Review: The Best American Noir of the Century

The Best American Noir of the Century by James Ellroy
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I have decided to assign this text for one of my classes, but I’m doing it under protest. It’s thick enough that I can get some good material from it, but, on balance, it falls far short of the kind of book I’m looking for.

James Ellroy is the most important voice in American noir since Elmore Leonard, but he and I have a very different idea about just what “noir” means. For me, noir is an applied ethics. Picking up where Hemingway left off, it asks us to orient our moral compasses in a world where there is no essential “good.” That is, in a universe where – as Hemingway put it in “Clean, Will-Lighted Place” – the divine has been replaced with the hallowed name of “nada,” we have to figure out our own sense of what is right.

When I read Ellroy, I see him grappling with such questions. When I hear him talk about it, though, I hear him playing up the shock value. In his fiction, he has an unrivalled capacity to strip away the comforting fictions of the modern world. In his commentary, though, he likes to play up the ways he embraces things that horrify others.

As a result, Ellroy opens this anthology with the short story behind the classic film Freaks instead of with something that reflects the existential angst of Hemingway. It is, as far as I’m concerned, a misunderstanding of the tradition.

I could forgive that misdirection more fully if it weren’t for the fact that many of the stories he subsequently selects are also saturated in shock. That is, many are simply not that good. I can forgive some lame stories in an anthology that purports to collect the best work of a given year. But when you have a whole century to choose among?

There has to be better David Goodis – whose novels are often terrific – than the cliched “Professional Man.” There has to be something more subtle than Jim Thompson’s “Forever After.” There has to be a better choice from the intriguing Patricia Highsmith than “Slowly, Slowly in the Wind.” And those are some of the greats and near-greats who have to be included in an anthology with this ambition. There are a number of others by less significant writers like James W. Hall, William Gay, and Andrew Klavan that make me say “huh?” I read more compelling work in most issues of the sometimes excellent neo-pulps like Plots with Guns or Pulp Modern.

Anyway, there are plenty of good pieces here, including Ellroy’s own “Since I Don’t Have You,” Dennis Lehane’s extraordinary “Running Out of Dog,” Dorothy Hughes’s “The Homecoming,” Joyce Carol Oates’s “Faithless,” Elmore Leonard’s “When the Women Come Out to Dance,” and Bradford Morrow’s “The Hoarder,” but many of those are obvious candidates for an anthology like this.

As a bottom line, the batting average is simply too low. I can make this work for a class since I can curate the good stuff for my students, but I wish it were worthy of its title and ambition. Noir has a powerful history, one that’s more evident in film and in the novel. I hope someone, someday, delivers the short story collection that tradition deserves.


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Review: Waiting for the Dead to Speak

Waiting for the Dead to Speak by Brian Fanelli
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am pleased and proud to discover that Brian Fanelli is my neighbor and colleague – even though I have never met him. He teaches up the street from me at Lackawanna College, and he grew up in the region where I live now.

There’s a lot to like in this collection. In it, Fanelli reflects on what it was like to grow up here, a place where an interest in larger questions of social justice and acceptance could sometimes be met with violence, but he never condemns the place either. He loves it the way you love a mutt, wet nose and all.

He reflects as well on his experience as an adjunct faculty member – something I am only now surprised to have seen so little poetry about – about losing his father, and about (apparently) the house he and his now ex-wife bought together.

I was immediately taken by the first of these, “For Jimmy, Who Bruised My Ribs and Busted My Nose,” for a childhood bully. As he ends it, “This poem is for the bully who never cried,/ who hid belt lashes from us, who ran from the sound/ of his father’s battered Ford tracking him down,/ the son whose hands tightened to fists like his father’s,/ who uncurled his fingers to study new blood,/ and then extended a hand to lift me up.” It sets the tone for the ambivalent affection he has for our Northeast Pennsylvania region, and it stands as one of the best in the collection.

A couple of others appeal to me as well for their locale. “At Exit 170, I-81, I Blast the Ramones” tells of him thinking of a friend killed in an accident at the spot. It’s strange for me, who takes the exit everyday on my way home from work, to think of it as a space quietly hallowed by a loss I never knew.

“Temp Worker” spins a thoughtful poem about a man who, for a couple months between February and April 15, gets paid to dress as a Statue of Liberty and twirl a sign to promote a tax preparation service. I know the exact mall Fanelli names, and I think I’ve seen the very man he describes. Again, it’s a pleasure to see such poems built on the everyday experience we share.

My favorite of the teaching poems is “Unwritten,” about an angry but promising student who, because of addiction problems, has to suspend his semester. There’s a real beauty there in the idea that the student’s best work is ‘unwritten,’ that it will probably remain so. I love the poignancy of that aspect of teaching, and I suspect Fanelli – whose students are more economically vulnerable than mine – is all too familiar with it.

While I do admire many of the poems here – and while there are none I’d point to as disappointing – I do wish these were more carefully culled. In a few cases, we get what seem to be the same germ sprouted into similar poems. I think this would be an overall stronger collection if Fanelli removed 15-20 of the 75 or so that are here. That is, the repeated themes sometimes obscure one another where it might be stronger if some of the poems, standing more alone, focused the ideas behind them.

Bottom line, though, I am glad to get a sense of some of the good work coming out of our region. We’re a small enough town that I expect I’ll run into Brian before too long, and I’m glad to be able to admire his work.


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Review: White Fang

White Fang by Jack London
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this as a kid, perhaps as part of the last generation of American kids who’d be expected to grow up with this and Call of the Wild. I remember liking it, but I remember also feeling early on that I’d moved beyond it. I don’t actually remember the experience of reading it, but I can still see the cover of the edition that sat on my shelf for years afterward.

In any case, I’ve had my current “edition” (audio) on my shelf for a long time, and it was only the last day or two when it finally ‘called’ to me. I told myself it had better grab me right away, or I was out. Yes, I was in the mood for some classics, but I wasn’t in the mood for anything that felt dated.

The first parts of this, really the first three-quarters of it, are flat-out amazing. The opening scene may echo some of the Victorian-era establish-character-through-description-of-place move, but I don’t know of anyone outside of Thomas Hardy who does it better than London does it here. We begin with a view of late 19th century Alaska, where, in the stunning cold, anything that lives is “defiant.”

The opening section also pursues a clever strategy. Rather than introducing us immediately to our protagonist – the part dog/mostly wolf White Fang – it lets us see the wilderness through the eyes of a pair of iron haulers who find themselves outsmarts by the dog who will become White Fang’s mother. It’s a beautiful and harrowing sequence, and London masterfully calls on us to sympathize with the perspective of ‘the wild’ over the perspective of the human.

The succeeding sections are equally wonderful as we come to see the world through the eyes of the puppy and then eventually full-grown White Fang. London shows further skill in the way he subtly builds a vocabulary of experience for the young dog, growing the language he has for describing the world we know as White Fang comes to know it.

The ultimate challenge here, though, comes in constructing a narrative around that sensibility. The first half of this flew by for me as London uncovered his basic perspective, but then came “the story” that he set out to tell. I’m OK with the way [SPOILER] White Fang begins to be domesticated by a Native owner, but things get less and less interesting as the “white gods” take over.

I’m troubled by the way the second owner, Beauty Smith, tricks Grey Eagle into selling White Fang by plying him with enough liquor to make him into an alcoholic. (I’m troubled as well by how much the novel privileges the “great White” culture of the white men the Natives do meet.) And, while the final compelling scenes of the novel come when Smith forces White Fang into dog fights, things already seem contrived.

And then, the novel becomes almost disappointing in the way the final owner, a white engineer who – after the “lowly” Native and the “little better” Smith – represents the best of humanity. White Fang in San Francisco – or at least in the American Northwest – seems like a silly 1970s sequel, a kind of Bad News Bears Go to China phenomenon. He’s a creature of the wild, and it’s asking too much of him to become a character in the not-so-interesting life of a California judge and his family. (In fact, the introduction of a final antagonist in the last chapter is so clumsy as to be laughable.)

I don’t come to London for scenes of American society, though. It’s easy to forget that London was as well known for his socialism and labor activism as for his fiction. What we remember collectively about him, though, is precisely what shines through in the first half of this. Maybe some others could do as masterful a job of capturing the hostile wilderness of 130 years ago, but no one else was there as he was, and no one else so skillfully mourned the passing of that world even as he was in the midst of it.


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Review: Rob Roy

Rob Roy by Walter Scott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Elmore Leonard famously say that he tried not to write the parts that people tried not to read. I like to think of that as an extension of the ‘technology of narrative,’ as one step in changing the techniques we have for writing fiction. In that case, it means realizing that contemporary readers have the capacity to understand gaps in the narrative. We’re sharp enough (and grateful) to be able to fill in the more tedious parts of what lie behind an otherwise compelling story.

Credit Walter Scott with creating a good chunk of the technology of the novel. Arguably the first commercially successful giant of the English-language novel, he taught us how to do the historical romance. Ivanhoe holds up two centuries later as a thrilling story of dual allegiance and heroism. Waverley, as I remember it, is also pretty good, taking a young man and putting him at the heart of powerful historical events.

I figured Rob Roy would be along those lines, and I also decided I could use a classic to wash down some of the other things I’d been reading recently. Rob Roy McGregor was a historical outlaw, a Scottish clan chief who used his knowledge of the Highlands to remain at large and to play a part in some of the conclusion to the Jacobite Wars.

If you take the last quarter of this novel, it’s just that – as good as advertised. But, there’s a lot of build-up, a lot, that is, that Scott could have learned from his authorial descendent Elmore Leonard. (To be fair, Leonard learned a great deal from Scott, of course. It may not have come directly from Scott, but it started from him.)

In other words, this gets exciting when Frank, our young protagonist, finds himself brokering peace between the triumphant English and the purportedly defeated Scots – all the while as he negotiates his own fortunes in love and society. It’s compelling work as it puts him in the middle of his Scottish heritage (his father left his Lowland home to make a commercial success in England) and his English livelihood, and you can see why Scott has been so beloved by so many generations.

The first part of this, though, I wish I could have skipped – or at least gotten to in compressed fashion. It’s thrilling when Frank is navigating the wilds and looking for Rob Roy. It’s, well, tedious, when he’s explaining some of the ins and outs of his father’s trading house or when he’s talking about how he’s tutoring the woman he eventually comes to love. That is, the material here is simply dryer than in Ivanhoe. There, even the quotidian is interesting when we learn about heraldry or get an indirect sense of the social divisions among the Saxons, the Normans, and the Jews. Here, it’s a subtler, social commentary and Scott isn’t quite acute enough to catch it in an intriguing way. (For that, he might have benefitted from the narrative technology of a woman writing at roughly the same time – Jane Austen.)

So, I’m glad to have read this, and glad especially to have it end on a note that intrigues me enough to put another Scott on my long list. As a caution, though, the beginning is dense and slow enough that this doesn’t feel like his best work.


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Review: Hark

Hark by Sam Lipsyte
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Before I started reading this one, I thought of Sam Lipsyte as possibly the funniest novelist writing today. (And that’s in a universe that includes Gary Shteyngart).

After reading it, I feel the same way, even though I think this one is a bit of a disappointment.

Page for page, this is hysterical. Lipsyte has a capacity for deadpan observation, for making the everyday miseries of life turn into humor, that never fails.

Here are a couple gems: At one point, our protagonist Fraz, who’s married to a woman most people recognize as out of his league, meditates on his place in her advice. As Lipsyte puts it, “His wife told him that life was not a zero-sum game, but he suspected he was the zero-sum if it was.”

In another, reflecting on some latter-day hippies, he observes they were on “the right side of history but the wrong side of glamour.”

The heart of Lipsyte’s description deals with Hark, himself, a guru who proposes a self-help program built around the concept of “mental archery.” The concept is at the perfect intersection of plausible and goofy, and Lipsyte runs on with it brilliantly. Even knowing it for a joke, I imagined taking focus from it, and then I laughed all the harder at the cleverness of the construct.

The trouble here, though, is that for all the humor and for all the brilliance of the situation – the hapless Fraz becomes an early Hark acolyte and leader in the cult of personality growing around him – there’s a limited central story. Hark is who he is, a finished product. And Fraz is a Schlub, but he’s a schlub who’s landed in enough clover to make his sad-sack experiences less interesting that in the even funnier and stronger The Ask, Lipsyte’s last novel.

I enjoyed the first half of this immensely, watching all the descriptions unfold. Then, as the second half took place, I found too much of the plot contrived. [SPOILER] Does Fraz’s daughter really need to fall into a coma? Does his wife really need to sleep around with his sleazy one-time best friend?

And then, while I continued to enjoy the language and inventiveness of the narrative, I found the end especially flat. [DOUBLE SPOILER] Lipsyte kills off Hark (in what I acknowledge, again, is a funny scene involving an actual arrow) because he seems to run out of things to do with him. And then, in the closing pages, he has Hark appear to various characters of the novel as a Christ-figure, as someone greeting the soon-to-be-dead to a kind of heaven. I get that it’s ironic, and I get that it comes as a kind of critique of the almost ubiquitous Christ-trope (as in Harry Potter, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and many other places) – and I love the quick note that Fraz, as a Jew, is barred from heaven because “there are rules, of course” – but it seems an ultimate failure of imagination to travel so worn a path.

So, I simultaneously recommend this one and urge caution. And I leave it with the renewed sense that Sam Lipsyte is probably the number one writer I’d want the chance to sit down and have dinner with.


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Review: The Neighborhood

The Neighborhood by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Years ago I read what I gather is an obscure Vargas Llosa novel, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. I loved it; it suggested a way of seeing the political filtered through the lens of the novel, and it left me with deep admiration for the future Nobel laureate.

Strangely, it now seems to me, that’s could be the last Vargas Llosa book I’ve read. As a result, I have little to compare this new one to – a new one that may well be the last he will manage to write.

In general, then, I think this is a disappointing work. I don’t know my contemporary Peruvian history all that well, but this feels in large measure like a wish fulfillment story. It ends with the downfall of Alberto Fujimori, the Peruvian president who defeated Vargas Llosa in national elections and did in fact get sentenced to many years in prison for corruption and state violence. It also allows an old man (Vargas Llosa is 83) to fantasize about Lesbian sex and three-ways.

This starts out better than it ends, with a skillful series of chapters that introduce us to a wealthy engineer/businessman, his wife, her best friend and lover, that woman’s lawyer husband, a journalist who threatens the engineer, that journalist’s chief disciple, and an old man who hates the journalist for a hit-piece that cost him his career.

I’m mocking the strategy a bit, but it is rewarding as it at first unfolds. Vargas Llosa certainly knows how to craft a story, and each character enters without wasted narrative.

Over time, though, the sex begins to feel indulgent and the story contrived. The well-drawn characters of the beginning become increasingly flat. [SPOILER] The engineer, for instance, goes from feeling humiliated by his involvement in a staged orgy to embracing the chance for a threesome. [SPOILER] The journalist/disciple, without much incentive that we’re shown, suddenly risks her life to expose Fujimori’s terror-state architect. And then it’s all a happy ending – that’s literally the title of the last chapter, “Happy Ending?”

I found most of this generally satisfying, although I expected more from a Nobel prize winner. But, strangely, he seems to get tired of his own conceit. Until the 20th chapter, he uses each chapter like a skillful still-life. In that one – which runs more than twice as long as the others – he confusingly blurs several strands of his story. (It’s difficult to read since he gives no warning in the text when he’s switching from scene to scene.) I can see someone defending it as a postmodern move; I found it lazy and ineffective. It felt like someone in a hurry to wrap up a novel he could no longer see as compelling in the way he began it.

[SPOILER] The dubious “happy ending” of the final chapter is somewhat confusing as well. It refers in part to the fall of Fujimori, but it also seems to imply that the sexual threesome may have become a foursome. Or, equally, that it’s been found out in a way that brings it to its end. Either way, it seems unnecessary and, worst of all, uninspired.

I’ll try someday to get to the works that made Vargas Lllosa’s reputation. After this, I’m not in too great a hurry.


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Review: More Bedtime Stories for Cynics

More Bedtime Stories for Cynics by Kirsten Kearse
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This one was free from Audible, and it was only a little more than two and a half hours.

I say it was still over-priced and too long.

There’s no way I’d have finished this if I hadn’t started it as part of a long run and finished the run with only a little more to hear. (Trust me, I was on double-speed by the end.)

For starters, it’s self-indulgent throughout. Each of the narrators seems to have been told just to go for it, to be as over-the-top as possible. As a result, the performances are all over the place in terms of style with the only common thread that each narrator seems intent on showing in a different way that she or he is mocking her more serious work.

Then there’s the matter of Nick Offerman being way over-exposed. I like his comedy less than many people, but I still like it. He’s at his best when he’s laconic, though, when he counter-punches with a quick and subtle jab. Here he’s the emcee, and he’s not merely unfunny but playing against his own strengths as he does so.

And, finally, this is just badly written. One starts out with “It was a dark and stormy night” and then goes on for the next couple minutes to qualify that hackneyed phrase. Hello, 1974 is calling and wants its not-so-funny-then meme back.

There’s only one story I’d characterize as even remotely inspired – a hardboiled retelling of Snow White where Doc, the dwarf, runs an illegal organ stealing operation. A couple others are just short of adequate, one where a woman-turned-frog discovers that unleashing her rage works just as well as waiting for a man to kiss her and another where a teacher in an inner-city magic school writes a series of letters chronicling the end of his idealism. That leaves ten that left me shrugging my shoulders and waiting for something like a laugh.

I’ve been fortunate to read some great things lately so, if nothing else, this one reminds me that I still have certain standards. And this doesn’t come close to those.


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Review: Stardust

Stardust by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There’s something deeply satisfying about a fairytale done right. At its best, it feels like a challenge to the imagination to understand that, even in a world of pure imagination (or perhaps especially so) there are still rules. Characters don’t get full-on happy endings, or at least not the happy endings they imagine. They run risks, learn things, and, even as they generally return home, they’re changed.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider that the Russian formalists – literary critics from the early middle 20th century – developed major strands of formal narrative theory by studying the ways fairy tales established and then played with expectations in their plots.

In any case, Gaiman is straightforward (in the interview appended here) that he wanted to explore fairy stories with this book, and – at least as far as I’m concerned after reading more than a dozen of his books (counting each Sandman volume as a separate book, that is) I think this is probably his best work.

I get tired of Gaiman when he’s trying to show me how smart he is, how his contemporary vision is rooted in mythologies of earlier ages. Here, though, he’s unfettered his imagination, or, more properly, fettered it only to the deep logic and rhythm of once upon a time.

Our central quest here is deeply satisfying as Tristran goes in search of a fallen star only to discover that it’s taken on human form. I really enjoy their interplay, and I appreciated the cleverness throughout – in particular the idea that the star has broken her legs in falling.

But that’s only the start of it. I find the parallel stories satisfying as well. There’s the story of the succession of the Storm King, where, in a deeply creative move, Gaiman has each of the seven sons compelled to kill his siblings and then has the ghosts of the dead siblings stand as a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the activity. There’s the minor witch who has kidnapped the Storm King’s only daughter and turned her into a bird and fairy flea market sales girl. There’s the queen of the witches who seeks to eat the heart of the star in order to restore her youth. And then there are all sorts of intriguing characters who cross paths with our heroes, my favorites being a gnomish packer/trader and a crew of sky sailors who make a living fishing for lightning from the clouds.

In other words all the elements are here. And then Gaiman weaves them all together into a connected story that stays true to its own implicit logic.

If that weren’t all enough, I love the end where [SPOILER] it makes perfect sense that, as the star falls in love with Tristran – as she gives her heart to him – the Witch Queen’s plan to eat that heart is thwarted; it’s no longer the heart of a star but rather a heart given to a young man who’s proved himself worthy.

Anyway, I’m less a Gaiman fan than most I know, but my hat’s off to him with this one. It’s innocent and inventive, taking us on a quest that’s always surprising yet also, even more impressively, in accord with the deeper laws of fairy.


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Review: Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In penal colony era Tasmania, on an island that served as a notorious prison, a prisoner called William Gould painted a series of striking images of the local fish. In a way analogous to what Audubon did for birds, he left behind a scientific and artistic document, but he did so in strikingly difficult circumstances.

That much is historical fact, and you can see reproductions of the fish on the cover of the edition of the novel Richard Flanagan has written around that fact. Flanagan being Flanagan, though – and, for shorthand, I’ll call Flanagan simply one of the handful of the most talented novelists in the world – that’s only the tip of a remarkably imagined world, one that calls into question the limits of art to reproduce reality and, further, the limits of human perception in a world that extends in nearly infinite directions.

Flanagan opens this with an invented frame narrative. His narrator, a two-bit confidence man and forger, claims to stumble upon a second copy of Gould’s fish, a book in which Gould recorded text alongside re-paintings of the now-famous fish. He’s taken by it enough to show it to others – including some academics who ought to be able to authenticate it but remain skeptical – and then he has it stolen.

The book we get thereafter, then, is “Ronnie’s” effort to reproduce from memory a book that Gould supposedly wrote 170 years before. At a first level, then, we’re called on to doubt the product. (And, if I have a complaint here – and it’s barely a complaint by the end – I’d like to see Flanagan gesture more often throughout the book toward that original framing concept.)

The book we get, though, is itself an acknowledged warping of the world of the Sarah Island penal colony. It becomes before long an utterly bizarre narrative of what happens when power corrupts a handful of men who believe in a kind of manifest destiny. The Commandant, above all, emerges as a kind of comic Thomas Sutpen (from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom) as he enters into state-level commerce, selling off whole swaths of virgin forest, building massive entertainment and government centers and hoarding fine art.

There are others, though, including an old Danish man who claims royal descent and who writes a massive “straight” history of the madness to cover for the fraud, a doctor and would-be scientist who sets Gould on his job of painting fish and who keeps a massive pig for his pet, and a native woman who bewitches virtually every man in the story. By the time we’re halfway into this, the only novel I can think to compare it to is Catch-22 for the way both capture vast systems of madness that depend on absurd characters to make them work. Both are a sustained effort to impose an arbitrary and senseless order on top of a deeper chaos.

And, yes, this is as morbidly funny as Catch-22 – which is no slight to Joseph Heller. [SPOILER] One of the funniest scenes here comes when, as Gould returns to Dr. Lempriere to persuade him for more paints to continue the scientific project, he discovers instead a massive turd in the center of which is Lempriere’s belt buckle. There’s no horror to the recognition that the man has just been consumed (and then shat out) by his own pet. Instead, the first impulse is to admire the turd itself as one more larger than life element of the place.

As with Catch-22 as well, though, the humor rests on a deeper critique of power and blindness. Part of the anger that Gould experiences comes from the fundamental inhumanity of the place. Characters think nothing of massacring natives or of torturing convicts. The handful who have power, in terms of money or military might, use it without conscience, without even a sense that the other is human. However much Flanagan reimagines that, we know it to be fundamentally true of the penal system.

The deeper joy of this conception is that we’re called on to recognize the impossibility of recovering that long-ago experience. All of the narrative could be Ronnie’s forgery, so we have an ever-present suggestion to ignore everything as a fantastic account. We also have the sense that the Dane is writing an official history, a record of the experience that satisfies the demands of the people back in England, and that that account is what stands in the way of history fully understanding the experience of Sarah Island. [SPOILERS: That said, many of the Dane’s official records are eventually burned, and – separately – most of the great buildings and wealth of the Commandant are destroyed as well. The point is, we’re told that only memory and imagination remain to give witness to what happened or did not happen.]

As if all that weren’t enough, Flanagan gives us what I find is his characteristic end-of-the-novel re-reckoning. (He uses a similar effect in most of his others, most successfully in his most recent, First Person.) As the world of Sarah Island falls apart, as Gould [SPOILER] attempts an ambitious escape in the midst of much death and destruction, he finds himself losing a large part of his humanity. He finds, that is, that he is beginning to see the world as a fish. The strangeness of that perspective shifts everything he thought he understood about the world, and it adds a note of magical realism to his supposed death by drowning at the very end when he explain that he has convinced himself he will be able to breathe underwater once he takes the plunge.

Somehow, all of that takes place in text, in language that Flanagan pushes to the breaking point. That makes for a sloppy ending, but that’s true of Catch-22 as well. Instead, we’re left with a sense of Gould’s ambition to capture a piece of a dramatic new world, of Ronnie’s fascination with Gould and his effort to reconstruct the loss of Gould’s book, and of Flanagan for creating the whole spectacle himself.

So, yeah, read this. That said, if you haven’t tried Flanagan yet, I recommend starting with The Narrow Road to the Deep North. That’s still the masterpiece, with First Person and The Sound of One Hand Clapping following. I find this stronger than Death of a River Guide – which is also very good for much of the way – and better than the one clunker Flanagan I’ve read, The Unknown Terrorist. I have just Wanting to get to, and then I’ll have to re-read or wait patiently for the next from a guy who is increasingly my candidate for the Nobel in literature.


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Review: The Baron in the Trees

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I think of “fantasy,” my first impulse – and most people’s – is to think of something in the Tolkien vein, something in the “high fantasy,” “world building” of Game of Thrones style 1000+pagers. Then, I work to remind to myself, there’s the gentler coming-of-age, quest stuff of Harry Potter of The Wizard of Oz. And that expanded definition can help to rethink the best of what’s possible, giving us peculiar hybrids like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell or The Night Circus (easily the two best ‘fantasies’ I know of from the last 10-15 years).

But there’s a third aspect I sometimes forget to include, too. It starts with Gulliver’s Travels, but it carries through in the 20th Century to Borges and the magical realists. That is, it’s fantasy that has a particular, pointed perspective – fantasy that’s not at all about escapism but rather understands itself as commenting on the world around it through the veil of alternate reality.

After Borges, the most important mid-century writer in that vein is probably Calvino, at least by reputation. I love If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler as one of the great works interrogating the nature of reading and the power of imagination. I’ve put off reading The Baron in the Trees for no good reason, though I think I’ve picked it up a couple times along the way.

This is not If On a Winter’s Night level brilliance. Instead, it’s a gentler, less confrontational fantasy about – as the title says – a young baron who decides, at age 12, that he will never set foot on the ground again. For much of this, we see a character having Italian-inflected Huck Finn type adventures. He invents all sorts of things to make life in the trees easier. He battles pirates and, later, participates in the Napoleonic wars. He befriends a frightening bandit who, given the chance, prefers reading to rampaging. He even has a rich and complicated love affair.

It’s all charming and clever, and Calvino is deft enough throughout that the conceit never loses steam. There’s always a new riddle to solve or challenge to confront, and our narrative perspective – from the Baron’s younger, on-the-ground brother – helps sustain the wonder of it all.

There are hints throughout, though, and an almost explicit discussion at the end, that this is also a serious intellectual interrogation. It’s no coincidence this is set at the height of the French Enlightenment. Cosimo is friends – from a distance – with Montesquieu and Diderot, and he is taken with Voltaire and others. This is an age of philosophical ambition, an age of people who – perhaps naively – refused to stand on the bedrock they inherited and, instead, tried to ascend to something greater.

We know the excesses of the French Revolution. If nothing else, we see them here where, devoted philosophe that he is, Cosimo can’t quite bring himself to acknowledge how Napoleon has betrayed the principles that motivated the Revolution.

As the novel wraps up, though, it invites us to see Cosimo as a man who made an early and rash decision to explore life from a different perspective. There’s a sweet, fantastic quality to that – and it makes the book a pleasure to read – but there’s also a call to reflect on the price and limits of challenging inherited ideas. And that makes it a pleasure to reflect on once it’s finished.


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