Gold Diggers (2020) by Sanjena Sathian

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Gold Diggers (2020)
by Sanjena Sathian

1400 Dunwoody Village Pkwy SUITE #1406

 Atlanta, Georgia

Georgia 11/26

    You'd think there would be more novels written by the sons and daughters of the Indian diaspora in America but one gets the sense that writing fiction is secondary to becoming a doctor, scientist or venture capitalist. The post World War II South Asian immigrants to the United States mostly arrived as graduate students in hard-science/technical subjects- they had top degrees from elite Indian universities.  There's a much smaller subset of small-business owning immigrants who were fleeing turmoil- your NYC cabbies and gas station owners, but mostly the South Asian experience in the US has been small families: Dad, Mom and one or two kids.  Dad works as a scientist or doctor or in computers, Mom stays at home or has some kind of home business.  Kids are under intense pressure to do well.  

   In that regard, what must be mildly embarrassing for Sathian's own parents (she went to Yale for undergraduate and then went to, sigh, the Iowa Writer's Workshop), is great for readers.  Sathian's magical realist/coming of age drama is a rare depiction of the inner lives of two families of reasonably well off Indian American immigrants living in suburban Atlanta.  Sathian's protagonist is feckless male high school student who moons over his more successful neighbor-girl, also Indian American.  One night he stumbles over her neighbor's secret:  Her mom is creating a drink out of stolen gold as a way to harness the ambitions of others.   Sathian goes light on the lore- I sense the hand of the market at work, but that doesn't detract from a lively tale. 

  I could actually identify somewhat with these characters- some of the action takes place in the Bay Area and some of Sathian's high school portraits reminds me of Indian American girls who went to my own, highly selective high school in Oakland.   I was glad to get this window into a world that had always seemed opaque to me as a high school/college/law school student.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025) by Stephen Graham Jones

 Audiobook Review

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025)

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Stephen Graham Jones is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet nation in Montana.  He is also a prolific author of genre fiction, with a bibliography that dates back to 2000, and usually with one publication a year, or two publications in one year and none in the next.  I'd never heard of him until he published The Only Good Indians, which was picked up by Simon & Schuster and represented a step up in authorial profile and out of the limitations of genre fiction (his previous publisher was Tor- a science fiction/fantasy/horror genre specialist.)

  I actually didn't like The Only Good Indian and didn't finish the Audiobook I checked out from the library, but that could have had something to do with the pandemic era publication date.  I also didn't know about the author's tribal affiliation, which makes a big difference in distinguishing genre horror from speculative but literary fiction.  The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, to me, is like, a riff on Interview with a Vampire but with the intent to actually say something about its historical era, instead of using the historical elements as scenery for the soap-opera plot.  It is also very much a horror novel with a very...um. visceral and uniquely Mountain West take on the familiar tropes of vampire lit.

  The format. a mysterious, black-clad Native American with an acute sensitivity to sunlight shows up one day in a late 19th century Montana frontier church whose minister has his own connections to the events that have touched the life of the stranger.  He insists on unburdening himself to the preacher over a series of evenings, and then the preacher recounts the events to his journal.

  Jones uses a somewhat awkward but historically accurate/appropriate framing device for this sort of 19th century yard, a present-day graduate student in western history who is the last descendant of the frontier preacher and who comes into possession of his narrative.  Considering his lengthy publication history, it's hard not to suspect that Jones is writing with editorial guidance about maximizing the potential for what I would imagine would be an FX miniseries adaptation.   More power to him- I think it would be a great tv show/movie, but you'd have to get the violence right, which would be tough. 

  The Audiobook is also good for this book because you get the Native American narrator voice, which I wouldn't have wanted to do in my head, reading a paper/e copy at home.

The Emperor of Maladies by Siddhartha Mukehjee

 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (New York Times)

The Emperor of Maladies (2010)

by Siddhartha Mukehjee

#84

   I'm wrapping up the non-fiction portion of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (New York Times) list.  I'm not sure if I'm going to do the fiction portion, since most of the books I haven't read from that part of the list are books I already know about and don't want to read.   I'm busy enough with my day job these days that I don't feel compelled to read as much during my leisure time.  I listened to the Audiobook version over a period of months.  It's a 22 hour listen, and frankly, 22 hours of listening to the history of the treatment of cancer proved to be a bit of a slog. 

   The take-away is that curing cancer is incredibly complicated because cancer itself is incredibly complicated.  Really, the history of cancer is the history of medicine itself.  No disease has attracted more attention from scientists seeking a cure, and The Emperor of Maladies was written at the cusp of the modern period, where a decline in the cost of genetic sequencing of individuals has made "curing cancer" a realistic prospect for a small but growing cohort of sufferers.   The major issue, as it turns out, is that each cancer is genetically different, and a cure requires sequencing the genetics of the cancer cells for a particular person.  

   Mukehjee does have lots to say about the causes of cancer, which can either be incredibly reassuring or the equivalent of a death sentence with no execution date.  Genetics plays a huge role in who does or doesn't get cancer, as do environmental factors and personal choices, but it really isn't only one thing or the other.  One fact I did take away is that family history is super important- if cancer runs in your family you are susceptible to it no matter how hard you try to stay away from risk factors, conversely, if no one in your immediate family has had cancer, you are more likely to get away with risky personal choices and environmental exposure.