Saturday, May 16, 2020

Review: The Winter of the Witch

The Winter of the Witch The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This trilogy began as a story steeped in fairy story. Then it moved into something that felt as if it were playing out in the space between the historic and the fantastic. And here, in the conclusion, it walks into history.
Vasilya has grown ever further in this one. She’s lost her horse, she’s become a full-fledged witch, and she’s realized she doesn’t need to take sides in the ancient battle between the winter king and his brother. Instead, she is her own person, someone committed to finding a way for the fairy folk of Russia to live alongside the world that Christianity is ushering in.
So, I have enjoyed this trilogy throughout because Katherine Arden has managed so well to reinvent the stakes of her story. Each book has built on the last but also introduced new stakes.
And what makes this third one so distinctive is that it moves from the realm of a Russian Snow White through a Russian Mulan into a glimpse of actual Russian history. This works through a world of fantasy to a climax that takes place at the Battle of the Vozha River in 1378, the first Russian victory in its struggle to win free of the Tatar invaders.
Part of the fun in reading this is the gradual recognition that these characters aren’t just stereotypical Black Forest characters but are rooted in authentic history. Arden does acknowledge in her afterward that she’s taken some liberties, but this reflects a decent sense of what we do know as Russian history. I think it says a lot for what she accomplishes here that I found myself Wikipediing 14th Century Russian princes and holy men even as I was enjoying where this was going.
The good news, then, is that this is a series of books that simply works. I’m a little skeptical that Arden knew from the beginning where she wanted to take all of this – as she says in her final note – but that’s just curiosity. I’ve had friends recommend this, and I recommend it too.


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Review: The Feral Detective

The Feral Detective The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have been so bewildered by the nature of our historical moment, that I find myself reading a lot of things as allegory for our contemporary America. I find Trump-analogues in all sorts of places, sometimes taking comfort in the sense that we’ve survived such deep narcissism and greed before and sometimes horrified with the sense that what see today is a distillation of much that has long threatened us. Sometimes those comparisons are there, at least if you squint, and sometimes I know I’m just imagining them.

This is a novel that asks us to read it as an allegory of Trump’s moment. On the day of his inauguration, Phoebe quits her job at a liberal New York publication in order to find, well, something. She’s aware of being caught in a kind of bubble, aware that there’s a larger America that may as well be an apocalyptic wilderness for all she knows of it.

Then, when a friend’s young adult daughter goes missing in the wilds of California, she volunteers to try to find her in that hard-to-imagine space.

In an irony that the deeply gifted Lethem must surely intend, those wilds turn out indeed to be an apocalyptic wasteland. Arabella has found her way to a community divided between the diminished intellectual and cultural descendants of a pair of one-time counter-culture communes. The “wolves” are all male and live in a kind of Mad Max society, willing to murder for their beliefs and recognizing as chief the man who can kill the last chief. The “rabbits” are mostly women, and they maintain a gatherer kind of lifestyle that resists the wolves as well as most technology and culture of the last couple decades.

Pheobe’s guide through this alternative America is Charles Heist, the feral detective of the title. He’s a child of both the wolves and the rabbits, a man who, without knowing his particular parents, was raised in both tribes and now commits himself to protecting any who unwittingly fall into their struggles. She falls in love with him in a New-York kind of way, seeing him as just another hook-up. He may or may not fall in love back, but if he does it’s in cowboy fashion: deep but humorless, a love without guile and accepting affection as implicit promise.

The mystery at the heart of the novel gets pretty tangled, even lost, which amplifies the political confusion at the heart of it as well. Phoebe has needed to escape her New York bubble, but she hasn’t exactly found enlightenment in the harrowing world she discovers. She becomes tougher, and she becomes someone capable of an uncynical love, but she also never quite stops flirting with the possibility of turning her adventures into a New York Review of Books style expose of that “other America.”

I say admiringly that I’m not sure what Lethem is trying in the end to show us about Trumpism. On the one hand, it’s tempting to read this in the context of Lethem’s own notorious move from the NYC he chronicled perhaps better than anyone of his generation in Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, Motherless Brooklyn, and Dissident Gardens. That accounts for some of the fatigue with New-York-as-America’s-cultural-capital that’s out front here.

On the other, Lethem seems to be exploring a larger zeitgeist in the way that only the most daring of our novelists can. Much of Chronic City’s brilliance comes from the way it refuses to give us a stable foothold; everything there is caught in a cannabis haze. In similar but not quite so successful fashion here, everything is coated in a post-truth patina. The characters’ separate truths threaten always to become separate realities. It’s no spoiler to say that we never really know whether Phoebe has discovered happiness or whether she’s simply given way to Charles’s and the West’s rural delusion.

I don’t feel any less confused by our American moment after reading this, and I don’t think Lethem has any bullet-point insight to help with our cultural clarity, but – in a consoling way – I don’t feel quite so alone in my bewilderment. This may be a great novel, and it may be something that turns out to be a confusing trifle. I don’t think we’ll know until (and may it happen soon) we have a new President and enough historical perspective to make fuller sense of what we’re experiencing.

For most of the last decade, I thought of Lethem as my single favorite working writer. (That may be a surprise to people who know me as a big fan of Philip Roth, but it was a new Lethem that really got me.) Then I was disappointed after teaching Chronic City that so many of my students didn’t seem to appreciate it. And then came his last novel, A Gambler’s Anatomy. For the first time, I saw Lethem as uninspired, as a writer just going through the paces. It had moments that may have clicked, but it felt like his jump-the-shark moment, and I came close to giving up on him as a real talent. (And I transferred my favorite working novelist title to Richard Flanagan.)

This one gives me hope. It’s weird and ambitious, and I think it might some day be one worthy of standing next to the really excellent work that Lethem has done.


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Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Review: Salvage the Bones

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 Bear and the Nightingale

The Bear and the Nightingale The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading this, I am reminded again of the potential joy in fantasy when writers looks outside the narrow Tolkien-lineage for inspiration. Here, Arden sets her story in a world informed by – maybe even set within – 14th Century Russia. There’s a dash of history, a heavy dose of an almost familiar set of fairy tales, and a rollicking mythos of a winter king and his brother death.

Our protagonist, Vasya, is a young girl who’s born when her mother – descendent of a purported ‘witch’ with second sight – decides she must bear one more child. The mother dies while giving birth, and Vasya survives as a representative of a wild beauty. We learn much of the fairy backstory through her eyes.

We get the almost predictable stepmother here, but she is not evil. Instead, Anna is frightened. She too has second-sight, can see the many little fairies and demons who populate the house is rural Russia, but they terrify her. Vasya recognizes them as the protectors of her home and village, but Anna – raised in the church – thinks they are an evil the church has warned against. She does not trust Vasya, but there’s something sad, rather than the conventional ‘cruel,’ in her inability to understand her stepdaughter.

Behind this family drama lies the title conflict. We learn gradually that “the bear” is a winter king, a creature bent on freezing the world. His brother, whom we see sometimes as a handsome knight, sometimes as a bird-figure, and sometimes as death itself, defeated him long ago. In the time of our story, though, death’s power over his brother winter is weakening. That’s because, above all, the people have stopped acknowledging the creatures of fairy who stand as their immediate and local defense.

In that light, then, Vasya represents a folk wisdom that stands against the catechistic Christianity that has crippled Anna. From the start, we get the sense that Anna might discover joy in her new home if only she could drop the prejudices of her earlier education. She cannot, though, and much of the sadness of the story comes from that.

Her cold religiosity is later reinforced by the arrival of Konstantin, a priest exiled from Moscow to their home because he is so charismatic that a superior fears him. Rather than being a cold and unfulfilled man himself (though he does later become more of that), Konstantin is a gifted painter, one whose ikons inspire all who see them. He, too, has a sense of the beautiful and abstract, but he cannot open himself to the truth of his senses because he has bound himself too fully to an orthodox fate.

So, I enjoy this novel most for the way it sets religious faith against the capacity to be open to enchantment. Arden may start with what seems an obvious good/bad distinction – those who see the fairies and demons have the inside track on “goodness” in a fairy story, of course – but she does not leave it so straightforward. There is much to admire in Konstantin and Anna, and there are petty cruelties and inconsistencies to Vasya and the creatures she seeks to sustain. All of this is set in a harsh world, a world where winter has such power that villages die every year to misfortune and bitter weather.

At some level, this is a novel of ideas, one that asks how we should negotiate faith in a world that seems too rich for any single path to render the world clearly. At another more evident level, it’s a story that surprises with colorful depictions of an imaginative tradition most contemporary fantasy doesn’t think to explore.

This is the first in a trilogy, and I’m already onto the second. It’s a good and rich distraction in this strange time of quarantine.


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