To Be Young Is To Know Solitude

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 121
S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

Ponyboy Curtis never wanted to join a street gang and fight with switchblades, but survival made it necessary. The streets are divided between the working-class Greasers, who pride themselves on their swagger and their lustrous hair, and the Socs, who drive flash cars and wear the slickest clothes money can buy. The groups fight, not because they have personal animosity, but because it’s what they do. Existential boredom leaves them with little besides the fight.

S.E. Hinton’s debut novel, written when she was still in high school, is sometimes credited as the beginning of the young adult genre. Other authors had written for teenaged readers before, but Hinton took an unprecedented tack. She wrote a teenager’s story of conflict and incipient adulthood, not for finger-wagging moralistic purposes, but simply because it’s his story. Hinton refuses to pass judgement, even when Ponyboy, her first-person narrator, spirals into self-recrimination.

The Greasers, by definition, have nothing. Ponyboy is an orphan, raised by his eldest brother, who’s forced to become a parent to teens at only twenty. His middle brother dropped out to get a job, basically because that’s what middle kids do. Other greasers dodge drunken parents, or practice fights in city parks, simply to pass the time. Ponyboy admits he doesn’t like most of them, but calls them his friends, because they can rely only upon one another.

Hinton putatively began writing this novel because a high school friend received a vicious beat-down, simply for walking unaccompanied. This event, and the trauma it caused not only him but everyone who loved him, becomes the inciting incident of the novel. Her feuding gangs hate one another without knowing one another, and fight because it gives their otherwise shapeless lives meaning. Hinton implies the battles would stop if participants simply spoke to one another.

One evening at the drive-in, Ponyboy and his friends encounter some well-scrubbed, middle-class girls. These girls rebuff the more aggressive Greasers, but one of them finds Ponyboy, with his big eyes and poetic soul, interesting. She wants to learn how the other half lives. But since Greasers and Socs never talk, this innocent encounter gets quickly misconstrued. An argument turns into a fight, turns into a knifing. Ponyboy flees a manslaughter accusation.

S.E. Hinton

Hinton never gives specific dates, and few places. Her gang of Greasers prefers Elvis, while the Socs favor the Beatles, which gives an approximate time. And her descriptions of dusty city streets, high-school rodeos, and rolling country hills locate the story in the southern Great Plains. Observant readers will recognize Hinton’s native Tulsa, Oklahoma. Which leads to an important question: is being rich in America’s despised hinterland any better than being poor?

The entire novel asks how an innocent, poetic teenager would handle everything that could go wrong in life, going wrong in quick succession. As the youngest Greaser, at only fourteen, Ponyboy is unprepared for battles against older, larger boys. When one battle leaves a Soc dead, he’s unprepared for the fugitive life. Isolation forces him into soul-searching that most boys don’t face until much later. Even soul-searching uncovers some conclusions he can’t yet handle.

Ponyboy and his friends find themselves in a no-win situation. If they flee their crimes, they’ll live as fugitives forever, with nothing to show for lives that have barely begun. But if they take accountability, they’ll face a criminal justice system that, they already understand, is slanted against poor, long-haired teenagers, and they’ll still lose everything. They find themselves forced into a world where choices lack the moral clarity of children’s stories and simple fables they learned in school.

Perhaps more than the story itself, Hinton’s narrative clarity differs from her contemporaries. Other youth narrators, like Scout Finch and Holden Caulfield, aren’t really children, they’re adults remembering childhood from their Olympus-like perch. Ponyboy is a real kid, struggling to come to grips with the adult responsibilities thrust upon him. He lacks mature guidance, only advice from other kids trapped in these circumstances with him. He survives, not because adults give him easy answers, but because he keeps moving when everything around him collapses.

At only 180 pages, written in a conversational tone, this book isn’t difficult reading. Its intended high-school audience will read it quickly, but they’ll also find themselves confronted with questions they can’t put aside nearly so easily. Adult readers will struggle with many of the novel’s themes of existentialism, purpose, and identity. The deep-seated social dislocation which Hinton identified in post-WWII America haven’t been resolved over sixty years later.

Knowledge That Died in the War

Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch: a Novel

Young ConaLee comes from a part of West Virginia hill country where people don’t need, or know, one another’s last names. Therefore it isn’t strange that she doesn’t know hers, or her mother’s Christian name. When the aggressive interloper that ConaLee knows only as Papa (though he isn’t her father) tires of ConaLee’s family, he deposits them at the lunatic asylum in Weston, ConaLee must maintain the illusion of post-Civil War respectability that she’s mastered.

Author and professor Jayne Anne Phillips’ novels focus on lonely souls wandering an America they don’t understand. She won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, which focuses on the loss of knowledge that follows war. Phillips’ characters spend the story pursuing information, and the healthy closure that come with it, and several times come perilously close to finding it. They never know how close, though, because unlike we readers, they have only a limited perspective.

Yanked out of the only life she’s ever known, ConaLee wants to protect her mother from more harm than she’s already experienced. ConaLee blames herself for her failure to ward of Papa, a Confederate deserter and sexual predator. This self-blame is certainly unfair, since she’s only thirteen. But the wider world ConaLee experiences at the Weston lunatic asylum [sic] makes her realize how small and uninformed she is, leaving her desperate for any momentary understanding.

Her mother passes as Miss Janet, a well-to-do who keeps her secrets zealously. Glimpsed from her perspective, though, the story changes. Her husband, ConaLee’s father, enlisted at the start of the Civil War, believing that valorous service would grant him status. They ran from ignominious beginnings, after all, and live in constant fear of capture. Service would grant both of them a legal name and freedom from the hunt. Sadly, he just never came back.

John O’Shea, the asylum’s Night Watch, knows that isn’t his real name. Wounded at some distant battle, he lost all memory before the War. He earned a pseudonym and discovered a talent for helping those who, like him, lost mental capacity through trauma or abuse. He continues searching for his past identity, feeling the gnawing sensation that someone, somewhere, waits for him. We know, as readers, who that is, but his wounded memory remains slippery.

Jayne Anne Phillips

Overseeing everything is Dearbhla (pronounced “Dervla”), a patient watchwoman who is half doting grandmother, half Irish swamp witch. She longs to restore ConaLee’s sundered family and exorcise Papa’s damage, but without better skills, she remains an observer. She wanders throughout the Virginias, seeking the lines of knowledge which war severed, always one step removed from finding it. Readers see how close she comes, always doomed to mishear a valuable clue or to miss something important.

Phillips’ narrative might meet the criteria of “postmodernism,” since it deals with the finitude of human knowledge. Her characters stumble blindly, always just barely failing to glimpse the truth, because they don’t understand their place in the narrative. Because they don’t know it’s a narrative. We readers understand we’re reading a novel, and therefore we grasp the importance of the many missed clues. But meaning is something readers impute, not something these characters naturally have.

Novels like this turn on degrees of disappointment. Characters are condemned to repeat the patterns of dancing right up to the precipice of understanding, then dance away again, never realizing how close they came. We wait on tenterhooks to see when the characters will realize what’s obvious to us, knowing that when they do, some other form of disappointment will follow. The limits of human perspective, and the fallibility of human memory, keep them blind.

The narrative voice reads more like a prose poem than a novel. Or like several braided poems. ConaLee, home-schooled on the books her mother can afford, mostly Dickens and the Bible, speaks in a lyric voice which differentiates her from more pragmatic characters, like the asylum doctor. O’Shea, a complete tabula rasa, has a plainspoken patter, a strict noun-verb voice bereft of ornament. War has changed how characters speak, leaving them with outdated, peculiar voices.

Human beings, Phillips implies, exist within a broader tapestry. But seen from inside, we never grasp the part we play, the thread we leave behind. Meaning comes only when we view the story from outside, which individuals can never do. Knowledge is something we create, not something that exists. And, as characters change names like shirts, even our identities come from our actions, not our beings. Someday, looking back, we’ll glimpse what it all meant.

The Dark Art of Nebraska Realism

Reina de los Comodines, A History of Bad Men

Cat Taylor loves to spin stories about his romantic Bayou Country heritage, but in reality, he’s lived his life in deep Midwestern disappointment. A stereotypical pretentious drunk, Cat doesn’t speak with his nearly-grown kids, but he still aspires to build a relationship with Martha, the downstate girl he met on a dating app. He doesn’t realize that he’s walked into a netherworld that he may never escape.

Once upon a time, novelists published their works serially, dropping them chapter by chapter into high-gloss magazines and penny chapbooks. Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, and even Hunter S. Thompson published their best-known works this way, which allowed them to adapt their storytelling to readers’ demands. But since television displaced magazines as truly mass media, this tradition has largely disappeared from print. Reina de los Comedines wants to resurrect the form.

Big River, Nebraska, is only a two-hour drive for Cat, who lives in the college town of Fetterman, but for Nebraskans, that’s a pretty wide gulf. Martha and Cat meet in The Bar, which, in this narrative, represents Nebraska’s id. Inside The Bar, Cat meets an ensemble cast of working-class Nebraskans who’ve seemingly trauma bonded over living in a city that modernity forgot. Reina de los Comedines writes herself into this cast.

According to Reina’s pre-release, this novel is a roman á clef, and most of her intended audience will recognize themselves. This probably undersells the actual story. The real Reina was a semi-public figure in the IRL equivalent of Big River, but chose to return to anonymity, as much as media-saturated modernity allows. This lets her depict her bar, and her Nebraska, as a highly symbolic mélange of aspiration and disappointment.

(As an aside, the real Reina lives in Big River, and I live in Fetterman. We met on a dating app. I’m trying not to take it personally.)

In the first two chapters, Cat and Martha try to have their first date, but it starts off rocky. Throughout almost the entire two chapters, The Bar’s denizens have a donnybrook about whether Jason Isbell is real country music. Chapter Three takes a sudden turn, leaping several months forward, finding Cat and “Martie” suddenly on the outs. The story also takes an abrupt tonal shift into magic realism.

Reina de los Comodines

Reading the chapters together, one suspects this later tone more accurately reflects the story Reina prefers to tell. The symbolism which her first chapters conceal in subtext, becomes more evident in Chapter Three. Her authorial self-insert character offers Cat the guidance he needs, but one gets the feeling, reading the nuanced complexity with which Cat responds, that this give-and-take is more internal than Reina admits.

When I say the author writes a self-insert, I don’t mean this as either an aspersion or a denigration. She gives the character her own pseudonym, and describes the character exactly as she depicts herself on social media. By writing herself into her story, Reina takes the initiative to tell the characters around her the truth they clearly need to hear—and to receive the criticism she needs to receive back from them.

Historically, Magic Realism has its greatest popularity in abandoned colonial empires. Jorge Luis Borges and Edwidge Danticat write from worldview predicated on the distrust that follows conquest. They present a world in which the Freudian subconscious, which citizens of industrialized empires seek to silence, is both present and real, in a physical sense. In the Magic Realist narrative, language creates reality, and symbols have mass.

That’s what happens in Reina’s third chapter. Her argument about whether Jason Isbell is real country music, is actually about who gets to control people’s identity in the hinterlands. Do the residents of forgotten agrarian communities like Big River decide for themselves, or do they purchase their identity from the corporate music publishers? In the first two chapters, this is subtext. In Chapter Three, it becomes the focus.

It may seem like I’m harping on about just three chapters. Because of this novel’s serial nature, I suspect Reina is still developing themes as she writes. However, I’m eager to see where this story goes, and to keep writing, she needs an audience. Therefore I’m willing to review a novel that’s still finding its feet in real time, because I feel it’s off to a promising start.

I postponed writing this review because I hoped to read Chapter Four, which was due to drop. However, Reina has a job and a kid, and deadlines are elastic. I only hope to steer her the audience her work deserves.

Low-Budget Monsters and High-Price Consequences

Paul Tremblay, Horror Movie: a Novel

Thirty years ago, when longshot indie movies became a realistic media presence, four New England kids decided to make a horror film. Decades later, the unfinished movie’s moldering remains have become a viral internet sensation, and the last surviving cast member is involved in helping the production “go Hollywood.” Between the two stories of cinematic hubris, one survivor recounts his tale of deep immersion, and the stains that don’t wash off.

Stoker Award-winning novelist Paul Tremblay’s books are often deemed “postmodern” because they comment on storytelling and the creative process. In this one, the nameless narrator recounts the two productions of his horror movie, entitled Horror Movie. Tremblay divides the novel into three braided strands: “Then,” “Now,” and the screenplay from the unfinished movie. Each, in various ways, criticizes the Hollywood process, while praising the human relationships which make Hollywood possible.

In the “Then” section, set mostly in 1993, a trio of starry-eyed artistes dragoons our narrator into their movie, mostly because a key prop fits his face. The movie, featuring adults playing teenagers in the 1990s style, addresses adolescent themes that seem simultaneously dated, and completely timeless. We know, because the narrator warns us, that this production ends in tragedy; we wait tentatively to discover what happens.

The “Now” section, set in 2023, describes how our narrator collaborates with a major studio to remake the unfinished movie. The original director used the internet to create buzz around a movie nobody saw, and the broken lives left in the movie’s wake, before she died—a death revealed only slowly. Our narrator gives the “E! True Hollywood Story” version, but only through his own, distinctly traumatized viewpoint.

Finally, the screenplay is… well… unfilmable. It represents the grandiosity that infected would-be auteurs after Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater made guerilla filmmaking look easy. Three teenagers turn the pain and ennui of suburban life into tortures they inflict on their anonymous friend, naively yearning to live inside their favorite horror films. They want, but don’t want, to create a monster. The script includes long, discursive passages which voice the screenwriter’s private misery.

Paul Tremblay

The word “metafiction” has been tossed around so heedlessly in recent years, that it’s become a parody of itself. We know the boilerplates: characters leaning on the fourth wall, aware they’re fictional constructs, commenting directly on the art-making process or the relationship with the audience. Sometimes it’s cute. But, like any movement that becomes sufficiently popular, it’s become cheapened by imitators who prefer the trappings to the substance.

Therefore, how readers receive Tremblay’s story will depend on what they bring into the experience. Fans of horror films from the peak slasher era will certainly recognize themselves. Tremblay’s characters, like their movie, and presumably like his intended audience, have been well-off and comfortable for long enough to become numb. His characters want to feel something, anything. However, their bid to create feeling, only spreads misery around.

Our narrator has confabs with Hollywood producers, attends fan conventions, collaborates with the countless hard-working technicians who make movies possible—all without telling us his name. He’s a complete cypher, an anonymous everyman moving through life propelled by others’ demands. Even before the unfinished movie made him legendary, it’s clear the aspiring auteurs cast him because he was someone they could control, and he never completely escapes them.

The overall result is thus less frightening than knowing. Tremblay doesn’t just signpost the looming moments, the tropes where horror cinema spills into its characters’ lives; he actively warns us what’s coming. When something gory finally happens, we already know the broad strokes; we only await Tremblay describing the finer details. Reading, we feel anxiety and anticipation, but never really fear.

This isn’t entirely a criticism. Tremblay presents a literary novel about horror, without necessarily being horror. Throughout the novel, Tremblay brings out themes of characters desperate to feel something, anything. The feelings they achieve, however, prove transitory and meaningless. Even the denouement, where the narrator finally shows some gumption, ends with him admitting: I don’t know what happens next. You, the fans, need to tell me.

Perhaps this reflects Tremblay’s own disappointment. Hollywood optioned his 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World, handed it to M. Night Shyamalan, and it did okay without making any waves. One can read this novel as a statement of both disillusionment and powerlessness. It teems with knowing winks to Tremblay’s intended audience, who watch these movies regularly. And it reminds them that, sometimes, it’s okay to feel nothing.

Black Afterlives Matter, Part II

Cadwell Turnbull, We Are the Crisis: a Novel

This review follows the book reviewed in Black Afterlives Matter

Two years after werewolves, vampires, and shapeshifters revealed themselves on the streets of Boston, some “monsters” are settling into healthy lives. Others, not so much. A faction of monsters have profited handsomely from their adversarial relationship with humans, and aren’t willing to relinquish their advantage. And some humans resent the changes they didn’t ask for, forming anti-monster vigilante groups in response. Something must give; the only question is what.

Volume Two of Cadwell Turnbull’s Convergence Saga drops two years after the first, which is somewhat awkward, since Turnbull provides few refreshers for veteran readers. I remember liking the first volume, with its blend of literary and genre conventions, its character-driven story structure, and its experimental use of a narrative voice that has come unstuck from the story. But I don’t remember his cast of thousands or their intricate relationships.

Ridley, Laina, and Rebecca have lost their werewolf pack, and someone doesn’t want them to find it. They try investigating the disappearances, and realize they can’t do it alone. So, against the advice of fellow “monsters,” they attempt to organize the monster movement and create a sense of solidarity. Unfortunately, as disfranchised peoples have always discovered, you can’t organize without drawing attention to yourself; the Black Hand starts hunting them.

Teenage Dragon enjoys the freedom he’s encountered since escaping a private collector’s perverted zoo. But the trade-off to freedom is remaining incognito, concealing the fire-breathing force of nature he truly is. The slightest slip means his human allies pay the price—as he learns when his comes home to find his adoptive human parents murdered. His friends scramble to compensate, but Dragon still lives with a target on his back.

Sondra has left public service to protect her secret shapeshifter identity. She attempts to live as a soft-spoken community organizer in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a remote American outpost that offers the opportunity to experiment with revisionist economic models. (Models which Sondra explains volubly.) But she can’t outrun her family’s history as embodiments of the islands’ primordial elements, and someone seems eager to expose her secrets in public.

Cadwell Turnbull

As these sprawling synopses imply, Turnbull doesn’t really write one novel. Basically, he’s written four intersecting novellas around the same theme. As the Convergence Saga title indicates the stories converge toward a unified climax, but for most of the book, Turnbull’s characters occupy their own worlds, with their own conflicts; sometimes, their stories seem to contradict one another. The resolution of that apparent contradiction is part of the payoff.

Consistent with the previous volume, Turnbull doesn’t blush to spotlight his story’s parallels with real-world issues. The previous novel dealt with the collisions between majority-led police power and minority populations. This novel carries these same stories, but not with the same torch-wielding vigor. Turnbull still deals with racial issues, but not necessarily directly; he in fact takes great pains to avoid mentioning his characters’ race, unless they mention it themselves.

Instead, Turnbull mainly inveighs against economic injustice. He repeats the words “cooperative” and “solidarity” heavily, alongside other revolutionary economic buzzwords. One of Turnbull’s protagonists, Sondra, has left public service to organize Mondragon-style worker cooperatives. His other protagonists organize against hatred under the cover of economic solidarity, while his antagonists disguise their bigotry behind claims of economic grievance.

This does require some level of patience. Much as I enjoy Turnbull’s story overall, it nevertheless sometimes feels like he’s lecturing his readers, in passages that expound his themes but don’t advance his story. This volume is fairly average length for a mass-market genre novel in the current market, but probably could’ve been fifty pages shorter without the economic theorizing. Even though it’s a theory I personally find admirable.

That said, Turnbull writes about the forces that turn ordinary people into “monsters” and chronic outsiders, and economics is one of those forces. It’s unlikely he could entirely excise the theorizing without short-changing his themes. Turnbull wants you to think, not only about what happens to these characters, but about why it happens, what forces outside individual control hastened this conflict, even before these characters fell backward into it.

Hovering over everything is the narrator, an enigmatic figure whose relationship to Cadwell Turnbull is, let’s say, vexed. Like the characters, the narrator only wants answers. Unlike the characters, the narrator has become unhitched from the story, and understands himself as a narrator. This forces him to reckon with why, if he’s telling the story, he can’t see where it’s headed. That question remains unresolved, postponed until Volume Three.

An English Curriculum that Freshmen Might Read

First edition jacket art

A fellow worker pointed at my t-shirt and smiled. “The Great Gatsby! That’s the only book I actually finished reading in high school English.” We were working the assembly line, and I’d shown up wearing a t-shirt featuring Francis Cugat’s iconic dust-jacket painting for The Great Gatsby. Our assembly line team had a whole range of education levels, from high-school dropouts to postgraduates who’d never found a job.

I’d heard people admit they didn’t read before. As a former college adjunct, I heard a panoply of excuses for long-term aversion to reading, which mostly boiled down to: I never learned to appreciate it as a child, and now that I'm grown, it’s too difficult to develop the habit. But this broke the pattern, because the person didn’t highlight his non-reading, he spotlighted the one book which penetrated his armor.

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has become one of those books, like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which we simply expect high schoolers to read. Someone possessing an American diploma should understand allusions to this handful of celebrity books. Yet as my co-worker pointed out, not everyone reads every “great” book. Whether from overwork, or unfamiliarity with dated language, or just plain disinterest, many students skim or skip books altogether.

My co-worker couldn’t finish most “great” books because English was his second language. Most important literature was written in language that, to his limited English, looked looping, ornate, and Yoda-like. The Great Gatsby, by contrast, was plainspoken, notwithstanding its luxurious milieu, and didn’t demand a dictionary to parse ordinary sentences. My co-worker could concisely describe his relationship with that novel, and reading in general, and eventually felt free to ask how to improve his reading goingforward.

Yet he also made me reconsider how we choose our literary canon. In Freshman English, I remember being assigned Homer’s Odessey, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Important words, definitely, but not works which most freshmen are prepared to savvy, not even highly literate ones who already enjoy reading. These works left students climbing the walls, desperate for validation that we weren’t stupid for failing to understand.

First edition jacket art

F. Scott Fitzgerald stands in an unusual position within the literary canon. Though famous now for his novels, he made his early living publishing for glossy magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker, which were read then by mass audiences. After the 1929 stock market crash made Fitzgerald’s hymns to nouveau riche excess seem tasteless, he relocated to Hollywood and became a script doctor. He wrote, that is, for mass audiences, in vernacular English, with an eye toward images.

You know who else wrote for mass audiences with image-friendly prose? Dashiell Hammett. His classic The Maltese Falcon, arguably his career peak, is in many ways the anti-Gatsby. Jay Gatsby is chummy with New York’s fiercest gangsters; Sam Spade has an adversarial relationship with the police. Gatsby romanticizes women, especially Daisy Buchanan, without really knowing them; Spade enjoys women, but doesn’t revere them, and surrenders his latest lover to the gumshoes.

Perhaps most importantly, Jay Gatsby has no moral code, except perhaps whatever makes him rich enough to court Daisy Buchanan. Spade, by contrast, is so hog-tied by his own unique, self-written moral code that it costs him lucrative paydays. He’s forced to live in squalor, sleep on a Murphy bed, and eat his beans from the can. He’s almost the diametrical opposite of Gatsby—while still being written in simple, imagistic language that high schoolers can understand.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’ve written before about the importance of students reading books beyond their immediate comprehension, and how that changes their brain circuitry for the better. But too many teachers—underfunded, short-staffed, and hurt for time—lack the resources necessary to guide students to higher comprehension. I remember my Ninth Grade English teacher telling the class explicitly that we could tell Ernest Hemingway was deep because we couldn’t understand him.

Pairing The Great Gatsby and The Maltese Falcon would provide Freshman-level English teachers the opportunity to discuss important themes in American literature, while speaking an English that most students understand. Other “literary” writers tend to be hermetic, like Hemingway; abstruse, like Eliot; or simply outdated, like Mark Twain. Yes, Hammett writes about unseemly themes, like infidelity, racism, and violence, but so does Faulkner. Students have seen worse on TV.

And if it means more working-class students glowing up for their favorite book, well, that’s a win for everybody.

Candide for the Romcom Era

Ellie Martin-McKinsey, Turtle A

The Girl doesn’t have a name, or friends, or a direction in life; she’s never needed them. She follows directions from The Universe, which gives her missions, and she simply obeys. Her latest mission takes her to Illinois, where Nico, an exotic dancer running from his past, ignores any universal plan. But once there, The Universe stops communicating with The Girl. She finds herself stranded with a stranger who doesn’t understand her mission.

Debut novelist Ellie Martin-McKinsey has basically written a conventional romcom, but rather than two mismatched characters, her story features two common ways of seeing the modern world. The Girl believes in radical purpose, and spends her life pursuing a higher calling, to the point where she’s become a complete cypher, even to herself. Nico believes in total individualism, but being self-reliant hasn’t made him happy; quite the opposite, he lives with constant, bottled disappointment.

Both characters depend on their philosophies because, so far, they’ve worked. The Universe keeps providing The Girl with missions, and she constantly falls bass-ackward into the money, connections, and transportation necessary to reach each job. Rules and morals are provisional; she simply goes where she’s needed. She squishily avoids questions of whether The Universe is God, but her explanation matches Thomist definitions.

Nico, by contrast, eschews all connections to a larger plan. He walked away from controlling family, from the strictures of higher education, and from any moral guideposts he didn’t write for himself. The resulting life isn’t lucrative—he works two low-paying jobs for rent and groceries—but it’s entirely his own, and that’s what matters. If anyone talks about responsibilities, community, or any Higher Plan, he responds with simmering wrath.

Two characters, each equally confident in their own philosophy. Life has conspired to reassure them that their system works. Until plot contrivances push them together, forcing them to work through their incompatible beliefs. (Martin-McKinsey doesn’t pretend to conceal her authorial fingerprints; she’s having too much fun for that.) Suddenly they have to make compromises, listen to each other, and try to understand.

Ellie Martin-McKinsey

Again, the plot follows the basic signposts of romantic comedy. The meet-cute, the mismatched personalities, the learning curve, the crisis point. Martin-McKinsey takes a comfortable commercial narrative form, which she confidently expects most audiences already understand, and uses it to pitch two commonly held philosophies into conflict. It’s easy to imagine Voltaire or Sartre doing something similar, had they lived in our era of Hollywood excess.

It’s easy to imagine an inexperienced author reducing this premise to mawkish lectures; I probably would’ve. But Martin-McKinsey eschews name-dropping exposition; the characters don’t explain the story to one another. They’re too busy living by their philosophies, and amending them where needs must. And Martin-McKinsey herself clearly has too much fun letting these characters roll to bother inserting herself to sententiously ensure we understand her point.

Like Voltaire’s Candide, her characters start as Platonic ideals, confident in their philosophy because it works on paper. But both authors remind us that Platonic philosophy only works in a friction-free atmosphere, which, until now, the Universe has politely provided them. But their collision forces both to reevaluate everything they’ve previously considered settled. Nothing, Martin-McKinsey reminds us, is ever completely settled when other people are involved.

Cultural purists like me often pooh-pooh the repetitive romcom structure. Superficially, little seems at stake; in most circumstances we know how it will end for the characters. Indeed, though Martin-McKinsey slightly subverts our final expectations, it remains easy to imagine someone like Richard Curtis writing this for Hollywood. Snooty writing professors disparage romcoms as structurally allergic to surprise, innovation, or depth.

But I don’t make Voltaire comparisons lightly. Candide follows similarly commercial novelistic patterns popular during Voltaire’s time, guiding audiences to understand his point because they already understand the plot structure. Both Voltaire and Martin-McKinsey divert audience resistance to deep concepts by keeping their attention on a story that they already know and enjoy. Readers don’t like being told what to think, but we enjoy going on a journey with the characters.

Martin-McKinsey uses our familiarity with comfy Hollywood storytelling to guide us on a journey we probably wouldn’t take in more solemn classroom conditions. Like Candide, this novel is short, fast-paced, and driven by action and dialog, not exposition. Our characters don’t have a point, they live their point, and encourage us to see them in their living. And when they’re forced to change their minds, we already understand why. It’s deep and philosophical, yes, but it’s also just fun.

Who Says You Can't Go Home Again?

Erin Bartels, The Girl Who Could Breathe Under Water: a Novel

Kendra Brennan has returned to the upstate Michigan cabin where she spent her childhood summers, in order to write her overdue second novel. Her first was a runaway success, and she fears she can’t match it. This fear is exacerbated by a “fan letter” she’s received, accusing her of exposing years of deeply buried secrets in her literary breakout. Whoever wrote this letter must know Kendra’s personal story. Whoever it is must know this Michigan cabin.

The back-cover copy on Erin Bartels’ fifth novel somewhat implies a twisting thriller, perhaps a Gone Girl about early traumas and the platonic bond between women. What we get is quieter and more nuanced, less Gillian Flynn, more Thomas Wolfe. Not that Kendra’s return to the site of childhood trauma (which Bartels basically admits is semi-autobiographical) isn’t thrilling. But the journey is more internal that I would’ve anticipated.

Kendra retells her story in the form of a letter to her childhood BFF, Cami, who spent summers in a similar vacation home across the lake. Kendra grew up with a single mother, and a very old-school grandfather who mastered the art of stuffing his emotions. Cami’s father, by contrast, was a star novelist who embodied the phrase “mo’ money, mo’ problems.” These girls came from different worlds, but in Kendra’s telling, her lakefront summers were her real life.

As an adult, however, she’s confronted with the realization that she saw Hidden Lake through a child’s eyes. She didn’t understand what her fast-paced, glamorous BFF might be enduring when the world wasn’t looking. And when she suffered a life-changing trauma on the water, one she finally exorcized ten years later in her first novel, she didn’t realize that it wasn’t her trauma alone. It’s difficult to see how one’s choices inevitably influence others.

One of Kendra’s summer goals is to confront Cami’s brother, who caused her life-changing trauma. And yes, that trauma is exactly what you expect it is. I feel comfortable spoiling this revelation, because the confrontation which Kendra expects to solve everything actually happens less than halfway through the book, and actually creates more confusion than it resolves. Especially as further old family secrets continue percolating toward the surface.

Erin Bartels

In many ways, Bartels’ message with this novel, is that life doesn’t work like a novel. Healing from adolescent trauma isn’t like Freytag’s Pyramid; there’s no climax, followed by morally pat resolution. Instead, each question Kendra answers invites three more. Before long, she realizes that her childhood summers, which looked straightforward to a child’s eyes, concealed a Peyton Place-like nest of lies, secrets, and damaging escapades.

Full disclosure: Erin Bartels is generally known as a Christian novelist, and this novel comes from a dedicatedly Christian publisher. There’s no cussing or violence, and one subplot involves a romance that remains remarkably chaste. Even as Kendra pursues her childhood trauma—and, piece by piece, that of others—Bartels never uses language you would feel uncomfortable repeating in front of your grandmother. Bartels’ writing is simultaneously frank, and demure.

This isn’t, however, a “Christian novel.” In over 300 pages, Bartels references church twice, God three times, and one transient reference to prayer. None drive the plot. Instead, this is a novel about facing, and moving beyond, the trauma that once seemed monolithic, a novel of psychological depth and complexity, which just happens to have been written by a Christian author. Bartels’ moral code is present, but it isn’t what the book is about.

Indeed, if this novel contains a Christian message, it’s that there’s a difference between fairness and justice. Kendra returns to the lake, expecting that her childhood tormentor will be thunderstruck with guilt, she’ll receive recompense, and the universe will restore balance. Instead, she learns that every terrible act comes from somewhere; and while her tormentor should’ve made better choices, it’s still not her place to pass judgment.

That’s sometimes a bitter pill to swallow, for us as much as Kendra. I almost stopped reading this novel because there’s an extended passage that, to modern progressive readers, sure looks like victim-blaming. I’m glad I kept reading, though, because Bartels reminds us that context matters. She also reminds us that one transgression, even one that causes trauma, doesn’t make individuals evil. We all have to atone for something, to somebody.

This isn’t an easy novel, but it’s a gripping one. Bartels’ message is bracing to Christian and non-religious readers alike. And I can pay no better compliment than that stayed up past my bedtime to finish reading.

Our Lady of Grace in the Snow

Peter Manseau, The Maiden of All Our Desires: a Novel

The distant convent at Gaerdegen has a secret. The Benedictine sisters gather to work and pray like mendicants throughout Christendom for centuries. But between their ancient prayers, they possess a more intimate connection with God. Mother Ursula, their chapter’s founder, bequeathed them a substantial trove of mystical insight. In a world still reeling from the Black Death, Mother Ursula’s words hint at secrets hiding behind Christian mortality.

The dust-flap synopsis on Peter Manseau’s eleventh book, and second novel, seems to promise something similar to Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. A distant abbey, a heretical book, a secret the episcopate will move mountains to keep hidden. But Manseau offers a different book. It’s much more intimate and humane, a portrait of sinners trying, where their limited vision permits, to glimpse the purpose tying their lives together.

Mother John, the convent’s second abbess, has spent twenty years preserving Mother Ursula’s vision of prayer, work, and simplicity. Under pressure from other convents, which increasingly run like businesses, Mother John preserves her abbey’s traditions, and personally sweeps the cloisters daily. But even her sisters don’t know her secret: she joined the convent to flee her family obligations, and didn’t really convert until spending years inside the convent.

Father Francis, the abbey priest, resents his posting. Exiled to Gaerdegen to conceal his indiscretions, he feels slighted, a thinker and craftsman who could’ve brought Christ to the masses. But his solemn words conceal his unwillingness to own his past transgressions. His sins, both of commission and of omission, leave a trail of destruction, which renders him distrustful. He foresees destruction in the plague-ravaged land, with nothing to offer but fear.

On one level, this novel describes one day within Gaerdegen. As the sisters await a vindictive bishop, who promises a church trial to expunge veneration of Mother Ursula, a blizzard descends. Trapped in close proximity, the sisters and their resentful, authoritarian priest begin voicing old resentments, and engaging in political posturing. Nothing less than the future of their honored abbey hangs in the balance.

Peter Manseau

But while this surface story unfolds, the characters travel back along the paths that brought them here. Father Francis remembers the entirely human passions, the capacity for love, that defined his early priesthood. Francis created art from the thickly forested land around them, but also from his personal relationships within the community. When those relationships embarrass the bishop, Francis finds himself exiled, unable to either preach or practice his art.

At Gaerdegen, Francis clashes with Mother Ursula. He finds a woman capable of great holiness, but also great rage. As the plague decimates the cities, leaving many sisters with no earthly family, Francis and Ursula have very different ways of facing this tribulation. Both visions are founded in a mix of Christianity and hard experience. Yet, faced with the same evidence, these two professional holy people reach completely opposite conclusions.

Manseau mostly avoids truth claims about the religious controversies driving his characters. A professional scholar of religion, he’s written extensively about the collision between faith and doubt before, and apparently has few ready-made solutions. Instead, he foregrounds the personalities, the lifetime of influences that steer how people of open hearts and mystical souls can disagree so wholeheartedly. Manseau dares ask: what if nobody is right? Or wrong?

To these characters, words have power. Encouraging homilies written years ago by thoughtful mentors can change the course of lives. Words spoken in anger create clefts not easily mended. Worst of all, words spoken carelessly can have consequences far beyond the moment. Words give true believers courage against a world turned grim and bloody, while powerful people fear the authority words of love can have.

It’s tempting to find contemporary references in Manseau’s heavily symbolic story. Metaphors of money and disease, of walls and doors, seem timely, and that probably isn’t coincidental. But Manseau isn’t talking about us, or not only about us. His characters, like his readers, keep seeking beauty and certainty in a world driven by fear and doubt. They never entirely find it, but maybe the seeking matters more than the finding.

Again, the synopsis implies a political thriller in a time of historic uncertainty. But the actual book is more gripping simply because it’s driven by honesty. Good people of upright character wonder which anointed leader to trust. What happens when two incompatible choices, both supported by God, force us to pick sides? Maybe it’s better to do something, even if it’s wrong, than to get lost in philosophy.

The Winter of Someone Else’s Discontent

John M. Ford, The Dragon Waiting

Four fugitives gather in a snowbound inn on the fringes of northern Italy. All live in constant fear of the encroaching Empire. Though they share a goal, they have their own motivations, their own closely guarded secrets and unhealed wounds. With little else in common, they agree to work toward their one ultimate desire, to stop Byzantium from gaining any more ground in Western Europe. To do that, they look to their one hope, the beleaguered English king, Richard III.

John M. Ford, “Mike” to his friends, had little patience for the commercial niceties of genre writing. His novels broke new ground in space opera, cyberpunk, and literary fantasy, and fellow authors adored him; he was a celebrity on the convention circuit. But other than two successful Star Trek tie-in novels, Ford found little recognition in his lifetime. Then he abruptly died, aged only 49, without a will. Nobody knew who owned his novels, which disappeared from print.

This 1983 fantasy, Ford’s first novel pushed back into print after his passing, bridges the gaps between Tolkein’s heroic fable-making, and George RR Martin’s cynical political chronicles. Like Tolkein, it features a fellowship of sworn brethren (though one’s a woman) seeking to restore justice to a wounded world. Like Martin, Ford’s disenchanted antiheroes prefer to work behind the scenes. The hybrid result will undoubtedly excite and confound dedicated genre fans.

Ford’s circle of bloody-minded revengers includes a Welsh wizard whose exceedingly long life has rendered him distrustful of his own power, and an Italian doctor, who counters her Welsh counterpart in youth and veracity. A Greek-speaking mercenary, a descendant of Emperors, who fled his Empire when court intrigue became more highly valued than honor. And an exiled Bavarian artillery commander who fears himself, and his unnatural thirst for human blood.

Even beyond Ford’s characters, though, his world-building will excite and challenge his readers. Ford postulates an alternate history where Emperor Julian, “the Apostate,” survived his battle at Ctesiphon and reigned long enough to prevent Christianity from becoming Rome’s state religion. This results in a world where tolerance and religious pluralism reign supreme. Equally important, the Byzantine Empire didn’t dwindle to insignificance; its intrigues continue growing as it reconquers long-lost territory.

John M. Ford

Therefore Ford’s world contains chilling contradictions. Though its civilization seems welcoming and broad-minded, it also keeps the Imperial government alive and growing. At a moment when the Italian Renaissance should begin blossoming, the greedy, undead corpse of Late Antiquity is instead spreading its intrigues throughout Europe. Julian’s rejection of parochialism, instead creates a perfect climate for ancient fears and paranoias to flourish in the shadow of modernity.

Our quartet of anti-Byzantine protagonists thus wades into a world where dynastic struggles and royal governments are merely proxies for ancient resentments and worship of the state. (Maybe not so fanciful, sometimes.) Our protagonists’ unique skills let them attempt to pull the levers of complex political machinations, though they often can’t see the outcomes of their actions. Nor do we; once laid, our protagonists’ plots may not see fruition for over 100 pages.

Ford has essentially crafted the John le Carré novel of epic fantasy. His characters maintain the public face of piety (without the bonds of shared religion), but their actions amorally aim toward desired outcomes. They consider these moral compromises acceptable, however, because the alternative is Byzantine reconquest, with its pitiless armies and its wizard enforcers. As someone, I’ve forgotten who, wrote of le Carré, this story features the pretty bad standing up against the truly awful.

And just as le Carré’s espionage classics featured generous doses of real-world politics, Ford salts his story with just enough familiarity to keep us hooked, even if we don’t always agree with his postulations. Ford presents Richard III and Lorenzo de Medici as flawed but remarkably sympathetic rulers, paternalistic despots who must govern harshly to control the wild, unlettered masses. In Ford’s world, religion is vast and all-enveloping, but somehow never controlling.

This novel was immensely popular with writers and critics upon release; it won the 1984 World Fantasy Award, and acquired the loyalty of several marquee authors, particularly Neil Gaiman. But it never found a mass-market audience, and twice fell out of print for nearly twenty years. Gaiman has suggested that it could’ve become a success if Ford had spun it into a series. But that was just one of many aspects of genre publishing that Ford regarded with distaste.

It may disappear again; don’t neglect this opportunity to grab an influential but seldom-read classic.

Existentialism and Hope in the Time of Plague

Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go In the Dark: a Novel

Deep beneath the melting Siberian permafrost, an archeologist makes a chilling discovery: dozens of perfectly preserved Neanderthal bodies, laid out with precision. As global warming thaws what the millennia have guarded, something wakes up. Despite the scientists’ best efforts, a long-dormant microorganism escapes the site. Before long, the “Arctic plague” threatens the very foundations of human civilization.

It’s slightly misleading to call Sequoia Nagamatsu’s first novel “science fiction,” though it uses time-honored genre staples to launch its story. I wouldn’t even necessarily call it “a novel,” as it’s basically a short-story sequence, the Winesburg, Ohio of mass-market fiction. Nagamatsu has crafted an experimental form, a postmodern rejection of literal through-line storytelling in favor of immersing yourself in a whirlwind of speculative experience.

The Arctic plague first strikes children. Global civilization (but, in this book, mostly America) struggles to maintain its cultural suppositions about childhood innocence, even as childhood becomes the number-one indicator of mortality. Scientists perform increasingly daredevil experiments to keep children alive, to preserve the illusion that humanity has a future. Some of these experiments test the limits of what defines “humanity.”

It’s exceedingly difficult to synopsize Nagamatsu’s story because, as I’ve already said, it lacks a through-line. Main characters in one chapter emerge as principal protagonists several chapters later; others disappear without explanation. Rather like life, that. The story jumps years, sometimes generations, as Nagamatsu moves onto whatever most interests him. Most stories are set in America, mostly California, though three take place in Japan.

Rather than a straightforward narrative, Nagamatsu focuses on creating a mood. As you’d expect from a novel about a plague, themes of mortality and loss abound. Though one chapter focuses on disembodied souls in limbo, that’s an outlier; nearly every chapter deals primarily with survivors, those forced to watch helplessly as their loved ones slip away. These days, many readers may find these themes disconcertingly familiar.

But despite these themes, Nagamatsu’s storytelling is remarkably optimistic. His protagonists find meaning in survival, in facing a world characterized by bereavement. His characters face the existentialist reality that all human endeavor ends in mortality, sooner or later; then they shoulder that burden and continue. Death, to Nagamatsu’s characters, isn’t the end, it’s their reason to persevere, though they sometimes require several chapters to accept this.

Sequoia Nagamatsu

Even with his cast of thousands and his international scope, Nagamatsu’s storytelling has a personal edge. Several characters are, like Nagamatsu himself, Japanese-American; more than a few are aspiring artists whose parents consider them a disappointment. (Hmmm…) The recurrence of this generational, cross-cultural conflict underlines several stories. During the plague, humanity needs more doctors and scientists; but it also needs artists to make chaotic times meaningful.

Nagamatsu’s story overlaps heavily with current events, but don’t read too much into that. According to the copyright page, this book’s chapters have dribbled out in literary journals and anthologies since 2011, long before COVID existed. Parts of Nagamatsu’s story eerily predict the fear and uncertainty we witness daily, though he probably rewrote portions to remain current. This book is about us, without necessarily being “ripped from the headlines.”

Not everyone will like Nagamatsu’s technique. He frequently uses the MFA workshop trend in ironic distancing, holding his characters at arms’ length. Though all but one of these chapters are told by first-person narrators, Nagamatsu’s storytellers maintain a dry, dispassionate tenor. Faced with dying children and desperate parents, with global warming in the background, and humanity’s brightest fleeing the Earth, his protagonists remain coolly detached, weary of their own emotions.

This approach takes some getting used to. Anybody hoping to read a conventional science fiction potboiler will find this book disappointing. It requires attentive reading, and a willingness to suspend our love of genre conventions. His writing reflects familiarity with Kierkegaard and Sartre, but also Star Trek and Japanese anime. (Seriously, there’s a Starship Yamato.) He uses science fiction parts without really writing a science fiction novel.

However, for readers willing to let Nagamatsu guide their attention, he tells a story both dark and humane. He writes in a near-future setting that’s all to plausible, about themes that are part of our everyday loves; but he doesn’t surrender to cynicism or let despair run his story. He writes about us, with all the disappointment and optimism that entails. He reminds us that, no matter how bleak our present seems, there’s always still a future.

Through it all, through the grief and art and isolation and love, he reminds us that we become human when we believe.

The New Gothamite Existential Drama

Raven Leilani, Luster: a Novel

Young Edie lacks direction in her life. She sleepwalks through a desirable but unfulfilling Manhattan publishing job, and despises her roommate. One day, desperate for connection with another human being, she answers a personal ad. That’s how she finds herself having an affair with a White man, twice her age, who feels stifled in his open marriage.

Front-cover copy calls Raven Leilani’s first book “a novel,” but that's somewhat misleading. It’s episodic, has only a vaguely defined through-line, and has more loose ends than a shoelace factory. Rather, it flows loosely, acrobatically, like a novel-length prose poem. Perhaps that explains the starkly divided opinions it has drawn from readers; your response depends on your willingness to immerse yourself in Leilani’s subtle undertow.

By her own admission, our first-person narrator, who is Black, has made some bad decisions. (She introduces herself as “Edie” very early, then never repeats it; she’s mostly a nameless cipher, even to herself.) She shits where she eats, has only a halfhearted commitment to her career, and frequently lets life happen to her. Accepting a wilful sexual relationship with a White man literally twice her age is painfully on-brand.

Appropriately, for somebody who spends copious ink regretting her past, Edie’s choices return to plague her. She loses her poorly-paid job, then her roommate, then her apartment. Trapped on a downward spiral caused by Manhattan’s “move up or move out” pressures, she caroms quickly through meaningless jobs, desperate for validation. To her horror, she finds temporary deliverance from the unlikeliest source: her boyfriend’s wife.

Leilani’s story moves forward, not by character or plot, but by theme. This perhaps reflects her narrator’s position: young, Black, female, and poor by city standards. Edie engages in ill-chosen sexual encounters, as much as anything, because they’re something to do. The novel’s title is deliberately ambiguous, reflecting the glamor Edie sees in her well-off boyfriend’s suburban life, but also her tendency to measure her life by sex.

Raven Leilani

Edie used to be a promising artist. But, like millions of art-school graduates, she shelved her talent when making a living became a higher priority. Finding herself suddenly sheltering with her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s wife, the phantom of imminent starvation temporarily abated, she rediscovers the motivation to create. However, she struggles to reconnect that motivation with the part of her that sees like an artist.

Anybody who’s taken grad-school creative writing workshops recognizes this: writers frequently create visual artists as narrative surrogates for themselves. Given the limited amount of biographical info available for reviewers, it’s tempting to wonder exactly how autobiographical Leilani’s story really is. If this isn’t a roman à clef for Leilani’s life, Edie at least represents the author’s attempt to organize and comprehend herself.

Eric, Edie’s boyfriend, is a library archivist; his wife Rebecca performs autopsies for the VA. They traffic in history and mortality, which warps their ability to communicate. Eric fails to remain hip and relevant (Edie repeatedly stresses his GenX credentials), while Rebecca sneaks off to secretly mosh at all-night metal concerts. Their household communications happen in weirdly coded language.

Meanwhile, Edie meets Eric and Rebecca’s Black daughter. The meeting isn’t exactly amicable. However, they quickly become a force in one another’s lives: Akila has a creative spirit undimmed by years of adult cynicism, while Edie has life skills necessary to teach Akila how to be Black in a world still organized for White convenience. The pair need, but don’t understand, each other.

Readers weaned on conventions of mass-market fiction, of unified story and of action rising to a climax, may find Leilani’s style confounding. Edie is timid and adrift, more acted upon than acting. Her story is segmented and episodic, and while something happens that arguably serves the climactic role, it’s disconnected from most of what came before. Again, this is less a novel than a prose poem.

This is compounded because we wonder how seriously to take Edie’s narration. Edie frames events to exempt herself from blame, even though the story indicates she’s partly responsible for her frequent setbacks. Though she’s prone to lengthy monologs explaining her backstory, she presents them with the dispassion of an archivist, which, in context, is ironic.

However, audiences willing to immerse themselves in Leilani’s storytelling, to let the narrative current carry them along, will find moments of intense clarity. This novel isn’t for everyone. But readers able to pause their egos, and follow Edie along her strange, often opaque journey, may find more than a little of themselves in her story.

The Door That Opened Into Somewhere

Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

Young January Scaller lives a life straight out of a post-Victorian pulp romance: while her archeologist father globetrots for exotic artifacts, she lives with her father’s sponsor, in unparalleled luxury. Sure, she misses her father. But Mr. Locke’s wealth and connections have provided her an education unavailable to most mixed-race children. Then one day January stumbles through an impossible door into a world that shouldn’t exist, and wonders: what other worlds exist behind this one?

It’s possible to find the political metaphors in Alix E. Harrow’s first novel. The teenager’s discovery that her privileged childhood doesn’t reflect how others live; the ways powerful people preserve their power by feeding on others; the influence race has on how Americans interact with one another. But I prefer another reading. Harrow has written an American fairy tale, channeling our better instincts and higher ideals. We become ourselves, Harrow suggests, by rediscovering childhood wonder.

Mr. Locke holds a poorly defined role within The Society, a group of gentleman archeologists who pay actual credentialed academics to crisscross the world looking for trinkets. The Society doesn’t publish scholarship or compile information, however; it supports itself with a thriving black market in antiquities, turning other worlds’ legacies into cheap cash. January, whom Mr. Locke is training as his junior accountant, gets fleeting glimpses of this corrupt world, never enough to understand it.

Meanwhile, January holds onto fleeting memories of her father’s extravagant tales of distant lands and mysterious peoples. She also half-recalls an incident when she was seven, in 1901, when she wrote words on paper, and those words opened a door into an exotic, spice-scented world. Did she really make something magical happen by simply writing it down? Mr. Locke discourages such speculations. He’s a rationalist, and insists that only this world matters enough to study.

January actually occupies a world riddled with Doors. Mr. Locke and his society have another, ruder word for Doors. But whatever name, these Doors open onto strange and mysterious worlds of wonder and possibility, many of them magical. When a puzzling book hidden inside an impossible chest reveals to January that the door of her childhood was very real, she sees new opportunities opening immediately. Mr. Locke, however, sees a threat which must be stopped.

Alix E. Harrow

Harrow’s writing straddles the line between fantasy thriller and social parable. The aptly named Mr. Locke has no patience with doors; he uses money and connections to preserve the Earth he loves, making our world smaller, safer, and more immune to change. January, a half-caste child whose father trades in mystery and exoticism, misses the thrill of wonder she experienced in childhood, the power of believing that, somewhere, magic still happens. The conflict is generational.

This metaphor doesn’t limit Harrow’s writing, however. Her first priority is creating engaging characters in difficult situations. In January’s first-person main narrative, she first challenges powerful institutions from inside; when this proves fruitless, she crosses the boundary to rediscover the outside world she was born in, but doesn’t remember. Meanwhile, between the covers of her puzzling book, she discovers Yule Ian Scholar, whose puzzling memoir might hold the key to January finding her way home.

Themes emerge quickly: what does going home mean? Does it mean returning to the comfortable untruths we learned in childhood? Or does it require passing through painful, harrowing (pun intended) uncertainty in search of truth? Like L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy, or Thomas Wolfe’s George Webber, January’s life is plagued by homesickness; but she has only a vague, half-formed notion of home. She only knows that truth exists, and it doesn’t necessarily correspond with mere reality.

Harrow also emphasizes the ways human words create other realities. The Society uses arcane rituals, influenced by Scottish Rite Masonic traditions, to create a nexus of power which the rest of reality can’t see. (Late in the book, Harrow’s distrust of the Scottish Enlightenment becomes glaring.) Meanwhile, January uses words to reveal hidden truths and actually increase uncertainty. The Society sees uncertainty as chaos, but January sees uncertainty as opportunity. Which set of words prevails?

This novel presents a world seeking resolution. Is trust always better than paranoia, is certitude always better than doubt? Harrow, by day a scholar of American race history, has definite opinions on these questions, though she doesn’t lay them out prescriptively. Instead, she walks readers, youth and adult alike, through the turmoil of finding our own resolution. By the end, maybe we don’t have all the answers. But, like January, we now have better questions.

The Disappointment of Small Terrors

Brian Evenson, A Collapse of Horses: a Collection of Stories

An American tourist in rural France watches secrets unfold by starlight, getting drawn deeper in, until he cannot escape. A childhood game of dares causes lifelong consequences to flare up brutally. A possessed teddy bear appears to have stolen a stillborn infant’s soul, and now sets its sights on the grieving father. A wounded cowboy stubbornly refuses to die, keeping his pardner bound to an old promise.

Brian Evenson comes highly recommended by readers who consider themselves connoisseurs of horror fiction. As a recent convert to the genre, I wanted to experience different kinds of horror, beyond the well-hyped chestnuts of Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft. Evenson famously merges horror with the understated introspection of so-called “literary fiction,” a fusion that’s earned him loyalty from countless critics and fans. Perhaps I’m just missing something.

Though I wouldn’t call Evenson “formulaic,” his writings have a recognizable pattern. He begins by taking some well-loved genre—Westerns, family dramas, science fiction, slice-of-life vignettes. Then one character realizes something doesn’t add up. A path that should lead straight becomes labyrinthine, perhaps, or an ordinary item becomes somehow ominous. The complication is seldom strictly supernatural, though for Evenson, naturalism is usually optional.

Our protagonist, having realized the complication, chooses somehow to resist. That resistance may involve actively opposing chaos, by trying to kill someone or destroy an artifact. Or it may simply involve obstinately sticking with whatever the protagonist believes to be true, even despite massive evidence and social opprobrium. Whatever form that resistance takes, the protagonist is willing to stand by that choice, no matter the consequences.

Then, usually: nothing. Evenson generally pours energy into creating characters, situations, and narrative MacGuffins, but apparently gets fatigued and quits. His stories frequently suffer the curse of today’s short-story market: the author creates the foundations for something complex and promising, but decides that, because he’s already written the story’s major themes, he doesn’t need to waste time on such fleeting trivia as action, dialog, character, or plot.

Brian Evenson

In “Cult,” a man agrees to help his abusive ex-girlfriend, thinking that makes him the bigger person, only to realize he’s getting sucked back in. Sounds like a great premise, right? Except Evenson writes the relationship entirely in sweeping generalities, long on adjectives, so we never understand exactly what made their bond so compelling, much less why he’d return. They’re simply going through the motions of a paperback cautionary tale.

“Past Reno,” a family drama redolent of Stephen King’s influence, features a man driving back to claim his portion of his sadistic father’s inheritance. Except the protagonist only vaguely defines what he previously fled, what horrific reckoning might await on the old homestead. He neither knows nor cares, and therefore, neither do we. The story culminates in the protagonist smashing a bathroom mirror, basically to do anything besides idle woolgathering.

My favorite story, “The Dust,” reflects cinematic influences like Ridley Scott and John Carpenter. A mining platform on a distant planet, thousands of miles from civilization, becomes infiltrated with fine, powdery dust that seemingly overtakes everything. The skeleton crew becomes isolated and paranoid, forcing the security chief to take steps. Soon, it becomes impossible to distinguish allies from enemies, and reality from one’s own internal demons.

But even this, my favorite story, the one which most utilizes Evenson’s fabled talent for misdirection and unease, ends abruptly, like Evenson lost interest. Time after time, Evenson’s stories tease a Shirley Jackson-like sense of existential foreboding, we barely start to care, and then Evenson moves on. Our emotional investments come to nothing, and I’m left feeling, not scared or disquieted, but swindled. Like he took my money and ran.

In over half of Evenson’s stories, characters don’t have names. Protagonists are identified by pronouns: “he” or (less often) “she.” Supporting characters have titles based on roles: “the doctor,” “the other man,” “his father.” Entire stories happen with no proper nouns. In individual stories, this imprecision maybe induces dread, but as stories accumulate, the vagueness bleeds together, making it difficult to even remember which story we’re reading.

I began reading this collection with high hopes, based on Evenson’s reputation. Before long, reading became an act of rubbernecking, transfixed by the grotesquerie of a train wreck in motion. As my lack of emotional reaction accrued, I realized I was simply going through the motions. Then eventually, I didn’t even have energy enough to do that.

Maybe this book misrepresents Evenson’s corpus. Who knows. After reading this, I won’t be going back to investigate any further.

Black Afterlives Matter

Cadwell Turnbull, No Gods, No Monsters: a Novel

It begins, as so many stories do today, with a leaked police video. A police body cam catches a Boston PD officer putting two bullets in a suspect. The twist is, the suspect this time is a lycanthrope. Though City Hall tries to bury it, evidence soon gets out, and the whole world knows. We have proof that the monsters and demons of folklore exist in the world of science and technology.

Cadwell Turnbull's second novel exists on multiple levels simultaneously. We can browse his text for parallels with our modern world, and how that speaks directly to us. It's easy, and tempting, to point out resemblances to BLM, QAnon, late capitalism, and other looming contemporary issues. Turnbull's monsters are metaphors for violent, segregated postmodern America.

Such rigid analysis, though, loses the nuance of Turnbull's prose poetry. Turnbull tells multiple overlapping stories of ordinary, civic-minded people trying to pay their bills and improve their communities. These individual stories, however, unfold against the background of an American society where the monsters of myth and fable, the phantoms of campfire tales and bedtime stories, have been forced back into daylight.

In and around Boston, a group of "smash the system" anarchists find their loyalties torn. Their commitment to peaceful resistance has always included BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and other marginalized groups. But do werewolves and techno-mages count as marginalized? Ideals that seemed unambiguous in theory, turn vague when tested, because seriously, do vampires and shapeshifters need civil rights?

In the US Virgin Islands, a territorial senator with high ideals has concealed that she's a weredog, and her sister walks through walls. But a secret society brings her information that could close her childhood trauma. Should she risk her career, and the trust of her constituents, to solve the biggest mystery of her life? And where does she turn when her personal trauma proves to be part of a secret civil war threatening humanity?

Meanwhile, the story's "Third Person Omniscient" narrative voice struggles to reconcile the seemingly divergent secrets and lies driving the characters. How, the voice wonders, can I speed these poor, blind people toward their resolutions? Soon the voice peels off and begins cross-examining the characters in their moments of vulnerability. We realize that the story has become self-aware.

Cadwell Turnbull

Does this sound like a lot of threads? Turnbull doesn't deny it. With his shifting perspective, his cast of thousands, and his multiple short stories converging on one destination, he has created the Winesburg, Ohio of contemporary dark fantasy. He uses horror tropes and political hot buttons to tell a story of literary depth and subtlety. The product dwells in the liminal space between genre fiction and literature.

Don't let that intimidate you, though. Turnbull writes with a casual voice and brisk pace that never lags (except maybe once, for two pages around page 185). Even when discussing revisionist economics or the many-worlds theory of quantum physics, he doesn't forget that writing is about the relationship with his audience, and he keeps us engaged with characters and story.

This hybrid form works in service of a plot with a message. Turnbull's characters, human and monster, draw from America's marginalized population: Black and Latinx, queer, traumatized, colonized. People who the majority culture have kept at arm's length throughout living memory. People the majority culture has dismissed as criminals, ingrates, and monsters.

What, Turnbull wants us to ask, happens when America's monsters become visible? When we can no longer pretend we don't see them? Like Slender Man, these monsters have always been there, and once they force their way into our perception, we see the footprint they've left on history. Once we've seen them, we can no longer forget them… until, Turnbull suggests, we start to forget them anyway.

In the final pages, Turnbull demonstrates the lengths some will take to ensure our collective forgetting. This opens new and darker doors, forcing a conflict that didn't have to happen. But, like in so many issues today, the powerful minority's refusal to face facts means someone has to take action. We ordinary people are forced along.

It isn't necessarily obvious at first that this is the beginning of a series. Though it says "Book One of the Convergence Saga" on the back of the dust jacket, it's written small enough to miss it. I'm eager to see how Turnbull handles the story threads he's introduced in this volume. Maybe that's the highest praise I can offer, to say I'm ready to see where things go from here.

The Truncheon of Forgetting, the Hand of Remembering

Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police: a Novel

On a nameless island in a nameless sea, people just periodically forget important things in their lives. Emeralds, perfume, photographs. No, the items themselves never disappear; but sweeping, population-wide amnesia strips the items of meaning in human brains. Our protagonist, a writer, simply takes these disappearances for granted. But some people remember, and their memory is a threat to the island’s deeply bureaucratic social order.

Novelist, essayist, and science journalist Yōko Ogawa is persistently prolific in her native Japanese, but her works have only trickled into English translation. This book, first published in 1994, has only newly appeared in English, rendered by her most frequent translator, Stephen Snyder. Having read one previous Ogawa novel, I awaited this one with great anticipation. Then, sadly, I made a good-faith attempt to read it.

Our protagonist makes her living writing literary novels. (Hmmm.) She writes about people having realistic experiences, which she attempts to analyze, or at least make romantic for the reading populace. But around her, as playing cards and roses and birds become meaningless artifacts which most people remember distantly, if at all, the range of realistic experiences is becoming painfully circumscribed. She struggles to muster ideas and make a living.

A flippant comment forces a realization on our protagonist: her beloved editor doesn’t forget when everybody else does. Our protagonist realizes this makes him a target for the Memory Police, whose ham-fisted but consistently polite raids quietly remove anybody who remembers what the social order deems forgotten. Unique knowledge, or an informed understanding of history, makes people dangerous to life on the island.

You might notice something missing from this synopsis: proper nouns. There’s my first problem with this book. My previous Ogawa experience, her novel The Housekeeper and the Professor, used this expressionistic vagueness to its advantage. But that novel was less than half the size of this one, with far fewer characters, set in a favorably genericized Japanese university city. This larger, busier novel needs some names just to keep the ensemble organized.

Yōko Ogawa

The novelist decides to protect her editor by building a secret annex inside her house. To survive the Memory Police, the editor will have to live inside a tiny basement cube with minimal light, occasional food, and a prison-style toilet. This description combines the most non-specific elements of the Freudian id and Anne Frank’s notorious squat. The product seems both impractical, and artificially constrained.

Meanwhile, the Memory Police stage periodic raids throughout the island, but apparently disappear between times. Our protagonist cycles the city with only momentary twinges of discomfort. This form of intrusive fascism seems uniquely Japanese, in that no matter how meddlesome, destructive, or scary their actions, their behavior is still polite, simply part of a background of social conformity that everyone accepts as necessary and normal.

Even when members of the novelist’s network, actively complicit in her efforts to preserve her editor from kidnapping, get seized by the Memory Police, they simply accept this as preordained. Ah well, they seemingly say, such is the price of stability. Even knowing they’re breaking the law, harboring a fugitive, and keeping him alive through Rube Goldberg-like schemes, they seem largely unperturbed by the ubiquity of the polite fascist state.

Brief reminder, this novel debuted in 1994, during the long hangover from Japan’s hypercharged 1980s economy. As Japan’s industrial state pulled its claws in and waited to see what happened next, people simply accepted their high accrued debts and diminished lifestyles. Japanese capitalism has, for decades, rewarded hard work and self-abnegation, creating that icon of post-boom malaise, the sararīman. Sticking your neck out isn’t considered heroic in Japan.

Therefore, I assume Ogawa’s parable of enforced technocratic blandness must’ve made sense to its intended audience. But that context has gotten lost. A quarter-century later, across the Pacific, the story just feels curiously low-stakes. The Memory Police’s atrocities don’t seem to elicit an emotional response, even from those who perpetrate them. This isn’t helped by the dreamlike lack of specificity; I cared more about Ogawa’s contradictory geography than her characters.

This saddens me. Having enjoyed Ogawa’s writing in the past, my inability to connect with her characters or plot this time around feels disappointing. Ogawa tells us something catastrophic is at stake in her story, but she holds everyone at arm’s length, discussing them with the courteous emotional detachment of an after-church picnic. I care more deeply about my inability to care, than I do about the novel.

I expected so much, but sadly, I feel so little.