Hello and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! It’s been a good week. I made a video with a friend about romance fiction, reviewed a good work of literature and a bad work of scifi, and took a trip to New York! I document it all here. If you like it, consider sharing, and also consider becoming a Citizen!
CONTENTS
Video Content
What is Romance fiction? with Gillian Daniels
Reviews
Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace
L. Neil Smith, The Probability Broach
Lagniappe
The Observed Life, with Peter: I’m Walkin’ Here!!
VIDEO CONTENT
After our discussion of thriller fiction, the next logical step was to discuss romance fiction! The biggest genre in the English-speaking world and I had never read any. I discussed the matter with area writer and critic Gillian Daniels. She recommended a couple to me, one of which I read and one of which I partially read. We discuss them, and the history and definition of the genre, here. Enjoy!
REVIEWS
Amitav Ghosh, “The Glass Palace” (2000) - I haven’t looked far enough to say anything too definitive about it, but from where I sit, Indian writer Amitav Ghosh runs somewhere near the lead of the pack of contemporary literary writers in terms of talent and relevance. I’ve only read his historical fiction, but my understanding is he has also written nonfiction about climate change, which could be interesting and would certainly be a credit to his relevance, given how lackadaisical the literary response to climate change has been thus far. His historical fiction is quite good. The Ibex Trilogy, dealing with the period surrounding the Opium Wars, topped my best-of-fiction-reading list a few years ago. A lot of writers (well, a lot of publishers on behalf of a lot of writers) claim to tackle the interconnectedness that goes under the name “globalization,” but Ghosh actually does it, with verve, historical understanding, and a lack of pretense.
Among other things, Ghosh’s historical vision helps show us a basic fact about “globalization” that it seems younger people grasp more intuitively than those of us who remember the nineteen-nineties: that there’s nothing all that new about it. Global patterns of trade, migration, war, imperialism, communication, etc. have been critical to how life is lived at the very least since the circumnavigation of the globe five centuries ago, if not well before, depending on your definition of “global.” So, in the Ibex trilogy, we see globalization, nineteenth-century style, at the hands of capitalists and the British Empire destroying whole populations to make money off the opium trade. In “The Glass Palace,” we get a broader sweep of South Asian history, from the British invasion of Burma in the 1880s to World War II to a coda near the time Ghosh was writing.
That broad sweep means you don’t get the sort of finely-grained character work that characterizes much of literary fiction, but Ghosh gets his points across about most of his characters. We begin with Rajkumar, a Bengali boy who flees plague and washes up in Burma. He works and builds a fortune in the teak wood trade, a tough business involving elephants and transporting two-ton logs down rapid jungle rivers. He’s fixated on Dolly, a servant to the Burmese royal family, which was deposed when the British decided they wanted that teak trade all for themselves and added Burma to the empire. The British exile the royal family to a small town in India, but after Raj makes his fortune, he dresses up all nice, heads to India, and courts Dolly. At first she’s like “this is weird” but various characters interfere and she winds up returning to Burma with him, just as Raj expands into the rubber business, where there’s some real damn money.
Reviewers focus a lot on the Raj-Dolly relationship, and I think that’s because we get to know them before the deluge of other characters come in. Various relatives and children marry people and while most of them “make sense” there’s still a lot to keep track of as they make their way through Asia’s late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Raj makes a shit ton of money in rubber and establishes sons and in-laws in plantations in Malaya. Burma and Malaya both had an odd ethnicized division of labor, encouraged by the British playing their usual divide-and-conquer games. Indians, like most of the characters in the book, do most of the interfacing with imperial-backed capitalism. This means both that a few Indians like Raj make a lot of money, and many Indians toil in the plantations. “Natives” — Burmans, Malays, the assorted smaller ethnic groups those two used to lord it over before the a British came along — basically sit on the sidelines of capitalism. I get the impression this is because the British liked them doing their “traditional” thing and thought they were ill-suited for industrial labor (and plantations might be outdoors, but they involve producing commodities on industrial scale, with industrial labor discipline).
This inevitably leads the characters into the politics of the era in Asia. In typical depressing human fashion, the Burmans blame their downfall not on the British, who orchestrated it, but on the Indians, who the British employed as instruments in it. Meanwhile, more and more Indians are wondering why they play the roles the British scripted for them, and what an independent future might look like. These questions cause tensions and blow-ups in the extended clan. Raj just wants to make money, chill with Dolly, and secure his sons in business, and doesn’t take kindly when Dolly’s friend Uma starts asking tough questions about imperialism (and Raj’s questionable lord-of-the-manor pleasures). Uma charts a path across the Indian independence movement, from the militant (indeed, soldier-based, on the idea that they needed to convert the British-controlled Indian Army to make progress) Ghadar to the nonviolent Congress. Raj’s… nephew? I think? Arjun, meanwhile, joins that Indian Army in the thirties, as part of the first set of Indian commissioned officers. He’s proud at first, and takes well to British-style regimental life (bacon, beef, and all!).
But one cool thing about Ghosh- he doesn’t stint from portraying the ways things completely outside of anyone’s control direct people’s lives. Sometimes that uncontrollable love or whatever, so far, so literary, but more often, it’s economic and political forces. Two things spell doom for this rich clan’s various arrangements: the price of rubber, and Japanese imperialism. They’re almost entirely off-scene, but their power directs the action of the second half of the book. When rubber prices collapse during the Depression, the family’s fortunes tumble with them, and all those lovingly-described classic cars with maker names I never heard of seem like white elephants, even as they roll along on plantation rubber. Meanwhile, the Japanese smash the pretenses of British rule in Asia, seizing “impregnable” Singapore et al. Ghosh, and most of his characters, are under no illusions about the nature of Japanese conquest — one character shoots herself rather than be taken alive, and the Indians who abandon the British army for militancy become rapidly alienated with their Japanese patrons — but I couldn’t help but enjoy the British get theirs. Of course, again, it’s mostly Indians who suffer- even bluff Arjun has to think about what an Indian nation without an outside overlord might look like. He doesn’t know. Do any of us?
This is a pretty great book. That’s not to say it’s flawless. One flaw is personal for me- stories of “I was in love since childhood and made that love mine” weird me right the fuck out. I’m not talking high school sweethearts getting married, I’m talking like “we were destined to be together since pre-pubescence.” Admittedly, Raj and Dolly are roughly the same age, and Raj doesn’t consummate the relationship until they’re in their twenties, but still. Like I said, the characters sometimes get hard to keep track of, and I think it would’ve been better if Ghosh had ended the story with WWII, and not had a coda that hailed Aung San Suu Kyi as savior of Burma. Admittedly, it was 2000, and old Aung looked a lot better then, before she got into office and showed her clay feet, in the Rohingya crisis and elsewhere (not that I support the generals locking her up again). A work doesn’t need to be flawless to be great though, or worth reading for anyone interested in what literature can look like right now. ****’
L. Neil Smith, “The Probability Broach” (1979) - A friend of mine who is a recovering “anarcho-capitalist” tried reading this, a depiction of an alternate-history free market utopia and one of the flagship works of libertarian scifi, during the height of his belief in its ideology, and couldn’t get through it, he found it was so bad. Well, now that I’ve read it, I can understand why. Boy howdy, was this a stinker.
A twist on one of my usual disclaimers: I’d love to find really batshit visions I disagree with explored in writing, and I’m not a stickler for plausibility in alternate history stories. I mean, I sort of am for myself, because I think it would be interesting to get a really rigorous, critical-historical take on the exercise, but I’ve obviously not accomplished that. Actually good alternate history stories like “Fire on the Mountain” and especially “The Man in the High Castle” have historical dynamics in their backstories that don’t really wash. But that’s all right. Alternate history stories are, naturally, more about us than about the past or it’s possibilities.
So it’s not really the implausibility of either the world Detective Win Bear goes to, not the one he leaves behind, that bothers me, though the patterns of implausibility in both cases indicate larger problems, like that the author is a dumbass ideologue of a dumb-assed ideology. Win Bear (he’s a Native American, always good to have them on side when you’re trying to make some fatuous settler point) works for the Denver PD in a 1987 that sucks pretty hard, because it’s a conservstive libertarian fantasy of what they thought Carter-Mondale style liberalism was doing to the country. Everyone’s broke, you can’t smoke, maybe some other stuff that rhymes, bureaucrats everywhere, etc. Win has to investigate a murder of a physicist, then some people try to murder him, then of course the physicist was doing alternate world stuff, so he winds up in an alternate world. No one knows about cops, or Denver, in this alternate world! People are happy, and also, for some reason, chimpanzees and gorillas are people and they’re happy too! Everything is privatized, no one pays taxes, everyone is armed.
Do I sound tired to you at this point of the review, dear reader? That’s because I am. The problem with this book was less the world building and more just the complete shit quality of the prose, characterization, plotting, and exposition. Exposition is often a problem in scifi, and especially alternate history, so that’s relatively forgivable. Win has a tendency to get shot, and so while he’s healing up, he has people tell him about the alternate timeline he’s in. The “point of divergence” is that Albert Gallatin, known in our world as an ethnographer (i.e. had a creepy fixation on Native Americans) and Secretary of the Treasury, sides with the Whiskey Rebellion against George Washington’s efforts to enforce tax payments. They win, kill Washington, and almost literally everything is hunky-dory from that day onward. No more constitution (and I will say it is refreshing to encounter an American winger who doesn’t slavishly worship that document, not that what he wants is better), no more taxes, really no more government. Jefferson (!) fixes slavery with moral suasion. The Native Americans gladly sell their land (?!) to western settlers and assimilate. Canada and Mexico join up, voluntarily. The only problem is that followers of the exiled Alexander Hamilton, arch-governmentalist, occasionally show up and do a terrorism, and that provides what skeleton of plot exists in this book.
I would say some of that stuff — especially about race — borders on the offensive, and the offensively stupid. But that’s not really why the book is so bad. It’s an ideological Marty Stu story, which is the real problem. The expression “Mary Sue story” comes from fan fiction, where it was common for writers to insert idealized, flawless versions of themselves on the bridge of the Enterprise or whatever (and it was gendered- women writers were called out for it more often, even though the male equivalent, the Marty Stu, was probably just as widespread if not more so). That’s one of the sad things about really thoroughgoing, join-the-party stockpile-gold libertarianism- the only meaningful conflict they understand is, basically, “normal people versus busybodies.” This is probably one of the reasons why libertarians so often become bigots and fascists- the explanation to the question “of libertarian paradise is the default, why does it exist nowhere?” can very easily become “the Jews, duh,” because it’s not like there’s any other good explanation of what binds “the busybodies” together, especially if you explicitly reject class analysis. It’s one way in which libertarianism really is “classical liberalism” — that ideology’s refusal of conflict and tragedy, well after most liberals got the memo that “freedom” can’t fix everything and adapted.
That’s tragedy, maybe, but “The Probability Broach” is farce, and not a funny one. Statist terrorists keep trying to mess stuff up, both in our world and the libertarian paradise, and keep failing. They’re meant to be extraordinarily dangerous, but are also ludicrously incompetent- after all, if they were competent, they’d be libertarians, right? Compounding this, Smith is a terrible action writer. It’s an art, writing action scenes, and one Smith hasn’t learned. He mostly substitutes gore and endless gun pedantry (he is, of course, a gun pedant, the creepy kind who talks about defending women, when he also delights in depictions of women being harmed, because of a lack of guns, of course) for an ability to write action. It’s a detective story in which no detecting takes place, just bad guys falling into the hands of Win and his new alternate universe friends.
I gotta say, I never expected to find myself wishing I was reading Ayn Rand. But at least she could inject some passion into her work, whatever her many failings as a writer and thinker. Smith can’t even manage that. His writing has the tone of the asshole at the end of the bar who’s figured everything out so hard he never has to do anything, never leaves his hometown or does anything with his life because it’s all bullshit anyway. Give that asshole free reign of his resentments and a very odd historical education, and you’ve got this book. *
LAGNIAPPE
The Observed Life, with Peter: I’m Walkin’ Here!!
For the first time in a long time — maybe five years? — I visited New York City. I lived there from 2008 to 2010, my first experience not living at home or a dorm. I like it a lot, even though these days I’d probably stick to Melendy Avenue, all things being equal. It was a fun trip.
I did a lot of walking, there. Here is the neighborhood in which I stayed-
Here is the nice courtyard where I hung out my first morning whilst awaiting some tardy friends-
The thing these days appears to be very tall skinny skyscrapers. They’re ugly and even downtown Brooklyn has gotten in on the game-
We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. I recommend doing so if you visit the city, but it’s also a bit of a nightmare on weekends-
What’s the proper verb tense- “I was walkin’ here!!”? Doesn’t have the same urgency
One thing I miss a lot from New York is Polish restaurants. There’s only one in Boston that I know of, far away from me. There’s a lot in New York, especially in Greenpoint, where I used to live. We went to Krowleskie Jadlo (“King’s Feast”) and ordered the koryto, which I always think of as “the troughs.” It was a good feed.
I’m not a “natural photographer” and so didn’t document everything, like getting caught in a summer downpour on the Williamsburg Bridge, but it was a fun time. Still, nice to see the Melendy Avenue welcome committee upon my return: