"The Nickel Boys" by Colson Whitehead

This sometimes harrowing expose of cruelty and abuse in a Florida reform school won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Elwood Curtis is a conscientious and intelligent young man. He studies hard at school and works hard at his part-time job. But he is black and this is Florida in the early 1960s. He is arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and sent to the Nickel Academy, a reform school. He has to learn how to survive in a brutal environment where the rules are made by the abusers. 

We also meet Elwood Curtis as an older man. He has survived Nickel and now lives in New York. Journalists have exposing the truth about what happened at Nickel.

And there is a twist.

Irony is deeply embedded in this beautifully written and compelling read, from the merely comic “Cherry, a mulatto who took up boxing as a matter of pedagogy, to teach others how not to speak about his white mother.” (Ch 9) to the deeply political: the house where the boys are beaten nearly to death is called the "White House"; what is outside the jail is called the "free world" in the way that the USA calls itself the 'leader of the free world' although even outside the jail the black boys, poor and persecuted, have very little freedom.

An tender and angry portrait of “the infinite brotherhood of broken boys.” (Ch 15)

Selected quotes:

• “He’d outgrown his shirt and the pressure against the buttons made him look upholstered.” (Ch 4)
• “He was familiar with Elwood's ‘situation’ - his intonation swaddled the word in euphemism.” (Ch 4)
• “Stuffing dribbled from the couches and armchairs in the recreation room.” (Ch 4)
• “The first thing Elwood noticed was the notch in the boy's left ear, like on an alley cat that had been in scrapes.” (Ch 5): Elwood’s first view of Turner.
• “He had the screwed-down smile of the rickety-toothed.” (Ch 5)
• “Horror comics, he’d noticed, delivered two kinds of punishment - completely undeserved, and sinister justice for the wicked.” (Ch 7)
• “Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.” (Ch 8)
• “The boy struggled over two plus three, like he didn't know how many damned fingers he had on his hand.” (Ch 9)
• “Out in the Free World to make your zig zag way.” (Ch 11)
• “The White House got a new coat. No one saw who did it. One day it was its dingy self, the next it made the sun vibrate on eyeballs.” (Ch 14)
• “Mr Betts paid on time, in cash, off the books. Didn’t matter what his name was or where he’d come from.” (Ch 15)
• “The worst thing that ever happened to Elwood happened every day: He woke in that room.” (Ch 16)
• “The world had whispered its rule to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order. The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead to deliverance, fight and things will change.” (Ch 16)
• “Elwood’s arms went wide’ hands out, as if testing the solidity pf the walls of a long corridor, one he had travelled through for a long time and which possessed no visible terminus.” (Ch 16)
• “She took his head into her lap as he wept, running her thumb over that stray-cat notch in his ear. The scar she never noticed but was right in front of her.” (Epilogue)

March 2025; 208 pages
First published in the UK by Fleet in 2019
My paperback edition issued in 2020.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Fire Exit" by Morgan Talty

Does our identity depend upon our heritage? And is our heritage passed down to us through 'blood' or 'stories'?

The narrator, Charles, is the stepson of Frederick, a member of the Penobscot nation, an indigenous people living in Maine. Because Charles doesn't qualify as Penobscot he is not allowed to live on the reservation. Instead he lives across the river and spends his days watching his daughter growing up with her mother and another man. Meanwhile his mother, Louise, who has battled episodes of depression throughout her life, is now drifting into dementia.

He wants to tell his now adult daughter that he is her father. “She needed to know that her blood was her blood. nothing could take that away, and nothing could even come close to capturing it.” (Ch 12) He hasn't really grasped the implications: not only does that cast doubt on her identity as Penobscot but also she will discover that her parents have been lying to her all these years. 

It's a nice conundrum. The narrator is obsessed by bloodline and yet many of the deepest and most meaningful relationships in this book are between people with no genetic connections, such as Charles with his beloved stepfather and Bobby with Louise. 

The subplot of his mother's voyage into dementia is a counterpoint that reinforces and strengthens the theme.

I found the first chapter very confusing (even after I discovered I had skipped two pages and returned to reread them). But the structure of the plot is nicely balanced between keeping the reader guessing, letting curiosity drive the page-turning, and providing sufficient information. It ends in a dramatic climax with is both surprising and a necessary consequence of what went before; Aristotle would have approved.

Selected quotes:

• “I knew her only by the conversations we had on the phone, her body the shape of a voice on the other end of the line.” (Ch 3)
• “The only true thing I could be certain about ... was that blood is messy, and it stains in ways that are hard to clean, especially if that stain can't be seen but we know it is there, a trail of red or dark red leading back to a time we cannot go to remove it.” (Ch 6)
• “I wasn't sure Louise knew who I was anymore, but I was quite certain I was nobody. And as I sat there I felt myself slipping away to damp depths of sadness as I had done the night before, and I was thinking and thinking and thinking about how, in just the past year, I had just started to know her, but then I began to unknow her, getting farther and farther away like watching a boat drift from the shore and head out not to some other land but to an open water that never, ever ends. And she did not even know this, that she was on the boat.” (Ch 21)
• “We are made of stories, and if we don't know them - the ones that make us - how can we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we really are?” (Ch 26)

November 2024; 292 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates

Chosen by Time magazine as one of the Hundred best novels since Time began, this debut novel first published in 1961 was a finalist for the National Book Award. It became a three-times Oscar nominated film directed by Sam Mendes and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet; I've never seen the film.

It's about how the need to grow up and earn a living destroys our dreams.

It's 1955 in the USA. Frank wants life to be meaningful. April, his wife, married him because he was always talking of things that seemed important and worthwhile. But now he is saddled with “the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs.” (1.2) She is a housewife and mother bringing up two children. They devise a plan to drop out of the rate race and move to Europe where she will work and he will find himself. But events and human weakness conspire to undermine their dreams.

We've all been there. We've all had to compromise on our hopes. This is a universal theme.

Despite being written in the third-person 'omniscient' and past tense, it was almost entirely from the PoV of Frank.

My problem was that I didn't like the characters. Now that should be a sign of excellence in writing: to inspire such a reaction in your reader. But I wasn't sure that I wholly believed in them:

• April was a neurotic doormat. She seemed to live entirely for her man. She seems entirely contented with her role as a domestic servant; her plans for the future revolve around making her man more fulfilled. She says things like: “You always do have the right instinct about things like this. You’re really a very generous, understanding person, Frank.” She belatedly realises this when, finally and of course disastrously, she makes up her mind to rebel. “The only real mistake, the only wrong and dishonest thing, was effort to have seen him as anything more than that. Oh, for a month or two, just for fun, it might be all right to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear.” (3.7) But in terms of the book this epiphany came too late. I suppose you can argue that their row-strewn marriage was fuelled by her unrealised anger. I suppose you can argue that women in America in 1955 were complacently subservient. But it didn't ring true to me.
• Frank almost completely lacks self-awareness. He's a self-pitying bully and tyrant. He wants to feel that he's a man. In conversation he's a bore. Somehow he has done less than the minimum at work for seven years and kept his job. He can embark upon an affair without any feelings of guilt. Of course you don't need your main character through whose eyes the others are seen to be a hero  but Frank was so unpleasant that, even though he had dreams (although he never really visualised them) and now his life is dull dull dull, I couldn't sympathise. Stop whingeing and get over it was how I felt. 

I am aware that I am judging these characters (a) as if they were real (which suggests that the book was well-written) and (b) in the light of contemporary standards, after we have had nearly seventy years of feminism.

The other characters were very much in the background. Mrs Givings (I kept reading that as 'misgivings') was a nice little cameo role.

The plot was mostly predictable and paced very much as you would expect. 

There are some wonderful descriptions:

• "as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell.” (1.2)
• “His temple ached in zeal and triumph as he heaved a rock up from the suck of its white-wormed socket and let it roll end over end down into the shuddering leafmold, because he was a man.” (1.3)
• “His thin gray body, which seemed to have been made for no other purpose than to fill the minimum requirements of a hard-finish, double-breasted business suit.” (2.4)

But if you want trapped suburban American angst, I'd prioritise Rabbit, Run by John Updike and its sequel Rabbit Redux.

There's an interesting homage to The Great Gatsby. Compare these two passages:

• “‘I just remembered that today’s my birthday.’ I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.” (The Great Gatsby, Ch 7)
• “I just thought of something ... Tomorrow’s my birthday. ... I'll be thirty years old.” (Revolutionary Road 1.4)

Is it a coincidence that the protagonist's name is Frank and that F. Scott Fitzgerald's first name was Francis?

Selected quotes:

• “His face did have an unusual mobility: it was able to suggest wholly different personalities with each flickering change of expression.” (1.2)
• “Nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn't seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing ... and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach." (1.2)
• “You want to know why everybody thinks you're a jerk? Because you're a jerk, that's why.” (1.2)
• “It was turning into mindless, unrewarding work, the kind of work that makes you clumsy with fatigue and petulant with lack of progress.” (1.3)
• “Wasn't it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn't really wanted to do?” (1.3)
• “He had never seen such a stare of pitying boredom in her eyes.” (1.4)
• “Her hair was as unattractively wild now as it must have been in childhood; it seemed to have exploded upward from her skull into hundreds of little kinks. She touched it delicately with her fingertips in several places, not in any effort to smooth it but rather in the furtive, half-conscious way that he had sometimes touched his pimples at sixteen, just to make sure the horrible things were still there.” (1.6)
• “Don't ‘moral’ and ‘conventional’ really mean the same thing?” (3.1)
• “She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known ... that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.” (3.7)
• “The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something.” (3.9)

October 2024; 337 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Journey of Simon McKeever" by Albert Maltz

A celebration of the resilience of an ordinary man.

Set in 1947, in the USA. Simon McKeever has worked hard all his life but now, aged 73, he is crippled by arthritis and unable to work and his pension is handed over to the proprietor of his Care Home. A chance encounter makes him believe that his arthritis can be cured by a doctor in LA. So, penniless, he decides to hitch-hike there.

It is a modern version of a pilgrimage to a religious site with a cure-all saint. In some ways it is a secular Pilgrim's Progress. The hero must overcome challenges and obstacles. Some of the people he meets on the journey will help him, some will cause him problems. He will be daunted. Perhaps his journey is no more than a fool's errand. But in the end, this book is a celebration of indomitability and the fact that most people are prepared to help their neighbour. 

On the journey, as you would expect in a story of this kind, McKeever remembers his past. He is an Everyman figure for that American generation, remembering the hardships of the depression, the fight for the working man to get fair treatment, the joys of a beer, and a dance, and a woman. There are sadnesses: how else did he end up alone and impoverished? But, in the end, he reminds himself of the pipelines and bridges he has built "to move the world one inch forward". (Ch 18)

It is written in a straightforward style. It's an utterly simple plot. The characters and the settings feel as real as the seat I'm sitting on. There is no great drama but that's the point: this is the story of little people. It gains its power and its beauty from that.

Albert Maltz was a novelist and screenwriter. His novel about the Germna resistance, The Cross and the Arrow, was distributed to US soldiers fighting in the Second World War, like The Great Gatsby. He worked on Hollywood screenplays until he was blacklisted (with Donald Trumbo) for refusing to testify before the Committee for Un-American Activities; he was sentenced to a $1,000 fine and a year in jail.

In this novel, Maltz praises the work of other left-wing writers such as Upton Sinclair who wrote The Jungle about the horrors faced by the working man in the Chicago Meat-Packing Industry. 

Structurally, it reminded me of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce but Simon McKeever is so much more down to earth.

Selected quotes:

• “They were granted tobacco at the Home - a weekly ration of horse manure or mattress sweepings or whatever else the poetry of old men's bitterness might choose to call it.” (Ch 1)
• “Most people are half scared - did you ever think of that? Scared of what other people will say, scared of their boss, scared of their own hearts even.” (Ch 1)
• “As for himself, he knew beyond argument that each stage of life brought its own adventure when a man wasn't dead in his heart. There was a profound satisfaction in observing life in a sixty- or a seventy-year-old way; it was quite different from any other way, or so he had found.” (Ch 3)
• “There was only one thing important to a man: the road he had decided to travel. Any problems that arose were no more than hills to climb.” (Ch 3)
• “All tasks worried him dreadfully until they were completed.” (Ch 3)
• “From thirteen on I wiggled my rump like a dog with fleas.” (Ch 3)
• “Ain't you had the lesson yet that your worst enemy is the man who's done you a bad turn?” (Ch 5)
• “For an old man every year is the time of the locust.” (Ch 9)
• “He yearned and needed to believe that there was meaning to his life, and that there was a joy in being a Man - even a common, anonymous man - and that Men together were more than beasts in the field.” (Ch 13)
• “Some get tired and some lose their way. Some are ground down by others and some get turned mad. But the Earth still turns, and only a man has the power to dream. Up from the apes by his own doing, and that's the bright glory of it.” (Ch 14)
• “A life without happiness wouldn't be a good life at all, would it? but I guess a life without disappointment wouldn't be real.” (Ch 17)

October 2024; 234 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Inheritors" by Nadeem Zaman

 

The Great Gatsby, relocated from 1920s New York to the bustling capital of Bangladesh in the 2010s.

But it's more than that. The Inheritors is a beautifully written critique of the gulf between the partying rich and the toiling poor; it explores the shallow relationships among the rich not-so-young things and the deeper but sometimes exploitative relationships between the wealthy and those who work for them. There are genuinely three-dimensional characters and a nice touch of mystery as Nisar the outsider tried to make sense of a world he didn't fully understand.

The Plot:

Nisar, the narrator, travels to Dhaka, which he left as a thirteen year old, thirty years earlier, to sell his father's properties. His next-door neighbour, Junaid, who holds lavish parties every Saturday night in an otherwise empty apartment block, is still in love with Nisar's cousin Disha even though their previous marriage ended; she is presently with Tarek. Bit by bit, Nisar discovers more about Dhaka and Junaid. As these rich young(ish) Bengalis live an opulent life-style, their various relationships fracture and reform until tragedy strikes.

The parallels:

The parallels with The Great Gatsby are clear and start with the characters' names, whose initial letters are identical:

• Narrator Nick Carraway becomes narrator Nisar Chowdhury. Nick comes from the midwestern US; so does Nisar. Nick gives a potted account of his ancestry: “The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch...” (TGG Ch 1) Nisar gives himself a rather more explicit ancestry, including his mother’s side, but it starts: “The Chowdhurys were of Yemeni Arab stock. They travelled to Bengal in around the 14th century and never looked back” (Ch 1) A difference is that Nick in TGG has his thirtieth birthday while Nisar is "flirting with my forties" (Ch 1) Another is that there is no suggestion that Nisar has gay sex.
• Protagonist Jay Gatsby becomes protagonist Junaid Gazi. Fitzgerald’s introduction to Gatsby is: “There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’” (Ch 1) Zaman’s introduction to Gazi is: “He existed in a kind of beauty that was undeniable. He exemplified the mysterious coexistence of opposing forces in one single being. He was as attuned to the universe as much as to his world, like an all-purpose machine, and picked up on the changes that took place miles ahead of others. His state of mind or any grand ability to tackle life with any special creative force towards the creative had nothing to do with it.” (Ch 1) Like Gatsby, the enormously rich Gazi lives next door to the narrator in a huge building empty except for the servants and himself. Like Gatsby, Gazi throws extravagant parties which he himself scarcely participates in. Like Gatsby, Gazi is in love with the narrator's cousin. Gatsby calls Nick 'old sport', Gazi calls Nisar 'boss'. Their ends are similar. Near the end of the book, Nick meets Gatsby's father, so Nisar meets Gazi's dad.  
• Daisy is Nick's second cousin, once removed; Disha is Nisar’s first cousin. Daisy had a romantic relationship with Gatsby and is now the wife of Tom Buchanan. Disha was married to Gazi but is now in a relationship with Tarek Bashir. 
• Antagonist Tom Buchanan, Daisy's husband, is a millionaire; he has a mistress. Tarek Bashir is still married but presently in a relationship with Disha. He is "running around with Maisha" (Ch 14)
• Jordan Baker is Nick Carraway's girlfriend for most of TGG though they grow apart towards the end. Nisar has a platonic relationship with Jasmine until nearly the end of TI.
• George Wilson is a garage owner.  Gowhar Wasim's family owns car dealerships.
• Myrtle Wilson is George's wife. She is Tom Buchanan's mistress. Gowhar's wife is Maisha Wasim. She is in some sort of relationship with Tarek.

There are other parallels. For example, in TGG, there is a billboard on a highway that runs through a desert of ashy wastelands that represent industrial America. On the billboard is an advertisement for an oculist which consists of a monstrous pair of eyes overlooking the desolation; the symbolism of the all-seeing eye of God (and perhaps a reference to the eye atop the pyramid on the dollar bill) is blatant. In TI, the character Gowhar is obsessed by the idea that the stars in the night sky are God's Eyes. Nisat says: “God's Eyes. I had a literal image of eyes wearing horn-rimmed spectacles staring down from the sky. A billboard along an American highway portending the end of days while those eyes watched and judged.” (Ch 18) Another visual image is that Gazi bought his apartment block because from its roof he can see where Disha lives; Gatsby bought his house because he can see, across the Sound, a green light on the jetty at the end of Daisy's lawn.

The famous last line of TGG is "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."; the last line of TI is “The past beats on, louder sometimes than the present, clearer than any visions of the future.” (Ch 28)

But there are differences. For example, Nisar has problems with a lawyer, Ehsan Kibria, who seems to have swindled his family. Both this solicitor and Meyer Wolfsheim (a friend of Gatsby's) have been involved in betting scandals; otherwise this plot line seems distinct.

I have no issues with a modern novelist mining and reforming an old source like this; Barbara Kingsolver did the same in Demon Copperhead. The only problem that I had, as with DC, was that once I had noticed the similarities, I started paying more attention to the parallels and less attention to the modern text; I was distracted from properly enjoying The Inheritors. Because this novel had a lot of great things going for it. The sense of placed was superb. The character of the narrator Nisar was much stronger than the original, Nick (a feature it shared with Demon Copperhead). There was a much stronger sense that the rich hedonists were parasites upon the poor. But the ending seemed a little rushed and, because of the parallels, it was highly predictable, even though Zaman tweaked it slightly.

Summary:

It was a fascinating glimpse into high society in Bangladesh and an entertaining story with some great characters.

Selected quotes:

• “Flirting with my forties, I'd reached a sort of morally stringent stance about the world. It had to stand upright, it had to pay unflinching heed to what was wrong, and I couldn't be bothered to understand its wayward, unruly ways, or care about the nuanced tendencies of human nature.” (Ch 1)
• “If bosses were that good there'd be no need for God.” (Ch 7)
• “His face was sunken into his cheeks, and half-moons of ashen blue hung under his eyes.” (Ch 8)
• “Dhaka isn't an easy place.” (Ch 12)
• “Old times are just that and no more. They're no longer the living, breathing present, they’re dead, not to be revived.” (Ch 14)
• “Disha and Gazi sucked the oxygen of ten people, and they didn't need to be present to do it.” (Ch 16)
• “If there’s a hell, it's right here - we’re standing in it. Heaven is the way out of it.” (Ch 18)
• “But there was no discomfort, no awkwardness, and we sat together as two people with a long and complex history, of many cycles of ups and downs, back once more to equilibrium.” (Ch 22)
• “Home isn't just one thing. it isn't a country, a city or a place of dwelling. Home is a going away, contained in loss, obscured by the brushstrokes of memory.” (Ch 28)

July 2024; 249 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann

Winner of the US National Book Award in 2009. My book group voted unanimously that this was a hit.

Based on a true story, as they say. On the morning of 7th August 1974 (the day before President Richard Nixon announced that he would resign because of the Watergate scandal), Philippe Petit performed an illegal tightrope walk on a wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. This novel tells the linked stories of a number of New Yorkers: mother and daughter prostitutes Tilly and Jazzlyn, Corrigan, a monk-in-the-world, bereaved mother Claire, her husband Judge Solomon and her friend Gloria, and Lara, a drug-taking artist. And the walker himself.

The chronology is non-linear and it took me a long time before I understood that all these individual narratives are linked not only by the tightrope walk but also intimately to one another. But this isn't a book in which the plot is centre-stage. This is much more about a slow exploration of the characters and their relationships with one another, and building this up into a portrait of New York in 1974 in all its beauty and its ugliness.

Corrigan is most important character who doesn't narrate; what we learn of him comes mostly from his brother, Cieran. Following the abandonment of the family by his father, Corrigan becomes a very religious boy who loves to hang out with the homeless, drinking with the down-and-outs. He reminded me very much of Sally Trench, author of the memoir Bury Me In My Boots. Having travelled from Dublin to New York, he becomes a friend of prostitutes, allowing them to urinate in the bathroom in his flat. He is a fascinating portrait of a modern-day St Francis. His scarcely-understanding brother says: "I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student - thirty six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten."  (All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here)

Another key character is Claire whose privileged world, living in an art-strewn penthouse apartment overlooking Center Park, is destroyed by the death of her only son in Vietnam. The depth of her sorrow hollowed me out. Colum McCann deserved awards just for this gut-wrenching portrayal of grief: "Death by drowning, death by snakebite, death by mortar, death by bullet wound, death by wooden stake, death by tunnel rat, death by bazooka, death by poison arrow, death by pipe bomb, death by piranha, death by food poisoning, death by Kalashnikov, death by RPG, death by best friend, death by syphilis, death by sorrow, death by hypothermia, death by quicksand, death by tracer, death by thrombosis, death by water torture, death by trip wire, death by pool cue, death by Russian roulette, death by punji trap, death by opiate, death by machete, death by motorbike, death by firing squad, death by gangrene, death by footsore, death by palsy, death by memory loss, death by claymore, death by scorpion, death by crack-up, death by Agent orange, death by rent boy, death by harpoon, death by nightstick, death by immolation, death by crocodile, death by electrocution, death by mercury, death by strangulation,  death by bowie knife, death by mescaline death by mushroom, death by lysergic acid, death by jeep smash, death by grenade trap, death by boredom, death by heartache, death by sniper, death by paper cuts, death by whoreknife, death by poker game, death by numbers, death by bureaucracy, death by carelessness, death by delay, death by avoidance, death by mathematics, death by carbon copy, death by eraser, death by filing error, death by penstroke, death by suppression, death by authority, death by isolation, death by incarceration, death by fratricide, death by suicide, death by genocide, death by Kennedy, death by LBJ, death by Nixon, death by Kissinger, death by Uncle Sam, death by Charlie, death by signature, death by silence, death by natural causes." (1: Miro, Miro, on the Wall) I don't normally enjoy what seems to be a common practice in American writing of offering lists. The book begins: "Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey." I don't think this list of streets adds anything; if its objective is to anchor the narrative in verisimilitude, it doesn't. But the list of deaths ... Wow!

Selected Quotes:

• "A flying chocolate wrapper touched against a fire hydrant. Taxi doors slammed. Bits of trash sparred in the darkest reaches of the alleyways. ... Revolving doors pushed quarters of conversation out into the street." (Those who saw him hushed)
• "She turned at the door and smiled. 'There'll be lawyers in heaven before you see somethin' so good again'." (1: All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here)
• "When you're young, God sweeps you up. He holds you there, The real snag is to stay there and to know how to fall. All those days when you can't hold on any longer. When you tumble. The test is being able to climb up again." (1: All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here) 
• "I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student - thirty six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten."  (1: All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here) Lots of tightrope-walking imagery although, of course, when you perform between the Twin Towers without a safety line you're never going to get up after you fall. The tightrope-walker is described elsewhere as an angel, or perhaps a demon, and Lucifer was the angel who fell to earth. There's also a mention of Dante and Jigsaw, a pimp, is buried in Potter's Field, which is a burial ground for paupers and the unknown, so named because in the Bible a Potter's Field was purchased to be a burial ground with the money that Judas had accepted for betraying Christ.
• "Nothing holy is free." (1: All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here)
• "Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get." "I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student - thirty six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten."  (1: All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here)
• "The overexamined life, Claire, it's not worth living." (1: Miro, Miro, on the Wall) A clever version of the maxim attributed to Socrates: that the unexamined life is not worth living.
• "He calls me his little honeybee sometimes. It started from an argument when he called me a WASP." (1: Miro, Miro, on the Wall)
• "If you stand in the same river for too long, even the banks will trickle past you." (A Fear of Love)
• "A row of smokers stood out in front of Metropolitan Hospital ... Each looked like his last cigarette, ashen and ready to fall."  (1: A Fear of Love)
• "It was the type of hospital that looked like it needed a hospital."  (1: A Fear of Love)
• "BEAUTY IS IN THE WALLET OF THE BEHOLDER" (1: A Fear of Love) 
• "Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable."  (1: A Fear of Love)
• "When I was seventeen, I had a body that Adam woulda dropped Eve for. ... and Jesus himself woulda been in the background saying, Adam, you're one lucky motherfucker." (2: This is the House that Horse Built)
• "I don't know who God is but if I meet Him anytime soon I'm going to get Him in the corner until He tells me the truth. ... And if he says Jazz ain't in heaven, if He says she didn't make it through, He's gonna get Himself an ass-kicking."  (2: This is the House that Horse Built)
• "It was so much like having sex with the wind. It complicated things and blew away and softly separated and slid back around him." (The Ringing Grooves of Change)
• "Every now and then the city shook its soul out." (3: Part of the Parts)
• "New York kept going forward precisely because it didn't give a good goddam about what it had left behind." (3: Part of the Parts)
• "When he was young and headstrong, he'd been sure that one day he'd be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that."  (3: Part of the Parts)
• "The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own." (3: Centavos) 
• "She wasn't a godly woman, mind; she used to say that the heart's future was in a spadeful of dirt." (3: All Hail and Hallelujah)
• "People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time." (3: All Hail and Hallelujah)
• "It was like they had spent their lives breathing each other's breath." (3: All Hail and Hallelujah)
• "Sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear." (4: Roaring Seaward, and I Go)
• "We stumble on, now, we drain the light from the dark, to make it last." (4: Roaring Seaward, and I Go)

A book to treasure for the writing and for the characterisation.

Colum McCann also wrote This Side of Brightness, also about New Yorkers and Twist.

February 2024; 349 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"No Dumping Allowed" by L M Ford

"Amanda Danvers stared at the arm sticking out from behind the dumpster" is a great first line which hooked my attention straight away. We are instantly launched into a murder mystery set in a small town in the USA. Amanda, the new owner of a car-wash business where the body has been dumped, investigates whodunnit. Needless to say, she succeeds where the cops fail, unravelling the mystery despite a number of red herrings. 

It is targeted at 12 - 18 years and there are many aspects of this novel which make it suitable, particularly for readers at the younger end of the age range:

• It is very easy to read. The author has a direct style which focuses on the plot, stripping away unnecessary sentences. I would have liked a  little more description to help me better visualise what was going on and I suspect some of the older teenagers would have enjoyed more gore but the author is probably wise to avoid too much detail.
• It is almost inevitable for a murder mystery to have a large cast of characters: suspects, witnesses and the detective and her friends and helpers. Given that the book was deliberately designed to be short, some of these characters were necessarily underused. I would have loved to have more of the golf-playing coroner, for instance. But each of the main characters was distinctive and I never confused them. I suspect that this book is the first of a series; I hope we meet some of the characters again.
• The heroine is clearly an adult and I wondered how easy it would be for some of the younger readers to identify with her. There is a romantic element to the plot but it doesn't progress beyond kissing. Again, older readers might see this as too tame but it seemed appropriate to me.
• There are a couple of scary situations. I would have liked more of a sense of threat but there is a delicate balance to be struck between increasing the tension and scaring the younger readers.
• There were dead ends and in a longer novel there might have been the scope for progressing further down these. Similarly, the size of the book seems to have precluded the classic 'extra twist'.

I found the simplicity of the narration refreshing.

I think my favourite moment came in chapter one when Amanda is pondering how to write a commiserative social media post about the death; among other great lines she rejects are: 

• You can’t wash away bad karma, even at a carwash. 
• Real estate developer ends up with only ten inches of land behind a dumpster. 
• Carwash owner issues reminder: dumping is illegal and so is murder.

My next favourite quote was:

• "Maybe she was just spinning her wheels, but they were her wheels and [she] had a right to spin them if she wanted." (Ch 8)

An unpretentious and straightforward murder mystery.

February 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Middlesteins" by Jami Attenberg

Attenberg's third novel, this was one of the ten best-selling books on Amazon in 2012; it also made the New York Times best-seller list.

It centres around Edie, a grossly obese Jewish-American woman living in Chicago but it is mostly told from the perspective of those around her: her husband who leaves her, triggering shock waves across the family, her son and daughter, her daughter-in-law who puts her own family on a strict diet, and other members of the community. In general, the women are strong-minded and determined and the men are weak and compliant, which could be regarded as stereotypical, but most of the characters are well-drawn and convincing, especially the husband, the daughter, the daughter-in-law and the grand-daughter. 

It is refreshing to read a book focused on the characters and the relationships. There is a timeline along which the story develops but the story isn't driven by a plot. This is a portrait of normal, everyday life. That's not to say that nothing happens; rather, the things that happen are part of everyday lives. The drama and the tension comes from the ordinary things that happen to all of us, from the strengths and weaknesses of the characters, and from their interactions. Although I wasn't racing through the pages, desperate to know what happened, this quiet, gentle story had more than enough to grab and hold my interest. After all, it was about day-to-day life, the mundane stuff that I and every other reader experiences all the time. I couldn't help but empathise and identify with at least some of the characters, and recognise the others. This is a book about my own experiences, my strengths, my weaknesses, my hopes and my hidden despairs.

It was enlivened with terse prose that went straight to the point, witty prose that often sparkled and sometimes made me laugh aloud, prose that could capture a description or make an original observation in a few perfectly-chosen words.

It is told from multiple, third-person perspectives in the past-tense but allowing the author to make comments, such as fast-forwarding to tell the reader what will happen in the future to that character.

Selected quotes:

• "A child should be squeezable. She was a cement block of flesh." (Edie, 62 pounds)
• "After they made love, she would lazily watch the skin that covered his heart bob up and down, fast, slower, slow." (Edie, 62 pounds)
• "They agreed that food was made of love, and was what made love, and they could never deny themselves a bite of anything they desired." (Edie, 62 pounds)
• "She ... had grown up in a town of drunks, fighting her way to the middle class while the rest of the roommates did nothing but hover there." (The Meanest Act)
• "She had no poker face. All day long she flinched."  (The Meanest Act)
• "Real adults left their homes and went somewhere to work."  (The Meanest Act)
• "She was in three book clubs but she only showed up if she liked the book they were reading." (Edie, 202 pounds)
• "His wife had made all household decisions since the day they'd married, crushing him like a nut when he offered the slightest opinion." (Middlestein in Exile)
• "With grace he offered her his love and protection, and she accepted it, tepidly, warily. It did not bring them closer together, but it did not tear them apart." (Edie, 332 pounds)
• "If her mother could adjust the color of the sky to match her own eyes, she would." (The Walking Wounded)
• "Once you really know how the world works, you can't unknow it." (The Walking Wounded)
• "Emily made a bitchy little noise, a noise she had only recently started practicing and one that would get much, much better with age." (The Walking Wounded)
• "He was pretty sure he had not failed at anything in his life, even if he hadn't really succeeded at that much either." (Middlestein in Love) Doesn't that sum up life for 99% of us?

January 2024; 272 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"To Paradise" by Hanya Yanagihara

This is a big book divided into three parts, of which the second and third are further subdivided.

The first book seems to be a not particularly original reconsideration of the tension between love and duty. Set in 1894, in an alternative history of New York, centre of a breakaway republic in which gay marriage is the rule rather than the exception, gently, drifting David Bingham, a scion of a powerful banking family, must choose between an arranged marriage with an older man and a love affair with a penniless music teacher who might well be intending to rip him off. Spoiler alert: there is no resolution, the reader will never find out what happens in the end.

The first book is entitled 'Washington Square' and the tension between the husband the paterfamilias wants the child to marry, and the child's own choice of a potential wastrel is very similar to the central tension in the Henry James book of the same name. 

The second book, set in 1994, tells the story of another David Bingham, the kept lover of powerful lawyer Charles Griffith. David would have been heir to the throne of Hawaii if history had been different and the second half of this book is a long letter (written, in secret, by a man who is apparently blind and almost too weak to leave his bed) from his father explaining how he, the dad, was persuaded by another Edward to leave his home and live in the wilderness. Once again, we never find out what happens to the principal characters.

The third book, comprising the second 50% of the novel, alternates between letters written by Charles, a scientist living in 2043 and later, as he describes having to make difficult choices, restricting personal freedoms in a society swept by repeated pandemics, and his granddaughter Charlie, living in a totalitarian regime in New York of the 2090s, mentally and physically scarred by disease, offered an opportunity to escape (but once again we will never learn if she succeeds).

Besides the obvious themes of homosexuality and the response of society to pandemics, each of these three stories has a weak and gentle character, cared for by a more powerful man, forced to decide between being safe and looked after, and risking everything for freedom. 

This is a long novel and I repeatedly questioned whether it was worth the effort of reading. The three stories are linked by devices such as the repeated names and the Washington Square location, and by the themes. But I found this somewhat artificial and irritating, and the lack of resolution of any story irritated me even more. There were also moments of high artificiality, such as the PI report in the first book and the father's letter in the second. There were moments when dinner-table  discussions sounded like dissertations, and when it was implicitly assumed that modern-day mores would survive into the future. Time and again my ability to suspend my disbelief, surely important in a novel rooted in alternative history and dystopian scifi,  was challenged. I got the feeling the Yanagahira was playing with form rather than concentrating on writing a novel that might appeal to the reader. 

Nevertheless, there are brilliant characters, drawn so that the reader really believes in them, and the tensions between what will keep them safe and what might offer them fulfilment are carefully explored and genuinely involve the reader in the dilemmas faced by the characters: should David in book one believe Edward (no!), should Charlie in book three believe David (yes) and attempt to flee (not sure). etc? Book Two was the weakest in this respect: more and more I cared less and less. 

On the other hand, it sometimes felt that, as with her previous novel A Little Life, Yanagihara's character are drawn from a tiny subsection of humanity. Although the principals (David, David and Charlie) are gentle, weak, powerless characters, they are all privileged being born into either rich or royal or powerful families. And their milieu is equally drawn from the higher echelons of society: rich and powerful and cultured. Almost everyone is handsome. Their challenges are the challenges of the lucky. Does Yanagihara not know any ordinary folk?

There are moments of perfect description and other moments when Yanagihara can succinctly nail aspects of the human condition. But fundamentally I was alienated by the formal tricks, by the first world problems, by the lack of resolution and by the sheer bulk of the book. 

Selected quotes:

Moments of perfect description:

• "The man’s head was tipped back on his neck, which was long but supple and strong, like a snake, and as he sang, David watched a muscle move in his throat, a pearl traveling upward and then sliding down" ((Book 1, Washington Square, 4)
• "Around him, the world was impossibly vivid: the sky assaultively blue, the birds oppressively loud, the smell of horse manure, even in the cold, unpleasantly strong." (Book 1, Washington Square, 16)
• "they seemed made not from flesh but from something silty and cold. Not marble, but chalk." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "on the wall opposite, a square of light flickers and vanishes, flickers and vanishes, flickers and vanishes, like a code meant only for me." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 4)
• "what I hadn’t realized until everyone left is that the small, human sounds of this gathering, the sighs and snores and murmurs, the sharp flick of someone flipping the page of a book, the glug of water being swigged from a bottle, somehow balanced the other noise: the refrigerated trucks idling at the docks, the cottony thud of sheet-wrapped bodies being stacked atop one another, the boats chugging to and fro." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 6)

Other great passages:

• "He felt at times as if his life were something he was only waiting to use up, so that, at the end of each day, he would settle into bed with a sigh, knowing he had worked through a small bit more of his existence and had moved another centimeter toward its natural conclusion." (Book 1, Washington Square, 2)
• "He was a bite of an apple, but Edward Bishop was that apple baked into a pie with a shattery, lardy crust pattered with sugar, and after a taste of that, there was no going back to the other." (Book 1, Washington Square, 4)
• "his leisure was so well-known that it had become its own kind of prison, a schedule in the absence of one." (Book 1, Washington Square, 5)
• "What would it be like to be someone anonymous, someone whose name meant nothing, who was able to move through life as a shadow?" (Book 1, Washington Square, 5)
• "His path was never his own to forge, for someone had already done it for him, clearing obstacles he would never know had once existed. He was free, but he was also not." ((Book 1, Washington Square, 5)
• "It was as if he had been bewitched and, knowing it, had sought not to fight against it but to surrender, to leave behind the world he thought he knew for another, and all because he wanted to attempt to be not the person he was—but the one he dreamed of being." (Book 1, Washington Square, 5)
• "Now it was time to seek. Now it was time to be brave. Now he must go alone." (Book 1, Washington Square, 16)
• "He could make his lack of knowledge—about flowers, baseball, football, modernist architecture, contemporary literature and art, South American food—sound like a boast; he didn’t know because there was no reason to know. You might know, but then you had wasted your time" (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1) A similar sentiment may be found in Washington Square by Henry James: "'Well, I never knew a foreigner!' said young Townsend, in a tone which seemed to indicate that his ignorance had been optional."
• "it sometimes felt as if he ... was an understudy, hurried onstage in the middle of a scene he couldn’t remember, trying to read his fellow actors’ cues, hopeful his lines would return to him." Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "he would listen in silence as they discussed things—people he had never heard of, books he had never read, movie stars he didn’t care about, events he hadn’t been alive for" (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "But he was also aware of feeling like a child. Charles chose his clothes and where they would vacation and what they would eat" (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "here was someone who allowed him to be the object of worry, never the worrier." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "Preparing to be thirty, much less forty or fifty, was like buying furniture for a house made of sand—who knew when it would be washed away, or when it would start disintegrating, falling apart in clots? It was far better to use what money you could make proving to yourself that you were still alive." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "To be hungry was to be alive, and to be alive was to need food." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "Even his new grossness was a kind of shout, a defiance; he was a body that took up more space than was allowed, than was polite. He had made himself into a presence that couldn’t be ignored. He had made himself undeniable." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "You should always have a close friend you’re slightly afraid of.” (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "the enjoyable things—eating, fucking, drinking, dancing, walking—falling away one by one, until all you were left with were the undignified motions and movements, the essence of what the body was: shitting and peeing and crying and bleeding, the body draining itself of liquids, like a river determined to run itself dry." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "it was when you were dying that people most wanted things from you—they wanted you to remember, they wanted reassurance, they wanted forgiveness. They wanted acknowledgment and redemption;" (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 1)
• "The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you’re nothing once again." (Book 2, Lipo-Wao-Nahele, part 2)
• "the government will do anything to delay confronting and correcting the actual problem: Americans’ scientific illiteracy." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 2)
• “'With every person you see, you should try to notice five things,' Grandfather would say when I was struggling to describe someone. “What race are they? Are they tall or short? Are they fat or thin? Do they move quickly or slowly? Do they look down or straight ahead?" ((Book 3, Zone Eight, part 3)
• “Those who congratulate themselves on their sacrifices for their families aren’t actually sacrificing at all ... because their family is an extension of their selves, and therefore a manifestation of the ego. True selflessness ... meant giving of yourself to a stranger, someone whose life would never be entangled with your own." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 8)
• "we are the left-behind, the dregs, the rats fighting for bits of rotten food, the people who chose to stay on earth, while those better and smarter than we are have left" (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 8)
• "when you’re twenty-four, your body is for pleasure and you’re constantly in love." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 8)"
• "to the young, anything unpleasant can be blamed on or attributed to old age." (Book 3, Zone Eight, part 8)

Some great moments, showing considerable authorial skill, but its flaws make it a chore to read.

Oh, and it's about personal freedoms in the face of a pandemic. Like so many other recent fiction. Ho hum.

December 2023; 792 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God