I’ve mentioned my approach to book reviews at the outset of my 2019 reviews, and so I won’t repeat it here. Suffice it to say that I give a book I enjoyed three stars and one that I found wanting gets two stars. I do my best to explain my rationale. To get four stars, a book has to be outstanding in terms of its characters, story, style or voice. Five stars will go to a work that is exceptional in all those areas. Typically I rate books higher if they have something to say about society at large, rather than only about individual characters’ lives. My ratings for books I’ve read during the second half of this year are listed immediately below, with the full review of each following thereafter.
Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney 3.5*
Station Eleven by Emily St. James Mandel 4*
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh 4*
Razor Girl, Bad Monkey and Lucky You by Carl Hiaasen 3.5*
Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen 2.5*
The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman 3*
The Sympathizer by Viet Nguyen 4*
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk 4*
92 in the Shade by Thomas McGuane 3.5*
The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian 3*
News of the World by Paulette Jiles 5*
Writers & Lovers by Lily King 4*
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 4*
Women Talking by Miriam Toews 3*
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
One thing I learned from Conversation with Friends is that they drink a lot of wine in Ireland. I thought it was all Guinness and whisky.
The plot of this novel is of no real importance. It’s mostly just what the title says – conversations among friends. What I found most engaging were the permutations in the conversations, principally between Nick and Frances. There are all sorts of games being played. Several times I got the feeling that the whole point of a conversation was just to keep the conversation going. At the same time, the characters seemed to push at boundaries, test each other, take risks. Frances in particular seemed to be testing the limits of what adult life would mean for her. Another time I felt like I was observing an athletic competition. The conversation seemed like a physical match of some sort, but performed with words.
A Unique Conversation Starter
Chapter 31 (the last chapter) illustrates their conversational manner particularly well. It begins with Nick apparently unintentionally calling Frances from the supermarket. Freudian slip or honest mistake, doesn’t matter. Since Nick previously said he’d stop seeing her, a “normal” reaction for Frances might be to hang up on him. Or she might coldly tell him he’s made a mistake, and then hang up. Instead, she keeps talking, and in interiority lets the reader know she doesn’t want him to hang up. He then shares some relatively ordinary thoughts with her, while she responds in a rather formal, almost snippy manner: “Your advice is welcome, Nick. You have an enchanting voice.” When Nick doesn’t immediately respond to this, she asks, “Did I take our playful repartee too far there?”
Later in this conversation she tells him about her endometriosis. This is information she’d refrained from sharing while they were still seeing each other. She tells him with the stated intent of asking how he thinks this information might affect her relationship with Bobbi. However, this is really a deception on her part; she knows the information will pique his interest in her. The idea of deception is then raised by Nick, but in a way that again uses Bobbi as a foil. Nick says, “What you’re doing now is deceiving her just for the illusion of control, which probably isn’t worth it.”
What Goes Around . . .
Not too long after that, Nick learns that she is actually in a park nearby. He says, “I’m like ten minutes away from you. I won’t come see you or anything, don’t worry. I’m just curious to think of you being so close by.” This statement is, of course, Nick’s way to sinking a hook into Frances, as she did to him. In response, Frances brings up a time when they were with a group in France. Then, he’d responded to her request that he tell her he wants her by instead telling her to fuck off. This is yet another challenge to Nick. He tries to squirm out of it by saying her request was gratuitous. But she says, “I should have known it wouldn’t work out between us.” Nick parries this by saying, “Didn’t we always know that?”
And the conversation goes on like this, back and forth. Eventually it transitions seamlessly into a discussion of how they can have a relationship in light of their other relationships. Specifically, her ongoing one with Bobbi and his with Melissa. This ends with Nick confessing that the conversation is making him feel as paralyzed as the first time they kissed. And then she asks him to come and get her.
I enjoyed this book. As others have pointed out, the characters are not all that likeable, but they weren’t unlikeable, either. And the author’s unmasking of them through their conversation was skillful and entertaining.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
From a craft perspective, Station Eleven is an excellent novel because Mandel is a fantastic writer. She is as adept as anyone in her physical descriptions, and in imagery and simile. She has a marvelous ability to create impressions, feelings and ideas by coupling many short phrases into long sentences. These sentences, despite their length, are easy to follow.
I particularly liked the way she takes us on imaginative journeys through her prose. For example: “Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyor belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. . .” And then she ties this long description up with an image of Clark, who now maintains the Museum of Civilization: “Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.” (255)
Playing with Words and Ideas
The foregoing passage illustrates the way in which the author plays not just with words but with ideas. For example, there is the idea of the artificial being superior to the real: “The fake moon, which has the advantage of being closer and not obscured by smog, is almost brighter than the real one.” (100) Similarly, there is the idea that the distinction between sincere and artificial behavior can disappear: “Did this happen to all actors, this blurring of borders between performance and life?” (211)
Overall, the theme seems to be: things are not what they seem. This stems at least in part from the fact that human beings take too much for granted. Jeevan thinks at one point: ”We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.” (178)
Later Jeevan finds a mysterious sentence written by his brother Frank. On a manuscript he was editing for a philanthropist when the virus struck, Frank wrote: “I’ve been thinking lately about immortality.” Initially, the mystery is why? Did frank foresee something? But the mystery is deepened by the apparent uncertainty over the provenance of the sentence: “Was that line Frank’s, then, not the philanthropist’s? Impossible to say.” This goes to another, related theme, the general theme of What is Real?
What Is and Isn’t Real?
The issue of what is and isn’t real comes up multiple times, for example: “Gil had offered an uncertain reminiscence about an article he’d read once, something about how subatomic particles are constantly vanishing and reappearing, which mean, he supposed, that there’s someplace else to be, which he imagined might suggest that a person could theoretically be simultaneously present and not present, perhaps living out a shadow life in a parallel universe or two.” Then Gill ads, in what seems an authorial tease, “But look, I was never a science guy.” (200)
What is happening to a substantial extent in these various articulations of ideas is a kind of playing with concepts. They are the concepts that the characters (and humans in general) use to try and understand their world. In the novel, they never add up to a grand theory. Nevertheless, some of the characters are driven to play with them. That sort of human striving seems to be the point, and another theme.
The overall theme – what is real? What we can rely on? – is never resolved, because it can’t be. The point of the pandemic is to reveal how fragile the reality that had seemed so solid actually was.
Character Traits
With respect to the main characters in the story, Arthur and Clark seem to be developed most fully. We see them grow from college kids to older adults, and are privy to their private lives. Kirsten is another main character, and yet we know little about her interior life, her feelings. We know somewhat more about Miranda, who creates the Station Eleven comics, but takes years to produce only two. For someone who can become lost in her art, she doesn’t seem to get far with it. What is most interesting about the characters is the way they interlink, usually by happenstance. Whether these random linkages are meant to suggest some unidentified deep structure to the world not clear.
Science Fiction or Fantasy?
Exactly what form of novel this is, is an interesting question. Clearly, it isn’t realism. If it were, the reliance of people on knives, bows & arrows and a few simple firearms wouldn’t occur. Americans currently possess 300 million guns and billions of rounds of ammunition. All of this would remain untouched by the pandemic. Still more weapons would be pillaged from military armories. Therefore, quaint caravans of musicians would be less likely than columns of armored personnel carriers. Powerful warlords would quickly impose order large swathes of the land. Organized states would re-appear, though not perhaps with the freedoms we now enjoy.
Moreover, after a major pandemic like the one depicted, it wouldn’t take 20 years for city lights to come on. Rather, electricity would soon return, since the infrastructure would be untouched. After all, among the survivors would likely be a few engineers and scientists and technicians. Even if there weren’t, engineering textbooks would remain, and necessity would spark human ingenuity. Refineries would also likely resume operation, meaning that fuel for vehicles would remain available. Other energy sources would also remain available, like solar, wind, hydro and coal.
A Golden Age with Shell-shocked Inhabitants
I was probably two-thirds of the way through the novel when I realized I was actually reading a fantasy. Aside from human deaths, the world of this novel remains unscathed. Indeed, we find ourselves in something like a pre-industrial “golden age”. Because there are so few people, the air is clear, the water unpolluted, and food can easily be grown. (Indeed, a pandemic would be the perfect, and perhaps only, cure for global warming.) The way people interacted reminded me of the Boxcar Children, although the adults in the airport were far less enterprising. Ultimately they created new lives, and survived, but they must have been psychologically damaged. Why else would they still be living in the airport terminal after 20 years? (Perhaps this is novel is an anti-fantasy?)
Comparing to Today’s Pandemic . . .
Interestingly, the pandemic in this novel was actually easier on the world than the one we are currently stumbling through. While it killed more swiftly, that effectiveness meant it was over quickly, and died out. Our current virus appears likely to stick around for a long time. Moreover, it’s deceptive, and seems designed to take advantage of many American’s stolid inability to exercise foresight. We are poor pandemic chess players. In Station Eleven, the people never had a chance to win. In real life, we have a chance, but seem bent on squandering it. Will the outcome be the same?
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh
This was a fun read. And a light one. No plot. More like an extended riff depicting the machinations of a financially secure but emotionally wrecked twenty-something with less than stellar manners. If there is any conclusion to be drawn from this book, it’s that giving a young person enough money so that they can sit around and do nothing, or sleep, is a profoundly bad idea.
Sly Humor
As others have said, the writing here is exceptional. I also find it slyly humorous. For example:
I thought about whatever subliminal impulse had put me on the train to Farmingdale. Seeing Reva in full-blown Reva mode both delighted and disgusted me. Her repression, her transparent denial, her futile attempts to tap into the pain with me in the car, it all satisfied me somehow. (166)
Cultural Commentary
Occasionally there is some amusing cultural commentary:
Remembering the geography of Manhattan seemed worth hanging on to. But I would have preferred to forget the names and details of the people I’d met in Chelsea. The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and cocaine. I might as well have worked on Wall Street. Speculation and opinions drove not only the market but the products, sadly, the values of which were hinged not to the effable quality of art as a sacred human ritual—a value impossible to measure, anyway—but to what a bunch of rich assholes thought would “elevate” their portfolios and inspire jealousy and, delusional as they all were, respect.
Simply Fabulous Writing
Frequently there are passages that are soaring streams of thoughts and images:
A dog walker passed by with a team of yipping teacups and lapdogs on whiplike leashes. The dogs skittered across the wet blacktop as silently as cockroaches, each so small it amazed me that they hadn’t been squashed underfoot. Easy to love. Easy to kill. I thought again of Ping Xi’s stuffed dogs, the preposterous myth of his industrial dog-killing freezer. A tight sheet of wind slapped me in the face. I pulled the collar of my fur coat up around my throat, and I picture myself as a white fox curling up in the corner of Ping’ Xi’s freezer, the room whirling with smoky air, swinging sides of cow creaking through the hum of cold, my mind slowing down until single syllables of thought abstracted from their meanings and I heard them stretched out as long-held notes, like foghorns or sirens for a blackout curfew or an air raid.
Your Homework
The foregoing are just a few of the many passages that I found particularly entertaining. I could go on, but here is a better idea: go read the book.
Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen
For me, the most enjoyable aspect of this novel was the author’s flair for descriptions both unique and humorous. Clearly there is satire at work, which may come through at times as unfair sarcasm to devotees of the Trump administration, so biting is it. Nevertheless, it was quite entertaining.
Now for the Plot
The plot is, like the waters of the Everglades, murky. I kept waiting for a strong sense of direction. A rich old lady is killed and devoured by a python during a benefit event in Palm Beach. The killing seems like something that should quickly be understood by the authorities. However, the venue manager conceals the cause of death, thereby creating a mystery that is the heart of the plot. Naturally, the unflatteringly portrayed president tweets that Kiki was killed by an illegal immigrant. Equally naturally, both local and federal law enforcement lack the cojones to set the record straight. To me, it all seemed rather contrived.
And if those initial plot chapters seem contrived, wait until you get to the chapters about Skink. Skink is a former state governor who lives on an unknown island in the ‘Glades. There, he raises giant pythons for the express purpose of terrorizing Palm Beach. The name he uses on his driver’s license – Hayduke – is a cute clue to his otherwise murky motive.
Characters are Sketchy
Aside from the murky plot, the characters never came across as real or particularly sympathetic. In part this is because the novel is told in third person omniscient. As a result, we are only occasionally and minimally in the heads of a character. We never really get to know them at any depth. Moreover, there are too many characters engaged in too many dithering subplots. The effect of all these is to confuse and sidetrack whatever forward motion the plot generates.
My last gripe has to do with the confusion created by the novel’s structure. There are 28 chapters that are broken into about a hundred individual sections (usually three or four per chapter). Typically, each section jumps from one set of characters and their actions to a different set of characters and actions. Because of these continual changes in focus, I found it difficult to keep track of the various subplots.
As I mentioned at the beginning, the language was fun, and the main reason I kept going. But overall it wasn’t a book I felt good about having read.
Lucky You, Bad Monkey, and Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen
These three novels are humorous, plot driven escapes that are raised above ordinary by the author’s skill with language.
Lucky You
Lucky You revolves around the theft of a $14 million lottery winning ticket. The crime is committed by two clownish white supremacists who are less evil than deplorable. The victim is JoLayne Lucks, a black assistant veterinarian. Her intent was to purchase and set aside about 50 acres of land as a nature preserve. The supremacists want to use the money to fund a racist militia.
Also involved in this story is Tom Krome, a reporter who helps JoLayne take back her winning ticket. A random collection of goofy freaks also shows up. These dimwits make money from not-very-bright tourists who come to see their cheap displays of fake religious miracles. The novel does a good job of ridiculing the white supremacists and the Jesus freaks, and is generally entertaining. However, the demise of the former is surpisingly gruesome without generating for me a sense of justice having been done. I would have preferred to see them captured and forced to recognize their ignorance and stupidity. Long prison sentences would have been well deserved.
Bad Monkey
Bad Monkey begins with a severed arm hauled in by a honeymooning couple. Ostensibly, the arm came from a man involved in a boating accident and eaten by a shark. However, the arm eventually leads to an unscrupulous real estate developer who is in cahoots with the dead man’s wife. The two intend to use the dead man’s wealth and insurance policy to build a new resort in the Bahamas.
The real estate scheme is eventually uncovered by Andrew Yancy. A good cop, Yancy has been demoted to health inspector as a result of assaulting the husband of his girlfriend. Additional humor is injected by another of Yancy’s girlfriends who is a fugitive from Oklahoma, and by a voodoo woman. The voodoo woman lives on the Bahamian island where the real estate scheme plays out. Another resident of that island is the titular bad monkey.
Razor Girl
Razor Girl begins with Merry Mansfield driving into the back of Lane Coolman’s rented Buick. Coolman, a Hollywood talent agent, is surprised to discover that Merry was distracted because she was shaving her bikini area. The accident is actually a planned part of an attempted abduction, but Coolman turns out to be the wrong guy. This error leads to another, as the waylaid Coolman fails to show up in Key West. There, he was to watch over his client, bigtime TV star Buck Nance. As a result, Buck makes racist and homophobic comments in a club that offend the whole town. Forced to run for his life, Buck ends up being accused of murdering a tourist.
Once again ex-cop Andrew Yancy steps in, proving that the crime was actually committed by Blister, a local bumfuck. In addition, a variety of other subplots bubble in this satiric novel, most of which serve to highlight the crazed behavior that apparently is commonplace in South Florida.
Great Light Reading
These are the only three Carl Hiaasen novels I’ve read, and they make great light reading. They are almost continuously humorous, generally satiric, and particularly well-written at the sentence level. Most of the characters are criminals or other crazies who are greedy, selfish, corrupt, stupid, or all of the above. To me, they weren’t especially believable. Only the protagonists—JoLayne Lucks and Tom Krome, and Andrew Yancy—came across as realistic and sympathetic. I cared about them.
My only criticism of these novels is that at for me they seemed to wander at time. I think this was because so many of the characters weren’t quite believable. When they were the only characters in a particular scene, my engagement with the stories faded. If I don’t care about characters, it’s hard to stick with them.
I’d give these novels 3.5 stars – better than average – because of the satire and excellent writing.
The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman
This is an interesting story of individuals, mainly Jews, fleeing the Nazis during World War II. It’s a story of innocence and denial, of sacrifice and magic. It’s a story of the resistance in France, and the price people paid. It’s a story of children being protected, and escorted to safety in Switzerland by courageous women. As a story, or collection of stories, it was illuminating. The magical elements and the inclusion of Jewish beliefs and language added the kind of verisimilitude that made the story real.
More than anything, the novel left me with a feeling of disgust at Hitler’s attitude toward Jews. It is appalling that the Nazis could be so inhuman, and I felt a new dislike for German people. I wondered how contemporary France and Germany could co-exist so easily, as if none of this ever happened. I was also left feeling uneasy, because nationalism similar to Germany’s seems to be threatening America. Recent events in Portland bring to mind the same tactics employed by Hitler’s brown shirts.
Issues of Style
I was less enamored with the style. The novel begins with an anonymous narrator who speaks to the reader directly: “In the world that we knew, Hanni Kohn saw what was before her.” But this is the only peek we have of a narrator. After that the novel is told to us by a conventional omniscient narrator. The form worked well in allowing the author to present a great deal of story-telling within a single novel. I would agree that it’s the stories that are of paramount importance. Still, I didn’t enjoy being told everything. It prevented me from being touched by the characters themselves, and feeling empathy for them. I would have preferred to have the stories dramatized.
Flat Characters
The characters in the novel felt flat to me. Largely this was a function of the stories they were involved in. Effectively, they were all playing roles in the terrible history of the day. Each of the main characters was single-mindedly focused on surviving, and helping others survive. Consequently, I couldn’t really expect to see much depth or breadth of personality. The fact that virtually everything we learned about the characters was told to us by the narrator didn’t help. Only occasionally was there a scene with dialogue. But even then the scene was in service to the story, rather than to revealing personality.
A Good Reminder
From time to time, it’s helpful to be reminded of the perversity that humans are capable of. In the current moment we seem to be enjoying a bumper crop of such perversity, courtesy of the Orange One. Qanon, skinheads, the alt right and the evangelical right have formed an unholy alliance to undermine our democracy. Fearful, lonely, and left behind, they believe guns will save them from themselves. This book is a reminder. I thank the author for it.
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
This thoroughly engaging book begins with the first person narrator confessing that he is a spy. That fact is quickly overshadowed by his description of his experiences as a member of a South Vietnamese General’s staff. In particular, he recounts the tragedy of a young female communist agent who was caught, tortured and raped. Had he tried to help her, he would have been exposed, so he does nothing, but feels guilty ever after. This episode and all the others recounted at the outset of this novel are intimate and powerful. The world that Nguyen describes, the behaviors of its inhabitants, and his own internal thoughts are feelings are immediately captivating.
The narrator, whose name we never learn, is half-French, half-Vietnamese. He went to college in the U.S. on a scholarship and speaks perfect English. This makes him very useful to the General. He is also a sleeper communist agent assigned to collect intelligence. This he sends back to Man, a friend from his lycée years who is now a communist officer. Later we learn that the novel is actually a confession. He has been forced to write it as a form of re-education, after the communists triumph in the war.
Gripping Scenes
In Chapter 2 the novel turns its attention to a stunning depiction of the last days of Saigon. Because of his connection to the General, the narrator is going to be evacuated to safety. But their experience is possibly the most harrowing escape I’ve ever read, filled with nightmarish detail.
As someone who was aware of the fall of Saigon when it occurred, I can vaguely recall what happened. I remember photos of hordes of people striving to escape on planes and helicopters at the last minute. This book adds vastly more depth to my understanding of what happened. It puts the reader in the middle of the chaos, with sympathetic characters, and we get to experience their terror. Some do not survive.
Life After Evacuation Is Not What I Imagined
Much of the book is devoted to the lives of the narrator, the General, and others once they are relocated. Their new homes are in Southern California. I expected that I would read about how these people adapted and thrived in America like typical immigrants. Instead, they are revealed to be angry and frustrated. They feel betrayed by America. The General is vengeful. As a result, the narrator is involved in the murders of two people at the General’s behest. He does so partly because he is still a spy, and needs to maintain his connection to the General. But we also sense that the war made death and murder so common that his moral code has fractured. He feels guilty after each murder, but never fails to follow the General’s orders.
Eventually the General organizes an army in exile, and plans to re-conquer his homeland. But when they fly to Cambodia, they are captured as soon as they cross into Vietnam. It isn’t clear what happens to the General and most of the others. The narrator is isolated and forced to write a confession that becomes the novel. Apparently the fact that he has been a faithful communist spy doesn’t spare him. Interestingly, his confession is never found acceptable by the commandant of the camp where he is held. The commandant judges it to be too intellectual, and thus not in keeping with revolutionary thinking. Eventually, however, the narrator is freed by the commissar of the camp, who turns out to be his friend, Man.
Insights Into Why the War Was Lost
The events in this novel are related so realistically that the book sometimes seems like nonfiction. It is an amazing story, and educational. The narrator tells us that many South Vietnamese soldiers were dedicated to freeing their homeland—just like the North Vietnamese. The fact that those from the North were going to impose a communist economic system wasn’t considered by the narrator. He viewed the North as rightfully seeking to throw out the latest foreign overload, and their corrupt South Vietnamese puppets. This corruption among many high-ranking South Vietnamese was something I’d never been very aware of. The narrator suggests that the South might have won the war, were the South’s leaders principled.
Expressive Language Brings the Story Alive
Last, I need to express my admiration for the writing. To me, it has an intellectual and figurative flair that adds much depth to the meaning of ordinary events. For example, as Saigon falls, the General has his family and staff transported to the airport to fly out. We get the following description of the scene. “The streets were empty; according to the radio, a twenty-four hour curfew had been declared because of the strike on the airport. Nearly as vacant were the sidewalks, haunted only by the occasional set of uniforms shed by deserters. In some cases, the gear was in such a neat little heap, with helmet on top of blouse and boots beneath trousers, that a ray gun appeared to have vaporized the owner. In a city where nothing went to waste, no one touched these uniforms.”
My only complaint about this novel is that at time I felt it was over-written. About three-quarters of the way through the book, I felt that the story was taking too long. I started to speed read, and did that for a few chapters before the novel drew me in again.
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club is a subversive novel in terms of both story and craft. It isn’t so much Tyler Durden’s creation of a club where men beat each other up that is subversive. Rather, it’s his subsequent establishment of Project Mayhem. In establishing Project Mayhem, Tyler reminds the nobodies who come to Fight Club how much power they have. They realize their power by engaging in various acts of mayhem. The acts themselves are proposed by four Fight Club committees: Arson, Assault, Mischief and Misinformation.
Tyler invents Project Mayhem after the narrator tells him fighting no longer relaxes him. He needs to move on to something bigger. As he explains:
“What Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of history, that’s how I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil well. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I’d never see.
. . . .
It was at breakfast that morning that Tyler invented Project Mayhem.
. . . .
This was the goal of Project Mayhem, Tyler said, the complete and right-away destruction of civilization.”
Nihilistic Philosophy in Action
What makes this novel unique are the innumerable manifestations of its nihilistic philosophy, which frequently involve silly actions. These might include things like waiters urinating into soup that they’re serving at banquets. Actual violence is limited, and certainly nothing much happens that is going to bring about the destruction of civilization. But Tyler’s imagination and the logic of his thinking is beyond absurd. I actually stopped reading the book half-way through for a week because it was so over the top. The fact that I went back and finished it is a testament to its quality.
As many have pointed out, Fight Club is a satire of modern society. It is also exceptionally well written. There is tremendous economy in the spare style that Palahniuk employs. It moves the reader through the story with speed. We move from one impossible-to-predict action or event to the next with alacrity.
Tyler and the Narrator Share an Uncommon Mind
If I had any quibble with the book, it would be with the reveal. Specifically, we learn later in the book that Tyler is just half of the narrator’s split personality. It was kind of a deus ex machina. It served to tie up the novel after the author had taken the story as far as he wanted to. At the same time, it does explain the source of the narrator/Tyler’s wild, nihilistic thinking. In any event, it closed out the story effectively. The novel didn’t need to continue any farther because the satire had run its course. And the narrator really wasn’t intent on blowing up civilization.
In the end, the narrator is apparently in a psychiatric hospital, but seems reasonably sane. He no longer asserts strange ideas about himself or society. Instead he says, “We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.” In fact, he seems ready to go back to his former sane life, but he doesn’t want to yet. The reason apparently is that some of the hospital workers know him and are in a fight club. One says, “We look forward to getting you back.” But the idea of going back and becoming immersed in Fight Club again frightens him. He doesn’t want to become the crazy person he was before.
92 in the Shade by Thomas McGuane
Reading this novel is like meeting the Queen of England on the street after she has become homeless. She is wandering around with her crown and scepter and asking everybody who she meets what went wrong.
92 in the Shade is rightly famed for its unique writing style. It took me a few pages to get used to the run on sentences and run-on images and the strange characters with their odd behaviors and clipped dialogue. You are going to go for a ride when you read this, you have to be willing to climb on an old wooden rollercoaster blindfolded and just go with it. When you do, it becomes like fine wine, the kind you savor.
Reflections on the Cultural Moment
I suspect that to a certain extent the behaviors of the characters reflect the culture of that era. For example, Tom Skelton goes to see Miranda, his girlfriend, and finds her making love to another man. When he calls her name, she nonchalantly tells him to wait in the front room until she’s finished, and later tells him about the incredible orgasm she had. Miranda surely reflects the attitude of free love that arose in the 1960s, in those halcyon years before AIDS.
I also wondered—it certainly isn’t clear—whether the story of Skeleton and Dance, both of whom believe they are in the right, and refuse to back down, doesn’t reflect the 1960s American attitudes that insisted on fighting the Vietnam War. The author’s repeated references to “the republic” and its troubles brought this to mind.
Then, too, I can’t help comparing this to Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? which answers the question stated in its title without ever mentioning Vietnam until the last page. Its focus is more clearly on how the brutish, cave man instincts of America lead to war, but those same instincts seem to be at play in McGuane’s novel as well.
In terms of story, the plot of the novel is thin, and carries no tension. I never felt a desire to turn the page in order to find out what happens next. What kept me reading was the fabulous language.
Examples of The Marvelous Prose
“Who said that kissing was sucking on a thirty-foot tube the last five feet of which were full of shit? . . . Shelton swept Miranda into his arms and sucked at the tangerine-like end of the thirty-foot tube, never heeding what might have been at its other end, doubtless rising slowly toward his mouth.”
Here is another, our first view of his grandfather’s business office: “In the front hall, directly behind the front door, Bella Knowles abused visitors from a low mahogany desk whose bland surface held five Princess Phones like a relief model of the Caribbean. Every time the door opened, she was revealed in amazing proximity to people passing on the sidewalk, really on a few feet away, her eyes at rump level.”
And a third (though there are examples on every page): “Communism, thought Goldsboro Skelton—one should really say Commonism, which is how he thought of the word—has had God knows a baleful and ruinous influence on the world; but the one major Greaser among world Commonists, Fidel (Skelton called him Fido) Castro, had done him an immeasurable favor when he decided to release Bella Knowles’s husband, Peewee, from the Isle of Pines, where he had served some doubtless sorry hours atoning for the one manly thing he had ever done: run a boatload of Springfields to a handful of counterrevolutionaries in Camaguey so worn out they turned the little insurance adjuster over to the Fidelistas out of tedium vitae and small hope of recompense; Peewee Knowles had just been trying to pay off his swimming pool, like any other citizen high and dry on the Morris Plan.”
Miami Vice It Is Not
Eventually the novel reaches an end after roughly 200 pages, an end that is mainly the termination of the reader’s exposure to fantastic prose. The story itself, and its ending, was not one I found particularly satisfying. But the same could be said for the entire Vietnam War, and particularly its end.
The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian
I found The Double Bind enjoyable enough to finish. It begins with the near-rape of a nineteen year-old college student who is bicycling on old logging roads in Vermont. She is rescued in the nick of time by a group of male bicyclists who happen by.
After the foregoing prologue, the novel actually begins about seven years after the near-rape, with the young woman, Laurel, now working for BEDS, an organization that provides housing for the homeless in Burlington, Vermont. It turns out that one of the clients that Laurel was close to, a man by the name of Bobbie, has recently died, and when they clean out his room, they discover a portfolio of impressive photographs that Laurel, a photographer herself, believes are professional and artistic.
After viewing the photographs, Laurel discovers that several from the 1920s appear to be of people who lived in East Egg, Long Island. She herself grew up in West Egg, and is familiar with the area. She recognizes Tom and Daisy Buchanan, characters from The Great Gatsby, and believes that a boy who appears in some of the old photos is Bobbie, her homeless client who owned the cache of photos. Laurel takes it upon herself to learn why Bobbie was apparently rejected by his wealthy family, and left to live homeless and poor.
The Good and the Bad of the Writing
Much of the prose in this novel is workmanlike; it gets the story out. At times I felt it was rather wooden, although at the very end there is this beautiful lyrical passage:
“Laurel began her long journey back to Vermont. Seven more hours. She drove briefly along the Sound, the last of the blue fog having lifted off the water, before veering toward the long strips of expendable plastic and neon that linked West Egg with the expressway. Then she was on the highway itself, rolling past the ambitionless office parks built upon the ash heaps and the remnants of a world’s fair. Past the Unisphere and the skeletal remains of the once great pavilions: the visible detritus of that era’s unachieved aspirations.”
One aspect of the story-telling that I definitely disliked was the way the mystery was revealed. Most of the clues are spouted out by characters that Laurel meets. Aside from Bobby’s photographs, she doesn’t uncover any other interesting physical evidence. I suppose this makes sense once you get to the end of the book, as discussed below, but in the meantime it’s disappointing and dull.
Spoiler alert: The rest of my comments contain spoilers because, frankly, it’s hard to talk about the merit of the book without doing so.
The Narrator You Cannot Trust
Central to this novel is the use of an unreliable narrator, Laurel. There are other characters who narrate a chapter or part of a chapter here and there, but Laurel is the young woman who is investigating the mystery of Bobbie and his photos.
As I read the novel I had a couple of negative reactions that were moderated once I realized I was dealing with Laurel’s unreliable narration. First, her motivation in trying to solve the mystery of a homeless guy’s photos seems weak, too weak for her to become so wound up in it. The novel lost credibility for me the longer I read. Second, the inclusion of characters from The Great Gatsby in the novel seemed screwy to me. I wondered whether Bohjalian was trying to build upon Fitzgerald’s work in some way – a way that was never clear to me.
Perhaps I should have guessed from the two foregoing factors that Laurel was an unreliable narrator. Once that becomes clear at the end of the novel, I felt as though the author had played fair with his readers in that he did provide some good clear clues as to Laurel’s narrative unreliability.
But She Is More Than Unreliable
Critically, Laurel’s interest in Bobbie and his photos actually transforms into an interest in the two men who attempted to rape her. She goes to some lengths to visit one in a Vermont prison, ostensibly because he was Bobbie’s son. This, too, I found as lacking in credibility when I first read it. Why would she want to meet with a man who has already been convicted of his crime against her? After all, she was in the courtroom and encountered him at that time, so what more could she hope to get from him?
The Crime Victim’s counselor who accompanies Laurel to the prison meeting thinks she is after an apology of some sort that will be good for both perpetrator and victim. But as it turns out Laurel and the reader get much more. We learn the horrible truth of what actually happened to her, and the sense I got was that some part of Laurel’s unconscious self forced her do this, as a way of facing the truth that she had repressed for seven years.
While facing and accepting the truth of what happened to her might have helped Laurel escape the ravages of PTSD, the sad truth that we learn at the end is that Laurel is a resident of the Vermont State Hospital, and that the novel we’ve read is a fiction she has made up. Moreover, Laurel continues to deny that she was raped and disfigured, even after hearing directly from the man who did it (and even writing it for us to read). The moral seems to be that facing one’s demons doesn’t necessarily mean one will overcome them.
The Verdict on Unreliable Narrators
Overall, this is a thoughtful and sensitive portrait of the effect on one young woman of a terrible crime. The question I was left with was whether it could have been told just as effectively without the use of an unreliable narrator. In general, I dislike unreliable narrators, and tend to think that authors use them when they’ve written a story that just isn’t creative or substantial or interesting enough. So they throw in an unreliable narrator in a feeble attempt to make a bland plot more interesting. But in this instance, a rare instance, I think an unreliable narrator is right. The focus of the novel is on the effect of trauma on a woman’s mental functioning. In employing an unreliable narrator, the novel brings the reader directly into that woman’s mind so that readers can see directly the effect of her trauma.
News of the World by Paulette Jiles
Simply an outstanding novel! I feel remiss in having taken so long to get to this book, but thankful for having made it at last.
News of the World combines fabulous writing with a riveting story. There are beautiful sentences throughout. At the same time that they are stunning, these works of art aren’t obtrusive or awkward; they fit in the text. They amplify the mood and depth of story and character.
The title – ‘News of the World’ – is itself a fine metaphor. The readings that the protagonist Kidd gives lend a nice historical context to what we see in his own story. And they also contrast sharply with the ‘news’ that a 10 year-old Kiowa captive is coming back into a world she was torn from. Her miniscule single life stands out against the panorama of turbulent American history.
The peek that this novel provides into post-Civil War life in Texas—and elsewhere in the South—is enlightening. It was a wild world, largely lawless outside of the towns. Kiowa and Comanche raiding parties were still attacking settlers. Carrying handguns was prohibited by law, but it was a law largely ignored except perhaps on the main streets of towns, and even there not always observed. Nevertheless, settlers were flooding into Texas in a frenzy of activity that the book captures well.
Living Completely, Moment to Moment
A curious question is raised by the novel as to why it was apparently so difficult if not impossible for captives to adopt to “white” life once they were returned. I think it may have been the immediacy of the life led by native Americans who did not have a permanent home or a society to support them. They were required to rely on their wits at all times, which has to be a riveting way to live. By contrast, living in a fixed home with reliable food, water, clothing etc. provided security to the former captives, but also constraint. Indeed, it may have been like living in prison. Their spirit would atrophy.
This is why writers and other artists live so much more interesting lives than most people. They are less secure, and may even have to struggle to survive. But they are always creating their world, which is what makes life worth living.
Writers & Lovers by Lily King
Casey Peabody has cojones and she has faith in herself. The fact that she perseveres in writing her novel while $70K in debt and living in squalor testifies to her vision and strength. She makes an admirable protagonist. I enjoyed her success.
The Choice that All Writers Face
The chief pleasure of this novel lies in its prose, which is simple yet elegant, and the skill shown in the way character insights are revealed. Early in the novel she visits Salvatore’s Foreign Books, where she’d worked six years before. Except for the manager, everyone who worked there when she did is gone, and there is a wistfulness to her tone when she tells us, “We’ve all been replaced by children: a boy in a baseball cap and a girl with hair to her thighs. Because it’s Friday, they’re drinking beers, Heinekens, just like we used to do.” And when her former boss hands out the beers, she notes, “The girl with the hair is looking at him the way I used to.” (p12) The sense that precious time is passing is clear in Casey’s mind from the outset.
After this she goes on to talk about all her friends who once planned to be writers but eventually bailed out and pursued conventional careers. This is the choice that all would-be writers face. Her only comment is, “I didn’t get it. I didn’t get any of them then.” (13) The idea of giving up and accepting a conventional life simply doesn’t compute for her.
Late in the story, when she is struggling to finish her novel and suffering anxiety attacks, she visits a Dr. Sitz, and when she expresses despair at where her persistence has gotten her, compared to her former writer-friends, he tells her, “You’re a gambler. You gambled. You bet the farm.” (300) Then, despite her upchuck of self-doubt, when he asks her what she wants now, at age thirty-one, she tells him she wants to finish the book and start another one. He laughs and tells her she’s a very high roller. Indeed.
A Unique Character Arc
Structurally, this novel has a fairly flat character arc. Casey never changes much. She begins and ends with the same insistence on being an artist, despite the sacrifices it requires. Early on when she is struggling with her writing she describes it thus: “It all looks like a long stream of words, like someone with a disease that involves delusions has written them.” And she adds, “I am wasting my life. I am wasting my life.” (65) Later in the novel, when interviewing for a teaching job, she mentions the novel Woodcutters to Manolo, the head of the English Department, saying, “it’s really a book about art and becoming an artist and all the ways it ruins people, actually.” (269) But she never changes. She can’t.
What changes are her circumstances. Despite all her distractions and adversity she finishes her novel and it’s accepted after only eleven agent rejections, and she even ends up with an advance that is big enough to get her out of debt. She also finds her way to the right lover. Although the author creates abundant doubt about which guy she’ll go with, her workmate Dana is right on the money when she says, “You always know your horse.” (188)
Craft Matters
Of course, before this happy and satisfying ending, the author uses the tried and true technique of piling all manner of troubles onto Casey’s shoulders to see how she’ll react. Medical issues arise in the form of a pointy cervix, a lump under her arm, possible cancer, and a looming nervous breakdown. She’s evicted from her stable-like apartment but can’t afford much of anything else. She loses her job—her only source of income. And the guy she really likes continually jerks her around. These events are like staccato notes playing against the ongoing symphony of her grief for her mother, anger at her father, and the regular arrival of threatening letters from debt collectors.
Interestingly, and a nice reveal of Casey’s way of viewing her life, she tells Dr. Sitz that she’s afraid that, if she can’t handle what is happening now, “how will I be able to handle bigger things in the future?” Dr. Sitz puts things in perspective for her by listing all of her challenges, and concluding with, “This is not nothing.” (300) His point is that she is already effectively handling adversity, while Casey displays what is perhaps a critical attribute of successful artists—a basic inability to fully grasp and be daunted by anything unrelated to her art.
On a technical note, I liked the way the author uses single quotes instead of the traditional double. Generally, I prefer standard punctuation; I think it makes a text easier to follow. But in this case I thought the single quotes worked to prevent dialogue from standing out too much and living on its own. This is a novel of interiority, and using single quotes helps retain the primacy of Casey’s interior life.
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
This novel shines a light on the inhuman conditions imposed on slaves in the pre-civil war American south. Too, it highlights the depravity of the individuals—and indeed the entire culture of the South—that imposed those conditions. The novel makes clear that slave owners did not simply keep people in bondage for their labor. Instead, they also harassed, tortured, raped and murdered them at will. The fact that an entire society could condone those actions is beyond deplorable. Just as it’s important never to forget the horrors of the Holocaust, it’s important to remember the horrors of slavery. This book serves as a powerful memory aid.
Issues of Plot and Character Development
I have read various reviews that argue the novel is lacking in plot and character development. I don’t entirely agree. Cora is so consumed with the trials of escaping servitude that she has little time to become much more than a runaway. She does, however, learn some things and change her perspective. In particular, her notion of freedom becomes more expansive as a result of her experience on the Valentine farm. “Everything on Valentine was the opposite. Work needn’t be suffering, it could unite folks. . . In her Georgia misery she had pictured freedom, and it had not looked like this. Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.”
With respect to plot, I would agree that the novel doesn’t follow a single continuous development. Instead, it jumps in time and between different characters’ points of view. Overall, however, it’s a story about Cora’s escape from slavery, something which she has to accomplish again and again. This seems to be an essential point of the novel: that a slave is never free, even after escaping to a free state. In the end, when Cora is on her way to California, she appears to have triumphed by never giving up. But we know she could always be dragged back.
A Truly Underground Railroad Works
I was surprised to learn that the railroad of the novel was presented as if it actually existed below ground. At first this seemed odd, but then I decided that treating it in this rather whimsical manner worked. It took the focus off the mechanics of the process by which escaped slaves were spirited north. Those mechanics aren’t the focus of the book and in any case can be found in Wikipedia. Thus the novel avoided becoming bogged down in background details, and could focus on Cora, the other characters, and the challenges and horrors they faced.
Throughout the novel there is fine sentence-level writing. For example: “Arnold Ridgeway’s father was a blacksmith. The sunset glow of molten iron bewitched him, the way the color emerged in the stock slow and then fast, overtaking it like an emotion, the sudden pliability and restless writhing of the thing as it waited for purpose. His forge was a window into the primitive energies of the world.” (73)
The Past Lives On
Reading this in 2020, I find myself seeing parallels between the world of this novel and our present world. In particular, the racists who supported Trump’s re-election still prevailed in the deep south, aside from Georgia. And the armed militias that have been incited by Trump, like the “Proud Boys”, seem like modern day Night Riders. Fortunately, they are out of their era. The world they’re agitating for, like that of the Night Riders, has passed away.
Women Talking by Miriam Toews
I felt like I finally connected with this book around page 134, when Klaas appears. He immediately demeans August, complains that he’s been smoking, and becomes angry with his wife. He wants to know why she isn’t taking care of the children and where his dinner is. He doesn’t even speak directly to the women, but directs his words to August. He acts as if the women are unworthy of any respect whatsoever. Reading this scene brought home the reality of the Mennonite culture most clearly because it was presented in a scene. The information that the women are illiterate and were drugged and raped was less impactful, being merely told to us. But in this scene it became clear just how depraved the Mennonite colony depicted in this book was.
Before this scene, the book consisted of a lot of disjointed talking. For a long time it seemed as though the talking would never lead to a choice. The choice is laid out on page 6: Do Nothing; Stay and Fight; Leave. Eventually the women decide to leave, but it takes a long time for them to decide.
One of the reasons it takes the women so long to decide is that they are worried. They worry not simply about which action will succeed, but whether leaving will undermine their prospects for admission to Heaven. One of the teachings of their religion is that women are to be totally subservient to men. They have few if any rights, but lots of duties. Their culture seems to believe that misogyny is ordained by God. Consequently, the women fear that disobeying the men could lead them to be excluded from Heaven. I understand that the women have been raised to live by these beliefs, and thus don’t see them as warped. Nevertheless, their entire situation is appalling.
Similarity to Other Oppressive Regimes
The situation faced by the women in this novel bears similarities to other manipulative social organizations. In such systems, a combination of groupthink and submission is a means of control. As a result, a subset of the group ends up debased and treated as less equal, less deserving, less worthy. One of the effects of organizations like this is to reinforce the power of the controlling group, often men. Religion typically plays a role; threatening the helpless with the wrath of God is a time-honored method of coercion. Groups like Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, the Branch Davidians, the Islamic Salafis and the Roman Catholic Church come to mind.
Poverty Comes in Many Forms
There is more going on in this book that adds to our view of the Mennonite world. It isn’t pretty. Both Greta and Agata are in pain, but their colony won’t allow them to access modern medical care. Greta’s husband Kurt committed suicide, and we can be sure that he had no access to needed psychiatric care. Mejal’s husband is frightened each month when she bleeds because he is ignorant about women’s cycles. The cultivation of ignorance makes the entire Mennonite community poorer and less free. Shockingly but not surprisingly, we learn that all the men drink far too much.
Elsewhere we learn some unflattering things about August and the women. August previously left the colony with his parents, fared poorly in the outside world, and was abused in prison. Subsequently he voluntarily returned to the colony, apparently wanting as a refuge. The men treat him like they treat the women, and he seems oddly willing to be demeaned by them. The fact that August and the women are willing victims in the colony undermined my sympathy for them.
A Potent Story Could Use more Drama
There really isn’t a whole lot more to say about this book. On a craft level, as noted above, it wasn’t until Klaas showed up that a dramatic scene was presented. All the prior pages of August’s notes about women talking weren’t very gripping. I would agree that an author has a right to present a story through notes taken by an observer. In this case, doing so helped illustrate the crippled world of the women. However, I would have preferred to read more scenes that illustrate crippling effects of this cult. I’m sure it would have been possible to dramatize the men being caught raping the women. August could have spotted them, for example.
In the end, I was left feeling sad for the women. They chose to leave, but didn’t know where they were going. They’re leaving in horse driven buggies and are illiterate; how will they survive in the modern world? They may be driving into a wildfire, and the men will certainly pursue them and catch them. I suppose I can hope that, when that happens, they will fight. Perhaps if they fight hard, they will refuse to submit to the men. But then, according to their beliefs, they will go to hell.
Overall, I commend the author for shedding light on the way in which religious cults can do tremendous damage. This book is yet another argument for banning religious organizations altogether.
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