“My husband, Charlie Willet, disappeared from a psychiatric hospital in the Berkshires on January 7, 2012.” The sentence that opens Paul La Farge’s bewitching, book-haunted new novel The Night Ocean hints at the sibling genres of horror and mystery, both of which lend their DNA to the story that unfolds. Moreover, this kind of  just-the-facts entry into a world where consensual reality will later be banished in favor of madness, obsession, secrets and unbelievable truths is, of course, the signature opening flourish of H.P. Lovecraft, the early-20^th century American master of “Weird Fiction” and the creator of the Cthulhu mythos, a body of stories celebrated for their unique contribution to dark fantasy and infamous for their reliance on racist and xenophobic terrors.

The echoes of Lovecraft’s style are deliberate, and the enigma of Charlie’s vanishment – investigated with heartbreakingly rational care by his wife Marina – becomes part of a story that draws on the mystery of Lovecraft himself. When Charlie discovers a long-neglected memoir by one of Lovecraft’s admirers, which fills in a surprising gap in the author’s biography, he sets out to investigate and document a story that will change the world’s understanding of Lovecraft and his work. But as Charlie journeys down the rabbit hole of stories — stories that lead from Florida in the 1930s to the horrors witnessed by liberators of the concentration camps, from a clutch of utopian science fiction writers in New York to a community of paranoid expats in 1950s Mexico City – he encounters forces that he hasn’t bargained on facing. Some seem to be arrayed mysteriously against his work, and some seem to come from within Charlie himself.

Like a set of Russian nesting dolls, The Night Ocean is a work that compels readers to see just how far within its nested stories they can follow Charlie’s quest. The result is a work about possession and loss, love and betrayal, and our unending thirst for the strange truth only fiction seems to be able to provide.

I sat down recently to talk to Paul La Farge about the origin of The Night Ocean, and all of the questions and obsessions it invites us to consider. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.– Bill Tipper

The Barnes & Noble Review: Was The Night Ocean a long-gestating idea, or was there a specific event that made you go “Aha!”?

Paul La Farge: Yes, there was. I was the writer-in-residence at Bard College in 2005, and one of the people on the faculty there is the poet and novelist Robert Kelly. I’ve been a fan of his — read his novel The Scorpions, which blew my mind. I got to go out to dinner with him, and somehow it slipped out that I was a fan of Lovecraft, that I’d been a Lovecraft fan as a kid. And it turned out that he knew a lot about Lovecraft, and he had been friends with Lovecraft’s friend Samuel Loveman, who was a used-book seller in New York for decades. And he told me the story of Lovecraft’s friendship with Robert Barlow, and he said, “Did you know that Lovecraft traveled to Florida to spend time with this very young fan in the summer of 1934 and 1935?” I had no idea. I had never heard of Barlow. So he told me a little bit about that, and then he told me some things about Barlow’s life, about what happened after Lovecraft died, and how Barlow had gone on — he’d moved to San Francisco, he’d become an experimental poet, and then he’d moved to Mexico City and become an anthropologist and an authority on the civilization of the Aztecs.

I had no idea about any of it, but as he talked, I thought, Wow, that’s actually a pretty good idea for a book. So I went home and I looked Barlow up, and his life was more interesting, if anything, than Robert had made it out to be. The questions about Lovecraft’s visits to Florida were also quite interesting, and there was no obvious answer to the question: What was a forty-three-year-old horror writer doing for two months at a stretch with a sixteen-year-old fan? What did they do? What was the nature of their relationship? What happened during the time they spent together? None of that was known, at least as far as I could find out.

BNR: Did Barlow himself ever comment on that relationship?

PLF: Both of them commented on it. Barlow wrote two memoirs about Lovecraft. I can’t remember if they’re both about the time that Lovecraft and Barlow spent together in Florida, but they both touch on that time. Lovecraft wrote dozens of letters to friends and relatives while he was in Florida, talking about things that happened while they were together. But at the center of it, there was this question mark, which Barlow doesn’t address directly, and neither does Lovecraft.

So I thought: That’s something that I would like to write a book about. But not exactly to fill in the blank. Not just to say, you know “Gosh, could it be that H. P. Lovecraft, the renowned American horror writer, was (a) homosexual and (b) in a relationship with a sixteen-year-old fan?” The question of Lovecraft’s sexuality has come up before. It’s one that people who study Lovecraft have been asking for decades. And the answer to it isn’t going to be as interesting as the question. Whatever anybody decides is going to be hypothetical, first of all, because we can’t know. But also it’s: OK, he was gay — and your point was what? There’s something a little deflating about coming down on one side or other of the question, of saying: This was Lovecraft’s relation to Barlow; this was Lovecraft’s sexuality; this is what happened.

So what I wanted to do wasn’t so much to answer the question as to write a novel about the question. I thought: OK, how can I do that? Maybe I could have somebody propose an answer which creates a scandal in the world of Lovecraft fandom, but then it turns out to be a fiction, and we have to live through both the scandal and the disruption of Lovecraft’s reputation, but then also the unmasking and the revelation that all of these people have burnt the wrong witch.

BNR: You reconstruct a view of what could have happened in that Florida, in that idyll, one with a melancholy, confused element. But it also has a real sweetness, this uneasy, fraught relationship between the older writer and this younger man, this boy, who is trying to emerge almost from this sort of chrysalis of himself, and become something new.

Then around this wonderful kernel of a romance that can’t quite come into being you expand into what I think of as a love story about stories, but one that takes a very dark turn. In a sense it seems to be a book about becoming possessed by books.

PLF: Yes, absolutely. I think that’s a really lovely way of putting it. All of the things that you’ve said were on my mind. One thing that’s notably absent from Lovecraft’s biography is the experience of romantic love. He was someone who was married for a couple of years, but when you read the story of his marriage you get the feeling it was maybe a warm friendship which he converted into marriage out of a feeling of what he ought to do as an adult, rather than because he had a passionate attachment to his wife.

BNR: They lived apart for some time as well, did they not?

PLF: They lived together in Brooklyn, and then, for economic reasons, she took a job somewhere else, and Lovecraft stayed behind, and then they separated. And he never had another romantic relationship.

So there was a part of me, I guess, maybe, that wanted to give that to Lovecraft, and say, “OK, this is what you might have had; you could have had this love story; and there might have been some actual warmth, some actual affection in your life.”

BNR: That’s something it seems we frequently want to find in the lives of writers. If they did not have an overt grand passion or a deep and well-evidenced romantic life, one wants to find that buried somewhere in there. It’s satisfying to us to look for secret love story.

PLF: Yeah. I think because we find love stories satisfying in themselves, and also because we want to be sure that these writers are people like us, that they have the same desires and the same attachments, or maybe even that they are people whose lives are more exciting and more sort of passionate than ours. And the truth might be quite different, that someone like Lovecraft was just a person for whom that wasn’t very interesting, and the reason that he was able to do what he did as a writer was because his energy and his attention were directed elsewhere.

The other part of your question about literary possession is also something that was on my mind. What happened is, I started to play around with this book in 2005, and I wrote some preliminary draft type things, some scenes, some chapters, and I set it aside, and I kept coming back to it and coming back to it and coming back to it.

I began with a little bit of story about Spinks, and his relationship in the ’40s and ’50s to the world of fandom.

BNR: I don’t want to spoil too many of the intricate, layered revelations of this book. But Spinks is a figure who emerges for the reader rather later in the story as a science fiction fan who has a particular engagement with the sort of world of Lovecraft, and begins to sort of insert himself into that world.

PLF: Yes. He is the editor of Lovecraft’s erotic diary, the intimate diary of H. P. Lovecraft. I couldn’t find a way, starting from that place, to sustain the story. It kept sort of going and then stopping, and going and stopping. Finally, I was at the New York Public Library, I had this wonderful fellowship at the Cullman Center, and I was reading a lot about Lovecraft and Barlow, and their world, and their friends and their friends’ world, and I immersed myself in it.

I came back to one of Lovecraft’s novels — really Lovecraft’s only novel. It’s a book called The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which he wrote right after he left New York and went home to Providence, and he had a kind of creative burst, and wrote a lot of the things that he’s remembered for now, and among them was this book. In a way, it’s the most autobiographical of Lovecraft’s fictions. It’s about a young man growing up in Providence who likes to walk around at night. He’s fascinated by history. He’s fascinated by architecture. He’s an antiquarian. He takes a strong interest in genealogy, and he looks into his own family tree, which ends up getting him in some sort of supernatural trouble. But the character feels very close, in some ways, to Lovecraft. He shares a lot of Lovecraft’s tastes and Lovecraft’s interests, and Lovecraft’s qualities. That story is also, I should say, a story about possession. It’s a story about possession which does not end well.

BNR:   I think it’s a story that many people who encounter Lovecraft through some of only his most famous short stories like “The Call of Cthulhu” would be find a little surprising. It takes the shape of more of a ghost story of the kind that we might be more familiar with from other writers —  rather than the encounter with cosmic-scale monsters as in so many of the other tales.

PLF: The story does become quite lurid by the end. But there is a kind of sobriety to the opening parts of the book. Lovecraft’s a very competent writer. He doesn’t have to be florid. And he’s engaged with all the world in that book, in a way.

So I knew that I wanted to do something with The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. I knew that would be a reference point for The Night Ocean. And in a moment of something, of confusion or desperation or whatever it was, I thought: OK, I’m going to make an outline of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and then I’ll see if I can use that structure, and I’ll see if there’s maybe some way that I can borrow it for The Night Ocean. So I made the outline, and then I started thinking about the different layers of The Night Ocean and how they might map onto the plot of Ward, and it turned out that there was a really natural fit. It was very easy for me to reimagine the episodes of Ward as scenes in the story that I wanted to tell. And that became the outline of The Night Ocean.

So it does follow the structure of Lovecraft’s novel, and in that sense, it’s literally a possessed book. It is possessed by the spirit of another book. I thought that was actually something that I wanted to happen. I wanted that feeling to be there.

BNR: I think that feeling is absolutely there! But you embed that very Lovecraftian and literary tale in a story that seems very poignantly about two people and their marriage.  Where did that part come from?

PLF: It comes from a few places. But I think most importantly, it comes from a desire on my part to write a book that would be of interest to readers who aren’t Lovecraft fans, to readers who aren’t already steeped in Lovecraft’s mythos and the various books and creatures and ideas that populate his cosmos. I think for that to be the case, I needed some of the characters not to live in that world already. There needed to be people who are coming at it from outside, so that they can be introduced to that world, and then they can kind of wander deeper and deeper into the mystery of it — but one step at a time rather than presuming all of this knowledge.

So Marina (the narrator who opens the book and who narrates much of it) is that character, for me. She’s our witness, our guide, our point of entry into this world. But it’s not her world

BNR: She’s kind of a Lovecraft skeptic, in the sense that Lovecraft is not a writer whose sensibility would have lent itself to her. She is a scientist.

PLF: That’s right. She’s a doctor. She’s a levelheaded person. She’s an empirical person. (Lovecraft was also an empirical person, but never mind.) And she’s never read Lovecraft when the book begins. She’s never even heard of him. So she really has to get the story told to her from the beginning, which gives me a chance to tell this story to the reader from the beginning. And it also maybe puts the story in a perspective where there’s at least one point of view that we feel we can trust. The other characters tell us stories, and there are a lot of true things in them, but they aren’t always completely true stories. At least with Marina, there is some ground under her feet, and maybe under our feet, while we’re reading her.

BNR: So Marina’s entry, her unlikely entry into this world, this kind of fantastical world, or this literary world, is through her husband, Charlie, a writer who opens the Pandora’s Box that this book winds up being.

PLF: Marina is a character who knows when to stop. She has limits. She will engage with something, but not past the point where it’s dangerous to her. Charlie doesn’t. He is willing to throw himself completely into the things that he’s interested in, into the things that he cares about. And that’s dangerous for him, to be that engaged, to immerse yourself in someone else’s world. You run the risk of being taken over. You run the risk of getting too involved.

BNR: So Charlie’s taken over by the project he’s involved with, by the voices or the stories of the people that he’s involved with. But that pliability also shows up in his willingness to put all kinds of masks on himself. He is constantly being fooled, but he’s also someone who does a significant amount of deception.

PLF: That’s true. I imagine those things, in a way, going hand-in-hand. That Charlie’s sense of who he is, is porous, so he is able to let other people in. As the book begins, he has made his living, such as it is, writing profiles, so he sort of immerses himself in other people’s lives and then writes about them, and that’s what he does to get involved with the story of Lovecraft and Barlow, which is where the book begins. That porosity is great for him as a writer of profiles. It allows him to almost become the person he is writing about, to see the world from that person’s point of view, to really get into their head and to write these very empathetic stories. But it also means that when he’s thinking about who he is, and how to present himself, he has to deal with the same porosity, and maybe there’s a kind of vagueness or a kind of uncertainty. Who is he? And in order to answer that question, he puts on a mask. He tells a story. He says, “This is who I am now; this is the part I’m playing.” And there’s a kind of deception in that.

BNR: One of the wonderful things about The Night Ocean is that there is never a point at which we feel like we’ve reached the level “base reality.” There’s always the possibility that there is another mask that might be seen to slip if we were only looking at it from the right angle. It’s about how we decide a story is true and how we decide a story is not true.

PLF: Yes.

BNR: It’s also populated with figures who are both based on real people from American history, and especially literary history, like William Burroughs and Donald Wollheim and other luminaries of science fiction, and they all  come with their own passionate interpretative lenses. They all give us an opportunity to see what’s happening as “it’s not that reality; it’s really this reality.”

PLF: In an everyday way, we put on masks. We see the world through the lens of our interests and our beliefs. It’s not that we are hoaxes, or that we are making ourselves up as we go along. But we do tell different stories about who we are, depending on the circumstances in which we find ourselves. We do tell different stories about what’s happening around us, depending on what we believe — and not only what we believe to be true but what we believe to be right, or good, or bad or whatever. So there is a constant creation of fictions that goes on as we live our lives and as we get along with each other. And if we try to get past those fictions, it’s very difficult to try to find out who someone is really.

When I was getting ready to write The Night Ocean I thought a lot about the active unmasking, and the way that hoaxes are exposed, and the hunger for truth that leads people to expose hoaxes, and to feel like, OK, now we know the real story. We hate to feel like we’re being lied to. Nobody wants to believe that what we’re being . . . We want to believe that we’re being lied to, but we don’t like it. We want to know what’s behind the lie. We’re hungry to find out the true facts.

BNR: The latter sections of the book really turn on our desire for the act of unmasking.

PLF: Yes. It’s very satisfying for us to say, “You say X, but I know Y to be the case,” because that puts me in a position of power, because I know the truth that you may or may not know, but that you’re not sharing with me. In a way, that’s the appeal of Lovecraft’s stories, that they are telling you the real truth about the cosmos: By the way, you didn’t know it, but Cthulhu is sleeping at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and humans are latecomers to the earth, and there’s all this other intelligent life and countless millennia of weird history have happened before people ever came along.

BNR: Horror is almost always a narrative that relies on the idea of “you don’t know the real story.”

PLF: “You can’t handle the truth.” The horror story is an initiation. It’s taking you from your place of ignorance, and it’s leading you into the world of initiated, and then, however unpleasant that world is, at least you have the consolation that you know the facts. You’ve been wised up.

BNR: Unless you choose to see it as not a consolation. In Lovecraft’s stories, getting wised up is the worst thing that can happen to a person.

PLF: It’s the worst thing that can happen to the characters. But for the reader, it’s very satisfying. I think that’s why Lovecraft appeals so strongly to teenagers. Right? Maybe teenage boys in particular, who are very, like, curious about the world, and also maybe sometimes a little uninformed. If you’re a teenage boy, you really want to be wised up. You want to feel like you know something that other people don’t.

But one thing that The Night Ocean is about is: What if you can’t just raise the mask and find out the true facts? What if the story that the person is telling kind of is their true self. What if that’s where the truth was? So this whole act of unmasking isn’t necessarily taking you from ignorance to knowledge. It’s just taking you from one kind of knowledge to another kind of knowledge.

BNR: By the way, this is a book that’s also very funny in a lot of places. There’s a wonderful section following Charlie as he goes to a Lovecraft convention to promote his book and give talks and stuff like that, and the local bars have Lovecraft specials, and he eats Lovecraft-themed seafood dishes…

PLF: Cthulhu calamari.

BNR: Which sounds either tasty or terrifying, depending on how you see it.

PLF: That was an actual thing. I went to a gaming convention years ago in Indianapolis, and there was a whole Lovecraft-themed menu at one of the restaurants, and they had Cthulhu calamari. They were terrible.

BNR: I was curious whether The Night Ocean was strongly influenced by other reading — as I read I thought of stories by Jorge Luis Borges that follow the logic of trying to get through the myth, the narrative, the mystery that you are presented with, only to find at the end that what you achieve isn’t a sort of firm ground of truth beyond that, but rather the simultaneous pleasure, and sometimes terror, of a world which is all narrative, which is masks upon masks upon masks.

PLF: Yes. I think about that Borges story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” about an imaginary encyclopedia that encroaches more and more on the real world until it feels as though the whole world is becoming a fiction from this encyclopedia.

BNR: There’s something in both stories that suggests the virality of a certain kind of fantasy.

PLF: I think that’s true. I think about what happened with Lovecraft’s imaginary book, The Necronomicon, which is this book of forbidden knowledge that is supposed to drive the reader mad. Lovecraft describes it as a real book. And he also got his friends, fellow writers like Robert E. Howard and Robert Block and Frank Belknap Long and all these people . . .

BNR: They refer to it also in their books.

PLF: They refer to it in their books, so that it comes to seem more and more real. And then everybody else kind of plays along. So people would plant cards for it in, like, the Yale University Library catalog or in the catalogs of rare book dealers, and as more and more people got involved, it came to seem more and more real. It’s like there was something so compelling about the idea of this fake book that everybody decided to bring it into existence. And finally, there was a paperback book called The Necronomicon.

BNR: I remember running into it at Waldenbooks in my science fiction−obsessed teenage years — it just was there, this black thing. It was very Heavy Metal.

PLF: Yes, it’s very Heavy Metal. The pentagram on the cover. So it’s almost like there’s a virality to hoaxes, to a certain kind of hoax. You experience it and then you perpetuate it. Or maybe you experience one kind of hoax and then you perpetuate another. There’s like the temptation to do something similar.

BNR: That seems to me to be of a piece with the idea that if you practice magic, maybe you can make the world magical by bringing fantasy, kind of hauling it out of the pages of books, and whether it’s the fantasy of a delicious hoax or the fantasy of magic — you know, if the magic described in a book might be made to work in the real world.

PLF: I think there’s a strong connection between those things. I think hoaxes are a kind of magical thinking. It’s like: I’m just going to make the world be the way I imagine it by saying that’s how it is. I’m going to bend the shape of the world to my will, and I’ll get away with it for a while.

BNR: One can argue that this is an age-old political technique. But I think we’re in an era where that’s become a more total phenomenon.

PLF: It has. Those stories are very powerful. And the acknowledgment that they don’t necessarily fit consensus reality is also increasingly explicit. I don’t know if for better or worse.

BNR: But you have major figures saying, “Well, I said that — but I was just saying that.”

PLF: Right. Or “these are alternative facts.” And of course, the stories that some of these people are telling are actually horror stories. They are stories about how terrible the inner cities are in America, or how many crimes are committed by immigrants, or how the crime rate is at an all-time high in the U.S. when it’s actually at an all-time low. They are alarmist stories, but they are very compelling. And we’re willing, at a certain level, to base policy on them.

BNR: Do novels and stories, and stories about stories of this kind, have any work to do in this context? Do they inoculate us against the danger? In other words, do they help keep us from making Charlie’s mistake? Is that a reasonable thing to expect, or is that something to ask of a novel that can’t really be asked of it?

PLF: I don’t know that that’s what novels do. I think there’s a lot of great critical writing that makes those points, and there’s a lot of great journalism that can kind of wake us up to the dangers of subscribing to stories and a lot of history. I think, in a way, a novel can give you a question. It can give you something to think about. But for a novel to make a case for something feels like a kind of bad place for a novel to be.

For me, fiction is more interesting when it’s in a kind of state of internal tension, when there’s a pull in one direction and then there’s a pull in the other direction also. Maybe, if I did my job right in The Night Ocean, on the one hand you feel the danger of believing too wholeheartedly in somebody else’s story about you or themselves or the world, but maybe, at the same time, on the other hand, you feel the appeal.

It would be terrible to live in a world where we couldn’t let ourselves be engaged at all. How cold would that be? How would we connect to each other if we couldn’t listen to each other’s stories, if, as soon as you started talking I said, “Ah, you’re just telling me a story.” There would be no possibility for empathy. There would be barely any possibility for communication. So we need some engagement. We need some warmth. We need some ability to care about each other’s stories, even as, maybe, in the back of our mind, there is a sense that we’re not learning everything, and that the person we’re talking to might have other aspects that elude us, and that can come back and surprise and disturb us.

Author photo of Paul La Farge credit: Carol Shadford

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2mr6Q42

Given the current political climate surrounding immigration, one might expect a novelist like Mohsin Hamid — the author of galvanizing works like The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia —  to be a pessimist. On the contrary. “I have a pretty optimistic sense of what human nature is,” he says. “It can do terrible, terrible things, but perhaps the split is 40% terrible and 60% good and over time more good will happen than bad.”

This belief shines through in Hamid’s latest novel, Exit West, which chronicles the journey of Nadia and Saeed, two young people who begin a relationship in an unnamed eastern country on the brink of civil war and eventually flee in the hopes of finding sanctuary in the West. This narrative – one which echoes the lived experiences of countless people fleeing war and privation — is given a kind of magical twist in Hamid’s telling. Nadia and Saeed, like millions of other refugees leave their countries not by boat or airplane, but through secret doors that, when opened, act as portals, carrying people thousands of miles in only a few steps. Nadia and Saeed don’t always know where they will end up when they go through these doors, and the location of doors change, or once discovered, are often sealed off by militant forces.

But, as more refugees use the doors in order to set up camps across the United States and Europe, the entire concept of immigration is rethought. As the concept of nationhood and borders starts to change, the purpose of the doors changes in turn. People begin to use them to return to the places they fled from, to visit loved ones, or to see new places out of sheer curiosity. Exit West is a powerful reminder of how crucial it is for us to create a world that embraces the free movement of bodies, and see transience not as something frightening or destabilizing but normal, even beautiful.

Hamid spoke with me on Skype from his home in Pakistan about the failure nostalgia, the role of the artist in rethinking our future, and what structures we need to embrace an ever-changing present.  The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. — Amy Gall

The Barnes & Noble Review: How did you get started on this book?

Mohsin Hamid: This is something that has been building my whole life. When I was three, my family left Pakistan for California. At age nine I moved back from California to Pakistan. At age 18, I went back to America again. At age thirty I went to London. But I think the real genesis was when I moved back to Pakistan from London in 2009. So many of my friends and even strangers said to me, “Why the hell did you do that?” And I realized how many people wanted to leave Pakistan. The tension between that realization and the growing backlash in America and England against migrants was something I wanted to deal with in the form of a novel.

Then, one day, I was probably having a Skype conversation like this and I thought, this little window in my computer is like a literal window. I can see this person, sitting in America. And I thought, what if there really were windows like this, and doors like this that we could actually move through to get to each other. The funny thing is I usually spend a lot of time thinking about the form for my novels, but once I had this idea for the doors the novel just sprang naturally from that.

BNR: Do you see this book as a viable possibility for the future of immigration or migratory patterns?

MH: I think that people are going to move. They always have and that’s going to continue. The question is, how are we going to deal with it? In the novel, it’s me imagining the next two to three hundred years of migration happening in one year. But I think wars, climate change, all that stuff is going to move people. And so I wanted to say, “What if the migration apocalypse occurs and it isn’t an apocalypse at all?” Maybe we will still find ways to be happy and for our children and grandchildren to thrive and the world to move on. I guess the world in the novel is one that I wanted to put forward, not as the likeliest outcome, but as a way to say, maybe the thing we’re so terrified of isn’t as terrifying as we think. The paralysis that we have right now when we think about migration is partly because we can’t imagine what the world would look like in the future. So I think it’s important for writers and artists to try to imagine that.

BNR: That is what felt so powerful about this book. It was actually positing something, not simply exploring a dystopia.

MH: I think that’s right. I think that right now, the global political crisis that we see all over the place has to do with virulent nostalgia. Everywhere, people are talking about taking us back to the good old days. Whether that’s the “caliphate,” or Britain before the EU, or “Make America Great Again.”  But, we can’t go back and many people wouldn’t want to go back even if we could. If the dominant political expression that we’re seeing right now is of nostalgia and we know that nostalgia won’t really work out, what happens is, we become depressed as individuals and societies — when we’re depressed, we’re much more vulnerable to be taken advantage of by demagogues and xenophobes. So I though it’s important to have a non-nostalgic view and say, let’s look forward, because if we don’t, all we’ll hear are voices telling us to go back.

BNR: It’s making me think about the importance of the artist and imagination in that forward thinking, especially since the first impulse of dictatorships is to shut down art as a way of controlling narratives about time.

MH: Yes. Artists are in the imagining/ prototyping business. Society needs people to be out there thinking of what might be. That cannot be something we just delegate to politicians or technologists. We need to start imagining the future or it will get imagined for us, and the ways that it has been imagined thus far don’t seem very attractive.

BNR: This book obviously extends way beyond America and England, but, would you have written this book any differently after the Trump election or post-Brexit?

MH: I finished the book in March of 2016 so, at the time the Brexit vote was still a couple of months away. I would have bet money that Britain would not vote to leave the EU, and I would have been wrong. I would have bet money that Trump would not have been the Republican nominee, and I would have been wrong and I certainly would have bet money that he wouldn’t win the election. So I think I was just as surprised by the developments of last year as anybody else. But the impulses that gave rise to those developments – the idea of nativism and the demonization of migrants were building for a long time, I just didn’t think it would take the form it did so quickly.

There’s a gnawing sense among most people it seems to me in most countries I go to, that things aren’t going the right way. What I suspect we’re going to see now is a long overdue politicization of people who up until recently thought things might be okay. Because, if we want things to be okay, we will have to make things okay.

BNR: Do you see writing as a political act?

MH: I think it’s a very political act. I think that any writer who says it’s not, is simply a writer who is disavowing the political connotations of what they write. If you’re book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave owners without acknowledging the system they live, that’s a political gesture. That said, I don’t think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, “Here’s the answer.” It’s not an op-ed. Writing a novel is like an amusement park or a museum or a city. You go into that place and you have certain experiences and those experiences, hopefully, have some impact on you. NYC doesn’t have a big sign saying “You must love diversity and the rights of all people.” And that’s not what makes you love diversity in NYC or anywhere. What makes you love diversity is because you live in it and you experience it. And I think fiction allows you to inhabit new domains and it’s you, the reader living in that domain for a few days that results in a deeper understanding as opposed to the novel proclaiming this is what it is right and this is what is wrong.

BNR: I was interested in the scene in the book in which a man willingly passes through one of the doors. It made me think about the privilege of being driven to migrate out of pure curiosity versus survival. How did you come up with that scene?

MH: I wanted to explore different kinds of migrations and journeys. There are people in the novel who are driven by terrible circumstances to move, there are others who are just curious, there are other people who are themselves not moving but watching other people come to where they are, and there are some characters who we get a sense of very briefly over a large swath of time and we recognize that they haven’t actually moved in geography, but they’ve moved through time and the town that they grew up in is not the town that they live in anymore. I think this idea of migration through time is very important because every human being does that and it unites us with people who migrate through geography. Through these vignettes, I wanted to open up lots of different models so that readers would see some part of themselves in those characters’ particular stances on the doors — and therefore, hopefully, on migration.

BNR: Do you think it’s necessary to disassemble the idea of the nation in order to change the immigration narrative?

MH: I think it’s going to happen. I think it was happening, but the problem was that we were, to a certain extent, disassembling the nation without empowering anything else in its place. Our countries are weaker: they cannot protect us from imported goods, they can’t protect us from climate change, they cannot protect us from epidemics. These things cross borders. But the kind of cooperation that would protect us from those things was completely lacking and because of this there’s been a backlash. People feel vulnerable. But I think we’re finding that if we try to ‘protect ourselves’, our nation-states begin to look like prisons. We’re being subject to incredible amounts of surveillance, the police are taking on draconian powers and violating our rights. I think this attempt to protect ourselves is ultimately going to founder because people don’t like living inside prisons.

So, I expect the next question after that will be, “What do we do now?” And for me that answer is both a combination of localism, having more powers at the local level and allowing people to experiment with their own visions — let San Francisco and Brooklyn try to do their own things and see what happens — and then at the same time we need bodies that exist far above the level of the nation to deal with climate change and migration and disease and taxation of corporations that function internationally. All of this stuff requires new kinds of infrastructures. But, basically it boils down to: we’re going to have to try something else.

BNR: What was so beautiful about the book was the way you showed the transitory nature, not just of humans in space, but of familial connections, of sexual identities, even of love.

MH: Yes, exactly. My question was, how do we create an emotional context where transience can be seen as more normal and less frightening? Because transience is what is normal. The problem is that we are busily trying to create political structures and cultural expressions that deny that and to deny that is to deny the basic idea of what is human. What used to help us to cope with transience was stuff like, extended families all living in one place, or very strong religious beliefs, or a tribe that would outlive you. That stuff is getting weaker. With movement, families get split. With the politicization of religion, spirituality gets diluted. With people intermarrying and falling in love outside of pre-existing defined groups, the tribe is disappearing. I’m not in favor of going back to those things, as I said, but you can’t take those things away without putting something new in its place. So finding a way to make transience more acceptable, even beautiful is key.

And, as you say love is transient even on a very personal level. We lose everyone that we love. Sometimes we drift apart and sometimes we die. But, so much of our conversation about love is possessive. “You are mine. And if you stop being mine, I will hate you.” And so exploring non-possessive ideas of love and friendship is important. Which is not to say we should just break down monogamy, I’m not taking a simplistic point of view. But, in addition to these examples of possessive love that we already have so much of, let us also explore what examples of non-possessive love and affection mean.

BNR: Do you see language as similarly transient?

MH: I have a funny relationship to language. When I came to California when I was three I spoke Urdu fluently and I didn’t speak a word of English. Within a few months I lost all my Urdu and spoke only English and then I learned Urdu all over again when I was nine. Urdu is my first language but it’s not as good as my English and it’s sort of become my third language. English is my best language but was the second language I learned. So, for me, language is about the impossibility of communicating what we precisely wish to communicate and this gorgeous attempt that we make to do that anyway. I love that we will never say exactly what we mean, but we will forever keep trying.

Photo of Mohsin Hamid credit: Jillian Edelstein.

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Bill Hayes’s boyfriend of eighteen years, Steve — “only forty-three” — had vanished, out of the blue and into a fatal heart attack, breaking Hayes’s heart. Hayes enters a ghostly dreamtime — liminal: not quite alive, not dead. “One day I met a man with the name of an angel,” Hayes writes. “We got to talking. Talking as balm. ‘You’re going to be fine,’ Emmanuel said right away. ‘Something bad always leads to something good . . . When my partner disappeared . . . ‘ and Hayes cuts in. ‘You said “disappeared.” ‘ He nodded. ‘That’s exactly how it feels for me.’ ”

Hayes is no innocent; he’s knocked around, but by disposition — and dint of vocation — he is open and vulnerable. He is a writer, a poet, a street photographer. He is fully feeling. “The night after he died, I found that a sliver of light from the streetlamp shone through the blinds just so and cast a single yellowy tendril across his pillow. It was the opposite of a shadow. Which is as clear a definition as I can come up with for the soul.”

”With morning, the light was gone.” Empty and agonized, soon it would be time to move to the next station. San Francisco was, New York City was to be: Insomniac City, where sleep goes to die, just the place for Mr. Restlessness. He lands in what New York criminally calls a “studio,” sized enough for a table, chair, and single mattress. Visitors sit on the floor: “This apartment should be illegal,” his friend Miguel says. “There must be some code somewhere that’s being broken.”

The city’s middle-of-the-night annoyances become Hayes’s sleepless familiars: the clip-clop of police-horse shoes, lovers’ sidewalk quarrels. “What is music to my ears may be intolerable to another’s. Life here is a John Cage score, dissonance made eloquent” (yes, he did say “music to my ears”). Hayes is still shell-shocked, but he’s a soldier, still damn-the-torpedoes open. He is grateful, courteous, and quick to tip his hat hello: “Kindness is repaid in unexpected ways,” he believes. “If you are lonely or bone-tired or blue, you need only come down from your perch and step outside. New York — which is to say, New Yorkers — will take care of you.” He loves the 2 a.m. burble from the outdoor seating at the French restaurant six flights down. “I discovered a phenomenon heretofore unknown to me: Laughter rises.”

Hayes turns out to be that particular kind of big-city denizen, the irrepressible soul who treats the pavement like a cocktail party. He approaches strangers if they appear to be doing something that strikes him. In his mind’s eye, this is neither discomfiting nor suicidal. He gathers those incidents and accidents that most of us have only heard in a song, experiences missed by being wary or the fear of being uncool. Sidewalks and subways are his hunting grounds. From a guy carrying fishing poles he learns that there are sharks in the Upper Bay. He promises a virginal, Sri Lankan cabbie that sex is everything he dreams it will be. From a homeless poet he learns the transit of Venus is taking place that week, an event “that only six times in recorded history have humans witnessed.” Underground, he marvels how the random sampling — the mash — tests our kindness and compatibility. “Is that not what civility is?”

Hayes stops people in the street and asks to take their photo: a cop, a vendor, two sisters. His black-and-white photographs dapple the chapters — chapters that are quick though composed, sometimes simply snatches from his journals. “We are eating outside. All at once, ‘Oh!’ he exclaims, seeing a firefly, Tinker Bell-like at our feet. ‘Isn’t it amazing!’ ‘Yes, but don’t — as I have told you before — eat one.’ ‘Ah, the dreaded death by firefly . . . ‘ O nods his head very seriously.”

Enter O. Oliver Sacks — The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, Island of the Colorblind, Hallucinations: that Oliver Sacks — had sent Hayes a letter praising his book The Anatomist, a pitch-perfectly, disarmingly Sacksian card: “I meant to write a blurb [but] got distracted and forgot.” They subsequently met in New York and started a correspondence. Hayes looked him up when he got to New York, eight years ago now. Sacks exuded innocence and vulnerability, protected only by his aura of brilliance. He took Hayes to his favorite haunts — the botanical gardens, the mineralogy collection at the American Museum of Natural History — and told him stories about the periodic table. Sacks fell in love for the first time, well into his seventy-fifth year.

Sacks experiences his first passionate kiss on his seventy-sixth birthday. Hayes: “After I kiss him for a long time, exploring his mouth and lips with my tongue, he has a look of utter surprise on his face, eyes still closed: ‘Is that what kissing is, or is that something you’ve invented.’ ”

Their relationship is charming and charmed — words here stripped clean and in amplitude. Sacks is murderously shy, and to witness how he emerges from this cocoon is wonderful. He is pulsing with life, his curiosity on some faraway astral plane: “Do you sometimes catch yourself thinking?” he asks. “Those special occasions when the mind takes off — and you can watch it. It’s largely autonomous, but autonomous on your behalf.” Hayes takes him to see some skateboarders. “They may not have read Euclid, but they know it all.” They sip wine from the bottle on their rooftop. There is a moment when Hayes catches Sacks, who is slowly going deaf and blind, trying to snip an uneven edge off a sheet of paper. “He was missing it entirely, scissoring the air very, very gently.”

This is a memoir, so a lot of other things work their way into and out of the story: Ali and his head shop; Ilona, the ninety-five-year-old, orange-haired, foot-long-eyelashed artist who draws Hayes’s right eye (“She told me she’d drawn Tennessee Williams’s eye once.”); the moving man who never moves; incidents and accidents. And there is the “cancer arising from the pigment cells in his right eye,” a recurrence of a melanoma that had by this point metastasized throughout Sacks’s body. You both read and watch, from Hayes many portraits, the vanishing of Oliver. He is such a brick. A journal entry from four months before Sacks dies: “O, when I accidentally dropped a carton of cherry tomatoes on the floor. ‘How pretty! Do it again!’ So I do.” When all Sacks can eat is gefilte fish, they have a taste test between Russ & Daughters and Murray’s. And Hayes is a brick, too. There, and aware that he had not only fallen in love, “it was something more, something I had never experienced before. I adored him.” It’s the kind of adoration that glows invitingly, like a warm, lighted window passed on a nighttime walk through a sleeping city.

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This afternoon, the winners of the 2016 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers^® Awards were announced in a ceremony in New York City.  The awards are presented annually in recognition of literary excellence. The six finalists for the Discover Great New Writers Awards were chosen by two panels of noted authors from the 42 titles handpicked by our booksellers for the Discover Great New Writers program in 2016.

First Place, Fiction: Abby Geni, The Lightkeepers

A young woman finds herself at the center of a murder mystery and surrounded by an unreliable cast of characters on a remote archipelago in Abby Geni’s sublime debut novel. (Counterpoint/PGW)

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First Place, Nonfiction:  Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Matthew Desmond’s reportage puts human faces on an overlooked but real national crisis, presenting a mix of Americans telling their own stories about poverty and eviction.

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Second Place, Fiction: Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi’s indelible novel follows two branches of a family—one in America and the other in Africa–over 300 years. (Alfred A. Knopf/Penguin Random House)

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Second Place, Nonfiction: Hope Jahren, Lab Girl

As a rule, people live among plants but they don’t really see them. Hope Jahren’s spirited memoir sprouts the vibrant story of a life studying trees, flowers, seeds and soil — and takes readers deep into the hidden wonders of the biosphere.  (Alfred A.Knopf/Penguin Random House)

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Third Place, Fiction: Jung Yun, Shelter

How much do we really owe our family —  and what do we owe ourselves? These are the questions at the heart of Jung Yun’s provocative debut novel, which unfolds from a household’s financial crisis into a gripping saga of violence, its causes and aftershocks. (Picador/Macmillan)

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Third Place, Nonfiction: Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root

Patrick Phillips brings to life an ugly and harrowing episode of American history in this meticulously researched and powerfully written history of his hometown, and the violence that kept the community all white, well into the 1990s. (W.W. Norton)

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The first place winners in Fiction and Nonfiction each receive a $30,000 prize and a year of marketing and merchandising support from Barnes & Noble.  Second and third place winners are awarded prizes of $15,000 and $7500, respectively.

 

The 2016 Discover Award Judges for Fiction:

Wiley Cash is the New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Discover Great New Writers selection A Land More Kind Than Home and This Dark Road to Mercy. His third novel is forthcoming from William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. Wiley is writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Fiction and Nonfiction Writing at Southern New Hampshire University.

Benjamin Percy is the author of three novels, two story collections, and a craft book, including The Dead Lands, Red Moon (a Discover Great New Writers selection), and Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction. His fourth novel, The Dark Net, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017. His fiction and nonfiction have been published by Esquire, GQ, Time, Men’s Journal, Outside, The Wall Street Journal and The Paris Review. He also writes the Green Arrow and Teen Titans series at DC Comics.

Emma Straub is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Modern Lovers, The Vacationers, and the Discover pick Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, and the short story collection Other People We Married. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Vogue, New York Magazine, Tin House, The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, and The Paris Review Daily, and she is a contributing writer to Rookie.

The 2016 Discover Award Judges for Nonfiction:

Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of fifteen books. Her 2003 memoir, She’s Not There: a Life in Two Genders was the first bestselling book by a transgender American. Her new novel, Long Black Veil is forthcoming from Penguin Random House in 2017. She is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University; serves as the national co-chair of the Board of Directors of GLAAD; and is a Contributing Opinion Writer for Op/Ed page of The New York Times.

Sloane Crosley is the author of The New York Times bestselling essay collections, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (also a finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor) and How Did You Get This Number, as well as the bestselling novel, The Clasp. Her work has appeared in Esquire, GQ, Playboy, Elle, W, The New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, and on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” She was the inaugural columnist for The New York Times Op-Ed “Townies” series, and is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Interview Magazine.

Brando Skyhorse is the author of a novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, which was a Discover Great New Writers selection,and received both the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters Take This Man: A Memoir was named by Kirkus Reviews as one the Best Nonfiction Books of the year. He is currently co-editing an anthology on passing, forthcoming from Beacon Press. Skyhorse has taught at New York University, George Washington University, and Wesleyan University. He joined the Bennington College faculty in 2016.

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What is the difference between the Great Lakes and the ocean? A scientist will tell you that the ocean contains saltwater, of course, and a vast ecosystem; the moon’s gravity also exerts a greater pull on it, establishing the tides. Asked the same question, a gifted novelist — indeed, a master — will tell you less, but also more. Twenty-eight-year-old Henry James, gazing for the first time on Lake Ontario in 1871, described what he saw this way: “It is the sea, and yet just not the sea. The huge expanse, the landless line of the horizon, suggest the ocean; while an indefinable shortness of pulse, a kind of gentleness of tone, seem to contradict the idea. What meets the eye is on the ocean scale, but you feel somehow that the lake is a thing of smaller spirit.”

James’s essay is part of a new collection, Travels with Henry James, which brings together twenty-one gems of his travel writing between 1870 to 1879. The irony of the book is that the author — so famous in his novels for depicting society in Boston and New York, Paris and London, along with the minute gradations in his characters’ thoughts — writes most movingly, as a travel correspondent, when his subject is nature. After viewing Lake Ontario, he proceeds to Niagara Falls, where he is most struck not by the raw power of the plunge but by the beautiful arc of the water: “[I]t flows without haste, without rest, with the measured majesty of a motion whose rhythm is attuned to eternity.” If only James had lived to see the centenary of our national park system, which has protected scores of similar treasures across the country, and especially in the West.

Travels with Henry James does not see the West; in fact, James never even approached the Mississippi. Although the mountains of Wyoming and the mesas of Utah might have set his pen on fire, one senses that the urbane and waistcoated James could not have endured truly wild frontier. He confined his American itinerary to a half-dozen locations in the Northeast. James presented the resulting travel essays to The Nation as a sort of audition for a broader assignment to Europe. The magazine wisely agreed, sending him to England and then the Continent, where he filed travel reportage throughout his thirties. He took in towns and cities, cathedrals and frescoes, never overlooking the denizens of these cultured lands: women in their frocks, men checking their pocket watches; the fashionable and garish, the gauche and homely. Nothing goes unobserved by his generous eye.

He is more democratic in his tastes than a reader of novels like The Ambassadors or The Portrait of a Lady might expect. Some of the grand attractions of Europe leave him cold. “There are people who become easily satisfied with blonde beauties, and Salisbury Cathedral belongs, if I may say so, to the order of blondes.” Several of James’s favorite vistas in town are not in the fashionable quarter but at the seaport or near the tracks. He is certainly no muckraker or bleeding heart, and still less a contrarian; he simply pursues the line of beauty where he finds it. This includes the “mouldy-timbered quiet” of old Newport. Through these pages he wanders and pauses, searching out the new and the unexpected. “I can wish the traveler no better fortune than to stroll forth in the early evening with as large a reserve of ignorance as my own, and treat himself to an hour of discoveries.”

The English countryside holds a special appeal — James writes of “this interminable English twilight, which I am never weary of admiring, watch in hand” — and Paris is Paris, but nothing compares to Italy. Here James finds the intersection of beautiful country, structures, people, and light. While observing an open-air theater rehearsal on a Roman afternoon — too far away to hear but comprehended through “the generous breadth of Italian gesture,” he captures the magic of the country in a few simple lines. “It was all deliciously Italian — the mixture of old life and new . . . the dominant presence of a mighty architecture, the lounges and idlers beneath the kindly sky, upon the sun-warmed stones.” I can think of no other writer, except perhaps Saul Bellow or Vladimir Nabokov, with so sure an ear for the music of prose.

Beyond the light it sheds on the master himself, this collection wonderfully expresses the sheer pleasure of travel. Visiting Stonehenge, James seems not to want his day to end. At leisure, with the new and the beautiful in prospect, a person can forget all troubles and bathe in the warm glow of happiness. “I can fancy sitting all a summer’s day watching its shadows shorten and lengthen again, and drawing a delicious contrast between the world’s duration and the feeble span of individual experience.” The only thing that would improve such a day is the company of this book.

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It took me forty years to find Vinegar Hill. As the crow flies, that Brooklyn neighborhood was around two miles from my apartment on Gold Street in Manhattan. I knew of Brooklyn; Crazy Eddie’s store was there, where he sold stereo components at prices that were insane, until he got bagged for fraud. The Brooklyn Bridge went there, over the spooky-dark waters of the East River. The river was what you call a psychogeographical barrier, intimately known only to people wearing cement shoes.

I learned of Vinegar Hill when my office moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn Heights in 2012. Not the Brooklyn Heights of Pineapple, Orange, and Cranberry streets, but over east, bordering the courts and the house of detention. That’s Brooklyn for you. That’s New York City for you. There are neighborhoods and, yes, they have histories and distinctivenesses. But they are always rubbing shoulders with the “other” — one street beyond the neighborhood boundary — and it mostly works out. “New York is a triumph of coexistence interrupted by people yelling at one another,” Rebecca Solnit neatly summarizes in Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas. Just so. There is still turf in New York, gang turf: shivs, zip guns, brass knuckles, and lawsuits.

When my office moved to the not-so-great side of the Heights, I went for walks. I’m a geographer, and if I didn’t walk around, I might as well be a sociologist. William Helmreich is a sociologist, up on the Hamilton Heights campus of City College, and he might as well be a geographer. He has walked 6,000 miles in New York City — that’s about every block, chronicled in The Brooklyn Nobody Knows — and he has walked them with an eye to knowing them, a least taking their measure from street level: he studies the architecture, the light, the sounds, the ambience. He is Baudelaire’s flâneur, Guy Debord’s dériviste. Helmreich was eating salted cod in Vinegar Hill before I bought my first turntable from Crazy Eddie.

It is not that Helmreich is all-knowing, but he is as tempting as a sideshow barker. And The Brooklyn Nobody Knows — especially for the 1972 Manhattanite know-nothing archetype like me — is made to order. He has a handful of fine curios. But he has competition in a couple of midway veterans: Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro — big competition, five-borough competition: “a rapture, a misery, a mystery, a conspiracy. A destination and point of origin, a labyrinth in which some are lost are some find what they’re looking for.” New York City, forever dying and being born. Who could resist?

Nonstop Metropolis  — co-authored by Solnit and geographer-writer Jelly-Schapiro — is impressionistic, a gallimaufry of takes on neighborhoods and topics: hip-hop, doo-wop, jazz, nerdy Scottish bands; wildlife, greed, riots (we like our riots); races, ethnicities, creeds; Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs; Yiddish theater and the West Indian Parade; pickup basketball and Latin radio; stone aqueducts and homeless shelters; Kings, Queens, Breukelen, the Bronck, and Staaten Eylandt, too (with apologies to the Lenape). Each of these essays is as dense and demanding as a prose poem. Some are as sudden as squibs. Don’t miss those; as in the paper newspapers, squibs are often the best parts. Many of the accompanying maps are highly colored, flushed with exuberance: so much to convey, so little space. Others are as quickening as the silk, escape-and-evasion maps given to pilots during World War Two. The writing and the maps are what “place” is about: desire, fear, landmark, memory, imagination, a state of mind, sometimes melting into thin air — but still right there under your feet. “Conventional maps are falling by the wayside as people just consult their phones about where to go. With that, the map as a work of art vanishes, and so does some key part of learning the lay of the land . . . digital devices just teach obedience,” writes Solnit, intuitive geographer extraordinaire.

The Brooklyn Nobody Knows is less flamboyant than Nonstop, and there is much the “walking guide” about it. He knocks around all forty-four neighborhoods, all seventy-one square miles, and may well have wished a good day to each of the borough’s 2.6 million inhabitants. Helmreich is smitten with Brooklyn; I’ll even take the liberty of saying he loves the place, loves the whole city. He’s the kind of guy who asks questions: ” ‘So you’re a hornsmith!’ I exclaim by way of beginning a conversation. ‘What’s that? I didn’t even know there was such a thing,’ ” he inquires of a man in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood. He knows there are parts of Brooklyn that can only be disarmed by common decency — not that he isn’t commonly decent — and being an old man. “If I see some bad-ass dude walking up toward me, I don’t put on my gang face, I don’t try to look tough.” (From an interview in the New Yorker, September 17, 2013.) As if. “I do the opposite. I seek to make eye contact, and as soon as they look at me I say, ‘Hey, buddy, how ya doin’?’ ” Not too much eye contact. Thinking he might break the ice with a group of Bloods, “I asked them, ‘How can I get one of those red jackets?’ and they said, ‘Depends what side you’re on.’ ” (New Yorker interview, same date.) That takes a special, radiant aura of street credibility. He also knows the power of laughter, and when to laugh.

Solnit and Jelly-Shapiro write that Nonstop Metropolis will be the last atlas of its kind, which includes San Francisco and New Orleans. “Nonstop Metropolis is the last volume in a trilogy of atlases exploring what maps can do to describe the ingredients and systems that make up a city and what stories remain to be told after we think we think we know where we are.” Sounds like Tennessee Williams: “America has only three cities; New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” Cleveland would make it a tetralogy, which is not in the works. Helmreich does, however: Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island, too. Sail in peace, William, may your legs be strong, your humor tireless, and your wish for a red jacket go unmet. Try camouflage.

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I fell in love with Alexander Pushkin as a teenager, smitten with his great novel-in-verse, Eugene Onegin, a moral tale about arrogance and ennui disarmed — too late, alas! — by love. Russian literature, with its philosophical moodiness and combination of optimism and hopelessness, is like literary grapefruit juice for a brooding teenager, quenching deep existential thirst with a bittersweet acidic tang. And while the books that grab you by the throat when you’re young often barely tug your sleeve decades later, I still love Pushkin. Rereading his complete prose in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s sprightly new translation, I’m freshly amazed by Pushkin’s liberal, incisive take on the moral repugnance and senselessness of racism and torture, and on his attitude toward women, who, as he wrote in his feminist-tinged story “Roslavlev,” “are better educated, read more, and think more than the men” — and are therefore so much wiser.

Even Pushkin’s life story remains mesmerizing: Born in 1799 to the old military aristocracy of Russian boyars on his father’s side, he was not just Russia’s greatest poet but probably its first multiracial one: His maternal grandfather was black, taken hostage from Africa — either Ethiopia, as long thought, or from what is now Cameroon, as has been recently argued — and presented to Peter the Great, who treated him as a godson and educated him as an officer. And then, of course, there’s Pushkin’s wasteful death at thirty-seven, baited into a pistol duel over his very attractive, very social wife’s honor.

Not speaking Russian, I read Pushkin in English and have compared multiple translations over the years. A new translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky, the tsar and tsarina of Russian translators, is cause for celebration — in part because it will draw new readers to his work, as have their vibrant renditions of the great classics of Russian prose, including nine volumes of Dostoyevsky and three of Tolstoy. Could Eugene Onegin or Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons be next?

In his introduction to Novels, Tales, Journeys, Pevear stresses the “openness and lightness” of Pushkin’s prose. He flags the stories’ straightforwardness yet notes that they are more complex than they first appear: “They are cast as local anecdotes, and are told so simply and artlessly that at first one barely notices the subtlety of their composition, the shifts in time and point of view, the reversals of expectation, the elements of parody, the ambiguity of their resolutions.”

Most of the fragments, some little more than literary doodles, are new to me, including the alluringly titled sketch “The Guests Were Arriving at the Dacha.” But the real draw remains Pushkin’s only completed novel, The Captain’s Daughter; his unfinished novel, The Moor of Peter the Great; and the stories, “The Queen of Spades,” “Dubrovsky,” and The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin. Taken in sum, the volume showcases Pushkin’s deliberate experimentation with various forms — epistolary, historical, romantic, folktale, society novel, ghost story, travelogue, and even a narrative from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old debutante. His narratives display a debt to European inspiration (including Shakespeare, Byron, and Walter Scott), yet their sensibility and settings are distinctly Russian. The translators’ annotations, which appear as endnotes, reveal Pushkin’s astonishingly wide range of literary references, which include Homer, Mme. de Staël, Samuel Richardson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and scores more. (Translations from French passages, Pushkin’s first language, are more conveniently located at the bottom of the page on which they appear.)

In the brief introduction to her translation of my well-worn Everyman edition of The Captain’s Daughter and Other Stories, Natalie Duddington wrote, “As a poet, Pushkin is untranslatable: the exquisite beauty and the austere simplicity of his verse cannot be rendered into a foreign tongue . . . But his prose has none of this poetic quality and loses but little in translation. It is vigorous and straightforward and sounds as simple and natural today as it did a hundred years ago.”

Indeed, in these pieces Pushkin himself indicates that while poetry requires inspiration, prose is a step down on the literary ladder and requires perspiration. Ivan Belkin, the fictional author of six top-notch tales about life and love in the provinces — for which Pushkin purports to serve merely as “Publisher” — explains that, while “not born to be a poet,” he was so taken with writing that he decided “to descend to prose.”

Clearly, prose is easier to translate. So it’s not surprising that a comparison of Pevear and Volokhonsky’s new edition with earlier translations — by T. Keane, Rochelle Townsend, and Natalie Duddington — reveals just minor differences: “gloomy Russia” becomes “sad Russia,” “the damned Frenchman” becomes the more humorous “that cursed moosieu.” More salient is the title of Pushkin’s frustratingly unfinished novel based on his great-grandfather Ibrahim Gannibal: The Moor of Peter the Great instead of the more common The Blackamoor of Peter the Great or Peter the Great’s Negro. Despite the avoidance of the racial epithet, none of the ironic edge of this comment is lost in translation: “Too bad he’s a Moor, otherwise we couldn’t dream of a better suitor.”

Of Pushkin’s finished fiction, I was particularly taken with the twists and turns of “Dubrovsky,” one of his many tales of thwarted love. In this heavily plotted story, a young aristocrat goes rogue after being cheated of his inheritance by a nasty neighbor and “the bought conscience of the ink-slinging tribe.”

Love letters figure largely in Pushkin’s work, including Onegin. In “The Queen of Spades,” a ghost story about gambling and greed that’s been popularized by Tchaikovsky’s opera, Hermann’s plot to wangle the old countess’ secret to winning at cards includes disingenuous love letters to her poor, susceptible ward. The fact that they are plagiarized from German novels is a quick tipoff to his character.

The Captain’s Daughter, Pushkin’s only completed novel, has more room for character development. Set during a bloody peasant uprising — the Pugachev rebellion of 1773, about which Pushkin also wrote a multivolume history — this action-packed narrative purports to be the memoirs of an honorable — and damned lucky — soldier whose often guileless actions are guided by his determination to save the woman he loves. Pyotr’s unlikely encounters with the impostor Pugachev add a touch of the absurd to the plot, while also showcasing Pushkin’s sympathetic munificence to a wide range of humanity. Intriguingly, this volume includes the rough draft of a chapter Pushkin omitted — wisely, as we see.

Like many of his characters, Pushkin was by turns lighthearted, touchy, volatile, rash, and self-righteous. He also shared their propensity toward womanizing and gambling. Plagued by Tsar Nicholas I’s censors, he was exiled from St. Petersburg for long stretches of his short life — which turned out to be his most productive periods. The pity is that he didn’t live to write more. The marvel is that he managed to produce such brilliant work in multiple genres, and that it has outlasted so many regimes. Pevear and Volokhonsky’s excellent new translation will help sustain that legacy for Anglophone readers.

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Americans can be proud that the person many consider Spain’s greatest living novelist and a prospective Nobelist, Javier Marías, is much influenced by writers and films from the United States. Although he has translated a number of English-language authors, the novelists he considers most important for his work are Henry James and William Faulkner. Those influences were not readily apparent in The Infatuations, his last translated novel that was widely and positively reviewed in English. But Thus Bad Begins improves upon that 2013 book by incorporating the baroque style of late James and the historical orientation of middle Faulkner.

A weekly journalist for El País, Marías surely knows the risks of these two unfashionable models, so he employs Hitchcockian plot devices (think Rear Window) and lightens the proceedings with a comic narrator, a bumbler out of Nabokov, another novelist Marías has translated and praised. Like the grandiose confabulator Kinbote of Pale Fire and the fumbling Humbert of Lolita, Marías’s narrator, called “young De Vere” by other characters, has, in Humbert’s words, a “fancy prose style” that attempts to cover up but unwittingly reveals his limitations as a person, his unreliability as an author, and ultimately the serious consequences of his moral obtuseness when the comic “bad” of the title becomes tragic “worse” by novel’s end. The full Humbert quote is “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

I admit to having a soft spot for writers who employ this kind of narrator or focal character. The moralistic stalker in Poe’s “Man of the Crowd,” the imperceptive captain of Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury, the false innocent Papa Cue Ball in John Hawkes’s Second Skin, and, most recently, the garrulous dupe in Norman Rush’s Mortals are some of my favorites. They seem peculiarly American, feeling entitled to their viewpoint, confident in their understanding, optimistic, supposedly well meaning in their interpretations and actions — and dangerous to others. I enjoy how the creators of these men make fun of certain readers’ nostalgia for nineteenth-century omniscience, for the passive assumption that fiction writers are earnest truth-tellers and not, fundamentally, elaborate liars like — how could I forget him? — that supposedly naïve, tale-telling hick Huckleberry Finn.

At 450 pages, Thus Bad Begins is certainly elaborate and sometimes over-elaborated as the twenty-three-year-old Juan De Vere struggles to see his acquaintances clearly, understand their complicated relationships, and push forward the investigation his employer asks him to perform as the new assistant of a fiftyish film director from Madrid named Eduardo Muriel. The year is 1980, and Muriel believes a physician friend, Jorge Van Vechten, has done something dishonorable with women in the past; he asks De Vere to entertain the much older man at nightclubs to see what can be learned, an intrigue that leads to some embarrassing moments when the old lecher is more successful with women than the junior informer. Because Muriel and his somewhat younger wife, Beatriz, are unhappy in their marriage (which De Vere learns by some humorous eavesdropping), the randy youth wrongly assumes Muriel believes Beatriz may be sleeping with the doctor. De Vere begins stalking Beatriz, follows her to a religious site, and climbs a tree to get a better view of an upstairs room (Marías is not above parodying the snooping first-person narrator). From the tree, De Vere sees something — that he believes is Beatriz and Van Vechten having sex. But after Van Vechten performs a life-saving favor for the Muriel family, Muriel refuses to hear what his assistant believes he has found. De Vere’s discovery is not wasted, though, for it emboldens him to have sex with Beatriz when she is in psychological extremis.

De Vere’s unexpected shift from loyal acolyte to live-in betrayer is plausible enough but may also be partly the result of Marías’s method of composition, which is the strangest I’ve ever come across. In his Paris Review interview, Marías states that when he begins a novel he has only a very general plan and never alters the first pages (and succeeding pages) that he writes. To avoid being bored, Marías says he changes his plan as his narrator/protagonist develops and changes. Unlike other novelists, Marías does not backfill for consistency. This means some incongruities and even contradictions between early pages and middle pages, so the author may seem no more reliable in plotting than his narrator is in reporting. Accidents, coincidences, and digressions are allowed to control events as they do, Marías suggests, in life.

In the second half of Thus Bad Begins, however, the plotting becomes more pointed and conventional as De Vere turns his attention away from the present of Muriel’s family to how they and others have been scarred by the past of Franco’s dictatorship, which ended shortly before the novel begins. I won’t name names, but De Vere discovers, sometimes by indirection and happenstance, that characters who seemed to be relatively neutral do-gooders, helping leftists despite positions in Franco’s government, were blackmailing helpless women for sex. Ultimately what De Vere stumbles upon leads back to secrets in Muriel’s family, and the political and personal merge — but with little credit for De Vere, who simultaneously advances upon and retreats from a history in which his own diplomat parents may have been complicit.

Although De Vere is telling this story some thirty or more years after the events, he claims to have an excellent memory that permits him to “quote” page-length paragraphs of others’ discourse and to remember equally long passages of his internal monologues. But punctuating and sometimes puncturing his pompously assured style are “seems,” “perhaps,” “might have,” “probably,” and other Jamesian qualifiers. Here is our amateur detective analyzing nameplates outside a building to which he has followed Beatriz:

The name “221B BS” made me suspect it was a detective agency; I couldn’t help associating that strange name with 221B Baker Street, where Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson lived and received their various intriguing commissions. It seemed more likely to me that Beatriz would be visiting them: unhappy people often insist on trying to uncover the full magnitude of their unhappiness, or choose to investigate other people’s lives as a distraction from their own. She could have been visiting Gekoski or Meridianos, whatever they were, or Marius K and his journeys to the Middle East, or someone else, who had no plaque. However, I inclined towards Deverne Films, after all, they were in the same line of work as her husband and she would probably know them.

De Vere remembers all these irrelevant details but shows himself guilty of arbitrary literary associations, projection of his own emotional state, and a suspect “inclination” that may have resulted from finding letters in his name embedded in “Deverne.” Of the dozen or so tenants in the building, De Vere rules out the one — Dr. Arranz — that Beatriz is visiting, an error that might well have shortened his investigation and the novel.

De Vere’s narcissistic personality and verbose style create a “mist” (his word) over the whole account. Marías has said the “filter” through which a story is told is crucial to him. Does Thus Bad Begins imply that De Vere intentionally creates this mist or filter because he feels guilty about taking advantage of an extremely vulnerable woman as several other characters have? Or does Marías imply that three decades after the end of Franco’s regime and after the amnesty provisions of 1977, we can’t be sure of how to distribute guilt for a past rife with turncoats and shrouded in secrets? Maybe by “we” I really mean “I.” The novel includes historical characters — such as the movie producer Harry Alan Towers, the actor Herbert Lom, and the director Jess Franco, Marías’s uncle. I sense that beyond these real people Thus Bad Begins is a roman à clef and that readers in Spain familiar with the convoluted betrayals of their recent past know whom the novel implicates in its compendium of sins.

Marías says that the quality he most values in readers is “patience,” a word that occurs frequently in the novel. Those who don’t read James and Faulkner with pleasure may be impatient with Marías’s slow-developing and unpredictably ramifying plots, but his barbed wit and Nabokovian puzzles entertain as Thus Bad Begins slouches forward, lurches sideways, and winds back upon itself. The title comes from Hamlet — “Thus bad begins and worse remains behind” — and points to a pattern of Shakesperian allusions and quotations worthy of the Russian gamemaster. Because De Vere shares his name with a man sometimes claimed to be the author of Shakespeare’s plays, characters discuss artistic fraudulence and imposture in general.

Like Pale Fire, Thus Bad Begins is metafictional and metalinguistic, for De Vere continually comments on how life resembles fiction, whether written or cinematic, and shares his hyperconsciousness of words themselves, their roots and hidden connections. Some of Marías’s wordplay, though, may have been lost in Costa’s translation, for Thus Bad Begins has occasional odd diction and unidiomatic sentences perhaps more appropriate for the British than the American reader.

Much of Marías’s earlier fiction turns upon secrets, as does The Infatuations. In that novel, the man who dies is named Deverne; De Vere, in the quoted passage above, sees the nameplate “Deverne Films.” In this self-reference, Marías may suggest (it’s always “suggest” or “imply” with Marías) that he considers The Infatuations more like a movie than, ironically, the movie-saturated Thus Bad Begins. The narrator of The Infatuations works for a publisher, but this new novel is a more bookish and more ambitious book because of its range and scale, its coiled stories of Franco’s abuses, and its detailed portrait of a marriage undone by secrets and even unnecessary revelations.

Perhaps the success of The Infatuations has made Marías fearless, for Thus Bad Begins pushes his methods right up to the edge of excess that his earlier narrator notes when she describes a murderer: “He had a marked tendency to discourse and expound and digress . . . which, with few exceptions, are either absurd, pretentious, gruesome or pathetic.” One of these methods is borrowing from writers he admires. Like Faulkner, Marías carries over characters from one novel to another. Along with Deverne, the pedantic Professor Francisco Rico and Dr. Vidal Secanell return in this new book. Like W. G. Sebald, Marías includes some photographs for his compulsive interpreter De Vere to analyze and project himself upon. The abstract discourse and self-referential qualities of Thus Bad Begins resemble the recent fiction of J. M. Coetzee, another writer Marías respects and a man who, like Marías, grew up under an oppressive dictatorship and distrusts all authority, including his own. With these and earlier comparisons, I don’t mean to suggest that Thus Bad Begins is a pastiche of other novelists’ work but to point out that Marías, like his narrator, who continually poses alternatives and possibilities, incorporates influences and allusions to show that any story can be told — filtered — in many different ways, as Marías may well have learned when he translated that encyclopedia of undecideds, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

Classic comedies end with a wedding, so De Vere describes his in the final pages Thus Bad Begins. He believes his marriage demonstrates what an upright character he is, but Marías undermines this belief when he reveals the shocking identity of De Vere’s bride. A more serious backstabbing of the narrator by the author also occurs near the end when De Vere barely mentions a pregnant woman’s suicide for which readers, who have been carefully investigating De Vere, may find him partly responsible. In Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence wrote that “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” A man whose family and country were victimized by Franco, Marías didn’t need to read American fiction to understand killing. But like the creators of those “innocent” American narrators I mentioned earlier, Marías knows that naïfs such as “young De Vere” are dangerous men.

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More than any generation before us, we have cause to be thankful, so thankful, on this Thanksgiving Day. Our harvests are bountiful, our factories flourish, our homes are safe, our defenses are secure. We live in peace. The good will of the world pours out for us.

When President Lyndon Baines Johnson addressed a troubled nation on Thanksgiving evening, 1963, just seven days after the assassination of JFK, he spoke in two very different tones. Passages such as the above were meant to reassure America that its blessings were fundamental and enduring; passages such as the one below, recalling Kennedy’s famous appeal for citizens who would ask what they could do for their country, were meant to warn that there was only one path forward:

Let all who speak and all who teach and all who preach and all who publish and all who broadcast and all who read or listen — let them reflect upon their responsibilities to bind our wounds, to heal our sores, to make our society well and whole for the tasks ahead of us.

Though Thanksgiving’s official status has been defined by presidential decree — George Washington first proclaimed it a holiday, and Abraham Lincoln tied it to the third Thursday in November —  it was Norman Rockwell, says Deborah Solomon in her  biography American Mirror, who put the stuffing in the modern Thanksgiving. He did so, says Solomon, not just in the iconic magazine covers but throughout his half-century career:

The great subject of his work was American life — not the frontier version, with its questing for freedom and romance, but a homelier version steeped in we-the-people, communitarian ideals of America’s founding in the eighteenth century. The people in his paintings are related less by blood than by their participation in the civic rituals, from voting on Election Day to sipping a soda at a drugstore counter. Doctors spend time with patients whether or not they have health insurance. Students appreciate their teachers and remember their birthdays. Citizens at town hall meetings stand up and speak their mind without getting booed or shouted down by gun-toting rageaholics. This is America before the fall, or at least before searing divisions in our government and general population shattered any semblance of national solidarity.

If the communitarian ideals proved shaky in the paintings, they were almost absent in the painter, says Solomon. Behind the tweeds-and-pipe persona, Rockwell felt “lonesome and loveless,” his relationships with his parents, wives, and children “uneasy, sometimes to the point of estrangement.” He did not care for church, and he “eschewed organized activity.” At age fifty-nine, after decades spent with “anxiety and fear of his anxiety,” Rockwell entered therapy with the famous German-born psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who coined the term “identity crisis.”

Rockwell’s first Thanksgiving magazine cover appeared in 1913, but his most famous ones were painted at midcentury. The Unwinding, George Packer’s bestseller about the “Inner History of the New America,” takes the midcentury Rockwell Nation as its stepping-off point, the moment when “the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way”:

If you were born around 1960 or afterward, you have spent your adult life in the vertigo of that unwinding. You watched structures that had been in place before your birth collapse like pillars of salt across the vast visible landscape — the farms of the Carolina Piedmont, the factories of the Mahoning Valley, Florida subdivisions, California schools. And other things, harder to see but no less vital in supporting the order of everyday life, changed beyond recognition — ways and means in Washington caucus rooms, taboos on New York trading desks, manners and morals everywhere . . . The void was filled by the default force in American life, organized money.

But Packer’s case-study portraits of those denied “the Roosevelt Republic” — Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union Address inspired Rockwell’s Four Freedoms, his most famous series of paintings — are not sepia-toned. “The unwinding is nothing new,” he writes, and it “brings freedom, more than the world has ever granted, and to more kinds of people than before.” Cases in in point are provided by the households portrayed in Modern Families, which offers “Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship,” include a post-nuclear family of two adopted girls, one from Nepal and one from India, co-parented by two couples, one lesbian and one gay.
In his recent bestseller Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J. D. Vance offers a more personal exploration of what happens when families fray and social capital is squandered, especially if exchanged for a materialist alternative. Vance’s memoir gives voice to a working class swept up in a downward-spiraling, lose-lose scenario in which families and communities are destroyed by the pursuit of an American Dream that, like Gatsby’s green light, only seems to recede.

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It’s 1957, New York City, Fifty-seventh Street. A strong-shouldered, tight-lipped salesman at a ladies’ hair barrette company called Feathercombs learns he’s been fired (a higher-up gave his job to Alger Hiss) and snaps. The son of a German-Jewish immigrant family from Philadelphia, the salesman counted on that salary to support his emotionally unstable wife — a raven-browed French war refugee with an “an Ingrid Bergman smile” who had once hosted a horror TV show in Baltimore — and her teenage daughter, whom he’d raised as his own. Unhinged by fury, he storms into the company president’s office wielding a phone with a frayed, dangling cord [(he’d ripped the phone from its base) and starts strangling his boss, deploying garroting skills he’d picked up in the OSS on special detail for Wild Bill Donovan in WWII London and Germany — like a real-life Pirate Prentice from Gravity’s Rainbow.

That irate garroter was the grandfather of Michael Chabon; the raven-browed woman was the author’s grandmother; and her daughter was his mother, according to Chabon’s new novel, Moonglow. Retelling the Feathercombs assault, as his grandfather had described it to him, he writes, “The president tried to stand up, but his legs got tangled in the kneehole of his desk. His chair shot out from under him and toppled over, casters rattling. He screamed. It was a fruity sound, halfway to a yodel.” A secretary prevented the assault from turning fatal by plunging a letter opener into the attacker’s shoulder. Chabon explains, “The bite of metal locked some meridian in the flow of my grandfather’s rage. He grunted. ‘It was like I woke up,’ he said.” Out on bail after a week in lockup at the Tombs, awaiting sentencing, the grandfather only had “enough money for a shave, a bus, a Zagnut bar for my mother, and coffee and a donut for himself.” He went on to serve a year and a half in a low-security prison, where he invented a model rocket that later made him and a business partner rich, for a while. In 1962, that business partner’s nephew married Chabon’s mother, and the next year, Chabon was born. So: no Alger Hiss, no Michael Chabon. What about these dramatic doings would you say stamps them as Chabonesque? Is it the dogged, ingenious charisma of the underdog hero? The nostalgia for postwar coastal metropolises? The sultry horror hostess? The Zagnut bar? Is it not, in fact, all of it?

A kind of DNA resides in the sentences of every writer, especially consistent in the works of the greatest, revealing a continuity of mind, art and worldview. If you were to extract a handful of passages from Great Expectations or David Copperfield and throw them onto a tabletop, unlabeled, alongside passages from For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms, or Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, you could sort them into Dickens, Hemingway, or Vonnegut without looking any of them up. This principle holds abundantly true for Chabon. Moonglow contains echoes of his earlier masterpieces — like Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and Telegraph Avenue — just as those books contain echoes of the stories he remembers in Moonglow, which “consciously and unconsciously found their way into my work.” But in this novel, he redoubles the identifying strand: the DNA of his storytelling is not only literary, it is literal. Moonglow relays the rich, complicated history of the author’s own family, reshaped through fiction.

How much of what Chabon writes here about his relatives and himself is true; and how much is invented, or embellished? He will not say. In an author’s note, he declares, “I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose or the truth as I prefer to understand it.” Further hedging his accountability, he adds that any “liberties” taken with “names, dates, places, events, and conversations,” not to mention with actual historical figures (notably Wernher von Braun, inventor of the V-2 rocket and bugbear of Chabon’s rocketry-obsessed grandfather), “have been taken with due abandon.” Yes, this is Chabon all right; tantalizing, precise, and polytropic, gazing with a scientist’s enthralled raptness at the creatures that divide and grow, seethe and Rorschach, beneath his microscope. But where observation ends and re-imagination begins here is never entirely revealed.

The seeds for this book were planted in 1989, the year after Chabon published his debut novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh. His grandfather — who, the book explains, was not his biological grandfather but acted as a paternal figure in important ways to Chabon’s mother and her sons — was dying of cancer. As the author, then twenty-six, sat by his sickbed, the grandfather grudgingly filled in episodes from the family’s past that he had not formerly disclosed. He did not want to romanticize himself, or even to think too hard about himself. “My grandfather and his emotions were never really on speaking terms,” Chabon explains. But he told his grandson: “After I’m gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours.” He added, “Start with the night I was born. March second 1915.”

Chabon, of course, started in his own way, but it took him a quarter century to work up the will to do so. The facts his grandfather told him about himself and his wife, whom Chabon knew as Mamie (pronounced mah-MEE, French for “grandma”) erased the familial certainties Chabon had absorbed from boyhood, certainties that had shaped his identity. He learned that his loving, high-strung, witchy grandmother — reader of fortunetelling cards, baker of tarte tatin, teller of nightmare-inducing fairytales (“wicked children received grim punishments, hard-earned success was forfeited in one instant of weakness, infants were abandoned, wolves prevailed”) — had not been who she said she was. (Not wanting to spoil things, I’ll hold off on exposing her shifts and prevarications here.) This discovery “messed me up for a long time,” Chabon writes. “One by one I began to subject my memories of my grandmother, of the things she had told me and the way she had behaved, to a formal review, a kind of failure analysis, searching and testing them for their content of deceit, for the hidden presence in them of the truth.” His determination not to be misled helps explain his caginess about the reliability of this novel-cum-memoir. It took fiction for him to restore logic and plausibility, if not exact truth, to his personal biography, assembling an ancestral narrative so rich in turbulent adventure that it makes Baron Munchausen look like a shut-in.

Moonglow unfolds in the roller-coaster style familiar to readers of Chabon’s other novels, loosely following the grandfather’s chronology — from his scrappy youth, scavenging coal in the Philly train yards, to his World War II experiences (in Germany he stalks Wernher von Braun, outraged by the scientist’s diversion of the utopian goals of rocketry from space travel to warfare), to his courtship of his wife and their marriage. Interspersed amid this picaresque trajectory are flash-forwards to a love affair in the grandfather’s final year, at a retirement home in Florida, when, long widowed, he takes up with a new resident, whose cat has been devoured (she thinks) by an alligator in a nearby swamp. Gallant as Don Quixote, the grandfather takes up a lance and goes after the malefactor (it turns out to be a python).

But this late romance can’t compete with the “freight-train rumble” of his passion for Mamie. Describing his grandfather’s besotment with his wife, Chabon writes, “In her pain and her vividness and her theatricality, she seemed to have access to some higher frequency of emotion.” In a chapter about one of Mamie’s hallucination-fed breakdowns, a few years before the Feathercombs incident, Chabon mentions a luna moth, which his grandmother had found “expiring with languid wingbeats on a tree in the backyard” and pinned to a bulletin board in her sewing room, “its viridescence fading with time to dull dollar green.” Marking that detail, you shiver, recognizing the touchstone that would recover its glow in the eerie comic book goddess Luna Moth, who makes the fame of Chabon’s Kavalier and Klay. In that novel, Luna Moth sought an earthly warrior to don her green wings and “right the world’s many wrongs.” When her chosen messenger protested that she wasn’t up to the task, Luna said, “You will find . . . that you have only to imagine something to make it so.”

This superb novel shows Chabon at his best; his documentary impulse here reins in the ornate language that can sometimes make his other work gaudy. He loses none of his audacious agency by harnessing his art to biography. But is Moonglow fundamentally a novel, or a memoir? Why quibble? As every novelist knows, it’s in fiction that the important truths get told.

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