The Winter People (2014) by Jennifer McMahon

1001 Novels: A Library of America 

The Winter People 

by Jennifer McMahon (2014)

West Berlin, Vermont

Vermont: 1/7

  Welcome to Vermont!  Vermont is the state with the second lowest population in the United States (643k) so it isn't surprising that it only gets seven titles on the 1001 Novels: A Library of America, list.   If you had to compare New England to a family,  Massachusetts's would be the patriarch/matriarch figure.  Rhode Island would be the rebellious older brother, Maine would be the older sibling who went to work in the forest and/or the sea and New Hampshire and Vermont would be like a pair of twins: New Hampshire, serious minded and dull, Vermont, free-wheeling and hippie-ish.  The major characteristic of the population of Vermont is the impact of outsiders who started moving into Vermont during the 1960's as part of the larger "back to the land" movement.  Today, these emigrants have made it all the way to the top both in government, i.e. Bernie Sanders and Howard Dean and in business, i.e. Ben and Jerry's.  It's gotten to the point where you would be hard pressed to get an outsider to identify anything else about the state. 

  New Englanders who have lived there since before the 60's are more likely to describe Vermont as a depressed, isolated backwoods area with little to offer anyone- I've heard this said by older, lifelong residents of other New England states.   The Winter People takes this flow of emigrants as its starting point, since it is about the adventures of a family of outsiders who move to a small town in northern Vermont from New York City.   When the curtain rises, dad, an antiques dealer/antiquarian is dead, of a heart attack, leaving Mom and her two daughters, one a sprightly teenager, the other a precocious 6 year old, to fend for themselves in classic "back to the land" style.  The family makes do growing crops and selling eggs at the farmers market.  They don't have computers or cell phones and Mom is described by daughter as having a deep mistrust government.

 Oh and they live on a farm that has a rocky outcroppings called "the Devil's Hand" which may be a kind of "portal" that allows the dead to be reanimated as "sleepers."  Yes, it's a supernatural thriller.  I gather from my Google search that McMahon is a moderately succesful writer of supernatural thrillers that always involve peril to a young girl- since that is literally the cover image of all of her books.  She's put at least one title "on the New York Times best seller list" and her Amazon product listings boast between mid thousands and mid hundreds numbers of reviews, which is good by the standards of literary fiction but just ok for authors of popular fiction.   There isn't anything remotely literary about The Winter People and I was kind of bummed that I checked out the Audiobook because even at 2x speed I had to spend five hours of my life waiting for Fred & Scooby Doo to unmask the real killer.

  I thought the resolution was preposterous.  

Death by Water (2015) by Kenzaburo Oe

 Book Review

Death By Water (2015)
by Kenzaburo Oe

Translation by Deborah Boehm

   Nobel Prize in Literature 1994 winner Kenzaburo Oe died in March of this year which spurred me to take a look for any Audiobooks that might be available on the Libby app.  I found an Audiobook version of Death by Water, which was originally published in 2009 in Japanese and published in English translation in 2015.  In many ways, Oe is the prototypical Nobel Prize winner:  A writer who does not write in English, who is politically engaged in a controversial way with his home territory and who writes serious books with both heavy political and personal themes.  In addition to be a controversial pacificist/leftist who authored many books that challenged the militaristic Japan of his childhood, Oe was also a pathbreaker in terms of his depiction of disability via the reoccurring character of his son, who was disabled and frequently appears in fictionalized form in many of his novels.

    Death by Water is a "late work"- a term used within the novel itself by Oe, the fifth in his series of novels about the life of Kogito Choko, who is widely considered a stand in for the author himself.  In that sense, Oe should also be considered an early adopter of auto-fiction, particularly in the treatment of the character of his disabled son.  Death by Water is very much the work of an author who can do whatever he wants.  The book is 450 pages and much of the plot involves the attempts by a group of "underground" theater performers to adapt Choko's books into works of radical theater.   As the plot slowly develops, issues with Choko's disabled son and his own attempts to write a novel about the traumatic death of his father, a right-wing militarist who drowned in the aftermath of World War II after an ill conceived plan to fly a kamikaze plane into the Emperor's palace fails, rise and fall within the context of the main plotline. 

   The action is slow indeed to get started but Oe does provide an action packed finale, hard as that may seem to anyone (like me) who struggled through 13 hours of Audiobook conversations about the vagaries of radical Japanese theater in the early 2000's to get to 2 hours of excitement.  

Show Review: Panda Bear x Sonic Boom @ The Bellwhether (Los Angeles, CA.)

 Show Review

Panda Bear x Sonic Boom

@ The Bellwhether

Los Angeles, CA.

   I was excited to visit The Bellwhether "Los Angeles' Newest Mid-Size Venue"(1600 capacity) to see the poorly named project Panda Bear x Sonic Boom plays the hits from their extremely poorly promoted 2022 record Reset, which has to be one of my favorite albums of 2022 even though I didn't listen to it for the first time until this year.  I've never had the energy to get deep into Spaceman 3 and its progeny.  Yes, I've seen Spiritualized several times.  I listen to Spectrum on Spotify frequently.  I hate Animal Collective and I've never listened to a Panda Bear solo record, even one produced by Sonic Boom, because I hate Animal Collective so much.   I didn't listen to the MGMT record Sonic Boom produced.  Generally speaking, I highly approve of the "pro-drugs" philosophy expressed in the music and the music itself but I didn't listen to them during the period I was involved in that kind of scene with the exception of Spiritualized, Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space (1997), which came out when I was in college.

   But the fact is, I did start listening to Reset earlier this year and I do believe it is an amazing record, and that it would be great to see live, and it was, indeed, all that.   Lennox and Kember performed silhouetted on the stage against a highly psychedelic, constantly changing video back drop that was more video art than concert backdrop.   They both had an array in front of them- a keyboard, triggers and probably some stuff Kember uses to obtain his patented circuit-bending sounds.  Kember also had various flute and whistle type devices that were deployed at various times for maximum impact.  In between songs from the Reset records they had distinct drones that sounded like Animal Collective/Panda Bear type improv- with Lennox sometimes wordlessly emoting over the sound of birdsong or ambient style drone.   

   Even for the most sober viewer, as indeed I was last night, coming in at the tail end of day that saw me wake up at 4 AM, drive to San Diego, back and then go out in Echo Park beforehand,  Panda Bear x Sonic Boom will provoke feelings similar to what you get during a mild psychedelic trip:  the visuals, the lighting, the songs.  It was a total blast. 

   The venue was very nice as well.  It seems like all shows are done and dusted by 10:30 PM, so make sure you get there early.   The available public parking lots within a block are 10 dollars and they both filled up slightly before showtime, so keep that in mind.  It's an easy location (just east of the freeway cutting through DTLA) to get to and from with rideshare so that is an option worth considering.  The surrounding neighborhood is unhoused heavy so take that into account particularly if you are parking outside the two lots within a block of the venue.

  I did park in the lot around the corner from the entrance and on the way back I had to walk out into the street because an unhoused fellow living in a tent on the sidewalk arrived home and started unloading his possessions into his tent, his bicycle and person fully occupying the sidewalk.  It doesn't bother me, but I know plenty of Angelenos who would not fully appreciate such an experience.

The Memory of Animals (2023) by Claire Fuller

 Book Review

The Memory of Animals (2023)

by Claire Fuller

   English author Claire Fuller has five novels under her belt and the kind of international recognition that is one step below the top tier (She won the 2021 Costa for best novel (RIP Costa Book Awards), and she won some even more obscure contests in 2015 for her debut, Our Endless Numbered Days, which sounds pretty interesting.  I think I read the Guardian review of The Memory of Animals and picked it up because of the theme (post-apocalyptic), the literary pedigree of the author and because it was available to check out immediately in the Libby library app for the Los Angeles Public Library.  

   The set up is dystopia 101:  Neffy, the protagonist/narrator, a somewhat feckless youngish woman who is banging her step brother and has recently had a spot of trouble with her job as an octopus handler at a London area aquarium, volunteers to be a test subject for what appears to be a post-COVID type virus that has just emerged.  After receiving the vaccine and the virus she falls unconscious and when she wakes up... you guessed it! Society has collapsed!

  Beyond that it's pretty clear that Fuller is more interested in the inner turmoil of Neffy than the implications of the collapse of society.   While Neffy and her cohorts remain barricaded inside the hospital there are a series of chapter length flashbacks that fill you in on Neffy and her issues.  When they finally get out into the world, it's essentially a coda to the (un)resolved personal issues of Neffy. 

This is Not Miami (2023) by Fernanda Melchor

 Book Review

This is Not Miami (2023)

by Fernanda Melchor

Translated by Sophie Hughes

  I'm a fan of Mexican author Fernanda Melchor since I read the English translation of her 2017 novel, Hurricane Season, a searing and brutal book.  I'm generally in favor of ANY author whose work can be accurately described as "searing and brutal."  The fact that Melchor scores so high on the diversity index is merely a bonus in her case.   

   It's hard to put This is Not Miami in a literary category- it is not a novel.  It could be considered a book of short stories centered on the Mexican city of Veracruz.  In her foreword Melchor describes the book as being based on journalistic reportage.  Like many authors who are translated into English, This is Not Miami is not her most recent writing.  It was published in the original Spanish in 2013, with Hurricane Season coming out in 2017 and Paradais in 2021 with an English translation last year.   Like her later books, This is Not Miami is searing and brutal with highlights including the title story, about a bunch of Caribbean immigrants who find themselves marooned in Veracruz under difficult circumstances. 

  Another memorable story is the tale of local beauty queen who ends up on trial for the murder of two young children.  Reading This is Not Miami does help the reader obtain a better understanding of Fernanda Melchor and her fans, but for novices it doesn't displace Hurricane Season as the best entry point.

Is Mother Dead (2022) by Vigdis Hjorth

Book Review

Is Mother Dead (2022)

by Vigdis Hjorth

Translated by Charlotte Barslund

  This was a 2023 longlist title for the International Booker Prize. In the time it took me to get off the Libby waitlist for the Audiobook version, I went back and read her 2016 book about the impact of a recovered memory of child sex abuse has on a Norwegian family- Will and Testament.  I thought Will and Testament was very well written and completely disturbing in the way it treated recovered memory and its impact on child sex abuse, written from the point of view of the child victim as an adult.  I gather from online reviews and the anger of Hjorth's own family that Will and Testament was autofiction, and I'm assuming that this book is in the same category.

 It features a narrator/protagonist who seems like the same person as the narrator in Will and Testament: A woman who has purposefully estranged herself from the family.  Here, the narrator abandons legal studies and a boring lawyer husband in Norway for an American who teaches her how to paint.  It turns into a succesful career as a painter, but she never makes good with the family she left behind in Norway.  They split is compounded by the narrator's work, paintings that dwell on the painful relationship between family members.

  She returns to Norway for an upcoming career retrospective exhibit and begins to stalk her estranged mother- not sure how else you could put it.  Her obsession with reconciliation is the central and only theme in the book and you have to marvel at the fortitude of a novelist who could paint herself, essentially, in such a negative light.

Ask the Dust (1938) by John Fante

 Book Review

Ask the Dust (1938)

by John Fante

   Ask the Dust, the great depression era proto-beat novel by John Fante, was another embarrassing omission from my reading list.   Like City of Night, I'd literally never heard of Ask the Dust before it came across my radar.  When I mentioned it to my girlfriend she laughed at me and told me it was one of the books "everyone" read when they moved to Los Angeles.   Fante's portrayal of Depression era Los Angeles, with a heavy emphasis on the area surrounding the now destroyed Bunker Hill neighborhood, is an iconic description of depression era Los Angeles.

   Fante's protagonist, Arturo Bandini (this is book three of the four book Bandini sequence) would be a common type after the mid 1960's, a would-be romantic writer, seeking his muse in the lower echelons of the big city.  He finds it in the figure of a latina waitress.  Their antagonist courtship has not aged well:  He insults her race frequently and generally behaves in a way that would get him arrested and served with a restraining order in the present day.   The story ends with his unrequited love running up the wall of a marijuana addiction induced bout of psychosis in the object of his affection- talk about not aging well- as the last fifty pages turns into a "reefer madness" type scenario.

  But man, in terms of the description of depression era Los Angeles Ask the Dust holds up.  How did I make it this far without ever hearing about it or Fante himself?  This is another canon level contender- Fante could sub in for one of Henry Miller's tropics- Cancer or Capricorn.  The west coast is basically unrepresented in the 30's American lit canon beyond Of Mice and Men which is set in the farm country of California, not the city.

City of Night(1963) by John Rechy

 Book Review

City of Night (1963)

John Rechy

   This groundbreaking novel about the life of a gay hustler during the pre-Summer of Love 1960's recently got a fifty-year anniversary edition, which was the first I'd heard of it- something I'm embarrassed to admit.  It is hard to believe that in 30 plus years of assiduous reading of transgressive fiction, City of Night never came up.   Rechy chronicled the LGBTQ underworld (Mostly the G/T letters of the formula) at a time and place where those kinds of choices were actively persecuted by the authorities.  In a way, this pre-Stonewall, pre-Summer of Love, pre-AIDS world borders on the quaint, as distant from our modern world of killer drugs, killer diseases and the open embrace of LGBTQ lives as a book about people living on a frontier farm in the mid 19th century.

   The lack of concern with societal approbation and open embrace of the gay hustler lifestyle is still refreshing in 2023.  His portrayal of the different hustling "scenes" of the era are memorable, NYC, LA, the SF Bay Area and New Orleans in particular.  LA/Hollywood, in particular is vividly drawn, almost a book within a book, including his portrayal of thinly veiled closeted Hollywood bigwigs.  This fiftieth anniversary edition makes the case for a canon-level placement for City of Night, perhaps replacing one of the cis-white male beats who are commonly included from this time period.   You could replace On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac and miss very little.

Walking Practice: A Novel (2022) by Dolki Min

American cover art for the English translation of Walking Practice: A Novel (2022) by Dolki Min.

 Book Review

Walking Practice: A Novel (2022)

by Dolki Min

Translated by Victoria Caudle

   I picked this title out of the Sunday New York Times book review- it's translated from the Korean, it's a literary fiction/science fiction/body horror/lgbtq themed book about a horrific alien who has crash landed on planet Earth and is forced to subsist... on humans.  Specifically, eating humans that they(yes, this is a book about gender issue) find on dating apps, both men and women.  The creature/narrator can assume human form, though it is a real effort- it sounds like having to hold some kind of weight lifting pose for hours on end and the book is just a couple days in the life of this creature as it goes about its extremely nasty business, which is described in clear prose a la American Psycho.

  At 144 pages Walking Practice: A Novel is a quick read.  There are some typographical shenanigans that have to do with the translation and the idea of an alien narrator, but it wasn't that difficult to follow.  There also line drawings of the creature in its hideous, natural form, sprinkled throughout the text as full, additional pages.

Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalities & the Sciences of Memory (1995) by Ian Hacking

 Book Review

Rewriting the Soul: 

Multiple Personalities & the Sciences of Memory (1995)

by Ian Hacking

  I actually source a decent number of books from the New York Times weekend obituary section.  One example is this book, by recently deceased Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking.   Here's the obit from last month.  Hacking takes what you might call a Foucauldian approach, excavating historical sources and showing the contingent nature of mental health diagnoses through time. 

  I found it revelatory, twenty five plus years later- the way he uses the Foucauldian method of demonstrating the social construction of allegedly "objective" ideologies- here he traces the development of "multiple personality disorder" from the 19th century through it's post-WWII rise in the USA as a companion of the child molestation hysteria of the 70's and 80's.  It was a pretty curageous position to take, and Hacking bends over backwards not to be unnecessarily cruel, up to and including a conclusion that argues that for the people suffering from "Multiple Personality Disorder" the truth of an allegation of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a family member may be beside the point so long as the client derives relief from its "discovery." 

  That is a diplomatic way to put it. Another way to put it is that the conjunction of the popularity of multiple personality disorder and flamboyant stories about recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse destroyed at least hundreds, if not easily thousands of lives as families were forced to take sides as shocking allegations were made decades after the events in question.

   My personal connection to this world is through my work as a criminal defense attorney.  Much earlier in my career I handled a case of sex abuse by a father of his children and at the time I struggled with how a child could make something like that up- not that it was the case for my client- just the idea of it, like, how could someone ever make something like that up?  This book provides that answer.