W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants ****

 The fragmentary scenes that haunt my memories are obsessive in character.

W.G. Sebald has a completely distinctive style, a confluence of old-fashionable prose, a consistent narrator (a solo traveler in remote or off-season European locations), overlapping storytellers explaining their personal histories, and a sense that the book is actually about something that goes purposely unmentioned. He creates a pervasive mood of melancholy and nostalgia for a lost world. And there are those enigmatic photographs.

The Emigrants is filled with Sebaldian images:

• A house with "hidden passageways [that] branched off, running behind the walls in such a way that the servants, ceaselessly hurrying to an fro laden with coal scuttles, baskets of firewood, cleaning materials, bed linen and tea trays, never had to cross the paths of their betters."
• The frozen remains of a mountain guide released by a glacier after 72 years.
• A former mental health spa now occupied by a beekeeper.
• A stay in the crumbling nineteenth-century Midland Hotel in Manchester. 
• A visit to an overgrown (and locked) Jewish cemetery.
• A empty streets in the formerly bustling resort town of Deauville.

"If one pauses for a while before the seemingly unoccupied houses, ... one of the closed window shutters on the top floor will open slightly, a hand will appear and shake out a duster, fearfully slowly, so that one inevitably concludes that the whole of Deauville consists of gloomy interiors where womenfolk, condemned to perpetual invisibility and eternal dusting, move silently about, waiting for the moment when they can signal with their dusters to some passer-by"

Our narrator consistently describes decayed landscapes that obscure the hidden activities of an unfavored group. 

I've noticed that everyone's favorite Sebald book tends to be whichever one they read first, whichever one introduced them to his unique genius. I read The Rings of Saturn many years ago, so I naturally prefer it, or rather my memory of it, to The Emigrants. Would that preference survive a re-reading? We'll find out some day.

Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch ***

From its breezy title, you might not expect Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch to be an occasionally true story* that takes place in Württemberg Germany in 1618. Katherina Kepler, whose son Johannes (Hans) discovered the laws of planetary motion, is accused by her neighbors of being a witch. Once she is accused, everyone in town starts attributing their misfortunes to Katherine. Can her children and her kindly neighbor use reason to challenge the superstitions of the time?

The story shows how Katherine's neighbors come around to believing her intentions are evil and how society encourages her persecution. At one point, both her family and her primary accuser complain to the duke that the expense of her incarceration is draining her estate; the accuser is unhappy because Katherine's assets are supposed to come to her in compensation.

The book ends with a touching scene between Katherine and her neighbor Simon who comes to apologize for not defending her vociferously enough. Katherine doesn't forgive him so much as refuse to judge him.

I'm find of you, Simon. I can see that you want me to be angry with you but I can't do it. You have love in your heart. You've been a friend to me. I don't know what difference your words would have made. I wonder if it's worth two old people spending time reassuring each other of this or that.

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch is quite different in style from Galchen's previous novel Atmospheric Disturbances. The earlier book deals with the operations of the human mind whereas this one is about the operations of society. In a blind test, I would never guess they were from the same author.

Spoiler alert! Highlight the next few lines of text to learn Katherine's fate.

Katherine is acquitted but forced to leave her home town, fated to serve as a "tale to frighten children until the end of days."

* To borrow a phrase from "The Great".

Tony Judt (with Timothy Snyder), Thinking the Twentieth Century ****

As its title suggests, Thinking the Twentieth Century is about how various constituencies interpreted the major events of the 1900s, primarily in Europe, and what those interpretations can tell us about the proper way to use history. At the same time it is an intellectual biography of Tony Judt, the historian and essayist who wrote Postwar and who was dying from ALS as he conversed with fellow historian Timothy Snyder for this final book.

The discussion presupposes knowledge of the events, so it's a good thing I read Postwar first (and not too long ago). My copy of Thinking the Twentieth Century bristles with Post-it flags marking notable insights, such as:

• The different moral and political lessons that Europe, the United States, and Asia took from the Holocaust –– and the French Revolution
• The fact that communists and free-marketers both think of people as economic abstractions
• The reason we tend to be sympathetic to intellectuals who supported the Soviets but not those who supported the Nazis
• Pre-World War I Vienna as the origin of so much 20th century thought
• The increased vigor of intellectual discussion when a party is out of power

The conversations happened from 2008 to 2010, so the final chapter includes dated talk about the Iraq War. It also include retrospectively disturbing warnings:

The wonderful mystery is that this [suspicion of the elite] has never effectively translated into real demagogic politics in the way that it has in most European countries ... [the right] managing to do just enough harm to threaten the quality of the republic but not quite enough damage to be seen to be what it really is. Which is native American fascism. ...

[This suggests] a certain mission for American patriotic intellectuals: ... are they defending institutions or are they rallying around a person who tends to make exceptionalist arguments about what should happen to those institutions?

 Judt reveals his fundamentally optimistic nature with this passage in the final few pages:

The twentieth century was not necessarily as we have been taught to see it. It was not, or not only, the great battle between democracy and fascism, or communism versus fascism, or left versus right, or freedom versus totalitarianism. My own sense is that for much of the century we were engaged in implicit or explicit debates over the rise of the state. What sort of state did free people want? What were they willing to pat for it and what purposes did they wish it to serve?

In this perspective, the great victors of the twentieth century were the nineteenth-century liberals whose successors created the welfare state in all its protean forms. They achieved something which, as late as the 1930s, seemed almost inconceivable: they forged strong, high-taxing, and actively interventionist democratic and constitutional states which could encompass mass societies without resorting to violence or repression. We would be foolish to abandon this heritage carelessly.

Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing ****

Richard Powers is a master of metaphor. The Time of Our Singing is a story about race and cultural inheritance told using the language of music. The book weaves together singing, general relativity, the Holocaust, and the struggle for civil rights into a rich symphony. It includes numerous set pieces that tie the experiences of the Strom family to larger social events and trends.

At 631 pages, The Time of Our Singing is about a third too long. Almost every chapter is impressive but overextended, and there are some that repeat the same themes.  Powers' prose is evocative but a bit too literary. For all of the richness of the story, most of the characters are thin. The most prominent example is the narrator Joseph Strom: through the first 500 pages he is a pure narrator who barely contributes to the situations he describes, with no personality of his own.

As a novel about race written by a white man, The Time of Our Singing raises some of the questions addressed in its narrative by its very existence. I found its insights about race in America convincing, but of course I am also a white man. Powers' descriptions of music are also enjoyable. My only issue with the book was how often I found myself flipping pages to see how far it was to the next chapter break.

Chris Frantz, Remain in Love *** 1/2

Chris Frantz is the drummer for Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club. Remain in Love is his memoir and a valentine to his wife and bass partner Tina Weymouth. The first sentence of the Preface captures the tone of the book well:

I had the great fortune to not only be a founding member of one of the most unique and exciting rock bands of all time, but to do so alongside the love of my life, Tina Weymouth.

Frantz has a friendly, casual writing style, and favors light anecdotes about people he has met and liked. His stories sound very much like what you would hear if you met him at a dinner party or sat next to him on an airplane. If you told your raconteur friend, "You should write a book!", it might come out like Remain in Love.

He comes across as an affable fellow, with only positive things to say about everyone except for recurring bitter comments about David Byrne. He provides the same enthusiastic introductions for his high school friends as he does for Brian Eno or Lou Reed. He describes the hotels, theaters, bus rides, and dinners more than musical subjects, which contributes to the everyman vibe but frankly makes me wonder about his defensiveness regarding his talent. (He feels obliged to mention every time someone praises him or Tina.)

I wish Frantz had elaborated more about how the various members of Talking Heads contributed to its sound and about the dynamics within the band. Jerry Harrison's perspective was notably absent from Frantz's diatribes against David Byrne. Of course, that would make Remain in Love a different book altogether, a more traditional rock memoir. That more traditional memoir would also be more forthcoming about the darker shadings of Frantz' character, such as his drug problems.

Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle ***

I heard an interview with Whitehead on NPR during which he characterized Harlem Shuffle as a crime story from the point of view of a peripheral character, namely a part-time fence who owns a furniture story. I liked that idea. The interviewer also commented on its sense of place (Harlem in the early 1960s).

Whitehead splits the difference between a pulp thriller and a literary social novel, doing a passable job at each. The prose feels clunky every once in while, as if Whitehead is shoehorning in some color about, for example, the World's Fair.

The most effective aspects of the book happen in the margins. In the early going, we gradually learn about the mismatch between our hero's self-image as a solid citizen and his low-key support of local criminals. Ray Carney grew up in Harlem as the son of a crook, but on a couple of occasions he travels through town with another character and sees a different city hidden in plain sight.

Louise Glück, Poems 1962 - 2012 ****

I don't read much poetry. I'm unable to sustain the necessary concentrated attention. However, Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020 and has a reputation for "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal" and for frank expressions of sadness and isolation. Sign me up!

I heard that Glück's style varies widely between books, so I purchased this collection rather than a more narrow slice of her work. It's true: each individual book has a distinctive feel, with recurring themes and images appearing in multiple poems.

Her early work didn't speak to me, and so I read it fairly superficially. But then suddenly, most of the poems about her family in the book Ararat engaged me, as did the nature poems of The Wild Iris. My interest tapered off during subsequent books, only to return again for the final book in this collection, A Village Life. 

Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness ***

Incompleteness is from the Great Discoveries series, in which a novelist undertakes to explain a great scientific discovery in literary terms without oversimplifying the technical details. In this case, Goldstein tackles Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

Very little of the book –– only about 20 pages –– actually attempts to explain the theorems. In fact, surprisingly little is about Gödel at all. Goldstein devotes significant time explaining the Vienna Circle, of which Gödel was a member despite apparently disagreeing with their very raison d'etre. As her chapter title puts it, Gödel was "A Platonist among the Positivists."

Goldstein's major thesis is that Gödel felt like an exile among his peers because (a) logical positivism came to dominate Anglo-European philosophy and (b) that dominant group managed to misinterpret his work so that it supported their point of view, which was anathema to him. She makes this case most effectively in the introduction while describing his unlikely friendship with Albert Einstein. In fact, I think you could get most of the value from this book by reading just the introduction.

Intellectually, the most interesting aspect of Incompleteness for me is its compelling argument for Platonism, for an objective realm of abstract things. "Einstein and Gödel's metaconvictions were addressed to the question of whether their respective fields are descriptions of an objective reality––existing independent of our thinking of it––or, rather, are subjective human projections, socially shared intellectual constructs." I personally believe this is a false dichotomy, that science is a subjectively projected organization that we use to understand an objective reality to which we have no access other than through our constructs (which I wouldn't characterize as "socially shared" or "intellectual").

I'm rating Incompleteness with one fewer stars than the first time I read it. During this reading, I felt indignant on Gödel's behalf about how much attention Goldstein paid to Wittgenstein and to formalism in mathematics. It short-changes the proofs themselves and limits Gödel's strange biography to a series of anecdotes in the epilogue.

Elliott Chaze, Black Wings Has My Angel *****

The blade crunched going in and somehow I'd never thought much one way or the other about bones. You think of shoving a knife into somebody and the picture is all meat and steel, with no bones.

You think of a noir crime novel from 1953 and the picture is all urban and cynical, with no outdoors or conscience. The lovers in Black Wings Has My Angel match the profile of the genre – he's an escaped ex-con, she's a classy escort disguised as a ten-dollar tramp, and they have a plan for an elaborate heist – but they have more complex characters than you expect in a pulp novel. Tim questions his own compulsions, loves the freedom of the Colorado mountains, and retains hope for the future. Virginia may or may not be looking to double-cross Tim, but she enthusiastically supports him.

The story has plenty of the traditional pleasures of the genre, such as stylized dialogue, the slow revelation of the planned caper, and uncertainty about Virginia's motivations. It also has lovely sequences about camping, the satisfaction of a job well done, differences between the South and the West, and differences of opinion regarding what constitutes the good life. Most noir novels (and films) have a fatalistic worldview, but this one still believes that joy is possible.

Ben Macintyre, Agent Sonya ***

Ben Macintyre writes non-fiction spy stories for general audiences; I previously read The Spy and the Traitor.  He has a talent for building a compelling story, injecting the right amount of context and psychological supposition into the facts of the narrative. However, he covers so broad a territory in Agent Sonya that it undermines the inherent drama.

Agent Sonya is the true story of Ursula Kuczynski, a German Jew who spent a lifetime spying for the Soviet Union. She was recruited as a young (and pregnant) wife in 1930s Shanghai and helped establish spy networks in the Far East, Switzerland, and Britain. Near the end of the Second World War, she was a valuable conduit for intelligence about the British atomic weapons program. She accomplished all of her espionage while raising three children (from three different fathers) and maintaining her cover as a housewife. She ended her career in East Germany as an author of young adult books.

Macintyre efficiently sets the scene for each episode, situating Ursula's adventures in the larger history. For example, he paints a vivid picture of Shanghai during the period of international concessions. But there is just too much material: not only 25 years of clandestine activity from Ursula, but multiple hotbeds of international intrigue (pre-revolutionary China, Japanese-occupied Manchuria, the Spanish Civil War, WWII-era Switzerland, early Cold War Britain) and contact with other infamous and colorful characters. Nearly every chapter includes a story that would benefit from closer attention: a plan to assassinate Hitler, near exposure by a jealous nanny, friendship with the Nazi arms dealer next door in Manchuria. 

It is surprising that Ursula avoids capture for so long given that her father and brother were well-known public communist sympathizers and her first husband a convicted Soviet agent. She also works closely with several different people introduced with claims of importance such as "Alexander Allan Foote is one of the most important, but also one of the most enduringly mysterious, figures in modern espionage history" (p 149). So many important and obvious spies in her orbit!

Macintyre is a strong writer of narrative but less skilled at developing characters. Ursula comes across as cold-blooded in pursuit of her ideals, but she also has loving and sexual relationships with several of her colleagues. She seems drawn to unstable men. I would have liked a better sense of Ursula's personality. (I had this same comment/complaint about The Spy and the Traitor.)

Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies *** 1/2

 Ayad Akhtar is best known as a playwright, so it should come as no surprise that the best parts of this "novel" come in the dialogue. Akhtar has Big Ideas to convey about the nature of the American Dream, for immigrants and Muslims in particular, and he puts those ideas into the mouths of his conflicted characters. His father, his mother, his college professor, his benefactor: they all have distinct world views that flow from a unique insight. Those insights are mostly thought-provoking and usually arise naturally based on the action of the story. However, the characters (and their Weltanschauungen) don't interact with each other, making the overall book feel disjointed.

I put the word "novel" in quotes because the book takes the form of a lightly(?) fictionalized memoir or essay collection. It believe Ahktar could take one more pass over the material and integrate it into an awesome play.

One other thing: While Ahktar generally creates rounded characters, he presents himself with a less critical eye. He comes across as a passive character shaped by others' ideas, which seems disingenuous. He mentions several times that people find his plays controversial and problematic, but willfully ignores any investigation of why that might be.

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear ** 1/2

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is the true story of a town (Grafton, New Hampshire) taken over by libertarians and how an increasingly aggressive bear population took advantage of the resulting lack of community services.

At least that's what I thought the book was going to be about. In fact, it's a collection of anecdotes about the eccentric denizens of Grafton and their crazy schemes. Only a handful of the folks who flock to Grafton are true libertarians; many of them are the kinds of loners, cultists, survivalists, and extremists you would expect to find in comparably small communities in Alaska or anywhere at the edge of civilization. For example, one chapter starts by introducing Doughnut Lady, who feeds doughnuts to the local bears, but ends up telling the story of Goat Man, whose 252 goats took over his property. In another chapter, the author speculates about whether the townsfolk (and/or the increasingly aggressive bears) are suffering from toxoplasmosis.

In 2004, a small group of libertarians launched the Free Town Project. They planned to take over Grafton and essentially eliminate its government. I have always thought that libertarianism is an intriguing concept that quickly turns problematic in practice, so I wanted to find out how this social experiment went. However, the Free Towners did not take over Grafton; they simply joined the already tax-averse population of the town and made lots of speeches at town council meetings. As the author's own research shows, it was not a qualitative change in the town's history.

The same goes for the bears. The increase in human-bear interactions is shown as the inevitable consequence of long-standing attitudes about wildlife and government funding.

There is only one chapter that (semi-)seriously looks at the libertarian project and compares Grafton (unfavorably) to its nearest neighbor Canaan in terms of its tax burden and quality of life. Another short section points out that "today's New Hampshire bruins are so different from their forebears of just five hundred years ago that they might be mistaken for another species." But these honest attempts to grapple with the issues get drowned out by the author's desire to be clever, exemplified by the title of the book and the alliterative chapter titles.

William Price Fox, Dixiana Moon *****

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, I read a lot of this type of "madcap" book about colorful misfits roaming the American byways; Tom Robbins is perhaps the king of the form. Dixiana Moon was my favorite of them, and it retains its charm for me even after the others have lost their appeal. 

The difference is in its narrator. My previous review remarks on Joe Mahaffey's level of enthusiasm, which is definitely his most endearing quality. Joe also appreciates fine craftmanship: he works in the product packaging industry and often comments on the great color registration or heat sealing on products he comes across: 

A.J. was from Louisiana. He had a '62 Cadillac pulling a '69 Airstream and lived with two black Labradors and four cats. His dogs and cats were eating dry kibble. He bought it in fifty-pound bags. Good, heavy-duty, triple-ply bag with a built-in tear-string. World Wide Paper had some board-of-directors deal on this business and no one even tries to compete.

But Joe is also a regular middle-class Northerner, something of a straight man, leaving the true wackiness to other characters. This trait makes him easy to identify with even though his personality is completely different from mine.

During this reading, I noticed how consistent the book was in addressing its theme of optimism in the face of the end of an era. The age of the traveling salesman is almost over, television is replacing the circus and tent revivals, and packaging is becoming cheaper, but the characters don't spend time lamenting their fate:

The old peddlers were dying off. Maybe we were already dead. But the tent circus was dead, too. And the circus-and-religion combination wasn't going to cut it either. But Buck wasn't worried. Loretta wasn't worried. They both knew that down the road was something new. Something bigger and wilder and better, with more money and more fun and more everything of everything.

Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant's Philosophical Revolution ***

 I accept Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) as "perhaps the most influential book of philosophical modernity," but I have never read it. Its reputation for difficulty matches its reputation for profundity. Here's a representative quote to illustrate:

The thoroughgoing identity of the apperception of a manifold given in intuition contains a synthesis of the representations, and is possible only through the consciousness of this synthesis. (B133)

I am good with learning Kant's philosophy through his commentators. (Frankly, I feel the same about most German philosophers, Schopenhauer excluded.) I was attracted to this short volume because it seeks to provide a "clear and authoritative summary" of the Critique of Pure Reason on a chapter-by-chapter basis, with a minimum of evaluation. The book derives from an introduction that Yovel wrote for his Hebrew translation of the Critique.

Kant's Philosophical Revolution is by no means a Cliff Notes for general readers. Yovel's prose is clearer than Kant's and benefits from centuries of discussion about the work, but it still ain't easy. I'm not sure I would have followed his presentation if I weren't already familiar with the main points. While it purports to present Kant's arguments in the order they appear in the original work, the book didn't give me any sense of how the Critique is actually organized.

David Diop, At Night All Blood is Black *** 1/2

At Night All Blood is Black opens with our narrator, a Senegalese soldier in World War I France, holding the hand of his eviscerated "more-than-brother." When the friend finally passes, Alfa immediately regrets having refused his repeated requests to put him out of his misery.  Alfa starts thinking about the conflicts between duty and humanity and decides he needs to forget the dictates of duty. He also tries to avenge and atone for his friend's death in increasingly gruesome ways that frighten his fellow soldiers.

The book effectively captures Alfa's troubled conscience with its intertwining of madness and clarity. As the story continues we learn more about his relationship with the dead man and with his community at home, which shades our understanding of his reactions.

At Night All Blood is Black won the 2021 International Booker Prize, but it is really more of a novella or "long short story" than a full-blown novel. It lacks the scope or complexity of a novel.

Tony Judt, Postwar ****

Postwar is "A History of Europe Since 1945". Judt says that it makes sense to consider Europe as a whole during this period because the issues of postwar reconstruction were transnational, as were the challenges of navigating the Cold War between the United States and the USSR. And of course there's the European Union, which tries to define what it means to be European.

The best thing about Postwar is that Judt presents the history in terms of broad currents, showing how specific events in far-flung parts of the continent flow from larger themes. At the same time, he doesn't try to shoehorn events into a grand narrative ("I have no big theory of contemporary European history to propose in these pages; no one overarching theme to expound; no single, all-embracing story to tell" [p 7]).

Occasionally I would reach a section where my eyes glazed over among the names and dates––the worst offenders were the chapters dealing with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, because so much was happening so quickly. But those sections rarely lasted long before Judt offered an intriguing insight or well-turned phrase of dry humor ("Portugal's ageing dictator Antonio Salazar was a genuine enthusiast for ecological objectives––attained in his case by the simple expedient of maintaining his fellow countrymen in a condition of unparalleled economic torpor" [p 491]). 

A handful of insights:

• Following WWI the victors redrew national boundaries based on where the people were; following WWII the victors kept the national boundaries and moved people to fit
• Only during the 20th century did people believe that the state is supposed to serve its people rather than vice versa
• People's day-to-day lives at the end of WWII were largely the same as they had been for a century before that
• The key to the "economic miracle" of post-war recovery was the Marshall Plan; alas there was no comparable plan for countries emerging from post-Soviet domination
• The cohort of students who participated in university demonstrations in the 1960s were mostly the first generation after the expansion of university admissions
• One of the reasons that 1970s "stagflation" was so pernicious was that it followed close upon the abandonment of fixed currency exchange rates; those years also saw a complete reassessment of the proper "balance of social rights, civic solidarity and collective responsibility that was appropriate and possible for the modern state" (p 793); a shift from Keynesian social democracy to neo-liberal free markets
• "The net effect of years of would-be revolutionary subversion at the heart of Western Europe was not to polarize society, as the terrorists planned and expected, but rather to drive politicians of all sides to cluster together in the safety of the middle ground." (p 477)
• The rise of "single issue" political parties affected the Left more than the Right

I found the pre-1989 chapters more compelling than the later chapters, probably due to the historical distance. The book has an optimistic ending, however: Judt feels that the European project of balancing responsibility for its citizens' welfare with economic efficiency is a better choice for "universal emulation" than any of the superpowers.

Edward St. Aubyn, The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels *** 1/2

The Patrick Melrose novels live up to their reputation as well written and bitterly humorous depictions of bad behavior (rape, pedophilia, drug addiction, abandonment, murder). They are exceedingly British in tone and content, as befits novels written by someone with a name like Edward St. Aubyn.

The prose is often delicious; as the New Yorker says, "On every page of St. Aubyn’s work is a sentence or a paragraph that prompts a laugh, or a moment of enriched comprehension... The striking gap between, on the one hand, the elegant polish of the narration, the silver rustle of these exquisite sentences, the poised narrowness of the social satire and, on the other hand, the screaming pain of the family violence inflicted on Patrick makes these books some of the strangest of contemporary novels." 

While the bitchy repartee is enjoyable, the Patrick Melrose series falls short of the similarly expansive Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and Frank Bascombe series (Updike and Ford respectively). As a character, Patrick has a somewhat monomaniacal obsession with questions of parental inheritance, both emotional and economic.  Rabbit and Frank feel more rounded -- and also more American which may account for my closer identification with them.

Never Mind

"I found myself thinking that everybody who is meeting for dinner tonight will probably have said something unkind about everybody else.... Why do people spend the evening with people they've spent the day insulting?"
"So as to have something insulting to say about them tomorrow."

Never Mind takes place over a single day as several characters prepare for a dinner party at the Melrose's French villa. I found most of the book to be too British for my taste, with everyone making wittily cutting remarks as they jockey for social standing. I couldn't care about any of the characters, with the exception of the philosopher Victor and his American girlfriend Anne. Victor is writing a book about the nature and origins of personal identity, and his ideas spark the only meaningful dinner conversation.

One can only refer to Never Mind as a "Patrick Melrose novel" in retrospect, because Patrick is a minor character, albeit one who suffers the only physical violence among all of the psychological violence. To the extent that anyone can be considered the central character, it's David Melrose, Patrick's horrible father.

Bad News

The sensible thing to do was to try to divide the coke into two halves, taking the first now and the second after he had gone out to a nightclub or bar. He would try to stay out until three and take the amphetamines just before returning, so that the lift from the speed would cushion the coke comedown...
Brilliant! He really ought to be in charge of a multinational company or a wartime army to find an outlet for these planning skills.

Patrick was five years old in Never Mind; he is twenty-two in Bad News and has just received word of his father's death in New York City. The story covers his few days in New York collecting his father's ashes.

Patrick starts the trip committed to refraining from heroin (but not other drugs) for the duration, but that commitment doesn't last long. Bad News is an upscale counterpart to Trainspotting, with copious scenes of narcotic debauchery and self-destructive behavior. Patrick's planning skills and his matter-of-fact description of drug-taking logistics give the book a sheen of verisimilitude, but Patrick doesn't display much personality beyond his addictions.

Some Hope

And yet he could never lose his indignation at the way his father had cheated him of any peace of mind, and he knew that however much trouble he put into repairing himself, like a once-broken vase that looks whole on its patterned surface but reveals in its pale interior the thin dark lines of its restoration, he could only produce the illusion of wholeness.

Some Hope is well titled, because in it we find Patrick sober and looking to reconcile himself with his father's legacy.  The main narrative event of the novel is an opulent dinner party in the country, but its emotional center is a more intimate dinner where Patrick tells his former drug partner about his father raping him.

The dinner party is far grander than the one in Never Mind –– Princess Margaret is one of the dozens of guests –– and it is funnier too. 

Mother's Milk

[Patrick] waited in vain for the maturing effects of parenthood. Being surrounded by children only brought him closer to his own childishness.

Mother's Milk is more ambitious than previous books, covering a longer time span and spending significant time in the points of view of other Melrose family members. It is the most acclaimed of the novels (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), but I felt that it exposed the limits of St. Aubyn's writing. All of his characters come across as mere reflections of Patrick.

The problem is most pronounced in Robert, Patrick's five-year-old son with whom we spend the first few chapters. He thinks and talks in a sophisticated manner that is far more like a miniature version of Patrick than any five-year-old ever. We're also introduced to Patrick's wife Mary, whose concerns about parenthood and family are notably similar to her husband's. 

And there was nary a dinner party for St. Aubyn to show off his sparkling dialogue skills!

At Last

"Her experience of Eleanor was so different from mine, it made me realize that I'm not in charge of the meaning of my mother's life, and that I'm deluded to think that I can come to some magisterial conclusion about it... I've been noticing today how inconclusive I feel about both my parents. There isn't any final truth; it's more like being able to get off on different floors of the same building."

At Last returns to the limited time horizon of the initial trilogy. The event in this case is Patrick's mother's funeral. The book starts and ends with mean-spirited rants from Nicholas Pratt, the sole surviving attendee of the Melrose's dinner party in Never Mind. In another nice bit of bookending, there is a philosopher in attendance thinking about the nature and origins of personal identity (including this intriguing tidbit: In a chain of reincarnation, who is being reincarnated?).

Final thoughts

I preferred the original trilogy, probably because they are more targeted (and funnier) than the ambitious final books. For all of his strengths as a prose stylist, St. Aubyn is weak at developing characters, which I found distracting.

Will At Last really be the final Patrick Melrose novel? The series ends with the deaths of Patrick's mother and of David Melrose's last crony, with Patrick feeling like their absence might give him the opportunity (at last) to escape his parents' shadows. 

 

Gerda Saunders, Memory's Last Breath ** 1/2

A bait and switch.

Several years ago (in 2013, according to the preface), I read a few online articles by Gerda Saunders, a 60-year-old academic who had been diagnosed with dementia. The articles presented a view of oncoming dementia from the inside by an articulate woman. I expected Memory's Last Breath to be an expansion of those articles, but it is not, despite its subtitle "Field Notes on My Dementia." Rather, it is Saunders' memoir interspersed with notes from her reading neuroscience literature. She relates incidents when her memory lapses caused a complication, but I didn't find anything new or insightful about the experience of living with dementia.

Saunders has lived a fairly ordinary life, except for the exoticism of growing up in South Africa. For the most part she tells the kinds of stories you'd hear from friends over coffee: the family farm, meeting her husband, emigrating to Salt Lake City,  diets she has tried over the years, how lovely her grandkids are. Her narrative voice occasionally reveals a quirk in her personality, such as this tidbit from when an attacker struck her mother in the head with an axe(!):

Some of us siblings dropped our lives and carpooled or flew across the seven hundred miles to [the town of] George. I was not among them -- and not because I was too busy. With three of my siblings already on their way, I decided to save the trip.

 

Elliot Reed, A Key to Treehouse Living ** 1/2

The cover of A Key to Treehouse Living advertises its "unorthodox" approach to storytelling (in the form of alphabetical glossary entries) and features quotes from respected writers such as Padgett Powell and Joy Williams. I expected a formal experiment along the lines of Dictionary of the Khazars, with a plot and narrator akin to Huckleberry Finn.

The alphabetical organization is a gimmick that doesn't add to the book. The story remains fundamentally linear, and at one point the narrator implies that he wrote it in order. The headings are not strictly alphabetical and often strain to fit the scheme; for example, the section about Salisbury Steak is headed "Loose Meats: Salisbury Steak" to get it into the proper position, and many sections have arbitrary-seeming headings such as "Careful Entry of Neglected Forts."

The narrator is supposed to be a self-educated teenager living largely on his own in the South. However, Reed fails to craft a distinctive voice or point of view for his protagonist. I regularly came across thoughts that didn't seem realistic for the character (such as the discussion of l'appel du vide filed under "Mental Daddy of the Self") and did not come across thoughts that revealed a unique perspective.

Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet *** 1/2

I've been planning to read a biography of Martin Luther for a few years now, at least since John Elliot Gardiner's book about Bach described the Lutheran world. Martin Luther is an extremely consequential person in world history, and I had the sense that he changed society in ways that go far beyond religion. I came across Renegade and Prophet, appropriately enough, at the Book Loft of German Village in Columbus Ohio.

The foremost thing I learned from Renegade and Prophet is that Martin Luther was an unpleasant character. He was quick to anger, vicious and foul-mouthed toward opponents and erstwhile friends, and approached theological questions based on how they affected him. He frequently turned on his closest advisors when they disagreed with him, and he had derogatory nicknames for his enemies. I'm tempted to call him Trumpian but I pray to God that Trump will have nowhere near the impact.

The ideas that spurred the Reformation were quite widespread at the time, with many thinkers arguing against the practices that Luther condemned in his Ninety-Five Theses. Roper does a nice job of describing the society Luther grew up in and the intertwining of religion and politics in the sixteenth century. She also explains the theological niceties that separated Luther from other reformers such as Calvin and Zwingli.

I started to lose interest in second half of the book as Luther retreats into isolation and gets ever more cranky. During this period, other participants take the leading role in the Reformation (most notably Georg Spalatin and Philipp Melanchthon), but this is a biography of Luther not a history of the Reformation.

Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved ***

What I Loved is the story of a friendship between two couples. The four of them are artists and/or academics who live in the same SoHo building and have sons at about the same time. We learn about Bill's art, Violet's book about hysteria, Erica's article about Henry James, and also about the couples' summers in Vermont and the boys' sibling-like bond.

The first half of the book feels very much like a conversation you'd have with a friend, catching up on the latest news about them and their families without any expectation of a narrative arc. The second half finds the couples dealing with tragedies involving their sons. The narrator's son dies in an accident at summer camp; the other couple's son shows escalating symptoms of an anti-social personality.

My reaction to What I Loved is similar to my reaction to previous Hustvedt novels.  She creates full-bodied intellectual characters and a realistic milieu, but her stories lack narrative drive. As Leo says about Lucille's poetry in this book:

I began to understand that the tone of the work never varied. Scrupulous, concise, and invested with the comedy inherent in distance, the [book] allowed no object, person, or insight to take precedence over any other. The field of the [author's] experience was democratized to a degree that leveled it to one enormous field of closely observed particulars - both physical and mental (p 177).

For example, in one scene our narrator visits a psychologist to discuss Mark, the anti-social teenager:

I talked about my anger, about feeling betrayed and the uncanny effect of Mark's charm. ... Through the window in the room I could see a small tree that had begun to leaf. The broken knots in its branches would later become large blooms. I had forgotten the name of the tree. I looked at it in silence after telling her about the friendship between Matt and Mark and continued to stare at it, searching for its identity as though its name were important. Then it came to me: hydrangea.

Leo's distraction adds a level of realism to this scene but also detracts from the main point. I felt the same way about the elaborate descriptions of Bill's projects and the subplots involving the main characters' parents and siblings.

Hustvedt's realism falters in the final section of the book when she introduces an outlandish character (Teddy Giles) and sends Leo on a melodramatic mission to help Mark escape from his clutches.

 

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations ***

Meditations is a collection of brief thoughts from the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius which collectively sketch his views on how to live a good and rewarding life. He subscribed to a mostly Stoic philosophy with an emphasis on recognizing that you as an individual are part of an interconnected logos and that you control the equanimity with which you accept everything that happens to you - up to and including death.

The main inspiration I get from Meditations is its form. The book consists of thoughts and reminders that the Roman emperor wrote for himself. It's repetitive and unstructured, with references to incidents meaningful only to him. He didn't set out to articulate a consistent philosophy but only to write notes to reinforce ideas that are easy to forget in the heat of living, such as the need to be patient with people who are "meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly" and the fact that "Alexander the Great and his mule driver both died and the same thing happened to both." Meditations remains popular because of its practical guidance, but I only agree with maybe half of its wisdom (mostly because I don't share the Stoic belief in a rational universe). On the other hand, I am inspired to start such a collection of my own.

A Meditations-type entry of my own:

• Consider the difference between water and jade.

This enigmatic statement triggers an entire train of thought for me about the nature of thought and reality, but would be completely obscure for most anyone else - especially if the works of the philosopher Hilary Putnam were lost.

The funniest thing about Meditations is how often Marcus Aurelius admonishes himself for being annoyed by other people:

The gods live forever and yet they don't seem annoyed at having to put up with human beings and their behavior throughout eternity. And not only put up with but actually care for them. And you - on the verge of death - you still refuse to care for them, although you're one of them yourself. (7.70)

People out for posthumous fame forget that the Generations To Come will be the same annoying people they know now. And just as mortal. What does it matter if they say x about you, or think y? (8.44)

I laughed on the very first page where he thanks his drawing instructor for teaching him "not to be obsessed with quail-fighting." This important lesson comes between his mother's "reverence for the divine" and his mentor's "recognition that I needed to train and discipline my character."

Let me finish my notes with a few more meaningful aphorisms:

Stop whatever you're doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore? (10.29)

People ask, "Have you ever seen the gods you worship? How can you be sure they exist?" Answer:... I've never seen my soul either. And yet I revere it. (12.28)

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita ** 1/2

I've seen The Master and Margarita on various lists of the best Russian novels, overlooked classics, and books with passionate cult followings.  It's a "fantastical, funny, and devastating satire of Soviet life... during the darkest days of Stalin's reign."

Books and movies can feel curiously strained when their comedy falls flat, and that was my experience with The Master and Margarita. The tone seemed off. We can question whether to lay some responsibility on the translation (from Pevear and Volokhonsky), but it can't shoulder the entire blame: the fantastical and satirical elements come from the story and structure not the language. In my view, the Jerusalem chapters are tangential and neither title character nor Woland/Satan has a clear motivation for their behavior - in short, I missed the point. Not even the smoothest prose is going to fix that.

P.E. Moskowitz, How to Kill a City ****

While describing the gentrification of four cities (New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York), Moskowitz shifts the focus from the gentrifiers to the displaced communities, from hipsters and bike shops to diverse working class residents and declining public services. Gentrification always comes at the expense of existing communities, even when gentrifiers move it to largely abandoned areas such as downtown Detroit.

Moskowitz makes a convincing case that gentrification is an inevitable consequence of neoliberal governance and rising property values, and that the process has accelerated since the 1980s as city governments have had to depend increasingly on maximizing land values (and property tax revenue) due to a severe decline in federal and state support. The gentrification of cities is the latest incarnation of the same process that lead to the development of post-war suburbs.

The author writes with a tone of righteous anger, which is justified even though I would prefer a more measured assessment of the systemic issues. I wish he had more to offer in the way of solutions; after spending a couple of hundred pages convincing me that it's an inevitable consequence of our current methods of governing, he has just four pages of traditional liberal policy suggestions. Throughout the book, as Moskowitz laments the deleterious impact of investment in troubled areas, I kept wondering about alternatives: How do we revitalize poor communities without triggering gentrification?

J.G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur *** 1/2

 The Siege of Krishnapur takes place in India during the Great Mutiny of 1857 but features no Indian characters. The story is told from the point of view of the English colonials at the isolated outpost, and for them the natives are merely the beneficiaries of their largesse. The leader of the output, Mr Hopkins aka the Collector, explicitly compares the locals to his children while speaking of his duty to control their lives. Each character has a distinctive view of how the British are improving India: by bringing them the trappings of civilization, infusing them with a spirit of rationalism, introducing them to Christianity or romanticism, setting an example of fortitude and decency. At dinner the men argue about whether their material or spiritual superiority is more important.

The subject matter is inexorably grim as the sepoys rise up against the British and conditions inside the output deteriorate due to diminishing food and supplies. The tone, however, is lightly comic; early on the characters are mocked for their blinkered world views and insistence on tradition, and the actual siege includes scenes of full-on farce. My favorite example of the latter was a battle during which the Padre, convinced that the uprising is a sign of Sin within the output, harangues George Fleury with evidence of God's design while Fleury incompetently loads the cannon and imagines how impressive he'll look in the daguerreotypes. There's also the time two young men try to scrape a cloud of cockchafer bugs off an unconscious woman's body:

Her body, both young men were interested to discover, was remarkably like the statues of young women they had seen ... The only significant difference ... was that Lucy had pubic hair; this caused them a bit of surprise at first. It was not something that had ever occurred to them as possible, likely, or even desirable.  "D'you think this is supposed to be here?" asked Harry.

Although the characters are drawn somewhat broadly as befits a satire, most of them do end up changed by their experiences. They question their earlier certainties.

 

Sam Anderson, Boom Town *** 1/2

Boom Town is a history of Oklahoma City told through the prism of its "purloined" basketball team (stolen from Seattle). The book includes many sardonically delivered anecdotes but is organized around three key elements: the city's founding during the Land Rush of 1889; the Thunder's playoff runs in 2012-2013; and its frequent tornadoes.

Anderson tries a bit too hard to draw parallels between these elements and to characterize the history as a tension between chaotic Booms and rational Process. He introduces compelling characters who shaped Oklahoma City but fails to provided a rounded portrait of how they accomplished their magic. Stanley Draper, for example, appears to have been a Robert Moses-type character who imposed his will on city planning, but it's not at all clear how he managed it. During the 1970s city leaders tore down most of downtown in thrall to a vision from I.M. Pei; Anderson paints a picture of a completely decimated city while other stories from the same time show continued activity there.

The book builds to a narrative climax with the bombing of the federal building in 1995. Anderson appropriately drains the sarcasm from his tone when describing this disaster, but undermines the seriousness of the moment by pairing it with a chapter about Russell Westbrook's injury in the 2013 playoffs.

Overall, Boom Town is an entertaining if superficial history that doesn't quite come together.

Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus ****

The many sources that call The Transit of Venus "one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century" say very little about its plot. You know why? Because there's nothing to it. It is a slow-developing love story with few dramatic incidents. Furthermore, Hazzard has an idiosyncratic writing style that piles on clauses and favors inanimate subjects. It shouldn't work; it should be a slog; but somehow it's great.

It's easy to see why her fellow writers gush about Hazzard: the book's success flows entirely from its stylistic effects, both the complex sentences that come at insights from an oblique angle and the "careful orchestrations of echo and rhythm" such as the repeated reports about how passersby would interpret the relationship between characters. Even I, as a casual reader, find myself wanting to read the book again to see how Hazzard pulls it off.

The Penguin Classics edition includes an insightful introduction from Lauren Groff.

Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House ****

I hesitated to buy this book despite its critical acclaim due to its subject matter: a memoir about an abusive lesbian relationship. I was eventually convinced by the intriguing idea that Machado tells her story through a variety of styles –– haunted house story, stoner comedy, noir, erotica, folktale.

The format wasn't exactly what I expected. The writing style remains fairly consistent throughout, lightly academic, without attempts to parrot genre styles. Machado does describe how her experiences with genres affects the way she interpreted her girlfriend's behavior and her own. She is very good (and honest) at capturing in-the-moment emotional responses, and most of the short chapters contain at least one insight.

In the Dream House was different than I expected, but compelling nonetheless.

Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union ***

 I love the idea of this book: a murder mystery taking place in an alternate reality where Jewish refugees from World War II were settled in Sitka Alaska rather than Israel. Detective action, social commentary, atmospheric location.

Alas, Chabon fails to blend the various components of this ambitious brew. The plot mostly fits together narratively, but Chabon isn't able to settle on a tone. A scene of hard-boiled slangy dialogue bumps up next to a broadly comic set piece followed by exposition about Jewish culture. Is our hero Meyer Landsman a flawed defender of moral justice (à la Marlowe) or a seriocomic bumbler (à la Clouseau)? How respectful are we intended to be toward the religious customs of the various Jewish sects?

I felt that Chabon wasn't vivid enough in describing life in his alternate world, either social life in the city or the natural environment. The Sitka District is about to revert to United States control (à la Hong Kong), but the stakes never feel high. I also felt that the scale of the nefarious plot underlying all of the action was a bit too world-historical to match the rest of the story.

Wallace Stegner, Marking the Sparrow's Fall ****

Wallace Stegner's great strength as a writer is his ability to describe landscapes, cultures, and history in terms that are vividly particular but also clearly related to a general thesis. He writes primarily about the American West, defined as everything west of the 100th meridian of longitude, which runs through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. This definition is not arbitrary but rather represents "the isohyetal line of twenty inches, beyond which the annual rainfall is less than the twenty inches normally necessary for unirrigated crops." In the course of these essays, Stegner shows how this one fact explains the distinctive flavor of the West, not just its topography but also its history, its politics, and its values.

The other key element that Stegner identifies is land. In "The Twilight of Self-Reliance," he provides a capsule history of the United States based on the premise that American values formed largely in response to the availability of free land in the New World, at a time when all land in Europe was claimed and held tightly. Much of our modern malaise began around the beginning of the 19th century when we exhausted the available land and our values no longer matched our society.

Put these two factors together –– low rainfall and the perceived value of working the land –– and you can see how the modern West was formed. Protecting watersheds becomes critical, lots of land can seem worthless for agriculture or indeed any productive use, resources are exploited in a boom then abandoned. Over 80% of Nevada is federal land.

I've read three other Stegner books, each of which I recommend strongly. Wolf Willow is a memoir of his childhood on a homestead in Saskatchewan. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is a biography of John Wesley Powell. Angle of Repose is a novel about a woman in the mining camps of Leadville Colorado. (I believe I read another of his novels, The Spectator Bird, but it has flown from my memory.)

Marking the Sparrow's Fall ends with a novella about cattlemen on the Saskatchewan prairie during the brutal winter of 1906. It is an immersive adventure story.

Alice Munro, Family Furnishings ****

Family Furnishings is a companion collection to Munro's Selected Stories. Selected Stories covers the years 1968 to 1994; Family Furnishings covers 1995 to her retirement in 2014.

The first stories in this collection find Munro at (what I consider) her peak, including a few stories from the book that first hooked me, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. I really enjoyed the stories from the books that preceded and followed that one. 

The stories in the second half of the book show Munro experimenting with different approaches. For example, "The View from Castle Rock" is an historical drama about a family emigrating from Scotland to Canada, and turns out to be the first of several stories/sketches drawing from her family's history. The most recent stories feature more dramatic and lurid events –– murders, sexual assaults –– compared to the more mundane and internal action of her earlier work. Some of them, such as "Dimensions," effectively demonstrate her talents; others, such as "Amundsen," suffer in comparison to other writers' work in a similar mode.

Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam ****

It is surprising how meaningful I find many of the essays in a book whose major theme is rehabilitating the reputation of John Calvin. As she does in her novel Gilead, Robinson presents an expansive worldview that speaks to me even though she uses explicitly Christian terms.

I propose that we look at the past again, because it matters, and because it has so often been dealt with badly. ... By definition it is all the evidence we have about ourselves, to the extent that it is recoverable and interpretable, so surely its complexities should be scrupulously preserved.

In many of her essays, Robinson notes how we have simplified or even misunderstood the import of the past, so that it fits smoothly into our story of progress. She demonstrates the value of returning to original sources in the interest of recovering the complexities.

The essays that address the denigration of (Calvinist) religion in the wider culture –– which is about half of them –– bristle in my copy with flagged passages, both for ideas and for colorful language.

This instinct [to feign incomprehension of unauthorized views] is so powerful that I would suspect it had survival value, if history or current events gave me the least encouragement to believe we are equipped to survive.

From the historically-focused essays I learned a lot about the influence of religious thinkers on American culture. The essay "Darwinism" makes a connection between the theory of evolution and neoliberal economics (both advocate for the liberation of "natural" forces) and argues forcefully against the inhumane harshness that follows from these views.

 

Julio Cortázar, The Winners ***

A cross-section of Buenos Aires society wins a cruise, with the details of the trip shrouded in mystery. What is the name of the ship? Where are they headed? Who are our fellow passengers? Why has the crew locked all doors leading to the stern?

The premise of The Winners suggests that a disquieting allegory along the lines of Blindness. However,  Cortázar downplays the thriller elements in favor of social satire. He uses the crew's strange behavior as a way to reveal the characters rather than as a puzzle to be solved. It's an allegory for sure, but it's also a MacGuffin. The epigraph from Dostoyevsky gives a clue about what Cortázar is up to:

What is an author to do with ordinary people, absolutely "ordinary," and how can he put them before his readers so as to make them at all interesting?

The story is full of contrasting pairs: two young unmarried couples, two confirmed bachelors unexpectedly drawn to female passengers, two boys who get sick, two schoolteachers, two crew members in the secret corridor, characters named Lopez and Lucio, Persio and Pelusa. These pairs cycle through variations of similar scenarios.

I suspect the translation of leaving something to be desired. There were several passages that felt like they might be more trenchant in the original Spanish.

Charles D'Ambrosio, Loitering ****

In my review of The Glorious American Essay, I said I preferred personal essays that "show off the writer's style and temper of mind as they meditate on a subject the reader may not have considered before." The essays in Loitering are exactly the kind of thing I had in mind.

D'Ambrosio states his goal in the preface:

My instinctive and entirely private ambition was to capture the conflicted mind in motion, or, to borrow a phrase from Cioran, to represent failure on the move, so leaving a certain wrongness on the page was OK by me. The inevitable errors and imperfections made the trouble I encountered tactile, bringing the texture of experience into the story in a way that being cautious never could.

D'Ambrosio's "temper of mind" tends toward loneliness and a distrust of nostalgia. His essays encourage a generous interpretation of people's lives, a recognition that "we are more intimately bound to one another by our kindred doubts than our brave conclusions."

I found the first three essays astonishing and beautiful. The pieces are arranged thematically without any indication of the chronology, so I can't say where the first three fit in the development of the author's style. They are properly positioned at the front of the book, because their lingering mood influences what I notice in the subsequent pieces.

Something of an aside: Loitering is the second book by an author unknown to me that I discovered while browsing at Half Price Books in Dublin; the first was my favorite discovery of last year, The Island of Second Sight.

Ben Lerner, The Topeka School ***

Lerner has an impressive if over-intellectualized writing style, and his books address subtle topics. For example, my review of his book 10:04 says: "I'd say it's about the interplay between art, memory, and personal identity."

Perhaps The Topeka School is simply too subtle for me. It contains Lerner's usual set pieces that work narratively and thematically, but this time they don't add up for me. I'd say it's about how language and communication collapse under pressure, and edge into violence. The central metaphor of the book is competitive high school debate, but Lerner doesn't convey the literal experience of that activity well enough for it to carry its analogical weight. In particular, "the spread" is a dominant concept that isn't explained clearly enough.

The chapters alternate between the points of view of three characters: Adam (the Lerner stand-in), his mother Jane, and his father Jonathan. The characters' voices are not distinctive enough: I sometimes found myself forgetting which character I was listening to.

The Topeka School feels more autobiographical than Lerner's other books do, even if the character names are changed. It includes incidents previously referred to in Leaving the Atocha Station. I imagine this book will be quite helpful to future students writing dissertations on Lerner's oeuvre. 

Conor Dougherty, Golden Gates *** 1/2

Golden Gates reports on the housing crisis facing most American cities, with particular attention to the San Francisco Bay Area. Dougherty explains the many factors that feed into the issue, and shows how competing interests make it difficult to solve or even ameliorate. The book has a good mix of policy discussion, political intrigue, and community stories, although it felt poorly organized, with in-the-weeds political reporting obscuring the larger issues under discussion.

The book got off to a strong start by presenting a point of view I'd never considered: housing advocates are representing the interests of potential new residents, who obviously have no vote since they don't yet exist. I was also interested to learn about how the interests of homeowners and renters align in some cases and diverge in others, and about why construction costs are so high.

Dougherty acknowledges different views on the complicated topics of affordable housing, subsides, rent control, and zoning, but ultimately comes down on the side of YIMBY activists and explains their position far better than he does any of the competing positions.

Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories ****

I knew Clarice Lispector by reputation as an avant-garde author from Brazil, without knowing much about the nature of her experimental approach. Many of her books were published in English during a renaissance about a decade ago, so I had plenty of options to choose from. I decided on the Complete Stories since it would give me a view of her entire career –– and manageable pieces if her experiments were too much for me.

It was the correct choice, I think. The chronological organization of the collection enables you to see Lispector's style developing, and I can identify the precise year when she lost me: 1971. 

From the beginning, Lispector had an odd depersonalized prose style that works surprisingly well with her interior stories about women undergoing personal transformations. For example, from the very first page:

Luisa remains motionless, sprawled atop the tangled sheets, her hair spread out on the pillow. An arm here, another there, crucified by lassitude.

It is Luisa who is "crucified by lassitude," but the phrase appears in a sentence with a couple of disembodied arms. In another story, a woman looks at herself in a mirror while a tram causes the room to shake: "Her eyes didn't leave themselves." A woman turning eighty-nine: "The birthday girl's facial muscles no longer expressed her, so no one could tell whether she was in a good mood."

I found many of the stories in the first half of the book unexpected and moving. In the stories from the 1970s, I felt the balance between her off-kilter style and the emotional content tipped too far toward the former.

I believe I will return to (the first half of) this book in the future. If I decide to pursue Lispector's novels, I'll definitely choose one of her earlier ones, such as Near to the Wild Heart or The Passion According to G.H.. 

Deirdre Mask, The Address Book ***

I picked up The Address Book in hopes of insights about how an address can reveal a lot about the person or business at that location -- consider a seven digit address compared to a two digit one, 14th Street versus Elm Avenue, Park Street as opposed to Park Avenue -- and what these patterns reveal about our society. However, the book took a wider and more superficial view of addresses.

Mask takes a discursive approach to the topic, following every tangent a little away. The chapter on street names in post-apartheid South African is largely a history of the period; much of the section about "block addressing" in Japan concerns the influence of their writing system; the chapter with Iran in the title spends more time in Ireland. The book contains fun tidbits about different countries' addressing practices but no sustained arguments.

Two key themes recur throughout the book.

• "House numbers were not invented to help you navigate the city or receive your mail, though they perform these two functions admirably. Instead, they were designed to make you easier to tax, imprison, and police."
• "Street names do more than describe; they commemorate. ... Arguing about street names has become a way of arguing about fundamental issues in our society at a time when doing so sometimes feels impossible."

These are some fairly weighty and fundamental societal tensions: between freedom and convenience and between different groups' vision of our history. Organizing the world's information, even when done with the best intentions, can be a tool of the status quo. Changing the names of streets (or schools or towns) can send a powerful signal. Mask mentions these topics in a breezy tone that belies their seriousness. I would have preferred a more focused discussion of "What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power" (per the subtitle).

Special Report: Author adopts my review!

Back in 2013 I read the true adventure story Fiva, about a pair of brothers attempting to climb a mountain in Norway. (The book was a Christmas gift from Evelyn.) I gave it a very positive review.

Recently, I was trying to get to this blog on my phone, and the Google search results included a page not from my site at all.

Gordon Stainforth, the author of Fiva, quotes my review on his own site!

Ruth Ware, The Turn of the Key ** 1/2

You might think that adding mystery on top of mystery would be an effective way to enhance suspense in a thriller, but The Turn of the Key proves otherwise. It features a haunted house in the Scottish highlands, creepy modern surveillance technology, a narrator with secrets, malicious children, a poison garden, parents with puzzling motives, and suspicious servants who appear at unexpected intervals. Rather than harmonizing into an atmosphere of dread, the various elements work against each other. What caused all of the lights and the loud music to turn on in the dead of night? Ghosts? Technical glitch? One of the kids? The housekeeper? A "butt dial" from the mother to the smart house? The surfeit of possible explanations makes each incident less creepy.

One additional explanation the reader needs to consider for some discrepancies is sloppy writing. The narrator talks about how the young and handsome handyman flustered her; four paragraphs later she is "shy for no reason I could pin down." A sign of an unreliable narrator or a missing editor? There are enough examples of sloppy writing (such as Rowan not putting her top back on after washing it [p 65]) to make it a real possibility.

Phillip Lopate (editor), The Glorious American Essay ***

I was attracted to this collection of "One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present" by its scope, with essays from 1726 through 2008, and its list of authors, a mix of the well known and the forgotten, of my favorites and those I know only by reputation.

Like nearly every essay collection, The Glorious American Essay starts with a preface defining the term. Lopate's inclusive definition ("I have taken the position of opening it to every type of beast") is the book's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. On the one hand, the collection includes sermons, (auto)biographical sketches, philosophical articles, book reviews, polemics––basically any non-fiction piece of appropriate length. On the other hand, this very eclecticism makes the anthology feel unfocused and random. Selections of historical importance such as Washington's farewell address appear alongside trifles like Edgar Allan Poe's "The Philosophy of Furniture," and Lopate's introductions are too brief to provide context. How do these selections collectively manifest the glory of the American essay?

Frankly, I would have preferred more traditional "familiar" essays, which show off the writer's style and temper of mind as they meditate on a subject the reader may not have considered before –– the kind of thing Lopate himself specializes in. (His essay "Against Joie de Vivre" is for me the epitome of the form.) Most of the pieces in this collection have strong writing, but relatively few of them show off the writer's personality or lead me to think about things in a different way. I was especially hoping to get a sense of character or style from writers I know mostly by name, such as Lewis Mumford, Adrienne Rich, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Paul Tillich. The oldest pieces show their age by making passionate arguments on long-settled topics such as equality of the sexes and races.

I was attracted to the book by the wide time horizon and unread authors, yet my favorites turned out to be written in my lifetime by authors who have impressed me before: Wallace Stegner's "The Twilight of Self-Reliance" and Marilynne Robinson's "Puritans and Prigs." I was struck by images from various nature writers: J Hector St John de Crevecoeur hunting bees, John Muir climbing a tree in a wind storm, Loren Eiseley empathizing with the mouse burrowing into his houseplants. Herman Melville's recommendation of Mosses from an Old Manse was fervent enough for me to add Hawthorne to my reading list.

This 900-page anthology contains thought-provoking ideas and images at regular intervals, but few sustained classics. What to do with a book like this? I can imagine wanting to return to, say, Eudora Welty's description of Ida M'Toy's secondhand clothing shop or Audubon's account of the massive flocks of passenger pigeons, but how would I wade through the less engaging pages? There are too many items to copy out into a highlights document; too few to justify reading the heavy tome again. These fine ideas and images are going to fade from my experience, aren't they? That is the fate of nearly all my reading (and IRL events!) as the past gets buried under the constant press of new material.

Jenny Offill, Weather **** 1/2

Written in the same epigrammatic style as Dept. of Speculation, Weather tells the story of a woman who comes to appreciate the gravity of the issue of climate change but doesn't know what to do beyond being anxious about it. Shouldn't she do something about it, just like she should do something more to support her son's advancement and her own success? The election of 2016 adds another layer of unfocused anxiety.

There is a period after every disaster in which people wander around trying to figure out of it is truly a disaster. Disaster psychologists use the term "milling" to describe most people's default actions when they find themselves in a frightening new situation.

The book is filled with pithy and hilarious nuggets, and it's a quick read. It does a great job of capturing the feeling that we are supposed to be doing more -- "what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls." I lost the thread a bit in the final pages.

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing ***

The subtitle of this book is "Resisting the Attention Economy," which sounds like it could be a screed against Facebook and Twitter with a prescription to opt out of the capitalist system. Odell certainly does lament that social media companies profit from encouraging our natural tendency for a short attention span. Her remedy, however, is not to head back to nature or retreat to a meditation center; in fact, she has a chapter about how retreat is impossible. Instead she encourages us to "refuse in place" and be more intentional about our attention. Paying closer and more prolonged attention to our surroundings is rewarding in itself, and is a prerequisite for meaningful action.

I find that I'm looking at my phone less these days. It's not because I went to an expensive digital detox retreat, or because I deleted any apps from my phone, or anything like that. I stopped looking at my phone because I was looking at something else, something so absorbing I couldn't turn away.

The most distinctive thing about How to Do Nothing is that Odell's examples of refocusing attention are not spiritual or political but artistic. She is an artist herself and so her touchpoints come from other (mostly contemporary) artists. Art often seeks to redirect your attention or shift the context of your perception, which is exactly what Odell believes we all need to do on a regular basis.

Random fun fact: The next book on my shelf is Weather by Jenny Offill. What are the odds of reading two books in a row by different authors named Jenny O___ll?

Brian Freeman, Thief River Falls ***

The epitome of a three-star thriller. Thief River Falls is a competently written page-turner composed of all the modern trappings of the genre: A psychologically damaged protagonist; a boy in danger who recovers his memory of a traumatic event at exactly the pace required by the plot; a villain in a position of power; unexpected relationships; and, since it's a 21st-century thriller, clues that everything is not as it seems.

The final twist provides some justification for a vice I have long complained about: that characters make intuitive leaps about what's going on based on very little evidence and are invariably right. 

Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit ****

When I read Michael J. Sandel's book Justice ten years ago*, I was particularly struck by an idea that Sandel attributed to John Rawls: "differences of talent are as morally arbitrary as differences of class." It's no more fair to reward people based on their intelligence or character than it is to reward them based on their social class or family; all of it is outside of the individual's control. The Tyranny of Merit expands on this idea to explore the issues inherent in a meritocracy, even a well functioning one.

The first few chapters lay out the argument that a meritocracy inevitably leads to hubris on the part of those who succeed and resentment/humiliation on the part of those who do not. The idea that a meritocracy rewards people based on their merits is seductive, because it implies that (a) we have a great deal of control over our own success and (b) that we deserve our rewards. However, it also implies that less successful people have less merit and that their lack of success is due to personal shortcomings. For blue collar workers, the loss of social esteem is at least as problematic as falling behind financially.

Sandel notes that both "the center-left and center-right" aspire to meritocracy, differing only in their recipes for achieving it. He connects this fact with the rise in technocratic governance, in which political figures argue about logistical implementation (which can theoretically be judged objectively) rather than civic values (which cannot), and with the increased emphasis on education. The way in which we overvalue a college education and tell displaced workers to train for other jobs reminded me of James Rebank's reaction to being characterized as an underachiever in The Shepherd's Life.

The book's subtitle is "What's Become of the Common Good?" but I don't think Sandel really addresses this question. The policy prescriptions of the later chapters are much weaker than his analysis of the issues. He calls for us to have humility about the role of grace or chance in our place in society, to respect the contributions of our fellow citizens, and to revive public discussion of what constitutes success. Great suggestions all, but Sandel doesn't offer a compelling vision of how we get there.

* In recognition of how frequently I think about ideas from Justice, I hereby retroactively award that book a fifth star.

Alice Munro, Selected Stories *** 1/2

The highest rated book from my 2020 reading was an Alice Munro story collection, so why not start 2021 with an overview of her early career? Selected Stories covers Munro's first few decades, with stories from the 1960s through the 1990s in roughly chronological order.

Even the earliest stories are accomplished, but they become more ambitious over time. It is interesting to see Munro's development. Stories from the same time often share the same narrative strategies; for example, stories from the mid 80s start and end with the narrator describing their relationship with their parents then flash back to a story from when the parents were young.

Munro writes classic New Yorker-style stories," which I recently heard characterized as "a tale in which nothing much happens to one or more not especially interesting people until it all ends on a note of melancholy ambiguity." What makes her work distinctive is how the key moments arrive obliquely relative to the main story. For example, "The Moons of Jupiter" is about the narrator's father, but the epiphany (for me anyway) comes when the narrator starts withdrawing her tenderness from her daughter with leukemia. Munro is like an illusionist, misdirecting our attention in order to spring a surprise.