The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
by Laird Barron
read: 2015

The United States covers a wide, often sparsely populated area, and modern civilization sprung up relatively recently. What dwells in the spaces that haven't been paved over by mankind? What undiscovered ruins lay there? Who lived (or lives) there, and what strange gods did they worship? Barron answers these questions with a healthy dose of Lovecraftian horror. The empty spaces are full of dark, evil creatures and forces that want to destroy mankind and only spare humans so they can spread the tales of the terrors they have seen. Most of Barron's characters have figurative demons even before encountering the literal ones that people his stories. It makes for pretty dark stuff.

At Swim-Two-Birds

At Swim-Two-Birds
by Flann O'Brien
read: 2015
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

Other than a couple of the stories in Lost in the Funhouse, I have not read anything with as many meta-fictional layers as At Swim-Two-Birds. The narrator is an author writing a story that features an writer who falls asleep, allowing his fictional creations to play at creating stories of their own. Characters interrupt tales with other tales, one-upping one another. The fictional author gives birth to a figurative offspring made literal flesh, and that character in turn writes a story wherein his dozing father gets his comeuppance. These stories-within-stories are intercut by the narrator's tales of drinking with friends and maintaining his relationship with his guardian uncle. Often I find this sort of metafictional exercise showy and pointless, but there's enough humor to make it work here; O'Brien knows he's being a bit silly.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

The Napoleon of Notting Hill
by G.K. Chesterton
read: 2015

I've spent a little time in London but I'm not sure I understand enough about either the geography of the city or about the public sentiment towards patriotism in England in 1904 to appreciate some of the apparently satiric elements in The Napoleon of Notting Hill.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
by Frank Miller
read: 2015

Throughout Dark Knight Returns, there's a running argument about whether Batman does more good or evil for society. Miller takes pains to make the characters espousing both sides of the argument look like idiots, letting them voice closed-minded or naive thoughts in the same breaths with which they render their opinions on Batman. But he also makes sure that both sides have a point. Obviously Batman stops a lot of crime and criminals, but he also inspires the Joker to come out of retirement and kill hundreds. Commissioner Gordon (and ultimately his successor) ultimately feels it best to look the other way, but it's a murky decision.

I have same complaint about Miller's Batman that I do about the Christopher Nolan movies: when he's causing destruction at a massive scale, it's ridiculous to continually point out that he doesn't kill people. He kills bunches of people.

Pale Fire

Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
read: 2015
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #53, Guardian 1000 Novels

Pale Fire has a unique structure, with the novel told in footnotes to the titular poem. The commentator, Charles Kinbote, serves as an unreliable narrator, believing that the poem is a tribute to his homeland of Zembla and the tales he told poet John Shade about his native land. We're meant to laugh at Kinbote's naivete, in part, but I think there's a compelling point here about the baggage that readers bring when interpreting works. The author's intention matters, certainly, but the audience for art is always bringing its own perspective and experience.

I don't find the story of Kinbote, Shade, and John Gradus really compelling in and of itself apart from the metafictional gimmick. There's some interesting guesswork as to whether Zembla is real, whether Gradus planned to kill Kinbote or Shade, whether Shade and Kinbote were really friends, etc., but it's an intellectual exercise rather than an emotional one: I don't really care what the answers are.

All Aunt Hagar's Children

All Aunt Hagar's Children
by Edward P. Jones
read: 2015

I couldn't find a master list of parallels between Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar's Children, so I put this reference together (not exhaustive):

	Lost in the City	All Aunt Hagar's Children
1	The Girl Who Raised Pigeons	In the Blink of God's Eye	LitC: Robert considers abandoning his daughter after his wife dies in childbirth. AAHC: Ruth finds a baby abandoned in a tree.
2	The First Day	Spanish In the Morning	Both stories describe a child's first day of school
3	The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed	Resurrecting Methuselah	Both feature a character named Anita, presumably the same woman (with AAHC story coming after). Main characters are both students dealing with death
4	Young Lions	Old Boys, Old Girls	Main character of both stories is Caesar Matthews, with AAHC story coming after
5	The Store	All Aunt Hagar's Children	Penny (grocery store owner) appears in both stories
6	An Orange Line Train to Ballston	A Poor Guatemalan Dreams of a Downtown in Peru	Marvella and her children appear in both stories, with her daughter Avis featured in the AAHC tale
7	The Sunday Following Mother's Day	Root Worker	Maddie appears in both stories
8	Lost in the City	Common Law	AAHC story takes place earlier, with Lydia a young girl and her mother Cornelia and Georgia about 30
9	His Mother's House	Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister	A Joyce appears in both stories. Both have a theme of raising children that don't belong to you, and of the destruction of drug culture
10	A Butterfly on F Street	The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia River	Both stories reference Mansfield Harper and deal with theme of infidelity
11	Gospel	Blindsided	Burned-down church and Revered Saunders from LIC story mentioned in AAHC
12	A New Man	A Rich Man	Elaine Cunningham appears in both stories
13	A Dark Night	Bad Neighbors	Beatrice Atwell appears in both stories
14	Marie	Tapestry	George Carter records life histories of main characters of both stories

One has to ask: why does Jones do this? From a literary standpoint, I think it adds depth to the characters and the world - they have life outside the 20 pages or so in their stories. Minor characters in one tale become major characters in another. This feeling that minor characters have their own rich, interesting stories to tell is present in Jones' novel The Known World as well. Aside from the literary reasons, there's a sociological / historical reason for Jones to set up the connections he does: the effects of slavery, Reconstruction, and institutional racism have reverberated throughout American history, and the thematic and literal echoes in Jones' tales reinforce those reverberations.

AAHC takes places largely in Washington D.C., but the setting is contrasted to the rural life that African-Americans left behind in the rural south during the migration to urban centers. In Root Worker, for instance, a middle class doctor learns herbal medicine from a "root worker" in the North Carolina town her parents came from. Jones is interested in the tension between Southern roots and modern progress, and AAHC is consumed with it.

Lost in the City

Lost in the City
by Edward P. Jones
read: 2015
Pen/Hemingway Award

When I wrote about The Known World, I mentioned Edward P. Jones' all-seeing narrative voice, free of judgment. That voice is almost frustratingly present in Lost in the City - Jones might give you several of a character's thoughts and actions, but he never reduces it to something simple by tying a verbal bow around it. The reader is left to wonder, judge, extrapolate, and doubt. I might liken his short stories to those of Flannery O'Connor, but O'Connor's stories - many of them brutally depressing - seem to suggest we should be laughing at the same time we're crying. Jones doesn't open the door to humor in the same way, which probably suggests something real and depressing about the African-American condition.