Review: Like Life

Like Life by Lorrie Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this one.

I am convinced that, if I’d read it when it came out 30 years ago, I’d have been part of the chorus declaring it “outstanding” (as the cover blurb promises). As it is, I read some of Moore’s work not long after and did jump on board the bandwagon declaring her our leading voice for the American short story.

Even now, with some of the age showing here, I am stunned by the sheer narrative skill here. Each of these stories presents enough insight and information to stand as a novel in a lesser but still talented writer’s hands. And that’s where the art of the short story comes through. She has the capacity to compress experience, to make each word carry more weight than you think possible.

I’ll be reading one of these stories, and I’ll find myself trying to imagine how I could tell the same story. I always fail to do it as well as she does – even when I’m doing it only theoretically – because her work is intricate, because she weaves her stitches so tightly and evenly throughout.

At the same time, I admire the characters who emerge in each of these. A Moore character might seem a stereotype for one sentence, a clever twist on that stereotype with a second, and becomes a wholly original person with a third. That’s all it takes her, three strokes of the brush and her people are unlike any others in fiction.

Why the partial reluctance, then? Some of it is her commitment to an aesthetic I don’t always share and that I’m not sure has aged all that well. I recently read Mary Roach’s Stiff from a slightly later era, and that one struck me as afflicted with a “Seinfeld syndrome,” a too-great readiness to stand and observe rather than sympathize and sustain. I see some of that here as well, I think. Too many of these characters seem to suffer without our being invited to empathize with them.

In the stories I like the most from Moore – above all her magisterial “Dance in America” from Birds of America – there’s simply more heart, more humanity. Here – and maybe it was a ‘90s “thing” – I feel more as if I am being asked to shut up and watch the show. (Didn’t Pearl Jam nail it around the same time with the chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” – “Here we are now, entertain us”?)

Perhaps as a consequence of that, and perhaps simply as a reflection of the fact that Moore’s skill is so arresting on its own, I also find myself hard-pressed to remember what any particular story is about. Each one is gripping, and I would sometimes put my family on hold to read the final couple pages and get resolution, but then – almost every time – I’d find myself unable to remember exactly what just happened.

I think my favorite story here is probably, “You’re Ugly Too.” It opens with some of those quick and powerful Moore moves, and suddenly it’s clear that Zoe is unhappy with her small-time Illinois life in a way no literary character ever has been unhappy in small-town Illinois. She might have a serious medical condition. She has a chance at an imperfect relationship with a man she imagines caring about.

Every step in the story has narrative power. They can go on a silly date – and he can lean in to kiss her – and I’m hanging on it. At the end, though, much of it remains unresolved. She seems to have blown the guy off, but maybe not. She may be really ill, but we don’t know. I want to ask the questions, and I recognize that Moore is carving out a space for story that falls before what we’d think of as the conventional climax, but I can’t help wanting to know more. Forgive me for being a Philistine, but I want a story that does more than make me admire its craft.

That feels like an unfair claim and, as I say, I suspect it makes me sound insufficiently sophisticated. Somewhere, someone reading this is huffing at me and reaching for a recent New Yorker to clear away the stench.

So, don’t let me go too far in that direction either. Moore’s skill astounds me, and that’s more than worth the price of admission. Knowing some of what she’s gone on to do, and knowing how she’s evolved with some of the zeitgeist as well, I admire this and think of it as prologue to some of the great later work.


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Review: Sing, Unburied, Sing

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Like most people who read it, I loved Salvage the Bones. I think it announced the possibility of a major talent, someone we’ll have with us for the next few decades, someone who can “sing” the African-American experience with new words but echoes of the same tune that Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison laid down. No, it isn’t fair to compare anyone to both of those two, arguably among the handful of greatest writers we’ve produced as a culture. Still, Ward is so good – in Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing – that it’s not a complete stretch. We’ll have to see how her work ages and what more she can do, but – three novels in – she remains in the conversation for being one of the greats herself.

I read Salvage as a powerful search for a mother figure, whether the dog giving birth in the stunning opening scene, the lost mother whose fragmented lore guides our protagonist, or the towering and feminine Katrina bearing does as a devastating hurricane. This one has many echoes of that same question – here, Mam is dying when we meet her, and Leonie is simply never there for Jojo – but I think it’s reasonable to characterize this one as about the search for a suitable father figure.

There is Pop, of course, and he’s a powerful possibility. This opens with Jojo watching Pop and learning how to slaughter a goat, but really learning how to be a man who has to do what it takes to keep his family safe and fed.

But Pop is handcuffed as well. If Jojo is his heir, there is still a yawning gap where the missing generation should be. There’s Given, Pop’s son and Jojo’s uncle, killed (or murdered) before he could grow into manhood himself. There’s Michael, Jojo’s white father, who’s always distracted by his petty schemes and the jail time that follows and who simply doesn’t know how to be a father yet. There’s Michael’s father, Big Joseph, who’s so blinded by racism that he can’t understand how to parent. There’s even Al, Michael’s lawyer, who rescues the family only to put them into just as much jeopardy when he involves them again with meth.

And, perhaps finally, there is Richie, one of the two ghost figures (Given being the other) who stand as young men who might have been fathers had they had the opportunity to grow to adulthood. Both also stand as Pop’s first “children.” Pop did what he could to save the young Richie, but Richie was too weak, and Pop not yet come into his capacity yet. [SPOILER: And, of course, we eventually learn that Pop benefitted from Richie’s death in that he was allowed to leave the awful Parchman prison early for having shown he could obey the authority of the warden by tracking Richie.]

The hope here, then, is always Jojo, a boy who is seeking a way toward a life that will allow him to care for Kayla and the others. He’s innocent and loving, and all that will keep him from full fatherhood is the almost overwhelming work of growing into adulthood. With Pop’s help, and with wisdom from the dying Mam, he’s already carrying more of a burden than a boy should. But he’s a figure of deep hope, and he stands as a possibility that this African-American world is slowly healing itself.

If I had to choose, I’d still prefer Salvage the Bones because that one is more focused both in its inquiry and its characters. Still, I can see the case for this one since it’s more ambitious in the way it considers three full generations with glimpses of before and after.

Either way, Ward is clearly a writer to continue watching. She writes with real and sustained grace, and she explores questions that, without resolving into easy answers, nevertheless make us feel a little wiser for having considered them.


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Review: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a funny book. That is, it’s funny-weird and funny-haha.

Throughout this, Mary Roach explores what happens to bodies after death when they are pressed, in various ways, into serving the living.

The concept is outrageous, yet it’s also interesting – compelling even – and Roach knows she’s onto something. Part of her approach here is a latter-day participatory journalism. She doesn’t simply report on what she’s learning, but she talks about her experiences learning it. At her best, she’s great at immersing us in one sort of lab or another. One of the most memorable parts is the way she describes the odor that clings to her shoes after she spends a couple hours in a morgue.

At a funny-weird level, she’s at her best in the early chapters when she explores what seems to me the most obvious examples of her inquiry. She visits cadaver labs, talks with morticians and pathologists, and gives us a tour of what it’s like in the world of scientists and engineers who use dead bodies to measure car tests and develop time-of-death determination techniques. It’s a good and important set of inquiries; however squeamish we may be about using bodies in such fashion, we still benefit from them. One researcher estimates that every cadaver used in car crash studies has saved dozens of lives a year.

The later chapters get a little farther out and, to my thinking, a little less interesting. It’s kooky to read about the researchers who tried to prove the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin by suspending cadavers in positions that replicated what might have been the dying position of Christ. It’s more stomach-turning to hear about historical instances (and sometimes not so historical) when communities ate humans either “for the taste” or for imagined medicinal reasons.

Even granting the morbidity of the subject, it seems fairly far afield to conflate the original premise of cadaver usage with the less savory non-scientific pre-history of the treatment of dead bodies, While it’s interesting, a part of it feels tangential.

At a funny-haha level, this also starts out funnier than it ends. Roach has a gift for one-liners in context. She makes me laugh – and will probably make most people laugh – and that’s a good thing. In the beginning, she seems to be going about her work – her odd and self-assigned work – and then finding ways of lessening the tension. She’ll go through a strong description of something clinical, and then she’ll uncork a line that reminds us there is a silliness to it all, too.

When she first begins that, it’s effective. Over time, though, her method starts to show through. She’ll telegraph the jokes more than before; some of what she goes into seems like it may be there as much for the opportunity for the jokes as for its legitimate connection to the topic.

Even more, while I did enjoy this throughout, I started to get troubled by her essential capacity for callousness. She’s observational in a Seinfeldian way; she assumes for herself the privilege of making stories about others – about objectifying them. Henry James criticized that impulse a century ago, and it hasn’t become any more appealing. It had a moment 15-20 years ago, a period when it seemed the dominant comic style, but I think comedy has evolved into something else. Put simply, in the age of Trump, it isn’t funny to sit on the sidelines and mock, even if that mockery is as gentle and clever as this is.

So, if this one were half as long as it is, if the method hadn’t started to get old for me, I think I’d have loved it. As it is, I’m still impressed with Roach’s curiosity, humor, and skill. There’s a lot to like about it still, and I think it would have been an even greater pleasure when it first came out.


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Review: Nimona

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was one of those bonus offerings from Audible for those of us who have monthly memberships. It looked fun, so I gave it a shot, and it turns out to be reasonably fun.

The book – I “read” an adaptation of the webcomic which I understand will eventually lead to a feature film – opens with an acknowledgement that its setting is so clichéd as to be a mockery. It’s a kingdom with a too-good-to-be-true hero in Goldenloin (the name tells you the tone we’re looking at) even though the real good guy is Ballister Blackheart. The two are old lovers, which is an interesting twist even though it’s rendered as unremarkable.

Again, all of that is so familiar that it’s a warning sign. I’d certainly have bailed on this if it weren’t so short.

The part that ultimately distinguishes this, though, is Nimona herself. We meet her as another kind of cliché, a little girl who wants to be a super-villain sidekick – which leads her to hooking up with Blackheart.

Except, [SEMI-SPOILER:] she isn’t a cliché, especially not in this context. She’s actually a kind of homicidal maniac, killing off all sorts of people for little provocation. She wants to hurt others, and she wants to commit crimes.

It’s a reasonably striking concept, and I enjoyed the provocation. What do you do with a creature who seems like a little girl in a fairy tale parody when she turns out to be a very real and ruthless killer?

Stevenson is mostly about having fun here, though, so she doesn’t push this all that far. Plus, there are some irritations in the way the cast performs this. The actors are all strong, but there are too many sound effects and awkward narrator intrusions. It’s too aware of its own jokes when, at least as I understand the underlying dark joke, we ought to be having it all dawn on us only slowly.

So, I did find things to like here, and I do think it has its successes. Ultimately, though, this is so much about exploring cliché that, while attempting to subvert it, it most just endorses it. For a time, I figured this for a two-star book. In the end, I think it’s really a 2.5.


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Review: How Not to Get Shot: And Other Advice From White People

How Not to Get Shot: And Other Advice From White People by D.L. Hughley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Laugh at this one until you cry.

This is what happens when a thoughtful guy takes the time to explain how the world looks if you’re Black. It’s what happens when he writes to an implicitly Black audience in a way that even us white people can understand. And it’s what happens when that guy is also lights-out funny in the midst of the heavy stuff he has to report.

There may be some Dave Chappelle or Richard Pryor here – yeah, they’re the all-time reigning champs, I know – but I suspect there’s a heavy dose of Dick Gregory too. This is humor, humor about the weight of racism, but it’s humor focused as a studied political act. Hughley is performing pain and anger; he’s harnessing them into a performance.

At one time he jokes that he hopes his book will save just one person from getting shot, but not really. He wants it to save a lot of people because, if it were just one, he wouldn’t sell enough copies to make any money.

But, of course, he’s also deadly serious. He references far too many times when Black men – and sometimes Black women and Black children – have been shot for preposterous reasons: carrying a BB gun (unloaded) in a toy store on the way to pay for it, reaching for a wallet, saying “I have a gun” without reaching for it, or simply being large. He’s channeling real and abiding pain, but he knows how little Black pain seems to register in the larger world. So he’s making us laugh at the horror instead.

And, somehow, he keeps the laughs coming. At one point he goes into a tangent about police violence, noting that you know it’s a problem when they accidentally kill white people. He recounts a police killing of an Australian yoga instructor – blonde, no less – and refers to her as probably “the least killable person you can imagine.” “What’s next,” he muses, “Nicole Kidman?” That’s edgy but, with apologies to Nicole Kidman, it’s funny too.

Or there’s his quick analysis of the white dispossessed working class’s voting for Donald Trump because he promised to bring back the factory jobs that have mostly vanished. They don’t seem to realize, though, that it’s not immigration but automation that’s taken most of those jobs. As he puts it, “They voted from Trump, but they really needed DeVry.”

It’s rare to go long without being moved here, and it’s rare to go long without something to make you guffaw. It’s a spectacular performance, and it makes me respect this talented comedian even more than I already did.

As an answer to the question of his title, he concludes with a biting final observation: What’s the best way not to get shot? Don’t be Black.

As a white person, it’s not my job to say much in response to this. My job is to listen. Hard as these truths are, I’ve done that with an admiration that only amplifies the power of the message.


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Review: Girl Walks into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle

Girl Walks into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle by Rachel Dratch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed this one.

Rachel Dratch was another of the Saturday Night Live performers of the post-Adam Sandler era, a time when – or so it seems – the show shed its “bro” vibe for a space that slowly allowed a female-centered style to emerge. Sandler, David Spade, and Rob Schneider gave way to Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Dratch. Inspired as the young Sandler could be, I call that an upgrade.

Anyway, this book turns out to be only partially about Dratch’s SNL career. She gets that phase of her life out of the way quickly to set up the rest of this memoir about her experience navigating singlehood and then becoming a mother for the first time at age 44. As she tells us, the only roles she’s being offered after SNL and a brief stint on Fey’s 30 Rock are wacky best friends and lesbian secretaries. She’s still comfortable financially, and she’s working enough to feel involved, but her big-time career is mostly finished. It’s a complaint we hear from a lot of talented female performers and, to her credit, she reports it, owns it, and moves on.

The main thrust of this is, indeed, a memoir rather than an autobiography. We see her as she stumbles through the dating life, as she negotiates a steady but only semi-serious relationship, and as she embraces the accident of discovering she’s going to have a child. It’s a good story, and she tells it with insight and a persistent, mostly gentle humor. I expected a set of show-biz memories; instead, we get a thoughtful account of a woman who’s reinvented herself.

Dratch does reflect some on the nature of her comedy, but for the most part she simply models a more mature form of it. If Fey set the tone for their collective approach – a form I think of as based around slightly exaggerating reality and then wondering at its absurdity – Dratch puts her particular accent on it. There’s something Jewish in her tone, something I’d call an updated kvetchiness, and I like it.

Her most famous role, of course, was as Debbie Downer, the depressive friend who’s always reminding everyone of some unpleasant and often remote possibility. Here, she’s more fully human, more three-dimensionally prepared for the worst. But there’s something plucky to her as well. She knows she’s had more professional good fortune than most people, but she knows as well that she’s mostly burned through that good fortune.

What’s more, she realizes that her work in comedy – the way she immersed herself in the full contact work of improv and TV sketch comedy – has insulated her from experiences others take for granted. She’s funny when she talks about how hard it is for her to read the signs of a man’s interest in her. At one point she wonders whether guys are interested in her or in Lorne Michaels.

I read these comedy biographies to get a sense of the ways different comedians have found to be funny. Dratch isn’t as analytical about that as I might like, but she doesn’t have to be. She’s found a worthwhile story to tell, and she uses it to demonstrate what makes her a welcome and distinct comic voice.


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Review: GOD, IF YOU’RE NOT UP THERE, I’M F*CKED

GOD, IF YOU’RE NOT UP THERE, I’M F*CKED by Darrell Hammond
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I never found Darrell Hammond all that funny, though, to be fair, I didn’t watch a lot of Saturday Night Live in his era. Still, I’ve found myself reading as many memoirs of cast members as I can because I’m curious about what makes something funny and because I have a son imagining a career in comedy.

Oh, and this was on sale.

If I’d known what I was getting into with this, I doubt I’d have read it. For the most part, there’s not much funny to it. Instead, it’s a harrowing account of Hammond’s emotional illness. He was physically abused as a child, mostly by his mother but also at times by his father. He coped in the cliched way of working to make people laugh, but also in darker ways like substance abuse and cutting himself.

While there are some early chapters about his SNL life and his work as a comedian, the majority of the first two-thirds of this is a straightforward memoir of a deeply pained man. There’s power in his self-discovery, power in the sense that he is working toward healing himself as he tells the story, but he’s only a solid writer, not a great one. If I’d wanted memoir in full, there are a lot of others I’d have turned to first.

There are, eventually, some chapters about his SNL life, but he seems to admit in his afterward that they’re there because his publisher asked for them. He’s surprisingly unhappy in describing his time on the show. He was older than most of the cast, and he was a drinker in a serious and solitary way, so he didn’t connect with his castmates the way so many others of the same era seemed to.

More to the point of what I was hoping for, though, Hammond was never quite a comedian. He was, instead, an impressionist. And, as far as I’m concerned, the best parts of this book come from him discussing what goes into a thoughtful impression. You don’t want to be too exact, he says. Mimicry is more a gimmick than something funny.

Instead, the challenge is to find a quirk and then exaggerate it. He credits Dana Carvey as a mentor and model, and he recalls the power of a sketch the two did together. Carvey as George W. Bush promised he was “Not gonna do it” when it came to raising taxes. Hammond as Al Gore promised to take Social Security and put it in a “lock box.” He nailed the impression so fully and with such mockery that some observers thought it was a factor in that razor-close election.

So it’s interesting to hear him discuss how he listens – studies deeply – the characters he does impressions of. For his Bill Clinton, the most famous of his characters, he developed three different sets of tapes to hear the President in his morning, afternoon and evening voices. He listens for where in the throat the voice comes. Others concentrate on the material, but Hammond lets the writers handle that. He wants to get at a subtler performing quality of someone he “does.”

And, intriguingly, he claims to have a form of synesthesia that makes him hear some voices in color. That gift seems a part of what it takes for him to “get” his subjects.

There’s ultimately less of that analysis than I’d like, though, and that leaves the uncomfortable fact that – absent his striking abilities as an impressionist – he’s simply not that funny a comedian. (In the edition I listened to, the memoir itself is often flat, laughless. In the appended live routine, though, some of the same stories – presented with full-throated impressions – becomes funnier. It’s in the delivery.)

Between the candor of the memoir and the analysis of his art, there are some legitimate elements here. It has some power, but not quite the power I was looking for when I picked it up.


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Review: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am a nerd, of course, but not even I expect to find linguistics riveting and funny. That’s what happens, though, when you find yourself reading something by a brilliant thinker who’s not afraid to challenge many of his field’s presuppositions and who can spin a good story out of otherwise dry stuff.

McWhorter has a couple of ideas that he both presents with stunning clarity and that he juxtaposes to the dominant thinking of other linguists. Above all, he has a sense that language carries the residue of the people who spoke it rather than the conquerors of those people. It’s a great and liberating sense as far as I’m concerned; these conquered people often vanished from history, but they have left their mark in the way we speak.

The first theory he explores is the notion that our English grammar owes far more to the Celts than we have otherwise imagined. When the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived as conquerors, they did not, as some historians have insisted, wipe out the existing Celtic population. Instead, they became an upper-class; as recent DNA evidence suggests, the Celtic Britons seem responsible for more than 90 percent of the genetic make-up of modern-day English.

The official language the island came to speak was indeed “Old English,” a descendent of Old German, but it had a number of grammatical quirks, mostly an absence of case endings and verb conjugations as well as an odd “meaningless do” that featured in sentences like “Do you want…” Where conventional linguistic history has it that these features either just fell away from disuse (something that did not happen to most other descendants of Old German) or emerged as quirks in the case of the “meaningless do,” McWhorter marshals all sorts of evidence to show that what we see is the evidence of a conquered people attempting to speak a new language but mangling it in the process. The Celtic British language indeed featured some of those grammatical elements, and it seems fairly convincing to think that those “second language speakers” of that time – who constituted a substantial majority – mis-learned the invaders’ way of speaking.

McWhorter applies similar thinking in a later era. Convention has it that the Norman Invasion, with its French speakers, infused Middle English with the novelties that eventually turned it into Modern English. And it is clear that we receive many Romance-language words through that transfusion. But vocabulary is a more superficial change in language than its core grammar. McWhorter argues that there were simply never enough Normans around to influence the everyday language; there were perhaps only ten thousand on an island with millions in population, and many of them rarely interacted with the common people.

Instead, says McWhorter, there’s a much more substantial infusion of population from a series of Viking raids. Those small-time conquerors – who tended to land near the coasts and establish colonies that eventually intermarried with the existing population – were ultimately both more numerous and more engaged in the commerce of everyday life. They are the ones, McWorter says, who brought about the further erosion of conjugation and case endings that is distinct to English. What’s more, he points out triumphantly, while the written record will always be far behind the conventional ways most people talk, the written records show that such changes began in the regions where the Vikings settled rather than in places closer to Norman strongholds.

He offers one more intriguing hypothesis from the same pattern of analysis. He notes that Old German is itself already a somewhat trimmed down version of its precursor Old Indo-European. Among other strange changes, it’s a rare language that goes from hard consonants tike ‘P’ to softer ones like “F,” as in Pater becoming Father. Using a kind of CSI—History of Language, he speculates that it’s possible the alternation we see is the result of a transfusion from the way Semitic speakers would have learned and bastardized the language.

Then, in perhaps the most speculative part of the book, he considers the possibility that the Phoenicians of Carthage – they of the Punic Wars, and speakers of Semitic Akkadian – may have had a larger geographic presence in the Scandinavian areas where Old German first emerged. That is, he proposes that our language has never been “pure,” that it has always been altered by contact with peoples who, though they have not gone onto political power, have mis-learned and passed along a new kind of speech.

If all that weren’t enough – a coherent story that gives a glimpse of academic controversy and still manages to stitch together different historical developments – this also offers the best grammatical defense I have ever heard for why I should let go the, to-me, ear-scraping sound of using the plural “them” to refer to individuals as a gender-neutral pronoun. First, he says, there’s evidence for such a use going back to Shakespeare and before; it’s always been a part of the language.

Second, he reminds me, no language is without its logical inconsistency. He offers a lot of great examples I can’t reconstruct, but most persuasively he points at the example of “aren’t I?” I’d never thought of it before, but – if numerical agreement is so important – then why does the singular I take the plural aren’t in such a situation? Logically it should be “amn’t I,” but we hear that as wrong. It’s just a reminder that this is how language works. It’s always got some illogical elements from its strange inheritance, and it’s never going to be entirely consistent.

What we have with which to write and speak is, it turns out, the record of many long-defeated peoples. We’ve lost their ideas and many of their words, but something of their experience has crept into what we know through the bastardization process of linguistic change. I knew a lot of this going in, but McWhorter makes me feel smarter, and he certainly entertained me along the way.


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Review: The House of Broken Angels

The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one has a majestic premise: we get to see as many as six generations reflected in the single month between the deaths of two members of an extended family. Their different stories telescope around the gathering(s), and we get backstory piled on top of backstory. From their roots in Mexico, through their time entering furtively into the U.S., to their all-American Spanglish childhoods, we get a glimpse of several decades of history as it has stamped itself on these individuals.

On top of that, Urrea has a real gift for voices. The oldest generations speak to us in an English (at times given to us as implicit translation) that’s formal and poetic. The next, exemplified by the patriarch and central character Big Angel, speaks matter-of-factly. And the youngest, Big Angel’s children and young adult grandchildren, talk with a cocky ease that’s sometimes reminiscent of a Junot Diaz narrator.

Those are real and memorable strengths, and there were times I was reading this that I thought it might be a masterpiece on the level of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. At the same time, though, there’s something inert about the narrative here. It feels sometimes as if we’re introduced to one family member and then another and then another. In each case we get a full backstory, but it’s already concluded. There’s just not that much at stake, not much that carries narrative uncertainty.

That central problem manifests itself particularly toward the end of this. We know from the start that Big Angel is dying, so there’s not much at stake as he winds down. He’d like to leave on good terms with everyone, but it’s not as if he has any particular amends to make. Various others have problems of one sort or another, but in the teeming cast, none seem really to stand out. There are, at times, almost a soap opera’s worth of mini-crises occupying one and another.

That begins to change somewhat toward the final third when [SPOILER:] one of the younger relatives confronts the gangster who shot and killed a couple of other family members years before. We’ve heard about those murders as a wound that will never heal, but it feels more contrived to be happening in the midst of the reality of the funerals of Big Angel’s mother and Big Angel’s imminent death.

[DOUBLE SPOILER:] Things get even more contrived when the gangster interrupts a family festivity threatening to kill one of the grandchildren and Big Angel, often unable by that point even to stand, puts himself between the would-be gunman and his child. It’s melodramatic, which might be OK if the whole of this were more clearly melodrama, and it feels orchestrated. The accidental machismo of Big Angel’s heroism serves as a climax, but it’s a climax that feels incidental rather than organic.

I’m aware that I read this one a bit too quickly – and took a few days break in between – so I missed some of the nuance of the different characters’ experiences. Still, I can’t help feeling that, beautiful as this is with its different voices and multi-generational span, it doesn’t live up to its early potential. I do love the effect of the first third of this, and I won’t be surprised if Urrea gives us a fuller masterpiece in years to come. As much as this delivers, it feels as if it could have been even more remarkable.


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Review: Burr

Burr by Gore Vidal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gore Vidal has long been a “name” whose work I didn’t really know. He seemed almost more famous for being famous than for any particular thing he’d written. So, when this one cropped up on sale, I figured I’d give it a shot.

As a concept, I love this book. A young man and partisan of Aaron Burr is hired to write a scandalous hit-job on Martin Van Buren by claiming that the Presidential candidate is actually the son of the disgraced old man. The result is a novel told back-and-forth between a present of Charlie Schuyler as he navigates the United States of the middle 1830s and a past of Burr’s life.

Burr’s voice, as Vidal gives it to us, is rich and ironic. He offers a view of American history that’s been buried by subsequent consensus, but that comes across as cutting and clever. His Alexander Hamilton isn’t the brilliant but flawed figure of musical fame, but rather an always conniving and striving upstart, jealous of Burr’s distinguished pedigree. (I hadn’t known it, but Burr was the grandson of the famous Jonathan “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Edwards as well as the son of the president of what would become Princeton.) His Thomas Jefferson isn’t the great, deistic sage we know, but rather a serial promise-breaker, a master politician, and a man capable of switching his philosophy as necessary.

The Burr we hear is a voice of dissent who lives long enough to be among the last major participants in the Revolutionary moment. He comes to us as a curmudgeon, a scoundrel even, but an unapologetic one.

At the same time, it’s hard to imagine anyone writing this book today. Forty-five years later, most of the references that seem essential to understanding it have simply fallen out of common knowledge. I found myself checking and re-checking Wikipedia for reminders of just who a whole host of secondary characters are. I remember Henry Clay and John Calhoun. But William Wirt? Samuel Swartwout? Some of these are colorful scoundrels in their own right, characters who must once have been near household names and who helped define American history. Today, well, they’re hyperlinks.

I enjoy the history lesson – that’s much of what kept me in this – but it’s striking to think that Vidal must have been writing for an audience (perhaps imaginary even then) sufficiently saturated in American history to recognize the nature of the revisionism he was exploring. In other words, he had faith there were enough “patriots” (in his Burr’s ironic sense of the word) to follow his fundamental claim.

As a consequence, there’s an airy elitism that pervades this, some of it Burr’s and some of it Vidal’s – himself the scion of a distinguished American family that history may have left behind. Vidal turns out to be every bit the master aphorist I’d heard he was. I didn’t write down any of the great one-liners he pulls off, but there are many turns of phrase that I wish I’d been clever enough to think of. Even so, that contributes to the sense that this is something that’s condescending to me, and to most of us reading it. We’re some of Jefferson’s great unwashed, products not of the openly cynical opportunism of Burr (who narrowly escaped execution as a traitor hoping to establish himself emperor of a region comprised of several of what are now some of our Southern states) but of the subtler hypocrisy of Jefferson and his “Virginia junto.”

There’s much to enjoy here if you’re willing to double-check the history against Burr/Vidal’s version. It can drag in places since it takes a while to find Charlie’s story, but it’s a lot of fun too. I understand Vidal wrote a loose series of these histories, books that challenge our received version of the events that shaped who we are as a nation. I won’t rush onto the next, but I’ll be on the lookout for it sometime down the road.


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Review: The Starless Sea

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For the last several years, I’ve offered up a consistent top-two when it comes to thoughtful fantasy novels written in the last decade: Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus.

The Night Circus, if you haven’t read it, is simultaneously a love story, a story of magic in the literal sense, and a story that basks in the magic of its own telling. It feels like a dream, yet you can put it down, reflect on the wonder that someone actually wrote it, and then pick it up and get lost in it again.

And she wrote it when she was still in her early 30s.

So I’ve been waiting for this one for a while, and I’m glad to say it sustains my sense that Morgenstern is one of the most beguiling writers we have.

This is a book full of wonders. One of the first is a magical moment (magical within the story and to someone reading it) when our protagonist, Zachary, the son of a fortune teller, reads about himself in an ancient book he’s found in the library.

Others include a vast sea of honey rather than water, a man who becomes lost in time, cats and keys and bees that serve as determined and overdetermined symbols, a magical kitchen that can supply any desire, a heart that beats inside a clever wooden box, and a dollhouse that reflects and maps the larger world around it.

Throughout, the prose almost always glows, and I found myself pulled along with every page I turned. This is a book about the magic of reading, and it manages with that to make reading it a magical experience.

Even with all that avid praise, though, I do think this one falls short of The Night Circus.

For one thing, this is simply longer than it needs to be. I can’t point to anything specific I’d want to see cut, but there’s a laxness to the narrative in places. The first 15-20 pages feel as if they’re superfluous, but Morgenstern eventually redeems them into the full narrative. Maybe it would make sense to cut some of the plot threads – do we need three love stories? Do we need as many back-and-forths between the world below and the world above? Do we need so many simultaneous quests?

The answer may be yes. As I say, nothing is superfluous, and the novel never went sour on me, but I did find myself worrying toward the end that it would somehow fail. That is, I always felt the magic, but its spell went on so long that I could feel its limits. In The Night Circus, I never felt outside the power of the circus itself.

And that, I think, is a big part of the issue here. The Night Circus is bounded; all its events take place within the defined space of the circus itself. This one is sprawling. There are multiple levels of reality and time and multiple stories from a deep history and a present. We’ll get characters (modest SPOILER: Kat) who appear early as supporting characters, vanish for hundreds of pages, and return for purpose that doesn’t seem all that insistent.

I can see how that might have happened. If I’d ever managed to write something as masterful as The Night Circus, I suppose I’d be tempted to see if I could write something even bigger, something that broke out of the defined space I’d made for myself.

So, I do recommend this one. I was glad to have some of my enthusiasm tempered by not-quite-glowing reviews, so I’m happy to return the favor. Definitely read this, and start the countdown for Morgenstern’s third novel. But recognize that this one doesn’t always entirely hold up under its sweeping ambitions.


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