→ October 1, 2024
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Red Side Story.

Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey came out in 2009, his first novel separate from his various Thursday Next/Nursery Crime books, and ended on a cliffhanger. The resolution had to wait for fifteen years, until the release earlier this year of Red Side Story, which picks up right after the end of the previous novel and thrusts our two heroes directly into jeopardy. It’s Fforde’s longest novel to date, and his darkest, as he finally reveals the story behind the alternate universe of both books.

The novels take place in the future, at a date unknown (but revealed within the second book), in a place called Chromatacia, which exists on the island of Britain. Our civilization appears to be long gone, as residents of Chromatacia refer to the Something That Happened before they existed. Their civilization revolves around color: Most humans can see just a single color, and their status in society depends on what color that is and how much they can see it. Purples have the highest status; Greys have the lowest. Our hero, Eddie Russett, is a Red, while he falls in love with the pugnacious Jane Grey, who has a habit of punching people in the nose when they displease her. In Shades of Grey, they discover that all is not right in Chromatacia or with the authorities that run it, National Colour, who profess to abide by the rules of a prophet named Munsell, who wrote the rules that govern the nation. The events that close the first book put Eddie and Jane in immediate danger of a death sentence, giving the sequel a real-time feel, as they must both solve the greater mystery of what exactly Chromatacia is and finagle a way out of execution via the Green Room.

Fforde has always at least dabbled in dystopias. The Thursday Next series takes place in an alternate universe as well, and while it’s mostly a comic and satirical world, he colors it (no pun intended) with numerous negative or simply unpleasant twists. Both of his standalone novels, Early Riser and The Constant Rabbit, depict worlds distinctly worse than ours, the former full of great suffering, the latter a not-thinly-veiled analogue for our own racism and xenophobia, just with bunnies. The truth of Chromatacia does not emerge until near the end of Red Side Story, but once it begins to come out over the last hundred pages or so, it is monstrous at both a micro level and a macro one.

That long, detailed conclusion and the sheer number of characters we met in Shades of Grey make Red Side Story the first Fforde book I’ve ever read that I found slow to start. It didn’t help that I read the first book fifteen years ago, so I didn’t exactly hit the ground running, but there is a lot of exposition here, and a ton of plot for Fforde to set up for his usual denouement to work. He’s a master of this particular form, laying hints and details early that will come back to matter later in a way that makes you laugh or simply slap your forehead for your failure to see it coming, but here he’s also busy building out more color (pun intended) to the world even as he’s placing stones for the conclusion. It’s not a mark against the book that he does so – this universe has so many details and quirks that it requires more work to set it up and keep it running. It does mean that some of the character development that boosted Shades of Grey doesn’t appear until you’re maybe a fourth of the way into Red Side Story.

That development goes far more to Eddie than to Jane, as she becomes more of a supporting player here, with Eddie clearly the star and far more in control of the action (to the extent that anyone is in control in Chromatacia). Jane was the more interesting and fun character in the first book, not least because she would punch anyone who commented on her rather retroussé nose (Eddie describes people’s noses any time he meets someone), but here she has somewhat less to do and ends up off screen more. Some of that is plot-driven, as Eddie is betrothed to the officious climber Violet deMauve, who is also carrying his baby, so she ends up a more significant character this time around, while Fforde also delves into the underworld of Chromatacia more than in the first book, much of which is necessary for the big finish.

Fforde had a long stretch of writers’ block when he was working on Early Riser, but since that book came out in 2018-19, he’s been on something of a roll, not just in productivity but in creativity, as his last few novels before the hiatus began had started to lose a little something, especially the Thursday Next ones. He’s promised the eighth and perhaps final book in that series next, and in February of this year he announced that there will be a third book in this series as well, which is especially interesting given how Red Side Story concludes. I’m already in the tank for Fforde anyway, but Red Side Story is even more ambitious than his typical novel, and seeing him succeed when stretching himself makes me even more eager to read whatever he publishes next.

Next up: Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.

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→ September 15, 2023
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Yellowface.

R.F. Kuang caused quite a stir earlier this year with the release of her fifth novel and first outside of sci-fi/fantasy, the scathing satire Yellowface, which bites the very hand that feeds her – the publishing world. The title hints at the secondary themes of cultural appropriation, racial identity, and who has the right to tell what stories, but the engine that drives this book and its self-justifying protagonist is sheer disgust at how the book sausage gets made.

June Hayward is a young white woman who has written one published novel to scant sales and mediocre reviews, while her college classmate and sort-of friend, Athena Liu, has vaulted into literary stardom in a manner not entirely dissimilar to Kuang’s history. Athena is Chinese-American and is working on her magnum opus, a massive historical novel about the use and abuse of Chinese workers in World War I, when she suffers a fatal accident in front of June … who grabs the manuscript to the unfinished and unsubmitted novel, The Last Front, and decides to clean it up and submit it as her own. June’s agent can’t believe it, shopping the book to a larger publisher, where the marketing folks suggest that June use her middle name, Song, instead of Hayward, ostensibly to get away from the failure of her first novel, but it’s hardly a coincidence that that Song could come across as an East Asian surname, is it? June’s happy to go along with all of this, even when a junior publicist at the firm pushes back on the whole scheme and questions the authenticity of some of the content, but after the book comes out to rave reviews and massive sales, the backlash begins, and eventually enough dirt comes out that June’s authorship becomes the subject of public scrutiny.

June is an anti-hero, an unreliable narrator, and a con artist, where she herself is one of her own victims: She’s so desperate for commercial and critical success that she dupes herself into doing and believing things that will obviously harm her in the end. She’s part Becky Sharp, part Maria Ruskin, and maybe a little Anna Delvey, but in the end she’s willing to do and say whatever she must to get ahead and stay there. That also means that anyone who gets in her way is an enemy and must be dealt with, which is when June becomes either ruthless or just so wrapped up in her own needs – and I think to her, this is about safety, rather than material gain – that she goes on the attack, or wants to, even when doing nothing is the best option.

The level of scorn that Kuang has for the industry is truly something to behold, and it provides some dark humor, not the laugh-out-loud sort but the “I can’t believe she’s writing that” kind. It’s not even a satire that exaggerates the truth to its limits to get its point across; Kuang does little more than sharpen a few details, letting the stark reality of things shock the reader instead. The outsized roles of Goodreads and social media sites, the emphasis on an author’s identity rather than their work, the control the Big Four publishing houses have, it all looks worse under the microscope. I doubt anyone still has the illusion that it’s the merits of a book that determines whether it’s a best-seller, but Kuang makes it clear just how far down the list of factors a novel’s quality sits.

The novel’s title refers to the history of white performers in stage and on screen pretending to be east Asian, such as the teeth-grinding cringe of Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. We’ve seen it in the publishing world as well, such as the white poet who submitted poems under a Chinese name because he claimed it increased his odds of getting published and another white poet who fabricated an entire persona of a Japanese survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima to publish his poems. Is June guilty of “yellowface” here? She takes on an Asian-sounding surname and doesn’t go out of her way to disabuse anyone of the notion that she has east Asian heritage. She takes on Athena’s novel, but makes substantial edits and rewrites, some before submitting it and some with the help of her editors. Is the mere fact that she’s telling a story about Chinese people, with references to Chinese culture and history, enough to say she’s committed this transgression? Is this cultural appropriation? Who can tell these stories – and if only an Asian writer can tell a story about Asian people, then does that mean Asian writers can only tell stories about Asian people? Kuang grapples with this last question at some length, including it in discussions of Athena Liu’s legacy, how the publishing world saw and used her, and how she felt as a token woman of color in what remains a white-dominated space where many decision-makers are still men.

I discovered Yellowface through several reviews and a Times article about the stir it caused in publishing circles, so I’m familiar with some of the criticisms. I do think it’s fair to ask about the quality of much of the prose, even though it’s told in Hayward’s voice, and while she presents herself as an underappreciated writer, she’s also extremely unreliable and likely overstates her abilities. It’s a novel that’s more readable than literary in that sense; the prose moves, and it’s evocative, but the wordsmithing here is unremarkable. What I do not understand or agree with is criticisms of its satire being insufficiently sharp, especially from writers, because I think making the satirical elements more overt or blatant risked taking the reader out of the story. Kuang could have made this funnier, but it would have come at a cost of veracity. This story rings true based on my limited experiences in and knowledge of the publishing world, which made it work for me even when the prose was a little thin.

For some comparisons, if you’re interested, you might want to read this very even-handed review by Hugo winner Amal El-Mohtar or you could read this incredibly nasty, juvenile review in the Cleveland Review of Books.

Next up: Ann Patchett’s latest, Tom Lake.

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→ January 7, 2023
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The Menu.

The Menu is a dark comedy/horror/social satire with an incredible cast and an impressive commitment to the details around its premise. It takes a hard turn about a third of the way through the movie that starts to make the audacious twist clear, and stays true to its theme almost to the end, where the movie sticks its first landing but fails to do so on the second, ultimate conclusion, which might be the difference between this film being just very good and being my favorite of the year. It’s streaming on HBO Max and is available for rent on amazon, iTunes, etc.

The film opens as we see a handful of obnoxious rich people boarding a boat for a highly exclusive restaurant, The Hawthorn, which is on a private island and helmed by a famous chef, Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), with a prix-fixe menu that costs $1250 a person. Our primary perspective is through the ardent foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) and his date, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), who we quickly learn was not the woman he was originally taking to this dinner. Other guests include the has-been actor George (John Leguizamo), an insufferable food critic who helped make Slowik’s career but is clearly now a skeptic (Janet McTeer), a trio of tech bros, and an older couple (Reed Birney and Judith Light) who we later learn are regulars. Margot recognizes the husband right away and isn’t happy to see him, nor he her. The diner-toursts are met at the dock by Elsa (Hong Chau), a humorless automaton, who gives them a brief tour of some of the grounds around the hotel before their seating. The meal begins with the sort of food you’d expect at a restaurant like this, with foams and gels and molecular gastronomy and deconstructions, with Slowik introducing each course with a soliloquy, only to have those become darker each time around. By the fourth course, things have taken a turn for the macabre, and it’s clear that this is no ordinary night at the Hawthorn. (There’s a great deleted scene that gives a little more backstory and that I think would have even further immersed the viewers in the food criticism aspect of the film, although I understand why it might have been cut.)

There is a lot going on here, and most of it works extremely well, starting with the film’s disdain for modern foodie culture – not food culture, mind you, but foodie culture, the worship of chefs, the conspicuous consumption, and the snobbery towards those who don’t speak the vernacular or share in the adulation. There’s a clear demarcation here between those two ideas; the substantive parts of Slowik’s monologues involve a real appreciation for food, for where it comes from, for living creatures that died for our plates, for the environment and the ecologies we spoil so we can eat whatever we want, whenever we want it. Chef Dominique Crenn, of Atelier Crenn, recreated several of her restaurant’s dishes for the film, and the plates we do see look incredible – and realistic, at least for a restaurant of this caliber. It’s food designed for the diner to appreciate the food, both the ingredients and the skill required to prepare them. That is separate from the diners, who are largely here for what you might call the “wrong” reasons, such as for the ability to say they ate there, even if they don’t remember or appreciate what they ate.

Margot turns out to be significant in the plot, as she’s the unexpected guest – the one person who wasn’t on the original manifest, and her mere presence seems to throw Slowik and some of the staff off their games, where they are otherwise robotic in their cultlike devotion to the chef and his commands. The contrast between their reactions to her and their reactions to everyone else is one of the early markers that something is very wrong at the Hawthorn, although I don’t think it remotely telegraphs what’s to come. (I will spoil one thing here, because it bothered me that it might be the twist: There’s no cannibalism involved. That’s such an overdone gag at this point that I was going to be seriously pissed off if that was the answer. It’s not.)

After a series of shocking events that drive the story deeper into the abyss, we get a double-barreled ending, one of which works extremely well, the other of which seems overcooked. The Menu requires some suspension of disbelief; it is the triple-distilled version of reality, which is a hallmark of great satire. The script is sending up both sides of the blade here, both the chef and the patrons, and does so effectively for most of the film, working with slight exaggerations that push the characters just to the wrong side of the line of plausibility. It earns that modest suspension of disbelief with dishes that look and sound completely accurate to the setting, with customers who viewers will easily recognize as archetypes, with a chef who conforms to the stereotype of the kitchen tyrant who abuses his staff in the name of great food. The first ending taps into a deeper understanding of two of the characters, and how one of them got to this point. The second ending feels more like bombast, and while it’s visually inventive (and funny), it pushed too far over that line of plausibility for me.

Fiennes and Taylor-Joy both landed Golden Globe nominations for their performances as the leads in a musical/comedy, which seems about right – Colin Farrell should win over Fiennes, Michelle Yeoh or Emma Thompson should win over Taylor-Joy, but both of these performances were strong and integral to the film. It’s a relief to see Taylor-Joy get a decent role and deliver within it after the fiasco of her performance in Amsterdam, and it might be her best film work since the very underrated Thoroughbreds (although I haven’t seen the 2020 version of Emma). Fiennes’s performance feels like the Spock-with-a-goatee version of his director character from Hail, Caesar!, a particular style he’s practically trademarked but that this time he twists just enough to make it incredibly sinister – not purely evil, like You-know-who, but menacing, so you feel like something awful is coming but can’t quite put your finger on why until the awful somethings start. He plays Slowik as the black comedy version of Daniel Day-Lewis’s fashion designer in Phantom Thread. I was a little disappointed to see The Menu didn’t get a screenplay nomination at the Globes, but they only give out one screenplay honor, while the Oscars do two and thus have twice the number of nominations available, so I hold out a little hope on that front. Right now this is in my top 5 from 2022, although we still have a lot of big films to watch (notably Aftersun and The Fabelmans), and the fact that I can’t stop thinking about it is probably the highest compliment I can give The Menu. It’s imperfect, but still has so much good stuff in it that it’s worth accepting its flaws.

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→ November 16, 2020
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Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm can’t match the shock value of the original Borat film, since we already know the deal and that Sacha Baron Cohen is willing to do anything for the sake of the gag, but I think in the end it’s actually funnier for it. There are still a few moments here where he and his new co-star, the Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova, go too far with a joke, but Cohen seems to have also realized that the real staying power of the original was that he could get the unwitting subjects to go along with him and show their worst selves on camera – which said more about America than it did about his fictionalized Kazakhstan.

After some early setup, the once-disgraced Borat returns to America on a second mission for the Kazakh government, this time to deliver a bribe to a high-ranking U.S. official – eventually settling on Mike Pence. He’s joined after some silly plot contrivances by his daughter Tutar (Bakalova), whom he decides to “offer” to Pence as a bribe, traveling across the southern United States and speaking with many ordinary Americans and some not-very-ordinary ones, most of whom come off far worse for the encounter. He gets a bakery employee to write “Jews will not replace us” on a cake, goes into a “pregnancy crisis center” with Tutar, and spends several days living with a pair of QAnon believers. He also meets a very kind and open-minded Jewish woman after he walks in a synagogue dressed as a giant pile of Jewish stereotypes, and hires a babysitter for Tutar who turns out to be the heart of the film and so popular with fans that a GoFundMe started by her pastor has raised over $180,000.

There are many laugh-out-loud moments in Borat 2, most of which come when one of Cohen’s jokes lands and the Americans he’s mocking do more or less what he’d hoped they would do. You’ve probably heard about the Rudy Giuliani scene – in which he doesn’t acquit himself well, at all, despite his later protestations to the contrary – but that’s not even among the top half-dozen scenes in the film for humor or impact. Borat takes Tutar to a Houston plastic surgeon, who takes the bait and describes how a “Jewish” nose would look by drawing the shape in the air – someone who’s highly educated and likely deals with high-income customers is completely comfortable trafficking in anti-Semitism. There’s a long setup to get to the pregnancy crisis center, but the result is a combination of old-school sitcom misunderstanding and the most cringey behavior imaginable by the pastor at the facility, who clearly has no concern at all for Tutar’s well-being.

Some of the jokes don’t land, though. There’s a menstruation joke that’s just about grossing out some Southern snobs at a dinner for debutantes, which is both unfunny and useless at exposing their elitism or the anachronistic nature of the whole practice. The end of the Giuliani sequence doesn’t really work either. It’s actually funnier to watch Cohen try to avoid fans who recognize him on the street in Texas than to watch those scenes or the drawn-out way in which he tries to reunite with Tutar after she runs away (thanks to the babysitter, who is beyond patient in explaining things to Tutar, including that women in the United States have actual rights).

Nothing is so damning as how easily many white Americans in this film show themselves to be racist or anti-Semitic, even when they know full well they’re being recorded, much as the South Carolina frat boys did near the end of the first Borat when they wished slavery still existed. The plastic surgeon is unapologetic for his comments on “Jewish noses” or his lecherous comments towards Tutar. I don’t think the bakery employee or the propane salesman who says his tank can wipe out a whole van of Roma people have said anything publicly or all the people singing along with the racist lyrics of “Country Steve.” And what would they say? This is who they are, and this is who we are. All Cohen had to do was turn his cameras on Americans and let us do the work.

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→ September 18, 2020
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The Invention of Sound.

I was the host for Chuck Palahniuk’s live-streamed Q&A event through Midtown Scholar, an independent bookstore in Harrisburg, PA, last Friday night, discussing Chuck’s new book The Invention of Sound. I’ve just gotten into Chuck’s oeuvre, having read that and Adjustment Day and just starting Fight Club, so I was simultaneously shocked and entertained by his newest novel, which is violent, dark, often funny, and extremely thought-provoking.

The Invention of Sound pairs two narratives that we learn early in the novel are going to intersect. One is that of Gates Foster, a father whose daughter, Lucinda, vanished from his office building about ten years earlier, leading to the demise of his marriage and his own downward spiral into obsessively hunting for her image in online pedophilia and child-porn communities. The other is that of Mitzi, a sound engineer who crafts and sells blood-curdling, realistic screams to movie and television producers, a business she inherited from her father and that she has built further with the help of Schlo, a successful producer who buys some of her best screams. We’ll also meet the wonderfully-named Blush Gentry, an actress on the downside of her character who sees a chance to boost her profile with Gates’ help – and who was the actor on screen when one of Mitzki’s most potent screams was used in a B-movie many years earlier.

Palahniuk was a great interview, and one of the best answers he gave me, which I think is instructive for all readers of fiction and for would-be writers as well, was that he uses violence as a way to bring the reader into the text and make the events on the page more visceral. (He said that drugs and sex also work in the same way.) The violence here is mostly implied, at least, rather than described graphically, as it was in Adjustment Day, but it’s there, and the specter of this violence lurks on every page – it raises the tension, but I read this with a good amount of fear that I was going to turn the page and find something that would turn my stomach.

Under the veneer of violence and depravity, however, are deeper explorations of questions like grief, especially when you’re grieving without closure; and of the power of fiction to move us, for better or for worse. Gates’ methods of dealing with his grief are not exactly evidence-based, but they do tell us something about the kind of open-ended horror of losing a child without knowing what happened to them – a rare occurrence, but among the most horrifying things any parent can conceive – and serve as an explanation for some of Gates’ more irrational or just plain dangerous choices.

Mitzi’s story is less successful than Gates’, although it’s just as compelling to read; it’s just hard to understand why she carries on with this business, knowing its personal toll on her, even when Palahniuk offers us a trauma in her past that might explain some of her risk-seeking behavior. She’s on her own death spiral, almost literally, but the more we learn about her character the harder it is to fathom why, more so because she goes so far out of her way to try to save her friend Schlo from almost certain death closer to the end of the book. She’s a villain, but also a victim, which makes her complex but ultimately inscrutable.

This might be too much of my own interpretation, but if I didn’t know Palahniuk’s work or reputation, I might have thought The Invention of Sound offered a sort of condemnation of horror films and other works of art that aim to please an audience by distilling and serving up the pain of others. There’s a whole genre of horror film that I won’t watch, where the violence is itself the point and the audience is supposed to root for the killer(s); Mitzi’s screams, and the industry she serves, feel like a satirical rendering of that kind of exploitative, misanthropic cinema. Why exactly do so many people enjoy watching the suffering of others, fictional or real? Would there really be a market for screams as realistic as those Mitzi sells, where no one asks how she manages to produce them? And is there tragedy at the end of this pursuit of greater horrors?

I’ll spoil one thing that probably should be obvious from the start of The Invention of Sound – Gates isn’t getting a happy resolution to his story, although he gets … something, certainly. The pleasure of reading his narrative is the multiple surprises that Palahniuk springs on us in the last few pages, twists for which he laid clues but that I at least missed while reading. It’s brilliant in several ways, and incredibly disturbing, but I can’t quite put my finger on what Palahniuk might be trying to say.

Next up: I’m reading his Fight Club, although of course I’ve seen the movie already.

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→ September 5, 2019
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Beer in the Snooker Club.

When I read My Uncle Napoleon back in March, longtime reader John Liotta suggested in a comment that I check out Waguih Ghali’s one novel, Beer in the Snooker Club, which he said was an analogous work set in Egypt rather than Iran. It is similar, for sure, perhaps less overtly funny and more satirical, replacing the slapstick of the Iranian novel with a more biting take on the Egyptian independence movement’s failure to provide its people with freedom.

Ram, the novel’s protagonist, and his friend-but-occasional-nemesis Font find themselves in a social and political purgatory in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, which overthrew King Farouk but replaced him with a military dictatorship that implemented its own repressive policies. The withdrawal of the English colonial presence has upended the social order and put Egyptian Copts in an uncertain position where the ruling Muslim authorities threaten their safety while the formerly open English borders have closed. In this context, Ram and Font recall their previous times in London, Ram’s wealthy aunt ‘donates’ her land to the poor while actually selling it to fellaheen (the farmer class), and Ram finds his affections torn between the wealthy Jewish woman Edna (off limits due to her background and class) and the also wealthy but less interesting Egyptian girl Didi.

There’s something overtly feckless and desultory about the entire novel, focused on Ram’s own aimlessness but infecting the entire setting, as if Ghali took the existentialism of Camus or Sartre and married it with the biting parody of Heller or Bulgakov. Ram’s slow realization that la plus ça change leads him to a state of ambition catatonia; he’s stuck, regardless of what he does, and if anything his prospects are worsening because of circumstances entirely beyond his control. He can stay in Egypt, but he’ll be in a religious, ethnic, and political minority (he, like Ghali, is a small-c communist, although Ram’s commitment to its principles is tenuous) at home, yet can no longer move freely to England in the wake of the change of government and the English actions at the time in the Suez. (Egypt’s president after the coup, Gamel Abdul Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, leading Israel to invade the Gaza and the Sinai with support from England and France in a failed effort to reclaim the Canal from Egypt.) Ghali combines the ennui of Camus’ protagonists with the absurdity of political satires of that era, although in this case he’s sending up the Egyptian upper class more than the government itself, which he depicts in the background in a same-as-the-old-boss way.

Ram’s character is the one that Ghali develops over the course of the book beyond the arc of his story, as we see how he went from a somewhat idealistic youth, protected from many of the harsher aspects of life under the autocracy of the king, to a cynical adult who realizes that Nasser’s rule merely switched one set of inequalities for another, establishing a new ruling class to replace the one it upended – a situation that leaves Ram worse off than he was before. It’s bleak, yet not quite hopeless, although the bleakness may have won out in the end for Ghali, as he killed himself in 1969 after more than a decade of living in exile.

Next up: I just finished Elizabeth McCracken’s novel Bowlaway.

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→ March 19, 2019
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My Uncle Napoleon.

My Uncle Napoleon, written by Iraj Pezeshkzad, is an Iranian novel written in the 1970s and later banned by the theocrats who took power in the 1979 revolution, likely for indecency, as the book is really a comic romp set during World War II in Iran. Based loosely on some of the author’s own experiences in childhood, the book follows the narrator as he falls in love with his cousin Layli and watches his father, his Uncle Napoleon, and another uncle squabble over trial things and plot against each other, often with unexpected consequences, as they all live in attached houses owned by the titular blowhard.

He’s usually called Dear Uncle in the book itself, however, and he is its Ignatius J. Reilly, a bombastic, self-important tyrant, trying to rule his house but finding himself thwarted by his brothers and often other members of the household. He’s assisted by his butler, Mash Qasem, who prefaces nearly every statement with “Why should I lie … to the grave it’s ah, ah … !” The two have concocted an elaborate fantasy of fighting for independence against Britain and in Iran’s Constitutional Revolution, and Dear Uncle is convinced that the English are still out to get him, something the narrator’s father frequently uses to his advantage. The narrator’s mischievous, philandering uncle Asadollah Mirza often helps in various schemes or tries to prevent them from getting out of hand, all the while speaking of sex in code, referring to it as “going to San Francisco” (and later referring to other sex acts as other cities). Dustali Khan shows up thinking his wife is trying to cut off his “noble member,” and maybe he deserves it, although she is quick to fly off the handle and scream bloody murder. Other eccentric relatives and neighbors wander in and out of the story, which doesn’t have a real narrative arc to it other than the loose background story of the narrator’s pursuit of Layli, who is promised to another cousin, the feckless wimp Puri.

Although some of the humor in the book is rooted in Persian culture, most of it feels very universal – this could just as easily be a comedy of manners set on some English lord’s estate, a Downtown Abbey with more yelling and backstabbing and at least talk of sex, although characters in this book talk about San Francisco a lot more often than they actually go there. It’s a different picture of Iran than anything we’ve had in the media since the Islamic Revolution brought the Ayatollahs to power; the news gives us Iranian leaders screaming death to the U.S. and to Israel, cooking up anti-Semitic conspiracies, and funding terror groups around the region, while Iranian film has given us pictures of a society in a sort of arrested development, a country that could be an economic and cultural powerhouse if it were a liberal democracy. These characters feel universal, even with names that are less familiar to western minds – I didn’t realize that the Khan in Dustali Khan was an honorific, not a surname – and some historical allusions that sent me to Wikipedia.

Like A Confederacy of Dunces, My Uncle Napoleon is also very funny. There’s a slapstick element of physical comedy throughout the book, with characters waving knives and guns around, falling over each other, and, once, kicking another right in the noble member, hard enough that any plans to go to San Francisco must be put off for some time. There’s some very clever wordplay throughout the dialogue, especially when Asadollah is involved. (The narrator is the obvious stand-in for Pezeshkzad, but I did wonder if Asadollah was his own adult self arriving in the novel to comment on the goings-on.) On top of the lower-brow humor is a thick coating of farce, mocking the Iranian habit of blaming the English for various problems in the wake of the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941, while also taking aim at all dictators through the orotund title character, whose sound and fury generally signifies nothing, yet whose lack of rank or history of valor don’t stop him from proclaiming himself a great hero and trying to keep all of the relatives staying in his compound under his thumb. He’s constantly trying to exile various people around him, or have them arrested, or to have this one pose confess to a murder that didn’t happen just to save the family’s honor and avoid a public embarrassment. Near the beginning of the novel, there’s a family gathering when someone passes wind loudly enough to interrupt Dear Uncle, which leads to an enormous family row that the narrator’s father enjoys far too much. It’s absurd, and funny, and also a symbol of the kind of family quarrels we’ve all had or seen start from nothing and blow up into more than they ever should have become.

Whether the story goes anywhere is probably beside the point, since the journey itself is entertaining, but if you’re looking for a neatly tied bow around the book’s conclusion, you won’t really get it. The story ends abruptly, and there’s a brief epilogue, but we don’t get a traditional big finish. It didn’t matter to me at all – I don’t really remember what Ignatius J. Reilly did at the end of his book either, and that never stopped me from recommending it, as I would this one.

Next up: I’m a few books behind now but just finished Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room and Karin Boye’s Kallocain.

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→ July 3, 2018
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The Death of Stalin.

The Death of Stalin (amazon • iTunes) , the latest film from writer/director Armando Iannucci, is a rollicking farce that is only loosely based on the death of the dictator in question and the mad scramble for power in the vacuum that resulted, with Iannucci moving events and even people around to suit the story. It’s frequently funny in a face-palming sort of way, even when the story is more barely contained chaos than structured plot, and a reminder to me that I need to spend some time with Iannucci’s past and better-known work, including In the Loop and the HBO series Veep.

Stalin appears as a character early in the film, mostly so we can see the rest of the Central Committee playing obsequious Ed McMahons to his Johnny Carson, laughing at nonsensical jokes and trying hard to stay off of Stalin’s legendary enemies lists, people to be rounded up and exiled or, more likely, shot after torturing, with one of the Committee members appearing on the lists the night that Stalin takes ill. (His death is also fictionalized – he did die of a cerebral hemorrhage, but the proximate cause, in the film, is fictional and played for laughs.) After a brief bout of will-he-die-or-won’t-he, he finally kicks it, and the chess game to succeed him starts, except it’s chess as played mostly by people who’ve never played anything more than checkers, except for the scheming Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) and the odious Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale). The factions behind these two are fluid, often in a nearly literal sense as when the two sides try to squeeze past each other to be the first to offer emphatic condolences to Stalin’s daughter Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough).

Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) temporarily became the Soviet premier in Stalin’s death, but Khrushchev wrested much of the power away from him in the nine days afterwards, which roughly corresponds to the events shown in this film. Tambor plays him as a seasons 4/5 George Bluth with more of a temper, generally a step behind everyone else and thus easily outplayed by Khrushchev and Beria throughout the story. The fact that everyone seems to be operating at a different speed, often missing things right in front of their faces, provides much of the humor in the film and all of those face-palm moments, as one character says or does something that others completely miss or just fail to understand.

The second half of the film, where the real machinations start up, kicks in when the army arrives, led by Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov (Jason Isaacs, chewing scenery left and right), and Khrushchev cooks up his final scheme to wrest control of the Committee for himself by throwing Beria under the bus. From that point, the humor shifts from the almost slapstick, misunderstanding-driven comedy of the first half to a mixture of high- and lowbrow farce, from the game of telephone the leaders all play while standing around Stalin’s casket to the antics of Stalin’s drunken son Vasily (Rupert Friend).

There’s no point in this film where it’s not funny, which saves it from the fact that the plot is rather slapdash and doesn’t hew closely at all to real events. The dialogue never stops, and Iannucci isn’t afraid to mix some bathroom humor (about up to my tolerance for that stuff) in with political gags, notably in the Keystone Kops routine after Stalin’s unconscious but not-dead-yet body is first discovered. The framing of the film around a recorded concert and vengeful pianist doesn’t work well, and some of the other Committee members seem superfluous to both the plot and the comedy, although it was great to see Michael Palin (as Vyacheslav Molotov) on screen again.

The Death of Stalin isn’t a great movie, or a particularly sharp satire, but it is very funny, often with jokes that build on top of each other as scenes become increasingly absurd. (Buscemi’s dance around Tambor at the funeral is beyond description and wonderfully choreographed.) I laughed, often, and then forgot much of the plot once the film ended – and the incongruous if generally accurate ending does burst the comic bubble too. The humor is smart, but the rest of the story doesn’t back up the humor with anything of substance.

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→ July 20, 2016
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The Sellout.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ November 18, 2015
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The Late George Apley.

I’m on a little run of past Pulitzer Prize for Fiction/the Novel winners right now, and just finished John Marquand’s extremely subtle satire The Late George Apley, which won the prize in 1938 when it was still only awarded to novels. The book is clearly a satire of the isolated, self-important life of the patrician class of the early 20th century, especially the so-called Boston Brahmins, but Marquand plays it so straight that I found myself vacillating through half the novel on just what parts he might have wanted readers to take seriously.

The book is a sort of fake biography/epistolary novel, where a longtime friend and former classmate of the title character has been asked by Apley’s family to write a private story of the man’s life, leaning heavily on his correspondence. The author (the fictional one, that is) traces Apley’s story back several generations, explaining the grand history of his family line within the United States, the first of many times when he tries to impress upon the reader the importance of the name. He gives us Apley’s birth and upbringing in a life of privilege and strict expectations, his attendance at the prestigious Groton School in Massachusetts (then all boys, now coed, which would have made for an amusing postscript to the book) and at some liberal arts college in Cambridge, and so forth, with every step already laid out for him by his imperious father and the constraints of polite society of the time. He falls in love with an Irish Catholic girl, is forced to end it when he’s shipped off for a Grand Tour, comes home, marries a woman of proper breeding, bangs out a couple of kids, and so on.

It’s a dull story in its own right, which is part of the point, and how dull becomes apparent in the latter half of the book when Apley’s son and daughter take advantage of the lax attitudes of the 1920s to live a little. Apley’s letters to and about his children seem increasingly ridiculous as the world changes around him – he’s still worried about the shrubbery around the family estate when the stock market is crashing – and only when he realizes he has a terminal heart condition does it dawn on him that life has passed him by. His final letters are reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day was, full of regret without hope. Unlike the butler of Ishiguro’s novel, however, Apley’s heartbreak is darkly comic: He admits, not quite explicitly, that he should have sowed his wild oats when he was younger, gotten wasted more, gotten laid more, and told his parents to stuff it and married the girl he loved (she makes a brief cameo again at the end of the book).

I can understand why this would have won the Pulitzer in 1938, when I presume the board considering the candidates was all white males and this sort of American aristocracy was more prevalent in the culture. It didn’t resonate so much with me today, however; even though I went to that liberal arts school, the population was quite diverse ethnically and by gender, and they’ve since done quite a bit to improve the diversity of economic backgrounds too, making Apley’s experiences there seem as anachronistic as the semi-arranged marriage and emphasis on decorum and appearances. It’s an entertaining read, but it feels very dated today.

Next up: Michael Shaara’s 1974 Pulitzer winner The Killer Angels ($6 in paperback!), a novel of the Battle of Gettysburg that was adapted into the four-hour movie Gettysburg in 199.
ppu

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