I’ve been making good progress on my plan to read all of the shortlist books for the 2021 Tournament of Books! Here are my thoughts on an assorted half-dozen books from the list.
Title: Interior Chinatown Author: Charles Yu
Published: January 28, 2020
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 273
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: he's merely Generic Asian Man. Every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here too. . . but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the highest aspiration he can imagine for a Chinatown denizen. Or is it?
After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he's ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family, and what that means for him, in today's America.
An allegory of race and “the American Dream” that isn’t quite a novel, but is certainly fictional. I liked it! Interior Chinatown is smart and thought-provoking, and it’s definitely experimental. I don’t have much to say about, though, just because I don’t feel qualified to content on either the content or the style.
Recommended if you’re interested in: screenplays, the Asian American experience, unusual narratives, and/or award-winning fiction.
Title: Breasts and Eggs Author: Mieko Kawakami
Published: April 7, 2020
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 448
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:An earlier novella published in Japan with the same title focused on the female body, telling the story of three women: the thirty-year-old unmarried narrator, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter Midoriko. Unable to come to terms with her changed body after giving birth, Makiko becomes obsessed with the prospect of getting breast enhancement surgery. Meanwhile, her twelve-year-old daughter Midoriko is paralyzed by the fear of her oncoming puberty and finds herself unable to voice the vague, yet overwhelming anxieties associated with growing up. The narrator, who remains unnamed for most of the story, struggles with her own indeterminable identity of being neither a “daughter” nor a “mother.” Set over three stiflingly hot days in Tokyo, the book tells of a reunion of sorts, between two sisters, and the passage into womanhood of young Midoriko.
In this greatly expanded version, a second chapter in the story of the same women opens on another hot summer’s day ten years later. The narrator, single and childless, having reconciled herself with the idea of never marrying, nonetheless feels increasing anxiety about growing old alone and about never being a mother. In episodes that are as comical as they are revealing of deep yearning, she seeks direction from other women in her life—her mother, her grandmother, friends, as well as her sister—and only after dramatic and frequent changes of heart, decides in favor of artificial insemination. But this decision in a deeply conservative country in which women’s reproductive rights are under constant threat is not one that can be acted upon without great drama.
This was fine, but not anything special. You can definitely tell that the first half of this book was a self-contained short story and that the second half was added in later—the two parts have little to do with each other, and aside from featuring the same narrator, there’s precious little continuity between the two. I think perhaps Kawakami would have been better off separating the “Breasts” portion from the “Eggs” portion into two separate novels, because mashing them in together and then attempting to pass them off as a cohesive whole seems very forced. Separately, the two stories are okay enough (“Breasts” is better by a long shot, in my opinion), but combining them in this way was odd.
Either way, though, I found this to be a very middle-of-the-road story. Kawakami appears to be more focused on exploring the struggles of everyday Japanese women on the whole than in telling a specific story about her specific protagonist. The “Eggs” portion in particular felt more like a debate on childbearing and donor-assisted conception than a fictional story. This takes up about 2/3 of the text, and I really struggled with it because the insistence that heterosexual two-parent biological reproduction is the only ethical way to have children is absolutely repulsive to me, so I was never going to agree with the characters who spouted that ideology.
Overall, Breasts and Eggs had its moments of thought-provoking greatness, but it didn’t quite seem to come together in a larger sense.
Title: A Children's Bible Author: Lydia Millet
Published: May 12, 2020
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 224
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Contemptuous of their parents, who pass their days in a stupor of liquor, drugs, and sex, the children feel neglected and suffocated at the same time. When a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, the group’s ringleaders—including Eve, who narrates the story—decide to run away, leading the younger ones on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside.
As the scenes of devastation begin to mimic events in the dog-eared picture Bible carried around by her beloved little brother, Eve devotes herself to keeping him safe from harm.
This post-apocalyptic novel felt like a sequel/companion to Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind. Rich white people during and after the end times, surviving only on account of great privilege, but unable to adapt to a world where that privilege no longer protects them from struggles.
A Children’s Bible was surprisingly enjoyable (although I’ve always enjoyed a good apocalyptic story). Millet uses the first-person plural to narrate the societal fallout from climate disaster from the perspective of children, who are largely disgusted with their useless parents and are forced to take charge of survival on behalf of the entire group. As the title and cover copy suggest, the author uses a lot of Biblical imagery and motifs as she explores a post-flood landscape. The characters and their narrative style aren’t quite meant to be realistic—indeed, the entire book reads almost like a parable.
I really enjoyed this.
Title: Deacon King Kong Author: James McBride
Published: March 3, 2020
Genre(s): Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
Page Count: 371
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range.
In Deacon King Kong, McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood's Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.
As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters—caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York—overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion.
McBride is a good writer, and I loved the complexity in his characterization and his societal observations. However, this book seemed to go on and on forever (even though it’s not all that long in terms of page count). I felt like I spent 100 years reading this book. No idea why. The tone of the ending also seemed overly saccharine to me.
More generally, though, this is an interesting glimpse into life in the Brooklyn housing projects during the late 60s. There’s a lot of complexity and genuineness to the portrayal, and even characters who only appear for a few moments are given well-rounded personalities. Unlike many books that try to capitalize on tragedy and misfortune, McBride is able to find the humor in things.
Title: Telephone Author: Percival Everett
Published: May 5, 2020
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 224
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area—the geological history of a cave forty-four meters above the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon—he is a laconic man who plays chess with his daughter, trades puns with his wife while she does yoga, and dodges committee work at the college where he teaches.
After a field trip to the desert yields nothing more than a colleague with a tenure problem and a student with an unwelcome crush on him, Wells returns home to find his world crumbling. His daughter has lost her edge at chess, she has developed mysterious eye problems, and her memory has lost its grasp. Powerless in the face of his daughter’s slow deterioration, he finds a mysterious note asking for help tucked into the pocket of a jacket he’s ordered off eBay. Desperate for someone to save, he sets off to New Mexico in secret on a quixotic rescue mission.
It seems that the main appeal for Telephone is that it has a gimmick: there are three different “versions” of the text out in the world, each with various differences, large and small. These differences are intended to mimic the children’s game, telephone, where you sit in a circle and whisper a phrase from ear to ear until the final result is a garbled mess.
I did not read all three versions; personally, I am resentful of books that require “outside” context in order to enjoy them.
Standing on its own, whichever version of Telephone I did read was fine, but it felt jumbled. In a short, singular novel, there are at least three novel’s worth of plotlines. None of the separate stories felt fully fleshed out, and some sections of the book felt entirely isolated from others. I personally thought the end was unduly abrupt.
Telephone is well-written and fairly interesting, but I’m skeptical that it would have gotten the amount of critical attention it has received if not for the gimmick. And there’s nothing wrong with that—either the gimmick or the resulting buzz. I just…imagine picking this up at the library, with no idea that you’re meant to track down the two alternative editions of the text and compare them. That kind of situation does not lend itself well to casual reading, and so Telephone, to me, seems pretentious and elitist.
For good or for ill, this is the kind of novel that makes people gripe about how “inaccessible” literary fiction is.
Title: Shuggie Bain Author: Douglas Stuart
Published: February 11, 2020
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 430
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:In 1980s run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland, Thatcher's policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie Bain's mother, Agnes, walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good—her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamourous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor. But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, and she drains away the lion's share of each week's benefits—all the family has to live on—on cans of extra-strong lager hidden in handbags and poured into tea mugs.
A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction.
Shuggie Bain is impressive, in that it’s brilliantly crafted a snapshot of life for working-class Glaswegians under Thatcher. It’s a book that’s meant to convey a very particular time and place and person, and the author succeeds very well. I gather that this story, which in spite of the title is about Agnes Bain, was inspired by the author’s own experiences with his mother in the late 80s.
I really enjoyed the book, but I did feel that the author’s craft began to fall apart a bit towards the end. There were unnoted time skips that made it difficult to know how long a particular thing lasted, or how long it had been since X event. I also don’t particularly know what to make of the final chapter. The book felt incomplete, as if it were a movie that paused ten minutes too soon.
Shuggie Bain is not a pleasant book, I suppose, but there’s a sense of truth and authenticity to the overwhelming bleakness that makes it more palatable than many a “tragedy porn” literary novel I’ve struggled through.
