→ August 2, 2015
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Colorless Tzukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

Haruki Murakami wrote one of the best novels I’ve ever read, his magnum opus The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a masterful blending of reality and dreamlike sequences (some literally in characters’ dreams) that combine to explore Japan’s trouble dealing with its brutal legacy from World War II. It’s #16 on my top 100 novels of all-time list. He followed that up with another tremendous novel, Kafka on the Shore, in 2002, another book that deals with the philosophical aftermath of the second world war, weaving a brilliant twin narrative that also delves into dialectics, the dream/reality divide, and “really good dumps.”

Since Kafka, however, Murakami has written just three novels, none up to the level of those two works. After Dark was short and felt unfinished, while I never bothered with his thousand-page tome 1Q84 due to its heft and comments from friends that it wasn’t worth the time required. Given the positive press around his latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, I at least had some optimism that Murakami was getting back to peak form, but after ripping through it last week, I am sorry to report that this book sucked. It’s a cold, aimless, distant, unsatisfying novel that takes Murakami’s frequent theme of alienation to the extreme of alienating the reader from the book itself.

The title character is seriously bummed out, with good reason: once part of an extremely tight-knit quintet of friends, he found himself abandoned and shunned by the other four without reason or warning, entering a period of suicidal depression for six months before emerging a very different person on the other side, although his life afterwards remains monotonous and largely friendless. Now in his late 30s, Tsukuru, an engineer who designs railway stations, finds himself in the first serious relationship of his life, but his semi-girlfriend, Sara, insists that he confront his four friends to deal with the unresolved sadness and angst that is blocking him from fully committing to their (or any) relationship.

It’s a solid premise for a book, but what happens next is a whole lot of nothing. Tsukuru visits his friends one by one, eventually going to Finland for the last of the encounters, and gets factual answers to his questions of why he was excommunicated, but only in the most superficial way. He learns about two crimes committed against one of the friends, the first of which was loosely connected to his banishment, but Murakami never bothers to go into those in any detail, much less tell the reader who committed them. While the novel ends with Tsukuru obtaining a sort of closure, it’s a thoroughly unsatisfying variety at least for the reader; there’s no cathartic event, but there isn’t even enough of an explanation to justify Tsukuru feeling any resolution of what’s “blocking” him. He believes he’s “colorless,” but why did the novel about him have to be that way too?

Next up: Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel The Buried Giant.

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→ July 29, 2015
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The Goldfinch.

I have Insider posts up on Troy Tulowitzki trade, the Ben Zobrist trade, and the Jonathan Papelbon trade.

Donna Tartt’s nearly 800-page bildungsroman The Goldfinch won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, sparking an ongoing controversy over its worthiness, with some highbrow critics arguing that its prose was too pedestrian while other critics and authors railed against the inherent elitism of those claims. I think I come down in the vast middle between the two camps: It’s a good novel, certainly not dumbed-down for anybody, elaborately plotted and written in an adult voice, yet it finishes weakly and doesn’t seem to fit the admittedly vague guidelines for the Pulitzer (“for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life”). It is, however, one of the only books I’ve ever read that seems to take a serious view of post-traumatic stress disorder and tries to bring it to life in an empathetic yet unstinting fashion.

Theo Decker, the protagonist and narrator of The Goldfinch, is a typical, bookish thirteen-year-old boy, living in Manhattan with his adoring mother after his alcoholic father walked out on them a few months earlier, when the two of them are caught in a terrorist attack on an art museum that’s exhibiting Dutch painter Carel Patritius’ (real) painting of the book’s title. The blast kills Theo’s mother, while Theo, in another room at the time of the explosion, tries to comfort an older man who’s dying near him and who tells Theo to take The Goldfinch from the wall, perhaps to protect it. Theo ends up carrying the painting with him for years, a physical manifestation of the PTSD (reminiscent in a slight way of Emma Sulkowicz’ Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)) from the attack, which he chooses to self-medicate via substance abuse and reckless behavior. The story takes him from New York to Las Vegas back to New York and eventually to Amsterdam, where the novel makes a sharp left into this weird noir-ish crime-story territory, losing much of the emotional impact from the first five hundred pages or so, losing the thread of the PTSD exploration in favor of, I think, finding a way to wrap up the book.

Some critics called the portion of the ending that eventually gets the painting back to the authorities too obvious/predictable, something Theo should have done far earlier, but I think that ignores or dismisses the idea of the painting as a symbol of Theo’s PTSD – he can’t get rid of the painting just by wishing to do so, but has to find some way to start to heal himself before he can do so. I could argue that Tartt fails to establish his healing well enough by the ending, but then again, the book was already too long by a third and by that point the escapade around the painting’s theft was approaching the ridiculous.

Theo is a flawed character but a well-developed one, and with almost 800 pages to spend in his head we get a full picture of his personality and his struggle to come to any kind of grips with the death of his mother and everything bad that comes after. He’s the only character in the book to get that treatment, however, as everyone else has a two-dimensional quality, from his angelic mother to the similarly wispy Pippa (a crush who is, herself, tied to the museum bombing and thus remains in a tangible way just beyond his reach) to the furniture restorer Hobie who becomes a surrogate parent to Theo in the latter half of the book. Even Boris (why always Boris?), Theo’s best friend during his time in Las Vegas, is half character and half caricature, not to mention capable of consuming unfathomable quantities of drugs and alcohol … although fictional Russians have a preternatural capacity to metabolize vodka.

The Pulitzer committee gives only a terse explanation for each winner’s selection, so we’re left guessing what they saw in The Goldfinch that many critics didn’t see or didn’t value. The only explanation I can conceive that fits the guideline about “American life” is the PTSD angle: the National Center for PTSD says about 8 million U.S. adults suffer from PTSD in any given year, with causes ranging from military combat to rape to disasters like the book’s museum bombing. PTSD isn’t quintessentially American, but it is a fact of life all over the world today, and it’s increasing in our consciousness if not in prevalence, especially with soldiers returning from lengthy tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan with the disorder. If that’s the book’s greatest strength, however, the slapdash finish undermines the exploration of the disorder and its effects. Theo’s recovery, such as it is, is unsatisfying from a reader perspective and, I’d guess, from a clinical one too. The Goldfinch spends two-thirds of its bulk as a serious literary work, but by its final pages it has devolved into a smart page-turner, diluting the impact of its more ambitious passages.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

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→ February 25, 2015
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Let the Great World Spin.

My ranking of the top prospects for 2015 impact is up for Insiders, and I held a (somewhat hard to read) Facebook chat about that piece on Tuesday. I also have a piece up for Paste from my visit to Toyfair NYC earlier this month, talking about recent and upcoming releases from major boardgame publishers.

Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin won the National Book Award (a prize I’ve always found to be even more eccentric in its choices than the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) in 2009, and the book is saturated with praise from critics and other authors for its scope, its structure, its characters, everything about it. I almost feel inadequate as a reader saying I thought it was a nice* book, but I just did not connect with it on any of those other levels.

*I’m using “nice” here somewhat sarcastically, sort of like saying it was “interesting.” It’s a very good book, just not a life-changing one for me.

McCann’s gambit here is to use the day that Philippe Petit walked the tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center as the central event that links all of the stories in the novel, stories involving a set of characters whose lives are improbably connected by tiny threads that strain credulity. It’s a short story novel, but far better structured and plotted than Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, one of the more perplexing Pulitzer winners I’ve read (which is a bit more than half of them). The first story introduces us to the Corrigan brothers, two Irishmen living in New York, one a monk (of sorts) whose mission is to help the various prostitutes who work under the Deegan Bridge, near his apartment in the south Bronx, a character at once incredibly compelling yet also drawn in impossibly sharp lines without enough graying around the edges. One of the prostitutes has two babies, who end up in foster care with a mother who’s lost three sons to the Vietnam War, who is in a social/support group with other mothers who’ve lost sons to the war, including Claire, the slightly neglected Park Avenue wife of a successful judge who happens to be the one who draws both the case Petit and of the aforementioned prostitute and her mother, arrested for robbing a john a year or so prior. Each of these characters takes a turn at the center of the narration, although only some get the first person treatment.

The precision of these narratives and the spidery fabric that connects them is itself impressive, but more from the perspective of respect for the craft than from a readability or even a literary point of view – ultimately, if those stories weren’t connected, this wouldn’t be a novel at all, but a story collection. Where McCann succeeds most is in varying his voices to put the reader inside the minds of the diverse cast of characters he’s assembled; the prostitutes and the socialite and the monk and his more temporally-minded brother all have to have different voices, even if it’s a third-person narrator and McCann manages to do that well and craft each character with great empathy, without ever coming off as overly sentimental or, given the racial mixture he’s describing, prejudicial. It would be too easy to turn his black prostitutes into blackface caricatures of a very real underclass, but McCann avoids that trap with great skill.

But by shifting its focus Let the Great World Spin also avoids your grasp; it’s hard to feel an emotional connection to any character or to the story when they change so frequently, but also because McCann keeps them at arm’s length from the reader, with the exception of the Park Avenue mother Claire, who misses her son and yet wants more than anything to find a kinship with other grieving mothers who begin to separate themselves from her when they see her home and assume she’s far wealthier than they are. Her husband, Solomon, was one of the book’s most hackneyed characters, yet she pulsed with life, with her grief intertwined with her social anxiety, her desire to be just one of the gals, each of whom has also lost a son in a pointless war. She felt so real that I could picture her gait on the expensive carpet, her expressions, her tiny movements and gestures, all because of how McCann depicted her inner monologue. If all of his characters had lived and breathed on the pages the way she did, I would probably be banging the table for all of you to read this book. Instead, I found it a skillfully written work, an enjoyable read, but not one I was rushing to finish due to narrative greed or a deep emotional connection with the characters.

Next up: I’ve already finished The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry and begun George Saunders’ short story collection Tenth of December.

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→ July 6, 2013
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The Orphan Master’s Son.

When the Dear Leader wanted you to lose more, he gave you more to lose.

I’ve read about half of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, including the last thirteen, and overall, my impression is that they pick some pretty dreary books. Many titles won for what I thought were fairly obvious reasons of political correctness, and others have won for reasons that escape me entirely. A few seem like lifetime achievement awards, like Faulkner winning for two of his lesser novels or Cheever getting an omnibus award for his short stories. Last year, they punted entirely, failing to name a winner for the first time since 1977, sparking some outrage from independent booksellers who see a spike in sales of the winner in years when the board deigns to name one.

The most recent winner, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, breaks that recent trend in many ways, all of them good. Unlike most winners, the novel isn’t set in the United States, and has nothing to do with the American experience. It’s set almost entirely in North Korea, yet explores themes, especially the natures of freedom and identity, that go well beyond the confines of the world’s most repressive regime. It’s rendered with deep empathy for nearly all of its characters, encapsulating a surprising amount of humor (some of it dark, of course) in a wide-ranging tragedy that harkens back to Shakespeare. Johnson even crafts government agents who are better than caricatures, and makes the horrendous conditions of life in North Korea real on the page without pandering. It’s a compulsive read in spite of, or perhaps in part due to, the difficulty of the subject matter.

The main character, introduced to us as Pak Jun Do, the son of the book’s title, begins life in a North Korean orphanage run by his father, after which he progresses through a series of jobs that bring him into increasing conflict with the regime that controls every aspect of North Korean life. His final role involves the assumption of the identity of a national hero, bringing him into the orbit of the Dear Leader himself, Kim Jong Il, leading to the ultimate conflict that drives the final half of the novel, where Pak Jun Do, now called Commander Ga, tries to save his new wife, whom the Dear Leader wants for himself.

Johnson spins an elaborate plot that remains quite easy to follow, even with his technique of telling the Commander Ga story through three different perspectives – a third-person view, the first-person narrative of one of Ga’s state interrogators, and brief dispatches from the state’s own mouthpiece. The first third, covering Pak Jun Do’s life from the orphanage to his time as a spy on a fishing vessel to a trip to Texas with a low-level diplomat, is all prologue to the story of the actress, Sun Moon. Yet even she is only a part of the larger story of Pak Jun Do’s own disillusionment and attempt to find what freedom he can in a totalitarian state, and to fashion an identity for himself after the state wiped out the first one and gave him another.

The development of Pak Jun Do, whose name sounds similar to the English “John Doe,” allows Johnson to explore those these of freedom and identity while folding in stories like that of the true-believer state interrogator who questions not just his allegiances, but the entire structure of his life to date – but does so subtly, almost as an objective outside observer of his own life, while he continues his job of chronicling prisoners’ lives before wiping out their memories with electroshock therapy. Johnson humanizes the inhuman, and gives texture to flat images that seem too awful to contemplate, weaving it all into the narrative as background, so that the characters’ stories can occur in front of a realistic setting that might otherwise have overwhelmed them.

Johnson did visit North Korea, but like the few Westerners allowed to enter that backwards nation, he wasn’t permitted to speak to any average citizens, which meant that he had to imagine their quotidian lives and their typical dialogue without the benefit of first-person research. I found his incorporation of the omnipresent state into nearly every conversation realistic, or at least reasonable, for a situation where a single errant sentence could get you sent to a prison camp (which, by the way, the North Koreans still deny they use) or worse. The refraction of normal conversation through the prism of the police state twists not only words, but the mores of everyday life:

“What happened?” Buc asked him.
“I told her the truth about something,” Ga answered.
“You’ve got to stop doing that,” Buc said. “It’s bad for people’s health.”

Even though Pak/Ga does some awful things during the course of the book, including participating in kidnappings of Japanese citizens (something the North Koreans have admitted doing), he earns the reader’s sympathy through the strange development of his character. The use of a “John Doe” soundalike name can’t be a coincidence; he is a blank canvas, growing up with memories but no independent identity, and shapeshifts into different roles, developing his moral compass and his emotions later in life, so that the person he is at the end of the novel bears no resemblance to the person he was at the start. It’s only a minor spoiler to say that the conclusion finds him at his most free, and with the clearest identity he’s had in the entire story. How he gets there, and how Johnson takes us along, is one of the strongest experiences I’ve had as a reader in years.

Next up: I’ve just finished Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami and am about to start Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career.

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→ July 3, 2013
→ By

The Sense of an Ending.

I have a brief analysis of the Scott Feldman trade up for Insiders, as well as a column on farm systems rising and falling so far this year. Arizona prospect Archie Bradley was my guest on today’s Behind the Dish podcast.

Julian Barnes’ slim, incisive novel The Sense of an Ending is sneaky-brilliant, a typically understated British work that, in the tradition of Kazuo Ishiguro and Graham Greene, devastates you from the inside out through subtle reveals and imperceptible shifts in character. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 and is easily among the best post-2000 novels I’ve read. (It also comes in a deckle-edged paperback, which matters greatly to me as a captain of #TeamDeckleEdge.)

Tony Webster, the narrator of The Sense of an Ending, is in his sixties, divorced, in infrequent contact with his married daughter, when he receives an unexpected message from the past, a bequest that returns him into contact with two names from his university years – one still living, the other long deceased but instrumental to the story at hand. The first section, which almost works as a standalone novella, recounts his time at boarding school and university with his small group of friends and a standoffish, haughty girlfriend named Veronica. A weekend visit to her family, Tony and Veronica’s eventual breakup, and her subsequent affair with one of Tony’s friends all lead to wildly unanticipated consequences forty years down the road.

The book comprises a tragedy wrapped in a mystery. Barnes peels back the mystery bit by bit, as Tony discovers buried memories or gains small clues from family or friends that help him discover just what happened forty years ago to make a woman he barely knew include him in her will. This inclusion puts Tony on a collision course with Veronica, one he could avoid; instead, he chooses to steer directly into her path, repeatedly, even to the point where he questions his own emotions for Veronica, whether he seeks closure, or a rekindling of what was, by his own account, a pretty lousy affair in the first place.

The tragedy at the heart of the mystery is one Tony doesn’t fully grasp until the book’s end; as with the butler Stevens in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Tony is introspective but emotionally stunted, unable to assess the effects of his actions on himself and on others until the time has long past. On seeing a letter he wrote forty years prior that has some bearing on the tragedy itself, he says:

Remorse, etymologically, is the act of biting again: that’s what the feeling does to you. Imagine the strength of the bite when I reread my words.

Yet, as with Briony in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Tony finds no opportunity for redemption here, and must move forward in the new reality of consequences that cannot be undone. The bite he delivered himself has come back around to him tenfold, which casts everything he’s done in his life – which adds up to less than he seems to think at first – in a new and unflattering light.

Unlike Atonement‘s Briony, who uses her memory to create a fiction for herself that is more tolerable than the truth (with unsatisfactory results), Tony himself questions the reliability of his own memories, thus opening the floor for readers to question his reliability as a narrator – whether he is whitewashing his own past, or aggrandizing his role in the tragedies of those around him. Has his mind altered his memories to create a history with which he can live? Isn’t that what the human brain does, as a protective mechanism? Or is this a symptom of Tony’s own arrested development, evident in his own descriptions of his boarding school and university years? Barnes offers no answers, which is good because I don’t believe any good answers exist, to these questions of the nature of memory and how we react when false or merely inaccurate memories collide with reality. For Tony, there is no avoiding what was done and what exists forty years later; there is only interpretation, and uncertain culpability.

Next up: I’ve got about 100 pages to go in Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son.

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→ May 31, 2013
→ By

Persecution.

I posted a new projected first round for next week’s MLB Rule 4 draft yesterday, with a new name up top, and did a brief Klawchat as well. I’ve already heard some fresh things since that mock went up, including that the Astros aren’t entirely off Bryant after all.

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I enjoyed Alessandro Piperno’s debut novel, The Worst Intentions, even though it often turned crude, because it was funny and featured so many cleverly crafted characters. His second novel, Persecution, shows far more polish and greater empathy with its flawed protagonist, with Piperno’s dry wit now applied to a tragic story, the fall from grace of a pediatric oncologist whose aloofness leads to his undoing.

Dr. Leo Pontecorvo had what he thought was a perfect life – a loving wife, two sons, a lucrative job with meaning as well as social importance, a freelance gig writing about health issues for a major Italian newspaper – until it is shattered by two accusations of wrongdoing, presented to us in reverse order. The novel opens with the Pontecorvos sitting down to a family dinner with the TV news on in the background, only to have the broadcaster announce that Leo stands accused of a sexual relationship with his 13-year-old son’s girlfriend, Camilla. Through flashbacks, Piperno’s unnamed yet omnipresent narrator leads the reader through Leo’s rise and fall, including allegations of financial impropriety and the disastrous consequences of his mishandling of Camilla’s crush on him, as well as the less-than-perfect truth below the surface of his marriage and family life, so that he is by turns sympathetic and deserving of his fate.

Pontecorvo’s emotional immaturity mirrors that of the lead character in The Worst Intentions, but without the earlier book’s emphasis on sexual immaturity (although Leo has his moments). He’s never quite cut the cord with his domineering Jewish mother, and has floated through so many difficult situations through either the force of his intellect or the power of his personality that he’s unable to cope with actual crises, often leaving the management to his doting wife. He’s hopeless when faced with people who have competing agendas because he assumes others will be rational and thoughtful, and can’t imagine them pursuing actions that might do him harm. That gullibility leads him to lend money to a wayward student who tricks him into appearing to commit usury, which also points to the scientific, rational-minded Leo’s inability to responsibly handle anything to do with money. It also means that when Camilla’s crush on him first takes form, he has no concept of how others might perceive his responses, and walks right into what might have been a trap – although the reliability of the narration is an open question even as the book ends.

At heart, Leo believes himself to be a good man, but his actions speak to a superficial and pretentious inner character. He loves to take photographs, but refuses to take family pictures, even on vacations, because they’re not artistic:

Her husband only photographed dead things. And, even worse, he lavished all the care in the world on doing it. But ask him to take a “normal” photograph, who knows, the boys learning to ride a bicycyle, his wife in evening dress or posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, or wherever the hell he wanted? Certainly not, not a chance. When you asked him, the artist felt outraged.

He’s not an artist in any sense of the word, of course, but the aspirational nature of his behavior in every one of his endeavors, even in parenting (which leads to acts of emotional cruelty toward his sons), reveals his own insecurity – which becomes fully apparent when his reaction to the public nature of the scandal is to hide, literally and figuratively, in the basement, abandoning his wife and children while believing they’ve actually abandoned him. He’s an overgrown child, incapable of handling true adversity in an adult fashion, of proclaiming his innocence to his wife, or working to regain the trust of either of his sons, or doing much of anything to fight the charges against him. He goes underground – ironic for a man whose surname begins with the Italian word for “bridge” – and never emerges.

Piperno’s strongest resemblance to Philip Roth and other Jewish-American writers – Piperno’s father is Jewish, and both of Piperno’s protagonists are Italian Jews – lies in that strong sense of irony evident in Leo’s name. (His actions don’t reflect the courage of the astrological lion of his first name, either.) The pediatric oncologist undone by the accusations of a child, the

The main weakness of Persecution is the depiction of Leo’s wife, Rachel, although she may get a fuller treatment in the sequel, The Inseparables, still unpublished in English but intended from the start as the second half of this diptych. Rachel Pontecorvo has much in common with her Biblical namesake – married to a doofus who is so naïve that he’s tricked by his brother and then father-in-law, she bears him two sons, and ends up suffering for her choices – but she’s a shadow in the book, nearly always the voice of reason when Leo is acting like a child. She’s never given the chance to reject him outright after the allegations, and we don’t see any curiosity about whether they’re true. Giving her character a third dimension would have improved the book beyond the study of Leo’s character, although I’ll reserve judgment until I read part two, which won the Italian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize last year.

If you appreciate Roth, or Joseph Heller, or the more mundane elements of Kurt Vonnegut’s works (as opposed to the sci-fi trappings around them), you must give Persecution a shot. Even during the moments when you’d like to give Leo a hard slap across the face, this portrait of a man whose superficially perfect life has lost its veneer to reveal an empty interior is searing, bitter, and funny.

Next up: As I mentioned on Twitter, I’m reading, but not enjoying, A Game of Thrones.

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→ March 4, 2013
→ By

The Night Circus.

I have new draft blog posts up for Insiders on Marco Gonzales and Alex Balog and on Ryne Stanek. I also held a Klawchat last week.

Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus mines its source material pretty heavily, stealing the circus idea itself from Ray Bradbury’s seminal book Something Wicked This Way Comes (#29 on the Klaw 100) while also borrowing from Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (#17) and relying on the hackneyed chosen-ones motif found in far too much fantasy and science fiction, including, of course, the Harry Potter series. Morgenstern layers her own imagination on top of these familiar settings, crafting an immersive scene rich with color and detail, but the main storyline never lives up to the standard set by the novel’s background details.

The circus of the title appears only at night, without warning, moving from town to town as if by magic (or actually by magic), creating a furor wherever it goes and leading some fans to follow the circus around the globe like red-scarved Deadheads. The circus itself is just the stage for a battle between two magicians who are themselves pawns of their mentors – a girl trained from age five by her father, a boy adopted near the same age by a rival – in a fight to which they are bound by a magic tie that is never explained. As you might imagine, the two opponents eventually fall in love, an attraction forbidden by the rules of the game they’re unwillingly playing, and one that leads to unfortunate consequences for the other pawns, real people who work in or around the mysterious circus.

Romeo here is Marco, a young boy adopted from an orphanage by the mage Alexander, who takes him in specifically to raise him for this challenge, which may last for years and promises no other purpose for the contestants’ lives. His Juliet is Celia, taken in by her father, Prospero the Enchanter, after her mother commits suicide; Prospero, having no apparent emotional attachment to his daughter, sees in her the gift of magical ability and pledges her for the next challenge with Alexander, a game the two have apparently been playing for centuries. His lack of empathy for his own daughter receives no explanation, nor do we learn about Alexander’s motives – this is merely an academic or philosophical fight over the nature of magic. There’s a battle going on, and the two protagonists fall for each other, which seems to shock Prospero and Alexander because they’re blind to human emotions.

Where Morgenstern excels is creating the setting and background characters that exist behind Marco and Celia and their puppet masters. The precocious twins Widget and Poppet were born into the circus just as it began and grow up over the course of the book into its secret masters, learning much about its running from the inside even as the adults who populate it are largely unaware of its greater purpose – all except the contortionist Tsukiko, whose appearance comes without explanation until much later and whose understanding of the challenge exceeds that of all others. Morgenstern crafts two parallel narratives that don’t coincide in time until the end of the novel, when the battle and romance between Marco and Celia reaches its resolution and the fate of the circus lies in the hands of the twins and their new friend Bailey, one of the circus’ biggest fans.

The conclusion of that central storyline remains a question mark for me as I considered the book after finishing it. To avoid spoiling it, I’ll say that Morgenstern doesn’t do anything too obvious with the main characters, nor does she choose a complete copout where the terms of the challenge are somehow voided so everyone can live happily ever after. There are vague hints earlier in the book of how the romance/challenge will end, but not enough to make that resolution logically consistent with the rest of the novel. As a result, the conclusion sits in that gray area where it wasn’t cheap or cliched, and yet wasn’t clever enough to feel satisfying on an emotional or intellectual level.

The Night Circus does read very quickly, as Morgenstern crafts visually compelling scenes and has a deft hand with the tension dial, creating sufficient narrative greed to help me race through the book. I wish it were a more original work, and that the story lived up to the quality of the settings, instead of feeling derivative and almost unfinished for the way she wrapped up the central plot.

I’m about three books behind on reviews, so I’ll try to post at least one of these a day this week until I catch up to what I’m reading now, which is Kathleen Flinn’s The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School.

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→ October 31, 2012
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A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (and the incumbent title-holder, since the Board decided that every book published in 2012 sucked and declined to give the award to anyone), is a hybrid novel/short story collection, weaving long vignettes involving a small group of interconnected characters together across time to track, backwards and forwards, their rises, falls, and sometimes rises again. The results are often funny and occasionally tragic, but the writing and characterization are so compelling that when Egan punts the entire thing in the final two sections it is an enormous disappointment.

The book doesn’t have a single protagonist, but we do see several of the core characters in multiple stories, including Sasha, the charismatic, troubled young woman with an unexplained penchant for stealing, one that doesn’t even fully abate when she’s confronted with the consequences of one of her thefts. She works for the unctuous Benny Salazar, a record executive whose fortunes ebb and flow with popular tastes, and whose own history includes a stint in a punk band where many of the novel’s central relationships began. He’s a bit of a wacko magnet, like the former bandmate of his who shows up at Benny’s office one day bearing a freshly-caught fish, or the snobby neighbors in the suburb where he moves with his young, self-conscious wife, looking down on the nouveau-riche Hispanic guy in the neighborhood – who might be a terrorist, because, well, you know. The spectre of 9/11 hangs over many of the stories set in the few years after its aftermath, with the majority of the novel happening in spitting distance of New York City.

The novel’s unconventional structure, with a nonlinear narrative and changing perspectives, gives Egan some room to stretch out and show off her writing skills, which she does well for most of the book. One section comprises a magazine feature, presumably unpublished, written by the brother of one of the major characters, an account of a celebrity puff piece gone so wrong that he ends up in jail (with cause) and the celebrity’s career ends up so derailed that she eventually finds herself paid to be the consort of a murderous third-world dictator, one of the funniest sections of the book, even more timely with the Arab Spring occurring after the novel’s publciation. Sasha runs away from home as a teenager, and one section has her feckless uncle trying to find her in Naples to coax her to come home. The changing styles shift our views of characters, peeling back layers while also turning the onion to show us as much as possible in such a short space.

The last two sections destroyed the book for me, unfortunately. The first of the two is a ninety-page slideshow – excuse me, slidshow – written the daughter of one of those recurring characters, describing their family dynamic and the slightly depressing future in which they live. It’s gimmicky and superficial, losing the depth and most of the wit of the previous sections. The final story is set in a dystopian future a few decades from now, with Egan embarrassing herself trying to craft her own texting vernacular, and where interpersonal skills have broken down the point that people standing next to each other communicate via their devices. It wasn’t funny enough to be a parody and it was a lousy way to send off some great characters.

Next up: I’m past the one-quarter mark in William Gaddis’ mammoth novel The Recognitions. I’m hoping to finish before Thanksgiving week.

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→ August 29, 2012
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A Naked Singularity.

Sergio de la Pava’s sprawling, ambitious novel A Naked Singularity took an unusual route, albeit an increasingly more usual one, to the broader marketplace, appearing first as a self-published title in 2008, finding a small but dedicated online following, and eventually attracting the attention of the University of Chicago Press, which published it this May to largely positive reviews. I received a complimentary review copy around that time and just worked my way through it this month. It is at times darkly funny, cynical, twisted, and bizarre, reminding me of other works from Junot Diaz to Zadie Smith to Aravind Adiga, brandishing a new American hysterical realism that, while often uneven, grabs you by the throat and forces you to pay attention.

The novel centers on Casi, an inadvertently-named young public defender in Manhattan who enters the book having never lost a case, only to find his 12-0 record in jeopardy, which flashes him back to the career of the (real) Puerto Rican boxer Wilfredo Benitez, who was on top of the world until he wasn’t, leading to a rapid and ignominious decline. Casi finds himself entangled in his usual mess of near-hopeless cases as well as pro bono work on an appeal for an Alabama death-row inmate of well below-average intelligence, while his friend Dane (who never seems to appear when anyone else is in the scene) tries to convince him to participate in a can’t-miss heist, stealing $10 million (or more) by intercepting a drug deal that involves one of those hopeless clients. He also has to cope with a bizarre immediate and slightly-extended family who wink in and out of his non-working life, as well as an even more strange group of neighbors living upstairs, one of whom is convinced he can make Ralph Kramden become real by playing episodes of The Honeymooners nonstop on his DVR. And that just scratches the surface of what transpires across the book’s 678 pages, some of which becomes increasingly divorced from reality as the novel goes on – hence the ‘hysterical realism’ tag, which I first heard in reference to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, a novel on which I had mixed feelings but have often found myself pondering in the four years since I read it.

Aside from Casi himself, all of the subplots in the novel revolve around the theme of justice, and its only occasional, arbitrary connection to the law and the judicial system. His indigent clients have their sob stories, some more sobby than others, but are largely treated by the system as widgets to be processed as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Ramon De Leon, the client who knows about the huge impending drug deal – which also involves a very large man known as La Ballena, or The Whale – is trying to manipulate the system, which is hungry for headlines and career-making deals, for his own benefit, working with lawyers from the district attorney’s office who are eager to swallow any story he feeds them without regard to its veracity. The Alabama death-row case gives de la Pava some room to criticize the hilariously stilted system of “justice” in that state, where judges may impose the death penalty by overruling juries that have voted for life without parole, one of only three states that allow such atrocities. Casi has a conscience and a strong sense of justice, and his rising awareness of the gap between that sense and the actual level of justice meted out by the system causes him to become slightly unhinged, especially in the novel’s final third, where he and Dane execute their heist plan, after which Casi is subject to a series of kangaroo-court hearings at work, is pursued by a corrupt detective straight out of central casting, and bumps into a new neighbor who has to be seen to be believed.

There are some off notes in the novel, even beyond the handful of typos. De la Pava always capitalizes the word Television, without a modifier, although even in 2008 it had already started to lose its grip as the dominant force in our culture, to be replaced (for now at least) by Internet. The vignettes involving his family often felt tacked-on, and had they disappeared from the story the main plot wouldn’t have suffered any for it, the kind of bulk-forming narrative that an experienced editor might have excised. De la Pava also had to get the long meaning-of-life soliloquies that seem to plague every new author today out of the way; if I never have to read another chapter where a bunch of fictional twentysomethings debate the existence of God or the virtue of altruism it will be too soon. Dostoevsky and Trosky covered this ground a century and a half ago. Can we all please just move on?

My tastes in fiction tend more toward classic novels and straightforward narratives, so A Naked Singularity was a clear departure from the norm for me, and it’s often compared to three postmodern classics that I have yet to read (but intend to hit soon): The Recognitions, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Infinite Jest. If those appeal to you, or if you like novels that, while a little unpolished, are broad and experimental with a liberal dose of humor, you may enjoy A Naked Singularity even more than I did.

Next up: Still ripping through Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music.

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