Gary Shteyngart, _Little Failure_

GIVEN THAT MEMOIRS by Russian-born novelists who emigrated to the United States and write in English are not that frequently encountered, it's hard to read this and not think of Nabokov's Speak, Memory. Once we do think of Nabokov, though, we are mainly struck by contrasts.

On the one hand, a butterfly-collecting princeling, his parents' pride and joy, grows up in the twilight of the Romanovs; forced into exile, he attends Oxford, becomes the shining star of the émigré literary scene, endures the assassination of his beloved father, and (after a series of romances) marries a devoted wife. On the other hand, a sci-fi devouring child of the Brezhnev years, whose parents call him "snotnose" and "little failure," ends up in Queens, majors in marijuana at Oberlin, suffers writer's block, and can never keep a girlfriend for long.

I wondered if Shteyngart was deliberately playing up the contrast, actually. He mentions Speak, Memory in passing (p. 261), and the almost absurd abyss between his circumstances and Nabokov's is the kind of sly joke that his novels often make.

Just as the memoir's comedy is a lot like that of the novels, the persona of the memoir often reminds one of the schlimazels whose beleaguered adventures feature in the novels. And just as one discerns behind the hapless narrators of Shteyngart's novels a novelist who is intelligent, perceptive, and resourceful, Shteyngart the memoirist is as skillful and deliberate as Garry the subject is naive and deluded.

The latter chapters of the book steer close to the edge of the topoi of celebrity memoir--drug and alcohol excesses, ethical lapses, recovered memories of rough treatment in childhood, therapy--but even while sustaining the tone of class-clown self-disparagement that runs throughout the book, Shteyngart handles this material with tact and even--not at all what one has come to expect from him--dignity. So in some subtle way the book may have a lot in common with Nabokov after all.

Lucy Ives, _The Hermit_

GIVEN THE NEWS that Lucy Ives has a novel forthcoming in 2017, and given that her work tends to be aware of its own processes, and even aware of its own awareness of its own processes, one wonders whether The Hermit somehow reflects on the composition of the novel that Ives was (I suppose) writing at about the same time that she was writing The Hermit.

Truth to tell, this is not even my idea. It occurs in section 9 of The Hermit: "Rebecca says, "This is a poem about trying to write a novel.'"

Rebecca is on to something, I think. The Hermit has quite a few reflections own novels and novel-writing, e.g., "Thus the novel could be the elaboration of nearly real situations as an aid, a kind of paradoxical recovery from the actual," and "When I was 13 I swore to myself that I would become a novelist."

Is that first one true, do you think? While it's a bit reductive to think of novel-writing as a large-scale game of fort-da, but I would say it does account for a lot of novels, including some great ones, such as Herzog or nearly every Roth novel.

Not that The Hermit is that much like Woolf's A Writer's Diary. It's quite a bit more mercurial, more glancing, more what-just-happened than that. But I do plan to read it again after I read the novel.

Colson Whitehead, _The Underground Railroad_

I HAD NOT noticed this before, but novels about slavery tend to traffic a bit in fabulism and fantasy. The ghost in Morrison's Beloved, for instance. The time traveling and chronological slippages in Butler's Kindred and Reed's Flight to Canada. Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage  do not deal in the supernatural, but they do draw on the kind of wild invention and gleeful disregard of plausibility that one finds in an older kind of pre-Flaubert novel, like Smollett or the picaresque. About the only example I can call to mind of genuine straight-up-and-down realism is Edward Jones's The Known World.

Jones can't be the only example, but still I wonder, why so frequent a resort to the imaginary? Tentative answer: a fiction writer immersing her- or himself in a reality so grim, dehumanizing, and hopeless as racialized, commodified slavery would naturally want to conjure up some magical escape.  Something like this may happen in the death camp chapters of David Grossman's See Under: Love as well. Is Beloved about Sethe's wanting a magical escape from the reality of her past so badly that she actually conjures it up, then lets it almost swallow her?

Whitehead's Underground Railroad is a bit of a return to the fictional vein of The Intuitionist, but by so returning it also participates in the lineage outlined in the first paragraph. For the first several dozen pages, we seem to be in a normally realistic novel about slavery, but when Cora and Caesar escape and find their way to a station of the underground railroad, it's in a tunnel, and has tracks, and a steam locomotive...in other words, Whitehead has with no forewarning at all whisked us into an alternative-history historical novel (à la Roth's Plot Against America) by the simple device of making literal the metaphor of the "underground railroad"--the network of people who assisted escaping slaves. (In historical fact, apparently, hardly regular or reliable enough to deserve the metaphor.)

The rest of the novel tracks Cora's progress along the railroad through various states, which turn out to have a variety of institutions and attitudes around slavery, slaves, emancipated slaves, and African-Americans generally.  None of the institutions or attitudes correspond precisely to anything in actual historical existence in the Carolinas or Tennessee circa 1850, but they do seem emblematic of post-emancipation history in the alteration of hope and dread, in the many shades of white obtuseness, in the ever-renewed striving after liberation and the ever-returning unkillable slavecatcher. The novel thus cunningly telescopes a lot of African-American history into a story lasting (maybe) a year or two in (maybe) the 1850s.

Thinking about The Plot Against America in our President-elect Trump moment makes me wish a certain someone had not retired. Roth, thou should'st be writing at this hour.

Sherman Alexie with David Lehman, eds., _The Best American Poetry 2015_

AS OFTEN HAPPENS, the poetry in the 2015 volume reminded me of the work of its editor--in this case, a mild but not obsessive fascination with closed forms, an occasionally surreal humor, a recurring interest in matters of identity. As with the editor's poetry, I found myself appreciating it and respecting it without being particularly excited by it.

About the usual proportion of familiar to unfamiliar names. No great new discoveries, though. I am often motivated to pick up a book or three because of what I read in BAP, but not this year.

To tell the truth, I had stopped about halfway through, and only picked it up when I saw the new one was out.

Bit of an off-year for BAP, it seemed to me. New one looks promising at first glance, though.

Katherine Anne Porter, _Pale Horse, Pale Rider_

RE-READ THIS LAST week for the book club, not having looked at it since I read it for a modern American fiction class in college some few decades ago, and was struck by how good it was. Three lengthy (50+ pages) short stories, or more what James called "tales," two about a young woman named Miranda breaking away from her upper-class Southern family and trying to make her own way (apparently autobiographical). The second of the Miranda tales, and the title story of the collection, is about Miranda catching the great influenza of 1918, and contains the best description of hallucinatory dreaming this side of De Quincey.

So, made me wonder--given the rocket boost that feminist scholarship has given the standing of many  once relatively neglected women writers since I was in college (top-of-the-head list: Elizabeth Gaskell, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, Dawn Powell, Mina Loy, Shirley Jackson), why not Porter? Not that she gets none whatsoever--some 500 items in the MLA International Bibliography--but Cather comes in at 2300.

Is it because there is just one novel (Ship of Fools)? I think, though, that even now a lot of her short stories get anthologized.

Something a little too cool, a little too analytically detached or Jamesian in the tone? You could say the same of Flannery O'Connor, though, and her reputation seems secure for the moment.

Did she commit some political misstep in the 1960s? I've known folks who dislike Elizabeth Bishop because she supported the mid-1960s Brazilian coup.

I can see why Pearl Buck (American writing about Chinese peasants) and Mary Ward (wrong, wrong, wrong on women's suffrage) are still waiting for their revival, but why Porter?

Chigozie Obioma, _The Fishermen_

ON THE ONE hand, here is a novel of a fully contemporary Nigeria, with the World Cup, Peugeots, office jobs, and election rallies, but on the other, we have a tale as dark and terrible as anything in Genesis or Greek mythology: lethal sibling rivalries, ominous prophecies, devouring revenge.

One often encounters the weird and elemental in Nigerian literature--Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri--and likewise one can think of plenty of examples of classic mimetic realism--Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Chimananda Ngozie Adichie.  (Is this a Yoruba-as-opposed-to-Igbo thing?) Obioma seems to be channeling both at once.

How does he pull this off? It helps, I think, that his principal characters and narrator are children, for whom plain quotidian details have a kind of distinctness and glowing presence, who can feel the wonder in the arrival of a helicopter and sense something demonic in the local homeless man given to   oracular pronouncements:

He smelt of rotten food, and unhealed wounds and pus, and of bodily fluids and waste. He was redolent of rusting metals, putrefying matter, old clothes, ditched underwear he sometimes wore. He smelt, too, of leaves, creepers, decaying mangoes by the Omi-Ala, the sand of the riverbank, and even of the water itself [...] But these were not all; he smelt of immaterial things. He smelt of the broken lives of others, and of the stillness in their souls. He smelt of unknown things, of strange elements, and of fearsome and forgotten things. He smelt of death.

Fearsome and forgotten things, right alongside cinderblock walls, homework assignments (Things Fall Apart, naturally), and juvenile courts. The Fishermen is not quite like anything else, and I expect it will stay in my mind for quite a while.

Thomas Frank, _Listen, Liberal, or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?_

IT'S THE QUESTION of the year, and I suppose of the next four: What do all those salt-of-the-earth folks see in Donald Trump? That question--or its ancestor, i.e., what do all those salt-of-the-earth folks see in the Republicans?--lay explicitly or implicitly at the heart of several books this year, and I have been reading a few of of them.

Let's start with this one by Thomas Frank, whose 2004 What's the Matter with Kansas? perhaps founded the genre. Trump is mentioned but once by name in Listen, Liberal, and Frank's answer to the question has little to do with what Trump is offering. Instead, it has much to do with what the Democrats are not offering, namely, attention to the issues of the working class (of any color or any region).

Frank argues that an influential cadre within the Democrat party, going back to the McGovern reforms of the early 1970s, believed that the Democrats could prevail nationally by being the party of the educated liberals, the professional class, women, and ethnic minorities, and thus could stop kissing the ring of crusty old labor types like George Meany. In other words, the Democrats had, in a way, told the Reagan Democrats to get lost before even before Reagan came along to scoop them up.

Bill Clinton exemplifies the trend. Frank's chapter "It Takes a Democrat" (on the model of "it took a Republican to open relations with China," since the Republicans would have crucified any Democrat who attempted it) portrays Bill Clinton's presidency as eight years of selling out the former heart of the Democratic Party constituency, with one measure after another undermining the nation's most vulnerable: NAFTA, welfare "reform," sentencing "reform," and financial deregulation.

Obama, Frank thinks, was not a great improvement ("Chapter 8, "The Defects of a Superior Mind"), and Hillary seemed  to him even less of one (Chapter 11, "Liberal Gilt"). Bernie Sanders does not come up, but I suspect Frank found his program a bit closer to what the Democrats ought to be talking about. Frank obviously views with distaste any cozying up to Wall Street or to various internet gazillionaires (see Chapters 9 and 10).

I've found all the books by Frank that I have read cogent and persuasive, and I think he's right this time, too, Can the Democrats re-connect to folks? Mark Lilla in the Sunday Times gave pretty much the same advice, and the scorched earth in the comments section made me think we're not there yet.