Why I Killed My Best Friend by Amanda Michalopoulou

A hazard of doing intense academic work all about novels and novelists and The Novel and the novelties of novelism, etc. etc. etc. ad noveleam, — as I have been doing for a few years now — is that you stop being able to enjoy novels. (Or maybe not you. Maybe this is just me. I long ago learned that I cannot binge on particular genres, whether novels or stories or poems or essays. After working as the series editor for the three Best American Fantasy anthologies, for instance, I hardly read any short fiction for a few years.)

I didn't realize I wasn't enjoying novels until recently when, after not enjoying yet another book that had been highly praised and/or recommended by friends, I asked myself what the last novel I actually enjoyed was. I had to think long and hard. The answer: Universal Harvester by John Darnielle, from February. (Before that, Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You, December 2016.) Not that long ago, but given how many novels I read or tried to read after Darnielle's, it felt like a looooong time. Sickness can mess up any sense of time, and when you're book-sick, days feel like weeks, months, years.

Anyway, that's all over now, at least for the moment. After tossing one book after another aside, I more or less randomly picked up Why I Killed My Best Friend by Amanda Michalopoulou, translated by Karen Emmerich. I liked the bright pinkish-purple cover and the title, so I thought I'd give the first few pages a shot.

Reader, I hardly put the book down until I was done with it.

It's not that I thought it was the greatest novel ever written. I enjoyed it, admired much of it, but like many books, its later chapters can't live up to the promise of the earlier. The elements that unambiguously worked, though, really appealed to that readerly pleasure center, whatever it may be, and that's what I want to outline here. The parts of the book that didn't work for me were the final two chapters, and I didn't realize quite how much they didn't work for me until I'd made my way through them and could reflect on the novel as a whole. And by "not work" I don't mean they were terrrible; there's much of interest in them, but the feeling of disappointment and even frustration was acute because everything leading up to those last 50 pages felt just about perfect. In a mediocre book, those final chapters could have been the best things about it, but this is not a mediocre book.

The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge

When I heard, a few months ago, that Paul La Farge's new novel would be about H.P. Lovecraft, I groaned. For one thing, I don't care about Lovecraft (no, more than that: I actively dislike Lovecraft's writing, life, everything); for another, there's a boom in people writing about Lovecraft these days. Good writers, too! Not just the hacks of fandom churning out their unintentionally almost-funny imitations, not just cretins of the sort who bought Weird Tales because they would rather run it into the ground than have anybody taint its legacy with stories that aren't imitations of Lovecraft — no, I'm talking about good writers, interesting writers, original writers, and—

Ugh, I just don't get it. And then comes the announcement about Paul La Farge, a writer I've enjoyed for almost twenty years now, ever since a friend of mine spent some time at the MacDowell Colony when he was there and told me, "There's a guy here who writes weird surrealist stuff you'd like," and when I went to visit her we stopped by the Toadstool Bookstore in Peterborough and I picked up a copy of The Artist of the Missing, read it, liked it (a bit too closely imitative of Kafka/Calvino/Borges, but well done), then later bought his next novel, Haussmann, or, The Distinction, which felt really original to me at the time, almost vertiginously so, as I hardly knew how to get my bearings with it, mostly because it was about histories I knew nothing about, but it haunted me. And then The Facts of Winter, a beautiful book of shimmering weird dreamstuff, lovely and yet also insubstantial. (I missed Luminous Airplanes somehow.) There were also various fun essays and interesting short stories that I caught here or there.

Thus, for some time now, La Farge's name has been one of the few that will induce me to pick up a book or magazine on the strength of his byline alone. His writing and his perspective are singular.

But ... Lovecraft? What was going on? Was he tired of suffering the obscurity of the highly literate, esoteric writer, and now wanted to jump on the apparent gravy train of Lovecraftianity? Everybody's got to eat, so good for him, but what was I to do, I who wanted to read Paul La Farge's new novel but...? And it has such a great Lynd Ward-ish cover... And...

And then, out of the blue, a publicist from Penguin Press asked me if I wanted a copy. What could I say? It wouldn't cost me anything. I could take a look at the first 25 pages or so and if it was too Lovecrafty, I could just pass the book on to one of the many people I know who (inexplicably!) are fascinated by old HPL and find enjoyment in reading his fiction. Sure, I said. Send it along.

Universal Harvester by John Darnielle

John Darnielle's first novel (after the uncategorizable critical novella Black Sabbath's Master of Reality), Wolf in White Van, got a lot of attention and made the longlist for the 2014 National Book Awards. I read it when it came out, since I adore Darnielle's work as singer-songwriter for The Mountain Goats, and thought maybe he'd be okay at writing novels, too, though I tried not to get my hopes up. After a few pages, I was entranced, and read the book quickly, almost in a fugue state, stopping only because at times I found it emotionally overwhelming. I never wrote about it because I didn't know how to do so in any way other than to say, "Go read this." To explain what made the book such a rich reading experience for myself would require delving into a lot of weirdnesses of personal response, useless to anybody else, and to talk much about the plot and structure would be to give away part of the novel's magic. I am not at all a spoiler alerter — quite the opposite, in fact, and I generally feel that any book or movie requiring a spoiler alert is a book or movie without much of interest beyond its plot machinations — but there are always exceptions, and the elegance with which Wolf shuffles and deals its information is such a carefully controlled performance that even to speak of the story's premise felt to me like a violation. (And it's not about Big Surprises. It doesn't take long to guess the big stuff; it's the way the information accumulates that is so powerful, so masterful.)

Universal Harvester is even more narratively tricksy than Wolf in White Van, but it seems to me much less harmed by description and analysis, and so I will offer here a few preliminary notes about the novel, with the assumption that you haven't read it but are, for whatever reason, nonetheless curious about its structure and effect.

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

To make Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora make sense, I had to imagine a metafictional frame for it.

The novel tells the story of a generation starship sent in the year 2545 from the Solar System to Tau Ceti. It begins toward the end of the journey, as the ship approaches its destination and eventually sends a landing party to a planet they name Aurora. The narrator, we quickly learn, is the ship's artificial intelligence system, which for various reasons is learning to tell stories, a process that, among other things, helps it sort through and make sense of details. This conceit furthers Robinson's interest in exposition, an interest apparent at least since the Mars trilogy and explicit in 2312. As a writer, he seems most at home narrating scientific processes and describing the features of landscapes, which does not always lead to the most dynamic prose or storytelling, and he seems to have realized this and adjusted to make his writerly strengths into, if not his books' whole reason for being, then a meaningful feature of their structure. I didn't personally care for 2312 much, but I thought it brilliantly melded the aspirations of both Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell for science fiction in the way that it offered explicit, even pedagogical, passages of exposition with bits of adventure story and scientific romance.

What soon struck me while reading Aurora was that aside from the interstellar travel, it did not at all seem to be a novel about human beings more than 500 years in the future. The AI is said to be a quantum computer, and it is certainly beyond current computer technology, but it doesn't seem breathtakingly different from the bleeding edges of current technology. Medical knowledge seems mostly consistent with current medical knowledge, as does knowledge of most other scientific fields. People still wear eyeglasses, and their "wristbands" are smartwatches. Historical and cultural references are to things we know rather than to much of anything that's happened between 2015 and 2545 (or later — the ship's population seems to have developed no culture of their own). The English language is that of today. Social values are consistent with average bourgeois heterosexual American social values.

500 years is a lot of time. Think about the year 1515. Thomas More started writing Utopia, which would be published the next year. Martin Luther's 95 Theses were two years away. The rifle wouldn't be invented for five more years. Copernicus had just begun thinking about his heliocentric theory of the universe. The first iterations of the germ theory of disease were thirty years away. The births of Shakespeare and Galileo were 49 years in the future. Isaac Newton wouldn't be born until the middle of the next century.

Aurora offers nothing comparable to the changes in human life and knowledge from 1515 to 2015 except for the space ship. The world of the novel seems to have been put on pause from now till the launch of the ship.

Mr. Turner and Mr. Turing

Two new biographical films give viewers an opportunity to see diametrically opposite approaches not just to biography, but to film narrative itself.

A warning: I saw Mr. Turner and The Imitation Game months ago (as part of the annual Telluride at Dartmouth festival), and my thoughts here are based purely on memories that are getting ever dimmer. Nonetheless, the differences between the films are so striking that I couldn't help but keep thinking about them, to keep reading about the stories' subjects, and to keep coming back to the idea of how information is conveyed through moving pictures.

I went into both films with relatively high expectations, since I adore Mike Leigh's work and I had very much enjoyed Headhunters, the previous movie directed by Imitation Game's Morten Tyldum. And overall I did like both Mr. Turner and The Imitation Game; however, "like" is part of a broad spectrum, and for me, Mr. Turner was a powerful emotional and aesthetic experience that made it among the best movies I've seen in a long time, and The Imitation Game was an entertaining way to spend a couple hours.

The Plausibles

Alfred Hitchcock in conversation with Francois Truffaut:

To insist that a storyteller stick to the facts is just as ridiculous as to demand of a representative painter that he show objects accurately. What's the ultimate in representative painting? Color photography. Don't you agree? There's quite a difference, you see, between the creation of a film and the making of a documentary. In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is the god; he must create life. And in the process of that creation, there are lots of feelings, forms of expression, and viewpoints that have to be juxtaposed. We should have total freedom to do as we like, just so long as it's not dull. A critic who talks to me about plausibility is a dull fellow.

The Narrative Arcade: On Vikram Chandra's "Artha"

Vikram Chandra's collection of interconnected stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, is a book I had thought of writing about in some detail, but I'm afraid time is not on my side with that, and a number of other writing projects need attention. One story I managed to make some notes on is "Artha", and here are those notes, in case some thoughts on the story are useful to someone else...

In thinking about Love and Longing in Bombay, I’m going to start by grasping some tiny pieces within the wholes, and see what I can do with them.

First, a single story, and a single page of that story, and not the words but the blank space.

The story: “Artha”. The page: 165 of the 1998 Back Bay Books paperback edition.

The two blank spaces between narrators and their narratives.

The Affect Effect: Notes on Sherlock and Hannibal

Last night, viewers in the US got to see what viewers in other parts of the world have already seen: the first episode of the third season of the phenomenally successful BBC show Sherlock. I've already seen it — twice, in fact — because I enjoyed previous seasons of the show enough to work around the BBC website's geographical limitations and watch the episode when it first aired, and then I saw it again at a local cinema's preview showing, where my friend Ann McClellan gave a presentation on Conan Doyle and Sherlock. I've also seen the other two episodes of the season, watching episode 2 twice and episode 3 once.

Recently, I watched the 13-episode first season of NBC's Hannibal, based on Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter character, and I've been thinking about certain overlaps and significant contrasts between the two shows in their approach to their material. The comparison first occurred to me after I re-watched the first episode of Sherlock in preparation for the new season and heard, again, Sherlock refer to himself as a "high-functioning sociopath" — immediately, I thought, "No you're not. But Mads Mikkelsen in Hannibal is..."* That then got me thinking about connections between the two shows.

Amigo

When I was younger, I thought John Sayles was one of the greatest living filmmakers. I unhesitatingly said Matewan was among my favorite five movies (yes, I had a favorite five movies, something that seemed immensely important to me at the time). I made a special trip to see Men with Guns when it was first released — I saw it during a matinee in West Newton, Massachusetts, and I was the only person in the theatre. It was a glorious experience.

But somewhere along the line, I began to re-evaluate Sayles's work. I saw all of his pre-Matewan movies, and they didn't really do much for me — I admired their intentions more than their results. I didn't quite know what to make of 1999's Limbo; I felt myself trying very hard to like it, because it was Sayles, but it took a lot of work to summon much enthusiasm for it. Then Sunshine State I thought was just terrible: flat, schematic, obvious, dreadful. Silver City was worse. Casa de los Babys I sort of liked, and certainly admired elements of, but it also felt generally minor and heavyhanded. I never got around to seeing Honeydripper.

I haven't watched Matewan for a few years now (partly because the DVD transfer is terrible and makes a mess of Haskell Wexler's cinematography). Nor have I revisited the other late-'80s/early-'90s Sayles films that I so enjoyed in my teens and early twenties (City of Hope, Passion Fish, Secret of Roan Inish, Lone Star, Men with Guns) because though most of them are still strong in my memory, I know that I would enjoy them less now than I did then, and I don't see any reason to lessen what were powerful cinematic experiences for me when I was more naive about both cinema and life.

Thus, I approached Sayles's most recent film, Amigo, with some hesitancy, because while I very much wanted to like it, I knew there was plenty of chance that I would not, and if I didn't, I would tempted to give up on Sayles forever.

But I ended up enjoying Amigo more than any Sayles film since Men with Guns. It's not a movie I'd put on any sort of top-ten list, but a number of scenes held at least a bit of the old magic for me.

About (Experimental) Writing

...having the entire intellectual armamentarium of rhetorical devices at your beck and call is far preferable to having to limit yourself to tradititional narrative tropes, when writing about truly important matters. To me, that's just simple logic. 

—Samuel R. Delany

(see also, here)

Spoiled Again!

Arguments about "spoilers" are [SPOILER ALERT!] tedious and annoying, and nobody who feels strongly about such things one way or the other will ever convince the fanatics people on the other side to agree with them, so such arguments are a huge waste of time and energy, and I have vowed [SPOILER ALERT!] to stay out of them for ever and ever and evermore, but now the film scholar David Bordwell has gone and made a fascinating blog post about [SPOILER ALERT!] how spoiler standards have changed and shifted over time and in various circumstances. Very much worth reading.

Reality Narrative Death Point

My latest Strange Horizons column has just been posted, and it's a sort of meditation on four books: Reality Hunger by David Shields, Narrative Power edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, and Vanishing Point by Ander Monson.

All four books are well worth reading, thinking about, arguing with. I especially hope that in the wake of Paul Di Filippo's review of Who Fears Death in the B&N; Review that the column will offer an alternative way of evaluating the novel. For the way Di Filippo read the book, I think his assessment is valid, but he read it in the most narrow and silly way possible, the way someone who's only ever read science fiction would read. And I know he hasn't only read science fiction, so I'm perplexed at the assumptions he applies. I agree with his desire for fewer savior of the world/universe/everything characters, and in fact once wrote another SH column about it, but I think there's abundant evidence in the text that Okorafor is a smart writer who is as aware of this paradigm as anybody else, and is both using and critiquing it in complex, multi-layered ways, just as she is simultaneously using and critiquing other tropes, tendencies, templates -- not all of them from SF -- throughout the novel.

In Which I Exhort You to Read Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

I just finished writing a long review for Rain Taxi of Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death, and it's one of those rare books that I just want to recommend to everybody.  It's going to the top of my list of really good science fiction/fantasy novels that can be safely given to people who think they don't like SF, but it's also a book that can be appreciated both by people who merely want to read an engaging story and people who want more than just a good story. 

I had so much fun writing a review of Who Fears Death because it is, among other things, very much a book about textuality and storytelling -- about how the stories we tell, the words we use, the structures and vantage points we select, affect our perception of the world.  I kept thinking of some of M. John Harrison's books and the way they throw our readerly expectations and habits back in our face.  Some of the pleasure, though, in reading Harrison is masochistic ("Yes, master, flog me again for my desire for fantasy!"), but the effect of Who Fears Death is very different, despite the many horrific events experienced or observed by the characters, because its view of fantasy is more generous -- the world is, it seems to say, made up of stories.  They're how we understand things.  So be careful in the stories you tell and the stories you listen to, but don't give up on myth and legend and fantasy.  (In that, it's more Barry Lopez than M. John Harrison, really.)

Though the review I just sent off is 1,500 words, I felt like I could have gone on at twice that length, and I fear what I wrote is too general.  I didn't even find a way to write about the epigraph from Patrice Lumumba that opens the book ("Dear friends, are you afraid of death?") -- one of the fascinating things about the novel is how it uses fantasy in a kind of dialogic approach to reality, thus illuminating both.  For instance, part of the story uses a quest structure with echoes of Lord of the Rings (including a giant eye of evil) to critique both the good/evil dichotomy of so much epic fantasy and the good/evil thinking that fuels massacres and genocide in our own world.  The stories we tell ourselves are not innocent -- they affect how we behave toward each other, and Who Fears Death shows that vividly.  It's also about other types of fantasy -- for instance, the common one that the Harry Potter books so effectively exploited wherein nerdy or awkward folks become the saviors of the universe.  Typically, once they've saved the universe, those characters go on to have great lives in the epilogues of their books.  It doesn't really give too much away to say that Who Fears Death is smarter than that about what heroism and fate can demand, while also recognizing that stories, to be useful, may need to answer some of the ambiguities more common to life than fiction.  Just because there are lots of lies in legends and myths doesn't mean we don't need them or that they don't tell truths about life; we just need to be careful in how and why we choose to keep telling them.

The method of the novel's telling will probably not obsess ordinary readers the way it did me, because I'm always obsessed with the Barthian question, "Who speaks?"   There are a variety of levels of narration in the book, and it seemed to me to be a kind of fictionalized fiction: Onyesonwu, the protagonist, may be the narrator for most of the novel, but her narration is not "realistic", but rather novelistic -- not only is it full of dialogue in a way it probably would not be were it the transcription it is presented as, but both the dialogue and narration are shaped and intentional in a way off-the-cuff storytelling is not.  Everything exists for expository purposes, and there's none of the noise we get in even a very stylized novel like JR, nor the delight in the rhythm and stagi-ness of scripted dialogue that is David Mamet's calling card -- instead, we get fluent, deliberate, written conversation that moves the story along ... just like most novels that aren't posited as told tales give us.  I don't know if this was intentional on Okorafor's part or not, but it doesn't matter, because the effect is marvelous, suggesting multiple levels of distance from the actual (in a diegetic sense) telling of the tale.  What we are reading, then, is a novelized legend that wants to pass itself off as a transcribed autobiography, and this conceit fits wonderfully with so much of what else is in the book.  And then the final chapters add complexity to it all.

Anyway, the novel is wonderful in all sorts of different ways, and I'll be writing more about it, I expect, probably in my next Strange Horizons column, because I happened to read it while I was also reading Timmi Duchamp's fascinating anthology of essays Narrative Power and David Shields's provocative Reality Hunger, and the three books really had an awful lot to say to each other, at least in my mind.  More on all that later, though...