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.