Edgar's Book Round-Up, September 2021

Looks like we’re still running these monthly, since I refuse to engage with observable reality except on my own terms, and it’s still too goddamn hot here in KCMO. Consider, though: today would be a great day to contribute to, for example, a reproductive rights organization! Or look for mutual aid organizations in your area (and here’s not one but two from ours)! Or fuck it: drunk-dial your elected officials and give ‘em what-for. You’re probably an adult and regardless, no one can stop you.

As always, book titles link to our Bookshop, and we might get a little money if you click them and buy stuff from them.

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We lead off this round-up with The Searcher, the latest outing from Tana French. After having my socks positively blown off by The Witch Elm, I was cautiously excited to dive into The Searcher, which came out last year. But only cautiously excited: the novel follows Cal, a retired Chicago police-cop, which gave me pause; I’m generally not in the mood for copaganda. Fortunately, Cal’s past on the force is mostly past, but the scars remain in unexpected ways — as do the skills, which come in handy when an ill-tempered, tenacious kid named Trey, who enlists Cal’s help to find her missing brother.

Set in a small town with any number of things to hide, The Searcher is a slow burn of a novel, with intimate focus on its characters. But it also uses its Irish back-country setting to play on the westerns that serve as fairly obvious inspiration for it: it’s hard not to add that extra “-s” to the end of the title, and Cal is very much a John Wayne kind of guy — for better and for worse. But French’s grip on how people interact, the ways they manipulate each other and the coded messages of small-town society is firm, and while the novel is admittedly a little slow to start, in many ways this is refreshing. It would have been easy for The Searcher to follow the beats of many other mystery tales, and even easier for it to call into copaganda territory, but it deftly avoids both of these. French sets up many little mysteries in those “slow” chapters — some to be resolved, others to be left to rot, but all of which create a rich and satisfying tale.

Concurrent with that audiobook, I also burned through Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd. Heaven has a similarly intense character focus, but there the similarities end: set in 1980s Japan, the novel is narrated by a nameless high school boy, whose life is consumed by vicious bullying that is largely spurred by his lazy eye. But when Komoji, a girl who is also subject to horrific harassment by their classmates, begins to leave letters in his desk, a delicate friendship begins to grow between them — if they can survive their school days.

Kawakami’s narrator, in Bett and Boyd’s hands, relates his tale in prose that feels affectless at first, until the reader realizes just how thoroughly he has been forced to shrink himself to try (and fail) to avoid notice by his tormentors. And the prose is truly gripping: even when the narrator is lying in bed on summer vacation, dreading his inevitable return to school, the reader feels compelled to follow him. And, in a genius touch, the few one-on-one encounters with certain of his bullies feel genuinely alien: these other kids seem to have truly embraced a cruel and uncaring view of others, taking on the narrative that the strong naturally dominate over the weak as actually natural. The fact that the narrator recognizes how inherently off-kilter this view is, while still feeling uncomfortably swayed by it, is really a testament to the power of this brief, intense novel. I am excited to seek out more of Kawakami’s work.

Continuing a very strong run of very Good Shit, I followed Heaven with two audiobooks that were both incredible in very different ways, the first of which was She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. The first of a projected duology, the novel follows a young girl in fourteenth century China who takes on her brother’s name and, she hopes, his destined greatness when he and their father die following a famine and a brutal raid by brigands. Zhu Chongba, now in possession of her brother’s name, and, hopefully, his fate, flees to a monastery, which she enters in disguise. But Zhu cannot hide from the depredations of Mongol rule forever, and when the monastery is destroyed, she joins the rebel forces aligned against them. Countering Zhu’s view of events, however, is countered primarily by Ouyang, the embittered former slave of the heir-presumptive to the Mongol throne, who has risen to the rank of field general. And when they clash — as they do, repeatedly — blood flows like water.

The first of what I’ve seen referred to as the “saffron sapphecta” that I’ve gotten to read — though I have the other two at my disposal and am VERY EXCITED to get into them — was inexpressibly good. I do not say that lightly. The prose was beautiful, limpid yet stylish; the characters and setting richly developed. Though I hope to remedy this, my knowledge of Chinese history is not strong (Zhu Chongba’s life story is loosely based on the life of Zhu Yuanzhang, the first Ming Dynasty emperor), but in Parker-Chan’s hands, I never felt lost; the speculative elements, though not a huge presence in the plot, were extremely compelling and well-deployed. And while, as a transmasculine person, I found Zhu’s experience very familiar, I was absolutely stricken down by Ouyang’s self-loathing and sense of his own marked, insufficient masculinity. I cannot wait for the second volume to arrive, and will probably return to She Who Became the Sun at least once before then.

And then I followed it with Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots, which has the unusual distinction of being an actually-really-good novel about superheroes. Well, okay, sort of: Anna, the narrator, is a “hench,” working through a temp agency to help staff supervillains’ start-ups, mostly drifting from one temporary data entry gig to another. But when an unexpected encounter with Supercollider, the world’s greatest superhero, leaves Anna badly injured and involved in a lengthy, painful recovery process, she begins to analyze the effects of superheroics, tabulating the cost as if every superhero were in fact a natural disaster. As Anna’s blog, The Damage Report, gains traction, she also attracts the attention of Leviathan, the world’s greatest supervillain — who offers her a job. With benefits!

Walschots gives us a world with superheroes, sure, but more importantly, she gives us a world with real people, putting a personality and a personal history behind every trope with care. The novel also treats the villain-coding of disability with humanity and empathy: Anna uses a cane in the wake of her encounter with Supercollider, which for her is a mobility aid, nothing more. It’s only when the reader steps back to imagine — as I certainly do, especially with audiobooks — the scene taking place in a film or television context that it becomes clear just what Walschots is doing, and how very fucking well she’s doing it. (Also the main character is bisexual and gets nervous around hot butches, which… Big same.) I could gush about Hench for a long time, and have already to many people here on the meatside, so I will move on, but it was a real gift.

The hits kept coming, in that I next finished Silas Marner by George Eliot, which I read in ebook form from the library. A few people I know have been, for one reason or another, reading a bunch of nineteenth-century Anglophone greats, and I had not indulged in that particular genre in a while, and there were a number of things about Silas Marner that appealed to me — specifically, its brevity and its title character’s trade. Marner is a weaver who settled in Raveloe, a small town in rural England, after being expelled from a particularly austere Calvinist group. He makes a quiet life for himself there, rejecting the company of his neighbors in favor of their gold, which he hoards. But one night, his riches are stolen, and not long after, he finds a girl-child, her mother dead of cold and opium by the side of the road. The child entangles Marner, not only with his community, which rallies to assist him, but also with the local gentry and their sordid secrets.

I realize everyone else has been aware of this for some time, but George Eliot is really fucking good at writing, and I’m mad at myself that it’s taken me this long to arrive at her novels. Needless to say, this won’t be the last I read of her. And Silas Marner specifically was a great starting place for me: Marner’s sensitivity to the tactile nature of things was an elegant undercurrent throughout the novel, his skills honed by years of weaving linen; the occasional didactic interludes were more charming and sly than heavy-handed; the characters, regardless of class, were treated with eminent respect. It was a true delight, and I’m so excited to delve further into Eliot’s oeuvre.

After that, I burned through Kai Ashante Wilson’s truly delectable A Taste of Honey; breaking with my usual practice, I’m going to cover that and its companion volume, The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps now rather than later. This is in large part because I found A Taste of Honey much more compelling: its tight focus around the relationship between Aqib, a prince of Olorum, and Lucrio, a soldier of Daluca, really gripped me, and I had an easier time parsing the setting and the action. I am fairly certain, however, that I enjoyed it more because I read A Taste of Honey as an ebook, while The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps was available through my library only as an audiobook, and Wilson’s style is rich and dense as flourless cake — which is to say, quite rich, quite dense, and entirely delicious, but not great when you’re listening to audiobooks and doing other stuff at the same time.

So: mea culpa on the format. But The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps coupled that style with a more straightforward plot and structure than A Taste of Honey, which unveiled several extraordinary twists in the novella’s very form that frankly made me squirm with delight. That said, the setting shared by the stories is incredible: truly awe-inspiring gods, magic that has real heft, mathematics as the preserve of women, rendered in beautifully descriptive prose. And that doesn’t even touch on Wilson’s use of extant languages as stand-ins for fantasy ones — a move of which the translator in me very much approves.

Finally, though, we arrive at a real book that I read off of paper I could touch with my hands, and it was Paul Veyne’s seminal Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, translated from the French by Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (which I cannot find on Bookshop, so note that the link goes to a search result from my best friend in college, BookFinder.com). This was a gift from my father, who said he found it “very interesting” but offered no other remark on why it appeared at my house one day, and it took me a long time to read it because I had to decontaminate it in light of an infestation in my house. I was sort of passingly familiar with Veyne: he’s a classicist by training, and ran with Michel Foucault and those guys.

And what Veyne did, or attempted to do, with Writing History was make legible a number of problems with then-current methodologies in French historiography. Which sounds really dry and not fun at all — but in fact, it was a lot of fun. Veyne set himself (sort of) against the Annales school of writing history, which focused on long-term tracking of social changes over a relatively narrow geographical and, indeed, temporal line. What Veyne argues is better is a broadening of scope, an embrace of the narrative qualities of history, and acknowledgement that history does not work the way, say, physics does, and shouldn’t be made to. And while Eugen Weber, in his New York Times review of the translation that I read, suggests that Moore-Rinvolucri’s translation is wooden, I honestly thought it was fine. She also uses the word “sublunary” a lot, which I really liked. But I already have a lot of thoughts about historiography — so of course I thought this was a lot of fun.

I was also lucky enough to snag an ebook of Cassandra Khaw’s debut novel, The All-Consuming World, from the library just three weeks after its release, and that was the next book I finished. The novel follows Maya, one of the two remaining members of the Dirty Dozen, as she and Rita, their leader, seek to reunite with their fellow criminals to try to find one of the others, who may still be alive. But to what value of “alive”? The characters are all clones, and most have been replicated multiple times — Maya, especially, is fond of getting out of situations by violently killing herself — and she is met with resistance, not only from her former friends, but also from vast and powerful AIs who seek total control of the known universe.

Pitch-black cyberpunk with very Gigerian aesthetics, baked-in queerness, and a laser-focus on characters and their relationships all combine in The All-Consuming World, to great effect. Maya’s dawning realization of just how unhealthy her relationship with Rita is provides a tense substrate to an already thrilling tale, and the many action set-pieces are punctuated with moments of real connection. It’s also just fucking cool, one-liners and luscious prose coming fast and thick. Unusually, it took until pretty far in to the novel for me to be distracted by the eternal question of where and how exactly they were getting this stuff, and not in a “why didn’t they go to a store?” way but in a “what are the supply chains like here?” way — and then I realized that I kind of didn’t care, and settled back in to enjoy the ride. I’ve already got Nothing But Blackened Teeth, Khaw’s novella due out from Tor Nightfire, on hold at the library as well, and if it’s anything like The All-Consuming World, I’m dead certain I will love it.

We finish this round-up, and I finished out the month, with another actual paper book, McKenzie Wark’s Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, which I began while partway through Writing History as that book was atoning for the sins of my shitty domicile, and then set aside to finish the Veyne, and then polished off in short order. Cameron has also written about it elsewhere. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wark’s answer to the question posed by her subtitle is, “Yes”; she posits that rather than capitalists and proles, we now live in an age of vectoralists — those who control the vectors by which information travels — and hackers — people engaged in creating something new out of the flows of information.

Personally, I had two major gripes with the book, which I otherwise found fun and thought-provoking. One is that Wark’s new dichotomy continues the leftist propensity to ignore service workers, who form one of if not the largest cohort of workers in Euro-American society, though in fairness to her, that’s by no means a problem specific to her. The other was her frequent reliance on argument constructions centered around baiting the reader into agreement with her position — which, again, is not a problem specific to Wark, but rather a rhetorical style which flourishes in argument-prone and text-heavy segments of the internet. That said, her position overall is very much worth considering: increasingly, and especially among knowledge workers of various kinds, things don’t work like the capitalism we know and loathe, and reconceptualizing how we approach the actual workings of these industries is very worthwhile. I also really enjoyed her conclusion, with its rousing call for an embrace of vulgarity as a way to think about the present and move forward to a (hopefully better) future, rather than relying on the models of the past.

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Honestly, it was a very good month for me in books. You can also follow Cameron and I on Twitter, if you’re so inclined.