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.

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.