The Optimist's Daughter

 The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty is one of the most aesthetic novellas I've ever read. Laurel Hand, the woman at its center, is the last in her family. Both parents and her husband have died. This seems dramatic as she's only my age, but it's believable in a mid-century world of lower life expectancy and men lost in war. Navigating her grief and dealing with her parents' affairs keep her occupied, but she's dogged by her husband's second wife, a woman her age and one of the great antagonists in all literature. 

I've read several Welty short stories, but this was my first of her longer works. She's a powerful character writer. All of her protagonists are fully formed and rooted in her Southern landscape. They vary wildly, though, in education, race, income, and condition. Sometimes they're absurdly funny; sometimes they're selfish and racist. Here, Laurel is thoughtful, elegant, and courageous in her grace under pressure. 

The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, deservedly. There isn't a word out of place. I found myself rereading several passages purely for their beauty. While not much happens in the plot (a death and a funeral), it reads like an extended personal essay. Grief is an important theme, but the passage of time resonates more completely throughout. There are bitter realizations about loss: the "optimist" in the title is mostly ironic. But the grand shift in the Laurel's understanding ultimately bends towards acceptance.

Saints at the River

 Saints at the River by Ron Rash is a novel that presents a morally ambiguous question. A vacationing girl is swept downriver and tumbles over a waterfall, drowning in the hydraulic behind the cascade. Unable to retrieve her body, her grieving family petitions to temporarily dam the river, an illegal operation as it has been given Wild and Scenic status. This proves controversial, and well-meaning people settle on both sides of the debate (a Christian burial vs. an untouched river). The conclusion is dramatic and tragic. Rash is a good writer and this is an absorbing, complex, and weighty narrative. While the dialogue is weak at times--too utilitarian, too expositive--the characterization is haunting and affecting, and I found myself pondering the events long after finishing the book.

Krakatoa

 Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester is an exhaustive nonfiction account of a big volcano. The Krakatoa eruption was the deadliest in human history. It killed over 36,000 people, mostly from a series of enormous tsunamis. Winchester explores everything around the volcano: plate tectonics, the discovery of plate tectonics, volcanology, animal evolution, Dutch colonialism, Victorian-era communication, Javanese local politics, the rise of Islam, economics, cartography, maritime technology, and on and on. It's too much, actually. The volcano doesn't even erupt until page 234, and by that point I don't know what else there is to possibly learn about the context of this event. Winchester's obsessive attention is made palatable by his easygoing, almost conversational prose. While I think the book probably overstayed its welcome, the writing itself was pleasant and interesting. 

The Return of the Native

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy is an excellent novel. Set in his fictional region of Wessex, and beautifully incorporating the wild countryside ("Egdon Heath"), the story centers on flawed characters in a doomed marriage. Its protagonists--Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vie--are both fully rounded characters that contain multitudes but share an inability to overcome their tragic flaws. Allowing them to fall in love, the story anticipates Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road or Noah Baumbach's A Marriage Story in its unflinching depiction of domestic decay. Hardy is a tremendous, poetic writer, and The Return of the Native was as rich and realized as his Far from the Madding Crowd. Highest recommendations for this haunting, monumental novel. 

One reason I avoid novels from the nineteenth century is that while the writing is elevated and often beautiful, the plots tend to be convoluted and labyrinthine. This is a function of being serialized. Most of these writers released a chapter at a time in a monthly magazine. The back third of these novels can a rough read, just like seasons three and four of a serialized television show can be rough watches. The writers lose their way. Hardy rarely does this, and he maintains excellence throughout all of The Return of the Native. However, I think he is irritated by the form as well. Late in the novel, two minor characters actually do get happily married. He didn't want this to happen, but he allowed it, and he includes the best author's note I have ever read. I will end this review with Hardy's own words:

"The writer may state here that the original conception of the story did not design a marriage between Thomasin and Venn. He was to have retained his isolated and weird character to the last, and to have disappeared mysteriously from the heath, nobody knowing whither--Thomasin remaining a widow. But certain circumstances of serial publication led to a change of intent. 

Readers can therefore choose between the endings, and those with an austere artistic code can assume the more consistent conclusion to be the true one."

I like to think that I have an "austere artistic code," but so happy was I with the novel overall that I accept either ending as believable and satisfying--artistically or otherwise.

The Anxious Generation

 The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt is perhaps the most influential book of the last five years. My state, and many others, have enacted school-wide phone bans directly after its publication and subsequent popularity. While the passages on smart phones and social media are moving (and well-known by this point), his later chapters on free-range parenting invite as much reflection. I'm thinking more about those ideas now. I'm reflecting on how quickly I can give my children the type of physical, real-world freedom that was common two generations ago.

The Afterlife of George Cartwright

 The Afterlife of George Cartwright by John Steffler is an impressionistic work of historical fiction. Cartwright was a real Canadian explorer who settled in Newfoundland and Labrador during the time of the American Revolution. Steffler uses Cartwright's actual journal entries, along with third-person narrative sketches, to evoke a dramatic life story. Much of it is engaging, and all of it is well-written. Some early chapters, documenting an early-life passage to India, are vivid and beautiful. As he travels to Canada, his encounters with landscapes, animal life, and inclement weather are crystalline and believable. Later interactions with the Inuit are profound and heartbreaking. It's a worthy read, which makes certain decisions annoying. The "afterlife" in the title is a framing device (Cartwright as a ghost in England's midlands) that is completely unnecessary and holds up the rest of story. I skimmed those vignettes: they did nothing to further our understanding of literary elements. But on balance, The Afterlife of George Cartwright, when focused on his earthly life, is a fine novel. 

In Search of the Old Ones

 In Search of the Old Ones: Exploring the Anasazi World of the Southwest by David Roberts is a book I'd seen in many a visitor-center gift shop. I finally read it, and enjoyed the interesting blend of memoir, travel narrative, archaeology, and anthropology. The Anasazi* of the title are an ancient group of Native Americans spanning centuries, mountain ranges, and artistic achievements. They are united in their pueblo-style housing and their propensity for cliff-dwelling. Roberts writes quite a bit about the "search" for their ruins and artifacts: much of this reads as a backpacking memoir. Throughout, with every fact of information gained, it seems that more mysteries arise. Why did the Anasazi abandon their dwellings in 1300 A.D.? Did they, in fact, practice cannibalism, as compelling evidence seems to suggest? How peaceful were they compared to their neighbors? What do their petroglyphs mean? Why did they dwell hundreds of feet above canyon floors? How much local knowledge--in  modern-day pueblos--accurately answers these questions? And on and on. Roberts doesn't give easy answers. An honest archaeologist wouldn't have firm opinions on these shadowy historical mysteries. 

I found this book engaging, but frustrating at times. Roberts is Jon Krakauer's old writing instructor, and in a fun late chapter, the real Krakauer appears and the two of them descend a remote canyon. The comparison between the two writers, then, was highlighted. I find Krakauer a master of building suspense, of creating a cohesive narrative that seeks to answer a central mystery. Roberts, by contrast, is more slapdash in his approach, and I didn't really know why I was being taken narratively into various ruins. A larger picture emerged, but it wasn't clear when certain characteristics would be explained. For example, he would often use anthropological terms in the early chapters that weren't defined until the later chapters. In Search of the Old Ones could've used a good editor. But its subject matter is fascinating enough to overcome the shortcomings of its structure. 

*"Anasazi" is a controversial term, as it's the Navajo word for "ancestral enemies," and the descendants of these people are Hopi, Zuni, and others that historically, well, were enemies of the Navajo. Roberts addresses this in an author's note, finding the more updated term "Ancestral Puebloans" even more problematic and inaccurate. I don't know enough to weigh in with authority here, and in this post I'm using the language of the book.

House of Sand and Fog

 House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III is a wrenching, brutal read. The novel centers on two deeply flawed characters: a proud Iranian colonel exiled after the Islamic Revolution, and a woman in recovery reeling from her husband's abandonment. Through unfortunate circumstances, they both seem to have legal claim to the titular house. A police officer falls in love with the woman during the eviction process, and their love affair (he's married) is a doomed, slow-motion car crash of somewhat understandable but terrible decisions. At almost every fork in the road, the characters pick the wrong option, and while they are sympathetic and well-meaning, they lack the intelligence or self-control to pull of their schemes. 

In one sense, the story reads like a good noir, maybe one of James M. Cain's fine books of adulterous misfits making violent, bad decisions. In another sense, it's a Shakespearean tragedy, where fate and the dark side of the Human Condition ultimately flood through the narrative. Some scenes near the end pushed the pathos a bit too far, but on the whole I was effectively disturbed as I read. These fictional characters hit me on an emotional level, which is impressive, given that that doesn't normally happen to me, and that Dubus III wrote from taboo perspectives (by modern standards). In 2025, it would be unlikely to read a white male author narrating from a Persian perspective--or even from a female one--but he did in 1999, and, by my judgment, pulled it off. 

Dubus III is the son of the great Andre Dubus. Dubus the elder was a thoughtful, spiritual essayist and short story writer that I've admired for a long time. His Catholic background made him keenly aware of human sinful nature and the need for grace. Dubus III, from what I understand, isn't religious, but House of Sand and Fog evokes Old Testament themes of guilt, purity, retribution, and atonement. Father and son are equally talented and worthy of attention, and American fiction is better off from both of their contributions. 

Bear Witness

 Bear Witness: The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land by Ross Halperin tells the story of the Association for a More Just Society (or ASJ), an NGO based in Honduras. Founded by two Christian activists--Kurt Ver Beek and Carlos Hernández--ASJ has ambitious aims to correct inequality and corruption across Honduran society. In that deeply violent country, this began with a small operation to successfully prosecute murder convictions, the precondition for affecting change in almost any other arena. Since that small start, ASJ has grown in power and influence, in arenas such a police corruption (in a large-scale purge working with the government); improved wages and labor standards for private security; and education reform. The drop in Honduras's murder rate and the decrease in narcotrafficking during this period, Bear Witness argues, is in no small part due to ASJ. Throughout, the humble employees at ASJ have faced all manner of threats and violence, and some of their own have been killed by hitmen. 

Evoking Jesus' exhortation in Matthew 10:16 to be "shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves," the various ways that Ver Beek and Hernández worked within a murky legal system at times blurred ethical lines. They used outside lawyers, vaguely associated ex-cops, and corrupt politicians. Ver Beek recounts how they could be purely critical of all corruption--and do nothing--or work within the government while maintaining distance--a difficult line to walk. They didn't always get it right. As their profile rose, so did the ambiguity about their integrity. Reading Bear Witness engenders a variety of responses, but on the whole, it is an authentic profile in courage. 

A Hunger for High Country

 A Hunger for High Country: One Woman's Journey to the Wild in Yellowstone Country by Susan Marsh is a fine memoir published by Oregon State University Press. Marsh worked for the Forest Service in Bozeman, Montana for many years before moving to Jackson, Wyoming to work and retire. Despite being hundreds of miles apart, these locales are part of the same Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. Her story includes gender discrimination, animal encounters, forest fires, major and minor obstacles, and breathtaking beauty. It's a rich narrative, told with love and honesty. One chapter in particular, about "mountain men" who lived in the forest and abducted a woman and murdered one of her friends, is a harrowing read. The larger sense that I got, as I read A Hunger for High Country, is that Marsh is lucky to have lived in some of the most wild country in the contiguous United States, and when she was working there several decades ago, it was even more raw and untamed. Bozeman and Jackson are now some of the bougiest places in the West--but still gorgeous--and this memoir evokes a more unspoiled era. 

The Maltese Falcon

 The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett is a good book that was turned into a great film. Unfortunately, I had seen the film (several times) before reading the novel, and it is the much better work of art. The book is slim and short and punchy, and it reads like a rough draft of a screenplay. The film, anchored by excellent performances from Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre, is the final product, the fully cooked version of the story. John Huston's screenplay maintains the best parts of the novel and adds more compelling lines ("the stuff dreams are made of"). Both are entertaining. The story's late shift of focus from the title falcon (maybe the most famous MacGuffin ever) to deeper ideas of loyalty and justice remains a thrilling turn, in whatever medium. 

The British Are Coming

 The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1776 by Rick Atkinson is the first volume in his Revolution Trilogy. It's a big, weighty read. I had heard of some of these great figures and battles: Bunker Hill, General Cornwallis, Ticonderoga, Thomas Paine, and so on. This book gave context to these names and many more. Atkinson is a thorough historian and a gifted writer, and he was able to zoom out to larger geopolitical issues and then zoom in on, say, a militiaman's letter to his wife. This often happened in the same paragraph, and it made for a dense, but enjoyable, reading experience. Many historical figures were fleshed out into round, complicated characters. The most interesting--not surprisingly--was Benedict Arnold. The British Are Coming skillfully laid groundwork and built tension in its narrative, and I was often surprised by the outcome of events. Atkinson won a Pulitzer Prize (for another work), and his writing goes down easy, the literary equivalent of a Ken Burns documentary.

Deep now into my middle age, I've taken to listening to Dad Rock like the National and the Allman Brothers, and now I'm reading war histories. This is all very clichéd, but another function of my age is that I don't care. I found The British Are Coming fascinating, and I look forward to the next installments of his trilogy. History is compelling, and it changes my understanding of the world. One shift in my perspective came about halfway through the text. I have long thought that of all American Wars, the conflict in Vietnam would have been the most hellish. My perspective is a product of the great war films of the 70s and 80s, as well as the hippie music I grew up listening to. But given the technology, smallpox, weather, clothing, typhus, bayonets, dysentery, sanitation . . . I think the Revolutionary War would have been pretty rough. Of course, I have no firsthand experience with any military conflict, so this is all academic. 

Let Me Tell You What I Mean

 Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion is a collection of twelve essays, compiled during the middle three decades of her career, as well as a good Foreword by Hilton Als. It's a short, punchy read. You'll careen through reportage on war veterans, gambling addicts, business tycoons, and first ladies, not clearly understanding the connections but entertained by Didion's precise observations and perfect prose. If there is a dominant theme, it's the subject of writing itself. This surfaces in her few, but fascinating, personal essays. It's also expounded on in a thoughtful essay on Hemingway's posthumous publications. I wonder if a beginning writing class would benefit from this short book, both in its examples, and analysis, of excellent craft.

My favorite essay--one that I'll print off and make my students read--is the unambiguously titled "On Being Unchosen by the College of One's Choice." I can't recommend it enough, this seven-page flash of genius. Go and find it and read it right now. Written in 1968, it easily speaks to today's college bound, bemoaning the problems and offering succor to this anxious generation.

The Last of the Mohicans

 The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper is an adventure story that traffics in early-American frontier myths. Swashbuckling and melodramatic, the novel reminds me of Ivanhoe, written only seven years earlier. Both novels mourn dying empires, but choose to spend most of the story rescuing beautiful maidens and besting cartoonish villains. Set during the French and Indian War, The Last of the Mohicans is also shockingly violent for something written in 1826. Some scenes almost anticipate Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian in their brutality. As a reader in 2025, part of this makes me uneasy. I am sure that the depictions of American Indians require careful correction and scrutiny, but Cooper does make an honest effort. He takes time to describe several tribes, with their unique languages and customs. Several of the heroes are indigenous (as well as the antagonists). It all seems thoughtful, but I don't know enough about the tribes depicted, or colonial America, or the available resources when the book was written, to offer intelligent commentary on the historicity of the events and characters.

I do know that Cooper is one of the most influential writers in American literature, and this is his most illustrious work. Almost every modern use of the word "Hawkeye"--including the University of Iowa's mascot--comes from the nickname of Natty Bumppo, Cooper's protagonist. There was a popular film of The Last of the Mohicans released in 1992, which I watched for the first time after reading the novel. Both the film and the novel are entertaining and mildly ridiculous. In the novel, a pivotal situation is resolved when Hawkeye puts on a bear suit (!) and infiltrates an indigenous village, completely fooling the Huron tribe. In the film, a nineties-era love story--absent in the novel--is conjured out of nothing and smolders absurdly for long stretches. 

To me, the novel and the film are good summer escapes, and not much more. That said, there is a deep history behind both adventure stories. The French and Indian War, the novel's backdrop, was much more interesting to me than the plot and characters, and I'm motivated to learn more about that time and that place. It's rare that setting becomes the most important literary element in a novel, but that was my experience. 

Martyr!

 Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is one of the most entertaining, profound novels written in the last ten years. I read it eagerly, absorbing the first few humorous chapters and enjoying the transformation as the book shifted into a serious meditation on mortality, sensuality, the power of art, the immigrant experience, and sobriety. The protagonist, Cyrus Shams, is one of the great literary characters: an Iranian-American orphan muddling his way through a quarterlife crisis. He's surrounded by friend support that he takes for granted, and also aided by his subconscious, art, God, and history. It takes him much of the novel to realize this, and to locate a meaning in life, a reason to carry on. Akbar is a poet first, and the writing is unflaggingly pretty, erudite, and honest. 

It becomes clear that the lost meaning is similar to the proverbial "God-shaped hole" in most people's experience. Martyr!'s answer to this is not conventional religion, but something else, a persistent thread in the second half of the book. On a personal level, I think the novel's diagnosis is incorrect. I disagree with Akbar. But Martyr! earns my respect even while presenting a worldview I don't share. It's a brilliantly composed work of art, worthwhile in all sorts of ways--literarily, morally, and aesthetically. 

How to Do Nothing

 How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell is a thoughtful extended essay on redirecting our attention. Specifically, the book wants to replace smartphone addiction with a reconnection to the natural world and, to a lesser extent, left-wing activism. Odell lives in Oakland, and she spends much of How to Do Nothing describing its history and landscape. This is inviting and interesting. The book on the whole is a useful, nudging challenge to be more present in the world, and it's impossible to read the whole thing without evaluating your own mental habits.

Some of the book struck me as unintentionally funny. Odell, an artist in academia in the Bay Area, has a specific assumption about the world, and it's what you would expect from an online, millennial, lefty narrator. She often cites performance artists, for example, that undertake extreme (and to this reader, absurd) "installations" as examples of resisting technology. I had trouble understanding the connection between celebrating bioregionalism and, say, living in a welded-shut cage for a year. Another time, at a reading, she is corrected by her audience for using the app "iNaturalist." This is not because bringing technology to her nature walks is counterintuitive, but because learning the names of plant and animal species privileges an "itemizing, scientific view" of the world. The scolding, jargony language of academia infringed on much of Odell's otherwise good ideas, and made for a complicated read. Despite these somewhat silly asides, I enjoyed How to Do Nothing and found myself rooting for Odell's argument. 

The Last Samurai

 The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt engenders a variety of complicated responses. I enjoyed it; I was frustrated and annoyed by it; I was moved by it. The novel follows a single mother and her prodigy son as they make their way through London during his childhood. Far too smart for normal school, he drifts around the city (often on underground rail) and learns various languages and translates various older texts. The absent father is the animating force behind the story. Concerned by the lack of a strong male figure in their lives, the boy's mother watches and rewatches Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, as though the noble men in that film may impart something to her child. Because she won't tell the boy who his father is, he goes on a sort of quest to locate him, with mixed results. This quest mirrors the film in conscious ways. Written in 2000, The Last Samurai employs tricks from that period: different font sizes and genre-collage blends in a late-postmodern mash-up that reminded me of Jonathan Safran Foer and Jennifer Egan. 

DeWitt is a funny and lively writer, and I was initially drawn in. At first, the five-year-old boy learning linguistics was thrilling. But precocious children soon become annoying, and after a few hundred pages of esoteric verb conjugations in Greek or Japanese or whatever, the "brilliance" of the child felt more like someone imposing collegiate linguistics onto a fictional avatar. The writing became tedious and  show-offy. Both the boy and his mother are bitterly condescending to "normal" people--those with average intelligence who appear content with their lives. The idea that the missing father may be normal haunts both characters. I was put off by this savage elitism until the last fifty pages or so, when the novel turned again, into a surprisingly poignant, Hamlet-esque meditation on the futility of life when weighed against the possibility of suicide. Life, rich with possibilities, won out, and I found the ending satisfying. 

Unfortunately, I read the author's  Afterword in my edition, published in 2016. DeWitt reflects on the positive response from her fans (in many ways the book is brilliant, and well written, and inspiring), but then doubles-down on the premise that society would be full of these genius children if we simply removed the barriers provided by structural education. In her mind, the protagonist isn't special, he's just been given opportunities to explore. Most kids would be translating the original Greek in The Iliad if we only let them. I'm sympathetic to reconsidering children's attention spans and potential--particularly around the negative effects of technology--but DeWitt's view is reductive. The characters in The Last Samurai ignore physical education, socialization, altruism, civic-mindedness, spirituality, and family life in their quest to be smart, to be better, to beat the old records. It makes for an anxious life, and frankly, one that seems remote from real children in the real world. 

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here

 Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer is a vital read. Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker and his book relates several years of reporting on immigration. Powerfully, it follows several real people from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. It is difficult to leave this book without a deep sense of injustice at US foreign aid, immigration policy, and asylum rules. The thesis is clear: intervention from the United States inflamed multiple crises in Central America throughout the 1980s, and then immigration policy--whether cruel or inept--exasperated the issue.

This book is almost 500 pages, but it's a fast read and feels underdeveloped in places. The topic is huge: five countries, fifty years, several personal stories. And yet, I wanted more. Some of the historical events (elections, treaties, administrations, recessions, hurricanes, pandemics) are mentioned in half a paragraph or so, and to this uninitiated reader, the book often left more questions than answers. I found Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here a powerful, urgent read, and at the same time I feel it's more an introduction than a comprehensive survey of its enormous topic. 

All the Pretty Horses

 All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy is a fine work of American fiction. The novel follows its teenage protagonist as he loses his family ranch and lights out for the territory--in this case Mexico--in the years following World War II. The plot is engaging enough: a straightforward account of love, calamity, and violence. McCarthy elevates this story with an extended eye to the past. The protagonist, John Grady Cole, comes of age against a backdrop that seems to blend five centuries. Beginning with Native Americans, extending to colonial Mexican haciendas and then revolutions, and touching on POW camps in the War, the historical allusions all weigh down Cole as he tries to make his own way in the world. He's comforted, ultimately, by the title symbol--a constant presence in the novel that even gallops through his dreaming life. 

Like many, I consumed a lot of Cormac McCarthy during his heyday in the late aughts: I read The Road, Blood Meridian, and No Country for Old Men. All the Pretty Horses is better than all of them. For one, it's not as persistently bleak. Its world feels more balanced, rich with opportunity. The writing is better as well. A. O. Scott of The New York Times said that McCarthy, through his career, went from emulating Faulkner to emulating Hemingway. This may mean a variety of things, but to me his earlier work was too ponderous and his later work too briskly cinematic. All the Pretty Horses strikes a balance between the beauty of its prose and the momentum of its plot. The novel deals with huge questions of fate and religion, of race and class, of the past and the present. And yet, you're never bogged down in too long of an essay: John Grady Cole has a horse to saddle and miles to make before dark.

Two things I loved: the prose and the elderly characters. McCarthy's writing style largely eschews conventional punctuation like quotation marks and apostrophes. The effect on the page, in its dark blunt font, is that spoken dialogue seems to be a jagged extension of the narration, like a faraway mountain range. The untranslated Spanish in conversation only adds to the sense of a rustic, hardscrabble landscape. It's wholly immersive. And the elderly characters--specifically an aunt and judge--seem to come from out the sky to explain to Cole how to understand the place he inherits. If the novel is interested in the past, then the older characters become its mouthpieces. They're almost beyond characters, like fourth-wall breaking narrators. Everything that the reader can sense in the action is put into clearer terms by these two, in their longer conversational asides. While I'm likely to reread all of this great novel, I'm more motivated in the meantime to revisit those two conversations.

Outline (revisited)

 Outline by Rachel Cusk is one of the greatest books I've ever read. I first read it in 2019 and it topped the Kammerzelt list of the best books of the 21st Century. Because it's short and I enjoy rereads, I revisited again this past week. Now, with the rest of the trilogy in mind (and more of Cusk's work, and more life experience), the novel happily holds up as a paragon of craft and narrative. Its conceit is simple: the narrator reveals almost nothing about herself, as other characters provide the "outline" of her through their dialogue, presenting a "corresponding negative" or "anti-description." And yet the cohesivity of Outline and its two sequels, Transit and Kudos, are almost impossible to pull off. It feels, immediately, like a work of crystalline genius. Its very structure comments on its exploration of nihilism, dislocation, meaninglessness, and alienation. Somehow, it's beautiful and inviting throughout, while being on a knife's edge on every page.

I remember being dazzled by the novel the first time I read it, so I missed a minor lag in verisimilitude that became clear this time. The conversations are in some ways too brilliant. I accept that the narrator is eloquent and thoughtful. But it seems that everyone around her becomes just as reflective when they speak with her, and it was difficult to imagine this many real people speaking this way. I can contrast Outline with another of my favorite novels, The Sun Also Rises. There, the characters are often drunk, profane, unintelligible, inarticulate. Here, even deeply unsympathetic people were often measured, wise, and writerly, and it was a pleasure to read but I didn't buy all of it. This is a minor issue in this great book of ideas. It does not inhibit the experience, and I will soon return to Outline and its sequels. 

Memoirs of Hadrian

 Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar is a beautiful, complex novel from the perspective of a Roman emperor. Its subject matter is similar to I, Claudius, but the voice is much more abstract, more methodical, more contemplative. Eschewing specific details and events for a more philosophical reminiscence, the voice reminded me of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead: it was thoughtful and hypnotic. The difference, of course, is that August Hadrian is a much different person than Rev. John Ames. Historically, Hadrian is widely considered one of the "good" Roman emperors (especially compared to Nero or Caligula), but from a late-Modern perspective, that's not a high bar.

One is fooled by the voice, though. A surface reading of Memoirs of Hadrian does seem to present a milder, art-loving, anti-colonial statesman. We are lulled into this sense as Hadrian pulls away from the frontiers (his famous "wall" in Britain meant to be the cap on expansionism, for example). He loves the Greeks; he makes peace with the Parthians. But there's something sinister behind the barely described events. How old was Antinous when Hadrian "adopted" him as a lover? For that matter, what was the age difference? How did he suppress the Jewish revolt? How consensual were his myriad "loves"? How "accidental" was his blinding of a slave with his pen? Beyond the aesthetic prose, the novel hides a deeply unreliable narrator. 

Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

 Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk solidifies its author's place as one of the very best writers alive today. Ostensibly a mystery novel, it inhabits its genre comfortably while transcending it every page. The compelling-but-unsurprising plot unfolds as several bodies turn up in a remote Polish village. The old, eccentric narrator is ignored as she offers increasingly outlandish culprits for the police to investigate. All of this is fine--and well constructed--but it provides only the bare bones of the narrative. The novel is fleshed out with its many masterful motifs: ecology, astrology, religion, ageing, and the works of William Blake, from whom the book takes its title. A deserving Nobel Prize winner, Tokarczuk is a singular, brilliant mind. The three books of hers I've read so far are wildly different in terms of subject matter, form, and even genre, but she maintains a top-tier, crystalline regard for craft and detail. The chapters, sentences, and even word capitalization all serve a remarkably complete voice. Janina Duszejko, the narrator, is one of the most complete and original characters in any work of fiction, in any era. 

The Buried Giant

 The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro is perhaps not the best introduction to his work. I've heard a lot about The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, his more acclaimed books, but they were out from the library. This novel, which I mistook for historical fiction, ended up being a strange foray into the fantasy genre. It blended English folk religion with Arthurian Legend and real, historical conquest. The Buried Giant had some interesting ideas--mainly about collective amnesia regarding large-scale traumas--but the execution was clunky. The characters were often one-dimensional; the plot was formulaic. The dialogue in particular was seemed false: expository and forcibly chivalric. Were it not a short read, I probably wouldn't have finished the book. This is a shame: I should have given Ishiguro a fairer shake with his more celebrated contributions. The Buried Giant felt more like an experiment, and for me, it did not pass the test. 

The Naked and the Dead

 The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer is an exhausting, brutal war novel, written just after his own deployment. It takes place in the Pacific Theater of World War Two, on a large fictional island, and it follows a platoon charged with increasingly difficult missions. Throughout, Mailer includes flashbacks to each platoon member's pre-war life, and during the course of the action, the ultra-omniscient narrator enters the head of multiple characters in every scene. Each character's motivation is clear, and their inability to communicate provides much of the conflict. The perspectives are often interesting, but vary in quality. A Mexican-American private is clumsily rendered; the Jewish characters (mirroring the author) feel more authentic. Perhaps the most layered portrayal is outside the platoon: the repressed, cruel, sensitive, and brilliant  general. Mailer's overall commitment to interiority prolongs the novel's page length, and contributes to its larger effect.

While I often found the soldiers sexist and brutish (again, like the author), the writing works in aggregate. Aside from sporadic violence, the plot is believably dull for long stretches. Mailer's war is a grinding slog, a daily hell. Its a study in exhaustion. The sheer physical cost of jungle warfare, during this era with this technology, was felt in every page. Long marches, sleep-deprived guard posts, heavy packs, wet-hot terrain, insects, sunburns, sores, cramps . . . it all came through. The bleary-eyed mood was more evocative than any other literary element. Mailer wrote this at 25--it's his first novel--and the strongest impression of the book was the fresh retelling of a veteran experience, as though he still had sweat stains and jungle rot when he crumpled down at the typewriter and cranked the novel out.

The Inconvenient Indian

 The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King is an extended essay on its title subject. The tone of the book is light and conversational, often describing its own writing process in an almost Postmodern, fourth-wall breaking. King's wife, for example, will often look over his shoulder in the narration and tell him to modify it somehow, and he will. He's often funny, though in later chapters his asides become more snarky and more tiresome. While overstaying its welcome, the voice makes for an inviting, fast-paced read.

Much more important that the voice, of course, is the subject matter. King was born in California, worked in Utah, and now lives in Ontario. He's Cherokee. His narration blends the personal and the historical, the Canadian and the American. Every era that King explores--from 1492 to post-1985 (it makes sense in context)--challenges myths, illuminates little-known stories, and comes from an indigenous perspective. This book is by no means comprehensive: it's an enormous topic. But it is certain to shift understanding, especially among Anglo readers.

Nuclear War

 Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen is impossible to put down. I stayed up four hours past my normal sleeping time, starting and finishing the book in one day. Jacobsen is a journalist, and she considers the book nonfiction, though it's probably best understood as a speculative novel rooted in facts. The facts are highly disturbing. Every fifty pages or so, some insane, myth-puncturing truth will enter the narrative and change your whole perspective on our "safety" in this world. Ballistic missiles can travel half the globe in 30 minutes. The missile defense shield is laughably small and inept. The ultimate decisions regarding nuclear strikes are in the hands of presidents, as mercurial and feeble as they can be. And so on. Jacobsen includes mini-essays after some chapters to prove her point, and the endnotes are full of interviews with former military personnel and scientists corroborating her conclusions.

The "scenario" in the subtitle is the speculative novel. According to Jacobsen, it's a likely unfolding of events if one missile left North Korea for Washington D.C. (something they apparently have the technology to accomplish). Based on current capabilities and political realities, along with the DEFCON 1 emergency procedures, seventy-two minutes after the Korean launch the world would be forever changed. The final result is something like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, only a lot colder and with more radiation sickness. It's hard to know what to make of a book like this. Deeply unsettling, but with a subject matter so outside our abilities to comprehend or meaningfully take action*, one is just left with a sober appreciation of the 21st Century's realities, and a humble appeal to a Higher Power.

*Unless you moved to the Southern Hemisphere, stocked up on Pedialyte, and dug a really good bunker . . .

At Swim-Two-Birds

 At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien is a slim, bizarre work of metafiction that is about four decades ahead of its time. Released just before World War Two, it would seem to be late Modernism, but by my judgment fits much more squarely into the height of Postmodernism. Briefly, the "plot" of the novel involves a lazy student working on a novel about a writer of other novels whose characters eventually revolt against the fictional writer. Throughout, random Irish folk heroes dip in and out of the scenes, and the student's uncle-landlord hectors him about his studies. The student narrator feels like Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces. The setting and voice evoke James Joyce. But the structure--in metafiction and especially in collage-like asides--anticipates Donald Barthelme more than these two. There is a late scene where a conversation devolves into dissociative science jargon, where "the following terms relating to the science of medicine were used with surprising frequency, videlicet, chyme, exophthalmus, scirrhus, and mycetoma meaning respectively food when acted upon by gastric juices and converted into acid pulp, protrusion of the eyeball, hard malignant tumour . . ." Barthelme admired O'Brien, and his haphazard, cut-and-paste stories from across genre echo this strange novel. 

So what to make of this anachronistic little book? I was mostly entertained, if mildly irritated in places. It's a ridiculous, slapdash novel. While most of the dialogue and characterization is endearingly silly, the "plot" meanders so wildly that you can almost feel a five-page stretch into nonsense coming. This is also funny, but the joke is on the reader. How many bad Irish poems can you read before closing the book? How seriously should you care about a work-within-a-work's character and his quest for revenge? Where in the world is this thing going? As it happens, the ending was satisfying, and well executed. O'Brien, for all his absurdity, can write. Overblown and windy, the descriptions were still often beautiful. Now that I know where the novel is headed, I think I will reread At Swim-Two-Birds. On its own risible terms, it's a worthwhile experience. 

English Pastoral

 English Pastoral: An Inheritance by James Rebanks is one of the great eco-memoirs of this or any generation. It's an homage to the English countryside, which has operated under a shared local knowledge for millennia. Until recently, that is: the gains in industrial farming over the last few decades have rendered the landscape unrecognizable and deadly to human and non-human life. Rebanks explains this deliberately. He traces his grandfather's practices to his family's modernization to their backlash to the degradation. There's a moral outrage underneath his stories, but he's smart enough to avoid a good/evil binary. There are countless reasons why our food supply exists in its current form. We can decide what future we want. Reading from a non-farming perspective, I learned an enormous amount, and everyday trips to the supermarket are now fraught with complexity.

This slim book stirred me on an emotional level. I thought of a Native American Ecosystems class I took in college, where the thesis for the course was essentially that our landscape has evolved alongside humans, that there is no "untouched" wilderness. I thought of my brother, who bow hunts for elk and catches his own fish. (We just had his elk sausage for dinner.) I thought of the great Steven Rinella, who won't eat "game" unless he harvests it himself. I thought of my friend Kevin, who raises cattle sustainably and humanely. I thought of Wendell Berry and John Muir and Barry Lopez. I thought of my college summer jobs, driving combines and burning fields. James Rebanks is a remarkable man leading a remarkable life, and I am eager to read more of his books and follow his career.

Rocannon's World

Rocannon's World by Ursula K. Le Guin is a brisk sci-fi/fantasy novella, the first in her Hainish Cycle universe. It reads like The Lord of the Rings and Ender's Game, if both texts were mashed up and played at triple speed. My entry into Le Guin's fiction was in the same universe but written later: The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Those two novels are masterpieces, fully realized worlds that invite multiple reads and analysis. They were both written at the height of her career. In comparison, this book felt like a blueprint, an outline. 

It was still enjoyable. The title itself is a complicated reference to colonialism. While some of the alien creatures and humanoid civilizations felt cartoonish and silly, others were haunting and poignant. The planet's climate and yearly rotation felt big and cold and real. Most of the offhand references to myths or political factions were interesting, making me want to know more. Rocannon's World is clearly the early writings of a great genius finding her voice. Like a good band's first demo tape, it's undercooked and uneven, while pulsing with exciting raw potential.

The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt is a fascinating work of moral psychology. Drawing from convincing international research and evolutionary biology, the book explains why deeply held values direct tribal groups, much more than reason or argumentation. The best metaphor is the rider and the elephant. Our minds are made up of a rider (reason, logic) on an elephant (emotions, instinct, intuitions). The elephant is mostly in charge, but the rider can mildly direct the elephant. Most often, the rider backtracks and rationalizes the decisions the elephant makes. With several clever examples, Haidt demonstrates this in the most skeptical readers (provided the reader isn't a psychopath). It's a wild journey. 

More than that, it's a helpful read if you're frustrated with our polarized society. In fact, I recommend pairing The Righteous Mind with Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized. The latter focuses on structural division; the former on instinctual human nature. Both books are light on possible solutions, but there is some comfort to be taken in their clear-eyed assessment of the problem. At a basic level, they demystify the seeming madness of the other side. Notably, both writers are liberal. (I have not heard of a conservative writer that attempts to accomplish what Haidt and Klein are getting at.) That said, both--and especially Haidt--are generous in their understandings of those big, right-leaning swathes of our populace. 

Emperor of Rome

 Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World by Mary Beard is an interesting, readable history of the titular dynasties between Julius Caesar and Alexander Severus. It's told thematically rather than chronologically, exploring topics like dining, travel, apotheosis, and court life. I'm a man who thinks a lot about the Roman Empire. I'd read another Beard history--SPQR--and enjoy them both. It's easy to see why Beard is the most popular current classicist: she's honest, funny, humble, and learned.