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?

Annie Lowrey, Give People Money *** 1/2

I am fascinated by the idea of a universal basic income (UBI), an unconditional cash transfer given to everyone. I have a lot of questions about how we could make it work in practice, but the concept serves as a basis for deeply satisfying thought experiments. Considering it as an alternative to our existing social welfare programs exposes the assumptions that underlay the existing system. For example, many people immediately recoil from the idea of a UBI because undeserving people would benefit from it or because poor people would squander it. What does it mean to "deserve" benefits? Would poor people really squander their cash?

Give People Money promised to be "the best study yet of the world's experiences with UBI." However, it is remarkably light on details about the various experiments that have been tried around the world (aside from some unexpected technical glitches in India). Each chapter talks about a social/economic issue that we face today -- technological unemployment, misdirected charity, the unfair distribution of paid and unpaid work, systemic racism -- and asks us to consider how a UBI could "disrupt" the issue. I appreciated the book for looking at the possibilities of a UBI from angles I hadn't considered before, but Lowrey is much better at presenting the issues than at making a convincing case for how UBI might solve it. Lowrey also notes that the idea is attractive to people across the political spectrum from libertarians to socialists, but she almost exclusively presents the liberal arguments.

The argument for a UBI that came through clearest to me is how equitable it would be. Our current means-tested programs attempt to assess what a population needs and the situations in which they deserve help, and they inevitably miss the mark about the needs and discriminate in unfair ways. Giving people money, rather than food stamps or housing vouchers, enables them to spend it in a way that works for their specific situation.

I don't expect the United States to ever implement a UBI. But I think the idea can be a valuable tool when designing social safety net programs. How and why is the proposed program better than just giving people money?  

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities ***

In a One Thousand and One Nights type of scenario, Marco Polo tells the emperor Kublai Khan about cities he has seen during his travels across Khan's empire. The descriptions are allegorical and attempt to convey what the cities feel like rather than what they look like. Each one runs about a page and a half, written in a style that splits the difference between prose and poetry.

It's an enjoyable, dream-like book that gets three stars for being almost exactly what I expected.

Donald Antrim, The Emerald Light in the Air ****

Based on my previous experience with Mr Antrim (The Verificationist), I expected The Emerald Light in the Air to be a collection of Donald Barthelme-style surrealistic stories. The first story, "An Actor Prepares," seemed to confirm that expectation: it was a disappointing comic romp about a college professor with outlandish ideas about how to stage a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

But then something surprising happened. The rest of the stories are fairly conventional accounts of couples struggling to maintain relationships in the face of their personal baggage. The characters are unpleasant people for the most part, but I found them strangely endearing. The stories were love stories along the lines of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Patrick O'Brian, The Commodore ****

My enjoyment of a book in the Aubrey-Maturin series is typically proportional to the amount of seafaring adventure it contains, and inversely proportional to the amount of time the characters spend ashore. The first half of The Commodore takes place in England, and the only sea battle takes place in the closing pages, so you would expect me to find it one of the weaker entries. However, it feels like O'Brian has taken a leap forward in his ability to engage me with the character-driven material. People have compared O'Brian to Jane Austen (who was writing during the time these books take place), but this is the first time I've understood the comparison.

Aubrey's mission in The Commodore is to disrupt the slave trade off the west coast of Africa. It provided a unique perspective on the trade, although the exposition was particularly overt. "I have no experience in this area," says Aubrey, "so pray, Mr Whewell, be so kind as to tell me all about it."