Daniel Mason, North Woods ****

The main character in North Woods in a plot of land in the forests of western Massachusetts. Each chapter tells the story of the occupants of the land, starting with lovers who flee a Puritan colony and including non-human protagonists such as a catamount, a scolytid beetle, and invasive plants. There are murders, abductions, sibling rivalry, artists, ghosts, a con man, a schizophrenic, stories told in a variety of styles from poetry to conference lecture. It's an enjoyable amalgam whose theme is ecological succession.

The only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.

 

Ian McEwan, The Innocent ****

When Evelyn and I visited England in 1990, tube stations and bus panels were filled with advertisements for Ian McEwan's new novel The Innocent. It seemed unusual for a book to get so much attention, and in one of my then favorite genres (spy novel). I was excited, but had to wait nearly a year for the book to appear in paperback in the United States.

The Innocent follows a young Englishman assigned to a secret project in the classic espionage setting of 1955 Berlin. A joint American-British team is digging a tunnel into the Russian zone in order to tap their telephone lines. Our hero needs to learn his role and navigate the competing loyalties of his co-workers. He starts an affair with a German woman whose motives we readers are more skeptical about than he is.

The espionage is well handled, although spy novel aficionados might feel there's too much distracting romance. The story takes a genre-shifting turn about two-thirds of the way through, but the twist felt organic rather than a gimmick.

A very entertaining genre novel.

Daniel Brook, A History of Future Cities *** 1/2

A History of Future Cities tells the stories of four cities that were deliberately designed to bring modernity to a self-consciously per-modern society: St Petersberg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai. All four of these cities are Asian, and they all adopted European models of modernity, so Brook characterizes them as being "purposely dis-orient-ed."

The history of each city is fascinating. I was particularly taken with the story of Peter the Great working incognito as a shipbuilder in Amsterdam, earning his carpentry certificate and determining which aspects of Dutch success to import to Russia. He had his forces capture a Swedish seaport and built St Petersberg.

Making connections between the four histories is left largely to the reader. Brook explains his premise in the introduction but leaves his arguments implicit during the narratives. I enjoyed discovering the similarities in how the cities developed but would have liked to hear how Brook interprets the variations. For example, St Petersberg and Dubai were created by their rulers while Shanghai and Mumbai were colonization projects; how does this difference affect their development?

The book raises two main questions:

• Is "modernization" equivalent to "Westernization"?
• Can traditional societies and authoritarian regimes modernize without losing their traditions or power?

Brook does not attempt to answer these tough and still-relevant questions.

Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World ****

Bringley worked for a decade as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He took the job as a form of therapy after the death of his brother. "Could there really be this loophole by which I could drop out of the forward-marching world and spend all day tarrying in an entirely beautiful one?"

All the Beauty in the World offers sketches of the art treasures in the Met and the day-to-day work of its guards. It captures the contemplative balm that Bringley sought without becoming too metaphysical or pretentious. The author responds to art emotionally even as he learns about the artists. The vast range of art in the Met hints at the breadth of human experience, as does the diversity of the guard staff; the insider's details about the job ground it all in daily life.

It sure made me long for an unhurried visit to an art museum!

I experienced the great beauty of the picture even as I had no idea what to do with that beauty. I couldn't discharge the feeling by talking about it––there was nothing much to say. What was beautiful in the painting was not like words, it was like paint––silent, direct, and concrete, resisting translation even into thought. As such, my response to the picture was trapped inside me, a bird fluttering in my chest.

Catherine Lacey, Biography of X ***

Biography of X presents itself as a biography of a controversial artist named X whose work encompasses music, literature, film, painting, and performance art. The author is X's widow, who starts the project to rescue X's legacy from a bestselling hack biography.

X was best known for embodying numerous personae that rendered her true self unknowable even to those closest to her. Her widow tracks down the truth of her birth: X was born in and escaped from the Southern Territory, the theocratic region that split from the Northern and Western Territories in 1945 before Reunification in 1989. Yes, X's story plays out in an alternate reality.

I applaud Lacey's ambition. I wish, though, that the book more closely resembled an actual biography. We don't start with enough information about X or her work to know why we want to read about her. The "author" (X's widow) foregrounds her adventures while researching the book rather than X's life and times. X comes across as an unpleasant character with none of the charisma that would attract her many admirers.

I read one of Lacey's previous books several years ago. It too dealt with the splintering of one's social presentation, and it too felt overly ambitious. To quote myself: "I felt like there was too much going on, too many unusual situations without a realistic platform to view it from."

One aspect of Lacey's alternate reality is that since "the Painters' Massacre of 1943 ... [in which] Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jackson Pollock" were killed, the art world is dominated by women. In our world, it used to be said that all of the ambitious writers were male; David Foster Wallace called them "the Great Male Narcissists who’ve dominated postwar American fiction."  Reading Biography of X soon after Creation Lake and Kairos, I feel like we have plenty of women taking on the big themes.

John Szwed, Cosmic Scholar *** 1/2

Cosmic Scholar is a biography of Harry Smith, the mysterious polymath best known (to me anyway) as the compiler behind the influential Anthology of American Folk Music. He was an anthropologist and experimental filmmaker hovering around the edges of the avant-garde art scene. He was "always broke, generally intoxicated, compulsively irascible," and surviving on the generosity of his friends such as Allen Ginsberg.

Smith (1923 - 1991) was a downtown New York characters whom everyone in the artistic demimonde seemed to recognize and loan money to, but few people knew more than one facet of his interests. He was a pack rat who loved to collect things –– obscure records, Seminole patchwork clothing, paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter Eggs. He fascinated friends with his wide-ranging abstruse knowledge. He sought insight by seeing patterns in his collections. In his art he attempted to bridge modalities, with paintings based on jazz recordings and films incorporating folk art. He spent a decade making a film that he hoped would be understandable to every human culture.

Cosmic Scholar makes stimulating connections between anthropology and modernist art (as attempts to understand alternate worldviews), and illustrates the fine line between mental illness and artistic genius. The author Szwed does an excellent job of presenting an overarching artistic vision that links all of Smith's diverse obsessions. He is less successful at capturing Smith's personality. People describe Smith as charming and temperamental, but we rarely hear what this translates to in practice.

Harry Smith reminded me of "Professor Seagull" Joe Gould from Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel. Szwed notices the similarity as well.

Gould managed to survive as long as he did by entertaining [Greenwich] Village people with his bizarre and antic behavior on the streets, in bars, and at parties that he crashed. ... Harry Smith is sometimes unjustly included among such colorful Village failures. But he, in contrast, succeeded at much of what he attempted.

I think it's entirely fair to compare Gould and Smith, and that it's arguable whether Smith succeeded. Both of them did field work with Native American tribes, befriended modernist artists, struggled with alcoholism, spent time in mental institutions, and pursued impossibly ambitious projects (Gould's Oral History of Our Time; Smith's Materials for the Study of the Religion and Culture of the Lower East Side).  I would say that Smith lived the kind of life that everyone assumed Gould was living.

Smith was awarded a special Grammy in 1991. He brought five kittens with him because he wanted them to experience the ceremony. When he accepted the award, he left the kittens in the care of the parapsychologist he had invited along as his guest.

Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake ***

I started Creation Lake with high hopes, so high that I bought the hardcover on its publication day. I had been impressed with the memorable scenes and thematic depth of Kushner's earlier book The Flamethrowers, but felt that it lacked narrative drive. Creation Lake promised to address this shortcoming with an espionage plot: an American woman infiltrates a group of French climate activists.

Alas, Creation Lake doesn't use espionage to generate suspense; instead, it uses it to explore more cerebral questions of personal identity and responsibility. The balance between action and reflection is tilted decidedly toward the latter. The narrator Sadie Smith doesn't meet her surveillance target Pascal Balmy until page 146, by which time we have heard more about the crackpot theories of Pascal's mentor than about her assignment. 

My favorite image in the book comes early. Sadie is driving from Marseille to the rural French district where Pascal's group lives:

I was on toll roads, pulling over to drink regional wines in highway travel centers, franchised and generic, with food steaming under orange heat lamps... I sampled these wines from the vantage of plastic seating overlooking fuel pump and highway. I sipped rosé from the Luberon at a clammily air-conditioned Monop' off the A55, a chaotic place where children screeched and a haggard woman dragged a dirty mop over the floor. The rosé was delicate and fruity, crisp as ironed linen. I found a Pécharmant from the oldest vintner in Bergerac at the L'Arche Cafeteria on the autoroute A7, a wine that was woody with notes of ambergris and laurel and maybe dried apricot.

I love the contrast between the industrial setting and the rich human experience, and I appreciate how the scene reflects the theme of modernity vs traditional ways of living. Another vivid image occurs about halfway through the book as Sadie walks home from the group's commune:

It was seven p.m. and the hottest part of the day, the peak temperature spike, at least forty degrees Celsius, maybe 105 in Fahrenheit, and by any measure hot as balls. Up ahead, something dropped from above and landed on the road. It was a snake. Snakes in heat waves don't coil up on tree trunks. They sleep hanging down from a branch; it's a tactic for staying cool...

I walked in the middle of the road, instead of the shade of overhanging trees, in order to avoid falling snakes.

Kushner regularly offers these kinds of meaningful images alongside her sophisticated themes. However, Creation Lake reinforces my impression that she's not great at plotting.