James Baldwin, Another Country

There are many possible "other countries" throughout James Baldwin's novel, set in New York in the early 1960s (when it was written).  There are actual other countries -- two characters are in Greece when we meet them, and one of them is French -- but more salient are the separate worlds, packed densely into that most remarkable, most wonderful and terrible city in the US:  New York.  The characters living in bohemian squalor in the Village are a world away from those struggling to get by uptown in Harlem (a few blocks from where I sit, writing this.  Only in the end does it seem that the other country of the title is actually *love.*

This is a searing novel, occasionally melodramatic, yes, but on the whole, gutting, blistering.  The characters are all trying so hard, trying desperately to defy what they have learned about cultures, groups, genders, races, sexualities.  'White' and 'Black,' 'gay' and 'straight,' married and single, the interwoven characters are all cheating , lying, and clinging to those they need, all while constantly driving knives into those who most want to help them.

In one brief moment of successful -- albeit stolen, fleeting, and doubly adulterous -- passion, one character turns to another to say:

This day is almost over.  How long will it be before such a day comes for us again?  …  I can't really like from moment to moment, day to day, month to month, make you less lonely.  Or you, me.  We aren't driven in the same directions and I can't help that, any more that you can. … And if we tried to arrange it, prolong it, control it, if we tried to take more than what we've -- by some miracle, some miracle, I swear -- stumbled on, then I'd just become a parasite and we'd both shrivel.

This, it seems, is as good as can be hoped for:  an hour of true companionship, before everything spirals away again, out of control, to the wild Jazz beats that punctuate their lives.

Kevin Wilson, The Family Fang

Kevin Wilson, The Family Fang

Caleb and Camille Fang reject conventional art — paintings, sculptures, photography, and so on — and even traditional art “happenings,” in which artists create events.  They prefer a sort of guerrilla art in which the artists create chaos and watch its effect on the unsuspecting public.  A mess to the public.  Beauty to the artists. 

Disaster to Child A and Child B, the Fangs’ children.  This wonderful novel alternates between the extraordinary art events concocted by the Fangs when their children were young, and the challenges they face trying to exist in the world as adults.  The novel is darkly funny, very strange (and possibly somewhat anti-art, but no mind).  It is apparently being made into a Hollywood movie now, but ignore that.  It won’t be as good.  Get the book, instead.

Nicholas Lamar Soutter, The Water Thief

Nicholas Lamar Soutter, The Water Thief

I have no idea how I came into possession of this novel.  I found it on my shelf, with no receipt to indicate purchase, no penciled price on the flyleaf to suggest a used book store, and it seems to have no publisher, so presumably was self-published by the author.  It did win the Kirkus Star, a presumably distinguished literary award I've never heard of.

The novel is a future dystopia, set in a time when the corporations have truly taken over the world, such that everything and everyone is their property, and profit is the only acceptable and moral motive.  Self-interest is the highest good.  In essence, it is as if every worse-case scenario of a liberal's nightmare vision of a corporate future has come to be.  It seems to be a book written to counter the horrors of Ayn Rand (the luxury neighborhood is called "The Galt"), and Soutter's prose are regrettably no smoother than her tortured attempts at writing.  Our hero is a midlevel office drone for the Ackerman Brothers corporation, which is among the stronger players in a world where the "social contract" has been thoroughly rejected.  He has been a more or less happy drone for years, when I reads a story about a woman who objects to the capitalist system, where those who interfere with profits are rendered to make soap, in order that the corporations can recoup some of their losses.  He is a naive, recent convert to the notion of socialism, and his ruminations often read like late-night freshman bull-sessions:

Competition exists in facets of life, but that doesn't make it the sum of life.  You can see the world through rose-colored glasses, but that does not make the world rouge, even if you live a lifetime that way.  Violence is the only possible conclusion to capitalism.

Would I recommend this one?  If you have one of those annoying friends who is always going on about Rand (or any of the more current libertarians who follow her), who keeps trying to get you to read Atlas Shrugged, then buy a copy of this for him for his next birthday.

China Mieville, King Rat, The City & the City, Perdido Street Station

 In the last few months, I read three novels by China Miéville: King Rat, Perdido Street Station, and The City & The City. I'd been hearing for ages that I'd love his writing (from people who were absolutely correct), so when a friend suggested we have a book club and start with King Rat, I jumped on it. All three are fantasy, though one is contemporary urban fantasy, another Steampunk, and the third is set in a sort-of parallel world. They differ in style, tone, and setting, but all are compelling, consistently creative, and somewhat creepy. But what really tied them together for me was a focus on vision -- on what we see and what we don't, or won't.

King Rat is set in London, roughly when it was published (1998), but primarily in the sewers and slums. I was startled when I realized that the decayed and dangerous neighborhood south of the Thames, where much of the action occurs, was the same now-trendy, upscale neighborhood where I'd just spent a few weeks. Prince Harry apparently hangs out at one of the local bars, regularly (though this, of course, does not improve the area). The book sets two age-old enemies against one another: King Rat (who asserts that he is a rat, and lives and eats like one, though he is human is shape) and the greatest of all rat catchers, the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Along the way, we meet Anansi the Spider King (similarly, at once a spider and human) and the Bird King Loplop (borrowed from the art of Max Ernst, of all places). The main character, Saul, learns of his rat heritage and, without changing his appearance, accepts his linage and becomes a rat. Outer appearance is not inner ontology. A whole parallel world opens before him, complete with alternate codes of conduct and Other moralities.

The City & The City, for me the most interesting of the three, also centers on parallel worlds. Here, two cities coexist in space and time -- they are superimposed on top of one another, as if each were the other's palimpsest. Set in an unnamed Eastern European country, in our own present world, these parallel cities draw attention to the ways that different groups can live side-by-side without ever acknowledging one another's existence, though they are both defined and granted meaning by their ever-unseen Other. The plot unfolds as a police procedural, but, gripping though this element is, the main issue here is the fracture, the gap that divides a city from itself.

Finally, Perdido Street Station is something of a sprawling genre exercise in Steampunk fantasy -- everything hisses and pops, with boiler-powered robots, hybrid creatures, and the stench of a retro-futuristic London-esque city. There is great fun in the inventiveness, even if, in the end, the plot seems to get a bit away from Miéville. The cactus-people in their giant greenhouse dome, the interspecial love affair between a bug-woman and a human man, the Remades punished for legal transgressions via horrifying reconstructive surgeries, all create a fascinating atmosphere that is, like the cities of The City & The City, really the protagonist of the novel. They are all at risk of being captured by the hypnotic, terrible beauty of giant, carnivorous moths that bring into question the role of vision, and the horror of beauty.

Read all three. For me, onward to The Scar!