Recent Reading Roundup 48

The theme of this recent reading roundup is awards lists.  Specifically, mainstream literary award shortlists like the Booker and the Women's Prize.  That's not an area of literature I tend to frequent, since the books nominated for those awards often strike me as flat and narrowly-focused.  But there are certainly enough exceptions to make these awards worth the occasional look--this year's Booker longlist, for example, is full of enough off-the-wall choices to almost make me reevaluate the entire award (I wrote elsewhere about Richard Powers's The Overstory, which challenges commonly held notions of what a novel is and what its focus should be; nor is it the only book on the longlist of which this could be said).  I didn't love all the books I write about here--and some sadly conformed to my prejudices about award-nominated litfic--but there are definitely reads here that were more than worth the effort.

• A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James - I was a great fan of James's previous novel, the dark, feverish Book of Night Women.  So I'm not sure why it took me so long to get to Seven Killings, which after all won the Booker in 2014, but perhaps there was some self-protective inkling that here, our interests would diverge.  Like Night Women, Seven Killings is a historical novel set in Jamaica, this time concentrating on the mid-70s, and taking as its linchpin the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976.  Like, I suspect, a lot of outsiders to Jamaican history, I knew that story mostly as an inspirational anecdote: Marley was shot the day before being scheduled to appear at a peace concert, and despite being lightly wounded, insisted on taking the stage, saying "The people who are trying to make the world worse aren't taking the day off.  How can I?"  James doesn't seek to explode this perception of Marley--on the contrary, to most of the novel's characters, he is a secular saint, and the man himself appears only briefly, as if he were too grand and holy a figure to attempt to depict in fiction.  But the point of Seven Killings is to set the stage for the assassination--the warring political parties and their associated street gangs whose violence Marley was trying to stop (while also associating himself with the left-wing government of Michael Manley); the CIA's halfhearted but nevertheless baleful interference in the island's affairs; the desperation of ordinary Jamaicans to get away from the island's poverty and generational violence.
  
  A Brief History of Seven Killings is a dense book.  Told in alternating point of view segments by people who are connected to the shooting in various ways--a gang boss who is inspired by Marley to try to rise above his history of violence; a stringer for Rolling Stone who senses that there is a bigger story developing, but can't convince his bosses, for whom reggae music is a sideshow at best; the local CIA station chief--James writes in a slippery stream-of-consciousness, often heavily inflected by Jamaican patois.  It makes for a challenging read, but a rewarding one in the novel's first two thirds, in which we count the hours and days leading up to the shooting, and address its immediate aftermath.  But in its later segments, in which James follows the people involved in the shooting for years after it (well past Marley's own death from cancer), this approach starts to drag.  It's easy to see his project--he wants to chart the reverberations from this single act of violence until every person involved in it is in the ground.  But for me at least, following along on this journey required too much investment--not least, in the assumption that Marley's shooting was a major event worthy of this kind of minute attention.  I found the segments of Seven Killings that used Marley, and his near-assassination, as a window to Jamaica's history to be quite fascinating, especially the way that Jamaica's left-right political conflicts, and the US intelligence agencies' attempts to influence them in favor of the right, end up presaging a lot of conflicts we see today.  But the later parts of the novel seemed to require more interest in Marley, and in the still-open mystery of his shooting, than I could make myself feel.
  
  
• Sabrina by Nick Drnaso - The big buzz about this book is that it's the first graphic novel ever to be longlisted for the Booker, and I'm here to say that--overdue as that distinction obviously is--it's also entirely earned.  Drnaso's style is highly reminiscent of Chris Ware, with many small, spare panels depicting characters in static positions, standing in their under-furnished houses or walking down nondescript suburban streets.  But instead of general-purpose ennui, as in Ware's work, the focus in Sabrina is on a terrible violation, the disappearance of the title character, and how it affects the people in her orbit--her sister Sandra, her boyfriend Teddy, and Teddy's childhood friend Calvin, who agrees to take him in after the other man suffers a breakdown.  Drnaso's choice of style is a perfect fit for his subject matter, effortlessly avoiding sensationalism and instead highlighting the horrifying mundanity of life in the wake of a tragedy.  This horror is only compounded when, after Sabrina's body is discovered (this happens fairly early in the book, and with a typical lack of sensationalism) the media attention lavished on her case brings out troupes of internet crazies who begin harassing Sandra and Calvin, while Teddy falls down a rabbit hole of internet conspiracy theories that help to make sense of the nightmare his life has become.
  
  It's an excellent turn of plot, very topical and sadly common, but if I have one complaint about Sabrina, it is that Drnaso takes the too-common approach of treating the poison spewed at his characters as a general-purpose failing of the internet.  In reality, these kinds of mobs tend to be rooted in various forms of right-wing fanaticism--racism, misogyny, gun nuts insisting that victims of mass shootings never existed.  In Sabrina, while the trolls who persecute our heroes evince traits of misogynistic hate mobs or gun right conspiracy nuts, there's no indication that there's any ideology at the back of their behavior, or a specific reason why Sabrina's case should have caught their attention, beyond simply being attracted to anything that gets a bit of a spotlight.  It's a choice that leaves the book feeling less relevant than it could have been, and maybe even a little misleading--identifying a symptom while eliding the actual disease.  Nevertheless, this remains a powerful work, brilliant at depicting the crushing weight of grief, and the toll that a sudden eruption of violence takes, even on people who are two or three degrees removed from it.
  
  
• Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin - As well as being nominated for several other major awards, this is the book that won this year's Tournament of Books, and what's more, did so by playing a perfect game, winning every single round on its way to the championship, and sweeping aside such contenders as Lincoln in the Bardo, Exit West, and Eugene Lim's Dear Cyborgs--three of my favorite books from the last few years.  And, I'm sorry to say, I'm just not feeling it.  I can see how in certain cases, the brevity and immediacy of Schweblin's horror novella would feel like a refreshing change of pace from a heavier read.  But taken on its own, it feels like a gimmick whose main claim to fame is knowing not to outstay its welcome.  Told as a dialogue between a dying woman, Amanda, and David, a boy who is obsessively trying to figure out when and where she came across the supernatural menace that is now killing her, Fever Dream offers a detailed narrative of the last few days in Amanda's life, in which she obsesses about protecting her young daughter even as weirdness closes in around her.  Her narrative begins with a nested story in which David's mother Carla tells Amanda about an illness he barely recovered from as a baby, after which he became altered and sinister.  This is probably the best part of the story, full of dark imagery and portents of doom.  But the follow-up to it feels mechanistic.  We know we're meant to be scared, but most of what Amanda describes are by-the-numbers horror film tropes, and the story's opaque ending leaves it feeling like much less than the sum of its parts or its atmosphere.
  
  Another point that leaves me feeling rather cold about Fever Dream--and which I am surprised (but, honestly, not that surprised) that the ToB judges weren't struck by--is the story's handling of disability.  When Carla tells Amanda about the change in David, she describes a happy baby who suddenly goes cold and distant, who becomes obsessed with minutiae, whose speech patterns are strange, and who has bizarre preoccupations that seem oddly adult.  In other words, the classic description of an autistic child.  And yet David is meant to be a monster--even described at one point as missing a part of his soul.  I don't know whether Schweblin intended this analogy--though the fact that the town the story takes place in appears to have an epidemic of birth defects and developmentally delayed children suggests that she is at least aware of the connection--and if she did, I'm really not certain what she meant by it.  There is, of course, a long history of horror fiction using disability, and the conflicted feelings of the parents of disabled children, as a metaphor or a trope.  But that history is not without its problems, and there is nothing in Fever Dream that suggests that it is trying to engage with those issues.  Instead, it ends up feeling just as flat on this level as on every other--an impressive performance, but one that lingers with you, if it does at all, for entirely the wrong reasons.
  
  
• Everything Under by Daisy Johnson - In its early chapters, Johnson's second novel (she is also a respected poet) feels like something very familiar, a novel of middle class ennui told in spare prose that is nevertheless plugged directly into its characters' emotions.  Narrator Gretel lives a solitary life, shuttling between her evocative but improbable job at a dictionary, and her remote cottage.  That life has recently been disrupted by the return of her mother Sarah, who disappeared when Gretel was sixteen, abandoning their already precarious existence, and vanishing so completely that Gretel has made a habit of periodically calling local morgues to see if her mother's body has turned up.  Now suffering from dementia, Sarah insists that Gretel tell the story of her teenage survival and of her search for her mother, and in turn she tells the story of Gretel's early childhood, when the two were living on a boat on an unnamed river, and befriended a runaway teenager known alternately as Margot or Marcus.  It's in the dive into these linked stories that Everything Under makes its turn into weirdness, and becomes a slippery, slipstreamy narrative that is half realism, half mythology.  Is Fiona, the woman who had such a profound impact on Marcus's life, just an ordinary trans woman, for example, or is she Tiresias, the gender-swapping prophet?  Is the Bonak, the monster that Sarah, Gretel, and other river-dwellers fear, an actual supernatural creature, or a serial killer preying on people who live half-outside the law and the reach of the authorities?
  
  Johnson shows her hand a little too soon--about halfway into the story, you suddenly realize what she's doing, and from that point it's hard not to wait impatiently for the obvious turns of plot to occur.  But her control of tone is so impressive, balanced just perfectly between dark fantasy and social realism, and her characters are so winning--in particular, Marcus's adoptive parents, who initially seem like a forgettable middle class couple but reveal themselves to be people of profound kindness who have suffered far too much, are a wonderful creation that I could have stood to read a lot more about--that even knowing where the story is going, the pleasure of getting there is significant.  If I were to describe in bald terms what Everything Under is doing, it would sound glib and uninteresting, but Johnson's execution makes it feel like a world in its own right, experimenting with genre and theme in a way that few other authors do (I'd be interested to see if the novel makes the Tiptree list next year), and ending up so much more than the sum of its parts.
  
  
• Warlight by Michael Ondaatje - The most conventional of the Booker longlistees I've read, and not coincidentally, the one that I feel most confident predicting for the shortlist.  Ondaatje's short, dreamy novel starts from what I can only describe as a completely serious, dramatic retelling of the first chapters of A Series of Unfortunate Events.  Two siblings, Rachel and Nathaniel, suffer the sudden loss of their parents, albeit not from death but from a genteel sort of abandonment.  It is shortly after WWII, and Rachel and Nathaniel's parents announce that work is taking them abroad.  The children are to be left in the care of the family's lodger, a shady character referred to as The Moth, who quickly fills the house with an array of demimondains--forgers, race fixers, veterinarians who moonlight as robbers' assistants, ethnographers who moonlight as spies.  These all turn out to be connected to the children's parents through their activities in the war, when their semi-legal talents were put to work in espionage.  Now, with the world order still asserting itself, some of them are active in counter-revolutionary activity, or mopping up resistance groups that don't quite fit the new status quo.  The children are only dimly aware of all of this, but nevertheless they manage to get sucked into the Moth and his friends' world.  Rachel becomes an actress, while Nathaniel becomes the assistant of The Darter, who illegally imports racing greyhounds.
  
  It sounds very exciting when you describe it, and there are a few scenes of action around the middle of the book.  But most of the story is spent peering through the fog of a child's incomprehension of their parents.  When the children's mother returns, Nathaniel goes back to live with her for a few years, but achieves only a partial understand of her wartime and post-war activity, and why it has endangered her so much.  Later, as an adult, he learns more, but at that stage the point of the novel feels completely lost.  For a while it feels as if Ondaatje is gesturing at the fundamental seediness of intelligence work and nation-building--the act that has made Nathaniel's mother a target turns out to be as far from wartime heroism as it is possible to get.  But in this, as in so much else about the novel, he is extremely vague.  The ending includes a sudden return to Nathaniel's time with The Darter to reveal how his thoughtlessness and self-absorption hurt people, but again Ondaatje's handling of this subject is too polite and distant to have much of an effect.  Warlight is beautifully written, and joins the ranks of books about little-known aspects of the war that we will probably continue seeing for years (see Manhattan Beach from last year).  But beyond that, I don't see that it has a point.
  
  
• Swimmer Among the Stars by Kanishk Tharoor - The stories in this collection range wildly between past and future, reality and fantasy.  They have settings as diverse as ancient Rome, post-colonial Morocco, the well-appointed enclaves of the Upper East Side, and outer space.  It can be hard to pinpoint a theme that unites them--besides, of course, Tharoor's dry-yet-affectionate tone and his careful attention to details--until one suddenly realizes that what ties them all together is loss.  In the title story, the last speaker of an unspecified language plays host to ethnographers who want to record her speech, and muses about the insufficiency of their project, and her own inability to convey what this language and its loss mean to her.  In "Tale of the Teahouse", a nameless city prepares to be sacked by a nameless khan, as the dwellers in the titular establishment proceed with their usual indolence, insisting that by doing so they are giving the doomed city meaning--after all, in what other place could people who are completely useless be able to survive and maintain their pointless lifestyle?  In "A United Nations in Space", set in the mid-21st century, the delegates of the UN are evacuated to an orbital hotel after Manhattan is reclaimed by the sea, and observe helplessly as the planet roils beneath them, international order and even nations falling to climate catastrophe and war, while in space the Secretary General tries desperately to hold on to a dying idea of unity.  Some of the stories are series of vignettes--"The Mirrors of Iskandar" follows the exploits of a romanticized version of Alexander the Great, and "Letters Home" travels back and forth across the ancient world to follow travelers and their tenuous, often hopeless efforts to maintain contact with the places they've left behind.  All the stories are sad and beautiful, and together they create a sense of a world that is far bigger, more varied, and more full of lost and forgotten treasures than we allow ourselves to acknowledge.
  
  
• When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy - I have a slight quibble with this book's inclusion in this year's Women's Prize shortlist, in that I really wouldn't call it a novel.  First, because long before this is confirmed in the book's afterword, it is obvious that what we're reading is a memoir only thinly concealed as fiction.  The excesses described here, during the nameless narrator's four-month marriage to a man who was emotionally, physically, and sexually abusive, are too specific to be anyone's invention--only real life can be this horrible and this absurd, at one and the same time.  And second, because despite being a work of prose, the book that I was most reminded of while reading When I Hit You was Claudia Rankine's Citizen, which is also presented in prose paragraphs but is still clearly a work of poetry.  There's a similar sense here that it's the weight and meter of Kandasamy's words we should be paying attention to, a similar feeling of a series of thoughts and moments strung together rather than a continuous narrative--which makes sense not only because Kandasamy is also a poet, but because the experience she describes can't really be captured in anything as straightforward as narrative.  In the book's opening chapter, the narrator listens to her mother tells the story of her escape from her husband, making herself the hero of it.  This leads the narrator to conclude that she has to write her story herself in order to reclaim it.  But another message seems to be that any attempt to tell her experience in a straight line will do violence to it, and therefore she's chosen a style that can be described alternately as an anti-novel, poetry in prose, or a poetic memoir.
  
  None of this should be taken as a complaint about When I Hit You's recognition by the Women's Prize.  On the contrary, since I don't tend to read memoirs or poetry collections, I might have missed this book if it hadn't been on the shortlist, and that would have been a grave loss.  When I Hit You is, simply, stunning.  Funny and thought-provoking as often as it is horrifying and infuriating, it moves back and forth in the narrator's marriage, as well as incidents that occurred before and after it.  Each chapter is dedicated to a different theme, as the abuse the narrator suffers progresses from manipulation, gaslighting, isolation, all the way to rape and attempted murder.  In one chapter, the husband demands access to the narrator's online accounts (he burns himself with matches until she agrees), and proceeds to answer emails on her behalf and even delete her entire online history.  In another, he becomes obsessed with getting his wife pregnant, dragging her to humiliating appointments with fertility doctors who talk over her head and don't respond to the obvious signs of abuse in the marriage.  Another chapter moves back in time to the narrator's previous relationship, which wasn't abusive but in which she was nevertheless taken advantage of, and which sets the stage for her marriage by classing her as used and soiled.  These incidents come together to create a hellscape that slowly stifles the narrator's willingness to escape, her ability to see the world through her own eyes, not her husband's.  It's particularly fascinating (and depressing) to read the scenes in which the husband uses his and the narrator's shared leftist ideology to tear his wife down, accusing her of petit-bourgeois hang-ups and claiming to be deprogramming her from her selfish, self-regarding feminism.  In one particularly cutting scene, the husband forbids the narrator from writing poetry expressing her anguish over the violence in their marriage, making convoluted, exhausting arguments that such an act is counter-revolutionary.  When she finds him writing poetry on the same topic, he insists that for him it's different--her poems are masturbatory; his are self-criticism.  The novel's title comes from one of these poems; the complete stanza is "When I hit you/Comrade Lenin weeps".
  
  It's in moments like this that one grasps the full genius of this book.  As much as it is a narrative of horror, it is also a brilliant act of vengeance.  Writing is both a liberation and a lifeline to the narrator--in her worst moments, the act of imagining how she will story this period in her life gives her the strength to believe that she will endure it.  And in committing her husband to the page, she exposes him in all his horrifying ugliness.  Without ever downplaying how malignant and dangerous the husband is, Kandasamy makes him look ridiculous and pathetic, and makes it clear how much of his abusive behavior is rooted in his own weakness and inadequacy.  This doesn't make him any less of a baleful influence on the narrator, but one of the book's points is that his power over her comes, at least in part, from the society around them, which encourages her to stay in the marriage.  The chapters describing the narrator's parents' minimizing reactions to her descriptions of abuse, in which they advise her not to talk back so much, or assure her that things will calm down after she has a baby, are terrifying precisely because these are the people she eventually has to rely on for her escape.  Their help, though it eventually comes, is always tinged with disappointment and disapproval.  From the rest of society, the narrator gets doubts, victim-blaming, and prescriptive demands whose sole purpose is to shut her up.  Some of these are ills specific to Indian society, but many of them will be familiar to women the world over, particularly the constant impulse to explain and justify abusive men, even when those men are strangers, and their victim is standing right in front of you.  However you want to classify it as a piece of writing, When I Hit You is a vital, brilliant work, a hugely important contribution to the growing conversation about abuse.

Recent Reading Roundup 26

Looking over this list, I see that it creates a distinctly underwhelming impression of my recent reading--even the one book I really liked proved less impressive in hindsight.  That's not actually an accurate picture, because there's a whole pile of books that I'm planning to write about in the near future that I've been very pleased with.  But for the time being, here are some books I wasn't too crazy about.

1. The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers - This is only the second Powers I've read, and the first, The Anubis Gates, was more than a decade ago and thus one of my earliest forays into non-Tolkienian fantasy.  That, and the fact that The Anubis Gates is a fantastic book with a twisty time travel plot that is a joy to unravel, created some high expectations from Powers, which I thought this novel, in which the Romantic poets turn out to be entangled in relationships that are one part abusive, one part addictive with vampires who fuel their creativity and feed on their, and their families', lives, would easily fulfill.  Not so, however--where The Anubis Gates's plot is twisty but, ultimately, impeccably structured, The Stress of Her Regard is a floppy, maybe even flabby book, overpopulated and unfocused.  Powers introduces some interesting twists to the vampire mythology, even suggesting a strange sfnal explanation for their existence and bringing in such esoteric subjects as quantum mechanics to the heroes' struggle to escape their lovers/tormentors' attentions, but it's too much mythology for a novel as centerless as this one is.  I was more than halfway into the book before I really understood the rules of how its vampires worked, and even then Powers kept piling complications, provisos, and special cases onto those rules.  The novel's characters and their predicament, meanwhile, are nowhere near interesting or appealing enough to make puzzling out this mythology worthwhile.  The poets who turn out to be victims of the vampires--Byron, Shelley, Keats--are all on the nondescript side.  Powers is more interested in them as examples of the dissipated, doomed Romantic lifestyle than as artists and innovators (which was particularly hard to swallow in Keats's case given that the version of him presented in the movie Bright Star, where he is intelligent, driven, and serious about his poetry, is still vivid in my memory), but it takes writerly flare to create characters who are as mad, bad, and dangerous to know as the Romantics supposedly were, and Powers doesn't wield it in this novel.  The poets thus become a little dull, and sadly they are not overshadowed by the novel's fictional hero, Michael Crawford.  Powers deliberately constructs him as something of a loser, tormented by his many failures even before coming to a vampire's attentions, but he does too good a job, because Crawford just isn't a very interesting character even when he overcomes his self-doubt and starts kicking vampire ass, and the romance he develops in the second half of the book, which drives his final confrontation with the vampires, is unpersuasive (it doesn't help that I have a sneaking suspicion that the novel would have been a great deal more interesting had it been told entirely from the point of view of his love interest).  It's possible that The Stress of Her Regard is a lesser work best left to Powers enthusiasts, or maybe my recollections of The Anubis Gates are a little too rose-tinted.  I'm certainly a bit afraid to revisit it now, or to take another stab at Powers's bibliography.


2. Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche - Marche's novel has an innovative concept that I found both exhilarating and worrisome.  The book is presented as an anthology of short stories from the fictional North Atlantic island nation of Sanjania, moving chronologically through folk tales, religious fiction, and pulp-style adventure stories to the more modern form of the short story, even as the nation undergoes the traditional hardships of a former colony, passing from colonial rule through more and less successful efforts at democracy and self-government.  It's a fantastically original and instantly appealing concept, but at the same time a self-defeating one.  The stories in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea are not the point of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea.  Though Marche is a persuasive ventriloquist with a wide range of styles at his disposal (the blurbs on the cover compare him to David Mitchell, and though that's probably going too far the two are certainly in the same ballpark), to read any of the stories as short fiction in its own right is to miss the point of the book, which is the cumulative image they form of Sanjania.  But unlike a fantastic novel taking the same tack (the most obvious comparison that comes to mind is City of Saints and Madmen) the Sanjania that Shining at the Bottom of the Sea creates isn't a creation in its own right either.  Its purpose is to mirror reality, almost to the point of slavishness, and certainly to the point where any sense of unique Sanjanian-ness is lost amongst the real-world parallels.  So that Shining at the Bottom of the Sea is almost an empty novel, an impressive achievement whose point escapes me--it certainly doesn't say anything about colonialism and the recovery from it that other, more traditional novels haven't already said.  It's an enjoyable reading experience, both because of the audacity of Marche's experiment and because of his success at it, but leaves very little residue behind itself.


3. His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik - Novik's bestselling, mega-successful series is by now on its sixth installment and I've only just gotten around to reading the first.  Can't say that I regret the delay, but then I wasn't expecting to, and in fact His Majesty's Dragon delivered exactly what I thought it would--it is charming, very readable, a great deal of fun, and extremely lightweight.  What I wasn't expecting was just how much the novel would downplay the adventurous aspect of its alternate universe, in which the Napoleonic Wars are fought from the air on dragon-back, in favor of a comedy of manners that morphs, in the novel's long center segment, into the classic boarding school story, complete with the protagonist, Will Laurence, a naval captain who is drafted into the dragon corps when he imprints on a newly-hatched dragon captured by his ship, turning out to be preternaturally talented at his new role and being resented by the school's mean kids for outsider status and talent, only to be finally accepted by them as the bestest dragon-rider to ever ride a dragon.  A cross, in other words, between Harry Potter and Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsinger, but one in which the dragon character, Temeraire, is as appealing and vividly drawn as the lead, and in which the relationship between them is sweetly devoted to the point of being almost romantic.  No wonder this book was such a runaway success--it rings nearly every one of fandom's bells, and quite nicely too--though I suspect that later books in the series move away from the school setting and spend more time on aerial battles, which in His Majesty's Dragon are almost an afterthought (the climactic one is won by Temeraire suddenly demonstrating a previously unknown ability that demolishes the enemy forces).  Not that I'm in any hurry to have those suspicions confirmed--I'm not sorry I read His Majesty's Dragon, but having seen what all the fuss is about I think I can give the rest of the series a pass.


4. The Book of Night Women by Marlon James - I'm not quite sure what to say about this novel.  When I read it a month ago I thought it was one of the most wrenching, overwhelming pieces of fiction I'd read in a long time, and a sure contender for best book of the year.  But only a few weeks after finishing it, I find that it's left almost no residue in my mind--I had to struggle, when sitting down to write this post, to recall its main plot points and characters.  That's a damning testimonial that I'm almost certain The Book of Night Women doesn't deserve.  I have no idea why it slipped from my mind so easily, and it could simply be that it's been a busy few weeks and that other subjects have occupied me.  Nevertheless, I can't recommend this book as wholeheartedly as intended to right after I finished it.  That said, this is still a magnificent novel, telling the story of Lilith, a slave in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the late 18th century who becomes entangled with her master's family situation and with a plot on the part of the plantation's slave women to foment rebellion.  James narrates the novel in the slaves' patois, which is initially a jarring choice that makes the novel's early chapters a challenging read, but which soon comes to suit, and amplify, its angry, visceral tone.  The Book of Night Women is suffused with anger and hate--of the slaves towards their masters, whose every cruelty is described with grueling detail; of the masters towards their slaves, whom they resent for not being the docile animals they want them to be; of women towards men, who, black or white, exploit the advantages of their gender in horrific ways.  In the middle of all of this is Lilith, raised in relative privilege due to her mixed-race background, but still prey to the dangers that threaten the life, well-being, and sanity of a female slave.  She's a fascinating and infuriating character, at once vulnerable and terrifyingly powerful, intelligent and deliberately ignorant, proud and self-hating.  Over the course of the novel she confronts the horrors of powerlessness, and the arguably greater horrors of exercising power over others, and struggles to reconcile her feelings towards the masters and overseers, who treat her with a combination of disdain, lust, and occasionally love (which she finds hardest of all to deal with), and towards the rebel slave women, who try to recruit her to their cause and bump up against her vanity and pride, but whom she also admires for their ability to find and occupy positions of power on the plantation.  These are all, of course, terrifically complicated questions with no real answer, and inasmuch as Lilith can be said to grow, it is into the realization that she doesn't know how to live well--happily, honestly, and honorably--as a slave.  Add to this James's rich, almost overpowering descriptions of Jamaican plantation life, of the heat and hard work and suffering that the slaves (and occasionally the masters) endure, and you get a novel that is almost too much to process.  Which may be why I couldn't quite hang onto it, or maybe it's because beneath his impressive presentation James is saying familiar things about the corrupting influence of slavery, violence, and hatred.  That doesn't mean those things aren't worth saying again, or that The Book of Night Women isn't worth reading.


5. Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock - This is one of the foundation works of the English fantastic, and as so often happens with these milestone books I find myself more impressed than won over.  Steven Huxley makes a reluctant homecoming from France, where he's been recovering from a war wound, after his distant, emotionally abusive father's death.  He discovers his brother Christian immersed in an obsession with nearby Ryhope Forest, the same obsession that consumed their father.  From Christian, Steven learns that the forest is a breeding ground for 'mythagos'--living, breathing manifestations of the communal myths of the various tribes and nations that have lived in England over the millennia.  One of these is a woman called Guiwenneth, whom both Christian and his father fell in love with.  After Christian leaves to look for her in the forest, Steven ventures in and creates his own version of Guiwenneth, with whom he also falls in love, and when Christian returns and kidnaps her, Steven must follow him into the depths of the forest.  The descriptions of Ryhope Forest, as a completely wild place in the middle of civilization, whose inside is bigger than its outside and contains living remnants of England's history, is well done, but the characters are not very persuasive.  The biggest problem is Guiwenneth and the plot's focus on her romance with Steven.  The very fact that all three Huxley men fall in love with this woman suggests that something ineffable, probably magical, is at work, and in his descriptions of their courtship Holdstock doesn't do much to dispel the impression that Steven doesn't so much fall in love with Guiwenneth as fall under her spell, and that Guiwenneth may have been made to love him (she is, after all, a manifestation of English racial memory activated by his presence in the forest).  So it's hard to become involved in Steven's frantic search for her, and though the novel picks up whenever the narrative gets out of his Guiwenneth-obsessed head, and especially when he encounters ancient tribes in the forest who tell him their myths and legends, these instances are relatively uncommon compared to the love story, which leaves Mythago Wood a rather uninvolving work as far as I'm concerned.


6. The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford - NYRB Classics has always been a terrific series, but their releases over the last year or so seem to have been calculated to appeal to my tastes and interests (and a lot of them have shown up in older, dog-eared editions at my used bookseller, which is how I came to read The Mountain Lion several weeks before the NYRB edition is due to be released).  In addition to The Mountain Lion, I've flagged Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver, Frans G. Bentsson's The Long Ships, and any one of the three short story collections by Mavis Gallant.  Unfortunately, my first foray has proved a bit of a dud.  The Mountain Lion, a short and lyrical novel about a brother and sister in the who come to stay at their uncle's Colorado ranch in the 1920s, has some fine qualities.  Stafford's writing is lucid and beautiful, and she gets right in the heads of siblings Ralph and Molly, who don't quite fit in at home where their mother aims to raise them, as she has their older sisters, to be a gentleman and a lady, and to think of manners and politeness as the highest ideal.  Ralph and Molly, however, are rambunctious, adventurous children, and are drawn to their mother's stepfather, an uncouth, uneducated rancher whom she barely tolerates.  When their grandfather dies his son invites them to stay with him in Colorado, but the ranch doesn't proved to be the home they've always wanted.  It's too wild and too scary for children raised, however unwillingly, in a genteel environment, and for Molly, at least, the barrier of her gender proves insurmountable, which drives a wedge between the siblings, who up until that point have only had one another.  This is a promising story, but Stafford takes it in uninteresting directions--she makes the focal point of the schism between the children their shared horror of adulthood and of sexuality, which Ralph begins to question when his own sexual maturation begins.  This turns The Mountain Lion into yet another story about children who don't want to grow up because the adult world seems so crude and messy to them, and populated with so many unbearable people, which I think has been done more than enough (though in all fairness to Stafford her version, published in 1947, predates the canonical entry in this subgenre, The Catcher in the Rye).  It also forces Stafford in the direction of an unnecessarily melodramatic ending for Molly, who is too strong and too disgusted with adulthood to make the compromises with it that Ralph does.  One senses that there is something slightly autobiographical in the character of Molly, a bright, talented aspiring writer who is frustrated and furious at the realization that she has no home and no one who truly appreciates her, and it's therefore understandable that Stafford should have wanted to give her an ending that is grandly tragic without forcing her to compromise her principles, but a more interesting novel, I think, could have been written about that compromise.