The Stars are Meh

The Stars Are Legion was given to me as a gift for last Christmas, and I was very excited to get it.  I had been following Kameron Hurley on Twitter for some time and was looking forward to seeing her work.  In addition, my friend got me the joke cover that Hurley had made, where the original title was replaced in the same dramatic font with “Lesbians in Space.”  What was not to love?!  My wife and I have been reading a bunch of science fiction novels by female authors, and this immediately went to the top of the list.  I’ve been reading aloud every night for 10-30 pages when we go to bed, and so as soon as we finished the Ursula K. Le Guin novel we were reading, we dove into this one.

We made it about 20 pages in before we had to switch to another book.  We were both put off by the writing pretty quickly.  The prose itself was serviceable but not enjoyable.  The dialogue was flat and without subtext.  Things that felt like they were supposed to be clever weren’t.  Somewhere in the third chapter, I realized that my reading was only agitating Ann rather than giving her something to enjoy before we slept.

But the book was a gift, and I was interested to know if it got better, so I read on to myself over the next couple of months.  It took me a couple of months because I had other things I wanted to read more, and making progress in the book, in spite of what an easy read it is, was difficult.  Now that I have finished it, I can say that there are no brilliant turns or innovative revelations that lifts the book above the average contender for a reader’s attention.

Sometimes when I finish a book I did not enjoy, I flip through others’ reviews to see if anyone can help me put a finger on what I found unsatisfying.  Whew, the reviews here were not helpful.  People who hated it were either grossed out by ickiness of biological fluids or were just confused and irritated by that confusion.  The people who loved it loved the grossness, the all-female cast, and what they saw as the innovativeness of the worlds Hurley created.  Personally, I was excited by the all-female world, but I was disappointed that nothing particularly interesting was done with it.  The main reason in terms of plot that everyone seems to be a woman is that they all need to be able to birth things that the worlds require.  The worlds have no use for men since they can’t contribute positively to the ecosystem.  That’s a cool idea.  But it wasn’t an idea that was explored or played with; it just was.  In fact, I didn’t know why whatever words they used to describe people in this world were gendered at all, given that there was only one gender.  In a world where the people only know humans who can give birth, why would those people be called anything but “people”?  The word “women” exists for us in our culture in relationship to its binary “men,” so a translation from whatever language the characters speak into English would naturally seem to only have one non-gendered word: people.  That the book is set up as a translation is established from the first chapter when Zan struggles with the word whose meaning is both “world” and “ship.”

As for the ickiness and grossness, I’m good with it.  In my limited reading it seems to me that biotechnology is a hot topic at the moment.  So the biological aspect of the ship didn’t feel innovative to me so much as in the moment.  And Hurley’s interest in that biological structure seems to have been as a backdrop for fluids and flesh rather than, again, something to explore or mine for narrative richness.  Most of the second section of the novel is Zan’s movements through the lower levels of the ship, and each level gave us a new biological horror or oddity, like Odysseus moving from island to island in the Aegean seas.  We were there long enough to see something new, overcome a challenge, and then move on.  The characters we meet and the challenges they face don’t lead to interesting revelations of world or character.  For example, the hot-air-balloon-pulley-system escape from the lake level to the amber-light level doesn’t give us readers anything to chew on. Casamir is clever to create a hot air balloon, and there is supposed to be some tension in the pulleying up of the characters, but in the end it’s a flat event without insight, like a scene in a summer blockbuster full of light and spectacle, but not much else.

In my own final analysis, the book skims across the subject of its surface without ever penetrating into the world or the characters.  The first-person perspective is on the one hand necessary for keeping us readers in the dark about who Zan really is, but it also limits what Hurley can explore.  Zan is a woman of action and not one to explore her own feelings and motivations, or even the world around her.  As a result, she dwells on nothing, introduces us to no insight, and does not have the curiosity to tell us anything of value beyond the movements of the plot.

So what is the book about?  When you strip away all the science fiction trappings and biological goo, you have a story about 3 women who are trying to save their world from extinction by the most brutal means.  Relationships are all negotiations and posturing with everyone trying to come out on top as lord.  Only Zan has the best interest of others at heart.  And what is Hurley saying about this?  Is it an examination of friendships between women?  A look at the nature of power?  A study of the tension between self-interest and communal-interest?  A tale about the cycle of birth and death and how women’s bodies are at the center of it all?  Maybe.  I don’t know if it looks at any of those things enough to ever be anything more than a passing observation.

Obviously what I’m describing is an aesthetic difference between the way Hurley wants to tell her story and the way I like to be told a story.  I think it’s awesome that Hurley has a lot of avid fans for whom this book rocked their world.  I can get what I want from other authors.

I’ve been spoiled by some excellent literature, and I miss reading them.  I seem to be living in a 3-star world lately, with books that are competently written but not especially rewarding to read, not for me at least. 

The Barrow Will Send What it May--more Danielle Can adventures

The Barrow Will Send What It May is the second book in Margaret Killjoy’s Danielle Cain series.  For me, it has the same strengths and the same weaknesses as the first book.  I’m about to spoil everything in the book, so read on at your own caution.

I really love the way Killjoy approaches the fantastic in these novels.  Her joining of small-town American life to supernatural has a flavor and look that is all its own, and that quality of freshness is not to be underrated.  Part of that uniqueness is the limited scope of the story told.  Here we have a necromancer who is raising the dead for a very specific and personal reason, and his plans affect two households in the whole town.  There is nothing earth-shattering going on here, and I like that restraint.  Similarly, Killjoy uses the tradition in detective fiction of the detective who encounters a pre-existing tangle of relationships and then has to navigate and untangle them to lay bare what is happening, if not solve it.  Crossing that detective fiction with supernatural investigation is a wonderful idea.

I admire Killjoy’s determination to create a pro-anarchy book with characters everywhere in the gender, sexuality, and romance spectrums.  She creates a world in which all these differences coexist matter-of-factly, and that’s just cool.

Finally, I like the thematic content of the book, the contrast of possessive and generous love.  Sebastian’s love for Gertrude is selfishness that disguises itself as generosity.  Vasilis has to face the fact that he too is powered by a selfish love for Heather and needs to confront that head on before he can progress.  Danielle’s sleepless night of jealousy over Brynn and Heather’s conversations is the point on contrast, in which she has to realize that her jealousy is about herself, not Brynn.  Thursday helps her come to this realization, so not all dudes are bad.  Thursday is of course held up for criticism when he is part of the dude-collective bringing firearms into one of the climactic scenes instead of contributing to the de-escalation effort that Danielle lead.  That’s when Brynn delivers the dismissive line: “Cis men.”

The politics of the book are front and center, and I enjoy that.  I also admire that Killjoy seeks to model good and open communication between characters, but it can read a little didactic at times.  When Danielle is talking to Isola in the library, she is careful to note that she doesn’t tread on Isola’s feelings: “I didn’t say any of that to Isola, though.  Because . . . me even pretending to understand where she was coming from?  That was bullshit.  I didn’t know shit about shit.  I’d never been kidnapped and murdered.”  She is, of course, absolutely right, and were that the only occurrence of such an exchange, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it.  Many of the conversations, though, show this kind of thoughtfulness.  I know I should be celebrating its existence, but something about it has the faint odor of after-school-specialness to it, to which I find myself reacting negatively.

And that leads me to the observation that there are some bad lines of dialogue in the book.  When there is a standoff in front of Sebastian’s gift shop, Danielle says to him that he doesn’t want to shoot Vasilis, and he responds “I don’t even know what I want anymore.”  Oof.  I read the entirety of the book aloud to my wife, so I was aware of every klunker.  That line, there is no good way to deliver it out loud so that it sounds believable.  Most lines of dialogue in the book are of course inoffensive, but there are very few that are noteworthy.

I like that cast of characters that Killjoy has assembled, but she doesn’t have a great way to handle all the characters in the team.  My complaint at the end of the last book was that we didn’t know anything of real meaning about anyone other than Danielle, and that doesn’t really change here.  Part of the limitation is that this is a first-person narrative, so we never get into the heads of anyone else, which raises the question: why is this a first-person narrative?  In detective literature, the first-person is necessary to limit the reader’s knowledge so that they can discover things with the detective.  In other literature, the first-person is necessary for the reader to be able to call into question what they are being told, which obviously doesn’t apply here.  In the first book, the first-person narrator made sense, since it was really about her discovering this world.  Now that we are a Scooby gang of five in their mystery van, it feels like the narrative naturally wants to broaden.  We didn’t learn anything new about Danielle in this book, and we didn’t learn anything about anyone else.

Finally, I’m not stoked about the magic feds.  Actually, I’m not stoked about the construction of magic in this world.  Apparently you can just pick up a book and do your thing.  Everyone learns from books, and they can apparently learn fast.  Doomsday has become something of an expert in short order.  It’s unclear what the magic draws on or what it costs.  I suppose both the magic feds and the shape of magic will be developed in later books, but I’m not seeing the groundwork or suggestions here.

I wish Killjoy and Cain the best in the books to come.  Unless something amazing happens, I think this will be the last book in the series I read.  The book was okay, but who has time for books that are just okay?

The Lamb with Slaughter the Lion

*There are going to be more spoilers ahead than Uliksi had ribcages in its collection, so don’t read on if you don’t want the book spoiled!*

There’s a lot to love about Margaret Killjoy’s The Lamb with Slaughter the Lion.  The novela has a great setup, a neat world, solid pacing, and a protagonist I was delighted to follow around.

I ordered the book on a recommendation because my wife and I are reading science fiction and fantasy by non-male authors lately, and the Danielle Cain books seemed right up our alley.  It arrived on a weekend, and I immediately started reading it out loud to my wife while we sat on the back patio.  The first third of the book flew by and we were hooked.

The book has a real noir feel throughout.  The lead character is jaded and idealistic, cautious and trusting.  Her personal quest to find out why her closest friend Clay killed himself brings her at the books opening to Freedom, Iowa, an abandoned town reclaimed by squatters and idealists.  The time and world that the novela is set in feels like a slightly more apocalyptic version of the here and now.  Were it not for the police and the existence of Walmart in the story, I would have told you that it must take place in a post-apocalyptic world.

I like Killjoy’s take on urban fantasy by divorcing it from the urban half of that name.  It’s more properly rural fantasy or small-town fantasy, thought neither of those names are particularly catchy.  The back of my edition calls it “anarcho-punk fantasy,” which is a much cooler name and a pretty good description since Freedom, Iowa is very anarcho-punk in its construction.  And I dig on that construction.  I love the casualness with which the world is peopled with every gender, sexual identity, and sexual orientation.  It might be one of the reasons the setting felt post-apocalyptic to me, because I could picture these characters existing in Avery Alder’s Dream Askew or Vincent and Meguey Baker’s Apocalypse World.  This world is not just unapologetically queer; it is celebratorily (is that a word?) queer.  Yeah, we need more of that in our fiction (and even more so in our non-fiction!).

As for the story itself, Uliksi is a great take on the old golem tale of a rabbi creating a guardian who then becomes a threat in and of itself.  Everything about the Uliksi is cool, from its three-horned, blood-red look, to its practice of eating hearts and sleeping on a bed of removed ribcages, to its stone-cold staring game.  It was a neat idea to have the Uliksi active only in daylight hours as opposed the the classic trope of having the creature that can only stalk at night.  And giving Uliksi an army of undead grazers and smaller animals was awesome.

It was only the in the final quarter of the book that it faltered for me.  First, what the hell is up with Clay researching only to leave quoted poetry that clarifies nothing?  He could have written, “we weaponized Uliksi, and for that we became the very things we summoned Uliksi to eliminate.”  Also, it is a pet peeve of mine (and I know I’m not alone in this) for characters to recognize obscure lines of poetry, and having Brynn casually recognize a misquoted Robert Frost line and a misquoted William Blake line was eye-rollingly bad, especially since the recognition gave neither the reader nor the characters any insight.  Another question: why did it take Uliksi years to figure out that it had been “weaponized” and only just now realized it and killed Anchor?  Rebecca and Clay were clearly aware before Uliksi was; why?  Someone of injures another person in the privacy of their own home and Uliksi just knows and is ready to punish.  Figuring out motives and actions is what Uliksi does.  It’s mere convenience that Uliksi started acting up the day Danielle arrived, and that feels hollow.  Then, having Uliksi pick and choose his work in the final scene is awfully convenient, settling on Eric as its final kill before skipping town because of the thinned veil.  It could have stayed and wreaked whatever vengeance it wanted before leaving, which it seems like it would be required to do given the nature of its summoning.

So I liked the pacing and the ideas in the ending, but it all just felt pasted together.

When the gang decided to become “demon-hunters” at the end, I actually laughed out loud because it was so unexpected.  First, no one in the group has any real experience with demons, so why would you feel called to do so.  Second, Uliksi was the most decent creature, having a set of rules and following them, as opposed to the humans who continue to fuck everything up, so why hunt demons?  Seems like it would be better to hunt humans who were awful, or hunt humans who used demons to do their bidding at the expense of the demons and other people.  Third, Danielle is the only developed character in the five-person team.  Everyone else is fun enough, but they are only vaguely even characters.  Vulture is a night owl (heh!) who takes pictures for Instagram.  Brynn tattoos.  The Days are a badass unit.  The team thing feels more like a gimmick to sell the book and the series as a TV serial than it does a logical next step.

So those were my frustrations.  They were not frustrating enough to keep me from ordering the second book in the series (which I admittedly did before getting to the final quarter of the book), and they won’t stop me from reading the second book.

A smattering of final thoughts: The writing is solid and direct, which fits the noir style nicely.  Dani is a better name than Danielle, so it’s disappointing that she insists on the latter.  Tall-as-Fuck is a brilliant last name.  It would have been nice to see anyone in Freedom, Iowa doing a lick of work to keep this anarcho-communist-punk paradise afloat.

The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin

*Spoilers ahead*

The Eye of the Heron is another fantastic novel by Ursula K. Le Guin.  Because of its brevity and directness, it feels at times like a YA novel, but its depth and complexity says that it’s intended for mature readers.  It occupies this between ground comfortably and elegantly, and impressively.

Reading the story in early 2019 was surprisingly hard, emotionally-speaking.  As with all of the other Le Guin novels we’ve read, I read Eye of the Heron aloud to Ann each night, so the progress was slow-ish and the challenges facing the people of Shantih had time to resonate in our heads at the end of each chapter for a day or two before we can pick the book up again.  For those of you who read the novel a while back and need a quick refresher, the book is about two societies on the planet of Victoria.  Victoria was originally a prison planet for prisoners from Brazil.  Those people founded the City of Victoria and have a classic capitalist power structure with the aristocratic bosses and peasants.  Their culture is also divided along what we consider traditional gender roles, with men as dominant and privileged and women as property and fragile vessels of morality.  Fifty or so years after the first settlers were sent, a third ship arrived, this time with 2,000 members of a communist labor group.  They founded the town of Shantih, where they work farmland for communal benefit. The two civilizations have a relationship, each providing things that the other needs.  At the beginning of the book, set 70 years or so beyond the arrival of the last ship, the people of Shantih have found a place in the wilderness to establish a second settlement, and they plan to send half the population northward. The bosses of Victoria City are afraid of losing their labor force and plan to put pressure on the people of Shantih so that they lash out, giving the military force of the bosses and reason to quell the “rebellion” and turn the peaceful and leaderless communists into slave labor.

So the non-violent people want to extricate themselves without violating their code of non-violence while the all-too-familiar power structure of Victoria city is looking for any excuse to subdue and conquer them.  Even though I knew that Le Guin is an optimist, or if not an optimist, someone who believes in providing models of hope, I didn’t see any way for the people of Shantih to escape their horrible situation.  Or I should say, I didn’t see any way for them to do so without the author pulling some punches or creating cheap escapes.  So I read with dread of either watching the one group subdue and yoke the other.  Since we are living in a time in America that a third to half of the political forces in America are willing to embrace authoritarianism and vilification of the weakest amongst us in the name of stability and privileged comfort, the dilemma of the book hit me very viscerally, way more than it would have done if I had read the book four years ago.

The resolution was of course thoroughly satisfying.  Le Guin is not only a gifted writer but a perceptive student of humanity.  The thing that makes her novels so thrilling and interesting is that she can turn her mind into a laboratory of human conditions.  She creates a test lab of limited variables, puts people into her constructed situation, details those people with specificity and uniqueness, and then records what she sees in her minds eye.  In the case of Eye of the Heron, she reduces the world to two cultures in a world with no outside influences but their traditions and memories. Then she gives each side simple desires that are opposed to each other, and a set of techniques and beliefs that govern the way they act on those desires.  But her magic ingredient is that she clothes these generic positions in specificity, grounding them in real characters with relationships and individual desires and personal commitments.  She’s concerned about things at a high level, but her stories take place in the weeds and mud of real people.  Large ideas might be forceful and driving, but they are always channeled through people.  Falco is no nameless capitalist, but a man with a specific position, a specific relationship with his daughter, and relationships with the other capitalists both established and upcoming.  Lev and Vera and Luz and Andre and Southwind and Macmilan are each anchored by their own relationships and views of the world that exist simultaneously within and separate from the larger movement of which they are a part.  The best social science fiction writers do this, and Le Guin is among the best of the best.  The laboratory of the mind can and should never be a fully sterilized place.  There are variables that must be removed for her experiment to take place, but as soon as the characters of the experiment are complicated and breathing people, a million tiny forces of reality are at play, and the talented author sees them and acknowledges them and grants them space to affect the story unfolding.

As usual, my intended introductory remarks have grown into their own little analysis, leaving me little room to comment on the things that I filled my paper with while brainstorming about the book after finishing it.  I’ll just throw out some of the ideas now and you can do with them what you will.  Ignore them, foster them into full ideas, use them as leaping off points for your own thoughts—whatever you do is cool by me.

The book begins and ends with wotsits, the most alien of creatures on Victoria.  All the other animals are based on the initial inhabitants’ memories of earth: herons, coneys, pouchbats.  The wotsit, as the name suggests, is completely strange.  It’s something like a three-eyed, feather-winged, shadow-colored toad.  Where it goes, it goes of its own will.  It cannot be coerced and it cannot be caged, because all caged wotsits die.  Knowing this, no one tries to cage them.  The wotsits appear to be an obvious analogy for the human spirit, and the people of Shantih in particular, who are making their break from the bosses of Victoria city.

The ringtree is a gorgeous creation and another beautiful image.  The tree grows solitary and at some surprise moment, explodes its one seed pod that then plants seeds in a neat circle around it, where in time, 40-60 trees take root and create a ring of trees around a center in which nothing but shrubgrasses grow and often a pond forms where the original tree was rooted once it has died.  Ringtree becomes tree ring and then the cycle starts all over again.  The relationship between the individual and the society seems an obvious read as the individual leader is only leader for a moment before the strength is given over to the masses to hold the line together until such a time as another leader is needed.  Perhaps it’s also related to the people of Shantih’s Long March, where an idea is the seed for a gathering of like minded people who can carry the idea to its end, until another idea from the crowd bursts forth to have its influence, with Luz being the next ringtree to explode, instigating the final expansion into the wilderness, taking Lev’s and Vera’s place.

I love the first section of Chapter 10, the section that immediately follows Lev’s death.  Luz, Vera, Southwind, and Elia are wrestling with what happened on the hill and what it means for the community.  Nothing is easy and nothing is clear, and even though they survived as an independent people, no one is comfortable with how things shook out or where things should go from here.  Not only is Lev dead, but the army was turned back because the people of Shantih responded by rushing the army, an act of violence.  Moreover, Falco’s shooting of Macmilan and other soldiers was also a significant reason for their victory, and his motivation was not one of peace or an interest in protecting the people of Shantih.  So the philosophy that is at the foundation of their movement is shaken and challenged and they are all struggling with how to proceed.  It is painfully human and complicated, and all it does is raise questions and not answers.  It is a beautiful section because it recognizes what has happened and doesn’t attempt to line up lessons or morals.  We are still believers in non-violence, but we must acknowledge that we don’t know its limits or how it exists entirely separately from violence, to which is always exists in relation.

I also loved chapter 6, the one in which the hundred or so people of Shantih are being forced to labor in the new fields at gunpoint.  This chapter is stunning in its depiction of power and consent.  Even though the soldiers have rifles, the laborers are there only because they have consented to be there.  As such, it would be more productive to lay down the rifles and share in the labors.  More would get done and community could thrive, but the city soldiers believe there is a hierarchy as long as they have the guns.  We know that belief is an illusion.  We often think of this dilemma as Angel did when he thinks the laborers are stupid because they outnumber the guards but do nothing to challenge them and are sheepish instead.  Lev makes it clear that it is not sheepishness that makes them organize as they do.  We are all connected and interdependent, and the more we acknowledge that unity rather than try to force a difference the better work we can do.  Le Guin is careful I think to not criticize those who have yielded to the oppressive power of guns—hell, it’s the thing that caused me so much anxiety while reading the book.  But power is always a relationship of consent, and when that consent ends, so does the power.  The people of Shantih are educated enough to know this; the people of Victoria City are not.

The novel is interested in the difficult relationship that we have with traditions and our past.  The understanding of “this is who we are” comes from our past.  The storyteller in chapter 10 tells of the Long March, and every child knows the stories.  This is who we are and how we handle adversity.  They are a comfort to us and a guide, but they can equally become a prison.  The traditions of Victoria City are what led Vera to staying in Casa Falco, which is what influenced Luz to side with the people of Shantih, which determined the course of the story.  There is tradition and there is growth and adaptation.  Luz is the one who rejects tradition, and as such she becomes a leader and a force for change.  She first rejects her own culture and then challenges her new people to push on beyond their boundaries.  Which I guess brings us back to the wotsit.  All the other creatures are traditional to us, things that remind us of home, but the wotsit is unique and fully adapted to the planet Victoria.  They are everywhere and free and totally alien.  And they are a sign of hope and the people who Luz has joined will become something as unique and perfectly suited to the life they are creating.

Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle

*As always, spoiler’s haunt this post, and I write with the assumption that you have read the novel.*

I was impressed by how much Shirley Jackson had grown as a writer in my review of The Haunting of Hill House.  But a mere 3 years later, when she wrote We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson is at the top of her game. Every part of this novel made me catch my breath again and again.  Is our main character really an 18-year-old woman who wishes for the violent and graphic deaths of everyone in this town?  Are we really behind the eyes of a non-neurotypical woman who casually breaks household items to express and temper her displeasure and who has planted her baby teeth all over the estate?

I could not love this book more.

I love a well-done first-person narrative and the challenge such a perspective presents to both the writer and the reader.  I guess challenge is the wrong word, especially in the case of Mary Katherine Blackwood.  The usual trick of a first-person narrator is their unreliability, the uncertainty about what really happened versus what they present and how they present it.  But for Mary Katherine, there is nothing unreliable about her; there is no deception or dissembling; there is only her matter-of-fact statements about her feeling and actions. We see the world exactly as she does, and Jackson is insightful and thorough in employing that perspective, that it was to me a perpetual surprise and delight.

In discussing the book with Ann, I kept using the phrases “mentally ill” and “broken” to describe Mary Katherine and Constance, but I wasn’t comfortable with them.  I’m in favor now of non-neurotypical because I think it better captures the level of understanding and Jackson’s non-judgmental presentation of the information.  Throughout her works, Jackson has shown an interest in the way women’s lives and their mental health collide with an uncaring and sometimes openly hostile world.  That concern is at the heart of The Haunting of Hill House, and it is the central subject of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Jackson is masterful in her revelations, unpacking her subject one step at a time & changing the readers’ understanding bit by bit. Beginning with Mary Katherine shopping in town shows us her hostility toward the villagers and the equal hostility they feel toward her.  We don’t question the state of her mental health or neurochemistry.  When she pretends to be on the moon in this first chapter, it seems to be merely a protective flight of fancy that any of us might partake in.  Her violent desires are striking, but not distressing.  Then as she approaches home and is concerned about Constance’s wandering out of the house, we think of her as protective of her sister, as the caregiver.  As we move into the kitchen and discover Mary Katherine’s obsession with protective magical words and charms, we understand that she is not “normal.”  After Uncle Julian’s tale and the revelation of the poisoning, we as readers are on uncertain ground, though I personally suspected Mary Katherine was the poisoner and Constance was protecting her.  With Constance’s never-ending patience, we are in awe of her care for her “sick” sister and failing uncle.  Every step, we reevaluate relationships and positions. It’s not until the fire that we understand the depth of Constance’s own mental situation.  Her obsession with not being seen surprised me, and as Mary Katherine once again became the protector, we realize that the two sisters are in this together, each doing what they can to get the two of them through a world that doesn’t want them as they are.

It’s in this context that we need to understand Charles Blackwood’s role in the book, I think.  At first he seems like a common golddigger, interested only in the girls’ money.  But he never gets the safe combination from them, and he never breaks into the house to take the money, which he certainly knows he could if that was his ultimate goal.  No, Charles is the force of patriarchy and normalcy from the outside world seeking to make the Blackwood home how the world says it should be.  Money needs to be respected, not buried carelessly in the yard.  Old folks suffering from dementia should be shipped off to a care facility.  Mary Katherine should be committed to an institution, and Constance should be married and keep a proper home.  Charles is a mean-spirited bastard, to use Uncle Julian’s word, but his violence is more ideological than physical.  In the context of the Blackwood household, Charles’s view of “normal” is off-putting and offensive.  His view of the world is no more valid than Mary Katherine’s, and a lot more disturbing by the time it is introduced in the novel. And when we see the villagers let loose after the fire is put out, we know that they are no more healthy in their attitudes than Mary Katherine and Constance.  Likewise, it’s hard not to be critical of Helen Clarke’s desire to take them away to take care of the girls.  We want to protect the Blackwood sisters from the world after the fire, and we understand their fear.

Of course, nothing is simple.  Mary Katherine did indeed kill three people in a moment (or sustained state) of anger when she was 12, and she has no remorse six years later. The Blackwood sisters are not angels or simple victims, so there are no simple emotional responses to the events of the novel, which is one of the things that makes the novel amazing.

After the fire, the novel takes two interesting turns that I loved.  In chapter 9, the 1^st chapter after the fire, the girls are in something of their own postapocalyptic setting. How are they going to survive?  They can’t go safely into the village.  They can’t protect themselves with mere cardboard over the windows.  They have two rooms and a limited ability to provide for themselves.  But then they rise from the ashes, literally, and carve out a space to live.  The next turn of course is as the sister’s isolation becomes the stuff of urban legends, so that by the novel’s end we seem to be in an origin story about that dilapidated house on the hill everyone avoids and tells stories about.  Our protagonists are seen as children-eating witches who are to be feared and appeased as they huddle in the dark with only each other, peering out at the outside world and laughing.  It is simultaneously creepy and sweet, and I personally felt and uncomplicated pleasure in their safety and seclusion.

The story I kept thinking about as I read the book is Lizzy Borden, and I wonder to what extent that story served as inspiration for the novel.  Sadly, Jackson did not write or talk a lot about her works, so we don’t know.

There’s actually another turn that I love, which is when Charles Blackwood enters the story.  In those chapters, especially following upon Helen Clarke’s visit for tea, this contemporary novel feels more like a period piece, something from Austen or one of the Brontë’s, as the story becomes one of extended families and questions of inheritance.  The novel feels like it moves through genres like Mary Katherine moves through her moods.

There is a long essay to be written comparing The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.  Women, isolation, “madness,” understanding, belonging—all are central themes and concerns in both novels.  The Crain sisters and the Blackwood sisters are similar in their isolation and oddness.  The patriarchal morality of Hugh Crain and Dr. Montague (as suggested in his reading of Pamela) are contrasted with Charles Blackwood’s demand for modern normality.  I’m not the one to write that essay, but I’d be among the first in line to read it.

This is one of those books whose story sets up residence in a corner of my brain.  I’m rolling if over in my brain like a multifaceted jewel, watching it catch and scatter the light. I’ve only been reading good literature these days, and this is one of the best.

Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House

*I’m probably going to spoil the shit out of the book, so don’t read this unless you have already read the book yourself or don’t give a damn about spoilers.*

I swear to you that I read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House somewhere around 2002 or 2003.  I can picture the cover still, and even the odd creases on the cover from where it was bent when placed down carelessly once.  My wife and I had been huge fans of the Robert Wise 1963 film adaptation for a long time, so we decided to read the source material.  But here’s the thing, as of two months ago, I would have told you the book was pretty damn close to the movie.

What the hell was I doing in 2003?!  The book is radically different from the movie, in spite of there being many scenes and dialogue (or voice-overs) pulled right from Jackson’s book.  Nelson Gidding, the writer of The Haunting’s screenplay was right to pull from Jackson’s novel, because Jackson’s writing is all kinds of delicious.  We have the Library of America edition, which comes with the collection of short stories published as The Lottery; or, The Adventures of James Harris, published originally in 1949, ten years before The Haunting of Hill House.  The stories in it are excellent (you can see my thoughts on them in the previous blog post or under that book on GoodReads), but in the ten years between publications, Jackson has grown significantly as an artist.  Her writing here is sharp and moving.  She is in top form throughout the novel.

As for what Jackson is doing with the book, I have been struggling with that for weeks now, and all I have to show for it are a bunch of scattered and not-necessarily-connected thoughts.  Rather than waiting for them all to gel together (which I’m not sure they’ll ever do), I’m going to just throw them out here.

There’s something going on about family.  Eleanor, Theo, Luke, and Montague are something like a family in the decidedly domestic space of Hill House.  Dr. Montague is a fatherly figure and the other three are like children, playing hide and seek and planning picnics and being lighthearted and playful with each other generally.  Theo notes that the statue of Hugh Crain depicts a family and points out who is who in the picture.  That Theo has no patronymic is an interesting choice and I think related to this idea.

There’s something going on about morality and the female body.  While Theo is a modern woman, and Eleanor is doing her best to play the part, there are trappings surrounding them of an archaic and oppressive (and unfortunately still too-modern) moral sensibility regarding women’s morality and their sexuality.  Hill House was built in the Victorian period, and Hugh Crain’s book for his daughters is all about the dangers of their own sexuality.  And for as modern as Dr. Montague seems, his novel of choice is Pamela, an 18^th century novel about the perils of a young woman’s virtues.  This combines with the sexual tension between Eleanor and Theo in the book.  While Luke is a possible romantic interest for both Theo and Nell, Jackson herself seems much more interested in the chemistry between the two women, both platonic and romantic.  Wise’s movie plays up Theo’s homosexuality, but there is very little evidence of that in Jackson’s novel; Jackson puts much more attention on what Nell wants from Theo.

I love the nature of the haunting itself as depicted in the novel.  Mrs. Montague thinks she has it all figured out.  Ghosts are unhappy and unfortunate souls who simply need compassion and understanding to be freed from their burdens and sent on their way to the heavenly light.  While Mrs. Montague is a riotously funny and engaging character, it is made clear that she has no real understanding of what is happening.  There do not appear to be ghosts in Hill House.  Instead, Hill House is itself sentient, calling to and compelling Eleanor.

The house controls the senses to some degree.  You hear the knocking and pounding, but only if it wants you to, for Mrs. Montague and Arthur hear nothing.  You smell the decay of death in the library, but only if it wants you to, for the others do not smell what Eleanor smells.  They all agree that food tastes better at Hill House, beyond the mere cooking skills of Mrs. Dudley.  Hill House can make a roomful of blood appear and then just as easily make it disappear upon Mrs. Montague’s investigation.

There’s something about repetition in the way Hill House works.  Mrs. Montague observes that trapped spirits often just repeat themselves, sometimes filling up whole pages with repeated words or phrases.  Well guess who else repeats her thoughts and sayings?  Journey’s end in lovers meeting.  Nell has certain choral phrases she returns to throughout the novel, like one of the spirits Mrs. Montague is certain inhabits the home.  And don’t forget Mrs. Dudley, who’s ritual sayings become the butt of many jokes.  The house is calling to Eleanor, but it already has Mrs. Dudley, who cares for the home immensely.  Things must be in their proper place.  She gets annoyed with Hill House is spoken ill of.  She follows the others and put things back where they belong.  And though she leaves every night, she returns every day.

Or is Mrs. Dudley really like that?  Near the end of the novel, Eleanor is flitting about like an unseen spirit, listening to the conversations of the others, certain that they are all talking about her.  But Luke and Theo never mention her any more than Dr. Montague and Arthur.  In Mrs. Montague’s and Mrs. Dudley’s conversation, we hear a Mrs. Dudley completely unfamiliar to us.  She is conversing naturally and without ritual phrases, seemingly casual and an easy conversationalist.  It is, for me, a sort of wow moment that made me wonder what was really going on with our impression of her to begin with.

The book strikes that beautiful balance between Nell’s madness and the supernatural so that it is impossible to separate the two.  Nell is lost, displaced without anywhere to belong.  The dominating force in her life, her mother, is gone, and she is adrift, having never had a moment to find herself.  As she drives to Hill House in the first chapter, she is imagining all the possible futures for herself, all the places she might live.  But all those visions are a life of being alone, just herself and her stone lions.  At Hill House, she is presented the possibility of human company, and the other characters are presented as possible lovers and friends, each with something else to offer.  But when she chooses Theo and says that she will follow her and be with her, Theo roundly rejects her.  Hill House will of course have her.

So what does that all add up to?  Wonderment, as far as I’m concerned.  From the short stories of hers that I’ve read, it is clear that Jackson is not a fan of morals and tidy endings.  She likes the messy and the possible, the suggestion and the ghostly whispers of our human impulses.  There are no clean metaphors or declarations about life and humanity.  She is a smart, observant, witty, loving, and critical writer of the human condition and she’s more interested in turning over stones than putting a bow on anything.  Which is one of the reasons, I think, that I keep returning to The Haunting of Hill House.

How the Universe Got Its Spots

I first picked up Janna Levin’s How the Universe Got Its Spots in 2003 at the NASA museum in Florida, coming home from taking our three-year-old son to see family and visiting Disney.  It was an impulsive purchase.  While I loved watching Carl Sagan’s Nova as a kid and enjoyed my physics classes in high school, I did not have any thoughts about astrophysics, cosmology, black holes, or space in general.  In 2003, I was a literature and film geek, a budding videographer, and a stay-at-home dad.

Levin’s book scratched an itch I didn’t even know I had, stretched a muscle I didn’t know had cramped up, and opened a door in my mind that had been entirely forgotten behind the clutter that had accumulated over the years.

In the 15 years between 2003 and 2018, I had thought of this book often, the science, the story of Levin’s life in 1999 and 2000, and her beautiful prose.  I had recommended it to many others, leant it to friends, and eventually loaned it to someone who never returned it.  But still it lingered for me.  I finally ordered another copy for myself for Christmas this last year and reread it in its entirety.

The book is every bit as amazing as I remember it being.

It’s structured as a series of letters-slash-diary-entries that Levin addresses to her mother.  In them, she fills her mother in on the movement of her life as a young theoretical astrophysicist in academia and gives her a basic overview of the science and work that she is focused on.  Her current work (in the book) seeks to determine the shape of our universe or discover the ways that its shape can be discerned.  To get there, she walks through the work of the giants on whose shoulders she stands.  In the end, the reader gets a quick but substantial summary of the foundational elements and theories of astrophysics.  Levin does all of this concisely, clearly, and entertainingly.

According to the blurbs on the book’s cover, Levin is a talented scientist.  I have to take their word on that.  What I can witness for myself is that she is a talented writer.  How the Universe Got Its Spots is beautifully written.  Whether she’s talking about her personal life or scientific theories, she is warm and insightful, elegant and evocative.  There is wonder and excitement in her tone, and a genuine love for her subject, even against the backdrop of the sorrows and strains of her personal life.  There were many passages I lingered over and reread for the sheer pleasure of her language and cleverness.

The book covers concepts of infinity, theories of gravity, special relativity, general relativity, quantum theory, the big bang, black holes, dimensional theories, topology, and even touches upon string and chaos theories.  As an introduction to these topics, this book could not be more ideal, and I would (and have) recommend it to everyone with even a passing interest or idle curiosity.

One of the things that makes physics so fascinating is that nearly all their theories feel like metaphors for life, things like every action has an opposite and equal reaction.  Levin takes full advantage of this feature by mixing biography and science, moving back and forth between her lived life and the subject of the moment.  The two naturally fit together so that the story of these two years in her life coexist comfortably with the 400-year history of modern physics.

One of my favorite aspects of the book, as a literary geek, is the way the truth and fiction hold hands like good friends and sometime lovers.  Levin makes it clear at several points in the book that the diary entries and letters are being written in hindsight, even though they are written in the present tense.  For example, at one point, she is at a conference in Moscow, which she placed in February of 2000.  She includes a footnote observing that the conference was actually in October of 1999.  She says in that footnote, “Honestly, I’ve gotten the date wrong.”  Honestly, I’m lying.  But of course it’s the truth too, which is how art works, right?  Sometimes you have to tell a fiction to better capture the truth of the experience.  This is of course at odds with the demands of science to be rigorously factual and honest.  So Levin gets her lies and her honesty, her fiction and her truth to all elevate each other so that science and art become one.  And she makes it look effortless the whole while.