This year it felt like I was making great headway on the Booker. Prize long-list. At one point it even felt like I might finish all the books before the short-list was announced. Considering that I had read none of the long-listed titles before the announcement, that was probably unlikely, and this proved to be the case. As the date of the short-list announcement approached, I realized that I would be far from finished, yet I still fully intended to write a post listing and rating the books I had read. This is not due to any pretensions that my opinion matters in the scheme of book prizes, or anything really, merely an exercise in pursuit of mental clarity.
However I found myself slowing down and unable to corral my thoughts.
The short-list was announced (above in title order). I was simultaneously thrilled to see that four of the books I had read made the cut and frustrated that I had failed to write. I thought the opportunity was over. Then I realized it wasn't. I still like the books I like. In the end, I think it will be interesting, to me at least, and since this is my blog nothing else matters, to note my own comparisons, ratings and thinking on the matter
Still it took me over a week to get myself to a point where I felt I had energy enough for my brain to work in a somewhat coherent matter and then another week to actually get words to take shape. That is just the way my life rolls at the moment. Hopefully my brain and I will get through this intact.
So what did I read? Before the short-list was announced I had finished seven novels on the long list, and was in the middle of an eighth. I have since finished the eighth, but this post is only about those initial seven novels.
These are the novels, shown above in order of my preference, from first (Small Things) to last (Booth). I thoroughly enjoyed all the books except one. Even though I had not read the entire list, I thought my top three were strong short-list contenders and I was rather on the fence about the fourth, Glory. I found that rating these books was very difficult because they are all quite strong and the distinctions that make one book more meaningful than another are often minute.
And now my thoughts, in reverse order.
7. Karen Joy Fowler: Booth. This was the third Booker-nominated book I read. It was, and continues to be, the least in my estimation by a rather wide margin. I suppose what I struggled with the most was that there was little that was literary about this book, other than its intentions perhaps. Booth is about the Booth family, the family of the infamous John Wilkes, and the times that led up to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Ostensibly it is supposed to be about how the forces of the time and culture shaped the outcome and how the family itself both contributed to, and dealt with, the aftermath of President Lincoln's assassination. The author has stated that she wanted to write about how a family deals with their own culpability and all of the questions of might-have-been or could-have-done. She has also spoken about her own struggles with current political turmoil in American life and her attempt to reconcile her feelings through writing this novel set in another time of great political and social turmoil. In fact there is no shortage of interesting ideas and big questions in this novel. The problem is that these ideas are dealt with in a rather heavy and plodding way with conventional language and really rather pedestrian prose. They remain, somehow, "ideas that we are supposed to address" rather than something seamlessly revealed in the story itself. This novel captured me with neither literary allusions that opened new insights or a story that captured my imagination.
6. Leila Mottley: Nightcrawling. This novel, based on a real-life case of institutional misconduct, was a fascinating, thought-provoking, enlightening and thoroughly enjoyable read, even if its subject matter is ultimately upsetting to my own comfortable middle-class illusions.This is the story of Kiara, a seventeen year old girl who lives alone with her older brother following the death of her father from cancer, possibly exacerbated by his own sojourn in prison, and her mother's incarceration following the drowning of a baby sister due to neglect. Her brother is a talentless wanna-be rapper who has abandoned caring for her in pursuit of his dreams. Kiara also serves as babysitter and ultimately the primary caregiver for a nine year old boy whose mother is a junkie. She is a girl with no options. Faced with a tremendous rent increase and a series of happenstances, Kiara drifts into prostitution and quickly finds herself in a situation from which she cannot extricate herself. The writing here is brilliant, and Mottley, who is really a teenager herself, captures the combination of innocence and scathing bitterness that define the world of her protagonist. The action and the feelings are often hyperbolic, but to me this both works for and against the novel. It gives a sense of urgency and loss to the story, and it captures completely the way a teenager, a teenager who has seen far too much of the bitterest side of the world, deals with what she sees around her. Hyperbole and teenage angst go hand in hand. The amped up emotion however is a dual edged sword; it is both a strength in terms of drawing the reader into Kiara's mind and heart, and a profound weakness, because there is no way to delineate issues, no way build emphasis. When everything is overwrought, there is little room for nuance or clarity. I am grateful for having read/heard in my mind this voice, but at the same time there were times when the story would have had even more power had a little more distance been maintained. I do recommend this powerful novel, and Mottley is a rising talent. I hope to read more from her in the future.
5. Hernan Diaz: Trust. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel, and it has remained on my mind but I give it more points for ideas than for actual execution. Trust is a novel written in two parts, or is it four parts? There are actually four short novellas which make up the novel, all of which revolve around the story of a Wall Street Tycoon and his wife during the time leading up to the crash of 1929. But there are actually two parts to this novel, and the first two stories are divided from the second two stories by a rather significant shift in point of view, and in fact reflect a greater cultural shift, although the stories are not necessarily told in strictly linear order. Sounds complex no?
The novel opens with a short, roughly 100 page novella written in the style of Wharton, Wharton with a perhaps a touch of Theodore Dreiser thrown in, about the life of a wealthy New York financier and his wife. I found it quite interesting and engaging, but flawed. It is not completely successful, either as a nineteenth-century novel, or as a modern pastiche of a nineteenth century novel. But that is, at least in part, the point. The second novella tells a very similar story of a Wall Street tycoon and the mental instability of his wife. The third version of this story is told by another narrator, Ida Partenza, who tells the story of how she wrote the second novella, combining this with the story of her own life and choice to become a writer. In Ida's novel we make a transition toward the a more modern approach in novels, and from this point Trust becomes a far more engaging read. The reader might wonder why the author did not interleave these stories in alternating chapters, but I do think the linear progression and delineation is part of the story, even if I feel the technique was not entirely successful. Diaz is giving us a deconstruction of the novel which is simultaneously a deconstruction of the myth of the American dream and the stories we tell ourselves. Diaz deconstructs not only the division between art and science and art and finance but also the divide between the stories we tell and the realities we portray, especially as they concern capitalism, free markets, the idea of the self-made man, and the common good, as well as the even bigger question of trust. The reader trusts the writer, must trust the story being told, must trust the myth on which a society is being built. But this novel consistently calls that trust into question and raises the issue not only of who gets to write the stories but of how and why the story is written. This grand scheme also references all kinds of side issues around which this novel revolves: finance and markets, the suppression and co-opting of women's ideas and voices, and an interesting discussion of music as well as art. In once sense, I can also see this novel as a musical composition in four movements. I need to follow that idea a bit further, which means of course that I will be reading this novel again.
4. NoViolet Bulawayo: Glory. Glory is a viciously funny satire that seeks to portray the events in Zimbabwe following the coup which deposed Robert Mugabe. Despite my laughter, I admired it more than I actually enjoyed reading it. The author has stated that she initially considered writing non-fiction or perhaps more conventional novel but eventually decided to write something more satirical taking her inspiration George Orwell's Animal Farm and utilizing local animal-based mythologies. I can perfectly understand the choice of Orwellian satire, and although I do feel that Bulawayo has successfully updated the Orwellian tradition for a perhaps younger, twenty-first century audience, writing a novel full of wit and humanity. I do not think the novel quite measures up to the level of art seen in Orwell, other African writers such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’, or even some of the other writers on this list. I also think that her use of the animals, the constant references to twitter, and the repetition of short sound bites have made the novel more of-the-moment and accessible, even if ultimately less profound as art.
3. Percival Everett: The Trees. This is a powerfully explicit and confrontational novel about lynching in the United States, specifically connecting our history of lynching and police violence against people of color, which the author explicitly links to genocide.
Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over 100 years, no one notices. Where thee are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life.
This is accomplished in a novel that successfully wraps a brutal expose in a cover of genre convention, in this case a crime procedural or detective novel. Short chapters, snappy dialog, and laugh out loud stereotyping and humor lure the reader into its circle. The novel is outrageously funny while simultaneously being deeply unsettling. In one heartbreaking section there is a list of names of the victims. It is a sobering list, coming as it does in the middle of the action, the impulse may be to skip over it, but instead one should take time with these names, google them, think about the implications. Everett does not pacify his reader with with pat answers or easy solutions. In fact the novel questions the entire idea culpability for the past and the role of justice, of its necessity, of the way it makes us uncomfortable because it often defies morality, defies societal convention, societal secrets. I did have some issues with this book, although not with its subject matter. If anything Everett played to my own biases and understandings. But I do think this is a pointedly inward looking and pointedly American novel. Although the need for justice is universal, and historically this need always erupts somewhere, somehow, into something deeply unpleasant, the novel does not feel as much universal but deeply specific. Still it stays on my own short list because it is so brilliant at what it does.
2. Alan Garner: Treacle Walker. Treacle Walker is the story of a young boy of indeterminant age, Joe Coppock, who is convalescing at home, when he encounters Treacle Walker, a rag and bone man "able to cure all things except jealousy", which caused this reader think back to the etymology of the name treacle itself, which harkens back to Middle English as an antidote to venom, where it is derived through old French from Latin and Greek thērion or wild beast, a derivation aptly relevant throughout the course of this short book. Treacle Walker is also probably the most elegant literary exploration of quantum mechanics I have ever read. As might be expected from that previous statement, there is a plot but it is follows a rather thin, definitely non-linear thread. I find the book thought provoking and thoroughly enchanting, but I also acknowledge that it may be difficult for many American readers as it is rife with colloquial language, references to British culture from the mid 20th century, and a heavy use of local (English) folktales and myths and literary traditions. Still, it is worth the effort. Alan Garner has written a novel that seems to capture the magic of reading.
Claire Keegan: Small Things Like These. Keegan's novel has already won the 2022 Orwell prize for political fiction. Set in Ireland in 1985, the story, on the surface, has all the makings of a sickly sweet holiday feel-good novel. Christmas, Ireland, A protagonist who does the right thing and helps a girl in distress. And there are probably people who will read this short novel as just that, but it is so much more. This is the story of Bill Furlong, the father of five daughters, a man who runs a successful coal and timber business, and also the child of an unwed mother who was taken in and helped by a widow who employed her as a domestic servant. Bill, who is an introspective thoughtful man, who is already disquieted by the poverty he sees around him and the comfort displayed by the Catholic Church, is thrown into a deeper crisis when he visits the local convent to make a coal delivery and is shocked by the appalling physical condition in which some of the girls under the care of the nuns are treated. Keegan captures this man, his history and his struggle, as well as that of his country and his church, in spare, elegant, pitch-perfect prose. Not a word is wasted. Rarely does the reader come to know a character so deeply and thoroughly in such a short time. It is a beautiful book, and yet one that does not pander to the reader with easy answers and a perfect ending except that Bill knows that his action is not an ending but a beginning, and not an easy one at that, but one upon which he has no choice but to embark.
Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?
