Far From Brooklyn

My September reading skewed violent and unpleasant. There were crooks, murderers, rapists, torturers, wife beaters, child molesters and drug dealers. 

And a few, but not many, decent people. 

It’s all the New York Times’ fault: I’ve been using its list of the top books of the 21st Century as a kind of syllabus. I had read about half the titles on the list (more like 80% if you only count the fiction), and now I’m working my way through the rest, or at least some of the rest. This month, I started with the ultraviolent but well-written “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” by Marlon James, then turned to Fernanda Melchor’s gruesome (but also very well-written) “Hurricane Season,” and finished with Justin Torres’s slim, poetic “We the Animals,” a less-violent (but hardly peaceful) evocation of boyhood.

A Brief History of Seven Killings

I had owned this book for many years — I bought the beautiful Riverhead Books paperback edition back in 2016, or thereabouts, having heard much about it on its publication. (It won the Man Booker Prize in 2015.)  Back then, I read maybe 25 pages or so, and, very quickly seeing that it was a graphic and grim tale about criminals and crimes etc., I set it aside. I could tell it was extremely well-written, but it wasn’t for me. Too violent, too dark. I couldn’t see how I would be either entertained or enlightened by a book that essentially opens with a brutal, closely described rape and murder scene, observed by the child of the victims — no thanks. I understand that terrible things happen in the world, and there may be times when I have to think about things like that, but not when I am reading for pleasure. So — I set it aside.

Then, years later, the NYT list came out, and there it was, “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” pretty highly ranked at No. 42.  I thought maybe I should give the book another shot, given that it was on my shelf. After all, it couldn’t just be blood and guts and gangsters waving guns around.

Could it?

Well…

“Brief History” is a fictionalized take on the 1976 attempt on Bob Marley’s life, shortly before he was to star in a concert cum peace rally ahead of a hotly contested election in Jamaica. Little is known about the attack, the perpetrators or their motives, so James concocts an elaborate story that is mostly about gang turf wars, but also about Jamaican national politics and even global Cold War machinations. Everyone in this novel, it seems, has some nefarious scheme to topple some other nefarious schemer. The few characters who don’t are, for the most part, summarily gunned down. 

A lot of people get gunned down.

I imagine James was comfortable killing off so many characters because he had so many more left to write about. The novel is packed with people, enough to justify a three four-page cast of characters — politicians, crooks, spies, journalists, musicians, drug dealers, on and on and on. So what if he offs one of his narrators? (The book is written in alternating first-person segments.) There’s at least thirty more narrators who can take up the slack.

Oh, by the way, more than once James allows his narrators to keep talking to the very last, narrating their own gruesome deaths right down to the last desperate breath. And in one case, a narrator is already dead—we’re hearing from a ghost.

I said it at the outset but I’ll repeat — the writing is impressive as hell. The voices of the various Jamaican narrators are rich and varied, and the sentences are full of energy and chockablock full of idiom that manages to be surprising but understandable. I never had to look up a slang phrase to understand was going on. The non-Jamaican characters are less compelling, partly but not entirely because American English seems flat and affectless beside the rollicking Jamaican gangster patois. 

That said, even though the gnarly, dense voices of the competing Jamaican narrators are incredibly well rendered, I found “Brief History” to be veeeery slow going. The story moves forward like sludge. Indeed, at the beginning, it hardly moves at all. The first two hundred or more pages are almost all explication. The story of one character, Bam-Bam, begins with a horrifying murder scene (mentioned above), but that is pretty much all the action that takes place until we come to the Bob Marley assassination attempt — on page 236. Yes, it takes more than 200 pages to get to the main hinge of the story, the attempt on Bob Marley’s life. The fact is, the vast majority of the book up until that point is fictive oral history of gang wars and political maneuvering of mid-1970s Jamaica. 

As for Bob Marley: he is never actually named in the book. Rather, the character is solely referred to as “The Singer.” I wonder if Marley’s name was elided because of libel fears — after all, his music is still under copyright, and the family has been involved in a bunch of lawsuits, including internecine battles. On the other hand, some of Marley’s actual song titles appear in the text so maybe the decision not to name him was driven by (misbegotten) artistic considerations… In any case, calling the character “The Singer” just seems vague and bland. And indeed, “The Singer” never really appears in the narrative, except as referred to by others. I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to have such a gauzy abstraction sitting at the center of the narrative — it’s like a Tootsie Pop with nothing in the middle.

Also left intentionally (I assume) vague are the political machinations that putatively are driving the action of the book. There are regular mentions of the rival political parties, and even their leaders, particularly Michael Manley, but the specifics of the political factions are generally left unsaid. In this story, we mainly understand the parties as extensions of rival gangs. We know that Cold War foes are converging on the island, worried about (or hoping that) Jamaica will have a Cuban-style revolution. But we’re not clear (or at least I was not clear) about why one gang or another was aligned one way or another. After reading a bit of Wikipedia for background, I think I vaguely understand the apparent motivations. Vaguely.

That vagueness of “the Singer” and the parallel fuzziness of the political landscape stands in sharp contrast to the vividly drawn (and vividly named) gangsters — Papa-Lo, Shotta Sherrif, Bam-Bam, Josey Wales (Josey Wales!!!) — and their unbelievably vile but inarguably colorful and energetic language. Alas, the Americans (CIA operatives, journalists, ex-pat executives — there are a lot of Americans running around in this book) have bland names and generally bland voices. Worse, they tend to declaim at each other, stagily, like some dark Neil Simon play from the 1970s, viz: 

—Don’t think I don’t respect your soft tactics, Diflorio, or you for that matter. But this ain’t Ecuador. Not even close.
—Soft tactics. Could’ve used some softness in the Congo.
—Congo is fine.
—Congo’s a mess. It’s not even the Congo.
—It’s not communist.

On and on and on and on. 

There’s no doubting the energy, intelligence, and sheer chutzpah of this book, but it’s just too long, too violent, and it has waaaay too much explication (for me, at least). I dogeared page 462, more than 200 pages short of the full length of the novel, and riffled through the final pages to get a sense of where it was all going. I just had had enough by then. 

“A Brief History of Seven Killings” is a beautiful piece of writing, gigantic and gigantically ambitious, but after a while it crumbles under its own weight.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

Like “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” this is a ferocious novel full of violence and blood and misdeeds, and it is also rendered in brilliant, coruscating prose. (Quick shout out to the translator, Sophie Hughes.) The sentences are long and serpentine, strung together with commas and “ands” and even a liberal sprinkling of semicolons, which maybe seems like cheating but whatever, these are long, winding sentences, mostly full of fury and bile, occasionally touched with kindness but not often, and… well, you get the point. 

Also like “Brief History,” “Hurricane Season” centers on a murder, and by coincidence the target of the crime, like “The Singer,” is never named — she (or is it a he?) is known only as “the witch.” The witch is a scrawny, bedraggled figure living in a dank ruin at the edge of a presumably small town, though she is rumored to have hidden treasure in her hovel. Although she does provide potions of one sort and another, her main occupation seems to be providing unhappy young women with abortifacients. (It had never occurred to me before but I imagine that it must have been a commonplace, once upon a time, for abortionists to be labeled “witches.”) 

The narrative is a mystery of sorts — who killed the witch and why? In an interview, Melchor said she was originally inspired by the real-life killing of a witch somewhere in Mexico, with the goal of creating a nonfiction novel a la “In Cold Blood.” In the end, she decided to simply render it as fiction. 

The events of this novel are every bit as vile and violent as “A Brief History of Seven Killings.” (Had I known that, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up right after reading the James book.) Similarly, both books have revolving narrators. (Not my favorite narrative structure!) The first chapter of “Hurricane Season” is probably the strongest, in part because it is the strangest, and it is not narrated by a character but rather in the third person — but it’s a very spicy third person, essentially telling the townsfolk’s point of view, spewing venom and judgment. The story is picked up by individuals after that, each one seemingly more vicious than the last. And at last we come to Norma, a 13-year-old girl whose pregnancy and abortion are, in essence, the proximate cause of the witch’s murder. 

If this book had been even half as long as “Brief History,” I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to wade through it — but it’s relatively compact, short enough that I didn’t feel utterly dispirited by the rank ugliness of the world it describes.

If it’s not already abundantly clear, both “Hurricane Season” and “Brief History” concern themselves with pure savagery. There’s virtually no kindness or decency to be found in these pages, certainly nothing more than fleeting gestures of generosity. And, frankly, those moments of grace aren’t rendered very believably in either book. 

It’s not fair or smart to criticize a work of art for what it isn’t, but I can’t help but ask: Where in these books is the beauty of the world, where is the generosity, where is the restfulness?  Where is the good?  And I have to ask, how honest and real is a work of art that presents a world so utterly lacking in any redemptive quality? 

I mean, just to say it out loud, where is the world that Marlon James and Fernanda Melchor actually inhabit or once inhabited??? I don’t know much about either of them but I know that James grew up in Jamaica in what seems to have been middle class circumstances, and then worked in advertising as an adult. I know even less about Melchor but I do know that after growing up in Veracruz, she studied journalism and later worked in communications for a local university.  There doesn’t seem to be any acknowledgement of that kind of prosaic reality in the worlds created by these two novels. And, ironically, that renders the novels less credible (to me). The deeper I got into these books, the more I said to myself, yeah, yeah, more bad guys, more guns, more drugs, more bile. At some point, it just felt like they were pulling my chain.  I loved the writing in both of these novels but there’s something about them that feels like a failure because their default is to focus on the worst in the world, and to fail to acknowledge any hint of goodness somewhere at the margins of whatever it is that they have imagined.

Note: I stumbled across a brief, thoughtful essay about “Hurricane Season” on The Library Is Open, a gay-centric “blog about books and writing, through rainbow-tinted glasses.” (Ha!) The essay focuses on the themes of gender, queerness and sexual violence in “Hurricane Season.” Really good.

We the Animals by Justin Torres

This is a slender reminiscence of childhood. It is the story, presumably autobiographical, of a family uprooted, for unknown reasons, from Brooklyn to upstate New York, where the mother and father struggle to make ends meet and their three young sons run wild, digging up a neighbor’s garden, smashing things in their kitchen at home, hiding from their exhausted mother and their volatile father. 

The early parts of the book, and especially the thrilling first chapter, are essentially written in the first person plural: “We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock.”

Very good stuff!

Later, the narrator separates himself from his older brothers. He’s smart; he’s sensitive; he’s different from them. Turns out, he’s gay. He’s gifted. The end of the book twists away from the family, away from “we the animals,” as the boy seeks out assignations and ultimately escape, back to the city where the family originated.

The book felt a bit too fragmentary; it struck me as incomplete. But the writing is gorgeous and gusty, especially in the early going. 

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When I was writing up these notes, I thought I might refer to a scene in one of the books where one of the characters is beaten viciously with a belt. I was about to type something about that scene when I realized that I couldn’t remember which book featured that particular scene. Really, it could have been in any one of them.

So I went back and looked it up. In fact there is a graphic beating with a belt in “Brief History.” There is an even more vicious beating in “Hurricane Season,” but it is delivered with a wooden board. There is also a beating with a belt in “We the Animals,” although it’s not actually described. We see the belt come off but the beating itself remains, blessedly, undescribed. 

So much violence. So many beatings. 

It was that kind of month. These kinds of books. I may have to look beyond the NYT list for October reading ideas… P.G. Wodehouse, anyone??? 

Photo credit: Alan Schmierer, via Wikimedia