Review: "The Old Drift" by Namwali Serpell

The author who I thought of most while reading Namwali Serpell’s brilliant epic of a debut a debut novel The Old Drift was David Mitchell. The way she weaves a wondrous world both ancient and futuristic, informed by our distant past and our near future but still wonderfully original reminded me of his best work and even some of his lesser quality work which, like this book in very few places, is still fascinating to look at, interpret and think about. It manages to exist wholly within its two worlds, running smoothly through the bulk of the 20^thcentury and into the great unknown of the 21^st, presenting a world informed by past mistakes, present failures and hopes for a brighter future, all within the microcosm of the Republic of Zambia, a country that only gained its freedom a little over 50 years ago. It offers a wide range of characters through the years, with both victims and victimizers thoroughly fleshed out with murky motivations and hidden desires, along with very cool running themes that recur throughout the book. It begins at the start of the 20^thcentury, where a seemingly innocuous event at a luxury hotel at Victoria Falls, a scuffle between a white businessman that leaves another man knocked imbecilic, draws in the lives of three families, black, white and brown, and follows their ancestors as to the near future where the world presented at the beginning feels unrecognizable but with its same prejudices and feelings of want and desire. Like Mitchell’s work, Serpell crafts a world that is fantastical but realistic and it is easy for the reader to by into the more ridiculous aspects of the novel, such as the character of Siballa, whose hair grows at a rapid enough rate that she resembles Thing from the Addams family (hair is one of the book’s recurring themes, such as its powers in both growing it and shaving it off) or the character of Grace, a background character in most of the lives of the three families as they converge who does not see to age over the course of several decades. One of the main themes I found that appears at the turning points of each section is the somewhat pessimistic look at progress in both history as well as politics, like what happens to the sisters Matha and Nkuka, both of whom fall under the spell of the cult like Nkoloso, whose failed Zambian space program would be funny if it did not indirectly cause the death of the girl’s mother at the hands of the government. The book takes a delightful if hard left turn when it focuses on the grandkids, Jacob, Joseph and Naila, and introduces hi-tech smart devices that are implanted in people’s fingertips and near microscopic drones that might be the swarm of mosquitos that narrate small pieces in between sections, but it swings for the fences in its daring final few pages, and it is easy for me to respect that for a debut novel so thick, complex and intricate. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Nickel Boys" by Colson Whitehead

I’m always interested in the follow-up to a great success, whether that be of the cinematic variety or the literary variety, so when I heard Colson Whitehead was publishing his follow-up to his awards sweeping novel The Underground Railroad, I was immediately interested. The Underground Railroad lived up to its hype, telling an engaging story of alternate history in all its ugliness, beauty and complexity and is surely to be one of the high points of 21^stcentury literature as the years roll on. But what was he going to give us next: more of the same or something totally different? It could have been anything for a writer with varying interests like Whitehead and his new book The Nickel Boys offers something new from him, but with the same attitude, eloquence and grandiosity his fans have come to expect from him. It reminded me a lot of the trajectory of the Coen Brothers after No Country for Old Men swept the Oscars, giving us the screwball Burn After Reading and the proudly esoteric and brooding A Serious Man. Whitehead has already accomplished more than most writers can do in a handful of lifetimes, and while this books is sure to have some detractors, I am not one of them. It is up there with his best books, a notch below John Henry Days and his preceding awards collector, but it might be his angriest and most cynical book, a tale of wronged young boys, victims of a system whose carelessness bred the monsters who tried, and succeeded a depressing number of times, to destroy them. Based on a harrowing true story of a reform school that operated in Florida, gives lurid headlines a tragic human face with Elwood, a young man at the dawn of the 60’s who finds himself the victim of despicable injustice and sentenced to hell, as he likes to think. We first meet him as he haunts the hotel where his Grandma works, barred from certain sections because of the color of his skin. He has a relatively stable life: college bound and inspired by the burgeoning Civil rights movements. But an offered car ride in a stolen vehicle gets him sent to The Nickel Academy, a place meant to shape young boys into men, but, as Elwood finds out on his first trip the “White House” is a hellish prison where abuse, physical and sexual, are the norm and where boys disappear “out back” and never return. It is a familiar story, but Whitehead adds layers of intrigue and subtext in the books slim 210 pages, like how injustice seems to follow Elwood (his first trip to the White House was because he tried to stop a fight), and his ambivalence toward the hopeful future he hears Dr. King preach about, given more credence and poignancy in the book’s shocking and brilliant epilogue, which I suspect will divide audiences. At times this is a hard book to read (and it seems to know that, spending scant time with the villains and focusing wholly on their victims), but it feels like an important book for our troubled times. Plus, it is a damn good book from a damn great writer. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Triangulum" by Masande Ntshanga

I’m beginning to see a pattern with the types of books Two Dollar Radio publishes. Thankfully, that is not a knock against them because what they put out is unique, memorable and always unlike anything else being put out, as is the case with South African writer Masande Ntshanga’s second novel Triangulum, a brilliant if overstuffed book that provides little in the way of substance but is really, really cool to look at.  It might be because I read it earlier this year, but there is a striking similarity between this novel and R. J. Campbell’s debut Found Audio, also published by Two Dollar Radio, if not in themes but at least in how the novel is layered House of Leaves style where the main story is at the center of a cursory story given to the reader first hand, so we are in fact the third layer of the story being told. Here, the story is told from the perspective of an astronomer in the middle of the 21^st century who has been given a manuscript of recordings and a memoir that has accurately predicted a series of events leading up to the end of the world. The majority of the book is the manuscript itself, detailing in audio recordings and journal entries the life of an unnamed woman, from her life as an adolescent, filled with sexual discovery and dread as a series of disappearances, including that of her mother, her romance with a mysterious woman named D. and her involvement with a terrorist group, all of which is accented by her mysterious vision of a triangular machine, whose significance is revealed in the book’s best part. As I said, there is very little of substance in the story, which seems drained of emotional impact, but it is never, not once, a boring read and filled with interesting ideas, cool scenes and mysteries that are more powerful left unsolved.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "The Border" by Don Winslow

I don’t much go in for book series’, with my reading habits making it hard to latch onto arcs over multiple books (I do not read more than one book by a certain author during a calendar year), but a few have made their way into my heart. Two come immediately to mind: one is Justin Cronin’s The Passage Trilogy and the other is Don Winslow’s drug epic, which I like to call the Art Keller Saga, beginning with The Power of the Dog, continuing with The Cartel and ending with this year’s The Border. I was entertained, horrified and deeply moved following the story of this flawed man who was there at the beginning of America’s misguided drug war and stuck with it as it evolved and morphed into a more ravenous and merciless monster with Adan Barrera as its head. If you have followed it too, you will enjoy this final part of it, the longest at a massive 716 pages, pulling from the headlines, narco hearsay and Winslow’s vivid and rhythmic imagination as Art Keller, exhausted, spent and pieces of his soul picked away like rotted flesh, still having hope that all of it will be worth it. It begins, like the other three with a prologue of things to come before stepping back to the end of the first novel where (SPOILERS) Keller walks out of the Guatemalan jungle, the Zetas finally defeated and Keller finally ridding the world of Barrera. After this, one of those who financed the covert mission to destroy the Zetas invites Keller to head up the DEA. He takes the job, knowing that even though Barrera is dead (despite the signs that crop up claiming he is alive) the vacuum left in the Sinaloa Cartel will be quickly filled, this time by the sons of those who started the whole bloody empire. And much like The Cartel, the book is not only focused on the story of Art Keller battling the cartels but stories completely separate from this blood feud, featuring a junkie undone by opioid addiction, an immigrant trying to avoid gang life as he makes his way from Guatemala to New York City and of course John Dennison, the pale horse candidate of the 2016 election, vowing to make America Great Again and build that wall, even though it is his own party who find themselves in the pocket of the cartels. Like all of Winslow’s books, it has a propulsive pace, with action scenes that feel authentic and over the top at the same time, under laid with a great passion for the subject ta hand; it’s ecstatic highs and horrid faults. If the Power of the Dog was about regret and The Cartel was about forgiveness, I’d surmise The Border is a book about hope, a hope that stems from the worst circumstances, a hope that stays a live and well lit when everything else seems to be falling apart. Winslow believes in this deeply, I think, and so do I. If this is the last book I will surely miss Art Keller and hope he has found some peace. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "You Know You Want This" by Kristen Roupenian

A book like Kristen Roupenian’s debut book of short stories, You Know You Want This, was published this year to great anticipation, with the story “Cat Person” being published in the right place (The New Yorker) and the right time (in the midst of the MeToo movement). I tend to steer clear of books with a clear political message, so when a friend bought me this book as a birthday present, I was both interested and a little hesitant as to whether it would live up to the hype or simply be an artifact of our current moment. Thankfully, I do not feel that is the case and found this book to be a little bit more complex than your average feminist screed. These are some of the creepiest stories I have come across in a while, reminding me of the work of Ottessa Moshfegh and Marina Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire but instead of Mexican history Roupenian is more preoccupied with how modern people fail to connect with one another, how things like paranoia, selfishness, our need to be loved and our overriding fear that we do not deserve such a thing take us down dark roads that we only realize lead to ruin and horror long when it is far too late. There is not a weak story here, although some I like more than others. The first story, “Bad Boy” about a couple who find that they get off watching their male friend drift in and out of a toxic relationship and can only have sex in the process of humiliating him is a good primer for what is too follow, the banal horror of the situation Roupenian deviously crafts only showing its ugly face when we are too far to go back. The stories take a welcome strange turn with “Sardines”, about a lonely divorced woman, her daughter and the results of her daughter’s birthday wish has echoes of Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities” in its grotesque ending. I also feel I have a differing view on a handful of stories than other readers might, such as “The Good Guy” about the inner thoughts of a man whose sexual shame, pitiful submissive nature and failure to be honest with himself turns him into a callous monster, “Biter” about a woman’s obsession with biting one of her male co-workers which has the book’s best ending and the aforementioned “Cat Person”. Far from casting women as victims or men as villains or worse, foils, Roupenian uses the aberrant relationships in these and the rest stories to interrogate modern romance, its focus on selfish need and instant gratification and frames it as the kind of horror story Shirley Jackson would right which makes you question every misinterpreted sexual encounter, every awkward first date, every affectionate gesture from the opposite sex as something sinister, masking one’s darker desires that they have talked themselves into justifying. This is the kind of incendiary, thought provoking and original short story collection that reinvigorates my love for this lost art form. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" by Marlon James

With the exception of one other title released earlier this year, no other book this year got me more excited than Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf, his follow up to A Brief History of Seven Killings, and by the end of the year, it is near impossible to think of something that will disappoint me more. In all fairness, that is partially my fault. I have never been one for high fantasy, still remaining unimpressed by both The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, (so much so that I have not read the two subsequent novels of the trilogy) and that is really the main inspiration for this book, placing that kind of high fantasy in an ancient and uniquely unfamiliar Africa, a very admirable quality this book maintains even as it wholly lost me multiple times through its 620 pages. The plot, which concerns a character named Tracker who is tasked to find a missing boy with a varied group of discontents, but really, it feels like a halfhearted reason for James to craft a world that is creative and original but also dense, obtuse and rarely if ever wanting to meet the reader halfway (at least it felt that way to this reader). What kept me going is James’ rich use of language and descriptions, which allows the reader to hear smell and even taste abstract ideas that seemingly float forth through thin air. Whether he is describing a knife cutting through flesh, a gory ritual involving humanoid creatures or an ancient delicacy that might or might not be a real thing, it is this book’s strongest point, especially if you are liable to get lost amongst the mountains of world building James seems a bit too eager to drop at the feet of his fans. 

Rating: 2/5

Review: "Bunk" by Kevin Young

My one thought throughout reading Kevin Young’s nonfiction book on the history of the American hoax, Bunk, was what his take would be on the Jussie Smollet case from earlier this year and how that would fit into his narrative. I will try to remain politically neutral and judge this book on its literary merits, but with something so caustic it is a little hard to avoid such discussion. I won’t go as far as to say that throughout the books 450 pages (and more than a 100 more of notes and index) that Young seems obsessed with the idea of the hoax as another tool of white supremacy, but he does so at the cost of a few other interesting ideas he could have covered. Throughout the book, whether he is discussing P. T. Barnum, the godfather of the American hoax, the many cases of him putting non-whites on display such as Joice Heth, George Washington’s 161 year old nurse or the first ever “moon landing” in the 1830s, he never tries to explain why these hoaxes were believed, putting the blame entirely on the perpetrator and never on the public who wholly bought into it. It sounds harsh but at times his got to answer seems to simply be racism (but then again, that might just be what this books is and I might as well be complaining that their isn’t enough cake recipes). But amongst the activism, there are some good sections, such as the one of fake memoirs where he talks about how James Frey and J. T. Leroy crafted fake stories (and in Leroy’s case, fake authors) to great success. But overall, the book is a little long and quite repetitive, with an eye roller of a coda where you know who is talked about with typically unoriginality. There is an interesting idea here in the history and psychology of the hoax, but again, I do not think that was the book Young was trying to write.

Rating: 3/5