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?

Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather

The tall black man turned to Nancy and put a hand on her shoulder. "Dey ain't strangers where you're goin', honey. Dey call theyselves Friends, an' dey is friends to all God's people. You'll be treated like dey had raised you up from a chile, an' you'll be passed along on yo' way from one kind fambly to de next. Dey got a letter all 'bout you from the Reverend Fairhead, an' dey all feels 'quainted. We must be goin' now, chile. We want to git over the line into Pennsylvany as early tomorrer as we kin." There was something solemn yet comforting in his voice, like the voice of prophecy. When he gave Nancy his hand, she climbed into the chaise.

Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Willa Cather's last published novel, might be a seen as a return to Virginia, the state where Cather was born. The story takes place shortly before the Civil War (Cather was born not long after it), in the household of Sapphira Dodderidge Colbert, who has grown old alongside her husband, a miller in the Blue Ridge mountains. As a young woman, Sapphira married slightly below her station, and the rural town where she and the miller live is not quite the plantation of her youth, and yet she maintains a full household of Negro "servants," whom she treats for the most part with kindness. The exception is Nancy, a young half-white woman, rumored to be the daughter of either an itinerant artist or one of the miller's own brothers, and who Sapphira suspects--wrongly--to be the object of her husband's sexual or romantic affections. Sapphira punishes Nancy in a lot of passive-aggressive ways, but Nancy's ultimate punishment comes when Sapphira opens her doors to a rakish young nephew whom she knows will not take Nancy's "no" for an answer.

I was surprised by just how heavy the threat of sexual violation hangs over Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Cather's prose is characteristically elegant, bordering on the plain, but in this case it conceals a deep and distressing sexual anxiety. Nancy is already marked from birth by the anxieties of interracial sex and rape, and Sapphira's belief that her husband's kindness toward Nancy is evidence of a sexual relationship shows just how intense those anxieties can be. Sapphira's solution is to introduce, even if by inaction, a greater and more predatory threat, as if to say, "Oh, you want to have sex with your white master, do you?" But of course, Nancy doesn't, and even if she did, there would be no meaningful consent within the boundaries of the master-slave relationship; Sapphira's antipathy toward Nancy reveals the mental gymnastics needed by the slaver to assign a sexual power to the enslaved in order to clear one's own conscience. Sapphira essentially targets Nancy for rape, and a suspicion that the book still believes in her genteel virtues may explain why Sapphira and the Slave Girl is so little read today. Sapphira's daughter, Rachel Blake, ultimately helps Nancy escape on the Underground Railroad.

Toni Morrison famously used Sapphira and the Slave Girl as a case study in her analysis of the white imagination; I haven't read that essay, but it's not hard to see where such an analysis might begin. At times the novel is surprisingly didactic, as when one character realizes quite pointedly that whether one treats one's slaves "well" is immaterial, that the system is fundamentally immoral. But it's hard not to feel that the novel wants to have it both ways, that it really wants us to admire and sympathize with the anti-slavery whites like Rachel, and not to be too harsh on Sapphira. It also wants us, I'd argue, to admire the hardiness and gentility of antebellum society, as when one of Rachel's daughters is killed by a diphtheria epidemic. The biggest flaw, perhaps, is that Nancy herself is a character that holds little interest, a passive recipient of sexual torment whose most developed moment comes when she must agonize over whether to leave the life she has known or light out for Canada. Whatever the promise of the title, it's hard to argue that both Nancy and the woman who keeps her enslaved have equal billing.

America, América by Greg Grandin

It is a maxim in both electrical engineering and international relations theory that power needs a ground. For a long many years, Latin America to the lightning-like United States: its persistent opposition to intervention and conquest, and its unwavering demand for the recognition of absolute national sovereignty, obliged Washington to learn how to discipline itself, to control its energies, letting its power flow more efficiently and evenly.

America, América, Greg Grandin's new history of the "New World," traces the history of both Anglo-America and Latin America together, instead of as separate histories. What would we learn, Grandin suggests, if we were to understand the forces that shaped the United States (and Canada) alongside the forces that shaped the rest of the Americas, from Mexico down to the tip of Patagonia? Should we understand the Spanish and English processes of colonizing the Americas as separate and distinct, or do they share certain important qualities that continue to tie their successor states together?

First of all, I appreciated the way that Grandin laid out the differences between English and Spanish colonization in ways that I have sensed but not been able to articulate. As Grandin describes it, as horrible and violent as the Spanish were--and they were very violent--Spanish colonial society identified a place for the Indigenous in its hierarchy, at the bottom, whereas English and later American colonies conceived of Indigenous people as outside the political order, thus needing to be either ignored or eliminated. You can trace a direct line from this distinction to the idea of mestizaje that dominates the self-conception of Mexico, in contrast with the reservation-and-sovereignty model of the United States. I was also very interested to read about how Spanish colonial society birthed the New World's first civil rights movement, spearheaded by Bartolome Las Casas and other Dominican priests. I had long heard of Las Casas as a kind of contrast to Columbus, and proof that it was possible even at the time to conceive of Indigenous rights, but I had no idea how powerful or influential, or, truly, courageous, he really was.

Las Casas' conception of Indigenous, even equal rights, were later picked up on by social reformers in the colonial Americas, like Marti and Bolivar. America, América does an amazing job showing how ideas of liberty and social change were shared by revolutionaries and thinkers on both sides of the Anglo-Latin divide--the book even opens by focusing on Francisco de Miranda, a Venezuelan who fought in the American Revolutionary War. In the crucible of the revolutionary 18th and 19th centuries, it was possible for people on both sides to imagine a transcontinental republic that would stand in opposition to the old ways of European monarchy. Sometimes that looked like Americans imagining a United States that encompassed Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, but sometimes it looked like a "Pan-American" republic that would be for all people. It's hard, reading America, América, to shake the idea that it was Miranda, Bolivar, and Marti who best epitomized the "Sons of Liberty" that we imagine in guys like George Washington.

Such Pan-Americanism failed to prosper in the United States, but it seems to never have really died in Latin America. In the latter portion of the book, Grandin describes how Latin America acted as a counterweight to the United States, birthing International Law and ideas of non-intervention and collaboration that would come to define 20th century. Grandin never quite spells it out, but it's easy to read a direct line from Las Casas to Bolivar to the Pan-Americans of the 20th century, who time and again did their best to force the United States to come to to the bargaining table and submit to treaties of peace and collaboration. Grandin puts heavy emphasis on a series of Pan-American conferences in the early 20th century that found brief success with Wilson and FDR, but later reaction produced the American-backed right-wing dictatorships of Pinochet, Somoza, and countless others.

One thing I liked best about America, América: Grandin skips over the stuff he thinks we already knows. The Cuban revolution, for example, gets basically skipped over as a footnote. Instead, we're treated to the story of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the Colombian socialist leader whose strange assassination (reminiscent, in its breeding of conspiracy theories, of JFK's) set off a violent reaction called El Bogotazo. I, of course, had never heard of that. Grandin does this again and again, treating lightly things he thinks his audience may know a little about already--the Civil War, the Republic of Texas, etc.--to focus on the things we don't. It's a bold strategy that asks a lot of his audience, but I thought it really made the book worth reading. 

Brent's Top Books of 2025

Another year, another list representing another pile of books I read and mostly failed to review. Which I regret every year, but this year in particular, I read a few books early on that I know I really liked but, sadly, I can't remember enough about them to say if they should be on this list or not. Maybe 2026 will be better?

But even with that caveat, it was very hard to trim my list down to the best books I read this year. My initial list of stuff I really liked was around 35 books, and I didn't read anything I really hated. My list this year includes a few new countries, some comics, some weird stuff, and lots and lots of great literature. Every year, when it's time to write these up, I look at all the relatively new stuff on my list, and think back to all the people I see online daily lamenting the lack of quality new books and, with all due respect, it's a skill issue. There's more beautiful, moving, funny, brilliant work published in the last 50 years than anyone could read in a lifetime. So without further ado, my best reads of the year.

Honorable Mentions:

Women of Sand and Myrrh, Hanan al-Shakyh

Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness, Jennifer Tseng

The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick

We the Survivors, Tash Aw

The Man in High Castle, Philip K. Dick

Territory of Light, Yuko Tsushima

The Hearing Trumpet, Leonore Carrington

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, Rick Perlstein

The Iliad, Emily Wilson

Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay

Best Books of 2026 in rough but not necessarily exact order:

Bone, Jeff Smith

If J. R. R. Tolkien had been a cartoonist, he might have written something like Bone. The entire work weighs in at a hefty 1360 pages, and every one of them is packed with Smith's beautiful black and white artwork. The story Bone tells is serious, dipping its toes in religion, colonialism, generational trauma, and dispossession, but you'd be forgiven for not noticing most of that on a first read. Smith somehow managed to create epic where most sequences manage a punchline and pay sly homage to the last 100 years of American newspaper strips and cartooning. A real treat.

The Scapegoat, Daphne Du Maurier

Du Maurier has much to recommend her, but perhaps her most enviable trait is the way she generates momentum from seemingly mundane situations, piling anodyne happenings and biolerplate plot points on top of each other until they assume a nature unlike anything else. The Scapegoat takes a premise as old as Shalespeare--what if a regular guy secretly traded places with a rich dude?--and takes it in directions no one else would ever.

Flights, Olga Tokarczuk

This is one of the books I really regret not reviewing. Framed by a narrator writing from a series of airports, it's a modernist-style work comprised of mini-essays on travel and place interspersed with loosely-linked short stories that underline those themes. But that doesn't do justice to the writing, which is beautiful, or the structure, that makes it hard to classify. Is it a novel? A short story collection? New Journalism? Maybe all of those, and more. 

Sun City, Tove Jansson

Another writer who seemingly never made a misstep, Jansson is always brilliantly funny and subtly pathotic, even, maybe especially, here, telling a story of a bunch of old folks who've moved to the liminal space of South Florida and dying or trying not to. It's got everything--a pirate ship, a Jesus freak, a pair of twins who die simultaneously, etc, etc. Quite a bit better than actually visiting Florida.

 

The Blind Owl, Sadegeh Hadayat

A bleak, cynical book, one of the most famous Iranian novels of all time, about a man trying to dispose of a corpse that he might've killed. Surreal, gross, poetic, a little scary, it's not like anything else I read this year, or maybe ever.

Lila, Marilynne Robinson

Possibly the best of the Gilead novels, Lila is the story of Lila Ames, wife of Rev. Boughton from Gilead. Robinson is, on the sentence level, one of the best writers I've ever read. Seemingly every page of her novels and essays contains a sentence or two that are perfect. And her stories, though not always neat or "nice", always give me a bit of comfort, even at their darkest. It says something that Robinson is a Calvinist and integrates it so beautifully into her work that I wish I was one too.

Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante 

And speaking of bleak and cynical, let's move on the Ferrante, one of the angriest and most honest authors I've ever read. A middle aged woman's husband leaves her and her two children suddenly for a younger woman, and she's left to pick up the pieces--which she's completely incapable of doing. Reading the summary of this book doesn't even begin to tell you what it's about. Perhaps my most harrowing read of the year.

The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño

I tried reading this a few years back and bounced off about 180pp in, when the story switches from a first-person narrative by an young poet to an oral history of the movement that poet was part of, Visceral Realism. But this time, after reading some of Bolano's shorter works, I understood what I was reading and it's brilliant. A sort-of biography of the two men behind the movement told entirely through the eyes of their friends, enemies, and predecessors, it creates an entire world only to ask, in the end, if there was really anything there at all. Also multiple people get stabbed for liking the wrong poets.

The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky

This was the first book I read this year, the only one I reviewed, and the one I've thought about the most. Easily the darkest of Dostoevsky's major works, The Idiot tells the story of Myshkin, an innocent, and asks the question, "What would happen if a human being was actually just like Jesus?" And the answer is, uh, not what you'd expect. More The Last Temptation of Christ then In His Steps, The Idiot asks questions for which there are still no easy answers, and asks them boldly.

And that's a wrap for this year. Thanks to everyone who reads this blog, even though you're mostly reading Chris's excellent reviews, and I hope you stick around for this year. I know I will.

Indian Tales by Jaime de Angulo

In a few days they started again, tras... tras... tras.... The trail wound in and out through slowly rising foothills. There were many outcroppings of rock, jutting out everywhere. Soon the party was strung out in a long straggling line. Coyote Old Man and Antelope were taking their time and bringing up the rear. The Bears were way ahead of them. And way way ahead of the Bears were the Antelope men and women, almost running in their fast electric stride. This seemed to be the only way they could travel, because they were desert people. At intervals they would sit down and wait patiently for the rest of the party to catch up. They just didn't know how to travel slowly. The Antelope children were the same, and Fox Boy and Oriole Girl had work to keep up with them, abut they were too proud to be left behind.

Jamie de Angulo was a linguist and ethnologist who spent time among the Indian tribes of California in the beginning of the 20th century. He was, apparently, an eccentric autodidact who went west to become, and did become, a cowboy, before turning his attention to the languages and folk tales of the area. Indian Tales is his version of the "Coyote Tales" that he heard among these tribes, sewn together into a single narrative that begins when the family of Bear, Antelope, Fox Boy, and the baby Quail set off to visit some relatives. Along the way they meet various figures from Californian legend, including Old Man Coyote, but also the Grass and Flint People, a Grizzly Bear, some hawks, Doctor Loon, and Oriole Girl, on whom Fox Boy nurses an obvious and impossible crush.

The tales themselves are a great deal of fun. They are recognizable to anyone who has heard Indigenous creation stories, which are often long, circuitous, and unpredictable. They've always struck me as different somehow, perhaps more episodic, than stories in European mythic traditions, and more humorous. People die and come back to life, animals perform strange and courageous feats, people are transformed into monsters, that sort of stuff. I was interested in the way De Angulo nests the stories, having Bear, Coyote, and others tell them to each other around the campfire. Are they telling legend, or in their world, history? I suppose both.

What's most interesting, though, is the way that De Angulo manages to seamlessly combine the traditions of Indigenous storytelling and modernist "Western" literature. You can see it, I think, in the romantic tension between Fox Boy and Oriole Girl, who keeps telling Fox Boy (who of course does not listen) that she's not interested in men. You can see it in the beautiful evocations of the thin Grass People or their enemies, the Fire People. You can see it, I think, in the skillful sketching of the characters whose personalities emerge through repetition and gesture: Grumpy Bear, secretive Old Man Coyote, petulant Fox Boy--who, true to the novel form, comes of age in the process of the family's long excursion. At the end, there's even some metafictional flourishes when Fox Boy and Oriole Girl discuss perhaps getting rid of "the author," and what might happen to them if they do. That shows, of course, that what we are reading has been crafted by a single craftsman, rather than the shared or repeated mode of the Indian legends. And it forces us to remember to take the whole thing with a grain of salt, too: Indian Tales is more fiction than ethnography, more novel than myth.

Ice Rivers by Jemma Wadham

The entwining of spirituality and water intrigued me. I was very taken by the idea that glaciers and springs were the realm of living goddesses with the power to cleanse and give life--for I had recently started to catch myself wondering, while trudging through the landscapes of Patagonia, whether there might be something more, something beyond what I could see, touch and sense? In these icy wastelands I had at times felt close to some kind of vitality that was neither human nor born of the terrain--a playfulness in the breeze as it ushered clouds up and over the soaring peaks, or the momentary warmth from the sun as it rose to quell dark, cold shadows, or (occasionally) an almost animated presence lurking at the fringes of a glacier. These were fleeting moments, lasting a mere millisecond, but long enough to spark a sense that, just maybe, there was a higher being at work.

Glaciers, scientist Jemma Wadham explains, are really "ice rivers": masses of water that move, slowly but inexorably. Their "snouts" may melt and stay where they are, or, in the climate change era, retreat backward, but the ice itself is always moving forward, though it may seem to stand still even as you are standing on it. It's easy to see why glaciers, which seem so much larger than we can comprehend in time as well as space, might capture someone's imagination. Wadham's science-book-slash-memoir takes the reader from the Alps to Greenland to Patagonia to the Himalayas to Antarctica, detailing not only the different glaciers found there, but the kind of research that Wadham has done, measuring the flow of water through the glacier and looking for small microbial life that might leave deep beneath, at the bottom of glaciers.

I did find the glaciers fascinating. The book is also deeply personal to Wadham, who braids the stories of the glaciers with her own personal troubles, beginning with the death of her mother and continuing with a series of headaches and blackouts that culminate in emergency brain surgery. (The glossy inset photographs of glaciers also include a pretty gnarly pic of Wadham's neck and skull stapled back together.) I don't know if this kind of book started with H is for Hawk, but it certainly reminds me of it. Wadham even describes how, for a long time after the surgery, she was unable to write the kind of logical scientific prose required of a researcher, turning instead to creative writing of the sort that clearly produced this book. I could have used either a bit more of this autofiction or a bit less, but I don't want to nitpick; in the end, Ice Rivers manages to balance well the small life of one dedicated human and the larger life of the glaciers.

The Names by N. Scott Momaday

The events of one's life take place, take place. How often have I used this expression, and how often have I stopped to think what it means? Events do take place; they have meaning in relation to the things around them. And a part of my life happened to take place at Jemez. I existed within that landscape, and then my existence was indivisible with it. I placed my shadow there in the hills, my voice in the wind that ran there, in those old mornings and afternoons and evenings. It may be that the old people there watch for me in the streets; it may be so.

When I visited Walatowa, the main settlement at the Jemez Pueblo in northern New Mexico, a couple summers ago, I told the guide at the visitor center that I was interested in the life of author N. Scott Momaday, who had grown up at Jemez. He took me into their small museum and showed me a huge photograph of Momaday's mother, Netachee, who had come with Momaday's father to teach at the Jemez Day School. A similar photograph, or perhaps even the same one, is printed in Momaday's memoir The Names, an illustration of the community that adopted Momaday and his family, inviting him into the place about which he writes, "My spirit was quiet there." As in House Made of Dawn, Momaday writes so beautifully about the landscape of Jemez, and it's clearer here than ever that it's a loving eye that produces such descriptions. It's the voice of a man writing about his home.

The Names begins with accounts of Momaday's ancestors, including his namesake Mammedaty, and Pohd-lohk, who gave Momaday his "Indian name," Tsoai-talee, which is derived from the name of Bear Lodge, or Devils Tower, in Wyoming. On his mother's side, Momaday describes a heritage that is part Cherokee but mostly white Kentuckians. His father's side is Kiowa, and here as in The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday writes with affection about his Kiowa family in Oklahoma. These places and heritages combine to make Momaday who he is, but not all equally; you can see that Momaday writes with respect and reverence for the Kiowa of Oklahoma, and with a mystic detachment about Bear Lodge, but much more ardently about Jemez. Between these there is a sojourn to Gallup, the colorful, largely Native city of western New Mexico, and Hobbs on the state's northeastern side, where Momaday's account of his life might be difficult to distinguish from any of the other children, whose big themes are school and sports, bullying and being bullied. This section contains a long section of stream-of-consciousness that captures the point-of-view of young Momaday, and is some of the memoir's most experimental and unusual writing.

What struck me when the novel turns to Jemez was the feeling that Momaday has of being an outsider. The hero of House Made of Dawn (and I did read much of The Names through the lens of this novel) is a native of Jemez, made an outsider by his alcoholism and the alienating experiences of war, but the novel is also interested in true outsiders, like the white woman Angela and the priest, Father Olguin. Here, as in the novel, Momaday writes of the Pecos Pueblo people who were given refuge at Jemez when their pueblo was destroyed. But only here in the memoir did I understand how much Momaday identifies with those people: refugees. The Names illuminates other parts of the novel, too. Here, for example, is an old and admired man named Francisco, who no doubt has become the Francisco of the book, and here is an account of the strange ritual where men try to pluck a buried chicken from the ground on horseback. Momaday describes it here as an ancient tradition that has degenerated, becoming a game for boorish young men; this really recontextualizes the scene in House where Abel kills the man who has embarrassed him at it.

More than anything, I thought The Names was beautiful. Momaday has a way of writing that feels utterly sincere. I guess it's not true that there's no room for irony here--Momaday's account of growing up in Hobbs makes great use of a child's narrow and self-involved worldview--but when Momaday grows up, or when he talks about Jemez, or the land, there's none of that, no detachment. I think of it as the prose of a writer who is deeply engaged with the world, and who speaks only when he has something to say. He really was remarkable.

Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke

Giles is not in possession of his murder. His murder takes place in a dream. The poetry and justice of it is a dream. How can you perform such an action and not be freed and transformed by it? The world is full of us, haunted by dreams of violence. Swaying like figures hanging from huge balloons filled with heat and air, blind to everything but the murders we commit in our imaginations, over and over again. You have committed your crime, destroyed those who have power over you, and now you are empty and dull. I wish you were dead. There's something too single-minded and logical about that perfect Oedipal crime, leaving out nothing, not even the mother, the agent, the function that was not fulfilled. Why can you not be a true murderer? One who finds his apotheosis, his fulfilment in his crime? Whose passions flower in the white serrated petals of his act? You stand there as a young cricketer. An ex-public schoolboy, an Englishman. Those images are more powerful than your despair.

Giles Trenchard is an ordinary Englishman of his class. His father is a solicitor, as his father was a judge, and he goes from the public schoolyard to serving his country when war breaks out in Europe. Through all these experiences, Giles is a dull sort of lump, unable to answer the questions in class, unable even to understand when he doesn't know the answer; he just raises his hand like every other kid. There's something off about him, maybe, but in the English navy, there seems to be something off with just about everyone. It may have something to do with the fact that people keep getting blown apart or having holes stamped through them, through which their entrails fall out. Wouldn't you keep your mind on something banal, like cricket? But through Dinah Brooke's narration of Giles' young life, other voices break in, the voices of a courtroom. They are discussing Giles, how he came to be the person he is, and we come to understand that he has, or will have, committed an act on unspeakable violence.

God, I love a nasty book. It's no wonder that Otessa Moshfegh wrote the introduction to this one; Lord Jim at Home is the kind of book she's been trying to write her entire career: bloody, filthy, and black-hearted. The target of Brooke's satire is not so much Giles--though it's one hell of a writer who can make a character interesting for being so uninteresting, up until the point, at least, where he kills his [REDACTED]--as it is the social environment that produces something like Giles. It starts with his very birth, when the narrator labels him "The Prince" and his parents "The King" and "The Queen," not because they're particularly powerful or noble, but because even a middle-class solicitor becomes fraught, as a parent, with the Oedipal drama of inheritance and disposession. Giles' upbringing is foisted off on a number of nannies and nurses, who are no more able to make a convincing human being out of him than his parents. Nothing in Giles' narrow-minded, bourgeois milieu can or should make a man of him. At the bottom of this family life, Brooke shows, are any number of petty cruelties and jealousies, beginning with his grandfather the Judge, who dies when his elderly pelvis is splintered in two by a buxom nurse he's seduced with promises of a legacy.

Among other things, I thought that Lord Jim at Home presented a really fascinating depiction of life as a seaman during World War II. At the public school, Giles' peers look toward the advent of war with a greed for glory, but when war comes, the seamen seem utterly incapable of really thinking of any kind of higher value at all. They're barely able to see or understand the violence all around them, which in Brooke's prose is so visceral--pun not intended--and immediate, as when Giles is tasked with cleaning his own friends' blood and guts off the deck. Is the war to blame for Giles' later violent act? It would be reductive to say so, but certainly the desensitization Giles experiences at war is part of a life that makes such violence permissible. The courtroom scenes are a farce, and at the end they devolve into something that resembles a fever dream; all they underline is that it's impossible to hash out, in a single room, the influences that have made one man a murderer and another innocent. And yet, when we appreciate the scope of Giles' life, cramped and malformed as it is, it feels almost impossible that he should become anything else. And in the end, Giles may face his own music, but who is there to pass judgment on the kind of cramped and malformed English society that made him?

The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck

If she'd gone downstairs just five minutes later, she'd have missed the entrance to the underworld, which would have trundled on its way, offering its open hole to someone else instead; or if she'd taken that step with her right foot instead of her left, she wouldn't have lost her footing; or if she'd been thinking not about this and that but about that and this, she'd have seen the steps instead of not seeing them. Even so, some death or other will eventually be her death. If not sooner, then later. Some entrance will have to be for her. Every last person, every he and every she, has an entrance meant for him, for her. So does this underworld consist only of holes? Is there nothing more to it? A different wind is blowing here. Is there nothing that could prevent a person from--sooner or later, here or there--stumbling right into it, flailing, falling, plummeting, sinking?

I started reading The End of Days just as some discourse was brewing about Hamnet on the internet: so-and-so said it was manipulative, another so-and-so defended it as an accurate picture of the grief of losing a child. Of course it's emotionally intense, the argument goes, losing a child is like that. I was thinking about as I read the first of five sections in Erpenbeck's novel, about a young woman in the late Austrian-Hungarian Empire who loses an infant child only a few days old. It's heartrending, and it struck me as utterly profound and sincere in the way that grief seems to gather in objects--the cradle, the sheet over the mirror, the everyday stuff of life transmogrified by grief into something else, yet remaining stubbornly itself. And in defense of Hamnet, which is not really what I want to write about, its best moments are reminiscent of that--empty rooms that were previously filled with life. The family in The End of Days falls summarily apart; the husband leaves, and the tensions grow between the mother, who is now only "daughter" again (wow) and her own mother, who is no longer "grandmother." And then the chapter closes, and the "Intermezzo" comes, and the child is revived: what if, Erpenbeck asks, the mother had reached out and simply placed a handful of cooling snow on the child?

In the second section, the infant of the first section gets a chance to grow up, but death is still waiting for her. In this section she will die as a teenager (bruised by love and entering into a misbegotten pact with another, equally bruised young man), but the intermezzo will come and revive her again. The novel's five sections go on like that, imagining the woman's next death: killed in Moscow by Soviet agents who suspect her for a German spy; falling down the stairs in her early old age; and finally, in a nursing home, well into her 90's. The point of this is all almost stupidly clear, but Erpenbeck says it so well: "Even so, some death or other will eventually be her death." And so it is for all of us. We know this, of course, but we don't like to be reminded of it. And yet I can think of few books who so profoundly confront us with an obvious truth we already know, and so profoundly.

One thing that really impressed me about The End of Days is the way that Erpenbeck makes each section self-contained, and yet somehow, part of the whole. Each section is narratively and, to some extent, stylistically different, and each contains its own fully developed elements while containing also threads that unite the whole. I enjoyed, for example, the satirical bent of the third section, which sees the woman feverishly writing down a defense of her activity in the Communist Party. In this section, everyone is described by initial, as in "Comrade O." or "Comrade Schu." or "Comrade H.," as one might find in the byzantine sectarian squabbling of the time. The fourth section is probably the weakest, though Erpenbeck writes about falling as a symbol quite stunningly. The fifth captures the now-old woman's weakening intellect, and the way that time might seem to unravel or deform for a senile person, in a really effective way.

And when taken as a whole, the stories tell a fascinating historical narrative, too, about the fall of European empire, the cataclysm of war, and the rise of Communism. We know, fascinatingly, that the protagonist's mother is Jewish but has hidden it when marrying the protagonist's father. This information becomes hidden even to herself, and we are permitted to know also that her grandfather died brutally, attacked by his own fellow villagers in a fit of violent anti-Semitism. This information is hidden from the protagonist's mother until she loses her child; of course, when the story is revised and the child revived to become the protagonist, that information never gets shared--but it hangs like a pall over the rest of the book. It's a subtle masterstroke in a novel that's full of them, and I have to admit that The End of Days really blew me away. 

Two Novels by Brandon Hobson

How do you lose a child to gun violence and expect to return to a normal way of life? This was the question I struggled with the most. My son was a victim. The officer who shot him--now retired--lived in our town, and there were many sleepless nights when I wanted to drive to his house and kill him myself. I wanted to hit him as hard as I could, so that he could feel pain. Yes, yes, I have always known grief is difficult and that forgiveness takes many years. I still haven't learned to completely forgive. I could only put it in the will of the Great Spirit.

I have reread Brandon Hobson's excellent novel, The Removed, so that I might teach it in the spring. I think--or hope--that it will hit the sweet spot for students: a book that is challenging in ideas, sometimes in prose, but mostly is made up of a kind of plain but sophisticated everyday language. It resonates, too, with topics that are on the mind of students today, like police violence, which it places in the context of the larger history of Indian Removal and dispossession. The story centers on the Echota family, whose son Ray-Ray was shot a decade prior by a cop. They take in a young foster boy, Wyatt, whose eerie similarity to Ray-Ray seems to reverse father Ernest's creeping Alzheimer's. Another son, Edgar, is lost in a fantastical "Darkening Land" of addiction and suicide, and where a sinister friend threatens to turn him into the bounty for an Indian-hunting game. What will students make, I wonder, of the book's mixture of realism and fantasy, and its refusal to cohere into something logical and explainable?

One thing I had a greater appreciation of this time around is the way that Hobson weaves the various timelines and narratives together. There are four third person narrators--mother Maria, sister Sonja, Edgar, and the legendary Cherokee rebel Tsala--and the story of each is punctured with visions and epiphanies in which the others seem to break through. This complicates, for example, the story of Wyatt, whom we are otherwise willing to believe is only strangely similar to the dead Ray-Ray. But when Wyatt's stories prove to have a kind of oracular insight, it becomes clear that we must take seriously the belief that Wyatt is Ray-Ray resurrected. I can already hear the students now--Well, is he?--but the answer, of course, is that he is and he isn't, that Hobson gives us a kind of Schrodinger's cat whose waveform threatens to collapse if you look too closely. This matters because the novel wants to give us models of resurrection and return that are larger than the realm of the materially possible. What "the removed" search for is not a literal return to Cherokee homelands--not in this book anyway--but some other kind of restitution or redemption that is not one-for-one. The last image of the book, with the family gathered for a memorial bonfire, watching a mysterious figure approach, underlines this nicely: is it Edgar? Wyatt? Tsala? Or somehow Ray-Ray himself? Yes, Hobson suggests, yes, yes, and yes.

The instances when Milton would wake in the middle of the night feeling like he was suffering in a bed of putrefaction, his dreams digested and visible as the glow of the school in flames, he could smell the sour gunpowder and dead bodies lying in pools of blood, their foreheads marked with the number of the beast while the rest of the students cried out in a panic, yet all he could hear were the voices of the dead buried in the land all around, rising out of their graves and asking him for an account of his decision to shoot and kill, and for the remainder of the night his sleep was restless and uneasy, full of their shrieking voices and hollow moans, because he worried about bearing the weight of all that guilt. In his notebook for English class, Milton had written down the following quote from Shakespeare: "Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind."

Hobson's new novel, The Devil is a Southpaw, opens with a note that the author has received a manuscript in the mail from a former classmate, or cellmate, having both been institutionalized in a juvenile detention facility long ago. The manuscript, which makes up the bulk of the book itself--very 19th century--is a novel with the same name by Milton Muleborn, and it draws on those experiences at the facility, which it describes as a kind of phantasmagoria of demons, witches, and sinister captors. Much of the novel focuses on Matthew Echota (the same last name as the characters of The Removed), a fellow student-inmate who, we're told, is the most intelligent and talented of them all, a gift for which he is sometimes praised by the prison guards, and sometimes isolated and brutally tortured. We intuit quickly that the author, Milton, is and has always been deeply jealous of Matthew, who it seems not only has a kind of artistic genius that Milton lacks or feels himself to lack, but who also had been dating his ex-girlfriend. Milton's jealousy and enmity toward Matthew is of the kind that only very similar people can share--both are sensitive, artistic, writerly souls trapped inside the harshness of the juvenile detention center--to the extent that part of me wondered if the two wouldn't prove to be the same person in the end.

Milton's detention center is a strange and frightening place, where a mysterious woman paints skulls at night and a freakish Dr. Strangelove type rules with an iron fist. Its cruelty verges on the fantastical, and the swamp that surrounds it seems to be filled with creatures and spirits. Parts of it, of course, are recognizable, drawn no doubt from the same experiences supporting troubled youth that inform The Removed and Where the Dead Sit Talking: the rancid food and forced isolation, the stultifying effects of institutionalization of childhood creativity. But in Milton's telling, these aspects become heightened into pure dreamland horror: the novel moves toward a shared escape, in which Matthew and Milton move through a literal underworld where they encounter, among other things, the spirit of Salvador Dali to guide them.

To me, the most interesting thing about The Devil is a Southpaw is the prose. I wonder how people will take Milton's Grand Guignol-isms, his general wordiness and clumsiness. To me, I thought this was all very recognizable. Though Milton is supposed to have written this novel as an adult, I recognized in it something I see often: the language of a talented and creative teenager who has limited control over his style and vocabulary. It's not supposed to be "bad," per se, but the language here is meant, perhaps, to show the fine degree of difference that separates the genius and talent of Matthew--who, as we learn, grows up to be an acclaimed but trouble painter--and the mere creativity of someone like Milton.

I can tell you that reading the prose of teenagers reorders your brain, and after a while you must take a break from it to regain clarity; I felt the same thing while reading The Devil is a Southpaw. It's a bold move, to write a book in prose that is ostensibly flawed in the same ways as its narrator. To me, the voice works as a reflection of Milton. What it means in the end for the novel as a whole is another matter--though Hobson make some gestures at other voices--a second half written by Milton in a more sober, reflective mode, and an interview with the adult Echota--but I walked away thinking that it all remained too claustrophobic in the end. There's really no getting around or outside of it--and maybe that's the point.