Christopher's Top Ten 2023

I just love the little ritual of looking over everything I've read in a year. The life of a book is larger than the experience of reading it, I think, and over the past sixteen years--Brent and I started the Fifty Books Project way back in 2006--I've come to believe that what matters most about a book is not contained within the pages, but the vaguer, more shapeless thing that lodges in the heart after the book is over. The ten books listed (as well as many of those in the honorable mentions, and even some I had to leave out) live on in some way, and going back to read what I wrote about them at the time is less a reminder than a rekindling of something. The grotesque terror of Jawbone and The Vivisector, the quiet desolation of Free Day and No Great Mischief, the wild humor of A Manual for Cleaning Women and The Visiting Privilege, I got to experience them in miniature all over again. Maybe I'm just getting sentimental in my old age, but I found making this list to be an emotional experience. 

As far as my reading goals go: once again I did pretty well about gender parity. 56 of the 111 authors I read were women. I did a little worse this year than last in my ongoing quest to read a book from each country. Last year I read eighteen new countries; this year I read ten: Albania, both Congos, Ghana, Israel, Mongolia, Mozambique, Singapore, Syria, and Ukraine. I'd like to do a little better than that in 2024. Of course, that's the best thing about a project like this one--there's always another year. Here are the best things I read in 2023.

Honorable Mentions:

Lover Man by Alston Anderson
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Voices Made Night by Mia Couto
The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick
Back by Henry Green
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
Ice by Anna Kavan
10:04 by Ben Lerner
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
Oh! by Mary Robison
Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada
Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness by Jennifer Tseng
Olav Audunsson: Vows by Sigrid Undset
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Top Ten:

10. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin - Lucia Berlin's funny, downtrodden stories seemed to me to bridge the gap between those of old masters like Grace Paley and Mavis Gallant and modern ones, like Joy Williams--which I think is no small praise. But perhaps it short-changes Berlin, whose rollicking, somewhat peripatetic life is transmuted in these stories into something totally unique. As the title story indicates, Berlin's gift is in portraying the lives of working class: cleaning women in Oakland, Native American elders waiting around at laundromats, Mexican girls in need of abortions, New Mexico nurses, alcoholics. Each one revolves around a fictionalized version of Berlin herself, whose voice animates the stories--they feel real because we sense they are taken from a real life, colorfully lived.

9. Jawbone by Monica Ojeda - I have a soft spot for books that are almost bad: the prose teeters on purplishness or grotesqueness, too many ideas are juggled, the structure is absurd--and yet, the book is saved by a spark of genius, because genius is closer to disaster than it is to mediocrity. Jawbone, a book that draws mainly from Slenderman creepypastas and horror exploitation, is just such a book. About a pair of Ecuadorian teenagers who are drawn, by online stories and their own fevered imaginations, into Grand Guignol games of sexual violence and humiliation, should go too far, be too strange. But somehow it uncovers something true about the horror of puberty and the body's transformation, and how it engenders both fear and excitement. Of all the books I read this year, this one might be the boldest, take the biggest risks.

8.  A Turn in the South by V. S. Naipaul - More than any other book I read this year, Naipaul's memoir of traveling through the American South made me see familiar things in a new way. First among those was Naipaul himself, who, despite being a notorious crank, writes about the ordinary people of the South with extraordinary openness. (Sometimes, when he converses with racists, you wish he'd be a little less open.) But the other, of course, is the South, which Naipaul depicts as a kindred to the post-colonial, post-slave societies of the Caribbean he knew so well. The final chapter, in which Naipaul travels through N.C. with a poet and scion of a tobacco farming family, plucked strings of pity and love for the place I was born that I barely knew were there. I was born a little less than a year after Naipaul passed through, and part of me felt like in reading A Turn in the South that I was reading about myself.

7. A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan - Speaking of North Carolina, here's a book that illuminates a part of the state that few people--unless they're from here--either visit or think about: the rich black coastal plain that stretches out from the cities of the Piedmont to the coast. This is North Carolina's (and South Carolina's and Virginia's) Black Belt, more rural and more poor than those "New South" cities, and Randall Kenan wrote about it as lovingly and critically as only a native son could. When A Visitation of Spirits opens, its hero, a teen struggling with his same-sex attractions, is choosing a bird from a book to transform into. There is no transformation ceremony, of course--it's not that kind of book--but the fact that young Horace believes in one illustrates the depth of his despair and isolation. It's Horace who is the spirit, the young man who haunts the preacher-principal who failed him, and whose guilt is at the book's heart.

6. Free Day by Ines Cagnati - "As for me, when I was little, I would have liked to be a little calf. I would have been loved, like everybody." [Sound of intense, ceaseless weeping] I read Free Day on Brent's recommendation, and he was right about it: it's one of the saddest, heart-wrenching novels I think I've ever read. Its heroine, Galla, is an Italian immigrant girl in a French boarding school; when she takes a day off school to go home, she finds herself locked out of the house, unwanted, so she wanders the stinking fens around her house, meditating on the various tragedies that have befallen her and her family. It's a little like Ferris Bueller if everybody hated Ferris. But its Galla's voice--wise and naive, defiant and defeated--that make it so sad and so strange.

5. During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase - Let's start here: I've never seen a writer use the plural first person "we" as well as Joan Chase does in this novel, whose protagonists are a quartet of cousins on an Ohio farm run by their demanding and domineering grandmother--the titular Queen. In one way, the point of view lends itself perfectly to a broad story of growing up and growing apart; witness the way each girl is "peeled away" when she becomes estranged or resented by the others. But During the Reign of the Queen of Persia is also a specific story about a strange family, and it centers especially on the slow death by cancer of one of the family's most beloved. Take away the point of view, and it's still an extraordinary--but more familiar--realistic novel, with the bread and butter of realism: sharp characters and accomplished prose. It often felt to me like an Alice Munro story stretched out to the length of a novel--which is one of the greatest compliments I think I could give.

4. The Wall by Marlen Haushofer - I think there's a good chance, a decade from now, The Wall will be the book from this year I'm still thinking about. The premise is so strange, but so simple; the book is so simple but so compelling: while alone at an Alpine chalet, an invisible wall cuts a woman off from the rest of the world. Her only companions are a few animals: a cat, a dog, a cow. Caring for them keeps her alive, and she becomes estranged from the old world of cars and contraptions, becoming more herself. In a way, The Wall is a version of Walden shorn of high-mindedness, sentimentality, and even cynicism--all things that the narrator has left behind in a former life. 

3. The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams - Now, you know I'm one of Joy's Boys. The story omnibus The Visiting Privilege cemented my opinion that Williams' work is among the best and most consistent of any living writer; she simply doesn't miss, not on the macro level and not on the sentence level. She's literally never written a boring sentence. The world of The Visiting Privilege is made up of Florida resort towns, nursing homes, desert outposts, dusty museums. Its characters are one step removed from murder and madness, from death row. There's one story about a support group for the mothers of committed murderers; another is even narrated by the father of Jared Lee Loughner, who committed a mass shooting in Tucson. My favorite is "Congress," which is difficult to even summarize here, but it involves a paralyzed man, a lamp made of deer hooves, and a mystical taxidermy museum. Talking about Williams' work often makes it sound silly, but it isn't; it's terrifying on a deep existential level. Each of the stories in The Visiting Privilege is like getting another finger stuck in a pool drain and knowing no one's coming to extricate you.

2. No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod - If you've ever been to Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, you know it's easy to imagine an unbroken connection between its rocky headlands and those its Scottish immigrants in the old world. No Great Mischief is about that unbroken connection, traced back through the narrator to his grandparents, who have faced immense tragedy and loss before they even step off the boat. No Great Mischief reverberates with loss: the narrator's parents, who disappear in a hole beneath the ice, and the cousin with the same name who is killed in a mining accident. In the present, the narrator makes a weekly trip to Toronto to provide his alcoholic brother with the booze he needs to stay alive: sometimes the reverberations of loss look like delirium tremens. And all this in MacLeod's quiet, elegant--and if you don't mind me saying--quite Canadian prose. A book like a sheet of ice, under which dark waters churn.

1. The Vivisector by Patrick White - Patrick White is one of my favorite writers, but I'm almost certain this is the first time one of his books has topped my year-end list. The Vivisector is something that's very hard to pull off: an art novel. But White, who manages to bridge the gap between the physical and the numinous, the physical grit and slurry of the paint and the intimation of the divine, is one of the few authors who can really pull it off, I think. The aging painter Hurtle Duffield struggles with exactly this opposition, the grotesque world of the physical and the life of the spirit. His story of being adopted away from his washerwoman mother into a wealthy family is an (obviously intentional) send-up of Great Expectations; his new hunchbacked sister Rhoda, toward whom he feels both deep attraction and revulsion, is maybe the platonic ideal of a Patrick White character. White's vision of the artist who is compelled to create, even as creation entails destruction, somehow both possessed by God and possessing God, is unforgettable. One of the greatest books ever written about the creative life--and the best thing this year.

Lover Man by Alston Anderson

Lots of girls were leaning on the sills behind the screens in their windows. Some of them were smiling and others were just looking at us. I was about to help load the trash barrels on to the truck when I saw her. She had long, black hair curling down around her shoulders, but what with the screen and all I couldn't see her face properly. So I walked over and stood below her kitchen. As I stood there looking up at her it looked to me like she was saying 'yes' with her eyes. I didn't know yes what; just yes. I thought she was the prettiest girl I'd ever seen; even prettier than Maybelle, the first girl I ever loved. I just stood there, looking at her, much as a starving man would a ripe orange that's just out of his jumping reach.

'I'm going marry you,' I said.

She laughed as if she'd been goosed. 'You and who else?' she said.

The stories in Alston Anderson's Lover Man stretch from small-town Alabama to a residential school in eastern North Carolina to the streets of Harlem. Their heroes are a loosely connected gathering of Black men and women engaged in the petty business of small town life: courting, drinking and playing games, marrying and cheating, razzing one another in the slightly formalized fashion known as "the dozens," working, working, working, pining, dying. Their voices are marked by the off-kilter music of vernacular speech, which, for Anderson, is made of malapropisms made good: scrucial for crucial, innercent for innocent (and of course, doesn't that reflect something of the spiritual coin that innocence provides?). As the stories move northward, the vernacular is overlaid with the language and patterns of jazz, with man and kats and pad and mother-hubbers.

Lover Man, written in the late 50's, is published here by McNally Editions as a kind of lost text, and the afterword by Kinohi Nishikawa describes its falling out of favor as a consequence of its apolitical nature at a time when the pointedly political work of writers like James Baldwin and Richard Wright was in ascendance. But as they say, the personal is political, and all the great world-turning themes of class and race and sex boil just beneath the surface. Sexuality, in particular, sits just behind the narrative of a story like "North Carolina School Days," about Aaron (or "Lil One"), who, shortly after a tearful goodbye to his roommate, finds himself in bed with the girlfriend he idolizes, unable to perform. As an ending, it's--pardon me--anticlimactic, but perhaps only because Aaron must face it mutely, with a lack of understanding; he's no Baldwin character. As the reader, it's not lost on us--or it least it shouldn't be--that the roommates at this particular boarding school call each other "old gal" as a custom. Similarly, the protagonist of "Dance of the Infidels" does not, and likely cannot, explain why he gets on a train to travel hundreds of miles uninvited to the Harlem apartment of an acquaintance with whom he shared a passing love of jazz LPs.

The two characters that interest me most among these stories are the title character of "Old Man Maypeck" and the German Herr Schaub of "Comrade." The former is black, the latter white; yet, in a way, they share a worldview that makes them stand out among the "apolitical." Old Man Maypeck is the oldest man in town, and the only one who can remember slavery; he describes to a younger man (Lil One/Aaron again) the difference between "house n--ers and field n--ers": "Field n--ers walk like they ain't a care in the world, and house n--ers is right nervous and prissy-like, most like a white man. You is a house n--er. Eat up, son." It's meant to be a complement. Maypeck encourages Aaron, 
"Don't you be letting nobody put no race problem foolishness in your head up North; else you'll be just like Conscrucious"--a cautionary tale with a suspicious-sounding name--"The first thing you got to learn about the race problem is that there ain't no race problem. People ain't like cattle or hosses what you can breed and put labels on."

In "Comrade," the protagonist is stationed in Germany after the end of World War II, and helps nurse a stray dog to health before locating its owner, Herr Schaub, and returning it. Schaub is genial and appreciative, and invites the narrator into his home, but nearly provokes a fight by using the German word for "Black man," neger. Herr Schaub explains, and the narrator feels foolish, but he goes on to explain that the "N-word" itself is a Cockney corruption of German, and so it's not worth getting so upset about that either. The etymology is as dubious as the moral claim, but the narrator ends the story by saying, "But if Herr Schaub ever reads this I'd like him to know that Comrade is OK by me, and I hope we never have to fight one another no more."

What interests me about both Old Man Maypeck and Herr Schaub is that their moral outlooks are layered in irony, and not so easily dismissed. We turn away from Old Man Maypeck's toadyism, his love for the "Old Master," but we must admit that he's right that people "ain't like cattle or hosses," and the narrator's father's assertion that he's simply crazy doesn't sit right, either. Herr Schaub's wisdom curdles quickly with his bad etymology, but the narrator seems to understand that behind even this misguided claim there is a deep desire to show friendship and acceptance, to hope that fighting will end. In both figures there is a straining to understand, and find sympathy for, the "Why can't we all just get along" approach to racial reconciliation, even as it seems deeply misguided. Although, as the afterword notes, Anderson once wrote a letter in support of William F. Buckley's beliefs regarding civil rights, so what do I know? Maybe we're supposed to take Old Man Maypeck at his word.

But I don't think so. Irony is Anderson's bread and butter, and it appears throughout these stories as a kind of verbal trickery, even warfare. It's there in "The Dozens," about a boy who drowns in the middle of that teasing game that skirts the line between irony and truth, and the guilt that his friend must live with thereafter. It's there most often in the conversations between women and men, especially the Lover Men of the title, whose thickly layered irony is a ploy toward getting a woman into bed. One of the best stories is "A Sound of Screaming," about a man who takes his mistress for an abortion, and who must sit with her for the next several hours as the fetus is painfully passed. The conversation between them teeters on an ironic edge; in a moment of crisis they are simultaneously desperate for and despising one another. In "North Carolina School Days," Aaron's ironic capacity fails as surely as his libido; stuck one-on-one with Del he can think of nothing to say. By contrast, the muteness of the friendly jazz-lovers in "Dance of the Infidels" seems to suggest a total failure of irony in the face of a kind of relationship that, for the Alabamian at least, has no social governance because it's simply too unthinkable. The stories of Lover Man may seem at times quite simple. ("That's it? He couldn't get it up?") But I think those who pay close attention to the dialogue will see how multi-layered they are, and what's happening just beneath the surface.

Wild Geese by Martha Ostenso

As she jogged along in the cart, her eyes idled across the flat, unsurprising earth that went on and on into the north with scarcely a perceptible undulation. Here was the bush land, without magnificence, without primitive redundance of growth, here was the prairie, spare as an empty platter -- no, there was the solitary figure of a man upon it, like a meagre offering of earth to heaven. Here were the little wood trails and prairie trails that a few men had made on lonely journeyings, and here the crossings where they had met to exchange a word or two. The sky above it all was blue and tremendous, a vast country for proud birds that were ever on the wing, seeking, seeking. And a little delicate wind that was like a woman, Jude thought to herself, but could in a moment become a male giant violating the earth.

The prairies of Manitoba: Lind Archer, having recently taken a job as a village schoolteacher, arrives to live with the Gare family. She finds them all--sons Martin and Charlie, daughters Ellen and Judith, wife Amelia--cowering under the thumb of the malicious Caleb Gare, a man who cares about nothing beyond his farm. Caleb has no intention of allowing any of his family to leave the farm; he wages a kind of psychological warfare against each one to keep them tied to the land, to enrich himself by holding onto their labor. For his wife Amelia, it means threatening to reveal that she is really the mother of the dashing young caretaker Mark Jordan, who believes he is the son of deceased gentlefolk. For daughter Ellen, it means keeping her away from her beau, Malcolm. Ellen submits meekly, but Judith has no intention of being like her sister: she, at least, fights her father at every turn.

Wild Geese, as I understand it, is a classic of "Can-Con." It won some kind of prize for its portrayal of the small farming villages of northern Manitoba, filled with Anglo farmers like the Gares, but also Hungarians, and Icelanders. At its best, it its reminiscent of Willa Cather's version of the American prairie, another remote outpost that turns out to be, in its own strange way, a crossroads of the world. In fact, Wild Geese seems to ask the question of what kind of place the Manitoba prairie will become: is it a land where Catholic Hungarians, Nordics, English settlers, and Cree Indians come together to create villages, governed by shared law and custom? Or is it a place where the law of the small stakeholder rules, where Caleb Gares go to exert their will on their dependents as much as the land, remote from the eye of the church and the law? (Wild Geese is actually a muddled book in this regard, as evidenced by Caleb's rather unbelievable assertion that he will have Judith tried in Winnipeg for tossing an axe at his head--though it rings true that the devilish Caleb would use law for his own ends, when possible.)

Wild Geese is reminiscent of Cather, but it hardly comes near Cather's Nebraska novels in quality. It resembles a lot of early 20th century fiction--including some novels of Cather's, to be fair--in its love of sheer melodrama. (Edna Ferber might be an even better American analogue.) Wicked Caleb is the book's most interesting and enduring creation, and the headstrong Judith is second, but the whole novel balances on an implausible secret of questionable import. Even allowing for the customs of a different time, it's hard to imagine the secret that Caleb hangs over the head of Amelia--that Mark Jordan, having recently attached himself to the beautiful schoolteacher Lind, was born out of wedlock--mattering all that much in the end. In fact, this "secret" seemed so weak that I kept waiting for some other secret to emerge, thinking that it couldn't be the entire story. The best part of the whole thing is probably when Judith throws that axe at Caleb's head, but such moments are few and far between. The ending, in which--spoiler alert--Caleb dies in a fire, sucked into his own precious mud, trying to save his flax, works more on a symbolic level than a practical one. 

The Other Name by Jon Fosse

...it's true probably the only thing I could have ended up doing was painting pictures, and if I wanted to make a living I need to paint, and that's both good and also wrong, but that's what I did and kept doing, I painted picture after picture, I did that at least, and when I wasn't painting I often spent hour after hour just sitting and staring into space, yes, I can sit for a long time and just stare into empty space, at nothing, and it's sort of like something can come form the empty nothingness, like something real can come out of the nothingness, something that says a lot, and what it says can turn into a picture, either that or I can stay sitting there staring into empty space and become completely empty myself, completely still, and it's in that empty stillness that I like to say my deepest truest prayers, yes, that's when God is closest, because it's in the silence that God can be heard, and it's in the invisible that He can be seen, of course I know my Pater Noster and I pray with it every day...

Jon Fosse's Septology is three books, divided further into seven volumes. It's hard to say whether it's one thing or three things or seven things, and each volume itself is one run-on sentence without periods, slipping from one day in the life of the painter Asle into the next, bleeding across volumes. Since the first two of the seven were published as a single volume--and since I'm trying to surpass my book total for last year--we're going to go ahead and call this volume a book, though certainly others will say the Septology's propulsive, fluid, and unceasing nature demands that one read until the end.

Asle, the narrator, is a painter living on the coast of Norway. He's a widower, with few friends, except for his neighbor Asleik and the owner of the gallery where he sells his paintings. And, of course, the other Asle, who lives in town and who--we quickly pick up--is a kind of doppelganger of the narrator, if not something even more intimate and overlapping than that. Another version of himself, perhaps, branching off at some undefined point. Whereas our Asle is a teetotaler, having been convinced to stop drinking by his late wife Ales, the other Asle is a hopeless and miserable drunk. Much of The Other Name is devoted to the narrator Asle's attempts to get the other Asle, whom he's found cataleptic in the snow, into a clinic where he can be treated for his severe addiction. This becomes a kind of shaggy dog story, literally: the narrator Asle realizes too late that he must find and take care of drunk Asle's dog Bragi, and this is made all the more difficult by a snow storm that keeps him from driving back to the coast.

How did Asle become Asle and Asle become Asle? Can it really be as simple as the suggestion, toward the volume's end, that the drunk Asle was set off on his path by the trauma of being molested as a child? Such an answer would be easy, too easy--perhaps it was the mollifying influence of Asle's wife Ales, now gone. Or perhaps there is no accounting for why our lives take the paths they do. This is complicated by a sneaking suspicion that there is something in the names of the other characters--Asle, Asleik--that suggests that there are more than just these two doppelgangers, and that we are meant to see them as many variations on the same Asle. The slippage becomes comical when narrator Asle keeps running into a woman, Silje, who insists they've met before, even slept together. What's obvious to us--she knows the drunk Asle, ensconced now in the clinic--is totally lost on our aloof narrator.

The ceaseless sentence of each volume lulls you, like a drug or a dream; it's easy to feel, carried on the endless flow of it, that you have been severed from realism, if not from reality. The style is a variation on stream-of-consciousness, and not, I would say, especially innovative, but it works really well here because it works to justify the novel's slight otherworldliness, its other strange slippages, like that between Asle and Asle. We don't question the vision of two lovers playing in a sandbox, which may be a memory of Asle about himself and Ales, or which may be two real people. We don't question the way the narrative perspective breaks as the narrator's consciousness enters into the consciousness of the other Asle. Is "our" Asle simply remembering the story that the other Asle told of his formative encounter with the predatory "Bald Man," or imagining it? Or has the narrative somehow slipped away from him, and really entered into the other man? Of course, it's both somehow, and the narrative's current, which refuses to recognize the epistemological barrier of the sentence, reflects it.

One thing I enjoyed a lot about The Other Name is the way it imagines narrator Asle's art. In the two days that make up the two chapters, he has recently begun--and perhaps--finished a painting made up of only two lines crossing, a brown and a purple one. His neighbor Asleik jokes that the painting should be called "St. Andrew's Cross," and there is something religious about the experience of painting for our Asle, a way of accessing the quiet and empty place where God lives, and where creation is possible. (Among other things, our Asle is a recent convert to Catholicism, and can be seen praying his Pater Nosters with the dedication of a convert.) My favorite bits might be when our Asle describes the glow he searches for in his paintings, a glow that comes out of sheer darkness, made layer by layer on the canvas; he tells us that he only knows when a work is finished if, when he turns the light out, the glow remains. A Glow in the Darkness might be another, more florid name for the first volume of the Septology.

I'm still searching, I think, for what people love about these novels, and what the Nobel committee saw in them (and Fosse's work more generally) when they awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature earlier this year. I will say that it took a little bit of self-sacrifice to stop with the first volume, when the narrative works so hard to carry you, like the tidal fjord, into the next one. But it took a little bit of self-interestedness, too.

Democracy by Joan Didion

She did it with no passport (her passport was in her otherwise empty stash box in the apartment on Central Park west) and a joke press card that somebody from Life had made up for her during the 1972 campaign. The pre card had failed to get Jessie Victor at age fifteen into the backstage area at Nassau Coliseum during a Pink Floyd concert but it got her at age eighteen onto the C-5A to Saigon. This seems astonishing now, but we forget how confused and febrile those few weeks in 1975 actually were, the "reassessments" and the "calculated gamble" and the infusions of supplemental aid giving way even as they were reported to the lurid phantasmagoria of air lifts and marines on the roof and stranded personnel and tarmacs littered with shoes and broken toys. In the immediate glamour of the revealed crisis many things happened that could not have happened a few months earlier or a few weeks later, and what happened to Jessie Victor was one of them. Clearly an American girl who landed at Tan Son Nhut should have been detained there, but Jessie Victor was not. Clearly an American girl who landed at Tan Son Nhut with no passport should not have been stamped through immigration on the basis of a New York driver's license, but Jessie Victor was. Clearly an American girl with no passport, a New York driver's license and a straw tennis visor should not have been able to walk out of the littered makeshift terminal at Tan Son Nhut and, observed by several people who did nothing to stop her, get on a bus to Cholon, but Jessie Victor had done just that. Or so it appeared.

Inez Victor is the wife of a Hawaiian senator and former presidential candidate, Harry Victor. She has developed a mien of utter detachment, having lived so long in the public eye, which is attracted to her for her elegance and stature. (Funnily, Inez is the second character, after the powerful First Lady Nicole Thibodeaux in Philip K. Dick's The Simulacra, to be clearly modeled on Jackie Kennedy.) But Inez has her secrets, too, and among them is a lifelong dalliance with a CIA "spook" named Jack Lovett who has had his hand in every bit of American mischief in a tropical country over the past several decades. The long-time affair comes to fruition as the third act in a brisk tragedy for the Victor family: first, Inez's demented father shoots and kills her sister Janet along with a well-known congressman. Then, Inez's daughter Jessie somehow gets on a plane and insinuates herself into Vietnam just as Saigon as falling. When Inez and Jack board a plane together to locate Jessie, the final dissolution of Inez's life as a political spouse is complete.

I brought this book to Florida because I got it in my head somehow that it's a Florida book. But it's a Hawaii book. Though his political ambitions are thwarted, something in Harry Victor's Hawaiian origin does anticipate Barack Obama. For Didion, Hawaii is important as the new margin of America proper. When Harry runs for president, it's been a state for less than twenty years, and it shares many qualities with those tropical places that Jack Lovett does his clandestine work. It's just a skip and a jump from Hawaii to the Marshall Islands where--as described in the book's opening--American atomic bombs were tested: "The light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see. Something to behold." It's a skip and a jump, even, to Vietnam, or Malaysia, where Inez Victor spends the remainder of her life after leaving Harry. These pacific islands, absorbed into the gestalt of America, only seem to exhibits the porousness of its borders, and of the idea of America itself. Hawaii is a place where the bleed between America and the world becomes apparent.

What's meant by the title, Democracy? I have a few thoughts about that. Obviously, there's Harry's political career, although you can't exactly say that his presidential campaign is a central part of the book; it's hardly mentioned except as a failure. But win or lose, the act of voting is only one element in democracy's vast operations. Another is the PR spin, the creation and maintenance of Harry and Inez's Camelot marriage. That marriage is threatened on all sides, by unsavory family elements like Jessie and Inez's father Paul, and by Jack Lovett's machinations, which are themselves a part of American democracy, too, like it or not. In a way, Democracy is a book about one part of democracy eating another.

But one of the most glaring and interesting aspects of Democracy is the way that Didion writes herself into it. She presents the (obviously fictional) story as a work of journalism, the kind of long-form essay for which she was well-known. That's Didion, flying to Kuala Lumpur to meet with aging émigré Inez. The novel presents several false starts, histories of Inez's family in the Hawaiian islands, before shuffling them away self-consciously. This kind of pretense is not so unusual, I think, but it's unique coming from Didion, who you really can imagine writing a book like this; the blurring between Didion's fiction and non-fiction is one of the most fascinating qualities of Democracy. And it suggests, perhaps, that what Didion does is part of Democracy as well: the maintenance of official memory, the interpolation of political events whose truth remains outside the public eye by nature. It's no wonder, then, that Inez, having washed her hands of it, treats "Didion" with such aloofness and hesitation in Kuala Lumpur.

Democracy never quite reaches the heights of A Book of Common Prayer, Didion's masterpiece of political fiction, although it's easy to see some overlap between Inez and the character of Charlotte Douglass, a non-political actor who refuses to recognize her own place in politics, or in history. Perhaps they are opposites, actually--Inez sees this maybe too well, which is why she runs from it. Democracy never reaches those heights because it's a little too shaggy; I think plot was not Didion's strong suit. (In the end, what the hell does Janet's murder have to do with anything? It hangs very strangely and limply from an otherwise very streamlined novel.) But she could write; more than anything, that was her superpower, and in that regard Democracy is pure Didion.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

He thought long on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s letter from the Birmingham jail, and the powerful appeal the man composed from inside. One thing gave birth to the other--without the cell, no magnificent call to action. Elwood had no paper, let alone the wisdom and the way with words. The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order. Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change. He never listened, never saw what was plainly in front of him, and now he had been plucked from the world altogether. The only voices were of those boys below, the shouts and laughter and fearful cries, as if he floated in a bitter heaven.

Elwood Curtis is a model student with big ambitions. While his peers are listening to Smokey Robinson and the Marvelettes, he's listening to records of Martin Luther King, Jr. speeches. He is honest and scrupulous in his part-time job at a local store, and he's been accepted to an early college program. All that comes crashing down one day when he accepts a ride from a stranger who, as it turns out, has stolen the car he's driving. He avoids jail, but his fate is worse: a reform school called the Nickel Academy, where young Black kids are tortured and humiliated under a thin pretense of "improvement." Elwood tries to abide by the school's rigid guidelines, believing that his own integrity will win out, but the purpose of the Nickel School is not to improve, but to crush. He quickly finds himself in the "White House," where students are savagely beaten. Repeat offenders, he quickly learns, are "taken out back"--and never heard from again.

I don't think Colson Whitehead's books are for me. Mostly, it's the writing, which often feels to me didactic and false. The Nickel Boys is a very different book from The Underground Railroad, of course, with its magical and anachronistic elements, but in a way it tell the same kind of story, about noble but ordinary people who bear the violent costs of American racism. Like The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys seemed to me to have few insights about racism except that it is cruel, and really sucks. Although The Underground Railroad is the science fiction novel, both books seem to me to operate in a kind of dystopian mode, depicting racism as a kind of closed system whose obstacles to escape ironically affirm the possibility that escape is possible. Elwood's misguided nobility strikes me as not so different than someone like Katniss Everdeen: a nobility that's doomed, perhaps, but even more noble for that fact. I want to phrase this carefully, because the obvious rejoinder is that racism really is cruel, and often cruel for its own sake, and nobility in the face of it really is a remarkable trait. But for a book that's based on a true story--that of the Dozier School in Florida's Panhandle--the obvious fictiveness of The Nickel Boys seems to paper over an urgent question like, "How could this really, really happen?"

What I did sort of like about The Nickel Boys was the final twist that--spoiler alert--Elwood died in an escape attempt, and the "older" Elwood we have received glimpses of is really his fellow escapee Jack Turner, who has taken on Elwood's name as a way of honoring his dead friend. (There's some suggestion that Turner changes his name to prevent being taken back to Nickel, but I'm not sure how such an obvious pseudonym would help?) There's a glimpse there of a more interesting story--though I would say it's rather bungled by the clumsiness of the flash-forward scenes--about subterfuge, about sacrifice, about the transformations wreaked by racism on a personal level. As the stories of the Nickel School--and the bodies--are dug up at last, Turner/Elwood decides to travel back down to Florida from his New York home to share the truth at last. Now, that interests me: what compels us to hide, or lie, what compels us to reveal and come clean, and whether the truth really will set you free.

Old Filth by Jane Gardam

The voids of his ignorance opened before him. I'm still the foreigner. To them. And to myself, here. I've no background. I've been peeled off my background. I've been attached to another background like a cut-out. I'm only someone they've been kind to for eight years because Pat was a loner till I came along. I'm socially a bit dubious, because they know my father went barmy. And because of living in the heart of darkness and something funny going on in Wales. And the stammer.

Old F-I-L-T-H: "Failed in London, try Hong Kong." Such is the nickname of Edward Feathers, a distinguished and superannuated English barrister, born in colonial Malaya, served in Hong Kong, and now retired in Dorset. Old Filth captures Feathers toward the end of his life, just after the death of his wife Betty, and the sudden appearance of his old rival--and Betty's former lover--who's moved in next door. The death of his wife sends Feathers on sort of a mental loop, going over the facts of his long and complicated life: being sent away from Malaya by his father, being summoned back for protection at the outbreak of World War II, the ship being turned around because of Japanese attacks on Ceylon, the love affair with his best friend's sister, his first ventures into the world of law. In London's Inner Temple he is a kind of living legend, a link with hoary Empire--but for Feathers, the past is not past.

Old Filth is dedicated to "Raj Orphans" like Feathers: the children of British colonial administrators who were sent away, back to the motherland, to be raised by foster families. The through-line of Old Filth, if there is one, is Feathers' perpetual feelings of outsiderhood: first in Malaya, where he is the only white child among his first friends (interestingly, Malay is his first language), then in England, where his strange colonial background can never quite be accommodated. Feathers, by his own account, never loses these feelings of foreignness, even as he rises to a rank of elevated esteem--that esteem, of course, having only been possibly in Hong Kong, not London.

Old Filth is, in a superficial way at least, a comedy, or a muted sort of farce. There's something funny, you know, in the way Feathers makes it all the way to Ceylon from England, by way of Sierra Leone, being extracted back into the colonial childhood he's tried to put behind him, only for the boat to turn around--and for Feathers to end up hospitalized for months, racked by parasitic worms lurking in African bananas. There's comedy, too, when Feathers is appointed a special bodyguard to the Queen (at that point, George VI's wife Mary), and using a spare hour in London as an excuse to look up--and bed--his crush. Much of the humor, though, comes from the latter day Feathers, whose lurch toward doddering senility produces a number of goofy foibles and misunderstandings.

Some of this is funny, and Feathers as a character is engaging. It was interesting enough to read about the experience of a "Raj Orphan," a Britisher who, by virtue of being born in the colonies, never quite fits in anywhere. By the time Feathers is an eminence grise, the world he came from no longer exists, and he is in a way doubly out of place. (Old Filth, like Feathers himself, feels a little dusty and anachronistic; it was shocking to read about his reaction to 9/11 and remember that the book is not so old.) But it's also a book with more ideas than it can really handle, threads that get picked up and dropped: the cuckolding rival, the enigmatic cousins, the shrewd niece-in-law. The late reveal (spoiler alert) that Feathers, as a child, helped murder his malicious foster mother, seemed so strange and out of place that I can only assume I missed some key foreshadowing. Old F-I-L-T-H: "Failed in logic, tried humor." OK, that's maybe a little too far--but you try making the anagram fit.

The Lyre of Orpheus by Robertson Davies

"Oh, somebody in a book! All you people like Nilla and the Cornishes and that man Darcourt seem to live out of books. As if everything was in books!"

"Well, Schnak, just about everything is in books. No, that's wrong. We recognize in books what we've met in life. But if you'd read a few books you wouldn't have to meet everything as if it had never happened before, and take every blow right on the chin. You'd see a few things coming. About love, for instance."

The Lyre of Orpheus, the third book in Robertson Davies' "Cornish Trilogy," brings the story back to the characters of the first novel, The Rebel Angels. In the latter, a bunch of professorial types and arts patrons, including are trying to figure out how to deal with the estate of the late art critic Francis Cornish. The trilogy's middle book, What's Bred in the Bone, serves as a biography of Cornish, who turned out to be a successful faker of Renaissance art. Here, the patrons are back, and they've decided to spend some of their money on a young doctoral student named Hulda Schnakenburg, who wants to complete an unfinished opera about King Arthur by E. T. A. Hoffmann.

The third in a trilogy of trilogies: though Davies wrote a couple other, largely unheralded, toward the end of his life, it's tempting to see The Lyre of Orpheus as the rounding of a career. If that's so, I think I'm glad to put Davies away for a little while, though one day I might go and read those ancillary novels. The Lyre of Orpheus is just too Davies; all the magic and the tricks here are reduced, I felt, to their most recognizable forms. As with The Rebel Angels, the professors and the patrons are all exhaustingly alike, even though Davies takes care to sketch them with different temperaments: they all finish each other's quotations from Hoffmann, or Sir Walter Scott, or Keats, or wherever. Even the new characters, like the demanding lesbian doctoral adviser Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot, arrive on the scene knowing just how to play these literary games. The effect, after nine novels, is of an especially well-read man talking to himself. This is easy enough to ignore, even enjoy, when the novels provide real drama, but a novel about the staging of an opera is a hard ask. (It's also, I observe, strangely similar to the plot of A Mixture of Frailties, where another group of patrons pays for the education of a lower-class singer.)

Davies' novels all suggest the same relationship between life and art. In each book, there is a central work or story, and the events of the work exert some kind of explanatory power on the events of the novel. It's Jungian, maybe, or it's just what the Welsh actor Geraint Powell says to the beleaguered "Schnak," quoted above: "If you'd read a few books you wouldn't have to meet everything as if it hadn't happened before." Here, it's the story of King Arthur that becomes manifested in the life of the characters, like an ur-myth emerging into life: Maria-slash-Guinevere allows herself to be briefly seduced by Geraint-slash-Lancelot, and ends up pregnant. They are both forgiven by Arthur-slash-Arthur, who is, like the Arthur in the play, the "magnanimous cuckold" whose generosity of spirit ennoble them all. (Never mind that this affair is out of character for Maria, and one of the falsest moments in all of Davies' books.) Davies loves to add a little spectral flourish, too. In What's Bred in the Bone, it's the pair of angels who bicker over Francis' soul; here, it's the spirit of E. T. A. Hoffmann, who looks down on the completion of his opera with excitement and trepidation.

The "Cornish Trilogy" is without a doubt the weakest of the three trilogies that Davies wrote. Yet, its middle book, with its exploration of art forgery and its traddy insistence that sometimes old forms are the best ones available to explore types of human feeling and experience we no longer pay attention to, is among Davies' best standalone novels. It's no coincidence, I think, that the most interesting parts of The Lyre of Orpheus have to do with Darcourt's discovery that the masterwork The Marriage at Cana is an original painting by Francis, and not from the 16th century, and his work revealing Francis' genius to the world at last. It made me wish The Lyre of Orpheus had a little bit more of Francis' spirit, and ability to find real truths in the falsehoods.

Olav Audunsson: Vows by Sigrid Undset

The unfathomable suffering and agony in her poor eyes--that was what drew his own naked soul up into the light. Gone was everything he had thought and intended and decided. He sensed that great and weighty things had now all but vanished from his mind; he was incapable of holding on to them. What remained was only the latest and deepest cruel certainty that she was the flesh of his flesh and life of his life, and no matter how mistreated and despoiled and broken she might be, it could never be otherwise. Their life's roots had been entwined from the first moment he could remember. And now he saw how death had seized hold of her with both hands, he felt as if he too had barely managed to escape from being torn apart. Then a longing came over him so forcefully that it shook him to his very core--a longing to pull her desperately close, to hide both her and himself.

For many years I have had a December tradition of reading one of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter novels. First, in the older, more archaic Charles Archer translation; then in Tiina Nunally's (superior) modern translation. This year, it felt like time to move on, not from the tradition, but to one of Undset's other books of medieval Norway. (I also read it at the end of November, not December, but it's pretty cold outside, and besides, I'm stuck at home with COVID and really needed something to seek my teeth into.) Vows, titled in other translations as The Axe, is the first of a series named either for its male protagonist Olav Audunsson, or for his title, The Master of Hestviken, and it follows Olav as he pursues the fulfillment of the promise of marriage his father made with that of his beloved, Ingun Steinfinnsdatter.

In many ways, Olav and Ingunn are like the anti-Kristin and anti-Erland. Whereas Kristin seeks to be released from her engagement to good-hearted Simon Darre so that she may marry the impetuous older man, Olav and Ingunn want nothing more than to fulfill the agreement their parents made: on his deathbed, Olav's father entrusted his son to Steinfinn, who would raise him as a son until he came of age, and then marry Ingunn. But plans change: Steinfinn and his wife Ingeborg are transformed by a cruel attack by Ingeborg's former betrothed, which leaves them both vengeful and withdrawn. Steinfinn has his vengeance, but receives a mortal wound in the process, and after his death, Ingunn's uncles are not so keen to fulfill a promise they know nothing about, and want to marry Ingunn to someone who will provide them a strong alliance. Olav and Ingunn force the uncles' hand by sleeping together, thus binding the marriage in the eyes of the local bishop, but theirs is a Norway in a state of constant change, and the power of the bishops is no guarantee. Olav only make things worse when he kills one of Ingunn's brothers in a fit of anger, and becomes an outlaw.

The story of Vows is one of patience and toil: Olav and Ingunn strive and wait for nearly a decade for their rights to be recognized, and for them to be permitted to live together at Olav's ancestral house at Hestviken. It must be said that neither character has the charisma of Kristin, with her preternatural loveliness and purity, or of outrageous Erland. Olav is sullen and sort of humorless, and Ingunn's principle character trait is her psychological fragility: after being separated from Olav, she becomes briefly psychosomatically paralyzed. But there's no doubt that they fit together, as they believe. Olav's single-minded insistence on claiming what's his by right, Ingunn's deep need for Olav's protection, these drive them together as much as any vow or legal status, and the social, political, and personal factors that drive them apart seem all the more horrible and cruel.

Like Kristin Lavransdatter, Vows only works to the extent that you are really willing to believe in the validity of Olav and Ingunn's marriage, which is cemented only by a promise and--forgive me--a penetration. Over and over again, people in the couple's lives try to convince them to settle for a different marriage, or an agreement to go their separate ways. In practice, this would actually be quite easy, it seems, but you have to believe, as Olav and Ingunn believe, that their marriage is something that exists between them and God, and that it cannot be abolished or supplanted. Undset's novel is clearly on the side of the Church in its skirmishes with powerful landholders like Ingunn's uncles, who resent the imposition of its laws over their feudal ones. And you must believe what a horrible violation it is when--spoiler alert--Ingunn allows herself to be seduced by a happy-go-lucky Icelander in Olav's long absence.

Olav and Ingunn battle heroically against the forces that would have them break their vow. But it is possible, perhaps, to go too far even in protecting one's marriage vows. Olav's killing of Ingunn's brother Einar, for which he ultimately is able to pay the acceptable murder-price, is one such moment. But another comes at the novel's climax, when Olav is approached by the Icelander, hoping that he will release his claim on Ingunn. Olav agrees to ski with the Icelander to the far estate of Olav's friend Arnvid, on the pretense of asking for his support. Then, in a woodland hut--and again, spoiler alert--he bashes the Icelander's head in with an axe. In the novel's final scene, Olav burns the hut down with the Icelander's body inside, realizing that he's left his treasured--and well-known--axe inside, and we are left to wonder if Olav hasn't finally committed a violation of God's law that is too cold, too cruel to come back from, one that will sunder him from Ingunn forever.

The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick

Kongrosian said, "I sent them away. They made it even more difficult for me. Look--see that desk? I'm not part of it and it's part of me! Watch and I'll show you." He scrutinized the desk intently, his mouth working. And, on the desk, a vase of pale roses lifted, moved through the air toward Kongrosian. The vase, as they now watched, passed into Kongrosian's chest and disappeared. "It's inside me, now," he quavered. "I absorbed it. Now it's me. And--" He gestured at the desk. "I'm it!"

In the spot where the vase had been Nicole saw, forming into density and mass and color, a complicated tangle of mass and color, a complicated tangle of interwoven organic matter, smooth red tubes and what appeared to be portions of an endocrine system. A section, she realized, of Kongrosian's internal anatomy.

What is politics but a mass delusion, a lie on a grand scale that is sometimes perpetrated upon us, but also one in which we collaborate, often quite willingly? Philip K. Dick's novel The Simulacra takes that idea to it extreme, most literal form: the president of the United States of Europe and America (renamed when West Germany was admitted as the 51st state) is nothing but a simulacrum, an android. The sham elections that put the simulacrum in place are ostensibly to vote in a new husband for Nicole Thibodeaux, the beautiful Jackie-esque First Lady, who is the real focal point of the American symbolic order: everyone loves her, and that unity keeps the country together. (It's no coincidence, I think, that The Simulacra was written the year of JFK's assassination.) If the country found out that her husband was a simulacrum--and that she herself only an actress, the fourth to play Nicole over many decades--who's to say what might happen?

The thing about Philip K. Dick novels is that they can never be distilled into a single thread, and trying to find the "main thread" is often a fool's errand. Maybe the novel isn't really about Nicole, but the telekinetic classical pianist Richard Kongrosian, who suffers from a mental disorder in which he believe he's become invisible, reduced to a terrible smell. Kongrosian is an integral part of the White House's "bread and circus"-style entertainments, and his mental dissolution represents a political crisis for Nicole. To make matters worse, psychotherapy has been outlawed, and only one therapist, the incredibly named Egon Superb, is left to take on all the book's major characters as patients. Maybe it's those other patients, like the classical jug band of Al and Ian, who want to make it big at the White House, who are the main characters--or maybe it's the group of musical ethnologists who take a trip into the jungles of northern California, looking for Kongrosian, and finding only a group of atavistic Neanderthals. I haven't even found a way to mention the fascist rabble-rouser Bertold Goltz, or the fact that Nicole and her counselors are scheming to bring Hermann Goering back to life.

The Simulacra is a book about falsehoods and persuasions. Where is the line between susceptibility to propaganda and mental illness? Al sells "jalopies," shambling one-way vehicles for immigration to Mars, with the help of a "papoola," a bug-like Martian creature capable of subliminal suggestion. (That the papoola itself is a simulacrum is a classic Dick move--a lie within a lie.) Society in The Simulacra is split into low-class "Bes" and upper-clas"Ges," the latter standing for Geheimnis, the German word for "secret," meaning those who are initiated into certain government secrets, like a kind of Gnostic knowledge. And yet being Geheimnis doesn't make one immune to the propaganda; if anything, it makes one's commitment to believing in the propaganda--in the beauty and goodness of Nicole--even stronger.

Kongrosian's madness is brought on by a "commercial," a pesky gnat-like robot that sneaks into your house or car to convince you about how badly you need deodorant. Is this what happens when you take commercials too seriously? And what if you take political propaganda seriously? At the end of the novel, as the Nicole regime begins to fall apart, Kongrosian begins to pick away at the boundaries between himself and the world. He absorbs the bad guy's gun, and leaves in its place a gun-shaped hunk of quivering Kongrosian-flesh. It's the best scene in a good book, and it's strangely reminiscent of Willie Mink at the end of DeLillo's White Noise, who ducks when Jack Gladney says "hail of bullets." Dick goes a step farther, perhaps, than DeLillo: the madness, the inability to tell the simulacrum from the real, infects not only the psyche but the world at large.

I'm continually amazed by how many masterpieces there are in the deep stacks of Dick's library. The Simulacra is not a book that people read much anymore, not like they do Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or Ubik or A Scanner Darkly. Perhaps it's not quite on the level of masterworks like VALIS and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, but it's a book of incredible ingenuity, constructed from innumerable layers, frightening and funny and bizarre. I'm amazed, too, by how much of Dick's greatest books are made up of the same materials: telekinetic "psis," the jalopies, the world governments. These element give the impression of a shared "cinematic universe," but in true PKD fashion, they are more like parallel universes, slight but exclusive variations. And so the unique images stand out: what I will remember about The Simulacra, I think, besides the image of Kongrosian's spleen in the shape of a vase, is the group of Neanderthals gathered in the California jungle, watching the government collapse on television and smiling to one another--knowing that their time is at hand again.

Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard

Yet it is also impossible not to be curious about emperors beyond the spin and the stereotypes. Can we get a view of those real-life human being, in all their ordinary human variety and frailty, who sat at the heart of the palace, as they hosted their dinners, greeted the senators at the salutatio, or just chatted to their slave barbers in the morning while they were shaved? And what was it like to be the ruler himself within a court culture of deference, deceit and dystopia? It is easy to understand how flattery humiliates the flatterers, even when it is spoken with knowing irony. We put ourselves more readily in the position of the underdog than of the autocrat. But the flattered are victims too. How did it feel to be the one person who knew that no one could ever be trusted to tell them the truth?

What must it have been like to be a Roman emperor? On one hand, you're so high above everyone else in the Empire that upon your death, you're likely to be elevated to the level of a god. Your face is on every coin, your words etched on buildings a thousand miles away; your likeness appears even on cookie presses, meaning you're devoured by your own subjects. On the other hand, much of your job, if it is a job, is taken up with settling small, petty disputes: as Mary Beard writes in Emperor of Rome, the central authority of the Emperor made him the final judge in all matters, and he spent a huge portion of his day settling disputes that came to him by mail, or were pressed into his hand by supplicants during his morning appearances. Perhaps more important was the emperor as symbol; first and foremost the emperors are called on to perform emperor-ness. Should we be surprised that emperors like Nero and Commodus took it a little too far, seizing the limelight on the stage, or the gladiatorial field?

I enjoyed Beard's SPQR, which sought to explain what life might have been like for ordinary citizens under the Roman Empire. Emperor of Rome, which takes the same methods and strategies but aims that at the top of Rome's social pyramid, left me even more impressed at Beard's abilities. What's so interesting about both books, I think, is that Beard really does manage to reorient one's perspective on ancient history, to see things in a new way, in a genre--let's face it, these are pop-history books; bound for airport tables--that rewards watered-down retreads. The magic is in Beard's simple, non-chronological approach. Instead of going emperor by emperor, Beard organizes the book into sections that deal with different aspects of the emperor's life: imperial banquets, royal palaces, foreign policy, relationships with slaves, relationships with women. The total impression is of a remarkably stable social system, with the emperor at top, that lasts for over two hundred years, before emperors became increasingly taken from outside Italy and power-sharing schemes became more common.

As in SPQR, one of the more interesting aspects of Emperor of Rome is the skeptical eye Beard turns toward our traditional notions of "good" and "bad" emperors. She begins the book with Elagabalus, remembered today--if he's remembered at all--for sexual perversions and cruel tricks. (Although, as Beard notes, there's an increasing acknowledgement of Elagabalus as a proto-trans figure, who implored his doctors to help him become a woman by surgically removing his genitals.) Beard reminds us that Elagabalus was only fourteen when he became emperor and eighteen when he was assassinated--how much of a true tyrant could he have been? The stories about Elagabalus--and Nero, and Caligula, and others--ought to be seen, Beard suggest, less as true indications of their character and rule, and more as stories that serve other interests: to posthumously illustrate the and govern the relationship between the emperor and the empire, or to indemnify a ruler whose claim to inheritance is shaky. Similarly, the stories of the "good" emperors, from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius, were spread at least in part by their successor who wanted to emphasize the unbroken--and virtuous--nature of their own power.

It doesn't sound all that fun to be emperor. You got to eat a lot of good food, but mostly you had to share it with senatorial guests at banquet to show your largesse. You could build your own house, and make it as big as you wanted, wherever you wanted, but in many ways you were a prisoner in that house, and as likely as not it would end up the site of your assassination. You had unlimited power, but the exercise of that power could be dreary, taken up by niggling complaints from your provincial governors and subjects alike. (As Beard notes, there was no such thing as a "grand strategy" or political agenda for most emperors, whose rule was mostly reactive rather than active. Even acts of conquest were mostly meant to project success and achievement "at home," and many conquered lands were barely governed and quickly abandoned.) There was no such thing as a private life; every aspect of your identity, from your family to your sexual preference, was absorbed into the empire. Your own flaws became the empire's flaws, and you'd better keep up performing your virtues, because those are the empire's virtues. You might become a divus when you die, but you could hardly enjoy that while you are alive. Still, it was a life that elevated men to such a symbolic status that we still remember their names today--for better or worse.

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

"You haven't said a word of blame, Sarah."

"What sort of word?"

"Well, I'm what's generally called a traitor."

"Who care?" she said. She put her hand in his: it was an act more intimate than a kiss--one can kiss a stranger. She said, "We have our own country. You and I and Sam. You've never betrayed that country, Maurice."

Maurice Castle is an agent with the MI-6 working on African intelligence. He's an ordinary sort of guy, aging but comfortable. When his superiors suspect that his unit has been leaking information to the Russians, suspicion naturally falls on his subordinate Davis, a desperate and hard-drinking man. These superiors decide it would be best to get rid of Davis, poisoning him in a way that will look like the effects of cirrhosis, but--stop me if you didn't see this coming--it's actually Castle that's the leak. He's no Communist, but he owes a debt to the Russians for assisting in his extraction from South Africa years ago with the Black South African woman who is now his wife. The discovery of the leak puts him in a tough position. Getting out would be the only prudent move, but an old South African enemy he's been charged with meeting reveals that the apartheid regime is considering using "tactical" nuclear bombs on the Bantustans, and Maurice finds himself torn between saving himself and his family, and doing what's right.

The Human Factor is maybe the bleakest and most cynical of all of Greene's books. Maurice is, as he describes himself to Sarah, technically a "traitor." But is his country something worth being loyal to? The chummy ease with which his superiors discuss dispatching poor Davis, between kidney pies and pheasant shoots, expose a British intelligence that has no interest in "the human factor" of the title, only saving themselves from scandal at any cost. They collaborate happily with the apartheid regime in South Africa, whose callousness toward Black South Africans is depicted with shocking clarity. When Castle asks his former South African contact Muller about his attitude toward the innocents who would die from these "tactical nukes," Muller replies that he expects they'll have their own segregated heaven. And to be honest, the Russians are no better--it's revealed late in the book that they, too, are happy to use Maurice more or less for their own purposes. The Human Factor makes it clear that you can as loyal as you wish to your country, but your country will never be loyal to you.

Greene could write about Africa well; he did in The Heart of the Matter. But if The Human Factor has a flaw, it's that the life of Maurice's wife Sarah and her (much darker) son Sam, a pair of Black South Africans living in the homogenous London exurbs, isn't really well imagined. There's a telling moment late in the book where Sarah, stoic but bereft at Maurice's sudden exodus to Moscow, finds herself being called "Topsy" by a stranger--the young enslaved girl from Uncle Tom's Cabin. But in habit, in temperament, Sarah might be another Anglo housewife. Still, the final act, in which Maurice is separated from Sarah and Sam, is among the most bitterly tragic moments in Greene's fiction. The novel ends with sad sourness: the Russians' promise to extract Sarah and Sam has been abandoned, and for the first time Maurice and Sarah are able to talk on the phone for a few seconds before the line goes dead. We don't expect that the two will ever be reunited; they are loyal to each other--the country of themselves--but it's the other, bigger countries that will always have their way.

A Visit to Don Otavio: A Mexican Journey by Sybille Bedford

Under the next morning's sun, Morelia does not look like Avila and autumnal Castile. All the same it is very Spanish. A town of under fifty thousand, architecturally homogenous, of long lines of arcades and seventeenth-century facades, compact, grey, handsome, dwindling into mud huts, ending abruptly in unbroken countryside. It is quiet after Mexico City, serene by day and melancholy by night. There is nothing particular to see. From the hotel roof, the view over the plain is enchanting. The inside of the cathedral is decorated to the last square inch in 1890 polychrome. Christ wears a wig of real hair, the Saints' tears are pearly beads, the Martyrs' blood lozenges of crimson wax, and the images are kissed to a high polish. Before independence, Morelia was called Valladolid, Valladolid of Michoacán. Yes, it is very Spanish, but it is not Spain. Like the Puritans of New England, the Spanish impressed themselves on Mexico. Both settle in a part of the continent whose climate and countryside were familiar and congenial. Both established their language, their religion and a style of building, However, unlike the Puritans, the Spaniards did not eliminate the Indians. In fact, the Indians have about eliminated them. There are now supposed to be only some forty thousand whites left in a population of three million pure Indians and seventeen million mestizos, and many of these whites are only whites by courtesy or the use of face powder.

Shortly after World War II, German-English writer Sybille Bedford got tired of the United States and decided she wanted to take a trip to Mexico. She took with her a companion identified here only as E.--in truth, her lover Evelyn Gendel--and spent a year traveling the country by rail, by automobile, by boat, and by airplane. What she found was a country of great natural beauty, suffused with history, and not at all like the fashionable travel destinations of Europe. It's not said, but it may have been that Bedford, who from what I understand was sort of rushed out of Europe by her literary friends when the war came calling, had become disillusioned with Europe as an idea; Mexico, the oldest country in the Americas (as Bedford describes it) seems paradoxically quite new, totally undiscovered.

Bedford's Mexico is a country that has not quite become friendly to visitors: to drive anywhere, you must first go somewhere else in the other direction. Much of the narrative is taken up by travel mishaps, by waiting around for a bus or a boat to appear, which it sometimes does, and sometimes doesn't. An attempt to drive through the jungle to the Pacific coast goes as well as you'd imagine. In one hotel, S. and E. try to return to the lobby only to discover there are no stairs. It's in this environment that Don Otavio de X. y X. y X., the charismatic hacendado who invites S. and E. to stay with him in the book's central sections, wishes to turn his ancestral home into a hotel. There is much wrangling among Otavio and his family about who will invest in the hotel, and what will remain reserved for whom in the hacienda; I didn't quite understand it, but it was funny. The main obstacle for Don Otavio is that a long-promised road around Lake Chapala has yet to be built, so visitors must come by boat. Which is to say that the general disorderliness of the Mexican authorities is only one manifestation of a larger, perhaps spiritual, shabbiness to which S. and E. must accustom themselves.

Bedford comes to Mexico with an intense interest in the country's history. On the long train rides, on the second-class buses where she is crammed next to the chickens, she reads about the ill-fated "Emperor of Mexico" Maximilian, installed by European powers and later killed by Mexican republicans, who didn't take much to the idea of a European leader. Maximilian, as Bedford describes him, was a well-meaning fool, whose reformist ideals were quite different from the conservative powers who invited him to rule, and who thought that would be enough to stave off revolution. In a way, Maximilian is mirrored in the many European and American exiles that Bedford meets at Don Otavio's: the meddlesome Englishman, the German homeopath who locals consider a witch, the poisonously racist Virginian. Perhaps they are all castoffs, fled to Mexico because their idiosyncrasies have made them impossible to deal with in the places from which they came. Next to them, Don Otavio's fecklessness is charming, and seems of a piece with his openness and warmth.

No doubt today's Mexico is not much like the Mexico of Bedford's day. The charming villages are, in many cases, sprawling urban cities. I would guess that there are working roads between, say, Puebla and Vera Cruz, though I can't say for sure. Still, Bedford's travelogue gave me an appetite to see it for myself: the vistas, the volcanoes, the haciendas and churches, the roadside stands of tortillas and beans, the tierra caliente and the tierra templada. 

Henry VI, Part 1 by William Shakespeare

EXETER: Ay, we may march in England or in France,
not seeing what is likely to ensue,
This late dissension grown betwixt the peers
Burns under feigned ashes of forged love
And will at last break out into a flame.
As festered members rot but by degree
Till bones and flesh and sinews fall away,
So will this base and envious discord breed.
And now I fear that fatal prophecy
Which in the time of Henry named the Fifth
Was in the mouth of every sucking babe:
That Henry born at Monmouth should win all,
And Henry born at Windsor should lose all,
Which is so plain that Exeter doth wish
His days may finish ere that hapless time.

Henry VI, Part One is not very good. It was one of Shakespeare's first plays, if not the first, and probably a collaboration with others, which may account for how its parts sometimes seem at odds with each other. Then again, "parts at odds with each other" is on-brand for this play, which is all about how internal divisions brought the defeat of English forces under the early reign of Henry VI. Henry VI, Part One is a startlingly jingoistic play, one that depicts the French as a "fickle wavering nation," full of fay schemers, dabbling in witchcraft, relying on a woman--Joan of Arc--to do their dirty work. How in the world, the play asks, did we let these people take back the lands that were conquered under the heroic Henry V? The answer is that only the English can defeat the English: bickering and squabbling between the English powers are what led to military losses.

There are many factions among the English: there's the Cardinal Winchester, representative of the Church, who hates Gloucester, the Protector of the the king, who is not yet of age to rule alone, and thus the true power behind the throne. But these squabbles are minor compared to the enmity that rises up between Richard, later the Duke of York, and the Duke of Somerset, the representative of the Lancastrians. Henry VI, Part One is, among other things, about the birth of the Wars of the Roses: in one memorable scene, York and Somerset's partisans literally pick white and red roses from the bushes of the royal gardens to express their allegiances. It's these squabblers that doom Talbot, the commander in the French field and one of the last remaining icons of English courage and bravery. It's Talbot who gets some of the better lines, railing against Joan of Arc and her forces: "Pucelle or puzel, dauphin or dogfish, / Your hearts I'll stamp out with my horse's heels / And make a quagmire of your mingled brains." But these are empty promises: without the material support of York or Somerset, too busy fighting each other to commit their forces to the English cause, Talbot is defeated and killed.

The war stuff, honestly, is very boring. What nearly redeems the play is Joan of Arc, styled as "Pucelle," the maiden, whose language bears the imprint of the Shakespeare to come. Shakespeare's Pucelle is a vulgar braggart who asserts dominance over the French king by the sheer brazenness of her self-promotion. It's Joan who understands better than anyone on the French side what the death of Henry V and the rise of the boy king means: "Glory is like a circle in the water, / Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, / Till by broad spreading it disperse to naught." She consorts with spirits, who refuse to help her in the final moments of French defeat. Knowing that France is doomed, she tries desperately to save herself, rejecting her own father to continue claiming a noble birth, then quickly discarding her "virgin" reputation by suggesting that she's pregnant to the English forces who would burn her at the stake.

No doubt she's meant to be a representation of fickle, filthy Frenchiness, but at times she seems like the only person worth rooting for. I loved how, when an English commander piles a heap of empty titles on the dead Talbot, Joan cuts through his blowhard patriotism: "Him that thou magnifi'st with all these titles / Stinking and flyblown lies here at our feet." This is ugly and vulgar, perhaps, but it's persuasive, and Shakespeare would later elevate a similar attitude to a kind of undeniable humanist dignity in Falstaff. Joan, at least, of all the characters in the play, knows that war is a dirty business.

In Search of Love and Beauty by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

The Point had a double meaning: it was both the point of human life--its goal--and also the point of intersection where its highest attainment, by which he meant its highest experiences, met. And what were these highest experiences? They were two-fold, he explained: one  on the physical plane, the other on the--what do you want to call it? The psychic, the spiritual? Whatever. 'Now what would you call the highest human experience on the physical plane?' he asked his audience on these Saturday nights in the sunken garden. No answer, a hushed stillness except for the incessant splash from the fountain, and the insects shrieking (sometimes a bird woke up and sang by mistake from the depths of some dark tree). 'What, no one knows? You don't even know that? What have I done to deserve this bunch of dummies?' And then he supplied the answer himself: 'The Orgasm, of course--isn't that it? Isn't that the Point of our highest physical experience?' It was, there was no question of it. Yes, Socrates.

Many years ago, Leo Kellerman enter Louise's world like an Adonis. Blonde, striking, and large, he managed to take possession both of Louise's apartment, occupied by her husband Bruno and daughter Marietta, as well as Louise herself. It's from Louise's apartment he began to court followers to his programs of physical and spiritual development. And though neither the sex nor the residency was permanent, Louise has had a kind of hopelessly entangled relationship with Leo all her life, up into old age. In the New York of the 80s, Leo has graduated to a run-down Victorian mansion in the Hudson Valley, where he runs what looks and sounds awfully like a cult. His charisma attracts the young--and young women especially--but those who have known him long can see how fat he's gotten, how shabby, and how desperate.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's In Search of Love and Beauty is, on a structural level, something to be admired. The way she interweaves the now and then, providing a holistic sense of Leo and Louise's lives. To these several generations of family are added: Louise's needy, insecure daughter Marietta; Marietta's son Mark, suave, cold, and gay; Natasha, an adopted daughter whose physical ugliness and shy devotion to Mark conceal the fact that, of all the characters, she's the only one who seems rather at peace. (She is the only one, it seems, on whom Leo's vulgar charms have no effect, because she lacks the the tremendous interior longings on which he preys.) Leo, of course, has no family; Louise is "as close to a wife" as he's ever desired, and it's hard not to feel that he has, in some way, parasitized them. But none of them are really fools; they more than anyone see Leo for what he is, and there is a sense that they attend to him--Mark helps finance that run-down Victorian, for example--out of pity as much as awe. It's a vision of the New Age in the 80s that has curdled, but which insists it's always been in on the joke.

One thing that really interested me in In Search of Love and Beauty was the characters' relationship to India. Jhabvala of course, was born Ruth Prawer in Germany, and married a Persian architect in New Delhi. Many of her books are about India, and she's perhaps best remembered today for her work with the Anglo-Indian Merchant and Ivory filmmaking team, including an adaptation of her India-set novel Heat and Dust. In Search of Love and Beauty is a New York novel, but it's a New York tinged by India: Leo's self-help work is pointedly influenced by Indian mysticism; Marietta goes to India yearly, to travel and be with an Indian named Ahmed with whom she carries on a decades-long affair. She learns to play the sarod, which makes In Search of Love and Beauty, somehow, the second book I've read this year in which a woman learns to play the sarod. Jhabvala's interested in the way that India becomes a focus for the Western imagination, a place whose wisdom we imagine we might turn to when our own has become exhausted. In one crucial scene, Marietta sees that Ahmed has aged terribly after a long absence, revealing, perhaps, that Eastern mysticism can't really keep us shielded from the bare facts of human nature.

In Search of Love and Beauty struck me as one of those books you might call a "real yarn," a story whose chief appeal is a plotty intricacy that keeps you engaged. It's often very funny, as with the section above, where Leo posits to his followers that the point of life is to seek a spiritual orgasm. It's written in an omniscient third person that makes it seem sort of antiquated--an 1880s voice for the 1980s. Its chief flaw might be that Leo, the novel's lodestar, never quite seems as magnetic or appealing as the story demands; his pathetic and rather ordinary nature are clear to us from the very beginning. But maybe that's the point--we even flock to gurus we don't believe in, because unlike us, at least they seem to believe in themselves.

Shakespeare by Mark Van Doren

What now of his vices, and why is it that they have not the sound of vices? None of them is an end in itself--that is their secret, just as Falstaff's character is his mystery. He does not live to drink or steal or lie or foin o' nights. He even does not live in order that he may be the cause of wit in other men. We do not in fact know why he lives. The great boulder is balanced lightly on the earth, and can be tipped with the lightest touch. He cannot be overturned. He knows too much, and he understands too well the art of delivering with every lie he tells an honest weight of profound and personal revelation.

Years ago I set a goal for myself: I wanted to read all of Shakespeare's plays. It helped to have read a bunch of them already, but if you try to stick to one book by an author per year like I do, filling in the gaps takes a while, and soon you find you're down to the dregs: the Henry Sixes, the Pericleses, the Titi Andronici. So for a few years I let it slip. What I needed, I suppose, was inspiration: a Shakespeare-loving voice to bring me back into love with the words again. This collection of essays by Mark Van Doren--professor an father of Charles Van Doren, the Quiz Show cheat--serves quite nicely for the purpose.

Writing a little essay about each play--what a fusty old pastime, with a smell of New Criticism. Bloom had his, but I'm sure he and Van Doren are not alone in having written their little Shakespeare books. Like Bloom, if I remember correctly, Van Doren arranges his by what was accepted as chronology at the time, beginning with the Henry VI plays and ending with Henry VIII. Like Bloom and the New Critics before them, Van Doren is chiefly in love with the words of Shakespeare's poetry: history and historiography, the wrangling of source material, the political and social context of the plays, these are all asides at best. What one gets instead is a lot of words, and though Van Doren says in his introduction that he will keep quotations as brief as possible, he actually loves to stack quotations one after the other, in full pages of text, as if to overpower us with the power of the poetry--or sometimes, depending on the judgment, its lack. Furthermore, Van Doren likes to thread words and phrases borrowed from the plays into his own words, leaving the reader--me--not always certain if a lovely turn of phrase is Van Doren's, an accomplished stylist, or Shakespeare's.

Shakespeare is chiefly concerned with passing judgments. Shakespeare is in control of his genius, or not in control of his genius, or reaching toward genius. He controls his theme, or the theme controls him, or the theme escapes his control and becomes genius. Most of the judgments are as expected, but a few plays come in for surprising disregard--All's Well That Ends Well--while some are lifted surprisingly to the ranks of the greats--like Antony and Cleopatra. It's all sort of an antiquated-seeming exercise, but let's be honest, it's what most of us dilettantes love to do: argue about which plays we love and which ones we don't quite get. It was enough to whet my appetite to dive back into the plays--even Henry VI.