→ May 29, 2020
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La Isla.

I’ve got a mixed take on Stefan Feld’s “point salad” games. The Castles of Burgundy is one of my favorite games ever, probably my favorite heavy (or heavier, depending on your perspective) game. Bora Bora is a shade heavier, and pretty good, although I have to be in the right mood for it. His last two games have left me cold, however. Merlin was a total mess where it took a lot of work to get tiny gains in points. Carpe Diem was somewhat better but still not good, with at least one scoring method too many and a tile-selection mechanic that makes it way too easy to end up stuck.

La Isla isn’t his newest, but it’s probably his least-known title, and I don’t see any good reason for that. It’s not a point-salad game, really; there are only a few ways to score and they are all connected, logically and thematically. The game also features a lot of simultaneous play, so turns are very short, and you can play a whole game in under an hour. Yet it has the kind of strategic thinking I expect from Feld games, along with an extremely satisfying mechanic at the heart of the game that I find I really enjoy.

Players in La Isla are explorers trying to photograph five rare animals spread throughout the island represented by the game’s board. That board is variable, with ten interlocking pieces around a circular center piece, and both the board and the distribution of animals varies every time you play. The animals go in the green spaces around the board, and every such space is surrounded by places where players can place their explorer tokens. When a player places explorers on all spaces surrounding one animal – which can be two, three, or four spaces – they take that animal token and score for the number of explorers it took to claim it. Each player starts the game with a large, two-point token for one of the five animals.

That’s the heart of the game, but there’s more to the scoring, of course. There’s a deck of cards in La Isla that governs most of the play itself, with each card showing three things: a special ability, a resource color, and one of the five animals. Each player gets three cards on every turn and must choose one to use for its ability, one to gain the shown resource, and one to advance the shown animal on the scoring tracks. Each player has a cardholder with three spaces in it, and on each turn will place one card in one of those slots – covering existing cards from the fourth round onward – to gain that ability for as long as the card is still showing. The card selection process is simultaneous for all players, so the rounds move quickly.

To place an explorer on the board, you need to pay two resources of the matching color of the space where you want your explorer to go. (You only have five explorers, so once you’ve placed your fifth one, you start moving them, which is itself a strategic decision because you only have a few explorers to use to surround any animal token.) There are many special abilities that make this easier – you may gain a resource for where you place an explorer or the animal you take, or you may get to go on a certain type of space for one resource instead of two – making those abilities especially valuable in the early and middle parts of the game.

At the end of each round, players move up the five markers on the scoring board, one for each animal. When you move up a specific animal marker, you score one point for every animal token of that type you already have, so concentrating on one animal type has significant scoring benefits. The scoring board affects the end-game values of those same animal tokens, which start at zero but increase in value every few spaces; when the sum of the five values across all tracks reaches 7/9/11 points for 2/3/4 players, the game ends.

At end-game, the big points come. You score for each of your animal tokens based on their values on the tracks. For each set of all five animal tokens you have, you get another ten points – one of a few ways where Feld makes sure you can’t win just by going for a single animal type. And you get one point for every two resources left over.

La Isla requires you to have quite a bit of strategic planning, but you’re also always limited by the randomness of the cards. You have to have a long-term plan for what animals to go after, looking for areas of the board where you can be more efficient with your explorers and make the most use of the ability cards you have, but after a few rounds you’ll also be dependent on the resources that show up on the cards you draw. It’s easy to end up with a turn where you can’t place an explorer – it’s not ideal, and if you do that twice in a game you probably won’t win – because of that resource limitation, so planning ahead for that inevitability also becomes a strategic consideration. You’ll also want to push the animal you’re gathering up the track while trying not to push others up, although on some turns you won’t be able to move up your preferred animal at all and will have to determine which one to move that might just help their opponents the least.

There are two levels of ability cards in the game, with 120 level 1 cards and 60 more level 2 cards that introduce a bit more complexity to the game – some of which allow you to add up to two more explorers to your supply, others let you add a fourth slot for ability cards, and so on. They’re absolutely worth using but I agree with the rulebook’s suggestion that you play without them at least once to get the hang of the game itself.

Feld’s reputation for overly involved point-salad games is well-deserved, but La Isla isn’t one of them. There are only a few main ways to score – when you take an animal token, when you move up a marker on an animal’s scoring track, and at game-end for your animal tokens, so they’re all related, and require you to consider balance in your strategy. It’s also a brightly colored, visually appealing game, like Bora Bora (and definitely not like the original Castles of Burgundy), in a space where those features often get short shrift. If you’ve wanted to bump up to games a bit more complex than the family games I often recommend, but still want something good for kids 10+ and that plays in an hour or so, I would definitely suggest giving La Isla a shot.

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→ May 5, 2020
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All Our Names.

Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethiopian-American author of three novels, most recently the 2014 book All Our Names, as well as an essayist and literature professor at Bard College. I’d never heard of him prior to seeing that novel of his show up on sale for the Kindle, and bought it on a whim based on the description and what I could find in a quick search about Mengestu himself. It’s a smart, incisive, and very fast-reading novel of alienation and identity that spans two continents and asks us to examine who we really are.

The novel alternates narratives between those titled Isaac and those titled Helen, but both are connected by a man who came from an unnamed central African country to a midwestern U.S. city as a refugee. In the Isaac sections, two young, poor men, one of whom will eventually flee for America, get caught up in a budding revolution that’s stirring around a university campus where the men hang around but can’t afford to be students. In the chapters titled ‘Helen,’ Isaac, the refugee, and the woman who picks him up at the airport begin a complicated love affair – and, since the novel is set in the 1960s or early 1970s, good ol’ American racism is one of those complications, so Isaac ends up facing threats on both ends of his trip.

Mengestu succeeds here by making both stories equally compelling despite their substantive and dramatic differences. The half of the book set in Africa is fraught with danger as the two boys are swept up by events surrounding them, and eventually join forces with one revolutionary group, so that they’re frequently endangering themselves or merely endangered by their mere existence as young men in a newly independent, barely functioning state. The half set in the United States, by contrast, has very little physical danger; the risk is of an interracial romance in an era and place that did not accept such couples, and of Isaac’s distance from Helen because of the unknowns in his past.

How he ties those two together is enough of a spoiler that I won’t go into it, but it’s clever, and revealed early enough in the novel that you have time to adjust to this new knowledge and reassess what’s come before while still working through the remainders of both stories. It could seem like a gimmick, and it didn’t quite help that I encountered the same gimmick two months earlier in a novel from 2019, but Mengestu makes it work because the eventual revelation makes everything that came before it fit. (I had a suspicion of what was coming a few chapters ahead, so it’s not that big of a spoiler.)

There are just three characters in the book, the two named and the other young man in Africa, with Helen probably the weakest of the three. The two men seem to stand in for the two paths available to young men in such environments, with revolution brewing around them – the true believer, ready to stir up trouble and even take up arms; or the reluctant rebel, seeing no other path out of poverty but hardly believing in the cause of the rebels any more than he believes in the government. Helen comes across more as observer than participant, and it’s never really clear – despite her narration – why she went to bed with Isaac, or how they fell in love. Once there, what follows is far more convincing, but the lead up to that requires some buy-in.

If you accept the twist that ties the two narratives together, All Our Names works as a portrait of a man adrift in two countries, fleeing his homeland, where he couldn’t feel safe, for a new life as a refugee in a country that will always view him as an outsider. It left me hoping Mengestu will return to fiction at some point, as he hasn’t published anything in the six years since this book came out.

Next up: I’m several books behind but right now I’m reading 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid, Willie Mays’ and John Shea’s collaboration that’s part autobiography, part biography of the New York/San Francisco Giants great, due out on May 12th.

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→ April 6, 2020
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Lent.

Jo Walton’s Among Others was one of my favorite novels from my reading of (nearly) all of the Hugo winners, a perfect use of fantasy elements to elevate a brilliant story, rather than relying on the fantasy (or sci-fi) bits to provide the entertainment. Her latest novel, Lent, goes a bit further in leaning on a single fantastical quirk to take the real-life story of Girolamo Savonarola, a martyred monk in 1490s Italy who was believed to have the gift of prophecy, and turn it into an extensive meditation on how small choices in our lives can have extensive, long-lasting effects on our world.

The first third or so of the book seems like a straightforward telling of the last six years of Girolamo’s life, from 1492 until the infamous “bonfire of the vanities” that led to a turning of public sentiment against him and his eventual imprisonment, torture, and hanging at the hands of the “do as we say, not as we do” Catholic Church. Girolamo preaches against corruption and secular art, gets under the skin of the Pope and other powerful clergy, and eventually they manage to win the political battle and execute him. After his death, however, we learn something about Girolamo before he returns to earth, back in 1492, to try it all over again – but this time with the knowledge of what transpired in his previous life, as well as that new bit of information, and thus can alter his choices to see if he can get the outcome he ultimately desires. He’ll fail again, return to earth, make new decisions, fail again, and so on until the final chapter where we will learn if he gets it “right” in the last attempt in the novel.

That conceit itself isn’t new, but the reason Girolamo gets to play life as a sort of role-playing game where he restarts from his last save is a new twist that provides a stark backdrop to the choices he makes – and, in many ways, makes some of them more selfless than before. Walton thus gives us a meditation on free will and chaos theory within a story about grace and salvation, one that upends traditional Catholic theology while playing around within its borders. There’s a slow build in the first section, but once you see what’s going on, and Girolamo himself is armed with the same knowledge, the entire concept becomes more interesting, and every subsequent decision that he makes carries much more weight, even when you know that it’s going to ultimately fail and lead him back to restart the cycle from some point in his past.

Girolamo himself makes for a fascinating protagonist as Walton writes him, although I think she’s softened his character a little to emphasize his generosity of spirit and belief in the church as a way to spread the religious and mundane philosophies of Jesus Christ in the world, thus deemphasizing to some extent his puritanical beliefs and attacks on secular art and culture. There’s one scene of a burning of secular or “profane” works, although even within that Girolamo is presented as more resigned to the event than the fanatic he appears to have actually been. He becomes friends with more than one character who is committing adultery, including a woman who would certainly have been seen as “fallen” in that time, which seems like it may not have been consistent with the actual Girolamo (although it’s a reasonable use of poetic license).

The magic of Walton’s writing seems to be in the getting there more than the destination itself, as I think it’s fairly clear where Lent is likely to end; it’s how Walton gets to that point that captivates. I wish she’d been able to give a bit more depth to the panoply of characters around Girolamo, many of whom are interesting even when a bit two-dimensional and just required more page time to help flesh them out, but the main character is so fascinating – as is the side character Crookback, whose real-life identity may be apparent to astute readers – that the book still soars without it.

Next up: José Saramago’s The Double.

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→ March 24, 2020
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Uncut Gems.

Uncut Gems was one of the best-reviewed movies of 2019, taking home the Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Actor honors at the Independent Spirit Awards in February, and landing at the top of many critics’ year-end lists, including those of my friends Will Leitch and Tim Grierson. (I count 20 critics who put it on top of their 2019 lists on this Metacritic roundup, which includes Tim’s list but not Will’s.) After finally catching it on demand this week, I can at least add my voice to the chorus – it’s tremendous, maybe not my favorite movie of last year but close to it, and one of the most intense, relentless movie experiences I’ve had in quite a while. (It’s available to rent now on amazon and iTunes.)

Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a jeweler in New York’s Diamond District who has a sliiight gambling problem and, as a result, makes one reckless decision after another, including regularly pawning valuable pieces that other people have loaned to him. As the film opens, we see the discovery of a large black opal in an Ethiopian mine, a stone that Ratner has negotiated to obtain so that he can sell it at auction for what he expects to be over a million dollars. He’s harassed by goons from a loan shark, Arno (Eric Bogosian, looking pained at every moment), who is extremely pissed that Howard keeps betting rather than paying him back. And in another early scene, Howard’s assistant Demany (Lakeith Stanfield) manages to get then-Celtics star Kevin Garnett into the shop, where Garnett becomes obsessed with the uncut black opal stone and asks to borrow it because he seems to think it will bring him good luck on the court. Howard is also busy having an affair with an employee while still living with his estranged wife, and appears to owe several other people money, but can’t stop himself from betting or making other really terrible decisions.

Directed and co-written by the Safdie brothers, Uncut Gems grabs you by the throat from the start and never lets up until the closing sequence (a gimmicky shot that mirrors one from the beginning of the film). Everything about this movie will induce anxiety in the viewer, not least the music, which often feels like the soundtrack to a 1980s arcade game, and the frenetic cinematography, which often puts the viewer uncomfortably close to the action. The story itself never gives you a chance to catch your breath: Any time it appears that Howard might have a way out of trouble, something goes wrong, usually something of his own doing. Meeting Garnett turns out to be the worst-best thing to ever happen to him, not least because he’s a bit starstruck and suddenly decides to bet huge amounts on complicated parlays involving Garnett and the Celtics. This four-dimensional balancing act he’s trying to pull is absurd and you know it’s destined to fail and you shouldn’t even want this guy with no apparent redeeming qualities to succeed, but knowing what the consequences will likely be if it doesn’t work will still put you on the edge of your seat and have you rooting for Ratner in spite of yourself.

Sandler’s performance here is remarkable, and it’s a crime he wasn’t nominated for Best Actor here. Gone is the joking, crude comedian persona, replaced by a nervous, obsequious, crude version of himself, with minuscule changes to his appearance that somehow were enough to make him seem like Not Adam Sandler. He is this character, so that everything he does fits with what we know about him; without the performance there’s no way this film would be watchable, let alone good, because everything depends on him being credible. Garnett is the other real revelation here – sure, he’s playing a version of himself, but, as with Sandler/Howard, you have to believe that Garnett really wants that stone, and you have to believe his interactions with Howard are authentic. There’s a lot of stunt casting here – Mike Francesa appears as a bookie/restaurateur, John Amos has a brief cameo (which makes for a good in-joke about the Safdies’ prior film, Good Time), the Weeknd plays himself, Tilda Swinton and Doc Rivers make voice cameos – but Garnett’s is the one that has to be credible for the film to work, and he does it.

I still have two more movies I want to see before posting a very-late ranking of 2019 movies, but this is clearly in my top 5 for last year. I couldn’t put it over Parasite, which was just as gripping, and also quite funny in parts (as is Uncut Gems), but also has a more serious underpinning than this film does. The Uncut Gems script also has a few moments that don’t quite add up, but the ending works, and some of the flourishes that pop up towards the end of the film (Wayne Diamond’s character doesn’t appear until maybe 80% of the way through, but damn is he effective) pay off in more substantial ways than I expected. I’m not that shocked that an indie thriller starring an actor known for lowbrow comedies was snubbed by the Academy, but Uncut Gems deserved more recognition than it got.

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→ March 18, 2020
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Wild Rose.

Jessie Buckley’s first film role was in the highly underrated, barely-seen independent thriller Beast back in 2017, a star turn by the young Irish actress just four years who had previously only worked in theater and on British television. She had a minor role in last year’s Judy, which was probably Americans’ first exposure to her work, but once again starred in an independent film, this time the musical comedy-drama Wild Rose, which plays with the standard formula of such smalltown-girl-makes-good movies and shows off Buckley’s impressive vocal and acting range. It’s free on Hulu and available to rent on amazon and iTunes.

Buckley is Rose-Lynn Harlan, who is just getting out of jail as the film opens and heads home to her two children and her mother (Dame Julie Walters), who has been taking care of them for a year while Rose-Lynn served out her sentence for a minor drug charge (revealed a bit later in the film). She’s never without her white cowgirl boots, and her only goal in life is to get to Nashville and become a country-music star, even if it means neglecting her kids or spurning the few people in her life willing to help her, including her mother and the woman whose house Rose-Lynn cleans for work. Susannah (Sophie Okonedo, who does not age) hears Rose-Lynn singing and tries everything to help her get to Nashville, but Rose-Lynn simply can’t get out of her own way.

Wild Rose is half formulaic, but manages to zig and zag enough times to get away from most of the clichés of the genre – notably the way such films generally rely on extraordinary good fortune to push their protagonists along the path to stardom. Rose-Lynn could have that, maybe, but every time she has such an opportunity, reality intercedes, often in the form of her own irresponsibility. She had her two children quite young and still hasn’t accepted the obligations of parenthood, nor does she seem to recognize the burden she places on her mother through her behavior. Yet she’s also spirited and driven and a talented singer and you’ll probably find yourself rooting for her in spite of her actions, even when she has gone past deserving our support. There are some moments that made me cringe, but that is what most helps this script avoid the saccharine elements of typical up-from-nowhere music films.

Nearly all of the songs Rose-Lynn sings in the film, and the majority of the songs on the soundtrack, are covers, many of them well-known country songs (John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” is a particular standout), along with a cover of Primal Scream’s “Country Girl” and a few originals. The closing song “Glasgow (No Place by Home),” co-written by Mary Steenburgen, is one of the two best songs in the film along with “Angel” and deserved one of the five Best Original Song nominations, at least over the Diane Warren song and I’d argue over the Elton John/Bernie Taupin track that won.

Buckley is an absolute star, though – she’s magnetic on screen and, it turns out, quite a singer too. (She finished second on a British reality-TV singing competition show at age 19, which led her to drama school and eventually to this career on screen and stage.) I’m not sure what it’ll take for her to land a  role in a major film that gets the attention of American audiences, but after three films, two in which she was the star, she’s reached the “I’ll watch anything she’s in” status for me. She earned a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress along with four nominees for the Oscar for the same award, taking the nod that Cynthia Erivo received here. She makes this movie work, even when it’s a bit uneven, and carries off the star-is-almost-born role to make every aspect of it credible, even when the plot seems a little farfetched (the Susannah bits). The resolution here is just perfect as well, avoiding the sentimental or the maudlin for a conclusion that’s just atypical enough to be satisfying.

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→ March 12, 2020
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Feast Your Eyes.

Myla Goldberg’s latest novel Feast Your Eyes, shortlisted for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction,employs a novel narrative technique – or gimmick, depending on your point of view – to tell the stories of two women, mother and daughter, whose lives were both affected by a few very specific choices they both made. The mother, Lillian, was a photographer who made headlines when a series of photos she took led to an obscenity trial; her daughter, Samantha Jane, is the narrator, and tells the story of Lillian’s life in a series of essays and quotes as she writes the catalog for a retrospective of her mother’s work. It is an unusual way to tell a story, and has a long ramp-up until it truly gets rolling, but when it clicks it zooms by – puns intended – as Goldberg has created a truly memorable, compelling, complicated character in Lillian, and wants to talk to readers about just how monumental and important a woman’s right to choose can be.

Lillian grew up outside Cleveland in modest but not poor circumstances, and fell in love with photography at an early age, deciding not long after high school that that was how she wanted to make her living – or, at least, to make art, and hope to find a living to support it. She moves to New York, becomes pregnant while still young, and goes to have an abortion, only to bail at the sketchy and unsanitary circumstances. That baby is Samantha, whose very existence alters the course of Lillian’s life, mostly for the better, although the artificial/societal conflict between motherhood and vocation becomes explicit – pun intended – when Lillian publishes a series of photos called Mommy is Sick, which shows a half-naked, prepubescent Samantha handing a glass to Lillian, who is in bed, bleeding after a completed abortion. Samantha was the subject of some of her mother’s photos before that series, but when it lands Lillian and the gallery owner in jail, and eventually goes before the Supreme Court, Samantha’s life is permanently changed as well, as she is now The Girl in the Photos and later switches to her middle name, Jane, to try to avoid the unwanted notoriety the photos have given her.

We know early in the book that Lillian has already died young, but Goldberg still makes her death pack an emotional punch because of how Mommy is Sick drove a permanent wedge between mother and daughter, and from how Lillian never quite grasped its impact on Samantha. Lillian is a reluctant feminist, progressive for her era but less so even to her own daughter, writing just twenty years or so later, especially as Lillian never wanted the First Amendment fight she sparked; for Lillian, it was about making art, and that was enough. Samantha clearly feels like she was often second to that desire to make art, but also strives to understand her mother through her photographs, and interprets the photographs (and thus her mother) for the reader through the series of essays and comments, interspersed with remembrances from several major people in Lillian’s life whom Samantha contacted for the catalog. She resents her mother for making her a symbol in her photos, and for choosing a lifestyle of working poverty that allowed her to keep taking photographs, but also accepts the sacrifices her mother made for her, especially when Samantha has an abortion of her own and considers how that choice changed the course of her mother’s life (and created her own).

You have to buy into the narrative device to appreciate Feast Your Eyes, and I imagine some readers simply won’t be able to get on the book’s wavelength for that reason. For the first few pages I wasn’t sure if I would, but it started rolling for me maybe 20-30 pages in as the story itself began to grab me and the titles of the photographs or series faded into the background. Goldberg’s best trick here is that she pivots within each comment or essay from the photo right into something larger from Lillian’s past; there actually isn’t that much detail about photos that we never see, which could have been dreadful to read. It also works here because Goldberg manages to tie the fabricated photographs to times and places that spur different recollections, by Samantha, or former friends or lovers of Lillian’s, that explore more aspects of her character, and sometimes of Samantha’s as well. Even without the two overarching, feminist themes – how society pressures women to choose between motherhood and career, and how essential a woman’s right to choose is to her agency elsewhere in life – Feast Your Eyes would have been a strong character study, but those additional layers give it impact beyond most of the 2019 novels I’ve read so far.

Next up: Another novel from last year, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

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→ February 26, 2020
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Trust Exercise.

Susanne Choi won the National Book Award this year for Trust Exercise, a novel that sneaks up on the reader, starting out on familiar ground as a story of teenage drama among students at a school for the arts before Choi’s ambition becomes apparent in the novel’s second and third parts. It’s metafictional and disorienting – I still don’t quite know what happened within the book – and morphs into a question of who owns the truth, or just has the right to tell it.

Sarah and David are classmates at CAPA, a prestigious (fictional) high school in Houston, where they’re both in the school’s vaunted theatre program, led by the enigmatic Mr. Kingsley, the sort of dream teacher you might expect to find in Fame. He pushes his students when he sees greatness within, and blurs boundaries with his favorites, inviting them out to lunch or occasionally to the home he shares with his husband – this, in the 1980s, when it was rare for a man to be openly gay, much less to do so in Texas where I believe it was still a capital crime. Sarah and David are drawn to each other, start an intense relationship, break up over something stupid, have a tryst in the school hallway, stop speaking to each other, and, when a group of young actors and their teacher/chaperone arrive from England, get entangled with other people. This all appears to come to a head when one of the older actors from England forces himself on Sarah in a way that she herself doesn’t entirely understand as nonconsensual.

That’s about half of the novel, and after that everything shifts in a way that can’t be discussed without spoiling the great pleasure of watching Choi handle the vehicle she’s created. This is much more than a story about star-crossed lovers, and it’s more than just the story of a sexual assault and its aftermath; Choi brings the reader in for a close look at the action, and then pans the camera back for a wider view, and then pans it back even further for one last glimpse. With each move backward in granularity, Choi moves forward in time, emphasizing the nature of narrative and who actually ‘owns’ the right to tell a story – a theme that works especially well because it is never clear what the facts of the story are. The first half of the novel appears to be a completely conventional story, and then Choi reveals that it’s so much than what it seems, which opens up the book to a set of timely themes and questions. In an era of public allegations of sexual harassment, who gets to tell these stories – and, of course, how they’re told – should be part of every discussion.

Saying too much more about Trust Exercise risks spoiling the various surprises and twists of the book, which jarred me at first but ultimately work well and forced me to think and rethink about what Choi was trying to express. The downside is that I’m still not sure exactly what happened, both in the sense of what parts of the narrative were factual (within the fiction) and in the sense of who was telling the truth, right down to the ambiguous epilogue involved a new character whose true identity is never made clear. There’s value in this abstruseness, even in disorienting the reader, but I was also left deeply confused by what I’d just read, and that eventually yielded to some dissatisfaction with Choi’s decision to reveal too little when she might have answered a few of the open questions without affecting the critical themes of the book.

Next up: Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, which, like Choi’s book is a potential contender for this year’s Pulitzer Prize; Lerner’s book is one of the five finalists for this year’s National Book Critics Circle award for Fiction.

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→ February 6, 2020
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The Nickel Boys.

Colson Whitehead won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his last novel, The Underground Railroad, which re-imagined that escape network as an actual subterranean train system that helped slaves leave the South before the Civil War. His follow-up, The Nickel Boys, stays in the world of the mundane, drawing on the true story of a violent ‘reform school’ in the South to tell yet another dazzling, compelling story about race and the experience of people of color in the United States, and how white elites have continued to suppress the black populations in the South long after the Civil War was over.

The Nickel Boys takes place largely in the panhandle of Florida, near Tallahassee, at a fictional reform school for juveniles called the Nickel Academy, where white and black boys are separated into different houses, and the treatment is brutal and dehumanizing. It’s based on the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, which operated for over 100 years and at one point was the largest institution of its type in the country. The school closed in 2011 after a massive state investigation into charges of abuse, and a year later Erin Kimmerle, a forensic anthropologist from the University of South Florida, used ground-penetrating radar to find mass graves of on the site. They’ve found an estimated 80 corpses already, with exhumations ongoing. (The State of Florida officially apologized to the surviving boys in 2017, and as of September of 2019, after two-plus years of delays, work finally began on building memorials to the boys who died at Dozier and its satellite campus.)

Whitehead draws on survivors’ accounts to create the Nickel Academy, building his narrative around a boy named Elwood, arrested for being a passenger in a car that may have been stolen, ruining his hopes of bettering himself by continuing his education. Elwood has a strong moral compass, one that sometimes works against him because he speaks up when the world thinks he shouldn’t. Once imprisoned at Nickel, he meets Turner, another young African-American inmate who matches Elwood’s idealistic view of the world with an equally powerful cynicism, and a sense of self-preservation that he tries to impart to Elwood to keep the latter boy from meeting the fate of others who’ve ‘disappeared’ in the middle of the night.

Life at Nickel is about what you’d expect for black boys at a reform school run by whites in the 1950s and 1960s. They’re barely fed, because the administrators skim off the food sent for the black kids (less so when it’s for the white boys across the property) and sell it to local restaurants; they do the same with other supplies, like those for the boys’ education. They’re beaten in a building called the White House – the same as the name of the actual building that still stands on the Dozier property where illicit beatings took place – and many are sexually assaulted by guards. Boys who try to escape or otherwise draw the ire of the administration are taken from their beds in the middle of the night and tortured to death, after which their families – if they have any – are told that the boys ran away. There’s a nominal system for earning your way to release if you follow the rules and don’t push back, although in Whitehead’s depiction it’s hard to see many boys running this gauntlet successfully, given the venality of the administrators and bloodthirst of the guards.

The narrative itself revolves around Elwood and Turner, and Elwood’s own hopes that he’ll earn his way out – although the guards take him to the White House once – and tell the world about what’s going on at Nickel. Whitehead could have made this story even more brutal than it was, but instead he gives the reader just enough to depict the inhumanity of the school without dwelling on lurid details. This is a story of two boys, of two different ways of facing their incarceration and subjugation, and of a society that didn’t care at all about a few more dead black boys. Nothing Whitehead can write here is as damning to Florida, and to the American South, as what actually happened at Dozier and how long it has taken the state to even acknowledge the crimes committed against children of color at the school, but the way he depicts these two boys, especially the depth of Elwood’s character and the tragedy of his backstory, make The Nickel Boys an immersive and compelling read even though you know that any page could bring a scene of unbearable violence. I have no means or justification for predicting the Pulitzer winners, but if Whitehead wins for the second time in four years I won’t be the least bit surprised.

Next up: Julia Phillips’ Disappearing Earth.

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→ January 31, 2020
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Pain and Glory.

Antonio Banderas landed one of the five nominations for Best Actor this year for his role as Salvador in Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria), the latest film from Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar (All About My Mother). It’s a command performance from Banderas, who gets his first Oscar nomination at age 59, one that would get my vote (if I had one) in his category for the range and depth he shows in bringing this complex, sad character to life in a story that meanders like the memories it’s trying to depict. (You can rent it on amazon and iTunes.)

Salvador Mallo is a once-famous Spanish director who is now in professional and physical decline, wracked by joint and back pain and hobbled by various other ailments (some of which may not be real), all of which leaves him feeling like he’s unable to work, and if he can’t make movies, he doesn’t see any point to living. He’s thrust into the past when a local cinema restores and airs his film of 30 years earlier, Sabor (Flavor), whose star, Alberto, played the lead character so differently than Salvador intended that the two haven’t spoken since. The two meet again, tentatively, and Alberto shares some heroin with Salvador, who tries it on a whim but becomes hooked, and while he gets high we see more flashbacks to his childhood with his mother (Penélope Cruz, who doesn’t seem to age) in a cave house in rural Spain. While there, Salvador meets Eduardo, an illiterate but kind local laborer, whom he teaches to read, write, and do basic math; and fights with his mother, who wants to send him to a seminary to continue his education so he doesn’t end up ‘like his father.’

The two tracks, in the present day and in the world of Salvador’s memories, both move forward in linear fashion, but the latter jumps around enough to resemble the way our memories actually work. Almodóvar then combines the two timelines when Alberto discovers an unpublished treatment Salvador wrote called “Addiction,” that tells the true story of Salvador’s affair with a man who was also addicted to heroin, an affair that ended because he couldn’t kick the habit; Salvador confesses he doesn’t even know if his former lover is still alive. When Alberto convinces Salvador to let him stage the play, you can probably guess what happens, and how that kind of closure helps Salvador finally take some small steps to help himself, and to let his incredibly devoted friend and assistant Zulema help him.

Most of the summaries I’ve seen of Pain and Glory have focused on Salvador’s infirmities, describing it as a meditation on aging and mortality. While those themes are clearly present, the movie, and Banderas’ performance, are both far more hopeful than you’d expect from such a description, while also trying to explore how our past experiences and our memories of them can shape our lives for years or decades afterwards. Salvador flashes back to various scenes because of how much they’ve influenced his later life, especially in how his relationship with his mother, right up to her death, has affected and haunted him well into adulthood. Confronting those memories is a crucial step in his recovery not just from his temporary addiction but from the depression that has taken over his entire life, threatening his career and possibly more.

Salvador is not exactly Almodóvar, but there is a lot of the director in the character, and Banderas does a marvelous job bringing that character to life with the kind of depth and rounded edges that he needs to have to engender enough empathy and interest from the audience. Some of the key points about Salvador, including his physical pain, come across in ways that feel organic without overwhelming the character or the story – he’s in pain, and that often leads to him choosing not to do things, but he is not inert on the screen because Banderas renders him in three dimensions, especially finding small ways to show that there’s some energy left in the old man even if his back or his legs aren’t willing. It could have been a monument to self-pity, but Banderas avoids that trap and instead gives one of the best performances of the year.

Almodóvar still makes some quirky choices that don’t entirely work; the sequence near the start of the film where Salvador runs through all of his maladies with the help of some animation feels incongruous and took me right out of the movie just as we were getting started. There was no way this was going to beat out Parasite for Best International Feature Film (for which both are nominated), but some of those small decisions are enough to keep it from coming close to the South Korean hit in my own estimation. Cruz is excellent in small doses as Salvador’s mother while he was still a child, but she could have used some more screen time to further develop both her character and her relationship with Salvador, and those scenes suffer a bit because Banderas isn’t there. His performance is so strong – he’s not going to win, as his character obviously isn’t crazy enough to beat out Joaquin Phoenix – that it elevates Pain and Glory from something maudlin into an elegiac lament that still gives its main character reasons to hope and to live, right up to the film’s glorious final shot.

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→ January 30, 2020
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That’s Pretty Clever!

In 2018, a fairly unknown designer named Wolfgang Warsch ended up with three of the six nominations for the annual board game awards known as the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) and the Kennerspiel des Jahres (often translated as the ‘expert’ game of the year, or the connoisseur’s game of the year), winning the Kennerspiel for his fun press-your-luck game The Quacks of Quedlinburg. One of those other nominations was for the game known as That’s Pretty Clever! (Ganz Schön Clever), a roll-and-write game with a crazy scoresheet that lends itself to all kinds of real-time decision-making.

That’s Pretty Clever! gives you six dice, each a different color, that you’ll roll three times on every turn. You also have a scoresheet with five scoring areas, one for each die color except the white die, which is always wild. You roll all six dice and choose one to score, but then must set aside all dice with values lower than the one you chose, placing them (if you’d like) on the ‘silver platter’ in the game box. You roll all remaining dice, choose another one to score, set aside those with lower values, and then roll any dice still remaining and score one more. You’ll do this sequence four to six times, depending on the player count. When an opponent rolls, you’ll still get to choose one die to score. After that opponent has finished all three of their rolls, you can choose any die from the silver platter and score it. Multiple players can choose to score the same die in this stage. You can still score more dice than this, however, if you choose wisely when scoring dice you automatically get to score.

A solo game after four rounds.

The scoresheet has five sections and each scores completely differently. The yellow area has a 4×4 grid with four spaces already X’d out, and then two spaces each showing a number from 1 to 6. If you score the yellow die, you cross out a space with the number showing on the die. (You can always use the white die for the same purpose, since it’s wild, but I won’t repeat that in each section.) When you complete a row or the top left to lower right diagonal, you get a bonus: you can fill in another square in a different (specified) section, or you get a +1 bonus that allows you to choose to score an extra die at the end of someone’s turn – even your own, or you get a fox bonus, which I’ll explain in a moment. When you complete a column, you score 10 to 20 points at game-end.

The blue section also has a grid, but this one goes from 2 to 12, and you score it by combining the blue die’s value with the white die’s. Thus not every space is equally easy to cross out, and when you get a blue bonus in another section, you might want to mark the 2 or the 12 since they’re generally hard to get. You score points at game-end based on the number of spaces marked in the blue section, with the values increasing faster as the number of spaces increases.

The green, orange, and purple sections are all rows that you’ll fill out left to right. The green row requires dice values greater than or equal to what’s shown in the space, starting at 1, going up to 5, then restarting at 1. The orange row is the easiest to fill in – you just write the die’s value in a space, with no restrictions. Some spaces let you double the die’s value; the last space lets you triple it. The purple row is the trickiest, as you can only fill in a space with a number greater than the one in the space before it, unless the prior number is a 6, in which case you can start over. All three of these rows award bonuses for certain spaces, but the purple row gives you a bonus of some sort on every space starting with the third one, so I think it’s the most valuable section on the sheet. At game-end, you score the orange and purple by adding all the numbers you’ve written in the squares, and you score the green by looking at the number above the last square you’ve filled, with values increasing kind of like they do in the blue section.

There are also a few bonuses you get at the start of each round – a free re-roll of all dice, a +1 bonus, and at the start of the fourth round the choice to fill in one square anywhere on your sheet, either with an X (for yellow, blue, and green) or a value of 6 (for orange and purple). At game end, you add up all five of your section scores, and then you count how many fox bonuses you got, with a maximum of five. Find your lowest section score, and then multiply that by your number of foxes, and add that to the five section scores for your total. Over 200 is pretty good; I’ve cracked 300 once in pen-and-paper, while my high score in the app – which works well but assumes you know the game already – is around 285.

I’ve played this dozens of times between pen-and-paper and the app, and I find it incredibly addictive. Despite the simple mechanics, it doesn’t become repetitive because you are always making multifaceted decisions – choosing a die to score usually means relinquishing other dice for the remainder of that turn; choosing when to use those powerful +1 bonuses involves weighing the value of saving them for later, when maybe you can start a daisy-chain of bonuses that will let you fill in four or five boxes with one die. There’s a sequel game I haven’t tried called Twice as Clever! that’s apparently good but not quite as elegant as this original, which has already entered the rotation of games we bring on trips because it’s so simple, portable, and easy to teach.

You can also see my reviews of Warsch’s other games, The Mind, The Quacks of Quedlinburg, and The Taverns of Tiefenthal, over at Paste.

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