Of all the categories of genre fiction that I’ve consumed over my lifetime, fantasy has probably best the least represented. Sure, I love The Lord of the Rings, and The Narnia Chronicles, and the works of Ray Bradbury that I consider to be dark fantasy (see Something Wicked this Way Comes). But I don’t keep up with many modern fantasy writers nor read many contemporary fantasy novels.
So, you can imagine my surprise when I took a chance on Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, a fantasy novel that made quite a splash when it came out in 2020, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. It’s a fascinating story of a man trapped in a labyrinth that he calls The House, and which is composed of endless Greco-Roman halls lined with innumerable statues and vestibules. There is a sky above and ocean tides below, which often flood the lower levels. The man is called Piranesi by the only other person (i.e., “the Other”) in The House, an older man who seems able to leave somehow, only to return with key supplies like vitamins and batteries, which he shares with Piranesi.
It’s a fascinating book, and unexpectedly suspenseful, too, especially when Piranesi begins having flashbacks of who he is and how he came to be in the House. This happens about the same time as the sudden appearance of mysterious, written messages that are scattered throughout the House. They seem to have been left by another, recent intruder (one who seems interested in helping Piranesi escape).
For me, at least half of the appeal of Piranesi lies in this whodunnit factor. Like the protagonist himself, I was caught up in the mystery of how he came to be there, who he is, and how he might get out. But the other half lay in the dizzying, intricate nature of the setting—the endless labyrinth that Piranesi inhabits. Such dreamlike settings are more common in literature than one might think, and their appeal is very much like that of a vivid, fabulously detailed diorama, of the sort that all children love to gaze into (and imagine themselves inside).
Capriccio Illustration by Giovanni Piranesi
I don’t know what it is, exactly, about mazes, labyrinths, and castles that evokes the power of imagination, But I think it has to do with their endless novelty, the promise of infinite rooms and corridors that we, like children, would love to explore. More to the point, such structures also symbolize the power of imagination—especially the child-like imagination that each of us still harbors. That’s why there is such a grand tradition of castles and mazes in fantasy literature and mythology, from the Minotaur’s labyrinth to the vast, rambling ruins of the Gormenghast trilogy.
Clarke herself acknowledges this tradition in her main character, Piranesi, who is named after Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the 18th Century illustrator who was famous for his drawings of impossibly grand and complicated imaginary buildings. His most famous works are a series of etchings titled Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), and these are, themselves, part of a much older tradition of so-called capricci, drawings that depict architectural fantasy.
In the past decade or so, it’s become fashionable to talk about creativity as the result of freedom, relaxation, and “flow”—that ineffable point where the artist connects with the sources of inspiration deep within the human soul. I, for one, believe in this idea. Art is really about connecting with the spiritual subconscious, and all of us have the ability to channel this source (although very few of us are willing to put in the work that is also required to develop it).
But not enough has been written about the role of conflict in creativity. Specifically, the role of rivalry, competition, and—yes—jealousy, at its most venomous and sincere. The history of art is, in some ways, a history of rivalries. Picasso and Matisse. Faulkner and Hemingway. The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. Rivals have a way of inspiring each other, of spurring each other on in ways that “healthier” forms of motivation just can’t reach. The greatest rivalries of all are, perhaps, those that exist within a rock-and-roll band. Would Lennon have been as good without McCartney breathing down his neck? Richards without Jagger? Henley without Frey?
Such internal rivalries are more intense because they also bring the family dynamic to bear. A rock band is like a family, and the members are like siblings. They love each other, but they hate each other, too. Worst of all, they know each other’s weaknesses. Which buttons to push.
Surely one of the greatest rock rivalries of all time is that between Roger Daltrey, the mesmerizing lead-singer for The Who, and that band’s lead guitarist and resident genius, Pete Townshend. As in any rivalry, one competitor eventually gets the upper-hand—in the judgment of history, at least—and that is also the case with Daltrey and Townshend. Daltrey has long been acknowledged as a brilliant singer, but it’s Townshend who gets the real credit for The Who’s iconic status. After all, Townshend is the writer of the pair, the creator of all the band’s great hits, including the classic rock opera Tommy.
One can hardly imagine my admiration and delight as I read Alex Kenna’s fine and refreshingly original novel, What Meets the Eye. One thing that sets this book above—far above—the vast majority of mysteries is the symbolic connection it draws between two central characters–a cop-turned-P.I. named Kate Myles, and a brilliant artist named Margot Starling. Kenna sets them up as linked opposites, each a very smart and driven woman struggling to succeed in a dangerous (and largely male-dominated) world. Both are driven by a deep outrage at the injustice they see around them. And both have some dark history.
Ultimately, of course, Kate and Margot are connected in a different way: Margot becomes the victim of a murder, and Kate is hired to find her killer.
Very seldom have I seen a mystery novel that attempts multiple points-of-view, and never with such skill. Kenna bounces back and forth between past and present, giving the reader before-and-after clues as to what, exactly, befell Margo, even as Kate unravels the mystery. It’s a very fresh and compelling technique. I also really enjoyed the surprising and original insights the novel offers about both women’s realms: the art world for Margot, and the law enforcement world for Kate.
But the real triumph of this book, for me, is Kate herself. It’s her book, and she’s a great character. Funny, smart, earthy, and fearless, she gives the reader an unequivocal here to root for. Yes, she’s done some questionable things in her past (she had a bit of an opioid habit), but she’s a devoted mother and a driven seeker of truth. She makes a great, new entry in the cannon of classic private detective heroes.
Like a lot of people, my first exposure to Walter Mosely was when I saw the 1995 film adaptation of his novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, starring Denzel Washington. It’s a good movie, with fine performances by Washington and Don Cheadle, but it didn’t inspire me to seek out Mosely’s fiction. As far as I knew, he was just another solid mystery writer, one of many whom I hadn’t read.
Sometime later, I bought a copy of The Best American Short Stories and I was surprised to see a story by Mosely among that year’s selections. The story is called “Pet Fly” and it’s a deceptively simple tale of an office grunt (who happens to be black) trying to keep his integrity while working in modern corporate America. I was knocked-out by it. Later still, I stumbled upon an actual novel by Mosely, a science fiction work called The Wave, which turned out to be one of the best novels (sci-fi or otherwise) that I had read in years.
My great friend Margaret Luongo and I just released the premier episode of our new YouTube Channel, Read a Classic Novel…Together. In this series, we tackle classic novels that we’ve been meaning to read forever, and we invite the viewer to read each chunk along with us. (We try not to read ahead, but do anyway sometimes. Sorry.)
For this first episode, we take on Part I of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Check it out when you can.
Anyone who follows this blog knows that my two primary obsessions are movies and history. So, you can imagine my excitement whenever I encounter that rare intersection of these two interests: a well-written film history book. And, still further within this category, there is the vaunted production-of-a-classic-movie book, which is a special favorite.
The supreme example of this sub-sub-sub-genre is Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution, which recounts the making of not one film but four, all of which marked the changing nature of Hollywood—and America—at a specific moment in time, 1967. But if Harris’s book is the touchstone of this subject, then Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood is a very close second. Put simply, I enjoyed the hell out of it.
Where Harris’s book describes the making of four movies, Wasson’s reveals the making of four men, the principal creators of Chinatown. These were the producer (Robert Evans), the screenwriter (Robert Towne), the director (Roman Polanski), and the star (Jack Nicholson).
Ever since I read her famous short story “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” in college, I have loved Joyce Carol Oates. I continued to read her short stories through the 1980s and 90s, and my admiration only grew. She seemed to combine the style and critical eye of other great practitioners of modern realist fiction (think John Updike, Phillip Roth, John Cheever) with her own particularly empathic sensibility.
Empathic, yes, and also brutal. Oates writes about working class people in dire straights, including physical danger. Her female protagonists, especially, often face the threat of violence and even death (several of Oates’s stories involve rapists and serial killers). But even in these heightened situations, the primary threat is the internal, psychological one. For Oates, the real adversary is the self—that is, ourselves, with all of our passions and desires and resentments and jealousies.
And fear, of course. Fear is the greatest enemy in Oates’s imagined world, and overcoming fear, in all of its manifestations, is the greatest achievement of any Oates character. And so it makes perfect sense that the opening scene of her epic novel, Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars, would present the reader with a man engaged in an act of actual heroism. John Earle “Whitey” McClaren is the patriarch of an big family in Hammond, New York. His five children, all grown, are pillars of the community, and Whitey himself was once mayor of the Hammond. But when he spots two police officers brutalizing an Indian man on the side of the road, he pulls over and intervenes. The cops turn their fury on him, and he is brutally beaten. Whitey ends up in a coma, with his family gathering around him in the hospital. I don’t think I’m spoiling much when I state that White doesn’t survive his ordeal. And his death, in turn, impacts all the members of his family, from his devoted wife, Jessalyn, to his five adult children.
But instead of writing just another book about the grieving process—a so-called aftermath novel—Oates describes a series of titanic transformations that take place in each individual over the following two years. Flannery O’Connor once wrote that fiction is about the mystery of personality, and Oates seems to confirm this in the way she reveals how Whitey’s loss “breaks” the each of his children’s personalities. Like crystals, they all fracture along unique and unpredictable fault lines, and that’s the genius of Oates’s novels. Some of the children find themselves growing spiritually and sexually (with lots of missteps and false starts), while others spiral down into paranoia and bitterness. Jessalyn, Whitey’s widow, works her way through survivor’s guilt to find new love with a Hispanic liberal photographer who is as different from Whitey as a man could be (at least on the surface; spiritually, they are similar, as Jessalyn soon realizes).
One common shortcoming of big, third-person novels with many view-point characters is that some of those characters blur together. But Oates renders each of these people so vividly and convincingly that, by the end of the book, they feel as real to us as…well…someone in our own family. This is, I think, the highest achievement of fiction—to make us feel what it’s like to be another human being.
Years ago, my son Connor and I went on a hiking trip with my dad. At some point along the trail, we stopped to rest, and he told us about something from his past that he’d never talked about before. Namely, that in high school, he once had a part-time job delivering ice. Not those bags of ice people today buy at the grocery store before a party, but blocks of ice that people would put in their ice-box, the precursor to the modern refrigerator.
Of course, his story was not a total surprise. I knew that my grandfather—Connor’s great-grandfather—had owned an ice factory in rural Mississippi, where my father’s family is from. And my father had been in high school in the late 1950s, when much of that part of the country was still lagging several decades behind in terms of technology. Still, my father’s tales of hauling blocks of ice up tenement stairwells impressed me, as did his description of the blocks themselves, which were notched into thirds. This was done so that poorer people could buy a third or perhaps two-thirds of a whole block. All that was needed was to cleave the block with a small hatchet, which my father had carried with him for this purpose.
I found myself thinking about these stories a lot as I read a memoir by my old professor—the great writer Harry Crews—called A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. Like most good memoirs, the book gives the reader a window into a time and a place that is now long gone. In Crews’s case, it was Bacon County, Georgia in the Great Depression, when poor farmers had a skillset that seems almost fantastic to our modern sensibilities. Take, for instance, this passage, in which Crews describes the technical and highly prized ability to estimate the age (and, thus, the mileage) of a mule:
A mule has a full set of teeth when he’s born. But when he is two years old, he sheds two of the teeth right in the front. A good mule man can tell if he’s shed those two front teeth, in which case he is between two and three years old. A really good man can tell if those teeth have just grown back in or if they’ve been back in the mule’s mouth for several months. The next year, when he’s three, the mule sheds two more teeth, one on each side of the two he shed the year before. From then on the mule sheds two teeth a year until he’s five years old. That’s the last time he sheds.
Reading this passage, I was struck—as I was on that day with my father and my son—by how much the texture of daily life has changed in the past one hundred years. How one human lifetime (Harry Crews’s and also my father’s) could span the era of mule men and ice-delivery boys to my own, in which I make my living programming a computer (an occupation as complicated, surely, as appraising a mule’s age, but not nearly as artful).
Not all of Crews’s memoir is as comfortingly rustic as the sample above. Crews was never guilty of sentimentality in his writing, and his description of his family and neighbors enduring desperate poverty are as horrifying as any I have ever read. To name just one example, he explains how a problem as mundane as a rotten tooth—a mere annoyance for us today—was an agonizing crisis in rural Georgia, where no dentists were available and no one could afford them even if they were. So, naturally, people were driven by relentless pain to pull their own teeth, as Crews witnessed a hired man do one night:
He had a piece of croker sack about the size of a half dollar in his left hand and a pair of wire pliers in his right. He spat the water out and reached way back in his rotten mouth and put the piece of sack over a tooth. He braced his feet against the well and stuck the pliers in over the sackcloth. He took the pliers in both hands, and immediately a forked vein leaped in his forehead. The vein in his neck popped big as a pencil. He pulled and twisted and pulled and never made a sound.
It’s this kind of detail that makes one appreciate the mercies of modern life, even as it vaporizes any nostalgia we might harbor for the so-called “good old days” that right-wing politicians are always blathering about. For Crews, the “good old days” were marked by disease, privation, hunger, and lethal violence. They were also marked by unexpected moments of kindness, decency, and courage. People helped each other out in times of need without any thought of recompense; it was simply the way of things.
As Crews writes:
Back in the county there was no charity. People gave things to each other, peas because they couldn’t sell them or use them, same with tomatoes, sweet corn, milk, and sometimes even a piece of meat because it was going to turn rank in the smokehouse before they could eat it. But nothing was made out of giving or receiving. It was never called charity or even a gift. It was just the natural order of things for people whose essential problem, first and last, was survival.
Clearly, hard times bring out both the worst and the best in human nature. But there is an even deeper lesson to draw from Crews’s narrative. Namely, that physical suffering can deepen and intensify the human spirit. I was particularly struck by the chapter in which Crews describes the time he was stricken by polio as a small boy. As he lay in bed, paralyzed, he was kept company by an African-American woman called “Auntie” who regaled him with stories of backwoods monsters and superstitions, which both entranced and terrified him. For instance, she warned him of a bird’s ability to spit in a person’s mouth and take over their body.
“Look in there, youngun,” she said. “Look in there and bleve. A bird mought take you to hell. Mought take you anywheres at all. Me, I been grieved more than some, you up here in the house with them birds. Them spittin like snakes, lookin to hit you all up in your mouf. One hit you—an one gone hit you—that bird own you, own all of you. Now you look in there an bleve.” Her old soft voice got sharp when she demanded that I believe. But she could have saved it; I’d been a righteous believer in the deadly accuracy of bird spit long before we came down the hall. “Bird spit mix all up with your spit, and then your spit is his and he’s you. You listening, chile?”
Crews never comes out and says it, but there is a strong implication that it was the power of Auntie’s imagination, and those of others like her, that fostered a desire in him to be a writer. The same was true of the place itself—Bacon County—whose very harshness gave him an appreciation of the miraculous divinity of all things. “I had already learned—without knowing I’d learned it—that every single thing in the world was full of mystery and awesome power.” What better description could there be of the artistic impulse? The need to capture the sublime and terrifying experience of daily life?
My appreciation of A Childhood is undoubtedly tinged by the fact that I got to know Harry Crews for a while. By the time I became an English major at the University of Florida in the 1980s, Crews was already a legend. He had written a lot of great books, of course, but he was more famous locally as a teacher and all-around character. Everyone seemed to have a Harry Crews story. He got into brawls. He took drugs. There was the time he had once (allegedly) tackled an irate student who had attempted to storm out of his class. He studied karate. He caught and raised hawks. He trained body-builders. He wrote five-hundred words a day, even if it took him three hours of sitting at keyboard, staring.
Harry Crews circa 1990
And he drank. A lot.
As a bright-eyed, wannabe writer, I was enthralled with the idea of Harry Crews. But by the time I finally signed up for his creative writing class—a night class, obviously, since he wrote in the mornings—the old Harry of lore was already in the past. He’d given up drinking (he took Antabuse daily), and he’d mellowed out. But he was still a legend. He produced one fine novel after another, and he made a lot of money writing for big-name magazines like Playboy. One of his most notable fans was Madonna, who would only agree to be the focus of a celebrity study in Playboy if Harry were the journalist. So, Harry flew to Manhattan and spent a few days with the Queen of Pop and her then-husband, Sean Penn (who also became a fan).
And yet, as awed as I was that fall evening when I sat in a classroom with a dozen other nervous students, I still had no idea what Harry Crews looked like. Then, at exactly six-o’clock, a lank man in faded jeans shuffled into the room, slightly stooped and smiling. For whatever reason, he looked at me first, sharp grey eyes fixing on me. He nodded and said, “Hey, guy,” a gentle greeting that I have often used. He then proceeded to teach a class that was ostensibly about the writing craft but more directly about the importance of fine art and the dedication required to create it.
My only regret about reading Crews’s memoir after all these years is that I didn’t do so sooner. It would have given me even more appreciation for the man. After all, most people who have the kind of childhood grow up to be hard, violent individuals. And, indeed, Crews wrote hard, violent novels, filled with men and women for whom brutality is a way of life. But the author himself–once you got to know him–was a bit of a sweetheart. I’ve been told that Harry wasn’t always so sweet, in his youth, but he was when I knew him, and so that’s the Harry I remember: a man who felt that all human beings deserve sympathy, but especially the most underprivileged and marginalized. He also knew of the power of imagination and storytelling to sustain us even in the most desperate of circumstances. As Crews says of his beloved Auntie and her bizarre superstitions, “Fantasy might not be truth as the world counts it, but what was truth when fantasy meant survival?”
P.S. Here’s a review of A Childhood recently published in the New Yorker.
(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)
One of my favorite novels is William Makepeace Thackery’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon. I first got interested in it after seeing Stanley Kubrick’s amazing film adaptation, Barry Lyndon, which I didn’t really understand but which blew me away anyway. Like the movie, the book is a tragedy, the story of an honorable young man who slowly transforms into a selfish adventurer and scoundrel.
It’s a beautiful and rollicking novel, but the main reason I like it has to do with Thackery’s unusual take on the tragic hero. We were all taught in school that the reason a hero falls in a classic tragedy is because of some fatal flaw—some negative quality. But in Thackery’s vision, it is not Barry’s flaws that bring about his downfall, but rather his strengths. That is, the very qualities that bring him riches and fame in the short run—his intelligence, courage, and ambition—are the very qualities which lead to his eventual destruction.
It might seem melodramatic, but I was reminded of this idea as I read Brian J. Jones’s excellent biography, George Lucas: A Life. Although Jones never actually uses the term tragic hero in the book—to do so would be ludicrous in the case of an actual, living man, especially one as laid-back and funny as George Lucas—he nonetheless gives a sense of a person whose determination and genius have sometimes led him dangerously close to self-destruction.
If there is a single genre that has been totally overused, tapped-out, wrung-dry, and exhausted, it would have to be the Zombie Apocalypse genre. From books to movies to TV shows, the idea of a world overrun with mindless, brain-eating zombies has been so fertile that it even engendered a classic spoof in Shawn of the Dead (and that was fifteen years ago!).
Having said that, it’s nice and even uplifting to remember that great writing, a kick-ass story, vivid characters and a hideously evil villain can overcome anything.
Oh, and a brilliant twist. That helps, too.
The “twist” in M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts is that the novel’s young heroine is, herself, a zombie. Or, at least, infected with the fungus that has caused the “Breakdown” which has reduced human civilization to a few small, besieged cities. Other than having a genius I.Q. and an almost uncontrollable hunger for human flesh, Melanie is an ordinary ten-year-old. She likes school (actually a prison filled with other infected kids), and she especially likes her teacher, Miss Justineau (actually a psychologist tasked with studying the kids’ neurological responses).
But not enough has been written about the role of conflict in creativity. Specifically, the role of rivalry, competition, and—yes—jealousy, at its most venomous and sincere. The history of art is, in some ways, a history of rivalries. Picasso and Matisse. Faulkner and Hemingway. The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. Rivals have a way of inspiring each other, of spurring each other on in ways that “healthier” forms of motivation just can’t reach. The greatest rivalries of all are, perhaps, those that exist within a rock-and-roll band. Would Lennon have been as good without McCartney breathing down his neck? Richards without Jagger? Henley without Frey?
Ash Clifton, Writer 