Benjamin Myers' THE PERFECT GOLDEN CIRCLE

He knows there is something else under all this. He knows there exists an under-England, a chthonic place of hidden rivers and buried relics, of the bones of extinct animals and battle-slain bodies. Layer upon layer of it, laminations of land, each made from stories packed tightly by the weight of time so that they become something else, just as wood becomes charcoal. So many stories, so many unseen footsteps. So many secrets that go beyond the limitations of the here and now.

I have a well- documented history of loving things like crop circles and of loving the people who love them. One of my favorite people ever to live was an aficionado; it's over this shared love that we first became friends. I still miss Mac Tonnies, all the time. 

I wish he was still around to have enjoyed The Perfect Golden Circle, Benjamin Myers' delightful character study of English eccentricity and the single- minded pursuit of a certain very unusual art form. 

 The Perfect Golden Circle is a delightful piece of conventional prose fiction, structured entirely around the serial creation by two men of vast crop circles of increasing scope and intricacy, intercut with snippets, John Dos Passos-style, of public reactions to same, mostly via the press. 

One way in which this novel, which takes two real "land artists" from the 1970s and 80s as inspiration but in no way tells their actual stories, really stands out is in its treatment of male friendship as something that can just be, without elaborate shared backstories or pseudo-psychoanalysis or invented conflicts or petty rivalries or toxicity of any kind. While they are very different men with no real reason to even know each other, let alone spend hours in the pub planning and more in the farm fields of England in the dead of night executing their plans, they do all of that, always together. Falklands War veteran Calvert and crustpunk Redbone don't even have a meet cute in the text of the story; we meet them in the third year of their project, the year they've decided to go beyond having a strange shared hobby and turn it into, as Redbone describes it at one point, a pursuit of art, myth and mystery. 

But the book's primary delight is describing the near-miss adventures the pair experience over the course of their summer as various other denizens of the British countryside at night, from rabbit-hunting weasels (in more than one sense) to tipsy toff landowners to the ever-increasing number of crop circle fanciers, armed with crackpot theories, homemade detective gear and flashlights, who are hoping to catch the aliens/fairies/secret agents/whatever in flagrante.

This was an especially enjoyable read for me on the heels of Andy Sharp's English Heretic, similarly concerned with English geography but altogether different in how the landscape might be interpreted. Here the land is scrutinized by Calvert's experienced logistical eye as he seeks the right field for the right project, which must not only be big and flat and full of ripening cereal crops but must also be accessible to two guys in an ancient VW van, and near a feature, natural or man-made, of sufficient height and, again, accessibility from which to view their creations in all their bizarre glory. 

It's better still if they have an interesting local name which can be incorporated into their private nomenclature. The best of these is the Cuckoo Spittle Thought Bubble, with the first two words coming from the name of the elevated landmark and the latter two describing the design they pressed, step by step with planks and ropes, into the grasses -- carefully and respectfully so as not to break the grain stalks and ruin the harvest. 

Ruining the harvest comes later, when the press blows up the sensation and people start flocking from as far away as exotic Oklahoma and Wyoming (heh) to see and study Calvert and Redbone's work, camping and trampling and dumping and landing helicopters. At least the more enterprising farmers can make up their losses by charging admission to see their new wonder.

Another source of great charm in The Perfect Golden Circle is the pair's consistent enjoyment of the attention given their work and the wild speculations about it. They take particular pleasure in seeing how close the press comes, in naming their productions on television or on the front pages of daily, sometimes national or international newspapers, to giving them the same names Calvert and Redbone did themselves. 

I'm reliably told by a friend on one of my book-focused Discord servers that Benjamin Myers is a reliable source for very, very good and beautiful books, but that no two of his are very much alike. Based on this one, I'll be exploring more of his work soon -- but not too soon, because I don't know if you've really noticed, but I'm on a year of trying to read only one book by any one author, and I'm doing my best to stick to that, but it's hard when I keep getting invited on buddy reads and book club forays. So I might cave and get, say The Gallows Pole or something sooner. Who knows?

Raymond St. Elmo's LETTERS FROM A SHIPWRECK IN THE SEA OF SUNS AND MOONS

To a certain degree, I'm still trying to figure out the freaking ocean of words I just swam through, as I contemplate the very unusual and ambiguous Letters From a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons, by Raymond St. Elmo. I mean, I know I had fun shaking my head over the combination of godpunk, sea adventure, star-crossed romance and epistolary interrogation it contained, but did I ever actually figure out what was going on? Enough to write a coherent post about on this here blog? 

Let's find out.

Interviewer: Describe how to kill Typhon.

Oh, there are as many ways to kill a god as there are to destroy a man. Personally my favorite is to melt him down in confusion and despair. 

Readers here who are also readers of Gene Wolfe have already raised their eyebrows at the mention of the ancient Autarch and god-king of the Whorl, but this Typhon is merely (?) a storm god, one of a cargo hold-full of mostly dead and/or forgotten deities being carried aboard the good ship Unicorn from San Francisco, at which point the last of them was collected, to the mysterious and uncharted island of Theodosia.

Typhon could also be our protagonist, cloaked in the body of Clarence St. Elmo*, the blind old sailor rousted out by the unknown Interviewer for purposes unknown but urgent for that entity.** A mad scientist on the island on which Clarence and a few of his crewmates from the Unicorn thinks Clarence is Typhon, anyway. 

Clarence has been adopted, though, not by Typhon, but by the Egyptian god, Thoth, who appears to him with advice and wry commentary in the form, usually, of a sea bird, though occasionally he's got a vaguely human form, shrouded in black.

But all of this is just distraction, as far as the Interviewer is concerned; they claim to have dredged up Clarence to help in a search for two green leatherbound books, one in Etruscan and the other a French translation of the first -- allegedly. As for Clarence... He's just this poet, you know? 

I saw some useful poetic fodder in the situation. It's just my nature. I considered putting seaweed in my hair and appearing to them as my own drowned ghost. The idea made me laugh, then the laugh made me check. I did have seaweed in my hair. Maybe I was my own drowned ghost. The idea scared me so I combed it out with my fingers and headed on.

To arrive at the above situation, shipwrecked and pondering how to approach some other castaways, Clarence first allowed his beloved's father and fierce, ancient aunts to chase him away from her, so very away that he left their hometown of Maidenhead, NJ for San Francisco and thence joined the crew of the Unicorn. Which brought him to a weird island complete with lighthouse, a seminary run by the aforementioned mad scientist, the Master of the Green, and many other features atypical of your standard Robinson Crusoe-esque fare. Like a bunch of gods and ex-gods rampaging around and wreaking havoc. Only some of whom seem to have been along for the ride on the Unicorn. I think. Were there already some feral gods or ex-gods on the island? I never decided for sure.

Meanwhile, back on the voyage, Clarence wrote his beloved K. (all we ever get is this initial, never a name) a series of longing letters which give the novel its title, and the Interviewer has only secured his cooperation by convincing him they have a way of seeing that she gets them, since she didn't in real life? 

Except what is the reality of any of this, here?

While trying to figure all of this out may feel like too much work to some (my own dear personal mother, who spotted this book in our shared ebook library and was intrigued by the title, started it before I did but DNF'd it for this reason), it is a fun exercise for the Wolfe-pilled who actively seek out this sort of thing -- but it's not the only reason to give this book a try! 

There's also the enjoyment of watching perhaps the most ill-advised sea voyage since Ishmael signed on to the Pequod. The Unicorn, we learn, is a perfectly fine ship but its crew mostly abandoned it long before it reached San Francisco; they were terrified of its cargo of statues of forgotten gods, you see. Also, the captain is kind of a freak show. The result is that the ship can attract no kind of competent or experienced crew, so nobody has the first idea what to do when things immediately start going wrong in ways both predictable and un-.

I'm bouncing around in chronology, here, but guess what: so does the novel! It's all part of the puzzle box, one which I'm not sure I've solved yet. Truly, I am not sure I understood this novel. 

But the experience of reading it was fun enough to make me more than willing to try it again sometime. So maybe stay tuned...

*As though we are perhaps meant to wonder if he is not an ancestor of the author of the novel Letters from a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons? Except I think "Raymond St. Elmo" is a pseudonym? But who knows. All I could find poking around in the wreckage of the internet was that St. Elmo has written a bunch of other books that seem even weirder than this one. But few biographical details.

**Or entities. Sometimes the Interviewer uses plural pronouns in referring to itself/themselves. And frequently sounds, as does Clarence sometimes, too, like a piece of software or otherwise artificial being.

Rick Harsch's THE MANIFOLD DESTINY OF EDDIE VEGAS

Did you ever wonder what kind of books our culture would have to enjoy if, instead of ho-hum Europe, the Old World, James Joyce had spent his expat years in the United States? Specifically the western United States? Specifically specifically the years when this part of the world still mostly belonged to its indigenous inhabitants and there were no railroads or interstate highways or even JC Penneys? Which, sure, that means Joyce would have needed access to a time machine, but I'm already deep in the realm of counterfactual conjecture here, so, why not?

But so anyway, did you ever wonder that? Because I think I have the answer. So, did you? Wonder that? No?

Oh dear. 

Well, anyway, I want to tell you about Rick Harsch's The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, a book that I've already mentioned twice on this here blog, which I was insanely excited to read while awaiting my copy but, yes, also dreading a bit because it's another maximalist  chonk of a novel that is only available in print. Meaning yep, another On-Dead-Tree-Despite-The-Pain read for Your Humble Blogger.

I first learned of the existence of this novel, of author Rick Harsch, and of the cult publishing phenomenon, corona/samizdat, when I saw a few BookTube videos about Philip Freedenberg's and Jeff Walton's America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic, which, on the most pathetic level of reality at least, is about what happens to a writer and illustrator while they are waiting for a copy of The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas to get shipped to them from faraway Slovenia.

Which means I was expecting another heavy dose of crazy, extremely post-modern meta-fictional shenanigans. But that's not quite what I got.

Not that I am in any way disappointed by what I did get. Far from it!

Because this is not the quintessential American experience, for that is too grand a theme. This perhaps is the quintessential endangered American experience. Canada, Mexico, the entire south - that will define the American experience over time. This will all be seen as excrescence, rude corruption of being hyper-aware, vapid, utterly disconnected from enduring life. This America, this United States of, has been making last stands from the beginning, practicing the last stand until they get it right and finally can indeed stand for the last time. No, this scene here, this man and his undershirt oiling his gun before a silent television, this scene has nearly been perfected to extinction.

The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas is a much more conventional narrative, more in the vein of, say, Cryptonomicon than of America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots or any of the other, weirder fare I tend to favor. Like Cryptonomicon, the narrative is more or less divided into two sections, taking place in different eras of history. We get a lot of background on some of one of our main characters' ancestors, who had colorful and thrilling adventures in the USA's frontier/Old West period (and one of whom was an Indigenous woman) in one narrative, while the other traces that character's, Donnie Garvin's, travels with his brand-new best friend, Drake Fondling, in early 21st century Europe and the United States, while also following a bit of Donnie's father's efforts to catch up with the duo. And since a decent amount of the novel takes place in and around good old Las Vegas, there's also more than a little bit of a more grounded/mundane Last Call here, too.

There now, I've mentioned two of my favorite, most fun reads of all time, so that must mean that Eddie Vegas* is fun, too, right? Well, yes and no. As I said, the narrative is pretty straightforward, even mundane, for all that at one point one of Eddie's ancestors gets lifted into the air and bodily flung at a grizzly bear, whether as a weapon or as a distraction doesn't really matter, and somehow survives to become one of Eddie's ancestors. But what one really reads this novel, and, I suspect, most of Harsch's work for, is the over-the-top wordplay. I have a lot of examples of this, and the text includes several lists that other reviewers have correctly categorized as "Rabelasian", but here are some passages that I marked with my little book darts (one of the pleasures I'd almost forgotten of reading a physical book that I own is using these cunning little tools) and then more or less just flipped to at random.

For instance, raw recruits looked at him and thought "Sure is rough out thar"; Douglas Stompett, Chief Factor and father figure for future factoti for a fee (fie!) (Foe of fumblers) and Friends of the Hudson's Bay Company...

And

On the walls of the spaces where the politics of his parents and their friends were diminished by upright plastered scorn were thematic reproductions, a Chinese room, a surrealist room, an impressionist room -- What of a childhood that renders Dali trite? a Dalit rite? a trolley ride, a trollop's rights, a flop all right, a polite oversight, a maggot white, a dollop bright, a scallop of shite, a pallette of, a mallet of... on the fucking head...

And

The Sick Man of Europe was such a healthy metaphor, diseased body parts still being sold off a century later, the moribund fellow fascinating in his decrepitude, shrinking as they do like healthy verdure under a too intense dry sun, the regimen of the new model of health was ignored until it was too late, the doctors all gone psychotic like any Freudian subject over-thrilled with the death of the other.

That last passage is from a whole chapter of profoundly insightful musings Harsch attributes to the character of Ethel Gravel, another of Eddie's formidable female forebears (I couldn't resist), a woman of profound historical imagination whom one might fear is going to waste in a still-backwater-ish Reno, Nevada of the early 20th century, but whose business acumen, general intelligence and indomitable will have assured her descendants' the kind of start in life that will allow sons to become dilettante scribes and professors who marry improbably named poets and have children whose own potential seems poised to be harnessed to ridiculous business ventures by heirs to mercenary company fortunes and oh, you just have to read this book to see all of the unlikely but compelling goings on. I haven't even begun to describe the compelling small figure of Nordgaard, or of Setif, or of Hermione, or of...

But as this all comes to an end, what The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas is really about is just plain old love, especially that between a son and a father, against whose relationship the entire world has seemed to conspire but who have chosen to care about each other anyway, to share their thoughts and feelings in the least toxic example of masculinity I've encountered in this sort-of-genre of maximalist "Brodernism." Even if the hundreds of pages preceding the novel's satisfying denouement weren't as entertaining as they are, it would all be worth it just to enjoy this at the end. Bravo, Mr. Harsch. I'm already looking forward to my next read from you.

*Eddie Vegas is the name a character assumes in the novel, but we don't know which character takes on this alias until about halfway through. This adds the pleasing note of ambiguity that perfects many a book, in my opinion.

Dubravka Ugresic's FOX (Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac and David Williams)

Is Fox a novel? Is The Rings of Saturn? What kind of a book is Landscape and Memory?

Does it matter for anyone who isn't a marketing executive or bookstore clerk? 

Dubravka Ugresic is one of those writers whom I always think was a Nobel laureate but isn't (I even had, always second guessing myself, to double check before posting this). A child of the former Yugoslavia now categorized as Croatian (but who ended her days in the Netherlands because politics), she had the kind of international reputation that leads to enthusiastic promotion by the likes of Open Letter Books (one of my favorite indie publishers and not just because Chad has had me on their podcast, honest!) and to my grabbing all of her works available when they have a sale. But then I get decision paralysis gloating over my hoard and then a library book I'd requested yoinks ago would suddenly come available (but as an interlibrary loan) and then one of my friends would publish something new and then...

So I slept on Ugresic despite my enthusiasm. To my shame! Because Fox is the kind of all-but-uncategorizable opus that is one of my favorite kinds of things to read: a guide through the vast and diverse catalog of the art that has fed the writer's imagination and scholarship through a rich and fascinating career. 

All brought under an inventive rubric to bind it all together: the role of the image of the fox in various cultures of the world. And it's not merely as a generic trickster figure. 

I mean, do you see why I mentioned The Rings of Saturn?

So, just for fun, I tried to keep track of writers and works Ugresic brought under the Fox's sway. And yes, lots of these are new to me and yes, my TBR groans anew under their figurative weight and halfhazard stacking.

§ Mikhail Bulgakov, whose The Master and Margarita I have adored for decades and which Ugresic is reminded of upon her arrival in Moscow for graduate studies in the 1970s.

§ Russian/Early Soviet (as in murdered by Stalin's NKVD early) writer Boris Pilnyak and his great novel, The Naked Year, as well as a piece around which Ugresic based her first chapter, "A Story About How Stories Come to be Written."

§ Japanese author Jun'ichiro Takizaki, a contemporary of Pilnyak, whose novel Naomi Pilnyak likely encountered during a sojourn in Japan and, Ugresic posits borrowed from for a somewhat fictionalized biography of one Sophia Vasilyevna Gnedikh-Tagaki -- who may or may not have existed! The biography might not either. Ugresic is a bit of a trickster herself, maybe?

§ Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher and critic I've always meant to explore but had never determined where to start. I now think I'm going to look for The Arcades Project, which Ugresic discusses in the context of having met a cosmopolitan figure she only designates as "K," whom she met in Japan while touring scenes from Tanizaki's life.

§ Japanese feminist and communist Yuriko Miyamoto, once a friend of Soviet film deity Sergei Eisenstein, whose works like Mileposts/Landmarks/Signposts (Dohyo in Japanese) look like they're going to be hard for me to find. She's sure sounds fascinating, though! And yes, she met Boris Pilnyak and fictionalized their unpleasant encounter.

§ Isaiah Berlin, a Russian-British scholar and professor whom Ugresic imagines having imagined Miyamoto's and Pilnyak's encounter while writing his essay contrasting writerly types, "The Hedgehog and the Fox" which was largely about Leo Tolstoy.

§ Peter Bruegel the Elder, whose painting "The Beggars" features peasants whose ragged clothing is festooned with fox tails; Ugresic thinks of this while contemplating the sight of modern Japanese tweens donning cute fox ears and tails over their clothes in tribute to the good old kitsune of Japanese folk tradition.

And all of this is just from the first chapter. At this point while I was poking around trying to decide what to pursue, I found that somebody has already written a pretty detailed annotation of Fox so I'm not going to reinvent the wheel, here. But there's so very much more; it would take a lifetime (as indeed it did, for Dubravka Ugresic) to properly explore it all and I'm already middle aged. And still haven't tracked down and read everything that W.G. Sebald set me haring after years ago!

I mean, she also describes a visit to the Tokyo train station that the hero of Marshland is accused of bombing, but it looks like that weighty tome was not part of Ugresic's literary universe - or at least she didn't mention it here. A pity if she never got to read it; she'd really have liked it, I think.

Fox is also a travelogue, in which international literary star Dubravka Ugresic explores places like the tourist trap Pompeii has become, her accounts of same frequently reminding me of those of fellow globetrotting scribe Umberto Eco, who left this ancient city out of his Travels in Hyperreality probably out of the same thinking that allowed me to live nearly a decade in Boston without ever once visiting the Bull & Finch.*

As I watched the human circus, the frenzied waiters reeling from the tempo, the countless plates sailing above our heads, the voluntary humiliation to which we acquiesced as if we had paid for the right to be humiliated; as I watched our stampede emptying the lunchroom so the next group could stand paid in, I suddenly longed for great Vesuvius to do it's damndest, spew its lava all over us, carbonize us, and blanket us with 20 tons of volcanic ash...

But what is most on Ugresic's mind as she visits various places, contemplates the real or imagined biographies of real or imagined artists, has a romantic encounter with a noble squatter in a house she inherited from a fan of her work back in her new-old homeland, is the plight of refugees of all sorts. Whether they're arriving, desperate and near-drowning in leaky boats on the shores of Lampedusa while she lunches with a possibly-fictional widow of a possibly-fictional writer of international renown, flees from Stalin's NKVD or later authoritarians to more permissive regimes in the east or west, or are simply a nice little old last ekeing out an existence in South London, all but forgotten but for a handful of people like Ugresic who have read her one book, migrants and refugees, who have to partake of all of the qualities of the fox, peek through at us from every page with gently reproachful eyes. At us and at Ugresic, who does not exempt herself from responsibility from their plights. She may have done things here or there to help, donated to causes, looked the other way on property violations, but she could always have done more, just like all of us. Even though she is, herself, a victim, too, of what happened in the former Yugoslavia, which she describes in unforgettable terms: 

From outside, it all looked as if this were happening inside a glass snow globe with the snow swirling. But, inside, instead of snow they're swirled blood. When somebody picked up the globe and shook it, miniature people inside the globe conducted a miniature war, burned books as big as poppy seeds, erected miniature borders, opened their miniature camps for the ethnically unsuitable, raised fences and barbed wire, revise the school books, erased everything old and established everything new, they died in miniature, we're expelled in miniature, blew up miniature homes, everything went on in miniature - and over it all flurried that soothing artificial snow.

That's certainly how it looked to me as a barely 20-something watching it all on the evening news from halfway around the world. And I still only know it via literature, but, let's be honest: the only way I know anything is either through literature or through a few years working (very badly) as a field entomologist.

Ugresic's books, by the way, were among those deemed unsuitable and removed from school and library shelves, presumably to be burnt, as she learned some 25 years later when she returned to Croatia on a visit. So she was, in a sense, doubly exiled, for all that she was welcomed and, in a small degree, feted in the West as a writer of international reputation. She just wasn't nationalist enough to please her new/old nation. A lot of us may come to know how that feels.

Her accounts are not totally mournful, though, witness a late chapter devoted to famous literary emigré Vladimir Nabokov, his wife Vera, son Dmitri, and the small band of women whom they met in New York City when the women took on Nabokov as a language tutor, in exchange for which they, especially the "human footnote" Dorothy Leuthold, guided the Nabokovs through their early explorations of the United States. As she relates charming anecdotes from this period in the Nabokovs lives, she muses also on how people mentally colonize environments that are new to them, appropriating things and people with whom they are not yet familiar by, for instance, bestowing them with diminutive nicknames such as "Dasha" for Dorothy. After whom, famously, Nabokov dared to name a species of butterfly he discovered in the Grand Canyon with her. He was famously very knowledgeable about butterflies and moths so perhaps he could indeed be sure that he was indeed the discoverer of this variety, but it's still kind of adorably presumptive to not only name it but to bestow it with his chauffeur's name. Though I'm sure she considered it a nice tribute -- what if she didn't want to be so remembered? The right to be forgotten is a right that not a lot of us think enough about, I suspect. Especially since the internet is going to make that close to impossible for a while yet.

Dubravka Ugresic left us mere months after I first discovered her and scooped up all of her then-available English translations at Open Letter. I've still got several more to read, and I'll no doubt tell you all about them right here. I, uh, hope she wasn't one of those who'd rather be forgotten.

But if that was the case, she shouldn't have written such fascinating books.

* Aka the "Cheers" bar.

Adam Levin's THE INSTRUCTIONS

The rest of the crowd booed. Not so much at Maholtz as the implications of the anticlimax he and I had just provided them. To see an oppressor felled without a hint of violent struggle can’t help but tarnish the shine on your victim badge. To see Maholtz made to cower so easily had to make those who would have otherwise cheered wonder how they, for so long, could have cowered so readily before him. They were booing themselves.

If Michael Pemulis, the very best character in Infinite Jest who is neither in drag nor in a wheelchair, were about five years younger and a student at a Chicago area day school instead of a Boston area tennis academy, he would be Gurion ben-Judah Macabee, the criminally, the messianically precocious hero of Adam Levin's big honking fiction chonk, The Instructions. Except instead of a tennis racket, our boy is packing a weapon of his own devising called a penny gun, and a pocketful of tiny metal wing nuts.

And a brain, an insight into humanity, and an advanced understanding of ethics that would shame any of the Incandenza family, would probably shame a Dostoevsky character. 

I am a middle aged Wyoming woman, neither a 21st century middle schooler, nor a child of the suburbs, nor even a little bit Jewish* so I'm about as under-equipped a reader for this novel as one could ask for, but I read it with admiration and delight anyway.

I was as charmed by its depictions of actually healthy and loving family dynamics as fascinated by its eternal school day themes of intra- and inter-clique politics, petty and serious rebellion, unjustly wielded authority, unbearable boredom, grandiose plans for the future, philosophical speculations both juvenile and profound, concerns earthly and spiritual and, of course, young love. 

But what young love it is: 

Above all, June and I were in love. I wanted reassurance because she’d gotten winked at, but it wasn’t her fault that she’d gotten winked at. It was Berman’s fault. He shouldn’t have winked. He shouldn’t have gotten me wanting reassurance. Especially because there could be no reassurance. That’s what was chomsky. To think that a hand-squeeze would reassure was chomsky. Had June squeezed my hand, I wouldn’t feel reassured; I’d only wonder why she thought I wanted reassurance. I’d worry that she thought I wanted reassurance because Berman’s wink was, in fact, worth worrying about. = If June had squeezed my hand, I’d want more reassurance. And I saw it was good that she hadn’t squeezed my hand. Which isn’t to say I stopped wanting reassurance, but that all at once I saw what needed doing, not to me or for me, but by me: I had to tell Berman not to wink at my girlfriend. Had he not been an Israelite, I’d’ve thought of that sooner, gone straight to confrontation. Instead of burning sweaty seconds lamely sorting useless feelings, I’d have risen to my feet and said, Don’t you fucken wink at her.

A big thinker as well as an over-thinker is Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, who is already infamous when he first shows up for classes in a new middle school, where his prior record of fights and rebellion lands him immediately in the school's special disciplinary unit called The Cage, in which every student is confined to an individual carrel and is closely monitored by a beady-eyed Australian disciplinarian with a name, Botha, that I associate with South African apartheid (I'm sure not accidentally am I so reminded). He doesn't teach, doesn't do anything but watch the students like a hawk and enforce the Cage's infinitely long list of behavioral standards while other teachers nervously present lessons to around 30 fifth through seventh graders, which Gurion is, I think, the only fifth grader by age but, as compensation for his immediate entry to The Cage, the school also agreed to honor his prior promotion to seventh grade on account of his intellect. 

Classic, this. 

But so, Gurion is very, very concerned about justice (and his father is a renowned civil rights attorney), about studying the Torah and about promoting the welfare of his co-religionists to whom he refers as Israelites rather than as being Jewish students. One of his many acts prior to his advent at his current school was to invent a punk little weapon constructed from the top of a plastic soda bottle and a rubber band, and to write out minutely detailed instructions on its construction and use, as well as to design a strict ritual for how this knowledge is to be taught and disseminated., starting with: Only to Israelites. His goal is to arm every Israelite boy in Greater Chicago and beyond with a weapon easily broken down into disposable trash, but capable of launching a small projectile (he uses a penny and calls it, thus, the Pennygun, but we encounter a sort of co-inventor who came up with the same device independently but uses it to fire fountain pen nibs and thus calls it the Pengun). This weapon has achieved a mythic status among devotees of The Instructions as evident from this YouTube clip explaining it.

Gurion also has a loftier project going on than merely helping young Jewish boys to defend themselves from antisemites and school bullies, however; he has been drafting for some time a work he fully expects will one day be regarded as scripture. And many of his former schoolmates, forbidden though they are by their parents from associating with him ever again, consider him a wise leader and teacher, even to calling him Rabbi, and agree that his writings will indeed become scripture. Two of whom, we learn, have even served as translators, necessary because Gurion chose to write about half of the original in Hebrew.

So is this book a very long marriage of The Books of Jacob and Heathers? Certainly more so than it is a descendant of Infinite Jest, for all that I invoked that book at the start of this post. Gurion does feel a bit like Pemulus, but differs vastly from that yachtsman-capped mischief-maker in that, for starters, the closest he ever comes to mind-altering substances is a cigarette or two he is deftly manipulated into sharing with the school's Golden Boy as Golden Boy seeks to co-opt Gurion's growing authority as an outcast leader. Which Gurion only figures out later, but don't you worry. Everybody gets their due in this massive work. Justice is served, like revenge, a bit cold... Or maybe not so cold?

For, on top of everything else, we find that author Adam Levin can write the best kind of action scenes, in which every shot, punch, kick, launch and thwack is clearly delineated, precisely described, but the pace is never allowed to lag. I say this as someone who often skips long flight scenes because I find them boring. But I mean...

By my side, on his knees again, Desormie gripped my face by the jaw and started squeezing. I bonked him with the megaphone. He squeezed unfazed. I got the bell to his ear and flipped on the siren. He threw himself backwards and I started getting up, but my hurt wrist kept folding beneath my weight and Desormie returned and he kicked me in the stomach.

The above is even better if you know who Desormie is. Neener.

And this, from a special sub-plot we can call the Revenge of the Band Kids, in which Levin shows us the weapon in everything:

Their brass scarred from teeth and their padcups askew, the bandkids were blitzing in squads of fours and fives, walking through the mini-riots, mowing down anyone. Cymbalists alternated neckchops with headclaps. Flautists pulled their flutes apart for double-fisted piking. Tubas and euphoniums remained strapped to players who held them under-arm to ram with like jousters. Splinters poked from fractures in oboes used for skullshots. The buttons jammed forever on trumpets gone knuckleduster.

Which is to say that, at heart, The Instructions is a war story at least in as much as the famous Pillow Fort vs Blanket Fort episode of Community was. Well, except instead of blankets and pillows we have actual blows exchanged and projectile pennies, wing nuts and pen nibs fired by Gurion's small army, the Side of Damage (and their junior auxiliaries, Big Ending and The Five, which, get ready for those five scene-stealing Best Buddies**) at their foes, the Arrangement. What, you thought that cover art was symbolic? This is middle school.

But so, my readers may well ask, is this a tale that really needs so many hundreds of pages to tell? Oh, yes. But are they really so satisfying, those pages? Also yes.

And I haven't even gotten around to all of the terrific character drama, the terrific characters, like Gurion's brand shiny new girlfriend, the fierce and fiery and newly-converting-for-his-sake June Watermark. And his best friend Benji Nakamook. And the one they call Brooklyn, as newly arrived as Gurion with even more dramatic a back story, with whom Gurion bonds immediately and who challenges him in ways Gurion usually only experiences with adults. If it weren't for the buddies of The Five, Brooklyn would be my favorite character in the book. 

And there are so many more. By the novel's climatic combat scene, the reader knows most of the Side very well, has watched a few of them fall in love (mutually!) and others learn for the first time that they have power. Usually for the better. Usually.

And yes, like so many books I'm reading now, this one seems to be more important to the present moment than to the one in which it was written, for all that it is a tale that could only take place then (2007), could only feature characters born just before 9/11 and raised doing active shooter drills in school. More than ever I am convinced that the Zoomers, largely the children of my own Generation X, are fundamentally different beings from those of us who remember not having to take off their shoes in public in order to board a plane and when phones were fastened to walls and History supposedly had an End, in whichever way you choose to define that word. Theirs is a fundamentally different world and they are prepared to live in an even stranger one. 

Too, lots of us have been promulgating the "gonna tell my grandkids" meme for years. What if they were to believe us? Because they don't really care? Because they have real problems, but have also at least solved the problem of what to do with all of those pennies lying around everywhere. It's a better idea than CoinStar or whatever. 

We damage we.

All great books command re-reading, but you can’t ever read the same book twice. Knowing, as you do, from the second reading forward, that A will lead to B, to Y to Z, your post-first readings are far more concerned with what exactly happens between those events, far more concerned with those parts you scanned (or even skipped) the first go-round in your rush to discover what would happen next.

Yeah, that's pretty much Gurion, and by extension, Adam Levin, equating their own book with the other great ones. But here's the thing: it is their equal. And I'm already looking forward to reading it again. I underappreciated some of these kids the first time. Including, possibly, Gurion himself!

Damn.

*My nickname at Bard among my soon-to-be dining companions for four years of mealtime shenanigans was "Blond and Blue" as in "Uh oh, Blond and Blue is giving me shit" -- at least until one way discovered that my name rhymes with a famous Dinah Shore ditty that serves as the theme song to, coincidentally, the movie "Heathers" thus guaranteeing me four years of hearing my name sung out loudly and not very tunefully before every meal I ate in Kline Commons. I was a member of an all-gentile cast of the Purim play one year, though...

**I've quoted too much from the climax, but I have to add just one snippet of The Five in action:

The Five were fine too; didn’t need coverage either. Bored with Shlomo, who no longer convulsed, and glimpsing Eliyahu between heads and shoulders, they gamboled toward the south wall, the better to see, a capering troop that undermined its native cuteness shooting mystified kids in the eyes at close range, stepping on crotches and faces on purpose, vociferating multiple Yiddish vulgarities.

These are little guys, maybe ten years old (like Gurion himself, actually, which is part of why, maybe, he takes them seriously where others would pat them on the heads and imagine them in propeller beanies), who have already had enough of bullying but quickly learned that if they can count on each other, they count. And since one of their number got pasted in the halls earlier in the week, they have their own little vendetta against the aforementioned Shlomo, who forfeited his Israelite status when he picked on the shrimp in order to commit a hate crime by proxy. And I mean, one of them even gets to rescue a cheerleader from a groper, with masterful fifth-grade aplomb. Egads, these kids are the greatest!

Phillip Freedenberg's and Jeff Walton's AMERICA AND THE CULT OF THE CACTUS BOOTS: A DIAGNOSTIC

I have a very special category on my reading tracker app which I call "On Dead Tree Despite the Pain," which, if I have actually finished a book, actually says more about my regard for said book than, say, whether I've managed to write about it here at Kate of Mind. I was not only interested enough in the book to start it despite the pain I knew it would cause me (long time readers of this here blog know that physical "on dead tree" books are extremely uncomfortable for me to read and trade paperbacks are the worst of all), which I only undertake if there's no other option, but also so engaged by said book that I actually suffered its physical effects just to completely experience it at first hand. 

I'm undertaking a modified "read what you own" type challenge*, and have acquired over the last many years a pretty significant stack of books that I really really really want to read but are either only available on dead tree or are unreasonably priced in digital or audio editions (charging more for an ebook than for a new copy in hardcover or paperback will never be ok), so you're going to see quite a few of these in the next few months.

America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic is a relatively recent acquisition for me, but the very idea of this book and the buzz around it in my very favorite weirdo literary corners of the internet meant that of all the physical books that I'm ready with which to torture myself, this was the one that most elicited cries of "hurt me, daddy" from my imaginal lips. 

I mean, look at it, for a start. And this is just the front cover, mind.

America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots: A Diagnostic is going to be a very difficult book to talk about because very difficult to do justice to, but it's a book that simply must be discussed at enthusiastic, bewildered, what-the-fuck, best medicine on paper lengths. 

Especially in year one of The Re-Trumpening Muskification, aka the Enshittification of the country about which this novel chiefly concerns itself. 

We learn from the jacket copy that it was written in the last year of our first overtly felonious POTUS' first term, while we all anxiously hoped and waited and worked to get the felon the hell out of there and as we ultimately succeeded (more or less), but the time it now feels like America and the Cult of the Cactus Boots is most needed for is right now.

At least until something even worse happens. 

And look; while this is ultimately a therapeutic and a hopeful read, the fact that this book exists in any form also makes me a little nervous, because the current regime could take some mighty terrible ideas from its pages, if they can persuade anybody with enough smarts and soul to understand it to explain it to them. Like the Total Information Control Initiative, which not only seeks to completely eliminate the written word from humanity's present and future (and even its past inasmuchas once the written word is successfully eliminated, so is most of our collective memory), but has a truly diabolical means of doing so that tells Ray Bradbury's Firemen to not so much hold its beer as go on permanent furlough the better to cross the entire supercontinent of the Americas on foot to fetch a whole new kind of beverage the likes of which do not exist as yet. By which I mean the whole enterprise of destroying books and printing presses and whatnot is not nearly the priority our reading lives have led us to prepare for. Instead, the TICI promulgates a high tech electro-psychotropic screen that the user straps on right over the face, a device so entertaining and so pleasurable to use that nobody (or almost nobody) really needs to be forced to prefer it to reading or possibly even speaking. Supplied free of charge, it is, of course, also subject to constant tinkering and updates to ratchet up its addictive properties and its ability to spy on and later replace the contents of the users' very minds.

I mean, Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. Neurolink, everyone?

Never mind that, kind of like Roko's Basilisk, there's not actually any guarantee that such a thing is even possible given stuff like resource availability and the universe's tendency toward entropy and sheer individual human cussedness and the actual feasibility of getting everybody to always react to the same thing in the same way in a world where, for example, people can have paradoxical reactions to medications and some people are actually repelled by sex and some people are genetically disposed to perceive cilantro as tasting like soap ...

Which, of course, is how, within the world of AatCotCB, at least on its Most Pathetic Level of Reality, there are still some dissidents here and there who cling to their books and underground newspapers and shampoo bottles to read on the toilet, including the novel's dual heroes, Phillip Freedenberg and Jeff Walton, who yes, happen to be the metafictional avatars of the author and visualizer/illustrator of this book. On the Most Pathetic Level of this book's Reality, they are employed at a Buffalo, NY print/lithography shop and have, as the story begins, just recently completed a large order of high quality protest signs that demand we all MAKE AMERICA READ AGAIN and seem destined to reap some terrible consequences at the hands of U.S. President RALPH's new Total Information Control Initiative, rumored even now to be approaching their building. 

While this and related tasks had been ongoing, the pair have been eagerly awaiting the arrival from faraway Slovenia (yes, this is more corona/samizdattery) of a novel by Rick Harsch entitled The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas** an actual book in our own world which, at the time of AatCotCB's writing, could only be acquired by emailing the author, one Rick Harsch, sending him the price and shipping costs via an Internet payment service, and then sitting back and waiting for the author (who is also corona-samizdat's publisher, warehouse manager and shipping clerk) to send the book from Izola, Slovenia to your own dear personal mailing address.

While they waited, they were inspired to begin writing and illustrating AatCotCB, which Harsch had already expressed willingness to publish, both in our real world and in the novel's MPLoR.

But so, even as the pair have begun to conceive of this work, it is already bursting into this work and into their world, sometimes in relatively tame ways like their sudden discovery in the attic of their shop a cool antique radio by which they can occasionally receive "Messages from the Great Beyond," more mundanely regarded as weird bursts of very targeted shortwave radio transmissions from none other than the author of the book they're waiting for and who has already agreed to publish AatCotCB, Harsch, who seems eeriely omniscient about their predicament and eager to warn them not only of the imminent approach of the Total Information Control Initiative but also of the presence, just outside their office door, of a full camera crew preparing to shoot the opening scenes of the film adaptation of AatCotCB.

And then the book starts getting weird. 

Like descriptions of competitive clothes ironing as extreme sport weird. Like a giant, near-infinite information processing network constructed on and between the brains of a vast herd of cattle (unknown whether dairy or beef cattle) living in a vast underground facility in the Midwest weird. Like one of the character's two hands disappearing from his body and much later being found, the hands, living independently and working as a park ranger in Alaska weird. Just a pair of youngish male human hands giving you directions and cleaning the latrines and telling you not to pet the grizzly bears. Ho hum.

And there are illustrations. Glorious, glorious illustrations from the demented genius mind and hand of Jeff Walton, who combines the painstaking, detailed realism of a scientific illustrator with his deep insights into the imagination of his longtime friend, author Phillip Freedenberg and a powerful sense of psychedelic whimsy to create the kind of works that belong, in poster form, on every college kid's dorm room wall and many of which would make utterly amazing tattoos if you could find an artist who could do them justice without taking psychic damage. 

And hey, you ergodic literature fans, you freaks pining for a new House of Leaves-style bibliographic experience, AatCotCB has you covered. See, Phillip and Jeff and sometimes a cute little homunculus of Rick Harsch wind up traveling through the "word tunnels" of AatCotCB, The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, and an unfinished novel Freedenberg started writing some 20 years ago, and the reader must really on subtle textual clues to determine in which book's lines through which they are currently moving or, occasionally, being chased. And one form of attack they occasionally experience takes the form of a "word fever" in which Phillip begins spouting lines and lines and sometimes pages and pages of surreal... I almost want to call it word salad but it's kind of... word salad that hasn't been tossed yet? So it's got defined layers and just enough hints of connection and is still formed into grammatical units that function like sentences and sometimes even seem to be carrying actual meaning but then seem to collapse into incoherence again and start to feel skippable, but Freedenberg has an uncanny sense for how much patience his readers are bringing to the exercise of reading his word fever symptoms and drops in a few lines that actually communicate something right there to keep one going. 

Or at least it seemed that way to me.

Oh, and there are constant other textual tricks that tempt the reader to page back, sometimes hundreds is pages, to reinterpret a scene, image or illustration, which will be great fun for some and really annoying to others. I thought it was fun, mostly. 

But none of this I've said so far adequately conveys the truly tonic effect of this work. It's not just a celebration of creativity but a cry out for it as one of the only things that can save is from "gestures at everything" and the despair to which the everything counts on us succumbing. The whole reason this book exists is to join up its readers in a Unified Field of free thinking, weirdness for its own sake, and the will to create something new, even if it sucks. Maybe especially if it sucks? These seem like very warm-hearted and forgiving guys, the kind of guys who would work extra hard to find something to praise, some way to encourage the creator of, even the most pedestrian work of fiction/drawing/bit of music/piece of fiber art/whatever as long as it was sincerely offered.

The world needs much more of these guys, and much more from them. But, as we got hung up on saying to each other during my very first personal experiment with psychedelics, "You can do it, too. It's not a show!"

Bring it, my darlings. And yes, that includes you, Phill, Jeff, Rick... Actually, Rick is good. I mean, he's even published a cookbook recently.

*I'm making exceptions for things I've previously requested from my public library that, all but at random from my perspective, suddenly come available, and also for a bunch of books I've been longing to read for years that are available via Kobo+ and are thus suddenly within my budget. But otherwise, it's a stack of trade paperbacks sitting in my reading room and the contents of the ebook reader that shall no longer be named. And believe me, there are years and years worth of TBR on there. The story bundles alone are staggering.

**Which is next on my list of books I'll be reading on dead tree despite the pain, so stay tuned. It will be my first Rick Harsch book. I hope it's as delightful as he is.

Alexis Wright's PRAISEWORTHY

Yes, he felt he was the total winner about that, his identity war, and he was truly beating Aboriginal Sovereignty hands down by fetching up his so-called ninja powers for eliminating the endless threats going bang, bang, gangbusters, from preventing his dreams from coming true. It was always a total war, and the boy pushed ahead like he had jumped from the ditches, and was already flying Qantas like a piece of war machinery that was destroying the mediocre killer drama, and the whole sick and sorry trail of far-reaching consequences that were coming to a head, to prevent him from enduring the final moments of being in his ancestral world, before he would not be long gone forever from the scene.

I was expecting a lot of things from Alexis Wright's most recent offering, Praiseworthy, which absolutely deserves every bit of the hype it's gotten but is also a very difficult read in many ways, which I'll get to. I was not, however, expecting Praiseworthy to be the best depiction I've ever encountered of what our hyper-mediated and tech-accelerated and over-connected 21st century media environment is doing to the inner lives of the young children growing up steeped in it. After all, this is a novel about an Aboriginal community in the northwest of Australia, focused on a family that lives in a house they built themselves out of whatever scrap metal and other discarded materials they presumably found in the course of doing their bit to make their town, Praiseworthy, into an award-winningly Tidy Community. 

Not exactly Neuromancer, in other words. But as that novel's author famously observed, the future is here, it just hasn't been evenly distributed yet -- only he made that observation back in the 1980s. It's now, alas and alack, the 2020s, and some of it (arguably the worst of it) finally has been distributed relatively evenly. To wit, a chubby little eight-year-old resident of Praiseworthy is running around with a government-issued iPhone, iPad and Apple watch (which he has to sneak into other people's houses to charge because his parents won't even spring for electricity because "our people survived for thousands of years" without it) and he is thus every bit a part of what has become of the internet as the Tide Pod Eaters and the Booktok Influencers Who Only Read Dialogue and the diehard adherents to QAnon.

If anyone in the town of Praiseworthy was desperately trying to get his hands on horse paste during the early days of COVID-19, it was our boy Tommyhawk Steel, is what I'm saying.

Oh, Tommyhawk, a not-quite villain of his novel. Tommyhawk, his virtual nose pressed to the virtual glass to watch the 21st century passing him by as he is stuck in a podunk town full of native hicks who have resisted assimilation into White Australia, has as warped a perspective on life as a little kid could possibly have. Someday, he is certain, a wonderful blond white lady, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, is going to arrive at the head of the Australian military to rescue Tommyhawk from Praiseworthy and its villainous, backward and 100% pedophilic population (the Australian government/media complex of the 2020s, with the willing help of Praiseworthy's mayor, is pumping out constant messaging that Aboriginal parents are uniformly incompetent bumpkins who don't really love their children and it's just a matter of time before every child they have access to gets molested, and Tommyhawk, whose media consumption (and, to a degree, his formal education ) is not being monitored by anybody who cares about him, Believes It All) and take him away to live with her in Canberra, in the glorious Parliament House, where he will be safe and loved and respected and recognized for his inherent Greatness.

Of course, Tommyhawk is wrong about everything, but the people around him, including his family, are all occupied with other matters and too busy to even notice (well, his father kind of noticed, dubbing Tommyhawk a fascist on the day the kid was born...) what a head full of wrong he's got, let alone make the effort to correct him, even about the fact that they actually do care about him.

Tommyhawk is, you see, only one of four very eccentric and passionate members of the Steel family, all of whom are very, very involved in their own shit (well, mostly donkey shit, but we'll get to that), mostly stemming from their circumstances as Aboriginal citizens of 21st century Australia.

For starters, the Steel family's house is built on a piece of land they have claimed as their share via Australia's Native Title system. Which would be pretty straightforward except the chunk of land in question happens to be Praiseworthy's long-established high tech cemetery. A cemetery equipped with live streaming cameras and other equipment so faraway relatives of the deceased can not only watch over the graves of their loved ones via the Internet but can also broadcast themselves to the cemetery and, e.g. sing to their departed ancestors at any hour of the day or night. And they do. And they can also send comments on the appearance and general condition of the grounds. And they do.

I don't participate in anything like Nextdoor but I feel like this system in Praiseworthy's cemetery is very much like a Nextdoor for a diaspora and the very thought of it gives me hives.

But it gets better. By which I mean worse. Because Tommyhawk's parents haven't just settled down to live, themselves, in the cemetery. They've also turned it into a giant sanctuary for feral donkeys. I told you we'd get to the donkeys. There's a psychedelic-looking donkey right there on the American edition's book cover. Why is there a psychedelic-looking donkey on the cover of Alexis Wright's novel, Praiseworthy?

Meet Tommyhawk's father, who goes by many names but most officially (I think) is known as Cause Man Steel. And his Cause is nothing less than the survival, nay, the thriving, of his people through the coming climate Jackpot (William Gibson again, yes), which he plans to manage from Praiseworthy by establishing a global transportation and shipping powerhouse completely independent of fossil fuels or manufactured machinery, i.e., 100% donkey powered.

Of course I'm thinking of the Underpants Gnomes. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that Alexis Wright was thinking of the Underpants Gnomes. The United States' stupid pop culture has eaten the entire planet. 

But so, Cause Man Steel's plan to save the world and become, in the process, its first Aboriginal Billionaire, is: Phase One: Collect Donkeys. Phase Two: ... Phase Three: Profit (and save the world).

Except this is not in any way presented for laughs. Cause Man Steel is in absolute earnest and lives a life of anguished seeking, prompted by dreams sent by his land and his ancestors, to enact this plan and pursue its central and most crucial aim: find the God Donkey, a donkey of corporeal perfection so great that its fur is not just silvery grey, like the hundreds or even thousands of donkeys he has liberated from "neglectful" owners or just lassoed out in the desert (Australia's feral donkey problem puts the southern U.S.'s feral hog problem to shame) and brought home to Praiseworthy's cemetery, one by one, in his decrepit and sandblasted Ford Falcon, but the exact hue and shininess of platinum.

You're probably already piecing this together. Tommyhawk's daddy is on a perpetual quest for the perfect donkey instead of being there to parent his son, and keeps using the barely running family car to bring failed God Donkey candidates home and turning them loose in the Internet-enabled cemetery and its environs (I mean, you don't expect feral donkeys to respect property boundaries, do you? Of course they're on the loose all over Praiseworthy, eating all the plants and pooping everywhere and kicking up clouds of dust which aren't even the only airborne hazards of life in Praiseworthy, as I'll get to.). And I mentioned that people all over the world can witness and comment on this, right? To whom are the commenters' helpful comments directed? 

Meet Tommyhawk's mother, Dance, wife of Cause Man Steel, who is sick to death of all her neighbors, actual and virtual, bitching at her about the donkeys. Her life would be nothing but being a receptacle for donkey bitching if she hadn't long ago checked out, mentally and emotionally, and cultivated a Nabokov-level obsession with moths and butterflies, an obsession that seems mutual because she is never presented in Praiseworthy without an absolute lepidopteran cloud orbiting her person. Occasionally, she notices her sons.

Oh, and she is convinced she is biracial: everybody tells her that, based on her appearance, she has at least one ancestor who was Chinese. So any issue of Native Title or anything touching on the eternally fraught question of Who Counts as Indigenous is extra complicated where she and her children are concerned. Which she doesn't think about much until circumstances in the novel force her to think about it all a whole lot.

Yes, sons, plural, because she and Cause Man also have a 17-year old, who rejoices in the name that is absolutely reflective of his father's priorities, but feels almost like it exists solely to provide the second two-thirds of the novel with a bitterly funny running joke, Aboriginal Sovereignty Steel. Ab.Sov to his friends and girlfriend, from whom he has recently been separated because she is a few years younger than he is, and by some reckonings, this makes poor Ab.Sov a pedophile. So, you know, Tommyhawk's big brother doesn't have much time for him either.

All of this is to say that, Tommyhawk Steel is a very, very unpleasant Eric Cartman of a kid, but, even more than Cartman, one who makes sense as a product of his environment and  is a tragically funny (until he's not) little asshole of a character, who is but one of the novel's two main antagonists. 

I feel like I've given away too much already so I'm not going to talk much about the other, the albino mayor of Praiseworthy, who is very much on board with the effort to force his people to Assimilate and in general get with the global economic exploitation program and seems to be spending most of his time trying and failing to put a stop to Operation Donkey God and maybe just put Cause Man in jail or something.

Nor have I much discussed the big problem literally hanging over the heads of every adult, child and donkey living in Praiseworthy, a mysterious and persistent atmospheric haze that yes, per the great Brian Wood*, is strongly reminiscent of Don DeLillio's Airborne Toxic Event except in that it's been there for years and is actually visible. The haze is introduced right at the novel's beginning as the likely ultimate source of the community's woes but its menace and effect are quickly overshadowed by those of the town's two most powerful internal enemies, Mayor Ice Pick (yes, that is his name) and Tommyhawk Steel.

The voluntary searchers who had never before wished to be elsewhere in their lives except being on country now felt their time immemorial beings jeopardized, by knowing this kind of little fascist was not dreaming ancient homeland dreams, and this made them feel as though their sanity was being stolen, and that they too had been placed in some jeopardy departure lounge of a busy international terminal, the subnormal monstrosity of unnaturalness that they had never before managed to imagine in their holy-place mind, and all this foreign mind transporting stuff happened just by watching the way the kid was prancing around like a caged animal in their aired zone airstrip cut through stripped land, where even they, who had never been to a city, were now impatiently pacing while channeling anyone for the sake of just saying hello, and checking for non-existent incoming and outgoing flights bundled in the blue sky, and expecting a call from somebody calling the scenario glistening in a sunray and oh! My god, it was not even the mother, Mother, or the White Mother calling.

The above is how this novel depicts a scene in its last third or so, in which an even more agitated and impatient Tommyhawk is pacing back and forth alongside Praiseworthy's makeshift airstrip, jabbering into his iPhone, while most of the rest of the town has been mobilized to search for Tommyhawk's missing older brother. And, given said brother's highly idiosyncratic name, Aboriginal Sovereignty, it's a big question, sentence by sentence, whether what's being discussed in phrases like "their missing Aboriginal Sovereignty" is the person or the concept. And is the mother being discussed currently Tommyhawk's actual mother, Dance Steel, or is it the faceless bureaucrat in charge of Aboriginal affairs for the Australian government? Etc.

All of this is to say that Alexis Wright does some wild things with English prose even allowing for the presence of Australian slang terms and the very, very broad and flexible range of meanings Aboriginal communities on Australia impart to seemingly ordinary and straightforward words like "country."

Wright's style also very effectively mimics a much older form of storytelling than a maximalist (did I mention that Praiseworthy is over 700 pages long? Well, it is) 21st century novel: a bedtime or campfire story, told in chunks over many nights, each time handing off the narrative duties to a new Oracle (which is often more than one being) and circling back to remind listeners/readers of where we last left all the characters physically, emotionally and spiritually before nudging the plot along a bit with something new. Furthermore, the narrative itself seems to be built around the idea that all of its reader/listeners witnessed the original events and are as much being reminded as told about them, so a lot of what we might call plot elements either happen offscreen or don't seem to actually happen at all. And sometimes the facts seem to differ, sometimes substantially; we are, after all, getting multiple perspectives on events. For example, suddenly the volunteer force looking for Ab.Sov has swollen from a handful of fishermen to a crowd of maybe thousands? But we aren't told when this happened or how. It's just suddenly so. You learn to roll with it. Or you don't. But it's better if you do. 

This has caused some readers to fuss that Praiseworthy is too long and bloated with all of that repetition and if all you ever read is tightly plotted genre fiction, you'll probably think so, too, unless you go into this with consciously different expectations. This isn't a soap opera or an action-packed adventure, not a social novel, nor, precisely, a character study. It's very much its own thing. And I'm not sure right now what to call that thing, but I like it.

*Chad Post and Brian Wood devoted an entire season of the consistently great Two Month Review podcast to Praiseworthy. Go listen to hear these insights and much more!

Margie Sarsfield's BETA VULGARIS

Elise fantasized about being the kind of adult she'd needed as a teenager, which felt a little pathetic, veering too close to "inner child" territory. Realistically, Elise could not be trusted with anyone's heart, not even her own.

Elise woke up with a thirst like she was a Russian doll and each of the selves inside her needed their own gallon of water to recover.

Elise had failed, miserably to learn every lesson, and she hated herself for it. She wanted to be the perfect person for everyone, and she'd never once gotten close. There were too many other fucked-up up versions of herself hanging out inside her, no room for the one true and flawless Elise to be born.

I don't think I've ever highlighted as many blocks of text in my ebook reader as I have in Margie Sarsfield's bizarre and brilliant novel, Beta Vulgaris, the chronicle of a young Millennial woman whose dreams of being able to support herself in a post-2008 United States mock her at every turn, and whose undergraduate education as a philosophy major and a lifetime of psycho-sexual anxiety and eating disorders have left her painfully and chronically self-aware, and whose current state of economic and social precarity has led her and live-in boyfriend Tom to the perfectly logical conclusion that their best move in the coming months is to leave their groovy Brooklyn life for a while, sublet their apartment to a friend/relative, and travel to faraway, exotic Minnesota and temporary employment as menial labor bringing in a massive and only sort-of industrialized sugar beet harvest. It pays really well, better than either of their current day jobs, and it should provide the kind of hipster credit and anecdote fodder beloved of their milieu, while also giving them a kind of rhetorical bludgeon to use on their elders, who just don't seem to understand just how dire their economic situation and prospects really are. And never mind that Tom is actually a trust fund baby who is getting ready to go to law school on his parents' dime. He's got his darned pride.

Elise, meanwhile, is generally struggling. The kind of struggling that she feels is unique to her age group but hey, I, too remember spending entire months walking six miles to and from work each day until my job decided to spring for monthly T passes for employees,and carefully rationing leaves off the head of lettuce that represented a week's groceries because I had stupidly splurged on a Ranma 1/2 VHS tape on pay day all those weeks ago, and having to pass up the really good temp jobs (before one of my temp jobs hired me as a permanent worker) because I couldn't afford the right clothes for the kind of office that would otherwise hire me based on my skills but not if I showed up in a fraying khaki skirt and a knit top that was beginning to pill because the dryers at my nearest coin-op laundry really sucked and [your own memory of twenty-something poverty here]. Elise's struggles have been my struggles, is what I'm saying, and if I'd had a groovy boyfriend with reliable cross-country transportation (aka a working car) when I was her age, I, too, might have chosen a season as a temporary agricultural worker of some kind. I might have made quite a few of the wacky choices (including, sometimes, choosing not to choose in the hope that a particular problem or two might just resolve itself or go away) she makes in the course of Beta Vulgaris. I might, too, have heard the sugar beets singing each to each, and thought that they were singing to me. Your mileage may vary.

Marcy Dermansky's HOT AIR

Nobody I can think of can write such absolutely despicable characters and make me want to spend hours in their heads like Marcy Dermansky. And her hour may yet be approaching.

I have to confess, though, that she's kind of a low-dose author for me. I enjoyed the hell out of her debut novel, Bad Marie, many years ago, but it left me feeling just icky enough not to want especially to indulge in that very specific kind of pleasure again for a long time. Which is to say that I haven't read any of Dermansky's work since Bad Marie. And her newest, Hot Air, hasn't changed my view of her work one bit -- even though I really liked it. 

Dermansky's subject is, at bottom, class envy, and it's a subject about which she is wickedly funny. The titular character of her first novel is a delightfully trashy person with whom to spend a few hours, watching her unhinged schemes go awry as she goes on a one-woman/one-child crime spree. Well, more of a misdeeds spree, although she happens to commit a few petty and one decidedly un-petty in the process. She has been badly used by her upscale friend who made the mistake of hiring her as a nanny, and feels perfectly justified, she tells us over hundreds of pages, in committing whatever malefaction she likes against that friend. We are happy to be persuaded, over and over again, even if she never really convinces us.

For Hot Air Dermansky has expanded the perspective she gives us to that of several characters, though pretty tightly focused on her signature distressed bourgeois heroine, Joannie. Joannie is somewhat recently divorced and rents an unsatisfactory-to-her apartment* in a neighborhood dominated by what sounds like a lot of McMansions. She has a daughter, Lucie, a tween who is well on her way toward becoming even less tolerable than her mommy is and for whom Joannie is about to set a whole lot of bad examples in one disastrous weekend-and-change.

Joannie lives next door to Johnny, a decent looking divorced guy with a son, Tyson, who is Lucie's approximate age. Johnny owns a very nice house with a very nice swimming pool, more or less next door to Joannie's apartment complex. Johnny is so nicely set up that he even gets along well enough with his ex-wife to have her living in the very nice house across the street from him, so he even has an easy time sharing custody of Tyson. Are you humming the Brady Bunch theme right now? I was. And so are Joannie and Johnny, as we quickly learn when the novel opens with Joannie on a pseudo-date with Johnny. To save on childcare expenses, Joannie has manipulated Johnny into having the date over at his house, with Tyson and Lucie banished to the basement with their various screen-equipped devices. So far, so good.

Except, as Joannie informs us pretty much right away, she is not feeling like their boy-girl Lego is ever going to click (I love that phrase, which I stole from William Gibson, because of course I did), and while it's mostly because their names will sound dumb together, Joannie and Johnny, it's also because she's just not feeling it with him, especially after he rather inexpertly kisses her. And kisses her. Oh noes! She forgot to make arrangements with someone to send a fake emergency text to get her out of this!

Fortunately, the plot happens. In the form of a hot air balloon that a rich, brash techbro type rented to celebrate his wedding anniversary after only having had a few lessons. As in not enough lessons to responsibly be allowed to pilot a balloon unsupervised, but when has that ever stopped a rich and famous and handsome billionaire?

As you already would know from a glance at the jacket copy, the billionaire's balloon comes crashing into Johnny's swimming pool and hijinks and sexcapades and a whole bunch of other bad decisions ensue. We're barely acquainted well enough to dislike Joannie and Johnny and here's Marcy Dermansky, serving us up an even more annoyingly privileged couple to dislike even more. One can never accuse Dermansky of being stingy with us; Jonathan (yes, there is a Johnny and a Jonathan in this awkward little bottle-book) and Julia have fallen out of love with each other, believe the world has done them dirty despite being billionaires, feel entitled to absolutely everything including Jonathan's personal assistant, Vivian (whom Julia wants to adopt as their own Vietnamese orphan despite Vivian being an adult with perfectly good parents of her own, and Jonathan just wants to bone, basically) and, once they get a load of Joannie and Lucie, to Lucie. They stop short of offering to buy Lucie, but only just.

BUT, lest we start feeling much in the way of sympathy or empathy for Joannie, who has barely gotten over her sick envy of Johnny's swimming pool and ridiculously over-equipped kitchen before being given people to really envy (and it turns out Jonathan just happens to have been Joannie's first kiss, at a summer camp when they were kids, who then ghosted her the day after Joannie's first kiss), she kind of seems like she'd maybe be down for selling Lucie, or at least renting her out for a little while? In exchange for a chance to share, just a little bit, in Johnny and Julia's fabulous lifestyle? But no, that would probably be too icky.

We have only this slight and kind of token assurance that Joannie has a firm line on what is and is not too icky, by the way. Because there are so many other icky things that she doesn't really even need to be pushed into doing. So many. So icky. But at least she is somewhat redeemed, as Bad Marie was in her novel, by her deep and true love for her little girl. Even though the little girl is a whiny brat.**

And all we can do is point and laugh and wait for consequences. Which, since this is fiction and not the actual world, do happen somewhat, at some points. See why I'm saying Dermansky's big moment may only just now be arriving? Despite what looks like has been a pretty decent literary career?

Just, you know, life sure do like to imitate art, don't it?

Anyway, I'll read some more of her back catalog someday, probably. If nothing else, it might soon be my only safe outlet.

*That, I dunno, sounds pretty nice to me, but I guess I must grudgingly admit that after living a nice, somewhat prosperous married life in a nice house, it's the kind of come-down that would sting some. Still, if we want to talk about class envy, this woman is living in a nice and safe area with good access to schools and shopping and is able to support herself and her daughter in pretty decent style off a literary career. Um. Where's my micro-violin?

**Really, the only character with even a pretense of likeability is Johnny's son, Tyson, but he doesn't get a lot of ink and would probably show obnoxious true colors if he got much more. Dermansky isn't about winning you over with loveable characters, you guys.

Tim Powers' MY BROTHER'S KEEPER

Anglican Church," he muttered. "You nearly never go to church anyway -- your church is the moors, your priest is your dog, your God is -- I don't know what. The wind.

Anybody who's been reading this blog for more than ten minutes knows how much I freaking love Tim Powers. He was the first author I ever put on the Automatic Buy list, long before I realized I even had such a thing.

But because he was the first and was, for a long time, the only, I still collect him in hardcover. Which is a format which I read with increasing difficulty as the years go by.

So while I was running around screaming like a little kid on Christmas Eve waiting for Powers' latest, My Brother's Keeper, to come out, had pre-ordered it the moment that was possible, I'm only now, almost a year later, finished reading it.

I beg you, do not take that as any kind of commentary on its quality, anymore than you should take its dirt-common title or its cover blurb from, of all people, Orson Scott Card.*

Because My Brother's Keeper is Tim Powers' tensest and creepiest read since he invented his own micro-genre of literary historical weird fiction (which lesser mortals have failed to duplicate. Cough. Seth Grahame-Smith. Cough) with The Stress of Her Regard, to which he returns here, not with a sequel like the serviceable but not exceptional Hide Me Among the Graves, but a true spiritual successor, pitting the Brönte sisters, their hapless brother and their Yorkshire parson father against a family of sort-of werewolves. I say "sort of" because these are werewolves in the way that the lamiae of Stress/Hide Me are vampires. This is still Tim Powers, an OG chaos magician of literature, the kind of guy who says "what if these classic monsters but both cooler and more sorrowful?"

And yes, of course there is a very Heathcliff-esque character striding the moors with Emily Brönte and her gigantic bull mastiff, Keeper (who is one of the best dog characters I've encountered in recent years and within recent years I read Jeffrey Ford's Well-Built City trilogy. Keeper ranks up there with Wood!), but he is not an inspiration for Heathcliff; the Emily of My Brother's Keeper already has a completed manuscript of Wuthering Heights in her writing case, has indeed been tempted by her brother, Branwell, to meet the wonderfully sinister and perfectly named villain, Mrs. Flensing, by suggestions that Mrs. Flensing has publishing connections in London. 

No, Powers just lets Alcuin Curzon, the "one-eyed Catholic" whom Emily and Keeper rescue one day, serve as a sort of unremarked-upon slant-rhyme to Heathcliff, the better to enlarge the imaginative power of she whom Emily Dickinson named "Gigantic Emily Brönte" by his presence, instead of diminishing her by creating a lame figure for her creation to be based on.

I like it.

Honestly, I haven't been this excited by a Tim Powers novel since the very first time I read Last Call. Do not snooze on this one, or I'll let Mrs. Flensing get you.

*Just, remember that we liked Card once, and he wrote some good books before he started milking his IP dry.