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Baby, we're off to a strong start with this only-reading-books-we-own thing. Three excellent novels and some quality time with Snoopy.
Let me tell you all about it!
☞
001) Red Harvest by Dachielle Hammett, finished January 3
Incredible novel. It's been a while since I've read any Hammett (The Thin Man in 2019 and The Maltese Falcon in 2007)—well, I read the first story or two in The Continental Op two summers ago (and now I'm anxious to get back)—and man alive is rediscovering him each time that a blast of freezing-cold over-oxegenated air clearing out the lungs and brain of accumulated gunk. Bracing stuff.
Anyway, the Op has been sent to a presumably Montana town although the geography seems more Northern California/Oregon/Washington or Utah to me (the ops seem to travel north from San Francisco but Salt Lake and Ogden are the closest big towns so . . . I have more thoughts about where imaginary Personville might be, but I don't know that we can prove it from the text; ask someone whose read it three times), but it doesn't matter. It's a corrupt mining town and in a fit the richest man in town hires the Op to take down the corruption. Once he gets over his pique, he repents of that desire but the Op's already taken his money and dammit he's gonna earn it.
But the easiest way to earn it is to turn the combinations against each other and let them murder each other off. And so the bodies begin piling up.
This book moved up my to-read list thanks to Murderland which uses descriptions in the book to show how Personville must be Tacoma thanks to the grit and grime and, yes, murder. I'm so glad I did. It's having an immediate impact on my work in progress and, I suspect, in good ways.
One way it hasn't impacted me yet but I hope willis Hammett's acumen in ending something and getting out while the getting is good. Amazing.
If you've never read Hammett, perhaps the time has come. Read this one if you want to watch an alocholic take on an entire corrupt town, compromising his remaining morality every step and solving a batch of mini-mysteries every few chapters; read The Thin Man if you want to watch an alcoholic in an excellent marriage solve a satisfying puzzle; and read The Maltese Falcon if you want to visit classic San Francisco with another alcoholic with a knack for violence and clearsightedness. Or read another one and tell me what I'm missing out out.
three days
☞
002) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, finished January 14
I really should have read this book years ago. It's on the list of dystopian options my students choose from and it gets chosen a lot—almost every semester. I'm finally reading it because a) a student who read it this semester gave me his copy because I hadn't read it and b) the book group I recently joined is discussing it tomorrow.
First, to refine a spoiler you surely already know (assuming you know anything about this book, which seems likely; it's debatable what the most famous English-language dystopias are, but my guess is Nineteen Eighty-four, then Brave New World, then Fahrenheit 451, then The Handmaid's Tale, then Never Let Me Go, the youngest of the five (and the last one I needed to read).
Anyway, the big spoiler I assume you already know is that our protagonist and her friends (and most of the people in the book) are raised to be donors. The book is near-past (it takes place in the Nineties but was published in 2005) but the world of
Never Let Me Go split with ours around World War II. By the Fifties, medical technology had sped forward more quickly than ethical deabates and a subclass of infertile children was being raised to provide the medical needs of society. Everything from cancer on down has been solved thanks to this farm systerm and people are happy not thinking about the implications.
This is the first thing about the book I most appreciated. First, how the will-be donors just accept the way society is, knowing they'll be dead—excuse me—completed by thirty and live their lives day by day, moving from vague awareness of the facts to absolute certainty of the facts' inescapable gravitational well.
That feels like a handy metaphor for / prosecution of our lives.
(By the way, only moving deeper into spoilers from this point on.)
These kids then adults never imagine escape. They never plot it, they never consider it, it's not a possibly possibility. At one point they wistfully imagine a deferral, but that's it. They will donate until they complete and they accept that. Just as we accept spending most of our lives working for wages, hoping retirement might last long enough to finally go/do/become. But escape? No.
As an aside, as in Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro is not great at writing teen dialogue. Once his characters age into adulthood, fine, but pre-adult characters speak . . . off.
Second aside, did you notice how Dr. Morningdale (a character mentioned in passing near the end) is totally Dr. Frankenstein? They even have the same address! And that address, all all Frankenstein's addresses, is the most ironic option because, you know, mates and all.
The way Ishiguro handles character relationship and his very British way of concealing emotions reminds me a lot of Ian McEwan. I like McEwan better but then I've also read more McEwan.
Anyway, the real engine of the book isn't it's loop-back storytelling or its individual scenes, but its story of repressed love which we the readers think we see long before the characters are allowed to bring it to the foreground. But the deeply subterranean aspects of the characters' relationships provide most of the intrigue, page by page. The complications of friendships and loves between the three leads are complex and awful but real and understandable. And so much more tragic and forgivable because they all know they'll be dead soon. Aren't you tired? Don't you just want to get started with your donations? So you can finally rest?
The book ends, with debatable necessity, with a long monologue explaining more (but still very little) of the world. (Note: I appreciate Ishiguro's restraint; the world is well built but its details are always at the edge of our vision.) This scene slows things down and it's primary purpose seems to be to make stuff explicit which we and our narrator know but which the characters, have not been forced to see clearly. I grant it's filled with key information my students always report on, but I'm not certain much of it is necessary. Why and how, exactly, this came to pass is less important than knowing that, having come to pass, it is accepted. Completely and utterly accepted by perpetrator and victim alike and no one questions the status quo. This is why the characters don't know until that near-ultimate scene. Fish don't know they're wet until they've been pulled from the sea. And then they, at least, don't have to comprehend the fact.
I was hot and cool (never cold) on this book as I moved through it, but in the end I'm certain it will stick with me. Which is a way of saying it deserves its spot on that top five I listed above. I have more to think about, to ponder, to discuss. And I'm glad.
UPDATE: At the book group, I mentioned that, in my opinion, the five best known and most influential English-language dystopian novels are 1) Nineteen Eighty-four, 2) Brave New World, 3) Fahrenheit 451, 4) The Handmaid's Tale, and 5) Never Let Me Go. But no one (beside son and I) in attendance that night had even heard of the book before it had been proposed and most of them read it without learning anything and...their experiences were quite different from ours. The same day, I read an Atlantic article that said Ishiguro's Remains of the Day is better known—and I'd been skeptical. But now.... Well. Have you heard of this novel before?
a couple weeks
☞
003) Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life edited by Barnaby Conrad and Monte Schulz, finished January 16
After twenty years on my Amazon wish list, I decided to use a gift card I'd been given to finally buy Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life, used. Christmas happened between my purchase and the books arrival and, for Christmas, my mother gave me a copy of Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life.
That's comedy, folks.
Anyway, it's great. Lots of Snoopy-typing comics and some other literature-adjacent strips, intersperced with short essays by writers responding to one of the strips by giving Snoopy helpful pointers. They collected a mix of writers to respond to Snoopy's various interests (a selfhelp writer, Julia Child) and I suspect they were all pretty famous when the book was released in 2002, but most of writers just . . . aren't as famous as they were then. For every Elmore Leonard and Ray Bradbury there's three guys who names I don't recognize. (And for every Sue Grafton, there's just a bunch of guys. Including a couple I thought were men but it ends up they're just so old that by the time I gained consciousness their names had become girls' names.)
The book is good and I'm very glad to have a home copy and a classroom copy, but we could really stand for a 2026 version. You can keep Ray Bradbury, sure, but bring in some people who are less Schulz's contemporaries (or nearly so) and bring in, I don't know, George Saunders and Anne Patchett (just have folks at the museum factcheck them first).
Who are the biggest Peanuts fans among America's literari, after all? There's certainly no shortage of options.
somehow three weeks apparently
☞
004) You Are Too Much, Charlie Brown by Charles M. Schulz, finished January 19
A solid little paperback collection from the late '50s.
Snoopy is pretending to be vultures but hasn't started wearing clothes yet, if you measure time by such things.
saturday/monday
☞
005) Ice by Anna Kavan, finished January 24
Because I may say things like this book is really weird and I'm surprised I made it through the first half, let me start by saying I really liked it. I thought it was powerful and moving in part because it was so strange and confusing.
But let me start by talking about the copy on the back of my Penguin edition.
Before we start, let me recognize that this text was intended to sell the book. And this probably sells the book pretty well. (It got me to read it!) But I don't think it's, you know, precisely correct.
In a frozen, apocalyptic landscape,
As I'm doing this, I might as well get petty. There are a lot of different landscapes in this novel. Many of them are frozen and apocalytpic. But this phrasing makes it sound to me like the book takes place in one location. But it takes place all over the globe.
destruction abounds: great walls of ice overrun the world
No complaint here, but this barely hints at what's happening. These great walls of ice aren't mere glaciers working their way southward and northward—they move faster than you can drive, instantly destroying everything in their path.
and secretive governments vie for control.
This was a big part of why I read the book. I'm always on the hunt for good dystopian novels for my class, but while these oppressive-regime elements are a big part of the novel, they are more a consequence of a world in process of being destroying. They're not failed utopias; they're human response to apocalypse.
Against this surreal
Completely agree that the novel is surreal. When nuclear weapons got mentioned over a hundred pages in, I was stunned. I had forgotten the book was published in 1967 and I had landed on an assumption that this was written in the Twenties or something. Because it is surreal—classically surreal—and it would fit in just fine with that era.
(More or less.)
But it's so hard to know what's happening in this novel. Midparagraph, our narrator may confuse another character for himself and something that just happened has not happened will never happen may yet happen what is time what is space nothing matters. Et cetera.
yet eerily familiar broken world,
What does that even mean?
an unnamed narrator embarks on a hallucinatory quest
I assume this is just a way of repeating surreal without repeating surreal?
for a strange and elusive "glass girl" with silver hair.
She is the most interesting character in the novel. She is a child; she is a woman; she is a victim; she is a goddess of destruction surfing the sheets of ice as they devour Earth.
He crosses icy seas an frozen plains, searching ruined towns and ransacked rooms,
Kavan (incidentally, she renamed herself after a character from two of her early novels) is a pro at describing frozen, ruined, and ransacked things. Everything is professionally awful.
depearate to free her from the grips of a tyrant known only as the warden
This is the third major character of the novel, the one the narrator occasionally confuses himself with. When we first meet him, he is the leader of a small oppressed nation. But then he runs away, girl in tow, just in front of the ice, leaving his people to be destroyed. He is cruel to the girl, but he does save her.
and save her before the ice closes all around.
He saves her from the ice over and over and over. But so, recall, does the villain.
A novel unlike any other,
I mean, yes, but sheesh. Puffery much?
Ice is at once a dystopian adventure shattering the conventions of science fiction,
I don't know about you, but "dystopian adventure" suggests something more...dystopian and adventurous? I'm not saying this is an inaccurate description. I've already covered the dystopic elements, but it is an adventure in that he's rushing around the world killing people to save the girl, but this is no cheery Sean Connery Bond. And there can be no happy ending because the world's about to end.
Similarly, all "the conventions of science fiction" means is "we want people who are too good for space opera to feel sneakily highbrow holding this."
a prescient warning of climage change and totalitariansim,
Is it? Yes, the ice is caused by scientists and politician, but there's nothing terribly precise about this "warning" that can serve as a warning. Same thing with its totalitarianism. It's bad. But you knew that.
a feminist exploration of violence and trauma,
This is the one I'm most skeptical of. Let me ask whether, if this "feminist exploration" had been written by a man, would it still be feminist? I propose not. I propose, were this book written by a man, it likely would be read as deeply misogynistic. And if that's the case, what do we mean by feminist?
The "glass girl" is raped and kidnapped and beaten and abused. She is murdered more than once. She's thrown to a sea monster once! Her body is weak and fragile and gets more transparent and bruised as our male characters are unkind to her. The moments she show spunk or independence, they act quickly to destroy her.
It takes a while to realize that our narrator is also terrible. The novel starts with him looking for her hoping to rescue her and then she's destroyed by a wall of ice and then she's married to another man who is so kind to her and then the narrator realizes how easy she'd be to murder then her husband is no longer a cool dude and so we, as readers, attempting to hold together a sense of the romantic ideal, hope for our narrator to rescue her. But he doesn't. And then she's locked up by the warden as his little sex toy while our narrator has evolved into some infinitely wealthy (his billfold will never run dry) and brilliant adventurer constantly trying to navigate a Kafka'sTheTrialesque world to save her from the warden but then warden shoots her in the head but don't worry—immediately afterwards he runs away with her, saving them both from the ice.
But don't worry. Our narrator has all the traits of a hero (can escape anything, defeat anyone, never stops in his pursuit of his female counterpart) but he's no better than the warden. When the girl is snarky he beats her.
So I see a simplistic feminist argument to be made (men suck!) but it's no harder to make the misogyny argument (she gots it coming!). So calling it feminist at all strikes me as reductive and insulting. Whatever's going on in this book, it's not simply "feminist exploration." I don't think she would have liked that being on the back of her book.
a speculative literary dreamscape,
More tried-and-true cliches to let you know what kind of book this is, but I'm onboard with this one.
and a brilliant allegory for its author's struggles with addition—
Booo. I mean, this is not an allegory. Your own copy says it's much much more than one thing. And while addiction may be a useful lens to read the novel through, it's hardly only that. It doesn't make my top three. Keep your dirty allegorizing off my fiction!
all crystallized in prose glittering as the piling snow.
That's fun. I'll allow it.
I have a couple other things I'd like to say, mostly about the end, so maybe I shouldn't. But all the ideas of this book come to a head as everything is as awful as it's been and then she calls him a bully and his self-image is shook. He discovers the possiblity of kindness and becomes a new man. And they drive off into the snow, ahead of their final doom. It tastes like a happy ending. It's just frosting over all the bitterness we already have in our mouth and we're skeptical he can change and we know they will die soon along with the remaining remnants of Planet Earth, but...it looks like a happy ending.
But there there is this, as the novel's final sentence, tacked onto that phantom of happiness:
"The weight of the gun in my pocket was reassuring."
You tell me how happy we can be.
three weeks
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