#63: The Visiting Privilege, by Joy Williams

Writing stories like this must be like being able to fly. If you know how to do it, there’s nothing to explain. And if you don’t, well, there’s still nothing to explain.

Again and again I was amazed at Joy Williams's ability to hit the ground running—to establish characters, a setting, and a tone with just a couple of sentences. The effect is to dispel the sense that she is making stuff up and replace it with the sense that she is observing. It’s sort of the opposite of starting a story with “Once upon a time…”. One story, “The Little Winter,” begins this way:

She was in the airport, waiting for her flight to be called, when a woman came to a phone near her chair. The woman stood there, dialing, and after a while began talking in a flat, aggrieved voice. Gloria couldn’t hear everything by any means, but she did hear her say, “If anything happens to this place, I hope you’ll be satisfied.”

Having set a story in motion, Williams almost immediately begins introducing details that seem to erupt into the tale, almost as though there was a second author trying to wrest control from the first. As we’re learning about Gloria, Williams gives us this, at the beginning of the story’s second paragraph:

The plane pushed through the sky and the drink made her think of how, as a child, she had enjoyed chewing on the collars of her dresses.

I could cite a similar pair of passages from many if not most of the stories in The Visiting Privilege that accomplish this one-two trick. Not “trick” in the sense of gimmick, but rather in the sense of doing something that is both simple and astonishing. Here is how the story “White” starts:

Bliss and Joan were giving a farewell party for the Episcopal priest and his family, who had been called by God to the state of Michigan.

And then, in the second paragraph:

Joan was a fourth-generation Floridian who missed the garish sunsets and the sound of armadillos crashing through the palmetto scrub.

Crashing armadillos, chewed collars—these details do not necessarily move the story forward, rather they make the entire enterprise seem less deliberate, give us the impression that Williams is observing the action rather than creating it. They’re a kind of narrative ventriloquism, they displace the animating spirit right into the story. It occurs to me that Joy Williams must be a very good liar.

The Visiting Privilege is subtitled “New and Collected Stories,” so I take it this is sort of the culmination of her writing career, which stretches back to the 70s. The stories are arranged more or less chronologically, I think, and become stranger and more entertaining as you go along.

I read somewhere recently about a woman who takes “micro doses” of LSD to combat depression. I find this notion very appealing, though I suppose it’s a serious business and not all fun and games. Joy Williams’s stories contain micro doses of something like fictional LSD. They dart and wheel dependably, but never go completely off the rails. The typical Williams story features a first-person narrator, usually female, who is either herself a bit nutty or is interacting with person or persons who are a bit nutty. Sometimes they’re all a bit nutty, but in an earnest, unassuming way. The nuttiness is manifested by a tendency to free associate.

I fixed clocks in the garage for a while but then I stopped serving the public, who were never, ever satisfied. So it’s just a personal hobby, taking apart clocks and watches and putting them back together again. There was a Frenchman centuries ago, a watchmaker, who created a life-size mechanical duck. It could move its head, flap its wings, even eat from a bowl of grain. Then it could even shit out the compacted grain. It was all gears and springs. More than four hundred parts moved each wing. They call things like that automatons.

That selection is from a story that is a seemingly random series of recollections and meditations about characters identified as “Mother” and “the boy.” Along with the narrator, they are a family, but it takes us a while to establish that the narrator is the boy’s father and that “Mother” is (probably) the narrator’s wife. They go to New York and help a blind lady across the street. They discuss Rimbaud. They get a dog. But then:

It was around eleven in the morning. A beautiful desert day. You forget how pretty the sky can still be. Mother was over at the park fixing a sprinkler system for the fortieth time. I think they break them deliberate so they’ll have something to do. I’m in my shop thinking like I frequently do that the third cup of coffee tastes funny and then all hell breaks loose. People banging on the door and screaming and shouting and I even hear a helicopter overhead. And I say, “Stay, Amy, stay, stay,” and walk out of the garage and there’s law officers out there screaming, “sumabitch, sumabitch” and “the congresswoman” and “sumabitch” again, even the women, all of them in uniform and with guns, and I think whatever I was thinking a minute ago is the last peaceful thought I will ever have. Though sometimes now I try to pretend he’s still in the house, in his room with the door closed. I pretend he’s still living with us and eating with us and getting by with us. But of course he’s not and he isn’t.

No, we were never afraid of him. Afraid of Jared?

So “the boy” turns out to be Jared Loughner, perpetrator of the 2011 massacre in Tucson, Arizona that severely injured U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. What’s strange is that everything leading up to this surprising conclusion seems like a completely typical Joy Williams story—there is no sense of impending violence. In fact, several of the stories feature violent episodes, but there is always also this sense of disassociation, people floating along, remembering snatches of conversation, relating arcane facts, describing the vegetation.

Of course, Jared Loughner did a horrible thing, but if you didn’t know about him I do not think you could infer the monstrous nature of his act from this story. It’s a surprising and unique synapse, a spark that leaps from the fictional universe to the real one. Joy Williams’s stories may say something about the lightly medicated sense of reality in 21st century America, but you would have to be a more sensitive instrument than I am to feel a strong moral current running through them.

#62: Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust

This is volume one, of six, of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, formerly known as Remembrance of Things Past. In Search of Lost Time is regarded as one of the major literary accomplishments of the 20th century, right up there with Ulysses or The Waste Land. If you’re the bookish sort, you might hope to read it some day the way a traveler might wish to visit the Great Wall of China. It’s as extravagant a reading project as I can envision, on a par with reading all of Shakespeare at a go, or plunging into Greek and Roman literature.

So here’s my first postcard from the farthest reaches of the literary outback. What’s it like? It’s difficult. More difficult than I had anticipated. The vast majority of books that I read assume a sort of contract with the reader. They propose to amuse me with wit, or entice me with suspense, or amaze me with insight. For Proust, the objective seems to be to render his perceptions and emotions in as complete and precise a way as possible. If I’m interested in his undertaking, fine; if not, he makes no concession.

Proust will elaborate and qualify his thoughts until he feels he has done them justice. His sentences descend on you like tsunamis. Some of the sentences are a page long and when you encounter a pronoun somewhere towards the end of one of them you practically have to send a search party out to find the antecedent. Here is an example. The author is recalling an occasion from his childhood when he encountered a Mademoiselle Gilberte Swann, who has held a place in his affections for no very clear reason—something to do with his fascination with her parents. He had seen her just once before, in the country; now he encounters her in Paris.

While I waited for [my nanny] I was pacing the broad lawn of meager, close-cropped, sun-baked grass, dominated, at its far end, by a statue rising from a fountain, in front of which a little girl with reddish hair was playing battledore and shuttlecock, when from the path another little girl, who was putting on her coat and covering up her racquet, called out sharply: “Good-bye Gilberte, I’m going home now; don’t forget we’re coming to you this evening, after dinner.”

A longish sentence, for sure, but it’s the next one that’s the tsunami:

The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcefully the girl whom it labeled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of someone in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed thus close by me, in action so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and the proximity of its target—carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the impressions concerning her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who called it out, everything that, as she uttered the words, she recalled, or at least possessed in her memory, of their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each other, of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible, all the more painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let it brush past me without my being able to penetrate it, who flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry—wafting through the air the exquisite emanation which it had distilled, by touching them with the utmost precision, from certain invisible points in Mlle Swann’s life, from the evening to come, just as it would be, after dinner, at her home—forming, on its celestial passage through the midst of the children and their nursemaids, a little cloud, delicately coloured, resembling one of those clouds that, billowing over a Poussin landscape, reflect minutely, like a cloud in the opera teeming with chariots and horses, some apparition of the life of the gods—casting, finally, on that ragged grass, at the spot where it was at one and the same time a scrap of withered lawn and a moment in the afternoon of the fair battledore player (who continued to launch and retrieve her shuttlecock until a governess with a blue feather in her hat had called her away) a marvellous little band of light, the colour of heliotrope, impalpable as a reflection and superimposed like a carpet on which I could not help but drag my lingering, nostalgic and desecrating feet, while Francoise shouted: “Come on, do up your coat and let’s clear off!” and I remarked for the first time how common her speech was, and that she had, alas, no blue feather in her hat.

This sentence tells you no more about Mlle Gilberte than a pearl necklace tells you about an oyster. I’ve underlined the word “them” in the middle of this sentence. It comes after a stretch in which there are three instances of the pronoun “it.” So the reader is expected to be holding at least two nouns in his head, one singular, one plural. Perhaps there are others? To which noun does this “them” refer? Perhaps it is “words,” six lines up, or maybe “impressions,” eight lines up. You may have a different candidate, perhaps even a better one. The point is that the syntax parsers in our brains will occasionally overheat and seize up as we read Proust. And if you’re the least bit tired or distracted, forget about getting anywhere with this book. You’ll wander off the path and into the trees, until you run smack into one of them and a large pinecone falls on your head.

But having read that long, long sentence a few times, and now having typed it, I have to admire what a fantastic Rube Goldberg-Chinese Dragon of a sentence it is. Our emotions are strange things: when we hear of a colleague’s good fortune, for example, we feel a vicarious pleasure at their success, some jealousy and resentment because they were able to achieve what we perhaps would have wished to achieve instead of them, shame at our recognition of the selfishness of this resentment, and perhaps three or four other subordinate emotion all at the same time. We watch ourselves watching ourselves watch ourselves. Proust has the absurd and impossible project of wanting to capture all such echoes and reverberations of the moment (as indeed it is a child’s cry that has set this all in motion); perhaps it is not so much a tsunami as a tornado, up into which various bits of the physical scene (blue feathers, dry grass, shuttlecock), extended metaphors (the Poussin landscape, the operatic clouds), events recently passed and soon to come, and various other perceptions and sensations have been whirled. I find myself writing longer and stranger sentences even just in thinking about Proust; he’s like a jazz musician, doing with words and thoughts what Charlie Parker might do with a Richard Rodgers show tune.

I’m so tempted to put Proust aside now that I’ve finished volume one and to take up a book that connects to what’s happening around me here in the United States in 2017. It’s a strange and disturbing time and it calls to me, insists that I put aside such a dilettantish, unworldly undertaking and read something with IMPACT, something that will feed into discussions, something that show me a reflection of myself in the modern world. Because whatever else I am, I’m not much like the protagonist of Proust’s novel, and so the narcissistic impulse that fuels much of my reading is an itch that isn’t getting scratched at present. As Billy Joel once wrote, “I don’t want clever conversation/I never want to work that hard.” It doesn't sound as if Billy would like Proust.

But I will press on for at least one more volume: Within a Budding Grove. Seven hundred and thirty pages. Full speed ahead.

#61: The Flame Alphabet, by Ben Marcus

I read this book and didn’t like it—it wasn’t really close. But it’s a strange and unique book and I feel on shaky ground telling you why I didn’t like it, because if I read it again in five or ten years I might discover that the things I disliked were superficial and that the enduring strangeness of this book and the sheer commitment of its author had somehow managed to get under my skin. The author clearly knows what he’s doing and goes about his task with intensity and intelligence. But there was little or no payoff for me as a reader.

The back cover of this book gives us the setup: “The sound of children’s speech has become lethal. In the park, adults wither beneath the powerful screams of their offspring. For young parents Sam and Clair, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther.” Interesting premise. But that summary doesn’t really even begin to convey the weird logic that rules the universe of The Flame Alphabet.

In Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon imagines an hallucinogenic drug he names oneirine. An oneirine trip is called a “haunting”:

Oneirine hauntings show a definite narrative continuity, as clearly as, say, the average Reader’s Digest article. Often they are so ordinary, so conventional—Jeaach calls them ‘the dullest hallucinations known to psychopharmacology’—that they are only recognized as hauntings through some radical though plausible violation of possibility: the presence of the dead, journeys by the same route and means where one person will set out later but arrive earlier, a printed diagram which no amount of light will make readable.

Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is something like an oneirine trip. The single detail that cannot be reconciled is given to us in the first line: “One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.” Every other detail of Gregor Samsa’s universe is pretty much as it was before his transformation. Nobody else turns into a bug. And that’s what makes the story so perfect.

Sam and Clair in The Flame Alphabet live in upstate New York, and that stray prosaic fact stayed with me because it was almost like the opposite of the oneirine trip’s single plausible violation. It’s the rare (if not single) detail that relates their universe to ours. Because we learn pretty quickly that we’re not in Kansas anymore, much less upstate New York. As the book progresses, it isn’t just children’s speech that makes people ill—all and any language, including written language, becomes thoroughly poisonous. Of course, this is a novel, made of language, so in a sense we are consuming a poison that Marcus has concocted for us.

Sam eventually ends up working for an organization that is trying to discover a form of language that isn’t toxic. We get endless pages about his inevitably hopeless endeavors, in this vein:

Of course I tried codes. In modern Roman letters I encrypted a suicide note, some gentleman’s last words, with the Caesar cipher. From there I recreated what I could remember from historical texts—the Gettysburg Address was one—and fed them into simple substitution ciphers, homophonic coding, and a modified Vigenère cipher. If this worked, it would mean that our own scripts were too obvious and needed to be concealed, encrypted. But it didn’t work.

He knows it didn’t work because these efforts are then sent down to a courtyard to be presented to test subjects, who promptly expire. Are we to equate the act of writing with the crimes of Josef Mengele? Marcus is nothing if not provocative.

Sam’s efforts become ever more bizarre. It wasn’t always possible to understand his strategy and objectives:

From my drawer I retrieved the Hebrew balloon shrapnel. The deflated letters had dried and curled over the last few days. Some of them stank of the sea. On a stretching board I revived the pieces, ladled oil into their skin until they were slick, pulled others too long until they tore, and with my molder I formed a new set of dense cubes, like square rubber erasers, with which to build, perhaps, a Hebrew letter heretofore unseen.

It’s obscure, and also a little disgusting. Sam is the narrator of The Flame Alphabet, and is forever explaining, elaborating, testifying to the reality of his experience. Alot of that experience takes place in various holes, ditches, and tunnels. Damp, dark, smelly places. Indeed, there is a relentless dreariness that pervades The Flame Alphabet. I’m pretty sure Marcus is counting on provoking a certain repugnance in his readers. I’m just hard pressed to know why—my best guess is that it’s a very dark kind of comedy, which is why I wonder if I might not be better prepared to get the “joke” on a second reading. I had a similarly negative reaction the first time I saw David Lynch’s first film: Eraserhead. There are interesting similarities: in The Flame Alphabet language is toxic; in Eraserhead, it’s febrile, meaningless. Both works are mildly disgusting, each in its own unique and charming way. The second time I saw Eraserhead I thought it was brilliant—and funny. But Eraserhead is a relatively short and simple movie—it’s like a dream. Similar to The Metamorphosis in this regard. It should really be the first thing they teach you in Surrealism 101: If you’re going strange, be brief.

But now that I think of it, not all dreams are simple. Sometimes you wake up and you remember a whole series of vaguely related episodes. For a few minutes you hold enough in your memory that you can imagine scribbling for hours to get it all down on paper. No doubt 98% of it would evaporate off the surface of your consciousness before you even sat down to get started. Maybe The Flame Alphabet is like that kind of dream. The kind that you might ponder for a few minutes, thinking “Did all that really come out of my brain?”

It’s not that the notion of “language as virus” isn’t both shocking and profound. We believe language is as essential to us as, say, our hands. But other creature walk, crawl, and swim the earth without language; what’s more, they have not come up to the point of destroying the planet. If there really was a “Great Designer,” he or she might be just at the point of backing this “feature” out right now. “No, no, that speeds things up too much and only leads to trouble.” But Marcus isn’t working this angle—he’s not asking “What if language is a virus?” He’s taking that as a given. It may be that he’s not giving us an idea, the product of his thinking, but a postulate, a starting point for our own ideas. But meanwhile, there’s a lot to slog through.

#60: Counternarratives, by John Keene

The title suggests an academic exercise, the work of a tenured PhD who’s in the habit of referring to a book or story as a narrative. But this is a book of “stories and novellas,” not a work of literary criticism. So perhaps then it’s fiction with a critical agenda? It’s more a cultural agenda. Keene is writing from the perspective of the non-white people invariably assigned to supporting roles in the standard histories—or cut out entirely. In his stories, he looks through the eyes and speaks through the mouths of the people who have been muted by the ethnic biases of five hundred years of American history. (And not just North American history—some of Keene’s stories are set in South American and the Carribean.) He doesn’t just bring these people into the picture—he puts them at the center, gives them agency (another word from the academic lexicon), the power to frame and control their narratives.

The most obvious example of this agenda is a tale narrated by Jim, Huck Finn’s black companion from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I would guess that most people reviewing Counternarratives would mention this story, titled “Rivers,” in the first paragraph or two because it’s such a perfect example of what Keene means by a counternarrative. Jim meets up with Huck twice in the years after they ride down the river together. The first time Huck is with Tom Sawyer, somewhere in Illinois in the years just before the Civil War. Huck is cordial enough, but Tom is more a man of his time:

“When did you get yourself down this way?” Sawyer said, his razor lips cutting me a smile. “Cause I reckon soon as you knew you had got your freedom we all woke up to find you gone.”

I’m not sure Mark Twain would acknowledge this Tom as his own. But that’s kind of the point.

The second encounter is down in Texas toward the close of the Civil War. Jim is now in a black Union regiment. He spies Huck on the Confederate side as the opposing forces close for battle:

I looked up and he still had not seen me, this face he could have drawn in his sleep, these eyes that had watched his and watched over his, this elder who had been like a brother, a keeper, a second father as he wondered why this child was taking him deeper and deeper into the heart of the terror, why south instead of straight east to liberation, credit his and my youth or ignorance or inexperience, for which I forgive him and myself but I came so close to ending up in a far worse place than I ever was, and I heard Anderson or someone call out in the distance, and raised my gun, bringing it to my eye, the target his hands which were moving quickly with his own gun leaned against his shoulder, over his heart, and I steadied the barrel, my finger on the trigger, which is when our gazes finally met, I am going to tell the reporter, and then we can discuss that whole story of the trip down the river with that boy, his gun aimed at me now, other faces behind his now, all of them assuming the contours, the lean, determined hardness of his face, that face, there were a hundred of that face, those faces, burnt, determined, hard and thinking only of their own disappearing universe, not ours, which was when the cry broke across the rippling grass, and the gun, the guns, went off.

“Rivers” is a fine story, but it almost feels obligatory. If Counternarrives were a movie, you know that “Rivers” would make up the bulk of the trailer. The best stories in the book, to my mind, are the two longest ones—the novellas—where the reversal of perspective is just one element in the mix. These tales have a delicious element of the macabre in them. They remind me a bit of Isak Dinesen’s gothic tales. One is titled “A Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon.” Keene uses his knowledge of languages and history to frame his stories as documents from earlier centuries and cultures.

The story is in the form of a letter, from one Jesuit priest in 16th century Brazil to another. It is a report on what happens when a young priest, one Dom Joaquim D’Azevedo, is assigned to manage a small mission at the edge of a small settlement that is itself on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. The priest finds the mission in a rundown condition, and the three other clergymen somewhat lacking in zeal. The employees of the mission are natives and African slaves who have been converted to Christianity—or at least given Christian names. D’Azevedo does his best to bring order and a sense of purpose to the mission, even establishing a religious school for the Portuguese children of the settlement. But there are strange things happening—especially at night:

As he closed the door he [D’Azevedo] could again hear the drumming, faint but now accompanied, he perceived, by a low wail, like an animal caught in the crevice of a deep shaft, or wire upon wire. […] It was as he was opening the door to go back indoors that he again heard drumbeats and, our of the corner of his eye, he spied a shape, a shadow, moving along the rear wall, and he turned to spot something, someone, its hair fanning over its shoulders, gliding over the stone barrier.

Native drumming at night—is Keene teasing us with this classic cliché from the heart of darkness? The story is a first rate spooky tale, but when you add Keene’s particular theme of inverted history, it flips in a fantastic and unexpected way: nobody is who they seemed, not even our central character, Dom Joaquim D’Azevedo. There are occult elements, but when the story flips what had seemed sacred becomes superstitious and what had seemed superstition becomes sacred. And those converted natives? Not so much.

The other long story bears the rather intimidating title “Gloss on a History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790 – 1825; Or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows.” Three paragraphs into this pseudo-document we are directed to a footnote, and that footnote then comprises the remainder of this 100-page novella. It’s the story of a young Haitian woman who lives as a slave on a Haitian plantation. As a revolt sweeps the countryside the landowning white family escapes to Maryland, taking the young woman, called Carmel, as a companion for their daughter, Eugénie. But Eugénie is possessed of an “innate rebelliousness” and exhibits a “libertine attitude,” and so she and Carmel are dispatched to the western frontier of the young republic:

In the late summer of 1806 Eugénie de L’Ècart entered the Academy of the Sisters of the Most Precious Charity of our Lady of the Sorrows, near the village of Hurttstown, Kentucky. The small and elite order had originated in southern Wallonia in the waning years of the Counter-Reformation. It was known for its industry and thrift, as well as for its effectiveness at spiritually molding young women of means.

All this brochure-like prose notwithstanding, the school is little more than a prison for Carmel who is thrice-subjugated: she is a black girl in a slave territory, a Catholic (at least by association) in a land that sees Catholics with suspicion and hostility, and most immediately, the victim of an unscrupulous and sometimes cruel companion in Eugénie.

Keene outdoes himself in this story, trying out a whole range of effects. As Carmel is oppressed and enclosed and muted by her circumstances, so the telling of her story is constrained and occluded. For several pages, Keene gives us her diary entries:

V hot today men loadd up wagons we put in preservs sev trunks of cloaths also got much merchdse from east mlle E up and abt she doesnt eat look ill but face flush I combd her hair some fall out she big as a calabash v quiet stared at me but say noth when wagons & men leave PH and I hid und the stairs so we cd talk I gave her dr hid it in my hair & she sd your power is in here & touches my brow later mlle E sd where was you dont lie to me then she wd not talk again tryd a night visit no luck latin sentences & 2 rosaries

Lots of things are going on. Eugénie is carrying on with a man from the town and becomes pregnant. A flood devastates the town and the townspeople hold the Catholics in the school accountable. We know that Carmel is the daughter of a sorceress, but if she has occult powers, what are they and how can they help her as things come to a head? Once again there are goings on at night—whispered conversations on dark staircases and the like. The ending is suitably apocalyptic.

After this mad ride, the remaining stories in Counternarratives seemed anticlimactic. Not that they aren’t interesting and imaginative, but sometimes they felt a bit self-conscious and contrived. I hope that in future writings John Keene journeys as far into the dark country of his mind as he does in the two longer stories in this book.

#59: The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton

This book has an awful lot going for it—it’s enough to give other books an inferiority complex. For starters, it won the 2013 Man Booker prize, the UK’s top literary prize. Add to that that it’s a beautiful object—a thick, handsome paperback with a beautiful cover and superb design throughout. Reading it on a plane, I was especially pleased to find that it would lay open on my tray without the aid of any additional weight. A flexible spine is a wonderful thing, for people or for books.

Of course, literary prizes and bindings are not intrinsic to The Luminaries as a work of fiction—you could order an electronic copy of the book and never be aware of such things. But even reduced to its chapters, paragraphs, and sentences, you would quickly understand that The Luminaries is a work of rare quality.

You are no doubt wondering if all this indirect praise is heartfelt, or whether I am about to attempt to take this book down a few notches. I want to have it both ways—to give The Luminaries its considerable due, but also to take issue with its somewhat airtight unimpeachable perfection.

The Luminaries is a complicated, original story well told. One of the blurbs on the cover describes it as “a lively parody of a nineteenth-century novel”; another describes it as “a twenty-first century Victorian novel.” And while it’s obvious that The Luminaries shares various characteristics with classic nineteenth century novels—its heft, its large cast of characters, its omniscient narrator and its elegant prose, for example—I never had the sense that it was commenting on or in any way seeking to separate itself from earlier work with which it shared those characteristics. It is most emphatically not a parody.

It’s also obvious from the start that The Luminaries is something more than just a complicated, original story well told—it goes places that Dickens and Eliot never went. This is made clear by the “Character Chart” at the front which presents the 18 major characters in groups such as “Stellar,” “Planetary,” and “Terra Firma” and also gives the first 12 a “Related House” and the other six a “Related Influence.”

Though the Character Chart page does not contain any terminology specific to the zodiac, each section begins with a chart. At the left are two examples

I’ve never been much for astrology, so I was hoping my lack of expertise on that subject would not put me at a disadvantage in reading The Luminaries. There are other indications that Catton is holding a few tarot cards up her sleeve. For one thing, the chapters and sections in the book grow progressively shorter. The first section is 360 pages long, the second 160 pages, the third 104 pages, and so on; the last is just two pages. I am not sure how this foreshortening effect connects to the zodiacal theme—if indeed it does. For me, such curious elements are reminiscent of the various mythological and symbolic overlays in James Joyce’s Ulysses and other modernist novels. The Luminaries could stand without them, but even though I didn’t pay very much attention to them, I think they probably heightened my sense of the intricacy and artificiality of the book. This was not a bad thing. I knew to be on my toes and to be willing to regard any and every detail as significant.

Perhaps I should mention what The Luminaries is about? It’s set on the west coast of the southern island of New Zealand, a damp and cool place not unlike the northwest coast of the US. The time frame is 1865-66. This is about 10 or 15 years after English settlers first arrived in New Zealand. There had been an earlier gold rush on the east coast of the island some years before, and now there is a second rush on the west coast where the town of Hokitika has sprung up. This is a real town, by the way, and so I assume that most of the historical setting is also authentic. Twelve men of the town, each corresponding to a sign of the zodiac, make up its civic structure. There is a banker, a chemist (that is, a pharmacist), a chaplain, a shipping agent, and so on. Two of the twelve are Chinese prospectors, and one, Te Rau Tauwhare, is Maori and “a greenstone hunter” who is after a different mineral than the others. These twelve are relatively static—the end of the book finds them much as they were at the beginning. There is a single exception—one of the twelve is killed.

Six other characters move through the book and move through space, for that matter, in a more dynamic manner, and even as I’m typing this, I’m congratulating myself for identifying them as the six "classical" planets known to the zodiac! Score for me! (OK, I see now that the Character Chart does classify these six characters as "Planetary," but I swear I just noticed that.)

The Maguffin of the story is a fortune in gold that changes ownership and form as we read (that is, it’s gold dust at one point, small ingots at another, and stamped bars at a third). Chronologically, the telling of the story starts in the middle (January 1866), runs forward as far as April 1866, then goes to May 1865 before finishing back in January 1866. So we join the action in the middle, see it through to its conclusion, and then circle back to see how it first got set in motion. This is all in proper mystery novel style, and indeed on a certain level The Luminaries is very much a whodunit, except that there is no single “it” that got done. I wasn’t quite sharp enough to figure out every detail—for example, I wasn’t sure who murdered one of the characters until I consulted the internet. But I definitely got most of it, and Catton is quite skillful in spinning us around blindfold at the beginning and gradually giving us just enough information to connect all the dots (to mix metaphors).

All in all, a worthy entertainment, like a well-made summer blockbuster movie. There is a sufficiency of interesting characters and dramatic scenes, and the setting is interesting, though there is very little about the Maori, unfortunately. Were they really marginalized so quickly?

I’m trying to avoid the self-imposed trap here of having to render either a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down” on The Luminaries. Though it’s a (mostly) realistic novel, it reminds me of The Lord of the Rings in some ways: it’s a clockwork universe with its own logic, limits, and rules. Set in New Zealand, no less. It’s more about the interactions and intersections of the characters than it is about anything going on within their heads. I’ve never seen the Lord of the Rings movies (not all the way through, anyway), but I have read the books. Like The Luminaries, I would recommend them for long flights. To New Zealand, say.

#58: Supreme City – How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America, by Donald L. Miller

I grew up in New York City in the 1960s and 70s—not in Manhattan, but in the outer reaches of Queens, where there were backyards and squirrels and lawns to be mowed. When I was about 14 I first rode the number 7 line train into Manhattan—Times Square is where the 7 went, and the city I surfaced into was not in its prime—porn theatres, pawn shops, crazed people in filthy clothes. One transfer away was Greenwich Village, then home to about 500 “head shops” selling glass pipes and black light posters. This was more like it, because my friends and I were aspiring hippies.

Though I was fascinated by the crowds and the intensity and the giant buildings of Manhattan, I was also hypervigilant and a bit terrified by it all. The idea was to keep moving and not make eye contact. Manhattan offered no repose. After college, I lived in Manhattan for several years. I got to know Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue, the museums, the parks. I never learned to love New York, but it’s imprinted on me, somehow—its 22 square miles seemed as vast and varied as a continent. There were the fountains and plazas of the opulent districts, the avenues you could walk for miles, the mountains of garbage bags at 2:00 in the morning.

Anyway, here’s a book about how Manhattan got to be the Manhattan that I know. It answers the questions I never thought to ask: How and when did Park Avenue become the place where the richest people lived? Why are the most exclusive department stores all on Fifth Avenue? I accepted Manhattan as a given, an outgrowth of the bedrock, like Australia or Yellowstone, but it only really became the place I knew a few short decades earlier—in the 1920s.

Donald Miller, focusing on the 1920s, devotes chapters to the builders and the sellers, the broadcasters and the publishers, people whose names I had heard but whose stories I did not know. Miller’s book is about a small army of Horatio Algers, mostly Jewish, who helped turn Edith Warton’s Manhattan of wooden mansions and horse carriages into Metropolis.

David Sarnoff founded NBC and William Paley founded CBS, enterprises that grew from nothing into essential American institutions in just a few short years. Walter Chrysler built not only a major automobile company but also the tallest (briefly) and most lavish skyscraper in the world. The car company retains his name, but the skyscraper is his monument; it could almost have been his tomb:

The completed lobby is a masterwork of dramatic design. Indirectly lit, its walls are of red, richly veined Moroccan marble. The floor is Sienna Travertine carved into patterns that point the way to the elevators. There are thirty-two of them, in four groups, each car with a different design and color, and each operator dressed—originally—in a different uniform ‘for each of the four seasons.’ The interior of the cabs are finished in exotic inlaid woods: Japanese ash and Oriental walnut, among them.

And so on and so forth. Later we get to read about Chrysler’s “three-story Cloud Club, a male-only redoubt for the three hundred or so of the city’s power brokers.” This was during prohibition: “Members were allocated wooden lockers to store their bottles; each locker had carved hydrographic symbols on its doors to prevent federal agents from identifying its millionaire lawbreaker.”

Park and Fifth Avenues only became possible after the massive engineering project that created Grand Central Station also buried the rail infrastructure going north along the East Side underground. Where the rich now live was once a several hundred foot wide corridor of tracks, mud, and shanties.

Miller also includes star athletes like Babe Ruth, the gangsters from Hell’s Kitchen in the West 40s—George Raft and Mae West emerged from this demimonde—and even the competing founders of cosmetics empires—Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden—who had competing salons at either end of Fifth Avenue’s miracle mile.

Money was water and fertilizer to the stone gardens of Manhattan, and money still flows freely. But the stone gardens have become a bit rank and overgrown, and it seems unlikely that there can ever be a flowering like the one that took place 90 years ago. Which is an overly ostentatious way of saying that the real action might now be happening somewhere else.

#57: The Black Sheep, by Honoré de Balzac

This book has an unusual plot. The first half is set in Paris and gives us the history of the Brideau family. There are two sons: one an artist and an honorable man, the other a soldier and a scoundrel. Balzac is not one for moral ambiguity. This soldier, Phillippe Brideau, has fought with Napoleon and then, after returning home, becomes a gambler and a playboy who goes on to ruin his family’s finances.

The second half is set in a provincial town, Issoudun. Balzac leads off with a fascinating chapter about the history of this actual town in the center of France.

With all due respect to Paris, Issoudun is one of the most historic towns in France….[E]xcavations recently conducted by a learned local archaeologist … have discovered a fifth century basilica beneath the famous tower of Issoudun. The very materials out of which this church was constructed bear the marks of an ancient civilization, for its stones come from a Roman temple which it replaced.

The Issoudun part of the book tells of another branch of the same family, the final descendant of which is a dim witted middle aged man, who happens to be worth a fortune. His housekeeper and another former soldier (also a villain) have this heir firmly in their control by means of emotional blackmail. They scheme to get his millions.

The final part of the book is a battle of wits between the two soldier villains. The Parisian branch of the family hopes that Phillippe can somehow come between the blackmailers and the heir so as to bring the inheritance to them. We root for Phillippe, the scoundrel from the first part of the book, because he is struggling to break the hold the housekeeper and her sweetheart, Maxence Gilet, have on the old scion. His own crimes are set aside for the time being. But Balzac does nothing to suggest that Phillippe has reformed in any way—he’s managed to give up drink and gambling, but only so that he can pursue his plan of action at full strength. He’s purged the self-destructive side of his character so that he can focus full time on destroying others, the fact that he is working to outfox schemers almost as evil as himself notwithstanding.

The struggle between Phillippe and Max forms the climax of The Black Sheep. What could be more entertaining than two arch-villians going at each other? It’s like Frankenstein vs. the Wolf Man, or Godzilla vs. Mothra.

Rest assured, though, that there is a lot more going on here than the battle of wits between Phillippe and Max. There are numerous friends and relations that come and go—I would estimate that there are at least 50 characters that we meet in The Black Sheep, each with a history, a personality, and a role to play. The action covers a period of about 20 years and we learn much about the events that shaped France in the first decades of the 19th century. We learn how Napoleonic loyalists fared during the Bourbon restoration and how military widows could be pensioned by means of becoming lottery administrators. We dip into the world of the theater and gain some acquaintance with the art world, where placing a picture in the annual Salon could make an artist’s reputation. I don’t know much about this period, and I didn't stop to look up the references to various politicians and artists. I was well entertained by what remained, but someone who knows about France in the 1820s would probably get that much more out of the book.

I was curious about the title—The Black Sheep. Because “sheep” can be singular or plural in English, I wasn’t sure whether it referred to a single animal or two, given that there are two roughly equal villains in the story. After thinking about it I realized it had to be just one—Max Gilet isn’t actually a member of the family, and you can’t be a black sheep without a family. But in the meantime I checked the original French title—La Rabouilleuse. Google translate was stumped, so I looked the term up in an online French dictionary and found this:

Agiter, troubler l'eau d'une rivière ou d'un étang pour effrayer les écrevisses ou les poissons qui, dans leur fuite, se laissent prendre plus facilement.

It’s a regional term from “Centre de la France”; it translates this way:

Agitate, disturb the water of a river or a pond to frighten the crayfish or the fish which, in their flight, allow themselves to be taken more easily.

This left me momentarily more confused than ever, until I remembered that the housekeeper from the second part of the book is often referred to as “The Fisherwoman” due to the circumstances that led to her inclusion in the family household back when she was a young girl. We first meet her when the father of the dim-witted heir comes across her as he drives his carriage through the country:

With the help of a stout branch whose twigs were splayed out in the shape of a racket, she was stirring and muddying the water of the stream. Frightened by an operation they did not understand, the crayfish quickly swam upstream, and in their confusion got caught up in nets which the fisherman had placed a convenient distance away. Flore Brazier was holding her branch in her hand, with all the grace of innocence.

So here is our rabouilleuse, who retains her beauty but not her innocence. It changes our perception of the novel a bit—during the final contest between Phillippe and Max, Flore is very much central to the story. Phillippe eventually marries Flore after he vanquishes Max, so she is an essential link between the two villains, the fulcrum of their struggle. But we can understand why translators have avoided "The Fisherwoman" as a title, which is what Flore is called by the townspeople of Issoudun. Fisherwoman is a sort of dingy, smelly term with no poetry whatsoever, whereas La Rabouilleuse is delicate and conjures a scene. So instead, we get a sheep.

#56: A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James

Not so brief, as it turns out—this book runs to nearly 700 pages. It deals with gangs and politics in Jamaica, and centers around an actual incident: an assassination attempt on Bob Marley at his house in Kingston in 1976. The seven killings of the title are (I think) of the seven assassins. Certainly there are a lot more than seven killings in the book, so that’s another problem I had with the title.

Up until about page 500 I was finding this book more trouble than it was worth. The story is passed among the voices of a large set of characters, a la The Sound and the Fury. Many of these characters speak in a thick Jamaican patois. For example:

This is how nine man become eight. Last night Josey Wales tell we what we going do. Renton from Trench Town say him cut a hit tune and he not pulling no gun like that boy in the Heptones who in prison when white man put him song in a movie. He say that him baby mother go to the Singer record studio and they give her money for the baby and her mother and her whole family. And he know that she is just one of more than hundred people that get help from the Singer and what goin’ happen if that stop? Josey Wales say that don’t make him better that make him worse because all him doing is giving poor people fish to eat because now that he reach he don’t want nobody else learn how to catch fish for himself. Some of we receive that reasoning but not Renton from Trench Town. Weeper take out him gun to shoot the bitch right deh so. Josey Wales say no, man, listen to the man and understand him reasoning. Then Josey Wales say that one has to know the factors. We don’t know what he mean, so he say kinetic energy: KE = mv2/2 (where m is mass and v is velocity). Yaw. Deformation. Fragmentation. Bleeding. Hypovolemic shock. Exsanguination. Hypoxia. Pneumothorax, heart failure and brain damage. Bang. Him skull stopped the bullet but blood still splash on Weeper chest. Not me Starsky and Hutch t-shirt! Weeper say as the man body fall and he wipe brains off him chest. Josey Wales put the gun back in him holster.

Did somebody get shot or not? Possibly not in that paragraph, but probably in the next.

James deploys the full modernist bag of tricks: Long stretches of dialog without quotation marks where it’s often difficult to keep track of who’s speaking to whom. Chapters that provide one side of a dialog leaving the reader to puzzle out who is being spoken too and what the other half of the conversation must be, etc.

And so many characters, major and minor! Many of them are gang members, and it’s not easy to distinguish one from another. Some are killed off before we get a handle on them; others live long enough that we begin to be able to know them.

The result of all this is that it’s difficult to know from one moment to the next what’s going on. Some novels deliberately blindfold you and then spin you around for a few chapters at the beginning and then coalesce by page 100 or so. With A Brief History of Seven Killings it takes a lot longer than that. For the last 200 pages the action moves to New York City, and for me this was when the clouds finally began to part. More careful readers might have gotten their bearings earlier. I just forged ahead, watching as characters came and went and occasionally got raped or murdered, and figuring things out as best I could.

Part of me wonders if James couldn’t have made his book a little more accessible—did he write like Faulkner because he wanted to be seen as Faulkner’s equal? Then again, given that I am such a fan of Faulkner, why should I begrudge this writer the privilege of challenging readers to the same degree?

James does give us one character we can root for: Nina Burgess is a woman who has had a one-night stand with Marley and has taken to standing outside his house waiting for a chance to speak with him. I cannot remember exactly why she is determined to do this—I thought maybe she was pregnant with his child but that doesn’t seem to be the case. She is described in the Cast of Characters at the beginning of the book as a “former receptionist, currently unemployed.” So she is a bit unraveled even when we first meet her, but her problems quickly escalate. She is outside Marley’s house the night of the assassination attempt and comes face to face with the head assassin, who puts a gun to her but doesn’t pull the trigger. Thereafter she shows up in different places using different names. James doesn’t actually tell us it’s the same woman whenever she re-emerges, but he doesn’t make it hard for us to figure it out. He also doesn’t tell us, until the very end, why she is on the run, but we figure that out too. I’m not a big mystery reader so I’m not used to having to figure so many things out as I read a book. But even though this isn’t a typical mystery, you’d better have your deerskin cap on if you plan on reading it. If you didn’t know, for example, that Bob Marley died of metastatic melanoma that started in his big toe you’d be mystified by several long passages.

Nina Burgess is a plucky, resourceful character who eventually becomes a nurse in New York. After 30 or 40 or so pages of violence and mayhem it was always a relief to come upon one of her chapters for a respite—I actually started looking ahead to see where the next one was. Her goal is to get as far away from Kingston and the man who might want to kill her as she possibly can. Along the way she has an affair with an American executive where she tries to pass herself off as a sex kitten so that he might agree to take her back to Arkansas with him, and then later gets a job in New York as caretaker for a rich man with a rather peculiar mental disorder.

The gangster story is, in the end, very impressive, more like Scarface than The Godfather. The CIA and the Columbian drug cartel play their part. In the early sections of the book there are several Kingston dons completing for power, but the one who survives and prospers goes by the name of Josey Wales. Which is odd because this character’s history goes back to 1966, but the Clint Eastwood movie that he presumably derives his name from came out in 1976, by which point the character in this book is well established. Wales is smart and he is as vicious as they come—the baddest of the bad. He eventually comes to control a large part of the North American drug market. But can he outrun his fate as one of the Marley assassins, or is he merely the last of the seven to meet his fate?

Marley, but the way, is mentioned maybe twice in the book by name—he is otherwise only referred to as The Singer.

The afterword to the book is revealing. James says:

The problem was that I couldn’t tell whose story it was. Draft after draft, page after page, character after character, and still no through line, no narrative spine, nothing. Until one Sunday, at W.A. Frost in St. Paul, when I was having dinner with Rachel Perlmeter, she said what if it’s not one person’s story? Also, when did I read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying? Well, maybe not in those exact words, but we also talked about Marguerite Duras, so I went and read The North China Lover as well. I had a novel, and it was right in front of me all that time. Half-formed and fully formed characters, scenes out of place, hundreds of pages that needed sequence and purpose. A novel that would be driven only by voice.

I’m thinking maybe Rachel should have kept her mouth shut. It’s a great pile of a book and it’s got some great stuff in it. But from a certain perspective it still reads like a work in progress.