A 16-year-old boy disappears from Austin

Reduced to its basics, The Slip is the story of the events leading up to 16-year-old Nathanial Rothstein's mysterious disappearance in 1998 and almost equally mysterious reappearance fourteen years later.  So why does it take Lucas Schaefer 484 pages to tell the story?

Because he's filled this, his first novel, with characters and incidents, all engaging, all interesting, if not all equally relevant to Nathanial's story. Some of them are only peripherally relevant, but the movement and writing carries the reader along.

Most, but not all, of the action takes place in Austin, TX, at Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym, a seedy but welcoming venue. (Two characters go to Africa for an exhibition fight. It does not turn out well.) Bob Alexander, Nathanial's uncle with whom he's staying for the summer, is a gym regular. David Delice, an ex-fighter, is another regular and works as the Director of Hospitality in an assisted living facility where Nathanial volunteers for the summer. Sasha is an Austin teen who initiates phone sex with Nathanial. And more, and more, and more. I haven't counted but there must be a dozen major characters, all of whom are significant, all of whom are fully fleshed out.

Some readers may be put off by the innumerable shifts in point of view as Schaefer follows the activities, thoughts, and assumptions of one character after another, This is a lot to follow, but the writing is clear and the threads eventually create a rich and satisfying (for the most part) tapestry. (There is a section in which Bob Alexander imagines (?), reports that Nathanial doesn't disappear at all.) 

I am in awe of Schaefer's ability to invent characters and situations and to make it all arrive at an unexpected but satisfying conclusion. You don't have to know anything about boxing to find pleasure in The Slip.

More Japanese vocabulary

Among the pleasures of Japanese—for me—are words that evoke or define ideas, concepts, feelings we don't have in English or are not as common or are expressed differently. Each one expands my sense of what is possible or enlarges my view of reality. For example, I just stumbled across 抹香臭い、(makkoukusai).

My online Japanese dictionary defines it as "smelling of incense; overly pious​," which is, I believe, a criticism of a Buddhist or Shinto priest who spends so much time praying while burning incense, he stinks of it. 

I believe other English approximations could be sanctimonious, self-righteous, holier-than-thou, churchy, pious, pietistic, moralizing, unctuous, smug, superior, priggish. This is what makes translating a challenge.

In the story in which the word appears, one character is talking to another and a literal translation might be "Jiro, why do you smell of incense?" which in the context does not make sense. Better might, "Jiro, why are you overly pious?" Or better yet, "Jiro, why are you so self-righteous?"   

This is what makes translating fun.

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.