The Names by N. Scott Momaday

The events of one's life take place, take place. How often have I used this expression, and how often have I stopped to think what it means? Events do take place; they have meaning in relation to the things around them. And a part of my life happened to take place at Jemez. I existed within that landscape, and then my existence was indivisible with it. I placed my shadow there in the hills, my voice in the wind that ran there, in those old mornings and afternoons and evenings. It may be that the old people there watch for me in the streets; it may be so.

When I visited Walatowa, the main settlement at the Jemez Pueblo in northern New Mexico, a couple summers ago, I told the guide at the visitor center that I was interested in the life of author N. Scott Momaday, who had grown up at Jemez. He took me into their small museum and showed me a huge photograph of Momaday's mother, Netachee, who had come with Momaday's father to teach at the Jemez Day School. A similar photograph, or perhaps even the same one, is printed in Momaday's memoir The Names, an illustration of the community that adopted Momaday and his family, inviting him into the place about which he writes, "My spirit was quiet there." As in House Made of Dawn, Momaday writes so beautifully about the landscape of Jemez, and it's clearer here than ever that it's a loving eye that produces such descriptions. It's the voice of a man writing about his home.

The Names begins with accounts of Momaday's ancestors, including his namesake Mammedaty, and Pohd-lohk, who gave Momaday his "Indian name," Tsoai-talee, which is derived from the name of Bear Lodge, or Devils Tower, in Wyoming. On his mother's side, Momaday describes a heritage that is part Cherokee but mostly white Kentuckians. His father's side is Kiowa, and here as in The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday writes with affection about his Kiowa family in Oklahoma. These places and heritages combine to make Momaday who he is, but not all equally; you can see that Momaday writes with respect and reverence for the Kiowa of Oklahoma, and with a mystic detachment about Bear Lodge, but much more ardently about Jemez. Between these there is a sojourn to Gallup, the colorful, largely Native city of western New Mexico, and Hobbs on the state's northeastern side, where Momaday's account of his life might be difficult to distinguish from any of the other children, whose big themes are school and sports, bullying and being bullied. This section contains a long section of stream-of-consciousness that captures the point-of-view of young Momaday, and is some of the memoir's most experimental and unusual writing.

What struck me when the novel turns to Jemez was the feeling that Momaday has of being an outsider. The hero of House Made of Dawn (and I did read much of The Names through the lens of this novel) is a native of Jemez, made an outsider by his alcoholism and the alienating experiences of war, but the novel is also interested in true outsiders, like the white woman Angela and the priest, Father Olguin. Here, as in the novel, Momaday writes of the Pecos Pueblo people who were given refuge at Jemez when their pueblo was destroyed. But only here in the memoir did I understand how much Momaday identifies with those people: refugees. The Names illuminates other parts of the novel, too. Here, for example, is an old and admired man named Francisco, who no doubt has become the Francisco of the book, and here is an account of the strange ritual where men try to pluck a buried chicken from the ground on horseback. Momaday describes it here as an ancient tradition that has degenerated, becoming a game for boorish young men; this really recontextualizes the scene in House where Abel kills the man who has embarrassed him at it.

More than anything, I thought The Names was beautiful. Momaday has a way of writing that feels utterly sincere. I guess it's not true that there's no room for irony here--Momaday's account of growing up in Hobbs makes great use of a child's narrow and self-involved worldview--but when Momaday grows up, or when he talks about Jemez, or the land, there's none of that, no detachment. I think of it as the prose of a writer who is deeply engaged with the world, and who speaks only when he has something to say. He really was remarkable.

Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke

Giles is not in possession of his murder. His murder takes place in a dream. The poetry and justice of it is a dream. How can you perform such an action and not be freed and transformed by it? The world is full of us, haunted by dreams of violence. Swaying like figures hanging from huge balloons filled with heat and air, blind to everything but the murders we commit in our imaginations, over and over again. You have committed your crime, destroyed those who have power over you, and now you are empty and dull. I wish you were dead. There's something too single-minded and logical about that perfect Oedipal crime, leaving out nothing, not even the mother, the agent, the function that was not fulfilled. Why can you not be a true murderer? One who finds his apotheosis, his fulfilment in his crime? Whose passions flower in the white serrated petals of his act? You stand there as a young cricketer. An ex-public schoolboy, an Englishman. Those images are more powerful than your despair.

Giles Trenchard is an ordinary Englishman of his class. His father is a solicitor, as his father was a judge, and he goes from the public schoolyard to serving his country when war breaks out in Europe. Through all these experiences, Giles is a dull sort of lump, unable to answer the questions in class, unable even to understand when he doesn't know the answer; he just raises his hand like every other kid. There's something off about him, maybe, but in the English navy, there seems to be something off with just about everyone. It may have something to do with the fact that people keep getting blown apart or having holes stamped through them, through which their entrails fall out. Wouldn't you keep your mind on something banal, like cricket? But through Dinah Brooke's narration of Giles' young life, other voices break in, the voices of a courtroom. They are discussing Giles, how he came to be the person he is, and we come to understand that he has, or will have, committed an act on unspeakable violence.

God, I love a nasty book. It's no wonder that Otessa Moshfegh wrote the introduction to this one; Lord Jim at Home is the kind of book she's been trying to write her entire career: bloody, filthy, and black-hearted. The target of Brooke's satire is not so much Giles--though it's one hell of a writer who can make a character interesting for being so uninteresting, up until the point, at least, where he kills his [REDACTED]--as it is the social environment that produces something like Giles. It starts with his very birth, when the narrator labels him "The Prince" and his parents "The King" and "The Queen," not because they're particularly powerful or noble, but because even a middle-class solicitor becomes fraught, as a parent, with the Oedipal drama of inheritance and disposession. Giles' upbringing is foisted off on a number of nannies and nurses, who are no more able to make a convincing human being out of him than his parents. Nothing in Giles' narrow-minded, bourgeois milieu can or should make a man of him. At the bottom of this family life, Brooke shows, are any number of petty cruelties and jealousies, beginning with his grandfather the Judge, who dies when his elderly pelvis is splintered in two by a buxom nurse he's seduced with promises of a legacy.

Among other things, I thought that Lord Jim at Home presented a really fascinating depiction of life as a seaman during World War II. At the public school, Giles' peers look toward the advent of war with a greed for glory, but when war comes, the seamen seem utterly incapable of really thinking of any kind of higher value at all. They're barely able to see or understand the violence all around them, which in Brooke's prose is so visceral--pun not intended--and immediate, as when Giles is tasked with cleaning his own friends' blood and guts off the deck. Is the war to blame for Giles' later violent act? It would be reductive to say so, but certainly the desensitization Giles experiences at war is part of a life that makes such violence permissible. The courtroom scenes are a farce, and at the end they devolve into something that resembles a fever dream; all they underline is that it's impossible to hash out, in a single room, the influences that have made one man a murderer and another innocent. And yet, when we appreciate the scope of Giles' life, cramped and malformed as it is, it feels almost impossible that he should become anything else. And in the end, Giles may face his own music, but who is there to pass judgment on the kind of cramped and malformed English society that made him?

The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck

If she'd gone downstairs just five minutes later, she'd have missed the entrance to the underworld, which would have trundled on its way, offering its open hole to someone else instead; or if she'd taken that step with her right foot instead of her left, she wouldn't have lost her footing; or if she'd been thinking not about this and that but about that and this, she'd have seen the steps instead of not seeing them. Even so, some death or other will eventually be her death. If not sooner, then later. Some entrance will have to be for her. Every last person, every he and every she, has an entrance meant for him, for her. So does this underworld consist only of holes? Is there nothing more to it? A different wind is blowing here. Is there nothing that could prevent a person from--sooner or later, here or there--stumbling right into it, flailing, falling, plummeting, sinking?

I started reading The End of Days just as some discourse was brewing about Hamnet on the internet: so-and-so said it was manipulative, another so-and-so defended it as an accurate picture of the grief of losing a child. Of course it's emotionally intense, the argument goes, losing a child is like that. I was thinking about as I read the first of five sections in Erpenbeck's novel, about a young woman in the late Austrian-Hungarian Empire who loses an infant child only a few days old. It's heartrending, and it struck me as utterly profound and sincere in the way that grief seems to gather in objects--the cradle, the sheet over the mirror, the everyday stuff of life transmogrified by grief into something else, yet remaining stubbornly itself. And in defense of Hamnet, which is not really what I want to write about, its best moments are reminiscent of that--empty rooms that were previously filled with life. The family in The End of Days falls summarily apart; the husband leaves, and the tensions grow between the mother, who is now only "daughter" again (wow) and her own mother, who is no longer "grandmother." And then the chapter closes, and the "Intermezzo" comes, and the child is revived: what if, Erpenbeck asks, the mother had reached out and simply placed a handful of cooling snow on the child?

In the second section, the infant of the first section gets a chance to grow up, but death is still waiting for her. In this section she will die as a teenager (bruised by love and entering into a misbegotten pact with another, equally bruised young man), but the intermezzo will come and revive her again. The novel's five sections go on like that, imagining the woman's next death: killed in Moscow by Soviet agents who suspect her for a German spy; falling down the stairs in her early old age; and finally, in a nursing home, well into her 90's. The point of this is all almost stupidly clear, but Erpenbeck says it so well: "Even so, some death or other will eventually be her death." And so it is for all of us. We know this, of course, but we don't like to be reminded of it. And yet I can think of few books who so profoundly confront us with an obvious truth we already know, and so profoundly.

One thing that really impressed me about The End of Days is the way that Erpenbeck makes each section self-contained, and yet somehow, part of the whole. Each section is narratively and, to some extent, stylistically different, and each contains its own fully developed elements while containing also threads that unite the whole. I enjoyed, for example, the satirical bent of the third section, which sees the woman feverishly writing down a defense of her activity in the Communist Party. In this section, everyone is described by initial, as in "Comrade O." or "Comrade Schu." or "Comrade H.," as one might find in the byzantine sectarian squabbling of the time. The fourth section is probably the weakest, though Erpenbeck writes about falling as a symbol quite stunningly. The fifth captures the now-old woman's weakening intellect, and the way that time might seem to unravel or deform for a senile person, in a really effective way.

And when taken as a whole, the stories tell a fascinating historical narrative, too, about the fall of European empire, the cataclysm of war, and the rise of Communism. We know, fascinatingly, that the protagonist's mother is Jewish but has hidden it when marrying the protagonist's father. This information becomes hidden even to herself, and we are permitted to know also that her grandfather died brutally, attacked by his own fellow villagers in a fit of violent anti-Semitism. This information is hidden from the protagonist's mother until she loses her child; of course, when the story is revised and the child revived to become the protagonist, that information never gets shared--but it hangs like a pall over the rest of the book. It's a subtle masterstroke in a novel that's full of them, and I have to admit that The End of Days really blew me away. 

Two Novels by Brandon Hobson

How do you lose a child to gun violence and expect to return to a normal way of life? This was the question I struggled with the most. My son was a victim. The officer who shot him--now retired--lived in our town, and there were many sleepless nights when I wanted to drive to his house and kill him myself. I wanted to hit him as hard as I could, so that he could feel pain. Yes, yes, I have always known grief is difficult and that forgiveness takes many years. I still haven't learned to completely forgive. I could only put it in the will of the Great Spirit.

I have reread Brandon Hobson's excellent novel, The Removed, so that I might teach it in the spring. I think--or hope--that it will hit the sweet spot for students: a book that is challenging in ideas, sometimes in prose, but mostly is made up of a kind of plain but sophisticated everyday language. It resonates, too, with topics that are on the mind of students today, like police violence, which it places in the context of the larger history of Indian Removal and dispossession. The story centers on the Echota family, whose son Ray-Ray was shot a decade prior by a cop. They take in a young foster boy, Wyatt, whose eerie similarity to Ray-Ray seems to reverse father Ernest's creeping Alzheimer's. Another son, Edgar, is lost in a fantastical "Darkening Land" of addiction and suicide, and where a sinister friend threatens to turn him into the bounty for an Indian-hunting game. What will students make, I wonder, of the book's mixture of realism and fantasy, and its refusal to cohere into something logical and explainable?

One thing I had a greater appreciation of this time around is the way that Hobson weaves the various timelines and narratives together. There are four third person narrators--mother Maria, sister Sonja, Edgar, and the legendary Cherokee rebel Tsala--and the story of each is punctured with visions and epiphanies in which the others seem to break through. This complicates, for example, the story of Wyatt, whom we are otherwise willing to believe is only strangely similar to the dead Ray-Ray. But when Wyatt's stories prove to have a kind of oracular insight, it becomes clear that we must take seriously the belief that Wyatt is Ray-Ray resurrected. I can already hear the students now--Well, is he?--but the answer, of course, is that he is and he isn't, that Hobson gives us a kind of Schrodinger's cat whose waveform threatens to collapse if you look too closely. This matters because the novel wants to give us models of resurrection and return that are larger than the realm of the materially possible. What "the removed" search for is not a literal return to Cherokee homelands--not in this book anyway--but some other kind of restitution or redemption that is not one-for-one. The last image of the book, with the family gathered for a memorial bonfire, watching a mysterious figure approach, underlines this nicely: is it Edgar? Wyatt? Tsala? Or somehow Ray-Ray himself? Yes, Hobson suggests, yes, yes, and yes.

The instances when Milton would wake in the middle of the night feeling like he was suffering in a bed of putrefaction, his dreams digested and visible as the glow of the school in flames, he could smell the sour gunpowder and dead bodies lying in pools of blood, their foreheads marked with the number of the beast while the rest of the students cried out in a panic, yet all he could hear were the voices of the dead buried in the land all around, rising out of their graves and asking him for an account of his decision to shoot and kill, and for the remainder of the night his sleep was restless and uneasy, full of their shrieking voices and hollow moans, because he worried about bearing the weight of all that guilt. In his notebook for English class, Milton had written down the following quote from Shakespeare: "Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind."

Hobson's new novel, The Devil is a Southpaw, opens with a note that the author has received a manuscript in the mail from a former classmate, or cellmate, having both been institutionalized in a juvenile detention facility long ago. The manuscript, which makes up the bulk of the book itself--very 19th century--is a novel with the same name by Milton Muleborn, and it draws on those experiences at the facility, which it describes as a kind of phantasmagoria of demons, witches, and sinister captors. Much of the novel focuses on Matthew Echota (the same last name as the characters of The Removed), a fellow student-inmate who, we're told, is the most intelligent and talented of them all, a gift for which he is sometimes praised by the prison guards, and sometimes isolated and brutally tortured. We intuit quickly that the author, Milton, is and has always been deeply jealous of Matthew, who it seems not only has a kind of artistic genius that Milton lacks or feels himself to lack, but who also had been dating his ex-girlfriend. Milton's jealousy and enmity toward Matthew is of the kind that only very similar people can share--both are sensitive, artistic, writerly souls trapped inside the harshness of the juvenile detention center--to the extent that part of me wondered if the two wouldn't prove to be the same person in the end.

Milton's detention center is a strange and frightening place, where a mysterious woman paints skulls at night and a freakish Dr. Strangelove type rules with an iron fist. Its cruelty verges on the fantastical, and the swamp that surrounds it seems to be filled with creatures and spirits. Parts of it, of course, are recognizable, drawn no doubt from the same experiences supporting troubled youth that inform The Removed and Where the Dead Sit Talking: the rancid food and forced isolation, the stultifying effects of institutionalization of childhood creativity. But in Milton's telling, these aspects become heightened into pure dreamland horror: the novel moves toward a shared escape, in which Matthew and Milton move through a literal underworld where they encounter, among other things, the spirit of Salvador Dali to guide them.

To me, the most interesting thing about The Devil is a Southpaw is the prose. I wonder how people will take Milton's Grand Guignol-isms, his general wordiness and clumsiness. To me, I thought this was all very recognizable. Though Milton is supposed to have written this novel as an adult, I recognized in it something I see often: the language of a talented and creative teenager who has limited control over his style and vocabulary. It's not supposed to be "bad," per se, but the language here is meant, perhaps, to show the fine degree of difference that separates the genius and talent of Matthew--who, as we learn, grows up to be an acclaimed but trouble painter--and the mere creativity of someone like Milton.

I can tell you that reading the prose of teenagers reorders your brain, and after a while you must take a break from it to regain clarity; I felt the same thing while reading The Devil is a Southpaw. It's a bold move, to write a book in prose that is ostensibly flawed in the same ways as its narrator. To me, the voice works as a reflection of Milton. What it means in the end for the novel as a whole is another matter--though Hobson make some gestures at other voices--a second half written by Milton in a more sober, reflective mode, and an interview with the adult Echota--but I walked away thinking that it all remained too claustrophobic in the end. There's really no getting around or outside of it--and maybe that's the point.

Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk

Qalingu, now in the thick of the blizzard, was fast losing hope. His face was encrusted with snow and he could not make out the slightest thing. Nonetheless, he plodded on into the wind. His cheeks were freezing and his entire body was feeling the cold. With night falling, he decided to take shelter on the side of the hill away from the wind, while there was still some daylight. Without even a snow knife, he began digging a hole for himself in the snow, all the while afraid of being smothered by the blizzard.

Sanaaq is billed not only as "An Inuit Novel" but "The First Inuit Novel," or at least, the first novel written in the language Inuktitut. Author Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, it seems, was tasked by missionaries with helping to prepare educational materials in Inuktitut. But the project soon took on a creative bent, and Nappaaluk, seeking at first to show the use of the words in context, I suppose, wrote this novel, about the widow Sanaaq and her life among the nomadic people of far northern Quebec.

Above all else, Sanaaq is a portrait of what life was, or perhaps is, among the Inuit. Much of the novel is taken up by the ordinary tasks of life: sewing bags and mittens, building and deconstructing igloos, fishing and hunting--both of which, it seems, often must take place at a moment's notice, when the fish begun to run or the polar bear appears (or the fox, or the ptarmigan, or the seal, etc., etc.). But it's a life, too, that's close to death, and in Nappaaluk's simple prose, moments of intense disaster and loss take on tremendous meaning. I was really struck by one scene in which a character, splashed by boiling water, loses his eye, which is so melted it falls literally on the ground. Another scene, in which a hunter slips beneath a floe of pack ice and is lost forever, underscores just how fragile life must be at the top of the world, and how present the possibility of death and disaster. Among these moments of quotidian and not-so-quotidian life, Nappaaluk sketches a number of compelling characters: the headstrong widow and her impetuous daughter Qumaq among them.

One of the most interesting things about Sanaaq is that Naapaaluk captures the arrival and slow integration of Europeans into the life of the Inuit: the arrival of the first boat, the first airplane, the missionaries, the doctors and nurses. These watersheds are compacted in time, so that Sanaaq's life, simple as it is, seems to span centuries. At the beginning of the novel, Sanaaq and her family are terrified by the plane that roars for the first time overhead; by the end, Sanaaq's husband himself boards  a plane to join a work program for the Inuit. Disruption and change are inextricable from the arrival of Europeans and European-Canadians: at one point Sanaaq runs away with her injured daughter because she is afraid she will be taken from her to bring her to medical care. Sanaaq's husband reacts violently, and it is Sanaaq herself that ends up being sent away to the southern hospital, and the outside authorities, the priests and the police, visit her husband to reassert their authority. At the same time, it's clear that Sanaaq is the work of a pious Catholic; Sanaaq's own conversion--from Anglicanism!--is meant to serve as the novel's resolution. Sanaaq is an interesting artifact in that its attitude toward colonial presence is not quite what we would expect in the 21st century. Beyond that, it's a hell of a story.

The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich

The sausages took him through Minneapolis and rolling prairie country into the sudden sweep of plains, vast sky, into North Dakota, where he sold the last link. He left the train and walked along the edge of a small town railroad platform. The town was a huddle of cheerful squat buildings, some framed with false half-story fronts on top of awnings and display windows, one or two of limestone and at least three of sturdy brick. Against the appalling flatness, the whole place looked defenseless and foolish, he thought, completely open to attack, and, with its back against the river, nowhere to flee. It looked to him like a temporary place, almost a camp, that one great storm or war could level. He read the sign Argus aloud and memorized the sound. He turned in a circle to get his bearings, brushed off his father's suit, assessed the fact that he'd arrived with thirty-five cents and a suitcase, now empty of sausages, that contained six knives, a sharpening steel, and graduated whetstones. There were streets of half-grown trees and solid-looking houses to the north. A new limestone bank building and a block of ornately bricked stores on the principle street stretched down to the east. The wind boomed around Fidelis with a vast indifference he found both unbearable and comforting.

He didn't know that he would never leave.

The Master Butchers Singing Club depicts Louise Erdrich's beloved North Dakota during the time period between two wars. Fidelis Waldvogel, a German who has recently married his dead comrade's wife and adopted her son, has made his way to this desolate spot by selling the sausages from his suitcase. The small town of Argus is as far as he can go--he was trying to get to Seattle, but he's run out of sausages--and he sets up shop as a butcher. Delphine Watzka is a local, the daughter of the town drunk, who returns to Argus after a brief stint as an acrobat with her boyfriend, Cyprian Lazarre. Cyprian is not-so-openly Ojibwe, and even less openly gay, a fact that Delphine learns by happenstance, and which shuts the door on the possibility of their marriage, even as the two share a great love and affection for one another. Delphine ends up as a shopgirl in the butcher shop, and eventually [spoiler alert] after the death of Fidelis' wife Eva, will become the wife to Fidelis and stepmother to Fidelis and Eva's several children. This is a long and slow process that, as the book shows, takes place over decades--nearly the entire twenty-five year period between the first and second World Wars.

What is interesting about The Master Butchers Singing Club is that, if you are a reader who is only familiar with Erdrich as a "Native American" writer, Native characters and issues exist only in the background. Only Cyprian is really Native, and he spends much of the novel away in Canada, funneling in alcohol during Prohibition. Instead, the novel depicts Erdrich's (note the paternal German name) North Dakota as a place of diversity and refuge: German Fidelis, Polish Delphine and her father Roy, and various others, mostly from Potato Europe. In this way it reminded me, though perhaps only superficially, of the novels of Willa Cather. When Fidelis arrives in Argus, it's hardly more than a "camp" on the plain that seems as if it's going to be blown away. The novel tracks the formation of a community in Argus that includes the Waldvogels as well as Natives like Cyprian and others, and emphasizes the resilience of those who, like the Waldvogels, end up in this inhospitable place looking for a kind of security and stability unavailable to them in the Old World. Although Delphine is the center of the novel, it has a disparateness to it that is strong even for Erdrich, as it follows the family's many sons through their own marriages and experiences in war--on both sides, as it turns out, of World War II.

One of the most interesting plot points in The Master Butchers Singing Club involves a horrible death: when Delphine returns to her father's house, she finds a set of bodies in the basement belonging to a married couple and their child. It seems that the family had come to a party at Roy's only to get locked in the basement; in his drunken state, perhaps he mistook their cries for help for voices in his head. (Was it an accident, or... MURDER?) There's an interesting echo of this later in the novel when one of Fidelis and Eva's sons, Markus, ends up swallowed up by the collapse of an earthen tunnel. Cyprian saves him with a feat of acrobatics, which soothes somewhat the rivalry between the two men for the attentions of Delphine. But I was interested in the way that the novel uses these two burials as an image of tragedy, which becomes buried, and perhaps even forgotten and ignored. Many things are buried in the novel, griefs and traumas, and when they are brought to light, as with the reveal of the bodies in the basement, they don't always provide healing.

Anyway. I think I like Erdrich a little better when she's in historical mode, and The Master Butchers Singing Club is no exception. While I don't quite think I'd call it one of her best--her most representative work always includes a kind of magical realism that's not present here--I found it really gripping and skillful.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

In captivity, in the shed, Pierre had learned, not with his mind, but with his whole being, his life, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfying of natural human needs, and that all unhappiness comes not from lack, but from superfluity; but now, in these last three weeks of the march, he had learned a new and more comforting truth--he had learned that there is nothing frightening in the world. He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree. He had learned that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom, and those limits are very close; that the man who suffers because one leaf is askew in his bed of roses, suffers as much as he now suffered falling asleep on the bare, damp ground, one side getting cold as the other warmed up; that when he used to put on his tight ballroom shoes, he suffered just as much as now, when he walked quite barefoot (his shoes had long since worn out) and his feet were covered in sores.

Here it is, my first book of 2026: Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. I'm on track to read 365 books and 730,000 pages. And of course, whatever I try to say about it here will be by rights insufficient to it. It's not just a book that's long, or large in scope, but a book whose capaciousness attempts to take in all of human history; it is, in the end, a treatise on the relationship between history and the illusion of free will. But it's also a pretty good story, so let me start with an attempt at a summary. In early 19th century Russia, Pierre Bezhukov is blessed with the title and fortune of his late father, despite being illegitimate. Being a rich count gives him no sense of purpose or goodness, and so he struggles to find ways to contribute, from the military to Freemasonry to an ill-advised marriage to a selfish and narrow-minded woman. There are others in Pierre's social orbit, like his friend Andrei, a widower who falls for Natasha Rostov, who is the sister of Nikolai, a young man searching for glory in the war against Napoleon. These four--Pierre, Andrei, Natasha, and Nikolai--are, I would say, the core four in a book with an immense cast. As Napoleon enters Russia in the fateful year of 1812, the war goes from being an embarrassment to a threat, and these four all find their lives upended by the arrival of total war to Moscow.

My first impressions of War and Peace were that, unlike Anna Karenina, it all seemed a little slapdash. The various storylines didn't seem to hang together very well, although there's a lot in the book's first half that's really delightful, like Pierre being accidentally successful in a duel with his wife's lover. But it's the book's second half, with the arrival of Napoleon and the war--not the fake war of Austerlitz, which seems almost like a feint by Tolstoy in the book's first section--where the book really gains a sense of purpose and direction. (Maybe, in that sense, it's a lot like Pierre.) The war provides a crucible for the love between Andrei and Natasha, even as we know that it will also (even if we're only familiar with the title of a certain Broadway play based on War and Peace) spell that love's doom. But the real highlights, I think, are the scenes where we follow Pierre during the Napoleonic occupation and burning of Moscow: Pierre convincing himself that numerology suggests he should go out and assassinate Napoleon; Pierre sort of accidentally saving the life of a friendly French nobleman; Pierre being ultimately captured and sent to a French prison camp, where he comes to a deeper and more profound understanding of human nature (the passage above). Pierre is the book's singular creation, a genial but hapless oaf--I loved how often Tolstoy reminds us he's a big fat guy--whose heart goes searching after wisdom, and amazingly, finds it.

You know, I said there's four main characters, but now that I think about it, there's really five, because Napoleon is one, too, right? Not knowing all that much about the Napoleonic wars outside of the basics, I found the "War" stuff interesting but often pretty tedious. But I really was interested in War and Peace's depiction of Napoleon, who Tolstoy describes as an overly proud man who believes in himself as a manifestation of the will of the people. This often verges on the comical, as when Napoleon seems convinced that even a Russian envoy, who just wants to deliver a message, will be charmed enough by his grandeur to kiss his ring. Among the more incisive things said by Tolstoy, whose editorial hand is much heavier here than in Anna Karenina, is that the myth of Napoleon's "greatness" has elided how evil he was, and how many people he wantonly murdered; that's true to some extent even today. I really enjoyed the way that Tolstoy cuts him down to size. Tolstoy manages to make interesting, memorable characters out of a few of the war's other figures, like the Russian military leaders Kutuzov and Rastopchin, though I imagine these depictions might resonate even more with a Russian audience for whom these figures are well-known.

Tolstoy interrupts the narrative time and time again to tell us that his real subject is history and its causes, and their relationship to free will. As insidious as his Napoleon is, Tolstoy informs us that to blame the war on Napoleon is a categorical error. War happens not simply because one man wills it, but because of the wills--such as they are--of millions of men. And in fact, even this is not quite right, because Tolstoy ends the book with a long treatise telling us that there is no such thing as free will. This is the realization that brings Pierre such joy in the prison camp, that happiness emerges from accepting the thought that one's will his limited. Tolstoy's argument is captured best by a dream Pierre has of a friend in the camp holding a globe which is composed of millions of drops; each man is a drop but also a manifestation of the entire sea, into which he ultimately returns. In the end, I wonder if War and Peace might have been an even better book--if it's not sacrilege to say so--if Tolstoy had kept that singular image and dropped the last thirty pages of sermonizing. But perhaps he wrote only the book that the forces of history drove him to write.