Robert Harris’s novels are wonderfully tart confections of political conspiracy, opportunism, cynicism, and vainglory. He has found his material in ancient Rome, France of the Dreyfus Affair, Bletchley Park, a (counter-factual) victorious Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, a rogue hedge fund, and the so-called War on Terror. Conclave, his eleventh fictional engagement with high-stakes intrigue, goes straight for the mother lode: the Vatican.

It is 2018, and a pope who resembles the present one in humility, charity, and tolerance has died unexpectedly in his sleep. Cardinals from all over the world are assembling in Rome to choose his successor. The media are slavering, “reporters and photographers . . . calling out to the cardinals, like tourists at a zoo trying to persuade the animals to come closer.” Armed guards, snipers, and surface-to-air missiles have been deployed against the threat of terrorist attack. Carpenters and technicians are preparing the Sistine Chapel for the electoral proceedings, and a number of cardinals begin to position themselves to step into the papal shoes. Factions and coalitions emerge in different permutations: progressive and reactionary parties, combining and splitting with the Italian, Third World, and North American contingents. Beneath it all, churning relentlessly, are the forces of what we may call the deep Curia.

We see events through the eyes of the dean of the College of Cardinals, Cardinal Romeli, an old, modest, and sincerely devout man whose “guilty recreation” is, appropriately enough as it turns out, reading detective fiction. It is his duty to officiate over the conclave and assure that it runs smoothly — which I’m happy to say it does not. A speedy election is desired lest it appear that the Church is falling into terminal discord. But perhaps it is. Romeli learns that, toward the end of his life, the late pope had lost his faith in the Church and, along with that shocker, had made some exceedingly strange decisions. On the very day of his death, he had met privately with one powerhouse cardinal, an aspirant to the papacy, and removed him from all his offices — then died before making the decision effective. What was that all about? And will this last act come out in the conclave? Furthermore, the old pontiff had also appointed a new cardinal whose existence had not been suspected until he arrives on the scene. What’s going on here?

Before unleashing the answers to these crucial question, Harris gives us a few splendidly satirical pictures of the workings of the Vatican, not least in the matter of ecclesiastical pelf. There is the American cardinal “who might come from New York and look like a Wall Street banker” but is not at all up to the job of straightening out the financial management of his department. As one old Italian cardinal remarks to Romeli, he would “never have given the job to an American. They are so innocent: they have no idea how bribery works.” We are also introduced to a dead ringer for the real Cardinal Bertone, whom the actual Pope Francis has censured for his extravagance in knocking together two Vatican apartments to create a vast luxury pad for himself.

As politicking commences and picks up heat, secrets from the past erupt to bury the candidacies of a couple of cardinals. Harris, the writer, loves the maneuverings and machinations of power-mongers, but he is just as superb here in showing men of true faith wrestling with the legitimacy of their own wishes and trying to fathom God’s will as events unfold. He goes so far as to suggest the presence of the Holy Spirit when Romeli discards a prepared homily to deliver an impromptu one of a completely different tenor before the assembled cardinals. It is a speech that sets the conclave on a most unexpected path.

I know this is all rather obscure — that’s the Vatican for you — but I don’t wish to reveal the plot elements that keep the book going against the countervailing force of Harris’s unremitting attention to rules of order and the arcana of ceremonial habiliments and accessories. Just when the story is getting a good head of suspense going, some matter of procedural housekeeping is explained in detail, or our old friend Cardinal Romeli starts putting on or taking off his choir dress, a great assemblage that includes scarlet cassock with thirty-three buttons (“one button for each year in Christ’s life”), cincture with tassel hanging midway up the left calf, rochet, mozzetta, zuchetta, pectoral cross, skull cap, and biretta.

Well before the end of the novel, it becomes clear where things are heading — even if certain details are a bit of a surprise. All in all, Conclave is not one of Harris’s best works; still, the political aspects of papal selection, the pressure of the “news cycle,” and the wheeling and dealing and backstabbing are excellently realized and put forward with a good deal of sardonic wit. This is where Harris excels and why one waits so impatiently for his next offering.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2gGzH3E

We need our comedians now more than ever. The best, from Samantha Bee to John Oliver, were so incisive during the interminable and punishing election season that their work often functioned less as comedy than as vital journalism. There’s a simpler reason many of us need our comedians, too: those of us who voted blue and are feeling, well, blue will need a way to laugh through our grief and anger as we gird ourselves for the coming Trump administration.

It could be that Daily Show host Trevor Noah, the South African comic unexpectedly tapped last year to replace the revered Jon Stewart, will prove particularly adept at wringing satirical humor out of a reality that already feels to many like dark satire. While during his early months in the hosting chair some complained that, as an outsider, Noah didn’t evince Stewart’s impassioned outrage at American political culture, a recent sketch comparing Trump to scandal-plagued South African president Jacob Zuma demonstrated how instructive an outsider’s perspective can be. (Noah made the case that the “inept and self-serving” Zuma and Trump appear to be “brothers from another mother.”) Noah’s new memoir, the rollicking yet tender Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, provides further indication that Noah’s is a necessary voice for these times.

In addition to that, it’s a great read. The book comprises eighteen autobiographical chapters, each prefaced by a short piece explaining a relevant element of South Africa’s history of apartheid. Many of the chapters center on his relationship with his fearless and devout black Xhosa mother, who risked a prison term of up to five years by having a child with Noah’s white father, a Swiss expat. Noah was indeed “born a crime,” and for the first five years of his life, until apartheid fell, he was mostly kept indoors, whether with his mother in her Johannesburg apartment or with his maternal grandmother in her Soweto township, to minimize the risk that the government would take him away.

“We had a very Tom and Jerry relationship, me and my mom,” writes Noah, a vivid storyteller who fondly recalls epic chases through the neighborhood as his mother sought to punish him for all manner of mischief and as he sought to escape a beating. As he grew fast enough to outrun her, she took to yelling “thief” to get bystanders involved in the pursuit. “In South Africa, nobody gets involved in other people’s business, unless it’s mob justice, and then everybody wants in,” Noah quips. His writing about his mother is loving and bighearted, especially as she becomes involved in an abusive relationship that culminates in a truly shocking outburst of violence that Noah’s mother, miraculously, survives.

Throughout the memoir, Noah slyly illuminates the absurdities of a society built on racial hierarchy. When the light-skinned child was with his mother’s extended family in the township, he was treated as white. Though he was the least well behaved of all the children, he was never beaten by his grandmother as his cousins were. “A black child, you hit them and they stay black,” she told his mother. “Trevor, when you hit him he turns blue and green and yellow and red. I’ve never seen those colors before. I’m scared I’m going to break him. I don’t want to kill a white person.” While he’s somewhat abashed to admit it now, Noah reveled in his special treatment. “My own family basically did what the American justice system does: I was given more lenient treatment than the black kids,” he reports. “Growing up the way I did, I learned how easy it is for white people to get comfortable with a system that awards them all the perks.”

But when Noah’s mother, who worked as a secretary, was eventually able to buy a home in the suburbs, Noah went from being “the only white kid in the black township” to being “the only black kid in the white suburb.” And although biracial, he was excluded from South Africa’s mixed-race “colored” population, an ethnic group that traces its history back to the seventeenth century, to the sexual unions of Dutch colonists and African natives. He didn’t quite belong anywhere, and growing up, he had few friends.

The book, focusing on Noah’s boyhood, doesn’t describe his decision to pursue comedy, but one can imagine that a childhood spent as a perpetual outsider, observing group dynamics to determine where he might fit in, has served Noah well in his chosen profession. There were so many times, he recalls, when he “had to be a chameleon, navigate between groups, explain who I was.” He survived it (and writes about it) well; expect him, in the coming months and years, to help explain us to ourselves.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2fKJH9J

Make a list, regret it twice: choosing the “Best” books in any year is a procedure guaranteed to given any book reviewer grief.  Whatever number you choose, you’ll be leaving out books that make their own arguments for inclusion with urgency and eloquence.  Yet, as the year winds up– particularly a year like this one, in which breaking news often threatened to break us under the sheer flooding volume and seismic consequences– looking back to capture some of what the slower work of the book had to offer seems all the more essential.

Consider this list from the B&N Review to be part of that attempt: an admitted fragment, a snapshot of highlights, a particular edit of a scene a different eye might have filmed quite differently.  We’ve chosen ten new-in-2016 works of fiction and nonfiction that appeared in our pages, books we think  represent this year with particular significance — whether for their urgent attention to the moment we share, their fresh and illuminating point of view, or their achievement in breaking through the cacaphony with a singular voice. (Next month we’ll highlight some significant rediscoveries and new translations as well).  Our selections, along with excerpts of our coverage in the Review, are below:

 

All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister

From Barbara Spindel’s interview with author Rebecca Traister: “American public policy and civic institutions were built with one formulation of the citizenry in mind, a model in which there was a breadwinning person and a domestic laborer. The assumption was that the earner was male. He got a series of things from the government: tax breaks for being married, for having a kid, for owning a home. The assumption has also been that that person had an unpaid or low-paid person, always a woman, who stayed at home and was working to put meals on the table, do laundry, pick up children from school at three o’clock in the afternoon — just think about how our country is built on the assumption that there is somebody who’s going to pick up a child at three o’clock in the afternoon! People don’t live like that anymore.”  Read More.

 

American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin

From our interview with author Jeffrey Toobin: “What gives the book, I think, contemporary resonance is that, you know, terrorism is nothing new in the United States. We are very scared of ISIS today. But in fact, there was more terrorism in the ’70s. …I do think that if you believe, as many people do, that events are shimmering out of control, it may be helpful to know that things have been worse in the past. But I don’t want to pretend that I wrote this book as sort of like a guide to contemporary life. It’s mostly just an extraordinary story from the past that has one woman at the mysterious heart of it.”  Read More.

 

 

 

Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett

From Hawa Allan’s review: “’The white man in this book is a symbol of progress,’ according to the former English literature teacher of Furo Wariboko, the protagonist of A. Igoni Barrett’s novel Blackass... But of course, in the zero-sum politics of settler colonialism, one man’s progress is another man’s decline. “Progress always wins,” Furo’s English teacher had taught, “that’s why it’s progress.”  Read More.

 

 

 

 

Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America by Patrick Phillips

From Tayari Jones’s interview with author Patrick Phillips: “So even as a schoolkid, I asked some of my classmates, ‘Why are there no black people here? Why is everyone so full of hatred when there don’t seem to be any people of color around?’ That’s when I first heard this story in its most mythic terms, which was that, a long-long time ago, this girl had been attacked and, in response, the white people had ‘run out’ all of their black neighbors. That’s the version of it I always knew. And exactly as you say, it was always told in very vague, mythic terms. There were never any names or dates or places. It was stripped of all of the detail. So it seemed like this thing that was just lost in the mists of time.”  Read More.

 

 

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

From Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s interview with author Matthew Desmond: “Americans are matched in their rich democracy with the depth and expanse of poverty. That’s really always unsettled me. So I wanted to get as close as I could and try to understand that from a ground level…So I started by moving into a trailer park on the south side of Milwaukee, and I lived in that trailer for about five months. Then I moved into a rooming house on the north side of Milwaukee, which is a traditional inner-city, predominantly African-American neighborhood, and I lived in that rooming house for about ten months. From those two places, I followed families that were getting evicted and the landlords doing the evicting. If you were getting evicted, I went to court with you, followed you into abandoned shelters and houses… I went to funerals with folks. Slept at their houses. Ate meals at their table. I was there for a birth… I saw landlords buy property, sell properties, pass out eviction notices, and collect rents, and tried to really plumb the complications of that relationship that defines the lives of so many families today.” Read More.

Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn

From Amy Gall’s review and interview with Nicole Dennis-Benn: “It is impossible to read Dennis-Benn’s debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, and not be changed. The book traces the stories of four Jamaican women fighting for selfhood and love in a country that is built upon their exploitation… [The novel]is beautiful and unsparing in its critique of the tourism industry and the ways in which racism, sexual violence, and homophobia warp the lives of the characters. It is a meditation on the possibility of hope and intimacy in the face of great adversity.”  Read More.

 

 

 

Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett

From Melissa Holbrooke Pierson’s review: “Imagine Me Gone fulfills its considerable ambitions. It touches greatness, and its seamless interleaving of the deeply personal with the widely collective is one reason. The character of Michael is another. Haslett suggests grief is passed to succeeding generations of a society by the same mechanism it is to individuals. In Michael both converge.” Read More.

 

 

 

 

Mercury by Margot Livesey

From Katherine A. Powers’s review: “Mercury is Margot Livesey’s eighth novel, and just like the previous seven, it is completely different from its predecessors. Her books have been peopled by a most variegated lot, among them an evil child, a lunatic, a blackmailer, an amnesiac, a control freak, a couple of ghosts, and, last time, in The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a mid-twentieth-century version of Jane Eyre. Now we find ourselves sucked deep into the lives of an optometrist, his equestrian wife, and their two children….I came to this story in a state of innocence, and I feel that its terrific power depended in great part on the gradual unfolding of unlooked-for events.”  Read More.

 

 

 

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

From Megan Abbott’s review:  “‘You once wrote me a letter . . . telling me that I would never be lonely again. I think that was the first, the most dreadful lie you ever told me.’..These wrenching lines appear twice in Ruth Franklin’s magisterial biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life and are, by some measures, the beating heart of the book. They are taken from an undated letter Jackson wrote to her husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. But Franklin employs them not so much for what they reveal about Jackson’s frequently unhappy marriage but instead to tease out the many murky nuances of what ‘lonely’ meant for Jackson — as a writer whose work frequently defied categorization, as a woman chafing against her era’s notions of what a woman could be, and as an artist of singular talent in a time and place when singularity was often suspect.”  Read More.

 

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

From Barbara Spindel’s review: “Hochschild sees the Arenos, who are staunch Republicans, as part of what she calls ‘the Great Paradox’: in Louisiana, as in other red states in the South, one finds ‘great pollution and great resistance to regulating polluters.’ Strangers in Their Own Land…grew out of Hochschild’s alarm over the country’s deepening political divide and her heartfelt interest in understanding, in her words, ‘how life feels to people on the right.’ Over a period of five years, Hochschild traveled to Louisiana bayou country from her Berkeley home to get to know a group of men and women she comes to refer to as her ‘Tea Party friends’ and to understand why, in an area that’s suffered from calamitous industrial pollution, they put more faith in industry than in government.” Read More.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2fht7eN

Make a list, regret it twice: choosing the “Best” books in any year is a procedure guaranteed to given any book reviewer grief.  Whatever number you choose, you’ll be leaving out books that make their own arguments for inclusion with urgency and eloquence.  Yet, as the year winds up– particularly a year like this one, in which breaking news often threatened to break us under the sheer flooding volume and seismic consequences– looking back to capture some of what the slower work of the book had to offer seems all the more essential.

Consider this list from the B&N Review to be part of that attempt: an admitted fragment, a snapshot of highlights, a particular edit of a scene a different eye might have filmed quite differently.  We’ve chosen ten new-in-2016 works of fiction and nonfiction that appeared in our pages, books we think  represent this year with particular significance — whether for their urgent attention to the moment we share, their fresh and illuminating point of view, or their achievement in breaking through the cacaphony with a singular voice. (Next month we’ll highlight some significant rediscoveries and new translations as well).  Our selections, along with excerpts of our coverage in the Review, are below:

 

All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister

From Barbara Spindel’s interview with author Rebecca Traister: “American public policy and civic institutions were built with one formulation of the citizenry in mind, a model in which there was a breadwinning person and a domestic laborer. The assumption was that the earner was male. He got a series of things from the government: tax breaks for being married, for having a kid, for owning a home. The assumption has also been that that person had an unpaid or low-paid person, always a woman, who stayed at home and was working to put meals on the table, do laundry, pick up children from school at three o’clock in the afternoon — just think about how our country is built on the assumption that there is somebody who’s going to pick up a child at three o’clock in the afternoon! People don’t live like that anymore.”  Read More.

 

American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin

From our interview with author Jeffrey Toobin: “What gives the book, I think, contemporary resonance is that, you know, terrorism is nothing new in the United States. We are very scared of ISIS today. But in fact, there was more terrorism in the ’70s. …I do think that if you believe, as many people do, that events are shimmering out of control, it may be helpful to know that things have been worse in the past. But I don’t want to pretend that I wrote this book as sort of like a guide to contemporary life. It’s mostly just an extraordinary story from the past that has one woman at the mysterious heart of it.”  Read More.

 

 

 

Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett

From Hawa Allan’s review: “’The white man in this book is a symbol of progress,’ according to the former English literature teacher of Furo Wariboko, the protagonist of A. Igoni Barrett’s novel Blackass... But of course, in the zero-sum politics of settler colonialism, one man’s progress is another man’s decline. “Progress always wins,” Furo’s English teacher had taught, “that’s why it’s progress.”  Read More.

 

 

 

 

Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America by Patrick Phillips

From Tayari Jones’s interview with author Patrick Phillips: “So even as a schoolkid, I asked some of my classmates, ‘Why are there no black people here? Why is everyone so full of hatred when there don’t seem to be any people of color around?’ That’s when I first heard this story in its most mythic terms, which was that, a long-long time ago, this girl had been attacked and, in response, the white people had ‘run out’ all of their black neighbors. That’s the version of it I always knew. And exactly as you say, it was always told in very vague, mythic terms. There were never any names or dates or places. It was stripped of all of the detail. So it seemed like this thing that was just lost in the mists of time.”  Read More.

 

 

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

From Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s interview with author Matthew Desmond: “Americans are matched in their rich democracy with the depth and expanse of poverty. That’s really always unsettled me. So I wanted to get as close as I could and try to understand that from a ground level…So I started by moving into a trailer park on the south side of Milwaukee, and I lived in that trailer for about five months. Then I moved into a rooming house on the north side of Milwaukee, which is a traditional inner-city, predominantly African-American neighborhood, and I lived in that rooming house for about ten months. From those two places, I followed families that were getting evicted and the landlords doing the evicting. If you were getting evicted, I went to court with you, followed you into abandoned shelters and houses… I went to funerals with folks. Slept at their houses. Ate meals at their table. I was there for a birth… I saw landlords buy property, sell properties, pass out eviction notices, and collect rents, and tried to really plumb the complications of that relationship that defines the lives of so many families today.” Read More.

Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn

From Amy Gall’s review and interview with Nicole Dennis-Benn: “It is impossible to read Dennis-Benn’s debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, and not be changed. The book traces the stories of four Jamaican women fighting for selfhood and love in a country that is built upon their exploitation… [The novel]is beautiful and unsparing in its critique of the tourism industry and the ways in which racism, sexual violence, and homophobia warp the lives of the characters. It is a meditation on the possibility of hope and intimacy in the face of great adversity.”  Read More.

 

 

 

Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett

From Melissa Holbrooke Pierson’s review: “Imagine Me Gone fulfills its considerable ambitions. It touches greatness, and its seamless interleaving of the deeply personal with the widely collective is one reason. The character of Michael is another. Haslett suggests grief is passed to succeeding generations of a society by the same mechanism it is to individuals. In Michael both converge.” Read More.

 

 

 

 

Mercury by Margot Livesey

From Katherine A. Powers’s review: “Mercury is Margot Livesey’s eighth novel, and just like the previous seven, it is completely different from its predecessors. Her books have been peopled by a most variegated lot, among them an evil child, a lunatic, a blackmailer, an amnesiac, a control freak, a couple of ghosts, and, last time, in The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a mid-twentieth-century version of Jane Eyre. Now we find ourselves sucked deep into the lives of an optometrist, his equestrian wife, and their two children….I came to this story in a state of innocence, and I feel that its terrific power depended in great part on the gradual unfolding of unlooked-for events.”  Read More.

 

 

 

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

From Megan Abbott’s review:  “‘You once wrote me a letter . . . telling me that I would never be lonely again. I think that was the first, the most dreadful lie you ever told me.’..These wrenching lines appear twice in Ruth Franklin’s magisterial biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life and are, by some measures, the beating heart of the book. They are taken from an undated letter Jackson wrote to her husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. But Franklin employs them not so much for what they reveal about Jackson’s frequently unhappy marriage but instead to tease out the many murky nuances of what ‘lonely’ meant for Jackson — as a writer whose work frequently defied categorization, as a woman chafing against her era’s notions of what a woman could be, and as an artist of singular talent in a time and place when singularity was often suspect.”  Read More.

 

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

From Barbara Spindel’s review: “Hochschild sees the Arenos, who are staunch Republicans, as part of what she calls ‘the Great Paradox’: in Louisiana, as in other red states in the South, one finds ‘great pollution and great resistance to regulating polluters.’ Strangers in Their Own Land…grew out of Hochschild’s alarm over the country’s deepening political divide and her heartfelt interest in understanding, in her words, ‘how life feels to people on the right.’ Over a period of five years, Hochschild traveled to Louisiana bayou country from her Berkeley home to get to know a group of men and women she comes to refer to as her ‘Tea Party friends’ and to understand why, in an area that’s suffered from calamitous industrial pollution, they put more faith in industry than in government.” Read More.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2fht7eN

Make a list, regret it twice: choosing the “Best” books in any year is a procedure guaranteed to given any book reviewer grief.  Whatever number you choose, you’ll be leaving out books that make their own arguments for inclusion with urgency and eloquence.  Yet, as the year winds up– particularly a year like this one, in which breaking news often threatened to break us under the sheer flooding volume and seismic consequences– looking back to capture some of what the slower work of the book had to offer seems all the more essential.

Consider this list from the B&N Review to be part of that attempt: an admitted fragment, a snapshot of highlights, a particular edit of a scene a different eye might have filmed quite differently.  We’ve chosen ten new-in-2016 works of fiction and nonfiction that appeared in our pages, books we think  represent this year with particular significance — whether for their urgent attention to the moment we share, their fresh and illuminating point of view, or their achievement in breaking through the cacaphony with a singular voice. (Next month we’ll highlight some significant rediscoveries and new translations as well).  Our selections, along with excerpts of our coverage in the Review, are below:

 

All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister

From Barbara Spindel’s interview with author Rebecca Traister: “American public policy and civic institutions were built with one formulation of the citizenry in mind, a model in which there was a breadwinning person and a domestic laborer. The assumption was that the earner was male. He got a series of things from the government: tax breaks for being married, for having a kid, for owning a home. The assumption has also been that that person had an unpaid or low-paid person, always a woman, who stayed at home and was working to put meals on the table, do laundry, pick up children from school at three o’clock in the afternoon — just think about how our country is built on the assumption that there is somebody who’s going to pick up a child at three o’clock in the afternoon! People don’t live like that anymore.”  Read More.

 

American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin

From our interview with author Jeffrey Toobin: “What gives the book, I think, contemporary resonance is that, you know, terrorism is nothing new in the United States. We are very scared of ISIS today. But in fact, there was more terrorism in the ’70s. …I do think that if you believe, as many people do, that events are shimmering out of control, it may be helpful to know that things have been worse in the past. But I don’t want to pretend that I wrote this book as sort of like a guide to contemporary life. It’s mostly just an extraordinary story from the past that has one woman at the mysterious heart of it.”  Read More.

 

 

 

Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett

From Hawa Allan’s review: “’The white man in this book is a symbol of progress,’ according to the former English literature teacher of Furo Wariboko, the protagonist of A. Igoni Barrett’s novel Blackass... But of course, in the zero-sum politics of settler colonialism, one man’s progress is another man’s decline. “Progress always wins,” Furo’s English teacher had taught, “that’s why it’s progress.”  Read More.

 

 

 

 

Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America by Patrick Phillips

From Tayari Jones’s interview with author Patrick Phillips: “So even as a schoolkid, I asked some of my classmates, ‘Why are there no black people here? Why is everyone so full of hatred when there don’t seem to be any people of color around?’ That’s when I first heard this story in its most mythic terms, which was that, a long-long time ago, this girl had been attacked and, in response, the white people had ‘run out’ all of their black neighbors. That’s the version of it I always knew. And exactly as you say, it was always told in very vague, mythic terms. There were never any names or dates or places. It was stripped of all of the detail. So it seemed like this thing that was just lost in the mists of time.”  Read More.

 

 

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

From Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s interview with author Matthew Desmond: “Americans are matched in their rich democracy with the depth and expanse of poverty. That’s really always unsettled me. So I wanted to get as close as I could and try to understand that from a ground level…So I started by moving into a trailer park on the south side of Milwaukee, and I lived in that trailer for about five months. Then I moved into a rooming house on the north side of Milwaukee, which is a traditional inner-city, predominantly African-American neighborhood, and I lived in that rooming house for about ten months. From those two places, I followed families that were getting evicted and the landlords doing the evicting. If you were getting evicted, I went to court with you, followed you into abandoned shelters and houses… I went to funerals with folks. Slept at their houses. Ate meals at their table. I was there for a birth… I saw landlords buy property, sell properties, pass out eviction notices, and collect rents, and tried to really plumb the complications of that relationship that defines the lives of so many families today.” Read More.

Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn

From Amy Gall’s review and interview with Nicole Dennis-Benn: “It is impossible to read Dennis-Benn’s debut novel, Here Comes the Sun, and not be changed. The book traces the stories of four Jamaican women fighting for selfhood and love in a country that is built upon their exploitation… [The novel]is beautiful and unsparing in its critique of the tourism industry and the ways in which racism, sexual violence, and homophobia warp the lives of the characters. It is a meditation on the possibility of hope and intimacy in the face of great adversity.”  Read More.

 

 

 

Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett

From Melissa Holbrooke Pierson’s review: “Imagine Me Gone fulfills its considerable ambitions. It touches greatness, and its seamless interleaving of the deeply personal with the widely collective is one reason. The character of Michael is another. Haslett suggests grief is passed to succeeding generations of a society by the same mechanism it is to individuals. In Michael both converge.” Read More.

 

 

 

 

Mercury by Margot Livesey

From Katherine A. Powers’s review: “Mercury is Margot Livesey’s eighth novel, and just like the previous seven, it is completely different from its predecessors. Her books have been peopled by a most variegated lot, among them an evil child, a lunatic, a blackmailer, an amnesiac, a control freak, a couple of ghosts, and, last time, in The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a mid-twentieth-century version of Jane Eyre. Now we find ourselves sucked deep into the lives of an optometrist, his equestrian wife, and their two children….I came to this story in a state of innocence, and I feel that its terrific power depended in great part on the gradual unfolding of unlooked-for events.”  Read More.

 

 

 

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

From Megan Abbott’s review:  “‘You once wrote me a letter . . . telling me that I would never be lonely again. I think that was the first, the most dreadful lie you ever told me.’..These wrenching lines appear twice in Ruth Franklin’s magisterial biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life and are, by some measures, the beating heart of the book. They are taken from an undated letter Jackson wrote to her husband, literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman. But Franklin employs them not so much for what they reveal about Jackson’s frequently unhappy marriage but instead to tease out the many murky nuances of what ‘lonely’ meant for Jackson — as a writer whose work frequently defied categorization, as a woman chafing against her era’s notions of what a woman could be, and as an artist of singular talent in a time and place when singularity was often suspect.”  Read More.

 

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

From Barbara Spindel’s review: “Hochschild sees the Arenos, who are staunch Republicans, as part of what she calls ‘the Great Paradox’: in Louisiana, as in other red states in the South, one finds ‘great pollution and great resistance to regulating polluters.’ Strangers in Their Own Land…grew out of Hochschild’s alarm over the country’s deepening political divide and her heartfelt interest in understanding, in her words, ‘how life feels to people on the right.’ Over a period of five years, Hochschild traveled to Louisiana bayou country from her Berkeley home to get to know a group of men and women she comes to refer to as her ‘Tea Party friends’ and to understand why, in an area that’s suffered from calamitous industrial pollution, they put more faith in industry than in government.” Read More.

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Though reading is at best low-impact exercise, we tend to describe our strongest responses to a book in physical terms. Bad books are flung against walls; thrillers have us at the edge of our seats or sitting up straight in bed; our arm muscles must be strengthened by all sorts of engaging books, unputdownable as they are.

Peter Orner isn’t nearly so demure: He’s the reading equivalent of a P90X enthusiast. In Am I Alone Here?, his new collection of essays on the writers who’ve moved him, he literally moves: He describes how a sentence by Gina Barriault “brought me to my knees” and how a Richard Bausch story was so breathtaking that “I had to lie down on the floor and just breathe.” When he finished reading Too Loud a Solitude, a collection by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, he recalls leaping off a park bench and “running around in circles, holding the book above my head and shouting because I believed I’d experienced some religious illumination.” Even sitting still as a reader is intense for him: When his copy of To the Lighthouse got dunked during a canoe trip, he writes, he did nothing but sit and wait for the book to dry on the shore so he could get back to it.

This kind of enthusiasm is infectious across Am I Alone Here?, because though he’s upbeat about his favorite story writers — Bernard Malamud, Eudora Welty, Imre Kertesz, Isaac Babel, Breece D’J Pancake — he’s not blurbing or selling so much as locating the places where a well-made story snaps to the emotional shape of his own life. The essays in the collection typically interweave criticism and memoir, as Orner — author of two story collections (Esther Stories and Last Car over the Sagamore Bridge) and two novels (The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love) — recalls his patriarchal father, a failed marriage, and his own work as a writer against the books that kept him company all the while.

Small wonder, then, that he once longed to get his chest tattooed with a few lines from The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor’s 1962 study of the short story: When words matter that much to you, you want them as close to the skin as possible. In this edited conversation, Orner talks about that physical relationship with story, reading, teaching, and the perils of trying to squeeze in some reading while waiting at traffic lights. —Mark Athitakis

The Barnes & Noble Review: This book started out as a column about the short story that you wrote for The Rumpus, “The Lonely Voice.” What appeals to you about the short story, as distinct from the novel?

Peter Orner: Stories are this weird lifeblood. I don’t know how it happened, but I can’t live without them. I need that compressed intensity every day. The book and column were sort of a response to that, to try and figure out why I am so attracted to this form. Short stories will always be declared dead, and then suddenly they rise again. That was the impetus for my originally writing the columns in The Rumpus, which is basically just private thoughts to myself that The Rumpus published without question. I didn’t have to answer to anybody; I just kind of did it. But the initial column was a response to the idea that story has once again been “resurrected.” I resent that idea, because they’ve always been here and always will be. But they’ll always be for a certain kind of reader. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, I just think it’s the truth.

BNR: Do you have a different mind-set when you’re writing a novel versus writing a short story? Your novel Love and Shame and Love has a short-story punch to it. It’s mostly written in brief chapters.

PO: I love novels that have the same level of intensity and compressed language as a story does. So I try to do that myself. I wanted to have a chapter be almost as self-contained as a story. But they’re totally different animals, completely different to me, even a novel that does have a storylike element to it.

I’m always writing stories; I’m never not writing a story. What would happen with both novels I wrote is that the story started to . . . not quite end. They just grew and they started to relate to each other and I was like, Oh, this isn’t a story. I stumble into things. I never have any idea, really, what to do.

BNR: In the book you write that Bernard Malamud can do in eight pages what it takes Dostoevsky 700 pages to do. What can Malamud do that Dostoevsky can’t?

PO: I think he can break your heart. Dostoevsky can break your heart, and The Brothers Karamazov can do a lot of other things too. But “My Son the Murderer” would touch anybody. To read that story and to see the disconnect between that father and that son and the love that can’t be, that there’s just no bridge to connect the love with the son anymore — it’s just simple and heartbreaking. And Malamud, who doesn’t get enough attention, can do it pretty much like no one else can. Except for all the other people I would say do it too.

BNR: There are numerous cases in the book where you repeat a variation on “Am I alone here?” You seem to feel some anxiety that your feelings about the short story or your enthusiasm for the short story leaves you isolated.

PO: I think it’s true. Talking to people about a short story, you often get shrugs. “Oh, yeah, I like short stories because they’re short and I don’t have a lot of time and I can read them.” But you need almost more time in your life for them. You need absolute silence for a story, I think.

BNR: It seems like every week or so I see a news story that says, “A study says that reading fiction makes us more emotionally empathetic or capable of empathy.” Do you agree?

PO: It’s a funny idea that fiction has to have some utilitarian purpose. “That’s why I’ll teach my daughter to read, because she’ll become more empathetic and that’s a good thing to have, I’ll put that in her toolbox.” That’s not why I look at a painting. I don’t think human beings learn empathy from a story. I think they, hopefully, learn it from existence. What a story does is amplify it and condense it and remind you, maybe. Remind you what you’ve forgotten. But if we need stories to teach empathy, we’re really fucked.

BNR: There are a few cases where you talk about a frustration with the limits of the short story. That Isaac Babel‘s short stories didn’t stop tyranny, didn’t save Breece Pancake‘s life. (He committed suicide in 1979, at twenty-six.) So what is its value if it can’t actually change something concrete in the world?

PO: That’s a great unanswerable question. I think we can ask it about all great art. I think it just reminds you of what you’ve forgotten about who you were. Like a look that your mother once gave. I was thinking about my mother today, her folding blankets. When you put the blanket under your chin, because you need to hold it in place to fold it — a short story is something like that, capturing those small gestures. What a beautiful thing, I thought, I should put that in a story. I’m just not sure that it tracks automatically in terms of what you gain. Even in terms of what I gain, all I know is that I need it, I need it.

BNR: You write very viscerally about the emotional impact writers have on you. Can you pinpoint the root of this very strong emotional reaction that you have to a story?

PO: I think it goes way back. I think of a book like A Cricket in Times Square, which was always my favorite book as a kid, I’ve carried that book around with me. I think I’m attracted again and again to writers who take what’s very familiar and show that it has something without making a thing about it. And what we don’t see, what we don’t have time to see. Stories slow me down, that I know, and I desperately need that, because I’m always going too fast.

I think part of writing this book is I was just coming clean about being a complete geek. I love this stuff way too much and take it way too seriously. My favorite thing in the world is to meet a writer who feels the same way, and then we have these conversations that indulge in this. I do find others, and not just writers. When you find a reader, a non-writer who needs it the same way that I do, that’s the best.

BNR: What directs your reading? There’s a lot of wandering in your reading choices.

PO: I like to read that stuff that I haven’t heard of. I’m constantly searching bookstores, used bookstores especially. I’m always looking because I think there are so many writers that have been forgotten for the wrong reasons.

Americans tend not to read as much in translation as in other countries, and I think that’s too bad. I read a lot in translation, and that’s one way especially to enter another place that I’m already interested in trying to get to. There’s no agenda. What I resent most is a book I have to read for work and teaching. I love teaching, but I always have a book that’s private to me, that I’m not discussing with anybody except in my own head. It’s just really what this book is these days, just conversations with myself about books that I don’t have with anybody else.

A few years ago I came across Gina Berriault. My teacher and mentor was Andre Dubus III, and Andre wrote a blurb on the back of one of Gina Berriault’s books saying how much he loved her work. I was working with him at the time, and I found the book in a used bookstore. I called him up and said, “Andre, how come you never mentioned Gina Berriault?” I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something to the effect of, “Because she’s somebody you find on your own.” Maybe that was a little too perfect or a little guru-ish. But because he dearly loved her, I feel I’ll always remember that idea. Sometimes, they’re not going to be the things that your mentors and your friends or the newspapers tell you about. They’re going to come to you in some other way.

BNR: What do you focus on when you teach?

PO: I’m at San Francisco State, teaching what I call literature classes for writers. The last couple years I’ve been doing big books, which is contrary what I love truly, truly. But I wanted to test that out, so we read Don Quixote together, we’ve done Moby-Dick. We’re going to do The Brothers Karamazov. One book, one class.

I had students literally weeping at the end of Don Quixote. We’d been with him so long. For so many weeks we’d been riding around with him in these circles. Moby-Dick was similar. Though we talked about how modernistic the narration is, the best thing is when you forget about all the narrative tricks or whatever [Melville’s] doing and just whether Ishmael is going to get off this boat alive. But I do think that there are moments, especially in Moby-Dick, where all of a sudden the narrator pops back, way, way back, and he’s a guy sitting at his desk looking at Mount Greylock out of his window. That was Melville. Melville’s not Ishmael, but there’s this moment when he kind of melds. I love it when he takes those crazy risks with the narrative. We would pause on moments like that.

BNR: We’re in this era where the lines between fiction and nonfiction and criticism and memoir are blurring quite a bit, and your criticism is fused very closely with autobiography. Who are your models for that kind of writing?

PO: I love reading bookish essays. I’ve been reading Roberto Bolaño’s collection of his nonfiction pieces, Between Parentheses. I’m not the biggest Bolaño fan, but his book of these tiny pieces, it’s so infectious. I imagine Bolaño waking up in the morning, he’s just read a Javier Cercas book, and he just needed to talk about it. I took a lot of solace in the way that he did that. That book was very influential throughout this. And I like writers who blur the line like Borges, where it’s an essayistic kind of fiction — I’m always looking for people that do that. Sebald. Gina Berriault. Joseph Roth — I don’t know how Joseph Roth did it. In his letters, he’s broke all the time. How is it possible that he produced these incredible novels while at the same time this beautiful nonfiction that was basically journalism to him but not really covering anything contemporary? He’s just musing about things.

BNR: Your family, and more specifically your father, is a presence in this book intermittently, you use it as a springboard a lot of time for talking about how you engage in fiction. Do you think that there’s a more dedicated memoir to be written about your family?

PO: I think this is it. The only way I could speak about these things was through reading and playing off of reading. I don’t think I’m going to go back to nonfiction after this. I just felt like this was my nonfiction book, at least for the moment. I found it painful enough to do it this way, to be honest. I felt like I went where I needed to go.

BNR: Like a lot of serious readers, you never go around without a book handy to keep you company. But you’re the first person I know who’s mentioned reading at traffic lights. How long is this been going on, and how do you do it safely? I lived in San Francisco and I know San Francisco traffic.

PO: My daughter is on my case a lot about this. I do do it, probably too much, and you’re right, it’s not safe. But I feel like there’s all that downtime. This is maybe a psychological problem I have, it’s not a good thing — I can’t sometimes just look around, I have to be reading. There’s something wrong with that, I’m not proud of it. But a long red light, there’s nothing like a few pages that or paragraphs if you can get that in. I try and be careful. One day I will be pulled over for reading and I wonder what the cops will say.

 

 

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“Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck there! — brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind’s eye. He’s too far off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over that helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down . . . “

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick was published in America on November 14, 1851 (a partial British edition had come out a month earlier in England). The passage above is from the final chapter, Captain Ahab pausing a last time before he steps from the Pequod to the whaleboat that will deliver him to his fate. As many commentators have noted, the commercial failure of Melville’s novel — by the time of his death in 1891, fewer than 4,000 copies had been sold — all but sealed his own fate. What little he published over his last forty years was also poorly received, forcing him into a full-time job as customs house inspector, rubber-stamping ocean commerce rather than imagining high-sea adventures.

The reevaluation of Moby-Dick gathered momentum in the 1920s, with both the critics and the filmmakers jumping aboard, if only to commit narrative mutiny. The popular 1926 silent film The Sea Beast, for example, lashed Melville’s story to the Hollywood mast with an ending in which a heroic Ahab, played by John Barrymore, not only gets his whale but marries his sweetheart. But today, 165 years onward, many put Ahab’s whale chase ahead of even Huck Finn’s river float as the essential American quest novel, even “our American bible,” says Nathaniel Philbrick in Why Read Moby-Dick?:

Contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America — all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775, as well as a civil war in 1861, and continued to drive this country’s march into the future. This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II, or as a profit crazed deep-drilling oil company in 2010, or as a power-crazed Middle Eastern dictator in 2011.

George Cotkin’s Dive Deeper: Journeys with Moby-Dick also makes a case for the relevance of Melville’s classic. After framing each chapter of the novel in a reader-friendly “chowder” of connected events, ideas, adaptations, and allusions, Cotkin agrees that Moby-Dick is indeed a tale of America — as, he notes, even the recent Nobel laureate dubiously recognized. Cotkin’s last chapter is a riff on “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” in which “Captain Arab” and his men, who are also Mayflower pilgrims and crew for Christopher Columbus, try to land a continent:

“I think I’ll call it America”
I said as we hit the land
I took a deep breath
I fell down, I could not stand
Captain Arab he started
Writing up some deeds
He said, “Let’s set up a fort
And start buying the place with beads”

The legendary sinking of the whale ship Essex, inspiration for much of Moby-Dick, is also tied to this week. Rammed several times by a large white whale, the Essex sank on November 20, 1820, some 2,000 miles west of South America. Philbrick’s 2000 bestseller, In the Heart of the Sea, tells that story of leviathans and cannibals, and his more recent Away Off Shore tells the history of Nantucket Island, home to generations of whalers, including Melville’s Ahab. David Kirby’s Death at SeaWorld tells the shameless history of man’s attempt to cage and commercialize killer whales, while Joshua Horwitz’s award-winning War of the Whales tells the true story of how the U.S. Navy, until just recently ordered by the courts not to do so, used sonar to drive hundreds of whales to their death.

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With the title of his 1990 book Our Age, Noel Annan gave a name to a tight-knit group of elite dons, politicians, and writers who dominated Britain in the twentieth century. Born around the time of the First World War, these mandarins fought in the Second, then lived through the dissolution of the British Empire, the transformation of Britain’s class structure under Labour socialism, and the revolution in culture and mores during the 1960s. The response of Our Age‘s protagonists to all these challenges was liberal and admirable. Rather than fight a rear-guard action against progress, they tried to guide the institutions they led — from Oxford and Cambridge to the BBC and the House of Lords — into a new, democratic era. They believed passionately in meritocracy — some of them were born rich and noble, but others earned their high places through intelligence and hard work — and they were evangelical about the power of education and culture.

If you had to name a single man — for they were all men — who encapsulated the spirit of “Our Age,” other than Annan himself, you could do no better than Kenneth Clark. Clark, who lived from 1903 to 1983, has receded far enough into the past that he no longer casts much of a shadow, particularly in America. Some readers who pick up James Stourton’s comprehensive and sympathetic new biography, Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and “Civilisation,” will remember him for his greatest achievement, the thirteen-part BBC series Civilisation. Others may have encountered Clark’s popular books on art history, such as The Nude.

But as Stourton shows, Clark was capable of even more than he achieved. His failure to become a world-class scholar and art historian is the great question mark hanging over his story. Instead, Clark’s energies were poured into public and administrative tasks, which brought him honor and a peerage during his lifetime but hold little interest for posterity. Indeed, in the mid-twentieth century, there was hardly a cultural institution in England that Clark did not lead or help to lead. At various times, he was in charge of the National Gallery, the Arts Council, the National Theater, and the Independent Television Authority. He was a regular on the BBC radio program The Brains Trust and a prolific presenter of highbrow TV shows, of which Civilisation was only the most famous. What united all these endeavors was his belief in “the best for the most,” a slogan that serves Stourton as a chapter title. Clark firmly believed that high culture should be open to everyone, without being trivialized or dumbed down.

In part, Clark came to this conviction through the power of richesse oblige. Though he ended life as a lord — “Lord Clark of Civilisation,” he was jokingly called — he was not born into the aristocracy. Rather, he was the descendant of a Scottish manufacturing family that became tremendously wealthy during the Industrial Revolution in the production of cotton thread. This means, of course, that the Clark fortune was founded on slavery, since it was American slaves who produced the cheap cotton exported to England. Stourton doesn’t discuss this, but it is a useful fact to keep in the background of Clark’s story, proving that, as Walter Benjamin wrote, “there is no document of civilization [or in this case, Civilisation] that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

Rich, handsome, and brilliant, with a passionate susceptibility to painting and sculpture, the young Clark had a talent for winning the encouragement of powerful men. At Oxford, he was a protégé of the witty, influential don Maurice Bowra. After university, he became an assistant to Bernard Berenson, the world’s leading authority on Renaissance art. At the age of twenty-seven, he was put in charge of fine art at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, and three years later he was lured away to become director of the National Gallery in London. But the most dramatic moment in his rise came in 1934, when King George V came in person to the National Gallery to implore Clark to become surveyor of the king’s pictures. Stourton’s book opens with this scene, “the first time a reigning monarch had visited the gallery,” and a dramatic tribute to Clark’s desirability. When it came to art, he was the man everyone wanted.

In private life, too, Clark had the power to seduce. He was married early to Jane Martin, a fashionable and charismatic woman, and together they enjoyed great social success. Clark’s family money fueled a grand lifestyle in mansions full of masterpieces old and new, where the guests included show business people like Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, artists like Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore, dukes and duchesses, even the king and queen. As Stourton shows, candidly but without judgment, Clark’s charm soon overflowed the bounds of his marriage, and he ended up conducting a long series of romances with other women. Some of these were probably platonic, like his flirtation with the (also married) American millionaire Jayne Wrightsman, while others were sexual. But they all took a heavy toll on Jane, who became an alcoholic. Clark’s allegiance to her, even as she became ferociously unpleasant, was much wondered at by his friends, but it makes sense as an expression of both loyalty and guilt.

In public life, however, Clark — known to all as “K” — went from strength to strength. He did not fight in World War II, but he did a double service to England as director of the National Gallery in wartime. First, as Stourton details, he managed the evacuation of the museum’s priceless collection to a bomb shelter in Wales. Second, he opened the now-empty gallery to the public for a series of lunchtime concerts, which became hugely popular and served as a symbol of cultural resistance to Nazism. After the war, he left the gallery but continued to serve the nation in many capacities — so many that they become a bit of a blur, especially to the American reader who is not familiar with the intricacies of British broadcasting or the work of the Arts Council. In addition, he became a celebrity, the public face of high culture, thanks to his TV programs, culminating in Civilisation in 1969.

Most people who get biographies written about them — statesmen, artists — are important but unhappy. Clark had his share of unhappiness, Stourton shows — about his marriage, his children, the tug-of-war between public responsibilities and scholarly pursuits. But on the whole his seems like a very enviable life, pleasant to read about, pleasant to have lived. He enjoyed the high life but escaped its insipidity; he did good for millions and helped art and culture to thrive. Reading Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and “Civilisation” you can only wish that our own billionaires were as conscientious.

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Zadie Smith has such a pleasant presence on the page that one only reluctantly abandons her. In Swing Time, her latest, her companionable voice will carry you for hundreds of pages. Even her description of the home of a depressed uncle is soaked in empathy: “It was a garden of abundance and decay: the tomatoes were too ripe, the marijuana too strong, woodlice were hiding under everything. Lambert lived all alone there, and it felt to me like a dying place.” The narrator, whom we meet as a young girl and follow into her early thirties, has no name. It’s easy to imagine she’s actually just Smith, that you have been lucky enough to befriend one of the world’s leading novelists and she is confiding in you. That Smith manages to work in that intimate way without revealing much of herself is her gift.

Of course, in Swing Time, the narrator is not Smith. She is a resident of a housing estate in 1980s London who meets and befriends a more outgoing and initially somewhat more blessed girl named Tracey. Their friendship is centered on dance class, about which both are passionate. But while the narrator and her friend both dream a future as professional dancers, only Tracey — whose beautifully arched feet contrast with the narrator’s flat ones — has a real shot. Their whole relationship is inflected with that kind of awe particular to friendships between young girls, the worship of a hero who is also a peer. It is an impression that lasts. “I was — I am — in awe of Tracey’s technique,” the narrator writes, with that emphasis on the present tense. “She knew the right time to do everything.”

Yet, in a tale as old as time, the narrator is actually the one who is destined to rise above her circumstances. She is the one who goes to university, gets glamorous jobs, and moves away to New York, for a time. She is also the one who will find that Tracey’s attempts to live out the dream of being a dancer are ultimately futile. In one of the novel’s last scenes, the narrator visits the adult Tracey and finds “an anxious, heavy-set, middle-aged woman in terrycloth pajama bottoms.” This moment occasions a classic instance of female aggressiveness: “I looked so much younger,” the narrator thinks. It’s the closest Swing Time ever comes to cliché.

It is hard to know if Smith was aware of the echoes of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels in her setup. Certainly Swing Time could, like Ferrante’s books, be characterized as a novel about female friendship, albeit one inflected by race — both the narrator and Tracey are black. Of course, the result is not so simple. The narrator eventually abandons Tracey and moves on to a job as a personal assistant to an aging pop singer not entirely unlike Madonna. This opens up all sorts of fresh thematic angles: Charity, class, and celebrity all get their turn, too, at the helm of this elegant ship Smith has constructed.

Sailing is a useful metaphor for the way feel of reading Swing Time; Smith keeps things moving at a steady, elegant pace, but the journey remains all on one plane of experience. Never precisely a moralist, Smith isn’t very comfortable pushing her characters deep into the dilemmas they find entangling them, in the difficult questions the novel does seem to want to raise. This, perhaps, is true to the way people actually live, skimming the surface of meaning. But in a novel it can occasionally be unsatisfying. The narrator of Swing Time, when she comes to a reckoning with her celebrity boss late in the novel, acts impulsively. The novel knows it; another character tells her so. But such self-consciousness only makes us more curious about what a deep dive into the narrator’s motivations might have retrieved from the depths.

There is one exception: The trajectory of the narrator’s life has been set by her mother, also unnamed, who had always had greater ambitions for her own life than she was able to realize. She is not the sort of mother who had dreamed of taking on that role, not a mother who thought her whole existence would revolve around her only child. “She believed my father wanted more children in order to entrap her, and she was basically right about that, although entrapment in this case was only another word for love,” the narrator writes. Her mother’s highly individual style — “plain white linen trousers” and “frayed espadrilles,” “everything so plain, so understated, completely out of step with the spirit of the time,” is alternatively a source of pride and embarrassment for her daughter — a more common parent-child relationship than the world generally admits. The character is fascinating.

And in fact, unlike most of the people in this book, the narrator’s mother gradually gets some of what she wants: She gets a divorce. She gets herself educated. She becomes a local politician. She does not, not particularly, spend much time repairing her relationship with her daughter. Late in the book she tries to explain herself and the best she can offer, telling the narrator she’s lucky. “You don’t know how that feels because you’re lucky, really, you were born lucky, but I know.” At that moment the reader wants to know more of what the mother knows. But the book, its course charted, not wanting to interrupt its own rhythm, is ready to sail on.

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So you’ve built your immigrant family a fortune out of your cosmetics business, and accustomed your children to the privileges of the upper class — and then the financial crisis of 2007 washes away your wealth in one terrible wave.  What’s a man like Charles Wang to do?  Time for a family road trip across the country — and an improbable dream of recovering long-ago-lost estates in China.   Jade Chang’s inventive and timely family tragicomedy The Wangs vs. the World  (a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection) begins from that premise and rockets into a high-velocity tale of pride and persona, money and manners, jealousy and joy.

A few weeks ago, Jade Chang took the stage at Barnes & Noble’s Upper West Side Manhattan store alongside award-winning poet and Buzzfeed culture editor Saeed Jones to talk about The Wangs vs. the World, the myth of a lost legacy that she borrowed from her own familiy’s chronicle, and the delicate art of bringing fictional characters to life in a contemporary setting.  The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Saeed Jones: I guess to start, an important idea throughout the book is: Where do we come from? Who are we? Who are we in the context of our families and our heritages? So I wanted to start with you, asking: How did the Wang Family come to you?

Jade Chang: Well, I think the first thing that really came to me was this first chapter, and Charles Wang’s voice, which is a very angry, very over-the-top, very kind of driven, but also really, I think, funny and very heartfelt kind of character. He is a man that I have seen a lot, actually. I think there are a lot of immigrant businessmen who are very much . . .

SJ: Running for president. I’m sure that’s who you were talking about.

JC: Absolutely. Yes. But there are a lot of people very much like Charles Wang, whose stories are never told. This is not the kind of person who we see in literature, in movies, on TV, and I knew that I wanted to tell that kind of story. I knew I wanted to tell a very over-the-top, exciting story that would feel like it was a new take on the immigrant novel.

SJ: You have to hear Charles’s voice. Because I think if you’ve already read the book, or even just looked at the first paragraph, he’s a character that comes at you with the full force of history. Yet, he’s absolutely human, and that was the first thing that kind of grabbed me by the collar. Would you read the first section?

JC: OK. I’m not going to set it up at all, because we’re right at the very beginning. But I will tell you that it begins in Bel-Air, California:

Charles Wang was mad at America.

Actually, Charles Wang was mad at history.

If the death-bent Japanese had never invaded China, if a million — a billion — misguided students and serfs had never idolized a balding academic who parroted Russian madmen and couldn’t pay for his promises, then Charles wouldn’t be standing here, staring out the window of his beloved Bel-Air home, waiting for those calculating assholes from the bank — the bank that had once gotten on its Italianate-marble knees and kissed his ass — to come over and repossess his life.

Without history, he wouldn’t be here at all.

He’d be there, living out his unseen birthright on his family’s ancestral acres, a pampered prince in silk robes, writing naughty, brilliant poems, teasing servant girls, collecting tithes from his peasants, and making them thankful by leaving their tattered households with just enough grain to squeeze out more hungry babies.

Instead, the world that should have been his fell apart, and the great belly of Asia tumbled and roiled with a noxious foreign indigestion that spewed him out, bouncing him, hard, on the tropical joke of Taiwan and then, when he popped right back up, belching him all the way across the vast Pacific Ocean and smearing him onto this, this faceless green country full of grasping newcomers, right alongside his unclaimed countrymen: the poor, illiterate, ball-scratching half men from Canton and Fujian, whose highest dreams were a cook’s apron and a back-alley, back-door fuck.

Oh, he shouldn’t have been vulgar.

Charles Wang shouldn’t even know about the things that happen on dirt-packed floors and under stained sheets. Centuries of illustrious ancestors, scholars and statesmen and gentlemen farmers all, had bred him for fragrant teas unfurling in fresh springwater, for calligraphy brushes of white wolf hair dipped in black deer-glue ink, for lighthearted games of chance played among true friends.

Not this. No, not this. Not for him bastardized Peking duck eaten next to a tableful of wannabe rappers and their short, cubby, colored-contact-wearing Filipino girlfriends at Mr. Chow. Not for him shoulder-to-shoulder art openings where he sweated through the collar of his paper-thin cashmere sweater and started at some sawed-in-half animal floating in formaldehyde whose guts didn’t even have the courtesy to leak; not for him white women who wore silver chopsticks in their hair and smiled at him for approval. Nothing, nothing in his long lineage had prepared for the Western worship of the Dalai Lama and pop stars wearing jade prayer beads and everyone drinking goddamn boba chai.

He shouldn’t be here at all. Never should have set a single unbound foot on the New World. There was no arguing it. History had started fucking Charles Wang, and America had finished the job.

SJ: Wow! So I immediately have a few thoughts — and let me know if you agree. In a moment of absolute crisis, your family fortune is about to be destroyed because of the financial crisis of 2008 — who has the presence of mind to notice the Italian marble? The details are so rich, and you immediately get a sense that father is a force of nature. Which then brings us to the next question. What would it be like for this person to be your father?

JC: Good question. So it’s through the three kids that we figure that out. I wanted to look at it from a bunch of different angles.

So the oldest daughter is Saina. She is an artist. She was very successful, and then has recently retreated from New York City in disgrace. I think she is probably the one who is most similar to her father. She has that same kind of desire for bigness, that same drive, that same desire to really kind of be part of the larger story and say something, and make some kind of mark.

Then there is the middle son, Andrew, who I have a real soft spot for. He’s in college. He is holding out for true love, but he’s also a wannabe stand-up comic — there’s a few stand-up comedy sets for him. He wants a more traditional kind of dad —  the kind of dad who is going to play softball with him. But Charles happens to be the kind of dad who is going to introduce him to some models and ask him if he’s gotten with them yet — which is not what Andrew is looking for.

SJ: One thing about Charles is  that he thinks the point of America was to have sex and learn how to play the guitar. He’s not pressuring his kids in the way I think even the kids expect.

JC: Yeah, exactly.

SJ: How did you get to that point? Was he always going to have that relationship with them?

JC: Then there’s the youngest daughter, Grace.

SJ: She’s very angry.

JC: She feels things very deeply, yes. She is currently in high school. She gets pulled out of her boarding school to go on this cross-country road trip with her family.

But I think part of it is that there are so many different ways to be a person. Right? There are so many different ways to be a parent. There are so many different ways to be an immigrant or a person of color in America. And this father . . . I’ve seen guys like that. I’ve seen kids who have grown up in families like that. And yeah, there is part of me that is like, “What is up with this group?” But that’s what made it a story that I wanted to tell. For me, things are so much more exciting if they’re just way over the top.

SJ: Yeah, and complicated. What’s cool is that when we see people like Charles or Andrew or Grace or Saina, we see only one side of them. Right? Because often, I think, we see characters either as individuals out in the world, and in romance and in relationship and building their own lives, or we see them in the context of their own family. Often we don’t get to see both sides forced together in such a way. Was that a challenge to write it in that way, where we get to see the facets?

JC: That’s interesting. I don’t know that I had really thought about it that much. But I do think that I always want fiction to show everything. I want to see people in all parts of their lives, but I also want to see them eating. I want to see them having sex. I want to see them taking showers. There are no showers in here — next book, there will definitely be some bathroom time.

SJ: It’s important to leave your options open.

JC: It’s important. It’s part of life. But you know, that I think that I really wanted to tell a story that went into every part of somebody’s life. I think often in books that kind of like have a glitzy fun side, we often don’t see the family.

SJ: Right. With a character like Grace, who is very precocious, she’s aggressive, she says she knows what she wants even if she maybe doesn’t always. Often that kind of character, it’s really fun, and great to see her at school by herself, kind of tearing into her roommate, or colorizing suicide. But then, when we have to see that same child in the context of her family, and whether that’s listening to the siblings on the phone or talking to her dad , it’s another facet to the diamond.

JC:  Exactly. Also, we know that each person is so many layers. Right? You know that when you guys go home and you’re with your families, the way that you relate to them is totally different than I think maybe when you relate to a friend, or someone you have a crush on, or someone who you’re trying to impress in the work world. I remember the first time that I really kind of got this, it was my first job out of college. I was an intern at the L.A. Weekly, and it was this very alternative newsweekly, and one of the people who worked there was a performer named Vaginal Davis.

SJ: Oh, that’s why you couldn’t remember what her job title was.

JC: Right. I only remember her name. Another person who worked there was a performer who had recently gotten into some serious trouble with the NEA, named Ron Athey. I remember one day I was out in the parking lot. It was like a mandatory valet system. I was out in the parking lot, and I looked at the kind of panel of keys, and I saw this one set of keys that kind of looked like mine. It had a Ralph’s Club card on it. (Ralph’s is one of the supermarkets in Los Angeles.) It was Ron Athey, like, renegade performer, who of course also wants to save money at Ralph’s.  That moment still sticks out in my mind so clearly.

SJ: No one is any one thing.

JC: Yeah, no one is any one thing. Everyone is sort of very normal, day-to-day prosaic things, and also, every kind of crazy kind of thing they can come up with as well.

SJ:  Can you talk about the structure?Some of the sections are even just a page or two long, and then we’re seeing another perspective. We’re all very postmodern here, but it doesn’t feel like we’re being jostled about. It’s so interesting. We’re getting an individual feel as we’re getting the whole family. That seems really complicated and hard to pull off. How did you do that?

JC: I’m not sure. I worked on this book for a really long time. That’s kind of how.

The book is told from alternating points of view. Each of the five family members, you see chapters told entirely in their voice. Writing in close-third like that, where it’s third-person but you’re essentially seeing the world from their eyes — I really enjoy that. I like that sense of being able to both have that omniscience of knowing everything that’s happening in their world, and yet also seeing something through a very particular specific set of eyes.

SJ: Absolutely. One of the first times I noticed it was with Grace, for example. She’s sharp and cutting and sassy, and then right at the end there’s a line in third person where you see a moment of her admitting . . . where maybe she wouldn’t have said it herself, but the perspective allows her to see that. She’s still trying to figure out what happened in her own family with her mother. I thought that was really powerful, because, of course, she’s really tough — she’s not just going to come out and say that.

JC: Yeah, exactly. I think you can also show more empathy for your characters than your characters might necessarily have for themselves.

SJ: Because you love these characters. Did you have fun writing one kid more than the other?

JC: You know, I think that definitely I really enjoyed writing Andrew, who is the wannabe stand-up comic. Because I wrote two stand-up sets for him, and that was really fun to research. I took an improv class.

SJ: Really? Oh, that’s so great.

JC: I did. Yeah. You know, half of the people under forty in Los Angeles have probably also taken improv classes.

SJ: Touché.

JC: It’s not that unusual. But I wanted to know what it felt like to stand up in front of a room full of people and try to make them laugh . . . and the kind of fear that someone might feel when they can’t. So researching him was so fun. He also has this sweetness that I really feel for.

SJ: Did you do particular research for Saina, since she’s an artist?

JC: For a long time, I worked as an arts journalist. So for her, she definitely helped me fulfill my secret dream of being a conceptual artist, in that I got to come up with a bunch of different art projects for her that she did. But in terms of special research, I think I had gotten so much of that. I got to be immersed in the art world just in that job.

This book is a way to play out all the other jobs that I kind of wish I had. I get to, like, design things, do stand-up . . .

SJ: Obviously, when life comes hurtling at people, the way people respond is fascinating and illuminating.  At one point, all the kids find out what their trust fund would have been, what they just lost, and it’s been abstract. So it’s interesting that his response to this disaster is: We are going to gather all of our family together, we’re going to get into a station wagon . . .

JC: A Mercedes station wagon.

SJ: Of course. You lose everything, but not everything. And do a road trip across the country (which you could literally not pay me to do with my family under the best of financial circumstances), go live with our daughter, and then do what?

JC: And then, try to reclaim the land that the Communists took from his family in China.

SJ: An especially important part of that amazing opening paragraph. How did you come up with the way that Charles was going to both respond to disaster and chart a course forward?

JC: People often ask me if this book is based on real life at all or if any of it is true. None of it is true except for the Wangs’ family story. Both of my parents are from parents who had owned a lot of land in China for generations, and then, because of World War II, the rise of Communism, the Chinese Civil War, they were essentially chased out of China, and there are all kinds of harrowing stories of boats taken under cover of night, and running down roads while Japanese warplanes fired at them.

So both sides of my family fled to Taiwan, and my parents both grew up in Taiwan. They grew up with their parents always talking about the land that we lost, the land in China — we need to go back and reclaim that land in China. I think that loss and that desire definitely filtered down to them. Although to me, it doesn’t seem like a real thing, I think that the mythology of it feels very potent to me. So in thinking about Charles’s drive…

SJ: Which is this kind of epic, Herculean . . .

JC: Yes, this quest, his impossible quest. Because the Communist government is never going to say, “Here you go. Sorry, dude. We didn’t mean to take all this.” So that was, in a way, something that’s always been with me.

SJ: You’ve mentioned that part of the appeal of  writing this book was that you get to explore the different professions and lives that you’ve always been curious about. Were there any particular moments maybe in the book that surprised you?

JC: I’m a very forgetful person. There are parts of the book that occasionally — and this is true — I don’t necessarily remember having written.

SJ: In writing you have a sudden idea in a character, you go, “Oh, this is how the character is going to react,” and then you go, “Whoa, I didn’t know Charles would do that or Grace would feel that way.”

JC: Honestly, I don’t think so. Some writers really kind of like to talk about the characters speaking to them from on high. And that is a perfectly valid way to feel and to write. It does not happen to be the way that I feel or write. I am the master of these people. I created them. I think what they do doesn’t surprise me in that way. I outline pretty extensively, and I do know what’s going to happen, but I don’t know how I’m necessarily going to get from one point to another.

SJ: It makes sense. Because they are all such strong personalities. They were definitely very much rooted in what they thought was their lives and their futures before everything changed.

Can you talk about Grace in that way? She has a lot of really elaborate ideas about the world, like the way she talks about all of the art she has in her dorm room.

JC: Well, Grace is the youngest daughter, and she’s in high school right now, and she really is in this time. She was really exciting to write; I mean, the whole family is in a state of transition, but she is, of course, the person who, in her own life, is at the very most in a state of transition. So she’s kind of trying on all of these personas for size, and she’s trying to figure out who she wants to be, and who she thinks is cool. She changes the most emotionally. So in the beginning the pictures that Saina is talking about, she has all these photos on a kind of corkboard in her dorm room, and it’s like Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, who I don’t know if you guys remember . . . they were the artists who committed like a double suicide. They were  glamorized by Vanity Fair. It’s a really fascinating story. She has a photo taken by Diane Arbus, a famous photographer who also committed suicide. So I think at the beginning she’s trying on this idea of the glamour of not-being, of . . .

SJ: And the control.

JC: Yes, exactly. But then, as she goes on, I think that she starts to think about the world really differently. She starts to think about Love and Beauty as being very real things that she cares about.

SJ:  Of course, she grows up. But she really blossoms amid this . . .

JC: Amid the chaos, yes.

SJ: Was there a part of the book that was harder to pull off than you realized before you started it?

JC: Yeah. This book took me five years to write. It felt like fifty. There are two things. One that I was not surprised was really difficult:The book takes place during the financial crisis, and it’s something that happened that was talked about so much in real time. We were analyzing that as it happened. I wanted to talk about it in the book, but not in a way that felt like you were being kind of taught a lesson — except then I chose to, in fact, put it in a class where you were being taught a lesson. So the challenge of doing that while keeping it kind of fun to read was really hard. First of all, I had to understand everything that was happening there. And then, to try to write that.

SJ: And keep everything moving. The movement and the velocity is such an important part of the book.

JC: Exactly. Keep it snappy and exciting — but it took months to write. Then the other part, which you would think, having been a journalist for years, I would be kind of OK at. There is an article in the book that someone writes about Saina that kind of glorifies her while taking her down at the same time. It’s the kind of article like, say, New York magazine does so deliciously.

SJ: And often about artists.

JC: Yeah. I think there is that sense of how did they get so famous and celebrated, and then, “Look at them now.” That also took me forever to write and then ended up being mostly cut out.

SJ: The last question: you’ve been out, and you’ve done a few events. What’s been your favorite reader reaction so far, or surprise from that end?

JC: I’ve had several people tell me that they feel like they see themselves or their families, or they feel like it’s a kind of story that both feels familiar to them and that feels like they haven’t sort of seen it. That just makes me really happy.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/reclaiming-the-loss-saeed-jones-talks-with-jade-chang