The Anomaly

 The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier is a thrilling read. Unfortunately, I learned too much in a review before I picked up the novel, and I felt that diminished some of my enjoyment reading it, so here I will avoid most summary. Just know that the novel recounts a global response to a major event, an event that shifts humanity's perception of reality. There are big surprises, and mind-bending explanations for the events of the text. Well-written and suspenseful, The Anomaly is difficult to put down. I read it in a weekend. Though certainly plot-driven, it's also an ideas novel, and the speculative philosophy--with roots in French Existentialism--is probably the most interesting aspect of the book. It's impossible not to ponder the large questions at its center, even as you're forging ahead to find out what happens. Relentlessly, the text doesn't quit, and the last few pages literally raised hair on the back of my neck. It was unsettling and disturbing and creepy and wonderful. 

Reading the novel so quickly removes some of my evaluation until later, on reflection. There were some artistic problems in The Anomaly. In a way, I was reminded of Richard Powers's The Overstory, in that the science and ideas of the novel were fascinating, the characterization less so. With their big casts of characters, both Powers and Le Tellier achieve some empathy, but leave out huge gaps. Antagonists are therefore reduced to cardboard caricatures. For Powers, it was the buffoons in the Timber Industry; for Le Tellier, it was for the simple-minded religious. In both cases, the other side exists more like a shrill social-media stereotype than an actual group of people. Late in The Anomaly, there's a scene involving religious leaders that reads very similarly to a clumsy passage in Yann Martel's overrated Life of Pi: narrow-minded fuddy duddies thwart the good-faith inquiry of curious protagonists. They bicker and throw stones at the other religions, but have no self-awareness, humility, or sense of wonder. I know many religious leaders, and none of them behave like these characters. Tellingly, the religious are all American, and Le Tellier writes from secular France. One of the thoughtful (good, secular) main characters, in a television interview, simply says "I don't understand" those people. Even when the omniscient narrative enters the mind of a zealot, it is clear that Le Tellier does not either. 

Still, this gap in empathy and--I would argue--creative integrity and realism, did not ruin the text for me. If anything, it stood out as a clumsy divergence from an otherwise excellent read. 

Babylon Remembered

 Babylon Remembered by David Malouf is a poetic, post-colonial novel set in Australia. There is no single protagonist--each chapter centers a different character--but the novel is concerned with the story of a white man who stumbles into a nineteenth-century outback village after being raised, mostly, by Aboriginal Australians. Most of the villagers treat this man with suspicion. Using hazy, impressionistic vignettes, Malouf tells a story of frontier life, poor communication, racism, poverty, and sadness. Some of the narration was convoluted, purple prose that overwhelmed the clarity of the story. In other places, the details were illuminating and haunting. 

The "Babylon" of the title was difficult to locate. Was it the Aboriginal society? England (or for some characters, Scotland)? Was it the colonial era in general, as the last chapter is set fifty years hence? Since none of those were given more than a half chapter or so, each, they did not seem to drive any character's motivation. Ultimately, the text was beautiful in places and consistently melancholic, but would have benefitted from greater cohesion in the narrative. 

The Dakota Winters

 The Dakota Winters by Tom Barbash is thoroughly enjoyable. It reads like a Brat Pack novel. I was reminded of Less Than Zero, only without the horrific subject matter. The novel charts the early-twenties malaise of its narrator, Anton Winter, as he drifts through New York City in 1980. Winter's father is a former talk show host, and they are friends with many celebrities, so many that I thought the novel was a little too name-droppy in its first half, but I think Barbash settled in and pulled it off in the end. 

A key figure in the novel is Anton's building neighbor, John Lennon. While Lennon's death is foreshadowed by a handful of recurring details--the fans outside the building, the general violence of 1980's New York--the novel does not wallow in it. It's sad in places but mostly a celebration of a great life in a great city. Page by page, The Dakota Winters retains its coolly jaded tone and inviting pace, and I read it hungrily, longing to turn up some synthesizer music and go for a drive under neon lights. 

The Iceman Cometh

 The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill is considered his greatest work. It's pretty good. I haven't read a play for a while, except for the Shakespeare I teach, and reading this one was fun, if a bit disorienting. I'm reminded of how my students must feel confused and frustrated when they begin a play: it's hard to know which characters are important, which stage directions are foreshadowing, etc. After about two acts I was engaged, however. I like O'Neill. He's at once generous to his characters and brutally honest about their human potential for growth. 

At its ending, The Iceman Cometh is bleak and nihilistic. It's an ideas play, and while I admire the craft that it took to get there, I never really felt like I was reading a realistic human exchange. This vague inauthenticity may be the author, or the time period, or the medium itself. I like plays, but they don't strike me as believable as a good novel might. Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion's masterpiece, is every bit as much about our inability to overcome self deception, but it felt true the entire time. But I will continue to appreciate good old Eugene O'Neill. Working within his medium, he clearly has important things to say. 

The Morning Star

 The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard is a walk-off grand slam of a novel. It hits in several places: emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, artistically. It's huge and bizarre and inscrutable and deeply humane. Because much of the pleasure of the novel came from the sheer surprise of the events of the pages, I hesitate to summarize any of it. A tiny sliver of exposition: after an epigraph from the Bible about people wanting to die, the novel records a few hot summer days when a new star appears in the sky. There are multiple narrators. Things are slightly off in each life's story. Strange things begin to happen . . . And that's enough of that. I demand that every reader of this humble blog drop everything and read The Morning Star so we can get a beer and talk about it. 

Knausgaard is my boy, and I like everything he writes. While he's good in every genre, his novels* are severely underrated. Only two have been translated to English, this one and 2004's A Time for Everything. Both novels are long and weighty. They seriously explore religion, specifically Christianity. His novels ignore the trappings of genre, and realism, and instead immerse the reader in worlds that are absolutely human and absolutely mystical. Knausgaard's sense of pace--deliberate and mundane--lulls the reader into a feeling of normalcy and then subverts it perfectly with chilling details. Early in The Morning Star, for example, a father takes his children fishing in a boat. He looks down and sees the water "teeming with crabs. Not just little stone crabs, but big sea crabs. There seemed to be hundreds of them, creeping and crawling on top of each other . . . It was like a snake pit." His sons don't notice, and they move to open water. Like passengers on that boat, us readers get taken along as well, slowly drifting into much darker waters. 

*Technically, the My Struggle series is a novel, but it's so autobiographical that many reviewers now just call it nonfiction. "Novel" may be the best description in our limited vernacular to describe that piece of art, but for our purposes we won't count My Struggle. 

Small Reviews

 Beginning in-person school has been a drain on my bandwidth. I have almost no time to write. I still read, though. Here are reviews--even smaller than normal--of a few good books from the past few months.

Second Place by Rachel Cusk is unsettling and weird. It's not as perfectly composed as her Outline trilogy: the narrative voice is uneven and sometimes manic. There are many exclamation points and wild mood swings. Still, it's Rachel Cusk. The "imperfection" of this novel amplifies the uncertainty of the story. Gloomy, irritating, effective.

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner is a fine memoir that I want to teach in my older classes. She's from Eugene, like me; I love her accurate portrayals. Great food motif throughout. Sensuous, heartbreaking, thoughtful.

Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein is must-read nonfiction about our political moment. He's as insightful as he is on his podcast. Everything from American governmental structure to group psychology is explored. Urgent, accurate, illuminating.

Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins is a poetic take on the post-apocalyptic novel. Details of a broken world are presented impressionistically, in a variety of genres and voices. Not all of it lands, and it's dark and gratuitous, but I read it eagerly. Raw, sun-baked, lively. 

Democracy

 Democracy by Joan Didion is her favorite piece of writing according to a recent interview. I'd read it years ago, but was clearly at a place then to not comprehend any of it: I'd forgotten the novel. (This happens a lot when I reflect on English classes I can't remember whose subjects are fascinating to me now. I should have gone to college two decades later.) Anyway, it's terrific. The protagonist Inez Victor, a distracted wife of a failed presidential candidate, makes her way through political scandal and family turmoil against the backdrop of America's failure in Vietnam and the evacuation of Saigon. As a daughter of Honolulu, Inez grew up assuming that American entrepreneurial spirit would colonize the frontiers of the Pacific. Her disillusionment with Vietnam parallels the failures in her personal life, to the point where she recognizes "history, or more exactly the particular undertow of having and not having, the convulsions of a world largely unaffected by the individual efforts of anyone in it." 

One of the pleasures of Democracy is that it contains many of Didion's greatest hits in one volume. It has the above-mentioned thesis about humanity: mechanistic, like in "Los Angeles Notebook"; unable to interpret events, like in "The White Album"; and producing a nihilistic ennui, like Play It As It Lays. In a fun postmodern twist, Joan Didion herself is a character, a reporter like from her essay collections, producing precise scenes but offering little by way of assurance or narrative. The messaging among some characters is focus-grouped and meaningless, like all of her subjects in Political Fictions. There's the vague global business deals and bargaining, like in Miami or Salvador--it does not come as a surprise that a major character is really trafficking opium more than "democracy." And droning persistently behind much of her work is the eerie specter of American militarism, whether it's an Army base in Colorado in "John Wayne: A Love Song" or a Pacific island obliterated by atomic tests in Democracy. The novel absolutely stands alone, and yet it can also serve as a good prologue to her tremendous oeuvre. 

Last Evenings on Earth

 Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño is a fine short story collection that drifts between Chile, Mexico, Spain, India, the United States, and more. Like W. G. Sebald, Bolaño often writes around catastrophic events, putting the aftermath of the crisis in the forefront and only hinting at the crisis itself. For Sebald, it's the Holocaust; for Bolaño, it's the Pinochet era in Chile. Last Evenings on Earth, then, is a generally plotless collage of aimless protagonists and unexplainable happenings. The effect that begins to emerge, story by story, is one of dislocation, grief, and Hemingway's "grace under pressure." As readers we become forced to fill in the gaps in understanding--the ambiguity--with our own interpretation of that mood.  

My first attempt reading Bolaño was his most celebrated work, the novel 2666. That book also circled around a horrifying event--the murders of women in Mexico's Ciudad Juárez--until it didn't. For the first 400 pages, 2666 only hinted at the violence. After that, he plunged in and described, in clinical detail, the discovery of hundreds of bodies of sexual assaulted women. I was engaged with the first part of the text, but I was so nauseated by the second half that I had to put it down. I may or may not finish 2666, but I acknowledge that Bolaño is a tremendous talent. His work is serious, global, and insightful. His plot structures are surprising and well crafted. For me, he bridges the structural innovation of European fiction with the landscapes and romanticism of the Americas, and I'm excited to read more.

Dune

Dune by Frank Herbert is sometimes called the greatest science-fiction novel of all time. I have not read many science-fiction novels, but I have read a few that are, in fact, greater than Dune. Ursula Le Guin, for example, is a stronger writer with a better knack for multi-layered characters. Dune characters are distracting with their silly names, like Duncan Idaho or Princess Irulan; their gravely sophomoric dialogue; and their single-minded, unambiguous motivation. Too many times to count, one character would say something ominous, only to have his listener "swallow" in fear. There was a lot of swallowing. Unfortunately, Dune had many of the clunky problems that has kept me away from science fiction in the past. 

However, while distracting to read page by page, the novel as a whole is a successful exercise in imagination and world building. Like Le Guin, Herbert blends space travel with religion, anthropology, government, economics, and ecology. His universe is comprehensive and, once you get past the individual characters, believable. There's quite a bit of backstory in Dune that is at times alluded to and at times fully explained in the appendix, and it's legitimately interesting. This Fall, a film version of the novel will come out, and I will go see it, so engaged was I by the world Herbert created. If the screenwriters improve on the dialogue, it should be a good one. 

The Club

 The Club: How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports, by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg, mostly lives up to the claims of its subtitle. It's a light, fun read. I've known that the EPL was the most entertaining league in world sports for a few years now. I enjoy weekend mornings with a cup of coffee, transfixed as Tottenham Hotspur roars through miserable English weather, far across the globe. The Club more or less explains why I, and countless others from every continent, can actually watch them. Television deals, wealthy owners, machinations of culture, and deliberate appeals of individual clubs have raise the profile of English soccer from a urine-soaked hooligan brawl in the 1970's and 80's to the fine entertainment it is today.

Plenty of moral ambiguity fogs the story, as select billionaires from around the world have turned middling clubs from relative backwaters into huge successes. Some clubs, like Blackburn Rovers, were financially propped up to actually win the league, then fell away. Others, like current league leader Manchester City, are essentially PR for the Abu Dhabi royal family, and while they aren't historically well-respected in England, they are enormous international entities. Chelsea owes its recent trophies to a Russian industrialist. Arsenal and Manchester United are owned by out-of-touch Americans. Traditionally important teams like Leeds and Newcastle struggle to keep up. As a fan of an American college team from a relative backwater (Oregon State) who has seen my rival propped up by a billionaire (the University of Oregon), I can empathize with English fans that do not welcome this change. Still, Tottenham is a terrific team to follow. I'm glad that it isn't difficult to watch them live, weekly, on the west coast of America. I don't know how I feel about what it took to get EPL football into my living room, but I'm glad it's there. 

A Life's Work

 A Life's Work by Rachel Cusk is a parenting memoir that speaks the truth. In that sense, it's a rarity. My edition came out seven years after the original, and it contains maybe the best addendum I've ever read, where Cusk addresses "readers who find honesty akin to blasphemy when the religion is that of motherhood." She has to clarify that she does not, in fact, hate her own children. And with that out of the way, we plunge into a wide-eyed and often hilarious account. The physical changes of pregnancy, the lack of sleep, the bizarre social expectations, and the inability to connect with her baby daughter all are given a thorough examination. I can see why at the time the text was controversial, in that it totally lacks sentimentality, but having read later Cusk, I was not surprised. Her voice, if anything, was funnier in A Life's Work than it was in the Outline trilogy or her essay collection, and I loved it. 

One interesting theme throughout the memoir was the dual impact of reading. On one hand, classical literature gave Cusk a foundation to understand her experience. She begins chapters with passages from writers like Edith Wharton or Charlotte Bronte, and these segue easily to her own revelations. On the other hand, current parenting books leave her bewildered. "Like a bad parent," she observes "the literature of pregnancy bristles with threats and the promise of reprisal, with ghoulish hints at the consequences of thoughtless actions. Eat pâté and your baby will get liver damage. Eat blue cheese and your baby will get listeria . . . Stroke the cat and your baby will get toxoplasmosis . . ." It was both funny and alarming how off-base Cusk found most professional advice. This juxtaposition between the usefulness of literary fiction and the stress of unhelpful nonfiction made as good a case for the study of English literature as I've seen. 

Shadow Country

Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen is a capital "g" Great American novel. It's actually a revised blend of three earlier works, a trilogy compressed into one volume. Shadow Country won the National Book Award in 2008, and deserved it. I had read The Snow Leopard by Matthiessen, and I like The Paris Review, which he co-founded. This novel was still an enormous revelation, a triumph of historical fiction and perspective. Ed Watson--the outlaw protagonist--is murdered in the first few pages and unsurprisingly again at the end (the structure of the text makes this obvious), but in between the narrative expands and contracts and swings wildly into the years before and after the death. A diverse chorus of characters, not least Watson himself, tell the story, and the result is copious but not comprehensive. Satisfyingly, Shadow Country retains its mystery and murkiness even after its 900 pages. 

Matthiessen grapples with the setting--South Florida post-Reconstruction--in all its ugliness. Racism, environmental destruction, alcoholism, sexism, and a pervasive code of warped frontier justice all infect the worldview so thoroughly that violence becomes predictable, even commonplace. It's hard to assign blame for the destruction in the novel. Capitalism played a part, as did Civil War trauma. A vague standoff with indigenous tribes in the Everglades. Watson's own childhood abuse. Even indifferent nature, with its mosquitoes and hurricanes. The last flashes of Watson's consciousness--"this world is painted on a wild dark metal"--may be the closest we get to a reason for it all. Shadow Country is exhausting, then, but skillfully told and worth the slog.