→ February 27, 2024
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Stay True.

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critic Circle award for memoir or autobiography, Hua Hsu’s Stay True begins as a coming-of-age story about growing up as a first-generation American, trying to fit in with other kids through culture and counter-culture. Hsu eventually found a strong friend group at UC Berkeley, doing normal college kid things and seeing the world as full of endless possibilities, until one of his closest friends is murdered in a random carjacking, a senseless crime that destroys so many lives and leaves Hsu in an uncertain world of grief. It’s brief yet Hsu writes so clearly and specifically that each scene feels real – and so do the emotions that come from it.

Hsu was born to Taiwanese parents who emigrated to the United States to flee the repressive government in Taipei in the 1960s and 1970s, then grew up in California as an outsider to multiple groups – he wasn’t white, yet he wasn’t a high achiever like many of the other Asian-American students he saw. He eventually gravitates to music as a way to be cool, particularly towards indie music, even starting his own zine in high school to try to get free CDs from record labels, adopting a cooler-than-thou attitude to people who listened to mainstream artists like Pearl Jam or the Dave Matthews Band, or even latecomers to Nirvana. When he graduates from high school and attends Berkeley, he meets Ken Ishida, who in many ways is all the things Hsu wants to be – effortless, charismatic, handsome, just naturally cool without trying. The two don’t exactly become fast friends; their friendship grows over time, and evolves around and through their differences rather than in spite of them. Theirs was, in Hsu’s telling, the sort of friendship that you are lucky to find a few times in your life, one that lasts for decades even as others drift apart or become nothing more than Facebook friendships.

Of course, Ken is the murder victim here, which I don’t think is spoiling anything if you’ve read any reviews or anything else about the book. It was as pointless as stupid as it gets; his killers bought a bunch of stuff with his credit cards and went to their house, with his car still on their lawn. They were caught almost immediately, and the guy who actually shot him is still in prison in California; his girlfriend, an accomplice in the crime, was just released last year. His murder was enough to shock Hsu and their whole friend group, but Hua takes it even harder because of how their last interaction went, and his guilt that perhaps Ken would still be alive if he’d said or done something different in that situation.

Hsu’s writing is delicate and evocative all at once; he eschews the big twist or shocking moment, and lets the characters – of which he is one – tell the story, with his wry observations often providing humor or some needed context. So much of Stay True asks how to measure a life, to borrow a phrase; when someone close to us dies, how do we remember them, truly remember them as they were, rather than the version we hold in our memories, which may be colored by our emotions or wishes. It becomes tangible to Hsu when he has to deliver the eulogy at Ken’s funeral, where he speaks more honestly than you might expect for the ceremony, while much of what comes afterwards, in the final third of the book, is Hsu trying to make sense less of what happened and more of how to go on. He writes letters to his late friend, sees his figurative ghost when a certain song plays or when it’s time for a cigarette. His relationship with his girlfriend stalls. He reacts as many people would in the face of such a tragedy; few could describe it in such lucid, honest terms.

I did read a review of Stay True that referred to the book as “unsentimental,” which I think depends on how you define the term. Sentimental literature and art is maudlin, weepy, turgid; Stay True is none of those. It is, however, a sad story, told plainly but with tenderness at its core. Hua Hsu lost his best friend, without warning, and without the emotional tools to cope. He’s written a beautiful tribute that speaks to the grief we all must face in some way, while also delving into the details of his life and Ken’s that made both of their stories unique.

Next up: Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage, by Nathalia Holt.

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→ March 13, 2020
→ By

Everything Inside.

Edwidge Danticat’s short story collection Everything Inside just won this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction on Thursday night, her second NBCC win (her memoir Brother, I’m Dying won the NBCC’s Memoir/Autobiography award in 2007) and the most notable award she’s won yet for her fiction. Each story in this slim, beautifully-written volume revolves around Haitian immigrants to the United States, the cultural shifts they experienced, and the challenges of settling in a country that still has racism and xenophobia in its DNA.

Born in Haiti, Danticat emigrated to the U.S. at 12 years old, and every story in this book revolves around that immigrant experience, especially those of Haitians who emigrated to Florida and move back and forth between the two countries, either physically traveling between them or feeling the pull of one from the other. (Danticat’s Wikipedia entry says that “Although Danticat resides in the United States, she still considers Haiti home. To date, she still visits Haiti from time to time and has always felt as if she never left it.”) Every one of these stories in Everything Inside feels drawn from something very personal to Danticat, as if they’re not just conceived and written but lived-in, so while there will always be a comprehension gap for readers like me (white, Anglophone, U.S.-born to U.S.-born parents) who don’t share her experiences as an immigrant or person of color, several of these stories still pack enough of an emotional punch to connect.

“Dosas” revolves around a home-health nurse whose ex-husband calls in a panic because his new wife – and former affair partner – has been kidnapped in Haiti and he can’t raise the ransom. (In Haiti, a ‘dosa’ is a girl born after twins.) This complex web of relationships, between the protagonist and her ex and between the Haitian diaspora and those who stayed behind (or move back and forth between the countries), colors her decisions and threatens her job as a live-in nurse to an elderly patient with kidney disease.  “Sunrise, Sunset,” originally published in the New Yorker, contrasts two women, a mother and her daughter who has just become a mother herself, as the former faces creeping dementia while the latter grapples with a stark postpartum depression, which culminates in a terrifying moment that confronts the erasure of memory, individual and across generations. “Without Inspection,” the closing story, follows the thoughts of a man who has fallen on a construction site and is heading to his death, during which he thinks about the family he leaves behind and the improbable way in which he arrived in the United States, saved on a beach by a Haitian woman who goes there each day to try to help migrants who barely make it to the shore when their transporters dump them to swim the last mile.

“Seven Stories” is the standout in the collection, perhaps in part because it’s so different from the other stories here. The Haitian-American protagonist, Kimberly, visits an old friend who is now the wife of the Prime Minister of an independent island in the Caribbean, where the elite live in luxury, abetted by corruption, amidst shantytowns and abject poverty. The story of how her friend survived the assassination of her father, himself once Prime Minister, and returned to the island unfolds over the course of the story and diminishes the dichotomy that first appeared to Kimberly when she arrived on the island. The story ends with a wedding and celebration in a village called Maafa – which I assume is an allusion to Ma’afa, a term referring to the “black Holocaust” where European and Arab peoples enslaved Africans and continued to oppress them through colonialism and imperialism – and Kimberly reflecting on how her friend’s life has been anything but simple despite her evident privilege, while Kimberly herself is an outsider (on an island where there’s prejudice against Haitians) viewing the island’s injustices through a different lens.

I’ve read four of the five books shortlisted for the NBCC Award for Fiction this year, and would have voted for either The Nickel Boys or Feast Your Eyes over Everything Inside, but with the caveat that I know there’s an aspect to this collection that I likely can’t fully appreciate because of my background and identity. (I’d vote for this book over The Topeka School.) It’s still a worthy winner, just not my top pick.

Next up: About halfway through Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

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→ April 13, 2018
→ By

Improvement.

Joan Silber won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction last year for her novel Improvement, a slim, fast-moving work of interconnected short stories that reminded me in many ways of the work of Ann Patchett, especially her books Bel Canto (a top 50 all-time novel for me) and Commonwealth, where a single event sets off a series of waves in multiple directions that alter the lives of several characters. The kiss of Commonwealth is here a decision not to go on a trip, which triggers enormous changes in the lives of at least a half-dozen people, leaving most of them better off, with at least one large exception, even though they may not even realize what happened to cause this.

Reyna is a young single mother whose boyfriend, Boyd, is in prison on Rikers Island on a marijuana charge; he’s black, she’s not, but this doesn’t seem to be an issue for anyone significant in the book except perhaps Boyd’s ex-girlfriend Lynette. Boyd gets out of prison, after which he and his genius (note: not actual geniuses) friends cook up a plan to smuggle cigarettes from low-tax Virginia to high-tax New York and sell them at a decent profit. This involves regular trips from the city to Richmond to buy the goods, complicated by the fact that, like a lot of lifelong NYC residents, most of these nitwits either can’t drive or can’t do it very well, with Boyd and one other member of the group also prohibited from driving or leaving the state due to their prior convictions. When the one group member capable of driving the truck doesn’t show for a scheduled run, Boyd & company try to press Reyna into doing it, but at the last second, she backs out, the novel’s Big Bang moment that changes so many lives in the book.

Silber’s strength here, which is one of Patchett’s as well, is her development of a diverse group of characters who sometimes have the most tenuous of connections but are still clearly populating the same world. We begin with Reyna and her eccentric aunt Kiki, who was once married to a Turkish man and lived in Istanbul and later on a farm near Ankara, but fan outward from there, even landing in Richmond to visit the girlfriend of Claude, one of the nitwits, who doesn’t know why Claude has stood her up; later the narrative returns to New York to Lynette, Claude’s sister, a cosmetologist who plans to open up her own shop with the money Claude makes from the scheme. One chapter flashes back to Kiki’s time in Turkey, when a trio of German tourists who are busy stealing artifacts from Turkish dig sites stops by her farm, a story that takes on greater significance later in the book.

Patchett’s best books – I’d include State Of Wonder in that list for sure, and would hear arguments for The Magician’s Assistant – all have some greater theme or illuminate something about human nature, but I don’t know if Silber did that here. I enjoyed the time I spent with these characters, and the development of those is the novel’s strength, yet the story is more interesting than insightful – it’s Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” set in Manhattan, without the sci-fi element, but Silber uses the same one-detail starting point to set the galaxies of her universe in motion. I’m not sure how this won the NBCC award even just considering the few other 2017 novels I’ve read so far.

Next up: One of the finalists for the NBCC award last year, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, by Arundhati Roy, who won the Man Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things.

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→ March 12, 2018
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The Warmth of Other Suns.

Isabel Wilkerson says she spent 15 years researching the book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction in 2010, and the research shows in the incredible depth of detail in this tripartite narrative about the mass movement of black Americans from the Jim Crow South to the north and west from 1915 to 1970. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism while working for the New York Times, interviewed over 1200 people, and focused this sweeping saga on three African-Americans who fled the south’s limited opportunities and overt, violent racism, fleeing Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana for Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Their stories are interwoven with each other’s and with other related histories of others who followed similar paths, and the tragedies of some of those who chose to stay behind.

Wilkerson gives us three characters who will accompany us through the book’s 600-odd pages (for me, 22-plus hours of audio): Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife from Mississippi who followed her husband, George, to Milwaukee and eventually the south side of Chicago; George Starling, a fruit picker from Eustis, Florida, who tried to organize other fruit pickers to earn better wages but fled from white landowners who set out to lynch him; and Robert Pershing Foster, a doctor from Louisiana who became a successful surgeon in Los Angeles and served many celebrity patients. The three all marry and raise children, and all find greater prosperity in the north than would ever have been possible where they were born, but all face the normal travails of any working-class life, and each carries some of the baggage of their birth and upbringing as outcasts in a racist country well into adulthood.

All three have compelling, often heartbreaking individual stories – although I think Wilkerson’s touch here is so deft that she could make anyone’s life story compelling – but none was more fascinating than the path taken by Dr. Foster, who left Monroe, Louisiana, and found success as a doctor in California both by outworking other doctors and by bringing an intense, precise sort of personal attention to his patients. Shedding his childhood name of Pershing after he moved to go by the more conventional name of Robert, Dr. Foster seems to have achieved the American dream against long odds, earning material wealth, marrying well, raising three daughters who themselves became successful, thus creating an ongoing chain of success and upward mobility from his own struggle. Yet he never seems to be able to escape the scars of a childhood (and possibly a marriage that brought him in-laws who never thought he was good enough) in a way that allows him to enjoy his success. Wilkerson illustrates him as a demanding, controlling husband who was meticulous about his own appearance and that of his wife, while he also was a compulsive gambler who clearly enjoyed how his spending at casinos bought him a form of respect at the casinos he frequented. Later in the book, Wilkerson tells of a gala Foster threw in his own honor, and how he agonized over every detail of the party, and how he couldn´t enjoy it during or afterwards because of perceived imperfections in the result.

At times a brutal, unsparing look at the treatment southern whites doled out to the black underclass as a matter of course, The Warmth of Other Suns is also deeply personal and empathetic. Wilkerson tells several stories of lynchings, including Leander Shaw and Claude Neal, the latter of whom was brutally tortured before he was hanged for a murder he may not have committed. She details the violent, racist reign of Lake County, Florida, Sheriff Willis McCall, accused at least 50 times of abusing or killing black suspects in his custody, once shooting two handcuffed black prisoners in cold blood and finally ousted from office after eight terms when he kicked a black prisoner to death. (McCall’s son, now 64, was arrested in January for molesting a young girl and possessing child pornography. He had stated in the past that his father was innocent of all charges of civil rights violations.) George Starling leaves Florida because a friend tells him local whites are going to take him to a swamp for a ´necktie party,´ racist slang for lynching. Ida Mae and her husband, also George, leave their life as sharecroppers under a benevolent but still manipulative, controlling landowner after a friend of theirs is beaten into senselessness over the theft of some turkeys that, it turns out, had just wandered off. Robert Foster isn’t driven out the same way but realizes that as a black doctor who can’t even receive admitting privileges at the white hospital, he’ll end up as just a ‘country doctor’ if he doesn’t move out of the land of Jim Crow.

The stories of violence and outright suppression are hard enough to fathom today, but the smaller indignities that the three protagonists and other African-American characters in the book faced fill in the gap and have even more impact because they’re easier to ingest today, when lynchings like that of James Byrd Jr. are extremely rare and result in actual convictions of the killers. When Dr. Foster is driving to California and can’t find a hotel room, even though some white proprietors are kind in rejecting him, lying to his face about vacancies, you can see and feel it. When Ida Mae has to take a series of temporary jobs in Chicago, where most employers will still choose only white candidates, she ends up in a situation right out of #MeToo. Even positive stories often come with a bitter reminder of what came before; George Starling, working as a porter on a north-south rail line, is told to direct black passengers to certain cars when the train passes into the south even after Jim Crow has been made illegal, and has to subtly inform these passengers of their right to say no, at risk of his own employment.

Wilkerson’s personal approach to the book does not exclude the academic research on the subject, but she instead sprinkles details and observations of experts on the timing, motive, and extent of the migration – which came in waves, and finally slowed after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and slowly implemented over the following decade. (And, of course, we now see one party trying to roll it back, along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.) This is a work of scholarship, yet also a labor of love, as no author could spend so much time and become so invested in a subject unless it were of abiding personal interest to her in the first place. It’s also a potent reminder of why African-Americans today remain at an economic disadvantage relative to whites, and how we are simply repeating the sins of our fathers when we deny black Americans their right to vote, or incarcerate them on nonviolent drug charges, or underfund urban schools as if they were the ‘colored’ schools of the Jim Crow era.

Next up: Margaret Creighton’s The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 Worlds Fair.

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→ January 8, 2017
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Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.

Ben Fountain’s 2012 novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for that year and has since been adapted into a widely-panned film by Ang Lee, although part of the critical response is because Lee used a super-high frame rate that apparently is quite distracting. That’s a real shame given how strong the story and dialogue are in Fountain’s novel, which all takes place on one day and deftly blends elements of satire, indignation, and hope.

Billy Lynn is part of an Iraqi platoon, Bravo company, involved in a firefight that was caught on video and has turned the group into American heroes, feted across the country, attached to a Hollywood agent trying to strike them a lucrative movie deal, and, on this day, an appearance at the halftime show on Thanksgiving at a Dallas Cowboys game. There are flashbacks to events from before the day on which the book takes place, but the bulk of it follows the boys around the stadium, into luxury suites, meetings with the team’s owner (not Jerry Jones … but okay, that’s pretty much Jerry Jones), a fortuitous meeting with the cheerleaders, odd encounters with fans, and a tussle or two with overzealous security guards. There really isn’t any football to speak of in the book – the Cowboys get destroyed, and fans get drunk – and the halftime show is just one scene in the entire story, which is far more about the kind of reception Bravo gets, especially in the heart of rah-rah ‘Merica, compared to the nature of their experiences and the signs of PTSD throughout the unit.

Fountain accomplishes a ton in this relatively short, quick-moving book. He crafts a number of interesting, clearly distinct characters among the soldiers, most of whom appear to be damaged to some degree from the ordeal – one dead, one severely injured, with numerous insurgents killed – and coping or not coping in different ways. Billy Lynn, just 19 and forced to grow up in a big hurry after joining the army to avoid jail after he destroyed his sister’s ex-boyfriend’s car, gets the most thorough treatment, since we get to spend time in his head and face his confusion over various moral questions, not least among them whether to finish his tour of duty or desert and become a symbol for the war’s opposition. But despite the relative lack of page time for most of Billy’s platoon-mates, Fountain manages to infuse each of them with enough unique attributes to make them distinct and memorable on their own, notably Sergeant Dime, Bravo Company’s leader.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk also creates a stark contrast between the reality of warfare and the perception of it back home – especially when the war is half a world away, against not a nation-state but groups of terrorists who don’t look, sound, or worship like us. Bravo Company’s actions are celebrated, and Fountain makes most of the Texans the soldiers meet come off as jingoistic and wholly naive about the state of the soldiers. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a toll even beyond the deaths and physical injuries; multiple government agencies have said at least 20% of Iraqi war veterans have come back with post-traumatic stress disorder. Some of Bravo Company are worse off than others, reflected in their actions and levels of substance abuse, but Billy Lynn in particular finds a real disconnect between their mental states and the way the locals, right up to the Cowboys’ (possibly sociopathic) owner, treat them as conquering heroes who did what they did because they just love their country so damned much.

If there’s a weak spot here, it’s the cheerleader subplot, although I suspect Fountain included it to provide a single thread of light in what is ultimately a dark comedy – funny, yes, but a very unflattering look at how we wage war today and treat returning veterans. Fountain brings up masturbation way too often, and then works it into Billy’s lust-at-first-sight dalliance with a cheerleader named Faison, a relationship that starts crude but ends up feeling like a desperate teenage love story. The contrast helps lighten the book, but there’s also a sentimental aspect to this thread that doesn’t fit the novel’s overall tone … but it did allow Fountain to introduce the only female character of any substance at all in the book, which probably didn’t hurt when it came to selling the film rights either.

The movie version was filmed at 120 frames per second, five times the normal frame rate for a movie, which even positive reviews have criticized for distracting from the plot and dialogue; that’s enough reason for me to skip it, as I’d say 90% of the time I see a book and associated film, I prefer the book anyway. In this case, I wonder if a film version could really capture the characterization Fountain has created in the novel, given how movies tend to eliminate or merge characters, and filmed versions of dialogue-heavy novels have to cut substantial amounts of the chatter to fit everything into two hours. But I can’t imagine choosing to make a movie about an important idea – that contrast between the reality of war for those in it, and the way those of us over here tend to sanitize or glamorize it – in an experimental way that detracts from the story’s core message. And none of the reviewers I trust has given me any reason to go see it.

Next up: I’ve been reading at a torrid pace since Christmas, finishing four books in the last seven days, including John Banville’s chilling novel (and Booker Prize finalist) The Book of Evidence, written as the confession of a sociopathic murderer, and Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner’s Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. I’ve just started Dorothy Sayers’ Strong Poison, the sixth Lord Peter Wimsey mystery and the fourth I’ve read.

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→ July 20, 2016
→ By

The Sellout.

My updated ranking of the top five farm systems right now is up for Insiders.

I first heard about Paul Beatty’s farcical novel The Sellout when looking at predictions of nominees for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which also led me to Edith Pearlman’s Honeydew … neither of which ended up a finalist for the prize, won by Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. It did win the National Book Critics Circle award for Fiction, and ended up on several top ten lists for 2015. I’d already picked up Beatty’s book at Changing Hands during one of my trips to Arizona, however, and am glad I found it, because it is absolutely hilarious – offensive by design, taking Zadie Smith’s brand of hysterical realism and distilling it through a filter of American racism to produce a unique work of indignant comedy.

The narrator of Beatty’s book, known only as “Me” in one of many examples of absurdist wordplay in the novel, grows up in the Los Angeles-area town of Dickens, so poor that cartographers prefer to ignore its existence. It’s a segregated, neighborhood originally filled with farms, but the only farm remaining is the one the narrator runs, having inherited it from his militant black atheist sociologist father, who had some rather interesting ideas on child-rearing. (The novel’s satirical strain runs deep; the narrator is raised by a single father, and has no idea who his mother is, eventually finding the woman his father claims gave birth to him only to learn she had no idea what he was talking about.)

After his father is killed by a white policeman – prescient, or merely evergreen? – the narrator embarks on a bizarre quest to reestablish Dickens on the map and improve its lot by reinstating segregation, first on the local bus route and then in the local schools. He even takes a man as a “slave,” although the slave sort of volunteers for the role, doesn’t work, and loves to rant about the lost Little Rascals films in which he appeared. He erects new road signs and paints a literal border on the ground around Dickens, all of which has intended and unintended consequences. Of course, he can only get so far in this effort without running afoul of white authorities, and he ends up facing the Supreme Court – getting high on one of his hilariously named strains of marijuana while waiting in the corridor.

The novel’s best character, however, is Foy Cheshire, the would-be intellectual whose ambition outstrips his abilities, and whose brand of liberation theology involves quixotic endeavors like rewriting classics to improve or star African-American characters, such as The Great Blacksby, Uncle Tom’s CondoThe Point Guard in the Rye. By turns fatuous and pathetic, Foy is part con man, part demagogue, representative of a brand of empty black intellectualism for which Beatty appears to have no use whatsoever.

Beatty doesn’t spare anyone or anything in The Sellout, and that includes many jokes at every race’s expense that, if we’re all being honest here, wouldn’t see the light of day if they came from a white writer. I have no problem with this; if anything, the parody is far more effective coming from a writer of color, lampooning many of the people and institutions that purport to help black and Latino Americans but are primarily there just to help themselves. Charles Dickens was known for social commentary in his work, some of it veering into satire; Beatty draws on that tradition of criticism, marrying it with realism run amok – what critic James Wood termed “hysterical realism” in an essay on Zadie Smith’s White Teeth – for a sendup that scorches the very earth Me uses to grow his prize satsumas, watermelons, and weed.

I’m sure there are allusions and subtexts in The Sellout that I missed or simply couldn’t appreciate as a white man who grew up in a very white town and knew racism because I read about it once, but I still found the book by turns funny and thought-provoking. It’s one of the most laugh-out-loud books I’ve read in the last few years, and pushes the boundaries of what modern realism in literature can include. There may simply be more here that I didn’t catch.

Next up: Amir Alexander’s Infinitesimal, on how the Jesuits did everything they could to stamp out the mathematical concept that gave rise to the calculus.

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→ July 18, 2016
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The Stories of John Cheever.

John Cheever won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for the compendium The Stories of John Cheever, which contains his complete output other than a few pieces of juvenilia. I’d only read Cheever in novel form, the outstanding Falconer (on the TIME 100) and the middling The Wapshot Chronicle (on the Modern Library 100), but his short stories nearly all cover the same old ground: Failing marriages and alienation in suburban America, with the settings and times changing but the themes and the drinks remaining the same.

Cheever himself was bisexual, alcoholic, and depressed, and these factors inform nearly all of his stories. His characters all drink; spouses rage and cheat; children suffer emotionally; marriages falter, but in many stories they hold together for the sake of appearances. He makes frequent half-joking references to sumptuary laws and his women (and many men) gossip excessively. Whereas Richard Russo’s output shows that author’s clear affection for his wounded suburbanites and their dying towns, Cheever seems to disdain everything about modern suburban life, which is especially evident in the stories he wrote after World War II, in the first stages of urban flight. His husbands become, if anything more faithless, and more drunk, while his wives increasingly show the desire for independence or at least some greater standing in their own homes.

The sixty-one stories in the collection include some variation, with Cheever even showing a charitable take on human decency (as in “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor”), and even delving into the occasional bit of what we might now think of as magical realism. A few of my favorites from the collection:

* An Enormous Radio: When a couple in a New York apartment building replaces their radio with a large, expensive new model, it allows them to tune in to the conversations of all of their neighbors. At first, of course, it’s salaciously amusing, but eventually the wife starts to hear things from other apartments she wishes she hadn’t.

* The Angel of the Bridge: A story about what we’d now call panic attacks, although at the time I doubt the disorder even had such a name. The narrator can’t drive over a bridge without suffering from one, until an “angel” appears to distract him as he’s struggling to complete such a trip.

* Reunion: The narrator is meeting his father during a 90-minute stopover in New York, a lunch that turns increasingly disastrous as the father, an alcoholic with a haughty, condescending air, gets them thrown out of four restaurants as he abuses staff and becomes more drunk and belligerent with each stop. I wondered if this was Cheever’s swipe at his own father, who was also an alcoholic and a financial failure.

* An Educated American Woman: Jill and George are a married couple with one child, Bibber, living in suburbia, of course, but Cheever flips the script by making Jill the intellectual half of the couple (George is just a Yalie) and the ambitious half as well, where George seems to resent her drive and perspicacity, while she feels unappreciated by her husband and stifled by suburban mom life.

* The Geometry of Love: An engineer decides to apply mathematical principles to some decidedly unmathematical problems in his life, including problems in his own marriage. Hilarity and tragedy ensue.

* The Swimmer: Cheever’s most famous story – one turned into a somewhat obscure movie starring Burt Lancaster that had to play like a horror film – involves a suburban husband and father, drunk at a party where everyone else has also had too much to drink, who then decides to swim his way home across the various pools and lawns of his tony neighborhood. Partway through, however, his memory starts to fail him, and it appears that time is passing at an abnormal rate, enough that when he arrives at his house he doesn’t find what he expects to.

Where Cheever lost me was in the stories he set in Italy, which frequently touched on dated themes like the declining aristocracy or life as an American expat. As much as I adore Italy and Italian culture, the country he depicts doesn’t resemble the bits of Italy I’ve seen or what I know of the country from my cousins there. While his paintings of American suburban life after World War II or even marriage and infidelity between the wars don’t apply directly to any of my experiences, in those stories he managed to capture more universal themes that make those stories the timeless entries in this collection.

For more on Cheever’s mastery of the short story, the Telegraph ran a great profile of him and his works last October, doing a better job with this collection than I could.

Next up: I’ve already finished Paul Beatty’s madcap farce The Sellout and begun Amir Alexander’s Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World.

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→ February 29, 2016
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Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest.

I read Rabbit, Run in 2009, shortly after the death of author John Updike, because it appeared on the TIME list of the greatest 100 English-language novels from 1923 (the year the magazine started publishing) through the year the list was published, 2005. I truly disliked the book because I disliked the main character, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a wildly immature young adult who peaked as a high school basketball player and can’t adjust to adult life and responsibilities.

Updike wrote three more Rabbit novels, the last two of which, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I read both books this month, skipping the second book in the series (Rabbit Redux), as part of my effort to read all the Pulitzer winners, and now, after reading over 1000 pages of Updike’s writing about Rabbit, I can say with great confidence that Harry Angstrom is an asshole.

I suppose someone better equipped to diagnose a fictional character’s psychological issues could have a field day with Rabbit, who can’t stop cheating on his wife, resents her and her mother for the way they’ve made him financially comfortable, can’t connect with or even fully trust his own son, and has a puerile, almost perverted obsession with sex that would be appropriate for a teenager but hardly for a 56-year-old man, as he is in the final volume. Even when faced with his own mortality after a mild heart attack at the end of the first section of Rabbit at Rest, Rabbit can’t even be bothered to grow up enough to follow his doctor’s rather obvious advice – eat right and exercise – try to prevent a recurrence, instead continuing his old-man leering while facing the unwelcome stress of a crisis with his wayward son.

In Rabbit, Run, we meet Angstrom, who still can’t quite get over the fact that his basketball career – and, we later learn, his life – reached its apex in high school, after which he experiences a long if nonlinear decline across four books and almost four decades. (Updike revisited his character every ten years, and we are fortunate he stopped writing when he did, or he would have won the 2001 Pulitzer for The Five Rabbits You Meet in Heaven.) The first novel is unpleasant, but has a clear direction and point. Rabbit’s refusal to grow up is rooted in recognition that it’s only going to go downhill from here, and with the ennui of a lower middle-class existence, tied to a wife and child he didn’t plan to have so soon, staring him in the face, he runs. By the third book, however, he’s at least come into money via his marriage, and is now running a Toyota dealership in the late 1970s as fuel economy entered the lexicon – Updike seems to be at great pains in each of the last two books to remind us of the mood of the time, as well as lots of brand names and details that seem like quaint product placement in hindsight (although I doubt Sealtest cared for Updike’s flavor suggestion). That shifts Angstrom’s angst (built right into his name!) to his desultory marriage, his ne’er-do-well son, and a simmering conflict with his wife over their son’s role in the family business.

The marital antibliss culminates in a couples’ weekend in the Caribbean where the eight participants agree to a one-night swap of partners – if ever there was a 1970s anachronism, there you have it – which puts Rabbit not with the woman he lusts for, the youngest wife of the four, but with Thelma, who has been in love with him for years. Rather than giving the scene any kind of emotional depth, or exploring what it might mean for Rabbit to see a woman truly (if rather perplexingly) in love with him, Updike has the entire book climax (sorry) in a scene where the two engage in anal sex, a moment he has Rabbit revisit in his mind in utterly bizarre fashion for the remainder of that book and in book four. I’d credit Updike with a clever metaphor if it weren’t so distasteful.

The escalation in Rabbit at Rest makes the book read like a Very Special Episode, where Harry’s son, Nelson, ends up a cocaine addict, destroying the family business and possibly contributing to Rabbit’s heart problems. After an angioplasty that’s designed to tide him over for a few months, after which the doctors recommend he have coronary bypass surgery, Rabbit goes to recuperate in his son’s house the first night, only to have his daughter-in-law, Pru (a nickname given to her because she was prudish as a teenager), seduce him while Nelson is away at rehab. I mean, this is what you do with a man twice your age who’s fresh off heart surgery, right?

Despite his frequent dalliances with women other than his wife, and desire for even more, Rabbit is one of the most outright misogynistic characters in modern literature, increasingly out of step with the times in which he lives. He frequently characterizes women as his enemy, referring to them by the most vulgar term you can use (and thus reducing them to a single body part), yet harbors a long-running obsession that he has a daughter by one of his former lovers. His relationship with Janice worsens in Rabbit at Rest when she begins to assert her independence, pursuing a career for herself after years of Rabbit telling her she was stupid. It’s hard not to root for her and quietly enjoy Rabbit’s accelerating decline, although Nelson’s mistakes and initial refusal to take any responsibility for his actions (just like dear ol’ dad) are infuriating in their own right. What could have been a thoughtful meditation on a man facing his own mortality at an age when most Americans are still working and looking forward to a long retirement is instead a pathetic coda to 1500 pages written about a terrible husband and father who is unworthy of any of our sympathy.

Next up: Steven Weinberg’s To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science.

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→ April 29, 2015
→ By

Americanah.

My annual list of the top 25 big leaguers under 25 is up for Insiders, as is a draft blog post on Dansby Swanson and Carson Fulmer, both of Vanderbilt.

Chimamanda Ngoza Adichie is one of my favorite living novelists, and I say that having read only two-thirds of her total output (she’s written three). Her ability to craft realistic characters, especially black female characters, and to have all of her characters engage in thoughtful, intelligent, unpandering dramas built around race and ethnic identities is second to none right now; she’s even passed Toni Morrison, whose recent output hasn’t matched her Beloved/Song of Solomon peak. Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) in 2007, made my last top 100 novels update at #92.

Her most recent novel, 2013’s Americanah, once again begins and ends in Nigeria, but this time follows two people as they emigrate to the west, one legally and one illegally, to escape a limited economic future in their native country, one that deprives them of hope. Ifemelu and Odinze are high school sweethearts, bonded by their intelligence and refusal to submit to a grey future, but the expectation that they’ll marry is lost when Ifemelu is allowed to enter the United States legally but Odinze, a single foreign male from Africa, is rejected due (we assume) to U.S. immigration crackdowns post-9/11. While Ifemelu encounters financial difficulties and humiliations as a student in the U.S. who lacks money or worldliness, even finding that her brand of English isn’t much use in understanding the American idiom, Odinze enters England without papers and aims for a sham marriage with a citizen to allow himself to stay and work. Ifemelu, ashamed by her situation and depressed by her isolation, ceases contact with Odinze and only resumes it when she returns to Nigeria over a decade later, finding the love of her life now married with a daughter.

“Americanah” is a derogatory term in Nigerian slang referring to someone who has moved to America and come back a changed person, especially one affecting an American accent or an excessive affection for American customs and culture. Ifemelu tries to assimilate early in her time in the U.S. because she’s told repeatedly that she won’t receive job offers if she’s too “ethnic,” but eventually sheds her American façade in favor of her own accent, her own hair, and her identity as an African woman. She adapts rather than assimilating, eventually advancing in her education and career thanks to a blog she writes under a pen name, called Raceteenth Or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known As Negroes), that documents her thoughts on the racial divide in the United States from the perspective of someone who was not conscious of race before she arrived in this country. (Adichie has since brought Ifemelu’s second blog, written after the character’s return to Nigeria, to life online as The Small Redemptions of Lagos.) Odinze’s story is shorter, as was his stint abroad, working dicey jobs under someone else’s National Insurance number, before he’s discovered and shipped back to Lagos.

Ifemelu is the star of the book, as Odinze, while a well-defined character, is rarely in the spotlight, while his story in England seems like a plot contrivance to contrast with Ifemelu’s experiences as a legal emigrant from Nigeria. Her story has global aspirations which largely succeed, coming through her series of jobs (including nanny to a definite White Privilege family) and relationships, including one with Progressive White Guy and one with Earnest Black Intellectual. We get some pretentious dialogue along the way, especially when Ifemelu starts to travel in increasingly academic circles, but Adichie avoids turning the book into a sermon by keeping Ifemelu’s emotions at the center of the book rather than driving us toward some Big Conclusion via plot tricks. The book describes the emigrant/immigrant experience, the desire to return home for its own sake (rather than to change the world), the emotional pull of a romance that one can’t fully separate from its environment, instead of trying to tell us one country or culture or path is better. This is Ifemelu’s story, just one tale that has its metaphorical implications but doesn’t feel in any way like Adichie is trying to tell every immigrant’s story at once.

Adichie’s strengths in characterization and avoiding predictable plot lines cover some of her weaknesses in portions of the dialogue and nearly all of the sample blog posts included in the book. The posts she includes are far too short and superficial to garner the kind of audience Ifemelu is supposed to have collected through her writing, not enough in a real world that has Ta-Nehisi Coates and Tanzina Vega and Jamil Smith and too many others to name who produce statement pieces that bring examples and evidence to the table. Ifemelu’s blog posts from the book wouldn’t find an audience because they’re not saying much of anything we haven’t heard hundreds of times before. Adichie says more about race when she’s not talking directly about it, putting characters into situations that force them to confront questions of racism and identity, than she does when she tries to blog through Ifemelu’s lens.

Told through frequent moves back and forth in time and across an ocean, Americanah marks another hugely compelling and intelligent novel from Adichie and her biggest seller to date, even though it lacks the gravity of Half of a Yellow Sun, which was set in Nigeria during the Biafra conflict and resulting genocide. Her eye for detail is sharper in the sections of Americanah where her characters are still in Lagos, growing up among ambitious economic strivers, religious zealots, and co-opted concubines whose fortunes are only secure as long as the current regime stays in power. When she transitions to America and England, Adichie’s writing becomes less nuanced and the stakes are largely lower (especially since we know from the first chapter that Odinze gets back to Nigeria safely). The strongest scenes of Ifemelu’s time in America come in an African hair salon she visits, somewhat resentfully, in Trenton, because she can’t find a place that knows how to braid hair properly in Princeton. The reactions she receives there from women who might share some of her background but clearly want very different things from life – and are largely appalled that she would return to Africa of her own volition – drive not just Ifemelu’s own memories but the overall narrative of the book, as well as its strongest symbol (hair) of race and identity.

Next up: I knocked off The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage’s brief history of the telegraph, over the weekend, and have since started Anthony Marra’s novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.

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→ September 24, 2014
→ By

Motherless Brooklyn.

My annual “guys I got wrong” piece is up for Insiders.

I loved Jonathan Lethem’s bizarro paranoid detective novel Gun, with Occasional Music, which felt like a mashup of Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick with a dose of Jasper Fforde added like the bitters that completes a cocktail. At least one of you recommended one of his other detective novels, the equally strange but more straightforward Motherless Brooklyn, in which the lead detective isn’t really a detective, but a flunky working for a half-assed detective agency. The boss is killed on a mission gone wrong, and the protagonist and narrator, Lionel Essrog, begins to investigate the murder – in part because he’s involved, but even more so because he has to, as he suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome and OCD.

Essrog’s tics are minor, and his coworkers at the L&L Car Service, a front for the detective agency run by Frank Minna, all treat them as a fact of life, mostly ignoring them or bestowing unkind nicknames on him (like “Freakshow”). The four underlings, including Essrog, were all at the same orphanage together, from which Minna plucked them first to work as day laborers on suspect jobs like moving what appeared to be stolen goods, then later on to be his team of lookouts and stooges while he played detective. When Frank dies on what at first looks like a normal job gone wrong, with Lionel and dim-witted colleague Gilbert serving as his backup, Lionel starts an independent investigation of sorts, one without a lot of direction at first but that he can’t stop once he gets enmeshed in it – just like he has to complete his series of taps or work out vocal tics that come out of his mouth like random attempts at anagrams and wordplay. (Lethem credits the work of several neurologists in his acknowledgements, including Oliver Sacks.) But Lionel isn’t any more a freak than anyone else – his eccentricities are just more visible.

The case itself is more convoluted than that of your standard hard-boiled detective novel, and the resolution is less clean and partially happens off-screen, but Lethem nods to the conventions of the form, perhaps a little too much so, with Lionel getting knocked out and waking up somewhere else, and sleeping with one of the only female characters in one of the book’s most improbable but funnier scenes. Making Lionel the narrator allows Lethem to draw humor from his condition without ever seeming to mock him for it, and in some ways the obsessiveness that often accompanies Tourette’s is an asset for a would-be sleuth. Some of his conversations with suspects would come off as unrealistic if he didn’t have the condition; Lionel’s tics and utterances punctuate the interrogations in such a way that his blunt questions don’t come off as starkly, which makes the suspects’ candor easier to believe.

I could have done without the stereotyped Italian wiseguys, particularly the older mobsters who are straight out of central casting and would have to inhale just to be two-dimensional, even though they probably had to be Italian to fill those roles in a book set in Brooklyn. They’re secondary, at least, playing limited on-screen roles, as Lionel himself is truly the star – and will apparently be played by Ed Norton in the upcoming film version. If you read this as an amazing character study first and a detective story second, you’ll find the book much more enjoyable than you will if you’re just looking for a good crime novel.

–

I picked up another detective novel, Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ’s Nairobi Heat, because the author’s father, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, wrote one of my top 100 novels, A Grain of Wheat, a seminal work of Kenyan colonialism and the struggle for independence. Nairobi Heat is a detective novel that takes its protagonist, Ishmael, from Madison, Wisconsin, to Kenya to investigate the murder of a white girl whose body was found on the doorstep of a hero of the Rwandan genocide. The book itself is a mess of detective-novel cliches – including the knock on the head, waking up bound to a chair, sleeping with the unbelievably good-looking woman who plays an important role in the investigation, and lots of needless violence – but the resolution evoked a powerful reminiscence of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, my favorite hard-boiled detective novel by any author. And perhaps that fits: the violence and lawlessness of Hammett’s book certainly seems to apply to modern Kenya, at least in wa Ngũgĩ’s rendering. He could use a lot of help with his characterizations and needs to craft a fresher plot, but at least his influences seem to be the right ones.

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