Kirsten Bakis, Lives of the Monster Dogs ***

Start with a riff on Frankenstein, with a nineteenth century mad scientist creating creatures who escape and ponder the meaning of their existence. Add Animal Farm-style social commentary, with a race of enhanced animals rising against their oppressors. Finish with a soupçon of satire about celebrity culture. Whip it into a frenzy that ends with a decadent three-week party, madness, and explosions.

Part One of Lives of the Monster Dogs sets up the bizarre scenario nicely with a touch of gothic atmosphere despite its 21st century urban setting. Part Two focuses on the monster dog revolution and hints at racial commentary. Part Three goes off the rails and fails to follow up on the promise of the first two parts. The book sets itself up as an allegory but doesn't have anything new to say.

Patrick O'Brian, The Yellow Admiral ***

The end is nigh. The Yellow Admiral is number 18 of the 20½ volume Aubrey-Maturin series. Naval officers are beginning to lament the lack of advancement opportunities associated with the imminent end of the Napoleonic Wars.

The story starts ashore with a Tolstoyan discussion of land-use policies in nineteenth-century England. Jack Aubrey prevents the inclosure of the commons near his estate. Unfortunately this success leads to complications when the admiral for Jack's next assignment is the uncle of his opponent in that dispute.

The Yellow Admiral illustrates O'Brian's talent for relevant but oblique titles. Aubrey spends the entire book concerned about being "yellowed" -- promoted to admiral without a squadron to command -- but his concern is an undercurrent that doesn't directly relate to the plot. The book also illustrates that the publisher W.W. Norton is not worried about spoilers. The summary on the back cover says "Aubrey receives an urgent dispatch ordering him to Gibraltar: Napoleon has escaped from Elba." This event happens more than halfway down the very last page!

Reihan Salam, Melting Pot or Civil War? ***

Reihan Salam was the conservative voice at Slate for a while, and I always found his pieces to be insightful and well-reasoned. Melting Pot or Civil War? is about immigration reform, a subject about which I would very much like to hear insightful and well-reasoned proposals; it's the source of wild rhetoric from right and left even though both sides agree we need reform.

Salam comes at the question of immigration from a unique angle. In his view, low-skill immigrants who come to the United States for work are typically better off than they would be in their home countries even if we pay them poverty-level wages. So you could make the moral argument that we should let in as many immigrants as our job market can support. However, our moral commitment is different to the children of those immigrants. They are American citizens who should not be forever stuck in low-wage ghettos. In the current environment, though, children of poor immigrants are exceedingly unlikely to rise very far. We need to limit low-skill immigration not because immigrants are stealing native workers' jobs (they mostly aren't) but because we can't adequately provide their children with the American dream.

I applaud the moral seriousness with which Salam takes the plight of immigrants and his acknowledgement that much of the rhetoric about immigration is not based in fact. His "what about the children?" argument is thoughtful, but ultimately a red herring I think. I would have liked more evidence for the claim that 21st century immigration is qualitatively different from early 20th century immigration.

The book wasn't as tightly presented as Salam's journalistic pieces. Several of its most interesting tidbits are not well integrated into the final argument. Thankfully, though, the tone doesn't fall to the level of its sensationalistic title.

V.S. Pritchett, The Pritchett Century ***

You see them in your grandmother's house or in model homes that aspire to class up their libraries. Faux-leather-bound books with the names of vaguely remembered authors in gold lettering on the spine: Horace, Trollope, Richardson, Bellow. In its musty pages you find a collection of poems, biographical excerpts, chapters from novels, and essays from defunct periodicals. V.S. Pritchett is a well-respected mid-century author that no one reads anymore, and The Pritchett Century is just this kind of miscellany collection, with short stories, autobiography, literary criticism, and excerpts from novels. The title derives from the fact that Pritchett was born in 1900 and died in 1997.

Pritchett has a clear smooth prose style. He is best known for his stories, many of which get their drama from a narrator slowly coming to realize that his assumptions about another character are wrong. For example, in "When My Girl Comes Home" a woman returns home after the Second World War and her family and friends believe she suffered hardship overseas; they have a hard time adjusting as the real story of her time away contradicts the picture they've had of her.

The autobiographical sections were entertaining, especially his childhood visits to Yorkshire, and it was fun to spot the details that made their way into the stories. His travel pieces and literary criticism seemed insightful, although they were often about places or authors I don't know well.

Overall, The Pritchett Century was a reminder of the many fine authors who once enjoyed a substantial (and deserved) reputation but are drifting out of fashion. Not just Pritchett himself, but also several of the writers he discusses: Walter Scott, Tobias Smollett, George Meredith, Saul Bellow, S.J. Perelman.

Martin Amis, Time's Arrow *** 1/2

Time's Arrow recounts a man's life in reverse, starting at his death in the early 1990s and ending with his birth in the 1920s. The man is a doctor; the narrator is an ill-defined consciousness (with a wide vocabulary) that has access to the doctor's feelings but not his thoughts. The narrator knows the doctor has a secret in his "past" that causes him some anguish, but has to wait until the past arrives to learn what it is.

The backwards time gimmick is fascinating and sometimes comic. At restaurants, the waiter brings a dirty plate to the table, which the diner slowly fills with food taken from his or her mouth; before leaving, they reminisce about the meal by reading the dishes from the menu. The doctor treats patients by introducing injuries, after which the patient timidly knocks on the door before leaving. The less said about using the bathroom the better.

One notable thing about the reverse chronology is that most of the changes are positive. The doctor gets younger and stronger over time, the air gets cleaner, and people are less traumatized after calamities than they were before (i.e. after) them. The story is journey from corruption to innocence.

Things take a serious turn as World War II approaches with the doctor's (somewhat predictable) secret. In reverse, the Holocaust is a miraculous process of conjuring Jewish lives from the air and dust.

I read Time's Arrow immediately after Evelyn did, like a private book club. She really enjoyed the first half, especially for its comic effect and slowly improving world, but felt like she didn't understand the ending. Her major complaint was that Amis never explains who the narrator is or how he ends up associated with the doctor. She waited in vain for that secret to be revealed.

I wasn't as concerned about the nature of the narrator, but I too struggled to understand what Amis was trying to say. He sees most human activity as corrupting, and is saying something about the relationship between morality and cause-and-effect. I appreciated the effect of the reverse perspective and the big ideas that the story makes us ponder, but ultimately I couldn't tell whether Amis' ideas about destiny, morality, and humanity are subtle or muddled.

P.S. This analysis from the Time's Arrow chapter in the book Understanding Martin Amis attempts to answer Evelyn's question about the provenance of the narrator.

William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis *****

Nature's Metropolis is a history of the relationship between Chicago and the rural areas to its west during the nineteenth century. Its primary thesis is that you can't understand one without the other.

No city played a more important role in shaping the landscape and economy of the mid-continent during the second half of the nineteenth century than Chicago. Conversely, one cannot understand the growth of Chicago without understanding its special relationship to the vast region lying to its west. ... The central story of the nineteenth-century West is that of an expanding metropolitan economy creating ever more elaborate and intimate linkages between city and country.

In other words, the nature of the landscape around Chicago shaped its development as a city, and Chicago's development shaped the landscape around it. Wisconsin has dairy farms and Iowa has cornfields because of business decisions made in Chicago.

It sounds like a dry subject perhaps, but I was fascinated by the interplay of natural and social forces, intentional and unexpected consequences, that defined the course of history. Chicago's founders thought their city would be the gateway to the west because of its "natural advantage" of being near the divide between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds, but ultimately its biggest advantage (over St Louis) was that its main Eastern trading partner (New York) wanted its supply lines to be to its north because its main rivals were to its south. There was also the Civil War, which cut St Louis off from its main trading partner New Orleans.

The heart of the book covers the three major commodities that flowed through Chicago: grain, lumber, and meat. In these stories too there are intentional and unexpected consequences. The coming of the railroad had its expected major impact; the invention of the automated grain elevator unexpectedly shifted the entire economy.

My discovery of Nature's Metropolis is an advertisement for the value of used book stores. I came across it at The Book Exchange, a used book store in Ashland Oregon. It seems unlikely I would ever have seen it at any other place. 

Otessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation *** 1/2

I picked up My Year of Rest and Relaxation based on my admiration for Otessa Moshfegh's writing style and the hilarious cover art. The narrator is a privileged young woman who feels an emptiness in her life. She decides to hibernate for a year in her apartment under the influence of a dangerous combination of drugs, in hopes of emerging as a new person.

Moshfegh very effectively conveys the narrator's emotional attachments, which the narrator denies having. Her relationships with her (dead) parents and her friend Reva are touching even through the haze of her cynicism and depression. The book maintains an ironic "control of distance" between the narrator's point of view and the reader's, similar to what Jane Austen does in Emma (as famously described by the critic Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction).

However, I did sometimes grow tired of the repetitiveness of the narrator's actions. Wake up, go to the neighborhood bodega, watch Whoopi Goldberg movies on VHS, take a wild combination of drugs, fall asleep. As I did when reading Eileen, I felt like Moshfegh could have tightened up the story.

The story takes place from mid-2000 until September 11, 2001. What's the significance of that?