Land of Milk and Honey (2023) by C. Pam Zhang

 

American author C. Pam Zhang

Book Review

Land of Milk and Honey (2023)

by C. Pam Zhang

      I didn't love C. Pam Zhang's debut novel, How Much of These Hills is Gold, but I certainly admired it.  Any American author who makes their debut novel something OTHER than a coming-of-age book about their particular experience/milieu or a book about how difficult relationships, dating and marriage are is interesting to me.  That debut didn't go unnoticed- it got longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020 and her second novel, Land of Milk and Honey was published by Penguin Random House main, where her first book was published by Riverhead, the prestige literary fiction imprint wholly owned and operated Penguin, now Penguin Random House.  That's a promotion! 

   I mention it because so much of the contemporary scene for literary fiction is decided by who gets published in the first place, and whether they get a second book, a third book, etc, at the same level.  Readers have almost nothing to do with that process, and yet breaking free of its orbit in any significant way is essentially impossible.  When you write about contemporary literary fiction you are writing about the mainstream publishing behemoths and their market-driven choices.   

  I knew Land of Milk and Honey would be a priority read after reading a one line description that promised a near-future dystopia and a food-driven plot.  How, I thought to myself, could that go wrong?  I found the New York Times book review, written by Alexandra Kleeman, to be polite but not an overwhelming recommendation.  She also claims to respect Zhang's resistance to the short-attention span of modern readers, but it was hard for me to see how Land of Milk and Honey would be taxing to the average reader of literary fiction.  It is, after all, part genre- nothing complicated about a climate-based near-future dystopia because we already live in one, and part conventional American literary fiction about a character with a complicated relationship to capitalism, western values and her immigrant parents.   

   I checked out the Audiobook from the library- narrated by Eunice Wong (Julliard graduate actress) who voices the Southern Californian Chinese-American chef (nameless by design) at the center of the book.   It was a great Audiobook- Wong captures the voice of the chef, no doubt.   The story at the center of the book- a remote Italian mountain top where a billionaire and his prodigy daughter are preparing to survive the end of the world- has its moments, but the most memorable portions concerned the chef looking back on her relationship with her doctor-in-china-cleaning-lady-in-america single mother and her struggles growing up in southern california.

    

Caucasia (1998) by Danzy Senna

 1001 Novels: A Library of America

Caucasia (1998)

by Danzy Senna

Boston, Massachussets

Massacussets: 15/30

   The 1001 Novels: A Library of America has slowed to a crawl during the big fall release season/awards shortlists on both sides of the Atlantic.   It doesn't help that I'm staring at a literal stack of YA and "domestic" fiction in my study.  I'm really not in a hurry to read any of this books I've got checked out from the library in pursuit of this project.  Caucasia is another volume from the sad families and their children genre that editor Susan Straight seems to prefer in her American fiction.  Senna is a professor of English at USC and she's married to fellow writer Percival Everett.  Senna comes from a mixed-race background- her mother Fanny Howe, is white, and her father, Carl Senna, is black.  They were married in 1968 (mixed race marriage was legalized in 1967) and split up in 1970.  Caucasia, and much of her other work, reflects the life experience of being mixed race, specifically written from the perspective of a child who can pass for white, as, I believe, is the case with Senna based on pictures of her online.

  Caucasia was her debut novel and it's about Birdie Lee, a young girl, like Senna, the child of a white mother and black father who split up.  Her mom, who is, lets face it, a bit of a drama queen, decides that she is being targeted by the FBI for her radical activities (unclear if that is actually the case), so she splits up her family, sending Birdie's black-looking sister off with her Dad to Brazil and decamping with Birdie to northern New England, where they end up spending most of the book in small-town New Hampshire.  I'm assuming this didn't actually happen to Senna since it is both presented as a work of fiction and because she wrote a subsequent memoir of her personal experience as a mixed-race child.

  Caucasia is another example of a book on the 1001 Novels: A Library of America written from the perspective of a teen although it is not YA fiction.   Like many issues related to race, growing up in the Bay Area in an upper-middle class millieu shielded me from many of the harsh realities of race in America.  It wasn't until I got to college in Washington DC that I realized that interracial relationships were in any way controversial.  Certainly, among on elementary through high school classmates there were plenty of interracial relationships- black/white, white/asian, black/asian, etc.  It just wasn't particularly unusual in that place and time.  I know better now, of course, and Caucasia is a good book for those looking for insight on the experience of growing up biracial in America.

Abyss (2023) by Pilar Quintana

 Book Review

Abyss (2023)

by Pilar Quintana

translation by Lisa Dillman

  Strong year for the finalists in the National Book Award for Translated Literature.  You've got the second novel by David Diop, a disturbing book of short stories by Bora Chung (Korean lit is so hot rn!)  Abyss, by Colombian author Pilar Quintana, who was nominated in 2020 in the same category for The Bitch, is another strong contender on the theory that multiple nominations for major literary awards increase the author's chance of winning each time.  Abyss is a familiar tale, told from a newish perspective, about the impact a parent's lives have on the inner life of their daughter, eight and a half, narrated by that daughter. This is an example of a child narrator for a work of adult fiction- nothing about Abyss is YA or children's lit. 

   The struggles of Claudia's parents, particularly her mother, who spends her days in bed reading celebrity gossip magazines, is hardly novel, but the location, Cali Colombia.  The time isn't specified but the gossip references in Claudia's mothers magazines: The death of Karen Carpenter, in particular, happens during the course of the novel.  The real star of Abyss, is Cali Colombia itself, which seems a quasi-idyllic place in the eyes of eight year old Claudia.  1983 was before the rise of the Cali cartel, and Abyss includes a distinct locations- a modernist vacation home built onto the side of the cliff.  This location proves significant in the development of the plot and gives the book its name. 

  Abyss doesn't feel like a prize winner to me- there isn't anything here that wasn't in What Maisie Knew in 1897, but the place and time of the book made it an interesting read, and I do like Quintana and her general style.  I'd like to see a bigger book from her, but I know that shorter pieces are all the rage these days, so I'm pretty sure she doesn't care about going big. Still, Cali...Colombia...historical fiction... lotta material there to mine.