Review: Kaddish.com: A Novel

Kaddish.com: A Novel by Nathan Englander
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

How has it come to this?

Nathan Englander may well be the finest current practitioner of the Jewish short story. His “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” “How We Avenged the Blums,” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” are all at least minor masterpieces, and I can’t imagine teaching a Jewish-American literature class without at least mentioning him these days.

But someone, maybe him and maybe his agent, has told him he has to turn out a novel in order to be genuinely big time.

His first attempt, The Ministry of Special Cases, had some powerful moments, including its remarkable opening conceit of a character who literally erases history. (His job is to scour grave markers so that the children and grandchildren of the criminal element can deny their ancestors’ crimes.) It goes on too long and descends into an unrelieved darkness, but it’s certainly worthwhile.

His second, Dinner at the Center of the Earth, strikes me as almost a great novel. It has a couple scenes – the one of Ariel Sharon reliving a moment when he was blown sky-high by a mortar – that are masterful, and it asks some brutal and powerful questions about Israeli hopes for peace. It ends on a somewhat unearned note, but I highly recommend it. When it came out two years ago, I assumed our next Englander would finally be a great novel.

But this one, his third, isn’t merely flawed like its predecessors. It’s a flat-out bad book.

For starters, this is a highly contrived story. Our protagonist, whom we meet in the days of his irreligiousity, hires an on-line company to say the Jewish prayer for the dead twice a day for his recently deceased father. Years later, he comes to think of himself as having sold a crucial birthright, and he sets out to buy it back.

I’ll skip the convoluted descriptions of how he comes to track down the people behind the website, but I’ll point out that there’s nothing inherently “modern” about hiring people to say Kaddish. It’s a central plot point in Israel Zangwill’s The King of the Schnorrers, published 125 years ago, and it’s a long and nearly honored practice. There may not be a full transfer of “birthright” as takes place here, but the distinction is so narrow that – without more reflection than Englander offers – it comes across as a particular complaint of a particular individual. It’s not a moral issue, and it isn’t really even an issue of Jewish law. It’s just a man who won’t forgive himself (as his wife repeatedly tells him) and a plot contrived to give him excuses not to do so.

In addition, there’s no substantive character development. Our protagonist is so anti-religious at the start that he – in line with Alexander Portnoy – streams porn on his nephew’s computer right after sitting shiva for his father. Then, without pretense of explanation, he becomes devout, marries, and takes a job teaching at his own childhood religious school. We never see why he’s so transformed and, while there might be intrigue in that omission, it seems as if it’s central to his motivation to track down the people behind the website. That is, the lesser part of his thinking is crucial to what’s happening in the novel while the larger question goes by without giving us opportunity to ponder it.

And, finally, this undermines much of what makes Englander’s short stories so powerful. As someone raised in the Orthodox world, he has always had the capacity to show us Orthodoxy without exoticizing it. His characters are three-dimensional; they take the world as they find it.

Here, though, we’re left to look on the world of the Orthodox as implicitly peculiar. They’re wedded to rituals, well, because. Because they’re wedded to rituals. Their character is less who they are and more how they define themselves through actions. If it had been much blunter, we might have gotten a glossary at the back translating the ‘strange’ conduct of our characters into ‘real and comprehensible’ English.

I’ll acknowledge there’s a residue of serious question here, and there are a couple of scenes where Englander seems within two steps of his best and most sublime work, but I am deeply disappointed on the whole. He’s shown us that he has it in him to be among our very best writers. With this, I have come to doubt it.


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Review: Senselessness

Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think I like thinking about this one more than reading it.

Our protagonist is a writer who’s been hired to put the finishing edits on an 1100-page collection of testimonies of victims of recent massacres in an unnamed Latin American nation. On the one hand, he’s sensitive enough to be drawn to the simple, often poetic power of the voices he’s helping to recover.

On the other, he’s a conniving womanizer who, when he finds his first paycheck isn’t ready, abuses the otherwise decent people he’s working for. Then, throughout the rest of the novel, he lies and manipulates his way into one woman’s bed after another.

The contrast is powerful. On the one hand, he’s doing work that gives a sense of healing deep damage to the country where he finds himself. On the other, he’s a first-rate asshole, as far as possible from the stereotype of the decent hero of such a context.

At a broader level, there’s something liberating in a novel about such atrocities that, without diminishing the power of the violence, avoids the obvious pieties.

So, as I say, I enjoy thinking about this, about the contrasts Moya gives us. Actually reading it, though, is another matter. It’s a small point, but the paragraphs are relentless, running 2-3 pages at times and leaving little opportunity to catch a breath. It’s also tough sometimes to keep up with the abrupt changes of narrative from one chapter to the next. And the unreliable narratorial perspective gets a bit frustrating. [SPOILER] We don’t know for a long time whether he’s correct that some of the people he knows are trying to sabotage the project, and the eventual reveal – in the final page – is dark in a way we haven’t quite been prepared for.

So, while I admire the experiment here a great deal, I enjoy it a bit less than I’d have liked. It’s a powerful concept, though, so I won’t be surprised if – in thinking about it – I come to enjoy it more in retrospect.


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Review: Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read this one for two unlikely reasons. First, Jess Speck is a friend of my friend Larry, and Larry recommended it not long ago as a great summary of their shared work in urban planning. Second, I found it on sale at a moment (the start of the summer) when I had time to read things off my usual list.

At first I found it more or less interesting, but the more I read, the more I was taken by the consistent logic of the book. Its overall thesis is straightforward: cities are complexes of different demands. They work best when they balance the competing needs of drivers, pedestrians, consumers, residents, workers, and commuters, and they tend to fail when planners, managers, or architects privilege one set of needs over all others.

Speck goes on to point out that nothing he’s saying is particularly new. Most of it’s been apparent since Jane Jacobs (Scranton’s own) put out her fabled Death and Life of Great American Cities. The challenge has been to make that point clear to enough stakeholders of our cities that we can move forward with thoughtful planning rather than make faddish or foolhardy decisions.

The more I read, the more I suspected that Speck was underselling his own contributions to this (just as I suspect Larry often underplays his own work in the small city where we both live). More than simply explaining how his school of thought operates, he also skewers some who, though they should know better, keep making different choices. He’s rough on several of the state departments of transportation that demand a consistency of regulation that makes the same requirements of urban roads as they do of highways, and he’s brutal on some of the star architects who, proud of their masterful buildings, forget how people have to live their lives around them.

He’s long on remarkable observations that flip what we might think of as “common sense” on its head. He explains that, contrary to most popular thinking, widening city streets usually does not help with congestion; it’s an observed fact that the easier you make it for cars to enter a city, the more will do so. Wider and more lanes typically make things better for only a brief time with their increasing capacity inviting increased demand until you have the same commuter problems as before but worse pollution and more demand for parking.

Or there’s the striking claim that “safer” roadways are often the most dangerous. He explains that, when we give drivers the impression they don’t need to be careful in their driving, they are less likely to pay full attention. One specific detail that really came through was the notion that four-way stop signs are often much safer than complicated traffic light systems at comparably busy intersections. That is, stop signs require drivers to be aware of and negotiate their surroundings while stop lights give the impression all they need to pay attention to is green or red. (In one cutting part, Speck explains as well that many of the companies that conduct the studies to determine whether cities need new traffic lights are the same ones that sell and install such lighting systems. Of course, they advocated for the more expensive systems.)

By the end of this, I found myself reminded of what it was like to read Bill James’s work on baseball back in the late 1980s or early 1990s. A reviewer then famously suggested that reading James gave you “the spectacle of a first-rate mind squandered on baseball.” Reading Speck, I find myself thinking of a ‘first-rate mind ignored’ on questions that affect all of us.

There’s a lot to study here, but there’s also a lot simply to be amused and frustrated by. I feel smarter now that I’ve read this, and that seems one of the best things you can say about anything you happen to read.


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Review: Salvage the Bones

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lots of people have said admiring things about this one, and I’m happy to pile on. It’s deserving of its National Book Award, and I’m adding it to my not-so-long list of books I might teach in my 21st century literature class. What strikes me, maybe with originality and maybe in line with most of what’s been written about this, is the degree to which it interrogates what it means to be a mother.

There is only one substantial female (human) character in this impressive novel, but there’s no shortage of potential maternal figures for our protagonist, Esch, as she contemplates the prospect of motherhood.

The novel opens with a memorable scene where Esch’s brother’s dog, a champion fighter named China, is giving birth. It’s bloody and beautiful, with the muscular and sometimes brutal dog becoming a mother without quite understanding what’s happening to her. She’s instinctual enough to know how to behave, but the new puppies make her vulnerable. By their existence and through the way her body plumps to feed them, she cannot fight with the same ferocity. We learn some of that later, but the opening scene, which Ward draws out with impressive skill, makes clear the heavy price of motherhood.

There’s also Esch’s own mother, lost in giving birth to her younger brother Junior. Although we never meet her, she casts a maternal shadow over the book. She taught her children to forage for food in their Bayou home, and she cared for them in challenging times. She’s just a memory, though, and she’s inextricable from the fact that the violence of childbirth cost her life.

And there’s the notion of Medea, the character from classical literature who, denied her lover Jason, proceeded to kill her own children. Esch reads about her in school, and then she superimposes her story onto the world she’s opening up to. In Medea, she sees a model for a woman who takes control of her role as woman and mother, but she senses as well the destructive – to self and to others – the power of the figure.

Finally, there is Katrina, the massive storm whose water breaks upon the small community, sweeping everything away in a now notorious cataclysm. Perhaps to belabor the point, it’s Katrina that ‘gives birth’ to the new and changed world of the end of the novel, place in which Esch is all the more called upon to understand her power as a potential mother and pillar of her family.

In each of these examples, Esch finds a collision of life-giving and life-taking. She is frightened of what it means for her to give birth herself, yet she’s drawn as well to the awesome power she recognizes in herself as a consequence. That makes this novel, in part, a coming-of-age story, one that gives us a perspective different from so many of the classic, white male narratives that helped define the form.

At the risk of a mild [SPOILER], I love the final scene nearly as much as the opening. In that case, we waited for China to give birth. In the end, we wait, with a peculiar but skillfully sketched optimism, for China to return to the family from the sweep of the storm. Katrina has stolen the puppies of her first litter, but it feels (without Ward quite telling us) that China is on her way back, that, as a mother herself, she has a kind of compatibility with the murderous, mothering storm as well.

Great stuff. I am glad this one lives up to its considerable hype, and I have Ward’s next book already in my pile.


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Review: The Jim Lehrer Plays

The Jim Lehrer Plays by Mickle Maher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I go back almost to the beginning as a fan of Theater Oobleck, of which Mickle Maher has always been a core member. For a good 12 years from the late 1980s until I left Chicago in 2000, I rarely missed a show, and I went away inspired every time. I missed both of these plays, “The Strangerer” and “Jim Lehrer and the Theater and Its Double and Jim Lehrer’s Double,” when they appeared, but I cheered them on from a distance and bought this collection when I first saw it on sale several months ago.

I come to it now with a mixture of admiration, nostalgia, and sadness – the sadness due to the recent death of Danny Thompson, another of the founding Oobleckers, someone I never knew well enough to claim as a friend, but someone who began inspiring me when I first saw him perform with his band Tex and the Cowpokes back in college.

The nostalgia covers these plays, of course, because Mickle – whom I knew a little better than Danny but never all that well – reminds me in general of the magic of Oobleck. The company began in Ann Arbor (or at least had its roots there) and always had an affinity not just for Brechtian fourth-wall breaking but also for breaking other imaginary walls. (I love the stage note here that one of the Lehrer characters is supposed to address the audience obliquely, as if he’s “breaking the three and ¾’s wall.) Sometimes that meant “Tiny Alice” style houses within houses. Other times it meant actors shouting strange slogans in ironic – and yet deeply felt – political statements. And sometimes it was Danny manically voicing a dozen different rubber figurines, spinning a childhood game of make-believe into an angry and hysterical critique of the contemporary political scene.

But, above all, I admire Mickle’s plays here because of their provocative questioning of the nature of art at a time(s) of strange social division.

The first of these, The Strangerer, is in the tradition of Oobleck’s election plays and, as a result, it’s somewhat dated. George W. Bush and John Kerry more or less refuse to be part of a debate moderated by the mystified (but knife-loving) Jim Lehrer. Bush is intent on murder right in the open but in a way he insists is a performance. Kerry acknowledges being asleep most of the time. The metaphors seem apt a dozen years later: Bush smilingly owned up to invading Iraq on a lie (among other offenses) while Kerry never quite mustered the anger and clarity of vision it would have taken to win his election.

There’s a wonderful weirdness to the play. It opens with Bush serially killing Lehrer, in a way that might be “real” and might be theatrical – all of which underscores the degree to which the debates of that era (presaging the debates of our own) were performance pieces rather than actual discussions of issues. They became (become) a “double” of the theater as Mickle expressly puts it in the second of these.

The play goes on to stage a non-argument between the two candidates and, while there’s a lot of humor, the ultimate joke is in the notion that they are really saying and doing nothing – or that all they are doing is performing. There are echoes of Dana Carvey’s Bush impersonation (or so it seems in the reading of this) which further underscore the impossibility of discussing real ideas, ideas that have implications for the welfare of millions, even billions of people.

It’s that standard Oobleckian outrage-channeled-through-humor move, and it’s impressive to see it played out on the page.

But it’s the second of these that really stands out. Our hero, Jim Lehrer, is now retired, and the play opens with him flustered that he’s been asked to fill out a survey declaring which of two candidates he prefers. (Mickle leaves it open which election he’s discussing, an element that keeps this all the fresher.) As he paces around trying to decide how he can determine the trustworthiness of performative creatures, he’s visited by his own double, a Jim Lehrer II who’s just returning from the debacle of the opening of his new play.

What follows is a Saturday Night Live skit…if Samuel Beckett were in the writers room alongside Michael Che and Colin Jost. There’s slapstick as each Lehrer arrives in the room just as the other leaves, and then there’s a weirdness around Lehrer’s supposed love of fine knives. And then there’s a remarkable and troubling twist when possibly another Lehrer arrives on the scene with murderous intent.

As goofy as it all is, there’s real philosophy to it. Where “The Strangerer” makes the more-obvious-now point that political dialogue is really just performance, this one probes even more deeply to the question of what performance is. Our lonely Jim Lehrer stands in his own house, ready at any moment to recite the news to an imaginary audience. He is strange, in part because we can’t know him outside the context of his television show. He is, then, I suppose, ‘strangerer’ in his incarnation as a double. And, when we try to discover the relationship between a performer and his shadow – and between the shadow that shadow seems to cause the original to cast – we’re into yet another dimension.

None of this is easy to think about. At that level it’s deeply unsettling. Where, after all, does it end if we acknowledge that we are performing in public and still performing as ourselves? As it plays out, though, it’s a perpetually funny exercise as well. Not having seen it on stage, I know I’d have laughed throughout. Having read it, I find myself caught up in the provocative way it challenges how I think of myself as a consumer of news and a citizen.


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Review: The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy

The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy by Kliph Nesteroff
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an extraordinary book. I bought it on impulse at an airport bookstore and, for the next five months, read in it when I could. Every time I picked it up again I felt it’s pull, felt the big picture of what Nesteroff is doing here. It’s a perfect by-the-bedside book, something you can read for long stretches or pick up and get in a meaningful five minutes.

In essence, Nesteroff accomplishes three things simultaneously.

First, this is a book that will make you laugh. That’s probably obvious since it’s a history of American comedy, but I’ve seen people be decidedly unfunny when they discuss humor. Nesteroff doesn’t try to be funny himself, he just curates some of the best and most pointed humor out there.

Second, this is a comprehensive history. I’m not aware of any book like it. This starts with Vaudeville and ends with Marc Maron’s podcast, and I – despite trying – I can’t think of a significant element he’s left out. This is loaded with footnotes, but they’re unobtrusive. It succeeds as a reference work to comedy, certainly the best I know of, and I am considering parts of it for a class that might deal with Lenny Bruce. It is, in other words, ambitious enough to be academic at the same time as it’s a flat-out pleasure to read.

Third, and most subtly, this is an argument. American comedy, as Nesteroff sees it, is a single story. It may have multiple chapters, but its practitioners have always understood themselves as influenced by their predecessors. As remarkable as Lenny Bruce was, he didn’t invent anything. He just inflected the tradition a little bit, taking from the Marx Brothers and Jack Benny before him, and influencing George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and the whole stand-up comedy boom of the 1980s.

What Nesteroff accomplishes, with an ambition I can hardly imagine, is to fit together different pieces of comedy history into chapters that comprise a whole. This could work as a textbook, but I say that hesitatingly because it implies a coldness or seriousness to the project that, page-by-page, it never seems to have.

If you don’t know the history of comedy, I can’t imagine a better place to get it. If you think you do know it, you’ll like this all the more for allowing you to connect dots that – until now – seemed detached from each other.


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Review: The Overstory

The Overstory by Richard Powers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years thinking about what I like to call the “rhizomatic novel,” novels structured so that their different characters are never fully conscious of being part of the same larger story. It’s a kind of bird’s eye, or even god’s eye, view of experience. Some of the practitioners of it include many of our leading novelists: Colum McCann, Jennifer Egan and Joan Silber among them.

Richard Powers’s The Overstory is partly in that vein, but its very premise is an exploration of the rhizome – in contrast to the more apparent, geometric unfolding that we historically associate with nature. That is, even though the main characters of this book are, essentially, trees, the real science of it deals with the ways that trees interact with each other and the larger world.

One scientist character here is part of the pioneering work of uncovering the ways that trees use pheromones to communicate with one another, signaling, for instance, to their neighbors if they’ve been attacked by insects and giving those neighbors time to prepare advance defenses. Another (or perhaps it’s the same – the humans here are ultimately less interesting than the forests they seek to preserve) wonders over the way their roots sometimes merge into larger shapes, giving additional dimensions of their communication and creating a webbed, rhizomatic underground tangle that links them all.

So, I admire the fundamental architecture of this book. It’s very shape – let’s go with rhizomatic for the moment – echoes its inquiry. Forests are not collections of individual trees, we’re told, but vast ecosystems that interact. They’re richer and more wondrous than we could have imagined, or at least than we were taught to imagine.

Powers often writes with stunning beauty, and I can easily see why it’s won the National Book Award and been nominated for a Man-Booker. This is fiction as ambitious as fiction gets. It’s a novel that challenges us to see humans as nothing more than supporting players in a drama overseen by trees that, in their age and magnificence, dwarf us.

To put it in his terms, the debris that falls to the forest floor – a debris that one character describes as “mothering” the rest of life into existence – is called the understory. Powers asks us to imagine the “story” that takes place ‘over’ that, to give voice to the literal and figurative canopy that the separate trees of a forest create.

With all that upside, though, I confess I enjoy it a bit less than much of its seemingly deserved hype tells me I should.

First, I like to think that novels are, at bottom, inquiries into possibility. The ones I admire most are the ones that put all their presuppositions on the table, the ones that often end up critiquing their authors as much as the world those authors see. In this case, though, Powers makes it clear from the start – and increasingly throughout – that we are wrong and the trees are right. We are never called on to question the basic premise here. These trees are extraordinary, but I don’t think it’s as easy as the novel implies to see them as the “good guys” as against our species as the “bad guys.”

That’s oversimplifying things a bit. The different characters of the novel come to different conclusions. Some turn to violence, some to quiet support, some to academics, some to computer modeling, and some to scientific activism. In the end, though, most come to realize how limited their efforts are. They are the best allies our few remaining great trees can have, but they can do little to fight against the virus that is humanity. Our great academic, for one, eventually comes to answer the question of how we can best help the environment with a simple answer: we can allow ourselves to die so that the trees can heal themselves.

So, there’s a bleakness here that seems to be inserted into the structure of this book rather than discovered within. That puts it in the tradition, say, of The Jungle or The Grapes of Wrath, but it keeps it (for me at least) from asking to be part of that other tradition that follows the novel where it leads.

Second, I found I got the idea pretty early and then wanted more. The first half of this is gorgeous as we see the back stories of several characters who are all somehow called to take part in activism to save the great trees. The second half brings some of those characters together, and then separates many later, but their stories are never all that compelling. The real heroes are the trees; the different people we see never quite emerge as central enough to command our attention. John Dos Passos tried a similar experiment two or three generations ago to greater success (it’s no shame to say this book is less good than Manhattan Transfer or the USA triology – you can be less good than those and still come close to being a masterpiece) but he had the same challenge of making peripheral characters matter enough for us to care about them. Part of his point, as I remember it, is that we can care only so much. Some do emerge as meaningful, but many others pass by without our being allowed to invest in them.

So, as powerful as Powers’s work is here, I’d like to see it give us a little more to hold onto, a little more of human life to care about.

I admire this effort tremendously, and I’d like to take a shot at another of his novels, but I find this a notch below the best and most inspirational work I’ve read in the last several years.


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Review: The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I meant to read this years ago and caught it now only very quickly to prep for an honors defense. It’s brilliant, of course, and also very funny.

I read V a long time ago and, while my student Brandon warns me that it can now look a little adolescent, it helped shape my sense of the possibilities of postmodernism. As I read it, every chapter seemed to take place in a differently ordered cosmos. Sometimes we were concerned with alien flying saucers in volcanoes; other times with the metaphor of the sewer system somehow connecting us all. I kept getting the sense that the entire structure of experience would shift.

And I loved that. And I still love that in memory – which makes Brandon’s warning about re-reading it carry a lot of weight. I wouldn’t want to lose that naïve sense I took thirty years ago that it was somehow possible to reinvent the very universe whim after whim.

Anyway, I read The Crying of Lot 49 the same way. At times it’s about the nature of property law. Then it’s intersecting laws of entropy – thermodynamic and informational. And then it’s about the postal system and its mythical Hapsburgian rival, the Trystero.

I have a lot more to think about this one – and I’m grateful to Brandon for framing it for me – but, on a quick reading – it’s given me exactly what I first loved in Pynchon: a wild, funny, and intriguing imagination suggesting that more is possible than I expect and that, with the turn of a page, it can all get turned on its head again.


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Review: Friday Black

Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In general, I like over-the-top. And, on principle, I like ethical fiction, literature that tries to amplify the wrongs of a culture so we can see our way to end them.

Friday Black is both over-the-top and ethical. It’s just, well, perhaps a little too over-the-top.

Nana Kwame Adjei Brenyah has a method here, and it works well in small doses. Basically, he takes a metaphor and reifies it.

These are not small does, however. They are every story, and the volume in each is turned up close to 11.

If you’re a retail worker at a mall on Black Friday, and the customers seem out of control, imagine them as a zombie horde intent on buying whatever items the marketers have set out for them. If you’re a man lamenting his role in urging his partner to get an abortion, imagine him walking around with the residue of his two fetuses (who talk to him).

The great exception here, or more appropriately the story that does this best, is the widely acknowledged “Finkelstein Five.” That one is both the most ambitious – it imagines an America proud of itself for the Trayvon Martin shooting – and the most impressively accomplished. We get a young man protagonist who, angered by an analogous shooting of five unarmed African-American youths, gradually allows himself to be radicalized.

The anger seethes in this story, and it seems to give license to the stylistic hyperbole. (I suppose it’s the lack of such immediate anger that causes me to lose patience with some of the other stories.) This feels like a legitimate echo of Richard Wright, Black anger unleashed on the page. (I’m not saying this is at the level of Wright, but I do think it’s a worthy heir to that literary tradition.)

The story may have some flaws – it is, still, blunt, and it ends abruptly – but it has real power as well. Enough power, I’d say, that I’d consider teaching it in a college class some day.

The rest of the collection, though, while it has intriguing stylistic moments and at times channels a compelling anger in other directions, seems largely adolescent to me. Over-the-top has its place, but so does subtlety, and I could use a bit more of that here.


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Review: All This I Will Give to You

All This I Will Give to You by Dolores Redondo
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Long ago I learned to distinguish mysteries between the “cozy,” or classic whodunit, and noir. The fundamental difference between them is that, implicitly, solving the mystery of the cozy restores a comfortable order while, whatever the specific crime of the noir, we’re led to see a deeper and unhealed corruption.

In that equation, give me noir any day. I don’t ask to celebrate the fact that the universe is fundamentally disinterested in us, but, respecting that perspective, I’m routinely stunned by the eloquent, doomed heroic, and dark view the genre presents.

I do understand, though, that the whodunit cozy has its fans. There’s something reassuring in the sense that an intrepid detective can arrive on the scene and straighten everything out. It’s a fundamentally optimistic view of the world, whether we get it in the mode of Agatha Christie/Murder She Wrote or in something darker, like this.

To put it simply, then, All This I Give You is a cozy mystery with many of the trappings of noir. There are noir dimensions to it. In one I wish Redondo explored more we learn that the Marquis’s family fortune came about because he threw in with the Franco regime. In other, much more elaborated possibilities, we see the sexual politics and drug-addiction-as-consequence of socio-political pressures.

As the novel proceeds, though, Redondo downplays most of that dark material in favor of the classic detective narrative. [SPOILER: If you doubt any of that, consider the way the novel ends with the reveal that our protagonist’s husband was heading back to him at the end – it’s a “you were right about your love” kind of moment, complete with the satisfaction that the conniving sister-in-law can be proved to have an “heir” by the wrong man, leaving the fortune and title instead to the loving you nephew. In other words, all’s right with the world at the end.]

Perhaps my biggest complaint here is the method of investigation. Whenever anyone has a question for a potential suspect or for some old hanger-on of the estate, it’ a straightforward conversation. After a while, I found myself thinking of Non-Player-Characters in video games, those figures who have crucial information that they willingly share but only after the protagonist finds his way to them. Otherwise they’re flat and immobile.

I will give Redondo points for a nice ability to throw believable red herrings for our suspects. The ending is satisfying from an unraveling perspective as well as a I-was-fooled pleasure. As it goes, though, it asks a lot of us in the way of keeping characters straight and in filing away precious details that may or may not matter.

As a bottom line, though, I didn’t know to be looking for such clues most of the first half of the book. Yes, I recognized it was a mystery, but I was stuck in the noir world, and I was preparing myself for an ethical vision about the corrupt and homophobic world thwarting our nobler instincts. By the time I realized this was a more modest work – by the time I realize it was a cozy – I was in a hurry to see how this more modest puzzle got solved.

It is well-solved. It’s just not as ambitious as I’d hoped.


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Review: Black Crow, White Snow

Black Crow, White Snow by Michael Livingston
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This has been my week of reading in genre, and I gave this fantasy a shot because it was free on Audible and it was short.

Both turn out to be positives.

I read more fantasy than I intend. Every so often there’s something deeply satisfying like Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell or Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, and it lingers long enough to trick me into reading something mediocre in its wake. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing except for the great Achilles Heel of fantasy: books that run on at anywhere from three times too long (I’m looking at you Robin Hobb) to ten times too long (cough, Robert Jordan, cough). For the record, those are not exaggerations.

So, here, the brevity comes as a breath of fresh air. We open with the seeming failure of a desperate attempt by an out-gunned society to recover the lost technology of their ancestors. Our heroes’ warship has been crushed in arctic ice, and they have to proceed in small boats and eventually on foot through hostile terrain.

Weirdly, the plot is similar to a short story I wrote a year ago, at least in the way it’s an all-female group of women who have to discover some of the latent powers (and limitations) of their seeming strengths while on a near hopeless quest. And who have highly regimented distinctions between the different warrior and specialist castes.

As such, I’m drawn to the story itself, though I think it might be a bit flat. And then, as fantasy, it’s awfully generic. Maybe the 1200-page sequel to this answers the question, but it isn’t clear why the ancestors would abandon their one-time capital and conveniently leave the flying-shop technology for anyone to find.

So, before too long, it becomes clear that our heroes are going through the paces that every group of fantasy heroes goes through. A few of the details are compelling – they fight polar bears with cutlasses, which is pretty cool – but most of this is predictable.

The single exception to that predictability, of course is that this is over so quickly. I can’t say it leaves me wanting more, but it seems a strong point in its favor that it ends before I reach the point of counting pages to the end or wondering what’s wrong with the editors in the field.


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Review: Daughters of the Lake

Daughters of the Lake by Wendy Webb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Paranormal romance is not my genre, but this was on sale and I was in the mood for something off my beaten path, so here it is.

To my pleasant surprise, Wendy Webb is a real pro. This is cleverly plotted – I think it could work as a good old school horror movie/love story – and it moves quickly. Webb knows what she’s doing, and I found myself really enjoying the overall story: a 21st century woman, who’s just discovered her husband’s affair, begins dreaming about a woman from a century before. And then that woman’s body washes up on the lake shore outside her home.

I’ll try not to spoil too much in describing how the two women are connected, but I will say that Webb skillfully gives us a range of possibilities. Without being heavy-handed, she entices and misleads us into one after another theory.

All that said, this can’t escape the limits of its genre and, without trying to cause too much offense, this is a pretty limited genre. It rests on the safe premise that there is someone for everyone to love (that would be nice, wouldn’t it) and on the possibility that the laws of time and spirit are flexible (which is fun but untethered from traditional morality). As such, Kate is mostly too good to be true. She’s sinned against rather than sinning, and she makes essentially no mistakes in dealing with her husband’s betrayal. And, conveniently, there’s a single, handsome police detective who shows up on cue as Mr. Available.

There’s also her gay cousin who’s happily partnered off and who offers her a new home and a new job with the added promise that, since he’ll have no children, she and hers can inherit the totality of the family’s traditional estate. Almost everyone, we finally learn, is half of a deep and meaningful – if sometimes flawed – marriage.

[SPOILER:] The single exception to that is a minor character who, it turns out, is the actual secret murderer from a century before. She’s alone and determined to break up someone else’s marriage; she succeeds, but she’s immediately punished, in part by being the most forgotten character of her long-ago generation. Even the apparent killer, a crazed woman, gets to enjoy a happy marriage with a man who does everything he can to protect her.

The paranormal half of this is much more successful, though it runs about a chapter long into the reveal of the true killer. (Note to the future screenwriter of this: cut out that final part and just go with [SPOILER:] the insane great-grandmother as the obvious and necessary killer.)

Still, there’s no denying the fundamental cleverness of this. Even if some of the characters and their relationships flatten into generic convention, the situation remains intriguing and haunting. Kate’s discovery of her relationship to Addie, the drowned woman, unfolds with skillful pacing, and it’s haunting in satisfying ways.

I doubt I’ll be reading much more from that paranormal romance shelf. That said, it’s hard for me to imagine I’d find a better practitioner of the genre than Webb.


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