An Imaginary Life by David Malouf

We have some power in us that knows its own ends. It is that that drives on to what we must finally become. We have only to conceive of the possibility and somehow the spirit works in us to make it actual. This is the true meaning of transformation. This is the real metamorphosis. Our further selves are contained within us, as the leaves and blossoms are in the tree. We only have to find the spring and release it.

An Imaginary Life is the story of Ovid, the Roman poet of the Metamorphoses, who was exiled to the Black Sea by Augustus for being a little too cheeky with his writing. As Malouf points out in his afterword, not much is known about his life there, which makes it a fertile opportunity for the imagination. (This is, perhaps, one meaning of the title.) What Malouf imagines is that Ovid, despondent to find himself among rustics who do not speak his language, struggles to reconcile himself to his fate, until, when on a hunting trip, he discovers a feral boy in the woods. The locals know all about the boy, and Ovid convinces them to capture him and bring them into the town, where he forms a connection with the boy, teaching him the rudiments of speech. Later, when sickness strikes the village, the boy is blamed by superstitious elements, and Ovid and the boy run away, even further into exile.

I think An Imaginary Life is a pretty bad title for a book that ought to be titled something along the lines of Metamorphoses. As in the passage above, Malouf often writes beautifully on the topic of metamorphosis and transformation. There is the metamorphosis of Ovid into the new person he has become at the edge of the Empire. There is the metamorphosis of the boy, who resembles something like the halfway point of Ovid's characters, stuck between human and beast. But for all that, I was surprised how little An Imaginary Life was interested in making literary connections to the work of Ovid. The fanciful "feral boy" story might have belonged to anyone, and feels a little grafted on to the story of the great poet. But maybe that's the kind of critique that looks for the book that isn't there rather than the one that is. The book that is here is often lovely, elegiac, though I found it a little slow and at times bordering on mawkish. It's a genre of book that I really love--here I'm thinking of John Williams' Augustus, Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, Robert Graves' I, Claudius--but compared to those, this one felt very forgettable.

Entering Fire by Rikki Ducornet

Septimus, jealous of my love for plants, despised them all. He attempted to justify this hatred when he insisted that plants, the whores of the natural world, fornicate with whatever comes their way: the wind, bugs, bats, birds, bees, snails, slimes and even men. In fact, the beauties of Evangelista's Palace were far more promiscuous--if less adventurous--for they copulated with only members of their own species.

My son had a morbid hatred of females, and whores in particular. Whores, like orchids, are the female archetype par excellence, painted, scented, seductive. Beneath their masks, the women of the Palace were fragile, luscious, and unique. But the men who visited them were so blinded by lust they never saw what was there, only what was painted there.

Rikki Ducornet's Entering Fire has two narrators: the first is Lamprias de Bergerac, a Victorian botanist and world traveler who spends most of his life absent from his family in France, exploring the wilds of the Amazonian jungle, where he adopts the free-love ethos of the women at the roadhouse known as Evangelista's Palace, and eventually falls in love with an Indigenous woman named Cucla. Lamprias is a recognizable kind of 19th century adventurer, who approaches all things, places, pants, and pussy (sorry, I couldn't help it) with the same sense of gleeful adventure and abandon. The other narrator is his son, Septimus de Bergerac, whose resentment at being abandoned by his father curdles into a rejection of everything his father stands for. Septimus, in turn, turns toward the savage nationalism and racism that will come to dominate the European landscape in the early 20th century.

It's a bold move to start your book with the words of an anti-Semite. You have to trust your reader--and your publisher, frankly--intimately. The first victim of Septimus' anger is his half-brother, the son of Lamprias and a Chinese woman whom he brings back from his travels named Dust. This son is named, somehow, "True Man," and his beauty and symmetry are an indictment of Septimus' own physical ugliness. Septimus delights gleefully in True Man's ultimate destruction--hanged for a minor crime--but it's the whole kit and caboodle of his father's worldview that he seeks to ultimately destroy. We get to watch as Septimus' Nazis take over Europe, and then collapse; Septimus flees (where else) to the South America that his father had loved, like so many other Nazis. But this turns out to be only a pit-stop on the way to the Catskills in New York, where his father and Cucla have taken up residence, and Septimus--slowly disintegrating thanks to the syphilis he's contracted from the women he despises--sets up a final watch on his father. 

Like with her other (incredible) novel, The Jade Cabinet, Ducornet seems to be really interested in the particular shape and pattern of history. How did the Victorian era, with its interest in open science and exploration, curdle into the inwardness and smallness of fascism and Nazism? (Of course, the seeds of race science were sown beginning with Darwin, someone whom Lamprias much resembles, but the novel, I think, is as loathe to blame Darwin as it is Lamprias.) In doing so, I was really struck by how Ducornet identifies racism as something psychological, even psychosexual or Oedipal, the son striking out at the father who abandoned him, Septimus' dalliance with Jewish prostitutes (whom mostly he wants to, like, kick him in the chest). And Septimus' seizing on whiteness as a way to obviate his own ugliness, both physical and mental, seems to me very shrewd. In fact, I was struck at just how recognizable Septimus' racial resentment is, its essential smallness and pettiness, its need to be made large by associating itself with a larger historical movement, which, of course, is all imaginary:

Time is on the march and Time is on my side. Like fish and bread I am multiplied; the armies of Hitler, upright and invincible, fan out in all directions like the spoke of a wheel. And France--the France of philosophers, Protestants, dissimulators, atheists, heretics, impostors, the spontaneous, the autonomous and the perverse--lies crushed beneath this wheel.

Looking back, I think maybe I have not said enough about Lamprias' half of the book, which is as lovely and free-spirited as Septimus' half is unsettling and difficult. Lamprias, perhaps, is guilty of many things, including abandoning his family (although the racist nastiness of both Septimus and his mother makes it hard to think so), abandoning Dust and True Man to their fate in that horrible household, and doing as he wished. But Lamprias' adventures among the whores and cutthroats of 19th century South America seem to capture something Ducornet really admires about the figure of the Victorian adventurer. Lamprias' tragedy, perhaps, is that he simply lives too long, all the way into the 1950s--long enough to be hauled into an interview by the House Un-American Activities Committee!--and long enough to receive a kind of final bittersweet triumph over his son's revenge

Killing Stella by Marlen Haushofer

Stella had always been a little clumsy and shy, and even when she was cheerful, her regular, wide face was immobile. Then it blossomed from within to her lips. Stella had been very happy for a short time, but she was unable to learn the rules of the game, she couldn't adapt and she had to perish.

Killing Stella is narrated by Anna, a dissatisfied housewife whose husband, Richard, cheats on her constantly. She's reconciled herself to this life, which is mostly miserable, though she maintains her grip on family life by nurturing an intense attachment to her son, Wolfgang, who seems not to have much of an attachment to anyone. Another, younger daughter, Annette, is still too young to understand just how dysfunctional the family is. Into this world comes Stella, the teenage daughter of a friend, who upsets the delicate balance that Anna has struck: she isn't happy, but it might be much worse. We know from the beginning that Stella's visitation ends with her demise--killed by a passing truck--and Anna must tell us, by way of expiating her own guilt, an glee, how it came to be.

Anna's theory is that Stella was fated to die. She begins to waste away quickly in the household, falling into spells of depression and tearful explosions. Stella, Anna reasons, has fallen in love with Richard, and is tortured by Richard's lack of regard. Is that true? Or is it only Anna's projection onto Stella, derived from her resentment toward her husband's philandering? The trick of Killing Stella is that Stella herself is always something of a black box. Anna tells us that there was no other fate for Stella than to step in front of that truck, and the logic of this seems to emerge from the teenager's declining demeanor as well as a sense of Anna's own fatedness: she is stuck in this marriage, and anything that threatens to disrupt it, for better or worse, must eventually be expelled. No, the real central character here is Anna, whose conflicted feelings about Stella are terribly frightening. It's not suggested that Anna had any hand in the death, of course, but her claims to feel guilty are unconvincing, and her insistence that Stella's intrusion in their life necessitated her death only makes her feel, somehow, more implicated.

Even for Short Book February, this is a slim little book, a snapshot of misery and resentment that is incredibly dark. Unlike The Wall, which has become a book I recommend to everyone anywhere I go, nothing unfolds and no one changes, except perhaps for Wolfgang, who hightails it out of Dodge. The Wall is about a woman trapped beneath a glass dome, but the barriers that enclose Anna seem somehow even smaller, and more impermeable.

In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A. Waberi

But you, Maya, where are you really from? What woods did you come out of? Stone by stone, you build your own edifice. You've raced through your life with your elbows close to your sides without ever looking back. The result of the race: if you admit everything you owe to others, it's because you're also well aware that you didn't engender yourself, and to a certain extent you are still determined by your place of birth, your family, your culture, and your origins, since a generic, self-engendered human being does not exist. At least not yet.

In Djiboutian writer Abdourahman A. Waberi's In the United States of Africa, 20th century history has been reversed: the "United States of Africa" are a prosperous conglomerate of wealthy and technologically sophisticated states, while Europe and America have plunged into civil war and famine. French, Swiss, German, Spanish, Italian refugees flock to the capital of Asmara to find work and food, where they form a despised and unfortunate underclass who live and die invisibly. Against this backdrop Waberi tells the story (in second person) of Maya, a sensitive young sculptor who discovers that she is half French, and who becomes increasingly socially aware of the plight of her European kinsmen, ultimately fleeing to troubled France to find her birth mother.

Part of me thinks: what's the point of this? There is, or could be, a kind of facileness in simply reversing the polarity of society in this way. At best, it reveals the way our language fails at universalism and becomes absurd when its applications become reversed, talking about, for instance, the "warlords" of France. At its worst, it becomes a kind of easy joke, a "what if" repeated a couple hundred times. But I think that's all redeemed by Waberi's writing, which is clever and erudite, full of cultural knowledge and allusion that gets pulled apart and remixed in ways that keep the worldbuilding fresh and curious. (Interesting to see how, for instance, Black Americans like Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, Jr. remain part of the historical scene--don't get too tripped up on the "well, what if" of that--and become celebrated figures after whom schools and airports are named.) 

The second person narration keeps us at a distance from Maya that keeps the focus on the topsy-turvy world, I think. She never quite emerges as a real character in a way that might elevate the imaginative qualities of the book even further. And yet there are scenes of real pathos, as with Maya's disillusionment upon discovering her destitute French mother, who has little to provide her, a victim, like so many, of world circumstances, and Maya's flight back to the safety of Africa. Change the victims, let the exploiters become the exploited, and still the shape of the world feels tragically familiar.

With the addition of Djibouti, my "Countries Read" list is up to 117!

Zama by Antonio di Benedetto

Nature, as she exists in this country, is most gentle, and for that  very reason I'm at pains to keep my distance from her. For she is childlike and might captivate me, and in my moments of lassitude when I'm barely half awake she may bring me sudden, treacherous thoughts that persist far too long and give neither satisfaction for repose. Nature holds up the mirror of external things; were I to submit to her wiles I might recognize myself there.

Diego de Zama is a moderately powerful colonial figure in 18th century Paraguay. Unlike many of his fellow administrators, he is an Americano, born in South America, not Spain. His wife and son are back at home in (I think) Lima, while he toils in a relative backwater. He is professionally and romantically frustrated, obsessed with women of "pure" European blood, unlike his own. His amorousness leads him into several complicated relationships: with Luciana, the wife of another administrator, with Emilia, a peasant woman who bears Zama's child, and others. At one point, unable to pay for his room in the hotel (his salary from Madrid being humiliatingly delayed), he moves into the house of an old man where either one or two women are living. He grows obsessed with her--or them? The intractability of this mystery, punctuated by sudden glimpses of a woman at a window or at the end of a hall, is indicative of the strangeness and indeterminacy of Zama.

I read Zama at the beach. This was, I think, not quite the ideal choice, though some of the salt marshes recall the stinking swamps of Zama's Paraguay, which is, at the novel's opening, captured by the corpse of a monkey moving in and out with the tide. But I wasn't prepared for just how weird Zama is. I hate the word "difficult" when applied to books, because books can be difficult in different ways, but Zama is a book whose fundamental reality is subject to obfuscation and slippage. It's strange that Zama himself is an Americano, because he seems to have absorbed already a colonial's perspective on South America as a strange and exotic place where strange and mysterious things might happen.

One thing that is clear, though, is that Zama's life is a series of frustrations. He's entirely unable to get his request for a transfer sent to Madrid, and is thus indefinitely separated from his family and forestalled from professional prestige or advancement. His fellow administrators treat him with dismissal or even unexplained hostility, even going so far as to sic beggar thieves upon him. The final of Zama's three sections ends with him enlisted in a platoon tasked with hunting down an infamous murderer and thief. But Zama is the only one who knows that the murderer is actually one of the party, and the dilemma this puts him in--whom to ally with, whom to betray--is typical of a book in which the colonial apparatus appears more as a knot of shifting allegiances and alliances. There is no way for Zama, no path forward for advancement or even stability, and there is no choice that can prevent him from suffering the final destiny that meets him at the novel's end.

The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami

It takes about half a year to reach this "final conclusion," Nishino said with a laugh. It's like the laws of physics. Why is it that, eventually, all girls end up adhering to the same formula in their response, no matter whether they are chubby or skinny, laid-back or uptight, conventionally beautiful or idiosyncratically striking, pescatarians or red-blooded meat-lovers? Nishino inclined his head in wonder.

"Nishino, do you really believe that all girls are exactly the same?" I asked.

"I could be wrong," Nishino said leisurely. "All the girls I've ever known, at least, they've all been the same, down to the last."

Well, then, the girls you date must all be pretty boring, I thought fleetingly, but I immediately regretted feeling mean toward all the girls Nishino had dated whom I had never laid eyes on.

Hiromi Kawakami's The Ten Loves of Nishino collects ten stories, all about, or related to, women that have been the lover of Nishino. The women range in ages, professions, attitudes, etc. Nishino himself something of a mystery, a little bit aloof and hard to pin down. The stories, when taken together, only give one oblique views of Nishino, who never has the opportunity to speak for himself like the women do. But overall, there is a sense of someone who is magnetic and charismatic, but difficult to read, and someone to whom love, in its permanent marriage state, never seems able to attach. Like the women of the story, Nishino struggles with a single question over and over again: Am I really in love? Or do I just think I am? And if I'm in love now, when will I fall out of it? Or have I already?

Real love is the big theme of The Ten Loves of Nishino. I found this interesting, but perplexing: is "love," in its romantic comedy aspect, being satirized or undermined here? How interesting or meaningful, exactly, are we meant to take this question? My favorite of the narrators was Manami of "Good Night," who is not a lover of Nishino but another man named Yukihiko, who undermines her own relationship by insisting that Yukihiko has fallen out of love with her, until she ultimately persuades him of the same truth. This felt like a familiar story: a pair of people who end up convincing each other, by way of themselves, that a relationship couild never work out. But I do have to admit that when Nishino said that all women end up the same, I agree with him--at least in the context of the stories, where the women began to bleed together and get mixed up for me.

The most interesting thing about The Ten Loves of Nishino is what I least know what to do with: one of the narrators describes seeing Nishino as a young boy, suckling at his own sister's breast. He explains that she had recently given birth to a baby that died, and that in her mental distress she turns to him to relieve the horrible pain of her breasts filled with milk. "Are you in love with your sister?" one of the lovers ask, but we can see that whatever kind of love Nishino bears his sister is more difficult and more complex than the rom-com love he bears toward these women, less easily categorized and thus less easily understood. This quasi-oedipal relationship lies in the background of all Nishino's failed relationships, but how much it explains is entirely unclear.

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.