Bill Chaisson (Author of Of a Feather)

Bill Chaisson rated a book really liked it The Dark Labyrinth by Lawrence Durrell	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The Dark Labyrinth was published in 1947, well before Lawrence Durrell's famous Alexandria Quartet. As such it does not include metafictional techniques or other narrative experimentation, although there are several main characters and Durrell jumps ...more
Jul 13, 2026 05:41PM · like · see review
Bill Chaisson is currently reading A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Karen Armstrong	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Jul 13, 2026 05:34PM · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of A History of God by Karen Armstrong. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — A History of God by Karen Armstrong <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Bill Chaisson rated a book really liked it The Dark Labyrinth by Lawrence Durrell	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The Dark Labyrinth was published in 1947, well before Lawrence Durrell's famous Alexandria Quartet. As such it does not include metafictional techniques or other narrative experimentation, although there are several main characters and Durrell jumps ...more
Jul 13, 2026 04:38PM · like · see review
Bill Chaisson rated a book liked it Hounded (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #1) by Kevin Hearne (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Hounded is like a comic book without any pictures, and I mean that as a compliment. Kevin Hearne moves the story along with relentless action and quite funny humor. Atticus O'Sullivan is a self-described—this is a first-person narration—as resembling ...more
Jul 08, 2026 03:23AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Hounded by Kevin Hearne. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Hounded by Kevin Hearne <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Bill Chaisson rated a book really liked it Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
People complain about the MFA-style of writing because of its sheer, unremitting writerliness. The stories are less important than the sheer muscularity of the writing and the themes that the author is so carefully, so artfully revealing, page by pag ...more
Jul 08, 2026 03:18AM · like · see review
Bill Chaisson is currently reading The Dark Labyrinth by Lawrence Durrell	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Jul 06, 2026 08:03PM · like
Bill Chaisson rated a book really liked it Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
People complain about the MFA-style of writing because of its sheer, unremitting writerliness. The stories are less important than the sheer muscularity of the writing and the themes that the author is so carefully, so artfully revealing, page by pag ...more
Jul 06, 2026 07:20PM · like · see review
Bill Chaisson rated a book it was amazing Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I first heard of Peter Carey years ago when I saw the movie Oscar & Lucinda, which might have been my introduction to Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett too. So, quite the boon. I don't remember when I first knew about Alexis de Toqueville, but I was a ...more
Jul 01, 2026 09:30AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Bill Chaisson rated a book really liked it Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Between the World and Me takes its name from the title of a Richard Wright poem, but James Balwin also used the phrase in "Down at the Cross," the second, longer essay in The Fire Next Time. In addition, to re-using the phrase, Ta-Nehisi Coates adopt ...more
Jun 30, 2026 02:05PM · like · see review
Bill Chaisson rated a book liked it His Majesty's Dragon (Temeraire, #1) by Naomi Novik (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
His Majesty's Dragon is a ripping good yarn that rests atop some decent world-building. The prose is translucent rather than the transparent, trying as it does to imitate the unimitatable (equal parts Jane Austen and Patrick O'Brian). Whatever its ch ...more
Jun 30, 2026 01:55PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">

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The Dark Labyrinth was published in 1947, well before Lawrence Durrell's famous Alexandria Quartet. As such it does not include metafictional techniques or other narrative experimentation, although there are several main characters and Durrell jumps The Dark Labyrinth was published in 1947, well before Lawrence Durrell's famous Alexandria Quartet. As such it does not include metafictional techniques or other narrative experimentation, although there are several main characters and Durrell jumps nimbly from one narrative to another and moves freely across time. All the protagonists journey from England to Crete on a passenger ship not incidentally called the Europa. This is definitely one of those novels where nearly everything is a symbol of something else, something more nebulous not to say existential.

Lord Graecen is a peer and middling bad poet; Campion is a very good but not great painter with a temper; Baird is a WWII veteran with PTSD; Fearmax is a psychic who has lost his gift; Miss Dombey is a missionary who has lost her faith; Virginia Dale is a Cockney who has lost her health; and the Trumans are working-class Londoners who have won a football pool. We follow each of them in turn as their lives lead them toward the fateful voyage to Crete. Some of them have overlapping lives; Baird and Fearmax are seeing the same therapist, who is an old friend of Graecen's. And Campion once slept with Baird's wife.

As this is a middle-century novel by a European, the working class people don't know any of the others. The upper class people, forced into close company with the proletariat seem surprised to find them interesting and genuine people, rather as if the animals in the barn turned out to be able to talk.

Durrell puts into the mouths and minds of all these people many questions that he has about the meaning of life, our experience of what we call reality, not to mention some sociological questions. At the center of it all is the labyrinth itself. It is of course a metaphor for our journey through life, with our little flashlights in the dark, going from passage to passage led by an untrustworthy guide. And there is a monster lurking somewhere in the depths, scaring the bejesus out of us with its inchoate bellowing.

All of these people are quite unhappy, almost all of them because they have lost something by which they defined themselves and now don't know quite who they are or what to do with themselves. And Durrell is not going to let any of them find it. He was 35 when this was published and perhaps was not at a point in his life where he felt he had answers to give. Instead, you spend a great deal of time in effect listening to each of his characters puzzle their way through their loss and confusion.

As part of their journey, the Trumans stumble onto an American woman living in splendid isolation. She is given to saying thing like, "Godfrey said that in some way we had become allied to the forces of Nature instead of against them. He had studied philosophy and used to say that the whole of the western civilization we knew was based on the Will: and that led always to action and to destruction." The Dark Labyrinth is full of passages like this, some of them going on at some length, but never overly long.

Each human being apparently represents some stage of the cycle that human civilizations inevitably go through: ascending to greater complexity through pursuit of rationality, into the rebellion of romanticism, only to decline into mannered sterility and final ending in decadence before starting all over again. Baird is a reluctant romantic whose beliefs are shattered by his wife's infidelity and his experience during the war. Campion is a hopeless decadent who cannot for the life of him figure out how to believe wholeheartedly in a damn thing. Graecen is hopelessly mannered, limited by his overbred sense of propriety, doomed to mediocrity. The Trumans are well meaning, good-hearted people without the education of their fellow travelers but in love with life and each other. And so on.

This is a deceptively dense book, quite unlike the Alexandria books, which are brazenly dense. The plot is exciting and draws you along, wanting to know what happens and a bit impatient with the sadness and lostness of the narrators. A sense of doom hangs over the whole story because of the way Durrell presages the end and due to the gloominess of the characters. Post-war Europe was a sad and discouraged place, everyone having just weathered an unprecedented catastrophe while having been told the previous war, dimly remembered by most, was supposed to have been the worst thing ever. Durrell, born after WWI, writes like a person stunned by the pointlessness of it all.

Were I younger and still wondering "what it all means," I may have slowed down and savored the philosophical and religious questions that Durrell has his characters chew on. As it is, I don't wonder about that sort of thing anymore and instead became rather irritated by Durrells tendency to poke holes in the goodness of everyone in this book. Even decent Mrs. Truman ends up sleeping with Campion. Durrell served in WWII and afterward was very disappointed in humanity. For those of us disappointed with the half of our population who voted for Donald Trump this picture of the dolor of post-war Europe is a worthy provider of perspective. ...more

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A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
by Karen Armstrong

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The Dark Labyrinth
by Lawrence Durrell

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The Dark Labyrinth was published in 1947, well before Lawrence Durrell's famous Alexandria Quartet. As such it does not include metafictional techniques or other narrative experimentation, although there are several main characters and Durrell jumps The Dark Labyrinth was published in 1947, well before Lawrence Durrell's famous Alexandria Quartet. As such it does not include metafictional techniques or other narrative experimentation, although there are several main characters and Durrell jumps nimbly from one narrative to another and moves freely across time. All the protagonists journey from England to Crete on a passenger ship not incidentally called the Europa. This is definitely one of those novels where nearly everything is a symbol of something else, something more nebulous not to say existential.

Lord Graecen is a peer and middling bad poet; Campion is a very good but not great painter with a temper; Baird is a WWII veteran with PTSD; Fearmax is a psychic who has lost his gift; Miss Dombey is a missionary who has lost her faith; Virginia Dale is a Cockney who has lost her health; and the Trumans are working-class Londoners who have won a football pool. We follow each of them in turn as their lives lead them toward the fateful voyage to Crete. Some of them have overlapping lives; Baird and Fearmax are seeing the same therapist, who is an old friend of Graecen's. And Campion once slept with Baird's wife.

As this is a middle-century novel by a European, the working class people don't know any of the others. The upper class people, forced into close company with the proletariat seem surprised to find them interesting and genuine people, rather as if the animals in the barn turned out to be able to talk.

Durrell puts into the mouths and minds of all these people many questions that he has about the meaning of life, our experience of what we call reality, not to mention some sociological questions. At the center of it all is the labyrinth itself. It is of course a metaphor for our journey through life, with our little flashlights in the dark, going from passage to passage led by an untrustworthy guide. And there is a monster lurking somewhere in the depths, scaring the bejesus out of us with its inchoate bellowing.

All of these people are quite unhappy, almost all of them because they have lost something by which they defined themselves and now don't know quite who they are or what to do with themselves. And Durrell is not going to let any of them find it. He was 35 when this was published and perhaps was not at a point in his life where he felt he had answers to give. Instead, you spend a great deal of time in effect listening to each of his characters puzzle their way through their loss and confusion.

As part of their journey, the Trumans stumble onto an American woman living in splendid isolation. She is given to saying thing like, "Godfrey said that in some way we had become allied to the forces of Nature instead of against them. He had studied philosophy and used to say that the whole of the western civilization we knew was based on the Will: and that led always to action and to destruction." The Dark Labyrinth is full of passages like this, some of them going on at some length, but never overly long.

Each human being apparently represents some stage of the cycle that human civilizations inevitably go through: ascending to greater complexity through pursuit of rationality, into the rebellion of romanticism, only to decline into mannered sterility and final ending in decadence before starting all over again. Baird is a reluctant romantic whose beliefs are shattered by his wife's infidelity and his experience during the war. Campion is a hopeless decadent who cannot for the life of him figure out how to believe wholeheartedly in a damn thing. Graecen is hopelessly mannered, limited by his overbred sense of propriety, doomed to mediocrity. The Trumans are well meaning, good-hearted people without the education of their fellow travelers but in love with life and each other. And so on.

This is a deceptively dense book, quite unlike the Alexandria books, which are brazenly dense. The plot is exciting and draws you along, wanting to know what happens and a bit impatient with the sadness and lostness of the narrators. A sense of doom hangs over the whole story because of the way Durrell presages the end and due to the gloominess of the characters. Post-war Europe was a sad and discouraged place, everyone having just weathered an unprecedented catastrophe while having been told the previous war, dimly remembered by most, was supposed to have been the worst thing ever. Durrell, born after WWI, writes like a person stunned by the pointlessness of it all.

Were I younger and still wondering "what it all means," I may have slowed down and savored the philosophical and religious questions that Durrell has his characters chew on. As it is, I don't wonder about that sort of thing anymore and instead became rather irritated by Durrells tendency to poke holes in the goodness of everyone in this book. Even decent Mrs. Truman ends up sleeping with Campion. Durrell served in WWII and afterward was very disappointed in humanity. For those of us disappointed with the half of our population who voted for Donald Trump this picture of the dolor of post-war Europe is a worthy provider of perspective. ...more

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Hounded (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #1)
by Kevin Hearne (Goodreads Author)

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Hounded is like a comic book without any pictures, and I mean that as a compliment. Kevin Hearne moves the story along with relentless action and quite funny humor. Atticus O'Sullivan is a self-described—this is a first-person narration—as resembling Hounded is like a comic book without any pictures, and I mean that as a compliment. Kevin Hearne moves the story along with relentless action and quite funny humor. Atticus O'Sullivan is a self-described—this is a first-person narration—as resembling a stoner college student. He is elaborately tattooed, sports a long soul patch, dresses in t-shirts and jeans, and gives pretty much everyone he meets (except certain goddesses) a steady rash of shit.

Iron is supposed to stop Druid and other earth magic, so the existence of an Iron Druid is meant to be a sort of paradox. It refers to an iron necklace that Atticus wears to protect himself against the earth magic of the Tuatha de Danann, witches, et al. It took him 750 years to make. That's long, even for someone who is 2,100 years old.

The plot unfolds in Tempe, Arizona, not incidentally the home of the author and, as is suitable for someone very in tune with the earth, the place is described in great and convincing detail. Tempe sounds like a very normal suburban/college town setting. So, the fact that often violent supernatural events are unfolding in such a pedestrian place adds to the comedy. Atticus carries a sword slung on his back into a bar, for example, and no one seems to think very much of it. No, instead his neighbor calls the cops on him because his Irish wolfhound poops on this front steps. Carrying a sword around is fine; just control your pets, please.

Another humorous aspect of Hearne's approach is his insistence that all the gods that have ever existed in every culture are quite real. Some of them seem to know each other—everyone thinks Thor is a complete jerk—and they are only vaguely acquainted with others. Hearne does a good job of representing the merciless, transactional ethos of gods and goddesses of the pagan pantheons of Europe. We meet only some of the Tuatha de Danann, but several others are trash-talked by either Atticus, various witches, or the Tuatha themselves.

There are at least three of these Iron Druid books, and maybe the world-making will deepen as Atticus's story unfolds further, but Hearne certainly does not frontload the first book with a lot of imagined-universe freight. Not a lot of balls in the air are mentioned in passing to promise further complications. This is perhaps the weakest part of resembling a comic book.

Comics are famously improvised (hence the need for retconning) and readers are content to have the plots unfold in arcs that are more or less resolved after a year and a half of issues. That is how the Iron Druid idea feels; it could go in any direction and probably will, but I'd be surprised if it became more structurally complex.

And honestly, sometimes that is what you want.Hounded is a rollicking good time with a fair amount of sex and violence, but none of it is drawn out or made to seem weird or kinky. Atticus is a strong character who is vulnerable in specific ways, and those ways are all aligned with his magical relationship with the earth itself. He is tough and smart and very, very wary, but he is also capable of friendship and knows how to have a good time. Throughout the book you will wonder where he gets all his money and toward the end he makes a crack about having made a lot of money with very long-term investments. Just one of the advantages of being older than Jesus. ...more

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Apex Hides the Hurt
by Colson Whitehead (Goodreads Author)

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People complain about the MFA-style of writing because of its sheer, unremitting writerliness. The stories are less important than the sheer muscularity of the writing and the themes that the author is so carefully, so artfully revealing, page by pag People complain about the MFA-style of writing because of its sheer, unremitting writerliness. The stories are less important than the sheer muscularity of the writing and the themes that the author is so carefully, so artfully revealing, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. Badly done, this kind of writing is kind of a nightmare, all artifice and no real art. Happily, Colson Whitehead knows how to purvey this decadent stuff, this writing about ideas, this pushing about of people, making them think and talk about Big Ideas while really doing very little.

The narrator of Apex Hides the Hurt is a "nomenclature consultant." That is, he gives products a name for a living. The narrator is also nameless. This is Whitehead's sense of humor, or one facet of it. The central plotline concerns a town that has too many names and the narrator is called in to pick one, which the town's querelous hegemony agrees to keep for at least a year. There are three parties represented by the mayor, Regina Goode, a descendant of the town's original settlers, who were former enslaved people; Albie Winthrop, the sad, diminished descendant of the white industrialist who galvanized the economy of the town with his barbed wire business; and Lucky Aberdeen, a tech tycoon who wants to make the town into his own Shangra-la.

The other thread is referenced in the title. The narrator has changed the fortunes of a third rate bandage company by renaming it Apex. The renaming is done to go along with its decision to issue their bandages in 25 different shades that correspond to the spectrum of human skin colors. Also, they've improved the adhesive. The narrator is black, but lives and works in what is strongly implied to be the very white world of advertising. He is accepted there because he is incredibly talented at what he does and his blackness is quite ignored.

If, with that much information, you don't see where Whitehead is headed, then you probably will not like this book. If you do, then believe me he turns over some heavy-ish stones and finds some interesting creepy crawlies as he explores the problems engendered by ignoring what has come before and just covering it up with some form of happy talk.

There is nothing realistic about this novel. The people in it represent types and the town of Winthrop (its present, unloved name) is really a microcosm of the United States (it is located in more or less the geographic middle of it). White folks are not just white folks. There is the hip white woman who was a techie and is now the town librarian. There are the suburban techies in their polo shirts who visit at Aberdeen's invitation to see if they want to become rural techies. There is Albie Winthrop, that shriveled avatar of the disintegrating WASP hegemony. And so on.

Similarly, the original settlers had two leaders, Goode and Field, who were called the Light and the Dark because of their respective world views. Goode is the assimilationist and Field is the separatist. Whitehead is eloquent in his distillation of black history into a struggle between which one of these men to listen to. It is comforting to listen to Goode, he says, even though you know Field is right.

There might be a little of a Grail quest reference here as the nameless narrator literally limps (the quest as told by the Fisher King?) through this landscape of ideas as he gamely does his background research on the way toward selecting what he believes to be the best name to propel this town into its own (perhaps better) future. Whitehead's satire is merciless: all of the proposed town names have their shortcomings for one reason or another. He is not writing a novel that features good guys and bad guys. In the end there is only the struggle to figure out where you should be going while honoring where you have been but without shooting yourself in the foot.

Oddly, except for the black history aspect, this seems a bit more like a David Foster Wallace story than a Colson Whitehead story. Which is to say that it is somewhat arid emotionally because of its conceptual obsessions and attention to form and repetition in the storytelling. Plus the brainteaser jokes. Except that where Foster Wallace was an obsessive and a depressive, Whitehead comes across as a rather neuronormal guy who happens to be justifiable pissed off about some stuff (the inanity of branding, the endless struggle of African-Americans in our society, and a few other things) and wanted to get it off his chest in an artful manner. His book is 210 pages long. Any stab at it by Foster Wallace's would have been at least 700 pages. And much stranger. And, depending on your sense of humor, a little funnier. ...more

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The Dark Labyrinth
by Lawrence Durrell

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Apex Hides the Hurt
by Colson Whitehead (Goodreads Author)

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People complain about the MFA-style of writing because of its sheer, unremitting writerliness. The stories are less important than the sheer muscularity of the writing and the themes that the author is so carefully, so artfully revealing, page by pag People complain about the MFA-style of writing because of its sheer, unremitting writerliness. The stories are less important than the sheer muscularity of the writing and the themes that the author is so carefully, so artfully revealing, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. Badly done, this kind of writing is kind of a nightmare, all artifice and no real art. Happily, Colson Whitehead knows how to purvey this decadent stuff, this writing about ideas, this pushing about of people, making them think and talk about Big Ideas while really doing very little.

The narrator of Apex Hides the Hurt is a "nomenclature consultant." That is, he gives products a name for a living. The narrator is also nameless. This is Whitehead's sense of humor, or one facet of it. The central plotline concerns a town that has too many names and the narrator is called in to pick one, which the town's querelous hegemony agrees to keep for at least a year. There are three parties represented by the mayor, Regina Goode, a descendant of the town's original settlers, who were former enslaved people; Albie Winthrop, the sad, diminished descendant of the white industrialist who galvanized the economy of the town with his barbed wire business; and Lucky Aberdeen, a tech tycoon who wants to make the town into his own Shangra-la.

The other thread is referenced in the title. The narrator has changed the fortunes of a third rate bandage company by renaming it Apex. The renaming is done to go along with its decision to issue their bandages in 25 different shades that correspond to the spectrum of human skin colors. Also, they've improved the adhesive. The narrator is black, but lives and works in what is strongly implied to be the very white world of advertising. He is accepted there because he is incredibly talented at what he does and his blackness is quite ignored.

If, with that much information, you don't see where Whitehead is headed, then you probably will not like this book. If you do, then believe me he turns over some heavy-ish stones and finds some interesting creepy crawlies as he explores the problems engendered by ignoring what has come before and just covering it up with some form of happy talk.

There is nothing realistic about this novel. The people in it represent types and the town of Winthrop (its present, unloved name) is really a microcosm of the United States (it is located in more or less the geographic middle of it). White folks are not just white folks. There is the hip white woman who was a techie and is now the town librarian. There are the suburban techies in their polo shirts who visit at Aberdeen's invitation to see if they want to become rural techies. There is Albie Winthrop, that shriveled avatar of the disintegrating WASP hegemony. And so on.

Similarly, the original settlers had two leaders, Goode and Field, who were called the Light and the Dark because of their respective world views. Goode is the assimilationist and Field is the separatist. Whitehead is eloquent in his distillation of black history into a struggle between which one of these men to listen to. It is comforting to listen to Goode, he says, even though you know Field is right.

There might be a little of a Grail quest reference here as the nameless narrator literally limps (the quest as told by the Fisher King?) through this landscape of ideas as he gamely does his background research on the way toward selecting what he believes to be the best name to propel this town into its own (perhaps better) future. Whitehead's satire is merciless: all of the proposed town names have their shortcomings for one reason or another. He is not writing a novel that features good guys and bad guys. In the end there is only the struggle to figure out where you should be going while honoring where you have been but without shooting yourself in the foot.

Oddly, except for the black history aspect, this seems a bit more like a David Foster Wallace story than a Colson Whitehead story. Which is to say that it is somewhat arid emotionally because of its conceptual obsessions and attention to form and repetition in the storytelling. Plus the brainteaser jokes. Except that where Foster Wallace was an obsessive and a depressive, Whitehead comes across as a rather neuronormal guy who happens to be justifiable pissed off about some stuff (the inanity of branding, the endless struggle of African-Americans in our society, and a few other things) and wanted to get it off his chest in an artful manner. His book is 210 pages long. Any stab at it by Foster Wallace's would have been at least 700 pages. And much stranger. And, depending on your sense of humor, a little funnier. ...more

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Parrot and Olivier in America
by Peter Carey

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I first heard of Peter Carey years ago when I saw the movie Oscar & Lucinda, which might have been my introduction to Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett too. So, quite the boon. I don't remember when I first knew about Alexis de Toqueville, but I was a I first heard of Peter Carey years ago when I saw the movie Oscar & Lucinda, which might have been my introduction to Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett too. So, quite the boon. I don't remember when I first knew about Alexis de Toqueville, but I was amused to hear him described as the only European to visit the United States and like it. Alas, I have never read his Democracy in America, but instead have been content to see it endlessly quoted.

Consequently, I read Parrot and Olivier in America with not so much as a clean as a smudged slate. The truth about Toqueville's evaluation of our country is a bit more complex as imagined by Peter Carey. Transformed into Olivier de Garmont he is fascinated by the raw energy and innovation of the United States, especially when he compares it to the backward-looking tradition-bound nature of his own social class in Paris. Carey is quite funny as he recreates the horror felt by a nobleman when he is face-to-face with democracy.

In a way he meets democracy before he ever gets to the U.S. when he meets John Larrit, aka Parrot. Parrot is part of a ruse that gets Garmont onto a boat bound for America that is engineered by his mother, who fears political events in France, where the Duke of Orlean has replaced the Bourbons, will send her precious son to the guillotine. Larrit is an Englishman who was "saved" by de Tilbot, a French nobleman turned spy and counterfeiter, which leads him to spend his life without a home. Parrot is always looking toward the future and is a natural egalitarian in the sense that he believes in a meritocracy.

Their relationship develops in the way of a movie rom-com: they hate each other, they like each other, they hate each other again, and they become the best of friends. Carey alternates the first person narrative from Olivier to Parrot and back again through out the book. It is an excellent example of what Harold Bloom identifies as the essential ingredient of a modern novel: the events of the characters' lives change them over the course of the story. It is wonderful to see the starch slowly go out of Garmont and the bile gradually go out of Parrot. We watch them become themselves, transformed by their experience of America.

Carey has lived in the United States for decades, but is obviously still an outsider. His depiction of Jacksonian era Americans teeters on the edge of insult: all we care about is making money and getting ahead. This appalls Garmont, who believes only an aristocracy can appreciate the finer things, including art, and sees proof of it everywhere in democratic America. Parrot is thrilled by America. His struggles are more personal. His allegiance to Tilbot has cost him as much as it has given him.

Carey's descriptions of the American landscape and culture are often funny and sometimes beautiful and touching. However foreign we remain to him, he is still somewhat awed. The reader has the feeling that the author identifies more with the aristocratic Garmont than the enterprising Parrot. The language veers over into the grotesque sometimes when we are looking through Garmont's eyes, but Parrot sees either beauty or a misery that he can readily understand. ...more

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Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Between the World and Me takes its name from the title of a Richard Wright poem, but James Balwin also used the phrase in "Down at the Cross," the second, longer essay in The Fire Next Time. In addition, to re-using the phrase, Ta-Nehisi Coates adopt Between the World and Me takes its name from the title of a Richard Wright poem, but James Balwin also used the phrase in "Down at the Cross," the second, longer essay in The Fire Next Time. In addition, to re-using the phrase, Ta-Nehisi Coates adopts Baldwin's idea from the shorter essay in The Fire Next Time, "My Dungeon Shook," which is written in the form of a letter to his nephew. Thus, this book, like Baldwin's essay, is a letter from a black man to a black teenage boy. That is important, because like Baldwin, Coates is uninterested in addressing white people, especially with the explicit purpose of educating them, making them more "woke."

Also like Baldwin, Coates refers to non-black people as "people who think they are white." It is one of his main points that race is an illusion and that people who believe themselves to be white continue to do so in order to preserve a hegemony that keeps them in a position of power by subjugating those who (they think) are not white. Just as Baldwin did, Coates thinks of "white" people as a little pathetic. While Baldwin felt a little sorry for them, Coates does not, because they are so dangerous to black people.

Coates is careful to point out that what white people take from black people is their body, and they always have. Coates was raised in West Baltimore by two idealistic intellectuals—his father was a member of the Black Panther Party—who were also secular humanists. Consequently, Coates is not at home writing about people's spirits or their souls. He wants to make clear that when he writes about "protecting his body" or about a friend's "body" being "destroyed," he is saying that this is all a racist system can really take. And that that is taking everything. In fact, the American system is built on the steady destruction of black bodies.

Coates writes about "The Dream" and "the Dreamers" and he is talking about the American Dream, that ridiculous fantasy that perpetuates white hegemony. It sustains a set of "values" that conflates "living right," "living well," and "the good life" and posits some sort of hysterical ideal toward which all right thinking individuals must set a course. And once having begun to live the Dream, they must do anything to keep living it. Anything. Including destroy black bodies.

Unlike Baldwin, Coates is primarily a journalist. In the parts of Between the World and Me that are essentially memoir he is quite candid about his early struggles to become a writer, and his path through journalism to writing books. As such, his writing just isn't as beautiful as Baldwin's, but then hardly anyone's writing is as beautiful as James Baldwin's.

Over the course of 152 pages Coates returns to some of the same images and enlarges upon them, which is satisfying and gives the essay structure. He also writes to some extent in coded language, calling, for example, the Howard University campus "the Mecca," because it isn't just a place, it is a community and the emergent property generated by all the participants. He eventually manages to describe a connectedness that supersedes race and while it is a heart-felt and heart-warming insight, it arrives in a manner that is clear, but not all that graceful.

Coates has no solution to the problem of race. He never explicitly makes any call to action; he never says "If you just think and do [blank], then this will all get better." Instead he treats where he and his son (and the eavesdropping we) are now as an egg that has been beaten or coffee to which the cream and sugar has already been added. It is what it is. And the only thing his son can do is try to be aware of how the world works. So there is nothing between the world and him.

And all the people who think they are white can do is snap out of the Dream, own up to the destruction they have wrought while living in the Dream, and start to live a different way. ...more

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His Majesty's Dragon (Temeraire, #1)
by Naomi Novik (Goodreads Author)

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His Majesty's Dragon is a ripping good yarn that rests atop some decent world-building. The prose is translucent rather than the transparent, trying as it does to imitate the unimitatable (equal parts Jane Austen and Patrick O'Brian). Whatever its ch His Majesty's Dragon is a ripping good yarn that rests atop some decent world-building. The prose is translucent rather than the transparent, trying as it does to imitate the unimitatable (equal parts Jane Austen and Patrick O'Brian). Whatever its characteristics as homage, it reads easily and does not detract from the principle purpose of an adventure story, which is to further the plot will developing the characters on the fly. It is not necessary for us to know Capt. Laurence's first name, for example, until Chapter 4, when his mother refers to him by it while speaking with his dragon.

Naomi Novik has written a historical novel about the Napoleonic wars with exactly one fantasy element: there are dragons. They are presented as a long-established part of human warfare, having been bred from wild stock since at least the medieval period. Novik is at great pains to describe the differences among the various varieties. It transpires that Temeraire, the focus of this series, is a rare Chinese breed very little known in Europe. Some readers may complain about the great number of different dragons that Novik brings into the story, all with their own capabilities and varied appearances.

The nature of dragons as imagined by Novik is original in my experience. A human "handler" is present at the birth of its future companion and must "harness" it within the first few minutes of its life. Novik is borrowing the idea of imprinting from the science of animal behavior, but she takes it step further: the dragons have an almost mystical hold on their handlers' affections. The bond between dragon and human is unmistakably one of love. This relationships dooms a handler to living outside of normal human society for the rest of his or her life.

Novik adds some progressive elements to her world building. A dragon breed called the Longwing, for example, refuses to be harnessed by a man, which means there are female officers in the Corps, her name for what amounts to the air force. A dragon's love for its handler is jealous and a handler's love for its dragon is usually obsessive. This affection between partners is something like that between riders and horses but cranked up to the nth degree. But exists for similar reasons: horses are to varying degrees intelligent and have worked either alongside or beneath humans for centuries, quite often in war as seems to be the chief purpose of dragons in this alternate reality.

While there is a certain amount of action and drama in His Majesty's Dragon, there is a great deal more about the evolving relationship between Laurence and Temeraire. Novik tries hard to get us to realize that Laurence is a little unusual before his initial chance encounter with his dragon's egg. He is a second son, which is why he has had to take up a profession and he is a disappointment to his father because he chose the British navy instead of the Anglican ministry. Laurence's decision to become an "aviator" brings him even lower in his father's estimation. It is presented as if he should have gone to Harvard, but instead went to Cornell and then became a Beat poet.

The dragon Corps is presented as something of a gang of misfits. They observe little in the way of military decorum, observe none of the proprieties of Regency England, and live resolutely on the margins of society. Laurence's transition from the rigid discipline of the navy to the more slapdash order of the Corps is a source of mild comedy for several chapters. For one thing the man has to get used to dealing with extremely independent and free-thinking women who wear pants.

The plot interweaves actual historical events with invented ones. Consequently, the more you know about the Napoleonic wars, the less lost you will be while following the plot. Novik expertly litters the plot with minor reveals throughout the narrative, gradually enriching our understanding of dragon lore. Nonetheless, when the climactic battle occurs near the end of the book (as it always does in these stories) one cannot be blamed for being a little lost in the complexities of the fighting strategies and the progress of conflict.

All in all, a fun read that stretches toward deeper explorations regarding human nature but is a bit shy about going all the way there. The relationship between Laurence and Temeraire is not homoerotic (in spite of all the "my dears") and it has more dignity than a "bro-mance." It is something not usually encountered in fantasy or adventure stories: a deep and abiding friendship that sees both partners improved by their union. Novik does her level best to prevent his from seeming corny or (worse) absurd and mostly succeeds. ...more

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