→ January 24, 2024
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North Woods.

Daniel Mason’s North Woods is the story of a house. I mean, it’s the story of the people who live in it, and some who just pass through, but the only constant in this peculiar but beguiling book is the house, located on what becomes an apple orchard in western Massachusetts. The house becomes the site of a number of tragedies – there’s a lot of death in the book, some comic but others just sad – and some truly eccentric characters who remind us of the transience of life and the things we leave behind.

The house, described as lemon-yellow and assembled piecemeal over many years, first goes up in the 1760s and sees everyone from young lovers to Revolutionary soldiers to a woman kidnapped by Native Americans to an escaped slave and the slave-hunter trying to abduct her and more, although none leaves more of a mark than the Osgood family. Their patriarch discovers an apple there he calls the Wonder, becoming an evangelist of the strain and developing the giant orchard that envelops the property and that his spinster daughters will eventually make their livelihood – at least, until one of them finds a beau. Much of the action in the book is botanical, as apple seeds, acorns, beetles, and fungal spores also leave their mark on the house, its environs, and thus the people who inhabit it. Eventually, we enter the 20th century, with a woman whose son believes he can hear the voices of the dead people who previously lived in the house – which leads to his diagnosis with schizophrenia – and the house’s decline into ruin.

Mason challenges the reader twice over, once with the unusual structure and once with his use of the supernatural in a subtle but central way. The book’s many sections vary in length and style, with interstitials that come in the form of letters, pamphlets, a real estate listing, poems, and more digressions from the prose format. Some work – the real estate listing is one of the funnier bits, and it’s just a single page – but there’s a sense of Mason trying harder than he needs to in a book that is in and of itself a creative marvel. The poems especially do not work, not because they’re bad poems – I am not in a position to judge their merits – but because they add nothing to the novel as a whole. They take up space without advancing story or character, and unless I’m missing some great Parnassian achievement here, I’d have preferred he omit them entirely.

The supernatural elements are harder to understand, but also more essential to the novel. Without spoiling what those elements are, they appear slowly, without much in the way of warning or foreshadowing, building as the novel progresses until they are woven thoroughly into the fabric of each story. By the time we reach the final character to visit the house, it’s easy to see where that chapter will end, because each successive tale has leaned a little more on the supernatural elements to complete its narrative. North Woods could exist, and excel, without the interstitial bits and style variations, but it could not exist without the spirits. (As an aside, I did not catch that the twelve chapters were supposed to represent the twelve months of the year, later reading that in the NPR review of the book. It’s another clever trick that, in hindsight, was also quite effective because of its subtlety.)

That last character refers to the world as either “a tale of loss” or “a tale of change,” and North Woods does not seem to take sides in this debate. The characters themselves experience loss, sometimes plural, often unexpected and unfathomable. The house and the land persist, but their denizens change, as do the ways in which the humans use the building and the trees. And all of the death begets new life, even, in its way, the eventual death of the house by fire, which we know can regenerate the land (e.g., certain morel mushrooms fruit well after forest fires). Death is not final in Mason’s novel, which is obviously a spiritual view that readers may or may not endorse, but he uses this as a device to connect the dozen stories and characters, as one death often sparks the series of events that lead to the next character or chapter in the house itself. It’s an unusual novel, and a slow one to start, but Mason’s lithe prose and gift for characterization ultimately wins out, even with some distractions in his literary flourishes.

Next up: Bryan Stephenson’s Just Mercy, which my daughter had to read for school last year. (He’s a Delaware native.)

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→ June 6, 2022
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Arthur and George.

Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending is one of my favorite novels of this century, and was adapted into a solid if very understated (or just very English) film a few years ago, so I’m likely to pick up any book of his I find lying around. Arthur & George precedes that book in Barnes’ bibliography, making the Booker Prize shortlist in 2005, six years before he won the honor for Sense. It’s a beautifully written fictionalization of a true story involving Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but lacks the tension and conciseness that made his subsequent book such a standout.

The Arthur of the title is the author who created Sherlock Holmes, while George is George Edalji, a bookish, half-Indian lawyer who was wrongly accused of a series of animal murders known now as the “Great Wyrley Outrages.” Edalji’s family had been harassed for years via letters and malicious pranks – thank goodness SWATting wasn’t a thing in the 1890s, as their tormentors would certainly have done it – while the local constables did nothing to stop the harassment, often intimating that George was the culprit in his own abuse. He was convicted on circumstantial evidence, boosted by prejudice and prosecutorial misconduct, and later released from prison without explanation or pardon. He wrote to Conan Doyle, who took it upon himself to prove Edalji’s innocence and campaign for a pardon, which he achieved after eight months of “detective” work of his own.

The novel follows the lives of the two men, starting in childhood, with brief sections on their upbringings (collected as “Beginnings”), followed by a long exposition of Edalji’s story (“Beginnings with an Ending”), then one on Sir Conan Doyle’s efforts to clear George’s name (“Endings with a Beginning”), before wrapping things up in a section whose title you can probably guess. The two middle sections constitute the bulk of the book, and that’s sort of where Barnes gets into trouble, as we get way too much of Conan Doyle’s personal life. His first wife was not a great match for him, and she spent the last several years of her life with tuberculosis. While still married, he met Jean Leckie, who would become his second wife after they maintained a chaste relationship for nearly a decade while, in effect, waiting for his first wife to die. Meanwhile, he also dabbled in spiritualism, his interest in (and gullibility towards) which only increased after his son died of wounds he suffered in the Battle of the Sonne.

Barnes tries to weave Conan Doyle’s personal life into the mystery around Edalji and the Outrages, but the former simply cannot compete with the latter: The crimes, trial, and Conan Doyle’s investigations have far more narrative greed and greater tension than his love life or his weird dalliances with superstition. There’s just nothing that interesting about his platonic friendship with Jean; their meetings are fraught with whatever the opposite of tension is. They’re flaccid. I couldn’t wait for any scene involving the two of them or spiritualism to be over with, so Barnes could get back to the good stuff – anything around Edalji, whether it was the harassment campaign, the accusations, the trial, or the investigation to clear his name. Those passages are electric, and if Barnes wanted to stop writing serious fiction at age 76, he could probably crank out of a couple of good detective novels before he’s through.

Fortunately for Arthur & George, there’s enough of the mystery to make up for the weakness of the other material, and Barnes makes it work without changing any of the substance of the real-world case, even where it makes Conan Doyle look like a bit of a hypocrite – he claimed another boy committed the crimes, but his case was just as circumstantial as the one that got Edalji convicted. It’s not in the same league as The Sense of an Ending, which was taut and focused, yet landed such a massive impact with its resolution, with the same clear and evocative prose, but good enough to get over the recommended line for me.

Next up: I’m reading this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, The Netanyahus, by Joshua Cohen.

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→ October 27, 2021
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Homegoing.

My daughter had to read Yaa Gyasi’s acclaimed debut novel Homegoing for her 9th grade English class, reporting that she thought it was extremely well-written, just sad. I tend to enjoy post-colonial literature, so I thought I’d give it a shot, further encouraged by the fact that the novel had won the PEN/Hemingway Award.

The novel is a sequence of fourteen connected short stories that follow the descendants of two Asante half-sisters, one of whom was sold into slavery, the other married to an English colonizer, down to the present day, by which point both lineages are in the United States. What happens from there isn’t as simple as you’d expect – this isn’t Sliding Doors, where everything is great in one set of stories and awful in the others – as Gyasi builds a new character in every chapter, developing them as independent people but also recognizing how history would define not just their circumstances but their personalities as well. The stories move through several centuries of history, from the way contact with Europeans tore apart the Gold Coast to how slavery and Jim Crow laws continue to limit Black Americans’ economic opportunities.

Even as the setting shifts from present-day Ghana to the U.S., the shadow of colonization obscures everything that happens in Homegoing. The course of history was changed when white people showed up in Africa and decided it was theirs – the land, the resources, and even the people – and the ramifications echo down through seven generations in this novel. Gyasi doesn’t deny her characters free will, but we are all shaped by our circumstances, and her characters’ circumstances build on themselves like a matryoshka, so that the characters in our present day, who would appear to have more freedom and more opportunity, are still weighed down by the centuries of oppression that preceded them.

I can also see why my daughter wouldn’t love the stories in this book, as most are grim, many are violent, and few offer much hope. There’s some graphic content in here, including rape and sexual assault, enough that I assume many schools wouldn’t assign it, but it’s almost certainly an accurate depiction of the way the English treated the Asante natives, and later enslaved, and of course the way American slaveowners treated their slaves.

Where Gyasi excels is in her ability to create one interesting character after another, despite only giving us a short time with each of them and also working with the constraints of the previous story in each chain (and, I presume, the subsequent stories as well). It’s an impressive feat of imagination within the confines of the novel’s structure, marking her as someone who is as deft with the short form as well as the longer.

It’s also why I’m not talking much about the individual characters and stories – they’re so short that I don’t want to spoil too much of them. Esi is the half-sister who is enslaved, then raped by a British officer; her daughter, born of that assault, grows up a slave in the American south, and manages to send her baby with an escaping slave to freedom in Baltimore, starting a chain of misery that moves back into the deep south and then to New York, with racism, further violence, forced labor, and more. Effia marries the Governor of the slave castle where, unbeknownst to her, her half-sister Esi is held in the dungeon below. Their child, Quey, is ill at ease in the white man’s world and returns to his Asante people, beginning a back-and-forth pattern between the Black and white cultures in east Africa until the final story sees their descendant in Alabama, where the two stories will eventually reconnect. It’s a masterwork of planning, with the parallel narratives coming together in a way that is driven by coincidence yet feels natural, almost inevitable, and that will never have you thinking how meticulous the novel’s structure is.

Next up: I’m reading some of the books on writing that you all recommended, having finished Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and started Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences about Writing.

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→ September 2, 2019
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Wolf Hall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next up: Elizabeth McCracken’s novel Bowlaway.

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→ July 23, 2019
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The Ghost Road.

Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road is the third book in a trilogy, but the first I’ve read since it won the Booker Prize and I wasn’t even aware it was the third book in a series until I picked it up to read it. I was expecting something bleak, even dreadful, given the description on the back of the book – it’s set during World War I (humanity’s deadliest), and involves two men, one a psychiatrist evaluating soldiers who’ve returned from the front, one a soldier who has returned and wants, against all logic, to go back. It’s surprisingly brisk, even dryly funny, even though the book doesn’t shy away from war’s horrors and the denouement is just as grim as you’d expect; it compares quite favorably to Evelyn Waugh’s war trilogy, written several decades earlier and from a very different point of view.

Rivers is the psychiatrist in question, based very much on a real doctor of that name, while Billy Prior is the soldier, surrounded in war by real historical figures, and himself based on Barker’s own readings of historical documents of soldiers’ experiences at the front. Rivers is presented regularly with the absurdity of war and its effects on the men who fought it, including hysterical conditions that we’d recognize today as post-traumatic stress disorder but that were dismissed at the time as a sort of dubious madness. He treats Prior as one of his patients, and is more frank with this particular soldier due to some shared experiences, owning up to the pressure form above to clear as many soldiers as he can to return to active duty.

Prior is strangely eager to get back to the fight, even though he’s long lost any faith in the reasons for the war – I imagine this is one of the great separators between those who fought for the allies in World War I and those who did the same in World War II – and knows that the more tours of duty he does, the more likely he is to die there. He’s engaged to be married, finding out just before his return that his fiancée might be pregnant, but is hoping to be absolved of that responsibility one way or another, because he, like Rivers, is gay.

Ghost Road doesn’t set out, at least, to be a novel of gay men in a war of masculinity literally gone toxic – wars are always begun by men, and World War I seems especially to one of the more pointless of all wars, a battle of egos that cost millions of young men their lives. Instead, it seems that Barker creates a parallel between the alienation of men fighting someone else’s war and the isolation gay (or bisexual) men would have felt in a time where homosexuality was criminalized in much of the world, including the UK where the novel is set. The sexual encounters described in the book are matter-of-fact, furtive trysts that are entirely devoid of emotion, let alone any sense of intimacy – fitting for a war that seemed to reduce men to their barest selves, sentient beings powered by rage or controlled by their survival instincts.

Rivers is the stronger character, even though Prior gets to fight and thus has a good bit more to do on the page. Rivers, however, gets to observe and interpret for the reader, and the reader in turn sees more of the turmoil inside of him, especially as he knows the futility of his work – that he’ll be sending men back to the war who have no business returning to the battlefield. His interactions with patients also provide the bulk of the book’s humor, without which it would be the tenebrous slog I feared it would be. At the same time, Barker’s characterization even of these two men falls more on the technical side than the emotional; the descriptions of their internal monologues even tend towards the precise, perhaps lacking some of the depth of feeling you’d expect of characters facing the effects of wartime trauma and the guilt involved with surviving or believing you should go back.

For those of you who’ve read this far, I wonder if it would surprise you to learn that Pat Barker is Patricia Barker – that a novel about two gay men in World War I, a novel with no female characters of any substance whatsoever, was written entirely by a woman. It certainly surprised me, not in the sense that I thought a woman incapable of doing so, but that I thought a woman might be less interested in telling a men’s story in a world of men’s stories. There’s apparently some reason behind this – that, early in her career, Barker was tired of praise that was always tempered by commentary that her books were about or for women – but it’s still fascinating to me that she made this choice, and then executed it so well.

Next up: about 2/3 of the way through Laura Cumming’s The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th-Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece, which is just $1.99 on the Kindle right now.

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→ August 20, 2018
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Pachinko.

Min Jin Lee’s second novel, Pachinko, earned broad acclaim last year, including a spot on the shortlist for the National Book Award (which it lost to Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing) and on the New York Times‘ list of the ten best books of last year, all of which brought it to my attention in the spring when I was looking at potential winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which went to the markedly inferior Less. Lee’s novel manages to combine a totally unfamiliar aspect of world history and culture – the outsider status of Koreans living in Japan during and after the latter’s colonization of the Korean peninsula – with the familiar epic structure of classic novels of the British tradition. If Dickens or Eliot had written a novel about Koreans living as part of the underclass in Japan, it would probably look a lot like Pachinko.

Pachinko is a type of arcade game very popular in Japan, similar to pinball, and often used for gambling. Pachinko parlors are mostly owned by Koreans, and it was one of the few industries open to ethnic Koreans in Japan in the wake of colonization, which Lee uses as the backdrop for her novel. The book covers four generations of a Korean family from their beginnings in Busan, a city at the southern tip of the peninsula, through their settlement in Yokohama, Japan, and multiple tragedies borne largely of the disadvantages and obstacles they face as permanent outsiders in their adopted homeland.

The novel moves quickly to get us to Sunja, a teenaged Korean daughter of a widowed innkeeper, when she becomes pregnant by a Korean man, Honsu, who lives in Japan and only later reveals that he has a wife and children in Osaka whom he won’t leave or divorce. Sunja marries a Korean Presbyterian missionary, who moves her to Japan, where the family faces ongoing discrimination that moves from the overt to the subtle over the course of the novel’s fifty-odd years, where even educational achievement isn’t enough to push her descendants past the invisible barriers of anti-Korean prejudice in Japanese society. The source of Hansu’s wealth and power isn’t revealed until later in the book, but even his influence can’t break down all of these walls, and the pachinko industry becomes the source of refuge and only path to wealth or success for several members of the family. Through the narrative, Lee works in the mistreatment of Koreans prior to and during World War II, including political prisoners and forced laborers as well as off-screen references to “comfort women,” before the tone shifts to one of superficial acceptance and tacit discrimination in the wake of the war.

The overarching theme of Pachinko is one of displacement, as some of the core characters still yearn to return to Korea, thinking of it as home, while others want to think of Japan as home – especially Sunja’s younger son and grandson, both born in the archipelago – but aren’t fully accepted by Japanese society. Koreans in the novel form a cultural enclave, surrounded by Japanese people and their economic and social hierarchies, unable to fully assimilate even if they learn the language fluently and attend Japanese schools. Any upward mobility is stunted by formal and informal obstacles, like a plant trying to grow into ground that is too hard for its roots to penetrate. This leads to a sense of anomie in some characters, like Sunja’s younger son Mozasu, who ends up in the pachinko business primarily because it’s that or jail, while others, like her son with Hansu, Noa, can never reconcile their two identities and come to awful ends.

Although female agency is another theme that looms large throughout the novel, Noa seems to best encapsulate Lee’s points about identity and isolation. He’s an ethnic Korean, but grows up believing his adoptive father, the Presbyterian missionary, is his biological father, and finds out far later that his real father is the businessman of dubious methods, Hansu, destroying any sense of self he’d built up through his own hard work in school and in jobs where he’s underpaid because he’s Korean. Lee writes more from the perspectives of the women in the novel, mostly Sunja, but Noa’s story after the revelation about his parentage could have used even more elucidation, as he disappears from the novel for many years of book time, leaving me with questions about the continued effects of his mixed-up identity.

I ended up getting Pachinko as a digital loan from my library after putting in a hold back in February, and when the book showed up, I was in the middle of something else, and had just eight days to finish it before the loan expired, which would be aggressive for a book of over 450 pages … but it reads so quickly that I finished it in four days. Lee’s prose absolutely flies, even with plenty of descriptive, scene-setting language, and the book is largely driven by dialogue, so the pace rarely slows. I have other, minor quibbles, such as wishing for more depth on certain characters, but Pachinko is so ambitious and exposes a world that was totally opaque or outright unknown to me beforehand that it seems petty to dwell on them. I would still rank it below Lincoln in the Bardo among 2017 novels, but it was more than worthy of any of the annual fiction awards for which it was considered.

Next up: Another 2017 novel, Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour.

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→ August 16, 2018
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The English Patient.

I’d never read Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel The English Patient until late May of this year, despite recommendations from multiple people, its status as a Booker Prize winner, and its adaptation into an Oscar-winning film (that I still have not seen). This past week, a public poll voted it the best Booker winner of all time (the so-called “Golden Booker”), choosing it from five candidates, one from each decade of the award’s history, but I tweeted that I wouldn’t even put it top five among the 14 Booker winners I’ve read; my favorite is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, which wasn’t on the shortlist. While I do like Ondaatje’s writing, I couldn’t possibly have felt less connected to a story than I did to this one, about four people holed up in a damaged Italian villa in the wake of World War II.

The patient of the title might be English, and is certainly modeled after the Hungarian count Count László de Almásy, although the Count didn’t crash and burn in the Sahara as this patient did. The fictional version is burned over nearly his entire body and has no hope of recovery. He’s cared for by the shell-shocked nurse Hana, and they’re joined by the Sikh sapper Kip and the Canadian thief Caravaggio, with their four stories told in intertwined narratives, with the patient’s recollections of his affair with a friend’s wife and eventual betrayal forming the book’s foundation.

Although the patient’s story sits at the center of the book, Kip’s narrative is both more interesting and more insightful, and I think a book about him would have held my attention and my empathy much more than the distant plot about Almásy did. Kip is Indian-born and goes against the nationalist leanings of his brother when he volunteers to become a sapper in the British army, joining an all-white unit that keeps him at arm’s length even when he proves skilled at his job. He is effectively drafted into a more elite group headed by Lord Suffolk (also based on a real person), who trains the best sappers in disposing of new types of bombs, but this brief honeymoon of belonging ends abruptly and cuts Kip adrift, landing him eventually into an abortive affair with Hana. The way that ends is one of the novel’s strongest moments, as an external event bursts the bubble in which Kip has been hiding for some time – the same one that Hana refuses to leave even though the war in Europe has ended.

I suppose part of the popular appeal of both the book and the film is that the patient’s recollections of his affair with Katherine Clifton, portrayed in the film by Kristin Scott-Thomas, depict some sort of great romance – especially founded as it was on a deep intellectual connection – but that scarcely comes across in the pages of the book, between Ondaatje’s fuzzy descriptions, probably to emphasize that we are reading the muddled memories of a gravely injured man, and the absence of any depth to Katherine’s character.

Perhaps the movie develops her character more, or fleshes out other parts of the story, but while I respect Ondaatje’s dedication to historical accuracy in borrowing these personages and his deft writing, I felt utterly detached from this story from start to finish.

Next up: Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel Pachinko.

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→ January 12, 2018
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Andersonville.

Andersonville was the nickname given to a Confederate prison in Georgia that held roughly 45,000 Union prisoners in an enclosure that had no shelter from the elements, no supply of clean water, and was designed to hold a fraction of that number. Nearly 13,000 Union soldiers died at Andersonville, mostly of scurvy, diarrhea, dysentery, starvation, and exposure. So of course there’s a monument on the site … dedicated to the prison’s commander.

Mackinlay Kantor spent nearly two decades researching the prison, reading first- and second-hand accounts of life there, before publishing his book Andersonville, which won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. (I think it’s the second-longest winner, behind The Executioner’s Song.) The novel opens with the construction of the prison, or the animal pen that posed as a prison, and ends at the conclusion of the Civil War, with prisoners freed, slaves emancipated, and Wirz arrested. Kantor’s attention to detail and attempts to accurately portray real people as characters in his book is a marvel, and a great example for anyone looking to write historical fiction around real events and personas. It’s also a slog to read, far too detailed both in the horrors of life in the prison and on the back stories of the fictional Union soldiers Kantor created, to the point where yet another death from scorbutic diarrhea loses its impact on the reader.

Kantor frames the book with the narrative of a local family, the Claffeys, who live very close to the prison, and whose family friend comes to stay with them while working at the prison’s makeshift hospital. The Claffeys are ridiculously idealized white southerners, the mythical kind slave owner who treats the human beings he owned as if they were voluntary employees working for housing and food. It does put Ira Claffey, the father, in direct contrast to the evils of the prison, as does the fact that he has lost three sons to the war and yet does not share the antipathy towards Union soldiers that Wirz and his boss, General John Winder (also a real person), did.

Interspersed with the Claffey story are two threads revolving around the prison itself, one from the perspective of the prisoners themselves, one from the perspective of Wirz, who comes across as somewhat helpless to ameliorate conditions at Andersonville but also has no compassion for the starving, suffering men in his charge. The stories of the prisoners appear to be here to give names and faces to the individuals; humans have an easier time understanding the suffering of one person than the suffering of thousands, so perhaps fleshing out their histories increases the reader’s appreciation of the human tragedy of the prison. Some of these back stories are interesting on their own, but very few have any bearing on the main plot around the prison beyond pointing out the utter pointlessness of war, and the irony that men who survived threats before the war and then avoided death on the battlefield would waste away in a prison or, in one case, die because one of the prison guards got trigger-happy.

The scenes in the prison vary in their potency and ability to stir the reader’s interest, with the subplot, apparently based on real events, of the prisoners policing themselves when a gang called the Raiders start to rule the camp through violence and intimidation. The Regulators, as the good guys called themselves, restored a semblance of order in the chaos of the prison, and the story Kantor crafted around the group coming together and defeating the Raiders is the best subplot in the book for the way he draws the characters themselves and how the Regulators form themselves into a functioning team. (Wikipedia has an article on the Raiders that gives more credit to Wirz in encouraging the Regulators than Kantor does.)

Although books of this length and level of detail still appear today, Andersonville feels dated even if we give him a pass for the portrayal of the slaveowner or the casual racism within the book. It’s bloated with the back stories of the prisoners, and there isn’t a through line to connect those stories, Wirz, and the Claffeys beyond the existence of the prison. The story ends because the war ends. Maybe that was Kantor’s point – that there’s no closure or resolution. Some men survived, many didn’t, and there isn’t a good reason for any of it.

As I mentioned on Instagram yesterday, this completes my reading of all 90 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel/Fiction winners.

Next up: Roger Zelazny’s Hugo-winning novel This Immortal.

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→ July 27, 2017
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The Last Days of Night.

Graham Moore won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2015 for his work on The Imitation Game, particularly impressive for a first-time screenwriter with just that and one novel under his belt at the time. His second novel, The Last Days of Night, came out last August and just appeared in paperback this spring, and is about as good a work of popular, contemporary fiction as I’ve come across.

Moore takes the term historical novel to a new extreme here, creating a coherent narrative around the War of Currents of the late 1800s – the public dispute over whether the nation’s power grid should run on direct current, favored by Thomas Edison, or alternating current, favored by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse – by relying on the historical record as much as possible for descriptions of characters, scenes, and even dialogue. This type of novel typically makes me uncomfortable because it potentially puts words and thoughts in the mouths of real-life personages, potentially coloring or distorting our impressions of them; Moore includes an appendix explaining source materials for many of the depictions in the book, even explaining the origins of some of the dialogue, and also delineating which events and timelines in the book are real and which he created or rearranged to fit the narrative. I’ve read “non-fiction” books that played faster and looser with the truth than Moore does here in his work of fiction.

The War of Currents was kind of a big deal, and a lot more public than you’d expect a scientific debate to be, largely because the two figures at the center of it, Edison and Westinghouse, were both famous and powerful at the time – Edison the revered inventor and showman, Westinghouse the successful businessman and an inventor in his own right, the two embroiled in a public dispute over whether DC or AC was the safer choice for the nation’s emerging electrical grid. (AC was the inarguably superior technology, and eventually won out, but not necessarily for the ‘right’ reasons.) Moore wraps this battle, including the bizarre entrance of one Harold Brown, inventor of the electric chair, into the debate, in the larger one over who really invented the incandescent light bulb, spicing things up a little bit with some fictional details like the firebombing of Tesla’s laboratory and a hostile takeover of Edison’s company.

Told from the perspective of Paul Cravath, a young attorney who handled Westinghouse’s side of the various lawsuits back and forth between him and Edison and later founded the Council on Foreign Relations, The Last Days of Night manages to turn what could have been dry history into a suspenseful, fast-paced novel (aided by lots of short chapters) populated by well-rounded characters. Edison’s depiction might be a little too on the nose, but Westinghouse, Cravath, and even the enigmatic Tesla – whose Serbian-accented English is recreated in clever fashion by Moore, who explains his technique in the appendix – come to life on the page in three dimensions even with the limitations of their roles. Moore relied largely on historical information to flesh out the characters, with the main exception of Agnes Huntington, Cravath’s wife, on whom there was very little documentation, leading Moore (or perhaps simply allowing him) to create her backstory and eventual romance with Cravath out of whole cloth. The trick allows Moore to give the book its one proper female character, since the War of Currents was fought entirely by men in domains – science and the law – that were closed to women until the last century.

I found the pace of Last Days a little frenetic, definitely aimed more at the popular end of the market than the literary end; events move quickly, as Moore compressed almost a decade into about two years, and the book has short chapters and tons of dialogue to keep up the velocity. That meant I tore through the book but found it a little balanced towards action over meaning; there was just less to ponder, especially after the book was over, but I also never wanted to put the book down because there are so few points where the pace slackens. That makes it a rarity for me – a book I could recommend to anyone who likes fiction, regardless of what sort of fiction you like.

Next up: Still playing catchup with reviews; I’ve finished Grazia Deledda’s After the Divorce ($2 on Kindle) and Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins, and am now reading Anna Smaill’s weird, dystopian novel The Chimes.

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→ June 17, 2017
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Blackout and All Clear.

Connie Willis’ time-travel novels are a marvel; she’s created an alternate universe where time travel isn’t just possible, but plausible, because it’s intrinsic to her plots but not to the characters or the setting. The first full-length novel, The Doomsday Book, sent a character back to the period of the Black Death at the same time that a pandemic hit Oxford in 2060, where the time-traveling historians reside. The second, To Say Nothing of the Dog, was a comedy of manners that parodied a Brit Lit classic. Her 2010 diptych Blackout/All Clear is a magnum opus in scope and length, a single novel published in two parts because the combination runs over 1100 pages, sending three historians back into World War II only to have everything go awry for them. The duo swept the major sci-fi novel awards (Hugo, Nebula, and Locus) despite some reviews that criticized the books’ length. I adore Willis’ writing and character development, so while the books are long – it took me just over two weeks to finish the pair – my only regret at their length was that I was dying to get to the resolution.

Willis’ time-travel universe keeps that physical impossibility to something of a minimum. Historians travel backwards in time for research purposes, and of course are charged with staying out of the way of history lest they find they alter it. Spacetime itself has a defense mechanism, however; it won’t allow time travelers to land at a point in history where their mere presence may change its course – so, no, you can’t go back and kill baby Hitler, even in fiction. Those who try end up displaced in time or location from their target, and the gap is called “slippage.” Meanwhile, returning through a portal, called a drop, to 2060 is also complicated – the drops must not be seen by “contemps” from that time period, and if the location isn’t secure, the drop won’t open and the historian can’t return home until the next rendezvous. It’s an elegant, concise way to introduce time travel and all of its attendant problems into serious literature that would otherwise collapse under the weight of the details.

Unlike Willis’ previous two novels in this setting, nearly all of Blackout/All Clear takes place in the past. Once the historians start to step through the portal into World War II at the start of the first book, we don’t get back to Oxford until well into All Clear; this is a novel of three historians stuck in World War II, simultaneously trying to find a way back to their present and to avoid doing anything that might alter history … which could in turn mean that time travel is never invented, creating a paradox with unforeseeable consequences (none of them good, though). Michael Davies wants to research heroes, but ends up in the evacuation at Dunkirk. Polly Churchill wants to research the conditions and behavior of people who sheltered in Tube (subway) stations during the Blitz, but ends up in a shelter below a church and falls into an amateur theatrical troupe. Merope Ward wants to research the lives of evacuated children in the English countryside, only to find herself saving one of her ward’s lives and bringing some of the children back to London to an uncertain fate during the bombings. The three all realize soon enough that something’s amiss, between the slippage and the failure of their drops to reopen, and start to look for each other in London to seek a way out before the paradoxes of time travel overtake them.

Willis’ prose captures the cadence and flow of great British authors of the 19th and early 20th centuries, even though she’s an American author writing today, with the clarity and wit of a Wodehouse and a bit of the descriptiveness of Dickens (but not too much). She also creates wonderful characters, a few of whom, like department head Mr. Dunworthy or young Colin Templer, we’ve seen before. Merope, who goes by Eileen in the past, and Polly are a little bit too similar to each other, although some slight personality distinctions emerge in the second book, but the characters around the core trio are wonderfully diverse and well filled-out, from the actor Sir Godfrey to the aging fisherman Commander Harold to the imps Alf and Binnie who plague Merope’s existence. Willis has given her world depth and texture by populating it with believable, three-dimensional characters, even unlikable ones, so that reading her novels, especially this two-part tome, becomes an immersive experience. I was very much reminded of watching the Foyle’s War TV series, which is set almost entirely in World War II and even has one episode that occurs in part in a bomb shelter; Willis recreated that setting in words to the point where I could lose myself in the story.

Blackout itself isn’t much of a standalone novel because it ends mid-story; there is absolutely zero resolution at its end, not even so much as an answer to the question of why these historians have gotten stuck when their colleagues had gone to other points in history and returned without major incident. If you’re going to read one, you’re committing to read both, and that does mean that you’ll be in the past with the trio of trapped heroes for a long time. I’m completely comfortable with that – I will happily spend all day in Connie Willis’ words if my schedule permits.

Next up: I’ve read a few books since this pairing, but just started another Hugo winner, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, which definitely sounds like something other than a critically acclaimed sci-fi novel.

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