Jesus Is Indian and Other Stories by Agnes Sam

Hama laugh. Hama holds her head up high and makes it wobble about. She say, “What this sister know? Don’t Jesus wear a doti like Ghandi? Don’t Hama talk to Jesus in our language? Don’t Jesus answer all of Hama’s prayers? You so clever, what you think that means? You electric light children and you don’t know? Jesus is Indian. You go to school and tell that sister.”

Agnes Sam, the author of this collection, was a member of an Indian community in South Africa during apartheid. This situation, which was new to me, was apparently not so uncommon--there were even schools in South Africa founded specifically to train Indians, who were largely Hindu, into good Christian boys and girls. And, of course, this meant more than (sometimes forced) religious conversion. It also entailed becoming as European as possible in dress, speech, and activity, and facing social consequences otherwise.

That’s the setting of the title story, which is told from the perspective of a young Indian girl as she is repeatedly chastened at the Catholic school for writing the wrong things (she uses the term Hama, instead of the colonial Mother) and calling herself by her Indian rather than her Christian name. Between incidents at school, she recounts trials of her family as they try tointegrate into Afrikaaner society, but inevitably fail due to their low economic station and, it must be said, Hama’s desire NOT to be colonized, as demonstrated in the excerpt that begins this review. It is evident that Jesus is Indian--in fact that Jesus is all of the oppressed; less clear whether the oppressors will ever recognize him.

While many of the stories have little to no religious content, two of the best--the first two--do. The opener, High Heels, follows a schoolgirl, again at a Catholic school, as she tries to learn what’s behind a mysterious door in order to win a bet with a friend and obtain the titular high heels. It’s a story that balances the fear of colonization with the desire to be accepted and safe, but the ending, where it is discovered that the room is--SPOILER--a Hindu prayer room, upsets the balance and problematizes the high heels, and the desires that drove the girl to acquire them.

The other standout for me is about a woman at a prison camp--notably many of the protagonists in this collection aren’t identified as female and I got caught more than once defaulting incorrectly to a male. She has no communication with the outside world besides heavily censored letters and occasional visits, where speaking is not allowed, from her husband. She writes to a friend about her son, now a teenager who she hasn’t seen in a decade, and about her husband’s strange behavior, which she takes to mean he’s seeing someone else. The burden of not knowing is too much, and the woman breaks solidarity with the other prisoners--their only defense in their weakened position--which leads to a truly horrific outcome. But whether it could have been prevented is questionable.

The last third of the book lost me a little. I had a hard time understanding the point of Jellymouse or Maths, and the final story is barely a narrative at all; it is, rather, a tragic summation of the events that brought low-caste Indians to Africa in the first place. A mixed bag, but a fascinating look into a culture and time I didn’t know existed

Three Graphic Novels

I'm not much of a graphic novel person. I had a brief comic book phase as a child, but it was short-lived. I liked to read Calvin and Hobbes. Most of the graphic novels I've read have been ones given to me by friends, who were sure I would like them, and some of the time they were right. Tomorrow I'm taking a seminar with Roz Chast, the erstwhile cartoonist of the New Yorker, whose cartoons manage to be funny and light-hearted, I think, without being airless, or like so many of the other cartoons in that magazine, insufferable. It's strange to think of what Chast does as being similar to a graphic novelist, even though the basics--picture and text, text and picture--are there. They sent me three graphic novels to read in advance of the seminar: Derf Backderf's My Friend Dahmer, Keiler Roberts' My Begging Chart, and Adrian Tomine's Killing and Dying.

Brent reviewed My Friend Dahmer here. As he noted, there's a limitation to the insight Backderf can provide about Jeffrey Dahmer, who was less Backderf's high school friend than a kind of mascot. But it's not as if Backderf's book can be reduced to an odd party anecdote--no really, I went to high school with Jeff Dahmer--and in fact, it's Dahmer's strange relationship with Backderf and his friends that makes the memoir interesting. I recognized something regrettable in it myself, remembering the way we once "adopted" kids with strange mannerisms or tics, without really befriending them. I remember well the way these kids performed their tics, as Dahmer performs a cruel imitation of his own unwell mother, but then, of course they did. The nature of the relationship prevents Backderf from having any real insight into Dahmer, but the stark black-and-white artwork, cribbing on the outlandish styles of R. Crumb and other underground artists, fills in some of the gaps. Over and over again, Dahmer is alone on the page, isolated from the other figures--or placed at the head of some forking path that represents, as Backderf describes it, the moment at which he becomes irredeemable.

My Begging Chart is a memoir, too, of a kind: a series of vignettes of Roberts' life as a mother and wife, who happens (as I understand it) to live with MS. Most of these vignettes have a formless quality to them that emphasizes their essential mundanity; they capture the everyday fuck-ups of a not-perfect mother, but also moments of small joy shared with Roberts' daughter. Who has some Park Slope name like Xivia or Zenon. I can't quite remember right now and the book is in the other room. The art has hasty, unshaded sketchbook quality that underlines the quotidian nature of the vignettes. It may actually be that the book is a kind of sketchbook, recording moments as they happen. But its lightness, I thought, made it the most forgettable of the three.

The best by far, I thought, was Adrian Tomine's Killing and Dying, a grim, funny collection of short stories. Tomine's style seemed, to my not-very-expert eye, cribbed from the Sunday funnies. See how each beat in the opening story, "Hortisculpture," is opened with a title banner like a newspaper comic. "Hortisculpture" tells the story of an earnest gardener who invents a new art form, a kind of concrete tube in which plants grow. Though the hortisculptures seem at least half-inspired, a lack of interest (who wants to buy a living sculpture you have to pay the gardener to maintain?) breeds a bitterness and resentment in him that threatens to destroy his family. "Am I talented?" he begs his wife, who responds that she has no idea--but she can't keep talking about it anymore. It's a touching, bittersweet story about the ways in which imaginative power is limited, and grows stale.

The best of the stories in Tomine's collection is the title piece, about a family--with a similarly rotund, balding father figure, drawn up in a slightly less cartoonish style than the one in "Hortisculpture"--whose daughter decides she wants to get into stand-up comedy. The limits on the daughter are even more profound than the hortisculpturist: she really isn't funny. Mom and Dad bicker about whether to support her by paying for classes, or being honest with her. And all the while Mom is dying of cancer, something that Tomine never mentions but makes clear by the character's wasting appearance--and then sudden absence from the frame. (One all-white panel says everything.) Dad, bereft and at sea, sneaks into an open mic night his daughter has refused to let him attend, and listens as she bombs horribly. 

How can you follow your dreams when you have no talent? And how do your protect your kids from the terror of being ordinary?These questions are at the heart of "Killing and Dying," which made me think there's something I'm missing out on by not reading graphic novels. And you know, they only take a couple of hours to get through. Who knows how high my yearly total could climb...

The FIintstones by Mark Russell

“We set fire to their trees. When the smoke cleared, there were dead Tree People everywhere! We participated in a genocide, Barney.”

 

Flintstones, meet the Flintstones. They’re the modern stone age family. From the town of Bedrock, they’re a page right out of history.

Sometimes I like to sit and think about the failed gritty reboots of times past. Power Rangers, Snow White, Superman, The Wonder Twins. In all forms of media there’s an inescapable pull that calls to young, hacky writers and says, “What if Big Bird, but a serial killer?” And those ideas generally yield about as much fruit as you might expect. Six episodes, two issues, one movie, largely forgotten except by the memelords and die-hards. And yet, the gritty reboot never really dies--right now we’re on the verge of Velma, a reimagining of Scooby Doo where Fred has a tiny penis and a dark secret. So maybe this was a good time to read Mark Russell’s Flintstones, and see how, once in a while, turning something light and fantastical into something a bit more grounded and world-weary can actually work, at least for a while.

Everyone knows the Flintstones, and everyone will find plenty here that they recognize. All the major characters show up--Fred, Wilma, Barney, Betty, Pebbles, Bam Bam--and quite a few of the secondary characters make an appearance too--Mr Rubble, The Great Gazoo, Dino. There’s even a running subplot about the secret lives of the prehistoric animals used as appliances. If you’ve ever wondered how that elephant feels about being a vacuum cleaner, or if the armadillo likes being a bowling ball, well, you can finally learn.

The storyline, which is lightly serialized but largely episodic, follows the town of Bedrock from its pre-bedrock era through its small city phase. And these progression points are largely what drives the individual storylines. We see the citizens move from a hunter-gatherer society to a consumerist one (malaise sets in as Fred collects more “crap” than he can ever use), from a powerless tribe to a pseudo-imperialist city-state, from animists to monotheists, from collectivists to capitalists. And Russell is none too optimistic about the progression.

If you’ve ever heard of this book at all, it’s likely you know it from the panel where Fred tells Barney they participated in a genocide, and it’s true. Driven by a warlike chief, the Bedrock soldiers are propagandized to fear the tree people, until even the kind-hearted Fred is taken in. We see the war in snapshots until the final battle, a Desden-like massacre, where Fred realizes he’s been lied to after he finds a doll on the “battlefield”. “What kind of army brings children to a war?” he asks Barney. Bam Bam, by the way, is adopted in this one--his parents were killed in the massacre and Barney finds him hidden in a tree. Barney doesn’t get a lot of development, though we do learn that he has slow sperm, but Fred and Wilma emerge as fully-formed characters, as does Pebbles who may be the world’s first atheist.

Religion is, in fact, a major theme of this retelling. One of the primary time markers is who the cave people are worshiping at any given time. They start with Morp, an emissary of animism, move on to worshiping an elephant and finally, to worshiping an invisible god named Gerald, renamed G-d on the final page because Gerald is too long for the church sign. While none of the social commentary is likely to sway anyone too much, it’s fascinating to see how Russell is able to work in trenchant (and dark) issues into the Flintstones’ universe without completely breaking it.

In fact, the most striking thing about Russell’s reboot is how funny it is. We meet Adam and Steve coming out of the local gay bar, Homo Erectus. Dino is recast as a narc, hated by the appliance animals. Fred gets caught up in an MLM. The town goes into panic mode when their Dr Sargon (who is visually, if not characteristically, modeled on Carl Sagan) miscalculates an asteroid’s path because mating moths keep messing up his abacus calculations, and ends up taped to a cave wall. The local pastor fights for monogamy (which the villagers protest with signs reading “God Hates Dads”) until Adam and Steve want to marry, after which he isn’t so sure (“I guess I have a lot to think about... but I probably won’t”) And there are any number of anachronistic puns along the way.

Finally, this reboot works because it’s 12 issues long. I could’ve read another 12 perhaps, but maybe the biggest lessons are that people shouldn’t handle reboots unless they have real affection for the original material, and that, by nature, these things can only be good for so long. They tend to lean heavily on familiarity with the source material, and there are only so many inversions one can take before the eye-rolling starts. But Russell nails it here. 

Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Know this: After two years, the best parts of me are still frozen in the lake--my limbic system; its best friend, the prefrontal cortex; and the hollow, pumping organ in which I keep benevolence. The only one that regularly comes to visit it Akiwenzii. In the winter they park their truck on the ice, drill a hole with the auger in the ice and fish until the cold makes their bones crack. As soon as the ice is off the lake, Akiwenzii is back in their boat, with a torch and a sort of pitchfork for spearing pickerel. In the dead of summer, Akiwenzii sneaks back before first light in their canoe, before the cottagers and their jet skis are out. In the fall, they sprinkle tobacco around me and sing.

A figure named Mashkawaji lies frozen in a lake. Immobile, waiting, they watch their friends go about their lives. Each of these friends is also a representation of a part of Mashkawaji: the old man Akiwenzii is their will, the old woman Mindimooyenh their conscience, the maple tree Ninaatig their lungs, giant Sabe their marrow, Adik the caribou their nerves, and a pair of humans named Asin and Lucy, their brain. All these figures, who live in more-or-less contemporary urban Toronto, are described as "they," as Mashkawaji is, even when their gender is clear. They are all, in many ways, fluid, and the borders between their identities are porous. They are individuals, but also part of a whole, and Mashkawaji, perhaps, represents a way of being that binds them, one that is frozen, but waiting for a future in which the wholeness can be truly whole again.

Noopiming is what one might call "experimental" fiction. That describes the characters and their relationships--don't think too hard, for instance, about how a maple tree climbs aboard a boat, or goes shopping. But it also extends to the printed page: many of the pages of Noopiming are a single sentence long, oriented at the top of a long, blank page. This captures Mashkawaji's plodding, patient perspective, but I imagine it must have spurred some cost-benefit analysis at the University of Minnesota Press. The reader is forced to slow down, to take each idea as it comes, and not get caught up, perhaps, in the bustling urban life that surrounds the characters. It sits sometimes in pleasant tension with the novel's contemporary language, and sometimes exposes it as clunky or silly. And sometimes one turns the page to find pure cringe, as when we learn the old woman Mindimooyenh as her "notifications turned on for Palestine." OK.

Noopiming didn't quite work for me. I liked best the character Asin, who spends his days at Tommy Thompson Park on Toronto's Lake Erie Shore, birding. Asin is not interested in expanding his life list (to each their own), but they must rely on eBird like the other birders; they, unlike Akiwenzii and Mindimooyenh, have lost the natural connection to the cycles of the earth that would tell them when the birds will arrive and when they will depart. As the book expands, it takes on additional consciouses, like that of Esiban the porcupine. I liked the long(-ish) discussion by a group of Canada Geese planning for their migration. Though it's not said, we are perhaps asked to imagine that these, too, are manifestations of Mashkawaji, parts of the frozen whole.

My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf

Ya know what? Dahmer is probably a serial killer by now!

Serial killers are having a moment. Of course, in a sense, they’re always having a moment--American culture has been fascinated with them since they Ted Bundy lured the first woman into his murder van--but they’re extra hot right now, thanks in no small part to Monster, Netflix’s dramatization of the life and deaths of Jeffrey Dahmer, the most famous cannibal in American history.

I haven’t watched Monster (and won’t be, fwiw) but I’ve seen enough clips to know that My Friend Dahmer takes a much different, more distant approach. John “Derf” Backderf went to middle and high school with Dahmer, and witnessed, at only a slight remove, his progression from slightly weird kid to, well, extremely weird kid. The book ends right after Dahmer’s first murder, but Backderf doesn’t recount the murder itself. In fact, aside from a very unfortunate fish, Backderf eschews illustration of any of Dahmer’s violence, focusing instead on Dahmer’s family life, most of which, we learn in the extensive endnotes, he knew of only secondhand, and a handful of notable interaction between Derf and his circle of friends.

The art calls to mind the comix movement of the 60s and 70s, and the influence of Crumb is especially evident; but where Crumb’s art is anarchic and wobbly, Backderf’s is more static, a series of thick-lined snapshots. It’s very effective and genuinely unsettling, especially when depicting something that’s badly “off”.

I learned a lot about Dahmer I didn’t know. His father and mother fought constantly and his mother had seizures and episodes that caused her to shake and produce only incoherent sounds, shakes and sounds Dahmer incorporated into the strange public demonstrations that served as his only real claim to fame in high school. He didn’t really kill animals, by his own account, except for one dog. And his murders and their macabre aftermath were driven by his (sometimes erotic, sometimes seemingly not) desire for “complete control”.

That said, as Chris mentioned when we discussed the book, I’m not sure how much insight there really is into Dahmer himself in this book, possibly even by design. Of more note is the way the interactions between Derf and his friends play out, and what it says about the disturbing and othering ways we tend to treat “freaks”. Derf and his friends spearheaded a group call the Dahmer Fan Club, which mostly consisted of doodling pictures of Dahmer all around the school, trying to sneak him into high school photos where he didn’t belong, and, later, encouraging him to do his spastic character in public so they could laugh at the reactions. The overall impression one gets is that Dahmer was a genuine weirdo, but the group of “friends” treated him as little more than a mascot or sideshow. My Friend Dahmer is, in fact, a very generous title--there’s not much here to suggest that anyone saw Dahmer as a friend. They all saw his drinking, his antisocial behavior, and his offensive odor growing worse but, at least as recorded here, no one so much as asked, “How’s it going, Jeff?” Derf does approach the question a few times, but it seems to me that while he recognizes that no one reached out, he never mentions the ways that he and his friend group exploited Dahmer’s tics for their own amusement.

Does My Friend Dahmer make a cannibal into a sympathetic character? No, it does not, and it’s hard to imagine a story told like this attracting the same sort of the fanfic “I can fix him” crowd that I saw all over Twitter when Monster premiered. Like most narratives about serial killers, this one offers no answers, because really, what could those answers possibly be?

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

Star- and moonlight hit the water. Down by the river, I sat on a rock, wishing I'd eaten and grabbed those pills and had a cigarette. Wishing I'd never heard of Antiques Roadshow. Maybe even wishing I was a winooch and didn't live on a reservation whose history was in a little museum and could be stolen for a buck. Didn't make any sense that parts of us were worth so much and at the same time we were worth so little. "You're nothing."

David is young when his mother, a Penobscot woman, leaves his white father and comes north to Maine to return to the reservation. It's disorienting for young David, of course, and not least because his mother has come to live with an older Native named Frick who seems to have a low opinion of David's connection to his indigenous background. David's sister, Paige, appears as well, mysteriously pregnant, and then mysteriously un-pregnant. As he grows up, David's life on the reservation becomes a checkered one. As a teenager, he develops an addiction to pills, and then methadone. As the lives of his mother, of Frick, and of Paige unravel in devastating ways, he finds himself--as he was as a child--challenged to provide meaningful support, or stability amid the chaos.

There is a familiar kind of story I have seen in many books by Native writers, a story in which lost Natives, mixed up with substance abuse or crime or simple despair and mental instability, find safety and wholeness by returning to their land. That's the story, more or less, of James Welch's Winter in the Blood, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn. Contemporary Native writers have been interrogating that story, I think, in interesting ways: Tommy Orange, for instance, in his novel about Natives living in urban Oakland, remarks that "the land is everywhere or it's nowhere." I'm interested in how Night of the Living Rez presents this story: David's "return" to the Penobscot reservation brings him closer to his sister and his grandmother, and to Penobscot life, but it's troubled in many ways that subverts the straightforward positivity of such narratives.

For instance, there's Frick: when David first arrives, Frick chastises him for his inability to shoot and hunt, suggesting this makes him deficient as a Native. It's only later (or I missed it the first time) that we learn that Frick is a western Native, not Penobscot at all--a small but clever dig, I think, at the way certain ideas about Native people dominate American cultural media. And yet, the reservation is always being mined for media. One subplot involves David's friend Ferris breaking into the Penobscot museum to steal a "root club," having seen one go for big bucks on Antique Roadshow. In the title story, a film crew trying to produce a documentary on the reservation ends up filming one of the most harrowing and traumatic experiences of David's life. These details provide a vision of Native life that is offered up as a consumable commodity, even as Natives like David remain, or feel they remain, estranged from it. Running from the cops, David ends up hiding out in a sweat lodge--a grimly ironic symbol, until he returns later to actually go through with the sweat lodge ceremony: "[A]nd right then my body sweated all that was left in it, which really wasn't very much at all." So there is a positive vision here; I don't mean to suggest there isn't--only that one of the things Night of the Living Rez suggests so eloquently is that sometimes, coming home isn't enough.

Not every story in Night of the Living Rez landed for me, but one thing I did really enjoy about it was its structure: David is the narrator of each story, but the stories are out of order chronologically; the book skips from child David to the teenage "Dee" to the adult, looking back. Partly this structure helps the book to subvert familiar expectations about problem and resolution, sickness and recovery, alienation and integration. Like my old friend Infinite Jest, it struck me how much Night of the Living Rez is a story about addiction--David waking up in a grain silo, David stealing money from his grandmother to pay for Klonopin, David adrift at the methadone clinic--and the structure reveals something about the halting and peripatetic nature of recovery. The title story, maybe the best story, reveals that it's not just David who struggle with substance abuse: Paige and Frick, too, stumble around like the zombies suggested by the title, and the abuse facilitates horrible acts that rupture lives. But although there are no simple solutions, life goes on--the "Living Rez."

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

Have our parents ever looked at us and felt slightly... disappointed? Such high hopes, so much possibility, to fall short. And though my parents took us far away from the site of their grief, certain shadows stretched far, casting a gray stillness over our childhood, hinting at a darkness we could not understand but could always feel.

We open in a hospital. Thi, the protagonist and author, is having her first child. Her mother, Má, has traveled across the country to be there for her first grandchild’s birth but can’t bear to stay in the room. Her father, Bố, is nowhere to be found, nor are any of her three siblings. A doctor is assisting with the birth, but she’s brusque and implacable. Her husband, Travis, is nearby, but Thi is--or at least feels--alone.

The Best We Can Do is, at heart, is about family--the way our parents, grandparents, and siblings shape us, either by their direct action or, more often and persistently, by the ways their actions shaped others. But it’s more than that too. It’s beautiful to look at, with clean but energetic linework counterbalanced by earthy pastel watercolors varying in hue and presence as the emotional beats of the story ebb and flow.

Although the story always comes back around to Thi, a first generation Vietnamese immigrant who came over on a boat, as a child, during the Vietnam War, the lion’s share of the narrative is given to her parents, Bố and Má, tracing their lives through childhood, college, marriage, exile, and eventually separation. Má, bookish and ambitious, comes from wealth; Bố, street smart and booksmart, grows up beneath a piece of cardboard nailed between two buildings. They meet at college as the war is beginning. Má, in spite of earlier proclamations that she wouldn’t marry, does so anyway, less for love than because she assumes she doesn’t have long to live with the county crumbling around her. Bố, on the other hand, falls for Má right away, but finds himself mostly unable to connect with Má or, for that matter, anyone else. At the beginning of the story, they’re separated and what happened in the intervening years becomes the story, as Thi slowly draws their story out so it can be told.

The middle section, where Má and Bố watch as their lives and their country are ripped apart by the Vietcong and, it must be said, the Americans who treat them scarcely better and tell the story of the war in ways that incense Bố. In one of the most memorable scenes, Bố defends the general from the famous photo, you know the one, taken just before a VC gets his brains blown out. We also learn that the general, after the war, came to the US and spent his last years working at a pizza parlor. And these sorts of details, the straggling conclusions of lives ripped to shreds by circumstances beyond their control, are the controlling throughline.

Yes, Thi builds a good life, but she’s haunted by the sense of otherness she feels, by the ugliness she sees in the American landscape, and, more ominously, the specter of becoming like her parents, of breaking her beautiful baby the way she was broken. The other side of the coin, though, is water--the water coming through Bố’s childhood roof, the lake where Thi learns to swim, the river that carried the “boat people”, the rain when they arrive on the peaceful beach--with its cool implacability, bringing (and taking) with it both the good and the bad. When Má’s third child, Queyen (River in Vietnamese), dies soon after being born, it feels like a repudiation of water as cleansing, lifegiving. But on the final page, the image is redeemed (or maybe just shaded) with a full page spread of Thi’s child, at ten, swimming joyously, unstoppable, as Thi narrates:

What has worried me since having my own child was whether I would pass along some gene for sorrow or unintentionally inflict damage I could never undo. But when I look at my son, I don’t see war and loss or even Travis and me. I see a new life, bound with mine quite by coincidence, and I think maybe he can be free.

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Nanapush looked into his mind and saw a building. He even saw how to make the building. It was the round house. The old female buffalo kept talking.

Your people were brought together by us buffalo once. You knew how to hunt and use us. Your clans gave you laws. You had many rules by which you operated. Rules that respected us and forced you to work together. Now we are gone, but as you have once sheltered in my body, so now you understand. The round house will be my body, the poles my ribs, the fire my heart. It will be the body of your mother and it must be respected the same way. As the mother is intent on her baby's life, so your people should think of their children.

When Joe Coutts his thirteen, his mother is attacked and raped. In the aftermath of the crime, she becomes skittish and withdrawn, a ghost of her former self. Joe's father, a tribal judge, sets out to find the perpetrator, scouring over the files of the people who have appeared in his court. Joe is allowed, sometimes, to share in his father's search, but for the most part he must look on from the outside, following his own suspicions, and perhaps even taking justice into his own hands. Though Joe's father tries to conceal it, suspicion soon falls on Linden Lark, a malicious white man who works for North Dakota's governor. There's a who, a what, and a why, but the where is what makes things hairy: Joe's mother was blindfolded, and can't remember where exactly the crime occurred, though she knows it's on the grounds of the round house the Ojibwe use for traditional purposes. These grounds are crossed by ornate lines of ownership--reservation land, federal land, private land--and without knowing the precise spot, no one know whose jurisdiction might be invoked to bring Lark to justice.

The Round House suggests at first it will be a kind of mystery novel, in which the reader is invited to follow along as Joe puts clue to clue. But, despite a false start or two, suspicion falls immediately on Linden, a man Erdrich paints as utterly vicious and amoral. The jurisdiction, instead, is the mystery, and it's an intractable one. The Round House presents a version of a story that plays out time and time again on reservations: when non-Natives commit violent crimes against Natives, tribal jurisdiction is powerless to pursue them, and state and federal lawmakers simply don't care. When Joe decides to punish Linden himself, he cuts through the red tape that protects violent rapists. And if we expect Joe to think better, or to disavow vigilantism in the end, we are sorely disappointed: there's no sense of regret or remorse here, because Joe's solution is the only one by which true justice can be done.

Talking in his sleep, Joe's grandfather tells the story of how Nanapush, the lustful, ancient trickster of many of Erdrich's other novels, built the round house on the instructions of the buffalo. The house is a symbol of the buffalo, whose hide and bones protected Nanapush in a snowstorm, and a symbol also of the mother, inside of whom we grow and who surrounds and protects us. When Linden rapes Joe's mother Geraldine, the violation is also a violation of Ojibwe sovereignty and memory, something that is depicted in The Round House as explicitly maternal. The round house is utterly unlike the land on which it sits: its value and ownership are clear and unambiguous. Perhaps this is why Linden chooses it to be the site of his violence.

There's another angle to Linden's story, which is rather convoluted: at birth, Linden's twin sister was left by his mother to die because of a birth defect. But instead she was adopted by a Native janitor, and enrolled as Ojibwe. Linda's story is an inversion of a more familiar one: Linden is helping the governor adopt a Native baby away from her mother. (It's this that seems to have sparked his ire against Joe's mom, a social worker.) Linden and Linda are part of the novel's interest in doubles, doppelgangers, wendigos, but the story also adds to the sense that The Round House is more relevant than ever. The questions of tribal jurisdiction are reflected in the recent McGirt decision, which asserted tribal jurisdiction over a huge section of Oklahoma. And the two adoptions presage a case currently in front of the Supreme Court that may strike down the Indian Child Welfare Act, meant to prevent the kind of child-snatching that Linden--dark father, evil twin--wants to perpetrate.

The Round House is one of Erdrich's straighter novels. Supernatural elements are few--though I enjoyed Joe's grandmother telling Nanapush's story in his sleep--and there's little of the sense of jubilant excess that you find in many of her other novels. But it stands among the best of her work in its depiction of cruelty and grief. And it isn't just limited to Lark: the moment where Joe himself blackmails his (unrelated) aunt to watch her strip is one of her more disconcerting moments. The aunt, Sonja, accuses him of being another vicious creep, another Linden perhaps, a wendigo who consumes human flesh. And the wendigo can take the form of anyone.

Brent's Top 10 2022

Another year of reading done, another year of reviewing less than 10% of what I read. It was a great year for discovering new authors--over half of my top 10 are people I'd never read before--and new places--I spent a chunk of the year reading and gathering lit from Africa and I'm excited to dive into even more international stories in 2023. Here are some quick stats: 31 books by women, 33 by men, from around 20 different countries, many of which were new to me. 20 POC and a handful of LGBTQ+ authors (room for improvement there). 18 nonfiction, 4 poetry collections, 42 fiction. And as Chris mentioned, the more I read, the more there is to read. So without further ado:

(Many) Honorable Mentions:

Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner

Women only want one thing and it's to trade their soul to Satan for freedom.

The Art of Asking Your Boss For a Raise, Georges Perec

Men only want one thing and it's a raise.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor

Elderly women only want one thing and it's a flaky twenty-something who'll pretend he's their nephew. 

The Silence, Don DeLillo

The modern world only wants one thing and it's silence.

The Doloriad, Missouri Williams

So this is a weird one. I can't say I really enjoyed reading this frankly upsetting post-apocalyptic novel about an incestuous family that's trying to repopulate the world in the most grotesque, squalid way possible but with its dense biblical language, stubborn refusal to perform, and sitcom called Will Someone Get Aquinas In Here, it won me over, kind of.

Before Freedom: When I Just Can Remember, Various, Edited by Belinda Hurmence

This collection of oral freed-slave narratives was as moving as you'd hope, but in addition, the voices themselves were so incredibly rich. Every writer could learn something from the kind of spontaneous poetry on display here.

Too Loud a Solitude, Borumil Hrabal

Book burners only want one thing, and it's to be pulped.

The Cabinet, Kim Un-su

One of the strangest things I read this year, The Cabinet start off as a loosely connected set of stories then turns into a spy novel via X-Files in South Korea.

Multiple Choice, Alejandro Zambra

Can a novel made up of multiple choice questions actually be good?

A. Yes

B. Yes

C. Yes

D. Maybe 

The Fifties, David Halberstam

The biggest book I read this year, Halberstam's sprawling survey of one of the most tumultuous decades in American history puts the lie to the Silver Age myth but still manages to be great fun.

Evangelical Anxiety, Charles Marsh

Former evangelicals only want one thing, and it's to write a spiritual memoir as raw, moving, and artful as this one. Guarantee you've never read anything like it.

God's Country, Percival Everett

A farcical western by way of Wodehouse wasn't what I thought I needed, but I was wrong.

 

Distant Star, Roberto Bolaño

I tried The Savage Detectives a while back and dropped out but this novella about a man who spends his whole life in the wake of a poet/serial killer scratched the fictional literary history itch I didn't know I had (Well, I did know I had it if I'm being honest).

Top 10 Books: 

As always, the order of the top 10 (and even what's included) is provisional--if I wrote this tomorrow it would look different. 

10. No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood

An idea that sounds both impossible and terrible on paper--let's write a novel about Twitter!--somehow pulls it off with just the right amount of cringe and flair. It helps that Lockwood, a poet, is clearly terminally online, and she writes about the ephemera of the web with just enough gravity to make it both hilarious and, in the novel's second half, moving and meaningful. Truly, a great book that could've gone so wrong but didn't.

9. Open Secrets, Alice Munro

Munro is simply the best short story writer who has ever lived, and this is one of her stronger collections. A semi-connected series of stories about the sad, funny, and mysterious things behind the lives we choose to believe we lead, it is, like all of her work, infinitely better than a blurb makes it sound. No one captures life like her, and no one else (and I do mean no one) can make 10 pages feel like a novel.

8. Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih

Perhaps the best known novel to emerge from Sudan, Salih's searing work manages to cover mythmaking, colonialism, Sudanese culture, gender roles, and almost everything else imaginable in less than 200pp. I really regret not reviewing this one because it's packed full of great stuff. Instead of reading this lousy blurb, read the book.

7. The Mandlebaum Gate, Muriel Spark

Spark, long recognized (by this blog at least) as the queen of the short novel wrote her only lengthy work here, a thriller/philosophical novel set in Israel and circling, though never being consumed by, the conflicts they were roiling (and indeed still roil) in Israel/Palestine. Like all Spark novels, it's funny and moves fast; perhaps less typically it also delves deeply into its characters and their motivations. It's enough to make you wish she'd written at least a couple more long books.

6. When Women Kill, Alia Trabucco Zeran, trans. Sophie Hughes

This book, which tells the true stories of four women convicted of murder in Chile by combining news articles, narrative nonfiction, poetry, and journals by Zeran herself, is like nothing else I've read. More than the true crime book its title promises, it's a book-length meditation on misogyny, male-female violence, feminism, and the ways we interpret and compartmentalize "bad" women. I read it in a day because I literally couldn't put it down.

5. Free Day, Inez Cagnati

The last book I read this year was one of the best. The back cover description makes it sound like a feel-good story of a girl escaping her abusive and limited environment through education and tenacity. In reality, it's a truly crushing book about the darkness that lies behind the triumphant stories we tell, the difficulties of overcoming our past, and the sobering realities of being the "other". But the narrator, a 14 year old Italian immigrant in France, is great company, funny, observant, and sometimes surprisingly naive.  

4. Harrow, Joy Williams

There's really no way to summarize this book, certainly the strangest of Williams' novels to date. As times frustratingly opaque, this post-climate-apocalypse novel is tremendously unsettling--I took a break halfway through. If you want to know how humanity is likely to respond when we hit the point of no return, you could do worse than this story about a hotel full of weirdos and a cosmic tribunal.

3. A Ghost in the Throat, Doireann Ni Ghriofa

I don't remember why I picked this up, but Ghriofa's memoir about translating poetry, motherhood, and the messy, slipshod beauty of life is the only book to make me really cry this year. Beautiful prose, unsparing, but I'm so glad to have read it.

2. St. Sebastian's Abyss, Mark Haber

The best surprise of the year, this novella about two art critics who spend their entire lives, first as friends then as rivals, thinking and writing about a postcard-sized painting called St. Sebastian's Abyss feels like it was written especially for me. Full of clever critical satire, invented art history, Borgesian analysis of nonexistent art, and the very human story at the heart of it, reminded me why I love reading so much. And Mark follows me on Twitter now so.

1. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante

I thought Haber would be my #1 book but when I looked at my list, I knew it had to be Ferrante. There's just nothing like the Neapolitan novels--the sense of place they conjure, the indelible characters (even after a 2 year gap since reading the second book I remembered every one of them), and their earthy, brutal storytelling--they're such beautiful, nasty, human pieces of art. This one spends about half of its 600pp talking about labor organizing and it's still the best thing I read this year. I'm excited to finish the story of Lenu and Lila in 2023, but also a little sad--I doubt I'll ever see another series like this.

And that's a wrap!

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately--the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws.

The "Infinite Jest" of Infinite Jest--that video cartridge that causes a viewer to become so entertained, they give up all will to live and become catatonically glued to their screen, even to the point of starvation and death--is called, by the Quebecois separatists and American operatives who search for it "the Entertainment." Entertainment is the subject--if anything can be said to be the subject--of this sprawling novel, itself a kind of Infinite Jest, meant to draw you in and keep you trapped. Like Finnegans Wake, it loops, bringing you from the "end" to the "beginning." The cycle starts afresh, and good luck getting out of it.

Although Infinite Jest sprawls over 1000+ pages and perhaps a couple hundred characters, it seemed to me that, ellipse-like, it has two main foci: the Enfield Tennis Academy, perched on a high Boston hill, and Ennet House, a recovery house for substance abuse addicts at the base of the very same hill. (The similarity of the names is surely no coincidence; maybe someone's written about what it means for the tennis kids to be "in" the "field" while the addicts are "in" the "net.") Enfield is the home of Hal Incandenza, whose father James, former head of the academy and amateur filmmaker, created the Entertainment prior to his suicide. Ennet is the realm of Don Gately, a recovering addict and warden of the halfway house.

The irony is that Enfield is as filled with addicts as Ennet: Hal and his pusher accomplice Michael Pemulis have saturated the academy with dope, and Hal himself is hopelessly addicted. The only difference, except that of class, between the academy on the hill and the halfway house beneath it is that the residents of the halfway house are in recovery. Quietly courageous beefcake Gately is, perhaps, an alternate version of Hal who emerged in different social circumstances; no coincidence, I think, that it's Don to whom Hal's father appears, in a hospital-induced fever, like Hamlet's father's ghost. ("A fellow of infinite jest," after all, is Hamlet's description of old, dead Yorick.)

Drugs and sports are both a kind of entertainment. The big theme of Infinite Jest, as I understand it, is the way we can be betrayed by the pleasure centers of our brain. Entertainment intensified becomes competition, becomes addiction; "The Entertainment" is a symbol of the harms we visit upon ourselves in the name of having fun. The novel emphasizes this, I think, in a million little ways. The new supranational order that forms the novel's political backdrop is called the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N., a rather crude but on-theme joke about Onan, the figure known for being the Bible's most infamous masturbator. And the president who presides over this order is a former crooner named Johnny Gentle--DFW probably would not have been surprised by the number of 21st century world leaders, from Trump to Bolsonaro to Zelenskyy, who got their start as television actors. 

The politics-as-entertainment bit is underscored by Eschaton, the tennis-slash-nuclear-holocaust game that might be the novel's most enduring image. In one way, Eschaton is a classic Borgesian "map vs. territory" joke--by hitting a player with a ball, are you striking against something that exists in the world of Eschaton, or something outside of it? When it snows on the Eschaton map, is it snowing in the Eschaton world?--but in the context of the book as a whole it's another instance of geopolitics getting mixed up with the muddiness of entertainment. The consequences of this muddiness in the world of Infinite Jest are grim: New England has become almost entirely a toxic wasteland. The need to be entertained, too, opens up opportunities for capitalist grifters: in this world, years are named for corporate sponsors; Infinite Jest takes place mostly in the "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment."

Infinite Jest is so capacious, so many-layered, has such an anything-goes spirit, you would think it wouldn't be able to surprise you. But I was genuinely surprised by the appearance of James Incandenza's ghost, or "wraith," who, we learn in the novel's late chapters, has been hanging around trying to push Hal toward some kind of personal growth. James, we learn, created "the Entertainment" for Hal, as a way of drawing him out of himself. Hal is cerebral, a skilled talker and wordsmith, but feels very little; he had no relationship with his father to speak of and feels nothing for his mother, not even anger at her sexual affair with the academy's #1 teen star. The immense world of Infinite Jest is suddenly contracted, and it becomes--as maybe it always was--a story about one dysfunctional family. The alcoholic James was never able to communicate with Hal when alive, but in death he hopes to pass some wisdom onto Hal at last. Entertainment, Wallace says, is good. It can be perverted and misused; we can become overly attached to it, even addicted; we can become blind to its boundaries, but ultimately, it allows us to connect with the world. To feel something.

I have to admit, I'm not a huge fan of the way Wallace writes. I have a soft spot, actually, for the sections of Infinite Jest (and in his short fiction) where he tries on other voices, ventriloquisms, even when they sometimes border on--shall we say--political incorrectness. He had that gift really great writers have of being able to listen to people and reproduce the particularities of their language. But his own natural language strikes me as flaccid, recursive, overstuffed with numbers and abbreviations, with jargon and bad jokes. It has a natural ugliness that accurately reflects something contemporary, but which is ugly nonetheless. But it's perfectly pitched for this weird, wild, unwieldy story, and I felt more captivated by it by the end of the two weeks it took me to read Infinite Jest. Like Brent suggested, I had to flip back to the first thirty pages to really understand the import of the ending--which leaves Don and Hal both largely incapacitated, and the wheelchair assassins of Quebec about to descend on the tennis academy in search of the master of the killer tape. I could feel Wallace inviting me to begin the novel again, to get caught in its net. But I'm ready to move on to something else.