WHAT I'VE BEEN READING: THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

I just learned that Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad is a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. While I'm sure the other finalists are worthy of consideration, it's hard for me to imagine a more deserving work. This is a book I found impossible to put down. I thought of its protagonist, Cora, even when I wasn't actually reading - wondering whether she would escape or even survive the dangers that beset her on her journey to freedom from slavery and the looming threat of slave catchers. This book made me care that much, not only on an intellectual or empathetic level, but deeply, in the most visceral recesses of my consciousness. It is that good.

Whitehead, who grew up in Manhattan, has said that when he was much younger, he imagined the Underground Railroad as an actual railroad, with tracks, engines, and passenger cars, that ran through real tunnels, rather like subways. In this novel he takes that childhood fantasy and makes it real; Cora, a young slave woman, escapes with another slave, Caesar, via the railroad. Cora's odyssey north takes her to various states - South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana - each of which is like another world. While one state initially seems safe and welcoming, for example, the citizens of another indulge in ritualized brutality that almost surpasses what Cora left behind on Randall, the Georgia plantation she escaped from. 

In interviews, Whitehead has readily acknowledged the influence of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels in the vastly different worlds he creates for Cora to experience. As different from one another as Swift's Lilliput, Brobdignag, Laputa, etc., the states become illustrations of various historical outrages against those of other races: the Tuskegee experiments, the Holocaust, and more. And although in this fabulist fiction Whitehead may take liberties with the details of history, what he describes can seem so uncomfortably real that I found myself thinking I should look up, for example, antebellum North Carolina's racial policies.

A friend told me she was afraid to read this book because she thought it would be gory. It's not. Really. Don't be afraid. Given that it is about slavery, violence is inescapable, of course, but Whitehead is a master of compulsively readable, nuanced prose that blends modern pacing with a sensibility that, to quote the nineteenth-century writer of a narrative captivity, "draws a veil over things" too painful or sensational or offensive to recall, except that the veil reveals enough so that we know exactly what is going on. Although we may be spared the graphic splatterpunk some writers indulge in, the horror remains. I admire Whitehead's writing more than I can express. 

The Underground Railroad is and is not fiction. I suspect there were at least as many Randalls in the slave-holding South as there were benign Taras (in Gone with the Wind). Absolute power like that exercised by slaveholders does not bring out the best in people. Scholars agree that there is such a thing as historical, generational trauma, and the United States is plagued by it. We can see its aftermath in recent events on the nightly news, and we need to try to understand it (and each other) rather than deny it. We are a diverse society and we are all in this together. We need books like The Underground Railroad. Much has been written lately about how reading literary fiction helps people to become more thoughtful and empathetic. I can think of no better place to start than with this brilliant novel.

FIRE AND FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Michel Faber is one of my favorite authors (except for The Crimson Petal and the White, which I just couldn't read), and it's always a delight to discover another of his books; I never know quite what I'll find inside the cover. So it was a delight and perhaps more than a coincidence when I stumbled across his 2008 novel, The Fire Gospel, at our local used books (and more) superstore, Bookman's, the day before I finished reading The Goldfinch (2013).

If you read my review of The Goldfinch,  (http://useofabook.blogspot.com/2016/04/sometimes-you-just-dont-know-what-you.html), you know it's not my favorite book. I began reading The Fire Gospel as soon as I finished The Goldfinch, and this is where the "more than a coincidence" part comes in. I found the similarities and differences rather uncanny, almost as if The Fire Gospel, which was published five years earlier, was meant as a sort of corrective to the later novel. Very strange. In each novel a protagonist named Theo finds himself in a museum when a bomb goes off, and not only survives but makes off with a priceless artifact, and neither of them behaves with any particular honor or integrity when it comes to their prize.

Unlike the teenage Theo of The Goldfinch, however, The Fire Gospel's Theo Griepenkerl is a grown-up. Well, sort of. He's a linguistics scholar, a specialist in ancient Aramaic, which is the language of the nine scrolls he pulls out of a shattered sculpture following the bombing of an Iraqi museum in war-torn Mosul. The scrolls form the fifth gospel, the Gospel of Malchus, an eyewitness account of Christ's last days on earth and the period that follows. Rather than turning the scrolls over to his own scholarly institution, Theo translates them and then publishes them, along with his own explanatory material. The book becomes a best-seller, but it also sets off a firestorm of reaction from religious extremists - reactions including public bonfires and even more violent threats - fueled by a media-mad world. Theo is definitely out of his depth.

In describing the success Theo doesn't know how to handle and its dangerous consequences, Faber smartly and stylishly satirizes the publishing and media worlds as well as the reactions of zealots who can't handle the thought of having to shift their thinking to accommodate new ideas or information . It's a well-written, often funny, sometimes shocking and always compelling narrative, and since at 212 pages in paperback it's only about a quarter the size of The Goldfinch, you may be able to read it in a day.

The book group I belong to will be discussing FG next Friday, September 9, but the discussion really began yesterday, when a friend said she'd finished it (in a day) and wasn't sure how she felt about it, except that although Theo's not very likable, the concept of a lost gospel written by an eyewitness is "titillating" and the book is well done. By today she'd decided it is a good read, although it presents a "very unflattering view of humanity . . . it opens the door to discussions on all levels of human experience." On the other hand, another friend said she finds little of merit and that "what the author parodies is not funny. Only very sad." But that's the thing about this book. It gets people thinking.

My feeling is that it is both funny and sad, and that for such a small book, there's a lot to talk about. For instance, the content of the scrolls Theo finds, i.e., the Gospel of Malchus, is very different in tone from the four canonical gospels Christians know. It is easy to see how some readers (both inside and outside the novel) might be offended by the extremely personal, often kvetching, first-person narrative voice of Malchus himself, who freely admits to having been in the employ of Caiaphas the high priest, who says he was there when Judas received his thirty pieces of silver, who claims to be the witness whose ear Peter cut off in the Garden of Gethsemane, and who tells readers more than they want to know about his own ill health, especially his digestive processes and problems. Malchus not only describes his own messy humanity, he also humanizes Jesus in ways that might indeed provoke the kinds of violent responses Theo faces in the novel.

Of course Theo himself is flawed and deeply human, a product of his (our) culture who believes that the titanic act of releasing the "fire" of the newly discovered gospel will somehow save him and perhaps help the rest of humanity. So it makes sense that this evening, while I was looking at some information about Michel Faber, I learned that this novel is part of a series of novels, The Canongate Myth Series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canongate_Myth_Series), made up of modern re-tellings of traditional myths from various cultures. The Fire Gospel is Faber's take on the myth of the Titan Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven to improve the lives of mortals. So now I have something else to think about in regard to this story; I like that.

TAMING THE VINEGAR GIRL

Anne Tyler's Vinegar Girl, the Pulitzer-Prize-winner's take on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew is an absolute delight, the best of Hogarth's series of modern takes on the Bard's plays, at least in my opinion. The other two, so far, are Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time and Howard Jacobson's Shylock Is My Name; my review of Winterson's novel is at http://morning-glory-garden.blogspot.com/2015/11/from-problem-play-to-challenging-novel.html. I haven't written a review of Shylock . . .  yet, but it's a close second to Vinegar Girl, which means it's very, very good.

Tyler's Kate is smart, stubborn, working at a job that doesn't seem to fulfill her potential, and indispensable to her scientist father - almost as indispensable as his research assistant, Pyotr, whose visa is about to run out. To Kate's dad, there's a simple and elegant solution: Kate should marry Pyotr and Pyotr should move in with the family, so Kate can continue to run the household and Pyotr's immigration status can be stabilized. Kate, quite understandably, is not thrilled by this proposition.

Throw into that mix Kate's younger sister Bunny, Bunny's probably-too-old-for-her Spanish tutor/boyfriend, who lives next door, and assorted relatives, co-workers, and friends, and the stage is set for a funny, touching, and ultimately satisfying re-imagining of one of Shakespeare's most entertaining plays. For those who are concerned that the play, like others of Shakespeare's, has been criticized as misogynistic, Tyler's updating neatly deals with that plot problem, in a way that makes me smile just to think of it. 

ANOTHER SUMMER BEFORE . . . .

We're in the midst of a long, hot summer (and in Tucson summers are longer and hotter than in many other places), and with all the things that are happening around the world (in addition to this being a particularly contentious summer-before-the-US-presidential election), a good read is the most refreshing restorative I can think of. I was so happy when a friend surprised me with the loan of Helen Simonson's second novel, The Summer Before the War, since it provided exactly what I needed this week.

A couple of years ago it seemed like remembrances of World War I were everywhere, marking the centennial of the beginning of "the war to end all wars." Of course it didn't achieve that goal. I was deeply moved by film and TV representations of that period: the film based on Vera Brittain's memoir, Testament of Youth; the series Crimson Fields, which sadly lasted only one season; and of course Downton Abbey.  But I watched more than I read, until my friend lent me this novel. The Summer Before the War begins like most summers, light and breezy, with the promise of romance and enough conflict in its English village setting to keep things interesting for those of us who don't read stereotypical romance novels.  It also has enormous resonance for our times, when, as in 1914, it seems like the world is falling apart around us.

Beatrice Nash has accepted a position as Latin mistress in the school in Rye, Sussex, though there's never been a female Latin teacher there before. She's recently lost her father, a scholar of some note, and the unpleasant relatives in charge of her inheritance seem determined to cheat her out of it. Though she's only in her early 20s, she has decided never to marry, but to support herself as a teacher but with dreams of becoming a published writer. But interested and interesting young men do appear.

Hugh Graves is a medical student nearly at the end of his surgical training when war is declared and he finds himself enlisting to serve in a field hospital under his mentor, whose daughter, Lucy, Hugh expects to marry. Hugh's cousin Daniel, a poet, does not plan to enlist but rather to start a literary journal with his closest friend. Hugh and Daniel's aunt and uncle, especially Aunt Agatha, play important roles in the lives of all these young people, whose lives wind up going in unexpected directions. Add to that the mayor's obnoxious wife, an influx of Belgian refugees, an expatriate American writer, and Gypsies, and the plot thickens with surprising twists and turns.

Simonson handles all these disparate elements with style and grace, with convincing and engaging characters and locations. The point of view shifts in different chapters from Beatrice to Hugh and back again, with intervals focused on Aunt Agatha and on Snout, the young Gypsy boy who is also Beatrice's best student. There's comedy, romance, and tragedy, all affecting characters the reader will care about. And while in some ways there's a sense of fatalism that may seem all too familiar in today's stressful and fearful times, there is also abundant reason for hope, and for love of all kinds.

This is a beautifully written book that I admire on many levels, but most of all because, in spite of all that can go wrong in the world (and that goes wrong for many of her characters), Simonson reminds us of what is best in us, even though we ourselves may be unaware of it.

WHAT I'VE BEEN READING

I've read three novels since my last post, and I've been thinking about some of the qualities they have in common, particularly a sense of generosity on the part of their authors. Somewhere, a long time ago, I read that a good writer doesn't totally demonize even his/her villains; the reader should be able to find at least some spark of humanity in every character. That seems right to me, even if the only redeeming feature is that the serial killer takes good care of his horse or the meanest woman in town saved all the letters someone wrote her fifty years ago.
     Sure, there are villains in both the real and fictional worlds. I don't deny that, and I don't want to read stories without conflict - heaven forbid! These three novels contain plenty of conflict and trials. But their authors also give us the nuance and complexity and, yes, compassion that enriches a worthwhile reading experience.

Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity, turns the classic "Snow White" inside out, calling into question how we see ourselves and others in the racist society of mid-20th-century New England. In a reversal of the usual pattern, Boy Novak runs away from New York City and her brutally abusive father to a small town where she meets and marries Arturo Whitman, a talented artisan with a beautiful young daughter, Snow. Boy never imagined herself as an evil stepmother, but when she and Arturo have their own baby girl, Bird, the Whitman family secrets are revealed and events spin out of Boy's control. Ultimately, Boy learns some secrets about her own background, and this become more than a novel about race and passing, as other kinds of identities become blurred, and even the worst villains turn out to be more complicated than we thought.
      Oyeyemi's transformative take on the traditional fairy tale and the way she weaves that story of the tyranny of the mirror and standards of beauty into something even more relevant to today is wonderfully inventive. To quote the New York Times reviewer, it is "[g]loriously unsettling." Add to that Oyeymi's marvelous style, "jagged and capricious at moments, lush and rippled at others," and this becomes a reading experience that, for me at least, drew me in and wouldn't let go. I don't know if she's planned a sequel (I suspect not), but if she does write one, I'll be first in line!

Jason Gurley's Eleanor (2016) takes a tragic family narrative and makes it more than a poignant, deeply moving story by incorporating elements of speculative fiction that enhance rather than distract from the human elements that make it so moving. It's about loss and love and how, in families, people can both damage and save one another.
      Eleanor is intricately crafted and works on many levels: the naturalistic stories of Eleanor, her sister, her mother, and her grandmother, and other, more magical realities where Eleanor meets strange and mysterious characters who may be more than they appear. This is a tender and powerful, haunting and genre-defying novel, and Jason Gurley is a generous, open-hearted, and compassionate writer.

     The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George is easily the most romantic and sentimental of these three novels, and that may be why it has been such a bestseller. This is the second time I've read it, though (my book group will be discussing it next Friday), and I have decided there is a solid core to this novel that the Washington Post reviewer dismissed as a "confection." Yes, it's set in fantasy locations - Paris, the coast of France, Provence - that are described in gorgeous, delicious detail. Yes, the characters are generally nice, decent, and attractive in various ways, some fairly quirky. But that doesn't make it mindless fluff.
     This is a road story, a quest story, with a hero who needs to learn to live again, after twenty years of loneliness and grief. Jean Perdu is the fifty-year-old owner of the bookshop, or rather the book barge, the Literary Apothecary, moored on the Seine, where he not only sells books but, because of his ability to read people as well as literature, he prescribes books that will be helpful to his customers who are experiencing "minor to moderate emotional turmoil." Some of us can relate to that, I think. I have read novels years ago that I thought were wonderful, but not mentioning them to certain people for fear they might open personal wounds, but insisting that someone else read a certain book because I knew it was just what that person needed. (And having that person confirm later that I was right.) Perdu can prescribe for others, but he is unable or unwilling to heal himself, until a letter from the past confronts him with a truth that changes everything. So he unties his boat and sets off down the rivers and canals of France to find . . . what? He doesn't know.
     There is no Holy Grail for Jean Perdu, but there are large and small discoveries, about the world and himself, that will help him to reclaim his life and find happiness again. The assortment of new friends, new places, and new experiences is mostly delightful, due at least in part to Nina George's writing and her excellent translator, Simon Pare (it was first published in German), and sometimes very sad. But the greatest sadness is within Jean Perdu (perdu is, after all, French for lost), as he struggles to open himself to life once again, and each step he takes toward that goal, and toward helping his companions find what they are looking for, kept me turning the pages.
     It is a lovely book, light enough to read on the beach, on a plane (or on a boat), thoughtful enough to make some worthwhile observations about life and relationships, not only with others but with ourselves. For example:

Habit is a vain and treacherous goddess. She lets nothing  disrupt her rule. She smothers one desire after another: the desire to travel, the desire for a better job or a new love. She stops us from living as we would like, because habit prevents us from asking ourselves whether we continue to enjoy doing what we do. 

Reading, however, is a very good habit. I hope your summer reading is going well.

GHOSTLY SURPRISES

While I was reading Yangsze Choo's 2013 novel The Ghost Bride, I didn't once think of Amy Tan. I was so immersed in Choo's story of power, intrigue, and yes, love among the living, the dead, and those who move between those worlds, that I didn't really consider anything beyond the pages in front of me. I mean that as a compliment to Choo; Amy Tan is one of my favorite authors, because of the way she brings her characters' different worlds together so that the reader can experience them. In this novel, Choo exhibits that same gift.

The premise is enough in itself to provoke interest: the daughter of a genteel but bankrupt Chinese family receives a proposal from a much wealthier family that she become a "ghost bride" for the family's only son, who died under mysterious circumstances. But it does not begin to prepare the reader for the twists and turns, loves and hates, and matters of life and death, both in this world and the spirit realm, that Li Lan, Choo's smart and independent-minded heroine and narrator, will encounter.

The setting is Malaya in 1893, when it was still a British colony settled by various ethnicities over the centuries, among them a considerable Chinese-Malayan population who maintain their own traditions, though not as rigidly as they might on the mainland. The ghost marriage is one of these, though it was apparently never common. I think I had heard of it before (or maybe that was a Tim Burton movie), but didn't really know anything about it. However, the exotic setting, along with the first paragraphs, hooked me immediately:

One evening, my father asked me whether I would like to become a ghost bride. Asked is perhaps not the right word. . . .
My father was smoking opium. It was his first pipe of the evening, so I presumed he was relatively lucid. . . .

Li Lan is an engaging narrator, and as her story progresses from a naturalistic narrative of the social and economic world of Malacca to a perilous quest into the supernatural world of the dead, she finds both love (though this is NOT a "romance novel") and danger, and she discovers things she hadn't known about herself and her own family, as well as about the Lims who want her to marry their dead son. The spirit world mirrors the world of the living in many ways, especially in social hierarchies and bureaucracy, with crime and corruption among both the living and the dead. In each world, Li Lan finds enemies and friends, though it's not always easy at first to tell who is which.

The folklore and mythology that ground the story are fascinating and clearly represented, the mystery and adventure are compelling, and the writing is very, very good. The author's "Notes" at the end are not necessary to the reader's understanding and enjoyment of the story, but they were a welcome bonus. This is Yangsze Choo's first novel, and it is definitely an auspicious debut.

A PARABLE FOR OUR TIME

I wouldn't describe myself as a full-blown sci-fi fan, but I enjoy reading thoughtful speculative fiction by writers I admire, like Ursula K. LeGuin, Frank Herbert, Margaret Atwood, and the late and much-mourned Octavia Butler. I can't help wondering if Butler's novel The Parable of the Sower would have seemed as powerful to me if I had read it when it was first published in 1993, before the recent glut of dystopian novels, some very good, most aimed at the YA market.  Right now, twenty-three years later, the terrifying, anarchic world of Butler's story seems all too possible, especially in this increasingly bizarre election year.

The story begins in another election year, 2024, just eight years from now, and the America Butler describes is much closer to the one we know than it is to, say, the world of The Hunger Games. Her narrator/protagonist is a Black teenager, Lauren Olamina, who lives in a walled and gated, ethnically diverse community about twenty miles from Los Angeles. Some people, like Lauren's father, a Baptist minister and college professor, still go "outside" to work, but "outside" has become a dangerous and terrifying place, its streets filled with roving gangs of thieves, drug addicts (one new drug turns its users into violent pyromaniacs), and of course the homeless and destitute. The education system has crumbled and many people are illiterate; Lauren's stepmother holds classes in their home for the children of the eleven households inside their walled enclave. Self-defense is even more essential than literacy, so when they turn fifteen all children are taken "outside" into the surrounding hills for firearms training. It is a world that does not allow for illusions, one in which Lauren realizes that a time may come when she must kill or be killed.

Lauren is a reader and a writer; the novel is structured as a series of journal entries covering a period of more than three years. During that time Lauren develops and refines her own belief system, a theology she calls "Earthseed," which describes God as Change. When the "outside" breaks in and Lauren's community is burned and her family murdered, she escapes and takes to the road, like thousands of others heading north. Earthseed gives her strength to survive and go on and, as she joins with a small group of other survivors (two from her community and later a few others, all with their own stories). She becomes the group's leader, with the goal of establishing an intentional community, based on the principles of Earthseed, in some safer place. The search for that place makes up the second half of the book.

When I finished Parable of the Sower last night, I felt actual separation anxiety, to the point where I nearly got dressed to go out to the book store for the sequel, Parable of the Talents. But it was too late. All the stores were closed. I'll get it today.

Butler published Parable of the Talents in 1998, and had plans to continue the series with a third book to be called Parable of the Trickster, but she had trouble with writer's block and moved on to other projects. Her last novel, Fledgling, was published in 2005. I've read Fledgling, a stand-alone novel exploring the culture of a vampire community living in mutualistic symbiosis with humans, and her best-selling novel, Kindred (1979), in which an African American woman is transported from 1976 Los Angeles to early nineteenth-century Maryland, where she meets her ancestors: Rufus, a white slave holder, and Alice, a free Black woman forced into slavery later in life. She wrote many other books, including the Patternmaster series and the Xenogenesis trilogy, as well as short stories, which I look forward to reading.

Sadly, Octavia Butler died in 2006, at the age of 58, from head injuries sustained in a fall to the sidewalk in her front yard; the fall may have been occasioned by a stroke. No one knows for sure. What we do know is that the ideas expressed in her fiction show us a great deal about ourselves, about the world that shaped us and the world we seem to be creating. Things are very bad in that future world, but for Lauren and her companions it is not a world without hope. Nor need it be for us.

Butler herself described Parable of the Sower as a cautionary tale. "I imagined the United States becoming, slowly, through the combined effects of lack of foresight and short-term unenlightened self-interest, a third-world country," she said in a conversation about Parable of the Sower. Twenty-three years later, some might say her words contain more prophecy than imagination.