Tournament of Books discussion

So, the first match-up took place this morning:

play-in round:

Life After Life versus Woke Up Lonely

Geraldine Brooks made the decision:

http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/201...


Here's her post:

Geraldine Brooks: First of all, I’m not a hand wringer. I don’t angst much. Nor do I have an MFA. In fact, I dropped English Lit after freshman year. But while reading the two books in my matchup I have found myself staring at the ceiling, pondering Large Questions in a most uncharacteristic way. To wit:

What is fiction for?

What is a novelist’s duty?

What is her minimum responsibility?

And then, more immediately: If you dislike a book, if you—let’s be blunt—actually hate it, is that OK?

I’m not talking about a tawdry, lazy, shitty piece of work here. I’m talking about a legit attempt at making art. A book with a Big Theme, even. A book in which the writing itself—the actual use of our glorious and rich language—is fresh and bold and lively. It’s just that these lovely, perfectly selected words and splendidly formed sentences are deployed in the service of creating characters so thin and plastic they might as well be Glad wrap.

But let me step back from value judgment and attempt to more or less dispassionately describe the two novels in my matchup. Fiona Maazel’s Woke Up Lonely has one foot in the sad squalor of quotidian American life in the years following the bungled Bush/Gore presidential election, and the other in a jazzed, revved, slapstick send up of that reality. Thurlow Dan is leader of Helix, a flourishing cult-like movement whose promise of rescue from loneliness has drawn thousands of followers to its speed-dating sessions and commune-like Packs. But like all such movements, it has attracted fringe elements with agendas that reach beyond issues of interpersonal connection to the advocacy of violent (if need be) revolution. So the government gets interested and assigns a freelance watcher/fixer to the group. Think: Carrie Mathison without an actual CIA credential but with the prosthetics genius from Mission:Impossible in her employ. “Today’s prosthetic: a nose brinked on caricature that appeared to have been launched from the putty of her face like a dart. Today’s chin: prognathous. She wore a wig. Sawdust blond, washed out, limp. Bowl cut—a vase, really—that came in at her chin.” Carrie—sorry, Esme—recruits a band of misfits to spy on Dan. He takes them hostage, and mayhem ensues. Oh, and I forgot to mention: Esme is Thurlow Dan’s ex-wife.

Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson, follows Ursula Todd through the toughest years of England’s 20th-century history, from her birth in the winter of 1910 to her death in, well, just about every year that follows until 1967. It’s like a condensed book version of A Dance to the Music of Time, only with a middle-class protagonist, and string theory.

Atkinson kills off Todd so many times I lost count. (But I kept reciting Dorothy Parker’s “Resume” to myself, and wondering if Atkinson also memorized it in her teen years.) Todd dies at birth, she falls from the roof, she drowns on a beach vacation, she succumbs to the influenza epidemic, a septic abortion, a gas leak, the London blitz, and she suicides as the Russians capture Berlin. Her reiterating life is a canvas created by the ideas of Buddha, Plato, and Nietzsche. Gradually, she is able to decipher some of the underlying text in the palimpsest of her multiple existences, and realizes that her mission is to use the next incarnation to take everything she’s learned and go kill Hitler before the Reichstag fire.

Whhaaaaa the farrrk? I hear you say.

And fear not. This is no spoiler. Atkinson actually turns over this card—this ridiculous, dumb, Inglorious Basterds-style plot point—in the very first chapter. Which, I’ll admit, put me off the book for quite a number of pages. I was also in a grumpy mood because I felt Atkinson had made me take a busman’s holiday. As someone who spends my work day deciding how my characters must live and die, I became chagrined that she had eschewed this duty, and was more or less laying before me several dozen drafts of a life, as if she couldn’t be bothered fulfilling her novelist’s contract with the reader, the one in which you stipulate: “I’ve thought about this life and struggled to write the best version I can for your reading pleasure. Here it is.”

But soon enough, Atkinson won me over. The device ceases to look like a cheap trick, and actually becomes a masterful and transcendent way to deal with the multiple horrors of the London Blitz. Because Ursula Todd experiences the Blitz first as a victim, then as a rescuer and dies and survives in both of those guises, Atkinson’s portrait of the nightly bombardment becomes multidimensional. “Her attention was caught again by Lavinia Nesbit’s dress hanging from the Millers’ picture rail. But it wasn’t Lavinia Nesbit’s dress. A dress didn’t have arms in it. Not sleeves, but arms. With hands. Something on the dress winked at Ursula. A little cat’s eye caught by the crescent moon. The headless, legless body of Lavinia Nesbit herself was hanging from the Millers’ picture rail.” Her writing comes most alive in these descriptions violent deaths.

Maazel’s writing, by contrast, never needs resuscitation. She wields words with the breathtaking deftness of a chainsaw juggler. But—and I asked myself the same question the first time I saw someone juggle chainsaws—what for?

Dave Eggers famously asserted that you shouldn’t criticize a book until you’ve written one. For which assertion he has been taken to the woodshed repeatedly. But I know what he means: that writing books is hard, and criticizing them is, by comparison, pretty easy.

And that’s when I started hoping that the ceiling would provide me with some guidance here. There’s no obligation for fiction to be plausible. So what if Maazel’s cult leader is so wet and whiny that no one would follow him out of a burning building? So what if his supposedly entrancing speeches bring to mind fortune cookie inserts rewritten by semiotics majors? So what if no one like Esme actually exists in the world of national security? So what if her prosthetics are impossible? (At one point, in North Korea, she’s disguised as a Kim Jong-Il impersonator—which is mega, even for meta.)

Sometimes, we read novels to escape hard truth. Or we find truth in the confections of richly implausible fantasy. And even though my own bias lists strongly toward story, a novel is not obliged to tell one, if its characters are compelling or its style mesmerizing. All a novel really needs to do, I concluded, is give the reader an incentive to turn the page. In piling frenzied incident atop wild antic, in playing even the most tragic losses for laughs, Woke Up Lonely ultimately left me bereft of that incentive.

And therefore, long live Life After Life. Ursula Todd survives, yet again, to face another round.

TODAY’S WINNER: Life After Life

I LOVE her decision - not so much who ended up winning the round (though i had chosen Atkinson's book), but just how she expressed herself and questioned each book.

(Also - I hope it's okay I created this new space? )

Beautifully written and not just because I agree with her choice. It was all I could do not to jump to the bottom to discover who won rather than reading all the way through.

Drew wrote: "Beautifully written and not just because I agree with her choice. It was all I could do not to jump to the bottom to discover who won rather than reading all the way through."

i really thought so too, drew!

I also really appreciated finding out how on earth these two books had ended up in the play-off. It was a relief to find out that Life After Life was actually at the top of the list, not the bottom -- I just couldn't understand how it had ended up secondary or even tertiary to such books as (sorry, fans) Hill William or At Night We Walk in Circles.

This was one of those things that I felt very "DO THE RIGHT THING" about. I was left with even more respect and admiration for Geraldine Brooks by the end of it. I love how some of the judgements and commentary pull back the curtain a little bit. I know most of us were baffled by how these two got matched up here.

Does anyone feel a little sad to be cheated out of the King Family Cage Match? I think that would make a good read-along for us in the summer months.

jess wrote: "This was one of those things that I felt very "DO THE RIGHT THING" about. I was left with even more respect and admiration for Geraldine Brooks by the end of it. I love how some of the judgements a..."

I have never read ANYTHING by Stephen King or his offspring but that sounds like a fun group summer reading event.

Me neither! I have never actually admitted that to anyone before, Drew. But I would do it for you guys.

I didn't know he had a son and daughter that were also writers besides Joe Hill.

I think I would've enjoyed the King Family Cage Match immensely! I was so happy when I read Geraldine Brooks' decision as I loathed (!) Woke Up Lonely and she put into words exactly how I felt about it.

The King Family Cage Match would have been amazing. The New York Times had a great article on the family last summer: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/...

I AM sorry we didn't have a King Family Cage Match -- although I'm not certain that any of the books published by any of them this year except Joe Hill's Nos4A2 was worthy, frankly.

If any of you who previously have eschewed Stephen King want to read one, I strongly, strongly, STRONGLY recommend 11/22/63. It was a wonderful book, and his best book in years, and had big themes.

Ellen, that was the only one of King's books that attracted me at all. Maybe I'll have to try it.

I enjoyed nos4a2 but it is the only Book by one of the King family I have ever read so my field to compare it to in the family is rather small. I have heard the one brother (not Joe Hill) is happy to write basic genre and enjoys smaller scale success. I thought nos4a2 was a really great read but having now read all but 2 in the tournament I am not sure it would have held up to some of these bigger themes. From a fun reading perspective it was up high on my list of 2013 reads.

It's very long, Drew -- but then most of his books are. I'm a big fan generally but some of his books are almost unreadable. 11/22/63 was the epitome of the "book you can't put down", and was his best book in years in my opinion.

The books he published this year don't come close, I don't think.

I loooooooved 11/22/63 and second (third, fourth, whatever!) recommending it. It was so long but it didn't feel like it.

I don't know what to say about NOS4A2, it gave me the worst icky feelings and I don't know if that's a good thing, but it was very King-esque in that way. I can say I like The Shining and all its creepy feelings but I just don't know if I could recommend the Hill book.

Round One and already the shocks are coming. I'm not completely shocked, many in this group alone weren't Luminaries fans. I am disappointed though. I liked Hill William but I wanted Luminaries to win. I don't think it will have Zombie support either. Killing my brackets already ;)

Yup. Wow indeed. You know, I didn't really have a dog in this race -- I was equally "meh" about them both, although in very different ways -- but I never for a minute thought that Luminaries wouldn't win. And I would agree that it's unlikely to have Zombie support, unless it's number four and the first three make it all the way through. Question -- was it anyone's favorite of the 17?

Joining the chorus of surprised but not shocked over today's first round. I've read 12 of the books (one of the "nots" being Hill William) and have 'Luminaries' at #4. While I liked it quite a bit it was one of those books that I respected more than loved. I suspect it won't rise again in the zombie round as it doesn't seem to have that passionate support. Still glad I read it, need more books that make me really dig in and be patient.

The Luminaries was one of the 4 books that I already had on my "to read" list before ToB, so I would have gotten to it eventually anyway, although I MIGHT have been more likely to abandon it if it weren't in the ToB. But you're right, I think, Ed -- it doesn't have the passionate support that some of the others do, particularly A Tale For the Time Being. I'm really interested in that match-up tomorrow -- my heart's squarely with How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

The Luminaries was one I had not read yet...it getting knocked means I can set it aside for now! Thinking of reading The People in the Trees next.Has anyone read this on a Nook/Kindle? I understand there are footnotes attached and wonder how cumbersome that will be and whether I should bite the bullet and purchase it in hardcover.Thoughts?

I almost never buy books -- when I do, they always end up on the Shelf of Doooooom while I read the library books first. Can't you get it from the library, Robin?

Unfortunately (and quite surprising!),our library system doesn't seem to have it.

There were a couple that neither of my library systems had (Hill William and The Tuner of Silences, if I remember correctly). I ordered them on ILL and they came in in less than a week! I have to admit that I hadn't ever used ILL before and was surprised at how fast it ended up being; I'm guessing that's not always the case, if you're looking for something REALLY obscure.

I read TPitT on the Kindle. The footnotes were annoying. I ended up reading most of the book on my computer monitor so I could read the footnotes as intended instead of all of them once I had finished the chapter.

Two weeks later, I saw the book in the bookstore and wished I had purchased it that way. It has a beautiful cover and over the spine there is a textured menagerie of the grubs that they eat during their adventure.

I did such a poor job of reading this year's entries. Luminaries was one of the few and the only one I enjoyed. So, bummer for me, I guess.

Robin, The People in the Trees is the reason I dropped out, in a way. That's when the Tournament became something like The Trigger Warning Book Club for me. I worry that my delicate sensibilities are more 'Victorian maiden' than '21st Century Man'.

I read about 10% of People of the Trees on my Kindle and I didn't feel like the footnotes were cumbersome, but... I am a footnote enthusiast.

My feelings about today's match up: I feel validated in my appreciation for Hill William, but my brackets are fuck'd already.

Regarding tomorrow: I love them both so much. I love TFTTB and I want it to take the Rooster, but I would be equally happy if Filthy Rich beat it this round and Tale came back as a zombie. I don't think Filthy Rich has enough passionate support to be a zombie. I don't know Mat Johnson's style, though. Anything could happen.

I think I might have enjoyed TPitT more in paper. My Kindle Fire does have the link you can just touch that brings you right to the footnote and then back but it was a bit annoying. I find footnotes like that irritating in a book in general though in any form.

Ed wrote: "Joining the chorus of surprised but not shocked over today's first round. I've read 12 of the books (one of the "nots" being Hill William) and have 'Luminaries' at #4. While I liked it quite a bit ..."

Even though I'm not done with Luminaries - I feel exactly the same way.

I was ok with Hill Williams but I really loved The Luminaries. If not for the Tournament I would have avoided it, even though it won the Booker, because it was so long. So glad I read it. I do just about all of my reading on Kindle and if I really like a book after reading it I then buy the "hardcopy". The Luminaries was one of those rare few that I wanted sitting there on my actual bookshelf.

jess wrote: "...my brackets are fuck'd already."

says everyone. haha!!

i am one of the readers who is only so-so on catton's book - i thought it was fine, but i didn't love it. i still haven't read 'hill william', but i thought the luminaries would power through because i seem to be in a minority where its concerned.

Sniff.

Please, please tell me that someone -- more than a few someones -- picked How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia for the Zombie Round. I didn't participate because I hadn't read enough of the books yet, and I hadn't read ...Filthy Rich... or People in the Trees, which are the two I would have entered. I liked A Tale For the Time Being well enough, but I didn't love it. Interestingly enough, A Tale... and ... Filthy Rich... were the only two I listened to rather than read, so I can't say that it's listening to/reading on paper that made the difference.

I liked both of these books pretty equally so I was happy either way. I felt this choice explanation had a lot more to it than yesterday's which I enjoyed.

Neither of these were my Zombie that went to The Son.

thought i would just add the link to the tournament for people: http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/

today, it's

A Tale for the Time Being

vs.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia


and the decision:

Mat Johnson: I really wanted one of these books to suck because then judging would have been a lot easier. In fact, I think I only agreed to do this because I assumed one of them would be awful and then I could just breeze through the immediate pain of having to read it and crown a winner and get on with my life. Instead, both How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and A Tale for the Time Being are good—a statement which says nothing, I know, but begins to speak to my dilemma. They are both, in fact, very good, and at times brilliant, and I left both feeling like I learned something about what you can do with the novel and the concept of story—which of course still says very little but sweet Jesus, give me time to warm up.

I read How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid first because it was short and I’m busy and also I am really getting sick of the long literary novel. Size doesn’t matter, sure, we are above the mundanity of counting page-length, but ever since the larger publishing world got it in their heads that longer novels are somehow more serious and of greater literary merit, there have been more and more literary books that sit bloated and bulging and would really do well to go on Paleo or start counting points or something. Actually I don’t know if this is a new phenomenon, I just know I walked into a bookstore about a decade ago and all the serious literary novels being promoted on the premier shelf looked big enough that if you dropped one you could break a toe. I see all that fat and I think award bait. It’s one thing if they needed to be long, but I’ve read a lot of them that didn’t, that had an ancillary 175-page narrative line whose primary purpose was to get it on some committee’s short list. It’s not fair, I know, and it’s my personal prejudice, but when I see a 200+ pager like How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, I think, Oh boy, looks like somebody doesn’t want to bore me.

Written in the form of a self-help book, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia follows the protagonist’s life from boyhood in impoverished rural Pakistan through the entirety of his existence as he rises to corporate opulence and beyond. Let me say first, I couldn’t create an entire lifespan for a character that feels this rich and true and poignant and visceral and still manage to fit that into a 200-plus-page arc. Really, it’s a marvel. Add onto to that the fact that Hamid does this in second person—which must rank just below the vosotros form as one of the most widely reviled literary tenses—and the book’s a stunner. While it focuses on our rising star, the novel is, at its heart, a love story. A writer who’s a lot more successful than me once told me, “All great stories are love stories.” He might have been drunk and overreaching but I like choosing to believe that. And this is a great story, with great prose riffs like:

We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.
Just lovely. And it’s a testament to the work that when I think of the novel now, its prose isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Hamid is a storyteller. We praise certain writers for being prose-stylists, but we assume all writers are storytellers. Well, some writers—a lot of writers—aren’t. They can tell a story, craftwise, but the essence of storytelling, embracing the magic at the heart of a tale, either eludes them or is secondary to other craft considerations. For true storytellers, casting the spell of the tale is central. The parts, no matter how luminous, remain in service to the grandeur of the whole.

God, I sound pompous when I talk about writing.

Oddly, the one thing I found specifically lacking was the framing of the work as a self-help novel, supposedly its central conceit, which takes place in the form of perfunctory self-help-referencing opening paragraphs for each chapter. Some were good, some distracting. All, I started to feel, unneeded. Because the book was so damn good. I didn’t want the device. I just wanted to jump back into the story.

In contrast to Hamid’s little gem, Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being is a big book. Not break-your-toe-big but, you know, big enough. It’s also happens to be haunting and rich and hard to quantify, which is apt because it’s about the discovery of a manuscript that could be described the same way. Here, an author, also named Ruth, also living on an island in British Columbia as apparently Ruth Ozeki does, discovers the existential diary of a Japanese teenager, Nao Yasutani, which has mysteriously floated across the Pacific and landed on North American shores. The narrative is mostly broken into two streams: Nao’s diary itself and the life of Ruth as she investigates and negotiates the truth behind the diary—if it’s even a real diary to begin with. The tension of the novel is that the space between these narratives, of knowing and not knowing, of truth and fiction, of present and past.

I knew it had me when I found myself reading just for some proof that Nao was real and not some hentia/perv’s fictional creation, because rationally I know that either way Noa is a work of fiction—the difference is only a question of how her fiction is layered in the narrative. What I love about this book is how much I love it even though there are so many things I normally hate: the protagonist being an alter-ego of the writer (you don’t get points for that anymore), having a bulk of the book come through a teenage narrator (this is not a valid literary concern, I just dislike teenagers), having the character in a book about knowing having a name that is pronounced like the word know, a plot that leans forward but more often winds its way back in circles, and again the fact that it’s a long book and I got shit to do. And yet I loved it anyway. Because it works.

With its myriad of interworking pieces, it clicks together like a masterfully designed clockwork marvel. While at first seeming meandering in its philosophical, quantum scientific, and political tangents, the more I read the more I appreciated how intricately they were intertwined and interdependent. Ozeki writes, “Information is a lot like water; it's hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.” In A Tale for the Time Being, it does leak. But it also pools, and starts to feel like an ocean.

I enjoyed the reading of How to Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, the act of reading it, more. But I was overwhelmed by the overall experience of A Tale for the Time Being, and I found myself immersed in the book even in the moments I put it down, and still after its completion. Maybe it’s the effect of immersion, when done right, that is the big books’ advantage. It was an advantage here.

TODAY’S WINNER: A Tale for the Time Being

Ellen wrote: "It's very long, Drew -- but then most of his books are. I'm a big fan generally but some of his books are almost unreadable. 11/22/63 was the epitome of the "book you can't put down", and was his..."

Early King Fan/Late King Fan - 11/22/63 was a favorite for three generations in my house.

So far I am batting zero. I hadn't read Hill Williams and I am still waiting for A Tale for the Time Being to come in at the library.

For Monday, I will have read Good Lord Bird but not Tuner of Silence. Which do you think will win?

Patty wrote: "For Monday, I will have read Good Lord Bird but not Tuner of Silence. Which do you think will win? "

i haven't read 'tuner of silence' yet, but i really loved 'good lord bird'. a lot. i would like to see it do well in the tournament.

I wasn't really thrilled about either The Good Lord Bird or Tuner of Silences, but I thought the latter was more beautifully written.

Tuner of Silence was one of two I didn't get to. I liked The Good Lord Bird. I haven't seen a lot of love for it and there were parts that felt a bit slow but overall I really did enjoy it and would like to see it win the round.

I loved The Good Lord Bird and in fact, I'd be happy for it to win. The only other book in the tournament I've liked as much is Life After Life.

I am just now reading The Tuner of Silences (about 50 pages in) and so far not sure what to think.

So far my bracket is still in tact (but I didn't have the whole thing filled in to begin with!).

I really would have loved to see Rachel Fershleiser judge in John Green's spot (Life After Life v The People in the Trees) or even where Roger D. Hodge is (The Dinner v The Signature of All Things).

Patty wrote: "For Monday, I will have read Good Lord Bird but not Tuner of Silence. Which do you think will win?..."

Patty, the judging so far has been a great reminder that the ToB is VERY unpredictable. It really comes down to the individual judge and their idiosyncratic responses to the book. Good Lord Bird won the National Book Award and has been pretty popular (I loved it and it gave it my Zombie vote). Tuner is much more obscure, and was the one book in this year's TOB that really disappointed me...but it has its fans as well. If I had to put money down, I'd go with GLB, but nothing would surprise me!

I loved GLB and will be profoundly disappointed if it's time in the TOB is done so quickly.

i am glad to read there is some love for 'good lord bird' - i really, really liked it a lot, and i have pegged it to go pretty far in the tournament. while i haven't read all of the books in contention (yet), GLB, to me, is one i would recommend most (not all books could be suggested to all readers, and i think GLB works well in that regard), and one that seems to be in keeping with the flavour of the TOB: interesting, layered, provocative.

Jess, Jennifer, where is the Like button when I need it? :-) By the way, GLB is also wonderful on audio.

I was disappointed by the lack of depth in the judge's commentary on The Luminaries and Hill William, frankly. I just now finished The Luminaries (took me forever!) and haven't read HIll William yet, so I didn't feel strongly either way--but I surely though Catton deserved better in the commentary. Was no one concerned that the judge for The Luminaries and Hill William thought that Catton spelled jail as "gaol" and connections and "connexions" just to be precious in her attempt to emulate a Victorian novel? Didn't the judge realize those are the accepted British spellings? Oh well.

jan, I listened to glb on audio. loved it. It was beautiful and horrible and hilarious. my only issue was that I felt mcbride was a little too heavy handed with his Big Themes (I.e. The glb metaphor at the end was like, yeah, i get it, you don't have to spell it out so much. using the character dressed as a woman for an opportunity to talk about being true to yourself was also a good idea that was overstated a bit imho). But I loved it.

today's match-up is posted:

The Good Lord Bird v. The Tuner of Silences

here's the decision, from judge Sarah Schulman:

http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/

Sarah Schulman: People who say “move on” are often advising us to give up our dreams. Usually they would have to make us change something fundamental for us to get what we need, and they simply don’t want to be bothered. Both of my books, The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto and The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, are about male authors creating black male characters who are charged with imagining what women could be, and I admit I did hope. But neither book, I would say, is successful on those terms. If the reader can “move on,” as disappointing as that might be, one of these novels gives us a little bit of somewhere else to go.

Mia Couto is a white African writing about a young black boy living in an imagined dystopia somewhere in the Mozambique hinterlands. James McBride is African American, telling a different kind of black man’s story, roaming from Kansas Territory to Wilmington, Del., from slavery to the ethical uplift of America’s favorite black era, the 1960s. Couto served in the revolutionary government after being in the struggle for independence from the Portuguese. McBride, as we all know, has a National Book Award.

Couto’s protagonist is a black child, Mwanito, whose father has locked him and his brother, uncle, and servant away in an all-male land, convincing them that the rest of the world has been destroyed. For the father, this is an expression of the end of civilization that emotionally accompanied the death of his wife. For the son, it is an internalized truth. There is something that veils this book, and it might be the translation. Even the title seems forced and awkward. Of course, that could also be an accurate replication of the author’s original voice, in which case there may be a formal revelation here that I am just missing. Is this a plot, or is this a metaphor for a society isolated by loss? Are these characters recognizable and resonant for black Africans? How much background would I, as a reader, have to have to be fully capable of evaluating the book? Obviously I have to rely on my experience of reading, alone, while recognizing that that could easily be misleading and filled with distortion. So, for this reader, Couto has a gross disadvantage, to the extent that I would say the contest is stacked.

As far as dystopias go, this one is no fun and holds little insight into experience, which is counter to the options created by the author’s choice of a first-person narrator. First person-ness equals hindsight. But without the advantage of stunning insights, first person can be an underminer. We know he lived to tell the tale. We know this boy grew up, gained perspective, developed a stylized grasp of language, became a coherent storyteller, perhaps even a novelist. As a result, I don’t worry for him. This defeats a lot of the potential reader involvement: suspense, anticipation, fear. The brothers know that women exist or have existed, but their modes of imagining Her are not inspiring. It’s all gash and blood. Why would two boys who have not been formed by the Western canon, the People’s Choice Awards, or any of this year’s Oscar nominees not be able to imagine woman having selves? Where did those dumb reductions come from? Their father is busy fucking the donkey, until she gets pregnant, which makes him suspicious, jealous and enraged. At this point I lost faith that the author would remember that this reader too lives in his world, and has come to call. Hello? Hello? Don’t you want Sarah to enjoy this book? Finally, an actual woman appears, the first one our protagonist, Mwanito, has ever seen. Maybe things will change.

She’s white and dressed like a man in order to survive. My white-savior alarm went off. I hope she’s not going to rescue the day. Well, in a way she does. She writes of her desire for a white Portuguese boyfriend in a way that Mwanito finds liberating. “The vision of this creature” he rhapsodizes, “suddenly caused the frontiers of the world I knew so well to overflow.” Not only has he discovered white women, but he has discovered white colonial heterosexual romance. And what could be more enriching to a black African boy than that?

The protagonist of James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird, Henry “Onion” Shackleford, also cross-dresses for survival purposes. Living, as I do, in the epicenter of the trans-revolution, that does seem awfully quaint. Why did he have to? As black comic Flip Wilson’s drag persona Geraldine used to say, “The Devil made me do it.” Made you? Immediately, I was worried. Queer writers have labored in the trenches of underground and grassroots literature only to watch their bounty show up in the most mainstream of texts. Certainly intersexuality won one straight man, Jeff Eugenides, a Pulitzer Prize and awkward unrecognizable lesbian characters seem to be popping up in the supporting casts of many very heterosexual novels. Whatever McBride’s objective for Shackleford’s gender transgression, I don’t want it to be derivative of lesser-known works or a sham on real people’s lives. I want it to sing true and deep, and, most of all, not be cute.

Unfortunately, it was both cute and not. See, little Henry is rescued from slavery by the famous abolitionist John Brown, but John thinks he’s a girl, named Henrietta. Why doesn’t she ever correct him? Because “lying come natural to all Negros during slave time for no man or woman in bondage ever prospered stating their true thoughts to the boss. Most of Colored life was an act.” It’s a plausible explanation. He passes as a woman because of racism. But when the hired hand sees Henrietta’s genitals and asks, “Are you a sissy?” it’s asked with no stakes at all. No sense that he could be beaten to death or simply shatteringly shunned. The real life of the real black sissy cross-dresser just isn’t in McBride’s mind. When it comes to women, McBride is a bit more liberal. Henrietta finds that men expect her to do so much for them that “being free weren’t worth shit.” Many opportunities to reveal his true gender are obstructed for stagey, devicey reasons and Henry learns nothing about what it is to be female.

The plot is propelled by the John Brown angle and even that seems to miss opportunities. Henrietta and John meet Frederick Douglass and, alas, we learn nothing about him that matters. He is “handsome,” his shirt is “starched.” Come on! We are meeting Frederick Douglass! There is the fact of his polygamous household, but the man himself is a drunken predator and there is no insight into his intellectual activities or deep and authentic personal contradictions. McBride simply does not rise to the occasion. Sometimes the fun of writing carries the reader along, and there’s a lot of arch historical detail so the reader is really living in a stylized kind of Tarantino America that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but can be engrossing. We are transported, even if it’s to Netflix. He enjoys writing, and you can kind of see the author talking to himself, tapping his foot, cracking himself up. There is a real person here, and there is an intimate relationship going on. But there are a lot of disappointments.

TODAY’S WINNER: The Good Lord Bird

The Kevin/John commentary and the reader comments that follow this review on the website are the best yet. Great discussion.

i really adore them, sherri!! and i am with them -- i actually, after reading schulman's reasonings, felt like -- wow, did we ever read different books, where 'good lord bird' is concerned. but then, as john points out, we bring to a novel our own experiences and perspectives. in reading the book, i found the douglass section utterly fascinating! and as far as kevin's question :

"Can an author have a male character dress as a female without acknowledging 21st-century gender identity politics, even if the character in the book lives at a time when those politics don’t exist?"

i agree with kevin's comment that while the book is about identity, gender identity isn't necessarily the end goal. at no time was i anticipating or looking for mcbride to make a statement concerning onion pretending to be a girl.

i found schulman's points really interesting and it made me reconsider my space in the world, that's for sure.