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.