The Keep by Jennifer Egan

I read Egan’s Pulitzer Prize winning A Visit From the Goon Squad back in 2011. I don’t remember it well, though I intend to revisit it soon. I love books that are oddly structured or that consist of stories that can stand on their own but when put together add up to more. I usually think of such story suites as a science fiction trope, but given books like Winesburg Ohio, Dubliners or Nazi Literature in the Americas (or on a larger scale 2666) there’s a lot of precedent for it in mainstream fiction as well. What I do remember about Goon Squad was that it worked wonderfully as a connected sequence. That metafictional impulse is on display in The Keep as well, and I’m glad that I’ve finally returned to Egan’s work.

The story begins as a pastiche of a gothic family melodrama/horror story. And it works incredibly well as that. For a while there were tics about the narrative voice that bugged me, but eventually I realized what was happening and came to love it. The gothic tale is being written by a prisoner, named Ray, who is in a prison writing group. If this were set in an MFA workshop, I think I would have rolled my eyes at that point, but the fact that the narrator is in a group of people at least one of whom is a legitimate threat to his safety adds stakes that make that part of the story compelling. The final section is narrated by the woman who is leading the workshop in the prison. 

Gene Wolfe once said something to the effect that the narrative voice should match that of the story, and Egan did that masterfully here. You believe that Ray wrote both the gothic novel and the prison one. There was a bit in there about hatred of adverbs that brought Elmore Leonard to mind, though the writing style isn’t as pared down as his. I read in a review (maybe on themillions.com?) that one reviewer appreciated the way Egan was able to bring an emotional weight to metafiction that is often lost in the ironic distance a writer risks in the use of such techniques. I couldn’t agree more (though I think more writers than just Egan and Vollmann can pull this off, though they certainly do. I suspect the reviewer hadn’t read genre masters like Jeff Vandermeer or Caitlin Kiernan etc who accomplish that feat regularly). This was metafiction as compelling page turner with emotional weight. For all the textual tricks it never disappears into too-clever-by-half navel gazing. It’s also smart/prescient (set in a time of blackberries, not smartphones and radar dishes not 5G networks) about how people get addicted to their constant connection with an illusory digital world. The importance of silence, imagination and how the latter is hard to foster without the other is a major theme. 

This is an excellent book and I look forward to reading more by her and to that revisit of Goon Squad.

Highly Recommended (though a reread could bump it up to Canon Worthy)

Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Back in 2013 I attended a reading by James McBride at the North Carolina Literary Festival. I had never heard of him before. But I got a signed copy of The Good Lord Bird and was blown away by it. It was an incredibly funny historical novel about a much larger than life version of the abolitionist John Brown narrated by a young boy named Onion who is disguised as a girl for the bulk of the novel. Like the great comic novels it had very heavy themes: slavery and the history of race in America most prominently. And yet its light touch made the whole thing completely enjoyable while still forcing the reader to confront those issues. I later read his memoir, The Color of Water and his biography of James Brown, both of which I enjoyed, though not nearly as much as The Good Lord Bird. Deacon King Kong, while set in a completely different time and place, 1969 New York, is equally funny and equally concerned with the same heavy themes as the previous novel, and pulls the balance off as well as its predecessor.

Deacon King Kong is equal parts a crime novel, a comic novel and a social novel that examines the life of a community. It pulls off all three genres and makes it look easy. The deacon whose behind-his-back nickname provides the book’s title, is more commonly known to the residents of the project he lives in as Sportcoat. In the first two pages Sportcoat gets drunk and shoots a drug dealer called Deems who he used to coach in baseball, but who has embraced a violent life of crime. Deems survives, but just. This event galvanizes the community, a group comprised largely of aging transplants from various southern cities. In an interview around a decade or so ago, Dennis Lehane said (I’m paraphrasing)  that the great social novels of the past had largely moved over to the crime genre after postmodernism and the Updike/Roth brand of mainstream literary novels had taken over. This seems true of Lehane’s work as well as his fellow The Wire writers’ room compatriots like Richard Price and George Pelecanos. The Wire isn’t a bad comparison point for the crime elements of this novel. The machinations of drug dealers both on the lower and higher ends of the hierarchy, investigating cops, smugglers at the docks and the bystanders of various degrees of innocence are all present in both, though the community of bystanders takes a much larger role here. And Deacon King Kong celebrates the city of New York even as it criticizes in a similar way to The Wire’s treatment of Baltimore. The ways that racism is baked into the system and the lives that people build within that system, the little ways that find some joy in the midst of the situation they’re in is incredibly moving.

But, while The Wire definitely has some jokes, Deacon King Kong is a full out comedy embedded in the crime story. The humor rises from the community and the way the characters who have known each other for so long interact. Sportcoat’s a tragicomic figure; his alcoholism has completely subsumed him in the aftermath of his wife’s death a couple years before the beginning of this story. He is in a lot of ways a pitiable character, but in McBride’s hands, the humor that is born out of that is stunning. There is a slapstick quality to some of it as well. A would-be assassin runs into such trouble taking out his targets that I was reminded of Patrolman Mancuso from A Confederacy of Dunces and Sportcoat himself seems like a drunken M. Hulot from Jaques Tati movies.

The beauty of the novel is in the way the crime, the humor and the social critique blossom out of the incredible cast of characters that form an absolutely convincing community. It would be easy for this to turn into a dour morality tale or for the comic tone to make a mockery of the more serious elements. But McBride’s masterful prose and grasp of character allows the novel to embrace both the ugliness and joy of life in equal measure. In its exploration of a community over a couple generations (and in its drunken tragicomedy) it reminded me a little of Wendell Berry’s Port Williams Membership novels. The ending is hopeful. Here someone might quibble that it is unreasonably so, but I think it’s more an expression of McBride’s humanistic approach to the religion of his characters, that both critiques the church’s role in supporting systemic racism and allows it’s characters to take some comfort in it. McBride doesn’t pretend it’s a simple situation. It works incredibly well for me. I will be rereading this at some point, and this has made me really want to revisit The Good Lord Bird as well.

Canon Worthy.

A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro

Back in 2009 I read The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go and really enjoyed them, and when I heard that Ishiguro had written a fantasy novel, 2016’s The Buried Giant, I read that shortly after its release. I remember them fondly and when Ishiguro won the Nobel in 2019, I thought, based on memories of those books that he was a good choice. I picked up a copy of A Pale View of Hills, his debut, at a library sale not long after I read Never Let Me Go, but hadn’t gotten around to it. After hearing an interview between him and Neil Gaiman last weekend about the release of his newest novel, I finally read this, and I’m kicking myself for not getting to it sooner. It is an excellent novel, especially considering it was his first.

What I remembered about the previous Ishiguro novels I’d read were the broadest possible plot outlines and the sense that he conveyed loss, shame and guilt as well as anyone I’d read. I need to go back and reread those, because, even in his debut he’s masterful at having characters never saying precisely what they mean and constant misdirection while still illuminating the trauma and loss they experience. I’m sure that his work will repay rereading.

The central events of A Pale View of Hills are the bombing of Nagasaki and the suicide of the narrator’s daughter. These are rarely mentioned directly, but it’s clear from early on that those are the substance of everything the narrator and other characters are not saying. The narrator, Etsuko, is a Japanese widow who lives in England after the death of her second husband. She is visited by her surviving daughter and is haunted by the memory of her eldest daughter who had killed herself shortly before the beginning of the book. The bulk of the novel recalls her first marriage to a Japanese man and her friendship with a woman who had a young child in post WWII Nagasaki, around the time of the Korean War. The ending could be taken in at least two different ways, especially as Ishiguro pointedly speaks of the unreliability of memory.

I really enjoyed this book. It’s meditative and gut wrenching, but never maudlin. It is a serious exploration of how memory and trauma interact and the ways people suppress and talk around the things that consume them. It’s also about change that happens between generations for good and ill. I’m going to read all of Ishiguro’s books, I think. Next up is his newest, Klara and the Sun and then either on to his second novel, An Artist of the Floating World or a reread of Remains of the Day.

Highly Recommended. Upon reflection, Canon Worthy.

Owned But Previously Unread 2021 9

Catching Up On a Month Of Reading

I took a hiatus from the blog, but not from reading. Here are mini reviews of what I’ve read since posting about Piranesi last month. I plan to pick back up with reviews soon!

Vladimir Nabokov by Jane Grayson- Recommended

This is a brief illustrated biography of one of my favorite writers, from a series of such biographies. If you are interested in an overview of Nabokov’s life, this is perfect!

Dark Hollow by John Connolly- Recommended/Highly Recommended

The elevator pitch for John Connolly is James Lee Burke does supernatural horror. The supernatural elements are muted here, more or less a literalization of the metaphor of being haunted by grief. The crime story here is compelling. Connolly is bloodier minded than Burke, but the first person narration is in a similar mode. The first Connolly I read, Bad Men, is, I think, the better book, but I like the narrative voice here more. Burke's prose is better (but who this side of Nabokov and Melville writes prose as good as Burke's?), but Connolly's is very good.This is the second Charlie Parker crime novel (yes, his nickname is Bird, but no, the book never makes a big deal of the homage). I was advised to skip the first, and got the gist of it in flashbacks here. If you like crime and horror, I highly recommend this, and I look forward to more in this series. I understand the supernatural elements are cranked up in later volumes. Heavy content warning, but good stuff!

Known to Evil by Walter Mosley- Highly Recommended

The second Leonid McGill book is as good as the first and kept me up late at least one night. Looking forward to the rest of the series. I like Mosley more with each book. If you like dark, bleak crime noir, this is top shelf stuff!

Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller- Canon Worthy

The story of Achilles as narrated by Patroclus. An amazing retelling of the Illiad. Madeline Miller is two for two. I like Circe quite a bit more, but this is fantastic!

X X by Rian Hughes- Recommended/Highly Recommended

It's as if Neal Stephenson and Mark Danielewski (House of Leaves) collaborated on a hard scifi thriller that doubles as a great art object and a dense philosophical argument.

It examines the idea of consciousness as a collection of ideas. It talks about the danger of ideologies that promise a paradise, earthly or otherwise, that justify any atrocity in the minds of their adherents (a favorite theme of mine). It has sentient memeplexes that represent the major ideas of this century and the previous two. It's, for mostly better but sometimes worse, a fierce defense of Enlightment ideals. It's a first contact scifi novel. And it is a mosaic of fonts, art, page manipulation, email exchanges, faux-wikipedia articles, transcripts of all kinds that make the book as object a delight to peruse. There's even an album that was created by the author's sister based on the  review in the book of an album that was recorded based on the signal that provide the inciting incident of the book (and it's really good!).

It was compared to Moby Dick in two of the blurbs, which immediately piqued my interest. In the sense that it is ambitious and long, sure, but that's the only connection.

Ultimately, I liked this, but not so well as I thought something so completely aimed at my interests (and compared to Moby Dick!) would. One, it's a little more hard scifi than my tastes generally run and I had to pause many times because of that. Two, while Hughes frames consciousness as essentially composed of ideas, I think he somehow manages to give short shrift to the fact ideologies are endemic to the human condition. Of course, ideologies are often dangerous,  but the Enlightenment rationalism that the book embodies is itself an ideology. I think a lot about this paradox of seeing the danger of ideology while understanding that vantage point is itself an ideology. I haven't reconciled that in my own thought and I'm still processing the presentation of that argument in the novel. You'd think that would endear the book to me, but it has a more mixed effect. That said, I agree with the quote in the picture I'll repost in the comments that says, essentially "Beware of ideologies."

But the book is thrilling and full of ideas (HA!) that require thought. And the scope broadens out to cosmic levels at the end; reminiscent of 2001 (the film) with a more concrete idea of what's happening. A tough read in some ways. I was a little mixed, but it is definitely worth wrestling through. 

 

Gold Coast by Elmore Leonard- Canon

One of the best books by one of my favorite writers. After slogging through XX I needed something that moved along more quickly. My fourth read of this. A perfect ending!

 

Lamb by Christopher Moore- Pass/Mildly Recommended

There were times I cackled delightedly during this and also times I rolled my eyes hard. More of the jokes hit for me than didn't. Don't know where that leaves me in terms or recommending it or not. I'm glad I read it.

 

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado De Assis- Canon Worthy

A great novel from 1800s Brazil. I'm sure I missed a lot through translation, the passage of time and being unfamiliar with the culture. I'm certain there is a fair amount of satire on his day that I'm missing, especially around the slave trade. But despite that distance of culture and time, this is brilliant.

It's funny, clear-eyed, and often cruel. But that cruelty is part of the point. Bras Cubas is dead and telling his life's story in short chapters. It's an early example of the unreliable narrator revealing his own selfishness and cruelty (and presumably his country's, though a lot of that is lost to me) while appearing to not realize what he's doing.

It will take several more readings to understand it better, but on first pass I absolutely loved it!

 

Fortunate Son by Walter Mosley- Pass

The first Walter Mosley novel that I’ve read that didn’t work for me. I will continue to read him as everything else has been excellent. Up next by him (maybe a few books down the line) Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, the first Socrates Fortlow book.

 

 

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke 2021 Reread

I stand by my review of Piranesi, pasted below with minor edits, from last year. The awe-filled mood that this creates is perfect. I said rereading would be the tell if this surpassed Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in my estimation. And I think it did. At any rate, Clarke has cemented her place among my top tier writers. 

As with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Clarke has once again found the perfect narrator for her book. I couldn’t imagine someone narrating Strange and Norrell other than Simon Prebble. And as for Piranesi, I’m very glad that I read the physical copy last year. I’m equally glad I listened to it this time as Chiwatel Ejiofor is spot on as Piranesi.

This type of material can be used to great horrific effect. In Piranesi, though, Clarke is able to convey the damage done to the lives of some of the characters yet maintain the awe and deep sense of silence that is at the heart of this novel. There is horror, but there is hope as well. Just perfect. This may end up as one of my yearly rereads.

Canon

2020 (first reading):

Susanna Clarke’s Jane Austen-era historical fantasy novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel is one of my favorite books. I’ve given it away 10 or 12 times over the years as I’ve found used or remaindered copies. Clarke has had some real health problems in the interim sixteen years since that book’s publication, and was unable to do the historical research required for a follow up. Fortunately, she got well enough to write recently. Piranesi, while it couldn’t be more different from Strange and Norrell  in some ways, is equally good, maybe even better (or at least closer to the center of my taste). It was worth every second of the decade and a half wait. The closest I can come to describing it is that it is almost as if CS Lewis wrote House of Leaves. That is an apt, if jarring and somewhat reductive comparison.

The title character got his nickname from the Other, the only other living human in his world. The name is a reference to the Italian print maker obsessed with Labyrinths. Piranesi lives in a house that is also a world. There are a seemingly endless series of connected classical buildings. There are four distinct seas complete with their own tidal systems in the lower halls and rain and fog in the upper. Piranesi does not know his true identity, and lives a sort of contemplative life cataloging the statues that line the halls and fishing in the lower seas to feed himself. He understands some things that clearly come from our world, but the house is the only reality he knows. To say much more would venture into spoiler territory.

Clarke builds an incredibly evocative mythic atmosphere. It is both contemplative and awe inspiring. The statues in the halls have significance, but are often ambiguous (though at least in one case, a clear reference which doubles as a subtle clue to what is happening). When I first heard the book described, I expected more horror than is present. There is horror, but it is not the primary mood. As Piranesi gradually discovers what is happening Clarke generates real tension without damaging the wonder of the House that is Piranesi’s world. And, as David Mitchell’s blurb says, the ending is pitch perfect. I would never have anticipated this as a followup to Strange and Norrell, but as I’ve sat with it for a couple of days I really think I may like it more. Rereading will be the tell.

 

The Long Fall by Walter Mosley

This is my fourth Walter Mosley book and I am in for many more. I had previously read Devil in a Blue Dress, the first in the Easy Rawlins series, and the weird and compelling The Man in My Basement. I also recently read his writing manual, This Year You Write Your Novel. The Man in My Basement is one I’ll be reading several more times, I’m sure. I’ll also be reading more of the Rawlins books. But first, I suspect I’ll be going forward with more books featuring the private detective, Leonid McGill, of which this is the first. As much as I enjoyed Devil, this and The Man In My Basement are what really pushed me over the edge with him.

McGill lives in what feels like one long ethical dilemma more than a series of them. He’s an amateur boxer who could have gone pro, in a marriage that is not exactly working but weirdly calibrated to keep him in it, and trying to get away from a past of skirting the morally dubious to outright wrong side of the PI profession he once trafficked in. There is “the one honest cop” in New York who has vowed to put him behind bars and the swank office building, in which his business punches above its weight, is trying to find a reason to kick him out. Then the people he’s investigating start getting murdered.

This seems like pretty standard noir fare, but Mosley’s command of language and mood make this something special. The bone deep weariness and inability to find a way out of the ethical morass he’s trudging through really made this sing for me. Each character seems believable and acts in a believable way. An online friend described the mood of the McGill books as a “surreal purgatory,” which description seems apt. I suspect I’ll read through these (and maybe the Socrates Fortlaw books) and the standalone The Fortunate Son first, but I may end up reading most, if not all, of Mosley’s work.

On the border between Highly Recommended and Canon Worthy.

Ahab's Return or The Last Voyage by Jeffrey Ford

Jeffrey Ford is a writer who writers and reviewers I love speak about in hushed tones, the kind usually reserved for the likes of Kelly Link, Ted Chiang or Gene Wolfe. I had not read anything by him before this, but I doubt this will be the last. That it took a sequel to Moby Dick to get me to take the plunge with him, is, I know, extremely on brand. Moby Dick is my favorite novel, one that I read every year. I’ve maintained in recent years that it has a lot of the structure and feel of a fantasy horror novel. No doubt though, it is a precursor to the big difficult novels of the 20th century as well. And I’m not sure what anyone would hope to accomplish by writing a sequel to it that went for a similar approach. Ford very wisely takes this in a very different, much pulpier direction; this is a delight of a very different sort; fun and propulsive without all the digressions of Moby Dick. And yet it has significant philosophical and political heft.

You could almost call it pulp metafiction. Ahab, again, is an obsessive character encountered by the narrator. The narrator in this case is one Alex Harrow, a reporter (read: person who makes up fantastical stories out of whole cloth) for a tabloid called The Gorgon’s Mirror in New York. After the events of Moby Dick, Ishmael worked as a copy editor for the Mirror while writing his novel. Like Harrow, Ishmael was a little fast and loose with the truth. Ahab survived after all, as did Dagoo (who resents his name having been changed in the book from Madi). After an implied Odyssean journey back to America, Ahab shows up in pursuit of Ishmael so that he can find his son. What follows is part fantasy bordering on horror and part Gangs of New York and part theory of fiction and ideology (though this part never drags down the narrative voice or pace). Ahab’s son has taken up with a gang led by a magical and nefarious gangster called Malabaster. On one level the book is this pulp story from the perspective of a delightful unreliable narrator in which a small band of characters all with different, believable motivations make a tenuous alliance to go after Malabaster.

The magic system is rooted in the power of language and of narrative. In this sense the book, without going on tedious tangents, is very much about the danger of ideology (specifically nativist ideology) and how the war for people’s minds is fought on that ground. Set, as it is, in the 1850s Ford makes masterful use of the rabid nativism that was happening at the time. As I said in my review of Redburn, you could copy paste a lot of what was being said about catholics at the time and just say muslim instead, and other than a few anachronistic phrasings the same message wouldn’t seem out of place in some contemporary outlets. And in Madi (nee Dagoo), Ford illustrates a lot of the ways things haven’t changed a century and change later. By making the enemy the embodiment of nativist ideology Ford makes a powerful statement. If I had to ding the book for anything, it’s that it’s more pointed in its political message than I usually prefer. That said, if there was ever a time to write an anti-nativist novel it’s now.

But the book is not sermonizing. It is, first and foremost, a rollicking pulp journey rendered in excellent prose. If this is representative, Ford deserves those hushed tones that people use when discussing him. This isn’t going to replace Moby Dick on my yearly reread list, but it’s definitely in the reread a couple more times (at least) pile. 

Highly Recommended 

Owned But Previously Unread 2021 Number 5