→ December 12, 2023
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The House of Silk.

I’ve loved much of the work of Anthony Horowitz, who created Foyle’s War, one of my favorite TV series of all time, and wrote the book Magpie Murders and the authorized James Bond novel Forever and a Day. He’s also written two authorized Sherlock Holmes novels – Moriarty, which was well-written but relied too much on a gimmick; and The House of Silk, which, unlike Moriarty, actually features Holmes as the main character. It’s also well-written, and moves along well, but falls into the trap of so many authorized continuations, where the author is trying so hard to be true to or respectful of the characters/settings that the story itself ends up suffering.

The House of Silk builds slowly to the first of multiple murders that all seem to tie to some mysterious entity by that title, although it’s unclear to whom or what it refers. Holmes enters at the behest of an art dealer whose shipment of paintings was destroyed by Irish gang members and whose client is later found murdered. When Holmes uses his Baker Street Irregulars to look for evidence, one of them ends up murdered himself, spurring the detective to continue his investigations even when others, including his brother Mycroft, warn him away from anything involving the House of Silk. Holmes finds himself framed for murder, and Watson has to find a way to spring him before they can solve the case.

Horowitz’s Holmes is the one you expect. He repeats his catchphrase “The game is afoot!” which actually comes from Shakespeare’s Henry V and just made me roll my eyes for its obviousness here. He does his parlor trick of glancing at a person and immediately coming up with a lengthy biographical sketch or a rundown of everything that person might have done that day, which has very little to do with the actual mystery here and didn’t happen nearly as often in the original Conan Doyle works because nearly all of them were short stories. He’s actually less disdainful towards Watson and the police in The House of Silk, where authenticity ends up lost to make him a kinder, gentler Holmes, and nobody asked for that. Watson, meanwhile, is even more of a cipher of a character here than he is in the original stories, retreating mostly to observer and chronicler status outside of the scenes while Holmes is in prison.

That’s one of my two main problems with The House of Silk – the characters are just not very interesting, including the man we all know and love. If you enjoy this sort of fiction, you likely have a favorite detective character; I’m a Hercule Poirot fan, and never enjoy the Miss Marple stories as much because she’s just not as interesting to me. Horowitz’s Holmes feels flat on the page, and none of the side characters are anything more than stock figures, some there because the reader might expect them (Lestrade, Mycroft), some there for the new plot, but none memorable at all once they leave the page.

The other is that the resolution to the story here is exceptionally lurid, and thus out of character with any of the original stories. Such things do happen in the real world, and did during the era of the novel, but putting Holmes into such a story is not only a break with the novel’s otherwise overzealous effort to stay authentic to the original material but requires a huge tonal shift for the character that the author can’t manage. It’s jarring in the wrong way, and Horowitz shows he’s a better craftsman than artist, able to frame and write the story but not to give it the panache or appeal of Conan Doyle’s works.

Next up: I’m currently about a third of the way through R.F. Kuang’s Babel, the most recent winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ October 12, 2023
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The Zone of Interest.

Martin Amis died earlier this year at age 73, leaving behind a bibliography of fifteen novels, several books’ worth of short stories, and eight non-fiction works or essay collections. His penultimate novel, The Zone of Interest, was in the news the same week that he died, as a film of the same name premiered at the Cannes film festival, where it won the Grand Prix (second place, of a sort, after the Palme d’Or). Both are set during the Holocaust at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but while the film – which I have not seen – focuses on Rudolph Höss and his wife, the novel fictionalizes the commandant and adds two more fictional characters for a tripartite narrative that plunges the reader into the contrast of setting and story.

Angelus “Golo” Thomsen is a Nazi officer at the death camp, a scheming womanizer who becomes obsessed with Hannah Doll, the wife of camp commandant Paul Doll, who is the fictional stand-in for Höss. Thomsen pursues Hannah despite the obvious threat to both of their lives, and she’s more than amenable, as she’s become disgusted with her true-believer Nazi husband, who drinks far too much and is becoming increasingly paranoid both of those around him and of his superiors in Berlin. Szmul is a Sonderkommando, a Jew and prisoner who is forced to help dispose of the bodies of victims of the Nazis’ gas chambers, in exchange for slightly better living conditions and little threat of arbitrary execution. Each of the three narrates his portion of the story, with Szmul’s sections the shortest but offering the starkest contrast to the mundane machinations of the other two.

While the story of Thomsen’s bizarre courtship of Hannah is ostensibly the core of the novel, it’s Amis’s development of the setting, presenting us with the contradictions between love, sex, and other ordinary facets of life with the murder, torture, and privation happening on the same grounds. There is no actual separation here – smoke from the crematorium fouls the air, prisoners from the camp sometimes ‘serve’ the Nazis, one prisoner happens to see Doll in a vulnerable moment and pays for it with his life. The Nazis, including their wives, simply choose not to see what is happening around them, like each ethnic group in China Miéville’s The City and the City, and go on with their daily lives as if they were not complicit in, or even actually ordering, the deaths of thousands of Jews, Roma, and others right in their literal back yard. That Amis makes this so plausible, this depiction of the banality of evil and the ways in which humans can justify anything to themselves, is what makes this novel such an odd, impressive work.

It’s often easy to get lost in the trivial nature of the bizarre love triangle here, until reality intrudes somewhere, either when Szmul gets the microphone or when one of the prisoners is forced to do something at one of the officers’ houses, and we’re reminded of the horrendous circumstances in which Thomsen’s and Hannah’s mundane acts and emotions are taking place. It’s a twist on absurdism, where the actions and dialogue are entirely normal, but they all occur at a death camp where over one million people were murdered. I don’t know if that was Amis’s point, to indict everyone involved, to show how easily people can devolve into complicity with genocide as long as they have food and shelter and sex, but I found that idea inescapable while reading this book. In many ways the plot reminded me of some of Graham Greene’s more literary works, such as The Heart of the Matter, where Greene would focus on a very small number of characters and work deep within their emotional cores to tell an extremely human story, often in a setting like British-occupied west Africa. Amis has a similar gift for prose and characterization, but here he shifts a similar story to the worst setting imaginable, yet keeps the diegesis intact, like picking up a house and moving it so carefully that the paintings stay on the walls. The Zone of Interest would be a great book if it were set anywhere, in any time, but Amis’s feat of using a compelling story to expose something darker about humanity turns it into a greater work and a highlight of modern literature.

Next up: I’m reading Liam O’Flaherty’s 1925 novel The Informer, although MC Shan has yet to make an appearance.

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→ March 7, 2023
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The Fortune Men.

I may have mentioned a few times that my in-laws are Welsh, as in born in Wales, so I’ve explored a bit of Welsh culture in the last few years while dabbling in the language as well. I discovered quite recently that Llenydiaeth Cymru (Literature Wales) has its own annual prizes under the Wales Book of the Year banner, and the most recent Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award went to Nadifa Mohammed for her latest novel The Fortune Men. It’s based on the true story of Somalian immigrant Mahmood Mattan, the last man hanged in Cardiff, whose 1952 trial and execution for the murder of Lily Volpert were a tragic miscarriage of justice. His conviction was quashed 45 years later, followed by a payment to his family of over £700,000 and then a police apology in 2022, although by then his widow and three sons had all died.

Mohammed reimagines the time from just before the murder through the crime, arrest, and sham trial, where Mattan barely received a defense and, in the retelling, the police misconduct was appalling. There were no witnesses to the murder, and the only two people who were certain to have seen the assailant, the victim’s sister and niece, both said Mattan didn’t match their recollection. A Black man came to the door of Lily’s shop after hours, but as a moneylender as well as a seller of fabric and other odds and ends, she was accustomed to such visits. Her sister closed the door between the shop and the family’s dining room, but about twenty minutes later, someone knocked to say that her sister had been found dead, her throat slashed, and £100 taken from the safe. A combination of racism, police incompetence, and coincidence put Mattan at the center of the investigation, and once the authorities had settled on him as their man, very little could stop the wheels of justice from crushing him under their weight.

Mattan receives a fascinatingly open portrayal in this novel, as Mohammed does not canonize her subject, depicting him as a dissolute gambler and a bit of a layabout. He was a sailor who fled a suffocatingly predictable life in what was then British Somaliland, eventually taking to the seas, settling in Cardiff, and marrying Laura over her family’s objections, only to jump back on a ship almost immediately after their wedding. He’s largely out of work at the time of his arrest, only half-heartedly looking for jobs, spending what little he gets in public assistance at the horse tracks. He doesn’t pay the people who lend him money back, at least not promptly. He’s also prone to verbal outbursts that come back to bite him at the trial. Yet he’s also quite clearly innocent of the crime in question, and a loving if sometimes inattentive husband and father to three sons.

We see Mattan as a whole person, rather than just a victim of a racist society, or even just a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He has a childlike faith that the truth will set him free in a literal sense, until it becomes clear that the British justice system is not interested in justice. Flashbacks to his childhood also lay bare the irony of a man leaving a predictable but relatively safe life in Somaliland only to move to the supposedly more enlightened colonizer country to face racism, poverty, and ultimately murder at the hands of the state.

The story, and the end, are already known, so Mohammed’s challenge is to make this story with a defined arc and conclusion interesting, which she does, while generating empathy in the reader for a relatively unsympathetic main character. Being condemned isn’t a character trait, so Mohammed fleshes out Mattan in a fascinating way to make him real and expand him beyond the common tragedy of an innocent man sent to his death. It’s a serious novel in multiple senses of the term, with a topic that seems contemporary despite the setting seventy years in the past.

Next up: Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust, winner of the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.

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→ January 17, 2023
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Elder Race.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race made the shortlist for this year’s inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, which first brought him to my attention even though he’d written twenty-odd novels before this and won a few awards along the way. It’s a quick read with a clever conceit at its heart: what if the person who’s supposed to be a great wizard is, in fact, just a human who possesses sufficiently advanced technology that it appears to be magic?

The ’wizard’ Nygroth Elder is, in fact, Nyr Illim Tevitch, an anthropologist left in stasis to keep an eye on this colonized planet while the remainder of his crew has long since left to return to Earth – which may or may not still be a going concern. Lynesse Fourth Daughter, a princess so junior you might call her a spare to the spare, believes there’s an existential threat to her people, so she treks to Nyr’s tower to try to enlist his help to fight what she calls a demon, which her own mother thinks is a fabrication to try to gain attention or glory. Nyr reluctantly agrees to help, even though his directive is to observe but not interfere, even if refraining might cause harm to the people he’s watching, and they set off on a quest to find and defeat the threat. Along the way, the culture clash between the two emerges through their languages, as Nyr can’t even explain what a scientist is, and the translation engine he uses makes everything sound to Lynesse like some sort of magic.

Elder Race is a quest novel – or novella, which is how the Hugo Awards characterized it, giving it a nomination in that category in 2022 – but one with a metatextual component as well that, in some ways, is the more interesting of the two. Tchaikovsky tells the story by alternating narration between Lynesse and Nyr, thus presenting both sides of most of their conversations, which operates as a commentary on fantasy literature and works that try to blend fantasy and science, as well as a more humanist look at the challenges of communicating across cultures. The fact that Lynesse’s language lacks so many words that Nyr takes for granted and finds himself unable to express even through translation recalled Samuel Delany’s classic novella Babel-17, which takes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – that the structure of a language influences how its speakers view the world – and turns it into an entire story, where a language is a weapon that alters speakers’ minds. Here language is less insidious, but stands as a concrete example of the difficulty of communicating across all of the boundaries that separate people, not just language but culture, history, religion, and more. Language is the visible manifestation of what amounts to a religious difference between Lynesse’s people and Nyr; what her family and subjects believe is magic is just technology they’ve lost in the centuries since humans colonized this planet.

Nyr is the more interesting and developed character of the two, in part because Lynesse is, by design, depicted as naïve – she’s young, but also not very worldly even within the confines of this civilization, and her faith in Nyr based on a historical anecdote is almost charming in its innocence. Nyr, meanwhile, has to grapple with both his role as potential savior, or as a failed savior, to Lynesse’s people, while also facing the fact that he might be severed permanently from his own civilization, condemned to a lonely existence where he enters long periods of suspended animation and can’t forge enduring relationships with anyone. He encounters crippling depression and covers it up with the help of embedded tech that takes the old trope about men compartmentalizing their emotions and turns it into software; he can just push it aside and deal with it later.

Tchaikovsky – who spells his name Czajkowski outside of his writing, as he’s of Polish descent rather than Russian – packs a lot into the 200 pages of Elder Race, without skimping on the quest part of the story, which is the real narrative that drives the book forward. You could probably just read this as a straight-up quest without giving the larger themes a second thought and still enjoy it. I found those themes gave this novel more heft and staying power in my mind after I finished. It’s to Czajkowski’s credit that he managed this in such a brief novel that revolves almost entirely around just two core characters.

Next up: I’m many books behind in my writeups, but I’m currently reading Brian Clegg’s Gravitational Waves: How Einstein’s Spacetime Ripples Reveal the Secrets of the Universe.

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→ November 9, 2022
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The Dark Frontier.

Eric Ambler was a British author of spy thrillers whose first novel, The Dark Frontier, started out as an attempt to satirize the genre. Written while he was a copywriter for an ad agency in London, The Dark Frontier morphed as it went along into a more serious spy novel, one that proved highly influential and set him on a new career as novelist and later screenwriter. His works influenced many later practitioners of the form, including (according to Wikipedia) Graham Greene and John Le Carré.

Dr. Henry Barstow is a mild-mannered British physicist who ends up drafted into a bit of international intrigue involving the eastern European nation of Ixania, which appears to be attempting to build a weapon of mass destruction. The plot partially foreshadows (and perhaps influenced?) that of North by Northwest, but this time, Barstow suffers a head injury, after which he decides Barstow is just a cover story, and he’s really Conway Carruthers, international man of mystery and scientist-adventurer who believes that the Ixanians are a threat to world peace. He sets about trying to stop them from developing this weapon while working with the Ixanian resistance and avoiding the arms dealer who tried to rope him into the conflict in the first place.

You can see the tonal shift in the novel a little before its midpoint. The first half feels jocular, even silly, as Ambler sets up the most absurd situation for a quiet, nerdy scientist, right down to the point where he gets bonked on the head. When he wakes up and thinks he’s James Bond, it would have been so easy for Ambler to turn him into Austin Powers, bumbling his way through intrigue after intrigue and narrowly avoiding getting himself or his comrades killed. Not long after Barstow’s transformation into Carruthers, however, the novel’s tone and pace change, and suddenly we are in full-on spy novel mode, with great action scenes, including chases and shootouts, and some Bond-esque cleverness (Fleming was another writer who credited Ambler for influencing his own work). The parodic humor of the first half is almost completely absent in the second half, even to the point where you might think Barstow really is Carruthers, something Ambler seems to be playing with over the last few chapters.

I’m not a connoisseur of the spy novel, but I have enjoyed most of the ones I’ve read, including Greene’s “entertainments” (notably The Confidential Man), Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands, Dennis Wheatley’s Black August, and others. I didn’t write it up because I was on vacation for nearly two weeks when I read it, but I also liked Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, which is told from the first person and follows the spy after the incident as he tries to run from multiple international authorities. The protagonist, who is never named, is hunting in a nameless eastern European country and aims his rifle at the dictator but doesn’t pull the trigger. He’s caught by the secret police, who try to kill him but fail, after which he goes on the run, making his way back to England, where the authorities can’t help him because he’s a suspected assassin, so he continues to hide in Dorset while the agents of the dictator, who’ve learned he’s still alive, hunt for him. It’s a little slow in parts because Household is so bent on a realistic depiction of his character’s predicament, but also has some great action sequences and chase scenes, with a tremendous denouement that I didn’t see coming.

The Dark Frontier is more fun than that, without skimping on the action stuff, although in the end its dichotomous nature works against it a little too much. I picked this after reading something about Ambler’s role in the history of the spy novel, figuring his first one was the place to start, but after reading this book – and enjoying it, just to be clear – I felt like this was a tune-up, and maybe some of his subsequent novels, where he has his purpose in mind from the beginning, would be even better.

Next up: Just about done with Jess Grose’s Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood.

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→ June 6, 2022
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Arthur and George.

Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending is one of my favorite novels of this century, and was adapted into a solid if very understated (or just very English) film a few years ago, so I’m likely to pick up any book of his I find lying around. Arthur & George precedes that book in Barnes’ bibliography, making the Booker Prize shortlist in 2005, six years before he won the honor for Sense. It’s a beautifully written fictionalization of a true story involving Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but lacks the tension and conciseness that made his subsequent book such a standout.

The Arthur of the title is the author who created Sherlock Holmes, while George is George Edalji, a bookish, half-Indian lawyer who was wrongly accused of a series of animal murders known now as the “Great Wyrley Outrages.” Edalji’s family had been harassed for years via letters and malicious pranks – thank goodness SWATting wasn’t a thing in the 1890s, as their tormentors would certainly have done it – while the local constables did nothing to stop the harassment, often intimating that George was the culprit in his own abuse. He was convicted on circumstantial evidence, boosted by prejudice and prosecutorial misconduct, and later released from prison without explanation or pardon. He wrote to Conan Doyle, who took it upon himself to prove Edalji’s innocence and campaign for a pardon, which he achieved after eight months of “detective” work of his own.

The novel follows the lives of the two men, starting in childhood, with brief sections on their upbringings (collected as “Beginnings”), followed by a long exposition of Edalji’s story (“Beginnings with an Ending”), then one on Sir Conan Doyle’s efforts to clear George’s name (“Endings with a Beginning”), before wrapping things up in a section whose title you can probably guess. The two middle sections constitute the bulk of the book, and that’s sort of where Barnes gets into trouble, as we get way too much of Conan Doyle’s personal life. His first wife was not a great match for him, and she spent the last several years of her life with tuberculosis. While still married, he met Jean Leckie, who would become his second wife after they maintained a chaste relationship for nearly a decade while, in effect, waiting for his first wife to die. Meanwhile, he also dabbled in spiritualism, his interest in (and gullibility towards) which only increased after his son died of wounds he suffered in the Battle of the Sonne.

Barnes tries to weave Conan Doyle’s personal life into the mystery around Edalji and the Outrages, but the former simply cannot compete with the latter: The crimes, trial, and Conan Doyle’s investigations have far more narrative greed and greater tension than his love life or his weird dalliances with superstition. There’s just nothing that interesting about his platonic friendship with Jean; their meetings are fraught with whatever the opposite of tension is. They’re flaccid. I couldn’t wait for any scene involving the two of them or spiritualism to be over with, so Barnes could get back to the good stuff – anything around Edalji, whether it was the harassment campaign, the accusations, the trial, or the investigation to clear his name. Those passages are electric, and if Barnes wanted to stop writing serious fiction at age 76, he could probably crank out of a couple of good detective novels before he’s through.

Fortunately for Arthur & George, there’s enough of the mystery to make up for the weakness of the other material, and Barnes makes it work without changing any of the substance of the real-world case, even where it makes Conan Doyle look like a bit of a hypocrite – he claimed another boy committed the crimes, but his case was just as circumstantial as the one that got Edalji convicted. It’s not in the same league as The Sense of an Ending, which was taut and focused, yet landed such a massive impact with its resolution, with the same clear and evocative prose, but good enough to get over the recommended line for me.

Next up: I’m reading this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, The Netanyahus, by Joshua Cohen.

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→ January 24, 2022
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Klara and the Sun.

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the greatest novelists currently writing in English, a deserving winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Booker Prize (for The Remains of the Day), and author of two of the hundred best novels I’ve ever read (Remains and Never Let Me Go). His latest novel, Klara and the Sun, made the longlist for the Booker, finds him revisiting themes from several of his earlier works in another light science fiction milieu, in a work that is beautifully written but often seems too remote from its real subjects.

Klara is an Artificial Friend, an android that parents buy to serve as companions for their children, since school is now held remotely. Many children are also ‘lifted’ in what appears to be genetic engineering, but it’s a devil’s bargain – children must be lifted to have a chance of going to a suitable school, but there’s some risk of negative side effects, even death, from the procedure. Klara finds herself chosen to be the companion of Josie, a child who’s been lifted but is suffering significant illnesses because of it, and it’s implied that the lifting is part of why her parents are divorced. Artificial Friends get their power from the sun, so Klara comes to believe that the Sun is a god, or the God, and that this omnipotent being will be able to cure Josie – if Klara does something in return.

Because Klara narrates the book, we only get a superficial take on everything that happens, and details you might expect are not forthcoming (do not forthcome?). I’m just assuming ‘lifting’ means genetic engineering of some sort, for example. It arises that someone else in the world of these people has died, and we are left to infer the cause. There are great novels narrated by children or childlike characters – To Kill a Mockingbird is the most obvious example – but they amp up the level of difficulty for author and reader alike. Klara’s commentary is robotic, by design I assume, and it is the first way in which Ishiguro holds us at a distance from the text.

Klara and the Sun might be the loneliest novel I’ve ever read. The mere idea of Artificial Friends seems conjured out of a cloud of loneliness, and every character in this novel comes across as almost desperate in their lack of connection with others. There are few interactions here that don’t involve Klara, who is, to be clear, not an actual person. Josie’s parents are alienated from her as well as from each other, and their nearest neighbors, who live a mile or so away, are further separated from them because Rick, who is Josie’s age, was not ‘lifted.’ This near-future, which also includes replacement of even highly educated workers by robots or automation, seems neither that distant from ours nor that improbable, but it sounds apocalyptic in its isolation.

Klara’s relationship with the Sun feels like a parody of religious faith, or at least of a child’s concept thereof; Klara assumes that anything she doesn’t understand must be the Sun’s doing, and that the Sun can change anything if Klara simply believes enough – or makes an appropriate sacrifice. She also has a child’s conception of the world, seeing one small construction belching out smoke and assuming it is the only source of pollution on the planet. Klara convinces several other people to help her in her odd quest to appease the Sun and save Josie, but, without spoiling the ending, I’ll say that the outcome leaves Klara with next to nothing in the end.

Ishiguro’s prose never fails to amaze; even in The Unconsoled, by far my least favorite of his novels even though its ambition is evident, he still writes beautifully, evoking rich images of time and place. It’s jarring in Klara and the Sun to see such classic, almost poetic prose used for a story that is relentless in its reserve. Klara had to be the narrator, and yet her childlike view of the world, including a limited emotional vocabulary, means that the novel lacks the emotional punch of Ishiguro’s other works – even Never Let Me Go, which had a similarly dystopian setup and story, but had a huge emotional payoff. Klara has the same distinctive voice and meticulous setup as I’ve come to expect from Ishiguro, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts.

Next up: I’ve just finished Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, which lived up to its billing.

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→ September 3, 2021
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Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.

Jasper Fforde was kind enough to appear as a guest on The Keith Law Show last month, and I asked him a question – of which I’d warned him in advance – about what books he would include in a class on comic novels. It was inspired by my favorite class in college, “Comedy and the Novel,” which introduced me to at least three of my all-time favorite novels: Jacques the Fatalist, If on a winter’s night a traveler…, and my favorite novel ever written, The Master & Margarita.

One of Fforde’s answers was Mil Millingham’s Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, and having read it, I can see why Fforde recommended it – it shares much of his style of humor, appreciation of the absurd, and derisive attitude towards all things bureaucratic. The book alternates between two parallel threads: The narrator, Pel, arguing with his girlfriend, and losing; and Pel’s day job at the library of the local university, where all sorts of shenanigans are taking place, including open corruption, the construction of a new building over what might be a graveyard, and not very much librarying.

Pel’s arguments with his girlfriend, an attractive German blonde named Ursula with a personality that might be described as slightly vampiric, are by far the funnier half of the book. While Millingham is certainly not showing Ursula’s best side, he doesn’t paint her as a witch, or a permanently unreasonable person, or one of those, “women, am right?” women. She’s more strong-willed, occasionally unreasonable, but less unreasonable than Pel is, and if anything, he comes off worse – he’s not going to die of overexertion, and he seems to step right into it every time one of those arguments goes on for more than a line or two. She’s just right more often than he is, and his narrative attempts to make her seem the unreasonable one reflect more on him. They have two young sons, who act as boys that age do, and whose antics will probably be hilarious to those of you with kids and mildly amusing to those without.

The stuff at work is a lot less compelling, and gets to the fundamental problem with Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, which is that the story here is as thin as rice paper. Pel’s former boss has left the country for parts unknown, and it appears he has absconded with Someone Else’s Money, which might itself be enough raw material for a cracking comedy of errors, but Millingham dispenses with that, mining it for some racially insensitive humor and eventually just moving along to another story. Pel also sexually harasses a colleague, falls into a giant hole, says the absolute wrong thing to some extremely annoying journalists (who would have been shot, or at least pushed into that giant hole, in the United States), and repeatedly fails to do his job – which seems to barely meet the requirements of a job, except that he gets paid for what little he is asked to do (which he doesn’t do anyway). It seems like Millingham had the idea of depicting a highly dysfunctional workplace, which has been done before but I’ll allow it, and then populating it with idiots and loonies, which has also been done before but will often make me laugh anyway, but it never adds up to anything here. Even when he catches one of his antagonists doing something he shouldn’t be doing, it’s nowhere near as funny as it should be, because those various colleagues of his are not that well-drawn, so when they fail or flop, it’s less funny than he might have planned.

The Ursula stuff, however, is the goods. I could have read a whole book just about the two of them arguing over matters large (they move to another house, and it goes as well as you’d expect) and small (Ursula scares off the gutter cleaners by speaking German to them, which culminates in a riotous high-speed car chase). That’s the sort of book that doesn’t need much plot, and the ending Millingham gives this novel would have worked better if the entire thing had been just about the two of them. So I’d still recommend Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About if you’re in the mood for a laugh, as long as you keep your expectations for plot on the lower side.

Next up: Daniel Kahneman’s new book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment.

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→ January 22, 2021
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Crudo.

Olivia Laing’s debut novel Crudo is a waif of a novel, barely 135 pages long, and drops you right into the middle of an inner monologue of someone who may or may not be the writer Kathy Acker. The book won the 2019 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, a British literary prize that often picks winners from outside the mainstream, resulting in some brilliant choices (Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know; Zadie Smith’s White Teeth) and some maddening ones (this year’s winner, Ducks, Newburyport, is 1000 pages long and comprises one sentence).

Kathy Acker was a real author, a novelist, playwright, and essayist who wrote experimental, transgressive works dealing with topics like suicide, trauma, and sexual abuse, but she died of breast cancer after a double mastectomy in 1997, at the age of 50. She worked well outside the mainstream and had a hard time finding publishers; her best-known novel, Blood and Guts in High School, took almost a decade to see print, and that came via alternative publisher Grove Books. Wikipedia mentions that her friends included Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, and her literary reputation has grown since her death.

Laing has brought her back to life, in a way, reimagining Acker as a breast cancer survivor, in the present day, but only around the age she was shortly before her death. This Acker uses social media and tracks the news, especially news of Trump and Brexit, almost obsessively, while also navigating her emotions as she approaches marriage to a man many years her senior. Both marriage, even though it will the “openish,” and the endless catastrophe of Trump’s reign of error terrify her. She views matrimony as an end to her freedom, perhaps to her autonomy, both of which could just as easily apply to her fears about the rising tide of nationalism, racism, and xenophobia that swept Trump into office and led British voters to twice choose economic self-immolation via Brexit.

Crudo walks us through the last few days before Acker’s marriage, through the circuitous thoughts in her mind as well as the extraordinary and mundane events that fill up the calendar. This Kathy Acker has lived as she pleased, and dreads the potential for that to change for any reason, more than she appears to fear death itself. The juxtaposition of the intensely personal and the publicly political works in Crudo‘s favor, by connecting something many readers (I’d wager most readers of this novel) themselves have felt with the less universal sense of marriage as a loss of something, which isn’t how everybody approaches the institution, at least.

The plot of Crudo, however, is as thin as the novel itself – a novella, really, if we want to be pedantic about the category, as there is very little to this book at all. It’s something you read for the prose, which is by turns lyrical and comically profane, or for the mood, but nothing really happens in the typical sense of a plot. There’s less than no action, conflicts are observed rather than experienced, and no character other than Kathy gets much page time, let alone development. I read it, I sort of enjoyed it, and I carried on living my life. It’s different, and perhaps that’s why it won the Tait Black Prize, but it’s not the sort of groundbreaking work the prize ostensibly seeks to honor.

Next up: I’m nearly through David Mitchell’s number9dream.

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Piranesi.

Has any novel been as long-awaited as Susanna Clarke’s sophomore work Piranesi? Her first novel, 2004’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, is one of the best books I’ve ever read, perhaps the best written this century so far, a brilliantly rendered epic about rival magicians in the 1800s, complete with the funniest footnotes I’ve ever seen. Clarke fell ill after writing it, and other than one book of short stories, published nothing until this year, when Piranesi appeared, as if from another world, in September. While it’s quite unlike her first novel, Piranesi is remarkable – brilliantly rendered, again, but in a completely new way, with a new voice and an atmosphere of mystery and dread throughout.

Piranesi is the name of the narrator, although we come to learn that his story, and his name, are more complicated than they first appear to be. He lives alone in a gigantic castle of hundreds of rooms, some sort of labyrinth, and the only person he ever sees is one he calls the Other, who seems to be conducting some sort of research on Piranesi and the house. As the story progresses, though, it becomes clear that there’s far more to Piranesi than even he realizes, as his memories start to come back to him in dribs and drabs, and he realizes there are other people in the world besides himself and the Other.

The less said about the story, though, the better. This is book about memory and loss, and it’s best to recover Piranesi’s memories, and learn the truth about him and the House that he treats as a sort of god, along with him. Clarke has, once again, created an immersive, dreamlike otherworld that will pull you in, even though this one is as nebulous as the world of Jonathan Strange was clear and familiar. It was easy to look at her first novel and see her influences in 19th century British literature and to understand where she was gently parodying the books she obviously loved from that era. Piranesi, however, is unlike any novel I’ve ever read. The closest comparisons I can think of – David Mitchell’s Slade House came to mind – aren’t really that close.

While the mystery of who exactly Piranesi is and what he’s doing in this house – which floods often, and doesn’t appear to have any exits – unravels, Clarke gives the reader ample time and fodder to consider his plight. He’s alone most of the time, yet oddly at peace with his situation, even though he’s in frequent peril from everything from the rising waters to lack of food. (The Other brings him gifts, including food, although Piranesi largely seems to live off dried seaweed and fish he catches.) There are the bones of 14 other people in the House, and Piranesi seems to think they speak to him, somehow, as do the various statues. Was he always mad? Did solitude drive him to madness? Why isn’t the Other trying harder to help him? And who is 16, the person whom the Other warns Piranesi to avoid at all costs?

The House is a character of its own in the book, especially given how Piranesi interacts with it, and could stand as a symbol for any of several real-world analogues. It’s a dream world, in the sense of the endless structure of dreams, but even more resembles the human imagination – a fractalized rendition of the world of our minds in a series of rooms that might be changing each time Piranesi visits them, in a total space that might have an end that Piranesi hasn’t actually found. There’s a sense of incompleteness within the House that feels like the sort of dream you get when you’re not completely asleep, but where impossible things creep into your mind enough that you know after that you weren’t completely awake, and how within those semi-dreams you can also feel trapped by your own confusion. I’ve had more of these experiences during the pandemic, for some unknown reason, and while Piranesi was in progress long before COVID-19 existed as a pathogen in humans, it takes on a different meaning eight months into the ongoing plague.

There might be a bit too much exposition in the middle of Piranesi, where Clarke has to break the spell a little bit to explain to the reader just how Piranesi got to the House and what might be coming next, but the resolution is gripping and veers from the expected in multiple ways, not least in the timing of events towards the novel’s end. It isn’t Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell because nothing could be, and perhaps it’s for the best that Clarke’s follow-up isn’t in that same universe, as she’d once promised. This new creation of hers is just as magical as the first, but in its own, memorable way.

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