Our place in the universe: Martin Amis's "The Janitor on Mars"

Blinded, betrayed, and bereft, King Lear's Duke of Gloucester cries out, "As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods./They kill us for their sport."

That pretty well encapsulates the theme of Martin Amis's short story "The Janitor on Mars," appearing in his collection Heavy Water. In the middle of the 21st century, Earth is contacted by an alien intelligence, a Martian "janitor"; the term's full implication is unclear until late in the story, but our point of view character back on Earth is an actual janitor, a largely chaste pederast who works at a facility for at-risk youth . . . if I've understood the organization properly. Things are morally muddy, as consensual relationships, no matter how imbalanced in terms of power, are encouraged and protected. Someone has assaulted one of our main character's charges, however, and he presses the nearly speechless, victimized boy to give him a name. Meanwhile, all of Earth is riveted to TV screens showing the arrival of the human delegation at the appointed meeting place on Mars. It's a juxtaposition that shouldn't work, in part because the science fiction aspect digs deeper and deeper—and for a sizable portion of the narrative—into certain "hard" SF premises having to do with the history and purposes of powerful sentient species. Just when you think the story can't get more grim, it takes another step down its dark path, unrelenting in the logic that governs its universe. Our Earth janitor, for his part, wants to protect one damaged boy from the terrible encounter the whole world is watching.

The story is rich with mordant humor as well as science fictional ideas, and it's deeply humane as well, despite the hopeless framework. What connects the narratives on Earth and in the heavens are the story's ideas about power. Perhaps there is something that makes us stand out against the dark infinitudes, and perhaps, Amis posits, if it's our frailty and weakness, then that may be a good thing.

Oh, it's a trilogy: THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM, Liu Cixin

 . . . or, rather, if you're looking for it on Amazon or in a bookstore, it's by Cixin Liu.

The Three-Body Problem combines politics, international skulduggery, serious physics, computer gaming, and a first-contact event in ways that alternate between creative and clunky. Not only the plot, but the characters and the writing, too, shift from profundity to something that reads like middle-school fan fiction. A penultimate section of the book, containing information that no one in the book should reasonably possess, seems to have been separately imagined and composed, a physics-laden, high-minded space opera that might have been the seed for the rest of the novel . . . or not.

If you're an SF reader, you'll certainly enjoy much of the book, which throws together a host of ideas and which, at least to this layperson, takes its science seriously. That it is a work originally in Chinese, planted in a culture unfamiliar to most American readers, gives it a refreshingly unfamiliar shape—mostly. The Cultural Revolution gives impetus to some characters' actions, but some characters seem to have walked out of Hollywood central casting. Several thought-provoking concepts—political, moral, ecological—lie at the heart of the story, but several truly dumb ideas also propel the plot. Some dialogue is fine, but some is unspeakably bad, the kind of thing one imagines hearing in Communist propaganda films—long-winded, discursive speech no one would say and no one would tolerate hearing. The game that's so important to the novel—a vivid world that fails to prosper in its chaotic three-sun system—doesn't coherently connect with the larger story (obviously, the writer thinks it does, but I found it unconvincing) and also proves disappointing by being more literal than metaphorical in its purposes.

The central character, a woman who, as a young girl, saw her physicist father killed for the sake of the revolution, is compelling, though she leaves the stage quite often, and the characters who displace her never take on the same heft.

The first book in a trilogy (I didn't know this until I'd finished it), the novel can nevertheless stand on its own—unless you're hoping the author is aiming for a happier ending in the long run.

Winningly full: Harkaway's TIGERMAN

A joy.

Tigerman's hero is straight from Graham Greene (say, The Comedians or The Heart of the Matter): profoundly engaged with his own interior life, posted to a spot on the map that his British mind finds impossible to comprehend, the protagonist can't see himself as a hero, but he has to rise to the occasion for pressing moral reasons. Unlike a Greene character, however, Nick Harkaway's Lester Ferris is a man who must, in these times, act boldly in the physical world. He cannot change things for the better through an ambiguous gesture or by speaking the truth or a lie at a given moment; rather, he must, while also using such diplomatic means to achieve his ends, be what he frequently terms "a sergeant," a man who knows how much force to apply when encountering resistance as well as when to yield to stronger forces.

The less said about the plot, the better, but I'll provide this: on a dying, lawless island off the African coast, Sergeant Ferris's friendship with a wickedly smart young boy drives Ferris to build a counter-narrative to the failing world around him. Harkaway provides vivid depictions of the characters we truly need to know; it's an uncluttered novel because Ferris's world is so interior, unlike the wild island whose recesses and people he has mostly come to know through departures and destruction. The story feels utterly modern—through both the openly darker politics of the post-9/11 world and the internet-and-comic-lingo-savvy boy who shadows Ferris— but remains moored, texturally, in the recent British post-colonial past. Harkaway toys with the responsibilities and behaviors of lost empires, all the while providing proof that there's still room for the kinds of heroic thinking that formed—and malformed—those empires. Indeed, the narrative twines life and death about each other in a hug that is like the hugs that form the novel's central motif: sometimes people reach hesitantly for each other; a few times, a hug is suggested but not given; at key moments, the hug is a desperate grasping after life.

And how long should we hold on to what must pass into oblivion?

Smart and exciting, and featuring that rarity, a third act that pays off in every way, never neglecting the themes it has set in motion, Tigerman is, in its words, deeds, and deeply felt passions, a joy.

Overview review: The Old Man stories

Writer and Cambridge-dweller Jay O'Connell (author of Dystopian Love) gives a nice overview of my in-process Old Man series here.

I've been poking and prodding at the final story, but I've also been working on an unrelated piece of short fiction. More news soon.

Bill

Free Fiction

Till 5/25, "Vox ex Machina" (Asimov's, Dec. 2013) and "A Crisis for Mr. Lion" (Zoetrope: All-Story prize-winner, 2006) are free (and together).

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JX0EFQS

And here's another story

"Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key," the fourth story in my Old Man series, recently published in Asimov's Science Fiction, is now available as an e-book via Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K6ZF8FQ

More stories via Kindle

I have joined together two stories that, really, have no business being together . . . except that I wrote them both. "Vox ex Machina," which ran in the Dec. 2013 Asimov's, and "A Crisis for Mr. Lion," which won the 2006 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Award, are for sale (less than a buck!) via Amazon as one e-book. I believe Amazon Prime users may "borrow" them for free, but perhaps I've misunderstood something about the process.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JX0EFQS

Reviews of "Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key"

I've received several thoughtful personal notes about the story; I thought I'd post here the links to some online reviews.

Tangent Online

Singular Points

SteveReads

Regarding "Each in His Prison" in the new Asimov's

The fourth story in my "Old Man" series is in the April/May 2014 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, on shelves this week.

"Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key" is a direct sequel to "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down," my Doc Savage/pulp hero homage that appeared in Asimov's in 2010. This latest story relies on not only the first "Old Man" tale but also 2011's "Clockworks," which takes place in 1962, and 2012's "Unearthed," which takes place in 1925. (All three stories appeared in Asimov's and are available in e-format via Amazon.) Readers will learn what has become of the Old Man in the five years since "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" and will join a "gifted" young lieutenant who wants to solve the dangerous puzzles surrounding the Old Man. The story also sets up readers for a final tale, "The World Will Be the World Again," coming in the not-too-distant future. (I'm working on it! I'm working on it!)

I appreciate readers' continuing (and new!) interest in these tales. Let me know what you think of these stories.

Going Too Far: PILGRIM'S WILDERNESS and TRANSCENDENTAL

Last week I read two books. One book took me someplace I'd never been, provided rich descriptions of a strange world, and delved into a history of discomfiting beliefs and beings. The other book was science fiction.

Tom Kizzia's Pilgrim's Wilderness is stunningly good. A non-fiction account of a dominating and demon-haunted family patriarch who takes his wife and 14 (later 15) children into the Alaskan wilds, the book is written with such energy, it feels novelistic—but not in the way of some fake suspenser masquerading as nonfiction, like The Hot Zone. The book is novelistic in style—employing rich language to provide vivid descriptions—and in structure, shifting through time according to the demands of the narrative. To say much about what happens is to spoil some of the book's surprises. Suffice it to say that "Mr. Pilgrim's" story begins in a past cluttered with privilege, tragedy, and unexpected connections. It would end with deprivation, tragedy, and horror. What the man did to his family makes for a disturbing tale, but reporter Kizzia also wants us to see how people responded to "Pilgrim," how communities struggled to both accommodate the varying impressions the man purveyed while also being mindful of his children.

Some of the actors have much to answer for, as their own paranoid politics fuel perspectives just as damaged as Pilgrim's. But Kizzia is evenhanded in treating both the people of the town of McCarthy (and other human developments through which the family passed) and the U.S. government, which in some ways mishandles the Alaskan wilderness and the people who live there. The author has a dog in the fight, too, as he and his wife (now deceased) had constructed a cabin in the region, drawn by the beauty and isolation. This is an American story. People do sometimes want to be left alone. Yet sometimes people only say they want to be left alone. Some people head into isolation for reasons that may not be isolating, but binding, as they look for connections amidst the vast emptiness. And some people are hiding. Like many stories of the American wilderness, it's a story of survival—and as in many stories of survival, the most dangerous animal is human.

Read Pilgrim's Wilderness.

The book was such a dramatic contrast to James Gunn's deeply disappointing Transcendental, about which the less said, the better. The blurbs that hawk its connections to Chaucer are disingenuous: there's a ship named the Geoffrey and some aliens tell stories on the way to wherever-they're-going, but beyond those superficial nods (and occasional other tossed-off literary hiccups), there's no deeper commitment to the types of wild stories told by Chaucer's pilgrims; in fact, all of the stories are similar, the voices are similar, and the aliens weirdly lean toward thinking that, annoying as humans are, maybe their systems of culture and government are better, with the elephant-type creature going so far as to declare that maybe humans, with their monogamy, have the right idea. Almost nothing happens in the novel; "transcendence" itself doesn't seem especially transcendental, once it's explained (so the final let-down isn't much of a surprise), and the novel appears to be a set-up for a series of books . . . unless Gunn truly intended for this to be merely a shaggy dog tale.

Next "Old Man" story

The next story in my "Old Man" sequence, "Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key," will come out in the April/May 2014 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction (which, due to the magic of magazine time travel, will be available beginning at the end of February).

The previous stories in the sequence ("Helping Them Take the Old Man Down," "Clockworks," and "Unearthed") continue to be available via Amazon.

The final story, "The World Will Be the World Again," is still being written.

Privacy Lost: Dave Eggers's THE CIRCLE

Why is this book typeset in “ragged right” rather than “justified”? Beats me. Mostly, it’s not noticeable, but at times, it’s sloppily done, with large gaps on the right that would easily accommodate the next word, and tremendous inconsistency with regard to hyphenation. Why mention it? It’s an odd choice that, to some readers, will stand out; also, in a book so concerned with technological innovation, the nefarious uses of technology, and the thoughtlessness with which some changes are embraced, the typesetting decision looks like what Eggers warns against: sloppy thinking in service to some ideal.

I hadn’t finished an Eggers novel before this one; I read perhaps a quarter of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius before losing interest. This novel does have a page-turning quality to it—enough of a narrative drive is generated, once you’re past the slow and uncompelling opening scenes—so one can move through it pretty quickly. With the exception of a few scenes in which descriptive writing takes over (often in ways that feel force-fed with symbolism and significance), the story is carried by dialogue. It’s not especially good dialogue. Everyone has the same voice, and only one character ever asks the questions an intelligent reader would ask. The main character is not only charmless, she’s a cypher. It’s possible that that’s what Eggers intends, given how she never makes a single good decision. (I’m not sure I’ve read another novel of which I could say that of the main character; I think even Humbert Humbert probably makes a few good decisions, or at least defensible ones.) This quality of hers may be why she’s hired, promoted, and successful.

In short: Mae is brought in, via an old friend, Annie, to work for The Circle, a Google/Facebook stand-in that has a cool campus in California and outsized ambitions to change the world using online technology. Mae quickly learns that one doesn’t merely work for The Circle; rather, one joins a community—a community that doesn’t like being snubbed and that wants to know everything about her. That, of course, becomes the tension-generating pivot around which the story turns, though Eggers’s handling of the technology isn’t convincing (Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore does a better job of leaping several minutes into the future by way of Google while also feeling more grounded in tech-type thinking). There’s an interesting question at the heart of this book about knowing and being known, but the big moments are telegraphed, the insights are blunt, and the book’s set-up is so gradual and surface-level, it felt to me as if Eggers needed to rethink at least the opening in light of where he was going to take the character, shaping the narrative more subtly.

Fifty years ago, or even twenty, this novel would be a satire. For their times, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World were satires, taking real things to their next level as a way of critiquing them. This book, at this time, can’t find anything to satirize. Mostly, Eggers describes things as they already are. The sole satirical element, to my eyes, was the proliferation of screens on our protagonist’s desk. “No one told you about monitoring your third screen? Here,”—and another computer screen is hauled within view. The way in which information is thuddingly and incongruously dropped into our protagonist’s lap seems the stuff of comedy, but it comes across as flat, especially since Mae simply yields to whatever is thrown at her.

I did enjoy the novel, but it’s not an especially well-crafted thing. Fittingly, it seems to be getting the critical praise it was crowd-designed to earn, but I was happy to see that citizen reviewers weren’t quite so impressed. It’s light entertainment with some half-considered ideas and no real surprises.

Long-Distance Romance: Burroughs's A PRINCESS OF MARS

As if to prove my lack of pulp and SF cred: I had not read this book before.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first John Carter adventure, A Princess of Mars was originally serialized as Under the Moons of Mars. I prefer that more evocative title (the moons being an oft-referenced motif in the story), though in fact, A Princess of Mars suits the resulting story better—and identifies one of the novel’s two chief faults.

The tale starts well enough, and I was familiar with the beginning (or at least its most necessary elements) from the Marvel Comics adaptation from the 1970s. Trapped in a cave by a group of hostile Apache, one-time Confederate officer John Carter steps out of his body and is transported to the planet Mars. Burroughs does a wonderful job setting up his premise, providing teasing bits of information in advance, creating tense scenes, and capturing our hero’s confusion at each turn of events. Then there’s the implied subtext of the novel, with the Native/white man conflict in the U.S. providing a lead-in to warring species on Mars learning to cooperate through John Carter’s intervention (though largely they cooperate in slaughtering other peoples). Though the green, gigantic, tusked, four-armed Martians and the red-skinned, human-like Martians seem to each contain components of Native Americans, the green folks get the sorry end of the comparison, with their communal rearing of children, pragmatic dispatching of the disabled, and their warlike ways seen as barbaric in contrast with the culture of the red Martians, who only make war when they need to. However, by the time the book wraps up, it becomes evident that the culture is not its people, and green Martians aren’t innately bad, just badly led. I’m sure someone’s written a dissertation on how ERB distributes good and bad traits among the various Martian peoples.

I have no idea what the idea is behind the white Martian apes, who, like the green Martians, claim squatters’ rights in the ancient abandoned cities but only show up when the plot requires it.

The story’s main weaknesses are two: the Dejah Thoris thread, and the shaggy construction of the novel’s second half. Once the beautiful Dejah Thoris enters the narrative, John Carter is in love; not a terribly well-defined character prior to this, he now becomes focused on the source of his adoration, and thus his mood shifts depending on his reading of the moods of his beloved. It’s exhausting and not terribly interesting, and Burroughs withholds information so that he can provide us with some late-story entanglements that could have easily been avoided. Also, though the princess gets some bold speeches to indicate her self-regard, she’s a less interesting character than Carter—and somewhat petty emotionally. (This is repaired in the 2012 film version, though the movie was lumbered with a poor choice for its lead and a jumpy narrative.)

There comes a point where the story lapses fully into pulpiness in the style of A.E. Van Vogt’s Slan, with psychic powers that come and go, convenient coincidences in every scene, and the clear case of a writer merely chattering away (and sending his characters lurching about) until he’s filled his word quota. Certain fight scenes which seem crucial get rushed as if Burroughs lost interest, while other moments drag out as he works to tie up the many narrative threads. The story does become vivid again near the end, setting up the reader marvelously for further adventures and intentionally leaving several elements unexplained and unresolved.

All-in-all, a mixed bag, but worth it for the premise, the sporadic strong scenes, and the many flights of invention.

Asimov's and the Old Man stories

My newest story in Asimov's Science Fiction, "Vox ex Machina," is a stand-alone tale that only exists because, in the real world, the guys who built the Philip K. Dick "android" lost the thing's head. Commence fiction.

My next story in the "Old Man" sequence, "Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key," will appear in the April/May issue of Asimov's, which comes out in February. The previous stories in the sequence continue (for now) to be available via Amazon for Kindle and the Kindle app. (Here's hoping that once I write the fifth and final story, "The World Will Be the World Again," someone will assemble all five stories between two covers.)

Though the stories jump around chronologically, they should be read in the order in which they were written: "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down," "Clockworks," and "Unearthed," which take place in 2001/2, 1962, and 1925, respectively. The new story takes place in 2006. As for the final story . . . you'll see.

Mirror Recognition: Karen Joy Fowler's WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES

If only there were a way to review—or even be aware of—Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves without knowing the premise that drives the story, which the narrator withholds for more chapters than I had thought likely. I tried to read the book that way, taking in its story without seeing it altered by what I knew was coming. Read that way, however, the story isn't particularly engaging. There's a cleverness to the narrative voice, and the events move smoothly, but none of the early characters felt vivid or realized enough for me to even recognize them when they reappeared later in the novel, and, lacking the novel's central organizing problem, the early events sound too much like a standard family drama, lacking a sense that some great doom had befallen everyone, which is what would have helped give the first section some weight.

What's initially untold, though certainly known by most readers, is that the narrator, Rosemary, was, for the first five years of her life, raised alongside Fern, a chimpanzee; Fern was her sister, in some ways her twin, and Fern's disappearance from the narrator's life, and from the life of her family, has left damage, anger, and a hole no one will mention. We find Rosemary in college now, dealing with both memories and suppressed memories of Fern, unsettling new relationships, and the possible reappearance of her brother, who disappeared some years ago on—she believes—a quest to rescue Fern from who-knows-where.

There's much in this novel that is wonderful. Often I paused to marvel at or reflect on certain clever lines, philosophical queries, or scientific observations. The novel is concerned with how we see ourselves and how others see us, and, through Rosemary's first-person narration, we appreciate how little we know of the minds of others or even our own mind and motivations. The story's arc is a fine one, resolving well even while forcing new questions on us, but I often felt that the most interesting aspects weren't allowed room to completely develop. I recognize Fowler's desire to use the secondary characters to delve—at more oblique angles—into the same questions the central relationship delves into, but those efforts felt schematic to me. Even Rosemary and Fern seem too often at arm's-length. Since Rosemary's only memories of Fern are (conveniently) from the time before we tend to form solid memories, the impressionistic (though often precisely described) presence of Fern is understandable, but even when brought close, Fern slips away. (I never felt I could pin down the parents either.) All of this can be justified as serving the question, "Can a human truly know a non-human animal?" but I wanted something more. Perhaps the story felt too incredible, no matter how Fowler worked to keep it grounded in our world—and her delay in talking about Rosemary may have added to that sense that Fern was never completely there.

The novel also moves into practical areas beyond the "merely" philosophical, asking exactly why we should "have dominion" over all the non-speaking animals of the world, and asking, too, what we ought to be doing to save them from our dominion. While I liked that the novel moved in that direction, it felt like an idea that should have saturated the story from its first moments, regardless of the persistent naiveté of the narrator.

The title, by the way, is perfect, as you'll see.

How to Say What Hurts: D.T. Max's bio of David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace has given me some great reading experiences as well as pieces I was compelled to put down and a towering novel I can't convince myself to pick up. (In addition, I enjoying his video and print interviews.) I love his essay on David Lynch, a piece that expresses so well ideas I'd sensed but which had, until that essay, remained inchoate. "Good Old Neon" is a marvelous short story—though, sadly, part of what makes it compelling for me is that I only read it after his death, and it's a story of a suicide. I find the use of footnotes maddening in some of his work, and the heavily footnoted structure (as well as the sheer length and openly professed irresolvedness) of Infinite Jest has kept me from feeling much more than mild curiosity about that novel.

I do feel some personal connection to Wallace. He was, like me, a child of 1962. Like me, he watched way too much television as a kid. He spent some time in Syracuse, where I live, and I'm pretty sure I met him once when he attended by (now defunct) parish church. As a writer—and as a much smarter person than I am—his influences and areas of interest bore little resemblance to mine, though what he wanted from his fiction, if Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, the biography by D.T. Max, is to be believed, was moral consequence, work that mattered because it affected the reader (though he struggled with the tension between "entertaining" the reader and expecting the reader to work).

What I enjoyed about Max's work was hearing how Wallace struggled to find ways through his fiction (less through his nonfiction, it seems to me) to express his deepest hopes and anxieties. What one really needs to see, perhaps, is less the finished works than all the false starts and crumpled pages Max mentions. How did Wallace arrive at that casual-yet-erudite pose in his writing or the piled-on conjunctions at the start of a sentence. By the time we see those moves, Wallace has them figured out and can explain their purpose. Such an exploration would require a different sort of volume, one of pure literary investigation (assuming early drafts of anything survive).

This volume spends a lot of time on Wallace's personal life. Arguably, the information about relationships—with humans, dogs, and harmful substances—is instructive: we see how the relationships inform the fiction and how, problematically, the relationships are one more element of an addictive personality that can's focus enough to produce the fiction. (Wallace isn't an especially slow writer, I think, but given that, when he's cooking, his output is enormous, he ends up with less to show for his years on earth than someone who produces consistently and doggedly, or someone who is more sure of what he means to produce. He does go through long periods in which nothing emerges, even drafts—unless I've misunderstood Max's characterization of those times.) These elements of Wallace's life are so intertwined, it's hard to imagine a successful literary biography of the man that didn't attempt to address Wallace's personal life. His successes and struggles as a teacher of writing were, though, worth more to this reader: most writers teach, and Wallace went at teaching with seriousness and joy, giving his all to the process. Even so, Dix quotes a comment from a Charlie Rose interview that had, when I saw the interview, also stood out to me: teachers learn from their teaching, probably learning more than they impart, but after two or three years, that effect is diminished or halted altogether. I don't think that's true, but for a mind like Wallace's—restless, brilliant, dissatisfied—I can see how even doing this important thing well loses its charm once it's been (as he would have seen it) "mastered."

Such restlessness informed Wallace's approach to fiction as well. Better that, better a dissatisfaction with how one lives and how one writes than the spiritual death that accompanies satisfaction. Unfortunately, Wallace's mental health issues led him to conclude that suicide was the only solution to the profound suffering that left his mind unable to think its way clear. Before that, Max does give readers a sense of Wallace's gifts and his questing spirit—but the book in toto left me unhappy with the project and wanting to read (and talk to) Wallace rather than read his post mortem.

Everyone's damaged: Iain Banks's THE WASP FACTORY

I tried an Iain Banks novel a few years ago, Matter, one of the Culture novels from Banks's SF side. I didn't get far, as I don't care for "court" dramas if they aren't Shakespearean, and a glance at the glossary at the book's rear told me I had a lot of learning to do if I was going to fully appreciate the book's world. As this is one of the elements that keeps me from enjoying Tolkien, a directory to another world didn't entice me.

With Banks's death two months ago, I wanted to give this respected writer another try, so I went with The Wasp Factory, his first novel, a sample of his non-SF side (though the book has a fantastical feel).

This book is a compelling narrative that works for most of its length, has some ragged moments near the end, then makes the mistake at the very end of explaining the message it wants you to have.

Frank Cauldhame was maimed in a way we only have fully explained several chapters into this short novel—though even then, we have to wait for an even fuller explanation. His maiming doesn't seem, at first, connected to the other events of the novel: his odd treatment by this father; the insanity of his brother, who, escaped from a mental institution, is headed home; his own history of violence; the mechanisms and charms by which he holds his world together. All of these elements are interconnected more than they first appear, though some of the connections require a fantastical leap—which is fine, given the narrator's tone. Some components of the story don't feel believable—a rabbit attack which turns into a mini-war stands out, though some of the murders seem to lack logistical logic—but everything and everyone in the novel is so damaged, the quirky plot doesn't come off as quite so unhinged as it otherwise might.

The plot moves between Frank's strange daily activities( enacting his bloody personal religion on his island home, playing by himself on the dunes, getting drunk with a buddy), his preparations for the arrival of his AWOL brother, and the horrifying bits of backstory with which Frank gifts us. We know it's all heading toward a bad scene. In fact, what's odd is how Frank isn't that worried about his brother's potential for chaos. Even when he has truly disturbing phone conversations with Eric, Frank insists that he loves his brother and wants to see him. I don't quite buy it. I also don't buy the relationship with his dwarfish drinking buddy, as Frank comes off as an adolescent; Banks never makes us feel that Frank is of age, and the scenes of him in a bar seem to involve another character.

Frank's father knows that Eric has escaped, but he doesn't know Frank is in touch with him. The obvious crisis toward which the book moves also turns out to move the novel into the foggy past, finally bringing clarity to the event that—in some ways, but not all—triggered everything terrible that would follow.

It's a fine first novel, captivatingly told, though grim going and, again, not managed smoothly at the end.

Unrequited and Requited: Faulkner's THE MANSION

William Faulkner wraps up the Snopes trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion) by veering from low comedy to stirring romance to prison revenge tale in a novel that covers more ground (literally and figuratively) than the previous novels. As with the other books, the events all circle around—when they do not directly address—the rise of Flem Snopes from his low-born station in life to his success as a wealthy bank president and landowner. Snopes himself appears less often in this final novel, but his presence is felt; he has withdrawn into his mansion, but his crafty machinations have affected every character's life, often in profound ways.

The novel takes some time to get going, by my lights, as Faulkner revisits events from the previous novels in circular, recursive form, making this book stall for quite some time. Aside from that slow start, the novel moves adeptly to cover a host of characters, all of whom are heading for a mutual resolution of plot and theme.

The novel's comedic bits work well, and the source of much of the humor throughout is our old friend V.K. Ratliff, at the top of his form here after a weak showing in the second novel. Ratliff's voice is compelling when he takes on the narrative, but also he's allowed to be the heroic figure he seemed set to be back in The Hamlet. He's never quite ahead of Flem Snopes, of course, whose sheer singlemindedness about money and quality of rapacious acquisition make him hard to beat, but he's typically ahead of Faulkner's mock romantic figure, attorney Gavin Stevens. Ratliff's visit to New York City (to attend a wedding we don't get to see) is both hilarious and touching, as this self-sufficient man who handles himself well in any situation is knocked down by the notion of spending 75 dollars on a tie.

Gavin Stevens continues to be a dependable knight, (almost) always sure to do the noble thing, sacrificing his happiness for obscure reasons, remaining absurdly chaste in his relationship with Linda Snopes, daughter of the mythic Eula Snopes from the preceding novels. His quasi-romance is full of both comedy and truly heartbreaking moments, but Faulkner works this story—which consumes much of the narrative—into the overarching tale of vengeance against Flem (whose refusal to act and then commitment to action results in a cousin spending 38 years in jail).

Along the way, we meet a host of amazing side characters, all of them engaged in quests of one kind or another. Faulkner sees something to praise in most of them, as they all resist the pull of the earth (there's a beautiful late passage concerning this) in order to somehow make their mark.

Everything's black and white: Cormac McCarthy's THE SUNSET LIMITED

Cormac McCarthy's "novel in dramatic form" (so says the cover), The Sunset Limited, leans toward allegory in its pas de deux of a black ex-con and white professor hashing out "to be or not to be," but it remains too grounded in its particulars, and too invested in its arguments, to go wholly in that direction. Instead it's an argument fraught—or overwrought—with significance, in which one man's life comes to represent, in its particularities, the human predicament as a whole.

Rather than give these characters names, McCarthy labels the men "Black" and "White." It's a decision that implies something about each character's cultural narrative, though that's a problematic road, requiring, as it does, broad assumptions about these cultural types that, while aiming to load them with significance, strips them of individuality. The black man is poor, uneducated, a former convict, a man who has known and done violence, a reformed soul, and a reader of but one book, the Bible. The white man is a college professor of whose background we know even less—he's not only white, he's pallid, character-wise—save that he has reached a nihilistic conclusion about life and made what seems to him to be the obvious choice, to jump in front of a train (the titular "Sunset Limited"). The black man, having appeared from nowhere on the trail platform, somehow "catches" and rescues the white man and transports him back to his below-humble abode, a lair that, we are told, is frequented by society's rejects. McCarthy's labeling of the characters "Black" and "White," however, doesn't quite satisfy his need to stereotype them, so in the stage directions, the white man is "the professor" and the black man is "the black." Why McCarthy didn't see this as problematic phrasing baffles me, and suggests that, shrewd as the dialogue is, his ear was tin for at least this decision. Additionally, the labeling suggests, in its sheer American-ness, that the piece will have something more to say about race, but that's not a direction the work goes.

The black man's dialogue is the gem in this work. Easy to hear, richly phrased, full of life and intent, the language shifts in tone as the man works every rhetorical trick to convince the white man to live. Much of this circles around an argument for God . . . maybe. Though White is convinced that Black is trying to convert him to religion in order to save him, Black doesn't argue that belief in God is a necessity in order to see value in life. The finest argument in "the trick bag" is likely (and I assume McCarthy agrees with this) the one he doesn't explicitly make: in a discussion of cooking, Black gets White to see that, though the poor have castoff ingredients with which to work, the meal becomes a thing of both sustenance and joy because the poor "improvise." What White lacks is the necessary empathy to see that other people keep living not because they've figured things out nor because they refuse to see their own suffering but because, moment to moment, they make do with what that universe makes available.

The ending wasn't completely satisfying, mostly because it let me down rhetorically rather than in its expression of ideas. The characters just seem to run out of room to negotiate and run out of energy for each other.

Dead or Undead: Colson Whitehead's ZONE ONE

Had I known going into Colson Whitehead's "zombie novel," Zone One, that the story took place over only three days, I'd have seen the first third of the book as less resistant to the novel form and more as the kind of tight narrative, dense with delineated or implied backstory, that makes something like The Great Gatsby or On Chesil Beach so effective. As the plot crept forward in the early going, I knew why some online reviewers had complained about the book, though I thought, regardless, it was excellent and riveting. How could those reviewers not, once they'd reached the latter part of the novel, seen the purpose in the structure? I suppose they were expecting something with more "beats," a crisis-to-crisis heartbeat-accelerator in standard "genre" mode.

For my money, this novel got under my skin more than a typical horror narrative, and it's largely due to how little time Whitehead spends on "zombie attacks." What takes their place? 1) Anxiety about what might be behind any door. Whitehead hits us with that right away. 2) A deep history. Our protagonist, nicknamed (and never named) Mark Spitz, though now part of a civilian sweeper team prowling Manhattan, has seen, engaged in, and fled from any number of zombie attacks, and the farther into the book we proceed, the more time we spend in scenarios in which he's awaiting those engagements, so that the past becomes more horror-filled than his present—while also portending something terrible for the narrative's arc. 3) How the past overlays the present. Every moment sends Mark Spitz into his past. How can it not? The undead people look like people he's known. The city is a place where he's spent time. Some zombies don't attack, but remain stuck in some repetitive behavior, as if they were sealed in nostalgia for a particular moment, and those moments look like moments Mark Spitz has known. This is a haunted world, but it's haunted by the living and inhabited by the dead.

The last conceit is part of a larger schema in which things are flipped on their heads. The world we knew is dead, the undead now move through that world, but did we progress through it any more meaningfully? While this may seem an obvious and merely cynical modern commentary on the circular and purposeless nature of much human behavior, Whitehead's expressive writing and trenchant observations make it a point he never exhausts, though he moves from subtle to explicit comparisons later in the book in a way that doesn't help his point. The writing itself is cleverly saturated with words that take on double meanings or horror-inflected implications. Thus, for example, when someone "shuffles" off to work, the "shuffle" of a zombie is nodded toward.

Mark Spitz himself is a sign of this upside-down world. We hear only rather late in the novel that he's black, and the character observes that notions of race have, if not collapsed, at least become less relevant, even though one of his colleagues, he thinks, surely knows the signifiers for every stereotype. Ironically nicknamed for the white champion swimmer, Mark Spitz is a man who "dog-paddles" through life. He is successful in this new world because he doesn't stand out—and because he wasted so much time watching horror movies, playing first-person-shooter video games, and imagining himself in post-apocalyptic adventures. Now he's in one, more fully alive than in life, living out a Friday-to-Sunday reversal of the Resurrection narrative.

Highly literate, rich in detail, and existentially haunting, Whitehead's novel might be seen as another look at the milieu of Camus' The Plague. There, too, people move through life without real purpose, and the plague gives them purpose because they become aware of death's imminence. But whereas Camus' people are locked inside the walls of Oran with the plague, Whitehead's people imagine themselves to have sealed off the plague behind stone walls. In either case, the disease proves inescapable.