MY 10 FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2016

     Before we get started, just so you know... there is more fiction coming. Yes, I know it's been a while, but THE TRIAL OF MARCUS AURELIUS is coming out in a few months--follow me on Twitter for that announcement--so I'm back into fiction-writing mode. 

     Now, here's the ten best books I read in 2016.

10) DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (Philip K. Dick, 1968)

It bears very little resemblance to Blade Runner, and that’s a good thing, because—blasphemy alert—I’ve always found the movie to be beautiful but boring. Philip K. Dick’s novel, however, is grimy and wondrous. The book is not just a rumination on what constitutes life, but on the intrinsic value of one life over another. It’s not enough that we think and feel, but what we think about and who we feel for. In a dystopia where people drug themselves into emotion, any emotion, and where androids are identified via a test for empathy they should not have, the simulacra of life have developed not just consciousness but a fraternity of otherness. Each android cares as much about the others as it/he/she does about it/him/herself. Roy Batty is not a snarling Rutger Hauer. He is a charismatic and committed leader exhausted by a series of difficult choices. After a book populated by humans less alive than their machines, the happy ending is a hard-learned but well-earned lesson that teaches Deckard to recognize and value life in its strangest form and most unorthodox splendor.

9) THE SPORTSWRITER (Richard Ford, 1986)

“An eloquent and stately character study, brimming with the tensions of everyday drama,” is an example of the kind of blurb that could grace the cover of the novel, but it probably wouldn’t galvanize you to take the book home. But Richard Ford’s story of a man slowly pulling himself out of a grave of despair following the death of his child and the dissolution of his marriage is why literary fiction remains the most lauded of genres. Ford’s prose, lacking showmanship and disinterested in impression, is the eye of the emotional hurricane that is wreaking havoc on his protagonist, Frank Bascombe. In the shadows of his craftsmanship, the trenches between lines, and the nooks and crannies between words, is a cosmos of subtext, the primordial soup that gives richness and immediacy to a simple, human story. Richard Ford’s characters are indelibly real, and his story is foundationally profound. This book is marvelous.

8) THE STORY OF THE JEWS (Simon Schama, 2013)

The title is a little misleading and slightly dishonest (most dogmatically absolutist titles are—don’t trust a book named “How So-and-So Saved Civilization” or “Such-and-Such Made the Modern World”). But Schama does chronicle an aspect of Jewish history that is often neglected by Jews and gentiles alike. Beginning with an exhaustive and mesmerizing examination of the oldest extant ruins of identifiably Jewish origin, Schama presents a compelling and comprehensive case that the central conflict of Judaism and Jewishness has always been the internal struggle between a belief that says, “We are Chosen, and to remain Chosen we must remain separate from the non-Jewish world,” and the contrary belief of, “We can engage with society-at-large, allow a cross-pollination of cultures, and still be Jewish.” From the fog of near-lost Antiquity to the waning days of the Middle Ages, Schama tells the story in a passionate voice filled with ebullient wisdom that will leave history buffs ensorcelled and smitten.

7) THE PARABLE OF THE SOWER (Octavia Butler, 1993)

I’ve finally acquainted myself with the work of Octavia Butler, and she has proven her bonafides as a singular artist of uncommon power. As a creator of science fiction, she has crafted a believable apocalypse-in-progress that, two decades later, appears chillingly prophetic in its accuracy and all-encompassing probity. As an African-American woman, she has plumbed the vicissitudes she’s endured to conjure a reality that is tragically too familiar. As a writer her ability to turn a phrase, erect a narrative arc, and bring to life characters we come to know as well as we would anyone beyond the pages is a feat to behold. THE PARABLE OF THE SOWER is a novel unlike any other I’ve read, but I’m hoping to find its equal in the rest of Octavia Butler’s bibliography.

6) RED SORGHUM (Mo Yan, 1986)

Thank god I discovered Mo Yan this past year. Read my original Not-a-Review here.

5) BLOOD ON THE FORGE (William Attaway, 1941)

A child of the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, William Attaway’s titanic BLOOD ON THE FORGE is an intellectual primal scream. The Moss brothers escape the Jim Crow South for the more lucrative and tolerant future promised by the North, only to find the unfamiliarity of the steel mills, the depersonalized mechanization, is more dehumanizing than the familiar marginalization of the southern farms. Attaway contrasts the blistering red and orange heat of the cauldrons with the warm, wet, fertile earth the brothers are accustomed to and take pleasure in. The fires burn down the brothers—angry, god-fearing Big Mat; sensible, responsible Chinatown; and foolish, fun-loving Melody—in a tragic conflagration that leaves each of them in the last place he wanted to be. Like NATIVE SON, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, and INVISIBLE MAN, William Attaway’s novel is about much more than the black experience, and BLOOD ON THE FORGE stands shoulder to shoulder with those other giants.

4) CALL IT SLEEP (Henry Roth, 1934)

It’s the only proper novel Henry Roth ever published, and upon reading the book it’s easy to see why it took him over forty years to write another word. Like Ralph Ellison, Roth has presented a single life with multi-faceted verisimilitude and bullseye specificity that captures an entire universe of human experience. The poor, the immigrant, the young, the neurotic, the Jewish, the abused all have their story brought to life in CALL IT SLEEP. What else can Roth say? I’m hesitant to recommend the novel to anyone but the heartiest of literary adventurers. Consider yourself warned: CALL IT SLEEP is relentlessly bleak. The prose is a fugue of tears, and the plot is a totem pole of compounded miseries, so much so that the experience of reading is largely an endurance trial. But if you’re willing to endure for the sake of majestic writing, or if you’re just a masochist of letters, this novel will leave a scar on your heart you will cherish forever.

3) THE TENANTS (Bernard Malamud, 1971)

There’s something different about Bernard Malamud. His stories are always in one way or another about Jewish identity and its concomitant pains. As a Jewish friend of mine once observed, “That’s the culture,” but unlike Henry Roth’s writing, Malamud’s does not drown me in dourness and crushing loss. There is always an ember roasting in the dark center of his work. THE TENANTS is a story about two writers; one Jewish, one black; squatting in a condemned apartment, desperate for the isolation they need to finish their purgative books. But in each other they see a world they wish included them. They feel the sting of their respective hypocrisies, and the resentment stoked between the two desperate, broken men leaves the apartment building beyond dilapidated. As bleak as the plot may be, there is still that ember burning in the black ink of every letter, and while the characters may not feel its heat, we the readers do.

2) THE POWER BROKER (Robert A. Caro, 1974)

America’s scholarly community has really dropped the ball. Every child in this country should grow up learning about Robert Moses. He was a real-life Charles Foster Kane, a man of unshakable self-confidence and unparalleled intellect who sacrificed his own soul to propitiate the god of power. Robert Caro, now the go-to authority on Lyndon Johnson, tells the epic story of how Robert Moses transformed himself from an idealistic youth dedicated to solving New York’s many social ills into the state’s unelected dictator whose aims began with getting his way and ended with crushing anyone who opposed him. Caro’s doorstop of a biography is electrifying from the first page to the last because Caro never takes the stance of either apologist or persecutor. He details how Moses’ tireless energy and blade-sharp mind built the infrastructure of modern New York as they corrupted the mechanisms of government to make Moses’ dreams a reality. Robert Moses was a character with a capital-C.

1) AUGUSTUS (John Williams, 1973)

John Williams is simply one the greatest American novelists of the twentieth century. Read my original Not-a-Review here.

Not a Review of AUGUSTUS by John Williams

John Williams—no, the other one—was a little-known instructor of creative writing at the University of Denver who published only a pawful of books in his life. When he died in 1994 he was barely a footnote in the annals of American letters, but thanks to New York Review Books, the publishing industry’s Criterion Collection, Williams’ stature has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade. His three major novels, all reissued by NYRB, have garnered him a posthumous reputation as a storyteller of uncanny insight, a writer of stoical craftsmanship, underneath which simmers a rare literary potency. Butcher’s Crossing is a Western that draws a knife across Ralph Waldo Emerson’s throat and leaves the American frontier and the national psyche doused by a pitch-black arterial spray. Stoner is a campus novel that by some mysterious alchemical sleight-of-hand manages to be both transcendentally idealistic and heartbreakingly realistic. Then there’s Williams’ final novel, Augustus, an historical fiction that is more believable than most histories, a tale of absolute power and its ultimate impotency. And it’s in Augustus that John Williams evinces the full power of fiction.

If you know me at all, you know how nerdily I obsess over Roman history, so you may suspect that my opinion of this book will be biased in its favor. But actually my standards for historical fiction are probably too high because I’m a history buff. I despise it when fiction ignores or rewrites history to accommodate a plot that could be just as easily applied to a contemporary or imaginary setting. As many people wiser than I have said, fiction is a lie told to reveal a greater truth. Why not take the historical truth and meld it to lies of characterization, to supposed motivations that the historical record never touches upon? Why write historical fiction if not to cast a little light onto history’s shadows? If not to outline those slender threads that will always tether the way-back-when to the here-and-now? That’s exactly what Williams does in Augustus, putting the distant and elusive under a lens that makes it immediate and knowable.

Given his subject, it’s only fitting that Augustus is John Williams’ most ambitious work. Augustus is a remote and larger-than-life figure, and the motivations of Rome’s first emperor have long puzzled historians. It’s hard to fathom how the definitive enlightened despot could so completely embody those words that to a contemporary mind reside squarely in mutual exclusivity. He’s a lot like Charles Foster Kane, an inscrutable character of intimidating stature and authority, simultaneously driven by an unquenchable thirst for power and a high-minded opposition to injustice, and as Orson Welles revealed his mercurial protagonist through the perspectives of others, so does Williams reveal his. The multiple points of view, with their unique personalities and prejudices, underline the oft-contradictory facets of a great and terrible man whose gravity holds those voices in his orbit.

Williams employs an epistolary framework to erect his panoramic and microcosmic view of Rome’s first emperor, and it enriches the reading experience in multiple ways. Firstly, it enhances the verisimilitude of the entire work. Some of our best primary sources on Roman history are the extant letters of those who lived it: Cicero, Pliny the Younger, and such. The epistolary structure creates the illusion that we’re reading a genuine first-hand account of Augustus’ life. The approach also enables a breezy economy of storytelling. Strabo of Amasia’s letter fears how Brutus will react to Augustus’ proscriptions, then Brutus’ letter to Augustus is the reaction, then Agrippa’s account of Philippi closes the matter and sets up the inevitable breakdown between Augustus and Antony. But each letter is flavored with a unique energy. Each individual is animated with the pure music of the written word. Agrippa’s starched military man, Maecenus’ cynical dandy, Salvidienus’ betrayed idealist, Piso’s sinister toady, Flaccus’ pretentious gossip. The entire novel is a sumptuous potpourri of character study.

Unlike Charles Foster Kane, Augustus is granted his own voice. After 260 pages of impressions from others who, no matter how close they are to him, can never truly know the most powerful man in the world, the Revered One speaks to us directly. Through a letter to his old friend, the only friend still alive, Nicolaus of Damascus, we meet a man who has only days left to live. He is dying of a life of regret. What begins as a simple thank-you note for some dates quickly becomes an epigraph in Augustus’ own hand. He confides the story of an idealistic youth who was handed the keys to the kingdom, who recognized the weight of the burden, and committed himself to the inexorable sacrifices he would have to make.

“When I was young, I would have said that loneliness and secrecy were forced upon me. I would have been in error… I chose to enclose myself in the half-formed dream of a destiny no one could share, and thus abandoned the possibility of that kind of human friendship which is so ordinary that it is never spoken of, and thus is seldom cherished.”

Now, in his twilight, with the wisdom that comes too late to us, he could not have foreseen the emotional toll taken by his loneliness and secrecy. With no companionship but from the ghosts of loved ones he had carved into pawns, he knows that the order he imposed upon a chaotic world has become his Frankenstein’s monster, and the monster has enslaved its creator. The most powerful man in the world is powerless against his responsibility.

Williams gives believable and fully fleshed voice to unknowable authority, but even more memorably he gives voice to the ultimate victim of that authority. Augustus imposed an involuntary responsibility on his daughter, Julia. She was married off repeatedly to the men who would succeed Augustus and ensure the survival of his orderly vision for Rome. When she rebelled against the princeps’ strict morality laws by cuckolding Tiberius and bedding half the men in Rome, he banished her and never set eyes on her again. Like her father, the historical Julia has become trapped in a popular image, one of wanton harlotry and irresponsibility. 

But through a novelist’s prose Julia becomes a full human being and the book’s most vivid and sympathetic character. Her story is entirely about her quest for agency, for the desire to lead her own life, to find value in herself, for herself, beyond her father’s political machinations.

“It was after the death of that good man, Marcus Agrippa, that Julia, daughter of Octavius Caesar, the August, discovered the power that had been hidden within her, and discovered the pleasure that she could take. And the pleasure she could take became her power, and it seemed to her that it was a power beyond that of her name and of her father. She became herself.”

The relationship between father and daughter is not the calculated arrangement undone by rebellion as history has cast it. It is a tragic love story between two people who want to make each other happy but can only sacrifice so much for one another.

In John Williams’ novel, Julia, alone among Roman women, gets to speak for and define herself. Augustus, a man who literally changed the course of human history, is free of his responsibility and can speak his mind. Augustus is not only a powerful story about power. It is a testament to the power of fiction. Fiction can correct the corrupted perspective of history, giving voice to the previously voiceless, revealing the humanity that impels history’s monsters, the heart and soul that is the foundation of the ignominy. And we are all stronger for it. 

Not a Review of RED SORGHUM by Mo Yan

     RED SORGHUM is one of those novels that will stay with me for the rest of my life. It has introduced me to the Nobel Prize-winner Mo Yan and has lit my spark to read every word he’s written. And that’s a spark I need to chase into whatever dark corner it leads me, because the siren’s call of this unique and uniquely talented writer is too strong a lure to ignore. I’ve read a lot of books. I’ve read many different types of books. The stylistic differences are legion, but distances between them seem to shrink a little with each new book you ingest. But RED SORGHUM occupies an isolated plot of real estate in an increasingly crowded literary community.

     The first thing that struck me about the book was Mo’s language. From the jump it soars like a falcon on the air currents over the sorghum. His choice of words is inspired, and his prose assumes a poetic tint that infects you from the first page. And before I go any further I have to give credit here to Howard Goldblatt. I’ve never before read a book written in a language other than English that made me so deeply appreciate the translator’s responsibility and the challenges he or she has to overcome in conveying a story, its intellectual heft, and its emotional resonance. However evocative and lyrical Mo Yan’s Chinese text is, I and most of you would miss out on it without Goldblatt’s exemplary English translation (okay, I have no idea what he had to sacrifice in translation, but I’d be stunned if it was much).

     More than one critic has compared Mo Yan to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and it is easy to compare RED SORGHUM to ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. Both are sprawling epics about multiple generations of one family and their plethora of hardships, set against the backdrop of war and civil instability, each possessing a blinding power that takes seed in your blood. But those are superficial parallels, and the comparison obscures Mo’s intent and affect.

     Rather than magical realism, Mo Yan’s style is more of a transcendentalistic realism. He does not treat the fantastical as a naturalistic fait accompli. In fact there is nothing fantastical in the story. The episodes and passages that come closest to fantasy are cast in that light from Mo’s idiosyncratic emphasis. Plants are described as having animalistic qualities, and animals are granted the emotional and intellectual agency of human beings. Like Emerson and Thoreau Mo ascribes absolute goodness to the natural world and sees no distinction between it and its human inhabitants. Synonymy with environment is most apparent in the Narrator. RED SORGHUM is a story about the Narrator’s parents and grandparents, but the Narrator assumes a third-person omniscient point-of-view that would be physically impossible. He knows all about Grandma’s pain, Father’s anger, the soft warm mud on the floor of the Black Water River. He laments for a world he never knew, could never have known, but that’s beside the point. He feels it all like a good Transcendentalist. 

     The titular sorghum is not only the totem through which the Narrator experiences the long-past events. It is the most nuanced character in the book. It can cut someone like sharpened steel or envelope them a soft mattress. It will bend lazily in the wind or stand firm against rampaging aggression. It has to. Sorghum is the basis of Northeast Gaomi Township’s economy and the foundation on which its entire society is erected. Like ancient Egypt on the banks of the Nile, Northeast Gaomi Tonwship wakes and sleeps with the sorghum. It must remain patient and resolute when the sorghum is green and growing, but it can reap its harvest and enjoy its just rewards when the sorghum ripens to a life-sustaining “blood-red.”

     But any Transcendentalist will tell you that the individual and the natural world will become poisoned by the corrupting influence of external societal forces, and that’s exactly what happens to Northeast Gaomi Township. The Japanese invade mainland China, and as they push into Gaomi, they use the sorghum for cover, forcing our protagonists to do the same. Soon much of the sorghum is crushed beneath the hooves of the Japanese cavalry, and what isn’t is chopped up by mutual gunfire, set aflame by dueling grenades. Everything follows the course of the sorghum. Our protagonists turn frightened, more implacable, so hungry for revenge that they become what they despise. And the toxin of corruption spreads everywhere. In one of the book’s standout sequences an “army” of wild dogs, lead by Grandma and Granddad’s three runaways, lay siege to the town, exhibiting human-like tactical know-how and falling prey to internecine power struggles. Even the language we are reading is changed. The color red is no longer the color of the blood that feeds us. It’s the color of the blood that has been spilt.

     Transcendentalism has as many flaws as any other philosophy, and those become unavoidable with that reading of the book. But Mo Yan’s skill and command of craft is so apparent, I can’t believe that he is not intentionally revealing the discrepancy to us. RED SORGHUM’s scope is sprawling, but its focus rests squarely on the human heart. And it’s our hearts that can move us to realize godlike accomplishments or commit demonic crimes. From his first appearance to his last Commander Yu is a mass of scar tissue. His inability to reconcile himself to his old wounds leads him to inflict new ones on himself and others. By the time the Japanese invade, the family is already set on a circuit that can only lead to the book’s conclusion.

     RED SORGHUM’s ending is one of those perfect endings that can only work in a book. Only literature allows for the headspace necessary for emotion and intellect to clash and encircle each other until an indescribable satisfaction suffuses the reader. There is no reason the last chapter should work as well as it does, but it does. As the Narrator visits the present Northeast Gaomi Township and seethes at the hybrid sorghum that now grows there, we know how irrational he is. How ridiculously everyone has behaved for the past three generations. And yet like the Narrator we can’t help but feel that something has been lost.

     Maybe it’s simply that there is no more RED SORGHUM to read.

My 10 Favorite Books of 2015

     I read forty-nine books in the recently departed 2015. Here’s thirty-nine of them (in no particular order):

     A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY by Jorge Luis Borges

     THE MEANING OF NIGHT by Michael Cox

     OPERATION SHYLOCK by Philip Roth

     AMERICAN GODS by Neil Gaiman

     THE SANDMAN OVERTURES by Neil Gaiman & co.

     FREE COUNTRY: A TALE OF THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE by Neil Gaiman & co.

     STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND by Robert Heinlein

     NINE HUNDRED GRANDMOTHERS by R.A. Lafferty

     THE HABIT OF LOVING by Doris Lessing

     VANITY FAIR by William Makepeace Thackeray

     THE END OF ETERNITY by Isaac Asimov

     SECOND FOUNDATION by Isaac Asimov

     THE NEW TSAR: THE RISE AND REIGN OF VLADIMIR PUTIN by Steven Lee Myers

     MEMOIRS OF AN ANTI-SEMITE by Gregor von Rezzori

     THE SHAWL by Cynthia Ozick

     DOWNWARD TO THE EARTH by Robert Silverberg

     THE GOON LIBRARY, VOL. 1 by Eric Powell

     THE GOON LIBRARY, VOL. 2 by Eric Powell

     RAISE HIGH THE ROOFBEAM, CARPENTERS & SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION by J.D. Salinger

     LAFAYETTE IN THE SOMEWHAT UNITED STATES by Sarah Vowell

     PERFIDIA by James Ellroy

     MOON PALACE by Paul Auster

     THE NEW DEAL by Jonathan Case

     HARLOT’S GHOST by Norman Mailer

     GHOST STORY by Jim Butcher

     TEMPEST-TOST by Robertson Davies

     LADY KILLER by Joelle Jones & Jamie Rich

     CLAUDIUS THE GOD by Robert Graves

     LUCKY JIM by Kingsley Amis

     AMERICAN LION by Jon Meacham

     FRANKENSTEIN UNDERGROUND by Mike Mignola

     MY NAME IS RED by Orhan Pamuk

     THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: CENTURY by Alan Moore & co.

     NEONOMICON by Alan Moore & co.

     THE BEAST THAT SHOUTED LOVE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD by Harlan Ellison

     THE JAPANESE LOVER by Isabel Allende

     THE BAD-ASS LIBRARIANS OF TIMBUKTU by Joshua Hammer

     ABSOLUTE MONARCHS by John Julius Norwich

     THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE by Douglas Adams

     THE GONE-AWAY WORLD by Nick Harkaway

     That’s an accomplished list, but as wonderful as some of those books are they couldn’t make my top ten for the year. Those ten books will stay with me forever, each one deserving of far more attention and analysis than I’ve given them in this post. But I need to write about them, however briefly, and attempt to convey some fraction of my respect and love for them. Hopefully I inspire some of you to check them out.

10) THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE (Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, 1974)

     It’s too recently published to count as Golden Age science fiction, but THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE does what Golden Age sci-fi does at it’s best: masturbate your imagination while turning your head to the world that exists around you and making you cough. Read my original not-a-review here.

9) TRACKS (Louise Erdrich, 1988)

     There’s a tragedy that seems tethered to even the most accomplished novel by a writer who writes about their minority: too many white people assume that the book is not for them. They tragically limit the writer’s audience, and they tragically deprive themselves of a marvelous reading experience. In TRACKS, Louise Erdrich does what any good writer should do. She uses specificity to speak to the entire world about all of us. The Anishinaabe at the heart of this multi-family, multi-generational saga could be anyone in America torn between the traditions of the past and a modernity of anonymity, their resentment of a hegemony that has destroyed their identity and the urge to accept it as their only way out of financial and spiritual destitution. Louise Erdrich writes with poetic empathy and gallows humor about a specific group of people with particular circumstances. But she recognizes the universality of their fears and desires. She brings out the dispossessed in every reader, broadening the fraternity of humankind. She doesn’t tell us to empathize with The Other. She shows us that we are The Other, that there is no other. There’s only Us.

8) NONSENSE NOVELS (Stephen Leacock, 1911)

     Today’s culturally astute prize irony more than they even know. Beating the drums to postmodern originality, they are ignorant of how none of the culture they hold aloft is particularly original. Stephen Leacock was doing everything they value a century ago. In NONSENSE NOVELS the Canadian satirist skewers Sherlock Holmes, Gothic romance, the various pulp genres of Lovecraftian horror, Howardian fantasy, the nascent hardboiled fiction, and more. He emulates them with the stylistic perfection and thematic acuity of a keen-eared impressionist. He pulls the dangling threads that betray those stories’ disconnection from reality, and he fills the gaps with an inspired silliness that today’s absurdists wish they could conjure. Nothing is wholly original. Everything is built on a foundation. Modern satirists and comic writers would benefit from reading Stephen Leacock and learning how far they are from originality.

7) INVISIBLE MAN (Ralph Ellison, 1952)

     You can say a lot about Ralph Ellison’s indelible novel about the black American experience. You can talk about its unflinching honesty in regards to black-white relations, class distinctions within black communities, self-image as informed by these relations, and so much more. The book is a deep vein of literary gold seemingly without end. But what I keep returning to is Eliison’s command of language, his note-perfect selection of words, the rhythmic punch of his sentences, how there seems to be no fat in a story of such deeply felt anguish that it dares the writer to run away with himself. In a story that is all about what we see and don’t see, INVISIBLE MAN’s writing is clear and sharp as honed crystal and simultaneously dreamlike and hallucinatory. It conjures an unreal world that is painfully, poisonously real. Ralph Ellison succeeds at one of the hardest things a writer can do. He takes the ephemeral symbolism of speech and crafts from it an edifice of tangible thought and emotion that only a blind man could miss.

6) WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? (Budd Schulberg, 1941)

     Budd Schulberg knew Hollywood. A career screenwriter who wrote, among other movies, ON THE WATERFRONT, he made the industry the focus of his first novel. WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? tears at the town’s scabs with as much force and fury as Nathanael West mustered in DAY OF THE LOCUST. Sammy Glick, the novel’s enfant terrible social climber, is as despicable a character as you’re likely to find in fiction. But Schulberg assumes the voice of Al Manheim, the journalist who Sammy passes, then seduces into following him to Hollywood. The dignity of truth can’t compete with the riches of fantasy. But the novel is not just about Hollywood. It’s about American avarice, about why the United States fell into its Great Depression. It’s about the men who destroy everyone in their path to make themselves Midas. But unlike the mythological king who turned his loved ones into gold at his touch, the modern Midas is only interested in touching himself.

5) THE HIGH WINDOW (Raymond Chandler, 1942)

     THE HIGH WINDOW is dynamite. No, I’m not angling for a blurb on the cover. It’s entirely appropriate to call a story “dynamite” when it carries the force of an explosion. Raymond Chandler’s third Philip Marlowe novel always feels combustible. His prose is as strong as his protagonist and as volatile as the motley assortment of scumbags and ne’er-do-wells that surrounds our hero. Every new paragraph, every exchange of dialogue is weighted with the wages of fear and the spark of sin. You’re on a rollercoaster, never at ease but too excited to feel the tension. Chandler’s style was two-fisted fluidity, a ballet of pugilism witnessed through a blood-red third eye. You can feel the unstable elements jostling between the lines. You know that the whole thing could blow up any second, and you know you’ll get burned. But who cares? This is what great reading is all about.

4) EXIT GHOST (Philip Roth, 2007)

     I love Philip Roth, but historically I’ve had a hard time tolerating Nathan Zuckerman. Roth’s surrogate has always struck me as being enamored with his own voice to the detriment of the story. Even in AMERICAN PASTORAL and THE HUMAN STAIN Zuckerman fills multiple pages with some of the richest, most provocative sentences you’ve ever read, none of which say anything that the first sentence doesn’t. But Zuckerman’s curtain call, EXIT GHOST, proved to be an exhilarating anomaly about an old man desperately fleeing his imminent mortality. Roth doesn’t allow his aging surrogate the satisfaction of lyrical bloviation. His sentences are as melodically rousing as ever, but they’re fewer and leaner, each laid like a single brick to form an awesome cathedral. As a result Zuckerman conveys a power and urgency he’s never previously managed. Death is on Zuckerman’s (and Roth’s) heels, and every struggle, whether preserving the legacy of the hero of his youth or clutching at an unattainable erotic fantasy, is charged with crucial immediacy. Philip Roth is the bravest writer America has ever produced. How brave of him to address the twilight without smoke and mirrors, without any obfuscation, and force himself to stand against a stark landscape as no one but himself?

3) THE MOTHER TONGUE (Bill Bryson, 1990)

     Bryson can and does write about anything and everything, but he’s rarely brought out the thrill of discovery with as much palpable electricity as he does in his examination of the English language. He not only traces the history of the tongue from its Indo-European root to the present day (well, to the book’s publication in 1990). He analyzes its popularity and finds that its versatility, its evolution as a bastardized and bastardizing sponge, has made it uniquely qualified to assume the role of Common Tongue. The book is a high: intellectually dizzying and often laughter-inducing. Whether explaining the disparate pronunciations of everyday words by next-door neighbors or tracing the origins of obscenities, Bryson’s breezy but exhaustive scholarship regularly reduces you to giggles. The man has made a career of practicing an everyman’s intellectualism, precise and rigorous but infectiously fun. Bryson’s work breaks his subject free of the shackles of humorless pedantry and returns it to us as the language of the people, a language without rules, of boundless possibilities and endless opportunities.

2) BLEEDING EDGE (Thomas Pynchon, 2013)

     Some people have relegated Pynchon to solitary confinement over the hill. You. Are. So. Off. The elder statesman has summoned forth a spell that reveals the lacunae at the heart of today’s national character as no younger writer could. A younger writer would lack the wisdom, the sight, and the sense of humor to show us what Pynchon sees. Read my not-a-review here. 

1) AS I LAY DYING (William Faulkner, 1930)

     AS I LAY DYING may be The Great American Novel. Read my not-a-review here.

Not a Review of AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner

     Expectations are double-edged swords. We usually associate them with fodder for disappointment, our hopes dashed to bitters and salt, our valuable time frittered to ashes for the wind to scatter. When I picked up my first sample of William Faulkner, THE SOUND AND THE FURY, I expected his incomparable reputation to welcome me with a fanfare of trumpets and rose petals on the ground. But the book’s southern fried stream of consciousness frustrated me and left me cold. LIGHT IN AUGUST largely moved me but also stretched beyond my tolerance. 

     But our expectation of disappointment is also an invitation to surprise, to sumptuous, revelatory surprise that collects, builds, and blooms into unforeseeable joy that makes us over anew. When I picked up AS I LAY DYING a week ago, I expected it to be more of a travail, one that would reinforce my respect for Faulkner but little more. I did not expect to read one of the best novels I’ve ever read, to have a transformative experience that would challenge my expectations of what a novel could be and what people are.

     The book’s skin is little more than the journey of the Bundrens, a family of uneducated farmers in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, to bury Addie Bundren, the family matriarch, in her hometown, several miles away. That’s it. Simple. But the Bundrens largely embrace simplicity, require it. It allows them to deal with a crushing existence of uncontrollable complexities. They can’t hope to grasp the political, economic, and cultural vicissitudes that conspire to cast them among the downtrodden. But they still want answers, answers to the Big Questions we all wrestle with. And they want answers they can hold in their hands. The simplest, easiest to hold is god. Some, like Cora Tull, cleave too strongly. Some, like Whitfield, not nearly enough. Some, like Cash, turn to personal integrity with steadfast, uncomplicated purity. Some, like his father Anse, pay integrity plenty of lip service while playing the victim to the hilt. 

     Faulkner doesn’t paint the struggle for purpose and meaning in soft, pliant pastels. Even its depiction is complex, with no set consequences for specific patterns of conduct.  Anse cons the pious Addie into marrying him, only then revealing himself to be lazy, selfish, and vain. Meanwhile, Addie falls from her own lofty heights of grace and goes to her grave wracked with guilt. Darl’s wisdom exceeds his actual intellect. He recognizes the multifaceted anarchy of his life, but is undone by his inability to cope with it. Jewel is equally incapacitated within a metaphysical silence, but he resorts to action without contemplation. Thinking about it is just too frustrating, too frightening, yet he survives. Dewey Dell is blessed with a preternatural intuition she cannot rationalize. She knows, perhaps more than any other character, but cannot understand. Yet, you finish the book feeling that she too will survive, despite the hole that asshole Anse has unwittingly dug for her.

     Faulkner reveals deep sympathy and empathy for his characters. He structures the book so that each chapter tells a part of the story from one character’s unique perspective (Think A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, younger readers). But Faulkner also grants those characters the agency to speak in their own voice. The care he takes, crafting each voice with an individual patois and sensibility that we are quick to recognize, speaks to the respect he has for even the villainous Anse and Whitfield. They are as much a product of their hard, indecipherable world as the blameless Cash and Dewey Dell or the more problematic Darl and Jewel.

     Faulkner respects these people and so many people like them that he elevates their story to a mythic scope. The text is peppered with small allusions to the Bible and Greek mythology, but the story itself is a medley of religious highlights. Death itself is the motivator of countless myths and legends. Addie’s death causes a downpour of diluvian proportions, and the Bundrens must at one point ford a torrential river straight out of the Old Testament. Even the crime Darl commits toward the end of the book can be seen as a misguided recasting of the Prometheus myth, and like Prometheus Darl is damned for nothing short of blasphemy. Hell, the family’s journey itself is part Exodus, part Xenophon’s march of ten thousand. Raising the story to eschatological heights is not only appropriately metaphorical. It lends great and edifying value to the lives and struggles of people some of us could easily dismiss. 

     I finished the book two days ago, and I am still reeling. I simply did not expect, could not have expected the experience of reading it. Maybe that’s what the novel comes down to. Expectations. The reader’s, the characters’, ours in general. To expect is to assume you have worked out the elusive order underpinning all of existence. But as we all know, life will constantly surprise you, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes violently. Sometimes it will do both and leave you beside yourself, feeling a fool for daring to predict the path it is leading you down, but also feeling enervated, alive, enraptured by the unknowable possibilities that lay before you. AS I LAY DYING did not simply exceed my expectations. It ground them into powder and blew them into my face. 

Not a Review of HYPERION by Dan Simmons

If you trawl the internet for opinions of Dan Simmons’ novel HYPERION, whether you take to Amazon or Goodreads or a half-assed blog like this one, you’re going to find countless reviews and messages that state something to the effect of, “It’s THE CANTERBURY TALES in outer space!” Well, that’s accurate enough if you’re only making a structural comparison between the two. If you want to ignore the fact that Chaucer owed more than a small debt to Boccaccio’s DECAMERON, that the TALES are mostly verse, that Chaucer never finished them, and that, since everyone who wasn’t clergy or nobility at the time was illiterate, we’re not sure who Chaucer was writing for, therefore we’re not really sure what he was trying to say, then yes, HYPERION is THE CANTERBURY TALES in outer space. But a simplistic comparison, no matter its validity, tends to minimize Dan Simmons’ accomplishment. HYPERION rides the currents of its many inspirations into depths they never approached and breaks the surface as something gloriously its own.

Simmons’ choice to use a pilgrimage as his work’s framing device was fraught with more narrative peril than Chaucer faced when composing the TALES. To the modern reader who hasn’t taken at least an undergraduate course on Chaucer the pilgrimage to Canterbury may appear so simple as to be inconsequential. But his contemporaneous readers, immersed in a fictional simulation of their modern world, would have recognized details and nuance that escape us undetected. Simmons’ pilgrimage however is one tile in a speculative mosaic that he has to conjure from word to word. That he does it so gracefully and vividly is a testament to his imaginative fecundity and storytelling economy. Every shred of exposition greets us via intimate conversation with his principal characters. Simmons not only shows us the crumbling Hegemony, the Ousters and their hostilities, the TechnoCore and its intrigues, the titular planet of legend. He makes us feel them it all. His world enters our bloodstream like a transfusion via semantic sleight of hand, and he’s never more successful than making us feel the omnipresent existential horror of The Shrike. 

But Dan Simmons does Chaucer one better. His framework has a story of its own to tell us, the imminent collapse of a once-mighty civilization, and the story weaves in and out of the pilgrims’ individual tales as we learn one by one why these individuals, out of a galaxy of hundreds of billions, were chosen to make this prestigious and fatal pilgrimage. And remember, this is a science fiction novel. Real science fiction is not about spaceships, lasers, and the traditional cosmetic iconography. Simmons takes aim at large targets of substance, and his message — if you want to call it that — becomes more pointed and more powerful with each revelation in the book and the individual stories.

The first of the stories is The Priest’s Tale. I tip my hat to Simmons. It was uncommonly daring to lead off with an epistolary story within a story. “Brace yourself,” he tells us. “This isn’t going to be some simplistic escapist adventure-time space opera for the indulgence of your inner child. I love literature, and I love mixing styles and genres. Get off the train now, or strap in.” The climax of the story also formally introduces us to our menacing MacGuffin. Up to this point we’ve only heard about The Shrike and felt the characters’ petrified repulsion. But when Simmons brings it center stage he makes it a thing to behold with marvel, a perfect note to strike before it becomes more enigmatic and deadly with each subsequent appearance.

Second is The Soldier’s Tale, as much a character study as it is a tragic war-torn love story. Before the tale begins we see the Soldier as our latest cold-blooded militant who doesn’t believe in anything except might makes right. But his story reveals the sickly marrow within, a man who feels deeply, painfully. A romantic in the truest sense. He longs for something that’s been lost. Simmons even begins the story with the Soldier firing arrows through gritted teeth in a virtual re-enactment of the Battle of Agincourt. Over the course of The Soldier’s Tale we see how this man went from longing for some silver to line the oppressive cloud of violence that’s defined his existence, to finding that line in an agonizing irrational love, to watching that love turn against him, extinguishing any chance in his mind of escape. We understand how he became the man we first met, and we pity him.

I love that The Poet’s Tale is a shamefully honest depiction of the artistic temperament: selfish, arrogant, insecure. Of course the Poet narrates his own story. No one else could do it justice. The converse of the Soldier, the Poet starts as the puckish rogue with the biting wit, the kind of character that immediately attracts the reader. By the end of his tale, however, he reveals himself to be the book’s most despicable persona. His biggest complaint is, “Nobody appreciates my genius and I have to churn out garbage to stay rich.” In the end he proves to be a sociopath happy to let everyone around him die so he can finish his magnum opus. I give Simmons a lot of credit for exposing what may be the part of himself he is least proud of. Good for him. It’s brave, and it’s what every writer should do, use the best in themselves to exorcise the worst.

The fifth tale, The Scholar’s Tale, is far and away the most moving and frightening part of the whole book. The Scholar’s beloved daughter grows up to be an accomplished archaeologist but returns from a study of the Time Tombs on Hyperion with a disease that causes her to age backwards until the day arrives on which she will cease to exist. What greater nightmare could someone live than to helplessly witness the slow death of their child? Simmons brings his full array of talents to bear, and smashes your heart to weeping splinters. He mines every moment for its full gut-wrenching effect with the simplest turns of phrase. Nothing fancy, no great semantic pyrotechnics, just the simple telling of a story with efficiency, suspense, and empathy. When I go back to read the individual tales, this is the one I read first.

The Detective Story arrives in the mode of hardboiled fiction, its opening shot hitting us between the eyes: “I knew the case was going to be special the minute that he walked into my office. He was beautiful. By that I don’t mean effeminate or “pretty” in the male-model, HTV-star mode, merely… beautiful.” Simmons even subtitles the story The Long Goodbye. It is the perfect choice at the perfect time. We’re dangling from tenterhooks by a pinkie, and the Detective Story unravels the mysterious helix of the book’s overarching story. Simmons embraces not just the conventions of hardboiled fiction, but the existential angst and fatalistic underpinnings, exemplified when Simmons has a certain character recite an excerpt from the John Keats’ epic, the not-at-all coincidentally named The Fall of Hyperion:

Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave

A paradise for a sect, the savage too

From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep

Guesses at Heaven; pity these have not

Traced upon vellum or wild Indian Leaf

The shadows of melodious utterance.

But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,

With the fine spell of words alone can save

Imagination from the sable charm

And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,

“Thou art no poet — mayst not tell thy dreams”?

Since every man whose soul is not a clod

Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved,

And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.

Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse

Be Poet’s or Fanatic’s will be known

When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

Which brings us to the last tale, The Consul’s Tale, which unfortunately is the book’s one problematic chapter. Since first reading HYPERION I have gone back and read The Consul’s Tale as a self-contained short story, and on that basis it’s as strong as any of the other tales. But in the context of the novel it’s a bit of a disappointment. It’s a story about two people who we’ve never previously met, and we have to wait until after the story is finished for the Consul to explain what it has to do with anything, although you’ll probably be able to guess before the story is over. This is the climactic tale. It’s supposed to bring everything to a head and unleash all our tensions in a unifying catharsis of narrative and thematic closure, and in the context of the novel I don’t think it satisfies. HYPERION is the story of a group of people making a pilgrimage. By diverting the novel at the height of its urgency to a cast of characters with whom we have no investment Simmons sabotages his carefully crafted tension.

But the misplacement of an otherwise wonderful little bildungsroman doesn’t ruin a book that juggles so many balls of different size, color, and texture and keeps them all soaring with balletic precision and punk rock energy. HYPERION proves you can do the hero’s journey, you can do space opera, you can embrace all the trappings of lowest-common-denominator sci-fi and still create a work of uncommon power and singular character.