House of Wonder (2014) by Susan Healy

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

House of Wonder (2014)

by Susan Healy

Harwick, New Jersey

New Jersey: 3/13

    New Jersey is another literary territory that raises low expectations in terms of anticipated merit.  If you wanted me to make an argument for the best art that has come out of New Jersey I'd probably say the Sopranos television show, which is as New Jersey as it gets and lightyears better and more entertaining than any of the novels from this state of the country.   These low expectations were brought into sharp focus by House of Wonder which is a New Jersey variation on the "city girl comes home the country/suburb/etc" to resolve outstanding childhood issues.   Here, the outstanding childhood issue is her Mom and her twin brother, who is autistic but lives in a place and time before that was something that people acknowledged.  I had to keep glancing at the publication date- 2014- although I assume she is talking about a time period from decades ago, to convince myself House of Wonder wasn't actually written in the 1980's instead of just taking place there-ish. 

  House of Wonder also has a strong storyline about the Mom and generally speaking the theme is that of inherited mental illness/disability and the way that history is often disguised and occluded over time, often on purpose to avoid someone not wanting to have children with someone else.  It's a theme that hits pretty close to home, so I didn't really have to read a book about this boring lady, her poor life choices (she gets knocked up by a New York City chef, has the kid and then he leaves her to open a restaurant in Tokyo, so she has to move back to her hometown where she makes a living as a corporate interior designer or something similar), and her boring family problems.  

  House of Wonder is another in what feels like a plurality of titles inside 1,001 Novels: A Library of America where every important character is a member of the same nuclear family.  I can't think of a single book so far that is substantially about a work environment, and few that are set at a school.  Based on the books selected by Susan Straight, editor of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America it is clear that she thinks family relationship are essentially the only thing worth reading about in fiction.

River of Shadows (2003) by Rebecca Solnit

 Book Review

River of Shadows: 

 Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003)

by Rebecca Solnit

   This is going to sound crazy, but I actually had the idea to write this exact book, or something like it, then I went and looked to see if anyone had already it, and found that Rebecca Solnit had written precisely the same book I had considered writing, in 2003.  I'd never heard of it before I looked it up after having the same idea myself (20 years later lol), but it won the National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism in 2004 as well as some lesser literary awards, so it isn't in any way obscure.

   I had the idea during a recent visit to the important locations of the Modoc War in Northern California/Southern Oregon between several bands of Modoc Native Americans and the United States Army(!) between 1872 and 1873.  During that war, the US Army hired San Francisco photographer and pioneer in the field of moving pictures, Eadweard Muybridge, to document the war, and he came up and took a series of photos.  It was while looking at one of those photos in the Fort Klamath historical site that I had the idea for this exact book that Rebecca Solnit wrote (with the support of a Guggenheim grant!) over 20 years ago.

  Of course, the Modoc War is just a chapter in this much longer book about the intersection of capitalism, photography, the American West and the motion picture business, and Muybridge is involved enough to keep the whole book interesting.  In fact, I'm surprised this book hasn't been turned into a biopic or prestige TV piece- it has the action to support it- including Muybridge murdering his wife's' lover in cold blood, spectacular photography trips all over the western hemisphere and a supporting cast of characters ranging from Leland Stanford to Thomas Edison.

  

The Law of Enclosures (2006) by Dale Peck

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Law of Enclosures (2006)

by Dale Peck

Long Island, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 12/28

New York: 88/105

    Dale Peck was/is a pretty significant literary critic- which is a type of author that very much interests me- the writers who are both critics and trying to make a serious go of it writing fiction.  The more I write about books, the more I align with the proper philosophy of the critic is to try to increase attention for the books they prefer, while simply turning a blind eye to the negative.  Saying you don't like a specific book is fine, you state your opinion and move on- jumping in to take issue with some kind of critical "conventional wisdom" in an attempt to draw attention to yourself (and your opinion) is, in my opinion, the saddest path to literary notoriety.  It is also extremely bad karma. Peck, for example, is known for calling Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, "The first literal waste of paper, in terms of the trees felled to create the book, that I have encountered."  I mean, ok, lots of people don't like David Foster Wallace but jeez.  

  But then, to be that type of critic- which Peck is, for which he was known for being at the height of his notoriety, and then to turn around an expect people to be nice to his own work.  Well, no.  So I have no problem saying that I found The Law of Enclosures insufferable.   I learned after finishing the book that Peck is a member of the LGBTQ community, and it is funny, because I often thought, before I knew that, that The Law of Enclosures was written by a gay man who has no insight into the dynamics of abusive/failed relationship between hetero suburbanites.   Basically, The Law of Enclosures is a standard take down of the emptiness of suburban existence genus long island, socio economic classification lower middle, ethnic racial classification, white non-ethnic. 

  There are some elements of the mechanics of Peck's storytelling that make The Law of Enclosures both more interesting than an average example of the above genre AND way more annoying- trying to piece everything together like a jigsaw puzzle a la high modernism and post-modernism.   When it comes to the trauma-narratives of mid 20th century American suburbs I'll take my sob stories straight, thank you very much.   I'm really not expecting much from Long Island in terms of literature, since it is already one of my least favorite places in real life. 

The Language Puzzle (2024) by Steven Mithen

 Book Review

The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million Year Story of How Words Evolved (2024)

by Steven Mithen

   If you want to skip reading this book I can give you the ultimate thesis in a nutshell:

  "When you get right down to it, fully modern language got over the hump after humans managed to tame fire, which led to them sitting around a fire at night, and listening to one another talk.  The humans who were the best at telling stories around the campfire did better in the natural selection process and became the leaders of early humanity, leading to the development of modern, human language."

   Mithen really takes the long view- he is very serious about the six million year timeline, if only to emphasis how late in the game what we know as language actually developed.   Mithen pieces his story together using a variety of disciplines that typically operate in silos: archeology, genetics, linguistics and zoology.  His references to modern languages are mostly limited to their use as illustrations of shifts that took place hundreds of thousands of years ago, or deep characteristics of language that have been there from the beginning.  

  Even with the "this is going to be obsolete before its published" disclaimer that all popular authors writing about advances in genetic science give, the chapter related to genetics was particularly intriguing.  I think I had heard that we had managed to sequence a Neanderthals genome, but I certainly didn't know the things Mithen writes about how those differences influenced language development.  I gather, from this and other books, that even post-sequencing DNA genetics remains complicated because the way genes interact is complicated and it is highly unusual that you can trace anything to one exact gene.

I enjoyed the Audiobook because I actually got to hear all the different noises reference in the book instead of having to puzzle everything out on my own.

Leaving Brooklyn (2006) by Lynne Schwartz

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Leaving Brooklyn (2006)

by Lynne Schwartz

Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 11/28

New York: 87/105

   Leaving Brooklyn is a novella about a nice girl from Brooklyn growing up in the middle of the 20th century who f**** her optometrist as a 15 year old.  For a story that, these days, would likely end up with the perpetrator in prison for a lengthy stretch, Leaving Brooklyn is a surprisingly low stakes affair. I gather from the reviews I read from when Leaving Brooklyn that this a work of bio-fic/thinly veiled memoir, i.e. that is something that happened to the author, and it seems dated in that sense, as much as the "Great White Man" fiction that it mirrors.  These days, a 15 year old simply can not f*** an adult man without being considered a victim by society, in the place and time this book is set, 15 year olds could and did get married. 

   It was, in other words, a real cringe fest as the kids say, with the "love scenes" by the naive 15 year old protagonist and the adult doctor being particularly rough to stomach.  At least Leaving Brooklyn is short and it very much left me wondering what the f*** I had just read.

The New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century List

 The New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century List

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  This list dropped last week- I can't track down a printable list but you can find non paywalled versions on Goodreads.  The list was generated via a survey of 500+ authors and other literary types which means that there was no editorial portion of the process. There was no definition of "best" give to the voters though in the parlance of this blog it is clear that voters cared more for "classics" than "hits,"  many hits were absent- no Sally Rooney, no Karl Ove Knausgaard, no Harry Potter.  Very little genre work of any kind.  The interactive presentation on the Times website allows you to tick off each title to see how many you've read- I came out with a count of 50/100- which probably would have been higher but for the inclusion of non-fiction works- not 50/50 fiction/non-fiction, but I'd only read one of the non-fiction titles.   There were a surprising number of authors who landed two or more titles on the list- Jesmyn Ward had three I thin, Ferrante has two, and Denis Johnson had 2 or 3.

  Leaving aside the actual rank order from 1 to 100, there was plenty of similarity between the books picked by these folks and the books I've written about here.  I was shocked by how many books in translation made the list- including the number one book (Ferrante) and three of the top ten books.  I saw the similarity in this blog and that list in the number of works of translated fiction and in the presence of so many titles that eschew the ordinary lives of ordinary folks.  I've made a dogged attempt over the past five years to come to terms with the merits of domestic fiction but after seeing only a handful of such titles on this NYT list, I'm starting to think I'm correct in my opinion that domestic fiction isn't particularly interesting to anyone. 

The Singularity (1960) by Dino Buzzati

 Book Review

The Singularity (1960) 

by Dino Buzzati

Translated from the Italian Anne Milano Appel

New York Review of Books Edition 2024

    Italian author Dino Buzzati isn't a household name, but his  1940 novel, The Tartar Steppe (f/k/a The Stronghold) is well known to the sort of people who care about the world literary canon (i.e. me) and it serves as a major point of departure for the very well know J.M. Coetzee novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, which was turned into an absolutely insane movie starring Johnny Depp.  I bought The Singularity off the new release pile at an indie bookstore in Exeter, New Hampshire because it looked interesting and promised a prescient look at ethical issues surrounding AI- this from a book published in 1960, when AI was barely a thing.

   Also, it's a novella so it was good for vacation reading.  The story is about an Italian professor who is called away by the government to a mysterious military-type project in the Italian mountains.  There, the protagonist is introduced to an AI that fills an entire valley and a cast of interesting characters.  Everything is not as it seems, perhaps he faces great peril, etc.  If it was published today it would be tame stuff indeed but for 1960, and in Italy, wow.

   At 136 pages, it won't keep you up late, but the pay off is likewise minimal. Fun book to have available if you run into a fellow fan of The Tartar Steppe but probably not a book a general reader would seek out for any reason. The Singularity is also a good example of the type of books I'd like to be reading constantly but I just can't string them together in any meaningful way, in a way that relieves the incessant burden of deciding what to read next.  

Behold the Dreamers (2016) by Imbolo Mbue

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Behold the Dreamers (2016)

by Imbolo Mbue

Lehman Brothers Building, Wall Street, Manhattan

Manhattan: 33/33 

New York: 86/105

   Woop Woop that is all for Manhattan, baby.  I won't miss the rat infested apartments and swarthy immigrant families- of all races, genders and socioeconomic status.  The immigrant experience has been at the fore of the Manhattan sub-chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America- I count 9 out of the 33 books located on the island of Manhattan.  Fitting then, we finish with a 10th book about the immigrant experience- and one of my favorites, Imbolo Mbue's debut novel, Behold the Dreamers, about an economic migrant from West Africa and his family, and his job as the chauffeur for a partner at Lehman Brothers, just before and during their collapse.

  It's not the first time Lehman Brothers has popped up this year.  I recently read The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave Breeding Industry (2017)  by Ned and Constance Sublette and the Lehman Brothers were a whole chapter as the example, par excellence, of the links between 20th century high finance and the slave trade in the American South (Lehman Brothers got their start as slave-trading middle men.)  I was mildly surprised not to see this fact established by any of the characters, and I was left wondering if it was the author himself who didn't know, or if he did know, picked Lehman Brothers for that purpose, and then decided none of his characters would know about that fact, so decided to omit any further discussion.  Anyway, that would be the first thing I would point out in a book about the relationship between an African immigrant chauffeur and a Lehman partner in the early ought's.

  Beyond that incongruity I quite liked Behold the Dreamers both in terms the characters and the mechanics of the book which center around the experience of an African immigrant that time and place. I also liked his treatment of the immigration legal system which I found to be sophisticated and nuanced in a book written by a non-lawyer.  At the same time, the writing wasn't overly technical or erudite, his portrayal of his aspirational immigrant family, living in a quasi-legal state while they actively try to defraud the US Immigration System (which is just treated as a fait accompli.) was also well executed.

  I was just generally impressed by the technical acuity of the prose writing, if not by the characters themselves, who are all morally culpable for various reasons.