What I'm Reading...

I spend an inordinate amount of time in bookstores.  In Tacoma, we're lucky to be located between the wonderful Powell's in Portland and Elliot Bay Books in Seattle.  Tacoma itself has two of my favorite used bookstores, King's Books on St. Helens and Tacoma Books by the Dome.  Here is some of what I've been reading:   

Cormac McCarthy's work almost defies description and writing a short paragraph on him feels both daunting and foolhardy.  He is a dazzling writer whose virtuoso skill with words, sharply critical eye, and ability to tell a powerfully exploding story is without equal.  Blood Meridian (1985) was my first encounter with his work and I can genuinely say that I have never experienced anything like it.  Something like 80% of the novel went over my head (each page is dense with allusions and reference to a range of texts that is humbling) and there were days I simply could not face its bleak and desolate world.  But I was also unable to stay away from its stark recreation of the mid-19th-century US-Mexico border and a group of marauding "scalp hunters."  Their world is a violent one, but McCarth's prose capturing it is incandescence.  He writes of some of the most gruesome acts humans have inflicted on one another so quietly that a reader is left physically shaking, not sure if the brutality actually occurred or was imagined.  McCarthy dissects the American West (and its many myths) with a surgical and stern eye, but he also explicates his deep reverence for that time and place (there is none of the present's condescension for the past in McCarthy's work.  He knows too well that the forces that draw us to kill and cheat are never far; he knows that "civilization" is a thin veneer).  The landscape of the US south and west (the Teas-Mexico border is one of his favorite stomping grounds) is described in such detailed precision that one feels bathed in the dry desert scrub or mesas of red earth, suddenly aware of a beauty that was utterly invisible before.  His "Border Trilogy" begins with All The Pretty Horses (1992), the tale of John Grady Cole, a sixteen-year old Texan who runs away from home to work in Mexico.  Cole's love is horses and McCarthy details this young man's search for work and himself in a increasingly car-dependent Texas with both horror and humor.  McCarthy is not for everyone, but if you are looking for prose that will undo you or a surgical revision of the myths of the American West, you can do no better.   (5/09)

Penelope Fitzgerald started writing only in her 60s, but in 20-odd years produced some of the most distinctive, funny, and tender fiction.  She won the Booker prize for Offshore, but many consider The Blue Flower, a fictional rendering of the final year in the life of the poet Novalis, her best novel.  My personal favorite is The Beginning of Spring (1988), a peculiar and astonishing novel set in Russia in the year before the revolution, that captures Fitzgerald's ability to draw forth the absurd in human behavior with the deepest tenderness; as soon as I was done reading it, I started it over, partly because I didn't want to leave the world of those singular and fiercely independent characters, partly because I wanted to figure out what the novel was about, partly because there is nothing like that bear-at-the-tea-party scene in literature.     

William Trevor is considered by many to be the best living short-story writer in the English language.  My introduction to him, however, came with his novel, The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), a sparse and stunning novel about a Protestant family in County Cork, Ireland during and after the civil war of the 1920s.  All Trevor's "Irish novels" (e.g. The Silence in the Garden, Reading Turgenev, Fools of Fortune) return, as if haunted, to "the Troubles" and occupy themselves with sectarian difference, guilt, revenge, violence, and ultimately redemption, eked out painfully and in tiny gestures in the long aftermath.  In Lucy Gault, Trevor surpasses himself and tells this story with a simplicity that leaves one emotionally spent - and uplifted.  

Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003) is a stunning achievement.  Set in 1855 in the slave south, the novel ostensibly deals with a free black man, Henry, who owns slaves. In writing that I hesitate because this is in fact only a small part of what the novel is about and yet is the plotline that has garnered the novel considerable notoriety and sensationalism.  Jones, however, is anything but sensational; his story is told quietly and carries astonishing moral weight.  He is interested in the multiple forms of "ownership" that exist in the world of slavery; we quickly recognize that Henry's ownership of humans is but one of myriad types of ownership Jones unravels.  This is not to exonerate Henry's purchase of slaves - indeed, the moral center of the novel is Henry's father, Augustus, who at one and the same time cannot grasp that the son he worked so hard to free would soon own slaves, but also cannot bring himself to cut this son off -but to add layers to a story we think we know already. In a striking moment, Caldonia, Henry's wife, asks the Sherriff for news of three runaway slaves. Later, as the Sherriff is leaving she offhandedly inquires after Augustus who has also gone missing.  Only moments later do we realize with a chill that "her" slaves matter more to her than her own father-in-law.  Jones lets us discover how easy it is to think like a slave-owner and the moral force it requires to dissent; and he does this without preaching or wagging a finger.  Set in fictional Manchester County, Virginia, the novel introduces us to a plethora of characters, each brilliantly realized, each complex, and each very human.  Jones is a genius at deftly sketching character.  The novel has about fifteen "central" characters and another dozen "minor" ones.  But even characters who enter the novel for only a page or two - the Irish woman and her son who receive a shipment of walking sticks carved by Augustus - are richly realized and utterly memorable. Run, don't walk, to get this book; you will not regret it.  (11/06) 

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra is 2007's hot-ticket item (it was published to rave reviews in India and Britain).  Ostensibly a detective novel, Sacred Games slowly reveals itself to be a teeming account of contemporary Mumbai (Bombay), casting its net high and low, far and wide.  The novel is narrated in two voices, chapters alternating between a third-person account focused loosely on the police inspector Sartaj Singh (reprised from Chandra's marvelous short story "Kama" from Love and Longing in Bombay) and a first-person account in the voice of Ganesh Gaitonde, a notorious gangster who leads the "G-company."  That these two men's lives should intersect is hardly surprising; what is surprising is the echoes and reverberations between the police and gangster world.  A rich portrait of contemporary India, this novel turns on its head conventions of detective fiction, realism, and stereotypes of India (if your notion of India is goddesses, spirituality, and Gandhi, either run from this novel or be prepared to read about a vibrant, rapidly globalizing, frustrating, deeply alive India that undermines Western stereotypes).  Chandra takes a risk in giving voice to a gangster (making him and his moral laxity appear sympathetic).  While we are in Gaitonde's mind for a good half of the novel, however, we never succumb to his worldview: we follow his choices, even come to appreciate some of the contexts in which they were undertaken, we laugh with him and celebrate some of his victories, but are always reminded - sometimes with a jolt - that we are in the over-heated and ruthless world of men for whom human life means little.  Yet Chandra is never didactic; he has the powerful ability to peel back layers of a character, slowly and patiently.  Just when we think we "know" or have placed a character - the Madame, Jojo, for instance - we come at her from a new direction and she she is revealed anew - and we are forced to question our easy morality.  Chandra likes his characters and this shows: the novel is filled with human frailty, verve, corruption, failure, laughter, and tiny moments of tenderness that redeem everything.  This novel is an undertaking: at 900-pages, it's hefty and its frequent use of Hindi words can be confusing.  But don't be daunted - Chandra provides a glossary and before you know it, you will be plunged into Bombay's bastis (shanties) and mansions, its ordinary folk and film stars, its gossip and rumali roti.  (3/07)

Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero (2007) is, in a manner of speaking, a return for him, a return to his poetic style after the clunky Anil's Ghost (2000).  Ondaatje is a poet, even when he writes prose. In his novels (with the exception noted), not a word feels wasted, meaning is conveyed through precise images and highly attuned sensations, the reader has to work to make and discover meaning, and emotions are always crisp and never maudlin.  This novel is no different; in fact, is one of his most delicately poetical.  Divisadero is about a non-biological family that comes together out of their shared need for human bonds, but those very bonds also tear them apart.  At the center of this novel is an explosive event - a conflagration that shatters the family, scatters its members to different corners, and burns every bridge so there is no possibility of return.  In the hands of any other writer in our therapy-obsessed culture, this event would be endlessly probed, characters' minds and emotions laid bare for us.  Ondaatje is too discreet and sure-footed to do anything of the sort: that each character is deeply seared by this event is unquestionable.  But they don’t talk about their pain and Ondaatje does not insist on explicitly reverting to it or continually putting it front-and-center.  It's there, the irrevocable change brought about by one moment of rage transforms these lives, but it is treated quietly (one almost misses the event, it is so sparsely and beautifully narrated) and without hand-wringing or moralizing.  Ondaatje respects his characters and his readers. For some, this respect may feel confusing - the last section of the novel leaves Northern California to narrate the story of an early-twentieth century French writer, Lucien Segura; the echoes between the two stories are many, but Ondaatje leaves it up to us to hear them.  (4/2007).   

The True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) by Peter Carey is a powerful novel about Australia's mythic, Robin Hood-like outlaw.  Author of Oscar and Lucinda (the movie starred Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchette) and Jack Maggs (in which Magwitch from Great Expectations recounts his version of his return to London), Carey is one of Australia's richest writers, and in The True History he creates a fictional "autobiography" of Ned Kelly.  Purporting to be the recently discovered account of his life that Kelly wrote on scraps of paper for his young daughter during the desperate last months of his life while he was hunted by half the police force in Victoria, the novel adopts Kelly's locution, grammar, style, voice - brilliantly.  It might take some getting used to reading a text with scant punctuation or capitalizations, but the effort is entirely worth it.  We enter Kelly's mind and we enter it fast and fully.  Yet, Carey does not give us one more "from the perspective of the downtrodden" piece of historical revision.  Firmly in Kelly's mind and perspective, we see his hatred of the English and the self-serving laws they create, we acknowledge his views and the reasons for them, the wrong perpetrated against the poor (mostly Irish in this novel), but we also see how paranoid, suspicious, petty and self-consumed - plain wrong - Kelly could be often. Carey is a sophisticated novelist - he does not wish merely to tell Kelly's "side" of the story or for us to venerate Kelly; rather he wants us to go on the ride with Kelly, to know from the inside what it meant to be a poor settler in 19th-c Australia, how state violence morphed into masculine violence, how close the law and lawlessness are.  (6/06)

Arthur and George (2005) by Julian Barnes is the story of two men in 19th-c Britain whose lives briefly intersected when Arthur took on George's wrongful-imprisonment case and swore to reverse it.  It's not giving anything away to tell that "Arthur" is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; George is less well-known, and we must thank Barnes for making his story available.  A "half-caste" (the son of an Indian Parsee minister and Scottish mother) who grew up in a small English village, George and his family are victims of petty and increasingly-brutal persecution (garbage strewn over their lawn or vile, insinuating letters) over many years.  Rather than help, the local police accuse George of these "pranks" and finally, when he is an adult, arrest him, put on a sham trial, and imprison him.  Throughout his trial and persecution, George, now an attorney and staunch believer in the British system of justice, refuses any suggestion that his color plays any role in his persecution; Arthur, the manliest of Britons and recipient of national honors and adulation, isn't so sure and is determined to expose and correct the narrow-mindedness that bedevils the British legal and political system and his compatriots' minds.  The novel is based on real events and out of them Barnes weaves a sparse, subtle, moving story .  Never heavy-handed, he lets the story and the characters he creates speak for themselves.  (4/06)

The Italian Boy: A Tale Of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London (2004) by Sarah Wise is a fascinating history of a gruesome subject that I simply couldn't put down .  In 1831, three men brought a suspiciously fresh body to one of London's many anatomy schools to sell. While this might seem like the scandal to us, buying "Subjects" from resurrectionists was common practice in the day.  The conceit was that the bodies were those of paupers who had died and that their "relatives" were allowing their bodies to be used for science; the truth was that grave-digging was a a brisk and lucrative business.  What raised suspicion in this case was that the body was fresh and never seemed to have been in a grave, factors suggesting murder.  Edinburgh's Burke and Hare case was still fresh in everyone's mind, and the possible "burking" of an Italian boy put London in a panic and uproar.  Wise's social history is wide-ranging - she delves into Italians immigrants, street theater, anatomists, the drinking habits and pubs frequented by resurrectionists, slums and privys, London's cattle market, the New Police, and the legal system - and her archival research is exhaustive (the many images she includes of newspaper coverage of the three culprits or images their homes and pubs are absolute gold).  Yet, she handles her knowledge lightly and the result is fluid and reads like a murder mystery with teeth.  (11/07)

Fingersmith (2002) by Sarah Waters is a rollicking ride of a novel.  An homage to and "revision" of Oliver Twist, the novel is about a group of "fingersmiths" or pickpockets, operating in the chaotic streets of London, c.1830.  Twenty pages in I wasn't able to put it down.  Densely and intricately plotted and always surprising, the novel gave texture and smell to a world that I thought I knew from reading Dickens and Mayhew and Chadwick.  The scenes in a mental asylum are some of the most chilling in fiction.  This is one of the most accomplished "post-modern period rewritings" I have encountered.  Waters's earlier novel Tipping the Velvet (2002) is about London's 1890s music-hall "mashers" [women cross-dressing as men] and "renters" [young male prostitutes] and the pleasure and pain of being a "tom" [lesbian] in a rapidly changing London, while Affinity (2005) is a chilling novel about London's prisons in the late 19th c, mesmerism, deep and unrequited longing, and repression, depression, and illusions.  Both have Waters's verve and stylistic flair in spades.  (4/07) 

Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) is a chilling novel about an idyllic childhood in an English boarding school, remembered two decades later.  I don't want to give too much of the plot away, so will only write generally.  Some have called Ishiguro's novel "science fiction" because it deals with cloning.  This misses the subtlety of Ishiguro's vision and what makes the novel truly chilling: although it's supposedly set in a world that doesn't yet exist, the novel is in fact darkly familiar.  This, it seems to me, is Ishiguro's point: as with the best of science fiction, the other world is merely a commentary on this one.  Ishiguro's sparse language, deep knowledge of his characters, and ability to represent and reveal a community and its mind set make this a revealing - and exhausting - read.  (4/06)

Maximum City (2004) by Sukhetu Mehta is probably one of the most enjoyable books I've read lately.  A report on the criminal underside of one of the most densely populated and cosmopolitan cities in the world, Bombay (or Mumbai as it was renamed in the 1990s), the book is a virtuoso performance.  One marvels at Mehta's access to gangsters, hindutva goons, thieves, prostitutes, corrupt police, compromised politicians, and judges.  They all speak to him openly, and the resulting portrait is frightening, funny, heart-rending, full of life and danger and, yes, laughter.  "Bombay," as one of Mehta's interviewees says, "is all of our future." This "socio-journalism" is an excellent companion to Vikram Chandra's vibrant collection, Love and Longing in Bombay.  (11/05)

Jim Crace. The Devil's Larder: A Feast was my joyous introduction to Crace (the cover - a snake slithering out of a bowl of strawberries moving towards a split papaya - caught my eye). Not quite a collection of short stories in the traditional sense, but some sixty-odd vignettes ranging in length from a paragraph to a couple of pages, the "stories" here are all concerned with food and the memories, smells, pleasures, and pain it brings.  Crace is not interested in warm-and-fuzzy: food and its rotten, disintegrating end are closely tied in his imagination, and the result is rich and surprisingly delectable.  Crace's Signals of Distress and The Gift of Stones are disturbing and stark novels, one set in 1830s England and concerned with Abolition and blacks in Britian, the other at the moment in human history when stone implements were replaced with metal. Crace may be too unrelenting and severe about the human species for some, but I find him strangely refreshing. (12/05)         

David Malouf's Remembering Babylon is a remarkable novel of life in 1840s Australia when settlers and aboriginal peoples are warily and gingerly testing one another's limits, and the threat of violence and danger is thick in the air.  A young British boy who has lived among the aborigines for more than half his life enters the picture and his soul, as much as the continent's, is at stake in Malouf's stark rendering of Australia's origins.  Not a word is wasted or extraneous in this beautiful and taut novel.   

Alistair Macleod has long been one of my favorite writers.  He is primarily a short story writer who captures the desire to escape (he is from Cape Berton and most of his fiction is set there) from one's roots, along with the pull to one's past and history, with a fierce honesty.  His No Great Mischief is an astonishing novel about loss and land and family and love that keeps surprising. 

Last updated: Nov 2007