Some Capsule Reviews
never go back/fight me/a dance to the music of time/central michigan farm towns
Never Go Back (novel; 2013; written by Lee Child)
Jack Reacher has rules, famously. So did his creator Lee Child, when Lee was still writing these books (now it’s his brother Andrew). Like Cynthia Ozick and Tom Robbins, he writes his books from A to Z, fix it as you go, no doubling back. This sounds incredible, given the intricate plots of these novels, but a journalist watched him write one and apparently it’s true. He makes them up as he goes along.
I also have rules. I will not pay money for a Jack Reacher book. It’s not because I don’t think they’re worth anything; it just seems absurd to do so, when they’re everywhere. Also, I want these books to play a thoroughly unplanned role in my life. They are not part of my routine; they are not part of my vast and intricate and almost uncertainly unrealizable lifetime learning plan. Rather, they will show up in a little free library and I will grab one, as though receiving a secret message from my faraway partner in a Byzantine scheme involving international smuggling of some sort, which is about to be blown up by Jack Reacher.
This one was good. Reacher develops a crush on a woman, a fellow military officer, that he’s only talked to on the telephone. He hitchhikes to her part of the country and discovers that she’s been accused of taking a bribe, an accusation he simply can’t believe. He is, on arrival, hit with old charges of military misconduct and also a paternity suit. (One cannot believe this. Jack Reacher has no settled address and doesn’t even seem to own a toothbrush for more than a week straight; you think he doesn’t practice safe sex? C’mon.) Obviously someone wants him out of the way so they can frame his possible new gf. Reacher fights and argues his way through the whole thing, but at one point he does get to meet the person who’s supposed to be his daughter. Just like him, she is improbably resourceful, self-reliant, and obsessed with etymologies. (This young woman, like Reacher himself, and like a surprisingly high number of writers I’ve met who work from prison, obviously reads the dictionary for fun. When you’re stuck in an enclosed place, that’s a reliable source of laughter and edification.) The subplot adds a bit of real pathos to one’s overall image of Reacher, a bit of late Howard Hawks mood thrown into these novels that are, after all, essentially modern Westerns.
I like to think that I will pick up useful fighting tips from these books in case I am ever called upon to, say, take down a corrupt military person named Shrago who has fucked up ears and murder in his eyes. Probably this stuff doesn’t work, and in any case, I could never think fast enough.
Fight Me (novel; 2024; written by Austin Grossman)
This is a funny, well-observed* and often poignant novel about Gen X superheroes fighting each other for a time machine. What fortysomething person doesn’t want a time machine, anyway? I’m pretty content with my life, but I would still like to say to 13-year-old me, “Eventually girls will like you. It will take an inconveniently long time. Please spend the next four years learning Classical Greek instead of being sad. You’ll thank me later.”
Some of the things that I thought were especially well-done here: The characters have all turned “evil” or fought each other and then turned “good” and re-teamed the exact right number of times for superheroes who came up during the 1990s. Moral ambiguity is the big narrative gimmick for that era’s superheroes. The sense of what it was like to be in high school right after the end of the Cold War and right before the internet. The simultaneous literalism and carelessness of the truth that characterize all court proceedings.
Austin’s books are of the sort that are sometimes said to “mix genre with literary.” This way of talking makes me feel as though I’m going insane. Everything has a genre — even the antinovel is a genre, for heaven’s sake. And “literary” is a name for several distinct but associated ways of reading and writing; it’s not a kind of book. When I notice, while reading Lee Child, that he is better at sentence rhythm than any number of more-hyped “serious” novelists, when I notice that late in Never Go Back he takes his type-sentence “Reacher said nothing” and starts swapping in other characters (“Espin said nothing.” “Samantha said nothing”) it becomes a way of commenting on who holds the power in the scene and also a wry self-parody, I’m reading him in a “literary” way. You don’t “mix” these things, exactly.
A Dance to the Music of Time, first two movements (novel; Anthony Powell; 1951-1962)
I am listening to the audiobook of this at a frankly insane pace, because it is more entertaining than literally everything else I’m doing, including eating food and reading Jack Reacher novels. The fact that it’s the audiobook is actually really helpful. Because I have spent basically no meaningful time in England, and do not watch as many BBC costume dramas as I could, I do not hear the various English accents with the distinctness and nuance that a good performer can bring out. (Similarly, I benefited from Ruby Dee’s superb narration of Their Eyes Were Watching God because I haven’t spent a lot of time in rural Florida and would never have known how to construe utterances like “I God, Janie” without help.)
People talk about this twelve-volume novel as a comic panorama of twentieth-century London, a nostalgic but critical glance back at a world (or several successive worlds) destroyed by war and political upheaval. Don’t believe them. It’s a horror story about the absolute moral corruption that can follow from the simplest, most innocent choices. The book fools you by making you think its narrator, Nick Jenkins, is its protagonist, but actually it’s a novel about Kenneth Widmerpool, a guy who becomes the most combination of perfect idiot and private tyrant and annoying self-involved piece of shit that it’s possible to be. But when we first meet him, right in the opening pages, he has done nothing wrong except a) go for a jog (the narrator for some reason thinks this is a crime) and b) have a coat that sucks. His coat sucks so bad that our narrator, Nick, goes on about it for like ten minutes. A little later we get the impression that Widermpool’s a bit of a toadie, but really — there’s nothing meaningful wrong with this guy. All he did was go jogging in the winter and own a coat that’s de trop. In what kind of Ari Aster moral universe, rigged against us from the start, can these small errors result in one’s becoming such a monster as Kenneth Widmerpool? How much is God rooting against us? This book is scarier than Silence of the Lambs.
St. Louis, Michigan (town; ca. 1848; “settled” by Lutherans ministering to nineteenth-century Ojibwe)
Where I grew up, if you went on a long country walk or drive and got even slightly lost, you would end up here (or Ithaca, a town that we worked way too hard coming up with obscene soundalike nicknames for). The point officially recognized as the middle of the lower peninsula of Michigan is here (I used to run slowly past it). My high-school English teacher and a bunch of the kids I went to church with or worked at McDonalds with came from here. I found St. Louis people on the whole slightly more chill, more at home in their own and each others’ eccentricities, than Alma people, although some of them got pissy if they found out you were from Alma. During the research for my first book, Midwest Futures, I discovered the historical basis for this rivalry: one night a bunch of stooges working for Alma’s resident Gilded Age rich guy, Ammi Wright, sneaked out tore up the railroad tracks that were supposed to go through St. Louis and make it an Important Local Trading Hub, and so then the railroad people built through Alma instead, getting the hint, and there you go. By the time I was in high school, both towns could be synecdoches for “decline of America’s manufacturing base.” Fortune steals away all our temporary advantages; might as well be kind.
I drove to St. Louis very early in the morning on Tuesday, the second day of school, to support a friend at his parole hearing. I have not been to my hometown since 2009 or so; I have not been to St. Louis since the ‘90s. The downtown doesn’t look too bad, frankly. (The first billboard that I saw that mentioned Alma was for a gas station, and it made a point of announcing that the place had clean bathrooms. So that’s where we’re at, in terms of amenities.) The staff at St. Louis Correctional were among the friendliest I’ve encountered at Michigan prisons, which is simply to say that they didn’t look at every human they encountered as though reviewing the bottom of their shoes. It’s low-security and a lot of the people there are headed for parole; that probably has something to do with it. This says something very obvious but also important about central Michigan as a whole: in the waiting room and parking lot of that prison, I saw more black people in one place than I ever saw in Alma, Ithaca, or St. Louis, from one end of my childhood to the other. I’m cautiously optimistic about my friend’s chances.
Sorry about all the typos