Reading Well: Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday

Posted on May 25, 2019 by Daniel (@MKNN)

Lisa Halliday‘s Asymmetry arrived to much acclaim in 2018. It’s a novel in three parts, really two parts and a coda. The first part details a relationship between a young woman who works at a publishing house and an older writer of great significance; the second focuses on an Iraqi-American who is detained upon entry to England; and the third is a short interview with the author from the first part.

Much of the response to the novel has focused on the degree to which the first section is a thinly veiled retelling of Halliday’s own affair with Philip Roth, and then on the revelations–both explicit and more hinted at–in the final short coda.

That’s interesting to me, as it immediately forces consideration of the novel to expand beyond the words on the page: to what degree is the enjoyment of the opening, novella length chapter–and it is mightily enjoyable–due to the salacious sense of peering in on a (not so?) hidden side of a great American writing icon? To what degree are our reactions to the novel modified (enhanced or degraded) by our belief in its reality? And what does that mean for the other parts of the book?

At its core, Asymmetry is about, well, asymmetry: imbalances of power and attention in many contexts. The spring/winter love affair has some obvious dimensions (the economic differences, the differences in social and political power between them), but the young woman’s perspective holds the center as well: her agency is never, at least from her view, compromised in the relationship. As importantly, the writing–throughout, but especially in this first section–is delightful, lyrical, and surprising.

In the second section, the massive control of the immigration system overwhelms the individual being detained. But this part is as much about the detainee’s history–the moments in his life where he did and did not have agency, the choices that led him to leave one career for another, the seemingly random chance that determined life and death in Baghdad during wartime–as it is about his resignation to his lack of control over his fate at the airport.

If you follow the popular interpretation of the final section–which I’m trying hard not to spoil here–then the novel expands to also encompass questions of asymmetry between author and reader, and the work and its readers and critics.

An intriguing, engaging, and deeply nuanced novel. Strongly recommended.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

The thematic echoes are never, ever “on the nose” in Asymmetry, yet they are present, and survive deeper exploration and thought. To the degree that is intentional, it is brilliant; to the degree it is innate, it reveals a wellspring of talent. Either is enviable.

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Reading Well: The Power by Naomi Alderman

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

Published in 2016, Naomi Alderman‘s The Power attempts to answer a fundamental what-if: what if something happened to give women a physical advantage over men?

In this case, it’s a chemical added to the water supply in WWII that, over a generation or so, creates power in women similar to that in electric eels: the ability to generate an electric charge at will.

There is a framing device of a future several thousand years down the road, where an inverted society has evolved–one where women’s role in the birth process is a rationale for the increased violence and aggression of women over men, while men’s comparative weakness (turns out shooting lightning from your hands trumps brawn every time) makes them natural nurturers.

But the core of the novel covers the time from the first emergence of the ability through its impacts, focused on three primary characters: a young girl who emerges as the prophet of the movement, another whose abilities are stronger than anyone else’s, and a male journalist who covers the global events spawned by these abilities.

These characters–and others–are well constructed, and their fates matter, making the book successful as a page-turner. There are some issues with simplicity–for example, a women’s revolution in an Arab state is conceivable, but certainly neither simple nor inevitable, given the book’s assumptions–and the envisioned future could be more nuanced.

Perhaps the most creative details involve how the archaeology of the future misinterprets the relics of the past: the novel does a great job at underscoring how arbitrary our assumptions around sex and gender are and how easy a different frame leads to a different interpretation.

It’s all very neatly done, and given the attention the book got, probably in pre-production as a major motion picture as well.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

Alderman does a really good job simplifying a narrative that is explicitly global to a story told through the eyes of small handful of characters. That’s necessary if you don’t want to write many thousand pages, labyrinthine fiction and, even if–as I do–you lean that way, remembering that there are more direct, concise alternatives is quite important.

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Reading Well: Silence is My Mother Tongue by Sulaiman Addonia

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

{This post published early by mistake, so some of you may have seen it before. Apologies for the misclick.}

Sulaiman Addonia‘s Silence is My Mother Tongue (2018) tells the story of Eritrean refugees displaced into a camp in the Sudan. The novel is hard to categorize: it’s not a love story, despite it being a story of several loves, and its focus is far more on how life evolves in the refugee camp than on any part of the conflict that brought people there.

There is a lot of misdirection in the narrative: it opens with a chapter focused on what turns out to be a minor character, but one who observes life in the camp as if it were a movie being projected on a white sheet behind his hut, which is a pretty inventive and neat image/framing device. The true focus of the story are two siblings who have, in essence, traded their culturally approved gender roles. The sister is brilliant, strong-willed, and–before being sent to the camp–on her way to a level of academic success pointing towards medical school, an almost unheard of height for young Eritrean girls, even in the capital city of Asmara. Her brother is mute, delicate, and happiest in the strongly coded feminine cultural roles.

The success of this reverse mirroring is highest when Addonia is writing about the young woman, capturing at different points of the narrative, her insight, intelligence, and motivations with a clarity that is compelling and impressive. It is, predictably perhaps, at its weakest when he calls outright attention to their roles, sliding too far towards the tell side of the classic show, don’t tell dictum.

The gendered critique of the social order of the camp, and Eritrean/Ethiopian culture in general, is pointed and biting: the struggle of the sister to be more than an object of exchange, a thing to be moved around between men, dictates most of the major plot points. Her future is mirrored between the comparative behavior of a conservative midwife (conservative in the sense of traditional, seeking to preserve cultural traditions–including a thwarted attempt at genital cutting) and a prostitute in the camp are, which drift, again, perhaps towards being a bit too “on the nose.”

Still, there are images in Silence is My Mother Tongue that will stay with the reader for quite some time, and the voice of the young woman refuses to be silenced. Additionally, the sketch of the refugee camp, as a place of normalcy, of social structure, of conflicts that are solved through established community processes, is very much worth the read, especially as a counterweight to the usual media presentation of such spaces.

#WhatIWishICouldDo

I love the sister’s voice, and think Addonia’s ability to inhabit a precocious teenage perspective is quite compelling. She is never trivialized or dumbed-down, while still retaining some of the age-appropriate impulsive recklessness.

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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. }

#WhatIWishICouldDo

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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