God's Country by Percival Everett

Someone recommended this, or at least Percival Everett, to me around a decade ago and I picked up a copy around then. I suspect now it was around the time I first read True Grit and Blood Meridian, both great western novels in their own rights and ways. I really wish I had gotten around to reading this sooner. This is an astonishingly angry novel and yet at the same time it is often very funny. It’s a brutal revisionist western disguised as a folksy tall tale one.

Curt Marder is a white farm owner who, in the opening scene has just stood by watching from a distance as his house and property burned, his livestock and dog killed, and his wife kidnapped by white outlaws disguised as Native Americans. There is a running joke in the first couple of chapters in which both he and the people he tells about the tragedy are far more impressed/horrified by the death of the dog than by the kidnapping of the wife. This is a great example of how the humor in the book works. It points out and mocks the tendency towards pearl clutching at animal deaths in fiction while violence towards people leaves people unfazed. It’s a statement about women’s place in society of the time. It’s the first sign of how morally blind he is. And this is a text that has morality very much on its mind. The humor throughout does this, but around increasingly difficult things to laugh about. But the laughs do come as do the bitter realizations, often simultaneously.

Most tall tale style westerns have unreliable narrators, and most are commenting in some way about the myth of the west. But that unreliability here is wielded here with a perfect blend of hilarity and vicious satire as effectively as I’ve ever seen it. Curt Marder’s voice is pitch perfect. Self aggrandizing and sure of itself, while over and over again showing him in the worst possible light as he makes the worst possible decision every time. His interactions with Bubba, the black tracker he hires to help him find his wife, and the Native Americans they encounter is cringe inducing. He sees himself as superior and is consistently surprised when people rightly see he is not. He is very much a stand in for white America and the way it has treated various peoples over the years. The novel simultaneously entertains at a high level and forces consideration of America’s biggest national sins. It is a difficult task to balance those tones and Everett does it perfectly.

Canon Worthy. I will be reading this again, and reading more of Everett’s work.

Owned But Previously Unread 2020 13/75

Agency by Willian Gibson

Gibson’s previous book, The Peripheral is probably my favorite of his (with the caveat that I still need to read his second trilogy, beginning with Idoru, and the short story collection to be a completist). I loved that it mixed elements of the cyberpunk and ability to see the effects of technology that are his calling card with a rural noir story (think Justified or Winter’s Bone). The conceit is that there is a far future, in the 2130’s, that has gone through a complex apocalypse called The Jackpot. They have advanced technology, but the population of the world has been thinned to a fraction of its current numbers and the west is ruled by a hereditary kleptocracy comprised mostly of Russian billionaires. Their advanced technology allows them to establish contact with people in the past, but once they do, there is a branching timeline,called a stub, and time passes in both the original timeline and in the stub at an equal rate. In The Peripheral that past was also in our future. Agency could be read on its own, but having read the first book will save a lot of work teasing out what’s happening. And as characters from The Peripheral, particularly in that future timeline, appear here it would save some spoilers from that earlier book.

The stub, or past timeline, that forms half of this story, is actually in our past. It was established in 2015, and even though communication is more difficult with a more distant stub, there are huge changes. Brexit and Trump didn’t happen in this timeline. If I were going to pick a nit with the book, it’s this aspect. Gibson does not make that world a utopia (there is an impending nuclear crisis), but it is a little bit more on the nose than he usually gets. Though, I have to admit I liked the crack about there being a fully functioning state department in that timeline. That said, this is an incredibly effective thriller. Gibson uses short alternating chapters to keep the tension high in both timelines. All three really, since some characters from the stub in The Peripheral show up to help.

The plot picks up in the stub’s 2017, as the protagonist, Verity Jane, is hired to beta test an experimental AI. The intent was to come up with something similar to the AI in her, a personalized Alexa on steroids. But the prototype, Eunice, has military training, and a mind of her own. The company that hired Verity Jane to test it wants it back. I don’t want to spoil too much of what happens. It is an excellent scifi thriller. The fact that when someone goes into a virtual world, it is an actual other world, whether the main timeline or one of the stubs makes the stakes seem higher. And the degree to which Eunice and some of the characters in the post-Jackpot timeline manipulate events, really raises the question of agency raised by the title far more subtly than the political stuff.

I prefer The Peripheral, and would recommend reading that first, but this is still recommended.

Library Books, Rereads, Etc. 2020 1/35

My Real Children by Jo Walton

I first read Jo Walton a few years ago when a couple of friends recommended Among Others, a nearly perfect novel combining a coming of age story with a story of fairies that might be real or might be imagined or hallucinated and a fierce love of books, mostly science fiction and fantasy. I picked up a copy of My Real Children and her collection of essays about rereading, What Makes This Book So Great, shortly afterward. The latter was a delight in and of itself and pushed me into finally reading Middlemarch and Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey and put a lot of others on my radar. So, in my quest to plow through books that I already own and haven’t read this year, I naturally wanted to read the only other book I have by Walton. Like Among Others, it was incredibly affecting. It’s been long enough that I don’t want to say for sure if I prefer one or the other, but this was brilliant.

In the first chapter, the main character, Patricia Cowan, is in a retirement home suffering from dementia, and remembers two versions of her life and gets the details of the two confused. In one her name is Trish and she has four children; in the other her name is Pat and she had three. The turning point was when she said yes to a proposal in one timeline and no in the other. The rest of the book is alternating chapters between her experiences in one and the other. Early on, it seems as if the novel is going to present one terrible life and one utopian one as a way to explore what a woman’s options were and are. And I don’t want to give that theme short shrift. It brings home powerfully what a bad marriage could do, and argues that women should be freed from its strictures as the only paradigm for life. But in the background two alternate histories (neither our own) play out, and the world that is good for Trish, is bad for nearly everyone else, and vice versa. This complication brings in themes of uncertainty that undermines the utopianism and culminates in a choice she has to make.

I was very moved by this book. I’m still thinking through the moral implications of the story, but I loved the book. The alternate histories are very subtly done, and both versions of Patricia are fully formed characters. In each world she has a fully realized family as well. This is a beautifully written, well crafted novel that I will almost certainly return to at some point.

I’m wavering between Highly Recommended and Canon Worthy.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Last year, after reading Middlemarch and having the top of my head taken off, realizing that Moby Dick had passed Pale Fire to become my favorite novel, reading Melville’s short stories and being convinced by The Jane Austen Book Club I needed to finish reading all of Austen’s novels, I thought it was high time to read more nineteenth century literature. If my book buying hiatus this year is lent, during the Fat Tuesday of late November and early December I traded in some books at Mr. K’s and got copies of the Austen I didn’t have, several more George Eliot and Mellville books, Jane Eyre and this one. I’m not sure what gave me the impression over the years that Wuthering Heights would be a slightly edgier Pride and Prejudice type book, but that’s the impression I had gotten. How wrong can a person be?

This is a cruel view of the world. It’s in stark contrast to the Austen I’ve read, wherein the lower classes seem happy in their state and the upper classes are where the real drama is. Heathcliff is resentful (rightfully so) of the way he was treated, and that eventually turned him into a monster. Everyone is weak, sanctimonious, cruel or some combination thereof. I found its view of human nature compelling. I was a little hesitant about how mean the book is until I realized it was essentially a psychological horror novel wrapped in a gothic melodrama. Once that clicked, I was able to enjoy the book for his oppressive atmosphere and its takedown of the society of the day. Where Pride and Prejudice gently mocks (which I enjoy), this swings a sledgehammer.

After Moby Dick and Middlemarch, this is probably my favorite among the (admittedly few) 19th Century novels I’ve read. I wish there were more Emily Bronte novels to read.

Canon Worthy.

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera

Several years ago, I struck up a conversation with a guy selling books at the excellent Letters Bookshop in Durham, NC, and after talking, he highly recommended this short novel and I bought a copy. I put it on the “read soon” shelf in the living room well over a year ago and had mostly forgotten it. Recently, though, in the midst of an online conversation about the controversy surrounding American Dirt (which I haven’t read), I saw at least two people recommending reading this book instead. I am glad that I was reminded that I had a copy, as it is an astounding book.

Makina is a telephone operator in Mexico (neither Mexico or the US is mentioned by name in the book). In addition to her work duties, she also occasionally carries messages or packages for local gangsters. The novel (novella?) is the story of her trip into the States to find her brother, who went some years earlier, and deliver a package while she’s going. Given the borderlands setting (and the relative lack of punctuation), the easy comparison would be Cormac McCarthy. Lisa Dillman, the translator, does cite him in her afterward as an influence on the way she did her work.* She mentioned The Road, and I thought about The Crossing a couple times while reading this. I couldn’t speak to Herrera’s relation to McCarthy, but it is covering a lot of the same territory. While that comparison is an apt one, it would do a disservice to Herrera to lean into it too heavily.

First there’s the language: “They speak an intermediary tongue that Makina instantly warms to because it’s like her: malleable, erasable, permeable; a hinge pivoting between like but distant souls, and then two more, and then two more, never exactly the same ones; something that serves as a link. More than the midpoint between homegrown and anglo their tongue is a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born.” If I read the afterward correctly, the language was similarly rendered in Spanish. That intermediary tongue is rendered in a deliberately region free English that is a pleasure to read. Herrera apparently coined words to use in the original, and Dillman repurposes words here to achieve the same effect. That effect is poetic without being overly showy and mythic.

Border crossing is a fraught topic. The book might come as a shock to Anglos who hadn’t previously considered the possibility that people coming in from Mexico might have a high level of ambivalence about the whole enterprise themselves. What is given up in such a trip? Why go to a place where abuse will be heaped upon them? One reading of the book (maybe the intended reading?) is to frame journey into America as a descent into hell. Herrera’s vision is not as bleak as McCarthy’s, but an encounter with a cop late in the book really brings it close. And I’m still trying to figure out how much hope is intended in the ending. It’s not always a compliment to say a book would make a great movie, but in this case it is. I would love to see an adaptation of this in the right hands.

I will definitely be rereading this. Canon Worthy.




Owned But Previously Unread 2020 10/75

*Dillman’s afterward is in itself fantastic reading.

Wit's End by Karen Joy Fowler

Like the two other books by Karen Joy Fowler I’ve read, Wit’s End is a delight. It is a mystery, but, like those others, it comments on its genre while being an excellent example of it. It also functions as a very early cautionary tale of trying to control your narrative, either fictional characters or the perception of your own actions, particularly in the age of the internet, which was just taking its shape when Wit’s End was published in 2008. It very subtly comments on its own structure. It pays everything off like a proper mystery. It’s a moving portrait of people dealing with grief. It’s also very funny.

Rima Lansill, 29, is grieving the death of her entire immediate family. To get away from things, she goes to live for a time with her godmother, the famous mystery author Addison Early. Early is an estranged friend of Rima’s late father, a famous journalist and columnist. In order to write her mysteries, Early creates miniature dollhouses laying out the crime scenes in great detail, and then spins the story out of those. Early is also very concerned with controlling the narrative about her most famous character, Maxwell Lane, going so far as to get into wikipedia editing wars with fans. Rima’s father was written as a character, the murderer, in one of Early’s books, and both Rima and Early are extremely uncomfortable with the fanfiction that springs up around that. Even in the age of Myspace and when blogs were what podcasts are now, there is a real sense of the futility of trying to maintain any sense of the truth in the barrage of conflicting information spoken in certainty. There is a stalker, and a cult, and no immediately obvious murder. And yet there is narrative tension as Rima gets to know her godmother and the people around her and tries to figure out what exactly happened between Early and her father. All of the characters are working through some kind of grief. There’s even a touch of contemporary/near future science fiction towards the end. And again, it’s a very funny book.

Fowler can apparently write compelling works in any genre. The Jane Austen Book Club is excellent women’s commercial fiction. This is a very good mystery. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is great literary scifi, or at least great fiction about science (and is overdue a reread). All have well drawn characters, good prose, great structure and great wit. I’m looking forward to reading more of her work.

Highly Recommended.

Owned But Previously Unread 2020 9/75.

Mythologies by WB Yeats

Depending on the day you ask me, Yeats may be my favorite poet.* I dip into the Collected Poems often, but I had not previously read any of his prose work. I picked up a copy of this omnibus of stories at a Wake County Library book sale a couple years ago. Mythologies contains the collections The Celtic Twilight, The Secret Rose, Stories of Red Hanrihan and the “essays” Rosa Alchemica, Tables of the Law, The Adoration of the Magi, and Per Amica Silentia Lunae. These all in some way relate back to Irish folklore, and, if the documentary about Yeats I saw recently** had a lot to do with his trying to establish a national myth for Ireland. I’m uncomfortable with nationalism as a movement, and there were hints here and there in the books of how that could turn sour, but that did not ruin the experience of the book. Throughout all the works collected here there is a real sense of the cultural battle between protestantism and catholicism with a pre-christian Irish paganism trying to reassert itself. This makes for some very effective and eerie tales, and is probably a symptom of Yeats’s attempt to give Ireland an identity that did not rest merely on the struggle between christianities.

Given that he won the Nobel, I was not surprised how good the writing is. Given its title, I should not have been as surprised as I was at how much some of it overlaps with the literary horror/fantasy genre that I’ve become enamored with over the past decade or so. Since this is an omnibus, and my reactions to the various collections range from mild recommendation to wildly enthusiastic, I will talk about each section separately. Since all the works in the omnibus are in the public domain, I include links to the Project Gutenberg ebooks of each.

The Celtic Twilight: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10459

In this collection, in short chapters, Yeats writes about going around Ireland and collecting any information he can get about the Sidhe, or fairies or any other Irish folklore. This is honestly my least favorite of the bunch (possibly excepting the final section), and its placement at the beginning of the omnibus may be a prime factor in my having not finished the collection before despite having started it at least three times before. Still, there were moments when Yeats caught me with a phrase, or an image, or the tale he was relating which really moved me. I’m glad I pushed through.

Recommended.


The Secret Rose: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5795/5795-h/5795-h.htm

In this collection there is a shift away from the framing device of people telling Yeats folklore stories and more firmly into the short fiction mode. And it is here that the struggle between catholicism, protestantism and a resurgent paganism really starts to come into focus. And some of these stories should be classics of the horror genre. The standouts, to me were the opener, The Crucifixion of the Outcast, in which a wandering bard runs afoul of murderous monks, and The Curse of the Fire and Shadows in which some puritan murderers fall afoul of ancient spirits.

Highly Recommended

Stories of Red Hanrihan: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5793/5793-h/5793-h.htm

Red Hanrihan is a character who appears in Yeats’ poetry, and in this collection he gets a proper introduction. He is a bard travelling around Ireland making a living singing and telling tales. I really loved this collection with the exception of the third story. Highlights include the first story, called Red Hanrahan, in which Hanrihan meets some spirits and receives his gift and loses a lot and Hanrihan’s Vision which is like a better version of Lovecraft’s dreamquest stories.

Highly Recommended.

Rosa Alchemica: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5794

This was amazing! Having read so much Lovecraft and Lovecraftian fiction over the past few years this was exactly in my wheelhouse. It’s described as an essay in the physical book I have, but it really reads like a literary horror story. In it Yeats, at the urging of Michael Robartes is very nearly inducted into the Society of the Alchemical Rose. Imagine if Lovecraft wasn’t a materialist; if the Old Gods were not ancient aliens, but were all the actual old gods trying to return. This is deeply disturbing and moving.

Canon Worthy

Tables of the Law and the Adoration of the Magi: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5794

These stories, also classified as essays, by the book delve into similar territory to Rosa Alchemica, and are nearly as good as that story.

Canon Worthy

Per Amica Silentia Lunae: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33338

This fits the essay designation a little better, and feels out of place in the collection.

Pass

Owned But Previously Unread 2020 8/75

*On the other days it is WH Auden, Robinson Jeffers or Anne Porter. Most often Auden.

** A Fanatic Heart: Bob Geldof on WB Yeats (very good if a little hagiographic, available on Amazon Prime)