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.