→ December 4, 2024
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Orbital.

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital was a surprise winner of the Booker Prize in 2024, beating the favored Percival Everett’s James (which won the National Book Award a week later), and coming in as the second-shortest book to ever win the Booker, just a few pages longer than Penelope Lively’s Offshore. I can confirm that the book is, indeed, short. I am a bit flummoxed at what the judges saw here, though.

Orbital takes place on the International Space Station and follows six astronauts, all from different countries, as they make many trips around the planet while living on the apparatus. The characters have first names and national origins, but very little else to distinguish them, just a breadcrumb of backstory here or there and some broad brush strokes like one being religious and another secular. The book lacks a single narrative throughline, instead rolling along with the station and tracking smaller movements – a bit of dialogue, a look at space, a memory from Earth – in language that can be lyrical but also insubstantial.

There is nothing to grab hold of in Orbital, neither plot nor character. I could not tell you a single character’s name from the book. I could barely tell you anything interesting details about any character, even without needing to attach them to specific people. There are passages that feel more tangible, like one character’s grieving over her mother’s death while she’s on the station, and another’s memory of a visit to a fishing village that is threatened by a typhoon as they fly uselessly overhead, but they sit on top of the rest of the book; there is nothing to integrate them, such as using them to inform the characters, with anything else that transpires.

The relative paucity of details around the characters creates a sense that they are less individuals than parts of a collective one, which could be a metaphor for humanity as a whole, and the way that these astronauts cooperate in space would then be a contrast to the way their home countries fall into conflict on terra firma. (After some diplomatic brouhaha, some astronauts aren’t supposed to use the bathrooms in rival nations’ parts of the station.) That’s a tricky thing to do if you put any sort of national properties into the characters, but the downside of Harvey’s approach is that she combines six entities painted with faint colors and the resulting whole just looks grey.

There was one moment in Orbital that did stick with me, as it provoked the only real emotional reaction I had to the novel. The Russian cosmonaut likes to play with a ham radio and talk to random people as the station orbits, which also means the conversations can’t last very long. The scene is whimsical and wistful, a symbol of the connections we can make with anybody, the endless curiosity of people everywhere, and the fleeting nature of those connections and our very existence. I wish Harvey had made all of Orbital out of that.

Next up: I’m about 2/3 of the way through Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, winner of this year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ September 10, 2024
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Some Desperate Glory.

Winner of the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novel, Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory plays around with some familiar tropes of sci-fi and fantasy, including the teenager who turns out to be the ‘chosen one’ and the idea of the multi-verse, spinning them into a fast-paced and often mind-bending story about fascism and totalitarianism. It’s uneven in several ways, and while I think it ultimately landed (pun intended) in a good enough spot to recommend it, it has a lot of first-novel vibes and I think author Emily Tesh took some shortcuts that weakened her main point.

The novel opens with a scene from a simulation where the protagonist, Kyr, is reliving the moment when the Earth and its 14 billion inhabitants were destroyed. Kyr lives on Gaea, a space station that houses most of the remainder of humanity, and whose leader, Admiral Jole, was the sole survivor of the assault on Earth. Gaea is a militaristic society where everyone on board is assigned a specific role for life to help preserve the colony’s existence and prepare them for some sort of revenge plot against the Wisdom, the interplanetary authority that called for Earth’s destruction. Kyr is part of the oldest cohort of young women still waiting for assignment, which could be to the Command group of soldiers, to the Agricole group responsible for growing food for the colony, or to Nursery, which means you’re sentenced to a life of continuous pregnancies. There are also rumors of a terrorist unit called Strike, where you may be called upon to commit suicide in an attack against the enemy. The enemy is the Wisdom, which is a massive artificial intelligence that chooses the option that produces the greatest good for the least harm in its estimation, and it is run, in a vague sense, by a species called the majoda … and early in the novel, Gaea captures a majoda ship and takes a hostage.

Kyr is a “chosen one” within this framework – her life and future turn out to be incredibly important to the fate of Gaea and humanity as a species – and up to a certain point, the plot unfurls like that of a YA novel. She’s the center of all of the action and she’s forced to grow up too soon and make some huge decisions that will save or doom all of humanity … but is she forced to do so by the circumstances, or the needs of the author? When she makes her first big decision, the outcome is about as predictable as a sunrise, only further underscoring the YA-ness of the story to that point. (Saying a novel is reminiscent of young adult fiction isn’t an insult per se – I have enjoyed quite a bit of YA fiction and am reading such a trilogy right now – but when a novel is ostensibly written for adults and descends to YA levels of plotting or character development, that’s a negative.)

It’s only after that point that Tesh turns Some Desperate Glory into a real adult novel, one with strong political undertones and some complexity around its protagonist. The Wisdom has access to other universes, more in line with the many-worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics than the sloppy multiverse we’ve seen too often in contemporary fiction, and Tesh uses that to great effect here to force Kyr to consider not just her actions but her motives and values. What begins as a quest for vengeance on behalf of fourteen billion humans turns into a much more difficult quandary that calls into question the power and limits of free will.

Kyr, which is short for Valkyr, experiences about as much development for a sci-fi protagonist as I can remember. Some of that is inherent in the nature of a teenaged main character upon whom adult decisions are thrust, but in this case, Kyr has to undergo a change of mindset, acquiring a whole new set of morals and values to replace the hollow ones that Gaea indoctrinated in her. It’s a form of humanism, although one of the targets of her newfound empathy for sentient creatures is not human, so it’s more built on a respect for all sentient life and the recognition that those we were told are Others are, quite often, a lot like us.

The political leanings here aren’t hard to catch, and even if you did, Tesh lists some sources in the acknowledgements that would make it clear, such as histories of the North Korean dictatorship and other books on fascism and totalitarianism. There is also some similarly unsubtle commentary on gender roles and gender politics, and queer identity in a society built around a rigid gender binary. The Wisdom itself is a futurist’s dream of AI, and this is where Tesh does show some real nuance, as the Wisdom turns out to be very different than the ruthless killer Kyr believes it to be, and the reasons why other sentient races have chosen to follow it are at least rooted in sense, even if Kyr can’t see it at first.

I was on Some Desperate Glory’s wavelength form the end of that first big section almost all the way to the finish, but at that point I think Tesh chickened out and didn’t allow for a conclusion that was either realistic within the book’s environment or that suited the characters and their various arcs. Your mileage may vary. I do recommend the book, even despite that disappointing finish, but I can see so many ways it could have been more.

Next up: I’m just past halfway through Charlie Jane Anders’ Unstoppable YA trilogy.

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→ August 12, 2021
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The Old Devils.

Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim is one of my all-time favorite comic novels, incorporating humor low and high, with lots of the excessive alcohol consumption that would characterize much of Amis’ fiction (and non-fiction, and perhaps some of his own life). Thirty-two years after the publication of that book, his first, he won the Booker Prize for The Old Devils, which still has his voice and humor but is far less frivolous, as it covers a quartet of older Welshmen and their long-suffering wives as they face old age, mortality, and the disappointments of lives less than well-lived.

The author/poet Alun Weaver and his wife Rhiannon – oh, that’s just the beginning of the Welshness here – are returning to Wales after many years away, and their arrival has stirred up many old friendships, rivalries, and secret romances among their group of old friends, including Peter, Charlie, Percy, Malcolm, Gwen, Muriel, Sophie, Siân, and Angharad. Rhiannon and Peter were old flames; Alun appears to have slept with several of the others’ wives, and resumes doing so straight off the train; and there’s a tremendous amount of drink, interrupted by brief meditations on alcohol’s deleterious effects on health and waistline.

While there’s obvious humor to mine from scene after scene of men drinking themselves into various stages of stupor, often finishing at one pub only to have one of them suggest that they repair to another one, or to his apartment where there’s more strong drink to be had, the tone of The Old Devils is unmistakably darker. The sun is setting on these men in various ways, none more so than Alun, who gets an unwelcome sense of how slight his popularity is when there’s barely any media at all attending his arrival, and who finds himself constantly in the shadow of the poet Brydan (a stand-in for Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, whom Amis apparently disdained).

I rattled off those names to make a small point about Amis’s writing here. The men’s names are mostly bog-standard, recognizable then and now other than the ‘u’ in Alun’s name. The women, on the other hand, have the more traditionally Welsh names, none more so than Siân (pronounced a bit like “she-AHN”) or Angharad (“an-KHAR-ad,” although the kh sound is softer than in Hebrew or Russian). Men are ordinary creatures in this book, while women are inscrutable. There’s a clear difference in their depictions, and while none of the men other than Alun is easily distinguished from any other – Charlie is afraid of the dark, of all things, and that’s what counts as a character trait – the women are even more two-dimensional, if you could even call them that. Muriel is a bit of a shrew, and there’s a running gag about Angharad and whichever fellow is her husband, but the women especially blend together because by and large they are props, not characters.

The Old Devils works when Amis aims his eye at the men at the story’s heart as they contemplate where they’ve landed in life. Alun is hardly a sympathetic protagonist, but his own difficulty accepting that his literary legacy is less than he wished it to be – did Amis harbor the same doubts about his own? – is one of the most haunting threads in the book, even if we’re not sorry to see Alun get his ego dented a few times. Peter’s unhappy marriage to Muriel is compounded by his own financial dependence on her – he’s squandered years where he might have forged a career of his own, and now that she’s threatening to sell their house and leave him, he has an uncertain financial future and no real identity of his own. Each of these men has wasted a good part of his life, and they all seem to be approaching old age with the plan of drinking their way through It, until the inevitable happens to one of them and the rest have to deal with the aftermath.

I probably enjoyed the Welshiness of the novel more than anything, as my in-laws are both Welsh natives and I’ve been learning some of the language on Duolingo, enough to catch a number of the Welsh words Amis slipped into the dialogue. He taught for many years at Swansea University, on the south coast of Wales, and described his time there as some of his happiest years, which is probably why the novel seems so understanding of Welsh language and culture – this at a time when the language was still not taught in schools – and derogatory towards those who dismiss it as parochial, or just as a nuisance, as when road signs appear in Welsh to the confusion of the main characters. Even as Amis gives us drink as an inadequate escape from life’s sorrows, he can’t avoid showing some affection for the novel’s setting or background people, or, of course, for the drinks themselves. (Except Irish cream, which he properly treats as the treacle it is.) I can see why Amis won the Booker for this book, but I did miss the madcap humor that made Lucky Jim such a treat.

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→ August 4, 2020
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Utopia Avenue.

David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue is, by his standards, almost a weirdly straight story, riveting and clever but mostly grounded in the realistic and the mundane. Following the rise and fall of a fictional English rock band in the late 1960s, featuring copious cameos by real-life rock figures from the British and American scenes of the time and more than a few references to Mitchell’s other works, the novel runs 570 pages and somehow feels like it’s still insufficient.

Utopia Avenue is also the name of the band in the novel, formed by an ambitious if not-very-successful producer Levon Frankland who assembles the band from the ashes of other London groups. Singer and keyboardist Elf Holloway is the most established, while guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet seems to have come from nowhere, bassist Dean Moss is about to hit rock bottom when Levon grabs him, and drummer Griff is looking for a new band. The four seem like they shouldn’t get on, let alone create music that will resonate with critics and fans, but it does happen in credible fashion. Mitchell chronicles their ascent from obscurity to moderate success in such detail that even mundane events and conversations become compelling.

The band’s story, at least their rise, is somehow that of every real band of the time but of no band at all. Each band member has some off-field drama, mostly drawn from the annals of rock history but deconstructed and recombined in Mitchell’s hands so that most of the parallels are obscured to the point that you won’t particularly care. Jasper’s trouble with mental illness derives from Syd Barrett’s, but Syd shows up in the pages of Utopia Avenue and Jasper’s story goes in a different direction than Syd’s did. Dean probably gets more than his share of the plot that happens away from studio and stage, although much of that is of his own making, and it’s not as if any of what he provokes or endures is unrealistic anyway. Perhaps there’s a bit too much of the Yoko Ono myth here, a bit too much sex-and-drugs there, but the current of the stream here is strong enough to keep the story moving despite those liberties.

The only misstep comes with the lyrics – granted, many rock bands’ lyrics are less than scintillating, but Mitchell’s strength in prose does not translate well to verse, and it doesn’t quite fit the praise the band members receive from critics and other musicians for their lyrics. Each chapter in Utopia Avenue is also the name of a song from the band, which one band member wrote in reaction to a real-life event described therein. It’s a clever conceit for the plot, but translating those ideas into lyrics doesn’t read well on the page.

I’ve only read two of Mitchell’s previous works, Cloud Atlas and Slade House, so I caught many of the references to characters from the former but also know I missed copious allusions to some of his other novels, notably Bone Clocks and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I loved Utopia Avenue, but I almost certainly didn’t get the full experience because I haven’t read all of his prior works; it has convinced me to go read the other five, starting from his first, Ghostwritten. Luisa Rey, my favorite character from Cloud Atlas, appears as a secondary character. Robert Frobisher gets a mention. You can see Jasper’s surname appears in one of his earlier books, and if you know what Horology is – I only barely knew, by way of Slade House – that ends up playing a role in one of the characters’ stories. The universe across Mitchell’s books is intricate and I assume rewards deep reading, leaving what I presume was a layer below the surface of this novel that I couldn’t appreciate.

Utopia Avenue’s fictional stay at the top doesn’t last, of course, but even with the detailed description of their gradual rise, it’s still somehow too short. All four band members are wonderfully three-dimensional; the three men are all emotionally complex and flawed, while Mitchell gives Elf a different sort of complexity without imbuing her character with as many negative traits. Even Levon, who gets quite a bit less screen time, has his moments and at least gives the sense that Mitchell drew him more completely even if it didn’t all appear on the page. How well Mitchell handles the various cameos by real people is probably a question beyond my capacity to answer, given how little I know about what these men and women were like in real life, but I’d like to know if any of their contemporaries weigh in on the topic.

Mitchell has been shortlisted for the Booker twice, and my sense of that award is that, like so many awards in the arts and in sports, the more you’re considered for it, the more likely you are to get it at some point. I’ll be curious to see if Utopia Avenue at least gets him on the shortlist again, as it feels less ambitious than, say, the nested six-novel structure of Cloud Atlas, yet in the perspective of his entire oeuvre it’s clearly a more progressive work than it might first appear. At worst, it should grace many best-of-2020 lists this December.

Next up: I’ll be interviewing Dr. Angela Duckworth for my next podcast, so I’m reading her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

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→ December 26, 2019
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Girl, Woman, Other.

The Booker Prize committee ignored the rules of their own award when they gave the 2019 Booker to two titles, claiming they couldn’t break the tie. The co-winners, Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, the sequel to her prescient novel The Handmaid’s Tale; and Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, are both ardently feminist works that attack serious cultural issues of our moment in time, the former going after our deteriorating political environment, the latter the singular experiences of women of color, especially those who are also LGBTQ+. I haven’t read the former yet, but the latter is at the same time a thoughtful and engrossing set of intertwined tales of a dozen women spanning multiple generations, and a pretentious bit of prose gimmickry that often reads like a student parody of e.e. cummings.

Girl, Woman, Other is a novel of intersectionality – every character in it fits into at least two cultural minority groups, usually women of color, but also with several characters who are lesbians, trans, or otherwise LGBTQ+, and several of whom are or grew up economically disadvantaged. Evaristo depicts this through their own stories, which vary from the tragic to the darkly comic, which themselves intersect with each other in varying ways, sometimes rather slightly while at other times deeply woven together. Each of the stories, however, at least attempts to depict some aspect of women’s experiences in a modern world that is at the same time the best situation in modern history for women of color and for LGBTQ+ people and also still full of barriers and challenges, often all the more frustrating for how needless and outdated they are, to anyone who isn’t straight, white, male, and well-off.

The hazard of a short-story novel like Girl, Woman, Other is that the form rarely gives the reader time or depth to connect with any individual characters, and I think that is generally true here since characters appear prominently in their own stories and mostly vanish beyond them. Amma, the black lesbian playwright of the opening story and whose major production serves as the connection point for many of the stories herein, is the strongest and most fully developed character, but her own history is more of a foundation in the book than a compelling story in its own right, while that of her ex-girlfriend Dominique, who follows a domineering militant lesbian vegan feminist to a commune in the United States, is the most interesting for plot but also maddening for her own inability to recognize when she’s being gaslit and abused. (Not that these things don’t happen regularly in the real world.) The most balanced stories are those that reach back into the past and follow a character from youth to her old age, such as the teacher Shirley, who is disillusioned by the school where she works and the declining efforts of her students but dedicates herself to working with any student she thinks has the potential to move beyond their current circumstances.

The real downfall of Girl, Woman, Other, however, is the prose style, which mimics stream-of-consciousness poetry but becomes extremely tiresome over 400+ pages. Far too much of the book comprises sentences fragments, missing punctuation or capitalization, or half-finished thoughts, which might work well for a single chapter here but becomes overbearing by the end of the book. Evaristo is trying to imitate a style of thought, but these twelve women can’t possibly all think the same way, and giving them all the same voice through one hackneyed device serves to diminish their individuality as characters when the entire point of the book seems to be to celebrate the uniqueness of each of them, and of every reader as well.

I did fly through the book, since several of the chapters were fascinating and read like strong novellas, and because the prose style leaves so much white space on each page that the book isn’t as long as the page count might indicate. Maybe the cultural import of the book, the exposure of intersectional issues to the wider audience, was enough to justify it winning the prize (along with what sounds like a lifetime achievement award for Atwood). Maybe as a straight white male reader, I didn’t get some of what Evaristo was trying to express. I believe, however, that I understood enough of the points of the novel to know that the way in which she told the story was what kept me at arm’s length from its content.

Next up: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven.

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→ September 2, 2019
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Wolf Hall.

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall won the British author her first Booker Prize, and the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, earned her her second a few years later, with the two novels also becoming a six-part BBC miniseries under the former’s title. Wolf Hall is an achievement, an incredibly immersive, precise work of historical fiction that, unlike so many reimaginations that feel untrue to their times, puts the reader completely into the mode and culture of its time period. It’s a long go, at 600 pages and somewhat dense with scenes that set mood rather than advancing the plot, and Mantel has some stylistic quirks that made reading it more difficult than it needed to be, but on balance the journey was worth the effort.

Wolf Hall is the story of Thomas Cromwell, with a brief prologue on his youth but primarily focused on his time in the royal court, advising King Henry VIII during the period when Hank was trying to divorce his wife Katherine so he could marry Anne Boleyn. The hitch, of course, is that in the 1500s the Catholic Church did not recognize divorce – oh, wait, they don’t recognize it now, good job fellas – yet they were still the quasi-official faith of England until the King broke with them in 1533 over this very issue. These were fraught times politically; the price of exclusion or expulsion from the King’s circle could be imprisonment in the Tower of London or execution, often after torture. Cromwell was successful at navigating these waters, both in terms of saving his own hide (during the time covered by this novel, at least) and pushing his personal agendas, often involving personal enmities against the likes of Thomas More or Stephen Gardiner.

Mantel is operating in tricky territory because these are all real historical figures and there’s a fair amount of existing material on their actions, but she manages to create compelling, credible characters out of many of them, notably Cromwell and the King. Even secondary characters like More, who is insufferable in his own idiosyncratic way, become interesting in Mantel’s depiction because she gives them enough depth to make them more than stock figures. It’s really the Cromwell and Henry show, though, with Cromwell the clear lead for multiple reasons, not least is how Mantel takes his own personal sorrows – the death of his wife and several of his children in the still unknown epidemic of the “sweating sickness” that hit England in many summers over a 60-plus year period. (Wikipedia cites one hypothesis that it was a type of hantavirus, a form of infection largely unknown until an outbreak in the American Southwest 1993.) Mantel manages to incorporate that thoroughly into Cromwell’s character and inner monologues without relying on it too overtly or allowing it to become his dominant feature.

The book is long, by which I mean it’s long even for 600 pages – it’s wordy and Mantel tends towards Dickensian descriptions. There are scenes here that are entertaining enough to read but don’t need to be in the book; they’re superfluous to the plot, even though they fit with the rest of the material. Mantel also rarely refers to her protagonist by name; Cromwell is usually just “he,” or is quoted without any pronouns attached for attribution. If you see a “he” without a nearby name to which it might connect, then that’s Cromwell. It’s a clear stylistic choice on Mantel’s part, and I found it incredibly annoying, because no matter how often she did it I could not get to a point where I would read an unattached “he” and assume, by default, it was Cromwell. In scenes with multiple speakers – which occurs frequently – reading the dialogue without Cromwell’s quotes tagged with his name was like listening to an old vinyl record with a small scratch on it. I often had to re-read a few lines once I realized Cromwell was in the conversation and hadn’t put his quotes into his ‘voice’ in my imagination.

There’s also too much mention of various couplings and proposed marriages among tertiary characters, exacerbated by the similarities in so many of their names. Mantel’s hands were tied on the latter point, but I’m also not sure if we needed details on the various schemes and affairs among non-core characters – even Cromwell’s children and wards, whose acts may have affected him but didn’t matter to the plot of this particular book.

I’ll certainly continue to Bring Up the Bodies, especially since it’s shorter, since I enjoyed Mantel’s storytelling and her prose isn’t actually a problem even though it’s not the style I prefer. (The third book, which I assume will move directly on to the shortlist for the Booker Prize, is due out in March.) I’m curious if any of you have seen the miniseries, which boasted a very impressive cast and earned great reviews and multiple awards.

Next up: Elizabeth McCracken’s novel Bowlaway.

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→ August 9, 2017
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The Sense of an Ending (film).

I adored Julian Barnes’ Man Booker-winning novel The Sense of an Ending, a spare and unsparing look at how one impetuous act could ruin multiple lives yet leave the actor unscathed until he discovers the consequences decades later. Barnes’ protagonist, Tony Webster, is bright and can think critically except where he’s involved; his lack of self-awareness is the central theme of the work, and Barnes unfurls the history to Tony as he does to the reader, allowing us to share in the main character’s befuddlement, denial, and rationalization in a sort of literary real time.

The film version of The Sense of an Ending came out earlier this year and is now available to rent/buy on amazon or iTunes, and it is excellent but falls just short of the book. The acting is superb, and the story largely hews faithfully to Barnes’ concepts, but alters a few key details in ways that muffle the impact of various revelations – and utterly alter the meaning of the book’s ending.

Jim Broadbent plays Tony, a divorced, very slightly grumpy old man who runs an antique camera shop in his semi-retirement, maintains good relations with his ex-wife Margaret (Harriet Wheeler), and is on call for the imminent birth of his first grandchild to his unmarried daughter Susie (Michelle Dockery). Tony gets a certified letter saying that a woman he knew decades earlier, Sarah (Emily Mortimer), has died and left him an object, but it turns out that Sarah’s daughter, Veronica (Freya Mavor), whom Tony briefly dated, refuses to part with the object – the diary of Tony’s friend and later Veronica’s boyfriend Adrian. Tony becomes obsessed with obtaining the diary, largely because it’s legally his (rather than any expressed interest in its contents), and his efforts to acquire it lead him to an encounter with Veronica (now played by Charlotte Rampling) and revelations from their shared past that will discolor Tony’s entire understanding of his own actions and character.

This is in so many ways a very British movie, from the way almost everything in it is so understated and even under the surface to the murderer’s row of a cast all delivering sparkling performances. The filmed Tony is less self-aware than the literary one, and Broadbent infuses him with aloofness in manner and accent, as if he is constantly flummoxed by the existence of other people and their feelings. Rampling absolutely seethes in her few appearances in the film, an angrier Veronica than the one in the book, who holds herself above Tony in word and deed because it is the only victory available to her this late in the match. Mortimer also gets limited screen time, only in flashbacks, but the subtlety of her performance as Sarah is more evidence once Sarah’s role in the events that followed becomes clear.

The novel on which this is based is only about 165 pages, but it felt like the film still rushed past some of the book’s flashbacks to Tony’s time in school with Adrian and his dalliance with Veronica. It also changes several major details from the story, not least of which is dispensing with Barnes’ structure, where the book starts with the school days, and the bequest doesn’t happen until about a third of the way into the book, starting part two and causing Tony to reevaluate the story he has narrated in part one. Tony follows Veronica from one of their meetings, somewhat creepily, whereas in the book Veronica shows him what he discovers by stalking her in the movie.

The most unforgivable sin of the film’s script, however, is the ending, which is much kinder to Tony than the book’s conclusion – and kinder than the film version of Tony deserves. He set this all in motion, but the movie’s ending doesn’t make his culpability sufficiently clear, and concludes his story on a somewhat hopeful note – even as we hear the text of a new letter he has sent to Veronica that left me thinking that even after he’s learned the truth, he still doesn’t get it, and at this point, he probably never will.

I don’t usually give grades or ratings of movies, especially since I often write about them months after their release, but in this case I’ll make an exception. This is a good movie that falls short of a great book – a 55 film from a 70 novel, in scouting terms – buoyed by a tremendous cast and that very British way of letting the audience work out a lot of details on its own. If you’ve read the book and enjoyed it like I did, however, you may find the deviations distracting, especially as they’re all to the bad.

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→ December 19, 2015
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Stand on Zanzibar.

John Brunner’s 1968 dystopian novel Stand on Zanzibar – still just $5 for the kindle through that link, or on iBooks – goes much farther than most preceding entries in the dystopian genre, with a rich, multithreaded plot and a vision of a world headed for collapse rather than one already there. It foresaw the rising power of multinational corporations and the widening gap between developed and developing nations, as well as offering a particularly prescient take on the importance and use of big data and machine-learning techniques decades before such things were even feasible.

The core plot of Stand on Zanzibar involves the effort by General Technics, one of the world’s largest companies, to execute a de facto takeover of the economy of the small, neutral (and fictional) west African nation of Beninia, which is caught geographically and politically between two unions of neighboring countries, Dahomalia and RUNG (a union of Nigeria and Ghana). Beninia is poor but in its own way paradisical, a sort of third-world Switzerland that has managed to assimilate various invaders over the preceding millennium. GT’s effort involves help from the U.S. government via their ambassador to Beninia, Elihu, and the GT executive Norman House, an “afram” man who feels he’s abandoned his racial identity to play white so he can move up the corporate ladder.

Meanwhile, Norman’s roommate, Donald Hogan, is a synthesist – a sleeper agent of the U.S. government paid simply to learn: he reads everything he can in selected subject areas and looks for connections and patterns that only he might pick up. Yet he’s “activated” after ten years on the job and “eptified” (retrained) as an assassin so he can go to the southeast Asian power Yatakang to see if the country’s claimed ability to genetically engineer their children to create a generation of supermen has any merit.

These two plots are intertwined on the page but not in fact, as there’s no practical connection between the two stories other than their shared setting in an overpopulated 21st-century Earth where everything’s gone a bit backwards. Most of the world limits reproduction (like China’s now-discarded “one child” rule), and most U.S. states have laws prohibiting reproduction by anyone with harmful or merely undesirable traits in their genotype, from diabetes to colorblindness. Many women (called “shiggies” in the strange lexicon of the book) live without permanent addresses, living with sexual partners and moving from one apartment to the next. Technology is pervasive, although Brunner’s vision of a future fifty years hence was a bit further off in this department. And entire neighborhoods, mostly non-white ones, are unsafe to walk in, with riots breaking out frequently when the mostly-white police officers (in “prowlies”) come through.

The structure of the book follows John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy in feel and structure, with mini-chapters between the narrative chapters that offer us headlines or snippets from news stories, or vignettes of side characters whose lives are unrelated to the main plots but still reflect the declining world of the novel. Some of them are simply unreadable, coming as lists or stream-of-consciousness nonsense, while others provide useful context for the events in the narrative chapters to follow. But the constant interruptions break the flow of the overall narrative and add to the disjointed feel of a novel with two unrelated core plots that are merely set in the same world.

The one exception to everything I just wrote is the introduction of Chad Mulligan, a sociologist and commentator who, in this novel, is a successful author of popular, anti-establishment books that argue in favor of mostly libertarian values, showing very little trust of government or corporations. Mulligan’s Hipcrime Vocab is an updated Devil’s Dictionary for this fictional universe, and like Bierce’s work the entries are often very funny.

Brunner created his own vocabulary for this book, mostly to its detriment, in part because it feels very derivative of the Russian-English hybrid Anthony Burgess used in A Clockwork Orange. Terms like “shiggy,” “biv” (a bisexual person), “mucker” (someone who runs amok – a domestic terrorist, in modern parlance) are distracting enough, but his replacements for a.m. and p.m., “anti-matter” and “poppa-momma,” reek of an attempt to sound contemporary to late 1960s readers. Most sci-fi novels attempt to incorporate some sort of new vernacular, but it’s far more effective when the neologisms represent new things or ideas, rather than simply renaming something for which we already have multiple terms.

Where Brunner succeeds, however, is with the two stories; either one would have stood well on its own as a shorter novel, and together they do at least present a more complete picture of this world toward which Brunner likely saw us descending. The novel would be a sociology student’s dream, as Brunner’s focus was less on characterization (it’s not weak, but hardly a strength) than on painting this world and moving the forces within it to explore the effects. That produced a novel that is certainly readable but is even more one to ponder long after finishing.

Next up: Still working on Hugo winners, so I knocked off Robert Heinlein’s Double Star last week and have now started Dan Simmons’s Hyperion.

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→ April 29, 2015
→ By

Americanah.

My annual list of the top 25 big leaguers under 25 is up for Insiders, as is a draft blog post on Dansby Swanson and Carson Fulmer, both of Vanderbilt.

Chimamanda Ngoza Adichie is one of my favorite living novelists, and I say that having read only two-thirds of her total output (she’s written three). Her ability to craft realistic characters, especially black female characters, and to have all of her characters engage in thoughtful, intelligent, unpandering dramas built around race and ethnic identities is second to none right now; she’s even passed Toni Morrison, whose recent output hasn’t matched her Beloved/Song of Solomon peak. Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) in 2007, made my last top 100 novels update at #92.

Her most recent novel, 2013’s Americanah, once again begins and ends in Nigeria, but this time follows two people as they emigrate to the west, one legally and one illegally, to escape a limited economic future in their native country, one that deprives them of hope. Ifemelu and Odinze are high school sweethearts, bonded by their intelligence and refusal to submit to a grey future, but the expectation that they’ll marry is lost when Ifemelu is allowed to enter the United States legally but Odinze, a single foreign male from Africa, is rejected due (we assume) to U.S. immigration crackdowns post-9/11. While Ifemelu encounters financial difficulties and humiliations as a student in the U.S. who lacks money or worldliness, even finding that her brand of English isn’t much use in understanding the American idiom, Odinze enters England without papers and aims for a sham marriage with a citizen to allow himself to stay and work. Ifemelu, ashamed by her situation and depressed by her isolation, ceases contact with Odinze and only resumes it when she returns to Nigeria over a decade later, finding the love of her life now married with a daughter.

“Americanah” is a derogatory term in Nigerian slang referring to someone who has moved to America and come back a changed person, especially one affecting an American accent or an excessive affection for American customs and culture. Ifemelu tries to assimilate early in her time in the U.S. because she’s told repeatedly that she won’t receive job offers if she’s too “ethnic,” but eventually sheds her American façade in favor of her own accent, her own hair, and her identity as an African woman. She adapts rather than assimilating, eventually advancing in her education and career thanks to a blog she writes under a pen name, called Raceteenth Or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known As Negroes), that documents her thoughts on the racial divide in the United States from the perspective of someone who was not conscious of race before she arrived in this country. (Adichie has since brought Ifemelu’s second blog, written after the character’s return to Nigeria, to life online as The Small Redemptions of Lagos.) Odinze’s story is shorter, as was his stint abroad, working dicey jobs under someone else’s National Insurance number, before he’s discovered and shipped back to Lagos.

Ifemelu is the star of the book, as Odinze, while a well-defined character, is rarely in the spotlight, while his story in England seems like a plot contrivance to contrast with Ifemelu’s experiences as a legal emigrant from Nigeria. Her story has global aspirations which largely succeed, coming through her series of jobs (including nanny to a definite White Privilege family) and relationships, including one with Progressive White Guy and one with Earnest Black Intellectual. We get some pretentious dialogue along the way, especially when Ifemelu starts to travel in increasingly academic circles, but Adichie avoids turning the book into a sermon by keeping Ifemelu’s emotions at the center of the book rather than driving us toward some Big Conclusion via plot tricks. The book describes the emigrant/immigrant experience, the desire to return home for its own sake (rather than to change the world), the emotional pull of a romance that one can’t fully separate from its environment, instead of trying to tell us one country or culture or path is better. This is Ifemelu’s story, just one tale that has its metaphorical implications but doesn’t feel in any way like Adichie is trying to tell every immigrant’s story at once.

Adichie’s strengths in characterization and avoiding predictable plot lines cover some of her weaknesses in portions of the dialogue and nearly all of the sample blog posts included in the book. The posts she includes are far too short and superficial to garner the kind of audience Ifemelu is supposed to have collected through her writing, not enough in a real world that has Ta-Nehisi Coates and Tanzina Vega and Jamil Smith and too many others to name who produce statement pieces that bring examples and evidence to the table. Ifemelu’s blog posts from the book wouldn’t find an audience because they’re not saying much of anything we haven’t heard hundreds of times before. Adichie says more about race when she’s not talking directly about it, putting characters into situations that force them to confront questions of racism and identity, than she does when she tries to blog through Ifemelu’s lens.

Told through frequent moves back and forth in time and across an ocean, Americanah marks another hugely compelling and intelligent novel from Adichie and her biggest seller to date, even though it lacks the gravity of Half of a Yellow Sun, which was set in Nigeria during the Biafra conflict and resulting genocide. Her eye for detail is sharper in the sections of Americanah where her characters are still in Lagos, growing up among ambitious economic strivers, religious zealots, and co-opted concubines whose fortunes are only secure as long as the current regime stays in power. When she transitions to America and England, Adichie’s writing becomes less nuanced and the stakes are largely lower (especially since we know from the first chapter that Odinze gets back to Nigeria safely). The strongest scenes of Ifemelu’s time in America come in an African hair salon she visits, somewhat resentfully, in Trenton, because she can’t find a place that knows how to braid hair properly in Princeton. The reactions she receives there from women who might share some of her background but clearly want very different things from life – and are largely appalled that she would return to Africa of her own volition – drive not just Ifemelu’s own memories but the overall narrative of the book, as well as its strongest symbol (hair) of race and identity.

Next up: I knocked off The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage’s brief history of the telegraph, over the weekend, and have since started Anthony Marra’s novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.

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→ August 11, 2014
→ By

The Heart of Midlothian and other recent reads.

I hosted the Baseball Tonight podcast today, and will do so three more times in the next week – Thursday, Friday, and Monday the 18th.

Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian was the last of his Waverly novels, a series of books set in the Scottish highlands that drew on local culture and tradition (distinct from that of England), including use of the local dialect, an aspect of his books that does nothing so much as make them harder to read. Scott also liked to mine true historical events to form the backdrops for his novels, and here chose the Porteus Riot, a major event in Scottish nationalism where a vicious English military commander who was pardoned after receiving a death sentence for firing on protesters was himself kidnapped and lynched by another protest mob. That story opens the novel – of course, it’s the most satisfying passage in the entire book – so that Scott can lay the historical groundwork while also borrowing one of the perpetrators of the lynching, George Staunton, for a central character in his story.

Jeanie and Effie Deans are half-sisters, living as tenant smallholders on a larger estate with their twice-widowed father David. Jeanie is relentlessly good: honest, pious, meek, in love with her neighbor the local minister but afraid to marry him due to her father’s disapproval. Effie is the wild child, and ends up disappearing from home briefly, only to return and be arrested on suspicion of infanticide under a new, cruel English law that allowed for the conviction of a mother even if no proof of the murder (like a body) could be established. Jeanie is given the chance to exonerate her sister with a tiny lie at trial, but refuses to do so after swearing before God to tell the truth, a step that sends her daughter to death row and forces her to make the long journey to London, some of it on foot, to seek the Queen’s pardon.

Scott worked in the era of the gothic novel and the romance, before the rise of realism in the 1800s, so all of his works are blatantly melodramatic. Every character is just so good or just so bad; every conversation, especially those between fathers and daughters or sons, is wrought with emotion. It’s too easy for the modern reader to tune this out because of the unrealistic nature of the dialogue, and Scott’s overreliance on heavy, coincidental plot twists probably doubled the length of the book. It also reads much slower than a typical novel of that era, as he uses muckle Scottish words the modern reader won’t likely ken.

This leaves me with two books remaining on the Bloomsbury 100 – Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which I’ll tackle later this month, and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which seems like a fitting way to (try to) finish the list.

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Anne Enright’s The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize in 2007, which is probably why I picked it up at Changing Hands bookstore in Tempe back in March; for the life of me I can’t find a better reason for me to have done so, as the book was absolutely dismal and relied on some now-hackneyed plot twists to get to where we always knew it was going.

The gathering of the book’s title refers to the many siblings of the narrator, Veronica, coming together for the funeral of their brother Liam, a cheerful, promiscuous, alcoholic ne’er-do-well who took his own life by drowning himself off the shore of Brighton. Veronica unpeels the layers of her family’s history, with unsparing candor and graphic language, to determine the cause of Liam’s depression and decision to take his own life, but also to examine her dissatisfaction with her own. She goes back to her grandparents, over her family’s comically fertile history, and eventually to the incident she witnessed as a child – the sexual abuse of Liam by a close family friend – that she blames for his lack of anchoring, his sexual rapacity and carelessness, and the inner void with which he apparently lived his entire life.

The book is absolutely dreadful. Veronica’s grief doesn’t play out as emotion beyond self-pity; she looks back at her family history and forward at her own life with incredible dispassion. Not only is she unsympathetic – she seems unreal. If she’s as broken as Liam, she never explains why. Her only moments of grief that ring true are those where she thinks Liam is there, or expects him to be so; coming to terms with the permanent loss of a family member or friend who’s “always been there” means facing the grief anew every time you think that Liam is going to call or might be standing in the room, only to have you realize he’s gone.

As for the Man Booker Prize … well, I’ve read a handful of them, and there’s a clear affinity for this type of novel, which is why I have never decided to work through that list of books as I have with several others.

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Caroline Blackwood’s novella Great Granny Webster is creepy, weird, and compelling for its depiction of one of the strangest villains I’ve ever encountered in a work of fiction. The great-grandmother of the title is a woman decidedly stuck in the past, refusing any sort of adjustment to modern life or conveniences, waiting out her own demise in a decaying manse, neither spending nor sharing her immense fortune, mostly cut off from her relatives – not least her daughter, in an insane asylum due to what would today be recognized as schizophrenia. Based on episodes from Blackwood’s own childhood, Great Granny Webster has no overtly sinister elements; there’s no murder or intrigue, no suspense, no hammer to eventually drop. The macabre feel comes from the shocking behavior of the main character, who appears not as evil but as the complete absence of empathy, and the environment in which she lives, which is so austere as to make an ascetic hermit worry his life is too opulent. At just 100 pages it’s a quick read, not comparable to anything I’ve read before, although it might not even be as fascinating as Blackwood’s own life, which included a marriage to the American poet Robert Lowell.

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My wife bought Christine Trent’s Stolen Remains for me as a birthday gift, knowing my penchant for mysteries with an English twist. The second in a series revolving around a British female undertaker in the 19th century who solves murders thanks to an impossible series of coincidences that put her in position to do so, in this case because Queen Victoria liked her work when burying the Prince Consort and now wants her to handle the burial of a Viscount who died mysteriously after returning from an official trip to Egypt with good ol’ Prince Bertie.

Forcing the lead character here to be female, a historically unlikely situation to be kind, requires a suspension of disbelief that I had a hard time mustering – and that suspension was further challenged by some incredibly silly behavior, too-modern dialogue, and those numerous coincidences that kept the plot going. Trent also goes too far in the direction of historical fiction by weaving in more real people than the novel can support, and she makes what I’d consider a rookie mistake with an obvious variation on Chekhov’s gun: Any time a mystery novelist tells you early in a book that someone disappeared and is presumed dead, you know the character will appear at some point and be involved in some significant fashion in the murder or its denouement.

Next up: I just finished Michael Pollan’s Cooked, which merits its own full review, and am about to start Charles Finch’s mystery novel A Beautiful Blue Death, both also birthday gifts from my wife (as was Great Granny Webster … I tend to read books in the order in which I got them).

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