→ September 25, 2024
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The Unstoppable trilogy.

Charlie Jane Anders won the Nebula Award for her first novel, All the Birds in the Sky, which revolved around two teenaged protagonists who grew up together, saw their lives diverge, and then came back together in a soaring conclusion. Over the past few years, she published a young adult trilogy, Unstoppable, that was also largely built around two teenaged protagonists, although here the story is more madcap, the threats much larger, and the relationships between characters more front and center. I won’t pretend to be objective here, as I’ve met Anders and I read these books because she sent me an autographed set of the trilogy, but I thought the books were a blast.

The first book of the series, Victories Greater than Death, starts out pretty normally, both playing into and gently satirizing some of the tropes of the form, with its main character, Tina, a teenager who happens to be the Chosen One to save the galaxy and lead its Royal Fleet against its enemies, although in this case she knows the first part because her mom told her. She’s just waiting for the call, literally, as she has a beacon in her torso that will light up at some point when the aliens come to take her home. Of course, even that doesn’t go off without a hitch, as her best friend Rachael, who is a talented artist and was bullied badly enough that she’s now home schooled, ends up along for the ride into space. Unfortunately for, well, everyone, the forces attacking the Royal Fleet are very determined to make sure Tina doesn’t get back to space, and they don’t seem to care if they blow up Earth in the process. Tina does get to her ship, and not long after – with a brush with death included – she ends up part of a motley crew of teenaged humans on board who help avert the catastrophe, after which they head off into the heavens to fight crime, or, well, the bad guys, of which there turn out to be more than one. By the time we get to the second book, the stakes are much higher than they first appeared, as this is no longer just one tyrant’s power play, but an unseen and unknown force threatening to put out every sun in the universe.

Because this is a young adult series, and the main characters are all teenagers, there’s a lot of interpersonal drama amidst the intergalactic drama, both the romantic and friend varieties. Tina becomes involved with Ella, a trans girl from Brazil who ends up in the pipeline to become one of the Princesses atop the sprawling intergalactic monarchy, although the job is a lot less glamorous than the name implies. Rachael falls for another crew member, Damiani ends up with a non-human partner, and so on. Life on board a spaceship, or multiple spaceships, gets complicated.

The story itself absolutely flies, with a pace that’s almost manic at times, with very short chapters and rarely more than two or three pages without some sort of action, whether it’s a battle between starships or between people. The initial villain has an origin story that involves Tina’s alter ego, and it’s quite intricate and plausible at the same time, with Anders integrating it well into the main story through flashbacks and through the residue it leaves in the contemporary plot. Tina and Rachael share the lead roles by book two, and both are well developed, showing growth over the trilogy, with Tina reckoning with a past she didn’t know she had and Rachael learning to find her voice in multiple ways as the situations demand more of her.

The most notable part of the prose is Anders’ decision to have all characters introduce themselves with their pronouns, which is only notable the first few times before you become habituated to it and stop noticing – which, as someone who uses he/him pronouns and lists them in his bios and on name tags, is kind of how it should be. The only time it threw me was the character whose pronouns were fire/fire; I know about neopronouns but I just can’t get my brain to read them as such, so every single time Anders referred to that character by pronouns I’d have to stop and re-read the sentence. I’m guessing my kids would have less of an issue with this, but my brain isn’t as plastic as it used to be.

Dr. Katherine Mack, better known by her social media handle of @astrokatie, advised Anders on the mysterious forces threatening to end all life in the universe, and I won’t pretend I really followed it. I did sort of feel like it was the Marvel movie problem, where the stakes are just always so high that you can’t really adjust your thinking – I ended up way more invested in the individuals’ storylines than any part about saving planets or the universe as a whole. That, of course, may have been Anders’s entire intent; science fiction that leans too much on the science and doesn’t give enough time to its characters is pretty dreadful. I was good just spending more time with Tina and Rachael, and to a lesser extent their other friends, although some of the alien characters on the ship still felt, well, a bit alien to me. (The Grattna race, by the way, are my favorite creation of Anders’s here, as she gets to delve into philosophy and linguistic relativity in a wholly organic way that ends up affecting how Tina and her friends interact with them.) My only reservation about the books is that there’s a lot of death, not out of violence but out of spaceships blowing things up, even the occasional inhabited planet, and that’s at least out of the ordinary for YA fiction in my experience, so I might recommend this for slightly older readers, but Anders does have Tina et al grapple with the consequences of their actions as they become increasingly pacifistic over the course of the last two books; even the death of a dangerous nemesis has moral repercussions. It’s just a joy to read, even in its most morbid parts, and even as Anders tackles broader themes like discrimination, gender theory, utilitarianism, cultural sensitivity, and much more. And I hope I would say the same even if I had come by the books some other way.

Next up: I’m about to finish Dr. Cassie Holmes’s Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most.

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→ September 10, 2024
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Some Desperate Glory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ November 4, 2022
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A Desolation Called Peace.

Arkady Martine won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel for A Memory Called Empire, the first in what is now the Teixcalaanli series of stories involving a character who has the memories of the man who preceded her as ambassador implanted into her brain. I despised it for its pretentiousness and its lack of character development, so I wasn’t exactly pleased to see the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, won the same award this year. It offers more plot than the first novel did, and has one new, interesting character (giving it one more than its predecessor), but suffers from the same pretentious style and emphasis on all the wrong things.

Mahit Dzmare returns from the first novel as the ambassador from the outpost Lsel Station to the Teixcalaanli empire – you know we’re in outer space, because the letters are all in the wrong order! – but the story here goes well beyond her. Where Memory was a bit of a whodunit, as she tried to find out who assassinated the previous ambassador – and that’s whose memories she has in her brain, although it’s not just memories, but his entire persona. She’s part of a bigger story this time that involves an unknown species that has attacked Teixcalaanli settlers on a remote mining world, eviscerating the victims for no apparent reason, and then attacks a fleet of military ships with some sort of viscous substance that eats through metal and might be ingesting (dissolving?) the pilots. Mahit’s superiors want her to sabotage any Teixcalaanli attempts to negotiate peace with the aliens to protect Lsel’s interests and sovereignty. Meanwhile, the heir to the Teixcalaanli throne, a precocious eleven-year-old boy, finds himself involved in the discussions that ensue around how to proceed against the unknown enemy.

One some level, A Desolation Called Peace didn’t stand a chance coming in, because the same elements I found so pretentious in the first novel are still here. The constructed language is back, with the same overly complex grammar and unpronounceable or just plain weird phonemes, like “ezuazuacat” or “yaoklat.” So are the Teixcalaanli names, which involve a number and usually a noun, like Nineteen Adze, Eight Antidote (the heir to the throne), or Three Seagrass. It’s showy, except that it’s not showing anything. This is the stuff I would have found extremely cool when I was a teenager, but that’s not a compliment here – it’s a sign that the entire endeavor starts from the wrong place.

However, the story here exceeds that of the first novel, both in construction and in interest. It’s part Ender’s Game, part Imperial Radch series, part Star Trek: The Next Generation, and nothing here is all that original, but it’s at least reasonably entertaining. Eight Antidote, the future Teixcalaani emperor, is the best character to appear in either novel, which is also a low bar to clear, but given how uninteresting Mahit Dzmare is – which is quite a feat, given that she’s simultaneously two people – it’s a huge improvement. He’s not just some imp, nor is he a savant; he’s a smart kid, doing smart kid things, getting into trouble, but also finding his way through an adult world that he knows, one day, will revolve around him. Martine divides the story into three interwoven plot lines, one around Eight Antidote, one around Mahit Dzmare, and one around the military discussions.

The other saving grace of A Desolation Called Peace is the resolution, where all three storylines converge in a reasonably satisfying conclusion, albeit one that’s a bit derivative of one of the works cited above. Even with the mediocre writing, with heavy use of archaic or esoteric terms that have common equivalents, and the bizarre nomenclature of Teixcalaanli characters, it’s pretty quick-moving. I also appreciated the de-emphasis of Mahit Dzmare’s character and her implanted predecessor, which got old very quickly in the prior book. If you enjoyed A Memory Called Empire, you might enjoy this one even more, even though I’m still not a fan.

Next up: Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark.

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→ March 20, 2020
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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous made the longlists for this year’s National Book Award (won by Trust Exercise) and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction (won by Lost Children Archive), both in the same year that Vuong earned a Macarthur Foundation grant. A grim, epistolary work of auto-fiction, On Earth is a difficult and unsparing read that’s probably better from a critical eye than it would be in the eyes of most readers (mine included).

Written as a series of letters from the protagonist, Little Dog, to his abusive mother, now that Little Dog is an adult, On Earth goes back to Little Dog’s childhood, to stories his mother and grandmother told him from before they left Vietnam, and to his adolescent years, when he first fell in love with a local boy named Trevor who became addicted to opioids. Little Dog is closer to his grandmother, Lan, who helps take care of him and tries to protect him when his mother becomes violent, and who helps him get to know an American veteran, Paul, who became her husband and Little Dog’s surrogate grandfather. The novel bounces around in time between those three settings – Vietnam, his childhood, and his relationship with Trevor – but hurtles towards multiple deaths that define the end of the novel, and the way it’s constructed, the story unfurls as a tapestry that weaves grief and memory together for a somber and often depressing read.

Entangled with those themes is Little Dog’s three-pronged intersectionality – he’s an immigrant, a person of color, and openly gay, all of which are true of Vuong as well. Little Dog also arrives in this country unable to speak English, and he becomes the first member of his family to learn to read, which makes the entire conceit of the novel as a series of letters to his mother more poignant or a little bit farcial. On Earth is more interesting as a new entry in the long tradition of immigrant fiction, especially given how many variables are different – how extreme the fish-out-of-water aspect is when his family ends up in Hartford, Connecticut; the added challenge of his sexual orientation at a time when society was more bigoted than it is now, and with a mother who doesn’t really understand it; and his mother’s work at a nail salon, a haven for exploitation of women who’ve immigrated here from east and southeast Asia.

There’s plenty to dissect in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, but Little Dog himself is too much of a cipher – even with all of the details we know about him as a person – to make this slight book connect with me. I sympathized with him, but never empathized with him; perhaps it’s the nonlinear narrative, perhaps it’s the dispassionate way in which Vuong writes, which always seemed to keep me at arm’s length. There’s a scene in the novel where Vuong describes something in explicitly physical terms, but never grapples with the emotional impact of it, during or after. That seems to be emblematic of the work as a whole. In the end, Little Dog seems to forgive his mother, to arrive at some sort of understanding, but I still wasn’t sure how he got to that point even with 240 pages leading up to that point.

Next up: I finished Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s short story collection Sabrina & Corina and started Jo Walton’s Lent.

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→ December 26, 2019
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Girl, Woman, Other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ 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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→ April 22, 2018
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Less.

Andrew Sean Greer’s Less was a surprise winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, both because there were several strong contenders that had already won other significant prizes in this cycle and because it’s ostensibly a comic novel, a subcategory that is very poorly represented in Pulitzer history. (I can count two outright comedies among the 90 previous winners.) Less is a quick and breezy read, the story of a writer, Arthur Less, turning 50 and taking a whirlwhind round-the-world trip after his younger boyfriend has left him to marry another man. It is also disappointingly bland and almost entirely without any real humor at all.

Arthur Less is a three-time novelist at something of a crossroads in his life and career. His first novel was a critical and commercial success, but his last two were each less so, and his latest one, a semi-autobiographical downer called Swift, was just rejected by his longtime publisher. His boyfriend, Freddy, has indeed left him. His previous lover, the Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Brownburn, threw him overboard some years earlier, and is now in some sort of assisted living facility. With his fiftieth birthday just weeks away, Less stitches together an impossible trip that takes him to four continents, speaking at one conference, appearing at another where he’s a finalist for an award, joining a friend for a journey across Morocco, heading to Japan to write a story on a ceremonial meal served in Kyoto, and so on. Along the way he meets a cadre of eccentrics, nearly has a fling with a married man, bumps into old friends, ruins one suit and buys another, and is possibly Patient Zero for some sort of 24-hour virus. The narrator is unseen, but confesses to knowing Less for many years – it’s not hard to guess who it is – and sprinkles the story of Less’s trip with flashbacks to earlier periods of the man’s life.

This is a midlife crisis novel, set loosely to the strains of Homer’s The Odyssey, with Less avoiding hazards and sirens on his trip around the globe, eventually making it back home after learning an Important Lesson about life. It’s mildly amusing in spots, but rarely does it become truly funny, and the whole exercise has too much of that unfortunate facet of literature of writers writing about how tough it is to be a writer. Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, each of whom won a Pulitzer for a book about or featuring a writer-narrator, were frequently guilty of the same thing. I am a writer, of a different ilk, and I do understand that there are aspects of this calling that are difficult, but as I often tell people who ask if I enjoy what I do for a living, I don’t complain about my job because no one wants to hear it. And many of Less’s complaints here are just that – cry me a river, you’re in Paris/Berlin/Tokyo and something trivial has gone wrong. There’s a small running gag about a bespoke suit that never quite lands and speaks to the privilege of Less’s life, that, even as he worries about being a bit skint, he can still indulge in luxuries most mortals cannot.

Greer does give the reader some moments of real pathos, including the touching digital reunion between Less, Brownburn, and Brownburn’s ex-wife Marian, whom Less assumes is still furious with him for stealing her husband – as if he turned the poet gay or some such nonsense – but is magnanimous and bears the wisdom of years as the three converse in unlikely fashion. There’s a pervasive sense here that Less is a side character in his own life, or that he believes that he is, only to have other people he encounters on his odyssey teach him of his own worth and importance, and that his best years aren’t necessarily behind him at age fifty.

The Pulitzer boards over the years have shown an affinity for books about writers or writing, and for books that fall into certain prescribed tranches of literature about well-off white men facing existential crises. If Less differs at all from such past winners, it’s that it’s the first novel to win the prize with a protagonist who’s LGBT. (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay had two protagonists, one a closeted gay man; several stories in John Cheever’s anthology feature gay main characters as well.) There just isn’t anything new in Less about life in these United States – ostensibly the purpose of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – nor is there anywhere near enough humor in this book to justify giving it the nod over other contenders like the daring Lincoln in the Bardo or the incisive Sing, Unburied, Sing. There’s always next year, I guess.

Next up: A true change of pace, as I’m reading Phil Collins’ memoir Not Dead Yet.

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→ January 19, 2018
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Call Me By Your Name.

Call Me By Your Name has been consistently lauded since the Toronto film festival in September as one of the best films of 2017, powered by a great lead performance from Timothee Chalamet and a gorgeous setting in northern Italy. It is a very different sort of film from anything to which you might compare it, and while it suffers at the top from languid pacing, the script delivers a powerhouse speech at the end that ties everything together in a way that gives the story its deeper meaning.

Adapted from a 2007 novel by Egyptian/Italian writer André Aciman (who has a brief cameo in the film as a flamboyantly gay friend of the main family), Call Me By Your Name tells the story of a summer romance between two young men, Elio (Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer), when the latter comes to stay at the northern Italian summer house of Elio’s family. Set in 1983, Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg, looking very much like Good Will Hunting-era Robin Williams) is an archaeology professor who invites graduate students to stay with him each summer and help him with filing and other administrative tasks. Elio is dating a beautiful local girl, Marzia (Esther Garrel), but it becomes clear quite early that he’s attracted to Oliver, who seems more interested in chasing local women until Elio implies his feelings to Oliver while the two are running an errand in town. The romance between them blossoms late in the summer, and Oliver in particular seems aware of its ephemeral nature, especially in an era where homosexuality was still decades away from mainstream acceptance. Eventually, Oliver must return home to the United States, and Elio is left to cope with his grief and his new understanding of who he is.

The beginning of the film is … well, it’s romantic and unhurried if you like it, I suppose, but about 20 minutes into the movie, I was seriously questioning my commitment. The pacing is slow to the point of soporific. It isn’t just that so little happens, but that James Ivory’s script takes too much time setting the scene, which director Luca Guadagnino is more than happy to oblige by giving us beautiful shots of the country house, the pools, the river, the unnamed town, and so on. If you clipped the first half of Call Me By Your Name, you could turn it into a very compelling video for the Lombardy board of tourism.

The inflection point for the script comes when Elio hints to Oliver that he’s gay and attracted to his friend, to which Oliver’s immediate response is that they can’t discuss or act on these feelings, which he obviously reciprocates. Then the real story begins, including Elio’s awkward attempts to make Oliver jealous, in a stop-and-start pattern before they finally begin their clandestine affair. (Or what they think is clandestine; Elio’s parents are both highly educated, intelligent people, and there’s never any indication that they’re ignorant of what’s happening.)

Stuhlbarg’s performance for much of the film feels a bit too familiar as he does the socially awkward, highly intelligent professor act, but as the script approaches its end, his character emerges as a more complex, thoughtful, compassionate person than you might have had any reason to expect. The talk he gives to comfort Elio after Oliver has left Italy is beautiful and concise, accentuated by Stuhlbarg’s note-perfect delivery. Chalamet is outstanding as the conflicted, teenaged Elio, the most important and demanding role in the film, but he’s not matched by Hammer, who – in addition to sounding almost exactly like Jon Hamm – never quite fills out the role of Oliver, seeming more dismissive than aloof early in the film, then coming off as patronizing to Elio in moments where they’re supposed to be at their most intimate.

Call Me By Your Name has also received some unwanted and unwarranted attention for the nature of the central romance, which occurs between two men aged 24 and 17. The legal argument, that the age of consent in Italy is 14, never held much water for me, and reading about the film I thought how I might feel if my daughter were 17 and I had a 24-year-old houseguest strike up a romance with her. (Answer: Not great, Bob.) The script answers the question in two ways, however, by making it clear that the relationship is in no way predatory, but also because of the time and place in which the story occurs. Life as a gay man in 1983, even before the scourge of HIV, included few guarantees of happiness, so for Elio and Oliver to fail to seize the day when this one chance for a transcendent romance arrives would be its own tragedy. That point was still unclear to me until Stuhlbarg’s soliloquy, which rounded out the story without sermonizing.

The score features some lovely selections of classical songs for the piano – I particularly loved the use of “Une barque sur l’ocean,” a piece by Maurice Ravel – but the intrusion of the vocals from Sufjan Stevens’ contributions during the film itself was unfortunate, as was the decision to boost the volume of his first song, a reworking of “Futile Devices” from his The Age of Adz. The film makes much better use of one of Stevens’ new songs, “Visions of Gideon,” which plays over the final scene along with the credits and adds to the haunting melancholy of the film’s conclusion. (Also, the Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way,” a favorite of mine from the new wave era, plays a small role in the plot.)

All of the predictions I’ve seen so far have Call Me By Your Name snagging a Best Picture nomination, with nods also for Guadagnino (Best Director), Chalamet (Best Actor), and one of Hammer or Stuhlbarg (Best Supporting Actor). I wouldn’t be surprised to see nominations as well for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Cinematography, although perhaps I’m misplacing credit due to the Italian countryside. Garrel isn’t in the film enough to merit a nod for Best Supporting Actress, but I thought she was superb in a limited role. The soundtrack is ineligible for Best Original Score, unfortunately. I have no vote on the Oscars, of course, but Chalamet is the only candidate I’ve listed for whom I might vote … and I haven’t seen Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour.

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→ June 28, 2017
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The Handmaiden.

A psychological and erotic thriller built around a classic con story, the South Korean film The Handmaiden made a number of critics’ top ten lists for 2016, but wasn’t even submitted by the Korean Film Council for consideration for the 2016 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film even after the film was generally praised on release at Cannes that year. Directed by Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Thirst), The Handmaiden manages to combine a double-cross story worthy of Hitchcock, a drawing-room mystery worthy of Charlotte Heyer, and erotica worthy of Cinemax into a single, stunningly shot film that still manages to compel even as Park’s train wobbles off the tracks in its final third. It’s free on amazon prime and can be rented via iTunes.

Adapted from the novel Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, The Handmaiden is told in three parts, beginning with the story of Sook-hee, a peasant thief who is recruited by the con artist “Count” Fujiwara to become handmaiden to a wealthy heiress and convince the ingenue to marry the fake count so he can then dump her in an insane asylum and make off with her money. Sook-hee agrees after negotiating a better cut of the proceeds for herself, only to fall in love with her mark, Hideko, and lose her commitment to the con. No one’s motives are truly clear here, and Lady Hideko’s uncle isn’t merely the reclusive rare book collector he appears to be; once the first part of the con is revealed, the narrative shifts back to the beginning and shows much of the same material with missing details restored. Everything you see in part one has a purpose, even if it takes most of the film to discover it.

The con drives the plot, but the power of The Handmaiden resides in the scenery and the lead performances. The film is gorgeously shot, from the uncle’s mansion to the Japanese gardens even to the night scenes among the trees, with Park manipulating light and dark or introducing bursts of color to enact quick shifts in tone. There are very obvious parallels to Hitchcock’s Rebecca, and there are scenes in the gardens on the estate where you’d expect to see the girl from Fragonard’s The Swing swaying to and fro.

Kim Tae-ri, making her feature film debut as Sook-hee, nails the urchin’s mixture of overconfidence and naivete, while Ha Jung-woo is perfect as the suave, unctuously charming con man Fujiwara. (The two are both in the upcoming South Korean drama 1987, about the student protests that year that brought down South Korea’s military regime.) Kim Min-hee won several awards for her portrayal of Hideko, perhaps the most thankless role of the three because so much of the script requires her to act numb, although the character gains complexity once the depravity of her uncle becomes apparent in part two; her role just seems less demanding, other than the makeup and hair she’s required to wear while Hideko delivers readings of the books in her uncle’s collection.

The film would almost certainly have received an NC-17 rating here for the two sex scenes between Sook-hee and Hideko, which some critics have tabbed “soft porn” but which would probably escape remark if they involved a hetero pairing. If there’s something objectionable here, it’s the scenes’ length, or some of the dialogue, perhaps badly translated, from Sook-hee that I think was supposed to show that she’s just as naive as Hideko. (Waters herself defended the scenes, saying the women are appropriating a very male pornographic tradition and that queer audiences welcomed them.) Establishing the attraction between the two women as genuine is critical for the credibility of the overall story, and while the second scene is probably too long by half, skipping them entirely would have left the film worse off. The movie’s conclusion, however, brings the off-screen violence from implication to reality with a needlessly grisly torture scene that would have survived just as well without showing us any severed fingers; I haven’t read the novel but I believe that scene was Park’s invention.

I doubt any film would have topped The Salesman for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, given the political circumstances around the latter’s nomination, but I would rank The Handmaiden above the four other nominees. You can argue it’s pornographic, but I think those scenes are both transgressive and true to the original author’s intent; the violence is far more disturbing and less essential to the plot. And the plot is reason enough to watch the film – it’s an old con done up in a new way, with double dealing and secret schemes, by actors who fully inhabit the devious characters they’re portraying. It’s easily among my top ten movies of last year.

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→ April 14, 2017
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Tough Guys Don’t Dance.

I’ve had mixed results with Norman Mailer’s work in the past – I loved The Executioner’s Song, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction even though it’s pretty clearly a work of non-fiction, but bailed on The Naked and the Dead after just a handful of pages because of its turgid prose and Dickensian attention to detail. When I read that he’d written a noir-ish detective novel, though, I figured the genre would at least make up for any obstacles I found in his writing, and contemporary reviews of the book, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, were so positive that I gave it a shot. It’s somewhere in the middle for me, overdone as a work of genre fiction, but also, I think, exploring a theme that’s basically absent from the first fifty years or so of hard-boiled detective stories.

Tim Madden is a writer who never seems to write anything, and whose wife has walked out on him, apparently for good this time. Their relationship is built on nothing much at all, but he’s broken up about it, and goes on a bender one night after meeting a couple from California in a bar in his adopted home of Provincetown (a small town at the tip of Cape Cod that, then and now, is known as a gay haven, which turns out to matter substantially in the story). He wakes up the next morning to find he has a tattoo with the name of a woman he doesn’t know, blood all over the inside of his car, and, eventually, a woman’s head in the place where he stashes his marijuana. He’s then left to try to figure out what happened – including who the woman was and whether he killed her – while various people from his past and present show up, including the woman he once dumped for his wife after they went to a swingers’ party, and complicate his efforts to solve the crime.

The novel’s style seems a clear callback to the hard-boiled novels of which I am so fond, although Mailer’s prose is more involved than the clipped tones of Dashiell Hammett or the sparse artistry of Raymond Chandler. It’s almost too well-written for the genre, in that you can tell this is a very good writer trying his hand at an unfamiliar type of writing. Nearly all of the side characters are straight out of central casting – dimwitted hoods, ex-boxers, corrupt cops – but Tim himself is unique, a writer rather than a detective, a child of privilege who got kicked out of Exeter, a former drug dealer who did a stint in prison where he met a former Exeter classmate of his who’ll also figure in the present mystery.

I’m completely interpreting here, but I think Mailer was trying to explore questions of masculinity, especially as it related to homosexuality, something that’s even telegraphed in the novel’s title, which comes from an anecdote within the book where a mobster utters that line, as if dancing would erode his toughness. (It also called to mind the Belle & Sebastian line, “We all know you’re soft/cause we’ve all seen you dancing.”) Most of the male characters in the novel are grappling with maintaining some sort of facade of manliness in the face of emotions that, I think especially in the 1970s and early 1980s, would have marked them as effeminate, if not as “gay” in the pejorative sense of the term. There’s a lot of just plain ol’ fashioned heterosexual depravity in this book, and of course given the time of its writing (published in 1984), there’s quite a bit of homophobic language, including a reference to “Kaposi’s plague,” which refers to a rare cancer that became common among gay men at the time and turned out to be associated with AIDS. But so much of that content read to me like men trying to prove they’re men – I’m not gay, see how I say awful things about gay men, they’re all (bundles of sticks), I’d like to kill them all, etc. The straight men doth protest too much.

And while I doubt “toxic masculinity” was even a term back in the early 1980s – as far as I can tell, it was coined well after the book was written – there’s a huge element of that within the book and behind the crime itself. Without spoiling the whodunit, I’ll say that men trying to either prove their masculinity or suppress characteristics that might be labeled as feminine or gay loom very large within the story, enough that when I finished the book, I found that theme was much more on my mind than the plot itself, which was a little too convoluted, with the murders kind of too pointless for this style of novel. That makes it a cerebral detective story, but maybe not as compelling of a mystery as the classics of the genre are.

Next up: Robert Charles Wilson’s Hugo Award-winning novel Spin.

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