→ October 19, 2017
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The New York Trilogy.

Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy is a collection of three novellas that are just barely connected enough that I would call this one novel, although it certainly bends the boundaries of the form. Each part starts out as a detective story, but turns into something else entirely, exploring questions of identity and meaning, with the three protagonists devolving into madness as their “cases” go awry. The work appears on the Guardian‘s 2003 list of the hundred greatest novels ever written, which is the only reason I even knew of its existence.

The first novella, City of Glass, covers a writer named Daniel Quinn who works under a pseudonym, William Wilson, about a detective named Max Work. Quinn gets a strange call one night asking for the detective Paul Auster, and after dismissing the first call, receives another one a few nights later and decides to play along, pretending to be Auster and taking on the case, which involves protecting a young man, Peter Stillman, from his abusive father as the latter is about to be released from prison. Peter speaks in a unique, stilted fashion, the result of the abuse his father, who was gripped by a sort of religious mania, put him through. Quinn decides to take the job, following the father, also named Peter Stillman, from Grand Central Station on the day of his release to the flophouse where he settles, eventually forcing a meeting with the older man, while also tracking down Paul Auster, the writer (not a detective), who is working himself on an article on the narrator character of Don Quixote. Quinn assumes the identity of the Auster-detective and goes undercover to an absurd extent, such that the case gets away from him and he begins to lose his own sense of self.

Ghosts, the shortest of the three acts, covers a detective named Blue, who is hired by the unseen White to stake out a target named Black. Every character has a color for his/her name – sometimes just part of the name, sometimes that’s all we get – but Blue, like Quinn in the first story, veers off the path, as he finds that watching Black day in and day out seems increasingly pointless, and eventually he decides to try to stalk White and find out what the purpose of the assignment is. It doesn’t go well, as you might imagine.

The Locked Room has the most conventional narrative of the three stories, and works less like a detective story and more like a psychological study. The unnamed narrator finds out that his childhood friend Fanshawe, with whom he’s had no contact for a decade, has disappeared, asking his wife to contact the narrator if he doesn’t reappear within a certain length of time and to have the narrator look through his collected writings. Fanshawe’s unpublished works turn out to be critical masterpieces and become commercially successful enough to allow the narrator, who quickly falls for and marries Fanshawe’s wife, to walk away from his own life and become Fanshawe’s agent, of a sort, as the steward of his friend’s various works. Of course, Fanshawe isn’t dead, and the narrator can’t leave well enough alone, especially once rumors start that Fanshawe is just a fabrication, so he tries to track his friend down despite explicit instructions not to do so. The resolution of this ties the three stories together in an unexpected and (by design) incomplete fashion, which I would argue makes the three novellas together a single work of narrative fiction despite the incongruities between stories.

Postmodern with metafictional elements, The New York Trilogy plays with layers of reality to push the three protagonists through varying levels of internal and external rebellion, against their senses of self and against the perception that they lack free will in a universe that is forcing action upon them. Blue and the nameless narrator both try to find the scriptwriters directing their lives. Quinn, himself an author, is presented with an entirely new script, but becomes obsessed with its narrative to the point that he completely loses himself, as if he’s playing a role that consumes him. In all three stories, Auster gives us less-than-reliable narrators and causes to doubt whether the antagonists or their backstories are real. Even when he unites the three narratives in the last few pages of The Locked Room (with a few scattered hints before that), the truth remains ambiguous – it’s possible that the stories all share a character, or that a character from one story created one of the others. It’s a work that asks questions without answering them, but still manages to grab the reader with the detective-novel paradigm and determination (if not entirely hinged) of its lead characters. I’m a devoted fan of noir detective fiction; this might be more gris than noir, but it works well with its foundation.

Next up: I’m reviewing out of order, but I’m currently on Frederik Pohl’s Hugo & Nebula Award-winning novel Gateway.

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→ October 23, 2015
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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

My first AFL dispatch for Insiders covers Jurickson Profar, Alex Reyes, Ian Clarkin, and more.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is Philip K. Dick at his paranoid, mind-bending best, the kind of fiction he was doing long before it became somewhat mainstream with films like Inception and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to play with layers of reality and imagination. There’s a mystical component here that also presages the outright religious overtones of his later work (notably V.A.L.I.S.), but with a more questioning and slightly cynical note to it, along with an absolutely bleak view of the near future of our species.

In the novel, PKD gives us an Earth so ravaged by environmental destruction that it is too hot for anyone to go outside unless they’re in one of the resort towns of Antarctica, while overpopulation has led the UN to undertake forcible migration via a draft lottery to various colonies scattered throughout the solar system, all of which involve living in underground “hovels” with only occasional glimpses of the surface. There’s also been interstellar travel to the (fictional) planet Prox, presumably around Proxima Centauri, from which the industrialist Palmer Eldritch has returned after a ten-year voyage, crash-landing on Pluto with a suspicious, unknown bit of cargo with him.

The colonists are all hooked on a drug called Can-D (say it out loud) that allows them to engage in a sort of group hallucination where they can inhabit, almost Being John Malkovich-style, two fictional characters, Perky Pat and her boyfriend Walter, whose environments within the hallucinations are determined by what layouts and miniatures the colonists have purchased. To put it another way, you buy the dolls, the dollhouse, the doll furniture and doll cars and doll whatevers, and then you chew the drug that lets you be the dolls. It’s big business, including the folks who sell the goods that get “minned” to be sold to colonists for their layouts.

Eldritch has brought back a new drug, called Chew-Z, that requires no layouts and is even more potent in the dream-states it provides to the users – but with an apparent cost in lost liberty, although exactly how that works isn’t revealed until later in the novel. But suddenly the users no longer control their hallucinations, and who exactly is controlling them and what the nature of that being is become the critical questions for the protagonists of the novel, none of whom is exactly operating with clean hands.

PKD touches on three of his most frequent and successful themes in The Three Stigmata: perception, paranoia, and mortality. What’s real is never clear in the book; we get layers of unreality, characters emerging from altered states unsure whether they’ve left the alteration or merely entered new ones, and the aforementioned questions of control of their perceptions. That plays into PKD’s paranoid themes, which also appear in the book’s greater structure – Earth in a sort of environmental ruin, the UN exercising a tyrannical hold on the world’s population, a free (or sort-of-free) market that enslaves its workers through their materialistic demands. As for the theme of our mortality, saying too much would spoil the book’s conclusion, but this book presages the exploration of the same theme in Ubik and also hints at the mystical conversion he underwent after what he believed to be a religious experience in the early 1970s.

PKD avoids the taut ending the reader might demand but that the story obviates – you can’t tie all of this up cleanly because the story is, by design, so messy. But it also fits the difficulty of addressing all of the metaphysical questions he asks in this book and in most of his works, about the nature of reality as we perceive it, about how much we cede our privacy and liberty to governing bodies, and of course about life and death and whether there is something beyond the latter. The Three Stigmata asks this sort of uncomfortable, unanswerable questions, just as PKD does in most of his best works.

Next up: Another Hugo winner, Robert Sawyer’s Hominids.

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→ May 17, 2015
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A Tale for the Time Being.

I get book recommendations from lots of places, many from all of you and many from friends who are bookworms like I am, but Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being came to me via a new route – call it Strangers on a Plane. I was on a flight at some point last year, I think heading to the AFL in October, and the guy sitting next to me was reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterful dystopian novel Never Let Me Go. I mentioned that it was among my favorite novels, and asked if he’d read any Murakami, which he had, spurring a brief and very rapid-fire chat about modern Japanese (including Japanese expats) literature. He mentioned Ozeki’s novel, which I’d never heard of, recommending it very highly given what else I said I liked. It’s not quite like Murakami or Ishiguro – both of whom are idiosyncratic enough to make it hard for anyone to be “like” either of them – but Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist priest who lives in British Columbia, has a similar knack with magical realism as Murakami does: A little bit goes a very long way.

A Tale for the Time Being is two stories woven into one, a duality even reflected in the book’s title, as a “time being” is a Buddhist concept (uji) developed by the writer D?gen Zenji, who believed that all time is being and all beings are therefore time. (Whether time is a flat circle he did not say.) Time is a flow, comparable to a river, and all beings exist within time, even though our lives here are momentary. The protagonist of the first story, named Nao (pronounced “now,” another allusion to time and temporality), narrates her own story through entries in a diary she intends to leave for someone else to find at random, a story she refers to as “for the time-being.” Her diary does indeed make its way to someone, a woman on a remote island in British Columbia named Ruth, who lives with her husband Oliver and their idiot cat Pesto. The diary washes up after the 2012 earthquake and tsunami, spurring speculation among the 50 or so residents of the island, but discusses events from over a decade earlier, including Nao’s father’s repeated attempts at suicide and her own intention to do the same when she finishes the diary.

And then it gets really weird: Although the two stories are separated by time and geography, they begin to bleed into each other in ways that don’t quite add up, eventually culminating in the disappearance of text from the last few pages of the diary – a lack of resolution in Nao’s story that Ruth herself has to fix. Saying more would spoil the book’s denuouement, but Ozeki employs this one instance of magical realism (everything else is hyperrealistic, but not actually impossible) to tie her main story and the quasi-metafictional diary story together.

That connection itself lends itself to many interpretations. There’s a crow who keeps appearing on Ruth’s island who may be spiritually connected to Nao or her family. Ozeki alludes to several quantum concepts, including Schrodinger’s cat paradox and the many-worlds interpretation of the effect observation has on quantum phenomena, and may even be teasing the concept of the ‘quantum soul,’ itself an odd marriage of hard physics and the metaphysical. While there’s nothing as cataclysmic as Ray Bradbury’s “The Butterfly Effect,” I found the similarity between the classical statement of this effect – a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa leads to a hurricane in the Americas – and Nao’s struggles to find her own wings eventually affecting Ruth across another vast ocean to be improbably coincidental.

Magical realism and the specific ribbon Ozeki uses to interlace her two narratives aren’t the source of the book’s narrative greed, however, nor is it her fictional version of herself, especially since Ruth’s conversations with Oliver veer into pretentiousness too often. It’s Nao herself, precocious rather than pretentious, a bright teenager who is at-risk due to a disastrous home life, a suicidal father who’s lost his career and self-respect, a mother largely turning a blind eye to her husband’s abdication of his duties, and schoolmates who scorn, taunt, bully, and physically abuse her. She’s a fragile teenager who doesn’t want to show a fragile side, and who’s asked to be stronger and more mature than any teenager should have to be. Her story is the compelling one, and Ruth’s story is more about her own connection to what she reads in Nao’s diary and her attempts to unlock some of the riddles Nao herself couldn’t solve than it is about Ruth herself.

The resolution relies on the collapsing of space and time into a temporary singularity, a metaphorical bridge Ruth can cross to get to Nao’s story and provide her with the resolution she can’t give herself. It’s sweet without becoming maudlin, although it abandons the largely realistic tone of the preceding 300-odd pages. Along the way, Ozeki gives brief introductions to basic concepts of Zen Buddhism, notably zazen, the type of seated meditation that is at the heart of the practice (and may have real physical health benefits as well), but to her credit it never overwhelms either of the core stories. She even has the brief stomach-churning passage of the violence of Japanese soldiers during World War II that marked Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. If you like that novel or Murakami’s work in general, take my seatmate’s advice and pick this book up too.

Next up: I’m bouncing around in my reviews, but I’m currently reading Wizard of the Crow, the 766-page opus from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, one of the greatest post-colonial writers to come out of Africa, less well-known than Chinua Achebe but writing with greater depth and a biting satirical slant. It’s set in a corrupt African dictatorship, where allegiances change with the wind and a new power emerges in the form of an inadvertent charlatan calling himself the Wizard of the Crow.

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