Damn! I almost forgot to do a newsletter today. It’s beautiful out and I am engaging with interesting material that will come out in Review form in due time. As it stands, I have three reviews here — a decent scifi novel, a lousy scifi novel, and a so-so literary novel — and a picture of my beautiful cat. We had several elections this week for what I read next, and more upcoming, so if you want to have a say in where this newsletter goes, fork over a little bit of Internet-money and become a Citizen!
CONTENTS
Reviews
James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate
Anil Menon, The Beast With Nine Billion Feet
Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Lagniappe
Mithra’s Excellent Side Floof
REVIEWS
James S.A. Corey, “Abaddon’s Gate” (2013) (narrated by Jefferson Mays) - Book Three of the Expanse! It’s getting downright… expansive! That rascally protomolecule has set up a portal of sorts at the edge of the solar system. What’s on the other side of the portal? Is it a sort of… star… gate?
Forgive my levity! This is a pretty good scifi novel. It doesn’t try anything crazy or innovative but that’s basically fine- it delivers the good. The workaday, no-lightspeed-travel spacefaring world the Coreys (its two guys, it’s a trade name) set up threatens to become a little less workaday as a result of the doings of the protomolecule. The protomolecule started out as an alien weapon, first zombifying people, then becoming a weird space-station sized intelligence, then becoming a star gate. All the space navies of the system — Earth’s, Mars’s, the rag-tag Asteroid Belt — are there to try to figure out what it’s deal could be.
Of course, perspective-dullard Jim Holden and his crew get sent out to do a thing out there. It turns out it’s all part of some setup a new perspective character has to ruin his reputation and do him in! She has money, a willingness to murder many people, and special combat glands. But the universe — and the protomolecule — have plans of their own. Holden’s ship gets sucked into the gate, and a bunch of navy ships, including one with the perspective-villainess, follow.
“Time moves at a different speed in the nether zone,” as Jez put it on “Peep Show.” The gate turns out to be a kind of cosmic foyer. If you know how, you can use it to get to other solar systems. But you can’t fly too fast! There’s a sort of monitor-station in the middle that can alter the laws of physics. One rule is if you go too fast it stops you, hard. After trying to clear his name from the perspective-villainess’s frame up, some space marines shoot a grenade at Holden on the monitor station, so the monitor decides to slow down the speed limit even further, severely donking up all the ships and killing many.
No one knows what to do! Except the perspective characters and their friends, when put in combination. These include Holden, the woman trying to destroy Holden, a Methodist preacher-lady, and the security head on the biggest ship, an Asteroid Belt rebel ship they stole from some Mormon settlers. They’ve all got their own problems. Holden is always getting visited by the ghost of Miller, a grizzled cop protagonist from the first book whom the protomolecule uses as a messenger (Miller wasn’t that compelling the first time around, but whatever). Clarissa, Holden’s nemesis, has to try to kill Holden and then (spoiler alert) makes good. Ana, the preacher, and Bull, the security guy, deal with the grisliest beast of all- internal spaceship politics. Holden receives information from the interstellar civilization that made the gates and the monitor that if the humans keep fucking up, the solar system is toast. But of course, humans being human :world-weary, writerly sigh: they keep fucking up, and the protagonists need to stop them.
There’s a fair amount of cool stuff here. I like internecine struggle in space, the madness of type-A motherfuckers in tin boxes in a vacuum going nuts at each other over their desperate plans. The villains are ok, though I kind of spoiled it for myself by learning that the big villain was played on the tv show by David Strathairn, who’s great, but it’s definitely typecasting. The fucking-with-physics is cool, though goes against the “this is HARD scifi, no magic here!” thing the series’s boosters promulgate. The battles get a bit confused, trying to keep track of who’s where on this huge ship. The Coreys, like their maitre George R.R. Martin, are at their worst when they try to make points about humanity, but they don’t intrude too badly here. We’ll see how it goes with the next one, when humanity starts star-gating around. ****’
Anil Menon, “The Beast With Nine Billion Feet” (2009) - It’s actually almost pleasant to read a book that’s just not very good because it’s not very good, without some additional factor- disappointment, ideological madness, ubiquity. Upon googling the book a little more, it appears that it is meant to be a “young adult” novel. What does that even mean considering how many grown-ass adults read “YA”? But it makes sense. The protagonists are two kids growing up in Pune, India in 2040, and the prose is indeed simple enough for middle schoolers to get through probably (not that that isn’t true for plenty of adult novels, or that there aren’t smart middle schoolers, etc etc conceptual problems). Googling late informed me of the YA nature of this book, and googling (but apparently not enough) got me into it- specifically, googling “Indian science fiction.” I’m curious about scifi from outside the usual Anglo-American context, and reading the great Liu Cixin whetted my appetite further. This book came up.
Tara and Aditya are two kids growing up in future-Pune, thirteen and sixteen respectively. Their dad is a brilliant geneticist who had to go on the run because he supported a sort of free-software regime for genetic modification. Truth be told the future isn’t all that different. There’s more gene modification but nothing that freaky- smart parrots, designer kids. Virtual reality is pretty big. India is still recognizably India, Tara wonders if she should gene-modify her dark skin. She meets some creepy twins who don’t have belly-buttons and their sinister mom. She befriends the twins despite their creepiness. Meanwhile, Aditya is a gene-hacker but gets in various kinds of low-grade trouble. The dad comes back. The creepy mom wants to do in the dad, somehow, or get him involved in her bad patented-gene schemes.
None of this coheres very well. Menon can’t quite nail where to set up his looming threats for best effect, like an earnest but incompetent haunted house manager. I’d say it “keeps you guessing” except it’s hard to be bothered. It also seems to be setting up for a sequel, but it’s been eleven years so who knows if it’s coming? And he doesn’t even tell you what the beast with nine billion feet is. I give it an extra half star because of my inability to judge YA but I’m pretty sure this isn’t a great example of that, either. **’
Ottessa Moshfegh, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” (2018) (narrated by Julia Whelan) - I don’t know, man. I tried. I really do try with these works of recent literature, especially those written by women. It used to feel kind of good, thinking I was above contemporary literature- now the sheer lack of interest to be found there gets me down. It doesn’t help when it makes me think I’m just not capable of relating to the experiences of people different from myself, even if I know that’s a way publishers guilt people into buying their books…
A gloomy start to this review, I suppose, but this one wasn’t all bad, not as bad as some other recent examples of capital-L Literature I could cite. For one thing, Moshfegh’s prose isn’t bad. A little typical at times- a lot of lists of three items separated by “ands,” but hell, it’s only three, compared to the great galloping mock-heroic and-lists we’re used to seeing that’s downright restrained. And for once, a somewhat interesting concept: a young woman in turn-of-the-millennium New York tries to zonk herself out for a year, on the idea she’ll come out the other side better off.
The unnamed narrator is a woman in her twenties living in the fancy Upper East Side. She has an art history degree, conventional beauty, inheritance money, and an annoying best friend named Reva who’s enough of a “Jewish American Princess” stereotype to be borderline antisemitic. Her parents are dead upper middle class jerks (probably not actually rich enough to have left her enough money to live in the LES, but who cares, it’s the early aughts). Mossfegh depicts her as having taste. She certainly sees through the pretensions of the art world when she works for a gallery downtown, in what are probably the book’s best passages. For the most part, though, all her sensitivity gets her is an increased sense of disdain for everything and everyone around her. No wonder she wants to xanax herself into sleep for a year, though the assumption that that will help somehow is at least as delusional (or anyway should be seen as such) as Reva’s crash diets to attract a man’s attention.
Look… I’m persnickety enough to by now be a little bit sick of the “I’m so tired of hearing about privileged people in literature!” thing. It’s not like writing about the underprivileged is some magic ticket to good writing (and how many of these same people gatekeep people away from writing about people other than themselves?). But… there’s a reason, above and beyond political bullshit and posturing, for why that critique rings out so often. I’m reminded of Tocqueville talking about how what pissed the sans-culottes in the French Revolution more than anything wasn’t the power of the nobility, which had been declining for years, but the perks and privileges and swanning around the nobles still did, even as they were completely useless even in their own terms. The ultimate perk of the world elite at this moment is for their individual pain to matter. That they continue flaunting this perk as they do nothing — show that they’re capable of doing nothing — while the world burns…
I mean, I get it. I get that rich and beautiful people get depressed and that depression sucks no matter who it happens to. I’ve known enough rich kids to know their lives aren’t all great. I’m not a preacher looking for a moral, a charitable foundation looking to means test those I’d dole out my reading fee-fees to, or a consumer looking for stronger jerks on my tear ducts. What I am is a reader looking for something interesting. This has a reasonably interesting premise- world-despising privileged lady tries to blot out world. I can get down with that. But it becomes a lot less so when you realize the shape of its arc: family-inherited trauma to extreme behavior turns to crescendo to bliss-out.
Spoiler alert- the narrator’s quack psychiatrist (the voice actress makes her sound a good amount like Dr. Melfi from The Sopranos) gives our heroine a made-up drug that takes away time in neat three day black out chunks. After some neat planning, the heroine takes enough of these to black out several months without dying or doing anything that fucks her up too bad. Then she feels fine, enjoying the little things, except a little sad that Reva dies in 9/11. Maybe the point is that the rich and the pretty always bounce back? Reasonable enough, I suppose, but it still feels like something of a waste.
I wonder if what’s really going on here isn’t a certain finickiness. The narrator does gross things — pukes, blacks out, lets various bad men grope and have sex with her — and is generally “unlikable” in a respectable rebuke of the reader-whine you hear so often about “likable” characters. But maybe I’m just missing something here- I think blotting out life, I think three things. I think suicide, I think the Internet/video games, and I think opiates. The narrator does consider suicide at various points, but only if her restoration-through-sleep plan doesn’t work. The Internet (and the really addictive online gameplay it allows) was much less of a thing when this book was set. But for all the narrator’s outrageous drug abuse, Moshfegh is very leery about opiates, having the narrator only pop one or two “stray” vicodins. That’s interesting to me. The woman wouldn’t need all of her complicated prescription cocktails if she got Doctor Feelgood to give her oxys. It’s almost as though that’s too dirty, though, or would make this an “addiction” book (it’s not as though the drugs she does take are so “clean” or non-addictive)... you get the feeling that Moshfegh avoids them, and suicide. This book dips a toe in the sort of world-abasement that even the New Yorker crowd can get down with, all things considered, but steering clear of the stuff that’d really scare them… anyway.
I’m probably making this book sound worse than it is. It beats Sheila Heti, Moshfegh’s cousin in high pointlessness (another problem with both books- they expect me to care about visual arts, when the visual arts have been instructing me not to care about the visual arts since before I’ve been born). It beats Bret Easton Ellis, creator of the narrator’s sibling in New York-based rich kid madness, Patrick Bateman. Moshfegh doesn’t try our patience with lousy writing and stupid tricks like Heti or Ellis, which is a shame, as all of them wind up in the same netherzone. ***
LAGNIAPPE
Witness the magnificence of Mithra’s flank-floof, its texture and depth of color. I pat that floof pretty much every single day.
a good word for Mithra's fluff is *plush*.