→ 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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→ March 22, 2018
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Speaker for the Dead.

My annual post predicting breakout players for the upcoming season is up for Insiders.

I read – more precisely, listened to – Orson Scott Card’s Hugo-winning novel Ender’s Game back in 2006, before this blog existed, and somehow have only referred to it once in all of the posts on science fiction I’ve had on the site since then. I thought it was fine, certainly entertaining, with an ending that felt tacked-on (because it was), a good young adult sci-fi novel that followed a fairly typical storyline of “outcast kid saves humanity” but that ended somewhere unsupported by the story that came before. I just read the book’s sequel, Speaker for the Dead, which won the Hugo the following year and takes that tacked-on ending and blows it up into a full-length novel in its own right. It holds together much better than its predecessor, and this time around Card manages to create a few more well-rounded characters, but Ender has become a little bit insufferable, Card’s admirable philosophy comes across in ham-handed style, and if anything this book feels even more like it’s written for a teenaged audience.

Ender, born Andrew Wiggin, has become the Speaker for the Dead after defeating the “buggers” in a war that he learned never needed to take place at all. He now travels through portions of space inhabited by humans delivering funeral orations that attempt to sum up each deceased person’s life in full, rather than, say, delivering the sort of encomia we expect when someone dies but that fail to do the subject justice. Because of the relativistic effects of faster-than-light travel, however, he arrives at planets years or even decades after his services have been requested, which allows much of the action of Speaker for the Dead to take place in his absence.

In this book, humanity has encountered another sentient species, called “piggies” due to their porcine facial appearance, on the Portuguese Catholic-controlled planet of Lusitania. The human scientists on the planet observe the piggies, more formally called pequeninos, and operate under fairly strict rules on non-interference, including avoiding exposing the piggies to any human technology so they don’t accelerate the latter species’ evolution in any artificial way. A plague wiped out much of the earliest human settlement, and Novinha, the daughter of the two scientists who found a cure but still died of the disease, calls for Ender to Speak for the scientist who raised her but was killed by the piggies in some sort of religious ritual after he discovered the secret of the plague’s place in the planet’s ecosystem. By the time Ender arrives, however, twenty more years have passed, Novinha’s former lover (the dead scientist’s son) has also died in a similar ritual, while her son and her former lover’s daughter have fallen in love while also studying the piggies. Ender walks into this quagmire just as the all-powerful “Congress” prepares to sanction the humans on Lusitania for illegally sharing technology with the piggies.

Speaker for the Dead swept the big three sci-fi awards (Hugo, Nebula, Locus) in 1987, beating out, among others, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and William Gibson’s Count Zero (the sequel to Neuromancer; my only review of a Gibson novel is of the third book in the trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive), which I can only assume from this vantage point was in response to its popularity. Card is offering a sort of pop philosophy in this book about tolerance and understanding – at odds with his longstanding opposition to gay rights – of other cultures and religious traditions, one that is admirable even if he does beat you over the head with that particular hammer. Ender was a regular if precocious kid in the first novel, going through the same kind of boarding-school experience that would later show up in Harry Potter and the Magicians series, but here he’s like a new Dalai Lama with a bit of an ego. (I suppose when multiple planets know your name and you’ve founded a new religion, you probably get a bit of a big head about it all.)

The big advantage of this book compared to Ender’s Game is that Card seems to have learned how to create compelling characters, even complex, difficult ones. Novinha is fascinating, even if there was a note about her that sounded off key to me, but one that involves something everyone has a hard time understanding – why women stay in abusive relationships. The kid scientists all have distinct personalities as well, even if they don’t get the page time of the adults, and there’s at least an attempt to distinguish the various named pequenino characters even though they cycle in and out of the story rather quickly.

There’s some graphic violence in this book – the ritual mentioned above would never make it to a theater if someone filmed this story – that is truly at odds with the overall tone. Card writes like he’s talking to a teenager, and as if his characters are all stuck in teenage modes of expression. Nicknaming the alien species “buggers” and “piggies” comes across as puerile. He also has a simple idea of atonement or redemption, one that I don’t think fits with the events that come before those moments, as if doing the right thing today wipes out all the wrong things you did before. I wish life worked that way, but it doesn’t.

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→ March 21, 2018
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Forever Peace.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Joe Haldeman’s Hugo-winning novel The Forever War, which described the history of a soldier involved in a war that takes place across several millennia due to the relativistic events of time travel. The science aspects of the story worked fairly well, but his depiction of the declining society on earth seemed homophobic and beyond mere dystopian thinking. Haldeman won the Hugo a second time (and the Nebula) for his 1997 novel Forever Peace, which isn’t a sequel or even truly connected to the first book other than in name, and takes an entirely different tack on the question of what causes wars and who really stands to benefit from them.

In Forever Peace, scientists have built the largest ever supercollider out within the moons of Jupiter, but it turns out that there’s a hitch in the system – if the experiment is allowed to proceed to its conclusion, it will result in the end of the universe, much as real-world opponents of the Large Hadron Collider claimed would happen once that came on line. (We are, at the moment, still here.) This would seem like a fairly straightforward story – the folks who discover what’s amiss in the collider have to convince the authorities to stop it – but in Forever Peace they are opposed by a fundamentalist Christian group, the Hammer of God, that has infiltrated the top levels of government, the military, and academia. Known colloquially as “Enders,” they *want* the end of the world to occur for religious reasons.

The main character, Julian Class, is a soldier who never sees the battlefield, working from a central command center and controlling ‘soldierboy’ mech units hundreds of miles away in what seems like a fairly clear precursor to Avatar’s main conceit. (I haven’t seen the latter movie, so I’m somewhat guessing here.) That disconnection between the actor and the violence s/he causes is a core idea in the book, and also foreshadows our increasingly indirect methods of waging war, like drone attacks in the Middle East that allow us to kill enemies real and imagined without risk to any American lives. When Julian has to take a life, it has a stronger, more profound effect on him than anything he says he’s experienced before, even when piloting the ‘soldierboy’ through Third-World villages and destroying property and crops.

There are also new Neuromancer-esque technologies where people can jack in to a shared network, which can connect your mind to others on the network at the same time, and which, of course, also becomes an interrogation technique. The protagonists discover a way to reprogram people via this technology to convince them of the utter futility of war or violence, by jacking them in with a group of other people for about two weeks, whether of their own free will or under coercion. Accessing the network in this way requires surgery to implant the jack, an operation that is sometimes unsuccessful and leaves the patients permanently offline, occasionally leaving them with brain damage as well. The operations are semi-legal, and Americans cross the border to Mexico to undergo them.

Haldeman’s writing is impersonal by design; none of his characters here or in the preceding book feel terribly real or fleshed-out, and many of his side characters are just props. Doomsday cults are real, of course, but the Enders depicted in this book feel so sharp-edged that I couldn’t take them seriously – it’s satirical, obviously, but the internal inconsistency of these characters, from the top government officials in the cult to the assassin trying to chase down Julian and his girlfriend, Blaze, so they can’t stop the collider, made them feel like cartoon villains.

As with the first novel, Forever Peace left me wondering what exactly the point was. Yes, war is bad, I got that, thanks. Removing the actor from the effects of his actions is also bad. Understanding other people, regardless of background, should reduce conflicts, yep, got that. There’s nothing here you wouldn’t find in a decent YA novel, and the latter character would almost certainly have better female characters than Haldeman could ever create. I know he’s built quite a following for his novels, and certainly his military experience means that his battle scenes are better written than most of what you’ll find elsewhere in sci-fi, but after these two books, Haldeman hasn’t convinced me he has anything interesting to say in his fiction.

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→ March 14, 2018
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Sing, Unburied, Sing.

Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing won the National Book Award for 2017, and is among the leading contenders for this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. It’s very much in the long tradition of African-American literature that employs magical realism to tell a story that shows readers the weight of historical racism borne by today’s African-Americans. It feels timely, and it does not shy away from any of the ugly truths of any such story, but it also felt too familiar, as Ward seems to cover ground that Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston covered a few decades ago.

Ward unfurls the story through two narrators, with a third joining briefly in the heart of the book, who move together but offer different perspectives on the same events. JoJo is a precocious 13-year-old boy, living in the Deep South with his grandparents, Pappy and Mam, the latter of whom is dying of cancer. JoJo’s mother, Leonie, is a drug addict and inconsistently in the house, so JoJo has learned to take care of himself and his toddler sister, Kayla, short for Michaela. Their father, Michael, starts the novel in prison, and the bulk of the story revolves around a disastrous trip the three of them take to meet Michael when he’s released from prison, joined by Leonie’s addict friend Misty. Leonie is black, and Michael is white, and his father is a good ol’ boy racist who wants no part of his grandchildren. Leonie had a brother, Given, who was shot and killed by a white boy … who happened to be Michael’s cousin. When Leonie gets high, she sees Given.

There’s a second story, told by Pappy to JoJo in pieces over the course of the novel, relating to Pappy’s time in the prison camp known as Parchman (now a regular prison, where Michael has been doing time). Pappy tried to take care of Richie, a young boy about JoJo’s age who was sentenced to time in Parchman for stealing food to feed his many siblings, but it’s clear from the start of the story that something went awry. When JoJo gets to Parchman, he sees Richie as a ghost just as Leonie sees Given, and getting to the bottom of the story becomes crucial to JoJo and to our own understanding of what Ward is trying to say in the book as a whole.

The way that past racism continues to exact a toll on subsequent generations suffuses Sing, Unburied, Sing. JoJo, obviously aware of racism and mature beyond his years, feels like a great secret is being kept from him, while Kayla is too young to care, but has also come to see JoJo as a parent more than Leonie or the father she doesn’t even know. Pappy has never recovered from what happened at Parchman; Mam has never recovered from losing Given. (In a nice touch of realism, the white boy who shot Given doesn’t go to jail.) And Leonie wants to escape, physically and mentally, from just about everything other than Michael, but the superficial escape granted by drugs brings her visions of Given, a past she didn’t ask to inherit.

Ward’s portraits of her core characters and even some of the side ones – Misty and the lawyer Al, at the least – are compelling and well-rounded, although all of the central figures are broken in some fashion. Michael is a bit of a cipher here, but also doesn’t appear in much of the book. But the gimmick of the ghosts is a familiar trope in this genre, and Ward doesn’t seem to say anything particularly new here, or to give readers a new angle on the subject. Yes, historical racism perpetuates the socioeconomic disadvantages most African-Americans face in our society. I don’t think this book does enough to illuminate the problem or give anyone a window on how to address it. There is also way too much vomiting in this book. I’m all puked out, thanks.

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→ March 11, 2018
→ By

They’d Rather Be Right.

Mark Clifton and Frank Riley’s They’d Rather Be Right won the second Hugo Award for Best Novel and is widely regarded today as the worst of all of the 66 winners of that prize. It was later reissued with two related short stories appended to the beginning of it and sold as The Forever Machine, which is the version I read, and the main story is not improved any but the inclusion of those two extra bits. I couldn’t get over what a shame this entire book was, because there’s a germ of an idea at the heart of it that is actually quite relevant today – what might artificial intelligence do for us, and how it might be able to change civilization if we’re willing to let it.

Two professors, with the help of a natural telepath named Joey, build a ‘cybernetic machine’ they name Bossy, which operates quite a bit like today’s backpropagation AI programs do, but with the unstated condition that, in the world of this novel, P is actually equal to NP and thus all problems that can be verified quickly can be solved in polynomial time. Bossy can answer anything and somehow can reverse aging and make people immortal. The media gets stirred up against Bossy at first, so the professors have to dismantle it, take it into hiding, and rebuild it in a flophouse in San Francisco, eventually gaining the help of a local industrialist who controls major media outlets and enlisting some help from the military to protect it. When their first patient reverse-ages about 30 years and starts talking like a Buddhist who’s achieved nirvana, the uproar threatens to engulf the project and potentially end it.

There’s a decent premise in there, and the title comes from a funny exchange about whether people would give up their most cherished beliefs and preconceived notions in exchange for a life of immortality, wisdom, and peace. One of the inventors of Bossy says that given that choice, most people would reject what Bossy was offering, saying “they’d rather be right” than gain everything there possibly is to gain. But my word is the execution here terrible. The three main inventors, all men, are paper-thin and boring; even Joey’s telepathy is just a crutch, not really important to Bossy’s development, but a way for him to control other people the way Second Foundation experts in Isaac Asimov’s series use mentalics. The woman who becomes Bossy’s first success story, Mabel, is the hackneyed hooker with a heart of gold, and about as interesting as paste even before her transformation – and she’s worse afterwards.

It’s also never really clear why the public rages against Bossy early in the book and then clamors for it later. Yes, public opinion often goes against new technologies or scientific progress if a large portion of the population doesn’t understand it – GMOs are the best modern example – but that’s not well set up here at all. If someone invents a Forever Machine, what fool wouldn’t take it? Even if I told you that it wouldn’t extend your lifespan, but would remove any effects of aging and protect you against cancer and autoimmune diseases and more, and also gave you greater intelligence and inner peace, you’re still saying no? People spend billions of dollars on useless supplements to try to get a little healthier. If someone invents Bossy, they’ll need an army to keep people away from it.

I’ve got a few more Hugo winners to review here that I’ve already read, and right now I have just four left: C.J. Cherryh’s Cyteen; Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky; and the second and third novels in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. Vinge’s book I’ll read soon enough – it’s just long, but I do find his books interesting, even if they move a little slow. But those Mars books … given how awful Red Mars is, and yes, it’s a more painful read than even this dreck, I’m in no rush to read them just for the sake of finishing a list.

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→ February 26, 2018
→ By

Barrayar.

My latest post for Insiders covers draft prospects Brady Singer and Jackson Kowar, plus notes on some other players at Florida and Miami.

I came into Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vor novels out of order, starting with The Vor Game, then Mirror Dance, and just now getting to the second book in the series and the one that introduces the star character of Miles Vorkosigan, Barrayar. Miles starts the novel as an embryo and ends it as a troublemaking toddler, so he’s not a central character, but the story of how he ended up with the bone disorder that came to dictate much of the path of his life – along with his friendship with the Emperor – is at the heart of this quick, enjoyable novel.

The protagonist here is Miles’s mother, Lady Cordelia (Naismith) Vorkosigan, herself a soldier of sorts from Beta Colony, now married to Lord Aral Vorkosigan, her former enemy in battle, and living on the planet Barrayar. Aral has become regent on the death of the old Emperor, with the successor Georg still in single digits. A coup attempt ensues, driving the couple into exile, but leaving the still undeveloped fetus that will become Miles growing in a “uterine replicator” in the capital city, under guard, when they’re forced into hiding. The main thrust of the book revolves around Cordelia’s flight and daredevil attempt to infiltrate the city to grab the replicator and rescue the fetus whom Aral’s father has already promised to reject as his grandson.

This was the first of three Vor novels to win the Hugo – McMaster Bujold also won for a fantasy novel, Paladin of Souls, that didn’t grab me like these books have – and the only one that doesn’t have the rascal Miles at its heart. Without him to cause confusion and delay (and eventually save the day), the book is a lot less funny, and instead gives us the very serious Cordelia as its hero, with Aral present and supportive, but unusually willing for a Barrayaran husband to respect the wishes and opinions of his wife. Instead, it’s a straight adventure/rescue novel with a feminist bent – granted, that’s also quite unusual in the sci-fi world, but now that I’ve read all but 5 of the Hugo winners (and at least one by every author to win it), I feel confident in asserting that the winning books authored by women are both better overall and include better, more fully-realized female or non-male characters. It’s not even close.

Cordelia doesn’t get a lot of time to completely grow as a character in this brief book, which is quite a bit shorter than the other two Vor novels I’ve read, but she’s well-rounded from the start: Strong, assertive, self-doubting, acutely conscious of her outside status, completely dedicated to her family, struggling with fealty to her husband’s position in society and desire to have him safe at home. Reading this first would have probably given me more insight into her cameos in later novels; she’s obviously a critical influence on Miles’ development, but here we see exactly what she had to do to rescue him and to what lengths she was willing to go.

The book also introduced a number of characters who appear later in the series, although there’s one book before this one, Shards of Honor, that includes the battle where Aral and Cordelia meet, where I assume some of the other characters (Illyan, Kothari) also appear. I’ll probably start there now that I’ve read the winners in the series and go forward in chronological order. If you’re interested in reading just one or two of these books, though, I’d recommend something with Miles in it, because he’s much more fun than his parents.

Next up: I just finished the second Hugo winner, The Forever Machine, which lived up to its reputation as the worst novel to win the award.

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→ February 18, 2018
→ By

Startide Rising.

My reaction to the Padres’ absurd deal with Eric Hosmer is up for Insiders.

David Brin’s Startide Rising is the second book in his Uplift universe, where sentient species across the galaxy (and beyond, I think) have used genetic engineering to bring “client” species to sentience themselves, in exchange for a period of indentured servitude to the patron class lasting something on the order of 100,000 years. Humans in this universe have themselves uplifted chimpanzees and dolphins but done so outside of the established order, granting their clients equal status in a shorter period of time, which has upset some of the most powerful patron races who prefer the status quo. It won Brin the first of his two Hugo Awards for Best Novel, along with The Uplift War (which I read in October), the third book in the series; this book also won the Locus and Nebula awards. It’s just not as good as the latter novel, by which point Brin seems to have improved his storycraft and his character development. And it’s really held back by the whole thing with dolphins flying spaceships.

The action of Startide Rising all takes place on one planet, Kithrup, that has no native sentient species, and is mostly covered by water. (We learn later in the book that an earlier sentient species was granted residency here to live out its senescent years, but is presumed extinct.) A dolphin-piloted vessel, the Streaker, has landed here, with a crew of all three Earth species, to hide out from galactic forces chasing it in the wake of its discovery of an enormous ghost fleet of spaceships that herald the discovery of a previously unknown, long-extinct race that may have been the fabled Progenitors of many or all current sentient species, including humans. While a fierce battle is waged overhead, the Streaker‘s crew must repair their damaged ship and await rescue or plot a dangerous escape, while some members fight internally over the best route and others explore the relatively unscathed planet.

Whereas the multi-threaded plot of the longer Uplift War involved multiple, three-dimensional characters, and created some believable tension in both action sequences and in the slower-burning intrigues, Startide Rising employs a too-large cast of disposable heroes, none of whom is interesting and some of whom verge on the ridiculous. (Among them: Charles Dart, the neo-chimp scientist whose ruthless commitment to research makes him a Spock-like caricature; and the dolphin whose name I forget who spends most of the novel sexually harassing a human crew member, which I think Brin intended to be humorous.) The novel’s very short chapters and constant shifts in perspective don’t help the narrative build any momentum, and the discovery in Kithrup’s oceans that eventually becomes a key part of the resolution is just not well written or explained.

But the bigger problem I had is the dolphins … which are still sea creatures, last time I checked. Brin jumps through all kinds of hoops to explain their presence, and I can at least suspend my disbelief in their evolution to intelligent, self-aware creatures. But they’re dolphins flying spaceships. I can accept a lot of things in science fiction, but I read this book with Tommy Shaw’s line from the Styx episode of Behind the Music stuck in my head. Shaw said he “just couldn’t write songs about robots.” Yeah, well, I just can’t get on board with dolphins – 12-13 feet long, 350 or so pounds, and, you know, without arms or legs – flying spaceships. Normally I’d say reading any series in order is an asset, but if you’re interesting in Brin at all, just skip to The Uplift War, which is better in every way and doesn’t include any dolphin characters at all.

Next up: Joe Haldeman’s Forever Peace.

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