MY (2) YEARS' BEST

These are the best books I read in 2018 and 2019.

Americanah by Chimimanda Adichie
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
The Archive of Alternate Endings by Lindsey Drager
Azazeel by Youssef Ziedan
A Book of American Martyrs by Joyce Carol Oates
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis
Circe by Madeline Miller
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman
Elmet by Fiona Mozley
The Enlightened Army by David Toscana
The Farm by Joanne Ramos
The Forensic Records Society by Magnus Mills
Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong
In the Distance by Hernan Diaz
Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott
Pulp by Robin Talley
There There by Tommy Orange
War with the Newts by Karel Capek
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Welcome to Lagos by Chibundu Onuzo
Why Karen Carpenter Matters by Karen Tongson (NF)
Yabo by Alexis de Veaux

My year's best

These are the best of the 80 books I read in 2017:

Fiction
Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout 
An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
Autumn by Ali Smith
A Book of American Martyrs by Joyce Carol Oates
La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
The City Always Wins by Omar Robert Hamilton 
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich 
Glyph by Percival Everett
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
La Rose by Louise Erdrich
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
Swing Time by Zadie Smith 
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
Volgiamo Tutto by Nanni Balestrini
White Tears by Hari Kunzru

Nonfiction
The History of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

 

THANK YOU LOUISE ERDRICH!

I knew she was good, great even, one of the finest and most important authors of our time. She's written many good and some great novels, most of which I've read and several of which I've loved. I knew. Still, maybe I didn't know, not really, how truly gifted she is.

Because goddamn if Louise Erdrich hasn't gone and done it: written an intelligent, wise, thoughtfully crafted, beautiful and deep and deeply literary dystopian novel. That elusive oft-sought gem I'd despaired of ever finding.

This blog is replete with my plaints about the myriad failings of dystopian fiction, sadly including books by otherwise good writers, certainly including critically acclaimed books. Not a one of them has met what I think are my quite modest requirements: honesty, credibility or at least internal credibility, not-nonsensical plotting and not-laughably stupid distortions of science, an at least minimal nod to political reality, a progressive slant that among other things precludes white- and male-centric story, and above all an imagination expansive enough to create a fictive reality that moves beyond the status quo in terms of social systems, an imagination that conceives a different way forward. 

These modest requirements are met and exceeded by this brilliant and thus far underappreciated novel. I say underappreciated because while yes it's been reviewed and has received some attention since the author is after all Louise Erdrich, most reviews have damned it with faint praise, judging this one of her lesser works. In my view the opposite is true. Future Home of the Living God is one of her greatest accomplishments.

I won't spoil anything for the potential reader with specifics about the story Erdrich tells here. Instead I'll emphasize how this novel shines with creative intelligence--intelligence about humanity, about community, about science and nature, and also intelligence about what kind of story a story such as this should tell. It's not only by comparison to the relentlessly stupid dystopias to which we've been subjected by so many other writers, but on its own merits and measured according to the work of art this book sets out to be, that Future Home of the Living God achieves greatness. I loved every minute of it, every painful and frightening and perversely hopeful page.

 

Reading revolution

2017 is the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The precise date the Bolsheviks took power is November 7. In the lead-up to the anniversary of this glorious landmark of world history, I'm doing a little reading.

First, I'm reading The History of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky (which, by the way, is available in a free e-book version here). Actually I think I'm rereading it, but the truth is that I have little specific memory of most of the great Marxist works I read in my early 20s as my aging brain seems to no longer retain that kind of detail. So now, 40 years later, even if it weren't the centenary, it'd be time to read them again. Especially now. To refresh and re-arm. None of us could have predicted even a year ago the way the class struggle in this country would so swiftly and sharply re-ignite. It has, though, and is heating up daily, and as I read Trotsky's superlative, thrilling, incisive, commanding narrative I come across passage after passage that is stunningly apposite. Much as I'd like to, I don't know that I'll remember these fantastically on-target formulations (see above re aging brain), but I do believe they'll have a cumulative impact and I'll come away from this book with a deepened, renewed understanding of how revolution is accomplished.

It is a long book, and I'm reading it slowly as pretty much every sentence is a gem requiring concentration and consideration, so who knows whether I'll finish before the 100th anniversary arrives. Whenever I do, though, I'll be moving on to two others that I'm embarrassed to say I have not read before but am eager to begin.

One is The Black Jacobins by the brilliant Marxist historian CLR James, who by the way called Trotsky's book "the greatest history of an event that I know." James' book, subtitled Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, is the history of the Haitian Revolution, the world's first successful slave revolution. The other is A Socialist History of the French Revolution by Jean Jaures, of whom Trotsky said, "Every revolutionary party, every oppressed working class can claim Jaures, his memory, his example, for our own."

Meanwhile, fiction obsessive that I am, I'm also reading a novel or two here and there, most of them trending in the revolutionary direction as well. One I just finished and do, to my own surprise, recommend is The City Always Wins by Omar Robert Hamilton. This book is set in the aftermath of, the ensuing two to three years after, the unfinished Egyptian revolution of 2011, the mass uprisings centered in Cairo's Tahrir Square that were the central events of what came to be known as the Arab Spring. I nearly didn't read this one. Basically because it was so widely praised by the bourgeois literary establishment that I assumed it couldn't be any good politically. I decided to give it a try. Then I nearly stopped within the first few pages because I saw that the story (1) is not about the actual 2011 uprising as I'd mistakenly thought it would be but rather takes place in the following years, and (2) is not a narrative about or from the point of view of the oppressed masses but rather is about and from the point of view of several middle-class artsy types--filmmakers, photographers, audio engineers--who undertake to record, bear witness to, the struggle. I kept going, though, and was soon won over, in fact swept up in the narrative. What is winning about this novel? For one thing, it's honest about point of view and achieves what felt to me like real authenticity. Also, the main characters may not be starving proletarians, but they are genuine partisans of the revolutionary insurgence who've assessed that their highest contribution will be to bring the news of it to the world. They're propagandists in the best sense of the word. As such, as partisans and propagandists, they do not stand outside the course of events. They don't just tell the story, they become part of the story. They are sincere, they are dedicated, they are in the thick of it. They sacrifice. They suffer. Ultimately, as the counter-revolution (armed and funded by U.S. imperialism which I wish Hamilton had touched on a bit more) retains and tightens its grip on the state, they are defeated. But only temporarily, as Egypt and the Arab masses, above all the Palestinian nation, will rise again, and at the novel's perfect end it's clear that the surviving characters are still in the fight.

Oh, and by the way, don't hold the literary establishment's praise of this novel against it. I suspect the critics felt free to laud it because they believe the story it tells is well and buried. They're wrong. As all will see.

Turn the guns around!

I just read a really really good book but I'm going to do it a disservice. I'm going to post some comments about it that aren't as fully thought through or comprehensive as they should be, some notes that don't rise to the level of a full-fledged review. Not because it doesn't deserve better--it does--but because of time constraints. Better to say something quickly, I decided, then nothing at all for who knows how long. So to my comrade John Catalinotto, author of the terrific new book Turn the Guns Around: Mutinies, Soldier Revolts and Revolutions, my apologies for the short shrift. To the rest of you, here's an even shorter version of my brief comments to follow: 

Read this book.

Why? For simple reasons.

First, it tells a story that very few people know. Second, this story is beyond relevant for anyone who is or wants to be engaged in the current wave of people's struggle--the resistance movement as it's now being called. There are rich lessons to be found in these pages. Third, because it will boost your morale--and who doesn't need that at this juncture?

Turn the Guns Around is mostly a history of  GI resistance during the U.S. war against Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s. Its focus is the work of the American Servicemen's Union and the ASU's newspaper The Bond. Catalinotto was deeply involved in both the organizing and the newspapering, so this is a tale from the inside, with an insider's feel for the nuance and complexity but also an analyst's perspective on the big picture. The book delivers both ways. There are page-turning day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour depictions of key cases when active-duty soldiers and sailors defied the brass, refusing orders, refusing to deploy, refusing to fight. Interspersed throughout are what felt to me like the pumping heart of the book: dozens of letters from GIs published in the Bond. It all feels fresh, immediate, as if it happened yesterday instead of 50 years ago. 

Alongside the ASU's overall story, there are several chapters that shift and broaden the focus. These chapters are about the Paris Commune; the Bolshevik Revolution; and the revolution in Portugal with its connection to the national liberation of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. In each case, Catalinotto shows how the the role of soldiers and sailors was a pivot point, how the moment they threw in their lot with the revolutionary forces of the workers, peasants and oppressed was central.

Which shows what he's really up to with this book. This is not just a fascinating story of brave, heroic people, although it is certainly that. This is a political orientation. And a reminder. Overwhelming as the enemy's forces can seem with all their state power and military might, our side--the side of the workers and oppressed, whose ranks include all those hundreds of thousands of enlisted personnel--is capable of overthrowing them. We've done it before. We'll do it again.

Bus driver fiction

When I was a city bus driver in Ann Arbor in the 1970s, the bosses used to harp on one rule in particular. They even made it into a singsong-y little slogan they'd sling at us time after time. "A late bus is annoying," it went, "but an early bus is worse than no bus at all."

For some reason, this refrain has stayed with me. At odd moments now and again over the years, it's suddenly echoed in my head. As have other memories of my four years driving bus, from the relentless push to meet time points to the endless battle against bus bunching, to how bus drivers regard stopping for passengers as the annoying necessity that endlessly messes with the schedule--to the ubiquitous driver fantasy of quitting the job by driving the bus into the management offices.

So imagine my delight upon opening The Maintenance of Headway by Magnus Mills to behold this first sentence: "'There's no excuse for being early,' said Breslin."

It only got better from there. Page after page, passage after passage, OMG moment after OMG moment--here is that elusive long-sought tome: a masterwork of bus driver fiction. From the dispatch-dictated illogical turnarounds to the deadpan hilarity of break-room dialogue, Mills here captures it all. The bus driving life, in all its quotidian nuttiness.

Sure, I have squealed with delight reading other books. And yes I'm sure, you don't have to have been a bus driver to appreciate this book. But oh my heavens it sure ratchets up the wow factor several notches when you can identify with each scene, appreciate each wisecrack, cringe at each management inanity. This verisimilitude coupled with Mills' customary mastery of working-class comedy of the absurd brings this baby home. A romp! From start to finish.

As I had also found The Restraint of Beasts, an earlier novel of his I read some years back. I remember howling aloud as I read that one. Don't know why I more or less forgot about Mills in the interim, or why I suddenly remembered him and thought to seek out more of his books, but yippee that I did. I now have at least two more to catch up on. Mills ain't perfect--I'm hoping I'll find something besides only male characters in his other books--but he's damned good.

He also, by the way, is that rarest and realest of deals: not merely a working-class writer, but a writer who remains a worker. A bus driver! His books get rave reviews, and have been nominated for awards, and who knows whether he could afford to quit driving bus and teach as so many other writers do to make a living. Whether he could or not, he doesn't. He works. And okay, yes of course teaching is working, but teaching writing to MFA students is a rarefied experience and to spend your days at that instead of at hourly wage work like driving bus or entering data or changing bedsheets or mining or cashiering or nail polishing or nannying or steel milling does remove you from the realm of real workers' lives which is to say real life. I've spent yo these many years bitterly resenting how I have to work full time at a full-time hourly wage job, and I'll resent and complain until the day I finally figure out a way to retire, but if you were to argue that living this life of the full-time wage worker has been vital to my writerly consciousness I guess I might concede the point. In Mills' case we have his job to thank for the brilliance of this book, I have no doubt.

The invention of Nikola Tesla

Years after its publication, I finally got around to reading The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt, and now I'd like to take a time machine back to 2009 and tell myself, jeez, what are you waiting for, read this book! Because this is a beautiful novel. Wondrous good. Poignant and powerful and purely original. This is a novel about love and grief, loneliness and longing, and even, no kidding, bonus points here, about capitalism and how it wrecks everything, blocks human possibility. Above all, it seems to me, this is a stunningly wrought consideration of creativity.

Skimming reader reviews on Amazon left me shaking my head at what seems to me to be a sad misread of Hunt's novel and thinking, as a novelist myself, about how you just never know what book a reader is going to fashion in her/his own mind and how it might be not at all the novel you thought you wrote. OK, I say this with the perhaps unsupportable belief that I, unlike those many Amazon readers, understand Hunt's intent. Who knows, but it seems to me that what she's up to with this novel is something much more delicate and profound than what many of those readers seem to have gleaned. What they, many anyway, assert is that Invention is a work of magical realism. Surreal, some label it. And other variations on this theme.

But, unless I've lost my readerly mind, The Invention of Everything Else is neither a surreal nor a magical-realist fiction. Rather, it is a deep dive into the creative consciousness. It is a study of the imagination--imagination as a powerful creative force that drives both the main and several of the minor characters and that leaves them ultimately adrift in a society that squelches imagination at every turn or, as in Tesla's case, appropriates it for corporate profit.

I loved how, especially in the early sections of the book, we experience Tesla's creative consciousness in all its expansiveness. There's a sense of wonder here that we are more used to associating with artists rather than scientists; Hunt had me reeling and gasping at the playful leaps of imagination she conjures in Tesla's mind. It's a daring and, it seems to me, mostly successful effort, which made me regard Tesla as a sort of artist himself, a being of the ether rather than a mere materialist.

But while we see him here as a person of soaring ideas, possessor of a mind that broke free of earthly bounds, he was of course, as every true scientist must be, a materialist through and through, and Hunt depicts this beautifully too. There are many places where she has him spin grand and ever grander ideas for inventions, and he is at pains to point out how every one, no matter how grandiose or implausible, is rooted in reality, in atoms and molecules, energy, electricity. I love this. Because science--a materialist perspective on the world--is or ought to be a soaring, limitless endeavor. A great scientist, a truly great one with an unbound mind, is a kind of artist, and must be a dreamer. As Hunt shows here so well.

At a few points in the book, Hunt's Tesla makes a nice little jab against religion, with a nifty little point that resonates. He takes to task those who would reduce all the myriad wonders of the natural world to a single simple magical all-powerful being in control of everything. How unimaginative, Tesla remarks. And how unexciting, when the universe offers up its endlessly complex mysteries for human examination, the thrilling project of a lifetime, his lifetime, endless lifetimes if they were available. So much to learn. So much to investigate. So much to think up. To create. So much room for improvement. Ever expanding vistas.

This is the Tesla Hunt offers up, hero perhaps, martyr, victim, human being with an unbound mind and a broken heart from almost the start. I'm so taken with him, with her version of him, that while I'm interested enough in learning more to think about reading a biography now, on the other hand I'm touched enough by this book, content enough, at the end, to live with this Tesla, fictional though he is, as the definitive version. There's literary magic here, and I think it's where I'll let him dwell.

I haven't mentioned the other main character, Louisa, whose life intersects Tesla's in his last days, but with her too Hunt has crafted a fine character. I found her a lovely creation, and her story an effective counterpoint to Tesla's highlighting the same themes of imagination, love, loss, grief, hope. The ache of life. All in all, as affecting and satisfying a novel as I've read in quite a while.

Juliet Takes a Breath

Gabby Rivera makes it look easy.

Which is the hardest thing a writer can do.

With her debut novel Juliet Takes a Breath, Rivera sucks the reader in on the first page and there's no escape until the final sentence from a headlong plunge into the life, loves, longings, the rages, thrills, confusions, epiphanies, the utterly original and thoroughly convincing consciousness of first-person protagonist Juliet Milagros Palante. This is one winning sweetheart of a character--but real, honest, multi-faceted, beautifully crafted, not saccharine or fake.This novel is one humdinger of a contribution to queer literature. And this is one fine writer, Gabby Rivera, whose narrative skill and literary art announce her as a bright new star on the LGBT lit scene.

If Juliet Takes a Breath is not a finalist for next year's Lambda Literary Award I'll be shocked. And mad!

I used the word humdinger a few sentences back. Which marks me as old. Which I am. I'm of the generation that came of age and came out of the closet in the immediate aftermath of the Stonewall Rebellion. Much has changed since then, including the language of our movement, of our communities, and one of the things I love about Rivera's novel is how it's a headlong plunge into all that. It takes up hot topics. It takes on tough questions about words and their import, community and its challenges, division and unity. Racism. Solidarity. It does all this without sacrificing story. Contrary to the reactionary rules promulgated by the literary establishment in this country, you can indeed portray characters grappling with these vital issues, you can indeed write dialogue that directly engages with these issues, this is indeed what real people are doing in their real lives and a really good writer can convey this all organically within the flow of the characters' story and plot development. That is exactly what Rivera has done, for which I admire her a great deal. 

Oh, and I forgot to mention: this book is damned funny too! The depictions of the Portland scene are scathing and hilarious.

A stunning new review of Vera's Will

File this one under shameless self-promotion, but sometimes a girl's got to do what a girl's got to do.

One and a half years after publication, long after I stopped expecting any new reviews of my 2015 novel Vera's Will, there is one. And it's a beauty.

Writing for The Lesbrary, a wonderful lesbian book review site from which, honestly, I'd long since given up on hoping for a review, a North Carolina librarian named Tierney offers a deeply thoughtful and gratifyingly positive take on the book. I'm so grateful, not only that Tierney liked the book--though of course that too--but also that she really got it. Really appreciated it for exactly what I'd wish it to be appreciated for. Her one criticism is on target, too, I've got to say.

I'll just tease here with a few choice phrases from the review: "heart-wrenching and heartwarming"..."an entrancing read"..."beautifully bittersweet, both melancholy and heartening"..."filled a void in queer fiction..."

Now please go read the full review! Thank you, Tierney, thank you Lesbrary!

The Sport of Kings

Randall Jarrell famously defined a novel as "a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it." We are squarely in Jarrell territory with this one, The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan.

Through much of this novel I was in thrall--to the story, the writing, the ambition--I was impressed, I was thrilled. And then by the end, not so much. I just glanced at Amazon and Goodreads and see that the average rating is, respectively, 3.6 and 3.7. Count me among the masses, I guess, because ultimately, although I'd started out thinking this was going to earn the big five-oh along with a gushing rave, I'd say that the Amazonians and Goodreaders have it just about right. Ultimately, this is a good but not a great book, and I'll try to grapple here with why.

There is much to admire. There is gorgeous writing. There are some well drawn characters. Mostly, and it's why this is a notable book even if not a great one, there is broad scope that takes in big questions and takes on the most crucial, the central, the basic defining issue of U.S. society and U.S. history: racism. This is a narrative that contains multitudes, from the evolution of millions of earthly species to the particular individual tales of a number of particular individuals, from enslaved Africans creating the riches of 19th to 21st century Kentucky to the self-proclaimed genteel bluebloods living off those riches, from the great Secretariat to a series of his descendants, from babies to children to preachers to receptionists to prisoners to trainers and grooms and jockeys, from lynchings to beatings to trotting to planting to drowning. To the landed gentry, always back to the strutting entitled wealthy white landed gentry of bluegrass country, around whom the story revolves.

So what's not to love? Some of it is quibbles. That gorgeous writing does spiral off in places toward the realm of overblown overdone verbiage. In fact the author herself, in a bizarre aside that I wish Morgan's editor had been able to talk her out of including and that in fact has the feel of a response to an editor's efforts to talk her down from some of the lengthy loopy flights of language, has the omniscient anonymous (or maybe not) narrator suddenly break the fourth wall briefly to speak directly to the reader and defend against the charge that it's all "too purple, too florid." Whoa! Way to break the spell, not to mention protest too much. But okay I was down for the most part with the many long, language-rich passages, most of them evocations of the natural world or natural history. Mostly, they're beautiful, and mostly they work--they draw the reader in, are in some places pure poetry, breathtaking. Not everywhere though. A quibble.

Sadly, some of the Jarrellian "something wrong" rises above the quibble level. SPOILER ALERT from here on.

As I read, especially as I passed the halfway mark, and definitively once I'd finished, I felt troubled by the unevenness of character development. Surprisingly, although perhaps it's unfair to be surprised, by my read the female characters get short shrift. The deepest, richest most multidimensional characters are male. Most of the novel's women are, well, sketchier, thinner, less full. Several have sort of walk-on parts, play a plot-related role, and walk off. Mothers, mostly, the first of whom, Henry's, is pretty much a cipher; the next, Henrietta's, gets a bit more fleshed out but is quickly disposed of; the third, Allmon's, is more fully treated yet still, somehow, it seems to me, is on the page primarily to fulfill her plot function. Maryleen, the onetime cook, is dispensed with early on, only to re-emerge at the end as a sort of deus ex machina and then disappear again. Is she meant to be the writer of these pages? I hope not, because I don't think she'd treat some of the characters the way the actual writer does.

Then there's the main female character, Henrietta. Troublingly, she seems to me to be not fully realized either, not in the way her father Henry or her lover Allmon are. There's something hollow to her, something not quite filled in. Now it may be that this is purposeful. That Morgan writes Henrietta in this way to convey how damaged she is by one of the central horrors of the story, the fact that her father rapes her for many years, probably from early adolescence on until her death in her late twenties. I use the word rape because that of course is what it is when a father has sexual relations with his child, regardless of how the father sees it and also regardless of how the child sees it, must see it, forces herself to see it, doesn't allow herself to see it or think of it in order to survive. But I don't believe the word rape is ever used in the novel; actually, the deed is never shown, nor even directly referred to, nor ever acknowledged directly in word or thought by either the victim, Henrietta, or the perpetrator, her father Henry. Which I'll address more in a minute. Here, though, the point is that it's not clear to me how I was supposed to read Henrietta the character on the page. If she is meant to be the walking wounded, which she absolutely is, if she is drawn as finding a way to function via dissociation, via separating herself from the central trauma of her life, via acting out in various potentially dangerous ways, that, I guess, is accomplished. And if so, okay, that explains the as-if, not-quite aspect of the character's portrayal. I don't know, though, if this explanation can be stretched all the way to explain the decision she makes when she realizes she's pregnant. As shown in a brief scene by the side of a road that as far as I can tell takes place over ten or fifteen minutes at the most, Henrietta sort of skims her mind over the situation and opts stunningly quickly to go ahead and have the baby. This did not ring true to me. She's been fucking her father as well as a man she's fallen in true deep love with, she has no way of knowing who has impregnated her, and she doesn't even take any real time to consider having an abortion, let alone decide to have one. I don't know, maybe I'm not being fair, maybe I'm lumping this in with every TV show that never allows any woman to have an abortion, that always has everyone who gets pregnant go ahead and have the baby, which is not how it works in real life nor should it, in real life women often decide, as is their right, to have abortions--maybe this doesn't fit with those TV offenses, because maybe her carrying out the pregnancy is a function of her damage, of her not-all-thereness. I don't know. It bothered me. But okay.

What bothered me worse was Henrietta dying in childbirth. It disappointed me deeply. There were so many other ways the story could have gone. Instead, by my read, it felt as if here went yet another, the main, female character being shuttled off the scene so the story could get back to its focus on the men.

I've gone on too long and will have to abbreviate the rest. Also, I didn't intend to go so negative on this novel as it does have a lot to recommend it. It's one I could see arguing about, could see another reader countering all my criticisms and that would be cool. But. A couple more things.

I was also deeply disappointed that the character Henry never, to put it simplistically, gets his comeuppance. Maybe I'm wrong, but by my read, despite his vile racism and despite his vile sexual predation against his own daughter, on balance he remains a sympathetic character. We are with him in his head a great deal, and especially as the novel takes its final turns toward the end, there are indications that he is growing, changing, opening, regretting. There are intimations of, lord help us, redemption. Well that's the author's prerogative. It too rings false, at least for me.

Then there's the end--the sacrifice? the narrative tying-up device? the gunshot suicide? the drowning?--of Allmon. I had my doubts, my unease, about the portrayal of this character throughout. There are places in his story, there are scenes, for example in prison, that strike me as, sorry, stereotypical, even though I understand that is the furthest thing from the author's good intentions. His life, his thoughts, his feelings feel authentic sometimes but not all the time. I just don't think the attempt to create this character has quite been pulled off. But okay, close enough. Until. Except. Really? The Tragic Mulatto? He really has to go down in flames? Crazed and destroyed by the racist system, the white power structure, the rich white man who--note well--does not die, is spared, will raise Allmon's and Henrietta's child as his own, none the poorer after the insurance settlement, much the wiser, kinder, mellower white man. Sigh. I don't know. It doesn't sit right. Is this really the only imaginable outcome to this story? Couldn't Allmon have been granted some agency? If not a happy ending (although why not, after all his suffering?), then some more complex conclusion, some road forward? Something more than destruction?

In this Commonweal interview The Sport of Kings author C.E. Morgan is asked about the fraught issue of white writers writing Black characters, the interviewer quoting "some hard questions" raised by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda in their book The Racial Imaginary. I find Morgan's response unfortunate, to say the least. She goes off against, yep, "an embrace of political correctness with its required silences," and it gets worse from there, including the nonsensical assertion that "the far political right and the far political left aren't located on a spectrum but on a circle, where they inevitably meet in their extremity." So oy, there's that.

I can't help but contrast this book and its reception to the magnificent novel that drove me to revive this blog earlier this year: The Castle Cross The Magnet Carter by Kia Corthron. Kings was published by Farrar Straus Giroux, one of the big boys in the publishing world, a division of MacMillan, owned by the German conglomerate Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, with all the promotional money available that implies. FSG brought out Kings with much fanfare earlier this year, and it got the full treatment: many reviews, feature articles, author interviews. Corthron's novel was published by Seven Stories Press, an independent. It was reviewed, and there was some press, but it was not given the Big Book treatment the way Morgan's was. Does a white writer writing about race get more props than a Black writer writing about race, does the white writer's book get more attention, is it seen as a more important contribution, even when the Black writer's book is superior? Welcome to the USA.

The Fifth Season is a great book!

In the early years of this blog I may have written once or twice about my frustrating relationship with science fiction. Or speculative fiction as it's often now called. Or fantasy, its, what, sibling? Whatever you call it, for most of my reading life I've wished to love books of this genre. And my wish has gone almost entirely unfulfilled. Time after time, I've turned to a new novel, a new writer, having heard that this is the one. The one with actual original ideas. The one with genuinely creative concepts. The truly new story. The beautifully written, literary, gripping thought provoker. The politically progressive, socially relevant, maybe even radical one that contributes something to the literature of struggle. Only to be, time after time, disappointed. Stale reworkings of tired old tropes. Uninteresting non-ideas. Pedestrian language. Now I know it's wrong to dismiss an entire genre simply because my own experiences have been lacking. No doubt I've simply not found the right writers. And so, revolutionary optimist that I endlessly urge myself to be, I keep trying. Again I read a review or hear a recommendation. Again I'm told that no, really, this one is different. This one will blow you away. Again I steel myself, prepared for the inevitable letdown.

No letdown, not this time. All praise to N.K. Jemisin! I've just read her novel The Fifth Season and I'm  squirming and squealing with delight. I've found it--a great sci fi book. I've found her--a brilliant sci fi author. All hail! And let the breathless countdown to the August 16 publication date of sequel The Obelisk Gate, second in the trilogy begun with The Fifth Season, begin. In fact I've just pre-ordered it, something I don't believe I've ever before done.

What is it that has me so over the moon after reading The Fifth Season? Well, everything whose lack has bummed me out so many other times. The world Jemison has built with this story is unlike any I've encountered in all my 56 years of reading. She's had a new idea! She's imagined a truly different world! Yet at the same time she's fashioned a story, built upon the foundation of her original idea and utterly true to her new world, that resonates powerfully with the realities of our own real, deeply damaged world. On top of all that this novel is powerfully free of the constricting archaic constructs of race, sex, and gender from which very few writers successfully liberate their fiction. Or even try.

At the same time, precisely by breaking free of heterosexist and racist norms in the pages of this brilliant story, Jemisin makes us think about the real world, the racist sexist anti-LGBT society in which we live. She makes us think about bigotry, about inequality, and also, in this story of literally earth-shaking cataclysms that drive epoch after epoch of the creation and destruction of civilizations, about the current international crisis of mass migration caused by war, occupation, poverty, imperialism. About what community is, what humanity is. About unity and divisiveness and about what can be accomplished with joint effort. There are echos of it all in this novel. And on top of that, there is, in an unbearable plot development at the end, an homage of sorts to Toni Morrison's masterpiece Beloved. A sad, bitter necessary nod to the only kinds of choices oppression offers.

Jemisin is a very fine artist. The Fifth Season is packed with delicacy, lyricism, passion. The characters are multidimensional. The story drives forward relentlessly. It involves you utterly. It challenges and stirs you. Who could ask for anything more?

The despicable Gay Talese will make lots of money from his forthcoming book

The book, officially out in July, is titled The Voyeur's Motel. I recently read the lengthy excerpt from The Voyeur's Motel that was published in the April 11 issue of the New Yorker. After taking the requisite while to recover from my rage and disgust, I decided to comment here.

The overall takeaway from this article: the celebrated writer Gay Talese is despicable.

Yes of course his subject, the retired Colorado motel owner who spent decades hidden above his motel guests' rooms spying on them, most especially watching their sexual activities, is a disgusting creep of the highest order, a deeply committed misogynist guilty of criminal violation of, apparently, hundreds if not thousands of people. His crimes even extend beyond his decades of peeping tom-ism, for he also witnessed a murderous assault and left the assaulted woman, who was alive and might have been saved had he done anything, to die.

Remarkably, that's almost all anyone is writing about in the many articles and commentaries that have run since Talese's New Yorker piece was published. They're talking about the Colorado violator (he prefers what he apparently believes to be the more elegant term voyeur so I won't use it), about his pathology, his delusions, and, to some extent but not nearly as much or as outragedly as they ought, about his crimes.

They're talking very little about Talese and his crimes. For me, this is the news about the New Yorker piece. There's lots to be said, but it boils down to four things:

1. Talese joined the motel owner up in his secret aerie above the motel and watched two people have sex. Talese did it. He committed the crime, even if not thousands of times (at least he only reports this one time.) Repeat: Talese climbed up there and watched through the screened peephole at least once.
2. Talese knew for many years that the motel owner was doing it. He never tried to stop him, and he never reported the crime this pig was committing.
3. Talese also knew, based on the motel owner's own written report, about his having witnessed the assault and left the woman to die. He did nothing about this either, neither trying to urge the guy to report what had happened, nor reporting it himself.
4. Throughout this long piece, and assuming it's representative throughout the whole book, Talese's tone is basically sympathetic toward the criminal motel owner who violated the right to privacy of so  many people. He wonders about why the guy is the way he is, he points out the guy's inconsistencies in reporting, his grandiosity and narcissism, but he evinces no horror, no revulsion. He becomes for all intents and purposes the guy's friend. By my read, Talese is troubled so little by the guy's actions as to amount to not at all. Nor, and of course this is the point,is he troubled in the least by his own, Talese's, complicity. And he is complicit, through and through, for years and years. Every few pages he throws in a phrase or a sentence to the effect of, hmm, I stayed awake worrying about whether I was doing the right thing, but it's so obviously pro forma as to be laughable. Talese has no compunction about any of it. The grand old man of "the new journalism" will no doubt have a grand old time on the book tour.

What we have here is a fine example of bourgeois morals. Most of the commentary about Talese's article consists of musing about journalistic ethics, and while some mildly question whether he didn't go too far in pursuit of a damned good story, most are barely bothered. Talese is after all famous. He's published lots of books and made lots of money. The New Yorker is a fine magazine and would never publish something tainted or questionable. The story is shocking--shocking, I tell you!--but the storyteller is more or less above rebuke. He, the publisher Grove Press, and the criminal motelier who sold his many pages of records of his crimes for I'm guessing a tidy sum, will all make big bucks on what is probably going to be a bestseller. The movie rights have already been sold, to Dreamworks, for six figures.

And that--its profitability--is what makes this book unimpeachable. In the publishing marketplace it's gold. Profit is the highest standard of morality in this stinking capitalist sinkhole of a country.

The Jaguar's Children

I just read an extrarodinarily good book, and I had to head right over here to Read Red to offer a heads-up: read it!

The book is The Jaguar's Children, a novel by John Vaillant. It gripped me from the first sentence, and as is so rarely the case (you'd be amazed how many books I start and stop, deeply disappointed, initial pages' promise betrayed soon enough), it never let go. So yes, this is a page turner, a very fine one, and purely in terms of its writerly quality it deserves praise. But it is much more than a well-written, well crafted story.

It is in a sense a horror story, the most horrifying kind, rooted in reality. Most important, and the reason my reaction lands here on Read Red rather than meriting just a five-star rating in my Goodreads account, The Jaguar's Children is a political novel that takes on a very important issue, or really two important issues.

•  The plight of undocumented Central American migrants trying to reach the United States

• The conditions at home that drive them to the desperate decision to migrate

With the first, Vaillant makes a needed contribution. At this moment in the U.S. presidential election campaign season, the leading Republican has made anti-immigrant demagoguery, specifically anti-Mexican racist demagoguery, the centerpiece of his candidacy. The leading Democrat mouths soothing platitudes but her record as secretary of state bulges with crimes including support of the right-wing coup in Honduras and subsequent death-squad reign of terror, invasion and virtual destruction of Libya, endless drone-bomb murders in Pakistan and the region, and of course working hand in hand with the chief executive deporter-in-chief in vicious, cruel, racist mass deportations of adults and children to Central America in unprecedented numbers.

The way Vaillant depicts the situation is simple and devastating. He takes us inside a truck, a sealed water tanker, that has driven across the border from Mexico into the U.S. The truck blows a tire in the Arizona desert. The truck's driver and the coyote who has charged exorbitant fees to the dozens of people hidden and sealed in the empty water tank abandon the vehicle along with the human beings trapped within. We are inside with them via the voice of one of them: Hector, who uses his friend Cesar's phone to dial the only U.S. number on the phone and leaves a series of voicemail messages to seek help, to narrate the experience in the truck as hour by hour hope trickles away, and to tell how he and Cesar came to be there.

It's this last, the back story, that provides the novel's political heft. In fact it's a beautiful example of the way fiction can, by telling one or two characters' individual tales, explicate and illuminate large, broad swaths of history, of political developments, of the class struggle, of the national question, of imperialism. Vaillant does so here, with great skill and sensitivity, and with full depth of feeling, full dimension allotted to the characters. The reader learns much about Mexico over the last century and more, and about what has happened to the lives of the Indigenous peoples in that country. Finally, and this for me is the key to how beautifully this novel accomplishes what I always yearn for a novel to do, the story comes full circle as the flashbacks build to a climax and we learn why Cesar had to flee. The villains: NAFTA, U.S.-based agribusiness, and their Mexican comprador-bourgeois accomplices. There's a lot packed in here, and, miraculously, it works.

If you google the phrase "Mexican immigrants die in truck" you'll come up with roughly 16 million results. The heart breaks. As it will reading this book. Which is good, for the world's workers--especially the tens of millions on the move, forced to migrate by U.S.-imperialist bombs and invasions and wars and occupations, U.S.-imperialist trade and agricultural wars, and the worldwide U.S. and other imperialist exploitation of resources and labor--need and deserve the fellow feeling of those of us who live in the U.S. and other imperialist centers. But it's nowhere near good enough if you close a book like this, your heart broken, and that's that. The ultimate worth of this kind of novel is measured by the action it arouses. In this case, it's a call to stand in solidarity with migrant workers, to fight the fascist Trump movement, to act against the deportations.

How? It's a no-brainer. May Day is coming up, and May Day 2016 is the tenth anniversary of the great national uprising that was May Day 2006, a.k.a. A Day Without Immigrants, when much of this country was virtually shut down by an immigrant workers' general strike. Here's the poster for this year's action in New York City. New Yorkers, I'll see you there. Everyone else, check out your city's event.

Harper Lee's first/last novel

I just read Go Set a Watchman, the lost/found first/last best/worst novel by Harper Lee, who died last month at 89. I hadn't partaken in the national fever to read it when it was published in July 2015, but last week I came across it in the library and decided to borrow it. Now that I've finished it, I have no huge deep meaningful pronouncements to make...but I guess that's sort of the point, sort of why I bother commenting here at all.

The novel's back story, as I recall from all the publication-date publicity, is that it was actually Lee's first. That when she submitted it, her editor said Watchman's most resonant passages were the flashbacks to Jean Louise's childhood as Scout, and suggested she write a new book telling the Scout story. She took the advice. She wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, won the Pulitzer Prize and many more awards down through the years during which she never wrote (or at least never published) another book, and finally, the year before her death, agreed to let her first work be published. Watchman received mixed reviews. Some found it lacking the artistic finesse of Mockingbird and wished it had been left in a drawer. Others admired Watchman's head-on tackling of the burning issues of 1950s small-town Alabama, that is, the Klan, White Citizens' Councils, the civil-rights struggle. Many were shocked at what had become of their beloved Gregory-Peck-inflected Atticus Finch, here aligning directly with the forces of racist reaction.

Me, I think Go Set a Watchman is purely of a piece with To Kill a Mockingbird. Well written, with a smooth conversational flow, it is a work of utter liberalism. By which I mean this: both are novels focused on the issue of racism yet in which the only Black characters are barely present and definitely not fully dimensional people, novels in which everything is seen through the filter of a white Southern sensibility with same as our hero/protagonist. Novels in which moderation is presented as the finest, best position as opposed to the extremism of both sides--and yes, in Watchman, the virtuous Atticus's view, for one, is that the NAACP is way too radical, equated with, for example, the KKK. Oy vey.

Indeed, in Watchman, Lee has Atticus say truly reprehensible things--bizarre things, really, like his rather benign and wholly inaccurate characterization of the history of the Klan--and she has his daughter, an adult Jean Louise who now lives in New York and is on her annual visit home, grope her way through an agonized disillusionment with him. If Lee had taken this further, if the book had followed through with real, honest grappling with the vital questions, if Jean Louise had actually made the break she threatens, and above all if there were any Black characters directly engaging, it would have accomplished something beyond liberalism. As it is, there are indeed some passages where Jean Louise argues--with her friend, father and uncle--and denounces them, and is horrified with which side they appear to be on. But then. It's all laid to rest in a rather hasty, clunkily constructed, condescending (and violent--her wonderful uncle has to slap her hard, nearly knocking her out, to bring her round to reason, and well he's just torn up about it but it had to be done!) denouement in which she (and the reader) is made to see that all this hullaballoo, all her ranting and raving, was a sort of immature extremism through which she had to wade as a necessary coming of age in order to step ashore on the other side, the other side being a quintessentially liberal coming to terms with the realities of home, the prime reality being the need for a slow sober approach to social change.

Catching up on some good books

In the long lag during which this blog lay dormant, I did of course read lots of books. Some of which I would have written about here had I been writing about books here. I didn't because I wasn't...but I do want to at least list a few of the books I read recently and do recommend. Check them out:

How to Be Both by Ali Smith
The Residue Years by Mitchell S. Jackson
H Is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald
Driving the King by Ravi Howard
Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera
The Blue Between Sky and Water by Susan Abulhawa
The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar
The Turner House by Angela Flournoy
Jam on the Vine by LaShonda Katrice Barnett
Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast
Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Song of the Shank by Jeffrey Renard Allen
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

A reason to revive Read Red: Kia Corthron's magnificent novel

It's been just about a year since my novel Vera's Will was published by Hamilton Stone Editions. An interesting experience it's been, this business of a first novel put out by a small press, and I'll probably report on that some time soon. Much more important things are afoot, however. The Black Lives Matter movement has swept the country, energizing a new generation of young activists in the struggle against the epidemic of police killings of African Americans, with Black women and queer people prominent in the leadership. In counterpoint there are the presidential primary campaigns: the leading Republican candidate, a pus-oozing boil on the slimy rotting skin of capitalism, makes an outright fascist appeal to racist whites, while the leading Democrat reacts to a social-democratic challenge from her party's left flank by furiously trying to refashion herself as some kind of progressive despite her long history of, um, not-progressiveness.

But hey. None of that is why I've been moved to revive my blog Read Red. This is:

Earlier this month I finished reading Kia Corthron's magnificent first novel The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, and I haven't stopped thinking about it yet. I've been dying to talk to someone about it but no one I know has read it yet--it did after all just come out--so I'm going to talk about it a little bit here. On Read Red. Which I herewith declare reborn.

The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter is, as any great work of art must be, several things at once. It is a book of amazing craft and innovative technique. The whole first third or so, all of which is written from the POV of four different children, is dazzling. The kind of writing that makes other writers shake our heads in wonder and wonder gee how in the world did she do that. But it's not the off-putting, fancy-but-unreadable kind of dazzling that in some quarters passes for laudable language manipulation, the kind of trickery for its own sake that accomplishes nothing except displaying the writer's self-regard. No. This is the pull-you-deep-inside-the-characters'-minds-and-spirits kind of literary magic that so many try but so few can pull off. I don't know how many times in the weeks since I finished the book I've heard little Elliot's full-of-wonder voice in my head saying 'I love Mom! I love pork and beans!' Which might sound like a minor silly example but is not, because these early passages that so thoroughly bring Elliot the young child to life have everything to do with how the reader is engaged with his story as it develops in his adulthood.

Well not everything. For the adult Elliot's story, who he becomes and what he does, speaks to another facet of what this book accomplishes. This is political art of the highest order. As we meet the four main characters--Elliot and his brother Dwight who are Black children growing up in Maryland, and white brothers B.J. and Randall in Alabama--it is 1941. Jim Crow is in full force. The U.S. is about to enter World War II. And we know that these two sets of brothers will come of age at the time of the start of the civil rights movement, and into full adulthood in the 1960s. What we don't know yet as the novel begins, what I didn't dare hope even as I was falling in love with it as literature, is that the story will open and deepen and tackle the big stuff. It does. And so as we read on, always engaged in a specific story about specific characters, we also engage with the history of the U.S.  in the 20th and 21st centuries. Racism and racist violence. Divisions and solidarity. War. Class. Poverty. LGBTQ oppression. Disability and disabled oppression. Palestine! And more.

Anyone who's ever read any of my posts on this blog during the years I kept it up--or anyone who now reads its title--or anyone who scrolls through and reads some of the archive as I now invite new visitors to do--will know from even my too-brief words here about this book that it meets every criterion for what I consider great literature. It is political art. On the side of the workers and oppressed. Full of passion, wit, charm and heart, this fine novel makes the case, and by doing so flies in the face of the U.S. literary establishment's anti-political-art rules, for what people's fiction can truly be.

I mentioned heart. Some paragraphs back I wrote that this book is several things at once, and of course I've failed to delineate what all those things are yet written too much already, so you'll just have to discover them all for yourself when you read The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter. But I do want to touch in closing on one facet that absolutely blew me away: the amazing, searing big-heartedness of this beautiful beautiful book. In the closing pages Corthron draws all the threads of the story together satisfyingly and effectively, with grace and skill--but more than that, with an unsentimental depth of emotion that shocked me into the kind of sobbing that makes it hard to read. I won't say anything specific that would be a spoiler, but I found myself feeling deep compassion for not only the characters I'd grown to love, the characters I could in one way or another identify or empathize with, but also for a character for whom I would never have thought I would or could or would ever want to weep. That Corthron made me cry for this character speaks, I think, not only to her deeply generous humanity, to her powerful insight into human beings, but, most important for a red reader, it speaks to her broad vision of the purpose of literature. She's making a case for change. For the possibility of change, and the necessity of change. For social change that can and does happen, brought about by people joining together and fighting for it, no matter how hard the sacrifice needed. For the future. And literature's place in forging it.

Hope, then. This is the abiding emotion you're left with when you close this book. You're left thinking about how hard it all is, but also how much better it's become, how far we have to go but also how fully capable we are of moving forward. What a gift.
 

I Hotel

I just read a hell of a book. I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita. Although I've mostly abandoned Read Red (for good reasons now! I'll post about that separately, after this), I'm compelled to stop in here to recommend this very fine novel.

It's a panoramic, yes even kaleidoscopic with all the word's trippy connotations, recounting of the political organizing among and struggles of Asian Americans in San Francisco from the late 1960s to late 1970s. Which culminated in the battle to save the I Hotel. Such a big story, comprising so many individual stories, and how does Yamashita tackle it? By telescoping in and out, veering round and about, telling and retelling, circling, approaching, pulling back, zooming in. There are many characters, many communities, much overlapping; there are jumpcuts and slo-mos; love and rage and beauty and death; there are workers and students, revolutionaries and artists; thought and action. Theory and practice!

This is not a novel to read for deep characterizations. Although there are many stunning moments, evocations of emotion, relationship pivots, in a book this big with so many characters and so many angles from which to tell the various smaller stories that spin together to tell the overall big story, mostly there are character sketches, and that's okay. You have to get into the rhythm, you have to accept that just as you are pulled into one life you're going to be yanked away toward another, but have faith, stick with it, they're all linked, they're almost all told more than once from more than one vantage point, and they'll all come together by the end. At which point you'll be weeping and raving as the people band together to save the I Hotel and the state mobilizes to smash them.

For perhaps the first one-third of the book I was a bit on edge because I was unsure whether the author was presenting these characters and these stories with the attitude that is prevalent in U.S. literature, that is, the distanced cynical 40-years-later attitude that looks upon the struggles of the 60s and 70s as misguided and overdone, the strugglers as naive and foolish. You know, I've ranted about it often enough here at Read Red: the "madness-of-the-60s" genre. But no, ultimately I relaxed and trusted Yamashita as a comradely guide presenting to the reader a lovingly rendered telling about people and a time and place that mattered if what matters to you is the struggle against oppression and racism, for liberation and justice. If you love that struggle, if you love your sisters and brothers who give themselves to it, you'll love this book.

A Tale for the Time Being

My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki is one of my all-time favorite novels. I also liked (though didn't love) her second one, All Over Creation. Then there was a long dry spell. Some years back I googled her in hopes of finding out she was working on a new novel, only to learn instead that she was studying to become a Buddhist priest* and, I either read or inferred, had dropped novel writing. O woe is me, I lamented. Oh no, a great author lost to the ether. I must of course on principle respect anyone's religious views even though I, as a Marxist, am a thoroughgoing materialist. Respect her inward turn though I might, I was bummed. One of our finest novelists, one of our most politically engaged novelists, down for the count.

Shows how much I know. It seems you can be a Buddhist monk or priest or nun and also still be a wonderful and fully politically engaged novelist. Duh: once again the depths of my ignorance plumbed. Really I should have remembered this on my own, that Buddhist practice, at least some variants of it, doesn't automatically negate political engagement, having more than once during my teens watched on the TV news horrific film of Buddhist monks in Vietnam immolating themselves to protest the U.S. war against their country. In fact in this newest novel Ozeki herself provides fascinating evidence of a stirring history of feminist and revolutionary nuns in Japan. One of the main characters here, a 104-year-old nun named Jiko, is based on one or more actual women, rebellious activists and/or writers. I'd be interested to try to find and read some of the real-life works mentioned in the course of this fictional Jiko's story.

Hers is only one of the lives examined. This is a book of stories within stories, layers opening onto newer deeper layers, all of it peeled back with an exquisite artistry that in my opinion exceeds anything Ozeki has accomplished before. I will note that there are magical elements, especially late in the book. I have no problem with such a literary technique if it works. Here, to my taste, it weakened rather than strengthened or deepened the book's overall power, but not to any marked degree. On balance, this is a terrific book, a beautiful story of human suffering and survival, as well as a meditation on the meaning and worth of fiction itself, or so it reads to me.

A Tale for the Time Being then, I'm happy to report, the first book I've read in 2014, starts my reading year on a high note. I started late, nearly two weeks in, because I spent the opening days of the new year along with the last weeks of 2013 horribly ill with shingles, so ill and in such pain that I couldn't read. Away with all that! Onward to a red reading year!

*In the original version of this post I erroneously referred to Ozeki studying to be a monk; she studied to be and in fact is a priest. More numbskullery on my part for which I humbly apologize.

Mid-vacation reading report

I've been on vacation (staycation, for now) for two weeks and have read six or seven books. They've ranged from meh to good to great. Below, a few words on the great one. First, a note on a new phenomenon I've observed: I'm losing the capacity to read vacation-y books. That is, horror, mystery, etc.--light stuff. OK, I've never been into any of that, but most years by the time I tumble into my vacation weeks I'm so tired and wrung out that I feel like all I can manage is some non-taxing reading. What I'm discovering this time is that, pooped and brain-weary as I may be, stuff of little substance doesn't sustain my interest. Yes, I read one or three early in the month--Red Moon, about which see my post below, and a couple after that--and yes they were each a cut above the run of the genre, each touted as literary to one degree or another. One or three was enough. None mattered. As to literary attributes, sure they were not laughably bad, but even in my limpid state not laughably bad is not good enough. Thus it was that when I finally hit the #1 position on the e-book waiting list for a library copy of NOS4A2 by Joe Hill, downloaded it, and read the first 70 pages or so, I woke up the next morning realizing I had no desire to read on. Hill is Stephen King's son, not a factoid I'd have commented on if those first 70 pages hadn't read exactly like a Stephen King book--no, not exactly, Hill is a slightly better writer, or at least less prone to pack his prose with irritating repetitive tics of various sorts--but they do. Story, style, characterization, all of it is King-ish to the nth degree. And what I woke up thinking was: who cares? Who cares about this story, these characters? Not me. Luckily, I've amassed a big pile of books, physical and virtual, to choose from over the next two weeks, so chances are decent that I'll find some meatier fare.

I did read one great book earlier this week. Mo Said She Was Quirky by James Kelman. I've blogged before about my regard for this wonderful writer, and with this most recent novel he does not disappoint.

Perhaps two or three times in my life I've read a novel with a female protagonist that left me marveling that the male author was able to write so true, so real a woman character, to so fully inhabit a woman's consciousness. Those all pale next to Kelman's accomplishment here. Consciousness here is both the medium and the message: how her lived life leads to these thoughts, these feelings. You know, being determines consciousness.The book lives us through 24 hours in the head of a young worker, seamlessly conveying all that her life is: work, worry, motherhood, pain, sorrow, sex, hope, love, loss, hope, bitterness, rage, despair, exploitation, frustration, fatigue. In the course of it she observes and comments on racism, women's oppression, homelessness, social service cuts, British imperialism and much more. Kelman is always a political writer, no less here than in his other books. His take is dead-on, here again.

Now I've got two more weeks off work, one more in the city and one--hooray! hurrah!--down the shore where Teresa and I will take our first real vacation in 15 years. I hope to get some good reading in, though I doubt I'll find another book as good as Kelman's this time around.

Rajesh Parameswaran is a fucking genius

I don't use the G word lightly. Genius is rare. But I have found it, in the pages of I Am an Executioner—Love Stories, the first book by an extraordinary writer, Rajesh Parameswaran.

Dazzling. Dizzying. Shout eureka! For this is the work of an astounding talent. A true artist—that is, someone with wild, unfettered imagination, boundless creativity, pitch-perfect literary chops, and at the same time engagement with the real world.

Thank goodness I decided to read this book. It was a fluke, as I almost never read short fiction collections. Yeah yeah the short story is the perfect form, I know that's the standard wisdom, but me, I prefer the novel with all its messy imperfection. Wow, what a horror I skirted. What if I'd let my aversion to story collections avert me from this one? I'd have lived my life without ever having experienced the thrill, the joy, the mind-stirring transport that reading I Am an Executioner is.

There are nine stories here. Two are merely excellent, merely beautifully written and perfectly crafted stories, poignant and affecting. The other seven? They. Blew. Me. Away. Five of those seven ("The Infamous Bengal Ming," "Four Rajeshes," "I Am an Executioner," "Elephants in Captivity Part One," "On the Banks of Table River") blew me so far away that I have yet to reassemble myself. Last night I dreamed myself into one of the others—that's how deeply these stories affected me, and I don't recall this ever happening before with anything I've read, though perhaps it has and I've forgotten—I dreamed myself wandering in a gigantic file room, one square mile gigantic, filled with filing cabinets so tall they reached all the way to the yards-high ceiling, and I dreamed that I was trying to find the file reporting on the minutiae of a certain facial expression I might have exhibited one afternoon 22 years before.

Never mind me, though. Perhaps I'm overly susceptible to this sort of thing. Perhaps tonight I'll dream myself an arthropod, not of a Kafkaesque variety, rather one among a future Andromedan population coping with Earth-based colonialism. Oy, I hope not, because I'm afraid my dreaming mind might explode in the effort to meld elements of science fiction, political allegory, thriller, police procedural and tragic romance, all of which elements Parameswaran melds seamlessly in the book's final story.

I don't know if I've ever read fiction that so splendidly interweaves so many layers and levels. These stories, especially the seven mind blowers, are about so very much. Weirdly, as far as I can tell from the several reviews I've read and reader comments at sites like Amazon and Goodreads, very few seem to have picked up on this. They note the postmodern aspects, check. The metafictional element, check. The virtuosity of voice and structure, check check. But is no one reading the multiple meanings in each of these stories? Far be it from me to impose my own worldview on an author whose life and opinions I know very little about, but I don't think I'm nuts to divine in these pieces a great deal beneath the surface. These stories variously touch on racism, emigration and immigration, imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism, misogyny, homophobia, violence and more. You can read them without taking any of that in, but it's the echoes of the real world embedded in even the most fantastical of the stories that deepen and enrich them, make them not only riproaring wild rides but thought-provoking, profound.

All this, and I haven't even mentioned hilarity sprinkled throughout. Or the panoramic literary and historical allusions with which these stories are packed. Here, named or not, are William Shakespeare, Satyajit Ray, Vladimir Nabokov, Srinivasa Ramanujan and more, probably more than I caught though I caught enough to keep my mind spinning.

And the language! Oy gott the words, the sentences! I NEVER underline in my books—but I couldn't help myself with this one. Some of the sentences, even whole paragraphs, are so stunningly perfect, so evocative and provocative, that they stopped me cold, had me reading them over and over, ultimately unable to proceed unless I underlined them so I could find them again. And I will. Some day when a yearning to read a perfectly expressed fictive idea overcomes me, I'll pull I Am an Executioner off the shelf and find the underlined passage and be delighted anew, reminded again that literary genius, though rare, does exist out there in the world. Over here, in fact, in Queens, where perhaps I've sat next to Rajesh Parameswaran on the #7 train, never knowing I was sitting beside a master.