→ 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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→ March 4, 2020
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The Topeka School.

Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School was shortlisted for this year’s National Book Critics Circle award for fiction and has now moved up to #2 on that Pulitzer predictions page I’ve mentioned a few times here. It’s a strange book, although that’s true of several of the leading contenders this year, with a nonlinear narrative, multiple lead characters, and a story without a clear ending or singular theme. I don’t know if that makes it a better contender for awards, as it is clearly more ambitious than the typical novel, but the result for me as a reader was that it felt incomplete.

The Topeka School is set in Topeka, Kansas, and the school in question is a foundation for young boys with psychological disorders, run by Jonathan Gordon, whose son Adam was the protagonist of an earlier Lerner novel and is a stand-in for the author himself. Adam is the star debater at the local high school and poised to win the national competition in one specific area of debate – none of this meant anything to me, as my school didn’t have a debate team and I doubt I would have had anything to do with it if it had – but is facing crippling anxiety and an existential doubt about the entire process. His mother, Jane, also a psychologist, has written a feminist non-fiction book that landed her a spot on Oprah and made her the target for endless meninist trolls who call the Gordons’ house to threaten her, only to have her troll them back in rather expert fashion. Jonathan is a vague presence next to the sharply drawn Jane and Adam, an unfaithful husband who sleeps with his wife’s best friend and is overly absorbed in his work ‘saving’ the boys at the Foundation, which all goes awry when one of them, Adam’s intellectually disabled classmate Darren, ends up in trouble with the law. 

Adam is the most prominent character in the book, but the star is really Jane, who could have supported the entire novel on her own if Lerner had given her the chance. She’s a strong personality, including that heroic response to her would-be harassers, but also has a history of abuse at the hands of her father with which she’s still coming to grips and that clearly affects her choices decades later. More exploration of that angle and how her mother’s willful ignorance of the abuse destroyed that relationship as well would have elevated the novel and helped make her even more of a central character, as would have more detail on her reaction to Jonathan’s infidelity, but she doesn’t get quite enough page time.

Part of the reason for that is the focus on Adam’s debating endeavors, which I think is a metaphor for our incredibly terrible political environment right now, where winning may be more a function of being louder than being better or being right. A new debating technique called the “spread” has become popular at the time of this novel (it’s set in the 1990s); the speaker simply talks as quickly as possible, raising as many points as they can during their allotted time, and forces opponents to try to keep up in their rejoinders as any unanswered arguments are considered points won. It’s a bit of an arcane point, like basing portions of a hockey novel around the neutral-zone trap, and too inside-baseball at least for me, even though I thought I could see the parallel to social media efforts to drown out opponents and boost candidates through sheer volume of content (even if the support is fake).

The Darren subplot is even more undercooked, and feels utterly tacked on; I was waiting for Lerner to tie it into the Gordons’ story more convincingly but he never does. Darren’s cognitive difficulties make him a target for bullies and an occasional object of derision for classmates, and his eventual lashing out is inevitable and also a lot less than I feared it might be (I thought Lerner was setting up a mass shooting or something similar, but he wasn’t). Darren’s story is largely told through 2-4 page interstitials between the Gordons’ narratives, and his actual connection to the Gordons goes no further than his time working with Jonathan. There’s a half-hearted thread about Darren falling a bit under the sway of an angry old white man, but that story fizzles out without impact. Instead he’s only a side note, as are the hatemongers of the Westboro Baptist Church, who also appear on the fringes of the novel and are among the people harassing Jane on the phone and in person around Topeka.

I’m just not sure I get the adulation for The Topeka School, which ended up less than the sum of its parts. Lerner works in a lot of hifalutin vocabulary from psychology – I don’t know why you’d ever need the word ‘analysand,’ for example, and while ‘cathexis’ is a fun word it also probably isn’t appropriate for its usage here – which makes the book seem smarter than it ultimately is. There are good ideas floating around in here, but the lack of focus on either Jane or Adam means they’re not fully fleshed out, and the novel ends before anything is all that well resolved. Maybe it’ll win one of these awards because it’s ambitious and feels relevant to multiple themes in American society of 2020, but I don’t think it measures up to its primary competition.

Next up: Myra Goldberg’s Feast Your Eyes.

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→ February 26, 2020
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Trust Exercise.

Susanne Choi won the National Book Award this year for Trust Exercise, a novel that sneaks up on the reader, starting out on familiar ground as a story of teenage drama among students at a school for the arts before Choi’s ambition becomes apparent in the novel’s second and third parts. It’s metafictional and disorienting – I still don’t quite know what happened within the book – and morphs into a question of who owns the truth, or just has the right to tell it.

Sarah and David are classmates at CAPA, a prestigious (fictional) high school in Houston, where they’re both in the school’s vaunted theatre program, led by the enigmatic Mr. Kingsley, the sort of dream teacher you might expect to find in Fame. He pushes his students when he sees greatness within, and blurs boundaries with his favorites, inviting them out to lunch or occasionally to the home he shares with his husband – this, in the 1980s, when it was rare for a man to be openly gay, much less to do so in Texas where I believe it was still a capital crime. Sarah and David are drawn to each other, start an intense relationship, break up over something stupid, have a tryst in the school hallway, stop speaking to each other, and, when a group of young actors and their teacher/chaperone arrive from England, get entangled with other people. This all appears to come to a head when one of the older actors from England forces himself on Sarah in a way that she herself doesn’t entirely understand as nonconsensual.

That’s about half of the novel, and after that everything shifts in a way that can’t be discussed without spoiling the great pleasure of watching Choi handle the vehicle she’s created. This is much more than a story about star-crossed lovers, and it’s more than just the story of a sexual assault and its aftermath; Choi brings the reader in for a close look at the action, and then pans the camera back for a wider view, and then pans it back even further for one last glimpse. With each move backward in granularity, Choi moves forward in time, emphasizing the nature of narrative and who actually ‘owns’ the right to tell a story – a theme that works especially well because it is never clear what the facts of the story are. The first half of the novel appears to be a completely conventional story, and then Choi reveals that it’s so much than what it seems, which opens up the book to a set of timely themes and questions. In an era of public allegations of sexual harassment, who gets to tell these stories – and, of course, how they’re told – should be part of every discussion.

Saying too much more about Trust Exercise risks spoiling the various surprises and twists of the book, which jarred me at first but ultimately work well and forced me to think and rethink about what Choi was trying to express. The downside is that I’m still not sure exactly what happened, both in the sense of what parts of the narrative were factual (within the fiction) and in the sense of who was telling the truth, right down to the ambiguous epilogue involved a new character whose true identity is never made clear. There’s value in this abstruseness, even in disorienting the reader, but I was also left deeply confused by what I’d just read, and that eventually yielded to some dissatisfaction with Choi’s decision to reveal too little when she might have answered a few of the open questions without affecting the critical themes of the book.

Next up: Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, which, like Choi’s book is a potential contender for this year’s Pulitzer Prize; Lerner’s book is one of the five finalists for this year’s National Book Critics Circle award for Fiction.

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→ February 24, 2020
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Disappearing Earth.

Julia Phillips’ debut novel Disappearing Earth is the story of a place more than the story of its people, set on the Kamchatka peninsula of eastern Russia, looking at the aftermath of the kidnapping of two young sisters across a gamut of characters in the town where they lived. The book has been widely praised and has even shown up on the list of possible Pulitzer contenders I check each spring (pprize.com), despite its distant storytelling and a setting that couldn’t have less to do with the United States.

The opening chapter sees the two sisters tricked by a man they don’t know into going into his car; once it becomes clear that he’s kidnapping them, they disappear from the story, which shifts each chapter to a new central female character, looking at their lives in the wake of the girls’ abduction (although it’s not known for sure to these characters if they were taken or drowned accidentally). Some of these women are trying to get away from a town they view as stifling, or that lacks opportunities, whether professional or romantic, that might be available elsewhere. Some of the stories focus on how the (single) mother of the girls ends up the target of gossip that blames her in some way for their disappearance, or how other mothers in the town react to the possibility that there’s a predator in their midst. Another young woman disappeared about a year earlier, but because she was 18 the police and the gossips assumed she ran away, perhaps to Moscow to pursue a better life. 

The novel really lacks a through line to connect these stories in any way beyond the kidnapping, which is only indirectly related to just about every character in the stories until the penultimate one, where their mother is the central character and encounters the mother of the teenager who disappeared. It’s not a coincidence that that is the most powerful and best-written chapter in the book, as the stakes for the main character are immediately obvious and create complex relationships with the other people she encounters right from the outset. For example, the mother of the missing teenager has also lost a child, but there’s a pervasive belief that that woman left of her own volition, and the circumstances were different enough that the mother of the two sisters feels less of a kinship than the other woman does.

Phillips’ evocation of the novel’s setting is the strongest part of Disappearing Earth, evidence of the time she spent in Kamchatka in 2011 via a Fulbright scholarship. Every place, whether town or wilderness, comes across as desolate and forbidding, yet also ordinary to the people who grew up and live there, because for so many of them it’s all they’ve ever known or all they ever will know. The shadow of the disappearances, and what they might mean in a small town where people once thought of themselves as safe – and some of the old-timers actually talk about the Soviet era as the good old days – is a sort of background shade to the dim light of Kamchatka itself. 

The novel never generates as much interest in any character or story as it does in the kidnapping itself, a story that is more or less resolved in the brief final chapter. It’s not that the women in Disappearing Earth are themselves uninteresting, or that their problems are trivial (some are, most aren’t), but that when you begin a novel with the kidnapping of two little girls, everything else is going to feel like a digression until you get back to that narrative. The stories in between the first and last chapters just feel cold, and while that fits the novel’s setting, it doesn’t make for a particularly compelling read.

Next up: I just finished Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise yesterday and starter Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School.

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→ February 6, 2020
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The Nickel Boys.

Colson Whitehead won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his last novel, The Underground Railroad, which re-imagined that escape network as an actual subterranean train system that helped slaves leave the South before the Civil War. His follow-up, The Nickel Boys, stays in the world of the mundane, drawing on the true story of a violent ‘reform school’ in the South to tell yet another dazzling, compelling story about race and the experience of people of color in the United States, and how white elites have continued to suppress the black populations in the South long after the Civil War was over.

The Nickel Boys takes place largely in the panhandle of Florida, near Tallahassee, at a fictional reform school for juveniles called the Nickel Academy, where white and black boys are separated into different houses, and the treatment is brutal and dehumanizing. It’s based on the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, which operated for over 100 years and at one point was the largest institution of its type in the country. The school closed in 2011 after a massive state investigation into charges of abuse, and a year later Erin Kimmerle, a forensic anthropologist from the University of South Florida, used ground-penetrating radar to find mass graves of on the site. They’ve found an estimated 80 corpses already, with exhumations ongoing. (The State of Florida officially apologized to the surviving boys in 2017, and as of September of 2019, after two-plus years of delays, work finally began on building memorials to the boys who died at Dozier and its satellite campus.)

Whitehead draws on survivors’ accounts to create the Nickel Academy, building his narrative around a boy named Elwood, arrested for being a passenger in a car that may have been stolen, ruining his hopes of bettering himself by continuing his education. Elwood has a strong moral compass, one that sometimes works against him because he speaks up when the world thinks he shouldn’t. Once imprisoned at Nickel, he meets Turner, another young African-American inmate who matches Elwood’s idealistic view of the world with an equally powerful cynicism, and a sense of self-preservation that he tries to impart to Elwood to keep the latter boy from meeting the fate of others who’ve ‘disappeared’ in the middle of the night.

Life at Nickel is about what you’d expect for black boys at a reform school run by whites in the 1950s and 1960s. They’re barely fed, because the administrators skim off the food sent for the black kids (less so when it’s for the white boys across the property) and sell it to local restaurants; they do the same with other supplies, like those for the boys’ education. They’re beaten in a building called the White House – the same as the name of the actual building that still stands on the Dozier property where illicit beatings took place – and many are sexually assaulted by guards. Boys who try to escape or otherwise draw the ire of the administration are taken from their beds in the middle of the night and tortured to death, after which their families – if they have any – are told that the boys ran away. There’s a nominal system for earning your way to release if you follow the rules and don’t push back, although in Whitehead’s depiction it’s hard to see many boys running this gauntlet successfully, given the venality of the administrators and bloodthirst of the guards.

The narrative itself revolves around Elwood and Turner, and Elwood’s own hopes that he’ll earn his way out – although the guards take him to the White House once – and tell the world about what’s going on at Nickel. Whitehead could have made this story even more brutal than it was, but instead he gives the reader just enough to depict the inhumanity of the school without dwelling on lurid details. This is a story of two boys, of two different ways of facing their incarceration and subjugation, and of a society that didn’t care at all about a few more dead black boys. Nothing Whitehead can write here is as damning to Florida, and to the American South, as what actually happened at Dozier and how long it has taken the state to even acknowledge the crimes committed against children of color at the school, but the way he depicts these two boys, especially the depth of Elwood’s character and the tragedy of his backstory, make The Nickel Boys an immersive and compelling read even though you know that any page could bring a scene of unbearable violence. I have no means or justification for predicting the Pulitzer winners, but if Whitehead wins for the second time in four years I won’t be the least bit surprised.

Next up: Julia Phillips’ Disappearing Earth.

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→ December 5, 2019
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Early Riser.

Jasper Fforde was one of my favorite authors in the first decade of the 2000s, from his Thursday Next series (starting with The Eyre Affair) to the two Nursery Crimes stories to his Shades of Grey, a brilliant, dystopian novel that ended on a still unresolved cliffhanger. I even got my daughter hooked on his young adult trilogy that began with The Last Dragonslayer, also still hanging as he decided to make it a tetralogy. All of his output screeched to a six-year halt, however, due to what he termed a “creative hiatus,” that ended with the long-awaited release in early 2019 of a new, standalone, self-contained novel, Early Riser.

Fforde started talking about this novel in the early 2010s, although I think it has undergone many changes since that point. It’s also a dystopian story, unrelated to Shades, this one in an alternate universe where the planet is exceptionally cold and humans must hibernate during winters. Set in Wales, where Fforde lives, the book follows Charlie Worthing as he’s brought into the equivalent of the night police in this world and uncovers a plot around “nightwalkers,” people whose cognitive functions have been severely impaired by interruptions to their winter sleep cycles. Such people, who kind of resemble docile zombies, take on menial labor tasks for the conglomerate HiberTech, which also produces the drug (Morphenox) that allows people to hibernate in dreamless sleep that doesn’t require the kind of calorie-loading other species must undertake before several months of slumber.

Fforde’s genius in all of his books prior to Early Riser was his humor, which played out in multiple ways, from slapstick to wordplay to more ornate situational gags. It’s almost completely absent in Early Riser, and there are a few points where it seems like he’s trying to be funny and failing – none more obviously so in his character names, which has turned from an amusing sideline from earlier books (e.g., just about all characters in the Thursday Next series have absurd names, from the title character to Braxton Hicks to Brikk Schitt-Hawse) into a tired bit here. Just one character has a clever name in this book, and I can’t mention it here because of the spoiler involved, but it’s not even a bad pun – just a smart, slightly esoteric reference that made me think, “yeah, actually, that is a pretty good name.”

The rest of the story, however, just isn’t funny in any way. So many reviews cite how hilarious the book is, but it’s not – the story itself feels serious, and most of the plot itself tends towards the serious side. I can see places where Fforde tried to add some levity, such as the occasional, bold-and-italic “Whump” lines that indicate somebody got hit by surprise, but his light touch with dialogue and story are absent here. It makes sense on some level that Fforde is trying to tell a more serious tale here, with both an unsubtle climate-change allegory and a more directly anti-corporate take than the parodic Goliath of the Thursday Next series, but it’s distracting to read Fforde’s voice as if its affect has gone flat.

As for the story itself … it’s fine, nothing more. I never felt all that invested in Charlie’s story, or the person he ultimately tries to save, in part because I knew the former was going to work out (and had a rough idea of how) and because the latter character isn’t well developed enough before she ends up in jeopardy. It seems like Fforde might have wanted to go to a darker, creepier place than in his other books, but pulled up a little short rather than committing fully to creating something so contrary to his prior work. The dark of the novel – there are multiple scenes set outside in blizzard conditions, so Charlie can’t see what’s happening – doesn’t quite lend itself to the sense of foreboding that Fforde seemed to want. The result undermines a bit of the allegory within the book as well: I could understand the goal of the climate-change metaphor, but it felt distant from the plot itself.

The good news, I suppose, is that the creative hiatus is over, and Fforde’s next book, The Constant Rabbit, is due out in the UK in July of 2020, to be followed by the fourth and final Dragonslayer book within twelve months. He still owes us the Shades of Grey sequel and I suppose one more (final?) Thursday Next novel, but at least now he’s back to writing regularly.

Next up: I’m almost through Manjit Kumar’s Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality as well as Alan Alda’s If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?

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→ September 13, 2019
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Bowlaway.

I’d never even heard of Elizabeth McCracken until my friend Eden suggested to me at Gen Con that I check out McCracken’s newest novel Bowlaway. McCracken, who edits Ann Patchett’s novels, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1996 and has earned some smaller plaudits for her work since then, but this was the first time I’d encountered her. Based on n of 1, at least, she is a wonderful storyteller on par with Patchett, and while I’m not really sure if there’s a broader point to Bowlaway, I was completely enraptured by the story, which washes over the reader with waves of fun or interesting characters.

Bowlaway opens with a woman in a graveyard in a fictional town just outside of Boston just after the turn of the 20th century, and no real clue of how she got there. Bertha Truitt doesn’t remember her previous history, or just isn’t telling, but she enters the town on a mission to introduce candlepin bowling, a regional variation on bowling with a much smaller bowl and slimmer pins. She founds an alley called, of course, Bowlaway, and attracts a group of regulars, including several local women, while also employing a pair of the town’s eccentrics. Bertha marries and has a child, and when she dies, the narrative shifts to her husband, then to his housekeeper, and on around to other people who are all primarily connected through the bowling alley, including one later owner who wants to ban women from the alley.

The characters are mostly well-drawn and three-dimensional, flawed and interesting and often amusing in their own peculiar ways. Bertha’s departure from the novel is a disappointment, as she’s the most larger-than-life character in the book and provides so much of the spark that sets the novel ablaze. If there’s a movie or TV series to be made from Bowlaway, it’s going to revolve around Bertha, who has most of the best lines in the book and could also be the breakout character getting quoted and captured in GIFs. Margaret, the housekeeper, is also very well-written, but her character is suffused with sadness and there’s a sort of simplicity to her personality that makes her less enjoyable on the page. The one character I found a bit disappointing is Bertha’s husband, Leviticus Sprague, whom McCracken gives an idiosyncratic way of speaking but who disappears into the bottle after his wife’s death; Margaret’s kids are also a bit meh, especially the profligate one who also takes to drink.

While Bowlaway has a real conclusion to its plot, it’s not clear whether there’s a point to all of this other than to tell a good, fun story. McCracken seems to love her characters, and that alone is enough to make the book a compelling read, although I did stop a number of times because of that persistent, subcutaneous feeling that I was missing a greater theme. It’s not quite empty calories, since McCracken’s prose is good (and smart) and the characters work, but it’s unusual for me to read fiction that isn’t genre that doesn’t have something more significant going on underneath the hood.

There is, however, the mere passage of time, which itself does allow McCracken to get into some additional cultural shifts as her fictional town goes from a somewhat sleepy hamlet to an active suburb of Boston, connected to the city via mass transit. The novel spans something close to 70 years – she’s vague with some of the dates – so she tracks characters, the alley, and the town across the decades, working in real-world events like the Great Molasses Flood. She also has the habit of dispatching characters major and minor in gruesome ways; the molasses takes one, another goes the way of Old Krook; others are killed by flying objects or a runaway horse. Death is just another detail in the world of Bowlaway, especially when the characters aren’t essential.

It’s really a better book than I’ve made it sound here – I tore through it and, once I got past the fact that the best character was gone before the midpoint of the novel, found myself enraptured by McCracken’s prose and knack for spinning new stories out of the spare threads of the ones before. I don’t know that it amounts to much, but the journey there is enough.

Next up: Gary Smith’s Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics.

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→ June 18, 2019
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Magpie Murders.

Anthony Horowitz created one of my favorite television series of all time, the magnificent British mystery show Foyle’s War, which stands well on its own but also comes across as a loving homage to the golden age of mysteries, with its gentleman detective D.C.S. Foyle and solutions drawn as much from psychology as from unearthing clues. He’s also been tabbed by the estates of Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming to write novels using those authors’ signature characters, including the Sherlock Holmes novel Moriarty, which I found a quick read but unfaithful in style to the Conan Doyle novels and too reliant on a huge twist for its resolution. He’s also written three standalone novels of original characters, of which Magpie Murders is one, and it’s every bit as brisk and compelling … but this time, the twists work incredibly well, and the reader is rewarded with two different mysteries to solve.

Magpie Murders presents us with a Poirot-like detective, the Holocaust survivor Atticus Pünd, who has both the little Belgian’s dispassionate approach to solving murders and endearing arrogance, drawn against his first instincts into a pair of murders in a small English town full of eccentric but well-defined characters. Pünd is also dying of an inoperable brain tumor, and this is almost certain to be his last case, but this seems to motivate him further to solve it rather than dwell on his imminent death. The murders are linked more by place than by method or motive, adding to the complexity, and as is typical of mysteries of the era Horowitz evokes, everyone had a reason to want the latter victim dead.

The novel runs over 400 pages, which is quite long for the genre (in my experience, only Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels reached that length), but that’s because there’s a second mystery wrapped up in the first one, and I won’t spoil it here. The first narrative breaks right before Pünd appears ready to reveal the solution, and you’re plunged into a totally different story, written in a more modern tone and involving a new set of characters, one where it isn’t even clear that a murder has taken place. (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, yes, there was a murder, because otherwise why would Horowitz even engage in this bit of metafiction?) The gambit here is that the end of the Pünd novel is missing, and the new narrator has to find the absent chapters to solve the mystery, which leads to a discovery of a murder and a conclusion that is more conventional for mysteries set in the last few decades. The marvel here is that Horowitz has nested two distinct, connected stories told in two entirely different voices, each mirroring a particular style of mystery novels – one from the golden era, one more contemporary – without ever ripping the reader out of the spell of the entire enterprise.

The twin payoffs here – I guessed the identity of the murderer in the inner story, but not in the Pünd one – help justify the book’s length, and Horowitz, who has eschewed the idea that this is an homage to Agatha Christie (even though her real-life grandson, Mathew Pritchard, appears as a character in the inner story), does capture the essence of the grande dame’s prose and structure. Unlike Moriarty, where the gimmick relied on fooling the reader from the beginning, the twist here is unforced and gives the reader a fair chance to follow what’s happening. As a Poirot fan (over Miss Marple), I was particularly pleased to follow Pünd, who is very much a Poirot surrogate in the novel, although he lacks the flourishes of the fastidious man’s mustache or ze little grey cells. Perhaps Horowitz is better when creating his own characters, even those which clearly draw from the icons of the genre, than when trying to work with the icons themselves.

Next up: Still reading Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

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→ June 17, 2019
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Fates and Furies.

Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies was nominated for a National Book Award in 2015, losing to Adam Johnson’s short story collection Fortune Smiles, and was widely praised as her best work to date. This intricate, profound novel about a marriage as the intersection of two lives presents that intersection from two distinct and often contradictory perspectives, a story that is beautifully told and that gripped me more the further I read.

The first part of the book, titled “Fates” – ten points if you can guess the title of the second part – introduces us to Lancelot, nicknamed Lotto, born in the eye of a hurricane and in some ways a very lucky child. He’s wealthy beyond measure before he’s finished his first cry, and as time passes it will become clear that he’s blessed with good lucks and great talent as a writer, but even someone born lucky doesn’t get a life free of worry, sorry, or even some bad fortune too.

After years of diffident debauchery, with a handful of broken hearts among the many women who sought his company and only got sex, Lotto sees Mathilde walk into a party right near the end of his college years, walks towards her and immediately asks her to marry him. A few weeks later they do indeed wed, and then live as starving artists – his vengeful mother, more fury than fate to be sure, cuts him off when she learns of the marriage – while he tries to find work as an actor and she works in advertising and then in an art gallery to keep them afloat. A real stroke of luck reveals his talent as a writer, and he becomes an acclaimed playwright for going on two decades until the fairy tale and part one both end.

Furies tells the same story from Mathilde’s side, and the trees we could not make out while standing in the forest are clear and sharp when viewed from above. Mathilde’s childhood isn’t what Lotto believed, and much of what he thought was fate was anything but. She’s a stronger character than the subservient wife we see in Fates, and angrier at a life that did not give her any fortune other than perhaps some physical beauty. Mathilde had to scratch and claw for nearly everything she got in life before Lotto, and then had to work twice as hard as he ever did to keep them going during his lean years as an actor, and then plays far more of a role in his writing career than the first part lets on. The first part is the veneer, and the second the solid wood beneath. It is stronger, but it’s not as pretty. Once the revelations start spilling, they come fast, and they frequently upend your impression of one or both main characters.

The parallel structure of the two parts mirrors the dichotomy of the title, but also presents the “two sides to every story” bromide in a new light by giving primacy to Mathilde’s side. The Greek Fates were three goddesses who determined the length of a mortal’s life, but did not concern themselves with what went on during that life. Lotto’s story feels like one mapped out by the Fates – very little of his life appears to be directed by outside forces, and while there’s luck from the circumstances of his birth, reading part one gives you the sense that he is the prime mover in his own universe, right up until the thread spun by the Fates is cut.

That’s not true, of course, but Groff saves the explanation until Furies, when it becomes clear that Mathilde’s machinations were responsible for much of what happened to Lotto, right down to their not-coincidental first meeting, from college onward. So much of her life is driven by vengeance, whether directly aimed at someone else or in the vein of “living well is the best revenge,” which is a major part of the mythology of the Greek Furies. (Wikipedia describes them as underworld deities of vengeance.) Once widowed, she’s determined to become the protagonist of her own life for the first time, yet becomes even more driven by the desire for revenge, especially when she realizes that one longtime acquaintance went out of his way to try to sabotage her marriage to Lotto.

The plot itself is intricate and almost immediately compelling, with so much realistic detail that it’s hard to believe one person conceived both of these characters’ lives. Groff’s character development, even with several of the side characters like Lotto’s family and childhood friends, is superb, both in interest and credibility. Lotto being a playwright is a bit more of the writers writing about writers problem, and I found it hard to buy into the idea of him becoming so financially successful or even moderately famous in that line of work, but if you get past that, much of what follows is plausible, and his vocation allows Groff to work in endless literary references (only a few of which I caught).

Groff ends the novel with a revelation that explains much of what went before, and even casts doubt on some parts of the story, but in a way that also opens up a whole series of questions that you might have felt were answered by the two parts. It’s a gimmick, but she executes it well, and if anything it seemed to underscore some of the questions posed over the course of Furies around the choices Mathilde made in trying to create a far better life for herself than the one lowercase-f fate has offered her. It’s a brilliant, incisive, deeply philosophical work that moves like popular fiction but still has me thinking a few weeks after I finished.

Next up: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Acintya bheda bheda fatwa.

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