Pryne resurrected as Payne in "When She Woke"

A few summers ago, I read a novel about a young woman who moves to a farm in the south with her family and is caught off guard by the grueling nature of the enterprise. She is shaken by the heat, the loneliness, and the crags and craters of her emotions. I remember being surprised by how much I enjoyed Mudbound and knew I would keep my eyes out for Hillary Jordan’s next publication. Nevertheless, when Jordan’s second novel was published I was hesitant to bring it home with me. When She Woke takes on the uncertain landscape of the future. I am often deterred by these premises. Maybe this is because Brave New World was spoiled for me by high school, maybe because I prefer to have uncertainties of the present enumerated for me, or maybe I’m just an old crank. Adding to my skepticism was the knowledge that Jordan’s second work modeled itself on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. If there’s something that makes me very nervous, it’s novels based on Classics. Despite my trepidation, there is much to be said for When She Woke. Jordan imagines a future where criminals are identified by the color of their skin. A virus has been created which alters your DNA and turns you a color that matches your crime. Green an arsonist, drug dealers blue, etc. Rather than overload the prison system, criminals are allowed into the general population. They serve out their sentence in years as their designated color. Unsurprisingly the Chromes form a new lower class. And as with all things other, they are largely despised and preyed upon. Jordan’s America is governed by a radical religious right. Abortions are illegal. If caught you are chromed red: murderer. Hannah Payne, our modern Hester Pryne, is the daughter of intensely religious parents. As a child she is shamed for asking too many questions, wanting to wear pants, sensing there is something out there bigger than her parents’ doctrinal obedience. She never quite fits into the rigid strictures of her world. Aidan Dale, her married pastor, is her undoing and her love story. Unlike Hester Pryne, Hannah aborts her child, unwilling to bring it into the world they inhabit, unwilling to incriminate her lover. After Hannah’s chroming and solitary imprisonment she is released into a religious halfway house for chromed women. Cruelty abounds, overseen largely by the proprietor’s wife. Hannah is able to build a deep friendship with another red, Kayla, and together they strike out into their own brave new world; a world full of Klan-like vigilantes and terrorists trying to give victims like Hannah a second chance at life. Jordan’s future is expertly crafted if not always fully explained. The scenarios and gadgets that fill her novel are probable extensions of current trends: biodiesel cars, restricted personal freedoms, mobile devices called ports that make calls, track your money, your location etc. Jordan’s terrain, technological and political, is familiar enough to be frightening. The roles of religion and freedom are seriously discussed and it isn’t difficult to see how the extremists arrived at their decisions. It’s abundantly clear how hard it is to win those freedoms back. In the end I felt that Jordan rushed to bring her heroines to a conclusion. Despite deviations in the middle, the story’s arc ended with a scene very close to Hawthorne’s. I found the synchronicity unnecessary, because When She Woke had taken on a strong life of its own. The novel neither reinforced my prejudices about futuristic, classic-based novels, nor assuaged them. I would like to see what Jordan does next.

Complexity of Internet Age Lost in Banks Novel

In his recent novel, Lost Memory of Skin, Russell Banks tackles three separate subjects: the criminality of sex offenders, morbid obesity, and his apparent love for Florida. There is certainly room for these three themes to become intertwined and accentuate each other. Unfortunately their crossings feel entirely forced and the novel is one of the few I can best recommend as a doorstop.

The protagonists are not awarded with the dignity of names. They are merely the Kid, a young, white adult male recently out of prison for a sex crime, and the Professor, an obscenely fat man who takes a scholarly interest in the ramshackle community of sex offenders living beneath the Calusa causeway. What we are meant to recognize early on is that both men are layered in misunderstandings and concealments. This clearly manifests in the Professor’s gross size, which Banks conveniently chalks up to overindulgent parents who were wowed with the brilliance of their only son, and in the Kid's secrecy about his offense.

It is easy to feel sympathy for the Kid. He grew up as little more than a mouth to feed in his mother’s house and he has a tendency to lavish kindnesses on odd or wrecked animals. His affection for his iguana, Iggy, is both sweetly touching, baffling and his undoing. The Kid basically suffers from a lack of knowhow. He can be viewed as an everyman or middle-man, but unlike other heroes he’s given no particular talents and his dispassionate if vaguely self-aware presence is fostered by an environment in which it’s possible to disappear through the cracks into various byways. The Kid chooses to quench his loneliness with sexual satisfaction and the rampant porn supply on the internet allows him to do so without ever becoming intimate with another person. The dastardly role that the web can play into modern lives is more than interesting in itself but Banks mars the easy vulnerability of his character by repeatedly patronizing him and undermining whatever dignity the unassuming Kid possesses.

The Professor's formula is excess. He is a genius and has ended up as huge fish in a tiny pond and the girth to make everyone take note. His interest in the Kid feels predatory even if it's not and we're expecting to uncover some sort of darkness between his evasions. The expectation is satisfied in the most absurd manner of secret government agencies and years spent as a spy. The Professor is as opaque as the Kid is transparent and the friendship that arises is unlikely and unconvincing.

A novel can be redeemed through its descriptions, either through ripe language or visuals. Again Banks disappoints. Florida never came alive for me. Even when the Kid and Professor are caught in the throes of a hurricane I felt nothing for the crashing waves nor felt the force of the surrounding storm. If Banks harbors a particular love for the complicated culture and environment of Florida he utterly fails to communicate it or to embroil the reader in its complexities.

At no point could I divine Banks’s purpose and I was wholly disappointed by the author, whose books I have previously enjoyed. His effort to uncover the complicated role the Internet plays in our lives today, allowing us to disappear from each other into alternate but not necessarily safer realities, is crippled both by his language and the lack of dignity and thrall in his characters' stories.

"Blueprints" an Explosive Portrait of Post-feminist Girls

The first story of Elissa Schappell’s collection Blueprints for Building Better Girls explodes off the pages. The vulnerability, sadness, cruelty and idiocy are like brutal scratches and the familiarity of the emotions like salt on a wound.

Heather has a bad reputation. Slut is shouted more than whispered as she walks through the halls of her high school. Ross is haunted by his recent past as the fat kid. The one in the pool with a long shirt, the one shoved into lockers, his books catapulted toward the floor. They find each other and it is a first exchange of intimacy and surrender. They are broken fledglings and their desperate search for solace is heartbreaking and destructive. “I couldn’t figure out why Ross, after taking such good care of that car, polishing each sleek curve, never seemed to clean outside,” thinks Heather, illuminating the way that all of Ross’s workouts and diets have shaved off the pounds but not smoothed whatever is inside him.

Schappell’s stories are linked by incidental crossovers between characters and my mind hopped around a bit trying to remember where Jenny had appeared before and what I knew about her. I’ve begun to tire of the six degrees of separation approach in short story collections, but Schapell’s overlaps bothered me less than some.

Joy of Cooking was good enough to make me pause. I have a tendency to react violently to narratives of eating disorders. Too often they are so wrong it feels like an insult. Schappell is at her strongest when she is writing in the first person and this is the best way to inhabit the pain of Emily’s mother. Twelve was the beginning of her daughter’s anorexia. Sit-ups, calorie counting, 74 pounds. The story hurts. The disease is an awful game where the winner dies, and this insidious disease is everywhere. Joy of Cooking harrowingly reminds us of the ripple effect, the way the obsession with food scuttles relationships and devastates multiple lives. “No one saw how much the mother hurt,” Schappell writes. “No one knew, or cared, what she’d lost.”

Schappell examines more than a few marriages, probing at the eventuality of children. She illuminates the polarizing feeling of absolute love and devotion paired with a distinct, if temporary, loss of self.

Sex itself is a vital thread in this narrative of girls and women. Unfortunately, every instance of sex in these pages is laced with ulterior motives, a promise or a deprivation. A woman bears three children to her husband and he stops sleeping with her. Another can't bear children and is similarly rejected. The anorexic is so uncomfortable in her body she can’t be touched, and a college girl tries to erase herself through degrading, semi-conscious encounters. Sex is not a success for these women, which I found upsetting and unfair. When will women, even in the confines of fiction, be permitted to pursue their sexual impulses without damning results?

I spent a lot of time thinking about these women’s relationship to sex afterward. Wanted, denied, unwanted, degraded, feared. Ultimately I think Schappell wouldn’t let sex be easy for her characters. Maybe she thinks it isn’t easy, or maybe she thinks it shouldn’t be, and maybe she’s right. But I can’t help hoping for stories about women who ask for what they desire and get it, without strings, without damage. How many times have we explained the foibles of men as boys being boys? When Heather’s son explains away a girl’s slip-up in a similar manner, her reply is devastating: “Don’t be a fool, there is no such thing as just a girl.”

Schappell unveils the frigid contours of post-feminist blueprints. The ability to have it all was somewhere confused with a directive. And as anyone knows, who has tried to be the good daughter, the temptress, and the measured prude, you simply can’t be everyone you’re expected to be.

"Grief of Others" Speaks to Suburbia

When I read a review of Leah Hager Cohen’s novel The Grief of Others, I was curious how it would compare to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. ¬The books possess similar elements, a fraying family, suburbia, secrets. As readers of Booking Around are aware, I did not like Freedom. I felt differently about The Grief of Others.

The Ryries live outside of New York City in a pleasant neighborhood and have two children. John also has an elder daughter from a relationship in college. And the Ryries have just lost their infant son. Ricky chose to carry the baby to term, though she knew he would survive only a few hours after his birth. He had a rare defect where his skull didn’t properly form to protect his brain. Ricky kept this knowledge from her husband John and her secretive decisions has opened a vast chasm between them and shaken the constructs of their family.

The shift has affected both their children, and the parents seem just mildly aware of the impact their marital trouble is having. Paul is being bullied by his peers, and Biscuit has started skipping school for no reason they can discern at the early age of ten. John’s first daughter, and their half-sister, Jessica shows up with a pregnancy of her own, and it is her presence that begins to bring the Ryries’ rupture to light.

What Hager Cohen draws from her characters is the human despair and desire to improve that Franzen failed to imbue in the Berglunds. They infuriated me because they saw their problems but wouldn’t attempt to repair them and answered the situation by destroying the lives of the people around them instead. The Ryries are similarly on fragile ground, and while the behavior that occurs may be hurtful, it is not cruel. The complexity of desires and selfishness of people, even mothers and fathers, is not overlooked by Hager Cohen, but neither is it indulged.

Gordie is another character who comes into the frame of the Ryries lives. He is of college age and has lost his father to cancer. He happens to spot Biscuit as she falls into the river and brings the sodden child home and finds himself welcomed into a home that doesn’t seem to have room for each other. He is suffering from his own grief and confusion about who he is now that he has one less template of personhood to compare to.

Hager Cohen gets deep into the heads of all of her characters, illustrating each with clear and sometimes startling illuminations of their thoughts. Her writing has the qualities of a river, direct in its course but able to respond to changes in light and interferences. The book is about recovering from crisis. Moving beyond what one believes one is capable of in order to be there for the ones left behind. The Ryries struggle to revitalize what they have built without razing their first attempt. The work is hard but the ability to reflect is available to them and recognized.

Love story at the heart of Murakami's 1Q84

The world of 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami is not to be entered casually. I suppose I wouldn’t encourage anyone to blindly jump into one of his previous books either (except I can’t help recommending the dark brilliance of Norwegian Wood to anyone who asks). Murakami tends toward the dark or bizarre or the sad. 1Q84 brims with all of these and its intensities are sometime wearisome or upsetting. But what 1Q84 made me realize more than anything else is that Murakami’s novels are always love stories. The romances are hardly formulaic, but at the center of shifting worlds and convoluted self-discoveries the ultimate focus is strangely pure. The grand complexities of 1Q84 manage to emphasize this more than most.

Aomame, her name means green peas, is a determined, attractive, and somewhat frightening woman. Her audacity is evident from the first scene, in which she exits a taxi in the middle of a traffic jam on the elevated Metropolitan Expressway of Tokyo. She is in a rush to make her business appointment (she’s an assassin) and she effortlessly climbs down the emergency exit in her stockings and skirt suit. As she departs from the safe confines of the cab the driver offers ger strange advice: “Please remember: things are not what they seem.” Aomame’s descent allows her to keep her appointment, and takes her into a world with two moons, air chrysalises, and the Little People.

Tengo is the same age as Aomame and has the strange occupation of working as a professor of math and of being a writer. His entrance into the year 1Q84 isn’t marked by a dramatic change, but the course of his days do shift when his editor asks him to rewrite a short story submission the magazine has received. Air Chrysalis was written by a 17-year-old girl, Fuka-Eri, and the editor believes that with Tengo’s writing and Fuka-Eri’s youth and odd story, they will have a blockbuster success. Tengo agrees to ghostwrite the project, bringing to life with eerie clarity the actions of the Little People.

Murakami’s characters are nothing if not enigmatic and he constructs them with such careful detail that their quirks are easy to recall months later. An eccentric, protective dowager plays a silent hand in the fates of women, and the men who abuse them. A hideous, unlikable man works on behalf of dark groups without any real agenda. Fuka-Eri’s speech is strangely devoid of inflection, while the contortions of Aomame’s face in the throes of anger are so horrifying as to be unrecognizable. Tengo resembles many of Murakami’s previous heroes. He is contemplative, solitary, smart. At times his inaction has a more profound effect than any action and it is common to spend pages with him as he goes about his modest daily movements.

As the title clearly suggests, 1Q84 exhibits the themes of George Orwell’s 1984. The world that Aomame and Tengo find themselves in isn’t so different from the 1984 they know, but the currents of power have shifted and as their stories grow closer together their survival is mutually dependent.

There is much that is mystical and mysterious about Murakami’s novel, but sometimes the most incredible aspect is the love story. A foreordained quality exists in the lovers’ trajectory. The intensity of the link between the two is both sustaining and suspicious, humming too closely to the tune of a fairy tale. I find it wild that such a massive, complex and unique text is built upon such a delicate kernel of truth. Aomame and Tengo are written as incredibly solitary, self-contained people and yet their union is the fulcrum of the fate of 1Q84. The novel is an adventure, a journey through the fantastical imagination of Murakami and his incredible web of detail. There is much to analyze in the text, much to like or dislike. If you are a fan of Murakami, you will savor this book, if you are not, it may not win you over.

The Stark Terrain of "The Outlaw Album"

The reader's introduction to any of Daniel Woodrell's stories is a clang of doom. "Morrow wondered if he might soon die because of a beautiful girl from his teens he'd never had the nerve to approach." This is typical of opening sentences in Woodrell’s short story collection The Outlaw Album. Non-decisions have just as much impact as bad ones. A horrifying combination of despair and accident exists in his characters' tales. Life is taxing and dark, danger is never too far off, and if you don't get mired in it this time, you are bound to the next time around.

In “Black Step,” Woodrell illustrates the life of a modern soldier with a gritty clarity that portrays the struggles of the returned as well as anything I've previously read. His protagonist, Darden, joined the army to become more interesting than his peers; overgrown boys who cruised the same bars night after night, hoping to get laid. Now that he has survived the desert the empty simplicity of those evenings is no longer available to him. Darden can’t even remember the desire to fuck or be touched. He remains at a remove, seeing his past as frequently as he sees his present, relishing graves that disappear.

The Outlaw Album isn't a collection to dive into without premeditation. I frequently noticed that I was steeling myself for the next encounter. Woodrell's language is spare, amplifying the intensity of what occurs. In an era where so much is packaged for our immediate satisfaction and instant entertainment, the weight of Woodrell's stories feel all the more poignant and necessary. Their edges are sharp and jagged. They not only cut into our consciousness but leave a corrugated mark as a reminder of what was learned.

Viewers of last year’s film “Winter’s Bone” will be familiar with the ferocity of Woodrell’s tales. He is the author of the novel and the filmmakers captured something of the sparse despair of the regular days of his characters; their shots floating across run down properties that are encapsulated in a persistent, dour grey.

The austerity of Woodrell’s prose puts him in league with Hemingway but tacks closer to Raymond Carber. Like Carver he writes of hard drinking, lost men, and determined, stern women. He excavates communities that we are not or comfortable, accustomed to, reading about. Readers of Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories may be more at ease with Woodrell’s terrain but he takes a different tone. There is filter on his lens and what is delivered is stark and harsh. Moments of possibility and beauty are not absent, but they are pared down to their essence. The presence of an artistic flourish would undermine the truth of what Woodrell creates and he has no need for them.

To infer that the absence of flourish means a cut and dry tone would be a mistake. Woodrell is a master of his craft and has a command of multiple writing styles. He is first person and third, brother and daughter, violent and loyal. Each hardscrabble character in Woodrell’s collection has a different story of upset and survival to tell. Recuperative periods are suggested between each portrait of life that he presents, but Woodrell’s book is a rare and raw piece of work that should garner the admiration and attention of its readers and perforate the heart.

Harbach Wins Fans with Debut

On occasion there are fictional characters whose lives you can imagine beyond the pages of the book they reside in. One feels like one has been given a window into their experience, not as if they have been created solely to prove a point or tell a single story. The characters in Chad Harbach’s debut novel The Art of Fielding are these sorts of people. When I reached the last page, in a matter of days despite the novel’s bulk, I was sure that Henry, Schwartz, and their teammates would continue on with their lives, and it was my loss to no longer be a witness.

Henry Skrimshander is a kid from South Dakota for whom baseball is the only thing. He plays shortstop with an effortless kind of beauty that Mike Schwartz spots immediately. Schwartz is a student at Westish College, a small, fictional school in Wisconsin. A hulking, stereotypical form of an athlete, Schwartz recognizes the kind of talent he always wished he possessed and decides to help Henry realize his potential. Schwartz himself is perhaps the most compelling character. He pursues law school as vehemently as he coaches the best from his teammates but finds himself skidding to a confused stop and searching for what actually anchors and drives him.

Schwartz changes Henry’s life drastically, shifting its course from community college student to rising baseball star of Westish. Henry’s arrival on campus exposes him to grueling, vivid training sessions and introduces him to his roommate Owen, one of the book’s fulcrums.

Guert Affenlight, the president of Westish, and his daughter Pella, are actors off the baseball field. Affenlight is a wonderful, scholarly figure, whom we see stirred by unexpected desires. His daughter has returned to him after a botched, early marriage, and is trying to land on her feet. Both characters add a dash of relativity to the events on the field, though struggles are not placed in a hierarchy.

Often I found myself pausing over Harbach’s sentences for the pleasure of rereading them. He is inclined to describe people with food in mind and I was happy to be sent to the dictionary more than once, though fuchsin was perhaps unnecessary since fuchsia works just as well. Quite a lot of reference was made to the “hip hop anthem of the moment,” a tired means of expressing the wilted nature of the surrounding college culture. But happily much is made of 19th century literary bastions, particularly Melville, whose brief, rediscovered visit to Westish earns the college athletes their name, the Harpooners.

The relationships in The Art of Fielding are fragile. Some of the relationships constructed by Harbach seem founded on very little. But then that can be the case; an incidental bond at the heart of something that grows almost without encouragement or reason. Their basis resides in the familial, loyalty, awe.

For much of the novel Henry is an obedient puppy dog to Schwartz’s insistent regime of vicarious success. But Henry’s relationship with baseball founders at the novel’s center, calling into question his purpose. He is infamous for his errorless play, and just as he ties the record of his hero, he throws an errant ball. The consequences multiply and set numerous, irreversible events in motion.

The Art of Fielding educates the reader about passion as well as confusion, prejudice, and baseball. As someone for whom sports are incidental, the novel was a consistent pleasure if not a comprehensive course on America’s favorite pastime.