ROBERT
SCOTTO
Novels in
the year of Covid
Every year a sizable number of new novels are published in
English, some by laureates, some by veterans, some by sophomores and some by
neophytes. Despite COVID, 2021 was no different, writers, after all, keeping to
their own calendars and working, despite lockdowns, in the privacy of their own
rooms. Rather than try to summarize an enormous number of books, or even give a
sense of trends, I will concentrate instead on fiction from writers with
established credentials, several of whom are among my personal favorites. I
strongly recommend, therefore, the following, an admittedly selective and
idiosyncratic group, in alphabetical order:
RACHEL CUSK
Second Place
Ms. Cusk moves beyond
her award winning Outline trilogy with a work so understated that it took me
some time to realize how profound it was. Not until the afterword do we get a
hint about place and time, but that information is unnecessary when it finally
appears because the novel is more an enigmatic parable than a realistic
recreation of experience. The narrator, a woman who is married to a man who
adores her, is looking for something beyond her life at the edge of a marsh, so
the couple construct an outbuilding, a second place, to serve as a kind of
miniature artist’s colony. A nameless, famous painter in the twilight of his
career whom she has admired is invited and the sexual tension mounts as his
attempt to paint her in the nude becomes both exotic and troublesome. I won’t
try to untangle the mysteries because they are the essence of the book: the unknown
Jeffers she addresses her reminisces to, the magical painting the artist
produces before he leaves and becomes famous once more before his death, the
nature of the relationship between husband and wife: Cusk creates a magical
alternate universe that you experience rather than explain.
ANTHONY
DOERR CLOUD
Cuckoo Land
I thought Mr. Doerr’s
first novel,
All the Light We Cannot See , a bit over written for its plot, but
he has certainly shown with this, his second, that his sentences have range and
power, evoking three quite different time periods peopled by five carefully
realized main characters and many interesting minor ones. The central
historical events are, roughly, the fall of Byzantium to the Turks, the Korean
War and a futuristic and incredibly detailed rendering of a colony star ship
that ultimately proves to be earthbound for decades. Two young people from
different backgrounds, she Greek Christian, he Balkan Moslem, through a serious
of extraordinary events that take place during the siege and capitulation of
Constantinople in 1443, find each other and overcome the obstacles of
linguistic, religious and cultural differences to settle into a lifelong
relationship. Two men, one elderly, a veteran of the Korean War, and the other,
young, disturbed and brilliant, come together in present day Idaho during an
act of protest that goes awry. The two story lines 600 years apart are tied
together by the translation by the veteran of an ancient text, which gives the
novel its title, and which had been saved and preserved by the couple in
Byzantium. The third narrative thread seems at first unrelated to the other
two, taking place in the future, but the Latin book plays a part in revealing
the lie the inhabitants are living in their false spaceship. Although the plot
seems, when deconstructed, utterly enigmatic, the 700 plus pages of the novel
are consistently interesting and evocative. The central mystery is the book
from the distant past that touches every character deeply.
KAZUO
ISHIGURO
Klara and the Sun
The only Nobel laureate on the list, Mr. Ishiguro continues
to surprise me with his adventurous sorties into speculative fiction, anchored
in prose of unremitting realism and precision. The typical Ishiguro sentence
renders a scene in such detail that we suspend our disbelief in the strange
story involving an android built to be a companion for a child. Unfortunately
for Klara, once her charge reaches maturity she is no longer needed, so,
powered by sunlight, she is permitted to waste away. As in his previous foray
into what was once called hard science fiction,
Never Let Me Go, no other
writer I am aware of invests his protagonists, who are, after all, machines or
surrogates bred to furnish organs for a more privileged class, with such
empathy. As Klara fades in the dying daylight, taking in her last rays of
energy, this reader feels as if he were watching a living, breathing entity
lose her soul.
RICHARD
POWERS
Bewilderment
I am bewildered that
Mr. Powers has somehow traveled under the radar of the glitterati even though
he produces one stunningly original novel after another. His latest is no
exception: the root word of bewilderment is wild, something Powers always is,
however much he creates credible people living in the places and through the
strange circumstances they encounter. Here we see themes we associate with his
other novels braided with a tighter focus and economy: the environmental
crisis, scientific exploration that edges into the mystical, a child disturbed
by the loss of his mother in an accident as well as what is happening to the
natural world, and an astrobiologist father trying to navigate the intensely
personal and speculative arrangements that life offers; these include invented
exoplanets and decoded
neurofeedback
experiments (and Powers makes these complex thought experiments comprehensible)
as he attempts to normalize the boy’s life.
Bewilderment is shorter and more intense than
The
Overstory, his foray into extreme environmentalism, but so packed with
information and family tragedy that it seems to be longer.
GARY
SHTEYNGART
Our Country Friends
The only real COVID novel of any merit I have encountered,
Mr. Shteyngart’s reimagining of Boccaccio’s Decameron
is both funny, as all of his previous efforts
have been, and in its own way profound, a microcosm that covers more social
intricacies and shibboleths than most contemporary fiction. Seven adults and
one child escape plague ridden New York for the dacha to the north owned by a
Russian writer and his wife, a psychiatrist. Their daughter, adopted from a
northern Chinese orphanage, is clearly gifted if also clearly on the spectrum.
Their friends, all but one of Asian origin, frolic, recollect, and fall in and
out of love as the world they left behind goes to the dogs. The comedy ends
with one of them dying, from the virus they tried to avoid, in an extended
fugue which touchingly blends past, present and the dreams that could have been
but never were.
I recommend, with some reservation, these:
T. C. BOYLE
Talk to Me
Mr. Boyle does not write boring books, and his gift for
comedy as well as his penchant for daring to explore subjects and people most
writers avoid can both be found in this evisceration of a failed scientific
experiment to raise a chimpanzee as a human child. Much of the action involves
the stupidity and greed of Nim Chimsky’s handlers, who use
the creature as a career boosting pawn, and
the young woman who really mothers and teaches him and ultimately tries,
unsuccessfully, to rescue him from the horrible fate of being turned over to a
biotechnical institute as an experimental test case. The surface is so dazzling
that we suspend out credibility at times simply to enjoy the depictions of
inter species interaction and we forgive the cartoonish characterization of the
exploiters because we come to believe, like Aimee Vuillard, the heroine, that
the chimp is a conscious presence who should be saved.
JONATHAN
FRANZEN
Crossroads
Mr. Franzen has been
over praised and under appreciated because he has dared to write novels that
are fully accessible, non- experimental and comfortably earthbound and yet that
aspire to be what he called early in his career “art fiction”.
Crossroads is the first volume of a projected trilogy
which, when completed, might be close to 2000 pages, a domestic study of a
minister and his family over the course of a couple of years in the early 1970s
in suburban Chicago, with extended flashbacks. You have to give him credit for
evoking a complex social scene with religion at the thematic center and replete
with a good deal of sex, a dangerous intersection experienced by the characters
as well as the reader. He pulls it off with grace and clarity even if several
of the protagonists in the nuclear family are not fully realized and their
stories not always galvanizing. Perhaps the consequent volumes will not only
fill in gaps but also, by bringing us up to the present day, enrich the barely
touched upon political and social issues of the times.
Interestingly, the two British novels are relatively short
and written in an unadorned prose while the American novels are longer, fuller,
funnier and more variegated, several running to over 600 pages. I am not quite
sure why this is so and I do not want to fall into the cliché trap. But the
focus of Cusk and Ishiguro is very different from the multi-plotted efforts of
Doerr, Franzen and Shteyngart, where various characters occupy the narrative at
various times, while the sometimes feverish prose of Boyle and Powers operates
at different levels of realism, even though, like Ishiguro, they are
speculative rather than naturalistic in intent. Whether you prefer
understatement or elaborate artifice, realism or imaginative invention, these
seven novels should satisfy your search for novelty as well as charm your
aesthetic sensibilities.
Former professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, until his
retirement,
Robert Scotto’s previous
publications include a Critical Edition of
Catch-22,
a book on the contemporary American novel and essays on Walter Pater, James
Joyce and other major and minor nineteenth and twentieth century writers. The
first edition of his biography,
Moondog,
won the 2008 ARSC Award for Best Research in Recorded Classical Music and the
Independent Publisher Book Awards 2008 bronze medal for biography. He has
published two poetry collections,
most
recent being,
Imagined Secrets (Nirala,
2019).
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