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.