Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
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Review: Eight Million Ways to Die
Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence BlockMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
With one troubling footnote, this is the strongest novel in the series so far. It’s stronger even than the first, and that’s saying something.
The central mystery here is compelling: a prostitute hires Scudder to help her get away from her pimp, Chance. He agrees, expecting a showdown, but the pimp is fine with it. He thinks of himself as treating his “girls” well, and he figures he’ll simply find new ones if they leave. A day later, when the Kim is murdered, everyone assumes it’s Chance. In part to clear his name, but ultimately for reasons he himself can’t figure, Chance hires Scudder to solve the murder.
For most of the novel, it’s crickets. Scudder interviews anyone with even a tangential relation to Kim, and he seems to turn up nothing. In place of the routine, non-player-character-spilling-the-clues approach of even some of the earlier Scudder novels, though, we get to see Scudder here as someone who understands how to interview. Amplifying a theme of the first novel, Block has Scudder pushing characters for their impressions. He’s building a narrative as much as collecting clues. He’ll ask something like, ‘what kind of job do you think such a man would have,’ or ‘what kind of shoes might he wear?’ He knows he won’t get definitive answers, but he also knows he can get more than a particular source might be inclined to give.
We also get some interesting back-and-forth with the cops, with a jaded one in particular. Joe Durkin is the cop Scudder almost remained, a guy who drinks a little too much and who’s a pretty good but over-extended detective. He looks like someone who will come back in future novels rather than one of the disposable cops in earlier novels who were willing to do Scudder a favor for old-time’s sake. Durkin wants Scudder back on the force. Scudder, seeming really to enjoy his company, wants his help as he gets closer to solving the case.
But the real power here, power that makes this work of genre knock on the door of full-blown literature, comes in the way Scudder deals with his alcoholism. The book before this, A Stab in the Dark, showed Scudder that he couldn’t handle his booze as well as he thought. Here, he’s begun to accept that he needs to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, but he enters that world the way he entered churches. He’s in, but not of the meetings. “I’m Matt. I’ll pass,” he says every time, refusing to accept the grace he cannot convince himself he deserves.
It’s not a straight line either. He makes it eight days sober, then he stumbles. He starts again, and he wrestles with it. At a narrative level, it’s a brilliant device. He’ll go through a dramatic moment – discover a dead body, avoid a hit or make a connection that had eluded him – and, when the adrenaline ebbs, he’ll have to fight off the need for a drink. The scenes of him almost giving in (set against the scenes where he does) have an emotional power that contrasts with the different energy of the procedural.
More than narrative effectiveness, though, this works as genuine character building. Like any Chandleresque detective, Scudder has always held back from us readers. We glimpse his vulnerability, but he pulls it back whenever it’s about to spill out. He’s in love here, sort of, with the ex-lesbian sculptor Jan from the last novel, but it’s as much a fellow-recovering-alcoholic partnership as a romantic one. They’re two wounded people trying to help each other, and Jan – 90 days sober to his eight – is the stronger and abler one.
All that culminates [SPOILER:] when Scudder ends the novel, having solved the crime, and finds he’s still aching for a drink. He’s done the seemingly impossible – he’s tugged on a handful of seemingly insignificant clues (a missing ring, a murdered transsexual’s estranged brother) and revealed that a vicious Colombian gang murdered Kim as a message to her emerald-smuggling boyfriend) – but it’s not enough. He still wants to get drunk. And, in a sequence of powerful scenes, he buys a drink, comes close to drinking it, and walks out. Then, at an AA meeting, dizzy from the effort, he stands up and declares, “My name is Matt. I’m an alcoholic.” With that, he bursts into tears, and the novel ends.
Look, I know that there are literary novelists who get at similar moments of inspiration more subtly, but this one works. We know this man, and we know what it costs him. And we seem to know how it relieves him, too.
So, as I said of the first in the series, this seems to be as good as genre-series noir gets, up there with Walter Mosley once he hit his stride with the third of his Easy Rawlins novels. That said, Block seems to exacerbate a peculiar blind spot around prostitution and its human cost. I’m not going to get preachy about his bringing in all sorts of prostitute characters. That’s part of Scudder’s turf, the underbelly of 1980s excess, but he seems to see it all in a bottom-line morality. Chance the pimp isn’t such a bad guy because he does treat the “girls” well. He takes their money and makes them dependent on him, but he lets them continue to express themselves. They sleep with guys all the time – Kim even “tips” Scudder with a nice roll in the hay even as she is off to see her still-secret boyfriend and hoped-for husband – and it never takes a toll. One, a would-be writer, does it as much for research as for the money.
I don’t mind the material – you sign on for that when you pick up noir – but I mind the way Block so casually treats this sex work as demeaning with being dehumanizing. It just feels as if he’s missing the opportunity for extending his impressive sympathy to the women caught in that situation.
That blind spot aside, this one really is terrific. I think I’m on for at least one more right away, and possibly more.
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Review: The Sympathizer
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh NguyenMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I am reading this for the third or maybe fourth time, this time preparing to teach it for the first time.
I don’t have much to add other than that it remains for me, possibly alongside Marilynne Robinson’s, the best American novel I know of from the 21st Century. Yeah, there’s a lot I haven’t read, but I think I’ve read my share, especially of the books touted as among the best. I cannot recommend this more highly. It is, as far as I can tell, as good as fiction gets.
I remain staggered by the clever dimensions in which Nguyen explores his opening theme of double-ness. Our unnamed narrator is a “man of two minds,” but he is split in many different ways. He is a double-agent. He is a child of mixed ancestry. He comes from a split nation, Vietnam. He splits his loyalty as a sympathizer for the North but an apparent apparatchik to the South. He is Vietnamese in America. And, later, he is American in Vietnam. He is an obedient son to a mother who cannot help him, and he is a traitorous son (in multiple ways) to the General and father-figure who can.
All of that I remembered from my earlier readings, in particular the tour-de-force ending where he is called upon to see the duplicity of the language of the revolution. In that climax, he has to recognize that “nothing is more precious than independence and freedom” is both the cliched literalism of a revolution that’s devolved from its true aspirations and, simultaneously, the recognition that “nothing,” – the failure of that revolution – has become more important than its abstract promises.
I find two things fresh this time, and I expect I’ll find more in future readings.
First, I am struck by the instances here where the stability of the narrator’s double-ness gets disrupted by a third element. That comes when he tries to balance the peculiar blood-brother bond he has with Man and Bon, friends from different sides of the war. It comes as well when he stumbles into love triangles and finds he cannot stay in them long. And it comes when he is a third point in the ideological showdown between the Commandant and the commissar.
Second, though I have seen it before, I am struck afresh at how funny this novel is. I thought I’d have to point that out to the students, but I didn’t. They greeted me with relief about it. This one will make you laugh throughout, including a couple of these gems:
Discussing a philo-Asian academic who can’t see his attention is a kind of condescension: “He had hung an oriental rug on the wall in lieu of an actual oriental.”
Thinking of his biological father, a priest who seduced his teenage maid: “Original sin was too unoriginal for me” (103).
Or, the extended sequence in which he serves as technical advisor to an Apocalypse Now-type film and, along the way, corrects the way extras scream and manages to get blown up by special effects.
This one may look long, and it may look serious. It’s both those things, but it’s also a sustained joy to read. Again, I recommend it as highly as anything I’ve read in over a decade.
___________________________________
Original review from 2016
This is a great book. I mean, really great.
Our narrator is a divided self. He is born a half European, half Vietnamese in the North of Vietnam, and then, despite being positioned to welcome Western influence in his country, aligns himself with the communists before the Vietnam War. Then, because of his excellence as a student and his not looking like what people would expect, he’s cast as a sleeper agent and rises to be aide-de-camp to a key South Vietnamese general. Most of the novel takes place in the United States where he finds himself secretly supporting the communist government and chronicling the exiles’ dreams of returning to Vietnam and creating a new counter-revolution.
The structure of the novel reflects that fundamental schizophrenia. Half of it is brooding and historical. We revisit American atrocities in Southeast Asia, we relive a history that some of us once new well but that current generations may never have known, and we get a first-hand glimpse at the horrifying re-education camps. It is, as I gather at least some critics have seen it, a history of the Vietnam War and its aftermath – in English – told from the other side.
The other part is deeply personal, though, and that’s the half that seems to me to take this from a very good novel into the realm of greatness. Our narrator cannot help but map the two halves of his identity – a Vietnamese loyalist willing to murder on behalf of his theoretical cause and a Westernized refugee/immigrant addled by sex and aware of the ambition of his ego.
Somehow, through all of that, the novel has moments of inspired hilarity. At one point, imprisoned in a camp, he contemplates the meal digesting in his stomach and labels the shit forming in his intestine another “brick” to help build the revolution. At the end [apologies for a kind of SPOILER] he finds a manic joy in deconstructive reading of “Nothing is more important than life and liberty,” turning the empty slogan into a powerful, almost-pun that undermines revolutionary thought and sloganeering. At another, echoing Portnoy’s Complaint, he recounts how he would sometimes masturbate into squid, a delicacy his Western father rarely doled out to his impoverished Vietnamese mother. It’s a tour-de-force scene, conflating an “f-the-father” Freudianism with Marxist revolution and good old fashioned teenage horniness.
In that light, a good part – though not all – of this novel works for me as what I call (Port)Nguyen’s Complaint. The two novels share a structure: Roth’s narrative is cast as an American Jew talking to his psychoanalyst while Nguyen’s is of a double-agent writing his confession for his communist allies in a reeducation camp. Both also deal with unreliable first-person narrators, characters who have reason to cast themselves as abject examples of what they once aspired to and yet who have also accomplished substantial things.
I think there’s a lot to learn in casting the two novels in conversation (maybe I have an academic project) as well. Roth, writing as an American in America, has the luxury of presenting his story as, implicitly, the story of a new sort of American. Nguyen, writing as a Vietnamese unable to ignore the intellectual gravity of the Western-American experience, can’t stand on such stable ground. Portnoy may eventually come to a kind of self-recognition at the end (though whether it’s a break though is open to interpretation), but our narrator here goes face-to-face with the failings of the Vietnamese communist project and the pangs of that country’s early rebuilding. Roth is granted what the communist’s might have called the privilege of Western decadence, while Nguyen has to reach through layers of irony just to reach the position of irony where Roth begins.
This one is already on my list of books to re-read in the next few years. Like its protagonist, it’s split along many axes: Vietnamese and American, coherent and careening, brooding and comic. With all that, it surely deserves a second reading too.
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Review: The Office of Historical Corrections
The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle EvansMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Even before this collection gets to the final, title novella, it’s a book that grapples with the weight of history. We get a series of stories with a similar, sophisticated narrative pattern: a present-tense story with a modest conflict sitting on top of an earlier experience woven into the proceedings.
In “Alcatraz,” a woman explores her feelings toward a cousin when each is descended from a great-grandfather wrongfully sentenced to Alcatraz prison. There’s not much to the present tense – which is by design – but it rests on a couple generations of family members working toward full exoneration.
In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” a woman tries to reinvent herself after an accident that cost the life of her best friend’s brother. She tries to live as if that past never happened, but she’s nevertheless shaped by it.
And in “Anything Could Disappear,” a woman trying to start a new life after a brief stint as a drug courier accidentally becomes acting parent. She manages to invent an entire new life with a fresh career, a boyfriend, and a child. All the while, though, she knows she is denying an earlier life, and that denial pushes against her contentment. In a time when she wants to pretend that history cannot contain her, she finds – as the title says – that nothing is permanent.
Most, though not all of these, deal as well with the nature of race. Much of what’s most impressive here turns on Evans’s ability to share how much of our present sits on a history inflected by a structural racism. It’s no accident that the ancestor in “Alcatraz” is African-American. In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” the protagonist’s present-tense conflict turns on her accidentally becoming a social media star when she’s photographed in a Confederate flag bikini. That’s when the fact of the African-Americanness of her childhood friend takes on a new light. She’s able to experience the privilege of her whiteness even as she has left an unexamined trail of hurt behind her.
All of that comes before we get the title story which makes explicit the themes the collection explores to that point. Cassie works for a governmental agency charged with correcting factual errors of history. It’s an opportunity for her to confront some of the wrongs of racism, but it’s tempered. She can correct only factual errors, not interpretive ones.
The central, present-tense concern of the story deals with a plaque acknowledging the Depression-era arson/murder of a Black man’s business in rural Wisconsin. Cassie’s longtime frenemy, Genevieve, wants to drive home the indignity of the event, raising the ire of a white nationalist [who, SPOILER:, turns out to be of African-Americe descent himself even though he denies it]. Further investigation reveals that the victim did not die in the fire, though. He escaped and was declared dead. That sets up the striking conflict of Cassie intending to give the straight facts – there was no murder – and Genevieve wanting to play up the spirit of the truth, that a mob of whites stole and tried to murder their one Black neighbor.
Bottom line, this is serious and thoughtful fiction that manages to clarify the stakes of many of our contemporary socio-political concerns. It’s often funnier and lighter than I think I’ve so far characterized it – which is a good thing – and Evans is a talented enough writer to keep things moving through that weighty material.
I’m impressed with the power of a consequential new (to me at least) voice, and I want to get back to her first book as well.
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