Zone One: Part Two

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The Part About the Book

By Colson Whitehead

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It was probably clear last week that I’m really excited about zombies. And the book that prompted my enthusiastic screed was ‘Zone One’, by Colson Whitehead.

I love Colson Whitehead. Whitehead is doing what I would want to do, if I were a novelist: using fantastical premises to ask moral questions. He loves alternative histories, weird metaphors (racism explored via elevator repair philosophies), apolocalypse dramas. And he’s incredibly smart – his novels are fast-paced and unsparing. He revels in complexity, never reducing or simplifying the problem or the prose. You need to pay attention, because Whitehead isn’t going to do you any favors.

If you had asked me to pick a writer to write a zombie-apocalypse novel, Whitehead would have been in the top five easily. He’s an author who marries a very vivid novelist imagination with a love for moral exploration. So, when I learned that he actually had already written a zombie novel, I jumped on it.

‘Zone One’ lived up to my expectations, all of them. It is exactly what I wanted a zombie novel to be: vivid, bleak, brutal, hopeless, specific, convincing. It’s the kind of book you want to read all the way through in one go, but you have to take breaks because you keep getting upset.

‘Zone One’ takes place in New York City several years after the zombie apocalypse. After a near-total collapse of civilization, survivors have begun to rebuild. There are emerging population centers, headed by a new capital in Buffalo. Now, the new American authorities have decided to clear New York City of all the undead. To do this, survivors have established Zone One,at the southern-most tip of Manhattan as a jumping-off point for the clean-up operations. The marines have already been through; now it is up to small, three-man crews to go in and take care of any straggler zombies. Mark Spitz is on one of these crews, working his way, block by block, through the dead city, finding and tagging bodies, and putting down any zombies missed in the first pass.

Most zombie stories take place up close. The drama of zombie stories usually lies in devastating choices forced on the individual: Dad has been exposed – do I kill him now, as he is begging me to, or wait, and risk his turning and killing us all? Most zombie stories are intimate – they dwell on personal love, familial bonds.

‘Zone One’ doesn’t really dwell in this space (or, very little). Rather, it takes that intimacy for granted, and then widens the scope. I loved ‘Zone One’ so much because it exploited the full brutality of the zombie story on a societal level. It is a novel not about the impossible decisions of individuals, but about the effect of the total collapse of civilization on the human psyche.

There are moments of individual poignancy, of course, but Whitehead deploys them not for direct emotional effect, but rather to show how, in the case of total social destruction, such choices are commonplace. All survivors will have a horror story; trauma no longer makes you special. In fact, the ubiquity of trauma, the fatigue of it, is one of the most affecting parts of ‘Zone One’: how can you build a civilization when everyone in it has experienced the stuff of nightmares? When the nightmares are reality?

Every person still alive at the time of ‘Zone One’ has watched unthinkable things happen to someone they love. Mark Spitz, for example, came home one night to find his mother eating his father. However, instead of leaning into this kind of personal tragedy in the normal, zombie-story mode, Whitehead imagines this sort of pain on a large scale. He imagines what it would be like if everyone felt the same pain – personal, but the same.

OK, you might be asking, but how is that any different from normal post-apocalyptica? I’ve read ‘The Road’ – does ‘Zone One’ have anything to add?

The answer is: yes, two things.

First of all, unlike other apocalypses (plagues, nuclear blasts), zombies are active. Not only do they destroy civilization, they literally chase you around afterwards. You may survive the initial event, but you will never be able to let down your guard. You will never be really safe again.

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead is less interested in communicating the relentlessness of the threat than in showing its effect, but he does this extremely well. ‘Zone One’ isn’t about the initial panic – it’s about the debilitating effect of constant panic over years. The characters in ‘Zone One’ aren’t scared to die. On the contrary, they have been scared to die for so long that they almost welcome it. The tone is more of defeat, of irreparable loss, of how chronic fear can shrink a human spirit into dull nothingness.

Second of all, Whitehead is a better, funnier writer than most people attracted to the genre of civilizational-collapse. He’s exactly who you want thinking about zombies. One of Whitehead’s strengths has always been his attachment to specifics. He is a wildly inventive writer, and he imagines not just on the grand, moral scale, but also in the details.

‘Zone One’ is rich in detail, dense and complicated without ever feeling like a slog. And it’s scary, but not the way zombie stories normally are. It doesn’t elicit the fear of pursuit, the sort of fear you might feel if you were being chased by an actual zombie. Rather, ‘Zone One’ caused me to feel a vague panic, a general feeling that everything I love in this world is vulnerable. While I was reading ‘Zone One’, I kept imagining how I would feel, wandering this empty landscape alone, my family destroyed, my loved ones eaten (or worse).

Now, I am not a particularly imaginative or empathic reader – it is not normal for me to suffer emotional discomfort while reading about the suffering of fictional characters. That I did in this case is entirely a testament to Whitehead’s skill as a world builder, to how convincing his imagination is. I loved ‘Zone One’, but, more than that, I was badly rattled by ‘Zone One’. It made me feel small and overwhelmed and unsteady. It gave me a taste of loss on a scale I hope never to experience. It scared me.

Zone One: Part One

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The Part About Zombies in General

By Colson Whitehead

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I spend a lot of time thinking about monsters.

It’s probably not difficult to understand why: 1) they are so cool and 2) they are everywhere these days. We have a monster glut. We’ve always been obsessed with them, I think, but monsters are particularly culturally abundant right now: vampires, sexy vampires, vampires fighting werewolves, sexy werewolves, werewolves playing sports, vampires in love with people, vampires in love with vampire slayers, vampires in the American South, zombies in the American South, zombies in love, zombies fighting Mila Jovovich. It’s a lot.

It’s market-driven, clearly; people love monsters. I love monsters (always have), so I’m fine with it, but certain aspects of the monster ecosystem confuse me. To be specific, I am puzzled by the relative super-abundance of vampires.

All monsters are metaphors: they are scenarios dreamed up to interrogate existential problems. They are one of the ways that we ask certain questions, about life, death, humanity, brutality.

Vampires are absurdly popular, which is confusing to me because vampires are so shallow, metaphorically speaking. They are about immortality: what would you give up to live forever? Would you give up your very humanity if you could avoid death?

It’s not a bad question, but it is simplistic. First of all, it supposes that everyone wants to live forever, which, of course, we don’t. Second, it can be answered simply: yes or no. There is no philosophical meat. Either you would, or you would not, depending on how scared you are to die. There’s not a lot more there.

(I’m being a little reductive here, I know: there is actually a slightly interesting wrinkle in the vampire mythos: in order to live forever, you have to literally drain the life out of other people – is that worth it? But, of course, even that question assumes you want to live forever, which, again, isn’t universal.)

I’m not just shitting on vampires and their fans: werewolves are barely more interesting. They’re just a heavy-handed metaphor for human savagery, asking, “Are we responsible for our own capacity for violence if it’s innate?” It could be interesting question, but it does not deserve the creation of entire monster-type to address it.

Zombies, though, zombies are different. Zombies are deep. They are complex, multi-faceted, the most metaphorically rich of all the major monsters. Zombies are powerful.

Werewolves and vampires ask questions which make assumptions about what people want. They assume that everyone longs for immortality, that everyone has a brutal streak which can be interrogated in canine metaphor. I don’t think that this is true, actually – I think there are plenty of non-brutal people who prefer a natural lifespan – but, either way, these questions only address facets of ourselves.

Zombies, though, ask universal questions, questions with global scope: what makes us who we are? Are we our bodies, or are we our minds? If you had to choose between your life and the lives of your loved ones, which would you choose? Would you kill them to survive?

There comes a moment in every zombie story when a protagonist sees their loved one infected. It might be a parent, a child, a spouse, a sibling, the story is the same. The loved one is infected, but change isn’t instant: they will suffer a period of doomed lucidity, waiting to turn.

Zombie protocol is clear: once bitten, a person must be destroyed, lest they turn and spread the infection. This is the one inviolable Zombie Law, universal and non-negotiable. Our protagonist knows it, but, at this, the crucial moment, as they stare into the eyes of their most cherished person, they will falter.

This is what zombies are about: could you stare into the face of the ones you love and destroy them for the betterment of all? Even if you knew they were doomed, even if they begged you to put them out of their misery, could you?

(As an aside, this is why I think zombies canonically require headshots. This killing, this destruction of the loved one, must be brutal. You cannot ease them into a painless death, put them gently to sleep: violence is required. A bullet to the brain, head chopped off, a knife to the top of the spinal column – there will be no mistaking that you killed them)

This is the kind of metaphor I can get behind. This is a wrenching, terrible question that speaks to one of the few truly universal human experiences: the love of another.

Vampires and werewolves are narcissistic creations: they are about what we want (immortality, the ability to vent our rage without consequence). Zombies, on the other hand, are about what we are, especially in relation to other people. They ask us whether or not it is possible to be truly safe while loving someone else.

This problem, known in real life to everyone who has ever been scared of rejection, is made literal in all zombie stories: is being alone the only way to be safe? The instinct of our zombie-story protagonists (as with humans in general) is to band together, to forms tribes and then colonies of survivors, to huddle for protection. But more people means more risk: more chances to get bitten, more vectors to bring the contagion home. Someone will eventually fail to latch the door tightly, forget to close the blackout curtain, will sneeze at the wrong moment: the more people, the more likely this becomes. More than that, if you love someone, your judgment may be compromised – you are more likely to make bad, emotionally-driven decisions if you are attached to your fellow travelers. Is the comfort and help of other human beings worth it? Or are you better off alone?

Zombies are brainless on only the most literal level; metaphorically, they are complex, and literarily, they are far and away the most emotionally effective monster. The vampire story has not yet been written which can compare to the visceral impact of imagining your loved one – your child, your spouse, your sibling – changing, becoming less and less human, and wondering if you will have to kill them to save yourself. Would you be capable? How could you ever convince yourself, sufficiently and truly, that you could never have cured them, that they were truly lost? It is the impossible choice.

Why am I talking about this?

I’m talking about this because I just finished reading the zombie novel I’ve been waiting for my whole life and got really excited about the whole topic. I originally meant this to be a one paragraph intro, but I got carried away. I’ll talk about the book next week.

This Town

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By Mark Leibovich

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I used to be something of a news junkie.

When I was in my twenties, I used to check the domestic news constantly. I was one of those people who loaded homepages from the major news outlets every hour or so, who had alerts on their phones, who trolled Twitter for stories that hadn’t hit the outlets yet. I especially loved political news: there was something about the personalities involved – the human complexity, the chess-board-like quality of moves and counter-moves – that I found fascinating. My friends and I would stay all up night on election nights (even midterms), following the results from individual congressional precincts.

That largely changed after 2016. The news, especially the global news, started to feel hopeless and punitive, and I dramatically reduced my intake. I still read the news every day, but usually only once. I go to sleep at normal times on election nights, and learn what happened when I wake up the next morning.

I heard about ‘This Town’ when Mark Leibovich was interviewed on a favorite podcast of mine. He seemed smart and funny and honest, and so I put his book on my list, although I will admit to feeling ambivalent about it. I was worried that it would be bleak and depressing, and I’m not looking for reasons to be more depressed about the government of my country. I was also worried it would be too insider-baseball-ish, too many names dropped that I wouldn’t recognize.

The book certainly advertises itself as both depressing and insular. For example, the Economist blurbed it this way, “This Town may be the most pitiless examination of America’s permanent political class – aka ‘the gang of 500’ or ‘the beltway establishment’ – that has ever been conducted.” That doesn’t sound hopeful, and, frankly, I would have said that my interest in the ‘beltway establishment’ was basically nil these days. But there are very few subjects that aren’t worth reading about in the hands of a smart, funny person, so I read ‘This Town’ last week.

Goddammit, but it’s fun to read. It’s really fun to read. It’s wry, self-aware, and funny. It’s a cliche to say that there were moments when I laughed out loud; it’s true, but it is also insufficient. There were moments when I laughed so hard I had to stop, run into the other room, and read the passage to my partner (who also laughed out loud, which is big deal, because he’s French).

For example,

“In an interview in his office, I asked [Harry] Reid what he really thought of Tom Coburn. He paused for several seconds, and I imagined a little self-editing gerbil inside his skull hurling itself in the unimpeded pathway that typically connects his brain directly to his mouth. A look of slight agony fell over Reid’s sober countenance, the look of someone whose self-editing gerbil is not well-trained.” (p. 85)

How about another?

“Washington convention dictated that [Darrell] Issa must go through the all-important Process of Investigating this matter and then issue his Findings. Part of this would include him seeking me out for questioning. I would not cooperate in Issa’s “investigation” because (1) that would violate my ground rules with [Kurt] Bardella, (2) it would be partaking of a political exercise (which Issa’s “investigation” clearly was), and (3) “refusing to cooperate” with the authority is the badass thing for a reporter to do.

The next few days whirled. At least 150 stories were written about l’affaire Bardella in the seventy-two hours after the original “bombshell” was posted on Politico…Mike Allen devoted exactly half of Playbook to it on the Tuesday morning that it “drove the day.” He and others sometimes referred to me in print as “Leibo,” a nickname I acquired in about first grade that has persisted through every station of my life. As a general rule, I don’t mind the nickname. It was always a good early-warning system in college of which women would never consider going out with me…But I disliked being called “Leibo” in print because it suggested a level of coziness and clubbiness that, while pervasive, I’d rather not be so easily pegged with – especially since I’m writing a book on just that.” (p. 212)

Mark Leibovich

As for insularity: yes, there are a lot of names. However, Leibovich handles them perfectly: clear identifications repeated just often enough to keep you on track, but not so often that it gets annoying. He has an instinct for the anecdote: he knows how to usher his characters through a story, showing their foibles and ridiculousness without humiliating them. He feels truthful but not sadistic. He communicates the absurdity of the situation while winking at his own place within it (and his clear fondness for it).

Leibovich does a beautiful job describing insider-Washington, such a beautiful job that it’s compelling even if you don’t care about insider-Washington, even if you find insider-Washington repellent (and I do). In fact, ‘This Town’ works particularly well if you have a healthy emotional distance from the subject matter, because Leibovich doesn’t demand that you take a moral position.

This is crucial to the success of the book. Leibovich doesn’t ask that you forgive or condemn the Washington establishment; in fact, he himself doesn’t forgive or condemn the Washington establishment. ‘This Town’ isn’t a polemic – it’s a depiction. Leibovich is only asking that you see Washington as it is.

I loved it. More than anything, ‘This Town’ felt like visiting a version of my self from an alternate timeline. Rather than making me feel depressed about the state of the world, it reminded me why I used to love following this stuff in detail: it reminded me how compelling the human drama of politics can be. It gave me a window into a different life, a life in which American politics might have stayed bearable – cynical, but manageable. Where I would have continued to love watching elections, where I would have cared who was running for Congress in that swing district in Ohio, where I would have known who these people were and followed their careers and lives with the same bemused avidity with which I watch my favorite TV shows.

It’s a testament to Leibovich’s skill that he got me to sit still with American politics for five pages, let alone an entire book. I loved this book so much I have already ordered the sequel.

Kitchen Confidential

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By Anthony Bourdain

I know that I’m basically the last person alive to read ‘Kitchen Confidential’. I know that everything that needs to be said about Bourdain, his life, his legacy, his death, his synthesized voice for use in documentaries, &c…, has already been said, and, honestly, I have nothing to add.

I knew all that when I picked up ‘Kitchen Confidential’ – my reading it was informed by all the news around Bourdain, not the other way around. Of course, all that context probably blunted my reactions to his book; I suspect that, if I had read it back, before Bourdain was famous, I would have been as fascinated and titillated as everyone else.

But, perhaps because ‘Kitchen Confidential’ is too famous to be surprising anymore, I had a very different reaction to it: I found it needy, and sort of poignant.

‘Kitchen Confidential’ is the book that made Bourdain famous, his memoir of becoming and being a chef in various New York City restaurants. Bourdain framed ‘Kitchen Confidential’ as an exposé of his industry: a peek into the kitchen. The book is filled with juicy little stories and reveals all sorts of mini-non-scandals, like that uneaten bread from bread baskets is recycled, or how long fish is actually kept in restaurant fridges. It emphasizes the culture of kitchens: the vulgarity, the sexual frenzy, the pressure.

But what ‘Kitchen Confidential’ really is, is one long brag. Bourdain’s loving lists of hardships won’t fool anyone: ‘Kitchen Confidential’ is about how grueling, ferocious, and elite Bourdain thinks his profession is. It is a book-length treatise on why chefs are the baddest of the bad. Lest you think that chefs are just people who cook for a living, Bourdain is here to convince that they are actually warriors.

The book is replete with passages like this:

“So you want to be a chef? You really, really, really want to be a chef? If you’ve been working in another line of business, have been accustomed to working eight- to nine-hour days, weekends and evenings off; if you are used to being treated with some modicum of dignity, spoken to and interacted with as a human being, seen as an equal – a sensitive, multidimensional entity with hopes, dream, aspirations and opinions, the sort of qualities you’d expect of most working persons – then maybe you should reconsider what you’ll be facing when you graduate from whatever six-month course put this nonsense in your head to start with.” (p. 289)

This sort of goading braggadocio is typical, and absurd. This passage would be melodramatic from a recruiter for the Marine Core – from a New York City chef, it’s fucking ludicrous.

It is also familiar to me, because, like Bourdain, I work in a specialized technical field characterized by indecipherable argot and mock-heroics: science.

Much of ‘Kitchen Confidential’ felt evocative to me of my own professional world. Scientists also use a jargon-laden dialect designed to be understood only by people in the know (and exclude everyone else). They also pride themselves on pain-points: where Bourdain brags about his cooking injuries, abusive head chefs, and crazy hours, scientists swap war stories about arduous experiments, cruel PIs, and crazy hours.

Scientists are often expected to put in grueling hours; their labor belongs to someone else (in their case, the head of their lab); they spend significant amounts of their careers in apprenticeship positions, where their low pay is justified by the idea that they are learning from a master. They are un-unionized, often at the mercy of tenured ego-maniacs who can be (I promise) as psychotic as any chef Bourdain ever encountered.

And, like Bourdain, for many scientists this suffering becomes a point of pride, something which distinguishes them, makes them tougher and more worthy than people who had have not had to make such sacrifices for their career. Like Bourdain, they come to feel that their ability and willingness to withstand this suffering is a virtue, and that people who are not so willing are therefore weaker and less deserving than they.

Bourdain doesn’t apologize for this kind of culture; on the contrary, he clearly glories in it. Like a lot of people who came up in cultures like that, he feels that it makes him gritty and rugged, “the real deal”, that it taught him the virtues of hard work and expertise, and that younger people should feel privileged and lucky to have the opportunity to be subjected to it.

Ultimately, this machismo, this need to be seen as tough, began to feel desperate. Is it not enough to be an excellent chef? Why do we all have to pretend that being a chef (or a scientist) is basically the same as being Rambo? ‘Kitchen Confidential’ is less a book than a masculine performance, an anxious plea for the sort of macho glamour that normally belongs to fighter pilots and gunslingers.

When someone feels the need to tell you how very manly they are, it never ends up being convincing. It’s not convincing when Bourdain does it, and it’s really not convincing when scientists do it. And, while I understand desire the share how difficult your job can be, when that description becomes celebratory, when you start to defend the behavior simply because you had to endure it, it perpetuates the conditions you should never have had to endure in the first place.

Books like Bourdain’s make their subject professions worse. It is not reasonable that Bourdain once had a fellow chef grope him every day – bragging about how well he took it entirely misses the point. Bourdain sets these challenges up as rites of passage, something you should have to go through if you want to do what he does. A better, more humane approach would be to decry them and hope that they don’t happen to younger chefs.

While there are winning passages, and while Bourdain can be extremely charming (and funny!), the essential posture of the book is problematic. Ultimately, it feels driven more by Bourdain’s need to be seen a certain way than anything intrinsic to cheffing. While parts of it are really entertaining, I doubt that ‘Kitchen Confidential’ will age well, and, frankly, I kind of hope it doesn’t. It represents a set of values and needs that I think would be better left behind.

Case Histories

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By Kate Atkinson

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You know the old saying, ‘Let not the perfect be the enemy of the good’?

Books, like people, are never perfect. They are rarely even excellent. The lucky ones, the once-in-a-generation books, are perfect along only one axis, but those are usually deficient along most others.

None of the Great Books are perfect; often, though, they are powerful in many dimensions. They are well-plotted, well-written, the characters are strong, the imagining vivid. What makes books really excellent is never that they are perfect, but often that they are consistently strong.

But what about books that are only excellent in one or two ways? Books that are lopsided?

I have great fondness for lopsided books. Not mediocre books – I resent those – but imperfect ones. Good books, strong books, but ones with clear and conspicuous failings.

Kate Atkinson has only recently bubbled up into my consciousness. I don’t remember how I first heard of her, but it was one of those things: as soon as I had first registered her name, I started hearing it everywhere.

Atkinson, a novelist, writes both stand-alone novels and a series of murder mysteries centered around the fictional detective Jackson Brodie. I purchased one of each, but I’ve been going through a bit of a murder mystery kick lately, so I started with the detective novel. ‘Case Histories’ is the first novel of the series, and is non-traditional in structure: rather than following one mystery, it blends three together:

On a summer night in 1970, 3-year-old Olivia Land vanishes from a tent in the backyard where she has been camping with her sister, Amelia. Her body will never be found. One summer day in 1994, 18-year-old Laura Wyre is working at her father’s law office when a man in a bright yellow sweater walks in and cuts her throat. He is never caught. One evening in 1979, Michelle Fletcher, a young mother whose world is unraveling into post-partum chaos, splits her husband’s head with an ax after he wakes their baby.

All three of these cases will converge, decades later, on Jackson Brodie. Brodie, who has retired from the police force and is working as a private detective, is something of a mess. His wife has left him for another man, and he is too chaotic to be a great parent to his beloved daughter, Marlee. His most reliable client is Binky Rain, an octogenarian with no family who is convinced that someone is stealing her cats.

Atkinson is a better writer than she is a plotter. ‘Case Histories’ eschews the tropes of normal murder novels. Important events happen off-screen; the murderer will not necessarily turn out to be a known character; bad guys are not always brought to justice, and narrators are not reliable. All of which might have been ok, except that the story-telling is uneven. Atkinson leans too much on sudden resolutions and improbable coincidences. Protagonists from different stories wander in and out of each other’s plot lines, people inherit improbably large sums of money suddenly, and, weirdly, everyone seems to live on the same block in Cambridge (England).

Too much important stuff happens off-screen. As a technique, the sudden jump forward to a later point in the action can be effective, but a little goes a long way. If you use it a lot, if a lot of your chapters end on cliff-hangers, only to be picked up on the next page two months later, it’s jarring for the reader. It starts to feel like watching a TV show while skipping episodes.

However, Atkinson is a great writer. Her prose is a blast to read: funny, readable, colorful. She writes well – the prose is sophisticated and excellent – but her tone is conversational, idiomatic. Her imagination is vivid: Atkinson prefers to spend her words inside her characters’ psyches, which she depicts with winning detail.

There are real and salient problems with the book, unmistakable and frustrating. However, in a weird way, they only made me like ‘Case Histories’ more. Atkinson’s prose is so engaging and lively that the plot feels a little beside the point. Most murder mysteries, the plot is the whole point; in ‘Case Histories’, the plot is merely an excuse for the characters to interact with each other via Atkinson’s sparkling writing.

I genuinely believe that, if ‘Case Histories’ had the robust and well-paced plot it deserved, I would love it less. There is something idiosyncratic about the slap-dash plot against the vividly-imagined interior lives of the characters, something charming. The point of this book is the prose: its light-heartedness, its humor, its specificity:

Kate Atkinson

“Julia started sneezing again. It was always embarrassing when Julia had a sneezing fit, one after the other, explosive, uncontrollable sounds, like a cannon firing. Amelia had once heard someone say that you could tell what a woman’s orgasm would be like if you heard her sneeze. (As if you would want to know). Just recollecting this thought made her uncomfortable. In case this was common knowledge, Amelia had made a point ever since then of never sneezing in public if she could help it. “For God’s sake, take more Zyrtec,” she said crossly to Julia.” (p. 127)

“He felt absurdly vulnerable, lying there in the chair, prostrate and helpless, subject to the whims of Sharon and her silent dental nurse…Jackson tried not to think about this, nor about that scene in Marathon Man, and instead worked on conjuring up a picture of France. He could grow vegetables, he’d never grown a vegetable in his life, Josie had been the gardener…In France, the vegetables would probably grow themselves anyway. All that warm fertile soil. Tomatoes, peaches. Vines, could he grow vines? Olives, lemons, figs – it sounded biblical. Imagine watching the tendrils creeping, the fruit plumping, oh God, he was getting an erection (at the idea of vegetables, what was wrong with him?). Panic made him swallow and gag on his own saliva. Sharon returned the chair to an upright position and said, “All right?” her head cocked to one side in an affectation of concern while he choked noisily. The silent dental nurse handed him a plastic cup of water.” (p. 146)

The truth is, despite its deficiencies as a murder mystery, I loved this book. I am absolutely going to read more of this series – the prose is irresistible. Atkinson isn’t a perfect novelist, and ‘Case Histories’ isn’t a Great Book, but it was so much fun to read. It is lopsided in the best way, lopsided in a way that makes you love it more. It’s special.

Beautiful World, Where Are you: Part Two

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The Part That Is About Sex

By Sally Rooney

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I have a rule.

I call it The Ayn Rand Rule, and I came up it with years ago, after reading ‘Atlas Shrugged’. ‘Atlas Shrugged’, in case you are not familiar, is a pretty bad novel about a woman named Dagny Taggart who runs a railroad company. The book is mostly about how Dagny Taggart and other visionary business leaders are forever being stymied by the forces of consensus mediocrity. These forces cannot stand the truly excellent in their midst and are trying, by any means necessary, to basically ruin everything for everybody. However, if you have read ‘Atlas Shrugged’, you will probably remember that Dagny Taggart, who looks suspiciously like Ayn Rand herself, also spends a significant amount of time having rough sex with several tall, dark, and handsome leaders of the business community.

The out-of-context intensity of these sex scenes, Taggart’s resemblance to Rand, and the juxtaposition with the otherwise totally monotonous moralizing of ‘Atlas Shrugged’, was both poignant and absurd. That Taggart was Rand’s avatar was obvious, but what was also clear from the too-fully-imagined quality of the sex itself was that the whole thing was Rand’s personal fantasy. It felt as though she could not help but write herself into her own polemic novel in a weird, transparent sort of sexy fan-fiction.

Now, ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is quite bad, so honestly the sexy interludes are kind of the high point. But, because those scenes are so obviously Rand’s sexual fantasies, they pull you out of the flow of the story and remind you of the author herself. It is as though she had scattered naked pictures of herself throughout the book: more than you probably wanted to know.

Hence The Ayn Rand Rule: I (the Reader) should not be able to tell what gets you (the Author) off just from reading your novel. Sex is fine, but the sex should belong to the story; when the sex is clearly about what you enjoy, when I can tell just from reading it that this is your thing, you have violated the rule.

Now, I realize that I am doing Sally Rooney a huge injustice by writing about her and Ayn Rand in the same post. I feel quite sincerely bad: Rooney is entirely too good an author to have to suffer juxtaposition with Ayn Rand. I feel bad enough about it, in fact, that I wrote a whole other post about ‘Beautiful World’ last week, where I tried to keep the discussion dignified and adult and Ayn Rand-free.

But I needed to describe the Ayn Rand Rule here because, I’m sorry to say, I think Sally Rooney has broken it.

Now, one of the things that is a little tricky about the Ayn Rand Rule is that you can never really be sure that an author has broken it. You may be quite convinced that your author is getting her jollies writing a sex scene, but, unless you actually have sex with the author, you’ll never know for sure. Therefore, Rule violations are always suspected, never proven. So, yes, technically, I cannot say for sure that Sally Rooney has broken the rule, but I think that she has (technically, I can’t even be sure that Ayn Rand violated the Ayn Rand Rule, but I can live with that).

Let me show you what I mean. Here is one of the offending passages from ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’, Rooney’s latest:

“He leaned over then and kissed her. Her head against the armrest, his tongue wet in her mouth. Passively she let him undress her, watching his hands unbutton her skirt and roll down her underwear. Reaching up under her knee, he lifted her left leg over the back of the sofa and moved her other foot down onto the floor, so her legs were spread wide open, and she was shivering. Ah, you’re being very good, he said. Shaking her head, she let out a kind of nervous laugh. Lightly with his fingers he touched her, not penetrating her yet, and she pressed her hips down into the couch and closed her eyes. He put a finger inside her then and she exhaled. Good girl, he murmured. Just relax. Gently then he pressed another finger inside her and she cried out, a high ragged cry. Shh, he said. You’re being so good. She was shaking her head again, her mouth open. If you keep talking to me like that I’m going to come, she told him. He was smiling, looking down at her. In a minute, he said. Not yet.” (p. 162)

This type of benignly patriarchal sex, this whimpering ‘Good Girl’ sex, appears several times throughout the book. It is very consistent, and very specific. And since Rooney’s writing is spare, the intensity of these scenes stands out. In some way that is hard to define, Rooney’s characters are more immediate, more tangible, when they are having this kind of sex than they are when they are fighting, talking, emoting, or having other kinds of sex. This is the most vivid they get.

Which automatically suggests an Ayn Rand Rule violation. When sex scenes are the most vivid part of a novel, that’s usually because they are the part which has been most thoroughly imagined by the author. And when the sex in question is distinctive in some way, it feels as though the author has devoted more time to imagining that particular sex than was strictly required by the needs of the work.

OK, so, fine, who cares?

Sally Rooney

I care. Frankly, I care because it makes me uncomfortable.

Now, I’m not uncomfortable with sex in novels. On the contrary, I love sex in novels: I seek it out, in the same way I seek out movies with nudity, because it’s sexy. But when the sex feels more salient than the rest of the work, when it vibrates on a different intensity than the rest of the novel, when I start to feel that the sex is personal for the author, I stop being able to focus on the story and start feeling intruded on by the writer.

It is a minor sin, all things considered. Authors are usually more vivid when describing their personal experiences, that’s normal, and sex, which often intense in life, is usually also intense in fiction. And, while sex has featured heavily in all of Rooney’s novels, this is the first time she’s given me that unpleasant feeling of learning too much, and I am not inclined to hold it against her.

But, it is also going to be one the things I remember mostly clearly about this work. It was absolutely the thing I most wanted to write about. I wrote two posts on ‘Beautiful World’ because I believed that it, and Rooney, deserved more discussion than just an analysis of some sex scenes, but the sex scenes really affected my experience of the book.

That’s the real risk of violating the Ayn Rand Rule: you can completely change the way the book is experienced by the reader. What should be experienced as a work of fiction suddenly swerves and starts to feel like a sexual disclosure by the author. If that’s the intention, it’s all well and good, but in most cases, it’s probably not what the author really wanted. And, at least for me, it’s not what the reader wanted, either.

Beautiful World, Where Are You: Part One

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The Part that’s NoT About Sex

By Sally Rooney

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’ is Sally Rooney’s third novel. Rooney, who is not much older than 30, has become one of the most famous novelists in the world. Her first two novels, ‘Conversations with Friends’ and ‘Normal People’, were both very zeitgeisty: they appeared on the Staff Picks tables at independent bookstores, they topped best seller lists, one was adapted into a TV show. They were the kinds of books that people asked you if had ‘read yet’.

I have read all of Rooney’s books, and in order of their publication. I wasn’t sure what to think after reading ‘Conversations with Friends’, but when I read ‘Normal People’, I gelled into a solid fan. I liked her project, as I understood it. It seemed to me that Rooney was trying to portray human feelings (with all their complexity, ambiguity, and wheel-spinning pointlessness) with flat realism, to treat emotion as just another fact about the world and to describe relationships as though they were not totally subjective.

I actually kind of loved that project, if I’m being honest. Rooney’s tone reminded me of what Hemingway might have sounded like if he were a sober millennial woman (and about 25 IQ points smarter).

‘Beautiful World’ is a little bit of a departure from Rooney’s previous work, although it makes sense to me as a natural extension, a sort of riff, on her first two books. But I have a lot to say about it, so I am going to break this into two parts. In this, the first part, I’d like to give Rooney’s project and prose the attention I think she deserves. In the second part, I’d like to talk about something which is bothering (obsessing?) me: sex.

‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’ is the story (as all of Rooney’s novels are) of two friends: Alice and Eileen. Friends since they were teenagers, Alice and Eileen are now in their twenties. Eileen, who is beautiful and literary, works as a copy editor at a magazine. Alice, who is prickly and complicated, has found international success as a novelist. ‘Beautiful World’ is about these two women, the men that they love, and what happens to their friendship as their paths start to diverge.

If Rooney’s project in her first two books was to talk about feeling as fact, her project in ‘Beautiful World’ is show human relationships without talking about feelings at all. It’s a little weird: the narrative portions of the books are entirely observational. Rooney, as narrator, gives absolutely no information about the internal experience of any of the four main characters.

To give you an example of what I mean, here is a passage from ‘Normal People’:

“He got back into bed besides her and kissed her face. She had been sad before, after the film, but now she was happy. It was in Connell’s power to make her happy. It was something he could just give to her, like money or sex. With other people she seemed so independent and remote, but with Connell she was different, a different person. He was the only one who knew her like that.” (p. 108)

Do you see what I mean when I says she writes feelings as facts? Her emotional assertions are dry, simple, declarative. “She had been sad before…but now she was happy” is as uncontroversial, unqualified, a statement as “She had been 24 before, but now she was 25.” It is not how emotions are usually discussed in literature, where they are usually described rather than asserted.

Compare that to a representative passage in ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’:

“Putting the cloth back in the sink, she said she would make up one of the beds. He looked down at the floor. She came to stand in front of him, and said in a kindly tone of voice: Felix, are you okay? He gave a half-smile. Yeah, I’m sound, he said. Just tired. Finally he met her eyes and said: You don’t want to sleep together, do you? It’s alright if you’ve gone off the idea, I know I was a bit of a prick about it. She looked back at him, her eyes moving over his face. I did feel foolish when I didn’t hear from you, she said. Can you understand why I felt that way or do you think I’m being crazy? Apparently uncomfortable now, he said he didn’t think she was being crazy, and that he had meant to reply to her message, but time had passed and he had started to feel awkward about it.” (p. 184)

If Rooney’s first two books tried to treat our interiority as reportable information, ‘Beautiful World’ tries to remove interiority at all. We are never told how our characters are feeling, what they are thinking – we are only told how they behave.

Sally Rooney

It’s a really interesting approach to take, and I think it would have worked quite nicely, except that Rooney cheated. Each narrative chapter is followed by an epistolary chapter, emails between Alice and Eileen. In my opinion, the decision to add these chapters detracts from the novel rather than adding to it. First of all, it feels as though Rooney didn’t trust herself (or her readers). In the end she isn’t actually content to let her characters’ actions speak for themselves, and so made sure to spell out for us the conclusions she wants us to draw at regular intervals.

But, secondly, the email chapters are unconvincing and, frankly, annoying. They don’t read like actual emails; they feel like authorial explications. They are too long, too verbose. They are essays, and they make both women sound pretentious. Let me give you an example:

“But I think you’re wrong about the instinct for beauty. Human beings lost that when they Berlin Wall came down. I’m not going to get into another argument with you about the Soviet Union, but when it died so did history…Or maybe it was just the end of one civilization, ours, and at some time in the future another will take its place. In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.” (p. 101)

Come the fuck on. I am, myself, a verbose, pretentious millennial woman, but if any of my friends ever sent me that email, I’d never speak to them again. The email chapters aren’t very good – they don’t give us a window into the lives and minds of these two women because they don’t sound like they were written by humans, and anyway wasn’t the point of the novel to not have the window in the first place?

Rooney is a good enough novelist that I would like to allow for the possibility that I am missing something fundamental, but, to me, it feels as though Rooney wanted to try something a little radical, and then had a failure of nerve. I have some sympathy for that, by way: it’s really hard to write about relationships without writing about interiority, and it might have made for a strange, bleak novel. It is totally reasonable that she would have wanted to give her readers some access to her characters; I just don’t think the emails were super successful at that.

But, as for Rooney as a novelist, whatever journey she’s on, I’m with her. The more books she writes, the more interested I am in what she’s trying to do, which, I think, is to really fundamentally find a different way to portray human feeling. It’s a hard project, but a really good one, so I’ll keep riding with her.

The Night Circus

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By Erin Morgenstern

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

‘The Night Circus’ is exactly the kind of book I would never pick up on my own. It positively bristles with red flags. The cover, all black, white, and red, is adorned with fruity Victorian imagery; the blurbs are literarily unpersuasive: “Nothing short of a wild ride – Elle”. The synopsis on the back is deeply alienating:

“The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves and it is only open at night.

But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them both, this is a game in which only one can be left standing. Amidst the high stakes, Celia and Marco soon tumble headfirst into love, setting off a domino effect of dangerous consequences, and leaving the lives of everyone from the performers to the patrons hanging in the balance.”

That sounds like a frankly terrible book. Le Cirque des Rêves? A dual between two young magicians, who will then “tumble headfirst into love”? The language is all so overwrought: “utterly unique”; “breathtaking amazements”; “fierce competition”; “mercurial instructors”; “only one can be left standing”; “dangerous consequences”; “lives…hanging in the balance”.

However, I was gifted ‘The Night Circus’ by someone I respect and love, which, as we all know, obligated me to read it under Book Law. They assured me it was a fun read; nevertheless, it’s been sitting on my shelf for years now. I have been avoiding reading it, sure that it contained nothing more than cliches strung together with breathless writing. But it was a tough week at work, and I needed something easy to read, so I finally grabbed it.

Here’s the thing: ‘The Night Circus’ is not a “good” book. It’s also, as promised, a really fun book to read, and I basically swallowed the whole thing in one sitting. While, yes, trading heavily in cliche, it still wasn’t quite what I expected. It had a little more pull, a little more substance than I thought it would, despite doing exactly what I thought it was going to do. It was both totally predictable and weirdly compelling.

I’ve been puzzling over that for a few days now, that tension between the predictably stupid romantic plot and the success of the book as an entertainment. And what I’ve decided is that a large part of what makes ‘The Night Circus’ work is Morgenstern’s restraint.

Now, you might think that ‘restrained’ is a weird word for me to use to describe a book about a nocturnal Circus of Dreams which houses a pair of dueling magicians, and you’d be right: on most levels, ‘The Night Circus’ entirely lacks restraint. It is, as expected, totally extra: too lavish, too ornate, too magical, too sincere. However, in one very specific and interesting way, ‘The Night Circus’ is very restrained: it is restrained in explanation.

What does that mean? Unlike other kinds of genre novels, sci-fi and fantasy books have a particular challenge: world-building. Because they are set in worlds that are meaningfully different from our own, they need to provide some guidance to their readers about how the realities of their books actually work. Usually, this information is woven into the story, and that’s part of what makes writing genre difficult: you need to orient your readers without dragging down the story.

If they err, most authors err on the side of explanation: better to be pedantic than to leave your readers confused. In most genre narratives, most questions get answered in the end. Morgenstern, however, does not over-explain. On the contrary, at the end of ‘The Night Circus’, the list of things you won’t understand will be dramatically longer than the list of things you do.

You will not know what the contest in which these two magicians are competing is about. You will be told it’s about competing views of the world: you won’t know what worldviews are or how they are proved. You won’t know how long it’s been going on. You won’t know how it started. You won’t know how many times it has been fought in the past.

You won’t know anything, really, about the two “mercurial mentors” who have decided to pit children against each other in a fight to the death: you won’t know who they are, where they come from, how many children they have killed in this way. You won’t know if they are the only magicians who fight children to the death, or whether it’s a common hobby among the magic class in this world. You won’t know if they feel bad, and you won’t find out what happens to them in the end.

Erin Morgenstern

Perhaps most importantly, you will not know what magic is, or how it is used. Now, of course, magic is basically un-explainable from any physical point of view, but most books of magic do a lot more world-building. You don’t learn anything about other magicians, how magic is used outside of duels, how it’s learned, how it’s practiced. Both our child magicians are trained, but all we are really told about that training is that spells are demanded of them and that they “read a lot”. You aren’t told how many kinds of magic there are, or how people come about acquiring the ability to do it (though you are told that some people have “natural ability”).

All this unresolved ambiguity is a bold choice on Morgenstern’s part. Not answering reasonable reader questions is risky, as likely to leave them pissed off as not. But, when it’s successful, it can give a work a feeling of focused integrity, as though the author has enough confidence to let the story stand as it is.

And ‘The Night Circus’ has that vibe of non-neediness, a quiet certainty that its story stands alone. It’s…pretty successful, I think. Yes, Morgenstern is a little too focused on the ambiance (and the costumes) at the expense of the story, but I suspect that more explanation would have hurt the book, not helped it. Partly, that is because I’m not sure she’s talented enough to discuss mechanics persuasively, but partly, the story genuinely benefits from the lack of precision. In a book that is meant to be sensual, which focuses on the experience of magic, too much logistics might have blunted the effect. Instead, what you get is a hazy, imprecise sense-novel about love and magic. It has no rigor, but it is vividly imagined. It is absorbing, which is good enough.

Travels with My Aunt

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By Graham Greene

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

I resisted Graham Greene for many years.

It was prejudice, pure and simple: I got it into my head that I didn’t like him, and so avoided him well into my twenties. I forget how I was cajoled into finally picking him up – probably someone gifted me the first book of his that I read, ‘The Orient Express’. Whatever happened to get me to read it, that novel changed my opinion about its author more quickly and thoroughly than any book I have read before or since.

That was more than a decade ago. In the interim, I have read most of Greene’s novels, many of them twice. My favorites I reread every year or two. I love Greene desperately; he is probably my favorite novelist. My relationship with him transcends simple enjoyment of his work: I am emotionally vulnerable to his books in some way I don’t really understand. Something in his worldview resonates deeply with me, and his work moves me more than the work of any other author I have ever read, I think.

It isn’t a happy resonance, I should state clearly. I find Greene powerful and devastating. Ever since I read that first book, I felt that he was showing me something true about the world, something terrible, something I had always sort of known but never wanted to admit. As though he were prophesying doom, I believed him and despaired.

‘Travels with My Aunt’ was, apparently, a special book to Greene. According to the Introduction, Greene described it as the only book he ever wrote for fun, and it shows. It is among the most mordant of his works, and it seems like it would have been fun to write.

‘Travels with My Aunt’ follows Henry Pulling, a former bank manager. Henry is retired; a bachelor, he spends his days rereading the books his late father loved and tending his dahlias. At his mother’s funeral, however, Henry meets his Aunt Augusta, a septuagenarian with vivid red hair who convinces Henry to travel with her. Aunt Augusta, it quickly emerges, is a slightly seedy character with a long string of past lovers and a predilection for minor crime. Henry, staid, lonely and conservative, finds that he cannot resist the company of his aunt, and will watch his life transformed by her companionship.

This is a Greene speciality, this sort of book. He has a knack for crafting caper-novels whose sense of antic fun hides a deep vein of despair. It’s probably clear even from my description that Henry Pulling is a pathetic character; you might even intuit that the character of Aunt Augusta is also poignant.

However, the most crushing figure in the novel, a character who perfectly captures Greene’s particular gift for devastation, is Wordsworth. Wordsworth, a South African exile, is Aunt Augusta’s lover and helpmeet at the beginning of the novel. A marijuana smoker and grifter, Wordsworth is devoted to Aunt Augusta, who he will refer to throughout the novel as his ‘bebi gel’, despite the fact that she is decades his senior. Though it becomes clear very quickly that Augusta is searching for the lost love of her life, the Nazi war criminal Visconti, Wordsworth remains devoted to her. His attachment to her will, of course, destroy him – attachments in Graham Greene novels usually destroy the hapless souls afflicted with them. By the end of the novel, he will be rejected, discarded, and killed.

Wordsworth is a peripheral character, and it is precisely his lack of importance (to you, the reader, to Henry Pulling, and, most importantly, to Aunt Augusta) which makes his love, and his death, so painful to read about. In a comic novel, Wordsworth is expendable; most often referred to by the main characters as “poor Wordsworth”, his death passes without grief or comment.

Greene often embroiders his stories with these brutal little tableaux. He always understood that every character suffers, even the ones who don’t get center stage. He shows the pain and despair of these bit players, but not to humanize them. No, he’s a much crueler author than that: he is not dignifying Wordsworth by showing us his degradation and pain, however briefly. He is demonstrating to us how pointless Wordsworth’s suffering is.

Graham Greene

This is a particularly Graham Greene kind of move, and it is the thing that I find so reliably upsetting about his books. Greene has seen with unusual clarity that most of us are peripheral characters; we just don’t know it. We live and love and suffer with all the intensity and sincerity of main characters, but we aren’t heroes. We aren’t even villains: we are scenery, comic relief, plot mechanisms. We are afterthoughts in the lives of others, and all our love and all our grief will vanish with us. They will not give our lives meaning – they will not redeem us. No one cares, except us.

I think that we have been trained by our culture to believe that suffering has meaning. Whether we consider it redemptive in the Christian sense, or enriching in the psychoanalytic sense, or simply a necessary development in a character arc, justified by happiness in the end, we tend to think that pain has a point. Graham Greene does not believe that. A lapsed Catholic, Greene is a nihilist: for him, the suffering of a character like Wordsworth has no point. No one learns, no one grows, no one is redeemed. We suffer, we die, we are forgotten.

It might seem strange that I love this author so much. I’m not sure I can really explain why I do. I have never finished any book of his without pain, a feeling that my heart has been wrung badly. But I have always, from that first book, believed him. If his novels are painful, they are also, in a very important sense, true. Greene saw something, something about human weakness and human selfishness and human pain, which I believe. I do not think he saw the whole picture, but I think he saw a part of it very clearly. I think he knew something, and I want to learn what it is.