→ June 10, 2021
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How Lucky.

As a general rule, I don’t review books by people I know. For one thing, I know a lot of people who write books. I’m a writer, and I wrote some books, and either of those things would probably put me in contact with lots of people who also write books. And life beyond that has also put me in contacts with people who write books. Sometimes people I didn’t know were writing books write books. There are a lot of books in my world. It’s a good thing I like to read.

Anyway, I’m going to break my own rule for a moment – not the first time, I think, but it’s rare – to talk about Will Leitch’s novel How Lucky. Will’s a longtime friend, and someone whose work I enjoy. He’s also one of the most prolific writers around, and when I see his newsletter come in on Saturday, I just can’t get over how many words he writes each week. I would never tell you that writing is hard for me, but I feel like an absolute sluggard compared to Will.

How Lucky is fabulous. It’s not what it seems to be, at first, and I wonder how well the book world will appreciate it for what it truly is – a character study of the highest order, full of empathy, insight, and humor. There’s a Rear Window-ish mystery here, and Will does a fine job executing that plot without resorting to too many clichés, and when the main character is in danger (as he must be, at some point, because the conventions of the genre say so), it doesn’t last too long. There are also some fun side characters who add a lot of humor in addition to giving the protagonist some sort of foils against whom he can work. But this is about Daniel, the narrator, the star, and eventually, the hero.

Daniel works from home, handling some social media work for a fictional, regional airline in the southeast, which means he’s extra busy on college football game days. He also has spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic, progressive disease that has him using a wheelchair and unable to speak without the aid of a speech-generating device. He lives in Athens, Georgia, and gets help a few times a day from a home health worker named Marjani, as well as frequent visits from Travis, Daniel’s best friend since childhood, a sort of lovable stoner right out of Inherent Vice.

Daniel’s days have a predictable routine, and over the few weeks right before the novel starts, he sees a University of Georgia student, whom we later learn is a recent arrival from China named Ai Chin, several mornings at the same time as she’s walking and he’s on his front porch. One morning, however, she gets into a tan Camaro Daniel hasn’t seen before, and within a day, there are reports that she’s gone missing, and Daniel suspects that he saw her abductor. The story becomes a little less straightforward than that as it moves along, but that is all secondary to what we get from Daniel. The mystery exists in service to the main character, to give Leitch more room to expand on Daniel’s personality and thoughts on his life in a body that is betraying him a hell of a lot faster than the rest of our bodies are betraying us.

The conceit that Daniel, despite being what most people would probably consider unlucky to an extreme degree, doesn’t see himself that way is central to the book. Will mentions in the acknowledgements (where, full disclosure, I am also mentioned) that he and his family are close with a family in Athens whose son was born with SMA as well, which introduced him to the community of families dealing with this disease. SMA is progressive, and degenerative, so while the life expectancy of children born with it has increased substantially over the last few decades, notably since the approval of a drug called Spinraza in December of 2016, it is ultimately terminal, and people with SMA see a faster decline in their quality of life as the motor neurons in the spinal cord shrink and lose function. I can’t speak for anyone with SMA, or even as a family member of someone with it or a similar disease (like ALS), but I didn’t find Will’s portrayal of Daniel here to be facile, or overly optimistic. Daniel strikes me as a realist, just a life-positive one. He’s not denying what’s happening, or what’s in front of him. He’s just determined to make the best of it, and appreciative of what the world – especially his mom, Travis, and Marjani – has given him. He combines that with some dry wit that, because I know the author and have listened to lots of his podcasts as well as read quite a lot of his work, is very much Will’s, and I heard much of Daniel’s inner monologue in Will’s voice.

I tore through How Lucky in just three days, even though I was pretty sure how the plot itself was going to conclude – not down to the details, of course, but in general, there are a limited number of ways Leitch could end this book, and one in particular that made the most sense given the rest of the novel. I just couldn’t get enough of Daniel’s character. Will has created a memorable, likeable protagonist whose voice is unique and who stands out especially today in the era of the antihero. I’ve seen comparisons of Daniel to all sorts of main characters from literary history, but he reminded me quite a bit of one of my own favorites, Miles Vorkosigan, the hero of Lois McMaster Bujold’s series of sci-fi adventure novels, himself born with a genetic disease that limited his growth and left him with brittle bones. Miles’ novels all work pretty much the same way: He throws himself into ridiculous situations, often with insufficient regard for his own well-being, and uses his brains to work his way out of trouble. It’s formulaic, but a formula I can’t help enjoying. Daniel is more well-rounded, and as the narrator, he gives us far more insight into his personality than Bujold gives us into Miles over multiple novels, but they share the same general outlook on life, and while Miles never says it explicitly, I think he’d echo Daniel’s view. We are all just lucky to be alive, and to experience the world with each other is one of life’s greatest gifts.

Next up: I’ve just finished Nella Larsen’s Passing, a film adaptation of which will appear on Netflix later this year.

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→ June 4, 2021
→ By

The Vanishing Half.

Brit Bennett has popped up as a favorite to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, to be announced next Friday, June 11th, for her second novel, The Vanishing Half, which HBO is already planning to adapt into a limited series. It is a fascinating work about “passing,” where lighter-skinned Black people pass as white (itself the subject of a novel, Nella Larsen’s Passing, that will appear on the big screen later this year), but with multiple dimensions of intersectionality as well, exploring what happens when two twins take divergent paths because one passes and the other does not.

Desiree and Stella Vignes are identical twins who live in a peculiar town outside of New Orleans called Mallard, a Black enclave where all the residents have relatively light skin – to the point that Mallard looks down on Black people with darker skin tones in many of the ways that you might associate with subtle white racism, even though Mallard residents themselves face racism subtle and unsubtle from white people from surrounding towns. That touches the girls’ lives when they’re seven years old and white men lynch their father as they watch, hiding with their mother, the devastation of which leads indirectly to their decision to run away from home as teenagers. They move to New Orleans, barely able to take care of themselves at first, but eventually settle into menial jobs, one of which comes to Stella because she can pass as a white woman, and the hiring person doesn’t even consider that she might be Black. Stella becomes the vanishing twin of the book’s title, leaving New Orleans without giving her sister any warning, leaving no trace of herself and cutting off any contact with her remaining family. The novel traces their two paths, and how each has one child, a daughter, the two of whom will eventually come into coincidental contact in California, forcing both Vignes sisters to confront their pasts, both shared and separate.

For a novel that isn’t very long – 343 pages, and a brief read for that length – The Vanishing Half has a lot to unpack, starting, of course, with its core examination of race and identity. Race is a social construct, and Bennett uses that as a launching point for the very unparallel lives first of the Vignes sisters, who find themselves in very different circumstances as they move into adulthood, and then their daughters, two cousins who come back together as if driven there by fate. (How Desiree’s daughter, Jude, first encounters and recognizes the aunt she’d never met requires some suspension of disbelief.) The interplay between race, identity – can you be who you are if you shed the race society first thrust upon you? – and later social status is the clear strength of the book, but it becomes muddled in places as Bennett’s approach becomes more intersectional, bringing in additional characters who are well-developed for secondary players but who aren’t additive to the main story. The narrative is more potent when she’s using the two sisters’ stories to explore different aspects of race and racism in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, which seems like the most likely argument for this book to win the Pulitzer.

Of the two main characters, Desiree seems the more developed, although there might be some primacy bias at work there – we get a few chapters of her story before we meet Stella at all. It’s also likely that Bennett left Stella more inscrutable by design, the “star” who is always just far enough away to remain somewhat impossible to truly know. Desiree’s daughter, Jude, shares a name with the Biblical figure who wrote about how God would punish false prophets, those who preached in his name without his truth, imploring the faithful to stand up for their beliefs – which she does, pursuing Stella and Stella’s daughter Kennedy with the tenacity of a true believer. As the twins fade into the background, it’s Jude who emerges as the novel’s most complete and compelling character, dealing with the consequences of both sisters’ choices in life, and a society that imposes such a cost on Blackness that her aunt chose passing – and giving up her sister, her mother, and her own identity – rather than continue to pay.

Next up: My friend Will Leitch’s first novel, How Lucky.

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→ June 1, 2021
→ By

The Ardent Swarm.

Tunisian author Yamen Manai’s slim fable The Ardent Swarm first appeared in the U.S. this February to wide acclaim, as the longtime novelist’s work hadn’t appeared in English before. Set in an unnamed country that bears a strong resemblance to Tunisia in the wake of the overthrow of the dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, the story follows the humble beekeeper Sidi, who sees one of his colonies of bees (whom he calls his “girls”) ravaged by what we all now know as murder hornets – Vespa mandarinia, the Asian giant hornet, which preys on honeybees. When he discovers the cause of the collapse of his colonies, two of his friends offer to fly to Japan to gather queen bees of the Apis cerana japonica subspecies, the only honeybee with a known defense mechanism against the murder hornets: the “ardent swarm,” where the honeybee workers surround the invader, exhale more carbon dioxide, and beat their wings furiously to raise the temperature up near 50 Celsius, cooking the hornet to death.

In Manai’s novel, the dictator, just referred to as Handsome One, has been deposed just as Ben-Ali was.  In the wake of his overthrow, various factions are competing for power, including the military and a radical Islamist group called The Party of God that tries to buy votes by distributing free food to rural villagers – a more extreme depiction of the Islamist party Ennahda, which won the most seats in the first parliamentary elections after Ben-Ali’s ouster, although secularist parties took power in subsequent elections. Sidi resists the The Party of God’s inducements, only to discover that they bear responsibility for the deaths of his “girls,” forcing him to make a choice that stands as a metaphor for the choice that faced Tunisia – and that other countries faced in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, often choosing less wisely than the Tunisians did.

The Ardent Swarm is an obvious parable, with obvious parallels to the Arab Spring while also serving as a lament and a warning over our cavalier relationship to our environment, and how fragile the ecosystem on which our species depends can be. We depend on these pollinators, including domesticated honeybees and wild bumblebees, to maintain our food supply, but a combination of stressors from parasites (notably the Verroa mite), habitat loss, and pesticides appears to be contributing to the decline of domestic stocks in North America and Europe. Minai ties the corruption of the Party of God to a breakdown in this historical relationship between humans and the land, short-circuiting it in a way that will leave people dependent on their government for basic needs – and thus more compliant to its demands – if they can’t, or forget how to, take care of themselves. Sidi stands nearly alone in his resistance to this pressure, and faces extremely difficult odds when trying to resurrect his colonies, an effort obstructed by further corruption by Islamist authorities in the government and in the university where one of his allies works.

A cynical take on The Ardent Swarm might compare it to the over-the-top fables of Paolo Coelho, which are well-written but simplistic. I saw this more as a modern and less oblique twist on the short novels of Italo Calvino, one of the greatest fabulists in literary history, an author very concerned with the relation between person and place. There’s wit here that reminded me more of Calvino, or even a little of Murakami, but with the seriousness of the French satirists of the mid-20th century. The Ardent Swarm is a plea, for democracy, for our environment, and for a different future than the one towards which we’re heading. It deserves a wider audience.

Next up: Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, one of the favorites to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when that award is announced next Friday.

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→ April 12, 2021
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The Oracle Year.

I’m not sure how I first heard about The Oracle Year, the first prose novel from graphic novelist Charles Soule, but I believe it was a positive review rather than a reader recommendation. It sat unpurchased on my wishlist for some time before I gave up and bought it myself, and then tore through the novel’s 400 pages in less than four days. It’s weird and improbable and incredibly compelling, with so much velocity to it that I could forgive its faults, and never could put the book down for long.

Will Dando is a more or less unemployed bassist who wakes up one morning with 108 oddly specific predictions about the future in his head, and when he writes them down, he realizes that the first few were accurate, so with the help of his friend Hamza, he dubs himself the Oracle, sets up a site (called the Site) to publish certain predictions, and sells a few others for a massive profit. This endeavor leads to substantial and largely foreseeable consequences, not the least of which is that he’s attracted the attention of the FBI, religious leaders, and a few other folks who would like to know his secret or just generally shut him down. For reasons that even he doesn’t fully understand, however, Will can’t just stop being the Oracle, even when it’s clear that doing so is his best shot to save himself, Hamza, and Hamza’s pregnant wife Miko, both of whom become deeply involved in the Oracle’s undertakings. Eventually, those predictions lead to real-world violence and many preventable deaths, sending Will into an existential crisis and opening up questions of free will, the inevitability of history, and just who sent Will those predictions in the first place.

The Oracle Year is nuts, and I mean that in a very good way. The pace never lets up, and Soule has managed to populate the book with interesting and strange characters – not many with depth, but at least with enough complexity to make them seem real on the page. There’s the Protestant televangelist Hosiah Branson, who fulminates against the Oracle from his pulpit, only to find that one of the 108 predictions is about him. There are two feds who clearly loathe each other but who have to work together to find the Oracle, because their boss says so. There’s the fixer named the Coach, the most intriguing and wonderful character outside of Dando – I’d read an entire book about the Coach, but I won’t spoil any details about them here. There are also a lot of people here who completely lose sight of their own humanity in trying to figure out who the Oracle is or what he’s doing or how to profit from his predictions, including, I’d argue, Hamza, even though much of what he plans as Will’s “business partner” turns out to be prudent. And then there’s Leigh Shore, the frustrated gossip reporter who latches on to the Oracle as a story and ends up (unsurprisingly) directly involved in the plot, a character who has one dimension, her ambition to get the story that will make her career, but it’s a good dimension for a character who ends up proving somewhat critical to the resolution of the story.

Where the plot goes is both extremely clever, reminiscent of good time-travel fiction like that of Connie Willis, and a little bit too easy. Soule has a very strong grasp of a storyline that could easily spin out of control, and brings back earlier elements to help close the story in a way that feels tightly plotted. He also has Dando and some of the other characters talk their way out of trouble that might not play out quite so easily in the real world – it’s not completely implausible, but at the least, Soule rushes through some of the dialogue where Dando (or someone else) argues a point and his antagonist concedes too quickly despite having the upper hand. It’s a small complaint for a novel that so engrossed me that I had to slow myself down to make sure I wasn’t skipping whole sentences, but I definitely got a sense near the end that I knew how this was all going to work out, and that it probably wouldn’t be wholly satisfying. But man did this thing hum along in a way few novels do, and Soule is obviously quite intelligent and tech-savvy enough to make some of the ways in which Hamza and Dando protect the Oracle’s identity credible.

Next up: Gilbert King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America.

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→ February 14, 2021
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The Shadow King.

Maaza Mengiste’s 2020 novel The Shadow King was nominated for the Booker Prize last year, making the shortlist before losing to the Scottish novel Shuggie Bain. An epic war novel that also comes across as deeply personal – which, it turns out, it is – The Shadow King also tells a forgotten story of the roles women play in wartime, roles that are not limited to staying home waiting for the men.

Set in Ethiopia in 1935, the main narrative revolves around Hirut, an orphaned girl taken in as a servant by a neighboring couple, Kidane and his wife Aster, as well as the nameless cook who also works for them. Kidane was friendly with Hirut’s parents and agreed to care for her, but Aster sees her as a romantic rival, and becomes increasingly abusive to Hirut through the novel’s first section. The cook has her own complicated, longtime relationship with Aster, and now tries to protect Hirut, as the two share cramped quarters while the vain Aster appears to live in relative luxury, demanding material rewards from Kidane and clutching them like heirlooms.

Then war arrives, in the person of the Italian fascisti, as the Italian tyrant Benito Mussolini attempted to annex the kingdom of Ethiopia, which they had tried previously to control via two prior wars and a disputed treaty. Their arrival leads Kidane to head off to war, but rather than waiting behind, Aster also grabs a gun and departs separately, also intending to fight, bringing Hirut and the cook with her. While at the front, they meet Minim, a poor man who happens to bear a strong resemblance to the Emperor, Haile Selassie, who ruled from 1930 to 1974 and was the last in a dynasty of rules that dated back to the 13th century. Selassie had fled to England, where he was ruling in exile (and comfort), so the leaders of the Ethiopians’ untrained army, with simple weapons and no armored vehicles (compared to the Italians’ modern weapons and tanks and highly trained soldiers), realize that seeing their king would help motivate the soldiers, so they use Minim as a stand-in so the fighters would believe Selassie had come to join them at the front.

Mengiste sets you up to think Hirut will be the downtrodden heroine with whom you should sympathize, with Aster the antagonist, but the novel isn’t that linear in plot or purpose. Aster takes on a new role when the war begins, while Hirut also just becomes less central, and Kidane turns out to be less a protector than Hirut originally thought. Mengiste also introduces a second subplot around the Italian photographer Ettore, a Jewish man who is serving a government he knows may choose to end his liberty or his life at any time, and that he learns has likely killed his parents, even as he continues to document the war and the army’s killings by photographing every Ethiopian they execute in their final moments. His story and that of the women will, of course, intersect before Ethiopia falls and the novel ends.

This is a war novel, and a feminist one too, but in no way does Mengiste let the latter mitigate or soften any part of the former – her women are strong, and unwilling to be limited by any social customs that keep women from fighting when the country’s existence is at stake. The Shadow King is brutal and violent. Her descriptions invoke the dry, hot, dusty climate where the soldiers gathered to plan guerrilla attacks and futile defenses – the Ethiopians fought for about 16 months, but succumbed in 1937 – and where Minim takes on the role of body double. They also add to the sense of desperation around Ettore, a noncombatant in the service of a country that views him as less than human and that will, soon enough, be willing to send him to his death, but who is every bit the stranger in a strange land in Ethiopia and visibly an intruder and enemy to the native population. The juxtaposition of the stories can be jarring, certainly incongruous, but their intersection is one of the novel’s most powerful moments, combined with the return of Haile Selassie from exile and the aftermath of the Italian occupation. I haven’t read Shuggie Bain and can’t comment on whether this is better, but I easily understand its nomination.

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→ December 4, 2020
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Piranesi.

Has any novel been as long-awaited as Susanna Clarke’s sophomore work Piranesi? Her first novel, 2004’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, is one of the best books I’ve ever read, perhaps the best written this century so far, a brilliantly rendered epic about rival magicians in the 1800s, complete with the funniest footnotes I’ve ever seen. Clarke fell ill after writing it, and other than one book of short stories, published nothing until this year, when Piranesi appeared, as if from another world, in September. While it’s quite unlike her first novel, Piranesi is remarkable – brilliantly rendered, again, but in a completely new way, with a new voice and an atmosphere of mystery and dread throughout.

Piranesi is the name of the narrator, although we come to learn that his story, and his name, are more complicated than they first appear to be. He lives alone in a gigantic castle of hundreds of rooms, some sort of labyrinth, and the only person he ever sees is one he calls the Other, who seems to be conducting some sort of research on Piranesi and the house. As the story progresses, though, it becomes clear that there’s far more to Piranesi than even he realizes, as his memories start to come back to him in dribs and drabs, and he realizes there are other people in the world besides himself and the Other.

The less said about the story, though, the better. This is book about memory and loss, and it’s best to recover Piranesi’s memories, and learn the truth about him and the House that he treats as a sort of god, along with him. Clarke has, once again, created an immersive, dreamlike otherworld that will pull you in, even though this one is as nebulous as the world of Jonathan Strange was clear and familiar. It was easy to look at her first novel and see her influences in 19th century British literature and to understand where she was gently parodying the books she obviously loved from that era. Piranesi, however, is unlike any novel I’ve ever read. The closest comparisons I can think of – David Mitchell’s Slade House came to mind – aren’t really that close.

While the mystery of who exactly Piranesi is and what he’s doing in this house – which floods often, and doesn’t appear to have any exits – unravels, Clarke gives the reader ample time and fodder to consider his plight. He’s alone most of the time, yet oddly at peace with his situation, even though he’s in frequent peril from everything from the rising waters to lack of food. (The Other brings him gifts, including food, although Piranesi largely seems to live off dried seaweed and fish he catches.) There are the bones of 14 other people in the House, and Piranesi seems to think they speak to him, somehow, as do the various statues. Was he always mad? Did solitude drive him to madness? Why isn’t the Other trying harder to help him? And who is 16, the person whom the Other warns Piranesi to avoid at all costs?

The House is a character of its own in the book, especially given how Piranesi interacts with it, and could stand as a symbol for any of several real-world analogues. It’s a dream world, in the sense of the endless structure of dreams, but even more resembles the human imagination – a fractalized rendition of the world of our minds in a series of rooms that might be changing each time Piranesi visits them, in a total space that might have an end that Piranesi hasn’t actually found. There’s a sense of incompleteness within the House that feels like the sort of dream you get when you’re not completely asleep, but where impossible things creep into your mind enough that you know after that you weren’t completely awake, and how within those semi-dreams you can also feel trapped by your own confusion. I’ve had more of these experiences during the pandemic, for some unknown reason, and while Piranesi was in progress long before COVID-19 existed as a pathogen in humans, it takes on a different meaning eight months into the ongoing plague.

There might be a bit too much exposition in the middle of Piranesi, where Clarke has to break the spell a little bit to explain to the reader just how Piranesi got to the House and what might be coming next, but the resolution is gripping and veers from the expected in multiple ways, not least in the timing of events towards the novel’s end. It isn’t Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell because nothing could be, and perhaps it’s for the best that Clarke’s follow-up isn’t in that same universe, as she’d once promised. This new creation of hers is just as magical as the first, but in its own, memorable way.

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→ August 28, 2020
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The City We Became.

N.K. Jemisin became the first author ever to win three straight Hugo Awards for Best Novel when all three parts of her Broken Earth trilogy took home the honor; she also became the first black woman to win that award at all, which is hard to believe in a field that brought us Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson, but the Hugos have had their issues with gender and especially race.

The City We Became is Jemisin’s first novel since the last book of the previous trilogy came out in 2017 (although she has written some short stories and a lauded novella called “Emergency Skin” in the interim). This new novel, which marks the beginning of a new trilogy or series, feels like a complete departure in tone and style from the Broken Earth novels, trading the dark, forbidding atmosphere of her future earth devastated by climate change and tectonic shifts for a modern New York City that’s full of life and humor, and also extradimensional superbeings.

Cities in this new novel can come to life, and express that through individual people – usually just one person for a city but, because New York is the Greatest City in the World, it gets one person per borough. When a person becomes a city, they gain powers related to that city’s identity and characteristics, or in this case the borough’s characteristics. Each borough of New York City has different demographics, and a different reputation, and Jemisin infuses the book with all of that, not least with the way Staten Island is a borough apart from the rest, and the quiet enmity that exists between it and the rest of the City.

As the novel opens, however, there’s another enemy that requires the immediate attention of the various City-humans, who also include Saõ Paolo and later Hong Kong. Something is invading New York City from an alternate dimension, although it appears to be coming up from below the ground, and it’s causing real damage even though only a few people – the City-humans and, for reasons never explained here, a few people with them – can see its physical form. The five boroughs are all ‘born’ simultaneously across the city, and have to find each other so they can team up, assuming they can work together, and try to fight their new, common enemy. She is, as you might guess, no pushover, and she comes with some serious attitude.

If the often funereal tone of the Broken Earth trilogy was an obstacle for you, you might find The City We Became a much easier go, because this book is madcap. If Zadie Smith wrote a speculative fiction novel, it would probably look a lot like this. Some of the humor is specific to New York, and maybe not everyone will enjoy Jemisin’s digs at Staten Island as much as I did, but plenty of it is situational and often laugh-out-loud funny.

That’s possible because Jemisin has put so much time and effort into creating these five main characters, giving them diverse identities, back stories, and personalities, so that each of them feels fully realized and their interactions with each other come across as natural conversations. So much of what’s funny in this book is organic, and even though the humor is entirely beside the rather serious points Jemisin is making, it also allows the seriousness to play better on the page.

And there is a lot going on under the surface, too. This is a novel of man’s impact on the environment, but it’s not anti-urban or anti-development; it’s a love letter to cities, to the life and culture they bring, and to the way they bring people together despite differences. The enemy’s tactics may make her rather unsympathetic, but, like Killmonger, she also makes some good points. When you learn why she’s so adamant about destroying New York – that the birth of a city here has dire consequences where she exists – and consider the parallels to real life, that there’s no such thing as unfettered growth without consequences, you can at least see her point, and why she might be able to convince one of the boroughs to listen to her.

Jemisin has clearly set up a larger story arc here beyond what happens in this one novel, although this story does have a concrete ending that’s more complete than those of the first two Broken Earth books. There are multiple unresolved questions, even some minor details (like what happened to Brooklyn’s townhouses), that point to a sequel. But there are also more characters in here to whom you might relate on some level, and the fact that these novels are written in the present day and in a very contemporary voice put me more into this story than I ever was in the previous trilogy, making this the best Jemisin work I’ve read to date.

Next up: Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson’s Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back.

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→ August 19, 2020
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The Glass Hotel.

Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven is one of my favorite books of this century, a gorgeous, lyrical story about a global pandemic (!) that leads to an improbably swift societal collapse, and small graces of humanity that survive it. Her long-awaited follow-up novel, The Glass Hotel, appeared this spring, and it’s far more grounded in the mundane realities of our world now, revolving around a Ponzi scheme run by a Bernie Madoff proxy character and a remote hotel he owns in British Columbia. Once again, the prose is beautiful, and the characters well-developed, but this time St. John Mandel has a harder time with the resolution, with an ending that felt far less satisfying no matter how I chose to interpret it.

As in Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel lacks a clear, single protagonist, instead giving us a wider array of characters who’ll flit in and out of the story as she moves around in time. The novel begins with the half-siblings Paul and Vincent; he’s a would-be musician and a bit of a ne’er-do-well, she’s a high school student who later bartends at the hotel, where she meets Jonathan, a financier several decades her senior who happens to be running a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme. Jonathan is widowed and makes Vincent an offer for her to serve as, for lack of a better term, a kept woman, appearing in public as his wife but not so in legal terms, which she accepts and seems to enjoy until his arrest and her return to a life of self-reliance.

Although the downfall of the Ponzi scheme has its appeal – I love a good story about con men or other frauds – the stories of Paul and especially Vincent are just more interesting, because their characters are more interesting. We don’t get any insight on why Jonathan would run this scam, and defraud hundreds of clients, many of whom lose their life savings because they put it all in his fund for its impossibly high (and consistent) rates of return. Paul screws up royally in the first proper chapter of the novel, and then ends up working with Vincent, briefly, at the hotel. Vincent has fallen off the side of a boat in the prologue, although the explanation of how she got there waits until the very end, but she returns in the next several chapters as we get her backstory along with Paul’s.

Following those two characters, even with the unnecessary jumping back and forth in time, is the real appeal of The Glass Hotel, especially since the hotel of the title isn’t even in the book all that often – it’s the setting where Vincent meets Jonathan, and where Paul commits a crime of vandalism that only becomes more serious in our eyes much, much later in the novel. If anything, I wanted more of Vincent, both because her character is so solid and complex, and because her arc, from an unhappy if comfortable suburban life to bartending at a hotel to sudden wealth beyond anyone’s imagination to an equally sudden fall, is itself more than enough to support an entire story.

There’s a section detailing the implosion of Jonathan’s scheme, bringing in several new characters and one or two we’d seen previously, that just flies, almost as if this were an action sequence rather than the end of a long white-collar crime, although I did get the sense that the collection of people involved in the fraud were a bit too diverse – we get an array of possible responses to imminent arrest and possible incarceration, but they’re also too distinct from each other, giving it the subtle feel of something that was carefully plotted rather than created organically. That same feeling comes up several times in the book, where the prose is so lovely but you can’t help but catch glimpses of the structure and foundation beneath the novel.

I do love St. John Mandel’s writing, and tore through most of this book in three days while we were away for the weekend; an uneven book from her is still a solid read, and her skill for creating compelling characters is itself reason to pick up anything she does. There’s even a brief David Mitchell-like reference to the pandemic of Station Eleven, and I assume to her earlier novels as well. Vincent deserved a better ending here.

Next up: N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became.

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→ August 14, 2020
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Or What You Will.

Jo Walton’s Hugo-winning novel Among Others   is one of my favorite novels of any genre, a beautifully written story around two incredibly compelling characters that just happens to have a slight element of fantasy to it. It’s an exemplar of genre fiction in that the fantastical parts of the book accentuate the plot but don’t define it. That book led me to pick up her 2019 novel Lent, which delves into Renaissance and Roman Catholic history and, again, uses a fantasy-like twist to tell a better story, but where the main character is the real star. And that, in turn, led me to her brand-new novel Or What You Will, which seems like an even more serious novel while drawing on the great history of metafiction in literature, going back to Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler… and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds to explore life, death, and meaning in new ways.

Or What You Will gives us Sylvie, the author, in her 70s, widowed, writing her new novel while visiting Firenze, which serves as the inspiration for her fictional duchy of Thalia and a series of novels set in the equivalent of the Renaissance, featuring several characters borrowed from Shakespeare’s plays (notably The Tempest and The Twelfth Night, the latter of which gives this book its title). The narrator and protagonist, however, is a voice in Sylvie’s head who has become many characters within her novels, and who realizes that when Sylvie dies, he will too, so he hatches a plan to make them both immortal through her writing – not just through fans, but a form of actual immortality in a Thursday Next-like world inside her books.

The chapters alternate, roughly, between scenes from within this new Thalian novel, which include Orsino and Viola (The Twelfth Night), Caliban and Miranda (The Tempest), Geryon (Dante’s Inferno), and the real-world Marsilio Ficino; and conversations between Sylvie and the narrator that unfurl the former’s life story, including an abusive first marriage and an idyllic second one, a brutal and unloving mother, and a late-blooming yet successful literary career. Those introspective chapters, which I assume at least draw a little from Walton’s own life (she didn’t get her first published novel until she was 35), are clearly the superior ones here, implicit meditations on life and legacy, unfolding a fascinating personal history of a three-dimensional character. The chapters set in Thalia are strongly reminiscent of Lent, which was set in Firenze during the Renaissance and featured Ficino and Pico della Mirandolo, who also appears in this book, but there are a couple of twists to life in Thalia versus that of real-like Italy that put it strongly in the realm of science fiction or fantasy. The characters in Thalia are aware that their world is different, and that other worlds exist, although they only know Sylvie as a god. It becomes a bit like Lisa Simpson’s “I’ve created Lutherans!” experiment; we’re looking down at these people, waiting for them to figure out what we already know, and knowing that they’ll have to figure it out for the book to end. There’s a separate intrigue around the rivalry between Orsino and Geryon, and the sudden appearance of Caliban from beneath the ground, which is moderately interesting but takes a clear back seat to the main storyline.

Walton manages to keep the narrator’s specific plan to save Sylvie’s life, and thus his own, out of the novel until close to the end, and introduces a clever wrinkle for the narrator to surmount for the entire plan to work. The conclusion is a bit beside the point, however, since it doesn’t work in our world and thus prompts you, the reader, to think about your own mortality and legacy, something that has at least been on my mind more than ever this year, between the pandemic, friends losing loved ones, and changes in my own life. That’s really why the novel works even with its implausible fantasy elements – that, and Walton’s typically lovely writing, especially when it comes to describing our world’s Firenze, a city she clearly loves – these themes are universal and timeless, and the way she presents them is both novel and still as comfortable as the familiar routines of Sylvie’s writing life.

Next up: I’m halfway through Emily St. John Mandel’s newest novel, The Glass Hotel.

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→ August 4, 2020
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Utopia Avenue.

David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue is, by his standards, almost a weirdly straight story, riveting and clever but mostly grounded in the realistic and the mundane. Following the rise and fall of a fictional English rock band in the late 1960s, featuring copious cameos by real-life rock figures from the British and American scenes of the time and more than a few references to Mitchell’s other works, the novel runs 570 pages and somehow feels like it’s still insufficient.

Utopia Avenue is also the name of the band in the novel, formed by an ambitious if not-very-successful producer Levon Frankland who assembles the band from the ashes of other London groups. Singer and keyboardist Elf Holloway is the most established, while guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet seems to have come from nowhere, bassist Dean Moss is about to hit rock bottom when Levon grabs him, and drummer Griff is looking for a new band. The four seem like they shouldn’t get on, let alone create music that will resonate with critics and fans, but it does happen in credible fashion. Mitchell chronicles their ascent from obscurity to moderate success in such detail that even mundane events and conversations become compelling.

The band’s story, at least their rise, is somehow that of every real band of the time but of no band at all. Each band member has some off-field drama, mostly drawn from the annals of rock history but deconstructed and recombined in Mitchell’s hands so that most of the parallels are obscured to the point that you won’t particularly care. Jasper’s trouble with mental illness derives from Syd Barrett’s, but Syd shows up in the pages of Utopia Avenue and Jasper’s story goes in a different direction than Syd’s did. Dean probably gets more than his share of the plot that happens away from studio and stage, although much of that is of his own making, and it’s not as if any of what he provokes or endures is unrealistic anyway. Perhaps there’s a bit too much of the Yoko Ono myth here, a bit too much sex-and-drugs there, but the current of the stream here is strong enough to keep the story moving despite those liberties.

The only misstep comes with the lyrics – granted, many rock bands’ lyrics are less than scintillating, but Mitchell’s strength in prose does not translate well to verse, and it doesn’t quite fit the praise the band members receive from critics and other musicians for their lyrics. Each chapter in Utopia Avenue is also the name of a song from the band, which one band member wrote in reaction to a real-life event described therein. It’s a clever conceit for the plot, but translating those ideas into lyrics doesn’t read well on the page.

I’ve only read two of Mitchell’s previous works, Cloud Atlas and Slade House, so I caught many of the references to characters from the former but also know I missed copious allusions to some of his other novels, notably Bone Clocks and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I loved Utopia Avenue, but I almost certainly didn’t get the full experience because I haven’t read all of his prior works; it has convinced me to go read the other five, starting from his first, Ghostwritten. Luisa Rey, my favorite character from Cloud Atlas, appears as a secondary character. Robert Frobisher gets a mention. You can see Jasper’s surname appears in one of his earlier books, and if you know what Horology is – I only barely knew, by way of Slade House – that ends up playing a role in one of the characters’ stories. The universe across Mitchell’s books is intricate and I assume rewards deep reading, leaving what I presume was a layer below the surface of this novel that I couldn’t appreciate.

Utopia Avenue’s fictional stay at the top doesn’t last, of course, but even with the detailed description of their gradual rise, it’s still somehow too short. All four band members are wonderfully three-dimensional; the three men are all emotionally complex and flawed, while Mitchell gives Elf a different sort of complexity without imbuing her character with as many negative traits. Even Levon, who gets quite a bit less screen time, has his moments and at least gives the sense that Mitchell drew him more completely even if it didn’t all appear on the page. How well Mitchell handles the various cameos by real people is probably a question beyond my capacity to answer, given how little I know about what these men and women were like in real life, but I’d like to know if any of their contemporaries weigh in on the topic.

Mitchell has been shortlisted for the Booker twice, and my sense of that award is that, like so many awards in the arts and in sports, the more you’re considered for it, the more likely you are to get it at some point. I’ll be curious to see if Utopia Avenue at least gets him on the shortlist again, as it feels less ambitious than, say, the nested six-novel structure of Cloud Atlas, yet in the perspective of his entire oeuvre it’s clearly a more progressive work than it might first appear. At worst, it should grace many best-of-2020 lists this December.

Next up: I’ll be interviewing Dr. Angela Duckworth for my next podcast, so I’m reading her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

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