The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

The privately owned mushroom is an offshoot from a communally living underground body, a body forged through the possibilities of latent commons, human and not human. That it is possible to cordon off the mushroom as an asset without taking its underground commons into account is both the ordinary way with privatization and a quite extraordinary outrage, when you stop to think about it. The contrast between private mushrooms and fungi-forming forest traffic might be an emblem for commoditization more generally: the continual, never-finished cutting off of entanglement.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World is a deep dive into the informal economy that produces the matsutake mushroom. Prized by consumers, especially those in Japan and Eastern Asia, the matsutake grows in forests from Oregon to Yunnan to Finland. Where it is picked, it is picked by loose "assemblages" of people operating on the margins of official society. In America, that often means Southeast Asian immigrants, Hmong and Lao, among others, as well as white survivalist types who embrace the notion that mushroom hunting offers a kind of freedom from the demands of normative society. Tsing's thesis, as far as I can tell, seems to be that this is a kind of economy that is not capitalist, that emerges from a kind of commons, but that these non-capitalist modes of economic activity are quickly and summarily subsumed by the capitalist economy. I don't know about that--but maybe I mean that literally, because the economic angle here isn't exactly my forte.

In general, I expected the book to be more about mushrooms, and less about economic and social theory. But I did enjoy how Tsing manages to bring together many modes: straight reporting about the matsutake pickers, of course, and economic theory, but also ecology and social history. In the growth of the mushroom, which relies on mutualistic assemblages so vast it's hard to isolate the fungus into specific, isolated species, she finds a powerful metaphor for the commons. As a result it's hard to say what kind of book this is, though I think a general reader might find its more theory-laden sections difficult.

One thing that struck me: The matsutake, as Tsing describes it, actually thrives best in the most ecologically ruined forests. In America, that means in forests of opportune lodgepole pines that emerge in the wake of clearcut ponderosas. This points to something that Tsing describes as "salvage," that I'm not sure I quite understood, but which has something to do with the way that the ruins of capitalist activity are reinscribed into informal economies. In that sense, there's an interesting kind of circularity to the economy that Tsing describes: it thrives in the wake of capitalist ruin and excess, transformed into an informal economy that is then reinscribed into the formal economy by buyers and wholesalers.

Scotland: A History from Earliest Times by Alistair Moffat

Reflecting on the immense journey that is our history, many competing interim conclusions crowd the landscape. But at least one theme is clear. Scotland was never an inevitable destination. As we approached several crossroads, our destiny might easily have turned in different directions. Scotland could have become Pictland, Alba, Norseland or Northern England. This recurring sequence of uncertainties, real enough at the time, is a useful corrective to the temptation to read history backwards.

On my recent trip to Scotland I saw many famous names: Stirling Bridge. Bannockburn. Culloden. William Wallace. Robert the Bruce. Rob Roy. Mary, Queen of Scots. John Knox. Loch Ness. Loch Lomond. Glen Coe. Iona. But at the same time they were arranged for me in a kind of mental geography, I needed a book like Alistair Moffat's Scotland: A History from Earliest Times to help me arrange them into chronology and narrative--a big fat history of this beautiful country. 

Moffat's history does indeed begin from earliest times, with the geological forces that created this landscape, with its volcanic islands and deep glacial lochs, and the prehistoric peoples whose mysterious "standing stones" still dot that landscape today. As Moffat moves forward through history, identifiable kingdoms begin to emerge: the Picts, the westerly Gaelic kingdom of Dal Riata, Northumbria, etc. Moffat shows how what we think of as Scotland and the Scottish people really emerge from a series of converging migrations and conquests: the indigenous Picts, the conquering Gaels, Romans, Norse, and Normans. (I found Moffat's reliance on DNA markers to trace this heritage a little tedious and suspicious, but I don't really know anything about it.) Scottish identity emerges only later on, with the battle of the Wars of Scottish Independence when William Wallace and Robert the Bruce fought to shake off English power and influence.

Scotland's relationship with its powerful neighbor to the south is a big theme in this history. To me, it seems as if the story goes something like this: after fending off English encroachment (and at times, direct control) for several hundred years, Scotland ends up sort of like the mouse that catches the cat when James VI becomes James I of England, bringing the two nations closer together than ever. But far from exerting a Scottish power over England, James' accession only further entrenches the entanglement that lasts all the way through the Acts of Union that create Great Britain in 1707 through the Jacobite uprisings, where forces loyal to the deposed line of James II tried to take the throne back from William of Orange, to the present day, when Scotland extracted the right to the reestablishment of its own parliament at the turn of the 21st century.

I knew some of that already, but there was much of it that was new to me, especially the line of hapless Stewarts that lead up, somehow, to the powerful reign of James VI and I, a narrative that's filled the expected gory and macabre details of medieval jockeying for power. I also enjoyed understanding better the internal conflict between Lowland and Highland Scots, which sometimes, but not always and never perfectly, maps to other conflicts: Protestant vs. Catholic, Scots vs. Gaelic, elite power vs. the hinterlands. Moffat makes a late point that really stuck with me, claiming that many of the symbols we associate with Scotland, like the kilt and the bagpipes, are cultural elements appropriated by a Lowland Scottish culture from a Highland culture where they're basically not found anymore--the irony of this being, of course, that through the Highland Clearances and the 19th century, these symbols were thought to be indicative of a primitive, savage backwardness.

To me, Moffat's book gets often too caught up in the details, the this-then-that, and misses the opportunity for a larger thematic understanding that might have helped a novice to Scottish history like me. I actually found the brief explanation of the Stewart line delivered by our tour bus driver on the Isle of Skye to be more digestible and understandable, though it must also be said that he illuminated the more detailed history of Moffat's I was already reading. I thought this was especially true of the military history, which gets bogged down in troop movements and strategies that I often felt myself straining to understand the larger importance of Stirling Bridge, or Bannockburn, or the massacre at Glen Coe. I actually found the most interesting and entertaining part of the book the little capsules Moffat includes about people, moments, and details that don't fit neatly into the overarching history. Scotland: A History from the Earliest Times is a big tome--I had to finish it on the 7-hour plane ride--but it ended up really enriching and elevating my exploration of this beautiful country.

Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood

As soon as she touched down in Scotland, she believed in fairies. No, as soon as the rock and velvet of Inverness rushed up to her where she was falling, a long way through the hagstone hole of a cloud, and she plunged down into the center of the cloud and stayed there. You used to set a child out for them, she thought, and was caught in the arms, and awoke on the green hillside.

Patricia Lockwood's new novel Will There Ever Be Another You is punctuated by illness and disaster. First, there is the death of the niece which is the culmination of her last novel, No One Is Talking About This. The death of "the Child" hangs over a family trip to the island of Skye in Scotland, and occasions many thoughts about changelings, those targets of fairy transformation who represent both irreparable loss and the possibility of radical and miraculous transformation. Then, there's COVID. Lockwood's narrator (can we just say Lockwood?) battles with a case of Long COVID that leaves her feeling like stranger to her own body, unable to recognize her own limbs, her brain falling apart, etc. Then, later on, her husband falls sick with some kind of spleen disease and undergoes the long process of hospitalization, surgery, and recovery. Everyone in this book, I guess, is falling apart, but falling apart means going to pieces, pieces that are put together again, and who better to put them together than a poet like Lockwood, whose whole schtick is about connecting the seemingly unconnected?

"The line of poetic logic," Lockwood explains to a group of students, "is as easy to disrupt as the narrative, is the narrative, where none appears to exist." No better explanation than that of the novel's entire theory of being. Certainly a book like this one will frustrate lovers of narrative as an expression of imaginary time and sequence. Lockwood is a poet, and this is a poet's novel, and I mean that in a totally different way than I meant it when I said it about Anna Moschovakis' novel, which seemed to be about wringing alienation of banality and cliche. Lockwood, by contrast, is all about harmonies and resonances, the way an image or a phrase can come back again and suddenly appear new in a new context.

But the elliptical nature of it can be rather frustrating, and I think you'd be excused if you felt from time to time that the poetic narrative, the line of poetic logic, can be too cute and self-interested. In No One Is Talking About This, the Internet provided the backbone of such logic; everything pointed back to it, and mirrored it: its collective, fractured nature, the algorithm and the feed, and the way social media sets repetition and recontextualization into hyperdrive. The omniculture stabs of Will There Ever Be Another You (Mrs. Doubtfire, Garry Shandling, Anne Hathaway, whom Lockwood meets for lunch and calls "Shakespeare's Wife," a long treatise on Tolstoy) try half-heartedly to recreate that in the aggregate.

But as often as not, Will There Ever Be Another You finds deep meaning in the collision of image and experience. The long principal section of Lockwood's Long COVID is a tour-de-force whose associative and rippling nature mirrors the experience of losing oneself piece-by-piece. And later, when Lockwood becomes the caretaker, rather than the patient (her husband glibly puts her "in charge" of "the Wound"), the images and phrases turn back in on themselves and find new meanings, new expressions. Around these tentpoles there are sections that seemed to wink, not quite successfully at their own self-indulgence, both materially and artistically: hey, did you know "Shakespeare's Wife" is going to portray me on the stage? That sounds a little more critical than I mean it to be, I think, because even though this novel lacked the urgent, propulsive shape of the last, it's always a pleasure to spend time with someone who knows their way around words like Lockwood does, and with such humor and insight.

They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire

What are we to make of such a saint or his levitations? And we are referring here to the saint, not the man. The saint can be encountered in many documents, but the man himself is much harder to find. Saint Joseph not only levitates more frequently than an other saint in Christian history but also rises higher off the ground. He not only hovers but actually flies--not just indoors, where it is relatively easier to employ wires or other props and fool people, but also outdoors, where such trickery is relatively more difficult or impossible. And he flies forward and backward too. Unlike Saint Teresa of Avila, whose levitations ceased after she complained to God about them, Joseph's gravity-defying ecstasies continued to occur up until the last few days of his life. Moreover, his levitations often point beyond themselves: while they are always carefully described as a side effect of sudden ecstasies brought on by God, rather than as events willed by Joseph himself, they often serve practical purposes and thus are much more than mere wonders.

They Flew, Carlos Eire's survey of flying miracles in medieval and Renaissance history, comes with a readymade pitch. If you've read a review of the book, you probably know it: Eire takes the flights seriously. That is to say, the book remains open to the possibility that what is said about those holy figures who were known to fly is true, and refrains from seeking alternative explanations, or a "true story." In some cases, as Eire explains, this is mere parsimony. As with the case of Saint Joseph of Cupertino, a 17th century friar, there are simply too many eyewitnesses not to remain open to the possibility. And perhaps to assume that the flights really happened is to deal with the people of the past on their own terms. Even Protestants and the skeptics of the Inquisition, Eire explains, believed that these miracles happened: the only difference is that they assumed it was the devil, not God, who gave people these powers. The impossibility of human flight as a rationalist stance simply was not in the cards. And yet, it might be said that this pitch is just that, a marketing ploy, and that the much-advertised credulity of the book only distinguishes it from alternative accounts in superficial ways. Still, it's a lot of fun.

They Flew offers up three case studies of flying saints: Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Joseph, and Maria de Agreda, known as Maria de Jesus or simply "Sor Maria." Saint Teresa, in Eire's telling, was a reluctant levitator, prone to ecstasies of divine communion that lifted her off the ground, embarrassing her so totally that she eventually asked God to cut it out. Saint Joseph, Eire describes, flew much more often and more happily, but his levitations seemed to have been tied up with his simplicity and incompetence as a monk: they are the miracles of someone transported not by ambition or calculation, but pure joy in the Holy Spirit. It must be said that these are the only two "pure" levitators on which the book focuses; the third, Sor Maria, levitated in the process of "bilocation," in which she was transported during her ecstasies to the New World, where she ministered to the Indigenous people of Spain's New Mexican territories. Although I didn't feel that bilocation was quite within the thematic framework of "flying," I enjoyed Sor Maria's story the most. Later, the book deals with a certain number of "cheats" and frauds who confessed their flights were made with the help of demons, and then with more pointedly "wicked" levitators like witches.

These sections don't quite have the focus that makes the three case studies so engaging; I spent some time wondering when it was, exactly, that Eire was going to get to the parts about flying. But these sections do offer the opportunity to put the flying in a larger context about belief and our changing relationship to it, which might be said to be the "true" thesis of the book. The epilogue, for instance, argues for approaching history with certain post-rationalist or post-materialist methods that are, as Eire suggests, outside the mainstream. One thing that interested me among these discussions is how, far from being credulous, those who lived in the world of Teresa, Joseph, and Maria, could be skeptical in the extreme. All three were, in different fashion, mobbed by attention, both by their admirers and their detractors. The Inquisition, for instance, examined claims of miracles with great skeptical intensity. They would do things like lock nuns who claimed to be able to survive with no food but the eucharist (a common miraculous claim) in their cells until they revealed their fraud by nearly starving to death. In the case of Joseph of Cupertino, the saint's flights were such a political headache that the authorities shuffled him around from monastery to monastery, eventually shutting him up in a cell by himself and letting no one enter. Ironically, this skepticism emerges from an attitude, as Eire shows, of taking these possibilities seriously.

Eire points out that some of these flights are basically happening at the same time as the Enlightenment, and encourages the reader not necessarily to think of them as in tension, but part of similar fronts in a changing relationship to belief. Did they fly? Who knows. Why not. Maybe it doesn't matter. But as the book shows, their flights, "real" or whatever, had a political, cultural, and theological reality that reveals the fault lines of doctrine and power.

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers by Lois-Ann Yamanaka

And my grandma. Her whole house smells like mothballs, not just in the closets but in every drawer too. And her pots look a million years old with dents all over. Grandma msut know every recipe with mustard cabbage in it. She can quote from the Bible for everything you do in a day. Walks everywhere she goes downtown Kaunakakai, sucks fish eyes and eats the parsley from our plates at Midnight Inn.

And nobody looks or talks like a haole. Or eats like a haole. Nobody says nothing the way Mr. Harvey tells us to practice talking in class.

My favorite town when I went to Hawaii last summer was Hilo, on the rainy side of the "Big Island": far from the tourist mecca of Kailua-Kona, Hilo felt to me like a real place, where real people lived. That meant grit and it meant visible poverty, including visible homelessness--each storefront on Hilo's small main street seemed to have someone sleeping in it. Lovey Nariyoshi, the young protagonist of Lois-Ann Yamanaka's novel Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, is a poor girl of Japanese descent living in the Hilo of the 1970s. Lovey wants more than anything to be like the rich girls who torment her at school, with their nice clothes and hair, and even more than that she wants to be a "haole," a white Hawaiian:

Sometimes I secretly wish to be haole. That my name could be Betty Smith or Annie Anderson or Debbie Cole, wife of Dennis Cole who lives at 2222 Maple Street with a white station wagon with wood panel on the side, a dog named Spot, a cat named Kitty, and I wear white gloves. Dennis wears a hat to work. There's a coatrack as soon as you open the front door and we all wear our shoes inside the house.

But Lovey is not a haole, she's Japanese and poor, and her visible poverty makes her deeply unpopular at school. Her only friend is Jerry, who is only slightly less popular than she is, and who is as interested in acquiring and amassing a collection of Barbie dolls as Lovey is--if you catch my drift. Jerry's brother, Larry, is one of the pair's chief tormenters--he steals and shaves the heads of all those Barbies, for one, but is capable of real physical violence as well--while his girlfriend Crystal is one of the few people who treat both Jerry and Lovey as human. One thing that sets Yamanaka's writing apart, both here and in Blu's Hanging, which I loved, is her attention to the material culture of time and place: Donny Osmond, Sonny Chiba, Charlie's Angels, a Hawaiian children's program called Checkers & Pogo. Yamanaka's cultural references come quickly, but they never feel irrelevant or overwhelming; instead, they seem to make up the cultural fabric that Lovey is always standing just on the outside of, dreaming of living the fantasies of popular music and television.

Wild Meat is a book about, among other things, how you speak: Lovey's teachers exhort her to adopt a kind of standard English that she's unable to master, illustrating that the difference between her and the world she wishes to occupy is one of being able to talk right. Lovey's parents aren't able to master it either, and the novel is buoyed by their colorful and evocative Hawaiian pidgin, a slightly modified version of which is also the language by which Lovey narrates the book. Of course, the strong and powerful voice that carries the book forward is ironically the very thing that Lovey tries and fails to eliminate in herself. Another recurrent motif is the importance of animals, both wild and domestic. In one story, we see Lovey's father drag her all around the island looking for feathers to use in the production of tourist leis. (The sellers who try to offer up native 'io, or Hawaiian hawk, feathers, are sinister people not to be trusted.) In the title story, Lovey describes being unable to eat a burger made from the family cow "Bully." There's a kind of overlap in these motifs, I think: the Hilo residents who speak perfect haole probably never stop to think where their meat comes from, or how a lei is made.

I didn't think that Wild Meat was as effective as Blu's Hanging. For one, Wild Meat is much more a novel of "linked stories," some of which are very brief and vignette-like. It lacks some of the physicality and viciousness that made Blu's Hanging such a shock, and until the very end it seemed much lighter in spirit and tone. I found myself longing for something like Blu's father's story about being isolated in a Moloka'i leper colony, and thinking it wouldn't come, until, in the novel's final chapters it did: First (spoiler alert) with the suicide of Crystal, unable to deal with the possibility of a second abortion. Then, with the possible blinding of Lovey's father in a convoluted story about trying to save some goats from a lava flow. Lovey, having listened to her father's stories about the highlight of his life--a boy's camp on Kaua'i--manages to hope a cross-island flight and bring her father back a bag full of earth. Blinded, he recognizes the earth by smell, and it smells, as he told her it would, like home. It's a wild swing by Yamanaka (she's like twelve??) but it works, and all the more because the novel refuses to tell us whether Lovey's father's blindness will be a lifelong condition.

So, by the end, I found myself persuaded and touched by Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers. Not to pick on it too much, but I found myself thinking of Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing, a novel where all "local flavor" to me felt cheap and forced. By contrast, Yamanaka's books pulse with Hawaiian life (as far as this haole can tell, at least), because she knows that such a local existence is also made up of the tawdry, cheap, and chintzy, and the stuff of mass culture.

Tales from Watership Down by Richard Adams

There was a time (said Dandelion), long ago, when rabbits had no sense of smell. They lived as they do now, but to have no sense of smell was a terrible disadvantage. Half the pleasure of a summer morning was lost to them, and they couldn't pick out their food in the grass until they actually bit into it. Worst of all, they couldn't smell their enemies coming, and this meant that many rabbits fell victim to stoats and foxes.

Watership Down was the third book I read for the Fifty Books Project, way back when Brent and I started this blog in 2007. It was a different world, and many of the books I've read since then have become blurry in my mind, this is a book I remember with real fondness. I loved the way that Adams turns the life of the rabbit into something both whimsical and adventurous, fraught with real dangers. It's not entirely true that the coziness and pastoralism of Watership Down is a facade, meant to lull you into a much darker and violent story, but it is true that it is several different types of book at once, and does them all well.

So I knew that no matter how good Adams' odds-and-ends sequel, Tales from Watership Down, would be, it would be nice to return to that world again. And it was. Tales from Watership Down begins with a series of stories (told in frame by the newly established rabbits in their hard-won warren) about the rabbit trickster figure El-ahraihrah, whose legends are a model and inspiration to the rabbits of the original novel. My favorite of these was the story in which El-ahraihrah goes on a quest to bring rabbitkind the sense of smell. This involves traveling far to meet the King of Yesterday, a shaggy bison or auroch who presides over a forest filled with all the animals that have gone extinct because of human activity. The King of Yesterday sends him to the King of Tomorrow, a deer who seems to inhabit a future world in which wildness has returned to the British Isles again, and the world. An appropriate framework, perhaps, for a story about the rabbits receiving those gifts that offer them protection against their enemies. (The vulnerability of rabbits is a big theme in their legend, it seems, "El-ahraihrah" means "The Prince With a Thousand Enemies.")

But the most satisfying parts of Tales from Watership Down are those stories that continue the tale of the rabbits of the original warren. Having secured their safety, the Chief Rabbit Hazel must adapt to being the leader of the rabbit exodus to a peacetime executive, and many of these stories are about the crises that threaten the stability of the warren: new, cocky generations of rabbits who do not remember the war with the rival warren Efrafra, the arrival of strangers, like a doe obsessed with the threat of "White Blindness" (myxomatosis) or a hutch-raised rabbit who would be killed because he "smells of man." These crises threaten Hazel's leadership, but of course, he always seems to navigate the right path, with the help of his lieutenant, Fiver, and enforcer, Bigwig. And in these stories, we see the warren in the next stages of its evolution: overcrowded, it must send out an envoy to establish a new satellite. For a rabbit, as for a college student with a Blogspot account, time moves on.

Sing, Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward

The boy is River's. I know it. I smelled him as soon as he entered the fields, as soon as the little red dented car swerved into the parking lot. The grass trilling and moaning all around, when I followed the scent to him, the dark, curly-haired boy in the backseat. Even if he didn't carry the scent of leaves disintegrating to mud at the bottom of a river, the aroma of the bowl of the bayou, heavy with water and sediment and the skeletons of small dead creatures, crab, fish, snakes, and shrimp, I would still know he is River's by the look of him. The sharp nose. The eyes dark as swamp bottom. The way his bones run straight and true as River's: indomitable as cypress. He is River's child.

Young Jojo has grown up hearing his grandfather's stories of Parchman, a notorious Mississippi prison. Jojo's fascination with them stems in part from his admiration for his grandfather's resilience and in part because his father, a white man named Michael, is at Parchman. On the day that Michael is to get out of prison, Jojo's neglectful mother Leonie piles him and his sister Kayla into a car to head north, into the Delta. They come back not only with Michael but the spirit of Richie, a young boy Jojo recognizes from his grandfather's stories about Parchman. Richie recognizes Jojo, and attaches himself to him, out of a vague sense that there is some business to settle with Jojo's grandfather, who failed in his attempts to keep Richie from being killed at Parchman. Their return puts Richie's ghost on a collision course with that of Given, Leonie's brother killed in a "hunting accident" by Michael's cousin, as well as Leonie's mother, who is busy ritually preparing for her own death.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is, ostensibly, about the reverberations of cruelty and racism into the present day. The story is not really Parchman (although it probably should have been), but the way that the violence of Parchman resounds in the lives of people who did not live through it, like Leonie and Jojo. The presence of the ghosts, who, we are made to understand, stick around because they experienced terrible, violent deaths--something Leonie's mother is determined not to let happen to herself--and become basic, literalized representations of the ways that racist violence still "haunts" the people of Mississippi. The malevolent ghost of Richie is eventually banished in two ways: first, Jojo's grandfather has to complete the story he has only partially told Jojo, and confront the shame of his failure to keep Richie alive. This is the novel as therapy, a representation of the idea that trauma can be healed by revealing and narrating. (In this, of course, Sing, Unburied, Sing is not alone; this idea is core to so many books these days.) Then, when Richie tries to snatch the ghost of the grandmother, it's Given who has to scare him off. So our ghosts haunt us, but maybe they protect us, too.

I hated the experience of reading this book. I found it turgid, mawkish, sentimental, humorless, overwritten, convoluted, and at times incomprehensible. At least half of it is a long, drawn-out "road trip" novel that moves like swamp water. The focus of this first half seems to be mostly on what a terrible mother Leonie is; when Kayla gets badly sick, it's Jojo who has to look after her--but this sickness is never really explained or resolved, and as such seems to justify Leonie's contention that she just has motion sickness. The conclusion, by contrast, comes quickly and confusingly, drawing the threads of dead Richie, dead Given, dying grandmother, etc., together in a way that feels badly forced. Despite a few aborted attempts to capture a regional voice, the prose is unrelentingly cloying. (The ghost of a teen that died 50 years ago describes Jojo as "indomitable as a cypress?") But most significantly, I felt that this book had very little meaningful to say about racism and violence. It's bad, and it haunts us. OK. Fine.

The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

Until I came to Brandham hall the world of my imagination had been peopled by fictitious beings wo behaved as I wanted them to behave; at Brandham Hall it was inhabited by real people who had the freedom of both worlds; in the flesh they could give my imagination what it needed, and in my solitary musings I endowed them with certain magical qualities but did not otherwise idealize them. I did not need to. Marian was many things to me besides Maid Marian of the greenwood. She was a fairy princess who had taken a fancy to a little boy, clothed him, petted him, turned him from a laughing-stock in to an accepted member of her society, form an ugly duckling into a swan.

At Brandham Hall, thirteen-year-old Leo Colston is out of his element. Recruited for the summer by a friend from school, he finds himself at sea among the upper classes. The temperatures climb, but he has only his one suit, and it's only when his friend's sister, Marian, has the grace to take him shopping for summer clothing that he finally finds himself at ease. His new cool green suit is symbolic of his difference from the others at Brandham Hall, but also Marian's charity toward him, and he quickly falls for her in the half-romantic, half-admiring way that young men fall for adult women. When Marian asks him to take a message to Ted Burgess, a local farmer, he jumps to be of service, but only later does he discover that these messages are ones of love, and he's become embroiled in an illicit love affair between the two.

One thing that interested me about The Go-Between is how deftly it manages the envy that emerges from the class divide. By all rights, Leo should be sympathetic toward the farmer, Ted, who is closer to his own class, and who treats Leo, all-in-all, with a kind of fatherly affection. But Leo finds himself gravitating more strongly toward Lord Trimingham, a nobleman, disfigured from his World War I service, who is, or plans to be, Marian's true fiance. Lord Trimingham is polite but cold, and it's not difficult to see why Marian prefers the humble Ted--so does the reader--but for Leo, Trimingham's nobility seems to emerge from the same distinctions as Marian's grace and charity. Leo is, although he doesn't realize it, and only in his heart, a kind of class traitor. The richness of The Go-Between emerges out of the ambiguous conflict within Leo's heart; he becomes increasingly suspicious of what he's been tasked to do, but not really for the right reasons, although he comes close to a flash of truth when he begins to think that both Marian and Ted have been neglectful in using him for their own ulterior purposes.

There's a comfort-food feeling to The Go-Between: stuffy, British, breezy, bucolic. It shares DNA with the classic boarding school novel, like Brideshead Revisited or A Dance to the Music of Time. I found it a little simple compared to these, a little less complex than it might have been. It felt as if it held perhaps a little too tightly to the three-part love triangle, so clean in its design--lady, lord, farmer. But I was really charmed by it, and I was pleasantly surprised by the ending, which presents at first a seemingly over-simple resolution, which it then complicates by sending the reader hurtling far forward in time to the "present" day. I didn't quite expect that, although I suppose I ought to have expected it form the novel's famous first line: "The past is a different country, they do things differently there." 

Silk by Aarathi Prasad

I have heard it said that scientific study can take away a sense of wonder because science reduces a miraculous organism into mere mechanical parts. I have never found that to be true. Perhaps I find miracles in mechanisms. But however I looked at them--these insects, their metamorphosis, their silken threads--all were still miracula, true "objects of wonder." Over centuries, the transformation of insects through metamorphosis had proved so inexplicable a mystery, and the silks that came of it so extraordinary, that women and men have studied it with the kind of fervor that cost some their eyesight, others their health, and a few their lives. And yet it is an obsession that persists.

Silk is kind of weird when you think about it. That stuff comes from a bug's butt. But there's no arguing with results: few fabrics are as lustrous, or soft, and, as Aarathi Prasad describes in her book about the natural history of silk, strong: for a long time it was even used to stop bullets. Human beings have long known the value of silk, as attested by the fact that the silk moth, Bombyx mori, is one of the earliest known domesticated animals we have, going back thousands upon thousands of years. The humble silk moth lost its ability to fly in the process of domestication, and now exists, like cows and chickens, almost entirely at our service. But there are other silks than moth silk, and the most interesting parts of Prasad's book are actually about the attempts to farm silk from other organisms, most of which met insurmountable challenges: the fine hairs of certain mollusks, and the ultra-strong silk of spiders. (As it turns out, it's harder to farm spider silk at scale because, unlike moths, spiders like to eat each other.)

Prasad's book is organized by personality, rather than chronology. Each chapter highlights, more or less, an important personage in the production or understanding of silk. There's Maria Sibylla Merian, whose artistic renderings of silk moth cocoons helped us understand the transformation process of silk moths for the first time. There's René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, whose experiments with farming spider silk were so popular they were translated into Chinese for the emperor. And then, toward the end of the book, there are the modern researchers who are using the technology of silk to build stronger fabrics and materials for the modern age, including those using gene-splicing technology to produce spider silk in goats. What this organizing strategy lacks in chronological sense--I had a hard time separating out the where and when, because the chapters jump around in time as well as place--it makes up in human interest. For Prasad, the story of silk is the story of human beings, and specifically those obsessive scientists and naturalists who advanced our knowledge of the production and nature of silk--as opposed to, perhaps, a broader sense of the larger social dynamics of the silk trade.

What I enjoyed most about Silk is the way that it sits at the nexus of several different types of book: it's a history book as well as a natural history book, and it balances history and science well. Prasad is a skilled writer, and the book felt breezy and readable--for the layman. And it left me wanting to get my hands on a pair of spider-silk socks.

An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth by Anna Moschovakis

I want what Tala has. I'm not ashamed to say it. I want her bony ankles and her wedge-heeled boots. I want the skin of her smooth forehead--dewy, there's no other word--and I want her dates and her friends. I want that high-pitched laugh that peals, even when there isn't much to laugh about. I don't care that it sounds fake sometimes, I don't care if it's a mask or a manipulation, if she's crying inside. It makes anyone who hears it happy: I want that.

The narrator of Anna Moschovakis' An Earthquake is the Shaking of the Surface of the Earth is a disgraced actor who's been out of work since becoming rattled by a protestor during a performance. She lives in a world that has been unsettled by some kind of geological disaster, and where earthquakes are frequent: she literally does not know where to put her feet. Amid this global and personal disaster, she has developed a fixation on her younger, more beautiful roommate Tala. She decides that she must hunt down Tala--who is out, somewhere, in the city, and never actually seems to be at home--and kill her.

The afterword to the novel suggests that much of it is about method acting, that process by which one comes to inhabit a character by channeling true emotions, rather than just performing them. Method acting, perhaps, requires a conscious splitting of the self as much as it requires the unification of such a split, a strategy that the narrator is no longer able to pull off. Tala, by comparison, is wholly herself; she has no need for performances, or to decide what are her true feelings and act upon them. That's why she walks more easily upon the shaking ground than our narrator.

To be honest, this novel really didn't hit for me. Moschovakis is a poet and translator as well as a narrator, and it reads to me a like a poet's novel. By that I don't mean what I think many would expect--that it's filled with beautiful or flowery language, or strong images. It struck me as the opposite, actually, preoccupied with the word and phrase to the point of abstraction: "Strange how language encapsulates time. And power, and relation." A recurring motif is the purposeful reconsideration and alienation of stock phrases and cliches. But I didn't believe in the world, and I didn't believe in Tala, and I didn't really feel persuaded by the anxiety and torment of the narrator. Worse, I didn't believe in the earthquakes. I think a certain kind of reader might get quite a bit out of An Earthquake is the Shaking of the Surface of the Earth--but that reader isn't me.