→ February 11, 2026
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The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (And His Mother).

Raja is a portly gay 63-year-old teacher in Beirut who lives with his overbearing, impossible mother. He calls himself gullible, although I think he’s being overly self-deprecating; he’s surrounded by lunatics, and lived through more history than most of us, from the Lebanese Civil War to the collapse of the country’s economy to the 2020 explosion at the city’s port. Rabih Alameddine’s The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), winner of the 2025 National Book Award, follows him in a sort of picaresque fashion through his memories of these and other major events in Lebanese history, as he ends up in one ridiculous situation after another, often with the city around him in ruins or chaos. It’s consistently funny, even in its sorrows, with an indelible main character (and his mother) as our tour guide through a sort of absurdist realism, where the improbable takes place right amidst the actual over the course of six decades.

The prompt that opens the novel is that Raja, a philosophy teacher who wrote one book that was reasonably successful, receives an invitation from a foundation in the United States to pay for him to come to their compound and give a lecture. This, he tells us, he accepted, because he is gullible, and it turned out to be a mistake, although we won’t find out what happened until the penultimate chapter of the book. On the way to that story, Raja walks us through multiple episodes in his life story, each tied to some major event in modern Lebanese history. He missed a huge chunk of the Civil War because he was kidnapped, but not by enemies: it was by a friend of sorts from school who hides Raja away after he witnesses a murder. He’s saving Raja’s life, but he also insists that Raja teach him to dance so he can sleep with some girl in their class – clearly assuming Raja can dance because he’s gay. That’s just the setup; the story goes off the rails from there, or perhaps the rails were blown up by the Israeli invaders. Who can say.

Raja is truly a delight as a narrator and a main character, and his relationship with his mother, who loves to respond to him in paradoxical fashion with “Fuck your mother,” is both an important throughline and a consistent source of laughs. The novel’s nested-stories structure allows Alameddine to jump around through time, while Raja and his mother are there in every one of those stories – true or not, as some of these tales are hard to believe, notably the one of the kidnapping, where Raja and his kidnapper become lovers in a sort of kicked-up gay Stockholm syndrome. Each of the stories, including the resolution of the speaking invitation, which itself is hard for Raja to believe because he’s not an author – he wrote one book, 25 years earlier, that wasn’t successful in the United States, so why on earth would someone there want him to come speak? The answer to that, as with so much else in the book, is hilarious on its surface, but comes with layers of meaning that point to Lebanon’s inability to reckon with or learn from its own history, which keeps looping back on itself, from crisis to crisis, with the Lebanese people always the ones to suffer – including Raja, who takes each setback in a fatalist’s stride.

There are probably further layers of the book that I missed because I’m not that familiar with Lebanon’s history; what I do know is largely through an American lens, such as the news coverage of the hostage crisis, which obviously didn’t paint Lebanon in a kind or accurate light. Alameddine depicts an entirely different Beirut, that of a worldly city with many modern aspects, beset by corruption and conflict, but one where a gay philosophy teacher and his overbearing mother can live their ridiculous life, with a too-large coffee table and a parade of terrible relatives, in something resembling happiness. It’s a richly textured work that takes great tragedies and packages them in wry humor, all delivered by one of the most delightful narrators I’ve encountered in ages.

Next up: I’m way behind on writing up books I’ve read, but right now I’m reading Andrei Bely’s Petersburg.

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→ August 6, 2025
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Service Model.

Andrei Tchaikovsky landed a pair of nominations for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, one of them for Service Model, a dark comedy set in a dystopian future and starring a robot valet who finds that he’s killed his master and no longer understands his purpose.

Charles is the valet, and when the novel opens, he finds his master in bed with his throat cut by his razor, and an investigation leads to the inevitable conclusion that Charles is the culprit. Charles takes himself to Diagnostics, although along the way he stops at some other manors, only to find that there aren’t any humans anywhere else, either. At Diagnostics, he realizes that the entire bureaucratic setup has been brought to a halt, with any robots who show up to wait in the unmoving line sent off for scrap, and The Wonk, who seems to be hanging out in Diagnostics but maybe not working there, tells him that he’s developed free will, so he should go ‘live’ outside of service. Charles, whom the Wonk dubs Uncharles, can’t quite grasp that, and spends most of the book on a quest for some human to serve, mostly with the Wonk at his (its) side.

Service Model combines elements of farce and picaresque novels to explore some fundamental questions that go beyond robots or so-called AI. Charles is searching for meaning when the meaning he believed in for his entire existence isn’t just erased, but completely defied, like someone who grows up in one religion and has a sudden experience or realization that the religion is false. Imagine an evangelical Christian turned atheist who can’t give up all of the trappings of the former belief system, and keeps looking for reasons to continue their previous way of life. Even in the face of undeniable evidence that his worldview is false – Charles and the Wonk meet a robot that calls itself God, who turns out to be neither omnipotent nor infallible – Charles can’t give up his programming.

Because Charles is a machine, not a human, Tchaikovsky – who says he was inspired by a scene in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe – pushes his quest to ridiculous extremes, like some sort of robotum ad absurdum. Charles’s source code says he must have a human to serve, even when there isn’t a suitable human, or any human, in sight. It reads as a commentary on the limitations of “AI,” even if it can supposedly rewrite its own code, and on our misplaced faith in these tools to think for us. Garbage in, garbage out. The solution Uncharles finds ultimately requires the intervention of a human.

Tchaikovsky uses peril quite liberally, almost to the point of parodying the picaresque genre, as Charles ends up in one ridiculous situation after another, often requiring the help of The Wonk or some other force, including just sheer luck, to get out of being shut down or decommissioned or otherwise ceasing to exist. It gets a little tiresome because when he’s on the verge of extinction with 250 pages left, you’re pretty sure he’s going to make it out all right, and there are a couple of situations Charles escapes just because he has to move to the next plot point. Most of those sections do work in spite of their absurdity, however, because Tchaikovsky has such a deft hand with black humor, and in Charles he has created one of the best unintentionally funny characters I’ve seen in a while. (I think Tchaikovsky might be the humorist-satirist that people say that Gary Shteyngart is.) You can just appreciate Service Model as a quixotic tale, where The Wonk is Charles’s Sancho Panza, but I think its great strength is what’s below the surface, with a deeply humanistic bent and a clear philosophy on the limitations and potential harms of technology.

Of the six Hugo nominees, I’ve read two in full, this one and T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes to Call, and right now I’m almost through Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup. All are good enough to win; I think Kingfisher’s might be my favorite, but Service Model has a lot more to say, and if Hugo voters consider that aspect it’s probably the superior choice. That said, I have a copy of Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time on hold at the library, and I think that might be the actual favorite.

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→ May 26, 2025
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I Am Not Sidney Poitier.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is the seventh of Percival Everett’s books that I’ve read, but the first for which I did some homework, watching four of Poitier’s movies to which I knew Everett alludes in the novel. This was hardly difficult, as only one of the movies (Lilies of the Field, for which Poitier won his sole non-honorary Academy Award) failed to hold up. I’m glad I went through the exercise, however, as it made reading Everett’s novel even more enjoyable. It’s a riot, and another incredible feat of imagination, and while it has its serious moments, it is Everett at his least serious among the books I’ve read.

The main character in I Am Not Sidney Poitier is named Not Sidney Poitier, which, as you may imagine, presents him with all manner of difficulties, including bullying in school. He is, however, quite rich, as his mother invested very early in shares of Ted Turner’s media company, making her one of its largest shareholders and, at her death, putting Not Sidney in Ted’s care, in a way. Turner himself becomes an amusing if caricatured side character, prone to rambling non sequiturs, but he makes for an entertaining conversationalist as Not Sidney tries to make his way through the world.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier proceeds into a sort of modern picaresque, as each chapter is a new adventure modeled after one or two of Poitier’s movies. Early in the book, for example, Not Sidney sets off for California in his car, choosing to avoid the interstates, and finds himself in a hick county in Georgia where he is arrested for the crime of being Black. He’s soon chained to a racist convict, and an accident gives them an opportunity to escape, which, if you haven’t seen it, is the plot of The Defiant Ones, which starred Poitier and Tony Curtis. Everett’s trick here is adhering very closely to the plots of several of these movies, often to the point of repeating key quotes (“They call me Not Sidney” might be the best), but then turning something inside out at the resolution.

Not Sidney drifts back and forth from his home on Ted Turner’s estates, including interactions with Jane Fonda, to these vignettes from films like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (but with a family of light-skinned Blacks prejudiced against darker-skinned people), In the Heat of the Night, and No Way Out, the last of which appears in a dream sequence.

Everett’s gift for comedy shows itself more in wordplay and in the humor he mines from absurd situations, rather than some of the more situational and highbrow humor in books like Dr. No. The protagonist’s name is obviously a source of repeated gags at his expense, and Everett creates all kinds of improbable interactions that allow him to poke fun at something, whether it’s the movies he’s referencing or Black literature or really anything that crosses his mind. Everett has referred to himself as “pathologically ironic,” and I have never felt that more in his writing than in his novel, even though I think it’s the least serious or thematic of any of the seven I’ve read.

I will say I think I enjoyed this novel the most of the seven, but that doesn’t make it the “best” or my favorite. It’s the funniest, it was probably the fastest to read, and it’s endlessly rewarding if you’ve seen any of the movies involved. I did notice that it was lighter in tone and subject, which isn’t a criticism, but it’s a change of pace from James or So Much Blue or Telephone. The guy still hasn’t missed for me, though, and there are very, very few authors about whom I could say that through even four books.

Next up: Another of this year’s Pulitzer finalists, The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones.

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→ 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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→ 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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→ August 12, 2021
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The Old Devils.

Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim is one of my all-time favorite comic novels, incorporating humor low and high, with lots of the excessive alcohol consumption that would characterize much of Amis’ fiction (and non-fiction, and perhaps some of his own life). Thirty-two years after the publication of that book, his first, he won the Booker Prize for The Old Devils, which still has his voice and humor but is far less frivolous, as it covers a quartet of older Welshmen and their long-suffering wives as they face old age, mortality, and the disappointments of lives less than well-lived.

The author/poet Alun Weaver and his wife Rhiannon – oh, that’s just the beginning of the Welshness here – are returning to Wales after many years away, and their arrival has stirred up many old friendships, rivalries, and secret romances among their group of old friends, including Peter, Charlie, Percy, Malcolm, Gwen, Muriel, Sophie, Siân, and Angharad. Rhiannon and Peter were old flames; Alun appears to have slept with several of the others’ wives, and resumes doing so straight off the train; and there’s a tremendous amount of drink, interrupted by brief meditations on alcohol’s deleterious effects on health and waistline.

While there’s obvious humor to mine from scene after scene of men drinking themselves into various stages of stupor, often finishing at one pub only to have one of them suggest that they repair to another one, or to his apartment where there’s more strong drink to be had, the tone of The Old Devils is unmistakably darker. The sun is setting on these men in various ways, none more so than Alun, who gets an unwelcome sense of how slight his popularity is when there’s barely any media at all attending his arrival, and who finds himself constantly in the shadow of the poet Brydan (a stand-in for Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, whom Amis apparently disdained).

I rattled off those names to make a small point about Amis’s writing here. The men’s names are mostly bog-standard, recognizable then and now other than the ‘u’ in Alun’s name. The women, on the other hand, have the more traditionally Welsh names, none more so than Siân (pronounced a bit like “she-AHN”) or Angharad (“an-KHAR-ad,” although the kh sound is softer than in Hebrew or Russian). Men are ordinary creatures in this book, while women are inscrutable. There’s a clear difference in their depictions, and while none of the men other than Alun is easily distinguished from any other – Charlie is afraid of the dark, of all things, and that’s what counts as a character trait – the women are even more two-dimensional, if you could even call them that. Muriel is a bit of a shrew, and there’s a running gag about Angharad and whichever fellow is her husband, but the women especially blend together because by and large they are props, not characters.

The Old Devils works when Amis aims his eye at the men at the story’s heart as they contemplate where they’ve landed in life. Alun is hardly a sympathetic protagonist, but his own difficulty accepting that his literary legacy is less than he wished it to be – did Amis harbor the same doubts about his own? – is one of the most haunting threads in the book, even if we’re not sorry to see Alun get his ego dented a few times. Peter’s unhappy marriage to Muriel is compounded by his own financial dependence on her – he’s squandered years where he might have forged a career of his own, and now that she’s threatening to sell their house and leave him, he has an uncertain financial future and no real identity of his own. Each of these men has wasted a good part of his life, and they all seem to be approaching old age with the plan of drinking their way through It, until the inevitable happens to one of them and the rest have to deal with the aftermath.

I probably enjoyed the Welshiness of the novel more than anything, as my in-laws are both Welsh natives and I’ve been learning some of the language on Duolingo, enough to catch a number of the Welsh words Amis slipped into the dialogue. He taught for many years at Swansea University, on the south coast of Wales, and described his time there as some of his happiest years, which is probably why the novel seems so understanding of Welsh language and culture – this at a time when the language was still not taught in schools – and derogatory towards those who dismiss it as parochial, or just as a nuisance, as when road signs appear in Welsh to the confusion of the main characters. Even as Amis gives us drink as an inadequate escape from life’s sorrows, he can’t avoid showing some affection for the novel’s setting or background people, or, of course, for the drinks themselves. (Except Irish cream, which he properly treats as the treacle it is.) I can see why Amis won the Booker for this book, but I did miss the madcap humor that made Lucky Jim such a treat.

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→ September 5, 2019
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Beer in the Snooker Club.

When I read My Uncle Napoleon back in March, longtime reader John Liotta suggested in a comment that I check out Waguih Ghali’s one novel, Beer in the Snooker Club, which he said was an analogous work set in Egypt rather than Iran. It is similar, for sure, perhaps less overtly funny and more satirical, replacing the slapstick of the Iranian novel with a more biting take on the Egyptian independence movement’s failure to provide its people with freedom.

Ram, the novel’s protagonist, and his friend-but-occasional-nemesis Font find themselves in a social and political purgatory in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, which overthrew King Farouk but replaced him with a military dictatorship that implemented its own repressive policies. The withdrawal of the English colonial presence has upended the social order and put Egyptian Copts in an uncertain position where the ruling Muslim authorities threaten their safety while the formerly open English borders have closed. In this context, Ram and Font recall their previous times in London, Ram’s wealthy aunt ‘donates’ her land to the poor while actually selling it to fellaheen (the farmer class), and Ram finds his affections torn between the wealthy Jewish woman Edna (off limits due to her background and class) and the also wealthy but less interesting Egyptian girl Didi.

There’s something overtly feckless and desultory about the entire novel, focused on Ram’s own aimlessness but infecting the entire setting, as if Ghali took the existentialism of Camus or Sartre and married it with the biting parody of Heller or Bulgakov. Ram’s slow realization that la plus ça change leads him to a state of ambition catatonia; he’s stuck, regardless of what he does, and if anything his prospects are worsening because of circumstances entirely beyond his control. He can stay in Egypt, but he’ll be in a religious, ethnic, and political minority (he, like Ghali, is a small-c communist, although Ram’s commitment to its principles is tenuous) at home, yet can no longer move freely to England in the wake of the change of government and the English actions at the time in the Suez. (Egypt’s president after the coup, Gamel Abdul Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, leading Israel to invade the Gaza and the Sinai with support from England and France in a failed effort to reclaim the Canal from Egypt.) Ghali combines the ennui of Camus’ protagonists with the absurdity of political satires of that era, although in this case he’s sending up the Egyptian upper class more than the government itself, which he depicts in the background in a same-as-the-old-boss way.

Ram’s character is the one that Ghali develops over the course of the book beyond the arc of his story, as we see how he went from a somewhat idealistic youth, protected from many of the harsher aspects of life under the autocracy of the king, to a cynical adult who realizes that Nasser’s rule merely switched one set of inequalities for another, establishing a new ruling class to replace the one it upended – a situation that leaves Ram worse off than he was before. It’s bleak, yet not quite hopeless, although the bleakness may have won out in the end for Ghali, as he killed himself in 1969 after more than a decade of living in exile.

Next up: I just finished Elizabeth McCracken’s novel Bowlaway.

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→ May 13, 2019
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Good Omens.

I’m a definite fan of Neil Gaiman’s work, having loved American Gods and also enjoyed Anansi Boys and The Graveyard Book, but have yet to get into any of Terry Pratchett’s output, including his famous and very popular Discworld series. With amazon about to release its adaptation of their joint novel Good Omens on May 31st, I picked up the novel a few weeks ago to prepare myself for the impending apocalypse. For a book written by two authors, it’s remarkably fluid and consistent, and, as you might expect given their reputations, it’s quite funny.

As the marketing campaign for the series has probably told you, the end of the world is nigh and someone has misplaced the Antichrist – more specifically, the forces of good and evil have discovered that they’ve lost track of the infant spawn of Satan, who was switched at birth with another baby thirteen years previously in a swap that went awry without anyone noticing. The ads sell the book a bit short, at least, as there’s much more going on than that particular mix-up; the book focuses far more on the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, who turn this book into an unlikely buddy comedy as they try to get the eschaton back on track even as events spiral beyond their control and, in Crowley’s case, various other agents of the devil come after him for possibly screwing up the apocalypse.

The Antichrist, meanwhile, grows up as Adam in an unsuspecting family, and gathers a few friends around him in a little gang of mischief-makers called “Them” by the adults in their community, a group of four mirrored later in the book by the appearance of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (although Pestilence has been replaced, a gag I won’t ruin here). The novel’s subtitle refers to an old book of prophecies by a witch named Agnes Nutter, the only truly accurate such book ever published, which of course means it has been summarily ignored throughout history – but one of her descendants arrives in the novel with an annotated copy and index cards referring to specific prophecies with attempted interpretations. There’s a modern-day witchfinder general (not this one), and his helper, Nelson Pulsifer, no relation to Bill, and the witchfinder’s dingbat landlord, a self-proclaimed medium (and, naturally, a fake). The narrative bounces around these different threads as they all converge, for whatever reason, on Tadfield, which is to be the epicenter of the eschaton.

Despite the quasi-religious underpinnings of the book, its best aspect by far is the interplay between Aziraphale and Crowley, who sit on opposite sides of the dualistic divide but appear to be longtime friends who, in this case at least, share a common interest in moving the plot along while encountering many obstacles, mostly of the physical variety. The book is substantially funnier when they’re on its pages, and, while never boring without them, it definitely lags a bit when neither of them is involved in the action. Their banter is snappier, and Gaiman and Pratchett clearly had more fun writing these characters and twisting their personae so that they appear to be acting on the ‘wrong’ sides of the good/evil dichotomy. There are various running gags around these two characters, notably around Crowley’s car, that work extremely well and, like any good running joke, get funnier the more they appear.

For a light farce like Good Omens, sticking the landing is helpful but not quite mandatory; the point is to enjoy the ride, and if the resolution is satisfying, so much the better. Gaiman and Pratchett do stick the landing, however, especially since we know from the start of the book the world isn’t actually going to end – I mean, mild spoiler, I guess, but it’s obviously not that sort of book – and they have to write themselves out of that predicament. It’s a well-crafted ending that doesn’t feel cheap or contrived; I didn’t predict it but after seeing the resolution I could see in hindsight how the authors had set it up. Given how well Good Omens delivers its laughs – and I laughed a lot – a solid ending feels like a bit of a bonus. Now I can’t wait for the TV series to arrive.

Next up: I bailed on James Kelman’s Booker Prize-winning novel How Late It Was, How Late after about 80 pages and around 200 uses of the c-word, so I’ve moved on to Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Killing Commendatore.

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→ March 19, 2019
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My Uncle Napoleon.

My Uncle Napoleon, written by Iraj Pezeshkzad, is an Iranian novel written in the 1970s and later banned by the theocrats who took power in the 1979 revolution, likely for indecency, as the book is really a comic romp set during World War II in Iran. Based loosely on some of the author’s own experiences in childhood, the book follows the narrator as he falls in love with his cousin Layli and watches his father, his Uncle Napoleon, and another uncle squabble over trial things and plot against each other, often with unexpected consequences, as they all live in attached houses owned by the titular blowhard.

He’s usually called Dear Uncle in the book itself, however, and he is its Ignatius J. Reilly, a bombastic, self-important tyrant, trying to rule his house but finding himself thwarted by his brothers and often other members of the household. He’s assisted by his butler, Mash Qasem, who prefaces nearly every statement with “Why should I lie … to the grave it’s ah, ah … !” The two have concocted an elaborate fantasy of fighting for independence against Britain and in Iran’s Constitutional Revolution, and Dear Uncle is convinced that the English are still out to get him, something the narrator’s father frequently uses to his advantage. The narrator’s mischievous, philandering uncle Asadollah Mirza often helps in various schemes or tries to prevent them from getting out of hand, all the while speaking of sex in code, referring to it as “going to San Francisco” (and later referring to other sex acts as other cities). Dustali Khan shows up thinking his wife is trying to cut off his “noble member,” and maybe he deserves it, although she is quick to fly off the handle and scream bloody murder. Other eccentric relatives and neighbors wander in and out of the story, which doesn’t have a real narrative arc to it other than the loose background story of the narrator’s pursuit of Layli, who is promised to another cousin, the feckless wimp Puri.

Although some of the humor in the book is rooted in Persian culture, most of it feels very universal – this could just as easily be a comedy of manners set on some English lord’s estate, a Downtown Abbey with more yelling and backstabbing and at least talk of sex, although characters in this book talk about San Francisco a lot more often than they actually go there. It’s a different picture of Iran than anything we’ve had in the media since the Islamic Revolution brought the Ayatollahs to power; the news gives us Iranian leaders screaming death to the U.S. and to Israel, cooking up anti-Semitic conspiracies, and funding terror groups around the region, while Iranian film has given us pictures of a society in a sort of arrested development, a country that could be an economic and cultural powerhouse if it were a liberal democracy. These characters feel universal, even with names that are less familiar to western minds – I didn’t realize that the Khan in Dustali Khan was an honorific, not a surname – and some historical allusions that sent me to Wikipedia.

Like A Confederacy of Dunces, My Uncle Napoleon is also very funny. There’s a slapstick element of physical comedy throughout the book, with characters waving knives and guns around, falling over each other, and, once, kicking another right in the noble member, hard enough that any plans to go to San Francisco must be put off for some time. There’s some very clever wordplay throughout the dialogue, especially when Asadollah is involved. (The narrator is the obvious stand-in for Pezeshkzad, but I did wonder if Asadollah was his own adult self arriving in the novel to comment on the goings-on.) On top of the lower-brow humor is a thick coating of farce, mocking the Iranian habit of blaming the English for various problems in the wake of the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941, while also taking aim at all dictators through the orotund title character, whose sound and fury generally signifies nothing, yet whose lack of rank or history of valor don’t stop him from proclaiming himself a great hero and trying to keep all of the relatives staying in his compound under his thumb. He’s constantly trying to exile various people around him, or have them arrested, or to have this one pose confess to a murder that didn’t happen just to save the family’s honor and avoid a public embarrassment. Near the beginning of the novel, there’s a family gathering when someone passes wind loudly enough to interrupt Dear Uncle, which leads to an enormous family row that the narrator’s father enjoys far too much. It’s absurd, and funny, and also a symbol of the kind of family quarrels we’ve all had or seen start from nothing and blow up into more than they ever should have become.

Whether the story goes anywhere is probably beside the point, since the journey itself is entertaining, but if you’re looking for a neatly tied bow around the book’s conclusion, you won’t really get it. The story ends abruptly, and there’s a brief epilogue, but we don’t get a traditional big finish. It didn’t matter to me at all – I don’t really remember what Ignatius J. Reilly did at the end of his book either, and that never stopped me from recommending it, as I would this one.

Next up: I’m a few books behind now but just finished Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room and Karin Boye’s Kallocain.

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→ February 26, 2019
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Popular Music from Vittula.

I really need to start writing down where I hear about certain books, because once again, I can’t figure out who told me about Mikael Niemi’s Popular Music from Vittula, a quirky, intelligent, yet often vulgar novel that delivers vignettes from a child’s memories of growing up in a small Swedish town inside the Arctic Circle and right near the Finnish border. Niemi, who grew up in that same region, Pajala, has a quick wit and delves into the kind of issues that would surround people in that environment – a linguistic minority also coping with extreme weather and sunlight patterns – but sinks the novel with some stylistic leaps and overemphasis on gross-out humor.

Vittula is the colloquial and unprintable (in translation) name of the village where the narrator Matti and his best friend Niila live, experiencing adventures real and fantastical, forming an ad hoc garage band, drinking too much, discovering girls (and then having something vaguely resembling sex with them), and … well, puking and shitting and peeing all over the place, as it seems. It’s as if Niemi started out trying to write a fictional memoir that would be heavy on the magical realism, and then shifted partway through to write something the Farrelly Brothers might call ‘a bit much.’

Those first few chapters are the most delightful, as the kids are younger – which may explain why the memories veer into the impossible, which becomes less prevalent as they get older – and so many things are new to them. Music is a regular theme in the book; at one point the boys get their first record, discover the Beatles, and create that incompetent rock band with two other classmates, even staging a few shows before anyone but the guitarist (who has drunk deeply of Jimi Hendrix, even though the book seems to be set before Hendrix arrived on the scene) knows how to play his instrument.

There’s also an ongoing theme of language and linguistic identity, established early in the novel as Niila appears to be mute but suddenly is able to translate the words of a visiting African priest who tries a dozen languages before hitting on one Niila knows (I won’t spoil it, as it’s a pretty funny moment). The residents of Vittula are in linguistic purgatory, as they’re part of Sweden, but Finnish by descent, and speak a local Finnish dialect first and Swedish second. This deepens the sense of isolation already in place due to geography, while also fostering a keen sense of community among the older generations, some of who view anyone who leaves the Pajala region as a traitor. Niemi even loops in the Laestadians, a revivalist Christian movement that began in the Sápmi region, although I think some of his references to its tenets were lost on me.

The memories of Niemi’s narrator are colored, or I guess discolored, by bodily fluids, which seem to flow freely in every chapter. Adults and children alike get drunk on moonshine, rotgut, and beer smuggled over the Finnish border, and then piss or beshit themselves, or, if they’re still capable of standing, engage in competitions over who can urinate the highest or farthest. (This does lead to one of the few bits of bathroom humor I found funny, late in the book, when Matti wins such a competition in artistic fashion.) Men and boys are throwing up all over the place – the women and girls in the book rarely even get names and are mostly above this kind of wanton drunkenness – and Matti and Niila sometimes roll over unconscious adults to ensure they don’t choke to death. And then there’s the blood, albeit not human blood, which shows up in a chapter when a visiting writer offers to pay Matti a bounty for each mouse he kills at the cottage the writer is renting, which leads to a widespread muricide (by Matti), described graphically, that ends in disaster. It’s hard to square Matti’s delight in killing these rodents with the depiction of his character in other parts of the book, especially when he speaks as an adult in the epilogue.

There is some highbrow or at least not-lowbrow humor in Popular Music in Vittula, but there just isn’t enough of it, and once the drinking starts in a chapter, we’re trapped in a mire of people falling down and soiling themselves and yelling or mumbling or just whipping out their dicks. If that’s your cup of tea, you may enjoy this book a lot more than I did, but I found it a tougher slog the closer I got to the end, and that brief epilogue just felt so disconnected from the rest of the book that I wasn’t sure what I had just read.

Next up: Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry.

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