The Indian Lawyer by James Welch

Now, as he remembered to look out at the small crowd, he saw the posters bobbing over the faces, red and blue with white lettering, YELLOW CALF FOR CONGRESS, and the large buttons on topcoats and wool jackets, and he became excited by what he was actually doing. All the planning, the strategy, the issues, which had seemed so academic to him, gave way to the reality that he was actually running for office, that he was qualified, not in the politician's way but in his own beliefs and values. He felt a great wave of anticipation through his body and he thought, I am on my way, I will make a difference because I am Sylvester Yellow Calf and I do count. He suddenly felt as though his life had inexorably led him to this moment and he wanted it to be momentous.

Sylvester Yellow Calf is a successful lawyer in Helena, Montana's capital. As a teenager, he was the star of the high school basketball team in Browning, on the Blackfeet reservation; this success marked him as a leader and made him what he is--which is to say, it got him off the reservation. Now he's on the precipice of considering a run for Congress, in which he hopes to become a strong advocate for the issues that affect Indians like those back home. But Yellow Calf also sits on the parole board, and a devious inmate named Jack Harwood has cooked up a plan to obtain his freedom by convincing his wife, Patti Ann, to seduce Yellow Calf and blackmail him.

It's interesting to compare Yellow Calf to the protagonists of James Welch's four other novels. (This is his fifth, and last--sad for me.) There are the historical figures of Fools Crow and Charging Elk, both caught in moments of great upheaval and change. Then there are the heroes of Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney, whose life on the reservation seems never-changing, only a dead end. Yellow Calf, by contrast, is the one who got out and made something of himself, but with the success comes the conflicted feelings of having left one's community behind. This is underlined for Yellow Calf when he sits on the parole board for another Indian his own age, whom he distantly remembers from the reservation. This man is not, perhaps, a frightening reminder of what might have been, but a reminder that not everyone had Yellow Calf's luck, or ability to shoot a basketball, and that success has meant becoming somewhat alien to the community whose hero he once was.

As a political thriller, The Indian Lawyer isn't much. It might have benefitted from a James Patterson-type, who could have turned the blackmail into something that fits a little better the desperation and deviousness we are meant to see in Harwood. Welch does try to ratchet up the intensity of the conflict; Harwood loses control of his scheme when a pair of reckless accomplices decide to take matters into their own hands. Harwood himself, though, provides an interesting contrast to Yellow Calf. Whereas we're told that Yellow Calf did all he good to "make good" on his difficult upbringing, Harwood is a shrewd, intelligent man--and a white one--who seems to have turned to crime out of pure pique. He's neither as stupid nor violent as his accomplices, but he's made an active choice to embrace criminality, perhaps for no better reason than he can. Together, the two of them seem to illustrate that the limitations of one's birth--geographic, economic, racial--are not absolute.

I don't know much about Welch as a person, but I wonder if this image of a fellow Blackfoot who transformed himself by leaving the reservation behind resonated with him. I wonder if Sylvester's success, and his grappling with it, emerged from Welch's own relative success and prestige as a writer. In any case, it's not Welch's best novel (it's probably the least interesting and effective of the five), but it's worth reading for the way it stands alone.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Over the door to the next room hung a painting rather strange in form, around fix feet wide and no more than ten inches high. It portrayed the Savior just taken down from the cross. The prince glanced fleetingly at it, as if recalling something, not dropping, however, waiting to fo on through the door. He felt very oppressed and wanted to be out of this house quickly. But Rogozhin suddenly stopped in front of the painting.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something, Lev Nikolaich; do you believe in God or not?”

“How strangely you ask and stare!” the prince observed involuntarily.

“But I like looking at that painting,” Rogozhin muttered after a silence, as if again forgetting his question.

“At that painting!” the prince suddenly cried out, under the impression of an unexpected thought. “At that painting! A man could even lose his faith from that painting!”

“Lose it he does,” Rogozhin suddenly agreed unexpectedly.

The Idiot opens on a train, where the protagonist, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a young man fresh from a years-long treatment of his epilepsy in Switzerland, is returning to Russia to seek family and to restart his life. He is, in Dostoevsky’s words, “a perfect man”, a man uniquely unsuited for life in modern Russia. His fellow passengers include the mercurial and chaotic Parfyon Rogozhin, who has just come into possession of a large fortune, Lukyan Lebedev, a gossipy know-it-all clerk. In conversation with the pair, Myshkin is directed to the household he has come to visit, that of his distant relatives the Epanchins. He also learns of Nastasya Fillipovna, who was orphaned as a child and is now a kept (and “fallen”) woman, with whom Rogozhin is obsessed.

Upon arrival at the house, a long conversation ensues, typical of Dostoevsky, during which most of the additional principles of the novel--disgraced General Ivolgin, his passionate son Gavrily,the Epanchin daughters, including the beautiful Aglaya--appear. By the time the gathering ends, all the crucial conflicts of the novel have been established, and Rogozhin has offered to, well, buy Nastasya Fillipovna from her benefactor, and Myshkin has come, surprisingly and suddenly, into a large inheritance which he tries to use to block Rogozhin from further disgracing Nastasya, which the Prince, in his guileless way, has already fallen deeply in love with. But, in one of the most electrifying scenes in the whole book, Nastasya moves to accept, then suddenly rejects, the Prince’s selfless offer and instead leaves with Rogozhin.

There are MAJOR SPOILERS in the following paragraph.

Like most of the big Russian novels, the ensuing book defines simple description. There’s ample intrigue interspersed with long conversations that are sometimes fascinating and moving, as when the Prince tells about a mentally ill outcast he befriended in Sweden, or his story of trying to understand the feelings of a man who is only moments from being executed, and dull or confusing, as in the two or three conversations where everyone seems to be in hysterics for no clear reason. Which is not really a downside--part of the buy-in with Dostoevsky is the sprawling nature of the stories and, just like I wouldn’t remove Teso Dos Bichos or Space from The X-Files, I wouldn’t remove a single long digression about Russian politics. Suffice to say, the book hurtles (if something can hurtle slowly) towards a number of confrontations. Unexpectedly (or not?), Dostoevsky’s book about a Christlike Prince has what is easily the darkest ending of his major works, ending with (GIANT SPOILERS) Nastasya’s murder by Rogozhin and Myshkin’s subsequent return to Sweden, his mind and spirit seemingly broken beyond repair.

Holbein’s painting The Dead Christ, which is what’s being discussed in the excerpt above, is the connection point between the various characters that populate the novel. The painting, which depicts Christ’s body in the grave, is grotesque, almost gleefully. It asks, what if Christ never rose but is, instead, rotting in the grave? What good is it to follow a dead man who led a good life but died a failure? And of course it is impossible not to ask these same questions of Dostoevsky’s hero, as Myshkin is always upright, always kind, always reaching to “save” the wicked Rogozhin, the unfairly exiled and used Nastasya, the beautiful but machiavellian Aglaya, the vindictive and jealous Ganya, the foolish and dishonest Ivolgin, even the aggressively antagonist young anarchist Ippolit, and in return, is embroiled in their petty conflicts and scandals, used as a pawn, and discarded, broken and seemingly without hope at the end of the story?

Like Dostoevsky’s most famous writings, the “Grand Inquisitor” chapters from The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot asks the hardest questions; unlike the later novel, The Idiot offers very little as a counterargument, save, perhaps, that everyone in this book is pretty miserable except Myshkin. The most famous line from The Idiot is “Beauty will save the world”; but the phrase isn’t uttered or affirmed by Myshkin, the novel’s moral center, but mockingly by Aglaya Epanchin, whose machinations propel the tragedy that closes the story. 

Maybe beauty will save the world. Or maybe what is beautiful will always be crushed by the ugly and powerful. Maybe Christ is still rotting in that tomb and selfless love is a mug’s game. I closed the book impressed the Dostoevsky, a devout Christian whose life was marked by violence and tragedy, was able to write something so unflinchingly bleak. And I think about all the “Christians” running things now who see following Christ as a guarantee of victory, and not an invitation to love our neighbors more than we love ourselves, even if that means we rot too.

The Indian Card by Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz

I begin to think about my own Native identity as a series of overlapping circles. A Venn diagram, id you will. In one of these circles exists political identity: membership in the Lumbee Tribe, citizenship through the process of enrollment. From a Native Nations standpoint, this identity seems paramount. Enrollment is the mechanism by which Tribes maintain political sovereignty and the vehicle by which they ensure their continued survival.

In another circle exists my racial identity: I am a Lumbee woman; a Native woman. Of course, the concept of a "Native race" is complicated. Many people would consider their Tribe to be their primary identity; they d o not feel an inherent sense of belong to a more global, pan-Indian "race." I'll be honest: it's still something I'm navigating for myself.

Remember when Elizabeth Warren released the results of her DNA test, showing that she had some percentage of Native American ancestry? It's got to be an all-time unforced error: it didn't convince any of the right-wing jerkoffs who like to call her "Pocahontas." But crucially, it offended many actual Native Americans, who responded by saying that a DNA test isn't enough to claim a Native American identity in the absence of any relationship with a Tribe or a tradition. Warren's cluelessness, in fact, touched upon a sore point in Indian Country today, one that you might only not know is a sore point if you haven't been paying attention: who gets to call themselves Native American, and how?

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz's new book, The Indian Card, is an in-depth exploration of this question. Schuettpelz frames the book with the story of her own "Indian card," a tribal document she received from the Lumbee Nation when she was a child. The card gave Schuettpelz a sense of legitimacy and connection, but this was troubled, in turn, by the fact that she lived in Iowa, far away from the geographical heart of the Lumbee in North Carolina. (And further troubled, we learn later, by the fact that the Lumbee Nation is not recognized by the federal government, which complicates the relationship between enrollment and sovereignty.) Schuettpelz, who worked in the Obama administration, pursues the question by means of statistical data analysis, but also through the stories of people, like her, whose "Native" identity is not straightforward, like those who have been denied enrollment because of the way different tribes define enrollment differently: because they don't have enough "blood quantum," or because of the barriers of proving their ancestry on the tribe's rolls.

Here's a couple big takeaways I had. While each tribe determines their own enrollment differently, there are only two main methods. One is blood quantum, the percentage of "Indian blood" you possess, often set at a minimum of one-quarter or one-eighth. The other is by tracing your ancestry back to someone who appeared on the official rolls of a particular historical census. This last is complicated by the fact that some tribes require patrilineal or matrilineal descent. This leads to complicated scenarios where someone, even with the same amount of "blood," is unable to claim the same enrollment as their half-sibling. These questions are not just about identity and belonging, Schuettpelz notes; they determine whether someone is able to receive cash payouts, like casino proceeds, or even use tribal health care resources. But they are also methods that can only be traced back to settler-colonial practices. She shows that many of the historical rolls used to determine ancestry were actually drawn up to facilitate forced immigration or allotment, tools used to depredate Natives of their land or resources. Similarly, blood quantum relies on European racial ideas imported to facilitate enslavement. Such is the bind placed on Native identity.

You might say that The Indian Card relies on three woven methods: statistical and historical fact, the interviews that Schuettpelz undertakes with various people about the challenges facing their own enrollment, and Schuettpelz's own story of her "Indian card." I felt a little underwhelmed by the book as a whole, perhaps because each of these three on its own seemed not quite whole or developed enough. It's no fault of the author's, really, but I think I might have liked a more scholarly approach, which traces more clearly and comprehensively the historical forces that created modern paradigms of identity. That said, as issues around Native identity go from being bruited within Indian Country to becoming public and political news--like Warren's DNA test, or the recent spate of "Pretendian" unveilings--it's good to have a book like this to fill a gap in general knowledge.

The Ancient Child by N. Scott Momaday

What he saw, not once but recurrently, was a dark, impending shape on a dark field of the sky. It seemed very slowly to revolve and approach. At a certain distance it was seen to be a beast, massive and indefinite. It was disintegrated, distorted, changing. The head was twisted in a severe, unnatural attitude, as if the neck were broken. It described a terrible mutation and suffering, a pain so great so to have become desperation and rage, and profound helplessness. There were faint blue facets upon the grotesque head and limbs, elongated like the quick strokes of a brush. But these only intensified the darkness of the thing and gave to it the illusion of light within, of a deep, steady, central life. The sky beyond was murky and splotched with light, not points of clear bright light, but random forms like beads of amber in which were ancient and delicate debris. And closer, the eyes of the beast glinted and were pierced with dull opalescence, and the great misshapen mouth gaped and flamed. Set had the terrifying conviction that when the beast drew near to him, within reach, it would crack open with pain and all its shining, ulcerous insides, its raveled strings and organs, its slime and blood and bile would fall and splash upon him, and he would dissolve in the hot contamination of the beast and become in some extreme and unholy amalgamation one with the beast.

Locke Setman--Set--is a successful artist living in the Bay Area. He has a beautiful girlfriend, a thriving  career, a loving adoptive father. One day he gets a cryptic message from Oklahoma: his grandmother, from the Kiowa side of his family that he knows little about, is dying. He rushes to Oklahoma out of curiosity and compulsion, but he's too late. His grandmother, who he never had a chance to meet, is dead. But there is another woman there, a beautiful young medicine woman named Grey, who gives him the bundle of bear medicine that is his birthright. Returning, stymied, to California, his life begins to fall apart. He suffers a series of nervous breakdowns; he becomes violent. His artwork is better than it's ever been, but unsellable. He comes to understand that he must return to Oklahoma, to Grey, that a life that he thought he was severed from by the fact of his adoption. It's only this return by which he might rescue himself.

Momaday's House Made of Dawn is a book that means a lot to me. The first time I read it--in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico--I was captivated by its slipperiness, its difficult language and shifting genres, though it is only through teaching it and letting the book unfold as an experience over many readings that I feel like I understand it. I was reluctant, a little, to read Momaday's only other novel, The Ancient Child, because what if it wasn't as good? There is something a little more recognizably written and human about The Ancient Child, perhaps because it's a novel of the 80s and not the 60s, but it shares with House Made of Dawn the qualities that make it both a challenge and a joy. 

At bottom, there's a story I recognize: a Native American, alienated from his heritage and culture by the forces of political modernity, becomes whole by traveling to the place of his ancestors. That's the story of House Made of Dawn, too, though in both novels Momaday gives us protagonists who have multiple heritages, different tribes and European heritages overlaid into the same identity, so it's not a simple matter of tracing back one's blood. The central myths of the novel are about bears. There's the Kiowa story about the boy who was transformed into a bear and chased his sisters into the sky; his scratching of a great tree created what's now known as Devil's Tower and the sisters become the Pleiades. But there's another story, too, from the Piegan tradition, in which a little boy appears in the village out of nowhere, and then leaves. His appearance, we're told, is so strange and hard to understand that the villagers suppress the memory: it must have been a bear that visited them. The madness and despair that stalk Set are like the spirit of the bear that transforms the boy against his will--simple enough--but the Piegan story undermines the story of the bear, and suggests perhaps it is only a way of smoothing over a deeper and more troubling truth.

Then there's Grey, who flouts most literary expectations for "medicine women" by being beautiful and young. Grey's status as medicine woman is depicted as a kind of holy innocence; we are told over and over again that she "never had to quest for visions"; they simply come upon her. She's a skilled horse rider, who can snatch a match from the ground on horseback without falling, and in one pivotal scene she ties the hands of a man who tries to rape her with barbed wire and circumcises him. For the most part, Grey's visions bring her back to the Wild West, where she becomes the lover of Billy the Kid. This is so strange, but clearly important; Billy is a significant character in the story, and he exists in a kind of timeliness with Grey where he is able to converse with her about the famous circumstances of his own death. Grey is in love with him--are we supposed to read this as a suggestion that even Indigenous people can fall in love with the myths of the American West? I'm still wondering what it is that Billy is doing in this novel, but I love him here; I love the way the pieces refuse to fit neatly together. I do see that Set's return to Oklahoma means that Grey must learn to let Billy go; I see that she's not just a magical healer for Set (like, for example, the medicine woman Ts'eh in Ceremony) but someone who herself must find a way to live wholly.

One last thing that stuck out to me: Set is an artist. The novel's biggest flaw, I think, is that it has trouble conceptualizing Set's art, because it really isn't interested in it as art, but rather as a symbol for a way of seeing. The novel is separated into sections called "Lines," "Planes," and "Shapes," pointing toward the fleshing out of vision, of visual elements coming together into a whole. It seems to me that Set's art picks up some of the yearning to see that characters profess in House Made of Dawn; I was reminded of the white woman Angela wanting to see "beyond the mountain," which I read as a kind of modernist desire to see beyond the intervening stages of art, words, interpretation. What interests me and troubles me about The Ancient Child is the way it adds myth to the list; myth points to the deeper truth of what happens to Set and Grey, but it can never be real, it can never satisfy. The novel ends with Set, gone on a pilgrimage to Devil's Tower, encountering and becoming the bear, the real, at last.

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

After crossing the Red River sometime in the 1830s, a priest climbed a tree seeking a spot where he could safely observe an approaching herd of buffalo. There he witnessed a deranging spectacle--the buffalo stretched all the way to where they disappeared into the line between sky and earth. He was forced to stay in the tree for three days as they passed, passed and migrated, three days of horizon-to-horizon buffalo. He nearly died of thirst. 'You may judge now the richness of these prairies,' he wrote later. There was no end to the beasts. Just like it seems there is no end to us, in our billions. But everything on earth can be eliminated under the right conditions.

Kismet Poe is torn between two men: one is Gary Geist, a local football star whose chief attraction seems to be that he is desperately in love with her. His desperation, we learn, has something to do with a horrible accident that killed two of Gary's friends, and which Kismet's proximity seems to allay. The other is Hugo, an oafish redhead who works at the local bookstore. Hugo is sensitive, clever, kind, though he lacks some of Gary's sex appeal. Gary presses Kismet again and again, in quite coercive and abusive ways, into marrying him, but after the wedding, Kismet feels trapped in his parents' large farmhouse. In the margin, other crises rear their heads. Kismet's father disappears, leaving a mysterious mortgage on their property. And the dirt that has supported the local sugar beet crop--from which the Geists derive their fortune, and which supports just about everyone in the region--has become hostile through the overuse of pesticides.

Traditionally, I read fiction by Indigenous authors in January, to get into the mindset of my second semester senior class. In practice, that means I almost always start the year with Louise Erdrich, who is more or less unrivalled among Native American authors still writing in the U.S.A. Erdrich has been going through a kind of late period Renaissance lately, publishing a novel nearly every other year, winning the Pulitzer Prize. I was pleased to get to hear her read from The Mighty Red a few months ago in Brooklyn, and the church hall where she read was entirely full. And yet, The Mighty Red confirmed for me a feeling that Erdrich's late novels haven't quite matched up to her earlier ones, though they share much of the same superficial trappings. A couple of pivotal scenes in The Mighty Red, in which the parents of Hugo and Gary confront one another regarding Kismet's affections, take place at book clubs meetings. (Funnily, the first book is Eat Pray Love and the next The Road.) But it also gave me an unpleasant feeling that The Mighty Red is not unlike the kind of book you might read at a book club (sadly, derogatory).

It's hard to say why I felt this book was so unsatisfying. It might be that the most intriguing theme here--the depletion of the soil because of the deleterious practices of big agribusiness, which is linked to the kind of dystopian future captured in The Road--never gets fully drawn into the light. The central focus is on Kismet's mistake of marrying Gary, and while this story has its highlights, it left the book feeling sort of static and motionless to me, because of the way Kismet is borne along by Gary's desire, unable to assert herself or make any positive choices. A subplot in which Kismet's father, Martin, reappears as a bank robber who dresses in a different theatrical outfit--old lady, elf, nun--for each robbery points toward some of Erdrich's boldness and humor. Short chapters and quickly shifting vantage points left the book feeling rather unfocused to me, and I never really thought that Erdrich was able to bring together all the novel's various strands into something that felt whole.

This is the eleventh (!) of Erdrich's books that I've read. It's probably the least satisfying. But that's OK. It's always a pleasure to return to Erdrich's North Dakota, even if it's not the best of visits. One of my hopes is that sometime she'll return to the historical fiction that feels, at least to me, her strength.

Mating by Norman Rush

My utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want. Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity? It has to be cultural. In fact the closest thing I have to a religion is that this has to be cultural. I could do practically anything while he was asleep and not bother him. I wrote in my journal, washed dishes in slow motion if we hadn't gotten around to them. I was emotional a lot, privately. I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

Book 1 of 2025, let's go!

Norman Rush's Mating follows an unnamed American academic living in Botswana. When she hears that a famously contrarian anthropologist named Nelson Denoon is building a secretive community in the desert, she shows up unannounced--after a week-long, life-threatening trek through the Kalahari Desert--to become a part of it. She becomes Denoon's lover and accomplice in the project, a female-dominated village called Tsai.

These two threads, love and the village, dominate Mating. The narrator and Denoon are, in many ways, perfect for each other: they are intellectuals and skeptics, people of both body and brain, sensual, devoted to the physical act of love, and secretly rather needy. Mating, if it does nothing else, gives a convincing sense of two people whose romance makes sense, because their thoughts and feelings seem to vibrate on the same wavelength. This love might just be the kind of kind of "equal love between people of equal value" that the narrator dreams about, but even the most equal loves exist within the context of the larger world, and this fact hangs over their heads. Tsai is meant to be a self-sustaining community, led by and for African women, and Nelson's role as leader--in fact, his presence--are only meant to be temporary. Will their love be able to survive somewhere else? Or is it only here, in Tsai, that the relationship can prosper?

Tsai is, I think, the most interesting thing about Mating. Decisions in Tsai are made my a woman-only council; necessary labor is assigned a daily value according to its urgency and can be performed by anyone in the community in exchange for credits to purchase items from a village store. Tsai is clean and orderly, both off the grid and technologically cutting-edge; it relies on the abundant sun for solar power and makes use of several practical inventions created by Denoon himself. For Denoon, Tsai represents a thumb in the eye of "development," a word that captures the ignorant meddling of NGOs in the lives of Africans. Tsai is designed to be bottom-up, to give power to the powerless. And yet, the model fails to keep out malcontents and bad actors, especially among the token number of men, who resent Denoon's position and seem to be scheming for ways to reassert their traditional dominance.

I think my favorite part of Mating is the final movement, in which Denoon sets out on an urgent and controversial mission, but ends up nearly dying in the desert before being rescued by a group of nomads. Denoon returns from his ordeal changed, more Zen-like, shorn of his humor and his cantankerousness. No one else seems to register the difference, or they like it. Only the narrator is left feeling abandoned, because, of course, there is no equal love between an ordinary woman and a Christlike Denoon, a Zen master. It's an interesting moment, because it suggests that the love we share for each other is as much about our flaws as our virtues. And it made me wonder if the same is true for our political communities, even for places like Tsai--are conflict, enmity, and friction a necessary part of the way we live with others? Utopias cannot stamp them out, but even if they did, would we want them to?

Brent's Top 10 of 2024!

 Another year, another 35-40 books I read and didn't review. Last year, I didn't even get an end-of-year top 10 posted; this year, I am. 

As always happens, when I read through my list, I realized what a wonderful year of reading it had been. Of the 60 books I completed, I only disliked a couple (which shall remain unnamed) and even those, I considered worthwhile. There were less graphic novels and less new authors this year; there was more nonfiction--including Madwoman in the Attic, which I've been chipping away at for years; there was a little less international lit, which I hope to recitfy in 2025.

And so without further ado, here are the peaks of the pages for 2024. 

Honorable Mentions:
In the Eye of the Wild - Nastassja Martin
Who knew a book about being mauled by a bear could be so existentially upsetting?

The Children's Bach - Helen Garner
I was going to say that this reminded me of the Australian The Man Who Loved Children, then I remembered that's already Australian.

Falling Man - Don DeLillo
Not DeLillo's best, but the first 3/4ths reframe 9/11 in a way I wouldn't have expected to work at all.

A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
Finally got around to reading the "funniest novel of all time" and it was indeed very funny. And bleak, my god, it's bleak as hell.

Pew - Catherine Lacey
Another member of the 75%er club--I wasn't satisfied with the ending but the journey to get there was as compelling as it gets.

Monologue of a Dog: Poems - Wisława Szymborska
I rarely remember new poems for long, but the title poem of this collection is going to be with me forever.

My Documents - Alejandro Zambra
My second Zambra opens with one of the most jarring nd precise short stories I've ever read, and that's not nothing.

Lapvona - Otessah Moshfegh
This book is disgusting and probably nihilistic and I'm not sure it holds together really, but also, I liked it.

American Demagogue: The Great Awakening and the Rise and Fall of Populism - J. D. Dickey
If you want to know what George Whitfield and Donald Trump (who doesn't appear in this book) have in common, this is the book for you.

House Made of Dawn - N. Scott Momaday
This probably would've been in my top 10 if I'd reviewed it when I read it. A great modernist Native American novel.

My top 10 this year were fairly easy to determine, but unlike many years, actually ranking them was difficult, partially because of the amount of nonfiction that made the cut. So take this ranking with a spoonful of salt, and read all of these wherever I've ranked them.

10. Robinson - Muriel Spark
Spark's second novel could have been made for me in a laboratory. I love Robinsonades, Spark, locked room mysteries, and short funny books. This was all four, a ripping and cynical tale of a group of castaways on the titular island, at the mercy of the titular character. A little triumph.

9. The Changeling - Joy Williams
My least favorite of Williams' novels so far, The Changeling is still one of the best and strangest books I read this year. It's a mysterious and often macabre examination of woman-and-motherhood, almost a thematic retelling of Williams' State of Grace, but much weirder and bleaker. I still don't know what to 

make of the closing pages but the final sentence haunted me all year.

8. Reaganland - Rick Perlstein
The other magesterial work of nonfiction, besides Madwoman, that I read this year. My timing was spot on, since most of the book is really about Carter--it ends on election night 1980. I spent most of the book almost as frustrated with Jimmy as I was with Ronnie, and by the time I finished I'd resolved to read Perlstein's other 3 books on the rise of conservatism. And isn't that really the highest compliment you can pay an author?

7. The Wall - Marlen Haushofer
The second Robinsonade on my list is a much stranger beast on paper, and yet, maybe not in practice. While the premise--a woman wakes to find that she's been trapped in the country with no other humans behind an invisible wall--might sound like science fiction, the book itself has more in common with Robinson Crusoe than Under the Dome. Long and riviting passages about nature and survival butt up against shocking and inevitable climaxes.

6. Clock Without Hands - Carson McCullers
Another unexpectedly timely book, not because it's about racism, which is always timely, but because the form the racism takes, that of the proper, upstanding, even charming, Judge is so well-wrought that you can't help but see him in all of the kindly, helpful people in your life who nevertheless prioritize their own fears and prejudices over the well-being of others. 

5. H is for Hawk - Helen Macdonald
I've been blessed, for most of my life, to suffer very little loss, until the last decade when mortality came home to roost. And H is for Hawk captures the complexity of the grief of sudden loss better than almost anything else I've read. It really is a book about hawks too--it's just a book about Hawks that will probably make you bawl like a baby.

4. Too Much Happiness - Alice Munro
Every Munro collection is good; every Munro collection is dark. But this one was better and darker than most. Child's Play is surely one of the bleakest things in Munro's bibliography, and almost every story has a moment or two of shocking violence. Perhaps there's a little less anger here than in something like Runaway; or maybe the anger is just made more concrete here. 

3. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse - Louise Erdrich
My fourth Erdrich novel is my favorite so far. An inveterate Graham Greene stan, I couldn't help but love a book about a priest who does the right thing in the wrong way. The explorations of gender, faith, and the American West all came together here in a way I found both techincally impressive--does anyone write prose better than Erdrich?--and moving at the same time.

2. Story of of the Lost Child - Elena Ferrante
I can't believe I've read all four of Ferrante's Neopolitian novels--for my money, the best extended narrative in modern literature--and haven't reviewed any of them. And part of me feels like this should really be my number one book, since it nailed the ending, wrapping up the story of Lenu, Lila, and their entire neighborhood over the course of 60 years as perfectly as anyone could.

1. Solenoid - Mircea Cărtăresc
I don't know what exactly to say about Solenoid. Like many of the other books I enjoyed this year, it feels impossible that it should work. It's too long, too strange, too gross, too avant garde, too indulgent--and yet, the surreal story of a man whose life is circumscribed by forces beyond his control or comprehension works perfectly, an expertly calibrated novel that takes ideas so bleak as to be nearly  Lovecraftian and winnows them to the fine point, repeated for 12 straight pages: HELP. And by the time the novel ends, we think there's a slight chance that someone--or something--may. 

And that's all! Here's to an ever better 2025. Thanks to the few readers of this blog and especially to my blog partner and friend Chris, without whom my literary life would be far less rich and this blog would be far more empty.

Christopher's Top Ten of 2024!

Famously, a year has 525,600 minutes, but you hardly ever count them up as you go. Reading a lot, and keeping track of what you read, has a way of bringing time into measurement in a way that's sobering. I read 115 books this year. If I wanted to, I could count out the number of books I might have left to read, if I'm able to keep up this particular clip, and if I am blessed to live an average life. I don't think I want to do that just now. But as large the number 115 might seem--and it is a lot, more than I've ever been able to read in a year before--it seems to me quite a paltry measurement to capture a whole year of life. Perhaps this is just another way that reading good literature forces one to confront the limitations that life imposes.

Maybe I'm in a morbid mood this New Year's season, or maybe just a contemplative one. Let me be more celebratory. I read some really wonderful books this year, and as always, going back over them for this list allowed me to appreciate them anew. Few people read these reviews, I know, but they do so much for me, both in the writing and in the revisiting, when I get to, in some sense, read them a second time. (I always think that you can't really judge a book's greatness immediately after finishing it; the really great ones have a way of living on in memory.) 

This year, I read 58 books by women and 57 books by men. I read books from twelve new countries: Malaysia, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Guyana, Egypt, Bulgaria, Palestine, the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, Cote d'Ivoire, and Greenland. I got to visit with some old favorites, like Vollmann and Munro, Greene and Green, Joy Williams and Patrick White. I reread a few books that are dear to me, by Spark, Welty, and Cather. You know what they say, some books are silver and some are gold, etc., etc. Here's what I really loved this year.

Honorable Mentions:

Cuyahoga by Pete Beatty
Falling Man by Don DeLillo
Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick
Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson
S. S. Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Rabbit Boss by Thomas Sanchez
Minor Detail by Adani Shibli
Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker
The Heartsong of Charging Elk by James Welch

Top Ten:

10. Blu's Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka - Yamanaka's Moloka'i is a side of Hawaii not seen by tourists: a run-down jungle of rusting scrap and stray cats, where children live on the knife-edge of poverty, hunger, and exploitation. The story promises cloying heartwarmishness--young Ivah is forced to act as a mother for her little brother, Blu, after the death of her mother--but sex and death here are real, and the childish fantasies of young Blu, who nearly hangs himself imitating what he's seen in TV westerns, are just as dangerous. I was really moved by the way, with a late reveal, Yamanaka links the hardship and resilience of Blu's family to the island's longtime use as a colony to isolate those who suffer from leprosy. When I went to Hawaii in July, I often felt that it was hard to see the real place behind the false images for sale in the gift shops. But you can see that Blu's Hanging captures the real Hawaii, because only a real place could be so full of life.

9. Divorcing by Susan Taubes - Ever read a novel narrated by a dead woman? A few pages into Divorcing, the narrator, Sophie Blind, is hit by a car, and she narrates the rest of the novel inside her coffin. It's the kind of authorial move that makes you sit up and pay attention. And you do need to pay attention, because Taubes is taking you on a kind of modernist amusement park ride, through various loops and falls. What's more, you have to do the whole thing backwards: Memento-like, Divorcing moves backward in time through Sophie's divorce and marriage back to the psychotherapeutic sessions of her childhood with her therapist father. By the time you realize the book is mimicking the shape of psychotherapy by plumbing the deaths of Sophie's past, regressing to the infant state, you've forgotten it's already too late for her life to change--she's already dead.

8. The Dog of the South by Charles Portis - It's as great as they say. More importantly, it's as funny as they say. The Dog of the South is a road novel with no destination, a shaggy dog novel that's all shag and no dog. On the surface, it's about Ray's journey through Mexico to Belize to find his wife, who's run off with the no-good Dupree, as well as his car and his credit cards. But The Dog of the South is really about what happens between the stops: the clowns, the broken-down bus, the Belizean child grifters, the self-help pamphlets. The Dog of the South never gets to the point, it's all distraction and digression, but maybe that's what life is, anyway: one long, entertaining digression on the way to the same place everyone else is going.

7. Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu - Of all the books I read this year, the image that will probably stick with me the most is the narrator of Solenoid becoming a Jesus figure to the world of the mites: communicating through stomach waves and spells, crucified in a way that only a mite could be crucified, trying to reproduce Christ's message of love and redemption in a world that is utter alien to us. It's a freshened version of an old thought, that we can analogize God's difference from us by contemplating our own difference from that of the world's lowliest creatures. But never before has the thought experiment felt so poignant as it does here, and somehow this strange digression becomes part of a larger whole with the rest of Solenoid's batshit images: the giant robot that stomps people, the boat-shaped house where you sleep while floating in the air, the man who takes a hammer to his own teeth. Solenoid is a phantasmagoria of a size and scope I've never encountered before, and yet its ultimate vision of mankind railing fruitlessly against the strictures of existence is filed down, like a point, into the simplest phrase: Help! Help! Help!

6. In the Eye of the Wild by Natassja Martin - In 2015, Natassja Martin was attacked by a bear in Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, losing a piece of her jaw and much of her face. To the Indigenous people she studies, this makes her a medka--a kind of bear in human form. In the Eye of the Wild suggests that this is not merely a piece of local superstition, but that Martin left with the piece of the bear in her just as the bear quite literally walked away with a hunk of her jaw. In the Eye of the Wild is non-fiction, memoir, but these words pale against the experience, and there is the suggestion that their methods cannot encompass what has happened, nor can the kind of anthropological writing that is Martin's professional arena. What Martin writes is much more like poetry, in the oldest sense of the word, something primal and pre-literary. Such an encounter demands new language, even as it eludes language perforce. This is a book that understands when barriers are broken down--between animal and man, between fact and myth--blood comes out.

5. Whores for Gloria by William T. Vollmann - This book made me think about the purpose San Francisco serves in our national conversation about drugs, homelessness, and crime. You always hear people with nefarious agendas talking about San Francisco as a city ruined by liberal policies, but the focus of these harangues--the Tenderloin District--has always been a containment zone for those sifted out of respectable society. Whores for Gloria comes out of the experience Vollmann had "embedded" with the prostitutes of the Tenderloin in the 80's, and it's a moving portrait of a place where passions, even love, have not yet been killed. The protagonist, Jimmy, is a torched-out Vietnam vet who channels all of his ardor for the various prostitutes, both cis and trans, into an imaginary love named Gloria. He borrows their personalities, their stories, and even their hair, fashioning it into an ideal that can not disappoint or fail; the way Gloria becomes an avatar for all the dream-loves we'll never acquire--because they are dreams--is among the most moving things in all of Vollmann's fiction.

4. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson - The five stories in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden seem to speak from beyond the grave. At times, I felt sure that Johnson, when writing them, knew that he would not live to see them published; in the nested stories of dying men in "Triumph Over the Grave" (such a bitter title) there is a sense that we are venturing into the writer's own death-consciousness, which is underlined with a final line that stopped me cold and made tears come to my eyes. There are other, showier stories here, like "Doppelganger, Poltergeist," which manages to be both and Elvis story and a 9/11 story, but "Triumph" is the one that I've carried with me. I'll carry with me, too, the wildly optimistic sentiment of the title story, which ends with the narrator leaving his house to hunt down the magic of a fairytale. That, too, was Johnson's bread and butter--the misery, but also the magic.

3. White by Marie Darrieussecq - OK, here are the top three, any of which I think might justifiably take the top spot. Ever year has its discoveries, and I hope that Darrieussecq will be this year's--though I think you can't really say until you read at least a second book by any particular author. I loved the strangeness of White, a strangeness that begins with the concept--a pair of loners fall in love at a remote Antarctic science station--and reaches down to the sentences themselves, the very words. I have a thing for the Arctic/Antarctic, and Darrieussecq is one of the few who captures something fundamental about the blankness, whiteness, of these landscapes, that quality that makes them both frightening and alluring. Did I mention it's a science fiction book, set at the same moment as man's first arrival on Mars? Did I mention it's narrated by ghosts? Being so balls-to-the-wall ambitious is a virtue on its own, but here it works, because it all adds up to a book that is about wrenching meaning from mystery--and from abject failure. No joke, I can't wait for next year because I can't to see if Darrieussecq's other books live up to this one.

2. The Sea Wall by Marguerite Duras - Duras was my "discovery" of a couple years ago. I loved The Lover, and then I was underwhelmed by L'Amante Anglaise. I can't even really explain why The Sea Wall hit me so squarely. Maybe it's because it's something I didn't really expect a Duras book to be: it's funny. It follows a French colonial family whose poor luck and poor planning--the failure of the titular sea wall, which inundates the meager crops--lowers them to the level of the indignities suffered on a daily basis by the (much more resilient) Vietnamese locals. Duras wrings great humor and great drama out of this, a French colonial who thinks they ought to deserve better, and whose catastrophism infects their entirely family: the cynical, feral son; the beautiful, teasing, farmer's daughter-type daughter. There's nothing better than a comic novel that is just the right amount of mean-spirited. And this on eof the best I've ever read.

1. Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon - I think this is the first time ever my #1 book of the year has not been a book of fiction. William Least Heat-Moon's travelogue, Blue Highways, scratched a very specific itch I'd been having for a long time. For a long time, I had yearned for a travelogue written with a fiction writer's spirit, by someone who understands something of the magic of the traveling, a magic that is not merely the accumulation of abiding knowledge or the happenstance of the random moment, but which lies somewhere between, at the intersection of these. Perhaps it affected me strongly in part because the kind of journey Heat-Moon took in 1978 is no longer sensible, if perhaps not even possible: sticking to the "blue roads" on the map, avoiding highways in exchange for discovering the tiny, unseen places where visitors don't go. Can you even do such a thing, in the age of Google Maps? Or perhaps it's that Heat-Moon knows that traveling is not just about a line on the map, or a landscape, but about people: few writers, fictional or non-fictional, are so adept at capturing the small details that bring a person to life. I loved seeing the American landscape anew through Heat-Moon's eyes. And I will forever live with this image: Heat-Moon, coming upon a reservoir that has covered the grave of a long-ago relative, bending down to drink: "In my splashing, I broke the starlight. And then I too drank from the grave."

Happy new year, everybody. Time to turn the page.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov

I have endeavoured to form a coherent picture of what I saw of my half-brother in those childhood days of mine, between say 1910 (my first year of consciousness) and 1919 (the year he left for England). But the task eludes me. Sebastian's image does not appear as part of my boyhood, thus subject to endless selection and development, nor does it appear as a succession of familiar visions, but it comes to me in a few bright patches, as if he were not a constant member of our family, but some erratic visitor passing across a lighted room and then for a long interval fading into the night.

Sebastian Knight, the critically acclaimed but aloof writer, has died. His brother, the narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, dreams of writing a biography of Sebastian, one that will counterbalance a recently published hatchet job by his former agent full of falsehoods and misinterpretations. The problem is that the two brothers have never been close; they are only half-brothers, sharing the same father--killed in a duel defending his first wife, Sebastian's mother, while married to the second--and as they grew up they rarely saw each other. The narrator becomes especially fixated on recovering a blank period of Sebastian's life while he was at a Swiss sanitarium, where he seems to have met a mysterious woman whose identity the narrator struggles to reveal.

Sebastian Knight is awfully straightforward for a Nabokov novel. Seeing that Sebastian's spurned lover is named Clare Bishop, I considered for a second the possibility that we're supposed to read the whole novel as a kind of allegory for a game of chess: pawn to queen four, and all that. But I think, in the end, it's only a little joke, the kind of situational rhyming that Nabokov loved so much. Rather, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight struck me as a surprisingly realistic attempt at dealing with the modernist themes of writing and fashioning that made up so much of Nabokov's career. That is to say that the problem that confronts the narrator, V.--whether a true life can be cobbled together out of written words, or if writing itself is actually primarily and by its nature made up of gaps, misprisions--is one that confronted Nabokov, too, but it seems to confront him here less than it does his narrator.

It must be observed that this was Nabokov's first book written originally in English. The confidence of his style is already here, fully formed; that he could become one of the 20th century's leading stylists in two different languages is a marvel so fully explored it hardly seems worth mentioning. But it interested me that Nabokov made his writer-protagonist a native Russian who becomes an English language writer. Sebastian's novels sound like Nabokov's novels, though I think there are moments where Nabokov cheekily has V. (Vladimir?) outshine the passages quoted from Sebastian. Sebastian's letters were burned after his death (shades here of Nabokov's own unheeded demand that his unfinished novel be burned), so V. must turn to the novels for an indication of Sebastian's experiences and feelings. He claims that Sebastian had an uncanny ability to write his own feelings into his characters, even critically: "The light of personal truth is hard to perceive in the shimmer of an imaginary nature, but what is still harder to understand is the amazing fact that a man writing of things which he really felt at the time of writing, could have had the power to create simultaneously--and out of the very things which distressed his mind--a fictitious and faintly absurd character." Is this Nabokov writing about Nabokov writing about Nabokov?

V. eventually identifies a woman named Helene as Sebastian's likely lover. Calling on her, he finds her out, but her friend, Nina Lecerf, promises to arrange an audience between them, and in the meantime spills all she knows about the stormy relationship between Sebastian and Helene. It's only later, in the wake of his own confused attraction to Nina, that V. realizes that Nina really is Helene; everything she has been divulging has been from behind the safer veil of another identity. It's possible, the ending of the book suggests, that V. really "is" Sebastian in the same way that Nina really is Helene. Although The Real Life of Sebastian Knight isn't the most accomplished of Nabokov's books, Nina is one of the small characters and moments I'll remember, like the kindly German private eye who refuses payment, or the moment when, having rushed to his brother's sickbed, he accidentally spends the night outside the wrong man's room, Sebastian having died the day before. Perhaps he is Sebastian, too, this man, Nabokov suggests: "any soul may be yours," V. writes, "if you find it and follow its undulations."

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler

They talk about their futures. John says that he wants to do something important, something with weight and consequence, something that will leave a mark. Asia can have no such hopes, but she is excited to think that someone might read the book about father. In her own small way, she wishes to add esteem to the Booth name. John is not so interest in that. "No," he says, "I want to be known for something more than simply being father's son."

You know, when you think about it, the fact that John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln is pretty crazy. It's like if Luke Hemsworth, or maybe Stephen Baldwin, killed Joe Biden: the lesser-known scion of a great acting family. Credit where credit is due, Booth's actions did the unthinkable, in that they were so momentous that they entirely eclipsed one of the most famous family names in all of America. Although many might be able to tell you that Booth was an actor, few might be able to remember that his father, Junius Booth, was one of the most famous actors of his generation, and that his brother Edwin, following in Junius' footsteps, is considered one of the country's greatest stage actors of all time. John Wilkes Booth was an actor, but not, we're told, anything like his brother. Yet it's John we all remember.

Karen Joy Fowler's book Booth starts from a simple observation: though the assassination of Abraham Lincoln has hidden the Booth family from the sight of history, they were all pretty interesting in their own right. Booth tells the story of the Booth family from its early days until just after the assassination; John, though lurking darkly throughout the book, can't be said to be the novel's center. I had never heard the story that dominates the early part of the novel, about how Junius Booth turned out to be a bigamist, living in America with what turned out to be his second family, while a wife and son still wait for him in England. Fowler's version of Junius Booth is a true actor, a drunk and a rapscallion whose antics put his family constantly on edge. Edwin inherits all his talent, but it seems to be John that inherits his instability, his megalomania, and his flair for the dramatic. The story of the bigamy--which ends with the legitimate British son wresting much of Junius' property away from Edwin, John, and their siblings--also calls into question what gets passed down, and to whom. Edwin, John, and their actor brother June all want to step into their father's shoes, though they are each in their own way to imitate him.

There are a pair of sisters, too, the beautiful and ambitious Asia, and Rosalie, whose sickly and malformed physical nature keep her more or less at home. Asia seems like the most normal of the siblings, seeking middle-class stability while her brothers live the peripatetic and inconsistent lives of actors. But the times in which the Booths lived are not normal times, and the steady march toward the Civil War is always present. Interestingly, Fowler makes much of the fact that the Booths were a Maryland family, right on the border of the conflict, and so it makes sense somehow that while the more respectable siblings are supporters of the Union cause, the unstable John becomes an ardent defender of the confederacy.

Booth has that flaw that most historical fiction has, a dedication to the truth. The story of the Booth family is complicated and strange, and I enjoyed reading about it, but I couldn't always shake the feeling that I was reading thinly-disguised non-fiction, which might have served the material better. Yet, I also would say that, despite a kind of book clubbish present tense that got on my nerves, Fowler is better at pulling out the threads of history than many who do similar things, and effectively manages to write those threads into a convincing "arc" for each of the Booth siblings. Mostly, the impression I was left with was foreboding. In this John Wilkes Booth--his cynicism, his machismo, his delusion, his yearning for a greatness that we see outpaces both his skill and his understanding--I see a familiar avatar for our own political landscape. I think there are many out there who would like to take history into their own hands, and like Booth, some of them may just succeed.