→ March 31, 2025
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Erasure.

Erasure was Percival Everett’s breakthrough novel, the twelfth one he published but the first to gain widespread acclaim and attention – ironic, in a small way, as it is in part a novel about the conflict between art and commerce, the need to create against the need to make a buck. Adapted into 2023’s Oscar-winning film American Fiction, Erasure is a masterpiece of biting, humorous satire, a work that holds up twenty years later in a world that hasn’t actually changed that much from the one in which it’s set.

Thelonious Ellison, known to friends and acquaintances as Monk, is a professor of literature and an author of inscrutable, dense novels that don’t sell. He lives in Los Angeles, far from his aging mother and sister Lisa, the latter of whom provides reproductive health services, including abortions, at her clinic in or outside D.C. Their brother Bill, who recently came out as gay, lives in Arizona; Bill and Lisa are close, but Monk is distant from both of them, and was their late father’s favorite in their telling.

Monk is appalled to find that a novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, written by a Black woman named Juanita Mae Jenkins, has become a critical and commercial success by pandering to white people’s sterotypes of Black America – even though Jenkins herself grew up privileged and the stories within the book aren’t hers. In his indignation over Jenkins’s success, and facing a sudden need to help pay for his mother to enter a memory-care facility, Monk writes a pandering novel of his own called My Pafology, submitting it under the pseudonym Stagg R. Lee. To his surprise, and his agent’s, the book sells immediately, and suddenly Monk has a Springtime for Hitler-like smash on his hands – and eventually ends up faced with the potential that he might win the Literary Award, a National Book Award-like honor for which Monk is also one of the judges.

Erasure is a masterpiece. It’s bursting with different themes and potential interpretations; Monk is a wonderfully complex and three-dimensional character; Everett balances his protagonist’s difficult personal life against the madness of his commercial breakthrough. It’s a satire of the publishing industry, sure, but Everett’s eye is much more on the white-savior racism of publishing and later Hollywood, and how Black creators are happy to contribute to it if it makes them rich. My Pafology, which Monk later retitles to something else I won’t spoil, has Black poverty, absentee fathers, guns, drugs, promiscuity, and the other requirements of white-published Black literature of the time, all written in a parody of AAVE that flies right over every white reader’s heads … but Monk is appalled to find that there’s a Black audience for the book as well, with an Oprah-like TV host also praising both his book and Jenkins’s for their realism and authenticity.

Everett’s biting wit and sense of irony are in top form here, with humor both from the repartee between Monk and some of the other characters and from the situations Monk encounters in the publishing side of the story. These characters are all intelligent, so the dialogue is sharp and often extremely funny, especially between Monk and Bill. The entire farcical plot line of the book becoming a sensation when Monk didn’t think any publisher would want it – and his agent refuses at first to even submit it to publishers – provides a natural “and of course that happened next” subtext that’s more facepalm-funny than the laugh-out-loud kind. The white critics on the Literary Award panel might seem a little overdrawn, but a look at the novels that have won the major U.S. literary prizes in the last fifteen or so years only underlines Everett’s point – if anything, he predicted this shift towards awarding fiction that critics think is Very Important, which isn’t to say they’re picking the wrong books but that the’ve gone from one type of bias in the selection process to another.

The farce of My Pafology is a stark contrast to the second story within Erasure, that of Monk’s family and his difficulty maintaining strong interpersonal relationships. He learns early in the book that his mother has Alzheimer’s, while there’s another death in the family around the same point in the story, both of which serve to push him to write the pandering novel, but also create new situations where he has to confront some of his past choices to remain separate from his family, which includes Lorraine, who has been the Ellisons’ housekeeper since Monk and his siblings were little. Everett also gives Monk a romantic subplot when he connects with someone who lives near their family beach house, but after the initial sparks cool off, Monk finds himself in familiar waters, erecting new boundaries and holding himself apart from – or perhaps just above – his new girlfriend. It might have felt leaden if it weren’t all set against a ridiculous parallel plot where Monk has fallen into a big pile of money and the potential for fame he doesn’t want.

This all has to come to a head at some point, and Everett lands in a perfect spot, avoiding the sentimental conclusion (which would be so unlike him) while also choosing not to give Monk some horrific Tony Last-style resolution. I imagine the end won’t satisfy everyone, but this is probably the best path out of the story Everett could have written.

Is this Everett’s best novel of the five I’ve read? I’ve been pondering that since I finished the book on Friday. Every one of those books has been so different than the others that comparisons seem foolish; James somehow seems like the strongest work because of the restrictions that come with writing within another person’s work, while Erasure is more precise in its construction, and has the benefit of humor.

As for the film, I’ll review that next.

Next up: T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes to Call, already nominated for this year’s Nebula Award.

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→ March 28, 2025
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Stations of the Tide.

Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1990, beating out one of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vor novels, Barrayar, and a William Gibson novel, The Difference Engine. Swanwick combines elements of fantasy and science fiction, including a significant amount of speculative writing that seems especially prescient today given the rise of (highly questionable) AI-powered bots. It’s a shame it’s undone by a trap that many white male sci-fi writers have fallen into: Swanwick is obsessed with sex, and writes about it like a teenaged boy.

Stations of the Tide takes place on a planet called Miranda, where the human civilization faces a catastrophic flood once a generation, for which they must prepare and evacuate while the ocean devours the land, destroying property but also helping renew the ecosystem. A rogue calling himself a wizard is promising residents that he can cast spells to help them survive the inundation, such as giving them gills to breathe underwater, and the interplanetary authorities suspect that he has absconded with proscribed technology stolen from them, so they send an agent, simply called the bureaucrat, to Miranda to track him down and retrieve it. This sets in motion a story that’s a blend between a spy novel and a paranoid thriller, moving through various settlements in tropical areas of Miranda that evoked Apocalypse Now for its contrast of a lush backdrop for social desolation.

The actual spy story within Stations of the Tide is its strength: The bureaucrat learns very early on that he can’t trust anyone, and his suspicions only deepen the further along he goes – except for any time a woman tries to seduce him, because he’s easier than Sunday morning. The small cadre of agents with and around him keep the circle of intrigue limited, as it’s clear early in the novel that someone has helped the wizard, named Gregorian, keep track of the investigation and the bureaucrat’s movements, but it’s not clear who’s behind it.

Swanwick’s speculations on technology include the use of holographic projections of people to allow them to be in more than one place at once, with the avatars able to act semi-autonomously and to even survive their creators. Not only does this allow the bureaucrat and his colleagues to work along several paths at once, but it allows the protagonist to operate across several (virtual) planes to try to figure out who’s double-crossing him. I imagine in 1990 this technology seemed fantastical, but today it seems possible, if undesirable, with Big Tech’s twin obsessions with LLMs and virtual worlds. Swanwick’s mind might have moved faster than his pen here, though, as his conceit of never using the bureaucrat’s name along with the fact that all of these officials using the technology are men can make it extremely confusing when real people and avatars are conversing.

The sex in this book veers from the unintentionally comic to the creepy, and it destroys the hallucinatory vibe that infuses most of the novel. Swanwick seems unable to conceive a female character who isn’t promiscuous, and the women in this book all exist almost entirely in their relationship to men. His descriptions of sex are awkward, at best, and betray the teenager’s fascination with anatomy over emotions, made worse by Swanwick repeatedly using the word “vagina” when he means something else. It reminded me of some of the worst sci-fi and fantasy novels I’ve read, like the later Dune sequels when Frank Herbert introduced the Honored Matres, or the first Game of Thrones book, or Snow Crash. Stations clearly came out in a different era, and it has aged extremely poorly.

There are some strong scenes in the book involving the bureaucrat and Gregorian’s agents, along with a reasonable climactic scene that uses something I probably should have seen coming but didn’t to resolve the final confrontation. Swanwick allows the bureaucrat to consider the moral implications of his actions and the authorities’ choices to limit technology transfer to these colony worlds, a theme that appeared here and there in the novel while becoming more prevalent near the end, opening up possible interpretations around paternalistic government, colonization, and regulations that tied the room together at the very end. It was enough to bump me up a half-grade or so, figuratively, to the point where I’d recommend the book if you don’t mind the bad sex writing. There’s enough suspense here to keep the story moving, and it turns out in the end that Swanwick did have some larger points to make. It’s not good enough to get me to pick up more of his work, but was worth the time I spent reading it.

Next up: Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper.

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→ March 19, 2025
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So Much Blue.

So Much Blue may be one of Perceval Everett’s lesser-known novels, as it hasn’t received a film adaptation or any major awards, but I suspect also because it doesn’t have any of the speculative or fantastical elements of his more famous or popular works. His prose and characterization translate beautifully to the realist mode, which isn’t surprising, and in this pensive work about a middle-aged painter dealing with the weight of memories and past failings Everett gives the deepest exploration of a character I’ve seen in the four of his novels I’ve read.

Kevin Pace is a painter, married with two kids, living what would appear from the outside to be a comfortable upper-middle-class life with the usual problems you’d expect to find in a story about a suburban family. Everett intertwines that present-day narrative, which includes a secret painting that Pace won’t show anybody, not even his wife or his best friend, with two narratives from the past: one from 1979 where he joins his best friend on a dangerous trip to El Salvador to try to find and rescue the best friend’s ne’er-do-well brother, and one from ten years before the present day where Kevin had an affair with a French painter about twenty years his junior.

The 1979 narrative is by far the most compelling of the three, as it’s part thriller, part buddy comedy, and is driven by the uncertainty of how it’s going to turn out beyond knowing that Kevin and his best friend survived. Yet the depiction of the affair is the most interesting because Everett avoids the two typical ways of writing about that topic: he doesn’t judge Kevin’s actions, and he certainly doesn’t condone them, but lets the character’s words and behaviors speak for him and the reader to do the judging. Kevin knows he’s doing something terrible, but he does it anyway and has to live with the consequences.

Those consequences are the real theme of the novel – what happened in 1979, where a ridiculous, foolhardy endeavor that starts with good intentions and eccentric characters ends in violence, and what happened in Paris both weigh tremendously on Kevin, with their impact threatening to unravel his marriage and family and to stall his career. The present-day narrative also has a significant event that forces Kevin to make a choice, and he makes the wrong one, again, even though in that case it seems like the right decision at the time, after which he has several chances to set things right and can’t bring himself to do it, a subplot that especially resonated with me.

Everett’s development of Kevin as a character across three time periods, each of which sees him change and grow in some sense (even if it’s not always positive), shows a level of craft I at least hadn’t seen in the other three novels of his I’ve read. There’s a depth of understanding of Kevin as a person, as a man, as a middle-aged man, and as a very flawed man who is still reeling from events that happened thirty years earlier, that rivals the character development in just about any contemporary novel I can recall. Whether you agree with Kevin’s choices, including the decisions he makes to keep things secret, or his own assessment of those choices, Everett’s depiction of all of Kevin shows incredible insight into the character and how people think and feel about complex situations.

As you might expect from the title, color is a recurring motif and symbol in So Much Blue, with that particular color coming up repeatedly, as the secret painting in Kevin’s shed contains various shades of blue, and he refers more than once to the fact that traditional Chinese had just one word for blue and for green. Blue itself can carry multiple meanings in art, from the  most obvious one, depression (is Kevin depressed? Is he hiding his depression from his family?), to the way painters use blue to represent distance, using more blue to show that buildings or other objects are farther from the viewer. Blue is also the color we associate with the unattainable; the sky is blue from the ground, but when we ascend a mountain or a building, we don’t get any closer to the blue, as it remains beyond our reach. The ocean is blue from a distance, but when we’re in the water, it’s clear. Kevin expresses an ambivalent relationship with the color even as he fills his hidden painting with it; is that a representation of his unfulfilled desires, a depression he wants to keep locked away, or his attempt to create distance between himself and the things he doesn’t want to remember?

Everett is approaching Ann Patchett as my favorite living American writer. She crafts incredible stories with beautiful, lyrical prose, filling the pages with believable and three-dimensional characters, while he ranges from the wildly inventive to biting satire to compassionate character study. It’s hard to believe all four of the books of his I’ve read all came from the same mind. He’s some sort of wizard.

Next up: I just finished Cho Nam-ju’s Saha and started Antonio Padilla’s Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Journey to the End of Physics.

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→ February 26, 2025
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James.

Percival Everett has been writing novels for over twenty years, but he’s having a moment right now: his 2001 novel Erasure was adapted into the film American Fiction, which won its screenwriter Cord Jefferson an Academy Award; and his latest novel, James, won the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction while making the Booker Prize shortlist. (It should have won that too, but lost to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.) James retells the story of Jim, the escaped slave who accompanies Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain’s novel, from Jim’s perspective, completely reimagining the character and most of the narrative, in a book that is far more of an adventure than the novel that inspired it while also giving its protagonist far more humanity than his creator ever did.

James narrates Everett’s novel, and does so in an erudite voice that, of course, has nothing to do with the slave dialect the character uses in Twain’s work. In this novel’s universe, slaves know how to speak as well as or better than their white tormentors, but they feign all manner of ignorance to make the whites feel better about themselves and thus try to improve their own odds of survival. The plot starts out on the same track as in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with Huck faking his own death to escape his abusive father while James runs away to avoid being sold and separated from his wife Sadie and daughter Lizzie. (Twain mentioned Jim’s wife, but didn’t name her; Everett is following the convention of other writers who’ve used these characters.) The two flee upriver, with James seeing the corpse of Huck’s father but not telling the boy, Huck witnessing the murderous feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, and the two encountering the con men who call themselves the King and the Duke and who eventually sell James to a local slave owner.

Everett fills in the blanks in Twain’s novel by following James rather than Huck, giving James’ dialogue with other slaves – all in proper English, generally more proper than what the white characters use – and his own inner monologue on his life and on philosophy. He’s visited in dreams by Locke and (I think) Rousseau, reads Voltaire and John Stuart Mill, and eventually gets a hold of a pencil at great cost so he can begin to write some of his thoughts on paper. James’s narrative diverges from the original when the King and Duke briefly leave him with a third man, who sells him to a traveling minstrel group, where James meets a man named Norman and escapes with him while looking for Huck, who’s still with the two bandits. This arc returns James to their home in the end, without an appearance from Tom Sawyer, and leads to a conclusion that is far more satisfying than Twain’s, if less realistic.

James, or Jim in Twain’s work, is just not a well-developed character in the original stories, even as Twain wrote him in a far more sympathetic manner than just about any of his contemporaries did when writing of slaves or even of Black people in general. Everett’s James is intelligent, sure, but the difference is that he is whole: he has fully-developed thoughts and ideas, values, a sense of justice, empathy for others, and a desire for even a little agency over his own life. It stands above nearly every other continuation or adaptation of a famous novel I’ve ever encountered, with the possible exception of Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s similar retelling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of the madwoman in the attic – but Everett’s novel is angrier and wittier and much better paced than Rhys’s.

Everett also mimics Twain’s use of the picaresque format both for its thrilling elements and its satirical ones, although here the satire is subtler than it is in some of Everett’s other works, like the absurdist Dr. No or the violent fantasy of The Trees, the other two of his novels I’ve read so far. James reads like Everett was trying to stay authentic to Twain’s work as much as possible until he veered away from the plot in the last third of his own novel – and it works, because of the familiarity of the original (one of the few novels I’ve read twice, and the only one I had to read in high school and in college) and because of how well-structured it was in the first place. Everett is brilliant and wildly imaginative, so his restraint here isn’t just impressive, but makes the whole work more powerful in the end. I have read very few works of great literature with this sort of haste, because the story and the character are so compelling I never wanted to put the book down.

Next up: Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day, winner of the 2020 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ June 18, 2024
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Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Anthony Doerr won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his World War II novel All the Light We Cannot See, a marvel of storytelling and character development that ranks among my 20 favorite novels of the century. His follow-up novel, 2021’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, follows a similar template of intertwined narratives, each centered around a single, well-developed character, but he fails to bring these narratives together in any sort of coherent fashion, and the entire enterprise comes off as a failed attempt to mimic Cloud Atlas instead.

Cloud Cuckoo Land comprises five narratives in three distinct time periods, each of which has a lost Greek novel/saga called Cloud Cuckoo Land at the center of its plot. One is set in the 15th century, as we follow two young people, Omeir and Anna, who both know of the story, and who sit on opposite sides of the 1453 siege of Constantinople – Anna trapped inside the walled city while Omeir is a reluctant aide to the attacking forces, helmed by a 21-year-old sultan. The second is set in our present day, again with two narratives, one centered on the octogenarian teacher Zeno, who translated what he could of the tattered pages of the novel, and the other centered on Seymour, a neurodivergent teenager who befriends an owl in the woods near his home, only to turn to eco-terrorism when developers raze the trees where the owl lives. The third, and least coherent, is set at some unknown point in the future, on a spaceship called the Argos that is taking a group of humans to an exoplanet where they might be able to start anew after climate change and ocean acidification have destroyed Earth. Those sections follow just one character, Konstance, who ends up alone in a sealed vault on the ship, copying out the text of Cloud Cuckoo Land from what she can find in the ship’s massive virtual library.

Doerr creates memorable, three-dimensional characters, and all five of his main characters in Cloud Cuckoo Land feel fully developed and strong enough to anchor their individual plot strands, each with some specific quirk or detail that helps define their personalities. Konstance is probably the least developed, although her circumstances and Doerr’s desire to keep some of her back story in his pocket until the last third of the novel both justify that choice. Seymour is infuriating at times, but also internally consistent and easy to understand even if, as a parent, reading about him made me want to pull my hair out. Zeno has the strongest back story of all of them, although his one key detail is pretty obvious from the start. Anna’s story does drag at times because much of it revolves around her sister, Maria, whose death is well foreshadowed from the start of that plot strand, although this sets Anna out on the course of autonomy that leads her to a copy of the book.

The book within the book, of which we get many snippets as the opening epigrams to various chapters, is supposed to be the throughline that connects all five stories, a testament to the power of books to transform our lives and deepen our understanding of the human condition. I didn’t find the novel within Cloud Cuckoo Land to be all that interesting, and the gimmick of having some of the text lost, so many words and sentences are missing, just makes the metafiction even more remote and inscrutable. The three timelines never intersect at all beyond the point that Anna and then Zeno uncover and/or create new copies of the book to make it available to future readers, so there’s no payoff to the extremely frequent jumps between timelines. It moves quickly, especially since the chapters are very short and there’s a lot of white space in the paperback’s 574 pages, but that velocity doesn’t change the weakness of the book’s resolution. It’s too long to call it a trifle, but Cloud Cuckoo Land lacks the depth and the emotional power of All the Light We Cannot See, which makes it a disappointment given that we know what Doerr can do at his best.

Next up: I’m going to try to tackle Alasdair Gray’s Lanark.

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→ August 21, 2023
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Trust.

Hernan Diaz shared this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his second novel, Trust, after his debut novel In the Distance was one of the runners-up for the same honor in 2018. In the Distance was a surprise honoree, as Diaz was an unknown author at the time and the book was published by a minor house. Trust comes from a Penguin imprint and had much higher expectations coming in, and while it did win the big honor, it reads far more as a literary exercise than a compelling narrative or a coherent novel.

Trust comprises four parts, each of which tells part of the story of a very wealthy New York City couple between the two wars, the husband a financial wizard who profits handsomely from the 1929 crash, the wife a woman of taste who gets them involved in the arts and philanthropic works until illness overtakes her. Part one is a 1937 novella about the couple called Bonds, a metafictional account of their lives that depicts her illness as a mental one and his demeanor as unfeeling and robotic. Part two is the half-finished memoir of the actual financier, his intended rebuttal to the best-selling novel that upended his life. Part three tells the story of Ida Partenza, the writer he hires to ghost-write that memoir. Part four is the diary of the wife, all fragments and contradictions. In each succeeding section, Diaz undoes what he did in the previous one(s), so that by the end it’s unclear what’s actually true, and the whole work feels like that aforementioned exercise, a way of undermining the reader by demonstrating the imprecision of memory.

Part of the problem here is that the main character is the financier, and he’s unsympathetic but also boring. He’s not an anti-hero. He’s not misunderstood, or tragic (even his widowhood fails to rise to that level). He’s just kind of a jerk, and his wife’s attempts to make him more of a human don’t really pan out. Even finding out how much the novel may have wronged him doesn’t make him a more interesting central character, and certainly the descriptions of the story from the ghostwriter’s point of view paint him in a worse, if different, light. (I was all set to rip Diaz’s bombastic insufferable prose when I reached the second section and realized that that was the prose of his fictional novelist.)

It was hard not to think of the similarly titled book Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi, which explored similar thematic ground in a much more straightforward and readable fashion. (I was also reminded of it when I went to save this file on my laptop and the review for the earlier book popped up.) Choi’s book delved into the unreliability of memory and the way other people can remember the same event in different ways because of memory discrepancies, perspectives, and prior lived experiences, and it did so in a way that also made you care about or at least invested in some of the characters. I haven’t even named the main characters in Trust because they don’t matter enough. I didn’t give a hoot about the husband, the wife, or really even the ghostwriter, because Diaz didn’t give me reason to care.

The Pulitzer committee never reveals much about its thinking, but its one sentence on Trust referred toits “linked narratives rendered in different literary styles,” and that tells me this was writers responding to a feat of writing craft – which is, to be clear, a good reason to give a book a literary award. They likely weighed that more than the novel’s lack of direction or what I at least found to be kind of a boring plot with poorly drawn characters. It’s nowhere near the novel that its co-winner, Demon Copperhead, is, perhaps choosing a higher level of difficulty – although Barbara Kingsolver didn’t go easy on herself – without that other novel’s compelling lead character or well-paced, intriguing plot. I’d put it more towards the middle of the Pulitzer pack, certainly ahead of 2022’s awful choice The Netanyahus or a good chunk of early winners that haven’t aged well, but nowhere near the best that the Pulitzers have honored in recent years.

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