The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

The problem for him in high school was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy--even if both could help you get to the vaguely imagined East Coast city from which your experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony. The key was to narrate participation in debate as a form of linguistic combat; the key was to be a bully, quick and vicious and ready to spread an interlocutor with insults at the smallest provocation. Poetry could be excused if it upped your game, became cipher and flow, if it was part of why Amber was fucking you and not Reynolds et al. If linguistic prowess could do damage and get you laid, then it could be integrated into the adolescent social realm without entirely departing from the household values of intellect and expression. It was not a reconciliation, but a workable tension. His disastrous tonsorial compromise. The migraines.

There are many risks for a young white man growing up in Topeka, Kansas: meth, for one, and the seductive anger of the Westboro Baptist crew right next door, the inchoate white male rage that lurked in the wings of American life until it ascended to power in 2016. For young Adam, these are forces against which others are marshaled: his mother, for instance, who has become famous writing a book of feminist pop psychology; the Foundation, a renowned psychological institute at which his father works, and where Adam and all his friends seem to receive various forms of psychoanalysis; the armor of being loosely connected to other people, to New York and to Judaism. And debate, at which Adam is one of the best in the country. He's widely expected to win the national championship in "extemp," extemporaneous speaking on a revealed subject.

The Topeka School makes high school look absolutely dreary, which it is. In theory, it's a way of channeling raw human attitudes into intelligible speech, of finding control through words, but in practice, it turns out to be just the opposite. In a typical debate, one party wins by "spreading" their opponent, that is, speaking so quickly and introducing so many arguments that the opponent cannot respond to all of them, thus conceding them. It leads to a kind of gibberish intelligible only to the initiated, and which at times resembles senseless glossolalia. It has its echoes in the word salad of nervous breakdowns, of which the characters in The Topeka School have many. Or with the angry outbursts that come on Adam after a severe concussion. It has echoes, too, in the taboo utterances of "The Men," who call to verbally assault Adam's mother for her writings, with rape threats and filthy words. Can the practices which claim to give order to the world--and sensibility and decency--actually lead to brutality? To social degeneration? To Fred Phelps and Donald Trump?

Adam, who, as the implied author cobbles together accounts from his parents to stitch the novel together, turns out more or less OK. (We see him late in the book channeling his uneasy feelings into poetry, another kind of speech and another kind of order.) But he has a shadow in Darren, another boy who isn't quite a friend. Darren is a patient of Adam's father at the Foundation, a troubled kid who goes from being rejected by his peers to being included in a kind of cruel and ironic way, like a mascot. We know from the beginning of the book that Darren commits a shocking act of violence: he breaks a girl's jaw with a pool ball:

What Darren could not make them understand was that he would never have thrown it except he always had. Long before the freshman called him the customary names, before he'd taken it from the corner pocket, felt its weight, the cool and smoothness of the resin, before he'd hurled it into the crowded darkness--the cue ball was hanging in the air, rotating slowly. Like the moon, it had been there all his life.

What separates Darrens from Adams? Something innate, surely. Darren feels it, the anger that exists before the reason for it, symbolized in the cue ball-moon. And Darren doesn't have Adam's intelligence, though perhaps that's less innate and more contingent than one would like to believe. At the end of the novel, an adult Adam sees Darren among the picketers with Phelps' Westboro Baptist cretins. There are Darrens everywhere, Lerner seems to be saying, and sometimes they look freakish and strange, but sometimes they look like rude parents at the playground, and sometimes they look like ICE agents, and sometimes they look like us.

I was really impressed by The Topeka School. It's a book that seems like it has one too many parts--there's the multiple narrators, the presence of Darren (whose connection to Adam is really, in a plot sense, very tenuous), the Foundation, some stuff about Adam's parents' affairs. A lot of that would seem really ungainly, or perhaps extraneous, if the book weren't cinched so tight by its themes: the brutality of white American masculinity, and its manifestation in language. Lerner handles all this with the aplomb of a poet, used to balancing unlike moments against one another to reveal their secret likeness. I think I liked it a little less than Leaving the Atocha Station, if only because that novel is frequently very funny, and The Topeka School isn't. But few other novels, I think, speak to something as urgent and contemporary.

The Wichita Lineman by Dylan Jones

That, for me, is 'Wichita Lineman,' a song I heard as a boy that has stayed with me all my life. I like it now for the same reasons I liked it then. I liked it because it took me to places I hadn't been, to places nowhere near me, places unknown. It was a complete escape. It may have been a song full of longing, full of anxiety and want, yet to me it seemed to announce a vortex of calm.

I love "Wichita Lineman." Who doesn't? It's a perfect song: only sixteen lines long, but perfectly balanced, a song about loneliness and longing on the high prairie in which the wistful lyrics are matched perfectly by the sweep of the music itself. Dylan Jones calls it the perfect imperfect song, because it wasn't finished when songwriter Jimmy Webb sent a demo off to Glen Campbell to see if he liked it. Campbell, knowing a sure thing when he heard it, recorded it within weeks, not waiting for Webb to add to--or perhaps monkey with--what was already one of the finest country songs ever written. And it was huge. Campbell outsold the Beatles that year, 1968, largely thanks to the success of "Wichita Lineman." It's a song that seems divorced from the social upheaval that was coursing through the country in 1968, but it tapped into something timeless about the United States of America, a large and lonely place.

Dylan Jones' book is an ode to "Wichita Lineman," which Jones treasured as a child in the U.K. and only belatedly learned, after years of private regard, that just about everybody in the world likes it, too. The Wichita Lineman is a history of a song, of how the lightning got bottled, and to write that history Jones writes the history of the Webb and Campbell, two men who were thrust together by a kind of destiny. Both grew up poor, in the parts of the country that don't get covered in popular music--Webb in Oklahoma and Campbell in Arkansas--but the buttery polish of both men's styles was formed in the studios of Los Angeles. As Jones describes it, each man was to the other a kind of revelation: while still a young man in Oklahoma, Webb heard one of Campbell's songs on the radio, and was so struck he declared he'd write for the man with that voice one day. And he got his chance when Campbell, hearing a lesser artist's version of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" on his own car radio, slapped the steering wheel and decided he could make it a hit. He did, but it's no surprise that the greatest collaboration between the two of them was the one that Webb wrote specifically with Campbell in mine. (Jones goes on, naturally, to discuss the longstanding partnership between them, which produced a small handful of masterpieces, like another favorite of mine, "Where's the Playground, Susie?")

One of the things I enjoyed most about The Wichita Lineman was learning the history of Campbell's career, which was even more far-reaching than I knew. As a member of the legendary session group called the Wrecking Crew, Campbell had a hand in half of the biggest popular hits of the 1960's; you can hear him playing guitar--he was known as a guitar virtuoso as well as a terrific singer--on "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" and "I'm a Believer." (In fact, because the musicians were rarely credited, it's impossible to know for certain how extensive Campbell's contributions were.) He played on Pet Sounds and briefly subbed for a post-breakdown Brian Wilson on tour with the Beach Boys, in exchange for which Wilson gave Campbell the song "Guess I'm Dumb," maybe his best song not written by Jimmy Webb. Webb, of course, is still alive, and his interview with Jones that ends the book helps put the song in its proper context, but there's a certain mysteriousness to Campbell's career that seems amplified now that he's dead.

As you might expect with any book about a single song, it feels a little padded. Jones' musical knowledge and passion are on display, and his reflections on how "Wichita Lineman" fit into his own personal musical history are part of what makes the book compelling. But you don't have to go far to find him suddenly going on about like, Neu! or Prefab Sprout for pages at a time. Perhaps you couldn't publish it, but one gets the sense that the book might have been better if, like "Wichita Lineman" itself, had done a little less. But I will say this: there just aren't that many songs you wouldn't get tired, if you had to read a whole book about them, of hearing on a loop in your head. That as much as anything is why The Wichita Lineman is successful.

Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara

Back in the days when everyone was old and stupid or young and foolish and me and Sugar were the only ones just right, this lady moved on our block with nappy hair and proper speech and no makeup. And quite naturally we laughed at her, laughed the way we did at the junk man who went about his business like he was some big-time president and his sorry-ass horse his secretary. And we kinda hated her too, hated the way we did the winos who cluttered up our parks and pissed on our handball walls and stank up our hallways and stairs so you couldn't halfway play hide-and-seek without a goddamn gas mask. Miss Moore was her name. The only woman on the block with no first name. And she was black as hell, cept for her feet, which were fish-white and spooky.

Toni Cade Bambara's story "The Lesson" is one of my favorites to teach. I use it in my fiction writing class to talk about voice, the particular quality of language inherent to identity and community. In "The Lesson," a girl named Sylvia is taken, along with a group of her friends, from Harlem to F. A. O. Schwarz, where the neighborhood busybody Miss Moore shows them the expensive sailboats and paperweights that rich people can buy for the cost of what their own parents make in a year. "The lesson" Miss Moore teaches is about social class, a hierarchy on which Sylvia and her friends are toward the bottom, but there is another, more implicit lesson she's teaching: that to transcend social class, one must act right, even talk right, like the college-educated Miss Moore. Sylvia feels betrayed when her friend Sugar parrots Miss Moore's words back to her: "This is not much of a democracy if you ask me." For her part, Sylvia refuses to trade in the voice of her narration, which is feisty, slangy, and recognizably black.

I find Sylvia's resolve admirable. And I think what is amazing about "The Lesson" is that it shares that resolve. Bambara mines the language of her own Harlem upbringing, and refuses to dull the edges to make it more respectable, or even publishable. When it was published in 1972, the dominant voice of the literary short story was still that of Updike and O'Hara, and though it's easier to imagine a book written in a voice like this one today, I can't think of any. "The Lesson," along with many of the other stories in Bambara's collection Gorilla, My Love, stands alone, a testament to believing in one's own voice--and the voice of one's community and place--despite the pressures of a dominant literary culture.

But as many times as I'd taught "The Lesson," I'd never read the whole collection all the way through. I was really delighted to read "Sweet Town," another masterpiece of voice, but a different voice entirely. Kit, the narrator of "Sweet Town," is one of those teenagers who uses a vocabulary beyond their capability. I know this kind of teen well. Some of them do it to impress, but many of them do it for the same reason that Kit does: because they are entranced by the world of words, and believe that elevated words can create an elevated life. But Kit, like the teenagers I know, often misuse such words, and the resulting voice is touching and comic: "And then one day, having romped my soul through the spectrum of sunny colors, I dashed up to her apartment to escape the heat and found a letter from her which eternally elated my to the heart of bursture and generally endeared her to me forever." One can easily imagine the English teacher coming along with their red pen, crossing through words like "bursture," writing question marks next to "eternally," and ripping out the heart of that fantastic sentence.

Like "The Lesson," "Sweet Town" is a story that doesn't just use voice, but is about voice. When B. J., Kit's quasi-boyfriend, tells her that he is leaving town with a friend that Kit hates, she loses control of that  voice:

I would have liked to have said, "Apollo, we are the only beautiful people in the world. And because our genes are so great, our kid can't help but burst through the skin into cosmic significance." I wanted to say, "You will bear in mind that I am great, brilliant, talented, good-looking, and am going to college at fifteen. I have the most interesting complexes ever, and despite Freud and Darwin I have made a healthy adjustment as an earthworm." But I didn't tell him this. Instead, I revealed that petty, small, mean side of me by saying "Eddie is a shithead."

Gorilla, My Love contains a small handful of such masterpieces, bristling with sharp characters, and most of all, powerful voices. In addition to "Sweet Town" and my old favorite "The Lesson," I really loved "Mississippi Ham Rider," about a black woman helping a white Alan Lomax-like record producer trying to convince aging southern bluesmen to record their music for posterity. The power of that story comes from the gray area the narrator occupies between the bluesman "Rider" and the producer, a space of identity between them that seems to expand and contract, as if to squeeze her out of it, at will. Many of the best stories are from the perspective of children, like the bitter sexual awakening of "The Basement" or the terrific title story, about a young girl dead set on making the adults of the world keep even their idlest of promises. Stories from children's perspectives are common, but I think it's rare to see a storyteller who can find the inherent nobility and dignity in childhood, especially in a way that doesn't veer into cutesiness.

The one misstep in the collection, I thought, was "The Survivor," a story about a pregnant actress, traveling to the home of her doula mother to give birth, still struggling with the car crash death of her abusive husband, who had been her director. "The Survivor" is the story most like Bambara's lovely but messy novel The Salt-Eaters, with its erratic time jumps, italicized sections, and slippages between reality and dreams. The Salt-Eaters works because it lets you jump in and ride the flow of it, but there's no space in a story like "The Survivor" to let such tricks run their course. Similar themes are explored much better in a story like "The Johnson Girls," about a large family of sisters who quibble over what exactly is owed to one of their boyfriends, and how to bring him to heel.

Gorilla, My Love convinced me that Bambara is something of an unsung master of the short story. I'd go so far as to say the stories in this collection are like an uptown version of Grace Paley's downtown masterpieces. Not everything in Gorilla, My Love stands out as strongly as "Sweet Town," "The Lesson," or "Gorilla, My Love," but even the mid-tier stories are powerful character portraits, stories that speak from a deep and authentic place.

Awake by Harald Voetmann

Nature begets monsters, fire-breathing bulls with lion's teeth who imitate human speech and call our names to lure us from our tents and cabins. She created man solely so he could suffer, the only animal who cries, the only animal who knows death and understands the scope of its suffering. The only animal who understands that it is made to suffer for nature's amusement. He who believes himself meant for better things is the unknowing victim of nature's game, hardly better than an animal. My suggestion: We must learn to enjoy the cruel game, and so be it that it is at our own expense.

There are four voices in Danish classicist and novelist Harald Voetmann's Awake: First, the voice of Pliny the Elder, as recorded in his Historia Naturalis, a first century AD attempt at taxonomizing the natural world. Then, a second voice of Pliny, elaborating inwardly on his Historia, embellishing it with details from his childhood on the hard margins of the Roman Empire, which are perhaps meant to represent the final dictations to his slave Diocletes, whose is the third voice. The fourth voice is Pliny's nephew, Pliny the Younger, commenting on his uncle's final works after his death at the hands of Mt. Vesuvius.

Pliny, as he writes his final additions to the Historia, is an aging and miserable wreck, mostly unable to rise from his bed and covered in various excretions: first piss, then blood--he's prone to nosebleeds--then vomit. (There's a grim irony in our knowledge that it's a volcano, not these ailments, that do old Pliny in.) The elder Pliny, it seems, seeks to finish his categorization of nature because he fears and disdains it; as he sees it, death and misery are the ultimate ends of the natural world, and to know nature better is to have a map of the enemy's forces. In this attempt he makes suppositions of a grand and imaginative nature, which the Younger Pliny--more of a poet, but more of a skeptic, too--punctuates dismissively. When the elder Pliny, for example, records that he has seen stars descend on a ship and "hop like birds from place to place," his nephew notes: "He is confusing stars with fireflies or something."

I'm just a sucker for these fictionalized versions of real historical figures. Awake couldn't be less like The Organs of Sense in tone, style, and method, but it, too, is about the ambitious quest for scientific knowledge. Pliny worked with fewer tools than Liebniz or the astronomer of that book, and, relying only on the pieces of the Historia Naturalis replicated here, wrong about every single thing, but for him, too, the desire to know the universe bordered on a kind of madness. Unlike The Organs of Sense, Awake is deeply unsatisfying, even intentionally unsettling: Pliny the Elder claims to have paid a man to have sex with his daughter, who was born without any orifices whatsoever. Later, he sentences his own slave and scribe Diocletes to a horrible death by crucifixion, as if intent on participating in the very cruelty of nature he's set out to document. Awake is, like the life of Pliny (and us all) short, difficult, beset with lust and misery, and full of gross physical ailments.

Birds of America by Mary McCarthy

He decided they were sacred birds, an unholy trinity. Standing on their dark piles in the water, they had an evil, old, Egyptian look; gorged, their black wings spread to dry in the sun, they resembled hieroglyphs or emblems on an escutcheon. In their neck was a pouch that bulged when they had been fishing. They did not swim or float on the surface like other birds but darted through the water in a sinuous, snake-like way. He had never seen them squat or sit. They were always erect, spread-eagled; not sedentary--vigilant. They seldom moved, though they occasionally gave a flap of their wings or a turn of their long serpentine necks. They usually stood facing away, surveying the cove like sentries, or, in profile, commanding the open sea, but sometimes he would come back from some private sleeveless errand to find that they had wheeled about and were facing him in glistening formation. Unlike the shrieking terns and squawking gulls, they did not utter a sound. This stillness and fixity were what made them seem so horribly ancient, Peter thought, as though they preceded time. That and their snaky appearance, which took you back to the age of flying reptiles. Moreover, their soundless habit gave their slightest movement a quality of pantomime; from his bedroom window, he could pretend he was watching a drama of hieratic gesture.

Peter Levi is nineteen years old, the son of a famous American pianist and a Jewish-Italian emigre. He's extremely attached to his mother (the pianist), and his only dream is to return to the small New England town (in what seems to be Rhode Island) where they once spent a pleasant summer with her and to live in a little college. But when she's offered a grand European tour, Peter must be sent to boarding school, and form there to a European tour of his own, living in Paris, visiting Rome, getting the kind of "education" that is given to American WASPs. In Europe, Peter finds it a challenge to fit in, either among the French or his fellow Americans. He's deeply empathetic and principled--his maxim is Kant's golden rule, that people must be treated as a means and not an end--but living out this principle is harder than it seems.

Birds of America is a deeply philosophical novel, and becomes moreso as it goes on. A long letter from Peter to his mother is a working-out of his principles, and one of the final chapters takes the form of a long conversation at the Sistine Chapel with his advisor at the Sorbonne, who challenges Peter on the contradiction between his Kantian ethic and his anti-democratic attitudes (that is, he hates the hundreds of uncouth American tourists who converge on the sites of great European art). At the novel's end, Peter is in the hospital--having gotten an infected bite from a menacing swan, which is very funny--and has a vision of Kant himself, who tells him that "Nature," like Nietzsche's God, "is dead." What this seems to mean is that, in an increasingly fraudulent and modernizing world, not only tradition, but also nature, cease to be effective moral guides. As such the end of the novel returns to the beginning, where a sheepish Peter learns that a beloved owl, kept in the Rocky Port wildlife refuge, has kicked the birdy bucket.

Probably a more interested person could tease out the exact philosophical contours of the novel. I'm more drawn to a reading that emphasizes Peter's character, which is that of someone with a detailed set of principles he finds it impossible to apply. He's just too pusillanimous, and most of the novel's drama is him imagining what he might do to put the Golden Rule into practice, and never quite getting the opportunity. (It's impossible to imagine Peter traveling to Mississippi with the Freedom Riders, as his parents forbid him from doing at the beginning of the novel.) When he does try to turn his ethic into practice, the results are comical slapstick, picking pathetic fights with the French police or letting a homeless woman sleep in his bedsit. (She pees everywhere and steals his doorknob.) I

I detect a conservative streak in Birds of America, though its politics are ostensible anti-Goldwater liberalism: a belief that the world is getting worse, or at the very least, in worse taste. This is most evident, maybe, in the Rocky Port sections (the best part of the book) where Peter and his mother become increasingly unable to find the traditional goods they associate with the New England coast. We live in a world, McCarthy suggests, where even on the Rhode Island coast, you can only find frozen fish. Maybe so. It's all very Updike, I think. It's also a book about how the son of a Jewish emigrant becomes, in practical terms, an American WASP--another heritage gone, a moral code without purchase. But true to the novel's title, there are a lot of good descriptions of American birds (like the cormorants described above), and what more can you ask for?

This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun

For a long time I searched for the black stone that cleanses the soul of death. When I say a long time, I think of a bottomless pit, a tunnel dug with my fingers, my teeth, in the stubborn hope of glimpsing, if only for a minute, one infinitely lingering minute, a ray of light, a spark that would imprint itself deep within my eye, that would stay protected in my entrails like a secret. There it would be, lodging in my breast and nourishing my endless nights, there, in the depths of the humid earth, in that tomb smelling of man stripped of his humanity by shovel blows that flay him alive, snatching away his sight, his voice, his reason.

There are secret prisons and then there are prisons so secret they bury them literally underground. For decades, King Hassan I of Morocco kept a group of political prisoners, including several arrested after an assassination attempt in the 1970's, in Tazmamart Prison, where they were kept in unlighted underground cells for twenty-four hours a day. They were given just enough food to keep them on the edge of starvation, and medical care was denied them. Many of them lived this way, deprived even of light, for over twenty years before the Moroccan government admitted the prison's existence and released them. Tahar Ben Jelloun's novel This Blinding Absence of Light is a fictionalized version of one prisoner's experience at Tazmamart.

The prisoners of the novel form a kind of society, working together as much as they can in these brutal conditions. One prisoner, Karim, uses his uncanny sense of time to become a human clock, announcing the date and time to keep the prisoners from slipping into an endless night. Salim, the narrator, is a kind of storyteller, recounting stories from the Quran and Camus, and when those run out, movies like A Streetcar Named Desire (a detail that reminds me of that other infamous prison novel, Kiss of the Spider Woman). In one tragic moment, he denies a fellow prisoner begging for a story, who dies shortly thereafter, a betrayal that haunts Salim. The deaths in the prison are as diverse as they are cruel: prisoners die of diarrhea, constipation, suicide, being eaten alive by cockroaches both inside and out, scorpion stings, wounds brought on by the tremendous weakness of their bodies.

Salim, understanding that the purpose of Tamzamart is to kill by neglect--to kill without ever firing a bullet--cultivates a kind of asceticism that is the novel's most interesting element. Salim must embrace some parts of the prison experience and ignore others, and he must do the same with his former life: carefully, he compartmentalizes his life in the outside world until he can imagine himself as a separate person. In this way, he is able to reflect with dispassion on his father, a neglectful dandy who is a member of the King's inner circle. He recites his prayers with a maniacal devotion, knowing that a small ritual like these might be the difference between staying sane and going mad. In fact, the varieties of madness in Tazmamart are as numerous as the varieties of death. One by one, his friends and fellow prisoners succumb to these madnesses, and then those deaths.

Obviously, This Blinding Absence of Light is a tough read. It is, by all accounts, a faithful account of some of the most brutal prison conditions that have ever existed. But at times it can be quite beautiful, especially in its depiction of Salim's cultivation of mental vitality. You hate to use a cliche like "a testament to the power of the human spirit," but if This Blinding Absence of Light doesn't fit the phrase, nothing does.

With the addition of Morocco, my "countries read" list is up to 70. Nice!!!

Yonnondio by Tillie Olsen

He learned all right, the tortures of the damned:

feet slapping the pavement, digging humbly into carpets, squatting wide apart in front of chairs and the nojobnojob nothingdoingtoday buzzing in his ears; hugging the coffee--and, shuffling along, buddy (they made a song out of it) can you spare a dime, and the freights north east south west, getting vagged, keep movin, keep movin (the bulls dont need to tell ya, your own belly yells it out, your own idle hands), sing a song of hunger the weather four below holes in your pockets and nowhere to go, the flophouses, the slophouses, a bowl of misery and a last month's cruller and the crabs having a good time spreading and spreading (you didn't know hell would be this bad, did you?).

The subtitle of Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio is "From the Thirties," and what it has to say about the Thirties is that they sucked big time and were bad. The novel follows the Holbrook family--father Jim, mother Anna, daughter Mazie, siblings Jimmie, Ben, Will, and baby Bess--as Jim moves from job to job in the American plains, looking for work that will allow the family to survive and rise above the depredations of poverty. First, it's coal mining in Wyoming, then farming in South Dakota, and finally the slaughterhouses of Omaha. In each place, Jim finds himself owing more to his bosses than he is paid, thanks to the brutal policies of company towns, and he takes his anger and frustration out not on his bosses--one thing Yonnondio seeks to illustrate is how poverty and abuse don't necessarily translate into political awareness--but on Anna. Sickness, violence, and misery ensue.

I like Yonnondio more when I read in the postscript that it was written by Olsen when she was in her early twenties, put away unfinished, then rediscovered and published decades later. As a novel, it seems to have only a downward shape, like The Inferno, from one circle of Hell to another. Even though there are small and hopeful moments--the discovery of a beautiful field of dandelions, with their edible greens, in the middle of Omaha--Yonnondio shows how punishing life was for the poor during the Great Depression by punishing the reader.

But seeing it less as a novel than a collection of fragments, the poetic and impressionistic elements of Yonnondio come to the forefront. Olsen's language can be brutal and lurid, Gothic in imagery and sentiment, and filled with strange, bold choices (like the stretch quoted above). Less successful, I thought, were Olsen's attempts to capture the family's vernacular, which very well might be accurate, but doesn't sound like any human beings I've ever heard. Jim is a thoughtless brute, and Anna and Mazie mostly characterized by their suffering, which approaches madness at times. But some of the minor characters provide the most interesting moments: the coal miner, disfigured and addled by the explosion of a seam, who nearly drops Mazie into the mineshaft to appease the gods of coal he imagines are torturing him; the street urchin Mazie befriends in Omaha who patterns her personality after movies she's too poor to have seen.

Olsen, as I understand it, chose not to finish or rework any of the material she had written in her youth, when the Depression was not yet a memory. As a result, there's no cant here about the nobility of poverty, or of those who grind through the exploitation the Holbrooks experience. Poverty isn't ennobling, Olsen shows; in fact, one of its harshest consequences is that it breeds cruelty in its victims. For that observation alone Yonnondio remains powerful.

The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

In an account sent to the Philosophical Transactions but for some reason never published there, or anywhere else, a young G. W. Leibniz, who throughout his life was an assiduous inquirer into miracles and other aberrations of nature, related the odd and troubling encounter he had with a certain astronomer who'd predicted that at noon on the last day of July 1666, the brightest time of day at nearly the brightest time of year, the Moon would pass very briefly, but very precisely, between the Sun and the Earth, casting all of Europe for one instant in absolute darkness, "a darkness without equal in our history, but lasting no longer than four seconds," the astronomer in Europe was predicting, according to Leibniz, an eclipse that no other astronomer in Europe was predicting, and which, Leibniz explained, drew his notice in part because the astronomer in question, whose observations of the planets and the fixed stars were supposedly among the most accurate and the most precise ever made, superior to Tycho's, was blind, and "not merely completely blind," Leibniz wrote (in my translation from the Latin), "but in fact entirely without eyes."

When Leibniz, the mathematician and philosopher probably most famous for A.) being one of two people to invent calculus, and B.) getting his ass handed to him by Voltaire, goes to visit the blind astronomer who claims to have predicted an eclipse without the use of his eyes, he is drawn into questions of sanity and madness as much as questions of astronomy. Leibniz arrives on the day of the supposed eclipse, knowing that if the eclipse doesn't happen, the astronomer will be proven insane (though if it does, he won't necessarily be proven sane--I think I'm getting that right), and while he waits, the astronomer tells him a remarkable shaggy dog story, ostensibly about how his eyes got torn out.

The story of how he got his eyes torn out, the astronomer explains, is the story of his life, and so he starts from the beginning: as the son of the former sculptor to the Holy Roman Emperor, who hopes to get his job back by creating a totally lifelike but mechanical human head. The son overshadows his father by inventing the telescope on the spot, allowing the Emperor to see a new star that has recently appeared in the European sky, and becomes the Empire's official astronomer. In this position he's drawn into the intrigue of the Emperor's family, including the heir to the throne, a dangerous murderer who himself may or may not be sane. A perilous success in the palace grants him total freedom--and unlimited telescopes--to map the heavens from his lonely observatory, where Leibniz has met him. This story unfolds over the course of three hours, moving toward its climax--the moment of the eye-obliterating--at the exact moment of the supposed eclipse.

What The Organs of Sense captures so well, I think, is a moment in the history of science at which knowledge about the cosmos was blooming at the same time that doubts began to fester about our ability to see and understand the world. At the same time that Kepler and other astronomers, like the one in the novel, were mapping stars and explaining the motions of the planets, philosophers like Descartes were wondering if the mind can ever really know anything but itself. Leibniz is obsessed with questions of madness because a world in which no one can really see outside of themselves is one that does away with distinctions like sane and insane; to understand the cosmos above one's head must also be to understand the cosmos within one's head. But Cartesian dualism shakes the core of this: consider the "insane" Prince, who has come to believe that only he exists, and that everyone else in the world is a mechanical automaton who speaks his own thoughts back to him. And what should Leibniz make of the blind astronomer, without access to the world, who yet claims to predict its movements?

I expected The Organs of Sense to be something like Labatut's scientific-historical fiction book When We Cease to Understand the World, perhaps not least because there is a kind of historical rhyming in the destabilizing effects of Cartesian dualism and that of twentieth century quantum mechanics. But Sachs' novel is something more like Borges or Calvino; a fable, or a picaresque, colored with humor. The layered narrators--the astronomer, Leibniz, the unnamed translator--give the whole thing a kind of specious hearsay quality that strengthens the themes. And most importantly, The Organs of Sense sticks the landing. I don't know if I've just been reading a bunch of books that fumble the ending or what, but the way the whole thing comes together--and especially the resolution to the question Leibniz waits hours for, how does he see the cosmos without eyes--is tremendously satisfying.

Little Eyes by Samantha Schweblin

The kentuki didn't move. This was fun. Suddenly she had a clear idea of what she wanted to ask. She needed to know if the person was a man or a woman, how old they were, where they lived, what they did for a living, what they liked to do for fun. She needed to judge, urgently needed to decide for herself what kind of dweller she'd gotten. The kentuki was there looking at her, maybe as eager to respond as she was to ask.

Then it occurred to her that this crow could peck openly at her private life, would see her whole body, get to know the tone of her voice, her clothes, her schedules; it could even move freely about the room and at night it would also see Sven. She, on the other hand, could only ask questions. The kentuki could decide not to answer, or it could lie. It could say it was a Filipina schoolgirl when it was actually an Iranian oil dealer. But she had to show it her entire life, transparently, as available as she'd been to the poor canary she'd had as a teenager that had died watching her, hanging in its cage in the middle of the room.

The devices are called kentukis: plastic footballs on wheels with plastic features, made to look like animals, pandas or crows or moles or dragons. They're sort of like pets, that chirp and purr and move around, but inside each of them is a real person, a "dweller" operating the kentuki from somewhere else on the earth. When someone purchases a serial code for a kentuki, they are linked at random to one of these animals, being turned on for the first time somewhere in the world. The dwellers don't know where it is they'll end up, or who their keeper will be or how they will be treated; the keepers can do whatever they like with their kentuki--even refuse to charge it so its battery dies and the connection irrevocably sundered--but they never know who's dwelling inside their new pet.

Samantha Schweblin's Little Eyes is an allegory for a connected world. Though the kentukis are the stuff of science fiction, the ethical challenges they present are real: every day, through social media and other forms of technology, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, we let other people--little eyes--into our home. These technologies can connect us in invigorating, even life-affirming ways, as an Antiguan teenager named Marvin finds when he stumbles (in the form of his dragon kentuki) into an underground of "liberated" kentukis who have found ways to communicate with each other and epxlore independently. But, as many of the characters in Little Eyes discover, it can also breed obsessions and resentments, or open us up to the scrutiny of strangers we had no intention of letting into our lives. The opening scene, for instance, describes a group of teenage girls who discover they can communicate with their kentuki's dweller using a Ouija board, but as soon as they do, he blackmails them over the videos he's been secretly recording.

Little Eyes features dozens of stories about dwellers and keepers around the world, but there's only a small handful of recurring characters: the girlfriend of an artist in Mexico who comes to resent what she senses are her kentuki's prurient attentions; an elderly Peruvian lady who becomes protective of her young German keeper; a divorced Italian who seeks out companionship from his son's hated kentuki; a Croatian who sells blackmarket kentuki connections. The most powerful, I thought, was that Antiguan teenager, who becomes obsessed with finding away for his kentuki, living in Norway, to touch the snow he's never seen. In that story, the "liberated" kentukis have somehow built a world of their own at ground level, a world of secret charging stations and painted signs that normal people don't notice, and this feels like an apt symbol for the kinds of new worlds social technology creates for us, for better or worse.

Though there's thematic overlap, I don't know that I would have otherwise guessed that Little Eyes was written by the same author as Fever Dream, a short and terrifying novel about the catastrophic effects of industrial pollution. In Fever Dream, Schewblin is content to leave much unexplained, and the terror is produced by the forces of literary ambiguity, but Little Eyes is more conventional science fiction in the sense that it is a simple thought experiment about the future, taken to its logical conclusions. Little Eyes struck me as more ordinary than Fever Dream, less existentially frightening, but perhaps more disturbing because of the plausibility of the world it imagines.

Devil House by John Darnielle

How, in this age, are grown-ups still afraid of a witch? Spells, curses, bloody sacrifices: none of them really believe in any of that, do they? It's just for fun, that stuff. You had assumed everybody knew that. It seemed obvious, self-evident. There aren't any witches. There are just the stories people tell each other, who knows why. But when you finally go to trial, almost a whole year from now, you'll learn better, and feel trapped. Four days from now you'll do what you have to do, and, when your story is assembled by the powers that have agreed to do the telling, meaningless details will be woven into a tale that will seem absurd to everyone if they weren't all proceeding backward from its bloody end.

Gage Chandler is a moderately successful true crime writer: a few years ago, he optioned one of his books, The White Witch of Morro Bay, into a film, which has set him up comfortably. He hasn't had that kind of success since, but his editor nudges him into purchasing a house in the small California town of Milpitas where, in its former life as a porn outlet, two people were killed by sword. Chandler's method is both scrupulous and based entirely on vibes: he moves into the house, tracks down boxes of paraphernalia from the crime on eBay, and laboriously absorbs every detail of the house and the lives of the three high school boys accused of the crime.

The middle section of Devil House presents a version of the book-in-progress. Its protagonists are the three teens: Derrick, an ambitious and intelligent senior who works part-time in the porn shop without his parent's knowledge; Seth, a class-clown type without Derrick's prospects; and Alex, a homeless friend who has recently returned to Milpitas. After the shop closes, Derrick sees it as a place to spend a few daily hours with Seth, but Seth becomes even more attached to it as a kind of refuge. And for Alex, it's a place to sleep. Without Derek's knowledge, the two other boys--tipped off that the owner is trying to sell it to an investor--turn the shop into an elaborate painted and decorated "Devil House," naively thinking it might scare them away. In Chandler's telling, it's Alex, fatigued from sleeplessness and oppressed by the desperation of homelessness, who kills the two. Chandler's method, we learn late in the book, involves recreating the gruesome house, with its angel sculpted from porno video cases and its broken mirrors glued to the walls, bit by bit.

Devil House is a complicated, perhaps overly complicated book. The main story of the Devil House murders, and Chandler's investigation of it, is complimented by sections from his big hit, The White Witch of Morro Bay. In some ways, this story is a mirror of the Devil House story, in which the teenagers are the victims rather than the murderers. In Chandler's telling, a troubled teen named Gene, accompanied by an impressionable friend named Jesse, tried to rob their teacher at home. (We're meant to read Gene-Jesse and Derrick-Seth as reflections of one another, I think, versions of Cyrus and Jeff from The Mountain Goats' "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton," a pairing of two lonely and codependent boys.) The teacher, freaking out, stabbed the teens to death and tried to dispose of their bodies by cutting them to pieces. Later, the media frenzy turned this teacher into a monster, a Satanist who beguiled the two boys. Chandler's book, we're told, is an attempt to recover the "truth" of that teacher's story, the kernel beyond the hysteria. And so perhaps he might do the same for the Devil House killers, though unlike the teacher, they were never formally accused, much less convicted.

But Chandler's belief in his methods is rocked when he receives a long letter from the mother of Jesse, one of the boys murdered at Morro Bay, who has nursed a long anger about the way her son was depicted in the book. (I think one indication of the fact that this book is just too complicated is how long I'm spending just trying to get the basic summary of it down.) So what does this say about the true crime genre? Chandler seems more conscientious than most, less interested in luridness; his method is scrupulous to a fault. But perhaps he's only comforting himself by telling himself that one can tell a full story simply by being methodical; Jesse's mother wants him to see how he slighted her son, shrunk him to a few facts on a page. The story she tells--which is told to us by Chandler--is a story of a hard life under an abusive father, and a dream of escape. These details, I'm almost certain, are inspired by Darnielle's similarly difficult childhood, which he's explored in his music with the Mountain Goats. They have a great pathos, but I found myself wondering what it is they really had to say, and why they seem to affect Chandler so greatly. Isn't it clear to anyone who's written a story that it's not the same as telling the "whole truth?" Was Chandler really under the impression that he'd told Jesse's story in full? Or that such a thing was possible?

In the end--big spoiler alert here--the story about the three teens at Devil House turns out to be a complete fabrication. Chandler's made it up. The "real story," such as it is, is about a group of homeless men who had been using the porno shop as a place to live. By turning them into teens, with ambitions and futures, perhaps, not yet calcified into identities that are assigned permanent value, Chandler provides them with sympathy, and shelters the real killers from the ignominy of seeing their lives flattened in the way that Jesse's was. I guess. In the end, I'm not totally sure why he did it, or why it's better than telling a flawed version of "the truth." (Additional references to a separate kid, a recent immigrant named Siraj on whom suspicion falls--but who is also made up--felt really baffling to me.) There's a nuance here that keeps Devil House from being Life of Pi, but I wouldn't say it's much more interesting.

So Devil House is, on a surface reading, a sort of muddled book about the true crime genre. But I want to suggest an alternative understanding that makes the book more interesting, and I think, a little more successful: Devil House is about real estate. I mean it: when Chandler purchases the Devil House, his first feeling is one of satisfaction. Even though it's for a job, he really does own a home, and the sense of security and rootedness that comes with it. By contrast, the unhoused men who killed the slumlord did so because they were afraid of losing the little bit of housing security they had scrounged up. In Chandler's fictionalized version, that impulse is assigned to the homeless Alex and the troubled Seth, two kids who have few places to call their own in the world. There's a strange little section, written in difficult Gothic font, that tells the story of a prince named Gorbonian, which many readers have wondered about. I think this section makes sense when paired with the courtly language that the book-within-a-book sometimes indulges in; both are representations of Alex's perception of himself as a knight defending a realm. Later on, this is made explicit when Chandler discusses the "Castle Doctrine," which says a man has a right to defend his home by any means necessary.

Devil House is a pretty flawed book, I think. But focusing more on the House and less on the Devil makes it more coherent and more compelling. And I do think it's the best of Darnielle's three books, which include Wolf in White Van and Universal Harvester. The prose itself is more accomplished, and the story--even if it's too complex, and too clever--is more effective.