Christopher's Top Ten 2020

In 2020, I did what I would have considered unthinkable a few years ago: I read 100 books. I think a lot of that had to do with being stuck inside thanks to the global pandemic. I would have rather read fewer books and have no pandemic, but you know what they say about silver linings. Maybe next year my total will drop, but I don't intend to slow down if I can help it.

I was pretty good this year in my continuing resolution to read more women; I've developed a solid habit of alternating books by gender, so a full 50 out of 100 of the books I read were written or co-written by women. In this space I usually count up how many authors of color and non-Americans I've read, too, but a cursory glance doesn't make me very proud. That's something I'm going to do better, and more intentionally, in 2021.

I also like to take stock of the new authors I've discovered, the ones I intend on coming back to. This year that list includes Otessa Moshfegh, John Wyndham, Edna Ferber, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Barry Lopez. But none of them stands out like Kathryn Davis, whose novel Labrador was the kind of book that has made this project worthwhile: a book that comes out of nowhere and grabs you by the shirt collar. After reading it, I immediately went out and bought another of Davis' novels, but I've been holding off on it, waiting for the calendar to turn over. Just three more days, and I'll have a fresh slate.

One of the drawbacks of reading more books is that picking the ten best gets really hard. Some books that I really loved, like Kathleen Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider and Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station, didn't even make the honorable mentions list. But isn't that a wonderful problem to have? Here are the best books I read this year.

Honorable Mentions 2020:

Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich
Giant by Edna Ferber
Home Truths by Mavis Gallant
The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
Eileen by Otessa Moshfegh
Fathers and Crows by William T. Vollmann
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

Top Ten 2020:

10. A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion - A banana republic in the tropics, a world-weary protagonist, a guileless foil who gets mixed up in world politics--sounds like a Graham Greene novel. But Greene's protagonists settle for political intrigue because, while secretive, it's knowable, unlike God. In A Book of Common Prayer, Didion suggests that maybe politics aren't knowable, either, at least in the unpredictable and unexpected ways they uproot our lives. It may be better to go through life like the novel's subject, Charlotte Douglass, who is "immaculate of history, innocent of politics." Common Prayer is spiky, witty, bloody.

9. The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe - A book that cannot be explained, only experienced, and maybe not even that. Is it a parody? Is it a self-conscious formal experiment? A fever dream, grafted on to the language and imagery of pulp fantasy novels? It's all of these, and none; it is only itself. The second novel in the series about Severian, the exiled executioner, starts to fall apart at the seams, just like the dying "Urth" in which the novels are set. I'm excited to read the final two novels in the series, but how can they dissolve any faster, or more completely? The Claw of the Conciliator is theatrical, beguiling, hallucinatory.

8. The Tree of Man by Patrick White - Ah, Patrick White, my longtime antipodal companion. Maybe the greatest author who remains unknown to most Americans. Like the married protagonists themselves, The Tree of Man seems so ordinary on the surface: it's a novel about Stan and Amy Parker, homesteaders in the Australian bush who live simply as they watch a whole country grow up around them. But, perhaps more effectively here than in any of his other novels, and with richer symbolism, White shows how real life goes on inside our private universes. We connect to God there, but tragically, not other people. The Tree of Man is bittersweet, earthy, intimate.

7. Jesus Christs by A.J. Langguth - This novel answers the question that youth pastors have been asking, without success, for decades: what if Jesus was fun? And Langguth suggests, also more effectively than our nation's youth pastor, that Jesus is everywhere: in Jerusalem, in a Detroit parking lot, in a boardroom. The whole novel is a shuffled deck of vignettes that imagines Jesus in various times and places, always struggling with God's mandate for his life, dying over and over, and never quite bringing about redemption. How can a book that is so silly in conception be so sad? Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani? Jesus Christs is epigrammatic, inventive, funny.

6. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante - These books are just the greatest social novels of our lifetimes; I don't know how you can argue anything else. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is the point at which the story of Lenu and Lena fully forsakes the interpersonal for the grand view. I mean, just compare the titles: My Brilliant Friend becomes Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay--not just those who are loyal to their friends, but those who make it out of the community and those who don't. It's also when the novels' feminism begins to grow real teeth. Ferrante's depiction of the upheaval of Italian culture and politics in the 1960s is horribly engrossing; it's a novel I literally could not put down. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is epic, Dickensian, ferocious.

5. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather - It's funny to see this book, the story of Nebraska homsteader Alexandra Bergson, next to Ferrante in the list. They have so much in common on the surface: two novels about women navigating overwhelming social change, cast onto immense landscapes to be navigated. But despite its epic-seeming exclamation point, O Pioneers! is simpler, smaller; it gives one the feeling of being alone on the prairie, rather than in the tumult of a sweltering city. And I think I've never been less prepared for a novel to punch me right in the gut than this one does. Is it possible that Willa Cather has the purest prose in the English language? O Pioneers! is heartbreaking, windswept, flawless.

4. Suttree by Cormac McCarthy - Is Suttree McCarthy's best novel? Blood Meridian might tap into the horrible inscrutability of a cruel God, but Suttree is McCarthy's most human novel. Thomas Suttree drifts up and down the Tennessee River in a dilapidated houseboat, having abandoned a life of privilege and comfort for reasons that are never clear. It's a hard life, but it is life, full stop, rowdy and convivial, filled to the brim with animals and garbage and all sorts of colorful degenerates. What if Huck Finn grew up and decided he never should have left the raft? Suttree is grotesque, picaresque, riotous.

3. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman - The behemoth! It's tempting to call Life and Fate, with its three dozen characters and 900 pages, the War and Peace of the second world war. (And I suppose Grossman wasn't ignorant of the comparison himself, given the title.) And it really is breathtaking, seeing the way these various threads are woven together, some drawn out and some tragically cut short, from the bureaucratic travails of the scientist Viktor to the dead-end hopelessness of the Soviet gulag and the German concentration camp. Life and Fate is remarkably clear-eyed, stripped of pretension to propaganda; it's a novel for human beings living in dehumanizing climates everywhere. Life and Fate is epic, daunting, powerful.

2. Labrador by Kathryn Davis - Like I said, this book came out of nowhere and floored me. How can such a simple, recognizable theme--a young girl's admiration and jealousy of her cooler, older sister--be so effectively drawn in such a weird novel? The angels, the murderous polar bears, the witches of this novel seem like they wouldn't fit in with the simple realism of much of the novel, but they do. You can do anything, I think, when you have the kind of confidence Davis has. Labrador reads to me like a novel that holds no hands, takes no second guesses, and the result is possibly the weirdest book I've read all year, and a real triumph. Labrador is mythic, insightful, shimmering.

1. The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams - I say Labrador is possibly the weirdest book I've read all year because Joy Williams' terrific The Quick and the Dead might be even weirder. Again, I'm struck by the similarities between two books I've put next to each other on this list, and struck because the books don't seem to me all that similar at all, except in superficial ways. There are no angels in The Quick and the Dead, but there is death, elusive and indescribable. There are nursing homes that operate like cults waiting on approaching comets; there are the ghosts of vindictive wives; there are laboratory monkeys that live in people's brains. There are hanged dogs, burning houses, and exploding genitalia. There are a lot of pieces, but somehow they're all brought together into cohesion by the powerful characters, especially Alice, the too-serious teenager and budding ecoterrorist. The Quick and the Dead is comic, enigmatic, haunted. It's the best book I read this year.

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You know, I write these things for myself, mostly. The reviews are my way of thinking through what I read, and this write-up is, for me, like looking back through a photo album or something. But if you're reading it, I appreciate that, too. It's a real pleasure to get to share the experience of reading, which is typically an practice of solitude, with other people. I want to give thanks to my fellow blogmates on the sidebar there for another great year. 2021 comes with a lot of apprehension and bated breath. I don't know what's going to happen, but I do know I'll get to read some books. I'm looking forward to that.

No Enemy by Ford Madox Ford

The writer's friend Gringoire, originally a poet and Gallophile, went to the war. Long, gray, lean, unreasonably boastful as a man and unreasonably modest as a poet, he was probably not too disciplined as an infantry officer, but he has survived to inhabit in tranquillity with the most charming of companions a rural habitation so ancient, frail and unreal that it is impossible to think of it otherwise than as the Gingerbread Cottage you may have read of in the tale of "Hansel and Gretel."

This book, then, is the story of Gringoire just after... Armageddon. For it struck the writer that you hear of men that went, and you hear of what they did when they went There. But you never hear how It left them. You hear how things were destroyed, but seldom of the painful processes of Reconstruction.

At first, when I read that last sentence, I imagined that Ford Madox Ford's war novel No Enemy would be about "reconstruction" in the sense of a man piecing his life back together after serving in World War I, reconstructing, that is, himself. And it is that, absolutely: the story of a man named Gringoire, who seems to be (?) an Englishman with a very French name, who came back from the war desiring only to keep a small home in the countryside, where he can tend to his garden, Candide-like, and make simple but delicious meals.

But it is a "reconstruction" too in the sense that an experience is "reconstructed" by memory, and throughout No Enemy, the narrator, calling himself "the Compiler," seeks to "reconstruct" Gringoire's memories of war, assembling them into a sensible whole. But Gringoire, a poet, tends to impressionism, and what the Compiler compiles seems less like a narrative than a collection of shifting images, which more often than not are entirely imagined by Gringoire. The "Four Landscapes" of the first section are sometimes real, for example, and sometimes not: chief among them is an image that Gringoire has during the war of a green "nook" in the countryside, a sanctuary away from the ravages of war. Gringoire steels himself to fight, it seems, by imagining that he is fighting for a sanctuary like this, and for every man's right to have one. The very landscape is at stake, not just the land over which the great armies move and fight, but the landscape that is imagined.

You can see in this, I think, echoes of Ford's other writings, where the experience of mind always supersedes the real or the physical. In The Good Soldier, John Dowling's impressions of comity and friendship overpower the truth (his wife and his best friend are having an affair), but perhaps it is these impressions that really matter (it was real music, Dowling says, rejecting the possibility that his experience has been a lie). In the Parade's End novels, which are also war novels, I'm reminded of Christopher Tietjens staring at a spot on the wall, which he relates with the scrupulous detail of a map of the Rhineland, or his brother Mark, who reports the entire final novel from a state of unspeaking paralysis.

No Enemy was written between The Good Soldier and Parade's End, as I understand it, which makes sense. The Good Soldier very pointedly ignores the war (Dowling calls his story "the saddest story ever told," ironically), and No Enemy reads like a man trying to put his impressions of the war into words for the first time. Mostly, these impressions fail to land. They're too ambiguous, too unrooted, and filtered twice over through Gringoire's memory and the Compiler's reporting. It's somehow both too specific to Ford's experience--how clear it is that Gringoire is semi-autobiographical, and the Compiler an attempt to give his own experience a measure of distance--and not specific enough. The war only comes alive, I think, in Parade's End, where Ford's imagination really starts to work.

I got bored by this book. For a war novel, the shelling and the artillery are always surprisingly muted, as if happening on the other side of the valley. Gringoire's little green nook might have been very real to him while he was sitting in the trenches, but it never really felt real to me. One thing that did interest me is this: Gringoire insists that "the next war" will be a war over food, predicting that European population growth would soon outstrip the ability of the land to sustain it. That didn't turn out to be true. But, given the current prognosis of climate change, it seems like Ford may be right after all--though a little delayed.

 

Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson

 

Since that visit, Daron had entertained very few thoughts of Charlie.  Fewer than few, he had to admit, turning his mind over and finding himself to have been agitated by only one query.  Idée fixe.  This constancy of theme was of no solace.  No, not at all, not when it traveled brothers in arms with a rabid and merciless frequency, tugging at this hems, cuffs, collars like a child with a limited vocabulary who will have his chocolate bar or, oxygen be damned, return to the womb.  (That’s crazy, D!) Likewise, erudition be damned, so D’aron’s mind assaulted him with this artless inquiry.  And explanation be damned, he ignored the incessant reiterations, attributing them to – horror!! – ego!!. ego!!? [And that horror paled, appalled as it was by the guilt of C/catholic – yes, both majuscule and minuscule – guilt of C/catholic dimensions (with apologies to Louis ten-time-hella-ten-times over.  For we were to shed Freud like diapers, were we not?  For we were to transcend the institutions attendant psychic impositions were we not?  For we were to walk upright, were we not?  Or we were to be slapped straight up in the dick with this hefty textbook, to, Give us something to motherfucking crouch about!) LeggoMyego!!, No!!, EgoLeggoMe!!, LeggoMe!!, dammit!]

 

It is a standard trope in literary analysis to look at texts in terms of content and form.  They are  either working together or in opposition to each other.  Just a few weeks ago in this space, I was praising Colum McCann’s Apeirogon for so successfully working form in the service of content.  And often I complain that a novel serves up simple plot without the sauce of style.  It is rare that a novel is spoiled by too much attention to style and form, but in this case, the author’s legitimate ability to call up linguistic fireworks at will detracted from content that should have been compelling, but was, in the end, a chore to sift through.

 

D’aron (usually, but not always, with the apostrophe) Davenport is a working-class white man from the small town of Braggsville, 2 hours southeast of Atlanta (and hence close to the center of that state).  His mother is a homemaker, his father works in a local factory.  He has been brought up to love football, hunting, barbecue and to be proud of things Southern.  Some of those lessons have not taken, however, and D’aron has always felt out of place, even with cousins JoJo and Quint, genuine good-ole-boys who revel in that life. D’aron has grown fond of chess, of literature and of school in general.  Too odd for Braggsville, he has passed up a chance to attend University of Georgia (this is referred to as “becoming a Bulldog”) and travelled three thousand miles to University of California at Berkeley.

 

There he has become friends with a typically diverse group of liberal intellectuals – a Malaysian everyone assumes is Chinese, a white daughter of University of Iowa professors who claims Native American ancestry, and a gay black man who, while also of working-class roots, has been a scholarship student and become comfortable with the privileged who attend Berkeley.  They read Judith Butler together and take classes that discuss “performative interventions” - guerilla theater-like protests such as bringing fake human ashes to a Six Flags ostensibly built on Native American land to bury an ancestor.  When the professor discusses Civil War reenactments in this context, and D’aron mentions that his hometown has a weeklong “Patriot Days” festival that includes a reenactment, the three friends agree to travel home with D’aron to disrupt the festival with such an intervention:  they plan on dressing as slaveowners and their enslaved workers to stage a mock lynching.  

 

This is a long set up for a visit to Braggsville that could have been compelling because Johnson has us follow D’aron’s consciousness as he sees his hometown through his friend’s eyes and his friends though the town’s eyes.  D’aron begins to find some of the shame he felt at his own Southerness is misguided.  He has to ask his mother to remove the black lawn jockeys from the front of the house, but his friends find his family warm, likeable and interesting.  Not only do they not embarrass him, but he feels how well they make his friends feel at home.  He also recognizes the arrogance in their plan to intervene in the reenactment – which he learns his father will have nothing to do with anyway.  Even while there is genuinely funny satire here, we get real characters and a well-drawn portrait of this town.

 

The intervention goes horribly awry.  The harness that is supposed to support Louis who – in blackface – acts the part of the uppity slave malfunctions and Louis is actually hung.  Or perhaps the reenactor’s step in and whip Louis for real, breaking the harness and causing the hanging.  Or perhaps Candice has not set the harness correctly and then panics and runs away.  None of the people who are there are able to give coherent testimony.  In fact, little about the event gains any coherence.  The black community of Braggsville (whom D’aron knows nothing about) treats him like a hero.  The reenactors treat him like a pariah (and have his father moved to the night shift).  The FBI is convinced that the reenactment is a front for an actual militia, which D’aron knows nothing about until he does.

 

D’aron becomes a man without a hometown – he cannot go back to Berkeley as the time spent on inquest and investigation have caused him to miss most of the semester; he cannot stay in Braggsville after he is definitively asked to leave by the militia.  Where will he go?  What can we learn from all this?  I am not sure because Johnson’s proclivity for complex parenthetical interruptions that chase down side issues, add bits of exposition, or just play with words and puns in bizarrely complex sentences renders the prose – what?  Not incomprehensible – no, there are passages that are confusing, but also rich and musical.  For example, the passage quoted above is from the end of the novel when Charlie (the black friend) has confessed to being gay and D’aron is trying to decide if Charlie might have had a crush on him and how he, D’aron, might feel about that.  It is nowhere close to central to the plot.  It is thematically linked to D’aron’s (and Charlie’s) character development, but so tangential that it feels trivial and as a reader I wondered why I was being concerned with that when D’aron had plenty of other conflicts to continue struggling with –  which he had been doing at proportional length and proportional ambiguity for more than 200 pages.  I had despaired of seeing D’aron reach any understanding or any understandable lack of understanding and did not want to concern myself with the narrator’s playful dissection of his sexual tensions.  

 

There were moments throughout when the plot became compelling – the adjustment to Berkeley, the revelation of bringing his friends home, the death of Louis, D’aron’s trip to the black side of town, the revelations about his redneck cousins. But as the pages multiplied, I learned that these situations would never raise questions worthy of straightforward clarity.  That none of the questions would ever be considered more valuable to explore than Johnson’s talent.  That while I viewed the substance of the novel as of equal importance to its style, in this case, I was alone.   

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

'As things are, we are the enemies of the world, and foreigners to this earth. Our grasp of it is a process of estrangement. Through estrangement itself I earn my living from day to day. I say, this is animate, but that is inanimate. I am Salt Inspector, that is rock salt. I go further than this, much further, and say this is waking, that is a dream, this belongs to the body, that to the spirit, this belongs to space and distance, that to time and duration. But space spills over into time, as the body into the soul, so that the one cannot be measured without the other. I want to exert myself to find a different kind of measurement.

'I love Sophie more because she is ill. Illness, helplessness, is in itself a claim on love. We could not feel love for God Himself if he did not need our help. -- But those who are well, and have to stand by and do nothing, also need help, perhaps even more than the sick.'

Approaching the end of the year I decided to return to a book I very much love: Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. The first of her books I read and also the best, and what seems to me one of few very perfect novels, The Blue Flower seems to shine on every page. It's funny, sad, touching, clever. Reading it put me in the spirit of Fritz's mother, seeing her old home for the first time in years, the feeling of "coming home after having done one's best."

The question posed by The Blue Flower--or, perhaps, the earthly and practical question posed by it, because there are a number of philosophical and aesthetic questions--is, why does the brilliant philosopher-poet Fritz von Hardenberg, later known as Novalis, choose Sophie von Kuhn, a largely unremarkable young girl, to be his betrothed? Fritz calls her his "Philosophy," but she is largely unphilosophical, disinterested in writing, amused primarily by trinkets and dogs, touched but sort of befuddled by Fritz's interest. And yet, Fritz is not the only member of the family who ends up being captured by Sophie's charms: first his brother Erasmus, who had been against the match, and then his severe, businesslike father, follow Fritz. "It is quite unsuitable," Fritz's precocious six-year old brother the Bernhard repots: "It is our business to see the beauty of that."

In a way, Sophie is like philosophy: she is the generator of questions, rather than the solution to them; Fritz's undying ardor for her is the given that generates wonder. "A story that begins with finding," Fritz says, "must end with searching." That, perhaps, describes philosophy and Sophie both--and poetry, too, and all kinds of human endeavors that Sophie comes to stand in for. Perhaps what impresses me most about Fitzgerald's warmth and humanity is that the legitimacy of Fritz's love for Sophie is never in question; it's not played for irony or laughs. It's puzzling, sure, but Fitzgerald also suggests that there is something eminently reasonable in it, that there is a quality in Sophie that is worth admiration but eludes our narrow definitions of intelligence, of talent, of human worth. "I don't want to become," Sophie says to Fritz when they first meet, suggesting that a purity and immutability that eludes, but foreshadowing, too, Sophie's sudden and debilitating consumption.

Reading The Blue Flower for the second time, I was struck by just how immense and how vivid the cast of characters is. Sophie and Fritz are the stars, of course, but Fitzgerald manages to people the novel with a dozen memorable figures: the Bernhard, wise beyond his years, stands out, but also Sophie's pragmatic sister known as "the Mandelsloh," Sophie's jovial stepfather Herr Rockenthien, Fritz's sister Sidonie, his lovesick friend Karoline, Sophie's mischievous brother George, several other siblings, and even the insular and pretentious "Jena crowd" that includes well-known philosophers like Schiller and Schlegel. The Blue Flower transports you into the world of late 18th century Prussia, not because it's meticulously researched (although Fitzgerald is clearly knowledgeable), but because the world seems so recognizably human. 

Someone who knows more about Romanticism and German philosophy could probably tell you a lot about the subtext of The Blue Flower. I don't feel like I have anything particularly smart of knowledgeable to say about it. As heady as it may seem, The Blue Flower hits me in the purest pleasure zones of the brain, the places that light up after a really good story, well-told.

Light Years by James Salter

Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers.

And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.

Nedra and Viri are married. Nedra is beautiful, creative, mysterious; Viri is a middling architect who dreams of being famous. They live in the suburbs of New York City with their daughters, Danny and Franca. From the outside, their life seems perfect, and often it seems that way from the inside, too: see, for example, the pair painstakingly huddled over the kitchen table writing an illustrated book about the mystery of eels for their daughters. Viri puts on plays for them, and elaborate Easter egg hunts (the speckled ones are more points than the plain, and there are several golden bees worth five times as much--some, he explains, should be hidden so that they are never found). But of course, there are cracks: both of them are carrying on affairs.

Is it that kind of novel? You know the one I mean: a mid-century family, a home in Westchester, adultery, prose that leers at women, an insistence the American family is in disarray, but for reasons having to do entirely with postwar ennui, and not with, say, income inequality or the stifling nature of patriarchal institutions. Well, it is and it isn't. It certainly checks all of those boxes, but the description seems to fall short of capturing what Light Years really is or does. It's highly impressionistic, floating, it often seems, from one dinner party to another. Friends of Nedra and Viri drift in and out like friends in real life do, appearing for a while to be crucially important and then fading away, having left few traces of themselves. The marriage does begin to dissolve, does end, but in the final reckoning it's hard to figure out why; it certainly doesn't have anything to do with the affairs, which mean next to nothing. A few moments shine out brilliantly--like the collaboration over eels, or Viri's encounter with a tailor who has devoted his life to making beautiful shirts, like a kind of yogi--but fail to generate conflict. Conflict is there, but it seems to have birthed itself.

The prose is absolutely impeccable, yet Light Years often left me feeling cold. "Cold," in fact, is one of the words that seems to characterize the novel most perfectly. The first line of Part Two might as well be the novel's epigraph: "In the morning the light came in silence." Everything in this novel is cold, light, silence; Salter lingers over the image of the Hudson on a winter's afternoon, or the sensation of being in a dark room in the middle of the day, doing nothing at all. I found it a relief, actually, when toward the novel's end the divorced Viri relocates to the sweaty chaos of Rome, where his life is reinvigorated by a new woman and a new environment. But for much of the novel I felt myself skipping off of the words like--oh, I guess, a stone being skipped on the frozen Hudson river, with some seagulls scattered around.

One thing I think Salter does really well is capture the way that violence, sickness, and death punctuated the sterility of bourgeois existence. Those things haunt the edges of the novel, affecting at first acquaintances, then friends, and then family. The death of Nedra's father is one of the most touchingly rendered passages in the book, and perhaps even moreso because it's neither young nor unexpected. As they age, Nedra and Viri must confront these things among their friends:

His voice was the only thing unchanged, his voice and character, but the structure that held them was dissolving. All the old and interconnected knowledge--architecture joined to zoology and Persian myth, recipes for hare, the acquaintance with painters, museums, inland rivers dark with trout--all would vanish when the great inner chambers failed, when in one final hour the rooms of his life dropped away like a building being wrecked. His body had turned against him; the harmony that once reigned within it had disappeared.

Of course, the tragedy of these dissolutions is always, in part, due to the fact that you know they'll come for you one day, too, and they do. The title Light Years, I suppose, is meant to emphasize the way that life is both vast--it is the only time and space allotted to us--but the way that it passes so quickly. I've found life a little warmer and more messy than Salter seems to, but it's easy to see why others, whom the novel has touched more deeply, have found it to be underappreciated.

 Best books of 2020

 

My total for the year will be 59, a new record for me (retirement has consequences).  I have mixed all genres together here and given myself 15, in no particular order.

 

·      On Earth We Were Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong – a lyrical and powerful coming of age novel by a young, already noteworthy poet.

·      New York Burning by Jill Lepore – the first book by this public intellectual; a stunning history of a racist campaign in early New York; a misuse of legal execution that rivals the Salem witch trials. 

·      The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead – funny, sad, surprising – a great tale.

·      Reconstruction by Eric Foner – the now standard history that changed the direction of thinking on this period.

·      The Courtship of Eva Eldridge by Diane Simmons – a thoroughly enjoyable non-fiction look at the life of an ordinary woman and her romantic troubles; excellent, small-bore history.

·      Deacon King Kong by James McBride – a comic story of a Brooklyn just as it is coming apart at the seams in the late 1960s.

·      New Selected Poems by Eavan Boland – I wish I had read her when she was alive; a worthy companion to Seamus Heaney.

·      Normal People by Sally Rooney – a powerful and enjoyable love story, told with great realism; I miss these two young people.

·      Night Boat to Tangiers by Kevin Barry – Waiting for Godot with drug dealers.

·      The Sounds of Poetry by Robert Pinsky – brilliant literary criticism for the layperson; sensible and smart.

·      Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli – a unique and original encounter with an American tragedy.

·      Outline by Rachel Cusk – a slow, painstaking, examination of a woman’s life, revealed through her brief sojurn in Athens.

·      Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson – several generations of a Bed-Stuy family captured in short, vivid vignettes.

·      How to Be Gay by David Halperin – a fascinating examination of what progress costs; a plea for respect for pre-Stonewall gay life; a warning against too much assimilation.

·      Apeirogon by Colum McCann – 1001 small stories surrounding a real-life friendship, Palestinian and Israeli.

·      Dorothea Lange, A life Beyond Limits by Linda Gordon – the fascinating photographer’s fascinating life; like Lange herself, quietly feminist.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

How to explain--"trans" may work well enough as a shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes ("born in the wrong body," necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some--but partially, or even profoundly, useful for others? That for some "transitioning" may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others--like Harry, who is happy to identify as a butch on T--it doesn't? How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don't want any of it. [Beatrix Preciado] How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK--desirable, even (e.g., "gender hackers")--whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? How does one get across the best way to find out how other people feel about their gender or their sexuality--or anything else, really--is to listen to what they tell you, and try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours? 

Maggie Nelson's theory-memoir The Argonauts tells the story--peripatetic, looping--of her marriage to Harry Dodge, a non-binary sculptor and playwright, and the birth of their son, Iggy. The title refers to the ship Argo, which, according to myth, was rebuilt plank by plank, provoking the question: is the new ship the same as the old? And if not, when did the transition occur? The word transition makes the metaphor plain, but hides much of the nuance: Nelson dwells at length on the nature of bodies and identities that change in all sorts of ways, not just because of the presence of prescribed hormones, but because of the nature of aging and childbirth. For Nelson, the body is a site of indeterminacy and slippage, but this is one of its wonders. We want our gender roles, like our bodies, to be clear and coherent, but as she writes above, "the shit stays messy."

One of the peculiar things about The Argonauts, especially for a book that is relatively popular, is that it's absolutely dripping with theory: Lacan, Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and many, many others. You might be forgiven for picking up and putting it down, thinking it pretentious, but to me, one of the marvels of The Argonauts is that it is anti-pretentious: by weaving the words of theorists into her own paragraphs and sentences--Nelson highlights them by italicizing, and places the names in the margin, even as her "borrowing" makes it clear that she speaking for herself with their voices--Nelson removes theory from the realm of the brain and claims it as a way of understanding her own body, her own husband, her own child. She's contemptuous of the trendy notion that our words are tragically incapable of conveying real truths; it may be true, but still they do much for us, and The Argonauts is clearly a book by someone for whom words are a mode of self-exploration.

One of the remarkable things about gender is that, even though it permeates our lives in ineradicable ways, we seem to be unable to talk about it. The conservative understanding is, as Nelson writes, like a child's drawing of a mommy and a daddy, all simple triangles and squares, but even thoughtful and accepting people have trouble being able to even say what gender is. I appreciated Nelson's attempt to mine the words of others to communicate her own experience, as a woman, as a pregnant body, as a lover, as a wife, etc., etc. But I appreciated, too, the honesty with which Nelson approaches the messiness of it all, and the way gender, like so much about our identities, refuses to be pinned down, like a butterfly to a board. 

Stream System by Gerald Murnane

In all the world there has never been, there is not, and there will never be any such thing as time. There is only place. What people call time is only place after place. Eternity is here already, and it has no mystery about it; eternity is just another name for this endless scenery where we wander from one place to another.

The world of Gerald Murnane is an insular one. He has never been on a plane, has never worn sunglasses, has left Australia only for places that can be reached by boat, and lives a hermetic existence in North Victoria. He spends his time keeping detailed files on his own life, something he has been working on since he was young. He's obsessed with horse-racing and has records of thousands of fictional horse races that he's simulated using an arcane system involving picking up random volumes of fiction, choosing a paragraph, and using the data contained in the words to determine the winner. Each of these horses has racing colors a complicated history, and all the races take place in a fictional, but not fantastical, world of his own making.

With an ordinary collection, including so much biographical data would probably be unwise and might serve to obscure the fictions themselves; but Stream System, a collection of all of Murnane's short fiction (a term used loosely since two pieces in this collection crack 100pp) is not a regular collection. There are virtually no character names at all, not a single line of dialog, and very little explicit action. Murnane, throughout the collection, explains bits and bobs about his writing methods through the voices of his narrators, while always taking care to remind the reader, sometimes explicitly, that what they are reading is a work of fiction and not, as they might be tempted to believe, a work of lightly fictionalized autobiography.

And yet, the stories are so internal and the narrators so like Murnane that the collection as a whole has a metafictional quality--what are we to make of dozens of middle aged Australian men who refuse to set foot on planes, who fantasize about race horses, who write fiction exactly like Murnane's? But these narrators also can't be the same person, because they have different backgrounds, different paths that led them to similar places. A Vietnam veteran in Finger Webs, blue collar workers in Stone Quarry and The White Fields of Uppington, a monk in As It Were a Letter, a teacher in When the Mice Failed to Arrive, etc etc.

These characters have in common many things, but one especially: all are driven throughout their lives by images they've seen, read about, conjured, and spend most of their time trying to connect them, and that is what these stories do as well. They achieve their momentum and denouments (almost all of which are spectacular) through the slow accretion of minutae and the revelation of the places created by their mental sediment, The collection's title story, Stream System, makes this explicit--the story takes place entirely as the narrator looks at the titular system and connects the shapes of the various pools to events thoughout his life. The images the characters carry around, sometimes happily, sometimes reluctantly, share many common elements (fathers, time-as-place, isolated phrases from books, race horses, the faces of women) and yet each man is subtly different. But different as they are, none of them are able to ultimately put the images in their heads into an order that solves the puzzle they're all mystified by, the infinite depths of their humanity.

You'd be forgiven, if you didn't read the cover copy, if you completed Stream System and thought it was a novel rather than an omnibus. The stories are of a piece, circling around variations, could-have-been, versions of the same man. And lest this review makes it sound tedious, it's full of dry humor, clever turns of phrase, and a sense of momentum that frankly makes no sense given the subjects of the stories. Murnane is a master of this style and indeed, I suspect he's the only one who could really pull it off, given how much of himself is within his carefully constructed fictions.

Ultimately, Murnane seems ambivalent about even his own work, citing repeatedly Philip  Larkin's line "Books are a load of crap" and giving his characters crises wherein they determine never to read/write again, and to live only within their own minds, a landscape which, even among the many he evokes throughout the stories, feels the most infinite of all.

Fleischman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

 

 

This was who Seth was going to marry.  But here’s what he didn’t know, I told him, and he would learn:  A wife isn’t like an ultra-girlfriend or a permanent girlfriend.  She’s an entirely new thing.  She’s something you made together, with you as an ingredient.  She couldn’t be the wife without you.  So hating her or turning on her or talking to your friends about the troubles you have with her would be like hating your own finger.  It’s like hating your own finger after it becomes necrotic.  You don’t separate yourself from it.  You look at your wife and you’re not really looking at someone you hate.  You’re looking at someone and seeing your own disabilities and your own disfigurement.  You’re hating your creation.  You’re hating yourself.

 

Toby Fleishman is in trouble, but so is everyone else in this novel.  It takes a little while to realize the seriousness of the trouble, because Brodesser-Akner presents it in comic terms for the first three quarters of the novel.  That comedy is fun, but when things turn serious, they disappoint.

 

Toby is separated from Rachel – their final divorce papers will appear in the second half of the novel – and he is just getting the hang of separation.  That means he is just beginning to date.  In the world of this novel – a very wealthy and privileged slice of Manhattan – that means that Toby, a short, balding, 41 years old with two kids, low self-esteem and a very demanding job, is having more sex than he ever imagined possible.  He has a wide variety of apps that allow him to preview, chat with, and select potential partners and virtually all of them want no-strings-attached sex.  Phone sex, text sex, quickies in the hall, mad romps on the floor, anything that is neither demanding nor emotionally involved. 

 

His trouble seems at first to center around whether he can balance the time required to harvest all this pleasure with the time he wants to put into raising his children and being a top liver specialist at NYU Medical Center.  This is made more difficult because Rachel is presented as a narcissistic, greedy and overly ambitious woman who cares little for her children.  We are told that Rachel’s was always the primary career in the family, that she makes many times Toby’s salary and was driven always to make her business larger and more lucrative. That early portrait is confirmed when – after dumping the kids on Toby so she can go on a yoga retreat – she disappears from their lives.  She returns from the weekend but never comes to pick up the kids or return Toby’s calls.  He makes moves to jettison her completely from his life and become a single father.  These attempts seem sincere – he takes time off from work and loses out on a promotion as a result.  

 

Somewhere in the midst of all this, Toby meets Nahid, the one sexual powerhouse from his internet dating who seems to connect on an emotional level, and for a time it seems that Fleishman will pull out of the trouble and lead a happy life, without Rachel.

 

Around this time, the narrative changes in two ways:  first, we begin to focus on the life and moods of our narrator.  For the first 50-60 pages, the novel appears to have a limited omniscient narrator who is following Toby’s thoughts and moods, knows the history of his marriage, the intimate details of his children’s birth, the conversations and fights that are milestones in both the deepening and the devolution of his relationship to Rachel.  But then it becomes clear that the narrator is a character in the story – one Libby who, along with Seth, is an old friend of Toby’s from pre-Rachel days.  We begin to learn of Libby’s complex relationship with these two men, Seth and Toby and of her own struggles with career and family.  While Libby is on a vacation from her strained marriage, she bumps into the long-absent Rachel and discovers that Rachel has not abandoned her family, but had a full nervous breakdown from the strain of her divorce and the pressure of trying to be the main bread winner for 14 years.  She is a flawed, but far more sympathetic person than Libby (who has only known Toby’s side of things) has believed.  Libby makes sure Rachel gets the help she needs, then returns to her own long-suffering husband; Toby realizes that Nahid is just as flawed as any other human and Seth plans to marry for the first time in spite of what he has seen from these friends.

 

Then novel ends with several pages of Libby’s reflections on marriage – including the analysis of Seth’s situation quoted above.  (He has delayed marriage into his 40s, but is now marrying a beautiful 27-year-old.) That reflection is serious and offers some interesting and thoughtful ideas about the challenges and rewards of spending decades in an intimate relationship with someone as complex and flawed as you yourself likely are.  It almost makes me take the rest of this seriously, but there has been too much breezily taken for granted for me to fully buy this turn of events.  

 

The feminist turn here – that Rachel is not a total bitch, that Toby’s sexual escapades are a childish male fantasy, that women are under enormous pressure to claim it all and that it is wives who bear much of the burden of marriages complexity – can only be revelatory if you believed something different at any point in the novel.  The first third of the book, when all Fleishman’s trouble seems to be libidinal, was only interesting because it was written by a woman.  It was a great male fantasy and it was written with humor and energy – I breezed through it.  The list of slogans on women’s t-shirts alone provides enough jokes to carry a novel. But it was never believable or challenging or interesting in any serious way.  Nor was Libby to be taken seriously as a narrator.  There is not the slightest attempt to explain how she knows so much about Toby’s life, or why, having intensely disliked and avoided Rachel for 15 years, she is  the one person capable of really understanding and helping her.

 

The fact that these basic elements are not plausible is layered on the hyperbolic focus on wealthy Manhattanites here.  Toby is a well-respected specialist at NYU, the kind of person a hedge fund manager calls in when his wife is sick, but he is the underpaid person whose career allows time for his children?  Rachel’s salary is many times his, but even with their combined income, they are the poor relations in their social group?  It is not a question of whether these conditions are possible, but whether they make fertile ground for a serious novel about relationships.  And in the end, Brodesser-Akner is attempting a serious novel about relationships.  The reading is entertaining and some of this is funny, and when it was just going to be that, I enjoyed it.  But as she turns towards tragedy, the breach between the reader’s pleasure and the reader’s trust grows too wide.

Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau

'Being or nothingness, that is the question. Ascending, descending, coming, going, a man does so much that in the end he disappears. A taxi bears him off, a metro carries him away, the Tower doesn't care, nor the Pantheon. Paris is but a dream, Gabriel is but a reverie (a charming one), Zazie the dream of a reverie (or of a nightmare) and all this story the dream of a dream, the reverie of a reverie, scarcely more than the typewritten delirium of an idiotic novelist (oh! sorry). Over there, farther -- a little farther -- than the Place de Republique, the graves are overflowing with Parisians who were, who ascended and descended the stairs, came and went in the streets, and who did so much that in the end they disappeared. Forceps bore them, a hearse carries them away, and the Tower rusts and the Pantheon cracks a little more rapidly than the bones of the dead who are too much with us to dissolve into the humus of the town impregnated with cares. But I am alive, and there ends my knowledge...'

One fact that will tell you what Raymond Queneau's Zazie in the Metro is like is that Zazie, the foul-mouthed little girl from the French countryside who arrives to spend the weekend with her uncle Gabriel, never rides the Paris Metro. No doubt you will think about Waiting for Godot, another text where the promise of the title never happens; it's merely set over the page like a winking irony. Like Becket, Queneau's characters are all surface. It's hard to recognize any human depth in them, which makes their conversations hard to follow, composed as they are of verbal tics being spooled out again and again. The characters are composed of verbal tics, I mean. They are like the parrot Laverdure, who says only one thing: "Talk, talk, that's all you can do."

French people, the introduction informs me, find Zazie in the Metro enormously funny. There's a recognizably comic plot, that goes something like this: Zazie arrives to visit her uncle with only one desire, to ride the Metro, but there's a strike on. Her uncle tries to give her a tour of Paris, but she eludes his control, skipping off to pester and curse at strangers. Zazie is in turns chased after and spurned by Gabriel, as well as his gentle wife Marceline, his landlord Turandot, Turandot's parrot Laverdure, a disguised cop named Trouscaillon, and several other broad comic figures.

There's something ultramodern about Zazie, something that captures a postwar Paris emerging into a global culture. What Zazie jones for, other than to ride the Metro, is a nice pair of American blue jeans and a Coca-Cola. Her uncle Gabriel and his friend Charles, a taxi-driver, try to show Zazie the "real" Paris, but prove to know as little as she does: they bicker over whether a certain building is the Place de Republique, or the Gare de Lyon, or the Commercial Court. The only landmark they can really identify is the Eiffel Tower, but standing at the top of it with Zazie, they no longer have any faithful reference point at all.

All of which is underlined when Gabriel is "captured" by a group of tourists who, despite not thinking any French, believe him to be a tour guide; instead of taking Zazie to see the "real" Paris, Gabriel finds himself kidnapped by the group, leading them to sites neither he nor they can recognize. If you're still thinking of Waiting for Godot, you might read Zazie at the Metro as a romp through the postmodern emptiness of words, which fail time and time again to locate the characters in space or in meaning. The blue jeans are real but the Pantheon is just some building.

Zazie is a novel also about modern sex panic. It seems awfully prescient, for example, in the way that Zazie's solo adventures invoke anxieties about sex perverts, anxieties that Zazie herself is more than willing to weaponize when, for example, she wants to duck Trouscaillon. But it's Zazie herself that turns out to be sex-obsessed: an off-hand remark by Trouscaillon pushes her to ask her uncle, again and again over the course of the novel, whether or not he is a "hormosessual." He's not, he insists, but he does make his living by dancing at a nightly drag show. And neither does he consent to tell Zazie what a "hormosessual" is exactly--in another way failing as a guide to his young nice.

What this edition could have really used, I think, is a translator's note. Queneau was famously the linchpin of Oulipo, a group of French writers whose hallmark is wordplay. I'm sure the translations into English here are very clever when you know the original French, but I found myself wondering why I should really be interested in calling the blue jeans "blewgenes" or the Coca-cola "cacocalo." Some layer of meaning--like the blue jeans themselves, for Zazie--kept alluding me. The madcap energy of Zazie's weekend was never enough, for me, to make up that deficit.

The Wreath by Sigrid Undset

Kristin felt that she was kneeling with Erlend on a cold stone. He knelt with the red, singed patches on his pale face. She knelt beneath the heavy bridal crown and felt the crushing, oppressive weight in her womb--the burden of the sin she was carrying. She had played and romped with her sin, measuring it out as if in a child's game. Holy Virgin--son it would be time for it to lie fully formed before her, looking at her with living eyes, revealing to her the brands of her sin, the hideous deformity of sin, striking hatefully with misshapen hands and his mother's breast. After she had borne her child, after she had seen the marks of in on him and loved him the way she had loved her sin, then the game would be played to the end.

For the last three years, I have had a December tradition of reading one of the books in Sigrid Undset's series about medieval Norway, Kristin Lavransdatter. Though the books span several years and thus, several seasons, there's something especially wintry in them; they match the cold weather and the cozy hearth. I thought this year I would begin reading Tiina Nunnally's newer translation, only to discover that I actually had read Nunnally's version of The Wreath, and the other two books in Charles Archer's older translation. Still, going from Archer's to Nunnally's emphasized the benefit of Nunnally's clear and modernizing language when compared to Archer's attempt at using medieval English vernacular. Kristin's desire to marry for love, rather than expectation or honor, is wholly recognizable, even when her social context seems foreign or strange, and Nunnally's translation produces an intimacy with the reader that Kristin and these novels deeply deserve.

Reading The Wreath again, I was struck by how well Undset anticipates The Cross, the final novel in the series. (Brent, you may want to skip this paragraph.) Kristin and her forbidden love, Erlend Nikulausson, meet while she is spending a year at the Nonneseter convent, which is something apparently that young women did before they became adults. If she cannot have Erlend, Kristin insists that she--having already given her virginity to him and thus being effectively married in the eyes of God--will go into the convent for good. This doesn't come to pass, but Kristin does end up in the convent in the end, after her husband has died and her children left home, giving her life at last to the service of God when it is most needed, during the Black Plague. Even Brother Edvin, Kristin's beloved priest and mentor, suggests that he dreamed she would choose the convent life. The scenes at Nonneseter in The Wreath, the second time through, are riddled with this irony, and they make me feel as if Kristin ends up in the right place in the end, after a long detour on which she is set by her "original sin." In a thousand other small ways--like the brief attention paid by Kristin's jilted fiancé Simon Andresson to her little sister Ramborg, who he will marry after being widowed in The Wife--I was impressed by how Undset seems to have the entire trilogy already fully mentally formed.

I know it's gauche to look at everything through the lens of television, but The Wreath had me wondering what an HBO-style Kristin Lavransdatter series would look like. I'm imagining a season for each novel where, like with The Crown, the main characters are recast as they age. The Wreath is punctuated by moments of sheer drama that would play well on the screen: the attempted rape by Bentein and the murder of Kristin's friend Arne (ingeniously set up by Undset as the "forbidden love" Erlend later becomes), the moment Erlend meets Kristin by saving her from a pack of thieves (and a escaped leopard!), the standoff over a cup of poison between Kristin and Erlend's former mistress Eline, the accident that cripples Kristin's sister Ulvhild, the church fire that brings Erlend and Kristin's father Lavrans inches closer to reconciliation.

The challenge, of course, would be convincing a modern audience that the morality of these novels deserves to be taken seriously. I don't think that sex before marriage is a big deal, but the Norway of Kristin Lavransdatter does, and for good reasons: marriage in this society, as in many, is not merely an act of personal love but a way of binding families and communities, and a sacrament jealously guarded by God. Only a skilled director and actors, I think, could sufficiently remind us, as Undset does, that marriage has meant something different to other cultures than ours. If you could get over that hurdle, Kristin Lavransdatter is riddled with moments of excruciating pathos. As when I first read it three years ago, I was deeply moved by the tense moment between Lavrans and his wife Ragnfrid at the end where she admits that she was not a virgin at their wedding, a moment which recontextualizes the entire novel that has come before it. And knowing that marriage is not the end for Erlend and Kristin--that the future holds further, deeper challenges--makes The Wreath even more heart-jerking.

As You Like It by William Shakespeare

ROSALIND: Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.

It was a real pleasure to read As You Like It; it's been such a long time since I've read a Shakespeare play I felt a little out of touch with that part of my reading identity. I once decided to read all of them, and although I've read most, it's been a while since I worked on that particular resolution. And As You Like It is such a pleasant one to return to, as whimsical and free-wheeling as the Forest of Arden that provides its setting.

The plot--though it isn't really a play where much happens--goes like this: Duke Senior, having been usurped by Duke Ferdinand, has fled to the Forest of Arden. Senior's daughter Rosalind has been allowed to remain because she is besties with Celia, Ferdinand's daughter, but not for long: when the jealous Ferdinand exiles Rosalind, she flees in disguise as a young man, Ganymede, with Celia in tow. Meanwhile, Orlando has been denied any inheritance by his cruel brother, Oliver, and, having fallen in love with Rosalind, flees to Arden as well. In Arden, Rosalind--as Ganymede--promises to "cure" Orlando of his lovesickness by pretending to be Rosalind.

As You Like It reminded me strongly of A Midsummer Night's Dream, another play that differentiates the civilized world from a "green" space where freedom and fluidity reign. The Duke's kingdom is a nasty place, where brother conspires against brother, and "civilized" institutions, like the primogeniture that robs Orlando of an education and an income, perpetuate misery. But civilized hierarchies collapse in Arden, a place whose essence is inherited from Roman pastorals. (It's a funny place, this forest: for one, there seem to be a lot of shepherds and sheep for a forest.) In Arden, plot seems to stop almost entirely; the most exciting action--including, amazingly, a lion attack--all happens off stage. Instead, what Shakespeare stages is a series of interactions and dialogues between residents and outsiders about the nature of love and the relative virtues of life in country versus life at court. Arden is a space for wit, which might be describes a kind of verbal free play, free of the consequences they may have in the ivilized world.

It's only in Arden that Rosalind can get away with the gender and identity slippage that she enjoys. The irony of Rosalind's identity--she's pretending to be a man who is pretending to be herself--is one of the core pleasures of the play, and as elegant a setup as it is, I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it. Rosalind is often described as Shakespeare's wittiest female character, and that's probably true, but Orlando, who is never quite more than a decent and victimized lunk, never seemed to live up to her. As a result, their relationship lacks some of the heat of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. But Arden is too gentle a place for that kind of sparring, and instead what stands out about Rosalind is the way she exerts control over her identity, and thus the relationships in Arden. She withholds her true identity until she knows she can use it to arrange everyone's lives in harmony: she with Orlando, Celia with Orlando's brother Oliver, and the shepherd Silvius with Phoebe--a young maiden who, as genre demands, has fallen in love with "Ganymede."

There's a feminist reading in there somewhere: only in Arden, a place of fantasy, can a woman even as intelligent and perceptive as Rosalind have real control over herself and her place. And even that has its limitations, because her last-minute sorting has the ironic result of reinscribing everyone into the rigid hierarchies of the civilized world. It's hard to imagine the marriage between Rosalind and Orlando surviving back in the Dukedom, even with Senior on the throne. But Shakespeare allows her at least the right of the play's epilogue, in which she stakes a final claim to total freedom: "If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not. And I am sure as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell."

Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns

This book does not seem to be growing very large although I have got to Chapter Nine. I think this is partly because there isn't any conversation. I could just fill pages like this:

'I am sure it is true,' said Phyllida.

'I cannot agree with you,' answered Norman.

'Oh, but I know I am right," she replied.

'I beg to differ,' said Norman sternly. That is the kind of stuff that appears in real people's books. I know this will never be a real book that business men in trains will read, the kind of business men that wear stiff hats with curly brims and little breathing holes let in the side. I wish I knew more about words. Also I wish so much I had learnt my lessons at school. I never did, and have found this such a disadvantage ever since. All the same, I am going on writing this book even if business men scorn it.

Sophia Fairclough, the narrator of Barbara Comyns' Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, seems entirely guileless. She begins her marriage to a commercial artist, at 21 with no guidance or model; Charles' family seems to hate her, in fact. She has a childlike innocence that seems rather foreboding for a woman embarking on an adult marriage: she keeps newts, for example, in her pockets. Her husband, Charles, is equally unprepared for marriage, but he has a malicious streak that allows the burden of their poverty and ignorance to fall entirely on Sophia.

Sophia's narration has such a light touch that the Faircloughs' poverty seems, at first, rather picturesque, even comic. The spoons may come from Woolworths, but the second-hand furniture is all painted sea-green, a symbol, maybe, of need transformed into domestic coziness. But the light touch is a feint; Our Spoons Came From Woolworths actually has a razor-sharp idea of what poverty does. Never is that clearer than, a third of the way through the novel, Sophia delivers her first child, in a public hospital, described in sinister and bewildering detail. Charles' family blames her for having the child, and even as Sophia grows older, she never seems able to eradicate this internalized guilt, even as future pregnancies unfold in even more grotesque permutations, including an abortion that the penniless Charles pressures her into having. "I knew men hate women when they are unhappy," Sophia writes, excusing Charles' cruelty. If this seems like the final intersection of poverty and misogyny, just wait until the moment where Sophia, cast out of her home, spends the night in a cold alley with her infant in her arms.

One thing I teach my fiction writing students is that tone and mood ought to contrast, or be different. Our Spoons Came From Woolworths is the perfect illustration of that rule: though its depiction of poverty is horrifying, it never loses the whimsical and slightly befuddled tone of Sophia's worldview. She comes off as a sort of holy fool, an ingenue who has been profoundly tricked and mistreated. The reader's expectation that someone will see and reward her earnestness and honesty is answered by Comyns, who contrives at the end for Sophia and her son to end up with the kind of husband that she has deserved; anything else would have seemed far too cruel for such a sympathetic heroine. I like the passage at the top of this review because it suggests that, at last, Sophia has found a way to tell her own story without the mediation of a husband figure at all: she's going to share it no matter whether the "business men" like it or not.

Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler

When Callaghan returned, he settled into his chair, reached for the bottle and said, "Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French-Canadians consumed by self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish the famine; and Jews the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from the Ukraine, Poland, Italy, and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are still huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy store window, scared by the Americans on one side and the bush on the other. And now that we are here, prospering, we do our damn best to exclude more ill-bred newcomers, because they remind us of our own mean origins in the draper's shop in Inverness or the shtetl or the bog. What was I talking about?"

"Solomon."

Moses Berger is consumed by two things: alcoholism and Solomon Gurksy. Solomon was--or is--a member of the infamous Gursky family, who rose from obscurity to conquer the bootlegging industry in Canada, eventually becoming powerful and respected men of business. Solomon, embroiled in a bitter rival with his brother Bernard, the company's CEO, died years before in a mysterious crash on his way to the Arctic. Moses, whose association with the Gurskys goes back to his childhood, when his poet father was hired as a speechwriter for Bernard, has become obsessed with the question of what happened to Solomon. Was he murdered? If so, by whom? And why was his body never found? And who's ominously leaving dead ravens everywhere, and is it the same person secretly buying up shares of Gursky stock under the name "Corvus?"

Solomon Gurksy is based on the real-life Bronfman family, who turned a bootlegging operation into the Canadian conglomerate now known as Seagram, one of the largest liquor companies in the world. But Richler takes an interesting story and turns it into an epic, stretching across the length of the Canadian continent and the breadth of history. The history of the Gursky family is inextricable from the history of Canada: Solomon's grandfather Ephraim, sources suggest, was a member of John Franklin's ill-fated expedition to find the Northwest Passage, and the only one who survived (by stowing away Jewish soul food, naturally, and avoiding the poisoned lead cans that drove the others insane). In the Inuit communities of Arctic Canada, Berger discovers, there are those who still go by the surname Gor-ski or Ger-ski, Ephraim's descendants. More surprising still, Ephraim seems to have inculcated in his Inuit friends a nascent branch of Orthodox Judaism.

We learn that, when Solomon was a child, Ephraim took him on a trip to the Artic Ocean from which Solomon was forced to return alone, without assistance or supplies. Solomon, if only in spirit, is Ephraim's true heir: an adventurous spirit, willing to do anything it takes to survive and advance. But it's Bernard who manages to muscle Solomon out of the way, supplanting him with a shrewder, more modern sense of business, where intrigue happens in the boardroom, rather than on the tundra, or in an illegal Manitoba distillery.

There's something of The Adventures of Augie March in Solomon Gursky: Bellow, though he was a Canadian Jew like Richler, tried to imagine a story that would weave Jewishness permanently into the American fabric. Richler does the same here for Canada: in Ephraim, Richler makes a European Jew one of the very first Canadian colonizers, for good and bad. (The way in which Richler insinuates Jewishness into Inuit religion may or may not be intentionally suspect; I'm not sure.) In Solomon, he illustrates the way in which the pioneering spirit of Jewish Canada is marginalized, attacked, and eliminated by social climbers who prefer to forget that Canada is the "disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples."

All this seems undeniably cool. So why did this book leave me so cold? Solomon Gursky, I felt, ends up far less than the sum of its parts, and there are so many parts. My description above leaves out at least two dozen semi-major characters: the third Gursky brother, Morrie; their father, Aaron; Berger's lovers Lucy and Beatrice; Solomon's son Henry, living as a devout Hasid in the Northwest Territories; Henry's  resentful son Isaac; Bernard's consigliere Harvey; Berger's mentor Hyman Kaplansky; several rough-and-tumble French Canadians; a customs inspector; a Chinese hotel owner in Alberta; a pair of North Carolinian furniture magnates; a bush pilot; I don't know who else. Richler jumps between the perspectives of these in a way that's meant to build tension around the novel's central mysteries, and to conceal important information for a later reveal, but which in practice I found utterly bewildering. I still have no real idea of why Moses was so obsessed with Solomon, and while I'm pretty sure I understand what happened to him in the end, if I'd have blinked, I would have missed it. Solomon Gursky may still be alive, but when he's in set down the middle of this Where's Waldo diptych of a novel, what does it matter?

In some ways, Solomon Gursky a pastiche made from Richler's other, better novels. Gursky himself is a version of the titular avenging Jew of St. Urbain's Horseman; the mystery of his murder isn't nearly as satisfying as the one in Barney's Version. Solomon Gurksy adds to these novels a sweeping, epic scale, but for me, it swept away much of what made those novel's work.