The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

'Where does a story begin, Willie?' I asked.

For a while he did not say anything. Then he shifted in his chair. 'Where does a wave on the ocean begin?' he said. 'Where does it for ma welt on the skin of the sea, to swell and expand and rush towards shore?'

'I want to tell you a story, Willie,' I said. Yes, I thought to myself. Tell him your story. Let him write it. Let the whole world know.

The music I had just played seemed to go on unspooling in the air between us, this song that had no beginning and no ending; the song of time itself.

In 1921, the British author William Somerset Maugham visits Penang, a colonial city in peninsular Malaysia. He bears with him several secrets: his sexuality, for one, and his affair with his "traveling companion" Gerald, but from Gerald he is keeping the fact that his investments have all cratered and he is essentially penniless. In Penang he stays with an old friend, Robert Hamlyn, whose wife Lesley has a secret of her own: the affair she had with a Chinese advisor to Sun Yat Sen during his exile from China in Penang. Lesley and "Willie" find an opportunity in each other; perhaps it is time for Lesley to finally tell the story she has kept to herself all these years, and for Willie, a great chronicler of the British colonial world, an irresistible story about the now-dead Sun may help return his fortune and fame.

The House Made of Doors, written by Malaysian writer Tan Twan Eng, offers itself as a meditation on the cultural collisions between the British, the Chinese, and the Malay in the early 20th century. A "ripped from the headlines" subplot involves Lesley's friend Ethel Proudlock, who has recently been arrested for shooting a man who may have been her lover, and who may have tried to rape her. Ethel's crime puts to the test whether a white woman in Penang can be convicted of a crime, and who exactly among the peninsula's many racial and governmental authorities holds control, and over whom. China exists off the page somewhere, and history seems to be happening there, unlike the sclerotic British elite of Penang. Lesley develops a passion for raising money for Sun Yat Sen's revolution against the emperor, less because of her concern for the plight of the everyday Chinese and more because, stuck in a mordant marriage to a gay man herself, she yearns for a passion of any kind. "Willie," and many others, believe her to have been the lover of Sun Yat Sen himself, but as she's told, Sun has enough wives, one of whom is the nation of China.

I thought this was sooo boring. For a novel about sexuality and passion, it's entirely sexless, in a way that matches the smoothed-over book-club prose. In retrospect, I should have known--the cover screams "front shelf at the Strand"--but there was an opportunity here, I think, to grapple with the kind of stories that Maugham wrote about British colonialism and the truth as experienced by Malaysians or the Straits Chinese. Tan is interested in Maugham as a character--a fairly wan and charisma-less one, at that--but never as an author, and seems to have made a conscientious decision not to quote from Maugham's fiction at all. I found the sexual drama to be predictable (the love note Lesley finds in her husband's pocket) and Arthur, Lesley's great love, to be entirely devoid of personality; I found the writing competent but cloying ("the song of time itself..." ugh). Not for me.

Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong

We notice Bi at the same time, in front of the prayer mat. When we lift our forehead from the floor, we see a trail of damp, muddy footprints leading to Bi's long, webbed feet. Bi is a gift from above. Heaven's answer to our prayers. Bi is all sinew and bone, dry and shriveled, scales almost too big for her body, like a frog just returned from the desert. Why does Bi look so strange? With our back to the light, we watch Bi fade away, like watching a shadow fall across a mirror. Who made Bi like this, amphibious, dual, neither of earth nor water? This is the question, hidden like frogspawn in the sand of the hourglass. We did, is the answer. Aminah and I. And the understanding undoes us, what to do, what to do. Go back to yesterday, the day before yesterday, the day before that--time is like a steamroller, crushing everything flat as a card and vanishing it into endless blackness. Aminah and I prefer to pretend that Bi fell from the sky. Fell like rain from on high. Imagine how far Bi must have come.

In "The Wall," the first story in Malaysian writer Ho Sok Fong's collection Lake Like a Mirror, a wall is built to protect a row of houses from a nearby road, leaving a backyard space that is just inches wide. A woman, whose daughter's car crash death preceded the wall, builds a garden in the long, skinny space, and even becomes skinny herself. Her cat disappears in the space, and then she herself, into the marginal place between the house and the highway, between the home and the world. The cat is discovered--a moldering corpse beneath the leaf litter and trash that such places collect--but the woman is never seen again.

Such uncanny moments are the highlights of this collection. Some are more subtle than others, subtle enough to disorient you, and make you wonder whether you have missed something: In "Summer Tornado," a woman follows a man and his children around an amusement park. Is she a stranger, being slowly absorbed into their domestic life? Or has she been the children's mother, suffering a strange alienation and detachment all along? She is, maybe, like the woman in "The Wall" who disappears into that neither-here-nor-there space. Another, more overt image is Bi, the imaginary froglike guardian who watches over Aminah and her friends in the oppressive girls' school where she is brought up to be a good Muslim. Bi, a frog, an amphibian, a creature of the land and water, home in both but in neither, may be a perfect guardian for a girl who feels neither here nor there, neither fully inside the mesh of power the school represents nor fully free from it.

Ho's stories often deal with the oppression of the Malaysian state. In another story, Aminah ("The name 'Aminah' is very common in Malay society," she writes, "as with Sarah or Mary, there can be many Aminahs") finds herself in a reeducation camp for those who wish to legally renounce their Islamic faith. The title story deals with a university professor who finds herself in the crosshairs of the Islamic censors, only to breathe a sigh of relief when another colleague finds herself fired instead. In this story, such rigid reactions encourage a kind of soft oppression in which people stifle themselves ("You should be more sensitive than they are," an administrator remarks), but Ho makes it clear that these systems are as insidious as the violence and rigidity that keep a character like Aminah imprisoned.

Some of Ho's stories are too cryptic: I felt like I was missing something in "Radio Drama" and "The Chest," some secondary layer that lurked in too much obscurity behind plainspoken prose. The collection may not get any better than that first story, "The Wall," though I did like the last story as well, "March in a Small Town," in which a young girl working at a seedy motel becomes obsessed with a man who checks in every night, seemingly without remembering he'd ever been there before. 

With the addition of Malaysia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 93!

Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles

"But you have gone to pieces, or do I misjudge you dreadfully?"

"True enough, said Mrs. Copperfield, bringing her fist down on the table and looking very mean. "I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I've wanted to do for years. I know I am guilty as I can be, but I have my happiness, which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now and a certain amount of daring, which, if you remember correctly, I never had before."

Mrs. Copperfield was getting drunk and looking more disagreeable.

The "two serious ladies" of Jane Bowles' novel are Cristina Goering and Frieda Copperfield. "Miss Goering" is a rich woman who begins to collect companions to fill her empty house, like the truculent Miss Gamelon, and Arnold, a hapless and pathetic suitor who is soon followed by his more charismatic and interesting father. "Mrs. Copperfield" is a married woman who leaves her inconsiderate husband in Panama to take up with a beautiful prostitute named Pacifica and live in a run-down hotel. These two stories are largely separated, though Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield intersect briefly at the novel's beginning and ending. Both depict a woman "going to pieces," as Miss Goering describes Mrs. Copperfield, throwing off the absurdities of bourgeois expectation for the absurdities of free love and squalor, which are no less absurd but are at least a little more fun.

It's hard to describe how strange a book Two Serious Ladies is. It has the light tone of a comedy of manners, but there is something alien and alienating in the aspect of the two women, and the people they come across. Two Serious Ladies is mostly a series of encounters; either someone will take an interest, often at random, in one of the two protagonists, or they'll take an interest in someone else. (Such interests are often one-sided, and when mutual, deeply ambivalent.) These interactions are mostly circular, non-eventful, without forward progress except in the sense that everyone keeps drinking and gets drunker. Structurally, the book is pointedly uneven and off-kilter. And yet, on the whole, the downward thrust of both women's story is clear. In throwing off the shackles of bourgeois, it isn't clear that either of them is much happier or more free, but neither are they significantly punished for their transgressions.

It's hard to know what to make of the novel; it's outrageous and over-sized but not quite funny in the typical sense. Its primary quality is it strangeness, which I suppose is a virtue in and of itself--I may not have done a good job of explaining or showing how, but there really isn't another book like it. Like the "two serious ladies" themselves, it's truly original.

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon

Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: "In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is." The uncluttered stretches of the American West and the deserted miles of roads force a lone traveler to pay attention to them by leaving him isolated in them. The squander of land substitutes a sense of self with a sense of place by giving him days of himself until, tiring of his own small compass, he looks for relief to the bigness outside--a grandness that demands attention not just for its scope, but for its age, its diversity, its continual change. The isolating immensity reveals what lies covered in places noisier, busier, more filled up. For me, what I saw revealed was this (only this): a man nearly desperate because his significance had come to lie within his own narrow ambit.

One day in 1978, William Least Heat-Moon found himself without a job and without a wife. He gets into his truck and heads east from his home of Columbia, Missouri, to see the United States, and write about what he sees. His goal is to stick to the "Blue Highways," the small roads on the Atlas that are colored blue, in contrast to the red interstates. His route is roughly circular, heading down the eastern seaboard and then across the southernmost regions of America's desert country, then up through the Sierra Nevadas, over the topmost edge of the Great Plains, into New England--and back home. This route, he explains, borrows something from Native American traditions about journeys, like all things, being shaped as wheels. (Perhaps it's best that we pass over the speciously Native name William Trogdon has passed down to him from his grandfather, the original Heat-Moon, or that he names the truck 'Ghost-Dancing.')

Or maybe it's just the way things shake out. At the end of his journey, Heat-Moon travels through a hedge maze planted by utopianists in New Harmony, Indiana, but the "true" path is worn so thoroughly into the dirt that "knowing the way made traveling perfectly meaningless." The wonder inherent in the journey's program is that there is no program at all, unless it is to investigate the places in the Atlas whose names token strangeness and mystery: Nameless, Tennessee; Othello, New Jersey; Dime Box, Texas. Heat-Moon's gift as a traveler is the way he gets people in these places to open up to him, as if they have been waiting their whole lives for someone to come by and ask how it is a place gets a name like "Nameless." Over and over again, an inquiry at a diner leads Heat-Moon to some superannuated resident who represents the repository of a place's history, which along the Blue Highways, always seems to be a diminishing resource. And once he's granted access, Heat-Moon has a gift for capturing the small, specific things that turn a person into a character, like the woman who listens to the radio hospital report each day, faithfully recording a register of the region's deaths, or the woman who trades between her glasses marked NEAR and the ones marked FAR. As Heat-Moon remarks at one point, "A person shows himself in the way he opens an orange."

I loved, loved, loved this book. I felt like it was the kind of book I had been looking for for a long time: a travelogue about America--next time you're in a bookstore, count how many of the travel books are about Italy or the French Riviera and how many are about Missouri--that tries to take in the whole of this massive, messy, melodramatic country. Heat-Moon can't see all of it, of course, but his circular route circumscribes it, and somehow contains it; when it's over, there's no doubt that he has "seen America," or come as close to a true fulfillment as possible of the phrase. What he finds is sometimes hostile, sometimes violent, sometimes troubled--see the way he asks everyone he comes across near Selma, Alabama, white or black, what's changed in the decade since the famous march--but it's impossible to come away with anything but love and wonder for the nation as project, in which we are all collaborators. I was hooked, of course, from the first section, when Heat-Moon travels through my own home state of North Carolina. He goes from the mountains to Manteo (where I can tell you first-hand that the locals are still arguing about how high a hotel should be permitted to be), and in between, the sleepy, clay-baked towns of the Piedmont where I grew up. Some of these places, the thought of spending an hour in them makes my skin crawl--and yet, Heat-Moon's account brought up stores of bittersweet affection I barely knew I possessed.

Heat-Moon can write. A lot of people can, even those who write travelogues. Perhaps the writing here feels different than, say, the writing of Paul Theroux because Heat-Moon is not interested in treating this journey sociologically. In Theroux's book about the South, he comes off like an alien on Earth. But Heat-Moon is implicated in his own journey; by searching America he searches for himself, and so his prose benefits not just from talent but from wisdom as well. Of a group of children playing on a Civil War battlefield, he observes, "Even though Titans and Tridents and MX's have not made 'the red business,' as Whitman called it, a thing of the past, they have eliminated future battlefield parks where boys can play at war--unless scientist find means to hang monuments in the sky." Taking water from a reservoir that has covered up a cemetery, he writes, "In my splashing, I broke the starlight. And then I too drank from the grave." And here is a sentence that captures the heart of the road trip, in words that stopped me cold: "In a hotel room at the geographical center of North America, a neon sign blinking red through the cold curtains, I lay quietly like a small idea in a vacant mind."

As with every journey, Heat-Moon finds that he comes back to himself in the end: "If the circle had come full turn, I hadn't. I can't say, over the miles, that I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn't known what I wanted to know. But I did learn what I didn't know I wanted to know." Traveling doesn't fix you; maybe it doesn't even change you. But the experience of travel stands alone, an act of unparalleled seeing: In a season on the blue roads, what had I accomplished? I hadn't sailed to the Atlantic in a washtub, or crossed the Gobi by goat cart, or bicycled to Cape Horn. In my own country, I had gone out, had met, had shared. I had stood as witness."

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long tiem gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her there at the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.

Inman, gravely injured at the Battle of Petersburg, walks out of a Confederate hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina. He's on his way back to his small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where his sweetheart Ada is. Though the war is in its death throes, violence is still the order of the day, and the road is a difficult one, beset by murderers and thieves, the worst of which are the Home Guard who go around pressing men into fighting a lost battle. Back in Cold Mountain, Ada is alone, having recently suffered the death of her father. She has no idea how to operate his farm, and comes close to starvation, before a local cornpone named Ruby comes to help her get things in working order. Together, they bring new life to the farm and a new way forward for Ada.

The obvious model for Cold Mountain is The Odyssey. Inman is the Odysseus figure, who vanquishes a series of enemies and monsters en route to his home and his Penelope. The moment when Inman, having crossed hundreds of miles on foot, is captured by the Home Guard and returned to the east, struck me as a pointed analog of the bag of Aeolian winds that drive Odysseus back in the direction that he came. Inman is capable, taciturn, even brave, but he has little of Odysseus' cleverness or grandiloquence; he's a small and private man who has become caught up with the great machine of war without his own choosing.

More interesting, actually, is thinking of Ada as Penelope. In The Odyssey, Penelope suffers at the hands of the suitors who devour all her food and resources. Ruby is a kind of anti-suitor, who arrives to make the estate multiply. Together, they build a kind of female utopia that would be unthinkable without the war and and the absence of men. Queer theorists might have much to say about the affection between Ada and Ruby; when Inman does return (as you know he will), Ruby tries to convince Ada that he's not needed, that they can thrive on their own. Ruby's love for Ada (if not Ada's for Ruby) approaches the romantic. The arrival of men, whether Inman, the Home Guard, or Ruby's rakish father Stobrod, is a threat to the utopia; Inman's return reinscribes Ada into a familiar kind of hetero union. (This is predictable enough; more disappointing is the post-script which does the same for Ruby.)

I was enthralled and impressed by Cold Mountain's version of the Confederate South, which manages to express the extent of ambivalence about the cause and purpose of the war without excusing or minimizing it. Inman is forced to shoot and kill a group of union soldiers, but his real enemies are the Home Guard--the real enemies, that is, are at Home--and Captain Teague, their sadistic leader, who shows up predictably to force the narrative conclusion. Among those Southerners Inman encounters on his odyssey are staunch true-believers and anti-Confederates, not to mention freed and enslaved Black people, but most white people he meets are somewhere in between, half-hearted in their pride and wearied by the length of a deadly and destructive war. This destruction, more than anything, is the central fact of the novel's landscape. Much of that destruction is self-inflicted--Frazier pointedly makes Ada the scion of Charleston elites, the kind of people one might say are the real drivers of the war--and we see ironically how the misguided defense of slavery has unraveled the precious social fabric that had been previously so rigid.

Frazier's writing is excellent, often lovely, only infrequently sentimental. The love story at the heart of the novel moves with the force of novelist predestination; even the spoilable moment where the novel ultimately diverges from the shape of The Odyssey seemed inevitable to me. I liked how the romance between Inman and Ada was made of small things--a handful of pre-war encounters, a single kiss--that are blown up to immense size during their long separation. I liked, too, the depth of the moment where they stumble upon each other once again--and, having changed so much, don't recognize the other.

The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane

So, look, the plain rises to meet the lower slopes of the ranges--but be sure to show that the ranges are the stubs of mountains, the shoulders of mountains, they're so worn down. Exhausted by the sun. The rhythm here is horizontal--fallen mountains, fallen trees. Long lines--like this. Only the sky is vertical. The sun lifts it. A low horizon, then? No, he likes the idea of a small sky that nevertheless crowds everything else--it feels true. How else to express the feeling of standing on this empty country, knowing how big it is because you've travelled weeks from the sea and haven't yet reached the centre? (God, what he wouldn't give to paint--or eat--a fleshy little oyster!) And then the sky comes along an flattens you, overwhelms you, but without ever making the country shrink. The sky pulls the land up to it. It involves the land. How to get this feeling out and onto paper?

It's the late 19th century, in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. A dust storm rolls in on a little boy playing outside his house; caught in its bewilderingness, he becomes lost. His disappearance will last for seven days, and bring together the whole town to search for him: his mother and father, their five daughters, including headstrong Cissy, their Aboriginal servants; the local constable and his new wife, who's been snogging a Swedish painter; the painter and his English wife; an Australian army sergeant and his Black trackers; the rich old sheep station family for whom the mountains in which the boy is lost are named; a group of sheep shearers; and even an Afghan camel driver. The boy Denny, lost and delirious, imagines himself at the whim of strange gods, half-invented and half-borrowed from Aboriginal legend.

The Sun Walks Down is one of those books that seeks to capture a particular place at a particular moment in history. Author Fiona McFarlane's Australia is a frontier in its second generation; already books have been written about the sheep-rearing patriarch who has only just recently died, painting him, for right and wrong, as a hardscrabble pioneer of a new nation. Sheep-station Australia, of course, relies on labor procured by certain degrees of coercion. I liked one small detail in which the rich old widow covets a finely woven shawl that one of the Black trackers uses to cover his withered arm, and which she tries to procure by any underhanded means. Billy spars with his master, Denny's father Matthew, every day, but he knows that he must hold back his true strength and skill; he harbors a resentment toward the rich sheep mogul, his former master, who prevented him from journeying into the interior to complete the ritual that would make him a man. It's to the book's credit, I think, that there isn't a single representative of Aboriginal existence, but several, with their own positions and motivations, and who are pointedly drawn from different tribal communities, not even speaking each other's language. The class distinction between the Axams and Wallaces speaks just as loudly--here, in the clash between Black and White, Anglo-Australian and Foreigner, Capital and Labor, McFarlane captures the truth that occurs alongside the origin of national myth.

McFarlane's Australia is a big place, and red: its garish red sunsets match its red landscapes, and it's those that the Swedish painter Rapp has come to paint. His attempts to make sense of the hostile, alienating landscape that has recently swallowed the young boy, that landscape called Australia, are some of the book's most interesting moments, I think. I also rather liked the sections with Denny himself, drawn into that landscape by his own fevered, boyish imagination. But the rest of the book I thought just didn't do enough with its raw materials. McFarlane makes certain feints at drama and escalation--the sergeant begins to settle on a theory that the town's dopey vicar has abducted the boy--but the story is mostly motionless, eventless. We are told of intense histories, like Minna's dalliance with Rapp, Billy's humiliation at the hands of his master, but for the most part history never seems to erupt into the present, only simmer. When Denny is found safe--if a little touched--at the end, I felt let down, as if I had been waiting for a climax that never comes. 

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

What a business. You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything. There was never any of what this is. You think that is one thing you will never have. And then, on a lousy show like this, co-ordinating two chicken-crut guerilla bands to help you blow a bridge under impossible conditions, to abort a counter-offensive that will probably already be started, you run into a girl like this Maria. Sure. That is what you would do. You ran into her rather late, that was all.

So a woman like that Pilar practically pushed this girl into your sleeping back and what happens? Yes, what happens? What happens? You tell me what happens, please. Yes. That is just what happens. That is exactly what happens.

Robert Jordan is a Spanish professor from Montana who has joined with Republican forces in Spain to fight in the Civil War. He's earned the reputation as an excellent dynamiter, and is tasked with blowing up a bridge to help keep fascist reinforcements from arriving during a Republican ambush. The process involves reconnoitering with small bands of guerillas in the mountains around Segovia, and among these bands are a collection of indelible characters with whom Robert becomes intricately involved: Pablo, the disgraced guerrilla leader who opposes the blowing of the bridge; Pilar, his headstrong "woman" and the band's true captain; the loyal old man Anselmo; and Maria, a girl with whom--despite all his warnings to himself--Robert falls deeply in love. There is a cinematic aspect to their love, coming as it is too late, and on the evening of a mission whose chances of success are slight, and for which the odds of a gruesome death are high.

Killing and dying are the subject of For Whom the Bell Tolls. When is it permissible to kill? When is dying a noble sacrifice? The characters all carry the burden of past killing, past dyings: for Robert, it is the bullet he put through the skull of a dying comrade. For Maria, it is the death of her parents in a gruesome fashion at the hands of the fascist, and her own repeated rape at the same hands. (Her short hair, shaved by the fascists and described as unbecoming to her face, is a symbol of the still-recent torture.) For Pablo and the other guerillas, it is the massacre of those same fascists; Pilar describes in long and gruesome detail the way the band laid siege to a group of local dons, slaughtering each one in turn, and the deep ambivalence of hindsight. The Spaniards are keenly aware that, in this conflict, the people they kill are their countrymen, and yet they know that they must continue on; the principle by which they live demands it. And they know that they, too, will likely be killed in turn, and thus live in a fashion close to their own deaths.

For Whom the Bell Tolls has superficial associations, perhaps, with his other great war novel, A Farewell to Arms. Among other things, there is a keen sense of the ways that the people at the bottom of the chain of hierarchy are abused and ignored by the people at the top. A subplot involves a messenger, sent by Robert to inform the Republican brass that they've been spotted by fascists and the ambush is foiled, who gets repeatedly waylaid by checkpoint guards and even thrown in prison by a petty French general who resents the ambush's commanding officer. It's not just that war involves death on a mass scale, it's that so many of the deaths are so pointless. For every heroic death that helps obtain a strategic advantage, there are a hundred others that are the result of poor judgment or sheer accident, and which result in no strategic advantage whatever. When, in the book's final moments, the destruction of the bridge finally takes place, the advantage of surprise has been lost, and the characters know they face death for little reason other than the need to follow orders--and for the broader principle of the war in which they fight.

Despite this, For Whom the Bell Tolls reminded me more of The Sun Also Rises, another story about a small group of people, set over a few days. Its scope and scale are so reduced, save for a few memories, stories, and gestures toward the wider war, that it feels almost like a closet drama. It's within this space that Maria and Robert live an entire romance, which they do with the special intensity of those for whom life seems very short. Hemingway haters, no doubt, may find much to despise in Maria, who attaches herself to Robert in a way that might seem naive. But you can't ignore the image of Maria with her shorn hair, taking up a machine gun and expressing her keenest desire to kill the fascists who murdered her parents, either. Nor do the haters have a response, I think, to Pilar, a battle-hardened badass whose resolve is the anchor of the small band of guerillas--whereas her husband, Pablo, represents the fickle Judas.

As I understand it, the novel's dialogue has come in for a lot of criticism over the years: Hemingway puts a lot of high-flown anachronisms in the mouth of the Spaniards, like "thees" and "thous." But I thought this worked. Partly, it's a way of elevating the guerillas, who are largely poor, rural people cast into world-significant circumstances they have not chosen, to the dignity of epic heroism. Partly it's an interesting way of transliterating the Spanish usted for an English audience. The novel--whose central character, if not sole viewpoint character, is a professor of Spanish--makes some really interesting decisions about how to present Spanish as English, relying on several false cognates and overly literal translations that I read as quite purposeful, and far more effective than trying to colloquialize everything they say. Among other things, it emphasizes the way in which Robert, though fluent in their language, is not quite of them, a stranger.

No Bones by Anna Burns

A few bare bones: this sister was called Amelia, she was seventeen, she never ate any food, suffered constant tummy aches, didn't understand why and was outrageously, sexually tin. She came in the door with that arm-swinging vigour all six-stone hunger-strikers are very keen on--or at least while on one of their extraordinary highs. So it could be said she was happy till that moment. Catching sight of her relatives however, she stopped being happy, stopped swinging her arms and her high dissipated in an instant.

The neighborhood of Ardoyne is one of the hardest hit by the three decades called, in Belfast and Northern Ireland, the Troubles. A teenager Amelia stops on the street to make out with a young man, and as soon as she leaves him, a car full of Protestants snatches him an executes him. A British cousin, having visited Amelia's family with open arms just a few years before, makes the mistake of repeating the visit, and finds himself murdered by his own family. Deaths pile up on themselves so quickly that they are quickly forgotten: "Everyone said wasn't it terrible, wasn't it a waste, wouldn't it always be remembered? But it wouldn't. And it wasn't. Everything got eclipsed, always got eclipsed, by the next, most recent, violent death."

No Bones is, like Anna Burns' subsequent and Booker-winning novel Milkman, about the ways that human psychology curdles in an environment of constant violence. The people of Ardoyne live in a state of constant denial and obfuscation; to live among the daily deaths requires them not to look too squarely at what's going on. It forces them to minimize the significance of violence; though one moment they may be cry about the wasted lives, their existence forces them to move on quickly as if this were a normal kind of life. It forces them to become inward, closed-off, and provincial. In the novel's final story, Amelia, having grown up and spent some time in London, comes back home and suggests that her old friends hire a car and take a holiday, an idea so strange and foreign to their understanding that they can barely understand what it is she's suggesting. (This story resolves in a clever way: instead of being "opened up" by the outside world, the friends find themselves on a ferry to a small island town off the Northern Irish coast, where the residents assume they are Protestants, or outsiders at any rate, and try to bully them off the island. What reforms their understanding, then, is coming face-to-face with a community as warped and defensive as their own.)

I was impressed by No Bones. It doesn't have the power of Milkman, which seems to me to take many of the same elements of No Bones and focuses them into a work with a singular nature. No Bones, by contrast, is organized as a series of stories, in some of which Amelia is the central character, or even the narrator, and others in which she appears at the margins. This method, on the other hand, allows Burns to play around with some of the more experimental elements of the novel, as with a story from the perspective of Vincent, a "mad" local whose viewpoint shifts between fantasy and reality in a way that I found really skillful and effective. Amelia herself is a kind of "madwoman," mentally warped by her community and a lifelong battle with anorexia; in one story she's in a mental clinic, imagining her brother--a crass and violent man who gets mixed up with the IRA--as a kind of beetle-like creature munching on her own flesh. Of course, it's just this kind of madness that gives Amelia the outsider's perspective she needs to see through the insanity of the way things are done in Ardoyne--only a madwoman could conceive of a plan as crazy as renting a car and going to the seaside.

The Gulf: Making of an American Sea by Jack E. Davis

The Gulf's history, as we shall see, is America's history; the energies of one are shared with the other. Our school books taught us that there were thirteen British colonies caught up in the war for American independence, yet in truth there were fifteen: the forgotten two were the Gulf colonies of East Florida and West Florida. The Gulf was on the frontier line that advanced from the original US states, delivered opportunities to Americans and immigrants searching for a better life, and nourished the nation's coming-of-age--doing so not in just western woodland, mountain, and river valley, but on the southern sea itself... With every new train line that reached the coast, every new hotel that opened ,and every new craving for a marketable resource, the region drew closer to the furious pace of change and consumption that possessed the rest of the nation--and then surpassed it. The Gulf had become America's sea.

I've traveled a lot in the United States, but to my mind, the Gulf of Mexico has seemed elusive and inaccessible: the first time I saw it was from the remote western edge of the Everglades, a part of the national park where few venture. Then, I saw it from a small fishing village that seemed intent on disappearing from the map of Louisiana. A third time, just recently, I saw it from Texas' beautiful Padre Island National Seashore. Three times might seem like many, but we're talking a big old gulf here--and many fewer encounters than I've had with the Atlantic or Pacific. The Gulf, Jack E. Davis contends, is rather forgotten, dimmer in the American imagination than either of the great oceans. And yet, it's the Gulf that's truly an "American sea"; though Mexico has nearly as much shoreline on it (and claims the name), the waters of the Gulf emerge almost entirely from the Mississippi, America's river. Its history, he says, is American history, from the birth of European colonization to the modern mega-business of tourism, commercial fishing, and, of course, oil.

What distinguishes The Gulf is the way that Davis brings together various genres and methods: it's a history book, but also a natural science book, and a work of cultural criticism. He begins by describing the arrival of Spanish colonizers and describing their interactions, typically fraught, with local tribes in Florida and Texas. Though the Gulf's shores were the first point of mainland contact for Europeans, the Gulf itself was long forgotten in the making of the American colonial experiment; only in the mid- to late-20th century, Davis says, did the prospect of fishing bring American attention. (Davis describes the Spanish sailors as unable or unwilling to eat the immense bounty of shrimp, oysters, and fish that provided sustenance to the Calusa and Karankawa, even as they ate their own horses and boot leather.) And even then, we learn, it's sport fishing--not commercial fishing--that makes the Gulf, where Americans first learned to hook the tarpon, a massive fish who had eluded anglers for a century.

In each section, Davis relies on the stories of individuals to tell the story of the Gulf. Some, like early settler Leonard Destin (namesake of Destin, Florida) and Key West resident Ernest Hemingway, are familiar, but others are more underheralded figures, like the environmental lawyer working to clear the Gulf of industrial pollution, or the reckless brothers who turned west Florida into a sinking morass of real estate grotesqueries. I was especially stuck by the story of Walter Anderson, an artist I'd never heard of, who basically abandoned his family to live on the remote islands of what are now the Gulf Islands National Seashore, and whose painted shack walls are preserved in a museum in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Davis never wants the reader to forget that the story of the Gulf is the story not just of birds and sawgrass and oil but the story of people, too.

The Gulf isn't shy about its political and ecological agenda. Perhaps partly because it is so ignored in the American imagination, the Gulf of Mexico is uniquely endangered. The fish are overfished; the birds, even after the early 20th century push to preserve their habitats to keep them safe from plume hunters, are diminishing in number. Oil, of course, is the number one threat, but it's joined by the effects of heavily polluting factories and the effects of eliminating marshland in favor of landfill and sea wall. "We cannot destroy or control the sea," Davis notes, "but we can diminish its gifts, and when we do, we turn away from our providence and diminish ourselves."

Divorcing by Susan Taubes

For a little while longer she tried to understand what induced her to abandon a more exciting, important pursuit just for lying in bed in this room, till she realized it was not a considered choice. She blundered into awakening. If she is still baffled, and even while getting on her feet with relative ease, struggles to recall by what tremendous effort she flung herself or was cast out of sleep, if this Wednesday morning seems so odd in its banality and part of her mind continues to dive for some deep reason it's because in the dreamer's world it had to make sense. Dream has its own time. While one is dreaming one does not know this of course; that it will end. In dreaming one assumes it will go on indefinitely, as in living--a reasonable delusion based on life experience: life goes on indefinitely until one is dead. Only dreams end. And in this respect loves and plays and stories are like dreams: they end.

Sophie Blind wants a divorce from her husband, Ezra. They are already living apart, Ezra in New York and Sophie in Paris, shuttling their three young boys between them. Sophie is already seeing other men, men who provide her with passions missing from her marriage to Ezra, but no more a possibility of permanence. Yet, Ezra is adamant that the marriage cannot end, refuses to grant the divorce, until the problem is solved--Sophie is killed by a car while crossing a New York street. Wait a minute, we ask--is this novel being narrated by a dead woman? Sure enough, in the very next chapter, we find ourselves within her consciousness as she lies in her coffin, being attended by her family, her still-husband, her children, each rewarded by her death by being more in control of her life and being than ever.

Divorcing is one of those books that rhymes unsettlingly with the author's life. Shortly after its publication to tepid reviews, Taubes took her own life by drowning. (Her body was identified, in another one of those lovely literary rhymes, by her friend Susan Sontag.) The sense of an eerie coincidence in Taubes' death is undercut by the fact that it was a suicide. Sophie is self-evidently a version of Taubes herself, also a Hungarian emigre to the United States and a daughter to a notorious psychoanalyst; in her suicide, perhaps, Taubes brought her life even further in line with that of the character she had created. This knowledge only amplifies the bittersweet fantasy of the dead narrator, who can hear as her life is measured and assessed, and who is called on by an angelic jury to make an accounting of it.

One of the strange things about Divorcing is that it moves backwards. It opens with Sophie's post-Ezra life, and her tragic death, and from there moves back in time to her young relationship with Ezra and her childhood with her father, the analyst. In a way, it's a novel that mirrors the process of analysis, moving deeper and deeper through layers of agglutinized time to what, one hopes, are the fundamental truths at the root of Sophie's ennui and despair. The logic is implacable and undeniable; as Sophie's father notes, the "new science" is incontrovertible because it "said that it was part of human nature to dislike and reject its view about human nature. You thought you were saying something against the doctrine or about human nature but in fact everything that was said in the doctrine was about you." In the same conversation, he notes that Sophie "was really in love with him and wanted to marry him and there was no point in denying it; that was part of her Electra complex to deny it." The narrative plumbs back father and farther, trying to explain Sophie, and pulls out this plum--her issues with men are, at root, Daddy issues. And yet the role of men--her father's carelessness, Ezra's domineering--are for their part absolved.

As it goes backward in time, Divorcing goes backward in style. By the end of the novel, Taubes seems to settle into a skillful but straightforward realism, abandoning some of the more avant garde touches that characterize the novel's first chapters: the structural and temporal shifting, the narration by the dead woman--this aspect of her point of view never returns or is reemphasized--and the loose play with genre and form: a long conversation between Ezra and her father, for example, is formatted in dialogue like a one-act play. A biography of Ezra is captured in Renata Adler-like vignettes. It might be said that the novel moves toward realism as analysis uncovers the truth; to me, we are meant to be reminded of the ways that realism, too, conceals and obscures, and that truth--and liberation, that goal which is reached for an not attained--requires new modes and styles from us. I think you can feel Taubes reaching for that, a literary mode that would free the spirit and mind from the cage of bourgeois marriage; that the novel expresses its own failures makes it doubly sad.