Once upon a time, but within memory of those living, science fiction was the dominant form of fantastika, and fantasy—epic, urban, barbaric, fabulaic or otherwise—was the minority mode. Something about the American Century up until, roughly, 1970 made the public hungry for bold and heroic visions of the future, and the kind of technocratic, streamlined, ultra-competent types that populated such scenarios. Technology seemed unstoppable and beneficial, albeit with occasional side-effects, and brighter tomorrows beckoned. Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke occupied the center ring of the imaginative circus, while off to the side in the shadows a few underestimated bumpkin acts like Frodo and Conan and the Last Unicorn quietly began to draw interested stares. Then the famous Ballantine Adult Fantasy series of books, launched in 1969, commenced to sway the crowds—or perhaps reflect new circumstances on the ground. Arriving in 1972, Watership Down appealed to millions. The true tipping point occurred in 1977, with Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara, the first of Tolkien’s commodified progeny. In 2015, according to the statistics maintained by the trade journal Locus (issue 661), there were 396 original SF novels versus 682 original fantasy novels. Add in 183 horror novels, and 111 paranormal romances, and the scales tip irrefutably toward those special visions that arise from the Sleep of Reason.

The rising popularity of fantasy seemed to encourage a growing number of women writers to come to the fore.  The short canon of wonderful female fantasists from a prior generation–a list that would include E. Nesbit, Hope Mirrlees, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Evangeline Walton, Jane Gaskell, Katherine Kurtz, and Angela Carter–was rapidly supplemented.  Today we consider three current representatives from this new generation of strong and innovative writers working in the realm of fantasy — and one new work by an established master that argues for fantasy’s deep relevance in our lives.

Leanna Renee Hieber’s previous novel, The Eterna Files, gracefully delivered to us a stimulating brand of occult steampunk—as opposed to the hard-edged science fictional steampunk of Gibson & Sterling—which featured colorful, multivalent heroes and heroines, wicked villains, and intriguing themes. She maintains the high standards of the first book in the sequel, Eterna and Omega.

In the New York City of 1882, the work of the Eterna Commission is in disarray. Seeking supernatural methods of life extension for the good of mankind, they were attacked by unknown forces, and prime researcher Louis Dupris was killed. His lover, the psychic Clara Templeton, remains distraught but determined to seek accountability and revenge. Her mentor, an older fellow known to the world as Senator Rupert Bishop, stands firmly by her side, along with a cadre of other misfit adepts, including Dupris’s own ghost! The vibe here is very much the classic Doom Patrol of DC Comics, if not quite that of Marvel’s X-Men. But all couched in the elaborate politesse and language of the Victorian era. Flailing about in the wake of disaster, the Eterna people suspect that some Brits known as “Omega” might be the malefactors.

Meanwhile, in London, the Omega bureau—a division of Queen Victoria’s law enforcement tasked with dealing with paranormal foes, and led by gruff cop Harold Spire and his ninja assistant, Rose Everhart—thinks in equivalent mistaken fashion that the little-known Eterna group in America is behind their own troubles, which center around the machinations of Beauregard Moriel (a surname not unreasonably akin to “Moriarty”) and his Master’s Society. Invoking murderous monsters from another dimension and using the new science of electricity along with the mana extracted from the excruciations of innocent victims, Moriel plans to launch an army of the undead on London. His tentacles extend to the USA as well.

Having played off the two good groups against each other in the first book, Hieber finally unites them here, sending, first, Rose to New York, then Clara and company to London, for a pull-out-all-the-stops showdown with Moriel. Her levels of inventiveness are consistently surprising; her plotting is suspenseful; and her meditations on the nature of good and evil and the interzone between them are weighty. (Queen Victoria herself stands culpable of abetting Moriel.)   Hieber has a lot of fun integrating the two disparate teams, and especially in teasing out the archetypical sisterly relationship between Rose and Clara.

From the very first page, Hieber succeeds in conjuring up the pure Victorian/Gothic umwelt, in a non-ironic yet not unthoughtful manner. Consider this passage as an example:

An unkindness of ravens had gathered to add to the cacophony from the tops of a nearby tree that arched over Trinity’s brownstone Gothic eaves and overlooked the graves. Every-thing dead and living lifted keening protest; wailing and squawking, these ravens as much harbingers as they were scavengers.

A dread power was about to unleash itself over England and America. This was dawning on those in the spirit world who remained attuned to the living. The two countries were woefully unprepared for the black tide that would rise like a biblical plague. Only in this case, the surge would be sent from devils, not from God.

In such capable hands, the reader might frequently find himself or herself giving vent to the same emotions as Clara’s lover, when he looses “a gamesome huff of contentment.”

* * *

Stephanie Burgis sets her Congress of Secrets during the famous Congress of Vienna (1814-1815), a rich and stimulating pageant of larger-than-life figures, whether real—Metternich, Talleyrand, Emperor Francis of Austria—or of her own invention. Whereas a book like Hieber’s presupposes and demands an alternate timestream, where consensus history can be seen to flow differently, accommodating, for instance, mass eruptions of the undead in London, as witnessed by hundreds, Burgis’s novel is the kind of interstitial fantasy or “secret history” akin to something by Umberto Eco or Thomas Pynchon. All her events could have transpired under the noses of the unsuspecting public and simply failed to enter the history books due to conspiratorial plotting. This type of book offers slightly different frissons than its cousin, often concentrating on realpolitik power dynamics.

Our two main lodestones in Congress of Secrets are characters with a deep connection, though they have long been kept apart by circumstances. A third, and slightly less important viewpoint figure enters their dyad only at the novel’s incipit. Lady Caroline Wyndham was born Karolina Vogl in Vienna. Her father, Gerhard, was a humble printer who devoted much of his labors to publishing incendiary material which the authorities eventually could not suffer to exist. So when they destroyed Vogl’s presses, they arrested father and eleven-year-old daughter. But one member of the firm escaped: Michael Steinhüller, apprentice, a few years older than Karolina, and the object of her puppy love.

Over the next twenty-four years, Michael would transform into a rogue and con man who lived by his unethical wits. Karolina, separated from her father, would spend four years in the prisons of Emperor Francis, under the awful ministrations of Count Pergen, chief of secret police. Unbeknownst to all, Pergen is a wizard and alchemist, whose main task is stealing psychic energy from young children such as Karolina and funneling it into himself and Emperor Francis. Once Karolina ages out of usefulness, she is deemed no threat and tossed into the streets; but against expectations, she begins the process of shaping herself into someone rich and powerful enough to take revenge. Towards her absent old love Michael she feels only hatred, because he seems to have deserted her and her father.

Before you can say “The Count of Monte Cristo meets Darth Vader,” Karolina is in Vienna to enact her plans. Michael is coincidentally there also to conduct a new scam. He was ushered into the city hiding inside a caravan of the friendly and gullible young showman, Peter Riesenbeck, our third protagonist. Peter’s good deed will backfire on him, as he gets swept up in the paranoid dragnet run by Count Pergen & Company.

Burgis’s recreation of period Vienna is sensual and vivid, stemming from much good research and from personal familiarity with the modern city. She does not betray the authenticity of her historical figures, and renders her imagined folks thickly enough to go toe-to-toe with the big guys. The reunion and subsequent love-hate relationship between Carolina and Michael is sweet and teasingly well done. Suspense and thrills abound in what is essentially a caper novel. But Burgis also layers in some potent subtext about authoritarianism and the freedoms we take for granted.

It was hard to remember, sometimes, that boys like this, even here in Vienna, hadn’t grown up with the institution of a free press as Michael had. They’d grown up with a government terrified by the French revolution, committed to repressing all dissent—to making the act of criticism itself a crime. Even at the university itself, there’d been a purge of professors in the 1790s, and those who’d remained had learned to forget all their inconvenient theories of natural law and social contracts.

Apply those words to 2016 as you will.

* * *

When the term “urban fantasy” first began to receive wide usage, around the start of the 1980s, it referred to books with modern settings naturalistically rendered, into which uncanny doings and beings of all stripes intruded. The pulp magazine Unknown had pioneered many such tales. By 1970, a book like Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber revealed state-of-the-art sophistications. Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness (1977) provided a prime example, as did John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981). But then the growing popularity of paranormal romances allowed that mode to usurp the term, so that nowadays the label seems to get affixed to nothing but endless volumes full of plucky youngsters battling and romancing the hoary bugbears of a Gothic past.

Barbara Barnett’s The Apothecary’s Curse is solid and gripping urban fantasy of the old school, and might on the strength of its telling help to revive the original usage of the term. Additionally, it walks the wire between magic and science to fine effect.

We open with a vignette from 1902, in which two mysterious men converse at a party with Arthur Conan Doyle. Although Holmesian motifs do pop up in the bulk of the narrative, the true practical and symbolic significance of this encounter remains hidden till the last chapter, given in a great reveal. But let us turn our attention to the pair of odd ducks. They are Simon Bell and Gaelan Erceldoune. What we will learn about them, over the course of separate accounts—one thread set in the 1800s, one in the present day—is that they are immortals linked by many shared passions and antagonisms. Gaelan is the older: he accidentally made himself undying in the 1600’s, when he concocted a plague antidote from a mysterious grimoire supposedly gifted to his family by the fairies. (Or is it a book of pre-technological science?) In the 1800s, his path crossed with Simon’s, and through elaborate circumstances, he conferred immortality on Simon as well. That long Victorian adventure is given at intervals so that it may complement the realtime narrative.

It’s the year 2016 in the city of Chicago, and Simon is living large, as a famous author of Holmesian pastiches. Gaelan, more stressed and ragged, runs a rare-book store as a cover for his quest for the original book of magic, which went missing in the 1800s. Both men are “half in love with easeful death,” and anticipate ending their extended lives if they ever find the right spell. But Gaelan’s existence is more tortured, and when he experiences what should be a fatal accident that leaves him impossibly intact, his inexplicable and very public survival draws the attention of doctors and scientists eager to dissect him and learn his secrets. One of the researchers, Dr. Anne Shawe, eventually comes over to Gaelan’s side, and now it’s her and the two immortals against a greedy world.

Barnett injects plenty of melodrama into the Victorian thread, and lots of thriller-type action into the contemporary narrative. But all the clever plotting does not obscure her deft treatment of the ethical, emotional and philosophical issues of immortality. She truly conveys the weight of the centuries in her depiction of Simon and Gaelan. As well, several affairs of the heart receive splendid play.

Combining a little of the transtemporal fatedness of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander with the sparring immortals from the Highlander film franchise, Barnett has created a unique urban fantasy that delivers pure magic intertwined with the quotidian demands of our daily lives—even if we are not all immortals.

* * *

To most readers, I suspect, the purest and most archetypical and most concentrated form of fantasy involves what Tolkien very cleverly and usefully dubbed a “subcreation.” A universe as manifold and intricate as our own, exhibiting a deep history but separate from the world we know, even unto its languages, where the author functions as an omniscient demiurge behind the scenes. In Rachel Neumeier’s The Mountain of Kept Memory we have a textbook example of how to do up such an alternate continuum to high standards. But Neumeier adds a delicious twist, albeit a classic one. I don’t feel much compunction in revealing her secret angle, since most veteran readers will suss it out early on from her plentiful yet not over-obvious clues. It is this: the seemingly magical and distant world of her tale is really our post-disaster future, some three thousand years hence. In this regard she has created a book firmly in the line of descent from such landmarks as Samuel Delany’s The Jewels of Aptor and Fred Saberhagen’s Empire of the East series.

Two rival kingdoms exist on either side of the Narrow Sea (a body of water which on the frontispiece map suspiciously resembles the English Channel). Tamarist is the aggressor, so naturally our sympathies lie with Carastind, where our protagonists live. (But we will come to experience mixed allegiances.) The major folks in Carastind are Prince Gulien, twenty-five years old, and his sister, Princess Oressa, twenty. Their misguided sire, Osir, still rules, and his various follies have invited invasion by Prince Gajdosik of Tamarist. In a desperate attempt to save his country, Gulien journeys to the sacred Mountain where a deity named the Kieba lives. Maybe her renewed patronage can save Carastind. Gulien’s quest partially succeeds, and Prince Gajdosik is defeated and sent packing. But then events necessitate Oressa paying a visit to the Mountain, and there she finds a sly, returned Gajdosik and company seeking to undermine the Kieba and steal her favors for themselves.

From this point, the narrative splits, rejoins, and splits again several times, in a dizzying and satisfying weave. Gulien must manage a second invasion from Tamarist, involving the principled Gajdosik’s utterly evil brother, Bherijda. Ancient secrets of the Kieba are slowly revealed. Oressa returns to her city; her father shows some surprising spunk; magical or super-science weapons are deployed; and finally all the players are assembled within the Mountain of Kept Memory to meet their various fates.

A lot of the charm of this novel derives from Oressa’s feisty and courageous personality. She recalled to me Ysabeau Wilce’s Flora, from Flora Segunda. Here she is, showing confidence at a pivotal point. “It wasn’t that she doubted her decision exactly. Only…it was such a big decision. Bigger and more important, maybe, than any other decision she’d ever made in her entire life. But she didn’t have any choice other than to stand up and make it, because nobody else here would—nobody else here even could.” Gulien and Gajdosik exhibit differing types of heroism. King Osir is a kind of Lear figure. And Bherijda brings the villainy. As for the Kieba, we have a figure worthy of H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha.

Ultimately, Neumeier succeeds in forging a special kind of fantasy, a “science-fantasy.” This once-popular genre, in the words of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, “is normally considered a bastard genre blending elements of sf and fantasy; it is usually colorful and often bizarre, sometimes with elements of horror although never centrally in the horror genre.” If you can imagine the crepuscular and brooding Tanith Lee writing an episode of the original Star Trek, you’ll have a sense of what Neumeier pulls off.

* * *

It’s safe to say that none of the accomplishments of these four writers would have been possible without the pioneering work of Ursula K. Le Guin. It would be nice to have included Le Guin here upon the occasion of a new novel, but she has recently confessed to being more or less retired from that game. Luckily, however, she has a fresh collection of essays, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books 2000-2016.   This heterogenous volume holds a plentitude of insights and wonders: keen observations on many individual books, a memoir of growing up in a very special house, a journal from a writer’s retreat, and other joys and hard-won wisdoms.

But two essays in particular bear on our topic. First comes “’Things Not Actually Present:’ On Fantasy, with a Tribute to Jorge Luis Borges.” Here Le Guin reaffirms her longstanding cri de coeur, that “Fantasy is, after all, the oldest kind of narrative fiction, and the most universal.” Her stirring tribute to the unfettered powers of the imagination and its role in charting and promoting the future of civilization justifies all our attention on a type of literature often deemed appropriate only for, as she mocks, “children and primitive peoples.” As she concludes: “[Fantasy fulfills] the most ancient, urgent function of words: to form for us ‘mental representations of things not actually present,‘ so that we can form a judgment of what world we live in and where we might be going in it, what we can celebrate, what we must fear.”

The second relevant piece is titled “Disappearing Grandmothers” and constitutes Le Guin’s own compressed take on what Joanna Russ dealt with at length in her How to Suppress Women’s Writing. It’s useful to keep in mind Le Guin’s keen observations on the many obstacles women authors face as we allot coverage in the future to female fantasy writers.

But I fear this very essay of mine has violated one of her prohibitions.   “Books by women are often grouped together in a joint review, while men’s books are reviewed individually.” Nonetheless, I proclaim my innocence and good faith against this over-stringent ukase. This blanket denunciation seems to me to demean the effectiveness of short reviews—often a necessity in the current oversaturated media landscape—and to overlook the common and necessary and even useful journalistic practice of creating reader interest and sussing out patterns by grouping items that share some trait. I can’t conceive, for instance, that Marilyn Stasio’s long-running column on crime novels in The New York Times Book Review has somehow been guilty of demeaning men and women alike by offering only short group reviews for decades.

With that self-defense, I like to imagine that these grouped reviews of a quartet of female writers have highlighted the wide variety of fantasy being practiced in 2016 — a subset of the great work being done by women (and men) who dare to dream beyond the fields we know.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/worlds-of-the-new-dreamers-fresh-fantasy-from-women-writers

“‘Have you stopped drinking,’” asks the doctor?”

“Yes, I said,” alcoholics being congenital liars.

“‘Are you sure?’”

“Yes, I said, yes.”

“‘Yes? Good. Because I’ve got your tests back…and if you go on, you probably won’t see Christmas.’”

And thus the critic and writer A. A. Gill will enlist in the “genteel bedlam” of a private mental hospital in the West Country of England. That exchange and its consequence kick off the memoir Pour Me, a Life , Gill’s chronicle of the space “between two events…the year between the end of the marriage and the end of drinking.” Memoir implies memory, and for that period, thanks to the “one miserable charity of drink,” he has little: “shards and tesserae.” But they glitter. These memories carry no message, no encouragement for those who still tip the bottle. “It’s not the all or the enough, it’s not the answer. I am now closer to the last breath than I am to my last drink and I need to know.”Needs to know why he miserably, shamblingly, boringly, self-pityingly shredded a decade of his life.

It’s not likely that a single year of shards and tesserae will add up to 268 propulsive pages. But in this book Gill covers considerably more terrain than one year of his sixty-year passage. What comes as such a pleasant surprise, for both those who think Gill is a force of nature and those who think he is a bigoted sexist assassin—his encounters with the northern Welsh, Mary Beard, and a certain baboon haven’t done him any favors—is forthcoming and signifying as memoirs so often aren’t. Gill’s honesty won’t necessarily disarm you, but you will feel its fearless self-exposure.

Sober Gill excavates the drunk Gill as much as he can through the blear. He didn’t want to be drunk all the time; he just never wanted to be sober. “Understand this, it’s not death that terrifies—it’s life. Life is the horror, the unbearable living.” But even for the hard-core alcoholic, there are unavoidable moments of sobriety, and they have consequences. Like waking up. “There are mornings that are stirring but difficult,” nailed Guy Debord after a night of wine and spirits, then some beer, for beer makes one thirsty, in what I thought was the perfect cork in the bottle of alcoholism.

Gill, however, is equal to the task: “The morning I’m thinking of, I’d pulled the emergency chain on sleep”—in extremis only begins to capture his drunken dreams—“and slammed into the daylight.” The physical wrench of wakening was bad enough, but addressing the grotesquery of sadness and alcoholic despair was too much, as were the murderous blackouts. Gill shares an acquaintance’s fix, “being confronted with the possibility that he’d raped and throttled a young stranger, he couldn’t in his drunken heart-of-hearts in all honesty say it was impossible.”

“I can’t remember” is the book’s suggestive refrain, but, as it happens, Gill recalls plenty. Not the whole drunken decade of his 20s, the wreckage of which at best gets a raking over, his insights constrained to the shattered remains. (Only because he was sober can he recount the desperate prospect of a night without a drink, this in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s, and he would risk his life, brilliantly at a three-decade remove, to cauterize the panic with a pint or ten.) What he does remember are the years leading to the decade, finding there, through all the embroidery of time, the wellsprings that charted his progress: some dramatic, some inconspicuous, all momentous.

There are the various schools that cluelessly complicate his stutter, then his “tongue-tied, word-curdling” dyslexia and intractable dyscalculia (“I can’t do long division, or short division for that matter,”) but, really, “the most important lessons to learn are what to discard, what you don’t need, what doesn’t fit.” The Slade will teach him that, nurturing his “pilgrim’s awe…the quiet, intense observation and love of the seen,” but a also convince him that he would never be great as an artist – which meant, for Gill, that door was closed. . He would put that education of a keen eye to work later, having “failed into journalism,” in his unconventional but engagé foreign correspondency.

Gill’s writing is a dense hedgerow of verbiage, his similes often as wicked as blackthorn and equally often as surprising as the fruit of an Osage orange. He can be rococo to the point of a peacock’s peacock, then lay down a bell-clear zinger: something light—“She wore an air of disappointment and lily of the valley.” or sounding something preciously, impossibly deep: how one lodestar brought him to another lodestar, his love of his brother and the table. “It was Nick. It was all about Nick. I don’t often talk about Nick, my younger brother. I don’t ever talk about Nick.” Nick, the natural cook, with Parisian street creds, who vanished like smoke, whom Gill still seeks in every new city he visits.

A love of words and language may have been homegrown for Gill—conversation was currency in the Gill household—but the world of books and the breadth of English would not come easily for a dyslexic: “I could read, just slowly, and consequently my comprehension is very good.” That sentence is crucial. Hard work. Gill has always been hard at work. Being is an outsider kid is hard work, so is being a drunk (try it), as is stopping being a drunk, as is crafting a writing style so mischievously distinctive and engrossing its audience is huge, whether it savors or reviles. Being around Gill is like being around nitroglycerine in the days it was transported by stagecoach over rude and rocky trails to miners blasting for gold. Never a dull moment.

Ten years lost to the “cold echo of absent memory.” Then came the turn: “There’s nothing left to say and no one left who’s listening,” except himself, and his father when Gill asked him for money for treatment: “He said how relieved and pleased he was.” Together, they took a train to the treatment center. “I wonder what dismembered remnants will I be left mantling like an old hawk at the end. Who will share that last synaptic spark.” A. A. Gill doesn’t drink anymore, hasn’t for thirty years. Pardon him his gaffes, excoriate his stupidities, and revel in the brio and dash of his work.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/pour-me-a-life

Murder is the dark stain at the heart of many a conventional mystery novel, but it also serves as a deadly effective tool in the hands of a writer who’s not interested in whether the butler (or the serial killer) did it, but why he did. Add to the canon of whydunits the grim and fascinating novel, presented in true-crime style, of a murder committed in Scotland nearly 150 years ago.

His Bloody Project: Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae, by Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a coup that has taken Saraband, the tiny Scottish publishing house that put it out late last year, by surprise. It has been scrambling to print enough copies to meet demand. (His Bloody Project was published in the U.S. this month.)

This sleeper of a novel is veiled in deception. For starters, Burnet has given a part of his name to that of his murderer, Roderick Macrae, a 17-year-old boy arrested in 1869 for a brutal triple murder in his small seaside village. Burnet includes a “preface” in which he explains that he stumbled on the case while doing research on his own family. The book itself consists of various pertinent historical documents: medical reports, witness statements, court transcripts, and, most important, the firsthand account of the murders and the events leading up to them, written by the accused from his jail cell. (The language has a veneer of antiquity but is entirely accessible. A short glossary of Scottish words that Burnet includes is all the translation necessary.) In offering us various pieces of the puzzle without any neat, prefab conclusions, Burnet turns his readers into detectives.

But what is it, exactly, that we’re meant to uncover? There’s no dispute that “Roddy” Macrae is guilty: He confesses to the murder immediately, and he comes from the scene of the slaughter covered in the victims’ blood. (It’s a testament to the powerful hold that the gotcha formula has on our sense of narrative that for a while I found it impossible to accept that Roddy was the killer. It just seemed too obvious.)

In interviews Burnet has mentioned his deep admiration for the ultimate crime novel—Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment—and it’s easy to see why he would find a character like the mad murderer Raskolnikov so fascinating. What makes a seemingly ordinary person, to use the term-of-art, “snap”? And is there any such thing as an ordinary person, anyway? Roddy’s character and motives are at the center of the mystery Burnet unspools—and his young antihero often seems as much at a loss for answers as anyone else.

Burnet’s first novel, The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau, set in in a backwater town in France, told the story of a man suspected in the disappearance and possible murder of a waitress at a beloved local café, and how the suspicion he was under rearranged the furniture of his own mind. It was a smaller novel, much of it sealed within the tight confines of the protagonist’s psyche and careful habits. As in His Bloody Project, Burnet wasn’t afraid to leave question marks where we might expect definitive answers.

The family research Burnet describes as the genesis for his current book may be a literary device, but he did immerse himself in the nineteenth-century Scottish agrarian system known as crofting, which wasn’t far removed from feudalism, to create the grim world that his young accused murderer inhabits. Roddy’s impoverished family is permitted to work a plot of land that they lease in a social arrangement ripe for abuse, and in which there’s little recourse for unfair treatment.

A passage in which Roddy describes a conversation that his father has with a local authority, known as the factor, underscores the hopeless absurdity of the crofting system for the average farmer, who must live in fear of violating unwritten laws. The factor explains:

The reason you may not “see” the regulations is because there are no regulations, at least not in the way you seem to think. You might as well ask to see the air we breathe. Of course, there are regulations, but you cannot see them. The regulations exist because we all accept that they exist and without them there would be anarchy. It is for the village constable to interpret these regulations and enforce them at his discretion.

But there are more layers to peel back. A criminal profiler (whose theories are based, Burnet says, on the work of real-life pioneering criminologist J. Bruce Thomson) has his own conclusions about the accused’s motives. And then there’s the possibility, dangled by Roddy’s optimistic lawyer, of an insanity defense. How is insanity to be defined, and what constitutes its proof? In a Scottish courtroom, where emerging modern legal concepts are brought to bear on a rural backdrop that appears little removed from medieval times, how is justice to be meted out?

Years ago, I served on a jury for a robbery and assault case that seemed composed of nothing but holes and contradictions and unreliable witnesses. We reluctantly found the defendant not guilty. The tremendous letdown I felt when, after we rendered that verdict, we simply went home, made me realize how thoroughly our narrative culture has primed us to expect comprehensive answers, final explanations, wrap-ups. The seduction of many crime stories is that they offer all the answers we don’t get in real life. His Bloody Project reminds us that there are other pleasures to be drawn from a superb novel that revolves around the act of murder.

 

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

Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to hold a federal political office, was elected to the House of Representatives on November 7, 1916 — almost exactly a century before the first time Americans at the ballot box would encounter a woman as a major party candidate for President. While Rankin is still the only woman to have been elected to Congress from Montana, there are currently 104 women in office, representing just under 20 percent of the congressional total (75 percent of them Democrats, a disproportion that has prevailed since the early 1990s).

A prominent figure in the women’s suffrage movement, Rankin said after the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1918 that she was proud to have been “the only woman who ever voted to give women the right to vote.” But Rankin is also remembered for another vote, one that became influential in unintended ways. Elected just as America was poised to enter WWI, Rankin was a pacifist as well as a feminist, as was the more famous Alice Paul. In A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot, Mary Walton recounts how Paul made a point of visiting Rankin in Washington on April 5, 1917, the two women sitting together in solidarity in the visitors’ gallery just hours before the vote to enter the war was taken. Walton describes how Rankin, torn between her patriotism and her pacifist principles, rose in the House to say, in a strained voice, “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war,” her no vote then uttered “with what many thought a sob”:

Although 50 legislators opposed the resolution, against 373 in favor, headline writers singled out the congresswoman from Montana. She was the one who had cried, who had covered her face in her hands, who had left the chamber immediately afterward to applause from pacifists in the galleries. The war was now a reality. But so, too, was the impression that women could not be relied upon when the nation was under siege.

Whatever the damage to the women’s movement, Rankin went down to defeat in the next election. That her statue on Capitol Hill today is inscribed with “I cannot vote for war” is surely a disservice to her role in suffrage history and to her wider legacy, says Cokie Roberts. Herself the daughter of a congresswoman, Roberts has a handful of books — Ladies of Liberty, Founding Mothers, and most recently the Civil War history Capital Dames — on women who, though not elected, held great political influence. In We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters, Roberts notes that while in office Rankin worked on many underrepresented issues relating to women and children, as did those who came after her:

When you call the roll of women in Congress in the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties, you find that they toiled in the corridors and the cloakrooms of the Capitol pressing their colleagues on equal pay, tax relief for single parents and working mothers, school lunches, consumer safety, food stamps, and the place of women in the military. Equally important, they came to the table of government with different sensibilities. Women simply experience life differently from men. And these mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives brought and continue to bring the perspectives of those roles to governing.

In her memoir My Beloved World, Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina Supreme Court justice, says that the perspective she brings to the bench was shaped by her upbringing in an immigrant Bronx neighborhood that offered life lessons in support, empathy, and tolerance. Of paramount influence, writes Sotomayor, were the two women who raised her:

If I try to imagine my most immediate examples of selfless love, instinct leads me first to those who were closest: Abuelita [grandmother], healer and protector, with her overflowing generosity of spirit; and my mother, visiting nurse and confidante to the whole neighborhood . . . Suffice to say, somehow a synergy of love and gratitude, protection and purpose, was implanted in me at a very young age. And it flowered in a determination to serve. My childhood ambition to become a lawyer had nothing to do with middle-class respectability and comfort. I understood the lawyer’s job as being to help people.

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On first look few writers are as dissimilar as Mary Oliver and Joyce Carol Oates. The former is a poet of the woods and the creatures therein, the avowed disciple of Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. Her reverence for the practice of quiet observation is expressed in diaphanous poetry and lean prose whose transparency invites the reader to enter the nave of nature to worship in awed silence.

Silence is not part of Oates’s credo. Her essays are of a piece with an extraordinary publishing career that has left no stone unturned and then fully examined in the literary equivalent of a geological survey, dense with evidence. If she has a thought, she does not merely suggest its possibilities, as Oliver might. If she used them, her footnotes would generate footnotes.

Yet two new collections of prose by these writers show they are not opposing candidates but actually spring from the same party: they are ardent latter-day Transcendentalists. They begin and end with Emerson’s notion that “the theory of books is noble.” Whether the pure experience that is transformed “by the new arrangement of [the writer’s] own mind” is that of viewing natural phenomena (Oliver) or falling under the novelist’s spell (Oates), what results is the transubstantiation that is literature. Once in story form, “it now endures, it now flies, it now inspires.” Joyce Carol Oates and Mary Oliver are running on the same platform.

They are two of the most notable of American letters’ old guard. Each has been publishing since the early sixties — half a century. They have certainly earned the right to reflect at any length they choose on the nature of inspiration. In Soul at the White Heat, Oates considers the origins of writing in voluminous detail and via every type of critical approach — review, reconsideration, instructional, public address, introduction — just as her scores of other books range exhaustively over genres and forms. Then there’s Oliver, the oracular poet of the natural world, whose essays are condensed, oblique. They present furtive glimpses of her passions, her predecessors, and how she experiences the divine through observation of the natural world. Upstream is as slender and suggestive as her poetry — and occasionally as maddening.

It is impossible to overestimate Oliver’s popularity as a poet. Across the land at any given moment a hundred yoga teachers are reverently reciting an Oliver poem during shivasana. Anyone who has a dog has had Dog Songs  eagerly pressed on them and likely went on to buy three more copies for their dog-loving friends. Aphoristic quotations show up frequently in the Facebook feed; yesterday mine included a line from “Of Power and Time,” an essay reprinted here: “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Her exhortatory tone is stirring and reassuring at once, and similarly constitutes both her poetry’s strength and its weakness. This quality is also in large measure why she has risen to a reputation as America’s bestselling poet. Her poems are accessible in the way a hymn is accessible: simple language set at just enough of a syntactical tilt that it sets you off balance; in the subsequent moment of reorientation you realize something happened. In head, or in heart.

If that maneuver is sometimes powered by sentimentality, it is no deterrent to her worshipful audience. (“Mary Oliver’s poetry and prose is the closest thing I know to God,” goes a typical paean.) If that were all she had to offer, however, it is unlikely she would have won the Pulitzer Prize. The basic frustration of reading Mary Oliver is that you never know where she’s taking you: her poetry holds dual citizenship in two separate but contiguous regions, the mawkish and the visionary.

A significant part of the project of both these collections is to declare influences. Oliver acknowledges Wordsworth, Shelley, and especially Whitman. A discovery of her youth, his “oceanic power and rumble” was her compass and companion, while his “boundless affirmation” would guide the tone of future work. Her poems also clearly bear the deep impress of Dickinson, which shows up not only in the borrowing of the signal dash but in a compression of intense emotion. The fact that Oliver’s appointed literary guardians are over 150 years old can leave her sounding antique, or at least self-consciously mannered; sometimes a sentence is so overvarnished no amount of rereading will sand it free. “Of all American poems, the 1855 Leaves of Grass is the most probable of effect upon the individual sensibility. It wants no less.” Huh? And again: Whitman “stood in the singe of powerful mystical suggestion.” I’m going to look for some singe so I can see this for myself.

Where Oliver is simply vague (or vaguely simple), Oates is precise and thorough, erudite and all-encompassing. A substantial part of Soul at the White Heat (the title comes from a particularly unyielding Dickinson poem) comprises book reviews of such contemporaries’ work as Coetzee, Lorrie Moore, McMurtry, Erdrich, Atwood. To their appraisal Oates brings to bear every other book she has read, it seems, and that is a lot: there is little in the western canon that has escaped her omnivoracity. These are her influences — just about everything. Three hundred years of English literature flows through her as if she had a transfusion. Not for Oates the unparsable sentence or less than thought-through insight (though apparently Twitter is another matter). Melville, Dickens, George Eliot, James, Lawrence, Simenon, Updike; I could go on, and on, naming the writers with whose entire oeuvre Oates is conversant. Her prolificacy as a writer is often, and tiresomely, mentioned; her copious reading is at least as remarkable and, in tandem with her own production, nothing short of astonishing.

But that is how much she, Oliver too, loves books; it is clear they in some way make life possible. The apparent utter necessity of reading and writing — on par with eating and sleeping — is the revelation within every page of these collections. The books’ implicit question, made explicit in the title of White Heat‘s first piece, “Is the Uninspired Life Worth Living?,” is one that both writers have answered with a resounding no. This is why those reports of the death of the book are greatly, and laughably, exaggerated. People couldn’t go on without them.

Overtly, the two books display little crossover, except when both Oliver and Oates take up the case of Poe. Oliver maintains that an experiential lack of certainty “disordered” him, making him rewrite the same hopeless tale over and over again. Oates, in the course of situating him in the tradition of the gothic, says Poe’s predominant form is one of “psychic autobiography.”

This is where both writers reveal their most profound kinship: they believe one must look at what happened in the life of the person who writes in order to discover what compelled him or her to write. For writers, this is always the most pressing question, about their work as well as others’. Notwithstanding the ghosts of the New Critics shaking their chains in disapproval, Oliver and Oates set out to prove that writing is as personal as it gets.

I closed the covers on these two celebrations of the bookish life and moved to leave the café where I had been sitting. Improbably, too perfectly, as if she had been written into the scene, a tiny figure of a girl no more than six blocked the door. She had no idea where she was because her head was in a book. Eyes wide, she looked as if she would climb inside the pages if she could. I may have been witness to the sort of formative moment of which I had just been reading. Only one question remained — poetry, or fiction?

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Since 1990, the booksellers who sit on our Discover Great New Writers selection committee have been on the hunt to find the best and the brightest, the next great storyteller (fiction or nonfiction) that they can’t stop talking about, the books that they can’t wait to get into the hands of another reader. Male and female; twenty-something, and (shall we say) something-more-than-twenty-something; based in cities and suburbs across the country, these booksellers review roughly 1,000 submissions each year from publishers of all sizes, and from that pool, select roughly 50 to feature in the Discover Great New Writers program. Our archive of previous Discover Great New Writers selections is here, and the archive of Discover Award winners here. Discover’s archive on the B&N Review is here.

Our booksellers have found our first 22 picks for 2017, and we can’t wait until January to share them with you. Look for more on all of these extraordinary books on The B&N Review in the coming weeks.

Kayla Ray Whitaker The Animators: A Novel

 

 

 

 

Katherine Arden  The Bear and the Nightingale: A Novel

 

 

 

 

Thi Bui The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir

 

 

 

Natalie C. Anderson City of Saints & Thieves

 

 

 

 

Caite Dolan-Leach Dead Letters

 

 

 

 

Michael Farris Smith Desperation Road

 

 

 

 

Leah Carroll Down City: A Daughter’s Story of Love, Memory, and Murder

 

 

 

Vivek Shanbhag Ghachar Ghochar

 

 

 

John Freeman Gill The Gargoyle Hunters

 

 

 

 

Emily Fridlund History of Wolves

 

 

 

 

Melissa Fleming A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea

 

 

 

 

Emily Ruskovich Idaho: A Novel

 

 

 

 

Kristen Radtke Imagine Wanting Only This

 

 

 

Jason Rekulak The Impossible Fortress

 

 

 

 

Bill Hayes Insomniac City

 

 

 

 

Julie Buntin Marlena: A Novel

 

 

 

 

Lindsey Lee Johnson The Most Dangerous Place on Earth

 

 

 

 

Stephanie Powell Watts No One Is Coming to Save Us

 

 

 

 

Rebecca Schuman Schadenfreude: A Love Story

 

 

 

 

Patty Yumi Cottrell Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

 

 

 

 

Shannon Leone Fowler Traveling with Ghosts: A Memoir

 

 

 

 

Tom McAllister The Young Widower’s Handbook: A Novel

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Peter Ho Davies’s beautiful debut, The Welsh Girl, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. The book is a careful, deeply faceted study of belonging and exile in a small town in Wales during World War II. Now, nearly a decade later, Davies brings us The Fortunes, his first full-length collection rooted in the United States, where he now resides, as professor at the University of Michigan. Like The Welsh Girl, The Fortunes is a multifaceted study of belonging and exile. But Davies’s scale is enlarged here: The book spans 175 years and shuttles between China and America, circling the lives of Chinese Americans in the act of forging new identities and searching for home.

In a moment when the politics of identity have become inflamed by polarizing forces, Davies’s book leans into the state of cultural between-ness. He deftly explores with the experience of living between cultures and countries. As Davies examines the forces that converge to shape our identities (with or even without our will), he also maps the longings by which we each attempt to shape ourselves.

The Fortunes, composed of four constellated vignettes, is formally deft. This is perhaps because it understands itself so keenly to be a book about reading, about the ways we learn to tell our stories and to read our own lives. As Davies plays with genres of writing — the record, the footnote, the journal, the autobiography — his tales meditate deeply on what it means to represent, whether a self, a nation, a group of people, a racial identity. How does one come to speak for the many? Which stories are heard, and what do they cost the speaker?

This fall I talked with Peter Ho Davies, first by phone and then via email. We spoke about things as various as inventing footnotes, trying to belong to a country, and the state of America’s national anxieties. Our conversation is condensed below.

 

Tess Taylor: Your first novel, The Welsh Girl, had a much different scale — there were a few main voices, folded during wartime into a Welsh village. But this is your first full-length book set in the U.S., and it leaps across time and space. How do you feel America worked its way into the form, into the structure? Were there particularly American pleasures and challenges?

Peter Ho Davies: An early inspiration for the book — twenty-some years ago now! — was a train trip I took across the U.S. from Boston to San Francisco. I’d only been in the U.S. for a couple of years at the time, and the sheer continental scale of the country was revelatory to me as someone coming from a much smaller nation (Britain). It’s one thing to grasp that intellectually but another to get it physically as you sit in a seat day after day, watching the landscape unfurl. That was the trip on which I learned about the Chinese workers on the Transcontinental, which forms the backdrop of the first part of the novel, and the sense of scale seemed inextricably woven into that enterprise.

In general though, books, even ones about a very specific location, often seem to me to be both about the place they’re set in and other, more distant places. Joyce’s Dubliners is a case in point. Character after character in that book, even as they walk Dublin’s streets, think of other places, real or imagined: Araby, Buenos Aires, the opera houses of Europe and London. My characters in The Welsh Girl live in a remote area — the world (in the form of POWs and refugees from WWII) comes to them, in a sense — but the contrast with that wider world of conflict is felt, I hope. While The Fortunes crisscrosses America, China is a recurring presence in the book, both as a location and also an idea.

There were, of course, lots of challenges — I certainly didn’t feel myself “American” enough to take on this project so soon after I moved here twenty years back — but also many pleasures. American idiom, for one thing, has delighted and engaged me since my childhood in Britain, and there’s a short section in the book that uses the lingo of the Jazz Age, of flappers, which was a special pleasure to write.

TT: As you note, the book is actually not only transcontinental, like our railway, but really concerned with shuttling back and forth to China. In the first, the character Ah Ling arrives in Sacramento from China, and in the next the movie star Anna May Wong goes to China to visit her father. Finally, a character named John, who (in some resemblance to you) is a creative writing professor from the Midwest, goes to China to adopt a child. This is profoundly a book about transmigration and about between-ness. Your own background is half Chinese, half Welsh, but you mentioned as we spoke that you went to China for the first time during the writing of this novel. How did visiting China for the first time now affect your writing?

PHD: I’d drafted the final section, about a contemporary journey to China, before I went, but of course it felt essential to go. I’m likely still processing that experience, but it enriched the book in ways both large and small. The closing pages especially couldn’t have been written without going there, but even small details were impacted. I have my character visit the Great Wall (of course!), but only after I’d been there myself and woke up the next morning feeling the ache of walking those steep slopes in my calf muscles could my character “feel” the experience.

The effect of the visit extends beyond my writing, I’d say, more broadly into my life and my sense of myself. That “halfness” you mention, coupled with another (I’ve now spent half my life in the U.S., half in the U.K.) has often felt like it implied a choice. I suspect that’s true, too, of many Chinese Americans and many others of so-called hyphenated identities. But the choice also feels like a loyalty test of sorts. To lean into assimilation may be seen as a betrayal of heritage, to cleave too closely to one’s heritage can feel like a failure to engage the broader society. It’s lose-lose if you think of it as a choice. My characters, I think, feel this, as do I. Anna May Wong, the actress who’s featured in one section, feels Chinese in America (her birthplace) but is seen in many ways as American in China when she visits, for instance. What I’ve grown toward — through writing the book, through going to China — is a rejection of the choice, the sense that there’s a third option, a hybrid-hyphenated identity that is its own authenticity.

TT: For me, some of the most profound pleasures of the book arrive out of constellations — layerings that have to do with repeating themes or figures: I think of the figure of the prostitute, or of prostitution, and also of way themes about parentage and belonging are woven through the stories. Did you sense these constellations of concern in advance, or did you write toward them? Do you sense what’s going to heap up in advance, or do you channel and direct it once it comes?

PHD: I love the idea of “constellations”; it’s one I use often when talking to my MFA students who are assembling collections of stories, a way of encouraging them to see patterns, affinities between the individual pieces. Thinking about that in the context of short story collections — my own and my students’ — surely informed the evolution of The Fortunes: a novel, but one knit together by these echoes and links between novellas. Some were more apparent than others at different stages of writing. All the characters, say, struggle with the burden of representing others, and transportation in the form of the railroad, steamships, automobiles, and flight evolves as time passes from section to section (something that bears on migration, of course), but there are an array of others smaller, quieter echoes and call-backs, the invisible stitching of the book, I hope. As a reader I love to come across those, and I hope my readers will enjoy them.

The broader context here is my sense of the Chinese-American community and its history as one of fractured generational bonds. Were I writing a novel spanning 150 years about a different immigrant group — Irish, maybe, or Italian — I might have opted for a multi-generational family as a vehicle for the story. But the history of the Chinese in America — from the “bachelor society” of male workers on the railroad, via exclusion laws that sought to stop Chinese from bringing their families to the U.S., and anti-miscegenation laws that barred them marrying here, to the recent arrival of adopted baby girls from China — is one of broken, interrupted lines of descent. The four novellas of The Fortunes reflect that. They’re not tied together by bloodlines, but despite these hurdles the Chinese-American community has persisted, and the echoes between sections are intended to suggest the affinities, the shared experiences, that bind the community together down the years.

TT: I love that idea of interrupted echoes. And of what is recorded and what is not. I had a funny experience when researching and preparing to write about your book: You acknowledge you’ve crafted Ah Ling, the Chinese valet who works for the railroad baron Crocker, out of “real” historical footnotes. Yet I went looking to find the book you cite in crafting Ah Ling, I discovered that that book, and the footnote, are actually fabricated by you. Ah Ling is a “real” character, so to speak, but it also seems you’ve taken some liberties in representing him — even to the point of inventing a scholarly footnote written by a fictional academic called K. Clifford Stanton! Can you tell us a little bit about inventing K. Clifford, researching Ah Ling, and the project of blending fact and fiction?

PHD: Ah Ling as a figure is a kind of gift for a historical novelist — someone who probably existed (he’s mentioned briefly in several Crocker biographies) and played a pivotal role in the past (his industrious example is said to have inspired Crocker to hire the thousands of Chinese who built the railroad) and yet about whom almost nothing more is known. That gap in the historical record seems an invitation to fiction (also a challenge, of course, in terms of imagining the man’s life). I wanted to acknowledge that Ling existed, but the lines from the biographies were slightly unwieldy to use as epigraphs, so I conflated a couple of them to create a line from a fictional biography of Crocker by a fictional biographer, K. Clifford Stanton . . . a fellow I’ve used once before in my fiction (he’s kind of my Kilgore Trout) to provide a useful epigraph, in that case to a story about UFO abductions, of all things.

TT: In the last section of the book, you begin to play with something that feels almost like autobiography. How literally do you imagine we may read this? What’s the point of perhaps impersonating someone who seems to be so much like yourself?

PHD: The book takes on several conflicted and equivocal representational figures in Ah Ling, Anna May, and Vincent Chin — it’s one of the thematic bonds that knit the book together. Each section sees characters wrestling with the impossible question of how one can represent many. And it dawned on me that that anxiety is, while particular to the characters, also a very deep writerly concern. We try to write of specific individuals but also aspire to something universal. For writers of color the burden of representing a group is particularly complex. I suspect I was drawn to my characters because they share my own anxiety of representation (such writerly anxieties can often stop us writing, but I sometimes find it productive to write into them). It seemed only fair to pull back the curtain a little at the end of the book and fess up to those fears, which is why I made the final figure a writer. He and I share other autobiographical aspects, to be sure, but he isn’t me, and I’d like to think readers who’ve got that far will have come to appreciate the ambiguities of representation and won’t make the straightforward assumption of autobiography. The book, if you like, is all about denying either/or answers. The characters aren’t Chinese or American, but both. The historical action isn’t fact or fiction, but both. And the final character isn’t autobiographical or fictional . . . but some mixture of both.

TT: I read this book in the Sierra Nevada, right along the very kinds of mountain roads that Ah Ling might have watched dynamited, the precarious mountain passes that the railroad — and Chinese labor — made possible. Meanwhile, just as I was reading your section about the struggles between Chinese railroad workers and Irish labor — Brexit got voted through, and there were white supremacists marching on Sacramento. All of this is to say we live in highly charged times, and that we can see anew how quickly seemingly submerged historical fissures can re-emerge and become inflamed. The charged racial and racialized politics, and the questions of belonging you present in this book, felt wildly insightful and very timely. Yet when we were speaking the other day, you mentioned that this book had its inception years ago. And you were also often writing about events that occurred over a century ago. Is there a way you find yourself — even as you’re writing about the past — also writing toward the conflicts or language of the present?  How do these things balance in your mind?

PHD: I very much admire historical fiction that casts light simultaneously on past and present. Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, say, invites us to think of the World Trade Center towers on the morning in 1974 that Philippe Petit tightrope-walks between them, but also to remember 9/11. That said, the present echoes in my own historical novels haven’t always been by design. In the case of The Welsh Girl, say, I began the book in ’98 or ’99, but its story of wartime and specifically of prisoners of war, and how we treat them, began to mean something more post 9/11, post the detainment of prisoners in Guantánamo, post the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. In the case of The Fortunes something similar has taken place, though I’d argue that the questions of immigration, and certainly of race are never all that far beneath the surface of the present.

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Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, regarded as one of the foundation texts of conservative political thought, was published on November 1, 1790. Burke’s argument contained not only a rebuttal of revolutionary principles, which he found hopelessly idealized and impractical, but a prophecy that the ensuing destabilization and violence would open the door to a charismatic military opportunist, someone “who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command”:

Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things. But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master; the master (that is little) of your king, the master of your Assembly, the master of your whole republic.

As Jesse Norman says in Edmund Burke: The First Conservative, Burke’s words offered “a frighteningly exact description of the emergence of Napoleon Bonaparte.” Almost nine years to the day after Burke published his Reflections, Napoleon staged the coup which allowed him to master not only the French republic but, over the next fifteen years, most of Europe. Unsurprisingly, after the Allies finally reined in the Little Emperor, they lost no time in implementing policies and national boundaries that ushered in a new “Conservative Order,” one that favored the old ruling dynasties.

The unofficial birthday of that new Conservative Order is November 1, 1814, when over 200 states and princely houses, representing Europe’s finest royalty and brightest diplomats, gathered for the Congress of Vienna. As described in David King’s Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War and Peace, the eight-month discussion of how to rebuild Europe was also the party of the century:

Reasoned opinion predicted that all negotiations would be wrapped up in three or four weeks. Even the most seasoned diplomats expected no more than six. But the delegates, thrilled by the prospects of a lasting peace, indulged in unrestrained celebrations. The Vienna peace conference soon degenerated into a glittering vanity fair: masked balls, medieval-style jousts, and grand formal banquets — a “sparkling chaos” that would light up the banks of the Danube.

Europe’s most recent political makeover took effect on November 1, 1993, when the twelve-nation European Union — twenty-eight nations now, though soon to be twenty-seven — was established. Also born from the chaos of war, the EU seemed like a good idea to many countries reeling from WWII, as reflected in this 1946 speech in Zurich by, ironically, Winston Churchill:

We British have our Commonwealth of Nations . . . why should there not be a European group which could give a sense of enlarged patriotism and common citizenship to the distracted peoples of this turbulent and mighty continent? And why should it not take its rightful place with other great groupings and help shape the onward destinies of men? . . . Therefore I say to you: let Europe arise!

Churchill’s comments give title to the prizewinning Turbulent and Mighty Continent, in which the eminent British sociologist Anthony Giddens offers a balanced critique of the EU’s problems and suggests how Churchill’s vision might still be achieved. In Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century, the German-American historian Konrad H. Jarausch also supports a reformed and reinvigorated EU, because “the European Alternative” may be the best one available — even for America:

No doubt the continent is confronting serious problems of aging, immigration, fiscal control, institutional structure, and global competitiveness — but they are ultimately solvable. Instead of being an imperfect clone of American modernity, Europe has different ideas about the role of religion, gun control, capital punishment, welfare support, public transportation, and international organization, just to mention a few. To many liberal Americans, these European solutions are more appealing than Tea Party prescriptions of military strength, unilateral intervention, unrestrained speculation, and social conservatism.

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Miwa Messer, director of Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program, writes “Tara Clancy’s memoir The Clancys of Queens roared into our hearts and minds; we couldn’t shake her voice even if we’d wanted to. The Clancys of Queens is the very best kind of memoir: emotionally inclusive and familiar, even if its terrain is not exactly ours; the universal, revealed through layers of detailed observation and ferocious, lively, loving prose.”

When we asked the author to share some of her favorite reading with us, she supplied a list of five favorites, each of which illuminates the life of the city from a unique angle.

 

The Wanderers
By Richard Price

“This book, more than any other, changed my life, both because of its unvarnished storytelling and for how it influenced future decisions I made. It’s Price’s very first novel — a partially autobiographical story about a group of working-class Bronx guys in the ’60s. Reading it transported me right back to being a kid in my own kitchen in Queens, where I used to eavesdrop on my father and uncles telling raunchy stories from their youth. But, as much I loved this book for what was in it, I was equally struck by what wasn’t: the stories of New York’s working-class women. In fact, after I read this book, I went to a bookstore, found a clerk, held up my copy, and said, ‘I want a book just like this, but by a woman!”‘The clerk thought about it for a while, then said, ‘Me too! . . . but it doesn’t exist.’ ‘So,” I said, ‘what was the last book written by a working-class New York woman?’ And he replied . . .

 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
By Betty Smith

“Yup! This classic was what the clerk and I came up with. The thing is, Smith’s novel about growing up as a second-generation Irish-American girl in Williamsburg, though deserving of its lasting legacy, was published seventy-three years ago! That’s my mother’s lifetime; it’s unreal to me. Immediately after leaving the bookstore, I started relaying this bonkers fact to everyone I spoke to. I often added the joke, ‘Well, shoot, maybe I’ll have to write the next book! I’ll call it, A Tree GREW in Brooklyn, A Long Effing Time Ago!’ Eventually, it went from being a joke to being a real motivator for me.

 

Drown
By Junot Díaz

“This was another life-changing book for me. The characters in Díaz ‘s first short story collection were very familiar — growing up in Queens, I went to school with a lot of Dominican kids — and so, just like with Richard Price, reading this book took me home. It also helped me realize that it was okay (and maybe even more powerful) to write in my authentic voice; that I could share my story without having to adopt any literary pretense. And when the term ‘ghetto nerd’ starting popping up around Díaz, as well as his characters, my instant response was, ‘YES! I knew a bunch of those growing up. Well, damn, I kinda am one, too!’

 

Preparation for the Next Life
By Atticus Lish

“Published in 2014, this was my favorite novel of the last decade. It’s a dark, raw, and thoroughly original love story between a white working-class American war vet and a recent Chinese immigrant, two demographics that hardly appear in literature. It’s also set in Flushing, Queens — a place where I spent a lot of time as a teenager — and features a native New York Irish-American family who, for better or worse (they’re some pretty rough folks), bear strong similarities to families I grew up with. Lish’s writing is phenomenal, and the story is one that needed telling.

 

Another Brooklyn
By Jaqueline Woodson

“So, here I’ve been outraged about the decades-long lack of native New York women writers, wondering why their stories have been missing on our shelves, and a few months ago, the brilliant Jacqueline Woodson comes out with this amazing novel! Set in Brooklyn in the 1970s, it centers on the friendship between four young black women. She had me hooked from the dedication: ‘For Bushwick (1970–1990) In Memory.’ Whether you’re familiar with Brooklyn then, now, or not at all, there’s no other way of putting it — this lyrical and transporting novel is an absolute must-read.

 

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Hell, it turns out, is children’s theater. That’s the distinct impression you get in Francine Prose’s new novel, Mister Monkey, about an eponymous “off-off-off-off Broadway” children’s production and its panoply of warped players. It’s always exhilarating when a serious novelist reveals her ridiculous, irreverent streak, when she isn’t too self-consciously proper to jape and jeer at the ineptitudes of everyday living. Prose has always been an unafraid novelist with a thirst for the mordant and satirical — her most effective novel, Blue Angel, chastens the illiberal extravagances of the academic Left — and in Mister Monkey she’s back to show us how downright batty our world can be.

Modeled on a children’s book about a Manhattan family that adopts a pocket-picking chimpanzee, Mister Monkey the musical is, by all accounts, “an outrageously bad play . . . a sweet but basically retarded musical for children.” One character describes it as “obvious and preachy, full of improving lessons about race and class, honesty, justice, and some kind of . . . spirituality, for want of a better word.” The children’s book author wonders “how anybody but a fucking moron could enjoy that fucking idiotic bullshit.”

The cast and crew of the musical lurch through a series of mishaps by the misbegotten, going off script, encouraging injury, inciting humiliation. Among the cast there’s Margot, a former Yale star who in costume looks like “a slutty executive-secretary birthday clown” and has “a brittle protective screw-you shell encasing a gooey caramel of longing.” There’s Adam, the barely pubescent child actor playing Mister Monkey — note his insistently symbolic name — who tries to hump Margot onstage: “Adam is darkness, darkness, terror, and rage building toward a volcanic eruption inside a monkey suit.” There’s Roger, the “sadistic, half-mad” director overseeing this debacle. There’s Ray Ortiz, the children’s book author, who refers to Mister Monkey as “that little primate son of a bitch,” apparently not realizing that he’s a primate, too. (In a confusion of taxonomy to drive a primatologist nuts, “chimp” and “monkey” are everywhere employed interchangeably — chimps aren’t monkeys.) He’s a common imbecile, this children’s author: about the butchery of gorillas in the Congo, his contribution is “I hate that shit,” as if he were rating salsa.

Prose casts an often shrewd eye over the fine-graded delineations of the New York society her players inhabit. There are chic thirty-something parents who yearn never to be found guilty of “the sin of talking or thinking about anything besides their kids” — Volvo drivers whose pompous daily objective is “to trick their children into eating quinoa.” Downtown is “the fascist corporate wasteland otherwise known as Battery Park City.” One woman uses a “tasseled Tibetan feed sack” for a purse. The smoke from a halal food truck is “half-crematorial,” a child’s German immigrant teacher a “Nazi pig asshole.”

As you can see, Prose doesn’t care whether or not you’re bothered by the crass way her people think and speak. The second the satirical novelist begins to worry about the delicate sensibilities of her readers is the second she forfeits her stake in genuine satire. If Prose marshals comedic observations no one would argue with — “Below a certain level of fame, a diva is just a pain in the ass” or: “Fuck with an elephant and he will stomp you flat, no questions asked” — she also knows when to inject a dignified veracity: “There is never a moment when the grandfather has to stop and calculate how long he has outlived his father; he always knows.”

But what Prose’s publisher calls a “madcap narrative” isn’t nearly madcap enough. If you attempt to allay silliness with shafts of sincerity, you’d best take care that the sincerity isn’t too aware of the juxtaposition, that it doesn’t bloat into sentimentality. When Prose hovers over the stage, detailing the various travesties of the show, she’s at her most comically astute. When she exits the theater to chronicle the dutifully unhinged lives of her characters, most of whom come freighted with unnecessarily traumatic back-stories, she trots down avenues of forced earnestness, straining for an emotional gravitas the story doesn’t need or want. These pat, frictionless forays into their personal affairs are fusillades of the quotidian, pointlessly exact, as in the tedious date when Ray Ortiz proposes to his girlfriend.

Why didn’t Prose rely on the undiluted comedy, let it be its disturbed self without defacing by precious longueurs? The characters are given to maudlin platitudes and clichés: “Each moment of life is a gift” and “The future looks bright” and “Anything could still happen.” They think in saccharine metaphor: “Outside I’m a prickly cactus. Inside is the cool refreshing water that will save your life if you are lost in the desert.” Prose is undeterred by the effortless banality of their inner realms, and she’s undeterred by caricature. In one scene with a priest, she has him trail every sentence with “my son”: “Go on, my son” and “Please continue, my son.”

Worse, much the novel is too breezily confected, with no linguistic commitment — the loose, nearly automatic language has all the attendant cliché you’d expect: “good as gold” and “heated discussions” and “flirting with disaster” and “a cry for help.” In Allan Gurganus’s Plays Well with Others and Martin Amis’s Money, two other novels that detail the sundry madnesses of Manhattan, the comedy surges as much from the circumstances as from the originality and wit of the language that narrates them. If every novelist has an obligation to say it new, the comic novelist has an extra onus, since staleness of phrase is incompatible with wit.

In one of the best scenes in Mister Monkey, “way beyond off-script,” Adam grabs Margot’s kicking foot and holds it there in the air before him:

They square off, staring, mongoose-cobra, Margot cork-screwed around and tottering on one high heel, the frayed hem of her purple skirt riding dangerously up her poor little chicken thigh. Adam could break her leg! Does the audience have any idea how rogue and psychotic this is? Do they think that violent assault is acceptable children’s musical theater?

Good questions. The shimmering cynics and earnest dupes who populate these pages, players and spectators alike, often seem astounded to find themselves at this present place in their lives — in this theater, this city. “Oh, the sad, sad, sadness of their puny ambitions,” Prose writes. How can they have larger, more interesting ambitions? They might start by becoming more interesting people.

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