Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) by Sadiiya Hartman

 Book Review

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019)

by Sadiya Hartman

New York Times Best Books of the 21st Century, 96

  When the New York Times published their Best Books of the 21st Century last month I was excited to see that they had both Fiction and Non-Fiction, books in translation and books in English and books by both non-American and American authors.  To often lists like this are parochial- "Best American Novels of the 21st Century," for example or they are perversely limited to one TYPE of book- usually the novel, to the exclusion of other forms of literature.   The New York Times list isn't flawless- there is little or no representation of poetry- but overall it's a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, foreign and domestic.  I've read most of the fiction titles but few of the non-fiction picks.

   Hartman writes about the lives of so-called "wayward women" of the American urban core in the early 20th century- almost entirely focusing on African-American women who were judged by the system to be dangerous enough to be sent away to a reformatory for up to three years at a stretch for crimes like having a child out of wedlock or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time coming home from work.  Hartman blends the non-fiction of facts she has gleaned from 20th century court documents with fictionalizations of the women from those documents.

  

 As Hartman repeatedly points out, the oppression in these pages is not hypothetical, but represents decades of actual lives ruined in the name of social progress.  Almost of all the court proceedings she discusses took place without the women being represented by anyone- a lawyer, a social worker, and truly once you were taken into the system, a place would be made for you.   Hartman also convincingly makes the point that many of these women were the direct inspiration for the American popular culture that emerged from the jazz age.   Women like Zelda Fitzgerald became  immortal icons, while the black-girls who inspired her went to the reformatory (and Zelda also got institutionalized, let's not forget.)

  

Daughters of Shandong (2024) by Eve J. Chung

 Book Review

Daughters of Shandong (2024)

by Eve J. Chung

   A recent publishing trend I do appreciate are these historical novels that tell grandmothers/grandfathers story.  It's an approach that gives an Auto-fictional vibe to work that otherwise might be construed as genre historical fiction.  It's also great to see American authors who write books like this one instead of starting off with a bildungsroman about a character that resembles the author.  As a best-seller, it's fantastic and more power to it.  It's not particularly sophisticated beyond the concept itself- taking Grandma's origin story and turning it into a compelling work of historical fiction.  The experience itself: the wife of a wealthy local landowner is left behind with her two "worthless" daughters when the Communist's come to town, she plots her escape out of the nascent Chinese Communist state, is very interesting.

  As the author points out in her Afterword, in which she makes the "grandma's origin story" plot clear, she also points out that the major players in post-Communist victory China:  The Chinese Communist Party, the British, who governed Hong Kong and the Nationalist Government of Taiwan, all had their own reasons to keep the refuge misery caused by the Communist victory quiet.  You can add to that the United States, which was fighting the Korean War nearby, thus it truly isn't well documented or well understood.

  I can forgive Chung her concessions to appealing to a broad, YA level audience.  One point that Chung does not soften is the ingrained sexism/prejudice against daughters in Chinese civilization. It's not exactly something one can point out in polite society but it comes up all the time- Chinese families face a lot of pressure to produce a male heir and are daughters produced BEFORE sons are considered bad luck and worthless.  Not something I learned about from Daughters of Shangdong but it's rare to see a work of fiction that centers this practice so squarely in the narrative.   That's also either the greatest strength and or weakness- Chung's plucky grandma-as-a-girl narrator sees the world through the eyes of a strong American feminist circa 2020 alternately acknowledging subservience to and criticisms of the strong tradition of deference to elders in Chinese culture.   Surely a "historically accurate" narrator would not  have such a sophisticated critique.

Kraken (2010) by China Miéville

 Book Review

Kraken (2010)

by China Miéville

  I checked this 2010 fantasy novel out as an Audiobook after reading the book Miéville just published with Keanu Reeves.  Miéville has been on my list for years, but I'm not a huge fantasy guy, so I needed some kind of bump of interest to get me reading listening.  I also liked the fact that the narrator was John Lee- who has done many (all?) of Kazuo Ishiguro's Audiobooks.  He's probably my favorite English accent Audiobook reader.

  Thus, I didn't let the 16 hour listening time phase me.  I also checked out Miéville on Wikipedia after reading the Keanu Reeves book and realized that he has a degree from the London School of Economics and is known as a Marxist, which is just adorable!   Miéville is classified as fantasy because of the strong element of the supernatural that runs through his work, but it's a fantasy that is firmly grounded in the mechanics of contemporary social sciences.  For example, the character Wati, described on Wikipedia as a "living Egyptian afterlife familiar," is, in this book, a union organizers for the familiars union (the witches cat, for example), and that is one of the plot-lines in Kraken.

  In fact, Mieville's world-building of a contemporary (circa 2010) London resembles nothing as much as the street-fighting days of the early to middle 20th century in places like Russia before the Russian Revolution took hold and Berlin before the rise of Hitler.  London is endemically infested with various cults and supernatural criminals, fighting each other beneath the consciousness of the general public but on the radar of the London Police, who have their own supernatural crime unit.

  Kraken has much of what I actually like in fantasy- it's set in the "real world" with the exception of the supernatural plot elements, it draws not just from mythology but also social sciences like economics and sociology and it is written with consciousness of the actual history of any supernatural elements in the plot.  The Keanu Reeves book had similar traits, and I noticed some obvious parallels, specifically the significant role in both books played by inanimate objects imbued with a supernatural consciousness and the use of magic as a kind of practical fix-it to get out of sticky situations. 

  On the other hand its a 528 page "trying to prevent the end of the world" type plot and it was hard not to feel like the book was about 150 pages over-long.  While I, personally, enjoy the world-building exposition in Kraken because I find it interesting, it's hard to ignore the negative impact the exposition has on the plot mechanics of what is a glorified detective novel. 

The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Great Gatsby (1925)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

West Egg, Long Island New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 26/26 

New York: 103/103

    Last book from New York state- certainly to be the biggest state, I'm guessing. I'm guessing the California won't have more than 80 books for the whole state. I can't actually remember when I read The Great Gatsby last, or first, for that matter, but I know I've read the book at least twice and seen two different versions of the movie- the 1974 Robert Redford one directed by Francis Ford Coppola and the Leonard DiCaprio 2013 version by Baz Luhrmann. 

 I don't think it's a stretch to call The Great Gatsby the first hit of the mass-media era- most people today don't even realize that it was a bit of a bomb when it was released and only achieved canonical status in 1926 when a theatrical version proved to be a huge hit and toured the country etc. My sense is that the idea of the novel as a piece of expandable intellectual property started with The Great Gatsby.  The Great Gatsby is also the UR example of the "Great American Novel" genre, the idea of a novel that purports to tell a deeper truth about American society beyond the lives of its characters.  Few of the books of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list have fit that category thus far- editor Susan Straight has shown a strong preference for the YA bildungsroman, strong and diverse representation among racial, ethnic and gender lines.   Straight has stuck to her one book per author rule- I think Colson Whitehead could have had at least three of his books in this chapter.  She has largely eschewed genre fiction outside of detective fiction, which has made it in both as genre titles and as genre/literary fiction cross-overs- where are all the future New Yorkers?   

 New Jersey to close out Chapter 2 next and then it's off to  Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina and South Carolina, (Chapter 3) before doubling back northward to do Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas (Chapter 4).