Julian Barnes, LEVELS OF LIFE

I don't know whether I would call Julian Barnes' new book a collection of linked essays or a monograph, but I do know that I admired it very much. At first I was hesitant: it begins with a decent but rather workmanlike account of early ballooning and aerial photography that only (ahem) rises to the level of art near the end, in considering how these new hobbies changed human attitudes toward religion and human endeavor. A second section, more short story than essay, recounts a love affair, of sorts, between Sarah Bernhardt and Frederick Burnaby, both of whom once went up in balloons; it's a reasonably charming evocation of devotion and desire on the part of two colorful characters, but it doesn't add up to much, and is easily the least relevant chunk of the book. Happily, the third and longest section redeems the first by tying the metaphors of ballooning into a succinct, devastating memoir of grief. Barnes grasps what so many writers do not, that death, "that banal, unique thing," is not easy to write meaningfully about, its very familiarity rendering its intensity almost impossible to capture. The brevity of this account works to its benefit (indeed, despite only running about 60 pages of large print, it may be slightly too long). Barnes moves briskly but devastatingly through his own loss, describing scattered experiences that combine to create a web of references, bringing order to the chaos of memory and allowing humor to leaven the intensity (he critiques the phrase "lost his wife to cancer," juxtaposing it with "We lost our dog to gypsies" and "He lost his wife to a commercial traveler"). The experience of the book, defined by the unexpected connections and callbacks, can't be captured in a review. It's not that Barnes has new insights into grief; I don't think there have been any of those for a very long time. But his style has a disjointed yet organized poetry that brings home the weight of grief, how it hits over and over like waves on a shore. This book will only take an hour or two to read, and at that length, it's almost certainly worth your time.

Luke Barr, PROVENCE, 1970

A gift for sprightly narrative non-fiction enlivens Luke Barr's account of several famous food writers, including his great-aunt M.F.K. Fisher, in France in 1970. They ate together, enjoyed the countryside together, and gossiped together, often about each other. It's all a bit too highbrow to be considered "dirt," but there's certainly enough sniping and snobbery to fill out an episode of a reality TV show. Conflicts within the group weren't merely a matter of pettiness, though; they also reflected different approaches to French and American cooking, preferences for hybridization and utility (Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard) vs. authenticity and difficulty (Richard Olney, Simone Beck). It's not hard to tell whose side Barr is on-- if we hadn't already guessed from his being related to one of them, the choice of names in the subtitle would give it away-- but he's clearly made some effort to be judicious, and clearly respects the principles, if not the individuals, on the opposing side.

The subtitle also promises "the Reinvention of American Taste," but doesn't really deliver: to the extent that it has occurred at all (I think well-to-do writers like Barr often lose sight of how most Americans continue to eat), it had already been created by these key players at the time they arrived in Provence. Fisher and Child were at points of professional or intellectual transition, yes, but the significance of that was more personal than national. And it's on the personal level that Provence, 1970 succeeds, as a romantic portrait of colorful characters exploring their passions in a picturesque setting. Barr tells the story well, balancing light biographical detail with charming incident and fascinating descriptions of culinary methods. An epilogue describing Barr's own visit to Provence is a fine piece of writing on its own merits, but somewhat jarring attached to the historical material. One wonders if it wasn't included in part to pad out what is not a physically substantial book. In any case, this is delightful reading. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to those utterly unfamiliar with the people involved-- there isn't enough background to give readers who know nothing about the period a sense of just what was at stake and where everyone was coming from-- but if you're already an admirer of Fisher, Child, Beard, Olney, or Beck, this is an excellent window into the social world of the people who brought French cooking into the American mainstream.

Margaret Drabble, THE PURE GOLD BABY

The cover copy would have you believe that the subject of Margaret Drabble's new book is motherhood, but though that's certainly a topic of interest in this rich, wide-ranging novel, I'd say a bigger issue in The Pure Gold Baby is change. Drabble's first novel was published exactly fifty years ago, when she was in her early twenties, which is not so far off from the characters and the historical moment with which this novel begins, and the narrator offers a steady stream of reflections on how different the world was at that time. The force of that difference is made especially evident by contrast with title character Anna, the mentally-challenged daughter of protagonist Jess, who is much the same in her forties as she was in childhood. Jess delayed a possible career in anthropology to become a single mother, and when Anna's difficulties became evident, the delay became permanent. Both are happy with their conjoined lives, at least to the extent that Anna's emotional state can be determined. But the possibility raised by the Plath quote in the title, of a darker side to their relationship, is one of the undercurrents beneath the novel's placid surface.

The narrator is another member of Jess' social circle, bright young things of the 1960s literary and intellectual world. Too smart to be cheaply nostalgic, she is nonetheless all too aware of how the physical world of her youth has disappeared, and of how beliefs and practices have developed over time, especially in terms of how an implicitly white, male, and psychologically stable elite relates to women, racial minorities, and the mentally ill. There may be a few too many of these "We wouldn't have called it that then" asides, but in the main Drabble strikes a good balance between reflection and other forms of thematic momentum, using the narrator's crisp recollections to remind readers, as only an elder (but not yet "elderly") novelist can, of how much things change within a single lifetime. She describes the characters-- poets, producers of TV documentaries, charity executives-- in a way that evokes that time and place without creating a caricature; it's a group of people, not an over-elaborate portrait of an era, and the course of the narrative is shaped by credible events rather than contrived dramas. A deep, humanist sympathy is evident throughout, an awareness of universal frailty that's never soppy or morally feeble. Drabble understands the tragedy of growing old, of not being able to control one's body or mind. There may be ambiguities in Jess and Anna's relationship, but it's not due to any failing in either of them; it's simply the nature of our imperfect capacity to connect with one another.

There are novels that succeed by examining a single theme, character, or situation in ruthless clarity, and there are novels that succeed by tangling several issues in a way that reflects the complexity of life as it is actually lived. This is one of the latter. It would take many more words than I'm prepared to write to explain how this novel weaves together care homes, Dr. Livingston, Pearl Buck, and a doctor who specializes in bladder ailments. But I should emphasize that the flow of the narrative is so natural these intellectual concerns never feel shoehorned in, or like work. Drabble is unafraid to be flatly expository where necessary, allowing her to cover simple material more succinctly than the unnecessary application of "show don't tell" would allow. The result is a novel of three hundred pages with the richness of an epic, punctuated by dry asides ("Air terrorism has had some small beneficial side effects, and the habit of carrying resealable plastic bags on one's person is one of them") and tangential pieces of elegant or moving description. I say that this is a novel about change, but really that's not true: there are books that not "about" anything but the world and characters they describe. In that sense, then, this is a novel about how certain aspects of the 21st century look to London academics and writers who lived through much of the 20th. It can be read and enjoyed simply as a story about a group of characters, but its real power is as a compendium of linked observations on past and present, health and illness, change and stasis. Some readers may be put off by the lack of an obvious narrative or thematic focus, but I for one prefer such complexity to overly-detailed elaboration of overly-familiar themes. The Pure Gold Baby was my first Margaret Drabble novel, and it won't be my last.

Una McCormack, THE CRIMSON SHADOW

[This book, unlike most titles reviewed on this blog, was not supplied to me as a review copy.]

 I used to read a lot of Star Trek novels, but about four years ago they stopped appealing to me, and I decided to spend my money on other things. But I'm still in touch with people who do read them, and I've never really lost track of what's going on in the Trek novel "universe." So it was probably inevitable that something would pull me back in. The something has turned out to be an event miniseries where the first two books were written by my two favorite Trek novelists back in the day: David R. George III and Una McCormack. I should note that McCormack, author of the book under review here, is an Internet acquaintance of mine: we follow each other on Twitter and occasionally make unfunny jokes about geeky things. But I was a fan of McCormack's work before I ever "met" her, so I don't think it's the personal-knowledge factor that made The Crimson Shadow such a fast, fun, thoughtful read.

It was, though, probably personal knowledge that got me to read it before the previous book in the series, Revelation and Dust, which I own but hadn't gotten around to when The Crimson Shadow was delivered. I don't know whether I would recommend that course to most readers. There's a biggish plot development in Revelation and Dust that also influences events in The Crimson Shadow; I had already been inadvertently spoiled, but if you're going to read Revelation and Dust at all, you might want to do so before starting The Crimson Shadow.

But enough preliminaries. What is The Crimson Shadow actually about? In a word: Cardassians. There are smallish supporting roles for some TNG regulars, particularly Picard, but this is basically a book about Cardassia. Nearly ten years have passed within the Star Trek universe since the DS9 finale, and the Federation is preparing to withdraw its occupation and humanitarian forces from Cardassia Prime. Federation President Nan Bacco and Cardassian Ambassador to the Federation Elim Garak have worked out on the final agreement, and all that needs to happen now is a signing to seal the deal. But the end of the occupation means a new order, and not even a tailor like Garak can guarantee that it will be a movement toward freedom and democracy rather than a return to authoritarian xenophobia. When unexpected events on Cardassia Prime and elsewhere threaten to unleash chaos, extraordinary steps may prove necessary to prevent the worst. But will those steps bring about the very moral decline they're meant to avert?

The interesting thing about this novel is that it manages at once to be a fast-paced quick read (I only needed a few hours) and a resonant examination of a society in transition. McCormack has always been good with Cardassians (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Never Ending Sacrifice was the last Trek book I read four years ago, and I definitely left on a high note), and here she focuses on how the Cardassians as defeated aggressors can come to terms with their past and shape a decent future. While there's one obvious demagogue, most characters are honestly trying to do the best thing in a difficult situation, at least according to their own frames of references. But since those frames of reference were shaped by a society that was poisonous and eventually poisoned itself, there's plenty of room for conflict. Almost everyone has something to be guilty about, must struggle with the line between acceptable bending of the rules for the greater good and abuse of power. After a light-hearted Part One, events take a darker turn in Part Two, and the sense of tragedy is, by Star Trek standards, surprisingly potent, as former allies turn on each other and battle lines are drawn.

But, as I've suggested, this isn't a slog through dark territory. Garak being Garak, there's plenty of humor, and McCormack doesn't feel the need to drive her thematic points home with lugubrious language-- a few mentions of the extent of the wartime devastation and of the inherently inhospitable climate on Cardassia Prime prove sufficient. Intrigues piled on intrigues keep the plot moving at a steady clip without becoming over-complicated. And, as in other books, McCormack occasionally plays with omniscient, slightly obtrusive narration, rather than the straight third-person limited of most Trek fiction. I'd like to have seen more of this, actually; it makes a nice change, and compensates for occasional infelicities in the rest of the prose and in the dialogue. Garak aside, the characters aren't terribly complex, but that has its own benefits: they're ordinary people making their way as best they can in a destroyed world. Overall, The Crimson Shadow is a fine novel, not enormously substantial but more than complex enough for its own purposes, and comes highly recommended to fans of DS9, Garak, or Cardassians generally, and to readers interested in science fiction about the aftermath of tyranny. If you don't want to commit to the full miniseries, it works by itself, but the intersections between it and Revelation and Dust (which I've now started) suggest an intriguing approach to the overall structure of The Fall, one that has me happy, for the moment, to have given Star Trek fiction another shot.

Lost in the Desert: Rick Bass, ALL THE LAND TO HOLD US

Rick Bass' new novel manages to overcome frustrating structural issues with its elegantly clotted language and a strong sense of the tragic dualities of human desire. The narrative is all over the place-- 80 pages of one set of characters, 100 pages of another, then back to the first set, then combining the two and introducing others to boot-- and so slow-moving that the first half utterly fails to build momentum. It's not just the absence of plot: the prose and themes are also repetitive, beating the reader over the head with "desert as metaphor for the human condition," and lingering so long on description of the beauty and deadliness of the milieu that the reader's initial awe gives way to irritation. But the second half, though still longer than it needs to be, moves at a more reasonable pace and has more emotional variety, so that the self-regarding intensity of the language becomes a virtue rather than a drawback. And even in the rougher patches there are extraordinary scenes that capture perfectly the way those who build lives in inhospitable places are but a reflection of the universal urge toward dangerous yet deeply satisfying experience. Bass writes, "What was it about a desert landscape, he wondered, that produced such needs and appetites, such oversized dreamers and flash-in-the-pan pretenders?" But of course those dreamers and pretenders are no different from the rest of us, except that the scope of their dreams and pretensions is greater, and therefore ideal fodder for a gifted novelist's imperfect yet unforgettable creation.

Death with Conversations: Javier Marias, THE INFATUATIONS

One of the character in Javier Marias' latest novel claims that "once you've finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel's imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with." Characters don't necessarily speak for their authors, and that's especially likely to be true in this case, but all the same the description is fitting, if not for most novels, then certainly for The Infatuations. The plot is that of a thriller: a solitary young woman becomes involved by chance in the mystery surrounding the death of a man she didn't know but had often watched eating with his wife in a cafe the young woman also frequented. But this is a "literary" thriller, which means that the plot is as implausible as in an ordinary thriller, but less complicated and intriguing. If I described any more of it, you'd know almost everything.

The theory, of course, is that a literary thriller makes up for narrative deficiencies by psychological or thematic depth-- the "possibilities and ideas" factor-- and by elegant prose. Marias offers the latter but not the former. This is a novel defined by its characters' long-winded philosophical ponderings and dialogues, the kind where everyone sounds the same because they're all speaking with the voice of the author. It's a fine voice, the kind that piles up long sentences that nonetheless remain easily to follow and captivating, but what it has to say is rather less surprising than it seems to imagine. Yes, grief is profound but ultimately transient; yes, people are adept at justifying their own crimes and failings; yes, infatuation inspires embarrassing impulses even in those who are aware of their irrational state. And yes, we can never really know whether others are lying to us. These are timeless and powerful themes; however, their potency depends not on artful generalized expression but on their embodiment in complicated yet credible characters, and Marias is far more interested in style than in characterization. His vertiginous sentences may be a delight to read, but the flood of additional clauses elaborates without adding nuance-- they have mass, but not weight. Only occasionally does an aperçu inspire the sense of unexpected truth toward which they all so evidently aspire.

What saves the book from collapsing under its unfulfilled ambitions is the protagonist, Maria. Known to the couple in the cafe as "the Prudent Young Woman," she's the closest thing to a rich character the novel has to offer, and does end up presenting a quietly effective study in how outward lives can fail to reflect the intensity of the impulses and desires storming beneath the surface. She's not a rounded character in the traditional sense, but her thoughtful evaluations of her own behavior and those of the people she meets do suggest a distinctive personality that grounds the fanciful narrative. The Infatuations may be too much in the familiar vein of the postmodern novel about truth and deception, but it offers small compensations that balance its larger failings.

Hanya Yanagihara, THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES

Hanya Yanagihara's accomplished debut is that rarity of rarities: a novel that balances weighty political and ethical themes and powerful character study, and does so without making either element unbearably overt. The plot is loosely inspired by the life of Nobel-winning scientist Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. Gajdusek's analogue is Norton Perina, who became famous for discovering an isolated Micronesian tribe whose diet allowed them to live greatly extended lives, but at a terrible price in mental acuity. He later adopted dozens of children from the island nation where that tribe lived, and was eventually arrested and convicted for molesting one of them. While in prison, he begins an autobiography at the request of a sympathetic (not to say sycophantic) colleague; that autobiography, with explanatory footnotes by the colleague, makes up the main text of The People in the Trees.

As you might expect, unreliable narration is an issue, but less in terms of outright dishonesty than of Perina's failure to understand the extent of his own pathology, to recognize the irony of describing his life as "a story with disease at its heart." Some might see the central question of the novel as how a man so brilliant could do something so awful, but to my mind that's a red herring: genius and morality have no easily quantified relationship. The true subject here is the mutually destructive connection between Perina and the country of U'ivu. Perina, already isolated and emotionally vulnerable after an unusual childhood and an education in the lonely, awkward world of biological research, is further unmoored by the strangeness of U'ivu's jungle landscape and the different social norms he finds there. And later, as Perina's shocking discovery becomes known, U'ivu itself is changed forever by the arrival of Americans, whose clothing, diet, and culture soon threaten to wipe out traditional ways.

Yanagihara knows to approach these issues of colonialism and cultural evolution with a light touch, evoking the inherent tragedy quickly but deftly, and filtering it through Perina's own peculiar perceptions, which mix guilt at what he has brought on with a rather racist sense of his own superiority to the pitiable U'ivuians. A similar ambivalence is present in Perina's commentary on medical ethics, which on the surface is a chillingly indifferent justification of cruelty to animals and humans but which reflects clear guilt about some of the things he's done. That Perina is a nuanced, regretful figure rather than a strawman of scientific and imperial arrogance, is part of the subtlety that keeps The People in the Trees from collapsing under the weight of its own ambitions. It helps also that the world of the novel is richly realized. Yanagihara's prose isn't very elaborate-- more stylish than one would expect from a pure scientist, but not much more-- but that very simplicity, and the work she has clearly done making the settings, cultures, and characters credible, creates a sense of the lifelike more meaningful than what simple vividness of language could achieve.

It's difficult to capture without extensive quotation the intelligence and humanity that Yanagihara demonstrates in her deployment of Perina's perspective, which like most unreliable narration undermines itself for the attentive reader. It's also difficult to say whether the book's finest section is the middle-- Perina's journey into U'ivu, which without becoming overly stylized reflects the emotional dislocation of entering an unfamiliar landscape and meeting people radically different from oneself-- or the ending-- Perina's adoption of dozens of native children and the home life he builds for them, in which his ignorance of the sheer strangeness and sadness of his existence generates a kind of sympathy even as he behaves as monstrously as a man can behave. The former is more stylistically intense, but the latter sharpens the novel's thematic potency by bringing into focus the links between personal and socio-political self-delusion. In any case, the greatness of The People in the Trees is not in an individual section, but in its scope as a whole, the unstated connections that invite rereading, if one can bear to endure its tragedies anew. This smart, heartbreaking novel is one of the best I've read this year.