→ 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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→ 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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