Open Secrets by Alice Munro

Maureen is a young woman yet, though she doesn't think so, and she has life ahead of her. First a death--that will come soon--then another marriage, new places and houses. In kitchens hundreds and thousands of miles away, she'll watch the soft skin form on the back of a wooden spoon and her memory will twitch, but it will not quite reveal to her this moment when she seems to be looking at an open secret, something not startling until you think of trying to tell it.

The final story in Alice Munro's collection, Open Secrets, is called "Vandals." As with so many of Munro's stories, it has several layers, so that it's difficult to tell--or tell at first--where the center lies. One layer is Bea, a woman who leaves her staid boyfriend for Ladner, a gruff taxidermist who keeps a maintains a kind of self-made nature trail on his rustic property. Another layer is Liza, who lived across the street from Ladner and Bea as a young girl, and who now, as Ladner is in the hospital dying, is asked to watch after their house. With her husband in tow, she enters the house and proceeds to smash everything in it. We must read between the lines to make sense of this shocking act, and the truth is only glancingly suggested--that Ladner sexually abused Liza and her brother when they were children. Here--content warning--is our only clue:

When Ladner grabbed Liza and squashed himself against her, she had a sense of danger deep inside him, a mechanical sputtering, as if he would exhaust himself in one jab of light, and nothing would be left of him but black smoke and burnt smells and frazzled wires. Instead, he collapsed heavily, like the pelt of an animal flung loose form its flesh and bones. He lay so heavy and useless that Liza and even Kenny felt for a moment that it was a transgression to look at him. He had to pull his voice out of his groaning innards, to tell them they were bad.

To say the least, I was floored by this story. I expected some of the stories in Open Secrets to mirror in uncomfortable ways the recent revelation that Munro stuck by her own husband for years after he sexually abused her daughter. But I didn't expect to read a story that so perfectly mirrored it that it left me with the discomforting feeling that it must have been drawn, with horrible clarity, from Munro's own life. 

For me, nothing more really needs to be said about Munro the person beyond what Brandon Taylor wrote in his thoughtful substack post about Andrea Skinner and her abuser, Gerald Fremkin. "People can justify anything to themselves," Taylor wrote. "Is that so interesting?" The story is a horrible one, and it is primarily horrible because of what happened to Andrea Skinner; what it has done to Alice Munro's reputation, or our image of her, is so comparatively unimportant it almost feels like an insult to focus on it. But contrary to what other people have said, I don't find it very surprising. Why should it be surprising to me? I never met Alice Munro the person; what do I know about what she is capable of? Actually, I think that those who say it is surprising because Munro writes so eloquently about abuse and our capacities for repression have it exactly backward. Who better to write about particular failures and flaws than someone who shares them? To put it another way, is there any reason in expecting an author to be better than the characters they write about?

"Vandals" begins with a letter. (Open Secrets is unique among Munro's collections for how many letters there are, I think: "Carried Away" focuses on a series of letters between a librarian and her secret admirer; in "The Jack Randa Hotel," a jilted wife secretly follows her husband to Australia and writes letters to him under an assumed name; "A Wilderness Station," about a murdered frontiersman and his suspect wife, is entirely epistolary.) This letter is from Bea to Liza, and it describes a strange dream: Bea is at a Canadian Tire (think lumberjack Sears) where buckets of bones have been laid out for purchase; she takes what she thinks are Ladner's bones, but which are too light. They prove to be the bones of a young girl, or boy, or both. This, we suspect, is the subconscious admitting to Bea that she knew exactly what was going on with Ladner, and did nothing to stop it. The conscious Bea admits it, too, buried deep in the exculpatory language of dreams. This is the most, we sense, that we will ever get from her. In retrospect, it is chilling to think of "Vandals" as a story that functions in the same way that Bea's letter does within it. Munro's knowledge, and guilt, are buried here, jumbled up but in plain sight--an open secret.

"Vandals" is, for better and worse, the best story in the collection. I also really enjoyed "The Jack Randa Hotel"; the letters the wife writes, pretending to be a recently deceased Australian to whom her husband has reached out, thinking they may be related--Munro was always one to write a plot that's hard to stuff into a sentence--are very funny in their playful cruelty. Of another tone and spirit entirely is "The Albanian Virgin," a fascinatingly un-Munro-like story about a woman who is trapped in a rustic Albanian village after a horse accident and nearly sold into marriage with a Muslim traveler. The woman saves herself by becoming a "virgin," a woman who refuses marriage and lives as a man. OK, I said it was not Munro-like, but that's a very Munrovian image, isn't it? It's just one of several images in the collection of women who escape the trap of bourgeois life by "going wild" in some way. Such a list would also include the frontier wife of "A Wilderness Station," as well, I think, as the strange young neighbor of "Spaceships Have Landed" who disappears from her home and comes back telling people that she's been abducted. 

In a way, that's the message of a lot of Munro's stories. You can play along, or you can get out. Both are a kind of madness, but you get to choose your flavor of madness. You can go up with the spaceships, maybe, or shave your head and eat at the men's table. Or you can tell yourself and others the kind of self-soothing lies that keep the monstrosity of domestic life going. You can judge for yourself which way Munro herself chose.

Blu's Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka

You know what I would wish if I could have one wish in the whole wide world? I wish my house was underneath Kaunakakai Groceteria.

In my bedroom there's a secret door up to the groceteria, which I could sneak into at night, after everyone went home. Then I can choose anything I want to eat when I get hungry, when all you, Maisie, Poppy, and I have to eat in the house is mayonnaise bread, peanut butter and jelly, or dry saimin.

And I would take Maisie and you with me too, so we can get all the ingredients to we need to make the biggest laulau dinner, the whole works--day-old poi, lomi salmon, haupia, pipi kaula, and squid luau, just for the three of us, and Poppy.

That's my wish. My one and only wish.

Ivah Ogata is a young girl living on the Hawaiian island of Moloka'i. After her mother's death, she has had to take up the role of a mother, looking after her imaginative little brother Blu (whose name comes from "Blue Hawaii," a pet name from their mother inspired by his real, Presley) and her youngest sister Maisie, who has become non-verbal. Their father, Poppy, is still around, but he works nights as a janitor at the Bank of Hawaii, and his despair at the death of his wife has made him increasingly bitter and resentful, especially toward Blu. Ivah does her best, but poverty makes their situation a difficult one, her two charges are especially challenging. The "hanging" of the title comes from a moment when Blu, inspired by the westerns he sees on TV, imagines himself to be an outlaw and comes close to accidentally hanging himself. He makes ropes out of the good sheets, like characters in cartoons. He has an adventurous spirit, but without the discernment of age to temper it: Ivah finds him exposing himself to a local creep in exchange for candy. And yet, Blu is generous and kind, too--he'd made sure to get three candies, one for himself, one for Ivah, and one for Maisie.

The central conflict in Blu's Hanging is within Ivah, who feels torn between looking after Blu and Maisie and her own dreams of a different life. This plays out in some predictable ways, as when the one kind schoolteacher suggests that Ivah apply to a prestigious school in Honolulu. But the novel itself is far from predictable, and enlivens a familiar scenario with the richness of its imagery and the sharpness of its characters. Yamanaka evokes a Hawaii of the 1960's where a child's life is perilously close to sex, danger, and spoil, to dying dogs and cats in heat, to blood and urine, dirt and rust. It situates Ivah's conflict in a particularly Hawaiian setting, noting that she's the only one among the Japanese students who receives a token for free lunch at the school, an indignity usually reserved for the Portuguese laborer families and native Hawaiians. She butts head with her haole teachers, white women who have arrived in Hawaii on work programs and not discovered the tropical paradise they were expecting. Once, when she discovers that a teacher has been shaming Maisie for soiling her underpants (another psychological effect, we understand, of the mother's death), Ivah ransacks the teacher's dormitory and spreads her ripped panties all over the street. In one climactic and chilling moment, Ivah learns that her parents met at Moloka'i's leper colony, a place they once thought they'd spend the rest of their lives. Her mother's death, as it turns out, resulted from kidney failure from overuse of the sulfones used to treat leprosy--terrified that she would be sent back to the colony and separated from her children, their mother medicated herself to death.

"But tonight," Ivah writes, "I loosen the knots in the rope that tie him to me, and let the rope fall away. Fall from my brother, who has learned how to fly." In the end, Ivah is unable to protect Blu in the way she wants. And it's important, perhaps, that she understand this, which her mother could not. She saves him from further disgrace at the hands of the creepy old man, but she cannot keep him from having much-too-early sex with the girl next door, a sinister Portuguese that Ivah labels a "Human Rat." The one thing that didn't quite work for me was the end of the novel, when Ivah discovers that Blu in the midst of--spoiler alert--being tied up and sodomized by Uncle Paco, another local pederast who might more properly be categorized a sleazebag than creep. Is it too extreme or too melodramatic? Or is it a moment that doesn't shy away from exactly the kind of dangers that Ivah must let Blu confront himself if she is to follow her dreams in Honolulu? My feeling is that it goes a little too far, but I found the book mostly so convincing that I'm not bothered by it. 

In the Time Before Light by Ian MacMillan

I described for him first the size of the world, and the size of the islands in the world, the distances. He listened to this intently, and then asked me what the haoles were like, how their world was different from ours. "It is very different," I said, "and in ways very similar. The world of the haoles is made up like our own in this way: there are two kinds of people--ali'i and common people, and the common people do the bidding of the haole ali'i. Those haoles I knew were all, at one time or another, victims of these ali'i, and in various ways escaped them as I escaped Kahimoku. I went on to try to make clear to him why so many heads were chopped off in China, and why two boys were burned to death in King Philip's Land. As I descriebd these things, I thoguht of Muapo's story, and understood how this pattern seemed to repeat itself, both in the things I had seen and in the stories I had heard. The world, it seemed, was made tis way.

One of the more interesting things I saw on my trip to Hawaii was the Pu'ukohola Heiau, a great temple built by Kamehameha I, the warrior-king who was the first to unite all the islands. Kamehameha was told by a kahuna, a priest, that he would be victorious against his enemies if he built a temple at what was known as Whale Hill; he did, and he was. What remains today is the great base of the temple, an enormous edifice of lava rocks that is all the more impressive for being made with no mortar: the rocks are simply chosen and positioned so that they bear each others' weight, and so clever were the Hawaiians at this that the temple remains intact today. Pono, the protagonist of Ian MacMillan's novel In the Time Before Light, is conscripted along with his family by a great ali'i, a chief, to build just such a temple. Pono, who belongs to the lowest, outcast class of Hawaiian society, having been ousted from his home by a neighboring band, works under the eye of the sadistic kahuna Kahimoku, who likes to select the weakest among his workers and kill them as a show of strength. When Pono finally is chosen for death, he is saved at the last moment by Roger Beckwith, an English pirate whose crew is made up of those whom, like Pono, he's saved from execution at the hands of authority.

Aboard Beckwith's ship, Pono proves to be a quick learner. He picks up English immediately (though MacMillan never addresses how easy it would be for a Hawaiian, whose language contains neither an F nor a T, to utter the first word "foot") and voraciously devours Beckwith's encyclopedia. Pono becomes a valued crewmate, and alongside his new mates he travels as far as the Philippines, China, New Zealand, and even the western American coast. Though he longs to return and search for the wife and children from whom he's been separated, Pono is one of the first Hawaiians after contact with Europeans to be ushered into the now much wider world, and what he finds is that that world is not so different from his own. As the excerpt above describes, his principal discovery is that everywhere, the big people exploit the little people. This is an interesting viewpoint, I think, for a white writer to take when writing about Indigenous people; similar arguments have been made to dismiss the depredations of colonialism: Well, they weren't so peaceful before we got there, you know. And yet it's hard to deny the truth of the matter; when I looked at Kamehameha's temple on Whale Hill, I thought of MacMillan's novel and the nameless, unremembered labor that must have occurred at the king's request.

What makes the book work, I think, is the frame story, in which an aged Pono tells his story to a British sailor in Honolulu with an interest in publishing his account. The Hawaii the sailor sees, as Pono illustrates, is a different one from the one he left behind when he was rescued by the pirates. For one, the warfare that turned Pono into an outcast is no longer, thanks to Kamehameha (who I think remains unnamed, a silent force), and white traders have descended en masse, bringing with them new ways of life--and new, devastating diseases. Perhaps it's true that everywhere the ali'i exploit the common people, but it's true also that Pono's new world is one that comes with new and frightening kinds of exploitation. As Pono tells his story, a rumor arrives that a Hawaiian Christian convert is due to arrive at Honolulu, one with the same name that Pono gave his long-lost son. The reunion is a failure; the son rejects the father because he has found another father. It seems like the final nail in the coffin for the Hawaii that Pono once knew, replaced by something that is perhaps no worse but certainly no better. And yet, this scene gives some hope, too: Pono's wife is still living somewhere near Hilo. When he sets off at the end of the novel to find her, MacMillan suggests that restitution and repair are possible even in a world that has slipped out from under one's feet.

Monologue of a Dog by Wisława Szymborska

There's fate and fate. Mine changed abruptly.
One spring came
and he wasn't there.
All hell broke loose at home.
Suitcases, chests, trunks, crammed into cars.
The wheels squealed tearing downhill
and fell silent round the bend.

After reading How to Start Writing (and When to Stop), I was curious about the poetry of author Wisława Szymborska, who, in a surprisingly turn, won the Nobel in 1996 after writing popular but largely regionally-known poetry for nearly 6 decades. 

It's interesting to read a collection like this after reading something like How to Start Writing, with its acerbic tone and ironical wit. I wondered if Szymborska's own poetry would live up to her own advice. I can imagine the recipients of some of her bon mots secretly hoping it wouldn't; alas for them, the poems in this slim volume are, to use a literally term, straight bangers.

The title poem, which I've excerpted above, opens the collection and is the clear standout. Over the course of the poem, it moves from pastoral animal poetry into something much bigger and broader: revolution, the cruelties of history, the tragedies of the simple lives caught up in time's tumultuous passage. And it does all this without ever leaving the head of the titular canine. If you read nothing else of this review, do yourself a favor and click the link above.

The other poems often follow a similar structure. From a simple and small scale starting point they often blossom out thematically to encompass far more than their ostensible subjects. A baby pulling a tableclose becomes a meditation on physics and entropy; a series of short aphorisms about statistics turns toward existential loneliness; a survey of epochal time gives way to the infinity of an instant. 

But lest this all sound weighty and tedious--and any poetry lover can conjure a hundred great poets are often just this--Szymborska's style is never less than approachable. As she recommended in her column, she never chooses to obscure when speaking straight will do. Mystery and ambiguity are in these pieces, around the edges, but she isn't interested in obscurity. It struck me while reading how often poetry is spoken of as something that can make the familiar unfamiliar, and how rarely that occurs; but here, in free verse lines anyone can read, Szymborska does just that.

Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter

Stephanie listened to their Terrace Stories and wondered which parts were true. The truth was overrated, she realized. Knowing that certain parts were fiction, this was what filled her body with an unexpected warmth. It was love, to recognize the inventions and inconsistencies that make a person whole.

Usually, it's a good book that breaks my review streak. Bad reviews, of course, are notoriously fun to write, and mid reviews can be a little dull but have a predictable structure ("Here's what happened, here's what's good, here's what's not"). But reviewing a really good book, that's harder. Because you want to capture what spoke to you about a particular work, knowing that you won't be able to, that in fact you might actually turn people off if you get it wrong. But I'm reviewing Terrace Story anyway, because it's one of the best books I've read this year, even if I'm not sure I can say why.

Terrace Story is a novel, not a collection of short stories, but structurally, it's broken up into four sections, three of which--Terrace, Folly, and Fortress--can almost, if not quite, be read as standalone pieces. The final section, Cantilever, wraps up the story chronologically, but what is that story? There are spoilers below, mostly for the first section.

The first section, Terrace, is about a young couple, Annie and Edward, and their toddler, Rose. The young family rents a tiny apartment and all is rainbows and butterflies, at first. One day, Stephanie, a friend of Annie's from work, visits, and opens a door that leads to a large, beautiful terrace that, somehow, neither Annie nor Edward had noticed before. They go outside, share some maybe true, maybe not tales they call "terrace stories", etc. But when she leaves, the terrace goes with her--the door leads, once again, to a closet. So, like anyone in too small a space would do, Annie and Edward invite Stephanie over more and more often, integrating her more and more deeply into their family. All is well until one day Edward tells a story about a perfect date that never happened, a story that invents a new origin for Rose's name, a date that, Annie is sure, he went on with Stephanie. In a linear sense, they both know this is impossible, but somehow Stephanie begins filling more and more spaces in their lives, especially in her growing closeness to Rose. It culminates in Stephanie slowly, but unknowingly, taking over Annie's job. On the day Annie is fired, she invites Stephanie over for reasons she doesn't quite understand. And this time, while Annie is preparing food in the kitchen, Stephanie walks out to the terrace with Edward and Rosie, and closes the door from the outside, leaving Annie alone with only the closet.

Terrace sets the stage for the rest of the book so discussing what happens is needed but it's a shame in a way. Because the world Leichter has built up to this point doesn't feel like one where a woman would, through no fault of her own, lose her family in an instant. And Annie's story, in some ways, repeats throughout the novel: women in situations they didn't create or ask for being visited by tragedy, loss, and loneliness for reasons they can't--and won't--understand.

Folly tells the story of Annie's parents, George and Lydia, as they attend a funeral--for someone neither of them can remember--which leads to another funeral which leads to affairs, distance, heartbreak, etc. I won't go into a lot of detail except to say that the portrait of marital dissolution in this section really struck me as truthful, building the eventual infidelities gradually so there's never a moment where a character is forced into a crisis--it's just a slow process of distance from one person and closeness to another.

Fortress is when I realized that, like Leichter's excellent first novel Temporary, Terrace Story is really a story of space. Here we learn about Stephanie's power which is, maybe you've guessed, the ability to create space at will. I wondered throughout the first section if Stephanie knew she was creating the terrace, and as it turns out, she did. As a child, she tries to hide her power but it seeps out--a nightmare rearranges her house, a playground trip leads to zoning violations, and when her parents realize what's happening, they do the worst possible thing: they get scared. So when Stephanie's toddler sister walks into the road and is hit by a car while Stephanie is watching, her parents whisper and wonder, did she do it, make the sidewalk wider, the road narrower? At college, she makes a friend, her first friend, Will, who, without going into detail, is on my permanent literary shitlist for being one of those guys who thinks they know everything and can't keep a secret.

The last section, Cantilever, is set in the future, once earth is nearly uninhabitable, and draws the various threads in the first three stories together. Rosie, the now-grown baby from Terrace, runs intake for new residents of what first seems like a space station but turns out to be more of a, uh, spacetime station. Parts of this section confused me but the last few pages paid off in a way I didn't see coming.

While it's never stated explicitly, I think Leichter, throughout the book, is playing a bit of a physics game with the reader. The stories are connected through a couple laws of physics: namely that space and time are the same thing, and that matter can never be created or destroyed. Stephanie sees her power as the ability to create space where there was no space before; but throughout there are nods to a darker idea: namely that Stephanie isn't creating space so much as taking it from somewhere else, that the time-in-space she spends with Will, with Annie, with Edward, represents a loss to someplace, or someone, else. Death haunts all the stories (maybe it haunts all stories, eh?) in the form of dead children, funerals, extinctions--crows are long extinct in the otherwise seemingly ordinary first part, and Lydia is an extinction scientist/writer(?)--and eventually, the Earth itself.

And yet, Leichter finds a way to eke out hope for her characters. When I finished the last section, I was unsure if I liked the ending which is (tonal spoiler, is that a thing?) really lovely and almost optimistic, but it's aged well in my mind: maybe there is a happier ending out there, but god knows if we'll ever find it.

Suslov's Daughter by Habib Abdulrab Sarori

Since we'd first met in my sister's house, we'd know nothing aside from life inside a flat with the shutters closed tight. We'd never gone out on the balcony, or into the street. We'd never walked under the sun together, on the beach or in the mountains. We'd never sat in a cafe, or a square, or on the roof of a building. We'd never lounged on a desert dune or under the moon. We'd never shared an umbrella in the rani. We did nothing but fuck like mice in a dark cellar.

There was no way of knowing how shocked I would be (and how shocked she would be, too) if I were to see Hawiya in front of me in the square, or if I ran into her on the street. Even for me, who spent half my Paris nights imagining us traveling the world together.

The unnamed narrator of Habib Abdulrab Sarori's Suslov's Daughter is a committed secularist and communist. As a young man, it seems to him that the communist revolution that has already succeeded in ousting the colonizing British cannot help but succeed, and that soon Yemeni society will be transformed. When he meets Faten--whom he calls "Hawiya," the abyss--for the first time she is only twelve, and the daughter of a high-ranking Marxist official. By the time he returns to Yemen from Paris--his pregnant wife having been killed in the Metro by fundamentalist Islamic terrorists--Hawiya has become a committed Salafist, dedicating her life to the theocratic government of North Yemen, the victors in the country's civil war. Despite these immense differences, the two are still drawn together through love and lust, the secularist and the fundamentalist, the communist and the theocrat. The narrator battles his own cognitive dissonance, weighing his commitment to his principles against his love for Hawiya; outside of his bedroom they are enemies.

Yemen, to the best of my knowledge, is in a bad state. It is one of the poorest and least developed states in the world, and there the revolutionary fervor of the Arab Spring seems only to have left an opening for more civil war and the Houthi movement. Suslov's Daughter, written in the wake of the Arab Spring, tracks Yemeni history over the past half-century, illustrating the strange divisions--and alliances--that characterize the various movements and moments of its instability. The narrator meets Hawiyah's father on the street: how did this committed Marxist become the kind of man who will refuse to shake your hand because he doesn't want to compromise his ritual ablutions? The love and war between the narrator and Hawiya comes to stand in for the civil war and all its civil strife, and encourages the reader to think about that which the secularists and fundamentalists have in common, despite everything. Hawiya, like the narrator, is a revolutionary, only the nature and the engine of her revolution is very different. All this comes full circle during the Arab Spring, when Hawiya and the narrator find themselves on the same side again, agitating for the downfall of the ruling elites. The reconciliation is not an easy one, nor is it, I think, essentially hopeful. The alliance, Sarori suggests, could only ever have been ephemeral, and ten years after its publication one might say that Yemenis are living in the aftermath of its breakdown.

Suslov's Daughter has a couple of goofy fictional tricks: the first is that it frames the narrator as telling his story to Azazeel, the "Reaper" who has come to collect his soul. On his deathbed, it seems, the narrator only wants to talk about Hawiya, to try to figure out the mystery of her once more. The second is that each chapter is preceded by a post from the narrator's Facebook wall, a long boomer-like rant about Yemeni history or the ruling regime. It seems a little silly, but it makes more sense later on when the narrator describes how crucial Facebook was to the organization of the Arab Spring. It's crucial to the relationship between the narrator and Hawiya, also: she is a massively popular fundamentalist figure; he has a smaller pseudonymous account with which he comments on her post, pressing back against her ideals. It's never clear whether she knows this commenter is him, but the repartee is another facet of their complex relationship.

As a book, Suslov's Daughter was fine. The prose has its flourishes, but often relies on really goofy cliches. I found it more interesting, perhaps, than good. But I do think it finds a fascinating way to present the history of one country in the life of two people, and the way their shifting relationship follows the shifting political and cultural scene in Yemen really works.

With the addition of Yemen, my "Countries Read" list is up to 94!

Love by Hanne Orstavik

He sees the car's gone. Vibeke isn't in. Maybe something's happened. An accident. Vibeke doesn't like diriving in the winter. Here it's winter all the time. She's crashed and maybe now she's paralyzed and will have to sit in a wheelchair. Maybe no one's found her yet and she's bleeding to death. Or maybe the car's about to burst in flames and she's going to die from the pain. He tries to imagine how much it hurts when your skin's on fire... Then I'll have to have my birthday at the hospital, he thinks.

Vibeke, a middle aged divorcee, lives with her son, Jon, in a small town somewhere in Norway. They've moved recently, less than a year before the story begins. Their existence is spartan and somewhat sad--Vibeke spends most of her time reading (she may even outpace Chris since she's said to read 3-5 books a week) and thinking about herself. Jon spends his time ice skating at the sports club and dreaming about getting a train for his ninth birthday which, as it happens, is the day after the story in Love happens.

Vibeke is crushing on a man she saw at the library, and so decides to return her books early, only to find the library closed. As she walks to her car, she notices that a carnival has set up across the road, and walks over, not yet ready to return home to Jon. Jon, meanwhile, has left the house to sell raffle tickets for the sports club he's just joined, and in the course of things, meets an old man who invites him in to show him his handmade ice-skates, a girl who invites him to her room to listen to music, and a strange, androgynous person who offers him candy when they see him outside his locked house at midnight, Vibeke still being out at a bar some ways away with a man she met at the carnival.

Love is very widely acclaimed. It's won many awards, is frequently put forth as one of the greatest Nordic novels ever written, and is Hanne's defining work, and indeed, there's plenty to like here. The town, though we see it only in bits, feels realistic. a place where the library closes early on Wednesdays, the carnival doesn't have a Ferris wheel, and the closest late-night gas stations and bars are twenty kilometers away. The situations the characters find themselves in often have undertones of menace, but much like real life, nothing really awful ever happens; awkward and tense is the worst things get.

Love is, at heart, a story about people missing each other, in multitudinous ways. Jon and Vibeke's stories butt up against each other constantly. Though they really only share physical space in the first few pages, Vibeke is always on Jon's mind--sometimes her words must literally come out of his mouth, as when he tells the girl he met that she was divorced because "she couldn't be tied down". Jon, on the other hand, never crosses Vibeke's--she doesn't check to make sure he's in the house before she leaves for the library, nor when she returns at 4am or so. And even early on, when they're talking, she's not really there, as Jon tells her about some (horrific) photos he saw of men being tortured, she responds with platitudes and, we know, is thinking that she wants him to simply go away. The text itself also reflects the same tension, as the POV will change, sometimes mid-paragraph, often offering some ironic juxtaposition of their circumstances. And near the end of the book, the car carrying Jon and the truck carrying Vibeke nearly collide, though neither knows it and probably never will.

So why, ultimately, did Love not work for me? I've given it some consideration and I think the problem is twofold. First, the voice throughout felt, to me, rather monotone. Maybe a necessity given the way the text plays with the alternating narratives, but Jon's story tonally felt too similar to Vibeke's. There's a lot of noticing going on, where Jon or Vibeke think something like "X reminded them of Y. It was like Z. They noticed A and [several tiny details humans tend not to notice]". 

But more than that, I never really bought Jon or Vibeke as real characters. There are plenty of bad mothers out there, but how many of them would go a full 24 hours without even peeking into their 8 year old son's room? Similarly, there are a lot of precocious 8 year olds (I have one) but not many who would say things like "It just happens, that's all. In class, or something after school. I was in a role-playing club, but they only played historical games with Vikings and stuff. I'm more into science fiction" or repeatedly thinking about "titties". Ultimately, the interesting structure and clever parallels couldn't salvage a story about connection that I couldn't connect to.

Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams

Azrael was in the vanished forest, amidst the smoldering stumps. The silence here really was as fearsome as the grave's. The sky seemed lifeless as well, a monstrously staring eye. Rain was falling hesitantly and sliding off the soil as if it were striking wax. More and more Azrael was arriving too late for the world. The logging had taken place months ago and the great trees had long since gone through--what was it called--the processing sequence. The forest had been a living being and now it was not. Azrael felt a little sick. He was still more or less on time with humans but was finding it harder and harder to keep up with everyone else. Death was the dark crude brother, he was the shining inspiriting one. His duties had always been performed gracefully and he was appreciated for his punctuality and beautiful manners. But how could the immensity of the earth and all her other children be assisted to insure their souls' generation? His methods were being disrupted by the sheer precipitous magnitude of it all.

In appearance and form, Joy Williams' new collection Concerning the Future of Souls is a sequel to 99 Stories of God. There are, after, 99 more short pieces in this collection, ranging from a couple of pages to as little as a single word. Again each is followed, rather than preceded by their title, which in 99 Stories has the effect of making each piece feel like a joke with a punchline, or a riddle with a solution. This time, Williams has added asterisked postscripts to signify, I guess, people or texts that inspired some of the pieces, or from which they are cribbed: Eliot, Calvin, the Quran, the Book of Luke, and, uh, Christopher Hitchens, for example. God has been swapped out, not for his opposite the Devil--though the Devil is a frequent appearance--but for Azrael, the angel whose task is to ferry souls upon death to their next location.

But, on the whole, Concerning the Future of Souls is very different from 99 Stories. It is far less joke-like, and more cryptic. The vignettes of 99 Stories were, while not simplistic, often self-contained and with a recognizable ironic logic. Logic and irony might be here, somewhere; you can sense them lurking, but they're much less accessible, hidden away somewhere. They begin to seem as if they are missing some crucial element that comes just before or just after, some piece that will provide the key. Compared to 99 Stories, they seem denatured somehow, deteriorated, or showing the initial signs of an all-consuming entropy. There are fewer epigraphs, more koans, and images which refuse to offer up their meaning: a blank square, a cone supposedly designed by Pascal, a piece of Chopin sheet music. And the titles, which in 99 Stories seemed like punchlines or solutions, only deepen the mystery further. I found reading 99 Stories very satisfying; but this book felt disorienting, even troubling. It reminded me perhaps even more of Harrow, Williams' most recent work before this one, which seemed to jettison kinds of narrative logic and cohesion that might serve to comfort the reader.

So what's the deal with Azrael? Azrael is not death; in one scene he chides the Devil for making exactly this error (though the Devil, who we are told "likes games and mazes," is doubtless making the error on purpose). In his capacity as the ferryman for souls, he sometimes meets Death, but describes their interactions as awkward in the extreme. He seems like he ought to be part of God's entourage, but God, like in 99 Stories, is aloof and not prone to dialogue, unlike the Devil, with whom Azrael spends much of the book in uneasy conversation. To the Devil, Azrael makes it clear that something has changed in the condition of the souls he is meant to gather. Souls, we learn, are "non-particular"; that they return to a kind of unity or repository from which they are regenerated into new forms of life. But more and more, the souls are not returning, they are simply evaporating; Azrael comes too late to retrieve them, or they suffer a type of mass death that destroys them totally and disturbs the ancient equilibrium.

Here is the core idea: the death of the environment is the death of the soul. Here is the disappearing forest, here the saltless ocean, here the manatees killed by leached phosphates. This destruction, Williams says, is not merely physical but metaphysical. That is, we kill not just individual manatees and trees but something much older and more fundamental that cannot be returned to us. To call this essence a soul might be to invite cliche, but in the image of Azrael Williams reinvigorates the word with its ancient properties. Williams' project for the last decade or two has been to find a new language that will sufficiently express the brave new world we find ourselves in, but part of that is returning to the religious language of mystery and reverence that have been shorn from everyday talk. 

In the end, I didn't think Concerning the Future of Souls worked as well as 99 Stories of God. But I also think Williams, at this stage in her life, is interested in things like "working," or satisfaction, or readerly pleasure. To the extent that it is frightening, disorienting, and strange, Concerning the Future of Souls may be the right book for our moment, and for moments yet to come.

Straight from the Horses Mouth by Mereyem Alaoui, trans. Emma Ramadan

Straight from the Horse's Mouth opens on Jmiaa, a Moroccan woman who's been working as a prostitute for several years when the novel begins. She narrates the novel in a humorous, hard-bitten voice occasionally undercut with melancholy, and tells the story of her life to this point, along with sketches of the lives of the other women she works with.

This is the second book I've read this year about women living under some form of fundamentalist-adjacent Islamic patriarchy (the other was the soul-crushing Tali Girls) and initially, I expected Straight to run along similar lines. After all, the first half of the book is mostly about how Jmiaa and other women begin with high hopes that are gradually crushed by the men and institutions in their lives. Jmiaa describes the men she sleeps with in graphically humorous detail, alongside her small acts of rebellion (after her husband pimps her out to a friend without telling her he's about to do so[!], she decides to "stop using soap down there" so he'll only ever stick his penis into a "disgusting pussy").

Her husband leaves her for some get-rich-quick scheme in Spain, so she begins doing sex work for herself, and, when she's caught by her mother in law around the midpoint of the book, it seems like her story is going the way of a younger prostitute whose story we hear earlier, who was forced into prostitution when one of her coworkers catfished her for nudes then emailed them to everyone, leading to her exile from polite society. But instead, while working one day, she is approached by a young woman, referred to for most of the book as Horse Mouth because of her large, white teeth, who's writing and directing a film about a prostitute and a layabout who rob a bank, and wants to interview Jmiaa to flesh out her script. 

Spoilers below, including the end of the book.

These meetings lead to Jmiaa being offered the lead role in the film, which is eventually picked up, shown at festivals in the States, and widely acclaimed, and the story ends with Jmiaa in Mexico, working as an actress on a telenovella ("the first Moroccan woman ever to star in a Mexican television program"). So ultimately, Straight becomes a rags-to-riches story, not at all what I expected around the midpoint. I kept waiting for the inevitable final tragedy but it never arrives--the novel ends with Jmiaa a success, having escaped the strictures of the society that drove her to her state early in the story.

The title of the book does double duty. First, as an aphorism, since we see the grimy realities of sex work under the patriarchal systems of Morocco firsthand through Jmiaa's narration. And secondly, as a bit of a joke, since Horse Mouth literally takes Jmiaa "out" of her circumstances by turning those very circumstances into the material that enables her liberation.

Religion plays an interesting role in the story. While in Tali Girls, the main characters seem to grow more and more disillusioned with fundamentalist Islam as the novel progresses, here there's an almost Calvinistic fatalism at play. The sex workers, even the cynical Jmiaa, talk a lot about God's will and invoke their own versions of "the best of all possible worlds" throughout, and in the cases of Jmiaa and Samira, a friend who goes with her to the States then Mexico, they beliefs seem to be vindicated.

There is something uncomfortable about a novel like this, that shares partial stories of perhaps a dozen women in terrible circumstances, then gives us a happy ending of sorts with only two of them, but upon writing this review it occurred to me that perhaps this is the point. After all, Jmiaa feels a bit of empathy for the other women she comes into contact with, but mostly she seems to feel contempt, frequently commenting to the reader that they're foolish, whining, stupid, etc. When she's plucked out of her circumstances through what we could almost call a deus ex machina--Horse Mouth is practically messianic--she sees it as a just reward for her own intelligence and cunning: her final words in the story are "I told you I was sharp".

Gretel and the Great War by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

In November 1919 a mute young woman was found wandering the streets of Vienna. She was handed over to the care of a neurologist, who wrote up her case in an issue of Nervenkrankheiten. No lesion, he concluded, could explain her condition, nothing organic, only a childhood deprived of language. Since she could not say who she was or what had happened to her, he welcomed correspondence from anyone with information about her past. He received a single response, from a patient at a Carinthian sanatorium who claimed to be her father. The girl's name, the man wrote, is Margerete--Gretel--and her childhood, whatever its privations, hardly lacked for language! Indeed, until his present confinement put an end to it, he used to tell her a bedtime story each and every night. He wrote now only to resume that cherished ritual. The doctor was asked to read her the enclosed story, titled A: THE ARCHITECT. She would understand it. The next day brought another story, B: THE BALLET MASTER, and the next day another, C: THE CHOIRMASTER, until there were twenty-six of them. Then they stopped, and the man wasn't heard from again.

I got to see Adam Ehrlich Sachs read a section from his new novel, Gretel and the Great War, a few weeks ago. The section he chose to read is among the best of the 26 short pieces, arranged alphabetically: O, the obstetrician. In this section, an obstetrician is brought to the Duchess to take care of her baby, only to find that the baby in question is a porcelain doll. Her other doctors lie to her, but the obstetrician is too upright; he informs her that her child is a doll. Because he proves himself trustworthy, she demands he takes care of her real child--but this, too, turns out to be a doll. The demand is no reward, it's a burden, and his practice suffers from the rumors that surround the doll; as a consequence he embraces his Slavic roots and revolution against the Austrian state.

In this one story, you can see all of principles that govern Gretel and the Great War. The 26 stories, ostensibly written by a father to his mute daughter, have the air of a children's primer, and many of the stories do deal with children and their relationship with adults--the Duchess and her doll, the choirmaster and his choir boys, the toymaker who is beaten to death by the boys on whom he wishes to bestow his toys. They are fable-like in both their innocence and malice. They are anything but simple, and often contain several stories nested inside one another, so that a story that seems to be about, say, a communist revolutionary, actually turns out to be about the armless, legless freakshow performer who secretly turns out to be her father. And yet, as they unspool, they lurch toward the political. "The Duke" and "The Duchess" may sound like fairy tale characters, but there are real Dukes and Duchesses in the world, who are behind real violence and war.

As the stories go on, you're supposed to understand the way in which they are all connected, and how the mute woman Gretel fits into the larger puzzle (as a child, she witnessed the tragic accident of her dancer mother on stage, an accident in which the other characters, the choirmaster, the kindergarten teacher, the lighting technician, are all tightly implicated). I think I really could have used a diagram here. (I got easily confused by what I think are two tragic performances at the City Theater, one which burns it down and one which leads to Gretel's mother's accident, but I can't really tell you how those two moments are connected.) But perhaps it's less important than to get the organization right in your head than to see the themes the connect them: the betrayal of children by adults, the nostalgic desire for simplicity, the way all the various characters seem to end up at the sanatorium of one Dr. Krakauer (are we meant to understand that all these people are, in a sense, just made-up avatars of the father himself?).

The total picture is one of a city, interwar Vienna, descending into hatred and madness. Sachs underlines this in the final sections, "Y for Yid" and "Z for Zionist." No longer are the alphabetical characters identified by their profession, but by terms of race and religion. The "Yid," having taken his daughter--Gretel--to the theater, begins to look around and see that the faces of his neighbors, too, have been replaced by nothing but "German-Austrians," and they in turns look at him and his daughter and see nothing but "noisy Yids." This is the logical endpoint of the madness: the fever of racial hatred that will soon ignite into a war even greater than the one that just ended. The brief "Zionist" section ends on a note of tragic ambivalence, a hope for escape from the madness that, we fear, may only be one of its symptoms.

How to Start Writing (and When to Stop) by Wislawa Szymborska

"My parting with summer springs forth like a white breast from a tunic bound with gems..." Many questions leap to mind: why a breast, why white, why springing, why from a tunic. The remaining poem leaves the questions unanswered. Instead Adam turns up, tempted by a snake--a bold innovation, but unlikely to catch on. Humanity has long since happily blamed it all on Eve."

How to Start Writing (and When to Stop) is a strange little book. Barely 100 pages long, it's a collection of responses to submissions made to the Polish magazine Literary Life, in the column Literary Mailbox. The responses are presented sans context, as the material or questions they're responding to aren't provided or summarized.

One interesting side effect is that this is the rare book where reading the introduction and afterward, a short interview with Szymborska, are more or less required, as they provide the historical and literary context in which the replies were written. Started in 1968 by Szymborska and her friend, author Wlodzimierz Maciag, Literary Mailbox doled out advice to writers who'd sent in various works--poems, stories, even novels--mostly in the form of cutting abut humorous bon mots or, occasionally, a paragraph or two of feedback:

The fear of straight speaking, the constant, painstaking efforts to metaphorize everything, the ceaseless need to prove you're a poet in every line: these anxieties beset every budding bard. They're curable, if caught in time. Your poems thus far resemble strained translations from direct speech into needless complication--we're tempted to ask for the originals on which this fruitless labor was based. For the moment, though, please believe us, a single metaphor organically linked to the poem's original concept is worth more than 1,500 embellishments added ex post. Please send us something new in a few months. 

Reading through them in bulk can be a bit of a dispiriting exercise, as most of the material collected here is fairly negative; but on the other hand, it's often very funny, and the advice given is good, if perhaps not particularly hard to come by: temper your highbrow language, make your work concrete, keep track of your metaphors and don't write poems about spring ("spring no longer exists in poetry"). Szymborska has the least patience, however, for the lazy or arrogant: her coldest replies are toward those who don't to rewrite, who write only about dour things, who demand publication. Perhaps the cruelest cut here is one of the shortest: "Does the enclosed work betray talent? It does."

But the cumulative effect, especially in conjunction with the closing interview, is that of someone who takes poetry, and writing in general, seriously while still recognizing that there is something a touch silly about treating every letter scrawled onto paper as holy writ. But I hope she never finds this review.

Shoal of Time by Gavin Daws

History came to Hawaii by way of the sea, and traces of the past are still visible in the water as well as on the land. At Lahaina, close to the harbor, skin divers prospecting on the sandy sea bed occasionally turn up anchor chains and oil lamps and square-face gin bottles from whaling ships, coffee cups from Navy submarines and Matson cruise liners, and splintered calabashes and stone adze heads tossed overboard from Hawaiian canoes. The sand shifts with the currents; one day the past is exposed, the next it is all but obscured, and it takes a sharp eye to bring it to light again. Farther out to sea the past repeats itself endlessly. The tides run, the sun sets, the night passes, and in the morning, just at dawn, the islands come into view again as they did for Cook so long ago, a fresher green breast of the new world than ever the old Atlantic sailors saw, and still a place of gentle, beckoning beauty.

I'm going to Hawaii next week. It'll by my fiftieth state state. And with good reason: it's possibly the single most remote major population center on earth, much farther away from mainland U.S. than even Alaska. I have many expectations, but one is that it will be strange how not strange it will feel to be dropped off in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, nearly as close to Japan as California, and to be in the same old McDonald's-and-Chipotle America. How did we come to possess such a place? And how did it become a state like all the others, when it seems so different?

A little less than 200 years passed from the time that Captain Cook first spotted the "Sandwich Islands" to the moment that Hawaii became the fiftieth star on the U.S. flag. Some might object that Gavan Daws takes these two moments as the endpoints for Shoal of Time, his history of the Hawaiian Islands. After all, Hawaii's history as a Polynesian settlement extends back much, much farther than the 18th century. (It seems perhaps more excusable to end with the 1959 statehood when writing in 1968, as Daws did.) But it's hard to argue, when Daws reveals how much of a watershed moment the arrival of Cook was not just for the Europeans, who found a new cache of resources to plunder in the Pacific, but for the Islands themselves. Without Cook, Daws makes clear, there would be no Kamehameha, the Hawaiian juggernaut who united the islands for the first time under a single ruler. Though there's no selling Kamehameha short--you only need to compare him, it seems, to the lineage of feckless drunks that came after him--it was European guns and iron that allowed him to make the conquest, along with the assistance of a pair of whites, one kidnapped and one shipwrecked. The arrival of Europeans, it seems, had a funny way of making a people out of fractious and divided tribes; Kamehameha's conquest is almost a literalization of this principle.

Kamehameha's story would make one hell of an HBO streaming series. I know what a lame thing that is to say, and I'm the first to say we're all a little too TV-pilled these days. But it really does have all the Game of Thrones elements: a powerful leader, unconventional allies, scheming vassals, and the pressures of choosing between a bunch of morons to carry on your legacy--plus the beautiful natural setting. Hawaiian history, and thus Daws' book, is never quite as interesting after the Kamehameha period, with its wars and diplomacies and poisonings. But Shoal of Time offers a reminder, too, that this Golden Age of Hawaii was a relatively brief period; after Kamehameha's death in 1819, no subsequent king or queen has the same kind of control over the Islands, and all seem caught perilously between protecting Native Hawaiian interests and the European planters who become quickly and uneasily absorbed into the kingdom's politics.

But in my imagined HBO series, I hope there is a season set aside for the aftermath of Kamehameha's death, which is one of the most interesting stories in all of Hawaiian history. At the time of Cook's arrival, Hawaiian religion was circumscribed by the concept of "kapu," that is, taboo, the interdiction of certain places and things as off limits to some or all members of society. It was kapu, for example, for women to eat with women, but a chief could also declare and lift kapu as he saw fit. Kamehameha consolidated his power, for example, by declaring the harbors where European ships had landed as kapu until his particular demands for trade had been met. Yet, when Kamehameha dies, his young son and successor Liholiho (or Kamehameha II) is convinced by the dead king's widow to overthrow the kapu system entirely. (Although powerful, she seems to have felt keenly the way that the kapu system was used to keep women in their place.) The result is total cultural destabilization, which paves the way for the Christian missionaries who arrive just months later, just in time to offer an alternative to the Hawaiian religion that lies in shambles.

One idea I see on Twitter a lot is that Hawaii isn't "really" part of the United States; or it shouldn't be. That's certainly true; the state of Hawaii is the direct successor of a military coup by American whites against the kingdom's last monarch, Liliuokalani. (As far as that goes, none of it should be the United States.) But one thing I didn't really understand until reading Daws' book is that the kingdom was already filled with, and staffed by, whites. Kamehameha relied on Isaac Davis and John Young; Kamehameha III relied on a rotating staff of whites from missionary families to perform the business of the kingdom. Though it was clearly far from racial harmony, there's something to marvel at in this era of the kingdom, in which whites served in the king's cabinet as Hawaiian nationalists. Later on, things devolved, as one supposes they must, with the white elements in the kingdom trying hard to minimize the power of the Hawaiian king. The pretext for Liliuokalani's overthrow, in fact, was her attempt to abrogate a constitution her brother and predecessor had been forced to sign at the point of a gun. This solved one of the two questions that seems to have dominated the white elements of the kingdom in the 19th century. The other question was, which imperial nation should we be allied to, and under what context? This question was settled with the 1898 annexation, fought for by the same actors who overthrew Liliuokalani and created a republic, but one look at the Hawaiian flag with its hopeful Union Jack shows that an American Hawaii was not a historical inevitability.

Daws describes the process of obtaining statehood as one that was both fraught and sort of inevitable. (One thing that made it inevitable, which I never really considered, was the admission of Alaska, which obliterated most of the already weak complaints by stateside politicians.) The Hawaii that becomes a state in 1959 is a far cry from the Hawaii of 1778, or even the Republic of 1898. Both Hawaiians and whites are far outnumbered by Asians (whom, in a regrettable relic of the 60's, Daws calls "Orientals"). Hawaii's position in the Pacific has made it a place where many cultures converge, and not always easily or well, as Daws shows in one particularly lurid story of racism and murder in the 1930s. But Daws finds a lot of hope in the symbolic nature of its statehood; perhaps its diversity--it's the first state to send a Japanese and Chinese legislator to Congress--tokens a changing America. I don't know how well we've lived up to that hope, but it's a nice thought, and it makes me wonder what Daws would have made of the political ascension of Barack Obama, whose Hawaii background is often forgotten in consideration of his breaking down of racial barriers.  

The Group by Mary McCarthy

The worst fate, they utterly agreed, would be to become like Mother and Dad, stuffy and frightened. Not one of them, if she could help it, was going to marry a broker or a banker or a coldfish corporation lawyer, like so many of Mother's generation. They would rather be wildly poor and live on salmon wiggle than be forced to marry one of those dull purplish young men of their own set, with a seat on the Exchange and bloodshot eyes, interested only in squash and cockfighting and drinking at the Racquet club with his cronies, Yale or Princeton '29. It would be better, yes, they were not afraid to say it, though Mother gently laughed, to marry a Jew if you loved him--some of them were awfully interesting and cultivated, though terribly ambitious and inclined to stick together, as you saw very well at Vassar: if you knew them you had to know their friends. There was one thing, though, truthfully, that made them feel a little anxious for Kay. It was a pity in a way that a person as gifted as Harald and with a good education had had to pick the stage, rather than medicine or architecture or museum work, where the going was not so rough.

Mary McCarthy's The Group begins with a wedding: Kay is marrying Harald, a somewhat untrustworthy and dilettantish playwright. But the real inciting incident, the moment that really sets the novel's action in motion, is the graduation from Vassar of the characters who make up the titular "Group": rich, portly Pokey; beautiful, cold Lakey; literary Libby; lovesick Dottie; poor Polly--and Helena, and Priss, and Norine. Graduation is a moment of dizzying possibility, the moment when you are ushered into "real life," and like presumably every generation before them, the women of the Group are dead-set on not doing things the way their parents did them. They will marry for love, not money, but they will also pass the various tests of success that life lays out for them; they will stretch, but not break, convention. Kay's marriage to Harald only happens to be the first of these many choices, and for the Group, who distrusts Harald (and with good reason), it is a mixed bag. On one hand, it's a sign that that real life really has begun to hurtle at them excitingly, like a train. On the other hand, the possibility that the marriage is ill-conceived is more than a tragedy; it's an omen.

The Group, which famously inspired Candace Bushnell to write Sex and the City, is perhaps remembered best today because of its frank attitude toward sex. When Dottie goes home from Kay's wedding with Dick Brown, a beguiling but contemptuous artist, he initiates her into the painful world of sex for the first time, and afterward gives her instructions on how to obtain a diaphragm. McCarthy describes in detail the grueling and somewhat humiliating process of Dottie's fitting, followed by the further humiliation of waiting for Dick with a park with the diaphragm on a bag in her lap. Realizing at last that he's not coming for her, she stashes it under a bench, perhaps to be discovered by some unsuspecting park steward.

But The Group is frank about a lot of things, not all of which are explicitly sexual. In fact, one of the more interesting throughlines of the novel is its focus on the girls' medical experiences, of which Dottie's diaphragm fitting is only one. I was struck by Priss' section, in which she, having just had a baby--see how the novel takes us step by step through the various milestones of post-college life--finds herself in a moral struggle between her doctors and her doctor husband as to whether or not she should breastfeed. In The Group, much of a woman's life is determined at the doctor, which can become a staging ground for masculine battles for control. Even in absentia, Dottie's diaphragm visit is a kind of play by Dick for control over her body in the same way that Priss becomes the prize in a war between male doctors. The Group, set at a moment when psychotherapy and analysis are on the rise, and the mind, too, has recently become the property of the medical field, extends this to the world of psychology--see how Polly thinks of her boyfriend Gus' analyst as her unseen enemy. The ultimate example of this comes at the end, when Harald, a true shit, has Kay institutionalized against her will. The hospital, she is told, will only release her to her husband--who has disappeared.

I thought that The Group had a real richness to it--a richness of detail, of character, of irony. I could barely keep the characters apart, but I think that's all right. Though they lead radically different lives--some are rich, some are poor, some married and some not--there is a sense in which the boundaries between the blur. It might be too much to say that they are, like, a collective expression of womanhood, but I do think it's true that in the aggregate they elevate the novel above its materialist and cultural particulars to something more universal. The Group is keenly aware of the changing nature of their world. Sometimes this is funny--I don't think I've laughed at any single line as hard as I did when one of them asks another, "Have you tasted the new Corn Niblets?"--but it also takes in sweeping cultural movements like psychoanalysis and socialism. (One of the divides that develops between the members of the Group is which of them identify as Stalinists and which of them identify as Trotskyites.) And yet, the more things change, it seems, the more they stay the same: the power of sex, the drama of divorce, the specter of rape, the repressive nature of convention, the cage of motherhood. Kay's marriage with Harald provides a throughline for all these stories, and when it explodes, it does so disastrously, giving the book its disquieting ending.