Reading Well: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Posted on April 28, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I had never heard of Shirley Jackson before, yes, Marlon James mentioned her (this is the last of the books I bought from James’ interview). But, evidently, many of us have read her, as the introduction claims that her short story, The Lottery, was at one point the most anthologized short story in the United States. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a short novel–probably properly a novella–from 1962.

This is one of the best written creepy, vaguely supernatural stories you’ll ever read … until the very end. Without giving much away, the setup is relatively clean: an aristocratic family lives on the outskirts of a town. The parents were poisoned under fairly suspicious circumstances, reducing the inhabitants of the “castle” to two young daughters and their paralyzed, addled uncle.

The daughters are the heroines of the story, and their relationship is amazingly sweet, even if it holds some very odd nooks and crannies. Their world is magical, in the best sense: meaning is held in everyday objects and in the natural world that surrounds the house, and it is all described with lyrically rich, highly evocative language.

On the other side, we have the villagers, a uniformly brutish and cruel lot who harass the daughters when they go into town, and who even delight at disasters that befall their family.

The story lost energy for me in its denouement, but the journey to get to that point is pretty fantastic: simultaneously heart-warming and deeply disturbed, sinister and sweet. Recommended.

{ It turns out (a) Haunting of Hill House, which I have not seen, was based on a Shirley Jackson story and (b) We Have Always Lived in the Castle is coming out as a film: here is the trailer. Knew neither of these things when I read the book. }

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There is a fluidity to Jackson’s writing that is astounding, an ability to ride the line between the fantastical and the mundane that continually surprises and engages the reader. It’s something attempt to emulate.

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Reading Well: As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann

Posted on April 17, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I think As Meat Loves Salt (2001) is another book that found its way into my life via an interview with Marlon James. He described Maria McCann‘s debut novel as compelling as a study in how to maintain sympathy for a protagonist that acts in some horrible ways.

As such, I expected the complexity of the main character, an imposing specimen of a man with, shall we say, ongoing anger issues. I didn’t expect it to be so meticulous in its historical recreation of 16th century England and, in some ways, As Meat Loves Salt could be read as a companion piece to Hillary Mantel‘s Wolf Hall (read before I started Reading Well). Wolf Hall is a better book, overall, but the two novels can certainly be seen as in conversation with each other: As Meat Loves Salt traces the life of a man caught up in the wars of the time, and then in an attempt to repossess land from the nobles resisting the monarchy.

The setting is incredibly fully realized, both in scope and detail, and maintains fidelity its epoch. Two examples: one, being slightly swarthy and dark-haired, the main character is often referred to as black or even Ethiopian, locating the novel shortly before the ideological notion of race had been fully created; and, two, there is a great minor discussion about a fossilized snail found in the middle of England, with theories of how the snail got there and how it turned to rock all based on Biblical foundations. Those examples are small, but they speak to how richly thick the narrative is.

And then there is the protagonist. It’s not rare in contemporary fiction to find examples of morally grey or unreliable narrators; what strikes me as a rarer accomplishment by McCann is creating a protagonist whose level of self-knowledge remains remarkably limited. You can, as a reader, see the internal conversation going off the rails, and long for the character to obtain the level of self-awareness needed to change their behavior … mostly to no avail.

It’s an interesting experience, as it fills the book with both hope and dread in equal measure, leaving it until the end to reveal which wins out.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The challenge of recreating a historical–or a totally fictional–setting is so, so difficult. McCann consistently makes such smart choices as to what to highlight and what to let be filled in by the reader’s imagination. It’s this magical mix of the smallest detail and the broadest brushstrokes, but when it’s done well, it’s so seamless and the process of slipping into the world goes unnoticed as it happens.

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Reading Well: Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

Posted on April 9, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Half-Blood Blues (2011) is Esi Edugyan‘s second novel. The bleakness of her debut, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne in no way prepared me for this book, which is as full of life as anything I’ve read in the past few years.

Moving between Germany and France in World War II and the early 1990s, the novel tells the story of a small ensemble of jazz musicians: the protagonist is a serviceable bass player and his childhood best friend an excellent drummer. And then there is the kid, a trumpet playing prodigy who is the propulsive force behind both the music and the action.

The earlier plot centers around attempts to escape the encroaching Nazi threat: first to find a way from Berlin to Paris, then, as France joins the conflict with disastrous results, from Paris to anywhere. The situation is complicated by the trumpet players German nationality, by a love interest, and by their being on the edge of recording some truly transformative music. The more contemporary scenes are driven by a journey to Germany for the debut of a documentary about the trumpet player, and a surprise trip to Poland.

There are two notable accomplishments in the writing. First, Edugyan captures a specifically male camaraderie in an utterly fantastic way: the slang, the rhythms, the flow between teasing and support, it is all simultaneously oblique and accessible and highly believable. It’s remarkably impressive.

Second, there is the music itself, which is the subject of the most lyrical moments in the novel. You may not hear Louis Armstrong or the kid the way Edugyan describes him, but you’ll see how the characters in the book do indeed hear it and, perhaps as importantly, you’ll see how that hearing impacts them throughout the novel.

After The Second Life of Samuel Tynes, I was unsure what Half-Blood Blues would hold. I was terrifically surprised, and Edugyan’s second novel is very highly recommended.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Two things. First, the conversational language, which is just fabulous. It is so hard to create a slang system and speech rhythm that is convincing and immediately comprehensible. I suspect Edugyan’s accomplishment is a mix of reasearch and inventive skill on her side, and I am left thinking about how to integrate that into my characters.

Second, I think the way she handles the primary love interest is really deft. The woman is not classically beautiful, the love is never fully reciprocal, and they remain in each other’s orbit throughout. Each part of that is handled with a clean, light, significantly mature touch.

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Reading Well: Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

Posted on March 31, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I think I found Skippy Dies (2010), Paul Murray‘s second novel, through an interview with Marlon James.

The title describes the action of the opening chapter, which is an interesting structure: we know, immediately, that Skippy–the erstwhile protagonist–does indeed die. But we don’t know why or what led up to it, and the rest of the novel traces the intertwined narratives leading up to and following Skippy’s demise.

Skippy is a boarder at a moderately wealthy private school in Dublin; other major characters include his fellow classmates, a few teachers, and some young women from the neighboring girls’ school.

The themes are fairly predictable from the setting: the competitive, aggressive, and occasionally surprisingly sweet relationships of teenagers; moments when high school debauchery threatens to spill over into more serious criminality; the confusions and manipulations between love and lust; the disillusions of some teachers and the passions of others.

The story is all well done, and occasionally quite memorable. The cadre of teenage boys are especially well managed, as is the initial relationship between the lead teacher and his American girlfriend. Ultimately, though, what sets the novel apart is the revealed structure. This is not Dead Poets Society: there is no conquering moment here, no teenage triumphalism, no endearing life lesson. After all, Skippy dies.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Murray pulls together a lot of themes related to courage, truth, and conviction, ranging from moments of individual bravery and cowardice to the relationship of the generations in the novel to those that came before to the importance of the sins of the past for characters in the present. It’s all skillfully presented, without being overly obvious or didactic.

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Reading Well: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

Posted on March 23, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Salvage the Bones is the 2nd in the trilogy of novels by Jesmyn Ward set in the Louisiana delta (I’ve already written about Where the Line Bleeds and Sing, Unburied, Sing–I read and wrote about them out of order).

Salvage the Bones is set in the same small community (the twins from Where the Line Bleeds make a brief appearance, even); here, however, historical events dominate the narrative: the book covers just under 2 weeks surrounding the landfall of hurricane Katrina.

The protagonist is a teenage girl, the youngest of a set of siblings who live with their father. One brother is a possible basketball recruit, the other raises and fights pit bulls, and the girl, who has been sexually active for a few years, discovers in the first few chapters that she is pregnant.

Salvage the Bones is similar to Where the Line Bleeds in that, in one sense, very little happens: the father is concerned about the oncoming storm, but nobody else is; one brother’s pit bull has a litter of puppies; the other has an important upcoming game that will determine a possible scholarship opportunity; the girl longs with the intensity of early teen puppy love for a boy–who does not know she is carrying his child–to pay her more attention.

But like Where the Line Bleeds, there is so much more here. The emotional arc of the girl is handled with a directness and sensitivity that is truly rare: when was the last time you read an early-teen woman who was both fully vulnerable and in full control of her sexual agency?

There are two parallel plots, one driven by the brother and his fighting dog, the other by the storm, and they each provide dramatic highs in the novel, one a dogfight, the other what befalls the family the night the storm rips through. Both moments are thrilling, kinetic, and terrifying.

Ward’s delta trilogy is quite an accomplishment, and one that richly presents a rural existence on the fringes of the American dream. Highly recommended throughout.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Wards’ mastery of voice is so complete: the characters are distinct, and they are thoroughly identifiable: even the protagonist’s teenage instability maintains a consistency of pitch and tone throughout.

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Reading Well: The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Posted on March 12, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Elif Batuman‘s The Idiot was a 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

It’s a contemporary journey over fairly well trodden ground: in a vaguely autobiographical tone, a young person is sent off for their education, they remain wryly detached, fall in love, and travel, all the while wondering–often in quite intelligent ways–about how to navigate the new worlds into which they have stepped.

In this case, the protagonist is a first generation Turkish immigrant, the school is Harvard, and the time is the mid 1990s, at the first edges of the technological revolution. This last bit is important, as the love relationship is mediated, at first, over early versions of e-mail. (The middle bit–Harvard–may be important, depending on your knowledge of and impression of academia in general, and that Boston institution specifically.)

There are some moments of genuine humor, and the main character’s struggle to navigate her first adult relationship–with someone who may not be interested in adding a romantic dimension to their intellectual attractions–are compelling.

The strength of the novel is its sense of isolation and displacement–she doesn’t really belong at Harvard, and when she travels to Europe, she doesn’t really belong in any of her destinations. The struggle, of course, is that same strength offers obstacles to deeply connecting with the world view of the protagonist: detachment only goes so far.

It has been too many decades since I read Dostoevsky’s novel by the same name for me to day anything intelligent about the echoes or homages between the two works, although a relationship is explicitly acknowledged by Batuman in the epilogue.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The travelogue bit is, I think, the strongest part of the novel, and it moves from setting to setting in a way that stays strongly with the reader. It also requires an impressionistic treatment of the other locales that I find very difficult to do.

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Reading Well: Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

Posted on February 28, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Gnomon (2017) may be the smartest book I’ve read in many years. Nick Harkaway has created a multi-leveled, many faceted story that manages to succeed on several levels.

First, it’s page-turning romp, a whodunnit that spans multiple timelines and characters, with enough twists and turns to keep the reader guessing. Second, it’s a meditation on the emerging digital landscape, on what it might actually mean to trade privacy for security. And, finally, it’s an exercise in unpacking a set of Russian doll narratives, where symbols and patterns nest inside each other at multiple layers.

That’s a lot.

It works because the protagonist–a dedicated, intuitive, thoughtful detective–remains engaging and compelling throughout; because the different nested narratives are enjoyable on their own, regardless of whether the reader connects each and every dot; and finally because the thoughts about security and privacy go beyond the obvious and the trite.

This last one is of particular interest: the novel is set (or part of it is set, or some of the nested narratives are set) in a UK of the future where an AI powered system sees everything. Instead of this being just another take on a Panopticon/Orwellian state, though, Harkaway takes the question seriously, and allows some real consideration of whether our privacy–which amounts to what, exactly?–might not actually be a fair exchange for safety and security. What is the total elimination of violent crime worth? What is the appropriate cost of a fully participatory democracy?

By the end of the novel, Harkaway’s conclusions are clear, but they are held in abeyance long enough for the reader to be forced to consider the questions more fully than most dystopian writing allows.

If you enjoyed films like Inception or Memento, you will enjoy Gnomon; if those films left you frustrated, this work is likely to as well.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Gnomon maintains its pace and intelligence for over 600 pages, and it manages a quintet of narratives with none of them dropping off and feeling incomplete. It’s quite an achievement.

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Reading Well: Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

Posted on February 15, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Akwaeke Emezi‘s Freshwater (2018) made a fair number of end of year lists, and deservedly so. It’s an inventive, compelling, and more than a little frightening novel that focuses on, depending on how you read it, a young woman struggling with mental health or a young woman possessed by a small variety of deities from her native Nigeria.

Your interest in the latter interpretation will largely determine your enjoyment of the book: as a novel exploring what it might mean to share your body with spirits, whose self-interest only occasionally overlaps with your own, Freshwater is a great read. It’s also not an easy one. There is sexual violence in the book, and, as a core idea for the narrative, a question of what is entailed in being used, in having little to no agency in what happens to your body.

For example, in order to shield the protagonist, a very promiscuous and sexually voracious spirit possesses her regularly. On the one hand, this prevents the protagonist from ever revisiting her rape; on the other, her body is in a very real sense not her own for nights on end.

One challenge for any book that delves into the supernatural is the author’s ability to keep the rules of those worlds consistent and understood, and Emezi does a very strong job of this, which means that, once you accept the general premise of what is happening, the rest hangs together.

The strongest parts of the book, for me, are when the spirits navigate their simultaneous disregard for the protagonist and their dependence on her in this strangely human world. They long both to return to the spirit world, but also to experience the human. It’s nicely done, and done without ever allowing you to lose your empathy for the protagonist herself.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

There is so much going on here that adds depth to the story, so much that touches themes of isolation and immigration and mental illness and the difficulty of navigating various structures of external power (bureaucracies in general, everyday racism, etc). I strive to, even in my totally fantasy based writing, to point towards other, larger themes as well, and I would do well to be as successful as Emezi is.

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Reading Well: The Second Life of Samuel Tyne by Esi Edugyan

Posted on January 29, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004) is the first of three novels by Esi Edugyan in the queue. This one follows a Ghanaian family that emigrates to Canada, settling into a fairly settled life in post WWII Vancouver and then relocating when the patriarch–the Samuel Tyne of the title–surprisingly inherits some land in a rural community. The immediate family is a foursome: a largely unhappy marriage that has produced a set of distant, problematic twins.

This was a surprising novel: it is not, or at least, not primarily, a novel of the immigrant experience, nor is it a novel centered on manifestations of racism in Canada in the last half of the 20th century, although both of those themes certainly inform and impact the narrative.

It is, far more, a novel about dissatisfaction, distance, and violence–both emotional and physical–in human relations. It may be bleakest novel I’ve read in decades, summed by this observation:

That was the nature of marriage, he thought solemnly, an argument that only ends with death.

Relationships in The Second Life of Samuel Tyne are rarely fulfilling, and only momentarily satisfying, for the most part–even an epilogue tracing the final years of the main characters falls short of any optimism in its resolution.

The story really centers around the fragile, and continually degrading, mental health of the twins, caught in a country and time without much support for either them or their parents. Friends, neighbors, and eventually much of the town gets caught up in their behavior, and their isolation remains a gulf the parents struggle to bridge.

I can’t say it was a pleasant read, but it was a minorly powerful one, and is certainly impressive as a debut novel: I look forward to the later works by Edugyan.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Edugyan paints a picture of the inner working of Samuel’s mind that is remarkably consistent and insightful. His flaws are on full display, but there is a consistency to his being that brings him into a full, three-dimensional, humanity. The fact that, as a reader, you can see him make his own bed does little to reduce our sympathy when he must lie in it.

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Reading Well: Milkman by Anna Burns

Posted on January 17, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Anna Burns‘ Milkman (2018) won the Man Booker Prize last year; as such, there are plenty of reviews of it to be found on the web (and is the second in back-to-back highly contemporary entries on Reading Well). I’ll just summarize the novel as a compelling exploration of life in a highly stressed community, where every action–and, indeed, most thoughts–full under intense scrutiny.

The specifics matter, of course: Milkman is set in Northern Ireland in the 70s, at the height of the violent clashes between British and Republican forces. This is not explicitly named in the novel, indeed, nothing really is: the main character’s dubious and part-time boyfriend is only referred to as maybe-boyfriend, her younger set of twins as wee-sisters, her elder siblings as first-sister or second-brother, and England as the-land-over-the-waters.

This is awkward at first, but easily adjusted to, and serves twin purposes: first, it speaks to the possible universality of communities in crisis and second, it reinforces the main antagonist of the novel’s role as an unknown and highly protected identity, only known as Milkman (not to be confused with real-milkman, who actually delivers milk).

I want to highlight two small realizations from the novel. First, if I had not read
Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s The Dirty Dust, I don’t think I would have recognized Milkman as belonging to what I interpret as an explicitly Irish tradition. There is a rhythm to the writing, a repetitiveness and circularity to its structure, that feels directly related to Ó Cadhain, but also to Synge and Beckett (and those names emerge solely out of my ignorance of the tradition–I’m sure scholars and deep fans of Irish writing could correct/expand the list).

In any case, it was nice to have my reading of Milkman deepened by that recognition. It also led to realization #2:

This is one of a very small number of books I’ve ever read where I found myself saying, I bet the audiobook of this absolutely rocks. Much as when reading The Dirty Dust, I found the linguistic patterns to be slow reading, and while I appreciated them–especially their rhythm and their tendency to go off-kilter in the midst of repetition, throwing in items that weren’t quite similar to the rest of the list–I thought the impact would be even greater listening to the text.

Milkman isn’t a quick read, nor an easy one: it is powerfully disquieting, and its focus–on the constant threat of retribution and violence, not those actions themselves–lends an air of foreboding that permeates acts as normal as running in a park or watching a sunset. But it’s a worthwhile read, for sure.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

I haven’t read anything else by Burns, so I don’t know if the style of Milkman is hers in a more pervasive sense, or is one she adopted for this novel particularly. Regardless, it serves her well, and I don’t have a sense of that kind of voice in my own writing.

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