THREE GAY-MALE NOVELS TO READ OVER MEMORIAL DAY

MEMORIAL
BRYAN WASHINGTON
Riverhead Books
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A funny, sexy, profound dramedy about two young people at a crossroads in their relationship and the limits of love.

Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black day care teacher, and they've been together for a few years—good years—but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other.

But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Without Mike's immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it.

Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they've ever known. And just maybe they'll all be okay in the end. Memorial is a funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the limits of love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

“There's this phenomenon that you'll get sometimes - but not too often, if you're lucky - where someone you think you know says something about your gayness that you weren't expecting at all. Ben called it a tiny earthquake. I don't think he was wrong. You're destabilized, is the point. How much just depends on where the quake originated, the fault lines.”

If your memory needs refreshing, my 2019 almost-perfect review of LOT: STORIES will refresh your memories as to my entirely positive opinion of Author Washington's story-crafting chops.

This novel is a downer to read, I'm afraid. It is very much about the pain of loving another, and discovering that it's never *just* about Love. The best, most beautiful moments in the book are also deeply sad ones. And, while that's okay, it's a bit wearing on the nerves.

Nothing should detract from your eagerness to read the story, just be sure it suits your personal mood. The fact that the men in this story are AAPI and Black, nary a white man to be found, should spur white gay men to read it: Author Washington is a Person of Color, and is drawing your attention to the universality of learning to make a life as a gay man in a world that doesn't always know it doesn't like us; then add the very real prejudices of ethnicity, body image issues, HIV status...it's actually a damn funny book a good bit of the time, and that laundry list wouldn't make you think I thought so.

Break out of your mental ghetto and live a major moment in the family life of men like you, only different.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

MURMUR
WILL EAVES
Bellevue Literary Press
$16.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In Murmur, a hallucinatory masterwork, Will Eaves invites us into the brilliant mind of Alec Pryor, a character inspired by Alan Turing. Turing, father of artificial intelligence and pioneer of radical new techniques to break the Nazi Enigma cipher during World War II, was later persecuted by the British state for “gross indecency with another male” and forced to undergo chemical castration. Set during the devastating period before Turing’s suicide, Murmur evokes an extraordinary life, the beauty and sorrows of love, and the nature of consciousness.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME AN ARC IN 2018. THANKS!

Winner of the 2019 WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE!

My Review: First, read this:

The problem with disguising or encrypting is that the original still exists. One has doubled the information, not made it less sensitive. Something has happened to it, but the semantic loaf persists behind a mask, a veil, a foreign accent, new papers, breasts etc., and really the only thing to do about that, if you’re still anxious, is to remove both bits of information—the original and the encryption—altogether.

That quote should tell you if this trip is one you wish to take. Eaves's narrative choices are all right there, as is the chosen PoV of third-person limited. From the chapter-opening quotes selected from Turing's voluminous writings to the damning if underplayed social commentary, the whole is of a piece and gleams like the gem it is.

So why only four stars? Because it's been fictionalized, and the elision and compression inherent in that act (I've typed "of vandalism" three times and erased it four) seldom sits well with me. Even when, as now, I recognize that the author is seeking (and mostly finding) a Deeper Truth, it...feels like a cheapening of this tragedy. BUT YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY READ IT!!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

TALES FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY SOLE
DAVID KINGSTON YEH
Guernica Editions
$21.95 (US) trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When a long-lost sister shows up as a trans man named Luke, a series of precipitous events throws the lives of boyfriends Daniel and David into turmoil. While David attends an extravagant family reunion in Sicily, Daniel's ex Marcus plans the world-premiere of his one-man show. The couple's vertiginous exploration of sex, intimacy and desire comes to a head when a shocking revelation tests their commitment and future together.

Tales from the Bottom of My Sole (2020) is the stand-alone sequel to David Kingston Yeh’s debut novel, A Boy at the Edge of the World (2018). It is a “confabulated fictional memoir” told by Daniel Garneau, a young gay man in search of himself. In the end, his story is the story of every man: a rollicking dramedy and a philosophical reflection on reconciliation, love and family.

Yeh has been listed among “writers to watch” by CBC Books. He lives with his husband in Toronto, Canada.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

"{David's mother} is pretty Catholic. I think it's turn the woman's life upside-down if she ever found out one kid was gay and the other one trans." {says Daniel}

Nadia sat straight-backed, observing the sailboats slipping past, chaperoned by raucous gulls. Her thin nostrils flared.

"'I am made and remade continually,' she said. 'Different people draw different words from me.'"

When I glanced at her, she said: "Virginia Woolf."

Apposite, no? Here's a well-read and deeply cultured person responding to a friend's revelation of the crisis affecting the other side of his family...his husband's family, in other words...with a pointer to the author of Orlando: A Biography, a famously trans-affirming novel, and a person of Sapphic preferences despite a long and loving marriage to a man.

I did not know this was a sequel when I requested it; I found that it made very little difference in my pleasure of reading it. The delights of family sagas complete with infidelity, deep love, family mishegas, and blending your life with another person's are not reserved to straight people. Anyone who read and enjoyed Tales of the City or The Cazalet Chronicles will find themselves in deeply satisfying, familiar territory with an able guide.

CLEAN: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less, does too much therefore too little

CLEAN: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less
JAMES HAMBLIN
Riverhead Books
$14.99 ebook editions, available now

MAY 2021 UPDATE $2.99 on Kindle now!

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: One of Smithsonian‘s Ten Best Science Books of 2020

“A searching and vital explication of germ theory, social norms, and what the modern era is really doing to our bodies and our psyches.” —Vanity Fair

A preventative medicine physician and staff writer for The Atlantic explains the surprising and unintended effects of our hygiene practices in this informative and entertaining introduction to the new science of skin microbes and probiotics.

Keeping skin healthy is a booming industry, and yet it seems like almost no one agrees on what actually works. Confusing messages from health authorities and ineffective treatments have left many people desperate for reliable solutions. An enormous alternative industry is filling the void, selling products that are often of questionable safety and totally unknown effectiveness.

In Clean, doctor and journalist James Hamblin explores how we got here, examining the science and culture of how we care for our skin today. He talks to dermatologists, microbiologists, allergists, immunologists, aestheticians, bar-soap enthusiasts, venture capitalists, Amish people, theologians, and straight-up scam artists, trying to figure out what it really means to be clean. He even experiments with giving up showers entirely, and discovers that he is not alone.

Along the way, he realizes that most of our standards of cleanliness are less related to health than most people think. A major part of the picture has been missing: a little-known ecosystem known as the skin microbiome—the trillions of microbes that live on our skin and in our pores. These microbes are not dangerous; they’re more like an outer layer of skin that no one knew we had, and they influence everything from acne, eczema, and dry skin, to how we smell. The new goal of skin care will be to cultivate a healthy biome—and to embrace the meaning of “clean” in the natural sense. This can mean doing much less, saving time, money, energy, water, and plastic bottles in the process.

Lucid, accessible, and deeply researched, Clean explores the ongoing, radical change in the way we think about our skin, introducing readers to the emerging science that will be at the forefront of health and wellness conversations in coming years.

I CHECKED THE EBOOK OUT FROM MY LOCAL LIBRARY VIA OVERDRIVE. USE YOUR LIBRARY, SAVE MONEY, AND GET INFORMED AT THE SAME TIME.

My Review: There are three books in here. Any one of them would be very interesting to read sequentially; simultaneously, there is too much and too little information on each topic. I'm interested in all three books...history of "cleanliness", politics of "health", and research into the existence of astonishing worlds we haven't been able to see until quite recently...but am satisfied by none of them in this busily overstuffed and distracted narrative.

These quotes should tell you why the topics interest me:

He explains that if you really wanted to kill all the bacteria on your countertop, you’d have to leave a disinfectant (like Clorox) in contact with the surface for ten minutes. The product isn’t “killing 99.9% of germs” in the way that anyone actually uses it—a quick wipe-down. This was, both in concept and in practice, misguided. And the magnitude of its effects on our lives is now starting to become clear.
–and–
Public-health advocates are pressuring the FDA to ban parabens in products sold in the U.S. The European Union did this in 2012—but the economic influence of industry on regulation in American politics makes this unlikely.
–and–
When we clean ourselves, we at least temporarily alter the microscopic populations—either by removing them or by altering the resources available to them. Even if we do not use cleaning products that specifically say they are “antimicrobial,” any chemistry applied to the skin will have some effect on the environment in which the microbes grow. Soaps and astringents meant to make us drier and less oily also remove the sebum on which microbes feed.

Because scientists and doctors didn’t have the technology to fully understand the number or importance of these microbes until recently, very little is known about what exactly they’re doing there. But as this new research elucidates the interplay of microbes and skin, it is challenging long-held beliefs about what is good and bad.

Any one of those statments by itself contains multitudes and is deserving of solid, sustained attention. They're not really given space to get that solid, sustained attention. This is by design: The book is written to be a popular-science title and is marketed as such...so, then what's that political anti-industry bit doing in there...? (And I am by no means pro-industry, remember: "Capitalism sells nothing so effectively as status" is music to my increasingly leftist ears.)

Even the chemistry bit, about the Clorox, is played for scares. "It doesn't work the way you're using it!" Nonsense. It works fine. The world isn't an operating theater, your kitchen and bathroom do not need to be germ-FREE they need to have fewer germs overall. The fluids and aerosolized solids present in the average dwelling-place would, if they were visible, cause most Westerners and more particularly Americans to collapse into screaming meemees. The point of cleaning is to keep the loads manageable for our immune systems, not create sterile bubbles. So the industrial concerns are promoting an unattainable, not to mention undesirable, end when they tell you their bleach kills 99.9% of germs? Umm...maybe hold off on tossing that bathwater. The scares outweigh the nuanced analyses in this regard.

The stuff about microbes and mites and the astonishing colonial organism that is our skin was what I came to the party ready to learn about and to kvell over. The fact that we *are* learning about the biology of our bodies outweighs, to me, the many ways that knowledge is flawed in its use.

Some of the most cutting-edge research is coming from people funded by or working directly for companies that are developing products to sell. There are few experts one can talk to who don’t have money in the skin care game.

Am I a naive oldster to believe that, uses be damned, the edge is still cutting? There are so many ways improved hygiene has improved lives via scar-tissue and skin-grafting research and the concomitant research into skin's many functions that it's hard for me to get exercised about Purell. Especially in the Plague Year.

Well, enough of that. There are points that the author makes which are, in my observation, largely unconsidered, disregarded, or wrongheadedly opposed:

We may not be doing a lot to change our biomes by showering less, but by conceptually getting over the idea that microbes are bad, we might consume less and use less of the antimicrobial products that do indeed create microbial “superbugs” that threaten all nonmicrobial life on Earth.
–and–
The best advice right now is to think of hygiene as similar to medicine—extremely important in some scenarios, and also very possible to overdo.
–and–
From pharmaceuticals to soaps and other personal care products, Americans are clearly overpaying for—and overusing—products and services that are supposed to make us healthier. The pattern of consumption is unsustainable, and much of it may be doing more harm than good.

This is an amusing read, packed full of good information, and as such deserves the attention of the general reader. Don't go into the read expecting to be more than backgrounded, not educated, and it will repay you with much food for thought.

Me? I wanted more of what the subtitle sounded like it promised but didn't deliver.

THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS, a beautifully written book from the Aughties

THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT HEAVEN BEARS
DINAW MENGESTU
Riverhead Books
$5.49 kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution after witnessing soldiers beat his father to the point of certain death, selling off his parents' jewelry to pay for passage to the United States. Now he finds himself running a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. His only companions are two fellow African immigrants who share his feelings of frustration with and bitter nostalgia for their home continent. He realizes that his life has turned out completely different and far more isolated from the one he had imagined for himself years ago.

Soon Sepha's neighborhood begins to change. Hope comes in the form of new neighbors—Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter—who become his friends and remind him of what having a family is like for the first time in years. But when the neighborhood's newfound calm is disturbed by a series of racial incidents, Sepha may lose everything all over again.

Told in a haunting and powerful first-person narration that casts the streets of Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa through Sepha's eyes, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is a deeply affecting and unforgettable debut novel about what it means to lose a family and a country-and what it takes to create a new home.

Published as The Beautiful Thing That Heaven Bears in the USA, Canada and Australia; and as Children of the Revolution in the UK. Winner of the Guardian First Book Award for 2007.

IMMIGRANTS LIKE AUTHOR MENGESTU ARE WAITING FOR PERMISSION TO STAY IN THE US RIGHT NOW. REMEMBER THIS WHEN YOU CAST YOUR VOTE.

My Review: How wonderful it is to find a first novel that feels so accomplished and tells such an engrossing story. I can't imagine that real, enjoyable talent is becoming rarer in a world that contains such eloquent proofs of its health. I can, and do, believe that unfounded and unrealistic fears of immigrants are preventing many of the world's as-yet unidentified talented folks from seeking safety that will enable them to create and contribute to the world.

Mengestu tells the story of three friends, African immigrants all, who meet in Washington DC, for so long the home territory of nativist sentiment in our republic of exclusion. I don't think a recap of the plot will help anyone decide whether or not to buy the book, because its outlines are simple: Men seeking material success in the motherland of same are thwarted and, through effort and good fortune, succeed at things they weren't looking to succeed at...temporarily.

A fire plays a major role in completing the story, and since I am currently seeing a fireman, that caught my eye. It's not, to my surprise, used as a pat plot device, but imbued with a real sense of the inevitability of sadness, loss, and change in the entwined lives of three lovely characters. Naomi, to name but one, is a heartbreakingly well observed actor in the piece despite her tender years, and Judith her mother is such a deftly drawn, conflicted, real person that I was tempted to look her up in the phone book; as for Sepha, he can come stay with me until things get better. That's the kind of connection Mengestu's characters call forth in me, and I hope in you too.

Bravo, Dinaw Mengestu. Thanks. Write...well, publish...more soon, please. Recommended for all readers of fiction.

LOT: Stories might as well be in post-apocalyptic Houston, but you NEED to visit now

LOT: STORIES
BRYAN WASHINGTON
Riverhead Books
$25.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

WINNER OF THE 32ND Lambda Literary Award—BEST GAY FICTION!

The Publisher Says: Stories of a young man finding his place among family and community in Houston, from a powerful, emerging American voice.

In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys.

This boy and his family experience the tumult of living in the margins, the heartbreak of ghosts, and the braveries of the human heart. The stories of others living and thriving and dying across Houston's myriad neighborhoods are woven throughout to reveal a young woman's affair detonating across an apartment complex, a rag-tag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, and a reluctant chupacabra.

Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world leaps off the page with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot is about love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

My Review: This is not, appearances to the contratry, autobiographical. It's art, inspired by lived life, and Author Washington isn't its only model. He knew the models better than privileged and pampered Reader Person can. But there's a smoothness and facility that's the hallmark of the born writer, the one who wouldn't fit in no matter what or where or how they grew up. He didn't live in Alief, or maybe he did exist in that space but he was always apart and different and queer...but mostly he was born to be a writer. As always, I will employ the Bryce Method and go story by story with my visceral impressions only lightly toned down and/or tarted up.

Lockwood is a quick hit of what it means to be down and out, illegal, and queer. Also black and queer.

Once, I asked Roberto if he liked it in Texas. He looked at me forever. Called it another place with a name.
Could be worse, I said. You could be back home.
Home's wherever you are at the time, said Roberto.
You're just talking. That doesn't even mean anything.
It would, he said, if you knew you didn't have one.

I live in the same world as these boys and might as well be Arcturian. Yep. This one's a winner. Anything that can tell you that you don't know one single goddamned thing about the city, the state, the country that spawned you? That's a voice you need to listen to.

Alief gives the ragged and rowdy account of the end of several lives, two cheating bastards and a fool of a husband, with the full force and majesty of the Neighborhood behind it. Mistakes, obliviousness, the eternal unchanging voraciousness for Story that makes gossip so damned toxic yet irresistible, addictive. Like...well...reading, if we're all honest, dipping into the universes we weren't invited to inhabit. In this universe we're visiting, the Greek chorus of the folks living there is used to best effect as it dissects not predicts. A good choice, Author Washington.

610 North, 610 West locates us in Houston's geometry, using it as a quick way to orient us to the emotional poles of little man narrator's life. Ma isn't what Pa wants; he finds something he does want; life goes on, the myriad casualties spread in Houston's circular blast radius. Javi the vicious brother starts out ans stays shitty, abusive, homophobic; Jan the eldest sister vanishes, as so many without moorings but with ambitions do. Who's left? The gay little brother! Shocking! he murmured, clutching his pearls. Ma and her queer son. How did that ever happen.

Shepherd follows one young half-Jamaican to his summer of love, his Jamaican whore-cousin (the soursop woman!)'s summer of rest and recovery from multiple tragedies, his sister's sexed-up summer of post-college freshman-year freedom; lots of firsts, not a lot of happiness. Unlike the lower-class family's stories, the parents are window dressing. The boy doesn't become a man, but he knows he's going to and it isn't a comfortable thought. His cruelty to a kind woman is a harbinger of bad things to come, I fear.

Wayside a whole eight pages of horror. "Rick was...the most light-skinned out of all of us, and he carried himself like all of kindness in a bottle." We get down to the double horror of: Spoiler Alert!
...
...
...
When we made it to the body, my brother snatched my hand. He made me touch Rick's face. He told me this was what happened to fags.
...
...
...
And that, mijos, is the worst and nastiest thing ever felt, thought, said. Our little man narrator doesn't report this with a flinch, just a numb and vacant, deadened, dead-end voice.

Bayou brings us the chupacabra, myth made flesh, that can't or won't save two of life's losers. Boys with names like TeDarus and Mixcoatl don't even inherit the meek's mite of World. They call out for attention, demand to be seen, heard, but when they get it they don't know what to do with it. Mix, poor thing, is gay in a world that needs someone to hate for being Other so he's it. TeDarus is a space-taker. Nothing can save them from oblivion. Nothing is going to change or get better. Like the chupacabra they found, they slip away and there's no proof they were ever here.

Lot is the heart of the book, the heart of the family. Everything comes to a head, breaks, spills its rage-pus down the sides of the boil that these wretched people fester inside. Javi the hater, Jan the jilter, father, mother...all just don't want to see any of the cesspit's contents they're grinding the youngest's face into. RUN I want to scream, take money for the sex, escape however you can! And I know I'm shoutin' down the well. He's not even going to inherit the cesspit.

South Congress has poor Guatemalan illegal Raúl hooked into small-time street-drug sellin' Avery; it's a sad if common tale of someone who was never going to do more than just get by getting by in a place that hates him for being, won't forgive him for existing. Then how that, finally, in the end, blows into smithereens is a shock because I wasn't expecting Author Washington to leave Raúl with an opportunity that he's smart enough to seize but dreads succumbing to. Pungent and packed.

Navigation is such a freakin' hopeless mess of a life story getting *worse* FFS as Nameless the Narrator rejects two...two!...separate chances to get his shit in order, maybe get above water by a flippin' nostril, but NOOOOOO

Javi would be proud. /sarcasm

Peggy Park is like the Biblical begats in Chronicles, only this time it's baseball in the ghetto. Bored me. Hard to do with baseball stories, but yeah.

Fannin is the last will and testament of Jan, the jilting sister, who saw her father in a bad way one last time but did nothing. I didn't like her before, now I really despise her. The world she's made is built on, not a lie exactly, a hollow place...an excavation of the root-ball her life sprang from. People like that? I don't envy them one single possession.

Waugh teaches us the lesson that Love's got shit to do with reality but will fuck you up worse than anything else. Poke loves Rod but betrays him by leaving him at Rod's lowest point; all to be with Emil the middle-aged refugee from a place that no longer exists (I'm guessing Lebanon based on his age and backstory). He loves Poke, but can't ever figure in to his picture Poke's love of his calling, the streets. Rod? No one sees it, no one says "oh yeah, that guy" and no one, when he goes looking, can tell Poke anything.

There's no closure to be had on betrayal.

Elgin is the beauty of failure, the glory of losing, the passionate need to fuck up again. Nicolás. The name that means People's Victory. He alone of all his people...Javi, dead in the ground; Mam booked out to Louisiana; Pa? *shrug*; Jan the arriviste, dreams drowned by Harvey...stayed in his place, stayed long after he lost the will to make a life; he won the loser's lottery by existing, just that, as his life spun out of reach. Sex with one-nighters does nothing to fill you up no matter how big a dick he has. Then what? Go to the sea, sit in the water, leave a sad and lonely and worthy man in your bed and....

What's left is existing before exiting. All there is.

Those two-tenths of a point off perfect are for the tedium of Peggy Park and the last-minute narrator naming. Best left, or used throughout, as this feels contrived to me.

WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY, stories from a new Nigerian voice

WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY: Stories
LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH
Riverhead Books
$26 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home.

In "Who Will Greet You at Home", a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, a woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In "Wild", a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground. In "The Future Looks Good," three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war, while in "Light," a father struggles to protect and empower the daughter he loves. And in the title story, in a world ravaged by flood and riven by class, experts have discovered how to "fix the equation of a person"—with rippling, unforeseen repercussions.

Evocative, playful, subversive, and incredibly human, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky heralds the arrival of a prodigious talent with a remarkable career ahead of her.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU!

My Review: There is so much more here than the slenderness of the volume they inhabit would indicate; hence the perfection of my use of the Bryce Method to give you a quick hit of my ideas of a story, and then show individual ratings.

The Future Looks Good if you aren't paying attention, anyway. The fact is that you get yourself into places you really don't want to be because of the past:

...Ezinma, keys fumbling against the lock, doesn't see what came behind her: her mother at age twenty-two, not beautiful, but with the fresh look of a person who has never been hungry.
–and–
He blinds {Ezinma's sister} with a constellation of gifts, things she's never had before, like spending money and orgasms.

And, in the end, it's never really you that they want, Ezinma, it's not the way of the world for a kindly, accepting soul to be given the Keys to the Kingdom. There are locks and doors and living spaces that you are not made for, and going there is fatal. 4 bitter stars

War Stories remembers the tack one's parents take to Educate and Enlighten you...

"Is this about the time {your c.o.} took your gun?"

The tale, intended to impart some inscrutable lesson, was a stale one my father had trotted out at various infractions over my short life. I heard it when I stole lipstick from my aunt's dresser. I heard it when my mother discovered me gathering ants in a plastic bag to put in a schoolmate's hair. I heard it after I got into a fight with the children who said my father was strange, and again when I wanted to know why {father's best friend} couldn't come to our house anymore, and later, why he'd done what he'd done. My father never shared stories from before or after the war, as though he'd been born in the barracks and died the night of the final volley.

We're on to your tricks, Parents! Why do you use this creaky, crappy, ineffectual technique...that I still remember...oh.

The truth of stories has power. The telling of truths through stories is an act of creation and annihilation, a bright flash of the Universe's unfiltered energy come to Earth for the merest moment. And no one near leaves unchanged. 4.5 stars

Wild

Light

Second Chances

Windfalls

Who Will Greet You at Home

Buchi's Girls

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky is the first of these stories I read, back when it was a finalist for the 2016 Caine Prize. My review is here.

Glory

What is a Volcano?

Redemption

HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA, entrepreneurship's dark side

HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA
MOHSIN HAMID
Riverhead Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: His first two novels established Mohsin Hamid as a radically inventive storyteller with his finger on the world’s pulse. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia meets that reputation and exceeds it. The astonishing and riveting tale of a man’s journey from impoverished rural boy to corporate tycoon, it steals its shape from the business self-help books devoured by ambitious youths all over “rising Asia.” It follows its nameless hero to the sprawling metropolis where he begins to amass an empire built on that most fluid, and increasingly scarce, of goods: water. Yet his heart remains set on something else: on the pretty girl whose star rises along with his, their paths crossing and recrossing, a lifelong affair sparked and snuffed and sparked again by the forces that careen their fates along.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a striking slice of contemporary life at a time of crushing upheaval. Romantic without being sentimental, political without being didactic, and spiritual without being religious, it brings an unflinching gaze to the violence and hope it depicts. And it creates two unforgettable characters who find moments of transcendent intimacy in the midst of shattering change.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A REVIEW COPY OF THIS BOOK AT MY REQUEST. THANKS!

My Review: An internationally flavored mash-up of Death of a Salesman and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.

I liked both of those stories, and this one too. I got tired of the second-person gag way early, and it took most of a month to read the book because of that.

What I most appreciated about the book was Hamid's gift for the pithy aperçu:

We are all refugees from our childhoods.

Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.

The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they’re not particularly fattening.

I love this sort of distilled wisdom. I like the way Hamid feeds it to his readers, in logical places, in small bites, in the course of telling the story. He doesn't set his gems in solitaires but parures. It makes for a richer reading experience this way.

Reading is a subject of interest in this book, the characters read and discuss reading-the-act as well as what they have read. The point of reading is a major revelation within the book:

Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.

It is exactly this that makes reading, moreso than watching, such a dangerous and subversive act, one that threatens tyrants throughout history. It is also exactly this that powers anti-intellectualism throughout history: The ability to decode and derive layers of meaning from a text is hugely threatening to people who aren't educationally or intellectually prepared for it. They can't see what you see...therefore YOU must be wrong and YOU are The Enemy.

But what you do sense, what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth afforded by ubiquitous television, and partly of the change in mentality that results from an outward shift in the supply curve for firearms.

An unnervingly sharp eye for the realities at ground level makes that a gift, if one is willing to receive it, from Hamid to culturally isolated US readers. He isn't likely to be around when you use the gift he's given you. Novelists, after all, are ephemeral culturally speaking. Think I'm wrong? How often does anyone you know speak of Ellen Glasgow or Erskine Caldwell? Influential in their times, they're forgotten and unread by the mass of Americans today. Much as I love reading, the visual media are (bizarrely to me) longer lasting in their impact on the cultural discussion. Many more film directors of similar impact to Caldwell or Glasgow are remembered and discussed today, eg Alfred Hitchcock.

But it's a gift nonetheless:

From the perspective of the world's national security apparatuses you exist in several locations. You appear on property and income-tax registries, on passport and ID card databases. You show up on passenger manifests and telephone logs . . . You are fingertip swirls, facial ratios, dental records, voice patterns, spending trails, e-mail threads.

This is a very stark reality. Everyone leaves a paper trail. Its existence is part of daily life in developed countries and its immense data store includes essentially the entire world. It is an ever-growing monster, The Blob writ large.

Here, though, is the inescapable conclusion that we learn from the data being crunched:

In the history of the evolution of the family, you and the millions of other migrants like you represent an ongoing proliferation of the nuclear. It is an explosive transformation, the supportive, stifling, stabilizing bonds of extended relationships weakening and giving way, leaving in their wake insecurity, anxiety, productivity, and potential.

It is this force that will form the world of tomorrow. It is history being made, reported by storyteller Hamid. It is your future, white America, read it and learn.

THE SOUND OF THINGS FALLING, a rough-tongued honey-voiced lesson for complacent US people

THE SOUND OF THINGS FALLING
JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ (tr. Anne McLean)
Riverhead Books
$8.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the city of Bogotá, Antonio Yammara reads an article about a hippo that had escaped from a derelict zoo once owned by legendary Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The article transports Antonio back to when the war between Escobar’s Medellín cartel and government forces played out violently in Colombia’s streets and in the skies above.

Back then, Antonio witnessed a friend’s murder, an event that haunts him still. As he investigates, he discovers the many ways in which his own life and his friend’s family have been shaped by his country’s recent violent past. His journey leads him all the way back to the 1960s and a world on the brink of change: a time before narco-trafficking trapped a whole generation in a living nightmare.

Vásquez is “one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature,” according to Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, and The Sound of Things Falling is his most personal, most contemporary novel to date, a masterpiece that takes his writing—and will take his literary star—even higher.

I read What We Talk About When We Talk About Magical Realism by Fernando Sdrigotti in the LARB, and it reminded me of this terrific read.

My Review: To every rule its exception: This book is praised highly by a writer whose work I abhor, Jonathan Franzen; and ordinarily that means I will avoid the book so as not to read even a Pearl-Rule 46pp of something I'm bound to hate.

Ha ha ha, rules. I liked this book a lot. Well, "like" is a weird word for the emotional resonance of the book. I responded to the book like a tuning fork responds to a smack.

The fact is that I am a fan of Latin American literature because, like this book and author, most of the translated works are political and tendentious in their natures, and so are the authors. So am I. So it's usually a good fit.

This story, which feels as personal as the blurb suggests it actually is, made me very uncomfortable, as I watched Colombia's descent into warlord rule and civil failure. I suspect I'd feel the same fearful anger if I were to visit Montana or Idaho or Wyoming, places that white supremacist/apocalyptic christian cultists have claimed for themselves. When nutball extremists take over a place, it's a failure of civil authority, and that is a crime. The net effect is the same as the drug cartels' takeover of Colombia in the 1970s or the current failure of civil authority in Mexico today or the Cascadian separatist movement here.

These are not positive developments, they have tremendous costs in personal misery, and they are much to be deplored. Vásquez does his deploring by focusing tightly on the emotional and psychic costs of civil failure to a small group of friends, Antonio's friends and his good self. It's a sad, sad chronicle of horror and rage. And it's wrapped in beautiful words expressing solidly grounded truths:

Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next.

Translator McLean has done a marvelous job of making poetry in the English, and while I haven't read the original Spanish text, I can only say that she is unlikely to have made such handsome bricks without good, abundant straw.

If I must pick a nit, and I must, it's that the structure of the novel is a tad more complex than is strictly speaking necessary to tell the author's very involving story. It's not hard to follow, but it's just artificial enough to pop the reader out of the narrative flow. That's almost never a good thing. (Okay, it's never a good thing, but I've learned not to make absolute statements because some little twidgee or another will come along and say something tiresome about my opinions and frankly I'm over it.)

I hope, that issue aside, that you will all race out to your local bookeries and procure copies of this book. It's got something important to say to us in the USA about the incredibly high cost of allowing dissent to become dissolution. Colombia failed its citizens, and their agony only slowly passes. Mexico is mid-failure, and is much closer to us. And yet we allow our own idiot rebels a far freer hand in obstructing and undermining our governmental institutions and shredding our social fabric in the name of some illusory "right" they assert that they have to do this to us all.

Read the book. Learn the cost. The price of the right wing's version of freedom is too goddamned high, and Vásquez knows it first hand. Please listen to him.