→ 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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→ November 22, 2018
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Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont.

I had no idea there was a British author named Elizabeth Taylor, apparently of some repute in the UK, until I saw the name pop up on the Guardian‘s list of the top 100 novels ever written about ten years ago, and even then knew little about her beyond the Wikipedia entry. I imagine her chagrin at having a world-famous actress (and one who provoked many tabloid headlines) share her name, although perhaps it also pulled some readers toward her books when browsing store shelves. Regardless, she did make that top 100 with her wry comic novel Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, a sweet but unsentimental look at a widow’s move into a long-term hotel that attracted a number of retirees, forming the early equivalent of today’s over-55 communities, and the odd friendship she strikes up with a local writer. (It was adapted into a movie in 2005, but I’ve never seen it and hadn’t heard of it till now.)

Taylor rather deftly creates two parallel narratives around her protagonist and then spins them together to evoke comedy from the intersection. Mrs. Palfrey moves into the Claremont at the beginning of the novel and meets the cast of eccentrics – the busybodies, the would-be lothario, the lonesome, the creep – who populate it. Since the residents are all on the older side, that group will change over the course of the novel, naturally, and the tenor of life in the building (especially in the dining room, the center of most activity) will also shift slightly with each alteration in its makeup. One day, while walking to pick up a library book for another resident, Mrs. Palfrey slips and falls outside the home of Ludo Myers, a would-be writer who spends his days at Harrod’s trying to work on a novel, and who runs out to help her. The two strike up an immediate friendship, as Mrs. Palfrey just appreciates the young Ludo’s kindness while he sees in her a potential muse for his fiction, that drifts into comic territory when she introduces him to her new neighbors at the Claremont as her grandson, Desmond, who really exists but has yet to bother to visit her. (I’m sure you can guess what happens later in the book.)

Mrs. Palfrey was the last of Taylor’s novels published during her lifetime, written when she was into her 50s, and perhaps a look forward at life in old age for a generation that was living longer and more likely to have many years after their children were grown. (She was married and had one child, but unfortunately Taylor died just four years after this book was published at age 63.) One common theme among the denizens of the Claremont is that they’ve largely been forgotten by people in their lives from outside of the Claremont: Adult children don’t show up often, if at all, nor are there many visits or even phone calls from the outside world. And when someone departs from the facility for what we might now call assisted living, the residents seem eager to forget her.

The intersection of her relationship with Ludo, which is somewhat maternal but with the awkwardness of a flirtation, and the way she tries to keep up appearances at the Claremont is the essence of the book’s humor – of course Desmond will show up, and hilarity will ensue. But Ludo also sees Mrs. Palfrey and her mates at the hotel as fodder for the novel he’s been long stymied in writing, a fact of which she’s ignorant, so the question arises for the reader if his affection for her is real or merely functional. The other residents of the Claremont are all stock characters skillfully deployed by Taylor for purposes of humor or pathos, both of a distinctly British variety – there’s little to make you laugh out loud, but much of the book is just witty, and it nicely balances out the obviously grim tone the book takes when one of its elderly characters dies.

This was Taylor’s most critically-acclaimed work, making the Man Booker Prize shortlist in its year, and appeared twice on top 100 lists in the Guardian – the one I use, and another that only included novels published in English (assembled by the same writer, twelve years apart). It’s a brisk, entertaining read, probably worth a more serious meditation on its thoughts on growing old and growing apart from the people who were close to us … but some topics are, perhaps, best left alone when one is in the throes of a good chuckle.

Next up: I’m many reviews behind at the moment, but I’m currently reading Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders.

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→ September 24, 2018
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The Pursuit of Love.

Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love appeared on the Guardian‘s 2003 list of the hundred greatest novels of all time (they’ve since produced other lists, but that’s the one I’ve been working through), a very British comedy of manners that focuses more on drawing humor from situations than witty dialogue or more overt humor. The first book in a trilogy of stories starring Fanny as narrator, telling the readers the romantic escapades of her cousins, this one focusing on Linda, her closest friend and a woman driven to love for the wrong reasons until she eventually has one affair that looks like the real thing.

Fanny starts the novel with a lengthy prologue of sorts that sets up the strange family dynamic; she’s growing up with her Aunt Emily and spends much of her time at the home of her cousins and her peculiar Aunt Sadie and gruff Uncle Matthew, as her mother has a habit of leaving her husbands or beaux the moment things become a bit too serious, earning herself the family nickname “the Bolter” as a result. Fanny is more than happy to live with her cousins, however, as she ends up a boisterous household with close friends who join her in various silly adventures and form a secret club they nickname “the Hons” (which appears to be a play on the British way of referring to certain sons or daughters of lesser nobles, the Honourable, abbreviated “Hon.” in writing). Matthew plays the misanthrope but is rather a soft touch where his daughters and nieces are concerned, although he opposes giving the girls much of any education and thus leaves them naïve and unprepared for the larger world.

Linda is the focus of The Pursuit of Love, and pursue she does, grabbing the first suitor who gives her a second glance after her older sister, Louisa, finds a husband, as does Aunt Emily, who marries late (to the ridiculous health-obsessed, fad-chasing Davey, who later finds work as a staff writer for GOOP) and leaves Linda the oldest girl in the group without a mate. She marries poorly, however, as her husband Tony is a financier with little personality and who views a wife as a tool for career advancement rather than as a life partner. After bearing Tony a daughter, much to his parents’ disappointment, Linda, who has no interest in being a mother anyway, is told never to have another child or she may die giving birth, which further loosens her ties to Tony. She eventually absconds with the communist Christian (irony alert), joining him as an activist during the Spanish Civil War, where he largely ignores her for his political work and eventually has a fling with her friend Lavender Davis, which leads her by chance and misadventure to meeting the son of a French duke, Fabrice, who woos her with a charming self-confidence and rather a lot of money, producing what appears to be the one true love of Linda’s life.

There’s a tragicomic aspect to Linda’s entire story here, as she’s chasing something that might not even exist and makes a series of bad choices along the way, while also trying to lord her own romances over others who either don’t have partners or who’ve made more sensible if less exciting matches (of course, whether Christian is “exciting” depends on your point of view). She has a child’s view of love and marriage, and in some passages appears to treat it as some sort of competition with her siblings and cousins; by the time she connects with Fabrice, the Bolter has returned to Matthew’s castle and tries to make Linda her compatriot in serial romances, much to Linda’s great horror.

The Pursuit of Love is wry and sardonic throughout, but it’s not very funny, other than perhaps Mitford poking fun at the hypochondriac Davey, who is constantly changing what he can or can’t eat, often in absurd fashion (for example, making a weird distinction between “red” and “white” foods, but moving foods around to suit what he wants to eat, too). There’s a long tradition in British literature of satires of middle to upper class lives that combine parody with more traditional humor, but Mitford here sticks more to the former, apparently drawing on her own upbringing for some of her source material. The result is a fine novel with a compelling throughline around Linda’s lovelife, but one so light on humor I’d recommend a dozen or more similar books before getting to this one.

Next up: Arundhati Roy’s Man Booker Prize-winning debut novel The God of Small Things.

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→ June 15, 2018
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Crosstalk.

I adore the prose of Connie Willis, the brilliant and prolific American novelist whose Oxford time-travel stories include some of my favorite sci-fi novels, including To Say Nothing of the Dog, Doomsday Book, and the diptych Blackout and All Clear, which as a group won three Hugos, two Nebulas, and two Locus awards. She has, however, written other speculative fiction outside of the Oxford universe (which began with “Fire Watch,” a short story that also won the Hugo-Nebula parlay), including the light novel Bellwether and, most recently, the 2016 novel Crosstalk, which builds an entire comedy of errors on a single technological twist while also prodding questions about just how much we really want to connect to other people.

Bridget “Briddey” Flanigan is the very lucky protagonist, a rising employee of mobile phone manufacturer CommSpan who happens to be engaged to the extremely desirable bachelor and top executive Trent, who then convinces her to get an EED, a neural implant that is supposed to allow two people with a strong emotional connection to feel each other’s emotions even more potently. Her fiancé is in a terrible rush to have the procedure done, and Briddey agrees to it even though her family members warn her not to do so, as does the eccentric programmer C.B., who works at CommSpan in a dungeon-like basement office. When she has the implant, however, she finds that she’s suddenly telepathic, and the first voice she hears isn’t Trent’s, leading to a series of misadventures around trying to stay afloat amidst the deluge of voices in her head, to avoid letting Trent know what’s going on, and, hardest of all, to keep anything private from her unbelievably intrusive family.

Figuring out how Crosstalk would end was the least of its pleasures – it’s obvious she’s going to end up with someone other than Trent, and I thought it was obvious what side character was pulling many of the strings throughout the book – but, as with so many Willis novels, the fun is in the journey. She has a classic comic novelist’s knack of creating side characters who are exaggerated just to the edge of realistic, like Briddey’s sisters, both of whom classify anything as an emergency, one of whom is referring to her awful dating choices while the other is convinced that her daughter Maeve is into everything from Disney princesses to online terrorism. (She’s mostly just watching zombie movies.) They’ll exasperate you as they exasperate Briddey – and I often wondered why she even talks to her great-aunt, who seems to have less respect than anyone for Briddey’s privacy – but they’re all just slightly embellished versions of people you probably know in your own life, and watching her evasive maneuvers provides a good chunk of the book’s humor.

Willis can craft a clever mystery as well, and in all of her novels she tends to reveal the secrets of the main plot very gradually, which works extremely well in the time travel stories, but a bit less so here because she has characters who know the truth deliberately holding it back from Briddey. The EED doesn’t make everyone telepathic, or even close, so why does Briddey become so after the surgery? Why does she hear that one other character first, even though that person hasn’t had an EED? Once the specific character trait in question is revealed, it’s easy to figure out who’s pulling many of the strings and to walk all the way back to the first chapter to understand certain characters’ motivations, but I also left with the sense that Briddey herself had a right to know what was happening to her. Several people who profess to care about her don’t share what they know, and she’s left worse off until they come clean. That’s not a factor in the Oxford novels, where something generally goes wrong with the time travel mechanism and no one, not even the Professor running the program, can figure out why.

The time-travel novels and even the much lighter Bellwether all sucked me completely into their worlds, because Willis writes so well – like P.G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis with a dash of Jane Austen thrown in – and because she creates so many three-dimensional characters in all of her books. Crosstalk is a half-grade down for me, because of the issue with characters not telling Briddey what they know, and because the moral and philosophical questions Willis seems to explore here don’t feel very fresh even two years after the book’s publication. We’re all online too much if we’re online at all. We’re replacing personal connections with digital ones, at apparent risk to our emotional well-being. Willis takes that to its logical extreme, that two people who are glued to their devices decide to make their romantic relationship a direct, digital one instead. It was probably a risk Willis knew she was taking while writing the book, but reality has raced forward to the point where the book seems like a debate we might have had three years ago, replaced today by so many more social media worries and changes to how we all communicate with each other (or fail to do so) instead. It’s worth reading, because Willis is such a fun writer, but I would rate it at the bottom of the novels I’ve read from her so far.

Next up: Still reading Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.

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→ June 14, 2018
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The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

Catherynne Valente first published her young adult novel The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making online, in installments; the book was a huge success online, winning the Andre Norton Award for young adult science fiction/fantasy, given by the Science Fiction Writers’ Association, and is still the only self-published novel to do so. It’s now the first novel in the five-book Fairyland series, which covers the adventures of a young girl named September who lives in Omaha and is visited one day by the Green Wind, who whisks her off to the parallel world known as Fairyland. Hilarity and peril ensue, as they would. I bought it for my daughter to read, but last month decided to give it a whirl myself, and it is witty, sweet, and written at a very high level for YA literature.

September is your typical YA fantasy heroine, a precocious child whose life is boring (to her) and whose family isn’t perfect (her father is away at war, her mother works long hours at an airplane manufacturing plant), so she is the ideal target for a being from Fairyland to come and rescue for a series of adventures – although Valente has a knack for making these adventures go sideways often enough that they’re not totally predictable. September then meets a series of eccentric characters from Fairyland after the Green Wind, including a wyvern who’s convinced his father was a library, a young ifrit named Saturday, a conjured servant made of soap, a sentient paper lantern, and plenty of others, leading up to the Marquess, a young girl who has become the evil queen of Fairyland after the death of the benevolent queen who preceded her. September ends up on a series of quests that generally don’t end well for her but instead lead her on a crooked path toward an eventual confrontation with the Marquess and a revelation about the true connection between Fairyland and our human plane.

Valente’s imagination is impressive, with crazy characters and amusing plot twists, but she writes in a high style that recalls 19th and 20th century British literature, from Lewis Carroll to P.G. Wodehouse, similar to the writing of Susanna Clarke but just a half-grade lower in difficulty. Reading it as an adult (by age, at least), I never felt that the prose was written for children or in any way condescending to the reader through simpler vocabulary or syntax. I’m unfamiliar with Valente’s other work – she’s a prolific author – but if this isn’t a near approximation of her natural voice, I’d be shocked. It’s perfectly calibrated to appropriately challenge a young reader without turning her off, and to appeal to an adult reader without seeming trivial or dumb.

There’s also quite a bit of wordplay within Fairyland, perhaps not quite as much as you’ll find in The Phantom Tollbooth or in the Harry Potter series, but a similar mix of straight-up puns and double meanings along with twisted loanwords from folklore and mythology. September meets a wairwulf, who is a wolf 27 days a month and a man the other three, and is married to two witches, one of whom gets the wolf days and the other the human days; the witches are named Hello and Goodbye, and the wairwulf Manythanks. There’s a quest for a spoon (alas, not the runcible variety), a dictum to avoid eating any food in Fairyland that quickly goes awry, an argument over the shape of the earth (“roughly trapezoidal, vaguely rhomboid, a bit of a tesseract”), and plenty of sly jokes about bureaucracy, pseudoscience, and air travel.

My daughter read this when she was 11 and both enjoyed it and said she had no real trouble with the prose; she read it on her Kindle, which, despite my affinity for dead-tree editions, does have the benefit of allowing you to click on a word and get an immediate definition. (And then you read a paper book and come across a word you don’t know and put your finger on the page and press and then look around and hope nobody saw you do that. Or so I hear.) Valente has hit that perfect sweet spot between writing for a young audience and keeping it smart enough to hold an adult’s attention. I ripped through the entire book in just a few hours while on a flight back from Europe last month, because I wanted something light for the long trip, but this was fun and sharp enough that I decided it was worth reviewing and recommending too.

Next up: I’m way behind on book reviews, but I’m currently reading Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood, which is just $3.55 for Kindle right now.

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