Andrew Ervin

Philadelphia Inquirer // How to Be Both by Ali Smith

January 25, 2015

My review of this wonderful novel ran on 12/14/14.

The order in which you read How to Be Both is entirely up to you. That’s of course true of all books. You’re always free to read the final chapter first if you’re so inclined. But in this instance, the Scottish-born Ali Smith has something special in store.

Her time-traveling, Booker-shortlisted novel features two distinct stories. Which one appears first depends on the copy you’ve purchased. In keeping with the title, the book has been printed both ways.
In my copy, the first story features a Renaissance artist who goes by the name Francescho. He’s a prodigiously talented illustrator who barters some of his drawings for the services of a nearby pleasure house and eventually gets work on an important fresco, among other projects. Even the unconventional syntax grants a fascinating kind of access to his mind:

But art and love are a matter of mouths open in cinnabar, of blackness and redness turned to velvet by assiduous grinding, of understanding the colours that benefit from being rubbed softly one into the other: the least of the practice will make you skillful: beyond which there’s originality itself.

For all his successes, Francescho’s life remains characterized by his inability to reconcile his sour relationship with his father. Similarly, in the other story, a young girl named Georgie is forced to cope with the devastating loss of her mother. Set in more or less contemporary Cambridge, her tale completes a kind of narrative yin and yang. Memories of a visit to Italy are particularly moving:

That night in their hotel room before they go to bed her mother is brushing her teeth in the bathroom. This hotel used to be someone’s house in the years when people made frescoes. It is called the Prisciani Suite and was the actual house of someone who had something to do with the making of frescoes at the palace where they went to see the pictures earlier.

Many of this novel’s great joys derive from Smith’s ability to tie together the two seemingly disparate stories in wonderful and unexpected ways. It’s a meditative book, steeped in the voices of these characters, and it insists on the precise kind of quiet attention so hard to come by these worldwide-wired days. In lesser hands, the flip-flopping order might have felt gimmicky, but Ali Smith is a master storyteller, and How to Be Both is a charming and erudite novel that can quite literally make us rethink the way we read.

Philadelphia Inquirer // The “Southern Reach” trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer

September 26, 2014

Philadelphia Inquirer.
9/25/14.

Genre is usually the least interesting way to describe a book. The novels we consider timeless – and I’m talking Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter and Beloved here, people – always defy our rigid categories in exciting and unexpected ways. The volumes that make up Jeff VanderMeer’s thrilling Southern Reach trilogy employ elements of different genres, such as science fiction and the espionage thriller and even horror. In VanderMeer’s hands, those ingredients combine to form some inventive and remarkable fiction.

The first volume, Annihilation, appeared in February, and its sequel, Authority, turned up in the spring. Now, with the publication of the final volume, Acceptance, we have the conclusion of an incredible series. A secretive government program known as the Southern Reach has assumed responsibility for exploring and researching a mysterious geographical – or is that temporal? – zone known as Area X.:

Area X, before the ill-defined Event that locked it behind the border thirty years ago and made it subject to so many inexplicable occurrences, had been part of a wilderness that lay adjacent to a military base.

The scientists know very little about this place, and we readers know even less. VanderMeer does a masterful job of allowing us to figure things out on our own. The region has fallen prey to some alternation by an unknown force, perhaps a natural disaster or alien occupation. The official, public story is that some sort of accident at the nearby military base has rendered the land unlivable:

The government’s version of events emphasized a localized environmental catastrophe stemming from experimental military research. This story leaked into the public sphere over a period of several months so that, like the proverbial frog in a hot pot, people found the news entering their consciousness gradually as part of the general daily noise of media oversaturation about ongoing ecological devastation.

Whatever caused the change, the laws of nature seem to work differently inside Area X. Teams have been sent in to study the area, but those that manage to return are transformed in strange mental, emotional, and perhaps physical ways. Our story begins with what is thought to be the 12th expedition into the once-normal coastal region.

Annihilation features a team of scientists known only by their roles, such as anthropologist or psychologist. Our narrator is the biologist, whose personal connection with a member of the previous, doomed expedition complicates matters even further:

We were scientists, trained to observe natural phenomena and the results of human activity. We had not been trained to encounter what appeared to be the uncanny. In unusual situations there can be a comfort in the presence of even someone you think might be your enemy. Now we had come close to the edges of something unprecedented, and less than a week into our mission we had lost not just the linguist at the border but our anthropologist and our psychologist.

The next volume, Acceptance, doesn’t follow the linear trajectory of the plot but picks up the story of a man known as Control back at the Southern Reach. Acceptance takes another unexpected peripatetic turn, and it works wonderfully. Any further plot summary risks trespassing into the realm of spoilers. Suffice it to say there are plenty of surprises waiting and some positively baffling moments. I mean that in the very best way.

The trilogy works a little bit like a mystery. We move rapidly through its pages with the expectation of some great revelation at the end. The most impressive thing about this series, however, is the manner in which VanderMeer presents – and withholds – information we seek. We get answers to our questions, but those answers only make things more complicated. The more we learn, the more there is to know. By the time the final page flips over, much too soon, we might actually know less than when we started.

When “the mind expects a certain range of possibilities,” the biologist tells us in Annihilation, “any explanation that falls outside of that expectation can surprise.” VanderMeer’s series works the same way. It expands the range of narrative possibilities. In splicing the DNA of other genres into a literary novel of ideas, Annihilation and Authority and Acceptance join some of our most indelible books in asking us to rethink what we consider “literary” fiction. The Southern Reach trilogy is derived from an intensely febrile – and, I dare say, genius – imagination. It also happens to be great fun to read.

Tin House // You Can Feel It Like a Demon, Swallowing You Slow: An Interview with Marlon James

My interview with Marlon James, about his terrific new book A Brief History of Seven Killings, is up at Tin House.

Philadelphia Inquirer // The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

September 23, 2014

My review of this wonderful novel ran online on 9/23/14.

In The Bone Clocks, English novelist David Mitchell once again transports readers across time and space. The six novella-length sections are set from 1984 to 2043 and span the globe, setting us down in such far-flung locations as the Swiss Alps and Shanghai, remote Iceland, and the Australian Outback. One does not read a David Mitchell novel as much as climb aboard, grab on tightly, and get carried aloft on a magic carpet ride.

The international approach makes Mitchell one of our foremost novelists of this age of globalism, and it has served him extremely well in the past. Two of his novels – number9dream and Cloud Atlas – have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and it’s entirely safe to consider the later one of the true and rare masterpieces of recent literature. Further, his underappreciated The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, set at a Dutch trading post in 18th century Japan, is even more daring and, I think, even stronger in many ways.

At the center of The Bone Clocks is Holly Sykes, an Englishwoman who hears strange voices in her head, which she calls the Radio People. Her younger brother Jacko goes missing, and his absence creates a void that affects the goings-on in each of the subsequent overlapping storylines. The plot unfurls slowly and with a kind of literary precision one doesn’t encounter all that often.

Although this is a marvelously and painstakingly crafted book, it’s Mitchell’s all-too-human characters that keep the pages turning. These people – and its easy to forget that they’re characters and mere constructs on paper – are often awful to each other and to themselves.

Hugo Lamb is an economics and politics major at Cambridge whose early-1990s pursuit of profit takes a tragic toll on one of his so-called friends. Yet he remains sympathetic. The almost-washed-up novelist Crispin Hershey takes unimaginably brutal revenge on a critic who trashed his latest book. (Don’t get any ideas, Mr. Mitchell – I loved this novel.) A lot of deliciously bad decision-making goes on.

One of the most riveting characters is an English war correspondent, home from the Middle East for a wedding, who is forced to choose between his job and his family. “I don’t knock a peaceful and well-functioning society,” he tells us. “I enjoy it, for a few days, weeks, even. But I know that, after a couple of months, a well-ordered life tastes like a flat, non-alcoholic lager.” Mitchell makes us feel the weight of all of these tough choices. He has also sprinkled in a bit more humor this time around, which he uses to keep the growing tensions more or less in check until they finally explode.

The Bone Clocks is at heart a mystery: There are strange, seemingly out-of-body happenings neither the characters nor the reader fully understand. The elements of what we might consider fantasy or even science-fiction literature – which, again, Mitchell has previously used to tremendous effect – call to mind the transmigration of souls in Yukio Mishima’s landmark Sea of Fertility tetralogy more than, say, The Lord of the Rings or Dune. Even if those otherworldly strains feel a tiny bit shoehorned in at times, they make for some unexpected and enjoyable turns of the plot.

The Bone Clocks will feel comfortingly familiar in some ways to admirers of Mitchell’s previous time-traveling and genre-bending novels. It’s a joy to witness the workings of a singular creative voice at the peak of his powers.

New York Times Book Review // Closed Doors by Lisa O’Donnell

July 26, 2014

My review of Lisa O’Donnell’s terrific new novel is published in the 7/27/14 issue of the New York Times Book Review.

Lisa O’Donnell’s dazzling new novel transports us to small-town Scotland and into the increasingly volatile mind of an 11-year-old boy. Michael Murray, who narrates the book, lives with his parents and grandmother in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute. As in most small towns, everybody seems to know everybody else’s business. Here gossip is something more than a spectator sport.

O’Donnell won the prestigious Commonwealth Book Prize last year with “The Death of Bees,” a first novel that deftly balanced the morbid with the mundane, a talent that remains on full display here. “Closed Doors” begins in early 1982, the time of Margaret Thatcher’s reign and of Britain’s undeclared war over some other remote islands. Like Roddy Doyle’s “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha” and “Black Swan Green,” by David Mitchell, O’Donnell’s novel effectively evokes the carefree joys of adolescence as well as all of its terrors, real and imagined.

When Michael’s mother comes home crying one night, the rest of the family attempts to shield him from the awful truth of what has happened, telling him that a flasher has harassed her in the local park. Michael doesn’t understand what that means: “In the morning I am full of questions. Granny folds laundry and Da looks tired. I ask him about flashing. He doesn’t want to tell me. Neither does Granny. They want me to disappear with my soccer ball, but I don’t. My ma has been flashed at and I want to know what it means. She’s in the hospital with a sore face and a limp. She fell hard because of this flasher. I have a right to know what’s going on and why I’m to tell everyone she fell on the stairs.”

O’Donnell perfectly navigates the distance between what Michael understands and what her readers do. The boy soon overhears some conversations he’s not meant to and comes to suspect that his mother was subjected to something much worse than the bad behavior of an exhibitionist. Since, out of anxiety or humiliation, she has refused to go to the police, the neighbors assume she’s been battered by her husband. Although Michael knows it’s not true, he’s forbidden to tell anyone.

The whirlpool of secrets within secrets and lies within lies comes close to tearing Michael’s family apart, especially after the attacker strikes again and more of the awful truth emerges. Had the Murrays gone to the police in the first place, they might have saved a neighbor from harm. Michael, pulled in many directions at once, carries the burden of witnessing his mother’s anxiety attacks, hearing his parents arguing and protecting what remains of his family’s reputation — all while dealing with the ordinary challenges that go with turning 12 and starting to take an interest in girls. His confusion is palpable, even tragic. “It’s terrible to know too many things about people,” he realizes. “It makes you feel like a liar because you have to act like you know nothing at all when the truth is you know everything there is to know.”

O’Donnell’s great talent is most apparent in her depiction of the gap between Michael’s thoughts and his actions. He gets in fights and acts up at school, but never comes to see that throwing tantrums is his response to the tensions he can’t deal with at home. It’s not revealing too much to say that O’Donnell wraps up “Closed Doors” in a way that feels both unpredictable and inevitable. It’s a fitting end to a moving story that stakes a lasting, and disturbing, emotional claim on her readers.