A Small Island by Jamaica Kincaid

Again, Antigua is a small place, a small island. It is nine miles wide by twelve miles long. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Not too long after, it was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa (all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there can be no question about this) to satisfy their desire for wealth and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they could be less lonely and empty--a European disease. Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way; eventually, the slaves were freed, in a kind of way. The people in Antigua now, the people who really think of themselves as Antiguans (and the people who would immediately come to your mind when you think about what Antiguans might belike; I mean, supposing you were to think about it), are the descendants of those noble and exalted people, the slaves. Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.

A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid's jeremiad about her home country of Antigua, beings in the accusatory first person: suppose you are a tourist, visiting Antigua for the first time. You see the beautiful green hills and blue waters of Antigua, and you see the poverty: the dilapidated library, the school, which looks like a latrine, and you have a kind of sense of superiority to what it is you lay your eyes on. There is an Antigua that has been fashioned for you, but still you cannot help but see what you might think of as the "real" Antigua, and you--you!--do not think about why or how this "small place" in the middle of the Caribbean sea might have inherited corruption and degradation from the colonial powers of which you, whether you know it or not, are a belated representative. It's a pointed and really quite vicious accusation. Kincaid doesn't mince words: "An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that..." She goes on to say the one thing that you will not and cannot imagine is that the people of Antigua despise you, and what is worse, they laugh at you.

A Small Place contains other sections, but they're all as frank and forthright as this one, and for that, I really enjoyed it. One section details the astonishing corruption of Antigua's leaders in the decades between independence from Britain and the 1980's in which Kincaid was writing, but Kincaid makes it clear that these methods were learned from the colonists, and reflect a kind of rapaciousness that the English taught to their subjects. One thing that really struck me, and will stay with me as I think about colonialism and its consequences, is that Kincaid describes the Antiguans of the colonial era not thinking of the English as racists: what they thought was that they were "ill-mannered," or in some cases, "puzzling," because they spent their time among people they clearly did not like. This provides an interesting response to modern critiques of (God help us) "wokeness," which might be described by its critics as a tendency to see racism everywhere, because the Antiguans, as Kincaid describes them, didn't see racism at all; they saw boorishness and ill manners--the sad and sorry traits that lie, perhaps, at the bottom of racism.

And the whole thing is filled with remarkable prose, because Kincaid is really a terrific prose writer. Her precise and cutting way of writing, I think, is really well disposed to a jeremiad like this one. She doesn't pull any punches, but neither does it seem one-sided or unfair, whatever that might mean in this case. Funnily, for someone so skilled at writing in the English language, Kincaid repeats a really familiar critique: "For isn't it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?") It is especially tragic to think of Kincaid, a talented and incisive writer if ever there was one, describing herself as having "no tongue." Tongueless though it may be, A Small Place lashes powerfully.

Norwood by Charles Portis

The train was slowing for the block in Philadelphia when Norwood suddenly awoke. He was asleep one second and wide awake the next. A thin wall of sunlight was coming through the doorway crack, with a lot of stuff dancing around in it. Something was wrong. It was his feet. He felt air on his feet. He sat up and there wasn't anything on them except a pair of J. C. Penny Argyles. Somebody had taken his thirty-eight-dollar stovepipe boots right off his feet. "Son of a bitch!" He got up and climbed over the floor and pulled sacks this way and that but there was no one to be found, and no boots.

Norwood Pratt works at a gas station in Eastern Texas, but he dreams of being a country music star on the radio show Louisiana Hayride. His sister Vernell has recently married, and brought into Norwood's house, a cantankerous old veteran named Bill Bird. Norwood takes a job offered to him by a smooth-talking local magnate named "Grady Fring, the Kredit King," driving a pair of cars--and a reluctant female passenger--to New York. Norwood figures out quickly that the cars are stolen, and the girl more or less the same, and dispatches both, but still continues on to New York in hopes of recouping seventy dollars owed to him by a buddy in the Marines. In typical shaggy-dog fashion, the friend has gone back to Arkansas--basically Norwood's backdoor--and New York is a hellhole. Among other things, I love how small the stakes are of a novel like this one--seventy dollars was probably a lot more back then that it is now, but it ain't that much, either.

I love the collection of characters Norwood picks up on his journeys. Besides Grady Fring, whose unctuous patter is among the novel's best bits, there's Edmund Ratner, a little person once billed as "The World's Smallest Perfect Man," and a "wonder-chicken" named Joanna who can answer any question. Portis has a real talent for making individual characters stand out; even someone as minor as Mrs. Reese, the mother of the man who owes Norwood money, who only cares about her familial connections to local judges (a Southern archetype I wonder if Yankee readers will get), pops out memorably on the page. And I liked the sojourn to New York, which is clearly in its "bad old days" era. Among the first things that Norwood sees is a group of Puerto Rican teenagers roasting marshmallows over a burning mattress. Still, even in New York, Norwood, a wandering Odysseus, is treated with kindness by some and suspicion by others, the same as in Memphis or on a Trailways bus.

Norwood was Portis' first novel, and it shares a lot in common with The Dog of the South, which is the only other one of his books I've read. Both are road trip novels and both are riotously funny, though I think Dog of the South has a clear edge in almost all of the novel's shared qualities. One way in which Norwood is different is that it's much gentler and more kindhearted. The Dog of the South is a hopeless tale, in which the narrator's quest--to hunt down his missing wife, along with his credit cards--is clearly doomed from the start. But Norwood, who is a gentle soul underneath his cowboy cool, comes back enriched. He does get his money--which is probably the novel's biggest surprise--though, generously, he loans much of it away immediately to the World's Smallest Perfect Man. And what's more, he comes home with a new fiancee, Rita, whom he has picked up on the Trailways bus. The final image, of Norwood arriving home, carrying a sleeping Rita in his arms to his own couch, adds a touch of unexpected sweetness.

The Seers by Suleiman Addonia

A throaty voice somewhere inside me--and I can't remember when or why I had labelled the voices I held inside me as a way of distinguishing between them, as if to give the multitude of my identity a voice--rose from a long slumber, ready to hurl accusations of selfishness at me. But that voice of reason soon incinerated between my thighs, pulsating, pumping out a sensation. I opened the window and invited the London night into my room. And London arrived carrying conversations of people on the verge of being born, dying, creating, singing, seducing, of killing and being killed, speaking in hundreds of different languages, and of Anne about to fuck someone somewhere.

Suleiman Addonia's novel The Seers begins with its narrator, an Eritrean refugee in London named Hannah, fucking a man in the ass with a strap-on in a public park. I'm not sure, but it the whole novel might take place mid-thrust, as Hannah looks back on her difficult and solitary journey from her war-torn country, and reflects on the self-awakening she's had since coming to London. That self-awakening, as she describes it, is pointedly sexual: it begins with a crush on a fellow refugee living at a halfway house, Anne, who scorns and humiliates her (something which, as it turns out, turns Hannah on). Hannah is guided--but also repulsed--by the diary of her mother, who describes her own predilection for men's butts and assholes, something which Hannah herself pursues with a similar gusto. As we see her in flagrante delicto with her lover in the park, she is as happy and whole as she's ever been, having learned to pursue her desires in this country as a way of being truly herself.

That description might make The Seers sounds a little silly, overwrought, or even gratuitous, but I was genuinely impressed by it. Addonia relates the whole story as a single long paragraph that stretches for 120 pages--which doesn't make it easy to find a place to pause between readings, but which effectively gives the sense of an orgasmic stream-of-conscious. Addonia makes good use of a few strange flourishes, as when he has certain sections narrated by (not through, by) Hannah's eyes, or when she describes some of the great English writers she has come to embrace get up and walk around from their graves at night and talk to her. As with anything, I suppose, the proof is in the pudding; these flourishes work because Addonia treats them with sincerity and skill. The Seers is a novel that carries you away on a flood of ecstasy, with pain and struggle mixed in equal measure, and I thought it was ultimately very affecting and convincing.

With the addition of Eritrea, my "Countries Read" list is up to 116!

Weather by Jenny Offill

It was the same after 9/11, there was that hum in the air. Everyone everywhere talking about the same thing. In stores, in restaurants, on the subway. My friend met me at the diner for coffee. His family fled Iran one week before the Shah fell. He didn't want to talk about the hum. I pressed him though. Your people have finally fallen into history, he said. The rest of us are already here.

Lizzie, the narrator of Jenny Offill's Weather is a washed-out academic working at a local library. Her former mentor, Sylvia, asks her to fill in answering questions she gets emailed in connection to her podcast, like "What are the best ways to protect children from the coming chaos?" At home, she has a husband and a son, as well as a brother, Henry, who seems to be on the road to a family life himself until he relapses and becomes, we sense not for the first time, the narrator's burden to bear. Lizzie's own marriage pulls under the strain of Henry's presence, and her husband takes a little break, during which time Lizzie considers sleeping with a handsome journalist she's been flirting with at the bar. He's a war correspondent, and the world they share is a little like war, turned topsy-turvy by a recent event that is, but is never quite outlined, the election of Donald Trump in 2016. An emailer asks the difference between a disaster and emergency--well, which is this? And how does it fit in with the larger dread Lizzie feels as she imagines her future "doomstead," where she plans to be safe--she hopes--with her husband and son?

The most notable thing about Weather is its clipped, various style: each section takes up about a half a page at most. I've seen this work in other books, like Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever, where it's used for great comic effect. Weather tries to be comic, too, though perhaps it is too anxious and depressed about the state of the world to really rise above a general wry cleverness. Moments in Lizzie's life are mixed in with questions from the emailers, yoga mantras, other bits and bobs. It's all woven together, and cleverly and effectively enough.

But I have to admit this didn't work for me, for reasons I'm not sure I can really articulate. It might be that the little bits all seemed a little bit too neat, too clever. It might be that the non-narrative pieces, pulled from history and culture in the fashion of a librarian pulling cards out of catalog, felt as if they were simulating meaning rather than creating it. Or perhaps it was just too obvious that there was a hand there, manipulating the pieces, putting them into places. I don't think the reason it didn't work for me is that its vision of Trump's election as a kind of ambient disaster already seems a little bit passe here at the beginning of Trump 2--but I have to admit, it didn't help. It seemed to me to capture a kind of woeful liberal handwringing and malaise that has aged very poorly. But even saying that, I feel like I might have been more kindly disposed to another version of the same thing, and maybe the reason it didn't work for me is that it just didn't work, no more no less.

Transcription by Ben Lerner

And now I felt that Thomas had arranged the exchange he was listening in on (but surely he wasn't listening), that my mentor was conducting this electronic opera, orchestrating these interferences, crossing wires, worlds. Impossibly thin glass filaments underground, underwater, in the lungs, in the cochlea, vibrating with the small waves hit them--You call this fiction, but it is more.

In the third section of Ben Lerner's new novel Transcription, a man named Max is describing his relationship with his father, a respected but somewhat eccentric academic named Thomas. Thomas, Max describes, grows sick during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Max is told by the hospital that he should say goodbye to his father. The iPad they use for these last goodbyes is on the fritz, so Thomas must deliver his last words over the phone. When I read this, I had to put the book down for a moment--it brought back so strongly the memory of telling my own father that I loved him over the phone. Like my own father, Thomas is too weak to respond, and it's unclear whether Max has been heard at all. Unlike my father, Thomas recovers somewhat miraculously. Though he dies somewhat later, the question remains: what has been communicated and how? Have the iPad, the phone, led to a true message being sent and received? 

Max's section isn't what you'll find in most summaries of Transcription, which begin with the narrator of the first section, the classic Ben Lerner stand-in, who has returned to Providence to interview Thomas, his mentor. The narrator accidentally drops his phone in the toilet, and is unable to record the conversation, which he is meant to write up, so he attempts to do it from memory. Later on, he confesses this somewhat sheepishly, but what he thought would be a funny anecdote turns out to enrage people, because the interview has come to be considered the (now) dead Thomas' last words. I will say that Transcription is not what I expected from this description: I thought we would get some sort of metafictional text, a cobbling together of reportage and memory, that asks us to comb through and interrogate it in order to separate the truth from falsity, or to show us that such a task is in truth impossible. But Lerner mostly plays it straight; whether the reported conversation is original or not seems not to be the question.

Instead, the novel seemed to me about the way that technology has shaped the way we communicate with each other, for better or worse. Whether the conversation is genuine or not, did Thomas' belief that he was being recorded change what he said? Can the medium, even when not in use, change the message? Lerner explores these ideas in a dozen ways, including the shame and frustration that the narrator shows in not being able to FaceTime his daughter before bed, nor let her know that he can't. These themes show up in the hospital iPad, obviously, but I thought they were most interestingly explored when, in the third section, Max describes the struggles he's had with his daughter, who engages in severe food refusal. The only thing that works, it turns out, is to let her watch YouTube while she eats. Is this a distraction? Or a lifeline? Can it be both? We all worry about the "iPad generation," of course, but even the technology that steals our attention, or worse, turns out to have its lifesaving uses. For better or worse, we're all wired now, and though we make a practice of lamenting what it's done to us, it is easier than ever to be heard. 

As with most of Lerner's books, this sounds a lot more simplistic in my rendering than it is on the page. I respect and admire his ability to explore the themes that seem so vital to us, and yet are so difficult to talk about; you never leave one of his novels thinking that it's not really relevant to you or the world in which you live. This one won't have the staying power of The Topeka School or Leaving the Atocha Station, but I think I'll remember what it expresses about our wired--or I suppose, now, wireless--world for a long time.

Emily Dickinson Face to Face by Martha Dickinson Bianchi

Her love of being alone up in her room was associated with her feeling for a key, which signified freedom from interruption and the social prevention that beset her downstairs. She would stand looking down, one hand raised, thumb and forefinger closed on an imaginary key, and say, with a quick turn of her wrist, 'It's just a turn--and freedom, Matty!' She read her letters there, never opening one until she was alone--not even so much as a note from a neighbor. Her loneliness has been much deplored; but where and with whom would she not have been lonely? her kind of loneliness was the gift whose riches she herself pronounced beyond the power of 'mortal numeral to divulge.' And what society of her contemporaries would have made up to her for the loss of that precious guest of her solitude she named 'Finite Infinity?'

It seems strange to even have a book like this, Martha Dickinson Bianchi's memoir about her famous aunt. We think of Emily Dickinson locked up in a room, never seeing anyone, never even venturing downstairs for her father's funeral. And yet, as Emily Dickinson Face to Face tells us, Emily was social, a favorite aunt and beloved family member that seemed to have been treasured by everyone she knew, even as they found her eccentric habits a little bit annoying. (As for the funeral thing, well, it also makes clear that Emily was devastated by her father's death, and perhaps retreated even further into isolation after it.) And yet, in passages such as the one above, Dickinson Bianchi--an accomplished writer and novelist in her own right--makes it clear that isolation and solitude were part of what animated the writer, and one feels the strong impression of a brilliant person whose self-sufficiency comes from an abundance of her own capacities.

Because Dickinson Bianchi was a child when she knew her aunt best, what we get most of is a child's impression of an older adult. Emily, as her niece describes her, was particularly beloved by children, and had a way with them, though it's a little like the way that children get attached to someone who remains a little withholding of themselves. The images that struck me most, I think, were of Emily walking to and fro in Amherst with gifts and notes. The notes, as Dickinson Bianchi describes them, were made of the same wit and cleverness as her poetry, as are the clever little letters she would write her niece, and especially the letter she would write to Dickinson Bianchi's mother, Sue, whom as we now know, was deeply romantically entwined with Emily. Are these little letters poems? Why not? I mean, are the poems poems? This is part of what I love about Emily Dickinson: her poetry flouts all the little fence-posts we put up around the entire concept of poetry.

Emily Dickinson Face to Face is a slim little vignette (it is short book February, after all), and so there's little here to really hold on to. Biography-heads looking for a close and intimate look at the poet might want to look elsewhere. But it might be enjoyed by those looking for something a little more like a poem by Emily Dickinson: brief, vivid, contradictory, mysterious.

Sugarcane with Salt by James Ng'ombe

Khumbo stepped into the September sun, now throwing its rays fiercely, but threatened by heavy, dark clouds around it. He knew though that the rains were still a month or so away, and that the bush fires must already have forced hundreds of mice from their underground hideouts into the hands of the scheming and salivating herdboys. The first rain, zimalupsya, when it came, brought with it an aura of ecstasy as expectant mothers rushed out in search of anthill soil which they sucked to satisfy the insatiable greed of the new life within them. Those who didn't have an anthill in sight--although they would not give up looking for this most treasured delicacy delivered by the spirits from underneath through the medium of ants--those who had to look for alternatives, went for the mudwalls of the house, kitchen or nkhokwe, and extracted a lump or two.

Khumbo Dala returns to Malawi from eight years in an English medical school, and finds the place deeply changed. The sugarcane fields that were once privately owned by small farmers have been swallowed up by large conglomerates, who no longer tolerate the friendly theft of a cane or two by hungry children. The school where he was once a student has become increasingly Muslim, and these changing demographics threaten conflict. His family, too, has changed, in ways he did not expect: his mother has given birth to a white child and split from his father; his brother has married a Muslim woman his parents don't approve of (who happens to be Khumbo's childhood sweetheart); the same brother has also gotten mixed up in the drug trade, running hemp. But Khumbo too, has changed. Not only is he now a doctor, but he has a white fiancee, who will soon follow him to Malawi. The two changes push Khumbo in opposite directions: is there a place for him, here, in the country of his birth?

These themes are, in some respect, a little predictable for a novel of mid- to late-century Africa. Sugarcane with Salt is often no more or less than what it presents itself to be; the prose is workmanlike, the story realist to the core, though intricate and interesting. The part I thought was the most engaging, actually, came at the end: Khumbo's brother, arrested by the Malawian regime, who seeks to make an example of him, commits suicide in prison. Tradition demands that Khumbo marry his brother's widow Chimwemwe, and become father to their young son. The fact that Khumbo and Chimwemwe are former lovers only complicates things, and it throws a wrench in his relationship with the Englishwoman Sue, who is already feeling threatened by Khumbo's attentions to a young schoolteacher named Grace. The three women represent different approaches for Khumbo, and perhaps might be thought of as traditionalism, moderation, and radical internationalism. I was interested in the way that, at the end of the novel, Khumbo's situation puts him at the heart of the competing pressures of a modernizing Malawi.

With the addition of Malawi, my "Countries Read" list is up to 115!

The War by Marguerite Duras

I couldn't stop my self--I started to run downstairs, to escape into the street. Beauchamp and D. were supporting him under the arms. They'd stopped on the first-floor landing. He was looking up.

I can't remember exactly what happened. He must have looked at me and recognized me and smiled. I shrieked no, that I didn't want to see. I started to run again, up the stairs this time. I was shrieking, I remember that. The war emerged in my shrieks. Six years without uttering a cry. I found myself in some neighbors' apartment. They forced me to drink some rum, they poured it into my mouth. Into the shrieks.

The first section of The War, Marguerite Duras' collection of memoir pieces about her World War II experiences, depicts the author in the war's waning days, waiting to hear news of her husband, who had been captured by the Nazis and taken to Bergen-Belsen. News is difficult to come by; it's all private whispers and hearsay. In her mind, he is already dead; and the death follows her around like another husband, always with her, even as it is not yet known. Miraculously, he's discovered alive by her friends in the Resistance, but in a deeply weakened state. By the time he makes it back to Paris, he's too weak to even eat--many returnees die, we're told, because their shriveled stomachs burst as soon as something solid is put into them. It's no happy homecoming, but something out of a horror movie: "The war emerged in my shrieks." What follows is a long and arduous process of getting him back to strength. At the end of it, when he's well enough, Duras tells him--and us--that she is, as she has always intended, divorcing him to marry her fellow Resistance fighter D. (presumably, "Duras").

What's funny about The War, which seems to have been cobbled together from several disparate pieces, is that it really isn't interested in the war's progression, but by its end. The war only becomes real, and most horrible, for Duras, when its most ravaged victims, like her husband, begin to return. The other two pieces deal more directly with Duras' experiences in the resistance, but they, too, take place toward the war's end, when Germany is already losing its hold on its possessions in Europe, and this gives the pieces a kind of bitter irrelevancy. One tells about an agent of the Gestapo with romantic designs on Duras; she goes out with him for months as a prelude to identifying him to the Resistance to be killed. The third is about literal torture: the bloody beating of a man expected of collaboration with the Nazis. There's a black humor to the single question he keeps refusing to answer: What is the color of the ID that let you into the Nazi administrative building? Finally, after beating him so badly he's likely to die, he admits that it was green--Gestapo green. Both of these figures, marked for death by the Resistance, have a kind of innocence and naivete that makes them strangely sympathetic, and the fact that the war is in both cases practically over makes their token stubbornness seem mean, vain, and sad.

Boy, Duras could write. The first section, about her husband's return, is some of the most effective and chilling writing I've ever read about World War II--which is maybe the most written-about event in all of world history, you know? I enjoyed all three parts, which I sense were never really intended to be grouped together when they were written, but it's that first section--the war emerging with the shrieks, the rum being poured into the shrieks--that I think will stay with me.

The White Bear by Henrik Pontoppidan

It is true that there would be times when his wild surges of blood subsided for a moment, when he, as it were, came to observe his own face--and looked away. He would then become almost afraid of himself... the sight of his own hand, still bloody from helping with the flaying of seals. Or his uncut, unkempt beard. The suddenly alien sound of his deep voice. Unbidden, visions of his grandfather's terrifying aura would visit him. And the mute silence the name of this "ogre" invoked. The petrified stare in his mother's anxious eyes on the only occasion she had allowed his grandfather's name to pass her lips.

The titular bear of Danish Nobel winner Henrik Pontoppidan's The White Bear is Thorkild Muller, a priest who has spent the bulk of his life preaching to indigenous Greenlanders. As a young man in Denmark, Thorkild is a wayward rascal who offers his services to the Danish in Greenland, thinking he'll basically fuck up his schooling so bad they'll never actually put him in a parish, but as it turns out, he's underestimated the inevitability of bureaucracy. He's a poor and talentless priest, but there comes a moment when he decides to toss away the proprieties of Danish civilization to live among, and like, the Greenlanders, even taking a wife among them. When he returns, as an old man, to Denmark, he has gained fervor and intellect, and even becomes popular among regular parishioners. But he's too wild for the Danish church, who essentially chase him back to Greenland. It's a slim, almost parable-like story, that pokes fun at a buttoned-up Danish culture and suggests that what the Danes perceive as Indigenous "wildness" may represent a truer and more genuine religion.

I'm a sucker for stories about the Arctic, and about Indigenous peoples, but I actually preferred the other novella in this small duo. Titled "The Rearguard," it focuses on a recently married Danish couple living in Rome, Jorgen and Ursula. Jorgen is a notorious painter working in the school of social realism, and Ursula is drawn to him because she admires both his talent and his passion, though she herself is the daughter of an bureaucrat who represents nearly everything that Jorgen despises. Like the young Thorkild of "The White Bear," Jorgen's red hair represents his fiery idiosyncrasy, and the reader has some sympathy with Jorgen's enthusiasm for tearing down the pieties of civil society in favor of a socialist utopia. But, like many would-be revolutionaries, Jorgen turns out to be a total boor. He can't go anywhere without making a scene; he chews out his fellow painters for their violations of his own orthodoxies. Ursula, too, often bears the brunt of his overflow of passion and vitriol; also like many would-be revolutionaries, he makes few distinctions among his targets, and the young marriage founders as it's just beginning. I found this the stronger of the two novellas because Jorgen is a really well-done character--Pontoppidan captures his proud, irascible voice in a way that made it more memorable.

OK, so I'm going to start keeping track of the Nobel Prize winners I've read. With the addition of Pontoppidan, I've read 59/122, so not quite half. I probably won't read them all, but maybe it'll be a nice way of discovering some new things.

Duplex by Kathryn Davis

In a contact dream the dreamer's mind got swallowed by the mind of another dreamer, usually someone who lived in close proximity though not in the same house; this phenomenon occurred most often in the very young or the mentally ill, whose brains lacked such walls as the mature brain erected over time, brick after brick of old passwords, the secret location of a soul, schoolmates' birthdays, how to sew a dress, how to recognize a prime number. People living in duplexes were especially susceptible, which was why the sorcerer had bought such an isolated house in the first place.

Kathryn Davis' Duplex opens on a sunny suburban street: Miss Vicks looks out on a street of cars, lawns, children playing, some of whom, like Mary, are in her class at elementary school. It's all a very ordinary scene, perhaps pointedly over-ordinary, and then a car drives by, and Miss Vicks recognizes its driver as the sorcerer who is called Body-without-soul. Also, he is her boyfriend. From there, the novel explodes, because anything is possible: the neighbors across the street, we learn, are robots. The youngest (?) robot, Cindy XA, is a friend of Mary's, when she isn't in her true form, which is the size and shape of a needle. Mary's childhood sweetheart Eddie has disappeared; later we discover that he has sold his soul to Body-without-soul (who has always, for obvious reasons, coveted it) in order to become a baseball star. And across the wall of the duplex, Mary and Miss Vicks share their dreams. Is this why Body-without-soul pursues Mary, as he pursued Miss Vicks, as she begins to grow older?

Needless to say, Duplex is a strange book. One of the strangest things about it, and one if its great strengths, is how it staggers forward in time. Miss Vicks grows old, dies, and Mary follows her, having had a daughter of her own. Death stalks these characters, as it does all of us, I suppose, but in each case death has a strange appearance. For Miss Vicks, for example, it involves following a wall on horseback, the other side of which can be seen but not penetrated, and ending up in a strange underground room. But Davis is canny about signifying to us exactly where and when we are; time moves forward in leaps and bounds, but she never quite signifies how far along its track we've moved. I suppose that's how aging is: we don't really notice it until a detail pops up to inform us that time has kept on passing.

Since reading Labrador, I have read several of Davis' novels, some of which I liked (Versailles, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf) and some which I really didn't get (The Thin Place, The Walking Tour). I feel like I've been chasing the high of Labrador all that time, and Duplex is far and away the closest I've gotten, though it doesn't (how could it) surpass that novel that first blew me away. It's so strange, so baffling and difficult to penetrate, that it's hard even to talk about. And yet, beneath the surface, it seems to me to resonate profoundly with much that is human: growing up, being initiated into sex and love, chasing one's ambitions, and then growing old and dying. Cindy XA looks upon these human acts with a bemused and disdainful eye, and the book does too, perhaps, as if saying: human life, isn't it all just a little strange?