→ September 18, 2020
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The Invention of Sound.

I was the host for Chuck Palahniuk’s live-streamed Q&A event through Midtown Scholar, an independent bookstore in Harrisburg, PA, last Friday night, discussing Chuck’s new book The Invention of Sound. I’ve just gotten into Chuck’s oeuvre, having read that and Adjustment Day and just starting Fight Club, so I was simultaneously shocked and entertained by his newest novel, which is violent, dark, often funny, and extremely thought-provoking.

The Invention of Sound pairs two narratives that we learn early in the novel are going to intersect. One is that of Gates Foster, a father whose daughter, Lucinda, vanished from his office building about ten years earlier, leading to the demise of his marriage and his own downward spiral into obsessively hunting for her image in online pedophilia and child-porn communities. The other is that of Mitzi, a sound engineer who crafts and sells blood-curdling, realistic screams to movie and television producers, a business she inherited from her father and that she has built further with the help of Schlo, a successful producer who buys some of her best screams. We’ll also meet the wonderfully-named Blush Gentry, an actress on the downside of her character who sees a chance to boost her profile with Gates’ help – and who was the actor on screen when one of Mitzki’s most potent screams was used in a B-movie many years earlier.

Palahniuk was a great interview, and one of the best answers he gave me, which I think is instructive for all readers of fiction and for would-be writers as well, was that he uses violence as a way to bring the reader into the text and make the events on the page more visceral. (He said that drugs and sex also work in the same way.) The violence here is mostly implied, at least, rather than described graphically, as it was in Adjustment Day, but it’s there, and the specter of this violence lurks on every page – it raises the tension, but I read this with a good amount of fear that I was going to turn the page and find something that would turn my stomach.

Under the veneer of violence and depravity, however, are deeper explorations of questions like grief, especially when you’re grieving without closure; and of the power of fiction to move us, for better or for worse. Gates’ methods of dealing with his grief are not exactly evidence-based, but they do tell us something about the kind of open-ended horror of losing a child without knowing what happened to them – a rare occurrence, but among the most horrifying things any parent can conceive – and serve as an explanation for some of Gates’ more irrational or just plain dangerous choices.

Mitzi’s story is less successful than Gates’, although it’s just as compelling to read; it’s just hard to understand why she carries on with this business, knowing its personal toll on her, even when Palahniuk offers us a trauma in her past that might explain some of her risk-seeking behavior. She’s on her own death spiral, almost literally, but the more we learn about her character the harder it is to fathom why, more so because she goes so far out of her way to try to save her friend Schlo from almost certain death closer to the end of the book. She’s a villain, but also a victim, which makes her complex but ultimately inscrutable.

This might be too much of my own interpretation, but if I didn’t know Palahniuk’s work or reputation, I might have thought The Invention of Sound offered a sort of condemnation of horror films and other works of art that aim to please an audience by distilling and serving up the pain of others. There’s a whole genre of horror film that I won’t watch, where the violence is itself the point and the audience is supposed to root for the killer(s); Mitzi’s screams, and the industry she serves, feel like a satirical rendering of that kind of exploitative, misanthropic cinema. Why exactly do so many people enjoy watching the suffering of others, fictional or real? Would there really be a market for screams as realistic as those Mitzi sells, where no one asks how she manages to produce them? And is there tragedy at the end of this pursuit of greater horrors?

I’ll spoil one thing that probably should be obvious from the start of The Invention of Sound – Gates isn’t getting a happy resolution to his story, although he gets … something, certainly. The pleasure of reading his narrative is the multiple surprises that Palahniuk springs on us in the last few pages, twists for which he laid clues but that I at least missed while reading. It’s brilliant in several ways, and incredibly disturbing, but I can’t quite put my finger on what Palahniuk might be trying to say.

Next up: I’m reading his Fight Club, although of course I’ve seen the movie already.

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→ July 9, 2020
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The Dutch House.

Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House was one of the three finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, losing the top honor to Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys. The honor was long overdue for Patchett, who received a Pen Faulkner award and what is now called the Women’s Prize for Fiction for Bel Canto and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Commonwealth. She’s in the uppermost echelon of American novelists, and worthy of more critical acclaim than she’s received. The Dutch House isn’t her best – that would be Bel Canto, a more ambitious novel that Patchett says was her attempt to write her take on The Magic Mountain – but it’s something different from her, a return to the narrower character studies of her earlier career but with greater emotional depth, informed by the wisdom of a quarter-century of living.

 The Dutch House tells the story of Danny, the narrator, and his older sister Maeve, who live in the colossal estate that gives the book its title, in the northeast Philadelphia suburbs. Their mother left the family several years earlier for unknown reasons, leaving them with their real estate mogul father, who, as the novel opens, is about to marry Andrea, a much younger woman, and then brings her and her two daughters into the house. Andrea loves the house and the status it confers, but has little use for Danny or Maeve, and eventually casts them out when the opportunity presents itself, starting the siblings on decades of acrimony and grief for what they lost, emotions and memories they process by parking outside the house, often for hours, over the ensuing years.

Danny tells us the story, but Maeve is just as much a central character here, better developed than Danny is, and the most influential figure in Danny’s life. (As an aside, I couldn’t help but picture Maeve as Emma Mackey, who plays the character by that name on Sex Education.) Maeve has the memories of their mother that Danny lacks, and has just enough of an advantage of age to be wiser and more perceptive than her brother, which serves them both well when Andrea arrives on the scene. She’s a diabetic, which becomes significant at multiple points in the book, and appears to sacrifice some of her future to help Danny – although it’s possible her motives are mixed up with nostalgia and an unwillingness to leave the area where she grew up.

The story jumps forward and back in time, so we see Danny as an adult, after medical school, then find out how and why he ended up pursuing that academic path from the point where we first saw him as a kid who played basketball and loved going around with his father once a month to collect rent and see properties, but didn’t have a ton of use for school. The relationships between the siblings and their distant father, and the siblings and the two older women who work in the house and end up helping raise the kids – at least until Andrea kicks them out –  form part of a foundation for both Danny and Maeve as they mature into adulthood. The problem they encounter is that the void left by their mother’s departure, which they’re told was so she could go help the poor in India, leaves the foundation incomplete, and their obsessive, nostalgic attachment to the house, even after there’s no one living there who truly matters to them, seems both symbolic of what they’ve lost and a sad testament to how the past can prevent us from moving into the future.

I had a hard time reading Danny’s voice for at least a solid third of the book, continually ‘hearing’ the narrator as a young girl, probably because I know Ann Patchett’s style so well (and know that she’s a woman), and can’t recall her writing in the first person for a male character before. That sensation faded as Danny grew up in the first half of the novel and his voice became more distinctive, while he also felt like more of a participant in the action rather than a passive observer (to whom many things happen, however). I think this also arose because Maeve is a much more clearly defined character from the start of the book, while Danny starts out as unmolded clay and grows into adulthood before the reader, a maturation that comes in fits and starts and doesn’t end up where you – or Maeve – expect it to finish.

Of all contemporary authors whose work I know, Patchett might have the most empathy toward her main characters, no matter how flawed; only Andrea, who is a bit of a one-dimensional plot device here, misses out on this, while her two daughters, Maeve and Danny’s mother, and the nanny who was fired when Danny was just four all reappear in some form before the novel is out to get resolution, if not actual redemption. You can probably see the main plot event at the book’s conclusion coming, but I was neither surprised nor dismayed to see it happen, because in Patchett’s better novels, the pleasure of reading is in the journey. These two characters are so richly textured, and so realistic, that I was willing to buy into the less believable aspects of the story, just to get to the end of Danny’s arc, and to read more of Patchett’s prose.

Next up: I just finished Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland yesterday.

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→ May 7, 2020
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The Parable of the Sower.

I’ve read a lot of science fiction authors, including at least one book by every winner of the Hugo for Best Novel, but had never read anything by Octavia Butler until I read The Parable of the Sower last month. Butler, the most prominent woman of color in sci-fi and a direct inspiration for the highly decorated author N.K. Jemisin, was the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur “genius” grant, and published 14 novels in her career before her untimely death at age 58 in 2006.

One thing often absent from science fiction novels and short stories, especially those written in the first few decades of the genre, are realistic women characters, something that inspired Butler to start writing her own stories. The Parable of the Sower is narrated by a young woman of color named Lauren who is a “sharer,” born with a condition called hyperempathy syndrome, so when she sees anyone else suffering physical pain she’s hit with the same pain even though she didn’t suffer the injury.

Set in the United States in the 2020s in a post-capitalist collapse that seems like it might have inspired the Purge movies, The Parable of the Sower follows Lauren from her poor but protected compound in southern California on her flight north while she develops her belief system, which she calls “Earthseed.” Her father is a pastor, which is a rare source of guaranteed income in this dystopian economy, but she finds herself unable to believe in his traditional Christian religion, or even in its conception of God, instead writing down verses and descriptions of humans as Earthseed, driving towards a heaven in the stars where man colonizes new planets now that he’s destroyed this one.

The Parable of the Sower is grim and unflinching, especially in its depiction of women as an oppressed underclass in this still-patriarchal facsimile of a society. If you leave the protection of the compound where Lauren and her family live, you put your life at risk; if you do so as a woman, especially alone, you are extremely likely to be sexually assaulted, and Lauren sees multiple women who appear to have been victims of brutal rapes whenever she heads outside of the commune’s walls. In a world where so many people have too little to eat, and very little to lose, and the police are worse than useless, theft is almost expected, and everyone is armed to protect themselves and their property. Butler also adds the wrinkle of a new drug, nicknamed ‘pyro,’ that causes addicts to light fires so they can be mesmerized by watching the flames. This isn’t our world today, but Butler’s prescient writing about the impacts of increased income inequality and food insecurity on top of a country already armed to its teeth feels a lot more possible right now than it would have when she wrote it in 1993 – even before you layer on a global pandemic and the rise of an entire political movement ready to discard tens of thousands of citizens just to goose the stock market.

The Earthseed belief system, which revolves around the idea that God is change and holds that man’s destiny is to colonize the stars, gets some treatment within this book, but the specific tenets are less important than Lauren’s development of the system, and how she uses it to try to build a fledgling community around herself while in flight to northern California. The core idea of Earthseed that God is malleable, and humanity can shape God, conflicts on some level with its idea that God shapes the universe, which I assume Butler would continue to address in the sequel (The Parable of the Talents); even within this book, Lauren is challenged by the people in her ragtag band of followers, who range from ardent skeptics to curious adherents, to explain this and other paradoxes – or even explain why anyone should believe at all in the face of such widespread misery and existential dread.

I read Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts about a year and a half ago, and was constantly reminded of that book, which also has a young female protagonist struggling against multiple levels of oppression in a dystopian environment, while reading Parable; searching now, I see multiple references to Solomon and their novel as a ‘successor’ to Butler’s work. The connections are undeniable, but it also seems like a reminder that voices like theirs and Jemisin’s remain uncommon in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy writing, and thus these themes of sexism, racism, inequality, and othering are also underrepresented, even as they become so much more prevalent in mainstream literature (e.g., with Colson Whitehead winning two of the last four Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction with novels about race and racism). Butler also wrote with a gritty, unflinching realism that existed in that era but was, at least, outside the more genteel strains of sci-fi that won awards and garnered more attention, a style that probably put her twenty years ahead of her time. It’s a particular shame that she died so young when, if she were alive today, she’d have seen her influence spread so far, and have seen the world of science fiction expand to include voices and styles like hers become not just accepted, but lauded.

Next up: Still reading 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid, by Willie Mays and John Shea. John will be on my podcast next week to talk about the book.

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→ March 20, 2020
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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous made the longlists for this year’s National Book Award (won by Trust Exercise) and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction (won by Lost Children Archive), both in the same year that Vuong earned a Macarthur Foundation grant. A grim, epistolary work of auto-fiction, On Earth is a difficult and unsparing read that’s probably better from a critical eye than it would be in the eyes of most readers (mine included).

Written as a series of letters from the protagonist, Little Dog, to his abusive mother, now that Little Dog is an adult, On Earth goes back to Little Dog’s childhood, to stories his mother and grandmother told him from before they left Vietnam, and to his adolescent years, when he first fell in love with a local boy named Trevor who became addicted to opioids. Little Dog is closer to his grandmother, Lan, who helps take care of him and tries to protect him when his mother becomes violent, and who helps him get to know an American veteran, Paul, who became her husband and Little Dog’s surrogate grandfather. The novel bounces around in time between those three settings – Vietnam, his childhood, and his relationship with Trevor – but hurtles towards multiple deaths that define the end of the novel, and the way it’s constructed, the story unfurls as a tapestry that weaves grief and memory together for a somber and often depressing read.

Entangled with those themes is Little Dog’s three-pronged intersectionality – he’s an immigrant, a person of color, and openly gay, all of which are true of Vuong as well. Little Dog also arrives in this country unable to speak English, and he becomes the first member of his family to learn to read, which makes the entire conceit of the novel as a series of letters to his mother more poignant or a little bit farcial. On Earth is more interesting as a new entry in the long tradition of immigrant fiction, especially given how many variables are different – how extreme the fish-out-of-water aspect is when his family ends up in Hartford, Connecticut; the added challenge of his sexual orientation at a time when society was more bigoted than it is now, and with a mother who doesn’t really understand it; and his mother’s work at a nail salon, a haven for exploitation of women who’ve immigrated here from east and southeast Asia.

There’s plenty to dissect in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, but Little Dog himself is too much of a cipher – even with all of the details we know about him as a person – to make this slight book connect with me. I sympathized with him, but never empathized with him; perhaps it’s the nonlinear narrative, perhaps it’s the dispassionate way in which Vuong writes, which always seemed to keep me at arm’s length. There’s a scene in the novel where Vuong describes something in explicitly physical terms, but never grapples with the emotional impact of it, during or after. That seems to be emblematic of the work as a whole. In the end, Little Dog seems to forgive his mother, to arrive at some sort of understanding, but I still wasn’t sure how he got to that point even with 240 pages leading up to that point.

Next up: I finished Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s short story collection Sabrina & Corina and started Jo Walton’s Lent.

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→ March 13, 2020
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Everything Inside.

Edwidge Danticat’s short story collection Everything Inside just won this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction on Thursday night, her second NBCC win (her memoir Brother, I’m Dying won the NBCC’s Memoir/Autobiography award in 2007) and the most notable award she’s won yet for her fiction. Each story in this slim, beautifully-written volume revolves around Haitian immigrants to the United States, the cultural shifts they experienced, and the challenges of settling in a country that still has racism and xenophobia in its DNA.

Born in Haiti, Danticat emigrated to the U.S. at 12 years old, and every story in this book revolves around that immigrant experience, especially those of Haitians who emigrated to Florida and move back and forth between the two countries, either physically traveling between them or feeling the pull of one from the other. (Danticat’s Wikipedia entry says that “Although Danticat resides in the United States, she still considers Haiti home. To date, she still visits Haiti from time to time and has always felt as if she never left it.”) Every one of these stories in Everything Inside feels drawn from something very personal to Danticat, as if they’re not just conceived and written but lived-in, so while there will always be a comprehension gap for readers like me (white, Anglophone, U.S.-born to U.S.-born parents) who don’t share her experiences as an immigrant or person of color, several of these stories still pack enough of an emotional punch to connect.

“Dosas” revolves around a home-health nurse whose ex-husband calls in a panic because his new wife – and former affair partner – has been kidnapped in Haiti and he can’t raise the ransom. (In Haiti, a ‘dosa’ is a girl born after twins.) This complex web of relationships, between the protagonist and her ex and between the Haitian diaspora and those who stayed behind (or move back and forth between the countries), colors her decisions and threatens her job as a live-in nurse to an elderly patient with kidney disease.  “Sunrise, Sunset,” originally published in the New Yorker, contrasts two women, a mother and her daughter who has just become a mother herself, as the former faces creeping dementia while the latter grapples with a stark postpartum depression, which culminates in a terrifying moment that confronts the erasure of memory, individual and across generations. “Without Inspection,” the closing story, follows the thoughts of a man who has fallen on a construction site and is heading to his death, during which he thinks about the family he leaves behind and the improbable way in which he arrived in the United States, saved on a beach by a Haitian woman who goes there each day to try to help migrants who barely make it to the shore when their transporters dump them to swim the last mile.

“Seven Stories” is the standout in the collection, perhaps in part because it’s so different from the other stories here. The Haitian-American protagonist, Kimberly, visits an old friend who is now the wife of the Prime Minister of an independent island in the Caribbean, where the elite live in luxury, abetted by corruption, amidst shantytowns and abject poverty. The story of how her friend survived the assassination of her father, himself once Prime Minister, and returned to the island unfolds over the course of the story and diminishes the dichotomy that first appeared to Kimberly when she arrived on the island. The story ends with a wedding and celebration in a village called Maafa – which I assume is an allusion to Ma’afa, a term referring to the “black Holocaust” where European and Arab peoples enslaved Africans and continued to oppress them through colonialism and imperialism – and Kimberly reflecting on how her friend’s life has been anything but simple despite her evident privilege, while Kimberly herself is an outsider (on an island where there’s prejudice against Haitians) viewing the island’s injustices through a different lens.

I’ve read four of the five books shortlisted for the NBCC Award for Fiction this year, and would have voted for either The Nickel Boys or Feast Your Eyes over Everything Inside, but with the caveat that I know there’s an aspect to this collection that I likely can’t fully appreciate because of my background and identity. (I’d vote for this book over The Topeka School.) It’s still a worthy winner, just not my top pick.

Next up: About halfway through Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

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→ March 12, 2020
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Feast Your Eyes.

Myla Goldberg’s latest novel Feast Your Eyes, shortlisted for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction,employs a novel narrative technique – or gimmick, depending on your point of view – to tell the stories of two women, mother and daughter, whose lives were both affected by a few very specific choices they both made. The mother, Lillian, was a photographer who made headlines when a series of photos she took led to an obscenity trial; her daughter, Samantha Jane, is the narrator, and tells the story of Lillian’s life in a series of essays and quotes as she writes the catalog for a retrospective of her mother’s work. It is an unusual way to tell a story, and has a long ramp-up until it truly gets rolling, but when it clicks it zooms by – puns intended – as Goldberg has created a truly memorable, compelling, complicated character in Lillian, and wants to talk to readers about just how monumental and important a woman’s right to choose can be.

Lillian grew up outside Cleveland in modest but not poor circumstances, and fell in love with photography at an early age, deciding not long after high school that that was how she wanted to make her living – or, at least, to make art, and hope to find a living to support it. She moves to New York, becomes pregnant while still young, and goes to have an abortion, only to bail at the sketchy and unsanitary circumstances. That baby is Samantha, whose very existence alters the course of Lillian’s life, mostly for the better, although the artificial/societal conflict between motherhood and vocation becomes explicit – pun intended – when Lillian publishes a series of photos called Mommy is Sick, which shows a half-naked, prepubescent Samantha handing a glass to Lillian, who is in bed, bleeding after a completed abortion. Samantha was the subject of some of her mother’s photos before that series, but when it lands Lillian and the gallery owner in jail, and eventually goes before the Supreme Court, Samantha’s life is permanently changed as well, as she is now The Girl in the Photos and later switches to her middle name, Jane, to try to avoid the unwanted notoriety the photos have given her.

We know early in the book that Lillian has already died young, but Goldberg still makes her death pack an emotional punch because of how Mommy is Sick drove a permanent wedge between mother and daughter, and from how Lillian never quite grasped its impact on Samantha. Lillian is a reluctant feminist, progressive for her era but less so even to her own daughter, writing just twenty years or so later, especially as Lillian never wanted the First Amendment fight she sparked; for Lillian, it was about making art, and that was enough. Samantha clearly feels like she was often second to that desire to make art, but also strives to understand her mother through her photographs, and interprets the photographs (and thus her mother) for the reader through the series of essays and comments, interspersed with remembrances from several major people in Lillian’s life whom Samantha contacted for the catalog. She resents her mother for making her a symbol in her photos, and for choosing a lifestyle of working poverty that allowed her to keep taking photographs, but also accepts the sacrifices her mother made for her, especially when Samantha has an abortion of her own and considers how that choice changed the course of her mother’s life (and created her own).

You have to buy into the narrative device to appreciate Feast Your Eyes, and I imagine some readers simply won’t be able to get on the book’s wavelength for that reason. For the first few pages I wasn’t sure if I would, but it started rolling for me maybe 20-30 pages in as the story itself began to grab me and the titles of the photographs or series faded into the background. Goldberg’s best trick here is that she pivots within each comment or essay from the photo right into something larger from Lillian’s past; there actually isn’t that much detail about photos that we never see, which could have been dreadful to read. It also works here because Goldberg manages to tie the fabricated photographs to times and places that spur different recollections, by Samantha, or former friends or lovers of Lillian’s, that explore more aspects of her character, and sometimes of Samantha’s as well. Even without the two overarching, feminist themes – how society pressures women to choose between motherhood and career, and how essential a woman’s right to choose is to her agency elsewhere in life – Feast Your Eyes would have been a strong character study, but those additional layers give it impact beyond most of the 2019 novels I’ve read so far.

Next up: Another novel from last year, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

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→ March 4, 2020
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The Topeka School.

Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School was shortlisted for this year’s National Book Critics Circle award for fiction and has now moved up to #2 on that Pulitzer predictions page I’ve mentioned a few times here. It’s a strange book, although that’s true of several of the leading contenders this year, with a nonlinear narrative, multiple lead characters, and a story without a clear ending or singular theme. I don’t know if that makes it a better contender for awards, as it is clearly more ambitious than the typical novel, but the result for me as a reader was that it felt incomplete.

The Topeka School is set in Topeka, Kansas, and the school in question is a foundation for young boys with psychological disorders, run by Jonathan Gordon, whose son Adam was the protagonist of an earlier Lerner novel and is a stand-in for the author himself. Adam is the star debater at the local high school and poised to win the national competition in one specific area of debate – none of this meant anything to me, as my school didn’t have a debate team and I doubt I would have had anything to do with it if it had – but is facing crippling anxiety and an existential doubt about the entire process. His mother, Jane, also a psychologist, has written a feminist non-fiction book that landed her a spot on Oprah and made her the target for endless meninist trolls who call the Gordons’ house to threaten her, only to have her troll them back in rather expert fashion. Jonathan is a vague presence next to the sharply drawn Jane and Adam, an unfaithful husband who sleeps with his wife’s best friend and is overly absorbed in his work ‘saving’ the boys at the Foundation, which all goes awry when one of them, Adam’s intellectually disabled classmate Darren, ends up in trouble with the law. 

Adam is the most prominent character in the book, but the star is really Jane, who could have supported the entire novel on her own if Lerner had given her the chance. She’s a strong personality, including that heroic response to her would-be harassers, but also has a history of abuse at the hands of her father with which she’s still coming to grips and that clearly affects her choices decades later. More exploration of that angle and how her mother’s willful ignorance of the abuse destroyed that relationship as well would have elevated the novel and helped make her even more of a central character, as would have more detail on her reaction to Jonathan’s infidelity, but she doesn’t get quite enough page time.

Part of the reason for that is the focus on Adam’s debating endeavors, which I think is a metaphor for our incredibly terrible political environment right now, where winning may be more a function of being louder than being better or being right. A new debating technique called the “spread” has become popular at the time of this novel (it’s set in the 1990s); the speaker simply talks as quickly as possible, raising as many points as they can during their allotted time, and forces opponents to try to keep up in their rejoinders as any unanswered arguments are considered points won. It’s a bit of an arcane point, like basing portions of a hockey novel around the neutral-zone trap, and too inside-baseball at least for me, even though I thought I could see the parallel to social media efforts to drown out opponents and boost candidates through sheer volume of content (even if the support is fake).

The Darren subplot is even more undercooked, and feels utterly tacked on; I was waiting for Lerner to tie it into the Gordons’ story more convincingly but he never does. Darren’s cognitive difficulties make him a target for bullies and an occasional object of derision for classmates, and his eventual lashing out is inevitable and also a lot less than I feared it might be (I thought Lerner was setting up a mass shooting or something similar, but he wasn’t). Darren’s story is largely told through 2-4 page interstitials between the Gordons’ narratives, and his actual connection to the Gordons goes no further than his time working with Jonathan. There’s a half-hearted thread about Darren falling a bit under the sway of an angry old white man, but that story fizzles out without impact. Instead he’s only a side note, as are the hatemongers of the Westboro Baptist Church, who also appear on the fringes of the novel and are among the people harassing Jane on the phone and in person around Topeka.

I’m just not sure I get the adulation for The Topeka School, which ended up less than the sum of its parts. Lerner works in a lot of hifalutin vocabulary from psychology – I don’t know why you’d ever need the word ‘analysand,’ for example, and while ‘cathexis’ is a fun word it also probably isn’t appropriate for its usage here – which makes the book seem smarter than it ultimately is. There are good ideas floating around in here, but the lack of focus on either Jane or Adam means they’re not fully fleshed out, and the novel ends before anything is all that well resolved. Maybe it’ll win one of these awards because it’s ambitious and feels relevant to multiple themes in American society of 2020, but I don’t think it measures up to its primary competition.

Next up: Myra Goldberg’s Feast Your Eyes.

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→ February 26, 2020
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Trust Exercise.

Susanne Choi won the National Book Award this year for Trust Exercise, a novel that sneaks up on the reader, starting out on familiar ground as a story of teenage drama among students at a school for the arts before Choi’s ambition becomes apparent in the novel’s second and third parts. It’s metafictional and disorienting – I still don’t quite know what happened within the book – and morphs into a question of who owns the truth, or just has the right to tell it.

Sarah and David are classmates at CAPA, a prestigious (fictional) high school in Houston, where they’re both in the school’s vaunted theatre program, led by the enigmatic Mr. Kingsley, the sort of dream teacher you might expect to find in Fame. He pushes his students when he sees greatness within, and blurs boundaries with his favorites, inviting them out to lunch or occasionally to the home he shares with his husband – this, in the 1980s, when it was rare for a man to be openly gay, much less to do so in Texas where I believe it was still a capital crime. Sarah and David are drawn to each other, start an intense relationship, break up over something stupid, have a tryst in the school hallway, stop speaking to each other, and, when a group of young actors and their teacher/chaperone arrive from England, get entangled with other people. This all appears to come to a head when one of the older actors from England forces himself on Sarah in a way that she herself doesn’t entirely understand as nonconsensual.

That’s about half of the novel, and after that everything shifts in a way that can’t be discussed without spoiling the great pleasure of watching Choi handle the vehicle she’s created. This is much more than a story about star-crossed lovers, and it’s more than just the story of a sexual assault and its aftermath; Choi brings the reader in for a close look at the action, and then pans the camera back for a wider view, and then pans it back even further for one last glimpse. With each move backward in granularity, Choi moves forward in time, emphasizing the nature of narrative and who actually ‘owns’ the right to tell a story – a theme that works especially well because it is never clear what the facts of the story are. The first half of the novel appears to be a completely conventional story, and then Choi reveals that it’s so much than what it seems, which opens up the book to a set of timely themes and questions. In an era of public allegations of sexual harassment, who gets to tell these stories – and, of course, how they’re told – should be part of every discussion.

Saying too much more about Trust Exercise risks spoiling the various surprises and twists of the book, which jarred me at first but ultimately work well and forced me to think and rethink about what Choi was trying to express. The downside is that I’m still not sure exactly what happened, both in the sense of what parts of the narrative were factual (within the fiction) and in the sense of who was telling the truth, right down to the ambiguous epilogue involved a new character whose true identity is never made clear. There’s value in this abstruseness, even in disorienting the reader, but I was also left deeply confused by what I’d just read, and that eventually yielded to some dissatisfaction with Choi’s decision to reveal too little when she might have answered a few of the open questions without affecting the critical themes of the book.

Next up: Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, which, like Choi’s book is a potential contender for this year’s Pulitzer Prize; Lerner’s book is one of the five finalists for this year’s National Book Critics Circle award for Fiction.

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→ February 24, 2020
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Disappearing Earth.

Julia Phillips’ debut novel Disappearing Earth is the story of a place more than the story of its people, set on the Kamchatka peninsula of eastern Russia, looking at the aftermath of the kidnapping of two young sisters across a gamut of characters in the town where they lived. The book has been widely praised and has even shown up on the list of possible Pulitzer contenders I check each spring (pprize.com), despite its distant storytelling and a setting that couldn’t have less to do with the United States.

The opening chapter sees the two sisters tricked by a man they don’t know into going into his car; once it becomes clear that he’s kidnapping them, they disappear from the story, which shifts each chapter to a new central female character, looking at their lives in the wake of the girls’ abduction (although it’s not known for sure to these characters if they were taken or drowned accidentally). Some of these women are trying to get away from a town they view as stifling, or that lacks opportunities, whether professional or romantic, that might be available elsewhere. Some of the stories focus on how the (single) mother of the girls ends up the target of gossip that blames her in some way for their disappearance, or how other mothers in the town react to the possibility that there’s a predator in their midst. Another young woman disappeared about a year earlier, but because she was 18 the police and the gossips assumed she ran away, perhaps to Moscow to pursue a better life. 

The novel really lacks a through line to connect these stories in any way beyond the kidnapping, which is only indirectly related to just about every character in the stories until the penultimate one, where their mother is the central character and encounters the mother of the teenager who disappeared. It’s not a coincidence that that is the most powerful and best-written chapter in the book, as the stakes for the main character are immediately obvious and create complex relationships with the other people she encounters right from the outset. For example, the mother of the missing teenager has also lost a child, but there’s a pervasive belief that that woman left of her own volition, and the circumstances were different enough that the mother of the two sisters feels less of a kinship than the other woman does.

Phillips’ evocation of the novel’s setting is the strongest part of Disappearing Earth, evidence of the time she spent in Kamchatka in 2011 via a Fulbright scholarship. Every place, whether town or wilderness, comes across as desolate and forbidding, yet also ordinary to the people who grew up and live there, because for so many of them it’s all they’ve ever known or all they ever will know. The shadow of the disappearances, and what they might mean in a small town where people once thought of themselves as safe – and some of the old-timers actually talk about the Soviet era as the good old days – is a sort of background shade to the dim light of Kamchatka itself. 

The novel never generates as much interest in any character or story as it does in the kidnapping itself, a story that is more or less resolved in the brief final chapter. It’s not that the women in Disappearing Earth are themselves uninteresting, or that their problems are trivial (some are, most aren’t), but that when you begin a novel with the kidnapping of two little girls, everything else is going to feel like a digression until you get back to that narrative. The stories in between the first and last chapters just feel cold, and while that fits the novel’s setting, it doesn’t make for a particularly compelling read.

Next up: I just finished Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise yesterday and starter Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School.

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→ February 6, 2020
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The Nickel Boys.

Colson Whitehead won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his last novel, The Underground Railroad, which re-imagined that escape network as an actual subterranean train system that helped slaves leave the South before the Civil War. His follow-up, The Nickel Boys, stays in the world of the mundane, drawing on the true story of a violent ‘reform school’ in the South to tell yet another dazzling, compelling story about race and the experience of people of color in the United States, and how white elites have continued to suppress the black populations in the South long after the Civil War was over.

The Nickel Boys takes place largely in the panhandle of Florida, near Tallahassee, at a fictional reform school for juveniles called the Nickel Academy, where white and black boys are separated into different houses, and the treatment is brutal and dehumanizing. It’s based on the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, which operated for over 100 years and at one point was the largest institution of its type in the country. The school closed in 2011 after a massive state investigation into charges of abuse, and a year later Erin Kimmerle, a forensic anthropologist from the University of South Florida, used ground-penetrating radar to find mass graves of on the site. They’ve found an estimated 80 corpses already, with exhumations ongoing. (The State of Florida officially apologized to the surviving boys in 2017, and as of September of 2019, after two-plus years of delays, work finally began on building memorials to the boys who died at Dozier and its satellite campus.)

Whitehead draws on survivors’ accounts to create the Nickel Academy, building his narrative around a boy named Elwood, arrested for being a passenger in a car that may have been stolen, ruining his hopes of bettering himself by continuing his education. Elwood has a strong moral compass, one that sometimes works against him because he speaks up when the world thinks he shouldn’t. Once imprisoned at Nickel, he meets Turner, another young African-American inmate who matches Elwood’s idealistic view of the world with an equally powerful cynicism, and a sense of self-preservation that he tries to impart to Elwood to keep the latter boy from meeting the fate of others who’ve ‘disappeared’ in the middle of the night.

Life at Nickel is about what you’d expect for black boys at a reform school run by whites in the 1950s and 1960s. They’re barely fed, because the administrators skim off the food sent for the black kids (less so when it’s for the white boys across the property) and sell it to local restaurants; they do the same with other supplies, like those for the boys’ education. They’re beaten in a building called the White House – the same as the name of the actual building that still stands on the Dozier property where illicit beatings took place – and many are sexually assaulted by guards. Boys who try to escape or otherwise draw the ire of the administration are taken from their beds in the middle of the night and tortured to death, after which their families – if they have any – are told that the boys ran away. There’s a nominal system for earning your way to release if you follow the rules and don’t push back, although in Whitehead’s depiction it’s hard to see many boys running this gauntlet successfully, given the venality of the administrators and bloodthirst of the guards.

The narrative itself revolves around Elwood and Turner, and Elwood’s own hopes that he’ll earn his way out – although the guards take him to the White House once – and tell the world about what’s going on at Nickel. Whitehead could have made this story even more brutal than it was, but instead he gives the reader just enough to depict the inhumanity of the school without dwelling on lurid details. This is a story of two boys, of two different ways of facing their incarceration and subjugation, and of a society that didn’t care at all about a few more dead black boys. Nothing Whitehead can write here is as damning to Florida, and to the American South, as what actually happened at Dozier and how long it has taken the state to even acknowledge the crimes committed against children of color at the school, but the way he depicts these two boys, especially the depth of Elwood’s character and the tragedy of his backstory, make The Nickel Boys an immersive and compelling read even though you know that any page could bring a scene of unbearable violence. I have no means or justification for predicting the Pulitzer winners, but if Whitehead wins for the second time in four years I won’t be the least bit surprised.

Next up: Julia Phillips’ Disappearing Earth.

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