Little Constructions by Anna Burns

Do you know this syndrome? Do you have it? I'll tell you. You're having a hard time, say, because something not very nice once happened to you. It was a big thing, and although it's supposed to be over, in your body and in your head and from the way you now look out on the world, it's not bloody over, it's still bloody going on. Or maybe it wasn't a big thing. Maybe it was a series of little things, most of them below the level of police CAD reference number material, but if you add them together, plus feather in the timescale, they amount to one hell of a cumulative assault.

But poor you. It's too late. By now you're infantilised. By now you've lost your language. By now you're no longer capable of speaking about what happened, for didn't you try and try and nobody could hear? You're left swinging to one extreme therefore, which is clutching on to reluctant people, babbling incoherencies, or else sitting alone at your kitchen table, driven into silence, unable to tune into anything at all.

That's because of evil. That's what evil does.

Little Constructions opens with Jetty Doe, a member of Belfast's notorious Doe crime family, barging into a gun shop and demanding a gun. She takes with her a handful of the wrong ammo--buckshot for Kalashnikov--and heads off to shoot her lover, the husband of her sister, crime lord John Doe. This sets of a series of events that reverberate not just in the future but somehow in the past, beginning with the complete dissolution of the gunshop owner, Tom Spaders, still reeling from being mugged by a group of children seven years before. From there we're introduced to all the members of the Doe family, who are named like Duggars: there's Jetty, of course, but also Jotty, and Julie, and JanetJoshuatine, and JerryJudges and Joe and Johnjoe, and so on, and so on. Not all of them are literally Does, and those that are literally Does occupy a vague place in the family hierarchy. Who is a sister, and who is a wife? Who is a daugher? And what happens when all these roles get mixed up?

Anna Burns' first novel shares certain recognizable qualities with her breakout book, Milkman, as well as another book of hers I enjoyed, No Bones. All are about the ways that a climate of constant violence can warp the brain and prevent one from seeing things as they really are. Little Constructions attempts to make that point even more severely than the other two, by presenting a kind of impossible-to-follow shaggy story, moving backward and forward from the point of Jetty storming the gunshop, filling in details, going on digressions, casting doubt on those details, etc., etc. It has a number of unforgettable images and ideas: John Doe's son hiding in the suit of armor as John assaults his daughter; the many, many coffins that Doe buries, each time claiming (persuading even himself, perhaps) that he's burying a beloved family member. Though these images touch on political and sectarian violence in Belfast, it seems clear that Doe is just a petty criminal, and yet that has given him a kind of nobility that has driven him and the rest of his family crazy, like a bunch of Habsburgs.

I enjoyed Little Constructions for a little while. It has a manic energy I really enjoyed, and I was fascinated by the bodiless "I" that Burns employs as a narrator. Is it a bystander? A ghost? One of those fantastical constructions that the Does use to justify and smooth over the contradictions of their insane lives? But in the end, it was just too confusing. I can barely explain what happens in the book's second half, and what I can explain, I certainly can't put in order. (Is the big blow-up that happens at the end a day after Jetty storms the gunshop? Or years later? And who exactly ends up dead?) It's all intentional, of course; Burns is trying hard to keep you from finding your footing in this topsy-turvy world. But I felt that it was those other, later books where she managed to find a better balance of realism and hysteria.

The Suffrage of Elvira by V. S. Naipaul

Foam's ebullience depressed Harbans more. The bargaining with Baksh had shaken him and he feared that Chittaranjan too might demand stiffer terms. Moreover, he was nervous about the Dodge; and the sweet drink and rock cakes he had had were playing hell with his inside.

'You shy, Mr Harbans,' Foam said. 'I know how it is. But you going to get use to this waving. Ten to one, before this election over, we going to see you waving and shouting to everybody, even to people who ain't going to vote for you.'

Harbans shook his head sadly.

Foam settle into the angle of the seat and the door. 'Way I see it is this. In Trinidad this democracy is a brand new thing. We is still creeping. We is a creeping nation.' He dropped his voice solemnly: 'I respect people like you, you know, Mr Harbans, doing this thing for the first time.'

Trinidad, at the time of V. S. Naipaul's The Suffrage of Elvira, is a newly independent and democratic state. Elections are being held, but no one has ever stood for them before, much less managed a campaign. There are no polls, no TV advertisements, no rallies--but there are vans, loudspeakers, and lots and lots of wheeling and dealing. The novel centers on an election between Sujurpat "Pat" Harbans, a Hindu merchant, and a Black Trinidadian known simply as "Preacher." The racial breakdown of the vote in diverse Trinidad is obvious, but there are many more votes--belonging to Muslims and "Spanish"--left up for grabs. Harbans enlists the young Foreman "Foam" Baksh as his campaign manager, which sets off a series of comic enterprises that mostly end with Harbans writing a check or a petrol voucher. Someone is getting rich off this election, but it isn't the candidate.

Naipaul became a much more "serious" writer with his later works, which are so often thoughtful and beautifully written investigations into the postcolonial spirit. But for my money, he was never better than at the beginning of his career, when he wrote these comedies set in Trinidad. The Suffrage of Elvira sits nicely between Miguel Street and A House for Mr. Biswas, the novel that made his career--all being vernacular-heavy novels that depict small-potatoes Trinidadian strivers. The irony from all of them comes from the presentation of Trinidad as a remote outpost; the election between Harbans and Preacher may share certain elements with English parliamentary elections, but England's a long ways away, and how many MPs owe their seats to fears that a puppy is imbued with obeah witchcraft? (This subplot, in which Foam's little brother nicks a newborn puppy and hides it in their storage room, leading to fantastic rumors, is maybe the funniest thing in the whole book.) It seems to me that Naipaul in his later work explored the anger and resentment that emerge in the spirit of the postcolonial subject, who knows how little he measures up to his colonizers, but these books are lighthearted because no one really seems to know or care.

"We is a creeping nation," Foam tells Harbans, and I think that's probably pretty close to Naipaul's view as well. There's something admirable, even honorable, about Trinidad's first forays into the world of electoral politics. But Naipaul captures well how, no matter the size of the country or how long it's been a democracy, elections turn not on clashing ideals but petty personal conflicts and jealousies, as with the breadfruit tree whose roots are in the yard of Ramlogan the tavernkeeper, but which drops its fruit in the yard of Chittaranjan the goldsmith. And it captures how everybody, even down to the lowest taxi driver wanting his ten dollars in petrol vouchers, wants to get his thumb in the pie.

Mice 1961 by Stacey Levine

Though Jody required the younger one to stay indoors during the day, it was typical for neighbors to see Mice hurtling down Reef Way or through neighborhood side streets at sunset. Perhaps the girl's racing around in the evenings satisfied a need.

In the small apartments those months, I watched the half-sisters near-always, impatient to be part of their togetherness and clashes both. Soon after moving into the apartment, I acquired the habit of breathing them in, of trying to draw goodness from one sister, then the other. Among family, satiating cuddles, from what I understood, could arise at breakneck speed: I waited.

Stacey Levine's Mice 1961 is about two half-sisters, living in south Florida after the death of their mother. One is Jody, the elder, and the other is Mice, whose improbable name comes from her pale white skin, cotton-colored hair, and thick glasses. The sisters are alike in some ways, so much so that they often seem like the same person, but in others, they are quite different, Jody the anxious caretaker and Mice in her own world, making crystal radios and hiding in wells. The girls, and Mice especially, are the subject of much gossip in their small suburban outpost of Miami, and though opinions differ, many seem to believe that there's something not quite right about Mice, that her strange appearance is connected somehow to her diffident nature and her unwillingness to work. Mice is tormented regularly by a series of teenagers who are simply known as "the teenagers," although, in a stroke that shows just how weird the novel is, one of them turns out to be a 28-year-old who's just kind of hanging out at the high school.

By far the most interesting thing about Mice 1961, for me, is the position of the narrator, Girtle, who occupies a strange kind of position in the girls' household as a maid or factotum, doing odd jobs and cleaning. The truth is that Girtle (what a name!) seems to have inveigled her way into the house by simply asking to be there; her origins are obscure, though she tells us that she once hopped a fence to escape an orphanage. Girtle longs to be part of the sisterly bond between Jody and Mice, and she even tries to peel Mice away from Jody by way of promising to take her to a remote cabin. As a narrator, Girtle manages to disappear, often very literally, hiding and skulking around and trying not to be noticed. Much of what Girtle is able to report is because she is literally unseen, not noticed by the townspeople, and often not by Jody and Mice, either. More interesting still, Girtle has a recurrent premonition that someone she calls "the helper" is soon to arrive, a figure who will come to further Mice's narrative as the protagonist of the story, perhaps by taking her away from Girtle. When a smooth-talking James Dean type with a secret connection to (what we know will be) the Bay of Pigs invasion, we're not even shocked that Girtle turns out to have been correct.

Mice 1961 has so many fascinating parts, and it's written in a slightly alien prose that keeps the narrative vigorous and captivating. But why is the middle of it so tedious? A huge section of the book takes place during a town party at a local bakery, where the villagers come in bearing cakes and pies (and in one case, "blue water"), gossiping about Mice and Jody but all sorts of other people as well. Some of these townspeople are memorable and some are not, but together they seem as if Levine is trying to give us a sense of the somewhat cloistered town in which the sisters live, one of those mid-century commuter towns that end up as a kind of panopticon of good manners. Girtle records it all fastidiously, but I felt again and again that I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be getting out of it. Like Jody, I kept wondering: Where's Mice? 

Carnality by Lina Wolff

We knew what kind of show it was, my wife and I, so we've got no grounds to play the innocent. It's just you'd think with a nun behind it there'd be limits, some kind of safety net. Not because I'm a believer. I don't believe in any religious communion or system. But an institution has always got something to lose, if only its self-image, which is why there are things you never believe it capable of doing. What we'd both heard about Lucia was that she could work miracles. I don't believe in miracles, but Soledad insisted that a miracle was exactly what we needed at that point: some vast, unbelievable miracle that transformed everything.

Bennedith is a Swedish travel writer on a month-long paid trip to Madrid. Looking for meaning, she takes on another role caring for a man who suffers from severe Alzheimer's--gratis. At a bar, she meets a man named Mercuro who inveigles his way into her life, and her furnished flat, telling her a strange story of woe: having cheated on his wife Soledad, he turned to a television series called Carnality, helmed by the mysterious Miss Pink and Mister Blue and their unseen patroness, a nun named Sor Lucia, to help him fix the rift between them. Sor Lucia's solution is simple: because Soledad needs a heart transplant, Mercuro can fix what he has done by offering her his own heart. In fact, by signing the waivers for the show he has already made the agreement to do so, and it is in fleeing the pursuing transplanters that Mercuro has ended up in Bennedith's arms. Bennedith is at first repulsed by Mercuro, then compelled. His own story of irrevocably fucking up has some resonances with her own, not least of which the way she shamefully loses her job with the Alzheimer's patient. So it's no surprise that they end up in each other's arms, literally.

The title Carnality takes in all kinds of fleshy meaning. There's Mercuro's carnal lust, of course, but there's the carnality, too, in the sense of carne, meat, as in the heart that Mercuro is compelled to cut out and give away. The last half of the book is a long series of letters from Sor Lucia, the patroness of Carnality, explaining to Bennedith (who is in jail after a series of complicated events involving a reckless Swedish party boater--go figure) her childhood as the stepdaughter of a cruel butcher during the Spanish Civil War. Sor Lucia's missing thumb is rumored to be from a pig's bite, but she explains that it was actually cut off by a man seeking vengeance for her stepfather's crimes. It's this experience--butchering, being butchered--that makes Lucia an asset at the convent, and gives her a kind of necessarily mercilessness. The story of the TV show Carnality is a story of that mercilessness, although one can see in Lucia's letters to Bennedith that cracks have begun to appear in the nun's moral certitude. Moral questions, Carnality, suggest, are tied up with the body as well as the soul.

What I liked most about Carnality was how unsettled it was. It constantly seemed to be transforming from one kind of book into another one, and I never really knew where it was going to go next: from Bennedith's listlessness and ennui to Mercuro's bizarre tale to their adventure with the evil boater, then to Lucia's letters and history. So I was a little bit disappointed, as I suppose would be inevitable, at the way the various threads were tied together at the end. I actually found that I wanted Carnality to remain mysterious, perhaps a fiction of Mercuro's head--Bennedith has never heard of it--rather than getting the detailed history of how Lucia came to be at the head of the mysterious television show. To Wolff's credit, she ties everything together skillfully, and the end brings the various themes of mercy and violence together really well--but I wonder if there was another version of the novel that stayed as unsettled and weird as it was at the beginning.

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

The Whatsisname was now at a loss for what to do. He knew his mission was essential to kill, to kill new people every day, but he no longer had a clear idea who should be killed or why. The flesh of the innocents, of which he was initially composed, had been replaced by new flesh, that of his own victims and criminals. He thought if he took too long avenging the victims in whose name he was acting, the body parts he had taken from them would decompose in situ. It would be the end of him, and he would be free of this world.

A suicide bomb goes off in American-occupied Baghdad. Hadi, a local junk merchant, picks up the pieces of bodies and stitches them together into a single corpse, thinking that perhaps the authorities will give the corpse a real burial, unlike the pieces of people that litter the street. But the next day, the corpse has disappeared, animated--as we learn--by the spirit of another victim of the bombing, who has been separated from his own body. Soon, Hadi realizes that the creature he's made is connected to a series of killings in the news. The creature, now known as Criminal X or Whatsisname, is busy killing the people who are responsible for the deaths of those of whose parts he is constructed. When one part is avenged, it falls off, and Whatsisname must take new pieces from the dead, but this only complicates his mission, mixing up the identities of victim and criminal, and soon he even resorts to killing people himself.

Frankenstein in Baghdad is an attempt to capture the cruelty and widespread violence of Iraq under the American occupation. The Americans, the displaced Baathists, the religious fundamentalists in al-Qaeda, are all are responsible for widespread slaughter that allow something like Whatsisname to emerge. At first, it's an image of the lack of respect and dignity afforded to the dead in a place where murder has become commonplace--what Hadi desires for the corpse is not revenge, but simple burial. But soon it becomes an image of the way that violence proliferates and metastasizes, expands past the limits one might think to place on it. You can see Saadawi's attempt to capture the landscape of a particular time and place in the large cast of characters that converge around the creature, policemen, journalists, astrologers, etc., etc. There are Iraqi Christians and Jews as well as Muslims; in one funny and pointed scene, a poster of a hadith is torn away to reveal a statue of the Virgin Mary; when the statue is destroyed it reveals a Jewish menorah. There is more, Saadawi seems to be saying, to Baghdad than violence; there are traces of a pluralistic society that has curdled in the face of fundamentalism and war.

I thought this novel was fairly effective. The image of the monster is clever and apt; Saadawi avoids getting too much into the explanatory weeds of how the creature is born or operates, but the way in which it is consistently regenerated by violence--the very violence it seeks vengeance for--is a fresh way to express an old and true idea. There were times I wish that the narrative were focused more on Whatsisname and less on the constellation of supporting characters--I found it difficult to care about the journalist Mahmoud's lust toward his boss' paramour, for instance--but for the most part, it worked for me.

With the addition of Iraq, my "Countries Read" list is now up to 122!

The Last Ride of the Pony Express by Will Grant

The more I learned, the surer I became that I was bound to ride the trail. How else could I attain an encompassing grasp of the Pony Express without riding the old mail route? Anything short of doing so was shirking from the truth: that the only way to fully understand the breadth and nature of the Pony Express was to horseback it from one end to the other. It emerged as a challenge, a pinnacle of horsemanship that was high and dangerous. But if I could pull it off, I'd land in rare company. Any horseman worth his salt would agree: the Pony Express is an apex of American horsemanship and to trace its course would be nothing short of transcendental. And so I talked myself into it. Some people look for answers in a library; I'd look for mine between the ears of a horse.

The Pony Express was really something: ten days to deliver a piece of mail between Missouri and California. It took a collection of brave and skilled riders, some not much more than kid, and by writer Will Grant's calculus, thousands of horses, each of whom was pushed to cover about ten miles between stage stops. It's an even more amazing feat when you consider that, when Grant rode the length of the Pony Express with his horses Badger and Chicken Fry, as recounted in The Last Ride of the Pony Express, it took well over one hundred days. Grant's goal, as he puts it, is not just to ride the Pony Express trail to understand the West as it was, but the West as it is: meeting with the ranchers, farmers, and homesteaders who still make up the West's human geography today. Along the way, he explores the history of the American West, but also the problems that face the west today: feral horses, water shortages, and factory farming. 

I enjoyed The Last Ride of the Pony Express; there's almost no chance I wouldn't. I love travelogues, and I love the American West. So it might be considered a kind of praise when I say: this book should have been a lot longer. Grant skillfully weaves three threads together, the physical landscape of the journey, the human landscape--the people--and the history, but I often felt that I never got enough of any one. More than that, I'm thinking of William Least Heat-Moon's River-Horse, about an equally massive undertaking, crossing the entire United States by water. A book like this ought to have the kind of heft and stature that the feat does. Instead, it felt to me like the experience of the ride was left somewhere outside the page. Grant explains that we don't really know that much about the Pony Express, which existed for only eighteen months, so part of that might be the lightness of the historical record. Surely part of it also the pressures of the modern publishing industry, who aren't interested in Least Heat-Moon sized tomes.

OK, enough quibbling. I really did enjoy the way that Grant brings two visions of the West, one modern and one historical, to bear on his incredibly journey. The most interesting and human part of the book might actually be Grant's sojourn among the Peruvian sheepherders of Nevada, whose hospitality is unparalleled, even in a book where people regularly open up their ranches for Grant and his horses to camp in. That's a vision of a new West, but also not so different (as Grant explains) from the Basque sheepherders who once dominated the area. Ultimately, the book gives us a sense of a frontier that is still changing, even as it remains one of the United States' most enduring places of legend.

South Riding by Winifred Holtby

Far into the night she sat writing letters, drafting memoranda. She dragged any member of the Higher Education Committee whom she could lure into her buildings from cellar to garret, exposing their enormities. Her energy was unremitting. If the South Riding was not prepared to build a new school for her, she would make this old one a perpetual torment. And always as she planned and wrote and argued, she saw Councillor Carne in her mind's eye as the apostle and ringleader of reaction, the author of false economies, the culprit really responsible for leaking taps in the science room and blackbeetles in the basement. Because of this, it was a little difficult to banish the thought of him completely from her consciousness; but at least she never forgot to remember him with resentment.

Is there such a thing as the "Great Local Politics Novel?" If they're taking nominations, I might suggest Winifred Holtby's South Riding, a novel about a Yorkshire region and the city council who decides on issues of public health, housing, and finance. One of the most respected members of the local political scene is Robert Carne, a conservative farmer who has had to sell most of the furniture out of his hereditary estate in order to pay for the treatment of his mentally ill wife. Carne is the principal opponent of Sarah Burton, the new headmistress of the local school, who needs the city council and its concomitant organs to approve the building of a new school. Carne disapproves of the idea, but more than this, he stands for all the forces that stand against progress and change. What happens next except, of course, Sarah's hatred for Carne becomes an obsession, and that obsession turns to ardent love?

OK, it sounds silly. In fact, what it reminds me of most is--forgive me--Parks and Rec, a story about the importance of local politics that centers on an alliance between two people, in this case Ron Swanson and Leslie Knope, whose friendship transcends their differences. The viewpoint of South Riding is the same insofar as it posits that both Sarah Burton and Robert Carne are figures of good despite their opposed political programs, and that the love that might be conjured between them is a force possible of transcending those differences. It threatens to be cheesy, but Holtby succeeds by virtue of not diminishing the actual importance of the politics involved, and by giving the romance between Sarah and Carne an air of Romeo and Juliet-esque tragedy.

But Robert Carne and Sarah Burton are only one part of the novel, which has a six-page inventory of characters in the front. Holtby presents the political life of the South Riding by introducing councilors, aldermen, socialists, tavern-keepers, laborers, teachers, children, preachers, etc., etc. One of the most critical plotlines involves Lydia Holly, the star pupil of Sarah's who has to drop out of school in order to take care of her many siblings after the death of her mother. It's clear that local politics means something to someone like Lydia; it is the engine that might mean the difference between a scholarship, and escape, and another life wasted in the trap of poverty and motherhood.

Much of the political wrangling in the book involves a scheme to put what is (I think) a kind of council house somewhere in the riding, and the dishonest speculation of greedy figures who want to use the scheme to enrich themselves. It's a little funny how easily this maps on to the local politics of our modern day, so much of which is about whether to build housing and where. One question at hand is: can social good come out of self-interest? Not, perhaps, in the libertarian way of the free market that engineers the most efficient social outcome, but in the way that flawed and even corrupt people may do good despite themselves. I'm not sure. Ultimately, the position of South Riding seems to be that whether it's noble or venal and hopeless, local politics is the most important politics tehre is.

Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth

On the other hand perhaps it was that he drew her to him in the dark, held her close, and gave her to know that while he could never feel just the same respect for her, he loved her nonetheless. They kissed. Tenderly together they rehearsed their secrets; long they lingered in the Sphinx's Den; then he bore her from the Jungle, lovingly to the beach, into the water. They swam until her tears were made a part of the Earth's waters; then hand in hand they waded shoreward on the track of the moon. In the shallows they paused to face each other. Warm wavelets flashed about their feet; waterdrops sparkled on their bodies. Washed of shame, washed of fear; nothing was but sweetest knowledge.

The first story in John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is written from the perspective of a sperm having an existential crisis. How can you have faith when you know that only one "swimmer" among billions will make it to the promised land? And is there even a promised land--an egg--at all? It's classic Barth: first of all, it's funny. Secondly, it operates via layers of irony and metaknowledge; one must understand how the ironies of the sperm's existence point back to the self of the reader. But there's a real humanity underneath in the way that explores the difficulty of understanding one's cosmological place when by their very nature the larger forces, be they God or the universe or the possessors of testicles and ovaries, are beyond our understanding. It is maybe the best story--not a good sign for a collection when the first story is the best--but actually I think I slightly preferred "Petition," written from the perspective of a conjoined twin cursed to ride eternally on his brother's back, asking the King of Siam for help in severing them. Like "Night-Sea Journey," the sperm story, I enjoyed how slowly, by design, I came to understand who and what was speaking to me.

Lost in the Funhouse is most famous for its title story, about a trip to the Maryland sea shore where Barth's stand-in, Ambrose, gets--well, you know. The story is famous for its metafictional elements, which call attention to the narrative choices, and the narrative failings, of the author, even going so far as to introduce a diagram of Freytag's pyramid. This is all purposely deflationary; I think even Barth would agree it's a paragraph like the one above, from another story about Ambrose, in which he imagines a relationship with an older girl, that really stir the spirit. But in "Lost in the Funhouse" Barth questions what it that's happening to us when our spirit is stirred, whether that spirit-stirring is an honest exchange. There may not be so much difference between Ambrose tricking himself into happiness by telling himself a story and the reader who lets himself be tricked. Be that as it may, I found "Lost in the Funhouse" to feel stale. It is, as Brent said, "the OG" in a way, but sixty years of postmodernism has produced, I think, more interesting and effective ways of exploring the same ideas. The subsequent stories, "Life-Story" and "Title," which take these ideas to their most abstract and intricate ends, I felt to be absolutely dreary reading.

Much better, then, are "Menelaid" and "Anonymiad," a pair of stories that draw from Greek myth to explore the nature of storytelling. "Menelaid" is a particularly difficult read, in which Menelaus tells a number of stories to Telemachus that involve quoting the discourses of others so that eventually ten or twelve sets of quotation marks are nested inside one another and you don't know who the hell is saying anything. But I really enjoyed the story's suggestion that, when Menelaus wrestles with the shape-shifting god Proteus (as I guess happens in the myth), it destabilizes the entire story, if not the world: how do we know the Menelaus that ends up with Proteus in his arms is not actually Proteus himself in Menelaus' guise? And if Proteus could be Menelaus, why not Helen, or Telemachus--or the reader? 

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Later, when I was living in New York, I would make the trip back to Sacramento four and five times a year (the more comfortable the flight, the more obscurely miserable I would be, for it weighs heavily upon my kind that we could perhaps not make it by wagon), trying to prove that I had not meant to leave at all, because in at least one respect California--the California we are talking about--resembles Eden: it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished, exiled by some perversity of the heart. Did not the Donner-Reed Party, after all, eat its own dead to reach Sacramento?

The title essay in Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem precedes itself. About the hippie convergence on the Haight-Asbury neighborhood of San Francisco, it stands in for a popular recognition of the era's failures, and its curdling into something more dissolute and sinister. A step on the road from Woodstock to Altamont. And before reading it I had a general idea that it reflected in some way Didion's own brand of conservatism, which in turn reflected the nation's rightward turn as the ideals of the 60's petered out. But reading it, it must be said that what is most remarkable about it is the way that Didion absents herself from the narrative, declining to pass judgment or evaluation on the hippies with whom she's embedded, as if San Francisco were Fallujah. It is the hippies, instead, who implicate themselves, as with one couple whose faith in psychedelic drugs extends to doping up their toddler. Of course, this is all a kind of feint, a maneuver that reveals just how good a writer Didion really was--a way of hiding her hand. One must admit that, when some of the Haight-Asbury "Diggers" refuse to share information because they fear Didion to be a "media poisoner," that they have something of a point.

One point that Didion makes--or perhaps suggests by assemblage and arrangement, because she often demurs from making points as we typically think of them--is that the hippie movement was a children's movement. A considerable number of the people who converged on Haight-Asbury were literal runaways, and in Didion's telling, it seems to be this that gives the movement is sense of hope and energy, like a children's crusade. But Didion also depicts it as a children's world, bereft of adult pragmatism and sagacity. Even those adults who appear in "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," like the couple that give acid to their toddler, have a kind of childlike innocence, which is to say stupidity. "We were seeing the desperate attempt," Didion writes, "of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum ,no longer pretend that the society's atomization could be reversed." Which is to say, yes, these people are idiot kids, but who let them out of the house?

One way of reading "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" is one vignette in a series of essays about California, along with "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," about a woman who may or may not have set her husband on fire in San Bernardino, and "Notes From a Native Daughter," an exploration of growing up and leaving Sacramento that is, I think, the collection's best piece. "John Wayne: A Love Song," another of the collection's highlights, is also a California story, though about the California that infiltrates our dreams through the engines of Hollywood. (Like the hippies, Didion gives Wayne and his hangers-on the rope to hang themselves; the image is of an aging star surrounded by sclerotic yes-men.) No doubt Didion writes best about California because it's what she knows best, but I think her best pieces are all about place, including "Letter From Paradise," which explores the way that the burgeoning tourist vision of Hawaii conceals a Hawaii that is deeply entangled with the military and the prospect of war. I also really enjoyed a typically acerbic essay called "Seacoast of Despair," about the grand mansions of Newport, Rhode Island. Didion's sense of place isn't unimpeachable--I thought her essays about the Southern U.S. in North and South were a strange misfire--but it must be said that she has a way of peeling back one understanding of a place to reveal something else underneath, whether it's California, Hawaii, Rhode Island, or Sonora, Mexico.

That said, I am developing an annoying and contrarian take on Didion that I think few will agree with: her fiction is better than her non-fiction.

The Gales of November by John U. Bacon

This is when the Fitzgerald's unique characteristics--the modular construction, the use of welds over rivets, the extraordinary flexibility of the hull, the lowering of the Plimsoll Line, and whatever damage she might have suffered over Six Fathom Shoal--would all be tested by the once-in-a-lifetime conditions on Lake superior. The fully loaded Fitzgerald had only 11.5 feet of freeboard on a good day, and this was not a good day. The question lo longer was whether the Fitzgerald could withstand such relentless punishment, but how long before she succumbed.

The first few times I heard Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," I'm pretty sure I thought it was about some late 19th or early 20th century shipwreck. I had no idea that it was about a ship that sank in 1975, just a few months before the song was released. Is it the song, or something else, that gives the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald the air of an old myth? Certainly, what captured Gordon Lightfoot's attention--the struggle of human courage against the merciless lake, the ship's status as the largest and most famous on Superior, the way it vanished without a trace, the phrase "storm of the century," the heart-rending detail of the bell ringing 29 times at the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral--are the elements that still make the story such an enduring one, on the Great Lakes and beyond.

John U. Bacon's book about the Edmund Fitzgerald is pure dadslop (complimentary). It's the kind of book you give an uncle for Christmas. But it also tackles a pretty serious challenge, which is that, because there were no survivors, the story of the Fitzgerald's wreck is actually a difficult one to tell. Bacon solves this problem partially by padding the book in several predictable ways: extensive prefatory chapters about the history of shipping on the Great Lakes, other shipwrecks, and lengthy profiles of a dozen or so of the sailors who went down on the Fitzgerald--lengthy, if you'll forgive me saying so, even for the human face they provide to the tragedy.

Once the ship leaves on its fateful final trip, though, I found the book gripping. Bacon does an excellent job dissecting the evidence in order to present and evaluate the theories about what happened to the Fitzgerald, and the ultimate impression is of a ship caught in a series of compounding difficulties, some preventable and some not. No one could have stopped the warm front moving up from the West Coast that created a "perfect storm" and fifty-foot waves, but it seems clear that the Fitzgerald was shipping with too much weight, pushing for one last run in a season when storms become too strong for most shipping. Decisions which must have made sense in the moment likely doomed the Fitzgerald: trying to avoid the storm by taking an unfamiliar northern route, which drove it over a poorly-charted shoal, slowing the ship down, which gave it more maneuverability in unpredictable conditions--but which also gave water more time to poor through open hatches or a rent in the hull. The perfect storm, it seems, includes not only the atmospheric conditions but the profit motive that drives recklessness. Ernest McSorley, the captain of the Fitzgerald, is described by Bacon as the most trusted and reliable on the Great Lakes--but it wasn't enough.

Mostly, the book made me deeply sad. A hundred things had to go wrong for the 29 people on board the Fitzgerald to lose their lives; if any one of them had gone right instead, many of them would still be alive today. Bacon notes that shipping practices today are more heavily regulated, weather forecasting and communication with ships is much improved. God willing, that means that the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald will stay what it is--a legend and a warning.

State of Grace by Joy Williams

Omit, omit and one day you will be down to a funny, white and quite lifeless seed. I see it as a sort of heart of palm myself. In the groceries, they sell them in tins at outrageous prices. In New York restaurants, I hear, they do the same. Actually the stuff is swamp cabbage, easily hacked from an ugly and useless weed that covers the ground of the South, common as pennies. But we're all game and gullible as tourists in this life. No one is able to tell us anything. The soul is a heart of palm and living is a messy salad with everything in it being similar but less interesting, less necessary as you proceed. The trick is not ignoring this discovery after you've made it. Do not be a polite guest.

Kate, the protagonist of Joy Williams' first novel, State of Grace, lives in a college town on the Gulf Coast. She lives in a sorority house, though she doesn't actually seem to be in college (is anyone in this college town in college?), and then she lives with her partner, Grady, who loves only her, along with his Jaguar coupe. The baby she's carrying, we quickly learn, is not Grady's but her father's: a holy rolling reverend from Maine who shows up out of the blue to re-cement his too-intimate relationship with Kate. We learn through flashbacks--if you can describe the fluid chronology of State of Grace in such terms--that Kate and her father were loathed by their mother, who instead heaped her love on a daughter she accidentally killed in a car accident. Car accidents: at some point, Grady wrecks that Jaguar, and Kate is left to face the problem of her pregnancy alone while Grady battles for his life in the hospital.

Here's a half-baked theory: Joy Williams and Cormac McCarthy had remarkably similar careers. Both started out writing fiction in the Southern Gothic mode; both found their voice as they moved away from this milieu toward the American Southwest, as Williams did with 99 Stories of God and The Quick and the Dead. Of course, that overstates the case, because Williams kept writing about Florida to great success, especially in books like Breaking and Entering. But early on both authors wore their influences a little too much on their sleeve, in both cases Faulkner, though Williams seems to draw quite heavily from Flannery O'Connor as well. State of Grace both is and isn't recognizably Williams, to me. The narrative malleability, the inability to write a bad or boring or even merely functional sentence, they're all here. But the novel spins and plods. It's too internal and self-regarding, and it strikes me as a version of Williams that hadn't yet learned to harness her stylistic richness to a mode that moves forward. And the father figure, while enigmatic and interesting, seems picked up right out of Flannery and not like a character from a Williams novel at all.

But there are flashes here of real Joy: I especially liked a subplot in which Kate is persuaded by one of the sorority sisters to "borrow" a leopard from a local menagerie with the help of her friend, Corinthian Brown. You can imagine how well that works out. The scariest thing, actually, about the book, is not the way the friend is mauled--another disaster along the lines of those that strike Kate's sister and Grady, victimized by the world's primal savagery--but the whisper campaign that comes afterward about how they caught and killed the "n---er" who they held responsible. You can recognize in this moment the seed of a lot of Williams' future fiction, not least an abiding interest in the world of animals as it intersects with the world of human beings. I wish more of the novel had been like that.

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella L. Bird

We forded the river, whose course is marked the whole way by a fringe of cotton-woods and aspens, and traveled hour after hour with nothing to see except some dog towns, with their quaint little sentinels; but the view in front was glorious. The Alps, from the Lombard Plains, are the finest mountain panorama I ever saw, but not equal to this; for not only do five high-peaked giants, each nearly the height of Mount Blanc, lift their dazzling summits above the lower ranges, but the expanse of mountains is so vast, and the whole lie in a transparent medium of the richest blue, not haze--something peculiar to the region.

Explorer Isabella L. Bird's A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains is an account of her 1873 travels throughout the Rockies, framed as a series of letters written to her sister. I put it on my Kindle on a whim for my trip to Colorado because I was struggling to find a book written by a woman--as you might know, I try to alternate--to go with Craig Child's travelogue about searching for Ancestral Puebloan sites on the western side of the state. Bird's book turned out to be delightful--a breezy, well-written account of life in Colorado in the late nineteenth century, accented by skillful descriptions of the land and droll accounts of the region's "characters."

Obviously, traveling in the Rocky Mountains in 1873 is not like the traveling I did there this week.  It takes an hour for the modern traveler to get from Denver to Estes Park, the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, but when Bird did it, it took several days of difficult travel by horse. And when she got there, Estes Park was not the town we know it today, but a true park, meaning a kind of valley or glad that might be home to a few houses. In this case, those houses belong to a pair of rival mountain guides, both of whom ingratiate themselves to Bird: Evans, with whom she typically boards, and the infamous desperado known as "Mountain Jim," whose bloodthirsty and frightening reputation is immediately belied by his chivalry toward Bird, with whom he strikes up an immediate friendship.

Birds account of Mountain Jim is, if I had to pick something, the most delightful thing about the book, and it's complicated by the numerous footnotes for publication revealing, little by little, that Jim met his end after the events of the book after being shot by Evans. We never get the whole story, which as I understand it is somewhat lost to history, but there's a bittersweetness to Bird's clear implication that it was Jim's reprobate ways, not Evans, that really brought his downfall. This knowledge brings a special irony to a late section where Jim, having guided Bird up a high winter pass, tearfully breaks down about his own "lost" nature.

But Jim is only one of a few fascinating characters who appear in Bird's travels, which include other trappers and guides, destitute farmers, and poor greenhorns who are in over their heads in the hardscrabble new territory. Bird notes that the thin mountain air has attracted many consumptives, and some of the saddest parts of the novel are depictions of tubercular patients who have arrived in the Rockies to live out the last moments of their lives. I also really liked her resentful account of a young boarder who eats everything, does no work, and loses the milk cow. But the most interesting character might be Bird herself, who despite some false modesty about her abilities, comes off as an intrepid and capable solo traveler. It's no wonder that, wherever she goes, the newspapers have announced the arrival of the remarkable "British lady." And part of that character is not just her ability to traverse the mountains, but really see them--her descriptions of the Rockies transcend the 150 years of stylistic difference, and I was particularly struck by her detailed account of climbing Longs Peak, a feat that challenges climbers even today.

House of Rain by Craig Childs

I turned off my light in the back of the cave. I closed my eyes. It felt as if all these centuries, these thousands of years, were contained here, their processions playing out again and again as drips strummed the pool beside me. The same routes are traveled repeatedly, the same meridians followed across horizons, over hundreds of years. Anasazi, I thought, was never a people. It was a rhythm, a form of motion stirred up from the land. People merely fell into step.

I got to return to Mesa Verde National Park last week and tour two more of the enormous cliff dwellings built nine hundred years ago directly into the rock. They are impressive places, made up of turrets and geometric stacks of rooms and huge circular underground kivas. It's hard not to think what the first white Americans, cattle ranchers, thought when they encountered them for the first time: how could somebody build something like this and then just abandon it? The "disappearance" of Ancestral Puebloans, previously known as the Anasazi, has been compelling narrative for a long time, a puzzle to be solved. Craig Childs, in House of Rain, travels through major and minor Puebloan sites throughout the southwest and Mexico, seeking an answer to just that question.

Among other things, House of Rain is a travelogue, and some of the most impressive passages involve Childs moving across the high, dry landscape of the Four Corners area on foot, sometimes with his wife and infant son in tow. He skillfully and poetically describes the beauty of this area, which is among my favorite places in the world. So in that sense it was like comfort food to me. And I appreciated hearing descriptions of some of these Puebloan sites I'll never see; tucked away in the corners of deep canyons, undisturbed in the way those first ranchers must have seen them. You can see how much more uncomfortable Childs is at, say, Aztec Ruins, a site run by the National Park Service in the backyard of a suburb of Farmington, New Mexico. Better to pass into these regions of quietude, where the intervening years can disappear and the past reappear in the form of a broken wall, a husk of corn, a potsherd.

So what happened to the Ancestral Puebloans? As Child notes, though a little begrudgingly, the mystery is not much of a mystery at all: they migrated, probably because of an intense drought in the high country of the Four Corners. Childs puts some specifics to this that I found highly interesting: his conclusion, based on the introduction of new kinds of polychromatic pottery in the lower regions of Arizona, is that the Puebloan culture migrated to the south, mingling with Hohokam and Mogollon cultures that were already there to create the culture now known by archaeologists as the Salado. It's Childs' contention, actually, that tensions between the new elements of this multicultural society resulted in the collapse of that society, leading the Pueblo peoples to splinter into the groups that now make up the two-dozen-odd Pueblos of the Rio Grande Valley, as well as the Hopi. But Childs throws his lot in with some more outre conclusions as well, like a revisionist theory that Puebloans migrated north from Chaco Canyon to Mesa Verde and then south again along the same meridian to a location in Mexico known as Paquime (or today as Casas Grandes), which other archeologists consider more closely related to the Aztec cultures of Mexico to the south. In any case, Childs favors a version of the Puebloans that emphasizes their grandeur, claiming for them a larger sphere of influence than many of his peers.

House of Rain is only twenty years old, but it wears its age. The term Anasazi, a rude exonym that comes from the Navajo, has been entirely supplanted by "Ancestral Puebloan." And while Childs undercuts the question Where did they go, my understanding is that nobody accepts this any longer as a framework from which to begin--something which perhaps Childs should be given credit for. But my biggest frustration with House of Rain is how it keeps modern Pueblo peoples at arm's length. They appear infrequently, and often in ways that stymie Childs' research, as with a council of elders that refuses to give Childs permission to conduct research. Childs paints this as a typical reservedness, but then again, he's the one who uses the word Anasazi around them, knowing it's offensive, but catching himself too late. Childs folds in some of the stories and legends of modern-day Puebloans that support the narrative of migration, but I noticed that these stories always tend to begin "a Hopi man once told me," while the researchers have names. At a dig, Childs notes the frustration of an archeologist who is forced to stop digging when human remains are found--a key stipulation of the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act--and, in way that felt telling to me, lets that frustration pass by without comment.

All of these are minor missteps, perhaps, but they add up to a sense that Childs is most interested in the version of the Ancestral Puebloans that live in his imagination, and keeps the modern-day Puebloans and Hopi who might shine light on them at arm's length because they might complicate that imagination. Which is all just to say that I think House of Rain would be stronger if it had found a way to engage more deeply with them. That said, in the end, I really enjoyed deepening my understanding of the people of Mesa Verde this way, and I was persuaded by Childs' invitation to see them not as a static society that suddenly "collapsed," but a living, moving culture passing through several stages of development over centuries: a rhythm, a form of motion.

Americana by Don DeLillo

"What we really want to do, he said, deep in the secret recesses of our heart, all of us, is to destroy the forests, white saltbox houses, covered bridges, brownstones, azalea gardens, big red barns, colonial ins, riverboats, whaling villages, cider mills, waterwheels, antebellum mansions, log cabins, lovely old churches and snug little railroad depots. All of us secretly favor this destruction, even conservationists, even those embattled individuals who make a career out of picketing graceful and historic old buildings to protest their demolition. It's what we are. Straight lines and right angles. We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identical structures. Boxes of cancer cells. neat gray chambers for meditation and the reading of advertisements. Imagine the fantastic prairie motels we would build if only we would give in completely to the demons of our true nature; imagine the automobiles that might take us from motel to motel; imagine the monolithic fifty-story machines for disposing of the victims of automobile accidents without the bother of funerals and the waste of tombstones or sepulchres."

David Bell is a young junior executive at a television company. His workplace is something of a circus, perhaps in the sense of a gladiatorial circus maximus: people are always getting the axe, and others rising in their place. Someone is sending out cryptic quotations that Bell thinks of as "schizograms," messages that may contain a deep meaning or none at all, or whose deepest meaning might perhaps be the fact that they mean nothing at all. And of course, everyone is sleeping around. So far, David has been the beneficiary of this cutthroat atmosphere, rising to a level of power and prestige. But when he's sent out a road trip to Arizona to film a group of "Navahos"--Native Americans standing for, throughout the novel, the opposite of the American impulse to capitalism and celebrity, though as always with DeLillo, that initial position is constantly undercut--David goes "off the grid," pursuing instead a private project in which he travels around the anonymous and suburban fabric of America filming a kind of quasi-version of his own embattled childhood in the Hudson Valley.

Americana was DeLillo's first novel, published all the way back in 1971. His novels have always had a quality of being ahead of their time, and Americana is no different; it strikes me as being as much about the television-addled "Me Decade" of the 1980s as White Noise, a book from the 80s, is really secretly about the advent of the internet era that followed it twenty years later. DeLillo's characters are always obsessed with the image, and Bell is the prototype, a lover of Burt Lancaster and Ozu movies who thinks, in some cryptic way that's never fully explained for the reader, that putting a version of his childhood on film might--what? Resolve it? Redeem it? Transform it? Bell's big project at the network is a program called "Soliloquy," in which people sit in front of the camera and tell their life story. (More foreshadowing: the front-facing video.) Is this Bell's "Soliloquy?" If so, is DeLillo exposing how the versions of our lives we distribute are always in a sense performative, that they never really capture the truth? Bell's version of his childhood is avant garde, elliptic; it took me a long time to even realize that was an important element of his "film."

For a first novel, Americana launches with incredible confidence. DeLillo's style is already hard-baked here, and the sentences are as epigrammatic and incredible as anything in Libra or White Noise. Americana is, if nothing else, a real pleasure to read, from one sentence to the next. But I left unsure of what all those sentences add up to. I think perhaps this is really a problem with the third section, the actual "road trip" the title promises. The first section is a terrific parody of the modern workplace, and the second section is a relatively straightforward realist depiction of Bell's coming of age: his mother's sickness and death, her confession that she was raped by the town doctor, David's outrageous Don Draper-like father, the disappearance of his sister. I loved this section; it's a more familiar kind of writing than we usually get from DeLillo, but in exceptional form. I actually didn't know he had it in him, this kind of realism. But the third section is too stuffed, too peripatetic, even as Bell ends up not traveling the country but rooted in one anonymous Midwestern town among football captains and insurance adjusters. I thought it suffered, perhaps, from first novel disease, packing in so many ideas that nothing comes out clearly. 

Catherine the Great and Small by Olja Knezevic

The year was 1988. July in Belgrade was intolerably hot; the city smelled of dead dogs and cats, strays killed by the heat, and of dried-up insects, black and brown cockroaches. But the pressure was on for my finals. I had to be like a young stoic and, with books as my only defence, resist desire--summer's naked, sweaty, sexual desire--and grapple with my demons.

The "Catherine" of Catherine the Great and Small is actually Katarina, a.k.a. Kaca, Kacic, Kaya, Kati, Kate, or Katydid. Katarina is growing up in Montenegro at a time of great upheaval for the tiny country: first the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which results in the creation of Yugoslavia, and then the outbreak of nationalist hatreds under Slobodan Milosevic, who was supported by many Montenegrins. But Katarina is just a normal kid, into pop and punk music, and the upheavals of world politics are in the background the more immediate facts of her life: her friend Milica, a brash and budding young actress who seems destined either for fame or a spectacular crash, and her love Sinisa, who disappears for years and then shows up again, looking as handsome as ever. Katarina, Milica, and Sinisa all end up in Belgrade, where young Montenegrins seem to end up for school or drugs. But it's in Belgrade where Milica discovers the secretive Sinisa has been sleeping with older women for a place to live--including her own friend and landlady, Alma.

Catherine the Great and Small is split into two sections, titled--wait for it--"Catherine the Small" and "Catherine the Great." Of the two, I much preferred "Catherine the Small," which depicts the small dramas of life for the young in the post-Soviet Balkans with skill and humor. Milica gets too into drugs and loses her teeth; she still has beautiful feet, and so Katarina enlists her as a shoe model in a brief business empire. In fact, I liked this section best because Milica is the novel's most gripping character, a woman almost too full of life, so much so that it seems, with good reason, that she may be burning up that life's short fuse. "Catherine the Great" jumps ahead to Katarina's adult life, living in London with an abusive Montenegrin husband named Vuksan. When her grandmother dies, Katarina returns to her hometown, which has changed its named from Titograd to Pogdorica, and reconnects with, of course, Sinisa. There's much to love about this section, too, but I became impatient with the way that it "reveals" the truth of Sinisa's infidelity; stories where the drama is limited to a reappraisal of events in the past always make me impatient.

Still, I thought Catherine the Great and Small was engaging and well-written, a fascinating glimpse into the frankly familiar life of someone growing up in one of Europe's more wartorn--and still, somehow, little-known--corners. With the addition of Montenegro, my "Countries Read" list is up to 121!

A World of Strangers by Nadine Gordimer

In their different ways, and in their one country where they pursued them, both Cecil and Steven were people who had not found commitment. Theirs was a strange freedom; the freedom of the loose end. They made the hour shine; but now and then they leapt up in half-real, half-mock panic and fled--perhaps, at that very moment, something better was waiting, somewhere else?

I respected this; for hadn't I, for my reasons, felt myself a stranger, uncommitted, in my own world in England; and wasn't that the reason why, in this African country, I had come to feel curiously at home, a stranger among people who were strangers to each other?

Toby Hood is an Englishman who travels to South Africa to take up an open position managing a small publishing company in Johannesburg. He doesn't have much going on in England, and his curiosity makes him open to this unfamiliar country, which is so like England in some ways and completely strange in others. In South Africa, he makes immediate friends on both side of the color barrier. On one side, there's Cecil Rowe, a beautiful divorcee with whom Toby falls in love. Cecil is used to fine English tastes and moves in upper-class Anglo circles, but lacks the wealth to keep herself and her son Keith (lol) out of precarity. On the other side, there's Steven Sitole, a charismatic African who invites Toby into a world of townships, jazz, and associations with Indian gangsters. Steven fascinates Toby, who envies the kind of freewheeling life that Steven seems to lead.

It's not unheard of, but it was interesting to read Gordimer writing from a first person perspective here. It made the novel much warmer than many of hers, and it's easy to see (this is her second novel) how she moved away from the kind of intimate realism of A World of Strangers toward something that was simultaneously colder and more cynical. The novel presents a very simple double life: Toby wants to be at home both among his fellow Anglos and Black South Africans, as well as those like Anna Louw, an Afrikaaner activist who has given up connections and privileges to fight for people like Steven. And why shouldn't he? Of course, it isn't possible, as Toby is often reminded--by Cecil, describing her disgust with her own servants, or by his landlady, who tearfully and frightfully expels him when she finds out he has invited over "kaffirs." The whole thing is, as surely Gordimer means it to be, faintly ridiculous; do these people really think they can live separately as an empowered minority in a black country forever? We can see, as she cannot, how Cecil's isolation and lack of stability is downstream, at least in part, from living in a country where she fears and despises most of the people on the street.

A World of Strangers is good in a realistic kind of way, but it doesn't measure up to Gordimer's later masterpieces. I detect a kind of hopefulness and optimism in it that I think she loses later on, perhaps as she became more cynical about the possibility of political rapprochement between white and black South Africans. You can see, for instance, how much more open to Toby the people in Steven's world are than the Anglos would be to someone like Steven. There are some intimations of tension between Toby and Steven's people, and certainly the suggestion that the life Toby is leading is impossible in the long run. But there's little of the sense you get in later Gordimer that one's race will win out, that the ties of racial identity are in some sense insuperable, at least by individual effort. But I suspect some that find Gordimer chilly might actually find A World of Strangers more palatable.

Language City by Ross Perlin

This book is about the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world: its past, present, and future. Now home to over seven hundred languages, early twenty-first century New York City is especially a last improbably refuge for embattled and endangered languages. Never before have cities like New York have been so linguistically various, and they may never be again, but this new hyperdiversity has hardly been mapped, let alone understood or supported. In particular, in just the last few decades, hundreds of thousands of people speaking hundreds of languages have arrived in New York form heavily minority and Indigenous zones of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At the very moment when languages worldwide are disappearing at an unprecedent rate, many of the last speakers are on the move. Far from being confined to remote islands, towering mountains, or impenetrable jungles, they remain invisible and their words inaudible.

Ross Perlin is a linguist behind New York's Endangered Languages Alliance, a kind of ad hoc meet-up space where speakers of minority languages teach them or record them, working to preserve them in the face of erasure. Similar efforts are certainly being made around the world, but only in New York is it possible to capture as many languages as the ELA serves. I have to admit to a little tingle of pride when Perlin describes New York City as the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world. In fact, it's one of my favorite things about the city: walking around and hearing, in the course of an hour, French, Spanish, German, and Arabic, and many other languages besides that I'm unable to identify. Perlin's book is about some of those languages: languages that are spoken by minorities even in their homelands, and which resurface here in New York where they have a new opportunity to thrive.

This is actually a central point in the first section of the book, something that I'd never considered: immigrants to New York, and perhaps most major metropolises, are typically minorities in their homelands. Of course, it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? Dominant groups don't need to immigrate because they are dominant where they are. As a result, Perlin explains, what we think of as singular national languages are actually often patchworks of minority languages stitched together under a single umbrella, as with speakers of Sicilian and Ligurian and whatever else that get knitted together as "Italian." It was interesting to learn, for example, that most Iraqi immigrants to New York are Jewish. It's a dynamic that brings with it a complicated push-and-pull: the immigrant city offers a space for minority languages to thrive, but it also threatens to subsume them under national identities that supplant the language, too. This section of the book--the linguistic history of New York, beginning with Lenape speakers and Dutch immigrants and including the major immigrant waves of the 19th and 20th centuries--was my favorite.

About half the book is taken up with a series of biographies of speakers of minority languages who work with ELA. Much of the attention on the book has focused on Rasmina, a speaker of a Himalayan language called Seke, whose speakers all occupy a single "vertical village" building in Brooklyn. Of 700 extant speakers of Seke, one hundred live in this building! But there are others, too: a writer and academic who speaks Bessarabian Yiddish, a restaurateur who speaks the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, and Ibrahima, who helps spread the N'ko alphabet of West Africa. Anyone who knows my particular interests won't be surprised to hear that I most enjoyed the story of Karen, a Lenape speaker who worked improbably to revitalize the language here in the heart of Lenape homelands. Karen's story makes it clear that much of the Lenape language has been lost and has to be created anew; while there's a sadness to this, it also seems like a powerful communitarian act. Languages, Language City reminds us, are communities. And at a time when the powers that be are trying as hard as they can to eliminate the exact kinds of immigrants this book describes, it was powerful to be reminded of just what these language communities add to the greatest city in the world.

The Magic Kingdom by Stanley Elkin

"Alone at last," said the Mouse. "Let's see, where were we? Right, we were discussing what's to be come of you. Or I was. You all seem a little shy on the subject. Oh, I know why, of course. This particular mouse wasn't born yesterday. He's been around the block a time or two. I'll tell you the truth, though. I was never really into tragedy. Control was always my thing, my gift. My special talent, you might say. Well, I never had any enemies to speak of. Popeye has enemies; Road Runner, Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Tweetie-Pie. Heckel and Jeckel have enemies. The Pink Panther. But not only Mickey the Mouse. I never had enemies. And neither do the people I hang with. My duckies and doggies. Life's too short. Hey, no offense." He looked around at the unsmiling children. "All right, all right," he said, "enough about me. What would you have wanted to be if you'd lived?" Doc, Dopey, Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful, Happy, and Sneezy stared at him, their ancient humors clogged, choked, stymied as ice, their deflected phlegms and cholers, their thickened bloods and biles subsumed in stupefied wonder. "Tch tch tch," said the Mouse, "you kids, you poor kids. I don't think I ever saw such losers. Where'd you grow up--on Fuck Street?"

Eddie Bale's son, Liam, dies a celebrity: everyone in England knows his name, and perhaps has contributed a few dollars to a fund for his care. But after the death, Eddie regrets spending all that sympathetic cash on doomed treatment that only lengthened Liam's life, if it did, by torturing him; he ought to have spent it making Liam happy. So his next scheme is to raise money to send a group of terminally ill children on a "dream holiday" to Walt Disney World in Orlando. (The novel opens with the Queen handing him a check for fifty pounds which he's instructed not to cash, but rather to show around, and induce others to give--that's the kind of novel it is, bravely unfazed by the threat of legal persecution from either Elizabeth or Mickey.) When they arrive, Orlando is experiencing a freak snowstorm--a sign, perhaps, that the dream holiday will not be all that it's cracked up to be.

Eddie's crew of kids is a motley one: there's Lydia Conscience (not the last such name), whose stomach tumor makes her look like a pregnant eleven-year old; Noah Cloth (see what I mean), who keeps having to give up bits of himself to amputation; Janet Order, whose hypoxia makes her blue; Charles Mudd-Gaddis, whose progeria makes him basically an eighty year old man. There are others, besides, chief among them Benny Maxine, the oldest and most normal-looking, whose leadership among the children threatens to devolve into schemes and dangerous jokes. The adult chaperones are no less ragtag: the gay male nurse trying to nick a set of animatronic manuals for his waxworker boyfriend; the chronic masturbator; the nurse who won't shut up about how she used to care for Prince Andrew; the doctor who is primarily excited to go to Orlando because he wants to do up-close medical examinations of Jews. And then there's Eddie, of course, who has pinned his moral life on what is clearly a disaster waiting to happen.

The Magic Kingdom is, as the summary suggests, a strange novel. It struck me as kind of fearless in how faithful it is to the real Disney World; I had to imagine the avuncular-looking Elkin riding It's a Small World and Spaceship Earth again and again to get the details right. This Disney World is instantly recognizable; a cavalcade of garish and shallow images and sounds that promises a kind of satiety it can't fulfill; we understand when the kids get quickly bored and led into mild disobedience by Benny. But I was also struck by how little the book was interested in Disney World. There are a few really good moments and details--one that sticks out to me for I-don't-know-what-reason is Noah, who is depicted as kind of an idiot, going on a gift-shop spree as a way of grasping at the normal life he'll never have--but Elkin's style is wordy, jokey, longwinded, more interested in depicting the inner lives of each of a large cast of characters than getting them out into the world to interact. The scene quoted above, in which the male nurse's new lover dons the Mickey costume and perpetrates some slight psychological torture, is strangely wandering and limp. Now and then Elkin makes some truly bonkers choices, which mostly, somehow, work, as when the children exhibit the ability to meet up in each other's dreams.

I enjoyed The Magic Kingdom, though its touchpoints are several authors I consider not-quite-my-style: Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. (And it must be said I don't think it's a coincidence that Elkin gives one of his characters the last name Gaddis.) It's goofy (pun intended) and overwritten, at times exhausting, but it's this maximal goofiness that allows Elkin to address the darkness at the center of the novel--the imminence of these children's deaths--with tragic effect. When the inevitable happens, as it must, it cuts through the goofs with laserlike prediction. It's a silly, strange, and somehow sweet novel.

Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann

Summer whites, green gardens, Mississippi, white summer suits and seersucker suits, those were the sights. In the Garden District, Claude stopped and pointed out the jasmine and the cicadas in the night. That was his innocence to me. He had the sweetness of the town itself and broken my heart completely into a million pieces on the floor, as he himself would say, for he touched my heart, to such degree, that I had to steel myself, or my heart would break, like his, into a million pieces on the floor. For in Claude Collier I saw my very youth, a fateful green garden, parades on the Avenue, an orchestra on a bandstand, my youth in New Orleans.

Louise Brown is in love with Claude Collier, a young man from her faintly genteel social set in New Orleans. Claude's main character traits are his extreme kindness and compassion and a general tendency toward haplessness, toward nervous breakdowns. In fact, everyone in Nancy Lemann's Lives of the Saints seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Or maybe they just claim to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown because it is, as it still is, a fashionable thing to say, but for Claude Collier it is God's honest truth. It is, perhaps, like the southern Gothics of Truman Capote, a trait of New Orleans itself, and as Louise describes above, Claude is for her the embodiment of the city and her experience in it, which is what makes it such a tragedy when he runs off to the Northeast.

Structurally, Lives of the Saints is an odd, tricky book. The sections are typically quite brief, marked by bon mots and sudden revelations of character among Louise's New Orleans set. (It reminded me, actually, of Renata Adler's Speedboat, transposed to a very different setting and voice.) A reader gets the quick impression that plot is secondary to the adumbration of a particular place and time, and is happy enough to go along, because Lemann's evocation of New Orleans is so simply and beautifully drawn ("summer whites, green gardens"--sometimes it's as simple as that). But tragedy sneaks into the corners and sets the novel moving: Claude's brother Saint falls out of a tree and is killed. Lemann's prose is so simple (sorry, that word again) that I had to go back and reread the paragraph to make sure that I hadn't missed anything. But it's this death that sends Claude and his tweedy father, Mr. Collier, both reading, and sends Claude off to New York and Boston, leaving Louise to pine for him.

There's really not much more to the book than that. There were times when I felt frustrated by the staccato style of the novel, by the way it seems to turn in place, but after the death of Saint, I was impressed by its humor and lightness of touch, and the way it balances the melancholy. And I was frequently struck by the loveliness of Lemann's writing:

And yet one felt such a melancholy or downright sorrow, as when there is something amiss, as when you wake up in the middle of the night or early in the morning suddenly, before it is time to wake up, with the distinct feeling that something is wrong--something with this life you are reading is very wrong--except you do not know what it is. It is a nameless wrong. The nameless wrong follows you wherever you go but you can't put your finger on it.

Butterfly Stories by William T. Vollmann

...Now he became in truth a crazed and greedy butterfly, no longer pretending to know who he was or what he was looking for, dreading the weary moment when he must stick it in, dreading the moment when the lady must leave, but avid to have and have had, his tips becoming smaller as the money went, the girls giving him colds, coughs, sore throats, weird new aches in his balls... What he was doing was systematically dismantling his own reality blurring faces and names (sometimes he couldn't remember te name of the woman he was on top of; of course she couldn't remember his, either), forming mutually exclusive attachments that left hi ma liar and a cheat attached to no one, passing his own reckoning by. When he wanted to eat out a whore, he'd say:   I want to kin kao you,   which means,   I want to eat rice you,   and then he'd point to her pussy --

"The journalist" of Vollmann's Butterfly Stories is on assignment in Thailand, which mostly means spending every cent he has on prostitutes. Unlike his rakish companion "the photographer," the journalist is a real romantic, finding something in these women that feeds some need that lies deeper than sex, although they fulfill that need for him, too. He falls half in love with nearly all of them, until he falls fully in love on a trip deep into the jungles of Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge have been lately on a killing spree. It's hard to say what makes this prostitute, Vanna, different from the others, except that she becomes a repository for these deep needs; her feelings toward him--as opposed to feelings toward the necklace he buys her or the money he gives--are inscrutable and ambivalent. But his feelings are strong enough that he marries her--despite having a wife back in the U.S.--or perhaps the marriage is in name only, a name given to the strength of those feelings. Naturally, when he's whisked out of Cambodia, he yearns for her, first in Thailand, then back in the United States, where he purposely wrecks his marriage out of jealousy and fear.

It's tempting to read Butterfly Stories as a companion book to Whores for Gloria, another book about a man deeply enmeshed with the local prostitutes. The protagonist of Whores for Gloria trawls San Francisco's Tenderloin District, not Southeast Asia, and though they can be irascible or even hostile, the prostitutes there have a kind of transparency that the journalist searches for in vain. In Gloria, the protagonist rarely even has sex, preferring to listen to the whores' stories, but the language and cultural barrier make it impossible to know if any of the Thai and Cambodian girls are telling the truth, or if they are, whether it gets lost somewhere in translation. Their opacity is at the heart of the book's tragedy; we know that the journalist will never find what he's looking for, because what he's looking for both depends and is stymied by the exotic nature of Vanna and the others. Even in the flesh, she's a dream and a fantasy, and it's for the fantasy that he wrecks his life, upending his marriage and ultimately even contracting AIDS.

It's hard to say where Butterfly Stories might fall in a ranking of Vollmann's works for me. It's more standoffish and at-arm's-length than Whores for Gloria, and perhaps less satisfying by design. It's frustrating read--the guy is such a loser, and I can imagine that someone who picks this one up as their first Vollmann might be put off by the exoticizing and fetishism on display, though I think one more attuned to his work will notice the instability of that quality, if not the critique of it. Most disturbing to me was recognizing a small detail--the journalist, unable to re-reach Vanna, travels to the Arctic and falls for an Inuit girl--that seemed so like The Rifles that I couldn't help but wonder how much of Vollmann really is in here. (That's something he does quite a bit, I think--puts himself in the story in ways that are ambiguous, mixing himself in indeterminate percentages.) There's a nobility to the guy in Whores for Gloria, but what the journalist evokes is more along the lines of pity--a much more discomforting emotion. But it must be said that Vollmann makes it look easy, and if Butterfly Stories does not stand out among his works, taken in isolation it must be astonishing.

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

In the sound of the shower or the tub, in the spray of water on the dishes in the sink, I heard the words that Mitsutsuka and I had shared, as well as all the words that we were yet to share. We'd only met up a handful of times, which made it harder to understand how I could feel like this. I didn't know the first thing about him. I couldn't even see inside my feelings far enough to know what they meant. Over and over, i asked myself if this had all been some kind of mistake. If I sat down with a cup of sake and thought about how weird it was that I spent so much time thinking about someone I didn't even know, I just wound up thinking about him anyway. I thought about him all the time.

Mieko Kawakami's All the Lovers in the Night is about Fuyuko, a young fact-checker who lives a lonely and isolated life. She's awkward around others, and doesn't make friends easily. In fact, they mostly have to make her: first Hijiri, the brash editor who encourages Fuyuko to go freelance, and introduces her to alcohol for the first time. Then there's Mitsutsuka, an unassuming older high school science teacher whose life collides with Fuyuko's when, plastered and investigating taking courses at a local college, she ends up puking everywhere. (Fuyuko's alcoholism, unwittingly provoked by Hijiri, is a major theme in the novel.) Mitsutsuka is kind, shy, reserved--exactly the kind of person, one thinks, that might pull Fuyuko out of her funk. Her feelings for him are identifiable to us as romantic, but with her diminished experience, she struggles to make sense of them, fleeing into drink or just plain fleeing.

In the center of the book, Kawakami places a flashback that explains everything we need to know about Fuyuko. She recounts how, in high school, a seemingly gentle and thoughtful boy cast his attentions on her, calling her once a week on the phone. But the first time this boy invited Fuyuko to his house, he ends up raping her and then cruelly dismissing her. Kawakami describes this scene with a painful clarity that is difficult to read. But it's clear we're meant to see this as something as a key to Fuyuko's adult strangeness: how can she reach out to others, when doing so leads to such cruel disasters? Other than this scene, All the Lovers in the Night is a quiet and uneventful book, only as big in scope as Fuyuko's shrunken life. The three central figures are well drawn, and I especially liked the ambiguity of the character of Hijiri, whose social prodding of Fuyuko is somehow both supportive and menacing at the same time; a scene where Hijiri gives Fuyuko her old designer clothes, and Fuyuko looks at her new self in the mirror, was especially effective, when it might have been obvious.

One thing that struck me when I read this, and thinking back to Kawakami's book Heaven, about a boy who is cruelly bullied, is that she shares a lot of qualities with once and future it-girl Otessa Moshfegh. The protagonist here reminds me of the heroines of books like Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, recluses who shun, or are shunned by, a wider world in which they feel unable to operate. Kawakami's book is much quieter, even compared to Heaven there's nothing really here that's shocking or lurid. That compares favorably to Moshfegh, I think, even as I think the book itself will end up being not quite memorable.