The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

I thought that I was beginning to get the hang of this. I had started by picking the wrong kind of father, but now I knew what to look for I could build up a collection of 20 or so. I felt ashamed, really ashamed of all the years I'd spent trying to identify the father who happened to be mine, instead of simply claiming the best on offer.

Sibylla is an American living in England. She's Oxford-educated, but her education has done very little for her in practical terms: she's got a job typing up periodicals like Carpworld and Tropical Fish Hobbyist while trying to manage her son Ludo. Ludo is what is typically called a prodigy: he begs Sibylla to teach him Latin and Greek at age 4, and soon he's learning Japanese, Icelandic, Arabic. Bored and poor, Sibylla and Ludo ride London's Circle Line with their stack of books, and the reactions they receive neatly trace our social expectations and anxieties about talented children:

Still he has been reading the Odyssey enough for a straw poll of Circle Line opinion on the subject of small children & Greek. 

Amazing: 7
Far too young: 10
Only pretending to read it: 6
Excellent idea as etymology so helpful for spelling: 19
Excellent idea as inflected languages so helpful for computer programming: 8
Excellent idea as classics indispensable for understanding English literature: 7
Excellent idea as Greek so helpful for reading New Testament, camel through eye of needle for example mistranslation of very similar word for rope: 3
Terrible idea as study of classical languages embedded in educational system productive of divisive society: 5
Terrible idea as overemphasis on study of dead languages directly and responsible for neglect of sciences and industrial decline and uncompetitiveness of Britain: 10
Stupid idea as he should be playing football: 1
Stupid idea as he should be studying Hebrew & learning about his Jewish heritage: 1
Marvellous idea as spelling and grammar not taught in schools: 24

The first half of the book is all Sibylla's; Ludo's thirst for knowledge prevents her from getting on the menial drudgework she needs to survive, even as she finds herself starved for the kind of invigorating mental work that she came to London to pursue. She drags a six-year old Ludo to a concert by a piano prodigy that goes on all night and is so absorbed in it that she doesn't realize he's gone home on his own until the concert ends. She forgets to take him to school for a whole year, and when she does, it becomes clear that school is a soul-killing process for the little genius; how can a single impoverished mother give a kid like Ludo what he needs?

The second half of the book is Ludo's. Literally, the novel switches from Sibylla's first person point of view to Ludo's, now 11 and possessing a working knowledge of two dozen languages, aerodynamics, Lagrangian transformation, and why not, judo. But what Ludo really wants to know is the name of his father, something the reader already knows can only be disappointing--Ludo's the result of a baffled one-night stand with a shallow hack writer.

Ludo finds it out relatively quickly, too, and goes to visit his father, now a famous (and terrible) travel writer. The visit is so enervating he hatches a scheme born from watching Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai over and over--literally hundreds or thousands of times--with Sibylla. He goes around visiting a half dozen exceptional men--a brilliant painter, a warzone journalist, a T. E. Lawrence-style adventurer--telling them he's their son. Most of them have a vivid enough memory of a long-gone affair that they believe him, but not all. In this way Ludo searches among several candidates for a father--in literary criticism, we call this a "Mamma Mia"--who will help him make sense of himself. I

The way I see it, The Last Samurai asks a question like, What is all this knowledge for? If Ludo's real father had been a genius, would it have proven that Ludo's exceptionalism is an innate quality, genetically inherited? (Of course, that begs the question, isn't Sibylla's clearly exceptional intelligence proof enough?) But Ludo's search for a spiritual father shows that what he needs is something else. The men he confronts are not merely intelligent but courageous and active, each in their own way, they've done incredible things. What Ludo searches for is a kind of fatherly guidance that will show him what all this learning can lead to, how to transform intelligence into moral living or public good.

DeWitt's novel, which I believe has gotten a lot of renewed attention after being republished a few years ago, was called the greatest novel of the 21st century so far in a Vulture piece. You can see why: it's both funny and brainy, pleasingly postmodern and playful with form, and much more complex than my flattening version above. It's a little saggy for me, a little too enamored with long passages of translation from Greek or descriptions of Bernoulli's principle, and I bristle a little at what might just be my own misreading that the book believes any kid can be like Ludo, if only they're allowed to be. They can't, and that's OK; clearly The Last Samurai believes that reading The Iliad is unquestionably good because The Iliad is beautiful, but the capability to do so does not by itself confer value on a person.

I found Sibylla's chapters rather chilly and Ludo's much more persuasive and warm. The best thing about The Last Samurai is that it's a brainy novel that's deeply concerned with why our brains matter at all, and locates the emotional drama in what we might call a life of the mind.

The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse

It has been well said of Bertram Wooster by those who know him best that there is a certain resilience in his nature that enables him as a general rule to rise on stepping stones of his dead self in the most unfavourable circumstances. It isn't often that I fail to keep the chin up and the eye sparkling. But as I made my way to the library in pursuance of my dreadful task, I freely admit that Life had pretty well got me down. It was with leaden feet, as the expression is, that I tooled along.

Brent gave me this book when I visited him in December. I'd never read any of Wodehouse's novels, but I know there are people who just can't get enough of them: the novels, the stories, the Jeeves extended universe. What is it that makes them so popular?

The Code of the Woosters was, for better or worse, pretty much like I expected: you have Bertie Wooster, brash and wealthy, always getting into scrapes not necessarily of his own making, and then you have his butler Jeeves, who is as wise as he is straight-buttoned. The novel sets up a ridiculous set of contrivances to enmesh Bertie, and then lets Jeeves devise the solution. I assume that is more or less what all of these novels are like.

In The Code of the Woosters, the farce revolves around a series of comical objects: a silver creamer shaped like a cow, a policeman's stolen helmet, a notebook written by Bertie's friend Gussie Fink-Nottle that's essentially a "burn book." Bertie's uncle covets the cow-creamer owned by his rival Sir Watkyn Bassett, but Bassett is a judge who has convicted Bertie of stealing a policeman's helmet in the past. In this case, it's Bassett's niece Stiffy who wants to pinch the helmet, and she wants Bertie to help, withholding the notebook that Gussie lost, leaving his marriage to Bassett's daughter Madeline in the wind, and--and, well, the plot basically proceeds from there. These MacGuffins are shuffled around in the possession of everyone but Bertie as he tries to navigate the demands of his uncle, his aunt, Sir Watkyn Bassett, his friend Gussie, Madeline, Stiffy, the policeman. It goes on and on.

Is it funny? It is funny. It crackles with comic energy, and the farce unfolds quickly and frenetically. I wasn't prepared for how much the humor depends on Bertie's voice, which is both identifiably patrician and endlessly inventive. Wodehouse really captures a highly mannered form of high manners, zipping through colloquialisms and slang that keep the narrative fresh.

The class politics of these books are interesting, I think. Jeeves makes me uncomfortable, as career servants in British novels and film always do, especially when they're depicted as being so wholly invested in their employer's well-being and happiness, as Jeeves is. But Wodehouse balances this by making Jeeves the wise one; Bertie is a mess but Jeeves is the one who always has the solution. The upper class doesn't come out of The Code of the Woosters looking very good, with their trivial obsessions and flighty characters. Jeeves' steadfastness and practicality are rooted in his position outside the carnival world of the very rich.

I liked The Code of the Woosters. I didn't exactly develop a lifelong addiction, like some people do; in fact, I probably won't read another one of these. I expect, rightly or wrongly, that they mostly all go the same way. But I get why it is that these books have been entertaining people for nearly a century.

Clean by Michele Kirsch

I want to get this clean right, because, while I cannot BE him, I still want to visit his flat weekly and make it nicer than it is already.  It is an easy gig and I always finish before the allotted time.  I love ironing his shirts with the special scented ironing water.  His toys seem to be in ascending order of year and popularity.  His Rough Guides are geographically ordered.  My trouble is this:  if you put things back in the exact right place, it looks as though you didn’t lift them to dust underneath.  Put the toys in slightly the wrong order and he will know you’ve moved them to clean underneath, but he will be annoyed if you put them back in the wrong place.

Michele Kirsch is roughly sixty years old and has spent most of the time since she was a teenager high on prescription drugs that she washed down with vodka.  Her reliance on Valium begins when her father dies and her mother falls apart, and continues through her anxious adolescence.  When she moves from Queens to Boston to, briefly, attend Boston University, she is high most of the days she spends cleaning houses to pay her bills.  After dropping out of college, she begins to build a career in music journalism – drinking and pills fit in with covering early 80s punk shows.  Despite her growing addiction and a general attitude of irresponsibility, she is successful, marries and has two children. 

Then she really begins to party, starting her days with vodka, blacking out from drinking on a regular basis, waking up on her living room floor most mornings.  She abandons her family to get high full time and struggles through a variety of rehab programs before getting sober and returning to cleaning houses for a living, visiting her children when they are willing to put up with her.

Kirsch recounts all this with honesty and an alarming sense of humor.  The book is told in alternating chapters, the chronology of her life interrupted by interchapters that describe the people she cleans for, their houses and possessions.  It is full of the kinds of crazy behavior one expects in the story of one who cares so little for sanity, and some of the anecdotes are entertaining – when she is working in the coat-check room of a punk club a man tries to check his passed-out girlfriend so he won’t miss the band, a musician she works for makes increasingly erratic requests (Get me 200 pencils!) that neither of them can remember the purpose of later, a music magazine's back issues are turned into furniture.  Kirsch is capable of making even sad or pathetic moments comic – she has to call the parents of a friend who has died and cannot bring herself to say the key words, repeating over and over that he couldn’t walk his dog that morning, somebody else had to walk it.  She also has a gift for capturing moments of tenderness – a boy on a bus reminds her of her son and she attempts to secretly straighten his collar.  

But there is a constant undertow of sadness in all this.  This is not the story of a fun, freewheeling rebel who went to far.  The cleaning chapters consistently show her comparing her life to the pathos and limitations of others, and coming up short.   Her addiction begins in depression and she struggles with anxiety and self esteem throughout.  Her husband and children are never really named and we see them slipping away from her life almost as soon as they are introduced.  The book is ultimately a redemption story – that is of course the subtext of the title, and her ability to handle honesty of this sort with such energy and humor is a kind of redemption.  But the sense of waste is never far from the reader and our happiness at her successful recovery is tinged with disappointment and frustration. 

Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality

[V]iewers found themselves in a parallel universe where political allegiances barely imaginable a moment earlier sprang to life: an administration that won an election through the shameless exploitation of the mythic black rapist took the offensive against stereotypes about black male sexuality; a political party that had been the refuge of white resentment won the support, however momentary, of the majority of African Americans; a black neoconservative individualist whose upward mobility was fueled by his unbounded willingness to stymie the advancement of other African Americans was embraced under the wings of racial solidarity; and a black woman, herself a victim of racism, was symbolically transformed into the role of a would-be white woman whose unwarranted finger-pointing whetted the appetites of a racist lynch mob.

In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" to capture "the way in which the particular location of black women in dominant American social relations is unique and in some senses unassimilable into the discursive paradigms of gender and race domination." In 1991 the Thomas/Hill hearings took place--with famed coke can, pubic hair, and Mr., ummm, Silver. And, in 1992, this book, a collection of critical essays addressing race, gender, and theory, "suggested itself," to use Toni Morrison's words, "to evaluate and analyze various aspects of what was and is happening."

As Morrison (our editor) explains in her introduction, "For insight into the complicated and complicating events that the confirmation of Clarence Thomas became, one needs perspective, not attitudes; context, not anecdotes; analyses, not postures." These essays, written by some of the smartest thinkers of the day, aim to provide that insight by deconstructing (I know, I know, everyone hates that word) the interplay of race, gender, politics, and power. All in the context of a Supreme Court nomination.

The collection is quite good. Morrison's introduction by itself is worth the price of admission, but almost all the essays were insightful and engaging analyses of the confirmation hearings and their implications. My favorite, by far was Crenshaw's essay, from which the block quote above came.

Crenshaw criticizes traditional feminism, and white feminists, for a failure of imagination that led to the widespread disbelief of Hill. She explains how the traditional discourse of sexual harassment is grounded in the experiences of white women, and this "grounding of the critique on white women meant that, in a sense Hill (and Thomas) had to be deraced, so that they could be represented as actors in a recognizable story of sexual harassment." But as Crenshaw points out, this narrative then fails to consider "[p]ervasive myths and stereotypes about black women," which play an important role in "whether black women's stories are likely to be believed" or whether "the insult and injury [black women] have experienced is relevant or important."

Against the conceptual difficulties of white feminism, Crenshaw points out how Thomas's supporters were able to weaponize the lynching trope--specifically the violated woman as justification for lynching. "Not only was Thomas suddenly transformed into a victim of racial discrimination, but Anita Hill was further erased as a black woman. Her racial identity became irrelevant in explaining or understanding her position, while Thomas's play on the lynching metaphor racially empowered him."

I find Crenshaw's analysis persuasive and illuminating. Being young, I did not really "live" through the confirmation hearings and did not learn of the "high tech lynching" comment until I watched Confirmation back in 2016. I was incredulous, and first thought the movie had taken some imaginative license. Crenshaw's essay (and the others in this collection) explain what this comment meant in the specific moment.

And Crenshaw's essay is only one example of the smart analysis in the book. The first essay is a letter from an older Black federal judge to Thomas, beseeching him to consider how the civil rights activists of yesteryear made Thomas's ascent to the Court possible. Another essay describes how "racism" was used as a speech act during the proceedings. Another had this title, which is so good I offer it in whole: "A Rare Case Study of Muleheadedness and Men: or How to Try an Unruly Black Witch, with Excerpts from the Heretical Testimony of Four Women, Known to Be Hysterics, Speaking in Their Own Voices, as Translated for This Publication by Brothers Hatch, Simpson, DeConcini, and Specter." (<--That essay was spectacular, BTW).

Anita Hill came to UNLV to speak earlier this year. The idea came up of the Kavanaugh hearings as being a repeat of the Thomas hearings, just without race. Hill explained how this idea was wrong. She said (and I'm paraphrasing), "Race was in that room in everything that was said or done, even if the word 'race' never came up." Reading these essays emphasized the truth of this statement.

Transit by Rachel Cusk

I said that my current feelings of powerlessness had changed the way I looked at what happens and why, to the extent that I was beginning to see what other people called fate in the unfolding of events, as though living were merely an act of reading to find out what happens next. That idea--of one's own life as something that had already been dictated--was strangely seductive, until you realised that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camouflaged their capacity to destroy. Yet the illusion of meaning recurred, as much as you tried to resist it: like childhood, I said, which we treat as an explanatory text rather than merely as a formative experience of powerlessness. For a long time, I said, I believed that it was only through absolute passivity that you could learn to see what was really there. But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality, as though I had disturbed a beast sleeping in its lair. I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.

In these sequel to Rachel Cusk's Outline, the narrator Faye--who you'd be forgiven for thinking has no name at all, being mentioned only once here and maybe that many times in Outline--has moved back to London with her two children. This is part of the rebuilding of her life after the catastrophe of divorce only alluded to in Outline, and she begins to rebuild quite literally, buying a shitty house in a good street and paying to have it renovated. The title Transit alludes both to the inexorable passing of time and the possibility of change, of being in one place and arriving at another, as well as the "transit" of planets and stars in the horoscope that might tell her what the future holds. The house, in a way that is obvious but compelling, becomes the symbol of change and its possibility: can you really make a good house out of a bad one, or is it a lost cause? And what do you do with the couple in the basement, who are so enraged by the sound of your transformation they threaten to spit in your face?

Transit is no less thoughtful, touching, or funny than Outline, but it's such a carbon copy in style and reasoning that it's hard not to feel a little let down. The methods that seemed so revolutionary and engaging in Outline seem a little more contrived and farcical here, for no other reason than they lack freshness. It's frustrating, for one, to see the narrator Faye receding again from the narrative. Like Outline, Transit is mostly made up of other peoples' stories, and Faye is so reticent to respond that the connections between other people and herself always seem oblique. And in Transit I also began to wonder what it is that makes people spill their guts to Faye, and how she only encounters people who are so philosophical and abstract. "I had found out more," Faye says, "by listening than I had ever thought possible." But when listening goes on so long it begins to seem pathological.

Cusk does throw in some interesting variations. I was struck how, in this novel, Faye is forced to "listen" through interpretive barriers, first with her Albanian builder Tony and then with his Polish assistant Pavel, whose English is even worse than Tony's. She gets a story out of both Tony and Pavel, but the tension--is she really getting the story, or is the process of translation (another suggestion of "trans-it") mucking it up--puts the narrative mode in sudden tension. Cusk underlines this moment by having Faye gift Pavel a Polish translation of her work, one that she mistrusts: "sometimes," she says about working with the translator, "talking about certain passages in the book, I would feel her creation begin to supersede mine, not in the sense that she violated what I had written but that it was now living through her, not me." And the couple in the basement flat flout the narrative mode most of all, because their unvarnished hatred for the narrator precludes them from telling any story at all.

Transit is a funny kind of sequel. Despite the suggestions of its title, it's hard to recognize any kind of growth or change at all, or even a forward narrative. No sooner is the house finished than Cusk whisks the narrative off to someone else's country home for the final forty pages, in a way that seems designed to frustrate our sense of the symbol's inevitability. The conversations are all about ways in which the characters have changed, but they themselves don't constitute change; I'm not sure the novel really believes in change as a meaningful concept at all.

Jesus Christs by A. J. Langguth

"I have come to die for your sins," Jesus told a stooped figure passing him on the road.

"Then what am I to die for?" the old man asked.

Jesus took a small notebook from his pocket and copied the question. "If I may have your name and address," he said, "an answer will be sent to you."

A. J. Langguth's Jesus Christs is a little like the Bible-as-Groundhog-Day: What if Jesus didn't come to earth just once, but over and over again, to live the same life and die the same death in a new context? And not just Jesus, but the whole entourage: each age has its own Mary Magdalene, its own Mother Mary, its own Peter, Judas, Matthew, John the Baptist, and John the Beloved. He dies, is resurrected, and returns--only to start over again.

It sounds a little like a science fiction novel, maybe, like A Canticle for Liebowitz or The Sparrow, or maybe an allegory meant to trace out a consistent theology like The Screwtape Letters. In fact, Jesus Christs often borrows the Screwtape image of heaven as a giant bureaucracy, where God is a distant boss and Jesus is just a cog in a machine--an image perhaps equally inspired by the capitalist Jesus of The Man Nobody Knows. But Jesus Christs is too scattered, too reliant on vignettes, to give either a full explanation of how these reincarnations are meant to work or a programmatic theology. Some of these vignettes are short and more humorous than profound:

A brazen girl possessed of seven devils was brought before Jesus to be cured. "I am going to cast out those seven devils from you," he said. 

"May I ask you for a favor?" She spoke impudently. 

"What is it?" 

"Cast out six."

But others are speculative fiction in a literal sense sense; they give a sense of what Jesus might have been, which is really something incredible in a world that is consistently convinced about what Jesus was. In one longer scene, Peter pretends to be Jesus at Gethsemane and is killed in his place, which transforms his denial of Christ into a protective act. In another, Jesus goes into the desert where he meets a tempter he assumes to be Satan, but who really turns out to be another Christ--who, of course, assumed he was Satan as well. In another, Jesus is grilled by a Nazi officer on his way to the gas chamber:

"So I am to be killed as a Jew." Jesus thought of the thousands of men who had preceded him into the death  chambers. "Then I have failed."

"Even death must be on your terms?"

"My life follows a formula. In this age of science that's become hard somehow for men to comprehend." Jesus felt his legs begin to tremble, as they sometimes did, and he held the soles of his feet squarely to the floor. The next sign was often a tic at the corner of his eye. He began to squint slightly to cover that spasm if it appeared. "There is a pattern for the Messiah that I must match, and men must feel threatened enough by my message to kill me to silence it. Otherwise I am no savior. I become only a man of the kind you prize so highly--living his own life, dying his own death."

These stories, through their infinite variation, try to cut the Christ story down to its essentials, and therefore ask the question, what are the essentials? Judas always betrays, but can betrayal be heroism? Jesus dies, but for what end? Langguth's Jesus, even in his various incarnations, is beset with anxieties about his role and a suspicion of his own inadequacy. He's trapped in a recurring drama from which there is no escape, and for which there seems to be diminishing returns.

In the final section of the novel, Jesus has disappeared. His disciples--Martha, Mary, Judas, Thomas, Matthew, John, even Lazarus, now a little boy--have taken up squatting in an abandoned home like a commune. Supposedly Jesus comes into the house after everyone has gone to sleep, leaves money for the household, but vanishes before they wake up, and the disciples must learn to keep their house going while they wait for Christ to return. In the basement, Judas the inventor has perfected a serum that will grant immortality, which he uses on the boy Lazarus after an accident.

"I am Jesus then." Thomas hooked his thumbs into his belt, and his crisp white shirt bulged out below his vest. "Except for what Judas did tonight, I could have gone on forever trying to recapture the faith I had lost. I'd be born again, rage against God's silence and die. And in the hearts of a few men, my anguish would continue to ignite small fires. Even when doubts overcame me, I could go on because there was no question more important. Tonight Judas has made no question less important."

In this scene Langguth manages to make a very banal question--what do we need religion for in a scientific age?--worth paying attention to again. If Jesus must be reincarnated for each generation, when do we reach a point where He's not needed anymore? And what do we do when He turns his face away, and we have to take his place, only to be met with the same doubts and fears that preoccupied Jesus, in Langguth's version? Jesus Christs is an elegy for Jesus in the modern world, torn equally between believing that He's no longer needed and desperate for his return.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter

Granite walls, whirpools, stars are things. None of them is death, nor the image of it. Death is death, said Miranda, and for the dead it has no attributes. Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a particular lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquires of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied on nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live. This fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction, to survive and to be in its own madness of being, motiveless and planless beyond that one essential end. Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said. Trust me. I stay.

In the title novella of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Miranda is a young small-town journalist who's sick of World War I. Suited thugs show up at her newsroom to berate her for being the only one there not to buy Liberty Bonds; before the third act of a play (she's a theater critic), the entire cast sings propaganda songs about the Hun in front of an oversized flag. But more importantly, she's recently begun to see Adam, who is about to enter the army, and the certainty of Adam's violent death casts a pall over everything. Their relationship, too young to turn to sentimentality, takes on a heedless and ironic cast; it becomes a long mordant joke.

But the real enemy in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" isn't the war: it's the Spanish Flu. Miranda feels constantly "off," a sensation that's enmeshed with her expectation of doom for herself and Adam, but it's not just existential; she really is sick. When the flu begins to ravage her, Adam takes care of her, but she recedes into a foggy world of sickness. This extended scene, in which Porter captures the associative, illogical, luminous feeling of sickness, is some really bravura writing; just look at the passage quoted above. Sickness pares away everything: work, love, even the self, or the things that we believe are the self, leaving behind the "hard unwinking angry point of life" that is ourselves unmediated. When she comes out of the fog, Miranda learns that Adam has died of the flu while at base camp, though it seems almost certain that she's the one that gave it to him.

What's it like to read "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" in a pandemic? Unlike The Plague, where the doctor stands at arm's length from the psyche of the sick, it gives the reader a persuasive sense of what it really must be like to be badly sick. I haven't read anything like it. But there's something recognizable, too, in the way that the whole world around Miranda is so wrapped up in war that there is no time or thought for sickness. Our social order is arranged to conquer enemies with guns, by ostracism, hate, militarism, but it doesn't know what to do with an inhuman virus. That--and not just incompetence--is behind the phrase "Kung Flu." If we can turn the virus into a foreign threat, we think we might know how to deal with it, by building walls and dropping bombs. We're ready to make the sacrifice of war but we have no idea how to be like Adam, and sacrifice ourselves for the care of others. "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" made me feel despair to see how little things have changed.

The title story of Pale Horse, Pale Rider is actually the last of three combined novellas, and the best. The other two are "Old Mortality," a story (also about Miranda, though not in any important way) about two girls in a genteel Texas family who learn to deconstruct the romantic myths of their family, a legend about their doomed cousin Amy and her husband Gabriel who shot a man in a duel for her honor. The middle one, "Noon Wine," is about a laconic Norwegian farmhand who comes to work on a small Texas farm and stays for years before a visitor comes to find him, claiming he's an insane murderer on the loose. What drives that story is actually the guilt of the farmer, who kills the bounty hunter because he fears for the life of the farmhand.

The novellas of Pale Horse, Pale Rider are death-haunted. In "Old Mortality," the stories that grow up around death must be punctured to see it plainly for what it is. In "Noon Wine," Porter's interested in the way that guilt over a man's death, because of its finality, can never really be assuaged or divested. In "Pale Horse," Miranda imagines in a dream that the pale rider of Revelation follows her to the stables, where he saddles a pale horse of his own and follows her down the bridle path. You can't outrun it, Porter seems to say--but you might not recognize it when it arrives.

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

As we decided where to meet, I looked up at the window. The sky outside was a dull gray. Waves of clouds were being pushed around by the wind with amazing force. In this world there is no place for sadness. No place; not one.

Two years ago, at 11:00am, I got a phone call from my dad, telling me that my Aunt Rhonda and her husband, Ted, had been in a car crash and died instantly. I'll never forget that moment, but I often feel like I can't remember that day at all. How did I feel? Shocked. What did I do? Collapse into a chair and not move. What happened the next day? The next? How did I grieve? Slowly and awkwardly and in unexpected ways. In some ways, Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen is about the long walk in the days and weeks after unexpected loss, the ambiguity of grief, the difficulty and desirability of moving on.

The novel is really made up of two novellas, the titular Kitchen and the shorter Moonlight Shadow. Both are told from the perspective of a young Japanese girl, both are in a (mostly) realist mode, and both are about death and the aftermath. These books aren't really plotty but I'm going to fully spoil them below.

In Kitchen, Mikage's grandmother has died, and she moves in with the Tanabes, son Yuichi and mother Eriko. Eriko is what we'd now call trans, I think, or at least non-binary:

After my real mother died, Eriko quit her job, gathered me up, and asked herself, ‘What do I want to do now?’ What she decided was, ‘Become a woman.’ She knew she’d never love anybody else. She says that before she became a woman she was very shy. Because she hates to do things halfway, she had everything ‘done,’ from her face to her whatever, and with the money she had left over she bought that nightclub. She raised me a woman alone, as it were.” He smiled.

She's a loving, kind presence in the household and when she's killed by a stalker at the nightclub where she works, Mikage is forced to deal with both her grandmother and surrogate mother's deaths. 

In Moonlight Shadow, Satsuki, a college-aged girl, is reeling after the death of her boyfriend Hitoshi, who died along with his brother Hiiragi's girlfriend, in, yeah, an automobile accident. She meets a mysterious woman named Uraru while staring out at the river, and at the end of the novella, has a vision of her boyfriend waving goodbye before he fades away.

The writing throughout is simple but moving. A couple excerpts I really loved:

I understood what she was trying to say, and I remember thinking, listlessly, is this what it means to be happy? But now I feel it in my gut. Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated—defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Still, to cease living is unacceptable.

And this, about greatness:

Truly great people emit a light that warms the hearts of those around them. When that light has been put out, a heavy shadow of despair descends. Perhaps Eriko’s was only a minor kind of greatness, but her light was sorely missed.

6 months ago, on the 18 month anniversary of my Aunt's death, I had a dream where I met her and told her how much I missed her. She got to say hello to my youngest, Samuel, who never had a chance to meet and I was hugging her and sobbing when I woke up. So many sections of Kitchen resonated so perfectly with my experience, I could hardly help but love it. As David Foster Wallace said, good fiction makes us feel less alone. Maybe experiencing death, sadness, and progression through the eyes of others is the only way we can really lay claim to our own lives.

For waving goodbye, I thank you.

Shardik by Richard Adams

Ah, Lord Shardik: supreme, divine, sent by God out of fire and water: Lord Shardik of the Ledges! Thou who dist wake among the trepsis in the woods of Ortelga, to fall pray to the greed and evil in the heart of Man! Shardik the victor, the prisoner of Bekla, lord of bloody wounds: thou who didst cross the plain, who didst come alive from the Streel, Lord Shardik of forest and mountain, Shardik of the Telthearna! Hast thou, too, suffered unto death, like a child helpless in the hands of cruel men, and will death not come? Lord Shardik, save us! By thy fiery and putrescent wounds, by thy swimming of the deep river, by the drugged trance and savage victory, by thy long imprisonment and weary journey in vain, by thy misery, pain and loss and the bitterness of thy sacred death; save thy children, who fear and know thee not! By the fern and rock and river, by the beauty of the kynat and the wisdom of the Ledges, O hear us, defiled and lost, we who wasted thy life and call upon thee! Let us die, Lord Shardik, let us die with thee, only save thy children from this wicked man!

Kelderek is a lonely hunter, considered by the other Ortelgans to be something of a simpleton because of his habit of playing games with children. That all changes when a fire on the other side of the Telthearna, the great river in which Ortelga is an island, drives an enormous bear into the woods. The bear saves Kelderek's life from a marauding leopard, then disappears, but the priestesses on the outpost of Quiso are certain that what Kelderek has seen is the reappearance of Lord Shardik, the legendary bear who is the Power of God.

Honestly, I expected Shardik to be about bears the way that Watership Down, also by Richard Adams, is about rabbits. In Watership, Adams humanizes the rabbits, not by forcing them into human behavior but interpolating the behavior of rabbits into human frameworks of emotion and cognition. But the great bear, Lord Shardik, cannot be understood through human paradigms. Shardik is a bear, and he does what bears do; he is as likely  to reach out a claw and maim or kill his worshippers as anyone else. Like Aslan from C. S. Lewis' Narnia novels, he is a representation of Christ, as well as other notions of the divine, but more convincing in that, like both God and wild animals, he remains outside human understanding.

What Shardik does have in common with Watership Down is the thoughtfulness and attention with which it constructs a fictional religion. In Watership, the rabbit's religion focuses on the legendary rabbit El-ahrairah, who is a trickster figure like you might find in traditional North American or African religions. Shardik, by contrast, is Abrahamic in his immense power and his moral imprimatur; the conflict of the novel, at least at first, is between those who believe they can use Shardik's power and those who believe they must follow the lead of Shardik. Kelderek, refusing the wisdom of the priestess known as the Tuginda, falls in with a nationalist baron named Ta-Kominion who believes that Shardik has come to free them from the imperial rule of the city of Bekla.

For a while, Ta-Kominion's beliefs are validated: Shardik helps the Ortelgans to rout the superior Beklan forces in battle, and Kelderek, as the priest of the bear, becomes the king of Bekla. (Adams smartly avoids all the Game of Thrones-style political machinations, jumping five years from the victory of Shardik over the Beklans to the height of Kelderek's power.) But Shardik wastes listlessly away in a cage in the Beklan palace, and Kelderek, we learn, has let the child slave trade prosper as an expedient to defeat the remaining Beklan rebels. It's as good an image as I've ever seen of the bankruptcy of religious nationalism, which uses and abuses the divine as a pretext for earthly power.

Eventually the rebels siege the palace and free Shardik, whom Kelderek follows into the vast wilderness. Following Shardik depletes him mentally, spiritually, and physically, and then he finds himself captured by one of the very slavers who has prospered under his rule. He comes face to face with the cruelty he has allowed, and it leads him to the point of death until Shardik returns to wreak a final judgment of divine wrath. In the end of the novel, the cult of Shardik has transformed into an ideology that believes children must be protected at all costs. Though the shape of the novel makes sense, I was less interested in this widescale transformation than in the specific journey of Kelderek, who must be broken in order to fully realize what it means to be a follower of Shardik. Whether this is a Christian allegory only, I'm not sure, but I do know that Kelderek's refrain, "I offer you my life, Lord Shardik," sounds a lot like "Whoever loses his life for my sake will save it."

I'm not a huge fantasy reader, but I think religion in fantasy novels often tends to be silly. Shardik is a fun novel, that ought to please readers who want adventure above all, or skillful world building. But I appreciated the seriousness and the thoughtfulness behind the book's ideas about religion, which, like El-Ahrairah in Watership Down, are both strange and familiar.

The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

Change the world but keep bits of it the way I like it for myself--who wouldn't make the world over if it were to be as easy as that. To keep anything the way you like it for yourself you have to have the stomach to ignore--dead and hidden--whatever intrudes. Those for whom life is cheapest recognize that. Up at the compound, Jacobus and his crowd. The thousands in that location. Face down under the mud somewhere, and cows trample and drop their pats overhead, the dry reeds have fallen like rushes strewn to cover, it's all as you said when you suggested: Why not just leave it as it is?

The Conservationist begins with a body. An unknown black man is found in one of the pastures of the farm belonging to Mehring, a wealthy businessman in the metal industry. Mehring's hard-working foreman Jacobus discovers the body, but it's the Boer police who respond by burying the man in Mehring's pasture, supposedly until they can come get it later, but they never do.

Mehring is a "master of the universe" type--a man whose wealth is so large he can do basically whatever he wants. He has bought the farm principally as a love nest, but also to scratch a kind of itch that only the rich who live lightly on the land can have. His wife has left him and moved to America, his son doesn't want to come home, and his mistress, a leftist radical, has fled to Namibia. Mehring can fly to Japan at a moment's notice on the flimsiest of pretexts, but he has no home in South Africa the way that Jacobus and the rest of his crew do.

Even as he buys it, he knows the farm will fail to grant him any kind of meaningful tenure on the land--like the protagonists of July's People and Burger's Daughter, Mehring has an instinctive sense that the time of white supremacy in South Africa is close to an end, and he will soon be dispossessed. So it's no surprise that the farm seems to refuse his attempts to cultivate it. Fire breaks out, then a flood, and at the end of the book the body of the dead man, the symbol of the trauma that will not remain hidden forever, floats up through the mud to the surface. At the end, while Mehring imagines his own death, unloved and unremembered, Jacobus and the others rebury the murdered man--a stranger, but a black stranger--in a ceremony of remembrance and love. In doing so they make it clear that no matter whose name is on the deed, the farm belongs truly to them.

The Conservationist is a bit more experimental than the other novel's I've read of Gordimer's. Mehring's sections are mostly stream-of-consciousness, hopping from one thought to another and dismissive of chronological time (when does the mistress flee back to Namibia, exactly?). It works, especially as an image of a man who has everything but cannot escape the insecurity of his own inner world. But I much preferred the straightforward sections among Jacobus and the other workers on the farm, or the Indian shopowners along the country street, whose stories are told with a working-class realism that contrasts the rootlessness and aimlessness of Mehring's narrative.

Like July's People and Burger's Daughter, The Conservationist is deeply skeptical about any kind of racial reconciliation in South Africa. None of these books present an image of white, colored, and black South Africans being able to communicate with each other in a meaningful way, and each has a kind of apocalyptic vision of a South Africa that is reclaimed by indigenous people, probably violently. Of course, Gordimer lived well into the 21st century and wrote several books after the end of apartheid. I'm very curious to read one of those books--did Gordimer still believe in the revolution to come? Who's in the helicopter at the end of July's People--and does Mehring ever get chased off "his" farm?

Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar

I was suddenly aware of his eyes in the portrait: you know how it is when you feel you're the focus of somebody's attention--you immediately glance up. There was no hint of embarrassment. Nor even of amusement. I wouldn't have wanted either. But was there--yes?--a look of somehow even greater attachment?

I felt that anyway he always watched over me and protectively followed my every move. Yet was there now something marginally more pronounced about the quality of his concern? Marginally more profound?

What is madness? The seniors in my fiction writing class love to write about it. Mostly, they use it as an excuse to have a character do or say anything without having to dwell on the question of motivation. Why does she stab him in the bodega? Well, she went insane. That's all there is to it. But mental illness isn't like that; it isn't the obliteration of the ego, replaced by quantum randomness. The mentally ill think and feel, and the things they think and feel are not so different than what anyone else feels, though exaggerated or unmediated by social context.

Wish Her Safe at Home is a dark farce about a woman on the road to insanity that understands how to present the interior version of what madness really looks like. I don't mean that it's particularly woke about mental illness; it's a lot closer to the Jane Eyre mode of grand Gothic madness than that, but that it presents a convincing narrative version of what it might be like to go insane and why, which is no easy feat.

At the beginning of the novel, Rachel Waring is a middle-aged woman living in London whose aunt leaves her a house in Bristol. Rachel, unsatisfied with her relative loneliness, the drudgery of her job and living with a roommate, jumps at the chance to reinvent herself in Bristol. Even before she moves, it's easy to see something unsettling about her personality: she spins elaborate fantasies about marrying the handsome pharmacist at the drugstore, and then gets disproportionately upset when she finds out he's married. We pick up through subtle context clues that her interlocutors are a little weirded out by her irreverence and optimism in a way she never picks up on. When the bank sends her a letter about the fact that her checking account as run out of money, she blithely ignores it.

In Bristol, Rachel's eccentricities become pathological. Her aunt's historic home, she's told, was once owned by an abolitionist ally of William Wilberforce named Horatio Gavin. She becomes obsessed with Gavin, buys a portrait of his likeness--the novel suggests it's a random likeness she's convinced herself is Gavin--and begins to write a novel about him. Soon, she's introducing him to house guests as her lover and husband.

What's so clever about Wish Her Safe at Home is the way that it keeps us firmly in Rachel's first person point-of-view, and never gives us any independent confirmation or denial that what she recounts is real. Obviously, the 18th-century Gavin has not materialized to sniff the flowers she weaves into her pubic hair (yowza), but what about the extended praise the vicar heaps on her singing voice? What about the handsome Roger, who, along with his wife Celia, asks Rachel to be the godmother to his newborn son? Is the couple trying to ingratiate themselves with an eccentric loner who appears to be rich? Or is it all made up? And when Roger, desperate for Rachel to make good on her promise to let the couple live with her, has sex with her (we are informed he has an enormous "winkie"), is that real?

Rachel's madness is rooted in two deep-seated needs: a need to be loved, physically and otherwise, and a need to live in a world without pain or suffering. Her reinvention of herself in Bristol allows her to imagine herself as an object of obvious affection for everyone ("You're quite a girl!" she says to herself as she sings showtunes in public), and to imagine herself presiding over a world where disappointment, much less death, disease, and pain are shut out of the garden. In the end, these very human and recognizable needs spiral out of control so badly that she's discovered by the authorities wearing a tattered, dirty wedding dress in the park and talking to herself. Many of us pass people in similar straits every day, and maybe we wonder "How did they get there?" Wish Her Safe at Home shows us how simply and easily it might be done.