New Teeth (2021) by Simon Rich

Book Review

New Teeth (2021)

by Simon Rich

    I actually thought Simon Rich was English, maybe because the narrator of the New Teeth, Rich's new collection of short-stores, has an English accent.  Turns out he's not, but rather an enfant terrible of American comedy, with "youngest writer ever on SNL" and "son of New York Times columnist and writer Frank Rich" prominently featured on his Wikipedia page.   Anyway, credit where credit is due, New Teeth made me laugh, repeatedly even though you would think some of the themes (a baby detective investigating the disappearance of his younger sister's toy, A half man-half ape city-rescuing superhero asked to work a desk job in the city bureaucracy) sound too much like other contemporary culture products to be interesting.   Fact is, I loved the story about the baby detective and I loved the story about the half-man, half-ape superhero reckoning with his obsolescence(Clobbo.) 

   And so, even though I try to avoid books of short-stories by American Humorists if at all possible, I liked this book of short stories by this American humorist.   I highly recommend the Audiobook, which was a great format for this book.

An Inventory of Losses (2020) by Judith Schalansky

Book Review

An Inventory of Losses (2020) 

by Judith Schalansky

   I've appreciated the recent increase in English language attention to works of literary fiction translated into English.  First, the Booker revamped its every-so-often recognition of a translated author to a yearly prize with the same format of its other awards(longlist/shortlist).  That was followed in short order by the National Book Awards announcing a new category for Translated Literature, which presumably should consist of all their formats, but seemingly omits poetry and children's literature in favor of a longlist that resembles the English language longlist in fiction.

   Something I've noted about both the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the Booker International Prize is that the authors tend more to the experimental/"High" literature than the English language longlist, which typically favor bangers written by proven commodities or first-novels written by promising new comers.  Experimental fiction tends to be relegated to maybe one or two titles for each English longlist, here it is the reverse.  The only non-experimental "banger" type book I've encountered so far on either longlist for 2021 is  Waiting for the Waters to Rise by known commodity Maryse Conde, a perennial Nobel Prize contender and actual winner of the one-off alternative Nobel handed out a couple years ago when the actual Nobel took the year off. 

  The New Directions Publishing product listing for An Inventory of Losses cites W.G. Sebald and Bruce Catwin- which are both good comparisons.  Also Rebecca Solnit, who I haven't read.  Those familiar with Scalansky's last book, An Atlas of Lost Islands, should know what they are getting into, those who aren't familiar with Atlas are probably not going to like An Inventory of Losses.  Inventory has discrete moments of joy- like when she describes the lost objects at the beginning of each chapter, but the actual chapters themselves are hard to connect. I honestly couldn't tell you what each is about without going back and referring to marked passages and notes, which I didn't bother to keep for this book.  It was like looking at a book of interesting photographs more than reading a book.

Strange Beasts of China (2020) by Yan Ge

Book Review

Strange Beasts of China (2020)

by Yan Ge

  Reading contemporary Chinese literary fiction is interesting because...if it comes from China, it means that the text has passed the censor's pen and been granted permission to be published by the Chinese Communist Party.  But what does that mean?  It's not a blanket prohibition on criticizing Chinese party because many of the Chinese language books I've read can be easily interpreted as a critique of contemporary aspects of Chinese society, materialism for example.  Criticizing the impact of capitalism or "business culture" on workers seems to be all right.   

  Mostly what you get is oblique allegories where it is impossible to determine what secret more or political truth is being described.  Some of the difficulty stems from inability to directly criticize the Chinese Communist Party and I think some of it comes from the collection of ideas that can be described as "things lost in translation." 

   The gently surreal world of Strange Beasts of China is one where everything is basically the same with the exception of different tribes of human-like monsters who co-exist under difficult circumstances with their human counter-parts.  I was hopeful for Strange Beasts of China, but everything is just so oblique.  I honestly don't know what to make of it.

So Long, See You Tomorrow (1979) by William Maxwell

Book Review

So Long, See You Tomorrow (1979)

by William Maxwell

   In August, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott published a lengthy article on American author William Maxwell as part of his series of "The Americans"- artists who help to define what is to be American.  The whole idea is to revive interest in "overlooked or under-read" authors (his formulation).  So far he has published essays on Wallace Stegner, Edward P. Jones and Joy Williams.   This process of artistic revival is very much at the heart of this blog- seeing how, if and when it works to bring an Audience to an author who is either non-canonical or canonical for other types of work besides literary fiction.  

  Answering the question of why William Maxwell came to be "overlooked or under-read" seems pretty easy, he wrote about an unfashionable part of the world (the American Midwest) during an unfashionable time, the middle part of the 20th century, after all the slots for canonical writers from the Midwest who wrote about the eartly 20th century/late 19th century, were filled.

  So Long, See You Tomorrow was his last novel by about 20 years, his second-to-last novel appearing in 1961 and this first appearing as a New Yorker short story (split into two parts) in 1979 before being published as a book in 1980.   A reader for looking for reasons Maxwell is "overlooked or under-read" might point the timeline of his bibliography:  novels published in 1934, 1937, 1945, 1948 and 1961.  Short story collections in 1956, 1966, 1977, 1988 and 1992.   That is not the kind of productivity meant to inspire the cultural-industrial complex to do it's best promotional work. 

  Next, you might consider his subject matter Wikipedia calls it "domestic realism," which, really didn't come into vogue as a subject of literary fiction worthy of canonical status until the 1970's, and didn't fully arrive until decades after that.   I've noticed that domestic realism penned by American authors from and about the Midwest seems to be a favorite for re-issue houses, probably on the grounds that republishing an American author has a better chance to catch on than publishing non-American authors. 

      So Long, See You Tomorrow recaps the events leading to a murder in a small town as experienced by various participants- a couple of broken marriages, allegations of infidelity, a divorce trial, back before you could just get divorced.  The events take place in the 1920's,  and I'm not sure I would be able to guess that it wasn't written back then- Maxwell has a style heavily influenced by the high modernism of Virginia Woolf, and everything about So Long, See You Tomorrow, feels like high modernism from the early 20th century.

Matrix (2021) by Lauren Groff

American author Lauren Groff

Book Review

Matrix (2021)

by Lauren Groff

  I loved, loved, loved this new novel by American author Lauren Groff, which is nominated for the National Book Award this year.   I liked Florida (2018) and Fates & Furies (2015) and I was excited for her new book even before I learned it was the reimagining of the life of a nun during the pre-Black Death Middle Ages.  Her protagonist, Marie de France, is the bastard child of a French noblewoman (a rape at the hands of an English royal during hostilities in France.)  After her beloved Mother expires, Marie spends three years undetected pretending that her Mother is still alive.  Discovered, she is packed off to England "Angle Terre" to revive a decrepit Nunnery in the English country-side. 

   While it isn't exactly a cheery place, the Middle Ages before the upheaval of the Black Death was relatively stable. Groff seems well versed on recent development in scholarship on this period of history, because Marie's nunnery doesn't seem like a such a bad place to land, especially after Marie starts taking care of business.  Also, at 220 pages, Matrix isn't a slog- it's actually quite unlike a normal work of historical fiction, where the author seems set on making darn sure that the reader knows how much the author knows about the period.   Can a television version a la The Favourite or Catherine the Great on Hulu.

Bewilderment (2021) by Richard Powers

Book Review

Bewilderment (2021)

by Richard Powers

   Is Richard Powers a potential Nobel Prize winner?   It might have seemed highly unlikely before The Overstory won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018.   Before that he had only some longlist/shortlist nominations and a single National Book Award for The Echo Maker.   Now he's got the National Book Award, The Pulitzer and a legitimate shot at the Booker Prize this year after Bewilderment made the shortlist.   I was surprised by the shortlist pick, if only because nominating an American writer with a large popular audience for the longlist as a way to drum up interest in the lesser known writers seems like a very Booker thing to do.

   I think if Powers actually wins a Booker he'd have to be considered as a Nobel Prize contender.   Surely, if a novelist is picked because of the importance of novels and their relationship with the hard sciences, Powers would be one of a select few.  Historically, the Nobel seems to favor "political" or "socially conscious" writers over those concerned with science, but perhaps the times are changing. I mean really, after handing the Literature award to Bob Dylan, it really feels like anything is possible.

   The elevator pitch for Bewilderment is "Richard Powers does Flowers for Algernon."  Flowers for Algernon is the famous and oft read short story turned novel about Charlie, a "retarded" janitor who receives life changing intelligence boosting surgery.   In Powers' take, the narrator is the single father of a "neurodivergent" pre-teen boy who suffers from non-specified differences that combine aspects of ADHD with Austism/Aspergers syndrome.  Powers is scrupulously aware of avoiding labels, probably because he understands how distracting the labelling process can be in the course of attempting to tell a story.

   It's obvious that there is a slot for neurodivergency in the canon, presumably to be meted out either to an Author who is actually nuerodivergent themselves or some kind of cross-over writer who first nuerodivegency and some other slot- gender/sexuality seems like a likely pairing.  Alas, that writer has not emerged, leaving the field to interpreters of neurodiversity like Powers.   Speaking as the older sibling of a neurodivergent child, I think that Powers gets it right.  

   It should come as no surprise to anyone that the flag-wavers in the neurodiversity movement  tend to be otherwise socioeconomically privileged individuals.  Specifically, the overlaps between parental/societal expectations that a specific child should "do well" in school and the failure, for whatever reasons, of said child to do so frequently leads down the path depicted in Bewilderment, whereas less advantaged children simply stop going to school or even up in alternative scenarios.   Just speaking from my own personal experience, the overriding obsession with the special needs of a neurodivergent child to the exclusion of all other concerns seems to be the prerogative of a very particular (white, well educated, financially secure) type of parent.

   So in that way, Bewilderment, with it's tenure level Astrobiologist single father is par for the course.  Although the narrator himself is the child of a schizophrenic mother and the husband of a deceased life who struggled with serious depression, he never appears to question the wisdom of having a child in the first place, and seems genuinely surprised with how everything turned out.   My experience is that, even when the raising of a neurodivergent child goes well, it's basically a life ender, in that the parent ends up just spending the rest of their life dealing with it.  It's enough to put you off wanting children, but not this guy. 

Second Place (2021) by Rachel Cusk

Book Review

Second Place (2021)

by Rachel Cusk

  Rachel Cusk is another good example of an author who I read because she gets a nomination to the Booker longlist, as she did this year for Second Place.  Second Place comes hot on the heels (relatively speaking) of the completion of her Outline Trilogy, which wrapped up in 2018 with Kudos.  Kudos was very much on my radar screen in 2018, but I just couldn't muster the energy to go back read the first two books in the trilogy.   

  I quite enjoyed Second Place, narrated by an unnamed woman who invites a notorious painter to her out-of-the-way estate.  Listening to the Audiobook, the painter sounded like a cross between Andy Warhol and Lucian Freud.   The truth is that I didn't want to enjoy Second Place, but I most certainly did.  I honestly can't get enough listening/reading to novels that revolve around artists and their behavior.  I can see why it didn't make the shortlist- it's not a signal masterpiece and the ending isn't fantastic- but it isn't some kind of experimental odyssey that makes no sense.