thinlinednotepaper

“The land is effortless: a lie. He hasn’t captured time: how long a walk might take; how long a piece of work might take; how long the seasons or the nights might last. No man has ever seen this view. But it is beautiful, nevertheless.”

And Thirsk’s voice is important, and necessary to the success of the book. Because Thirsk is also poised quite perfectly in between the two stories that the book tells (as here, when he is excused from working the fields due to injury, and instead assigned by his master to assist the surveyor plotting the enclosure of his village): the crumpling and dissolution of village life under the pressure of fear and xenophobia and prejudice, and the impending destruction of an entire way of life in the countryside through enclosure. Caught in the middle of it, belonging entirely to neither story, neither the village nor the gentry, Thirsk is able to perceive both halves, mourning the folly and the faults of his neighbors’ troubles while understanding that their way of life was never in their control, never going to survive the winter.

April 23, 2013, 11:00am   Comments

“It did not take many working days before I understood that the land itself, from sod to meadow, is inflexible and stern. It is impatient, in fact. It cannot wait. There’s not a season set aside for pondering and reveries. It will not let us hesitate or rest; it does not wish us to stand back and comment on its comeliness or devise a song for it. It has no time to listen to our song. It wants to see us leathery, our necks and forearms burned as black as chimney oak; it wants to leave us thinned and sinewy from work.”

This is an impressive piece of voice, which makes sense coming from Crace, who is an excellent stylist. Walter Thirsk’s narration of the dissolution of his village is perfectly constructed by his author, mannered enough to be timeless without becoming archaic, and methodical enough to serve character without cheating interest or incident.

Nan A Talese / Doubleday 02.12.13

April 23, 2013, 10:41am   Comments

“Manhattan was narrower up here, the water deeper; Mitchell suspected that the Hudson River had flooded as well and the two rivers had converged in the middle, as in the era of the Lenape Indians.”

This is somewhere near the Harlem Meer — the northeast corner of Central Park — after an enormous flood inundates Manhattan; the second act of Rich’s novel involves the anxious savant who spent the comic first part of the novel as a disaster consultant, speculating on businessmen’s fears of large-scale catastrophe, forging through his city in a garish canoe. You’ve got to wonder at Rich’s emotions — this book must have been complete by then — during hurricane Sandy.

“She paused, trying to find the right words. ‘I suppose it’s something like this: if the storm was so horrific, then why is everything now so beautiful?’”

April 19, 2013, 11:00am   Comments

“Tornadoes were charted by the Fujita scale, named after Professor Tetsuya Fujita of Kitakyushu, Japan, a man known in press reports as ‘Mr. Tornado.’ Through his work on tornado classification, Mr. Tornado discovered a peculiar meteorological phenomenon that he named a ‘microburst.’ A microburst was a strong, localized air current that caused wind to change direction and speed rapidly. Mr. Tornado determined that this freakish phenomenon was responsible for most unsolved airline crashes. Mitchell had never heard of microbursts before and was terrified by the thought of them.”

This is one of the pleasant things Rich does: the little digression from his main story, into something mildly relevant, a nugget of information that gets pulled back to fuel his characters and their anxieties.

FSG 04.02.13

April 18, 2013, 11:00am   Comments

“I heard Ramon come up the stairs and then he was there, and begging me to go back down. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Your father is freaking out on me. You have to go downstairs and talk to him,’ he said, and I did, wordlessly, brushing by him, touching him gently enough to hurt him, and I gathered myself up, the way I knew even then I would continue to on nights to come, nights when the phone sat silent and the birthmothers didn’t call, or the nights they did call and we talked for hours but then they did not choose us, on nights when, if we ever got that child, that child had grown up to hate us, as much as I had told my parents I hated them, as much as I had run from them, as much as I had thwarted them for only being themselves, but I did not know that as I made my way down the steps to talk to my father that night, I did not know that my parents were only human; I had not reached that level of humanness that would allow me to forgive them.”

I feel like this is both very good and very bad, which kind of lines up with my response to The Mothers. Gilmore’s topic is something that I know a little bit about, and it was interesting to put her experiences — the press stuff emphasizes that her book is drawn from her own experience with domestic open adoption — alongside mine. And it’s interesting that she chose to do this in the form of a novel, giving her a little distance, allowing her to make Jesse, the adoptive mother, a little rawer and harsher than one might want to in a straight-up memoir. So here, at an important moment in Jesse’s story, we get a delicate, well-done moment, “gently enough to hurt him,” followed by a long, wandering, forward-projecting sentence that I’m not sure makes very much sense.

Scribner 04.19.13

April 17, 2013, 11:00am   Comments

» We look to genre fiction for something specific; something that the structure of genre can fulfill in ways that “literary fiction” does not — perhaps cannot. The same, of course, is true of the inverse; literary fiction involves an expansion of horizons, and a text that adheres precisely to convention cannot hope to accomplish that. Literary genre fiction promises to subvert the genre in “unexpected” ways, but those ways become tropes themselves, eventually. Perhaps I’m overly conservative when it comes to genre fiction: I see something so promising in the simple conflicts of a space opera, and most attempts to subvert that only end up seeming twee. Sorry Please Thank You is always enjoyable, but the few stories that stand out are the ones that refuse the comfort of the inside joke.

Eleanor Gold, well thought-out in a review of Charles Yu’s collection Sorry Please Thank You.

April 16, 2013, 11:00am  Comments

“His face relaxed, slightly amused at my eagerness. ‘I’m going to tell you in such a way that you’ll remember the answer but not the question or the asking of it.’”

And this is the second memory wipe for our heroine, although unlike the first this one does sidestep the enormous clumsiness of the setup (where she remembers being told that she won’t remember anything) a page or two later, with the revelation that her memories have been shielded psychically. But the illogic isn’t the problem that the clumsiness is; much of The Best of All Possible Worlds is earnest and hamhanded, like the love story that unites all the episodic traveling Lord’s characters do (it’s obvious, after all, that the two main characters are an opposites-attract setup virtually from their first scene, and it takes the whole three hundred pages of the novel to get there). But if the literary, novelistic stuff is Lord’s short suit, her novel is still detailed and completely-imagined, her thought experiments varied and philosophically-engaged, and because of that the book is interesting — and interesting in a genre where that tag is not at all faint praise.

April 15, 2013, 11:00am   Comments

“‘Is there some other production we might attend which does not illustrate that dysfunctional pair bonding is endemic in most cultures?’ asked Dllenahkh with heavy disapproval.”

The larger thought experiment is this: a human race that evolved in parallel on four planets, with four different courses of development; one planet — the best of all possible worlds — where their cultures and genetics combine. Which leads to moments like this, where several characters try to tease out which version of a jealous-love-triangle play, where the hero kills his faithful wife on the goading of his false friend, they’re watching. Until one reads the fine print at the bottom of the poster which says the play’s drawn from Pagliacci.

Also, please note that this is a distant future that features live stage plays as entertainment.

April 14, 2013, 11:00am   Comments

“‘But they say that for centuries the land was populated by two taSadiri clans who were constantly at war with each other. They had endured a particularly bad run of hostilities when a strange Cygnian turned up with an intriguing solution to their problem. Since the main cause of their war was the question of which clan’s rituals and dialect should take precedence, the compromise was for both clans to learn an entirely new identity.’”

This is the kind of thing that hard sci-fi is good for, and is also its undoing: it’s a thought experiment in narrative, a baldly fictional test case for an idea, and the genre permits that thought experiment to be clothed in the trappings of the novel — character, plot, incident. Sometimes this is very good; sometimes it winds up being bloodless and mechanical.

Oh, and by the way — the new identity is drawn from Celtic folktales and fictions; it’s the kingdom of Faerie that this diplomatic mission is visiting.

Del Rey 02.12.13

April 13, 2013, 11:00am   Comments