The Snake Stone

This is the second novel in Jason Goodwin's series about the Ottoman investigator Yashim, which I am reading before reviewing the most recent one, to be published in March.

There is little new in this novel beyond the themes and characters Goodwin introduced in The Janissary Tree. In fact, this book is almost a carbon copy of the previous one. Yashim visits the court -- the sultan is now ill, so the focus is on the valide, the sultan's mother. He eats and pals around with his friend, the Polish ambassador Palewsky, who once again save's Yashim's life by rescuing him from an otherwise fatal predicament. Yashim does some cooking and shopping, experiences once again a eunuch's frustrating yearning for a damsel in distress. The novel turns on one of Istanbul's historic sights -- the Janissary tree in the first book, and the serpent column in this one. And the climactic chase takes place in one of the city's distinctive architectural features.

The author's intimate familiarity with the culture and history of this fabulous city and his skillful prose bringing it alive are still what carry this series, though it is starting to wear thin and I wonder what he will do to pick things up in the subsequent novels. I know that the third book takes place at least in part in Venice, so we'll see what that brings.

Aside from the lack of novelty in this second installment -- other regular characters such as his transvestite entertainer friend and a fruit stall owner dutifully make their appearances here -- what is missing the most is more characterization of Yashim. In fact, after intimating some depths of character in the first book, Goodwin actually seems to pull back from going to deeply into his character. The reader's empathy for this unusual investigator becomes, I think, more attentuated, rather than less so, in this novel.

The Help

Just because a book is a runaway bestseller doesn't mean it can't be good and Kathryn Stockett's phenomenally successful narrative about "colored" maids and their employers in 1960s Mississippi has somehow struck a deep chord in the country.

Boomers of course can still dimly recognize a familiar world from our childhood, though, as with "Mad Men," it's amazing to see how much attitudes have changed. Stockett's book may not be literature for the ages -- I doubt, for instance, that it will have the staying power of To Kill a Mockingbird -- but it is somehow comforting for our generation to see how successful the civil rights struggle has been.

It's timely, too, when you see Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's recent gaffe about racist city councils in his youth not being so bad -- some people still don't get it.

Reading this book has been a particularly interesting experience because I started the audiobook version on a long drive to North Carolina, but for various reasons got nowhere near the end and decided to read the hard copy to finish it. The novel, which features three different narrators -- two of the maids and a white woman, lends itself marvelously to audio treatment. The audio version had three different readers, whose speech and dialect perfectly matched the characterization of the novel. It was jarring, then, to switch to print and to see the Southern black dialect rendered in cold black and white after the comfortable, soothing voices of the readers.

The Help is about a young white woman's effort to write a novel about how the maids viewed their mistresses, an enterprise fraught with peril for all involved. The fear engendered by the racial oppression of Jackson society in the early 1960s is palpable throughout the novel and creates a constant tension. The three narrators -- Skeeter, the would-be author, recently returned home from college; Aibileen, an elderly, thoughtful maid; and Minny, a cantankerous, angry woman with a heart of gold -- tell the story in tag-team fashion, the one picking up where the other left off, providing three different views of the characters. All three are true heroines, though each flawed in her own way. The characterization of each is so sensitive, so detailed, and so well-rounded that all three come alive for the reader as real people.

Some of the other characters are less successfully rendered. Hilly Holbrook, the pushy president of the Junior League and a bigot without boundaries, would put the Wicked Witch of the East to shame for sheer meanness. There is not a scintilla of sympathy for this woman, whose cruelty is heartless and strikes everyone from her helpless maids to her hapless mother.

Other characters also have trouble emerging from two dimensions, though the author has some success with Skeeter's mother and her boyfriend, the son of a state senator. Celia Foote, a buxom rube marked as poor white trash, remains perplexing as a character, and her husband is a cipher. All of the men, in fact, are weak, bewildered creatures in this book club favorite.

The author maintains the tension, the sense of danger -- marked by cruel events such as the blinding of one maid's grandson and the jailing of another maid for petty theft -- until the climax. But then she seems to flinch, and the climax is somewhat anticlimactic.

The killing of Medgar Evers in Jackson and the assassination of President Kennedy are the historic backdrop for this novel of racism, as well as Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech in Washington. It is a time capsule that shows us how far we have come in race relations, and, in a way, how far we have yet to go. For many of these prejudices are still with us. The efforts of these three women narrators, though, inspire the hope that we shall continue to overcome them.

The Death of Sweet Mister

Daniel Woodrell's totally original voice is experiencing something of a breakthrough after his Winter's Bone was made into a feature film. This book, which I bought on remainder some years ago, is being reissued in March, Amazon tells me, with a new foreword by Dennis Lehane.

Reviews compare him to Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy (in his southern phase?), but this Ozarks-based writer focusing on what he knows best is something new. In this novel, the narrator, 13-year-old Shuggie Akins, describes in unrelenting detail the sordidness of his life -- the very essence of poor, white trash -- in the fictional West Table, Missouri, right on the Arkansas border. He interrupts his narration with passing observations on the beauties and wonders of the nature in this backwoods, which stand in such contrast to this life.

Shuggie's (step)father, Red Akins, is one of the meanest cusses ever portrayed in literature. He has no redeeming qualities, as he bullies and beats his wife, Glenda (Shuggie's mother), exploits the youth by sending him into homes of invalids to steal their prescription drugs, and rousts about in a totally selfish existence, gambling, drinking and womanizing on a constant high.

But the centerpiece of the novel is the relationship between Glenda and Shuggie. The young adolescent is devoted to his mother, but dangerously aware of the slutty manner and behavior that makes her a permanent victim. Violence is in the air in this raw environment. In a masterful sleight of hand, however, Woodrell delivers the violence the reader expects, but offstage, and then slams the reader with another kind of violence that is not really unexpected but shocking nonetheless.

Someone mentioned Woodrell to me some years ago as a great read, and that's why I picked up the remainder. I grew up in part near the Ozarks, in Pittsburg, Kansas. Some of the telling details, such as Shuggie's pretending to sell the tabloid newspaper Grit as a cover for his home invasions, recall to me a world I've mostly forgotten.

The deft characterizations, lean plot, and gritty descriptions all make Woodrell well worth reading. But it is his language -- simple words, surprising metaphors, an easy virtuosity in using sophisticated language to describe painfully primitive scenes and emotions -- that mark him as a master. His books are compact -- this one is less than 200 pages -- and his oeuvre so far is relatively small, so it's an experience to be relished.

The Janissary Tree

Jason Goodwin's debut novel with the 19th-century investigator Yashim Togalu won the coveted Edgar Award for Best Novel. I've had it on my shelf for a while, but wanted to read it after I was assigned Goodwin's latest novel to review for the March issue of the new Washington Independent Review of Books.

I'll keep this blog short and save more about Goodwin and his background for the review. The Janissary Tree is a very literate, textured novel, rich in detail about the exotic Ottoman court, the Sublime Porte, without letting any of it overwhelm a lean mystery. Goodwin's main gimmick is to make Yashim a eunuch and to successfully overcome a certain natural squeamishness about this subject. It enables Yashim to enter the titillating world of the harem, to consult with the sultan in the Seraglio itself, and to move easily in a demi-monde of ambivalent sexuality, while keeping him an outcast and a loner.

The plot in this debut turns on the possibility of a resurgence of the Janissaries, the elite palace guard that was brutally suppressed 10 years before the time of this novel in 1836. The plot is developed with panache and some suitably gory murders. Intimations of a three-dimensional Yashim also emerge in this debut, presumably to be amplified in subsequent novels, so that his castration is something more than a gimmick to get your attention.

Istanbul -- Goodwin usually refers to it by this name because he is writing from a Turkish point of view though it was known as Constantinople in Europe until Ataturk officially changed the name in the 1920s -- is a marvelous setting for any novel, and Goodwin knows how to use it to great advantage. It is a quick, rewarding read, and I look forward to the sequels.

Servants of the Map

Andrea Barrett's stories about passion and desire, longing and frustration are stirring at times, almost unbearably poignant at others, and always compelling. They are about people driven by curiosity, the need to discover and understand nature. They are scientists, mostly, trained or amateur, or, in "The Cure", healers and caregivers.

The title story is the most austere, told in part in the letters of Max Vigne to his wife, Clara. He cannot own up to her his fascination for the pursuit of plant life above the tree line in the mountains he is surveying, his willingness to forgo the comforts of hearth and home, his rejection, in effect, of her and their children. He is clearly an emotionally stunted man but possessed of his own incipient passion, which he is able to finally recognize in the isolation of the Himalayas.

The next stories are each enchanting in their own way. "The Forest" tells of an encounter between an aging Polish scientist and a young, failed science student, who nonetheless bond through their love of the forest. Both characters wrestle with the expectations put upon them -- the one an accomplished scientist ignored by a hostess too wrapped up in her own little world, the other a young woman who chooses not to follow her sister's path. A quiet drink (of bison-grass vodka!), an interlude in the woods amidst the deer with the old man extracting what pleasure he can from this glancing acquaintance with a young woman who sees him as -- an old man.

The heart of the book comes, though, in the two related stories, "Theories of the Rain," and "Two Rivers." They are the stories of two siblings separated at a young age (two and five) but who retain an abiding attachment to each other. Lavinia, who describes herself at one point as nothing but appetite, is consumed by passionate longings that remain unfulfilled, even as she chooses the rational path of a suitable marriage. Even more telling is the story of her brother, Caleb, who loses the love of his life, but gets a second chance at marriage and devotion to a cause -- educating the deaf -- that gives him a fulfilling life.

It is in the novella-length "Two Rivers" that Barrett demonstrates the full range of her virtuosity as a writer, shifting points of view, creating characters in a few sketches who possess an astonishing range of emotion, giving us in these characters -- Samuel, Caleb, Stuart, Miriam, Grace, and the absent Lavinia -- a generational saga, all in 50 pages.

"The Mysteries of Ubiquitin" tells the story of a young girl whose infatuation with her parents' entomologist friend leads to a career in biochemistry and ultimately, if improbably, a romantic interlude with this older man when she is a young woman. The Polish scientist may have been better off keeping his romance in the realm of fantasy. This story, more explicitly than the others, suggests that the passion driving scientists is a profoundly erotic one.

"The Cure" is an ambitious tale, the longest in the book, that reunites Max Vigne's wife and daughters with characters that, apparently, appear in Barrett's earlier novels, Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal. While Barrett is fond of these connections, it was for me in this story not particularly enlightening, since I haven't read these other books. It was almost disappointing, in fact, to learn the after-story of Max Vigne's decision to pursue a career as a botanist. The depiction of the Adirondacks and the ravages of tuberculosis, with all its echoes of The Magic Mountain, made for an entertaining story nonetheless.

I ordered this book because of my research into MacArthur grant authors and because I like maps. I'm curious now to see whether Barrett can maintain this wonderful balance between her elegant prose and her probing of the nature of passion through an entire novel. Watch this space.

The Stone Gods

While this recent book by Jeanette Winterson made for compelling reading and there were flashes of feeling that stirred me, it left me puzzled in the end. The depictions of dying worlds made you feel the barrenness of physical existence, but in the end I think Winterson failed to master the genre well enough to make this work as a novel.

It reminded me strongly of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas -- so strongly that I felt obliged to look up the dates to see that Mitchell's 2004 book did indeed precede Winterson's 2007 novel. The wrapping of parallel stories through time, with the future worlds so strikingly similar in tone and sentiment, makes me wonder how much influence the Mitchell book had on Winterson, if any.

Winterson's style is simpler, more direct, less flashy and more lucid than Mitchell's, but Mitchell's work was somehow more coherent, with more of a punch. The interplanetary love affair between Billie and Spike in the end seemed too episodic to be moving in any way.

I have a good friend who swears by Jeanette Winterson, so I probably have not done her justice by starting with this later work, which I found on the remainder shelf at Politics & Prose. I have some of her earlier books, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The Passion, on my shelf and will read those before coming to any judgment. Perhaps they will give me a new appreciation for this book.

The Lazarus Project

I feel ambivalent about this book by Aleksandar Hemon. The writing is dazzling, it is chockablock with insights, it is a compelling, layered novel -- and yet curiously unmoving.

The narrator, Vladimir Brik, who shares many biographical details with Hemon, is troubled, flawed, and ultimately, I think, not very sympathetic. While the wit and perception carry the reader along, Brik's ambivalence and what seems to be lack of character makes him someone it's hard to care for.

This may well be Hemon's intention. Brik, caught between cultures and a perennial victim like the historical Lazarus Averbruch that he wants to write about, suffers from being in this situation. He is precisely not the hero his American wife, Mary, might expect. He is rather the somewhat unsatisfying character you encounter in Bosnia or Moldova or Ukraine.

"I recalled Mary, her strained, half-assed Catholic innocence, her belief that people were evil due to errors in their upbringing and a shortage of love in their lives. She just could not comprehend evil, the way I could not comprehend the way the washing machine worked or the reason the universe expanded into infinity. For her, the prime mover of every action was a good intention, and evil occurred only if the good intention was inadvertently betrayed or forgotten. Humans could not be essentially evil, because they were always infused by God's infinite goodness and love. We had conducted long, unerotic discussions about all this."

That deadly American innocence, as R.W.B. Lewis wrote about in The American Adam and Herman Melville portrayed so well in Benito Cereno. The innocence that remained ignorant of evil -- the kind of evil Chicago authorities showed toward immigrants Lazarus and Olga Averbruch, no different than the vicious anti-Semitism that chased them out of their homeland.

Brik contrasts storytelling in Bosnia -- where listeners voluntarily suspended disbelief to enjoy a good story, expecting it to be embellished or fabricated -- with that in America. "It was different in America: the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth -- reality is the fastest American commodity."

Obviously, Brik's relationship with his neurosurgeon wife is not in good shape and seems to have come completely unraveled by the end of the novel -- though it's hard to tell because Mary is more of a cipher than a person. Olga Averbruch, whose point of view is the primary one in the parallel narrative of the events in 1910 Chicago, and even her brother, the dead Lazarus, are more alive than Mary.

There are, as one blurb promises, traces of Ragtime and Everything Is Illuminated, but both narratives in this novel skim the surface and are not as satisfying as the total immersion of the two earlier works. The real focus is Brik's problem in finding a cultural identity, one that will enable him to fulfill the same yearning that Lazarus and Olga had, of finding happiness and peace after being uprooted.

Brik resists Mary's desire for him to become more acceptable by becoming more American. She accepts his foreignness as long as he is willing to grow out of it. So Brik seeks refuge in his alter ego Rora, the enigmatic Bosnian photographer who accompanies him on his "research" trip back to Europe. That trip slowly slips into a fantasy-land. It is impossible for the reader to consider Rora's fate as real, or, if it is supposed to be real, to care. But if we adopt the Bosnian attitude toward storytelling, it doesn't matter.

We will never know what really happened to Lazarus. It is a mystery without a solution and still tantalizing when the book ends. But we get a glimpse into a little-known episode in American history, when hysteria about "anarchism" and hyper-prejudice about Emma Goldman and other radicals suppressed civil rights in a way uncomfortably similar to today's anti-Islam hysteria. It would be helpful to know more about this period and hopefully Jamie Morris will be able to translate his project for a Goldman biography into reality.

Hemon is another recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, like Yiyun Li. This book is more cerebral than The Vagrants and for that reason less satisfying, but stimulating and worthwhile nonetheless.