→ May 24, 2024
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Night Watch.

Jayne Anne Phillips’ newest novel Night Watch was, as far as I can tell, a surprise winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in two senses: I saw nothing that anticipated its win, and I think it sucks. It is a ponderous, pretentious, pointless, predictable piece of fiction that was an absolute chore to finish and offered far too modest a payoff for the effort required to complete it.

The setup to the plot of Night Watch is far more complex than the plot itself, as if Phillips knew she had a scant concept and decided to mask it with time-shifting, insufficient use of quotation marks, and avoidance of pronouns. A man takes a woman who has stopped speaking for several years and her 12-year-old daughter to a West Virginia asylum several years after the end of the Civil War, cautioning the girl that he is not her father and telling her the story she needs to relate at the asylum to gain admittance for herself and her mother. The girl’s actual father went to fight in the War but never returned and the family received no word of his fate. From there, we jump back and forth to find out who the man was, why the woman stopped speaking, and what happened to the father, before we get to a conclusion that you can see coming from the first fifty pages, if not sooner.

This book thinks it has a lot to say, and that might be its worst attribute, even beyond the leaden, torpid prose and the meager characterization. (It also contains a long, graphic scene of sexual assault that stood out as one of the only scenes in the novel that has that level of detail about anything happening to any of the characters.) There could be a larger point here about the treatment of women during and in the aftermath of the Civil War, and how conflicts tend to save their worst impacts for the most vulnerable populations, such as women and children, which would seem to have a rather apt parallel today in Gaza. There could be something here about the poor treatment of the war wounded and the insane of that era. There could be any number of themes here if Phillips had the insight into the subject to lead the reader there, but she doesn’t. It revels in the misery of its setting like Andersonville, another Pulitzer winner about the Civil War – the judges for that award just can’t seem to resist that setting – without saying anything meaningful about any of it.

The characters are the book’s second major failing, as Phillips seems almost determined to prevent the reader from getting to know any of them. The man never gets a name beyond “Papa,” a sort of cruel joke in the circumstances. The father gets a name that isn’t his own, only after he’s wounded and loses his memory. The mother and daughter each have two names, their own and the false identities they assume when they enter the asylum. There’s also a woman and a horse who are both named Dearbhla, in case you weren’t confused already. They’re all thinly drawn enough that they exist only as one-dimensional villains (Papa) or victims (the mother and father) or sort of impossible fairies (the daughter). The daughter, named ConaLee but known at the asylum as Miss Eliza Connolly, is the closest character here to a protagonist, and is certainly its hero, yet she is a cipher inside her outlines: We only see her as her world has made her, never as who she is as a person.

The sum of these disparate parts may leave you rooting for any sort of happy ending for the central characters, and of course Phillips could not give you one – nor does this novel need one, to be clear. She simply chose the cheapest way out, rather than resolving the plot’s various threads in a way that actually says something about their lives or their time or, as is written in the guidelines for the Pulitzer committee, “dealing with American life.” That this was chosen over North Woods or Tom Lake is appalling, the second massive whiff in three years by the Pulitzer committees for the fiction award after 2021’s mind-boggling selection of The Netanyahus, which really hasn’t aged well. A great novel will justify its existence through its story, its prose, and its characters. Night Watch does none of the above.

Next up: Oliver Roeder’s Seven Games: A Human History.

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→ 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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→ August 21, 2023
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Trust.

Hernan Diaz shared this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his second novel, Trust, after his debut novel In the Distance was one of the runners-up for the same honor in 2018. In the Distance was a surprise honoree, as Diaz was an unknown author at the time and the book was published by a minor house. Trust comes from a Penguin imprint and had much higher expectations coming in, and while it did win the big honor, it reads far more as a literary exercise than a compelling narrative or a coherent novel.

Trust comprises four parts, each of which tells part of the story of a very wealthy New York City couple between the two wars, the husband a financial wizard who profits handsomely from the 1929 crash, the wife a woman of taste who gets them involved in the arts and philanthropic works until illness overtakes her. Part one is a 1937 novella about the couple called Bonds, a metafictional account of their lives that depicts her illness as a mental one and his demeanor as unfeeling and robotic. Part two is the half-finished memoir of the actual financier, his intended rebuttal to the best-selling novel that upended his life. Part three tells the story of Ida Partenza, the writer he hires to ghost-write that memoir. Part four is the diary of the wife, all fragments and contradictions. In each succeeding section, Diaz undoes what he did in the previous one(s), so that by the end it’s unclear what’s actually true, and the whole work feels like that aforementioned exercise, a way of undermining the reader by demonstrating the imprecision of memory.

Part of the problem here is that the main character is the financier, and he’s unsympathetic but also boring. He’s not an anti-hero. He’s not misunderstood, or tragic (even his widowhood fails to rise to that level). He’s just kind of a jerk, and his wife’s attempts to make him more of a human don’t really pan out. Even finding out how much the novel may have wronged him doesn’t make him a more interesting central character, and certainly the descriptions of the story from the ghostwriter’s point of view paint him in a worse, if different, light. (I was all set to rip Diaz’s bombastic insufferable prose when I reached the second section and realized that that was the prose of his fictional novelist.)

It was hard not to think of the similarly titled book Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi, which explored similar thematic ground in a much more straightforward and readable fashion. (I was also reminded of it when I went to save this file on my laptop and the review for the earlier book popped up.) Choi’s book delved into the unreliability of memory and the way other people can remember the same event in different ways because of memory discrepancies, perspectives, and prior lived experiences, and it did so in a way that also made you care about or at least invested in some of the characters. I haven’t even named the main characters in Trust because they don’t matter enough. I didn’t give a hoot about the husband, the wife, or really even the ghostwriter, because Diaz didn’t give me reason to care.

The Pulitzer committee never reveals much about its thinking, but its one sentence on Trust referred toits “linked narratives rendered in different literary styles,” and that tells me this was writers responding to a feat of writing craft – which is, to be clear, a good reason to give a book a literary award. They likely weighed that more than the novel’s lack of direction or what I at least found to be kind of a boring plot with poorly drawn characters. It’s nowhere near the novel that its co-winner, Demon Copperhead, is, perhaps choosing a higher level of difficulty – although Barbara Kingsolver didn’t go easy on herself – without that other novel’s compelling lead character or well-paced, intriguing plot. I’d put it more towards the middle of the Pulitzer pack, certainly ahead of 2022’s awful choice The Netanyahus or a good chunk of early winners that haven’t aged well, but nowhere near the best that the Pulitzers have honored in recent years.

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→ June 11, 2023
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Demon Copperhead.

Barbara Kingsolver shared this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – the first time the honor was split among two books – for her novel Demon Copperhead, which shared the honor with Hernan Diaz’s Trust. Demon Copperhead borrows its structure and characters from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, transplanting the whole story to a poor mining county in the Appalachians, narrated by its title character from his early childhood to adulthood as the opioid crisis devastates his community, family, and his own life.

Demon is born to a single mother in Lee County, where the mining industry employed nearly everyone and then left them underemployed, injured, and increasingly addicted to painkillers. Demon, whose real name is Damon but acquired the nickname “Demon” early in life and had it stick, never knows any stability from the word go – his mother is a recovering addict, marries a local tough guy who terrorizes her and abuses Demon, only to have his mother die and his stepdad toss him out into the hands of social services. His path takes him through two foster homes, including the con-artist McCobbs, then to his estranged grandmother’s house, then back to Lee County and the high school football team, only to have a knee injury push him into the bottomless well of oxycontin. It’s a parade of tragedies interspersed with dark humor, leading towards eventual small triumphs, told by one of the most memorable narrator characters I’ve ever encountered.

If you know the bones of David Copperfield, from the book or perhaps from Armando Iannucci’s faithful 2020 film adaptation, then you’ll know the general plot outline of Demon Copperhead, as it adheres to the former book’s major story beats right to the end. Almost every character here has a clear analogue in the original – Demon is David, the McCobbs are the Micawbers, U-Haul is Uriah Heep, and so forth – that also provides the foundation for the modern versions, although they’re fleshed out enough to feel different from the originals. You could see U-Haul becoming Demon’s main antagonist early on, especially once you connect him to Uriah, but the way in which this plays out is different enough from the original to make it seem new.

This novel’s real strength is Demon, though. Kingsolver has given him a unique voice that combines the wisdom of his experiences through the story, the naïveté of his place of birth, and layers of empathy that appear at surprising times throughout the work. Kingsolver has used interesting narrative techniques before, as in The Poisonwood Bible, but here she does so with a single character who is thoroughly developed, who grows and learns throughout the novel, and whose flaws are right there on display even in his own telling. David Copperfield is someone you root for throughout Dickens’s novel because he’s so inherently good, and his travails are the result of encounters with terrible people and the extreme economic inequality of England in the early 1800s. Demon is more complex, making poor choices, sometimes to the point of treating people who care for him quite badly, even missing out on opportunities and lifelines. It’s a little harder to root for him, although ultimately I came down on that side, bearing in mind that it was clear where things were all going to end.

Dickens’s work was a social commentary on that inequality and the abysmal treatment of the poor, especially children, in his era, a theme he’d first covered in Oliver Twist and would return to many times in the later parts of his life. Kingsolver does the same here, with two focal points – the opioid epidemic and its main drivers in Purdue Pharmaceuticals; and the abandonment of rural people by nearly every stage of government, from counties and school districts up to the federal level. It’s not subtle by any means, and that’s been a criticism of the book, but I don’t know how you can be subtle about the harm that opioids have wreaked on these parts of the country. Kingsolver delivers the commentary in the most granular fashion, by showing the epidemic’s impact on individual characters and their families, most notably children neglected, abused, or left orphaned by those addicted, with scant discussion of policy questions or legal maneuvers. Purdue gets its mention, but mostly because Demon’s Aunt June briefly dates a guy who’s a sales rep for the company, and for the rest of the book they’re an offscreen villain, while every form of government is asleep at its respective wheel. It’s very Dickensian in a contemporary way, trading the workhouse for rehab, sharing its disdain for the central government’s failure to protect its most vulnerable charges.

It’s an arduous read because of all of the slings and arrows Demon suffers along the way, but Kingsolver does it more concisely than Dickens, and with such a compelling voice as the narrator that it’s both quicker than its page count would imply and more enjoyable than you’d think for a story where people do horrible things to each other and themselves. The adult Damon’s wry, wise telling of his own life is what truly powered me through the book so quickly. And with such a distinctly American plot and setting, it’s a worthy winner of the Pulitzer honor.

Next up: Susanna Hoffs, one of my favorite musicians of the 1980s and early 1990s, just released her first novel, This Bird Has Flown.

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→ June 17, 2022
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The Netanyahus.

Joshua Cohen won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his short novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, which fictionalizes a real event involving Benjamin Netanyahu and his father, the Zionist historian Benzion Netanyahu, visiting Cornell University and the esteemed literary scholar Harold Bloom. This is a travesty; in a year with several better books (at least two by Black authors), the selection of such an unfunny, narrow work for the highest honor in American literature undermines the award and robs more deserving books of attention.

The book is narrated as a memory by a professor from Corbindale College in upstate New York, a badly disguised stand-in for Cornell, who is chosen to be on the committee to interview the senior Netanyahu for a faculty position because he’s the only Jewish professor in the department. They expect Benzion to show up alone, but instead, he brings his wife and three unruly children – Benji, the middle one; Yonatan, who would later die a hero in the raid on Entebbe; and Iddo, who’d later become a physician, author, playwright. Benzion doesn’t actually reach Corbindale until the middle of the novel, so the first half is the sort of insular follies that made Netflix’s The Chair a modest hit among academics, as well as a portrait of the casual anti-Semitism of the late 1960s. Then the Netanyahus show up and trash everything, including the novel itself.

The entire family, in the book at least, sucks. The father is an intellectual, a strong Zionist who makes compelling arguments on the pages, but he’s also a selfish asshole. His wife is worse, and invites her entire family to stay with the protagonist, whose wife wants no part of this (nor should she). The two older boys are assholes, not just in the way that most teenaged boys are, but with a spectacular lack of self-awareness. I suppose Iddo is the least offensive of the bunch, but the point is that these are deeply unlikeable, one-dimensional characters who suffocate the last half of the novel with their presence, and add nothing to it.

Cohen’s writing is insufferably pretentious, right down to his frequent, deliberate choices of uselessly esoteric vocabulary words. Writing of a character “knowing at some chthonic lake-depth that …” is pointless, just a way to send the reader to the dictionary to show off your own linguistic prowess. (It means “relating to the underworld.” “Abyssal” would have worked better here, or just saying “knowing at the deepest level of his subconscious,” which uses words any middle school student could understand.) Another passage goes “logopoeic, propaedeutic,” using words only an academic might know and love – more on that in a moment. “Nugatory” does not, in fact, refer to the center of your 3 Musketeers bar, but is the rare word that describes itself: of no value or importance. In other words, worthless. The word Cohen needed was “worthless,” but he chose the more difficult one. The entire book is like this, and it is a work of supreme arrogance.

So why the heck did it win the Pulitzer? It’s not actually funny. The story is small and unremarkable, and the themes are fairly narrow. But it is a book about academia, and about Harold Bloom. At least 30% of the Pulitzer Prize Board for 2022 comprises current professors or Deans. The majority of the Board are current or former writers who would probably all be familiar with Bloom’s work. This is a book for them and about them. It’s The Artist and Argo telling Hollywood that movies are important. The Netanyahus puts a fancypants college at the center of its narrative, and takes one of the great critics and historians of literature and makes him the protagonist. The Board probably couldn’t resist. I can’t think of another explanation – I’ve read all of the Pulitzer winners, and this is the worst choice in at least 25 years. I found nothing at all redeeming in The Netanyahus except that it’s short. There were so many better books right in front of them – Hell of a Book won the National Book Award for Fiction and The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, so they weren’t obscure, and both were miles and miles better than this thing. Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This made the Booker Prize shortlist, and it’s better and far more relevant to our current moment. Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle and Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby were better. And that’s just among novels I read. I know it’s just a prize that doesn’t make the novels considered any better or worse, but these awards drive sales, and I’d rather see a better book get that big sales bump than this nonsense.

Next up: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, a Booker Prize winner from 2004.

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→ August 2, 2019
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Amity and Prosperity.

If you’ve heard of fracking at all, it’s probably for bad reasons; the practice of fracturing rocks to free and capture natural gas has caused substantial environmental damage, from earthquakes to groundwater contamination to air pollution, across wide swaths of the Midwest, down through Oklahoma and Texas. The practice was once hailed as a way for the United States to achieve energy independence, or at least reduce our dependence on oil from the Middle East, and was even embraced by some Democrats, including Barack Obama, who would have said in the next breath that they favored policies to protect the environment.

Eliza Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America documents the horrendous effects of fracking on one town, Amity, in western Pennsylvania, where the drilling company Range Resources ran amok, ignoring environmental regulations or simply lobbying the state to alter them, sickening local residents – possibly to the point of causing cancer – and making multiple homes unlivable. She reported for eight years on this story, getting close to two mothers in the area in particular whose children and animals were sickened by groundwater and air pollution from Range’s fracking and mishandling of waste materials, and won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction for this book. No Range executives were fined or charged; the company was only modestly fined, despite violations of environmental regulations and false claims in its advertising; and the homeowners most adversely affected received a pittance after years of litigation against Range and Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection.

The story all takes place in the northern Appalachian region, atop the Marcellus Shale formation of sedimentary rock, which it turns out contains a large quantity of natural gas that must be retrieved via hydraulic fracturing, now called “fracking” for short. This involves the high-pressure injection of a slurry of water, sand or other proppants, and various additional chemicals to hold the fractures open, reduce friction, lubricate the drill bit, prevent scale deposit buildup, or serve other purposes. The result of the process, in addition to copious supplies of natural gas, is a lot of wastewater that can contain hydrogen sulfide, ethylene glycol, arsenic (released from the rock that has been fractured), and other chemicals or elements that are harmful to human health when ingested or inhaled. The national desire for cheap domestic energy sources, the (mistaken?) belief that natural gas could serve as a “transitional” fuel between coal/oil and renewable energy sources, and extensive lobbying by the oil and gas industry have led to a regulatory environment that is, to a large extent, dictated by the companies the agencies, including Pennsylvania’s toothless DEP, are supposed to be monitoring and sanctioning. The DEP, in this case, was defanged by Democratic governor Ed Rendell, then further hamstrung by Republican governor Tom Corbett and the GOP-controlled legislature, which passed a law that was likely written in large part by the oil and gas lobby; it should surprise no one that the DEP completely whiffed on the Range fracking endeavor in the Marcellus shale region, but it should surprise and enrage you to hear that lawyers for the company and the agency worked together in the lawsuits filed by the sickened homeowners.

Fracking continues largely unabated in states controlled by the Republican Party, which touts their job-creation potential (and that isn’t in dispute) and potential to provide cheap energy from within our borders, although many, many Democratic politicians have gone along with fracking for their own reasons. What is clear, however, is that the process requires substantial regulation if it could ever be made safe for citizens anywhere in the vicinity of the wells. Any drilling within a mile of community water sources puts the water at risk of contamination, and that’s even if the fracking company handles its waste water correctly. Range, according to Griswold, used open waste “ponds” to store its toxic sludge, didn’t line them properly, and then ignored evidence of leaking while fighting any effort to get them to take responsibility. (Several Range executives Griswold named not only escaped any accountability, but have since moved on to better jobs in the industry.) One of the two mothers Griswold profiles, Stacey, kept diligent notes on the appearance of foul odors in the air (hydrogen sulfide, like the smell of rotten eggs, which can indicate bacterial contamination as well) and the increasing illnesses of her kids, one of whom missed a year of school because of fracking pollution, and the deaths of many of her animals. Yet despite all of this evidence, the state of Pennsylvania tried to pass a law, some of which was struck down by the state Supreme Court (but not all!), that would have prevented local governments from banning or regulating fracking in their area; prevented doctors from discussing poisoning cases possibly caused by fracking with each other; and excluded private water wells from pollution/leakage notification requirements.

Griswold’s telling of this story is fundamentally humanist – she never, at any point, loses sight of the people suffering from Range’s actions, the people who reside at the heart of the book – but it is also very much a story of institutional failure. Pennsyvlania, which was gerrymandered into another dimension, let many of its citizens down in the most basic way. We take certain government protections for granted, yet here, the people who were supposed to be protecting the state’s water, air, and land resources – it’s one of only three states with an environmental rights amendment to its state constitution – did no such thing; at best, they looked the other way when Range wanted to drill and frack, and at worst, they aided and abetted the polluters, including helping them fight against the state’s own citizens when the latter tried to assert their rights under the amendment. It bears repeating: Pennsylvania didn’t just do nothing. They worked against their own citizens. If you live there, you should be angry. If you live anywhere in the United States, but especially somewhere where there’s fracking, you should be angry. Once this garbage is in the groundwater, entire towns will become unlivable, maybe for generations. If you’re cool with wide swaths of Oklahoma looking like the Love Canal, I guess that’s your choice, but I wasn’t okay with it before I read Amity and Prosperity and I sure as hell am not okay with it now.

Next up: Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, the story of how he threw two consecutive no-hitters.

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→ April 30, 2019
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The Overstory.

Richard Powers’ The Overstory won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in what feels like a crowded year of critical favorites, with Tommy Orange’s There There taking home one of the honorable mentions. Powers has woven a complex tapestry of narratives and seemingly disconnected characters around a central story of environmental degradation and injustice, a novel that feels extremely important but that suffers from the breadth of his vision and ambiguous characterization.

Trees are at the heart of The Overstory, both in terms of the characters’ interactions with trees and humanity’s degradation of the planet’s forests and climate. Powers rages against the human machine throughout the book, decrying everything from our failure to appreciate the beauty and diversity of nature to the capitalist impulse to plunder our forests for profits and rationalize it away. The characters themselves seem to lose hope for the planet as the novel progresses, and Powers himself is certainly no optimist, but there’s at least a strain of possibility throughout the story that gives us an inkling that we might still have time to save ourselves if we stop denying the truth and act to reverse the damage we’ve done.

Powers’ thematic ambition spreads to a diversity of central characters that seems to be beyond his ultimate reach. He has nine core characters in The Overstory, and I’m not sure I could name an author writing today who’s up to the task of managing that breadth of personae across 500 pages; Powers is game, but the characters bleed into each other far too much to keep them distinct or explain their varying purposes on the pages. Nick and Douglas, two middle-aged white men with personal tragedies in their back stories, become harder to distinguish, especially as their stories on the pages eventually connected, intertwine, and separate; the same is true to a lesser degree with Mimi and Olivia, who are a bit more sharply drawn but still are too similar in personality and speech to keep them completely separate in the reader’s mind.

An overstory is either the layer of foliage in a forest canopy or the trees that give the canopy its foliage, so Powers is playing with words here, as he’s layered the story of the trees, and how they have been indispensable to life on earth, on top of this story of nine characters who start the novel with no connections to each other but several of whom find themselves connected and even relying on each other in emotional symbiosis. It’s a clever conceit for a novel, but to make the understory work, you have to make at least some of those characters compelling and/or sympathetic. Powers doesn’t do that, at least not enough for me; I think one of the nine characters, the researcher and would-be professor Patricia, who may have autism, was well-drawn enough to stick with me, and even that was as much a function of the injustice the world of the novel does to her – laced with misogyny and the human tendency to reject new ideas – as it was to the depiction of her character.

There’s one common theme among the characters in the novel that serves as a functional metaphor for the environmental cause he’s espousing, that of death and rebirth. The novel opens with prologue chapters for each for the characters, and nearly all of them experience the death of a loved one, often a pivotal figure like a parent (at least two fathers die in this section, so steel yourself), as part of their back stories. The idea that new life comes from death recurs throughout the novel, including a discussion of how much one dead tree lying on the forest floor feeds the next generation of life in the forest, from fungi to insects to new plants; Powers extends the metaphor so that many of the characters in the novel find the paths of their lives determined or at least directed by the deaths that altered their childhoods.

There is an actual core plot in The Overstory, as five of the characters unite at a logging protest and end up splitting off to form an eco-terrorist cell, which has some of the consequences you’d expect and a few you wouldn’t – but Powers doesn’t resolve this story in a remotely satisfactory way, and the connections to the other four characters, notably the invalid lawyer Ray, are tenuous at best. There are many great ideas in this book, but it never comes together into a coherent narrative.

Next up: Iain Banks’ The Player of Games, part of his Culture universe of novels, currently on sale for $2.99 for the Kindle.

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→ July 30, 2018
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The Emperor of All Maladies.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American oncologist who trained at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction for his 2010 tome The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, his first book and an enormous undertaking – an exhaustive attempt to chronicle the history of the disease itself and the ongoing scientific fight to cure it. Interspersed with anecdotes from his own oncology work, including several patients he treated – some who survived the disease, and many who did not – Emperor covers a truly incredible amount of ground, often with more detail than I needed to understand the story, and presents a sobering picture of how endless the efforts to treat and cure cancer will be, given the disease’s nature and ability to defeat our best weapons against it.

Mukherjee goes back to ancient Egypt and Greece to give us the earliest known examples of the disease’s appearance and explain how it got its name – it’s from the Latin word meaning ‘crab,’ and the word carcinoma comes from the Greek word for the same – but the bulk of the history in this book starts in the mid-19th century with the first real identification of a specific cancer, leukemia. The story wends its way through the late part of that century with the advent of radical mastectomies to remove breast cancer, disfiguring surgeries that would remove many muscles beyond the breasts and that were the brainchild of the coke-addicted surgeon William Halsted, who also conceived the modern residency program for new doctors that forces them to operate without sleep. We get the discovery that radiation causes cancer, and the related discovery that it might treat cancer as well, as would certain drugs that we now put under the umbrella of chemotherapy. Mukherjee takes the science thread all the way through what were, at the time, the latest developments in oncology treatment and research, including the ongoing identification of oncogenes (genes that, when switched ‘on,’ can produce cancer), proto-oncogenes (genes that become oncogenes with mutations), and anti-oncogenes (tumor-suppressing genes); and therapies that target specific cancer subtypes based on their genotypes – such as Herceptin, which has proven exceptionally effective against breast and other cancers cancer with the HER2 oncogene.

The science bits – my favorite, of course – are interspersed with much of the story of the American public policy fight over cancer, which led to a so-called “War on Cancer,” the passage of the 1971 National Cancer Act to boost the National Cancer Institute, and many breathless pronouncements that we were mere years away from finding a cure. The narrative lags at several points here – the origin story of the Jimmy Fund’s “Jimmy,” real name Einar Gustafson, is the big exception – although it serves as a reminder of how credulous the world was, including early researchers into oncology, about our ability to ‘beat’ or cure cancer. Cancer is not just one disease; it is many, probably hundreds, of diseases that all share the common characteristic of abnormal cell growth, but that can differ substantially by their origin in the body, and even for a specific source or organ can come in vastly diverse forms that require different, targeted treatments. The above-mentioned Herceptin works on HER2+ cancers, mostly breast cancer but sometimes appearing in gastric or ovarian cancers; it will be ineffective against HER2-negative cancers. Someone with ‘breast cancer’ can have any of several forms of the disease – each of which will respond in totally different ways to treatments. This is good news and bad news; the more we know about specific forms of cancer, the better that scientists can come up with targeted treatments to attack them, but there are also far more forms of cancer than we’d ever realized in the history of our fight against the disease. The single ‘cure for cancer’ is probably a chimera, because cancer is not just one thing, but a common attribute of many diseases, and stopping that attribute – rampant cell division – would kill regular cells too.

The Emperor of All Maladies is kind of a depressing read, between the awful outcomes for some of the patients described, but also because the outlook for the future of the disease is not that great. Yes, the medical world continues to search for and find treatments for specific cancers, some of which are the most effective drugs in the history of oncology, but it’s also clear that if your specific cancer isn’t one of those, the medical response is the same drug cocktail approach that has been the norm for decades – better than it was, and with the benefit of drugs to help combat nausea, but still an ordeal for the patient with modest success rates. And finding Herceptin-like advances for all cancers will take many years and billions of dollars that may not be available without a massive public investment. Dr. Mukerjee has put together a remarkable work of research and insight, written with great feeling for the individual patients fighting their cancers, but I left this book feeling worse about the war on cancer than I ever had before.

Next up: Dan Simmons’ The Fall of Hyperion.

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→ May 19, 2018
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Locking Up Our Own.

James Forman, Jr., was a public defender in DC for six years, right after he clerked for Sandra Day O’Connor, and encountered the results of two decades of disastrous policies in the criminal justice system of the nation’s capital, many of which led to differential policing and mass incarceration of the city’s black residents. He discussed the history and causes of this system in his 2017 book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, which lays much of the blame for the high incarceration rates on policies embraced and advocated by black community leaders themselves. The book won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction this past April.

Forman’s parents met while working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (known colloquially as “snick”) during the civil rights movement, which he says spurred his decision to move off the career track into the public defender’s office, eventually moving from there into teaching at Georgetown’s and now Yale’s law schools. Where the 2016 documentary The 13th laid all of the blame for the high rates of black incarceration in the United States on two-plus centuries of racism and white domination – a view that is largely justified – Forman’s book lays bare the role that leaders in black communities played in supporting those policies. Foremost among them: Fighting early progressive efforts to decriminalize possession and personal use of small amounts of marijuana.

Washington DC didn’t achieve some semblance of home rule until 1973, and Congress still holds the power to overturn some laws passed by the DC council and could even, in theory, dismiss the city’s council at will. This gives the city’s residents a status not too much greater than those of territories like Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands, although I suppose if two hurricanes knocked out power to DC for several months the federal government would be a little quicker to address the problem. DC’s population is nearly half African-American, and the high rates of incarceration and different policing strategies in its neighborhoods with higher black populations have had a severe effect on the city’s economy, including continuing high crime rates. Forman explains how DC got into this mess, going back to the end of the civil rights movement and explaining how it was actually a white progressive council member who tried to decriminalize marijuana possession, but found himself opposed by black church leaders, Nation of Islam leaders, and even some black city council members, all of whom ended up working together to scotch the proposal (which may not have passed muster with Congress anyway). When a similar proposal arose a few years later to create mandatory minimum sentencing to fight rising crime rates in DC – themselves at least in part the result of the crack cocaine epidemic – black community leaders were all for the new law, responding to residents’ concerns about violent street crime and home invasions, but also enforcing a longstanding moral viewpoint that African-Americans could defeat stereotypes about them by, in essence, behaving better. If DC cracked down on even trivial crimes, even misdemeanors, the theory went, it would improve the quality of life for all DC residents while also working against white politicians and community leaders who worked to disenfranchise and/or limit the economic mobility of people of color.

None of this worked, as Forman writes, and instead helped fuel a new DC underclass – as it did in other cities, including Detroit, the US city with the highest proportion of residents who are African-American – of blacks, mostly men, who were now de facto unemployable because they had criminal records. Such ex-convicts also could find themselves ineligible for certain government assistance programs, turned down for housing, and even unable to vote. Forman, as a public defender, worked with many such clients, but, in his own telling, he was struggling upstream against a system that simultaneously limited the advancement of African-Americans in its police force and judiciary and also aggressively pursued policies that further hindered the black community. He touches on greater arrest rates in black wards of DC versus white, the long-term harm of “stop and frisk” policies (formally known as a Terry stop, and of dubious constitutionality, especially when opponents can show disparate impact by race of police targets), and the formal and informal obstacles that efforts at community improvement can face from municipal police forces – even when officers and administrators are themselves African-American.

Locking Up Our Own is a sobering look at how we got here, but perhaps short on prescriptions for undoing forty years of damage. Marijuana decriminalization is finally happening, although it’s driven by white stoners and libertarians rather than black citizens and provides no procedure for vacating past convictions for trivial possession cases. Stop and frisk was ruled unconstitutional in NYC in 2013, but our current President and Attorney General have both explicitly endorsed the practice. Mandatory minimums remain popular, in large part because they serve “tough on crime” candidates well – and who would dare to stand up and say that criminals deserve shorter sentences? A path to greater African-American enfranchisement and sovereignty in majority black neighborhoods would likely be impossible in any system where higher level, white-dominated government bodies can invalidate city or state policies. Any change that starts at the bottom will fail without a change at the top.

Next up: Claude M. Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do.

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→ April 22, 2018
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Less.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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