Christopher's Top Ten 2022

The word for 2022 is disaster. Many of the best books I read this year were quite literally about disaster: Svetlana Alexevich's Voices from Chernobyl, about the nuclear disaster that happened, and Denis Johnson's Fiskadoro, about the nuclear disaster that's yet to come. William T. Vollmann's Europe Central is about that disaster that shook a whole continent--and a century--by its heels. Joy Williams' Breaking and Entering, my favorite book of the year, is about the kind of ecological disasters that are happening around us all the time without our care or attention; the kind of disaster that sprouts at our own touch, like a Midas of petroleum. Other books, like Adam Erlich Sachs' Organs of Sense and Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World--not to mention Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger, a book I enjoyed but which did not make my year-end list--are about epistemological disasters, the ugly wreck of science foundering against its own limits.

Last year, I made a resolution to read more international fiction. I had a great year in that regard, adding eighteen new countries to my repertoire: Antigua, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Ecuador, Oman, Tanzania, Equatorial Guinea, Serbia, Belarus, Senegal, Cuba, Latvia, Botswana, Morocco, Rwanda, Indonesia, Nicaragua, and Belize. This project has been a real blessing; it lead me to a half-dozen really terrific books I never would have otherwise read. Among those I really enjoyed, but which didn't make the list below, are Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga's Our Lady of the Nile and Moroccan Tahar ben Jelloun's heart-stopping prison novel This Blinding Absence of Light. This project also forced me to do a better job of reading books by people of color: 41 out of 110. For another year, I was able to read roughly equivalent numbers of men and women writers: 55 out of 110 books were written by women. Ten of the 110 were non-fiction.

As always, the more you read, the more there is to read. I've got some great books under the tree to get to, and about 120 more countries. Happy new year, everyone! See you when the page turns to 2023!

Honorable Mentions:

The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years by Chingiz Aitmatov
Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara
On Lighthouses by Jazmina Barrera
The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
Desperate Characters by Paula Fox
Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade by John Hawkes
Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid
Six Walks by Ben Shattuck
The Use of Man by Aleksandar Tisma
This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Top Ten 2022:

10. Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich - What kind of book is this, that has no original words in it? Can an author speak with someone else's voices? Voices from Chernobyl is a stunning thing, a work of journalism that is unsettling because it seems there is no veil between the world and the reader. We are given the thing itself, Chernobyl, killing and maiming and ruining lives. We are allowed to see, seemingly without interpretation or interpolation, the flaws in Soviet society that preceded the disaster and its rippling effects. For those reason few books seem so honest, or so pitiless. My guess is that Voices from Chernobyl is a book we will be returning to again and again in the 21st century, which promises to be a century of unabated disasters. They may not look like Chernobyl--they may be floods, or famines, or diseases--but there will always be powerful people who would prefer we didn't look straight at their complicity, as Alexievich does in Voices from Chernobyl.

9. The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs - It's funny to think of the resonances, in retrospect, between Sachs' The Organs of Sense and Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World (see below). Superficially, they could not be less alike. Sachs' novel about the mathematician Leibniz visiting a blind astronomer who claims to be able to predict an eclipse without the use of his eyes is a 17th-century picaresque, whereas Labatut's is a novel of the grim and bewildering 20th century. But both manage to capture historical moments at which scientific progress threatens to destabilize us in frightening ways. For Labatut, it's the strangeness of quantum mechanics. But Sachs reveals that such fear, the fear that science will lead us not into greater knowledge but greater darkness, have their roots in the Cartesian dualism of Leibniz's day. And of course, The Organs of Sense is simply a great deal of fun, a bit of illusionist magic that plays the curtain drop perfectly.

8. Europe Central by William T. Vollmann - I almost wanted to dislike Europe Central. Aren't there enough books about World War II, anyway? Why would Vollmann, whose novels about European settlement and conflict with Indigenous people of the Americas are some of the most comprehensive and thorough explorations of that particularly American narrative, want to turn his incisive eye--and what one can only assume is a poor and beleaguered research assistant--toward someone else's continent? But Europe Central won me over, as I knew it would, partly because it contains some of Vollmann's boldest writing, his wildest tightrope-walking. (Who else would dare to have a chapter written from the point of view of a metaphor?) And partially because in composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Vollmann presents a cowardly, corrupted genius who is one of his most sympathetically tragic figures.

7. The Lover by Marguerite Duras - Every year I discover at least one new writer for whom I think, I'm going to read everything this person has ever written. This year, it was Marguerite Duras, whose quasi-biographical story of a young girl's induction into the world of sex and despair at the hands of a rich Chinese man in colonial Vietnam was perhaps the most psychologically rich book I read all year. I was fascinated by what lurks under the surface level of The Lover: a story about two brothers, one innocent and murdered, the other an evil killer--though in what way is never clear--and a mother whose neglect compels the young narrator into a cycle of sexual self-annihilation. The Lover, I think, is a story that threads a historical needle, published at a point after we decided feminine sexuality was a worthy literary subject, but before the kind of statutorily abusive relationship depicted here became too hot to touch. For that reason alone there won't be another book like it anytime soon.

6. The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe - I was sad to finish Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series; nearly as sad as I was, I think, to have no more of Ferrante's Neapolitan series to read. (Though surely this is the only meaningful connection between them.) The Citadel of the Autarch is a book that, like the three books that precede it, makes every fantasy book in the world look imaginatively impoverished by comparison. I've never read another book with a setting as clever as the Last House, where every floor exists in a different chronological era--and The Citadel of the Autarch has inventions like these in every chapter. Citadel completes the series by explaining how Severian came to become the Autarch, the all-powerful ruler who seeks to usher in the rebirth of Urth's dying sun, and answers one of the books' fundamental questions--why him?--by subverting it completely: as he takes on the dying Autarch's consciousness, he absorbs the thousands of consciousnesses absorbed before him, becoming a kind of Son of Man. Tolkien could never.

5. Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah - The Nobel folks got this one right, I thought. Paradise is a kind of Heart of Darkness from an African perspective: a young Tanzanian boy, essentially sold by his parents into the service of a powerful merchant, joins a disastrous foray into the inner bush, where incipient German colonialism has yet to set foot. Unlike Marlowe and Kurtz, Yusuf isn't far from home; he's searching for one that eludes him, and one of the novel's tragic ironies is that, unable to find one in the cities of the coast or the cloistered villages of the bush, he ends up running off to join the Germans. It seems banal to say, but Africa looks different through the eyes of African writers; there's a complexity and subtlety to Gurnah's narrative that even a master like Conrad could never see. On top of all that, Paradise is just a gripping adventure story.

4. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner - Isn't there always a book that sneaks up on you? One that, once you put it down, you can't stop thinking about it? This year, The Topeka School was that book for me. Everybody's talking about toxic masculinity these days, but few have written about it in ways that feel as true as Lerner's sort-of-autobiographical novel about a prestigious debater at a Kansas high school. I found myself thinking again and again about Lerner's depiction of the way machismo can make its way into our language and speech; the way that talking can become a kind of game of domination. The Topeka School has more going on than this, though; it's also about psychology, and infidelity, and even Trumpism, and it's to Lerner's credit as a writer that it doesn't all fall apart. It's the style that make it cohere, I think, in the end, the words of the poet, rather than the debate champ.

3. Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson - Everybody's got their post-apocalyptic book these days. I think what separates the mediocre ones, even the good ones, from the real greats is a capacity to imagine a whole new world, different from ours in ways that are entirely surprising and strange. That's what makes Riddley Walker a classic of the genre, and Fiskadoro is the closest any book I think has ever gotten to the sheer weirdness, the linguistic transformation, of that novel. It is even, like Riddley Walker, an exploration of a post-bomb society trying to understand, with diminished knowledge, how they got to be where they are. But the bombed-out Florida Keys, the mystical resurrection of Jesus-like Fiskadoro, the ghostly broadcasts from Cuba, the ragtag apocalyptic orchestra, and the final image of the mysterious ship on the horizon--presenting, like the helicopter at the end of July's People, either hope or devastation--are Johnson's alone.

2. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut - Do you think Cormac McCarthy is bummed to have written only the second best book of the year that prominently features reclusive mathematic genius Alexander Grothendieck? Labatut's novel, a series of vignettes about scientific and mathematic geniuses of the 20th century, is, as the title suggests, a chronicle of a world for whom progress leads to more doubt, more darkness, and even--as in the first section, "Prussian Blue"--the horrible atrocities of Nazi Germany. The seams between reality and fiction are more invisible, and more insidious, perhaps, than any book I've ever read. But such methods seem to match the darkness and inscrutability at the heart of the "new science" that is the book's subject.

1. Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams - I kind of wish it weren't--I like seeing new authors at the top spot--but Joy Williams' Breaking and Entering was the most enjoyable book I read this year. It's the story of Willie and Liberty, a pair of "wanderers" who drift from one stranger's house to another, trying on other peoples' lives like used coats. It was fun to read it in the same year as Fiskadoro, another novel about the Florida Keys. (I have Williams' guidebook to the Keys sitting on my shelf, in case I ever get back to the "spiritual and biological abbatoir" that is Florida--her words.) If Fiskadoro is about a Florida after ecological disaster, Breaking and Entering is about a Florida for which the disaster--as is true in all of Williams' books--is already here, where apocalypse is present in every river, every shopping center, every vacant home. Liberty herself is like the heron she tries to save, wrapped in a wire, free and wild but trapped at every turn by human dross. Her boyfriend Willie tries to seduce her into a kind of non-life, but is there no other way than to embrace annihilation?

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

The Kid turned and faced him.

What you want me to believe, said Western, is that you came here to help her in some way.

Help her in what way? She's dead.

When she was alive.

Jesus. How do I know? You see a figure drifting off the screen and you pick up the phone. How do you know that the call of the coletit from the bracken is not really the lamentations of the damned? The world's a deceptive place. A lot of thing that you see are not really there anymore. Just the after-image in the eye. So to speak.

What did she know?

She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get a hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it's a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it's the same thing. Jesus.

Bobby Western has been a lot of things. Right now he's a salvage diver, plumbing the depths of the Gulf of Mexico to ransack wrecks and tinker with pipelines. Once upon a time he was a student of physics, a mathematical whizkid who received his genius from his father, a Manhattan Project engineer, and who was yet in the shadow of his even more brilliant sister, Alicia. After that, he was a race car driver, a profession that put him in a coma. When he emerged from this coma, Bobby discovered that Alicia--his greatest love, his soulmate in perhaps the most literal sense--had committed suicide. The Passenger's companion novel, Stella Maris, is her story; this is Bobby's, although Alicia is here too, in the form of italicized flashbacks in which she faces her own hallucinatory attendants: a crude, disfigured figure called the Thalidomide Kid and a troop of Vaudevillean goblins.

When The Passenger begins, Bobby has been sent to scout a plane crash in the Gulf, the kind with moldering corpses inside. There's no sign of entry on the plane, but the black box is missing, and one of the passengers seems to be, too. Bobby makes a few quick investigations, finding little; but shortly after he finds himself the subject of a mysterious investigation: he's menaced by agents of unknown affiliation, his apartment is ransacked, his car and bank account are seized with no explanation, his fellow diver is killed under mysterious circumstances. Are Bobby's pursuers connected with the crashed plane? Or are their interests related to Bobby's father, who worked at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, helping to usher the world into an age of atomic cataclysm?

The Passenger's refusal to bring these mysteries to a satisfying conclusion seemed like an affront to me personally. Maybe there are answers in Stella Maris, but I doubt it. So one must think of the plane crash as a symbol: a symbol, perhaps, of Bobby, who survives his wreck and his coma but emerges into a world that is missing its most important soul, and which refuses now to make any sense. Alicia, perhaps, is the passenger of the title, whose significance is reduced in death to a mere absence, and whom Bobby spends the entire book fretting that he will forget. (For what its worth, in the post-Game of Thrones era, sibling incest seems too anodyne to be shocking, even a kind of literary cliche.) Amd the forces of grief and despair that pursue him can not even be named, much less mollified.

And yet, I found Bobby's dives to be some of the most interesting and engrossing parts of the novel. Much has been made of McCarthy's newfound interest in physics and mathematics, apparently gathered from his friendship with quark-discoverer Murry Gell-Mann and a connection with the research department at the University of New Mexico. But McCarthy's interests haven't changed, it seems to me; he's still the Gnostic, terrified by the world's indifference and unknowability. Mathematics is, like diving, another way of plumbing the deaths, searching for a truth that will not be made known. As the Thalidomide Kid tells Bobby--who sees him also, like a kind of dispensation--"Whether it's a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it's the same thing."

The Passenger is an awfully strange book, even for McCarthy. On one level it's sort of an espionage novel, a classic noir of the man who got into deep. But in practice it's mostly talky, composed of a dozen or so lengthy conversations: with down-and-outs from New Orleans to Knoxville, with Bobby's shrewd private investigator, with his fellow divers, with a friend of Alicia's from the period of her commitment. One of Bobby's interlocutors is a trans escort named Debussy Fields (LOL) who is touchingly and sympathetically drawn in a way I really would not have expected McCarthy to have in him. But all these conversations, all these parts--diver driver mathematician apparition--have difficulty cohering. The Paassenger could only be a late period work. It reminds me of those late Shakespeare plays in which he stopped bothering trying to make sense to anybody but himself.

But it's a Cormac book, no doubt, and who else is going to give you a book like that? Who else is going to give you those sentences? The language is plainspoken and hushed, with fewer forays into the OED, but the rhythm of those words is unmistakable, inimitable. And though the mathematics, it seems to me, betrays a dilettante's eye, they give a new language, perhaps even a better one, to ideas that have troubled McCarthy's books for a long time. We've had a long time to live with books like Blood Meridian, even The Road. Something tells me that we'll have to live with this one a little longer to really see it as it is.

The Cross by Kristin Lavransdatter

Surely she had never asked God for anything except that He should let her have her will. And every time she had been granted what she had asked for--for the most part. Now here she sat with a contrite heart--not because she had sinned against God but because she was unhappy that she had been allowed to follow her will to the road's end.

She had not come to God with her wreath or with her sins and sorrows, not as long as the world still possessed a drop of sweetness to add to her goblet. But now she had come, after she had learned that the world is like an alehouse: The person who has no more to spend is thrown outside the door.

Kristin Lavransdatter should only be read at Christmastime, perhaps before a fireplace in an oak-trimmed room, with a fragrant wreath on the door and a steady snowfall at the window. It's been nothing but hideous rain here in New York for the past few days. But that's all right, I guess; The Cross, the third and final novel of Sigrid Undset's series about the life of the medieval Norse noblewoman, is all about disappointed expectations. It begins with Kristin and her husband Erlend having come down in the world as a result of Erlend's attempt to overthrow the king; he has been saved from execution but stripped of most of his lands. At their remaining estate, Kristin and Erlend are little-loved by their tenants and neighbors. There is hope in their seven sons--perhaps they will re-win the position Erlend has lost--but you know what God does when you make plans.

Beware, weary traveler: past this point are spoilers. What I know realize, having read The Cross twice--once in the original English translation, which enters the public domain later this year, and then in Tiina Nunnally's much improved one--is that the novel is structured around three principal deaths, each one swifter and more anticlimactic than the last: Simon's, then Erlend's, the Kristin's. Simon's, perhaps, has the most drama to it. When his wound becomes infected and he knows he is going to die, Simon plans to tell Kristin the truth, that he has always loved her, even after she broke their engagement, and after he married her sister Ramborg. But as he sits on his deathbed being tended by her, he finds he is unable to say the thing he thought he wanted to say, instead urging her to reconcile with Erlend, who has moved out of the house after a quarrel. Even before this, Simon has been the books' most selfless and upright character; and his final words to Kristin are an act of self-abnegation that surprise even himself.

Simon dies before he can think better of his silence; Erlend dies so quickly he's unable to hear confession. In a way, he dies for Kristin: after he hears that Kristin has been slandered by those who believe she has had an affair with their overseer Ulf, he returns to the estate and immediately picks a fight, in which he's mortally wounded. It seems at first like Undset has engineered a pretext for a final reconciliation, but no such luck. The speed with which Erlend, whose charisma and recklessness are the novels' catalyst, is carried off is almost shocking. When he's gone, both Kristin and the novel feel adrift. Slowly, Kristin's place at her estate is supplanted by her son Gaute and his new wife; the life she led, which had burnt so hot, fades strangely away.

What I find so interesting about Kristin's death is this: much is made in these novels about family. Kristin's original sin, for which she struggles her entire life to atone, is the betrayal of her father by breaking her engagement and sneaking off with Erlend. Simon urges her to be a more faithful wife, and she tries mightily to be a faithful mother to her sons. When she's displaced from her estate, she leaves to become a nun in the sister cloister to the monastery where her sons Naakve and Bjorgulf have become priests. But on the way she finds herself caring for a child that belongs to a pair of other pilgrims; when she contracts the Black Death it's not because she's caring for her sons, but because she is caring for strangers. Her last acts are to save an annoying little boy (who is about to be sacrificed to pagan gods to ward off the plague) and to bury the pestilential body of his mother. And the death is so quick--there's no final word like Simon's, or even Erlend's.

So what struck me this time is the subtle way that The Cross supplants the notion of family, which has been so crucial to the novels, with a different, broader understanding of family. A family that encompasses the beggar and the stranger. When Kristin hears, prior to her own death, that her monk sons have been carried off by the plague, she barely has time to grieve before she is back to her work as a carer. Kristin Lavransdatter is a deeply Christian book, and makes little sense if a reader's not willing to take its religion seriously. And here at the end perhaps you see echoes of the Christ who urged his followers to hate their mother and father.

A Maze of Death by Philip K. Dick

A shape moved clumsily, slowly along the porch. A bent shape which crept blindly, as if accustomed to the darkness within the Earth. It looked up at him with filmed-over grey eyes; he saw and understood the shirt of dust which clung to it... dust trickled silently down its bent body and drifted into the air. And it left a fine trail of dust as it moved.

It was badly decayed. Yellowed, wrinkled skin covered its brittle bones. Its cheeks were sunken and it had no teeth. The Form Destroyer hobbled forward, seeing him; as it hobbled it wheezed to itself and squeaked a few wretched words. Now its dry-skin hand groped for him and it rasped, 'Hey there, Tony. Hey there. How are you?'

Fourteen colonists receive new orders; they're being transferred to the previously uncolonized planet of Delmak-O. But when they arrive--on one-way transports--they find that there's no communication with the powers that sent them there. They've come from other worlds where they received specific instructions about their roles, but there are no instructions on Delmak-O. The world is populated by strange creatures that seem both mechanical and organic; some have the ability to replicate any object placed in front of them. Out there in the wilds there is a cubic building (which they call, imaginatively, The Building) which vanishes if you try to approach it. It's a setup designed to make people go mad, or perhaps for people who are already mad. Soon, they start dying one by one.

A Maze of Death is one of Dick's most overtly religious books. In the theology of the colonists, advanced alien beings have assumed the role of God, and those who are lucky often find themselves visited by their avatars: the Walker-on-the-Earth, the Mentufacturer, the Intercessor. This religion is vaguely Christian, tinged with paganism, often Gnostic: these avatars are opposed by the Form Destroyer, who is responsible for the imposition of entropy and death. A Maze of Death is the first book of Dick's I've read since finishing Lawrence Sutin's biography of him, and there are familiar echoes here of the religious visions whose meaning Dick clamored to discover in the last decade of his life. The colonists share a religion of universal certitude; some of them, like protagonist Seth Morley, have even seen avatars like the Walker, who saves him from boarding a doomed ship. Ironically, Delmak-O is more frightening to them because it resembles the world in which the rest of us live, where the existence of God, much less His intentions or directions for our lives, is obscure.

I wouldn't put A Maze of Death among Dick's best work, partly because of the--SPOILER ALERT--Life of Pi-esque twist at the end. As it turns out, Delmak-O is actually a constructed reality occupied by the residents of a spaceship, left unable to land anywhere because of an accident. These residents enter computer-generated scenarios like Delmak-O regularly to alleviate the tedium of their situation; but their increasing, and increasingly violent, resentment toward one another surfaces in the simulation. Everyone who dies on Delmak-O returns to the ship perfectly safe and alive. But what frightens them the most is the convincing nature of the computer-generated theology. What seemed so real, and so gratifying, is taken from them, and once again they occupy a life that hurtles toward death with no purpose.

Though A Maze of Death was written, as far as I know, before Dick's visions, the ending of A Maze of Death suggests the most frightening possibility that Dick considered: that there was no presence beaming ideas on rays of pink light into his brain, that it was all fake, and that he was mentally ill. All that is troubled, though, in the book's final moments, when the Walker--who as far as the ship residents know, was only a computer simulation--comes to take Seth away from the ship for good. In the end, the idea that there is no supernatural, no godhead, no revelation, is too intolerable to depict.

A Curtain of Green by Eudora Welty

It was December--a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air, that seemed meditative like the chirping of a solitary little bird.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to walk along a sunken portion of the original Natchez Trace. The Trace was once a heavily trafficked path running from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee. It was blazed by Native Americans, and used by early pioneers. Before roads and railroads spread across the south, merchants took their goods to Natchez on steamboats along the south-running Mississippi, then walked back 400 miles along the Trace. Today, portions of the "sunken trace" remain, where the feet of thousands and thousands of travelers have worn a path twenty feet down in the soft earth. Walking along one of these portions is like walking along a shared history.

What a pleasure, then, it was to return to Eudora Welty's story "A Worn Path," about an elderly black woman walking along the trace to Natchez, where she is to pick up medicine for her grandson. The Trace, by the time of the story, is largely disused; in Natchez they call it the "old Trace," and few others use it. It's a difficult trip, that involves crawling under a barbed wire fence and over a creek, but she makes it, as she has every few months for years. The story is a well-loved one because it has a beautiful simplicity: Phoenix Jackson is an image of diligence, of courage and steadfastness. She's also wily: she pockets a nickel dropped by an unwitting hunter, and cajoles another one from the pharmacist in Natchez. But walking the sunken trace made me realize the extent to which she is also a symbol of a history that, as Welty wrote the story, was being abandoned and forgotten, a history literally written in the earth.

"A Worn Path" is one of two familiar masterpieces in A Curtain of Green, an early collection of Welty's; the other is "Why I Live at the P.O.," which is certainly a contender for the funniest short story ever written. I have always loved this story, with its escalating familial outrages, and its gaggle of comic Southerners, as colorful as something out of commedia dell'arte. It's a story I've always thought about teaching, but have avoided, partly because of the single casual n-word, and partly because it seems a shame to cut it up and analyze it, which might kill it. It's a story that should only be enjoyed, and maybe marveled at.

Most of the other stories in A Curtain of Green were disappointing. Many of them, like the title story, seem awfully slight, attempts at portraying a milieu or a mind, or even a vibe, rather than a story. Some of them struck me as being mainly experimental, attempts by a young and newish writer to feel out her craft. How different they are than, say, the linked stories of The Golden Apples that Welty wrote later in life. Some of them are Welty straining at the Southern Gothic, and not particularly succeeding: "Clytie," for example, about a trio of ghoulish rustic shut-ins who are left to fend for, and fight, one another after the death of their father, struck me as being grotesque for grotesque's sake, and its ending--the dim-witted Clytie drowns in a water-barrel after becoming captivated by her own face--like an unfunny joke. I enjoyed the comic narrator of "Mr. Marblehall," who can't stop being flabbergasted by the pathetic audacity of the title bigamist, but it's hard for anything to feel funny when it comes behind "Why I Live at the P.O." Several of the stories just seemed forgettable: what was "Flowers for Marjorie" about again?

But there are two stories that were new to me that I thought were, like "Why I Live at the P.O." and "A Worn Path," Welty at her best. The first is "The Hitch-hikers," about a traveling salesman who picks up a couple of vagrants on his way back into his hometown. One of the two hitchhikers murders the other, and the murderer is locked up in the hotel room across the hall from the salesman. The salesman goes out to a party while the police and the hospital deal with the aftermath of the killing; but of course the event weighs on him strangely. "The Hitch-hikers" is one of those stories that successfully gives the impression of a whole life, a whole world, beyond its margins. The violence does not interrupt a peaceful routine, but stands in, somehow, for the alienation the salesman feels from his own life.

The other masterpiece is "Powerhouse," about a black jazz musician playing in small Mississippi clubs. At first, I wondered a little about the way the narrator describes Powerhouse:

You can't tell what he is. "Nigger man"?--he looks more Asiatic, monkey, Jewish, Babylonian, Peruvian, fanatic, devil. He has pale gray eyes, heavy lids, maybe horny like a lizard's, but big glowing eyes when they're open. He has African feet of the greatest size, stomping, both together, on each side of the pedals. He's not coal black--beverage colored--looks like a preacher when his mouth shut, but then it opens--vast and obscene.

But as the story went on it seemed to me that the narrator (not Welty) is trying to label Powerhouse, to understand him by affixing these words to him, and failing. The narrator fails, because Powerhouse takes over the story, whipping up the crowd with an extended black comic story about the death of his wife, which he has just learned about in a telegram. He tells this story as he plays--interspersed with descriptions of the song that plays beneath it--and then, later in the bar, elaborates upon it. His wife, he says, fell out of the window while she was looking for him, her body discovered by the telegram sender, a man with the unlikely name of Uranus Knockwood:

"Why, he picks her up and carries her off!" he says.
"Ya! Ha!"
"Carries her back around the corner..."
"Oh, Powerhouse."
"You know him."
"Uranus Knockwood."
"Yeahhh!"
"He take our wives when we gone!"
"He come in when we goes out!"
"Uh-huh!"
"He go out when we comes in!"
"Yeahhh!"
"He standing behind the door!"
"Old Uranus Knockwood."
"You know him."
"Middle-size man."
"Wears a hat."
"That's him."

The charismatic Powerhouse has completely taken over the story, molding it into call-and-response jazz rhythms, wrested it, it almost seems, even from Welty herself. It's never clear how much of the outrageous story Powerhouse tells is true. "And who could ever remember any of the things he says?" Welty writes. "They are just inspired remarks that roll out of his mouth like smoke." There is real grief, real resentment, real outrage--you can figure out for yourself who it is, in the context of the Black South, that might always be "standing behind the door," coming in when they go out--but the story is a performance. Everything about Powerhouse is a performance. Like "A Worn Path," "Powerhouse" is a depiction of a Black person by a white writer, but where "A Worn Path" succeeds (in my opinion) through admiration and empathy, "Powerhouse" succeeds from something like intimidation and wonder. It's a story that seems channeled, not written. It's incredible.

Deep South by Paul Theroux

Reverend Lyles said he was proud of what had been done at the old Rosenwald school, how it had been fixed up and was now a well-attended community center. The Auburn Rural Studio was still building ingenious low-cost houses. It was not the town of Agee and Evans anymore. It was still struggling, but it was improving, and hopeful.

On a single visit I would not have seen this, but over the course of a year, in four seasons, the true condition of the town had become apparent. This was not a trip about my having had a good meal or a bad meal, or my laboring toward a destination in the old travel-book manner. It may have seemed to some people I met that I was headed somewhere, but I was still traveling in widening circles, happily, on back roads, meeting people, and revisiting friends.

Paul Theroux has traveled all over the world: India, Southeast Asia, Africa. But until he steps out of his door on Cape Cod in Massachusetts one morning and hops in his car, he has never been in the American South. He heads down the interstate, making brief stops in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, heading deeper and deeper into a land that is familiar but unfamiliar, recognizable but unrecognizable. His travels in Africa become a specific touchpoint: the poverty Theroux sees in Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas is not just a reminder of the third world, but an instantiation of it, right under the American nose. Deep South explores these forgotten places, which are not just unknown to Theroux, but to nearly every American, because they lie in the places that even the highways have passed by, where industry and work have vanished, and which the cultural and political leaders of the United States would just as soon turn a blind eye toward.

I'm a Southerner, though I have always thought of my home in North Carolina as quite different from the "deep south" of Mississippi and Alabama. It is interesting to read about yourself, or at least a region to which you are allied, from an anthropological perspective. At first, I felt a kind of bemusement at the Northerner who carries with him a set of bromides about the South, without wondering whether or not they are accurate or true. When Theroux writes that the church is the center of social life in a Southern town, and claims this is one way it differs from his native New England, I thought about how a few weeks ago, I visited Sandwich, Massachusetts--where Theroux literally lives--and ended up at a church festival where a bunch of elderly white Catholics were selling wreaths and dolls and chili hot dogs. Certainly for those folks, the church is at the center of social life in Sandwich. And what do we do with the increasing number of white Americans, southerners included, who no longer go to church but claim evangelical as an identifier? There's an awful lot of cant about the South, is all I'm saying, and it can be hard to set it aside and see the place clearly, especially if you carry your expectations with you.

This feeling was amplified, for me, by Theroux's pointed aversion toward urban life in the South. Charleston, Asheville, Natchez: Theroux passes these places by, stopping in them briefly, if only to tell us their charms have no interest for him. To Theroux, this is a way of side-stepping the tourist sheen of the South, of skirting the guidebooks. But it also presupposes a real South that lies in rural places. Of course you are going to find the South to be poor and rural if you define it from the beginning as rural and poor. But moreover, I found myself wondering if Theroux doesn't miss something crucial about the South by not interrogating the "New South," the cities where industry has fled, where investment in the tech sector, for instance, has created new opportunities for gentrification and dispossession. I'm not sure you can understand the depreciation of Greenville, Alabama, for instance, unless you understand the boom in Huntsville.

But anyway. Most of my reservations about Deep South came to little, because in the end, what makes Theroux seem reliable is the fact that he keeps coming back. Deep South is the story of not just a single trip, but four different trips, each in a different season. Theroux keeps coming back to the same locations over and over again, meeting with the same non-profit leaders, the same black farmers and unemployed whites, the same Indian motel owners. Out of this investment in time a real picture of a region emerges: a place rich in pride and cultural power, but torn inside out by the deprecations of global capitalism and political neglect. By the end of the book, Theroux is no longer ignoring the cities: he spends several chapters on his time in Hot Springs, Arkansas and the capital of Little Rock, integrating them into the larger story of the South as he sees it.

I brought this book with me on a trip to Mississippi last weekend. We didn't quite get up to the Delta, the poorest part of the state and where Theroux spends most of his time, but we did see much of what Theroux saw. For me, it was the sight of a roofless, wrecked building on the main street of Port Gibson, sitting next to a restaurant: someone's business and dream. Everywhere he goes, Theroux wonders why Africa gets so much aid from the USA while its own communities suffer. (I thought Theroux was a little silly in the way he would compare the money given to say, Ghana, population 31 million, to the federal aid provided to a town of 800, but still, point taken.) But among the neglect are people whose roots are deep, and who spend their lives trying to make those communities thrive.

The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier

This person who walked around wearing another's clothes, parading his features, colouring and manners, was guiltless, he was merely a covering, a facade, as remote from its original as a violin case from the instrument it protects. Emotion should have no part in this. I had never for one moment been so blind as to imagine that any show of warmth coming from these people was due to qualities of my own, springing suddenly to the surface and finding a response: they came alight for him and him only, however misplaced hte glow. What was happening, then, was that I wanted to preserve Jean de Gue from degradation. I could not bear to see him shamed. This man, who was not worth the saving, must be spared. Why? Because he looked like me?

John is an Englishman, a professor of French history, who longs for a life of human connection. He has no wife, no family or friends; he spends most of the time he's not teaching wandering through French towns and gazing wistfully at lighted windows there, yearning to be a part of what he passes. In Le Mans one day he encounters a shocking site: a man who looks exactly like himself. John's doppelganger, a Frenchman named Jean de Gue, draws him into a night of debauchery, and when John awakes from it he finds that de Gue has swapped all of their clothes and possessions. Well, what is he to do but to follow the address he finds on de Gue's effects, and take up residence with his family, pretending to be his own double?

The life John/Jean takes up is a troubled one: de Gue, it turns out, is a provincial Comte who owns a struggling glass foundry, which is managed by his envious brother, Paul. The Comte de Gue has been having an affair with Paul's wife, Renee, while his own wife Francoise suffers from a difficult pregnancy. His mother, Maman, is addicted to morphine, and his daughter Marie-Noel is obsessed with the idea of becoming a saint, and suffering for the satisfaction of God. In this pursuit she is tutored by the Comte's religious sister, Blanche, who has not spoken to him in many years. As John insinuates himself into the family, he begins to piece together the Comte de Gue's dark secrets, including his part in the murder of the foundry's former manager, who may or may not have collaborated during the Nazi occupation of France. Except they aren't secrets: everyone knows all about the Comte's past, it seems, though it isn't spoken about openly. John, in the role of the Comte, is the only one who doesn't know the truth about himself.

The elegant concept of The Scapegoat really seems like something only du Maurier could invent. There's no big secret here a la Rebecca, but John's inherent ignorance, and the impenetrability of his disguise, make for gripping reading. Like John, you long to find out the truth about the de Gue family. Why are they so resentful toward one another, so recriminating? It doesn't matter how scandalous the answer is, because the knowledge seems just beyond the limit of investigation: there's no one, and no way, to ask. But the interest of The Scapegoat lies in the characters as well as the premise, characters who, like in other du Maurier books, seem to have been lifted from the Gothic novels of a hundred years prior: bitter Blanche, imperious Maman, pious Marie-Noel. John, too, becomes drawn into their lives. What seems at first like a lark, a chance to live another man's life without consequences, without being touched, becomes a tangle, like a trap. John finds himself caring for the broken family, eager to fix what the Comte--by all accounts a selfish person--has led to ruin.

Rebecca is du Maurier's masterpiece, but I think The Scapegoat might be my new personal favorite. I really couldn't put it down. Like all good novels about doubling and imitation, the lines become quickly blurred. When John inserts himself into the Comte's life, looking and acting like the Comte, who's to say he is not the Comte? If Marie-Noel breaks her mother's porcelain figurine, what does it matter if she receives a replacement, rather than the original, mended? Is it possible to borrow a man's identity, but not his history? These are interesting questions the novel asks, that give it heft and weight, but they're almost beside the point when it's so gripping.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

"You speak as if that were some kind of general moral imperative." He looked at Orr with his genial, reflective smile, stroking his beard. "But in fact, isn't that man's very purpose on earth--to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?"

"No!"

"What is his purpose, then?"

"I don't know. Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass."

Like most people, George Orr has bad dreams. But unlike most people, George's dreams come true: he imagines the death of his abusive aunt, and suddenly she has died in a car wreck. Not dies, has died: as soon as George emerges from the dream he knows that his aunt has been dead for several weeks; his dreams have literally change not just the future but the past, and no one remembers but him. In George memory has a doubleness; he remembers both what happened in this new timeline and the one from before his dreams. Distraught, he tries to keep himself from dreaming through pharmaceutical means, but his abuse of drugs lands him in the hand of a court-appointed therapist, Dr. Haber, who believes he can use George's abilities to create a better world.

My favorite scene in The Lathe of Heaven, I think, is when Dr. Haber, experimenting with his many dream-inducing machines, instructs a hypnotized George to dream of something innocuous: a horse. When George awakes, the mural of Mt. Hood on Haber's wall has become a portrait of a horse. It's a neat little moment of shock, dealt with organically in a way that's almost like a jump cut from a horror movie. Things escalate from there, with each of Haber's attempts at fixing the world having strange and grotesque consequences: by instructing George to make the world less overcrowded, he kills off billions in a plague. By instructing him to make the world peaceful, he conjures up an alien invasion--aliens that turn out to look like giant sea turtles. By instructing him to eliminate racial prejudice, he makes everyone a shade of even gray.

I don't think it was Le Guin's intention, but there's a conservative streak to The Lathe of Heaven: a belief that the best intentions of liberal reformers will always have unintended consequences that are worse than the problems they try to solve. Interestingly, Lathe has mixed success in diagnosing what humanity's problems will be. For 1971, the depiction of a world ravaged by the greenhouse effect is frighteningly prescient. But the belief that the world at seven billion people will be devastatingly overcrowded--she imagines a Portland of three million, with even larger cities emerging in Oregon's interior--looks like awfully silly Malthusian nonsense. Still, there is some wisdom in George's harried warning to Dr. Haber that the ends don't justify the means because "the means are all we have." What Le Guin understands is that the world is an unfolding process with no teleological end; utopian dreams of ending history will always be dreams, and not the kind that become real.

I read in Divine Invasions that Lathe was inspired by the Philip K. Dick novels of the 60's. Le Guin and Dick had a friendly correspondence, and that's not difficult to see here: the spineless subaltern whose dreams become real might have emerged directly from Dick's pages. The love interest, a spidery and abrasive woman named Heather Lalache, seems very "Phildickian" too. But I was struck by the process, outlined in Divine Invasions, by which Dick crafted a novel by smashing two separate ideas together, something that explains the sense of doubling and instability that characterizes his best work. Lathe is a classic, but it suffers in comparison to Dick's work, for me, because it really only has a single layer. And Dick never got caught up in the tedious technobabble that Le Guin writes whenever Dr. Haber starts talking about his dream machine, the Augmentor. I ended up tuning most of that stuff out. Still, Lathe speaks to a modern world that feels constantly on the edge of crisis, when one feels like solutions are simple but elusive.

Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

But let's put aside theories for now and try first to determine just what happened in 2-3-74 and the months that followed. Be forewarned that Phil's experiences during this time simply do not fall into a neat, overarching pattern--to fashion one for them is to distort them irrevocably. They include moments of doubt, panic, and anguish such as to make them seem all too human. But there are also times of startling sublimity, not to mention sheer breathtaking wonder. They neither prove that Phil was crazy, nor do they establish the existence of a Saint Phil. In fact, the 2-3-74 experiences resemble nothing so much as a wayward cosmic plot from a Phil Dick SF novel--which is hardly surprising, given who the experiencer was.

Philip K. Dick was a twin: his sister, Jane, died in her infancy. Dick never quite got over his sister's death, according to Lawrence Sutin, the biographer who writes about Dick in Divine Invasions. For one, he never ceased to blame his mother for his sister's death. But traces of Jane can also be found in the constant doubling and dissociation of Dick's novels. Jane, Sutin writes, was never far from Dick's mind, and his impressions of the person she would have been had she lived--he imagined her, interestingly, as a lesbian--were a more permanent relationship than any Dick had with real "flesh and blood" women.

This is the first really fascinating thing about Philip K. Dick, and it forms a kind of tentpole with the other thing: a series of visions that occurred in February and March 1974, and which Dick called "2-3-74." Details of these visions were known to me, as they are to anyone who has read VALIS and The Divine Invasion, the novels that deal most directly with these experiences: a belief that time stopped during the Roman Empire, that the modern world is an illusion, that this information was beamed down to Dick in the form of a beam of pink light from a kindly alien divinity somewhere in the vicinity of the star Fomalhaut. But the actual visions were much more complex and varied, and never cohered into a single understanding, as much as Dick wanted them to. The last years of his life Dick spent coldly and rationally dissecting his visions, an effort that produced the 1000-page religious tome published as The Exegesis. They sound like the visions of a mentally ill man--and they almost certainly were--but Dick was well and sober often enough to look at them with a kind of skepticism that resembled the patterns of his books: the humdrum suburbanite who must decide whether his reality is really real. And in the visions, as Sutin describes, with their doublings, their sense of a realer reality that lies inaccessibility, there are intimations of the lost Jane.

Divine Invasions is as thorough a biography as I've ever read. Dick's life between Jane's death and the 2-3-74 visions is, if I'm being honest, not all that fascinating, dominated as it was by scrounging for royalties and a tawdry series of doomed marriages. (If anyone out there decides Dick needs to be canceled, there's plenty of material in here.) But Sutin has gone through it all with a fine-toothed comb, stocking it with commentary from all of Dick's wives, friends, and acquaintances, as well as important passages from Dick's letters and the Exegesis. Sutin has done his homework: he even informs us that, when he played Monopoly, Dick would always choose to the old shoe. But more importantly, Sutin illuminates how the threads of Dick's life become woven into the books themselves. And it ends, as every authorial biography should, with a chronological assessment of all of Dick's writings, each with a ranking out of 10. (Among other things, the ranking of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Dick's best book, is scandalously low at 7.) The overall impression is of a prolific madman--Dick could write a whole book in a couple weeks, apparently, working through the day and night--but also a genius who produced 10 to 15 books of outstanding innovation, and about twice as many that are merely good.

What's Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies

So you stood by him to the end, brother, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

--The end is not yet. Though he sometimes defied me, I obey my orders still, said the Daimon Maimas.

--Your orders were to make him a great, or at least a remarkable man?

--Yes, and posthumously he will be seen as both great and remarkable. Oh, he was a great man, my Francis. He didn't die stupid.

--You had your work cut out for you.

--It is always so. People are such muddlers and meddlers. Father Devlin and Aunt Mary-Ben with their drippings of holy water, and their single-barrelled compassion. Victoria Cameron with her terrible stoicism masked as religion. the Doctor with his shallow science. All ignorant people determined that their notions were absolutes.

--Yet I suppose you would say they were bred in the bone.

--They! How can you talk so, brother? Of course, we know it was all metaphor, you and I. Indeed, we are metaphors ourselves. But the metaphors that shaped the life of Francis Cornish were Saturn, the resolute, and Mercury, the maker, the humorist, the trickster. It was my task to see that these, the Great Ones, were bred in the bone, and came out in the flesh. And my task is not yet finished.

What's Bred in the Bone is the second in Robertson Davies' "Cornish Trilogy," coming after The Rebel Angels, which deals with the aftermath of the death of Francis Cornish, a wealthy patron of the arts, and his estate. Rebel Angels always seemed a bit funny, the way it establishes a central character who never appears; What's Bred in the Bone is the novel that fills in Cornish's life: how he went from an upper-crust but provincial childhood in the small Ontario town of Blairlogie to become a world-renowned art expert, as well as--something no one in The Rebel Angels seems to know--a British spy.

Young Francis is a tormented child: tormented by the moralistic pictures that dominate his childhood bedroom, tormented by his peers, who see him as weak and strange (and what's worse, rich), tormented by the surprising revelation that his older brother, a mentally disabled boy also named Francis, has been kept secreted away in the attic for many years, while a nearby grave lets the world believe that he's dead. Francis learns to draw from a book, and his early talent is given room to practice when he's allowed to accompany the local mortician and sketch the bodies. After an Oxford education and a disastrous marriage to a reckless but sexy cousin (!), Francis becomes the assistant to Tancred Saraceni, a world-famous art restorer who recruits Francis into a scheme to fake old German paintings so they might be traded to the Nazis for legitimate world treasures. Saraceni's education is technical--and in true Davies style, the art of a restorer and forger is intimately and convincingly detailed--but also spiritual, and as a final project for his master, Francis produces an original painting in the style of the German masters that is so convincing it becomes the talk of the art world. Funnily, it's this painting that destroys Francis' ambition to be a painter: to paint in this style, the only style he really can, would be to out himself as the forger.

As the title suggests, the big theme of What's Bred in the Bone is how one becomes the person they are meant to be. Davies intersperses scenes from Francis' life with a conversation between his guardian angel and the animating "daimon" who guided Francis' development. The daimon explains to the angel how the qualities that already existed in Francis had to be brought out by the external influences in his life: his luckless brother, the kindly mortician, the wily forger. Like Dunstan Ramsay of The Fifth Business, who makes a cameo appearance here, Francis must be content with being something other than great, or great in a way that is different than how he conceives it. Francis can never be a painter, never an old master, but in his capacities as a forger, a restorer, a critic, a benefactor, he can become something else. If that something else is not quite what one dreams of, still it is something the world needs, and which represents the fulfillment of his capabilities. (Of course, self-actualization takes a lot of money, something that Davies never seems to want to interrogate that closely.)

What stands out to me, though, is the way that Francis is presented as something of an old soul: he might have been one of those German masters, if he had been born in the right time and place. Nearly all of Davies' protagonists are anachronisms, people who live by moral and aesthetic codes that have been sent to the rubbish bin by modern life. Davies has this kind of quality, too, I think, but his models aren't really Renaissance painters, or even the pre-Raphaelites that Francis loves, or even the medieval thinkers that preoccupy Dunstan Ramsay. Instead, they strike me as callbacks to a kind of early 20th century Oxford don: fussy, cloistered, small-c conservative. Like Francis, Davies is an old soul working in a modern medium, searching for greatness in a genre that no longer allows for it.

Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill

I felt locked out of my own fat body, as if I were a disembodied set of impulses and electrical discharges, disconnected rage and fear, something like what real humans feel in abandoned houses and call "ghosts." I remembered my father on top of me, mashing my lungs, making my breath smaller and tighter until it barely existed, opening my body with his fingers, infecting me with his smells, his sounds, grinding his skin on mine until it came off as a powder and and filtered into m pores, spewing his deepest poison onto my skin where it was subtly absorbed into my blood and cells and came out in my sweat, my urine and shit, even my voice and words. I felt so saturated by his liquid stench, I didn't even think to wash it off when he left.

Dorothy Never is a fat woman in her middle age. Justine Shade is young and thin, and beginning a career in independent journalism. Both of them are victims of sexual abuse--Dorothy in particular, at the hands of her father, for many years--and the kind of sexual bullying that, while it might not rise to the level of rape, women are subjected to from the earliest moments of their childhood. They are radically different women, both physically and temperamentally, but they are drawn together when Justine decides to write an article about Anna Granite, a semi-Randian novelist and philosopher in whose inner circle Dorothy once moved. 

One of the most interesting things about Two Girls, Fat and Thin is the way that it writes about Granite's philosophy,  Definitism, without ever really defining or outlining it. Gaitskill gives the impression of a total philosophy without really having to write one: it's a belief that centers the individual, and the sanctity of their will; power and self-gratification are lionized; squishy modernist ideas about subjectivity are loathed. Though Dorothy denies it to Justine, it is certainly a right-wing philosophy, but one which clearly appeals to the abused and the victimized. "Every loneliness," Granite writes in one of her books, in a line that appeals deeply to the tortured Dorothy, "is a pinnacle." For Dorothy, Definitism gives her the confidence to cut her abusive father out of her life, and to forge a life of her own.

Justine takes what might seem to be an opposite tack: sexual masochism. As she works on the Anna Granite story, she meets a serpentine young bruiser at a bar who invites her deeper and deeper into fantasies of domination: being tied up, whipped, urinated on. In a way, the two women represent different responses to being victimized: a flight toward power and a flight toward submission. But these are more malleable categories than they might seem. As Justine notes, the strong heroines of Granite's books often find themselves yearning to be controlled and dominated. And it is Justine who, in her childhood, reacted to the unwelcome prodding of young boys by abusing a young girl herself.

I don't know if Two Girls, Fat and Thin totally worked. It sets up a relationship, even a collision, between the two women, that it can't really deliver on, choosing instead to keep the pair siloed in long life histories until the very end. The Granite stuff is dealt with obliquely, in a way that feels skilled but sort of hollow. Shadows of Veronica are here--there's something in the way that Dorothy, like Veronica, works in NYC at night, like a ghost of a person--but the book is fuller, more florid, more satirical, without any of Veronica's chilly cool. But I did find a lot to admire in how boldly and plainly it deals with abuse.

Six Walks by Ben Shattuck

The idea to follow Henry David Thoreau's walks came while I was standing in the shower at dawn one May morning, listening to the water drill my skull and lap my ears, wondering what I could do to stop the dreams of my past girlfriend. This was years ago, in my early thirties, when I couldn't find a way out of the doubt, fear, shame, and sadness that had arranged a constellation of grief around me. In this last dream, the one that got me into the shower at sunrise, she was in labor. I dreamt that she had a husband--dark-haired, wearing a red shit with sleeves rolled to his elbows--show stood bedside, gripping her hand while she breathed. I stood against the wall, touching a white handkerchief I wanted to offer them.

My wife and I went to Cape Cod last weekend, her first time, my second. It stretches out in the shape of an flexed arm, with the long sand beaches of the Outer Cape running from the knuckle to the elbow. They are beautiful beaches, cream-colored running beneath tall ochre cliffs, looking out on an eternal sea dotted with gulls and eiders and kittiwakes as white and numerous as the little caps of the waves. You're guaranteed to see a seal, and if you're a little lucky, a whale. But only someone who is deeply strange, or deeply damaged, could imagine walking the entire stretch of the Outer Cape, someone like Henry David Thoreau, with a touch of the misanthrope. For Ben Shattuck, who sets out to trace Thoreau's footsteps, the walk offers a way to step out of oneself, out of the sleeplessness of a bad breakup and the chronic misery of Lyme disease. Shattuck is in a bad place when he starts his walk: at the Truro cliffs he eats a bar of clay like a hunk of chocolate.

The Cape Cod walk will become the first in a series of six walks that Shattuck takes, each in the footsteps of Thoreau, who recorded his walks in his journals. The second is a hike up Mt. Katahdin, the towering axe-head in Maine that lies at the terminus of the Appalachian trail. The third is an MDMA-laced trip to the top of Massachusetts' Wachusett Mountain, now a ski resort. The fourth is a walk from Shattuck's Massachusetts' home across the Rhode Island border, in the spirit of a walk that Thoreau took due southwest from his house, not knowing what he'll find. The fifth is a paddle up the Allagash River in far north Maine to a place where Henry camped, one of the few spots that seems to remain true wilderness, and the final one is a return to Cape Cod.

By the time Shattuck makes his return, his life is changed. The first three walks are records of misery, desperate attempts to outrun fatigue and depression. They seem often recklessly unplanned: Shattuck ends up spending the night with a pair of gracious Cape Codders who live near Thoreau's old property, but only by luck and happenstance. The MDMA on Wachusett mountain fails to bring the required transcendence, but it does lead to a moment of détente with a porcupine. But years pass between the first three walks and the second, and in the meantime Shattuck has conquered his Lyme disease and gotten a new girlfriend, an actress named Jenny who, as I was forced to curiously Google, turns out to be SNL alum Jenny Slate. (Honestly: Good work, Ben.) As Shattuck's life improves, the tone of the essays changes; the walks go from being flights from human life to deep engagements with the natural world.

Shattuck is a visual artist, and the essays are dotted with evocative black-and-white charcoal drawings of his walks. He brings an artist's visual sense to the landscapes he and Thoreau share: imagining the heart "the size of a chestnut" in the porcupine: "There's a heart at the center of all animals. Everything is soft underneath." In Henry's words: "A very suitable small fruit." There's the "black wedge" of a whale's mouth, and the way sunlight "raked across" the tops of Wellfleet houses. A coastline is "crenellated." And often Shattuck's language works in service of profound meditations on loss and grief: the most successful of the essays might be the Allagash one, in which Shattuck ties together an alien abduction reported in the area in the 1970's and Henry's loss of his own brother. Henry's guide, a Penobscot Indian named Joe for which Thoreau has little respect, also lost a brother, probably at the hands of whites, and agrees to serve as guide so he can go looking for him, but Thoreau is unable to cross the boundary of race to see a common kinship. These threads, along with Shattuck's own griefs and losses--chief among them the loss of a fingertip on his writing and painting hand--become a strong rope.

I really enjoyed Six Walks. I love reading books set in the places I travel to, and sometimes there is a resonance, but often not. Six Walks made me look at the Cape Cod landscape a little differently: I saw, standing on the thin fringe of beach, how someone might feel at the edge of their life there. I saw the cliffs at Truro, but I didn't stop to eat any of the clay. And I also saw how, standing with my wife and watching a seal roll around in the surf, how different it might be to be at that edge with someone loved.

The Wedding by Dorothy West

When she got lost, she was lost altogether, her identity deserting her, her name on doubting tongues, and her wholeness hanging by a tug of hair. There was no one to help her orient herself, and she could not communicate her need for help. In a world where everyone was adult and articulate, she was overwhelmed by the handicap of having to be a child. That she would ever coalesce into something concrete, with more sense than lack of it, seemed beyond the promise of prayer. She was still bits and pieces of other people: a frown she had no use for, a phrase stuck in a senseless sentence, a grunt like Gram's when the weather tied a knot in her back, walking like Gram when she had to place her hand on her hip to ease the pain of a rainy day, and echoing Liz's yeas and nays when half the time she felt just the opposite. Like most children, Shelby spent her days and hours trying on the most transparent parts of other personalities, gradually growing aware of their insufficiencies. Then slowly, at a snail's pace, and with a snail's patience, she would thread her frailties and fears, her courage and strength, her hopes and doubts, into the warp and woof that would cloak her naked innocence in a soul of her own.

The Oval is a community of black vacationers on Martha's Vineyard, proud and exclusive, named for the oval shape of the ring of inward-facing houses that compose it. Many of these "Ovalites" are descending on the island to attend the wedding of one of their daughters, Shelby Coles, to a white jazz musician named Meade. The marriage sets off old racial anxieties: could it be that, as Shelby's father and sister suspect, Shelby's upbringing among the light-skinned Ovalites has taught her to hate her own race? A neighboring interloper, a dark-skinned man named Lute whose presence on the Oval is suspect, decides he will get revenge on the Ovalites who spurn him by making a conquest of Shelby on the week of her wedding. Will Shelby, testing her own deep-seeded racial feelings, use Lute to conquer her own suspicions about herself?

I'm reading Passing right now with my juniors; I was struck by what a companion piece The Wedding makes. The Wedding is a late work by Dorothy West, one of the last surviving doyennes of the Harlem Renaissance, and it takes up many of the same questions about race, color, and class that Passing does. West keeps Meade--and the wedding--off stage, instead using it as a pretext to comb through the family history of the branches that have come together to make Shelby: Gram, the disappointed white matriarch; her desperate and sickly daughter who marries the self-made Hannibal; on the other side, the kindly doctor Isaac and his charity-crusader wife. And of course, Shelby's parents, including her father, who married a light-skinned woman like himself, though he has kept a darker mistress for decades. Like Passing, The Wedding understands the intimate relationship between colorism and racism: "passing" is, for the black upper class, a mark of unparalleled distinction. But chasing it requires a tightrope act: you can marry another light-skinned person for it, but to marry white threatens a wholesale dilution of the family's blackness. Ironically, perhaps, such distinctions are predicated on the same kind of one-drop blood quantum laws that kept white families' whiteness intact.

The strongest and most interesting part of The Wedding was, I thought, an extended flashback in which the young golden-haired Shelby chases off after a stray dog and becomes lost. The Ovalites are alerted, and then the larger Vineyard community, but even when Shelby is found, wearing the outfit in which she was reported missing, her rescuers assume that she must be a different lost child, a white one. Shelby herself is unable to make sense of this mystery, because she herself doesn't know if she's black or white. She knows she has a white grandmother, and black family, but how to cobble an identity out of these parts, no one has ever told her. This formative experience is an early wound in Shelby's identity, and reveals the shakiness at the heart of the racial logic that serves to keep the boundaries of the Oval tight. While each of the parts of the novel--which at times resembles a collection of stories, linked only in the sense that they are each about a member of the family--is good, I found myself wanting more of that central presence, Shelby's, to anchor the book more soundly.

The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

To walk from Paddington to Battersea gives time for thought. He knew what he had to do long before he climbed the stairs. A phrase of Johns's came back to mind about a Ministry of Fear. He felt now that he had joined its permanent staff. But it wasn't the small Ministry to which Johns had referred, with limited aims like winning a war or changing a constitution. It was a Ministry as large as life to which all who loved belonged. If one loved one feared. That was something Digby had forgotten, full of hope among the flowers and the Tatlers.

It's a classic noir set-up, the wrong man: Arthur Rowe has his fortune read at a local festival. The fortune teller, one member of a spy network working in service of the Axis, tells him the winning number for a guess-the-weight game, and he goes home with the prize cake. But inside the cake somewhere is a bit of microfilm for which England's enemies are willing to intimidate, even kill. A German raid saves Arthur from his pursuers, but they're dogged: first, they try to pin a murder on him, then they try to explode him. Neither of these works, but the bomb gives him a spell of amnesia, and Arthur finds himself committed to a sinister mental ward, under a false name he doesn't know is not his.

It's a shaggy dog story, all right. On top of all this, Arthur carries around with him a horrible guilt: he really is a murderer. Years before, Arthur poisoned his ailing wife in an act of mercy. It's this act, actually, that makes Arthur difficult to blackmail or chase underground. Having done the most horrible thing he can imagine, Arthur has little to lose, and no conception of himself as either too good or too vulnerable. At the same time, Arthur's deed lies in contrast to the murders and machinations of the spy network that make up the title "Ministry of Fear." "You think you are so bad," an Austrian refugee named Anna tells him--not exactly a femme fatale, but a recognizable noir figure just the same--"But they can bear pain--other people's pain--endlessly. They are the people who don't care."

The amnesia thing is very silly. Perhaps in 1943, when Greene wrote the novel, it seemed a little less hoary. But it works here because, while Arthur slowly regains his memories, the memory of his wife's murder is the one thing he fails to recover. By forgetting the deed, he is renewed, equally determined as before, but with a fresh and much-needed conscience. The "new" Arthur is no murderer, but an avenger.

The Ministry of Fear actually struck me as one of the stronger of Greene's espionage books. It's more complex, less tawdry, than This Gun for Hire, more interesting that Stamboul Train, two of the books packaged with it in my four-book omnibus. The fourth, Our Man in Havana, illustrates how Greene's later books, even as they kept their spy themes, moved outward into the "Greeneland" of MI6; but The Ministry of Fear alone captures something worthwhile about the homefront. The constant air raids of the Blitz are a physical analog of the "Ministry of Fear," who look like ordinary doctors and tailors but who whose mission, whether by coercion or bribery, is to batter at the integrity of British domestic life. One way to read Arthur is as a symbol for the United Kingdom: no innocent, but one whose crimes cannot compare to the true evil that wages war against him.

Beka Lamb by Zee Edgell

A severe hurricane early in the twentieth century, and several smaller storms since that time had helped to give parts of the town the appearance of a temporary camp. But this was misleading, for Belizeans loved their town which lay below the level of the sea and only through force of circumstances, moved to other parts of the country. It was a town, not unlike small towns everywhere perhaps, where each person, within his neighbourhood, was an individual with well known circumstances. Indeed, a Belizean without a known legend was the most talked about character of all.

Beka Lamb is a young girl living in the small Central American nation of Belize. Her parents have gone to great lengths to provide her the kind of education few Belizean girls have, but she's squandered it, failing all of her classes. She must labor to convince them to send her back for the next year so that she might prove herself again. Meanwhile, her best friend Toycie is a straight-A student, but she has begun to have problems of her own: Toycie's boyfriend Emilio has abandoned her just as Toycie has begun to suspect she is pregnant. Beka struggles to keep up with her urgent studies and be there for her friend at the same time; while Beka re-commits herself and grows, Toycie begins to fall irrevocably apart.

I've been doing this project, in which I am trying to read a book from each country, for about a year now. Beka Lamb is just the kind of book you hope will appear when searching among small and less developed countries like Belize. Not because it's especially good--it is, but nothing earth-shattering--but because it captures something indelible about the country, its land and customs, its palpable essence. If you stop to reflect, you might begin to suspect that a book like this one is written consciously for outsiders, in the way it scrupulously records the cuisine, the rituals, the music and dance, of Belize, but when such things are done with expertise, it hardly bothers you. Beka Lamb is set at a time of great tumult for this small country: many are advocating for full independence from their British rulers, and others are fretting that an independent Belize will be gobbled up by its neighbor Guatemala. (Among other things, it is odd from an American perspective, which sees it as a relatively small and poor country, to think of Guatemala as a predatory power.) But of the country's vibrancy and pride Edgell leaves no doubt.

Beka Lamb is a tragedy: Toycie's child dies in childbirth, and Toycie becomes mentally unwell. She spends some time at an asylum, but her grandmother chooses to take her into "the bush" where she can rest, but a sudden hurricane ends Toycie's life. These final consequences are spelled out at the beginning of the book, as Beka holds a mental "wake" for her fallen friend; it's suggested that, through her struggle to support Toycie, Beka is finally allowed to grow. The symbol of this growth is that she wins an essay prize at school, claiming victory over older--and non-black--girls. Such tradeoffs, Toycie for an essay prize, are difficult to swallow. But in the end, Edgell suggests that to grow and prosper as a young girl in a proud but beleaguered country is no easy thing.

With the addition of Belize, my "countries read" list is up to 73!

Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov

"Today is the eight day" (wrote Cincinnatus with the pencil, which had lost more than a third of its length) "and not only am I still alive, that is, the sphere of my own self still limits and eclipses my being, but, like any other mortal, I do not know my mortal hour and can apply to myself a formula that holds for everyone: the probability of a future decreases in inverse proportion to its theoretical remoteness. Of course in my case discretion requires that I think in term of very small numbers--but that is all right, that is all right--I am alive."

Cincinnatus C. has been sentenced to death for a vague crime specified only as "gnostical turpitude." He sits in jail, tortured not by the certainty of his sentence but its uncertainty: he has no idea when the hour of his execution will come; no one will tell him. Maybe nobody knows. In the meantime, he shares his cell with a persistent spider and a zealous jailor, and soon a cell mate, a noxious little snob named M'sieur Pierre. He has time enough for visits, each one with its own cryptic refusal to provide any closure: his absent mother, his unfaithful wife, her large and vituperative family. He orders books from the library, and reads the newspaper, though references to himself are cut out of it. And he writes.

In the passage above, Nabokov makes explicit a central fact that underpins Invitation to a Beheading: Cincinnatus is basically in the same position as all of us. We all know we must die, but none of us knows the hour. Cincinnatus' life is lived on a contracted scale, but in its nature, he's like everyone else. Understanding this, his scribbling becomes especially poignant: over and over, in his writings, Cincinnatus expresses the desire to be able to express himself clearly, but he always feels that he has not quite said what it is he means to say. The desire, made urgent by the ticking clock, is a kind of manifesto about writing: the desire to say something real, and the understanding that there is limited time in which to say it.

Invitation to a Beheading is one of those capital-L Literature books about the Human Condition: the certainty of death, and what we do with it. Nabokov claims in the introduction that he had never read Kafka's The Trial when he wrote Beheading, and though the surface similarities are the same, there's nothing in the novel about authoritarians or autocrats. Cincinnatus is not degraded by his sentence, not tortured or physically punished; in fact, his jailors seem eager to treat him as some kind of honored guest, much to his annoyance. It's funny, actually; after having been chased out of Russia by the revolution, Nabokov would have had reason to imbue his prison story with such flavors, but he reaches for something much more universal.

Invitation to a Beheading is very funny, more Beckett than Kafka. It even has a kind of Vaudevillian flair to it, with Cincinnatus acting as the straight man to an increasingly mad world. Its best parts, I think, are actually the stream-of-consciousness writings that Cincinnatus pours out onto the page--though he may be dissatisfied with them, the pathos of their insufficiency really only makes them more touching. I was also taken with the novel's final scenes, which resolve the dreary questions of foreshadowing and climax--what will happen to Cincinnatus?--with a dreamy flare of imagination.

My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley

I tried the same tack. I read out the dinner choices as Griff had done. I tried to use her newspaper, too, to talk to her. 'Isn't this dreadful?' I said, about a headline, or 'Do you know who that is?' about a picture of a soap star. I read out a Quick Crossword clue and she tried to answer. Or rather--as in a game of charades--she would communicate that she knew the answer, and then it was down to me to make suggestions, and for her to shake her head and frown, or nod and urge me on, until I guessed it right. If she let me know that she was drawing a blank then it was me who did the mimes and the gurning, until she said 'Oh! Oh!' to let me know she'd got it. There were some words she could say. She said 'yellow' for lemon and 'big doors' for wardrobe. She couldn't manage more than three or four words at a time.

Bridget and her mother Helen--Hen--have a relationship at arms' length. They see each other once a year, on Helen's birthday, going to the same ratty tavern, and though Hen seems to resent that she is not more included in her daughter's life, any attempt at change in a way that might bring them closer leads to more misunderstanding, more resentment. As Bridget's boyfriend John observes--when Hen finally meets him after years and years--Bridget's mother seems to have a preconceived notion about how any interaction ought to go, and the way it actually goes fails to reach her perception. In the meantime, she is desperately lonely, throwing herself into clubs and cruises and activities, searching for a man who will could become her third husband, but without the capacity for change or accommodation that such love would require.

My Phantoms is a book that's so small in conception, so confined to the everyday miseries of mothering and daughtering that you find yourself wondering if, despite the protagonist not sharing a name with author Gwendoline Riley, you're reading some of that autofiction you keep hearing is everywhere these days. But what it does, it does well: Riley captures exactly the feelings of stagnation and standoffishness that characterize only familial relationships. The way in which the need for change is glaringly obvious, but the person in front of you is too familiar for either of you to change--you know each other too well, which is why you don't know each other at all. At times I found it a little too small, feeling that, even though Hen is quite specifically evoked and alive-seeming, the familiarity of the narrative made it an odd subject for a novel.

In the novel's final movement, Hen develops a brain tumor. (This does provide a little melodrama, but then again, that's an ordinary kind of story, too: such medical ends are awaiting all of us.) In her diminished form, unable to speak coherently, Hen is not so different than she always was. What's different is that the possibility of change, of drawing closer or resolving the small barriers of family bitterness, has been precluded. Hen, spoiler alert, dies, but in a way her death is prefigured by the death of these possibilities. In the end, Bridget understands her mother, pities her, but never reaches her.

Guerrillas by V. S. Naipaul

As he had been talking to Jane and Roche, as they had let him run on, he had begun to feel unsupported by his words, and then separate from his words; and he had a vision of darkness, of the world lost forever, and his own life ending on that bit of wasteland. After they had gone he allowed himself to sink into that darkness, keeping the memory of the afternoon close: the memory of Jane who, by her presence, manner, and talk, had suggested that darkness reserved for himself alone. Yet at the same time, in his fantasy, she washed away the darkness; he carried the picture of her standing outside the hut on the bare, bright earth, nervous, tremulous in her flared trousers.

Peter Roche is a South African, come to this unnamed island in the Caribbean to distance himself from political imprisonment and torture in his native country. Ostensibly, he has come to assist with various left-wing political projects, but the job he's taken is with a firm connected to global resource extractors. His girlfriend, Jane, is an American with little in the way of a political worldview; the Caribbean seems to be a kind of adventure for her, but one that has quickly soured, along with their relationship. Roche introduces Jane to Jimmy Ahmed, a local activist who has recently returned home (or been kicked out of) England, and who is trying to build an agricultural commune. Though Roche puts little stock in rumors, some say the commune is a front for guerrillas who threaten the island's political stability.

When Roche and Jane leave Jimmy's compound, he sits down and begins to write a letter: "Ever since I arrived here I have been hearing about the man they call Jimmy." One quickly realizes that what he's doing is writing as if he is Jane, describing himself in admiring and enigmatic terms. It's one of those brilliant touches that only Naipaul, who wrote about the inferiority complex of the post-colonial subject, could write. The island of Guerrillas, which is specifically not, but is inspired by, Naipaul's Trinidad, is a minor and disordered place. His long descriptions of the countryside focus on the accumulation of garbage, the desolation of wildfires. Even its revolutionaries are degenerate: Jimmy names his commune Thrushcross Grange, as if to borrow a little English respectability from Wuthering Heights, but he's sexually abusing the wayward young boys who come to work the land.

Guerrillas is a strangely oblique book. I don't know if I quite understood it. The instability, when it does come, happens off screen, while the white characters wait it out in their houses among the wealthier residents on the ridge outside of town. Though men like Jimmy and Roche should, by light of their fame, be important actors in these events, Naipaul makes it clear that they are mostly at the mercy of powerful figures never seen, some of the island, but also including the American bauxite extractors who arrive on the island carrying their stashes of explicit pornography. Guerrillas is a novel of waiting, of simmering tensions, until it finally does explode at the very end, in an act of sexual violence so grotesque and unpleasant (based on the real life murder conviction of Trinidadian activist Michael X) it's hard to think about the book as containing anything else.

When he wanted to, Naipaul could have a light touch; books like Miguel Street and A House for Mr. Biswas cover similar themes with a lot of humor and irony. But Guerrillas is a dark, mean book, which makes you wonder what anyone could ever find funny about the state of the post-colonial world. It might be said that Guerrillas better reflects the violent dysfunctions of that world, but it's no mystery why it doesn't make anybody's best-of lists.