Reading Well: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

Posted on December 23, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

I’ve been a fan of Louise Erdrich for decades, and remember thinking that Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks were as fine a sequence of three novels as I had read. I hadn’t read much from her since then–perhaps a couple novels and a book of poetry. And then I saw something that mentioned Future Home of the Living God (2017), describing it as her entry into dystopian fiction.

Sign me up!

It does not disappoint: Erdrich creates a confident and sure-footed narrative, set in the near-future where an unexplained occurrence has led to evolution reversing its course (yes, there is an appearance by a sabre-toothed tiger, but that’s not really the point). The protagonist is young and pregnant–something so rare as to subject her to an immediate threat of state control–and the novel traces her struggles to remain free, while also discovering what she can about her own family history, encompassing her own Native American roots and adoption by a white American family, as well as her fairly sophisticated integration of Catholicism into her world.

The journey is both page-turning and emotionally compelling, and Erdrich’s creative insights into feminism, faith, and resistance are all made while steering the book well-clear of a simplistic allegory. It’s a solid book, recommended.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Publish as regularly and successfully as Erdrich? OK, aside from that, create a character with the complexity of the protagonist, who is in turns highly intellectual, naive about the workings of the world, reactionary in her reactions to her family, and carefully considered in how she should proceed: an excellent capturing of a young adult struggling to survive, having been thrown into a world far beyond her capabilities.

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@TheMovies with PopPop: The Salesman

Posted on December 22, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The Salesman is another excellent film from Iranian Director Asghar Farhadi. The film won the 2016 Best Foreign Film Oscar, and Farhadi made additional waves when he refused to attend the ceremony in response to Trump’s travel ban.

The movie focuses on a married couple in the center of a Tehran-based theatre company that is staging Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Various scenes from the play are part and parcel of the film, shot in present day Tehran.

The married couple at the center (playing much older Willy and Linda Loman in the play) along with other tenants, have to evacuate their house after serious structural weaknesses occur, likely from construction going on nearby. A member of the acting troupe offers them an apartment they take on a temporary basis. Shortly after moving in, the wife, thinking her husband is returning, buzzes him in while she is showering. We then see her at the hospital being treated for quite serious wounds and injuries. It appears the apartment’s previous tenant had been a woman “with numerous make visitors” and the assumption is that one of them came to do her harm, and not knowing she’d moved, attacked the wrong woman.

The wife, Rana, is devastated and humiliated by the attack, suffers greatly psychologically as well as physically, and feels guilty for having let the man in. She doesn’t want to go to the police to report the incident because of the humiliation involved. The husband, Emad, acquiesces, but decides to pursue the attacker on his own. The attacker has left possessions including his car keys, phone and money in the apartment when he was apparently spooked by Rana’s screams, and using these, Emad tracks down the attacker. Stresses and consequences occur along the way for Rana and Emad as individuals, as a couple, as neighborhood residents, and as acting troupe members.

Many of the themes of Miller’s play, particularly those related to humiliation, respect, and situations that change who we are, are interwoven with the film plot, and their lives and roles continually impact each other.

Extremely well acted and directed, and not to be missed. We’ve now seen maybe 3 of Farhadi’s films, and they are all excellent.

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Reading Well: Sequels & Other Novels

Posted on December 17, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{More follow-ups and other works …}

I hadn’t realized Colson Whitehead, long before The Underground Railroad, wrote The Noble Hustle, a first person account focusing on one of my favorite topics: poker, and specifically, No-Limit Texas Hold ‘Em. Published in 2014, Whitehead’s book was written at the height of the poker boom in the late 2000’s, when you could barely turn a channel without seeing players at the felt with chips and cards.

The more interesting parts of the book are the more introspective: Whitehead claims to be a representative of the Republic of Anhedonia, even getting a custom red hoodie made proclaiming his allegiance. Anhedonia is defined as an inability to feel pleasure, and the best parts of the book are Whitehead’s reflections on how that impacts his life, how he struggles and benefits from it, and how it intersects with the skills needed to successfully play poker.

The problem, of course, is that out of thousands of players, only a few hundred survive long enough to make money at the World Series of Poker, and only a few dozen make serious money. And that takes incredible levels of both luck and skill: Colson lacks the latter, and the former runs out on him well before people get paid, leaving the central “plot” of the book somewhat unsatisfying. Still, a decent read, and if either poker or anhedonia seem of interest, better than that.

Sword & Citadel (1982) completes the saga started in Shadow & Claw. This volume is more focused, and more plot-driven than the first, and it demands that you remember what has passed before: what seemed like small details in the first book emerge as major plot features here. The series ends up veering more towards sci-fi than fantasy, but the mechanics are inventive, with a few veering towards being highly memorable.

Whether you should read this one is probably a factor of your enjoyment of Shadow & Claw: if you liked it–or even if you can’t bear not knowing what happened–then Sword & Citadel is recommended.

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Reading Well: Company Town by Madeline Ashby

Posted on December 11, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Published in 2016, Madeline Ashby‘s Company Town deserves a place among the more solid entries in the burgeoning field of young adult dystopian novels that reach beyond a simple displacement of a boy-meets-girl narrative into a bleak future (although, it must be said, there is a strong romantic thread, especially in the latter half of the book).

The protagonist, Hwa, is a bodyguard working for a union that represents sex-workers in a town dominated by a single, controlling, multi-national corporation (obviously, this is nudging the YA market upwards in terms of maturity and subject matter, although, while certainly sex-positive, the book is never explicit or offensive). Through a combination of her own skill and a bit of luck, she is hired by the single family that literally owns the town to keep their youngest heir safe as he attends a high-end school. A deep friendship develops between them, and when the situation is complicated by the upper-level employee who hired Hwa becoming the aforementioned love interest, the wheels of plot are set fully in motion.

What is more interesting about the book is Ashby’s vision of the future, where class determines the ability of each individual to customize and improve upon their genetic lot, and her sophisticated characterization of Hwa, who is both a sophisticated and–appropriately for her age and life–somewhat naive narrator.

The ending is a bit pat–it is YA, after all–but I think Company Town is an interesting and intriguing read, one that left me hoping more stories set in that world are forthcoming.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Create sympathy for the protagonist as quickly and deeply as Ashby does: within very few pages, I was fully rooting for Hwa, intrigued by her story, and hoping to watch her succeed. That’s a pretty good sign for the beginning of a novel.

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@The Movies with PopPop: Battle of the Sexes

Posted on December 2, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Battle of the Sexes is a very good movie – far better than it might have been! While its main plot event is the $100,000 purse tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, the movie is really about several transitions occurring in the US at that time: struggles for recognition of equal opportunity for women; for breaking down classic ‘50’s marriage stereotypes; for the legitimization of risk; and for the beginning, just the beginning, of recognition of gay and lesbian relationships.

The movie handles the relationships of Billie Jean with her husband, with her first lesbian lover, and with the gay fashion designer for the new women’s tour (sponsored by Virginia Slims!) with unanticipated warmth, subtlety and depth. The movie is also quite funny, showing us a playful, off center, and very creative Bobby Riggs – not quite the asshole he often seems in retrospect. Costuming and settings are appropriate to the era, and we also get Howard Cosell (his actual voice) calling the match. Perhaps the only person to come off worse than he likely was is Jack Kramer, then head of the USLTA, and while an important figure in the development of the men’s sport, a fierce opponent to women’s equality with men in the sport (of course a misunderstanding of what was being pursued) and to their receiving equal prize money.

You’ll enjoy the movie, appreciate how far we’ve come (and how far we still have to go), and value the way it didn’t wind up a simple minded sports movie!

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Reading Well: Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

Posted on November 28, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Shantaram (2003) by Gregory David Roberts is a dizzying, frustrating, entertaining novel. The dizzying and entertaining are entwined: the protagonist is a (slightly? radically?) fictionalized version of Roberts himself, and the novel follows his audacious escape from an Australian jail, his travels to India, his time spent running a makeshift clinic in an urban slum of Bombay, more time in jail (this time in India), and many escapades while in the service of a faction of the network of gangs controlling the Bombay underground (including a gun-running trip to Afghanistan).

All of those key events are, it seems, historically true for Roberts, although he insists the details have all been fictionalized and, certainly, there are elements of the central love affair, as well as deeply symbolic characters, that seem quite clearly manifestations of his imagination.

Which lead us to the frustrating bits: Roberts is a good writer, and the action pieces move well, making two-thirds of the almost 1,000 page novel an engaging page-turner. The rest is spent in a mixture of philosophical musings and reflections on morality (to his credit, his own as much as others), and these are, while heartfelt, a bit repetitive, simplistic, and overly Romantic in nature. More importantly, they interrupt the other narratives, proving, in the end a distraction for the reader.

Still, the novel is rewarding overall, and the question of why it hasn’t been made into a movie can only be answered with, “yet.” It is, at core, a great vehicle for a leading man: a hero who, while fully repentant for his sins, is redeemed through both self-knowledge and, ultimately, love itself.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

There is an energetic pacing to the non-philosophical bits that makes Shantaram an instantly commercially attractive book. Maintaining that across a novel this long is something I need to figure out, given how long my novel seems to be insisting on being.

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Reading Well: Sequels & Other Novels

Posted on September 30, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

{It’s been a little while. Summer, and sequels, and a major storm, and a very long novel. This post marks a few months of sequels/other novels by writers that have previously appeared on Reading Well. I wanted to find out how a few things turned out …}

The Cold Commands (2012) follows The Steel Remains in Richard K. Morgan‘s trilogy, A Land Fit for Heroes.

Little has changed: the novel is incredibly readable, and the three main characters (an aristocratic rebel, a mercenary, a sorceress of sorts) remain clearly sketched and compelling. There is a save-the-world plot that involves a shadowy (and time-traveling) threat to humanity, but the smaller challenges are, to me, more interesting as our triumvirate of heroes navigate their world.

The social world remains very nicely drawn, and the locales have a nice amount of depth. A lot remains unexplained, especially regarding the reptilian nemesis that lurks at the edges of the known world and the hyper-advanced race that abandoned the world long ago. But the odds are you will care about the main characters and how they will escape their current danger, whetherpolitical, physical, or supernatural.

The larger plot will, I assume, dominate the third book of the trilogy. I look forward to it.

Kai Ashante Wilson‘s A Taste of Honey (2016) is set in the same world as The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps.

Ashante Wilson continues to be a strikingly original voice in contemporary fantasy: like Wildeeps, A Taste of Honey is an explicitly African setting focusing on (forbidden, or at least, partially frowned upon) homosexual desire; in this case between a visiting warrior and a local member of the royal family. It’s tried-and-true material in terms of the strict plot, but the inventiveness of detail around the different cultures, around the relationship of women and higher mathematics, around the relationship between people and the natural world, all raise the novella far above the norm.

I hope Ashante Wilson continues to explore this world: there are hints at sweeping stories yet to be told here, and I would like to read them.

Ellen Ullman‘s The Bug (2003) isn’t really a sequel at all, but it does carry on many of the themes she explored in her book of essays, Close to the Machine.

The Bug is a thriller of sorts, narrated by a software tester at an early Silicon Valley startup, but focusing on a bug–a flaw in the software being created–that is downright malevolent, causing a developer to slowly lose his grip on reality as he grapples with its impact on his professional and personal life.

Ullman’s insights into the technical–how software works, how the people involved in creating it think about it, how those groups function–are the strength of the book; the rest is a clever conceit with occasionally gripping individual scenes. If you liked Close to the Machine and enjoy mysteries, you’ll enjoy The Bug.

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Reading Well: The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

Posted on July 21, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

The opening chapter of The Flamethrowers (2013) by Rachel Kushner is perhaps the best thing I’ve read in quite some time. In it, we are introduced to our protagonist through the overlap of two worlds: the first is art, specifically the New York scene of the early and mid 1970s (she is described as a land artist, using photographs to record events of interaction with the surrounding landscape); the second is motorcycles, as she is on her way to the desert flats of Nevada, where she will ride a new model bike on the same tracks where land records are threatened and set each year. It’s fantastic stuff: deeply ingrained in each world, finding authority in the details of language and behavior, and painting her character in crisply defined movements.

The rest of the novel is quite good, but never quite recovers the energy and electricity of the opening salvo. It traces her relationship with an older Italian artist, one of the heirs to the company that made her motorcycle (but whose fortune was really made in rubber sourced from Brazil and turned into tires for the near-infinite demand during World War II). The novel is very conscious of the complex contradictions of capitalism, making stops not only in Brazil, where indigenous workers are endlessly abused in the pursuit of rubber, but also spending a fair bit of time back in Italy, where factory strikes carry an ever-increasing threat of violence against both the workers and the factory owners themselves.

The book, however, is much more about the personal than the political: it is a story not so much of lost love, as of duplicitous behavior, of the cost of maintaining a facade for the world, whether that facade is emotional detachment or performance art. It is not a book of happy endings, but it is a moving voyage, well -executed and engaging to read.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Create authenticity. Kushner’s ability to embed details in her descriptions and, more importantly, in her character’s actions immediately conveys a sense of thick reality to her settings, from the mechanics of riding a motorcycle at high speeds to the rules of engagement for the production of modern minimalist art. It’s so hard to do that without either (a) limiting your writing to only those things you know well or (b) sounding stiff and forced. As someone who writes about impossible futures, (a) is not an option …

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@The Movies with PopPop: I Am Not Your Negro

Posted on July 10, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

James Baldwin, one of the mid-20th centuries best writers and speakers – some might insist on an “arguably” in there, but I’ll take my chances! – is often overlooked or at least under appreciated as an interpreter and prophet of the Civil Rights movement. While he returned from his self-exile in France in 1957 to participate directly and was always in or near the inner circle of planning, implementing, and publicly speaking about what was happening, he brought a long term view somewhat different from many of his peers, and at times in conflict with other major leaders.

Baldwin understood clearly that the struggle at its core had to do with white behavior and perceptions, and it was those that needed to change if the scourge of racism and its continuing impact on America were to be dealt with. He also understood that little beyond cosmetics could change until white folks and the country acknowledged that the country was built on genocide and oppression, of Native Americans and enslaved people, and that the ingrained institutional racism, attitudes and behaviors ended neither with the end of slavery, nor with the successes of the Civil Rights era.

I Am Not Your Negro, the 2016 (Oscar-nominated) movie directed by Raoul Peck, relies only on words written by Baldwin, and wonderfully and calmly delivered by Samuel Jackson, along with archival footage of Baldwin and some of the events he describes. The words come from an unfinished manuscript he was working on prior to his death in 1987 that was focused on the lives and deaths of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. It’s an important movie, that neither embellishes nor dulls Baldwin’s words.

The movie works well; it’s not preachy and will hold your attention and focus. You should see it – and then listen to additional excerpts from Baldwin’s speeches (Pacifica archives has many of them and google leads to even more), and if you haven’t – or haven’t in a while — take a look at his writings, both fiction and non-fiction. Much of what Baldwin said in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s seems even more on-target today.

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Reading Well: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Posted on July 9, 2017 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Homegoing (2016) belongs to an honored tradition of African-American fiction, a generation by generation narrative tracing a family’s life from a moment a few centuries distant in West Africa, through the horrors of capture and slavery (and often encompassing moments of both resistance and collusion), through some form of emancipation and into the 20th century. Yaa Gyasi adds a twist, in that she follows two families, one that remains in West Africa (Ghana) and one that survives the middle passage into North America.

The chapters alternate by location, with generational parallels. This structure makes Homegoing more a series of inter-related short stories than a continuous narrative–although towards the end of the novel, individuals persist more and more, becoming parents and grand-parents of the chapters’ main characters (this happened in Some Sing, Some Cry as well and is more a function of the longer lifespans and interconnected nature of 20th/21st century life than some narrative inconsistency).

Perhaps the most impactful moments of Homegoing are of the tragic variety: several individuals exist on the edge of mental illness, several others struggle with addiction of different types, and Gyasi’s skill at creating empathy for those characters and moments is impressive. There are some thematic elements that survive across the narratives as well, one of which is a necklace passed from generation to generation. Originally salvaged from a fire, the totem asks the joined questions of what survives and what is passed on, and, in the final scene (which also unites the two narrative lines), the answers are, as they should be, ambiguous.

It’s hard not to compare Homegoing with The Underground Railroad, given the close proximity of both their publication and my reading of them: I think Gyasi’s novel is more successful from a purely literary perspective, but Colson, in contrast, adds some new and distinctive elements to the conversation. Both are worth your time.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Stick with this kind of regulated structure. If I were attempting this, some characters would become novellas, others would struggle to hold my interest for more than a dozen pages. There is a rhythm and a regularity to these kind of novels that I think demonstrate a mastery of craft on the part of the author.

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