Wool, by Hugh Howey

This book gave me two great days of reading. I started it having not the slightest idea of the plot. All I had to go on were the effusive ratings on Goodreads and Amazon, and you know, they weren’t far wrong.

It helps that the book sits squarely in one of my favorite genres, that of dystopian science fiction. Wool is set in the far future. For whatever reason, the world has gone to shit. The air is so toxic that not only is it unbreathable, but it will eat away at you and kill you within minutes. The stars appear only in brief moments above filthy cloud cover.

The people all live underground in a weather-proof, enormous cylindrical structure they refer to as the “silo.” Because whatever happened to destroy the planet happened so long ago, everyone in the silo was born there, and all of their parents were born there. They don’t know that “silo” used to be the word for  an above-ground structure used to store grain. There are few remnants of mankind’s time above-ground; the inhabitants cling to ancient children’s books as artifacts of times past, and believe the pictures of “elephants” inside are make-believe, since the existence of a beast so enormous is outside their comprehension.

The strictest taboo of the silo is: you never speak about the outside. You don’t express curiosity or desire about it. You don’t try to find out why you live in the silo, because as far as you know, we have nearly always lived in the silo and we likely always will. The restoration of the surface is a distant hope that will not be realized in yours or your children’s lifetime. Breaking this taboo gets you  sent to “cleaning”:  you are dressed in a suit designed to protect you from the elements and sent outside to clean the sensors– screens that help your fellow inhabitants monitor the outside. Unfortunately, technology has not yet been able to create a suit that can withstand the elements for longer than it takes to clean the sensors, and you’re basically doomed. Strangely, though nearly every person who’s ever been sentenced to die has proclaimed that he or she would not clean the sensors, all of them have changed their minds once they’ve gotten outside. The inhabitants of the silo believe this to be the result of a transcendent spiritual experience that occurs outside. But come on. You know there’s got to be some other reason, right?

There is, and the revelations concerning the origins and running of the silo are satisfying, though not groundbreaking. The real draw for me was the main character, Juliette. She’s smart, tough, and too curious for her own good. She’s pissed off, but not in a bad-attitude Katniss Everdeen/Veronica Mars kind of way. She just has a gritty determination. Another female character, Mayor Jahns, is also complex, recognizable, and well-drawn. That a book in the sci-fi genre features two excellent female characters shouldn’t be cause for notice, but it is. It’s just so rare to see female characters who aren’t there simply to be the female characters. Juliette and Mayor Jahns have important plot points to set in motion, and most of the other characters in the book revolve around one or the other of these women. They do have romantic experiences, but these flow organically out of the course of events, and are far from being the focus of the book. In other words, they’re just characters! Like anyone else! Howey doesn’t draw attention to them simply for being female. They’re not tokens. It is, rather, the state of female characterization in culture as a whole that makes the fact of these characters’ existence so remarkable.

Howey’s talent at drawing characters also extends to the supposed “villains” of the story. The backstory of the silo is complex, and the motivations of the “bad guys” are as well. This doesn’t redeem all of them, but it does give a savor to the conflict between Juliette and the people who run the silo that a more black-and-white dichotomy would not have had. It also makes for an ending that, while satisfying, maintains mystery in its piquant implications.

This makes sense: I read the Omnibus, Books 1-5, but I understand that there are more Wool books to follow. I hope that the next books in the series will keep the same sense of mystery and excellent characterization of the first five, but perhaps with a more tightly wound plot. These first five spent too many words describing certain battle scenes that did not unfold relevant plot details or add to my understanding of the world or its people. Howey’s best action sequences were the ones in which he followed just one or two characters (usually Juliette) through some harrowing ordeal or other. I gasped aloud during a couple of these scenes, because they were so tautly written.

I don’t know if the Wool books to come will be as smart or as entertaining as these first five, but Hugh Howey has done his job well, because I know I’ll keep reading just to find out.

Carry the One, by Carol Anshaw

Carry the One, by Carol Anshaw

This book was such an easy and absorbing read you could almost miss how quietly impressive the writing is. It reminds me how important it is for writers to not just have a story to tell, but to also have something to say. And if you have something to say, sometimes the story isn’t even all that important.

The story in Carry the One is simple: after Carmen and Matt’s wedding in 1983, Carmen, Matt, Olivia, Nick, Tom, Alice, and Maude all clamber into a car at three in the morning. Nick, in the front passenger seat, and Olivia who is driving, are both high, too high to stop the car from hitting a ten year old girl when she wanders into the road. She dies, and all seven adults in the car spend the rest of their lives feeling inseverably linked to that one moment. From then on, there is before the accident, and there is after the accident.

It’s a dramatic moment, certainly, but a simple one. There’s no magical realism, no mystery, no further details later revealed in flashback. It takes up the space of slightly more than one chapter. And from there the stories of the seven characters look, from the outside, like the stories of many other people with no such horrific incident in their pasts. Carmen and Matt eventually get divorced. Alice and Maude share a passionate but intermittent love affair. Olivia goes to prison and comes out hard and distant. Nick abuses drugs. Tom seems to have forgiven himself. But this is just the story Anshaw tells. The book is great because she actually has something to say about life using the the story. Its thematic scope is that of a Greek tragedy:  the characters feel that they have been doomed by a power beyond themselves, yet still suffer in the knowledge that, nonetheless, they were at fault.

That they feel guilt is obvious. In different ways, they punish themselves mercilessly over the course of the book, and these punishments constitute the main plot points. In their musings and in Anshaw’s prose, we are shown how the characters feel cosmically manipulated, cheated out of the lives they should have had: “Bits of our energy fused together that night. Soldered filaments on the cosmic web.” This is spoken by Nick, who is, significantly, an astronomer. His skill at discovering bodies and events in the sky is juxtaposed with his intense earthly suffering. Before the accident, drugs are a casual recreation for him: “On his off nights he explored– through doors opened by hallucinogens and opiates– an inner universe.” After the accident, he uses drugs to slowly kill himself. He himself is compared to a heavenly body: “In order to keep liking Nick (as opposed to loving him, which was non-negotiable), Alice sometimes had to look at him obliquely, or with her eyes half closed, or through a pinhole in a piece of cardboard. Straight on would burn her retinas.” This kind of seemingly one-off comparison is actually one in a series of metaphors that create an overarching symbolic narrative for the book. This is what I mean when I say Anshaw’s writing is quietly impressive. She maintains an unostentatious prose tone that never breaks pace, never calls attention to itself, and is seamless.

The comparative metaphor of earthly versus ethereal takes on a temporal aspect, since each of the characters is anchored so heavily to a point in the past. This manifests literally in Alice’s paintings of the little girl, whom she renders in various stages of her life as if she had lived to grow up. Olivia, who lives with the knowledge that she was most directly responsible for the girl’s death, feels  that “Guilt… was the easiest, the simplest response. Much more complicated was living past guilt, bearing the permanence, accommodating the weight of having done something terrible and completely undoable.” Nick also experiences this temporal displacement. At one point, he tells Alice about looking at the clock at 3:17, going downstairs to buy a coffee, and coming back to see that the clock was still running, yet somehow still read 3:17: ” I just exit regular forward momentum, then I come back in at exactly the place where I left.”

It is often a pleasant thing for a character to be relatable. Several of the characters in Carry the One are painfully relatable. It is not enjoyable to feel such a combination of loathing, pity, and identification with people who have made a mistake of such proportions. Yet reading Carry the One was an enjoyable experience, not only because I admired Anshaw’s really excellent writing, but because the characters are allowed some joy, some worth despite the darkness they carry with them.

Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

I’m about 30 years too late to tell you that this is an amazing book. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. But one of the beauties of truly great literature is that it lends itself to endless thought and discussion. Take the first page of Housekeeping as an example.

In the third sentence, Ruthie, our narrator, tells us that her grandfather had “escaped this world years before I entered it.” The single word, “escaped,” tells you something about how Ruthie feels about this world and about death, since we can only be said to escape from things we are trapped by. To her way of thinking, Ruthie has not survived her grandfather; she has been left behind by him, as she was left behind first by her mother, then by her grandmother, and then by her two great-aunts. These are not the only losses she will experience over the course of the book. Her life is defined by loss, and it is only the beginning for her. She and her younger sister, Lucille, will finally come to be raised by their aunt Sylvie, but always with a fear of losing her, and and always looking for the sense of permanence that Ruthie will come to believe does not actually exist. This is the “housekeeping” to which the title refers: the finding and keeping of a sense of something lasting.

There is so much to say about the layers of meaning to be found in nearly every sentence of this book, that I hardly know how to contain myself to something that would still qualify as a review. If you’ve read Moby Dick, perhaps saying that Housekeeping is strongly influenced by Moby Dick will give you some idea of how powerful the book is. But where Moby Dick’s sweep is broad, Housekeeping plumbs the depths of a few meaningful notions. Moby Dick takes place on the open sea; Housekeeping is set on a glacial lake in rural Idaho. Melville wrote, “Yea, foolish mortals, Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.” Robinson’s lake floods Ruthie’s town every spring: “The earth will brim, the soil will become mud and then silty water, and the grass will stand in chill water to its tips.” The town itself used to “belong to the lake,” which by some geological shift or other retreated to one discrete mass, only to reclaim its territory periodically. Ruthie’s grandfather died when his train derailed from the bridge and drove straight in. Years later, Ruthie’s mother will drive her car off a cliff into the lake. For Ruthie, the lake is emblematic of the dissolution of all physical boundaries, including time. So many people have left her that her memories and thoughts of them become the strongest presence there can be, and physical proximity and permanence become hindrances. Home, then, can only be the absence of a home, something Sylvie also understands though Lucille does not. Sylvie is referred to repeatedly as a “drifter,” and it becomes clear that Robinson uses this word because of its relevance to water.

Robinson also deploys light and dark to explore Ruthie’s sense of impermanence. Lucille (whose name means “light”) has blazing red hair and evinces a desire for the concrete nature of a “normal” life. Ruthie, with her dark hair and introverted nature, eschews reality and prefers to live in the presence of perpetual figments that can never threaten to desert her. Near the book’s climax, Ruthie walks through an orchard in the dark:

I learned an important thing in the orchard that night, which was that if you do not resist the cold, but simply relax and accept it, you no longer feel the cold as discomfort. I felt giddily free and eager, as you do in dreams, when you suddenly find that you can fly, very easily, and wonder why you have never tried it before. I might have discovered other things. For example, I was hungry enough to begin to learn that hunger has its pleasures, and I was happily at ease in the dark, and in general, I could feel that I was breaking the tethers of need, one by one.

Compare this to the following from Moby Dick: “Truly, to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.”

Considered outside the context of the novel, Ruthie’s struggle to somehow merge life and death would seem objectively sad. Strangely though, there is beauty in her acceptance of the world’s transience. It is made more precious by her knowledge that she has no stake in it.

These are only some of the ways in which Housekeeping is a simply beautiful book. I have compared it to Moby Dick, but I could have written more on that subject, and I could have written equally as much about the clarity of Ruthie’s narrative voice or the metaphorical likeness of the lake to the river Styx. The book is already a classic, so to say my review is superfluous is understatement, but the meaning of this book filled me and flooded out of me in so many thoughts and words that to write nothing would be impossible.

The experience of reading the novel is like a strange meditation. I felt intensely focused on the words in front of me while simultaneously feeling inexorably pulled toward what was to come. And when I finished, I turned back to the first page to reread, trying to understand how quietly, with a hundred near-imperceptible transitions, the book had become what it was in the end. I know I’ve read something great when I feel grateful at the end of the story. This is one of the two best books I’ve read this year, and certainly one of the best ever.

White Horse, by Alex Adams

     

White Horse

White Horse is the first book in what will eventually be a trilogy. Often in trilogies (notwithstanding Star Wars episodes IV-VI), the first installment is the strongest, and the other two ride the coattails of the their successor’s innovation, to varying degrees of success. Though it’s impossible to say for sure at this point, Alex Adams’ White Horse feels like exactly the opposite: the precursor to something much bigger and better than is contained within its own pages. That said, what is there is enough to substantiate the book in its own right and make a reader eager for more.

White Horse is the name of the disease that wipes out most of the population and turns many of the survivors into mutants. In her old life, our protagonist, Zoe Marshall, was a janitor at the pharmaceutical company that invented the plague. In her new life, with the earth irrevocably damaged by war, her friends and family dead, and a baby inside her, Zoe journeys across the Atlantic and through the wastelands of Europe, ostensibly in search of her therapist-turned-lover, Nick, but really to somehow prove to herself that there is anything left worth living for. She is an odd mixture of parts, at once needy and defiantly self-sufficient, wisecracking her way through a gruesome landscape as she wipes away her tears. In another book, she would be the neurotic-yet-lovable thirty year old, wryly deferring the advances of the unsuitable blind dates her mother finds for her.  In this world, she uses a chair to nearly kill a man who’s been raping his niece, trades her blood for passage on a boat, and clings desperately to the thought that it’s still possible to be a good person. Sometimes her insistence on morality seems noble; other times it is frustratingly idiotic.

Zoe is meant to be a kind of Pandora, as evidenced by the sealed jar that mysteriously appears in her apartment one day, which she is terrified of opening. But somewhere around the time she meets Medusa and consults the Oracle of Delphi, I realized that Zoe is also the Danaë to a seeming Perseus, who, should he survive, seems destined to serve as a source of hope and illumination to the ravaged population. The development of the symbolic mythological overtones into literal components of the plot was unexpected. Suddenly, I realized that the book’s inside flap, pitching the story as one in which “Zoe comes to see that humans are defined not by their genetic code, but rather by their actions and choices,” was not was the book was actually about, or at least not what it should be about. This new world, these mutants, this potentially epic landscape, are what the book should have been about from the time Zoe starts her journey. Enjoyable as these revelations were, they were not truly of a piece with the rest of the book, which seemed at first to be standard post-apocalyptic zombie movie fare.

This incongruence is largely due to the unnecessary pages the book devotes to describing the “Then” portion of the “Then” and “Now” segments into which it is divided. There are two ways to go in a post-apocalyptic world. Down one road, we can find out what caused the apocalypse so that we can attempt to stop whatever it is that caused it, and hopefully return to some semblance of the world we had before. But Adams’ world is one that is hurtling headlong down Road Number Two: The Road of No Return (and yes, I magnanimously offer that as a title, free of charge, should the book get picked up for film). Adams spends too much time giving us back story, as if solving the riddle of how it all started will somehow be of consequence to Zoe’s fate and the fate of the new world. Meanwhile, there are no clues to suggest that these pages will ever prove to be part of an overarching narrative. If Adams does decide to use any of the origin story in the future books, it will require masterful plot weaving.

The less than graceful plot transition is not the only indication that the book lacks tight focus. Adams’ strain shows  in her uneven prose, which sometimes produces wonderful, painfully vivid images like this: “A woman is lying on the ground nearby. I help her up… Another woman is a magician’s trick gone wrong, her body severed by a sheet of corrugated iron.” Other times, it lapses into cliché, as when Zoe confronts an enemy: “Come on, asshole. You and me. Right here.” Or when she meets the man who was president of the United States: “We speak of other things… of apple pie and ice cream, of baseball, of times when people still celebrated July Fourth.”

Had White Horse only been a story about a woman looking for her lover at the end of the world, I would have enjoyed it simply because I like a good apocalypse story. But its ambitions raised it above my initial expectations and made me hopeful that the remaining installments will spend less time looking back. Forward and outward are the proper directions for this story to take.  White Horse gets where it’s going, just not at a gallop.

The Séance, by John Harwood

The Seance, by John Harwood

This book hit me right at the nexus of my interest in both Victorian sensation fiction and horror. I knew I was going to like it from page one: Harwood’s prose is observant of 19th century conventions, but not priggishly so. It sets an atmosphere without creating a barrier for the modern day casual reader. This deftness in balancing old and new told me straight away that I was reading the work of an author who understood what he was working with and who he was working for.

Make no mistake: this is not an attempt at writing a perfectly faithful Victorian novel. If you’re looking for that, The Quincunx does a pretty incredible job (though I suppose I can’t say there’s no modern-day twist in that book as well). I suppose I liked The Séance so much because it seemed that Harwood, like me, loves Victorian gothic and sensation fiction so much that he knows how silly and over-the-top it can be, and loves it none the less for all of that. And the book is over-the-top: there are not one, but two young women estranged from their families and cast out on the world; there’s a case of suspected mistaken parentage; mysterious deaths; murder; strange disappearances; a haunted house; an unhappy marriage; and possible ghosts. But Harwood understands that to keep our interest, he needs to play it straight, and he is skillful enough to put the reader in the frame of mind to take his story seriously, at least in the moment.

The book begins when Constance Langton’s younger sister dies, and her father abandons the family, leaving Constance alone to care for her grief-stricken mother. Hoping to console her mother by any means at her disposal, Constance becomes drawn into the world of spiritualism, attending séances and trying herself to enter trance states in order to channel her sister. This makes for an immediately intriguing beginning, though I was confused when what seemed like a budding plotline was set aside in favor of the story of Wraxford Hall, the manor house Constance inherits from a distant aunt. Though the story of Wraxford Hall and its former inhabitants is absorbing and by turns truly creepy and suspenseful, it did seem as if much of what had come before could simply have been culled from the book.

Constance, like the other characters in the novel, is fairly two-dimensional. In fact, the two main women in the novel are almost indistinct from one another, which was perhaps deliberate. But the character of Magnus Wraxford, one of the Hall’s former owners, cuts a deliciously menacing figure, and the stock sensation novel roles the other characters fill are well-written enough to render them functionally interesting.

Harwood gives a hearty nod to Wilkie Collins in his use of multiple narrators. He references both The Woman in White and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret by using the madhouse as a peripheral threat to the women in the story. Times being what they are, Harwood’s novel does not scandalize in the way it might have 150 years ago, but anyone capable of enjoying “Downton Abbey” or any Merchant Ivory job will be able to contextually situate himself.

The ending disappoints a bit. A somewhat forced romantic liaison and a clumsily handled denouement don’t clinch the fibers of this tale together as satisfyingly as one could hope. What can I say? There will never be another Wilkie Collins, but while reading The Séance, I felt that John Harwood and I were in the same room on a dark, rainy afternoon, giggling over the melodrama that such fiction generally presents, and enjoying the intrigue and eeriness that it nevertheless provides.

The Not Yet, by Moira Crone

In Moira Crone’s vision of the future, the one percent are immortal.  The U.S. population of 2121 is divided into social strata even more rigidly segregated than the socioeconomic classes of today. The secret to possibly eternal longevity has been discovered, and it’s available for a steep price.  With the economy geared almost exclusively toward the preservation and entertainment of “The Heirs,” most live in poverty outside the beautiful cities that house the Heirs. Malcolm is a foundling and a “Not-Yet,” or “Nyet,” a kind of indentured servant to an Heir. Malcolm’s guardian, Lazarus, pays into a trust for Malcolm, so that one day Malcolm can afford to be Treated, to undergo the process that will keep him alive for a very long time. As Lazarus tells him, before sending Malcolm off to complete required training, “This is all just your Prologue!” Malcolm decides that “prologue” means “you weren’t supposed to live now, so you could live later, when you deserved to.” But just as he is about to take the next step towards immortality, Malcolm discovers that his trust is in escrow, and, pursued by men who want to kill him for unknown reasons, he embarks on a journey to find Lazarus and ask him what has become of his trust.

The metaphor of islands and its attendant theme of isolation can be connected to almost every aspect of the book, from the re-imagined city of New Orleans (which, post-Katrina and its fictional successors, has become an island); to the walled cities in which the Heirs live out their centuries-long lives, surrounded by the poor and aging; to the Heirs themselves, who wear over-skins of living tissue, or prodermises, to keep them looking young and to protect them from the environment. The prodermis can be ordered to any aesthetic specification the wearer wishes, but it also prevents the wearer from feeling anything with her real skin or seeing anything with her own eyes. Heirs are so far above the rest of society that it is considered taboo to even touch one of them.  They cannot eat real food because of the delicate nutritional balance they must maintain, and regulation of their hormones prevents them from feeling any real pleasure from most sex. The closest thing to pornography for Heirs is a kind of play that depicts death, also known as “the so-long,” or “that dirty awful thing,” which they are simultaneously disgusted by and obsessed with. Malcolm, meaningfully, spent much of his youth as a well-regarded actor in these kinds of plays.

Malcolm, as a traveler on a quest, becomes a navigator of the book’s islands, both literal and human versions of them. He knows that to be immortal is the greatest thing the world has to offer him, but he can’t seem to cut himself off from mortality the way he needs to: he falls in love with a “Nat,” or untreated woman, he longs for physical affection and approval from Lazarus, whom he sees as a father, and he is unable to estrange himself from his brother, Ariel, whose rebellious ways and desire to discover his and Malcolm’s origins threatens to ruin Malcolm’s chances of completing his Not-Yet training. Though Malcolm is not a character who engages emotional sympathy, his version of the hero’s quest and realization as a combination Moses/Oedipus figure unfolds at a steady pace punctuated by compelling revelations.

The richness of the book’s environment is a lot to take in, and for much of the first half I had no choice but to settle temporarily into ignorance of what new terms and situations really meant, and trust that they would be explained in time. This is intelligent science fiction that does not coddle the reader by providing tidy explanations of its novelties in the first fifty pages– but a bit more background up front would have set up Malcolm’s adventures more effectively by making the significance of certain events clearer. For instance, a better explanation of the class system and types of people who inhabit Malcolm’s world would have made his reactions to “Yeareds” and “Altereds” he meets near the beginning of the story more understandable. Too much of the book is too ambiguous or cryptic for it to be as effective as it could be. This becomes especially problematic because of the many side-plots circling Malcolm’s quest to reconnect with Lazarus; it’s hard to understand all the implications of the discoveries Malcolm makes without a stronger baseline understanding of the world and its terminology.

Even so, more than enough meaning leaks through to make it apparent that this is refreshingly original and thoughtful science fiction. The Not Yet is slightly flawed in its execution, but its intriguing premise and philosophical inquiries into the nature of life and death make it a worthwhile read with potential for an equally good sequel, should Moira Crone choose to write one.

The Odd Women, by George Gissing

I could not believe what I was reading. Some of the ideas in this book could be straight out of The Feminine Mystique. When middle-aged Edmund Widdowson tries to convince his young wife, Monica, that she should be content with staying at home and taking care of the house, she counters that everything that needs to be done can be done in just a few hours. Taking care of her home and husband is supposed to be her whole life, and she’s informing her husband that it only takes a few hours a day. She also insists that she doesn’t need him to sanction her comings and goings, and that he needs to trust her entirely or not at all. The frankness of these declarations, among others, is what will keep The Odd Women in my thoughts for some time.

Monica Widdowson is not one of the novel’s “odd women,” or women who are unmarried. Her two older sisters, Alice and Virginia, are. Left only a meager sum off which to live into their old age, Alice and Virginia live in barely genteel poverty, because they were not educated for anything beyond “womanly” careers, such as teaching. Meanwhile, their childhood friend, Rhoda Nunn, is also single, but has made it her mission to educate women for any and all careers they can get, and encourages spurning marriage until the day when men and women can be equal partners. The story of how she herself falls in love and works through the conflict between her ideals and her affections is the book’s centerpiece, and it’s tightly interwoven with the plot thread of Monica’s marriage.

These outer conflicts make for interesting storytelling, but I was bowled over by Gissing’s psychological portraits of the men in the book, and how they struggle with reconciling the women in their lives with what they have been taught to think about women in general. In one scene, Widdowson reflects on his ailing marriage, and almost manages to transcend his limited knowledge:

Would not he have been a much happier man if he had married a girl distinctly his inferior in mind and station? … From the first he understood that Monica was no representative shopgirl, and on that very account he had striven so eagerly to win her. But it was a mistake… ‘Let me ask myself a question. If Monica were absolutely free to choose between continuing to live with me and resuming her perfect liberty, can I persuade myself that she would remain my wife? She would not… Of that I am morally convinced. And I acknowledge the grounds of her dissatisfaction. We are unsuited to each other. We do not understand each other… My love– what is my love? I do not love her mind, her intellectual part… I don’t know what her thoughts really are, what her intellectual life signifies.’

Then, a page later, he is on the verge of mentally sanctioning divorce, when he finds he has stepped too far beyond his own capacity for liberality. Skillfully, Gissing shows us how, afraid of the implications of these ideas, Widdowson steps back into the shade: “Perhaps there ought not to be such a thing as enforced permanence of marriage… It would not do to think like this. He was a man wedded to a woman very difficult to manage– there was the practical upshot of the matter. His duty was to manage her. He was responsible for her right conduct.” In this scene, I was reminded of some of the best passages from Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, psychological, interior passages which, despite any outer action in the plot, constitute the climax of the novel.

Gissing is unromantic and unremitting in his attacks on Victorian-age marriage and societal expectations of women, and he goes the extra mile by showing the effect these mores have on men as well as women. Over the course of this 1893 book, Gissing discusses women working outside the home, women making the life decision to remain single, prostitution, alcoholism, poverty, inhumane working conditions, common-law marriages, divorce, and adultery. Those who are less than academically interested in these issues may find much of the dialogue to be rather fibrous, since Gissing lapses into speechifying in more than one instance. But I was enthralled, if only to be reminded of how much things can change in one century.

Modelland, by Tyra Banks

I watch Tyra Banks’ “American’s Next Top Model” religiously, usually while eating dessert. The experience is a pleasant one: it’s not mentally taxing, it’s amusing, it occasionally strains credibility, and it gives me the opportunity to haughtily pass judgment over tightly edited versions of people I’ve never met. Modelland provided a similar experience, with the added element of surprise. I was expecting something along the lines of a wackier Devil Wears Prada; what I got was just about a so-so young adult-level dystopian science fiction novel. Only wackier.

Even typing this makes me feel ridiculous, but the main character is Tookie De La Crème (and every time I read her full name, I thought longingly of Oreos), a self-described “Forgetta-Girl,” who lies on the floor of her high school in the town of Metopia, hoping someone will notice her enough to even step on her. In the future Tyra Banks imagines, we will worship models, and our entire society will be centered around following the fashions Modelland dictates, and trying to get ourselves or our daughters selected to be a Modelland trainee, or “Bella,” on the annual Day of Discovery. It’s like fashion Hogwarts. Or, you know… not. Modelland is ruled over by a mysterious entity known as the Belladonna, whose minions, the Triple7 models, have literal superpowers of beauty and salesmanship. Tookie’s beautiful younger sister, Myrracle, has been groomed by her parents to be chosen on this year’s Day of Discovery, but somehow, Tookie, with her frizzy hair, mismatched eyes, and huge forehead, is chosen instead. During her time in Modelland, she will face the challenges of supermodel classes, a personal nemesis, a possible love interest, the insecurities that come from having zero family support, and a mystery. It seems Modelland is trying to hide something.

The scout who selects Tookie (and three other similarly unlikely candidates) is the famous Ci-L, who was once the greatest model on earth, but is now being punished for unnamed crimes. Judging by the way Tyra Banks presents herself on television, Tookie and Ci-L both represent aspects of Ms. Banks herself at different stages of development. Tookie is the awkward, insecure side, and Ci-L represents the woman who has conquered the world of fashion, and now seems to want to nurture new talent. But in the book, at least, there are more sides than this to Ci-L, and she becomes more menacing as the story progresses.

Banks’ sense of pacing is mostly rather good, with a few misfires in the form of side plots that are ill-developed and eventually abandoned altogether. The plot itself is of course ridiculous, but that’s not at all to say it’s devoid of entertainment value. Though the classes in the model academy are mostly dull, and many of the peripheral characters fail to draw interest despite their oddities, Tookie herself is actually a pretty sympathetic character, and her arc is well-described: organic and believable. The book also present a few mysteries that I was surprisingly curious to see the resolutions to, though in this area the story does disappoint in some respects, since a few of the questions presented by the book are never really answered.

To someone like me, who will read just about anything, the book was okay. It was moderately discomfiting in the way it’s discomfiting to read the work of a good friend who, while clearly intelligent and imaginative, is simply not a writer. Modelland didn’t blow me away, but it impressed me if only because I had little to no expectations for it to begin with.

Five Bells, by Gail Jones

At the beginning of Five Bells, the four main characters separately wander Sydney’s Circular Quay and contemplate the famous opera house. To each character, the opera house symbolizes something different: to Ellie, who is there to meet her childhood lover, James, the building seems to represent the passive bowing of the present to the future, the flow of music and water; to James, it is white teeth that remind him of a shark’s jaw he saw in a museum as a child; to Pei Xing, a survivor of China’s Cultural Revolution, it is harmony itself; and to Catherine, it is both a bowl of white roses just past full-bloom, and her own body. Each of these characters is obsessed with some element of his or her past, and the way they envision the opera house foreshadows how they will cope with “waking into the visionary present after so much smothering past.” Though it is thinly plotted, Five Bells makes beautiful work of  showing how our preoccupations with our pasts can usurp the place of the meaning inherent to new experiences. The characters are looking for something new without realizing that nothing can ever really be new.

Though Ellie, James, Pei Xing, and Catherine are each held captive by different elements of their pasts, they seize on the same elements of symbolism throughout the book as containers for their shared desires. Because of something they feel was missing from their earlier lives, they seek both acceptance and a sense of finally being here and now, or, as Jones repeatedly refers to it, here-now. Ellie cannot forget the sexual relationship she had with James when they were just fourteen, and her sense of having failed him when he needed her. James holds himself responsible for the death of a child and seems to hope that a reunion with Ellie will stand in for the forgiveness he seeks. Pei Xing, as a young woman, was imprisoned, beaten, and put to hard labor during the Revolution, and is forced to reconcile her past and present when her former prison guard surfaces and begs forgiveness. Catherine, the least compelling of the four, struggles with memories of her dead brother, her disappointments with the field of journalism, and her break with her Irish Catholic family. The shared symbolism demonstrates the sense of belonging each character desires, when it crops up in various forms of the image of the Madonna and Christ, or the bodies of their past lovers, or music as a means of temporarily anchoring oneself in the present moment.

This flow of symbolism becomes a plot thread in itself, one which I found more compelling than the when/where/why of what physically takes place in the book. Though Jones makes frequent reference to Russian writers (Gogol, Pasternak), her most obvious literary cousin is Virginia Woolf, who also dealt in metaphors of time and water, and who relegated plot to secondary status in order to give stream of consciousness and internal development leeway. The material itself, then, because it is the stuff of thought and not always of action, draws comparison to time and water whether the author chooses to articulate the similarity or not. In the hands of a less talented writer, the book might become as shapeless as water itself. But Jones keeps all the events of the story to one day, so that we sense a build toward resolution even as we’re unable to predict what form that resolution might take.

The book’s weakness is Catherine, whose troubles are a bit too loosely gathered together. James and Ellie have an inherent element of interest because they are the only characters who interact with one another for any length of time, and because their connection is romantic in nature. Pei Xing’s story is the most naturally compelling, because of its historical context and the truly tragic nature of her suffering. But Catherine remained vague and strangely inaccessible to me, as she seems to experience all the longing the other characters do without as exact a locus for her obsession.

Five Bells is not a book for everyone, and that’s a good thing. It was not written to appeal to a broad audience, it was not written to titillate, and it does not even seem calculated to touch the reader on a very deep emotional level. The effect of its poetic prose is, ironically, to stimulate the reader intellectually. It does one thing, and it does it very well: it explores the feeling we have of never being quite present, and whether it is possible to move forward by moving backwards. It is precise and effective, and deserves to be taken for what it is, for us to read it meditatively, not looking ahead to guess what will happen, but finding where it resonates with us here and now.

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers–and the Coming Cashless Society, by David Wolman

In what would become a precursor to The End of Money, David Wolman wrote a 2009 article for Wired magazine arguing in favor of ending physical money. In the introduction to his book, he recounts some of the fervent reader responses to his article. Readers called him a fascist, along with accusing him of “shilling for secret lobbying groups.” Though I don’t usually evince such extreme reactions to the ideas of people who are merely writing for magazines, I admit I approached Wolman’s subject matter with some uncertainty about my ability to remain open-minded.  After all, I like cash. Cash means never worrying about whether your form of payment is acceptable. It means the transaction is finished in the time it takes to pass your money over the cashier’s counter. And if I’m honest, it means other, less practical things, like the wry smile you twist out when you find a crumpled ten dollar bill in a Christmas card from your uncle, who has clearly not kept up with inflation rates, or indeed, your current age; the everything’s-going-my-way feeling of reaching into the pocket of an old jacket, and finding a twenty from last fall. So while I wasn’t anywhere near being ready to call Wolman a fascist, I was at a loss to imagine what he could possibly find to say against sweet, simple cash.

The most substantial, and enlightening, part of Wolman’s argument is that cash really isn’t as simple as we typically think it is. Who, for instance, regularly thinks of the cost of printing money? And who is it that pays this cost? (We do, as it turns out.) And who gets to keep this payment? (Not us. Wolman writes that simply for cranking out the recent U.S. State Quarter series, the Federal Reserve has made 4.6 billion dollars.) How is cash made, and what is it made of? Wolman contends that the “production and secure transportation of notes is an expensive an environmentally costly business paid for by the tax payer.” He cites figures for the massive amounts of metals mined in the United States for the production of coins, and goes on to inform us that a “heavy nickel-producing area in Siberia provides a fifth of the world’s supply and emits more sulfur dioxide in a year than all of France.” He points out that sulfur dioxide is the main cause of acid rain. All this happens before the money is even transported anywhere, which of course, involves fuel.

Wolman loses ground, however, when he leaves the realm of hard fact. A side discussion about the potential of cash to transmit disease speaks more to Wolman’s personal aversions than it does to actualities. After finding out that Swiss researchers determined that the flu virus could survive for up to seventeen days on a banknote, he forwards the study to a friend at the Center for Disease Control. When his CDC contact replies that the conditions required for prolonged survival of bacteria on money are highly unlikely to occur, Wolman is only temporarily relieved. He then learns anecdotally that people in some parts of Africa store cash in their underwear. He never says whether he followed up with his CDC contact on this point, but he continues to evince a physical aversion to touching cash for the rest of the book.  Later in the book, he will detract from a legitimate argument about the connection between cash and crime when he muses, “More than 10,000 bank robberies in 2009 and 2010 alone wouldn’t have happened if crooks knew there was no cash to be had. Yet never have I heard someone imagine a world without cash robberies. It’s as if our affection for Bonnie and Clyde… and so many other venerated villains makes us want to keep bank heists around like some kind of treasured pastime.” It is sarcasm, yes, but the point of intelligently used sarcasm is to hit on an element of truth, and insulting one’s target audience by implying that we keep cash around out of nostalgia for bank heists is just plain silly.

Like Wolman’s lapses in logic, his narrative arc is too choppy to add up to the cohesive argument he is clearly trying to build. His attempt to avoid cash for a year is established near the start of the book as a device that will link his various adventures in research together. But this is all but abandoned once he begins his research in earnest.  Like other writers of journalistic non-fiction, Wolman centers his chapters on individuals in order to personalize broader, impersonal concepts. But he fails to bring these individuals to life in a way that is truly engaging. The only subjects that leap off the page are Glenn Guest, a pastor who believes that the end of cash is inevitable and is in fact a sign of Armageddon; and Bernard von NotHaus, one of the founders of the Liberty Dollar, “’a private voluntary free-market currency backed entirely by silver and gold.’” Here, Wolman’s personal approach to the subject matter works well, since his bemusement over the motivations of these two subjects becomes our own, and adds color to the two chapters in which they appear.

The most poignant part of Wolman’s argument should have been his discussion of how cash penalizes the poor. Since the poor in many parts of the world are excluded from bank use and credit card use due to barriers like bank fees and lack of, or simply bad, credit history, they are condemned to existing in an all-cash state, and denied benefits that come with being able to save and earn interest. I admit to finding this part of his argument confusing. Everyone should have access to the benefits of virtual banking, but if the poor are prevented from having them, the problem is not cash– it’s the banks themselves. A fair, convenient, and democratically beneficial credit and banking system is not mutually exclusive from the use of cash, and really, it is not clear to me if this isn’t where Wolman’s argument logically (unintentionally) leads, at least as it currently stands. I suspect that the final effect of The End of Money on readers will not be to convince them one way or the other, but to elicit real thought on the nature of money itself, and to Wolman’s credit, that’s no small feat.