→ December 4, 2024
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Orbital.

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital was a surprise winner of the Booker Prize in 2024, beating the favored Percival Everett’s James (which won the National Book Award a week later), and coming in as the second-shortest book to ever win the Booker, just a few pages longer than Penelope Lively’s Offshore. I can confirm that the book is, indeed, short. I am a bit flummoxed at what the judges saw here, though.

Orbital takes place on the International Space Station and follows six astronauts, all from different countries, as they make many trips around the planet while living on the apparatus. The characters have first names and national origins, but very little else to distinguish them, just a breadcrumb of backstory here or there and some broad brush strokes like one being religious and another secular. The book lacks a single narrative throughline, instead rolling along with the station and tracking smaller movements – a bit of dialogue, a look at space, a memory from Earth – in language that can be lyrical but also insubstantial.

There is nothing to grab hold of in Orbital, neither plot nor character. I could not tell you a single character’s name from the book. I could barely tell you anything interesting details about any character, even without needing to attach them to specific people. There are passages that feel more tangible, like one character’s grieving over her mother’s death while she’s on the station, and another’s memory of a visit to a fishing village that is threatened by a typhoon as they fly uselessly overhead, but they sit on top of the rest of the book; there is nothing to integrate them, such as using them to inform the characters, with anything else that transpires.

The relative paucity of details around the characters creates a sense that they are less individuals than parts of a collective one, which could be a metaphor for humanity as a whole, and the way that these astronauts cooperate in space would then be a contrast to the way their home countries fall into conflict on terra firma. (After some diplomatic brouhaha, some astronauts aren’t supposed to use the bathrooms in rival nations’ parts of the station.) That’s a tricky thing to do if you put any sort of national properties into the characters, but the downside of Harvey’s approach is that she combines six entities painted with faint colors and the resulting whole just looks grey.

There was one moment in Orbital that did stick with me, as it provoked the only real emotional reaction I had to the novel. The Russian cosmonaut likes to play with a ham radio and talk to random people as the station orbits, which also means the conversations can’t last very long. The scene is whimsical and wistful, a symbol of the connections we can make with anybody, the endless curiosity of people everywhere, and the fleeting nature of those connections and our very existence. I wish Harvey had made all of Orbital out of that.

Next up: I’m about 2/3 of the way through Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, winner of this year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ March 27, 2024
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Prophet Song.

Taking his cues from the devastating civil war in Syria, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rise of populist authoritarian movements in the West, Paul Lynch has crafted a terrifyingly personal dystopian vision in his newest novel, Prophet Song. Winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, the book follows the decline into tyranny and civil war of the Republic of Ireland through the eyes of Eilish, a mother of four who tries desperately to hold her family and herself together even as the world around her crumbles.

The story begins in the not-too-distant future, where an unidentified party has taken control in Ireland and turned the national police (the gardai) into state security, choosing labor unions – especially the teachers’ union – as their first targets. Larry, Eilish’s husband, is a leader in the teacher’s union himself and after one interrogation finds himself arrested by the national government, disappearing into the state’s growing apparatus for political prisoners and leaving Eilish alone with four kids, ranging from the teenager Mark to the still-nursing Ben. The state gradually increases its authority and rounds up more and more dissidents, even firing on protestors, leading to a near-total breakdown in the social order, food and water shortages along with bread lines, neighbors denouncing neighbors, and the inevitable rise of a ragtag rebel army. All the while, Eilish is trying to keep her family safe, including her father, who is in the early stages of dementia and only half understands what’s happening. Eilish can access some foreign news sources, such as the BBC, to get an outside view of the conflict, and the ubiquity of cell phones changes some of the dynamics of survival, but none of this changes the more fundamental needs to get food, shelter, and medical care, all of which become critical as Eilish has to decide whether to stay or make a dangerous bid to cross the border with Great Britain and join her sister Aine in Canada.

There’s something very It Can’t Happen Here about Prophet Song; this is the kind of collapse we associate with countries where the populace is mostly non-white – Syria, Somalia, Yemen, the D.R. Congo, and now Haiti. Lynch’s Ireland goes from an affluent, stable democracy to a police state that resembles the early U.S.S.R. but with the weaponry and technology of modern conflicts. A staid middle-class life sits on a shaky foundation of civil society that, as we’ve seen in the U.S., depends in large part on people not losing their minds and voting for would-be fascists. (Lynch never identifies the party in power by name or ideology, but they are at the least anti-labor; their specific policies aren’t relevant to Eilish’s story and he doesn’t waste time on them.) Hungary had a functioning democracy for a short while, but its people voted in an irredentist autocrat who has gone after two of the most common targets for authoritarian regimes – Jews and LGBTQ+ people. Venezuela and El Salvador have slid from democracy to dictatorship, with the former’s economy collapsing after its first strongman died. It can happen, but we never dream that it will until it’s too late, often by our own hand.

The real power of Lynch’s work is that he focuses exclusively on one family, and one person, rather than telling the story of the collapse of a country. In that way it’s more in the vein of survivalist or post-apocalyptic fiction, like Testament, In a Perfect World, and The Road than the standard dystopian novel. The leaders of the country are never named; in fact, no one in any position of authority, not even a police officer, gets a name in Prophet Song. Names are reserved for the ordinary people – Eilish, her family, a few neighbors. This choice makes the book more intensely personal, and becomes its own form of psychological horror – will Eilish’s family survive another day, and what calamity might lurk around the corner? You can experience the terrors of the police state from the most granular level, where the lights don’t stay on and food is scarce, where you can’t get across town to see your ailing father and you have to worry one of your kids will be arrested or shot for being out past curfew.

Lynch doesn’t shy away from the inevitable tragedies of his setting; Eilish is fighting a losing battle but refuses to admit it. Even the ending leaves some questions unanswered, and Eilish still isn’t certain if she’s made the right choices for her family, because in that situation you will never have that certainty. Instead, Lynch makes the smart choice to lean into the crises, but move us quickly in and out of them, so the story is never lurid, never ogling Eilish’s misery for the reader’s pleasure. It’s a masterful blending of the dystopian novel, the political thriller, and an exaltation of the power of one person – of one mother – to carry the weight of two different generations and somehow make it through.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s essay collection This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage.

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→ December 2, 2023
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Stick to baseball, 12/2/23.

I had one new post for subscribers to The Athletic this week, looking at the free-agent signings of Sonny Gray and Kenta Maeda plus some thoughts on what the Twins might do next. Some readers got very mad that I don’t think Chris Paddack will be a mid-rotation starter when he hasn’t been anything close to that since 2019.

Over at Paste, I ran through eight new board games that would be great stocking stuffers. I’ll do my year-end post for them the week of December 11th. Also, here on the dish, I updated my ranking of my top 100 games all-time.

On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Nik Sharma, author of the new cookbook Veg-Table and the also wonderful cookbooks Season and The Flavor Equation. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My free email newsletter is moving from Tinyletter (which Mailchimp is shutting down) to Substack. If you already subscribed as of Tuesday of this past week, you’re fine – I was able to export the subscriber list and import it to Substack with no issues.

And now, the links…

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→ March 1, 2023
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The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

Shehan Karunatilaka won this year’s Booker Prize for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a fascinating work of magical realism that might as well be called Maali Almeida in the Bardo, as its protagonist is dead from the moment the book begins. Set in Sri Lanka in 1989, in the early years of what would be a 36-year civil war between the governing Sinhalese majority and Tamil rebels, the book follows the title character, a photographer who took many photos of victims of the war, through his seven days (moons) in purgatory as he tries to figure out who killed him and how.

Maali Almeida is dead, and finds himself in a bureaucratic afterlife where multiple entities try to coax him into different directions, one of which is “the Light” and promises some sort of salvation, while another might give him the chance to communicate with the living to try to direct them to solve the mystery of his death by retrieving an important set of incriminating photographs he’s hidden. One possible explanation is that his work for a shadowy non-governmental organization or his freelance work for the AP and other journalistic outlets covering atrocities committed by both sides during the war. Almeida photographed corpses, but also murders and murderers, and any number of people might have wanted him dead.

Almeida was also gay in a society that was not particularly hospitable to gay people, although in his tales of his life there were closeted gay men all over Colombo (the capital of Sri Lanka). He lived with two friends, Jaki, who was supposed to be his girlfriend; and Dilan, known as DD, who was one of those closeted men and becomes Maali’s lover, although the photographer is serially unfaithful to him. DD’s father is the powerful businessman and politician Stanley, who would strongly prefer that his son not be gay and join his business rather than working for an environmental activist group, and who is emblematic of the byzantine connections across Sri Lankan society at the time, where even the “good” guys could be tied to one side of the civil war or the other.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a richly layered novel that explores themes beyond just that of the civil war, which ended in 2009 with the defeat of the main Tamil rebel group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and the death of their leader. Maali is a complicated protagonist, part hero and part anti-hero, a drunk, a philanderer, a degenerate gambler, an atheist, and more. He professed to just taking photographs as a job, although of course he took photographs as a hobby as well; he’s not explicitly political, but hoped to take pictures that could end wars and bloodshed. His multifaceted character opens up all kinds of thematic possibilities, from discrimination to morality to how we cope with our own mortality, and Karunatilaka explores all of these, some more successfully than others.

Of course, because of the photographs Maali took, the authorities become very keen to find this missing stash – more keen than they are to find out who killed him, even with pressure from his family, from Jaki and DD, even from Stanley at one point. This creates two parallel narratives and a real sense of time pressure, as Maali tries to direct his friends to get to the photographs so they can expose the atrocities of both sides, while the authorities are trying to get the photos for themselves, and there’s an inherent tension from the question of who’ll get to the photos first – or whether the authorities will get to Jaki and DD before anyone finds the cache. There’s also the clock of the seven moons, referring to seven days before which Maali must decide whether he’s going to move into the Light or follow one of the other shades offering a different experience in the afterlife.

Karunatilaka seems to be well-versed in the history of this sort of political satire with elements of magical realism, from The Master and Margarita to One Hundred Years of Solitude. This novel isn’t at the level of those two masterpieces, but it’s an heir to their legacy, drawing heavily on the former’s sense of the absurd and fantastical, and on the latter’s sense of outrage, especially outrage at the lack of outrage. Both of those earlier novels targeted authoritarian regimes that would torture and disappear opponents, which is exactly what the Sinhalese government in Sri Lanka did during the civil war. So much of this novel takes place in the afterworld – an especially ridiculous one, with bureaucrats, flunkies, and talking leopards – that it shields the reader from some of the worst horrors of the civil war, allowing Karunatilaka to push forward with a narrative that might otherwise have been unreadable.

I haven’t read any of the other longlisted novels for last year’s Booker Prize, although Percival Everett’s The Trees is on my to-read shelf right now. As Booker winners go, though, this is one of the better ones among the 40 I’ve read, and I hope it signals a return to the peak the prize had from 2008 to 2018, with just one dud in those eleven years and several of my all-time favorite novels winning during the span.

Next up: Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men, which won the Wales Book of the Year award in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Booker in 2021, losing to Damon Galgut’s The Promise.

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→ December 29, 2021
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The Promise.

Damon Galgut’s novel The Promise won this year’s Booker Prize, beating a tough field that included Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro (whose Klara and the Sun made the longlist); Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers; and the delightful No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. It’s a fine novel, but I think without more knowledge of the recent history of South Africa, I didn’t get the full gist of the work.

The novel focuses on a white family in South Africa, the Swarts, whose matriarch dies as the novel opens. She made her husband promise her that he’d leave the family home to the Black woman, Salome, who helped raise their children and take care of the home, but he later denies this – except that Amor, their youngest child, heard it. She refuses to forget what she heard (or says she heard, as Galgut only gives us her assertions), even as it causes a break between her and her siblings, Anton and Astrid. The four chapters in the novel each revolve around the deaths of one of the family members, leaving only Amor in the end to reckon with the family’s legacy.

Galgut sets The Promise againsta backdrop of societal upheaval in South Africa, including the end of apartheid, the tenure of HIV/AIDS denialist Thabo Mbeki as Prime Minister, and his corrupt successor Jacob Zuma, who was in the news again this month when a judge ordered him to return to prison. Each of the Swarts family members dies in a way that could serve as a metaphor for one of those larger changes – one dies as a result of religious mania, a clinging to old and outdated ways; one dies in a carjacking, of which there are over 10,000 a year in South Africa. Without knowing a lot more about the recent history of South Africa, however, I can only guess at any deeper meanings here.

Lacking that context, the novel doesn’t have as much to offer the reader as the accolades imply. Amor is the only remotely interesting or sympathetic character in the book. The father, Manie, is two different messes in two different chapters. Astrid is shrill, materialistic, and selfish. Anton could have been a deeper character in his own novel, but he’s off the page enough in The Promise that we only see the surface, never getting at, say, why he deserted from the military, or what he did in the intervening years before he returns for the next funeral. Galgut keeps all of his characters, even Amor, at arm’s length, giving the whole text a feeling of emotional reserve and thus preventing the readers from getting to know any of the characters enough to connect with them. I’m only assuming that Amor is supposed to be the central character, or most central one; she is the moral compass, refusing to budge from her recollection of the promise or belief that the remaining family members should fulfill it, even when it leads to a rupture between her and her siblings. Her life away from the farmstead would appear to be more interesting, or at least a way to further develop her character, but instead she comes across as cold and remote even when she has the strongest feelings of any character in the book.

The Booker Prize has always felt more enigmatic than the Pulitzer Prize, even though they are often seen as analogues to each other; it’s easier to understand why a book wins the Pulitzer than why one wins the Booker, at least in more recent times. (I won’t even get started on the early Pulitzer committees’ apparent love for wildly racist novels.) In the case of The Promise, I’m assuming I just missed what they saw in the novel. If it won because it serves as an allegory for the last forty years of South African history, I plead ignorance. As a narrative, however, it was merely good – an interesting premise, with solid execution and a strong conclusion, but lacking the well-defined characters that might have elevated this novel to something greater, and something that I would associate with the sort of plaudits The Promise has otherwise received. For whatever it’s worth, I would have voted for No One Is Talking About This instead.

Next up: I’m between books but just finished Harold Evans’ Do I Make Myself Clear?, a wonderful book of advice for writers and editors by the former editor-in-chief of the Sunday Times and founder of Condé Nast Traveler. Evans died last September at 92.

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→ December 17, 2021
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The Luminaries.

Eleanor Catton won the 2013 Booker Prize for her massive novel The Luminaries, becoming the youngest-ever winner of the prize, all the more remarkable for how much the novel sounds like the creation of a much older mind. It’s part mystery, part historical fiction, a dash of picaresque, and at times a bit of a mess, with one of the most untidy endings I can recall in a novel of this magnitude.

The Luminaries takes us to 1866, to New Zealand’s South Island, and walks us into a gold-rush town called Hokitika with the newly arrived prospector Walter Moody, who is there to pan for gold, and instead wanders headlong into a series of interconnected mysteries in the town involving a corrupt sea captain, a missing goldpanner, a dead hermit, an opium-addicted prostitute, a possibly-bogus will, a vendetta, Sinophobia, a M?ori miner, and more. The twelve men he meets are all caught up in the web of mysteries in some way, with their connections forming an elaborate tapestry that puts Moody (and the reader) well into the weeds before any resolution appears. The mysteries are gripping, but they’re far better because of the strength of all of the characters Catton has created; if anything, Moody is this novel’s Nick Jenkins, the observer character who is himself not all that interesting.

The central mystery revolves around that dead hermit, Crosbie Wells, and his unknown relationship to the conniving captain Francis Carver, and their shared connection to Anna Wetherell, the prostitute who was found unconscious, possibly as a result of a failed suicide attempt, on the side of a road the same night that Wells was found dead in his hovel. That question drives the plot, but the way Catton unfurls it, character by character, shows incredible plotting for such a young novelist, and allows her to give the reader a cornucopia of fascinating and often weird characters, most sympathetic, a few decidedly not so. You come for the mystery, but you stay for the weirdos.

Catton did make two significant structural choices in the novel that didn’t quite work for me. She used the signs of the western zodiac and other astrology tidbits to title the chapters, and the twelve men are supposed to correspond to those signs. Astrology is woo, and if there’s a real connection between the zodiac signs and anything in the book, I missed it, and I’m not terribly sorry about it. She also concludes the novel’s main narrative somewhat abruptly, and then jumps back in time to provide a mostly linear narrative of what actually happened before Moody arrived, an answer key of sorts at the back of the book. Doing so is not an inherently bad choice – every mystery needs its solution – but the switch was sudden, and after the climax of the main story, which has an unexpected event that triggers the end, we get very little resolution or explanation of what happened or how the main characters react to it.

I’ve read plenty of 800+ page novels, but few are actual page-turners. The Luminaries flew by, with prose that evokes the 19th century without sounding like it was written in the 19th century – there’s some formality, some nods to colloquial English of the time, but the majority of the prose reads like it was written more recently. That central narrative gripped me from fairly early on in the story, and Catton increases its complexity (and thus the reader’s confusion) quite well before the gradual revelations of different characters’ parts in the overall drama. The Booker Prize winners’ list is a real mixed bag, but this is one of the better ones I’ve read – and one of the most readable, too.

Next up: I’m partway through this year’s Booker Prize winner, The Promise, by Damon Galgut.

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