It is a rare thing: to find a book that simply lays itself out, seduces, moves forward, never falters, and lands with a deft final step. The good read that Goodreads is named for. Taylor’s novel is simple on the surface, complex beneath, steady, heady, marvelous in the way it reveals and reveals. Taylor has many gifts. He can choose the perfect moment to show a character inside and out; he writes dialog that is precise, that lands in a territory of conflict without feeling pushed, that has none of that quality of bickering that overwhelms so much television and movies. He creates a nest of people who push and pull at one another because that is the place they inhabit and the age at which they find themselves. He writes about things I don’t know, like examining nematodes under a microscope or playing tennis on a warm afternoon, with such clarity that I follow his narrative moment by moment. His writing is the definition of effortless. The charater Wallace makes me ache, makes me want to defend him from Roman, from Vincent, from Dana. Wallace and Miller are so vivid and harsh in they way they come together and tear at one another. The feeling of the vulnerability they all have, here in this graduate program, with real life stretching ahead of them, has a tangible quality that kept me reading with the deepest interest. This novel can’t be simplified to a discussion of books about gayness or books about race, though it is profoundly true in the way it touches on those and other subjects. The ending at first felt abrupt but quickly enough I understood that by pulling the camera backward to the moment that Wallace met all these people, Taylor is returning us to a glimpse of innocence, when they are all possible; and when after all their turmoil and strife and pain I see them in that early moment toasting to life, I can believe the sincerity of it. I only find a book that does all this now and then. I’m so grateful to have found this one.
Call Me by your Name by André Aciman
To say that the book is superbly written, and that it inhabits the very difficult territory of a literary love story, is to say that the achievement of Aciman is large. He’s depicted the cauldron of young love, youth, erotic ecstasy, with exquisite lyricism. There’s no contradiction in asserting at the same time that the prose is overwrought and claustrophobic. Lyricism carries these risks and Aciman pushes the boundaries. The anxious state of the prose is a match to the age of Elio, in whose voice the story is told. He is an impossible to believe seventeen year old who knows everything, wants everything, remembers everything; and in his unbelievability he becomes vivid and tangible. The voice of the novel matches the character of Elio perfectly, I think. The story is slight and most of its permutations can be intuited from the fact of its being centered on a summer romance. Those words are too palid for what happens between Elio and Oliver but they’re useful enough. Elio becomes obsessed with Oliver, who becomes obsessed with Elio, though more quietly. The difficulty of writing that includes the erotic is that what a person responds to is often very specific and centered on what he, she, or they likes. This was the case for me in the reading of this book. Elio’s ordinary consciousness is so charged that when the love scenes happen they have nowhere to go but into the territory of the purple. This must be a reaction that is in the minority of readers, but nevertheless I had it. The scene with the peach just made me giggle and put the book down for a while. I had to think about the actual stickiness and flimsiness of peaches, and the roughness and sharpness of their pits. The book is notable for its ignoring of categories, its fluid shifting of desire. There is a wonderful passage in which a character shifts from man to woman to man to woman from paragraph to paragraph. After the Rome episodes my interest flagged. The book ended with a bit of a whimper. For me, when a book like this is successful, I want to dive into it again and live it anew. With this book I was relieved that it was over, much as I admire it.
Noah’s Compass by Anne Tyler
This novel has a hazy quality from start to finish. Well, that’s not quite true. The beginning of the book has a startling turn when Liam, the main concern, loses his job, moves into a new apartment, and wakes up the next morning in the hospital, having been bashed in the head by an unknown intruder. Promising, one thinks. Liam has no memory of the attack. He obsesses about that. Then the novel heads out to sea and meanders from island to island. We meet Liam’s messy family, none of whom appear to have any feeling for each other. We learn that Liam has barely inhabited his own life. He has a grandchild for whom he has no feeling, a daughter whom he abandoned to live with her stepmother, a sister who barks orders at him; worse, he has a hollow core that is partly his own and partly Tyler’s, who writes him as though he has never had an emotion. There follows an encounter with Eunice, who is a rememberer for an elderly businessman, tailing him and keeping notes on what he needs to know about wherever he is. This is an interesting idea that goes nowhere (one of the islands referred to above). There is a romance between Eunice and Liam but it communicates little feeling to the work. There is his daughter Kitty who comes to live with him and provides a certain degree of connection. At the end there is an attempt to awaken Liam to the possibilities of the family he has kept at a distance. The end circles back to the attack that begins the story, in a desultory scene that might have been a comic gem except that the writing is perfunctory and a bit exhausted. This is not strong Tyler. What the title means is anybody’s guess. There is nothing offensive in it and it’s a passable read, but there are worlds of better choices out there.
Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D. James
This book feels like a case of fan fiction meets Agatha Christie, but not the good Agatha Christie. The fact that the book has as its premise that we return to the world of Pride and Prejudice makes it something of a sure thing, given that James’s reputation was long established before the novel. Not that it feels mercenary in design. I have the sense that this is James’s homage to Jane Austen and that it was delicious fun for her to write. If you are the kind of writer who updates the classics, writing sequels to or adaptations of great books that are out of copyright, then the idea of a murder at Pemberley would be irresistible. You climb right up onto Austen’s back and type away. There’s no reason to berate James for doing something that has appealed to all kinds of writers, and she herself notes that Austen probably wouldn’t think much of the effort. But the writing here is notably poor. James’s sentences, here at least, have a run-on, unpunctuated quality that does not match the grace of Austen in any way. The murder mystery is really not much of a mystery; there’s a notable lack of detective work. Wickham is the possible murderer, the charming villain of Pride and Prejudice, and he is only saved by the confession letter written by the person who actually caused the death of army officer Denny, whose identity is more or less incidental to the story. The true purpose of the book is to revisit Austen’s beloved characters. I never could overcome the sense that this is not the real future of Elizabeth, Lydia, Jane, Darcy, or any of the rest. Nor could I believe that this is James at her prime, since the book was published when she was 91. The most disappointing part of the book is that it culminates in a series of chapters in which people sit in period-furnished rooms and tell each other stories (or read letters) that put the solution of the murder offstage and almost out of sight. This was Christie’s great feat in book after book, but in most of her books the telling of the story is direct, from the detective to the suspects, and comes at a point when we have seen clue after clue that have us ready for an explanation. In this book, there are hardly any clues, and no detective, and the revelation falls flat.
Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin
Finding this book in my smallish public library, I read it with some fascination over a few days, and with the surprise one feels on hearing a genuine voice. Laurus is the fourth name by which the protagonist is known in the book, the final stage of his transfiguration. For most of the book he is known as Arseny, a healer and a holy man, trained by his grandfather in the use of plants. Examination of holiness and divinity is one layer of the book; but this is not religion that seeks to convert, that preaches or convinces. This is divinity as the mechanism that moves the world, and for Arseny it is bedrock. He sits inside his beliefs with such comfort and certainty that the idea of church explains miracles, transformations, angelic incarnations, to such a degree that Vodolazkin can basically take the book in any direction he likes. Another layer of the work is the formulation of eternity as Arseny’s true habitation and the fiction of time the dream through which he moves. There are impossible, sometimes clumsy, moments in the novel; set in the fifteenth century, it transfers itself in an instant into any other moment it chooses. This is not a time travel novel; the author’s design is that all instants are adjacent to one another. A storm in a medieval forest uncovers plastic bottles under the leaves. A twentieth century Italian Catholic undertakes a journey with Arseny through Medieval Europe to the Holy Land. Paragraphs move the story into other such territories, we glimpse a moment in time, and then move back into the narrative of Arseny and his long expiation for sin. Time moves or time circles or time dodges or time does not exist at all. Yet the book is very literal and not at all speculative. And in Arseny (and later Ambrosio) we meet characters whose focus on God enables them to see through the veil of the ordinary into the future, the past, even into the fates of those around them. All this feels quite effortless and tangible. Even the prose shifts tense as it pleases. Form follows function. A read to remember.
Valentine by George Sand
I have been reading George Sand’s novels in and among other books, including Indiana, Mauprat, Consuelo, The Countess of Rudolstadt, and this book. The story of Sand’s life, including her cigar-smoking, pants-wearing, and Chopin-loving, are better known in English than her fiction, which until recently was not easy to find. I’m not sure what I expected. Her writing is lush, overripe, passionate, unevenly plotted, desperately dramatic; sometimes the books are so wretched (Rudolstadt, for instance) that it’s a chore to finish them. Her characters throb, tremble, weep, moan, pace the floor, take walks at midnight in dangerous castles and forests, endure abductions, betrayal, visitations; it is safe to say that there is nothing like her writing anywhere else. It is tempting to sound wiser than I am and declare that she is French through and through, but I’ve only ever been to France for three days and only know about France what I hear people say. But she is much more emotional, romantic, and florid than any other French writer I have read (in translation, of course) other than, perhaps, Genet. Valentine is of a pattern with the other books, full of descriptions of love so intense that it bursts liquid up from the page. I am in awe of her not because she is transcendent or elegant or fine but because she stuffs her pages so full of emotion that it’s at times absurdly funny. Yet still I read her and like her. This is not so much a review of Valentine as it is a chance to talk about Sand in general. Every time I finish a book of hers I swear it will be the last one. This one may in fact be it. Though there are so many more left to sample.
Blindness by José Saramago
I started hearing about this book during the pandemic, from readers who found some parallels between the Covid crisis and this novel’s narrative of an epidemic of blindness that strikes an unnamed city. I’m not sure I would have made that comparison if I had come to this story on my own. The book is a literary fantasy, set in a nameless city, inhabited by nameless people, and under the thumb of an unforgiving writer who means to shy away from nothing. In this case, thinking of the book as a fantasy helped me understand why it made me uncomfortable – apart from its gritty view of human nature. An author can take a fantasy anywhere. People begin to go blind for no discernible reason, are sequestered from one another at first, and the people in which the book is most interested are interned together in an old mental hospital. The city tries to cope but quickly becomes overwhelmed. Saramago writes about an apocalypse that is total and almost hopeless, were it not for a miraculous turn of events at the end. He is interested in the breakdown of civilized ideas and habits. Hardly any kind of order could survive the sudden blindness of nearly everyone, or at least this is Saramago’s formulation. (I wonder what people who are actually blind might make of this idea.) The book examines the collapse of civilization through the collective inability of people to deal with their feces in appropriate ways. There is a harrowing passage when thieves take over the food supply for the mental hospital and use this power to coerce women into orgies of sadism; this leads to a brutal and welcome act of revenge, which was one of the high points of the reading for me. But I did wonder how these men who had recently lost their eyesight could manage to stage orgies of this kind of violence. By the end of the novel, after the group of central characters has left the mental hospital, with almost everyone in the city blind and the city’s collapse in evidence, the conceit of the blindness epidemic has proven to be so total and hopeless that Saramago can only reach for a miracle, another act of fantasy, to resolve the book. The people who have gone blind for no discernible reason suddenly regain their sight for no reason. And the book is over. The experience of reading it was a bit too aimless for me, and I persevered mainly because of the Nobel label.
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
This is a smart book written by a smart person and you will feel smart if you read it and like it. If, like me, you don’t enjoy the reading, you will get the feeling you have failed literature in some way, that you have fallen short. I did in fact enjoy a few of the chapters very much, including the Bobby chapter about Sasha’s pretend boyfriend, and the Kitty Jackson section about the genocidal general. I spent most of my time trying to keep track of who was who and how the current chapter was going to tie itself to the sort-of-narrative about Bennie and Sasha that provides the book’s structure. The writing was at times so concise and exact it exceeded what most poets do, especially the section about Uncle Teddy folding his love in half because it was too overwhelming. There are dozens of such startling moments. There is no story as such, but there is a lot of reading to do, and I did all of it, including the powerpoint poem, which meant almost nothing to me, though I have heard about it as a dazzling this-or-that. A book can be great without my liking it, and I’m used to that, and don’t doubt that there is a lot here that I missed. But I’m going to read another book now and let this one go.
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The sense of character is remarkable and drives the writing in fantastic ways in this novel about culture and migration and peoples butting up against each other, England and Bangladesh and Jamaica colliding. It is a dizzying book, full of voices, precisely drawn and vivid. Inhabited by people who are like raw chunks of earth, real and tangible, inserted into a comedy they never asked for. I loved reading ninety percent of it, and forced my way through the remainder. What I will remember about the book is the encounter with all these intensely separate people, who hold themselves in themselves as if they were monuments, as if their personal history is the most precious possession, as if their selves are vital to the operation of the universe. This feels like the way people see themselves. It’s an approach to character not quite like anything else I’ve read. On one plinth stands Samad with his moons of contradiction, his passionate love for his religion but his inability to keep faith with all of it, his love of Mickey’s, his loyalty to Archie; on another is Alsana, who married him in the long ago and quickly learned to keep her mental distance from him, who matches him blow for blow, and whose voice is always recognizable the moment it returns. Only two examples out of dozens. The book is overblown, too long, repetitious, ponderous at a few moments, and in its last third creeps slowly toward an ending that, when it arrives, after foreplay that just lasts too long and tries too hard, doesn’t really come off, for me. But that doesn’t really matter. The novel makes me think this kind of storytelling could endure for a while longer, and that fiction has indeed entered a new millennium. Nice.
Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson
I’ve read a good bit of work now by this writer and have been at times awestruck and at other times found myself with a desire to flip pages and be done with whatever it was of his I was reading. This book was somewhere between the two extremes. Like most Robinson novels, these pages demonstrate his deep learning about his subject, in this case a sweeping grasp of China. While a Chinese reader might see it differently, the Chinese protagonist of this book is very convincing, Chan Qi, a woman with the highest government connections but also with deep roots in a revolutionary movement, neither anarchistic or democratic but rather intended to bring the rule of law to future China. The book sweeps back and forth between Chinese settlements on the moon to travels over the face of the moon and long passages that take place on Earth, in Beijing and other locales. The ideas are fast and furious, the shape of the world comprises a struggle to end capitalism in the West at the same moment as the crisis in China. This is a variation of the near future world that Robinson describes in the Mars trilogy and in The Ministry for the Future, which are the books of his that I know. We have once again lava tunnel settlements, self-driving vehicles driving across an alien world, magnificent descriptions of craters, a struggle between new-world identity and Earth interference, carbon-capture-coins, blocks-chained money, deeply described environments that become possible on the colonized world, and more, if I were to bear down. The oddest part of the book for me, though, was that I struggled to keep reading it at times and then, looking backwards at what I had read and learned, felt quite satisfied. This is a book that is better in retrospect than during the experience. What’s new for me in terms of reading Robinson is the depth of the character work that he does on Chan Qi and Fred Fredericks, as two examples. This book does not have a cast of hundreds though its sweeping use of location prevents it having a sense of intimacy. I did find myself scanning pages in a few places; the birth scene, I thought, when on and on, though perhaps that’s simply my squeamishness. The complicated plot was satisfying and the breakthrough of this world into Robinsonian sunrise, when the world appears better at least in terms of its possible heading, served well as an ending. He’s too wise a writer to resolve the future. Despite my average response to the book I’ll keep reading him, because I’m sure there’s more to admire.