Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson

He was alone, a young male of a ferocious and persecuted tribe whose only friends, except the Spirit that made it, were its enemies--the otter hunters. His cubhood was ended, and now indeed did his name fit his life, for he was a wanderer, and homeless, with nearly every man and dog against him.

Tarka, a river otter, is born in the west of England. He learns from his mother how to feed himself, hunting for fish and frogs, and also how to play. But an otter's life, Tarka will learn, is not an easy one, and he spends his entire life in the shadow of the gruesome Deadlock, the champion hound that local men employ to hunt and kill otters. Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter follows Tarka's life from birth to death, hunting, mating, playing and fighting.

Tarka is not like Watership Down or any number of other books about talking animals; the animals do not talk and are really no more than animals. Though they are often given names--Tarka's otter associates include Greymuzzle, White-Tip, and Tarquol, and other animals get them too, like the heron Old Nog and the crow Kronk--the animals are not anthropomorphized. Rarely does Williamson even assign the kind of emotions to them with which we may identify, which preserves the essential strangeness of an animal's life: it explains, for example, how Tarka can search so endlessly for his "lost love" White-Tip and then leave her again. And yet Tarka can be as engaging and thrilling as any adventure novel. Tarka's relationship with his nurturing mother, his steady companionship with his first mate Greymuzzle, his yearning for White-Tip, his escalating skirmishes with Deadlock--these events are gripping, but their interest lies in the projection of human emotions that the reader must bring with them.

Otters are an interesting subject for this kind of book. For one, they're famous for their playfulness, a trait that makes them more rounded as "characters" than, say, the stoats and weasels that compete with them for food. One of my favorite scenes in Tarka shows the protagonist learning to play with a crow--a similarly intelligent and playful creature--by passing rocks and sticks and other objects back and forth. But otters are also meat-eaters, efficient and vicious killers, and Williamson doesn't shy away from depicting the violence of the natural world. (Don't get too attached to the hedgehog Iggywick just because he has a cute name.) Tarka is an enemy to many just as he has enemies, and yet he has too "many friends, whom he played with and forgot--sticks, stones, water-weeds, slain fish, and once an empty cocoa-tin, a bright and curious thing that talked strangely as it moved over the shallows, but sank into the pool beyond, sent up bubbles, and would play no more."

Tarka the Otter's depiction of the Devonshire countryside in which Tarka lives is remarkably rich. It's clear that the novel is the product of man years of close observation of animal behavior in exactly this habitat; Williamson's introduction is in part a defense against critics who claim that an otter could never, for instance--spoiler alert--drown a dog. But as the foreword notes, Tarka is really a novel about habitat, because the shape of an animal's life is completely governed by its habitat in a way a human being's never could, and Williamson does this idea justice by casting a sharp eye on the botany, geology, and hydrology of Devonshire. A liberal use of local jargon emphasizes this, and makes Tarka a convincing portrait of a single animal in a single corner of the wide world.

How Much of These Hills is Gold by C. Pam Zhang

There is claiming the land, which Ba wanted to do, which Sam refused--and then there is being claimed by it. The quiet way. A kind of gift in never knowing how much of these hills might be gold. Because maybe if you only went far enough, waited long enough, held enough sadness pooled in your veins, soon you might come upon a path you knew, the shapes of rocks would look like familiar faces, the trees would greet you, buds and birdsong lilting up, and because this land has gouged in you an animal's kind of claiming, senseless to words and laws--dry grass drawing blood, a tiger's mark in a ruined leg, ticks and torn blisters, wind-coarsened hair, sun burned in patterns to leave skin striped or spotted--then, if you ran, you might hear on the wind, or welling up in your own parched mouth, something like and unlike an echo, coming from before or behind, the sound of a voice you've always known calling your name--

Lucy is a young Chinese-American girl living in the gold rush region of the American West in the nineteenth century. Since the death of her mother, her little sister Samantha has cut her hair short and taken to calling herself Sam, posing as a boy. When Lucy and Sam's father--known as "Ba"--dies suddenly in the night, the pair end up alone in this frontier land, and without a way to stay in their house, they set out into the wilderness to find a place to bury Ba's putrefying body.

How Much of These Hills is Gold wrenches the reader through several chronological shifts: no sooner is Ba's body buried than Zhang winds back the clock several years to illuminate the kind of hardscrabble life the family lived before the death of Ma and Ba. Ba, it turns out, was one of the very first to discover gold in the California hills, a secret he has been keeping--and mining--for years, but when the secret gets out, it's only a matter of time until white men find a way to use his race to lock him out of the munificence of the gold rush.

There's even an As I Lay Dying-style section written from the point of view of Ba's corpse as he rides on back of Lucy and Sam's horse, written as a farewell to Lucy in which he fills in the history of his own relationship with their mother and his first experiences in what the Chinese called, appropriately enough, Gold Mountain. This section, I thought, was one of the most successful of the novel--despite its fancifulness, Ba's voice grounds the narrative; I found the third-person present-tense mode of the rest of the novel to be a little too precious at times.

From there, the novel zooms forward again five years, when Lucy and Sam meet again for the first time after splitting up in the wilderness. Lucy has found safety and comfort in a frontier town, attaching herself to a vain, rich white girl; Sam has been an adventurer in the hills, in the spirit of long-dead Ba. The two are foils in many ways: civilized and wild, assimilating and proudly Chinese, feminine and masculine, Ma and Ba. Against the backdrop of the Wild West, Zhang explores these themes of race, gender, and identity with a great deal of subtlety and complexity. But the story never quite recovers from the time jump, I thought, and tries to fill in too much. Still, How Much of These Hills is Gold offers a new and welcome perspective on the familiar myths of the West.

A Lost Lady by Willa Cather

Long, long afterward, when Niel did not know whether Mrs. Forrester were living or dead, if her image flashed into his mind, it came with a brightness of dark eyes, her pale triangular cheeks with long earrings, and her many-coloured laugh. When he was dull, dull and tired of everything, he used to think that if he could hear that long-lost lady laugh again, he could be gay.

Niel is a poor boy, a homesteader's son, when he becomes enchanted with the wife of the railroad magnate Captain Forrester. Beautiful, elegant, educated--and of course, rich--Mrs. Forrester becomes an embodiment of all that is sweet and good about the Nebraska outpost of Sweet Water they both call home. Over years, he becomes more and more attached to the Forresters, lingering behind when his own father gives up on his dreams of farming to study law with the Forresters' patronage. But slowly, Niel's ardor for Ms. Forrester becomes disenchanted, as when, having come from the pond with freshly picked prairie flowers, he hears the caddish Frank Ellinger inside Mrs. Forrester's room. He deduces--correctly--that the two are having an affair, and the realization shatters his beliefs: "This day saw the end of that admiration and loyalty that had been like a bloom on his existence. He could never recapture it. It was gone, like the morning freshness of the flowers."

Time is unkind to the Forresters. Captain Forrester is bankrupted by a failing bank, though we learn that his bankruptcy is partially attributed to the fact that he, in his largesse, backed the many small investors with his own money, essentially giving up his own riches so that hundreds would survive. He suffers a series of strokes, leaving Mrs. Forrester to become his caretaker. Money dwindles, and so does their stature, until Mrs. Forrester is compelled to seek investments with shady criminals without her husband's knowledge. The Forresters--both of them--are a representation of the Great West, settled by men of genius and daring, but which in later generations has fallen prey to vicious speculators:

"Because," he roused himself from his abstraction and looked about the company, "because a thing that is dreamed of in the way I mean, is already an accomplished fact. All our great West has been developed from such dreams; the homesteader's and the prospector's and the contractor's. We dreamed the railroads across the mountains, just as I dreamed my place on the Sweet Water. All these things will be everyday facts to the coming generation, but to us--" Captain Forrester ended with a sort of grunt. Something forbidding had come into his voice, the lonely, defiant note that is so often heard in the voices of old Indians.

This is, in all fairness to wonderful Willa, bullshit. The original homesteaders and railroad-builders of the American West might have had a kind of bravery their successors didn't, but it's not hard to see that Cather is engaged in a kind of active myth-making that papers over the atrocities westward expansion required. Note the subtle association of Captain Forrester with the "old Indians" who no longer recognize their homelands, which steps quietly over the question of where the Indians went, who sent them there, and how the railroads that Forrester himself helped to build were involved. Cather's attempts to taxonomize the different generations of pioneers certainly obscures how the covered wagons opened up the trails that became the railroads, and how the railroads brought the prospectors in. On the other hand, there's no shortage of writers who engage in the mythmaking of America, and few of them are as persuasive or skillful as Cather is. 

Into the vacuum left by the noble pioneers like Captain Forrester rush lawyers like Ivy Peters, the novel's villain. When Niel and Ivy are boys, Ivy shocks Niel by--in a moment as viscerally horrible as anything I have ever read--catching a woodpecker and gouging its eyes out, laughing as it flaps helplessly in painful darkness. The new Nebraska suits Ivy, and he becomes rich, even buying much of the Forresters' land. He turns the beautiful pond into a wheatfield, not merely for the profit, but because it represents something beautiful over which he now has power, and wants to eradicate. Ivy is one of those "who had never dared anything, never risked anything. They would drink up the mirage, dispel the morning freshness, root out the great brooding spirit of freedom, the generous, easy life of the great land-holders. The space, the colour, the princely carelessness of the pioneer they would destroy and cut up into profitable bits, as the match factory splinters the primeval forest." Tragically, it's Ivy to whom Mrs. Forrester turns with her want of money, further disenchanting poor Niel.

It's hard to love A Lost Lady as one loves O Pioneers! or My Antonia. For one, it's focused on the downfall of the very rich, rather than the striving of the very poor. Yet, those books are made for love and admiration; this one is designed to produce mostly revulsion. Thinking back upon those pioneer novels makes me more sympathetic, actually, to A Lost Lady, which wants me to believe that something noble that was born out in the West has been irrevocably lost.

Dalva by Jim Harrison

What I am trying to do is trade in a dead lover for a live son. I'll throw in a dead father with the dead lover and their souls I have kept in the basement perhaps. The world around me and the world of people looks immense and solid but it is more fragile than lark or pheasant eggs, women eggs, anyone's last heartbeat. I'm a crazy woman. Why didn't I do this long ago? I'm forty-five and there's still a weeping girl in my stomach. I'm still in the arms of dead men--first Father then Duane. I may as well have burned down the goddamned house. Whether I see the son at least he is a living obsession.

Dalva is part-Lakota Sioux, a social worker living in Santa Monica. When she oversteps professional boundaries to protect a young boy from his abusive uncle, she finds herself out of a job and in danger of being targeted by the uncle himself, so she leaves Santa Monica to return to western Nebraska, where she spent her childhood, vowing to finally find the son she put up for adoption when she was only a teenager. Back in Nebraska, she and her current beau Michael--a dipsomaniac historian from Stanford--reconnect with the places and the people of her childhood, and we learn the story of her whirlwind romance with a boy named Duane Stone Horse, who gave her a child, then ran off and committed suicide.

Dalva has a funny three-part structure: the first and third sections are narrated by Dalva herself, but the middle section is narrated by the historian Michael, who has agreed to help Dalva find her son if she will give him access to the papers of her ancestor John Wesley Northridge, a 19th-century pioneer who became a friend to the Lakota and, as a consequence, despised by other white settlers and the U.S. army who took on the task of eradicating the Lakota from the landscape. Michael's narrative quotes heavily from Northridge's journals, which track the pioneer's turn from missionary to apostate, and give an overview of the sad and sorry history of American policy toward Native Americans in the latter half of the 19th century: broken treaties, forced emigration and starvation, bloodshed, etc. These journals contextualize the contemporary lives of characters like Dalva and Duane, who are both part white and part Lakota, though in ways I often found vague. As a narrator, Michael is funny and high-spirited; his scholarly focus is balanced by a wily capacity for ferreting out hidden liquor, and his amorousness gets him into quick trouble in the small Western town.

On the other hand: I read this book bit by bit over a long trip through the part of the country Dalva describes, and the ultimate effect of this structure was to alienate me from Dalva, who is the novel's emotional core. Dalva is a long and rich novel, thick with detail, but perhaps too thick, filled with digressions, literal wanderings to other places: Dalva's uncle's place in the Arizona desert, the Baja peninsula in Mexico, the Florida keys were Duane commits suicide--when all I really wanted was to return to the immediacy and importance of Nebraska. Perhaps this is more about the conditions of my reading than the book itself, but I enjoyed the first section the most, which I read on a long airplane flight and thus could really immerse myself in the thoroughness and vividness of Dalva's life. 

Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

She pets Mariette's wrist and kisses a knuckle. She whispers, "We are so privileged." She holds the palm open and kisses it. "You have turned your face from me too often. You have been frightened by my affection."

With reverence Sister Hermance licks the blood inside the hand wound. "I have tasted you. See?" Tears streak shining paths down her cheeks as she says, "Ever since I first met you, I have loved you more than myself."

Mariette Baptist is a teenager when she leaves her home to join an order of French nuns living in upstate New York. Her sister, Mother Celine, is the prioress at the nunnery, and their father is a severe and skeptical doctor who is befuddled and disappointed by his daughters' calling. As a "postulant"--that is, a probationary not-yet nun--Mariette distinguishes herself through her piety. She confesses to the nunnery priest, Pere Marriott, that she often has visions of Christ in which they converse, and during which she begs to experience the kind of suffering that will bring her closer to him. And yet her piety--and her beauty--are not prized by everyone; to some of the nuns it looks like pride or arrogance. These differences are brought to a crisis when Mariette begins to manifest the stigmata: the wounds in Christ's hand, feet, and side received at the crucifixion.

Is Mariette a saint or a liar? Hansen, as you might expect, offers no clear conclusion to the question: it seems equally likely that the dreamy, aloof Mariette experiences a miracle as it does that she wounds herself, either through a pathological need for attention or a real psychotic break. (Equally likely, that is, if you come into the book willing to believe that such things are possible.) The question dogs the nuns, too, who are divided into pro- and anti-Mariette camps: gossiping, sending letters to the Pere, et cetera. As the Prioress Saint-Raphael--whose responsibility to keep the nunnery together is threatened by Mariette's ecstasy--notes, it is hard to understand God's intention in afflicting Mariette this way. There is no gain, material or spiritual, for the nunnery or anyone else in Mariette's stigmata, not even, it seems, for Mariette. As the Pere observes, the stigmata are gratia dei gratis, given by God's will and not through any desert or lack thereof; saints and reprobates both have manifested the stigmata throughout history. In this way the very uselessness of the stigmata may be part of their miraculousness: a reminder that God's will is inscrutable.

Mariette in Ecstasy is an interesting contrast to Sylvia Townsend Warner's book about a nunnery, The Corner That Held Them. While the latter applies a Marxist lens to the nun's life, showing the ways that even spiritual lives are ultimately shaped by the relations of capital and labor, Mariette in Ecstasy really asks us to consider what the spiritual life of a nun demands. Hansen often lingers on short scenes of pastoral life--the tedium of wash day, the family of skunks that have gotten into the corn cob, stuff like that--in a way that reminds us that a nun's life is one of contemplation and stillness, a life that Mariette's miracles must inevitably interrupt and transform. The antipathy of the anti-Mariette factions may be a kind of jealousy, generated by those who submitted obediently to a life of quietude only to find ostentatiousness rewarded. On the other hand, there is a queer sensuality--queer in both senses--to the pro-Mariette factions captured neatly in the above passage, where Sister Hermance literally licks the wound in Mariette's hand.

I really enjoyed Mariette in Ecstasy. Its pastoral simplicity seems borrowed from the Cather tradition of American writing, but it belies a crypticness that is not easily solved. The question of skepticism--are Mariette's miracles real or fake--is only the most superficial of several questions about faith, belief, and obedience that give the book a quiet power.

A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet

Before the storm we'd caught sight of the parents' screens sometimes, snagged their devices when we needed a quick fix. Gotten flashes of TV through a doorway. But these days we mostly had what was in front of us, the cottage and the barn and long grass in the fields. Long and short, tussocks and bare patches. Topography. We had the wood of the walls and fences, the metal of the parked cars with their near-empty gas tanks.

We had the corners of buildings and the slope of the hills, the line of the treetops. The more time passed, the more any flat image began to seem odd and less than real. Uncanny delicate surfaces. Had we always had them?

We'd had so many pictures. Pictures just everywhere, every hour, minute, or second.

But now they were foreign. Now we saw everything in three dimensions.

A group of teens and near-teens have gathered with their parents at a beach house on Long Island. They exist aloof from their parents, who embarrass them with their drinking and drug use, their sexual neediness and general carelessness. They are so detached from them that the teens play a game: who will be the last of them to have their parents "identified" by the others, and thus claimed by them? (How, I wonder, do you end up with a group of adult friends whose teenage kids don't know whose parents are whose?) Meanwhile, a storm is coming, a monster created by climate change that promises to unleash an apocalypse on the country. The teens, fed up with their parents' cluelessness, escape to safety on their own, fleeing to an abandoned farmhouse in Westchester County.

There's a powerful dynamic at the heart of A Children's Bible: the affective gap between generations, created by climate change. The increasing precarity of the world has sundered the trust that children ought to have in their parents, and while it's nothing new for each generation to distrust their elders, a hippie-like confidence in the future is no longer possible. Millet's choice to make the teens sober cynics and the parents hedonists--an inversion of our usual expectations for stories about generational clashes--captures something true and sad about the world in the climate change era. The teens, and the book, are a little too smug about this difference sometimes, but it works.

I'm sorry to say I didn't like almost every other thing in this book. I didn't buy the voice of the protagonist Evie or her friends, which often felt false to me, like an old person trying to talk like a young one. ("True dat.") I didn't like that the book became a kind of thriller movie, when a roving militia kidnaps the teens and the helpful adults who have gathered at the farm in search of food, and I didn't understand the bizarre deus ex machina that resolves the siege. And I especially didn't like the character of Evie's little brother Jack, who is inspired by his Children's Bible--hence the title of the book--to save two of each animal, Noah-like, and who becomes convinced that he has "cracked the code" of the Bible: God is Nature and Jesus is science. If we only put our trust in science/Jesus, we will be saved, Jack insists. Now, he's nine, but it's clear we're supposed to see him as one of those babes out of whose mouths truth emerges. I don't think "science is Jesus" is an idea that reflects well on science or Jesus.

We're going to have to figure out what the new world we have created demands of us, artistically. (Art, Evie concludes, is the "holy spirit" in the Trinity that includes Nature and Science. Blech.) We're going to stumble into that new world, and stumble into the new art. A Children's Bible offers one very good, very chilling contribution: a powerful symbolic representation of the way we have betrayed our future and our children, unable to pull ourselves away from the party.

The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson

An eel, silvery and fat, swims out to the ocean, setting off on its final journey back to the Sargasso Sea. How does it know where to go? How does it find its way?

When it comes to the eel, we can allow ourselves to ask banal questions, simply because the banal questions don't always have immediate answers. We can also allow ourselves to welcome this. We should be glad that knowledge has its limits. This response isn't just a defense mechanism; it's also a way for us to understand the fact that the world is an incomprehensible place. There is something compelling about the mysterious.

The European eel is one of the most mysterious, yet familiar, creatures in the world. For hundreds or thousands of years, it's been a staple of European cuisine and culture, a staple of coastal lifestyles from Spain--where the juvenile "glass eels" are considered a delicacy--to the Sweden of author Patrik Svensson's childhood home. And yet little is known about the eel, a creature that no one has ever seen mate. For centuries, the "eel question" dominated discourse among natural scientists. Some claimed the eel must be hermaphroditic, reproducing asexually, or even appearing naturally from the mud, since its sexual organs could not be found. The 18th century discovery, at long last, that eels grow sexual organs only when it's time to reproduce was an Einstein-level bombshell among biologists.

The Book of Eels is, at least partially, a history of "the eel question," and the dedicated naturalists who pursued it. Svensson details the life of Danish biologist Johannes Schmidt, who doggedly trawled the Atlantic measuring the size of willow leaf-shaped eel larvae, looking for the smallest, and who determined that eels must reproduce in the Sargasso Sea, the placid sea-within-a-sea that rests between the various ocean currents. He describes others who turned their attention to the "eel question," like a young Sigmund Freud, whose frustrated attempts to discover the reproductive patterns of eels may have helped turn his attention toward psychology, and Rachel Carson, whose description of the life of the American eel was an integral part of her advocacy for the world's oceans. And yet, The Book of Eels shows, the "eel question" has never been satisfactorily resolved. There are those who believe, because we have never seen them mate in the Sargasso Sea--or even found a sexually mature eel there!--the assumption that they breed there must be mistaken. To consider the eel question on the precipice of the 21st century is to consider the limits of our own knowledge and the persistence of mystery.

Svensson intersperses with these natural histories a loving and wistful description of his own relationship with his father, with whom he used to fish for eels in the rivers of his native Sweden. The mystery of the eel, touched by the ordinary fisherman, stands in for other, more personal mysteries, like the one that lies at the heart of the father-son relationship, and the inevitability of loss. In this way The Book of Eels reminded me of Helen Macdonald's wonderful and touching H is for Hawk. It's to Svensson's credit that the transitions from the natural history sections to the personal reflections, which might have seem forced or silly, never do. Among other things, The Book of Eels is skillfully written, deft and nimble, but never overly sentimental or tendentious. Its power comes from the simple and familiar nature of its subject, a common--and not very attractive--fish, that nevertheless evokes a deep wonder.

Parakeet by Marie-Helene Bertino

One week before my wedding day, upon returning to my hotel room with a tube of borrowed toothpaste, I find a small bird waiting inside the area called the antechamber and know within moments it is my grandmother. I recognize the glittering, hematite eyes, the expression of cunning disapproval. The odor of a gym at close of day encircles her.

A woman about to be married discovers that a parakeet has gotten into her hotel room, and the parakeet is her grandmother. The parakeet-grandmother is not all that excited about the impending wedding--she shits on the wedding dress--but neither is the Bride, to be honest, who moves through the various arrangements that lead to a wedding with disassociated trepidation. The parakeet-grandmother tasks her with finding her brother, warning her, however, You will not find him. In a sense this turns out to be true: her brother Tom has become a woman named Simone.

Parakeet is a novel about strange transformations. A grandmother becomes a parakeet; Tom becomes Simone. Of course, Simone is the person who Tom has always been, and as Simone she and the Bride may be able to have the kind of relationship they have never before had. Parakeet holds out the possibility of transformation as a discovering wholeness, a way of becoming oneself. But a wedding, too, is a kind of transformation, from a single woman into a wife, but perhaps not all transformations are welcome ones. In one brief chapter, the Bride finds herself transformed into her own mother. While unwelcome, occupying her mother's body allows the Bride to learn things she never knew about her mother: that she's consumed by lust, and also prone to uncomfortable bouts of farting. If this episode is an exercise in empathy, it's discarded by the end of the novel, when the Bride's mother viciously rejects Simone, who shows up to the wedding at last--becoming her own mother only gives the Bride permission, perhaps, to hate her more.

This is all a lot. Parakeet struck me as a novel that has a few too many good ideas, a few too many transformations. It has a kitchen-sink quality that crowds out the Bride's sense of listlessness and woundedness; it's overstuffed and gaudy. It takes patience, I think, to unravel the themes as they emerge: for example, we learn late in the book that the Bride associates her grandmother with parakeets because they, too, are immigrants from another climate to New York. (I'm very familiar with the monk parakeets who live in and around Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, but Bertino is taking some license when she describes them as having striking "indigo foreheads"--their foreheads are the same gray color as their breasts.) This observation unlocks, it seems, the connection between her grandmother and the traumatic attack the Bride keeps alluding to, when an anti-immigrant gunman stabbed her at a coffee shop where she was working after shooting to death two customers and her Asian-American coworker. There is an undercurrent of racial animus in her marriage--the grandmother-parakeet observes, disapprovingly, that her fiance is white--but otherwise this theme manifests mostly as a conspicuous attention to the Bride's brown skin that seems oddly bereft of any real cultural or ethnic implications.

The big theme, though, is trauma. The Bride has become a bride because she thinks it is the "normal" thing to do, and while she has craved normalcy in the aftermath of her stabbing, she has come in this last week to doubt whether such normalcy is really the solution to, or opposite of, that trauma. Though Parakeet is much more thoughtful and clever than Migrations, another book about trauma and birds, it struck me as presenting a similar ethos. Both books layer their traumas over one another, laying at the center, like the proverbial pea in the princess sheets', the Big Trauma. Layered over the stabbing, though not necessarily in a chronological way, are the Bride's distant mother and rocky childhood, her sister's absence, Simone's insistence on staging a play about her stabbing, Simone's own wedding, which ended in a heroin overdose, etc., etc. But for me, these layers fail to illuminate each other; they only make render them murky and illegible.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

At first--even long before--he had been occupied with one question: why almost all crimes are so easily detected and solved, and why almost all criminals leave such an obviously marked trail. He came gradually to various and curious conclusions, the chief reason lying, in his opinion, not so much in the material impossibility of concealing the crime as in the criminal himself; the criminal himself, almost any criminal, experiences in the moment of the crime a sort of failure of will and reason, which, on the contrary, are replaced by a phenomenal, childish thoughtlessness, just at the moment when reason and prudence are most necessary.  According to his conviction, it turned out that this darkening of reason and failure of will take hold of a man like a disease, develop gradually, and reach their height shortly before the crime is committed; they continue unabated during the moment of the crime itself and for some time after it, depending on the individual; then they pass in the same way as any disease passes.

One thing that surprised me about Crime and Punishment, which I have now read for the first time, is how early the Crime part happens. Raskolnikov's murder of the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta happens very early in the novel. In the first few pages, it's presented as a kind of obsession for Raskolnikov, a foregone conclusion he is steeling himself to make, and only later do we discover his rationalization for the horrible act: by killing the pawnbroker, he believes he can "step over" the bounds of civil society like Napoleon or other great men, who were able to do great things because they did not allow themselves to be straightjacketed by laws and norms. But Raskolnikov is not Napoleon, and he is tortured by his act and its implications. Yet this torment forms a kind of background for much of the novel, which is taken up by a set of other, intersecting plotlines: the death of the drunk Marmeladov, Raskolnikov's love for Marmeladov's prostitute daughter Sonya, the proposed marriage between Raskolnikov's sister and the wealthy Luzhin, and of course, the machinations of the vile Svidrigailov.

Approaching a book like this for the first time is tough, especially when you don't have any special expertise about Russian literature. I have a vague sense that anything I might say has already been said, and developed far better than I'll be able to articulate. But let me make some tentative observations. The first thing I see in Crime and Punishment is a veiled statement on class. Raskolnikov's assumption that great men can get away with murder is essentially correct, but his belief that all it takes is a will to power fails because it lacks class awareness. (I had a dim understanding that Raskolnikov's attempt to "step over" the law is connected to Nietzsche's Ubermensch, but I guess this book was written first, so maybe the influence works the other way? I'll have to look this up.)

Raskolnikov, after all, is not the only criminal in the book. There are two others: Luzhin and Svidrigailov, both of whom want to use their wealth to control Raskolnikov's sister Dunya. (Luzhin wants to marry her; Svidrigailov's desires are more crude.) Luzhin is a clown and a fool who thinks throwing his money around makes him admirable--a type of guy who has not disappeared in a century and a half, you must admit--and who stuffs a thousand rouble-note in Sonya's pocket just so he can accuse her of stealing, thus discrediting her, and by extension, Raskolnikov. If anyone in the novel seems like they could "step over," it's Svidrigailov, whose disinterest in virtue or ethics is nearly sociopathic. And yet in the end, even Svidrigailov isn't Napoleon; which is to say that he hasn't the resources to legitimize his evil. Combine Svidrigailov's viciousness with Luzhin's money and you might start to approach a Napoleon. But how could someone like Raskolnikov, a big sensitive baby without a dime, ever hope to do it?

I think Crime and Punishment has much to tell us still about how to understand human capacities for good and evil. It made me understand how totalizing our cultural conversations about these things can be: "Should X be canceled for doing Y when they've also done Z?" Applying such frameworks to Crime and Punishment seem silly: "Should we cancel Raskolnikov for killing the pawnbroker when he gives his remaining twenty-five roubles to Sonya's family after the death of Marmeladov?" Plotting good and bad deeds, as if on a number line, fails to help us understand anything about Raskolnikov. The end of Crime and Punishment, in which--spoiler alert--Raskolnikov confesses and submits to the suffering of the gulag, suggests that suffering can be ennobling and renewing, and that such suffering is inextricable from the crime that necessitates it. Great criminals, Dostoevsky suggests, are capable of great things because it is they who have the greatest capacity for suffering, and thus the greatest capacity for change. For a book whose religious ethic is buried fairly deep--save perhaps for the moment where Sonya gives Raskolnikov her cross, and exchanges it for the murdered Lizaveta's, a moment layered with symbolic meaning--its attitude toward sin and redemption seems deeply Christian.