This novel is an odyssey of a kind, focused on the women of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe – a bit of Russia that transformed into a bit of Poland by means of bloody conflict – who make their way in ones and twos across the ocean to America. Pearl, who incarnates this story, is forced to choose to travel with her sister Frieda to Havana when their trip, already underway, has to be aborted or transformed due to changes in immigration law in the United States. Much of the novel takes place in a kind of Yiddish Cuba, in which Pearl survives in a community of other immigrants. Cuba here has become a halfway house to America, full of anxious exiles desperate to make their way into Florida. The real story is Pearl’s transformation from a frightened girl to a woman made of bedrock, one who fears little and faces change after change while setting her sights on a future in which she is free. She is no more certain what that means than we are today, but she is sure that she will recognize her freedom when she finds it. The writer’s prose is as good as anything I’ve read, and the story is a quiet, steady, transformational delight. The book evokes Cuba in the twenties, prohibition New York, and young Detroit with equal ease and detail, and the historical aspect of the fiction is sure-handed and convincing. Best of all is the nuance of Pearl, the loving portrait of the author’s grandmother, pulled from family stories and written with wonderful authority. This is one of those reading experiences I can treasure for a while before moving on to the next.
Journey to the Heartland by Xiaolong Huang
I read this book because of the connection to China; I’ve never read a book by a gay man from China and was interested in the premise. I missed the fact that this is a self-published novel, but that likely would not have stopped me from reading the book, though it might have helped me understand the quality of the writing, which is quite poor. The grammar is uncertain in the finer points and usage is all over the place. Words are swapped or used in awkward contexts. The writing is that of someone who has learned English well but not with the intimacy required of a fiction writer. The story itself has some compelling moments, especially in the sections written about Hanmei’s childhood, growing up as the son of a gay father who nevertheless accepts a traditional Chinese marriage. Hanmei views his father as a monster due to his treatment of Rulan, Hanmei’s mother. These sections alerted me to the fact that the writer has something important to say but probably not all the tools needed to say it. So I relaxed and read the book for its information rather than its beauty. When Hanmei moves to Los Angeles and embraces his sexuality the book feels less important, though the story is still, at times, engaging. He becomes a gay clone in West Hollywood, haunting clubs, taking off his shirt with all the other hot dudes, living the life. This is my editorial comment on him, not what he says about himself. The book is genuinely interesting but full of assumptions about men and manliness. Sex is a contest of strength and aggression. Hanmei’s desperation is to fit in and belong, meanwhile trying to negotiate his place in a Chinese family that still expected certain behaviors from him, like obedience to his mother and father and his eventual marriage. The relationship with Jay, a young black man, was tender but also with some queasy references, as when the writer describes him as thuggish. On the whole this felt like a book from a world that its author saw only partly and incompletely.
The Days of Bluegrass Love by Edward van de Vendel
This is a young adult novel, very tenderly written, in which Tycho and Oliver encounter one another on the way to an international camp in Tennessee. They are immediately overtaken by each other and fall into a relationship that is quickly and quietly physical. To Tycho, whom we inhabit during the reading, this feels like the most wonderful change ever to take place in the world, an event that makes everything else perfect and new and bright. Then the problems set in. People cannot quite take the knowledge that these two boys are together, and the boys are not able to accept a need to be quiet or to hide, not quite. At least not while they are on foreign soil. Tycho is Dutch and Oliver is Norwegian, so the American landscape figures into their discovery that their love for each other does not work in the daylight, not for most people. The story follows them to Oliver’s house and then further, through Oliver’s struggle with how to deal with Tycho at home, among his friends and teammates. The story is delicately told. The early part of the novel felt so simple it was almost childlike, but that feeling quickly fades when the idyllic part of the romance comes to an end. The choice whether to keep hold of one another or to let the world separate them comes so quickly into play that it feels tragic. The novel rises to the challenge of this conflict but always in that simple, quiet tone, with one plain fact leading to another. The book depicts the flood tide of new love in Tycho with clarity and quickness. The whole novel is over in a breath. This book was published first in 1998; I am very grateful to have found it now, in this lovely translation.
The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera
A comet is about to strike Earth and a family chosen to board a colonization starship hurries to their ark of survival. This is a similar plot to any number of science fiction novels, with some variations, but in Higuera’s book we are centered on Petra, a girl who comes from the indigenous Mexican culture and who was trained to be a storyteller, a cuentista, by her grandmother. This reinvents the current story into something new and rather wonderful while doing full service to the science fiction elements of the book. The colonists are betrayed by a Collective of humans who want to eradicate their own humanity and who take over the ship and destroy most of the colonists either immediately or over time. Petra wakens out of her stasis-sleep to find her family gone, her future betrayed, and the few surviving original, unaltered children in the position of guinea pigs and expendable explorers in service of the Collective. The summary of the story does not do justice to the book, which is reminiscent of A Wrinkle in Time both in mood and power and in some story elements as well. The rescue of the other children from the monotone culture of the Collective hinges on Petra’s stories, which have the power (as stories do) of reaching through propaganda and ideology to the core of human memory. Like L’Engle’s book, this is young adult writing that anyone can love, and I certainly loved the experience of reading this novel.
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
This novel belongs to the sub-genre of science fiction that deals with big splashy ideas, a subset of hard science fiction, which is focused more on science than character or psychology. It is also Chinese science fiction which is something I have not read before, though I have read a number of Chinese novels in translation, mostly classical but a few modern. The book is evidence of what I would call idea inflation in the field of SF. There are certain writers, like Charles Stross, who push their speculations into grandiose speculative arenas, and Cixin Liu is certainly one of these writers. To some degree the book is a vehicle for the ideas and exists to serve them. This makes for rough reading if this is not the kind of book you prefer, and that’s true for me. I admire this novel and enjoyed the ending of it but never felt very touched by it, not emotionally but in terms of interest. Like many fictions of this ilk, the story feels very far fetched, even for science fiction. It would be wrong to say that the characters are flat; they are drawn with quite a lot of detail, at least in terms of the core people. But I felt as though I was viewing them from a distance. And as the book proceeds they grew more and more peripheral as the scale of the story expanded. As the ideas inflate, the characters contract, and their story becomes insignificant. This made the book easy to put down and hard to pick up again, and left me with little interest in continuing the series to its conclusion. This is the kind of story that will inevitably spin out of the writer’s control as the idea grows grander and bigger and the scale increases to the galactic and the universal. I admire the writer very much and found some of the concepts he evokes to be extraordinary, but that’s not enough to make me read, unless I’m in the mood for nonfiction. However, it’s a staggeringly successful novel so who cares what I think? Maybe that’s part of the problem for me. I don’t need a book to make me feel small, insignificant, and pessimistic. I feel that on any given Monday.
A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske
The climax of this book is a climax. The scaffolding on which the romance is hung is a fairly entertaining story about “English magic,” a phrase I associate more with Suzanna Clarke’s novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell but have encountered elsewhere since that novel came out. There are a whole hidden population of magicians in the world and the ones in England belong to two or three major families who act a good deal like the frivolous titled country estate dwellers of any number of novels about English manners. This sounds a bit disdainful as a description only because this is the territory of so much fiction, romance and otherwise, but Marske deals with it adequately well and mixes the idea of capricious magic into the more or less traditional approach to Edwardian entertaining in a fabulous country house. The romance is handled very deftly and reticently at first, and then Edwin and Robin, our couple, are plunged into the erotic. There are not a lot of sex scenes but they are quite long and quite detailed and the first of them is a bit laughable, involving a rhapsodic several pages of the two men giving each other hand jobs, which is not a particularly rhapsodic process. The other scenes, one involving kinky magic, are more successful, but for me a bit embarrassing. It’s a fine line between romance and erotica and then on to softcore porn; this novel shies clear of the last, but only because the sex scenes are few. But there is also something gutsy in refusing to fade back from the two men and their physical engagement, and there is a reward to following the men all the way through their sex to the other side. Although maybe not so gutsy in the aftermath of Fifty Shades of Whatever. The fantasy feels ordinary for the most part, a search-for-a-powerful-artifact story. The construction of magic in this world has a certain intricacy that is worthwhile. It was a pleasant read but felt mechanical in the end.
A Feast Unknown by Philip José Farmer
If I read this book without Philip José Farmer’s name on the cover I would not have paid any attention to it. I found a reference to this novel during some internet roving and thought it sounded interesting, though the reference noted that it was a very extreme novel. Feast Unknown was described as an over-the-top sendup of hyper-male pulp fiction like Tarzan and Doc Savage. Knowing that it was written by a writer whom I respected a lot when I was younger, and who is still revered in science fiction circles, I still found myself reading all goggle-eyed. The book plunges you into a combat between the aforementioned Tarzan and Doc Savage, or rather between the people on whom those characters were based (in the conceit of the novel). They are prototype superheroes who happen to be immortal, prodigiously endowed, and mostly naked most of the time. The book covers a little of everything that you don’t want to read about: cannibalism, coprophilia (a mild form, admittedly), homoerotic violence, heteroerotic violence. If you stand back from the book a bit you can see that Farmer might actually be sending up the whole genre but this does not protect you from the fact that his writing is weak, awkward, rushed – it reads very like an imitation of pulp writing, or of slash fiction. Or maybe it reads like actual pulp writing or actual slash fiction. The plot is one long series of explosions, gun battles, and hand to hand (and sometimes cock to cock) fighting. Farmer pulled out all the stops whether you like it or not. This novel was part of the inspiration for the Wold Newton universe and Farmer’s subsequent novels to this one are vastly different in tone, without any of the crazy eroticism and no sense of transgressiveness. Which give those elements a chosen quality in this book, which helped me to think about it. I enjoyed pondering this book a lot more than I enjoyed reading it.
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
This was a solid book to read and well written from beginning to end. The cast of characters contains people that are different from those in any book I can remember, in particular Henry, the brilliant catcher who loses his ability at a crucial moment in the book, and Mike Schwartz, the athlete/coach who is the prime mover for sports at Westish University. The story involves a collision of all the core characters and explores the permutations of Henry’s lost throwing ability on all of them. It is an unusual plot in that it involves athletics to such a degree, including the nuts and bolts of games, while at the same time wholly inhabiting the genre of literary fiction; but that is not all that makes the story unusual. The romance between young Owen, a gay baseball player and budding literary scholar, and the president of the university, a man in his sixties who has been nearly reclusive in his habits for many years, is not typical in any way. Harbach avoids the feeling of sexual harassment in this relationship of unequals while also evoking it in the plot as part of the culmination. The weakest link in the five-sided character set that gives the book its heart is Pella, the president’s daughter; she is convincing enough as a character but some of her role in the story is sacrificed to the necessity of romantic entanglements. While I enjoyed reading the novel it did not feel vital, and it did feel as if it were stretched to a degree, a fairly large degree in my opinion. Part of this feeling comes from the juggling of five different points of view, a formal challenge that meant the book felt as though it was always starting over. This is handled about as well as it can be but still caused me some loss of interest from time to time. I have read books of this length much faster than I read this one.
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron
This is immaculate writing and is spiced with nice comic touches. James is eighteen and full of angst. His family includes his mother who is both passionately mother-like and mostly indifferent outside times of crisis, and his father, divorced from his mother, who hasn’t much of a clue. And a brightly cosmopolitan and annoying New York sister. And a magical grandmother. James has had a history of therapy, anxiety, anti-social behavior, and signs of what would probably be called neurodivergence. If the writing were not strong this would feel about as thin as it sounds, and at times it is exactly as thin as that. It is a book that I expect people going through this kind of depression and struggle will appreciate. I did appreciate most of it, especially the therapy scenes, which have a very real tone, though there is the choice of having James resist the therapy and try to see through it and that becomes the weakest part of the book, for me, not the therapy itself but James’s waffling between doing the work and outsmarting the work. But of course he has to do that or else there would be no drama. Then there is the stalking and abortive attempt to make a connection with a coworker which is the best drama in the book. Despite these quibbles the novel is strong and works but comes the end and suddenly the problems either stop or simply submerge into the present and James’s struggle, which is whether to go to Brown University or not, ends, and we learn in a chapter after a time interval, that there he is, at Brown. Not that all his problems are solved or that this is a happy ending. It is that kind of ending that is more enigma than not. The problem with this is that the book feels as if it simply stops. And there is this reaction I had, which is unfair, but I had it anyway. Here is this privileged kid moping about whether he should attend one of the best schools in the country when there are kids all over the place dying for a spot in a school like that and actually suffering with external trauma that makes James’s problems feel trivial. Like I said, it’s not a fair reaction but it’s a real one. But this is a really good writer whom I would read again.
1500 Miles from the Sun by Jonny Garza Villa
This book is undoubtedly a wonderful experience for its target audience, and deals effectively with a painful coming out experience precipitated by overuse of alcohol and careless posting on social media. The aftermath is well studied and would be very instructive for people in this situation. Jules is a likable character for the most part, and his friends are angelic in their support of him. The main antagonist is Jules’s father, who is violent in his homophobia in the early part of the book, and whose abuse of Jules is well handled and counterbalanced by his obvious love for his son. The book is one long gush of emotion. If I were at the right age I would have been overwhelmed by it. But books like this did not exist when I was at that age. From where I sit now, the story could have used some understatement, but this is of course simply a preference and the author made a different choice. But there is a self-centeredness to Jules that is hard to ignore after three hundred pages or more. His friends are supportive sometimes to a degree that strains credibility, but there are very few instances of Jules returning the favor. Granted the drama does center around his coming out and his confusion and choices. But I found myself tired of him precisely at the point when I should have had the most empathy for him. His found-family is not well depicted and only late in the book does anything happen to develop them in lives of their own. Nevertheless it’s a book worth reading especially for the folks at whom it is aimed. The book is also notable for its evocation of social media and smart phone culture; at least half the story involves Jules staring into his smart phone. This is a vivid depiction of that part of our world.