Tag: fiction

A Fan, Some Pans and Back Again: Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know

The first Ian McEwan novel that I’ve read in two decades . . . . . . and what did I think of it?  Well, you’ll just have to scroll down to find out!  Fear not, Gentle Readers,  I’ve inserted lots of subheadings to make it easy for you to skip the boring bits ….

I.   Preliminary Remarks: What’s Not Been Happening With the Blog 

I’ve been so inactive with my blog last year, and so very disinclined to write posts, that I’ve seriously considered giving the enterprise a merciful death.  After all, it’s sooooo much easier to leave comments on other bloggers’ well thought out opinions than to write my own posts!  Although I’m all about the easy solution, however, I do find that I’ve been a little dissatisfied since I’ve stopped posting, particularly when I’ve just finished a marvelous book (I read several last year), or I read one of your posts on a book I’ve previously read and loved, or read and hated, or even merely thought about reading.  I have the strong but supremely irrational feeling that, if I’ve even thought about it, it’s my book!  At such times, my adrenaline flows, ideas rush in and I find myself thinking, “I really should have written about that!”  It’s not that I think my insights are particularly insightful; I simply have more fun when I share my opinions on what I’ve read.  After all, the excitement of discovering new books and the joy of sharing our discoveries is really why most of us blog, innit?  I’ve also found that writing, and the organizing and analysis that it demands, always helps me to understand better whatever I’ve just read and, equally important, to appreciate what a particular writer is (or is not) trying to accomplish.  Posting also serves a very practical domestic function in the Janakay household, as it gives a welcome break to poor Mr. J., who’d otherwise have to listen to my yammering about books that he, a committed reader of serious non-fiction, has absolutely no interest in reading!  All in all, I do think I’ll pay a bit more attention to the blog in 2026 (my first New Year’s resolution perhaps?), although I doubt that I’ll ever be one of your methodical “post on a schedule” types.

And what better time to start than now?  My last post occurred in January, 2025; a nice piece of symmetry, don’t you think, for my next one to occur almost precisely a year later?  A pair of symbolic bookends, so to speak, with absolutely nothing blog-wise occurring in-between.  Last year was a mixed year for my reading, which began quite slowly (hard to concentrate given the dreadful political events in the U.S. and with a mild case of PTSD brought on by surviving two major hurricanes in one month).  After the first few months of 2025, however, I eventually recovered my bookish mojo and went on to have a fairly satisfying year.  Along with some bookless spaces here and there and a few duds over the months (I had a higher percentage than usual of abandoned books last year) my 2025 list eventually included several memorable novels, ranging from very good (e.g. Pamela Hansford Johnson’s Helena Trilogy); to wonderful (Desai’s Sonya and Sunny & Ęca de Queirós’ The Maias) to really, really fabulous (Leopoldo Alas’ La Regenta — thanks again, Silvia, for suggesting this project!).  As with the past, I also read several things for sheer distraction and fun.  I didn’t alas, make it to Lottie Hazell’s Piglet but I’d definitely recommend Harriet Lane’s Other People’s Problems, a wonderfully nasty tale of envy & revenge and a most welcome distraction during that dreary afternoon in Chicago’s Midway when my plane was late.

II.   A Fan and a Pan: How I Fell In and Out of Love

So why go now with McEwan, a writer I’ve actively avoided for two decades or more, when I’ve read so many other wonderful books this year?  Practicality, as always, carries considerable weight in these types of decisions.  Because What We Can Know (WWCK) is my most recent “big” book, its impact is fresher than that of the complex novels I read earlier in the year, making it easier (remember — I’m all about the short cuts) to yammer on about.  Equally important, I wanted to test my reaction at returning to an old love.  For you see, Gentle Readers, back in the early days of “Ian Macabre” I was one of this writer’s biggest fans.  Although my memory of The Cement Garden (1978) is now a bit hazy, I still retain fond recollections of The Comfort of Strangers (1981), and, to a lesser extent, of Black Dogs (1992); Enduring Love (1997); and Amsterdam (1998).

But then, towering above even these very interesting gems, came Atonement (2001), my very, very favorite McEwan novel and one of my most memorable books from that era of my life.  What a transcendent few days I spent, reading that masterpiece!  However did it not win the Booker that year?  Atonement was one of my early experiences with meta fiction, which was exhilarating in itself.  This, combined with lyrical writing, a clever plot and great characters (I still haven’t forgiven that nasty little Briony) made it one of those transcendent reading experiences that so seldom comes one’s way (I am not embarrassed to say, dear Readers, that one of Atonement’s plot twists reduced me literally to tears).  In addition to all this surface shine, Atonement raised some very provoking questions regarding time, memory and artistic morality:  when an artist transmutes his/her great sin into a beautiful work of art, has s/he atoned for their transgression or merely rationalized their moral failure?  (Readers, this is a question I’m still pondering in the odd moment or two, particularly when I’m listening to Wagner.)  I was already a confirmed admirer prior to Atonement; with its publication I became a worshiper at the Shrine of McEwan!

My adulation lasted until 2005 and the publication of Saturday, when I concluded that my literary god had feet of clay.  With advance apologies to any fan of the novel, I really, really hated Saturday.  I was baffled by its glowing reviews from critics and prize committees (it made the Booker short list & won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, etc), as I wholeheartedly agreed with John Banville’s opinion that Saturday was “ill-conceived,” smug and “a dismayingly bad book.”  (If its website is in a generous mood, you may read the entirety of Banville’s entertaining & highly critical review in the May 26, 2005 edition of the New York Times Book Review.)  Perhaps it was class consciousness (although we both favor the same recording of the Goldberg Variations, Saturday’s privileged protagonist & I occupy opposite ends of the social spectrum) or perhaps an almost laughable plot twist (reciting “Dover Beach” repelled the thugs invading your home?  Really?).  Perhaps it was simply the wrong book for me at the wrong time, but Saturday parted the ways for me and my hitherto beloved Ian Mc.  In the following years, I barely glanced at reviews of McEwan’s subsequent novels and wasn’t at all tempted to read any of them.

So what made me risk fifteen U.S. dollars (the current sales price on that platform we all love to hate) and two days of my time on WWCK?  True, the novel has received glowing reviews but then, so did Saturday.   WWCK’s plot, centering on a search for a lost literary work, seemed intriguing; almost enough to overshadow my cringing memory of Saturday’s smugly rarefied & privileged world.  WWCK’s futuristic setting was also a strong draw; I love sci-fi, especially when it nods towards dystopia.  Timing, as always, certainly helped, as I’d just finished a marvelous book right before Christmas (Margaret Kennedy’s Troy Chimneys, if you’re curious) and found myself in one of those awkward “whatever do I read now” holes that urgently demanded a new book.  At this crucial point, I stumbled upon yet another laudatory review (this one in the New York Times, where WWCK apparently gave the reviewer “so much pleasure” he  “laughed with delight” etc etc).   Reading this effusion with some skepticism, my eye caught the sentence that tipped the scales, i.e., WWCK is “the best thing McEwan has written in ages.”  Gentle Readers, it had been over twenty years since my disillusionment.  I decided to risk all (well, fifteen bucks and an afternoon) to give my former love another chance.

III.   Back Again: So What About The Novel Itself?

WWCK is a chameleon of a novel, deceptively simple in structure and surprisingly complex in content.  Opening in the 22nd century and extending back into our own times, at its simplest level WWCK is a literary mystery centered on the fate of the only extant copy of a legendary poem, “Corona for Vivien.”  Composed in 2014 by the great (fictional) poet Francis Blundy as a birthday present for his wife, the poem was subsequently lost in the climate disasters and political upheaval that destroyed the world as we know it.  In pursuing the mystery of the poem’s fate, McEwan’s protagonists encounter some very melodramatic events (murder! insanity! attempted kidnapping! betrayal! revenge!) and the reader gets to enjoy some very nicely done satire as McEwan skewers (among other things) academia, the literary world and current pop culture.  Lurking beneath the brio of the literary treasure hunt, however, are some very serious questions regarding the nature of history (as well as who gets to tell the story); the relationship between biographer and subject and the detritus (both physical & metaphorical) we of the present day are leaving for future generations.

I hope I’m not making WWCK sound overwhelming and pompous, because it’s nothing of the sort.  Although serious themes are definitely present, they are treated very lightly and can be happily ignored by readers who prefer focusing on a treasure hunt and a sci-fi setting rather than pondering the big questions.  Regardless of a reader’s chosen approach, WWCK is equally enjoyable; it’s tightly plotted, with complex and well-drawn characters and the prose is among McEwan’s best.  What can I say, Readers, except the obvious — I absolutely adored this novel!

I particularly enjoyed McEwan’s depiction of life in the 22nd century setting.  Like Margaret Atwood, McEwan has an definite knack for world building and is equally skillful in extrapolating from current trends to construct an all too plausible future.  While both writers concern themselves with environmental issues, Atwood IMO focuses more on scientific and social aspects (e.g., the MaddAddam Trilogy’s genetic engineering or The Handmaid’s Tale & Testament’s female repression) while McEwan concentrates more on the geopolitical.  WWCK’s world is a product in part of the Derangement, a late 20th century phenomenon in which society collectively acknowledged, but refused to address, the catastrophic effects of climate change.  In 2042, amidst rising sea levels and conflicts over dwindling resources (the mid-21st century is marked by several “climate wars” for instance), came the Inundation, a global flooding event triggered when a Russian hydrogen bomb aimed at the U.S. misfired over the Atlantic Ocean.  The resulting seventy meter waves (combined with record high sea levels) obliterated three-quarters of the Atlantic-facing population of North America, Europe and West Africa:

There were only a few hours of warning.  The survivors were those who trusted their governments sufficiently to act, had transport and were not trapped in traffic jams and knew the routes to higher ground.  * * * Lagos, London, Rotterdam, Hamburg and most of Paris did not emerge from under the counter-surges that raced up estuaries or from the savage storms that followed.  In revenge assaults, Russia lost St. Petersburg * * *   More than 200 million died.  Britain became an archipelago, its population halved (pages 105-106).

The world portrayed in WWCK, however, is far from the blood soaked, cannibalistic scenarios so common in today’s dystopian fiction (think Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road or a movie like The Day).  Despite its best efforts to self-destruct, humanity not only survived but managed to preserve a sizable chunk of its cultural past.  The survivors and their descendants adapted surprisingly well to a world that was now without heavy metals, fossil fuels or much dry land.  Life is peaceful, with stable communities existing on the small archipelago islands that survived the Inundation and nature (albeit much diminished in species diversity) has begun to recover.  New technologies (such as retrieving metal from wrecked & drowned vehicles and making “protein bars” from bacteria & atmospheric carbon dioxide) have developed to replace those of our own time.  Major libraries and museums have been relocated to the highest of elevations and are relatively safe & reasonably accessible to those willing to travel by boat.  Take comfort in this fictional future, dear Readers with academic inclinations!  Universities and literature departments very much remain a feature of life, along with their associated & perennial problems of bureaucracy, inadequate funding and students who’d rather be elsewhere.

Just as quotidian life has changed, so also has geopolitical hegemony.  Global power has shifted from the West to Nigeria (Britain has been reduced to a string of small, isolated islands while the United States has devolved into warring territories ruled by rival warlords, much like its current situation).  A controlled and regulated AI plays an important role in ordinary life and, in a point that’s very important for plot purposes, the pre-Inundation internet with all its contents has been preserved and maintained by Nigerian scientists.  As Tom Metcalf, the novel’s protagonist who leads the quest to recover the lost “Corona for Vivien,” explains (p 58):

Everything that has ever flowed through the internet is now held centrally in New Lagos and has been well-catalogued.  Advances in quantum computing and mathematics have cracked open all that was once encrypted.  I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago:  if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ears of your dearest, most trusted friend.  Do not trust the keyboard and screen.  If you do, we’ll know everything.  

The idea of “robb[ing] the past of its privacy” (page 17) plays an important role in WWCK.  Aside from being a clever twist on the omniscient narrator (it’s the data bank that now knows everything and makes it available to a diligent researcher), it underscores one of the novel’s main themes, so amply demonstrated in Tom’s all-consuming quest to discover the fate of the lost poem, i.e., that one may possess a massive amount of data about an object (including a poem!) or person, without really knowing anything at all about either it or her.  Echoing McEwan’s previous great novel Atonement, WWCK is very much concerned with that liminal space between reality and fiction, between the objective “truth” the artist/writer observes and that which s/he invents.

WWCK begins in 2119 with Tom Metcalf, a literature professor at the University of the South Downs, traveling by boat to the Bodleian library, now located on a mountain peak in Wales.  Specializing in fiction from the 1990-2030 period, Tom is obsessed with the poet Francis Blundy, one of the major poets of his era (eclipsed only by Seamus Heaney) and his lost masterpiece “Corona for Vivien.”  (I’ll spare you the wiki click dear Readers, as well as most of the technical details.  It’s enough to know that a “corona” is a complex sequence of sonnets linked by their internal structure and exploring different aspects of the same theme.)  The poem, which exalted the beauty of nature and the mutual love between Blundy and his wife, was handwritten by Blundy on vellum and presented to Vivien at a dinner party in honor of her birthday in October 2014.  To mark the unique value of Vivien’s gift, Blundy made no copies; the fate of the poem, in other words, lay entirely (and literally) in Vivien’s hands.  Although Blundy read the poem for the couple’s dinner guests, his reading was not recorded nor, surprisingly given the poet’s fame, was the work subsequently ever published.  As a result, “Corona for Vivien” is known to the 22nd century only through the imperfect memories of the Blundys’ dinner guests, whose emails, social media posts and memoirs suggest that the poem was the culminating masterpiece of Blundy’s career.  With the passing of the years, the dinner party (known as “the Second Immortal Dinner,” the first being an 1817 event attended by Wordsworth, Lamb & Keats) became legendary and the mystery and allure of the missing poem grew.  Because it so lovingly catalogued the glories of the natural world, it even became an anthem of the environmental movement, with many believing that the oil industry had bribed Blundy to suppress the poem’s publication.  “Like the play of light and shadow on Plato’s cave,” “Corona for Vivien” became for posterity the ideal for all poetry, “all the more beautiful for not being known.”  (page 107)

Aside from the dinner party itself, the first and longer portion of WWCK concerns Tom’s obsessive search for the poem, which, he is convinced, has been hidden by Vivien in some now inaccessible spot.  I won’t repeat the details of either Tom’s detective work or physical quest, conducted with the aid of Rose, his colleague and on-again, off-again lover.  I’m afraid you’ll have to read those for yourself, although I will say that both were quite entertaining.  Equally so, IMO, were the glimpses into the pair’s teaching grind (“In the two weeks allotted, almost half the kids had done some of the reading, well above the norm, though none had managed the full ninety-six pages” (page 154)).  Because it would be impossible to avoid spoilers, I’ve also decided not to discuss Part Two of the novel except to say that McEwan uses it to switch both narrator and time period.  This tricksy maneuver gives a whole different perspective on the Corona’s creation and meaning; equally important, it heightens many of the serious themes the novel evokes.

Given how much I enjoyed WWCC, do I regret my long boycott of McEwan’s work?  Not really, although I’m open to suggestions if any McEwan fan cares to offer a recommendation regarding the novels I’ve skipped.  While I’m not terribly eager to make up lost ground, I am actually considering a 2026 re-read of The Comfort of Strangers!

IV.  If You’ve Made It This Far, Here’s Your Visual Reward

A little untimely, but I always think that it’s really the first full week of January that marks the end of the holidays, don’t you?  Formally christened “Katy,” that name was lost to her forever on her first visit to the Vet; he took one look & exclaimed “she doesn’t look like a cat at all!  She’s more like a little bear!”  Not exactly a “people cat,” Pooh-Bear prefers to spend her time solo in closets & under the coffee table.

My Second New Year’s resolution: get those books off the floor and onto some shelves!  Two of my feline overlords (the third is in the next photo), unfortunately, offer only supervisory assistance . . . .
Yeah!  She’s finally stopped yammering!  Nap is next (assuming she hasn’t already put you to sleep)!

My (Very) Impressionistic Take on 2024’s Booker

Although it was touch and go to finish those last two novels (Wandering Stars & Headshot,  respectively twelfth and thirteenth on my list), for the first time in many years I actually read all the Booker nominees.  My thoughts on the novels?  Well . . . .

My heavens, dear Readers, can it really have been eighteen months or so since I last posted anything?  I can’t imagine that anyone’s still checking the blog, after so prolonged an absence, but if I’m wrong many thanks for your patience/optimism!  Despite intending otherwise, my teeny little break from blogging somehow morphed into a very prolonged absence.  There were many reasons, positive and not, for this shift in plans.  On the plus side, I had an interesting trip or two; on the minus, I suffered through a prolonged & rather aggravating home construction project, followed by the angst & dislocation of three (!!!) hurricanes in little over a year (admittedly, one of these was mostly a bad rain storm by the time it reached my little town; two, unfortunately, were much more).  And then, of course, there’s the anxiety and anger that comes from reading the current political news and surviving an election that was something of a nightmare, even by U.S. standards.  

And books do help us survive, don’t they?  Along with the arts in general, combined, perhaps, with a judicious limitation on internet usage.  I recently stumbled upon a very interesting NYRB essay on a phenomenon Russians term “vnutrennaya emigratsia,” defined as “internal immigration” or “internal exile.”  (You can read a far more sophisticated explanation at https://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/02/11/a-refuge-from-reality-a-la-russe/ as I believe the paywall allows a free click or two.)  This self-exile involves the creation of an internal space facilitating observation and thought; the concept has morphed from describing what was literally a  geographic exile into the idea that one mentally relocates by forging an internal space apart from the prevailing cultural norms.  The internal exile’s mental relocation facilitates survival and sanity by focusing on the arts & avoiding anything connected to politics or public life.  Although cultural self-exile may become nihilistic or counter-productive (too much disengagement may permit real evil to thrive–think Hitler), what other choice is available in times such as these, dominated as they are by political and cultural ideas that one regards as sheer anathema?  Rather than tuning in to the latest “bro” podcast or having hateful political screeds raise my blood pressure to dangerous heights, I’ll self-exile to my shelves of fiction, or to the haven of the nearest art museum (well, maybe not the nearest!  I find its paintings to be a little dull and I’m willing to travel to see some more interesting stuff).  As I’m sure you can surmise, the 2024 Booker long list has also provided a welcome distraction from the current political cycle. 

This was particularly true as I found this year’s long list much more interesting than I have for some time. Aside from being a welcome distraction, it solved my paralysis about how to fill my reading schedule and was a handy way to re-acquaint myself with contemporary fiction, which I’ve been somewhat neglecting this year.  To be candid (and I’m nothing, if not candid, dear Readers, it’s a professional survival from my legal career) it helped that the list included Harvey’s Orbital, which I’d just finished reading and that several of the nominees looked reasonably short.  I quickly discovered, however, that several were actually what my British friends call chunksters (my own term is “doorstops”), at which point I gave myself permission to take breaks at will or to abandon the project altogether if I felt like it.  Despite some temptation to stop, I did finally stumble through all thirteen novels, having finished Headshot and Wandering Stars about a week ago.  As my title indicates, the remainder of this post is a mosaic of the impressions I gained from my reading. Please do remember that these are impressions rather than reviews; by their nature they’re a bit shallow, quickly formed and highly subjective.  Your own judgments may well differ from mine; in fact, I hope they do so and that you’ll share your reaction!  I’ve followed my bookish talk with a brief account (accompanied by a few photos) of some of my activities since my last post.  Not to worry, however, as I separated it with bold-face type, making it easy for you to skip if you so desire! 

My Overall Impression of the List:

I thought on the whole it was a pretty good, if not overwhelming, assortment of novels.  (I won’t speak to the mix of gender, ethnicity and nationality, or the number of debut vs. well-established authors, as there’s already been plenty of comment on these subjects.)  Necessarily I liked some of the nominees much more than others, but I didn’t regret the time I spent reading any of them.  Only one novel, Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, blew me away but, on the other hand, none aroused my active dislike.  (This hasn’t always been true in the past.  I detested Richard Flanagan’s Narrow Road to the Deep North as well as George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, winners, respectively, in 2014 &  2017.)  Although I don’t go so far as to claim this year’s nominees demonstrated any particular linkages or themes, it did seem to me at least that several of them revolved around characters who were cultural outliers, either by birth (Everette’s enslaved James & Orange’s disinherited indigenous Americans in Wandering Stars); by circumstance (the Libyan exiles of Matar’s My Friends or the prickly doyenne of van der Wouden’s Safekeep) or choice (check out the female rogue intelligence agent in Kushner’s Creation Lake).  Sarah Perry’s two protagonists lead fairly mainstream lives but are spiritually estranged from the religious community which has shaped their values (one is a single and very independent woman while the other is a closeted homosexual).  Given the number of women authors who made the short list, it’s hardly surprising that so many of the novels contain strong female characters who make unusual or unconventional life choices, such as Bullwinkel’s girl boxers (Headshot); Harvey’s female astronauts (Orbital) or Wood’s contemplative solitaire (Stone Yard Devotion).  Respecting stylistic approaches, the list seemed mildly tilted towards experimental or at least non-traditional narration, most notably in Orbital and Anne Michael’s Held.  

My Personal Short List (doesn’t coincide with the judges):

I know, I know — I only list five novels (and four of them already rejected!), while the real list has six, all of which are of course still in the running.  Fantasy lists, however, are meant to be self indulgent!  Besides, this way you get to supply your own nominee!  I almost limited my personal short list to four, as Playground survived my scrutiny only by a whisker.  I’m not a big Powers’ fan, as I usually find his work a little too cerebral, an opinion that still stood after reading his latest.  Playground was also burdened IMO by being a bit too baggy in its plot and a little too prone to preachy information dumps about ecology and artificial intelligence.  But Powers’ ideas are fascinating and his descriptions of undersea life sheer magic.  Since Matar, like Powers, isn’t one of my favorite novelists, I was surprised to discover how much I liked and respected My Friends.  It opened my eyes both to a history that’s been largely ignored and to the practical difficulties of living as a political exile, which has also been largely ignored (my observations in these regards, dear Readers, pertain only to what we in the southern U.S. refer to as “our neck of the woods”).  I usually have somewhat mixed feelings regarding Messud’s novels (I’ve read about half of them), but found her saga of lives disrupted by historical forces her best work yet.  I almost skipped Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot, the story of eight teenage girl boxers who are each determined to prove she’s the best, but am so glad I didn’t.  It’s funny, it’s compassionate and it’s very, very realistic in depicting a gritty, physical and ruthless competition that isn’t usually associated with teenage girls.  Bullwinkel’s innovative technique (a narration structured on the tournament’s rounds, with the girls’ past & future told in brief chronological shifts) serves her unusual subject well.  As for her next novel — sign me up already!

My Personal Winner:

This was an absolutely fabulous novel, one of the best I’ve read in a very long time.  It’s about forgiveness, both of one’s self and of others; about facing the dreadful consequences of how humankind has treated the earth; and about living a life that’s both unknown and unknowable to others.  “Midway in life’s journey” Wood’s unnamed protagonist found herself “in a dark wood;” the story of how she searched for the path out of it will stay with me for a very long time.  Who cares if the plot is unconventional (unlike many, I actually think quite a bit happens, but it occurs mostly on an interior plane)?  Or that much of the novel’s middle section is dominated by the physical necessity of dealing with a huge mouse infestation?  Disgusting though it is, the mouse plague reinforces Wood’s theme of how human depredations have destroyed the earth’s natural balance (the protagonist is an environmental activist who has given up her work in despair, while the mice are trying to escape bad weather & dwindling food supplies).  It occurred to me that the mouse plague also serves a symbolic function of providing the protagonist, a modern day hermit, with a desert trial comparable to those faced by the the early eremites.  This is a short novel, but its reverberations are huge.

The Novel I’d Least Like to Win (from the real short list):

A tie, for opposite reasons, between Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep & Anne Michael’s Held.  Although I found Safekeep’s historical background compelling, and its depiction of the prickly and unconventional Isabelle skillfully done (at least in the earlier portions), I thought the novel as a whole became something of a potboiler, with an easy and unconvincing resolution of the central dilemma.  If Safekeep struck me as an airport type read, Michaels’ Held was at the opposite end of the spectrum.  Admittedly, my preference for traditional narrative structures may have unfairly prejudiced me against Held’s highly fragmented style, which at times I found quite distracting.  The author obviously has loads of talent, the writing is poetic and beautiful and some of the individual sections are very moving.  But those constant time shifts, combined with extremely tenuous (and sometimes extremely artificial) connections among the characters became too frustrating for me by the end.  Perhaps I’d have coped better if Michaels had simply labeled her work a short story collection.

The Novels I’d Be o.k. with Winning (assuming, of course, that Stone Yard doesn’t):

James was my first novel by Percy Everett (about time, wouldn’t you say?).  It’s extremely well written and quite tender in spots; it also says things that desperately need to be said.  Despite all this good stuff, I didn’t quite warm to James.  I’ve always detested the Huckleberry Finn strain in American writing, even when it’s been as cleverly subverted as it’s been done here.  Orbital was very beautifully written, an icon of words designed to invite contemplation but . . . although I’m not unduly demanding in this regard, I just needed something in the way of a plot.  As for Creation Lake, it was quirky and interesting, and I’m sure I’ll understand what Kushner was doing with it as soon as I finish reading The New Yorker’s very clever review.   https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/creation-lake-rachel-kushner-book-review

My Own Prediction About the Winner:

Who knows? Certainly not the Booker Frog.

Non-Sequiturs & Stray Observations:

Two of these novels (History & Friends) made my own, if not the judges’, short list!

To begin with a total non-sequitur, I found it interesting that both Messud’s Strange History & Matar’s My Friends dealt with the post-colonial effects of European expansion, but from entirely different perspectives.  Messud’s Cassar family (strongly modeled on her own grandparents) are French-Algerian settlers who lose their home and cultural identity after that country’s bloody war of independence.  Scorned and rejected as Pied-Noirs by their French countrymen, they are forced to forge new lives in cultures whose language & customs are alien to them.  Matar’s protagonist Khaled, by contrast, is a Muslim native of a Libya that has ejected its colonial overlords; after doing so, however, it forces its dissidents into an exile that requires them to build lives that are largely the opposite of those they would otherwise have experienced.  Different perspectives in the two novels — European colonizers and native colonized — but the lives of both equally twisted and bent by the force of European expansion from the shapes they would otherwise have possessed. 

In closing I’d like to offer a few observations on three other novels that didn’t make the short list.  From the positive side of the street, I’d like to put in a brief word of praise for Colin Barrett.  I wasn’t surprised that his Wild Houses didn’t make the short list, but its believable characters, great dialogue and unsuspected depths put Barrett on my “novelists to watch out for” list.  On a negative note, I was a little disappointed by both Orange’s Wandering Stars as well as Perry’s Enlightenment.  I love Tommy Orange’s work (I went to a great deal of trouble to get an autographed copy of his debut novel, There, There) but somehow I didn’t connect nearly as well with Stars.  I think it covered so much historical ground, along with so very many of the problems created by the historical injustices inflicted on its characters, that I began seeing them less as individuals and more as avatars of various societal ills to be checked off the author’s historical list.  That being said, Stars remains a very good novel, with a spot on and touching portrayal of how a family deals with generational trauma, whether it be caused by alcohol, drugs or an unexpected stray bullet.  As for Perry, she’s less of a favorite of mine than Orange, although I did enjoy Melmoth, her shivery gothic from a few years back.  Enlightenment had some really good stuff, most notably its misfit main characters and its depiction of the outlier religious community that shaped their lives (I believe a few reviewers have hinted that Perry was drawing on her own background for this aspect of her novel).  Despite these strengths, however, a number of reasons prevented me from really connecting with the novel.  I found the unrequited love to be just a bit too unrequited; the friendship between the main characters a little too unlikely and the reappearing ghost far too prone to provide helpful hints at key points in the plot.  

PART II: WHAT I’VE BEEN DOING FOR THE LAST YEAR (See — It’s Easy to Skip This Part)

. . .  a little bit (never enough) of interesting travel. I finally made it to Berlin & Dresden, where I spent a lot of time in their fabulous art museums.

 

. . .  a little bit of wildlife viewing, including this bald eagle with its chick (thanks to Mr. J., his camera & a spring birding trip to western Ohio)

 

. . .  a little bit of home remodeling (this is a photo of my once and future bedroom, temporarily converted into a construction site).  Fortunately, I could camp out elsewhere in the house.

 

. . . surviving hurricanes (one last year and two this fall). This tree belongs to my next door neighbor. Although Mr. J & I, along with house and cats, escaped untouched, my area suffered a great deal of damage, particularly on the barrier islands.

 

. . .  staying off Percy’s favorite rug.  Despite a truly frightening set of fangs, I wasn’t deceived!  Percy was simply yawning after a nice morning nap!

That’s it for 2024’s Booker list and various assorted matters! (and aren’t you glad?)  I’m not going to embarrass myself again by predicting the timing of my next post, but I have been reading some very interesting things lately  . . .