→ August 20, 2018
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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.

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→ July 22, 2018
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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.

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→ May 1, 2018
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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.

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→ April 22, 2018
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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.

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→ April 13, 2018
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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.

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→ April 10, 2018
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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.

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→ January 1, 2018
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The Obelisk Gate.

N.K. Jemisin won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel for her 2015 book The Fifth Season, the first novel in the Broken Earth trilogy, set well into the future, on an Earth that is plagued by massive tectonic shifts that result in lengthy Seasons where nearly all life on the surface is extinguished and humans must huddle underground to wait the Season out. (You might call this “cli-fi,” although it’s not clear that this kind of climate change is caused by humans … at least, not through two books.) The sequel, The Obelisk Gate, won the Hugo Award again this year, but while it follows the first in chronology and setting, it has a thoroughly different tenor than the first book did.

Where The Fifth Season followed three distinct storylines set apart in time, The Obelisk Gate focuses on just two simultaneous threads: Essen’s life in the underground commune (“comm”) Tarima, which finds itself under threat from within and without; and her daughter Nassun’s journey with Essun’s husband south toward a comm where the father, Jija, hopes his daughter will be “cured” of her gift of orogeny – a sort of magical, innate ability to alter the very molecules of one’s environment, including starting tectonic shifts and communicating with the orbiting obelisks of unknown origin. A massive Season is imminent, likely caused by Essun’s former lover Alabaster, who created the Rift that provoked this season but is now himself turning to stone as a result. Essun wants to find her daughter, but as an orogene in a world where such people are often killed (even by their Guardians) when a Season approaches, she’s also driven toward self-preservation. Nassun, meanwhile, is barely scratching the surface of her own powers, but when she and Jija arrive at the southern comm, she meets the former Guardian Schaffa, who recognizes her limitless potential and begins to train her even as Jija believes she’s going to be made ‘normal.’

The twin but parallel plot strands make The Obelisk Gate a much more straightforward read than its predecessor, in which time seemed deliberately obscured from the reader and the relationship between the three subplots far from clear. That conceit ended up working in the book’s favor, increasing the tension (and perhaps baiting the reader’s impatience), so that The Obelisk Gate feels like a book in the same universe by a different author – not better or worse, just different, more conventional, and thus more dependent on the nature of the two primary characters.

So where Jemisin has created a grim, realistic, almost tangible setting for these books that elevated The Fifth Season, here in the middle book of the series, her weaker characterization becomes more of a problem. Essun and Nassun are both good people, with credible emotional reactions to setbacks and obstacles, but neither is particularly interesting or compelling; you root for these characters because they represent hope, for themselves and humanity, not out of any direct empathy for or interest in either of them. Some of the secondary characters have that interest, such as the complex motivations that drive Schaffa or the bizarre nature of the stone-eaters Alabaster and Hoa, but the two main women lack the texture or depth to carry the book.

Instead, the story itself has to do all of the lifting, and it’s mostly up to the task, although there’s still some Middle Book Syndrome as Jemisin gets further into her world-building and explains more of what’s happening in the book’s present. The nature of the Obelisks is at least partly explained, and she sets up what I assume will be the narrative of the third book, The Stone Sky, how Essun and Nassun will interact with the Obelisks to save the world (or at least parts of it). It’s compelling enough to keep me reading, but I thought this was a step down in ambition and in characterization from the first book.

Next up: I’ve finally begun MacKinlay Cantor’s Andersonville, winner of the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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→ December 4, 2017
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Smoke.

I can’t remember where I first heard about Dan Vyleta’s novel Smoke, which I think falls somewhere in between the YA and adult literature genres, but I’d had it on my shopping list for a year when the paperback version appeared in June for under $10. Offering a gothic-themed setting in an alternate reality where sin is revealed as visible Smoke emanating from the sinner’s body, Smoke follows its trio of compelling characters through a physical and metaphysical journey that leads them to question everything they’ve been told by their parents, teachers, and every other moral authorities in their lives.

Set some time in the late 19th century, Smoke begins, as so many young adult books do, in a boarding school, where we meet Thomas, a volatile child with hidden rage and some sort of secret in his family background; and Charlie, his new best friend at school, a more mild-mannered, rule-abiding kid. The school is for children of the upper class, who send their kids there to learn to avoid producing Smoke – easier said than done, as it turns out – as part of the complex social hierarchy that has evolved to protect those who don’t smoke, the gentry, from those who do. The opening scene, which does a wonderful job of pulling you right into the story, sets Thomas up against his antagonist for the remainder of the book, Julius, a Malfoyesque character who runs the school’s unofficial but apparently tolerated inquisitorial squad. What appears at the start to be a conflict among boys, two good against one evil, takes a hard and unexpected right turn when they visit Thomas’s aunt and uncle over the holidays, only to find themselves plunged right into the heart of the mystery of Smoke and on a quest to try and solve it, to save Thomas’s life and perhaps overturn the entire autocracy the aristocrats have constructed with Smoke as their weapon.

Vyleta takes the story from there into some surprising places, and does well to create a panoply of opponents for the two boys and Thomas’s cousin, Lydia, as they work on unraveling the knot of Smoke. There are some agents who are clearly evil, but many others who are working at opposing purposes to the kids for independent, moral, or even banal reasons. Eventually, we need and get a showdown with the worst of the baddies, but it is not central to the book the way it is to so many YA fantasy novels. (I’ve seen it referred to in video games, especially for RPGs, as the “Kill the Big Foozle” plot device.) It’s the other stuff that makes Smoke … um, sizzle, because the varying motivations and understanding of what’s actually going on beneath the skin, literally and metaphorically, open up the characters to natural discussions about right and wrong, moral authority, and historical revisionism. The most obvious target of Vyleta’s satire is the Church – Catholic, Anglican, you pick – although much of Smoke‘s subversive subtext works quite as well when applied to the pernicious effects of classism, environmental racism, or how people respond to totalitarian regimes.

By setting up a multi-threaded conflict, Vyleta set up a delightfully unconventional ending with plenty of tension, including the big fight that some readers will demand, but also resolving other plot threads in unexpected ways, not always thoroughly (by design) but at least hinting at what the End of Smoke might entail for whole groups of people whose identities are tied to the status quo. The book itself was inspired by a line from Dickens’ Dombey and Son, but the vibe of Smoke is much more along the lines of Lev Grossman’s superb trilogy The Magicians: It’s a bit dark, but not overwhelmingly so, and there’s plenty of humor and empathy to balance out the sinister elements. It’s too well-written to call it a true YA novel, but the themes would be appropriate for teens.

Next up: I read James Gould Cozzens’ Pulitzer-winning novel Guard of Honor, and it was just so bad – boring in story and prose – that I’m not going to bother with a full review. I’m now 2/3 of the way through Bessel Van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, which is $2 right now for the Kindle.

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→ September 3, 2017
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Everyone Brave is Forgiven.

Chris Cleave has written several global bestsellers, notably the 2008 novel Little Bee, but his 2016 book Everyone Brave is Forgiven was his first foray into historical fiction. This quick-moving novel of four young people caught up in World War II is heavy on both action and emotion, but the character development lags behind the pace of the text, and it can’t help but suffer in comparison to a contemporary novel that does so much more with the same setting.

The quartet of characters at the heart of the book are Mary, Tom, Alistair, and Hilda, although Hilda is secondary to the main trio and bizarre love triangle that occupies the first half of the book. Mary and Tom are a quick item, meeting by chance at the start of the war when the manor-born Mary signs up and runs into Tom at the war office. Alistair, Tom’s more worldly, witty roommate, meets Mary later and the attraction is instant and mutual – but she and Tom are already engaged by this point and Alistair is heading back off to war after his first stint ended in the evacuation at Dunkirk. Mary is beautiful, so of course Hilda, her best friend, must be ugly, in what I believe is the 4th or 5th law of popular fiction (I get the order wrong sometimes), and attempts to set Hilda up with Alistair go nowhere.

Cleave can really write – the pace is brisk but never skimps on evocative imagery, especially the scenes of Blitz-plagued London or the privations Alistair suffers while stationed in Malta. The section where Mary, Tom, and Mary’s little class of non-evacuated students are caught in a bombing is the most memorable passage in the book, especially in how Cleave communicates the characters’ confusion in the shock of the attack – everything was fine, and now it’s not. His rendition puts the reader in the fog right next to his characters, so you feel the disorientation and the revelations seem to come in reverse, as if time has rewound and played back at half-speed.

He adds to the sense of disorientation, however, through the way he reveals big twists, such as the death early in the book of a side character whom Alistair has just befriended. The nonchalant description of the death, in the final sentence of a chapter, feels manipulative, although Cleave uses the aftermath to explore more of Alistair’s character in the first real window the reader gets into his emotions. But the regular use of jarring reveals wears thin very quickly and gives the novel a pulpy feel that doesn’t marry well with the subject matter.

Alistair is easy the most interesting character of the four, as Tom is a blank page and Mary’s appeal must lie in her looks rather than anything about her personality. Cleave builds the characters and then puts them through the ringer, but they come out on the other side relatively unchanged, just older and short a limb or with a visible scar. This is the real disappointment of Everyone Brave is Forgiven: Cleave set a novel during the Blitz, put real thought and energy into depicting the city in ruins, and then had his characters drift through the setting without sufficient growth or development.

This book appeared just one year and one day after Anthony Doerr won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with his own WWII novel, All the Light We Cannot See, one of the best contemporary works of fiction I’ve read. Doerr crafted a more complex, meticulous plot, and in the soldier Werne gave readers a memorable, thoroughly-developed character who faces real moral challenges, without falling into the sentiment that traps Cleave. Doerr doesn’t skimp on the narrative greed – his novel moved faster and worked with higher stakes than Cleave’s, but along the way we get much more insight into Werne, and even Marie-Laure, who bears a few marks of the stock character, is better developed than Mary or Hilda. I find it hard to judge the latter novel without considering Doerr’s work, given their settings and how close the release dates were, but even on its own Cleave’s book is more a well-written page-turner than a work of good literature.

Next up: Still reading T.S. Stribling’s The Store, which has managed to pile a dash of anti-Semitism on top of its pervasive racism.

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→ July 27, 2017
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The Last Days of Night.

Graham Moore won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2015 for his work on The Imitation Game, particularly impressive for a first-time screenwriter with just that and one novel under his belt at the time. His second novel, The Last Days of Night, came out last August and just appeared in paperback this spring, and is about as good a work of popular, contemporary fiction as I’ve come across.

Moore takes the term historical novel to a new extreme here, creating a coherent narrative around the War of Currents of the late 1800s – the public dispute over whether the nation’s power grid should run on direct current, favored by Thomas Edison, or alternating current, favored by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse – by relying on the historical record as much as possible for descriptions of characters, scenes, and even dialogue. This type of novel typically makes me uncomfortable because it potentially puts words and thoughts in the mouths of real-life personages, potentially coloring or distorting our impressions of them; Moore includes an appendix explaining source materials for many of the depictions in the book, even explaining the origins of some of the dialogue, and also delineating which events and timelines in the book are real and which he created or rearranged to fit the narrative. I’ve read “non-fiction” books that played faster and looser with the truth than Moore does here in his work of fiction.

The War of Currents was kind of a big deal, and a lot more public than you’d expect a scientific debate to be, largely because the two figures at the center of it, Edison and Westinghouse, were both famous and powerful at the time – Edison the revered inventor and showman, Westinghouse the successful businessman and an inventor in his own right, the two embroiled in a public dispute over whether DC or AC was the safer choice for the nation’s emerging electrical grid. (AC was the inarguably superior technology, and eventually won out, but not necessarily for the ‘right’ reasons.) Moore wraps this battle, including the bizarre entrance of one Harold Brown, inventor of the electric chair, into the debate, in the larger one over who really invented the incandescent light bulb, spicing things up a little bit with some fictional details like the firebombing of Tesla’s laboratory and a hostile takeover of Edison’s company.

Told from the perspective of Paul Cravath, a young attorney who handled Westinghouse’s side of the various lawsuits back and forth between him and Edison and later founded the Council on Foreign Relations, The Last Days of Night manages to turn what could have been dry history into a suspenseful, fast-paced novel (aided by lots of short chapters) populated by well-rounded characters. Edison’s depiction might be a little too on the nose, but Westinghouse, Cravath, and even the enigmatic Tesla – whose Serbian-accented English is recreated in clever fashion by Moore, who explains his technique in the appendix – come to life on the page in three dimensions even with the limitations of their roles. Moore relied largely on historical information to flesh out the characters, with the main exception of Agnes Huntington, Cravath’s wife, on whom there was very little documentation, leading Moore (or perhaps simply allowing him) to create her backstory and eventual romance with Cravath out of whole cloth. The trick allows Moore to give the book its one proper female character, since the War of Currents was fought entirely by men in domains – science and the law – that were closed to women until the last century.

I found the pace of Last Days a little frenetic, definitely aimed more at the popular end of the market than the literary end; events move quickly, as Moore compressed almost a decade into about two years, and the book has short chapters and tons of dialogue to keep up the velocity. That meant I tore through the book but found it a little balanced towards action over meaning; there was just less to ponder, especially after the book was over, but I also never wanted to put the book down because there are so few points where the pace slackens. That makes it a rarity for me – a book I could recommend to anyone who likes fiction, regardless of what sort of fiction you like.

Next up: Still playing catchup with reviews; I’ve finished Grazia Deledda’s After the Divorce ($2 on Kindle) and Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins, and am now reading Anna Smaill’s weird, dystopian novel The Chimes.

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