Labrador by Kathryn Davis

The snow fell faster and faster outside, encasing us all. In Labrador, Willie, the snow sometimes rises in drifts so high that a person can walk up to the bell in the church steeple and set it ringing with their hand. In Labrador there is always too much of something or none of it at all. Jacques Cartier called it "the land God gave to Cain." For my part, I think of it as your kingdom--the kingdom of the queenly Willie, whose neck I would have broken gladly, had it not been so fragile.

When I picked up Kathryn Davis' novel Labrador I expected--quite reasonably, I think, based on the synopsis on the back of the book--a realist sort of novel about a young girl who travels to Labrador with her grandfather to escape a complicated relationship with her older sister. I've always had a predilection for novels about the Canadian far north, where people live improbably, and while this is an improbable novel, that synopsis of it isn't really worth much. I didn't expect the lyrical and metaphorical intensity of the narrator, a teenager named Kathleen, and I didn't expect so much of the story to be about a literal angel named Rogni who speaks with her:

So I entered the language of the angels, the dangerous territory through which quills shot--where the heart of a human child is most vulnerable. A wing folded around me; I was bound in by pinions, the hooks and barbs of enormous feathers; the other wing rose and fell, beating a dark chord, and we flew, higher, through the thick yellow rapture of souls stewing in heaven's pot. An then there was the silver and judgmental silence.

"Look, Kathleen," said Rogni, pointing to where I could see myself standing on a silver and empty plateau under a silver sky. "An event is taking shape here," he said, "if only you know how to recognize it."

Is Rogni real? Probably not. He's probably a manifestation of Kathleen's intense devotion to Willie, a white-hot and inexplicable love for her more graceful and admired sister that is undermined by Willie's capriciousness and cruelty, and the way that Willie, as older siblings inevitably do, wanders away from their shared imaginings as small children. Rogni attaches himself to Kathleen but he, too, loves Willie, and seems to want to use Kathleen to get closer to her. But Labrador is written in such a way that the question really doesn't matter, like really effective narratives, it has its own logic upon which the world outside its pages is unable to intrude.

"Fantasies," Willie tells Kathleen, "are supposed to give you what you want. They're not supposed to make you jealous." But Willie, like real world logic, has it all backwards; though Rogni may be a story Kathleen is telling herself, he also suggests that he is the one writing the story of Willie and Kathleen: the love that creates the world, rather than being the part of creation. The reader might well ask, "Is Kathleen real?"

Into this family, which is completed by a pair of unhappy and quarrelsome parents, Kathleen's grandfather appears. He has been living in Labrador, in the far north city of Nain, since abandoning his wife several years back, and neither Kathleen nor Willie has ever met him. The grandfather is the first person ever to take a shine to Kathleen, rather than Willie, and Kathleen begins to see returning with him to Labrador as an escape from her crippling love.

Labrador begins as an idea and becomes a place, and the sudden shift is so powerful that the narrative style changes; while most of the book is in the first person, written to Willie from Kathleen's perspective, the section "Labrador" is in the third person, holding Kathleen perhaps at arm's length. Kathleen's fantasies about what Labrador might mean for her seem close to fulfillment; she meets and falls for an Inuit boy named Jobie, for instance. But a boat trip and a sudden storm put their lives in danger, and the grandfather--who, honestly, she seems to have met just a moment ago in narrative time--is suddenly face to face with a very real polar bear.  Davis wants us to know just how real:

It was a real bear filled with the breath of this world, putrid and immense, its tongue a grayish pink, its teeth crusty with green sediment. Believe me when I tell you it was not a story bear; not a legend bear; not a bear preparing to shuck off its skin and reveal itself to the youngest sister as a suitor--the prince, at last, static as paradise and requiring only admiration.

In this way Davis, as she does throughout the novel, blurs the line between the mythical and the real. Perhaps Kathleen is a story told by an angel; perhaps Labrador is an idea only, but an idea is as deadly as anything else and has its own consequences. The failure of Kathleen's brief Labrador trip forces her back home, to deal with Willie once and for all, to find a way to control the story of the two sisters herself.

Every year I discover a couple of "surprise" novels: books that seem to come out of nowhere and floor me with with their beauty or their brilliance. I picked this book up at a used bookstore in Rockport, Maine, for no other reason than I like reading about Canada, and I had a vague sense that the author's name was familiar. (It's possible I was thinking of Lydia Davis.) Labrador is so shimmeringly weird, so tremendously written, to have found my way to it feels like an amazing stroke of luck. A gift, maybe, from a guardian angel.

Angels by Denis Johnson

She looked up out of her voice and saw the angel.

He will have ears like a cartoon of organic growth.  He is yellow with light but covered with mobile shadows, animated tattoos.  His face kept changing.  His voice will come from far off, like a train's.  His body is steady and beautiful and hairless, the wings white, incinerating, and pure, but the head changes rapidly--the head of an eagle, a goat, an insect, a mouse, a sheep with spiraling horns that turn and lengthen almost imperceptibly--and the entire message had no words.  The entire message will be only the beat and direction of time.  Yes is Now.

The angel who says, "It's time."

"Is it time?" she asked.  "Does it hurt?"  He will have the most beautiful face she has ever seen.

"Oh, babe."  The angel starts to cry.  "You can't imagine," he says.

Angels begins on a cross-country Greyhound bus.  There, Jamie Mays is traveling with her two young children, away from her husband.  She is desperate, confused, and alone; she has thoughts like this one: "She wished she could smother the baby.  Nobody would know.  They were four days out of Oakland."  On the bus she meets Bill Houston, who has beer enough to share, and over the course of several days they are drawn together.  It's not exactly sweet--it's their willingness to ply their pain with chemicals that brings them together, at least in part--but the connection is genuine.  They part ways, but she goes seeking him in Chicago, only to be raped by a would-be Good Samaritan.  It's his reading about the paper that puts them back together, and cements their relationship to one another.  The rape itself is ghoulish and macabre, facilitated with drugs and written accordingly, but Johnson writes about its role in their relationship with cold-blooded clarity:

They started calling it The Rape, and it came to stand for everything: for coming together while falling apart; for loving each other and hating everybody else; for moving at a breakneck speed while getting nowhere; for freezing in the streets and melting in the rooms of love.  The Rape was major and useless, like a knife stuck in the middle of things.  They could hate it and arrange their picture of themselves around it.

Bill pulls Jamie back across the country, to Phoenix, where he grew up.  They connect with his brothers, James and Burris, each of them tied up with petty criminality and chemical abuse to different degrees, like Bill.  These characters are familiar from Tree of Smoke, where Bill and James are terrorized by their army service and Burris is just a kid developing the drug habit that will be his albatross in Angels.  Tree of Smoke is the later book, a prequel to this one in a way, it reads like a natural sequel.  Those who read the two novels in the other order probably read Tree of Smoke with additional foreboding, knowing where Bill Houston's tragic life is headed.  Back in Phoenix, the three brothers get involved in a scheme to rob a bank at gunpoint.

Things go wrong.  I'm going to mention exactly how they go wrong, so consider yourself appropriately warned.  A bank guard, shooting at James, is himself shot to death by Bill.  All three brothers are arrested, and Bill is tried and sentenced to execution.  At the same time, Jamie, perhaps pushed over the edge by Bill's predicament, is admitted to a mental hospital.  The pair, who were seemingly driven together by fate, are ripped apart for the book's final third by two very different forms of incarceration.  Johnson's account of Bill's trial and his time on Death Row is one of the most desperate and heartbreaking pieces of writing I can think of, rendered in a kind of hallucinatory realism that reliably describes how strange and unbelievable it must be:

He watched his trial from behind a wall of magic, considering with amazement how pulling the trigger had been hardly different--only a jot of strength, a quarter second's exertion--from not pulling the trigger.  And yet it had unharnessed all of this, these men in their beautiful suits, their gold watches smoldering on their tanned wrists, speaking with great seriousness sometimes, joking with one another sometimes, gently cradling their sheafs of paper covered with all the reasons for what was going on here.  And it had made a great space of nothing where Roger Crowell the bank guard had been expecting to have a life--a silence that took up most of Bill Houston's hearing.  It was a word that couldn't be spoken, because nobody knew what it might have said.

Johnson, better than maybe any writer, seems to understand people like Bill Houston: people who can't get ahead, whose poverty is endemic, who devote themselves to alcohol and opioids, who turn to petty crime, and even not-so-petty crime.  He doesn't gild them; they're not good people just trying to make it in this crazy world.  Most of them are fairly bad people.  But lots of people are bad people; they're just not so easy to get rid of--you can't ignore them or ship them off to the gas chamber.  They are invisible in this novel, the people whom Bill calls "the outraged owners of the establishment... [t]he bankers, the people with tie-pins and jeweled letter openers and profoundly lustrous desks of mahogany, the workers of all this machinery of law and circumstance."  He calls them "[t]he people he couldn't fight--the people who were never here."  Bill Houston, toward the end of the novel, gets to make a few gestures of selflessness, but they're no more than prayers.  When are "the people who were never here" to make their own contritions?

Angels is terrific.  It's a shame to think I probably won't be able to put it on my year-end list, because I try not to include more than one author, but it's close to the masterpiece that is Tree of Smoke. It begins shamblingly, with buses crossing the country and back again with no clear destination, and ends with the knife-edged inevitability of what seems like doom.  It left me with a feeling of profound, gut-rocking sadness.

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

So I've been on vacation the last two weeks, or "vacay" as the kids say. I've got four more books under my belt and four more reviews to write. This one's my second--actually, the only other--birthday present (thanks, Kelly).

Good Omens is older than I thought it was at first. I read Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, which was published in 2005, and really enjoyed it, but this was a lot different. He wrote the introduction to The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and made it very clear that he's got a thing for Douglas Adams. Reading Good Omens, you can kind of tell. A lot of it feels like it's in the same style. The writing is clever, but the plot feels a little bit haphazard, like all the loose ends were tied together at the last minute, no matter how much of a stretch they needed.

I read somewhere that it was written as a loose parody on the movie The Omen, but, not having seen the movie, I felt like it was more of a spoof on the apocalypse in general. Events are set in motion to usher in the reign of the Antichrist and the great war between Heaven and Hell, but problems keep popping up. What really sets things in motion is that someone (a member of the Chattering Order of Satanic nuns) misplaces the baby Antichrist, who ends up growing into a normal boy with some serious persuasive abilities. The two characters who I thought would be most important actually ended up fading to the background for the most part by about the middle of the book, so it was hard to feel much interest towards them when they popped back up at the end. The demon Crowley and the angel Aziraphale, having been on Earth since it began, decide that they kind of like it here, and do what they can do thwart the oncoming end of said planet. A lot of other subplots show up for a few pages, then disappear, then take on more importance towards the end.

It was a fun read, but I had the same problems with it that I did with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. A lot of it seem kind of haphazard, characters and plots added for no apparent reason, just kind of made the book seem to busy. However, there are two covers you can choose from, so it's got that going for it: