→ November 1, 2023
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The Guest Cat.

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

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

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

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

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

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→ October 10, 2022
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Behold the Man.

Michael Moorcock has a huge bibliography of fantasy, science fiction, and some literary fiction, while also writing lyrics and even singing on a couple of tracks for bands like Hawkwind and Blue Öyster Cult, and I’d never heard of him until I came across one of his books in the London bookstore Hatchard’s in August. Moorcock won the Nebula Award for Best Novella for Behold the Man, which plays with a small but interesting conceit: A time traveler goes back to the time of Jesus, only to find that the ostensible Messiah isn’t, and that John the Baptist and his followers think the time traveler might be the promised savior.

Karl Glogauer is a man adrift in his world in the early 1970s, dabbling in studying philosophy, engaging in and sabotaging various romantic relationships, never finding an actual job or calling, or anything that might anchor him in society. He ends up falling in with a mad scientist who claims to have developed a time machine, which we know actually worked – once – because Karl crash-landed in AD 28 in the device, which was damaged badly enough that there’s no hope of a return trip. Because he arrived in a strange box in a flash of light, the people who saw him think he must be supernatural, and of course word spreads that someone who might be the Adonai.

You can sort of see where the book is going early on, even though Jesus doesn’t actually appear until past the halfway point, but in this case the plot isn’t the point. I’m sure some readers would find it sacrilegious, but this is more a character study than an attack on religion. Karl is a man without a purpose, with multiple neuroses, even told by at least one of his girlfriends that he has a messiah complex. Moorcock intertwines the 1970s narrative with the Nazarene one, so you can see the character developing as you watch his reactions to the Jews of Christ’s era trying to ascertain if he is the Chosen One – and then trying to convince him that he is. Karl goes from trying to dissuade John the Baptist and other followers that he’s anyone special to becoming a peregrinator to taking deliberate steps to fulfill the events of the Bible, not out of faith or obligation, but because it gives him a sense of purpose.

Whether this novella works for you will depend on what you think of Karl, and perhaps how much  you know of either the Gospels or the works of Carl Jung. I know a bit about the former but very little of the latter, other than that he was influential early in the days of psychiatry and believed in a lot of stuff we know now as woo. The novella does subvert the hero’s journey in multiple ways, from the way that Karl knows exactly what he has to do, since it’s already been written, to the fact that he’s deceiving everybody he meets, either because he’s a narcissist, or because he believes he’s doing the right thing by fulfilling the Scriptures.

Moorcock’s prose style is very easy to read, even with the frequent time-shifting and differences in dialogue styles between the two settings, and the author doesn’t overburden the prose with background information, such as more about Jung’s beliefs. There’s a somewhat disjointed passage about Karl having a fling with an older man, which I think makes the mistake of the time period of conflating homosexuality with a clear case of abuse, that hasn’t aged well. Beyond that, it was more than good enough for me to look into more of Moorcock’s oeuvre.

Next up: Still reading Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly.

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→ January 22, 2021
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Crudo.

Olivia Laing’s debut novel Crudo is a waif of a novel, barely 135 pages long, and drops you right into the middle of an inner monologue of someone who may or may not be the writer Kathy Acker. The book won the 2019 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, a British literary prize that often picks winners from outside the mainstream, resulting in some brilliant choices (Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know; Zadie Smith’s White Teeth) and some maddening ones (this year’s winner, Ducks, Newburyport, is 1000 pages long and comprises one sentence).

Kathy Acker was a real author, a novelist, playwright, and essayist who wrote experimental, transgressive works dealing with topics like suicide, trauma, and sexual abuse, but she died of breast cancer after a double mastectomy in 1997, at the age of 50. She worked well outside the mainstream and had a hard time finding publishers; her best-known novel, Blood and Guts in High School, took almost a decade to see print, and that came via alternative publisher Grove Books. Wikipedia mentions that her friends included Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, and her literary reputation has grown since her death.

Laing has brought her back to life, in a way, reimagining Acker as a breast cancer survivor, in the present day, but only around the age she was shortly before her death. This Acker uses social media and tracks the news, especially news of Trump and Brexit, almost obsessively, while also navigating her emotions as she approaches marriage to a man many years her senior. Both marriage, even though it will the “openish,” and the endless catastrophe of Trump’s reign of error terrify her. She views matrimony as an end to her freedom, perhaps to her autonomy, both of which could just as easily apply to her fears about the rising tide of nationalism, racism, and xenophobia that swept Trump into office and led British voters to twice choose economic self-immolation via Brexit.

Crudo walks us through the last few days before Acker’s marriage, through the circuitous thoughts in her mind as well as the extraordinary and mundane events that fill up the calendar. This Kathy Acker has lived as she pleased, and dreads the potential for that to change for any reason, more than she appears to fear death itself. The juxtaposition of the intensely personal and the publicly political works in Crudo‘s favor, by connecting something many readers (I’d wager most readers of this novel) themselves have felt with the less universal sense of marriage as a loss of something, which isn’t how everybody approaches the institution, at least.

The plot of Crudo, however, is as thin as the novel itself – a novella, really, if we want to be pedantic about the category, as there is very little to this book at all. It’s something you read for the prose, which is by turns lyrical and comically profane, or for the mood, but nothing really happens in the typical sense of a plot. There’s less than no action, conflicts are observed rather than experienced, and no character other than Kathy gets much page time, let alone development. I read it, I sort of enjoyed it, and I carried on living my life. It’s different, and perhaps that’s why it won the Tait Black Prize, but it’s not the sort of groundbreaking work the prize ostensibly seeks to honor.

Next up: I’m nearly through David Mitchell’s number9dream.

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→ October 8, 2020
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Grief is the Thing with Feathers.

I recently included a link to a podcast that featured authors David Mitchell and Jasper Fforde where, at the end of the program(me), they each had to recommend one book and make the case for it in some brief period of time – I think it was three minutes – after which the host would choose the winner. Fforde didn’t take it very seriously, naming the owner’s manual for his car, but Mitchell recommended a book by Max Porter called Grief is the Thing with Feathers, reading a passage from it as part of his allotted time. The prose was so unlike anything I’d heard before that I felt like I had to read it immediately – easy enough to do since the book is a scant 114 pages – to see how Porter could stretch that lyrical yet dark language into something the length of a novella.

The novel is certainly about grief, telling the story of a young father of two boys whose wife has just died unexpectedly, and who is understandably consumed by his grief. He is assisted, in a way, in his grieving process by the Crow, a probably-imaginary being who speaks to the Dad and protects the three of them, but isn’t always as helpful as he thinks he is, and brings his own stories of woe and insecurity. The narrative rotates from the Dad to the Crow to the Boys and back again as it traces the path of their grief from shortly after the wife and mother has died to the point where the Crow decides to leave because his work is done.

Porter’s technique here means that the book is all dialogue and internal monologue, yet he infuses so much of it – notably Crow’s, but the Dad’s as well – with imagery and a sort of curious wordplay, where Crow seems to be trying words out for the sounds of them, that it comes off a lot like poetry. Prose doesn’t look or sound or feel like this, at least not in the sorts of literature I inhabit, and it enhanced the sense of magical realism throughout the book in a way that made Crow seem far less ridiculous, even when Dad explicitly refers to him to the Boys as imaginary.

The grief of the father in Grief is the Thing with Feathers comes through intensely on these pages, with no efforts by Porter to soften or deflect the blows. The fact that the wife died without warning – it is explained how later in the book – gives the Dad’s grief an acute edge to it, combining the emotional abyss with the realization that he is now a single father of two boys who will now look to him for the emotional and physical support they had received from their mother. Porter tries to take us inside his suffering, and then gives us Crow as the foil who challenges the father in a way that helps the father towards healing without obviously (or mawkishly) doing so.

The Crow’s passages are the most memorable, and the most poetic. He’s part fabulist, part black humorist, part wordsmith: “He flew a genuflection … Ley lines flung him cross-country with no time for grief, power cables catapulted loose bouquets of tar-black bone and feather and other crows rained down from the sky.” Perhaps my favorite of Crow’s words are a bit of apparent doggerel, starting with “Gormin’ere, worrying horrid. Hello elair, krip krap krip krap who’s that lazurusting beans of my cut-out?” but ending with the revelation that “I do this, perform some unbound crow stuff, for him.”

Mitchell is himself a brilliant writer, and his recommendation was good enough for me to read Grief is the Thing with Feathers, especially when I saw how short it was. It’s one of the most remarkable novellas – not a novel, certainly, not when it’s probably less than 30,000 words – I’ve read in years, like little else I’ve ever seen, for its prose, and for its unflinching look inside the grief of losing one’s partner at the peak of love and life.

Next up: I’m treating myself with something a bit more fun than my other recent reads, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Falling Free, the first book (by chronological order) in her Vorkosigan saga series of novels.

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→ August 27, 2020
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This is How You Lose the Time War.

This is How You Lose the Time War won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella this year, limited to works that run between 17,500 and 40,000 words, among the many plaudits for its unusual call-and-response structure and its commentary on war. Written by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, the book follows two time-traveling soldiers on opposite sides of an interdimensional war who find common threads between them and eventually fall in love through their letters to one another.

The only names we get for those two soldiers are Red and Blue, although they’ll refer to each other by various puns and nicknames as their relationship moves from taunting to affection over the course of the novel. The nature of the war they’re fighting is never quite clear, other than that they both seek to alter the courses of history in various instances of the multiverse by changing single events that will ripple forward in a sound-of-thunder-like pattern to enact massive changes in societies, civilizations, and even entire species. They go about implementing those changes in different ways, but they seem to be assigned to similar or related tasks, so their paths nearly cross multiple times, which allows them to start communicating with each other, secretly, in strange and incredibly imaginative ways.

They are, of course, being watched at the same time, by shadowy presences and interdimensional seekers, spies who want to decode Red and Blue’s missives to one another, and eventually that matter has to come to a head to provide some narrative thrust to the story. How the two figure this out and plot a way to escape their pursuers and fool their bosses, which risks splitting them apart forever, is the real purpose of the story, since we never get that much sense or meaning of what exactly the two sides want from the Time War.

This is How You Lose the Time War is a slow burn despite its short duration. The prose isn’t easy; both authors jump right into the new vernacular of their multiverse, and it teeters on the edge of the ridiculous for a while before the plot comes along to subsume any concerns you might have about word choices or syntax. There’s also a leap, pun intended, when Red and Blue go from rivalry to deep affection in the span of just a few letters; it felt incredibly sudden, as if the mutual respect they develop on the temporal battlefield was enough to make them fall in love with each other, visible in the abrupt shift in the language and tone of their notes.

It’s hard to entirely buy why they fall so hard for one another, but the payoff is strong; it feels like the two authors needed the first half of the book to find a shared rhythm, and once they got it, they could both put their feet on the gas. I didn’t quite buy how they fell in love, but once Red and Blue are there, and their budding relationship is threatened by the powers that be (were, will be, always are?) in their timelines, it’s credible and compelling – and the way it ends is satisfying and avoids the too-predictable traps into which the authors might have fallen. The novella is probably my least favorite format of prose fiction, compared at least to novels and short stories, but This is How You Lose the Time War felt like it was just the right length, and the way the two authors intertwine their voices produces a remarkable, emotional book.

Next up: I’ve already finished N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became and moved on to Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson’s Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back.

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→ November 23, 2018
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Terra Incognita.

I’m a huge Connie Willis fan, and have been since I first encountered To Say Nothing of The Dog a few years ago, enough so that I chose that book for my guest appearance on the Hugos There podcast a couple of months back. I’ve read all of her Hugo-winning novels (four books for three awards) and two more of her novels, but hadn’t tried any of her short(er) fiction until I stumbled on Terra Incognita, a collection of three of her novellas, in the Strand back in August. The collection includes “Remake,” which was sold as a standalone novel when it was published and sits on the blurry line between short novel and novella, as well as “D.A.” and “Uncharted Territory.” Two of them are great, and the third feels like filler.

“Remake” is the star of the show, so to speak, and features some of the imagination and prescience found in much great science fiction back to Jules Verne. Willis envisions a world where studios no longer make movies; they use computer algorithms to digitally update old movies, inserting different actors into others’ roles, and then fighting over the legal rights to every actor’s likeness on celluloid. They can change plots and endings, all automagically, and even go back and erase all traces of alcohol or tobacco to satisfy the Temperance League. Into this world comes a young woman who just wants to dance in the pictures, and who captures the attention of a programmer responsible for those digital edits, including the aforementioned temperance nonsense. He tries to talk her out of it, saying she won’t even find a dance teacher let alone movie roles, but then something strange happens and he’s convinced he’s found her likeness in the background of some classic films. Did she find another way in? Was it time travel?

That story was worth the price of the book, even though it’s a bit more ridiculous than even Willis’ lighter fare (Crosstalk and Bellwether), as the central mystery of the story is so clever and there’s no way you won’t start rooting for the girl to make it. The half-hearted romantic tension between those two is sort of a red herring, and there’s some frippery involving the third character, Hedda (also spelled Heada), that takes us away from the main story, but the central plot is strong and I loved dancing along with Willis through the golden age of musicals. She got the CGI part of her future right, but she shouldn’t have bet against musicals coming back into vogue – everything comes back into fashion eventually.

“D.A.” is the shortest of the three entries in this volume, and felt to me like a taunt directed against Ender’s Game, which is much beloved and very male-centric, even though author Orson Scott Card tries to walk back the toxic masculinity with the short story that is tacked on to the novel’s end. (The story came before the novel, but that’s a discussion for another day.) A young woman in cadet school finds herself drafted for duty on the space station … but she didn’t even apply for the spot. She’s brought to the base against her wishes, albeit not quite against her will, and spends all her available time trying to find out what went wrong in the selection process, with the help of an earthside friend with some convenient hacking skills. I could see the vague outlines of the ending coming, but I still enjoyed the journey.

“Uncharted Territory” was the one story that never clicked with me, although there’s one comic element that is funny in a very Connie Willis sort of way. Three humans and one non-human are charting the terrain on an unpopulated planet that likely holds some substantial mineral resources, and must deal with harsh conditions while also coping with the interpersonal relations of that sort of mission … including some strange attractions among them. The characters just don’t gel here at all; Willis rarely has trouble giving her characters unique profiles and three-dimensional personas even in just a handful of pages, but these characters, human and otherwise, just don’t come together. The one non-human’s habit is a good running gag, and there’s a little comic material in the fact that the two species can’t seem to distinguish biological sex in the other species, just not enough of that to salvage the story.

Next up: Still Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders, winner of the Man Booker Prize.

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→ January 28, 2011
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Breakfast at Tiffany’s & Fludd.

My list of sleeper prospects for all 30 teams went up this morning for Insiders.

—

Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a novella-length character study of the iconic Holly Golightly, the chameleonic protagonist whose ability to reinvent herself and manipulate people to her own benefit charms the milquetoast narrator.

Holly is a very young, independent-minded woman who takes a flat in a Manhattan brownstone where the unnamed narrator, dubbed “Fred” by Holly, also lives. She fascinates him through her force of will, her expectation that people will jump to meet her every whim (they often do), and through how men just fall hopelessly for her like dominoes in a line. (Fred’s affection for Holly always seems to be of the arm’s-length variety, and I thought the character, like Capote, was gay.) Her anchorless life hits a snag when a piece of her old life shows up out of the blue to try to drag her out of her high-society ways to a backwoods existence she never wanted in the first place.

Capote was a prose master, with Norman Mailer issuing the oft-repeated statement that he “would not have changed two words in” this story, but the line that caught my eye was because it reminded me of a television program:

…I noticed a taxi stop across the street to let out a girl who ran up the steps of the Forty-second Street Public Library. She was through the doors before I recognized her, which was pardonable, for Holly and libraries were not an easy association to make. I let curiosity guide me between the lions…

I’ve tried to find out of the makers of the children’s show Between the Lions took their name from the book, but have had no success. Naming a show about literacy after a phrase from an American literary giant seems fitting, though.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is usually sold along with three Capote short stories: “House of Flowers,” “A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory.” The first two are ordinary, the first about a prostitute in Haiti who finds an escape to what might be a better life, the latter about two unlikely friends at a southern prison camp (one of whom is named Tico Feo, which means “ugly Costa Rican.”) The third story is a marvel, a peer to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s canon of short stories, a sweet but wholly unsentimental tale about the friendship between a young boy and an cousin in her 60s, and how the two would make and sell fruitcakes every Christmas season. We often praise players who recognize their skill sets and their limitations by saying that they “don’t try to do too much.” In “A Christmas Story,” Capote didn’t try to do too much. He lets the story do it for him.

–

Hilary Mantel’s Fludd is a strange piece of fiction, a short novel about a curate assigned to a small, backwards English town where Catholicism is practiced by means of superstition rather than faith and the priest has lost his own belief and probably his marbles as well. The curate, however, isn’t what he at first seems to be, and as the novel goes along one of the nuns emerges as the real central character despite being little more than a stock extra for the first half of the book. That character, Philomena, turns out to be the only character with any depth of anyone who populates these pages – even Fludd, the possibly-supernatural being named after a long-dead alchemist and mystic, is barely revealed, with nothing on his motives or actual thoughts – and her decision between life in the convent (which was chosen for her by her deranged mother) and the fearful world outside of it is the only major event in the entire book. There’s an anti-Catholic undertone to the book, which may bother some readers, and a subplot around idolatry and statues that went right over my head.

—

Next up: Hugh Laurie – yes, that one, House, Wooster, Jools, and so on – wrote a comic novel in 1996 called The Gun Seller. I have incredibly high expectations for this one.

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→ August 24, 2010
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Unaccustomed Earth.

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London, and her writing revolves around Bengali families in the United States who retain at least some of their non-American identity, but her writing is more American than most fiction by contemporary authors born in this country. Lahiri’s stories are richly textured, written in intelligent yet easy prose, showcasing her incredible skill at encapsulating human emotions through plot events large and small, and her overarching theme of Bengalis feeling adrift in a foreign country and culture seems central to the American experience regardless of the characters’ nation of origin. Her first published work, the short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and if anything, her second story collection, 2008’s Unaccustomed Earth is even better, more assured with stronger characterization.

The title story, which leads off the collection, is one of the most subtle stories in the book, dealing with Ruma, an Indian mother married to a non-Indian man, whose widowed father comes to visit her in her new home in Seattle. She is still grieving from the sudden loss of her mother, and now must deal with the question of whether to invite her father to stay with her, per Indian (or perhaps Bengali) custom, even though she has never had a close relationship with him and believes her husband is less than thrilled with the idea of having his father-in-law living in their spacious house. Ruma’s father, meanwhile, has begun a quiet affair – so quiet it barely merits the term – with another Bengali woman, also widowed, and does not wish to reveal it to his daughter or to give up his peripatetic new lifestyle. Lahiri allows both characters to narrate the story, creating two distinct voices, moving the story along by magnifying tiny events in their lives during the father’s visit and establishment of a new relationship with his grandson, surpassing anything he ever developed with Ruma. The story’s conclusion is extremely un-Hollywood, yet more effective for its realism.

Unaccustomed Earth closes with a three-part novella titled “Hema and Kaushik,” which returns to the twin perspectives of the collection’s title story by tracking two young Bengalis through three stages of their lives – a brief period in their teen years when Hema’s family housed Kaushik’s on the latter’s return from India to Massachusetts; Kaushik’s difficulty in adjusting to a major change in his family situation while he’s in college; and an unlikely reunion between the two in Rome with the two in their late 30s. The novella is more about Kaushik (the boy) than Hema, with the latter serving more as a lens to examine Kaushik’s character, and how a few major events in his life shape his choices in adulthood, including his inability to grieve and his difficulties in forming lasting relationships with women.

As much as I may praise “Hema and Kaushik,” it wasn’t the star of this particular show. I don’t read many short stories because I often find it hard to get emotionally invested in a character or a plot in ten or twenty thousand words, but “Only Goodness” was easily the most affecting short story I’ve ever read, for personal reasons. The story opens by telling us that “It was Sudha who’d introduced Rahul to alcohol,” a clue to the guilt the sister would later carry for her brother’s alcoholism, even though the addiction and downward spiral was almost certainly inevitable. An uncle with whom I always felt close was a lifelong alcoholic, something I didn’t know until late in my teens, and his periods of recovery never lasted and were punctuated by disappointment and frustration on the part of the rest of his immediate family. I remember too well the phone calls I’d get from him at odd hours in the late 1990s, about some get-rich-quick scheme he’d found or a penny stock on which he wanted my opinion, and the fact that I was not equipped to handle him in those states, or even fully aware of what the calls truly signified. Eventually, I drifted out of contact with him, talking maybe once or twice a year, hearing of him through my parents, until the day in spring training of 2005 when I got another call that he had taken his own life the night before. Rahul lives to see the end of “Only Goodness,” but Lahiri paints an accurate portrait of the devastation a grown child’s alcohol problem can cause and the false hopes and crushing disappointments it can cause, while still giving the reader enough insight into Rahul to feel some empathy, until the climactic event that caps the story.

“A Choice of Accommodation” chronicles the gradual decline of a “mixed” marriage (between an Indian man and a non-Indian woman) by watching the couple over the course of a single day and night at someone else’s wedding; I’ve criticized many writers here for badly-written sex scenes that feel like they were written by teenaged boys, but Lahiri wrote one of the few I’ve ever read that didn’t make me cringe – perhaps it simply needed a woman’s pen – although as the conclusion to this story the device felt a little hackneyed. “Nobody’s Business” is actually told from the perspective of the shy American roommate of an Indian woman on whom he probably has a small crush; he finds out her mysterious boyfriend is having an affair and is left trying to decide whether and how to tell her about it. The story itself works, with a technologically quaint solution, but the constant parade of suitors that the girl, Sang, faces – all men seeking an arranged marriage through her parents – provided a level of exasperating comic relief. The weakest story for me – still above-average if you’re looking for grades – was “Heaven-Hell,” told by an Indian girl about her mother who, trapped in a loveless arranged marriage, develops a crush on a Bengali graduate student who rooms with the family for several months, and even thatt story features a classic Lahiri oh-by-the-way twist at its end.

Interpreter of Maladies was brilliant and worthy of the recognition it received, but I can’t say I was as moved or involved in its stories as I was in those of Unaccustomed Earth, and her ability to create tension in short stories that revolve around emotions rather than action is astounding, reminiscent of the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the novels of Marilynne Robinson, two of the best American writers of the last hundred years. And I think it’s fitting that someone of a non-traditional background should emerge as one of the brightest voices in 21st century American literature, one who speaks to the experiences of an entirely new wave of immigrants who spend much of their lives living in one country while trying to maintain the cultures and traditions of others.

–

Before Unaccustomed Earth, I read John Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel, the first part of his U.S.A. trilogy. However, it’s not a complete, standalone novel; it weaves together the stories of five people in the U.S. in the late 1910s, but their paths just start to cross near the book’s end and nothing is resolved enough to merit a real review. I’ll write them up when I finish all three parts, which appear as a single entry on a few of the greatest-books lists I follow.

Next up: Dawn Powell’s final novel, The Golden Spur.

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→ August 4, 2010
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Legend of a Suicide.

David Vann’s story collection Legend of a Suicide has won a slew of literary awards and plaudits, including the Grace Paley Prize and appearances on 25 “best books of the year” lists, as well as becoming a critical and commercial success in, of all places, France. It’s a highly autobiographical book built around the suicide of Vann’s father when the author was just 13.

Legend is built around a central, two-part novella, “Sukkwan Island,” with three very short stories before it and two after; those five stories tie together closely, but the novella shifts two major plot details in a way that prevents reading the set as a single, linear story that would probably qualify as a novel. The five stories are well-written and useful for setting the scene, but I found the shift in “Sukkwan Island” jarring not just for its shock value but because the three stories that preceded that one had set me up for a different path.

In the early short stories, Vann’s alter ego, Roy, watches his father’s demise into depression and bad life choices from something of a distance, but in the alternate reality of “Sukkwan Island,” Roy chooses to spend a year in Alaska with his father, living survivalist-style in the woods on a remote island, only to witness Jim’s downward spiral up close. (In real life, and in the two stories that end the book, Roy/David declined to go to Alaska, after which Jim killed himself.) Roy dies in Alaska, and Jim’s depression and anxiety after his son’s death take on more corporeal form as he tries to survive, to cover up what happened, and to escape responsibility. Even Roy’s death could be a metaphor for the death of Vann’s relationship with his father – sensing that his father was headed for an inevitable tragedy and fearing the darkness and mood changes of crippling depression, perhaps David pulled away from his dad, convincing him to decline the invitation to spend a (miserable) year in the wildnerness with an unstable parent. Jim’s eventual death in “Sukkwan Island” is simultaneously a form of revenge on his father and a form of forgiveness, a glimmer of understanding that despite the inherent selfishness of suicide*, someone in the grip of that type of depression isn’t fully in control of his actions.

*Yes, I’ve lost a close relative to suicide, as has my wife. I speak from some experience, although nothing comparable to Vann’s.

Jim’s descent, fueled by despair, grief, fear, and self-doubt, is gripping and difficult to read; by putting Jim in the position of a father whose son has died and who bears at least some responsibility, Vann gives the reader more reason to empathize with the character, perhaps even to pity him, and thus makes his late father more than just a personal mess who screwed up his life and then screwed up his son’s by killing himself.

In the concluding stories, Roy – very much alive – goes to Alaska and attempts to piece together a little of his father’s legacy, only to find that the world there has changed so much during his own emotional stasis:

Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from memory itself. And because memory is often all that a life or a self is built on, returning home can take away exactly that.

He remains emotionally paralyzed by his father’s suicide, and while that’s probably realistic, it doesn’t make for much of a story. I was looking for some kind of conclusion – not a happy ending, not even closure necessarily, but some sort of event to guide me out of the book. Roy goes to visit one of his father’s mistresses, only to find himself unable to ask her anything about his dad, a perfect vignette in a larger book but very unsatisfying as the basis for a short story.

Vann’s prose is easy and earnest, so much so that it’s uncomfortable at times to see through a window that clear, but a book about depression and suicide can’t be anything but brutally honest – if a novel or story on the subject doesn’t make the reader at least a little uncomfortable, it failed in its mission. If anything, Vann could have delved more deeply and continued any of the stories, or expanded “Sukkwan Island” into a longer novel, and found more material to mine in the complex, broken personality of his father and his own complex, even warped relationship with him, and the material would have remained compelling because he writes so well about these stark emotions. The first half of “Sukkwan” is the strongest material in Legend because that honesty is blended with the child’s view of his father breaking down, a mixture of confusion, fear, and stop-and-go sympathy from a boy in a position that would be difficult for an adult to handle. The second half of the story does suffer slightly from Roy’s absence.

If you don’t mind a bleak read, one where endings are few and never happy, but one that’s unsparing in its look at a fairly common mental illness that went untreated and ended in tragedy, Legend of a Suicide does an outstanding job of handling the subject. It’s uneven but introduces a talented writer who’s able to write about tough emotions, and I’m hopeful that in his upcoming novel, Caribou Island (due out in January), he’ll make the adjustments to tell a more complete story without compromising his emotional honesty.

Next up: Mary Murphy’s Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird. I received complimentary review copies of both that book and Legend from the publisher.

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Woman in the Dark and The Wicked Pavilion.

Dashiell Hammett only wrote five novels during his lifetime – I’ve read four and have the fifth, The Dain Curse, on my shelf now – as well as 80 short stories, most of which involved either Sam Spade or The Continental Op as the detective. One of the most unusual works in his bibliography is the novella Woman in the Dark, a suspense story originally published in three parts in Liberty magazine in 1933.

Unfortunately, I’d have to say this is my least favorite Hammett work, and not just because it’s not a detective story. The plot revolves around the titular Woman, Luise Fischer, a kept woman who has fled her abusive boyfriend (Robson) and lands at the house of a man named Brazil who has some criminal activity in his past. A fight scene puts the two on the lam and eventually in hiding with another ex-con that Brazil knows while Robson manipulates the law to try to put Brazil and jail and force Luise to return to him. The conclusion required a last-minute twist and a bit of guesswork on Luise’s part, and I didn’t feel the story went anywhere. That said, bad Hammett beats good work by a lot of authors, and it features his usual crisp prose, noir settings, and characters in various degrees of corruption. It’s just more for completists; if you’re new to Hammett I’d suggest you start with his most famous work, The Maltese Falcon.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he conceded graciously. “Childhood is the happiest time, after all, so why shouldn’t she want to spend her last years in a return to that happy state?”
“I never found anything happy in childhood and neither did you,” Elsie stated pugnaciously. “I don’t think I ever saw a smile on your face till the day you were allowed to clip your own coupons.”

Dawn Powell’s The Wicked Pavilion is an ensemble novel, a rare style because it’s so difficult to pull off, but when done well – as here, or in Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto – it creates an immersive atmosphere and increases the odds that the reader will identify with one or more characters or subplots.

The Wicked Pavilion revolves around the fictional New York restaurant Cafe Julien, a gathering place for the city’s artists, writers, men-about-town, and various hangers-on. Dalzell is a painter dancing around the poverty line, pining for his halcyon days with his friend Marius, another painter who found tremendous success by dying suddenly in an accident in Mexico. Elsie is the domineering dowager who tries to run the life of her young female friend Jerry, who realizes that Elsie is doing more harm than good – and might be a touch unhinged. Rick and Ellenora are the star-crossed lovers who met in Cafe Julien, and continue to meet there after long periods apart … but this time, Rick has returned from abroad and Ellenora is nowhere to be found. Everyone, to borrow a line from White Christmas, has an angle, even the side characters who populate the book’s fringes, and many of the characters only seem to be pretending to be artists or society women or intellectuals, and Powell never lets on whether her characters are ever happy or merely putting on the good face:

Rick Prescott had been leaning against the park fence watching them for a long time, thinking ruefully that of all the happy workers in the world wreckers were undoubtedly the most enthusiastic.

Rick’s observation seems to set him outside the world of happy workers, while Dalzell’s observations on other artists lay before him how much he’s sold out his art – which may not have been anything special in the first place – while Jerry ends up in the wrong bar at the wrong time and finds herself in a special prison ward for prostitutes, forcing her to contemplate her symbiotic (and destructive) relationship with Elsie.

Powell’s transitions across the three main subplots, often intertwining them by having Rick connect with Jerry at Cafe Julien or Dalzell end up with a patroness of the arts who ends up invited to a party thrown by Elsie, are smooth, and if you’re okay with insightful inner monologues, all three move along well. It’s rich, complex, satirical, witty, and rewarding. I would still suggest anyone new to Powell start with the more linear A Time to Be Born, but The Wicked Pavilion would be a great follow-up.

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