The problem with creating an alternate universe

I think I've figured out why I find novels like Kate Quinn's The Astral Library unsatisfying.

It's Quinn's 18th published book so she knows what she's doing. The protagonist, Alexandra "Alix" Watson, a single, 26-year-old, who is living on the edge of economic disaster, is feisty and sympathetic. Contemporary Boston is recognizable. Secondary characters are well sketched. And The Astral Library asks an good question: Have you every wished you could live inside a book?

The novel starts with Alix's really terrible horrible bad day. She loses her fast food clerk job. He roommates are  evicting her for not paying her share of the rent  Someone has stolen her identity so the bank has frozen her credit card and bank card. Her one friend Beau Sato-Jones cannot help; he's working day and night on a gown that will save his dressmaking-costume business. At the end of her tether Alix seeks peace and quiet in the magnificent reading room of the Boston Public Library.

Alix has a scuffle with a security guard and in escaping tries a small side reading room door and finds herself in an even larger, infinitely larger, reading room—the Astral Library. 

It has some unusual features. The Library itself has to invite you in, but once you have a library card you can return easily. Its shelves hold every book ever produced anywhere in history. It is accessible from any library on the planet. The books have a kind of life; they flutter their pages when worried. Dead patrons may exist as spirits; dead Dennis is still reading his way through War and Peace. While time advances in the Library, it stops in the real world. In other words, Alix may spend a day in the library but when she returns to the BPL only a moment has passed. 

The Librarian, an ageless woman who can turn into a dragon, welcomes Alix and introduces her to the Library's idiosyncrasies. Alix, like the thousands of patrons before her, can disappear into a favorite book and live safely as a minor character. As a foster child with an absent mother no one will miss her.

Complications ensue. Which brings me to my dissatisfaction. I am willing to suspend disbelief long enough to accept a magical library, but I don't care what happens to Alix. I am more interested in how the author was going to address the problems she'd raised than in any of the characters and their concerns.

That Quinn includes a full-throated cry for adequately funded libraries that are free to all and free from censorship is admirable. Unfortunately, they need more than magic and an ageless dragon.

What can we truely know about past lives?

 "On 20 May 2119 I took the overnight ferry . . . " So begins Part 1 of What We Can Know by Ian McEwan. 

The narrator telling us his story is Thomas Metcalfe, a literary scholar in what remains of the British isles, now an archipelago of small islands after the ice caps have melted the the seas have drowned coastal cities. Metcalfe is specialist in early 21st century literature with a consuming interest in Francis Blundy, a major British poet, right up there with Eliot, Larkin, and Heaney.

What We Can Know is an unusually rich and interesting novel. McEwan has evoked a plausible future history, one in which local nuclear wars have polluted the atmosphere, humanity has had to create new food sources, local warlords fight for limited resources, the world's population is less than half what it was in 2019, and life expectancy is barely 62 years.

Still, scholarship exists. All the world's email, text, and electronic chatter has been deciphered, exists and, under the right conditions, is available to researchers. Metcalfe has been searching for years for an extraordinary poem, "A Crown for Vivian," that Blundy wrote for his wife's birthday. Metcalfe knows when Blundy wrote it, knows who attended the party when he read it, knows that Blundy destroyed all his notes and drafts giving Vivian the one hand-written vellum copy, knows the guests' reactions to the masterpiece from a magazine account written by one of the dinner's guests. What he doesn't know is poem's content or its location. It will be a major scholarly coup if he can find and publish it. 

Part 1 is Metcalfe's account of his research, It includes a fascinating discussion of the biographer's art and challenges —even with access to a subject's entire electronic history, his papers, and an ocean of material from and about the people around him. It is also the story of Metcalfe's own romantic history. It's a rich and engaging story. In fact, with a few tweaks at the end, Part 1 could stand alone as an interesting piece of academic science fiction. But then there's Part 2.

Part 2 is narrated by Vivian, Blundy's now-widowed wife. The action takes place in early 21st century and ends around 2020. We learn much more about Vivian's first husband than Metcalfe told us and about her long-running affair with Blundy's brother-in-law. We learn many things Metcalfe did not know, could not know. Indeed, the novel  could have been titled What Can We Know? 

Because the only honest answer is "Not much," that title is somewhat off-putting, so forge it. I would hate to discourage anyone from reading this brilliant, imaginative novel.. 
  

An unusually rich and satisfying reading experience

Although the articles about the novel were positive and although it is set in Ohio, "the Buckeye State," and I grew up in Ohio, I wasn't sure I wanted to read any more 445-page novels. (Don't disparage the way I choose what to read or skip. It mostly works for me.)

Patrick Ryan's doorstop of a novel Buckeye arrives with high praise (but then, doesn't every novel?). He is author of two story collections and is editor-in-chief of One Story magazine. From short stories to a long novel is noteworthy in itself.

Buckeye's action all takes place in Ohio with the exception of an interval in the South Pacific during WWII.  Otherwise we're in an orphanage east of Columbus, in he fictional town of Bonhomie, and in Columbus, Toledo, and even Cedar Point.

While the action is not strictly chronological, it takes place from roughly the early 1930s to the 1970s and Ryan seamlessly weaves in news and cultural events as time markers and indicators how how American society and culture changed during the period. All this makes an unusually rich and satisfying reading experience.

We follow the lives of four main characters, all around the same age. and get to know well several others as well. Cal was born with one leg shorter than the other so he is ineligible for the WWII draft. Becky is able under certain conditions to hear the voices of the dead. Felix is gay, something he does not understand and, for years, ignores (homosexual activities are, after all, illegal). Infant Margaret is abandoned by her mother at an orphanage and although three families take her in none keep her so her closest relationship is with the orphanage director.

In one sense—and I believe the strength of the novel—none of these people are exceptional. They do not do great things. They do their best with who they are and what they know and what they feel. In another sense of course they are all extraordinary and their lives engaging and moving for 445 pages. Becky takes no compensation whatever when she uses her gift to help someone. She and Cal marry and have a son. Felix feels the pressure to be "normal." marries Margaret, and takes her to Bonhomie. He is drafted into the Navy, made an officer, and serves on a supply ship in the Pacific. He and Margaret have a son, Tom.

I am deliberately sketching the action lightly so that readers will find as much pleasure and surprise and anguish as I did in the characters' thoughts, actions, beliefs about themselves and reality. I cannot improve Ann Patchett's cover blurb,  Burkeye is "A glorious sweep of a novel."

A note readers

Foe several weeks now I have been reviewing—or commenting on—the books I read as I finish them. This only works as long as I finish. I do not believe it is fair to the reader to discuss a book you have not finished unless, of course, you have no intention of finishing it and discuss why.

At the moment, I am about halfway through two interesting if hefty books, Buckeye, a novel by Patrick Ryan (448 pages), and The Frenchmen, a history of mid-20th century philosophy by Emily Eakin (414 pages). I am also finishing the first draft of my own novel and editing an older manuscript.

All of which is to say I am not ready to review Ryan or Eakin. But as soon as I finish one or the other I will. 

Watch a trained police dog help solve crime

The Dog Who Knew too Much (2011) is Spencer Quinn's fourth Chet and Bernie mystery. For fans, there are 16 books in the series with Raiders of the Lost Bark due out next year.

Chet, who narrates, is a delightful companion to Bernie Little who, with Chet, is the Little Detective Agency in an unidentified western city but which sounds like Los Angeles. It's unidentified perhaps because Chet is a little shaky on place names. Chet is a dog.

My first reaction was, who wants to read a mystery narrated by a dog? But Chet is an extremely engaging character. And Quinn (the pen name of Peter Abrahams) has done a remarkable job of creating a convincing canine.

Chet was thrown out of K-9 school because of an unfortunate incident with a squirrel. His senses of smell and hearing are far superior to human, which comes in handy, He cannot count above two. He is fanatically loyal to Bernie who is the smartest human on the planet. In addition to place names, he is shaky on cause and effect. He pretty much lives in the present, taking events as they occur, spending little time in memory.

The Dog Who Knew too Much begins with a worried mother hiring Bernie to find her 12-year-old son who was supposed to be at a summer camp in what sounds like the Sierra Mountains. Chet and Bernie visit the camp and they are exploring an old mine with one of the locals who was with the boy on a sleep out when he disappeared. Chet and Bernie following the boy's scent become separated from their guide and he is murdered. 

Before the book ends, Bernie is locked up for the murder; Chet, restrained by collar and chain, is brought back to the city; Suzie, Bernie's girlfriend, a reporter, uncovers (with Chet's help) corruption in high places; and Chet, Bernie, and Suzie pre-empt the FBI's arrest of the malefactors. 

Except for my impatience with Bernie (signing a document without reading it for a guy he should know better than trust) and a question of how Chet managed to escape the collar, the book is a delightful romp.

It's an intellectural banquet

I am confident that Namwali Serpell's study of Toni Morrison's fiction, On Morrison, will not be the last written about the Nobel Prize winner's work. I am also confident that it will not be surpassed.

Serpell comes to it with an interesting history. She was born in Lusaka, Zambia. She has a B.A. from Yale and a PhD from Harvard, both for English literature. He debut novel, The Old Drift (2019), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Her next two books, Stranger Faces (2020), critical essays, and The Furrows (2022), a novel, were both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. 

She is a tenured literature professor at Harvard and teaches a course on Morrison. With her racial, academic, and literary background Serpell can—and does—write about Morrison with unique authority.

She discusses in detail Morrison's first six novels—The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved,  and Jazz—and her single published short story—"Recitatif." The widely anthologized story is remarkable because Morrison removed all racial markers from the two female characters and readers have argued over which Black and which is white since. 

Because I recently read Sula, I was interested to read what Serpell said about it. She said a lot more than I did (or could) say. I think it would be useful and helpful to read each novel immediately after reading the chapter of Serpell's commentary. I can't imagine that many of us have read as widely or can read as deeply as Serpell. I believe such a program would be enormously rewarding intellectually.

Yet for all that,  On Morrison is not written in "academic" prose. It is clear and accessible. Serpell adds a touch of personality when talks about herself and her own writing when appropriate and always to indicate Morrison's influence on her. She's a fan although she never met her.  

On Morrison is not a biography; however Serpell sketches enough of her life to give context to the work. She discusses Morrison's last four novels and how they relate to the earlier books. She talks about Morrison's poetry (it's not very good, surprising in how lyric her prose often is) and her playwriting. It's an artistic life in full.

On Morrison is a book to keep and to reread. I've never read Tar Baby or Jazz, and before I do I will reread Serpell's discussion of them. An intellectual banquet.

Unexpected plrasures of learning Japanese

One time in my 60s I stopped in a Japanese coffee shop to have coffee and read my book or The Japan Times. When the proprietor served my coffee I told him, "Haizara ga iranai."—I don't need the ashtray—and he took it away.

Where had "ashtray"—haizara—been hiding in my subconscious? I have never smoked. I have never needed an ashtray. I have no recollection of learning the word. Why would I? I could not have seen it or used the word in 40 years. Because the incident was exceptional, I remembered it.

Recently I was reviewing color words—akairo, red; kiiro, yellow; aoiro, blue; etc.—and learned a new one, haiiro, gray.  Iro by itself means "color," so haiiro literally means "gray color." And, by extension, it can also mean "ash colored." 

When I read that, the penny dropped. I already knew that sara  or zara means "plete "or "dish." If the first half of haizara means "ash," the second half must mean "dish"—or, a dish for ashes. Or ashtray. Which is how the dictionary translates it.

Aside from the sharp pang of pleasure this insight gave me (no small thing), I now have a way to remember "gray." Who'da thought?

Why the body with the buried bikes?

Val McDermid is a writing phenomenon. She was born in Fife, Scotland, a mining community, in 1955. She was eight when the East Wemyss coal mine near her home caught fire. The disaster, which killed nine men, gave her an early understanding of fear and loss. Also, her childhood habit of telling scary stories to her friends in the seaside caves near her home started her on the path of making up frightening tales.

After becoming the first student from a Scottish state school to enter St Hilda’s College, Oxford, she became a journalist, working for the Scottish tabloid the Daily Record, and later, the Daily Mirror Group, on the northern desk of the Sunday People. Her career as a reporter included being beaten up by 80s wrestling legend Big Daddy, as well as an unsettling encounter with Jimmy Savile who was eventually revealed as a predatory sex offender with 400 to 500 victims—ranging in age from 5 to 75—over fifty hears. Saville inspired one of her most notorious villains.

Her experiences covering tragedies like Lockerbie (the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing) and Hillsborough (a stadium crush that killed 97 fans) finally pushed her to leave tabloid journalism in 1991 and write fiction full-time, although she had been writing fiction.  Her first mystery Report for Murder was published in 1987.

When she started, British crime fiction often seemed to her to be excessively middle-class and polite. She was determined to do something different, writing punchy and contemporary stories that would draw on her journalistic background. She believes that crime fiction can hold a mirror up to society: “I want to write a novel that people will enjoy but will also give them pause.”

She has now written over 40 books in five series and isn’t ready to stop: “As long as the ideas are still there, as long as the passion and enthusiasm is still there, I'll be writing. And what else would I do?” Broken Ground (2018) is the fifth of eight in the Karen Pirie series. 

An American couple have come to a remote Highland peat bog  to hunt for a treasure her grandfather said he buried at the end of WWII. They have managed to find two brand new Indian motorcycles, but buried with them is a body. Who is it? Why was he shot? Moreover, the body has not been buried for 70 years, he was added sometime after the motorcycles. Cold case detective Karen Pirie has a challenge.

Broken Ground is smoothly written with plasuible characters, none of whom are TSTL—too stupid to live. McDermid's ability to change points of view smoothly keeps the story hurtling right along. A professional job by a professional.

 

How to get a better grasp of real reality

Because President Trump in his Truth Social posts often describes a reality I don't recognize and because as a philosophy major I spent considerable time considering reality and tests for it, my attention was caught by a book titled The Perils of Perception: Why We're Wrong About Nearly Everything by Bobby Duffy.

Duffy is the Managing Director of the Ipsos Social Research Institute,  a London-based market research firm. To help clients understand changing markets, Ipsos regularly surveys consumers and this book compares and contrasts opinions about important issues in as many as 14 different countries. 

For example they asked "What proportion of the population of your country is aged sixty-rive or over?" On average Americans guessed 36%; the reality is 14%—a 22 poins difference. At one extreme of the difference between guess and reality, Italians guessed 46%; the reality is 21%. At the other,  the Swedes guessed 33%; the reality is 19%.

The book is filled with such nuggets. Is violence in the world increasing or decreasing? What proportion of your country is Muslim? What does it cost to raise a child? How much do you need to save for retirement? How much tax do the rich pay? "Out of every 100 people aged 20 years or over in your country, how many do you think are either overweight or obese? The average American guess: 50 people. The reality: 66 people.

"What percentage of women and girls aged 15-18 in your country do you think give birth each year?" The average U.S, guess: 24%. The reality is 2.1%. 

One more. "What is the proportion of immigrants among your country's population?" The average U.S, guess is 33%. The reality is 14%.

Some caveats: the book was published in 2018 so the research is ten or more years old. Also apparently the studies were done online, which means respondents had to have access. Nevertheless, I suspect that for all the domestic turmoil Trump has caused, American perceptions and reality have not changed significantly comforting though it might be to believe we have better information.

What is timeless is Duffy's observation that our perceptions are affected by external reality—news, family, friends, entertainment, books, etc., etc.) and our mental equipment that has evolved over millennia. For example, we tend to recall bad news more than good. We tend to believe things that reinforce what we already believe and to ignore or discount things that contradict what we already know.

Read with an open mind, hard as that may be, The Perils of Perception may help readers understand reality better and be less surprised when real reality turns out to be different than they expected.

What do you do if you're stuck in a time loop?

I'm sure Solvej Balle's novel On the Calculation of Volume 1 (smoothly translated from Danish by Barbara J. Holland) is not the first and will not be the last to play with Groundhog Day's premise—that a character is stuck in time and endlessly repeats the same day over and over and over. Because I've heard it before, I almost did not start the book even though it was a Booker prize-winner. That would have been my loss.

Tara Selter and her husband Thomas run an antique book business out of their two-story stone cottage on the outskirts of the fictional Clairon-sous-Bois in northern France. On the 17th of November she goes to a Bordeaux auction on a buying trip, returning that evening to Paris to check into her regular hotel.

She plans to spend the 18th and 19th in Paris, browsing book dealers, consulting with a specialist librarian, having dinner with a coin dealer friend and his girlfriend who Tara's never met.  They have a convivial dinner in the shop, although Tara accidentally burns her hand on the stove. She spends an uncomfortable night in the hotel, the night of the 18th, with a towel and ice cubes wrapped around her hand.

The next morning her hand is still in pain, but she comes to realize it is still—again?—the 18th of November. Thomas is surprised to see her return from Paris a day early. He has no memory of his yesterday. Indeed, for the rest of the year, for the rest of the book, every morning he and the rest of the world wakes up to the 18th of November while Tara's hand heals, her hair grows, and she tracks the number of repetitions.

Thomas, who has no memory of yesterday's November 18, is willing to believe Tara's story and together they attempt to understand what has happened or break the cycle or both. They can't, but part of the book's suspense is watching and pulling for their attempts. Because nothing changes in Tara's external reality—every morning it is November 18—she and we really, really get to the minutia of that day.

On the Calculation of Volume has no chapters. Tara numbers the repetitions and Balle separates the short paragraphs with a line of space. And because I feel what I've said is inadequate, let me quote the American publisher with whom I agree:

"The first volume’s gravitational pull―a force inverse to its constriction―has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating." Go get drunk on it.