Beautiful Days (2024) by Zach Williams

 Book Review

Beautiful Days (2024)

by Zach Williams

   Beautiful Days is the debut short-story collection by American author Zach Williams.  I checked out the Audiobook from the library after reading the New York Times review earlier this month referred to him as a "genuine young talent...who deftly palpates the dark areas of human psyche." while at the same time making many of the same points I've made here about the difficulty of writing about short-story collections.  My favorite was "Ghost Image" about a divorced dad type slouching towards the end of the world at  Disneyworld type resort.  I also liked "Wood Sorrel House," a riff on the Groundhog Day theme featuring a terrifying infant toddler and some fine descriptive work.   The Audiobook I read was well done- most of the stories (all?) feature a narrator/protagonist type with a single point of view expressed in each story, which makes for a good listening experience.  I wouldn't exactly recommend Beautiful Days to all and sundry, but if you are someone who likes short stories and edgy milieus then Zach Williams is going to be your guy!

Brat (2024) by Gabriel Smith

 Book Review

Brat (2024)

by Gabriel Smith

   I've run into people who join multiple libraries so they can get popular books faster, on the theory that people living in dipshit Arkansas aren't going to be interested in the latest- not sure if that actually works or not, but I think about every time I have to wait three months for the latest work of hot literary fiction. Such was the case with Brat by English author Gabriel Smith, which had the good fortune to be released at essentially the same time as the Charli XCX record of the same name.  He even faked an email which purported to say that Charli XCX named Brat after the novel, but that has been debunked.  Still, google this book and the first 10 returns on Google all mention the serendipity of sharing a title with THE album of the summer.

 The numbers haven't been great in the US- I imagine they are better in the UK.  Gabriel, who I surmise is the titular Brat- though the only reference is to a shirt his ex-girlfriend owned that had brat written across the front- is a writer, in his 20's.  He owes his publisher a novel, his Dad just died and his brother and sister in law want/need him to clean up the house for sale in the aftermath of Dad's death, Mom being in the later stages of dementia and confined to a home.

  Gabriel is grief-stricken, handling everything badly, and to make matters worse, large sheets of his skin are peeling off.  It sounds grosser than it actually is: the skin peels away to reveal...more skin. Gabriel haphazardly tries to figure out what is going on with his skin while he deals with a couple of neighbor teens with bad attitudes, a frightening deer-man who may or may not be stalking him with grievous intent, and his bitch sister-in-law.   There's also his Dad's marijuana grow in the attic to attend to, manuscripts and video tapes that change their content with every reading/viewing, black mold and a collapsing roof. 

  In the end there is plenty of atmosphere but only the loosest outline of a plot.  Smith is not concerned with a cohesive narrative, plainly.  It's a fun, hipster-type read and enough to keep interested in his next book, which is hopefully neither a short-story collection nor a memoir, but not a fantastic book.

On Such a Full Sea (2014) by Chang Rae Lee

 Book Review

On Such a Full Sea (2014)

by Chang Rae Lee

  I read Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee's 1994 debut as part of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list, where it is part of the New York/Manhattan chapter.  I enjoyed Native Speaker, so when I saw he had written a dystopian-fiction/literary fiction cross-over book a decade ago, I checked out the B.D. Wong narrated Audiobook from the library.   I enjoyed the listening experience and I guess I would call On Such a Full Sea an interesting failure- again my own feelings were echoed by the contemporaneous review in the New York Times, by now Pulitzer Prize winning author Andrew Sean Greer.  I actually wanted to quote his paragraph of the state of dystopian sci-fi, literary-fiction cross over circa 2014:

Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood (in her recently concluded MaddAddam trilogy) have all tackled this genre. Doris Lessing’s “Mara and Dann” is a classic, as is Anthony Burgess’s “Clockwork Orange.” Further back in time, one has only to think of Orwell, Huxley and Wells, even Jack London and Mary Shelley. -New York Times(paywall)

   Amazing that Greer would single out the MaddAddam trilogy at the expense of The Handmaid's Tale, but otherwise that's a good summary. I think you'd have to put Kazuo Ishiguro in there in 2024, but besides those two things.  

  If I had to focus on one reason On Such a Full Sea wasn't a hit, it would be the choice of the author to use a collective second person tense to narrate- as in the, story is told from the collective perspective of the citizens of B-more, a post collapse Chinese colony occupying the ruins of Baltimore.  The protagonist is Fan, daughter of B-more and a "tank diver"- someone tasked with maintaining the aqua-culture tanks that Bmore uses to cultivate fish which they then sell to the "Charters"- enclaves of wealthy post-Americans who exist largely cut off from both colonies like Bmore and the unorganized "counties"- which is a mild take on the Mad Max/The Road idea of society in the aftermath of a total collapse of government. 

  Fan's adventures start out after she leaves Bmore in search of her disappeared boyfriend, whose child she is carrying.  Because of the second person narrator, we never get inside Fan's head and her twin desires- to find her boyfriend hopefully via her brother, one of the few colonists who have been elevated to charter life, never separate out.   Time is a little imprecise because of Fan's adventures, but there is no denying that at the beginning of the book she knows she is pregnant, and by the end she is still pregnant and not one person has noticed, so we're talking a couple months tops. 

  But I thought the world building was interesting, and Lee is a no-doubt writer of literary fiction, so the overall quality level of the prose was very high. Not a book I would go around recommending, but I personally enjoyed the Audiobook experience.