→ March 24, 2023
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The Rabbit Hutch.

Tess Gunty won the National Book Award in 2022 for her debut novel The Rabbit Hutch, the title of which refers to a low-income housing complex in a declining Rust Belt town called Vacca Vale that is home to a broad cast of peculiar characters. It’s a compelling read and the prose is lovely, although the stories of the various characters don’t tie together that well, giving the book the feel of a series of nested short stories rather than a single, coherent work.

The most prominent characters in The Rabbit Hutch are the four young adults who have just recently left the town’s foster-care system, including 18-year-old Blandine Watkins, the star of the show in more ways than one. She’s beautiful and eccentric, unknowable in many ways, bewitching at least one of her three male roommates (Malik), delving into all sorts of mysticism and woo while redefining who she is as she enters adulthood. Those three roommates are all just a little further into their majority, none of them doing very well at adulting, which is why, we’re led to believe, they so easily fall into a bizarre pattern of ritual violence against animals. Gunty also gives us an extended flashback to a former student at the local high school, Tiffany, who becomes the subject of the school’s 42-year-old music teacher’s advances and eventually his victim as well; and a long digression about Elsie, who was once the child star of a TV sitcom called Meet the Neighbors that’s beloved by one of the Hutch’s residents, and whose son, it turns out, hated her guts and is completely out of his mind. He doesn’t even live in Vacca Vale, and the thickness of the thread that brings him there by the end of the novel could be measured in nanometers.

It’s a disjointed novel, but Gunty has a real knack for crafting characters and describing her settings so that the reader observes from both the bird’s-eye view and from up close, putting you right there in the action through her use of both detail and metaphor. She refers to a dowdy 40-year-old woman named Joan who moderates the forums on an obituaries web site as having “the posture of a question mark (and) a stock face,” which only underscores the woman’s insignificance in the town and to some degree in her own life. She speaks of an older man failing on dating apps as hating women “an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument.” Even when the plot was all over the place – and it was, a lot, especially when Gunty jerks us out of Vacca Vale to follow Elsie and her idiot son – the prose carried it through.

The novel opens with a passage where Blandine “exits her body,” which is going to lead readers to assume she’s been killed and they’ll have to wait the whole book to find out how and why. I’m going to spoil this right now, because it’s a dumb gimmick: She is alive at the end of the book. There’s more to it than this, but I can’t tell you how irritated I was even when I figured out before the midpoint that this was a scam – and it’s just not necessary. The progression of the story around these characters, and the way Gunty brings together the various subplots, is more than enough to sustain the narrative greed here. The strong implication that Blandine is dead, boosted by some other hints throughout the novel, only to reveal at the end that she’s not is cheap and unworthy of the rest of the book.

The Rabbit Hutch follows in the Richard Russo tradition of profiling dying industrial towns through their residents, here with less humor but with far better-written women than Russo ever provided. It also reminded me of J. K. Rowling’s poorly-received novel The Casual Vacancy, her first novel for adults and one that received a lot of criticism because it wasn’t Harry Potter. That book was set in a fictional town in southwest England that also seemed a bit down on its luck and followed a very broad, and in that case more diverse, cast of residents in the wake of the death of a parish councillor, working in themes of income inequality, racial injustice, drug policy, and more. I liked that book more than critics did as a whole, and think it’s a fair comparison here, with a more ambitious plot but inferior prose to Gunty’s.

I can’t speak to the National Book Award for last year, as I haven’t read any of the five other finalists, but The Rabbit Hutch feels much more to me like a promising rookie season that points to superstar potential than a “best of the year” sort of work. I enjoyed it, I loved the prose, I thought some of the subplots worked but as many didn’t, and there was too much manipulation of the reader’s interest for a novel this serious. I hope and expect that her next work will play more to her strengths, and dispense with the stunt writing.

Next up: Percival Everett’s The Trees.

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→ May 9, 2022
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The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.

Honorée Fannone Jeffers’ debut novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the best 21st century books I’ve read, an epic work of historical and contemporary fiction full of three-dimensional characters, evocative places, and an exploration of how personal and generational trauma echoes through years and family trees. Winner of this year’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction, it’s an actual heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

The novel follows two stories in the same family line, focusing on Ailey Pearl Garfield, who is three years old when the novel opens and a graduate student by the time it closes. She’s one of three sisters born into a well-off Black family in an unnamed northern city, but whose roots are in Chicasetta, a small town in rural Georgia that, as we learn over the course of the novel, went from Creek territory to slave plantation to village, with Ailey’s ancestors there throughout. Her narrative follows the traumas of her modern family, especially those of her sister, Lydia, and herself, as we learn early in the novel that both were molested by their grandfather over a period of several years.

Their ancestry traces back to the Creek people who originally lived on that land until white colonoists tricked them out of it, eventually kicking them off the land and building a brutal cotton plantation there. The primary slave owner, Samuel Princhard, was especially vile and his crimes seem to pass through subsequent generations like a genetic inheritance, although eventually some of the slaves escape the plantation and create new lives for themselves after the Civil War. Ailey’s connection to her ancestors runs through three aged relatives still living in Chicasetta, especially her great-uncle Root, a former academic and expert on Black history who loves to debate the relative merits of W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. When Ailey makes her meandering way to graduate school, after an abortive attempt at pre-med to follow in her father’s and her oldest sister’s footsteps, it is Uncle Root who both opens doors for her in a predominantly white world and who coaches her through the worst moments. Along the way, characters die, come in and out of Ailey’s life, and dredge up old memories, all of which collides when Ailey’s research into her own lineage as part of her dissertation runs headlong into Princhard’s story and the many people who lived, worked, and died on that plantation.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois runs to nearly 800 pages, but Dr. Jeffers has created an immersive world – two of them, really – where, for me at least, the reader is as close to the scenes as possible. Few writers can evoke images and create characters this real and solid, let alone in a debut novel. Ailey and Uncle Root are the standouts, but they’re just the head of a wide cast, and even many of the secondary characters are still memorable and move beyond stock status. Jeffers also weaves a discussion of intersectionality throughout the book, mostly that of Black feminism and the roles of women in Black American society as well as in American society at large – and yes, the phenomenon of white women leaving Black women behind in their fight for rights appears several times, including in probably the weakest character in the book, Rebecca, who only appears briefly near the end.

The historical passages in Chicasetta, on the plantation and before the white settlers seized the land, have the same gauzy feel of some of the great works of Black American literature set in that time period, including Beloved, with elements of magical realism at play. Jeffers centers the slaves in the story, treating the brutality of their lives as a matter of fact, which I found increased the horror of it – this was just an accepted part of their reality, living under a capricious, vengeful god in human form. She still does give time to the slaveowning family, but that’s because telling their story becomes a critical part of telling Ailey’s.

Ailey herself is a beautifully flawed, realistic character, often exasperating in her choices or even words but ultimately the hero of the work – and the hero of her family, the one who doesn’t just survive her trials but steps forward to reclaim the family’s legacy and take it forward for future generations. I imagine someone will try to turn The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois into a movie, but this book has the rich storytelling of the best narrative television series we’ve seen. It deserves the longer treatment, or none at all. And of the candidates I’ve read for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – which includes the very good Hell of a Book, by Jason Mott, winner of the National Book Award – this is by far my favorite.

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→ December 16, 2020
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Ghostwritten.

After reading Utopia Avenue this summer, I realized, with some help from readers, that I was missing out on quite a bit of the context because I hadn’t read enough of David Mitchell’s previous work. His first novel, Ghostwritten, introduces several people who’ll pop up again in his later books, while also introducing what I assume is the first appearance of one of his noncorporeal Horologists.

Ghostwritten is more of a short story novel, with each story connected in some small way with at least one of the previous ones – sometimes just by the detail of a character appearing in the background of one and becoming the protagonist of the next, sometimes more significantly. That made it feel much more like a tuneup for Cloud Atlas, where he weaves six separate novellas together but is more effective at making them all feel like parts of the same tome. That’s not to say Ghostwritten doesn’t work, but I definitely had more of a sense that I was reading a short story collection than a cohesive single work.

That story where we meet what I assume is a Horologist is probably the book’s best-written and most interesting, as the narrator is a spirit who can take over a person’s brain and can jump to another person with a touch. The spirit is in Mongolia, and ends up in someone who’s on the run from the secret police, so the whole chapter has a spy-story vibe that isn’t present elsewhere – the same way the Luisa del Rey chapter in Cloud Atlas read like a detective story within the larger novel.

One other oddly compelling story in the book is set on a tea shack on Mount Emei, one of the four sacred mountains in Chinese Buddhism, in a tale that spans almost the entire life of its main character. Beginning when the shack owner is just a young girl, the narrative follows her through regime changes, social upheaval, and multiple razings of the shack that require her to rebuild. There’s a powerful undercurrent of perseverance and acceptance, consistent with the tenets of that religion, demonstrated by her resilience in the face of what could have become crippling defeats.

The first and the penultimate stories in Ghostwritten revolve around a doomsday cult that launches a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, very much like the actual 1995 attack by the cult Aum Shinrikyo that killed 12 people, which was chronicled by one of Mitchell’s stated influences, Haruki Murakami. While the events, and ultimate confusion over what’s real in the depiction, make a useful framing device for the other stories within the novel, the translation of a real-world terrorist attack in such stark terms felt almost exploitative, especially given the extent of Mitchell’s imagination on display elsewhere in the book.

Perhaps reading Ghostwritten out of order, after reading what is widely considered his best book (Cloud Atlas) and two more written after that one (Slade House and Utopia Avenue), takes away some of its power, as I was left with the impression that I’d read a strong debut that hinted at better things to come but also felt uneven and in some ways unfinished. The concluding two chapters are especially unsatisfying, one because it’s an unsuccessful attempt at an experimental style, the second because it blows up (pun semi-intended) most of what came before. Had I read this first, I probably would have compared it to the rookie season of a player I thought would become a star but hadn’t shown it all in year one – say, George Springer in 2014. Now I’m biased because I know Mitchell can do so much better, and already has.

Next up: I just finished David Wondrich’s Imbibe!, a history of the American cocktail, and am almost halfway through Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police.

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→ August 6, 2019
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A Kiss Before Dying.

Ira Levin wrote seven novels in his long career, as well as the long-running Broadway play Deathtrap, garnering raves from critics and his peers for much of his output despite working across a broad range of themes, with novels as seemingly disparate as Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives. His debut novel, A Kiss Before Dying, was a straightforward noir thriller, a grim take on a ‘perfect’ murder that uses shifting perspectives to keep the reader guessing in the first half of the novel and raise the stakes for the second half. (It’s out of print; the link above goes to the Kindle version.)

The first third of the novel centers on Dorothy, the daughter of a very wealthy copper magnate, who is dating a charming classmate at her college and has just revealed to him that she’s pregnant, which does not comport with his plans to marry her for her expected inheritance. Assuming she’ll be cut out of her father’s will for becoming pregnant outside of wedlock, the boyfriend first tries to get her to abort the baby and, when that fails, decides to kill her and make it look like a suicide. He succeeds, at least at first, but Dorothy’s sister Ellen can’t believe Dorothy would kill herself – especially since no one knew she was pregnant – and decides to go investigate.

At this point, Levin switches the point of view and you realize that he never named the boyfriend in part one, so you enter the college town with Ellen and share her ignorance of the killer’s identity – just a very rough description of his appearance, which means it could be any of several men, and Levin utilizes that puzzle to ratchet up the tension for the first half or so of Ellen’s section. Once you find out who it is, which I didn’t see coming, the story flips, putting the reader into the chase and the mystery of whether anyone will catch Dorothy’s killer before he kills again while exploring the depths of his sociopathy, eventually introducing us to the girls’ father, Leo, and making him a central character in the story even though he tries to avoid accepting that Dorothy was murdered.

The book has been filmed twice, once in 1956 to positive reviews and once in 1991 to negative ones, although in both cases the screenwriters changed the story enough that I don’t think either could possibly match what Levin accomplished here in the book. The murderer here isn’t so much twisted as callous and insensate, viewing Dorothy as a mark to make himself wealthy, and viewing all of his victims as obstacles, with no apparent compunctions whatsoever about killing to protect his own interests. Levin also takes advantage of the author’s privilege of hiding key information from you that would have to be revealed on a screen, which raises the stakes for the reader, makes the reveal especially potent, and then lets him play with perspective throughout the third part of the book, where you’re unsure if the killer will get away with his crimes or if the ‘good guys’ will figure it out in time. It’s very classic, straight noir, with a dim view of humanity that leans a bit towards Jim Thompson but with more balance between the good and the bad.

Next up: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

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→ October 29, 2018
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Moth Smoke.

Mohsin Hamid came to my attention last winter due to the praise lavished on his most recent novel, Exit West, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, a book I enjoyed and appreciated on several levels. Shortly after I read it, I found a copy of his first novel, 2000’s Moth Smoke, on one of my prowls through used book stores; it’s not as weighty or immediately relevant as Exit West but still showcases his intelligent yet brisk prose as well as his strong sense of characterization.

Moth Smoke tells the story of Darashikoh, known as Daru, an intelligent but shiftless young Pakistani man whose academic promise was short-circuited by his family’s lack of money and status, leading him to a series of dead-end jobs – one of which he loses at the start of his narrative – and a life of drug addiction. The novel begins with a brief passage telling us that Daru is on trial for killing someone, a framing story that we’ll receive in dribs and drabs in interstitial passages between the chapters where Daru narrates his life story. His jealousy of his friend Aurangzeb, known as Ozi, eventually leads him to an affair with Ozi’s wife Mumtaz – all three of their names coming from the Mughal Empire, which covered most of modern-day India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – with the expected tragic consequences, and some unexpected ones as well.

If Moth Smoke is unfocused at times, as is common in first novels, it’s a function of Hamid’s ambition to lampoon so many parts of Pakistani society of the time period: the feckless youth of wealthy and corrupt oligarchs, the amoral subculture of ‘entrepreneurs’ trying to make a living without the benefit of patrons in the government, the way electricity and gas are wielded as weapons to keep the poor in poverty, widespread drug use among those who might publicly preach the abstinence prescribed by their faith, and so on. Lurking in the background of the novel is the cold war between Pakistan and India, as the former tried to catch up to the latter in testing nuclear weapons, which the Pakistani government under Nawaz Sharif achieved in 1998. Hamid appears to be drawing a parallel between Daru, who is trying to keep up with his wealthier and more successful friend Ozi but only manages to sink himself deeper into trouble, and the country where he lives. Daru may achieve temporary victories, but it’s clear he’s going to end up with less money, in worse health, and without any morals he might have once possessed.

The real Dara Shikoh lived in the 1600s, the eldest son of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan and the Emperor’s second wife Mumtaz, and was heir to the throne until his younger brother Prince Muhiuddin killed him, later taking the name Aurangzeb when he became emperor. The characters Daru and Ozi in Moth Smoke aren’t brothers, but are close friends from childhood, Daru fatherless and boosted by Ozi’s father and other relatives, who drift apart when Ozi’s privilege takes him to school in the United States while Daru must remain home in Pakistan. When Ozi returns, with a new wife in tow and lucrative career waiting for him, a rivalry emerges between the two men because their fortunes have diverged so much in the interim. They’re the same age – just as the modern nations of India and Pakistan, achieving independence one day apart during Partition, are – and could be natural allies, but their relationship is instead marked by bitter and often petty rivalry. Hamid borrows other character names from this period in Pakistani history – Daru’s servant is named Manucci, the name of the Italian traveler and writer whose records provide much of what we know of that time period; Daru’s previous girlfriend, Nadira, shares her name with the real Dara Shikoh’s only wife, perhaps a way for Hamid to signal that his Daru has never gotten over the broken affair with Nadira – although some of this seems like mere allusion rather than metaphor.

The title of Moth Smoke appears during the story when Daru watches a moth dance around a flame and eventually dive into it, after which all that is left is smoke. He is, of course, the moth in the novel, aware on some level that he’s going to burn himself up but still unable to stop himself from taking the actions that will lead him there, which in turn seems to be an indictment of Pakistani culture and the country’s government, often run by its military, which pursued self-destructive policies like nuclear armament that provided the people with a temporary high but ultimately left the entire subcontinent worse off. It’s simplistic compared to Exit West, a book of indignation that works through a compelling story of self-destruction like Appointment in Samarra or any of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, and accessible even without knowledge of the history or contemporary state of Pakistan that underlies it.

Next up: Nearly done with Ben Rhodes’ The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House.

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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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→ May 6, 2016
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The Sympathizer.

The Sympathizer was the surprise winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the debut novel of Vietnamese-American author Viet Thanh Nguyen, and if nothing else is a truly fascinating work of fiction for its new take on the Vietnam War. Nguyen’s unnamed narrator is a communist sympathizer and sleeper agent in the south of Vietnam, and recalls the conflict and its aftermath from the perspective of a Vietnamese national, as opposed to the countless looks back at the war from western perspectives (The Things They Carried, Tree of Smoke). The narrator himself is a walking dichotomy, born to a Vietnamese mother and French father (a priest, no less), living in the south and then in the U.S. while professing loyalty to the communists, with very bourgeois sentiments that compromise his work as a spy and an unwilling assassin.

The closest parallel I can think of for The Sympathizer is Graham Greene’s novel of Vietnam, The Quiet American, written later in his career after he’d become disillusioned with his country and his faith, a bleak picture of the war that included more than just a cursory consideration of the conflict’s devastating effect on the people of Vietnam. Nguyen’s look at the war is similarly derisive, suffused with parody and gallows humor, but ultimately an indictment of everyone involved, not least the United States.

The narrator tells his story as a confession to an unseen commandant and “faceless” commissar, as he’s apparently in a postwar Vietnamese reeducation camp despite serving the People’s Liberation Front during the conflict as a mole and assassin both in South Vietnam and then in the United States, where he works with a disgraced General from the South’s army who seeks to stage a Bay of Pigs-style invasion force that goes roughly as well as that real-life attempt did. His story involves time as a student in California, where he writes his thesis on the works of Graham Greene (in case you missed that allusion), as well as his work as a “consultant” on a thinly-disguised version of Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, itself an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad novella into a Vietnamese setting. The director, known only as the Auteur, is a fatuous, racist pig who fancies himself an artist and tries to work from a script that doesn’t give a single line to a Vietnamese character. The narrator’s job is to try to undermine the pro-American tone in the film, but the entire story turns into an elaborate farce of the film, the movie industry, and subsequent American attempts to retell the story of the war in terms that the American public would buy.

The last quarter of the book takes a sharp turn toward the more serious territory of Darkness at Noon or 1984 as we switch to real time and the narrator’s ordeal in custody, where, we learn, he’s been telling and retelling his story to his jailers, but hasn’t given them the particular truth they demand of him. The climax is graphic and hard to read, worse than the two assassinations in which the narrator takes part, but works better as a metaphor for the damage the North Vietnamese inflicted on their own people and the psychic scars that endured long after the conflict.

Nguyen can be a bit heavy-handed with the allusions and metaphors. The narrator’s two best friends are Man (the blank canvas) and Bon (the good one of the three). He encounters a go-getter journalist named Sonny, and an ice-cold Japanese woman named Ms. Mori (think memento mori). The Auteur and the older lead actor in the film border on caricature, while the film is called The Hamlet presumably because the Auteur views his work as comparable to Shakespeare. And the prose can get a little purple, although I found myself flying through it anyway.

But Nguyen’s strength lies in the main character, both as the vehicle for retelling the war’s story in a new light, and for his own dichotomy. The narrator is not truly accepted by his fellow citizens because he’s half European; he’s not accepted at all in the United States, even though he speaks perfect English, because he looks “foreign.” He lives in the South and serves in their military, but his loyalties are with the North … only to find himself in a communist (which was the North) political prison after the war. These splits all parallel the way his self was broken by an incident he witnessed during the war but has buried in his subconscious, the nauseating passage I mentioned above; only by reliving and acknowledging it can he move on with his life.

Next up: I actually just read Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows for the first time; I read a few chapters with my daughter, but she found it boring, so I finished it myself. At least now I know the true story behind Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

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→ November 1, 2015
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The Man Within.

Graham Greene is one of my favorite novelists, period; I’ve read more novels of his than of any other author save P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. Greene wrote twenty-six novels, two of which he later repudiated and which have been out of print for over eighty years, and divided his works into serious novels and mere “entertainments,” the latter typically what we’d now call spy novels, although some of his entertainments, like my favorite work of his, Our Man in Havana, still had serious themes and the distinction seems arbitrary when one has the vantage point of reading his entire oeuvre. His first novel, The Man Within, foreshadows the potential dichotomy in his work, as a suspense novel with a tragic-romantic component, themes of Christian morality and guilt, and a central character grappling with fundamental questions of right and wrong.

Francis Andrews, the novel’s protagonist, is on the run as the novel begins, fleeing his former smuggling mates after betraying them to the authorities. After three days on the run without sleep, he stumbles into a hovel occupied by a young woman, Elizabeth, watching over the corpse of her just-dead guardian, an encounter that begins with her threatening Francis with a gun but improbably turns into a Victorian romance. Their entanglement comes apart when Elizabeth persuades Francis to follow through on his anonymous letter and go to Lewes to testify against the smugglers, who stand accused of killing an officer of the law when the authorities caught them on a local beach – but who remain so popular with the townsfolk that securing a conviction is very unlikely. Francis, who labels himself a coward throughout the book, in contrast to his fearless (and likely sociopathic) smuggler father, faces choice after choice to put what is right over his own skin, a path that endangers Elizabeth and himself before a strange ending allows Francis to make one last stab at finding some measure of courage.

The Man Within was published when Greene was 25, and it reads more like an homage to British literature of the 19th century than a novel of its time; it came four years after The Great Gatsby appeared, three years after The Sun Also Rises, and seven years after Joyce ushered in postmodernism with Ulysses, all of which makes Greene’s first stab at a novel seem quaint in comparison. His second novel, Orient Express (also published as Stamboul Train), was a pure “entertainment,” a thriller set on the train that Christie made famous two years later. While that novel had elements of romance between the characters, those threads were more cynical in nature, dispensing with the naïve take on love Greene displayed in The Man Within, which has Greene’s voice in evidence but without the life experience he might have needed to craft his later works, both the serious “Catholic novels” and the thrillers that made his reputation. The most interesting character in this book gets relatively little screen time or development – Carlyon, Francis’ patron on the smuggling ship, a friend who filled in as a father figure, and who was most directly hurt by Francis’ ultimate betrayal and who is hunting Francis with the intention to kill him. That relationship, prior to the anonymous letter, isn’t well fleshed-out, and Carlyon is drawn too thinly for a character that would have to be complex to generate the remorse he does in Andrews.

Greene himself later derided this book as “hopelessly romantic,” but at least allowed this one to remain in print whereas the next two novels he wrote were, in his view, so bad that he renounced them and let them fall out of print. The Man Within stands more as a work of historical interest, as it shows Greene the storyteller learning his craft in a work that would probably rank as very good had it come from most novelists but, from one of the masters of 20th century literature, feels immature and a bit hollow.

Next up: I’ve finished Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and started William Faulnker’s Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning novel A Fable.

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→ February 26, 2014
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Swamplandia!

Karen Russell’s debut novel, Swamplandia!, was one of three finalists for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the year that the board decided not to give the honor to any title – in essence saying that there was no novel published that year that met their threshold for the award. It was an embarrassing decision, one that may have hurt independent booksellers, a dereliction of duty reminiscent of the BBWAA puking all over itself in the 2012 Hall of Fame balloting – there had to be a “best” book, even if the overall quality of the titles in that year was lower than previous classes. Swamplandia! fits that description well – it’s a very good book, not a home run like Empire Falls or The Orphan Master’s Son, but more than good enough to win the award and a whole lot better than the 2011 winner, A Visit from the Goon Squad.

In the novel, Swamplandia! is an alligator theme park run by the Bigtree family on one of the Ten Thousand Islands off the coast of southwest Florida, most of which are uninhabited and which are connected to the mainland (in the book) only by a daily ferry service. (In reality, the largest island, Chokoloskee, is connected by a causeway, but that appears to be the only one with such a link.) When Hilola Bigtree, a mother of three and fierce alligator wrestler, dies of cancer, the business and the famiy begin to come apart at the seams. Her husband, the Chief, seems to get lost in a delusion of expansion amidst rising debt and new competition from a mainland park, the World of Darkness; Kiwi, their oldest child, defects to the mainland to work for that very competitor; Osceola, the middle child, falls in love with the spectre of a long-dead shipworker; and Ava, the youngest child and primary character, finds herself alone at the family homestead, faced with the daunting task of trying to save something out of everything collapsing around her.

Swamplandia! itself is a profound tale of death, loss, and disillusionment, as Ava, wise for her years but still fundamentally a child, feels her mother’s absence most acutely, with all three children setting out on different searches for something to fill the void left after Hilola’s death and their father’s abdication as a parent. While incorporating elements of magical realism, Russell never lets the story devolve into pure dreamscape or fantasy, and the two primary plotlines – Ava’s search for Osceola in the “underworld” and Kiwi’s sputtering coming-of-age at the hell-themed World of Darkness – resolve in ambiguous ways, especially Ava’s, as the denouement of her story left me very conflicted on whether that particular device was necessary to wrap up her story.

Ava herself is a fascinating character, a Flavia de Luce transplanted into a darker setup, where the father isn’t just absent emotionally but physically, and her precocity isn’t always such an asset. She’s intelligent and independent, retaining some of the emotional immaturity of a typical 13-year-old, responding with an admixture of fear and determination to the impossible situation in which her father and siblings place her. She and Kiwi are the only fully-formed characters in the book, with Kiwi providing more comic relief as the fish-out-of-water on the mainland, a home-schooled (self-taught, really) teenager with the diction of a character from 19th-century literature but almost no self-awareness or ability to function in the social environment of modern teenaged life. The symbolism of some of the rides at World of Darkness is bombastically silly, but these interludes also provide a needed break from the darker sections involving Ava’s journey into the swamps.

Russell has, as far as I can see, never spoken about the theme of disillusionment, but Ava’s storyline with Osceola functions as a strong metaphor for a break with religion, or at least the “old-time” religion of Biblical literalists. Osceola finds a book on spiritualism and follows it, blindly, into the book’s underworld – a place of uncertain location or even existence. Ava connects with a prophet of sorts, the “Bird Man,” and follows him, also blindly, in search of Osceola, and perhaps her mother, deeper into the swamps of the Ten Thousand Islands in search of the entrance to the underworld, a trek that leads to what I’ll only identify as a stark disillusionment for Ava and near-madness for Osceola, as well as a sacrifice that parallels the red heifer of the Hebrew Bible (notably Numbers:19). It might be a stretch to say that the book is itself anti-religious, as Russell hasn’t publicly voiced any such views, but it struck me as at least a strong allegory in opposition to blind acceptance of religious dogma and scripture.

Next up: I’m behind on my reviews, but I’m just about finished with Tom Acitelli’s The Audacity of Hops: The History of America’s Craft Beer Revolution, which even has a whole section devoted to Delaware’s own Dogfish Head brewery.

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→ April 13, 2013
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The Imperfectionists.

I’m still slogging my way through David Foster Wallace’s leviathanic novel Infinite Jest, but before I cracked this one open (figuratively, as I acceded to the ease of tackling this three-pound tome on an e-reader), I read Tom Richman’s marvelous 2011 debut novel, The Imperfectionists. Reminiscent in form of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011, Rachman’s book is exponentially better in every aspect, from execution to prose to characterization, and should have won the prize over Egan’s book in a rout.

The Imperfectionists revolves around the staff of an English-language newspaper published in Rome, a paper that is dying the slow death of print as the Internet erodes its business model underneath its presses. (This paper hasn’t even established a Web presence, so backwards are its operations.) The staff of Americans comprises the motley crew you’d expect to find in such an ensemble novel, as in Then We Came to the End, with Rachman giving each character his or her own short story within the novel, while connecting everyone across the stories, jumping around slightly in time or place, so that the result is a richly textured work that provides insight into everyone – and into people in general – by looking at each character through several lenses and at varying distances.

Rachman’s style won me over through its incisive internal monologues, often the most cliched writing in any book. His dialogue is spectacular as well, but when he moves the voice into a character’s head, he might make you uncomfortable with how accurate and honest the writing feels, rarely if ever lapsing into the kind of overwrought nonsense that might make you want to pull a Pat Solitano and put a book through a window. His characters are mostly compelling, all sympathetic to enough of an extent that you want to hear what happens, yet all flawed in believable ways, especially around fidelity, which is the book’s dominant (but not sole) theme. Rachman adds interstitial passages on the history of the newspaper, from its founding to its demise, and crafts a subtle parallel between that rise and fall and the cycles of human relationships.

The strongest of those parallels develops around the subject of betrayal, as Rachman depicts relationships that unravel due to affairs, that survive in spite of them, or that struggle to stay true. The sense of loyalty that held the newspaper together while its wealthy founder/patron and, later, his son, keep the publication afloat morphs into a sense of betrayal as ownership declines to further subsidize the mounting losses, leading to staff cutbacks and eventually the paper’s closure. He crafts other stories around the death of a staffer’s child (for me, by far the hardest to read) or the inner emotional turmoil of the least-liked member of the staff, the subject of derisive comments in previous stories who becomes simultaneously an object of sympathy and pity as you understand why she is who she is.

The one thing The Imperfectionists lacks is a real conclusion, at least in the traditional sense of the structure of the novel: Each story is self-contained, with some kind of climax and resolution, but the novel as a whole does not have a single, linear plot, with just a brief epilogue attached to provide some kind of closure for readers invested in specific characters. I thought the novel would have stood alone without that appendage, as Rachman’s skill in crafting characters made further revelations unnecessary – I completed each story feeling as if I had learned what there was to learn about the character at its heart. It’s a remarkable book that deserves your attention.

Next up … well, let’s just say that the book I’m reading how is giving me the howling fantods.

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