→ December 14, 2023
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Hanamikoji.

I’ve owned the small two-player game Hanamikoji for probably seven or eight years now, and played it maybe twice when I first got it, but I set it aside and did what I unfortunately do with a lot of games I own but didn’t get as a review copy – I forgot about it. It popped up recently on Board Game Arena, so I got to play it a bunch of times, since a full game takes less than ten minutes, and I was reminded how elegant and great it is. It’s a capture-the-flag game, like Battle Line or Riftforce, with a simple scoring method and a strict set of possible actions that forces you to try to figure out what your opponent might be trying to do.

The theme of Hanamikoji isn’t that relevant except for the art, mostly by the wonderful Taiwanese artist Maisherly, who has also provided art for Walking in Burano, Realm of Sand, and Mystery of the Temples. The game itself is so simple you could make your own version with a bunch of index cards, although I would say just buy the game since it’s only about $17: The game has a deck of cards numbered 2 through 5 in seven different colors. The 2s come in purple, red, and yellow; 3s in blue and orange; 4s in green; and 5s in pink. A card’s frequency matches its value, so there are 21 cards in the deck.

Before each round, you shuffle all cards, remove one without showing it to either player, and then deal six cards to each player. The first player must draw one card and then take one of the four possible actions, which they will then not be able to take for the rest of that round. The second player does the same, and the play goes back and forth, with each player drawing one card and taking a previously unused (by them) action, until each player has had four turns.

In between the players sits a row of geisha cards, one in each color, and players will play cards to their side by the matching geisha to try to win each geisha’s favor with gifts. The four possible actions are to reserve a card to be played to the table at the end of the round (so a final, secret move); to discard two cards from your hands so they’re out of the round entirely; to present your opponent with three cards, where they choose one to play to their side, leaving two for you to play to your side; and to present your opponent with two pairs of cards, where they choose one to play and you then play the other. At the end of the round, you see who has more cards on their side of each of the geishas. Whoever has more cards on their side gains that geisha’s favor, and if the players have the same number on both sides, the favor doesn’t move. If one player gets the favor of four geishas, or gets the favor of three geishas worth a total of 11 or more (for example, the 5 and both 3s), they win.

If, as is most common, you complete the first round and neither player wins, the start player switches and you play a new round, but you retain the favor you won in the previous round, so if, say, you had the favor of the purple 2 geisha, and each player plays a purple card to the table, you would keep her favor. Play continues until someone meets either victory condition. If both conditions are achieved in the same round, the player with the 11+ points is the winner.

There are two tremendous strategic bits to Hanamikoji – when to use which actions, and predicting what your opponent might do. The order of your actions is entirely up to you, and in some sense depends on the cards you get. You may want to save the discard action until second or third, when you might already know some cards are worthless to you either way (e.g., the blue 3 geisha is already decided either way with two cards on one side, so the last card won’t change anything), but saving it till last might cause you to discard a card that would help you. Many players like to use the three-card action with three cards of the same color, since no matter what you get two and your opponent gets one, but that cedes the possibility of gaining control of two geishas rather than just one. The little decisions here go on and on in a way I find incredibly satisfying – like chess, but on a smaller scale.

Anticipating your opponent’s choices is, of course, inherent in lots of games with direct interaction, and here it comes into play in two ways. One is just trying to infer what geishas they might be trying to win, so you can choose where to parry and where to put cards to win your own geishas. You also need to understand their thinking, or at least try to do so, when choosing which cards to present to them in the three-card and two-pair actions, so that they’ll choose what you want them to choose. You can’t do this perfectly, since the card draws are random and you don’t see the cards they reserve or discard, but you can at least think about the odds of different scenarios. I love this part of the game, because, again, it’s a bit like chess, but with smaller trees of possible outcomes and a little randomness to help balance out small gaps in skill levels.

I’m due to revise my list of my favorite two-player games, and I have at least two newish ones in the basement to try (The Hunt & Broken and Beautiful, both from 2023) before I do so, but I think Hanamikoji has earned its way (back) on to the list. It’s so easy to teach, highly portable, has lovely art, and seems to be highly replayable, everything I’d want in a true two-player experience.

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→ November 21, 2023
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The Killer.

David Fincher’s Mank was a passion project for the director, but despite its critical acclaim and awards, it wasn’t a particularly enjoyable film, or even that interesting. His follow-up is both of those things, a neo-noir thrilled called The Killer that follows a hit man on his quest for revenge after a botched hit leads to an attack on his home and his girlfriend. (It’s exclusively on Netflix and in select theaters.)

Michael Fassbender plays the title character, whose real name we never learn; he uses a series of aliases that provide one of the movie’s best gags. The film opens with a long monologue from our antihero about the nature of his life and his work, all of it as he waits for his target to appear in Paris. The hit goes awry, and he’s forced to flee, but when he returns home he finds out that two people ransacked his (very nice) house in the Dominican Republic and violently assaulted his girlfriend. He works backwards from there to find out who the assailants were and who ordered the attack, and you can probably imagine what he does with each person he finds as he moves up the chain.

The Killer is all style and vibe, without trifles like character development or story arcs. You have to be on the wavelength of a genre film like this, just like you might with a mystery, and be comfortable with rooting for a ruthless, violent protagonist because he’s persuaded you that his cause is just. The opening scene is slow and meditative, but it’s probably three-fourths of the insight we’re going to get into the main character, because once he fires that single shot that sets the remainder of the story in motion, the plot never lets up.

One of the plot’s more curious aspects is that Fassbender’s character doesn’t kill everyone. He spares at least two people he encounters who he might have killed, one of whom wasn’t involved in the crime but could potentially identify him. He also doesn’t kill the dog, which is an interesting contrast to some of the people he does kill in what seems like … overkill is a poor word choice, I admit, but there’s one in particular that just didn’t seem necessary. Fassbender provides a voice-over through much of the film that makes us privy to his inner monologue, and thus to his personal ethos, and explains some of these choices, but there’s still some mystery left over to give you something to ponder after the film ends.

Fassbender, who had just one film credit between 2017 and this film, is superb in this role, entirely credible and chilling as someone with little to no moral compass and that ideal level of confidence that allows him to act like he belongs in every setting. The screenplay, by Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, gives that character nearly all of the air time, threading the needle between exploring the character and keeping him at arm’s length. Most of the other supporting performances are solid but minor, other than Tilda Swinton, who plays another contract killer, where I can’t decide if the role is ridiculous, or if she’s just playing it that way, or if I’m just reacting like this because she’s Tilda Swinton and I expect this from her.

Only one of the many confrontations the Killer has with his various targets turns into a fight scene – the rest involve a lot of talking, and then a gun happens – and it might be a tremendous one. I have no idea, because that scene is so unbelievably dark that I could barely tell anything that was happening, including whether Fassbender was hitting or getting hit. (Both, obviously, but I mean more specifically.) It’s part of a well-documented trend in movies and TV towards making everything too dark to see, but in this case it may have ruined one of the film’s best scenes. I can’t say for sure.

I’ve commented before that I can tolerate violence in film if it furthers the plot, but not suffering as entertainment, which is generally the idea in “torture porn” and slasher films. There is some extreme violence in The Killer and a couple of the kills are stomach-churning, so while I won’t defend its use of violence, I will say that the camera isn’t playing it for entertainment or laughs. Fassbender’s character kills in service of the plot, and it’s up to us to decide if we’re comfortable with some of them.

This isn’t as serious a work as some Fincher’s other films, but it’s a detour into a genre I particularly like (neo-noir, not murder and mayhem), and the lead performance really anchors the film. There’s enough moral ambiguity that it’s not strictly a revenge thriller, but it offers plenty of revenge and plenty of thrills, along with the slightly inscrutable antihero that neo-noir demands.

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→ November 3, 2023
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Nettle & Bone.

T. Kingfisher (the nom de plume of writer Ursula Vernon) won this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel for Nettle & Bone, a light fantasy novel that subverts many tropes of the genre while adhering to others as it follows its protagonist on a quest to save her sister, the Queen of the North Kingdom. It is a blast to read, with some wonderful side characters alongside our hero and a great balance of humor and darkness, although I’m not sure it has the thematic depth of some of the best winners of that honor.

Our hero is Marra, the youngest of three sisters in the tiny Harbor Kingdom, a city-state located around the midpoint of the coast between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms, protected by its strategic location and the desire of both neighbors to avoid having it fall into their rival’s hands. As the story begins, Marra’s eldest sister, Damia, is married to the young Prince and heir to the throne of the Northern Kingdom, but she dies in an equestrian accident before she can produce a son, so the Prince then marries the middle sister, Kania. When Marra goes to see Kamia as her sister is about to give birth, however, Kania gives her a cryptic warning, and subsequent events cause Marra to realize her sister is the victim of a violent husband. She finds a dust-witch to try to obtain a way to kill the Prince, which ultimately leads her on a journey across two kingdoms with a party that grows to four, not counting the chickens, and ends with a showdown in the royal chambers.

Nettle & Bone is a quest novel, and we get a classic adventuring party of a cleric, a fighter, and a couple of mages, roughly speaking, where the pleasure is in the interplay between these characters as well as the world-building. Kingfisher has a Gaimanesque knack for crafting weird and creepy magical realms, with more delightful settings here than I can count – very reminiscent of a well-crafted RPG campaign, but with the detail of a Neverwhere or Among Others, where you’re immersed in the scene even as the writer asks you to believe any number of impossible things. The goblin market is an obvious homage to Gaiman’s work, among others, but Kingfisher gives it enough unique flourishes that it stands on its own merits.

I absolutely tore through this book, and I’ve already recommended it to two strangers who asked about it when I was reading it in public. That said, I have two major criticisms of the book, although only one of them affected my enjoyment of the work. That one is straightforward – Marra is not that interesting of a character. Kingfisher sure as hell tries to give her some personality, but beyond making her a worrywart, she doesn’t have much to distinguish herself. She’s the observer of the action, a Nick Jenkins (from A Dance to the Music of Time), but all three of her companions on the quest are more compelling characters. Marra’s whole family is boring, honestly; Kania’s a cipher, her mother doesn’t even have a name, I think, and her father is somewhere else. Kingfisher’s strength may lie in creating side characters, which is a real skill and not something I wish to diminish, but the time we spend with Marra alone forms some of the least interesting pages in the book.

My second criticism of Nettle & Bone is an academic one, which is that I don’t see much of a theme here – and for many readers, that won’t matter at all. It didn’t affect my pleasure in reading the book, either; it’s great fun, I laughed quite a bit, and I enjoyed a lot of the time I spent with these characters and in this world. I usually don’t think much about deeper themes or meaning until a book is done, after which it’s often all I think about – what is the author trying to say? What might they want the reader to take away from the book? Marra is a strong female lead, and her world, like ours, is patriarchal, while two of her three companions on the quest are also women, so there’s no question the book has a feminist bent. Beyond that, however, I couldn’t discern any greater themes here. That’s fine for the average reader, maybe for the vast majority of readers, but if we’re comparing books for the purpose of an award like the Hugo, I think questions of theme and meaning do matter. That said, I haven’t read any of the other nominees yet, so I have no opinion on whether this book was worthy other than to say I loved every minute while I was reading it.

Next up: Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a self-published, Kickstarted novel from 2014 that has spawned three Hugo-nominated sequels. I’m on page 10.

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→ November 1, 2023
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The Guest Cat.

I picked up Takashi Hiraide’s slim novel The Guest Cat on a whim at Midtown Scholar, the wonderful independent bookstore in Harrisburg, about a month and a half ago en route to a Senators game, drawn by the quirky cover, the small format, and the description that referred to the author as a poet, which if nothing else should mean the prose is interesting. It’s a strange, lyrical little book, lovely in its way, but also very much about grief and change, reminding me very much of the two novels I’ve read by Max Porter.

There is a cat, although the cat needs a host, and the hosts are a nameless couple who have no children and have what seems like a staid life in a Japanese city, working, living together, but without much spark or interest to their lives. The husband is our narrator, and describes the arrival of a neighbor’s cat who begins visiting the couple every day as part of its routine, once its owners have left for the day. Neither husband nor wife is especially fond of cats, or so they say, yet this cat, whom they eventually nickname Chibi, captures them both – especially the wife, who is just a wisp on the pages, surprisingly incorporeal in the husband’s telling. We know so little about her, which implies that perhaps he does, too, and he’s fascinated by just how much she cares for and about Chibi, even frying little fish just for the cat (I know people do this, but cooking explicitly for your pet is a bit much for me), and the cat’s visits eventually become a part of their quotidian lives. They even venture out, exploring the grounds where their cottage is, to follow the cat, meeting some neighbors and even gaining use of the main house as its owner leaves for a retirement facility.

Until, of course, one day Chibi doesn’t arrive, and the two of them find their highly predictable lives upended by his disappearance. To this point, they appear to have avoided any tragedies or other major events that might have derailed their lives – birth, school, work, death as the song goes – yet Chibi’s brief time in their lives jolts them out of their doldrums, and when he’s gone, they’re completely thrown. The journey, if you can even call it that, from that point to the end of the novel, pushes both husband and wife to reevaluate some of the givens in their lives and to consider life’s transience, and they end by making what are, for them, some pretty significant changes.

The novel also has a metafictional aspect, as the husband reveals that he wrote the novel we’re reading after Chibi disappeared, while the prose is spare but not austere, setting the scene with lithe descriptions of trees, rooms, and, yes, cats. The whole thing feels like a meditation, a small idea that Hiraide expanded into a broader commentary on how easily we slip into routines and lose sight of the brief nature of our lives. Perhaps he’s a cat person now, too, and is arguing that pets can give surprising meaning to our lives, making us appreciate the brevity of our lives because theirs are even shorter, or to see their carefree ways as a model for letting go and being free. I took it as a broader comment on the need for change in our lives, to avoid becoming stuck in routines and the drudgery of living day to day if we have the luxury and privilege to do so. The beauty in The Guest Cat, though, is in how such a simple fable can lead to a myriad of interpretations, and linger with you long after its title character has left the scene.

Next up: I’m more than halfway done with this year’s winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone.

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→ October 24, 2023
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Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

I’m a bit of an oddball for my age bracket when it comes to Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve played the pen and paper game, while in middle school, and liked it but found the actual process kind of slow, and of course when you put a bunch of teenaged boys together in a room, they will begin to act like idiots at some point and the game becomes secondary. (They didn’t stay idiots, though; that group now has two successful lawyers, one of whom has defended death-row inmates; a senior VP at a big insurance company; and whatever I am.) I loved some parts of it, including the character creation, and thought others were slow. I did get very into video role-playing games, both within the D&D universe, such as the Pool of Radiance (which I never completed – I couldn’t beat the final boss, even when I tried to play the game again in my 20s), and without, like the Bard’s Tale and some Ultima Games. Regular readers know I became obsessed with the original Baldur’s Gate trilogy about twenty years ago, and I won’t try the newest game because I’m afraid I’ll disappear into it for days or weeks. So I have some nostalgia for the game, but it’s limited, and when people ask if I was a D&D player I generally answer with something like “not really,” because I don’t know the lore or the rules anywhere near like dedicated players do.

Thus I approached the Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves movie (free on Amazon Prime) without any particular bias towards or against the film; I don’t think I was predisposed to like or dislike it, or to criticize it for any lack of fidelity to source material. I did worry it would be too fan-servicey, or corny, or maybe just boring because plenty of video-game stories lack the depth required for a two-hour film. D&D: Honor Among turned out to be a lot of fun, witty, fast-moving, a little too silly at times, but very enjoyable, and the rare film that left me hoping we’ll get a sequel.

Chris Pine plays Edgin Darvis, a bard who begins the film in prison with his comrade Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), a barbarian fighter, after the two were part of a large robbery gone very wrong, which also led to Edgin’s daughter Kira going with one of the members of their crew who escaped the authorities, the thief Forge Fitzwilliam (Hugh Grant). We see their parole hearing, where Edgin dissembles at length, waiting for one particular judge to arrive, allowing the script to give us Edgin’s and Holga’s back stories – he was part of the peacekeeper group the Harpers until a Red Wizard they’d arrested killed his wife, after which he teamed up with Holga, who became a sort of surrogate mother to Kira, and later Forge and the elf Simon (Justice Smith), a young mage who, like low-level magic users in D&D, isn’t good for much because he’s so inexperienced. When Edgin and Holga finally get out of prison, they find out that Forge is now Lord of Neverwinter, and perhaps not the welcoming old friend they expected to find. They reunite with Simon and draft the tiefling druid Doric (Sophia Lillis), a shapeshifter who, we find out quickly, Simon is rather sweet on. Hijinks, magic, and combat ensue as they try to find the missing magic item they were after in the busted burglary that landed the two in prison, while also rescuing Kira and uncovering whatever Forge’s game is.

The story’s fine, although you can see in general where things are heading and the film doesn’t rely too heavily on big twists and plot surprises. It’s the characters and the actors who make this so much fun, notably Pine, who wisecracks like Michael Bluth with a bit more savoir-faire and less befuddlement at what people around him are doing. Pine sets the tone from the rambling monologues he gives to stall for time at the pardon hearing, making it clear that the script is going to lean heavily on humor and his personality, and less so on the lore of the source material – which is good, because I don’t think anyone needs a film about the 5e core rules set or lengthy soliloquies about critical hits and saving throws. His interplay with Rodriguez is very strong, as she’s doing a sort of Rosa Díaz/Cara Dune mashup that contrasts nicely with his “I’ve got this under control” smartass vibe. Smith has his moments as a supporting character whose importance increases as the story moves along – again, thematically consistent with the rules of the game – and it seems like the script sets his character and Lillis’s up for bigger roles in any future installments. Grant is a complete ham, but it works, and having some knowledge of his behavior over the years, including on the set of this movie, well, perhaps it wasn’t that big of a stretch for him.

Combat in role-playing games can be a slog for players, and even in the best of circumstances it’s still driven by probabilities whether through dice or cards or some other similar mechanism, which would not translate very well to screen or page. The combat sequences in Honor Among Thieves dispense with all of that – the characters just fight, mostly Holga, who can take out a whole army, although Simon plays more of a role as the party gains experience. It’s a subtle nod to the way the game is played without ever slowing down the overall story; the fights are entertaining, well choreographed, and, most importantly, quick. (There’s also very little blood or actual on-screen violence – it’s all cartoonish or out of sight, less violent than a typical Marvel movie.)

There are some clear plot conveniences here and a visit to the Underdark that raises all sorts of questions about architectural stability and sanity. I also wouldn’t call any of the character development or overall themes “deep,” as the script is happy to give us these four adventurers and allow their chemistry to keep things light and fun, which is this film’s greatest strength. I laughed quite a bit, and I was reasonably invested in the plot, even though I think anyone can guess the general outline of the conclusion. It’s a great, not too serious adventure film in a genre that doesn’t often get this treatment.

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→ October 12, 2023
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The Zone of Interest.

Martin Amis died earlier this year at age 73, leaving behind a bibliography of fifteen novels, several books’ worth of short stories, and eight non-fiction works or essay collections. His penultimate novel, The Zone of Interest, was in the news the same week that he died, as a film of the same name premiered at the Cannes film festival, where it won the Grand Prix (second place, of a sort, after the Palme d’Or). Both are set during the Holocaust at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but while the film – which I have not seen – focuses on Rudolph Höss and his wife, the novel fictionalizes the commandant and adds two more fictional characters for a tripartite narrative that plunges the reader into the contrast of setting and story.

Angelus “Golo” Thomsen is a Nazi officer at the death camp, a scheming womanizer who becomes obsessed with Hannah Doll, the wife of camp commandant Paul Doll, who is the fictional stand-in for Höss. Thomsen pursues Hannah despite the obvious threat to both of their lives, and she’s more than amenable, as she’s become disgusted with her true-believer Nazi husband, who drinks far too much and is becoming increasingly paranoid both of those around him and of his superiors in Berlin. Szmul is a Sonderkommando, a Jew and prisoner who is forced to help dispose of the bodies of victims of the Nazis’ gas chambers, in exchange for slightly better living conditions and little threat of arbitrary execution. Each of the three narrates his portion of the story, with Szmul’s sections the shortest but offering the starkest contrast to the mundane machinations of the other two.

While the story of Thomsen’s bizarre courtship of Hannah is ostensibly the core of the novel, it’s Amis’s development of the setting, presenting us with the contradictions between love, sex, and other ordinary facets of life with the murder, torture, and privation happening on the same grounds. There is no actual separation here – smoke from the crematorium fouls the air, prisoners from the camp sometimes ‘serve’ the Nazis, one prisoner happens to see Doll in a vulnerable moment and pays for it with his life. The Nazis, including their wives, simply choose not to see what is happening around them, like each ethnic group in China Miéville’s The City and the City, and go on with their daily lives as if they were not complicit in, or even actually ordering, the deaths of thousands of Jews, Roma, and others right in their literal back yard. That Amis makes this so plausible, this depiction of the banality of evil and the ways in which humans can justify anything to themselves, is what makes this novel such an odd, impressive work.

It’s often easy to get lost in the trivial nature of the bizarre love triangle here, until reality intrudes somewhere, either when Szmul gets the microphone or when one of the prisoners is forced to do something at one of the officers’ houses, and we’re reminded of the horrendous circumstances in which Thomsen’s and Hannah’s mundane acts and emotions are taking place. It’s a twist on absurdism, where the actions and dialogue are entirely normal, but they all occur at a death camp where over one million people were murdered. I don’t know if that was Amis’s point, to indict everyone involved, to show how easily people can devolve into complicity with genocide as long as they have food and shelter and sex, but I found that idea inescapable while reading this book. In many ways the plot reminded me of some of Graham Greene’s more literary works, such as The Heart of the Matter, where Greene would focus on a very small number of characters and work deep within their emotional cores to tell an extremely human story, often in a setting like British-occupied west Africa. Amis has a similar gift for prose and characterization, but here he shifts a similar story to the worst setting imaginable, yet keeps the diegesis intact, like picking up a house and moving it so carefully that the paintings stay on the walls. The Zone of Interest would be a great book if it were set anywhere, in any time, but Amis’s feat of using a compelling story to expose something darker about humanity turns it into a greater work and a highlight of modern literature.

Next up: I’m reading Liam O’Flaherty’s 1925 novel The Informer, although MC Shan has yet to make an appearance.

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→ October 6, 2023
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The Sum of Us.

Heather McGhee was the head of Demos, a think tank that aims to “power the movement for a just, inclusive, multiracial democracy,” for four years before stepping aside in part to work on her first book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Prosper Together, which came out in March of 2021. It’s a clear-eyed, evidence-based argument that public policies that aim to reduce racial or gender inequity actually benefit society as a whole, including white people and men, even though political opponents of those policies will try to paint them as anti-white or anti-male.

McGhee’s topic might seem incendiary, and in her rhetoric about modern conservatives, the Republican Party as a whole, and the race-baiting Trumpists and MAGA adherents in particular, she does not shy away from calling out the racist attitudes behind their arguments and beliefs. When making her arguments about the societal benefits of these policies, however, she sticks to the facts, and allows the shock value of just how much white conservative Americans are voting against their own self-interest to speak for her.

There are plenty of arguments, and quite a bit of evidence, that diversity in and of itself brings broad benefits to communities and companies, such as the way demographic diversity leads to increased creativity and productivity in the workplace. McGhee largely avoids that line of thinking in favor of more tangible benefits from particular policies that conservatives tend to oppose, such as Medicaid expansion. The states that have rejected expanded Medicaid funds from the federal government have lower life expectancies than the states that have accepted it. There are actual lives in the balance, and the excess deaths in the states that refuse to take the extra Medicaid money, declining it for political gain only, are not limited to people of color, although of course those communities are more adversely affected than white communities are. McGhee uses example after example to show why policies that are often depicted as favoring people of color would in fact be beneficial for substantial portions of the white populations of states or the country as a whole.

The first full chapter of The Sum of Us is titled “Racism Drained the Pool,” a fantastic bit of wordplay that has a literal meaning, referring to the closing of public pools across the country, even outside of the South, after courts required them to integrate. The results are still evident today; cities and towns filled in their old pools rather than allow Black kids to swim there, or converted those pools to private “swim clubs” that Black residents were less likely to be able to afford, but public pools never came back, so now everyone suffers. Where I live in northern Delaware, most people who have the means belong to some sort of private pool, and I can say from experience, as someone who has belonged to two different pools, that they’re not exactly integrated affairs. If you’re poor, you don’t get to swim – or to learn to swim, which is a life skill, not just a matter of recreation. The visible segregation is racial, but the invisible sort is economic.

McGhee explores these policy questions across most of the major spheres of public-economic life, including health, education, real estate, and the environment. Environmental racism and real estate redlining might be the best known examples, but McGhee points out, with data and research, that these inequities do not only affect people of color, regardless of what politicians who oppose stronger environmental regulations or greater controls on banks and lenders. Most of the policies she covers end up adversely affecting all poor people, regardless of race or ethnicity, but politicians and pundits try to sell these policies as somehow good for white people because they’re supposed to be worse for people of color. This is the ‘sum’ of the book’s title: These aren’t zero-sum policies, and in all of the cases she covers, the rising tide will lift all races. If we tighten environmental regulations, everyone benefits from cleaner air and water, with better health outcomes, better education outcomes, and so on. If we improve access to education with greater public investment, lower tuition, or greater reimbursements or grants, then we get a more educated populace, which improves the economy as a whole through increased productivity while also reducing crime.

The book goes through example after example of policies that would benefit wide swaths of the population but that die at the state or federal level through opposition from so-called “fiscal conservatives” who depict public aid or other public spending (e.g., infrastructure) as wasteful, as well as from politicians and activists who lean more into the language of white grievance by painting such government spending as “handouts.” They try to cut it completely, as the extreme right wing of the House is doing right now with the federal budget, or tie it to so many criteria that it’s difficult or impossible for people in need to benefit from it. McGhee points to the medieval Medicaid policies in Texas, where adults are not eligible at all for this need-based health coverage if they don’t have kids, and a family of four can’t have household income over $3900 a year to remain eligible. That’s not a typo – if you work 40 hours a week for the minimum wage in Texas (which is $7.25 an hour, the lowest legal amount, of course) for 14 weeks, you lose eligibility for Medicaid in Texas. Over three quarters of a million people in Texas go without health insurance because of these restrictions, and that population is not limited by race or gender or national origin or party affiliation. The Sum of Us makes a compelling argument to rid ourselves of the zero-sum thinking that says a gain for non-white people is a loss for white people, and recognize that in many, if not all, areas of the economy, raising the tide will lift all boats.

Next up: I just finished Martin Amis’s book The Zone of Interest, although I understand the upcoming film of that name has a very loose connection to the novel.

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→ September 29, 2023
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Tom Lake.

Ann Patchett remains one of my favorite contemporary novelists; I think she’s only missed once, really, with Run, which was too heavy-handed in its political allegory, and Taft is probably the weakest of the remainder even though it’s above the line for me. Bel Canto remains her magnum opus and one of the best works of American fiction since World War II, reimagining The Magic Mountain through a fictionalized version of the Túpac Amaru hostage crisis, and other than Run she’s been on a roll this century with State of Wonder, Commonwealth, and The Dutch House, the last of which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, losing to The Nickel Boys.

Patchett’s run of success continues with Tom Lake, which returns to the motif of reworking a classic of literature into a modern narrative, while also seeing her return to themes of family history and mythmaking, this time through the lens of a family matriarch telling her life story to her three grown daughters. Lara is in her late 50s, but the bulk of the story she’s telling her girls is about the few years when she played Emily in a community theater production of Our Town, which led to a summer gig playing the same character in the western Michigan town of Tom Lake, where rich people would spend a few days or a week at the lake and often drop in to see a prestigious actor or two on the stage. While there, Lara has a fling with a young actor named Duke who would later go on to great fame in Hollywood, first as a heartthrob and later as a more serious actor. Lara’s daughters have known about her affair with Duke, with very little of the details, but the pandemic throws them all together on the family cherry orchard, giving them plenty of time together to talk, and for the kids – the eldest of whom, Emily, was once convinced that Duke was actually her father – to grill their mother.

Lara is right about the age Patchett was when she was writing Tom Lake, and this novel feels like her second attempt at an autobiographical work, this time perhaps more inspired by the way we reconsider our lives as we cross the half-century mark (which I did earlier this year). I’m not aware of Patchett having a summer fling with a future movie star, but Tom Lake reads like someone reckoning with their past, contemplating paths not taken, maybe thinking about the role chance plays in the paths our lives take. So much of Lara’s story comes down to these seemingly tiny details of life, such as the way she lands the first role as Emily, how she ends up at Tom Lake, or how that summer ends.

At a certain point in your life, if you’re lucky enough to live long enough, you become an observer as well as a participant: you live with your memories, good and bad, and in retelling them you choose what to include and what to omit, especially when telling your children. Lara makes those choices, holding back some information for the pleasure of surprising her daughters with the reveals, and then holding back some information forever, including the last time she saw Duke before the pandemic hit. (It’s also the one sour note in the novel, certainly the least realistic moment, and a drastic tonal shift from what’s come before, although it’s possible that that was an intentional contrast between the sepia-toned filter of our memories and the harshness of reality.) We curate our pasts for our children, much as we curate our lives for social media. Lara’s daughters are all adults, each unique and each very well-drawn, yet she still only shows them a portion of herself and is thoughtful about what she excludes.

As always, Patchett has created a whole cast of fully-realized characters; the three daughters each have their own personalities, goals, and values, each sharing a little something from their mom and yet also baffling her in ways in which they differ both from her and from each other. If she were Marilynne Robinson, another of my favorite contemporary novelists, each of these girls would get her own spinoff novel, but alas, Patchett has never (to my knowledge) revisited any of her prior creations. Lara’s husband appears a little later on, a little less three-dimensional than the women in the family or the Duke of Lara’s memories, although that’s also clearly part of the point – he’s the steady man Lara married after her dalliance with the unreliable bad boy.

I’ve read all of Patchett’s novels, and Bel Canto is the clear leader for me, still, but I could at least make an argument for Tom Lake to be in the #2 position. After a week or so of pondering this, I came down at Commonwealth second, The Dutch House third, and Tom Lake fourth over State of Wonder. At her best, she gives us a cast of wonderful, realistic characters, and wraps them up in a plot that’s realistic but compelling. Tom Lake might show her in a more mature, meditative mood, but her prose and her characterization is as strong as ever.

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→ September 15, 2023
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Yellowface.

R.F. Kuang caused quite a stir earlier this year with the release of her fifth novel and first outside of sci-fi/fantasy, the scathing satire Yellowface, which bites the very hand that feeds her – the publishing world. The title hints at the secondary themes of cultural appropriation, racial identity, and who has the right to tell what stories, but the engine that drives this book and its self-justifying protagonist is sheer disgust at how the book sausage gets made.

June Hayward is a young white woman who has written one published novel to scant sales and mediocre reviews, while her college classmate and sort-of friend, Athena Liu, has vaulted into literary stardom in a manner not entirely dissimilar to Kuang’s history. Athena is Chinese-American and is working on her magnum opus, a massive historical novel about the use and abuse of Chinese workers in World War I, when she suffers a fatal accident in front of June … who grabs the manuscript to the unfinished and unsubmitted novel, The Last Front, and decides to clean it up and submit it as her own. June’s agent can’t believe it, shopping the book to a larger publisher, where the marketing folks suggest that June use her middle name, Song, instead of Hayward, ostensibly to get away from the failure of her first novel, but it’s hardly a coincidence that that Song could come across as an East Asian surname, is it? June’s happy to go along with all of this, even when a junior publicist at the firm pushes back on the whole scheme and questions the authenticity of some of the content, but after the book comes out to rave reviews and massive sales, the backlash begins, and eventually enough dirt comes out that June’s authorship becomes the subject of public scrutiny.

June is an anti-hero, an unreliable narrator, and a con artist, where she herself is one of her own victims: She’s so desperate for commercial and critical success that she dupes herself into doing and believing things that will obviously harm her in the end. She’s part Becky Sharp, part Maria Ruskin, and maybe a little Anna Delvey, but in the end she’s willing to do and say whatever she must to get ahead and stay there. That also means that anyone who gets in her way is an enemy and must be dealt with, which is when June becomes either ruthless or just so wrapped up in her own needs – and I think to her, this is about safety, rather than material gain – that she goes on the attack, or wants to, even when doing nothing is the best option.

The level of scorn that Kuang has for the industry is truly something to behold, and it provides some dark humor, not the laugh-out-loud sort but the “I can’t believe she’s writing that” kind. It’s not even a satire that exaggerates the truth to its limits to get its point across; Kuang does little more than sharpen a few details, letting the stark reality of things shock the reader instead. The outsized roles of Goodreads and social media sites, the emphasis on an author’s identity rather than their work, the control the Big Four publishing houses have, it all looks worse under the microscope. I doubt anyone still has the illusion that it’s the merits of a book that determines whether it’s a best-seller, but Kuang makes it clear just how far down the list of factors a novel’s quality sits.

The novel’s title refers to the history of white performers in stage and on screen pretending to be east Asian, such as the teeth-grinding cringe of Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. We’ve seen it in the publishing world as well, such as the white poet who submitted poems under a Chinese name because he claimed it increased his odds of getting published and another white poet who fabricated an entire persona of a Japanese survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima to publish his poems. Is June guilty of “yellowface” here? She takes on an Asian-sounding surname and doesn’t go out of her way to disabuse anyone of the notion that she has east Asian heritage. She takes on Athena’s novel, but makes substantial edits and rewrites, some before submitting it and some with the help of her editors. Is the mere fact that she’s telling a story about Chinese people, with references to Chinese culture and history, enough to say she’s committed this transgression? Is this cultural appropriation? Who can tell these stories – and if only an Asian writer can tell a story about Asian people, then does that mean Asian writers can only tell stories about Asian people? Kuang grapples with this last question at some length, including it in discussions of Athena Liu’s legacy, how the publishing world saw and used her, and how she felt as a token woman of color in what remains a white-dominated space where many decision-makers are still men.

I discovered Yellowface through several reviews and a Times article about the stir it caused in publishing circles, so I’m familiar with some of the criticisms. I do think it’s fair to ask about the quality of much of the prose, even though it’s told in Hayward’s voice, and while she presents herself as an underappreciated writer, she’s also extremely unreliable and likely overstates her abilities. It’s a novel that’s more readable than literary in that sense; the prose moves, and it’s evocative, but the wordsmithing here is unremarkable. What I do not understand or agree with is criticisms of its satire being insufficiently sharp, especially from writers, because I think making the satirical elements more overt or blatant risked taking the reader out of the story. Kuang could have made this funnier, but it would have come at a cost of veracity. This story rings true based on my limited experiences in and knowledge of the publishing world, which made it work for me even when the prose was a little thin.

For some comparisons, if you’re interested, you might want to read this very even-handed review by Hugo winner Amal El-Mohtar or you could read this incredibly nasty, juvenile review in the Cleveland Review of Books.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s latest, Tom Lake.

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→ August 17, 2023
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Barbie.

Barbie had already crossed the billion-dollar mark before I got to see it on Saturday, on top of weeks of positive reviews, hype, and discourse, which combined to both set a very high bar in terms of expectations while also likely predisposing me towards the movie a little bit because everyone seemed to like it – especially film critics and fans I know and respect. So bear all of that in mind when I tell you I pretty much loved this movie from start to superb-last-line finish.

Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s script takes existing IP but does something wildly ambitious with it, turning a kids’ doll with very little lore or mythology other than the series of toys in the line’s history into a wide-ranging social commentary and satire on patriarchy, feminism, toxic masculinity, and consumerism, among other things. It’s also a visual feast, at least when the movie is in Barbie’s world, and packed with allusions, references, and entendres that appear to be double. (I was most partial to the Zack Snyder reference, although the Proust and Stephen Malkmus ones were close.) Aside from a slight slowing near the end of the film as the script grapples with how best to get the main characters to the finish line, it maintained its pace with quick wit and snappy dialogue that never talked down to the adults in the audience and provided plenty to keep the kids interested as well.

Barbie starts out with its titular character (Margot Robbie) in Barbieland, driving her tiny car, saying hi to all of the other Barbies, while an obnoxiously catchy song (“Pink”) by Lizzo plays. We also meet several Kens, including Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling), and discover that in Barbieland, girls run everything, and the guys are just various flavors of eye candy, competing for the Barbies’ attention. Beach Ken is obviously in love with Robbie’s Barbie, who we find out later is Stereotypical Barbie, but she doesn’t really need him – he needs her far more. Everything is perfect, every day, in every way, until Barbie is plagued by a sudden existential dread and things suddenly aren’t so perfect any more, which leads to the actual plot of the story, where she ends up going to the Real World to find the kid who’s playing with her and putting all of these thoughts and problems into Barbieland. This leads to a rather rude awakening for Barbie; a massive epiphany for Ken, who sneaks into her car as she’s leaving Barbieland and then discovers the glories of patriarchy; and a problem for the executives at Mattel, who would really rather not have a repeat of the time Skipper showed up in Key West.

I cannot praise this script enough; other than the set design, it’s the strongest part of a very strong movie. Gerwig and Baumbach had to satisfy so many stakeholders and, I presume, mandates: make it funny, make it smart, make it appeal to kids and adults, make it look great, make it authentic to the limited source material, don’t denigrate the doll or the line or its history, and so on. It is often laugh-out-loud funny, with Gosling actually delivering many of the better lines, and when it’s not, it’s mining humor from satire, or just from wry observations.

The pace is also superb, as we’re barely into the movie, with about ten minutes of worldbuilding in Barbieland, before Barbie utters the out-of-character line that kicks the plot in motion. So many movies, whether prestige films or films built off outside IP, are 150 minutes or more; Barbie didn’t need to be, and it isn’t, coming in at about 114 including the credits. The result is a movie that’s packed without feeling dense, and that only slackens a little towards the end as the movie has to focus entirely on resolving the main storyline.

Gosling does kind of steal Robbie’s thunder, though, which is a little ironic for a movie that’s not just about her character but about feminism and the absurdity of patriarchy. He’s just so good as Himbo Ken – well, it seems like all of the Kens are himbos, but he’s especially dim – and the script provides him with more chances to flex. Barbie is dismayed and annoyed in the real world, but Ken thinks it’s the best thing he’s ever seen, and his reactions to little things like someone asking him for the time are priceless. The remainder of the cast is probably more impressive on paper than in the movie because there’s barely enough for anyone else to do. About half of the cast of the Netflix series Sex Education is in this movie, including Emma Mackey (Physicist Barbie), who is the best actor on that series and seems destined for superstardom, and Ncuti Gatwa (Artist Ken), who’s taking over as the Doctor in the next season of Doctor Who. Both stand out when they’re on screen here, but neither gets much definition. Simu Liu is very, very funny as Tourist Ken, Beach Ken’s main rival, playing an obnoxious dudebro version of the character, although it’s also a pretty two-dimensional role. Michael Cera might have the best supporting performance here as Allan, Ken’s best friend, whom Cera plays as every character Michael Cera has ever played on TV or in film – and it’s hilarious. If it’s not him, it’s Rhea Perlman, who is also quite wonderful but in a character that gives the film its most saccharine moments. Bonus points if you spot Lucy Boynton’s cameo; I missed it until the credits, and jumped when I saw the Sing Street actress’s name – and that of her character, which completes a great joke from within the movie.

Given the critical acclaim and commercial performance, Barbie seems likely to earn a slew of awards nominations this cycle … and win very few of them. It might be the best lock for any set or production design awards, followed by costume design, but this could be the sort of movie that has to be happy with the honor of being nominated. The dark horse category here would be the screenplay, where Gerwig – who I really, really hope gets a director nomination now after she was snubbed for Lady Bird and especially for Little Women – and Baumbach get points both for technical merit and artistic integrity. They chose a high level of difficulty and still succeeded, while also slipping in plenty of inside-Hollywood jokes to please that crowd. I’ll go on a limb and predict it gets eight Oscar nods: Picture, Director, Song, Original Screenplay, Production Design, Film Editing, Makeup/Hairstyling, and Costume Design. That’s not what I’m saying it will deserve – I haven’t seen any other contenders yet, with most of them still unreleased to the public – but a wild guess on what it will end up getting. I wouldn’t be the least bit upset to see Robbie or Gosling get a nod, although my gut says that enough voters will decide that the movie isn’t serious enough, the same way actors in genre films have had a hard time breaking through for nominations. Barbie totally captured me once the 2001 homage ended, and I’ll be surprised if this doesn’t end up among my ten favorite movies of the year.

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