→ October 27, 2021
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Homegoing.

My daughter had to read Yaa Gyasi’s acclaimed debut novel Homegoing for her 9th grade English class, reporting that she thought it was extremely well-written, just sad. I tend to enjoy post-colonial literature, so I thought I’d give it a shot, further encouraged by the fact that the novel had won the PEN/Hemingway Award.

The novel is a sequence of fourteen connected short stories that follow the descendants of two Asante half-sisters, one of whom was sold into slavery, the other married to an English colonizer, down to the present day, by which point both lineages are in the United States. What happens from there isn’t as simple as you’d expect – this isn’t Sliding Doors, where everything is great in one set of stories and awful in the others – as Gyasi builds a new character in every chapter, developing them as independent people but also recognizing how history would define not just their circumstances but their personalities as well. The stories move through several centuries of history, from the way contact with Europeans tore apart the Gold Coast to how slavery and Jim Crow laws continue to limit Black Americans’ economic opportunities.

Even as the setting shifts from present-day Ghana to the U.S., the shadow of colonization obscures everything that happens in Homegoing. The course of history was changed when white people showed up in Africa and decided it was theirs – the land, the resources, and even the people – and the ramifications echo down through seven generations in this novel. Gyasi doesn’t deny her characters free will, but we are all shaped by our circumstances, and her characters’ circumstances build on themselves like a matryoshka, so that the characters in our present day, who would appear to have more freedom and more opportunity, are still weighed down by the centuries of oppression that preceded them.

I can also see why my daughter wouldn’t love the stories in this book, as most are grim, many are violent, and few offer much hope. There’s some graphic content in here, including rape and sexual assault, enough that I assume many schools wouldn’t assign it, but it’s almost certainly an accurate depiction of the way the English treated the Asante natives, and later enslaved, and of course the way American slaveowners treated their slaves.

Where Gyasi excels is in her ability to create one interesting character after another, despite only giving us a short time with each of them and also working with the constraints of the previous story in each chain (and, I presume, the subsequent stories as well). It’s an impressive feat of imagination within the confines of the novel’s structure, marking her as someone who is as deft with the short form as well as the longer.

It’s also why I’m not talking much about the individual characters and stories – they’re so short that I don’t want to spoil too much of them. Esi is the half-sister who is enslaved, then raped by a British officer; her daughter, born of that assault, grows up a slave in the American south, and manages to send her baby with an escaping slave to freedom in Baltimore, starting a chain of misery that moves back into the deep south and then to New York, with racism, further violence, forced labor, and more. Effia marries the Governor of the slave castle where, unbeknownst to her, her half-sister Esi is held in the dungeon below. Their child, Quey, is ill at ease in the white man’s world and returns to his Asante people, beginning a back-and-forth pattern between the Black and white cultures in east Africa until the final story sees their descendant in Alabama, where the two stories will eventually reconnect. It’s a masterwork of planning, with the parallel narratives coming together in a way that is driven by coincidence yet feels natural, almost inevitable, and that will never have you thinking how meticulous the novel’s structure is.

Next up: I’m reading some of the books on writing that you all recommended, having finished Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and started Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences about Writing.

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→ December 16, 2020
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Ghostwritten.

After reading Utopia Avenue this summer, I realized, with some help from readers, that I was missing out on quite a bit of the context because I hadn’t read enough of David Mitchell’s previous work. His first novel, Ghostwritten, introduces several people who’ll pop up again in his later books, while also introducing what I assume is the first appearance of one of his noncorporeal Horologists.

Ghostwritten is more of a short story novel, with each story connected in some small way with at least one of the previous ones – sometimes just by the detail of a character appearing in the background of one and becoming the protagonist of the next, sometimes more significantly. That made it feel much more like a tuneup for Cloud Atlas, where he weaves six separate novellas together but is more effective at making them all feel like parts of the same tome. That’s not to say Ghostwritten doesn’t work, but I definitely had more of a sense that I was reading a short story collection than a cohesive single work.

That story where we meet what I assume is a Horologist is probably the book’s best-written and most interesting, as the narrator is a spirit who can take over a person’s brain and can jump to another person with a touch. The spirit is in Mongolia, and ends up in someone who’s on the run from the secret police, so the whole chapter has a spy-story vibe that isn’t present elsewhere – the same way the Luisa del Rey chapter in Cloud Atlas read like a detective story within the larger novel.

One other oddly compelling story in the book is set on a tea shack on Mount Emei, one of the four sacred mountains in Chinese Buddhism, in a tale that spans almost the entire life of its main character. Beginning when the shack owner is just a young girl, the narrative follows her through regime changes, social upheaval, and multiple razings of the shack that require her to rebuild. There’s a powerful undercurrent of perseverance and acceptance, consistent with the tenets of that religion, demonstrated by her resilience in the face of what could have become crippling defeats.

The first and the penultimate stories in Ghostwritten revolve around a doomsday cult that launches a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, very much like the actual 1995 attack by the cult Aum Shinrikyo that killed 12 people, which was chronicled by one of Mitchell’s stated influences, Haruki Murakami. While the events, and ultimate confusion over what’s real in the depiction, make a useful framing device for the other stories within the novel, the translation of a real-world terrorist attack in such stark terms felt almost exploitative, especially given the extent of Mitchell’s imagination on display elsewhere in the book.

Perhaps reading Ghostwritten out of order, after reading what is widely considered his best book (Cloud Atlas) and two more written after that one (Slade House and Utopia Avenue), takes away some of its power, as I was left with the impression that I’d read a strong debut that hinted at better things to come but also felt uneven and in some ways unfinished. The concluding two chapters are especially unsatisfying, one because it’s an unsuccessful attempt at an experimental style, the second because it blows up (pun semi-intended) most of what came before. Had I read this first, I probably would have compared it to the rookie season of a player I thought would become a star but hadn’t shown it all in year one – say, George Springer in 2014. Now I’m biased because I know Mitchell can do so much better, and already has.

Next up: I just finished David Wondrich’s Imbibe!, a history of the American cocktail, and am almost halfway through Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police.

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→ March 25, 2020
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Sabrina & Corina.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina is her first published volume, a slim collection of eleven stories about women of mixed Latina and indigenous ancestry grappling with identity, sexism, and cultural changes in the rapidly shifting landscape of Denver, the author’s hometown. The book was shortlisted for the National Book Award (won by Trust Exercise) and the Story Prize (won by Everything Inside) and made numerous year-end top ten lists for 2019, due, I assume, to its beautiful prose and the window it opens on to characters and subcultures that do not often appear in contemporary literary fiction.

The title story is told through the eyes of Corina, remembering her cousin Sabrina with whom she shared much of her childhood before they grew apart as Sabrina became more licentious, and who has now been strangled by some unknown man months after the last time Corina saw her, the latest in a long string of women in her family killed or harmed by men. That leads into “Sisters,” which jumps back a few decades to tell how Corina’s aunt was blinded by a violent man – and how little people even seemed to care about what happened to her. “Tomi,” one of the standout stories in the collection, is told by a woman who’s just coming home from prison to live with her brother and his son, the title character, as she tries to rebuild trust with her family even as Tomi is struggling with his mom leaving the family, leading to a confrontation when Tomi tries to go see his mother across town. Every story has some incident of death or another kind of loss, set against the backdrop of a city that marginalizes women of color in multiple ways – economically, geographically, socially – and creates the conditions for these cycles to repeat themselves.

I wouldn’t put this among the top contenders for this year’s literary awards – at this point, the Pulitzer is really the only significant one left – because there just isn’t enough here. The stories are great, without a letdown in the collection, but there is a sameness across the volume that made me want Fajardo-Anstine to stretch out beyond these themes and character archetypes. I assume she will do so as she grows as a writer, whether in more short stories or in longer forms of fiction, but by the time I reached the final story, the plaintive “Ghost Sickness,” I realized how similar the characters and settings had become over the course of the book. There’s a tenuous quality to the stories, especially their main characters, where I felt connected to what was happening but not to the women at the centers of these events, and in nine or ten of the stories the protagonist might as well have been the same person. It is a very promising debut effort, however, a bit like a rookie season by someone you think is going to become a star in another year or two – just not as well-developed a work as you’d expect of someone further in their career.

—

I’d set a goal for myself for 2019 to read ten works of literary fiction, and this marked the tenth such work I’ve read, which means I feel like I have read enough to rank them. This isn’t a Pulitzer prediction in any way, but a matter of personal preference. I wouldn’t be shocked to see something from this list win the award for fiction next month, though.

1. Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken
2. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
3. Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg
4. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
5. Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat
6. Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
7. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
8. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
9. Exhalation by Ted Chiang
10. Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

The one 2019 work of fiction I haven’t read but plan to read when I can is Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House. If something I haven’t read wins the Pulitzer, I’ll read that too.

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→ March 13, 2020
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Everything Inside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ July 8, 2019
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The Periodic Table.

Primo Levi’s short story novel The Periodic Table is a strange, interesting, maybe convoluted book, with each chapter built around a single chemical element that usually figures into the story, with Levi’s life from childhood through the Holocaust and afterwards as the book’s through-line. It made the Guardian‘s list of the top 100 novels ever written, and in 2006 the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it the best science book ever written, for which it beat out The Selfish Gene, Double Helix, and Gödel, Escher, Bach, among other titles. It’s also an arduous read, not for the content around Levi’s time in Auschwitz but for his disconnected writing style and prose that is often a difficult slog. I’m also fairly certain there’s some metaphor in here I missed, perhaps because I found his prose so prolix that I couldn’t read the book on two levels at the same time.

The Periodic Table is an autobiographical collection for Levi, a professional chemist who survived World War II in part due to his chemistry skills (and due to some good fortune, like falling ill before the death march out of Auschwitz that killed many surviving prisoners of the Nazis). Two of the stories (“Lead” and “Mercury”) are straight fiction, but the remainder tell some stories from Levi’s life before and during the war, although a few others read like fables rather than renderings of real life.

The two fictional tales and some of the fabulist stories, like “Arsenic,” in which the narrator is asked to examine a sample of sugar that might be tainted, are much easier to follow in prose and story – Levi lets loose, so to speak, and writes more like a fiction writer than a scientist. Some of the earliest stories about his life prior to the Fascist takeover of Italy and his eventual imprisonment are among the slowest to read, with the elements in question also less directly related to the actual story … but when the Nazis arrive, Levi becomes a bit of a different writer too, working with the natural tension that comes from having a murderous regime in charge, with its agents unpredictable and violent. The stark “Cerium,” named for a rare earth element about which Levi knows little other than its use in the flints found in lighters, is set inside the Lager (Auschwitz), where he and a comrade Alberto steal supplies of cerium so they can trade them for rations to survive, making the grim calculus of X flints for Y more days of life.

Levi survives the war, of course, while many of his friends and colleagues did not. The chapters after the liberation skip over some of his worst experiences in the hands of the Russians, but detail his attempts to reintegrate into the greater science world. “Vanadium” has Levi trying to locate an old nemesis decades after their last meeting. “Silver” is a bit of a science mystery, as Levi has to figure out why certain photographic plates are arriving with flaws from their factory. The final story, “Carbon,” is the most literary of all, a fanciful, beautiful meditation on the arc of a carbon atom over the millennia, going from somewhere in rock and earth to forming part of an actual life and back again, a testament to the impermanence of our existence and the survival of the building blocks of the universe beyond ourselves. But I exited the book with the sense that I didn’t fully appreciate what Levi tried to express; it could be the translation, of course, but I think Levi was such an erudite and precise writer that he often sacrificed clarity to find just the right word or phrase, which meant I spent more time trying to follow the literal plot when there was probably a greater layer of meaning I missed.

Next up: Still reading John Berger’s G..

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→ September 20, 2018
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Florida.

The National Book Award announced its longlist for its 2018 fiction prize last week, and among the ten titles was Florida, the new short story collection from Lauren Groff. She was previously nominated for the same honor for her 2015 novel Fates and Furies, which earned widespread critical acclaim and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Florida is a good bit shorter and showcases Groff’s ability to craft a compelling narrative in just a handful of pages, with the typical inconsistency of most short story collections but some standouts that rank among the best things I’ve read all year.

The stories in Florida are connected only by that state, which is the setting for most of them and the place of origin for central characters in the others, with recurring themes across stories like the pernicious effects of climate change (including the existential fears it causes for various characters), physical or metaphorical sinkholes, or growing income disparity in a state often associated with ostentatious wealth. Groff paints a grim portrait of the state’s present and its future in stories that range from psychological horror to pleas for empathy, turning the so-called “Sunshine State” into a vaguely menacing and often depressing backdrop for stories of lives gone awry.

The best story in the book – and quite possibly the best story of any length I’ll read in 2018 – is “Above and Below,” which tells of an adjunct professor who slides far too easily into homelessness and follows her over several weeks and months of living in her car, in a homeless encampment, in a flophouse hotel, and more, documenting her own feelings through the process of simply trying to stay alive and safe. The story, about 30 pages long, manages to touch on so many aspects of the protagonist’s life, including her broken relationship with her mother and stepfather, as well as the way superficial factors affect our sense of self and how people within our lives can quickly become invisible to us. There’s so much heartbreak in this brief work that I found it easy to understand and empathize with the main character, even though I’ve never experienced any of this; nothing hit me harder than the moment when she thinks she’s been recognized by a former coworker and is mortified by the thought of him seeing her in her current state, only to realize he’s seen right through her and is looking at someone else.

The other true standout in the collection is “Dogs Go Wolf,” which reads like a horror story, with two young girls left alone in an island cabin by their mother who may be off partying (although as with most off-screen details in Florida, Groff leaves much of this ambiguous) while a storm approaches and the girls’ supplies start to dwindle. They’re young enough to be scared of imminent threats but probably should be more scared about who’s going to rescue them, and manage to keep themselves feeling somewhat safe by telling each other stories – a theme, that stories can nourish and comfort us, that recurs throughout the novel in all manner of settings.

One maddening aspect of Florida is Groff’s insistence on leaving characters without names. Once in a while, it can be a clever rhetorical device, something that helps make a story seem more universal, or that can emphasize the dehumanizing experiences a character undergoes, but when every story has the same feature, it begins to feel like affect rather than a purposeful decision on the part of the author. The opening and closing stories appear to include the same central character, a woman who in the first part is trying to avoid making a scene at home after dinner and in the second has her two young sons with her on a quixotic working vacation to research Guy de Maupassant in France, but she’s also one of the least sympathetic figures in the entire collection, someone who hamstrings herself with questionable choices and rash decisions, and even in 70-plus pages featuring her, the reasons for her odd behavior are never made clear.

I haven’t read any other nominees for the National Book Award yet, so I have no idea where Florida might rank, but I do expect to see it come up frequently in best-of-2018 lists given its quality and Groff’s history. It’s certainly miles ahead of the latest Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, the forgettable novel Less, with stories here that will stay with me for months, and a hazy, sluggish atmosphere throughout the collection that left me feeling dazed the way a humid summer day in Florida itself would.

Next up: Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.

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→ July 18, 2016
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The Stories of John Cheever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ June 5, 2016
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Honeydew.

I was totally unfamiliar with the American short story writer Edith Pearlman until earlier this year, when I saw her name and her latest collection, Honeydew, on a list of likely candidates for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (eventually won by Thanh Viet Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer). Honeydew didn’t end up on the short list, but I’d already bought it and I’m stubborn like that. Most of the stories in the book run around 10-12 pages yet manage to create totally believable, well-rounded little worlds, usually with at least one three-dimensional character, yet with a very light touch that keeps the prose moving.

Pearlman’s stories focus on some little detail of ordinary life and exploring its effects on one or more of the characters, but all seem to tie around the idea of finding enough happiness to get by. Several stories are set in or around an antique shop in the fictional Massachusetts town of Godolphin, owned by the slightly eccentric Rennie, who lives by a very specific code in dealing with her clients, but seems less able to apply similar rules and limits on her own life. We experience her shock, when, for example, the wife half of a couple who frequently shop with her falls ill and requires hospice care, and the husband refers to Rennie as one of her closest friends. But is this the sadness of a woman who was simply without friends, or is the problem Rennie’s for failing to recognize the meaning she held in someone else’s life?

In “Hat Trick,” four teenage girls are mooning over boys when one girl’s mother, a bit drunk and bitter, concocts a game where the girls put the names of various boys on slips of paper and place them in a hat, to be drawn at random but never revealed; each girl then must pursue the boy whose name she drew. It is a realistically-drawn fable; the girls take the pledges seriously, or at least three of them do, and the results, while hardly what the reader might expect, feel real. Each girl pursues happiness and finds some – the “happy enough” bit I mentioned above comes directly from the mother in this story – even though her fate was determined by a sort of rigged random draw.

“Castle 4,” one of the longest stories in the book, has a bit of a Hollywood ending, but the core character, the introverted anesthesiologist who rejects copious advances from women (dude, what are you doing), is so alienated from other people that you can feel cold just reading about him. He drifts through the job and social functions like a shade, making only the barest minimum of contact with others, yet his story resolves when he falls for a patient whose back pain turns out to be terminal, stage 4 cancer. The conclusion is forced, but his attraction to a woman who has been forced into an isolated state by circumstance fits with the way Pearlman has defined his impalpable character.

The title story ends the collection but was one of my least favorites in the book, as it’s less realistic and uncharacteristically overwrought. The headmistress at a girls’ prep school in New England is concerned about an anorexic student, yet is having an affair with the girl’s father, and is six weeks’ pregnant with his child. None of the characters gets the full development of those in other stories, although Pearlman does write brilliantly about the eating disorder itself, and there’s the whiff of the hackneyed in the setting itself.

There’s a bit of dry wit in many of her stories as well, which helps keep the stories moving even when the themes could be depressing, none more so than in “Blessed Harry,” in which a Latin teacher at that same prep school gets an out-of-the-blue invitation to speak at a conference in England on “the meaning of life and death.” The teacher’s kids, sporting varying degrees of cynicism, all immediately suspect it’s a hoax, while he at first allows himself to soak in the feeling that he’s wanted, that he’s been more of a success in his working life than he actually has. It’s a bit more respectable than a 419 scam, but Pearlman milks it for humor before the teacher begins to realize where the success and meaning in his own life lie. These little moments of grace or insight in an existentialist context, coupled with her ability to quickly define and fill out her characters, carried me through Honeydew as if I were reading a single, gripping narrative.

Next up: Connie Willis’ Bellwether.

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→ May 30, 2016
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For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.

My friend Samantha has been touting the work of Nathan Englander for a while now, and I finally cracked open his first collection of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, last week. Even though the subject matter couldn’t be more foreign to me – many of the stories revolve around Hasidim, adherents of an ultra-orthodox sect of Judaism – Englander’s prose and his insight into human emotions are uncanny, especially given his age when he wrote many of these stories. He deftly blends humor into stories that get at serious questions like spirituality, gender equality, and finding hope in the hopeless.

The nine stories within the collection all encompass Jewish themes or characters, but range from World War II to a modern Hasidic community in New York and the aftermath of a bombing in Tel Aviv. The first story, “The Twenty-Seventh Man,” evokes the Night of the Murdered Poets with a story of the roundup of 27 Jewish writers in the postwar Soviet Union, a number that should have been 26 but mistakenly includes a shut-in writer whose work has never seen the light of day. “The Tumblers” reads like a fable, telling of the Jewish residents of a European city’s ghetto who are deported to a concentration camp but manage, however briefly, to stave off their fates by pretending to be a traveling circus of acrobats, a tragicomic story because you know it can’t really end well, but the individual moments are light even in extreme darkness.

My personal favorite in the collection, “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” takes the concept of the gilgul, a belief of Jewish mysticism of the transmigration of a Jewish soul from one body to another, and turns it into a story that is by turns a slapstick comedy and a serious look at what happens in a marriage when the two partners have divergent spiritual beliefs. A nonbelieving Christian experiences an epiphany while riding in the back of a taxi in Manhattan: He realizes, or perhaps it just hits him, that he’s Jewish. And it’s not just a lark, as he rather quickly becomes orthodox, keeping kosher, adopting various rituals, seeking the advice of a sort of iconoclast rabbi who also believes in this doctrine of transmigration. The wife, however, is not having it, and tries to get her husband’s psychiatrist to talk sense into him, culminating in a painful, awkward dinner with the four of them (eating kosher) where Englander refuses to give us a true resolution, because there isn’t one: when two people disagree on such a fundamental issue, one that in this case would pervade most of their mundane lives as well as their spiritual ones, there’s no easy answer.

“Reb Kringle” is just what you’d expect – a Jewish man who bears a strong resemblance to Santa Claus reluctantly plays the part every December, until he meets the child who causes his hidden self to rebel against the subterfuge … and yet his overreaction doesn’t negate the truth of the injustice the child faces. The closing story, “In This Way We Are Wise,” goes in the other direction, ditching the comedy of the earlier stories to look at how ordinary people can survive living in an environment where terror is banal, ten brief pages that walk one survivor through the immediate aftermath of yet another cafe bombing in Israel.

Englander’s great gift is the intense realism of his dialogue – the spoken words, and the interior thoughts – of each of these characters, who seem so very normal because Englander can paint them quickly with broad strokes that hit the canvas with precise edges. The mentally ill Jewish father of “Reunion” could be a clown, or a nut, but in fact is a very regular guy with some sort of mania that is destroying his family. The central character in “Gilgul” is also run-of-the-mill, but even when what he says – like announcing to the taxi driver, “Jewish, right here in your cab” – is absurd, the voice, the scene, the specific words make it plausible. Englander’s fiction reads like fact because he writes people as people are.

Next up: More short stories, this time Edith Pearlman’s Honeydew.

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→ March 9, 2015
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Tenth of December.

I wasn’t familiar with the work of American short story writer George Saunders until a friend of mine here in Delaware (the father of one of my daughter’s classmates) recommended Saunders’ collection Tenth of December, which won the 2013 Story Prize and the inaugural Folio Prize, while it was shortlisted for the National Book Award (along with Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland), losing to James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird. Saunders has a clear gift for speaking in tongues, using wildly different narrative voices from story to story, sometimes to the detriment of the story, while the vignettes themselves capture dark emotions through the eyes of ordinary (if a bit off-kilter) narrators.

The title story closes the book, and tells of a chance encounter between an adult man who intends to kill himself by allowing himself to freeze to death, and a teenaged boy who believes or is merely fantasizing that the girl on whom he has a crush has been abducted by the first man. When the boy falls into a frozen lake, the man is forced to abandon his plan if he wants to save the boy, while the reader hears his internal monologue explaining why he wants to take his own life. It takes a while to get going, which is true of most of the stories in the volume, but the pace accelerates once all of the critical elements are in place.

The real centerpiece of the book, both the most complex story and the one with the most irritating narration, is “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” written by a suburban father who’s struggling to provide a middle-class upbringing for his daughters. The story is told as a series of journal or diary entries from the father, who often dispenses with grammatical niceties like subjects, so the whole thing reads like it was written by a three-year-old (with a big vocabulary) or by Cookie Monster. The father has a Willy Loman-esque quality to his yearnings for more material trappings for his kids, especially his oldest daughter, who’s feeling the social impact of being one of the least affluent students in her school, while he and his wife (who don’t seem to be any too sharp with money) slowly rack up strangling consumer debt. An unexpected windfall allows him to splurge on a gift for his daughter, the Semplica Girls, whose plight – I won’t spoil it – should open his eyes to what real poverty and hopelessness are like, but don’t because he’s so caught up in his own internal rat race.

Saunders gets some comparisons to Vonnegut, although I think the latter was more wry and cynical where Saunders finds far more humanity in his characters and shows more empathy for them. “Escape from Spiderhead” describes the experiences of a convict in an experimental prison where the prisoners end up test subjects for a variety of drugs used to stimulate or repress feelings of love and lust. It’s a Vonnegut-esque view of the future, but where Vonnegut would have used the setting as a commentary on our increasing reliance on the pharmaceutical industry or the dangerous intersection of technology and the human condition, Saunders instead uses it as mere backdrop for the central character’s inner conflict when the warden/director administers a drug that delivers horrible mental and emotional pain to another patient while he’s forced to watch.

As in any collection, fiction or essays, one author or many, the quality within Tenth of December fluctuates. “Victory Lap,” the opener, takes a disturbingly distant, antiseptic view of one young boy, whose parents are strict to the point of abusive, facing an internal struggle whether to stop the potential rape of his young neighbor, a girl who appears to have thrown him overboard as a friend as she became more popular and his parents restricted him from any kind of socializing. “Home” may be a highly effective story of a young veteran returning from Iraq, struggling to deal with his own emotional trauma while he encounters an absolute mess in every aspect of his home life, but the story left me thinking I lacked the life experience (as in, I never served) to appreciate or evaluate what Saunders was trying to tell me. The ending of “Puppy” didn’t click with me at all, as it seemed like Marie would have made the opposite choice when confronted with the horrifying detail that turns her away.

Saunders’ facility with language, not so much his vocabulary but his ear for syntax, affect, the sound of words whether spoken or thought, was by far the strongest aspect of Tenth of December, making it easy for me to get lost in a story even if I didn’t find the plot itself terribly compelling. And the fact that he has empathy for most of his characters (aside, perhaps, from the two leads in “Victory Lap”) made it an emotional read as well, given his ability to get the reader into a character’s mind. When Saunders’ stories are more just stories and less with A Point, Tenth of December can match any anthology I’ve read.

If you’re intrigued and want to read a bit of his writing, Saunders’ nonfiction essay “Manifesto: A press release from People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction,” which appeared in Slate in 2004, is a marvelous read.

Next up: Andrew Lawler’s Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?: The Epic Saga of the Bird that Powers Civilization, which uses the word “cock” more often than any book I’ve ever read.

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