The Roots of Dystopic Fiction - We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin

When reading Ursula Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter, I made a reading list from books she discussed or referenced.  That was years ago now, and I no longer remember exactly what Le Guin said about We that made me put it on my list, but I have no regrets about reading it!  I have no idea how I had never heard of this book as it appears to be the primary influence on Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.  You can absolutely see the DNA of Zamyatin’s novel in those two dystopic works, from plot structures to characters and relationships.  Zamyatin provides us with the dystopian novel upon which a century of such works are built, and yet, I had never even heard of it, much less read it.

The book was written in 1920 and published first in 1925, not in Russia, Zamyatin’s home country, and not in Russian, the language he wrote it in, but in England and as an English translation, because the book could not get published in Soviet Russia.  I have the Penguin edition with a translation by Clarence Brown from 1993—and, man, do I love Brown’s translation.  I imagine the original writing in Russian must be just as beautiful and evocative, because this translation is scintillating. Here’s a sample of one of the many sentences that gave me pause: “Mortified, I handed him the paper. He read it, and I saw a smile slip out of his eyes, slide down his face, and, with a flick of its tail, take a seat on the right side of his mouth” (143). Right?!

The book takes the form of a collection of journal entries, originally designed to be one of the “treatises, epic poems, manifestoes, odes, or other compositions dealing with the beauty and grandeur of OneState” (1).  OneState is a dystopian city built of steel-like glass and surrounded by a glass wall that keeps the green wilds permanently separate from the city itself. There was a 200-year war between the city and the countryside, which the city won.  Everything within OneState operates on a strict schedule, with allotted hours to wake up, eat, exercise, work, have sex, and sleep, the whole population engaging in the exact same schedule.  There is not privacy, except when you are granted leave to lower your blinds during your permitted sex time.  Otherwise, the glass walls and furniture allow you to see all and be seen by all at any time.  All citizens have been assigned numbers instead of names, as individuality has been stamped out, each person being a mere organism of OneState, which is the true entity.  Our protagonist is D-503. D-503 is the head builder of the INTEGRAL, a glass spaceship that has been built to allow OneState to colonize space and spread its vision of orderly happiness. D-503 begins the novel as a true-believer in the glory and sophistication of OneState, and as you can already guess if you’ve engaged in any dystopic fiction, that will change over the course of the novel.

The first person perspective makes the novel surprisingly part of the epistolary tradition, as D-503 is always addressing an unknown reader, imagined to be on one of the as-yet-uncolonized planets, someone living in barbarity as D-503 understands it. It’s a great frame to allow the protagonist to explain culture and history to someone who knows nothing about it.  Zamyatin’s skill makes the character and the world come to life through this limited perspective, especially as D-503 goes through the changes caused by him becoming aware of his individuality, what he calls at one point, coming down with a “soul,” viewed as an illness.  As he writes, “So here I am, in step with everyone else, and yet separate from all of them. I’m still trembling all over from the recent excitement—like a bridge that one of the ancient iron trains has just rumbled over. I feel myself. But it’s only the eye with a lash in it, the swollen finger, the infected tooth that feels itself, is conscious of its own individual being. The healthy eye or finger or tooth doesn’t seem to exist. So it’s clear, isn’t it? Self-consciousness is just a disease” (110).  There are several passages that become downright confusing because it is unclear if our narrator is having a hallucination, unclear of how to find the words and mindset to describe what he is experiencing, or if it is exactly as he says.  Zamyatin does not shy away from that complication of the first-person narrative, but instead leans into it and allows it to be poetic and confusing, in hot contrast to the cool orderliness of D-503’s life at the beginning of the novel.

The book suffers only from the author’s racism and misogyny. While I was impressed that there were black characters at all in a novel started in 1917 Russia, let alone that one is the best fried of our protagonist, the portrayal is not one of love.  Similarly, D-503, and presumably Zamyatin himself, is fascinated with the roundness of women and their breasts, and while women presumably play an equal role in this society without individuality, there are few woman at all, and one of them is a soft, insipid, simpleton who marvels at the brilliance of her man.  All the women are love objects, important within the novel for their desire and desirability, or lack thereof.

On the back of my edition, Le Guin is quoted as calling this novel “the best single work of science fiction yet written.” I don’t agree with that, but it is certainly a fascinating one, and a beautifully written and thoughtful one.  It is well worth the reading.

Timothy Egan's A Fever in the Heartland

Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland was recommended to us at a luncheon, where we gathered to celebrate the wedding of some dear friends. It was the summer of 2024 and we had been studying American and European fascism and authoritarianism for several months. We were seated with like-minded people, and the topic naturally came up. I try to act on recommendations, and the premise of Egan’s historical recounting sounded perfectly in line with our studies. We are ourselves Hoosiers, so hearing about the Ku Klux Klan’s presence in Indiana in the 1920s was pertinent to every aspect. I was not prepared for how well-written, how gripping, or how traumatic the tale would be.

This is the story of how the Klan rose to power in America in the 1910s and 1920s on the back of anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-black, white supremacist sentiment. By 1925, the Klan was everywhere and dominating state politics in many states, but especially in Indiana.  In fact, the man responsible to making the Klan’s presence in the North so extensive had become the most powerful man in Indiana and his eyes were set on the presidency of the whole nation.  It was not a pipe dream for him, either. With the Klan’s embedded power within Congress, this was a real possibility. That man was D.C. Stephenson, or at least that’s the name he adopted when he drifted into Indiana several years before.  Stephenson was vicious, crude, a bully, a racist, and a misogynist.  He had many times brutally abused women in his life, including his wives, but as the powerful often do, he escaped any kind of reckoning, keeping his victim’s silent through fear and power over the law enforcement. But when he brutalized one young woman in 1925, she and her family, along with an unbought prosecutor, took the remarkable steps to demand justice.  The trial changed the entire course of the Klan’s influence.  That’s the story that Egan artfully unfolds. 

As a book of history, A Fever in the Heartland is first rate.  It’s an easy read that is full of surprises (for me) and direct, powerful, recounting of the state of America.  Egan covers the history of the clan in deft strokes, doing an amazing job of bringing the times to life with sensitivity but without euphemisms.  Even as we spend time in the lives of Klan members, Egan always has the moral clarity to call their actions what they are—hateful, anti-democratic, self-interested, and repugnant.  I appreciated his balancing of an unimpassioned presentation of the facts as he knew them with the equally unimpassioned moral position of the horrors spurring the organization.  I walked away from the book with what felt like a full understanding of the times.  It is the kind of book that pulls you through even as you want to stop to ingest all the details so that you can recall them later.

If you listened to Rachel Maddow’s two seasons of Ultra, this book will be of especial interest to you.  The two narratives (along with others available to us in this age of podcasts and peoples’ histories) work together to build an understanding for how much of the 20^th century has been a struggle between the forces of authoritarian white supremacy and the those fighting for genuine democracy and equality.  This is the history I was never taught, as the American education system is too interested in the tale of American exceptionalism. The rotten fruits of the Trump administration were planted centuries ago, and the land has been tilled with fervor for more than 100 years.  This is a book that every Hoosier should read to understand the present moment, even though the events took place almost 100 years ago to the day.

The only thing I found dissatisfying about the book was the brief coverage of the Klan’s undoing that followed the trial that let to D.C. Stephenson’s incarceration and fall from power.  I realize that there are a lot of factors that play into something like a nationwide organizations crumbling, but I wanted more than the relief of knowing that the group was diminished.  It crumbles so quickly in the retelling that there is little to take away from it.  I would gladly read another 200 pages about all the bits and pieces that went into the Klan’s members shedding their robes and wearing their racism in other ways.  That was not the scope of this book, and I can’t blame Egan for not writing those additional 200 pages, but still I found myself disappointed in the denouement.

The book will be staying on my shelf because I will want to have this bit of history available to me to read again and from which to gather still more wisdom.

Sara Levine's Treasure Island!!!

 After reading Michael Poore’s Reincarnation Blues, I went looking for more comic novels, but I specifically wanted something written by a woman.  An internet search led me to Sara Levine’s 2012 novel, Treasure Island!!!.  The pitch of a modern young woman, so taken by the adventurousness of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel, that she decides to model her life after it, sounded fantastic to me.  The library had it in stock, and here I am!

It’s a captivating book, and wonderfully written.  I found myself put off by the main character almost immediately, and I found the premise positively ludicrous in practice.  But in spite of all that, I didn’t want to stop reading.  Partly, I was compelled by a desire to see where the novel went so that I could make sense of it, so that I could see what the author was trying to say.  Partly, I was compelled to see where the story would go—would it just escalate into insanity or would it try to create a moral from the narrator’s tale? The fact is that I read the book in a single weekend, which is not something I typically do.  The book moves quickly, but I truly had a hard time looking away.  I can’t think of a higher compliment to the writing and plotting of the tale.

As I have said in various other review/posts, I’m a sucker for a well-written first-person narrative.  Give me a fun and interesting unreliable narrator and I am all in.  The narrator here (and I can’t give you a name because she doesn’t have one) is a woman of 25 with no career ambitions, no relationship ambitions, no real need for money since her parents and friends allow her to live off them with very little complaining, and no direction in life.  After reading Treasure Island, she decides that the reason her life is so unsatisfying is that she has been leading a dull life as a dull person.  She goes, I can only infer, from a timid self-involved person to a bold self-involved person.  She leaves her job, but not because she has the character to quit and find a better job, but because she makes horrible choices and gets fired.  In fact, she’s ready to take the job back as long as she doesn’t have to apologize.  She leaves her relationship, but not because she has discovered she needs something better and more fulfilling, but because she makes unilateral decisions for her boyfriend who then dumps her and kicks her out of his apartment.

And the narrator truly is an awful person.  She’s unfeeling, uncaring and uninterested in others.  As she observes, courtesy is not a Core Value for her (118) and when her mom, after being direct with her, says, “I thought you liked candor,” the narrator replies, “I like my candor. There’s a big fat difference” (130). She is cruel toward her sister at every turn, because of her weight, her appearances, her job.  Everyone is valued by her insofar as they can do something for her.  She’s pretty much a catalogue of every undesirable trait you would want in a person in your life.

And yet, there is something about her that keeps her from being someone you hate.  I say that even though I’m aware that there are many readers who have hated her.  So perhaps I should say there is something about her that keeps me and many other from hating her.  First, there are the glimpses beneath the surface that show us her sorrow and pain, what she refuses to tell us directly in the self-conscious presentation of her writing, such as when Little Richard, her parrot, imitates our narrator unexpectedly: 

At first it seemed like a laugh. Then the laugh sort of fell down the stairs and became a wail. That intractable bird, that bird in whom I could barely wedge a useful phrase, had been studying my misery when I’d thought he was asleep. I threw the cloth over his cage and my hands began to tremble. The sound was terrible: defeated, despairing, almost crazy. Shut up, shut up, but he carried on sobbing, relentless as a wave (116).  

And even more importantly, there is a little bit of the narrator in all of us, a piece that we are both ashamed of and feel a little proud of.  It’s a stubborn and ugly part, but sometimes it’s the part that saves us.  It’s the part that makes everything about us, even when we don’t want it to. It’s the part that cuts our sympathies short to focus on some personal tragedy, lacking in comparison. It’s an embarrassing part, but it’s there. As a man, I have a difficult relationship with that part of me, but I imagine that relationship can be even more fraught for a young woman. The book leans into that complication to find the humor and sympathy and horror of its subject.

I can’t say I know what the book is doing, as much as I like being able to say that I know what books are doing.  At first, I thought it was a kind of clever spin on Fight Club, the useless empty feeling that consumerism and life in the suburbs makes us feel, but from the perspective of a young woman.  But that is unsatisfying and incomplete.  I think this book, in spite of its seemingly small world and limited scope, is grasping at some very large things and trying to present them all concurrently, even through the cacophonous voice of our narrator.  Adriane, Lars, Rena, Nancy, the narrator’s mother—they all have lives that Levine successfully gets us to feel are much larger than the narrator’s reduction of them all.  That’s no mean feat given the novel’s form.  Levine points to all these other narratives existing and drowned out by the narrator, and allows their unspoken narratives to be in dialogue with the only voice we are given.  What it all adds up to, however, I don’t know.  And I don’t know if Levine knows either, or if she is feeling her way toward truths, letting her sense of aesthetics and character guide her toward what it real.  That’s admirable.  And she is talented enough to accomplish all that in this short, quick-moving, humorous novel.

Michael Poore's Reincarnation Blues

 My son, on the strength of the first couple of paragraphs, picked up this book after a trip to the bookstore with friends a few years ago. I had been reading haltingly this year and thought something comedic might do me some good.  I haven’t read any of Michael Poore’s other books, and I was completely unfamiliar with him or his work before reading Reincarnation Blues.

 Poore is an excellent writer, with a knack for poetic language that makes his prose sparkle.  Here’s a brief example, in which he describes a roulette wheel: “A ball pops around like an electrocuted cat and eventually comes to rest somewhere” (108).  The electrocuted cat is surprising and funny and evocative.  A good deal of the humor of the book comes from Poore’s clever and insightful wielding of language, and it is truly a joy and a pleasure to read.

 

In the world of the narrative, we all live life after life, learning as we go, hopefully, until we achieve a moment of perfection that allows us to transcend into the oversoul and become one with the universe.  In between each life lived, there is a kind of staging world, in which you can collect yourself, reflect upon things, get coaching from two beings who are neither gods nor mortals, but agents of the universe.  Our protagonist is a man named Milo.  He’s not always a man, and he’s not always named Milo, but for the bulk of the narrative, he’s a man named Milo.  His two universal guides appear to him as older women named Mama and Nan.  In that in-between world with Mama and Nan, Milo has a friend and lover names Suzie, who is Death.  Her name as given by the universe is not Suzie, but that’s the name she gave herself to be pronounceable by Milo.  And she is not THE Death but merely one of many Deaths who help people transition from their living life to the in-between world.  Suzie, like Mama and Nan, is neither god nor mortal, another agent of the universe.  The crux of our story is this: Milo has lived 9,990-some lives when he learns that you only get 10,000 lives to achieve perfection and join the universal oversoul.  If you fail within that time period, you instead get option B, which is to become nothingness, to cease to be entirely.  Can he do it? Should he do it? What does perfection look like? Does he lose Suzie if he joins the oversoul?  Is the nothingness forever?  Read the book to find out.

 

It's an enjoyable read, even beyond Poore’s talented use of words and phrases. It’s fun to skip through whole arcs of lives.  Poore does something very neat with this world he created. Lives are of course not lived chronologically through the earth’s timeline as well know it.  You can live in 2,000 BC or 3,400 AD or 1848 or 1972 as you wish.  By shooting us into the future, Poore brings science fiction into a book that does not appear at first glance to be science fiction. And while the world of the past closely mirrors the real world as we readers will know it, the future takes some bold leaps that are funny and poignant. Best of all, there is a weaving between the lives in the futures that creates a stable timeline, a single invented world.  The lives lived are not part of alternate worlds of possibility, but one single timeline.  In doing so, Poore creates a genuinely new and unique world that’s fun to follow and play in. It’s a clever trick, expertly done.

 

Generally, I found the book to be a quick read, but there were parts that were very difficult to wade though. Poore does not shy away from the ugly parts of human nature and human history, and for that I applaud him. For the most part, the more sci-fi-y parts of the novel still feel grounded in a real understanding of humans and relationships. For me, however, the chapter set in a prison ship adrift in space was not just ugly, but unbelievable. There was no human compassion or sense of community among people outcast by society and left to die. I realize that he did this for a number of reasons, but none of those reasons make up for how unbelievable it is.  Part of his reason is that these are murderers and irredeemable people jettisoned from society.  Part of his reason is that Milo’s arc in that part of the story needs to raise him from the lowest of the low to what might be the highest of the highs. Part of his reason is that we are going to see another outcast society on the planet of Jupiter later in the novel, and you don’t want for them to be too similar; there needs to be considerable contrast between the two. In the end, though, I think it plays into the idea that people in prison are mean, horrible people, murderers and rapists and the worst of all of us. We of course know that societies formed within prisons, while there may be gangs and plays for power as there are anywhere else in society, are mutually supportive, containing all the positive aspects of society that we see anywhere else.  When Milo walks naked and battered into a room of people hanging out, playing a card game, every single person in the room has the first impulse to rape the 16-year-old boy and gleefully acts upon that impulse, en masse.  It’s not just upsetting, but ridiculous, and not in an amusing way.

 

There are other minor decisions that didn’t sit well with me, but nothing that ruined the book or the reading experience.  A story is the teller’s statement about the world and humanity and life, and I’m not surprised that Poore and I have different visions. None of those differences between us, in short, is the fault of the writer.

 

It’s a solid book, focused and funny, well-constructed and clever. If it sounds at all like your jam, I highly recommend it.

The Ups and Downs of Bram Stoker's Dracula

 

I read this novel for the first time in 1992 or 1993, for a literature class my junior year of college on horror stories and their cinematic adaptations.  I don’t know what about the topic gripped my imagination because I was not a fan of horror films at the time, nor was I a fan of horror literature.  Something about reading classic horror novels like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde hit me in the exact right spot, and while all my essays written for that class were poorly done, the class itself had a huge impact on me.  I’ve watched horror films ever since, and I’ve had a particular interest in the different languages and requirements of cinema and novels.

 

My wife had never read Dracula, and after seeing The Last Voyage of the Demeter (a film that disappointed both of us) she found herself wanting to.  So we took to reading a couple of chapters before bed each night.

 

I found a lot to admire in the book and a few things that sent my eyes rolling.  Let’s start with the ugly stuff.  The politics in this book are deeply conservative and regressive. Bram Stoker is deeply invested in gender and sexual norms.  Women are the seat of all that is good and pure, and the need to save that goodness and purity is the driving force of the male protagonists.  When women become corrupted, they are repeatedly described as “voluptuous.”  They are wanton, sexually aggressive, full of hunger and desire.  Meanwhile the men cannot stop falling in love with each other’s manly virtues.  Vampirism is explicitly heterosexual in the novel.  Dracula only feeds on women, and the women only try to bite men.  That last part is not true—Lucy ends up feeding on children, even though her vampirism presumably gives her the strength to overpower men.  Nevertheless, she only uses her feminine wiles to get her way, entrancing men with her sexuality and children with promises of candy and sweets.  Even the domain of evil respects the hierarchy of men above women, and women above children, feeding down the line of power.

 

At the heart of the narrative, of course, is a foreign man coming to English soil to corrupt their women and undermine the noble society of this white world (there are as far as I could tell, no one in the novel who isn’t white).  The good English men (and one doctor from the Netherlands) have to drive this foreign invader from English soil to save their women and children, chasing him as far as it takes so that he cannot return to topple English greatness another time.  There are additionally references to physiognomy and the natural greatness of the white man’s brain.  Yuck.

 

There is plenty there to scoff at while reading the novel, but I did not find that that hopelessly sunk the reading experience.  Dracula is a wonderful character.  He is cruel and controlling, abusive and self-centered, powerful and intelligent.  He indeed has incredible strength and can scale walls like a fly; he possesses the ability to control the weather, wolves, and bats; and he wields the power to turn into mist itself.  But for all these supernatural powers, he is painfully human in his awfulness.  He may as well be Jack the Ripper or any Victorian serial killer.  When he tells Jonathan Harker to write three letters dated weeks apart to send to England, Harker sees no way out of doing so, and remarks that he now knows the day on which he will die.  And when Jonathan asks to leave, Dracula acts hurt and says that he would never keep him against his will, only to lead him to the front door behind which innumerable baying wolves howl, forcing Harker to “choose” to remain.  The cruelty is ugly and thrilling.  That same cruelty seems to trigger his interest in converting Mina.  While the men wreak havoc in the Carfax Estate, Dracula hits them where they care most, striking out at the one they want to protect.  Dracula’s draw, for me, had nothing to do with his supernatural trappings, and everything to do with how very human he was.

 

Another cool thing about the novel is that Stoker’s decision to use letters and diaries to tell the tale meant that he was forced to show Dracula’s presence mostly by the effects he created, like watching the footprints in the sand made by the invisible man.  Yes, the convention forced him to create silly reasons for different people to write about their experiences (and in ridiculous detail), but the rewards of the form were well worth it.  Dracula of course keeps no diary, so he only makes a few direct appearances.  And because of that, he is incapable of belaboring many connections and activities—he’s forced to trust the reader to make all the necessary connections.  Those connections are not hard to make, but it’s still nice to have them observed and then moved on from.

 

As an aside, it’s fun to think that “found footage” films, like The Blair Witch Project had a progenitor a hundred years earlier.  And just as films inspired by Blair Witch needed to keep coming up with reasons and ways to have a camera recording at those moments, Stoker had to come up with reasons to have his characters keeping detailed recountings of their experiences.

 

Something that met at the midway point between eyerolls and admiration, for me, was the relationship between the characters.  This is not a story about interpersonal drama.  In fact, since the characters have to be able to read each other’s diaries, they can’t really talk smack about each other and expect to trust each other and work together.  So Stoker’s format forces him to have all the character admire the holy hell out of each other.  It feels like the characters are constantly being blown away by how wonderful their companions are and continuously promising to be best friends until their dying days. It’s hokey.  But under that hokeyness is something genuinely attractive.  This isn’t the story of a single hero against a single villain, but of a community of people and a Great Evil.  There’s something beautiful in that.  That beauty is sadly undercut by their being a community of white hetero dudes from a colonizing empire—so yeah, it’s a real mixed bag.

 

As for the writing itself, the book has moments that ready smoothly and beautifully, and other moments that can be relatively rough to get through.  Overall, I was impressed and found reading it aloud very enjoyable.

Making Sense of Far-Right Religious Extremism in When the Moon Turns to Blood

 I listened to the first and second season of Leah Sotille’s Bundyville podcast in 2019 and was impressed by her talent for presenting a complicated and upsetting situation in a clear, interesting, and compelling way.  Moreover, she made what seemed to me an impenetrably different way of thinking about the world understandable.  So when I saw that she had a book out, I knew she would bring those same journalistic and personal skills to bear on her new subject.  It didn’t matter to me what the subject was—I had never heard of either Vallow or Daybell before—I just knew it would be worth reading. And I was right.

My wife often listens to true crime podcasts while trying to beat insomnia and slide into sleep, so I offered to read the book to her each night, a practice we have always enjoyed with a well-written book.  Sotille not only has the ability to turn a poetic phrase even when discussing the most awful aspects of human nature and activity, but she writes for the human ear, with flowing, rhythmic sentences.  Given that she is experienced in writing for her podcast, I am not surprised, but I was still pleased with the strength of her prose and structuring.

The book was published on the verge of Lori Vallow’s trial and well before Chad Daybell’s, so none of the book focuses on the trials. Instead, Sotille is interested in the How of the story—how did these two people get to a place where they could kill two children (not to mention one of their spouses and potentially both of them).  She looks at the environment of their upbringing and their social maturation, and the importance of the fringe cultures forming around the Mormon church.  She takes her time to explain the tenets of the church and the difficult tightrope the church walks with some of its most troublesome beliefs.  For example, the faith has at its very foundation a belief that God can give revelations to any member of the church.  So how then does the church help determine what revelations are from God, which are meaningful, and which should be given weight.  The official solution is that your personal revelations should be kept to yourself, that they are indeed revelations but that they are personal and apply to you only.  Sharing them could cause trouble, so don’t do that.  You can see how that has the ability to contain things like a sieve can hold water.  In addition to these personal revelations, the church, coming from a past of being attacked ideologically and physically by others, stresses being prepared for catastrophe, which leaves fertile ground for preppers and doomsdayers to grow within the church.  Add to these beliefs (and many more) the modern technology of online forums and the growing anti-government beliefs of right-wing religious groups and you have explosive ingredients intermixing near roaring flames.

There’s a wild shift in the book that occurs heading into Part Four.  Up to this point, Sotille has been explaining the landscape and history of the tragedy.  Heading into Part Four we understand that Vallow and Daybell have weird and dangerous beliefs.  But nothing that comes before prepared me for the wildness of their beliefs or for the influence those beliefs have over others.  It is a mad tumble down the rabbit hole, a murderous Wonderland where things are topsy turvy and subject only to their own twisted logic.  It was hard for me to tie these two parts together, because the conditions described in the first half get overwhelmed by the particular insanities of the second half.  It’s like getting an overview of the forest and then being suddenly thrown into the trees head first. It was difficult to keep the forest in mind while you are trying to dodge tree trunks.

There are so many moments in this book that blew my mind, looking into the lives and thoughts of a world well outside my own.  Sotille provides a glimpse at a whole slice of American life that is otherwise inaccessible to those of us outside of it.  This books may be about a specific set of crimes and the world that birthed them, but it is also about what is happening among the far-right religious groups, what is motivating them, what they take to be facts, and what they understand to be happening around them.  It is terrifying, but it is important to know.

Sotille never offers a solution to what’s happening. But there is, I think, a suggestion that the churches and organizations that house these rapidly radicalizing groups of people need to face the constituents and members directly.  They need to nip the paranoia and fear where it breeds, rather than watering it, or even ignoring it.  People outside these groups cannot convince them that their thinking is dangerous and harmful.  Only the authorities they trust and guide them out of the dark places they have been inhabiting.  I suspect that the Church of Latter Day Saints will react negatively to the look this book takes at them. I can only hope that instead of being angry at their portrayal, that they look inward and ask themselves what they can do to prevent the fanning of paranoia’s and fear’s flames.

H.G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon

I am not proud of the way that I came at this novel.  I wasn’t exactly reading to find faults, but I apparently wasn’t feeling especially generous either.  I was interested to see Wells do his magic, but several stories in the past had made me wary of a couple of unpleasant political leanings I had caught glimpses of.  “The Land of the Blind” particularly stuck with me like a splinter of wood beneath my fingernail.  The narrator of The Time Machine also sat uneasily with me.  So when The First Men in the Moon opened with a narrator running from his creditors, writing a play to make a quick buck, I was unenthused.  I read the majority of the novel with my shield in one hand and my sword in the other, as it were.

My edition, the Penguin Classics edition, first published in 2005, has an introduction by China Mieville.  I saved the introduction until after I had finished the book, to avoid potential spoilers.  On the one hand, this was a good move, because it was indeed full of spoilers.  On the other hand, I could have used Mieville’s insight and good sense while reading the novel!

Mieville’s introduction is thoughtful, well-researched, and invigorating.  If I were writing one of my usual analytical reviews, I would just want to quote everything Mieville says, because they are the things that I wish I had been thinking and seeing while I was reading.  Instead, I got a burst of information and analysis that cast the book in a new light, that let me look over the path I had followed and reinterpret it, more wisely now.

While reading, I kept looking to make sense of Bedford and Cavor as moral characters.  I don’t know why I did this—probably to get a glimpse behind the mask of who H.G. Wells was at this time in his life.  It is uncommon for a writer to make their main character a complete ass (uncommon but certainly not unheard of), and while the Wells novels and stories I have read certainly have flawed, limited, and human narrators, it did not occur to me that Bedford might be someone Wells disagreed with completely, someone he was mocking and expecting us to be in on the joke. I was appalled by much of his character, but I assumed that Wells was not, and that’s what I mean by reading with my sword and shield in hand.  I couldn’t interpret openly and honestly, enjoying what was there before me.  I was dancing around it as though in a duel.  It compromised both my enjoyment and my understanding.

Before reading the introduction, I would have told you the book, politically and philosophically, was a muddle and a mess.  But the more generous reading of that is to observe the beliefs that are in tension within the novel, to see what is at war in the very soul and imagination of the author.  What is rotten at the core of the Imperial and Industrial world of Britain, and how do you save it?  What does that look like?  How do we have the progress and quality of life experienced by some without the cost that such a life inflicts on many?  Wells is trying to work that all out while creating honest and living fiction.  In Mieville’s eyes, I see the book as something much more beautiful and searching than what I saw before.  And I am thankful for his guidance.

The Beauty of Sherwood Anderston's Winesburg, Ohio

 Winesburg, Ohio is a quirky, beautiful, strange little book.  It is a collection of short stories, each one focused on a different character living in the town of Winesburg, Ohio in the 1910s.  There is no real overarching story although the characters and tales have some overlapping, and we get a particular focus on George Willard, the boy who is becoming a man.  Sherwood Anderson began writing the short stories that would comprise Winesburg, Ohio, in 1915 and published the slim volume in 1919.

I first read the book in the mid-1990s during my graduate studies at Boston University.  I had moved from studying the British Romantics and was trying to find what part of American literature I wanted to focus on. I don’t remember who exactly pointed me to Sherwood Anderson’s book, but I’m glad it wound up in my hands.  It was one of those texts that struck my in the heart instantly, like it was an aesthetic and perspective I had been hungering for.  My Oxford World’s Classics edition is full of marginalia and underlining (both from my initial reading and from when I taught parts of the book in a composition class).

The basic thematic thread running through the stories is the pain of loneliness and isolation that we each feel by virtue of our very humanity.  We are all necessarily isolated in our own heads, experiencing the world and our thoughts and our emotions alone, trying to understand who and what we are.  Each character is looking for a way to connect with others around them, to communicate what’s inside them, to open their heart and their soul, to be seen and heard and understood.  That desire is checked by the coexisting fear that they will be rejected, railed against, laughed at, and feared.  The author shows us their humanity and what moves them.  He makes sense of the odd ways they attempt to tolerate the unbearableness of living alone among others.  And of course, we understand because we recognize the truth of this beautiful and cursed human condition.  I imagine that readers either love the book or reject it entirely.

In the first short story, The Book of the Grotesque,” an old man has a dream that he then wakes up and writes about:

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague throughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.

The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not tr to tell you all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and profligacy, of carefulness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood. (9)

This provides a lens with which to view the other stories and the grotesques that populate Winesburg, Ohio, each lifting a concern or thought above all others, believing that one thing to be central to their life.  But of course that is more reductionist than the rest of the novel.  The characters sometimes threaten to become two-dimensional in their desires and pain, but the love that Anderson feels for them each, and the love we as readers are encouraged to feel for them, saves them from such a fate.

The book is important, historically, for a number of reasons.  According to the forward in my edition, written by Glen A. Love, this book marks a major change in the focus of short stories in American literature.  Before this point, short stories were often built around plot, like those of O. Henry or Edgar Allen Poe.  Anderson’s short stories look inward, built instead of the emotional situation of the lead character.  Thing happen, most certainly, in the stories, but those happenings are about the inner journey of the character, their mental and emotional landscape.  Anyone who reads contemporary short stories knows that this is still the prevailing way to structure short stories.

In addition, as you can see from the passage I quoted above, Anderson uses simple sentence structures and a plain affect as narrator.  You will not be surprised to learn that Anderson influenced Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver.  And while syntactically his writing is nothing like William Faulkner’s, he also influenced the southern author.

But for me, the historical importance of the novel is not the reason I treasure it or reread it.  It is the writing that I enjoy.  Anderson’s prose may appear businesslike, but it is laced with poetry. Looking through the book to find an example, I’m a bit stymied, because the poetry is contextual.  It’s not like grabbing any passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, where every line is poetry disguised as prose.  No, here, even as Anderson has some beautiful turns of phrase, the poetry is in communicating the profound with an unassuming simplicity.  For example:

Their bodies were different as were also the color of their eyes, the length of their noses and the circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the same release, would have left he same impression on the memory of an onlooker. (182)

I am of course a different person than the one who first discovered the powerful beauty within these pages 30 years ago.  Revisiting the book now, I found those moments of aching beauty, but without the strength that I felt in my 20s.  I am aware of how much more complicated life is than I once thought.  I see cracks in the beauty, such as the sameness of the pain that plagues the women in the book, while the men have a greater variety.  I see something dark in the story of Wing Biddlebaum.  The work is entirely fiction, of course, and what the author says must be regarded as truth, but characterization of the “half-witted” “loose-hung lip[ped]” boy who “imagined unspeakable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts” (15) smacks of ableism and a standard defense given to so many who have actually victimized children.  Similarly, so many of these stories dismiss the mental health of the characters, confusing neurodiversity with the same longing that someone like George Willard has.  George’s mother needs love, understanding, and connection, certainly, but I can’t help but feel that she is equally in need of pharmaceutical and professional support.  Of course I don’t expect Sherwood Anderson to write anything other than he wrote, but from my perspective now, the enjoyment of the narrative is complicated by my wider view of these things.

Even with those complications, I love this book.

The Time Machine

 

After reading the collection of H.G. Wells’s short stories, I wanted to revisit a couple of his longer pieces.  I had read The Time Machine a while back, and I remember reading it quickly.  It was a short book, and I knew it was an adventure story, and I wanted it to move quickly, so I moved through it as such.  My other memory of reading the book last time is that my head was filled with what I already knew about the book, and those images and ideas covered the very words I was reading like a translucent layer of onion skin, allowing me to read but not to clearly see.

 

I have often said that the least wonderful part of any work of fiction is the plot.  What happens happens, and it’s interesting and even gripping, but it’s rarely the rich and rewarding part of any given reading experience.  You can get the plot from hundreds of sources on the internet (bound to be close to accurate), or from one of the many cinematic adaptations (bound to be wildly inaccurate in some places).  What is compelling, rather, is the language of the text.  What the author actually says and how they actually say it, that is the actual meat of any reading experience.  For me, at least.

 

For this read, I slowed down, and I didn’t worry about where the story was going.  The first two chapters have all the fun theory about time, and the scientific foundation for the wild tale.  These are gripping chapters, like short stories unto themselves.  In spite of the many characters gathered around the time traveler, the conversation is easy and fun to follow.  The richness really kicks in with chapter three. Wells possesses an unusual gift for bringing his imagined physical world to life.  Here’s his description of moving forward in time:

 

I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensation of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash.  As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed and I had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling success of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.

 

We are used to seeing movie magic today, used to someone turning a concept into a brilliant visual to amaze us.  Again and again I am stopped by Wells’s ability to do that same thing with words—and to do it in a time when no one had ever seen special effects in films.  He had to come up with those details himself and then paint the picture such that we could see it with him.  He applies his skills to moments of drama, like the movement through time, but also to the quiet descriptions of the landscapes of the future.

 

If you care about the plot and spoilers, I would stop reading here.

 

The plot itself is interesting and moves well.  Like most great classic plots, it moves forward with a simple, driving arc.  The narrator, stuck in the future because his time machine has been seized, needs to locate his machine and find a way to get it back.  He investigates, gathers resources, endures a few close calls, all of which educate him about his antagonists, makes a daring attempt for his machine and narrowly escapes danger.  In his desperation while fleeing he flies further into the future and comes as close as one can to the death of the planet before returning home.

 

The philosophical argument is not nearly as gripping as the writing or the plot.  There is a warning that the comfortable class is getting to comfortable and will become effeminized and infantilized until they are defenseless and little better than lambs.  The fate of the working class is not much better.  They maintain some ingenuity, but they become beastlike and not much better than predatory animals themselves.  There is a whiff of political concern about class division, but Wells’s sympathies are so clearly with the sad fate of the rich and well-off that I can’t even muster the interest or strength for any thorough analysis.  I’m sure many such analyses already exist out there.  There is also the stench of racism surrounding the Morlocks, but I didn’t see any need to prod into that either.

 

Even more problematic for me, on this read, are the parts of this sociological construction that don’t make any sense. The structures built to house the Eloi are, if not sophisticated, elegant and pretty.  We don’t see the Morlocks displaying any such interest in architecture beyond these homes.  Similarly, the narrator suggests that it’s the Morlocks who make the clothing for the Eloi, but again, we don’t see them displaying any other textile skills or interests.  And why both to clothe and elegantly house the Eloi instead of creating a simple pen in which they could sleep.  The narrator suggests that the houses give them some genuine protection from the Morlocks, but why would the Morlock’s do that, instead of building a structure that allows them easy access without traumatizing their livestock.  As easy as it was for me to see and feel the physicality of Well’s world, it was difficult to swallow the social structures existing within the physical ones.

 

All in all, I enjoyed the book less than I expected, mostly because of the political and social beliefs (or lack of beliefs) that failed as tentpoles to hold everything aloft.  

The Selected Stories of H.G. Wells

 I sought out this specific collection of H.G. Wells’s short stories because they were gathered, ordered, and edited by Ursula K. Le Guin.  I had read a few of Wells’s longer stories (War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Time Machine), but I read them as entertainment, not as literature.  I don’t mean that with any kind of judgment. Wells writes entertainingly and to entertain, and to read a story to hear a good yarn is a perfectly legitimate enterprise.  I just mean that I hadn’t paid any attention to Wells as an artist, making artistic decisions.  Coming to these stories in this collection through the eyes of Le Guin is like taking a small course on Wells as a writer, or seeing his works through the eyes of friend.  It shaped the way I see and understand Wells’s writing.

 

Instead of presenting the 26 short stories, spanning 40 years of Wells’s life, in chronological order, from the first written to the last, Le Guin has grouped the stories by genre: “Because almost all Wells’s stories are genre stories and because I value them as such, I arranged them, not chronologically, but in sections by kind.  Each section has a brief introduction, discussing what kind of stories they are, where this kind of story came from and what it may have led to” (xii).  It is a clever way to group an artist’s work, and it makes you conscious of how each story relates to the other stories within its grouping, and of course, how blurry and artificial those lines are in the end.  Her first grouping is not by any larger-recognized genre that I’m familiar with: “In one way or another all the stories in this section have to do with what somebody sees” (italics in original, 3).  And while these first 7 stories are built around gifted vision, Le Guin uses the category to set the larger theme that she sees running through all of Wells’s work: his incredible ability to bring a scene, a landscape, a person, a world to life.  It was a joy to slow down and see how effectively and efficiently Wells could describe a thing, especially in a world that predates big cinema.  So often when I read 21^st century novels, I can feel the writer writing for the big screen, or even for the prestigious small screen.  Wells had no such experience with cinematic scenes of war or romantic lighting or catastrophic destruction, and yet his descriptions bring those very things to life.  Here’s a small taste, from “A Dream of Armageddon” (grouped by Le Guin in “Technological and Predictive Science Fiction”). In it, a man and woman are feeling a war-torn part of the world. They are resting for a moment when war planes fly over-head, firing indiscriminately (and this was written before World War I, even before the Wright Brothers had been to Kitty Hawk): “Overhead in the sky flashed something and burst, and all about us I heard the bullets making a noise like a handful of peas suddenly thrown. They chipped the stones about us, and whirled fragments from the bricks and passed . . .” (194).  You can hear and see it like it were on a screen before you, and yet it is all a part of his finely-tuned imagination.

 

I was struck by how modern Wells’s language felt, especially given that some pieces were nearly 125 years old.  Both the general sentences and the dialogue are vibrant and present, alive and human.  I realized that one of the reasons he reads so quickly and easily is that his language is unobtrusive.  His words give you the image, create the feeling, propel you forward, and then disappear.  The world is alive and the people understandable and the situations both human and intriguing.

 

There are a few stories that I found hard to stomach for their racism.  Le Guin tries to smooth over the issue by noting that “the writer’s sympathy is with the black man,” but that is an unfortunately facile way to apologize for the problems at its root.  She suggests that the problem with “The Lord of the Dynamos” is essentially the use of the N-word, but the problems are much deeper.  Even if Wells expresses sympathy for Azuma-zi, there is a world of racist assumptions and stereotypes propping Azuma-zi up.

 

I found “The Country of the Blind,” the story that concludes the collection, to be fascinating in that it seems to make an argument unintended by the author and unrecognized by the editor.  The story involves an isolated people in a small valley of the Ecuadorean Andes.  For whatever reason, the environment his led to all the inhabitants, for generation after generation, to become or be born blind.  One day, a mountain climber from Bogota accidentally finds himself stranded in the valley.  He initially thinks his gift of sight will make his superior to, and a natural leader of, the blind people, but he finds that the world and life they have built favors blindness and he is outmatched by them.  Because he talks of things they cannot comprehend, they consider him a lunatic, heretical, and an idiot.  He is dependent on them for survival, living entirely in their world, and he submits himself to their ways.  The story is supposed to be about how a visionary is stifled and dismissed among the ignorance of the masses who are unable to even understand the language of the visionary.  And to that end, the story is effective.  But Wells undercuts this idea by having the seeing man be such an arrogant fool.  First, Bogota (the name the blind people give him) is a rich mountain climber, indulging in his own abilities, not trying to improve the world in any way. Second, the near-immediate thought that Bogota has once he discovers where he is, is the refrain “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”  And his expectation is not to serve or help anybody, but the rule over them.  He comes into the village like an empirical force, learning nothing of the local culture or their ways and assumes they are childish and ignorant and in need of his wisdom and experience.  My sympathies were entirely with the blind folk.  Wells showed that if the world were set up with differing abilities in mind, that there is no actual handicap to blindness, that in fact there are advantages and special gifts that come with it.  It is living in a seeing world that refuses to accommodate blindness that disadvantages the blind person.

 

Like all of us, Wells is blind to his own assumptions, and when they stick out so apparently to me as they do in these last two stories I describe, it is a little painful. But I have discussed only the two stories that are problematic, so please don’t let those two stories dissuade you from reading the other 24 presented in this collection.  In fact, I would definitely recommend “The Country of the Blind” because there is a lot of thought in it, and even when it has sour tastes, there is a lot to relish.

 

Wells has a lot of interesting approaches to interesting topics.  Some tales are like Twilight Zone episodes, and some are unlike anything I’ve read before, artful and contemplative and unexpected.  “Under the Knife” and “The Star” are two that come to mind.  H.G. Wells touches upon nearly everything that will be the stuff of science fiction throughout the 20^th century. Strange magic shops (“The Magic Shop”), body switching (“The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham”), seeing through time and space (“The Crystal Eggs”), new technology making war more horrifying still (“The Land Ironclads”), oversized beasts (“The Valley of the Spiders”), underwater discoveries (“In the Abyss”), the nature of the soul and out of body experiences (“The Stolen Body”), and so much more.  All told from interesting, human perspective with thoughtful explorations of what these things mean for the world.

 

This collection is a delight, and having Le Guin’s guiding voice to move through them is a treat.

W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folks

I don’t believe I have read any of DuBois writings before this one, except possibly as excerpts in literature classes in the first year or two of college.  I decided I needed to read this seminal work somewhere in the midst of reading The 1619 Project.

 

I expected something very different from what this book is.  I expected a high-level, argumentative, sustained philosophical piece about America’s “problem of the color-line,” something full of footnotes and citations to sociological works.  The book does indeed reach high-level considerations. But it also grounds itself in specific people and stories.  It is certainly argumentative.  But it is interested in painting a broad picture beyond the borders of those specific arguments. It is definitely philosophical.  But it is every bit as humanistic, concerned with the flesh and lived lives, not just matters of philosophical concern.

 

Published in 1903, the book comprises a collection of essays that DuBois had previously published in magazines and journals, such as The Atlantic Monthly and The Dial.  Together, essays look back at the preceding 40 years and ahead to the whole of the century stretching before him, noting that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,--the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (16).  He begins by looking back at the American government’s responses at the end of the Civil War, where it tried to do right, where it maliciously did wrong, and where it gave up altogether.  He then takes a prolonged look at the education of previously enslaved people and their children, taking up argument with Booker T. Washington’s position and looking at his own experience as a school teacher in rural Tennessee.  This latter essay, “Of the Meaning of Progress,” is the first of his personal essays in the collection.  By looking at the political issue of education through the lens of his own lived experience, DuBois is able to include all the factors that play into the continued disadvantaging of Black Americans.  The poverty, the geography, the social barriers, the cultural history—it’s all there in the telling of the lives of his former students and their families.  It’s very much in the vein of what is now common modern journalism, and it’s powerful stuff in literary and mental talents of DuBois.  He then looks at the larger issues of freedom and power, specifically in Georgia and Atlanta, though those specifics are clearly meant to point to the larger national condition.  He observes how the laws and racist customs are designed to hem in and limit Black folks economic futures, and how those limitations affect family relations and individual behaviors.  DuBois then offers a few especially personal pieces, about the loss of his first born still in his infancy, the biography of Alexander Crummel, and a (presumably fictional) short story about two Johns in a small southern town, one Black, one white. He concludes his book with a short essay on the musical and cultural contributions Black people have given to America through their music: “[T]he Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas” (180-181).

 

DuBois writing is eloquent and powerful, and just formal enough that it requires attention and a slowed-pace to absorb it all.  He opens the book with the statement, “Herein lies buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century.”  I discovered that indeed patience was needed, and warranted.  I’m not a fast reader, naturally, but the slower I went, the more I enjoyed and got out of this book.  One chapter I read to myself entirely out loud to feel the rhythm and music of DuBois’s language.  I admired his clarity of thought, his thoroughness of vision, and his literary power to bring it all to the page.

 

There were a few things that troubled me while I read the book.  There were veins of anti-semitism that were difficult to travel past.  The assumed patriarchal stance needled me regularly as DuBois made it clear that he was interested entirely in the matters of men.  Finally, there are several points where, to make his larger argument, DuBois accepts the characterization of many Black people as lazy and shiftless.  Of course, he seeks to explain culturally and economically how that laziness and shiftlessness are created and encouraged, but even accepting such things made me wince.

 

This is the kind of book that will bear rereading and re-engagement.  I will undoubtedly be picking it up again down the road.

 

As a mere side-thought, it occurs to me that The 1619 Project is in some ways a reimagining of The Souls of Black Folks, borrowing its structure, its focus, and its methods to start out the 21^st century as DuBois kicked of the 20^th.

The Princess and the Goblin

I learned of this book when reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter, which is in part a collection of her writings about other people’s writings. I trust Le Guin not only as a writer but as a reader, and I decided to make a list of the works she chose to write about and decided to work my way through them over the next couple of years.  George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, published serially in 1870 and 1871, and published as a novel in 1872, is the oldest book she wrote about, so I decided to start with it.

 

First thing I did, after re-reading Le Guin’s Introduction, was Google George MacDonald. He’s not an author I ever remember hearing of, so I was surprised to find that he had inspired so many writers that I had heard of.  C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Frank Baum, Richard Adams, Lloyd Alexander, Madeleine L’Engle—what?!  It’s an all-star list of authors of the best children’s and young adult fiction we have.  And once I began reading, I saw it immediately.  There’s so much about MacDonald’s voice that you can see picked up and carried forward by the author’s mentioned above, and that has become a mainstay in the category of literature that MacDonald himself practically created.  As a result, very little about the book feels 150 years old, even though the story is unabridged, changed, likely, in spelling only.

 

The narrator adopts moments of uncertainty and familiarity.  In spite of the fact that the narrator is clearly omniscient in the classic narrator sense, he speaks as one telling a story of which he has imperfect knowledge.  For example, he notes in the opening chapter, “The princess was a sweet little creature, and at the time my story begins was about eight years old, I think, but she got older very fast.”  That little “I think” appears in touches throughout the novel.  The effect is to make the narrator a character, with a specific voice, and to align that character with you, the reader, very much from the same world with the same expectations and sense of wonder.  But the narrator is in a position of privilege, both in the sense that they know more than you, but also in the sense that they are parental or avuncular.  When the princess meets a magical old woman seemingly living in the attic of the princess’s grand home, the narrator says,

 

That the princess was a real princess you might see now quite plainly; for she didn’t hang on to the handle of the door, and stare without moving, as I have known some do who ought to have been princesses but were only rather vulgar little girls. She did as she was told, stepped inside the door at once, and shut it gently behind her. (12)

 

It is hard to read that without feeling the nod and wink to the audience.  At the end of that same chapter, the narrator promises to tell us more in some following chapter about what the magical old woman was spinning at her spinner, and he concludes the chapter with, “Guess what she was spinning” (18).  Again, this breaks down that fourth wall between the narrator and their audience.  In fact, the title of that same chapter is “The Princess and – We shall see who.”  Above that title is an image, included in the original publication, of a woman at a spinner.  The reason I know this is that once or twice the narrator refers to one of the accompanying pictures to report on its accuracy and reliability.  Pulled altogether, these techniques create a playful and friendly tone that is immediately familiar to anyone who has read Alice in Wonderland; The Hobbit; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; The Black Cauldron; etc.

 

One of the effects of this tone is to make the reader always feel safe, assured that no matter what horrors or brushes with the grotesque lie before us, there is nothing to be afraid of.  Everything will work out alright in the end.  This allows the author to put Curdie, the little mining boy who is our model of heroism in the story, in deep danger in the tunnels of the Goblins without ever making us or our young charges sweat.

 

The writing itself is warm and easy, aiming for clarity first, but taking occasional dips into the poetic.  To take an example again from early in the book, I’ll quote from the narrator’s first description of the princess: “Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two bits of night sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue.  Those eyes you would have thought must have known they came from there, so often were they turned up in that direction” (2).

 

The characters are every bit as warm and lovely as the narrator and the writing.  Except for Lootie—the princess’s nursemaid, who loves the princess deeply but lacks the maturity and self-awareness to govern her feelings and fears—every grownup in the book is an impressive person.  They treat the children like people with respect and understanding, and they model behaviors of love and trust.  While the story has a princess and her father the King, Curdie and his parents are every bit as regal and admirable.  The Goblins are fun foils, treated with the same playfulness and affection, even though they are clearly the antagonists of the story.  Although they are set up as the unnatural and twisted versions of humans after living generations below ground (a nod to the popularity of Darwin’s evolutionary theories), they are not presented as the inversion of all that is good and human.  They live in families and have pride in themselves.  They are certainly not always nice to each other, but they are not reduced to caricature as Roald Dahl tends to do with his comical villains.  A full and proper analysis could be made to look at what the Goblin’s represent to the author.  They have notions of conquest, an ability to long nurse a grude—one that goes back so far the narrator is uncertain of its origins, proposing legendary theories instead of offering us anything concrete--, a sense of righteousness in their own actions in violating another’s autonomy, prejudices, and ambitions.  But they want their children to thrive, they care for their families, and they have a government that parallels the kingship above ground.  When the queen is revealed to have toes (Goblins in this world do not have toes), the Goblin King uses that information as leverage against her, but he is not appalled and certainly doesn’t subject her to torments or even demotion because of it.  I’ll be tinkering around with ideas, but I haven’t developed any solid thoughts yet.  If and when someone does that analysis, I’d love to see it. 

 

Instead, I’ve been thinking about that magical old woman in the attic.  She might look initially like a fairy godmother, and she certainly has those trappings.  The princess even calls her grandmother.  But the old woman doesn’t just show up for a deus ex machina or two; she saves the day many times.  She leads the princess home when she is lost at night.  She leads the princess to Curdie to save him from the Goblins. She leads the princess out of the house when the Goblins attack, and then again she leads Curdie to the princess when he thinks she might have been kidnapped by the Goblins.  Nothing happens without grandmother’s knowledge or approval.  The issue, narratively speaking, surrounding the grandmother is faith and belief, who can see her and who can’t, and who having seen her can believe in her.  It seems pretty clear that grandmother is a stand in for God.  I remember reading in an article about MacDonald that he was a pastor for some time, but that his parishioners booted him because of his unusual teachings.  I wonder if his understanding of God was a little to maternal and not enough Angry Father to make his fellow Scotsmen happy.  Grandmother definitely likes people to behave properly and with good manners, but she is loving and comforting and understanding.  She prepares the princess for her adventure, but doesn’t stop it from happening.  She is proud of the princess. Supportive. Nurturing.  She lets the princess learn for herself that not everyone will believe in grandmother, and then comforts her with the knowledge that that’s okay.  Believing must come before seeing for grandmother, and God.  Interestingly, grandmother is associated with the Moon—which the lamp in her room emulates.  It seems odd that she is not associated with the sun, but of course that is for the masculine he-God.  But then the moon is a much more fitting image for this deity, the light that guides you when the world is dark, the sliver of thread that leads you through the darkness if you have faith that it is taking you where you should go, the little snippet of daylight when the easy comfort of the sun is gone.

 

There is generally a rejection of masculine solutions throughout the book.  Yes, the princess’s father is a manly, armored king, and the queen is absent entirely, but we never see that king as anything other than her King-Papa.  His guards are humbled by the strange creatures, the Goblin’s pets who slip past them and frighten them.  Martial solution is limited.  Even in the battle with the Goblins, the main power Curdie wields is song and poetry, not a stick.  He stomps on soft feet, but he mostly wins by avoiding battle, singing his rhymes and not taking the Goblins especially seriously.  And while Curdie needs rescuing by the princess, the princess never needs rescuing by Curdie, which narrative expectations set us up for and then deny us.  Grandmother has already taken the princess, not to the protection of armed men, but to the protection of a loving mother who can hold her.  The traditionally feminine arts of spinning and homemaking are the heroes of the story.  Even the Goblin Queen is protected not by armor, but by cobbling.

 

This was a delightful book to read, and an important one.  MacDonald has been called the father of modern fantasy, which is a well-deserved title in his influence of J.R.R. Tolkien and others.  I am only surprised that it took me so long to discover this treasure.

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

I usually reserve this blog for posting reviews and thoughts about works of fiction. I make an exception in this case.

We Americans surround ourselves with myths about our country, myths that we learn early on from family, school, and our institutions.  Myths can be wonderful, unifying banners to gather and work under, but they can also serve the purpose of hiding shame and obscuring responsibility.  Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project takes the singular institution of chattel slavery and holds it up to the light of the sun, like a glass gathering and concentrating its rays to burn away the mists of myth we have collectively been hiding in for over 400 years.  The 19 historical essays, along with the works of poetry and fiction interspersed between those essays, delineate the ways that chattel slavery, present from the very origins of our national identity, has shaped our founding documents, institutional structures, and social policies.  More importantly, the essays make clear that our national desire to hide our shame, to “get over” it, to dismiss and disown it, has denied us the ability to rectify the past wrongs and forced us to compound error and mistreatment upon error and mistreatment.

 

Each essay, written by a different historian or cultural critic, looks at one facet of America and examines the way our slavery has shaped and continues to shape our country.  The essays follow a chronological arc from 1619, when, a year before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the first slave trade ship docked at Jamestown, to 2020 and the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  They bear single-word titles, showing both the broad scope of that influence into every corner of American life. 

 

Even if you are familiar with a lot of the history present in these essays, there will still be a lot to learn, both in terms of facts and in terms of the connective tissue that links everything together.  While I found every essay worth reading, there were certain essays that punched me harder than others.  Matthew Desmond’s essay on “Capitalism” made America’s version of capitalism make sense in a horrifying, eye-opening way.  I sat with that essay for a long time, and read it to my wife immediately upon completing it.  Likewise, Carol Anderson’s essay on “Self-Defense,” and its look at the history of the 2^nd Amendment is a powerful look at history that my extensive education has never afforded me.  Wesley Morris’s “Music” is artful and accomplished, making connections and a cultural argument is hard to deny.  Ibram X. Kendi’s “Progress,” the penultimate essay in the collection, looks at how America has been using the idea that we are making progress in overcoming our past to excuse great horrors for as long as we have been a nation.

 

When I first flipped through the book and saw the timeline and fictional passages and poems between essays, my original plan was to skip past them and just stick to the essays.  But once I got to them I appreciated what they were doing, and how they interacted with the essays. They provide historical anchors and poetic, human voices that bring the larger issues and events through another vein into pumping heart of the book and the its readers. Instead of skipping over those sections, I slowed down and took them in, reading many of the poems and passages aloud to myself.

 

I imagine many will argue that this collection of essays should be required reading for the American people, and I agree with them fully.  In fact, I think it is a civic duty, an important way to become a fully informed citizen.  Hannah-Jones has given us all a gift to collect all of this knowledge into one book.  What Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States did for understanding labor in America, The 1619 Project does for understanding racism.  Don’t let the size of the book dissuade you from picking it up. The essays range from 10 to 30 pages, and they are written in compelling, straightforward language that easily carries you through the arguments. The last 100 pages of the book are acknowledgments, endnotes, and index, so there are only about 480 pages of essays and poems and timeline.

Super Sad True Love Story Is Super Okay

I have had a complicated reaction to this 2010 novel, the first of Shteyngart’s that I have read.  The writing is solid and dependable, but seldom surprising, beautiful, or striking. The comic elements are usually clever, seldom funny, and sometimes merely painful.  The social commentary is insightful but simple.  Through all of these reactions, I was never sure how much was coming from me and how much was coming from the novel itself.  Absurdist fiction can be hit or miss with me, and I haven’t figured out what makes a work fall into either category.  Whatever the reason, this book landed on the side of miss, but while it irritated me at times in the reading, I was always interested and hopeful that it might have more flashes of brilliance than potholes that make me grumble about the narrative trip.

The thing that I keep coming back to in analyzing my feelings are the main characters, Lenny and Eunice. Let’s start with Lenny.  Shteyngart seems to want Lenny to carry more weight than he can.  Or perhaps he wants to have a character we both like and dislike.  Or perhaps it’s something else altogether that I can’t sense because our aesthetic tastes are too different.  On the one hand, Lenny is eminently human. He’s insecure, scared of dying, scared of growing old, scared of becoming irrelevant, and scared of being alone.  He seeks the approval of everyone, whether he respects them or not.  But for all that, he’s also pathetic, ludicrous, and kind of gross.  He latches on the Eunice for every wrong reason, and it’s never clear what he’s attracted to in her, other than her looks. And of course, Eunice gets the same treatment, the same mix of humanity and absurdism.  And similarly, it’s never any clearer what Eunice sees in Lenny.  For a love story to work, we have to be invested in the lovers and their love.  While I was sometimes fascinated by them, I was never invested in them and never felt like I understood them.  They always felt like characters in a play, half real and half fake, held up by strings and wire, going through the motions as the storyteller dictated.

Part of the distance between me, the reader, and the characters might be the form the novel takes.  It’s an interesting idea to make an epistolary novel in which the two main characters seldom write to each other.  As a diary, Lenny’s chapters are unbelievable, especially in a world that doesn’t value writing.  That goes doubly for Eunice’s writings to her friends and families.  We are constantly told that Eunice doesn’t value the written word and then we see her embracing it fully as her medium of communication.  It seems to undermine the characterization of the world, unless of course the intention is to say that even as people reject the written word and alienate themselves from it they actually love and embrace it, that Eunice and Lenny are not exceptions, but what’s actually going on beneath the surface of America.  But that’s hard to believe, and it would take a lot of mental gymnastics to create a reading that would support that idea.

The epilogue is another odd choice. As with the traditional epistolary novel, this book attempts to present the collected writings of our main characters as put together, edited, and presented to the public in the form in which we just read them.  But to do so here is to take away any political punch the novel may have had.  The wrap up makes everything about Lenny.  Part of the charm of the novel in the context of the love story, the dystopic nightmare America that is just around the corner.  As I read the novel, I kept thinking that perhaps instead of the politics being a backdrop, the love story is a mere foreground detail to frame the political happenings.  But the epilogue mostly kills that idea, and it adds nothing but some semi-clever additional framing and a reason for the title of the book.  And if you ever thought that Eunice and Lenny were equal main characters in the narrative, the epilogue will set you straight.  This was always Lenny’s story first.  I find everything the epilogue brings to the book disappointing.

So Super Sad True Love Story is an awkward mix of a failed love story and a failed political parable.  I would say that I feel like it’s trying to do too many things at once, but I can’t even say that, because I believe that Shteyngart wrote exactly the novel he wanted to write.  These characters are presented exactly the way he wants to present them, and the political background is exactly as he wants it to be, making the stabs he wants to make and withholding the conclusions he doesn’t want to draw.  So I can’t fault the book for being exactly what it is, but I can say that it isn’t exactly for me.  I don’t feel the need to explore more of Shteyngart’s writing because I suspect we will continue to miss each other.  And that’s fine for both of us.