The Sellout (by Paul Beatty)

The Sellout was the winner of this year's Tournament of Books! All the discussions of it throughout the tournament completely sold me on this novel, many times over, so of course I had to read it.

Broadly, it's a satirical novel about race relations in America. The main character, known only by his nickname of Bonbon, becomes an involuntary slaveowner and then reinstitutes segregation, which turns out to have a positive impact on the black community in his Los Angeles neighborhood. And I could quote it all day long.

“Sometimes I wish Darth Vader had been my father. I'd have been better off. I wouldn't have a right hand, but I definitely wouldn't have the burden of being black and constantly having to decide when and if I gave a shit about it. Plus, I'm left-handed.” 

 

“I'm so fucking tired of black women always being described by their skin tones! Honey-colored this! Dark-chocolate that! My paternal grandmother was mocha-tinged, café-au-lait, graham-fucking-cracker brown! How come they never describe the white characters in relation to foodstuffs and hot liquids? Why aren't there any yogurt-colored, egg-shell-toned, string-cheese-skinned, low-fat-milk white protagonists in these racist, no-third-act-having books? That's why black literature sucks!” 

I'm a farmer, and farmers are natural segregationists. We separate the wheat from the chaff. I'm not Rudolf Hess, P. W. Botha, Capitol Records, or present-day U.S. of A. Those motherfuckers segregate because they want to hold on to power. I'm a farmer: we segregate in an effort to give every tree, every plant, every poor Mexican, every poor nigger, a chance for equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living organism has room to breathe.”

I actually have a hard time figuring out how to write about this. It feels very urgent and very current. It captures Los Angeles so incredibly well. It's funny but the kind of funny that makes your heart clench. And it's especially hard to write about it as a white person -- I feel like the two white people who go to the black comedy club towards the end of the novel, when the comedian yells at them:

“What the fuck are you interloping motherfuckers laughing at? . . . Do I look like I’m fucking joking with you? This shit ain’t for you. Understand? Now get the fuck out! This is our thing!”

Googling for that quote got me to this reviewer, who had the same experience and who actually articulates a lot of what I thought about this novel. So go there and read her very thoughtful analysis. And definitely read The Sellout.

The Sympathizer (by Viet Thanh Nguyen)

Holy shit this book is good.

I read it because it is in the Tournament of Books and also ticks off one of the boxes in the Read Harder Challenge (Viet Thanh Nguyen is an author from Southeast Asia). Two for the price of one! I wasn't sure what to expect except that I knew it was about a Vietnamese-American spy and set during the Vietnam War.

This is so erudite, so well-written, so funny and tragic and entertaining and transporting. The observations of Vietnam and America will absolutely change the way you see the country and the war. You will also never watch Apocalypse Now the same way again. I highlighted dozens of quotes as I was reading and I immediately recommended it emphatically to half the people I know.

I haven't read all the Tournament of Books shortlist (by a long shot) but this is absolutely my sleeper pick to win it all. A Little Life will be hard to beat but The Sympathizer, to me, is even better. It's as good as The Orphan Master's Son, if not better.  Highest recommendation.

The Story of My Teeth (by Valeria Luiselli)

This book is... weird.

It's a good weird! The first four or so parts are the autobiography of auctioneer Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez, told in a charming and surreal narrative style. (He talks about events and concludes them with statements like "End of anecdote.") The title comes from the fact that he has false teeth (which used to be Marilyn Monroe's... maybe) and auctions off other famous false teeth, and then loses his teeth under mysterious circumstances. You're never quite on firm ground during Gustavo's story.  (The next few paragraphs are all spoilers, so proceed at your own risk. You should be safe with the final two paragraphs.)

The next part is the account of a character Gustavo has met, whom he commissions to write his "dental autobiography" -- thus casting a light on the previous parts, which we now know were written by this ghostwriter. Next is a timeline of events (both fictional and non-) by the actual translator of the book from Spanish to English. Then the epilogue by Valeria Luiselli herself, which explains that it was a novel commissioned by an art gallery, sponsored by a juice factory, written to be read aloud to the juice factory employees as a serial novel. (She got recordings of the juice factory employees discussing each installment.)

She concludes by saying, "This book began as a collaboration, and I like to think of it as an ongoing one, where every new layer modifies the entire content completely." As you can see, she succeeds there.

It is postmodernist in flavor, and feels more like a deliberate art-gallery-style piece of art than any novel I've ever read before. It is a meditation on the nature of art, reality, labels, and so much more that I can't even articulate. I cannot wait to hear what they make of it in the Tournament of Books.

(Note that it seems like a lot was lost here in the translation from physical book to ebook. I would give this a try in its physical form, not electronically.)

The Invaders (by Karolina Waclawiak)

I don't know what the Tournament of Books was thinking with this one. It's like a mediocre Tom Perrotta, and I'm not a Tom Perrotta fan to begin with. I gather that it was very well-reviewed; maybe it just wasn't for me.

There are two narrators, Teddy and Cheryl. They live in a wealthy beach town, where Cheryl is Teddy's stepmother. The people in the town don't accept Cheryl, and Teddy is a bit of a douche. The beach community is insular and snobbish. From there, the story unfolds in unpredictable ways, which I did appreciate.

I had problems with each of the main characters, though. I found Teddy's first-person dialogue unconvincing and Cheryl is so frustratingly passive and opaque that it is difficult to care about her at all. Her husband, Teddy's father, is an over-the-top asshole. Actually the people in the town -- meant to embody white wealthy privilege, I guess -- are unconvincing too. It's a novel filled with caricatures. Even the names -- like who is named Teddy or Cheryl? I don't need sympathetic characters, but they never felt real to me in any way.  And actually, as unpredictable as the ending is, it's also implausible.

Again, up against Fates and Furies or A Little Life, this one loses bigtime. You never know which way the ToB is going to go, but for me, no contest. It shouldn't even be on the shortlist as far as I'm concerned.

The New World (by Chris Adrian & Eli Horowitz)

It's weird. It's not weird enough.

Someone on Goodreads said the final Tournament of Books slate was "hipster" and I think if any book deserves that label, it's probably The New World. (The most hipstery thing for me was the authors refusing to capitalize acronyms. The main character, a doctor, goes into the or or the icu. Struck me as a pointless affectation.) I gather this was originally presented as an interactive ebook, so reading it on Kindle I may have lost some of the impact. The publishing house is now defunct, so I think we're stuck with the non-interactive version for now.

It has a crackerjack premise -- Jim has had his head cryogenically preserved and wakes up in a distant future, and Jane is the wife he has left behind. By far, the most interesting parts are the future -- will he turn out to be a computer simulation? Is the future in any way real? Can and will Jane join him there? Is he doomed to forget her? Is he willing to? What happens after his "Debut"? Sadly, most of these very interesting questions are never answered.

Beneath the hipster gimmickry, there's a beating heart, which I appreciate -- but ultimately it develops into a conventional love story that I never quite buy. For example [SPOILERS], what evidence is there that Jane loves Jim? She guilts herself into marrying him, then cheats on him, and never particularly seems to like him. Yet we're supposed to be moved by their love that transcends death? I'm not convinced.

This is going to be an interesting book to discuss in the early ToB rounds, but I don't think it will go particularly far -- put it up against A Little Life, say, and it crumbles to dust.

A Little Life (by Hanya Yanagihara)

This book appeared on the top of many "best book of the year" lists last year. But every review made sure to mention that it's grim, that it delves into the life of a man whose past is devastatingly traumatic, and that we slowly learn the details of that devastatingly traumatic life over the course of 720 pages. So I downloaded a sample on my Kindle and then never managed to bring myself to dive in. But then I opened my Kindle app and started reading a novel at random -- not realizing what I was reading or remembering what I'd heard about it -- and was hooked.

It starts off as a fairly standard, if extremely well wrought, story of four multi-ethnic friends in a timeless New York City.  Willem, a waiter and aspiring actor, JB, a spoiled artist, Malcolm, an aspiring architect with daddy issues, and Jude, who cuts himself, who is disabled in some vague way, whose past is a mystery. All four characters are compelling and their stories are well told. As I said, it captivates the reader immediately. Slowly, the focus shifts to center on Jude. Slowly, his past is revealed. Slowly, the novel asks the question: what defines the value of a life? What healing is possible when you've been traumatized to your very soul? Will Jude be redeemed? Can he be? What about the people who love him?

We joke around that the movie of Ian's dreams would be the most depressing movie of all time, with a title like Holocaust Barn. It would be a black-and-white Swedish documentary where nothing happens except maybe in the third act a horse commits suicide. And also there's the Holocaust. But unlike Ian, I like my entertainment more escapist. And at points, this novel did start to feel like tragedy piled on top of tragedy, trauma on top of trauma, until it was basically a Lars von Trier film without the misogyny. Holocaust Barn: The Novel. But then I read this Atlantic piece by Garth Greenwell, which argues that A Little Life is purposely operatic tragedy, an allegory for the experiences of gay men:

Just as Yanagihara’s characters challenge conventional categories of gay identity, so A Little Life avoids the familiar narratives of gay fiction. Yanagihara approaches the collective traumas that have so deeply shaped modern gay identity—sickness and discrimination—obliquely, avoiding the conventions of the coming-out narrative or the AIDS novel. But queer suffering is at the heart of A Little Life... Jude’s childhood is an extreme iteration of the abandonment, exploitation, and abuse that remain endemic in the experience of queer young people. Recent discussion of that experience has been dominated by an affirmative narrative—“It Gets Better”—that may be true for most. But it isn’t true for Jude.

I don't know if this is what Yanagihara intended, but this reading unlocked the novel for me, and made it possible for me to appreciate the experience of reading it without getting derailed by the "tragedy porn" argument. It's not that. It's something deeper, something more profound.

I actually knew what was going to happen in advance (I read the Wikipedia summary so I could brace myself for how bad it was going to get) but it's still hard reading. The full meaning of the title comes as a punch in the gut. The cover art is horrible. The horse jumps off the barn roof. And yet I agree with all those glowing reviews -- it's a powerful, unforgettable tour de force of a novel.  If I haven't scared you off completely, brace yourself and dive in.

Fates and Furies (by Lauren Groff)

This year I'm not going to play the fool's game of guessing what I think will be shortlisted for the next Tournament of Books, but if I were, I'd put some money on this buzzy novel by Lauren Groff.

This is an incredibly well-written, intimate portrait of a marriage and the lives orbiting it. The relationships are messy and the backstories are complex. Been done before, you might say. But not quite like this.

The point of view is largely centered on the married couple at the center of the novel, but it drifts in and out of the heads of minor characters, sometimes even just for a paragraph. This makes it somewhat obvious that the perspective of the wife, Mathilde, is being omitted -- at least until the last third of the novel, which shifts into her point of view and recasts many of the novel's previous incidents and events.  I loved the structure of this -- Groff jumps around in time, and secrets unfold non-chronologically for maximum impact. Some secrets are predictable, some are not, but all are compelling. 

The writing itself is virtuosic, yet it was entertaining enough to qualify as a "vacation read" and made a day of travel fly by. I'm oddly reminded of Jonathan Franzen, only Fates and Furies blows Freedom out of the water as far as I'm concerned. An excellent litfic novel.