→ March 4, 2020
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 26, 2020
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
→ February 24, 2020
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 6, 2020
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ December 5, 2019
→ By

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?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ September 13, 2019
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ June 18, 2019
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ June 17, 2019
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ May 31, 2019
→ By

The Friend.

Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2018, a surprising turn of events for a writer whose first book was published in 1995 yet had never found much of a commercial audience, even with significant critical praise for her work. A novel about a writer and a dog, about love and death, about the writer’s calling and the reader’s expectations, it’s a skillfully crafted work that asks a lot of you even as it is rushing past.

Nobody has names in this book except the dog, Apollo, who doesn’t appear until about 40 pages in. Nunez writes in the second person, as the narrator, a writer, speaks to her recently deceased friend, an acclaimed writer who often taught writing, slept with his students, married three of them, and was a fountain of insight (or merely opinion) on the nature of writing. His death has unnerved her and leads her to revisit much of the history of her friendship with him, but she also ends up taking in his dog, Apollo, an aging great Dane who is himself mourning his lost master, despite the fact that her rent-controlled apartment strictly forbids dogs.

From there, we get the relationship between the narrator and the dog while the narrator draws parallels to her relationship with her late friend, which was … complicated, certainly. She’s learning to cope with the reality of his death and the void this leaves in her life, in which he has been some kind of fixture for what appears to be a few decades. Walking back through her memories of him opens up extended thoughts on literature, what it means to be a writer, why writers write, and what readers want, or think they want, from what they read. On the one hand, the world needs another novel about writers writing like I need a hole in my head. On the other hand, The Friend is quite good, and these are most of the best parts. The idea of writing as a calling versus writing as a vocation is still an important one – maybe a more important one than ever, since, as Nunez points out in the book, the publishing world could simply stop publishing new books tomorrow and it wouldn’t make an iota of difference to the quantity of books available to readers. (The narrator wryly observes that it would have some impact on the economy, although those aren’t the same books that the narrator and her friend write.) We can write our own stories; can we write those of others? What obligations do we have to our subjects, even those we fictionalize? To what extent should privileged writers step aside for other voices from previously disadvantaged communities or groups?

The Friend also brings us two sets of interactions with students – one from college students in writing classes who come across as spoiled non-readers who don’t appreciate good writing and believe their own to be ready for the world, and another from the narrator’s experience working with victims of sex trafficking in a sort of writing therapy. The first group is there more for comic relief, although it becomes a launching point for some of the broader dialogues on why people write (and what a poor choice of career it might be). The second, however, could have spun out into its own book, and if anything gets too little time on the page, but it seems to stand in for the argument that writing can serve a purpose beyond satisfying the author’s ego.

Nunez pulls an authorial trick near the end of the novel that breaks any spell she’d cast to that point, partially redeeming herself with the last few sentences of the entire novel. Prior to that, however, there are some narrative gaps that never sat well with me – notably, why on earth does the narrator take the dog? She’s barely talked into it by Wife Three, and is fully aware it may cost her her apartment. (That also gets a bit of cheap resolution.) You may forgive all of these foibles because The Friend is driven by the narrator’s grief, not by plot. Little actually happens in the book, and what happens is mostly mundane stuff about the dog. You are here for Nunez’s thoughts on writing, on coping with unexpected loss, and what we give and get from our pets. It’s not perfect, but there are some truly lovely passages here, and the ending is so well done it should be punctuated by a bat flip.

Next up: Spike Milligan’s comic novel Puckoon.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ May 22, 2019
→ By

Killing Commendatore.

I’m a huge fan of Haruki Murakami’s two peak novels, the dreamlike The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and similarly surreal Kafka on the Shore, but have found some of his earlier and especially his later work disappointing, as if he’s trying to recapture the spark that lit those two novels but can’t find it. His newest novel, Killing Commendatore, might be the last straw for me, as it’s not just a disappointment – it is awful, lacking any of the magic or creativity that Murakami showed in the first half of his career, with a boring plot and some outright creepy details that someone should have told the author to cut.

The novel is narrated by its main character, a painter and portrait artist who is never named, and who begins the book by talking about his wife leaving him for another man, a shocking announcement that unmoored him and led him on a winding path to living in the disused house of his friend’s father, a well-known painter named Tomohiko Amada. (The narrator mentions in passing that he and his wife have reunited, one of many throwaway subplots in the book that has no fulfilling qualities when it’s resolved.) While there, the narrator discovers an unknown painting by Amada called Killing Commendatore that depicts a violent murder from the opera Don Giovanni; multiple characters in this painting come to life over the course of the novel, notably the Commendatore himself. Meanwhile, an eccentric, wealthy, handsome loner named Menshiki, who lives nearby in the mountains, shows up and asks the narrator to paint his portrait, but has an ulterior motive involving a young teenaged girl, Mariye, who lives nearby and might be Menshiki’s daughter.

The fundamental problem with Killing Commendatore is that Murakami doesn’t seem to give a shit about what’s happening in the book, and as a result, I didn’t either. In nearly 700 pages, only one tangible thing happens with actual stakes, and everything else is a mystery that Murakami can’t even be bothered to resolve. (I’ll warn you now that you don’t find out if Mariye is Menshiki’s daughter.) There’s a pit and a bell that seems to ring by itself, which is a mystery of sorts but not a particularly interesting one – and is also poorly resolved – while Menshiki’s own backstory is shrouded in another mystery that didn’t grab my attention. Eventually, the characters from the painting appear and Murakami’s trademark magical realism shows up, but it’s a relatively minor part of the book – this is my personal view, but I think magical realism needs to be suffused throughout a work of fiction if it’s there at all; a little bit just feels like a cheat – and the connection between the characters and their roles is extremely tenuous.

Murakami’s lead characters tend to be stand-ins for him – at least, they share a lot of personality quirks and interests with the author, often working as creatives with loves of classical music and cooking. The painter-narrator here has all of that, as well as the passing knowledge of baseball that shows up in many Murakami novels, so it’s fair to wonder how much else of the narrator’s character also applies to the author – especially because the narrator is kind of a creep. He’s completely obsessed with the growing breasts of pubescent girls, referring both back to his sister, who died of a heart defect in her teens, and again to Mariye, who is herself obsessed with her changing physique, with an excessive attention to their busts. It goes nowhere in the plot, and it doesn’t seem like anyone around the narrator is the least bit perturbed by this – including Mariye, who you would think would be uncomfortable talking to an adult male she barely knows about her breasts, or hearing his thoughts on the matter. The result was just gross to read.

But wait, there’s more! Murakami’s prose has never bothered me before, but this translation feels like a mess – his prose is wooden and his sentences awkward and terse, sometimes even broken into fragments. It feels like an unedited manuscript at far too many points. One of the translators, Philip Gabriel, has translated several Murakami works, including Kafka on the Shore, which I loved; while the other, Ted Goossen, translated Men Without Women, which I found generally inert. In neither case did Murakami come across as an amateurish stylist, however, which is an overwhelming sense I got from Killing Commendatore from the very beginning. It’s harder to get lost in a plot when the prose keeps jarring you out of the reverie, and the story here didn’t absorb me the way some other Murakami novels did anyway. When you add the the main character’s failure to evoke any interest – he seems totally disconnected from life, but there’s no explanation of why – you get a complete dud from an author who has shown he’s capable of so much better.

Next up: I’m reading an advance copy of Homegrown, Alex Speier’s forthcoming book on the building of the 2018 Red Sox.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,