→ August 15, 2025
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The Ministry of Time.

Kaliane Bradley entered the crowded field of time-travel fiction last year with her debut novel The Ministry of Time, earning a Hugo nomination for Best Novel and landing a coveted spot on Barack Obama’s best-of-2024 list. It’s a marvelous book that does this sort of fiction right: it’s very light on the time-travel parts, and spends extremely little time worrying about the mechanics or the paradoxes, instead jumping off time travel for a story that is by turns philosophical, psychological, and quite romantic.

The narrator of The Ministry of Time is a British-Cambodian woman, like Bradley, and has been working in various government agencies when she’s tabbed for a special project as a ‘bridge’ to one of six people that the British government has plucked from history and brought to the present. There is a single time-travel door, and while the government hasn’t mastered its use – far from it, as we learn – they went through history and found people who were otherwise about to die, usually in horrible ways, to ‘save’ them by way of making them guinea pigs in a massive experiment. The narrator’s charge is Commander Graham Gore, who was aboard the HMS Terror during the doomed Franklin Expedition in the Arctic waters north of and around what is now Nunavut, where the search for a Northwest Passage to Asia led to the death by exposure and starvation of over 100 men, along with no survivors. The Ministry extracted Gore, knowing he would die shortly anyway (so his removal would not affect the historical timeline), and put him in the narrator’s care, housing them together in a shared apartment once he’s released from several weeks of confinement and forced re-education so he and his fellow time travelers, some of whom came from the 1600s, would know what a car is or how money works.

There is a thriller here within The Ministry of Time – as you might imagine, the British Crown’s intentions here are hardly pure or altruistic – but the novel is a love story at its core, as the narrator and Graham develop feelings for each other from very early on, despite the gulf between them in times, cultures, and ethnic origins. (Race and racism are frequent fodder for dry humor in the book, especially as the various ‘expats’ from times past, all of whom are white, struggle to adjust to a multicultural society where a whole bunch of words are no longer suitable for common use.) The relationship comes across as natural, almost inevitable, including the required element where one gets furious at the other and appears to break things off, which here happens simultaneously with the big twist and leads to a slightly ambiguous but extremely satisfying conclusion.

Bradley also has a knack for creating supporting characters who manage to be three-dimensional and yet still useful in various ways, often for humor but occasionally for purposes of intrigue or suspense. The narrator’s own handler, Quentin, might be a conspiracy theorist, or he might know more than he lets on. Maggie, from the 1600s, turns out to be a saucy wench (channeling my inner Laurence Sterne here), and gets to explore her sexuality in a way that would never have been permitted in her time. Arthur was about to die during World War I, and has a harder time adjusting to the fact that he’s now in a time when his life and liberty won’t be at risk just because he’s gay. And Adela, the Ministry of Time’s Vice Secretary, starts out as a sort of comic relief taskmaster character, but plays an increasingly essential role in the plot as the story develops.

I said before reading The Ministry of Time that I thought it was going to win the Hugo, because it had so much hype and positive press behind it, and because the last ten nine authors to win the Hugo for Best Novel have all been women, with only one of the other six nominated works written by a woman author. Bradley’s work also includes significant explorations of race, sexual orientation, and culture, again all things the voters have tended to favor, over the sort of hard sci-fi that dominated the award’s first 40-odd years – with the winners then nearly always white men. (One exception is The Calculating Stars, the 2019 winner, one of the worst novels ever to take this award. The author was the President of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association at the time.) Now that I’ve read it, I also think it’s going to win because it deserves it* – it would be an upper-half novel among all the winners, probably the best novel to win since N.K. Jemisin’s three straight wins, just edging out T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone. It’s sci-fi, but it’s literary sci-fi, one that uses a single speculative element to tell the sort of story an author couldn’t tell otherwise, and those are nearly always the best examples of the form.

*The other three nominees I’ve read, all of which were good: Service Model, A Sorceress Comes to Call, and The Tainted Cup.

Next up: Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, a classic of 20th century Italian literature.

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→ August 12, 2025
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The Tainted Cup.

Nominated for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup marries the classic detective story with high fantasy novels, with a story narrated by the detective’s assistant (think Archie Goodwin) because the detective can’t do the leg work (think Nero Wolfe), set on a world where civilization is constantly threatened by enormous aquatic creatures called leviathans that crash through the city walls and flood the town. It’s a slow build, but Bennett sticks – pun intended here – the landing, and by the end of the novel, both of the central characters have been so well developed that it felt like the middle of a longer series.

Din is the very young, very green assistant to an investigator named Ana, and finds himself at the scene of a very bizarre death: A military official with powerful connections, Blas, has been found disemboweled, killed by a mutant plant called dappleglass that essentially kills its host by sprouting a giant tree. The corpse is impaled upon the branches when Din arrives, and he finds that the wealthy family on whose estate the murder took place is away while their servants range from uncooperative to hostile. The murder turns out to be a small piece of a much larger conspiracy that runs all the way to the top, so to speak, as Blas was just one person killed in this manner and the body count will continue to rise over the course of the story.

In the world of The Tainted Cup, people – I’m assuming they are people, at least – can be augmented in various ways that enhance certain abilities at the cost of others, or perhaps of their health, sanity, or longevity. Din is one such augmented person, called a ‘sublime’; he’s an engraver who has the equivalent of an eidetic memory, ‘engraving’ everything in a scene into his mind through the use of specific chemical scents. Ana is an eccentric, not a sublime, but with superlative powers of deduction, choosing most of the time to remain blindfolded so that she can focus better on the problem at hand. She seldom leaves her lair, never visiting the crime scene, instead sending Din out to gather the information and report back using his engraving powers, making her a fantasy heir to Nero Wolfe in multiple ways. (If only she loved orchids.) Their relationship isn’t that interesting, at least not yet, as Din is so clearly the subordinate, and is often the straight man to Ana’s barbs and witticisms, although as the novel ends, multiple small events start to shift that balance of power to a more equal one and the door to a more Nero Wolfe/Archie Griffin sort of relationship opens.

Bennett has also built a fascinating world here, where humans are at the mercy of a larger species that threatens them, and the empire’s ability to maintain order and control of its people is at least in part predicated on their ability to protect them – or persuade them that the empire is their only protection. The investigation into the murder(s) exposes a complicated back story of multiple levels of corruption and a past catastrophe that killed scores and rendered an entire canton of the empire uninhabitable, a crime that ripples through their society to this day. It’s a complex supertext above the simple narrative of the detective story, and the latter allows Bennett to give the former so much detail and texture – the investigation propels the plot forward, and no one ever stays in one place, literally or figuratively, for very long.

The Tainted Cup is more detective story than mystery, however; I don’t think the reader is supposed to figure out whodunit, given that Ana figures out the culprits over a period of time, with one of the assassins identified with probably a third of the novel to go – except, of course, they’re an accomplice rather than the mastermind. I enjoy both genres, but the detective story depends much more on the strength of the detective character(s), while the mystery is usually driven more by how clever the plot is. Bennett has created two reasonably compelling characters already, with enough interplay in the last few chapters to start the development of their relationship and foreshadow a more interesting (platonic, to be clear) one in future novels. Ana could easily have fallen, or fall in the future, into cliché; she is odd, certainly, as Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes and Poirot are, but in different ways, and she’s a stronger detective character than Inspectors Alleyn or Montalbano, to name two other series I enjoy. Din shows more growth within this specific novel, as he’s young and naïve and wedded to formal traditions that Ana finds amusing or just silly. By the time we reach the conclusion, he’s learned substantial things about himself, and found his voice in a way that was almost as satisfying to read as the solution of the main mystery itself.

Next up: I just finished Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, which I fully expect to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year. I think it’s the best one and I think it checks a lot of boxes.

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→ August 6, 2025
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Service Model.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ July 29, 2025
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Headshot.

I’ll start off the review with the conclusion: Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot, one of the three novels shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize this year by the nominating committee that the board passed over in favor of Percival Everett’s James, is just not very good. It’s probably the best of those three, but that is damning with faint praise. I’ve often suspected that the Pulitzer process was skewed by non-literary considerations, but never more so this year.

Headshot follows a series of eight relatively anonymous and uninteresting teenaged women competing in a boxing tournament held in an empty (maybe abandoned) warehouse in Reno, with modest prize money that hardly justifies the investment in time and pain required of its contestants. Bullwinkel uses the tournament as a gimmick to give personality sketches and life stories, backwards and forwards, for the various contestants, showing a broad range of archetypes but a surprising lack of insight into what makes any of these young women tick beyond some very general tropes (e.g., sibling rivalry). The plot is extremely beside the point; I don’t even remember who won the tournament.

Indeed, I barely remember anything about these characters, and I’m flabbergasted by all of the reviews specifically praising the characters as the novel’s strength. They’re not all the same, far from it, but they are all fairly boring. Most of them box because they have some kind of hole inside they’re trying to fill – broken families, bullying, dead-end lives – but the sheer number of characters means none of them gets the kind of page time they’d need for any depth, never mind actual development.

And some of those characters’ names are amateurish. Artemis Victor is one of the best of the eight boxers – she may have won the fictional tournament, I don’t know – but I’ll call Fowl on that one. Others just have weird character traits that don’t add to their definition, like the one woman who has memorized pi to 50 digits and uses it as a sort of mantra/coping strategy, like meditating, but appears to have no other interest in math or just school in general.

There’s a deep sadness throughout the scenes in the ring and around it, even though Bullwinkel’s descriptions of their later lives at least hint at richer futures to come – families, marriages, careers, lives longer than many people who get hit in the head this often end up with. (There’s no mention of concussions or CTE.) Those are the stories that mean something here, but the structure leaves them as afterthoughts because the focus is far more on what’s happening in the ring and in the girls’ heads as they prepare to fight or trade punches. That just leaves those flash-forwards feeling like throwaways, sops to lighten the mood of what is overall a rather depressing novel, because it’s easy to say “and then she had a good life” rather than exploring just what that meant and implying that this tournament, which loomed so large in the girls’ minds as it happened, turned out to be irrelevant in the grand scheme.

I don’t know what the committee was thinking here with the three choices, all written by women, none of which was even good enough for me to recommend. Everett’s James is one of the best novels written this century. Kelly Link’s The Book of Love was also eligible, and is better than any of the three shortlisted novels by a country mile. Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars was better. I’m sure there were other works of literary fiction more deserving than these three novels. The Board made the right call.

Next up: I’m slowly making my way through Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup, nominated for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel.

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→ July 1, 2025
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Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride.

Will Leitch’s Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride is the heart-warming story of a police officer and divorced dad of an 11-year-old son who discovers he has terminal brain cancer and decides to die on the job so his son can get more cash in death benefits. It’s definitely the most enjoyable book you’ll read about dying of glioblastoma this year.

(Disclaimer: Will’s a friend – someone I’ve actually spent time with on multiple occasions – so there’s just no way I was going to be objective about this book. If I had disliked it, I just wouldn’t mention it at all, so bear in mind that this is one time you can actually accuse me of bias and be correct.)

Lloyd is a cop in Atlanta, the son of a decorated, hard-nosed, military-minded cop who was a sort of legend in the force himself until he died of a heart attack, possibly hastened by the case of a serial killer that he couldn’t solve. He learns at the very start of the book that his headaches are caused by an aggressive type of brain tumor called a glioblastoma that will kill him in a matter of months, and do so in ugly fashion as he starts to experience memory loss, extreme mood swings, and pain in his head he describes as “lightning bolts.” He doesn’t tell anyone at all about the diagnosis – not his son Bishop, his partner Anderson, his boss, his ex-wife, nobody but his doctor. He realizes that his life insurance policy isn’t going to do much for his son, paying for about a year of college if they’re lucky, and realizes that there are large payouts coming to any officer who dies in the line of duty, so he decides to find a way to do just that, only to learn that he’s a pretty good cop and not that good at the dying part.

Lloyd’s letters to his son, which he calls his ten edicts, are interspersed throughout the narrative and lend some gravity to the proceedings, which otherwise are quite jovial for a story about a guy with a time bomb in his brain and a gun at his hip. (To say nothing of his car, which is a weapon in its own right when Lloyd’s behind the wheel.) Those poignant interludes are an accurate reminder of every parent’s nightmare – that you won’t be there when your kid grows up to experience all of the big moments, to tell him how to change a tire or ask someone on a date, to answer the phone (or a text) when something’s wrong and they need their mom or their dad. The real genius of the book is that those moments aren’t sappy or maudlin, which they could so easily be. They read as honest and clear, probably clearer than any of us could really be if we sat down and thought too hard about what writing that kind of letters really meant, and as a result they hit some big emotional notes without dragging down what is otherwise a fast-paced novel with some great action sequences once Lloyd decides he has a literal death wish.

I would still rank Will’s first novel, How Lucky, as my favorite of the three, because I think its protagonist, Daniel, is such an incredible, compelling character, and I love the way the tension builds in that story. That’s not a knock on Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, as they’re different books with clearly different goals. There are even nods in this book to Will’s second book, The Time Has Come, that I won’t spoil, and a few other Easter eggs scattered here and there. I’d say Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride is his most earnest book, but I feel like that word has morphed into a backhanded insult, like a pat on the head for a writer who’s mailed in the emotional stuff in most of their previous works. It’s very thoughtful, getting the details right in the important ways, and even in more trivial ways, like details of what an Atlanta cop’s daily routine might be like, that most readers wouldn’t even notice. (I only realized it after reading the acknowledgements.) It’s a novel with a big heart that earns your response through its honesty, with a strong main character and some levity to get you past the fact that the main character is staring death in the face from page one.

Next up: I actually finished Rita Bullwinkel’s gimmicky, Pulitzer-finalist novel Headshot last week and am reading Masashi Matsuie’s The Summer House.

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→ April 28, 2025
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The Book of Love.

The Book of Love is Kelly Link’s first novel, coming nine years after her third short story collection Get In Trouble was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – a rarity for genre fiction of any sort. This novel, following a quartet of teenagers after three of them end up accidentally dead and are purposely brought back to life by a demon of questionable intent, is a damn masterpiece.

The novel opens with Susannah mourning the disappearance and presumed death of her sister, Laura, and two of Laura’s friends, Daniel – Susannah’s putative boyfriend – and Mo, a year earlier. But it turns out they were just mostly dead, and in the second chapter, we meet the three of them, plus a fourth character, as the guy they thought was their boring music teacher Mr. Anabin reveals he’s brought them back from the death place, and that he’ll give them another chance at life, altering everyone else’s memories so they think the trio were just away on a study-abroad program in Ireland. It turns out that this is part of a more complex deal between Mr. Anabin and another demon (or whatever he is) named Bogomil, whose history is longer and more complicated than anyone imagined. We follow the four as they try to figure out how to fulfill Mr. Anabin’s requests so they can stay alive while also navigating their relationships with each other, with people in their New England town of Lovesend, with a new visitor or two, and with an all-powerful evil entity who would like nothing better than to just eat them all up.

Link builds the world of this book piecemeal, giving us hints as we go along as to what lies just beyond the ‘door’ through which the three friends passed, even holding off on introducing or explaining some key characters until well into the narrative. It adds to the book’s dreamlike atmosphere, which itself connects to Susannah’s dreams about Bogomil and the way Mr. Anabin and later other characters play with sense and memory, while also keeping the reader from becoming too omniscient, so we can better feel the confusion of the troika as they seek to understand their situation and their changing abilities.

The book overflows with interesting characters, highlighted by the fantastic four at the heart. Susannah and Laura are sisters, opposites in nearly every way, but believable and fleshed-out, even more than the two boys. Daniel’s a bit of a goof, a well-meaning one, the guy who drifts through life while good things happen to him; while Mo is a more tragic figure who hates Daniel for exactly that reason. The way the four interact, with fights and tiffs and real moments of emotion, may be the greatest strength in a book that is as strong as any I’ve read in a year.

The story meanders at times, yet it never feels padded and certainly doesn’t slow down for anything or anyone; the final quarter or so seems to move at top speed, as the trio figure out some things about their predicament and the various competing forces lock Lovesend under a spell that may end in the destruction of the entire town. I don’t know if Link entirely stuck the landing here; it’s imperfect, but not bad by any means, just perhaps a little too tidy, where everyone gets some variation of a happy ending – or at least not a sad or tragic one. The denouement with the final boss is also of debatable quality; it works, barely, but again relies on a little hand-waving that this is all just fine and go with it. And I did go with it, to be clear.

If you like the work of Neil Gaiman, which I always have, but are looking for similar literature by any other author for obvious reasons, this is the most Gaimanesque novel I’ve ever read. It has dark, creepy elements, and it sits on both sides of the divide between life and death, with flawed main characters and demons from the benevolent to the purely evil. It has the feeling of an impossible story, that no one should be able to write this well, with prose this clear and clever, with characters this three-dimensional, and with a story that nearly sets the pages on fire as you progress. It’s on the list of finalists for this year’s Nebula Award, and I have no idea how the Hugos whiffed on it. The Book of Love is a marvel.

Next up: Alexei Panshin’s Nebula-winning novel Rite of Passage.

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→ April 10, 2025
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Transcendent Kingdom.

I read Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel Homegoing a little over three years ago, because my daughter had been assigned it in her high school English class and said it was good but “grim.” I thought it was marvelous, and also grim, but beautifully crafted with a series of compelling characters through the time-shifting narrative.

Her second and still most recent novel, Transcendent Kingdom, has a far more conventional structure and is built around a single family of four, only two members of which, the daughter Gifty and her mother, are still around in the present day, although we don’t learn immediately where her brother Nana and father are or if they’re even still alive. Gifty is a graduate student in neuroscience at Stanford, while her mother, a Ghanaian immigrant, lives alone in Alabama; Gifty gets a call that her mother has taken to her bed in a severe bout of depression, so she brings her mother to California to take care of her. We learn that this isn’t her mother’s first such episode, and the recollection brings us the story of Gifty’s father, brother, and how Gifty turned away from the devout Christianity of her childhood and towards the science she hoped would explain everything that religion couldn’t answer.

This isn’t a huge spoiler, since it’s mentioned on the back of the book, but if you want to know nothing stop reading here … Nana died of a heroin overdose after a doctor gave him Oxycontin for an ankle injury Nana suffered playing basketball. Gifty wants to learn about the neuroscience of addiction, to understand why someone would be unable to stop when they know it’s hurting them, killing them, and hurting everyone who cares about them. She was about eight years younger than her brother, and watching him go from a lively, popular kid who seemed to be going places to a zonked-out addict, and a thief, and worse has shaped huge swaths of the last eighteen years of her life. It forced her to grow up and take more charge in the house than someone her age should have to do, it broke her faith in God (but not her mother’s), and it turned her inwards, especially when it came to talking to anyone outside of her family about her brother – or even that she had one.

As someone who grew up with religion, devout perhaps in my blind belief but not exactly in practice, but who is secular now, I found particular resonance in Gyasi’s descriptions of Gifty now, knowing something is gone and won’t return, but that there is no regaining it. Religion serves a purpose for many people, and often becomes a core part of one’s identity, but if you lose your faith, as Gifty does and as I did, you can’t simply go to the God store and buy a new one. Once you realize it’s not true, the spell is forever broken. That absence is real, and you may grieve for all that once was, from your belief in a benevolent God to the hope of an afterlife to the fact that so many adults told you these things were true when they’re not. (I recognize not everyone shares my nonbelief, of course.)

Beyond the question of religiosity, Transcendent Kingdom functions as a different sort of coming-of-age novel: The protagonist loses her innocence about the world, and then spends the next eighteen years following one narrow path that she believes will help her make sense of it. Her mother returning to the isolation of her bed and near-total silence bookends the period of Gifty’s quest for an answer to everything, from why Nana fell so quickly into addiction and death to why their mother is so prone to these severe depressive episodes. Faith couldn’t answer these questions, so why can’t science? This structure also allows Gyasi to retell parts of Gifty’s story that don’t involve Nana or their mother, including her time at a certain college in the Boston area and her tenuous relationships with people around her at Stanford. The novel puts Gifty together piece by piece in front of us, jumping back and forth in time to show how she got to this point of a sort of crisis of unfaith.

It’s hard to avoid judging Transcendent Kingdom by the standard of its predecessor, which was a completely different sort of book and wowed with its structure and scope. This is a small novel about a big character, and it doesn’t cast the same sort of spell that Homegoing did. It’s just different, but still has Gyasi’s easy, thoughtful voice, and shows her developing a single character to a much greater extent than she could possibly have done in Homegoing’s staccato stories.

Next up: About to finish Naomi Novik’s Uprooted.

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→ 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
→ By

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
→ By

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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