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.

Stories in the Worst Way by Garielle Lutz

Here is a story in the worst way. I have no business being anywhere in it. It comes between me and the life I have coming.

Look: a man who is not me but whose accomplishments are similar (he was the son of some parents, got himself schooled around, circumstanced himself aplenty, placed himself squarely and irreversibly in the employ of somebody who could be counted on to walk all over him, etc.) found a new way to cheat on his wife. This was not the way that everybody else was cheating at the time.

"I hate when it all gets languaged around like this," writes one of the narrator's of Garielle Lutz's collection Stories in the Worst Way. The quality of being "languaged around" is one of my favorite things about Lutz's fiction, starting with the precisely aloof metaphor, the "meteorites of fried chicken" described as "casketed" in their paper box. But I also thought about Jonathan Franzen's recent comments that he puts a book down when he gets to the second cliche. It seems to me that a really great writer has an interest in, pays an attention to cliche, which are little ossifications of shared meaning. Lutz is great at interrogating cliche and wrenching it just out of place, as when one narrator describes their wife as having "given up on me hand and foot," or when another writes: "Then came nights when, lying awake beside my final wife, I would spent too much time putting my finger on what was wrong. I was wearing the finger out." Phrases find themselves wedged into strange new context, sentences that reveal the strange possibilities of grammar: "And here comes what your life will never be the same after which, the same way mine has already never been."

The characters in Lutz's stories are slightly alienated from language, standing just off to the side of it, as they stand slightly outside their own lives. It is entirely possible that each of these stories has the exact same narrator. They go "rivering" around their anonymous suburbs and work in underpaid, underheralded jobs, like adjuncting. They have sex, or don't, and what that adds up to in either case is never all that clear. Some are clearly marked as men or women, but others occupy a kind of indeterminate space, less non-binary than simple non-essential. On gender, Lutz writes: "This much is figured out: the thing about being a girl is that stuff gets stuck inside you--but with a boy, stuff goes away and never comes back. A boy keeps losing himself. A boy just keeps watching himself run out. How much should this explain?" The stories themselves answer not much, because gender here is subject to slippages and indeterminacies that reveal a deeper sense of alienation and ennui. The characters have feelings of isolation and powerlessness that have everything to do with gender, but not their gender, if that makes any sense. A recurring idea is the character who is somehow not in their own story, how whatever "the story" is, is separate from them.

Lutz is one of those writers who sounds only like themself, which I think is probably the greatest possible achievement a writer can manage. So I found these stories very reminiscent of her later collection Divorcer. The differences are small: the stories in this collection are numerous and shorter; the weakest, I thought, were the flash pieces that pointedly avoid the overbearing nature of subject and narrative. The best stories are those that, being longer, reminded me more of Divorcer, as with "Not the Hand But Where the Hand Has Been," about a narrator whose job is to write the indexes for books. Struggling to understand their daughter, this narrator writes an index for them ("subclothes of," "parents of, constructive potshots taken at"). There are stories about shitting your pants and eating cum. Those, in fact, are the best ones, the ones that root the "languaging around" in the terrible and frightening physical experience of having and being a body. But how much should this explain?

Two Books About U.S. History

Political partisanship, Washington predicted, would reduce the government to a crowd of bickering representatives who were very good at thwarting each other but got very little accomplished for their constituents. And for all his talk of unity, he had come to see people as for or against his administration and had little patience for criticism. Unbridled partisanship was his greatest fear, and his greatest failure was that he became increasingly partisan.

This weekend I visited Fort Necessity National Historic Site, a reproduction of the hastily-assembled for in Western Pennsylvania where a young George Washington fired the shots that started the French and Indian War. It's a strange little quirk of history that it was Washington, still a young officer and not yet the American Cincinnatus, started what some call the first true "World War." It's one of those facts that's so insane you'd think everyone would know it, except that perhaps it doesn't fit in our conception of the man who could not tell a lie and who helped forge, then lead, the American republic.

I read Alexis Coe's You Never Forget Your First in part because I wanted to read something about Washington that wasn't a colossal Ron Chernow-size tome. Incidentally, Coe describes her project in writing about Washington as being in opposite to Chernow and his peers, calling them "Thigh Guys"--because they all seem to marvel at the supposed size of the first president's hams. Coe's account is brief and breezy, punctuated by witty tables and feature boxes. I liked, for example, the way she dispatches the battles of the Revolution into a table of summaries, presuming correctly that if someone wanted that kind of thing, they might go to a thousand other books, including the Thigh Guys'. The compaction helps the reader get a stronger sense of the particular shape of Washington's life, which involve not an obvious march toward greatness but a combination of false starts, missteps, and true achievements. I enjoyed learning about Washington's actual administration as president, which always seems to be shrouded somewhat in the mists of history. While Washington's assumption and transfer of power provided the root of the American system, the administration itself seems to have been dominated by an intransigent cabinet--Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton--whose disagreements marked the birth of the partisan era and who ended up estranged from Washington personally.

I couldn't help but think that, for all its posing as an alternative to the "Thigh Guys," Coe's book has little in the way of an opposing thesis about Washington. Those he enslaved, and his moral vacillation about whether and how to emancipate them, come to play here, but that's hardly new information, and Coe seems reluctant to integrate it into a coherent understanding of Washington. He did good and bad, which I suppose is true.

Most of the people in Johnstown never saw the water coming; they only heard it; and those who lived to tell about it would for years after try to describe the sound of the thing it rushed on them.

It began as a deep, steady rumble, they would say; then it grew louder and louder until it had become an avalanche of sound, "a roar like thunder" was how they generally described it. But one man said he thought the sound was more like the rush of an oncoming train, while another said, "And the sound, I will never forget the sound of that. It sound to me just like a lot of horses grinding oats."

Not far from Fort Necessity is the Johnstown Flood National Memorial, which commemorates and interprets the 1889 flood that wiped out the city of Johnstown, PA, killing over two thousand and immiserating many, many more. David McCullough's The Johnstown Flood--the erstwhile historian's first book--tells the story of the flood in detail, beginning with the adjustments to the Lake Conemaugh dam made by a wealthy sporting club of industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and Henry C. Frick, moving on to the dam's bursting and the gruesome aftermath.

What can you say about this except: holy shit. If anything, McCullough's book convinced me that the flood was much worse than I'd even expected. The lucky, it seems, were killed outright, pummeled by the force of the wave, but for many if not most death came in a horrible and drawn-out way. People were launched down the river on the planks that had formerly been their houses, were caught in debris and crushed or drowned. The most horrifying fact is that the flood was actually stopped by a stone arch in Johnstown that did not give way, leaving people to be smashed within a plug of debris that quickly caught on fire. McCullough tells the story of the flood not just in generalities but in painful detail, describing the experiences of specific named victims and families, each of whom suffered their own ghoulish species of misery. It's a tough read, but I was really impressed by how scrupulously researched the book is. Here, as elsewhere, McCullough shows his eye for the telling detail: the sound of the horse grinding oats, or the unlucky brakeman swept away in his train, having settled down for a nap with his socks in his pockets. The fact that McCullough, writing in the sixties, was able to interview survivors is even more exceptional.

The Johnstown Flood would be a seminal moment in American history if only for the number of people it killed--I think the worst disaster pre-9/11?--but it stands out especially because of what it illuminates about Gilded Age America. Public anger turned toward the wealthy of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, who had turned a derelict reservoir into a ticking time bomb. I appreciated McCullough's sober evaluation of culpability; it's entirely possible, McCullough notes, that the exceptional rainstorm that filled Lake Conemaugh might have broken the dam even without the adjustments, and besides, no one living had been responsible for them. But, McCullough concludes, the neglect in replacing the original valves meant that no matter what, there had been no way to adjust the water level of the dam--a sin which falls directly at the feet of those who ought to have known better. It's not really fair to compare them, because their scopes and purposes are so different, but reading them back to back I did feel like McCullough succeeded with a strong perspective in a way that Coe struggled to achieve in her book about Washington. In both cases, however, they illuminated a very interesting trip to a part of the United States with deep layers of history.

Measurement by Paul Lockhart

In general, the main task of the geometer is to translate geometric information into algebraic information, and vice versa. This is not so much a technical problem as it is a creative one. The real idea was the dissection of the pentagon into similar triangles. Where does such an idea come from? How can you invent something like that? I don't know. Mathematics is an art, and creative genius a mystery. Of course, technique helps--good painters understand light and shadow, good musicians have a thorough knowledge of functional harmony, and good mathematicians can untangle algebraic information--but a beautiful piece of mathematics is just as hard to make as a beautiful portrait or sonata.

Paul Lockhart's Measurement starts with a triangle. If you connect each of a triangle's vertices to the midpoints of the opposite sides, they all seem to meet right in the middle--but do they? How do you prove it? From this exercise, Lockhart spins out an explanation of the basic premises of most grade school level (and perhaps beyond grade school level, what do I know) mathematics. "Measurement" is the key term here, that in doing mathematics we are measuring things according to other things, breaking down polygons into constituent shapes, measuring the paths of vectors in a space of any number of dimensions, fitting triangles into circles and slicing up cones. It's mostly stuff you might remember from high school, but which, unless you went on to a career in STEM, you have probably mostly forgotten. But it's presented in a way that reinvigorates the material, not as a set of dreary problems, but as a kind of elegant unfolding and shifting, toggling back and forth between different modes to reveal fundamental relationships.

I take that back: there are lots of problems. They just aren't the kind that I remember, which start with "Imagine a ladder ten feet high," or "Two trains leave Pittsburgh at 10:03 a.m." Instead, they sound like these: "How can we measure the length of a helix?" Every curve can be straightened without metric distortion. Is the  same true for surfaces?" "How many corners are on a four-dimensional cube?" Some of these problems are explained, but some you're supposed to take a break and explore on your own. I didn't do this, but I appreciated the invitation all the same. I liked that the problems kept the number to a minimum. Lockhart emphasizes that what this mathematics about is not application, the kind of "real-world" motivation that is vogue in education today, but the imaginary "pure" mathematics that is never exactly reproduced in the messiness of the real world. In this way, Lockhart emphasizes the beauty and the elegance of mathematics. It's a subtle argument not just for a way of looking at math, but a way of teaching math, one that forsakes ladders and trains for the two simple section titles: "Size and Shape" and "Time and Space."

I'll probably remember very little of the specifics here, except maybe for the explanation of conic sections as lines in projective space, something I'd never heard about before, and the disturbing fact that there's no way to measure the perimeter of an ellipse algebraically. But I really did appreciate the opportunity to rethink some of the mathematics I learned, and see it in a new way. Lockhart is right when he says that mathematics can be elegant and beautiful. My dad, a professor of physics, unlocked an understanding in me when he told me, when I was a kid, that mathematics is a kind of language. I suppose that, as Lockhart writes, it's a kind of art as well.

The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim by Marcia Douglas

Now that woman, Leenah, she know. I like how she stand up to me. Check her out. She look me in me eyes and she listen me with her heart. Me respect her. Me find meself a tell her things me never tell no other woman. Or man. Jah descend on that dawta and she see me plain--no locs and no guitar; no herb and no mic--just I&I.

In Marcia Douglas' The Marvellous Equations of the Dread, Bob Marley is reincarnated in the body of a "Fall-down Man," that is, a beggar, living at the Half Way Tree clocktower in Kingston. No one recognizes Bob, and when he tries to give away his precious ring, once owned (maybe) by Ras Tafari himself, Haile Selassie--tries to give it away for a couple of patties and a box rink--no one wants it. Only Leenah, a former lover, recognizes Bob in his new guise, but reconnecting is hard, because every time Bob steps out into the street, another five years have passed. As Bob speedruns the future that, in our world, death denied him, he's joined at Half Way Tree by Jamaica's past, visited by the spirits of Edward VII, Marcus Garvey, and his own white father. (Maybe I'm stupid, but I actually didn't know Marley was biracial.) As a kind of nexus where the threads of Jamaica's history are joined, it seems appropriate that Marley, who came to represent the country for so many, ends up here, where once, we're told, a young slave was hanged.

I really enjoyed The Marvellous Equations, and I loved it most when Douglas speaks with Marley's voice, or else in the incredibly evocative language of Rasta Jamaicans. So many Rasta elocutions, some of which are familiar from reggae music, have the rhythm of true poetry: Jah, Zion, Babylon, sufferation. But there's so much more to this expansive novel, which bills itself as being written in "bass riddim," with many harmonies and counterpoints under which the single heaving bassline of Jamaican history can be heard thumping. We expand out into the story of Leenah's family, including a great-uncle who spends his time in heaven hunched over a sewing machine with sky-blue thread. There's an angel whose notebook is recorded, and a number of Jamaican streetfolk who come into contact with Bob-slash-the-Fall-down. We even get the story of Haile Selassie himself, a reluctant and bewildered godhead to the Rastafarians, a representation of the hope of a return to an African "Zion." We see Selassie killed in his chamber by his maid-slash-lover, and that hope extinguished, but as Marley notes to a young runaway he befriends as the Fall-down, Zion is a place inside yourself. Among other things, it seems, The Marvellous Equations is about how the deaths of both Marley and Selassie forced Rastafarianism to turn away from the kind of millenarian idea of an African promised land to something more inward.

But it's about a lot of other things, too, including the nobility of the love between Bob and Leenah (a more noble love, it seems, than the one shared between Bob and Rita Marley, who only makes a few momentary appearances here.) Foremost it's about Jamaica, a place where history and hope converged on one exceptional but flawed--one might even say doomed--man. Part of the reason I picked it up is because I couldn't stomach committing to Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings, a 700-page tome that also has Marley's life as a central thread. Maybe I still will read that one someday, but it's hard to imagine it being more inventive, colorful, or satisfying than this one.

With the addition of Jamaica, my "Countries Read" list is up to 124!

A Void by Georges Perec

Things look normal, but looks can play tricks on you. Things at first look normal, till, abruptly, abnormality, horrifying in its inhumanity, swallows you up and spits you out.

OK, let's get this out of the way: what is most notable about Georges Perec's A Void is that it never uses the letter "E." What follows from that? Well, after a while I found myself less impressed with Perec's achievement--after a few pages, the impression ends up being something like "OK, there are actually way more words without the letter E than I thought--and more impressed with that of translator Gilbert Adair, who had to preserve not only this feat in English but the particular vibe of the circumlocutions that are employed. I have no idea if, for example, it stands out as self-consciously goofy in the French when someone is described as "worth their avoirdupois in gold" (rather than weight, you see), but in Adair's translation, at least, it becomes cheeky, a flaunting of the trick. This stands out especially when Perec/Adair rattle of a long list of things without the letter "E," as when the hero, Anton Vowl, suffers from insomnia, "switching to a cot, a crib, a foldaway, a divan, a sofa, a hammock, lying on his back, on his stomach, or with arms akimbo, casting off his quilt or placing a thick, hairy tartan rug on top of it, borrowing a plank of nails from a fakir or practising a yoga position taught to him by a guru..." This is showing off: look how easy it is. These circumlocutions stand out as both braggadocious and funny, and much of the delight of the book is seeing how writer and translator not simply a-void the forbidden letter, but embrace its absence.

That's all great, but what about the novel itself? Is it even a novel? The plot involves Vowl, who has suddenly disappeared after a short, strange illness. Vowl's friends and associates, with E-less names like Amaury Conson (a pun on consonant) and Olga Mavrokhordatos and Hassan Ibn Abbou, all assemble to solve this mystery, only to reveal a much deeper and more troubling conspiracy that involves a mysterious sigil that seems to have the power to kill. This sigil, described, among other ways, as a parabola with a dash down the middle, is clearly the absent "e." The biggest pleasure of the book is that this produces a kind of dramatic irony; we know what's missing from these characters' world. The dramatic irony is enhanced by--my favorite part--a series of literary copies found in Vowl's possessions that are essentially famous works reimagined with no "E," as in "Living, or Not Living" by William Shakspar, or a version of "The Raven" called "Black Bird." I also really enjoyed a "clue" that involved a bit of text discovered without the letter "A"--something the characters are ironically quite able to clock.

But it must be said that, ultimately, the book's E-lessness is only incidental to Perec's style, which is madcap, effusive, silly, and maybe even a little superficial or shallow. The mystery ends up being "resolved" by a dramatic story of siblings separated at birth and a secret killer. It's playful, like all Oulipoan literature is or should be, but it also reminded me that Harry Mathews was able to elevate such restraints and word games into something both human and humane in The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium. A Void is wonderfully clever with its chosen restraint, and it does more with it than you might suspect. But ultimately what I'll remember it for is what was missing.

I Liked Rex by Diane Williams

What in the world will her name be? Diane!

I should not hurt anybody else I know with this story.

I hope she is not too fake.

At the lake she is often cheerful, although her eyebrows are frequently raised--a common response to the untoward or to the unexpected.

A highly dangerous path leads to the lake. But why say that?

What can you do in a page or two? That's the animating question, I think, of the short fiction of Diane Williams' new collection I Liked Rex. And the answer is plenty, when you toss out some of the drearier literary conventions: "Must there really be a need for harsh realism?" she wonders at one point. Which is not to say that the stories in I Liked Rex are full of space aliens or sea monsters, but that the kind of detail accumulation one thinks of as the stuff of realism is not important here. But that's not to say, in turn, that detail is not important. The story "There You Go" begins like this: "The man entered the lady's house as if it were the most natural thing for him to do. She watched as he exited his car, towing toward her his hard-shelled valise--which held personal articles, which he could not live without--including his oral irrigator." What's important about the oral irrigator? Why is this, out of all the "personal articles... he could not live without," singled out for focus? Who is this guy anyway? A reader weaned on harsh realism has every reason to be outraged, because there aren't really sufficient answers to these questions. But there is a novel and interesting kind of writing, one which flouts a lot of hoary expectations of sense and meaning. (As an extra question, I might ask what the hell kind of point-of-view this is.)

Here's what I'm thinking. A good realistic novel is a kind of surprise engine, a series of advancements or intensifications that come out of a set of ground rules. A short story can do this in miniature, but a piece of flash fiction really can't; there's no time to set the rules, the parameters, and little space for the story to surprise us once, much less several times. But Williams' stories manage to do exactly this, by withholding information, by tossing up red herrings, which are not really red herrings, because why should anything else make more sense than an oral interrogator? I found that, in each of these individual stories, I was surprised at every turn, sometimes by a novel image or unexpected phrase, sometimes by the reveal of some key detail lately revealed. One of my favorites, "Pleasure of the Day," begins: "before things fell apart, she had her first pleasure of the day." What's the pleasure of the day? Well, it comes on a "tin tray, layered with paper that catches and preserves the grilled treat's grease and crumbs." Later: "The even wider grin she received was well worth the cost of the cream horn?" Is the treat the cream horn? I guess! Why mention it more than three-quarters of the way through the story? Well, because it's not the specific cream horn that's important. It's that hell of a ringer at the end: "The world... yes, the world can look pretty shitty when you have finished eating up the Plain Jane, or the Triple Threat, the Big Top, or the Baby Princess Louise."

Williams is maybe best known to the lit mag world as the editor of NOON, a mysterious and well-regarded journal she's edited for years, which--uniquely these days--accepts only snail mail submissions. I've never read her before, but I think--I think--I Liked Rex is really typical of her work. It's like nothing else I've ever read, which is, to my mind, the single highest praise you can give to a book. That said, I don't know how much these stories will stick with me. Their anti-realism, their refusal to cohere to simple themes and narratives, means that it's easy to bounce off of them. They are like pin-pricks, sharp and intense, but disappearing quickly. But I'm sure it won't be the last of her collections I read.

The Invention of Curried Sausage by Uwe Timm

For a moment she struggled with herself as to whether she should confess that she had been keeping something from him, in fact she had lied to him, but now she could no longer say it, now it was too late. It had been a game. Now it had turned serious, bloodily serious. To him it would now appear as a low-down dirty lie, as if she had meant to trick him, keep him like a household pet, make a fool of him, and finally drive him to a total loss of self-control. And hadn't she done exactly that? If she had at least let him twist her arm or strike her--she had never thought of that, instead she had held him in a grip of iron, using all her strength: in fact, she had defended herself. If she were now to sit across from him with a swollen eye and bruises on her arm, it would have made everything easier; she could have said, I just wanted to keep you here a bit longer. But now he was sitting there with his bandaged right hand, apologizing for having gone out of his mind.

The narrator of The Invention of Curried Sausage is sure that, contra the wisdom of the day that curried sausage was invented in Berlin, it actually came from his home town of Hamburg, where it was first sold by Lena Brucker, a food-stall proprietor he remembers from his youth. Intent on proving his theory, he travels back to Hamburg to find Lena in a retirement home, where she unfolds the story of curried sausage over a series of visits, a story that turns out not to be about curried sausage at all, really, but about the last days of Nazi Germany and the upheaval of the lives of ordinary Germans. Lena tells the narrator a story about how, abandoned by her husband in the final days of the war, she picked up a much younger soldier in a bomb shelter, taking him back to her apartment where they begin a torrid but complicated affair.

For Lena, the presence of the young soldier Bremer reinvigorates a life that had grown stale and isolating. For the soldier, Lena offers the companionship of a beautiful older woman and safety from the front lines, where soldiers are being offered up as sacrifices in a last-ditch effort to save the Reich. But the war is over within a few days of the young soldier's arrival, and Lena quickly and instinctively makes the decision not to tell him. As long as he believes the war is still ongoing, he knows that he will be shot as a deserter as soon as he emerges. When British soldiers appear on the streets, she even makes up a story about an armistice signed between Germany and the Allied powers to fight the Russian menace in the East. In a way, what The Invention of Curried Sausage reminded me of was the wonderful movie Goodbye, Lenin, about a young man in post-Soviet Russia who must convince his ailing mother that the Iron Curtain has not fallen. Both stories are about the ways that, in the midst of rapid transformation and change, we lie to ourselves--and to others--in order to hold onto the world to which we've become accustomed.

It's clear from the very beginning, almost cheekily so, that the curried sausage is a red herring. We eventually do get the story of the curried sausage, which involves the resourceful Lena making a series of effective black market trades after the war's end, mastering the shifting reality of a makeshift economy. Bremer the soldier is, at best, a footnote to that story. But the story the narrator takes away is of much greater insight and significance than the wone he went looking for, because it captures something meaningful of the reality of the German landscape at the end of the war. I was really struck by the shrewdness and psychological richness of Timm's novel. Let's be honest, few people are hankering for realistic novels from the perspective of the Germans in World War II. But by exploring the specific moment of the Reich's collapse from the point of view of two ordinary but, like all ordinary people, exceptional people, The Invention of Curried Sausage struck me as interesting and gratifying.

Break It Down by Lydia Davis

The girl wrote a story. "But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel," said her mother. The girl built a dollhouse. "But how much better if it were a real house," her mother said. The girl made a small pillow for her father. "But wouldn't a quilt be more practical," said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. "But how much better if you dug a large hole," said her mother. The girl dug a large hole and went to sleep in it. "But how much better if you slept forever," said her mother.

Everybody thinks they can write short fiction, but I think a lot of writers just aren't good at it. Being good at writing novels, sustained narratives that unfold over several sittings, doesn't necessarily translate into being good at writing short stories. Lucky for us, then, we have authors who choose to make short fiction their medium, like Lydia Davis, who's often held up as one of the genre's most accomplished practitioners. Break It Down is the first of Davis' collections, and it's the first in her big omnibus The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which I will be reading over the course of several years and counting each as individual books--sue me.

The impression I was left with was--well, I don't know. I often think of the short story as something that needs to make a quick and sudden impact, like a meteor hitting the earth, but Davis' stories are often quite light. She operates mostly from a bird's-eye view, relying on lots of summary and abstraction--contra the kind of specificity and focus that many writing books push you toward--and avoids fireworks, big changes and resolutions. The stories are full instead of subtleties, as with "A Few Things Wrong With Me," a story about a woman undergoing a breakup who is forced to take a hard look at her flaws. Like many experiences, this one is brief and inconclusive, and ends with the woman deciding she doesn't want to think about herself any more: "But there will always come a time later that day or a day or two after when I ask myself that difficult question once, or over and over again, a useless question, really, since I'm not the one who can answer it and anyone else who tries will come up with a different answer, though of course all the answers together may add up to the right one, if there is such a thing as a right answer to a question like that." No revelation here, no epiphany. But what comes instead is something perhaps truer: a sense that personality is in the eye of the beholder, and that the intensity of a crisis is always fleeting.

For my money, Davis' shorter, weirder stories are her best. My favorite might be "The Brother-in-Law," about a strange, unassuming presence in the house of the unnamed narrators: "The brother-in-law. Whose brother-in-law they do not know." That's great. That's a great couple of sentences. The story, which is about how weird the guy is and how he just kind of "dissipates," contains lots of great sentences: "Even his urine divorced itself from his penis and entered the toilet almost before it had left him, like a bullet from a gun." These stories, like "Mildred and the Oboe" (she masturbates with it, we think) and "City Employment" ("All over the city there are old black women who have been employed to call up people at seven in the morning and ask in a muffled voice to speak to Lisa") are where Davis' talents for the subtle and the strange really shine. I'm aware that, by going through the book in order I'm moving through Davis' career chronologically, so one thing I'll be looking for is how these elements change and grow--does the strangeness win out, or the subtlety?

Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey

Not when it was so goddam evident, so right-before-your-eyes obvious, that in Wakonda, that year, the town's worries and woes were being caused by nobody else but that goddam hardnose up the river! And rain is one thing and, fine, maybe you can't do nothing about the weather except yak about it, but Hank Stamper is a different breed of cat from the rain! And you can maybe put the blame on the Arm of the Lord those years when that arm puts a stranglehold of frost on the woods so tight it freezes all the way to your pay envelope, and maybe you can roll with the blow of the wind if there's nothing else except the wind blowing... but when the arm is the arm of Hank Stamper strangling off your income, and you know damn well that the blow is being dealt by the fist on that arm, then you find yourself having a pretty hard time blaming your woes on anything other than that arm!

Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion is set in the fictional town of Wakonda (lol), Oregon, where a strike has brought the lumber industry to a standstill, except for one family: the Stampers, who make a private contract with the local lumber company to continue felling trees. (These small non-union outfits not associated with sawmills were called gyppo loggers, and in the real world they were as hated by their union counterparts as the Stampers are in Kesey's novel.) Hank Stamper, the oldest son of grizzled patriarch Henry, is just the kind of guy to make such a contract, not selfish, really, but stubborn, and insensate to what other people might think about him. But Hank needs labor, and few of the locals are willing to scab for the man they see as taking money out of their pocket. Lucky, then, is the return of Hank's half-brother Lee from school in the East. Lee and Hank have a complicated history: Hank may have been sexually involved with Lee's mother, who has recently committed suicide, and Lee has always felt in Hank's shadow. His return to Wakonda is a chance to either prove himself or defeat his brother--in his neurotic state he vacillates between these goals--both of which might mean making off with Hank's wife Viv, whose intelligence and sensitivity are wasted in that remote ramshackle house on the Wakonda River.

Sometimes a Great Notion is a one hell of a tome. Not only is it 700+ pages, it's stylistically frenetic, most notably in its habit of switching from third to first person without warning. Often I found myself reading whole paragraphs before realizing I'd been dropped into the first person, then having to go back and figure out whose head exactly I'd been dropped into. In moments of high physical or mental intensity, Kesey will even switch rapidly back and forth between, say, Hank and Lee within the same paragraph, often with liberal, but not perhaps clarifying, use of italics and parentheses. It's a big, beautiful mess, and in my opinion it tries to do too much. But it's clear that Kesey is trying, and often succeeding, to capture several levels of human experience, from the larger communal life of the logging town to the inner turmoil of the individual psyche. The ramshackle house, with its precarious add-ons supported by innumerable timbers and pillars to keep it from sinking into the river, is a symbol of the precariousness of the Stamper family, besieged both from without--as with the locals angry with their lumber contract--and within--by the inflexibility of Hank and the psychosexual vengeance of Lee.

Sometimes I felt like the boat needed to cross the river and reach the Stamper place, bobbing up and down on uncertain waters. But when the narrative finds moments of pathos and intensity, it's really something, as when [spoiler alert] one of the Stampers' most loyal associates is pinned by a log against the bank of the rising river, certain to drown before the heavy log can be lifted. The characters here are at the mercy of happenstance, including the torrential rains and natural remoteness of the coastal Oregon landscape, but even moreso they are the mercy of themselves, their stubbornness, their desires, their inability to see and speak to each other. As the passage above suggests, it may be the Stampers themselves who most resemble the weather, implacable, insensible, and unstoppable, even by themselves. 

Edo's Souls by Stella Gaitano

It's been ten years I have been away from my village, the same age as my daughter Maria, whom we like to call Edo, named after her grandmother, who hovers around me like a thick, transparent cloud of air. I could only feel her presence, whereas I think my babies could see her more clearly. She'd play with them while I was busy with something else, like washing their tiny clothes covered in dust and poop. They'd be beating t he air with their hands and small legs, babbling and smiling, their wide black eyes following silhouettes floating in the air. I got the sense this was more than a child entertaining themselves with angels, as people say--the bond with this other being felt too strong. Maria-Edo was there, the children's grandmother, sitting on the edge of the bed, stopping my children--or what she probably saw as her own children reincarnated--from rolling off and hitting the floor.

Lucy-Eghino, a young girl living in the south of Sudan (which is now, you know, South Sudan) is the only one of her mother's children who survives. On her deathbed, Lucy's mother Maria, never having gotten over the struggles of her offspring, declares that Lucy's children will be the reincarnations of her own. But the children that Lucy will raise will see a different life than the traditional Sudanese village in which Lucy was raised. When violence breaks out, Lucy and her husband Marco must travel first to Juba, then to Khartoum in the north, a busy megalopolis where safety is only temporary, and civil war begins to approach. In Khartoum they live with Peter, another southerner raised by an Arab family in the north who has joined the military in order to find his imprisoned father, and his wife, Theresa. Together with Peter's extended family--who have a couple of other subplots related to the military oppression in Sudan in the 1970s and 80s--these four do their best to maintain the life of their family in the midst of upheaval.

I liked the first part of Edo's Souls. South Sudanese author Stella Gaitano draws on the traditions and legends of the country's small village to give us a sense of a woman with a deep-rooted power to transform the life of her child; we believe that Maria-Edo's--what, blessing? curse?--will come true. And when Lucy finds a baby on the road to Juba--the only survivor of a horrible killing--we understand it as a kind of fulfillment of the prophecy; what Maria-Edo has condemned Lucy to be is simply that, a mother. But the rest of the novel felt sadly familiar to me--a novel about political violence in the developing world where the violence hovers mostly somewhere offstage, operating opaquely. Gaitano makes Peter a kind of reluctant soldier, wavering over his multiple loyalties, but this fails to give us a real sense of what the violence in the Sudan is about or why. It's all very bloodless--not in a literal sense, of course. But the real problem is that, just as Lucy is disenchanted with the north to which she must flee, the novel becomes disenchanted as well. Gaitano tells us that the spirit of Maria-Edo watches over Lucy's children, but Lucy's children are more or less nonentities to the narrative, having been totally subsumed by the adventures of Peter, or Peter's sister and her Arab lover. It was a mistake, too, I think, for the novel to move from a third person that mystifies and enchants the narrative to a series of first-person narratives where the characters exhibit a shallow, plotty inner life. Oh well.

With the addition of South Sudan, my "Countries Read" list is up to 123!

Father of the Four Passages by Lois-Ann Yamanaka

Sonny Boy, a painter cannot paint, sculptor sculpt, photographer photograph, musician compose, not without the experience; your birth was to enhance my art. Art enhanced. Now how do I get rid of you? All evidence of you. Everything. I should kill you. Artfully, I've done it before. What a requiem I would compose.

Sonny Boy, I had to birth you. I thought you were the blessing of a uterine lining, gone for what they all told me was forever. The possibility of my redemption, a miracle from God, who found me at last.

Sonia Kurisu is an art student and lounge singer living in Las Vegas who has just given birth to her first son, Solomon--Sonny Boy. Sonny Boy is technically her first, but she is haunted by the spirits of three boys she killed before they were born: one appearing as pieces chopped up on a doctor's table, another as a drug-malformed "turtle boy," and another as he was buried, in a jar. Sonny Boy himself is no picnic, becoming another burden in a life of drugs and abuse that Sonia struggles to get away from. When he turns out to be severely autistic, nearly non-verbal, Sonia's family members converge upon her, dragging her back to Hawaii, and not always with kindness. Sonia struggles to love her deadbeat mother, her born-again sister, her meddling grandmother and aunt. Her connection is with her father, who sends lyrical letters from whatever part of the world--Japan, Nepal, Argentina--he happens to be visiting. His quasi-abandonment, of course, informs Sonia's fantasies of getting rid of Sonny Boy for good.

I have a high regard for Yamanaka's work. I thought Blu's Hanging was a near-masterpiece, and although I didn't like Wild Meat and Bully Burgers as much, its final scenes have stayed with me for a long time. Father of the Four Passages, in fact, has a similar ending, in which Sonia is provoked by Sonny Boy--who has some sort of mystical powers to speak without speaking, it seems, though that's all a little bit muddled--to find restitution for the three dead children, including turning the baby-in-the-jar to ash on top of Mauna Kea. Father of the Four Passages differs from those other books in that its protagonist is an adult, not a child, and Yamanaka brings a much more poetic and staccato style to it, eschewing the earthy and pop-cultural aspects of those other two books. It's kind of a mess, and the end is supposed to bring it all back together by giving the various pieces of the book a kind of direction, toward atonement, restitution, healing. And that mostly works, but I did find the experience of reading Father of the Four Passages to be a much more whiplash-inducing experience, and though the story coheres, the book didn't necessarily cohere for me. 

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

When our daughters were small, I'd sometimes dump a bunch of building toys on the floor (Legos and wooden blocks and parts of other sets) and we'd sit there for hours, listening to music and talking and absentmindedly making something. There was no plan; we were just putting this with that, because we liked the way it looked. But pretty soon, a structure would start to appear. The ramps were leading to that platform, and there was a cool little space under that platform, an excellent place for that plastic dragon and Lego plumber to live. The final product was complex, and I think you could say it had "meaning," but it wasn't a meaning we'd intentionally put there; no way could we have planned out something so strange or anticipated the exact effect it would have on us later when, having forgotten we'd made it, we walked past it. That is, the thing we would have planned would have been less. The best it could have been was exactly what we intended it to be. But a work of art has to do more than that; it has to surprise its audience, which it can only do if it has legitimately surprised its creator.

George Saunders' A Swim in the Pond in the Rain combines several short works by Russian masters--Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Gogol--with short essays explaining how and why Saunders thinks the story works the way it does. These pieces come out of a class that Saunders teaches on the Russian short story, and while the class might not be a workshop class in the truest sense, it's clear that what Saunders really cares about is thinking of these stories as a writer, someone who wants to imitate their graces and surprises effectively. I think sometimes that anyone can think about a piece of fiction as a reader, but if you start thinking about it as a writer you'll find that you see much more--and for better or worse, you can never really stop. So whether the class is a writing workshop or not, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain is a book for writers.

First things first: one has to admit that the stories Saunders has chosen are really good. There's no surprise there, I guess. But it's been a while since I've visited the Russian short story--which I also took a class on in college--and I really was delighted by these stories, which are so different from one another, but which have a kind of earthy, earnest pre-Revolution "Russianness" that is unmistakable. One of them, "The Nose" by Gogol, will be familiar to many, as it was to me, but it's still a highlight, a funny absurd story of a man chasing his own nose around town that shouldn't work, but it does. (Saunders describes the story as functioning with a kind of audaciousness, making the absurdity work by pointedly illustrating that it shouldn't work, thereby getting a little grace from a skeptical reader.) But I had never read, for instance, Chekhov's "The Darling," about a woman who gives her whole self to a series of lovers, or Tolstoy's simple morality tale "Alyosha the Pot." (There are more stories by Chekhov here than any other, and I think that's no accident--he really was the genius of the short story.)

One thing that struck me as being rather funny is how straightforward the writing advice here is. Though Saunders is often associated with a kind of topical futurism and social critique, when it comes to teaching writing, he has a kind of old-fashioned fuddy-duddiness, which, if I'm honest, I think as a teacher I share. He takes seriously, for instance, the idea that a story should contain something like "rising action"--a phrase that might make a postmodern bristle. One specific point he makes that I really appreciate, and has made me think about my own writing, is that a good story needs to "always be escalating," and while I don't know if that's true, I do think that it will often explain why an otherwise well-written story seems not to work. I appreciated, too, his thoughts on how "The Gooseberries" and "Alyosha the Pot" succeed by a kind of thoughtful reticence, whether neither Chekhov nor Tolstoy puts too heavy a hand on the moral questions at the heart of the story. That is, I think, easier said than done, and one must admit that to be a writer like Chekhov or Tolstoy you have to have a kind of genius insight into the nature of human beings at baseline that few possess. Nonetheless, for us ordinary Iosips, there's a lot here worth pondering.

G. by John Berger

I despise the dust of which I am composed: anyone can pursue and put an end to this dust. But I defy anybody to snatch from me what I have given myself, an independent life in the sky of the centuries.

G. is the illegitimate son of an American divorcee and an Italian candy manufacturer who grows up in England. That makes him, in some sense, both no one and everyone, an heir to the international turbulence of the late 19th century that, as we know and he does not yet, will blow up into the conflagration of World War I. Most of his life is marked not by politics, but sex, beginning with his seduction by his own aunt in that English country house and continuing on through a series of reckless affairs with everyone from chambermaids to Austrian noblewomen. But love for G. is represented by the face of a Roman woman who protected him when, as a child, he escaped a visit to his father and ended up in the barricades of a nationalist uprising. So perhaps sex and revolution are tied together from the very beginning, something that G. will have to relearn when, after years of tomcatting around, he casually accepts a reckless request to do a little light spycraft in the city of Trieste, where Serbian nationalists are beginning to become suspicious not only of their Austro-Hungarian overlords, but Italians like G.--if that's what he is--as well.

John Berger was better known as an art critic whose Ways of Seeing (which I have not read) has been overwhelmingly influential. From time to time, G. reads like a novel by an essayist, who frequently interrupts the narrative to expound on the various emotional and visual dynamics that occur between G. and his several lovers. (One of Berger's most enduring ideas is the male gaze, which says something like "men watch women while women watch themselves being watched," and that idea is all over G. as well.) Berger isn't hiding his hand; the "I" here is so strong that Berger will often compare the events of the novel to things that (presumably) happen in his own life, or baldly declare the struggles of composing the text: "I cannot continue this account of the eleven-year-old boy in Milan on 6 May 1898. From this point on everything I write will either converge upon a final full stop or else disperse so widely that it will become incoherent." The dryness of Berger's essayistic style contrast in an effective and interesting way with the heedlessness of G., who follows his passions at every turn. The reader identifies more strongly with that "I" than it does G., a man who we suspect would probably be incapable of thinking very articulately about what he's doing, or why, or how he fits into the larger context of European history as it passes from the age of revolution to the age of total war.

For all that, there is a novel here, and an interesting one. More or less, it can be split into three segments, the first being G.'s conception and childhood and the second being a long middle set in the town of Domodossola, where a friend and fellow pilot is attempting to be the first to cross the Alps in an airplane. In a way I won't overexplain he both succeeds and fails, and this perhaps sets the tone for the third part, with G. in Trieste. G. enlists a Bosnian peasant woman as his plus-one to a ball where he intends to seduce the aforementioned Austrian noblewoman, causing a terrific scandal. Is G.'s act political, or not? Is he acting merely out of lust for the Bosnian woman, or is he intending to indict the Austrians by shoving the political iniquities and instabilities of their rule in their faces? Are political and revolutionary deeds acts of will or are they something closer to lust, rising from someplace deeper within? These are the questions that make G., I thought, a strange and provocative work.

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.