My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier

She moved away and picked up her candlestick to take to bed, and as she went from the room she said to me, "Good night, Philip, and God bless you. One day you may come to know some of the happiness that I knew once."

I heard her go upstairs, and I sat down and stared into the library fire. It seemed to me that if there was any bitterness left in the house it did not come from her, nor from Ambrose, but was a seed deep in my own heart, which I should never tell her of and she need never know. The old sin of jealousy I thought buried and forgotten was with me once again. But this time I was jealous, not of Rachel, but of Ambrose, whom hitherto I had known and loved best in the whole world.

Philip Ashley lives under the care of his older cousin, Ambrose. They are as physically alike as they are mentally: a pair of tall bachelors living in a kind of masculine paradise. That is, until Ambrose falls in love with a mysterious woman named Rachel during a sojourn in Florence, where he marries. The letters he sends back to Philip are entirely enamored, then desperate, even crazed--then word comes that Ambrose has died. Philip, having been bereft of his closest friend and idol, vows to hate Rachel, whom he suspects of driving Ambrose to his death. But when Rachel shows up at the Ashley estate, she's all together different from what he expected, not a sinister hag but a beautiful woman with a sharp sense of humor. As he begins to see in her what Ambrose saw, so clearly Philip begins to resemble Ambrose to Rachel. Soon he is--wouldn't you know it--deeply in love, but the question remains, which Rachel is the true one and which the false? Was he deceived when he thought her to be a cold and calculating killer--or is it the charming widow who is the deception?

My Cousin Rachel is even more tightly plotted than Rebecca (which, let's admit, relies on a lot of turgid unveiling at the end) and more ambiguous in its implications. I almost don't want to detail the plot too much, because to describe the book too much would be to give away its emotional upheavals. Suffice to say, du Maurier is deft in getting us to fall in love with Rachel, too. The first flirtations between the twenty-something boy and the widow in her mid-thirties are--I have to admit--incredibly erotic. When the "twist" happens, which is not so much a twist as something telegraphed clearly to us as it isn't to the callow, headstrong Philip, the change in the book's emotional tenor is so strong that it left me feeling almost physically sick. What I wasn't expecting was that du Maurier would twist that around again, so that we pass from one certainty to another into a kind of state teetering in apprehension. These "twists" are less plot revelations than sea changes in the book's emotional valence, and our attitude toward Rachel; and though the novel leads to a grand Gothic conclusion it also ends up in a place where Rachel is even richer for being perhaps both of the women we have suspected her to be.

That's all very vague, but I don't want to spoil anything, because I'd hate to deny anyone the chance to be experience My Cousin Rachel as it was meant to be read. I found it impossible to put down--in a class with Rebecca and my personal favorite, The Scapegoat. In the final balance, I wonder if it might be read as a subversive story about the legal and financial restrictions experienced by women. Ambrose's suspicion for, then pity for, Rachel relies on the fact that Ambrose wrote out, but failed to sign, a will that would leave his estate to her rather than Philip (who in turn becomes Rachel's heir). If Rachel is conniving, is it a way of carving out an independence in a world that keeps women under the paternalistic care of men? How should we read Rachel's "transformation" of the worn-down, hypermasculine Ashley home into a civilized Italianate estate? It's tempting to read it as a straightforward Eve-and-the-apple story, by which a woman (and an Italian, no less) infects a male Eden. More interesting, I think, to embrace the more complex version of Rachel that emerges at the end.

Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel

After the dog's cremation, I lie in my husband's bed and watch the Academy Awards for animals. That is not the name of the show, but they give prizes to animals for Outstanding Performance in a movie, on television, or in a commercial. Last year the Schlitz Malt Liquor bull won. The time before that, it was Fred the Cockatoo. Fred won for draining a tinky bottle of "liquor" and then reeling and falling over drunk. It is the best thing on television in what my husband, Flea, said.

With Flea gone, I watch out of habit.

My favorite story, I think, in Amy Hempel's collection Reasons to Live is "Nashville Gone to Ashes," about a woman whose veterinarian husband has died and left her with all the animals. The narrator, who came to the work of a vet reluctantly, is left with the parts of her life with Flea (his name is really F. Lee) that she hadn't chosen, and none of what she did. "I think it was that love that I loved," she writes of Flea's attention to his charges. "That kind of involvement was reassuring; I felt it would extent to me, as well. That it did not or that it did, but only as much and no more, was confusing at first. My love is so good, why isn't it calling the same thing back?" I was touched by this story, and the simple grief of what gets left behind. At the end, the narrator finds herself giving money to a homeless man begging for help for his dog, and turning around and seeing a man without a dog, begging for himself. Do we value animals too much? Or do we value them because they serve, unable to talk--except for Flea's mynah--as repositories of our own loves and passions?

Many of the stories in Reasons to Live focus on grief and dying. There's a lot of hospitals. There's one, for instance, in "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," a story that comes up a lot when people talk about stories they love. The narrator, sitting at chemotherapy with an old friend, plies her with fun facts that are almost always wrong. (For instance--Bob Dylan's mother invented Wite-Out.) These facts come to stand in for something else, or nothing else, or the impossibility of finding something to give ground to a relationship that has lasted so long. But for me I preferred "Going," a slim little three-pager from the perspective of a reckless young daredevil who has miraculously survived a car accident while driving with his binoculars. The longer stories here feel no more "complete" or round than the flash stories; I often felt that Hempel offers only snapshots into stories--vivid and in bright detail, but only snapshots nonetheless. I thought this worked well in a pair of stories about fathers trying to keep their precocious children from experiencing a vague kind of familial unease that grips them: "Back to Celia" and "Today Will Be a Quiet Day." Other stories felt difficult to penetrate, too wispy or impossible to grasp.

John Adams by David McCullough

So much had happened in John Adams's life--he had done so much, taken such risks, given so much of himself heart and soul in the cause of his country--that he seems not to have viewed the presidency as an ultimate career objective or crowning life achievement. He was not one given to seeing life as a climb to the top of a ladder or a mountain, but more as a journey or adventure, even a "kind of romance, which a little embellished with fiction or exaggeration or only poetical ornament, would equal anything in the days of chivalry or knight errantry," as once he confided to Abigail. If anything, he was inclined to look back upon the long struggle for independence as the proud defining chapter.

OK--I guess we're doing this, huh. After reading Alexis Coe's biography of George Washington, here we are reading David McCullough's biography of John Adams. It's the second McCullough book I've read this year, after his book on the Johnstown Flood, and it shows the popular historian in full form: a big honking tome, well-written. John Adams can take credit for a renewed interest in the second president, who McCullough clearly suggests is underappreciated relative to his predecessor and successor, and resulted in the HBO miniseries starring Paul Giamatti. But McCullough's position is, I would argue, not just that Adams is underappreciated when set amidst larger personalities, but that there is a political valence to that underappreciation--that our historiography has been shaped by Jacksonian Democrats whose rhetoric of "liberty" and "states' rights" have prevented us from fully appreciating Adams as an advocate for a strong central government and opponent of slavery.

McCullough is a great writer, so in saying I was persuaded, perhaps I am saying that his style worked on me. But I do actually think McCullough's case is compelling. Firstly, he depicts Adams as the "voice" of the Declaration of Independence, advocating stormily for its passage during the Continental Congress during a time when loyalists reluctant to shake the wrath of Great Britain might still have won the day. As a diplomat, Adams secured loans and treaties from European powers in the face of powerful contempt. As president, Adams has the benefit of being a staunch opponent of slavery when every other president of his era, outside of his son John Quincy, either supported the institution's expansion or waffled on it hypocritically, as Washington and Jefferson did. (A nice detail here is that, by inviting a representative of Haiti's Toussaint to the White House, Adams was the first president to host a Black guest.)

I had a vague sense of all that before reading the book, but what I did not realize is that Adams successfully managed the "Quasi-War" with Napoleon's France and kept it from blowing up into a full-blown war of the kind that saw the White House burned just a decade later. This gained Adams no friends, because his own Federalist party (like Hamilton, who comes off here as an absolute conniving piece of shit that everyone hates) was drumming the beat for war and accused Adams of being cowardly, whereas the Jeffersonian Republicans were Francophiles who failed to see the extent of French provocations. This is sort of a key to understanding McCullough's vision of Adams, who successfully navigated both sides of the political arena, which kept the country safe and thriving but made him personally unpopular.

Adams was, it seems, kind of annoying on a personal level. His chief sin, in his own words, was "vanity," though one might add stubbornness, a short temper, and a rusticness inappropriate to the grand courts of Europe. But one person adored him--his wife Abigail, whose eloquence and intelligence set her apart among the First Ladies of the first American century, if not beyond. Adams is unique in that we have a huge trove of his writings, including the letters he and Abigail sent each other, giving us a sense of Adams' own perspectives and thought processes we don't have for other presidents. I was charmed by the thread of Abigail's love for this weird little man that most people seemed to have found unlovable, and it is one of two personal threads that undergird the book, the other being the close friendship with Jefferson that was sundered by their political differences, then stitched back together after both were out of office.

If John Adams has a flaw, it's that the book doesn't seriously deal with the Alien and Sedition Acts, an affront to the right of free speech that marked the low period of Adams's presidency. McCullough explains it away as a kind of product of the political pressures of the time, and shows that Adams later regretted it, but it's not clear exactly what those pressures were, nor why Adams, who seems to have such an iron spine when it came to doing unpopular things, embraced it. And yet, despite this, I came away with a renewed respect for the forgotten second president, "His Rotundity."

Transit by Anna Seghers

And yet although all this transit whispering made me feel miserable, it was amazing to think that even though thousands, no, hundreds of thousands, had died in the flames of the air raids and the furious attacks of the Blitzkrieg, there were many more who were born quite without being noticed by the consuls. They hadn't asked for letters of transit, hadn't applied for visas; they were not under the jurisdiction of this place. And what if some of these poor souls, still bleeding physically and spiritually, had fled to this house, what harm could it do to a giant nation if a few of these saved souls, worthy, half-worthy, or unworthy, were to join them in their country--how could it possibly harm such a big country?

Anna Seghers' Transit is set in the city of Marseille during the upheaval of World War II, where people from all over a Europe in turmoil converge, each trying to set sail for somewhere else. This makes Marseille a kind of continental waiting room where people linger for months, waiting for their visa to arrive, for their refugee status to be approved, making a temporary life for God knows how long in a place they have no intention to stay. That is, except for the +narrator, who arrives at Marseille wanting the one thing the authorities will not allow--to stay for good. Through a convoluted series of events I will try to outline here, he ends up using an assumed name: a friend sends him with a letter to a stranger, a semi-famous novelist who turns out to be dead. While trying to return the dead stranger's items to his wife at the consulate, the narrator is mistakenly identified as him, a misidentification he seizes upon in order to gain the transit visa that will allow him, ironically, to stay in Marseille for a time. This is all complicated when he meets the dead man's wife, Marie, with whom he falls in love.

Transit is a funny thing. It takes as its subject a painful stasis, and the book often seems not to be moving forward or toward anything in a way that mirrors this subject. It's hard to figure out the narrator, who is somehow both calculating and reckless. He promises to help Marie get her traveling papers--she has taken up with a handsome doctor who wants to emigrate with her, to make things more complicated--but of course, to do this would mean to take her away from Marseille, so he sort of half-does it and half-doesn't, manipulating her in order to keep her in his presence. Is he a hero, or a scoundrel? It may be that categories like these break down in the great waiting room of Europe. Either way, his voice is unique and magnetic, and he's an interesting character to follow around; a schemer making his way in a world of impenetrable paperwork. In part, it's a satire whose target is the absurd bureaucracy of Europe, whose rubber-stamping seems entirely inadequate to the gravity of world war. More than one person tells the narrator that they have decided to give up and return to the places of their birth, choosing violence and war over red tape.

In fact, it made me think a little of immigration in the United States today, the way, without even the upheaval of world war, we have created a system of perverse and obscure incentives that leaves people with no clear way forward. The strange motionlessness and circularity of Transit made it, for me, a little difficult to really embrace. But I did find it skillful and insightful, and certainly worth reading.

Lies, Inc. by Philip K. Dick

There was silence. And then, by labored, unnaturally retarded degrees, a groaning noise came from the speaker of the television set; the noise at last became intelligible speech, at the proper pitch and rate: his categories of perception had again achieved a functioning parallel with the space-time axis of the image of Omar Jones. Or had the progression of the image resumed as before? Time had stopped or the image had stopped, or perhaps both... or was there such a thing as time at all? He tried to remember, but found himself unable to; the falling off of his capacity for abstract thought--was--what--was--

He did not know.

Something looked at him. With its mouth.

It had eaten most of its own eyes.

Millions of people on an overcrowded planet (population--LOL--seven billion) have already made the journey by teleport to the distant planet known as Whale's Mouth. The problem is, the teleportation only works one way. Rachmael ben Applebaum is one of the few on Earth who don't trust the veracity of the images of idyllic life being beamed back from Whale's Mouth, and he plans on finding out exactly what's going on the old fashioned way, on a seventeen-year trip by spaceship. (It doesn't hurt that Rachmael's transportation business is on its last legs, and might be reinvigorated by the existence of a few million people eager to sign up for a return trip to Earth.) The plan puts him directly in the crosshairs of a battle between the teleportation company, the very funnily-named German company Trails of Hoffmann and the secret police service known as Lies, Inc.

Classic PKD premise, no? Lies, Inc. has a fascinating publication history: originally written as a novella in the 60s, Dick added about 100 pages of new material toward the end of his life that was rejected by his publisher and released only posthumously. The result is a mishmash that doesn't quite work as a novel, but provides a really fascinating study in the contrast between early and late Dick. The early book is quite familiar, down to its obsession with the repetition and extension of World War II-era politics: note the German company and the Jewish hero. (One of the horrors of the seven-billion-strong world is, in fact, that Germany has been reunited once more.) The new material follows Rachmael who has decided (confusingly) to travel through the portal anyway, where he finds himself in a waiting room with a couple dozen other people who are not fit to be released. Each of them suffers from a series of delusional "paraworlds" filled with monsters; periodically they must compare notes on their paraworlds and make sure they're not the same, which would suggest that one is becoming real. That's very Dickian, I think: the proliferation of one premise into several, the carefully orchestrated logic of the sci-fi world dissolving into multiplicities.

But like I said, as a novel, it's a mess, even at the level of basic logic and coherence. It's no wonder that no one wanted to published it like it is, though another pass at editing might have made it into something great. There are several memorable images of the kind that only PKD could write: the monster--actually the head of Lies, Inc. transformed via paraworld--that grows and eats its own eyes; the corporate apparatchik who lives slightly outside of normal time and is kept, like a pre-cog, in a glass room; the book that seems to tell people about their fate, by which I mean it borrows paragraphs from later on in the book. What I love about PKD is that he tosses off these ideas, which for another writer would make up the whole center of the work, by the bucketful. 

Passing by Nella Larsen

She was caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself. Her race. Race! The thing that bound and suffocated her. Whatever steps she took, or if she took none at all, something would be crushed. A person or the race. Clare, herself, or the race. Or, it might be, all three. Nothing, she imagined, was ever more completely sardonic.

I'm going to teach Passing again this year--Song of Solomon, a book I love, turned out to be just too dang long. So I needed to reread it. But this will be a short review, because I don't have all that much to say about it. Unlike The Great Gatsby, a book I don't have any special love for but find something new in each time I re-read it, Larsen's Passing seems to have little in the way of surprises. Which is itself a little surprising, because as a book it is rich with ambiguities: racial, sexual, what have you. But the ambiguities each time are the same.

One thought I did have as I was reading this is that, while Passing has a lot to say to us about modern day ideologies around race, it actually depicts a world that has vanished. Passing, as I understand it, was extremely common in the early 20th century, sometimes in the all-or-nothing way that Clare Kendry passes as white in the novel, and sometimes in the casual way that Irene is seen to be passing at the Drayton Hotel at the beginning of the novel. (In fact, what Irene is doing is so casual in that scene she fails to mention it until she faces the possibility that Clare, who she mistakes for a white stranger, has clocked her, and she'll be thrown out of the hotel.) There simply isn't any analog to that universe today. Which I think actually makes Passing more interesting, because it offers a glimpse into an ecosystem that could only exist under Jim Crow.

It also makes me think that when Clare accuses white people of being stupid--she explains to her novelist friend that a white person could never pass as black, hello Rachel Dolezal, because black people are too savvy for it--they must have been really stupid. Which is to say that race as an idea operates entirely on ignorance, relying on the fact that unstated assumptions remain unstated. If it were ever all dragged into the light, Passing seems to suggest, something would fall apart. "If I could explain" Clare Kendry, Irene's husband Brian says at one point, "I'd know what race is." But who really wants to know?

Nightside the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe

Enlightenment came to Patera Silk on the ball court; nothing could ever be the same after that. When he talked about it afterward, whispering to himself in the silent hours of the night as was his custom--and once when he told Maytera Marble, who was also Maytera Rose--he said that it was as though someone who had always been behind him and standing (as it were) at both his shoulders had, after so many years of pregnant silence, begun to whisper into both his ears.

Patera Silk is a young priest in charge of a manteion, that is, a religious school, in the city of Viron. Like all manteions, it has a sacred window where the pateras and materas pray each day one of the gods will show their faces, but such a thing has not happened in living memory. So when Silk receives "enlightenment" while playing a ballgame with the students of the manteion, it's a big deal--though perhaps not as easily believed as the god showing up at the window. The god that appears to Silk is not one of the "Nine," a pantheon with discrete purviews like the Greek or Norse pantheons, but a minor god known as "the Outsider." What does it want with Silk? Perhaps it has something to do with the terrible news that Silk receives later in the day, that the manteion has been sold by the state to a vicious criminal named Blood. With the help of members of the criminal underworld, Silk breaks into Blood's estate, considering going so far as even killing him, if it might save the manteion--a moral choice that the pious Silk makes with shocking coldness. What actually happens, of course, is that Silk becomes drawn deeper into the criminal world of Viron.

Compared to Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, the Book of the Long Sun series, or this first volume at least, is much more ordinary. It felt much closer to me to typical fantasy fare, though much smarter and better written, and with a few of Wolfe's customary bolts of strangeness. (The pantheon of "the Nine" seems shockingly similar to the mythos of the Game of Thrones series, which I will point out came out three years after this book was published.) The two series are set in the same world, but this one is much earlier; the sun that is dying in the time of the torturer Severian is burning white-hot here, so that night never truly falls anywhere on Earth. It feels smaller in scope: there is no quest here, and the action is all contained within the city of Viron. The stakes--the future of the manteion--seem small, though the intervention of the gods presages perhaps that they will get bigger as the books go forward.

What I thought was most interesting about Nightside the Long Sun is how Wolfe's reputation as a Catholic writer shows up here. I knew that about him, but I think you're hard-pressed to find evidence of Wolfe's religious beliefs in the Book of the New Sun. Nightside the Long Sun is explicitly religious in theme. Silk's piety actually puts him outside the bounds of most of Vironese society; much like our world today, most people pay a kind of lip service to religion but don't really believe. That means that the moral choice that Silk makes--that he will do almost anything, including murder, to save the manteion--is inscrutable to most people, criminal or otherwise. "The Outsider," a sensitive reader quickly understands, is actually the Catholic God, who has been pushed out into a marginal place outside the pantheon. No wonder, then, that Silk's mission takes him to a whorehouse--maybe in the next volume he'll visit a tax collector.

Ultimately, Nightside the Long Sun is hardly comparable to the Book of the New Sun stuff, but then again, The Shadow of the Torturer, the first book in that series, doesn't really capture the heights the series eventually achieves. And I will say that I wanted to keep reading when it was over; so much so that I am thinking of breaking my rule and reading the next one before 2027.