→ December 12, 2018
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ November 30, 2018
→ By

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ September 5, 2018
→ By

From a Low and Quiet Sea.

Irish writer Donal Ryan has received significant acclaim in his home country and Great Britain for his works to date, but relatively little attention here so far, although that might change with his latest book, From a Low and Quiet Sea, which was just long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and weaves together three narratives of men adrift in their worlds that is by turns harrowing, wry, and empathetic.

The novel, a scant 180 pages with a lot of white space within, unfurls in four parts, one for each protagonist and then a short final section that brings the three plot threads together. The first of the stories is the most powerful and feels the most timely: we meet Farouk, a Syrian doctor who senses that country’s civil war approaching the city where he lives with his wife and daughter and arranges with a smuggler to take them out of Syria to Europe, only to find that the smuggler has lied and put the three of them and dozens of others on a ramshackle boat that isn’t seaworthy and ultimately ends in tragedy. Farouk is then left to try to assimilate into a new country while bearing the weight of the tragedy that befell him and many of his countrymen, without a home to which he can return.

The next two stories are less gripping, although they will eventually connect with Farouk’s in powerful fashion in the final section. Lampy is a ne’er-do-well of sorts, a college-aged man with a job as a bus driver for local assisted living facilities, living with his mother and her father, with Lampy’s father unknown to him and seldom even discussed. John is nearing the end of his life and expressing remorse for so many of the actions of his younger years, including how many lives he ruined as a “lobbyist” (a fixer, really) and one man he killed by accident. Eventually these characters and a few adjacent ones intersect in part four, with deep consequences for most of them.

Ryan’s prose style is challenging, with meandering sentences that run on for half the page, reminiscent of Faulkner or Ryan’s contemporary Eimear McBride, but his scene-setting skills are remarkable if you can process all the information he’s throwing at you in these endless phrases. He’s at his best as a pure writer in Lampy’s section, explaining the chaos of Lampy’s home life and communicating his disorientation within his own life. Ryan often gives you the sense that you’re observing the action from a remote distance, or perhaps from some altitude, so while the action is clear, the images might be blurred around the edges, which establishes the inner confusion of the three primary characters – Farouk ripped from his normal life into a new country; Lampy uncertain of fundamental aspects of his identity; John grappling with his own mortality, unsure if any repentance will suffice for things he’s done.

That sense of distance and of the reader’s difficulty in fully observing the action before him is strongest in the final section, where Ryan connects the three stories in oblique fashion, enough so that I had to re-read several parts to be sure I had caught the intended connections Ryan had made between characters. You might piece one or two of them together earlier in the book, but I did not, and Ryan’s unannounced shifts in how he identifies certain characters was jarring.

However, Ryan has infused so much of the empathy he has for his creations into this book that even my momentary confusion at how he assembled the pieces in the fourth part couldn’t reduce my investment in the resolution – and that is From a Low and Quiet Sea‘s great strength. This is a literary work, aimed high in prose and complexity, but is still fundamentally an accessible and human work, a novel that is simultaneously timeless and very much a document of our time today.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ August 23, 2018
→ By

The Ninth Hour.

Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour earned her a spot on the shortlist for the National Book Critics Circle award last year, which went to Joan Silber’s Improvement, and as far as I can remember that’s the only reason I put in a hold request for it at my library – that and the fact that it was barely over 200 pages, meaning I could knock it out in a few days. It was certainly fast, taking me less than 48 hours to finish, but it’s a literary anachronism, a facsimile of the types of novels that used to win these awards 50 years ago – perhaps the type of book people think they’re supposed to like rather than one that they should.

The Ninth Hour begins with a suicide, significant in a book drenched with Catholic dogma and practices, as Jim decides to exercise some agency in his own life by ending it, leaving behind his pregnant wife, Anne, who in turn is taken in by a local cloister of charity-minded nuns. Anne gives birth to Sally, who spends her formative years with her mother as the latter works in the laundry of the convent, soaking up the secular aspects of the nuns’ faith and eventually toying with the idea of entering a convent herself. Anne, meanwhile, is left a young widow when barely out of her girlhood, and is, unsurprisingly, neither satisfied with her lot in life nor willing to sit back and accept it, eventually taking up with a man who is married to an invalid who is in turn tended by the nuns on their daily rounds.

McDermott’s one trick in this novel is setting up the eventual intersection of these different threads in sufficiently organic fashion to make it credible, at least up until what I’ll call Sally’s last decision, the one truly inexplicable detail (and one I feel like I’ve seen in other works as well). The affair between Anne and her paramour feels natural, as does Sally’s attraction to the vocation of the women who have all helped to raise and educate her. The discovery of the affair itself is faintly comic but, again, entirely fits within the structures of these characters’ lives, and if anything McDermott undersells any scandalous aspects to it, perhaps because her order of nuns is, on the whole, far more progressive than the Catholic Church was at any point in the 20th century.

Those nuns, however, are almost ciphers on the page; McDermott’s attempts to give them distinct characters fall flat, as their defining attributes are neither significant nor strong enough to sear their identities on the reader. By the end of the book, I sort of knew the differences between Sister Jeanne and Sister Lucy, but not enough to keep any of the sisters in my memory once I’d hit the final page. Anne is the most interesting and well-rounded character while she’s at the novel’s center, but once Sally grows up and decides she’s interested in becoming a nun, she takes over as the protagonist, and she’s quite a bit less interesting than her mother is. The longest chapter, describing Sally’s train ride from New York to Chicago to join a convent there on a trial basis, would have worked very well as a standalone short story, where Sally is the observer and pivot point but her personality, which appears just in flashes, is secondary to the cast of eccentrics around her, notably the crass woman who sits next to her (and has a vocabulary inapposite to the time period). It even ends on the right note for the conclusion of a short story about a woman on her first journey out of her birth city, considering embarking on a new and permanent direction in her life. It’s too bad the rest of the novel couldn’t live up to that chapter; so little happens and the characters are so bland that many of the chapters in The Ninth Hour are just plain boring.

I’ve read all five of those NBCC fiction finalists, and this was clearly at the bottom. I would have given the prize to Exit West rather than Improvement, with The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness third and Sing, Unburied, Sing (which won the National Book Award) fourth. The Ninth Hour is the only one of the five I’d say is below the recommendation threshold, however; it’s such an inconsequential story that illuminates nothing about us, its characters, our society, or even questions about faith, the meaning of life, or dealing with death. I’m not sure what the critics in the NBCC saw in the book to give it a nod over the vastly superior Lincoln in the Bardo for the shortlist.

Next up: Kory Stamper’s Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ August 20, 2018
→ By

Pachinko.

Min Jin Lee’s second novel, Pachinko, earned broad acclaim last year, including a spot on the shortlist for the National Book Award (which it lost to Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing) and on the New York Times‘ list of the ten best books of last year, all of which brought it to my attention in the spring when I was looking at potential winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which went to the markedly inferior Less. Lee’s novel manages to combine a totally unfamiliar aspect of world history and culture – the outsider status of Koreans living in Japan during and after the latter’s colonization of the Korean peninsula – with the familiar epic structure of classic novels of the British tradition. If Dickens or Eliot had written a novel about Koreans living as part of the underclass in Japan, it would probably look a lot like Pachinko.

Pachinko is a type of arcade game very popular in Japan, similar to pinball, and often used for gambling. Pachinko parlors are mostly owned by Koreans, and it was one of the few industries open to ethnic Koreans in Japan in the wake of colonization, which Lee uses as the backdrop for her novel. The book covers four generations of a Korean family from their beginnings in Busan, a city at the southern tip of the peninsula, through their settlement in Yokohama, Japan, and multiple tragedies borne largely of the disadvantages and obstacles they face as permanent outsiders in their adopted homeland.

The novel moves quickly to get us to Sunja, a teenaged Korean daughter of a widowed innkeeper, when she becomes pregnant by a Korean man, Honsu, who lives in Japan and only later reveals that he has a wife and children in Osaka whom he won’t leave or divorce. Sunja marries a Korean Presbyterian missionary, who moves her to Japan, where the family faces ongoing discrimination that moves from the overt to the subtle over the course of the novel’s fifty-odd years, where even educational achievement isn’t enough to push her descendants past the invisible barriers of anti-Korean prejudice in Japanese society. The source of Hansu’s wealth and power isn’t revealed until later in the book, but even his influence can’t break down all of these walls, and the pachinko industry becomes the source of refuge and only path to wealth or success for several members of the family. Through the narrative, Lee works in the mistreatment of Koreans prior to and during World War II, including political prisoners and forced laborers as well as off-screen references to “comfort women,” before the tone shifts to one of superficial acceptance and tacit discrimination in the wake of the war.

The overarching theme of Pachinko is one of displacement, as some of the core characters still yearn to return to Korea, thinking of it as home, while others want to think of Japan as home – especially Sunja’s younger son and grandson, both born in the archipelago – but aren’t fully accepted by Japanese society. Koreans in the novel form a cultural enclave, surrounded by Japanese people and their economic and social hierarchies, unable to fully assimilate even if they learn the language fluently and attend Japanese schools. Any upward mobility is stunted by formal and informal obstacles, like a plant trying to grow into ground that is too hard for its roots to penetrate. This leads to a sense of anomie in some characters, like Sunja’s younger son Mozasu, who ends up in the pachinko business primarily because it’s that or jail, while others, like her son with Hansu, Noa, can never reconcile their two identities and come to awful ends.

Although female agency is another theme that looms large throughout the novel, Noa seems to best encapsulate Lee’s points about identity and isolation. He’s an ethnic Korean, but grows up believing his adoptive father, the Presbyterian missionary, is his biological father, and finds out far later that his real father is the businessman of dubious methods, Hansu, destroying any sense of self he’d built up through his own hard work in school and in jobs where he’s underpaid because he’s Korean. Lee writes more from the perspectives of the women in the novel, mostly Sunja, but Noa’s story after the revelation about his parentage could have used even more elucidation, as he disappears from the novel for many years of book time, leaving me with questions about the continued effects of his mixed-up identity.

I ended up getting Pachinko as a digital loan from my library after putting in a hold back in February, and when the book showed up, I was in the middle of something else, and had just eight days to finish it before the loan expired, which would be aggressive for a book of over 450 pages … but it reads so quickly that I finished it in four days. Lee’s prose absolutely flies, even with plenty of descriptive, scene-setting language, and the book is largely driven by dialogue, so the pace rarely slows. I have other, minor quibbles, such as wishing for more depth on certain characters, but Pachinko is so ambitious and exposes a world that was totally opaque or outright unknown to me beforehand that it seems petty to dwell on them. I would still rank it below Lincoln in the Bardo among 2017 novels, but it was more than worthy of any of the annual fiction awards for which it was considered.

Next up: Another 2017 novel, Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 22, 2018
→ By

The Stone Sky.

N.K. Jemisin became the first African-American author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and I believe the first woman of color to win it, when she took the prestigious (but generally white-dominated) prize home for her 2015 novel The Fifth Season, the opener of the Broken Earth trilogy. The story continued with The Obelisk Gate, which also took home the Hugo, and finished with last summer’s The Stone Sky, which is one of six nominees for this year’s Hugo and won Jemisin her first Nebula Award earlier this year. Continuing the saga of Essun and her daughter Nassun, two ‘orogenes’ who can control seismic movements in an earth subject to massive tectonic upheavals that cause lengthy climate disasters, The Stone Sky explains the origins of the post-apocalyptic setting and combines the parallel narratives – Essun’s, Nassun’s, and the nameless narrator of Essun’s sections, who is identified near the end of this book – into one story that answers all of the questions from the first two books. Wrapping up a series of this magnitude is difficult, and Jemisin, who has authored many other books, including series, seems to wobble as she tries to conclude this one. (UPDATE: This novel also won the Hugo, making Jemisin the first author to win the prize for all three books in a trilogy, and the first to win three straight Hugos for Best Novel.)

In the Broken Earth trilogy, humanity is in dire straits, as relatively unpredictable “Seasons” occur that produce catastrophic weather conditions that make survival extremely difficult, driving most humans, especially those near the Rifting (which I sense is by the equator), underground for the duration. If they don’t have food stores to survive, then they die. Somehow, enough humans have survived that the race persists, including some humans with the strange power of orogeny, allowing them to move the earth’s plates enough to try to stop some of those catastrophes from occurring. They also can draw on the power of the planet for combat, defensive or offensive, and there’s some overlap between the orogenes and people with a power the book refers to as magic, of even more obscure origin. And then there are the stone eaters, humanoid creatures who do as their name implies, can move through rock, and are effectively immortal.

Essun and Nassun are mother and daughter, but have been apart since the very beginning of The First Season, when Nassun’s father killed her little brother because he showed signs of orogeny and then absconded with her, leaving Essun to come home and find her son’s body with her family gone. Essun is part of a new ‘comm,’ which is trying to reach a distant haven before the imminent Season arrives, but is also still hoping to find her daughter, and in this book, she becomes aware that Nassun is doing things with her own nascent orogenic powers, driving Essun, herself one of the most powerful orogenes on the planet, to try to stop her daughter from wreaking unimaginable destruction on the world.

Nassun, meanwhile, has now lost her brother and father, and is separated from her mother, leaving her only with her Guardian, Schaffa, who acts as a father figure but also has ambiguous responsibilities beyond protecting his young charge. When his life is threatened, Nassun sets off on a quixotic mission that might save him but bring about an eschatological crisis from which humanity and the planet would never recover.
Although the series’ post-apocalyptic setting appears in the first novel to be the result of unchecked climate change, the cause of the Seasons turns out to be more fantastical than that, and any indictment of man’s reckless misuse of the planet and its environment is strictly metaphorical. The stronger metaphor, played out in parallel with Essun and Nassun, is one of man’s relationship with ‘Mother’ Earth, and the changes in the nature of that relationship over the course of the lives of both mother and child. Nassun needs her mother, but resents her absence (feeling abandoned, although that’s not fair to Essun). Essun is torn between her responsibilities to her comm – which is what’s keeping her alive – and her responsibilities to her daughter. Nassun eventually takes a course of action that reflects her youth and the poor judgment of humans whose brains have not yet fully developed, and it takes a heroic effort from Essun to try to stop her. The parallel with the man/Earth relationship here – there’s a hint of Gaia theory underneath the novel – is not perfect, but similar ideas, like man taking the environment for granted, using it up and discarding it when finished, appear in both the literal and figurative aspects of the novel.

The problem with The Stone Sky and the trilogy as a whole is the resolution of the main storyline, which seems to require Jemisin to create some new magic to complete it. The first book conceived a world that, while strange and often vague, felt self-contained: You didn’t know all of the rules of the environment, but you could trust that the author knew them and worked within their limits. By this third book, however, it seemed like Jemisin had expanded her own rule set to get to the finish line, including the transport method – like a hyperloop train through the earth – that is essential to get everyone in the right place for the slam-bang finish, and I found my suspension of disbelief starting to fall apart. Between that and some plodding prose – Jemisin is clearly brilliant and creative, but I found her style sluggish to read – I finished this book because I felt an obligation to it, but wouldn’t say I enjoyed it to the end.

Next up: still reading John Wray’s The Lost Time Accidents.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ May 1, 2018
→ By

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

Indian author Arundhati Roy won the Man Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel, The God of Small Things, after which she swerved into non-fiction writing and political activism, earning plaudits and awards for her open criticism of militarism, sectarianism, and corruption in India and in other world powers. Despite rumors for a decade that she was working on a second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness didn’t appear until mid-2017, by which point it seems that some of the popular interest in her work had cooled. It is a sweeping novel that is deeply saturated with modern Indian history and culture, and as such felt opaque to me, an American reader of European descent who has never visited the Asian continent’s mainland and, as I learned quickly while reading this book, knew very little about the politics and recent strife in the world’s largest democracy.

Roy weaves two narratives together in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and while she ultimately combines the two into one by the end of the book, it works more on a metaphorical level than a literal one. The first story, which accounts for about a quarter of the book, covers a hijra named Anjum who is rejected by her family and goes to live in a house of other people who exist outside the western male/female gender dichotomy. (Hijra, as I understand it, is a sort of catch-all term for intersex and transgender people, and is often recognized in south Asian cultures as a third gender distinct from the first two. In this book, at least, they’re depicted as a separate cast, alternately revered and reviled.) Anjum is born with underdeveloped genitalia of both sexes; her parents want her to be a boy, but she feels that she is a woman and lives openly dressed as one for the rest of her life. A Muslim in a time of rising religious fractiousness in India, Anjum is caught up in anti-Muslim violence perpetrated by Hindus, and ends up taking in an abandoned toddler to raise in the hijra enclave, fulfilling her biologically impossible desire for children. Their life is tragicomic, populated by eccentric characters like the self-named Saddam Hussain and the loony protestor Dr. Bharatiya, who writes an opinion newsletter that nobody reads.

The second narrative is more involved and, in my case, harder to follow without a deeper understanding of recent Indian politics. The Christian woman Tilo works at a theater where she meets three men who will all play important roles in her future – one who becomes a journalist in Kashmir; one who becomes a militant fighting for azadi, or freedom from India; and one who works for the Intelligence Bureau, the Indian equivalent to our FBI. The ongoing conflict in Kashmir, a region in the north of the Indian subcontinent that is the subject of a sixty-year dispute between India and Pakistan, with an active insurgency in Jammu & Kashmir against the Indian government, comes to dominate all of their lives. Tilo falls in love with one man but marrying another, the militant (Musa) marries a woman he meets during a grenade attack on a shop in Kashmir, everyone ends up questioned by the IB (which often involves torture), and, improbably, they end up connecting with Anjum, who has taken up residence in a graveyard and built her own little commune of outcasts within it.

I could infer from structure of the second narrative that Roy, an outspoken critic of the nationalist government now ruling India and the demagogues who have incited sectarian killings that include the 2008 Gujarat riots (depicted in the book), was trying to retell the history of Kashmir and of violence against Hindus in miniature through each of these characters – the soldier, the journalist, the government yes-man, the woman victimized by the mistakes of the men in her life. The bad guys here are really bad, and while the heroes are held up even when they err, and there’s a thread of hope and optimism throughout the convoluted narrative. But because I was raised in a country where history education barely includes anything at all that didn’t involve the United States, the allusions that I think were there may have been lost on me, or simply not there at all. Even events from within my lifetime that appear in the book – the Gujarat riots and the train-burning that triggered it, the Taleban insurgency in Kashmir, the repressive tactics of the Indian army in that region – weren’t familiar enough to me for me to fully appreciate what Roy expressed.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness will likely be compared to three novels in particular – her first novel; Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which she checks directly with a reference to Macondo; and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the tone of which is extremely similar to Roy’s tone here. This is an angry novel, one that paints the nationalist Hindu government in India as Trumpian, hate-driven, greedy, and feckless, while depicting India itself as beset by poverty, trash, and fear of violence. It might be a great one, even though it feels a little disorganized and the connection between Anjum and Tilo at the end is tenuous. I just know I didn’t fully grasp it.

Next up: Thomas Friedman’s Thank You for Being Late.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ April 22, 2018
→ By

Less.

Andrew Sean Greer’s Less was a surprise winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, both because there were several strong contenders that had already won other significant prizes in this cycle and because it’s ostensibly a comic novel, a subcategory that is very poorly represented in Pulitzer history. (I can count two outright comedies among the 90 previous winners.) Less is a quick and breezy read, the story of a writer, Arthur Less, turning 50 and taking a whirlwhind round-the-world trip after his younger boyfriend has left him to marry another man. It is also disappointingly bland and almost entirely without any real humor at all.

Arthur Less is a three-time novelist at something of a crossroads in his life and career. His first novel was a critical and commercial success, but his last two were each less so, and his latest one, a semi-autobiographical downer called Swift, was just rejected by his longtime publisher. His boyfriend, Freddy, has indeed left him. His previous lover, the Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Brownburn, threw him overboard some years earlier, and is now in some sort of assisted living facility. With his fiftieth birthday just weeks away, Less stitches together an impossible trip that takes him to four continents, speaking at one conference, appearing at another where he’s a finalist for an award, joining a friend for a journey across Morocco, heading to Japan to write a story on a ceremonial meal served in Kyoto, and so on. Along the way he meets a cadre of eccentrics, nearly has a fling with a married man, bumps into old friends, ruins one suit and buys another, and is possibly Patient Zero for some sort of 24-hour virus. The narrator is unseen, but confesses to knowing Less for many years – it’s not hard to guess who it is – and sprinkles the story of Less’s trip with flashbacks to earlier periods of the man’s life.

This is a midlife crisis novel, set loosely to the strains of Homer’s The Odyssey, with Less avoiding hazards and sirens on his trip around the globe, eventually making it back home after learning an Important Lesson about life. It’s mildly amusing in spots, but rarely does it become truly funny, and the whole exercise has too much of that unfortunate facet of literature of writers writing about how tough it is to be a writer. Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, each of whom won a Pulitzer for a book about or featuring a writer-narrator, were frequently guilty of the same thing. I am a writer, of a different ilk, and I do understand that there are aspects of this calling that are difficult, but as I often tell people who ask if I enjoy what I do for a living, I don’t complain about my job because no one wants to hear it. And many of Less’s complaints here are just that – cry me a river, you’re in Paris/Berlin/Tokyo and something trivial has gone wrong. There’s a small running gag about a bespoke suit that never quite lands and speaks to the privilege of Less’s life, that, even as he worries about being a bit skint, he can still indulge in luxuries most mortals cannot.

Greer does give the reader some moments of real pathos, including the touching digital reunion between Less, Brownburn, and Brownburn’s ex-wife Marian, whom Less assumes is still furious with him for stealing her husband – as if he turned the poet gay or some such nonsense – but is magnanimous and bears the wisdom of years as the three converse in unlikely fashion. There’s a pervasive sense here that Less is a side character in his own life, or that he believes that he is, only to have other people he encounters on his odyssey teach him of his own worth and importance, and that his best years aren’t necessarily behind him at age fifty.

The Pulitzer boards over the years have shown an affinity for books about writers or writing, and for books that fall into certain prescribed tranches of literature about well-off white men facing existential crises. If Less differs at all from such past winners, it’s that it’s the first novel to win the prize with a protagonist who’s LGBT. (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay had two protagonists, one a closeted gay man; several stories in John Cheever’s anthology feature gay main characters as well.) There just isn’t anything new in Less about life in these United States – ostensibly the purpose of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – nor is there anywhere near enough humor in this book to justify giving it the nod over other contenders like the daring Lincoln in the Bardo or the incisive Sing, Unburied, Sing. There’s always next year, I guess.

Next up: A true change of pace, as I’m reading Phil Collins’ memoir Not Dead Yet.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ April 13, 2018
→ By

Improvement.

Joan Silber won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction last year for her novel Improvement, a slim, fast-moving work of interconnected short stories that reminded me in many ways of the work of Ann Patchett, especially her books Bel Canto (a top 50 all-time novel for me) and Commonwealth, where a single event sets off a series of waves in multiple directions that alter the lives of several characters. The kiss of Commonwealth is here a decision not to go on a trip, which triggers enormous changes in the lives of at least a half-dozen people, leaving most of them better off, with at least one large exception, even though they may not even realize what happened to cause this.

Reyna is a young single mother whose boyfriend, Boyd, is in prison on Rikers Island on a marijuana charge; he’s black, she’s not, but this doesn’t seem to be an issue for anyone significant in the book except perhaps Boyd’s ex-girlfriend Lynette. Boyd gets out of prison, after which he and his genius (note: not actual geniuses) friends cook up a plan to smuggle cigarettes from low-tax Virginia to high-tax New York and sell them at a decent profit. This involves regular trips from the city to Richmond to buy the goods, complicated by the fact that, like a lot of lifelong NYC residents, most of these nitwits either can’t drive or can’t do it very well, with Boyd and one other member of the group also prohibited from driving or leaving the state due to their prior convictions. When the one group member capable of driving the truck doesn’t show for a scheduled run, Boyd & company try to press Reyna into doing it, but at the last second, she backs out, the novel’s Big Bang moment that changes so many lives in the book.

Silber’s strength here, which is one of Patchett’s as well, is her development of a diverse group of characters who sometimes have the most tenuous of connections but are still clearly populating the same world. We begin with Reyna and her eccentric aunt Kiki, who was once married to a Turkish man and lived in Istanbul and later on a farm near Ankara, but fan outward from there, even landing in Richmond to visit the girlfriend of Claude, one of the nitwits, who doesn’t know why Claude has stood her up; later the narrative returns to New York to Lynette, Claude’s sister, a cosmetologist who plans to open up her own shop with the money Claude makes from the scheme. One chapter flashes back to Kiki’s time in Turkey, when a trio of German tourists who are busy stealing artifacts from Turkish dig sites stops by her farm, a story that takes on greater significance later in the book.

Patchett’s best books – I’d include State Of Wonder in that list for sure, and would hear arguments for The Magician’s Assistant – all have some greater theme or illuminate something about human nature, but I don’t know if Silber did that here. I enjoyed the time I spent with these characters, and the development of those is the novel’s strength, yet the story is more interesting than insightful – it’s Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” set in Manhattan, without the sci-fi element, but Silber uses the same one-detail starting point to set the galaxies of her universe in motion. I’m not sure how this won the NBCC award even just considering the few other 2017 novels I’ve read so far.

Next up: One of the finalists for the NBCC award last year, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, by Arundhati Roy, who won the Man Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 10, 2018
→ By

Lincoln in the Bardo.

George Saunders is best known for his short stories, including the award-winning collection Tenth of December, so there was tremendous anticipation for his first full-length novel, Lincoln at the Bardo, when it was released last year; the transition from short form fiction to long is not a simple one, given how few writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald comes to mind) excelled at both. Lincoln at the Bardo is short, experimental, comprising entirely quotes from real and fictional sources, set in a sort of purgatory on earth, where Saunders gives us a grieving Abraham Lincoln among a multitude of shades who have yet to cross over, including that of his eleven-year-old son, Willie. (In Tibetan Buddhism, the bardo is the period of existence between one’s death and next rebirth.)

The novel, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize last year, opens with Willie dying of fever in an upstairs bedroom even as a White House party takes a place below, while we are also introduced to the three shades who will be our guides to this mysterious netherworld Saunders has constructed in the graveyard where Willie will be laid to rest. These spirits can interact with each other, but can’t be seen or heard by any living characters in the novel (a cheat I’m glad Saunders avoided); they can ‘enter’ a living body, and see his thoughts or feel his feelings, but the living are unaware of the shades’ presence or existence. The spirits appear incorporate to each other, and most carry some manifestation from their lives, often delivering substantial comic relief to a novel that by its very subject is weighty and tenebrous.

The three guides – Reverend Everly Thomas, who is unsure why he appears to have been condemned to hell; Roger Bevins III, a gay man who killed himself when his lover left him; and Hans Vollman, whose story is too funny to be spoiled here – try to convince Willie’s shade to cross over to the afterlife, which the shades we meet in the graveyard by and large have declined to do. Willie’s reluctance comes about because his father visited him in the graveyard and has promised to return, so Willie decides to stay, unaware of the significant consequences that can arise from this refusal. His father does return, leading to the climactic sequence where the shades all work together to try to convince Willie to cross, or to get his father to say something to accomplish the same, with unintended, tragicomic results.

The story unfurls entirely through quotes, many of which are drawn from contemporary newspaper accounts or later anthologies of letters or remembrances of the period, often showing how inconsistent descriptions of the same event can be – or how diverse sources can still agree on something like the sadness of President Lincoln’s visage even before his son’s death. Most of the quotes in the book are fabrications, either narrated by the three shades or attributed directly to the spirits who spoke them, and they run the gamut from the loquacious to the sentimental to the ridiculous, especially the Barons, a deceased husband and wife who seem locked in an eternal competition over who can swear the most, and have little shame about any peccadilloes from their previous lives. Some of these chapters are so tangential that they lead you well away from the main story around Willie and his father, and thus from what appears to be the ostensible point of the book: How do we love when those we love must die, and how do we move on with our lives when they’re gone?

Historical records of the time describe Lincoln as consumed by grief, visiting his son’s grave many times and talking aloud to his deceased son, providing Saunders with an ample starting point for this story, which gives us a President who knows he must persevere for his remaining family and for his country, but who is constantly drawn back to the graveyard and to his memories. (His wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, appears but briefly in the novel.) Saunders has also given us Willie and his comrades in the land of shade as grief incarnate; none of them can cross over until they acknowledge that they’re dead, as survivors can’t move on with their lives until they grieve and accept their losses.

I could have done without the glib ending, where Saunders gives Lincoln a little extra nudge in the direction in which the President actually took the war and his domestic policy, which felt too much like a wink and a nod to the audience. The myriad ways in which the shades interact with each other and attempt to do so with Lincoln provide plenty of comic relief, often bawdy and frequently hitting its mark, but having that aspect of the story touch actual history at the novel’s conclusion left me with a bitter taste, as if Saunders wanted to tell the reader he was just kidding about all the serious philosophical stuff that came before.

The few reviews I’ve read of Lincoln in the Bardo focus on Lincoln’s character in the book and how Saunders explores the father’s grief at the loss of his son, but that was less compelling than the novel’s inherent exploration of the temporary nature of our lives and of all of our loves. Was Lincoln’s love of his son somehow worth less because his son died so young? How do we cope with knowing that those we love will die – die before us, leaving us heartbroken, or die after us, a grief that we can only imagine and wish to prevent at any cost? Saunders tears open the paper covering up these questions, without providing pat answers, but revealing something about the human condition that I haven’t seen before in another novel.

Next up: Joan Silber’s 2017 novel Improvement, winner of the most recent National Book Critics Circle Award.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,