Review: The North Water

The North Water by Ian McGuire
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Think of Herman Melville by way of James Ellroy.

At its best, this is a novel that finds a fresh way to interrogate the nature of human depravity, to explore what happens to our humanity when we find ourselves face to face with a natural world that has no room for civilized mores.

At its worst – which is still awfully good – it’s an adventure story with an unusual capacity for presenting the physical and historical details of a time before our technology insulated us from the perpetual danger of storm and winter.

We get, in essence, a showdown here between two deeply flawed men. Henry Drax is so vile that he can sullenly select a man at random and kill him, that he can casually bludgeon and sodomize (the novel’s word) a boy when the urge finds him. And lest you think that’s a spoiler, it all happens in the first handful of pages.

Patrick Sumner is a surgeon, but he’s also an opium addict in disgrace after taking a foolish chance during the British conquest of India. He has no qualms about lying to others, and he has no clear loyalties.

Both men find themselves on a whaling voyage into the arctic at the end of the profitable window for whale-hunting. There is [SEMI-SPOILER] a mercantile plot by the ship’s owner to have it sunk so he can claim the insurance money and rid himself of investments he’d prefer to put into the coming market for coal, and the result is a voyage even more hazardous than anyone could have expected.

McGuire apparently has a background as a historian, and it shows. He has a deep sense of both the everyday lives of 19th century mariners as well as a broad feel for the ways in which the historical moment was changing. The age of sail is dying; there’s less and less reason for men to risk their lives in arctic ice when, soon enough, it will be a matter of steam and – for the U.S. – a brutal civil war that will show how much our technology can overwhelm us.

He also has a sense of the moral conflict in play. There is something beautiful and wild in the savagery of a bear, something we see reflected in both the amorality of Drax (who’s made his career as a top-flight harpooner) and in the fluid morality of Sumner. Each is reflected in the wild creatures of the novel – in particular the bear – and when this is at its best, we’re called on to measure what it means to be human against such wildness.

There are voices of seeming decency. We meet a thoughtful harpooner who’s taken with Swedenborgism and who talks about all existence as a reflection of God’s love and light. We meet a priest who’s determined to convert the Inuit to Christianity, and who wants to do so without the barbarism of some conversions. Each gets a chance to be articulate, but McGuire skillfully relegates them to whispers against the larger wind of simple survival as Drax and Sumner experience it.

The showdown, then, -- and this is where the James Ellroy thread is clearest – comes down to whether it’s better to reject all of what we think of as decent or simply most of it. That is, is it better to root for a vicious killer and rapist like Drax – who is deeply suited to survive the most hostile of worlds – or to support a man like Sumner who isn’t sure he stands for anything as he relies on luck to get by?

The first four-fifths of this is flat-out gripping, and McGuire keeps it all moving with real skill. I confess [SPOILER] to a little disappointment with the ending, though. We learn early that Baxter, the corrupt owner of the ships, plans to scrap them. It’s not until the very end, though, that it becomes apparent that Drax is part of his scheme. That strikes me as a flaw in the plot since Baxter has better placed men than Drax to further his plan. It’s Drax’s rashness that’s caused much of the difficulty on the doomed voyage, and it seems to me Baxter would be shrewd enough not to rely on the man.

There’s a rewarding final showdown between Drax and Sumner, but I think there are ways McGuire might preserve that without casting Drax as an agent of the larger mercantile plot. (I’d like to see Sumner and Drax take down Baxter together and then have their showdown.)

I thought of that disappointment as perhaps knocking this one down a star, but, when I sit back and consider the deep excellence of the story, its description, and the moral questions it raises, I’m happy to keep trumpeting this as one that I think a lot of people will enjoy. I certainly did, and I’m hoping McGuire puts out another one before too long.


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Review: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m part of the choir when it comes to declaring Lorrie Moore one of the great short story writers of our generation. “Dance in America” from her collection Birds of America, is one of the most powerful stories I’ve ever read, and I’ve been happy to teach it more than once.

The challenge for all great short story writers trying to write novels, though, is to figure out how to work from their strength into a new kind of strength. Someone like Nathan Englander – another top tier short story writer – hasn’t quite pulled it all together. His novels feel a little spliced together. I’m not the writer that either Moore or Englander is, not by a long shot, but I have the same issue. It’s simply hard to spin a novel out of the impulses that go into writing short stories.

In Anagrams, Moore solved the problem by never quite leaving the short story form behind. I find that novel a real success as it scrambles its core characters into a series of stories that, with modest elements altered, change the outcome each time. That is, it makes anagrams out of its characters and situations, rearranging the same elements to different results.

This one, though, for all its impressive reputation, feels to me more like an overgrown short story, or perhaps a pair of stories. Like a good short story, it delivers its insights through subtle Joycean epiphanies rather than as the culmination of a novel-like plot. It’s beautiful and subtle – I doubt Moore could write something clumsy or ugly unless she tried – but it doesn’t quite seem at home in the novel form. It’s a bit distended, a bit slow to make its most powerful claims.

The heart of this one is the story of Berie, a woman in the midst of a decaying marriage, as she reflects on her adolescent friendship with Sils, a local teenage beauty. Each half – the present tense of her marriage and the more prominent flashback of her experiences with Sils – deals with the way our most intense relationships don’t quite deliver what we need from them. There’s a beautiful sadness that runs throughout. Her husband is a decent guy, someone with whom she has a mostly positive marriage, but he’s finding that his love for her has slowly dried up. And Sils, while fun and inspirational even, has a deep selfishness to her. Berie eventually steals for Sils, helping her fund an abortion and then to underwrite a lavish-by-small-town-standards lifestyle, and Sils never quite seems to appreciate the sacrifice.

At that level, the novel (or stories) seem to say that the idea of a relationship is never quite the same as the fact of one. At a deeper, late 1980s early 1990s (when this was written) post-structural level, this is full of not-quite-subtle broken signifiers, of words that turn out not to mean what we think they do. In the first few pages, for instance, her husband confuses the “gato” (cat) of Spanish with the “gateau” (cake) of French. Or we get arguments about whether a couch is the same thing as a “chesterfield.” And there are countless other examples of puns that cross languages and ideas that don’t seem to fit within the available words.

I’m not sure that element ages as well as it likely seemed it would in 1994. I’m also not sure the form of this – what I’m tempted to call the bloated short story – works as well as the form that’s supplanted it. That is, I imagine that if Moore wrote this material today, she’d likely fall into the linked short story form that seems the most common way for short story writers of this moment to build from the “smaller” form into a larger one. That is, there are real epiphanies here, but they often get washed out a little as the story continues to further ones.

There’s a lot of power in this one, and I’m glad I finally got to it. Excellent as it is, though, I think it falls a bit short of the extraordinary work Moore gives us elsewhere.


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Review: The Stars My Destination

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This one looked interesting enough to give a shot – and I needed the distraction of sci-fi while I was dealing with my mother’s final days, -- and then Neil Gaiman’s introduction got me intrigued. Gaiman argues that we should see this as a key text in the development of the genre, a story where a real character emerges within an invented world, one where the technology of the future reveals who we really are rather than who we imagine ourselves becoming.

It is, Gaiman insisted, a kind of sci-fi Count of Monte Cristo.

That should have been my warning, though. As it happens, I don’t like the terrestrial Count of Monte Cristo very much. When I gave it a shot five or six years ago, it seemed endless and contrived. So, if Dumas didn’t make it work for me, Bester certainly doesn’t.

There are a lot of intriguing inventions here, from the idea that humans are suddenly able to use their minds to move from place to place, to “jaunt,” that corporations have become the new feudal structures, and that there’s a vast interplanetary battle among the haves and the have-nots. In fact, I probably like many of the other ideas here, too, including the commercial use of telepaths, the notion of a substance that can power an army or explode with a carelessly directed thought, and the possibility of time travel, but eventually they come too quickly and too furiously.

This starts with a tight, careful plot – and I thought initially I’d see this as Gaiman prompted me to – but it unwinds in ways I can’t help but find careless. Bester not only breaks his narrative in two or three spots – usually when Gully either flees or gets returned to captivity – but he seems to reinvent his entire setting. At one point Gully undergoes an operation that makes him faster and stronger than other humans. I have to wonder, though, if such surgery is possible, why don’t the incredibly well-funded corporate titans outfit their personal armies the same way? (Eventually one does, but only after Gully gets dramatic utility out of having no real competition in the strength department.)

I could make the same complaint about jaunting. It works one way – the way it’s defined in the opening chapter – for about half the book, and then it starts to work somehow differently. Jaunters can go much farther than the original rules suggested, and they can do so more furtively than they could in the early chapters. Gaiman tells us not to overthink it, tells us to pay attention to the way Gully eventually realizes his mad quest for revenge has turned him into a kind of demon, but I find the one distracting and the other contrived.

I did see this one through the end, and I respect both its place in the genre’s history and its handful of striking inventions. As a novel that holds up, though, not so much.


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Review: In Zanesville

In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A lot of things happen in this one – it opens with two babysitters who discover their charges have lit the house on fire, and it chronicles most of an eighth grade year fraught with cliques and the discovery of boys – but the center of the book is our protagonist’s voice. Jo is distinct in her perspective and language, so insistent on making sense of the world changing around her, and so consistently funny, that she’s the star of the book even in the rare moments when nothing is happening to her.

Like the best adolescent characters – Tom Sawyer or Holden Caufield, for instance – Jo is neither a proto-adult nor an overgrown child. She’s trying to make sense of the world as it strikes her immediately, and the result is that she comes to conclusions that show up the hypocrisy (or silliness) of adults. She notices the way her teachers are both “weird” and human, how they leap at any chance to share their passions with students yet have so little sense of how to frame those passions. She watches as her mother does her best to deal with her alcoholic father, complaining about the problem but never quite rising to address it.

Such conclusions are only incidental, though. Jo’s real focus is on understanding her role as “sidekick” to her best and fellow not-quite-cool friend, Felicia. The two of them have depended on each other for years, babysitting as a team, backing each other up against one another’s mothers and older sisters, and standing as the hub of a clique of girls who rate somewhere below the self-confident cheerleaders.

At the beginning, Jo is happy to be the lesser light, the girl no one notices alongside the taller, prettier (at least in Jo’s own sweet appraisal), and more visible Felicia. As the year progresses, though, the girls discover the twin dangers of boys and cooler girls who seem intent on prying them apart. They assign one another crushes while they’re hanging out in detention, and then they begin getting invited to the cooler kids’ parties. Jo resents it when Felicia gets led away by a boy, and she reacts by pushing Felicia further away herself. It’s stuff that looks small, even quaint, when you look back on it as an adult, but it looms large and life-shaping in the moment. Beard, through Jo’s voice, captures that urgency without losing its simultaneous wonder and humor.

Jo is so drawn to making herself invisible that she never even reveals her name. There’s a brief passage late in the novel (p. 183) when she talks about sharing the name of a character in Little Women. It’s not Amy, she tells us, but rather someone who winds up as a character in another Alcott novel. Since “Jo” is the only major character to appear in both – and since the author is a Jo as well – it’s the reveal, so subtle that I’ve seen multiple reviewers claim our protagonist narrator is unnamed.

Beard manages to get a lot of balls in the air. There are three larger “chapters” each consisting of dozens of shorter, unnumbered sections, and the third of those, when the real danger of boys manifests itself, is more than half the novel. Within that, though, she ties most of the threads together in deeply satisfying fashion. Jo begins to understand herself as an artist, for instance and she envisions a bizarre sculpture – complete with her pet parakeet – that really does begin to make sense of her fractured world. Later, in a concluding scene that isn’t really a spoiler, she sees the moon in a way that begins to reconcile her to her father and that becomes an entree into the world of kissing and real boyfriends.

Again, though, it’s Jo’s voice that rings the loudest. As a coda to my thinking about this rich and fulfilling adolescent self-discovery, here are a few lines I particularly loved:

The abrupt transition: “In retrospect we probably should have quit band after the parade instead of during it.”

At a high school football game: “On the cinder track, a teetering hive of Zanesville cheerleaders forms – “Hey, hey, that’s okay, we’re gonna beat ’em anyway – and then collapses. One girl takes a running start and does a series of increasingly sagging backflips, spelling out Z-e-p-h-y-r-s. By the end she is nearly landing on her head.”

When a friend tries to help her deal with the cramps of her first period: “ ‘Not a uterus, a vagina,’ Maroni says. She pronounces it like her first name – Gina – shaking my confident.”

Or, in case you’re wavering about whether to give this a shot, the fabulous opening sentences: “We can’t believe the house is on fire. It’s so embarrassing first of all, and so dangerous second of all. Also, we’re supposed to be in charge here, so there’s a sense of somebody not doing their job.”


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Review: The Jazz Palace

The Jazz Palace by Mary Morris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is simultaneously an historical novel and a jazz novel. There’s no reason it can’t be both at once, of course, but it turns out to be a very good short jazz novel while only a pretty good historical one.

The central story here is tied into history. The opening scene is harrowing as our two eventual main characters – Benny and Pearl – first glimpse one another on the afternoon of the Eastland disaster, to this day the largest number of deaths ever to take place in Chicago. Benny tries in vain to rescue victims of the toppled ship, and Pearl, too young to do anything herself, has to deal with a grief-maddened mother who seems intent on killing her and her sisters.

The prose, as it is throughout, begins to sing from the beginning. In one stunning line, Morris compares Benny’s clutching the body of a dead young woman to the idea that he has his first kiss with a dead woman. It’s a great image, and it foreshadows Benny’s later career. He’ll always seem to be longing for a woman who isn’t there, for something larger and darker than what he has already known.

From Eastland, the story moves to Prohibition, and we see the way it and the eventual Depression shape the lives of the two families. The dream of Chicago – the way it rose from the great fire and made itself into one of the world’s great cities in a matter of decades – seems like a individual promise. As it plays out, though, the characters are generally disappointed. Their great business plans go awry; they lose loved ones; they find they aren’t becoming the self-reliant adults they imagined they would be.

In that light, jazz become the soundtrack of their sadness. Benny finds himself drawn to playing piano whenever he gets the chance. He’s haunted by melody and changing tempo, and he grows into an accomplished jazz player. Pearl is instrumental in turning her family’s store into a speakeasy – the jazz palace – where assorted musicians come to play and where, eventually, she meets Benny again.

This book is at its best when Morris lets us experience the way the jazz of their moment works as the soundtrack of their unrealized ambitions. They’re hungry for something larger than what the world is offering, and Benny specializes in performances that take raucous music, slow it to something that brings its listeners to the brink of tears, and then speeds it up again. It’s enough to make Pearl fall in love with him – Pearl, the woman who takes comfort in long lake swims where she both recalls and rises above the experience of the Eastland disaster. At the same time, it takes him further from her into his own mind, his own disappointments.

Morris writes beautifully about all that, and it’s where the novel works best. It works a little less well – or, to put it differently, a little more conventionally – in the way it weaves the larger timeline into the events of its characters’ lives. I may be biased because this is a Chicago I know very well, but we get some oversimplification and an occasional “error” or alteration of fact. (I acknowledge I’m being petty, but we get a reference to the Sun-Times newspaper before the Sun existed and certainly before the Times merged with it. Also, while it’s a clever anecdote, Dean O’Banion knew very well for whom he was preparing flowers in the day he was killed – it was Unione Siciliano boss Mike Merlo. He did not, that is, prepare them for a mysterious someone who turned out to be himself.)

In addition, as well as Morris writes in general, some of the stop-the-story-and-update-the-history passages seem, well, conventional next to the more intriguing, alternate time signatures of the jazz passages.

Still, Morris shows here that she is yet another seriously skilled faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College where my son will start in the fall. I’m excited for him; being surrounded by this kind of talent will have to help him grow as a writer himself.


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Review: Swing Time

Swing Time by Zadie Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like almost everyone who read it, I was blown away by Smith’s White Teeth. She established herself as one of the British heavyweights – on a par with Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, or Martin Amis in her capacity to write a novel of ideas – but she did so as someone younger, hipper, female and mixed race. I hadn’t made it to anything else of hers, but that was enough for me to place her in the big leagues.

The first part of this strikes me as equal to that exceptional level. Smith has a gift for tight prose that gives nuanced psychological portraits of her characters, and she writes with both muscle and grace. As this goes along, though, she works through a split narrative that doesn’t quite seem to justify its complexity.

As I see it, the central question here – asked explicitly near the end – is what are we entitled to do to the people we love. That’s different from the more conventional question of what we owe the people we love. This is more about the limits of what we can impose on people whom we come to feel “owe” us something for the concern we have shown them.

This gets at such concerns by exploring two threads of narrative in the life of our central character and narrator. In one of those threads, she establishes a friendship with a mixed race girl of her own age, and the two of them grow up learning to dance. Over time, it becomes clear that Tracy is not at all a good friend. She manipulates the narrator, takes advantage of the narrator’s family, and ultimately double crosses her.

In the other, the narrator goes to work for an Australian pop star who is a beloved international figure of her childhood. Aimee is usually a mostly likeable narcissist, a privileged star who assumes everyone is as concerned about her happiness as she is.

The two threads eventually intersect, but there’s a long stretch of narrative awkwardness as Smith bounces from one to the next, using flashbacks throughout even though the Aimee thread takes place mostly after the Tracy. And, when they do finally connect, the payoff falls short of justifying the tension Smith has worked to create.

SPOILER: The book opens with an ominous note from Tracy in which she gloats that everyone will now know what a whore Tracy is. Hundreds of pages later, though, we learn our narrator has slept with Aimee’s boyfriend, but it isn’t in especially whorish fashion, and she forgives Tracy in any case. That is, we don’t gain that much through the delayed revelation. It just feels complicated for the sake of complication.

That’s ultimately too bad because the core question is compelling. Tracy is as awful as she is because she sees herself loving the narrator and her family. She’s jealous of the narrator’s having an attentive father, and she sets out to torpedo that in part because she feels her own love entitles her. In the conclusion, which is a bit abrupt, the narrator seems to understand that deep truth at last, and she forgives Tracy, or at least sees herself as entitled to continue loving her old friend on her own terms.

The opposite plays out with Aimee. The narrator eventually wants to help save Aimee from using a Caribbean native as her one-sided fling. When she’s confronted with the harsh truth that she is nothing but an employee, an employee with a confidentiality agreement no less, she lashes out in public revenge. She discover that the fundamental nature of her relationship with Aimee means that she could never love her in the way the much more fraught relationship with Tracy makes possible. She cannot finally reconcile with Aimee because they were never really friends and never really in a position to love one another. Even though their relationship was better than the one with Tracy, it was always shaped by capital rather than personal impulse.

The prose, characters, and psychological insight are all top tier throughout, so I’ll be looking for more Smith down the road. Given the ways the narrative over-complicates this, though, I think it’s a notch below White Teeth.


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Review: The Song of Achilles

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On the one hand, this is a gorgeously written adaptation of The Iliad. We get the story from the perspective of Patroclus, and that means the homosexual love between him and Achilles gets more attention than it otherwise might. And, in Miller’s hands, it’s a moving love, two people who discover, explore, and eventually defend their right to be a single couple.

On the other hand, this is so dependent upon a familiarity with the Iliad that it has elements of fan fiction to it. We’ll get an early scene, for instance the one where we first meet Achilles as a child prodigy, and we’ll know to assign it extra weight because it so clearly references the familiar story. Or we’ll get a list of characters we have yet to get to know – Ajax, Odysseus, or Menelaus – and it will make sense only because we know from other sources how important they’ll be. That’s part of what it means to write classical/historical fiction, but I point it out as a rare frustration I had with the book: part of the time it seems to be promising a new look at a story we think we know, wrapping us in a narrative with the feeling that it might go anywhere, and part of the time it does the opposite and pushes us to see the contrast between this version and others that came before it.

There are a couple other issues as well. While the opening chapters move with real energy, the middle bogs down some. Miller has real skill in detail – she lets us see the lyres they play and the swords they swing – but that gets in the way of moving the narrative forward once the boys become familiar with their world. And, as most readers likely know, Patroclus dies before the real climax, making him an awkward narrator. Miller eventually solves that with a stunning invention – [SPOILER] she proposes that Patroclus’s spirit cannot rest until his name is inscribed on the monument where his and Achilles’s ashes are buried – but the lead-up to that drags a little as the suddenly dead narrator keeps on talking.

I’ve foregrounded those criticisms, but I don’t want them to overshadow the basic fact of the beauty of the prose here. Borrowing from Homer himself, Miller shows a gift for grand simile, comparing one or another facet to something vast and beautiful. That’s part of what makes the opening chapters the strongest here, discovering her voice and getting a fresh glimpse at a world that’s existed so long as classical “fact.”

So, I do recommend this, and I do applaud what Miller has done. Be prepared for things to slow down in parts, but that seems a small price to pay for giving a fresh aspect to something so ancient.


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