→ June 11, 2023
→ By

Demon Copperhead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ September 2, 2018
→ By

The Song of Achilles.

Madeline Miller is a scholar of Ancient Greek and Latin and of Greek mythology, so her Orange Prize-winning novel The Song of Achilles seems very on brand for her – she has taken one of the classic myths of antiquity, featuring one of the most famous names to be found in Bullfinch’s guide, and created a stirring novel around it. She mostly hews to the standard myths of the time, adding some notes at the end to explain why, for example, she didn’t use the part of the myth where Achilles’ mother dips him in the water to make him invulnerable, but leaves his heel dry and thus the one place where he can be slain. (It turns out that part of the story came very late to the Greeks and isn’t canon.) Where she does take a liberty is in turning the friendship between Achilles and the exiled prince Patroclus into a romance, one that probably isn’t inaccurate to the norms of Greek society but absolutely changes the very nature of the two characters and why Achilles died the way he did in the original myth.

Achilles was a half-god, half-mortal, conceived during the rape of the sea goddess Thetis, and the godhead within him made him into a fearsome warrior who appeared to be immortal on the battlefield and capable of feats of strength and quickness that were beyond the capacity of any other mortals. In the original myth, he befriends Patroclus, exiled from his own nation after he accidentally kills another boy (who, in Miller’s telling, was attempting to bully him). In this book, Patroclus, the narrator, is quickly smitten with Achilles, and their friendship turns first into an awkward teenage romance between the two boys – one that Miller’s Odysseus remarks isn’t uncommon for the time – but then into a full-fledged relationship not that far from the state of marriage. Miller uses this to put Patroclus right at the center of all of the action, and adds depth to the story of Achilles’ death at the end of a sequence of killings that leave Patroclus and Hector of Troy dead as well.

Miller truly does hew to the story she was given by the gods, and spends more time filling in the details than in trying retell or in any way alter the core myth of Achilles – but that’s part of this book’s problem. It’s a stirring read and moves extremely quickly – I’d guess I knocked this out in under five hours, very fast for a 360 page book, and the last half of it took me two hours on a flight – and yet in some ways felt insubstantial, especially the bulk of the material that comes before the Greeks head to Troy to fight for the return of Helen, the beautiful wife of Menelaus who was kidnapped by Paris (Hector’s brother … seriously, not the best of families there, Mr. Priam). When Miller takes us to war, even though some of the drama there, again drawn from the source myth, has little to do with battle and more to do with grown-ass men (and one demi-mortal) acting like teenagers, the material moves away from dialogue and idyllic scenes in the forest to acquire some actual weight. Of course, by that point, the reader realizes we’re in the place where Achilles and Patroclus will die, so the narrative greed picks up, but there’s also a marked difference in the intensity and realism of the prose between the two halves of the book. So much of the description of the puppy love between the two boys reads more like a bad YA novel with better vocabulary; the interactions among the soldiers and their leaders ring far more true.

There’s also a weird disconnect between how Patroclus perceives Achilles, since the reader sees his inner thoughts, and how Achilles treats Patroclus, which always, even in moments that are supposed to read as tender, come across as distant. It is as if Patroclus idolizes Achilles – which is kind of understandable, since Achilles is a handsome, athletically gifted half-god, sort of a Greek Kris Bryant I suppose – but Achilles is just dabbling in the love that dare not speak its name. Perhaps he is just playing around; perhaps Miller’s Achilles is bisexual, and his brief infidelity is a reflection of a conflict within him that Patroclus faces. By making Patroclus the star-struck gay kid within the story, Miller put the less interesting character of the two in front of the microphone. Had she told the story in another way, and spent a little less time on Achilles’ youth, perhaps she wouldn’t have needed the crutch of war to power the novel through to its conclusion – a conclusion that, by the way, is very sweet and befitting a myth of this magnitude. If only the rest of the book lived up to its ending.

Next up: Donal Ryan’s From a Low and Quiet Sea.

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→ April 29, 2016
→ By

The Most Dangerous Book.

James Joyce’s Ulysses stands today as one of the most critically lauded novels ever written – despite the fact that it’s difficult to read and more difficult to understand – which has, to some extent, papered over its tortuous path to the marketplace. When Joyce was first writing the novel, it was serialized in parts in a literary periodical called The Little Review, which then ran afoul of U.S. obscenity laws, leading eventually to the book’s banning before it had even been published. In 1933, Random House, at the time a relatively new publisher founded by the owners of the Modern Library imprint, decided to publish Ulysses and force a judicial hearing on the book’s legality. In the resulting case, United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, Judge John Woolsey ruled that Ulysses was not obscene, marking one of the first big victories against U.S. obscenity laws, including the Comstock Act, which made sending materials deemed obscene through the mails a federal crime.

Kevin Birmingham recounts the legal battles over Ulysses in The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, weaving that story into one about the book’s original authorship, including Joyce’s health problems and eccentricities. The book may have gone a bit overboard in detailing Joyce’s personal life – I really didn’t need to hear excerpts of the dirty letters he and his partner Nora sent to each other – but the details around the book’s history and the Puritanical extremes of American laws at the time are indispensable to anyone who’s ever read a banned book.

Joyce is a giant among authors today for all four of his major works, but had difficulty finding a publisher for his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or his collection of short stories, Dubliners, each of which also ran afoul of authorities but also lacked any obvious commercial appeal. Even when published, the works languished on the market for several years, leaving Joyce, obsessed with his novel and spending what money he had on drink, financially dependent on various patrons who wished to see Ulysses completed. He began writing the book in 1914, published the first episode in The Little Review in 1918, and saw the novel published as a whole in 1922 by Sylvia Beach, the owner of Paris bookshop Shakespeare & Co. (The Paris bookshop by that name today is named for Beach’s shop, which closed in 1941 after Beach was sent to an internment camp.) Copies of the banned book circulated for nearly a decade, with multiple seizures and burnings by overzealous authorities, until the 1933 ruling that cleared the way for its publication and unlikely status as a bestseller.

Joyce received some money from the serialization but wasn’t always aware of the self-censorship of his sort-of friend and advocate Ezra Pound, who looms large in the book for his role in spreading the gospel of Joyce while appearing to hold a sort of professional jealousy of the Irishman. Even the first full edition of Ulysses was rife with mistakes – Wikipedia cites Joyce scholar Jack Dalton as saying it contained “over two thousand errors” – and its publication history has always been complicated by Joyce’s deliberately obscure prose and the messy handwritten manuscript he handed over to a series of typists as he was writing. The attempts of Pound and others to soften the parts of Joyce’s work deemed “offensive” were futile, as Joyce wanted the book to offend, both because he wrote much of this novel (the first major work of modernism) to resemble thought in the mind before it became formal speech, and because he had a puerile obsession with bodily functions.

Yet the Nausicaa episode, the one at the heart of the eventual trial, is also one of the book’s most literary and most abstruse to readers. Leopold Bloom masturbates as he watches a young woman sitting on the beach, exposing her legs and bloomers to him deliberately when she realizes he’s looking at her, but Joyce couches it in obscure language and makes it unclear how much of the episode is real and how much is happening in Bloom’s mind. Similarly, the final episode, Penelope, is a fifty-page internal monologue from Molly Bloom, Leopold’s wife, broken into just eight sentences (and with only two periods at that), where, among other things, she admits she was “fucked yes and damn well fucked” by another man, yet the “obscenity” is so thoroughly buried within the long, hard-to-follow text, that arguments around its offensiveness had to isolate the “dirty” parts rather than considering them as a whole – because, in reality, if you read the work straight through to try to get to anything salacious you’d be too exhausted to be titillated by the handful of descriptions of sex. Those arguments eventually carried the day in Woolsley’s oft-reprinted opinion on the matter.

Birmingham gives great detail on the business end of Ulysses, from its publication history to smuggling efforts to get it around censorship in the U.S. and eventually Great Britain, as well as much information on the fundamentalists in various anti-vice societies who helped write and enforce the draconian laws that could ban a book on the basis of a single complaint. The founder of the New York Society of the Suppression of Vice, Anthony Comstock (later U.S. Postal Inspector), and his successor, John Sumner, abused powers they should never have been granted, trampling on the First Amendment to censor and destroy any materials they found objectionable, including early works on contraception and abortion. While Comstock died before the first episode of Ulysses appeared in print, he set up the regime that allowed Sumner and others to suppress the book in part or whole for fifteen years, even though by 1923 it had been widely praised (and panned) by well-known authors, poets, and literary critics. These passages end up some of the strongest in Birmingham’s book, better than the details of Joyce’s life with Nora, as is the brief section on the beginnings of Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s last novel and one of the most difficult reads in English literature (or so I’m told, since I never got past page one).

–

Around the same time I listened to Birmingham’s book on audio, I read Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, winner of the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and a book so heavily inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses it felt highly derivative to me. McBride writes in a style that mimics Joyce’s pre-speech efforts – McBride herself has said she wanted to voice thought before it became thought – to tell the story of a girl whose brother undergoes a drastic surgery to remove a brain tumor when he’s still a toddler (before she’s born), an event that shapes her entire life as well. The narrator’s destructive relationship with her born-again mother (the book has a strongly anti-religious bent) leads to her having sex with her uncle at 13, going to college, becoming a promiscuous alcoholic, being raped twice, and pulling an Edna Pontellier. Beyond the aggravating prose, the book is one-note, dismal and hopeless, the story of a path determined before birth, a girl who can only gain agency by destroying herself. It may be realistic, but that doesn’t make it something I’d want to read.

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→ April 29, 2015
→ By

Americanah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ September 20, 2012
→ By

The Tiger’s Wife.

Tea Obreht’s debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the Orange Prize for Fiction (now known as the Women’s Prize for Fiction) in 2011, making her the youngest author to win the award, given to the best English-language novel written by a female author in the preceding year. It’s an unusually thoughtful book for an author of 25, reflecting Obreht’s upbringing in the former Yugoslavia until age 7, when her family moved to Cyprus to flee the war, eventually settling in the United States. The book employs magical realism and obvious yet strong symbolism to cover the tragedy of her native country’s brutal sectarian civil war, although the story was surprisingly antiseptic for such an awful, emotionally-charged subject.

Obreht’s protagonist/narrator is Natalia, a young doctor who has recently lost her grandfather, to whom she was extremely close as a child and who often told her stories of his encounters with “the deathless man,” a man who could not die and claimed to be an agent or acolyte of Death itself; and of the tiger’s “wife,” a deaf-mute woman who befriends a tiger that escaped from a local zoo and lives in the woods outside of the town where the woman lives with her abusive husband. The deathless man draws from just about every major work of magical realism you can think of, as well as more overtly spiritual works like The Alchemist, and as a result is the less interesting of the two major subplots. I understand his relevance in a country repeatedly torn apart by wars, both civil and continental, where death becomes an ordinary part of life, and could see his value as a symbol of something that cannot die or be killed (national pride, family, love) even when death is everywhere.

The fable, presented as fact, of the tiger and the woman known in her village as the tiger’s wife is more complex and more compelling, even though it starts with one of the worst cliches and ends in hatred and intolerance. The tiger is the outsider, escaped from a zoo elsewhere in the country, scraping out an existence on the periphery of this village, apparently aided by the deaf-mute wife of the abusive butcher (the cliche, right down to his back story). Her unknown relationship with the tiger, especially after her husband’s disappearance, becomes the subject of gossip in the town, fueled by fear, ignorance, superstition, and hate. Here lies the book’s greatest strength – where Obreht could have beaten the reader over the head with “bigotry is … bad!” commentary, she allows the story itself to make those points subtly, further softened by the use of a non-human character who appears more often in conversation than in the flesh.

Natalia herself, however, is surprisingly bland, more of an outside observer in the mold of Nick Jenkins without the latter’s wry observational humor. Her relationship with her grandparents is sweet, but draws little sentiment from the reader because so much focus is on the two secondary stories. Her own relationship with her friend Zora, another doctor with whom Natalia visits an orphanage to deliver vaccinations, is an afterthought, as is the story of the band of gypsies tearing up a local field to find the remains of a cousin buried there during the country’s civil war twelve years earlier. It’s rare that I write that a book could have been longer, but Obreht cut herself off too soon and could have tried to tie the four main plot strands together more fully.

Ultimately Obreht’s book reminds me of the two novels by Khaled Hosseini, both strongly symbolic novels that attempt to tell a specific country’s tragic history through smaller narratives, yet both books I enjoyed reading more than I enjoyed pondering after reading them. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with reading for pleasure, but for whatever reason, I prefer novels that stick with me more after I’m done.

Next up: I finally went back and finished Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, which was borderline unreadable, and am about to begin Lush Life, by The Wire writer Richard Price.

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→ April 30, 2011
→ By

Home & A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

My latest top 50 ranking for this year’s Rule 4 Draft is up. I’ll also be back on College Baseball Live this Thursday night at 7 pm EDT and on the postgame show as well.

—

The old man nodded. “Maybe I’m finding out I’m not such a good man as I thought I was. Now that I don’t have the strength – patience takes a lot out of you. Hope, too.”
Jack said, “I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it’s gone, it’s like there’s nothing left of you at all. Except–” he shrugged and laughed “–what you can’t be rid of.”

She’s only written three books, but Marilynne Robinson has to be in any discussion of the best living American novelists, and there is no living writer whose prose I’d rather read. Saying a writer writes “from the heart” can be like saying a player “sees the ball well,” but Robinson produces some of the most moving, heartfelt scenes and passages I’ve ever seen and does so without the excess of sentiment or cloying language that could turn a book with a similar setup into mass-market chick lit.

Home, currently on sale for $10 through that amazon link, is the parallel novel to Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead. (It’s worth mentioning that Robinson’s three novels have each won a major award – Housekeeping won the PEN/Faulkner award for the best debut novel of its year and Home won the Orange Prize for the best English novel written by a female author.) Gilead was a series of notes or journal entries from an older priest named Ames who, nearing his death, wishes to leave a testament for his young son. That journal also showed scenes of his complex relationship with his friend and fellow preacher Robert Boughton and Boughton’s prodigal son Jack, named for Ames, who returns to Gilead after a twenty-year absence. That return is the subject of Home, as Jack, a lifelong alcoholic who didn’t even come back for his mother’s funeral, shows up carrying two decades’ worth of secrets and memories, with arguably four decades’ worth of loneliness and sorry as well. His timing is propitious, with his father’s health declining even more rapidly than Ames’, and Jack’s sister, Glory, living at home again after a disastrous courtship that has left her resigned to spinsterhood.

Despite the presence of just three characters for most of the book, with everyone else accounting for maybe 10% of the dialogue and whatever passes for action in a Robinson novel (she has never in three books resorted to plot twists or other tricks of the trade to spice up the story), Home is Robinson’s most complex work. The developing relationship between Jack and Glory, separated by enough years that they were never close as children, is one side of a highway where the other direction contains the gradual yet accelerating deterioration of the relationship between Jack and the dying father who has confused decades of worry over his wayward son with decades of love; it’s not clear that anyone was or is capable of helping Jack, who has what would today most likely be diagnosed as depression, but Boughton, already starting to lose control of his emotions in the earliest stages of dementia, faces the crushing disappointment of seeing the failure and tragedy of Jack’s life incarnate, in his kitchen or his living room. And yet Jack, first welcomed and then rebuked by his own father, draws closer to the old man and to his sister … but never so close that he can make the place he refers to as “home” his actual home, instead revisiting the childhood feeling that he wished he lived there in spirit rather than simply in body.

That dualism symbolizes one of Robinson’s central themes, the gulf between our spiritual selves (or souls) and our corporeal existence. Robinson writes honestly of religion, or more specifically of religiosity, as her many religious characters are neither caricatured nor placed on pedestals; religion is simply intrinsic to their lives, and Home is suffused with conflicts between religious tenets and human behavior, as well as the doubts that have plagued Jack for his entire life, further isolating him (although it was far from the main reason) from a family of believers.

And part of Robinson’s gift is that she can write about religion without creating an overtly religious novel. Home is very much about life on earth, about the weight of memories, about choices gone awry in the distant past with ramifications in the present day. Glory’s broken engagement has left her back at home, unemployed, and without romantic prospects; one of the most heart-rending scenes comes near the book’s end as she remembers her own daydreams about her own future family, about children that will probably never exist, a warmth and happiness that she feels is now permanently denied to her. (I don’t believe the characters’ ages are mentioned, but Glory is probably in her early 30s, and I suppose in a small Midwestern town in the 1950s this would make her marriage prospects fairly slim.) Jack, meanwhile, slowly exposes layers of his sorrow to Glory, but not to his father, a permanent barrier to the old man understanding his son; the woman who helped Jack get back on his feet and remain at least partially sober for the past ten years is now denied to him, a severance that seems to have driven him back to Gilead and, in his mind, has cut him off from salvation in this life or any other. Unfolding these relationships in a way that gets at the heart of family dynamics, of loneliness, of regret, and of the ultimate comfort of home without ever relying on unrealistic plot twists to force characters into false corners is more evidence of Robinson’s mastery of language and of character. She went 25 years between her first and second novels but just three years between Gilead and Home; I can only hope the gap before her next novel is as short as the last.

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Flannery O’Conner’s first short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, is even more theologically-minded than Robinson’s work, combining stories about the meaning of faith, salvation, and what it might mean to be “good.” The stories are largely twisted, even macabre, as in the title story where an escaped convict wipes out an entire family so O’Conner can show us the difference between saying you’re a good person (or, more specifically, a good Christian) and actually being one. O’Conner dreams up killers and con artists, thieves and rascals, putting “good” people in bad situations to see how they might react.

Aside from the notable title story, the most interesting to me was the longest story in the book, “The Displaced Person,” about a rather high-minded Southern widow named Mrs. McIntyre who takes in, under some duress, a family of Jewish refugees from Poland who fled the Nazis. Her ignorance of conditions in Europe at the time is particularly stark to us now, given the passage of time and our deeper understanding of the extent of the genocide and the horrible conditions in and outside of the camps for Jews. But her lack of charity and her unusually defined ideas on race/origin stood out for her post hoc construction of ethnic identities; even as the Jewish husband works harder, without complaint, than anyone else she’s ever had on her farm, she is appalled to find him trying to bring over relatives trapped in German death camps and potentially marry them off to black workers on the farm. The priest who organized the placement of the refugees is no help, as he’s a single-minded, simpering man who sees Mrs. McIntyre only as a shell, as a person to be saved and as a settlement place for the refugee family but not as an individual, an oversight that leads to the story’s ultimate tragedy. That climax is one of the strongest depictions I’ve seen of the banality of evil, a phrase which, not coincidentally, was coined to describe the complicity of German citizens with the Nazi’s plans for extermination of Jews and other minorities.

Anyway, the title of this collection inspired me to create my second Tumblr post.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s English-language debut novel, A Wild Sheep Chase.

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→ August 3, 2008
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Bel Canto.

All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and a PEN/Faulkner Award, is a beautifully written, intelligent novel with one of the best-developed character ensembles I have ever found in a work of literature.

Bel Canto is based on the 1997 hostage crisis in Lima, where fourteen members of a fringe guerrilla group invaded the Japanese embassy and held 72 people hostage for four months, at the end of which the Peruvian army stormed the embassy and killed all of the terrorists, with one hostage dying of a heart problem in the assault. Patchett’s version is in an unnamed, poor, Spanish-speaking country, in the Vice-President’s residence, where a party is being held in honor of a Japanese executive, Mr. Hosokawa, who may be about to bring a large capital investment to the country. However, he only agreed to attend the party when the organizers agreed to fly in Roxane Coss, a world-famous opera singer and Hosokawa’s favorite artist.

Patchett tips us off up front that the eventual murder victims will be the terrorists, not the hostages, although of course the characters don’t know that as we follow them through the ordeal. Patchett has created an amazing number of fleshed-out characters, showing skill both at delving into human emotions and at painting characters with the flourishes that give them definition. Once the initial period after the raid has ended, each character, terrorist and hostage alike, finds his or her niche within the makeshift commune, like the Vice President who becomes the housekeeper, or the poor priest with a secret love of opera. (In a flashback scene, Father Arguedas confesses his love of opera to his priest, who responds, “Art is not sin. It’s not always good. But it’s not a sin.” The priest asks Arguedas if he prefers Verdi or Wagner, and when Arguedas responds, “Verdi,” the priest answers, “You are young. Come back and tell me again in twenty years.”) But more impressive is the way Patchett takes the relationships between some of the hostages and some of the terrorists beyond simple Stockholm Syndrome territory, showing how factors such as age, size, gender, and skill define interpersonal relationships and building a web of interactions on that basis.

If there’s a flaw at all in Bel Canto, it’s that Patchett made her terrorists too sympathetic. Most of the rank and file members are just teenagers without ideology, and each of the leaders has some distinct humanizing trait. It’s good writing, but also the book’s biggest departure from reality.

Bel Canto lacks a linear plot, instead telling the stories around the shift from the captor/hostage dynamic to a commune that is so tranquil that some of the hostages find they lose their desire to leave. Whether this is because they’re truly happy or because they’re happy to be escaping from the tedium or stresses of their daily lives is left to the reader to decide.

Next up: I owe you reviews of Embers and the nonfiction book Manhunt, but the next book for me to read is a behemoth, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.

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