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Joe Kraus

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Earthcore Audiobook By Scott Sigler cover art

Thrilling Heart of this Diminished By Predictable

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 02-28-20

A couple things first: I’m not a thriller guy, and I generally have little patience for flat, unrealized characters – especially when some of those characters’ personalities are pivotal for the plot points.

Also, I picked this one up because it was on sale and because one review I saw ticked me off: someone complained that this was a bad book because, since some of the characters in it were supposed to be affiliated with Brigham Young University, they would never use the profane language that many do. That seemed so uncharitable a reading, that I got sympathetic.

I nearly put this down after the first 30 or so pages, though, because it felt formulaic out of the gate.

Then, in what I can only describe as a pleasant surprise, I enjoyed the next 80 percent of it. I enjoyed it a lot.

Sigler has a couple successful gimmicks here, and I both enjoyed reading them and am glad to have them in my back pocket as strategies for writing compelling fiction.

First, he gives us a wide range of perspectives here. While I don’t think any of the characters get far beyond caricature, they’re still clearly defined. And, in their differences, we get contours to the situation I wouldn’t have expected. No character has a full sense of what’s going on, so we get a lot of dramatic irony, a lot of our knowing what the characters don’t know and therefore sensing their peril before they do.

Second, there’s a deep mystery at the literal core of this, and Sigler takes more than his time in revealing it. We get all sorts of clues, but none suggest a whole. It’s a good, sustained tease, amplified by the fact that we get information from so many different characters’ perspectives.

All in all, it’s about capturing the thrill of the slow reveal, and I got it. The genre made sense to me, and I started to think I might want to read more of this Sigler guy.

All that said, this takes a substantial dive toward the end. What’s mostly a satisfying mystery for the first three quarters gets revealed all too clearly at the end. [SPOILER: it turns out the hundreds of ton platinum mound they’re trying to mine is actually an ancient spaceship guarded by the devolved heirs of a once-interstellar crew.] That answer is modestly clever, but it’s less fun than the uncertainty. When we couldn’t know what the gang was up against, it was pleasantly compelling to learn more. Once they have all the answers, this becomes a kind of underground Poseidon Adventure, a group of survivors trying to get to the surface.

The final 30 or so pages are especially disappointing. Two characters who have expressed a passing romantic interest in each other suddenly become a couple whose love inspires another to sacrifice himself for their survival. Another, an anthropologist who’s spent her life studying the aliens, decides she’ll try to exterminate them. (Why? It seems gratuitously apocalyptic.)

And then, and I almost sniffed it, we get a further warping of our characters and their motivations in the service of a predictable sequel set-up. We don’t even need those characters to commit to revenge. (And what do they want to avenge? They’re hardened killers who’ve survived – and who are permanently injured anyway, so less able to accomplish much in the hand-to-hand mode they propose.)

Sigler has an impressive lack of sentimentality, and he kills many more characters than he allows to live. (In fact, he kills off almost everyone.) Given that, it seems all the less necessary for him to have an epilogue in which our last two standing vow to keep going. Why not invent a whole new cast of characters in the next book and have them interrogate our survivors? That’s a slower way to get at the same place, and Sigler is definitely at his best when he’s teasing rather than explaining.

So, while I absolutely enjoyed this more than I expected, the end does disappoint. What feels for most of this like a welcome exception to a genre that rarely satisfies me turns into something too predictably bound by the rules of that genre to change my mind about it.

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The Iliad Audiobook By Homer, Caroline Alexander - translator cover art

The Horror and Perverse Glory of War

Overall
5 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
5 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 02-24-20

I read a striking review of the recent film, 1917, that proposed the idea that war films are always, by necessity, pro-war. The argument went something like this (and I regret I can’t remember the author or location): even when we condemn war, we give it a stage. And war, whatever else it does, commands our attention. Staging it at all gives it the oxygen it needs to seize our imaginations. (In that way, it’s a little like Donald Trump. Even hatred and mockery of him have a strange way of reinforcing his status as the eye of the storm that’s sweeping the country.)

In any case, while I found myself thinking of many things as I listened to this new translation and its stunning performance (by Dominic Keating), I kept circling back to that idea.

On the one hand, I think it’s fair to say that The Iliad is fundamentally damning of war. It is endlessly bloody, but it spends much more of its narrative energy mourning death – or celebrating the living who are about to die – than it does on actual fighting prowess.

The poetry here is far more inspired when it talks of the pain and waste of death. We get the haunting repeated phrases of “and darkness took him,” “death unstrung his limbs,” or “and then he tasted of the earth.” In contrast, the killing itself is more clinical and engineered, something like, he pierced him in the place where the neck meets the shoulder. (I can’t recall specifics which I take as evidence, even if tautological: it’s less poetic so I can’t remember it.)

In the same way, while this is clearly often concerned with glory and who gets it, we hear such concerns from the mouths of the characters rather than from our ongoing narrative voice. True, our narrator records what others say of glory, but the voice itself allows one or another ‘blowhard’ to speak but spends its own energy lamenting the great losses. It’s heartbreaking to get capsule biographies of one disposable character after another who grew up beside a river with plenty of cattle and grains and who then fell below Ajax’s spear, or Achilles’s, or Hector’s, or Sarpedon’s, or Diomedes’s, or the list goes on.

And, finally, the entire narrative here is largely one of failure. We begin with the birth of Achilles’s anger at having his prize concubine taken from him by Agamemnon. And we end only after, having killed Hector, he finds his anger cooling in the face of Priam’s pleading for Hector’s body to be returned. The larger story of which this is part may glorify the conflict, but this slice of it records only pointless anger. Achilles hardly cares about the return of Briseus, and Priam, who has risked his life and what’s left of his city, does no more than bring back his son’s body. There’s no glory, no point to the immense loss of life and opportunity for peaceful occupation.

It's really just, as the opening line promises, the song of Achilles anger – which, when we account for the hyperbole of the whole (I mean, how many men can really be “god-like”) – is nothing more than a temper tantrum. Here, at the dawn of Western literature, we have more concern for the emotional fragility of a warrior than for the military accomplishments of that warrior.

To get back to my original question, then, I think this is a work that sets out to condemn war as fully as possible.

For all that, though, this somehow perversely celebrates it too. I’d forgotten the exact range of the story itself. I kept waiting for the death of Achilles, which doesn’t come in the Iliad itself. I wanted a military solution to the drama even when it wasn’t there. And, strangely, I remember it that way.

In other words, despite what this great work of literature is, despite it’s clear – at least as I see it – anti-war sentiment, it can’t help celebrating war for the way it brings the emotions of war (even the trivial emotions) to the fore.

How many subsequent works have looked to Achilles or Hector to celebrate victory or glory? I can’t count them any more easily than I can count all the deaths here. Still, though, it seems the memory of this work has kept alive the idea, the perverse appeal of war, for all it set out to do to condemn war. Maybe there is no way to tell of war without somehow, inadvertently, celebrating it too.

And, as a P.S., Caroline Alexander’s translation is stunning. I can’t speak to its accuracy, but I can say that, listening to this is almost like listening to a song. It’s a remarkable accomplishment.

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The Other Americans Audiobook By Laila Lalami cover art

Solid Premise w-Scattered Execution

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
3 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 02-18-20

There’s a strong novel buried in the book we get here. In fact, I’d even say there are two potentially strong novels here. As it is, though, neither gets either the room or the attention really to shine out, and the result is a novel substantially weaker than Lalami’s earlier, excellent The Moor’s Account.

The Moor’s Account shone because it offered a different foundational narrative for America. Our narrator, Mustafa/Estebanico, is a Muslim slave of a would-be Spanish conquistador, and he takes part in a dramatically failed expedition to find gold in modern day Florida. It’s a big topic told from the striking perspective of a man of color, a Muslim, a slave, and someone opposed to the whole colonial project.

Yet, in a way, he is an “other American,” himself – a figure whose story informs our larger American one even as he falls outside of the histories we tell ourselves.

If The Moor’s Account is a sustained (and successful) exercise in voice, this is a quilt of different voices. Instead of sustained chapters in which Mustafa/Estebanico sorts through the contradictions of his life and addresses his fears that he will be forgotten, we get short chapters from a range of different perspectives. The book seldom sits still long enough to give us a developed character. Above all, for me at least, this falls short because of the way it interrupts one account after another, deferring not just plot points but the full expression of the characters we encounter.

That said, the premise – or I should say the original premise – is very strong. A Muslim restaurant owner is killed in a hit-and-run that might have been a hate crime.

In the first half of the book, we have a kind of whodunit, with the victim’s daughter – Nora, our central character – intent on figuring out who’s guilty. There’s a sub-plot of an undocumented Mexican-American man who witnessed a part of the accident who has to decide whether to report what he saw, or almost saw. There’s another about a high school friend of Nora’s who kindles a you-can-see-it-coming romance with her. And there’s a sister who, seemingly perfect in her American success, is hiding a painkiller addition. And there’s the older white man who owns the bowling alley next door and nurses a politics of resentment. And there is the African-American female detective who, good at her job also juggles the responsibilities of being a worried mother. And there is the mother who wishes she’d never come to America. And there is the dead father who, conveniently, supplies flashbacks just in time to resolve seeming mysteries.

So, yeah, I don’t think it’s much of a mystery, and I don’t think Lalami does either. Roughly halfway through we [SPOILER:] learn that the car that hit Driss was owned by the bowling alley owner next door.

At that point, the premise seems to shift from solving a mystery to coming to terms with the seeming reality that it’s hard to find the line between accident and malice. Oh, and while we’re at it, Nora’s romance with Jeremy heats up so that she is both angrily grieving her father and instantly falling in love with someone she hasn’t thought of since high school.

I think the best of the novel deals with the gray area of the crime/accident, and Lalami has some moments of impressive insight all along. She does a strong job bringing the mother’s voice forward, and she often gets off a strong inner monologue for a character in the midst of an emotional crisis. But, since none of that is sustained and we have so wide a range of different characters, those insights seldom accumulate into something sustained and moving.

[SECOND SPOILER:] At the end, just as the novel seems to lean into its premise that love, mourning, racism, and what it means to be an American all situate in a gray area, we learn that the real culprit isn’t the bowling alley owner but his son, a long-time bully of Nora and Jeremy. He is the epitome of the ugly American, someone who’s self-satisfied and – this being the age of Trump – reasserting the privilege of his nativism and racism.

Oh, and Nora – having dumped Jeremy to return to her life as a contemporary composer – returns in the final pages to reconcile with Jeremy. Happy, sort of, ever after.

There are glimpses of skill here, though not enough to make me quite understand how the same author wrote this and The Moor’s Account. This is, ultimately, conventional even as it thoughtfully weaves a Muslim-American perspective into a larger vision of an “other America.” In contrast, The Moor’s Account, committing to one voice and one larger question, asks a similar question in a singular, tragic voice.

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With the Fire on High Audiobook By Elizabeth Acevedo cover art

Beautifully Written, Thoughtful YA Work

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 02-14-20

There’s a wonderfully edgy scene near the beginning of this Young Adult novel: Emoni describes her first sexual experience at the age of 14. It’s underwhelming, and she doesn’t understand it. So, gifted cook that she is, she returns home and unconsciously interprets it into the language of food. She fries up a plantain (“that’s Dr. Freud sitting at table 3!”), slices it into separate bites, and looks at the small, oily residue at the end of the meal.

And that scene is emblematic of a potentially radical look at the life of a half-Puerto-Rican/half African-American single mother who’s trying to navigate her senior year of high school. I love, for instance, that it takes the first 50 or 60 pages for us even to glimpse a boy/man in her life. Yeah, there are the occasional visits from “Baby Girl’s” father Tyrone, but he’s hardly a complication. He’s mostly disappointing, but at least he lets her down on schedule. She isn’t pining for him, nor is she at all tempted to define herself by anything like desire for him.

This is a book that, for its first third and probably a good bit more, aces the Bechdel test and shows us a girl with more than enough on her mind to worry about what a man thinks of her. Emoni is in a tough situation, but she doesn’t define herself by her problems. She’s hardly interested in a boyfriend, instead spending her energy raising her daughter, enjoying her best friend’s advice – and the best friend is, mostly unremarkably, a lesbian – and refining the recipes she gets from her dead mother’s sister. She’s an artist in the kitchen, but she’s also in a position of having to learn the skills that underline and define that art. She’s a girl on the brink of becoming a woman, but she’s also someone trying to juggle the demands of weeks torn between school and parenting.

As this goes on, it does become more conventional. There is a boy, Malachi, who recognizes her as the deep and compelling character we know her to be, and he makes his interest clear. That teenage romance becomes more and more important, but to Acevedo’s real credit, it still never defines the central matter of the novel. It’s also the case that, even with so many odds against her, Emoni shines out as a potential professional chef.

What ties all this together, though, is the consistently impressive – and occasionally gorgeous – prose of Acevedo. I understand that she has had success as a poet, and it shows. It’s not easy to write about how food tastes, certainly not time after time, yet Acevedo does it. Each time Emoni has a cooking breakthrough, we get a fresh description.

At some level, you can see the calculation here. This is a book that checks all the boxes for what you’d want in a novel to teach in, say, 8th to 10th grades. It’s female-centered, honest and contemporary in its exploration of young sexuality and the relationships that follow, reflective of different ethnic cultures, and thoughtful in navigating the path to adulthood.

All of this is so well done, though, that it’s hard to hold that calculated quality too much against it. I plan to recommend it to friends and former students who teach at the high school level, and – in ways that would have surprised me if I’d known what I was getting into when I picked it up thinking it was a work of adult literary fiction – I enjoyed it very much.

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Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line Audiobook By Deepa Anappara cover art

Striking Postcolonial Perspective But Falls Short

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
3 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 02-11-20

I picked this one up on the day of its release because The New York Times Review of Book was glowing over it and because Ian McEwan among others was singing its praises. That was a kind of experiment for me since I’m not usually an early adopter. I wanted to see if I shared that reaction right out of the gate.

I’m sorry for that hype because, while there is a lot I admire here, I don’t think it rises to the level of your typical McEwan. It’s a striking book with a look at world most of us never see. I admire it for giving voice to protagonists who have some dignity, and I enjoy its setting. But, I think it blinks at the end and undermines some of its strong premise in the way it presents multiple narrators to limited effect.

Our main characters here are all children in the slums of India. A couple are so poor that they live in the railway station stealing and getting by on their wits. Our central character, Jai, is somewhat better off; his parents care for him, and he has the relative luxury of going to school and watching TV.

In fact, Jai watches so much TV that, when first one and then another of the children in his neighborhood go missing, he determines he will find them like the detectives he knows from his shows. He recruits a pair of his friends, wins the friendship of a stray dog, and tries to piece the larger clues together.

Jai’s voice and perspective are, for me, the star of what’s happening here. This is postcolonial in both its perspective and its early structure.

The climax of the first part of this comes when Jai and his young friends steal a little money and take the newly built (in part by his father) purple line of the city’s rail system. It feels a lot like Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time in the way our protagonist ventures on a great adventure that is also the everyday stuff of others’ commute. That postcolonial reworking is effective as a structural ploy – a refiguring of Western culture in something of the classic example of the way steel drums came from reworked surplus and supplies – and the boys’ adventure is powerful.

It’s also powerful in the way we see the world through the eyes of characters who are shaped by forces so out of their control. As an Indian in a nation that has much of its economy shaped by powers abroad (at least one character takes classes with an aspiration to work for an American call center), as a lower-class resident of a community that the area wealthy routinely threaten to tear down, and above all as a child, Jai can never forget his powerlessness.

Anappara’s greatest success here is in refusing to see these children as acted upon. They have agency, and they really do conceive of themselves as detectives with the power to solve this crime.

All that said, [SPOILER ALERT:] I think this loses some of its edge when, at the end, we learn that instead of inchoate, international powers that cost this community its children, there is a real serial killer. Jai even has a hand in uncovering him when, though the corrupt police try to stop him, he is among the first to storm into the house where they find the incriminating evidence. I find that move a betrayal of the larger sense of the people of this community as victimized by a global economy indifferent to the price the poorest of the world have to pay.

Further [SPOILER ALERT:]. I’m also frustrated by the seemingly gratuitous plot twist that Jai’s sister, angry that her father has struck her, decides to run away in the midst of the childnapping crisis. As a result, she seems to be another victim, one never recovered or accounted for, and the price her parents pay is extreme. The action simply doesn’t feel authentic to me. Before her decision, she seems to have the same pluck as Jai. After, she seems sullen and unnecessarily cruel.

On balance, I do see a lot to appreciate. It’s good to hear so striking a voice and to be brought to a world of such poverty. It’s not McEwan, though, and I don’t think it’s even extraordinary by the standards of current releases. Again, maybe I’d be more inclined toward it if I didn’t walk in expecting a masterpiece.

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Cloud Atlas (20th Anniversary Edition) Audiobook By David Mitchell, Gabrielle Zevin cover art

Ambitious but Less Imaginative than Its Reputation

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
3 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 02-04-20

I’d heard great things about this one, and I suspect that has colored some of my reaction. I saw the Booker Prize interest and a terrific student (shout out to Bodo) told me it was one of her all-time favorites. As it stands, though, I couldn’t quite get into most of this, and that probably makes this feel more disappointing than if I’d simply stumbled upon it.

I love the ambition here. The structural premise is that six different stories, four set in the historical past and two in the speculative future, show us how a certain impulse travels across time and generations. This isn’t a family saga at all. It’s more in keeping with what Colum McCann or others of what I call the rhizomatic novel do. The characters only dimly sense their interrelatedness. It takes us as readers to develop a sort of “god’s eye view” of the goings-on below.

And part of the experience of that disjuncture is reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler in the way we’re shown texts that collide with one another. That novel (which is one of the great reflections on the power of reading) makes us jump from text to text, never quite satisfying the hunger it creates with each one.

Here, Mitchell attempts to hook us on each of the stories, at least on the first go-round. Then, after the sixth, we go back to the fifth, fourth, and so on to resolve what we’d earlier begun.

That’s where I ran into a couple of problems. For starters, I just didn’t like the stories as much as I expected to. I found the science fiction of the future chapters a bit narrow. In one we have a clone who’s raised to consciousness and part of inciting a great clone rebellion. In another we have a future where civilization has nearly been eradicated but a small redoubt of scientists remain to help a select group of pacific villagers.

I also didn’t enjoy a thriller with a Karen Silkwood heroine; it read like by-the-book thriller genre and – compounding the confusion of the novel’s larger premise – we’re eventually told it’s fiction and that it’s written by a man. It is not, that is, a story of a “true person” within the novel, someone who might be in a position to inspire others.

I did, however, very much enjoy “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish,” about a roguish publisher who, fleeing his creditors, is held against his will in a retirement home. It’s got a persistently funny tone, and its premise is fun.

Beyond finding the stuff of the novel itself up-and-down, though, I find I finally question its underlying metaphysics. The closing pages of the book suggest that we can’t measure the ultimate effects of great decency. A man who has risked his life to save a slave has that slave save his own in turn. That, we’re led to believe, ripples forward so that – in a dystopic future – it’s part of what saves humanity from extinction.

On the one hand, I find that a bit unimaginative. I’m all in favor of decency, but this is so narrow a genealogy of it that it doesn’t persuade me. Sure, this almost forgotten (even in the world of the novel) act of humanity matters, but shouldn’t countless others? Decency has many parents in every generation; I think this betrays some of its own potential when it suggests so slender a line running from one to another.

On the other, I find that a bit trite. Is decency always born of decency? Isn’t it possible for some people to discover it on their own, perhaps in response to the inhumanity they see? We’re a complicated species, I think, and this book doesn’t leave room for such complexity.

Anyway, while I confess I found parts that dragged and repeat that some of the core stories seemed under-imagined, I am still glad to see a narrative experiment this bold. I don’t think the explicit sci-fi is all that good here, but the shape of the interlocking stories is audacious. I’m glad to be finished with this, but I am also enjoying reflecting on the work Mitchell has done to weave so different a set of stories into something that begins to come together into a larger whole.

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Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City Audiobook By K. J. Parker cover art

An Adventure the Questions Empire

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 01-29-20

I’ve been thinking recently – and this one has helped me crystallize some of my loose ideas – that there’s a distinction in what they call “high fantasy.” By definition such work imagines empire, imagines some idea of order that stands in contrast to the “low” chaos that some antagonist offers. (Never mind that most of the best recent fantasies – Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, The Night Circus, The Vorrh, Jerusalem, Harry Potter, and even The Magicians – don’t deal with empire at all.)

In any case, I think there’s a line to draw between books that have a yearning for empire – as Tolkien taught all of us – and those that have a memory of empire. The distinction sets up much of the action of the novel, but I think it also establishes its politics. Books like The Lord of the Rings are, whether we realize it or not, fundamentally conservative. They want to restore that lost order and, even if they champion the capacity for characters to conceive of something new, that diminishes the potential of the individual outside the whole. Frodo is magnificent, of course, but he is so – as he only gradually learns – within the context of a great and lost kingdom of men. He can never be great by the standards of that empire; at best (and he is at best) he can be only a heroic commoner whom the great condescend to reward.

In books that have only a memory of empire, though – and that’s mostly the case with Game of Thrones – we get abiding skepticism about what came before. Empire isn’t lauded as a lost Eden; it’s seen as a persistent threat to the individual, to the character who has real and personal dreams.

I say all that because, while Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City has its flaws, it opens with a refreshing contempt for empire. Orhan is an engineer who finds himself accidentally the ranking officer in charge of defending a great city – think Rome or Byzantium – from an existential threat. He’s no fan of the empire; its clients wiped out his village when he was a child, and he has risen in its ranks even though his milk-colored skin marks him as an outsider and other.

Still, he takes on the task as if its another of the bridges he knows how to design. He’s drawn less by loyalty and ethics than by the simple engineering challenge of the operation.

That tells you much of the politics of this novel. In many ways, it has a deep cynicism toward everything. Orhan turns out to be more of a scoundrel than we might imagine. On top of that, Parker explores some of what it means to have an unreliable narrator recording his own deeds. Yes, Orhan makes one brilliant (or fortunate) decision after another, but he admits outright that it’s his story and he might, every so often, be exaggerating.

The primary fun of this is its focus on the problems of design. Orhan has to solve one crisis after another and, early on especially, it’s refreshing to get such nitty-gritty. This is an empire that turns not on the hoped-for return of the king but rather – literally – on a nail. Can they recover or fashion enough of them to repair and sustain the siege engines they need to resist the attackers?

I’ll confess that I think this gets weaker toward the end. [SPOILER:] I’m no fan of the plot twist that has the leader of the assembled army be Orhan’s long-lost childhood friend; as the two survivors of their village, they’ve both risen around the threat of the empire and its troops.

[Second SPOILER:] While I like the tone of the end of this when an accident alters the course of Orhan’s life and we’re shown how the siege looks to observers centuries later, it felt a bit as if Parker had run out of ideas. That’s not entirely a bad thing, though, since it largely reflects that he offered so many terrific and clever ideas in those early parts.

In the end, though, what redeems this from just a clever premise is its willingness to question the prevailing perspective of the genre. A little like Joe Abercrombie in The Blade Itself – but with a very different tone – it remembers what its world was like when an empire put everything into an order that gave little room for the self to blossom. It remembers empire, but it doesn’t yearn for it.

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27 people found this helpful

The Swerve Audiobook By Stephen Greenblatt cover art

A Generally Fun, Near-Fantasy of a Poem's Power

Overall
4 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
4 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 01-25-20

Stephen Greenblatt was one of the heroes of my graduate school era. He was perhaps the foremost of the Shakespearian New Historicists who provided a counterpoint to the deconstructionism that had overwhelmed the field several years before I arrived. Where the deconstructionists – calling themselves post-structuralists – were fundamentally concerned with structure (or its aftermath), the New Historicists insisted that texts took their meaning from context.

Greenblatt developed a method where we could show that texts didn’t simply rest on top of history (which is a shorthand for describing the “old historicism”) but that they shaped the history of which they were a part. Shakespeare didn’t simply observe Elizabethan politics; in perhaps the most famous example, Robert Devereux commissioned a performance of Richard II (a play about an uprising against a sitting English monarch) the night before he began his own failed uprising. That is, New Historicists see texts as shaping the way people see their age and, as a consequence, how they see new possibilities for themselves and their culture. And, incidentally, they showed a way beyond the nihilism of deconstruction – or at least what I came to see as its frequent nihilistic applications.

So, I’m all in on Greenblatt. People doing similar things in American literarature – like Sacvan Bercovitch and Anne Douglas – became the thinkers who guided my own eventual work, but he was the first to make clear what was possible.

That said, this a very interesting set of observations, but I’m not sure it’s an entirely coherent book. In some ways, it’s doing three different things – things that are largely incompatible as a straightforward story – and pretending they line up more neatly than they do.

One part of this is an explanation for the power of philosophy out of the epicurean school. It’s very interesting work, and I absolutely enjoy what Greenblatt has to say about the early thinkers in the field. Naively, I’d bought the case against those early thinkers. Epicurus, was not – as I’d heard – a supporter of gluttony, but rather someone who believed that, with the heavens disinterested in our human condition, we ought to achieve the highest happiness possible in our own lives.

Another, final part, is Greenblatt’s claim that Lucretius, the Latin poet whose De Rerum Natura turned that philosophy into poetry, was a central influence on the Modern world. I confess to some skepticism in all that, but Greenblatt does an impressive job of showing that the first wave of early modern philosophers – like Thomas More, Erasmus – and then later thinkers like Montaigne, Shakespeare, Jefferson, and many others, were inspired directly by Lucretius (and therefore by Epicurus) as they created the modern world.

But the main part of this is the connecting story between those two points, the story of how an Italian humanist scholar, Poggio Bracciolini, found what might have been the only extant copy of De Rerum Natura in a monastery, had it copied, and then championed it so that, within a couple decades, it had become a major source of ideas for the early Renaissance world.

I like to think I’ve been in Greenblatt’s position in my own work. There are dozens of great stories to tell about various Jewish gangsters whose careers intersected but rarely ran parallel. The challenge is to find “a hero,” one character who sits at the middle of the story and ties it all together.

That’s who Poggio is in this. Greenblatt writes affectingly – sometimes over-the-top – about the implications of Poggio’s discoveries. (I can’t quote it, but there’s at least one line about how – had he known it – he was taking the future off the shelves and putting it back in the world when he pulled down the manuscript.) Never mind that, in a kind of mumbled voice at the end, Greenblatt confesses that there were at least a couple complete manuscript copies of De Rerum Natura extant in other libraries – manuscripts that survive today even as the one Poggio found has been lost. And never mind that, influential as Lucretius is, he was not the only source for Epicurian thought to survive into the Renaissance and into the Modern world. And never mind that, for all that Democritus and other proto-Epicurians talked about “atoms” that construct all things in the world, there were other significant scientific and philosophical sources for that general way of seeing the world.

So, by forcing what amounts to a wide range of Classical thought through the eye-of-the-needle story of Poggio’s recovery of Lucretius down to the notion that Lucretius is central to most Modern thought, Greenblatt seems to make his case too tightly. Epicurus apparently moved beyond Democritus by insisting that atoms could “swerve,” that there was what we might today recognize as a kind of quantum uncertainty that make free will possible. That’s good stuff, but it seems more parallel to what we understand today rather than – as Greenblatt insists – its origin.

And yet, this is ultimately enormous fun. Just as Greenblatt long ago taught me (and many more talented others) how to understand the ways that text can reshape the culture of which they’re a part, he makes a broader and ultimately fabulous claim. Lucretius may not be as central as he claims, and Poggio – central as he is to the story – isn’t the only reason Lucretius’s work came to be recovered, but it’s a great near-fantasy for the enduring power of philosophy and poetry to remake the world.

The bottom-line test of this for me is a simple one: now that I’m finished with this, I’m itching to read Lucretius.

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The Good Earth Audiobook By Pearl S. Buck cover art

Once Influential Novel Mostly Past its Time

Overall
3 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
3 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 01-25-20

I had multiple, not-quite-sufficient-alone reasons for reading this. Above all, my student Alexis is doing very interesting work around the way Westerners imagine China, and this is a potentially crucial text in that argument. I’m also at least casually interested in those books that “mattered” at mid-century, the ones that may have been middlebrow but were also influential. And, it was on sale.

I mention that haphazard set of motives because I experienced the book in a strangely mismatched way.

I enjoyed the first several chapters very much when this seemed an unusual economic history. It’s compelling to read as Wang Lung slowly rises through his hard work and focus. Unlike his uncle and cousin, he guards his hard-won profits and turns them into additional land. The tiny copper coins he manages to save add up slowly to his path out of the peasantry.

I liked as well that he found such a partner in O-Lan, a woman clearly smarter than he is who is willing to work just as hard to overcome the indignity of slavery. Her generally impenetrable mien is powerful. We recognize the work Wang Lung puts into accruing not just wealth but dignity; we can only dimply sense the deeper and even more compelling incentive O-Lan has for rising from slavery to respect.

The general excellence of this continues through to the awful experience of famine that the family knows, but I confess it begins to work less well for me once they are in the city, away from the land. That may be to Buck’s credit – her thesis, after all, is that the land can give wealth and dignity to those who respect it – but it begins to feel like a different novel.

But then, [SPOILER:] I am troubled that the big leap forward comes not through the gradual accrual of wealth but through the happenstance of Wang-Lung and O-Lan each committing something like a crime. Each seizes property from the wealthy during an army attack and, suddenly, they have the money to return to the land and buy more. And eventually even more.

That change in focus from a careful economic rise to a sudden one troubles me, I think, because it glosses over the steady work the novel earlier praised. Wang-Lun is special originally only because his dream of rising is so focused. Later, he seems the beneficiary of a specific providence.

By the end, this feels much more conventional to me. It seems almost required that Wang-Lung will buy the estate where he was made to feel so diminished on the day he arrived to buy his slave wife from the mistress. (For what it’s worth Faulkner uses a similar trope a few years later in Absalom, Absalom! when he imagines Sutpen working his whole life to overcome the humiliation of being less than a slave when he visits a plantation as a child. No offense to Buck, but Faulkner wears it better.)

And [FINAL SPOILER:] with the concluding revelation that the sons intend to sell some of Wang-Lung’s hard-won land, we see what sounds like the beginning of the unraveling of the family fortune. (There are a pair of sequels, but I doubt I’ll read them.) The basic idea – the earth is good; you should trust it – seems simply overdone.

I look forward to talking with Alexis about ways this fits into her project, and I might care enough to read some summaries about the sequels. And I am glad finally to have read a book that still cast something of a shadow into the 1970s when I would see it on the shelves of many of the older relatives and friends I visited. But, as a novel that has a lot to teach us about how we experience the world today, I think this one is past its time.

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The Alchemist Audiobook By Paulo Coelho cover art

Saccharine for the Soul

Overall
2 out of 5 stars
Performance
5 out of 5 stars
Story
2 out of 5 stars

Reviewed: 01-18-20

My wife beat me to the punch with the line I’d intended to start my reflections on this: The Alchemist is this generation’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Then she took it a step further, reminding me that she enjoyed Jonathan Livingston Seagull when she was 13.

In many ways, I think that says it all. I didn’t know that much about the book except for the fact that a lot of people seem to have enjoyed it. It seemed to have acquired a reputation as contemporary ‘wisdom literature,’ something someone would encourage you to read if you were feeling down or uninspired.

If I squint, I get some of that. This is a fable, so you have to accept a certain amount of easy narrative and simplified conflict. Santiago sets off on a quest, and everything lines up to make that quest possible.

Still, there is something unquestionably adolescent about the whole business. We are told repeatedly that the universe is built to make true the dreams of those who believe most firmly. We’re assured that certain true believers – loosely defined so as to include those who fall truly in love – have a kind of secret path laid out for them; they just have to be earnest enough in its pursuit.

I can see how some people might be inspired to hear such a message at certain low points in their lives. I can’t see, though, how they can take it at all seriously. This is every bit as much a fantasy as Harry Potter, but, unlike there, we’re never invited to weight the real burdens of growing up. Instead, we are invited to stay within the confines of this comfortable, imagined strategy for confronting our individual destinies.

Perhaps worse, this sort of “prosperity gospel for the irreligious” seems to imply that failure is simply a lack of true faith in one’s destiny. It suggests that, if we aren’t fulfilled, we need to see how we passed up on the opportunities and “omens” that would have made us so.

As a result, this is pernicious in the way it gives us a fantasy for the privileged. Santiago may begin as a poor shepherd, but he’s always rich – literally so – in his capacity to choose the way in which he lives his life. This may not be about a seagull who see the world differently from his peers, but it’s the same entitled escapism. Most people fail to live their dreams because they are born into a poverty or connectedness that prevents them from self-indulgence. This book ignores that. Like the notorious Marie Antoinette, it invites everyone without sufficient bread simply to eat cake instead.
There is some fun here, and I like the way Coelho peppers the work with so many admiring references to Islam and the wisdom of other cultures. Plus, it reads easily, though I confess I grew bored with parts of it even though it’s a very short book.

Bottom line, I should have listened to my wife.

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