→ September 18, 2018
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Unquiet Spirits.

The character of Sherlock Holmes, like all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s writings, is now in the public domain, which has the rather unfortunate effect of letting anybody who wants to write something involving him do so without restriction. If someone wanted to write a story involving Holmes with the supernatural, which would be entirely antithetical to the character and to the author’s beliefs during the period when he was writing Sherlock Holmes stories, they could do so. That’s why I tend to avoid these ‘continuations,’ whether it’s completing an unfinished story or crafting something out of whole cloth – it’s too much to ask most authors to write a compelling story with someone else’s characters while also capturing the prose and dialogue unique to the original author.

Bonnie MacBird is one of many authors who’ve attempted to write something new involving the famous fictional detective, with two novels to date, including 2017’s Unquiet Spirits. She hadn’t published any novels prior to her first Holmes story, with the screenplay to the original Tron film her best-known work, but there’s no evidence here to indicate her inexperience with the form. Her prose is light but mimics the style of Conan Doyle’s late 19th century British vocabulary and syntax, and the story itself moves along quite well until the resolution. The problem here, however, is that she’s managed to turn Holmes dull, and Watson along with him, while also whiffing on the form and structure of the standard Sherlock Holmes mystery – not least by writing a novel of nearly 500 pages, twice as long as the longest of Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Unquiet Spirits is set mostly in a Scottish distillery and the castle of the family that owns the firm, the Maclarens, some of whom believe their castle is haunted by various specters, giving the title its wordplay and creating too many puns on the word ‘spirit’ within the text. A chance encounter takes Holmes and Watson to the south of France, where the central murder is revealed in gruesome fashion, after which they repair to the glens outside Aberdeen and investigate the crime. Aside from perhaps putting Holmes in more mortal danger than Conan Doyle did in most of his works, save “The Final Problem,” MacBird does a credible job unfurling the mystery at the book’s heart through the eyes of Watson watching Holmes investigate it, using observation, knowledge, and ability to extract truth from unwilling interviewees.

There’s a cadence to Holmes’ dialogue and a bent to his character that MacBird simply fails to capture, however, so in the process of writing this overlong story she manages to denude him of most of why his character remains so beloved. His discoveries and revelations are less wondrous than in the original stories, and his speech less sparkling, so he becomes tedious rather than charming. The mystery itself involves something from Holmes’ past, which is the same mistake many other Holmes adapters have made, including the creators of the BBC series – who seem obsessed with Holmes’ history, to the point that it’s truly taken away from the show more than once in the last two seasons – with MacBird going way too far in creating a failed romance, a lengthy back story involving prep school rivalries, and an emotional side to Holmes that simply did not exist in the originals.

The sheer length of the book makes the inventions and extrapolations all the harder to overlook. Unquiet Spirits needed an editor, badly, to trim much of the fat and perhaps simplify the resolution to the central mystery, which is both convoluted (not necessarily a problem) and far too personal to Holmes (almost always a problem) to be true to the spirit, no pun intended, of the character. Holmes is beloved because of how Conan Doyle wrote him – rational to a fault, observant of everything except how his demeanor and speech affected others, and exhaustingly brilliant. He’s still brilliant in Unquiet Spirits, but the rest of him seems to have been left somewhere in the Scottish highlands.

Next up: I’m nearly through Lauren Groff’s Florida.

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→ September 2, 2018
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The Song of Achilles.

Madeline Miller is a scholar of Ancient Greek and Latin and of Greek mythology, so her Orange Prize-winning novel The Song of Achilles seems very on brand for her – she has taken one of the classic myths of antiquity, featuring one of the most famous names to be found in Bullfinch’s guide, and created a stirring novel around it. She mostly hews to the standard myths of the time, adding some notes at the end to explain why, for example, she didn’t use the part of the myth where Achilles’ mother dips him in the water to make him invulnerable, but leaves his heel dry and thus the one place where he can be slain. (It turns out that part of the story came very late to the Greeks and isn’t canon.) Where she does take a liberty is in turning the friendship between Achilles and the exiled prince Patroclus into a romance, one that probably isn’t inaccurate to the norms of Greek society but absolutely changes the very nature of the two characters and why Achilles died the way he did in the original myth.

Achilles was a half-god, half-mortal, conceived during the rape of the sea goddess Thetis, and the godhead within him made him into a fearsome warrior who appeared to be immortal on the battlefield and capable of feats of strength and quickness that were beyond the capacity of any other mortals. In the original myth, he befriends Patroclus, exiled from his own nation after he accidentally kills another boy (who, in Miller’s telling, was attempting to bully him). In this book, Patroclus, the narrator, is quickly smitten with Achilles, and their friendship turns first into an awkward teenage romance between the two boys – one that Miller’s Odysseus remarks isn’t uncommon for the time – but then into a full-fledged relationship not that far from the state of marriage. Miller uses this to put Patroclus right at the center of all of the action, and adds depth to the story of Achilles’ death at the end of a sequence of killings that leave Patroclus and Hector of Troy dead as well.

Miller truly does hew to the story she was given by the gods, and spends more time filling in the details than in trying retell or in any way alter the core myth of Achilles – but that’s part of this book’s problem. It’s a stirring read and moves extremely quickly – I’d guess I knocked this out in under five hours, very fast for a 360 page book, and the last half of it took me two hours on a flight – and yet in some ways felt insubstantial, especially the bulk of the material that comes before the Greeks head to Troy to fight for the return of Helen, the beautiful wife of Menelaus who was kidnapped by Paris (Hector’s brother … seriously, not the best of families there, Mr. Priam). When Miller takes us to war, even though some of the drama there, again drawn from the source myth, has little to do with battle and more to do with grown-ass men (and one demi-mortal) acting like teenagers, the material moves away from dialogue and idyllic scenes in the forest to acquire some actual weight. Of course, by that point, the reader realizes we’re in the place where Achilles and Patroclus will die, so the narrative greed picks up, but there’s also a marked difference in the intensity and realism of the prose between the two halves of the book. So much of the description of the puppy love between the two boys reads more like a bad YA novel with better vocabulary; the interactions among the soldiers and their leaders ring far more true.

There’s also a weird disconnect between how Patroclus perceives Achilles, since the reader sees his inner thoughts, and how Achilles treats Patroclus, which always, even in moments that are supposed to read as tender, come across as distant. It is as if Patroclus idolizes Achilles – which is kind of understandable, since Achilles is a handsome, athletically gifted half-god, sort of a Greek Kris Bryant I suppose – but Achilles is just dabbling in the love that dare not speak its name. Perhaps he is just playing around; perhaps Miller’s Achilles is bisexual, and his brief infidelity is a reflection of a conflict within him that Patroclus faces. By making Patroclus the star-struck gay kid within the story, Miller put the less interesting character of the two in front of the microphone. Had she told the story in another way, and spent a little less time on Achilles’ youth, perhaps she wouldn’t have needed the crutch of war to power the novel through to its conclusion – a conclusion that, by the way, is very sweet and befitting a myth of this magnitude. If only the rest of the book lived up to its ending.

Next up: Donal Ryan’s From a Low and Quiet Sea.

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→ August 23, 2018
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The Ninth Hour.

Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour earned her a spot on the shortlist for the National Book Critics Circle award last year, which went to Joan Silber’s Improvement, and as far as I can remember that’s the only reason I put in a hold request for it at my library – that and the fact that it was barely over 200 pages, meaning I could knock it out in a few days. It was certainly fast, taking me less than 48 hours to finish, but it’s a literary anachronism, a facsimile of the types of novels that used to win these awards 50 years ago – perhaps the type of book people think they’re supposed to like rather than one that they should.

The Ninth Hour begins with a suicide, significant in a book drenched with Catholic dogma and practices, as Jim decides to exercise some agency in his own life by ending it, leaving behind his pregnant wife, Anne, who in turn is taken in by a local cloister of charity-minded nuns. Anne gives birth to Sally, who spends her formative years with her mother as the latter works in the laundry of the convent, soaking up the secular aspects of the nuns’ faith and eventually toying with the idea of entering a convent herself. Anne, meanwhile, is left a young widow when barely out of her girlhood, and is, unsurprisingly, neither satisfied with her lot in life nor willing to sit back and accept it, eventually taking up with a man who is married to an invalid who is in turn tended by the nuns on their daily rounds.

McDermott’s one trick in this novel is setting up the eventual intersection of these different threads in sufficiently organic fashion to make it credible, at least up until what I’ll call Sally’s last decision, the one truly inexplicable detail (and one I feel like I’ve seen in other works as well). The affair between Anne and her paramour feels natural, as does Sally’s attraction to the vocation of the women who have all helped to raise and educate her. The discovery of the affair itself is faintly comic but, again, entirely fits within the structures of these characters’ lives, and if anything McDermott undersells any scandalous aspects to it, perhaps because her order of nuns is, on the whole, far more progressive than the Catholic Church was at any point in the 20th century.

Those nuns, however, are almost ciphers on the page; McDermott’s attempts to give them distinct characters fall flat, as their defining attributes are neither significant nor strong enough to sear their identities on the reader. By the end of the book, I sort of knew the differences between Sister Jeanne and Sister Lucy, but not enough to keep any of the sisters in my memory once I’d hit the final page. Anne is the most interesting and well-rounded character while she’s at the novel’s center, but once Sally grows up and decides she’s interested in becoming a nun, she takes over as the protagonist, and she’s quite a bit less interesting than her mother is. The longest chapter, describing Sally’s train ride from New York to Chicago to join a convent there on a trial basis, would have worked very well as a standalone short story, where Sally is the observer and pivot point but her personality, which appears just in flashes, is secondary to the cast of eccentrics around her, notably the crass woman who sits next to her (and has a vocabulary inapposite to the time period). It even ends on the right note for the conclusion of a short story about a woman on her first journey out of her birth city, considering embarking on a new and permanent direction in her life. It’s too bad the rest of the novel couldn’t live up to that chapter; so little happens and the characters are so bland that many of the chapters in The Ninth Hour are just plain boring.

I’ve read all five of those NBCC fiction finalists, and this was clearly at the bottom. I would have given the prize to Exit West rather than Improvement, with The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness third and Sing, Unburied, Sing (which won the National Book Award) fourth. The Ninth Hour is the only one of the five I’d say is below the recommendation threshold, however; it’s such an inconsequential story that illuminates nothing about us, its characters, our society, or even questions about faith, the meaning of life, or dealing with death. I’m not sure what the critics in the NBCC saw in the book to give it a nod over the vastly superior Lincoln in the Bardo for the shortlist.

Next up: Kory Stamper’s Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries.

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→ August 20, 2018
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Pachinko.

Min Jin Lee’s second novel, Pachinko, earned broad acclaim last year, including a spot on the shortlist for the National Book Award (which it lost to Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing) and on the New York Times‘ list of the ten best books of last year, all of which brought it to my attention in the spring when I was looking at potential winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which went to the markedly inferior Less. Lee’s novel manages to combine a totally unfamiliar aspect of world history and culture – the outsider status of Koreans living in Japan during and after the latter’s colonization of the Korean peninsula – with the familiar epic structure of classic novels of the British tradition. If Dickens or Eliot had written a novel about Koreans living as part of the underclass in Japan, it would probably look a lot like Pachinko.

Pachinko is a type of arcade game very popular in Japan, similar to pinball, and often used for gambling. Pachinko parlors are mostly owned by Koreans, and it was one of the few industries open to ethnic Koreans in Japan in the wake of colonization, which Lee uses as the backdrop for her novel. The book covers four generations of a Korean family from their beginnings in Busan, a city at the southern tip of the peninsula, through their settlement in Yokohama, Japan, and multiple tragedies borne largely of the disadvantages and obstacles they face as permanent outsiders in their adopted homeland.

The novel moves quickly to get us to Sunja, a teenaged Korean daughter of a widowed innkeeper, when she becomes pregnant by a Korean man, Honsu, who lives in Japan and only later reveals that he has a wife and children in Osaka whom he won’t leave or divorce. Sunja marries a Korean Presbyterian missionary, who moves her to Japan, where the family faces ongoing discrimination that moves from the overt to the subtle over the course of the novel’s fifty-odd years, where even educational achievement isn’t enough to push her descendants past the invisible barriers of anti-Korean prejudice in Japanese society. The source of Hansu’s wealth and power isn’t revealed until later in the book, but even his influence can’t break down all of these walls, and the pachinko industry becomes the source of refuge and only path to wealth or success for several members of the family. Through the narrative, Lee works in the mistreatment of Koreans prior to and during World War II, including political prisoners and forced laborers as well as off-screen references to “comfort women,” before the tone shifts to one of superficial acceptance and tacit discrimination in the wake of the war.

The overarching theme of Pachinko is one of displacement, as some of the core characters still yearn to return to Korea, thinking of it as home, while others want to think of Japan as home – especially Sunja’s younger son and grandson, both born in the archipelago – but aren’t fully accepted by Japanese society. Koreans in the novel form a cultural enclave, surrounded by Japanese people and their economic and social hierarchies, unable to fully assimilate even if they learn the language fluently and attend Japanese schools. Any upward mobility is stunted by formal and informal obstacles, like a plant trying to grow into ground that is too hard for its roots to penetrate. This leads to a sense of anomie in some characters, like Sunja’s younger son Mozasu, who ends up in the pachinko business primarily because it’s that or jail, while others, like her son with Hansu, Noa, can never reconcile their two identities and come to awful ends.

Although female agency is another theme that looms large throughout the novel, Noa seems to best encapsulate Lee’s points about identity and isolation. He’s an ethnic Korean, but grows up believing his adoptive father, the Presbyterian missionary, is his biological father, and finds out far later that his real father is the businessman of dubious methods, Hansu, destroying any sense of self he’d built up through his own hard work in school and in jobs where he’s underpaid because he’s Korean. Lee writes more from the perspectives of the women in the novel, mostly Sunja, but Noa’s story after the revelation about his parentage could have used even more elucidation, as he disappears from the novel for many years of book time, leaving me with questions about the continued effects of his mixed-up identity.

I ended up getting Pachinko as a digital loan from my library after putting in a hold back in February, and when the book showed up, I was in the middle of something else, and had just eight days to finish it before the loan expired, which would be aggressive for a book of over 450 pages … but it reads so quickly that I finished it in four days. Lee’s prose absolutely flies, even with plenty of descriptive, scene-setting language, and the book is largely driven by dialogue, so the pace rarely slows. I have other, minor quibbles, such as wishing for more depth on certain characters, but Pachinko is so ambitious and exposes a world that was totally opaque or outright unknown to me beforehand that it seems petty to dwell on them. I would still rank it below Lincoln in the Bardo among 2017 novels, but it was more than worthy of any of the annual fiction awards for which it was considered.

Next up: Another 2017 novel, Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour.

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→ August 13, 2018
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The Fall of Hyperion.

Dan Simmons’ Hugo-winning novel Hyperion is one of my favorite science fiction novels ever, a totally unexpected epic story that creates a new universe in a distant hyper connected future and gives the reader five absolutely fascinating character backstories … but doesn’t give the reader any kind of resolution. The five people in question have all traveled to the world of Hyperion, a planet at the edges of the dominant galactic federation, about to be threatened by the invading Ousters, to journey to a portion of Hyperion inhabited by a mysterious and deadly creature known as the Shrike, who lives among the Time Tombs where entropy goes through the roof and time itself moves in inexplicable ways. The nature of the Shrike, the outcome of their journeys, the potential for war between the global confederation and the Ousters – these are all left hanging at the end of Hyperion. It’s still so powerfully written, with erudite prose and meticulously and thoughtfully crafted characters that I could easily recommend the book as a one-off read, even with its cliffhanger ending; but I concede I still wanted to know what would happen to some of those characters and what on earth the Shrike was.

Simmons returned to the story in The Fall of Hyperion, which breaks the plot up into multiple threads, one of which is narrated by a ‘cybrid’ who is the reincarnated consciousness of the poet John Keats, but also provides the reader with a more conventional finish to the story. The series of novels in this universe continues, but you can read these two book as a diptych and get a complete self-contained story. And I think that might be enough for me for now; Simmons’ writing is wonderful, but I’m not driven to get back to this universe the way I have been with some others.

The five pilgrims on Hyperion are as we left them, running out of time, stymied by the very forces who helped them reach the Time Tombs, and in perpetual fear of the bizarre creature who stalks them but whose intentions are entirely unclear. The pilgrims have a purpose in the passion play at work here – the Keats cybrid is a rather obvious Christ surrogate – but that purpose, beyond the sheer opening of the Time Tombs, is unknown to all of them. Simmons layers on top of this the greater question of war between the federation of humanity, aided by the sentient and independent artificial intelligence unit called the Core, and the Ousters, whose goal is also unknown beyond mere territorial conquest. The CEO of the ‘good guys’ is Meina Gladstone, a woman surrounded by men who doubt her, with scarcely any support from the politicians below her, and with her own personal interest in the movements of the pilgrims.

That combination of stories along with the need to just wrap the dang thing up meant that The Fall of Hyperion didn’t have the same sort of narrative greed as its predecessor, even though the prose remains superb, replete with references to 19th and early 20th century English poetry, because of the fractured nature of the narrative itself. Only in the last few chapters does Simmons spend more time in each location before shifting focus, and that’s because by that point in the book the stories are converging. The most riveting of the pilgrims’ stories, that of Sol Weintraub and his daughter Rachel, who is aging in reverse after her visit to the Time Tombs, remains so – but it’s also fairly easy to see what her role in the greater drama will be, and that she’s not going to die even though Sol and the other pilgrims, who all become emotionally invested in her survival in a beautiful flourish of writing from Simmons, believe she may.

Saying that The Fall of Hyperion doesn’t live up to its predecessor is not a criticism, or even necessarily a measure of disappointment. I wanted to finish the stories given in the first book, and I truly enjoy Simmons’ writing, so I had little doubt I’d find the sequel a great read. The first book was such an immersive read, one that reminded me of getting lost in Jonathan Strange or the Harry Potter novels, that no second book was going to live up to it.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women.

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→ August 7, 2018
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The Lost Time Accidents.

John Wray’s The Lost Time Accidents is yet another novel that someone recommended to me months ago, maybe longer, but I have long since forgotten who it was who suggested it – or maybe I made that up and stumbled upon a review of the book elsewhere and liked the sound of it. I was unfamiliar with John Wray’s work previous to this, and he’s clearly a brilliant thinker, well-versed in science and philosophy, but the book never quite seemed to provide the payoff in terms of plot or character, especially not around the central mystery of time travel that is too enmeshed in the core story to end up without any real resolution.,

Waldemar is the central character and narrator of The Lost Time Accidents, the latest generation of a family that has been obsessed with the physics of time travel – treating time as a fourth dimension of space that can be manipulated in the same way as the first three – since at least the time of his great-grandfather. Waldemar’s antecedents have included physicists and cranks, as well as one man whose work inspired a Scientology-like cult convinced that he’d solved the secret of time travel. In the twin narratives, Waldemar repeats his tortuous family history, and explains that he is currently somewhere else, exiled from the timestream, unable to return to it, and unaware of how or why he’s been kicked out of time in such a fashion.

For a book ostensibly about time travel, The Lost Time Accidents has remarkably little time travel in it – and the few mentions of it therein are of questionable veracity. Waldemar was raised in ignorance of the family’s history of time travel experiments, or, in the words of his mother, of mental illness, but is eventually drafted into the obsession with time travel by his eccentric aunts, one of whom has pursued time-travel physics in secret for decades in the New York apartment the two women share.

The similarities between The Lost Time Accidents and Infinite Jest work to the former’s detriment, in large part because it’s so hard for any writer to live up to the standard set by the polymathic David Foster Wallace in his sprawling, wryly comic magnum opus. Wray obviously has a strong layman’s grasp of the theories of general and special relativity, but the story is much stronger when he’s covering the weird cult that has sprung up around the Accidents and Waldemar’s father, and the hints that these people are all just seriously delusional, Waldemar included. (Wray’s previous novel, Lowboy, has a schizophrenic protagonist, so this may be a focus for him. I haven’t read any of his other works.) I interpreted this novel as a sort of test for the reader – do you think any of this is real, that Waldemar’s great-uncle, his aunts, or his father had some insight into time travel? Is Waldemar actually trapped outside of time (but obviously not space), and is any of what he sees there real?

The DFW comparison is more favorable to Wray on an analytical level, given the somewhat aimless storyline, as Wray plays with words and concepts around time. Ottokar, the ancestor of Waldemar who starts all this nonsense, makes pickles for a living by fermenting them, the classic method of preserving food using microbes and a little time to allow the fermented items to defy time by avoiding decay. Waldemar’s father is named Orson Card, a rather obvious reference to the Mormon science fiction writer behind Ender’s Game, and Orson’s works become the foundation for a Scientology-like cult. The very title of the book plays with the modern factory-safety idea of “X days without a lost time accident” while alluding to Proust’s opus on time and memory, In Search of Lost Time. It is as if Wray had a bucket overflowing with ideas for allusions and references to time and its effects, and decided to stuff as many into the book as it could handle, then decided to stuff the rest in there too. That makes it an interesting philosophical novel, one that left me with plenty to ponder after it was over, but I wanted more plot and character development than Wray was able to provide.

Next up: Nearly done with Dan Simmons’ The Fall of Hyperion.

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→ July 22, 2018
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The Stone Sky.

N.K. Jemisin became the first African-American author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and I believe the first woman of color to win it, when she took the prestigious (but generally white-dominated) prize home for her 2015 novel The Fifth Season, the opener of the Broken Earth trilogy. The story continued with The Obelisk Gate, which also took home the Hugo, and finished with last summer’s The Stone Sky, which is one of six nominees for this year’s Hugo and won Jemisin her first Nebula Award earlier this year. Continuing the saga of Essun and her daughter Nassun, two ‘orogenes’ who can control seismic movements in an earth subject to massive tectonic upheavals that cause lengthy climate disasters, The Stone Sky explains the origins of the post-apocalyptic setting and combines the parallel narratives – Essun’s, Nassun’s, and the nameless narrator of Essun’s sections, who is identified near the end of this book – into one story that answers all of the questions from the first two books. Wrapping up a series of this magnitude is difficult, and Jemisin, who has authored many other books, including series, seems to wobble as she tries to conclude this one. (UPDATE: This novel also won the Hugo, making Jemisin the first author to win the prize for all three books in a trilogy, and the first to win three straight Hugos for Best Novel.)

In the Broken Earth trilogy, humanity is in dire straits, as relatively unpredictable “Seasons” occur that produce catastrophic weather conditions that make survival extremely difficult, driving most humans, especially those near the Rifting (which I sense is by the equator), underground for the duration. If they don’t have food stores to survive, then they die. Somehow, enough humans have survived that the race persists, including some humans with the strange power of orogeny, allowing them to move the earth’s plates enough to try to stop some of those catastrophes from occurring. They also can draw on the power of the planet for combat, defensive or offensive, and there’s some overlap between the orogenes and people with a power the book refers to as magic, of even more obscure origin. And then there are the stone eaters, humanoid creatures who do as their name implies, can move through rock, and are effectively immortal.

Essun and Nassun are mother and daughter, but have been apart since the very beginning of The First Season, when Nassun’s father killed her little brother because he showed signs of orogeny and then absconded with her, leaving Essun to come home and find her son’s body with her family gone. Essun is part of a new ‘comm,’ which is trying to reach a distant haven before the imminent Season arrives, but is also still hoping to find her daughter, and in this book, she becomes aware that Nassun is doing things with her own nascent orogenic powers, driving Essun, herself one of the most powerful orogenes on the planet, to try to stop her daughter from wreaking unimaginable destruction on the world.

Nassun, meanwhile, has now lost her brother and father, and is separated from her mother, leaving her only with her Guardian, Schaffa, who acts as a father figure but also has ambiguous responsibilities beyond protecting his young charge. When his life is threatened, Nassun sets off on a quixotic mission that might save him but bring about an eschatological crisis from which humanity and the planet would never recover.
Although the series’ post-apocalyptic setting appears in the first novel to be the result of unchecked climate change, the cause of the Seasons turns out to be more fantastical than that, and any indictment of man’s reckless misuse of the planet and its environment is strictly metaphorical. The stronger metaphor, played out in parallel with Essun and Nassun, is one of man’s relationship with ‘Mother’ Earth, and the changes in the nature of that relationship over the course of the lives of both mother and child. Nassun needs her mother, but resents her absence (feeling abandoned, although that’s not fair to Essun). Essun is torn between her responsibilities to her comm – which is what’s keeping her alive – and her responsibilities to her daughter. Nassun eventually takes a course of action that reflects her youth and the poor judgment of humans whose brains have not yet fully developed, and it takes a heroic effort from Essun to try to stop her. The parallel with the man/Earth relationship here – there’s a hint of Gaia theory underneath the novel – is not perfect, but similar ideas, like man taking the environment for granted, using it up and discarding it when finished, appear in both the literal and figurative aspects of the novel.

The problem with The Stone Sky and the trilogy as a whole is the resolution of the main storyline, which seems to require Jemisin to create some new magic to complete it. The first book conceived a world that, while strange and often vague, felt self-contained: You didn’t know all of the rules of the environment, but you could trust that the author knew them and worked within their limits. By this third book, however, it seemed like Jemisin had expanded her own rule set to get to the finish line, including the transport method – like a hyperloop train through the earth – that is essential to get everyone in the right place for the slam-bang finish, and I found my suspension of disbelief starting to fall apart. Between that and some plodding prose – Jemisin is clearly brilliant and creative, but I found her style sluggish to read – I finished this book because I felt an obligation to it, but wouldn’t say I enjoyed it to the end.

Next up: still reading John Wray’s The Lost Time Accidents.

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→ July 6, 2018
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Wise Blood.

Flannery O’Connor is a fascinating figure in American literature – a staunch Catholic who wrote macabre, misanthropic, even violent stories seem to stem from a mind like Cormac McCarthy’s, becoming a leader of the new Southern Gothic style before her death at 39 of complications from lupus. Her short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find includes the title story, one of the creepiest I’ve ever read, a story that seems completely without hope and presents as dark a view as possible of humanity.

O’Connor wrote two novels, including Wise Blood, about a young man named Hazel Motes who decides he’s going to start a Church Without Christ, a sort of anti-church, not a church of atheism specifically but a church opposed to churches. If it sounds like a less than coherent philosophy, then you’ve got the idea, as Hazel is very mad and not very smart. He’s befriended by the teenaged zoo employee Enoch, an eager and socially inept youth who is looking for anyone to whom he can attach himself. Hazel’s half-hearted attempts to preach his anti-gospel are quickly subsumed by a local con man, who names his church the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ and starts collecting donations while steering attention away from Hazel. Hazel’s rage gets the best of him as he sees someone else profiting from his ideas, leading to violence and then a period of remorse marked by self-mutilation and asceticism.

Wise Blood is disjointed, and side characters and themes come and go without much bother, so it wasn’t surprising to see (after I read it) that O’Connor cobbled it together from previously written short stories and her master’s thesis (the first chapter). The one unifying element is Hazel himself, a damaged World War II veteran whose family has disappeared while he was away, and who returns believing in nothing at all – a pure nihilist, angry at the world and at the God in which he claims to disbelieve. He’s a comic antihero, in part because he’s a bit of a moron, and in part because so much of what he does goes awry. So while the novel does have a climax and long resolution, it’s more a connected set of stories around Hazel’s return from war and anti-religious fervor, culminating in his attempt to find redemption via masochistic means after committing a horrible crime.

O’Connor makes heavy use of symbolism in her works, none more here than the repeated references to characters’ eyes. We get the crooked preacher who pretended to blind himself with quicklime but is the first one to see through Hazel for what he is. Hazel is stopped by a police officer at one point whose eyes are ‘diamond blue.’ The crooked preacher’s daughter, named Sabbath Lily, decides she loves (or just wants) Hazel because of what she sees in his eyes – that he’s not just looking at you, but through you into the future. And the name Hazel Motes includes two allusions to eyes or sight, hazel as a distinctive eye color, and mote as a reference to Matthew 7:3-5 (“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”), which decries those who see flaws in others but are blind to faults in themselves.

But despite comic elements and text rich with metaphor and allusion, Wise Blood feels inconsequential; I read it, but never felt absorbed at all in the story, and found the redemption arc too inverted to connect with it. The side characters are all too one-dimensional and serve as props for Hazel’s actions, not as fully-realized individuals themselves. And the ending moves more into speculative fiction territory, losing any threads of realism we’d had earlier in the book. The Guardian named this one of the 100 best novels ever back in 2003, but I’ve read a few hundred novels better on both a literal and a symbolic level.

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→ June 15, 2018
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Crosstalk.

I adore the prose of Connie Willis, the brilliant and prolific American novelist whose Oxford time-travel stories include some of my favorite sci-fi novels, including To Say Nothing of the Dog, Doomsday Book, and the diptych Blackout and All Clear, which as a group won three Hugos, two Nebulas, and two Locus awards. She has, however, written other speculative fiction outside of the Oxford universe (which began with “Fire Watch,” a short story that also won the Hugo-Nebula parlay), including the light novel Bellwether and, most recently, the 2016 novel Crosstalk, which builds an entire comedy of errors on a single technological twist while also prodding questions about just how much we really want to connect to other people.

Bridget “Briddey” Flanigan is the very lucky protagonist, a rising employee of mobile phone manufacturer CommSpan who happens to be engaged to the extremely desirable bachelor and top executive Trent, who then convinces her to get an EED, a neural implant that is supposed to allow two people with a strong emotional connection to feel each other’s emotions even more potently. Her fiancé is in a terrible rush to have the procedure done, and Briddey agrees to it even though her family members warn her not to do so, as does the eccentric programmer C.B., who works at CommSpan in a dungeon-like basement office. When she has the implant, however, she finds that she’s suddenly telepathic, and the first voice she hears isn’t Trent’s, leading to a series of misadventures around trying to stay afloat amidst the deluge of voices in her head, to avoid letting Trent know what’s going on, and, hardest of all, to keep anything private from her unbelievably intrusive family.

Figuring out how Crosstalk would end was the least of its pleasures – it’s obvious she’s going to end up with someone other than Trent, and I thought it was obvious what side character was pulling many of the strings throughout the book – but, as with so many Willis novels, the fun is in the journey. She has a classic comic novelist’s knack of creating side characters who are exaggerated just to the edge of realistic, like Briddey’s sisters, both of whom classify anything as an emergency, one of whom is referring to her awful dating choices while the other is convinced that her daughter Maeve is into everything from Disney princesses to online terrorism. (She’s mostly just watching zombie movies.) They’ll exasperate you as they exasperate Briddey – and I often wondered why she even talks to her great-aunt, who seems to have less respect than anyone for Briddey’s privacy – but they’re all just slightly embellished versions of people you probably know in your own life, and watching her evasive maneuvers provides a good chunk of the book’s humor.

Willis can craft a clever mystery as well, and in all of her novels she tends to reveal the secrets of the main plot very gradually, which works extremely well in the time travel stories, but a bit less so here because she has characters who know the truth deliberately holding it back from Briddey. The EED doesn’t make everyone telepathic, or even close, so why does Briddey become so after the surgery? Why does she hear that one other character first, even though that person hasn’t had an EED? Once the specific character trait in question is revealed, it’s easy to figure out who’s pulling many of the strings and to walk all the way back to the first chapter to understand certain characters’ motivations, but I also left with the sense that Briddey herself had a right to know what was happening to her. Several people who profess to care about her don’t share what they know, and she’s left worse off until they come clean. That’s not a factor in the Oxford novels, where something generally goes wrong with the time travel mechanism and no one, not even the Professor running the program, can figure out why.

The time-travel novels and even the much lighter Bellwether all sucked me completely into their worlds, because Willis writes so well – like P.G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis with a dash of Jane Austen thrown in – and because she creates so many three-dimensional characters in all of her books. Crosstalk is a half-grade down for me, because of the issue with characters not telling Briddey what they know, and because the moral and philosophical questions Willis seems to explore here don’t feel very fresh even two years after the book’s publication. We’re all online too much if we’re online at all. We’re replacing personal connections with digital ones, at apparent risk to our emotional well-being. Willis takes that to its logical extreme, that two people who are glued to their devices decide to make their romantic relationship a direct, digital one instead. It was probably a risk Willis knew she was taking while writing the book, but reality has raced forward to the point where the book seems like a debate we might have had three years ago, replaced today by so many more social media worries and changes to how we all communicate with each other (or fail to do so) instead. It’s worth reading, because Willis is such a fun writer, but I would rate it at the bottom of the novels I’ve read from her so far.

Next up: Still reading Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.

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→ June 14, 2018
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The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

Catherynne Valente first published her young adult novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making online, in installments; the book was a huge success online, winning the Andre Norton Award for young adult science fiction/fantasy, given by the Science Fiction Writers’ Association, and is still the only self-published novel to do so. It’s now the first novel in the five-book Fairyland series, which covers the adventures of a young girl named September who lives in Omaha and is visited one day by the Green Wind, who whisks her off to the parallel world known as Fairyland. Hilarity and peril ensue, as they would. I bought it for my daughter to read, but last month decided to give it a whirl myself, and it is witty, sweet, and written at a very high level for YA literature.

September is your typical YA fantasy heroine, a precocious child whose life is boring (to her) and whose family isn’t perfect (her father is away at war, her mother works long hours at an airplane manufacturing plant), so she is the ideal target for a being from Fairyland to come and rescue for a series of adventures – although Valente has a knack for making these adventures go sideways often enough that they’re not totally predictable. September then meets a series of eccentric characters from Fairyland after the Green Wind, including a wyvern who’s convinced his father was a library, a young ifrit named Saturday, a conjured servant made of soap, a sentient paper lantern, and plenty of others, leading up to the Marquess, a young girl who has become the evil queen of Fairyland after the death of the benevolent queen who preceded her. September ends up on a series of quests that generally don’t end well for her but instead lead her on a crooked path toward an eventual confrontation with the Marquess and a revelation about the true connection between Fairyland and our human plane.

Valente’s imagination is impressive, with crazy characters and amusing plot twists, but she writes in a high style that recalls 19th and 20th century British literature, from Lewis Carroll to P.G. Wodehouse, similar to the writing of Susanna Clarke but just a half-grade lower in difficulty. Reading it as an adult (by age, at least), I never felt that the prose was written for children or in any way condescending to the reader through simpler vocabulary or syntax. I’m unfamiliar with Valente’s other work – she’s a prolific author – but if this isn’t a near approximation of her natural voice, I’d be shocked. It’s perfectly calibrated to appropriately challenge a young reader without turning her off, and to appeal to an adult reader without seeming trivial or dumb.

There’s also quite a bit of wordplay within Fairyland, perhaps not quite as much as you’ll find in The Phantom Tollbooth or in the Harry Potter series, but a similar mix of straight-up puns and double meanings along with twisted loanwords from folklore and mythology. September meets a wairwulf, who is a wolf 27 days a month and a man the other three, and is married to two witches, one of whom gets the wolf days and the other the human days; the witches are named Hello and Goodbye, and the wairwulf Manythanks. There’s a quest for a spoon (alas, not the runcible variety), a dictum to avoid eating any food in Fairyland that quickly goes awry, an argument over the shape of the earth (“roughly trapezoidal, vaguely rhomboid, a bit of a tesseract”), and plenty of sly jokes about bureaucracy, pseudoscience, and air travel.

My daughter read this when she was 11 and both enjoyed it and said she had no real trouble with the prose; she read it on her Kindle, which, despite my affinity for dead-tree editions, does have the benefit of allowing you to click on a word and get an immediate definition. (And then you read a paper book and come across a word you don’t know and put your finger on the page and press and then look around and hope nobody saw you do that. Or so I hear.) Valente has hit that perfect sweet spot between writing for a young audience and keeping it smart enough to hold an adult’s attention. I ripped through the entire book in just a few hours while on a flight back from Europe last month, because I wanted something light for the long trip, but this was fun and sharp enough that I decided it was worth reviewing and recommending too.

Next up: I’m way behind on book reviews, but I’m currently reading Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood, which is just $3.55 for Kindle right now.

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