Ride the Nightmare by Richard MathesonMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
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Review: The Great Fortune
The Great Fortune by Olivia ManningMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I wanted to like this more and, truth be told, expected I would. A colleague I deeply respect (thanks, Jay) recommended it when he heard I’d been in Romania. And this novel is set in Romania – a dawn of World War II Romania – but it feels like it takes place in a kind of bubble.
Harriet Pringle is bright and gifted, but she lives in an era when her chief role is as wife. She’s married Guy, a good lower-case-g-guy, who’s come to teach literature in Bucharest. As such, the couple is in a privileged position. They have a vague immunity from all that’s taking place around them since they are British as the hostilities are rising in the greater world. They aren’t wealthy, but they have enough which is more than can be said for many others.
We also get a lot from the viewpoint of Yakimov, a Russian émigré who experiences the highs and lows of fortune in a short span, going from a useful tool for disseminating covert information to a freeloader who gets in everyone’s way.
Harriet’s problems are real. She’s under-occupied, and that leaves her time to get jealous as Guy grows close to at least one of his female students. She’s happy when she makes friends on her own, but a lot of her drama feels like it could be taking place in any university town.
There’s a world conflict that’s getting more and more imminent, but it’s always in the background.
I get that that’s part of the point here. Manning writes from the perspective of someone older looking back on her youth, and it makes sense that a bright woman would remember her personal travails more dramatically than the global ones swirling around her.
But, as I say, I read this to keep experiencing Romania, and that feels like a secondary part of the novel itself.
Meanwhile, Yakimov is experiencing more of the vicissitudes of war. But, while his circumstances are more global, he confronts them like a spoiled child. When he’s impoverished, he turns into a full-time sponger, taking deeper and deeper advantage of the few who still support him…until Guy is virtually the only one left.
The plot culminates – and I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say it – in Guy putting on a college production of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Harriet is hurt when he casts his student over her, and Yakimov turns out to have a hidden gift as an actor.
The play is a success…hurray? Meanwhile, Hitler has invaded Czechoslovakia.
As I say, I get the idea of personal romance taking place against the backdrop of history-in-the-making, but, for me at least, I’d prefer a personal drama with more at stake, and I’d prefer a second-banana with a greater awareness of the forces he’s up against.
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Review: Sleepwalk
Sleepwalk by Dan ChaonMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Utter, inspired lunacy.
I didn’t intend to buy this book. I was looking for something else on the shelf, and – when I saw Dan Chaon’s name – I recognized it as someone I’d been meaning to check out at some indefinite time down the road. I picked it up, loved the sound of the back of the book, and put it to the test: if I like the first paragraph, I’d consider buying it.
When I didn’t look up until I’d finished page 5, I knew I was in. I did get other things at the store, but I kept reading this past the cash register and even as I walked out the door. It’s that arresting at the start.
And it’s that wonderfully weird throughout.
“Billy” – he goes by multiple names – is a blue-collar, black-ops “wet work” specialist for an array of evil corporations, organized crime cartels, and bizarre think tanks. Sometimes he arrests people who’ve pissed off his employers. Sometimes he ferries newborns in black-market adoptions. And sometimes he kills people.
He lives in a near-time dystopian future when much of America’s infrastructure has collapsed. One subtle and running joke, though, is that it doesn’t sound all that different from the traffic, pot-marked roads, drones, and surveillance cameras that we already endure.
Then, mysteriously, he gets a call from a girl who says she believes he’s her father.
In lesser hands, I don’t think this would work. For two-thirds of the novel, Billy is on the move (that’s not a spoiler since he lives his life that way from word one) and slowly recalling a childhood he’s mostly repressed.
It’s the perpetual weirdness that carries the freight here.
Billy has a special recipe for microdosing LSD, dissolving tablets in single-shot bottles of whiskey and then eye-dropping bits every so often. He listens to tame oldies while he kidnaps fugitives for his employers. He meets a drug connection who gets off on sucking his toes. He has a loyal dog, one he rescued from a dog-fighting ring and who hates almost everyone else. He carries on conversations with drones. He may or may not have killed his own mother, but he gets caught up in thinking of himself as a father…after a long-ago sperm donation.
In other words, you never know what will happen next. I probably made it the occasional 4-5 pages without snorting in laughter, but that was a rare dry patch. Chaon gives us a bizarre and hilarious world and world-view.
At the same time, there are real questions at play. Above all, in a comic rather than noir fashion, it asks the question of what we owe people when we are no longer bound by conventional morality.
The focus of that question is whether Billy will answer the implicit distress of his potential daughter or whether he will be loyal to the code of his operations – a code that has seen him survive but at the price of virtually every relationship he’s ever known.
This one reminds me of Jonathan Lethem at his best and, from me, that’s high praise. Lots of fun, and now I intend to look for more of Choan’s work.
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