Reading Well: There There by Tommy Orange

Posted on January 6, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

There There (2018) has found its way onto several prominent end of year lists, which makes me feel quite au courant in this entry in Reading Well.

It’s Tommy Orange‘s debut novel, and speaks–from about a dozen different perspectives–to the contemporary and urban experience of a cross-section of Native Americans in and around Oakland (some are from other Western states, but all are converging towards Northern California).

What is most striking is Orange’s insistence on wrestling with the always-challenging notion of Indian identity within a contemporary, post/modern context. The teenagers are lost online, the adults are puzzled by this behavior, the discoveries of shared ancestry are facilitated by Facebook, traditional dance is learned from YouTube.

And little of the contemporary world helps: the outlook for Native communities, whether on or off government declared reservation boundaries, is bleakly complicated. And the questions of what it means to be Indian have certainly not grown simpler over the decades.

The plot is inevitably violent, building towards a confrontation at an event known is The Big Oakland Powwow, and there is something akin to terror in watching it slowly unfurl. But Orange manages that with a deep humanity in his characters, and by nicely capturing the range of experiences they present, both in terms of their levels of allegiance and interest in their cultural roots and in their abilities and opportunities in navigating the obstacles common to the economically disenfranchised in contemporary America.

The novel also manages to nimbly, and without comment, avoid cliché. There are no magical saviors here, no deep fountain of wisdom accessible only to those deemed closer to the Earth. That he does that while still weaving an ending that echos quite palpably with historical massacres and strategies of resistance is startling and powerful.

The range of voices and the inter-relatedness of the characters can be challenging to track at times, and perhaps a few of the perspectives are too similar to cleanly differentiate their voices in the reader’s mind. Still, an impressive debut, with some powerful moments.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The multi-perspective thing is really appealing in a ton of ways, but I struggle with–shock of shocks–the plot skills that are required to pull it off. It’s not just different characters, it’s different characters that are converging and overlapping and interacting around a central sequence of events.

Also, Orange gives a great shout-out to one of my favorite discoveries of the past few years, the hip hop collective known as A Tribe Called Red, which brings Native musical traditions into direct conversation with hip hop and EDM to great effect.

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@The Movies with PopPop: Roma

Posted on December 22, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Roma, a 2018 Netflix film written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón, is wonderful. It’s a story of an upper middle class household in Mexico City in the early 1970’s, and Cleo, the young woman who works for them as maid and nanny (one of several household employees).

It’s more “a day in the life” (or many days) than a plot driven film, though during its course the head of household husband/father leaves, the wife struggles with the aftermath, Cleo gets pregnant, and there are student riots and attacks on them by a quasi-government militia!

The film though is about the relationships within the family; the class and race issues (all the servants, e.g., have clearly Indian features and the wealthy do not), and the tension in Cleo being both a loved and valued member of the family – she is not thrown out after getting pregnant – and a household servant. There are no real villains, though lots of human actions with consequences, and it’s a family for which one might want to work if one had to! The acting is first rate, and the black and white photography magnificent.

Above all, it seems to capture the specificity of a particular time and setting, while making it universally relevant. Cuarón describes the film as semi-autobiographical of his own childhood.

See it – it’s both on Netflixand in theatres.

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Reading Well: The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

Posted on December 20, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

You may have noticed that I usually don’t read mutli-volume entries in order. N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy (The Fifth Season [2015], The Obelisk Gate [2016], and The Stone Sky [2017]) is so good it made me break that rule, and I steamrolled from one to the next to the next.

I have a confession: Jemisin is hailed (along with Reading Well favorite Nnedi Okorafor) as a leading voice in the next generation of science fiction/fantasy, and specifically of what is termed afro-futurism. Should be exactly in one of my sweet spots.

I read something by her many years ago, I don’t even remember what, and it just left me … unreactive. This was before Reading Well, so I didn’t have to think about the reaction much, just shrugged, tossed it aside, and moved on.

Having read this, I’m pretty sure the fault was in me.

Let me be clear: this is not “great literature.” This is a page-turning fantasy epic that is richly and deftly constructed, a world that, with very little exposition, feels deep and real and whose impossibilities are shrugged off willingly. That’s a great achievement.

Add a central character who veers between courage and anger, between moments of potentially world-changing possibility and the particular grief of mothers whose children are lost to them; toss in a complex system of social control that is–and yet is not–slavery in different clothing, and you have a magnificently compelling story.

The setting is a world ravaged by tectonic disruption: every few centuries, this manifests in global catastrophe, placing humanity in a very subsistence rhythm: there are times of plenty, and then seasons of total lack, where even the flora and fauna become aggressive and deadly. There are some people–and the main character is one–who have a genetic ability to calm, if not control, the Earth itself, using this ability to lessen the impact of the constant tectonic churn.

If the genre is one you read, and the setting has the faintest appeal, read The Fifth Season immediately. I suspect you will pick up the other two shortly thereafter.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Creating a world this rich with this little exposition is a great feat: Jemisin’s conception of this world is consistent and true and what you don’t know emerges in ways that are a natural progression of the story. Just fantastic.

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Reading Well: Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward

Posted on December 5, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I really loved Sing, Unburied, Sing and when I realized it was the third book of a loose trilogy (connected by geography, not by characters as far as I know), I got the other two books into my queue.

Where the Line Bleeds (2008) is the first of those three, focused on a set of twins in rural Louisiana in the months before and after their High School graduation. A lot of the comments about Sing, Unburied, Sing apply here: the book is lyrical and generous and fantastically empathetic to slices of American, and specifically African-American, life that are usually either hidden or portrayed in fairly simplistic ways.

A minor example: the twins are both tempted by illegal means to generate income and wake up early on the weekends to tend their grandmother’s yarn and garden.

In other words, the characters–the twins, their immediate family, the network of aunts/uncles/cousins that surround them, the rest of the small-town community–are woven from strands of real life, frayed and intertwined and knotted as that is.

The flora and fauna of their world–the streams and rivers, the parks and forests and yards, the snakes and dogs–are very well drawn, and those elements combined with the ever-present, oppressive heat and sweat and swelter all add to a palpable realism that is maintained throughout the story.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Weave a full and compelling narrative out of such a small thing. There is less plot here than a passage of time, and while there are moments of conflict and resolution, struggle and success, the overall arc of the book is merely a slice of life deeply rooted in a handful of characters and their community.

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Reading Well: Trickster Books

Posted on November 25, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{I’m prepping for another class, and these are more a product of wanting to keep recording most everything I read here. These are very worthwhile books, each with a significant blindspot that, while important to consider, also does not reduce their overall worth as resources on the subject of tricksters.}

I first bought Robert D. Pelton‘s The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight (1980) in 1991. I did not read it for many years, and then found it absorbing and compelling when I did. It was only later, on a second pass through it while writing my dissertation that I realized that Pelton had clearly had much of the same academic training I had, which was a bit of a shock.

It stands up to a third reading, but it’s a bewildering text in many ways. Pelton’s presentation of the trickster figures of the Ashanti, Fon, Yoruba, and Dogon peoples (Ananse, Legba, Eshu, and Ogo-Yurugu respectively) is nuanced, complicated, sophisticated, and sympathetic. It’s also almost bizarre in its avoidance of the question of Pelton himself, his “armchair” relationship to his subject matter, his (presumed) whiteness, and the politics involved in reading so deeply into “the other.”

Pelton is quite aware of the dangers of interpretation at a distance: in one of the best lines of the book, as a reaction to the heavy-handed attempts at interpretation of West African culture by a host of Europeans (Dumézil, Jung, many others), he writes

The Ashanti, however, are not trying to say something; they are saying something.

Indeed they are, and that something is not dependent on Western eyes for its explanation or understanding, Pelton’s included.

My suspicion is this is mostly a product of being written in the 1970s: there is a sense that what is missing most from The Trickster in West Africa is another chapter that situates Pelton’s scholarship within those frames, but academic awareness and grounded critique of those things blossomed in later decades. Regardless, what is present in the book is illuminating, and while much of it is difficult to grasp–at their core, West African trickster figures embody a host of contradictions that resist resolution as part of their very definition–wrestling with the ideas here is well worth the effort.

Lewis Hyde‘s Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (1998) is an intelligent, wide-ranging romp through an impressive mind. Hyde–of whom I know very little–clearly spent a long time thinking about the Trickster figure, and what emerges is erudite and illuminating, and brings together figures as diverse as Hermes and Frederick Douglass into engaging conversation with each other.

For the most part, it works: that is, the points Hyde makes are salient and hold together, and while I don’t know that he really does much to analyze Trickster figures in their own contexts, he certainly helps enlarge our understanding of how they may function for contemporary readers.

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Reading Well: Two Short Story Collections

Posted on November 15, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I’ve written about both Jeff Vandermeer (The Southern Reach trilogy) and Sarah Hall (The Wolf Border, The Electric Michelangelo, and Daughters of the North) before. Vandermeer sits clearly in a post-Lovecraft tradition, somewhere between horror and the merely psychologically disturbing, a style that adapts very well to the form of the short story. Hall is one of my favorite contemporary authors, and a prior short story collection, The Beautiful Indifference, was also quite, quite strong.

Both Vandermeer’s The Third Bear (2010) and Hall’s Madame Zero (2017) are solid collections, and there are, between the two, a small handful of truly standout entries.

The title story of Vandermeer’s collection is a thoroughly creative riff on a common fantasy context–avillage threatened by a violent external force–and The Goat Variations may be the most creative exploration of President Bush’s response to the events of 9/11 you’ll ever come across. There is a degree of self-indulgence in some of the other stories, but none of it ruptures the consistency of supernatural voice that makes Vandermeer’s fans so loyal. If that’s up your alley, you’ll greatly enjoy The Third Bear.

Hall’s collection is more even, with the opening and closing stories the really outstanding pieces. Mrs. Fox is a meditation on love and sex, with an anthropomorphic twist that makes it more than memorable, and Evie is a stunning work, thoughtful and subtly feminist in nature. It looks at a change in personality, probing whether and how it matters if we know the cause of new or altered behavior.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Create mood like Vandermeer and describe the natural world like Hall. I mean, if I had to choose one of these authors to emulate, it would be Hall–she has more range, and a style more conducive to supporting multiple, different novels. But I’d take being able to do either.

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Reading Well: Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

Posted on November 2, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

JD Vance‘s 2016 mid-life memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis generated quite a bit of buzz when published, and it’s pretty easy to see why, as Vance’s account of his upbringing in rural poverty is a compelling read. Add the fact that Vance emerges (after transformative time in military service and at Yale) as a staunch social conservative, and the appeal of the book becomes even clearer.

The personal story is everything you would expect: heart-breaking and inspirational and full of characters that both fulfill and invalidate pre-existing stereotypes. As a primary example, the quasi-stable source of love and positive regard for him are his grandparents, especially his grandmother, who is a demanding, foul-mouthed, gun-toting, hyper-protective woman, capable of both tough and soft love as she sees fit, with tough love often involving believable threats of firearms.

Vance’s social analysis is predictable: he sees some of the ways in which government intervention could assist, but he never wavers from a demand that personal choice and individual responsibility are key elements: that is, improving schools is great, but if parents don’t care, what good can it do?

The problem, of course, is that the answer is, a lot, as it provides another venue for what Vance sees as crucial to healthy development: engaged, positive role models.

Vance also stays away from the concept of whiteness for the most part, neither wrestling with how it formed his community, nor with how it played to his advantage as he moved through the wider world. That’s fine–there is no ethical imperative for him to write about it–but it does sit at the center of the debate Hillbilly Elegy contributed to, and as such its overall omission is striking (he writes about being white; that’s a different thing the structure of whiteness).

Still, especially if you are curious about what rural poverty might look like in 21st century America, it’s a worthwhile read.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Dunno. I read this because a friend wanted to. I have never been drawn to writing a memoir, and I don’t read a lot of this kind of non-fiction. I do think that Vance’s ability to create his family on the page is admirable: his relatives come through as fully realized, three dimensional people, and that keeps the book from sliding into a dry piece of social observation.

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Reading Well: Waking Gods by Sylvain Neuvel

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The sequel to Sleeping Giants , Waking Gods (2017) continues Sylvain Neuvel‘s story of human encounters with radically advanced technology.

It follows the same structure: interviews and journal entries and transcribed conversations; and, again surprisingly to me, somehow it still manages to be a page turner.

I think this is partially because of the absolutely inscrutable nature of the aliens: they don’t communicate, they just appear, and without any warning, they wreck massive destruction upon humanity, wiping out hundreds of thousands of people without explanation or clear cause.

That is the strength of the book, the sense of how humanity might respond to a truly lost cause, facing impossible odds without even the possibility of surrender. That context helps bring the humanity of the characters to the forefront.

There is, of course, a way out, but the procedural nature of the solution to save humanity is, for me, the weakest part of the book: the crisis is more compelling than the cure.

There is a third book, and at some point (once it’s released in paperback) we’ll see how it all ends up. Until then, if the description of Sleeping Giants seemed attractive, so will Waking Gods.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Trying to make this a different answer than with Sleeping Giants, I would move to Neuvel’s willingness to create an inscrutable adversary. It takes a lot of trust to believe your readers will buy into an antagonist whose motivations remain quite opaque.

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Reading Well: When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost by Joan Morgan

Posted on October 12, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I meant to read When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down (1999) along with Tricia Rose’s work. But the book was back-ordered, so I was unable to dive into Joan Morgan‘s manifesto until more recently.

This is the quote that first brought Chickenheads to my attention:

Any feminism that fails to acknowledge that black folks in 90’s America are living and trying to love in a war zone is useless to our struggle against sexism.

Though it’s often portrayed as part of the problem, rap music is essential to that struggle because it takes us straight to the battlefield. […]

Yeah, sistas are hurt when we hear brothers calling us bitches and hos. But the real crime isn’t the name-calling, it’s their failure to love us – to be our brothers in the way that we commit ourselves to being their sistas.

But recognize: Any man who doesn’t truly love himself is incapable of loving us in the healthy way we need to be loved. It’s extremely telling that men who can only refer to us as “bitches” and “hos” refer to themselves only as “niggas.”

It’s fairly exemplary of Morgan’s style–insightful, conversational, rooted both in common language and uncompromising analysis.

Chickenheads is, as a whole, much more focused on issues around being an African-American women in America (among them the complicated relationship between activist, perhaps even “woke,” thought and the term feminism) than it is about hip hop, specifically. That’s not a critique, not by a far shot, although it was a surprise.

There is something dated about the book–it is fantastic as a set of insights grounded in the 1990s and early 2000s, but its lack of attention to issues of globalization, LBQTx thought and issues, and its overall heteronormativity, make it clearly a product of a certain moment.

Still, it’s a compelling read, perhaps most of all in its embrace of ambiguity: Morgan is willing to stare into the mirror and accept that her desires are, in fact, sometimes contradictory, and that the need to critique behavior does not remove the demand to love and support individuals through their own struggles.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

I think the way Morgan mixes academic, psuedo-academic, and common language is incredibly effective. It almost never hits the ear as forced or unusual, and it simultaneously increases the readability and credibility of her work.

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Reading Well: A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Posted on October 2, 2018 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) is a pleasant diversion wrapped around a very intriguing idea: the protagonist, a thirty year old Russian aristocrat, is, in 1922, sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. His house happens to be the Metropol, Moscow’s grand old hotel (at a time when such things either existed or are easily mythologized).

While exiled from a luxurious suite to a tiny attic room, the Count remains elegant, unflappable, and an attractive, insightful character. This is both the strength and weakness of the novel: strength, because an engaging protagonist is a pretty great thing for a writer to have; weakness because other characters–especially female characters–seem thin in comparison (they often have very strong and memorable entrances, and then fade from there).

But the bustle of the hotel, and the Count’s ability to transform that controlled chaos into a sense of home, largely carry the novel, making it a good character study. One note: I learned less about the progression of Soviet life over the five decades spanned by the novel than anticipated. The Count is, essentially, an idealized westerner, and the novel could have been enriched, in my view, by a more nuanced–even, sympathetic–view of those changes.

Still, the Count will stick with you, as well the hotel itself (the building, and all of its passageways, corridors and, especially, restaurants is really the second most important character in the book).

#WhatIWishICouldDo

I really like the way the plot sets constraints on the rest of the novel, and how sympathetically Towles embraces those limits. Part of the enjoyment of the novel is wondering if it can stay engaging, given the somewhat limited cast and totally limited setting. For the most part, it does!

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