→ May 31, 2019
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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.

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→ May 22, 2019
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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.

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→ April 30, 2019
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The Overstory.

Richard Powers’ The Overstory won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in what feels like a crowded year of critical favorites, with Tommy Orange’s There There taking home one of the honorable mentions. Powers has woven a complex tapestry of narratives and seemingly disconnected characters around a central story of environmental degradation and injustice, a novel that feels extremely important but that suffers from the breadth of his vision and ambiguous characterization.

Trees are at the heart of The Overstory, both in terms of the characters’ interactions with trees and humanity’s degradation of the planet’s forests and climate. Powers rages against the human machine throughout the book, decrying everything from our failure to appreciate the beauty and diversity of nature to the capitalist impulse to plunder our forests for profits and rationalize it away. The characters themselves seem to lose hope for the planet as the novel progresses, and Powers himself is certainly no optimist, but there’s at least a strain of possibility throughout the story that gives us an inkling that we might still have time to save ourselves if we stop denying the truth and act to reverse the damage we’ve done.

Powers’ thematic ambition spreads to a diversity of central characters that seems to be beyond his ultimate reach. He has nine core characters in The Overstory, and I’m not sure I could name an author writing today who’s up to the task of managing that breadth of personae across 500 pages; Powers is game, but the characters bleed into each other far too much to keep them distinct or explain their varying purposes on the pages. Nick and Douglas, two middle-aged white men with personal tragedies in their back stories, become harder to distinguish, especially as their stories on the pages eventually connected, intertwine, and separate; the same is true to a lesser degree with Mimi and Olivia, who are a bit more sharply drawn but still are too similar in personality and speech to keep them completely separate in the reader’s mind.

An overstory is either the layer of foliage in a forest canopy or the trees that give the canopy its foliage, so Powers is playing with words here, as he’s layered the story of the trees, and how they have been indispensable to life on earth, on top of this story of nine characters who start the novel with no connections to each other but several of whom find themselves connected and even relying on each other in emotional symbiosis. It’s a clever conceit for a novel, but to make the understory work, you have to make at least some of those characters compelling and/or sympathetic. Powers doesn’t do that, at least not enough for me; I think one of the nine characters, the researcher and would-be professor Patricia, who may have autism, was well-drawn enough to stick with me, and even that was as much a function of the injustice the world of the novel does to her – laced with misogyny and the human tendency to reject new ideas – as it was to the depiction of her character.

There’s one common theme among the characters in the novel that serves as a functional metaphor for the environmental cause he’s espousing, that of death and rebirth. The novel opens with prologue chapters for each for the characters, and nearly all of them experience the death of a loved one, often a pivotal figure like a parent (at least two fathers die in this section, so steel yourself), as part of their back stories. The idea that new life comes from death recurs throughout the novel, including a discussion of how much one dead tree lying on the forest floor feeds the next generation of life in the forest, from fungi to insects to new plants; Powers extends the metaphor so that many of the characters in the novel find the paths of their lives determined or at least directed by the deaths that altered their childhoods.

There is an actual core plot in The Overstory, as five of the characters unite at a logging protest and end up splitting off to form an eco-terrorist cell, which has some of the consequences you’d expect and a few you wouldn’t – but Powers doesn’t resolve this story in a remotely satisfactory way, and the connections to the other four characters, notably the invalid lawyer Ray, are tenuous at best. There are many great ideas in this book, but it never comes together into a coherent narrative.

Next up: Iain Banks’ The Player of Games, part of his Culture universe of novels, currently on sale for $2.99 for the Kindle.

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→ March 5, 2019
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Asymmetry.

Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry is one of the best, most immersive, cleverest new novels I’ve read in the past year, at least since Lincoln in the Bardo and possibly back to In the Light of What We Know. Built around a single, interconnected narrative in three highly asymmetrical parts, it takes a fictionalized account of Halliday’s affair with the much older writer Philip Roth and spins it into a dazzling, textured story that gives her stand-in character an agency not typically seen in these stories and uses the relationship as the platform to show the development of her writing voice.

The first part, the longest of the three, is called “Folly” and tells the story of how Alice, an editor at a New York publishing house, met the Pulitzer-winning author Ezra, and began an affair that is itself asymmetrical. He’s older, successful, world-weary, and confident in his writing voice; she’s younger, new to the publishing world, naive in some ways (but not totally or hopelessly so), and a would-be writer who has yet to develop her own voice or even find confidence that she’s a worthy enough talent to be published. Their relationship is sweet and grounded in reality, with descriptions of the mundane far more than the tawdry, like Alice picking up very specific foods Ezra loves or medicines he needs, and dialogue that reveals layers of their relationship even through the minutiae of the topics. It doesn’t hurt that Ezra loves the Red Sox and makes Alice into a fan, which then becomes a running theme through the book as the seasons pass and the Sox win their first World Series in 86 years during their affair. What could be weird or even inappropriate never seems such because Alice never loses her autonomy or sense of self within the relationship, even standing up for herself a few times, and often the balance in the relationship shifts in the other direction, as her youth and greater ease in the world giver her an advantage over the less physically able and less flexible Ezra.

The second part, “Madness,” details the Kafkaesque trial of Amar, a dual citizen of the United States and Iraq who gets caught in the purgatory of the UK’s equivalent of homeland security as he tries to make a stopover in London on his way to see his brother in Iraq by way of Istanbul. Amar is powerless in this situation, despite possessing two passports, a valid air ticket, and specific reasons for the stopover and the trip; the power rests entirely in the hands of his tormentors, who demur and delay until they finally decide they’re not going to allow him to leave the airport to legally enter England to visit his friend Alastair. The connection between these two stories is only made clear in the third part, although in hindsight you can see how Halliday presaged it; and even then it’s merely in passing, but that link also gives the first part a new level of significance beyond retelling a May-November romance story that we’ve heard before.

The third part is an interview with Ezra on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs program that functions as an extended epilogue and really ties the room together, although I don’t think it stands that well on its own except as an amusing trifle. It provides a coda for the first part, and an explanation for the relevance of the second part, while also giving us more of Ezra Booker, who is himself a wonderful character – an old man with a young spirit, a speaker who’s light on his feet, and, by this time, Alice’s ex-lover but someone who’s obviously tracked her career with pride.

The novel is also a treasure of literary allusions, both to other works – I doubt Alice’s name is any sort of a coincidence, as so much of the dialogue between her and Ezra is reminiscent of what Lewis Carroll’s protagonist may have found through her looking glass – and to real-world literary events, including Roth/Booker’s desire for a Nobel Prize that never came. Ezra gives Alice books to read on all sorts of subjects, the way an older writer might mentor a younger one, but also buys her expensive (albeit practical) gifts, further exacerbating the asymmetry of their relationship. Nothing is balanced in Halliday’s telling, nor is it any more balanced in reality.

The ultimate question Halliday seems to ask in Asymmetry is whether any of us can truly see the world through the eyes of another person. Ezra has done so through his books, or so Alice believes, but his characters – and Roth’s alter ego Zuckerman – share his perspective on the world, whereas Alice wants to write the character of someone who could not differ from her in a more fundamental way. So much of what we see is merely the way our brains interpret the motions of particles or radio waves, and thus each of us sees a different picture as we move through the same world. Halliday takes that aspect of physics (is the title a wink to supersymmetry?) and asks whether any of us can truly understand the views and experiences of another, even when we seem to walk the same path. It’s a gorgeous debut that can’t answer that question but will linger on your palate long after you finish.

Next up: Iraj Pezeshkzad’s novel My Uncle Napoleon.

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→ January 17, 2019
→ By

Milkman.

Anna Burns became the first Northern Irish writer to win the Man Booker Prize when her third novel, Milkman, took the honor in 2018. It’s an experimental novel, atypical for Booker winners, that reads like a more accessible Faulkner, and combines a story of the Troubles with the staunchly feminist narrative of its 18-year-old narrator for a result that is unlike anything I’ve read before.

Characters in Milkman go without names, including the narrator, a young woman who walks around with her head in a book and is literally and figuratively oblivious to the internecine warfare occurring around her, as well as the titular milkman – well, both milkmen. The milkman of the title isn’t actually a milkman, but rides around in a white van as if he were one. He’s in his 40s, associated with a local paramilitary group, and stalks the narrator while ensuring that everyone in their tightknit, gossip-ridden community knows that she is his, to the point where others, including her own mother, assume that she’s indeed having an affair with this dangerous, older man. There’s also a real milkman, whose role becomes apparent as the novel progresses; ‘maybe boyfriend,’ whom the narrator has been seeing for a year, who’s obsessed with cars, and whose life may be endangered by not-really Milkman; Tablets girl, who runs around poisoning people, including her own sister and eventually the narrator, but everyone seems to just take it as part of life; the boy the narrator calls Somebody McSomebody, who also tries to threaten the narrator into becoming his girl, which ends rather poorly for him in one of the novel’s few scenes of actual violence; and far more.

Burns layers a story of personal terror inside a story of the societal terror that affected Northern Ireland for decades. The narrator’s life is turned upside down by this unwanted attention from a man she barely even knows, but whose reputation in the community is enough to scare her and to convince everyone else she’s submitted to him willingly (even though she never submits to him at all). When the Milkman stalks her, he also inducts her, against her will, into a theater of the absurd that mirrors reality from that time and place, where violence split Catholics and Protestants, where any official authority was seen as essentially Ours or Theirs, where an act that shouldn’t merit a second thought, like going to the hospital, would be fraught with political and social implications. She’s suddenly seen to have taken sides, and even finds herself the unwitting beneficiary of the fear others have of the paramilitaries, which further underlines for her how potent the impact of this one man’s attentions towards her are.

Burns also surrounds her narrator with families who’ve been hurt by the violence in the community, directly or indirectly, including the one mother who, by the end of the novel, seems to have lost her husband and every one of her children to direct violence, related accidents, or suicide. The narrator’s father is dead when the novel opens, while her mother is a tragicomic figure who is convinced her daughter is a sinner, who believes every rumor she hears about her daughter (some from ‘first brother-in-law,’ who is both a gossip-monger and a creep), and who goes into hysterics over every bit of innuendo, which the narrator never wants to even acknowledge because it merely prolongs the agony.

Milkman is still quite funny and even hopeful in parts among the litter of tragedies and the ever-present specter of the stalker, although we do learn at the start of the novel that he’ll die before it’s over. The narrator’s third brother-in-law, while a peculiar man himself, takes on a protector role over his young sister-in-law, as does Real Milkman, whose interest in her is a side effect of his romantic interest in her mother. There are also signs of intelligent life amidst the gossips and harridans, including the “issue women,” a group of seven residents who embrace feminism when one hears of it in town and starts up a local women’s group in the backyard shed of one of the members (because her husband wouldn’t allow it in the house).

Of course, this is all set against the ever-present backdrop of the Troubles and you don’t need to know much at all about that conflict to appreciate Burns’ depiction of the effects of the sectarian violence on this particular neighborhood. Burns draws and redraws the picture of this time and place with swirling, inventive prose, in paragraphs that go on for days, often putting unlikely vocabulary in the mouths of her characters – esoteric or archaic words, or even words she’s just made up – to provide further much to the narrative. It’s not as difficult as Faulkner or Proust, but shows the influence of those early 20th century writers at the same time, both in a technical aspect and in how Burns uses her experimental sentence structure and vocabulary to contribute the reader’s sense of unease.

I’ve only read a few of the contenders for this year’s Booker but can at least understand why this novel won. It also feels like the third straight year where the prize has gone to a novel that does something different, as opposed to the prize’s history of going to literary works that still adhere to the traditional form and intentions of the novel. I could imagine this novel seeming abstruse to readers outside of the UK, given its setting during the Troubles, but that’s merely the backdrop for a rich, textured story that is as relevant today (with its #MeToo similarities) as it would be to a reader of that time and place.

Next up: A little light reading, Albert Camus’ The Plague.

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→ January 11, 2019
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All the Birds in the Sky.

Charlie Jane Anders was a founding editor of io9, the Gawker subsite dedicated to science fiction and fantasy, so it’s no surprise that her debut novel All The Birds in the Sky combines those genres and works in many tropes common in those areas, especially coming-of-age novels from the fantasy realm. Despite a slow ramp-up that doesn’t hint at the novel’s greater ambitions, the story builds to a bold climax that recalls many pioneering novels in these fields without ever coming off as derivative or unoriginal.

Anders’ gambit in All the Birds in the Sky is to create two synchronous, intertwined stories, one of which draws from straight fantasy and one from realistic, hard science fiction, with one character at the head of each, and contrast the complicated personal relationship between the two of them with the growing and apparently inevitable conflict that will occur between their two forces. Set in the near future where climate change and runaway capitalism have led to catastrophic weather patterns and rapid societal breakdown, the novel keeps raising the stakes between its two protagonists and pushes them into difficult, sometimes dangerous choices that only might help save the world.

Patricia and Lawrence are those two central characters, both misfits in their junior high school, albeit for different reasons. Patricia lives with her overbearing, judgmental parents, and a too-perfect older sister whose bullying of Patricia borders on the sociopathic. Lawrence lives on the other side of town, with warmer parents who don’t quite understand him, both of whom gave up ambitions of bigger careers to settle into working-class malaise. Patricia discovers one day that she can talk to animals, if only briefly, and ends up following a chatty bird to a giant tree in the middle of their forest where the birds are holding their Parliament (which is not restricted to owls). Lawrence is a gifted hacker who scavenges parts and builds a supercomputer in his closet, giving it a machine-learning algorithm that allows it to grow by talking to real people online, one of whom is Patricia. Of course, both kids are badly bullied – to such a cruel extent that reading the first few chapters was painful – which pushes them together but later pulls them apart, something exacerbated by a guidance counselor who isn’t what he seems to be, and is acting on a vision of the future where the two lead opposite sides of a global conflict between science and magic that threatens to end the planet as we know it.

The prologue was tough sledding, but once Anders gets her characters out of school, thanks to a dramatic flourish where Patricia rescues Lawrence from misery and possible death at a military academy of dubious merit, the pace picks up and the nonrealistic elements, both magic and fictional science, contribute more to the development of both the story and the two characters. Both Patricia and Lawrence are flawed, due to immaturity and the challenges of each of their upbringings, and then are pushed into situations, Patricia by her classmates at magic school and Lawrence by colleagues at a Boring Company-like startup, for which they aren’t well-prepared. Anders’ greatest achievement in the novel is showing those characters’ growth even through failures, one of which would be particularly traumatic, so that they are better prepared when the climax of the story arrives and the decisions they must make have the largest consequences yet.

All the Birds in the Sky will remind you of many great novels in these genres without ever drawing too heavily on any one source. The entire tenor of the book brought the great Magicians trilogy to mind, including the emphasis on the flaws in the two characters and how events in our youth can have long-lasting effects on our personalities and life choices well into adulthood. The influence of the major YA fantasy series like Harry Potter or The Chronicles of Narnia is evident in the background, but never overt, and any similarities are muted by the presence of the parallel sci-fi strand around Lawrence. He’s something out of a Heinlein novel, but better, more well-rounded and a lot more aware of the existence of women as actual people than anything Heinlein ever dreamed up.

I expected the ultimate battle between science and magic in this novel to play out differently, perhaps as some sort of faith/reason allegory, but it doesn’t, and that’s just how Anders rolls – so much of this novel sets you up in a comfortable, familiar way, and then resolves matters in a way that defies expectations without cheap surprises. All the Birds in the Sky won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2017, beating The Obelisk Gate (a result that was flipped for the Hugo), and I certainly agree with that result. It’s a fun, smart, compelling read, appropriate for young and full-grown adults alike.

Next up: Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts.

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→ December 28, 2018
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A Brief History of Seven Killings.

I’ve been getting reader recommendations for Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize, for several years now, including a recommendation from our Twitter friend Old Hoss Radbourn. I’ve even owned the Kindle version of the book for more than a year, picking it up at some point when it was on sale for $2 or $3, but then procrastinating because the book was so long and seemed dense. Well, it is long, it is dense, and there were certainly parts of the reading experience where I wasn’t entirely sure what was happening, but it’s also very good, a transgressive work of postcolonial fiction that takes a strong political stance and weaves a compelling, violent narrative around the real-life assassination attempt against Bob Marley in 1976.

Marley isn’t named in James’ book, referred to throughout merely as the Singer, and his 1976 performance at the Smile Jamaica concert, an event held to try to stop violence between supporters of the two main political parties in Jamaica at the time, is central to the book. Two days before the concert, seven gunmen broke into Marley’s house at 56 Hope Road and shot him, his manager, his wife, and one other member of the Wailers, although somehow there were no fatalities. James works from historical accounts of the assault, including manager Don Taylor’s claims that he attended a street-justice ‘court’ and execution of several of the gunmen, and then populates the narrative with a cast of extraordinary characters – including some of the shooters, Jamaican drug dealers and underworld figures, a white Rolling Stone writer covering the Singer, a woman trying to escape the violence for the United States, and more – to build this sprawling novel where even the good guys are probably bad guys too.

Although the Singer – the shooting, the concert, just his mere existence at the heart of Jamaican culture in that moment – is central to the story, he’s not a character in the book. James shifts his narrative among multiple people, mostly men, and gives many of them individual stories that give their characters depth. (The BBC story on the Man Booker announcement says the book has “more than 75 characters,” but I think about a dozen come through as core characters with three-dimensional depictions, which is still a remarkable number.) James also writes each chapter in the language of the character speaking it, so much of the book is written in a Jamaican patois that slowed me down while reading, and I’d say it took me a hundred or more pages before I got used to the vastly different vocabulary and speech patterns, but that’s also part of the power of the book to evoke a setting and, for me at least, to emphasize that this is a culture and place that is very different from anything I’ve ever experienced and that I shouldn’t judge its characters or events through my lens.

A Brief History of Seven Killings does imply in the title that the book will be violent, but even that did not adequately prepare me for how violent it is – graphic, yes, but also seeming to revel in its own violence. There’s a scene of a massacre in a New York crack house which is pivotal to the plot of the final section of the book but also horrifying in how casual the murders are and how James chooses to describe them in such bloody fashion. There’s a similarly casual attitude on the part of most of the characters towards rape, and a weird mix of outright homophobia and acceptance of some gay or bisexual men among the gang members involved in the assassination attempt. The novel makes heavy use of many gay slurs, one of which is part of Jamaican patois, which I assume is a fair representation of how these characters might have talked but no less jarring to read.

The core themes of James’ novel, opening a window on a pivotal time in modern Jamaican history while exposing the CIA’s suspected role in fomenting this violence and even accelerating the cocaine trade, recalled those of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which did the same for the brutal rule of Dominican dictator Rafael “El Jefe” Trujillo, who may have been assassinated by the CIA as well. While Diaz’s work made the oppressive Trujillo regime’s crimes against its people more personal, James’s novel puts the government’s misdeeds at a further remove – the authorities’ incompetence and selectively applied attention helped create these enclaves of wealth and poverty, and a lawless environment where local gangs would inevitably pour in to fill the void left by the absence of real government or the corruption of the local police. The infighting between the two main parties and the proxy war in the streets also created the opportunity for the most famous Jamaican in the world at the time, the Singer, to be simultaneously beloved by his people and marked for death by one faction vying for power. I’m at a disadvantage reading such novels, since I came into it with no knowledge of Jamaican postcolonial history and very little knowledge of the country’s culture, but reading James’ novel and then going online to read about events described in the book became a sort of superficial education on the subject.

Because James weaves multiple smaller plots around the central event of the assassination and its aftermath, there’s no single resolution to the novel, and many of the storylines fade out rather than reaching a clear conclusion. One particular death provides closure to other characters, while other events seem to end one phase of Jamaican political culture only to usher in a new one. It all adds to the feeling that James’ novel is the equivalent of a good Tarantino film – it’s hyper-realistic, over the top with violence, with a wide cast of characters, darkly funny at times but also tackling serious themes amidst the shock and gore. It’s not for everyone – one of the Booker committee members said it wasn’t a book you’d give to your mother to read – but it’s a great exemplar of why the Booker’s decision to open the prize up to writers from other countries was a good one.

Next up: Graham Greene’s It’s a Battlefield.

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→ December 13, 2018
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The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize in 2014 for his World War II novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a graphic description of life for POWs forced by the Japanese army to build the Burma Railway in 1943. Through the eyes of its flawed hero, Dorrigo Evans, the novel exposes the brutal conditions for soldiers and civilian slave workers, with estimated deaths over 100,000, as well as the impact of that imprisonment and a failed affair on Evans’ life for decades beyond the war.

Evans is a student rather than a soldier, a man in love with literature and poetry going back to the ancient Greeks, a doctor conscripted to fight in the war and eventually made a colonel, a position that carries over to leadership over the other captives as they’re forced to work on the railway even as malnutrition and disease overtake them. Evans is a paragon of virtue in the literal and metaphorical jungle, sacrificing his own well-being to try to keep as many of his men alive as he can, negotiating without leverage to try to get sick men time off the line so they might recover, setting up a makeshift hospital and even performing amputations and surgeries that increase patients’ odds of survival just to something above zero. Flanagan creates a whole cast of eccentrics around Evans to put a veneer of comedy above both the inherent tragedy that many of these men will die there and none will leave unharmed as well as the unstinting descriptions of the physical degradation of life in the labor camp. (Flanagan gives a lot of detail on how the men’s bodies betray them due to dysentery and other parasites, so if you can’t deal with substantial prose about emesis or defecation, this book may not be for you.)

Wrapped around that narrative is a secondary thread about Evans’ romantic life – his quick but futile attachment to Ella, whom he marries but to whom he is serially unfaithful for decades, and his one affair, during the war, with Amy, the young wife of Evans’ uncle Keith. Amy is very much his one who got away, but after the war their affair does not resume, and he returns to Ella and a life of emotional isolation and meandering. Evans struggles to balance that internal void against his rising profile as a national hero, a man who fought to protect his men from the worst their Japanese tormentors could dish out and who himself survived to be celebrated, even as he feels worse about himself and can’t find any meaning in all of their suffering.

The two subplots don’t tie together particularly well even at the end of the book, however, leaving a disjointed feeling even after the final pages. Keith lies to Amy, telling her that Dorrigo died in captivity, and then after the war, Evans learns from Ella that Amy and his uncle died in a gas explosion at their hotel, so there’s no happy ending or even a continuation of this great, passionate affair between them, and the story barely resurfaces in the remainder of the book. Instead, after the war, we get more of the story from the perspective of two of the captors who also served as main characters in the jungle – a sadistic Japanese officer and a Korean guard who especially enjoyed beating the captives. The former manages to escape punishment and, given a chance, repents, to some extent, and tries to create a new life where he can redeem himself. The latter is caught and tried, finding himself blamed and punished for the atrocities that were ordered by men above him in the hierarchy who often weren’t tried or received lighter sentences. The theme here, reminiscent of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, seems to be that things don’t always come right in the end, and that any idea of justice for the victims or survivors was misguided, so it fell to each individual to make his own meaning out of meaninglessness.

That choice by Flanagan detracts from the center of the novel, which focused on life in the slave camp from the perspectives of Evans and the Japanese officer, by the way it splinters the reader’s focus and fails to adequately tie the Amy subplot into anything else other than the connection through Dorrigo. The storycraft within each plot thread is very well-executed, and the prose, while often difficult to stomach, is erudite and evocative, so that each individual chapter or section works on its own. The finished product lacked some of the unity that a great novel like this, that covers an enormous historical event by casting a wide net, needs to have to truly hit its ceiling.

Next up: Still reading Marlon James’ Booker winner A Brief History of Seven Killings.

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→ December 12, 2018
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Last Orders.

Graham Swift won the Man Booker Prize in 1996 for his novel Last Orders, a book influenced by William Faulkner’s seriocomic classic As I Lay Dying* but rather more somber and fleshed-out in its telling of four men traveling to scatter the ashes of one of their friends. It’s a very quick-moving read where Swift gave each character, including the dead man’s widow and some of the wives and daughters of the men narrating the book, nuance and depth in a short period of time, but falls short on the ultimate question of what Swift is trying to express in the work.

* Whether it was more than just influenced by Faulkner’s novel is a matter of some debate. I don’t recall As I Lay Dying with enough detail to offer an opinion here.

Jack Dodds is the dead man at the heart of the story, a butcher, married to Amy, with a biological daughter June and adopted son Vince, and his death of stomach cancer sets off the events of the novel, including his last wish to have his ashes scattered into the sea at Margate. Amy doesn’t wish to do this, so his friends Ray, Lenny, and Vic join Vince on a road trip to the coast, a journey narrated in parts by the four men, with other chapters telling portions of their history from the viewpoints of Amy and Vince’s wife Mandy. The present-day narrative unveils cracks in the relationships between the four men and between some of them and Jack from before he died, as well as emotional visits with him in the hospital after it was clear he wasn’t going to recover, while other chapters, including those narrated by Amy, unfurl Jack’s complicated home life and relationships with family members. Amy’s pregnancy was unplanned, and June was born with some severe developmental disability that has confined her to an institution; Jack refused to even visit her, while Amy dutifully visited weekly, and that started a crack between them from which the marriage could never recover.

Where Faulkner’s take on a caravan moving the coffin of the family’s dead grandmother bordered on farce, Swift uses Jack’s death to explore the different relationships between these characters, especially how Jack’s life choices – going back to his decision to become a butcher – affected those around him, permanently damaging any chance of a functional marriage to Amy. Mandy appears in the history as a runaway teen whom Jack decides to take in as an employee and boarder, a strange and perhaps inappropriate decision that also looks like an attempt to replace the ‘normal’ daughter he never had, only to have his adopted son end up marrying the girl who was a sort of surrogate daughter. Amy had an affair that Jack probably didn’t know about, with one of his friends, and her own story – that of a wife who felt emotionally abandoned because her husband washed his hands of his own daughter – is the most emotionally engaging part of the novel, including the question of whether she would rekindle the affair now that Jack has died. I haven’t seen the film adaptation, but it appears from what I read on my Internet that Amy’s character, played by Helen Mirren, gets a more significant arc in the script.

What misses the mark in Swift’s telling is the boys-being-boys aspect of the road trip. He accurately depicts the modern masculine idea of restraining one’s emotions, of swallowing your grief until you choke on it, but there are scenes here where the men are just acting like children – the juvenile fight, the bizarre behavior in a bar somewhere on the road – that don’t get at any ultimate point. This is a larger story set on the framework of a road novel, but a road novel has to have a metaphorical destination as well as a physical one, and Last Orders skimps on the former.

Next up: I’ll be reading Marlon James’ Booker winner A Brief History of Seven Killings for a while.

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→ November 30, 2018
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Swing Time.

I didn’t love Zadie Smith’s White Teeth when I first read it, but after reflecting on it, I think it’s because it was so unlike anything I’d read before, and over time it continued to grow on me to the point that I included it the last time I ranked my top 100 novels. I read her third novel, On Beauty, but it looks like I never reviewed it; it was a good read, fast-moving, with well-drawn characters and intelligent themes, but it lacked the power of her debut.

Swing Time is her latest novel, coming out at the tail end of 2016, and covers familiar ground – issues of race, class, gender, and nationality in a global world that would like to tell you that it’s post-racial but is anything but. It bears more of the hyperbolic, frenetic nature of her debut novel – especially compared to the sedate On Beauty x – but there’s a new distance between the reader and the two main characters, the narrator and her friend Tracey, two girls of mixed-race parentage who are joined in childhood by a love of dance and separated by a gulf of class between them.

The narrator, never named in the novel, comes from a higher status than Tracey, in part because Tracey’s father is absent for reasons that are explained during the novel – explained, then revised for accuracy, which is also a huge part of the book. The girls love to watch old musicals, especially those of Fred Astaire*, and try to mimic his dance routines, later adapting those of pop singers they see on TV. Through a couple of coincidences, the narrator ends up a personal assistant to one of those singers, Aimee, some sort of teenage icon who has managed to maintain her following into her 30s, and follows the singer around the world while putting much of her own life on hold for the all-consuming job. Aimee eventually decides to build a girls’ school in The Gambia (never named, but identified as a narrow country, split by a river, ruled by a homophobic dictator, surrounded by Senegal, so there aren’t a lot of choices here), dragging her retinue to the country multiple times, falling in love with a local boy and eventually adopting a baby from the village. The narrator flashes back during this story to her childhood and then intermittent encounters with Tracey after they drifted apart, setting her timeline with Tracey, whose dance career never materializes and ends up in straitened circumstances, against the Africa/Aimee storyline with its absurd use of money and the westerners’ attempts to work with the villagers.

* Yep, somehow I read two straight books, this and Connie Willis’ Terra Incognita, that featured the works of Astaire in a prominent role.

These encounters form a scenario where the distinctions of race, class, and national origin are even starker than what the narrator faced as a black woman in England, allowing Smith to rail against western paternalism and the corruption of African nations. (The dictator described in the book, Yahya Jammeh, lost an election a month after the novel’s publication and was forced from power about six weeks after that.) Nobody in the novel comes off that well; perhaps Fernando, a consultant working with Aimee on the school project who brings some needed cynicism to the circus, is the closest to a sympathetic character, but he’s never fleshed out to the extent that the narrator, Tracey, and Aimee are. Tracey is a sort of train wreck in the distance, facing the consequences of poor decisions, including those made by her parents, while the narrator sails into good fortune and eventually fritters some of it away through immaturity.

Swing Time read to me – and I say that recognizing I may miss much of its subtext – as a novel of big ideas that don’t gel on the page. For example, the narrator visits some tourist sites related to the slave trade, a practice that Smith seems to lampoon, but it’s so tangential to the story that it falls from the mind once the narrator returns to the frantic life of her job with Aimee. The singer herself is a mélange of various disposable pop stars and the second act of Madonna, who set up a nonprofit in Malawi that built a pediatric surgery there; she has since adopted four children from the sub-Saharan nation. Smith is satirizing the do-gooders of the west who would plow money into developing nations without considering whether their efforts are in fact doing good, but the depiction seems to argue that westerners, especially white ones, should stay home, when there are obvious examples of such charitable efforts succeeding as well as failing.

As for Tracey … I’m not sure I got where Smith was going with that character’s arc or her relation to the narrator. That the circumstances of our births, from race to socioeconomic status to the environment in which we’re raised, have enormous and perhaps irremediable effects on our lives is not a new thought, yet that seems to be Tracey’s main purpose in the novel. She was born with greater talent, but was unable to convert it, and much of the blame for that falls on her parents or the world as a whole. The narrator was born with less talent, but into better circumstances, and somehow fell into a successful career (albeit not in dance). The world isn’t fair, but again, Smith isn’t giving us any sense of how we might make it a little more so.

That’s not to say Swing Time is anything less than a good read – this is a smart novel with some thematic ambition, and even if the execution is imperfect, Smith is a glorious writer and even her lesser efforts force the reader to open his (my!) mind and confront uncomfortable issues. I suppose seventeen years on, it’s unfair to expect her to churn out White Teeth again, but I know that’s what I want her to do anyway.

Next up: Richard Flanagan’s A Narrow Road to the Deep North.

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