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.