→ September 21, 2017
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The Little Paris Bookshop.

Nina George’s novel The Little Paris Bookshop, originally published in German as Das Lavendelzimmer (“The Lavender Room”), was a global bestseller shortly after its 2013 release and has been translated into over 30 languages. (Her website says “335 languages,” but I’m going to assume that’s a typo.) It’s … fine. It’s better than most popular fiction, certainly, and George infuses the work with her own expansive literary knowledge, but for a book that’s been marketed and reviewed as an inspiring, life-affirming sort of story, much of the plot itself left me rather cold.

Monsieur Jean Perdu runs a quaint bookshop on a little boat that’s moored in the Seine in Paris, from which he dispenses books like medicine, ‘reading’ his customers’ needs and diagnosing the proper books to treat what ails them. Of course, the one person he can’t help is himself; he’s been mooning over his lost love for twenty years, after she left him without warning to return to her husband, leaving just one letter that he never opened because if he had there wouldn’t be much of a story here. A circumstance occurs in the form of a new neighbor in his apartment building, a woman who’s just been thrown over by her husband, whom Perdu helps with a book and some furniture, and who ends up opening the letter and thus opening the rest of the story, in which Perdu, a young, bestselling author with writer’s block named Max, and a few stray eccentrics they pick up along the way set sail for the south of France to get the answer to the twenty-year mystery of Perdu’s paramour.

This book could have gone very, very wrong, but George at least avoids the most hackneyed or sentimental tricks of popular fiction – she has Perdu discover early in the book that his former lover died shortly after leaving him, to pick one ending I was afraid we’d get, and if you get the sense that Max might be Perdu’s son, as I did at one point, he’s not. The ending is a little sappy, and frankly not that believable given what we know of the two main characters; there’s also an absurdly coincidental answer to Perdu’s secondary quest, the search for the actual identity of the author of one of his favorite novels. Max is also a stock character, a literary wunderkind (and, apparently, a handsome devil) who’s stymied by the success of his first book and can’t seem to get started on his second one, only, of course, to find his true or second calling in the course of their sojourn down the river.

Perdu is at least the novel’s one credible, three-dimensional character, more than anything else for the way George portrays his grief. Perdu’s life outside of his work stopped when his lover left him, and if we can overlook the absurdity that he’d refuse to open the letter (but, say, would trash his furniture in despair), his arrested development after that point is a thoughtful depiction of someone who just can’t get over the death, or at least in this case the disappearance from his life, of a loved one. Telling the reader “you have to continue to live your life” as an answer to grief isn’t exactly profound, but the way that George incorporates Perdu’s knowledge of literary fiction, mostly real books, is novel (no pun intended) and gave the book a level of interest for me that elevated it above most popular fiction I’ve encountered. George didn’t stick the landing, but she didn’t flub it, either.

Next up: Just about done with Margaret Ayer Barnes’ Years of Grace.

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→ July 20, 2016
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The Sellout.

My updated ranking of the top five farm systems right now is up for Insiders.

I first heard about Paul Beatty’s farcical novel The Sellout when looking at predictions of nominees for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which also led me to Edith Pearlman’s Honeydew … neither of which ended up a finalist for the prize, won by Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. It did win the National Book Critics Circle award for Fiction, and ended up on several top ten lists for 2015. I’d already picked up Beatty’s book at Changing Hands during one of my trips to Arizona, however, and am glad I found it, because it is absolutely hilarious – offensive by design, taking Zadie Smith’s brand of hysterical realism and distilling it through a filter of American racism to produce a unique work of indignant comedy.

The narrator of Beatty’s book, known only as “Me” in one of many examples of absurdist wordplay in the novel, grows up in the Los Angeles-area town of Dickens, so poor that cartographers prefer to ignore its existence. It’s a segregated, neighborhood originally filled with farms, but the only farm remaining is the one the narrator runs, having inherited it from his militant black atheist sociologist father, who had some rather interesting ideas on child-rearing. (The novel’s satirical strain runs deep; the narrator is raised by a single father, and has no idea who his mother is, eventually finding the woman his father claims gave birth to him only to learn she had no idea what he was talking about.)

After his father is killed by a white policeman – prescient, or merely evergreen? – the narrator embarks on a bizarre quest to reestablish Dickens on the map and improve its lot by reinstating segregation, first on the local bus route and then in the local schools. He even takes a man as a “slave,” although the slave sort of volunteers for the role, doesn’t work, and loves to rant about the lost Little Rascals films in which he appeared. He erects new road signs and paints a literal border on the ground around Dickens, all of which has intended and unintended consequences. Of course, he can only get so far in this effort without running afoul of white authorities, and he ends up facing the Supreme Court – getting high on one of his hilariously named strains of marijuana while waiting in the corridor.

The novel’s best character, however, is Foy Cheshire, the would-be intellectual whose ambition outstrips his abilities, and whose brand of liberation theology involves quixotic endeavors like rewriting classics to improve or star African-American characters, such as The Great Blacksby, Uncle Tom’s CondoThe Point Guard in the Rye. By turns fatuous and pathetic, Foy is part con man, part demagogue, representative of a brand of empty black intellectualism for which Beatty appears to have no use whatsoever.

Beatty doesn’t spare anyone or anything in The Sellout, and that includes many jokes at every race’s expense that, if we’re all being honest here, wouldn’t see the light of day if they came from a white writer. I have no problem with this; if anything, the parody is far more effective coming from a writer of color, lampooning many of the people and institutions that purport to help black and Latino Americans but are primarily there just to help themselves. Charles Dickens was known for social commentary in his work, some of it veering into satire; Beatty draws on that tradition of criticism, marrying it with realism run amok – what critic James Wood termed “hysterical realism” in an essay on Zadie Smith’s White Teeth – for a sendup that scorches the very earth Me uses to grow his prize satsumas, watermelons, and weed.

I’m sure there are allusions and subtexts in The Sellout that I missed or simply couldn’t appreciate as a white man who grew up in a very white town and knew racism because I read about it once, but I still found the book by turns funny and thought-provoking. It’s one of the most laugh-out-loud books I’ve read in the last few years, and pushes the boundaries of what modern realism in literature can include. There may simply be more here that I didn’t catch.

Next up: Amir Alexander’s Infinitesimal, on how the Jesuits did everything they could to stamp out the mathematical concept that gave rise to the calculus.

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→ July 7, 2016
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In the Light of What We Know.

My ranking of the top 25 MLB players under age 25 is up for Insiders, and I held a Klawchat today.

Zia Haider Rahman’s debut novel, In the Light of What We Know, is one of the most intellectual, erudite, epic novels I’ve ever read. Rahman, born in the Sylhet region of Bangladesh and raised in England, shows the polymathic range of David Foster Wallace, the facility with language of Graham Greene, and the scope of Anthony Powell, crafting a story that takes place on three continents, across a war, a financial collapse, in slums and drawing rooms, all to delve into the mystery of one man’s search for an unknown solution.

The nameless narrator of In the Light of What We Know is its Nick Jenkins, a man largely apart from the action, yet our sole lens into the story whose occasional forays into the narrative have stark consequences. The main character is his friend Zafar, Sylheti-born like Rahman, raised in England yet always aware of his separate status from both the white English aristocracy but even from others of South Asian descent who were raised in different circumstances. Zafar has been off the grid – or merely off the narrator’s radar – for about seven years when he shows up on the latter’s doorstep, looking haggard, with a long story to tell that forms the basis of the novel. The tale he unfolds comes in nonlinear chunks with frequent interruptions and asides by the narrator, and it is up to the reader to piece things together.

Zafar himself is also a polymath, a genius at mathematics with a particular obsession for Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (which state, in short, that arithmetic is not a complete system, so there will be statements within it that cannot be proved within the system itself) who makes his first mark on the world in financial analysis. The narrator ends up with a job in derivatives trading thanks to a good word from Zafar, eventually building a portfolio of credit default swaps and CMOs that, of course, proved highly profitable until one day it wasn’t. Zafar, meanwhile, walks away from one career after another, following his peripatetic mind to law school, back to south Asia to work in human rights in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and eventually the post-Taliban Kabul, with many stops intertwined with his affair with the patrician Emily Hampton-Wyvern, for whom Zafar falls hard enough that he can never quite recover.

As Zafar, who resists his friend’s entreaties to turn these recollections into a formal memoir, recounts his life story in these disparate soliloquies, the picture of the man emerges first in sketch, then in greyscale, but never quite in full-color focus. He remains scarred by certain key instances from his childhood: the derailed train he was supposed to be on, the shame over his ‘unpronounceable’ (read: non-English) given name, his poverty in England, a cringe-comic scene in the Hampton-Wyvern’s drawing room. Zafar’s development isn’t so much arrested as undefined; he yearns for the completeness in his life that mathematicians believed they had found in arithmetic before Gödel blew it up. Finding repeated disappointments, inexplicable tragedies, and systemic racism wherever he travels, he walks away from one successful career, launches a second, only to find himself back in Kabul with Emily after their first split, a second meeting that leads to an engagement, a revelation, and the closest thing the novel has to a plot climax.

The narrator is in the story a few times, notably in the betrayal of his friendship that seems to be at least one reason, if not the sole one, that Zafar has shown up on his friend’s doorstep in September, 2008, just as the markets are collapsing, the narrator has been fired (perhaps scapegoated) for his firm’s losses, and the narrator’s wife has moved out. This involvement makes it clear the narrator is not as disinterested as he appeared to be, although Rahman doesn’t give us reason to question his reliability; instead, however, it may drive the questions he has the narrator pose to Zafar – or not pose – to tease out the latter’s multi-threaded story.

When the novel does reach its conclusion in Kabul, Zafar learns multiple things that once again upset his precarious mental state, leading to the novel’s one shocking turn as well as the end of Zafar’s stay with his narrator, even though he hasn’t finished so many of the threads of his story. (What exactly happened during his return to Bangladesh at age 12, after the train wreck, is never revealed.) Instead, Rahman deals us the devatasting one-two punch of a the narrator’s own realization of the impact of his betrayal on top of Zafar’s discovery that he lacked the agency he believed he had in his work and life.

Rahman makes implicit and explicit references to more fields of study than I could count, from number theory to quantum physics, from Graham Greene (whose novels The End of the Affair and The Quiet American, both amazing works of literature, pop up frequently here) to Kierkegaard, from carpentry to classical art. The author infuses Zafar with much of this knowledge and the odd mixture of passions or obsessions, including dropping him into the Hampton-Wyvern’s drawing room as the outsider observing their absurd, stiff-upper-lip lives with a mixture of bemusement and resentment to subtle comedic effect. Elsewhere in the novel, however, Rahman uses Zafar’s breadth and depth of knowledge to allow him to manipulate conversations or see through subterfuges in ways that draw secondary characters out of themselves, often by unnerving them with his probing questions, producing dialogue of a caliber I’ve scarcely seen in contemporary or classic fiction. It’s a tour de force of a novel, an arduous read that simultaneously pays homage to the western canon while upending it entirely from its very non-western vantage point.

In the Light of What We Know won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2014, putting Rahman in company with Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and E.M. Forster.

Next up: The Collected Stories of John Cheever, the most recent Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner I have yet to read.

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→ July 3, 2016
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The Snow Child.

Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child is a grown-up fable, a fairy tale in the more traditional sense of the term (where endings were seldom happy), a very simple story in one of the most striking settings I’ve come across in contemporary literature. In a quick read with only a half-dozen characters of any import, the book manages to delve into questions of love, parenthood, loss, grief, and meaning, without becoming cloy or mawkish. The novel was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist in 2012, losing to Adam Johnson’s amazing novel of North Korea The Orphan Master’s Son.

The Snow Child takes place in Alaska in 1920, where we meet a childless couple, Mabel and Jack, scratching out a life as farmers in the forbidding landscape, where starvation is a threat each winter if you haven’t grown enough crops and killed enough game to get through the season. The pair lost one baby in childbirth many years ago, and it appears the death and subsequent inability to have another child has left them in a permanent state of barely-there depression, culminating in Mabel’s suicide attempt at the start of the novel. Shortly after, during an early snowfall, the two end up building a snowman – or snowgirl, giving her mittens and a scarf and talking about what this girl might be like (and yes, it’s like that sappy movie The Odd Life of Timothy Green, but only in setup). The next morning, the snowgirl is gone, but both Mabel and Jack spy a young girl running around in the woods with a fox, a girl who turns out to be very real, at least in the tangible sense, but only appears in the winters and says she lives by herself in the mountains in the summers. Mabel recognizes similarities between this child, named Faina, and an old Russian children’s book she had growing up in Pennsylvania, while Jack learns more about Faina’s life before they found her that seem to ground her firmly in reality.

Ivey never bothers to clear Faina’s backstory up for the reader, allowing the character’s reality to flicker before us so we can experience the uncertainty of Mabel and Jack. It reminded me of nothing so much as the saying that being a parent is like learning to live with your heart outside of your body; not only did the couple suddenly find a child years after such a thing seemed impossible, but her appearance defied reality and she would disappear for months at a time without explanation. Mabel in particular seems to vacillate from high highs to deep funks around the girl’s appearances, while Jack is trying to grapple with his rational side even as he comes to love the girl like a daughter.

Faina’s story arc is a bit predictable, and Ivey doesn’t even try to hide it, providing plenty of foreshadowing (and, I thought, winking and nodding at the reader all the way) through the Russian folktale, but despite the girl’s status as the title character and hinge for the story’s action, this book is far more about everybody else. Faina herself has no depth; she’s a wisp of a thing, in physical and emotional sense, but whatever her true identity might be, she’s ultimately the book’s primary plot device. Ivey crafts this forbidding setting that combines breathtaking natural beauty – her landscape descriptions are some of the most evocative I’ve come across – and dark, menacing conditions that seem unfit for human habitation, then drops two characters, already drenched in melancholy for the life they didn’t expect they’d live, into it. Finding moments of joy or even simply of humanity – the relationship the couple develops with the Bensons provides a second emotional center, not to mention lots of great talk of jams and preserves – without resorting to pure sap is a deft trick of both plot and character development. Ivey manages to celebrate life and all that is good within it even in the face of the certainty of sorrow and the realization we all face that we have less control over our lives than we’d like, right up to our endings.

Ivey’s second novel, To the Bright Edge of the World, comes out on August 2nd. Given how much I enjoyed this book, including the detailed yet quick prose, I imagine I’ll read that one fairly soon.

Next up: I’m most of the way through Zia Haider Rahman’s Tait Prize-winning novel In the Light of What We Know, an expansive, erudite novel of ideas that seems to grow in scope with every page.

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→ October 21, 2015
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Inherent Vice.

I was oh for two with Thomas Pynchon books and figured that was enough to assume I just didn’t like his writing style, but two strong recommendations from friends for his 2009 novel Inherent Vice: A Novel, and seeing it available for $6 at a local B&N, were enough for me to give it a short. As much as I disliked Gravity’s Rainbow and just didn’t get The Crying of Lot 49, I loved Inherent Vice, which is a laugh-out-loud funny detective story and homage to/sendup of noir fiction, replete with the cultural allusions that mark all of Pynchon’s work, but in this case in a package that you can actually read, understand, and enjoy.

Doc Sportello is the detective, a private investigator in LA in the early 1970s, working out of the standard shabby office with the standard fetching secretary out front, but replacing the alcohol usage of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade with pot – and a lot of it, to the point where reality and hallucination start to blend for Doc and for the reader. The case walks in off the street, a woman who thinks her dead husband may not be dead after all, and as is par for the course in classic detective fiction, the superficial case opens the door to a broader conspiracy that involves crooked cops, organized crime, and a lot more pot. (That last part may not be standard for the genre.) Doc ends up knocked unconscious, accused of a crime he didn’t commit, in trouble with three or four different groups, and making a lot of wisecracks when his head is clear enough to permit it.

Nobody in Doc’s circle of friends and associates is remotely normal except perhaps his sort-of girlfriend Penny, who works in the local DA’s office and isn’t shy about using him as a chip to get something she wants from the feds. Doc’s attorney, Sauncho, is actually a marine lawyer whose comprehension of criminal law is about as clear as the marine layer, and who is obsessed with a ship of unclear provenance, the Golden Fang, that turns out to be significant in Doc’s case. His friend Denis – you pronounce it to rhyme with “penis” – is so THC- and other drug-addled that he provides some of the book’s funniest moments, one involving a waterbed, one involving a lost slice of pizza, and the other involving a television set. There’s a crazy former client, Doc’s ex-girlfriend (who is also tied up in the main case), the “masseuses,” the ridiculously-named feds (Flatweed and Borderline, or F&B like food and beverage?) …

…and the cop-antagonist, “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, who simultaneously bows to and blows up the stereotypical cop from all hard-boiled detective fiction, the thickheaded guy who gets in the way, hates the PI, always tries to arrest the PI for something, and ends up getting the collar thanks to the PI’s hard work. Bigfoot is big and thickheaded and doesn’t particularly care for Doc, but he’s far from the dumb or useless cop we typically get in the genre – he’s a character of some complexity, more so than any other character but Doc.

While the crimes at the center of the book are involved and take some time for Doc to sort out, to the extent that he does actually sort much of it out, Pynchon chose not to employ the labyrinthine prose and highly allusive style that made Gravity’s Rainbow, for me, an unreadable mess. You may not entirely follow Doc’s thinking or his actions, but that’s only when he can’t, because he’s stoned. That much mind-alteration can make users paranoid, and Doc is paranoid … but they’re really after him, too, and his paranoia tends to serve him pretty well. Pynchon does nothing to clearly distinguish the hallucinatory sequences from reality, but it’s also not that hard to tell when the haze has set in, and Doc gets some time on the page to sort these out himself in case you’re still confused.

Inherent Vice speaks to me because I love the genre that Pynchon is both satirizing and honoring; Doc is hard-boiled to an extent, except that he’s walking around in huarache sandals and, for reasons I can’t begin to explain, gives his hair a sort of perm at the start of the book that takes much of any hard edge off the character. But more than anything else, Pynchon has finally taken the humor that his adherents have long found in his books and put it in a format that the rest of us can appreciate. The book is flat-out funny in multiple ways – situational humor, clever banter, the absurdity of most of what Denis does, and even comedy around sex that comes off as, if not exactly highbrow, less lowbrow than most attempts at sexual humor too. Stoner humor doesn’t always hit the mark because much of it just makes the stoner out to be stupid, but stupid alone isn’t funny. It has to be a certain kind of stupid – in the stoner’s case an absurd twist on it, much in the way that Andy on Parks & Recreation was funny because his lack of intelligence manifested itself in these wildly illogical paths in his mind. Marijuana use isn’t funny, kids; it’s hilarious.

Making the book so readable means that the things Pynchon has always done well, like cultural references, are suddenly accessible to the rest of us. Pynchon loves to make up names – silly character names (Japonica Fenway, Puck Beaverton, Trillium Fortnight, the loan shark Adrian Prussia who happens to have the initials that stand for Accounts Payable), but also band names (Spotted Dick), radio stations, songs, movies (Godzilligan’s Island), and so on, and they get sillier as the novel goes on. Many names refer to plants (trillium, flatweed, japonica, charlock, smilax), although if there’s a broader significance to that than that marijuana is also a plant, I missed it. Doc is obsessed with the actor John Garfield, who played hard-boiled characters and refused to name names when called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which also comes up when Dalton Trumbo’s name is broached; the whole post-McCarthy era looms large as then-President Nixon was trying again to crack down on “subversive” elements, which is a small part of the novel’s main plot line. We even get Doc’s parents, which you never get in a detective novel, worrying about their son’s career and bachelorhood and providing one last bit of comic relief before the novel closes.

I’ve since seen some contemporary reviews of the book that were disappointed that it wasn’t vintage Pynchon, and one that cited a lack of suspense (that reviewer had to be unfamiliar with the tropes of hard-boiled detective fiction), but I haven’t read a novel in some time that hit on this many cylinders for me. It’s phenomenally funny, very smart, and yet at its core is a very well-crafted detective story. Maybe I will have to try some more Pynchon after all.

Next up: Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

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