The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child?  Perhaps that's why men have invented God -- a being capable of understanding.  Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bamboozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God only exists for leader-writers.

It seems now that Graham Greene's The Quiet American had a kind of prescience.  I'm told it wasn't very popular in America, because it made us seem like meddlers and dilettantes in world affairs, but if Aldon Pyle, the "Quiet American" of the title is meant as a stand-in for the nation as a whole, it couldn't be much more accurate.  Pyle is an American in Vietnam before the war, when it was a French problem, and he arrives with no more knowledge than his textbooks have given him, but with an unwavering certainty that the way to solve the "Vietnam problem" is to fund a third force of rebels who will destabilize the conflict between French colonialists and Communists.  Greene wrote about Pyle in 1955, and a decade later, there we were, meddling and dilettanting on a much more tragic scale.

The narrator of the novel, Thomas Fowler, is classically Greene: a cynic, a realist, and an atheist.  He and Pyle become fond of each other, but Fowler sees Pyle for what he is, a man who has "punted down into Phat Diem in a kind of schoolboy dream."  Fowler, a journalist, holds to a fierce neutrality:

'You can rule me out,' I said.  'I'm not involved,' I repeated.  It had been an article of my creed.  The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved.  My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter.  I wrote what I saw.  I took no action--even an opinion is a kind of action.

Fowler suffers from the same delusion as Nick Carraway, a delusion that Heisenberg destroyed in the twenties, the belief that you can be a mere observer, and not affect what happens around you.  Greene's books are always true to their novelistic staging, and when Fowler insists that he is "not involved," we can be assured that by the end of the novel he will be very involved indeed.  In this case, what drags Fowler into involvement is Phuong, a beautiful Vietnamese woman who has been Fowler's lover for a long time, and with whom Pyle falls deeply in love.  Like a boy scout, Pyle insists on taking Phuong from Fowler in the honorable way, even going so far as being air-dropped into a battle zone to find Fowler and ask his permission.  Fowler, older and married, knows that he cannot compete with Pyle, who will bring Phuong to the United States, and yet his fondness for Pyle never wavers.


Like Fowler, we like Pyle, though he is kind of a genial monster.  To his surprise but not our own, the rebels he has armed kill dozens of innocent civilians.  On a political level, he ought to have served as a stark warning against mucking around in world affairs where our idealism counts for very little--a lesson you might argue we seem not to have learned.  On a literary level, he's a powerful portrait of misguided rectitude, and a sour criticism of modern virtue.  The Quiet American is Greene at his most cynical and least redemptive, but perhaps his most troubling.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

"I know, too why she asked me not to forget her. Naoko herself knew , of course. She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed. The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. Because Naoko never loved me." 

The above quote ends the opening chapter of Norwegian Wood which doesn't leave a lot to the imagination. In fact, it is probably the most notable feature when considered in comparison to other Murakami Fiction Works: it is not imaginative. It doesn't contain any of the magical surrealism, any of the absurd, any of the unknowable. It is an utterly human and maybe even boring novel about a very lost young man in college who can't seem to quite get his love life in order. 

So what saves an incredibly boring story about a college guy - Watanabe - who loves the girl who never loved him? The characters in the book are so well written and fun. Reading this book is almost like being in college again. The first time I read the novel, I had just started college and felt a weird nostalgia for the experiences in the book that I didn't think I was going through, but in retrospect I think it is Every College Person's story. We just don't think our lives are that interesting as we live them because Murakami isn't crafting our stories. Revisiting it was like revisiting a college diary with all the details that have been forgotten through time. 

For my reading, the characters are the heart of the story. Lost Watanabe who is completely indifferent to life and pretends to have no emotions. Manic Pixie Dream Midori who drags her male friend to a porno because her boyfriend won't take her and says things like "I looked like a corpse on the beach with seaweed stuck to my head" as she describes a bad perm. He's Your Friend But You Know He's a Dick Nagasawa, who loves to read, spend money, womanize, and once ate three slugs to get the upperclassmen to leave the freshies alone. Nagasawa's girlfriend, the Girl Who Everyone Knows Can Do Better Including Her But She Stays Anyway. Kizuki the Teenage Tragedy. Storm Trooper the Weird Roommate. And Naoko - the person who never loves you no matter how much you feel they should.

Although this is not the most Murakamiesque, it is one of my favorite of his novels, and when looking for a good airplane read, I decided to pick this one over any of his others.  

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

PROCTOR: You are the high court, your word is good enough!  Tell them I confessed myself; say Proctor broke his knees and wept like a woman; say what you will, but my name cannot--

DANFORTH, with suspicion: It is the same, is it not?  If I report it or you sign to it?

PROCTOR--he knows it is insane: No, it is not the same!  What others say and what I sign to is not the same!

DANFORTH: Why?  Do you mean to deny this confession when you are free?

PROCTOR: I mean to deny nothing!

DANFORTH: Then explain to me, Mr.  Proctor, why you will not let--

PROCTOR, with a cry of his whole soul: Because it is my name!  Because I cannot have another in my life!  Because I lie and sign my name to lies!  Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang!  I have given you my soul; leave me my name!

The Crucible is famously an allegory for McCarthyism, in which the accusations of witchcraft which rapidly multiply in 17th-century Salem stand in for the similar mania for secret Communists which Joseph McCarthy inspired in the 1950's.  But allegories are reductive--once you have observed that X is a representation of Y, or that Napoleon is Stalin and Snowball is Trotsky, you have solved the puzzle the allegory represents and need go no further.  I didn't find the McCarthyism angle necessary or helpful in reading The Crucible.  Yes, Miller draws parallels between the 17th and 20th centuries, but The Crucible is far less interested in using the past to illuminate the present than it is in observing something frightening and true about human nature: the fragility of community, and the tyranny that public morality can exert over the moral self.

What happens in Salem happens, Miller observes, thanks to a poisonous mix of noble motives and evil ones.  Governor Danforth, who sentences Proctor and others to hang for witchcraft, is never anything less than a devout, if myopic, figure who takes Proctor's claims that the accusations are false quite seriously.  But others, like Putnam, seize the opportunity to punish their enemies and seize their property once they've been accused.  The worst of these is Abigail, the chilling villainess of the play, only a teenager, whose calculated show of being afflicted by witchcraft is terrifying in its malice.  Abigail, having had an affair with Proctor, makes his wife one of her principal targets--as Proctor says, she "means to dance on my wife's grave."  At the end of Act III, Abigail whips herself into a possessed frenzy in front of the courtroom, pretending to be menaced by the spirit of a girl she wants to ruin--and ultimately forces an abject apology out of the very girl she wants to destroy.  It's a frightening moment, partly because of Abigail's shameless cruelty, but also because it shows how weak the individual spirit can be.  It's probably awesome on stage.

The hero, Proctor, is not a very good man--he has an affair with Abigail, after all, and is renowned for not being much of a churchgoer--but fights valiantly to preserve his own sense of right and wrong in the face of immense social pressure.  At the end, in prison, he faces a choice: sign his name to a confession and live, or refuse and be hanged.  The choice is between public absolution and private morality--is it worthwhile to be a good and honest man, the play asks, if it means the rest of the world sees you as a bad one?  Proctor begs to keep his name, though he's given the community his soul, but it seems like the terms have gotten switched around: his name, that part of his identity which belongs to the community, has already been robbed from him, but his refusal to sign the document allows him to retain something of himself, even at the cost of his own life.

Putting The Crucible in the McCarthyism box prevents us from really understanding the power of Proctor's doomed choice, and from realizing that we still fall prey to the same kind of savage mania as the Puritans.  I'd argue that, in the social media age, we're constantly finding new victims on whom to exert the will of public shame.  Like Danforth, sometimes our motives are essentially good ones--I'm looking at you, Racists Getting Fired Tumblr page--but we fail to anticipate the destruction and abuse they foster, and so we devour ourselves.

Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban

There are green turtles whose feeding grounds are along the coast of Brazil, and they swim 1,400 miles to breed and lay their eggs on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, half way to Africa.  Ascension Island is only five miles long.  Nobody knows how they find it.  Two of the turtles at the Aquarium are green turtles, a large one and a small one.  The sign said: 'The Green Turtle, Chelonia mydas, is the source of turtle soup...'  I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that.  Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup.  In a town as big as London that's a lot of soup walking about.

Two London strangers encounter each other at the Aquarium on multiple occasions, and they begin to suspect that the other is having the same thought: that the Aquarium's two green sea turtles, confined to their small tank, ought to be set free.  Each of them is lonely, isolated, and the possibility that the other shares those feelings of loneliness and isolation is somehow both thrilling and threatening.

Turtle Diary takes the form of alternating diary entries by these two strangers, William G. and Naeara H.  He is a divorcee working in an independent bookshop; she is a children's book author and illustrator who is moderately famous for writing a series of books about a character named Gillian Vole.  (Of course, Hoban himself first found success writing the Frances the Badger series.)  They are more apprehensive about finding company in each other than they are about finding company in the turtles--and numerous other animals, who seem to live more naturally and comprehensibly than human beings:

I was looking at a book on shamanism at the shop, by Mircea Eliade.  In Siberia and South America, wherever they have shamans, they're always the unstable, the epileptics, the weird ones of the group, people prone to terrors and depression as I am.  But unlike me they get initiated into power and a place of importance, they become seers and healers.  There's something between them and animals, a bond, a connection, channels of power.  Speech with animals, magical transformations.  Could I be a turtle.  Could I through an act of ecstasy swim unafraid and never lost, finding, finding?  Swimming with Pangaea printed on my brain and bones, the ancient continent that was before the land masses drifted apart.  That's part of it, too: there were no seas between, the land was one, there was one thing, unbroken.  Now there are thousands of miles of open water and the strong ones, the swimmers, the unlost, are driven to trace the paths between, maintain the ancient connection.  I don't know whether I can keep going.  A turtle doesn't have to decide every morning whether to keep on bothering, it just carries on.  Maybe that's why man kills everything: envy.

To Hoban's credit, Turtle Diary refuses to follow the paths of expectation.  William and Naeara don't fall in love; they never really rise above the level of strangers, in many ways alike but in others inscrutably different.  They come together to set the turtles free, and with the help of a sympathetic Aquarium employee, they do so, but this act of compassion doesn't come at the end of the novel and it doesn't fix all of their problems.  The turtles remain for them a symbol of possibility:

In them was the place they were swimming to, and at the end of their swimming it would loom up out of the sea, real, solid, no illusion.  They could be stopped of course, they might be killed by sharks or fisherman but they would die on the way to where they wanted to be.  I'd never know if they'd go there or not, for me they would always be swimming.

But the turtles remain turtles, and William G. and Naeara H. remain William G. and Naeara H., the source of their own kinds of soup.  They go on having to decide "whether to bother every morning," and whatever human companionship they find along the way is hard-won.  Hoban refuses to overstate the parallels between the two protagonists and the turtles themselves, and though something is achieved on the turtle's behalf, human nature makes similar achievements elusive for William and Naeara, and perhaps never quite possible or as fulfilling as the return to Ascension Island.  William and Naeara drift away from each other after the turtles are freed, and they probably never see each other again.

Turtle Diary shares some of the mystic habitation in ordinary things that characterizes Kleinzeit.  Of the four Hoban novels I've read, these are the only two that seem in any way like they were written by the same person.  Turtle Diary is a much more muted and subtle work than Kleinzeit, but it possesses a power that comes from the recognition of the quiet desperation that characterizes much of our modern lives.  It reminded me of Georg Lukacs' idea of transcendental homelessness: unlike the turtles, the beetles, and Gillian Vole, we have no ancient instinct that tells us where and how to be.

The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America by Naomi Murakwa

The first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence . . . . And to those who say that law-and-order is the code word for racism, here is a reply: Our goal is justice--justice for every American. --Richard Nixon's Acceptance of the Republican Party Nomination for President, August 8, 1968.

The [first] Condition of Our Rights [is] the Right to Safety and Security of the Person . . . . Many fear entanglement with the law because of the knowledge that the justice rendered in some courts is not equal for all persons.  --President Harry S. Truman's Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights, 1947.

Professor Murakawa starts her book with these two quotations, taken from different eras, both asserting something akin to the first civil right, and seemingly different in meaning.  The first is an assertion of freedom from criminal violence.  The second asserts freedom from racial, state-sanctioned violence.  Murakawa's book unpacks these seemingly different positions to show that they had the lead to the same result: over-criminalization and mass-incarceration.  She does so by following criminal justice debates starting in the immediate post-World War II era through the 1990s.  Her thesis is that race-liberals and/or Democrats are as accountable for the current state of criminal justice as race-conservatives and Republicans.

So, she explains, after World War II, as we started to confront racial injustice, one of the issues lawmakers had to deal with was white mob-violence against African-Americans.  Race-conservatives took the position that the mob-violence was an inevitable result to black criminality; thus, any end to white mob-violence required addressing black criminality in the form of harsher punishments.  Race-liberals, in turn, addressed white mob-violence in the context of procedural due process and police professionalization.  So, race-conservatives and race-liberals were able to compromise with legislation that created more procedures and more police---for race-conservatives, this meant more law enforcement; for race-liberals this meant better (and so, the idea went, fairer) law enforcement.

The problem with this framing of the issue, Murakawa explains, is that it concedes the principle of black criminality.  By framing the issue in terms of procedural due process and police professionalization, race-liberals did not confront either the evil of white-mob-violence or the idea that African-Americans were more prone to crime.  For Murakawa, this fatal concession shaped all subsequent debates of criminal justice policy.

So, for example, in the 1960s and 1970s as the crime debate turned more towards police brutality on the one hand and civil rights activism on the other, black criminality was already understood as an existing condition.  Race-liberals answered these debates, again, with fairer procedural mechanisms and stronger law enforcement, conflating structural fairness with racial fairness.  As a result, our criminal justice system gained objective indicators of fairness, without addressing racial inequities or, much worse, challenging the idea that African-Americans are more prone to crime.

When Murakawa turns to the 1980s to present, her book hits its stride---I think mainly because by then everything is coming together and the strength of her thesis is becoming clearer---as she describes Republican and Democratic tough-on-crime bidding wars.  Starting in the 1980s, as the "crack epidemic" played into pre-existing racial fears and the drug war took off, she describes how Democrats sought to steal the "crime" issue by being tougher on crime than Republicans.  This instigated a bidding war as both parties sought to be the tougher party.  Unsurprisingly, this period oversaw an explosion of mandatory minimums and a huge jump in the incarcerated population.  It was also in this environment that the number of federal capital crimes exploded and Congress passed anti-habeas legislation.

Murakawa's book seems to be in partial response to The New Jim Crow, which attributed much of the blame for mass-incarceration on Republicans/race-conservatives.  In contrast to The New Jim Crow, Murakawa's book focuses on joint-responsibility.  I don't think Murakawa's goal is to point fingers or blame, however.  Rather, the goal of book seems to show what Congress has been doing with criminal justice issues in the last 60 years to show that we have lost any sense of fairness or restraint.  More pointedly, though, the book also seems to imply that adding more procedural due process will not adequately solve what is wrong with the system.

This book is recommended for anyone interested in criminal justice.  It's very much written for an academic audience, though, so be warned: it can, at times, be a difficult read.  It provides a pretty detailed history of federal criminal law developments since World War II, and it describes much of the debates that went with major reforms. For anyone not interested in slogging through an academic work, I would suggest sticking to something meant for a more general audience, like The New Jim Crow or Don't Shoot.

I Regret Everything: A Love Story by Seth Greenland

There is a school of thought that says every character in a dream is another facet of the dreamer. The Minotaur dwelt at the center of a Labyrinth where he was eventually slain by the hero Theseus. Was I Theseus or the Minotaur? And if I was the Minotaur, was I trying to kill some part of me over and over?

The house of regret has many rooms.

The title, I Regret Everything, makes this sound like a much different book. Yes, it is about regret. Jeremy, a successful lawyer whose true love is poetry, lives a life of quiet desperation despite his material wealth. Spaulding, a 19-year-old girl who happens to be Jeremy's boss's daughter, has spent periods in various institutions after attempting suicide in various ways. There are deadly diseases, shattered dreams, and some soul searching. But overall, I Regret Everything is still a pretty light read.

That's not a bad thing--it's the sort of book you can read in bits and pieces that still gives something to think about when you're finished. The writing is good, sometimes very good, and Greenland does a fine job at switching up the voices between the two first-person narrators. Even the plot itself is satisfyingly intricate, not necessarily a given in what is basically a slightly weepy romance, and the ending, in spite of heavy themes and a surprisingly dark twist, doesn't devolve into treacle.

If I sound a little reserved in spite of this praise, it's because I Regret Everything was good but felt like it could have been better in some way. There are points where Spaulding feels like a bit of wish fulfillment--she's sort of crazy but can be saved/she can save Jeremy--and the sometimes dour events sit a little uncomfrtably with some of the book's more humorous moments.

Still, there are small complaints in the big picture. I Regret Everything is funny, sometimes moving, and doesn't commit any awful literary sins during its highwire act. If this sounds like your sort of thing, check it out.

Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa edited by Michael Molasky and Steve Rabson

[This entire post is full of spoilers...I figure no one else is going to read this book, though, so it's okay?]

Tokusho turned around and lay Ishimine on the ground . . . . Tokusho took out a piece of dried bread from the paper bag Setsu had given him and placed it in Ishimine's hand.  Tokusho then poured some water from the canteen into his palm and let it drip between the rows of white teeth that shone though Ishimine's parted lips.  The moment Tokusho saw the water overflow and drip down Ishimine's cheek, he could no longer restrain himself.  He put the canteen to his own mouth and gorged himself.  When he caught his breath, the canteen was empty.  The droplets of water spread through his entire body, creating a searing pain as if they were tiny shards of glass.  Tokusho fell to his knees and stared at Ishimine, who lay on the ground where he was slowly absorbed by the shadows and muddy water.  He looked too heavy to carry.  No voices could be heard in the shelter.  Tokusho set down the empty canteen next to Ishimine.  "Forgive me," he said.

--Droplets by Medoruma Shun

Droplets, my favorite story in this collection, starts with a Kafkaesque premise: Ushi, Tokusho's wife, wakes one morning to find that Tokusho's leg has transformed into a giant gourd.  This gourd, in turn, is dripping a water-like liquid.  Tokusho is as though paralyzed, he doesn't move, cannot speak, and is unresponsive to Ushi.  Tokusho's leg becomes a point of interest in the village because no one can figure out what happened to it (Ushi, a poor farmer, refuses to send Tokusho to a hospital because she believes hospitals are where people go to die).

This is an example of the
gourd in question.

While Ushi cares for Tokusho's leg and their farm, Tokusho starts receiving visitor's at night.  They are dead soldiers, with visible (and fatal) wounds, who come to suck on his leg, where the water is coming out.  He starts to recognize some of the people as people who died during the Battle of Okinawa.  This motivates him to start reflecting on painful memories---particularly of his own acts during the battle.

Meanwhile, in the non-mystical world, Tokusho's brother drops in and Ushi agrees to pay him to take care of Tokusho.  Tokusho's brother is something of a drifter and con-man.  He notices that the garden where Ushi poors the leg-water out is lush with growth.  So...he tries to drink some of the leg water.  He is instantly invigorated (and aroused for the first time in years---he's an alcoholic).  He puts some of the liquid onto his bald head and hair immediately starts sprouting.  He decides to start selling the liquid.

Tokusho's reflections take him back to one of the nights during the Battle of Okinawa, quoted above, when he left his friend Ishimine behind.  They and a large number of others were in a make-shift cave hospital as the U.S. bombed the island.  The cave was being evacuated because they expected it to be bombed.  While Ishimine and Tokusho are out gathering water and helping to move wounded soldiers, shrapnel from a bomb cuts open Ishimine's stomach and his intestines fall out.  Tokusho immediately bandages them and carries Ishimine inside.  At this point, most of the hospital has been evacuated and it's just the two of them.  A mutual friend tells them to hurry up and leaves Tokusho with bread and a canteen...for both of them.  Tokusho has a choice.  He can share the water and bread and then try to carry Ishimine to the new hospital.  Or he can leave Ishimine behind.

He chooses the latter.

In the years the follow, he becomes a popular speaker about the war and people consider him a hero.  Of course, he feels otherwise.

More happens, but I'll leave the ending for the people who feel motivated to read the story.

I'm not quite sure what the gourd-leg is supposed to symbolize.  Regardless of what it is supposed to symbolize, it forces Tokusho to confront the reality of his past and his actions during the war. Tokusho abandoned Ishimine, and now feels guilt both for that action and for the accolades he received after.  In the same way he has fed off his experiences during the war, the soldiers he failed to help now feed off him.

This was, by quite a bit, the best story in the collection.  With that said, the other stories (and poems) in the collection were quite good too.  I would recommend this book to anyone...but I acknowledge that, for most people, there's no reason to be interested in the Modern Literature of a Minority in Another Country (which is to say...this is a very specific category...).  The stories confront a number of different issues: life after war, being a minority, cultural identity while being "colonized," cultural identity after being "reverted" to the country that controlled you before you were colonized...which is itself a country that more or less took you over.

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

The window invited her to see--her window.  She got out of bed (her filmy dress like a sleeping moth clung to the chair) and the whole leafy structure of the outside seemed agitated and rustled, the shadows darted like birds.  The gigantic sky radiant as water ran over the earth and around it.  The old moon in the west and the planets of morning streamed their light.  She wondered if she would ever know... the constellations... the birds all slept.  (The mourning dove that cried the latest must sleep the deepest of all.)  What could she know now?  But she could see a single leaf on a willow tree as far as the bayou's edge, such clarity as there was in everything.  The cotton like the rolling breath of sleep overflowed the fields.  Out into it, if she were married, she would walk now--her bare foot touch at the night's hour, firmly too, a woman's serious foot.  She would walk on the clear night--angels, though, did that--tread it with love not this lonely, never this lonely, for under her foot would offer the roof, the chimney, the window of her husband, the solid house.  Draw me in, she whispered, draw me in--open the window like my window, I am still only looking in where it is dark.

Delta Wedding opens with a train called the Yellow Dog moving slowly through the Mississippi countryside, traveling from the city of Jackson through rolling green hills into the flat, wide cotton fields of the region called the Delta.  On the train is young Laura McRaven, whose mother has just died, going to visit her cousins the Fairchilds, who are busy preparing for their daughter Dabney's wedding.  The Fairchilds are many and wealthy, and their roots go back to the plantation days of the antebellum south--so tightly connected to the Delta are they that the nearest town to their land is actually called Fairchilds.

But Welty also depicts them as generous and kind, though self-possessed, a small universe unto themselves.  She packs the narrative with numerous uncles, aunts, daughters, sons, cousins, as well as black servants and preachers and various hangers-on, most of them Fairchilds, passing from one point of view to another among nearly thirty distinctly drawn characters.  It is difficult, we see, for outsiders, like Laura McRaven, or George Fairchild's wife Robbie, or Troy, the overseer, who is to marry Dabney, to enter into the hermetic Fairchild world.  Like many real tightly-knit families, they share common understandings and a common language that Welty depicts as both beautiful and vital, but also isolating.  Their frenetic banter is intoxicating, and bewildering, and extremely real--Welty does as good a job with "world-building" with this patrician Southern family as any science fiction author.

Laura is particularly enamored of her Uncle George, who is sensitive and taciturn:

Perhaps the heart always was made of different stuff and had a different life from the rest of the body.  She saw Uncle George lying on his arm on a picnic, smiling to hear what someone was telling, with a butterfly going across his gaze, a way to make her imagine all at once that in that moment he erected an entire, complicated house for the butterfly inside his sleepy body.  It was very strange, but she had felt it.  She had then known something he knew all along, it seemed then--that when you felt, touched, heard, looked at things in the world, and found their fragrances, they themselves made a sort of house within you, which filled with life to hold them, filled with knowledge all by itself, and all else, the other ways to know, seemed calculation and tyranny.

I love the subtlety of this moment.  It is easy to forget that Laura is only imagining her uncle's perspective in this moment, and that he, as he remains throughout the novel, is essentially a mystery--we never have access to his perspective in the way we do for Laura, or Dabney, or several of the other uncles and aunts.  But the truth she intuits from watching her uncle is profound, and so enraptured is she by what she imagines he is seeing that she fails to recognize that she is enacting this very "way of knowing," that she has "made a sort of house" in her own heart for George to inhabit.

Welty is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors.  Her prose is astonishing, and manages to capture the small mysteries and miracles of domestic life like no other author I have ever read.  The depth and complexity of feeling in Delta Wedding is nearly overwhelming; it's no wonder that with a later novel like The Optimist's Daughter, she chose to narrow the focus to something still profound but, in a way, more manageable.  Delta Wedding was Welty's first novel, and while it seems to lack some of the humor that she developed in The Optimist's Daughter and The Ponder Heart, the strength of its voice is the work of a mature author.  I'm going to Mississippi for the first time in a couple weeks, and I'm excited to bring another of her books with me.

Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu

'I don't understand metaphysics, my dear, nor witchcraft.  I sometimes believe in the supernatural, and sometimes I don't.  Silas Ruthyn is himself alone, and I can't define him, because I don't understand him.  Perhaps other souls than human are sometimes born into the world, and clothed in flesh.  It is not only about that dreadful occurrence, but nearly always throughout his life; early and late he has puzzled me.  I have tried in vain to understand him.  But at one time of his life I am sure he was awfully wicked--eccentric indeed in his wickedness--gay, frivolous, secret, and dangerous.  At one time I think he could have made poor Austin do almost anything; but his influence vanished with his marriage, never to return again.  No; I don't understand him.  He always bewildered me, like a shifting face, sometimes smiling, but always sinister, in an unpleasant dream.'

The title character of Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas doesn't appear in the novel for more than 200 pages, but he's always a presence, casting a shadow.  The protagonist, plucky young Maud Ruthyn, obsesses over his portrait--she's never met her uncle--and imagines him as mysterious and debonair.  Silas' brother, Austin, confesses to his daughter Maud that Silas was once rumored to have killed a man to whom he owed money: the man was found dead in a room that locked from the inside, but suspicions against Silas have turned him into a sickly recluse.  When Austin dies in the middle of the novel, his will stipulates that Maud will live under Silas' care, hoping that Silas' kindness toward Maud will soften his public image (ignoring, for some reason, the fact that Silas ignores his own two children so severely that they've grown up with the cockney accents of their servants.)

What Austin fails to realize in his will is that Silas stands to inherit all of the family's fortune if only he can get rid of Maud somehow, and putting her in Silas' hands might be too much of a temptation for his possibly murderous brother to withstand.  The question of Silas' true nature hangs over the second half of the novel--is Maud in danger, or not?  (Is Uncle Silas a bait-and-switch horror book, like Northanger Abbey or Scooby Doo?  Or is something real at stake?)

Uncle Silas is the kind of book that builds its suspense on bumps in the night and sinister conversations half overheard.  It's the kind of book in which adults only ever partially explain things to Maud, saying things like "I will tell you more in due time, Maud," but without any good reason beyond keeping the reader guessing.  But it's awfully good at that, and manages to be quite a page-turner despite being artificial and silly in the way a lot of Gothic fiction tends to be.  Among the book's better creeps is Maud's malevolent governess Madame de la Rougierre, a shriveled old crone in a wig who speaks with a comically bad French accent and whose subtle malignity toward Maud is never fully explained.  Uncle Silas has a lot of reverence for the British manor system which provides Austin's riches, and has no reserve when it comes to associating Madame's foreignness with evil.

But probably the best thing about the book is Maud, who is both headstrong and regular-strong, and provides a compelling voice unlike the kind of damsel-in-distress that you might find in Radcliffe.  Those looking for well-developed heroines in spooky stories would do a lot better to read Uncle Silas than your Twilights and your Hunger Games and whatnot.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell

Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose. 

I really want to like Karen Russell's work, and it is even a little difficult for me to figure out why exactly it is that I don't, but I don't. After a very disappointing experience with Swamplandia!, I was still committed to reading at least one of her short story collections. One of my feelings about Swamplandia! was that maybe Russell wasn't yet ready to take on a novel, and her writing was lovely, so with those two things in mind her short stories could be absolutely perfect for me. Unfortunately, no. 

I am in the absolute minority (I read review after review after review to try to figure out why, for once, I am at odds with the literary world), so I can't say that I would un-recommend them based on my own experiences, but these stories are just not for me. I like dark and twisty (see Gone Girl, Dark Places, Sharp Objects), I like magical realism (see The Color Master, Wind Up Bird Chronicle, 100 Years of Solitude), and I like clever (see every other literary darling), but...the way she puts it together doesn't work. 

I categorized my Aimee Bender short story collection into: Heartbreakingly Good, Incredibly Good, and Just Good. For Russell I will do: Good, Meh, Why? 

• Good

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Reeling for the Empire

The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis

• Meh

The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979

Proving Up

The New Veterans

• Why?

The Barn at the End of Our Term
Dougbert Shakleton's Rules for Antarctic Tailgating


The Goods have solid writing and ideas and their strength is taking extra-ordinary situations and giving the characters in these completely human moments that are absolutely ordinary. 

The Vampires in the Lemon Grove are having marriage problems and their relationship issues manifest in a conversation that is superficially about one thing but actually about another. 

"The lemons aren't working, Clyde." But the lemons have never worked. At best, they give us eight hours of peace. We aren't talking about the lemons. "

The Reelers for the empire are girls who have been turned into silkworms whose silk is helping Japan become a silk exporter, but the girls all have to live together in a single room and they are driving each other crazy.

"Courage, sisters!" sings Hoshi. Hoshi is our haiku laureate. She came from a school for young noblewomen and pretends to have read every book in the world. We all agree that she is generally insufferable. 

When the Graveless Doll of Eric Matis appears - looking like a scarecrow - our juvenile delinquent protagonist takes a moment to realize how lame his imagination is.

All day and all night, the scarecrow had to stand over his quilty hills of wheat and flax, of rye and barley and three other brown grains that I could never remember (my picture of scarecrow country was ripped directly from the 7-Grain Quilty Hills Muffins bag - at school I cheated shamelessly, and I guess my imagination must have been a plagiarist, too, copying its homework). 

I did enjoy these three stories, but all three of them share a 'huh' moment when I turned the last page and realized the story was over. It's not that I need a clear resolution where all questions are answered, but endings should not be a surprise. That is what stops these really interesting premises with lovely ideas and prose from being truly excellent. 

The Meh stories are different levels of creepy - maybe some of them even belong rightly in the Horror category, but the premises aren't as interesting and the endings are still unsatisfying. 

The Why? stories are ones that really emphasize my overall problem with the book: 

• it reads like a collection of writing exercises. 

Writing Exercise: Write a story from the perspective of a non-human character. 

Result: The Barn at the End of Our Term, where former presidents are reincarnated as self-aware horses

Writing Exercise: Take an ordinary event and treat it like a major sporting event. 
Result: Dougbert Shakleton's Rules for Antartic Tailgating, where the super stoked fans for Team Krill are beaten by the super stoked fans of Team Whale every year.

I understand that many people really love Karen Russell, and I do see potential, but I don't think that I will be picking up any more of her books.