thinlinednotepaper

This is not a poem, but instead a series of short one-sentence paragraphs. I remember the style working much better in Shovel Ready, the first book of the series; indeed, I remember the first book of the series working much better. And while I’m not predisposed to particularly like books in series, this one seemed surprisingly uninterested in providing any kind of service to the reader for context--even while it picks up very shortly after the first book ends, it’s still been a few years outside since the last one, and clues always help.

It’s probably beside the point in this case, because Scenario is a farce set in a mildly-satiric future and decidedly not sci-fi, but the time travel in the book irritated me. Or, rather, was a symptom of a larger disregard for internal logic that irritated me. Now, it’s not like everything that uses time travel as a plot point has to be Primer, much less has to agonize over mechanical questions--but the application of implausibilities was just . . . inconsistent. So much so that this moment, where one character recognizes that all things cannot simultaneously be possible, comes as a surprising application of logic (and something you almost expect to be contradicted or undermined in the next paragraph).

From a torture scene, but contributing here to my goal to run the foremost country-music-in-contemporary-literature tumblr. Because we all need goals.

The Sympathizer is usually pretty great, if a little mushy in execution (it’s written in great slabs of text, no quotation marks, which is a valid choice except when it causes large chunks of dialogue to lose their snap because of the effort you expend tracking who’s speaking); even the points where the plot drags are packed with enough detail to glitter. The Sympathizer is also very much of its time--which means that as much as the book is about the late 1970s, narrated by its main character not long after the events he narrates, its perspective comes with nearly 40 years of telescoping hindsight.

For one reason or another, I’ve read enough of Kang’s writing online--and Kang is comfortable enough injecting himself into his journalistic writing, or maybe just spends enough time writing about the specific things that he loves--that I feel like I have a sense of his personalities, his tastes, prior to having started this novel. And the novel is good--a caper, with the humor and momentum that a caper needs to work. But a huge part of why this works is its first-novel-ness--the quirks and specifics of Philip Kim’s character are the quirks and specifics of Kang’s, at least from his journalism. Southern, Korean-American, marinated in ‘90s East Coast hip-hop. Makes you wonder what a second novel looks like, or a second novel’s hero.

Narration in the second person very seldom works. At best, it reads as a trick, something to inveigle you into easy identification. Here, it’s one of several obvious flaws that don’t wind up quite being flaws, with all credit to Vida’s weird choices. Rather than encouraging identification (or even the opposite, emphasizing artificiality or distance) the “you” works--largely because it’s not part of a transaction between writer and reader but an expression of character, one who is estranged enough from her own experience and her own body that the “you” seems natural. It makes for an odd dislocation, well-managed in the way that, say, Muriel Spark dislocates (more than anything else, this reminded me of a rather cheerier The Driver’s Seat).

According to the jacket copy, an update on the conspiracy-theory novel for the something-or-other age, which is about right but also misses the important stuff. The conspiracy stuff is there, of course, for better or worse: the shifting allegiances, the McGuffins, the naif at the center of things, relatable as he tries to figure things out alongside us. It does what it says on the tin. But--and Beauman knows this--the thing that makes the book worthwhile is its city, and the style that the city is sketched out in. There’s a scene where Raf, our naif, stumbles onto a synthetic London street, and his reaction to its fakeness is wonderful; and throughout there’s stuff like these (totally incidental) bike messengers, initially described with their “famished muscularity . . . that you also see in gay men who’ve kept on clubbing for a few years too long, and the dozen standing in this pub look as if they all have resting heart rates so slow that by any strict definition they’re medically dead.”

At the risk of being rather too on-point, this is much the experience of reading The Cartel--Winslow’s perspective is so very high, so god’s-eye, that you don’t wind up identifying with the characters, even despite his very good circulation between perspectives and characters. It becomes a numbers game, where the dollar amounts and the bodies pile up, and it’s crushing. It’s also an interesting parallel to Bolano; 2666 has that long passage in the middle about the feminicido. But the feminicido is read as the most distancing bit of 2666; here, it’s the backstory of Winslow’s most sympathetic character, and it still plays as a numbers game.

I have a vague suspicion that The Cartel is a thriller for people that enjoy sabermetrics.

The general excellence of this book aside--and it is generally excellent--it’s fascinating that after reading this bit maybe two months ago it’s spat out a huge amount of confirmation bias. Not just seeing Marty Robbins everywhere: I do live in Nashville now, and that means hearing ‘El Paso’ or ‘Cool Water’ coming from somewhere more weeks than not. But the unexamined link between country music, and Marty Robbins’s record with the perfect hot-pink cover, and Jamaican music. Which is fascinating, as it’s the rare example where the whitest country music pollinates back into black roots music. There are enough fascinating examples of black music informing (or being coopted by, stolen by) white music: Jimmie Rodgers yoking together twelve-bar blues with yodeling to create country music, Elvis singing R&B for Sam Phillips, even the hillbilly jazz of Chet Atkins’s studio crew (enough of them playing on Gunfighter Ballads). Putting Marty Robbins at the root of reggae and dancehall, Ike Turner to Desmond Dekker’s Elvis, unwitting and unacknowledged, is--lovely?

To the Editor:

I was grateful to see my book “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage” mentioned in Paperback Row (Oct. 19). When highlighting a few of the essays in the collection, the review mentions topics ranging from “her stabilizing second marriage to her beloved dog” without benefit of comma, thus giving the impression that Sparky and I are hitched. While my love for my dog is deep, he married a dog named Maggie at Parnassus Books last summer as part of a successful fund-raiser for the Nashville Humane Association. I am married to Karl VanDevender. We are all very happy in our respective unions.

ANN PATCHETT

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

She describes, in the previous paragraph, the pope with “a huge ornamental headdress that looked like a brushed-metal bullet, a large pointed dome with a row of twinkling stones low around its girth, underneath a spiky gold base.” And one of the things that this book does so well is set up and pick up resonances: there are images of popes throughout, here a motorcycle brand, there a wistful dream, elsewhere a ceiling fresco of popes drowning; there are a couple of bullets, each freighted with significance; there is the futurist dream early in the book, of mechanized speed and half-human half-machine hybrids, which this resembles. None of which is, needs to be, remarked on, in the middle of this tossed-off story, which is one of the chief reasons this book is so good. It has invented a world, a coherent and consistent set of symbols and images and icons, that taken on their own might be heightened or hyperrealistic or hysterical even, but capture the moment they’re intended to more completely than stricter verisimilitude might.

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

Which is great, and apt, and we’ve all been in that bar, right? But even better, a little down the page: “She shone like something wet, a piece of candy that had been in someone’s mouth.” Which winds up just being glitter and sweat, but is beautiful and cruel and ominous. So much of this book is so very good at sentence level.