Review: Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish (2014)

Zou Lei, a pilgrim from the Uighur people of Northwestern China, finds her way to Flushing, Queens in search of a better life. She has no papers, no personal connections in the U.S., and a poor grasp of English, but her military spirit sets her apart in her own mind from the many immigrants who run afoul of law enforcement or fall prey to the many injurious vices that this bright land offers. By chance, she encounters a recently discharged veteran named Skinner, and the two strike up a hesitant romance. His physical toughness appeals to her, but she gradually discovers that his mind did not return home intact. Together, the two navigate the most desperate kind of love: one that is not allowed to dream of a bright future, one that is amazed to wake up in the morning having survived another day.

Tonally and stylistically, this novel echoes authors like J. D. Salinger and William Vollman in its attention to grubby details and its meandering through the darker corners of the human psyche and experience. As though even the pages are cheap and ill-used, we rarely get a clear, measured description of any scene; characters are introduced as "he" or "she" rather than their names, and there are no quotation marks to distinguish dialogue from narration. Crucial actions are glossed over, leaving the reader to piece them together post mortem. It is as if Zou Lei's language barrier and Skinner's fractured sanity extend to us as well, and the feeling is accordingly depressing.

This depression, which permeates the whole novel, is punctuated alternately by beauty and horror on the occasions that Lish's descriptions are clear, focused, and sequential. The first of three critical such sequences is a workout routine the couple share:

The last exercise they did was flutter kicks. He and Zou Lei lay down on the floor and moved their legs like goose stepping soldiers. They got to fifty and her feet fell on the ground. One hundred, he said. No, she said. But she pulled her feet up again. They continued kicking and counting together, chanting the way everyone does in group calisthenics. At one hundred, both of their sets of feet fell on the ground. She groaned and held her stomach. When they stood, they left behind sweat patterns in the shapes of themselves. She stared down at their spirit-patterns on the ground. The intensity of the exercise made her think strange things. (pp. 217)

In a world where legal, mental, and communicative agency is withheld from them by ideologies too systematic to be tangible, the couple is joined by their common physicality. Another passage illustrates the immaterial barriers that nevertheless keep Zou Lei from attaining legitimacy, and therefore security (no quotation marks in text):

How did you come here? You...

Snuck in.

Snuck in from Mexico? In a truck?

When they arrested you and let you go, they would have given you a piece of paper. Do you have it?

I think so.

Let me see it.

No, on my body I don't have it. I have it at home.

Bring it next time, because that will make a difference when filing a petition. You want to file a petition?

Okay. Yes. I think, whatever is possible. I don't know what is possible right now. I want to stay in this country if it's possible. An American says he can marry me. That's the real thing I want to know. Can I get married with him even if I have no identity? ...

As she was leaving, the lawyer came out and spoke to her while he put another folder in the wire basket. I overheard you. If you're getting married, it better be a real marriage or you'll be in big trouble. That I'll tell you for free. Free advice.

She didn't understand what he meant. What do you mean? Maybe we're ordinary people, but the feeling between us is real. (pp. 292, 294)

The question of reality in their relationship takes a sharp turn when, in one of their darkest fights, Zou Lei runs away and Skinner gives chase. This exhilarating sequence both highlights the physical impulses to which the main characters' choices are limited and packs all the bleak material structures into one short space. A later, more drawn-out sequence features Zou Lei alone and without any of the belongings (money, keys, or phone) to plug her into the urban environment. She simply walks on as a part of the ever-changing multitude of the city. Both these dynamic passages are concluded only when the characters meet their physical limits; I will quote neither because of their length and the fact that they give away details of later events in the plot. Yet Lish's prose is at its strongest here, and in fact either passage could be an excellent standalone vignette. Ultimately, although the story has weight, the descriptive lens through which we are shown it is the major strength of the book.

My final praise is that although Preparation for the Next Life undoubtedly swims in the most politically-charged of waters, it in itself is not a political book. Although this single text leaves little doubt of Lish's perspective of certain American policies, it stays true to form as a novel attempting to present a realistic fiction. The protagonists are deeply flawed themselves, and the antagonistic background (for it truly does seem to be "the world" that has it in for Zou Lei and Skinner) is not written as inexplicably evil. If anything, one message of this novel is that one evil begets another, and as long as this lineage continues, all individuals can do is survive and care for each other. If I had any criticism of this novel, I would decry its entrenched pessimism, but ideologies aside, I simply can't deny the physical straits of those who haven't been as fortunate as I have.

REVIEW: THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH BY SAUL BELLOW (1949)

Augie March is a typical boy becoming a man in Depression-era Chicago: so typical, in fact, that he is destined to fill most of the possible types that could be found in America. A “born recruit,” he finds himself launched from career to improbable career across all of his society’s nuanced social castes. But his quest, though one of self-discovery, is not intentionally so; it is merely his easy acceptance of fantastic opportunities and the malaise that closely follows commitment that lead him under the wings of rich socialites, to crime, to fights for social justice, across deserts full of wild animals, into the arms of glamorous and particular lovers, and always away again from the same pursuits.

This novel is a fine example of classic fiction that can be just as imaginative as fantasy itself. Although all of Augie’s jobs are possible, their combination and the personalities behind them stretch the definition of possibility. Those personalities are what shape the heart of the novel as they burgeon into a Dickensian cast which is colorful enough not to lose any of its members to repetition or the reader’s boredom. Though the novel is about Augie, many major characters experience dynamic journeys as well, which weave in and out of the main narrative. The other, more static characters, who serve as mileposts on Augie’s journey, are no less memorable.

Taken together, the varied characters and experiences combine to weave a unified tapestry of Chicago in the 1930’s. From the fantastically rich to the unemployed poor, everyone was inventing ways to get a little more for themselves, whether that “more” was money or meaning. Augie stands out in that he isn’t seeking anything, which counters the traditionally American symbolism his climb out of poverty implies. Every time he finds himself in dire need, he can be sure to have his problems soon solved, and every time he finds his dreams have come true, events conspire to knock him off his pedestal again. Chance, not hard work, wins his fights for him. If Augie is America, he is a new America that has been thrust into a complicated, cosmopolitan world before he has had a chance to mature.

I read this book at exactly the right time in my life, as random and interesting jobs have changed my direction enough times to awaken me to the vast scope of life’s possibilities. If it were merely that kind of inspiration, it would have my recommendation. But it is more: a rollicking adventure whose every stop is a story worth reading for its improbability rooted in realism and heartwarming laugh at bleakness. 

Review: The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Alexey Ivanovich Velchaninov is a man who has everything he wants: land, money, prestige, and, most importantly, a way with women. All this is thrown in jeopardy when he becomes shadowed by a mysterious man who eventually reveals himself as Pavel Pavlovich Trusotsky, a man whose house Velchaninov used to visit frequently in another city. With a good deal of his land and money at stake in a lawsuit, Velchaninov faces added psychological turmoil at the memory of an affair he had with Pavel Pavlovich’s late wife. He begins to wonder anxiously whether his new “friend” is aware of the affair and whether he has sought him out to execute revenge. In the middle of this silent feud is Pavel Pavlovich’s young daughter Liza, a tormented girl whom Velchaninov begins to treat like his own daughter, and after all, she might well be.

After being underwhelmed by The Double and Notes From theUnderground, I was delighted to rediscover what I love about Dostoyevsky in this little novella. It has all the psychological roller coaster of his other works, but loses no coherence even when Velchaninov is at his least sane. Its ethical focus is what ties it together; Velchaninov, though justly persecuted by a man he has wronged, has matured since his affair and become a kinder man than Pavel Pavlovich. His efforts to give Pavel Pavlovich the benefit of doubt are an even greater struggle than his fear of retribution. In many ways, the suspense of this story has less to do with fear and more to do with redemption, which, as always, is a great theme of Dostoyevsky.

Redemption is presented even to the readers who do not identify with Velchaninov as a great, sucessful man; Pavel Pavlovich, too, has many opportunities to regain his honor without harming his old friend. His portrayal as a far less likable character invites us to assume the worst of him, but gradually there emerges the possibility of a second life for this man who lost everything at once. What looms in the background is the great seed of human vice: that wrong will never stop growing, here if Velchaninov’s wrong toward Pavel Pavlovich will cause the latter to destroy himself in wronging the former. We can learn from this most effectively on a microcosmic scale, by examining where we “pay forward” grievances and where we allow them to die.

I recommend this novel to anybody looking for an entrance to this era of Russian literature. While not as grand or genius as Dostoyevsky’s more famous books, it is more accessible and contains most of his essential themes. The characters are masterfully woven and relatable, complete with hopes and pains we all feel at some point.

Review: Summerlong by Peter S. Beagle (2016)

Gardner Island off the coast of Seattle is home to a quirky, aging couple: Joanna Delvecchio, an energetic flight attendant; and Abe Aronson, a gruff professor emeritus. Once a wild pair, they have settled into a comfortable life with each other, their hobbies, and their shared concern for Joanna’s passionate, adult daughter, Lily. Into their vividly human world steps Lioness Lazos, an unobtrusive yet utterly captivating young waitress who appears at the local diner as though she has always been there. Upon learning she has no home, no possessions beyond her dress and her bicycle, Joanna and Abe offer her a place to stay. Lioness has a way of brightening everything she touches, and even the sea and the seasons of Gardner Island seem to offer her special hospitality. Yet throughout the impossible summer she brings, the horizon hints at trailing shadows of the past from which she has escaped only temporarily.

Beagle’s special mastery is his ability to step into any of a variety of genres and pull from them the fundamental elements of human experience. In this book there is a mythos I found vaguely reminiscent of Neil Gaiman, though subtler, as Lioness is kept a mystery for the better part of the novel. The human interweaves with the eternal in a way that is not immediately noticeable, although it does draw our attention. Fantasy takes a back seat; more entrancing than the supernatural details are the quirks of each character that make the reader gradually fall in love with each one. Joanna shoots hoops to burn off energy and is torn between motherly and disdainful feelings toward her junior flight attendants. Abe annoys everyone with his harmonica and loses himself in primary accounts of thirteenth-century politics. Lily hides her feelings from her mother and endlessly falls for narcissistic lovers who are even more lost than she.

This effect of genre illustrates a crossroads I’ve reached in my own writing, and one that factors significantly into the worldbuilding of speculative fiction. For my whole life, my own fantasy stories have been set in medieval or pre-medieval civilizations, following the mold of my favorite authors, including Tolkien, Lewis, Le Guin, Donaldson, and Jacques. This stereotype of setting is important because it evokes the connection to the eternal we seek in fantasy; if the story feels like our myths, it feels that much more eternal. Yet few authors can peddle fluently in the human details of premodern civilizations, even if they’re classical scholars or geniuses of the human condition. Perhaps I can invent a profound character, but if I don’t know how she brushes her teeth in a kingdom without manufactured toothpaste, I’m missing an aspect of her that she accesses every day. I can make up a solution, but without good information I’m liable to fall short.

Thus one role of fantasy is to bring the modern into the realm of the eternal rather than the other way around. This is nothing new; Shakespeare’s lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream did not go into the ancient past to encounter Titania and Oberon. They merely went into the woods. The building of ancient-seeming worlds totally separate from Earth is actually primarily Tolkienian in origin, and he himself was actually trying to retroactively invent a mythology for England, one better to his tastes than the Arthurian legend with more Welsh and French blood than anything else. Many have followed less grandly in Tolkien’s footsteps, including most recently George R. R. Martin. Others have had other approaches. Le Guin, like Beagle himself in The Last Unicorn, minimalizes the minutiae of her worlds in a way that emphasizes their grandness. Savant-like authors like Susanna Clarke are able to weave pastiches of specific, real civilizations. But Beagle’s method of painting Summerlong like a photograph of gods dancing in my own backyard is one that increasingly tempts me to try it out.

The bulk of the story is character-driven rather than plot-driven, but when there is plot, it happens all at once, with hurricane force. A signature of Beagle’s is that change is irrevocable and when it happens, nothing ever goes back to normal. Even despite knowing this from page one, I was unprepared for just what the changes were and how they came about.

Summerlong is one of Beagle’s more adult works (there is little violence but sexual themes throughout); beyond this, I recommend it to anyone looking to be entranced by a medium-length novel. The prose, though poetic, is extremely accessible in a Fitzgeraldian way. And the true theme, which shows its face only after the plot-twisting climax, is one that none of us can live without.

Review: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864)

A mysterious narrator presents the first part of this book as a series of essays about the nature of suffering, ethics, and reason. His rhetoric is passionate and intuitive, conveying the thinly veiled implication that his words stem from pivotal emotional experiences in his own life. He describes himself as having lived underground for forty years, until in the moment of his speaking he has finally come forth to share his insight with an audience whose attention and agreement is not guaranteed.

The second part describes a series of embarrassing events in the narrator’s early life. Driven by a fragile ego and an obsession with honor, he socially disgraces himself in front of coworkers, then runs straight into the bed of a random prostitute. Her candid innocence is unprepared for his dramatic raving, especially as she grows to love him.

19^th-century Russians never produced light bedtime reading, and Dostoevsky was no exception. I was entranced by two of his classics, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, for their exploration of light in the darkest corners of the human soul. Notes from the Underground displays the same capacity, but unlike those later and longer novels, there is little story to match it. My guess is that this work laid the philosophical groundwork for Dostoevsky’s later and greater writing, and in that regard it is essential to an understanding of his messages. The trouble is that it’s downright uncomfortable to read.

Like much European literature of this era and later, the narrator is heavily unreliable. His initial essays vacillate widely, which is partly prevarication and partly the self-contradiction that comes from a troubled but insightful mind. This is a man who aches to be a hero but considers himself lower than a worm. His intense self-focus borders on narcissism, but for the fact that he is harshly critical of many of his actions and does not deflect the blame for the implied straits in which he has found himself. The central paradox of this half is, for me, the contrast between his stated age and the maturity of all the lesser paradoxes he writes, which fit perfectly into a troubled adolescent consciousness. To feel so vile and yet so self-important, with an urgency of life or death, would more accurately describe a teenage psyche, and without true narrative we have no knowledge of any late-blooming coming of age for our sad narrator.

The second half, while easier to understand for its narrative cohesiveness, is that much more painful for the narrator’s social awkwardness. He is a man of little consequence, and his typical social relationships leave him in shambles and the other parties more or less unaffected. This tendency is illustrated by his obsession with an officer who once moved him out of the way without acknowledgement in a crowded bar; the narrator schemes like a maniac to collide with the officer in the street to reassert his self-worth. Such desperate pettiness in a narrator, a position with whom the reader naturally identifies on some level, is difficult to swallow, and it only gets worse. His buffoonery culminates when Liza, the prostitute mentioned earlier, becomes the first person to take him seriously. His reaction toward her attempt to understand him is great tragedy, a gem of interesting relationship amid a shipwreck of unsettling gaffes.

The elements of human introspection in this book are fundamental and worthy of study, but their conveyance comes up short, at least in the English translation. I recommend this book to any dedicated fan of Dostoevsky, but not to anybody else.

Logan (2017 film) and superhero violence

"There's no living with the killing..." -Shane (1953 film)

Throughout the 20^th century, humankind gave birth to a class of genetic mutants with fantastic powers, who were generally hated and feared by ordinary humans. Now in the mid-21^st century, mutant births have ceased, and most mutants have died out, along with the bloodshed done to and by them. Two surviving mutants are a clawed drifter named James Logan “Wolverine” Howlett and a telepath named Professor Charles Xavier, who once ran a school for young and exiled mutants. Logan is finally losing his ability to heal from any injury, and Charles’ advancing ALS is making his telepathy a danger to those around him. Together, with Logan as caregiver and Charles sliding into a second childhood, the two old men are quietly preparing to die in Mexico. But the discovery of an impossibly young mutant named Laura, with abilities and a temper much like Logan used to have, forces them into their last chance to be role models in a world that hated, then forgot them. The resulting journey is a test of how much they would sacrifice to save not the world, but one young life.

I don’t normally review movies, but this one deserves an entry for two reasons: it captivated me, and it gives me a chance to talk about superhero violence.

Superhero comics are an inescapable part of the body of modern speculative fiction. They have one key difference from novels, including most graphic novels: they are designed to continue forever. This requires them to embrace a bizarre marriage of predictability and ever-increasing flashiness in order to keep selling issues. (Or it did until comics became a way to market movies.) It also requires that superheroes always defeat their villains in the end. Typical comic book heroes refuse to kill their conquered villains both as a statement of moral superiority, and as an opportunity to recycle those villains in years to come.

Superhero movies are different. Because they are iterated with far less frequency than comic books, they pack their punch by killing the villain. Even the more moral heroes who, like Spider-Man in his first two film iterations, try to minimize casualties, are nevertheless burdened by a villain who accidentally dies as a result of his own hubris or sacrifices himself as an act of redemption. A notable exception to this rule is the X-Men’s Magneto, whose death would have martyred him.

Into this same franchise steps Logan, whose abandonment of the codename “Wolverine” has come with a humanizing of a character who, unusual among comics when he was first introduced, was unafraid and sometimes even eager to kill. He was animal-like by nature and enhanced to be a military weapon, leaving little room for any human personality but a gruff, cool exterior and the occasional current of passion for romance and saving innocent lives (by killing antagonists). In the movies, of which he has appeared in nine, his signatures are stabbing faceless foes with his unbreakable metal claws, and receiving sickening wounds that heal before he has a chance to bleed.

This changes in Logan, which features blood aplenty. The former Wolverine is old and tired. He does not eagerly leap into battle like superheroes are supposed to do. Of the three main characters, he is the most battle-hardened, yet actually the least deadly; Laura fights with sickening savagery, and Charles’ condition can cause him kill anyone around him regardless of moral categories. The audience is invited to question our own appetite for violence by sequencing the deadliness of these protagonists. Our opening scene features a drunk Logan beaten half to death before he sloppily dismembers his attackers. Charles’ first seizure is emotionally depressing, full of grating lights and sounds. Finally, once Laura bares her claws for the first time, we receive the heart-stopping, choreographed action we’ve learned to expect from a Wolverine movie—only to realize the scene we’ve been anticipating shows a child being gored with a harpoon, among other atrocities.

Kurt Vonnegut has written that writers should put their characters through hell in order to see what they’re made of. Logan does this to all its characters, “good” and “bad” alike, and many new sides surface to characters who have remained essentially the same for over a decade of films. It also does this to its viewers, who watch superhero movies to experience the catharsis of watching seemingly relatable characters perform incredible feats and beat the snot out of people who deserve it. I acknowledge that this kind of release is a major reason I enjoy comics. Logan does nothing of the kind, but it does offer the catharsis of knowing that no matter how bleak things get, redemption is always possible in the pursuit of simple acts of kindness for the people you least expect.