Garth Greenwell, _Cleanness_

 I FEEL WARY when a book gets described as a novel-in-short-stories. Since novels sell much better than do collections of stories, I wonder if the designation is merely opportunistic marketing; since stories can be sold individually to periodicals as well as to the book’s publishers, I wonder if the author has merely found a way to be paid twice for the same work. 

My skepticism is not entirely vanquished in this instance, but I will concede that a legitimate case can be made. Cleanness feels like a novel in several ways.

For one, the narrative point of view stays the same from story to story—that of a young gay expat American writer making a living by teaching in a former Soviet bloc country (Bulgaria). Indeed, the narrator could well be that of Greenwell’s previous book, What Belongs to You, only a few years older and more comfortable in the local culture, language, and customs.

For another, there are several recurring characters from story to story: the narrator’s students and colleagues, each designated solely by an initial, and most importantly R., a Portuguese man with whom the narrator has a sustained affair, although they break up when R. decides he cannot quite make a go of things in Bulgaria.  

Finally and crucially, the collection does not have an arc, exactly, as the stories are not arranged in chronological order, but it does have an architecture. The nine stories are presented in three groups of the three. The middle trio all concern the narrator and R., and the mood is contented and balanced. Their relationship seems to be in a happy equilibrium, especially in the group’s middle story, “The Frog King,” the one with the most detailed sex scene.

In the first trio, set both before and after the advent of R., the narrator is subordinated, we might say, to the   goals and wishes of others—not necessarily sexually, since the first story is about a very demanding student, but sexually as well, as again the middle story has a very detailed sex scene.

In the closing three stories, the narrator’s will predominates—these stories are mainly about what he wants, who he wants to be. Again, the middle story of the group gives us this will-to-power version of the narrator in a detailed (and somewhat alarming) sex scene.

Maybe there is an arc after all—for something is percolating in the narrator before, during, and after the relationship with R. that has to do with laying the ghost of an abusive father, achieving mastery, and attaining self-understanding. 

So you probably could read it as a novel—if you did not just skip to the hot parts.

John Banville, _The Untouchable_

 I REALIZED AGAIN, when I heard that John Le Carre had died, that I had yet to read any of his novels, so I picked up a very recent one (Agent Running in the Field) at a nearby branch library, read about fifty pages, then found myself very much wanting to read this instead. Odd. But that’s what I did.

And it certainly worked out—this is the eighth Banville novel I have read and I would say it is now my favorite, dislodging Doctor Copernicus from the top spot it has occupied with me since the late 1980s.

Victor Maskell, the narrator of The Untouchable, a close match for Sir (until he was stripped of his knighthood) Anthony Blunt, art historian, director of the Courtauld Institute, person in charge of the royal family’s picture collection, and, it so happened, a spy for the USSR—the last of the “Cambridge Spies” to be publicly exposed

The novel begins in 1979, with that public exposure having just occurred, and Victor Maskell  deciding to write his memoirs/confessions. He tells of his youth and university days in the 1920s, his political passions and commitment to the Communist cause in the 1930s, his becoming a double agent during WW II, his being caught (but not publicly exposed) in the 1950s. Along the way, we learn of his family, his friends, his marriage, his discovery that he is gay. 

In effect, we have a Brideshead Revisited or Dance to the Music of Time (Banville even seems to allude to those novels occasionally), but from the other side of the tapestry, so to speak, its secret history set in the subterranean world of spy cells and gay cruising. Both activities require secrecy, signals, and codes and both activities were dangerous, with grave penalties for being caught. Banville manages to make each activity the dark mirror of the other.

In revisiting Waugh/Powell territory, Banville manages the feat of recreating a familiar fictional world in a startling new way—a bit like Alan Hollinghurst in The Sparsholt Affair or The Stranger’s Child, but with the difference of adding some classic Irish snark, for Maskell is Irish (as Blunt was not), son of a (Protestant) bishop in Ulster, placing him at one more crucial remove from the society that he both wishes to rise to the top of and demolish.

I still haven’t read Le Carre, but the revelations at the very end of The Untouchable provide the kind of startling-but-inevitable payoff people like about Le Carre, and along the way we get not only Banville’s impeccably textured evocation of an historical period (also a hallmark of Doctor Copernicus) but also his astonishing prose—there’s an arresting figure or turn of phrase on every page. 

And I will continue on with Agent Running in the Field until it mysteriously inspires me to pick up something else.

Corey Robin, _The Enigma of Clarence Thomas_

I WOULD NOT have picked up a book about Clarence Thomas were it not by Corey Robin, whose The Reactionary Mind impressed me. Enigma? Really? I found Anita Hill credible, for one thing, and for another I had (lazily) assumed that Thomas was just a follower of Scalia's lead. He's famous for not asking questions, after all. Classic sellout, I figured. What's enigmatic about that? But Robin puts Thomas in a whole new light.

According to Robin, Thomas is actually a hard-core black nationalist, perhaps even black separatist, of an unusual conservative kind. Part of Thomas's conservatism (according to Robin) is a conviction that White America is not only racist, it is incorrigibly so, and will never change. No amount of teaching, preaching, or legislation will change that. MLK's dream will never come to pass. The best Black America can hope for is equal protection under the law. All legislative or policy efforts to achieve fairness will fail, breaking on the rock of white resistance.

Robin makes a convincing case that Thomas does not oppose affirmative action for the classic "conservative" reasons, either because (á la DeSouza) racism is over or (á la plenty o' white people) it is unfair to white people. For Thomas, however well-intentioned, affirmative action will always be Something We White People Did For You Black People. Its beneficiaries will be dismissed or condescended to or resented or all three. Their lives will actually be worse, because whites will never see them as having earned their success. 

Thomas's pro-corporate rulings (he has a pattern of whittling down the reach of the Commerce Clause) come from his conviction that the free market affords Blacks more opportunity to improve their lives than any laws or policies generated by white people will. 

He rules in favor of restricting the vote because he feels America's Blacks should abandon any hope that, as a minority, they can change the country through political impact.

His Second Amendment rulings (Thomas has led the court in defining the right to bear arms as an individual right, not a right that belongs only to a "well regulated Militia") arise from a conviction that America's Blacks should arm, because the state is never going to be interested in protecting them or their property.

Thomas, according to Robin, perhaps even longs for the strengths and virtues that African Americans developed during slavery and Jim Crow--for the self-sufficiency and family loyalty that they developed when they could count only on themselves, before they succumbed to the the belief that laws or policies or court decisions would compel white America to do right.

I don't actually know that Robin is right, because some of this just sounds literally incredible. but he has been through Thomas's decisions with a fine tooth comb, as well as many of his speeches and his autobiography, and his book is not just shoot-from-the-hip hypothesizing. Sixty pages of footnotes. 

One of my nieces is a recent graduate of a prestigious law school, and she once surprised the hell out of me in conversation by saying that Thomas's Supreme Court decisions were, in her opinion, actually the most interesting of those by any of the sitting justices. At the time, I was skeptical. But no longer.

Joan Didion, _Blue Nights_

 [This is my 118th post of the year. My previous highest annual total was 86 (in 2013 and again in 2018), which I passed back in July. One of those 2020 silver linings, I suppose--more time to read, more time to blog. I also noticed I passed 100,000 views this year--not all that many, considering how old the blog is, not to mention that 85% of this views were likely by Russian trolls, but still, it feels noteworthy.]

THIS CAME OUT in 2011, which is when I purchased it. I have not read it until now, however, even though I admire Didion immensely, and I know exactly why. 

I have a fine recording of Gustav Mahler's Songs on the Deaths of Children that I stopped playing while the kids were growing up because...well, in a word, because of superstition. It just seemed to be asking for trouble. I played it again once they had grown up and moved out, but soon there were grandkids, and I haven't played it since the first was born.

So, knowing this book was about the death of Didion's daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, in her thirties, and knowing it would be an extraordinarily powerful and moving book, again I thought...why ask for trouble? Why draw the evil eye by reading a  book about the death of an adult child?

Then, after reading Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror, which reminded me forcefully enough of Didion's strengths that I wished I had a new one of hers to read, I thought...well, there's Blue Nights.

So I read it. A staggering book. About fear, we might say. 

The fear, for one, that parents acquire as soon as they become parents, that something might happen, that you have to be mentally prepare for any threat or danger that might ever come near your child, ready to confront it and overcome it, whatever it is. 

For another, children's fears, fears of abandonment or or all sorts of bogeymen, which are amplified in Quintana's case as an adopted child who had to wonder why her birth parents had chosen to give her up. Or fears of what might have happened had Didion and John Gregory Dunne not been available to answer the call of the doctor who phoned to say there was an available baby girl.

Then, the fears of having a loved one fall ill, and none of the qualified and certified medical professionals to whom we entrust our loved ones and ourselves having any idea of what is happening. The fear of hospitals.

Then the fear of death--Didion was in her seventies when she wrote the book and in the course of writing it has a fainting episode and some lapses of memory. These lapses are particularly frightening--now that all she has of her husband and daughter are memories, what if these too come under the erasure of age? What if she loses everything?

It's not a consolatory book. It's cold and clear-eyed, as Didion always is, but as always in Didion, the cool and the clarity somehow intensify the radiance of the passion.

Esmé Weijun Wang, _The Collected Schizophrenias_

 IN ARTHUR FRANK’S The Wounded Storyteller, he notes that much the greater part of the available literature on most illnesses comes from observers who are studying it, typically aiming at a detached objectivity, and that we would benefit from having more complementary subjective accounts from people who actually have the illness, describing it from the inside.

Schizophrenia may be a case where the objective presentation and the subjective experience vary most bafflingly. The illness itself is not very fully understood. Wang’s title alludes to the tendency of the illness’s very name to undergo periodic revisions, to say nothing of its treatment or its diagnosis. As she mentions in the book’s first essay, diagnosis of schizophrenia depends not on any straightforward yes-or-no lab test, like cancer or tuberculosis, but on sets of criteria that change from one edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to the next. 

The Collected Schizophrenias has thirteen essays from someone who has the illness, whatever exactly it is—how it feels like subjectively, how people respond to you, how it is represented in our culture, what hardly anyone understands about it. Regrettably, describing the book that way makes it sound like a twin of Elyn Saks’s The Center Cannot Hold (2007), and it isn’t at all, although I’m not sure how to identify the difference. Wang’s book is...more baroque, perhaps? More writerly? More millennial? More post-Foucault? I don’t know. They are quite different, and both worth reading.

Wang mentions Saks’s book in passing, but does not say much about it. I’d be curious to know what she thinks of it.

Tangential remark: without my intending it, 2020 has become a year in which I read several autobiographically inflected books by Asian-American women: Victoria Chang, Trisha Low, Cathy Park Hong, and this one. I wonder if some sort of wave is occurring. 

Don DeLillo, _The Silence_

 I’VE READ THREE reviews of this—by Andrew O’Hagan, Michael Gorra, and Joshua Cohen (which feels fitting, an A-team novelist getting A-team reviewers)—and all three spent a bit more time on DeLillo’s standing, the DeLillo corpus and the DeLillian cosmos than they did on The Silence.

I can understand why. DeLillo looks to be one of the definitive American novelists, even the definitive American novelist of his generation, so any new arrival in his canon naturally prompts reconsideration of his whole canon, the mapping of connections to Underworld or White Noise, and so on.

I wonder, too, if any of the three would have been hard-pressed to meet their word count had they been restricted to writing about this book and only this book. Because it is (a) brief and (b) relatively uneventful.

Brief: just over a hundred pages, but small pages with generous white space. I think William Shawn would not have blinked at publishing the whole thing in one issue of the New Yorker back in the day.

Uneventful: a couple is returning to New York City from Europe with plans to watch the 2022 Super Bowl that evening with another couple, who will have a guest, a former grad student of the wife, who teaches physics. But all goes awry when the World Wide Web goes down all at once all over New York City and perhaps all over the world. There will be no watching of the Super Bowl—also no online shopping, finding of recipes, Zoom, or Spotify. We do not find out what caused the Silence, nor what its consequences will be, as the novel ends on the evening in question.

Have to admit, DeLillo touches a nerve. So much of life has migrated onto the internet and into the cloud, and with COVID, even more of it did—plenty of us are not even seeing our families in person this holiday, and internet connectivity is our sole consolation. So what would we do or could we do if the whole world of the Internet just abruptly vanished? On that score, in making us ponder the scenario, The Silence is at least thought-provoking.

But DeLillo does not speculate what would happen, beyond our being dumbfounded and paralyzed. The novel ends:

Max is not listening. He understands nothing. He sits in front of the TV set with his hands folded behind his neck, elbows jutting.

   Then he stares into the blank screen.

Hari Kunzru, _Red Pill_

 HARI KUNZRU’S FICTION seems more “literary” than “genre” to me, and is as cerebral as any reader could hope, but he certainly has a deft way with genre fiction’s tropes. In White Tears, Charlie Shaw’s “Graveyard Blues” made a neat synecdoche for white America’s exploitation and appropriation of African American culture, but it also made a dandy MacGuffin with which to send Kunzru’s characters on elaborate journeys through hazards and revelations.

Red Pill is similar. Any novel that invokes Heinrich von Kleist, Joseph de Maistre, and the Wannsee Conference is cerebral enough for me, and the novel’s central preoccupation is a grave one—the novel’s over-arching preoccupation is the extent and power of the far right intellectual networks of our time. So...cerebral and serious...but also as brisk a page-turner as one could ask. Pynchonesque in its inquiry into almost invisible forces of oppression, yes, but in the sprinter’s mode of The Crying of Lot 49 rather than the marathon of Against the Day.

Red Pill’s unnamed narrator is an independent scholar, someone who researches and writes but has no college or university position to provide a steady salary. It’s a none-more-precarious way to make a living, I imagine, but our narrator has caught a break. His book on the idea of taste got some notice, and so he has a six-months grant from an institute in Germany to complete his next project, a book on the construction of the subject in lyric poetry.

Which sounds like a even more dated, wheezier idea than the idea of “taste,” as another fellow at the institute rudely points out. The “lyrical subject’? Who are we, Lionel Trilling? Our narrator seems blocked, actually, no longer sure of the validity of his own project. He self-medicates by binge-watching a cop show—in which, eerily, one of the cops starts quoting French reactionary philosopher Joseph de Maistre.

What the hell? Forget about the lyric subject. The narrator has to track this down. And that’s the novel, basically. Along the way, he and we the readers have plenty of occasion to wonder whether he (like Oedipa Maas in Crying of Lot 49) is actually on to something or is losing his mind. 

Did I mention the novel is set in 2016? That might give us a clue.

Sulayman Al-Bassam, _The Al-Hamlet Summit_

I FOUND OUT only last year that there are several modern Arab adaptations of Hamlet. I am only familiar with this one and with Forget Hamlet by Jawad al-Assadi, and they differed in a interesting way. They both set the play in contemporary circumstances (as a good many productions of the original do these days), and both use Hamlet, Laertes, and Ophelia as representing the options and potentialities of the younger generation (which is also a pervasive theme in the original, I would say).

Al-Assadi makes Laertes more assertive and more militant than Hamlet, an intellectual who shies away from commitment and action. This works reasonably well—Hamlet is famous for his dithering and indecisiveness, after all. What interested me is that al-Bassam does it just the other way around. In The Al-Hamlet Summit, Hamlet is the one calling out and standing up to the corruptions of the compromised older  generation, and Laertes has been co-opted into serving the interests of the powerful. This works well, too—works better, maybe. Laertes, for all his heat and momentum, lets himself be turned into Claudius’s agent. He’s a nobler, more sympathetic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, someone who succumbed to power’s promises.

Definitely worth a look, and a useful reminder of what a fertile imaginative seedbed Shakespeare’s play has been. 

Simon Hanselmann, _One More Year_

 ANOTHER INSTALLMENT IN the annals of Megg the witch, Mogg her feline familiar, their uptight and much put-upon flatmate Owl, and their trainwreck-on-two-legs friend, Werewolf Jones. 

One extended episode gives us a glimpse of the quartet and some of their other friends as they were in their last year of high school, an era some them recall as blissful and others recall as hell on earth. But mainly it's just Megg, Mogg, and perhaps one of the others in four rows of three identically-sized panels per page, sitting on the couch, watching television, and getting stoned.

"I'm so perfectly buzzed," says Mogg at one point, under a vast night sky. "I never want to leave "Drug World." Can we never leave?"

"...No...," Megg answers. Then, as if quoting someone, she says "'One More Year.'"

Megg and Mogg are the objective correlative of one of the less advertised truths of drug culture. The good, decent, hard-working people of the world look at them and think they're derelicts. But they don't care what we think. As in they really don't care what we think. That, oddly enough, is their superpower.

Jillian Tamaki and Bill Kartapoulos, _The Best American Comics 2019_; Vera Brosgol, _Be Prepared_

 THE 2020 ONE must be out already, although I haven't seen it. The 2019 volume was not one of the very best, but was still enjoyable. 

The memoir/autobiographical vein is well-represented (Sophia Foster-Dimino, Jerry Motiarty, Lauren Weinstein), but there are also some items that are quite far from being realist or representational (Xia Gordon, Noel Freibert, Erik Nebel). An excerpt from Nick Drnaso's prize-winning Sabrina appears, but we also have some self-published entries by E. A. Bethea and Jed McGowan.

The real find, for me, was an excerpt from Vera Brosgol's Be Prepared, which I promptly acquired in order to read the whole thing. 

In this graphic memoir, the 11-year old Vera, daughter of Russian immigrants, struggles to fit in with her new small town America peers but has high hopes when she learns of a summer  camp devoted to Russian language and (pre-Bolshevik) Russian culture. Here, at last, she hopes, she will find her community. Hopes are dashed minutes after her arrival, and dashed again repeatedly for good measure by cliques of older girls, arrogant entitled boys, and the horrific stench of the outhouses. 

You half expect that all this will be redeemed--Vera will make a good friend, discover unsuspected abilities, connect with the outdoors, or all three, and it will turn out to be a wonderful experience. And she does make a friend, discover new abilities, and connect with the outdoors (seeing a moose in the wild one night), but no, she does not really have that great a time, and she is immensely relieved when her mother says no, Vera does not have to return next year.

Summer camp can be a great thing, and most kids love it or learn to love it, but still it's great to have a candid, crisply drawn, and moving account from one of the kids who did not love it.

Zadie Smith, _Intimations_

 NOT TO BE mistaken for Smith’s next essay collection, I take it, as it does not include “What Do We Want History to Do to Us?” nor the astonishing “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction.” It’s a short book (just under 100 small [7” x 5”] pages) of short essays or sketches written in the earlier days of the pandemic. 

Nonetheless, not to be missed. The great thing about Smith is that she sweeps us up to the intellectual heights for one beat, then huddles with us down in the trenches the next, as if she is the seminar room and out on the street at exactly the same time, as if Susan Sontag tried to do standup comedy and turned out to be really good at it.

The title essay is a gem—well, the whole book is a gem, worth including in toto whenever the next collection of essays occurs, but that collection definitely ought at least to include “Intimations,” which is mainly a list, with short, sometimes cryptic explanations, of people to whom Smith feels indebted and for whom she is grateful.