→ March 19, 2025
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So Much Blue.

So Much Blue may be one of Perceval Everett’s lesser-known novels, as it hasn’t received a film adaptation or any major awards, but I suspect also because it doesn’t have any of the speculative or fantastical elements of his more famous or popular works. His prose and characterization translate beautifully to the realist mode, which isn’t surprising, and in this pensive work about a middle-aged painter dealing with the weight of memories and past failings Everett gives the deepest exploration of a character I’ve seen in the four of his novels I’ve read.

Kevin Pace is a painter, married with two kids, living what would appear from the outside to be a comfortable upper-middle-class life with the usual problems you’d expect to find in a story about a suburban family. Everett intertwines that present-day narrative, which includes a secret painting that Pace won’t show anybody, not even his wife or his best friend, with two narratives from the past: one from 1979 where he joins his best friend on a dangerous trip to El Salvador to try to find and rescue the best friend’s ne’er-do-well brother, and one from ten years before the present day where Kevin had an affair with a French painter about twenty years his junior.

The 1979 narrative is by far the most compelling of the three, as it’s part thriller, part buddy comedy, and is driven by the uncertainty of how it’s going to turn out beyond knowing that Kevin and his best friend survived. Yet the depiction of the affair is the most interesting because Everett avoids the two typical ways of writing about that topic: he doesn’t judge Kevin’s actions, and he certainly doesn’t condone them, but lets the character’s words and behaviors speak for him and the reader to do the judging. Kevin knows he’s doing something terrible, but he does it anyway and has to live with the consequences.

Those consequences are the real theme of the novel – what happened in 1979, where a ridiculous, foolhardy endeavor that starts with good intentions and eccentric characters ends in violence, and what happened in Paris both weigh tremendously on Kevin, with their impact threatening to unravel his marriage and family and to stall his career. The present-day narrative also has a significant event that forces Kevin to make a choice, and he makes the wrong one, again, even though in that case it seems like the right decision at the time, after which he has several chances to set things right and can’t bring himself to do it, a subplot that especially resonated with me.

Everett’s development of Kevin as a character across three time periods, each of which sees him change and grow in some sense (even if it’s not always positive), shows a level of craft I at least hadn’t seen in the other three novels of his I’ve read. There’s a depth of understanding of Kevin as a person, as a man, as a middle-aged man, and as a very flawed man who is still reeling from events that happened thirty years earlier, that rivals the character development in just about any contemporary novel I can recall. Whether you agree with Kevin’s choices, including the decisions he makes to keep things secret, or his own assessment of those choices, Everett’s depiction of all of Kevin shows incredible insight into the character and how people think and feel about complex situations.

As you might expect from the title, color is a recurring motif and symbol in So Much Blue, with that particular color coming up repeatedly, as the secret painting in Kevin’s shed contains various shades of blue, and he refers more than once to the fact that traditional Chinese had just one word for blue and for green. Blue itself can carry multiple meanings in art, from the  most obvious one, depression (is Kevin depressed? Is he hiding his depression from his family?), to the way painters use blue to represent distance, using more blue to show that buildings or other objects are farther from the viewer. Blue is also the color we associate with the unattainable; the sky is blue from the ground, but when we ascend a mountain or a building, we don’t get any closer to the blue, as it remains beyond our reach. The ocean is blue from a distance, but when we’re in the water, it’s clear. Kevin expresses an ambivalent relationship with the color even as he fills his hidden painting with it; is that a representation of his unfulfilled desires, a depression he wants to keep locked away, or his attempt to create distance between himself and the things he doesn’t want to remember?

Everett is approaching Ann Patchett as my favorite living American writer. She crafts incredible stories with beautiful, lyrical prose, filling the pages with believable and three-dimensional characters, while he ranges from the wildly inventive to biting satire to compassionate character study. It’s hard to believe all four of the books of his I’ve read all came from the same mind. He’s some sort of wizard.

Next up: I just finished Cho Nam-ju’s Saha and started Antonio Padilla’s Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Journey to the End of Physics.

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→ February 26, 2025
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James.

Percival Everett has been writing novels for over twenty years, but he’s having a moment right now: his 2001 novel Erasure was adapted into the film American Fiction, which won its screenwriter Cord Jefferson an Academy Award; and his latest novel, James, won the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction while making the Booker Prize shortlist. (It should have won that too, but lost to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.) James retells the story of Jim, the escaped slave who accompanies Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain’s novel, from Jim’s perspective, completely reimagining the character and most of the narrative, in a book that is far more of an adventure than the novel that inspired it while also giving its protagonist far more humanity than his creator ever did.

James narrates Everett’s novel, and does so in an erudite voice that, of course, has nothing to do with the slave dialect the character uses in Twain’s work. In this novel’s universe, slaves know how to speak as well as or better than their white tormentors, but they feign all manner of ignorance to make the whites feel better about themselves and thus try to improve their own odds of survival. The plot starts out on the same track as in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with Huck faking his own death to escape his abusive father while James runs away to avoid being sold and separated from his wife Sadie and daughter Lizzie. (Twain mentioned Jim’s wife, but didn’t name her; Everett is following the convention of other writers who’ve used these characters.) The two flee upriver, with James seeing the corpse of Huck’s father but not telling the boy, Huck witnessing the murderous feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, and the two encountering the con men who call themselves the King and the Duke and who eventually sell James to a local slave owner.

Everett fills in the blanks in Twain’s novel by following James rather than Huck, giving James’ dialogue with other slaves – all in proper English, generally more proper than what the white characters use – and his own inner monologue on his life and on philosophy. He’s visited in dreams by Locke and (I think) Rousseau, reads Voltaire and John Stuart Mill, and eventually gets a hold of a pencil at great cost so he can begin to write some of his thoughts on paper. James’s narrative diverges from the original when the King and Duke briefly leave him with a third man, who sells him to a traveling minstrel group, where James meets a man named Norman and escapes with him while looking for Huck, who’s still with the two bandits. This arc returns James to their home in the end, without an appearance from Tom Sawyer, and leads to a conclusion that is far more satisfying than Twain’s, if less realistic.

James, or Jim in Twain’s work, is just not a well-developed character in the original stories, even as Twain wrote him in a far more sympathetic manner than just about any of his contemporaries did when writing of slaves or even of Black people in general. Everett’s James is intelligent, sure, but the difference is that he is whole: he has fully-developed thoughts and ideas, values, a sense of justice, empathy for others, and a desire for even a little agency over his own life. It stands above nearly every other continuation or adaptation of a famous novel I’ve ever encountered, with the possible exception of Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s similar retelling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of the madwoman in the attic – but Everett’s novel is angrier and wittier and much better paced than Rhys’s.

Everett also mimics Twain’s use of the picaresque format both for its thrilling elements and its satirical ones, although here the satire is subtler than it is in some of Everett’s other works, like the absurdist Dr. No or the violent fantasy of The Trees, the other two of his novels I’ve read so far. James reads like Everett was trying to stay authentic to Twain’s work as much as possible until he veered away from the plot in the last third of his own novel – and it works, because of the familiarity of the original (one of the few novels I’ve read twice, and the only one I had to read in high school and in college) and because of how well-structured it was in the first place. Everett is brilliant and wildly imaginative, so his restraint here isn’t just impressive, but makes the whole work more powerful in the end. I have read very few works of great literature with this sort of haste, because the story and the character are so compelling I never wanted to put the book down.

Next up: Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day, winner of the 2020 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ October 1, 2024
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Red Side Story.

Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey came out in 2009, his first novel separate from his various Thursday Next/Nursery Crime books, and ended on a cliffhanger. The resolution had to wait for fifteen years, until the release earlier this year of Red Side Story, which picks up right after the end of the previous novel and thrusts our two heroes directly into jeopardy. It’s Fforde’s longest novel to date, and his darkest, as he finally reveals the story behind the alternate universe of both books.

The novels take place in the future, at a date unknown (but revealed within the second book), in a place called Chromatacia, which exists on the island of Britain. Our civilization appears to be long gone, as residents of Chromatacia refer to the Something That Happened before they existed. Their civilization revolves around color: Most humans can see just a single color, and their status in society depends on what color that is and how much they can see it. Purples have the highest status; Greys have the lowest. Our hero, Eddie Russett, is a Red, while he falls in love with the pugnacious Jane Grey, who has a habit of punching people in the nose when they displease her. In Shades of Grey, they discover that all is not right in Chromatacia or with the authorities that run it, National Colour, who profess to abide by the rules of a prophet named Munsell, who wrote the rules that govern the nation. The events that close the first book put Eddie and Jane in immediate danger of a death sentence, giving the sequel a real-time feel, as they must both solve the greater mystery of what exactly Chromatacia is and finagle a way out of execution via the Green Room.

Fforde has always at least dabbled in dystopias. The Thursday Next series takes place in an alternate universe as well, and while it’s mostly a comic and satirical world, he colors it (no pun intended) with numerous negative or simply unpleasant twists. Both of his standalone novels, Early Riser and The Constant Rabbit, depict worlds distinctly worse than ours, the former full of great suffering, the latter a not-thinly-veiled analogue for our own racism and xenophobia, just with bunnies. The truth of Chromatacia does not emerge until near the end of Red Side Story, but once it begins to come out over the last hundred pages or so, it is monstrous at both a micro level and a macro one.

That long, detailed conclusion and the sheer number of characters we met in Shades of Grey make Red Side Story the first Fforde book I’ve ever read that I found slow to start. It didn’t help that I read the first book fifteen years ago, so I didn’t exactly hit the ground running, but there is a lot of exposition here, and a ton of plot for Fforde to set up for his usual denouement to work. He’s a master of this particular form, laying hints and details early that will come back to matter later in a way that makes you laugh or simply slap your forehead for your failure to see it coming, but here he’s also busy building out more color (pun intended) to the world even as he’s placing stones for the conclusion. It’s not a mark against the book that he does so – this universe has so many details and quirks that it requires more work to set it up and keep it running. It does mean that some of the character development that boosted Shades of Grey doesn’t appear until you’re maybe a fourth of the way into Red Side Story.

That development goes far more to Eddie than to Jane, as she becomes more of a supporting player here, with Eddie clearly the star and far more in control of the action (to the extent that anyone is in control in Chromatacia). Jane was the more interesting and fun character in the first book, not least because she would punch anyone who commented on her rather retroussé nose (Eddie describes people’s noses any time he meets someone), but here she has somewhat less to do and ends up off screen more. Some of that is plot-driven, as Eddie is betrothed to the officious climber Violet deMauve, who is also carrying his baby, so she ends up a more significant character this time around, while Fforde also delves into the underworld of Chromatacia more than in the first book, much of which is necessary for the big finish.

Fforde had a long stretch of writers’ block when he was working on Early Riser, but since that book came out in 2018-19, he’s been on something of a roll, not just in productivity but in creativity, as his last few novels before the hiatus began had started to lose a little something, especially the Thursday Next ones. He’s promised the eighth and perhaps final book in that series next, and in February of this year he announced that there will be a third book in this series as well, which is especially interesting given how Red Side Story concludes. I’m already in the tank for Fforde anyway, but Red Side Story is even more ambitious than his typical novel, and seeing him succeed when stretching himself makes me even more eager to read whatever he publishes next.

Next up: Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.

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→ June 18, 2024
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Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Anthony Doerr won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his World War II novel All the Light We Cannot See, a marvel of storytelling and character development that ranks among my 20 favorite novels of the century. His follow-up novel, 2021’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, follows a similar template of intertwined narratives, each centered around a single, well-developed character, but he fails to bring these narratives together in any sort of coherent fashion, and the entire enterprise comes off as a failed attempt to mimic Cloud Atlas instead.

Cloud Cuckoo Land comprises five narratives in three distinct time periods, each of which has a lost Greek novel/saga called Cloud Cuckoo Land at the center of its plot. One is set in the 15th century, as we follow two young people, Omeir and Anna, who both know of the story, and who sit on opposite sides of the 1453 siege of Constantinople – Anna trapped inside the walled city while Omeir is a reluctant aide to the attacking forces, helmed by a 21-year-old sultan. The second is set in our present day, again with two narratives, one centered on the octogenarian teacher Zeno, who translated what he could of the tattered pages of the novel, and the other centered on Seymour, a neurodivergent teenager who befriends an owl in the woods near his home, only to turn to eco-terrorism when developers raze the trees where the owl lives. The third, and least coherent, is set at some unknown point in the future, on a spaceship called the Argos that is taking a group of humans to an exoplanet where they might be able to start anew after climate change and ocean acidification have destroyed Earth. Those sections follow just one character, Konstance, who ends up alone in a sealed vault on the ship, copying out the text of Cloud Cuckoo Land from what she can find in the ship’s massive virtual library.

Doerr creates memorable, three-dimensional characters, and all five of his main characters in Cloud Cuckoo Land feel fully developed and strong enough to anchor their individual plot strands, each with some specific quirk or detail that helps define their personalities. Konstance is probably the least developed, although her circumstances and Doerr’s desire to keep some of her back story in his pocket until the last third of the novel both justify that choice. Seymour is infuriating at times, but also internally consistent and easy to understand even if, as a parent, reading about him made me want to pull my hair out. Zeno has the strongest back story of all of them, although his one key detail is pretty obvious from the start. Anna’s story does drag at times because much of it revolves around her sister, Maria, whose death is well foreshadowed from the start of that plot strand, although this sets Anna out on the course of autonomy that leads her to a copy of the book.

The book within the book, of which we get many snippets as the opening epigrams to various chapters, is supposed to be the throughline that connects all five stories, a testament to the power of books to transform our lives and deepen our understanding of the human condition. I didn’t find the novel within Cloud Cuckoo Land to be all that interesting, and the gimmick of having some of the text lost, so many words and sentences are missing, just makes the metafiction even more remote and inscrutable. The three timelines never intersect at all beyond the point that Anna and then Zeno uncover and/or create new copies of the book to make it available to future readers, so there’s no payoff to the extremely frequent jumps between timelines. It moves quickly, especially since the chapters are very short and there’s a lot of white space in the paperback’s 574 pages, but that velocity doesn’t change the weakness of the book’s resolution. It’s too long to call it a trifle, but Cloud Cuckoo Land lacks the depth and the emotional power of All the Light We Cannot See, which makes it a disappointment given that we know what Doerr can do at his best.

Next up: I’m going to try to tackle Alasdair Gray’s Lanark.

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→ March 27, 2024
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Prophet Song.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ January 24, 2024
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North Woods.

Daniel Mason’s North Woods is the story of a house. I mean, it’s the story of the people who live in it, and some who just pass through, but the only constant in this peculiar but beguiling book is the house, located on what becomes an apple orchard in western Massachusetts. The house becomes the site of a number of tragedies – there’s a lot of death in the book, some comic but others just sad – and some truly eccentric characters who remind us of the transience of life and the things we leave behind.

The house, described as lemon-yellow and assembled piecemeal over many years, first goes up in the 1760s and sees everyone from young lovers to Revolutionary soldiers to a woman kidnapped by Native Americans to an escaped slave and the slave-hunter trying to abduct her and more, although none leaves more of a mark than the Osgood family. Their patriarch discovers an apple there he calls the Wonder, becoming an evangelist of the strain and developing the giant orchard that envelops the property and that his spinster daughters will eventually make their livelihood – at least, until one of them finds a beau. Much of the action in the book is botanical, as apple seeds, acorns, beetles, and fungal spores also leave their mark on the house, its environs, and thus the people who inhabit it. Eventually, we enter the 20th century, with a woman whose son believes he can hear the voices of the dead people who previously lived in the house – which leads to his diagnosis with schizophrenia – and the house’s decline into ruin.

Mason challenges the reader twice over, once with the unusual structure and once with his use of the supernatural in a subtle but central way. The book’s many sections vary in length and style, with interstitials that come in the form of letters, pamphlets, a real estate listing, poems, and more digressions from the prose format. Some work – the real estate listing is one of the funnier bits, and it’s just a single page – but there’s a sense of Mason trying harder than he needs to in a book that is in and of itself a creative marvel. The poems especially do not work, not because they’re bad poems – I am not in a position to judge their merits – but because they add nothing to the novel as a whole. They take up space without advancing story or character, and unless I’m missing some great Parnassian achievement here, I’d have preferred he omit them entirely.

The supernatural elements are harder to understand, but also more essential to the novel. Without spoiling what those elements are, they appear slowly, without much in the way of warning or foreshadowing, building as the novel progresses until they are woven thoroughly into the fabric of each story. By the time we reach the final character to visit the house, it’s easy to see where that chapter will end, because each successive tale has leaned a little more on the supernatural elements to complete its narrative. North Woods could exist, and excel, without the interstitial bits and style variations, but it could not exist without the spirits. (As an aside, I did not catch that the twelve chapters were supposed to represent the twelve months of the year, later reading that in the NPR review of the book. It’s another clever trick that, in hindsight, was also quite effective because of its subtlety.)

That last character refers to the world as either “a tale of loss” or “a tale of change,” and North Woods does not seem to take sides in this debate. The characters themselves experience loss, sometimes plural, often unexpected and unfathomable. The house and the land persist, but their denizens change, as do the ways in which the humans use the building and the trees. And all of the death begets new life, even, in its way, the eventual death of the house by fire, which we know can regenerate the land (e.g., certain morel mushrooms fruit well after forest fires). Death is not final in Mason’s novel, which is obviously a spiritual view that readers may or may not endorse, but he uses this as a device to connect the dozen stories and characters, as one death often sparks the series of events that lead to the next character or chapter in the house itself. It’s an unusual novel, and a slow one to start, but Mason’s lithe prose and gift for characterization ultimately wins out, even with some distractions in his literary flourishes.

Next up: Bryan Stephenson’s Just Mercy, which my daughter had to read for school last year. (He’s a Delaware native.)

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→ December 27, 2023
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Sea of Tranquility.

Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven was a masterpiece, a beautiful novel of humanity set in the most despairing, hopeless setting – the onset and aftermath of a global pandemic that causes society to collapse. Her follow-up, The Glass Hotel, had the same sparkling prose and characterization, but the story fell apart at the end, undermining the entire work. Her most recent novel, Sea of Tranquility, brings back one of The Glass Hotel’s characters and the fictional town that served as its setting, with an entirely new story that delves further into science fiction than Mandel has ever gone – and this time, she sticks the landing with a conclusion that ties the entire novel together and brings the reader back to the sense of humanity that set Station Eleven apart.

Sea of Tranquility begins in 1912, as the disowned grandson of an English aristocrat arrives in Caiette, British Columbia, after his exile from his family. While there, he walks into the local forest, but has a mysterious experience where he hears a violin playing – despite there being no one else in sight – and the world around him seems to go black. Shortly afterwards, a visiting priest asks him about the experience, but it appears that the priest may be an impostor. The story then jumps ahead a hundred years, then nearly two hundred, then about two hundred more, and there’s very little in common between the stories except for that impostor-priest person, who appears in different guises in each story. What ties them all together is the mystery that guy is trying to solve.

Mandel’s previous two novels leaned quite heavily on her strength of characterization, but that’s the weakest part of Sea of Tranquility, which might only have one true central character who gets a three-dimensional rendering on the page – that guy, who at one point in the novel is known as Gaspery. Instead, Mandel’s exploration of humanity, both what it means to be human (and whether we have free will) and how we treat one another, comes through an inventive plot device that doesn’t reveal itself until at least halfway through the novel. (You might figure it out before then, but I’m trying not to spoil it.) Crafting a story like this requires a fine attention to detail and an ability to maintain plausibility in the face of automatic disbelief. Mandel couldn’t manage this with a simpler story in The Glass Hotel, where her main character made more than one irrational decision that didn’t sit well with me, given what had come before for her character. Here, her central character’s actions, while not always entirely rational, are at least believable, and thus don’t get in the way of the broader story.

So much of Sea of Tranquility recalled David Mitchell’s magnum opus Cloud Atlas, another book told in pieces separated in time by decades or centuries, leaving it to the reader to connect them. In Mitchell’s case, however, the connections were tenuous, and only there for the audience, while the novel succeeded because he wrote each of the six sections (five of which were then split into two) in a different literary style. He also loves to bring back characters from previous novels, even just for cameos, something Mandel did in The Glass Hotel with some minor characters from Station Eleven. Sea of Tranquility lacks the grandiose ambitions of Cloud Atlas, but it’s also far more focused on its core themes and more effective in asking its questions about them. I may not answer Mandel’s main mystery question in the affirmative, but I found it easy to go along for the ride as she explores it.

Next up: I’m about halfway through Nurrudin Farah’s North of Dawn.

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→ November 3, 2023
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Nettle & Bone.

T. Kingfisher (the nom de plume of writer Ursula Vernon) won this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel for Nettle & Bone, a light fantasy novel that subverts many tropes of the genre while adhering to others as it follows its protagonist on a quest to save her sister, the Queen of the North Kingdom. It is a blast to read, with some wonderful side characters alongside our hero and a great balance of humor and darkness, although I’m not sure it has the thematic depth of some of the best winners of that honor.

Our hero is Marra, the youngest of three sisters in the tiny Harbor Kingdom, a city-state located around the midpoint of the coast between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms, protected by its strategic location and the desire of both neighbors to avoid having it fall into their rival’s hands. As the story begins, Marra’s eldest sister, Damia, is married to the young Prince and heir to the throne of the Northern Kingdom, but she dies in an equestrian accident before she can produce a son, so the Prince then marries the middle sister, Kania. When Marra goes to see Kamia as her sister is about to give birth, however, Kania gives her a cryptic warning, and subsequent events cause Marra to realize her sister is the victim of a violent husband. She finds a dust-witch to try to obtain a way to kill the Prince, which ultimately leads her on a journey across two kingdoms with a party that grows to four, not counting the chickens, and ends with a showdown in the royal chambers.

Nettle & Bone is a quest novel, and we get a classic adventuring party of a cleric, a fighter, and a couple of mages, roughly speaking, where the pleasure is in the interplay between these characters as well as the world-building. Kingfisher has a Gaimanesque knack for crafting weird and creepy magical realms, with more delightful settings here than I can count – very reminiscent of a well-crafted RPG campaign, but with the detail of a Neverwhere or Among Others, where you’re immersed in the scene even as the writer asks you to believe any number of impossible things. The goblin market is an obvious homage to Gaiman’s work, among others, but Kingfisher gives it enough unique flourishes that it stands on its own merits.

I absolutely tore through this book, and I’ve already recommended it to two strangers who asked about it when I was reading it in public. That said, I have two major criticisms of the book, although only one of them affected my enjoyment of the work. That one is straightforward – Marra is not that interesting of a character. Kingfisher sure as hell tries to give her some personality, but beyond making her a worrywart, she doesn’t have much to distinguish herself. She’s the observer of the action, a Nick Jenkins (from A Dance to the Music of Time), but all three of her companions on the quest are more compelling characters. Marra’s whole family is boring, honestly; Kania’s a cipher, her mother doesn’t even have a name, I think, and her father is somewhere else. Kingfisher’s strength may lie in creating side characters, which is a real skill and not something I wish to diminish, but the time we spend with Marra alone forms some of the least interesting pages in the book.

My second criticism of Nettle & Bone is an academic one, which is that I don’t see much of a theme here – and for many readers, that won’t matter at all. It didn’t affect my pleasure in reading the book, either; it’s great fun, I laughed quite a bit, and I enjoyed a lot of the time I spent with these characters and in this world. I usually don’t think much about deeper themes or meaning until a book is done, after which it’s often all I think about – what is the author trying to say? What might they want the reader to take away from the book? Marra is a strong female lead, and her world, like ours, is patriarchal, while two of her three companions on the quest are also women, so there’s no question the book has a feminist bent. Beyond that, however, I couldn’t discern any greater themes here. That’s fine for the average reader, maybe for the vast majority of readers, but if we’re comparing books for the purpose of an award like the Hugo, I think questions of theme and meaning do matter. That said, I haven’t read any of the other nominees yet, so I have no opinion on whether this book was worthy other than to say I loved every minute while I was reading it.

Next up: Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a self-published, Kickstarted novel from 2014 that has spawned three Hugo-nominated sequels. I’m on page 10.

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→ October 12, 2023
→ By

The Zone of Interest.

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

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

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

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

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

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→ September 29, 2023
→ By

Tom Lake.

Ann Patchett remains one of my favorite contemporary novelists; I think she’s only missed once, really, with Run, which was too heavy-handed in its political allegory, and Taft is probably the weakest of the remainder even though it’s above the line for me. Bel Canto remains her magnum opus and one of the best works of American fiction since World War II, reimagining The Magic Mountain through a fictionalized version of the Túpac Amaru hostage crisis, and other than Run she’s been on a roll this century with State of Wonder, Commonwealth, and The Dutch House, the last of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, losing to The Nickel Boys.

Patchett’s run of success continues with Tom Lake, which returns to the motif of reworking a classic of literature into a modern narrative, while also seeing her return to themes of family history and mythmaking, this time through the lens of a family matriarch telling her life story to her three grown daughters. Lara is in her late 50s, but the bulk of the story she’s telling her girls is about the few years when she played Emily in a community theater production of Our Town, which led to a summer gig playing the same character in the western Michigan town of Tom Lake, where rich people would spend a few days or a week at the lake and often drop in to see a prestigious actor or two on the stage. While there, Lara has a fling with a young actor named Duke who would later go on to great fame in Hollywood, first as a heartthrob and later as a more serious actor. Lara’s daughters have known about her affair with Duke, with very little of the details, but the pandemic throws them all together on the family cherry orchard, giving them plenty of time together to talk, and for the kids – the eldest of whom, Emily, was once convinced that Duke was actually her father – to grill their mother.

Lara is right about the age Patchett was when she was writing Tom Lake, and this novel feels like her second attempt at an autobiographical work, this time perhaps more inspired by the way we reconsider our lives as we cross the half-century mark (which I did earlier this year). I’m not aware of Patchett having a summer fling with a future movie star, but Tom Lake reads like someone reckoning with their past, contemplating paths not taken, maybe thinking about the role chance plays in the paths our lives take. So much of Lara’s story comes down to these seemingly tiny details of life, such as the way she lands the first role as Emily, how she ends up at Tom Lake, or how that summer ends.

At a certain point in your life, if you’re lucky enough to live long enough, you become an observer as well as a participant: you live with your memories, good and bad, and in retelling them you choose what to include and what to omit, especially when telling your children. Lara makes those choices, holding back some information for the pleasure of surprising her daughters with the reveals, and then holding back some information forever, including the last time she saw Duke before the pandemic hit. (It’s also the one sour note in the novel, certainly the least realistic moment, and a drastic tonal shift from what’s come before, although it’s possible that that was an intentional contrast between the sepia-toned filter of our memories and the harshness of reality.) We curate our pasts for our children, much as we curate our lives for social media. Lara’s daughters are all adults, each unique and each very well-drawn, yet she still only shows them a portion of herself and is thoughtful about what she excludes.

As always, Patchett has created a whole cast of fully-realized characters; the three daughters each have their own personalities, goals, and values, each sharing a little something from their mom and yet also baffling her in ways in which they differ both from her and from each other. If she were Marilynne Robinson, another of my favorite contemporary novelists, each of these girls would get her own spinoff novel, but alas, Patchett has never (to my knowledge) revisited any of her prior creations. Lara’s husband appears a little later on, a little less three-dimensional than the women in the family or the Duke of Lara’s memories, although that’s also clearly part of the point – he’s the steady man Lara married after her dalliance with the unreliable bad boy.

I’ve read all of Patchett’s novels, and Bel Canto is the clear leader for me, still, but I could at least make an argument for Tom Lake to be in the #2 position. After a week or so of pondering this, I came down at Commonwealth second, The Dutch House third, and Tom Lake fourth over State of Wonder. At her best, she gives us a cast of wonderful, realistic characters, and wraps them up in a plot that’s realistic but compelling. Tom Lake might show her in a more mature, meditative mood, but her prose and her characterization is as strong as ever.

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