Review: Nutshell

Nutshell by Ian McEwan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ian McEwan is one of the world’s great novelists. This is not one of his greatest novels. That said, this is a lot of fun and, if you go into it without thinking it’s another Atonement or The Children Act, there’s a lot to recommend it.

This opens with a tour de force of comedy. Our narrator talks of “being inside a woman,” which feels like a metaphor for some deep emotional involvement. Instead, it’s no metaphor at all. Our narrator is actually a fetus, coming to term in the final months of his in-utero development, and understanding himself as a character in a complex family drama.

That drama turns out to involve a plot by his mother Trudy – aka Gertrude – and his uncle Claude (very close to Claudius) to kill his father. It took me a bit longer than it should have, though the insight dawned on me piecemeal, but that gives us an unborn “prince” who’s in the exact situation of Hamlet.

Once that central premise emerges, this drama becomes, as I read it, a comedy. McEwan works to include a variety of prenatal analogues to the Shakespearean play. We get something that feels like a ghost. We get levels of narratorial uncertainty, questions of do-I-act-or-don’t-I, and, in one far-fetched scene, a suicide attempt by wrapping the umbilical cord around his own unborn neck.

This opens with tremendous skill and, once I got my bearings (and the bearingless quality of the opening seems meant to reflect the emerging awareness of the developing fetus) I laughed for most of the first 50 pages. McEwan does an amazing job of milking the possibilities of such a pre-full-term narrator, and his language is rich, his observations clever, and his ‘unborn’ concerns surprisingly thoughtful.

This one never loses that pitch of skill, but I did find it slipping a little as the novelty of the narrator wore off and the implicit echo of the Hamlet plot became central. That is, this feels like utter invention at the start. By the end, it’s an adaptation of something familiar, and it feels less capable of that pure reimagining of what it means to be human.

The end [SPOILER] is harmlessly fun, when our narrator foils his mother’s escape (who, in turn, foils his uncle’s) by precipitating the rupture of his placenta, causing himself to be born a couple weeks prematurely. The idea makes me laugh, and it’s a fitting conclusion to what becomes the heart of the second half of this, but it’s somehow less than the magnificent opening promised.

Certainly give a thought to reading this, but lower your expectations before you do. McEwan may yet win a Nobel prize. If he ever does, this one won’t get mentioned until the last paragraphs of the news story.


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Review: One of These Things First

One of These Things First by Steven Gaines
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Stephen Gaines has a remarkable story to tell, and he has an engaging voice to tell it with.

As a teenager growing up in early 1960s Jewish Brooklyn, he has no clear idea how to deal with being gay and, in despair, tries to kill himself. As a consequence, he winds up in an upscale psychiatric hospital, one where Marilyn Monroe was recently treated. He’s essentially a child among assorted minor celebrities, a Jew among mostly WASPs, and a Brooklynite among the Manhattan elite. It’s a great fish-out-of-water experience, and the strongest part is unquestionably the color he sketches for the contrast.

The trouble here, as I see it, is that the context ultimately overwhelms the story. I’m a sucker for glimpses into that not-so-distant Jewish world, and Gaines delivers character studies of his neighbors and his bizarre family. (A highlight is his grandfather, a gentle man who seems irresistible to women. He has his wife, Gaines’s grandmother, his long-time paramour, who becomes the grandmother’s business partner and a key presence in raising him, and then he has his 40-years-younger final girlfriend with whom he mostly but not always lives in his final years.) He delivers as well in the vignettes around the people he meets in the hospital, most memorably the forgotten Broadway producer and theater reviewer Richard Halliday, a man best-known today as the second husband of actress Mary Martin. His stepson, actor Larry Hagman, hated him so much that he wrote in his own memoir about fantasies of killing him.

So the milieu is terrific and the characters memorable. They are so terrific that the central story, the place we begin, gets buried. Gaines is confused about how he feels and about how he should act on his feelings. He tries to kill himself by running his forearms through a glass window, and it’s heartbreaking. He’s skeptical of the treatments he receives in the hospital – a caring and thoughtful Freudian psychoanalyst thinks he can “cure” his homosexuality – but he does indeed become more aware of himself. The deeply troubled teen grows into a man whom I’d be happy to know, a man I get to know, in small part, through this book.

But we don’t get to hear the motivating story here. If it begins with the suicide attempt, the implication is we’ll learn how he came to grips with the crisis that precipitated it. Instead, Gaines’s story takes a backseat for most of this memoir to the characters he encounters. There’s a final chapter, one that feels almost disconnected from the rest of the book, when he catches us up on what’s followed, but it moves too quickly for real satisfaction.

I enjoyed this, but, to paraphrase its title, it feels as if he put several things ‘first,’ several things before the story he seemed initially to be telling.


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Review: Independence Day

Independence Day by Richard Ford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve nursed a theory for some time that it should be possible to define a category of ethnic literature around the WASP experience. We’ve done a lot to theorize African-American or Jewish-American literature, and we have given a lot of critical attention to the Fitzgerald-John O’Hara-Updike-Carver school of authors, but I don’t think we’ve thought of them as an ethnic group. They’ve been the “American” school against which other, accented figures get contrasted.

In any case, I start my theorizing with an observation out of Fitzgerald’s short story “Babylon Revisited,” but it could be in any number of places in Fitzgerald: the idea is that much of what concerns him is ‘dissipation,’ the phenomenon of a gifted character making something into nothing. O’Hara certainly picks up on that notion in Appointment in Samarra, and the same notion is at the heart of the Rabbit novels; Rabbit Angstrom starts with something, a social place and the implicit promise of success, but he keeps fumbling it away. Along the way, such authors allow that experience to become entwined with the experience of America itself, to have them embody an idea of American decline, or at least – going back to Gatsby – the decline of a certain kind of middle-class, white and Protestant America. (Quick footnote: I know that Fitzgerald and O’Hara were not WASPs themselves, but they both so aspired to the status that they wrote, literally, the book on how to do it.)

I say all of that because, if I ever decide to prove that point, I can’t think of a better novel to focus on than this one. It’s excellently written, but I feel like uttering an “of course” when I say that. Ford is a master stylist, and – though I don’t hear it as much as I guess I’d expect to – Frank Bascomb is the clear heir to Rabbit. I admire Updike as an understated stylist (and also, in his Bech books, as an over-the-top stylist) and I think Ford can stand right next to him. If writers were law firms where talented senior partners brought in talented junior partners in their same mold, I can see doing business with Updike and Ford, and I intend it as a compliment to both.

Instead, what I take from this novel is less its acute exploration of mid-life self-recrimination and more the degree to which it asserts one man’s experience of life’s challenges as metonymy for a larger national reimagining. Take away the deep literary skill in play – which is, of course, the reason to read the novel in the first place – and this is all about a man who realizes he faces a reckoning as a father and as a numbed soul as ‘independence day” approaches. He takes his son on a road trip to the various sports halls of fame, to places against which all of us fall short, and he insists his son read Emerson along the way. It’s a mini-crisis, or an extension of the greater crisis, that young Paul can’t seem to find any use for Emerson except – right before the accident that resets the parameters of Frank’s life – to tear the pages out of the book. And it’s partial evidence of Frank’s moving past his “existence period” that he can begin to imagine Paul reading Emerson more carefully, that he can imagine Paul coming into his American birthright.

Once you look for such evidence, it’s plentiful and generally unsubtle. Even the epilogue portion of the novel deals with the ebbing of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams’s influence, on Frank’s casual insistence that he not only hasn’t forgotten them but that he thinks of them with a kind of intensity that surprises the neighbor-friend who brings the subject up himself.

All in all, Frank is ineffectively seeking his personal independence against the backdrop of the country’s uncertain stagger in that direction as well. The novel takes place in the months before the Dukakis/George H. Bush election which, though that feels like an achingly innocent political choice, looks to Frank like a choice between a liberal figure who’s mostly surface against a generally selfish and unreflective conservatism. (Again, that makes the book feel downright naïve next to what we see in the current administration.) Frank retains his strength and his ideals, but he has little he can apply that strength to and he has almost no sense of how to pursue those ideals.

I can see a case where someone might say that we’ve heard enough from privileged white men who can’t figure out what to do with the good fortune of their birthright. To that I’d say, first, there should always be room for voices of this excellence. The context of this one has changed enough that, where it might have been a contender for great American novel status 20 years ago, I think it’s probably worth downgrading it to really-good-American novel today. But still, this is a novel as excellent as what Updike was doing, and that’s a rare enough fruit that have to care about it if we’re going to care about literature at all.

I’d say as well, though, and this takes me back to where I began, that Ford isn’t insisting that we see his story as the only American story. Everyone who attempts what my old professor Julia Stern taught me to call auto-American-biography has license to put him or herself forward as representatively American. As readers, we need to see not just the soloist but the entire choir that emerges. If we set this work alongside the other excellent work of its era – alongside the best of Philip Roth or Toni Morrison – we can begin to see it in a light that continues to do it justice. There’s white privilege at the heart of this, and there’s a thoughtful sense of diminishment (or dissipation) that, in the unthinking hands of Trumpdom is appalling. But at bottom, this is a story of someone who wants the greatness that this country promised. If we grant him the standing to represent a larger group around him, if we allow him to stand as “ethnic” in the sense of representing a particular group experience in the coming together of America, then I think his voice has a clearer place.


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Review: The Hunt for Red October

The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Talk about being late to the party. It’s been 34 years since almost everyone in the country read this book. For perspective, that means it’s now as long since it was published as 1984 was from the days of Stalin. So a lot has changed, even as Clancy’s Jack Ryan gets a third or even fourth life in the new TV show reboot.

I doubt I’d have read this if not for finding it on sale and being on the hunt myself for something distracting. I figured, if nothing else, this would be a good thriller and keep me occupied.

I’m surprised to find that, with the notable exception of the final 50 or so pages, this is not much of a thriller. Instead, as I now recall from contemporary reviews, this is distinguished largely by its technical acumen. (I remember there were reports the CIA was concerned Clancy had gotten access to classified information; how else, they wondered, could he have known so much about the U.S. Navy’s resources. Clancy answered that all he’d done was to read Jane’s and other public information. He’d just read it very carefully.)

The early parts of this work – or, maybe better said, must have once worked, by letting us see Ryan and other analyst sorts doing the same thing Clancy did as a writer. They take scraps of discrete information, rub them together, and produce a conclusion. In a few cases here, that pays off at a narrative level. Unraveling the mystery of the Red October’s new advanced drive system has a nice feel to it, and I enjoyed the sense of being part of solving the mystery.

For large portions of the bulk of this, though, this turns into engineering porn. We get techies talking in a shorthand that would be utterly tedious if they weren’t also involved in hunting or evading one or another adversary. Even in that context, though, it can drag. Maybe when this material had the aura of being genuinely new – when it felt as if we were glimpsing a war that might happen – it had a different feel. Today, I’d like to see a good editor go at it. I suspect this would work just as well, likely better for the tightness, if it were half as long. (And I suspect, without having seen any of the films or TV shows growing out of it, those derivative productions have indeed accomplished that tightening.)

I’m glad at last to have a sense of what Clancy is all about. I have tried to appreciate that other sales titan of the 1980s, Stephen King, and I find him similarly wanting. There’s something there, but it seems to me attenuated. Take that for the little it’s worth since these guys count their sales in the millions, and I count mine on my fingers, but, there, I’ve said it.

And, at bottom, it’s fair to say that Clancy (and, of course, King) are vastly beyond someone like Dan Brown.


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Review: Bring Up the Bodies

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Great historical fiction is great because it refracts a history we already know for the age in which we read it. This is, as so many acknowledge, great historical fiction, but it is so in intriguing and original ways.

To start with, this chronicle of the late-middle years of Henry VIII, when his chief advisor Thomas Cromwell negotiates his desires and long-term interests, has clear hints of our own historical moment.

Above all, we get a Henry VIII who is weirdly reminiscent of Donald Trump. Both men are tyrannical in the sense that they expect their whims to stand as law. They see self-interest and the interest of the state as identical, unable to recognize that their desires – desires in which sex and self-aggrandizement are indistinguishable – send after-shocks across everyone in their orbit. As Cromwell puts it at one point, “To succeed with him, one must know his mind. When he changes it, one is exposed for having put oneself forward.”

There are even strangely coincidental qualities between Henry and ‘Donald.’ Both try to hide their morbid obesity, carrying themselves as if it is a sign of great retained vigor. Both are, as this novel plays out, dealing with third wives. In each case, the first was a European with a claim to comparable social standing, and the marriage lasted long enough to see children into near adulthood. (And, in the ending of each of those first marriages, the surviving children found themselves having to favor their deposed mother while waiting their opportunity to take advantage of their father’s position and power.) In each the second was to a woman accused of using powerful sexual wiles upon him, a woman who was – at a distance – desirable but whose unceasing attentions as a wife proved too much (or proved to lessen her charms). And in each the third was desirable in large part for her meekness, for her seeming attachment to silence.

But the real historical relevance here centers on Cromwell, who, as we come to see him, effectively invents what Trump supporters have come to call “the deep state.” Cromwell is neither “well-born” nor overwhelmingly wealthy. He is, instead, the most astute student of his era in the ways that power moves across the country. He stands in contrast to the powerful families that would marry into the monarchy or benefit from an ally’s doing so: the Seymours, Boleyns, Poles, Howards, and Carews.

As Cromwell works his legislative wonders, one wealthy house or another rises. The peers of the nation see themselves as above him, routinely reminding him they are higher than he is, but they can’t see what the next half-millennium will reveal: that the modern state endures no matter who temporarily commands it. (SPOILER: And his revenge is total and sweet.)

In the midst of that, the central drama is Henry himself, a man who lacks the wisdom to see how dramatically he is shaping his nation and, as a partial consequence, loses sight of his own mortality. He desperately wants a son, an heir to carry forward what he’s begun. The nation demands one as well, but not for his narcissistic reasons. Instead, it wants an heir for the collective survival of England itself.

Only Cromwell can see to serving both those motives for the same end. In doing so, he brings into being the modern state apparatus that we see so tested today.

I need a quick word on Mantel’s method as well, though. Most historical fiction functions by bringing past characters to life, by making them seem somehow human or, for lack of a better word, modern. Instead, Mantel gives us each character as the product of deep calculation. We never really get to know Cromwell; instead, we see him in moment after moment (and that’s a lot of moments when you add up this one, its equally excellent prequel, Wolf Hall, and the to-be-published finale, The Mirror and the Light), always answering the needs of history before he answers the needs of Mantel’s story.

The metaphor that comes to mind, and sorry if it’s obscure, is pre-calculus. Rather than depending upon a calculus that produces a formula for determining the curve of a line at every point, Mantel seems to recalculate the arc of Cromwell’s career at every different point. She’ll sketch a scene in deep detail, bring it to a conclusion, and then begin a new one with an abrupt transition marked sometimes by a date and sometimes by a sharp scene break.

You can almost see the penciled figures in the margin as she notes an external change in power relations. For instance, when Anne Boleyn becomes pregnant a second time it elevates her, and when she loses the child it sets in motion changes to the entire power dynamic of the government.

Cromwell never feels as if he is someone we could talk to. Rather he feels like a succession of still photos, each carefully realized from what we know of the larger historical moment. There’s a discomfort in that; we never, for instance, get the easy gift of a Tudor world made to feel like today’s. Instead. Mantel pushes us to come as close as the facts permit. She takes cold artifacts and makes them relevant, but she stops short of giving them a pulse. It falls to us to perform the alchemy that makes them come to life, and the fact that Mantel can pull that off says all I need to know about why she’s won two Booker prizes for this remarkable work.

If all that weren’t enough, Mantel is a real master of prose. I end with a gem I couldn’t find another place for, a sentence so subtle and clever that it reflects the subtle mind and clever stratagems of Cromwell himself: “The Italians say the road from England to hell is well paved and runs downhill.”


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Review: The Last Days of Night

The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If I were an acquiring editor, I’d have swooped this one up in a heartbeat. The premise is compelling and tight, and it seems to have a built-in market. Paul Cravath is a young attorney in the late 19th century when he gets hired to represent George Westinghouse in his patent war with Thomas Edison over the future of the nationwide electrical grid. From Paul’s vantage, we get to see how this complicated chapter of American history played out, a chapter that bounced between legal, scientific, political, and financial venues before resolving itself in a network of power (literal and metaphorical) so familiar today that it seems it must always have been as it is.

On top of that, Moore does two other striking things. First, he reminds us that the clash between Edison and Westinghouse prefigured the technology clash of our own lifetime – most famously played out between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs – and, second, he adds a sustained romance.

On the surface, then, there’s something for everything.

So, yes, I’d have published this if I could, and, yes, I read and mostly enjoyed it. Still, as instructive as this is – as compelling as it sometimes becomes when some detail of a patent seems likely to sway the battle away from DC current to the AC we know today – it has flaws that keep it from the level of the other recent historical fiction I’ve read. This falls short of the fully realized characters of David Liss’s The Whiskey Rebels and, as does almost everything else, it falls well short of Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winning Bring Up the Bodies.

The characters here have a lot of interesting things to say, but they say them as historical personages rather than as real people. The dialogue, that is, is generally stiff, stentorian in the old word. Characters make grand pronouncements, clarifying intellectual elements of the plot, but growing flatter as they do so. Paul and others are shaped by the events around them rather than by their own distinctive identities. Paul is strong and clever when need be, and he makes foolish professional and personal mistakes when that’s what the story demands. He’s simply not consistently realized.

All that undermines the effectiveness of the love affair here. I root for Paul to win, but, as the romance takes more and more of the spotlight the longer the book goes on, his happiness seems pro-forma. Agnes is too good to be true, so much so that it becomes increasingly unclear why she falls in love with him. She too becomes flat, and – SPOILER – while I might have admired the affair if it didn’t end happily (as it looks to go for a stretch there) it feels too conventional in the end.

Above all, though, I feel a bit cheated that Moore has taken so many liberties with the history here. As the afterword makes clear, the big picture is authentic to what we know, but many of the day-to-day scenes and characters are presented in an invented chronology or are the product of multiple separate characters. The result is that this is, by admission, only marginally accurate history. (Moore himself generously acknowledges the sources from which he’s drawn.)

So, while I do enjoy having read this, I can’t help thinking that, in its inability to develop fully realized characters, it falls a bit short as a novel. At the same time, in the way it tweaks its own sources so routinely, it falls a bit short as history.


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