A book for anyone serious about writing fiction

If you are unable to be admitted to the Syracuse University writing program (it accepts six students a year from an applicant pool of between six and seven hundred), the next best thing is George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.

Actually of course it’s Saunders who gives the master class, which is based on his twenty years of creative writing teaching. To illustrate what he wants to convey he uses three Chekhov stories (“In the Cart,” “The Darling,” “Gooseberries”), two Tolstoy stories (“Master and Man,” “Alyosha the Pot”) and one each by Turgenev (“The Singers”) and Gogol (“The Nose”).

Saunders advises reader at the beginning that none of the models he offers as a way to think about a story is “correct” or sufficient. “If a model appeals to you, use it. If not, discard it.” He is not trying to teach you how to write like George Saunders (or Chekhov). He is trying to teach you how to write a compelling story, one readers want to read.

Each of the stories he examines is, in its own way, worth studying for what the author does and how he does it. Saunders gives each a very close reading. Indeed he analyses “In the Cart” virtually sentence by sentence, one of his points being that the short story writer does not have room for words or sentences that do not contribute directly to the whole. So how does Chekhov do it?

The million-dollar questions Saunders wants to answer is: What makes reader keep reading? He believes happens through a series of expectation/resolution moments. “We read a bit of text and a set of expectations arises. ‘A man stood on the roof of a seventy-story building.’ Aren’t you already kind of expecting him to jump, fall, or be pushed off? You’ll be pleased if the story takes that expectation into account, but not pleased if it addresses it too neatly.”

Janice Hardy on her Fiction University blog has an interesting article that points out the difference between idea, premise, plot, and story. “Ideas are those moments of inspiration that first excite or interest us. The premise is a general description of the story you plan to tell, and what the story is about. The plot encompasses the core conflict. [The] story is . . . the internal struggle the character goes thorough to resolve a personal issue.” 

Saunders says that a story “frames a moment of change, saying implicitly: ‘This is the day on which things changed forever. A variant of that says, ‘This is the day on which things almost changed forever, but didn’t.”

One of the problems with my stories (one among many) is that they tend to be anecdotes. Time passes. Things happen. They often have interesting ideas and observations. But the main character does not change. Or, the character had an opportunity to change but didn’t. 

Chekhov said, “Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.” Saunders says, “A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were.”

Saunders mines each of the seven Russian stories for what they can teach about description, pattern, repetition, facts in fiction, and the possibility of saying true things in a world in which “things happen in it that don’t and could never happen in the real world.” I.e., in Gogol’s “The Nose.”

How does a detailed description of a country inn, the furniture, a character’s face, or clothing add to the story? What does “a bloated face, a pair of sly, genial little eyes, and a fleshy forehead with deep furrows running right across it” really tell you about the character? We modern readers are sensitive to and impatient with data dumps. 

Saunders describes how he discovered he was a writer and how he works. He seems to be a pantser rather than an outliner, never sure where the story is going after he’s written the first sentence. He also believes in revision.

At the same time, he insists that every writer should find his/her own way. Hemingway may be a great short story writer but he’s already done what he can do. Writing in the style of Hemingway is still fake, no matter how skillfully done.

Rather he argues, “We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition . . . In my experience that’s the whole game: (1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.”

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a splendid book for several reasons. As a writer, I have revisited older stories and think I now see why and where they fail. As a reading writer, I try to see the mechanism at work under the stories and novels I read; I believe I am now more sensitive to what is actually going on (or not). As a reader, I am delighted to be introduced to seven masterpieces by an experienced and knowledgeable guide.

Finally, I am inspired by Saunders writing. Anyone who is serious about writing fiction should own and read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and return to it regularly for insights and inspiration.

 

How do you make sense of your life?

Reader Alert! The following includes spoilers. Do not read on if you are the sort of person who is upset by learning how a book ends before you’re read it. 

Ordinarily, I avoid giving away an ending, but (a) careful readers of Luiz Ruffato’s Late Summer will know how the novel must end halfway through, and (b) the pleasure the book offers has little to do with how the book ends.

Ruffato was born in Cataguases, a small industrial city in southeastern Brazil. The novel is set there and, if the text is to be believed (and why not?), the town has fallen on evil days. The textile factories on which the economy was based have closed. The polluted and stinking river Pomba floods during the rainy season. Street crime is common.

The grandson of immigrants who fled northern Italy, Ruffato worked throughout his youth as a bar clerk, textile worker, street book vendor, and turner to supplement the income of his parents, a popcorn vendor and a laundress. He earned a journalism degree from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, and later settled in São Paulo. 

He is the author of eight novels as well as short story collections, poetry, and essays. In addition to numerous Brazilian literary prizes, his works have received the Premio Casa de las Américas (Cuba) and the Hermann Hesse Literaturpreis (Germany), and have been published in thirteen countries. Since 2003 Ruffato has worked exclusively as a writer.

Late Summer begins with Oseias Moretto Nunes, an older (elderly?) Cataguases native returning to his home town from Sao Paolo on Tuesday, March 3, which could make it 2015. His wife has left him taking their son. He is sick, and he is tired. He still has two sisters living in the city; a third sister, Légia, is dead. And he has a successful and wealthy brother. His parents are dead. He did not return to the city for their funerals.

Oseias spends five days in the city, two nights his sister Rosana’s houses. Rosana is a school principal, visits New York City once a year, is fighting a furious if losing battle with the signs of aging, and is married to a doctor Ricardo. After the second night, Rosana leaves a note in her “teacherly scrawl”: 

“Oseias, I’m afraid this situation can’t go on. Ricardo has been patient, too patient. I don’t want to get into a fight with him at this point in my life. He’d appreciate it, we’d appreciate it, if you could find some other place to stay. Rosana.” He moves to a cheap hotel.

A former school chum is now mayor and Oseias attempts to see him, finally ambushing him one morning. The mayor is not interested in talking about old times and brushes him off. Oseias does  connect accidentally with a former art teacher who is now sick and penniless and who would like to talk about old times. Oseias is repulsed and escapes.

He visits his younger sister Isinha (Isabela), who is married to an affable drunk and has an ingrate and shiftless adult son who has at least two illegitimate children. Isinha, although poor and estranged from her Cataguases siblings, seems to have accepted her portion. She washes and irons his dirty laundry Oseias brings her. But in a house overflowing with children, Isinha has no place—or much time—for her brother.

João Lúcio, Oseias’s younger brother, having been given a leg up by an uncle, has been able to turn a local sawmill into a regional furniture manufacturer and himself into a rich man with a big house, a pool, a wife and a mistress. Caught unawares by his older brother’s arrival, he invites Oseias to spend the night in the guest room although he cannot stay with him. He has an unspecified appointment elsewhere. 

In the final pages, Oseias showers in João Lúcio’s house, dresses in his clean, freshly ironed clothes, destroys his driver’s license and ID, crushes the pills he’s been collecting for his condition (cancer?) to make a cocktail. On Sunday, March 8, he hides himself in the deep woods behind the estate and kills himself.

Late Summer is so vivid, so alive that it did not occur to me until much later to wonder how Oseias was able to tell his story in the first person—the only way it could be told and have the effect it has—if he were dead.

I can imagine some readers will be put off by the 277 pages of solid type, no paragraphs. The book’s design reflects Oseias’s thoughts and perceptions, leavened with dialogue, as they pour from him.

I can also imagine readers being put off by all the unfamiliar names of relatives, children, friends, associates, acquaintances. Julia Sanches’s translation from Portuguese is fluent and smooth however, so anything the reader bumps on is the author’s not hers. (For example, I had to look up “Cebion” to learn it’s a branded form of vitamin C.)

But you don’t read Late Summer to ask how a dead narrator can tell his story or for the plot. You read it—or I read it once I became acclimated to the lack of paragraphing—for a powerful evocation of a man trying to make sense of his life. To explain to himself how he came to be where he is. To attempt one last time to only connect with his sisters, his brother, his nieces and nephews, his childhood companions. 

You read Late Summer for a compelling portrait of contemporary Brazilian life. Ruffato’s evocation of Cataguases is not one that will please the local tourist office. (And I cannot imagine what the Covid-19 pandemic is doing to the town.) 

You read Late Summer because it extends your knowledge of what it is to be human. 

How do you live with history?

Ordinarily I do not care for a book that has to include a family tree to guide the reader through the family connections. 

I am making an exception of Asako Serizawa’s collection of thirteen linked stories, Inheritors. The stories involve five generations of a Japanese family. They cover the period 1913-2035 although do not appear in strict chronological order. The family tree is useful to see how characters are related and the year in which a story takes place.

Asako Serizawa was born in Japan and spent her pre-college life in Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo. She completed her BA in English and French at Tufts University, her MA in English and American literature at Brown University, and her MFA in creative writing at Emerson College.

She told the Rona Jaffee Foundation in connection with the book, “Over the years, the task of balancing my practical responsibilities with my writing needs trimmed my life to its essentials, but my project, over ten years in the making—an interconnected short story collection spanning 150 years and tracing five generations of a family fractured across Asia and the U.S. by war—was slow going, its completion, as well as my sense of its viability, blinking in and out of focus. Then, several years ago, I received a seven-month fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where I made tangible progress, after which pressing on felt critical.”

Serizawa’s winning a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award made possible not only a whole year of full-time writing but also the freedom to return to Japan for final research. The result is Inheritors, an exploration of a Japanese family fragmented by the Pacific side of World War II. 

A retired doctor is forced to confront the moral consequences of his work at Unit 731, where the Imperial Japanese Army experimented on human subjects.

The doctor’s sister-in-law, compelled to speak of a fifty-year-old murder, reveals the realities of life in Occupied Japan. 

Half a century later, her estranged American granddaughter winds her way back East, pursuing her absent father’s secrets. 

Decades in the future, two siblings face the consequences of their great-grandparents’ war. 

We live through the fire-bombing of Tokyo in which more people died than in the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima (and thankfully, given Serizawa’s fierce writing, we do not have to live through that). We ride with a pilot as he guides his kaiten, a manned suicide torpedo, toward an American destroyer. 

Because Serizawa is writing from both an American and Japanese perspective, the stories are exceptionally rich with insight and the details are fascinating and apt. The storis are told from both a first-person and a third-person point of view. They can come in the form of a Q&A interview and as a transcript, as in: 

“I was born in the first year of Taisho—

“That’s right, 1912. Of course, as a Japanese, I wonder if nuances aren’t lost when accounting in the Western way. For example, unlike Meiji people, like our parents, we Taisho people were very open to the Western world. Have you heard of ‘moga,’ or ‘modan gaaru’? As a girl, I thought we were quite modern, quite the sophisticates <laugh>. . . .”

A central character in one story becomes peripheral in another, and the book’s power grows as we learn more about this family, their lives and histories. And Serizawa is not afraid to break free of the strict realism that characterizes most of the stories. The penultimate story, “The Garden, aka Theorem for the Survival of the Species,” while still realistic is set in 2035 and begins:

“’So, the world’s deconstructing,’ Erin said. It was day three of their senior year of high school. He and Anja were sitting at their usual table in the cafeteria. ‘War’s breaking out on all planes of existence. We’re like, the last human generation still holding out any chance of survival. What do we need to do?’”

Reading Inheritors would be a good start.

The life and art of a Living National Treasure

This thin work of non-fiction does not reflect its depth and substance. While Back to Japan may not be the most captivating title, it does the job of identifying the key event in the subject’s life. The subtitle offers readers much more information: “The Life and Art of Master Kimono Painter Kunihiko Moriguchi.”

The author, Marc Petitjean is a French writer, filmmaker, and photographer. He has directed several documentaries, including From Hiroshima to Fukushima about an atomic bomb survivor, Living Treasure (2012) , about Kunihiko Moriguchi, and Zones Grises, on his own search for information about the life of his father after his death. 

Several years ago while Petitjean was making the Hiroshima documentary, he met Kunihiko at the late, lamented Hotel Okura. Kunihiko speaks French thanks to his years in France where he went to study at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs after graduating from Kyoto City University. 

He and Petitjean talked about France, art, Japan, Japanese art and culture, and he gave Petitjean a catalog of his painted kimonos. It piqued Petitjean’s interest, which resulted ultimately in the documentary, Trésor Vivant and this book.

Kunihiko was born in Kyoto in 1941 where his father Kako Moriguchi was a master yūzen artist. Yūzen (友禅染) is a  resist dyeing technique that involves applying rice paste to silk to prevent the dye from bleeding into other areas of the fabric. Originating in the 17th century, the technique became popular as both a way of subverting the Shogun’s sumptuary laws on dress fabrics and as a way to produce kimono designs that were hand-painted with dyes rather than woven. 

The Moriguchis survived the war. The U.S. never bombed Kyoto, although Kunihiko recalls houses being torn down to create firebreaks in the event we did. Around the time he turned twelve, a student of his father’s came to live with them and was soon joined by two others. “According to the old school to which his father adhered, being a student meant not merely learning a craft, but living full-time with the master, cleaning the house, carrying out all sorts of thankless chores for the family, keeping quiet and obeying orders.” 

Rather than stay at home as another apprentice to his father, Kunihiko entered the department of modern painting in the Japanese tradition at Kyoto City University of Arts where “teachers and students alike were dazzled by American Pop Art.” He, however, distanced himself from that movement.

On graduation, he applied for a student grant from the French government, won one, and in August 1963 sailed to Paris where he was exposed to Op-Art (in which repeated shapes are used to produce illusions) and became a friend and protégé of the French-Polish painter Balthus. Through that connection, he met Jean Miró, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and other artists. 

He finished his course of study at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs and was courted by French companies. Friends expected him to stay on in France, but he decided to return to Japan and learn yūzen painting from his father. He realized that it would be impossible to duplicate his father’s approach, telling him, “I think your kimonos are magnificent, but if I have to draw the same patterns as you—” Waterfalls, plum trees, cranes, chrysanthemums. “—I might as well stop right now. I need to know if following in your footsteps implies working in the same style as you. I might as well tell you straightaway, I’ll never be as good at it as you are.” 

Rather than insist Kunihiko match his patterns, Kako gave him permission to follow his own path. 

Kunihiko’s patterns resemble Op-Art. He called his first yūzen kimono “Hikari” (light). The design is made up of squares that push and pull the illusion of space on its landscape, creating a sense of movement.

The geometrically inspired patterns create different visual effects thanks to the interplay between the background and the foreground or the movement created when the kimonos are worn. Back to Japan includes photos of both Kunihiko’s and Kako’s kimonos; unfortunately they are not in color. And while these are garments meant to be worn, they are also works of art now collected in museums.

The book, smoothly translated from French by Adriana Hunter, not only sketches Kunihiko’s life (and suggests the life of a traditional Japanese artist), it discusses kimono, the art of yūzen, and Japanese culture generally. 

“For me,” says Kunihiko, “tradition is like the purity of spring water. There always needs to be water falling into pure water. When it’s dirty, it overflows. And so it’s always kept pure. And I’m just one droplet in history. That’s how I see tradition.” He is also, like his father, a Living National Treasure, a trésor vivant.

Japanese sci-fi that's more fiction than science

 I bought Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki because I am endlessly fascinated by Japanese fiction and because I watched a video chat about the book and the author.

Suzuki was born in 1949 (the same year as Haruki Murakami) in Shizuoka. She killed herself  at age 36 in 1986. After graduating from high school she worked briefly as a keypunch operator. In 1969 she was a runner-up for the literary magazine Shosetsu Gendai and move to Tokyo where she worked as a bar hostess, nude model, and actor in “pink films”—sort of low-budge soft-core porn. She wrote plays and from 1971 devoted herself to writing. In 1975 she published her first science-fiction short story.

She married Kaoru Abe in 1973 and they had a daughter in 1976. A year later she divorced Abe although they continued to live together. He died in 1978 from an accidental overdose of Bromisoval, a sedative/hypnotic drug. According to Wikipedia, “For a time she managed to support her daughter by publishing stories in sci-fi magazines, but eventually her health deteriorated and she began receiving public assistance. In 1986, she committed suicide by hanging herself at home.”

Given Suzuki’s tumultuous marriage and avant-garde instincts (writes the reviewer who has no idea what he is talking about), it is no surprise that the seven stories in Terminal Boredom tend to be bleak. They are selected from earlier collections and translated by six translators: Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Akio Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan.

In the first, “Women and Women,” men, responsible for war and the world’s other evils—have begun to die off, the survivors exiled to the Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupation zone. The narrator is fine with this until a boy—someone who has escaped the zone—passes by her house. They become unlikely and secret friends until one day:

“Suddenly he hugged me, then flipped me over and pinned me down like we were wrestling. At first, I thought he was just messing around. But he wasn’t. Not in the slightest. Hiro wasn’t messing around at all. I spent the rest of that day learning the unexpected, dreadful truth about human life. Learning it with my body.” What she’s learned, however, is an adolescent fantasy.

The stories all have sci-fi aspects, but they tend to be subordinate to the conversations between characters. Two friends seem to be in an ordinary coffee shop when “she took a slow look around the room and pushed the button at the edge of the table. A see-through capsule popped up to cover us. No one could hear us now.” In “Night Picnic” the family picnics on the moon. In “That Old Seaside Club” CHAIR in small caps “sits in the middle of my apartment and talks to me—and only ever to say mean things!”

I am afraid that my patience with talking chairs and human/alien individuals and faster-than-light travel is limited. Nevertheless, I think Terminal Boredom is worth reading if only to be exposed to the attitudes and ideas of a prolific and interesting writer. I also do not regret the two hours I’ve spent (because I’ve watched it twice) with the translators talking about translation in general and Suzuki in particular. You can find it here.

How do you love someone hell-bent on harming himself?

 I picked this up because Phil Klay, the author of Redeployment, said in an interview, “One of my friends, Scott Cheshire, wrote a beautiful book about faith called High as the Horses’ Bridles. Scott is not a believer himself, though he was raised in the Jehovah’s Witnesses and used to give sermons as a child, and the novel approaches questions of faith with the same degree of respect and serious consideration that any great believing writer would. It’s a challenging and provocative read.” It is that. 

A bio of Cheshire on the Gotham Writers site says that “in the back of every New World Bible (the official Witness translation), there are appendices that include maps and ‘scholarly references’ supporting a literalist reading of the Bible. Ironically, it was the inclusion of these references, designed to keep believers in place, that led Scott ‘astray.’ Scott realized how terribly flawed the so-called scholarly references were in that they merely propped up the Jehovah’s Witness agenda. He researched secular criticism along with histories of American Christianity, Mormonism, and Seventh Day Adventists.”

In college Cheshire found that even sacred texts steal. “Good writers steal or are at least influenced,” he says. “The writers of Genesis stole or borrowed from other religious texts.” He attended church less and less and even skipping the much-revered “Last Supper” celebration. Ultimately, he began exploring fiction, began writing fiction, published short stories, and earned an MFA in fiction from Hunter College.

High as the Horses’ Bridles is the story of a believer who stops believing, his father, mother, and ex-wife. The title refers to how deeply the blood will rise when God brings about the Apocalypse. In the first chapter, 12-year-old Josiah Laudermilk is a boy preacher speaking to an audience of 4,000 in what had been a Queens, NY, movie palace, now the sect’s church. Josiah, his spirit fired by the crowd, announces to the believers that in fact the world will end in twenty years, on December 31, 1999. 

Twenty-five years later, the world has not ended. Josiah returns from California to the Queens family home. He is divorced. He owns a shaky computer retail business. After growing to four stores, Otter Computing has shriveled to one with one employee, Josiah best friend Amad Singh, who keep the business afloat. His mother has died after suffering for several years with with the onset, remission, and return of cancer. And his father, Gill, has retreated into his faith, allowing the house and his health to deteriorate.

While Josiah has given up on the church although not (apparently) on his belief in God, his father has become obsessed with living by the rules of the Bible that mean the most to him. For example, that one should lie down beside the still waters means that Gill has moved a cot in the bathroom so he can sleep beside the filled bathtub. Everything that happens, happens for a reason. In a scene between Gill, Josiah, his mother and church elders, Gill says:

“I want to be a true believer, it’s all I’ve ever wanted out of life . . . And my wife. She wears a hat so you don’t have to see her shining head. For you! You think this is sickness? This is God’s work! All of it God’s work! All of them signs we are living in the End Days, and you won’t even see it. Look to the book of Matthew. In the Last Days. The Apostle Matthew says in the End Days one shall be taken, but the other left behind—”

High as the Horses’ Bridles puts us in the consciousness of white, middle-class American man who in his mid-thirties is trying to make sense of the world and his own history. Josiah does not debate his father or the tenets of his church. The novel does not question the inerrancy of the Bible’s stories, nor does it suggest that there may be questions about or inconsistencies in the stories.

The book does convey the difficulty of loving someone who seems hell-bent on harming himself in a mad quest for . . . what? Transcendence? Ultimate truth? Death? At times I found Josiah irritatingly indecisive. I wanted to tell him: Clean the damned house of the cat crap! Don’t let your father continue to live in such filth! Do something even if it’s wrong! 

Eventually, with the unexpected help of his ex-wife, he does. His friend, Amad back at the store in California, never gives up on him (or the store). And in an extraordinary coda, Cheshire ends the novel with a story of religious transfiguration in Woodford, Kentucky, in 1801. It alone is worth the price of admission. 

What life can be like while serving a life sentence

This Life is a fascinating novel for several reasons, starting with its publishing history. In the book’s Foreword, Zachary Lazar writes that he first met Quntos KunQuest in 2013 at Louisiana’s notorious Angola Prison.

Lazar, a professor of English at Tulane University, had come to the prison as a journalist to cover the production of a play the inmates were performing. Quntos was part of the sound crew and wrote some of the play’s music. “He was a rapper, he said, but Angola disapproved of hip-hop, unlike country, gospel, and rock, so he had to find ways to work that didn’t draw much notice.”

Lazar mentioned to Quntos that he was trying to write a novel “about a man serving life at Angola.” Quntos, 20 years into his life sentence, said he’d written a novel like that himself. He said “he would send it to me and I could ‘steal’ from it anything I wanted.” Lazar wasn’t interested in stealing but was interested in read the manuscript—which was 348 pages hand printed in ballpoint pen with cursive for italics. It took at least one false start before the novel found a publisher in Agate.

This Life is a highbred: memoir, poetry, fiction, all written in an English that may take some getting used to. Here on page 1 is Lil Chris considering the correctional officers who are taking him to Angola: “If anything unusual happened, they wouldn’t have hesitated to shoot. That triptriggered sump’n he wa’n’t tryna think about, but he knew: this was his slow descent to the bottom of the barrel.”

The other major character is Rise who’s been inside for a while. Looking at the new arrivals, “within 30 minutes he’ll have assessed every one of them’s makeup. He’ll know who’s dangerous and who’s soft, who’s got sense and who can’t think, who’s playin’ games and who wants to be left alone. And, most importantly, which of these fools he’s willing to allow inside his zone.”

Lil Chris and Rise are both natural born rappers and This Life is studded with, and enriched by, rap poetry. At the climax of the story, they compete in a rap contest.

This could have been a simple memoir of what it’s like to be serving an extended sentence in Angola, which has provoked a number of books, notably Wilbert Rideau’s In the Place of Justice and Sister Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking. Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, is the largest maximum-security prison in the U.S. Covering 18,000 square acres, Angola is larger than Manhattan. It currently houses about 6,000 prisoners. 

In a facility so large with working farms, manufacturing facilities, education center, an inmate-run radio station, TV station, and magazine, one individual prisoner’s daily life inside can be very different from another. Violence exists, but prison tends to be more peaceful than movies and television would have you believe. We watch Lil Chris being institutionalized before he is fit to live relatively peacefully in a dormitory with a job in the library rather than in a two-man cell or in the SHU—the segregated housing unit, what modern prisons call solitary.

In the course of This Life, we watch Lil Chris change from an angry young man into a rap artist who (we can hope) has a future within and perhaps beyond prison. He is guided in this change by Rise who has his own demons and history to live with, but who also has learned exactly how the system works. As one of the old ’victs tells Lil Chris:

“The prison system is a racket. When we go out and commit criminal acts and get caught, we fall into a well-planned net. A trap. From that point forward, it’s we, the offenders, who are usually victimized. They already know that a large percentage of us don’t know the law—let alone our rights. This problem is compounded by the fact that most of us can’t afford competent legal assistance. We’re given a court-appointed lawyer who not only doesn’t have adequate resources, but also can’t properly defend us even if they did have the resources. They’re being called to defend too many clients at one time.”

So not only is This Life an interesting story, a persuasive picture of prison life, a chapbook of rap poetry, it also offers a thought-provoking perspective on the criminal-justice complex. It reads so well, so persuasively one wonders what, if anything, a copy-editor did with the manuscript. Would you touch an exchange like this between Lil Chris and a female CO:

—“How you doin’ Sarge?”

—“Fine. What’s up with you?” she returns.

—I’m straight.” A little too emphatic. Damn! “I mean, I’m cool. Just another day in the joint.” He recovers. “So you chllin’ wit’ us tonight”

—"Yeah,” she smiles. “I’ll be here with you, tonight.”

—Did she just give him a little under-eyed glance? Boy, that’s cold. I know she just didn’t do me that, Lil Chris thinks.

This Life deserves to be read, to be read widely, to be read aloud, to be savored, and to be thought about.

What Jane Austin would have written if she'd written a mystery

Death Comes to Pemberly is an outlier among P.D. James’s murder mysteries. It was published in 2012 after James had published 17 mysteries set in the contemporary era in which she created Adam Dalgliesh, a police commander and poet. James died in 2014 at age 94, so Pemberly is a very late blossom indeed.

It is also as far as I know unique in that recreates Jane Austin’s characters an involves them in a mystery, rather than, say, taking a detective like Sherlock Holmes and involving him in another mystery as Laurie King does in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. James said, “I wanted to combine my two enthusiasms: writing detective fiction and reading Jane Austen. I thought it would be enjoyable to revisit the characters in Pride and Prejudice and to create a really original, exciting, credible detective story at the same time.”

Death Comes to Pemberly opens in 1803, six years after Pride and Prejudice, with Darcy and Elizabeth happily settled in Pemberly House, the great house on the Darcy estate. They are the parents of two young boys and preparing for the annual Lady Ann’s ball. The evening before the ball, a carriage hurtles out of the stormy dark carrying Elizabeth’s flighty sister Lydia who is screaming bloody murder. Lydia’s husband, the despicable if charming, George Wickham, has followed his friend, a Captain Denny, into the woods after Denny stopped the carriage. Lydia screams that Denny has killed Wickham. When a search party finds the two men in the wood, however, Denny is dead and Wickham, cradling the body exclaims, “He was my friend, my only friend, and I’ve killed him! I’ve killed him! It’s my fault.”

Because the death occurred on Darcy’s land and because Wickham, much to Darcy’s disgust, is Darcy’s brother-in-law, Darcy cannot be the investigating magistrate. That has to be Sir Selwyn Hardcastle from a neighboring estate. Complicating matters is some unfortunate history between the Darcy and Hardcastle families. Indeed, that is only one complication and among the pleasures of Permberly are the number of events and characters in which Darcy and Elizabeth are embroiled. 

Another pleasure is James’s ability to reproduce Austin’s style and syntax. Here, taken entirely at random, a sample: “The statement was met by a silence which Elizabeth felt she was expected to break. As she rose she was aware of the sixteen pairs of eyes fixed on her, of worried and troubled people waiting to be told that all in the end would be well, that they personally had nothing to fear and that Pemberly would remain as it had always been, their security and their home.” The passive voice, the long sentences, the record small moments and social relations all reflect Austin’s sensibilities. 

At the same time, James managed to avoid the melodrama and preposterous coincidences of much 19^th century fiction. In my reading, James handles masterfully the ripples caused by Captain Denny’s death, the potential harm to the estate, the family in crisis, and the story of what led up to and actually happened the night before Lady Ann’s Ball. We understand Elizabeth and Darcy, Lydia and Wickham, Elizabeth’s parents and her sister Jane. We understand them better perhaps that we did in Pride and Prejudice.

Readers who enjoy the book may also enjoy the three-part BBC television adaption of the story. It is no longer Jane Austin, and the scriptwriter had to simplify as they always do. I did not see Ann Maxwell Martin as Elizabeth, but that is a quibble. It did help to see Chatsworth House as a stand in for Pemberly House’s exteriors and Castle Howard for its interiors. When the show was broadcast in December 2013, Antonia Frasier called it “a Christmas feast.” I recommend it, but for maximum pleasure, read the book first.

". . . creating a space for thoughtful moral response"

This is an appreciation rather than a review or critique of Phil Klay’s collection of short stories because (a) I think Redeployment is tour de force and (b) it’s already won 2014 National Book Award. It’s right up there with Dispatches, The Things They Carried, and The Last Parallel.

Klay, born in 1983, grew up in Westchester, New York. He studied creative writing and literature at Dartmouth College and during the summer of 2004, he attended Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia. He graduated from Dartmouth in 2005 and joined the U.S. Marines, where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. In 2007 was deployed to Iraq during the troop surge. He served as a public affairs officer out of Camp Taqaddum in Anbar Province until February 2008. After leaving the Corps in 2009, he completed an MFA in fiction at Hunter College. Redeployment contains a dozen stories of varying lengths. Most are set in Iraq, a few in the U.S. as Marines return home to adjust (or not) to civilian life. They are all told in the first person, but remarkably and interestingly the narrators are all different: enlisted men and officers, infantry grunt and artilleryman, a chaplain and PsyOp specialist. Even a Marine combat engineer who spent his deployment filling potholes in Iraq’s roads and a State Department Special Assistant who is charged with bringing democracy and American values to the country in “Money as a Weapons System.” That’s actually a funny story if you find cultural incomprehension and head-throbbing waste funny.

Klay personally never saw combat, and he’s written, “Though I continue to tell stories about Iraq, I sometimes fear this makes me a fraud. I feel guilty about the sorrow I feel because I know it is manufactured, and I feel guilty about the sorrow I do not feel because it is owed, it is the barest beginnings of what is owed to the fallen.”

These stories are not entertainment. They are serious attempts to covey what it was like to be in that place at that time—Iraq in 2007-08. As sharp and brilliant and powerful as they are (and they are), they must fail in some sense because if you were not there, you cannot know what it was like. That of course is true of fiction generally; the difference here is that the experiences being described are so alien to most people. The most these stories can do, I think, is to describe to safe, comfortable readers the fear, the human waste, the folly, the physical and mental wounds of war.

The Navy medics are there to treat the physical wounds, the chaplain to treat(?), relieve(?), ease(?) the wounds to the soul(?), the spirit(?), or the psyche(?). “Prayer in the Furnace,” a long story in the center of the collection, is told by a Catholic chaplain who reads from Second Timothy at the memorial service of a dead Marine, the battalion’s twelfth KIA in four months: “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.”

The chaplain talks to Rodriguez, a Marine who was with the dead man when he was shot by a sniper. You sense that Rodriguez is trying to make sense of the senseless, and possibly report a war crime, and that the narrator can offer only what the Church has ever offered, trust in God’s mercy. 

But is that enough? During training for deployment in the California desert, a trainer told the unit, “I’m very concerned that this battalion is overly focused on killing people.” The chaplain hears a company commander stage-whisper to his first sergeant, “I guess that pogue think he joined the fucking Peace Corps.”

And in Iraq, after two more Marine deaths, the narrator prays: “I asked God to protect the battalion from further harm. I knew He would not. I asked Him to bring abuses to light. I knew He would not. I asked Him, finally, for grace.” 

An interviewer in Image magazine asked Klay about this story which seems “to burrow down toward a single, absolute, dramatic point, but then end on complex, natural, often ambiguous notes. How do you know that a story is finished—in terms of character, story, even morality?”

Klay said that he sends the works out to trusted friends for suggestion. But, “When I end a story I don’t want to close it off or tie it up. What I want is, ideally, to achieve a slight twist, to shift the ground a little in a way that offers the reader an altered perspective on what they’ve just read . . . As far as how I know a story is done in terms of morality, I think that’s a question of whether I’ve been true to the characters, and to the moral stakes for the characters. You’re not just trying to tell the reader what war was like; you’re trying to guide the reader toward the kind of collision of values that happens for people in war and after. The morality, I suppose, lies in creating the space for thoughtful moral response from the reader.”

How can Bo Bo in Burma, only 12, help his parents?

The Heart Remembers is the third novel in a series set in Burma (now Myanmar), written in German by Jan-Philipp Sendker. The first two novels in the series are The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (2012) and A Well-Tempered Heart (2014) While it is not necessary to have read these two to enjoy The Heart Remembers, I suspect the new book will send readers to them to live a while longer with these interesting characters.

Sendker, who was born in Hamburg in 1960, traveled first to Burma in 1995 as a journalist and several times later as a novelist. He was Stern’s American correspondent from 1990 to 1995 and its Asian correspondent from 1995 to 1999. His books have been translated into Burmese even though they criticized the military. For example, the military is said to have kidnapped young men and sent them into minefields as human mine detectors. “My translator at the time said that as a foreigner I had a kind of fool’s license,” says Sendker. “A local writer probably would not have been able to express himself in that way.”

While there is nothing so horrific in The Heart Remembers, the Army does confiscate a piece of land a character owns and will not sell. And it is clear that the military is a force to avoid if possible.

We follow four main characters, 12-year-old Ko Bo Bo; his uncle U Ba, who is Bo Bo’s caretaker; Bo Bo’s mother Julia Win, who is U Ba’s sister, a Burmese-American lawyer; and Bo Bo’s father Thar Thar, who is a Buddhist monk and former soldier. Bo Bo tells his part of the story in the first person; Julia’s and Thar Thar’s stories are told in the third. Bo Bo has not seen his mother in seven years; he sees his father for only a week or so once a year because Thar Thar cannot leave Julia alone for long in Yangon.

The action takes place in  Kalaw, a village in central Burma interesting enough to attract foreign tourists; in New York City, where Julia has been a high-powered lawyer; and in Yangon, a large city to the south at the confluence of the Yangon and Bago Rivers (formerly Rangoon). One of the many pleasures of The Heart Remembers is the tension Thar Thar feels moving about New York City and the stress Julia feels in unsettled Burma, where she had never lived. 

The book is set in the current day and twelve years earlier when the military junta was officially dissolved following a 2010 general election, and a nominally civilian government was installed. This, along with the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and political prisoners, improved the country's human rights record and foreign relations.

The narrative is set in action when Bo Bo discovers letters his uncle U Ba has written about his parents’ love story. He presses U Ba to tell him about Julia’s courtship with Thar Thar, a romance that unfolds against the uncertain backdrop of the Saffron Revolution, a series of mass protests in 2007, spurred by increases in fuel prices and a long history of military government rule. At the time, Thar Thar is in New York with Julia but feels he must return to Burma to participate in the revolution.

Back in the present day, Bo Bo hatches a plan to help his family by employing his acute emotional perception. He tells us, “I can tell that a person is sad even when they’re laughing. I can tell that someone is getting angry, even if they pretend that everything is fine. I can tell when rage is a mask for fear. I can sense the uneasiness behind a friendly voice. Your eyes will give you away. They can’t pretend. They can’t lie, even when they want to.” Believing he can cure his mother, Bo Bo sets off to find his parents and bring his family back together.

The Heart Remembers is smoothly translated by Kevin Wiliarty. It is an absorbing and persuasive evocation of a place and situation about which few readers will know much more than what television news has reported. In other words, almost nothing.