Review: I Hear the Sirens in the Street

I Hear the Sirens in the Street by Adrian McKinty
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



View all my reviews

Review: Earthcore

Earthcore by Scott Sigler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



View all my reviews

Review: The Moor's Account

The Moor's Account by Laila Lalami
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The premise of this alone makes it stand out: a North African man, who’s had to sell himself into slavery to pay his family’s debts, arrives in 16th Century “New Spain” to serve as part of a Conquistador’s mission of conquest. On top of that, though, Lalami adds a thoughtful layer of what it means to tell history, and we’re left with an original and provocative story.

The premise here reminds me of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. (If it is not as accomplished as that novel, don’t worry; very few things are.) Both of those books imagine the New World at a moment before it coalesced into a place capable of the sort of slavery we know. Each explores (and largely rejects) the possibility of friendship and partnership between people of different races, but each does so at a moment in American history before there is an America.

The best parts of this one come as the explorers get their first glimpses of a southern North America that, if familiar to us, is bewilderingly new to them. There may be a sameness to our experience of their discoveries – it does get difficult to distinguish one new tribe or one new river from another – but the group’s gradual diminishment changes their experience in ways that sustain the narrative. They lose their arrogance, and the nature of their encounter takes on an ever-changing tone.

Early on, the narrator notes of the would-be conquerors, “They gave speeches not to voice the truth but to create it.” They name everything they see as if they are in a world without history.

Later, once their hardships compel them to acknowledge the history and power of the land around them, they become more descriptive. The narrator even subtly mocks them for switching to a shorthand of “first river” or “second river” where once they thought of themselves as drawing a new map.

Lalami adds to that drama the sense that the very business of telling the group’s story follows a similar pattern. The arrogant tell their story and think of it as history in full. And, at least as I have learned the history, the Spanish story feels like the full and familiar one.

The central joy of this book is the realization that, without “the Moor’s account,” we have only a partial history of that awful and awesome time. It takes a black man, enslaved to the Spanish, to help us see those Native Americans in a new light. If the picaresque of this occasionally drags (but only occasionally) that implicit narrative correction to our history makes it all come together as a compelling and entertaining story.


View all my reviews

Review: The Iliad: A New Translation by Caroline Alexander

The Iliad: A New Translation by Caroline Alexander by Homer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



View all my reviews

Review: The Other Americans

The Other Americans by Laila Lalami
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There’s a strong novel buried in the book we get here. In fact, I’d even say there are two potentially strong novels here. As it is, though, neither gets either the room or the attention really to shine out, and the result is a novel substantially weaker than Lalami’s earlier, excellent The Moor’s Account.

The Moor’s Account shone because it offered a different foundational narrative for America. Our narrator, Mustafa/Estebanico, is a Muslim slave of a would-be Spanish conquistador, and he takes part in a dramatically failed expedition to find gold in modern day Florida. It’s a big topic told from the striking perspective of a man of color, a Muslim, a slave, and someone opposed to the whole colonial project.

Yet, in a way, he is an “other American,” himself – a figure whose story informs our larger American one even as he falls outside of the histories we tell ourselves.

If The Moor’s Account is a sustained (and successful) exercise in voice, this is a quilt of different voices. Instead of sustained chapters in which Mustafa/Estebanico sorts through the contradictions of his life and addresses his fears that he will be forgotten, we get short chapters from a range of different perspectives. The book seldom sits still long enough to give us a developed character. Above all, for me at least, this falls short because of the way it interrupts one account after another, deferring not just plot points but the full expression of the characters we encounter.

That said, the premise – or I should say the original premise – is very strong. A Muslim restaurant owner is killed in a hit-and-run that might have been a hate crime.

In the first half of the book, we have a kind of whodunit, with the victim’s daughter – Nora, our central character – intent on figuring out who’s guilty. There’s a sub-plot of an undocumented Mexican-American man who witnessed a part of the accident who has to decide whether to report what he saw, or almost saw. There’s another about a high school friend of Nora’s who kindles a you-can-see-it-coming romance with her. And there’s a sister who, seemingly perfect in her American success, is hiding a painkiller addition. And there’s the older white man who owns the bowling alley next door and nurses a politics of resentment. And there is the African-American female detective who, good at her job also juggles the responsibilities of being a worried mother. And there is the mother who wishes she’d never come to America. And there is the dead father who, conveniently, supplies flashbacks just in time to resolve seeming mysteries.

So, yeah, I don’t think it’s much of a mystery, and I don’t think Lalami does either. Roughly halfway through we [SPOILER:] learn that the car that hit Driss was owned by the bowling alley owner next door.

At that point, the premise seems to shift from solving a mystery to coming to terms with the seeming reality that it’s hard to find the line between accident and malice. Oh, and while we’re at it, Nora’s romance with Jeremy heats up so that she is both angrily grieving her father and instantly falling in love with someone she hasn’t thought of since high school.

I think the best of the novel deals with the gray area of the crime/accident, and Lalami has some moments of impressive insight all along. She does a strong job bringing the mother’s voice forward, and she often gets off a strong inner monologue for a character in the midst of an emotional crisis. But, since none of that is sustained and we have so wide a range of different characters, those insights seldom accumulate into something sustained and moving.

[SECOND SPOILER:] At the end, just as the novel seems to lean into its premise that love, mourning, racism, and what it means to be an American all situate in a gray area, we learn that the real culprit isn’t the bowling alley owner but his son, a long-time bully of Nora and Jeremy. He is the epitome of the ugly American, someone who’s self-satisfied and – this being the age of Trump – reasserting the privilege of his nativism and racism.

Oh, and Nora – having dumped Jeremy to return to her life as a contemporary composer – returns in the final pages to reconcile with Jeremy. Happy, sort of, ever after.

There are glimpses of skill here, though not enough to make me quite understand how the same author wrote this and The Moor’s Account. This is, ultimately, conventional even as it thoughtfully weaves a Muslim-American perspective into a larger vision of an “other America.” In contrast, The Moor’s Account, committing to one voice and one larger question, asks a similar question in a singular, tragic voice.


View all my reviews

Review: No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am back to this novel for the third time, teaching it for the second, and I am again struck by its unblinking look at the indifference of the universe to the human condition. I like to set McCarthy into conversation with Don DeLillo. Where DeLillo writes about contemporary characters who seem unable to extricate themselves from the created world – whether of art, politics, or technology – McCarthy shows us characters who can’t escape the concrete, real-life of the human animal.

In McCarthy’s universe – in book after book – he arrives at the same point. Life is nasty, brutish and short. Our plans, whether of what we hope to accomplish or of what we think stands as our enduring accomplishments, are nothing more than specks of dust blown by indifferent winds. It’s a bleak theology, maybe the bleakest of any contemporary writer I know, but that doesn’t keep it from being uninspiring. In fact, while I may question it when I’m not reading McCarthy, when I am reading him I’m convinced he’s the greatest writer of his generation.

I also believe that McCarthy, unlike DeLillo whose topics change as he explores different aspects of contemporary culture, writes that same fundamental set of observations time after time. He’s thought long and hard about what existence promises us in the midst of our separate human hopes, and the answer is always the same: the heavens are empty. Anyone paying attention will know there’s no benign providence looking after us. And anyone thinking about it for long will come to see that the next alternative, that there is a malevolent force shaping events, doesn’t hold philosophical water. There’s only “luck,” – only good accidents or bad accidents – but they’re all accidents rather then the product of some great evil that would, in the sense of suggesting we’re part of some celestial plan, offer a perverse comfort.

No, McCarthy never blinks when it comes to asserting that we’re all alone and that our existence is fundamentally meaningless. If you can deal with that, though, if you can look nakedly at what the human condition implies, then you can go forward a little stronger than before. No one is promising you (or anyone else) anything. Use what strength you have to endure the world before us and, maybe, to look out for someone else who’s going through a hard patch of luck.

All that said, I think what distinguishes one McCarthy novel from another is genre. Going back to Suttree, I see him exploring one literary form after another as he articulates that same fundamental sense of existence. Suttree is, in many ways, a “beat” novel, an On the Road for someone who’s unimpressed by anything that poetry or jazz might offer. It’s about a man who’s chosen his own counter-culture life for the same abiding philosophical reasons as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. And he’s done so with so deep a philosophical dive that he doesn’t feel the need to offer an apologia.

After that, in the historical Blood Meridian and then the more contemporary Border Trilogy, McCarthy explored that idea in his Westerns. And then he did so in the post-apocalyptic The Road.

But this, No Country for Old Men, is McCarthy dressing up his philosophy in the clothes of a noir murder not-quite mystery. We know from the start that the relentless Chigurh lies behind most of the near countless killings, and we see it unravel.

Our purported protagonist, Llewellyn Moss, finds $2.4 million in cash after a drug deal goes bad in the middle of the Texas desert. He sees what he’s found and knows he “can’t treat it like luck,” knows he has to try to put his experience into the context of some larger plan for himself.

Moss is savvy and competent. As a Gulf War veteran and a longtime hunter, he knows how to use guns and he knows how to anticipate what most potential enemies might try to do to him. None of it’s enough, though. He understands from the start how endangered he is if all that’s come to him is merely luck, merely a hiccup of the universe as it drops a fortune into his lap; because, if it’s merely luck that brings it to him, then it can be the same indifferent impulse that takes it away.

Chigurh, who’s ultimately over-the-top, understands himself as the embodiment of that indifference. In his most memorable scenes, he allows the result of a coin toss to determine whether he will kill or allow someone to live. He seems emotionless as he tells others that a heads-or-tails means life or death, and he seems to take neither pleasure nor thrill in the killing. He’s merely an agent of chance.

In the end, we are reminded that even he is subject to good or bad – but always indifferent – fortune, but that hardly matters as well. He’s made his point to everyone else he’s encountered in the novel.

Our final major character, though, is our titular point-of-view character and sometime narrator. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is a seemingly good man, someone who’s committed to protecting the people of his county. He begins the book by describing how he felt compelled to visit on death row the one man he ever sent for execution, a confessed child murderer. Bell knows the man is guilty, but he feels compelled to see the result of the justice he’s enforced, feels obligated to the ritual of acknowledging the human nature of even the most depraved man he’s encountered.

But Bell finds, as the title’s reference to Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” implies, that he lives in a “country,” – really a universe – where there’s no place for an old man. He does what he can to help Moss from a distance, but he comes to recognize the threat that Chigurh represents. He wants to call it evil, but the growing horror of the novel is his realization that it’s worse than evil, worse than the opposition to the god-centered view of the world he wants to be true.

Instead, he comes to see that Chigurh represents the negation of that world view. Chirgurh is the embodiment of his abiding fear that the universe might simply not give a damn about him or the people he tries to care for. In addition to the horror of the killings and the near-mindless rampage of Chigurh, we get the demoralizing unraveling of Bell’s faith in a decent world.

I won’t call this McCarthy’s greatest novel, but show me one that isn’t nonetheless great and you’ll surprise me. Instead, I’ll point out that, as an exploration of the noir tradition, it’s McCarthy finding the genre where he may well have been most at home all along. His Western/cowboy writing is devastatingly beautiful – and you have to read Blood Meridian if you think you have the stomach for powerful writing – but this seems where McCarthy was always inevitably heading. It’s a contemporary classic, and he’s a writer who, while never feeding you an easy escape from what it means to confront an empty universe, still inspires with the unblinking courage to share his difficult truth.


View all my reviews

Review: With the Fire on High

With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There’s a wonderfully edgy scene near the beginning of this Young Adult novel: Emoni describes her first sexual experience at the age of 14. It’s underwhelming, and she doesn’t understand it. So, gifted cook that she is, she returns home and unconsciously interprets it into the language of food. She fries up a plantain (“that’s Dr. Freud sitting at table 3!”), slices it into separate bites, and looks at the small, oily residue at the end of the meal.

And that scene is emblematic of a potentially radical look at the life of a half-Puerto-Rican/half African-American single mother who’s trying to navigate her senior year of high school. I love, for instance, that it takes the first 50 or 60 pages for us even to glimpse a boy/man in her life. Yeah, there are the occasional visits from “Baby Girl’s” father Tyrone, but he’s hardly a complication. He’s mostly disappointing, but at least he lets her down on schedule. She isn’t pining for him, nor is she at all tempted to define herself by anything like desire for him.

This is a book that, for its first third and probably a good bit more, aces the Bechdel test and shows us a girl with more than enough on her mind to worry about what a man thinks of her. Emoni is in a tough situation, but she doesn’t define herself by her problems. She’s hardly interested in a boyfriend, instead spending her energy raising her daughter, enjoying her best friend’s advice – and the best friend is, mostly unremarkably, a lesbian – and refining the recipes she gets from her dead mother’s sister. She’s an artist in the kitchen, but she’s also in a position of having to learn the skills that underline and define that art. She’s a girl on the brink of becoming a woman, but she’s also someone trying to juggle the demands of weeks torn between school and parenting.

As this goes on, it does become more conventional. There is a boy, Malachi, who recognizes her as the deep and compelling character we know her to be, and he makes his interest clear. That teenage romance becomes more and more important, but to Acevedo’s real credit, it still never defines the central matter of the novel. It’s also the case that, even with so many odds against her, Emoni shines out as a potential professional chef.

What ties all this together, though, is the consistently impressive – and occasionally gorgeous – prose of Acevedo. I understand that she has had success as a poet, and it shows. It’s not easy to write about how food tastes, certainly not time after time, yet Acevedo does it. Each time Emoni has a cooking breakthrough, we get a fresh description.

At some level, you can see the calculation here. This is a book that checks all the boxes for what you’d want in a novel to teach in, say, 8th to 10th grades. It’s female-centered, honest and contemporary in its exploration of young sexuality and the relationships that follow, reflective of different ethnic cultures, and thoughtful in navigating the path to adulthood.

All of this is so well done, though, that it’s hard to hold that calculated quality too much against it. I plan to recommend it to friends and former students who teach at the high school level, and – in ways that would have surprised me if I’d known what I was getting into when I picked it up thinking it was a work of adult literary fiction – I enjoyed it very much.


View all my reviews

Review: Taína

Taína by Ernesto Quiñonez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I spent a lot of time enjoying, thinking about, and teaching Quinonez’s first novel, Bodega Dreams, in the years after it first came out. That was a sometimes-too-faithful reimagining of The Great Gatsby in a Latinx context, and part of the fun of it was seeing the ways Quinonez played with his source material to reflect his own different ambitions and cultural context.

This one, his third, seems to me to rewrite another, even more famous story: the account of Mary as she conceives and gives birth to Jesus.

Quinonez’s tone here largely pulls off what could be a difficult sell. Our hero, Julio, is a bit of a visionary to begin with. His mother thinks he might be insane, but he isn’t – or, at worst, he’s only gently so.

Julio becomes convinced that his neighbor Taina, a beautiful 15-year-old girl, has become pregnant through immaculate conception. He wants so badly to believe her, that he ‘conceives’ of his own notion for how it’s happened: an elaborate explanation involving his partial understanding of quantum physics and the uncertainty of matter at the atomic level.

It’s a charming situation, but it’s also more than that. Julio does in some ways worship Taina, his Mary, and he gradually becomes a modern-day Joseph. He’s happy to be a supporting character in her story, and he even turns to a petty dognapping scheme to raise money so she he can provide for her.

In a twist that’s a lot of fun, though possibly a [SPOILER:] Taina, who doesn’t speak for half the novel, turns out to be foul-mouthed and ungrateful. She shouts at him as he brings her presents, finding fault with everything he does, whether his choice of pizza restaurant, his failure to bring her soda, his forgetting to get her gum, or his general emoting of smitten puppy.

The result, I’d say, is a more mature working from source material for Quinonez. He seems less burdened by echoing something like Gatsby, and instead he more intent on suggesting the nature of the experience of the community he’s studying. There’s something very funny in Taina’s tantrums, something that suggests a playful exploration of the boundaries of matriarchy. (And, indeed, the women here are all the strongest characters.) The men here, whether Julio’s unemployed father, Taina’s ex-convict uncle, or Julio himself, can’t get it together to accomplish much. They are dependent on the women they know, and they want, in the end, mostly to serve them.

I hope that aspect of the story isn’t so much a fantasy, but much of the rest of this is. Taina’s mother insists that only a Puerto Rican spirit-woman can solve the mystery of Taina’s pregnancy and restore their family to something like stability. [SPOILER:] Peta Ponce does turn out to have what seem to be real powers, and the story she retrieves about her version of the conception (one involving a fight between two doves, one slightly whiter than the other) is lyrical and moving. (It also sets up the possibility that the white dove that does succeed in fathering the unborn infant – to be named Usmail after the U.S. Mail of the postbox across the street – represents one of Julio’s rivals (maybe the thuggish Mario) and suggests that he tried and failed to have the privilege.

Instead, what does restore the family – both families, really – to stability is a capacity for accepting one another. Julio is the hero here for his deep faith in Taina, and she emerges as a more likeable figure as she gradually does come to love him back. This isn’t a story of a man overcoming a woman’s reluctance as much as it is the story of a man coming to be appreciated for the way he makes a possible home for a woman independent of her initial feelings for him. He does what he does without expectation of a reward, so their gradually becoming a couple has a quiet sweetness to it.

I gather some readers have complained that this ends abruptly. While it is true that we never learn the fate of Julio after he’s charged with the dog theft, there’s something fitting about the way this wraps up. Julio dreams of a future where his world turns around Usmail, but he remains in a present where he is doing all he can to help Taina. He’s a would-be savior of a woman who’s strong enough not to need him, one whose beautiful voice makes him experience something like prayer when he hears her sing.

Many parts of this don’t quite line up, and that seems part of Quinonez’s plan. There’s a humor that moves beyond either Bodega Dreams or the second novel, Chango’s Fire. This is a new Quinonez, one ever more able to tell his own story.

I like this, and, since he is coming to my campus for a visit, I am glad for the chance to hear about what he has planned next.


View all my reviews

Review: Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this one up on the day of its release because The New York Times Review of Book was glowing over it and because Ian McEwan among others was singing its praises. That was a kind of experiment for me since I’m not usually an early adopter. I wanted to see if I shared that reaction right out of the gate.

I’m sorry for that hype because, while there is a lot I admire here, I don’t think it rises to the level of your typical McEwan. It’s a striking book with a look at world most of us never see. I admire it for giving voice to protagonists who have some dignity, and I enjoy its setting. But, I think it blinks at the end and undermines some of its strong premise in the way it presents multiple narrators to limited effect.

Our main characters here are all children in the slums of India. A couple are so poor that they live in the railway station stealing and getting by on their wits. Our central character, Jai, is somewhat better off; his parents care for him, and he has the relative luxury of going to school and watching TV.

In fact, Jai watches so much TV that, when first one and then another of the children in his neighborhood go missing, he determines he will find them like the detectives he knows from his shows. He recruits a pair of his friends, wins the friendship of a stray dog, and tries to piece the larger clues together.

Jai’s voice and perspective are, for me, the star of what’s happening here. This is postcolonial in both its perspective and its early structure.

The climax of the first part of this comes when Jai and his young friends steal a little money and take the newly built (in part by his father) purple line of the city’s rail system. It feels a lot like Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time in the way our protagonist ventures on a great adventure that is also the everyday stuff of others’ commute. That postcolonial reworking is effective as a structural ploy – a refiguring of Western culture in something of the classic example of the way steel drums came from reworked surplus and supplies – and the boys’ adventure is powerful.

It’s also powerful in the way we see the world through the eyes of characters who are shaped by forces so out of their control. As an Indian in a nation that has much of its economy shaped by powers abroad (at least one character takes classes with an aspiration to work for an American call center), as a lower-class resident of a community that the area wealthy routinely threaten to tear down, and above all as a child, Jai can never forget his powerlessness.

Anappara’s greatest success here is in refusing to see these children as acted upon. They have agency, and they really do conceive of themselves as detectives with the power to solve this crime.

All that said, [SPOILER ALERT:] I think this loses some of its edge when, at the end, we learn that instead of inchoate, international powers that cost this community its children, there is a real serial killer. Jai even has a hand in uncovering him when, though the corrupt police try to stop him, he is among the first to storm into the house where they find the incriminating evidence. I find that move a betrayal of the larger sense of the people of this community as victimized by a global economy indifferent to the price the poorest of the world have to pay.

Further [SPOILER ALERT:]. I’m also frustrated by the seemingly gratuitous plot twist that Jai’s sister, angry that her father has struck her, decides to run away in the midst of the childnapping crisis. As a result, she seems to be another victim, one never recovered or accounted for, and the price her parents pay is extreme. The action simply doesn’t feel authentic to me. Before her decision, she seems to have the same pluck as Jai. After, she seems sullen and unnecessarily cruel.

On balance, I do see a lot to appreciate. It’s good to hear so striking a voice and to be brought to a world of such poverty. It’s not McEwan, though, and I don’t think it’s even extraordinary by the standards of current releases. Again, maybe I’d be more inclined toward it if I didn’t walk in expecting a masterpiece.


View all my reviews

Reflections on Jojo Rabbit

As I sort through my up-and-down thoughts on this movie – mostly up – I find myself settling on the notion that it’s most effective when I think of it as a gloss on two of its weightier lines.

One of those comes in a haunting moment when, as the heartbreakingly innocent Jojo is walking with his too-good-to-be-true mother Rosie, they come across a row of Germans who have been executed and left to hang as warning to any others who might object to the Nazi state. Jojo asks, “What did they do.”

His mother replies, “What they could.”

It’s a quiet and powerful moment when it happens, but – for me at least – it simmers throughout the movie and eventually stands as a kind of apologia for Rosie and her decisions. She, like all decent Germans, is faced with confronting national insanity. There’s almost nothing she can do against a culture that’s corrupted not just in its moral direction, but also in its ontological: these people are spread a steady stream of untruths – a point that screenwriter/director Taika Waititi brilliantly sends up in the opening scenes when Jojo and his friend go to an absurd learn-to-be-a-Nazi children’s day camp – and she has to perform a masquerade in order to survive in a world governed by those untruths.

But Rosie is a woman who does more than simply survive. She’s committed to raising Jojo, which is all the more heartbreaking a fact as we slowly learn that her older daughter has died, but she’s also risking her life to protect Elsa, a Jew on the brink of leaving adolescence and becoming a young woman. And, as the Nazi armies lose ground in the war – with Hitler already killing himself – she pushes to do even more, circulating handbills that somehow support a resistance that we presume will save lives.

It’s not enough. It never could be, and the harrowing scene in which Jojo finds her hanging as an executed traitor punches through any illusion that it is. She’s done what she could, though, in an impossible time, and it stamps her as a purely heroic figure.

I do have some problems with the scene. It’s dark in a way that the movie hasn’t prepared us for, and it seems to demand that we break away from the largely comic tone that’s preceded it.

Still, Waititi reminds us immediately of the central premise of that tone. He’s established that Jojo cannot yet tie his shoes. Hugging his mother’s legs and sobbing in near despair, he notices that her shoes are loose. He stops a moment and ties them – or nearly does. It’s not enough; he’s still too young and too affected by his fantasy friendship with Hitler. It’s still something, though. And, in retrospect, he’s done what he could.

And, while it takes him a while to realize it, he tries to do even more when he sets out to rescue Elsa.

None of that would work, though, without a range of striking shots and remarkable acting. I was not in the mood to watch a Holocaust film, but I couldn’t look away from Waititi’s peculiar camera work. There’s a lot reminiscent of Wes Anderson in the way he holds his camera still and gives us brightly colored, postcard-like images.

At the same time, his signature shot seems to cut something off. Characters’ legs – or in the powerful shot of the executed Rosie, her torso – extend out of the frame, and, unlike with Anderson, we seldom get the full set in one shot. There’s always something implied but unseen, some piece of the the image that doesn’t fit in the frame, and the result is an underlying aesthetic that supports the notion that Jojo can’t comprehend the full situation in which he finds himself.

And the actors seem to get it too. Scarlett Johansson has it easy in some ways since she is the only character who both understands all that’s taking place and then acts on it. Still, she is lying to Jojo about surface truths – trying to make him think he’s safe in a world that isn’t, pretending to a capacity for joy and sexual potential that she doesn’t feel, and, in a great scene, explicitly performing the role of his absent father by rubbing fireplace ash into a beard – while holding onto the one, core truth: she will do what she can to save him and forestall some of the insanity of the world around her.

Sam Rockwell is remarkable too. His Klenzendorf is a man who, like Jojo, has surrendered to fantasy, though he lacks the excuse of being a child. Having lost an eye in combat, he thinks of himself still as a potential German hero. When we first meet him, he demonstrates that he can’t distinguish firing a gun from hitting a target. In the closing, surreal scene where he takes part in the final defense of Berlin, he actually comes out in the be-feathered and caped costume he once doodled away on, imagining himself always as an ideal of his Fatherland.

Then, in his final moment, we see him wrestling with his repressed understanding of the extent to which he is part of a masquerade. For one brief moment, he drops his pretense and – stripping off the Nazi jacket that would mark Jojo for potential harassment from the victorious Allied troops – becomes fleetingly the one legitimate father figure Jojo encounters (with the possible exception of Rosie in her ash beard). He tells him to get home. Then, having made him safe, he sells his performance by pretending to turn on Jojo, and shouts in the voice of a swaggering Nazi colonel that he won’t tolerate a world of Jews and Allied armies. It costs him his life, but it helps secure Jojo’s safety. It is, to go back to the refrain, all he could do.

And Alfie Allen proves the old axiom that there are no small parts, only small actors. I’m not sure he has a single line in the film, but he’s nearly perfect in playing Finkel, the handsome but dim lieutenant/homosexual lover of Klenzendorf. He’s a man committed to literalism, unable to distinguish the real from the imagined. In his signature moment, when ordered to round up a handful of German Shepherds to help in the defense, he has recruited a handful of older men who – as keepers of sheep – are indeed German Shepherds. (One of the many great Waititi sight gags comes in the final 400 Blows inspired final battle when we see the old shepherds gallantly charging at the Allied troops.) Throughout, Allen finds a way to play it all straight, to keep the fundamental absurdity of his role in balance with its surface seriousness. He is, in his quiet way, the perfect Nazi – a man committed to an heroic ideal that’s possible only without a sense of nuance, a man who can function only to the degree that he is following the orders of others.

But none of it works without the work of Roman Griffin Davis, who turns in what might be the finest performance by a child actor I can remember – certainly by a boy. He is endlessly interesting in the way he expresses himself. He’s a child who’s constantly challenged by the fact that what he has been told is true – what he wants to be the easy truth of the world – is not entirely true. He never has a moment of full comprehension (unless that’s the case in the closing dance scene of the film) but we see him reflecting on one insight after another. He can’t figure it all out, but that’s OK because we see his impulse to keep doing so. It’s only at the very end, when he bends down to tie Elsa’s shoes, that we see how he has finally mastered one thing his mother kept teaching him and around which she had endless patience in his failing forward.

Somehow Davis is always fresh, always surprised by the world around him. He gives the impression of never getting the joke, never quite understanding what the grown-ups around him are doing, but of always almost recognizing that there is a joke. He’s a beautiful kid, and, with his not-quite-straight teeth and ever-widened eyes, he holds the movie together as the hope for a future that will come after the greater madness passes.

So, yeah, I admired the film, but I also found myself tiring of much of it by the end. I was frustrated with what I felt was Waititi’s insufficient grappling with the weight of Rosie’s death, and I began to tire of the almost too-perfectness of the victims. Thomasin McKenzie as Elsa seemed simply too beautiful, too easy for Rosie and then Jojo to agree to take care of. I kept seeing her as a young Natalie Portman (who did first come to major notice for playing Anne Frank, another perfectly sympathetic Jewish girl in an attic), and wondered how the film would be different if she’d been too old, too unattractive, or too starved to serve as a love interest.

I also began to wonder how Waititi could extricate himself from the box he was in. In a film where he’d killed off so many of his intriguing characters, he seemed to have left himself nowhere else to go. I couldn’t imagine him killing off Jojo – that would be way too dark – and I vowed I wouldn’t forgive him if he gratuitously killed Jojo’s one best friend, Yorki (who, drafted into the Nazi army at age 11, becomes another of the chess pieces that Waititi cleverly exploits in the gathering mayhem of the final several minutes). And I couldn’t imagine it working if Jojo’s father returned without explanation or Elsa had a moment of clear, safe exit.

Then, in what I think is both the most memorable scene of the film as well as Davis’s finest moment among many, we have the dance. Elsa has told Jojo that the first thing she’ll do when she’s free is dance. She’s just seen that he briefly lied to her about the Nazi’s having won as a way to keep her for himself, and she’s slapped him. But then, without immediate explanation, the two lapse into the best dance scene in a non-dance film since John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction.

It’s such a great sequence that I wanted to love it, but I was also frustrated that the film hadn’t yet come to terms with the death of Rosie, with the larger ontological crisis of Nazi propaganda undermining reality, or with the narrative arc of what would happen next. I was taken with the visual but inclined to see it as unearned, as a way of dodging the deepest implications of the film.

And then, in a final frame, Waititi put up the words of the other line that – in retrospect – gives weight to the entire film. Elsa has already quoted the Rilke, but seeing it as text changes it: “No feeling is final,” Rilke declares.

I have long felt that Rilke understands the grand movement of emotion better than any poet I know. (I often paraphrase him from Letters to a Young Poet on the idea that the seeds of our coming sadness are sown in our greatest joy and that the seeds of our coming joy are sown in the midst of sadness we can’t see beyond.) In that closing line, I see Waititi changing, or at least justifying the tone he’s brought to his Holocaust film. He gives himself license to open with an upbeat version of The Beatles’s “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and then to close with a danceable David Bowie’s “Heroes” – both sung in German – because this is not 1944 with Berlin in ruins and a shell-shocked world coming to terms with Jewish survivors.

Instead, we are at least two generations removed. As a world, we have survived the Nazi insanity, and we have not allowed it to define us. We have the power as artists to cast Hitler as a slapstick buffoon – which is precisely how Waititi himself plays him – and we have the opportunity to move on.

No feeling is final. We could, and indeed we must, mourn the death of Rosie. And we must – and indeed we are, through this very film – resist the ontological assault of a current American government (or at least President) committed to pushing untruths as reality.

But if we give in only to mourning, if we believe the despair of Adorno’s warning that there can be no art after Auschwitz, then we give to Hitler (and, in a lesser way, to Trump) a lingering power over us.

In the end, we cannot allow any feeling to be final. The film wrestles with a great many possibilities, but it leaves us with a liberating image of a beautiful boy and a beautiful young woman owning a moment of freedom in a world that will surely try to snatch that freedom away again. And yet they dance with a comic joy that tells us that, when the next threat comes, we cannot allow it to be final either. We’ll be called on to do what we can and then, at whatever price we pay, to remember that there will be something that belies that finality as well.

Review: Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’d heard great things about this one, and I suspect that has colored some of my reaction. I saw the Booker Prize interest and a terrific student (shout out to Bodo) told me it was one of her all-time favorites. As it stands, though, I couldn’t quite get into most of this, and that probably makes this feel more disappointing than if I’d simply stumbled upon it.

I love the ambition here. The structural premise is that six different stories, four set in the historical past and two in the speculative future, show us how a certain impulse travels across time and generations. This isn’t a family saga at all. It’s more in keeping with what Colum McCann or others of what I call the rhizomatic novel do. The characters only dimly sense their interrelatedness. It takes us as readers to develop a sort of “god’s eye view” of the goings-on below.

And part of the experience of that disjuncture is reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler in the way we’re shown texts that collide with one another. That novel (which is one of the great reflections on the power of reading) makes us jump from text to text, never quite satisfying the hunger it creates with each one.

Here, Mitchell attempts to hook us on each of the stories, at least on the first go-round. Then, after the sixth, we go back to the fifth, fourth, and so on to resolve what we’d earlier begun.

That’s where I ran into a couple of problems. For starters, I just didn’t like the stories as much as I expected to. I found the science fiction of the future chapters a bit narrow. In one we have a clone who’s raised to consciousness and part of inciting a great clone rebellion. In another we have a future where civilization has nearly been eradicated but a small redoubt of scientists remain to help a select group of pacific villagers.

I also didn’t enjoy a thriller with a Karen Silkwood heroine; it read like by-the-book thriller genre and – compounding the confusion of the novel’s larger premise – we’re eventually told it’s fiction and that it’s written by a man. It is not, that is, a story of a “true person” within the novel, someone who might be in a position to inspire others.

I did, however, very much enjoy “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish,” about a roguish publisher who, fleeing his creditors, is held against his will in a retirement home. It’s got a persistently funny tone, and its premise is fun.

Beyond finding the stuff of the novel itself up-and-down, though, I find I finally question its underlying metaphysics. The closing pages of the book suggest that we can’t measure the ultimate effects of great decency. A man who has risked his life to save a slave has that slave save his own in turn. That, we’re led to believe, ripples forward so that – in a dystopic future – it’s part of what saves humanity from extinction.

On the one hand, I find that a bit unimaginative. I’m all in favor of decency, but this is so narrow a genealogy of it that it doesn’t persuade me. Sure, this almost forgotten (even in the world of the novel) act of humanity matters, but shouldn’t countless others? Decency has many parents in every generation; I think this betrays some of its own potential when it suggests so slender a line running from one to another.

On the other, I find that a bit trite. Is decency always born of decency? Isn’t it possible for some people to discover it on their own, perhaps in response to the inhumanity they see? We’re a complicated species, I think, and this book doesn’t leave room for such complexity.

Anyway, while I confess I found parts that dragged and repeat that some of the core stories seemed under-imagined, I am still glad to see a narrative experiment this bold. I don’t think the explicit sci-fi is all that good here, but the shape of the interlocking stories is audacious. I’m glad to be finished with this, but I am also enjoying reflecting on the work Mitchell has done to weave so different a set of stories into something that begins to come together into a larger whole.


View all my reviews

Review: Point Omega

Point Omega by Don DeLillo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I like to say of DeLillo’s Mao II that it’s the greatest novel written about the terrorist events of September 11 – yet he wrote it nine years before those events.

As I come back to Point Omega for at least the third time (yes, I’m teaching it, but I haven’t taught it in almost five years) I’m struck by the degree to which this foreshadows the ontological crisis of the Trump years.

Put more slowly, I see part of our shared cultural experience in the last three to four years as a crisis of ontology – of the ways in which we come to understand what we recognize as the truth. Whether for cynical or sincere reasons, many of the thinkers (I suppose I use the term broadly) behind the Trumpist view of the world have long challenged what they saw as the bias of the media, academia, and corporate consensus. Terms like “left-wing media” and “lamestream media” were outgrowths of the petri dish of Fox News pundits, Breitbart, and all the other dark places that have emerged uncomfortably into the light.

The cumulative point of all that was a concerted effort to make Americans doubt our “collective senses,” to doubt what we learned from the news, from our education, and at times from our firsthand experience. (The notorious episode around the crowd size at the inauguration was a telling case: with poor Sean Spicer having to defend what seems Trump’s wished-for-truth against that which our cameras showed as truth.) “Fake news” began as a moderate talking point; it referred to reports about events that we knew hadn’t happened, like Pizzagate. Within weeks, Trump had commandeered the term to refer to any news story whose content he didn’t like.

Those are just examples, but over time they have created a strange – for lack of a better word – ontological experience. Even for those of us who still “know” we know what we know, it’s unsettling to find that so many of our fellow citizens apprehend the world in a way we know to be false. Even if we hold true to what we know to be true, it’s a wearing experience. We have our umbrellas out to block the rain, but we see people everywhere pretending they’re dry. In such a moment, it’s hard not to peer around the edge of the umbrella – at least once or twice – to make sure of the precipitation we know is there. To bring it back, it’s hard not to wonder if maybe there is something wrong with the photos of the inauguration that simply don’t show what the President insists so persistently says was there.

In any case, if you read Point Omega carefully, it raises some of those same concerns. Our central characters are Elster – a professor of linguistics who, during the Iraq War, accepted an invitation to help narrate the war to a skeptical public – and Jim, a would-be filmmaker who wants to do a documentary on Elster.

Coming from different perspectives, both men are caught in the web of representation, of art. Jim dreams of a kind of film that will reveal the truth of the war, but he can’t escape his experience of film. He’s ultimately a voyeur, someone who can’t move from what he sees into the world beyond it.

Elster, on the other hand, refuses to apologize for his role in, effectively, lying to the American public about the purpose of the war, but he has developed a philosophy to move forward. He’s thought about the generally optimistic philosophy of the Jesuit Teilard de Charin, who postulates that all creation is evolving toward a point of collective self-understanding. He sees humanity as gradually arriving at a point where we can reflect to God the greatness of all creation. He imagines that are closing in on what he calls an “omega point.”

Elster, understanding that, wants nothing to do with it. He has taken from his experience of the war the sense that we are all at ontological odds with each other. He doesn’t apologize for his role because he sees that we in the West must set the terms of our understanding of the world because, if we don’t, our enemies will do it in our place. He wants, in other words, to push toward the opposite of the omega point, to push toward the titular Point Omega, as a time when we will shed consciousness and return to a pure reality outside art and representation, when we will become again as unaware of the larger universe as stones.

Just as Jim can’t escape the hold him has over him to do what he wants as an artist, Elster can’t entirely live out the philosophical point omega of his thinking. He likes his comforts and the company of others too much – which is why he has invited Jim to stay with him for an indeterminate time. He espouses a deep and lonely cynicism, but he loves his daughter and can’t imagine life without her.

Meanwhile, Jessie, the daughter, arrives to unsettle both men. While both aspire to an experience of the real unmediated by art and fail, Jessie has a powerful and primitive capacity for experience. In one telling scene, she goes to New York City for a gallery trip and then skips the galleries, choosing instead to wander the streets of the neighborhood.

Jessie is, in other words, someone capable of knowing the real in ways neither of the men is.

There is a foreboding dark side to all that, though. The novel is framed by a pair of scenes set in an art gallery showing Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho at one-twelfth speed. Those scenes are narrated by a voyeur who sits and watches, one who finds himself slowly merging with the consciousness of the murderous Norman Bates. He’s a man who seems even more deeply stuck in a world of representations – in an ontology that grows from art rather than the real – than Elster or Jim.

[SPOILER:] Late in the novella, Jessie disappears. The closest thing we find to a clue is a knife, one that in subtle and haunting ways, evokes the experience of the slow-motion Psycho that each of our four characters have watched. In the final scene, we get a handful of additional clues linking our unnamed narrator to a worrisome boyfriend who is the only suspect in what may or may not be Jessie’s murder. (Those clues include that the otherwise anonymous voyeur and the boyfriend are both incapable of speech unless they have rehearsed it as script; that the voyeur does pursue a young woman at the screening who seems very much to be Jessie; and that the voyeur concludes by describing his sense of inhaling the impulses of Norman Bates.)

There are many ways to read that twist, but I’m inclined to see it as a dark and depressing coda: even for someone like Jessie, a generally free spirit, it is impossible to escape the world as it comes to us through art and representation. Maybe de Chardin is onto something with the notion that we grow ever more capable of producing a collective reflection of the whole of creation, but, as individuals, we seem as trapped in the experience of how-we-know-what-we-know as ever. Our modernizing world is not giving us greater clarity and access to the real. It is, instead, subordinating us ever more to the narratives that the powerful tell in order to make their preferences into the truth.

All of that leads me to think of this as a powerful and all-too-relevant novel for the right now. I will acknowledge that it echoes some of what I think are the weaknesses of DeLillo’s mid-career work (most notably White Noise). This is a so much a novel of ideas that its human-ness wears away.

If you want great DeLillo, look at Mao II or at his masterpiece, Underworld. (Or, read the stand-alone start of Underworld, “Pafko at the Wall.”) For that matter, I think that the more recent Zero K is probably better than this as well.

Still, even B+/A- DeLillo is powerful literature, and this one – eight years before our collective ontological upheaval – offers some tools for understanding our contemporary experience in ways that (as I see it) writers like Jonathan Lethem and Patti Smith (and I am looking for more) are just beginning to do.


View all my reviews