→ 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
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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
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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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→ September 15, 2023
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Yellowface.

R.F. Kuang caused quite a stir earlier this year with the release of her fifth novel and first outside of sci-fi/fantasy, the scathing satire Yellowface, which bites the very hand that feeds her – the publishing world. The title hints at the secondary themes of cultural appropriation, racial identity, and who has the right to tell what stories, but the engine that drives this book and its self-justifying protagonist is sheer disgust at how the book sausage gets made.

June Hayward is a young white woman who has written one published novel to scant sales and mediocre reviews, while her college classmate and sort-of friend, Athena Liu, has vaulted into literary stardom in a manner not entirely dissimilar to Kuang’s history. Athena is Chinese-American and is working on her magnum opus, a massive historical novel about the use and abuse of Chinese workers in World War I, when she suffers a fatal accident in front of June … who grabs the manuscript to the unfinished and unsubmitted novel, The Last Front, and decides to clean it up and submit it as her own. June’s agent can’t believe it, shopping the book to a larger publisher, where the marketing folks suggest that June use her middle name, Song, instead of Hayward, ostensibly to get away from the failure of her first novel, but it’s hardly a coincidence that that Song could come across as an East Asian surname, is it? June’s happy to go along with all of this, even when a junior publicist at the firm pushes back on the whole scheme and questions the authenticity of some of the content, but after the book comes out to rave reviews and massive sales, the backlash begins, and eventually enough dirt comes out that June’s authorship becomes the subject of public scrutiny.

June is an anti-hero, an unreliable narrator, and a con artist, where she herself is one of her own victims: She’s so desperate for commercial and critical success that she dupes herself into doing and believing things that will obviously harm her in the end. She’s part Becky Sharp, part Maria Ruskin, and maybe a little Anna Delvey, but in the end she’s willing to do and say whatever she must to get ahead and stay there. That also means that anyone who gets in her way is an enemy and must be dealt with, which is when June becomes either ruthless or just so wrapped up in her own needs – and I think to her, this is about safety, rather than material gain – that she goes on the attack, or wants to, even when doing nothing is the best option.

The level of scorn that Kuang has for the industry is truly something to behold, and it provides some dark humor, not the laugh-out-loud sort but the “I can’t believe she’s writing that” kind. It’s not even a satire that exaggerates the truth to its limits to get its point across; Kuang does little more than sharpen a few details, letting the stark reality of things shock the reader instead. The outsized roles of Goodreads and social media sites, the emphasis on an author’s identity rather than their work, the control the Big Four publishing houses have, it all looks worse under the microscope. I doubt anyone still has the illusion that it’s the merits of a book that determines whether it’s a best-seller, but Kuang makes it clear just how far down the list of factors a novel’s quality sits.

The novel’s title refers to the history of white performers in stage and on screen pretending to be east Asian, such as the teeth-grinding cringe of Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. We’ve seen it in the publishing world as well, such as the white poet who submitted poems under a Chinese name because he claimed it increased his odds of getting published and another white poet who fabricated an entire persona of a Japanese survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima to publish his poems. Is June guilty of “yellowface” here? She takes on an Asian-sounding surname and doesn’t go out of her way to disabuse anyone of the notion that she has east Asian heritage. She takes on Athena’s novel, but makes substantial edits and rewrites, some before submitting it and some with the help of her editors. Is the mere fact that she’s telling a story about Chinese people, with references to Chinese culture and history, enough to say she’s committed this transgression? Is this cultural appropriation? Who can tell these stories – and if only an Asian writer can tell a story about Asian people, then does that mean Asian writers can only tell stories about Asian people? Kuang grapples with this last question at some length, including it in discussions of Athena Liu’s legacy, how the publishing world saw and used her, and how she felt as a token woman of color in what remains a white-dominated space where many decision-makers are still men.

I discovered Yellowface through several reviews and a Times article about the stir it caused in publishing circles, so I’m familiar with some of the criticisms. I do think it’s fair to ask about the quality of much of the prose, even though it’s told in Hayward’s voice, and while she presents herself as an underappreciated writer, she’s also extremely unreliable and likely overstates her abilities. It’s a novel that’s more readable than literary in that sense; the prose moves, and it’s evocative, but the wordsmithing here is unremarkable. What I do not understand or agree with is criticisms of its satire being insufficiently sharp, especially from writers, because I think making the satirical elements more overt or blatant risked taking the reader out of the story. Kuang could have made this funnier, but it would have come at a cost of veracity. This story rings true based on my limited experiences in and knowledge of the publishing world, which made it work for me even when the prose was a little thin.

For some comparisons, if you’re interested, you might want to read this very even-handed review by Hugo winner Amal El-Mohtar or you could read this incredibly nasty, juvenile review in the Cleveland Review of Books.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s latest, Tom Lake.

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→ August 21, 2023
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Trust.

Hernan Diaz shared this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his second novel, Trust, after his debut novel In the Distance was one of the runners-up for the same honor in 2018. In the Distance was a surprise honoree, as Diaz was an unknown author at the time and the book was published by a minor house. Trust comes from a Penguin imprint and had much higher expectations coming in, and while it did win the big honor, it reads far more as a literary exercise than a compelling narrative or a coherent novel.

Trust comprises four parts, each of which tells part of the story of a very wealthy New York City couple between the two wars, the husband a financial wizard who profits handsomely from the 1929 crash, the wife a woman of taste who gets them involved in the arts and philanthropic works until illness overtakes her. Part one is a 1937 novella about the couple called Bonds, a metafictional account of their lives that depicts her illness as a mental one and his demeanor as unfeeling and robotic. Part two is the half-finished memoir of the actual financier, his intended rebuttal to the best-selling novel that upended his life. Part three tells the story of Ida Partenza, the writer he hires to ghost-write that memoir. Part four is the diary of the wife, all fragments and contradictions. In each succeeding section, Diaz undoes what he did in the previous one(s), so that by the end it’s unclear what’s actually true, and the whole work feels like that aforementioned exercise, a way of undermining the reader by demonstrating the imprecision of memory.

Part of the problem here is that the main character is the financier, and he’s unsympathetic but also boring. He’s not an anti-hero. He’s not misunderstood, or tragic (even his widowhood fails to rise to that level). He’s just kind of a jerk, and his wife’s attempts to make him more of a human don’t really pan out. Even finding out how much the novel may have wronged him doesn’t make him a more interesting central character, and certainly the descriptions of the story from the ghostwriter’s point of view paint him in a worse, if different, light. (I was all set to rip Diaz’s bombastic insufferable prose when I reached the second section and realized that that was the prose of his fictional novelist.)

It was hard not to think of the similarly titled book Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi, which explored similar thematic ground in a much more straightforward and readable fashion. (I was also reminded of it when I went to save this file on my laptop and the review for the earlier book popped up.) Choi’s book delved into the unreliability of memory and the way other people can remember the same event in different ways because of memory discrepancies, perspectives, and prior lived experiences, and it did so in a way that also made you care about or at least invested in some of the characters. I haven’t even named the main characters in Trust because they don’t matter enough. I didn’t give a hoot about the husband, the wife, or really even the ghostwriter, because Diaz didn’t give me reason to care.

The Pulitzer committee never reveals much about its thinking, but its one sentence on Trust referred toits “linked narratives rendered in different literary styles,” and that tells me this was writers responding to a feat of writing craft – which is, to be clear, a good reason to give a book a literary award. They likely weighed that more than the novel’s lack of direction or what I at least found to be kind of a boring plot with poorly drawn characters. It’s nowhere near the novel that its co-winner, Demon Copperhead, is, perhaps choosing a higher level of difficulty – although Barbara Kingsolver didn’t go easy on herself – without that other novel’s compelling lead character or well-paced, intriguing plot. I’d put it more towards the middle of the Pulitzer pack, certainly ahead of 2022’s awful choice The Netanyahus or a good chunk of early winners that haven’t aged well, but nowhere near the best that the Pulitzers have honored in recent years.

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