→ 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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→ April 22, 2018
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Less.

Andrew Sean Greer’s Less was a surprise winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, both because there were several strong contenders that had already won other significant prizes in this cycle and because it’s ostensibly a comic novel, a subcategory that is very poorly represented in Pulitzer history. (I can count two outright comedies among the 90 previous winners.) Less is a quick and breezy read, the story of a writer, Arthur Less, turning 50 and taking a whirlwhind round-the-world trip after his younger boyfriend has left him to marry another man. It is also disappointingly bland and almost entirely without any real humor at all.

Arthur Less is a three-time novelist at something of a crossroads in his life and career. His first novel was a critical and commercial success, but his last two were each less so, and his latest one, a semi-autobiographical downer called Swift, was just rejected by his longtime publisher. His boyfriend, Freddy, has indeed left him. His previous lover, the Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Brownburn, threw him overboard some years earlier, and is now in some sort of assisted living facility. With his fiftieth birthday just weeks away, Less stitches together an impossible trip that takes him to four continents, speaking at one conference, appearing at another where he’s a finalist for an award, joining a friend for a journey across Morocco, heading to Japan to write a story on a ceremonial meal served in Kyoto, and so on. Along the way he meets a cadre of eccentrics, nearly has a fling with a married man, bumps into old friends, ruins one suit and buys another, and is possibly Patient Zero for some sort of 24-hour virus. The narrator is unseen, but confesses to knowing Less for many years – it’s not hard to guess who it is – and sprinkles the story of Less’s trip with flashbacks to earlier periods of the man’s life.

This is a midlife crisis novel, set loosely to the strains of Homer’s The Odyssey, with Less avoiding hazards and sirens on his trip around the globe, eventually making it back home after learning an Important Lesson about life. It’s mildly amusing in spots, but rarely does it become truly funny, and the whole exercise has too much of that unfortunate facet of literature of writers writing about how tough it is to be a writer. Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, each of whom won a Pulitzer for a book about or featuring a writer-narrator, were frequently guilty of the same thing. I am a writer, of a different ilk, and I do understand that there are aspects of this calling that are difficult, but as I often tell people who ask if I enjoy what I do for a living, I don’t complain about my job because no one wants to hear it. And many of Less’s complaints here are just that – cry me a river, you’re in Paris/Berlin/Tokyo and something trivial has gone wrong. There’s a small running gag about a bespoke suit that never quite lands and speaks to the privilege of Less’s life, that, even as he worries about being a bit skint, he can still indulge in luxuries most mortals cannot.

Greer does give the reader some moments of real pathos, including the touching digital reunion between Less, Brownburn, and Brownburn’s ex-wife Marian, whom Less assumes is still furious with him for stealing her husband – as if he turned the poet gay or some such nonsense – but is magnanimous and bears the wisdom of years as the three converse in unlikely fashion. There’s a pervasive sense here that Less is a side character in his own life, or that he believes that he is, only to have other people he encounters on his odyssey teach him of his own worth and importance, and that his best years aren’t necessarily behind him at age fifty.

The Pulitzer boards over the years have shown an affinity for books about writers or writing, and for books that fall into certain prescribed tranches of literature about well-off white men facing existential crises. If Less differs at all from such past winners, it’s that it’s the first novel to win the prize with a protagonist who’s LGBT. (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay had two protagonists, one a closeted gay man; several stories in John Cheever’s anthology feature gay main characters as well.) There just isn’t anything new in Less about life in these United States – ostensibly the purpose of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – nor is there anywhere near enough humor in this book to justify giving it the nod over other contenders like the daring Lincoln in the Bardo or the incisive Sing, Unburied, Sing. There’s always next year, I guess.

Next up: A true change of pace, as I’m reading Phil Collins’ memoir Not Dead Yet.

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→ April 16, 2018
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Ranking the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners.

Today, the Pulitzer Prize Board will announce the winners of the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes, including that for Fiction, which – assuming they give one out this year – will give us the 91st honoree in this category (which was known as the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel until 1948) in the 101 years since the awards began. The Board declined to give this award to any title in 1920, 1941, 1946, 1954, 1957, 1964, 1971, 1977, and most recently in 2012.

I have read all 90 winners to date – thank you, thank you, hold your applause till the end, please – and have now presumed to rank them, because ranking is a thing I do. As the list goes on, the writeups get shorter, because you really don’t need to read them all, or even half of them, and even the bad ones at the end aren’t so-bad-they’re-good, just bad, and I chose instead to spend my words up top on the good ones. I’ll update this post each year when we get a new winner and I’ve had a chance to read it.

Linked book titles go to amazon; links to my reviews, all on this site, are separate and come after the author’s name. If there’s no link to a review, I didn’t write one.

1. Beloved – Toni Morrison. (1988) Beloved has a strong case for the greatest American novel ever written; a 2006 New York Times poll of authors, critics, and editors, asking them to name the best novel of the last 25 years, and Morrison’s magnum opus won. It is a searing story of a runaway slave woman who sees the toddler she killed (to save her from a life in bondage) reappear as a ghost, calling herself Beloved, wreaking havoc among their poor black community. Rich in metaphor and symbol, Beloved is the most acclaimed novel by any African-American author, and the greatest novel we have to describe our country’s greatest shame and its still-extant ramifications.

2. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee. (1961) Call it a children’s novel if you like – as if that’s some sort of putdown – or claim that Lee had to have had a little help to craft it, To Kill a Mockingbird is a little slice of prose perfection, capturing the dialect of a specific time and place to tell us the story of a great injustice as seen through one little girl’s eyes.

3. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole. (1981) Perhaps as famous for how it ended up getting published – after the author’s suicide, his mother harassed Walker Percy to read the manuscript, and a skeptical Percy was blown away – as it is for its content, this modern picaresque gave the world Ignatius J. Reilly and his uncooperative pyloric valve, an actual large adult son who is a walking case of arrested development and whose comic misadventures have made him a favorite since the book’s publication. This is one of two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction awarded posthumously.

4. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton. (1921) A subtly witty sendup of the changing American aristocracy and the serious novels describing it that were popular for the preceding century, The Age of Innocence made Wharton the first woman to win the Pulitzer, and remains one of the great works of irony in American letters.

5. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck. (1940) My review. The final scene is the one most readers remember, but Steinbeck was a masterful writer, showing incredible empathy towards his characters even as he puts them through the wringer.

6. Empire Falls – Richard Russo. (2002) My (brief) review. Russo’s peak output, led by this novel, combines strong characterization – although after a while you notice he has certain archetypes to which he regularly returns – with brilliant, wry humor even over serious plots. This one is probably his most serious, set in a declining mill town where tragedy is just around the corner, populated by a cast of eccentrics.

7. The Road – Cormac McCarthy. (2007) Don’t do what I did, listening to this in audiobook form while doing some long, dark drives to and from Cape Cod League games. It is dark, grim, misanthropic, and also one of the best fictional depictions of the lengths to which a parent will go for his child I have ever seen.

8. The Reivers – William Faulkner. (1963) Okay, it’s Discount Faulkner, but you still get Yoknapatawpha County, and even simplified Faulkner prose is award-worthy. I can only assume that this was, in some part, a lifetime achievement award, as it turned out to be Faulkner’s final novel, but this modern picaresque of the Mississippi underclass is a much more satisfying read than more famous works like As I Lay Dying.

9. All the Light We Cannot See – Doerr, Anthony. (2015) My review. Three intertwined stories, where the main characters don’t meet until the final few pages, built around the tiniest of connections, all packing an enormous emotional wallop.

10. The Color Purple – Alice Walker. (1983) Walker became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with this brutal novel of poor black Southerners in the early 1900s, with particular attention on the plight of black women, doubly disadvantaged in society at that time.

11. The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer. (1980) My review. This is one of the most controversial winners in the award’s history because it’s almost certainly not fiction – it’s a non-fiction novel, but the content is driven by Mailer’s interviews of the subjects of the book, including Gary Gilmore, the first man to be put to death after the restoration of capital punishment in 1976. It’s also the longest winner by page count, over 1000 pages, but is so well-written and compelling that I flew through it.

12. The Orphan Master’s Son – Johnson, Adam. (2013) My review. The Pulitzer Prize criteria for this award are: “For distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.” That’s true of most winners, but not this one, a breathtaking work of fiction set in North Korea, as un-American a place as you could find. The story is gripping, the main character extremely well-developed, and the prose moves you through the very dark material so that you’ll still hang on every word.

13. The Stories of John Cheever – John Cheever. (1979) My review. A massive collection of more than fifty stories, this book runs the gamut of Cheever’s career and hits on all of the major themes found in his writing, including conflicted sexuality, the ruinous effects of alcohol, and the vacuous nature of suburban middle-class life.

14. The Caine Mutiny – Herman Wouk. (1952) I loved this book, but never reviewed it because I finished it while trying not to end up in the hospital with a respiratory infection that required a fluoroquinolone, an antibiotic of last resort. Anyway, this book, based on Caine’s own experiences at sea in World War II, tells of a coup d’etat aboard a destroyer when the captain, Lt. Commander Queeg, appears to be unfit to lead, followed by a climactic court-martial of the soldiers involved.

15. All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren. (1947) My review. Loosely based on the rise of Louisiana politician Huey Long, All the King’s Men tells the story of Willie Stark, an ambitious populist who runs for governor of a southern state, and the reporter, Jack Burden, who is embedded in Stark’s campaign and covers his tenure in the state house.

16. A Bell for Adano – John Hersey. (1945) My review. Hersey is best remembered today for Hiroshima, a short book originally printed in the New Yorker as the issue’s sole content, telling the stories of six survivors of the American attack on the Japanese city. A Bell for Adano also covers World War II, but in a serio-comic fashion, as an American officer tries to secure a new church bell for the Italian town of Adano after the fascist regime appropriated their old one to melt it down.

17. Elbow Room – James Alan McPherson. (1978) A short story collection by an African-American essayist who just died in 2016 without much notice, Elbow Room deserves a much wider audience than it has today, telling stories of the black experience that examine and question contemporary notions of race.

18. Interpreter of Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri. (2000) My review. Lahiri has published two short story collections and two novels, with her strength clearly in the shorter form; this debut collection focuses on the dual identities and conflicts faced by Indian emigrants to America and their children, as Lahiri herself was born to Bengali parents in London and grew up in the United States from age two.

19. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz. (2008) My review. One of the most widely acclaimed novels of this century, Oscar Wao incorporates magical realism, Dominican politics and folk traditions, and inventive, acrobatic language that bridges English, Spanish, and whatever came out of Diaz’s own head. The title character is something of a Latino Ignatius P. Reilly, less maddening and a bit more pathetic, which is the main thing keeping this out of the top ten.

20. The Keepers of the House – Shirley Ann Grau. (1965) My review. This novel’s takes on race, from its condemnation of old South racism to its equal treatment of white and black characters, are so strident I was sure the author had to be African-American, but Grau, who will turn 89 this year, is white, born and raised in New Orleans. It’s an angry novel, and with good reason.

21. Gilead – Marilynne Robinson. (2005) My review. I still think Housekeeping, her debut novel, is her best work, but this book, which kicked off a trilogy of stories about one family in a small Iowa town, also showcases Robinson’s beautiful writing and deeply empathetic characterizations, written as a journal from Reverend John Ames to his young son.

22. The Magnificent Ambersons – Booth Tarkington. (1919) The Ambersons become less magnificent as the novel progresses, tracing the decline of the wealthy, aristocratic Indianapolis family, usurped by industrialists who earned their riches. Orson Welles adapted it for his acclaimed 1942 film.

23. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon. (2001) My review. Too long by 150 pages, K&C still brings the boundless imagination of Chabon’s Hugo-winning novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in a complex plot that involves comic books, professional magicians, the Nazis, and the problems faced by Jewish emigrants and closeted gays in mid-20th century America.

24. The Late George Apley – John Phillips Marquand. (1938) My review. Marquand created the detective character Mr. Moto, who appeared in six novels and numerous stories and films, but this was a more serious work, a devious satire of Boston’s upper class and the suffocating nature of privilege and the need to keep up appearances.

25. The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead. (2017) My review. The most recent winner was an obvious choice, an imaginative alternate history where the Underground Railroad was an actual railroad, built underground, that ferried escaping slaves out of the deep south, but often brought them into equally difficult circumstances as they fled north.

26. Lonesome Dove – Larry McMurtry. (1986) My review. The sweeping western epic that launched a critically acclaimed TV mini-series and is now part of a quartet of books that run 2600 pages, its wide scope contrasts with the very simple story at its heart of a friendship between two very different men. I am still mad that Gus had to leave his sourdough biscuit starter behind, though.

27. Foreign Affairs – Alison Lurie. (1985) My review. Lurie’s short novel of two Americans abroad in London embarking on different, unexpected love affairs is a beautiful study of a pair of characters and a meditation on loneliness even in the busiest of locales.

28. Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell. (1937) My review. Yep, it’s pretty racist, and that’s hard to overlook from today’s vantage point. The story itself is a sweeping epic of the ante- and postbellum American South, and Mitchell created two of literature’s most memorable characters in Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler.

29. Journey in the Dark – Martin Flavin. (1944) Mostly out of print at this point, Journey gives us Sam Braden, an ambitious young man in 1880s Iowa who wants material and social success but finds they don’t fulfill him when he achieves everything he sought.

30. The Hours – Michael Cunningham. (1999) My one-paragraph review. Combining three related narratives that share ideas but neither time nor place, The Hours builds on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway literally and thematically, even improving it by making it more accessible without undermining her emphasis on the beauty of quotidian details.

31. The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Thornton Wilder. (1928) Wilder won three Pulitzers, two for Drama and one for the Novel for this book, in which a Peruvian friar attempts to learn all he can about five victims of a bridge collapse in 1714 so he can find evidence of divine providence in the catastrophe.

32. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway. (1953) An old fisherman heads out to sea. He hasn’t caught a fish in months. He and a boy talk about Joe DiMaggio. The man catches a fish. Some sharks eat it. Life is pointless. Subordinate clauses are for the weak.

33. The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters – Robert Lewis Taylor. (1959) A darker picaresque that alternates humorous and graphic elements, Taylor’s book, which later became an ABC television series, follows the title character on a wagon train headed from Missouri to California in the wake of the gold rush, along with his dissolute doctor father, a journey which brings them disaster, fortunes, and many very bad decisions.

34. The Killer Angels – Michael Shaara. (1975) My review. Shaara might be familiar to the baseball fans among you for his book For the Love of the Game, published posthumously and later adapted into a sappy movie. The Killer Angels is a historical novel of the battle of Gettysburg that hews closely to actual events and has earned praise for its accurate depiction of war.

35. Arrowsmith – Sinclair Lewis. (1926) A debatable entry, as Lewis declined the prize, but unlike later controversies like Gravity’s Rainbow (recommended by the committee, rejected by the board), the Board actually did sign off on this title winning in its year. The book tells the story of a young, idealistic doctor, Martin Arrowsmith, who faces a real-world ethical dilemma during a breakout of bubonic plague when he has an untested, unproven treatment available to him. I thought the setup was strong, but Lewis couldn’t figure out how to stick the landing. Also, I keep hearing Dr. Dre saying, “And no, this ain’t Arrowsmith.”

36. The Sympathizer – Nguyen, Viet Thanh. (2016) My review. Nguyen, a professor of English and American Studies at USC, won with this debut novel narrated by a Vietnamese double agent who has returned to Vietnam and been captured as an enemy of the very state he helped to win the war against the United States.

37. Tales of the South Pacific – James A. Michener. (1948) My review A short story novel, where they’re all tightly connected but each has a self-contained narrative, this winner was later adapted into the hit Rodgers & Hammerstein musical South Pacific. It’s a very ‘inside baseball’ look at American sailors in World War II, interacting with natives on various islands that had no actual stake in the war, and preparing for an amphibious invasion of an unnamed island.

38. Early Autumn – Louis Bromfield. (1927) Bromfield’s depiction of a decaying wealthy Protestant family in Massachusetts takes square aim at the hypocrisy of old-world values, incorporating Shakespearean romantic tragedy but suffering somewhat from the dated nature of the plot.

39. Ironweed – William Kennedy. (1984) My review. The final book in Kennedy’s Albany trilogy gives us Francis Phelan, a broken-down alcoholic ex-ballplayer trying to make amends with estranged son Billy, the protagonist of the preceding book in the series.

40. A Summons to Memphis – Peter Taylor. (1987) My review. The summons of the title brings Phillip Carver back to Memphis to see his father, now 81, remarry a younger woman, much to the consternation of his spinster sisters, reopening old wounds from childhood in a plot that borrows slightly from King Lear.

41. American Pastoral – Philip Roth. (1998) My review. Probably higher on most others’ rankings, but I can’t get past Swede, the main character, leaving his daughter in that flophouse once he has finally found her. The development of his character grinds to a halt at that point and it swamped the positives that came before.

42. The Way West – A. B. Guthrie, Jr.. (1950) My review. If the video game Oregon Trail were a book, this would be it.

43. The Yearling – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. (1939) The only young adult novel to win the Pulitzer, The Yearling is the story of a boy and the fawn he takes in as a pet, only to find that he can’t tame the wild creature.

44. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides. (2003) My review. Although the protagonist, an intersex person named Cal, is memorable, the tangled narrative here never quite came together for me, and there’s a weirdly moral aspect as if the genetic mutation is some sort of divine punishment for the act that sets the novel in motion.

45. The Fixer – Bernard Malamud. (1967) My review. The novel that gave us the quote “There’s no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew.” This is a fictionalized version of the story of a Jewish man falsely accused of killing a 13-year-old boy and then imprisoned for two years before he was given a trial.

46. The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt. (2014) My review. One of the most criticized winners since I started paying attention to this stuff for its pop-fiction leanings, The Goldfinch is actually quite well-plotted and doesn’t talk down to its readers, although Tartt, like Sinclair Lewis, can’t quite figure out how to wrap up the book.

47. The Known World – Edward P. Jones. (2004) My review. A novel of slavery, and of slave stories, none more gripping than the true tale of Henry “Box” Brown, the slave who mailed himself to abolitionists in Philadelphia. And the known world loves it when you don’t get down…

48. The Confessions of Nat Turner – William Styron. (1968) My review. Although this novel frequently appears on “greatest books” lists, including TIME‘s list of the 100 greatest novels since the magazine began publication, the cultural appropriation here is itself offensive, as is the portrayal of some white slaveowners as kind and black men as the violent rapists that white Southerners long made them out to be.

49. A Death in the Family – James Agee. (1958) My review. The other posthumous winner of this award, Agee died of a heart attack at 45, leaving a wife and three children (plus another by a previous marriage). This autobiographical novel fictionalizes the death of Agee’s own father in a car accident when he was just five years old. I loathed it when I read it, but I do understand it more today now that I’m older.

50. So Big! – Edna Ferber. (1925) My review. A somewhat dated novel of the battle between materialist and artistic values, the book draws its title from the sing-song line parents and grandparents say to infants.

51. Dragon’s Teeth – Upton Sinclair. (1943) My review. One of Sinclair’s Lanny Budd novels, Dragon’s Teeth is the closest thing to an adventure story among the winners, with Budd heading into the hornet’s nest of Nazi Germany to try to save a Jewish friend who has been sent to a concentration camp.

52. The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck. (1932) The first Pulitzer winner I ever read, back in seventh grade, which likely colors my view of the novel today; I do remember understanding protagonist Wang Lung’s single-minded ambition, but not his betrayal of his faithful wife.

53. Andersonville – MacKinlay Kantor. (1956) My review.A dense historical novel retelling the horrors of the Confederate prison camp in Georgia by this name; it’s an arduous read, but for what it is, and what Kantor wanted to say, it’s well done.

54. March – Geraldine Brooks. (2006) My review. I’ve never been a huge fan of continuation works or parallel novels, even when the source material is something I enjoyed. March is the story of the father in Little Women, absent for much of that work while serving as a chaplain in the Civil War. The story is marred by the introduction of an absurd romance between the title character and a slave he meets.

55. The Optimist’s Daughter – Eudora Welty. (1973) My review. A short novel about a woman who goes home to care for her dying father, who had surgery for a detached retina, and encounters both his unpleasant second wife and her own memories of childhood.

56. Alice Adams – Booth Tarkington. (1922) Alice may have been more of a feminist hero at the time of the novel’s publication, but the novel, still boosted by Tarkington’s prose, hasn’t aged well at all.

57. A Visit from the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan. (2011) My review. The best example on this list of a good book ruined by a bad ending, as the final chapter-story here is just embarrassing to read (in a “hello, fellow kids!” way).

58. Independence Day – Richard Ford. (1996) I didn’t like The Sportswriter, to which this is a sequel; at least here, Bascombe has grown up and recognized his agency in his own life.

59. Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner. (1972) If you wanted to know all about the mining business in the Old West, well, this is the novel for you.

60. Olive Kitteridge – Elizabeth Strout. (2009) My review. The book behind the HBO miniseries, this one fell flat for me because the title character is kind of a shrew.

61. The Edge of Sadness – Edwin O’Connor. (1962) My review. A dark but not hopeless novel about a Catholic priest who is also a recovering alcoholic as he tries to put his career back together with a return to his hometown.

62. His Family – Ernest Poole. (1918) Three books on this list borrowed (or at least appeared to) structural elements from King Lear; here the crotchety family patriarch can’t get his three adult daughters to listen to him, but they do largely reconcile before his death.

63. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain – Robert Olen Butler. (1993) My review. A collection of short stories written from the perspective of Vietnamese immigrants living in Louisiana in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, written by a white American who served three years there and fell in love with Vietnamese culture.

64. Advise and Consent – Allen Drury. (1960) My review. It’s so cute to think about the Senate actually considering the merits of any nominee put before it for confirmation. What lovely days those must have been.

65. Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer – Steven Millhauser. (1997) My one-paragraph review. A hackneyed story of an ambitious young American entrepreneur who keeps aiming for the next big thing and finds the goal illusory.

66. House Made of Dawn – N. Scott Momaday. (1969) My review. More notable for the fact that Momaday was the first Native American to win the prize than for the book itself.

67. Honey in the Horn – Harold L. Davis. (1936) A seriocomic novel of pioneer life in Oregon around the turn of the 20th century; its humorous elements have not aged well.

68. A Thousand Acres – Jane Smiley. (1992) My review. A direct adaptation of King Lear into modern-day Iowa, told from the perspective of Ginny (Goneril), with an added layer of hidden sexual abuse and twisted family hatred.

69. Humboldt’s Gift – Saul Bellow. (1976) I’ve never understood the critical acclaim for Bellow’s novels, having now read four of them and liked just one, Henderson the Rain King. This bloated book, built out of a short story, criticizes the commercial world’s encroachment on the fine arts, but it feels like it won because Bellow was a three-time bridesmaid by the time of its nomination.

70. Breathing Lessons – Anne Tyler. (1989) The story of the cracks that have grown in a long-term marriage, packaged in the sort of novel you might find in an airport bookstore.

71. One of Ours – Willa Cather. (1923) Not Cather’s best, or second best, but her top two books were both published before the awards existed.

72. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter – Katherine Anne Porter. (1966) Porter had a commercial success in her novel Ship of Fools, but won the Pulitzer for this collection of relatively long stories, many focused on the American South, which also won the National Book Award.

73. In This Our Life – Ellen Glasgow. (1942) My review. Depressing as hell.

74. Laughing Boy – Oliver La Farge. (1930) A Navajo boy falls in love with another Native American girl, but her education in white schools aimed at assimilation complicates their relationship.

75. Tinkers – Paul Harding. (2010) My review. Never judge a book by its cover, as the packaging for Tinkers is far more appealing than the dull book within.

76. The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields. (1995) A long, meandering fictional autobiography of a woman in search of her purpose in life, which is marred from the start by the death of her mother while giving birth.

77. Scarlet Sister Mary – Julia Peterkin. (1929) My review. Peterkin made a valiant effort here to tell the story of a poor black woman unrepentant about her desire to live life on her own terms, but the dialect she uses is painful to read now, and the depiction of the title character is stilted.

78. Lamb in His Bosom – Caroline Miller. (1934) An overly earnest historical novel of the antebellum South.

79. The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford – Jean Stafford. (1970) The Guardian called the tone of her writing “lugubrious,” as if that were some sort of compliment.

80. The Able McLaughlins – Margaret Wilson. (1924) My review. A moralizing novel that seems to blame a rape victim for the assault, and suffers from a staccato unfurling of the plot as well.

81. Years of Grace – Margaret Ayer Barnes. (1931) My review. A decent idea that never really goes anywhere, possibly because it was published at a time when more freedom for women was inconceivable.

82. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love – Oscar Hijuelos. (1990) I read this ages ago, and remember being distinctly turned off by how women were depicted in the novel and treated by the characters within it.

83. Now in November – Josephine Winslow Johnson. (1935) This is the story of a poor farming family slowly starving to death. Hard pass.

84. The Town – Conrad Richter. (1951) Boring. Granted, it’s part of a trilogy, and I didn’t read the rest, but I doubt the other two parts were action-packed.

85. The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx. (1994) This also won the National Book Award, but I found it crass and aimless.

86. Rabbit Is Rich – John Updike. (1982) My review. Rabbit was an asshole.

87. Rabbit At Rest – John Updike. (1991) My review. And he certainly didn’t deserve four books or two Pulitzers.

88. A Fable – William Faulkner. (1955) My review. I love me some Faulkner, but let’s call this what it is – a failed experiment. Faulkner wanted to write his Ulysses, but this book is just as impenetrable without the humor or insight of Joyce.

89. The Store – Thomas Sigismund Stribling. (1933) My review. It’s not a terrible book, but it’s terribly racist, even when Stribling may have thought he was being fair.

90. Guard of Honor – James Gould Cozzens. (1949) An absolutely dreadful read in every respect – prose, plot, and character – and one that does a disservice to the members of the armed forces you might expect it to honor. Despite receiving praise in its day, it has sunk without a trace beneath a cavalcade of superior novels of World War II.

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→ April 13, 2018
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Improvement.

Joan Silber won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction last year for her novel Improvement, a slim, fast-moving work of interconnected short stories that reminded me in many ways of the work of Ann Patchett, especially her books Bel Canto (a top 50 all-time novel for me) and Commonwealth, where a single event sets off a series of waves in multiple directions that alter the lives of several characters. The kiss of Commonwealth is here a decision not to go on a trip, which triggers enormous changes in the lives of at least a half-dozen people, leaving most of them better off, with at least one large exception, even though they may not even realize what happened to cause this.

Reyna is a young single mother whose boyfriend, Boyd, is in prison on Rikers Island on a marijuana charge; he’s black, she’s not, but this doesn’t seem to be an issue for anyone significant in the book except perhaps Boyd’s ex-girlfriend Lynette. Boyd gets out of prison, after which he and his genius (note: not actual geniuses) friends cook up a plan to smuggle cigarettes from low-tax Virginia to high-tax New York and sell them at a decent profit. This involves regular trips from the city to Richmond to buy the goods, complicated by the fact that, like a lot of lifelong NYC residents, most of these nitwits either can’t drive or can’t do it very well, with Boyd and one other member of the group also prohibited from driving or leaving the state due to their prior convictions. When the one group member capable of driving the truck doesn’t show for a scheduled run, Boyd & company try to press Reyna into doing it, but at the last second, she backs out, the novel’s Big Bang moment that changes so many lives in the book.

Silber’s strength here, which is one of Patchett’s as well, is her development of a diverse group of characters who sometimes have the most tenuous of connections but are still clearly populating the same world. We begin with Reyna and her eccentric aunt Kiki, who was once married to a Turkish man and lived in Istanbul and later on a farm near Ankara, but fan outward from there, even landing in Richmond to visit the girlfriend of Claude, one of the nitwits, who doesn’t know why Claude has stood her up; later the narrative returns to New York to Lynette, Claude’s sister, a cosmetologist who plans to open up her own shop with the money Claude makes from the scheme. One chapter flashes back to Kiki’s time in Turkey, when a trio of German tourists who are busy stealing artifacts from Turkish dig sites stops by her farm, a story that takes on greater significance later in the book.

Patchett’s best books – I’d include State Of Wonder in that list for sure, and would hear arguments for The Magician’s Assistant – all have some greater theme or illuminate something about human nature, but I don’t know if Silber did that here. I enjoyed the time I spent with these characters, and the development of those is the novel’s strength, yet the story is more interesting than insightful – it’s Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” set in Manhattan, without the sci-fi element, but Silber uses the same one-detail starting point to set the galaxies of her universe in motion. I’m not sure how this won the NBCC award even just considering the few other 2017 novels I’ve read so far.

Next up: One of the finalists for the NBCC award last year, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, by Arundhati Roy, who won the Man Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things.

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→ April 10, 2018
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Lincoln in the Bardo.

George Saunders is best known for his short stories, including the award-winning collection Tenth of December, so there was tremendous anticipation for his first full-length novel, Lincoln at the Bardo, when it was released last year; the transition from short form fiction to long is not a simple one, given how few writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald comes to mind) excelled at both. Lincoln at the Bardo is short, experimental, comprising entirely quotes from real and fictional sources, set in a sort of purgatory on earth, where Saunders gives us a grieving Abraham Lincoln among a multitude of shades who have yet to cross over, including that of his eleven-year-old son, Willie. (In Tibetan Buddhism, the bardo is the period of existence between one’s death and next rebirth.)

The novel, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize last year, opens with Willie dying of fever in an upstairs bedroom even as a White House party takes a place below, while we are also introduced to the three shades who will be our guides to this mysterious netherworld Saunders has constructed in the graveyard where Willie will be laid to rest. These spirits can interact with each other, but can’t be seen or heard by any living characters in the novel (a cheat I’m glad Saunders avoided); they can ‘enter’ a living body, and see his thoughts or feel his feelings, but the living are unaware of the shades’ presence or existence. The spirits appear incorporate to each other, and most carry some manifestation from their lives, often delivering substantial comic relief to a novel that by its very subject is weighty and tenebrous.

The three guides – Reverend Everly Thomas, who is unsure why he appears to have been condemned to hell; Roger Bevins III, a gay man who killed himself when his lover left him; and Hans Vollman, whose story is too funny to be spoiled here – try to convince Willie’s shade to cross over to the afterlife, which the shades we meet in the graveyard by and large have declined to do. Willie’s reluctance comes about because his father visited him in the graveyard and has promised to return, so Willie decides to stay, unaware of the significant consequences that can arise from this refusal. His father does return, leading to the climactic sequence where the shades all work together to try to convince Willie to cross, or to get his father to say something to accomplish the same, with unintended, tragicomic results.

The story unfurls entirely through quotes, many of which are drawn from contemporary newspaper accounts or later anthologies of letters or remembrances of the period, often showing how inconsistent descriptions of the same event can be – or how diverse sources can still agree on something like the sadness of President Lincoln’s visage even before his son’s death. Most of the quotes in the book are fabrications, either narrated by the three shades or attributed directly to the spirits who spoke them, and they run the gamut from the loquacious to the sentimental to the ridiculous, especially the Barons, a deceased husband and wife who seem locked in an eternal competition over who can swear the most, and have little shame about any peccadilloes from their previous lives. Some of these chapters are so tangential that they lead you well away from the main story around Willie and his father, and thus from what appears to be the ostensible point of the book: How do we love when those we love must die, and how do we move on with our lives when they’re gone?

Historical records of the time describe Lincoln as consumed by grief, visiting his son’s grave many times and talking aloud to his deceased son, providing Saunders with an ample starting point for this story, which gives us a President who knows he must persevere for his remaining family and for his country, but who is constantly drawn back to the graveyard and to his memories. (His wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, appears but briefly in the novel.) Saunders has also given us Willie and his comrades in the land of shade as grief incarnate; none of them can cross over until they acknowledge that they’re dead, as survivors can’t move on with their lives until they grieve and accept their losses.

I could have done without the glib ending, where Saunders gives Lincoln a little extra nudge in the direction in which the President actually took the war and his domestic policy, which felt too much like a wink and a nod to the audience. The myriad ways in which the shades interact with each other and attempt to do so with Lincoln provide plenty of comic relief, often bawdy and frequently hitting its mark, but having that aspect of the story touch actual history at the novel’s conclusion left me with a bitter taste, as if Saunders wanted to tell the reader he was just kidding about all the serious philosophical stuff that came before.

The few reviews I’ve read of Lincoln in the Bardo focus on Lincoln’s character in the book and how Saunders explores the father’s grief at the loss of his son, but that was less compelling than the novel’s inherent exploration of the temporary nature of our lives and of all of our loves. Was Lincoln’s love of his son somehow worth less because his son died so young? How do we cope with knowing that those we love will die – die before us, leaving us heartbroken, or die after us, a grief that we can only imagine and wish to prevent at any cost? Saunders tears open the paper covering up these questions, without providing pat answers, but revealing something about the human condition that I haven’t seen before in another novel.

Next up: Joan Silber’s 2017 novel Improvement, winner of the most recent National Book Critics Circle Award.

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