The Known World by Edward P. Jones

“The evening his master died he worked again well after he ended the day for the other adults, his own wife among them, and sent them back with hunger and tiredness to their cabins. The young ones, his son among them, had been sent out of the fields an hour or so before the adults, to prepare the late supper and, if there was time enough, to play in the few minutes of sun that were left. When he, Moses, finally freed himself of the ancient and brittle harness that connected him to the oldest mule that his master owned, all that was left of the sun was a five-inch-long memory of red orange laid out in still waves across the horizon between two mountains on the left and one on the right. He had been in the fields for all of fourteen hours.”

The opening lines of The Known World by Edward P. Jones.

Before we’re told his name, we’re told that Moses has a master, which, in a society built on slavery, is a more important and more pertinent piece of information about him. But we’re also shown that, despite his status as a slave, Moses also enjoys a degree of authority: it is his to tell the other slaves when they can stop working and leave the fields. The implication seems to be that this authority is the reward for his dedication: he regularly works longer than anyone else, and on this day he does not take the death of his master as an excuse to slack off. So it’s clear from the beginning that this will be not just a novel about slavery, but a novel about the nuances and details of slavery, about how the institution is experienced by individuals.

We’re shown Moses “freeing” himself from a “harness.” Not that he is free of the great harness of slavery, but perhaps it is suggestive of some smaller freedoms that he enjoys as an overseer and as the slave of a man determined to be a humane master.

In this book, Jones has a habit of interrupting a scene to offer information on the past or future experiences of a character; I initially found this technique disruptive and I resisted the book because of it.

But I tried to understand my own resistance and to think more objectively about what the technique might accomplish. I thought I saw some similarities with Samuel R. Delany’s investigations of the ways in which personal memories invade and inform the present. I also thought I heard echoes of an oral tradition in this discursiveness, which would be a resonant element in a story and a society in which literacy is a charged subject. And I thought about the fact that for any historical novel set in America in this period, the Civil War is always the elephant in the room. The usual solution is to ignore the elephant on the grounds that the characters can have no knowledge of events that will occur in their future, and that’s a very reasonable position, but inevitably the reader has that knowledge, and I thought that Jones was addressing that dynamic in an interesting way, since his digressions often dealt with the post-Civil War/post-slavery experiences of the characters.

It seems to me that one effect of a historical novel is to emphasize the historicity of its subject matter. Yes, it may allow the reader to feel a greater identification with characters who live in an unfamiliar time and place, but it also, I think, tends to insist on the distinction between “then” and “now.” And in a novel about slavery, about the greatest tragedy of American history, is such distancing desirable? Or does it make it too easy for the reader to compartmentalize slavery as something that happened “back then,” and to ignore the ongoing legacies and repercussions still with us today? It seems to me that Jones’s digressions have the effect of collapsing chronology, of minimizing the distinctions between then and now, and thereby reminding us that the effects and influences of the institution of slavery are still very much with us.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

“Nine months Landsman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker.”

The opening lines of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon.

Nine months: the gestation period of homo sapiens. Signaling, perhaps, a novel of rebirth?

Certainly the protagonist, this Man of the Land, has fallen far, as the word “flopping” suggests. He’s not homeless or unemployed but he’s crawled deep inside a bottle, alcohol being his preferred course of self-medication as he tries to avoid thinking about the string of tragedies that has upended his life. Can he pull himself out?

The question of Landsman’s land will also prove to be vexed—not just for him, but for all the Jews residing in the Federal District of Sitka which, in this novel’s world, was created as a haven for the refugees of Eastern European Jewry as they fled the conditions that produced World War II. In the novel’s timeframe, they’ve now lived in Sitka for sixty years and made a thriving city of it, but they are about to be dispossessed as the United States comes in and reclaims this Alaskan territory in a process dubbed Reversion.

But for the moment, Detective Landsman (and really, what other job could he have in a book that begins like this? he’s gotta be either a cop or a PI) has a more immediate problem in the homicide victim that’s been found by the night manager of his hotel. (The victim’s alias is a clue to another of the novel’s preoccupations: Emanuel Lasker was a famous chess champion of the turn of the twentieth century.) Perhaps the path of investigation will also prove to be that of redemption—if he can overcome bureaucratic obstacles and his own demons along the way.

The familiarity of the form is animated by the exuberance of the writing and the astounding depth of the imaginative conception of this alternate Alaska.

Zamenhof, by the way, was the man who invented Esperanto, a “constructed language” made from repurposed bits of other languages, which is a nice metaphor for this novel whose constructed history is made up of re-imagined bits of real history.

A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis

Justice? —You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
—Well of course Oscar wants both. I mean the way he talks about order? She drew back her foot from the threat of an old man paddling by in a wheelchair, —that all he’s looking for is some kind of order?
—Make the trains run on time, that was the . . .
—I’m not talking about trains, Harry.
—I’m talking about fascism, that’s where this compulsion for order ends up. The rest of it’s opera.
—No but do you know what he really wants?

The opening lines of A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis.

The opening mirrors that of Gaddis’ wonderful novel JR, which begins:

—Money . . . ? In a voice that rustled.

In each case, the first word announces the primary preoccupation of the book, not the concepts named so much as the behaviors and institutions—financial in the one case, legal in the other—that surround them. It took me a long time to notice that the word “justice” was not a word of dialogue (the way that “money” is), since it precedes the dash that signals dialogue in Gaddis. Presumably it is the questioning thought resonating in Harry’s head, to which he responds with the line of dialogue that follows.

Both novels are written almost entirely in dialogue, with minimal punctuation or attribution. They demand the reader’s full attention, which is the reading experience I think of when a book is described as “absorbing.” (JR remains the only book ever to make me miss my subway stop.) Nevertheless, his command of the patterns and cadences of speech is mesmerizing, and after a couple of pages, one falls into the rhythm of the work so that it is transporting while still requiring close attention.

And both books are extremely funny, satirizing their respective subjects, but also with a degree of respect.

And what is it that Oscar, and other litigants, really want? It goes on:

—The ones showing up in court demanding justice, all they’ve got their eye on’s that million dollar price tag.
—It’s not simply the money, no, what they really want . . .
—It’s the money, Christina, it’s always the money. The rest of it’s nothing but opera, now look.
—What they really want, your fascists, Oscar, everybody I mean what it’s really all about? She tapped a defiant foot against the tinkling marimba rhythms seeping into the waiting room somewhere over near the curtains, where the wheelchair had collided with a radiator and come to rest. Trains? fascism? Because this isn’t about any of that, or even ‘the opulence of plush velvet seats, brilliant spectacle and glorious singing’ unless that’s just their way of trying to be taken seriously too —because the money’s just a yardstick isn’t it. It’s the only common reference people have for making other people take them as seriously as they take themselves. I mean that’s all they’re really asking for isn’t it? Think about it, Harry.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

“Lyra and her dæmon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen. The three great tables that ran the length of the hall were laid already, the silver and the glass catching what little light there was, and the long benches were pulled out ready for the guests. Portraits of former Masters hung high up in the gloom along the walls. Lyra reached the dais and looked back at the open kitchen door, and, seeing no one, stepped up beside the high table. The places here were laid with gold, not silver, and the fourteen seats were not oak benches but mahogany chairs with velvet cushions.

“Lyra stopped beside the Master’s chair and flicked the biggest glass gently with a fingernail. The sound rang clearly through the hall.

“‘You’re not taking this seriously,’ whispered her dæmon. ‘Behave yourself.’”

The opening lines of The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman, the first volume of the His Dark Materials trilogy.

The first four words of the story introduce one of the most important aspects of the novel, the existence of “daemons.” It will be many pages before we fully understand what a daemon is, but the odd word immediately sparks the reader’s curiosity and also signals that the world of this story will be something different from our own. A few lines down, we get our second important piece of information about them: whatever they are, daemons are conscious and capable of speech.

In retrospect, it will become clear that the construction “Lyra and her daemon” is almost as important, since the relationship of people to their daemons is the key to their nature and their significance in the story.

It also seems to me that the use of the first name with no last name suggests that Lyra is a child or adolescent (though maybe the real signal is the fact that the book is marketed as a Young Adult novel). And the references to a hall, the large tables, the portraits of the Masters, etc. all establish the institutional/educational setting while suggesting the possibility of a different time period from our own.

The story opens in mid-action, with Lyra sneaking along through the dining hall, and this narrative strategy is both engaging and characteristic, since this book’s story is relentless and enthralling. Within a page or so, Lyra will become privy to restricted knowledge, witness an attempted murder, and become swiftly caught up in the events that will drive this novel and the two that follow.

And yet, even still, there is the slightest touch of levity as well, as Lyra stops in her sneaking progress to ring the crystal goblet and her daemon (whatever it may be) fussily upbraids her. She is an outstanding example of that long line of curious, snooping children in literature.

Theft by Peter Carey

“I don’t know if my story is grand enough to be a tragedy, although a lot of shitty stuff did happen. It is certainly a love story but that did not begin until midway through the shitty stuff, by which time I had not only lost my eight-year-old son, but also my house and studio in Sydney where I had once been about as famous as a painter could expect in his own backyard. It was the year I should have got the Order of Australia—why not!—look at who they give them to. Instead my child was stolen from me and I was eviscerated by divorce lawyers and gaoled for attempting to retrieve my own best work which had been declared Marital Assets.”

The opening lines of Theft by Peter Carey.

The contrast inherent in the first sentence is characteristic of Michael “Butcher” Boone, one of the two narrators of the novel. On the one hand, he aspires to—or at least thinks in terms of—the scope and sweep, the grandeur, of tragedy. On the other hand, he undermines his aspiration with course language and the lack of control its use suggests; he even undermines the stature of the very condition he aspires to by implying that tragedy may be no more than “a lot of shitty stuff.” He exhibits enough self-awareness to express doubt that his story rises to the level of tragedy, but in doing so, he signals his hope that it does; one even suspects that his expression of doubt may be no more than a gesture, a socially acceptable fig-leaf for his inner conviction that it does.

As the title suggests, Theft is interested in questions of value: the very notion of theft implies value, generally commercial value; who would go to the trouble of stealing something if it was valueless?

It’s particularly concerned with the process by which commercial value becomes attached to art, and with the tension between commercial and aesthetic value. Butcher speaks about the latter in terms of people who do or do not have “the eye,” though for me that just raises the question of whether aesthetic value is inherent in the work—there for the eye that can to see—or whether it is something that exists, like beauty, only in the eye of the beholder. Butcher himself embraces the former view.

Aesthetic and commercial value do not necessarily correlate, it seems to me, though people tend to behave as if they do, or at least ought to. This even in spite of evidence to the contrary, such as when Butcher feels his own work to be undervalued by the marketplace; he’s convinced this results not from a flawed theory of correlation, but rather from a failure of the market to appreciate the work’s “true” worth. (That his work possesses aesthetic value he takes for granted.) He resists the notion that commercial value is exactly what the market will bear and nothing else.

The book is also concerned with the ways in which other factors, beyond the aesthetic element, contribute to the commercial value of a painting: authenticity, scarcity, fashion. Michael himself, now that he is out of jail, is repeatedly said to be “out of fashion,” and the prices his work might attract suffer accordingly. The notion of authenticity, meanwhile, raises an issue of authority: who gets to decide what’s authentic? Much of the story revolves around questions of authenticity as they apply to the work of a painter named Leibovitz.

It’s interesting that most of the scams perpetrated in the book do not involve outright fakes, but rather unfinished or abandoned originals that have been manipulated to varying degrees and/or assigned false dates. The very same work may have different commercial values depending on when it was painted; a painting from 1913 is a great Leibovitz, we are told, one from 1920, not so much. This rather undermines any correlation between commercial and inherent aesthetic value; if the value of the work were completely intrinsic, then the timing of its creation should be irrelevant.

This interest in the commercialization of art is likewise signaled in those opening lines above by the reference to Marital Assets. Talk about a term that strips away the aesthetic element altogether!

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

“Two tires fly. Two wail.
A bamboo grove, all chopped down
From it, warring songs.

. . . is the best that Corporal Bobby Shaftoe can do on short notice—he’s standing on the running board, gripping his Springfield with one hand and the rearview mirror with the other, so counting the syllables on his fingers is out of the question. Is ‘tires’ one syllable or two? How about ‘wail?’ The truck finally makes up its mind not to tip over, and thuds back onto four wheels. The wail—and the moment—are lost.”

The opening lines of Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

I loved the disorientation this opening produced when I first read this book. I tend to think of haiku as a quiet sort of poetry, contemplative and focused on the natural world and the inner self. The juxtaposition of the haiku with the military figure, clinging to a jeep that is careering along, made for a delicious contrast, one so strong and unexpected that it took me time just to figure out what was going on. The haiku itself also runs counter to my expectations, with its modern, manufactured tires and its cacophony (wailing; warring songs); and even if the presence of the bamboo grove promises something more appropriate to the form, it turns out the grove has been chopped down.

But the disruption of the settled order that this unusual haiku suggests is perfectly appropriate for wartime, which, is turns out, is the setting for the action of the scene.

In the end, it’s just a great image: the soldier, clutching his gun and in the midst of, if not battle, at least chaotic and frenetic activity, and yet making art on the fly and worrying about his syllable count.

Gun Ball Hill by Ellen Cooney

“They wanted a pilot to steer them up the Kennebec, stopping at forts along the way. They weren’t novices, but they knew what they were in for if they tried it on their own, without a local. So they came out of the woods and threw a coat on his head.

“This was fourteen years ago. They had lumber, furs, rum, corn, guns, dried cod, taken from Maine and bound for English troops in Canada. The war against the French was looking like it wouldn’t be over soon. The Mowlans held on to the illusion that it did not concern them.”

The opening lines from Gun Ball Hill by Ellen Cooney.

At first, the reader may expect that some sort of commercial transaction is being set up, that the mysterious “they” will be hiring someone to act as their pilot. Then the potential business deal suddenly becomes a kidnapping, a shock that foreshadows a larger shock to come at the end of this tour de force opening chapter.

The reference to the Kennebec sets the location in Maine; the references to Maine, Canada, and the French evoke the French and Indian Wars; the references to supplying the troops suggest that “they” are also British soldiers. And the use of “taken from” – as opposed to “bought in” or “shipped through” – does not bode well for the colonists who these soldiers are supposed to be defending. Nor does their abduction of one of those colonists, apparently named Mowlan.

We are told that the incident referred to occurred fourteen years before the present action of the novel, a span of time that will bring us to a period of even worse relations between colonists and soldiers, the eve of the War of Independence.

But Cooney has not jumped those fourteen years for good: she circles back and gradually gives us the full scene of the kidnapping and its effect on Lavinia Mowlan, the abductee’s wife. Cooney tells it in a calm, detached manner, interspersing background information about the Mowlans and their life together, so that the slow revelation of the event itself is terrible and chilling and suggestive of the long, slow, cold anger that Lavinia is left with.

The husband, William, does return, and Cooney suggests the scars that each bears in the aftermath of the incident, bringing their lives and attitudes up to the period of the novel’s main action, and showing how some colonists, at least, could be brought to the brink of revolution.

It’s a terrific book, and the opening chapter is powerful and tragic.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

“On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chili pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the mix. Ashima has been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout India, spilling from newspaper cones. Even now that there is barely space inside her, it is the one thing she craves. Tasting from a cupped palm, she frowns; as usual, there’s something missing.”

The opening lines of The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri.

In many ways, these lines represent the things I liked best about this novel: the specificity of the ingredients; the collision of cultures as Ashima seeks to replicate the Indian dish with American brands; memory’s evocative detail of the newspaper cones; and the suggestion of the larger issues troubling the character, for whom, “as usual, there’s something missing.” Though Ashima, it turns out, is not the central character of the novel; rather, it is the about-to-be born child that she is carrying. And that choice strikes me as less than ideal, and perhaps symptomatic of the novel’s problems. I don’t mean to suggest that every novel must open with its principal character in the very first sentence, but I do wonder if this one would have been better off doing so. The fact that it does not, despite its bildungsroman nature, suggests (at least in retrospect) the lack of narrative focus that characterizes the book.

The book’s larger problems aside, I think this opening is lovely. I like the way in which the immigrant Ashima is seeking to recover an aspect of her homeland, making use of her expertise in cooking to creatively bridge the gap between past and present. And I like how her ingenuity is inevitably thwarted, at least in a small degree, by the lack of necessary ingredients. I especially like the fact that her “concoction” is a “humble approximation” of the original; one would think that a cheap snack sold on the streets and railway platforms would be pretty humble already. The fact that this imitation is even more humble speaks both to the evocative power of the original for Ashima, for whom it is undoubtedly bound up with all kinds of other memories, and also to the character’s own natural humility (for I read that “humble” as an expression of the character’s own judgment of her efforts).

I find it especially satisfying that, after the descriptive care lavished on the snack, it is never named. Perhaps this is another indication of the degree to which it is a humble approximation, but it is also entirely appropriate to the novel, which will be very concerned with names, lack of names, and the differing roles that names play in the old culture and the new. One almost begins to sense the overwhelming nature of American consumer culture when the brands which are the constituent parts are prominently named but the resulting concoction, which presumably has only an Indian name with no American equivalent, is not. The name’s absence seems to anticipate the loss of the baby’s Indian name, selected by his grandmother back in India, but lost in the mails on its way to America.

To my mind, though, this book has a forest-and-trees problem. While the writing and observational detail are frequently wonderful, there’s insufficient control of the larger narrative; the story meanders and, for me, fails to cohere into a unified work. It seems to me that the whole is rather less than the sum of the parts.

The Way Through Doors by Jesse Ball

“—Young man, let me look at you.

“The room was broad, and lit from behind by massive windows that lined the dark mahogany-paneled wall. Light came through in a vague haze, sifted just beyond the glass by the leaves of the oaks from the street. A large man, my uncle, came around the desk towards me.”

The opening lines of The Way Through Doors by Jesse Ball.

I haven’t enjoyed a book this much since Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. And the opening, with its brief bit of dialog (and perhaps its use of dashes rather than quotation marks to signal speech) for some reason reminds me of the opening of JR by William Gaddis, another novel that blew me away. But it was the review from The New Yorker that pushed me over the line to read this when it advised, “think Steven Millhauser on acid.”

Many books are described as dream-like, but few achieve (or aspire to) the degree of associative narrative flow that this story offers. The flexibility of its logic is signaled early on, in the scene introduced by the lines above: the narrator’s uncle resumes his seat behind his desk “with the air of a man who has often sat down in the presence of others who remain standing”; a few lines later, when the uncle chides the narrator, Selah Morse, for his pamphleteering efforts, Morse says, “I sat up straight”; and a few lines after that, another character enters the room and Morse says, “He looked at me as I stood there, book in hand.”

This uncertainty of Morse’s posture reflects the mutability of the narrative itself as stories morph into different stories, circle back on themselves, trail off, repeat with variations, or strike off in new directions. Both commanding and avuncular, the opening line places the reader in a passive position via the narrative, and this seems appropriate as narrative here feels like something that happens to the reader. The best way to enjoy the book, it seems to me, is to go with the flow.

Well, but the reader is perhaps not passive, exactly – receptive, say. Though even “receptive” gives short shrift to the reader’s work. The reader is forced to stay in the moment with this book because the narrative is too likely to veer off into some unexpected direction. One doesn’t want to anticipate narrative developments because those expectations will almost certainly be frustrated – or perhaps ignored. I see this statement seems to presuppose a “standard” style of reading which is more anticipatory and in which the reader is always trying to second-guess the narrative; in such cases, the pleasure of the reading lies in the degree to which expectations are, perhaps, resisted and satisfied simultaneously.

Here, the pleasure lies in the ability of the narrative to demand full engagement from the reader at all times.

Since I’m already making comparisons, this book also reminded me of Mark Helprin’s A Winter’s Tale, with its fantastical version of New York, and for me, it offered much the same sort of enchantment and narrative satisfaction.

An aside on reviews:

It’s seldom that I can point to single review (as here, to The New Yorker), or even a single factor, that convinces me to read a particular book, though when it happens, it always turns out to be a book I enjoy a great deal. It was a single review in the New York Times that got me to read The Chess Garden by Brooks Hansen, and reviews in the Washington Post convinced me to read American Falls by John Calvin Batchelor and Baltasar and Blimunda by José Saramago – in the latter case, more than a decade after I read the review. But generally my decision to read a given book or author is the result of an accretion of experiences – reviews, recommendations, glances through a book in the store – and I think the same is probably true for many readers. Even in this case, before The New Yorker there was a review on NPR by Alan Cheuse that first got me curious. People in publishing spend a lot time speculating about the effects of reviews on sales; I believe they are important, but seldom is the line from review to sale so direct as in these instances.

Christine Falls by Benjamin Black

“It was not the dead that seemed to Quirke uncanny but the living. When he walked into the morgue long after midnight and saw Malachy Griffin there he felt a shiver along his spin that was to prove prophetic, a tremor of troubles to come.”

Not quite the opening lines of Christine Falls by Benjamin Black, though the first after the prologue.

The line – and paragraph – introduce the pathologist Quirke, the novel’s protagonist, and his preference for the living over the dead is not the least of his quirks. The scene that follows is an economical introduction to the important aspects of the character.

First of all, he’s drunk, as he will be, to varying degrees, through much of the novel. But his inebriation notwithstanding, he is also closely observant; he notes that Mal is writing “with peculiar awkwardness” in a file, and on the next page that Mal puts “his forearm quickly over the file to hide it.” But though he observes, and draws conclusions from his observations, Quirke characteristically keeps his own counsel, and he does not mention the file in the ensuing conversation.

And finally, in the first paragraph, we see Quirke as a person shaped by, perhaps obsessed with, his past. The first thing we learn about Mal is that he is in Quirke’s office, sitting at Quirke’s desk, an interloper. But even within the same paragraph, Quirke flashes to a memory of “their school days together,” revealing immediately that the two have a long shared history. This knowledge resonates through the tension of the conversation that follows.

Christine Falls is famously (perhaps infamously) John Banville’s pseudonymous take on the mystery novel, but it is this rich sense of the characters’ histories that, for me, distinguishes it from most works in the genre. I don’t say that other mystery novelists fail to provide backstories for their characters, or do not imagine crimes that are rooted in the shared histories of suspects and victim, but the nature of the form inevitably places a great deal of focus on the present action of the investigation. While Christine Falls is also shaped by an investigation, Banville’s skill in creating a living context for the characters and their relationships is one of the things that, for me, distinguishes the book.