→ September 13, 2019
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Bowlaway.

I’d never even heard of Elizabeth McCracken until my friend Eden suggested to me at Gen Con that I check out McCracken’s newest novel Bowlaway. McCracken, who edits Ann Patchett’s novels, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1996 and has earned some smaller plaudits for her work since then, but this was the first time I’d encountered her. Based on n of 1, at least, she is a wonderful storyteller on par with Patchett, and while I’m not really sure if there’s a broader point to Bowlaway, I was completely enraptured by the story, which washes over the reader with waves of fun or interesting characters.

Bowlaway opens with a woman in a graveyard in a fictional town just outside of Boston just after the turn of the 20th century, and no real clue of how she got there. Bertha Truitt doesn’t remember her previous history, or just isn’t telling, but she enters the town on a mission to introduce candlepin bowling, a regional variation on bowling with a much smaller bowl and slimmer pins. She founds an alley called, of course, Bowlaway, and attracts a group of regulars, including several local women, while also employing a pair of the town’s eccentrics. Bertha marries and has a child, and when she dies, the narrative shifts to her husband, then to his housekeeper, and on around to other people who are all primarily connected through the bowling alley, including one later owner who wants to ban women from the alley.

The characters are mostly well-drawn and three-dimensional, flawed and interesting and often amusing in their own peculiar ways. Bertha’s departure from the novel is a disappointment, as she’s the most larger-than-life character in the book and provides so much of the spark that sets the novel ablaze. If there’s a movie or TV series to be made from Bowlaway, it’s going to revolve around Bertha, who has most of the best lines in the book and could also be the breakout character getting quoted and captured in GIFs. Margaret, the housekeeper, is also very well-written, but her character is suffused with sadness and there’s a sort of simplicity to her personality that makes her less enjoyable on the page. The one character I found a bit disappointing is Bertha’s husband, Leviticus Sprague, whom McCracken gives an idiosyncratic way of speaking but who disappears into the bottle after his wife’s death; Margaret’s kids are also a bit meh, especially the profligate one who also takes to drink.

While Bowlaway has a real conclusion to its plot, it’s not clear whether there’s a point to all of this other than to tell a good, fun story. McCracken seems to love her characters, and that alone is enough to make the book a compelling read, although I did stop a number of times because of that persistent, subcutaneous feeling that I was missing a greater theme. It’s not quite empty calories, since McCracken’s prose is good (and smart) and the characters work, but it’s unusual for me to read fiction that isn’t genre that doesn’t have something more significant going on underneath the hood.

There is, however, the mere passage of time, which itself does allow McCracken to get into some additional cultural shifts as her fictional town goes from a somewhat sleepy hamlet to an active suburb of Boston, connected to the city via mass transit. The novel spans something close to 70 years – she’s vague with some of the dates – so she tracks characters, the alley, and the town across the decades, working in real-world events like the Great Molasses Flood. She also has the habit of dispatching characters major and minor in gruesome ways; the molasses takes one, another goes the way of Old Krook; others are killed by flying objects or a runaway horse. Death is just another detail in the world of Bowlaway, especially when the characters aren’t essential.

It’s really a better book than I’ve made it sound here – I tore through it and, once I got past the fact that the best character was gone before the midpoint of the novel, found myself enraptured by McCracken’s prose and knack for spinning new stories out of the spare threads of the ones before. I don’t know that it amounts to much, but the journey there is enough.

Next up: Gary Smith’s Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics.

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→ August 6, 2019
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A Kiss Before Dying.

Ira Levin wrote seven novels in his long career, as well as the long-running Broadway play Deathtrap, garnering raves from critics and his peers for much of his output despite working across a broad range of themes, with novels as seemingly disparate as Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives. His debut novel, A Kiss Before Dying, was a straightforward noir thriller, a grim take on a ‘perfect’ murder that uses shifting perspectives to keep the reader guessing in the first half of the novel and raise the stakes for the second half. (It’s out of print; the link above goes to the Kindle version.)

The first third of the novel centers on Dorothy, the daughter of a very wealthy copper magnate, who is dating a charming classmate at her college and has just revealed to him that she’s pregnant, which does not comport with his plans to marry her for her expected inheritance. Assuming she’ll be cut out of her father’s will for becoming pregnant outside of wedlock, the boyfriend first tries to get her to abort the baby and, when that fails, decides to kill her and make it look like a suicide. He succeeds, at least at first, but Dorothy’s sister Ellen can’t believe Dorothy would kill herself – especially since no one knew she was pregnant – and decides to go investigate.

At this point, Levin switches the point of view and you realize that he never named the boyfriend in part one, so you enter the college town with Ellen and share her ignorance of the killer’s identity – just a very rough description of his appearance, which means it could be any of several men, and Levin utilizes that puzzle to ratchet up the tension for the first half or so of Ellen’s section. Once you find out who it is, which I didn’t see coming, the story flips, putting the reader into the chase and the mystery of whether anyone will catch Dorothy’s killer before he kills again while exploring the depths of his sociopathy, eventually introducing us to the girls’ father, Leo, and making him a central character in the story even though he tries to avoid accepting that Dorothy was murdered.

The book has been filmed twice, once in 1956 to positive reviews and once in 1991 to negative ones, although in both cases the screenwriters changed the story enough that I don’t think either could possibly match what Levin accomplished here in the book. The murderer here isn’t so much twisted as callous and insensate, viewing Dorothy as a mark to make himself wealthy, and viewing all of his victims as obstacles, with no apparent compunctions whatsoever about killing to protect his own interests. Levin also takes advantage of the author’s privilege of hiding key information from you that would have to be revealed on a screen, which raises the stakes for the reader, makes the reveal especially potent, and then lets him play with perspective throughout the third part of the book, where you’re unsure if the killer will get away with his crimes or if the ‘good guys’ will figure it out in time. It’s very classic, straight noir, with a dim view of humanity that leans a bit towards Jim Thompson but with more balance between the good and the bad.

Next up: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

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→ July 15, 2019
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Furious Hours.

Casey Cep’s Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee is more like three non-fiction novellas in one package, tied together by overlaps in the stories but not by any significant theme, so the inclusion of all three in a single tome feels a bit forced. Each of them is interesting and tightly told, none more so than the first of the three, as Cep has done substantial research, although ultimately she can’t create a conclusion where none exists.

Harper Lee did not write another book after the runaway success of the novel she would refer to as “the Bird” for the rest of her life, and barely wrote any words at all for publication, leading to a popular myth around her that she had said all she wanted to say – a myth into which her famously reclusive nature also played. Lee did try to write another book, however, about the story Cep unfurls in Furious Hours, that of the Reverend William Maxwell, a black preacher and timber worker in Alabama in the 1960s and early 1970s who took out numerous life insurance policies on family members, including two wives, and then killed at least five of them to collect the payouts. He was arrested and charged with one murder but acquitted mostly due to the lack of direct evidence, and the killings only stopped when the uncle of his last victim executed him point-blank at the funeral service. Lee heard about this story and spent years researching the Maxwell case, interviewing the man’s killer and Maxwell’s longtime attorney, Tom Radney, among others, but for reasons Cep tries to address in the final third of the novel, she was never able to finish it – or even submit part of a manuscript.

Maxwell’s story is a crackerjack, right up to his dramatic death. He wasn’t just a cold-blooded, calculating murderer, but a traveling, revivalist preacher, a longtime con man, and a hard worker on timber sites, respected if a bit feared by the men with whom he worked. His decision to kill off his first wife, and then continue to kill off several other family members, for no other apparent purpose than to collect insurance money, came fairly late in his life: he was around 44 when his first wife was found dead in her car – this was a common method for Maxwell, with four of the five corpses for which he is assumed to bear responsibility discovered in or under cars – and he was killed at age 52, right after delivering the eulogy for his last victim. Cep details the murders and how Maxwell managed to get away with so many, even as a black criminal in 1970s Alabama – although the fact that all of his victims were also black may also have helped him.

Maxwell spent a lot of time over those eight years in court, sometimes defending himself against murder charges but more often fighting insurance companies that tried not to pay him for deaths they thought he’d caused. His lawyer through all of those cases was a white man, Tom Radney, formerly an idealistic state legislator who came home to open up a private practice and made good money off Maxwell, since he was so frequently at war with the law. Radney’s story makes up the middle third of the book and it’s the weakest by far; he’s not as fascinating a character as Maxwell or Lee, nor is any part of his life as interesting as what they both did, but there’s also a reliability problem with Radney’s story that isn’t present in the other two – he helped Lee in her research, which then became part of Cep’s. History is told by the survivors, and Radney outlived Maxwell by over 30 years, while Lee was alive but chose silence.

The third section tells Lee’s story, not just the story of her work on the never-submitted book she titled “The Reverend,” but her whole biography – no small task given the author’s disdain for media attention and her nearly half-century of self-enforced silence. Cep does her best work here, because there is so much in the Lee section that I never knew about her – details from her childhood and adolescence, the extent to which she worked with Truman Capote on In Cold Blood (and perhaps wrote, or rewrote, parts of it), her reactions to the book’s enormous and almost immediate success, and some of the real explanations for the writer’s block that kept the world from ever seeing “The Reverend,” or anything else, in print. (The book that was released a year before her death, Go Set a Watchman, was her first manuscript, which multiple publishers rejected before J.B. Lippincott responded favorably but asked for major revisions; the revised book is the one we know.) Perhaps there isn’t enough material for a full-length biography of Lee, who wrote numerous letters but was obviously very protective of her privacy, but this is a very good use of the limited material that is available.

So Furious Hours is a good read – three good reads, really, or at least two, and the middle one is fine – but a disjointed one. The first section is a true crime story with lots of drama and salacious details; the last one is a thorough if short biography of a pivotal figure in American literature who, herself, was a flawed, regular human whose success contributed to her undoing. The through line of Furious Hours is a tenuous one: it’s the Maxwell case, but without Maxwell there, the connection feels forced. If you approach this book as three distinct reads that share a particular connection, it’s probably going to be far more satisfying than the series of loose ends left by trying to into the three a single narrative that isn’t quite there.

Next up: Sadegh Hedayat’s novella The Blind Owl, in its first translation.

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→ June 17, 2019
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Fates and Furies.

Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies was nominated for a National Book Award in 2015, losing to Adam Johnson’s short story collection Fortune Smiles, and was widely praised as her best work to date. This intricate, profound novel about a marriage as the intersection of two lives presents that intersection from two distinct and often contradictory perspectives, a story that is beautifully told and that gripped me more the further I read.

The first part of the book, titled “Fates” – ten points if you can guess the title of the second part – introduces us to Lancelot, nicknamed Lotto, born in the eye of a hurricane and in some ways a very lucky child. He’s wealthy beyond measure before he’s finished his first cry, and as time passes it will become clear that he’s blessed with good lucks and great talent as a writer, but even someone born lucky doesn’t get a life free of worry, sorry, or even some bad fortune too.

After years of diffident debauchery, with a handful of broken hearts among the many women who sought his company and only got sex, Lotto sees Mathilde walk into a party right near the end of his college years, walks towards her and immediately asks her to marry him. A few weeks later they do indeed wed, and then live as starving artists – his vengeful mother, more fury than fate to be sure, cuts him off when she learns of the marriage – while he tries to find work as an actor and she works in advertising and then in an art gallery to keep them afloat. A real stroke of luck reveals his talent as a writer, and he becomes an acclaimed playwright for going on two decades until the fairy tale and part one both end.

Furies tells the same story from Mathilde’s side, and the trees we could not make out while standing in the forest are clear and sharp when viewed from above. Mathilde’s childhood isn’t what Lotto believed, and much of what he thought was fate was anything but. She’s a stronger character than the subservient wife we see in Fates, and angrier at a life that did not give her any fortune other than perhaps some physical beauty. Mathilde had to scratch and claw for nearly everything she got in life before Lotto, and then had to work twice as hard as he ever did to keep them going during his lean years as an actor, and then plays far more of a role in his writing career than the first part lets on. The first part is the veneer, and the second the solid wood beneath. It is stronger, but it’s not as pretty. Once the revelations start spilling, they come fast, and they frequently upend your impression of one or both main characters.

The parallel structure of the two parts mirrors the dichotomy of the title, but also presents the “two sides to every story” bromide in a new light by giving primacy to Mathilde’s side. The Greek Fates were three goddesses who determined the length of a mortal’s life, but did not concern themselves with what went on during that life. Lotto’s story feels like one mapped out by the Fates – very little of his life appears to be directed by outside forces, and while there’s luck from the circumstances of his birth, reading part one gives you the sense that he is the prime mover in his own universe, right up until the thread spun by the Fates is cut.

That’s not true, of course, but Groff saves the explanation until Furies, when it becomes clear that Mathilde’s machinations were responsible for much of what happened to Lotto, right down to their not-coincidental first meeting, from college onward. So much of her life is driven by vengeance, whether directly aimed at someone else or in the vein of “living well is the best revenge,” which is a major part of the mythology of the Greek Furies. (Wikipedia describes them as underworld deities of vengeance.) Once widowed, she’s determined to become the protagonist of her own life for the first time, yet becomes even more driven by the desire for revenge, especially when she realizes that one longtime acquaintance went out of his way to try to sabotage her marriage to Lotto.

The plot itself is intricate and almost immediately compelling, with so much realistic detail that it’s hard to believe one person conceived both of these characters’ lives. Groff’s character development, even with several of the side characters like Lotto’s family and childhood friends, is superb, both in interest and credibility. Lotto being a playwright is a bit more of the writers writing about writers problem, and I found it hard to buy into the idea of him becoming so financially successful or even moderately famous in that line of work, but if you get past that, much of what follows is plausible, and his vocation allows Groff to work in endless literary references (only a few of which I caught).

Groff ends the novel with a revelation that explains much of what went before, and even casts doubt on some parts of the story, but in a way that also opens up a whole series of questions that you might have felt were answered by the two parts. It’s a gimmick, but she executes it well, and if anything it seemed to underscore some of the questions posed over the course of Furies around the choices Mathilde made in trying to create a far better life for herself than the one lowercase-f fate has offered her. It’s a brilliant, incisive, deeply philosophical work that moves like popular fiction but still has me thinking a few weeks after I finished.

Next up: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Acintya bheda bheda fatwa.

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→ May 31, 2019
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The Friend.

Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2018, a surprising turn of events for a writer whose first book was published in 1995 yet had never found much of a commercial audience, even with significant critical praise for her work. A novel about a writer and a dog, about love and death, about the writer’s calling and the reader’s expectations, it’s a skillfully crafted work that asks a lot of you even as it is rushing past.

Nobody has names in this book except the dog, Apollo, who doesn’t appear until about 40 pages in. Nunez writes in the second person, as the narrator, a writer, speaks to her recently deceased friend, an acclaimed writer who often taught writing, slept with his students, married three of them, and was a fountain of insight (or merely opinion) on the nature of writing. His death has unnerved her and leads her to revisit much of the history of her friendship with him, but she also ends up taking in his dog, Apollo, an aging great Dane who is himself mourning his lost master, despite the fact that her rent-controlled apartment strictly forbids dogs.

From there, we get the relationship between the narrator and the dog while the narrator draws parallels to her relationship with her late friend, which was … complicated, certainly. She’s learning to cope with the reality of his death and the void this leaves in her life, in which he has been some kind of fixture for what appears to be a few decades. Walking back through her memories of him opens up extended thoughts on literature, what it means to be a writer, why writers write, and what readers want, or think they want, from what they read. On the one hand, the world needs another novel about writers writing like I need a hole in my head. On the other hand, The Friend is quite good, and these are most of the best parts. The idea of writing as a calling versus writing as a vocation is still an important one – maybe a more important one than ever, since, as Nunez points out in the book, the publishing world could simply stop publishing new books tomorrow and it wouldn’t make an iota of difference to the quantity of books available to readers. (The narrator wryly observes that it would have some impact on the economy, although those aren’t the same books that the narrator and her friend write.) We can write our own stories; can we write those of others? What obligations do we have to our subjects, even those we fictionalize? To what extent should privileged writers step aside for other voices from previously disadvantaged communities or groups?

The Friend also brings us two sets of interactions with students – one from college students in writing classes who come across as spoiled non-readers who don’t appreciate good writing and believe their own to be ready for the world, and another from the narrator’s experience working with victims of sex trafficking in a sort of writing therapy. The first group is there more for comic relief, although it becomes a launching point for some of the broader dialogues on why people write (and what a poor choice of career it might be). The second, however, could have spun out into its own book, and if anything gets too little time on the page, but it seems to stand in for the argument that writing can serve a purpose beyond satisfying the author’s ego.

Nunez pulls an authorial trick near the end of the novel that breaks any spell she’d cast to that point, partially redeeming herself with the last few sentences of the entire novel. Prior to that, however, there are some narrative gaps that never sat well with me – notably, why on earth does the narrator take the dog? She’s barely talked into it by Wife Three, and is fully aware it may cost her her apartment. (That also gets a bit of cheap resolution.) You may forgive all of these foibles because The Friend is driven by the narrator’s grief, not by plot. Little actually happens in the book, and what happens is mostly mundane stuff about the dog. You are here for Nunez’s thoughts on writing, on coping with unexpected loss, and what we give and get from our pets. It’s not perfect, but there are some truly lovely passages here, and the ending is so well done it should be punctuated by a bat flip.

Next up: Spike Milligan’s comic novel Puckoon.

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→ April 30, 2019
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The Overstory.

Richard Powers’ The Overstory won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in what feels like a crowded year of critical favorites, with Tommy Orange’s There There taking home one of the honorable mentions. Powers has woven a complex tapestry of narratives and seemingly disconnected characters around a central story of environmental degradation and injustice, a novel that feels extremely important but that suffers from the breadth of his vision and ambiguous characterization.

Trees are at the heart of The Overstory, both in terms of the characters’ interactions with trees and humanity’s degradation of the planet’s forests and climate. Powers rages against the human machine throughout the book, decrying everything from our failure to appreciate the beauty and diversity of nature to the capitalist impulse to plunder our forests for profits and rationalize it away. The characters themselves seem to lose hope for the planet as the novel progresses, and Powers himself is certainly no optimist, but there’s at least a strain of possibility throughout the story that gives us an inkling that we might still have time to save ourselves if we stop denying the truth and act to reverse the damage we’ve done.

Powers’ thematic ambition spreads to a diversity of central characters that seems to be beyond his ultimate reach. He has nine core characters in The Overstory, and I’m not sure I could name an author writing today who’s up to the task of managing that breadth of personae across 500 pages; Powers is game, but the characters bleed into each other far too much to keep them distinct or explain their varying purposes on the pages. Nick and Douglas, two middle-aged white men with personal tragedies in their back stories, become harder to distinguish, especially as their stories on the pages eventually connected, intertwine, and separate; the same is true to a lesser degree with Mimi and Olivia, who are a bit more sharply drawn but still are too similar in personality and speech to keep them completely separate in the reader’s mind.

An overstory is either the layer of foliage in a forest canopy or the trees that give the canopy its foliage, so Powers is playing with words here, as he’s layered the story of the trees, and how they have been indispensable to life on earth, on top of this story of nine characters who start the novel with no connections to each other but several of whom find themselves connected and even relying on each other in emotional symbiosis. It’s a clever conceit for a novel, but to make the understory work, you have to make at least some of those characters compelling and/or sympathetic. Powers doesn’t do that, at least not enough for me; I think one of the nine characters, the researcher and would-be professor Patricia, who may have autism, was well-drawn enough to stick with me, and even that was as much a function of the injustice the world of the novel does to her – laced with misogyny and the human tendency to reject new ideas – as it was to the depiction of her character.

There’s one common theme among the characters in the novel that serves as a functional metaphor for the environmental cause he’s espousing, that of death and rebirth. The novel opens with prologue chapters for each for the characters, and nearly all of them experience the death of a loved one, often a pivotal figure like a parent (at least two fathers die in this section, so steel yourself), as part of their back stories. The idea that new life comes from death recurs throughout the novel, including a discussion of how much one dead tree lying on the forest floor feeds the next generation of life in the forest, from fungi to insects to new plants; Powers extends the metaphor so that many of the characters in the novel find the paths of their lives determined or at least directed by the deaths that altered their childhoods.

There is an actual core plot in The Overstory, as five of the characters unite at a logging protest and end up splitting off to form an eco-terrorist cell, which has some of the consequences you’d expect and a few you wouldn’t – but Powers doesn’t resolve this story in a remotely satisfactory way, and the connections to the other four characters, notably the invalid lawyer Ray, are tenuous at best. There are many great ideas in this book, but it never comes together into a coherent narrative.

Next up: Iain Banks’ The Player of Games, part of his Culture universe of novels, currently on sale for $2.99 for the Kindle.

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→ March 20, 2019
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The Mars Room.

Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room sits atop that Pulitzer Prize predictions list I’ve mentioned a few times previously, the same that guided me to read There There (now at #2) and Asymmetry (my favorite of these three, but down to #11). Kushner’s book is a blindingly fast read built around a compelling central character, although the story itself fell short of my expectations and I was never sure what Kushner was trying to express in either the main story or the many subplots throughout the novel. It’s clearly a feminist novel, but perhaps too hopeless and scattered to get that core point across.

The Mars Room centers on Romy Hall, a woman serving two life terms for a murder that will be explained partway through the book, as she details her experience going from sentencing to jail and then serving time in a women’s prison in California while also giving flashbacks to the traumatic life that got her to this point. Romy encounters other women incarcerated for similar reasons, crimes against a society that had brutalized them first, as well as a small cast of unusual side characters who get more development than most secondary characters do in novels but whose stories end abruptly enough that their presence ends up unsatisfying.

The most prominent of these additional characters is the trans woman Conan, whose story would probably be worthy of her own book – although Kushner uses male pronouns to refer to her because the book is written in Romy’s voice, and Romy can’t see Conan as anything but male. Conan is originally sorted into a men’s prison, then is transferred to the women’s prison, but is kept separate from gen pop while authorities try to sort out what to do with her, during which time the other prisoners aware of her presence split into two factions around her status in the jail. This subplot was both as interesting and as nuanced as Romy’s until Kushner cut it short by turning it into a device to push Romy’s plot towards its denouement. It does the Conan character a disservice to use her as a prop rather than even beginning to truly explore the plight of a trans person in our prison system, or using a trans character to illuminate the way our prisons serve to dehumanize everyone incarcerated in them.

The other side characters who get more prominent billing in The Mars Room feel too tangential to the main story and end up distractions when it becomes clear that Kushner isn’t going to tie them together with Romy’s narrative. The dirty cop Doc ends up getting what’s coming to him, in a sense, but before then recounts his history of corruption and violence against suspects, provoked and unprovoked, but the connection to Romy is never established. The prison teacher Gordon at least has more to do with with Romy, in part because he becomes platonically involved with many of the prisoners he teaches, which means he inserts himself into Romy’s story and provides her with a critical piece of information that spurs the action that ends the book, although, again, he’s more of a prop than a fully-realized character (and, ultimately, not that interesting).

There’s one point of social criticism in The Mars Room that deserves far more exploration than Kushner gives it, although in fairness to her I’m not sure how much more she could have done within this plot. Romy committed a crime against someone whom she believed, with reason, posed a threat to her and her son, but her public defender refuses to let her testify (and explains why) and also has very little time to spend on her or any of his cases. If you are poor in this country and are arrested for a crime, you will get a public defender who is probably competent and capable but wildly overloaded with work and thus given no time to devote to cases where that same lawyer might achieve much better results for the client given more time. Locking Up Our Own looked at this same issue and gave a statistic that, I think, claimed that public defenders get an average of about four minutes to work on any specific case. This system is totally broken even before we ask whether it is biased against women who commit violent acts against men who assault them or threaten to do so. Romy has been broken against the wheel, and the act that put her in prison for life was, at the very least, worthy of more consideration and likely more mercy than she received. The ways in which this world robs women, especially women without means, of everything from their dignity to their agency to their lives, are myriad, and define the plot at the core of The Mars Room. Perhaps Kushner had the right kind of anger, but just needed another story to express it.

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→ March 5, 2019
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Asymmetry.

Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry is one of the best, most immersive, cleverest new novels I’ve read in the past year, at least since Lincoln in the Bardo and possibly back to In the Light of What We Know. Built around a single, interconnected narrative in three highly asymmetrical parts, it takes a fictionalized account of Halliday’s affair with the much older writer Philip Roth and spins it into a dazzling, textured story that gives her stand-in character an agency not typically seen in these stories and uses the relationship as the platform to show the development of her writing voice.

The first part, the longest of the three, is called “Folly” and tells the story of how Alice, an editor at a New York publishing house, met the Pulitzer-winning author Ezra, and began an affair that is itself asymmetrical. He’s older, successful, world-weary, and confident in his writing voice; she’s younger, new to the publishing world, naive in some ways (but not totally or hopelessly so), and a would-be writer who has yet to develop her own voice or even find confidence that she’s a worthy enough talent to be published. Their relationship is sweet and grounded in reality, with descriptions of the mundane far more than the tawdry, like Alice picking up very specific foods Ezra loves or medicines he needs, and dialogue that reveals layers of their relationship even through the minutiae of the topics. It doesn’t hurt that Ezra loves the Red Sox and makes Alice into a fan, which then becomes a running theme through the book as the seasons pass and the Sox win their first World Series in 86 years during their affair. What could be weird or even inappropriate never seems such because Alice never loses her autonomy or sense of self within the relationship, even standing up for herself a few times, and often the balance in the relationship shifts in the other direction, as her youth and greater ease in the world giver her an advantage over the less physically able and less flexible Ezra.

The second part, “Madness,” details the Kafkaesque trial of Amar, a dual citizen of the United States and Iraq who gets caught in the purgatory of the UK’s equivalent of homeland security as he tries to make a stopover in London on his way to see his brother in Iraq by way of Istanbul. Amar is powerless in this situation, despite possessing two passports, a valid air ticket, and specific reasons for the stopover and the trip; the power rests entirely in the hands of his tormentors, who demur and delay until they finally decide they’re not going to allow him to leave the airport to legally enter England to visit his friend Alastair. The connection between these two stories is only made clear in the third part, although in hindsight you can see how Halliday presaged it; and even then it’s merely in passing, but that link also gives the first part a new level of significance beyond retelling a May-November romance story that we’ve heard before.

The third part is an interview with Ezra on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs program that functions as an extended epilogue and really ties the room together, although I don’t think it stands that well on its own except as an amusing trifle. It provides a coda for the first part, and an explanation for the relevance of the second part, while also giving us more of Ezra Booker, who is himself a wonderful character – an old man with a young spirit, a speaker who’s light on his feet, and, by this time, Alice’s ex-lover but someone who’s obviously tracked her career with pride.

The novel is also a treasure of literary allusions, both to other works – I doubt Alice’s name is any sort of a coincidence, as so much of the dialogue between her and Ezra is reminiscent of what Lewis Carroll’s protagonist may have found through her looking glass – and to real-world literary events, including Roth/Booker’s desire for a Nobel Prize that never came. Ezra gives Alice books to read on all sorts of subjects, the way an older writer might mentor a younger one, but also buys her expensive (albeit practical) gifts, further exacerbating the asymmetry of their relationship. Nothing is balanced in Halliday’s telling, nor is it any more balanced in reality.

The ultimate question Halliday seems to ask in Asymmetry is whether any of us can truly see the world through the eyes of another person. Ezra has done so through his books, or so Alice believes, but his characters – and Roth’s alter ego Zuckerman – share his perspective on the world, whereas Alice wants to write the character of someone who could not differ from her in a more fundamental way. So much of what we see is merely the way our brains interpret the motions of particles or radio waves, and thus each of us sees a different picture as we move through the same world. Halliday takes that aspect of physics (is the title a wink to supersymmetry?) and asks whether any of us can truly understand the views and experiences of another, even when we seem to walk the same path. It’s a gorgeous debut that can’t answer that question but will linger on your palate long after you finish.

Next up: Iraj Pezeshkzad’s novel My Uncle Napoleon.

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→ February 9, 2019
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There There.

Tommy Orange’s debut novel There There draws its title from multiple sources, including the great Radiohead song of that name and the oft-used but misunderstood Gertrude Stein quote about Oakland, which might give you some idea of how hazy and broad the novel is as a whole. With twelve central characters in a novel of a scant 290 pages – including a lot of white space – there are interesting ideas but, for readers who like to connect with characters in novels they read, not much there here.

Orange is Native American, a enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma (I was ignorant of this idea of enrollment before this) and the idea of being Native American in our current society, which simultaneously fetishizes aspects of indigenous cultures while putting substantial pressure on people of Native descent to assimilate. The twelve characters in There There are connected by a complex web of biological relationships and coincidental acquaintances, all of which leads them to a major pow-wow at whatever it is we’re calling the Oakland A’s stadium right now. Several of the characters plan to rob the powwow using 3D printed guns made by yet another character, which, of course, leads to a mass shooting event that closes out the book. (That’s a spoiler, but if you don’t see that coming by everything that comes before, we may need to talk about foreshadowing.)

The characters themselves don’t get enough page time to develop any depth or to distinguish themselves from each other – it’s not always this simple, but 14-15 pages per character doesn’t give the author much time to develop them – so I had a particularly hard time keeping their relationships straight. That’s exacerbated by what I assume was a major point of Orange’s – that the fractured nature of Native Americans living in a sort of parallel or shadow world next to ours can lead to fractured family relationships. Nobody in this novel has or grew up in a nuclear two-parent home where all members were biologically related, and many were raised by someone other than a parent. In that sense, the lack of definition around the characters works in the novel’s favor, because every individual seems just a little out of focus – and from the way many of them describe their upbringings, that may also represent how they feel.

There are other elements of Native culture present in the book that didn’t make sense to me in context, although I could simply have failed to understand them because I know so little about Native traditions. Several characters report pulling spiders’ legs out of their own legs – they’ll have a wound or cyst of some sort, and then will pull strands out of them that resemble spiders’ legs. It’s the only bit of magical realism in the novel – assuming that’s what it is – and it’s never explained, eventually just disappearing without explanation. If that’s a symbol, I missed it, and yet felt like there was something significant about the descriptions that I needed to grasp to fully understand the book.

And then there’s the mass shooting, which, unfortunately, is way too familiar in contemporary fiction, which is of course an artifact of how familiar mass shootings are in American life today. The way the shooting plays out makes it feel like a jumble of knots Orange used to tie off all of the loose threads he’d created over the course of the novel, and avoids the trap of having to give each of these characters individual endings. The failure to develop any of the characters also makes the ending – some are shot, at least one dies, some do heroic things – surprisingly inert for what should be an evocative portrayal of a gigantic trauma. You should feel something when a significant named character dies on the page; I was still trying to sort out who was who, leaving me disconnected from everything that happened to them.

I heard of There There from a site that tries to predict each year’s Pulitzer winner so that collectors can try to get first editions; this was currently their most likely title to win, although I don’t believe they had last year’s winner, Less, on their board at all. (They nailed the previous year’s winner, The Underground Railroad.) Perhaps they’re right – it has been positively reviewed, and stories about Native Americans in modern America would fit the Pulitzer’s guidelines favoring stories about the American experience. It just didn’t click with me in the least.

Next up: Already more than halfway through the Booker Prize-winning novel The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson.

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→ January 18, 2019
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An Unkindness of Ghosts.

Rivers Solomon’s debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts bears a blatant stylistic similarity to the writing of N.K. Jemisin in her Broken Earth trilogy, from prose to characterization to both writers use of old-time religions in futuristic settings. And both writers put young women right at the heart of their respective stories, with Solomon giving us Aster, a young adult on a ‘generation ship’ that has, over centuries of drifting in space to an unknown and possibly nonexistent destination, devolved into a caste system by ship deck that incorporates skin color into its stratification, resulting in something that looks a good bit like American slavery.

Aster is a self-made scientist and doctor’s helper, often working with the Surgeon General, Theo, as well as tending plants in her botanarium, even though she’s a low-decker on the ship Matilda. That vessel has been in space at least 300 years, and thoughts of its Golden Land destination are more remote and have become tied up in a sort of doomsday religion that most of the ship practices – or, perhaps, that the upper-deck castes use to control those on the lower decks. Aster is neurodivergent, although Solomon never identifies her difference in any specific way, and for reasons that are only somewhat revealed by the end of the book, she’s marked for especially cruel treatment by the Lieutenant, a sadistic leader who is poised to take control if the Sovereign in charge dies. (You can guess whether that comes to pass.) Lune, Aster’s mother, took her own life the day Aster was born, but left behind cryptic clues in a series of notebooks that Aster and her bunk mate Giselle start to decipher when they realize its code may contain clues about the ship, as well as a potential way off of it.

There is, as we say on Twitter, a lot to unpack here, as Solomon has written a tight 350-page novel that incorporates race, religion, class, sex/gender, sexual harassment and assault, how people (mostly men) use and retain power, and a healthy dose of science fiction. There are women in the upper castes, but every authority figure we see is male. Women and girls on lower decks have darker skin, and are also used, to put it bluntly, for breeding, so the ship will have an ongoing supply of workers. Officials and guards have the tacit authority to rape or abuse women as they please, and it’s implied they do so with boys as well. One scene where Aster mouths off (with justification) to an upper-class twit woman lays bare the societal strictures that hold the barriers between upper and lower decks in place, backed by the force of the guard.

Unlike so many science fiction authors, good and bad, Solomon doesn’t spend a ton of time building the world in An Unkindness of Ghosts, giving the readers just what they need to understand what’s happening in the story, or where the characters might be in the architecture of the ship, but nothing extraneous. (Somehow there is meat on the ship, quite a bit of it, and I’m not sure how that one would work unless it’s supposed to be lab-grown.) The result is that the characters are extraordinarily well-developed for the genre – Aster, Theo, even Giselle and the caretaker known as Ainy or Melusine, whose importance grows as the book progresses. Solomon also defies many plot conventions by, again to be blunt, having smart characters still make stupid mistakes, especially Aster, who often acts without foresight because of her youth or how her brain works. She’s the hero, without question, but she’s flawed in a different way than your typical flawed hero. She’s flawed because she was born that way, and her successes come both in spite of that and often because of it, because she makes the best out of who she is, and can thus do things neurotypical people probably couldn’t. All of this, and other aspects of her character including some unspoken history of abuse and her unusual connection to Theo, make her one of the most interesting protagonists I’ve come across in a long time.

Solomon can get caught up in some clumsy prose, another similarity to Jemisin’s writing, such as when they start trying to describe the physics of space travel in their universe, especially the discovery Lune made that changes everything for Aster and her comrades, or in the description of Baby, the ship’s main power source. Yet they also display facility with creating language, giving each deck its own dialect, much the way slaves in different parts of the South would blend their native tongues with English and create new patois, such as the Gulla dialect still spoken today off the coast of South Carolina. The culture and economy of Matilda feel impossibly rich for a book this short; even when I wasn’t gripped by the plot, I was enveloped in Solomon’s world. The book starts slow, but stay with it; the last hundred pages are a barnburner and the ending is satisfying without becoming sentimental or obvious.

Next up: Still reading Camus’ The Plague.

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