blogwallah

Personal Days

by Ed Park
(Random House)

This comic and creepy début novel takes place in a Manhattan office depopulated by “the Firings,” where one can “wander vast tracts of lunar workscape before seeing a window.” The downsized staff huddle like the crew of a doomed spaceship, picked off one by one by an invisible predator. Crippled by computer crashes (one worker suggests that the machines are “trying to tell us about the limits of the human”), the survivors eddy in a spiritual inertia; when one of them is banished to “Siberia”—a lone desk on another floor—no one can muster the energy even to reply to her increasingly anguished e-mails, until, one day, she is simply no longer there. Park transforms the banal into the eerie, rendering ominous the familiar request “Does anyone want anything from the outside world?”

The New Yorker, June 30, 2008

Sharp Teeth

by Toby Barlow
(Harper)

In a cheeky nod to epic poetry, Barlow’s début novel is written entirely in free verse and concerns a metamorphosis, of humans into wolves, in Los Angeles. No slaves to the moon, these postmodern lycanthropes do a thousand situps at a time and choose when to “self-ignite.” (There are lapses: a grease-sensitive type inadvertently commits a massacre at Popeye’s.) The story involves a white-collar pack run by a Sun Tzu-style strategist that operates like a cross between a ruthless law firm and the Lakers; a plot to infiltrate animal shelters and high-end bridge tournaments; and a dog catcher who unknowingly falls in love with a werewolfess. Barlow deftly sketches the L.A. landscape—stucco, sun beating through smog, tract-home meth labs, fresh-cut lawns that “hiss with wealth,” freeways that devour hours of life—and metes out his tale in noirish koans: “Watch any man’s eyes / at the bounce of a ball. / His head tilts slightly sideways, just a hair, / as a primitive focus / comes to life.” 

The New Yorker, March 17, 2008

The Voyage of the Short Serpent

by Bernard du Boucheron
translated from the French by Hester Velmans
(Overlook Duckworth)

Can a novel that features cannibalism, amputations, burning at the stake and the devouring of children by wolves be a comedy? Tackling the gruesome and the grotesque with gleeful abandon, “The Voyage of the Short Serpent” is an eccentric, slightly maddened and often brutally funny tale of a colony of Roman Catholics marooned in medieval Greenland by the encroachment of a new ice age. Much has been made in France of the fact that its author, Bernard du Boucheron, was 76 years old when “Voyage,” his first novel, was published, and there’s something oddly triumphal about the way the narrative takes direct aim at death — which, despite its omnipresence (the bodies pile up rapidly) is never entirely conceded to.

It’s not clear if the letter of instruction that opens the novel — from a Norwegian cardinal-archbishop to the abbot Insulomontanus, appointing him the new bishop of Gardar, “at the Northernmost reach of the world” — constitutes a reward or a punishment. Although the priest has what sound like sterling qualifications (including a diploma in exorcism and hands-on experience in “the pursuit and extermination of heresy, witchcraft and apostasy”), he’s also a bit of a maverick, aiding children orphaned by the Inquisition and dipping into church revenues to build an infirmary for lepers (“for which We rebuke you but mildly”). Worse, he’s acquired a certain worldliness, sampling culinary delights “other than the barley soup and salted herring so dear to Our flock” and reading books outside the sanctioned realm of religious manuscripts.

This imaginary ecclesiastical document is a tour de force of bureaucratic desiccation. In Hester Velmans’s translation, you can practically hear the creak of its author’s thin, querulous voice warning against hiring Germans as shipbuilders (due to their “lumpish skills” and tendency to “bark out orders harshly, in the military manner”) and muttering against the infiltration of spies from the Hanseatic League. The cardinal’s primary concern is for Insulomontanus to assess the wealth of the Gardar See and collect tithes accordingly. Within certain boundaries, he is also instructed to address the state of the settlers’ souls. (“You will investigate if wives are faithful to their husbands, and whether the husbands stay within the bounds of acceptable debauchery.”) The cardinal is particularly concerned with the various methods Insulomontanus will employ to put sinners to death, including “the stake, the wheel, the head vise, drawing and quartering, the slow hanging, suspension from the feet or carnal parts (only for men, since the female constitution does not lend itself to it), immersion in boiling oil, or stoning.” Again, however, there are limits:

“You will disdain, as too expeditious or indeed too gentle, the use of poison, fit only for politics; the sword, which turns the criminal into a gentleman; drowning, which, in those climes, will cause the condemned to expire of the cold ere he can experience the suffocation; or the beer funnel, for not only will intoxication muffle the pain, but it is also a waste of a scarce commodity and abases the executioner to the vile office of a common innkeeper.”

The chapters that follow form a report on his voyage by the new bishop, who proves an increasingly suspect narrator. (His account is interrupted by two italicized sections in the third person, which may or may not represent the “true” story.) During the sea voyage to Greenland, his sailors’ teeth fall out and their skin peels. When he forbids his men to eat their frostbitten limbs, “one of them replied that the season was not Lent, and proceeded to devour his own toes.” These horrors are just a prelude to the desperate poverty and near starvation that await in Gardar, where the colony’s gaunt survivors wear “the haunted air of people on intimate terms with their own death.”

Although the bishop professes sympathy for their plight, he immediately begins ferreting out fornicators. But executing them by the preferred method, burning at the stake, is tricky, owing to a lack of firewood. Still, the bishop soldiers on, substituting peat and seal oil, and deciding to punish child sinners not by amputation but by gouging out an eye, “preserving the abilities they would need (with the exception, perhaps, of archery) for hunting, fishing, herding or plowing.”

Inevitably, the bishop himself strays from righteousness, and his oblique account of his downfall — a halfbreed girl accuses him of fathering her child — maintains a perfect pitch of cruelty and farce. (Claiming a need to get the facts straight, he asks her to elaborate exactly “in what position, illicit or lawful, she had had amorous encounters ... upon the understanding that when performed out of wedlock, even the lawful positions are a crime.”)

Throughout, du Boucheron steers clear of overpsychologizing, staying true to the medieval worldview even as he slyly creates a modern morality tale. The result is a portrait of a society destroyed by its inflexibility, by its obstinate faith in its superiority. History tells us how the story ends: by the year 1500, the Norsemen of Gardar had vanished. Perhaps they abandoned the site for warmer shores or were slaughtered by the more adaptable Inuit. Or else they simply starved to death, having eaten their livestock down to their hooves.

The New York Times Book Review, February 3, 2008

Samedi the Deafness

by Jesse Ball
(Vintage)

Ball, a poet, was once a croupier, and elements of both professions are evident in his début novel, which combines the measured culling of language with the headlong propulsion of chance. Nominally a thriller, the book begins with the discovery of a dying man in a park, who claims that his stabbing is linked to a terrorist conspiracy, and it leads to a labyrinthine country manse retrofitted as a “verisylum” for chronic liars whose fictions are so extreme that they wind up “compromising the identity of the individual.” Chapters are brief, dialogue oblique, but even dimly glimpsed characters are invested with genuine feeling. The hero’s struggle to decipher the rules of the sanitarium is rendered in a series of exquisite set pieces, each one a clue in a puzzle whose solution is ultimately immaterial to its beauty.

The New Yorker, October 15, 2007

Spook Country

by William Gibson
(Putnam)

As in his previous novel, Gibson abandons the futuristic dystopias that have sustained most of his career, picturing instead a dystopic present—specifically, a post-9/11 America, which, in thrall to ubiquitous media and vague threats of annihilation, has “developed Stockholm syndrome toward its own government.” The convoluted and politically insistent plot involves a missing shipping container, a former rock star, a Cuban-Chinese crime-facilitating family, and an Ativan addict coerced into domestic espionage. Fanciful touches include the creation of virtual art in public spaces using satellite mapping and Wi-Fi; texting in Volapuk, a Cyrillic-Latin amalgam; encrypting data within songs on an iPod; and the C.I.A.’s recruitment of sea pirates in the war on terrorism. (All but the last are verifiably real.) If Gibson’s vision has got bleaker, his eye for the eerie in the everyday still lends events an otherworldly sheen.

The New Yorker, July 23, 2007

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

by Mohsin Hamid
(Harcourt)

“I am a lover of America,” the young Pakistani narrator of this lucid, unsettling novel begins. In the course of a single day and night, he divulges to a mysterious and possibly menacing American his love affair with this country: embraced first by Princeton, then by a New York firm of business analysts, and finally by the beautiful daughter of a patrician Upper East Side family. Throughout his brilliant trajectory, however, he is troubled by the easy, almost insolent sense of superiority in his American peers, who take for granted their status as sons of empire. Only in the wake of the September 11th attacks, when America’s wrath turns toward his homeland, does he realize that he has become a latter-day janissary—akin to the children of defeated nations who, conscripted in the army of the enemy, “fought to erase their own civilizations.”

The New Yorker, May 28, 2007

Poor People

by William T. Vollmann
(Ecco)

Following Vollmann’s three-thousand-page treatise on violence, this relatively slender book is framed as a collection of “snapshots” showing how “certain poor people experienced their poverty at random moments.” Vollmann disavows the kind of sustained analysis attempted in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” which he considers a failure, “because it consists of two rich men observing the lives of the poor.” But, as Vollmann acknowledges, he, too, is rich, compared to those he encounters, and a sense of guilt pervades these pages. His unsentimental portraits—of Russian beggars, indentured Chinese prostitutes, Kazakh schoolteachers reduced to shovelling snow—are revelatory. When he asks people why they are destitute, almost none lay blame on others or express animosity toward the rich. One says, “We just had poor luck adjusting.”

The New Yorker, April 30, 2007

Mirrors of the Unseen

by Jason Elliot
(St. Martin’s)

In this penetrating account of a series of journeys to Iran, Elliot reports on the “double life” of the Persians he meets, who unanimously denounce the ruling mullahs. One insists that you’re nobody in Iran if you haven’t been imprisoned; another rolls his eyes at the author’s obsessive trawling of mosques, protesting, “People will think I’m with a fanatic.” The book is replete with historical arcana (such as the second-century Parthian tactic of catapulting jars of bloodsucking flies at enemies), ruminations on the “turbulent calligraphies” of Islamic architecture, and labyrinthine footnotes that threaten to leap off into tomes of their own. Elliot is a travel writer of the old school: untethered to an itinerary, eager to be led astray, and as ardent an observer of the experience of travelling as of his destination.

The New Yorker, December 11, 2006

Imperial Life in the Emerald City

by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
(Knopf)

This revealing account of the postwar administration of Iraq, by a former Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post, focusses on life in the Green Zone, the American enclave in central Baghdad. There the Halliburton-run (and Muslim-staffed) cafeteria served pork at every meal—a cultural misstep typical of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which had sidelined old Arab hands in favor of Bush loyalists. Not only did many of them have no previous exposure to the Middle East; more than half had never before applied for a passport. While Baghdad burned, American officials revamped the Iraqi tax code and mounted an anti-smoking campaign. Chandrasekaran’s portrait of blinkered idealism is evenhanded, chronicling the disillusionment of conservatives who were sent to a war zone without the resources to achieve lasting change.

The New Yorker, October 9, 2006

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl
(Viking)

The first hundred pages of this wildly idiosyncratic début novel are a blizzard of obscure bibliographical references, apocrypha, Capitalized Words of Import, and nouns coerced into being verbs (a pen is not twirled but “triple-lutzed”). If the author seems overexuberant, her pyrotechnics nonetheless suit her narrator, a hyper-literate teen-ager named Blue van Meer, the daughter of a lady-killing professor and (shades of Nabokov) an amateur lepidopterist who died young. Blue chronicles her senior year in high school, when she is Svengalied by a clique of louche, privileged kids, united in their obsession with a mysterious film teacher. “Everyone is responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story,” Blue’s father warns her. She takes his words to heart, and her mesmeric tale, even at its most over-the-top, feels true to the operatic agonies of adolescence.

The New Yorker, August 28, 2006