novels

Small Things Like These: A Small Review

~ Flynn ~ 3 Comments

Twenty-four days into 2024, I’m renewing my resolution to post a brief review here of everything I read, instead of just posting on Goodreads.

Because, first, why should I work for Goodreads for free, when I can instead work for myself for free here on WordPress?

Second, my reviews seem to be vanishing off Goodreads. I definitely wrote down some thoughts about Grant Allen’s “What’s Bred in the Bone,” the most insane book I read in 2023, and now my review is gone! Vanished down the memory hole as if it never existed. I don’t think I had deep thoughts about it, but now I might as well now have had none. (Was it possibly the label “batshit crazy” that earned its erasure? I will never know. Goodreads does not explain. Goodreads does not apologize.)

But here, without further ado, Small Things Like These:

Wow. Holy mother of god. This book.

On my third book by her, I should be used to Claire Keegan by now and the things she can do with fiction, but “Small Things Like These” has knocked me sideways. It’s a very short novel and I listened to it on a weekend day. When it ended, I could not stop thinking about it.

Once I understood the basic problem that the story was setting forth, I could not imagine it how would end. But once I got to the end, I understood perfectly what would happen next. Like that of “Foster,” the ending “Small Things Like These” has a way of propelling the narrative, as if you as the reader are continuing the story in your head, participating in the work of the writer.

The problem the story sets forth is this: A man — Bill Furlong, a basically normal, decent man, with a personal history that has conditioned him to be sympathetic to outsiders and those down on their luck even though he himself, through hard work and self-discipline, has constructed a comfortable life — sees something he should not have seen, a vision of cruelty that causes him extreme discomfort.

Everything practical and sensible, every spoken and unspoken social pressure, is telling him to sweep it under the rug and pretend he never saw this thing. To ignore it would be the easiest thing in the world; no shame would attach, except that he attached by himself. And yet. And yet.

A universal story, you might say, and it is, but Keegan cleverly constructs it out of specific particulars, a carefully chosen time and place. It’s mid-1980s Ireland, a small town. It’s Christmastime, and it’s cold. We all know about the Magdalene laundries by now, but this is a few years before all the horrifying details would come out; the last years when small-town Ireland was effectively ruled by an informal yet powerful theocracy of the priests and nuns of the Catholic Church. Keegan makes it clear how people in the town sort of knew but sort of didn’t want to know what might or might not be going on in the convent, and how the women who worked there came to be there.

Furlong, whose business is supplying heating fuel like coal, wood and turf, goes to the convent to make a coal delivery, early on a Sunday morning because he’s so overbooked, not a time he would normally be expected. When he opens the coalshed door, he makes an unexpected discovery: a girl has been left there.

What’s so interesting and powerful about this book is the way it is rooted in particulars, yet it also has an almost mythic dimension. The way Furlong’s own childhood is something of a fairytale; minor characters who assume, ever so lightly, allegorical shapes. The use of snow, and cold, and Christmas. There is not one detail out of place, and even the evil nuns are sketched with a certain sympathy. For the Christians among us, it is one of those books that raises uncomfortable questions about what being a Christian actually means.

My Search for Warren Harding

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Book Cover

I learned about My Search for Warren Harding from a story in The New York Times. It was originally published in the 1970s and soon fell into obscurity, along with its author, though becoming sometimes of a cult classic for its edgy humor. By chance a few years ago it fell into the hands of people influential enough to get it published again and given a second chance at fame. Even better: Robert Plunket, in his 80s, is still alive and gets to enjoy his book’s revival.

His new introduction had me laughing out loud, so I had high hopes for the actual book. Alas, these were only partly realized, though there are definitely funny moments.

The other introduction, by the writer who helped get republished, essentially warns the reader: Political incorrectness ahead! There is a great deal of homophobia and fat-shaming here, which would get Mr. Plunket canceled had he dared to write it today, and perhaps was funnier a few decades ago. But one should read a book as a reflection of its time, not impose today’s strictures on it.

But to get to the story. It is narrated in the first person by an obscure historian who has come to California from New York City in hopes of obtaining a cache of documents connected to President Warren Harding, who notoriously fathered a child with his mistress. The narrator has discovered through a series of unlikely events that this love child is in fact still alive, though obviously quite old, and living in Southern California. She is still in possession of these papers. Certain they will change the field of Warren Harding studies forever, as well as make his career, he engages in an escalating set of bad choices in an effort to get his hands on them.

So the plot itself is kind of a nonsense quest; it reminded me of Headlong by Michael Frayn. Just as that book taught the reader about Bruegel’s paintings between the madcap capers, this one painlessly teaches the reader more about Warren Harding. (And who among us does not need to learn more about Warren Harding?) In sheer wackiness, it reminded me of Made for Love by Alissa Nutting.

The story kind of sputters along, or so it seemed to me — though delightfully. Reading it was like having the sort of friend who tries to tell you a story of something that happened to them but keeps getting sidetracked by humorous asides. Until finally you give up and realize that the humorous asides are in fact the point.

The real interest here is in the narrator. He has the stereotypical reactions of a New Yorker to Southern California, and he is — as becomes increasingly clear as the story goes on — a deeply closeted gay man. There is humor in this but honestly for me also pathos, which I don’t think the writer was necessarily intending (although who can know for sure).

In one of the introductions, or maybe The New York Times story, I learned that this is a rewrite of The Aspern Papers, a book I have long meant to read by another famously deeply closeted gay man. Maybe this will finally get me to do it.

Hello Again

~ Flynn ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been sadly neglecting this blog, but have resolved to revive it, if only to keep track of my reading. The things that I write on Goodreads (an increasingly squirrelly platform; and has anyone else noticed it is giving inaccurate dates for when a book was read?) will now also go here, starting today, on the 206th anniversary of the way-too-early death of Jane Austen (even though she is, for practical purposes, immortal).

Starting with my most recent read, The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (a great author name, very nice balance of syllables).

Read more: Hello Again

THE SPARROW is a novel written in the 1990s and set partly in 2014-2019 and partly about 40 years later, telling the story of a mission to another planet led by Jesuits.

Which sounds like the setup of a joke but isn’t. And why not Jesuits, I suppose? They are known for bringing the word of Jesus everywhere.

Which does raise the question of whether, if there are other planets in the universe with sentient life (the odds for it seem good when you consider just how big the universe is), what kind of gods do they have? Can the Jesuits really argue that Jesus came to Earth to rescue humanity from original sin, but you guys on Planet X ought to worship him too, because….

Or should we suppose that Jesus, taking as our Jesuit starting point the notion that Jesus literally existed/exists, also came to Planet X, in some form or another? Such questions tax my weak theological muscles, so I would probably be better off talking about the novel.

The earlier timeline tells the story of how the mission came to be: a radio telescope has picked up a transmission from a distant planet that consists of beautiful and haunting music. A group of people — among them, an astronomer, a physician, an engineer and a Jesuit priest — who are all friends become fascinated by this and somehow find themselves involved in a secret Jesuit-sponsored mission to the planet.

The other timeline is 40 years later, when the sole survivor of that mission, the priest, returns to Earth, physically and mentally shattered. (Although not actually 40 years older, because, relativity) The party that came and rescued him found him in a shocking and lurid situation (details of which are revealed only gradually) and the job of a group of priests in the later timeline is to figure out what happened. To get him to confess, basically, so he can cleanse his soul.

As the priest, Emilio Sanchez, gradually and reluctantly tells his story, the other timeline also advances and the two eventually converge.

What I liked about this book: the alien planet is very interestingly imagined. At a few points, the omniscient narrator allows us into the mind of one particular resident of the planet who will play an important role in the story, and I found this fascinating and persuasive. We also learn a little about the alien language the visitors pick up and how the language shapes how they see the world. The parts set on Earth also feel solidly detailed and imaginatively realistic, if that makes sense. I also thought the conceit of the novel was so wacky yet intriguing that I could not help but keep reading to see how it would be resolved.

What I struggled with: the pacing is a little odd. It takes a long time to get going, though the setup is mostly enjoyable. But the mysteries so intriguingly introduced get resolved at the end in what felt to me like a rush, and they are not narrated directly but instead are told at a remove. Also, the characters are introduced in the start, sometimes at great length, and then we don’t seem to learn much more about them as we go along. They spend entirely too much time for my taste bantering with each other; the author insists a bit too much on how incredible and clever they all are.

But I admired the author’s willingness to go there — to address questions of faith and doubt in a way that was earnest and searching, even at the expense of seeming unsophisticated or basic. Even though I am not a religious person, these are interesting questions. Even though I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the way they are resolved here. And it was somehow fascinating to see a writer in the 1990s imagining the time we live in now.

This book also made me happy by reminding me of another book about a Christian mission to an alien planet, which I remember loving though I have forgotten many plot details: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber.

The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker

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It was great to be back.

I read The Golem and the Jinni not long after it came out in 2013 and at least once again since. Though I don’t remember every detail now, what I can’t forget is how it gave me the feeling of dwelling in an an entire and completely realized world, one that felt rich with historical details but also intimate and outside of time, one I was sad to leave. Chava and Ahmad were greenhorns in 1900 New York, and the novel was both a slow-burn love story and an immigrant tale of learning to adapt and fit in. The narrator was omniscient and a little at arm’s length. There were other story lines and secondary characters, but the focus was firmly on golem and jinni.

The Golem and the Jinni didn’t end on a cliffhanger — fortunate for the reader waiting eight years for this continuation, but not offering an obvious sequel path for the writer. And sequels/continuations are harder than they appear. Since they already have characters and a world, they seem like they should be easier than starting anew. But they need to explain things to people who never read the first volume yet not bore those who know it very well. They need to create the experience that readers loved the first time, but do more than just repeat it. And this case, there’s the weight of thousands of readers’ expectations. So how does this compare?

What soon becomes apparent is how differently time is handled here. The books are the same length, roughly 480 pages, but The Hidden Palace covers about 15 years, a much greater span of time than G&J. The action ranges beyond Little Syria and the Lower East Side: to Morningside Heights, to Brooklyn and even the Ottoman Empire.

Also, there’s more people, some with only a tenuous connection to Chava or Ahmad, doing stuff of their own, including, spoiler alert, constructing a golem in their tenement apartment (as one does). There is more History: the Odessa pogroms of 1905 get a mention, as does the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. We meet Lawrence of Arabia before he was famous, and Gertrude Bell when she already was. The sinking of the Titanic and the Lusitania both move the plot forward. And we see the city itself changing before the eyes of its residents, as the Manhattan Bridge is built, the first skyscrapers spring up, cars start replacing horses, women start demanding the vote.

So the feeling of The Hidden Palace was very different for me from The Golem and the Jinni: less cozy, but no less compelling. Chava and Ahmad were less at the center of the action, as their differences drove them apart, and they began to pursue divergent paths in this new New York, though events will bring them back together.

The plot is a thing of wonder, as the different story lines start to converge in ways both logical and surprising, and there are many delights along the way. I particularly enjoyed the stubborn orphan Kreindel, the wisecracking bicycle messenger Toby, and that Chava managed to put herself through college and become a teacher of Home Economics, which seems both absurd and completely right.

Will there be a third installment? It almost seems like…maybe?

The Blog’s Gone Dark

~ Flynn ~ 9 Comments

I have not posted here since an outing in February to a wonderful dramatization of the Bronte sisters’ life. I am not keeping up with my reading list  (although I do  so on Goodreads). I started another #100daysofwriting challenge and quickly began forgetting — not to write, I never forget that — but to take a daily picture and post it on Instagram.

Feckless though I am, it struck me it might be fun in retrospect to have had some record here of the progress of the novel I imagine myself to be writing. Though it may come to nothing (the novel-diary plan, I mean — the novel will come to something, though hard to say what), mere risk of failure is not enough of an argument against. So here goes, in hopes that it can encourage others as much as myself.

I got a half-baked notion to write about the Brontes back in 2013, though I did not form any resolve until 2017,  also an alarmingly long time ago. Continue reading →

Reading While Human

~ Flynn ~ 2 Comments

This week I read a wonderful essay titled “Reading Jane Eyre While Black”  that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Not only does it compare two of 19th -century England’s most fascinating writers — Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen — but it hits on many of the issues I’ve been thinking about lately. About authorial intent, and how there will always  be something a little mysterious about it, even to the author. Also how as both readers and writers we bring our own biases, both the known and unknown, to the page.

Tyrese L. Coleman makes many interesting points along the way, but one key theme is how “Jane Eyre” has been ruined for her by Bronte’s depiction of Bertha Mason, whose craziness and evil is inextricably linked to her West Indian origins and implicit blackness. Continue reading →