Éric Vuillard, _L'ordre du jour_

THIS WON THE Prix Goncourt in 2017. It is not a novel, precisely, but a récit, a narrative form familiar in the French literary tradition but elusive of definition, like novelle in the German literary tradition, I suppose.

It's a narrative, but not exactly fiction, and not exactly not fiction. It has no invented characters, so far as I can tell. All the characters actually existed, and what they say and do seems largely based on documents, to a large extent their own memoirs or testimony (at Nuremberg, say). Vuillard very occasionally slips into the sensoria of the historical actors in the way historical fiction usually does, as when Austrian Prime Minister Schuschnigg is awakened by his valet on the morning of March 11, 1938--

Il pose ses pieds par terre. Le parquet est froid. Il enfile ses mules. On lui annonce de vastes mouvements des troupes allemands.

[He puts his feet on the ground. The parquet floor is cold. He puts on his slippers. He is told of vast movements of German troops.]

--but typically he eschews such devices. The narration does not aim at being historically objective--it has an attitude, sometimes a bristling one--but Vuillard generally confines himself to documented facts. 

The first and last chapters have to do with how the major German industrial concerns decided to go along with the Nazis (who promised stability, big spending on armaments,  and the suppression of labor unions). The second chapter is about Edward Wood, Lord Halifax, the British government's pre-eminent advocate of appeasing Hitler, and his meeting Göring and Hitler himself before the war. The main part of the book, though, is about the Anschluss, the political union with Nazi Germany that Austria was bullied into, or succumbed to under the threat of military force, or rushed to embrace--Vuillard gives us evidence for all three of those possibilities. 

I've wondered whether novelists use World War II settings for their fiction so frequently not only because WW II novels are popular, but also because the setting is a quick way of lending gravitas to a plot. Having World War II in the background instantly creates moral weight, significance. Civilization in the balance, fatal decisions, lives of millions at stake--World War II is one of those unusual actual historical events that rises to the plot stakes of a Marvel superhero movie, and those stakes give the fiction's characters' actions and decisions an epic scale.

Vuillard seems intentionally to go against the grain of all that, though. Everyone, even the political leaders--especially the political leaders, come to think of it--seems egotistical, shortsighted, petty, gaffe-prone. British response to the German troop movements is delayed because the German Ambassador won't leave a state dinner, instead keeping everyone listening to his tennis stories. The fearsome mechanized German military machine breaks down in the mountain passes, creating a  bottleneck. There is lots of film footage of the Austrian crowds cheering Hitler, but it was all edited by Goebbels's team, so we have no idea  how faithfully it records anything. 

Someone occasionally makes a stand--Wilhelm Miklas, president of Austria, stalls a bit before consenting that several crucial state posts be filled by Nazi sympathizers--but just about everyone comes off as a bit shabby: weak, hypocritical, dishonest. No great heroes, no great villains. Even Hitler gets mistaken for a valet.

Vuillard so consistently undermines the usual epic tonality that I wondered, is that why he got the prize? Is he trying to break the paradigm, and succeeding? Not quite as interesting as Les Onze, but L'ordre du jour does show there is life in the old dog of historical fiction yet.

Solmaz Sharif, _Look_

 WHEN I BUY books, I always intend to read them, but rarely do I read them right away. They typically land on some shelf or in some stack as I promise myself I will soon find the opportunity...you can imagine how it goes. It usually takes some kind of occasion or spur to get the book off the shelf and into my hands. In this case, it was the publication of Sharif's second book and its attendant buzz. I thought, geez, I guess  it's time I read the first book.

It's a strong one. Sharif is Iranian-American, and the book reflects both her own family's experience of the lengthy and terrible Iraq-Iran war and the U.S.'s military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her language tends to be spare, pared down, exact, with a scattering of lyrical bright spots.

The surprising element is that throughout the book Sharif stirs in terms and phrases from U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. Their presence in the text is signaled by block capitals: 

His father grew very quiet

His father would

HEAVY DROP sob

behind a closed door

His father was a

PERSON ELIGIBLE TO RECEIVE EFFECTS

A PILLBOX of opium

in his sock drawer.

The incongruity of the military terms would, you might think, sink the enterprise, given their clunkiness and their Orwellian tendency to hide or blur a grim actuality--their being the exact opposite of what poetry is supposed to be, we might say--but Sharif makes them work in a kind of counterpoint to the grace and clarity of her own voice. Perhaps the military terms' indigestible rigidity makes clearer that the family's suffering and the suffering of whole peoples occur within constraints they did not choose, in terms they do not get to set. 

A really convincing first volume. Yes, I have already bought Customs. I hope to read it before the third appears.

Pierre Michon, _Les Onze_

 A UNIQUE AND for me powerful novel, although it took me a good while to catch on to what was happening. It's a historical novel, I suppose we would say, but on new and surprising lines, like Alvaro Enrique's Sudden Death or Laurent Binet's HHhH, both of which it predates.

It reads like an unusually literary work of art history. Les Onze ("The Eleven") is, we learn, a painting of the Comité de salut public (Committee of Public Safety) during their brief but historically crucial tenure as chief authority of the revolutionary French Republic, a period often known as the Reign of Terror. The painting is the work of François-Élie Corentin, the "Tiepolo of the Terror," and now hangs in a room all by itself in the Louvre. The first part of the book is devoted in large part to Corentin's biography and to accounts of the painting's current placement, surrounded by plaques of background information, as well as some details about the members of the Committee, the best-remembered being Maximilien Robespierre.

As I read, I would occasionally Google Corentin, hoping to get an image of Les Onze or of his other paintings or just some supplementary information about him, and kept getting no results other than the novel Les Onze itself. My frustration had no source but my own dim-wittedness, for it turned out, as I should have seen, that Corentin and his painting are entirely Michon's invention. Michon's imagined biographical details about Corentin, his description of the painting, even his description of the painting's museum setting, were so persuasive that I took them as real.

So, we have a historical novel about the French Revolution, but not at all engineered in the way historical fiction typically is. Nonetheless, short (132 pages) and peculiar though it is, it gives us a more sharply focused idea of what the revolution was about than the much longer, much more populated novels about it do (e.g., those of Dickens, Hugo, Balzac, Trollope, and their many 20th century successors). For Michon, the revolution is about a migration of authority and power from the sacred to the secular. He captures this in describing the scene of the painting's commission, for instance, but also in describing the (mainly frustrated) literary careers of the members of the committee and the way arts and letters, in some respects, moved into the place in the culture that religion had occupied.

Robespierre, I gather, came up in the recent French presidential election, since the leading left-wing candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, sometimes cited Robespierre with approval, especially for his redistributivist principles, which brought outcries from those who associate him mainly with the guillotine. But Michon's novel seems less about political particulars than about a watershed moment, a tectonic shift in our basic social assumptions. 

Anatole France's Les Dieux Ont Soif has long been my very favorite novel about the French Revolution, but now I would say it's Les Onze.

Jonathan Balcombe, _Super Fly_

 I WAS SUFFICIENTLY enchanted by Sheldrake's Entangled Life to attempt a deeper dive into pop biology books. This one arrived as a Christmas present, a happy instance of a holiday present rhyming with one's current interests.

Super Fly is devoted to flying insects, a class of being much larger and more varied than I had any idea. It is witty, informative, and well-written...it does suffer in comparison to Enchanted Life, though, I would say, but that's a high bar. 

Still, pretty darned informative. Chapter 3, about flying insect intelligence (capable of quite a bit more than I expected, so far as memory and problem-solving go) and Chapter 8, about flying insect reproduction (a good deal weirder than I expected) were especially illuminating.

Edna O'Brien, _The Little Red Chairs_

 SPOILER ALERT, LET me note, since I can't think of a way to write about this novel without noting the curveball that occurs at its midpoint.

The first half is set in a small, somewhat isolated town in Ireland. A stranger arrives, apparently eastern European in origin, and sets up shop as a sex-therapist or life coach or new age guru or masseur--anyway, he's a hit, even with the nuns and priests. He is a special hit with Fidelma McBride, not exactly middle-aged but no longer young, leader of the local book club, a woman of sensibilité.

There are signs that the new arrival, Dr. Vlad, has a complicated past and may not be what he claims to be. Fidelma is married, making her interest in him, which soon becomes sexual, adulterous. Still, I thought we were headed towards an Irish Music Man with Vlad as Harold Hill and Fidelma as Marian the Librarian--the simple virtues of the small town will redeem him, he will redeem the small town from its hidebound narrowness, life will proceed happily....

No such luck. Vlad is a war criminal, a kind of  Radovan Karadzic figure. He is spotted, arrested, hauled off to the Hague for his trial. Fidelma is pregnant, but she is found by Vlad's former body guards, who (in revenge for what they see as his betrayal and abandonment of them) abort the fetus and nearly kill her. Shattered, she ends up in London, where she slowly and painfully reassembles what she can of her selfhood.

This is the only O'Brien novel I have read. Philip Roth, a longtime fan, called it her masterpiece. Maybe it is. She certainly throws a mean curveball.

Percival Everett, _The Trees_

 I THINK THE Trees is still Percival Everett's most recent novel, but odds are it won't be much longer--he's that prolific. He is also unpredictable, inventive, canny, inspired, prophetic--not to mention deft in any genre he feels like picking up, from metafiction to fantasy to Western. 

The Trees traffics in noir and in the ghost story simultaneously. A well-known local white man turns up dead in Money, Mississippi, alongside a longer-dead corpse of a black man no one recognizes. While the police investigate, the black man's corpse disappears--only to turn up alongside the recently-killed corpse of another local white man. In both cases, the dead white man's testicles have been forcibly removed from his body and are to be found in the tight grip of the dead black man.  Next thing you know, the black corpse disappears again, only to turn up next to....

You get the idea. Since Money, Mississippi, is the town where Emmett Till was murdered, we begin to wonder: is the ghost of Till walking, taking a long-deferred revenge? For the dead white men are the descendants of the men who killed Emmett Till.

Turns out, eventually, that there is a more down-to-earth, wholly natural explanation for the deaths in Money, Mississippi, but soon there is a national outbreak of sudden, violent death among the descendants of lynchers, all found alongside another corpse, sometimes Black, sometimes Chinese. 

The Trees is a kind of fable, then, wrapped in a couple of layers of genre fiction. 

Sometimes it is farcical, as in the names that seem inspired by Dickens (the Rev. Cad Fondle, Prof. Damon Thruff) or Bennie Hill (FBI agent Herberta "Herbie" Hind). Even though Everett is capable of shrewd social and psychological depiction, he mainly goes for the archetypal here: the redneck sheriffs, the white trash Klansmen, the diner called "Dinah," the wisecracking out-of-town detectives, and the omniscient matriarchal crone who lies behind it all. There is a spot-on parody of Trump's speaking style in Chapter 103. You could almost decide not to take it at all seriously.

But then there is Chapter 64, at ten pages the book's longest, which is basically just a list--a list of people lynched in the United States since 1913. The names here are all too real. And they include the names of victims of recent police violence, as if to emphasize that extra-judicial murder is still extra-judicial murder even when it has a uniform on.

The Trees is a swift read, briskly paced, often funny, but not at all funny by the end. 

Does anyone know why Chapters 74 and 104 are not here?

Elie Wiesel, _Night_, trans. Stella Rodway

 EVEN LESS UNDERSTANDABLE than my never having read Passing before is my never having read this before. A long-time high school staple in a lot of places, even in Nebraska. 

As I imagine anyone likely to wander into this blog already knows, Night is a Holocaust memoir. Wiesel was fifteen and living with his family in Sighet, in what is now Romania, when they and the other Jews of the town were rounded up by the Nazis in the spring of 1944. Upon their arrival at Auschwitz, he and his father were separated from his mother and sister, whom they never saw again. As they were capable of labor, Wiesel and his father were not immediately killed. They managed to survive in the camp, and even survived a brutal transfer to Buchenwald after the Russians reached Auschwitz. His father dies just shortly before the camp is liberated by U.S. soldiers.

It's a terrifying story. To use the terms Giorgio Agamben has made famous, the camp is designed to systematically dismantle and strip away the prisoners' bios, "life" understood as having dignity, rights, and value, leaving them with just zoë or "bare life," mere natural functioning without a claim to anything, "unaccommodated man" as Lear says on the heath. 

How much "humanity" can be taken away from someone before they are no longer "human" even in their own eyes? That's one way of saying what this short book is about. That anyone who survived the camps went on to have any kind of productive life whatsoever, as so many did and as Wiesel himself so abundantly did, inspires hope.

Nella Larsen, _Passing_

 BACK IN THE mid-1980s, I picked up a paperback that contained both Quicksand and this. I read Quicksand, liked it well enough without liking it a great deal, and never got around to Passing. My mistake--Passing is quite a bit more interesting. The recent film adaptation inspired me to pick it up, and I wound up teaching it in one of my courses this spring.

One hot day while visiting Chicago, Irene Redfield of Harlem (doctor husband, two sons) encounters a childhood friend she has not seen in years. They lost touch because the light-skinned Claire has been "passing," living as a White woman, even marrying and (riskily) having a child with a White man who has no idea Claire grew up Black. The renewal of the friendship is pulled up short by an awkward meeting with Claire's racist husband, who does not suspect that Irene (also very light-skinned) is Black and airs some disparaging opinions about those he does not  realize are his wife's and his guest's people.

Irene wants nothing more to do with Claire, taking a stand in which she is seconded by her husband, Brian, alongside whom she is very active in what we now call the Harlem Renaissance. Claire, however, who seems fascinated by the new Harlem, keeps showing up in New York City, cultivating Irene, ingratiating herself in their circle of friends--what is she after? Doesn't she know the risk she is running?

Irene decides Claire has set her cap for Brian. Tensions mount. The dung hits the propellor at an evening party in Harlem. Claire ends up dead, without our being told exactly what went down.

Part of the brilliance of this novella lies in Larsen's keeping to Irene's point of view, so we never know what is going on inside Claire. Her mystery is alluring. Does she regret the deal she made in passing? Does she want to reclaim her Blackness? Is she really interested in Brian? Or is she really interested in...Irene?

Or ...is Irene interested in Claire? Because another part of the brilliance of this novella is the simmering lesbian subtext. Irene scorns Claire's choices, distrusts Claire's motives, fears Claire's cunning, but she also finds Claire fascinating, charming, and (as is repeatedly noted) gorgeous.

So when Claire and Irene are standing at an open upper-story window at the party when Claire's husband bursts in shouting and threatening, and seconds later Claire is dead on the sidewalk, what exactly happened? Larsen isn't telling, but the ending is pretty darned discussable, let me tell you.

Han Kang, _Human Acts_, trans.Deborah Smith

 SPEAKING OF SATISFYING second novels (see yesterday's post on Caleb Crain's Overthrow)...actually, all I know is that this is Han's second novel to appear in English. But I did find it as worthwhile as the Booker-winning The Vegetarian. 

Human Acts is centered around the anti-government demonstrations in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1980, the brutal, even murderous repression of those demonstrations, and the afterlife of the events in the memories of survivors.  Each chapter takes the point of view of a different participant. The first two are set at the time of the demonstrations themselves, the subsequent chapters five, ten, twenty-two, and thirty years later. An epilogue gives us the point of view of Han herself, who was born in Gwangju and whose family had moved away just a short while before the demonstrations; she was just ten at the time.

The characters whose perspectives we get are not leaders or even all that near the center of things; they are volunteers, part of the crowd, with various reasons for being there and joining. Two of them are among the dead; those who survived struggle with memory and trauma, even after the fall and eventual conviction of Chun Doo-hwan, the coup leader who ordered the assault of the demonstrators. The need (or desire or imperative) to remember is continually in a struggle with the need (or desire or imperative) to forget.

The novel has a lot to convey about hope, courage, solidarity, endurance; it also has a lot to say about defeat, suffering, grief, and traumatic memory. It's short, but complex; the interrelationships among the characters are many, but they are rarely spelled out explicitly, so readers need to do some noticing and piecing together on their own. For me, the readerly engagement required made the novel all the more powerful--the gradual realization that I had met the point-of-view characters of Chapter 3 and Chapter 5 back in Chapter 1 became part of the novel's slow reveal of the long-term legacy of the demonstrations, parts of its lesson about the nature of political change.

Caleb Crain, _Overthrow_

 I THOUGHT CRAIN'S first novel, Necessary Errors, was the very best in the crowded field of Young American Literary Man Sojourning in the Former Soviet Bloc fiction  (LLL, July 8, 2014). Overthrow is his second novel and strikes me as less likely to appeal to a wide audience, but what do I know about wide audiences? It certainly shows Crain has been sharpening his fiction chops.

At the novel's center is a small group of young activists who become acquainted during the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 and decide to form a working group dedicated to the "Refinement of the Perception of Feelings," i.e., sharpening their ability to know what other people are thinking. What they have in mind is less ESP than the sort of skills in discerning the minds of others that most Jane Austen heroines painfully acquire, but a mystic aura nonetheless hovers around the group, drawing in new recruits like Julia, a child of the 1% looking for an identity outside of her parents' wealth, and Matthew, a grad student with an unfinished dissertation on Samuel Daniel that dogs him like Philoctetes' wound. 

The mystic aura belongs largely to Leif, the group's poet and visionary. One of Crain's brilliant strokes is to use the points of view of different members of the group for each chapter, while never giving us a chapter from the point of view of Leif. He becomes more complex from chapter to chapter without ever acquiring a definite outline, and that's perfect.

The group and its surprising mission attract the attention of the police, who have their own method of knowing other minds--electronic surveillance. The group is tricked into finding some official folders (on themselves) on the internet. Their violation of state security is immediately detected, and Leif and several of the others are arrested--hence the plot of most of the novel, as Leif and his friends come under legal and media scrutiny, testing their loyalty and strength to the breaking point. 

There may be a turnaround and a qualified victory at the very end. Evidence leaks that the group was illegally surveilled, which means they will probably get off. It's a happy ending, I think--but one made largely possible by good luck, and the novel mainly makes us aware of the long, long odds against any group of young idealists with a vision of a better tomorrow.

The group of students I assigned the novel to liked it, basically, and one in particular said, "I know  these people," and was especially drawn to Leif, "a manic pixie dream boy." But could I sell it to the book club? I'm not sure. I am sure, however, that Crain is a gifted novelist, and I will pick up his next the moment my eye alights on it.

Roxane Gay, _Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body_

 I HAVE GOTTEN backlogged in my blogging--I read this back in January. I'm six or seven books behind, in fact. But school's out (for me), and it's catch-up time.

The crackling prose and maverick attitude of Bad Feminist are abundantly present in this book, but a lot of pain, too--not to mention shame, anger, and other blood-accelerating emotions. Gay is a big person--six foot three and 577 pounds at her biggest, she mentions on p. 6--and Hunger is about how that bigness came about it and why, despite repeated efforts and many exhortations to be smaller, she is still big. 

The crucial event occurred in middle school, when Gay was raped by a boyfriend and his buddies. The best way to avoid this kind of male attention, she decided, was to get really, really big, and so she put on 120 pounds in high school alone. 

The book proceeds roughly chronologically, through college, grad school, the beginning of a career in teaching and writing, on through Gay becoming famous with Bad Feminist. High levels of accomplishment alternate with fugues and crises of confidence while she learns the hazards and tactics of navigating the world as a really large person for whom relatively ordinary objects--airplane seats, restaurant booths, stairs--can inspire dread. Not to mention being someone nearly everyone feels entitled to sneer at and give advice to.

The book is nonetheless often funny, as when Gay describes how she will often tell herself to eat less and exercise more, "But then I get out of bed." And she does get a breakthrough when a broken ankle and subsequent operation bring home to her how much her friends and loved ones care for her. 

She has not forgiven and forgotten (see chapter 84, in which she details how the internet has enabled her to keep tabs on her rapist), and she takes pains to avoid a big swelling major chord ending, but she has certainly moved on, lived her life, made her mark.  

Merlin Sheldrake, _Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures_

 THERE ARE GOOD books of popularized science, then there are really good books of popularized science, and then there are the stop-you-in-your-tracks, stone-cold classic books of popularized science, the ones that reconfigure reality for us--Silent Spring, A Brief History of Time, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Entangled Life is of that small but mighty subset.

I picked this up with little knowledge of fungi other than as something nasty that could happen to your toes or as something tasty when fried with onions. My eyes were well and truly opened. For one thing, mushrooms are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, so to speak. Fungi are their own kingdom, alongside plants and animals. We all now know that trees communicate, but how do they communicate? Thanks to fungi, mostly, or the threadlike extensions known as mycelium. Fungi convey information. They solve problems. They make possible bread (!) and beer (!!). They colonize everything. They give us visions of the oneness of being.

Entangled Life is not merely brimming with illuminating fact, though; it is also gracefully, wittily, lyrically written. Try this, plucked at random:

   I walked into the growing rooms, packed with shelving units three meters tall. This was the fungus comb. Thousands of bags charged with soft blocks of furry mycelium filled the space. Some were white, some off-yellow, some a pale orange. If the fans filtering  the air had stopped, I felt that I might have heard the crackling of millions of miles of mycelium running through its food.

 Good lord. What is the happiest phrase hit upon in that short passage? "This was the fungus comb"? "soft blocks of furry mycelium"? "fans filtering the air"? "the crackling of millions of miles of mycelium"? And Sheldrake's not even in top gear here--try the chapter "Mycelial Minds." 

The best book I have read so far this year, that's for sure, and it will be difficult to surpass.

Richard Powers, _Bewilderment_

 AFTER THE GRAND opera of The Overstory, this is Powers in chamber music mode. A slim volume by Powers standards, a bit under 300 pages. Just two characters, narrator Theo Byrne and his nine-year-old son, Robin, or three if you count Theo's beloved wife and Robin's adored mother, Aly, who died in a car accident some while before the novel begins. Just one point of view, Theo's, and just one plotline, the story of Theo's valiant but frustrated efforts to do right by Robin. 

Robin is brilliant but also on the autism spectrum (a diagnostic concept to which Theo objects). Robin flies into sudden rages in which he can inflict real damage. Unsurprisingly, his behavioral problems have gotten worse since his mother died, and seem on course to grow worse yet. Managing his education is proving too much for the patience and resources of the public school he attends, so, with reluctance, Theo agrees to home-school him, difficult though home-schooling is to balance with Theo's teaching and research responsibilities as an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin.

Then, a breakthrough. Through some experimental (and fictional, I think) biofeedback based on brain scans of his mother, Robin starts to do better, then a lot better, then becomes a miracle cure story and an internet celebrity. 

Powers drops a reference to Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon way back on p. 41, before Robin's innovative therapy is even suggested, tipping the alert reader that Robin's dramatic improvement will be temporary. The treatment that is enabling him to flourish gets shut down about the same time that a major research project investigating extraterrestrial life, in support of which Theo had testified to Congress, loses its funding.

It's a brutal, heartbreaking spiral down from there.

Bewilderment has something in common with Powers's earlier short novel, Generosity, in its depiction of a radiantly good woman and and the avid quest to capture the bio-chemical signature of her goodness. Aly is even more radiant than Thassadit Amzwar (not altogether credibly so, I would say, though it makes sense that her bereaved husband and son would recall her as a kind of goddess). Here, though, the story is darkened by the storm cloud of Trumpian America and its war on science, intellect, curiosity, and imagination. It's a sad story. Sigh.