Dec 23 2018

Social Creature by Tara Isabella Burton

Shamefully, I have never read The Talented Mr Ripley, electing instead to read the Wiki page to see how much symmetry there is between that classic and this novel that does not pretend not to be very much inspired by that earlier book (in my defense, there are only so many hours in the day, and between Little Tales Of Misogyny and The Price Of Salt, I’ve read my share of Patricia Highsmith.) I don’t know if it’s a bit of a spoiler to warn you that Social Creature is very much a modern updating of TTMR, because that’s pretty much the entire point of the book: to be an exercise in deception and guilt and how to get away with murder in the age of social media. Bonus: the main characters are female, which adds an entirely different level to the goings-on.

SC follows Louise Wilson, a 29 year-old living a life of quiet desperation as she ekes out a respectable living in New York City, juggling three jobs and telling herself that she’ll get back to being a writer some day. Single, friendless and lonely, she quickly succumbs to the seductive spell of Lavinia Williams, the wild and wildly romantic older sister of one of the girls Louise tutors for the SATs. Lavinia introduces Louise to the heady, decadent New York City high life that exists only for the young, rich and well-connected. For the first time in her life, Louise feels beautiful and wanted and seen.

But Lavinia has her private rules and an unspoken agenda that slowly bind Louise closer to her and to her lifestyle. Were Louise more sensible, more self-assured, perhaps she could face losing this entire gilded world when she trespasses against the most closely held of Lavinia’s many mean girl barriers; instead, she finds herself living a life so perfect but for its fragility, encroached upon by the paranoia and guilt that come from needing to keep up appearances in the face of the actual end of it all.

SC is a novel about a toxic female friendship on steroids, about a woman whose only reality is herself and the friend who chooses that reality over the person. It’s also a novel about social media as a filter for our lives, and a merciless extrapolation of how we use it to present the facades we want to show the world. And while it definitely hits several of TTMR’s story beats, it’s not a slavish reproduction — tho perhaps I say that only having read the Wikipedia outline. Regardless, I was vastly entertained by this dark exercise in young feminine ruthlessness. Also, I must say that I thought the growing friendship between Louise and Mimi quite sweet; had Lavinia not done her best to ruin them, perhaps Louise would have stood a chance, in the end.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/23/social-creature-by-tara-isabella-burton/

Dec 21 2018

The Willow By Your Side by Peter Haynes

A few years ago, I bought a boxed set of Susan Cooper’s The Darkness Rising series, eager for the nostalgia of English children fighting evil, mythical forces in semi-allegory for real world conflicts. It was, sadly, a disappointing experience because, as an adult, the stories are frightfully simplistic in a way that they weren’t to my spellbound childhood self.

The Willow By Your Side, however, is the perfect grown-up successor to that tradition. Atmospheric and creepy, the tale follows a young boy who is devoted to his troubled, tale-telling older sister as much as to his Great War veteran, PTSD-suffering father (his mother gets short shrift, but she clearly favors the older sister, so that’s rather to be expected.) When his sister goes missing after a particularly fraught chapter in their family history, the boy goes into the nearby woods in search of her and enters a fantastical, hallucinatory world of monsters and history-made-almost-legend. Things get a bit muddled sometimes as we leap between past and present, reality and not-quite-surreality, but the boy’s emotions are a steady throughline guiding us on his quest.

And it’s hard because his emotions are so real and his family so loved yet so damaged that you absolutely understand why everything happens the way it does but you can’t really root for anyone or even be really mad at anyone, much like in real life. The Willow By Your Side hit all my sweet spots: English children in a very English fantasy novel with a tinge of WWI and Roman legionnaires. If that’s the kind of thing you like, too, then I can’t recommend this novel highly enough.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/21/the-willow-by-your-side-by-peter-haynes/

Dec 20 2018

What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Two years and some-odd weeks ago, Donald Fucking Trump — aided by the Russian government along with its witting and unwitting stooges, boosted by an FBI director he soon fired, slavered over by a national press that apparently couldn’t help itself any more than it could help spending more time on his opponent’s e-mail practices than all other issues combined, and, finally, selected by fools the length and breadth of the land — assembled a fortuitously placed minority of votes, and secured enough of the Electoral College to make him the forty-fifth president of the United States.

I didn’t see it coming. (I was in good company there.) In the months leading up to the election, I joked that Trump might go the full Mondale — losing all 50 states. I underestimated how difficult it is for a political party to hold the White House for three consecutive terms. Since World War II, that has happened exactly once. I underestimated the willingness of the press to dwell on trivia on one side of the ballot, and make it seem equivalent to serious matters on the other side. I underestimated the accumulated effects of a quarter of a century of bile spewed at Hillary. Most of all, I underestimated misogyny.

In What Happened, which I still think is missing two words from its title, Clinton reckons with the campaign, the election, and a short period afterward. On the inaugural that might have been hers, she relays the quote attributed to George W. Bush, “That was some weird shit.”

She lays out some of the structural constraints in the chapter “On Being a Woman in Politics”:
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/20/what-happened-by-hillary-rodham-clinton-2/

Dec 17 2018

The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine

The first half of The House of Government located the Bolshevik party within a specifically Russian tradition of millennarianism. Revolutionary socialism would redeem the world, starting with Russia, and usher in a new era, a time of plenty, a time of the perfectibility of humanity. The second half of the book details what life is like, and supposed to be like, in the arriven utopia.

The House itself, which was Europe’s largest residential building when it was completed, is simultaneously a prototype for the Bolsheviks’ hopes of creating a new kind of life by altering the material conditions under which people lived, a reward for high functionaries in the Party and state (although not the highest; they followed centuries of Russian rulers by living in the Moscow Kremlin), and the scene of hundreds of dramas as victorious revolutionaries settled into the long haul of governing. They worked together, socialized together, had affairs, brought in additional family members, raised children, managed second (or third) marriages, had breakdowns, and did all the things that ambitious humans are prone to do. They did it while attempting to make a new society from the remnants of the Tsarist empire, collectivizing agriculture, forcing industrialization, and otherwise trying to build what had only been glimpsed in the theoretical writings of Marx.

Slezkine captures slices of these lives by generous quotations from their letters, diaries and other personal accounts. The immense size of the book is necessary for him to tell even a small portion of what happens to the people in the House, to give a sense of the ferment, the intrigues, and the interconnectedness among the upper reaches of Bolshevik society. I never found the reading a slog; even now, looking back through the book, if I open it to one of the pages I have flagged, I tend to get pulled back into the myriad stories that Slezkine sketches, following the lines of connection and argument to the next photo, the next anecdote, the next mix of old and new. “Ilya Zharsky’s job after [university] graduation was exempt from Marxist exegesis. (He liked to call himself a ‘paraschite,’ but his official title was ‘Lenin mausoleum employee.’) In other arts and sciences, young proletarian true believers of mostly nonproletarian origin were trying to oust their former teachers while fighting among themselves over Party patronage and definitions of orthodoxy. Urbanists, disurbanists, constructivists, RAPPists, AKhRRists, and sulphuric acid engineers were planning a new world in the ruins of the old.” (p. 455) Slezkine’s occasionally droll take on the very serious Soviets is on display, both in “mostly nonproletarian origin” and in the importance of orthodoxy, but not Orthodoxy, among Russia’s new rulers.

Once in power and ensconced in the House of Government many, but of course not all, Bolsheviks recreated the lives of the educated upper bourgeoisie that they had displaced in Moscow. They had household servants, some of them amassed collections of art, many of them played the pianos that graced House apartments. Some traditions came back with new, Party-approved meanings.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/17/the-house-of-government-by-yuri-slezkine-2/

Dec 17 2018

The Favorite Sister by Jessica Knoll

I don’t think it’s possible to review The Favorite Sister without bringing up Jessica Knoll’s searing debut Luckiest Girl Alive. That book centered a female protagonist who was done being “nice”, to the consternation of a large number of readers. To the rest of us, TifAni FaNelli was a source of cathartic glee.

TFS expands on the idea of the “unlikeable” protagonist and spreads it across several characters, who are all involved with a reality TV program called Goal Diggers. Each season showcases 5 women trying to support and uplift each other as they pursue lucrative careers — or at least that was the original intent. The first season had terrible ratings so the women were subsequently pitted against one another, which turned the show into a highly lucrative smash. The book is told through the points of view of Brett, the white lesbian gym entrepreneur with a passion for helping needy women; Kelly, her older sister who juggles the practical side of running their business together with being a single mom to a mixed-race 12 year-old daughter, and Stephanie, the African-American author whose recent memoir has topped the charts and earned the attention of Hollywood. The reader learns very quickly that Brett was murdered and that Kelly is helping to cover it up: the rest of the book is the why and wherefore and how.

I actually enjoyed the structure of the novel with the shifting viewpoints and leaps back and forth in time. It felt especially suitable for a book about a reality show which, like most of its ilk, manipulates timelines for maximum drama. As far as who I was rooting for (because honestly you’re going to wind up rooting for one of the women,) my sympathies definitely rested more with Stephanie than anyone else. These women are all liars desperate to preserve their ways of life but she, I felt, was the person with the most justification.

Which leads to another thing I enjoyed about this book: the complete and brutal honesty about what it means to be a woman in these times. Ms Knoll skewers the ridiculous expectations women are subjected to while also showing great empathy for women who have to deal with said expectations on a daily basis. Most importantly, Ms Knoll cleverly illustrates how differing viewpoints are equally valid and how women (all, but specifically the ones in this book) aren’t necessarily good or evil but a very human mix of the two.

That said, it was really hard to like most of the women in this book because of their prevailing character trait: some people might think it avarice, but really it’s cowardice. Whereas TifAni did not lack courage, the women in this book all choose the easy way and it’s pretty disappointing. TFS is a well-written book with a lot of great insights but it’s also a story without heroes, which rarely makes for a good read and in this instance most definitely does not. I mean, it’s worthy reading, but it’s not satisfying reading, not the way LGA was. Here’s hoping Ms Knoll’s next book keeps improving on her oeuvre.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/17/the-favorite-sister-by-jessica-knoll/

Dec 16 2018

Night of Stone by Catherine Merridale

Night of Stone is a book for deep and dark December, and an amazing work of history. Carrying the subtitle “Death and Memory in Russia,” it focuses on the twentieth century, when there was more than enough of the first, and the second existed under the particular pressures of the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet governance. Merridale started by looking at the rituals surrounding death as a way of understanding the extent of revolution in Russia, but she followed where her questions led, and found herself writing a much deeper, much more heartfelt, and much more tentative history as a result.

When I first began to think about Russians and death, it was this aspect, the disruption and reinvention of ritual, that interested me most. I had been intrigued by the idea that a modern revolution could try to create an entirely new kind of person. As I began to collect material about the Bolsheviks’ first efforts … the history I thought I was writing was a study of ideology, propaganda and mentalities. Death, or rather the rituals and beliefs that surrounded it, played the part of a test case. I could measure the impact of Bolshevik power by looking at the ways people chose to bury and grieve for each other. Rites of death, after all, are notoriously resistant to change. (p. 12)

So far, so academic. “But the story of scientific atheism was only one of the threads in an exceptionally rich weave.” (p. 13) The cultural practices surrounding death were singular and vivid under the Tsars, and 70 years of Bolshevism transmuted them but did not extinguish them. Russians are no more inured to death than any other group of people. “The point is worth making because Russia’s story of death has been obscured so often. Rather than thinking of the ritual and the grief, most histories of Soviet Russia write of death from the point of view of politics or demography.” (p. 13) Outsiders often write about Russia as if it were unique, and had a tradition of repeated violence, of brutalization that was somehow inherent. Merridale points her readers in the other direction:

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/16/night-of-stone-by-catherine-merridale-2/

Dec 12 2018

The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley

I did not love this nearly as much as the book that first introduced Aliya Whiteley’s genius to me (The Arrival Of Missives — go pick it up, it’s amazing,) but it was still an incredibly deep and powerful meditation on an important aspect of the human condition, examined through a sci-fi what-if filter. In the case of The Loosening Skin, that aspect is love and the filter is this: humankind moults off its skin every seven years or so, shedding with that skin all manner of prior attachments. Primarily, this involves romantic love, with often devastating consequences. Changes can also be found in more mundane preferences, such as career or taste in personal furnishings. Regardless, entire systems of belief and coping have sprung up around this aspect of human biology that forces emotional along with physical renewal.

Rose Allington is our heroine. She suffers from Extreme Moult Syndrome, a condition where she moults much more frequently than every seven years and often in times of extreme duress. After being discharged from the RAF, she finds a job as bodyguard to Hollywood superstar Max Black. Almost in spite of herself, she falls deeply in love with him, a feeling he returns with fervor. Max believes in pills and the power of medical science to stave off moulting, but Rose thinks it’s all quackery. When her condition strikes once more and she leaves him, he is far more devastated than he lets on.

Fast forward several years and Max has tracked Rose down in order to ask for help: someone has stolen his old, very valuable skins and is likely going to sell them to the highest bidder. Old skins retain the emotions of their former wearers, accessible to the touch, and Max is understandably leery of being exploited like this. Rose reluctantly agrees to take the case, and soon finds herself tangled back up in a world of horrors she’d sought to outrun with each shed skin turned to ash in her past.

TLS is a poignant examination of what it means to leave love behind. Moulting is a terrific physical manifestation of the emotional process, and I was completely drawn in by the almost fatalistic notion that romantic love must always die. I don’t necessarily believe or agree with that — I personally feel that love evolves between people and, as with any evolution, survives and grows stronger or withers away — but it’s fascinating to see a world where the maxim holds true, and the lengths that people will go to in order to hold on to love. I also straight up loved the sci-fi, even as the criminality that sprang up around the moulting made me feel a bit queasy. That factory scene was especially chilling.

What didn’t really work for me was the bit with Mik, and his fluctuating views on others. His feelings at the end felt far more adolescent than the feelings he displayed in the flashback scenes, or even earlier in his quest for Rose. Since he’s pretty much our viewpoint character for the last part of the book, it’s a rather disconcerting way to end an otherwise excellent novel.

TLS was sent to me by its original, British publisher Unsung Stories because of our mutual admiration for Ms Whiteley’s work. I’ll be reviewing some of their other books in the near future as well, so stay tuned!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/12/the-loosening-skin-by-aliya-whiteley/

Dec 11 2018

European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman (The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club #2) by Theodora Goss

At 702 pages — nearly twice the length of its predecessor in the series — European Travel For The Monstrous Gentlewoman is an unfortunately ungainly novel. Whereas The Strange Case Of The Alchemist’s Daughter was a sprightly reimagining of classic monstrous tales especially as they pertained to the much abused daughters of horrible men, ETftMG is an overlong journey through Europe that had me as fatigued as travel-weary Mary Jekyll by the end.

It continues the narrative begun in TSCofAD, and while it’s hard to be churlish at the great slate of characters introduced as a natural progression of the story given the richness of the source material, it’s almost too much. I had quite a bit of literary fangirl squee at all the semi-obscure references brought to life here, and can see why they’re all pertinent to this particular plot line, but I felt that the narrative dragged far more than it should have. As much as I appreciated the attention to place and historical detail, it felt a bit too vacation slideshow for my tastes. I do feel that loads of set pieces could have been cut or spliced together to make this book feel like less of a slog. I was also not a fan of Theodora Goss’ action scenes, which felt disjointed and, worse, unimmersive.

However, I did continue to enjoy the distinct voices of each member of the Athena Club, particularly in the interjectory passages, tho I scoff at the idea of Mary not knowing that the Greek goddess Athena kept an owl as a familiar. I also enjoyed the way Ms Goss mulls over the costs of scientific progress (tho honestly one would think that voluntary experimentation should be the rule when it comes to human testing) as well as morality in general, particularly in regard to Mary/Diana and Justine’s musings on guilt and responsibility.

Overall, I’m hoping this is a case of sophomore slump and the next book will return to the sparkling form of TSCofAD. Tho I haven’t the slightest idea for the basis of Alice/Lydia, and would welcome direction in that regard.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/11/european-travel-for-the-monstrous-gentlewoman-the-extraordinary-adventures-of-the-athena-club-2-by-theodora-goss/

Dec 09 2018

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

In the eight linked tales that comprise Lovecraft Country, Matt Ruff takes readers on mind-stretching journeys across time and space, far more frightening trips across the mid–twentieth century US, conjures ghosts in Chicago, banishes them in New England, and summons up a sparkling cast of friends and relatives who are doing their best to live in Jim Crow America when the supernatural suddenly walks off the pages of the pulps and the comics and into their day-to-day life. The title story, first in the volume, introduces Atticus Turner, who is on his way back to Chicago after an unhappy post-Army year in Florida. A blown tire during his first hour in Indiana brings him face to face with discrimination in the North, but a fellow African-American (though the book uses “Negro,” as a sympathetic writer of the period would have done) who owns a garage in Indianapolis tows his car, and on the way back they discover a mutual interest in the science fiction of the period. Both men’s dads had also given them a hard time for liking the pulp adventures, not least because of their relentless whiteness and the often crude stereotypes on their pages.

Atticus makes it to Chicago, not without yet another encounter with a harassing white police officer, to discover that his father, Montrose, has already left, departed for a rural backwater in northern Massachusetts where, he claims, Atticus’ late mother’s family was from and where a significant legacy awaits. Atticus and his father have had a combative relationship in the past, but he does not hesitate to go and find Montrose. Joining him is his uncle George, who owns the company that publishes The Safe Negro Travel Guide, Ruff’s fictional counterpart to The Negro Motorist Green Book. George is the one who calls Montrose’s destination “Lovecraft Country,” and he knows not only the author’s work but also some of the places where fiction might not have been so fictional. Also joining them is Letitia Dandridge, a friend of the family since Atticus’ childhood, who needs a ride to a nearby part of Massachusetts. She had been the only girl in the science fiction club at school, until her mom “put an end to that, insisting that Letitia stop wasting time on foolishness and start earning her keep like her siblings, after which Atticus rarely saw her.” (p. 29)

And with that, they are off to an adventure to rival anything in the books that the three of them enjoy. Letitia is as resourceful as either of the men, providing a crucial intervention when a tip that George got for potential inclusion in the next edition of the Guide turns out to be dangerously wrong. The legacy that Atticus travels to find provides not only the climax to the first story but the bridge to more Lovecraftian intrigue in the mid-century Midwest. And elsewhere, of course. Sometimes very elsewhere.

The stories that follow — including “Dreams in the Which House,” “Abdullah’s Book,” “Hippolyta Disturbs the Universe,” or “Jekyll in Hyde Park” — riff on those themes: supernatural doings, the everyday dangers of being black in 1950s America, the joys of the interrelated characters, their varying personalities facing the usual questions of life as well as more unusual questions of the universe and everything. There are tales of passing, of unquiet ghosts, of coming to terms with terrible choices, of what one does when one is just tired of everything, of how power behaves when it thinks it can get away with anything. The characters are funny and lively, grounded even as they show their flaws and occasional pettiness.

With the characters facing mundane dangers and degradations along with the supernatural plots, it would be all too easy for a certain grimness to set in. Thinking back over the stories, though, I remember more of the characters working out what to do next while also teasing each other about one thing or another. They may not approve of each other’s actions — some of the churchier folks definitely do not think much of the apparent magic that others seem to command — but they never give up on one another. The paralysis that afflicted so many of Lovecraft’s characters is almost nowhere to be found in Ruff’s book. Visiting Lovecraft Country is great, but don’t trust the maps, things have changed.

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Doreen’s review of Lovecraft Country is here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/09/lovecraft-country-by-matt-ruff-2/

Dec 07 2018

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Not every fantasy features swords and sorcery, though most of them involve a mythical creature of one sort or another. Amor Towles names his in the title: A Gentleman in Moscow. In midsummer 1922, following a brief trial, Count Alexander Rostov is not ordered immediately shot as a class enemy. It seems that senior Bolsheviks value a pre-revolutionary poem that appeared under his byline, and so the usual punishment is held in abeyance. Instead, he is marched out of the Kremlin and ordered to return to the Hotel Metropol, where he has spent the previous four years. He is further ordered to remain inside the hotel for the rest of his natural life. If he sets foot outside of it again, revolutionary justice will take its course, and he will be shot.

The Party has left him his life, but it does not leave him the luxurious suite where he had lived since 1918. He is required to relocate to a small room in the attic, near the utility stairs. “Up they wound three flights to where a door opened on a narrow corridor servicing a bathroom and six bedrooms reminiscent of monastic cells. This attic was originally built to house the butlers and ladies’ maids of the Metropol’s guests, but when the practice of traveling with servants fell out of fashion, the unused rooms had been claimed by the caprices of casual urgency—thenceforth warehousing scraps of lumber, broken furniture, and other assorted debris.” (pp. 10–11) That small room is to be the Count’s indefinite home, the hotel the limit of his world.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/07/a-gentleman-in-moscow-by-amor-towles/