Ben Lerner, “The Topeka School” (2019) (read by Peter Berkrot, Nancy Linari, and Tristan Wright) – Well, well! An actually ambitious contemporary literary novel! And it’s… good? Perhaps great? You know, I’m going to go with “it’s great.” Perhaps it’s not for everyone but I thought it was great. Moreover, I “disagreed” with it, to the extent it has a thesis, and still think that! And it’s not even in one of the more-or-less official dissident categories that cranky lefty readers like me are “supposed” to reach out towards- right-wingers (conveniently, usually from outdated flavors of fash), people who are shitheads in their personal lives, etc. No, my disagreement is what seems to be a sort of left-liberal outlook on our current pass, the sort of thing that’s supposed to be poisonous to thinking and writing, in our bestiary. And it’s by a poet whose previous two novels look like the sort of stuff I’d hate, praised by the likes of Jonathan Franzen! But here we are.

This is primarily the story of the Gordons, a transparent and admitted stand-in for the Lerners: an upper-middle class family in Topeka, Kansas at the end of the twentieth century, composed of two psychotherapist parents (the mother is somewhat famous) and a highly successful but neurotic son set to graduate high school in 1997 (apparently there’s a second Lerner brother but he’s nowhere to be found in the Gordons). The stories are mostly told in the past tense, and we linger most with the son, Adam, a high school debate champion who is now a successful novelist and father in Brooklyn. We learn of his parents’ courtship and troubles, their efforts to live a psychoanalytically-informed, lightly culturally liberal life in increasingly conservative Topeka, anchored by a psychological institute that was there (for some reason) and was apparently hot shit between the fifties and the nineties. The present tense stuff we get entails mostly a final chapter, with Adam discussing experiences in contemporary New York, and brief interludes from the perspectives of a high school classmate of his, Darren, who was mentally ill, probably on the autism spectrum, and gets involved in some terrible violence.

What’s so great about “The Topeka School”? It’s an intellectual novel (partially) about intellectual life as lived, and seems to come from an honest place, without self-flattery or its cousin, self-flagellation. The language gets Lerner’s points across with the flourishes one might expect from a poet, but never gets in his way. The characters make sense, and, miraculously for a novel steeped in psychoanalysis, are fleshed out deeply, feel lived in, but that fleshing out is never tedious. It kept my interest. That’s a lot, for a contemporary novel without a genre hook (and for many contemporary novels with such hooks!).

All compliments in the negative, what “The Topeka School” avoids, but there’s positive goods too. I especially enjoyed the painful scenes of Adam’s debate career (there’s another champion debater who writes pretty good contemporary fiction: Sally Rooney). I knew I didn’t care for formal debate. I didn’t realize how much of it involved literally spewing out as many bullshit arguments as quickly as you could, so as to browbeat opponents, to the (adult!) judges approval. Apparently, “Lincoln-Douglas” debates, which prioritize declamation and thoughtfulness over “owning” the other guy, are increasingly popular in scholastic competitive debate, but as Lerner makes clear, determined shitty teen pedants can make those awful, too. Lerner’s good with stuff like that- the feeling of these debates and preparation for them, parties with the gangsta-fied rich white high school kids of suburban Kansas in the late nineties, passive-aggressive scenes between analysts in highly entangled relationships, and other scenes that make one question whether leaving the oceans was a worthwhile choice for terrestrial life.

The debate stuff enters into “the point” of the novel. People say that novels shouldn’t have points, that that should be left to nonfiction, which should in turn be all about the thesis. I almost believe the opposite. Thesis-heavy nonfiction books are often repetitive drags to read. I think a novel that makes an argument can often be fun and can avoid a lot of pitfalls. There are many, many bad examples of pointed novels and pointless nonfiction (and of pointless novels and thesis-heavy nonfiction), I know, but I think at this point one of the problems of anglophone fiction is that it often makes a fetish of pointlessness, or else of points so childlike that they haven’t really got a point to an adult reader (hence, maybe, the rise of an adult YA fiction readership…).

Anyway! The debate stuff is just the most prominent example in “The Topeka School” of characters slipping into non-signifying speech or glossolalia, talking a mile a minute but saying nothing. Teenage Adam goes to a therapist (at his parents’ employer, natch) who plays glossolalia tapes at him to get him to “open up.” Little kid Adam gets a concussion that messes with his memory and speech and gives him migraines for the rest of his life, and his parents witness college-aged Adam slip into nonsense-speak after he gets dumped. His (at the time married) dad has a bad trip on acid when courting his mom in New York in the sixties and loses control of his speech. But the debate stuff above all, and “the spread” — where one debater deluges another in bullshit — is the central metaphor for this problem, for the way language slips the bounds of civilization — of which it is the main support — and threatens to undo all that it’s done, to become a non-communication.

This is relevant, in the Trump years! I think the idea here is that the lives of the Gordons and those around them in the late nineties/early aughts are canaries in the coal mine of a communicative apocalypse that led to Trump, of the meaningful speech that builds society giving way to the glossolalia that is always under the surface. Lerner doesn’t say why, exactly this happens- the internet is an unwelcome, ungemutlich, porn-laden presence, and the fecklessness of the guardians of civil society in the book, the psychologists (including Adam’s parents and a refugee from Nazi Germany), probably doesn’t help. The antidote is to learn to speak together, meaningfully- and here, Lerner cites the Occupy-style “people’s mic,” at the end of the book, where he and his family are protesting ICE and telling off cops who tell his kids not to chalk on the sidewalk.

There’s much to be said about this! I agree with the basic framework of the thesis: there is indeed something different and at the very least unhelpful — perhaps “sinister” and “wrong” are warranted adjectives here — about many characteristic modes of recent discourse compared to discourse within living memory. I disagree with the notion that those who take up so much of public life discoursing in a way orthogonal to what were once commonly (maybe not so commonly?)-held conventions of truth and rationality are practicing glossolalia. Or else, I need to borrow a scene from another novelist who thinks a lot about contemporary communication, and arguably stole a march on Adam/Ben when they were in middle school-

“‘Cut,’ the journalist says, turning into the camera. ‘Just cut. The Babble Brigade has started again.’

“The soundtrack now consists of thousands of people speaking in tongues under the high-pitched, shit-eating chuckles of L. Bob Rife.

“‘This is the miracle of tongues,’ Rife shouts above the tumult. ‘I can understand every word these people are saying. Can you, brother?’”

As a certain clade of my readership will no doubt have caught on, this is from Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash,” a novel with a distinctly mixed reputation these days (I still think it’s good). The basic plot of the book is that Rife, an evangelical billionaire, wants to un-do the sundering of human language effected by the fall of the Tower of Babel (in Stephenson’s telling, a neurolinguistic virus created by Sumerian hackers to overthrow the tyranny of priests and create humans with personality- neuro people and people who know anything about Sumerian are among the major detractors of “Snow Crash”) and with it, the creation of separate languages- and separate human consciousnesses. We can all be a mishmash hive mind gabbing away in tongues, like God intended? The worst thing a hyper-literate nineties edgy dude could imagine (to be fair, I don’t like it either).

The point here isn’t that “Snow Crash” is better or worse than “The Topeka School” (a real apples and oranges comparison), but that Stephenson gets the power equation with language more than Lerner seems to. Rife has a purpose in mind with glossolalia, and he can understand it just fine. It communicates- just in a different mode than the one the protagonists of “Snow Crash” (and the writer and the audience) prefer and have built an existence around. Similarly, Trump may not “make sense” in the way a finely-written essay might, but he absolutely conveys meaning. You can argue that the internet has a higher static-signal ratio, and I think you’d be right, but there’s plenty of message there — hate, lust, desperation, affection for cats — if you listen. You can make use of these communicative techniques to build community, of a sort. I mean, look at this essay, or the rest of my writing- clearly, not my sort of community. But there it is.

Intermittently, Lerner seems to get that, or anyway gets there’s power at work, it’s not just a descent into nothingness. In the last chapter, he encounters a shitty dad of a child misbehaving in a sexist fashion and who won’t do anything about it, and a shitty cop trying to intimidate him and his kids. I think Lerner tries to depict their communications — the dad’s repetitions of cliches and refusal to engage, the cop’s tough guy woofing aimed at children — as part of the decline of speech. But their speech communicates, differently, but clearly. Similarly, he seems to get that the debate glossolalia he once indulged in, practiced like a sport, isn’t value-neutral madness, but a domination ritual. It’s meant to dominate another, and adult judges reward it, see it as grooming for further power positions.

Lerner also discusses hip hop and fighting. In trying to be cool — in Adam’s case, rebelling, before returning to, his parents gentle liberal humanism — the Topeka boys fight a lot, and try to do rap, both supposedly inspired by hip hop culture. Fighting is harsher than it used to be, Lerner argues, due to these white boys taking on hip hop posturing (and watching early televised MMA, with its ground fighting and elbows); attempts at rap were the first real poetry Adam tries, before becoming a renowned poet as an adult. The fighting is seen as entirely negative, a degeneration, a morbid symptom, and that seems reasonably fair. Adam gives his efforts at rap some credit for building his poetical skills, but is sufficiently ironic about his expensively bred white corpus mouthing phrases about bitches and gats so as to see it as basically foolish, a failed communication. Are either failed communications, or are they borrowings to express things that always were there under the surface of the lives of these boys? Is it entirely impossible that they could have found an outlet for their desire for conflict that kept hip hop’s power (and the knowledge that an elbow often does better than a fist at close range) without taking on board dysfunctions?

And then there’s Darren. Darren can’t communicate, never could, except in inept lies and sporadic violence. Adam and his friends intermittently bully him and people at his parents’ center try to treat him. Nothing works. The deck is stacked- broken home, almost certainly some degree of developmental disability, he just never had a chance. Some of the high school seniors start letting Darren hang around, semi-ironically (how often is anything that any privileged teen does entirely sincere?). When it becomes clear they’re playing with him, Darren uses a pool cue to cold-cock a girl. That’s the last we see of him until Adam comes home to Topeka for a poetry reading, and there’s Darren with the Westboro Baptist Church protestors.

This might be the wrongest part of a book the theses of which I have several disagreements. And even here, Lerner’s Darren is still human, thoughtfully portrayed. He’s pitiful and enraging in turn. There’s an interesting discursus Lerner makes on the man-child and his place in middle American life, the way in which that by being the same gender and race of the dominant type of the empire, man-children like Darren are allowed to be mascots, sometimes even muscle for an officially permitted body, in a way women or people of color with similar inability to grow up aren’t. Of course, they always know they’re on the outside… but… the idea that the Darrens of the world represent the Trump base, what happens to us when the communicative bridges collapse… that doesn’t work. WBC muscle, maybe, but not the Trump base. That’s more like the cop, or the shitty office worker dad, Lerner encounters in the end. My take is that Lerner is smart and perceptive enough to write his way into the mind of a loser enough to get us to believe him, but not enough to really get what makes those losers — or the worlds made by people cynically appealing to senses of inarticulate loss and rage — what they are. They’re just a mystery. You know how “serious” novelists love their unsolvable mysteries.

Well… I think that’s a fine position for a novelist, as long as they’ve got the chops to back it up. I’m dedicated to not treating these things like a mystery, and I’m not at all certain I’ll succeed! Moreover, if we’re writing passes for Celine, Kipling, Mishima (do we write passes for writers who co-signed or lied about communist atrocities, or is it either we pretend they didn’t on the left and the right and the center never forgives them? Asking for a friend), Norman Mailer, and so on, we can allow that a liberal with some mildly useless liberal opinions can write a great novel expressing those opinions, especially when there’s a lot else going on in said novel. That’s what Lerner accomplished here. Five stars? Ding half a star for liberalism? Fuck it, no. Five stars! *****

J.K. Huysmans, “Là-Bas” (1891) (translated from the French by Keene Wallace) – Joris-Karl Huysmans served for respectable decades as a civil servant and wrote decadent novels in his spare time, until he converted to Catholicism and wrote sufficiently Catholic novels to generate enough sales to quit his day job. That sums a lot of it up, right there. My understanding is that Huysmans didn’t see himself as a decadent- he lived a simple bachelor lifestyle, and started out his literary career as a Zola-style naturalist. But disdain for his time and place — late nineteenth century France — and a fascination with the wicked led him to decadent literature, first with “A Rebours,” easily the most important literary novel of interior decoration going, and this novel about satanism. Huysmans wasn’t an aesthete dandy, like the main character in “A Rebours,” and like his narrator in “Là-Bas,” he never became a satanist. He liked to watch, especially things that either confirmed his disdain for his times, transcended it, or both.

“Là-Bas” contains elements of what would become the genres of horror and crime fiction, as bored writer Durtal, lackadaisically finishing a book on medieval serial killer Gilles de Rais, decides he needs to find some real devil-worshippers, “for research,” of course. A lot of the novel is Durtal kicking it with his doctor friend Des Hermies (interesting name) who knows a lot about the occult, and a humble church bell-ringer named Carhaix, who represents a (mildly patronizing) picture of the vanishing “good Catholic” of France, someone with a downright medieval level of devotion. They’re joined by their hatred of the (supposed) mediocrity and corruption of their era. The Middle Ages were a better time, they declare, though with much more Gallic irony and acceptance of things like squalor and foolishness — Durtal and Des Hermies disregard much of what the church actually says — than you get with a lot of medieval nostalgists. But how are these three going to find the black mass Durtal wants to see (Des Hermies is too “over it” to bother and Carhaix is too much the good simple Catholic)?

“Cherchez la femme” as a roughly contemporary Francophone literary figure would have it- Durtal starts getting anonymous horny letters. A little detective work reveals they come from Madame Chantelouve, the wife of a literary Catholic friend. In keeping with his then-contemporary neuroticism, Durtal can’t decide whether he wants to go through with an affair or not, but once he finds out that Chantelouve has connections with the biggest contemporary Satanist, a real bad dude. Eventually, she leads him to a black mass- Durtal, naturally, doesn’t participate, just watches. This scene, along with the recitations of Gilles de Rais’s murderous career, are what put “Là-Bas” on the censor’s desk as often it appeared there. The depictions of blasphemous deeds aren’t that much to anyone who’s seen all that shit done on MTV by scrubs like Marilyn Manson, but the speech the satanist priest makes against god and Jesus is pretty impressive, even in translation. After all this, Durtal and his bros eat dinner among the bells again and Durtal thinks, “maybe I’ll be Catholic after all,” maybe a little out of shock from what he’s seen but more in reaction to the way it confirms contemporary banality.

This is a weird, interesting book, less for the peculiarities of the occult scene and more for its form, pacing, and general ethos. French antimodernism is both less “catchy” than the usual Anglophone (or German, or Russian for that matter) variants but also usually a bit smarter, with a sense of actual tragedy. To the extent this is a mystery story, it’s less a whodunit and more what they used to call a “city mystery” – as cities expanded during the industrial revolution, people wrote loosely-plotted novels revealing their seamy undersides; part crime novel, part travelogue, part pornography. What lies at the heart of fin de siecle Paris? A deep rot, naturally, an underground war between good and bad occultists (but even the good ones are sketchy and basically off-camera), the base materialism of the age causing people to seek out older truths, but only when they think no one’s watching, etc. If you want to be an artist, you have to seek out truths that transcend the age, and that’s hard to do- the church might be the path of least resistance, even if it also produces occultists (the big bad satan priest is, naturally, a defrocked Catholic priest).

Again, Huysmans was an actual writer and a smart person and he was writing before whatever threshold in the mid-twentieth century was passed before we had to make all of these thing schematic. “Good” and “evil” barely show up- in fact, the throughline with the Gilles de Rais stuff, the payoff for Durtal narrating his notes, isn’t De Rais’s evil- it’s his redemption. When he got caught, after some brief tergiversation, he confessed and threw himself on the mercy of Mother Church, which he once served alongside Joan of Arc. According to Durtal, the parents of the children who De Rais brutalized and slaughtered all forgave him, prayed for him at his execution site, before they did him in. This, more than anything, is what Durtal/Huysmans sells to us as the greatness of the Middle Ages: not our sense of good and evil, cleansed of modern accretions, but an alien sense — none of it “makes sense” — that allows for an alien greatness. You wouldn’t see that in a contemporary good-evil narrative, I tend to think. The battles between occult forces would be hard to game out in any of the RPG systems I know about. It’s genuinely irrational, and that’s hard to get across, but Huysmans did it, even with his viewpoint characters of drawing room detectives. ****’

Jesmyn Ward, “Sing, Unburied, Sing” (2017) (read by Kelvin Harrison Jr., Rutina Wesley, and Chris Chalk) – This is a perfectly decent example of contemporary literature! Ward tells the story of a young mixed-race boy named John, his black mother Leonie, and some bad trips, both physical and psychological, that they take. The story is set in more or less contemporary Mississippi. Leonie and Jojo live with Leonie’s elderly parents in a rural part of the Gulf Coast. The two take a trip with Jojo’s toddler sister Kayla and a friend of Leonie’s north to Parchman, the ex-plantation prison where Leonie’s lover and Jojo and Kayla’s white dad, Michael, is being released after serving a stint for drug dealing.

Parchman, Angola, Sugarland… I’m aware that the prisons of the north, your Atticas, Sing-Sings, Norfolks, are no happy valleys, but those old southern plantation-prisons skeeve this New Englander right the fuck out. Ward leans into that haunting feeling. Jojo’s grandfather did time in Parchman and tells the boys stories that never seem to come to a conclusion. On the way up to the prison, the travelers encounter many of the inconveniences that come with life when you’re poor. Car trouble, police trouble, drug trouble, above all puking baby trouble. It is a genuinely uncomfortable ride, in a highly relatable, human way that Ward gets across effortlessly.

Leonie was the most interesting character for me, especially because she is a rare thing in literature: a bad mother, portrayed unsentimentally (the voice actor puts a little “poet voice” in her, all breathy, but it comes to work for the character) but sympathetically. Is there any more agreed-upon villain than the bad mom? Whole theories of crime, of civilizational collapse, have been placed on her head! Murderers can be made cool and relatable, terrorists, thieves, seemingly every crime under the sun, but not a shitty, selfish, indifferent mother (as someone whose mother is none of these things, I relate to why people would be repelled). So Leonie is interesting- she’s those things because she is weak. Aspects of her life that tried to make up for her weakness just mire her further: she genuinely loves Michael, and so has babies with him that she can’t properly care for. Guilt over that makes her mothering worse. Guilt and trauma — her brother was murdered, her lover arrested and imprisoned — drive her to drug abuse, which doesn’t help anything. Some people don’t have what it takes to raise kids. It doesn’t make them evil. They probably shouldn’t then have kids, but people make mistakes. Ward conveys well the weird lassitude of the structurally fucked.

Ward’s humans are humans, and so are her ghosts. The family is immersed in the supernatural traditions of the black people of the Gulf area. Leonie’s mother (dying of cancer- no one has a good life in this book with the possible exception of a crooked white druggie lawyer) practices conjurings and prays to the divine feminine in various forms. Leonie sees her brother’s murdered ghost when she gets high. Jojo has a more impertinent ghost problem- the ghost of a Parchman inmate, who did time with his grandpa, following him home from the jail. Jojo doesn’t want to deal with ghosts, he’s only thirteen and has to take care of a toddler most of the time because of his weak mom and absent dad. He tries to find ways to get rid of him. Terrible revelations from his granddad are what the ghost is after, but he doesn’t go away, and soon enough Jojo is seeing more ghosts, all the black lives ended by violence in that cursed part of the world.

All in all, “Sing, Unburied, Sing” was pretty good. Being me, I preferred the human parts to the ghostly. But the ghosts weren’t too much of an intrusion. Mississippi is probably roughly midway on my list of states to visit — mostly as a fan of blues music, I’d like to see the Delta — but this didn’t exactly light a fire under me to go, more due to its painfully vivid summoning up of inconveniences (you really, really want to get that baby some pepto or dimetap or something) than its horrors. It’s good to see literature carrying on. ****’

Anthony Trollope, “The Prime Minister” (1876) – I read about one Trollope a year. He’s probably my favorite Victorian novelist. I like the (relative) frankness with which he deals with his society. This is the fifth of six novels in his Palliser series, all having to do with Plantagenet Palliser, fabulously wealthy aristocrat and politician troubled by conscience. There’s always a lot going on in a given Trollope novel, though, at least the big ones (this one is big) – some politics, some marriage biz, a crime or two. “The Prime Minister” is no exception, with two main plots. As the title would lead you to expect, Planty (can’t remember if anyone calls him that in the books, but I do) becomes Prime Minister, in this case, of a coalition government, trying to ride herd on both Liberals and Conservatives. He’s a bit of a drag, possessed by notions of duty and a simple desire to be useful- all of his fabulous wealth and power means nothing to him, you see. It’s up to his wife, the Lady Glencora, to play the social game that could make the whole thing work. She overdoes it; he underdoes it; it doesn’t work well.

Then there’s the plot involving Emily Wharton and who she should and shouldn’t marry. She’s the daughter of a rich solicitor from a respectable family, who’s in love with Ferdinand Lopez, a financier in the City. Her dad doesn’t like it, because Lopez is foreign (Portuguese!), possibly a Jew (not a lot of Portuguese Jews, in Portugal anyway, circa 1876 but ok) (also he converted), and his parents weren’t gentle-folk. Various people prevail on Daddy Wharton to see past his prejudices and so they get married. But it turns out the old man was right! Lopez is a scoundrel. He seems nice enough for the first third of the book. But he reveals himself, once he marries Emily, as something worse than crooked (which he also is): he’s pushy. He talks about money in indelicate ways, even with ladies and Dukes! He gets his, in the end, and Emily marries a nice English gentleman.

Those of you who know me know I don’t apply a political or moral litmus test to what I read. I don’t really think Trollope was a ravening anti-semite: I think he was a Little Englander. To my mind, a Little Englander is someone who prefers English flaws to foreign virtues, on the idea that God or nature or whatever has made England and the English such that they can only really be happy and settled with each other. This doesn’t answer why they then sail around the world bothering other people so much, but no one ever said English bigots were consistent. That said, I think if there’s any type of novel to judge on a moral basis, it’s the Victorian triple-decker, and I do think this one’s a little bullshit. Among other things, the smugness — that the crusty old Englishman’s bigotries always wind up correct, even when (especially when?) he hasn’t got any good reason for them — turns the whole thing into a protracted sadistic morality play, watching Lopez descend further and further into cringeworthy servility and lying, the opposite of Trollope’s bluff, independent, somewhat stupid English gentleman, the height of creation.

Oddly enough, the Irish, or anyway Phineas Finn, hero of previous novels in the series, come out ok, if anyone is keeping score at home. Finn stands up for his buddy Plantagenet even after old Planty gets in trouble because his silly wife trusts Lopez. Finn knew his place, Lopez didn’t. “Knowing your place” does not for great literature make. There’s still enough enjoyment in Trollope’s writing and wide-scope depiction of Victorian Britain to make this not totally terrible, but it’s not one of the better Trollopes in my opinion. ***

Marlon James, “A Brief History of Seven Killings” (2014) (read by various actors) – Jamaica! What a contrast between the image I was sold of it as a kid — the era of “Cool Runnings,” a movie I saw dozens of times and which held up relatively well when I saw it a few years back — and the complex, often harrowing realities one learns as an adult. I’ve never been and have no plans to go. I just mean that by and by, one learns it’s not paradise, that the people have complex and difficult lives, that one of the things it suffers from is the contrast between white desires/expectations and the universe of black thought and dreams that nation has generated itself… like Haiti, I guess, but there were never any heartwarming movies about a Haitian bobsled team.

Bob Marley plays an outsized role in the country’s tangled image (and image of self) – a transcendental figure in twentieth century music whose music, some of the purest pleasure you can find, both reflected and contrasted the mixture of grimness and beauty of his home, and his life. Did you know someone tried to assassinate him in his Kingston home in 1978? I didn’t, before I read this book! A novel that plays with history and journalism by a Jamaican writer who mixes literary and “genre” (this could be called crime fiction, and his latest is basically a fantasy novel), “A Brief History of Seven Killings” has a lot more than seven murders. Even if Marley avoided that fate (only to be killed not long after by a melanoma on a toe he refused to have amputated), the attempt on his life structures the action of the book.

This is a multiple-narrator novel, and different voice actors play the different narrators. Most of them start out as inhabitants of Kingston in the late seventies. Socialism and black revolution are in the air as the sort-of socialist Michael Manley is in office, but things are still stuff for most Jamaicans. Manley’s People’s National Party and the opposition Jamaica Labor Party (notice how nice and lefty both names sound! Different era) both strive for power by hiring gunmen in the various Kingston ghettos to deliver votes through corruption and violence, with emphasis on the latter. Wear the wrong color (drink the wrong beer! I’m told Heineken was the JLP beer and Red Stripe the PNP one) in the wrong neighborhood and bad things will happen.

Two of our narrator characters, Papa-Lo and Josie Wales, are JLP-aligned gunman chieftains. Papa-Lo, older and more paternalistic, starts sending out peace feelers to the PNP, in large part through Bob Marley, whose star is on the ascendant and who is only referred to as “The Singer” throughout the book. The young and hungry Josie Wales sees a path to power through keeping the violence going. Papa-Lo and the singer want to see Jamaica achieve real independence for its people and the instantiation of something like Rasta values (honestly a mixed bag but probably better than open kleptocracy) in power. Josie Wales aligns himself with outside powers — the Colombian cartels and the CIA — with other plans. He’s involved in the abortive Marley assassination, but survives the fall out by pretending loyalty to Papa-Lo and concentrating on making Jamaica a hub in the cocaine trade.

The coke trade and its consequences — all of them still tied in with Jamaican politics into the nineties — follow characters all the way to New York City. An ex-lover of Marley’s who fled to the city after witnessing the assassination attempt provides viewpoints into both Jamaican women’s labor minding very old and very young New Yorkers, and gets tied up when the crack wars invade her neighborhood. A journalist who started out writing about Marley for Rolling Stone and ends up writing about Jamaican “posses” and their propensity for ultraviolence — learned through ghetto brutalization, honed by CIA training and guns, accelerated by coke, its profits and its chemical effects — for the New Yorker has a harrowing experience with a new breed of gangster- slick, tied in to global capitalism.

All in all this was pretty good. A lot of characters, some sprawl, some visits from the ghost world that were good not great, crime, coke, the CIA, AIDS, sexism and homophobia, lots of interesting stuff. It probably could have been shorter, but hey, it covers a lot of time in the life of some interesting places. It presents something like the complexity of Jamaica and the way the dreams, nightmares, and realities of the place refract off of each other. One of the better contemporary literary reads I’ve read lately. ****

Marie Vieux-Chauvet, “Love, Anger, Madness” (1968) (translated from the French by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur) – This was great! Marie Vieux-Chauvet was already a leading light in Haitian letters when she wrote this triptych of novellas in 1960. Born to an upper-class family, she was one of few women accepted in Haitian literary circles and gained major acclaim in France, where Simone de Beauvoir ushered “Love, Anger, Madness” into print in 1968.

François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the ghoulish CIA-backed dictator, was in charge of Haiti by then, and you can see his censors wouldn’t like “Love, Anger, Madness.” The latter two novellas deal directly with people — families from the Haitian upper/middle class, and intellectuals — menaced by totalitarian movements led by openly kleptocratic thugs and manned by “armed beggars.” The first takes place in a similar context but has other issues in mind as well. If the translation of the Haitian Creole Wikipedia entry on Vieux-Chauvet is right, the Duvalier regime bought up all the copies of her books in Haiti to keep them from the public, and killed some of her relatives. She fled to New York, where she died in obscurity a few years later.

“Love” is probably my favorite of the three, the story of one Claire, oldest daughter of a locally-prominent family and an old maid (and virgin) at thirty-nine. Told in queasily intimate first person, we are immersed in her jealousies, mainly of her sisters, one married to a white Frenchman and the other wild and promiscuous, in her neurotic rituals, and her fears. The Frenchman flirts and dallies with all three sisters while helping to strip their part of the country dry of resources for his firm back home, and then wonders why no one rebels against the secret police who help him do it. The sounds of torture waft from the police headquarters at night, and the local secret police chief is one of few men to indicate interest in Claire. She devises dramas and tries, with more or less success, to conscript the people around her into them, and in the end, bursts out in violence against the restraints around her. If you’re used to literature about women going mad due to the constraints on rich white Anglo-American women, well, the pressure cooker is even worse in a place like Haiti.

The other two stories are also great. “Anger” is about a family that wakes up one day to find the blackshirted “armed beggars” taking their land. This is no social revolution, there isn’t even a pretense of redistribution beyond the hands of the criminal elite. Like many Haitian households, this one is multigenerational, and all the family members stew and consider their own vengeance. The grandfather and crippled grandchild dream of revolutionary revenge. The mother drinks, the son plays soccer with supporters of the blackshirts and considers how to save his honor. The father equivocates and winds up selling his daughter to the criminals. He double crosses them, but the damage is done. In “Madness,” Haitian poets and intellectuals find out how much their writing and internal debates are worth as they’re besieged in a broken-down old house as the blackshirts take over.

The prose is beautiful, by turns lyrical and epigrammatic and never overly flowery or sentimental- Vieux-Chauvet knew the Caribbean, knew racial lines shifting like sand but hard as steel, knew vodou, knew poverty, knew what sex looked like in this kind of environment where power and despair loomed so large, knew the beauty and the ugliness of the island, respected the power of all of it, and rhapsodized none of it. Her Haiti and her Haitians are mythological — if one people on this earth deserves to be mythologized, it is they — but entirely human. This accomplishment alone would put this work at the top of my list in terms of fiction I’ve read this year, but there’s more to enjoy. I recommend this highly to anyone who likes quality fiction. *****