Tagged: review

The Man in the High Castle

To have no historicity, and also no artistic, esthetic worth, and yet to partake of some ethereal value–that is a marvel. Just precisely because this is a miserable, small, worthless-looking blob; that, Robert, contributes to its possessing wu. For it is a fact that wu is customarily found in least imposing places, as in the Christian aphorism, ‘stones rejected by the builder.’”
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

Why did no one make me read this book earlier? Or, considering that I have smart friends who certainly recommended this book to me over the years, why didn’t I listen and read this book a long time ago?

At the very least, I would have understood Mirage a lot better.

The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history–the Axis powers win World War II and divide the United States into Nazi and Japanese spheres of influence–but it’s much more than that. It’s a hall of mirrors, with an alternate history–”The Grasshopper Lies Low,” in which the Allies win the war–buried within the alternate history; it’s a political intrigue about the machinations of the fascist state, with its various overlapping branches and organizations attempting to thwart each other during a time of regime change; it’s a love story, a road story, an esoteric meditation in which the world is a book written by a book, the I Ching, that is randomly generated by the world.

It’s a subtle book–except for some jarring moments of violence (a Nazi operative is murdered, a skirmish in the Japanese consulate in San Francisco thwarts a Nazi kidnapping raid), there isn’t much action. But it’s a strangely unsettling book, packed with unstated ideas and unexamined consequences. As soon as you grasp what’s going on, something happens to throw it all out of place again.

Tenth of December

Why should those he loved not lift and bend and feed and wipe him, when he would gladly do the same for them? He’d been afraid to be lessened by the lifting and bending and feeding and wiping, and was still afraid of that, and yet, at the same time, now saw that there would still be many–many drops of goodness, is how it came to him–many drops of happy–of good fellowship–ahead, and those drops of fellowship were not–had never been–his to withheld.
Withhold.
Tenth of December by George Saunders

I’m not sure that I’d go quite so far as The New York Times in proclaiming that Tenth of December is the best book you’ll read this year; the year is young, and I read a lot of books. But it is probably the best book I’ve read so far this year, or at least a very close second, and it’s certainly the best book I’ve read this year that was published this year.

There are some things that have always irked me about George Saunders’ stories. His characters are a singularly inarticulate bunch, seemingly incapable of introspection and oblivious to their surroundings. While that may well be the point of stories like “Al Roosten” and “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” the point once having been made could probably be dropped, or at least suppressed. When I read one of his stories in “The New Yorker,” I sometimes feel a little cheated, as if I’ve got an issue with two “Shouts and Murmurs” columns instead of one clever but forgettable bit of satire and one solid short story.

But then I’ll read a story like “Escape from Spiderhead,” which explodes the Milgram experiment with a devastating example of human compassion, or “Home,” which counters all the stupid horror of the last two decades with subtle grace, or “Tenth of December,” which is the simplest expression of loving kindness in contemporary fiction, and I completely forgive Saunders for the numbing sameness of his characters’ voices. The world he offers up–of free will subverted by all manner of carefully (or not-so-carefully) wrought chemicals, of tawdry fame, of devastating but unthinking cruelty–is certainly our own; but the solutions he offers, or that his characters stumble into, are from so simple and beautiful a place that they are wholly alien.

From a writer’s perspective, the other thing I value in Saunders’ stories is their complete disregard for realism. Though Saunders’ moral universe is quite close to Andre Dubus’, he gleefully launches into the middle of a logical universe closer to Douglas Adams’ without needing to build the scaffolding to get there. Things aren’t just slightly off-kilter in his world; they can be extremely off-kilter (psychological drug experiments on prisoners? employees given consciousness-altering drugs as a normal part of their duties? immigrants frozen into symbolic tableaux on status-conscious suburbanites’ front lawns?), but Saunders doesn’t try to explain how things got to this point. Instead, he trusts the goodwill of his readers to suspend their disbelief and come along for the ride; and the payoff for surrendering to the madness more than makes up for any narrative gaps.

Of course, Saunders earns that trust by delivering on his promises. His characters, as inarticulate and self-absorbed and naive as they are, deliver up the goods; even if they aren’t always shaken out of their complacency, we are, and are made to see ourselves, uncomfortably, mirrored in these stories.

The London Train

It was a relief, to state the thing with such finality–as if she made it exist as an object to contemplate stony with clean lines and hard edges. With the loss of her parents behind her, and the loss of the babies she might have had ahead, she was withdrawn out of the past and future into this moment of herself, like a barren island, or a sealed box.

The London Train, Tessa Hadley

The London trainTessa Hadley; Harper Perennial 2011WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 

It took me two years to finish Tessa Hadley’s The London Train, not because it’s a terribly long and challenging book but because I had trouble caring very deeply about Paul and Cora, the characters at the novel’s heart. They aren’t unlikeable, necessarily, nor especially likeable either; they were simply not very interesting–I didn’t find myself wanting desperately enough to know what was going to happen next to keep going.

This isn’t to say it’s a badly written book; it’s not. Hadley’s writing is on a par with Alice Munro, William Trevor, or Ian McEwan; I picked this book up because I’ve loved her short stories, which are sharp and insightful and present characters who are realistically attractive and repulsive in just the right mix. Not only is it well-written, it’s interestingly structured: chronology is turned inside out, and the parallel narratives–first Paul, then Cora–plays with perspective and tone, giving two very distinct flavors to Paul and Cora’s affair.

Alas, the main characters turn out to be the least interesting characters in the novel. Cora’s husband Robert, an outwardly staid civil servant who has a history of walking away from commitments; Paul’s neighbors, Welsh farmers with designs on the land on the property line; Paul’s daughter’s boyfriend, a Polish immigrant squatting in London with his sister and engaged in a shady import/export scheme; even the nameless exiled Iranian poet who dies in an immigration holding center; all of these characters are infinitely more interesting than Paul and Cora, and would make for interesting stories and possibly even a novel in their own right. Had the novel been boiled down to a story, or perhaps two stories that mirror each other and hinge on the chance meeting that leads to the affair, the banality of Paul and Cora might not have been a problem; but their consciousnesses are simply too slender to hold up 200 pages.

The Last Policeman

Still, the conscientious detective is obliged to examine the question of motive in a new light, to place it within the matrix of our present unusual circumstance. The end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective.
The Last Policeman, Ben H. Winters

Post-apocalyptic fiction is not uncommon, and indeed has been quite unavoidable in recent years. Pre-apocalyptic stories, on the other hand–stories set in the shadow of a known and anticipated end of the world, or at least end of the world as we know it–are rarer. On the Beach is to some extent–much of the novel’s power comes from the inevitability of the radiation clouds’ southward trek–but most end-of-the-world fiction is more interested in the aftermath than in the lead-up.

Ben H. Winters’ The Last Policeman is very solidly a pre-apocalyptic story; indeed, it closes well before the anticipated apocalypse (though with two more books to come in the series, there’s a good chance that the end will arrive). Set in a recognizably contemporary United States, the doom that will be visited on the world comes in the form of an asteroid, Maia: having avoided detection because of its long eliptical orbit, the 6-kilometer-around hunk of rock will collide with Earth on October 3rd. With just months to go before the asteroid hits and plunges the world into chaos, society is in disarray: many people have abandoned their posts to pursue “Bucket List” dreams, suicide is rampant, and mistrust is endemic. With no future to plan for, the physical and virtual infrastructure is collapsing, and a general malaise permeates everyday life.

In the midst of this breakdown is Henry Palace, a recently-promoted detective on the Concord, New Hampshire, police force, who is committed to carrying on as though police work still mattered. He’s a recent police academy graduate, and tries to stick to a by-the-book approach even when the book is roundly ignored both in and out of the police force. When processing what appears to be an all-too-routine suicide (Concord has earned the nickname “hanger town” because of its citizens’ preferred suicide method), he becomes suspicious that there’s more to the case than just another hanging, and finds himself navigating a maze of narcotics trafficking, insurance fraud, and conspiracy theories. Palace is a novice detective, and it shows: he often misses important clues and connections, and chases many dead ends.

At one point I suspected that The Last Policeman was heading in a direction like The Pledge, which is in many ways the anti-detective novel: fabricating a murder around a desperate suicide seems just the right kind of break with reality someone like Henry Palace would have in the face of global doom. But while the novel is thoughtful, and conscious of the genres it’s playing with, it isn’t quite as outside its declared genre as that; Palace does uncover real crimes, but they’re complicated and nuanced by the “unusual circumstance” of the asteroid.

The Mirage

Mustafa used the van’s ignition key as a crude knife and managed to get the package open. Inside, in a slim plastic case, was a deck of playing cards. Each card bore a picture of a man’s face, captioned with an English transliteration of his name and a job title. Mustafa recognized many of the names and faces–almost all of them were prominent Baath Union members–but the job titles were whimsical.
The Mirage by Matt Ruff

Matt Ruff’s “The Mirage” starts as a police procedural and political thriller set in a topsy-turvy, through-the-looking-glass world: a world where the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in Baghdad on 11/9/2001 by a group of American Christian fundamentalists has plunged the United Arab States into a War Against Terror, embroiling it with the failed states and theocracies in North America. It’s a world where the Jewish state was established after World War II in occupied Bavaria, and where Israel and the United Arab States are allied against European and American Christian terrorists. Many of the transformations are broad and obvious, some are subtle and intriguing, and for about 200 pages the conceit holds together well. Ruff’s characters, particularly the Homeland Security agent Mustafa, are well-rounded and interesting, not merely plot devices, and the main characters’ conflicts rise as much from personal history as from the geopolitical world Ruff has created.

But the second half, with a massive expository dump by CIA agent David Koresh (just one of many recastings that seem satirical though not played for obvious laughs) and a too-literal deus ex machina, strains the suspension of disbelief a bit too much. Certainly a major theme of the book is the eruption of alternate realities into one another–Mustafa has begun to find artifacts from our own world, like New York Times articles about 9/11 and a set of the Saddam Hussein “playing cards” issued during the early days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq–but the eruptions become increasingly jarring and crudely drawn as the story winds down. It may have been a more satisfying read if it had ended with the mystery unrevealed, or if it had stretched to twice its length with more time to develop the alternate world and wrap it up more convincingly.

Despite this flaw, though, I found “The Mirage” well worth the read: it’s fast-paced and action-packed at the same time that it raises interesting questions, a combination that is fairly unusual.

a year in reading, 2010


photo by happy via

As 2010 comes to a close (with over a foot of snow and more coming down outside my window), I’m looking back over some of the books and such I’ve enjoyed; there have been some great and thought-provoking reads in the last year, and some that were pretty good but didn’t quite hit their potential. All in all, though, a good year for reading. Here are some of the books and articles that have made their way to these pages this year.

I closed 2009 and started 2010 with Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, the story of a German couple’s quiet but daring campaign against Hitler. The novel is gripping as both a moral exploration of the German people under Hitler, and as a police procedural; and even the back story of the novel, and of Fallada’s own life under the Nazis, is a harrowing tale.

In the Spring, I was inspired by a series of posts by Ta-Nehisi Coates on The Atlantic Magazine’s web site to learn more about life under another repressive regime: the plantation system in the South during the Confederacy. Andrew Ward’s The Slaves’ War is drawn from the words of the people who survived the war, particularly from a rich collection of interviews with ex-slaves and their descendants from the 1930s. The slaves emerge as actors in their own liberation with some ambivalence toward both sides of the Civil War.

Also in the Spring I read Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges and Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, two books which complement each other well. Hedges’ book is a Jeremiad against a cruel, crass, and corporate-controlled culture, with an all-too-brief ode on the “human capacity for love.” Judt, in contrast, is largely level-headed and reasonable, offering a history of the decline of the welfare state, politics’ retreat from “the common good,” and the uncritical acceptance of a rhetoric of perpetual market growth. A combination of Hedges’ passion and Judt’s analysis, bolstered by the empiricism of The Spirit Level, seems a good, if unlikely-to-be-followed, way forward.

I also made a dent in my stack of New Yorker magazines, though they’ve crept up on me again in the last couple months. (The current blizzard might be a great opportunity to revisit that project.) Of the stories and articles I read–an Italo Calvino fugue, a report on free diving, and stories by Joshua Ferris and William Styron–I think it was Sherman Alexie’s War Dances that I enjoyed the most. Alexie is always true to his voice, and voice matters a lot.

Marc Jacobson’s The Lampshade also deals in voices–ranging from a blues historian to Holocaust deniers to museum curators to a Santaria priestess–to tell the story of a voiceless object, a lampshade that appears to have been made from human skin of unconfirmed provenance. Jacobson pulls together the Holocaust, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the Jim Crow South, and Mardi Gras to tell the story of this lampshade and his quest to find it a home.

Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is less a time-travel sci-fi tale than a family drama about a son searching for his secretive father’s inner life. It uses the tropes of science fiction in some interesting and original ways. But it has some stylistic quirks, tics, foibles, follies, that drove me a little nuts, batty, crazy, around the bend. Another round of editing might have helped.

The last book I’ll likely get up on this site this year, given my holiday and other obligations, is The Word for World is Forest by Ursula LeGuin. It’s a story of colonial exploitation not unlike “Avatar,” but without that movie’s colonial baggage: LeGuin’s exotic green aliens don’t require a human helper to stage their revolt; indeed, their only human ally turns out to be a bumbler who does more harm than good. A LeGuin novel, even a very short one like this (a slightly different version won the 1973 Hugo Award for best novella), lives up to the promise of speculative fiction: a rich collection of ideas, an extended thought experiment, and a human moral drama in an alien place.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

I fix time machines during the day (whatever a day means for me–I’m not sure I even know that anymore), and at night I sleep alone, in a quiet, nameless, dateless day that I found, tucked into a hidden cul-de-sac of space-time.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

Charles Yu’s “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” uses the tropes of science fiction to explore questions of identity, memory, and loss. Though wrapped in the trappings of science fiction, with various time-travel paradoxes playing a part in the plot, the novel is really a story about an immigrant father and his son, and the mutual disappointments that inform their relationship.

And though I enjoyed the book very much, I found that its style kept me just on the verge of hurling it across the room. This novel suffers from a style that I’ve encountered in a few recent books, in which repetitive descriptions are stitched together with commas into long strings. It’s a sort of elegant variation on steroids. Used sparingly, this trope can enhance a passage: it can convey an uncertainty on the part of the narrator, who struggles to find just the right words, and provide just a touch of uncertainty when the pile of descriptors contradict each other. But used constantly, it feels cluttered and rough, and in desperate need of an editor. “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” would likely have lost a quarter of its weight had passages like these been trimmed down to size:

My father would forever be the guy who did not get the credit, the one swallowed up, enveloped by security, swept away and lost in time.

If I could tell him just one thing, wherever he is, pass him one message, it would be this: he had something. Something to his thoughts, his ideas, the papers in his notebooks, the work we did in his garage. Beyond just a purity to his ideas, a sincerity to his belief, a genuine curiosity, a determination that, if he just sat there long enough, thought hard enough, failed enough times, he’d find a way in. His idea was good enough, would have been good enough for the director, for the world, good enough to be a serious contribution to fictional science, good enough for me, but I don’t know where he is, and I have never been able to tell him this.

Pages and pages of these passages fill up the middle third of the book–unfortunate, because this is the most affecting part of the novel, in which the protagonist re-lives the moment his father succeeds, and fails, with his time travel invention. A recent article by Alexander McCall Smith demonstrates the power of concision against this sort of overwrought prose. While I don’t think every writer needs to sound like Hemingway or (Gordon Lish’s version of) Carver, I do value some editing.

Luckily, Yu’s book was compelling enough to overcome its style. (I never finished Arthur Phillips’s The Song Is You because this stylistic tic was combined with cloying self-obsession.) I look forward to reading more of his work, perhaps in a more rigorously edited version.

The Lampshade


With this lampshade you can say it had a first history, which is that identification with the Buchenwald camp and people like Isle Koch. … Then there is the second history. The history with you. Your adventures and your thoughts. There is the strange and frightening idea that someone would make a lampshade out of a person and it has arrived in New Orleans after a storm.

Mark Jacobson, a New York Magazine writer who splits his time between New Orleans and New York City, acquired, third-hand, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a lampshade apparently made of human skin. Four almost four years he tried to determine its actual provenance, and to find a fitting home for it; it proved to be an artifact that no one wanted, a horrible “white elephant” shunned by mainstream Holocaust historians and Holocaust deniers alike. The lampshade’s wanderings, in a custom-made carrying case, take it to Buchenwald, Jerusalem, New Orleans, and New York City, stitching together the threads of the Holocaust, the Jim Crow South, 9/11, Katrina, and the “Faust” legend (both in Goethe’s native woodlands and at the midnight crossroad where Robert Johnson sold his soul).

As a “Holocaust detective story,” The Lampshade has few actual clues. Jacobson has a DNA profile made at the lab that identified the meager remains of many 9/11 victims, which shows that the lampshade is likely to be human, though the age and degradation of the material makes an absolute determination impossible. Antique dealers place the metal frame of the lamp in the first half of the twentieth century, of a middle European style: the atrocities at Buchenwald fit within this broad historical geography, but it’s insufficient evidence to pinpoint the lampshade’s origins. The official record, in particular the Nuremberg trials and the trial of Ilse Koch, the infamous “Hexe von Buchenwald,” alludes to lampshades made of human skin, but there is little direct evidence of these particular horrors within the context of the greater horror of the Holocaust. In short, there’s little opportunity for a Sherlock Holmes to deduce the lampshade’s origins with much clarity.

But the heart of “The Lampshade” is less the quest for the lampshade’s origins, than it is an investigation of the tangled stories of racism and injustice in Germany and the United States. The book starts with Goethe, whose favorite walking site would become the location of the Buchenwald concentration camp, and with Robert Johnson at the crossroads in Clarksville, Mississippi, where the man who gives the lampshade to Jacobson spent years trying to get fitting recognition paid to the area’s rich musical legacy. Throughout the book, Jacobson illuminates connections between lynchings, neo-Nazi marches, grave robbing, medical cadavers, Mardi Gras krewes, and care for the dead. He interviews a wide range of characters, from Louisiana racist David Duke to the Jewish American communications officer in charge of opening Buchenwald to the world after the camp’s liberation; he discovers that Holocaust deniers are more open to the lampshade’s possible Holocaust connections than are the Holocaust museums in Washington, DC, and Jerusalem, and that Buchenwald itself, tainted for half a century by East Germany’s Cold War interpretation of the camp and struggling to overcome the heroic anti-fascist myths of the Communist era, isn’t particularly interested in a homecoming.

Though unsatisfying as a detective story, “The Lampshade” is a fascinating look at history through a macabre lens. The lampshade is both illuminating and obfuscating, directing light to interesting places and blocking the light from some hidden corners. It may not provide new insight into either the Holocaust or the history of New Orleans, but it raises uncomfortable questions.

Ill Fares the Land

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.

Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land is the perfect companion, and foil, to Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion. Where Hedges’ essay is a Jeremiad against the specific ills of contemporary culture, Judt’s is a cerebral assessment of where we took the wrong turn and how we might start to move back onto a path that was started in the years after the Second World War. They are both incensed by the same thing–a political culture dominated by corporate interests and an uncritical belief in the efficacy and naturalness of “free” markets–but Judt’s cooler analysis suggests possibilities where Hedges’ leaves the reader in despair.

Judt tells the history of Anglo-American political economy from the Great Depression to the present, as the story of the rise and fall of Keynesianism and social democracy. In his version, social democracy–in which a regulated market is guided by broad political consensus to provide material comfort for the majority of citizens, while also subsidizing culture (he devotes quite a bit of space to entities like the BBC, PBS, and public-private initiatives to support the arts)–was done in by its success. Over-confident planning created a drab and fettered world for too many–the council flats and public housing of the working class, the conformist suburbs of the middle class–and in the rebellion against conformity, the baby of the public good was tossed out with the dreary bathwater. The ideology of individualism, with the radical economics of the Austrian and Chicago theorists, threw the whole social democratic project into question; and with the fall of Communism, of which social democrats were far too uncritical, it became almost impossible to make a convincing case for the government’s role in building a just society.

Though clearly rooted in the Left, Judt’s analysis owes quite a bit to a particular brand of English conservatism. Echoes of Burke, Oakeshott, and Carlyle run through the book; Judt’s case is that it is the contemporary free-marketeers, not the New Deal and welfare state up to the early 1960s, who should be considered truly radical. The most radical effect of the 1980s turn to free market ideology has been to define the terms of debate such that social democracy has become unthinkable: as he quotes Margaret Thatcher, “there is no alternative” to unregulated markets.

The last two years (really, the last twenty, during which the living standards of the working and middle classes have failed to keep pace with the rise in GDP, and the lot of the poor has actually declined) should suggest that there are alternatives. Judt’s social democratic solution is based not on a bold vision of the future, but on a chastened fear of further economic catastrophe. It’s a very cautious program, focused on preventing future calamity rather than building a Great Society: social democracy ought to be as chastened by its history of failure as the free market ideology.

Judt’s clear, level-headed arguments, with a solid foundation in the conservative (rightly understood) ethical sense undergirding civil society, ought to win adherents looking for a way out of the corporatist dead end. I worry, though, that it is a bit too level-headed, and too lacking in vision. He’s right that the collapse of Communism makes bold visions look suspiciously totalitarian; note how the decidedly center-right Obama administration is tarred as “socialist” for even suggesting a minimal public role in health care, finance, and energy policy. Real Communists (there must be a dozen or so left someplace, perhaps in Cuba; clearly there are none in China anymore) must be scratching their heads at the rhetoric of the Right. Level-headed arguments may convince the academic class, but they don’t mobilize voters.

Some marriage of Hedges’ passion and Judt’s temperance is needed. There was a moment in the 2008 Presidential campaign–perhaps in Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, when he described the failures of the Bush administration and declared that “[w]e are a better country than this”–when it seemed as if a vision of a different future was forming. Alas, that moment seems to have passed; and despite Rahm Emanuel’s exhortations, a good many crises have been wasted without resurrecting a vision. The technocratic solution that Judt offers would certainly be preferable to what has passed for policy in the wake of the latest (but surely not the last) financial meltdown, but without some vigor, and maybe just a touch of brimstone, it is likely to remain a highly reasonable road not taken.

Free Fruit for Young Widows

He made it through the camps. He walks, he breathes, and he was very close to making it out of Europe alive. But they killed him. After the war, we still lost people. They killed what was left of him in the end.

Nathan Englander’s Free Fruit for Young Widows is more parable than story, sketching two acts of brutal self-preservation–one at the end of World War II, one during the Suez Crisis–and the very different reactions of two men. The characters, though, are more fully realized than is typical of a parable, and the result is a haunting story that brings abstract moral arguments down to concrete human terms.

Englander’s story would be memorable in any context, but especially so after a series of New Yorker stories that haven’t lived up to the standards of the magazine. (Was anyone else deeply disappointed by Doctorow’s Edgemont Drive, which was stilted, predictable, and not up to the standards of an undergraduate writing class? Were all the fiction editors on vacation that week?) I hope it’s an idicator of a better summer ahead.

Blog Widget by LinkWithin