→ 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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→ June 11, 2023
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Demon Copperhead.

Barbara Kingsolver shared this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – the first time the honor was split among two books – for her novel Demon Copperhead, which shared the honor with Hernan Diaz’s Trust. Demon Copperhead borrows its structure and characters from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, transplanting the whole story to a poor mining county in the Appalachians, narrated by its title character from his early childhood to adulthood as the opioid crisis devastates his community, family, and his own life.

Demon is born to a single mother in Lee County, where the mining industry employed nearly everyone and then left them underemployed, injured, and increasingly addicted to painkillers. Demon, whose real name is Damon but acquired the nickname “Demon” early in life and had it stick, never knows any stability from the word go – his mother is a recovering addict, marries a local tough guy who terrorizes her and abuses Demon, only to have his mother die and his stepdad toss him out into the hands of social services. His path takes him through two foster homes, including the con-artist McCobbs, then to his estranged grandmother’s house, then back to Lee County and the high school football team, only to have a knee injury push him into the bottomless well of oxycontin. It’s a parade of tragedies interspersed with dark humor, leading towards eventual small triumphs, told by one of the most memorable narrator characters I’ve ever encountered.

If you know the bones of David Copperfield, from the book or perhaps from Armando Iannucci’s faithful 2020 film adaptation, then you’ll know the general plot outline of Demon Copperhead, as it adheres to the former book’s major story beats right to the end. Almost every character here has a clear analogue in the original – Demon is David, the McCobbs are the Micawbers, U-Haul is Uriah Heep, and so forth – that also provides the foundation for the modern versions, although they’re fleshed out enough to feel different from the originals. You could see U-Haul becoming Demon’s main antagonist early on, especially once you connect him to Uriah, but the way in which this plays out is different enough from the original to make it seem new.

This novel’s real strength is Demon, though. Kingsolver has given him a unique voice that combines the wisdom of his experiences through the story, the naïveté of his place of birth, and layers of empathy that appear at surprising times throughout the work. Kingsolver has used interesting narrative techniques before, as in The Poisonwood Bible, but here she does so with a single character who is thoroughly developed, who grows and learns throughout the novel, and whose flaws are right there on display even in his own telling. David Copperfield is someone you root for throughout Dickens’s novel because he’s so inherently good, and his travails are the result of encounters with terrible people and the extreme economic inequality of England in the early 1800s. Demon is more complex, making poor choices, sometimes to the point of treating people who care for him quite badly, even missing out on opportunities and lifelines. It’s a little harder to root for him, although ultimately I came down on that side, bearing in mind that it was clear where things were all going to end.

Dickens’s work was a social commentary on that inequality and the abysmal treatment of the poor, especially children, in his era, a theme he’d first covered in Oliver Twist and would return to many times in the later parts of his life. Kingsolver does the same here, with two focal points – the opioid epidemic and its main drivers in Purdue Pharmaceuticals; and the abandonment of rural people by nearly every stage of government, from counties and school districts up to the federal level. It’s not subtle by any means, and that’s been a criticism of the book, but I don’t know how you can be subtle about the harm that opioids have wreaked on these parts of the country. Kingsolver delivers the commentary in the most granular fashion, by showing the epidemic’s impact on individual characters and their families, most notably children neglected, abused, or left orphaned by those addicted, with scant discussion of policy questions or legal maneuvers. Purdue gets its mention, but mostly because Demon’s Aunt June briefly dates a guy who’s a sales rep for the company, and for the rest of the book they’re an offscreen villain, while every form of government is asleep at its respective wheel. It’s very Dickensian in a contemporary way, trading the workhouse for rehab, sharing its disdain for the central government’s failure to protect its most vulnerable charges.

It’s an arduous read because of all of the slings and arrows Demon suffers along the way, but Kingsolver does it more concisely than Dickens, and with such a compelling voice as the narrator that it’s both quicker than its page count would imply and more enjoyable than you’d think for a story where people do horrible things to each other and themselves. The adult Damon’s wry, wise telling of his own life is what truly powered me through the book so quickly. And with such a distinctly American plot and setting, it’s a worthy winner of the Pulitzer honor.

Next up: Susanna Hoffs, one of my favorite musicians of the 1980s and early 1990s, just released her first novel, This Bird Has Flown.

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→ April 9, 2023
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The Trees.

Percival Everett has been publishing novels since the mid-1980s, but the 66-year-old author has come into much greater critical acclaim with his three most recent works, becoming a Pulitzer finalist for 2021’s Telephone, a Booker finalist for 2022’s The Trees, and, so far, already a finalist for the NBCC Fiction award for Dr. No. I’d never read any of his work before The Trees, which I read on my flight to Phoenix and enjoyed so much that I went to Changing Hands that same day and bought Dr. No. The Trees is a massive fake-out of a novel, starting out as a bawdy, neo-noir sort of detective novel, before taking a sudden turn into more serious and philosophical territory, resolving the question of the crime in the least satisfying way possible – because that was never the point.

A couple of white men are found brutally murdered in the minuscule, backwards town of Money, Mississippi, a town only known for being the site of the murder of Emmett Till. In each case, they’ve been castrated, with their genitalia in the fist of a Black man’s corpse found in the same room. And each time, it’s the same Black man’s corpse. It goes from the morgue to the next murder scene, making a mockery of the local authorities, who did not need the help. Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations show up to try to solve the murders, which doesn’t go over well with the white cops in Money or even the victims’ families, although the assistance the two receive from some of the Black residents is only slightly better. The victims turn out to have a surprising connection, and just as the MBI agents and the FBI agent assigned to help them have started to put this together, reports come in of nearly identical crimes in Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.

The Trees is part dark comedy, part revenge fantasy, part detective story (at least at the start), but it is entirely a story about the weight of history. The systemic racism that pervades the entire history of the United States is reflected in the murders, the authorities, the investigation, almost every aspect of The Trees. It’s in the banter – much of it very, very funny – between the two MBI agents, who absolutely could have stepped out of The Wire. It’s in the diner where Gertrude, a fair-skinned woman who lives in Money, works as a waitress, often serving white people who conveniently forget that she’s Black. It’s practically woven into the pages of the book.

While the novel doesn’t have the same psychological horror element as Get Out, it mines very similar thematic territory, combining it with the sort of over-the-top humor that made Paul Beatty’s The Sellout such a critical success. There’s a seething rage beneath the surface here that Everett holds in check with the various layers of humor, especially with the MBI agents Jim Davis and Ed Morgan, who combine the “old married couple” vibe of McNulty and Bunk with wry commentary on the dangers of their situation as two Black feds in a town that has is still debating whether to acknowledge the advent of Reconstruction. (These two characters could have their own TV series, although doing so would strip out the theme of historical racism that underlies the novel, and I think the novel is unfilmable given its somewhat ambiguous ending.) It’s a delicate balance to strike, and Everett never seems to waver, mixing in humor highbrow and low, even throwing in some ridiculous character names like Cad Fondle or Herberta Hind, to allow him to escalate the extent and violence of the crimes at the narrative’s heart without turning the reader away.

Where The Trees ends may frustrate you if you need a firm conclusion that wraps up all of a novel’s loose ends, as Everett does very little of that. You’ll know who’s responsible for the murders, but beyond that, he offers little resolution and far more doubt than is conventional for any novel, let alone one that at least draws on the traditions of the detective genre. It’s in service of the book’s larger themes of historical racism and the double-edged sword of vengeance. Your mileage may vary, of course. I found myself so drawn in by the humor and the tight prose that I was willing to follow The Trees wherever it led me.

Next up: Elizabeth McCracken’s The Hero of this Book.

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→ March 24, 2023
→ By

The Rabbit Hutch.

Tess Gunty won the National Book Award in 2022 for her debut novel The Rabbit Hutch, the title of which refers to a low-income housing complex in a declining Rust Belt town called Vacca Vale that is home to a broad cast of peculiar characters. It’s a compelling read and the prose is lovely, although the stories of the various characters don’t tie together that well, giving the book the feel of a series of nested short stories rather than a single, coherent work.

The most prominent characters in The Rabbit Hutch are the four young adults who have just recently left the town’s foster-care system, including 18-year-old Blandine Watkins, the star of the show in more ways than one. She’s beautiful and eccentric, unknowable in many ways, bewitching at least one of her three male roommates (Malik), delving into all sorts of mysticism and woo while redefining who she is as she enters adulthood. Those three roommates are all just a little further into their majority, none of them doing very well at adulting, which is why, we’re led to believe, they so easily fall into a bizarre pattern of ritual violence against animals. Gunty also gives us an extended flashback to a former student at the local high school, Tiffany, who becomes the subject of the school’s 42-year-old music teacher’s advances and eventually his victim as well; and a long digression about Elsie, who was once the child star of a TV sitcom called Meet the Neighbors that’s beloved by one of the Hutch’s residents, and whose son, it turns out, hated her guts and is completely out of his mind. He doesn’t even live in Vacca Vale, and the thickness of the thread that brings him there by the end of the novel could be measured in nanometers.

It’s a disjointed novel, but Gunty has a real knack for crafting characters and describing her settings so that the reader observes from both the bird’s-eye view and from up close, putting you right there in the action through her use of both detail and metaphor. She refers to a dowdy 40-year-old woman named Joan who moderates the forums on an obituaries web site as having “the posture of a question mark (and) a stock face,” which only underscores the woman’s insignificance in the town and to some degree in her own life. She speaks of an older man failing on dating apps as hating women “an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument.” Even when the plot was all over the place – and it was, a lot, especially when Gunty jerks us out of Vacca Vale to follow Elsie and her idiot son – the prose carried it through.

The novel opens with a passage where Blandine “exits her body,” which is going to lead readers to assume she’s been killed and they’ll have to wait the whole book to find out how and why. I’m going to spoil this right now, because it’s a dumb gimmick: She is alive at the end of the book. There’s more to it than this, but I can’t tell you how irritated I was even when I figured out before the midpoint that this was a scam – and it’s just not necessary. The progression of the story around these characters, and the way Gunty brings together the various subplots, is more than enough to sustain the narrative greed here. The strong implication that Blandine is dead, boosted by some other hints throughout the novel, only to reveal at the end that she’s not is cheap and unworthy of the rest of the book.

The Rabbit Hutch follows in the Richard Russo tradition of profiling dying industrial towns through their residents, here with less humor but with far better-written women than Russo ever provided. It also reminded me of J. K. Rowling’s poorly-received novel The Casual Vacancy, her first novel for adults and one that received a lot of criticism because it wasn’t Harry Potter. That book was set in a fictional town in southwest England that also seemed a bit down on its luck and followed a very broad, and in that case more diverse, cast of residents in the wake of the death of a parish councillor, working in themes of income inequality, racial injustice, drug policy, and more. I liked that book more than critics did as a whole, and think it’s a fair comparison here, with a more ambitious plot but inferior prose to Gunty’s.

I can’t speak to the National Book Award for last year, as I haven’t read any of the five other finalists, but The Rabbit Hutch feels much more to me like a promising rookie season that points to superstar potential than a “best of the year” sort of work. I enjoyed it, I loved the prose, I thought some of the subplots worked but as many didn’t, and there was too much manipulation of the reader’s interest for a novel this serious. I hope and expect that her next work will play more to her strengths, and dispense with the stunt writing.

Next up: Percival Everett’s The Trees.

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→ March 7, 2023
→ By

The Fortune Men.

I may have mentioned a few times that my in-laws are Welsh, as in born in Wales, so I’ve explored a bit of Welsh culture in the last few years while dabbling in the language as well. I discovered quite recently that Llenydiaeth Cymru (Literature Wales) has its own annual prizes under the Wales Book of the Year banner, and the most recent Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award went to Nadifa Mohammed for her latest novel The Fortune Men. It’s based on the true story of Somalian immigrant Mahmood Mattan, the last man hanged in Cardiff, whose 1952 trial and execution for the murder of Lily Volpert were a tragic miscarriage of justice. His conviction was quashed 45 years later, followed by a payment to his family of over £700,000 and then a police apology in 2022, although by then his widow and three sons had all died.

Mohammed reimagines the time from just before the murder through the crime, arrest, and sham trial, where Mattan barely received a defense and, in the retelling, the police misconduct was appalling. There were no witnesses to the murder, and the only two people who were certain to have seen the assailant, the victim’s sister and niece, both said Mattan didn’t match their recollection. A Black man came to the door of Lily’s shop after hours, but as a moneylender as well as a seller of fabric and other odds and ends, she was accustomed to such visits. Her sister closed the door between the shop and the family’s dining room, but about twenty minutes later, someone knocked to say that her sister had been found dead, her throat slashed, and £100 taken from the safe. A combination of racism, police incompetence, and coincidence put Mattan at the center of the investigation, and once the authorities had settled on him as their man, very little could stop the wheels of justice from crushing him under their weight.

Mattan receives a fascinatingly open portrayal in this novel, as Mohammed does not canonize her subject, depicting him as a dissolute gambler and a bit of a layabout. He was a sailor who fled a suffocatingly predictable life in what was then British Somaliland, eventually taking to the seas, settling in Cardiff, and marrying Laura over her family’s objections, only to jump back on a ship almost immediately after their wedding. He’s largely out of work at the time of his arrest, only half-heartedly looking for jobs, spending what little he gets in public assistance at the horse tracks. He doesn’t pay the people who lend him money back, at least not promptly. He’s also prone to verbal outbursts that come back to bite him at the trial. Yet he’s also quite clearly innocent of the crime in question, and a loving if sometimes inattentive husband and father to three sons.

We see Mattan as a whole person, rather than just a victim of a racist society, or even just a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He has a childlike faith that the truth will set him free in a literal sense, until it becomes clear that the British justice system is not interested in justice. Flashbacks to his childhood also lay bare the irony of a man leaving a predictable but relatively safe life in Somaliland only to move to the supposedly more enlightened colonizer country to face racism, poverty, and ultimately murder at the hands of the state.

The story, and the end, are already known, so Mohammed’s challenge is to make this story with a defined arc and conclusion interesting, which she does, while generating empathy in the reader for a relatively unsympathetic main character. Being condemned isn’t a character trait, so Mohammed fleshes out Mattan in a fascinating way to make him real and expand him beyond the common tragedy of an innocent man sent to his death. It’s a serious novel in multiple senses of the term, with a topic that seems contemporary despite the setting seventy years in the past.

Next up: Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust, winner of the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.

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→ March 1, 2023
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The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

Shehan Karunatilaka won this year’s Booker Prize for his novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a fascinating work of magical realism that might as well be called Maali Almeida in the Bardo, as its protagonist is dead from the moment the book begins. Set in Sri Lanka in 1989, in the early years of what would be a 36-year civil war between the governing Sinhalese majority and Tamil rebels, the book follows the title character, a photographer who took many photos of victims of the war, through his seven days (moons) in purgatory as he tries to figure out who killed him and how.

Maali Almeida is dead, and finds himself in a bureaucratic afterlife where multiple entities try to coax him into different directions, one of which is “the Light” and promises some sort of salvation, while another might give him the chance to communicate with the living to try to direct them to solve the mystery of his death by retrieving an important set of incriminating photographs he’s hidden. One possible explanation is that his work for a shadowy non-governmental organization or his freelance work for the AP and other journalistic outlets covering atrocities committed by both sides during the war. Almeida photographed corpses, but also murders and murderers, and any number of people might have wanted him dead.

Almeida was also gay in a society that was not particularly hospitable to gay people, although in his tales of his life there were closeted gay men all over Colombo (the capital of Sri Lanka). He lived with two friends, Jaki, who was supposed to be his girlfriend; and Dilan, known as DD, who was one of those closeted men and becomes Maali’s lover, although the photographer is serially unfaithful to him. DD’s father is the powerful businessman and politician Stanley, who would strongly prefer that his son not be gay and join his business rather than working for an environmental activist group, and who is emblematic of the byzantine connections across Sri Lankan society at the time, where even the “good” guys could be tied to one side of the civil war or the other.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a richly layered novel that explores themes beyond just that of the civil war, which ended in 2009 with the defeat of the main Tamil rebel group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and the death of their leader. Maali is a complicated protagonist, part hero and part anti-hero, a drunk, a philanderer, a degenerate gambler, an atheist, and more. He professed to just taking photographs as a job, although of course he took photographs as a hobby as well; he’s not explicitly political, but hoped to take pictures that could end wars and bloodshed. His multifaceted character opens up all kinds of thematic possibilities, from discrimination to morality to how we cope with our own mortality, and Karunatilaka explores all of these, some more successfully than others.

Of course, because of the photographs Maali took, the authorities become very keen to find this missing stash – more keen than they are to find out who killed him, even with pressure from his family, from Jaki and DD, even from Stanley at one point. This creates two parallel narratives and a real sense of time pressure, as Maali tries to direct his friends to get to the photographs so they can expose the atrocities of both sides, while the authorities are trying to get the photos for themselves, and there’s an inherent tension from the question of who’ll get to the photos first – or whether the authorities will get to Jaki and DD before anyone finds the cache. There’s also the clock of the seven moons, referring to seven days before which Maali must decide whether he’s going to move into the Light or follow one of the other shades offering a different experience in the afterlife.

Karunatilaka seems to be well-versed in the history of this sort of political satire with elements of magical realism, from The Master and Margarita to One Hundred Years of Solitude. This novel isn’t at the level of those two masterpieces, but it’s an heir to their legacy, drawing heavily on the former’s sense of the absurd and fantastical, and on the latter’s sense of outrage, especially outrage at the lack of outrage. Both of those earlier novels targeted authoritarian regimes that would torture and disappear opponents, which is exactly what the Sinhalese government in Sri Lanka did during the civil war. So much of this novel takes place in the afterworld – an especially ridiculous one, with bureaucrats, flunkies, and talking leopards – that it shields the reader from some of the worst horrors of the civil war, allowing Karunatilaka to push forward with a narrative that might otherwise have been unreadable.

I haven’t read any of the other longlisted novels for last year’s Booker Prize, although Percival Everett’s The Trees is on my to-read shelf right now. As Booker winners go, though, this is one of the better ones among the 40 I’ve read, and I hope it signals a return to the peak the prize had from 2008 to 2018, with just one dud in those eleven years and several of my all-time favorite novels winning during the span.

Next up: Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men, which won the Wales Book of the Year award in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Booker in 2021, losing to Damon Galgut’s The Promise.

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→ February 24, 2023
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Death is Hard Work.

Death is Hard Work is the most recent novel by Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa to be translated into English, first published in Arabic in 2016 and appearing in translation three years later. It’s a play on William Faulkner’s classic tragicomic novel As I Lay Dying, this time set in Syria during the present civil war, as three siblings try to transport their father’s corpse to a specific graveyard where he’d asked to be buried, working as a commentary on the collapse of Syrian society as well as a window into the internecine squabbles of the family.

Abdel Latif el-Salim has died, not long after his beloved second wife, Navine, preceded him in death, and Abdel’s dying wish to his son Bolbol was that he be buried in a certain graveyard in his hometown of Anabiya, a long way from where he died somewhere in Damascus. Bolbol takes this request very seriously despite the obvious practical complications of transporting a corpse in a hot country that is bitterly divided by civil war, where passing between two checkpoints can be more complicated than crossing an international border. Bolbol then recruits his brother, the arrogant and short-tempered Hussein, and their sister, Fatima, to accompany him on what seems like a suicide mission to drive a van with their father’s corpse in back to Anabiya. The novel follows them through interactions with friends and acquaintances who try to help them, rebels and soldiers who usually try to hold them up, to a jail and a hospital and across roads that barely exist, before the trio finally reach their destination.

The absurdity of the novel comes primarily from the fact that their father was wanted by the brutal authoritarian regime that still controls Syria for some unknown offense, likely just thoughtcrimes, which causes problems almost every time they are stopped by any entity connected to the central government. At one point, the soldiers “arrest” the corpse, although fortunately for all concerned, it never progresses to a trial. There’s also the grotesque humor that comes from the decomposition of the body, the stench of which actually helps the siblings escape trouble on more than one occasion on their journey.

The quarreling among the siblings, and the back stories of all four of the main characters (including the father, whose life was full of joy and heartbreak), all give the novel its dramatic heft. There’s a contrast between the almost mundane lives they all lived prior to the start of the civil war in 2011-12 and the life-and-death struggle going on every day across Syria in the novel’s present day, as well as a parallel between the siblings arguing with each other and the split within Syrian society, pitting neighbor against neighbor in a conflict that has at least a half-dozen different groups fighting the government and sometimes each other. I have just superficial knowledge of the civil war, but it seemed clear that Khalifa was at least in part crafting a metaphor for the conflict and for his country, where siblings continue to argue long after the thing that ties them together – a nation, their father – is dead and decaying.

There’s another, less positive aspect to the connection between this work and Faulkner – the challenging prose. Khalefa’s writing is dense, without the long sentence structures of the bard of Yoknapatawpha County but a similar grounding in the details of every scene and every character. That creates a richer tapestry, with even secondary characters becoming more three-dimensional on the page, but also makes it a slower read for a novel just short of 200 pages.

Khalefa’s previous novel, No Knives in this City’s Kitchens, won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, given annually since 1996 to a novel written in Arabic that has not yet been translated into English, with such a translation part of the prize. I’d be curious if any of you have read that novel (or this one), since I liked Death is Hard Work enough to seek it out.

Next up: I’m currently reading the most recent Booker Prize winner, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka.

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→ December 1, 2022
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A Burning.

Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning became a surprise bestseller in 2020, shortly after its release, catching fire (pun intended) in part because of a page-turning narrative and terse chapters that keep the pace moving. It’s a well-written book, crafted as if by a far more experienced writer, but a simple plot and poorly developed characters make it a less satisfying read than other novels with similar themes and settings.

A Burning revolves around three characters in Kolkata: Jivan, a teenaged girl who aspires to the middle class; PT Sir, her former physical education teacher who finds himself rising quickly in the ranks of a Hindu nationalist party; and Lovely, a hijra and aspiring actress whom Lovely is teaching to read English. When Jivan witnesses a terrorist attack on a train near her home, she posts some anti-government comments on Facebook, and finds herself arrested and charged as an accessory to the crime. Lovely could serve as her alibi, as Jivan was with her right before the bombing took place, and PT Sir could be a character witness. Yet they both find that helping Jivan would hurt their own aspirations. PT Sir has gained this status with the party by serving as a witness against various defendants in criminal cases, claiming he saw them commit the crimes in exchange for a small payment and increased favor. Lovely seems to be falling for some kind of predatory scheme aimed at would-be actors, but when a demo reel she posts to WhatsApp goes viral, she’s suddenly famous for that and her connection to Jivan’s case.

The book is gripping, and extremely hard to put down; I read it inside of 48 hours, even knowing more or less what would happen to Jivan. The short chapters keep the book humming along, and the prose itself is clear and concrete. There’s little here beyond the purely descriptive – we don’t get a lot of inner monologues and there are no characters of any note beyond the main three. It’s a just-the-facts novel, almost like an old detective story, which makes the book feel urgent throughout.

There’s also some unsubtle commentary here about upward mobility in modern India, a society that has seen rapid growth of its middle and upper classes in the last 30 years, but that still has an enormous underclass that measures in the hundreds of millions of people. That backdrop may explain how, or why, two otherwise moral individuals, neither of whom had any real status prior to the terror attack, would consider throwing away the life of someone they knew just to help themselves. PT Sir comes across as venal, but Majumdar gives Lovely enough of a back story to depict her with nuance, as someone who survives, and has always had to grab any lifeline she sees.

However, there’s not a lot else going on below the surface, starting with Jivan. She’s less a character than a victim of fate and circumstance, bobbing along on the surface of an ocean she can barely see. She’s an object of pity, and Majumdar gives us just a sliver of her life in flashbacks, as a journalist interviews her, somewhat covertly, for a profile in a tabloid newspaper. They’re not that illustrative of why Jivan is in the situation she’s in, because Jivan didn’t actually do anything wrong – her Facebook comments weren’t even that inflammatory, and it’s a little hard to believe she’d end up charged with a capital crime for them, although that’s probably part of the point. It’s mob justice dispensed by a religious plurality operating with the power and impunity of governmental authority.

The religious divide in India forms a key subtext to the novel, although it doesn’t show itself directly much in the content. Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister since 2014, is a Hindu nationalist and member of a paramilitary group aligned with that ethnocentric philosophy. Since taking office, he’s overseen the passage of laws discriminating against the country’s large Muslim population and Muslims trying to emigrate to India while also revoking the special status of the disputed Jammu and Kashmir regions. PT Sir’s political rise is tied to a Modi-like politician whose party also espouses Hindu nationalist aims, so Jivan, a Muslim girl, is a convenient target for them, a way to stoke outrage and try to drive voters to the party, just as the current Republican Party in the U.S. is targeting LGBT people, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, and so on.

That reduces Jivan to a prop, a useful plot device without much agency or complexity as a character, and that’s ultimately what led me to feel like A Burning fell short of the mark. It’s such an easy, fast-paced read that it’s understandable why it became a bestseller, and it has the veneer of a Very Important Novel. It’s more of a facsimile of works that deal with similar subjects, like the novels of Arundhati Roy or Salman Rushdie, without their thematic depth or character development.

Next up: After finishing Scott Hershovitz’s Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids, I’m reading my friend Eden Robins’s debut novel When Franny Stands Up.

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→ October 24, 2022
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The Anomaly.

Hervé Le Tellier won the Prix Goncourt, the French equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 2020 for his psychological thriller The Anomaly, which was subsequently translated into over three dozen languages and became a worldwide bestseller, an uncommon outcome for a literary prize in a language other than English. It’s an impressive combination of a page-turning plot with a fascinating thought experiment in speculative fiction, crafted in expert fashion so that the twist comes late enough in the novel that you’re already engaged with its diverse characters.

The Anomaly opens with a series of what appear to be unconnected short stories about various people around Europe and the United States, all of whom happened to be on the same Air France flight Paris to New York that encountered severe turbulence on its way into JFK. Each of those stories ends with police approaching those individuals, for an unknown reason, and given how different each of these characters and their lives are, it’s especially foreboding. Anything else would just be a spoiler.

Le Tellier tries to accomplish two very different goals in The Anomaly, and succeeds on both counts. The story picks up the pace and intensity as it goes along; he wisely starts out the novel with a section on a contract killer, which sets a specific tone that doesn’t last but immediately grabs the reader’s interest. You’re already on edge before you even get to the second character, so despite the fact that this isn’t a novel about a hit man, that opening sets up the possibility that anything might happen. By the time you find out what’s actually going on, you’re already flying through the book (pun intended), and that’s when Le Tellier really messes with your head.

There’s a real philosophical question at the heart of The Anomaly, centering on identity and the nature of self, along with more modest questions of personal rights and ownership in a modern capitalist society. Once we find out why the police are gathering everyone who was on that flight, we’re thrown into the existential crisis that’s about to face the passengers, turning what seemed like a potboiler murder or spy mystery into a work that explores deeper and unanswerable questions through the actions and reactions of its characters. It’s a hard line to travel, but Le Tellier manages to do so because he’s set up a collection of characters who would naturally respond differently to the massive shock they receive.

Le Tellier has a solid sense of humor as well, working in a couple of misfit scientists who were first called in by the feds in the wake of 9/11 to come up with a packet of recommendations for the response to all manner of improbable events, only to have them befuddled by this impossible event and responding in kind – by making it up as they go along. There’s a slew of pop culture and other contemporary references, which might not age that well but do give the novel an added sense of realism that balances out the unreality of the latter half.

Whether this novel ultimately works for you will probably come down to your willingness to suspend disbelief for the thought experiment in the latter half. I had no issue with this because it’s so well crafted, even before we get to the reveal, and because the novel does not wallow in the details or make the event itself the center of the story. This is a humanist story – although there’s a brief detour into a meeting of religious leaders that is wryly funny – that has characters at its heart, with Le Tellier writing believable reactions for each of them and representing a broad range of emotions in the process. I found it incredibly compelling from start to finish, even as the author leaves some questions unresolved.

Next up: I’m reading this year’s Hugo winner, Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace.

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