To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is not Hemingway’s best work.

The biggest problem is that he doesn’t have a good enough reason for switching characters. When your main character is seriously wounded, we want to know what happens next. It’s very irritating when you switch to some other character for no good reason. And even worse when your reason is transparently political.

It started feeling like a hard-boiled detective novel. Yes, we know smuggling is dangerous. No, even at the high of prohibition it couldn’t have been the murder-fest depicted here. Not every job ended with blood in the water. But if it’s a noir detective story, that’s okay. The various unrealistic excesses are forgivable in that context.

Then it becomes clear that there’s no overarching conspiracy to dismantle. No Maltese Falcon to find.

The best part of the book happens during one of the digressions that hurt the narrative so much. We’ve followed some random character to some random bar. He has nothing to do with the story. Oh, wait, the main character’s wife passes him on the road at the end. But who cares? Anyway, this guy goes to this bar and sees one drunk smashing another drunk’s head into the sidewalk. The random character and a police officer break up the fight. Then one of the drunks ask the police officer for a dollar.

Anyway. To Have and Have Not either lacks Hemingway’s classic subtlety and style, or I’m not wise enough to detect it. There are a few good jokes and character sketches. Far more racial slurs than I’m comfortable reading. A mangled plot and a transparent political bent that doesn’t feel like Hemingway at all.

I’d almost say it’s like an imitation Hemingway novel, and the author hasn’t read Hemingway. Only bad reviews of Hemingway. Maybe this is the novel that’s the foundation for all those bad reviews.



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In the House in the Dark of the Woods by Laird Hunt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a lovely scientific treatise on the life cycle and development of the witch. It comes, of course, in three phases. You don’t realize at first that that’s what you’re reading. Because the various witches at various points in the cycle appear very different. It’s only at the end of the novel, when we see the metamorphoses from phase to phase, that it all comes together.

So if you start reading In the House in the Dark of the Woods and it seems mixed-up and confusing, don’t worry. It all comes together in the end. It’s a big picture with a lot of complex emotional valences, and the author can only show a bit at a time. A lot of different clues have to be in place before the big reveal can happen.

And if you read somewhere that it’s a fairy tale, and you want the swineherd to marry the princess at the end, well… It’s not going to be like that. It’s true that it’s written very much like a fairy tale. Very much in the Neil Gaiman mode. There’s a Brothers Grimm style of diction that it does a good job adhering to.

But it doesn’t quite have the same kind of plot as a fairy tale. The plot is much more like going to the zoo. You pass a series of animals that, at first, seem like they don’t have anything to do with each other. But if you have a good guide–and Laird Hunt is a good guide–you’ll see, by the end, that it’s all one ecosystem.



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The Dead Zone by Stephen King

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I like Stephen King’s world-building better than his horror. It’s hard for books to scare me, so I don’t get much out of the fright aspect of these novels. But he builds interesting, convincing characters in worlds that feel real.

There are two significant plot problems in this book.

The first is structural. The first half of the book is the protagonist getting and learning about his powers. The next quarter of the book is the protagonist using his powers to catch a serial killer. The next quarter of the book is the protagonist using his powers to stop the next Hitler. Notice a problem?

Yeah. 90% of the book is Act 1. The most important conflict takes up very little space. There are two major issues that arise that you think are going to be the main conflict. But they aren’t, first one, then the other. Is The Dead Zone about him winning his girl back? 25% of the book later, the answer is no. That’s not what it’s about. Is The Dead Zone about him stopping a serial killer? 25% of the book later, the answer is no.

If the novel is about using psychic powers to stop the next Hitler, you have to let us know that earlier. You make your character’s most heroic moment feel like an afterthought.

The second problem is conceptual. Every time the protagonist has a psychic flash, it comes true. King spends a huge chunk of time in the novel demonstrating this. If we ever doubted that these flashes represent the truth, he proves them right like 8 times. But then the stop-the-next-Hitler plot depends on one of them not being right. Is it important for us to know that sometimes, if a hero does the right thing, these visions might not come to pass? Then establish that at some point!

He has a vision of a post-apocalyptic future caused by this politician. All of his visions so far have come true exactly as he saw them. Yet he tries to stop this one from coming true. And succeeds. That’s a problem. As far as King has told us so far, that’s not how this works.

Anyway. Good world-building. Not scary. Poor understanding of Baptists. Plot problems. Read Hearts In Atlantis or Salem’s Lot instead.



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The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Sequel to The Cuckoo’s Calling, this book is better written. Or, maybe, I’ve gotten used to Galbraith’s prose style. It doesn’t have the third-person-omniscient-related problems the other had, at least.

Plot-wise, it’s very well constructed. Aspiring detective fiction authors should make a chart of the conflicts. Every situation that every character is in has some form of suspense-building conflict. At any moment there are four or five dominoes that Galbraith has set up. She could knock any of them down to cause her protagonist realistic trouble. And she’s set them all up so she can do it whenever is convenient for the plot. The leg, money, Robin’s fiancee, Strike’s ex, Strike’s dad, et cetera.

One problem with the plot is that much of the suspense of the last few chapters is arbitrary. Strike sends two friends to get two final pieces of evidence. But the narrative leaves out what they’re looking for. It omits all details about their instructions. So we’re not in suspense about something in the world of the book. The protagonist knows the information we want; but the narrator won’t tell us. It’s frustrating.

She does this so that the big reveal can happen all at once. And the big reveal in Silkworm is very, very good. I realized who the murderer was right on cue, from a clue that nobody in the story mentioned. That’s exquisite: chef’s kiss.

I only wish she had found another way to withhold the key information from me besides just… withholding it.

It reminds me of Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry From Kensington. I suppose writers have the right to set their novels in the world of publishing. It’s good that she waited for the second book in the series, though. Writers writing about writing gets boring quick; we have to know there’s more to it than that.

I wonder if the manner of the murder isn’t Rowling saying something to the Harry Potter fan-fiction community? In fact, I would be surprised if they haven’t dissected Silkworm to the tune of hundreds of pages. The plot yells that novels are symbolic. That they say something about their author’s lives. And then it yanks that idea away.

Maybe, in the end, it’s a version of Nabokov’s Symbols and Signs…



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The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Cuckoo’s Calling is a pretty good murder mystery. I’d say it scores an 8 on the Agatha Christie Scale. (Where Nemesis = 10 and At Bertram’s Hotel = 1.)

Reading this, I would say, proves conclusively that Harry Potter was not a fluke. Rowling should be as respected as her sales indicate.

I do have a problem with the ‘omniscient third person’ point of view. I don’t actually believe such a thing exists. But in any case, if you’re attempting it, you have to be a bit more careful than we see in The Cuckoo’s Calling. You see, anglophone readers assume that every sentence in the narrator’s voice has been filtered through the consciousness of one particular character. Authors let us know which character that is by narrating something only they could know.

If you switch back and forth between viewpoints, you have to be careful about any subjective information you narrate during the switch, because your readers won’t know which character’s subjectivity that information belongs to. There are a few trip-ups in this regard in The Cuckoo’s Calling, and it can be confusing.

Authors who want to write from multiple viewpoints should learn from Zadie Smith. She does a wonderful job of this.

The Cuckoo’s Calling has awesome potential as a series. She’s setting up lots and lots of relationships and complexity that she can draw on in later books. It’s going to be incredible, a couple of books from now, when Strike’s ex gets in trouble with the law. With multiple novels-worth of development already invested into their relationship, it’ll be gripping.



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The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Is ‘old man finds out the truth about his past’ a genre now? I only ask because I recently read The Sea by John Banville and it’s the same.

The Sense of an Ending is well-constructed. There are two big revelations which hit one after the other like a one-two punch. And they have behind them the whole force and weight of a novel’s-worth of empathy generation. Schoolyard memories; misunderstood genius; suicide; lust.

It’s a plot that carries you along. But looking back, it doesn’t hold together as well as it feels while you’re reading. This is because most of the suspense comes from one character withholding information. You assume that something is forcing her to be mysterious. But it turns out not to be so. She could have resolved all the suspense of the whole novel in a single sentence, if she had felt like it.

So it ends up as a book-length exploration of how the protagonist is insensitive and the antagonist is uncommunicative, with neither of those qualities very well explored.

It also drags a bit. The protagonist’s relationship with his ex-wife isn’t very germane to the plot. So all the pages spent on her feel boring.

On the other hand, it does a good job of following the ‘necessary but unguessable’ rule. You ought to be unable to see the end coming. But you should also realize, once you get there, that no other explanation fits all the facts. The end of this novel is exactly like that. It’s a really neat moment of revelation, exactly what a good tragedy or mystery novel should do.

And there’s a lot of poignancy in the belated realization of his own cruelty to his friend. When he gets his decades-old letter back and sees how evil he had been.



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Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Lincoln in the Bardo is the strangest Civil War ghost story you will ever read. That aspect of the book is very good and creative and interesting. I don’t have much more to say about that aspect of it. The ending is fantastic; brilliant; life-affirming.

I’d like to advance the theory that Lincoln in the Bardo contains a sly defense of historical fiction. A defense, even, of experimental fiction.

Ever since Plato, ethicists have been uncomfortable with fiction. It has an eerie similarity to lying, for them. Aren’t there enough true stories to learn from? Why would you have to make anything up, except to deceive? How can we trust any insights we glean from your fiction, given that it’s not true? George Saunders has never been a dead child. How then can he write about them?

Quotations from historical source documents precede every section of Lincoln in the Bardo. Saunders shows us his research. If he had read even half the books he refers to, most people would consider him well-informed. This is one kind of defense: that the author can read what those who experienced a thing wrote about it. If you trust them, why can’t the author trust them?

But he does better. He gives a lengthy catalog of descriptions of the moon on the night of a particular party. Witnesses describe it as every possible color, and every possible shape. It’s white and full. Half-full and obscured by clouds. It’s blue-tinged. It’s green.

He did the same thing later on with Abraham Lincoln’s eyes. They’re brown. They’re brown-gray. They’re gray. They’re gray-blue. They’re blue.

Meteorological and astronomical science can tell us the moon’s actual shape that night. If Saunders had wanted it, he could have looked it up. But he wanted to show us how unreliable witness accounts are. Platonic critics of fiction are as beset by epistemological difficulties as anybody else.

You want the truth of lived experience? Not even the people it happened to get it right.

So we tell each other stories. And they’re part true and they’re part made up. And we know the author is trying to deceive us. The author is trying to deceive us into truth and beauty and virtue. Stories, even autobiographical stories, even first-hand witness accounts, aren’t true the way scientific measurements, mathematical formulas or religious/philosophical/political doctrines are meant to be true.

Stories are true the way a beating heart pumps blood.



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In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In Our Time is an Ernest Hemingway sampler pack. All his favorite topics are in here: fishing, literature, drinking, bullfighting, horses, war, hobos. If you like Hemingway for his choice of topics, you’ll find something to enjoy here.

People write a lot about the last chapter of Ulysses. My own theory about it is that it has a particular and rare kind of enjoyment to offer. Which is that it’s been subjecting you to some kind of discomfort, and then at the end, it releases you from it. Like, the author has walled you into a crypt, and the last chapter knocks a hole in the bricks and lets the sun in.

For Ulysses, the prison is the over-analytical minds of Bloom and Dedalus. The Molly chapter finally lets in some light. For In Our Time, the prison is all interpersonal relationships. Heartache and pride and anger and fear. The Big Two-Hearted River chapter, in which Nick does nothing but hunt and fish, is our escape from all that.

This has made me think a lot about how to end a novel. There are a lot of strategies, of course. But if your novel has been full of complexity and difficulty, letting up at the end might be good. Giving the reader a door out. This probably won’t work if your book has been a rollicking good time from the start. Which is why a certain kind of reader might find Big Two-Hearted River boring.

But I liked it. After so many painful yet beautiful portraits of human complexity, it’s a relief. He returns to the simple pleasure of living off the land.

It is very, very American.



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Census by Jesse Ball

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Ever since reading The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp and Carr, I’ve been a bit mystified by Jesse Ball. How are his worlds so dreamlike, yet so sharp and well-defined? There’s never any mystery what things look like. And yet you’d never be able to say what historical period or country the stories take place in. (An exception to this is How To Set a Fire and Why.)

In the introduction to Census, he tells us that he grew up with a brother, who’s no longer alive. The brother had a learning disability of some kind. Ball expected to spend his life taking care of his brother, but that ended up not happening. Census is a kind of tribute to this brother.

It’s also a writing manual, in a way. A key to Ball’s strategy. I’m only guessing, of course. But knowing this about his early family life does seem to shine some light on his writing. As a young person, he must have become good at communicating with learning disabled people. This is how he’s able to write with such simplicity, and yet still reach the deepest emotional places. I’ll bet his books are very accessible to neurodivergent people. And I imagine they’re also easy to translate into other languages.

Maybe his brother is the true, invisible audience to his novels. I have absolutely no grounds to make that claim at all. Maybe I’m too sentimental.

I suppose, as somebody who values the ability to simplify language, I’m almost jealous of him. What better training as a writer than to grow up with a beloved, learning disabled brother?

Or maybe put it this way: if you imagined that you were writing to somebody who was distracted, or learning disabled, or perhaps not a native English speaker, or stressed out, wouldn’t that help your writing? You’d take as much of the burden of communication onto yourself as you possible could. You’d impose as little mental effort on your reader as you could. That’s one way of respecting them.

There are other ways of respecting your reader. But that’s one of them.

Of course it’s very complicated. Census does a fantastic job of communicating the nuances of these relationships.

One thing I particularly like is the tattooing. The protagonist, as part of the census, goes around tattooing people. It’s reminiscent of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. But there’s a difference. Where, in In the Penal Colony, the state inscribes itself on bodies with an inhuman attitude and an ill-defined, transcendent purpose, in Census the protagonist carries out the state’s self-inscription with tenderness and a kind of ironic or absurdist detachment from any ostensible purpose it might serve. It’s as though the protagonist is aware of the criticism In the Penal Colony embodies and has accepted it. Yet he doesn’t fight the state, or flee from it, but accepts it as absurd, and then accepts his own absurdity as well.

It’s very interesting, and I’ll be chewing on it for a long time. There are insights there that diligent study will expose.



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The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The best thing about this book is the view of India. I don’t know enough to say whether it’s accurate; but it’s different. And it has the feel of truth. The way it resists some stereotypes and embraces others speaks to authenticity. (With one exception.) Because how would you know which was which unless you’d been there? For instance, I never would have known about betel nut spit staining streets and things.

I don’t like where the author decided to have the protagonist end up. It’s like he made a list of corrupt political practices in India. Then he made at least one distinct harm from each of them happen to his protagonist in youth. And then he made his protagonist practice or condone each of them, later in life.

“See,” he’s saying, “my protagonist knows exactly how bad this is. It happened to him. And he does it anyway.”

He describes a sub rosa system of political control that seems almost fantastical to me. This is the exception to the general feeling of authenticity I had about it. Mob bosses threatening to kill the entire extended family of every Indian worker? Really?

That’s not to say it doesn’t tally. It’s internally consistent. If this was a sci-fi world, I would rate the political system as well-constructed. There aren’t any serious inconsistencies or oversights that would cast doubt on it.

I guess it’s that it’s so different from my own experience and political tradition. I wish I could say for sure that it’s made up or exaggerated. But I guess, until I read more, I’ll have to conclude that I don’t know enough to tell.

It’s expedient for the drama. To break away from his past life, Balram has to give up his family. And because of this system, it’s not just that they’re dead to him. They are literally dead.

We know from the beginning that the narrative arc is for Balram to break away from his past. He’s ‘the White Tiger’, set apart from childhood. With heroic effort, he breaks away from poverty. He breaks away from family ties. He breaks away from geographical ties. He breaks through cultural and caste boundaries.

I only wish the author had let him break away from corruption, too.



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