Rachel Cusk, Outline ***

Outline recounts ten conversations that the narrator has during a visit to Athens to teach a summer writing course. We learn very little about the narrator herself -- by design, as we learn from the title and from one interlocutor's insight:

While he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her... a sense of who she now was.

Each chapter feels like a (very successful) writing exercise, with the author conveying ideas in an oblique fashion. Most of the conversations concern relationships between husbands and wives, or rather ex-husbands and ex-wives, and how those relationships affect a person's understanding of life.

I started Outline expecting monologues from a variety of characters, each in their own distinctive voice. However, the narrator describes most of the dialogue in the third person, which gives all the characters an unfortunate sameness.

John McWhorter, The Language Hoax *** 1/2

This book is a manifesto. I will oppose... the idea that people's languages channel the way they think and perceive the world. ... The idea that grammar channels people into thinking of time as cyclical is catnip.

Catnip indeed. My original motivation for studying linguistics was the tantalizing possibility that I could glean secrets about people's world views from the way they speak, and I've been an avid reader of books purporting to rehabilitate the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The Language Hoax presents a convincing case that the tantalizing possibility is false. A person's language does indeed influence his or her thinking to some degree in experimental settings, but not in any interesting way.

I appreciate how McWhorter highlights the fact that linguistics reveals the diversity of languages in ways that are interesting in and of themselves. I also liked his close reading of a randomly overheard English sentence ("Dey try to cook it too fast, I'm-a be eatin' some pink meat!"). I wasn't as happy about the amount of time he spent railing against the well-intentioned paternalism inherent in much of popular Whorfianism: it's a good point, but it's independent of the question of the truth. 

Benjamin Markovitz, You Don't Have to Live Like This ** 1/2

A group of friends who met at Yale, led by a friend with political ambitions, try to single-handedly gentrify the outskirts of Detroit. Their naive idealism brings them into conflict with the existing residents, because neither side really understands where the other is coming from.

Everything about the book cover -- its aerial photo of Detroit, the quotes from the Washington Post and Literary Review, the tone of the author's bio -- promises a sardonic but nuanced examination of class conflict and inner-city life. ("The Wire scripted by J.M. Coetzee," says The Independent.) But the book does not fulfill this promise. Once every fifty pages or so there's an interesting insight about how different people experience life differently, but the majority of the story is like our narrator Greg Marnier: aimless, passive, and superficial. Almost all of the action happens in the last couple of chapters.

It's a squandered opportunity, because the setup offers a wealth of material.

Rachel Kushner, The Strange Case of Rachel K ****

A literary amuse-bouche: three impressionistic sketches from Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers. Kushner has a mesmerizing prose style, and these short pieces are a wonderful way to appreciate it.

China Miéville, The City and The City ****

Yes, another China Miéville book so soon. I enjoyed his story collection Three Moments of an Explosion enough to send me almost immediately to one of his novels.

The City and The City is fundamentally a noir-esque detective novel. The narrator is a detective who catches a murder case involving a young woman who was studying at a controversial archeological dig. His investigation leads him into dangerous subcultures and suggests larger forces at work. As I say, a detective novel.

The fantasy element comes with the locale. The detective lives in the (Eastern European?) city of Besźel; the murder victim came from the city of Ul Qoma. Besźel and Ul Qoma are neighboring cities with distinct clashing cultures, but they happen to occupy the same physical space. Citizens of each municipality learn to "unsee" everything about the other municipality. Our hero has to solve the case without "breaching" the boundary between the city and the city.

It's a great concept, impressively pulled off. It was tough going early on as I tried to imagine the logistics of unseeing, but I eventually settled into it and got engaged with the plot. The book's imitation of the detective genre extends to the resolution: our narrator spouts a bit too much exposition when he faces off against the perpetrators.