point Denfeld makes with the final reveal becomes the core message of the entire book. Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say it’s a plea for empathy and understanding, and I found it extremely moving.

Next up: Jason Kander’s Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD.

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→ June 17, 2022
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The Netanyahus.

Joshua Cohen won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his short novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, which fictionalizes a real event involving Benjamin Netanyahu and his father, the Zionist historian Benzion Netanyahu, visiting Cornell University and the esteemed literary scholar Harold Bloom. This is a travesty; in a year with several better books (at least two by Black authors), the selection of such an unfunny, narrow work for the highest honor in American literature undermines the award and robs more deserving books of attention.

The book is narrated as a memory by a professor from Corbindale College in upstate New York, a badly disguised stand-in for Cornell, who is chosen to be on the committee to interview the senior Netanyahu for a faculty position because he’s the only Jewish professor in the department. They expect Benzion to show up alone, but instead, he brings his wife and three unruly children – Benji, the middle one; Yonatan, who would later die a hero in the raid on Entebbe; and Iddo, who’d later become a physician, author, playwright. Benzion doesn’t actually reach Corbindale until the middle of the novel, so the first half is the sort of insular follies that made Netflix’s The Chair a modest hit among academics, as well as a portrait of the casual anti-Semitism of the late 1960s. Then the Netanyahus show up and trash everything, including the novel itself.

The entire family, in the book at least, sucks. The father is an intellectual, a strong Zionist who makes compelling arguments on the pages, but he’s also a selfish asshole. His wife is worse, and invites her entire family to stay with the protagonist, whose wife wants no part of this (nor should she). The two older boys are assholes, not just in the way that most teenaged boys are, but with a spectacular lack of self-awareness. I suppose Iddo is the least offensive of the bunch, but the point is that these are deeply unlikeable, one-dimensional characters who suffocate the last half of the novel with their presence, and add nothing to it.

Cohen’s writing is insufferably pretentious, right down to his frequent, deliberate choices of uselessly esoteric vocabulary words. Writing of a character “knowing at some chthonic lake-depth that …” is pointless, just a way to send the reader to the dictionary to show off your own linguistic prowess. (It means “relating to the underworld.” “Abyssal” would have worked better here, or just saying “knowing at the deepest level of his subconscious,” which uses words any middle school student could understand.) Another passage goes “logopoeic, propaedeutic,” using words only an academic might know and love – more on that in a moment. “Nugatory” does not, in fact, refer to the center of your 3 Musketeers bar, but is the rare word that describes itself: of no value or importance. In other words, worthless. The word Cohen needed was “worthless,” but he chose the more difficult one. The entire book is like this, and it is a work of supreme arrogance.

So why the heck did it win the Pulitzer? It’s not actually funny. The story is small and unremarkable, and the themes are fairly narrow. But it is a book about academia, and about Harold Bloom. At least 30% of the Pulitzer Prize Board for 2022 comprises current professors or Deans. The majority of the Board are current or former writers who would probably all be familiar with Bloom’s work. This is a book for them and about them. It’s The Artist and Argo telling Hollywood that movies are important. The Netanyahus puts a fancypants college at the center of its narrative, and takes one of the great critics and historians of literature and makes him the protagonist. The Board probably couldn’t resist. I can’t think of another explanation – I’ve read all of the Pulitzer winners, and this is the worst choice in at least 25 years. I found nothing at all redeeming in The Netanyahus except that it’s short. There were so many better books right in front of them – Hell of a Book won the National Book Award for Fiction and The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, so they weren’t obscure, and both were miles and miles better than this thing. Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This made the Booker Prize shortlist, and it’s better and far more relevant to our current moment. Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle and Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby were better. And that’s just among novels I read. I know it’s just a prize that doesn’t make the novels considered any better or worse, but these awards drive sales, and I’d rather see a better book get that big sales bump than this nonsense.

Next up: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, a Booker Prize winner from 2004.

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→ June 8, 2022
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Freedom.

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was his first novel in nine years, since his acclaimed 2001 novel The Corrections, and was greeted with even greater praise. Esquire called it the Great American Novel (or at least a Great American Novel), two New York Times writers wrote glowing reviews, and the Guardian called it “the novel of the century.” It is well-written and intricately plotted, but it’s also far too long and, like The Corrections, a terribly depressing take on American suburban life – white suburban life, specifically.

The family at the center of this novel is the Berglunds, Patty and Walter and their two kids, Jessica and Joey, who live in suburban St. Paul and whose family is gradually unraveling. The couple’s marriage is hanging by a thread, the kids are moving out and moving away from their parents, and Walter’s job is short-circuiting his brain by causing cognitive dissonance. Walter’s former roommate, Richard, is an aging ex-punk rocker who has had a second 15 minutes of fame thanks to a new indie band and our culture’s habit of making everything old cool again; his story intersects multiple times with both Walter’s and Patty’s. Patty has left behind her New York family, including her politician mother, but lost much of her identity as a stay-at-home mom whose mind has atrophied and who finds herself disdained by one child and used by the other. Walter’s job, creating a nature preserve for the cerulean warbler by giving away land rights to a company that intends to engage in mountaintop removal mining, a highly destructive practice that conflicts with Walter’s longheld environmentalist principles. Joey hooks up with the girl next door and has a hard time getting out of the relationship … I could go on, but you get the idea. Everyone’s a mess, and everyone’s miserable, despite having all of the privileges and benefits in the world.

Based on just those two novels, it seems like that’s Franzen’s worldview – money and prosperity won’t make you happy; in fact, they might make you less so. He creates these setups where the reader would think the characters’ lives would be easy, and they’d be better able to find happiness, and then the characters go and fuck everything up (often literally, by fucking people other than their partners, which, shocker, leads to a lot of trouble and unhappiness for multiple characters around them). Having money just leads them to greater opportunities to make mistakes. (They’re all white, though, so some very real problems that affect people of color are just not in play here.) The difference between Freedom and The Corrections is that this time, their misdeeds are more interesting, and sometimes even funny. The presence of some interesting side characters, especially Richard, elevates a huge portion of the novel – he’s the best character in the book, and the most believable. Franzen must be a longtime music fan, because even small details around Richard’s music career are credible, and he’s crafted a character who could just as easily have been part of Utopia Avenue.

Then Walter’s work project takes over as the primary narrative, and the book runs out of steam with about 200 pages to go. The plan itself is far-fetched, but the execution within the book is a mess, and requires more suspension of disbelief and acceptance of some of the less credible details, like Walter’s obsession with zero population growth or the plan he and Lalitha, the very attractive (of course) young employee with whom he must work very closely on this project, cook up. I’m sure you can imagine where that goes, but that’s probably the most believable part of this entire subplot. Franzen comes up with a local yokel to oppose their efforts in West Virginia, right out of central casting, and it all devolves from there until he writes himself out of a corner with a convenient plot twist to get us to the end.

Through about half of the book, I was on its wavelength, certainly appreciating the prose and the plotting even if I couldn’t quite say that I was enjoying it. Once the story moved to Walter and Lalitha and the cerulean warbler, though, I started to lose interest, to the point where eventually told my wife I just wanted the book to be over. It starts out better than The Corrections, but it seems like Franzen didn’t have a great idea where he wanted Freedom to go. The big conclusion to the West Virginia storyline doesn’t work well with what appears to be the overall theme of the book, unless Franzen was just trying to make fun of suburban liberals and their pet causes – but even that is weirdly set up, since Walter had interest in environmental causes like this going back to college, and his upbringing was nowhere near as privileged as the life that he’s given his children. I get it, Jonathan. Suburban life is hell. I don’t think I need to read another novel about it, though.

Next up: Just finished Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus this morning.

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