All the words you see overused on book jackets are true of this novel. The one I’ll pick to emphasize is ‘luminous’. Everything is lit perfectly: every landscape infused with light, like a painting; every sin lit from within by the fires of hell; every emotion clear and sharp and shining like broken glass. The tableau lit from below by violence; from above by piercing beauty.

Contemporary Western ethics doesn’t have as many taboos as we once did. The incest taboo, thankfully, remains. It is a strong emotional battery, and Tallent has hooked up the plot of his novel directly to it.

When one comes to the end of philosophy, there’s only one way forward. Inside oneself, it’s called faith. Outside, it’s called art. This novel is a theodicy, for those who have eyes to see. If that sounds like nonsense, ignore it.

Turtle’s father is a man who has come to the end of philosophy and has not found that way. He is a great soul, burning terribly. Not a role model. God save us from such men!

It’s impossible to root for a protagonist as much as we root for Turtle. It’s impossible to hate a villain as much as we hate her father. And yet grieve over him. And almost, in a way, love him because she does. Such strong emotions, which combine with such clarity and force.

All the power of Lolita, without all the misdirection and irony. An utter masterpiece.

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Reading this novel is like a gentle hallucination. A dream of the desert, more myth than image. Firmly grounded, but grounded in unfamiliar spaces. It’s a novel that revolves to show you new faces. Every character starts as a cardboard cutout. Then vibrates. Then some ink drops into water and the character blooms into round space.

Ondaatje tells the story of four dissimilar people who live for a while in a bombed-out monastery. Each is grappling with some deep disconnection from the world. There’s a lot of morphine. Indeed, it’s a novel as soaked in opiates as it is in memory. Like the distilled essence of a time and place that probably never was.

An airplane concealed beneath the sands of the Sahara. A man’s life recorded in the margins of Herodotus. A fugitive wife slowly starves to death in an ornately-tiled cavern. A woman holds a potentially deadly electrical wire perfectly still. A man steals documents from a safe in an Italian villa. They dance to the music of a scratchy gramophone.

He can’t bear that his own side would set off such a bomb.

What a beautiful book!

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Hunter S. Thompson was insane. Really, genuinely sick, and not in a way that’s fun or exciting, but rather, sad.

A lot of the stuff he says here would be interesting if it was true. But he sets out pretty early to make sure you know not to trust him. He’s not going to narrate the truth. He’s not going to attempt to. His brain is not up to the task of conveying knowledge from the world into a book. Nobody is fact-checking.

Salacious gossip that you know is bogus lacks much of a thrill, don’t you think? Instead of being exciting and important, it’s just poor taste.

Poor man. He needed to be in therapy, not reporting on a presidential campaign.

The account of the Democratic National Convention in Miami would be worth something. If I could trust it. There’s a neat procedural chess match internal power machinations feel to it. There’s very clever strategy that goes on, and is entertaining to read about. If it even happened.

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Some of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels I do not understand at all. This is one of them. I could tell you about the characters and the setting. I could list scenes and events. But if there exists such a thing as a plot in this novel, I could not discern it.

The BBC exists. The characters work there. It’s World War II, during The Blitz. The characters are living life, recording sounds, broadcasting, taking in boarders, being dysfunctional, being brave, making ends meet, observing chaos, drinking tea and enjoying varying levels of understanding of one another’s psychological complexities and romantic entanglements.

But what is it about? Why did she write it? Who’s the protagonist? What do they want, and do they get it or not? Who or what, in the end, am I rooting for?

In Gate of Angels, she crafts a beautiful puzzle box with a single, exquisite key. When she gives you the key at last, on the final page, the whole mechanism falls into place. You see, with breathtaking clarity, what it’s been about this whole time.

Perhaps such a key exists for Human Voices. If so, I wasn’t perceptive enough to grasp it.

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What a novel! Set in a stern and disjointed college with odd and ancient roots, it follows a young professor and a working-class girl. He doesn’t know what to do with his life. Pursue academic greatness? How, in this dead-end place? Pursue love? With who, when the college forbids women to enter?

He meets the girl by accident. There’s a whiff of scandal. She is very right not to trust men. A professor tells a ghost story with symbolic resonance.

Will they or won’t they? And why has Fitzgerald been giving us all these other facts and stories? They have nothing to do with the main plot!

Except.

On the last page, she gives you one final key. One small, ghost-story element. Just a tiny thing like a filigreed toothpick. And it fits right into a little plot hole she’s left. You slide it in. Pieces shift, and click into place. The whole novel is a magnificent machine, assembling itself in a second out of a pile of scraps. Every part suddenly tight and square, the corners beveled and shining. It lifts a robot hand and pours you a cup of tea.

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Alice Munro is, of course, an excellent writer. She’s wonderful to read. Every sentence, paragraph and story is as well-built as a strong oak table.

These stories, however, suffer from a structural defect. They’re marked “Fiction”, so she’s allowed to invent the details. But the impetus behind the stories is biographical. And so the interest is biographical, too. And false biography isn’t interesting.

So they’re interesting because they’re true, but they’re not true. See the defect?

Despite that, they’re good stories. Little windows into a different time and place. One the author knows well, and has strong sympathy with. Literature as time travel is one of the worthwhile things to do with stories.

The best of the stories come at the beginning, in Ireland. They ride the edge between history and myth.

The title and initial image — “you think you’re looking at America, but you’re really looking at Ireland” — ought to have appeared in the rest of the stories. At least symbolically. I thought we’d be seeing glimpses of Irish culture persisting through history. There’s a little of it. Maybe you have to be a more subtle reader than I am to appreciate it.

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The Appeal tells the story of a small town destroyed by an immoral, rapacious corporation. They’re trying to get justice through the courts. But the corporation is too powerful. They corrupt and fund the campaign of a naïve lawyer for a judgeship. Then he judges their state supreme court appeal corruptly.

It is, of course, aggressively cyclopic: Good guys are human beings. Bad guys aren’t. That aspect isn’t interesting, except to note how it turns the villains one-dimensional. It even seeps into the quality of the narration. There’s a strange feature of the free indirect style when Grisham writes his villain: he can’t even describe the villain’s life positively from the villain’s own perspective. Or else this villain hates his own life. A lot.

The legal procedure is deeply-rendered and interesting. The details of the campaign show good, complex curlicues. The good guys are sympathetic, and fit into their world. The novel is, generally, well-written. Is it fiction or is it propaganda? That’s a question of semantics.

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Ted Chiang is one of the greats! Every story in this collection is fantastic. Chiang builds incredible, well-connected worlds and populates them with real people. That excellent writing is the rocket fuel behind his ideas.

If you take a mostly-discarded idea — like Kabbalah golems, a tower to heaven, God’s omnipotence, etc — extrapolate it into the present, weave its implications into politics, geography, culture, put some interesting characters into that world, make them navigate the consequences of the original idea, and draw the thing to a satisfying conclusion — then that’s a Ted Chiang story. It’s not half thought experiment, half story. It’s 100% thought experiment, 100% story. The thought experiment is fully dissolved into the story. This is a very hard thing to do, and it represents the apotheosis of the science fiction writer’s craft.

That may have been a bit hyperbolic. These are good stories. They make you think. And, unlike many sci fi stories, they make you think about real things.

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Ghost Road Blues is pretty standard American doorstop horror. The protagonist makes a lot of terrible Dad jokes. Otherwise, it’s small town versus Evil.

For a longish book, not much happens. This, I think, is one of the features of this particular genre of horror. Lots and lots of pages, conveying not that many minutes of actual time. Plenty of gore. Plenty of physical pain, most endured by the bad guys. But the good guys get their share, too.

One weakness is that, for most of the book, we have no idea why Evil cares about this small town. In the last quarter, we get a glimpse. But most of the time, it seems like these bad guys are there to cause mayhem and carnage for no reason. Or a very poorly-defined reason: “Evil doesn’t die. It just grows stronger.”

I just feel like there wasn’t much interesting going on.

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Jesse Ball has his own mysterious energy, and it is as strong as ever in The Divers’ Game. The novel is extraordinarily poignant.

The society in which the book is set has divided itself into two classes. Members of one class have the power to kill members of the other class. They don’t need a reason. There’s no legal procedure; they’re allowed to do it, and sometimes, they do.

The simplicity of his language and mastery of tone sweep you into the setting. It’s only afterward that you start to wonder about symbolic resonance. Meaning creeps in, afterwards.

Few readers of this book will understand what’s going on beneath the surface. Jesse Ball won’t say, for reasons that will be obvious to those who also understand. Nobody will say. I certainly won’t.

It’s like an optical illusion. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And most people will never see it. But the ritual mutilation of the thumbs is a dead giveaway.

Don’t worry about it. He’s a beautiful writer, so tender and poigant. Whatever that undercurrent is, it’s probably not something you’re guilty of. He’s telling the truth when he says that he writes instinctually. The issues the novel touches are far too complex for mere symbolism.

That’s why he said, in an interview about the novel, “I expect there will be a few people in various places around the world who will find it makes sense. At this point, my audience is that: just a few people here and there around the globe.”

Hi, Jesse. Here I am. It makes perfect sense to me.

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