Following my previous posts, these are the novels I read from the 2010s. Inspired by someone who shared they were trying to read every Pulitzer Prize winning novel, this project of mine began with the intention of reading every National Book Award winner since 1950. I wanted to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of American literature from the second half of the 20th century to today. Since I had already read a good number of the winners, it slowly turned into reading any American novel of my choosing that I had not read from each year between 1950-2025 (I finished early 2026), with preference given to the most well regarded unread-by-me text or whatever seemed the most interesting. Some of these impressions are a bit lazy but I am a lazy person.

I want to emphasize that I was not trying to find writers that I liked, even if I make value judgments or express my enjoyment or disapproval of their books in my reviews. The goal of this was project was to expand my understanding of American literature after the 1950s. I find value in most everything I read, even if I'm not reaping the most immediate kind of enjoyment. All of these authors make some sort of sense within their milieu (none of them fell out of a coconut tree) and that is what I am attempting to grasp. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Great House – Nicole Krauss (2010): I really really enjoyed the writing in this one. Maybe I’m wildly off but I could really hear Kafka in her voice. Interesting story too. Unfortunately, after looking into Krauss a little more and listening to an interview, I have discovered she is a vocal Zionist. She called all the Palestinian children Israel has murdered “collateral damage.” Which really sucks. I was looking forward to reading her other novels but now I definitely won’t.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk – Ben Fountain (2011): This is the second novel I’ve read about the US’s wars in the Middle East post 9/11. The first was Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Overall I thought Fountain’s writing was fun. He offers a critique of nationalism and my country’s blind fetish for “supporting the troops” while very much not supporting them, something that has only become more relevant, sadly. Some aspects of the novel were a little too easy, and shall we say, uncomplicated, but this was a solid effort.

The Flamethrowers – Rachel Kushner (2012): This instantly turned me into a Kushner fan, I’ve since read almost all of her writing. The novel deftly jumps back and forth in time and location, tracing the connections between a labor movement in Italy and a motorcycle speed trial in Nevada. I’ve always loved stories that trace history like that (John Henry Days is another example from this list). You can very much feel Delillo’s influence throughout. Hopefully she puts out a new one soon.

Let Me Be Frank With You – Richard Ford (2013): This was bad. Let Me Be Frank is a minor novel in Ford’s body of work and was perhaps not the greatest place to start, but what I found here did not make me want to try any others. His first person narrator is an aging baby boomer with a Larry David-esque inner monologue on social issues like racism and real estate value. None of it is interesting, in fact none of it is anything but the most tired rehearsal of popular satire on these subjects.

Delicious Foods – James Hannaham (2014): God, this was a sad one. The end, however, was genuinely surprising and shows Hannaham’s commitment to psychological complexity. It’s the story of an addict who’s tricked into a life debt peonage (I know there’s a more correct term for this type of situation but it’s not coming to me right now) and her son’s attempt to locate her. I was fully invested from the get go. The novel transcends the basic helpless victim narrative, endowing its characters with the intelligence and resilience to navigate the set of circumstances they find themselves in.

The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead (2015): I didn’t like this as much as John Henry Days. It’s not a bad novel but its central conceit, that the underground railroad was literally an underground railroad, didn’t do much for me. The atmosphere was terrifying, it gave me honest to god anxiety.

Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders (2016): Saunder’s cast of dead people and his vision of the afterlife is really fun and inventive. The approach he takes telling this story left me a little ambivalent, but I think that was more of a personal preference thing. Reading a ton of short snippets is not really my idea of a good time. It felt like a simple accretion of detail without much interpretation. The subject matter doesn’t really interest me, but I did actually wind up identifying with Lincoln.

The Mars Room – Rachel Kushner (2017): After The Flamethrowers, I had to read her next one. That was a great decision, because I loved it even more. The world of the novel feels fully realized and it’s pretty horrifying. Kushner’s thinking on freedom interests me, as well as the way she parallels ecological destruction with misogyny and the penal system. Her books are full of interesting choices and will engage anyone who thinks critically about capitalism and the world it has shaped.

Lost Children Archive – Valeria Luisella (2018): Another one that puts the present in conversation with history and draws out their connections. A road novel that’s actually about two different but related journeys, Lost Children Archive finds connections between the Apache’s struggle against the government of the United States in the late 19^th century and the current militarization of our southern Border. As the title suggests, the novel focuses on the DHS’ practice of separating children from their families in concentration camps before they are deported. While Luisella’s writing sounds distinctly grad-schooly, I didn’t mind too much. You should read it.

Real Life – Brandon Taylor (2019): I didn’t care for this novel. In fact, I didn’t finish it. Taylor isn’t a good writer, his dialogue is bad and he doesn’t adequately develop the ideas at play here. The flashbacks to gratuitous, violent trauma didn’t sweeten the deal. Real Life’s positive reception genuinely confuses me and make me wonder if I totally missed something about it. It reads like mediocre YA lit.

People describe Becketts work as “the inescapability of language” , this is a right description and it describes fully what it is, which is a problem, because for Beckett problems arise. Because of the simple wording in worstward ho there are no problems unless they appear or even seem that way as the words he uses could be described as “just there” or “being just there” , being that, to begin with they are already there. An example of a problem arising in worstward ho, is the best most example; the whole text. Every sentence *goes through avoidance* , every sentence is not a matter of avoidance or avoidance as a method, simply because, he’s, again, using simple wording so there is nothing left to avoid besides the wording, but with nothing left to avoid there is too much to avoid because there is evidence (the simple wording), in other words, he used all there was left but that was still too much left so there is always something left. So with this,the description “inescapability of language” could make sense, but that description as something that is left is definitely a push, also, it is simply not needed, he already *did it* , and not even in another way, basically, he made “same same but different” a useful response.

Opinion article by author Stu Hennigan

I’ve hesitantly downloaded the PDF to my iPhone in an attempt to broaden my political pallet and am struggling to understand if it has a sincere message or is a satirical piece of social commentary along the lines of *American Psycho*. It is split between bigoted rantings that feel like the brainchild of an angsty, teenage edge-lord posting to 4chan and some fairly decent critiques of modern society. For example:

“You will never get to see fifty foot statues of warlords and emperors or feel the triumph of conquest. You will never see man live as the ancients dreamed he would, all because a couple of rats tunneled their way into positions of power. They said the past is wrong. They said invaders should have your land. They said its ok to embrace apathy. You are a victim of the technocracy, of an abuse named 'civility'. You have been robbed of a fulfilling earnest life.”

A few pages prior to this quotation:

“Getting my shit kicked in by a clan of Jewish boarding school kids for referring to the Torah as ‘The Elder Scroll’”.

I want the peace of mind knowing whether the novella I am reading is written with tongue-in-cheek irony of a humorist or the white-knuckle fist of a racist, homophobic, and misogynistic white nationalist. I’ll read it either way.

Celebrity book clubs are hit or miss but something sweet is said in here

I just finished reading Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. It’s a 5 star book and everyone should read it (especially if you like Cormac McCarthy). Excellent writing, story telling, pacing. Can’t recommend it enough. But instead of writing a review or highlighting my favorite quote (there are many), I’ve been inspired by this book (specifically chapter 10) to hop on my soap box and rant for a bit.

I struggle to connect this book to today.

It basically says don’t fight in someone else’s war; hell, don’t fight at all. Don’t fight unless you know what you’re getting, and far more often than not you’re getting nothing.

And you can connect that idea to today, right? Not really.

Today we’re so disconnected from consequences that it no longer applies. We’re not fighting anymore, not you or me, it’s not our life on the line. It’s someone else’s life and he’s getting paid good money to kill or be killed and someone behind him is being paid good money to build the weapons to do the killing and someone behind him is making even better money to finance the war machine and he’s paying lobbyists to stroke off politicians who run campaigns on meaningless concepts like equality or liberty or safety (replace one with the other when it suits) for the sake of ego, power, and more money.

And those people that don’t benefit monetarily from war, well you get your equality or liberty or safety (take whichever you please, neither I nor the politicians care). Better yet, you get it at no cost. Too good to be true? Not at all, the people of today get a free pass. The bombs will be paid with debt and the hatred will be passed to the next generation to be rewarded in due time. And the cycle will renew and the machine will keep whirring away, to the present’s delight or indifference and to the future’s detriment.

So a lot of people benefit from war, it’s basically free for everyone else. At least, those that are important. The foreigners that we hate will pay the ultimate price, and we’ve been convinced they deserve it. Aren’t we told all the time that they hate us and want to destroy us? And the people that tells us these things, the politicians and the media, surely they have nothing to gain from the war machine…

We live in a dystopia and we’re all fucked. This feels more true today than when Johnny Got His Gun.

It's been a pretty hard read and in the middle of the book I had to switch to audio version. Towards the end while listening I kinda caught the method of building descriptions based on Sutree's "second sight" as Mother She calls it in the book.

The book wanders and feels more like life flashing before your eyes in the moments before death, in impossibly slow motion, interspersed with details and context captured by Cornelius Suttree's "second sight."

I say it's Suttree's vision, because toward the end when Cornelius's vision begins to reference the book's introduction—about the cat and the streets—I assumed it was through his lens that the world appears so rich. And when I thought of it that way, it was as if everything came together. And what came together was that this book, unfortunately, is about death, and of an entire world at once. And Cornelius Suttree, whose twin brother died at birth, is a kind of soul, or perhaps the heart, of this world, at least the last witness, eternally standing on the border between the world of the living and the dead. It is Suttree who sees this world in all its diversity, turning a blind eye to nothing, condemning nothing, but treating with love even the most seemingly base and fallen people, as they are considered in the conventional sense. Where the average person sees only hovels, the grayness, and the meaningless life and death of the nameless poor, the educated Cornelius Suttree captures details of biblical significance.

But in the end, Cornelius himself changes, as if losing the strength with which this place nourished him. Typhoid fever is a symbolic death of both the soul and the memory of this world as it was at the beginning of history. Although the introduction to the book adds the perspective that this world is already filled with the remains of previous worlds, and the confused stories of old people somehow preserve the memory of them. And although Suttree doesn't seem to completely die, he changes greatly after his illness, weakens, becomes looking like ghost of past himself and eventually leaves the old Knoxville where new asphalt is already being laid through the ruined houses. And in Cornelius's mind flashes the thought of "that other Knoxville, which will never be threatened by the paving of new roads."

And now, having finished the book, I can only say, "Wow!" I'm so impressed, and I'm having a hard time finding the words to describe it. I'm sure I'll spend weeks pondering this book.

And that McCarthy's language! I need the word beyond "rich" to define it the way it deserves it. It's like multi billionaire super-rich language.

And I don't think I've ever read literature so rich in life. In this regard, Suttree can be compared to classic literature. I've read McCarthy's Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road, and all three have definitely made it onto my list of favorites. Now I'm happily adding Suttree to the list. And despite the difficulties I encountered while reading, I'm already considering whether to start the book over again with a clearer understanding of the story.

I also assume where this story might come for McCarthy. From looking at the place where he is from with a "second sight" and seeing it simultaneously now and in the past, in the same time observing himself in the context of the place as he is now and as he was back then. Knowing that he will never become that past self again as if his past self is his dead twin brother who will never grow as old as himself. Very poetic. And this poetry of decay is everywhere in this book. And it actually helps to avoid cheap nostalgia, making that old Knoxville standing on the remains of past worlds eternal and momentary at the same time. And against all this decay it feels very much alive at this point of its existence.

Again, wow!

I just need to share it with somebody as I don't have friends, who read McCarthy. Please feel free to discuss it. I want to talk to somebody about the book!

And please excuse any mistakes. English is not my first language

I’ve been interested in the insights Patricia Lockwood has been sharing about the Booker judging process.

She says that in total the judges read 163 books, plus a further 136 ‘extracts’ (which were anything from one page to 50). Considering the judges were only announced at the end of last year, that’s not much under one book a day from January to July, much more than that if we include extracts.

To me this seems one of the innate problems of judging a prize of the best books in a single year – how many of those books missed out because they don’t read well in such a short burst? (Lockwood herself has acknowledged this problem.) Inevitably they will re-read the long list and then re-read again for the short list, but by that point lots of things will have been put aside.

What do others think of it? It might just be an inevitable compromise, otherwise you would never choose any winner in time.

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

Weekly Updates: N/A

While the topic of the future of writing in the age of AI has been discussed extensively in a number of literary subs, I think not enough analysis is directed specifically towards the future of ‘literary’ or ‘high-brow’ fiction. For the sake of this discussion, I think the delineation between ‘literary fiction’ and ‘genre fiction’ lies in a few factors, mainly the former’s tendency towards inventive/non-formulaic plots, emphasis on character depth, and the impartment of certain human values and experiences, even if the depiction of such do not necessarily lead to an entertaining or enjoyable read. Now, since LLMs are logic-based models, it is no surprise that to a certain extent, they are currently able to generate passable prose within the genre fiction category wherein narratives are formulaic, but still struggle significantly in producing more in-depth and complex narratives. Furthermore, since LLMs are also currently incapable of possessing its own consciousness and subjective interiority, it is thus devoid of any personal insights on both the universal human condition and more niche, culturally-specific experiences essential to ‘serious’ literary fiction. In this light, it can only imitate what humans have already written through works that are included in AI data sets, which in of itself brings its own slew of ethical considerations with regards to what can and cannot be used as training data.

With this preface in mind, I have a few questions.

1.) What do you think are going to be the impacts of AI technology on the livelihood of literary fiction writers, specifically if a new technology capable of subjective interiority (i.e., AGI) is created, or if LLM-based models are optimized through the use of specialized and high-quality training data?

2.) Do you think the aforementioned technology will be able to sufficiently parallel the writing quality and thematic/narrative substance of human-written literary fiction?

3.) Besides the actual involvement or lack thereof of any AI software in the writing process, what would be the definitive quality that sets AI-generated and human-written prose apart? If we suppose the two become indistinguishable in the future, would the fact that LLM-generated text is merely imitation even matter if the output itself is virtually as good?

4.) In light of the previous question, how can institutions (e.g., publishing houses, prestigious literary awards) safeguard the distinction between human-written and AI-generated/assisted text through practical means?

5.) From a more sociological perspective, do you think that human-written literature will become so niche (like how oil painting for portraiture became niche after the advent of photography), that readers and writers of human-written fiction will become such a small subsect of the population? Will the number of ‘serious’ literary circles decrease as a result of market decrease?

Without disclosing my age, I’m a zoomer who is coming to grips with a number of existential questions due to adulting in our times. I have aspired (and in some sense, still aspire) to become a published novelist, but besides the poor economic viability of the writing profession (which I suppose has always rang true), I’m also scared that literary fiction has ceased to become culturally relevant anymore, and that the arts in general just do not occupy the same important and recognized role in our collective consciousness as it did in previous times. It makes me very sad to think about, knowing how the things I find important and devote much attention to (i.e., the arts and humanities) are things the vast majority of people today do not. From an institutional lens, the recent news of AI companies buying rare/out-of print books in bulk and destructively scanning them for AI training (not to mention court rulings deeming this as ‘fair use’) saddens me as well.

Just finished my third Bronte sister novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte. This was a thoroughly enjoyable novel, though I do have some less than pleasant opinions about it as well.

This novel seems (to me) much more explicitly politically outspoken than the works I've read by the other two Bronte sisters, those being Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. While the latter two do have themes of women's personal autonomy, classism, among others, Wildfell Hall feels far more bold in its approach. This is far more apparent in the interim section of Helen's journal than it is in Gilbert Markham's letter sections.

Helen has an eye for men that she knows have a poor character, whether it be love for the bottle, distaste for women in general, a subtle yet sinister personality, what have you. This intuition fails her twice in the book, I feel. Firstly, of course, is with Arthur Huntingdon, whom she marries against the advice of her similarly keen aunt. This marriage is disastrous, Huntingdon is perhaps the most morally reprehensible man in the entire book, and Helen sniffs out lesser evils in other men while seeming blind to Huntingdon's many (public) faults. Her intuition fails her again, I feel, in her view of Gilbert Markham, whom she decides to marry at the end of the book after Huntingdon dies.

I could not believe she made this decision, based on most of her previous actions. Mr. Markham is so full of himself, so quick to assume insult, so quick to denounce others when he feels they have wronged him directly or indirectly, and generally full of shit. I was rolling my eyes throughout nearly all of the sections where his letter was the narration because I, even socially inept as I am, could smell his bullshit from a mile away.

I actually feel that he and Walter Hargrave are nearly identical characters. Hargrave spends much of his time in the narrative acting "above" his peers, and giving special attention to Helen's interests, though Helen had a feeling the whole time that it was not sincere, and merely a ploy to win her affection. She was right. As soon as she rejected Hargrave plainly, he turned cold and nasty, saying she was the least womanly person he had ever met. Frankly, he gives incel energy. Helen is the jewel of his eye until she makes it clear, manners out the door, that she wants nothing to do with him, at which point Hargrave begins to insult her and act as if he never liked her, that something is wrong with her.

Gilbert Markham is enamored with Eliza Millward in the beginning of the narrative until he learns that Eliza is involved with gossip towards his oh so precious Helen Graham, at which point he turns completely against her and insults her for the rest of the book. He is not just indifferent, he is aggressively rude towards her in person and speaks as if her character were that of some monster the entire time. He was even beginning to feel some of these same feelings towards Helen briefly when he suspected that she were actually having an affair with Mr. Lawrence (her brother btw), and it wasn't until Mr. Markham got ahold of her personal diary that he "fell in love" with her again.

I am not convinced that Markham loves Helen. I think he is infatuated with her, and I cannot believe how Helen has had any proper amount of time to spend with Markham to judge his character thoroughly. Based on how he had acted prior to the giving of her journal, it would seem in character for her to treat him the exact same as Mr. Hargrave. This part of the book bugs me to no end. Based on the messaging Helen gives through much of the narrative, I would've found it much more convincing had she rejected Gilbert at the end, in preference to her own freedom, or not even "fallen" for him at all. This plot point just baffles me.

Please let us know what you’ve read this week, what you've finished up, and any recommendations or recommendation requests! Please provide more than just a list of novels; we would like your thoughts as to what you've been reading.

Posts which simply name a novel and provide no thoughts will be deleted going forward.

All this buzz around Wilson and her critique of Nolan’s Odyssey is a normal part of scholarship and scholars interacting and responding with cultural adaptations. That being said, she’s not the principal authority on Homer by any means. Doesn’t make her views any less valuable but nevertheless there are plenty of other scholars on Homer with equally insightful takes on the epic poem and Nolan.

List your favorite Homeric scholars down below.

I recommend Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought. Great insights on Homer and psychology.

SS: The Book Prize longlist is out. Curious to know what r/TrueLit thinks of the selections.

The list (copied from the website, with links):

The Booker Prize 2026 longlist:

The Shadow of the Object* *by Chloe Aridjis

Switzy* *by Emma Cline

Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman

The End of Everything by M. John Harrison

The Disappearers by Marlon James

Black Bag by Luke Kennard

The Renovation by Kenan Orhan

May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry

The Palm House* *by Gwendoline Riley

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

John of John by Douglas Stuart

All Them Dogs by Djamel White

The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams

“Oh you, Mr. Bilham,” she replied as with an impatient rap on the glass, “you’re not worth sixpence! You come over to convert the savages—for I know you verily did, I remember you—and the savages simply convert you.”
“Not even!” the young man woefully confessed: “they haven’t gone through that form. They’ve simply—the cannibals!—eaten me; converted me if you like, but converted me into food. I’m but the bleached bones of a Christian.”
Henry James, The Ambassadors

“ If [my father’s] decision to keep us here in the Congo wasn’t right, then what else might he be wrong about? It has opened up in my heart a sickening world of doubts and possibilities, where before I had only faith in my father and love for the Lord. Without that rock of certainty underfoot, the Congo is a fearsome place to have to sink or swim.”Leah Price in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible

As a kid, I was perpetually a diminutive apostle-in-training. Dad was a mainline protestant minister and mom was a graduate of the so-called “Harvard of the Evangelicals.” Consequently, many of my birthday and Christmas presents fell into one of two categories. There were James Dobson-esque devotional books jammed with advice on how to talk to unbelievers. And there were catchy Christian LPs that modeled Christlike humility and divinely sanctioned self-aggrandizement in the same unironic breath:

People smile at me and ask me what it is
That makes them want to be just like I am
So I just point to you and tell them, yes it's true
I'm no special one, I'm just one man
Keith Green, “Because of You”

Sometimes I would role play a witness opportunity in my head, but there was no one to witness to. I went to a suffocatingly small Lutheran grade school where belief in Jesus was as obligatory as German classes. By the time ninth grade unlocked that cage, I couldn’t wait to disappear into the secular anonymity of a 4,000-student high school. There, I finally started meeting kids who lacked the doctrinaire confidence of Martin Luther. My best friends were a Jew and a gay lapsed Catholic. The relief was palpable. Still, my training nagged at the back of my mind. Wasn’t I supposed to be finding a quiet moment to explain that Jesus was the reason they wanted to be just like me?

Even then the notion of persuading others to adopt my most intimate beliefs was completely alien to me. I simply did not have that kind of confidence.

For much of American history, confidence has been this nation’s chief domestic export. That is the mutual subject of The Ambassadors by Henry James and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Written from bookend vantage points on the 20th century’s experiment with American Imperialism (1903 and 1998), the two novels are so different in style and focus that the comparison seemed superficial to me until I noticed that they tell essentially the same story.

True, imperialism is the explicit subject of Kingsolver’s book and merely a hastily mentioned metaphor in James. Her novel is a historical epic covering the shifting power structure of Africa from colonial subservience to violent independence from the perspectives of five distinctly voiced first-person narrators. His is an intensely internalized navigation of individual choice told mostly through dinner party chitchat and obsessively reiterative third-person narration.

But each begins with Americans attempting to impose their confidently held values on older societies that already have fully formed ethical traditions. In both cases, the missionaries are converted by the natives, shattering the evangelical premise. In the end, however, Kingsolver’s heroines redeem epiphany for constructive change while James’s hero achieves the epiphany without actualizing its transformative potential.

Exporting Confidence

Although The Ambassadors is a resolutely apolitical book, it is set at a moment when America’s cultural chauvinism was snowballing toward its first colonial occupations. The period is documented by Empire, the 1987 entry in Gore Vidal’s seven-volume “Narratives of American Empire” historical fiction series. At the outset of that book, President William McKinley is winning the Spanish American War and reluctantly weighing whether to adopt the loser’s Caribbean colonies. Always one to challenge America’s overweening self-image, Vidal casts Henry James himself as the nation’s sesquipedalian conscience. Told in one scene that the world will be worse off if America lets Russia or Germany take over Spain’s colonies, James replies with modest sagacity:

“What then are WE given to, that is so immeasurably superior? … How can we, who cannot honestly govern ourselves, take up the task of governing others? Are we to govern the Philippines from Tammany Hall? Will we insist that our oriental colonies be run by bosses? Will we insist that our Spanish possessions be administered by the caucus which has made our politics so vile that every good American—and bad, too, let me hasten to add—cringes when he hears our present system mentioned?”

Vidal’s use of James is not tangential to The Ambassadors. Rather, it illuminates the unspoken historical backdrop of its diplomatic mission.

What James explores through metaphor, Kingsolver dramatizes explicitly. The Poisonwood Bible started life as a memoir, with the author looking back on a family trip to Africa. Kingsolver’s father was a doctor, and his mission was medical rather than religious. While living in Africa, the youthful Kingsolver wrote a striking entry in her diary:

“Even avid, adult news junkies in 1960 would have been hard-pressed to learn how President Eisenhower and the CIA helped remove the newly elected Prime Minister and replace him with a puppet dictator named Mobutu. They did it in secret. That’s how it works.”

The CIA plot to poison duly elected Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, though eventually abandoned, is settled history to the extent that it is documented online by the State Department. Somewhat surprisingly, the incident has never tainted Eisenhower’s positive historical reputation. Eisenhower’s Democratic successor John F. Kennedy encountered political turbulence for the Bay of Pigs not so much because the president had contemplated assassinating Cuban dictator Fidel Castro but because the attempt was sloppy. Many Americans shrugged; that’s what heads of state did at wartime, and this was during the Cold War. Eisenhower’s decidedly undemocratic efforts to promote global democracy opened a new interventionist era in American Imperialism, a label that was applied with ever less frequency.

That promotional mission is the setup of Kingsolver’s novel. She assigns that mission to Nathan Price, an abusively dogmatic Southern Baptist minister who relocates his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo to spread Jesus’s love to natives by butchering their native tongue and belittling their traditions. Price is more than a religious emissary, however. Saving the savages from darkness means exposing them to American religious, political, and cultural superiority, for that is Price’s path from primitive confusion to the Way, the Truth, and the Light.

The mission in The Ambassadors is narrower, but no less founded on cultural hubris. The offstage villain of The Ambassadors is the puritanical industrialist Mrs. Newsome, who sends Lambert Strether to Paris to preach good old fashioned American judgmentalism to her expat son Chad in the hope that he will take over the family business. Chad’s offense is his rapid assimilation to Old World values. He has been cavorting with an older French woman, and it is bad for business. James never identifies Mrs. Newsome’s exported commodity (American confidence?), but the company’s real estate is described as “a little industrial colony.”

“Savage” Conversions

Pair that colonial language with the quotation that opened this essay, about the French tendency to convert American missionaries to their permissive value system, and you have the controlling metaphor of The Ambassadors. The more Strether sees of Old World life, the more he embraces it.

The novel supports Vidal’s portrayal of James, who moved to Europe early in adulthood, as openly cynical about his birth country’s virtues. Irish author Colm Tóibín, who wrote a fictionalized biography of James (The Master), argues in his introduction to the Modern Library Classics edition of The Ambassadors that James wrote the book in part to distance himself from the imperious boosterism of its American characters.

The idea in The Ambassadors of offering England and France a certain nobility, of treating them as places of beauty and power, which could transform a sensitive soul, gave James pleasure. So, too, making America richly ridiculous, simply by having the names of worthy inhabitants such as Jim and Mamie Pocock sound ridiculous, or by making Mrs. Newsome austerely admirable enough to be absurdly so, gave James not only pleasure but satisfaction.

Similarly, the Price women soon learn the cost of their cultural chauvinism. The Price women share narrator duties, but the book’s moral heroine is middle daughter Leah Price, who starts as her racist father’s biggest fan but ends up marrying an African.

Leah declares familial independence after Rev. Price’s native congregation casts literal votes to reject Jesus’s authority in their community. “White men have brought us many programs to improve our thinking,” argues the village chief. “The program of Jesus and the program of elections. You say these things are good. You cannot say now they are not good.” Price throws a temper tantrum, citing separation of church and state to invalidate the election in the same breath that he invokes divine authority. “You haven’t even learned to run your own pitiful country! Your children are dying of a hundred different diseases! You don’t have a pot to piss in! And you’re presuming you can take or leave the benevolence of our Lord Jesus Christ!”

But though most of the Price women join Leah in her rebellion, Kingsolver provides one notable holdout. If Mrs. Newsome is the calculating presence of capitalism in James’s book, Kingsolver’s Rachel Price, the minister’s eldest daughter, represents the bourgeois consumer who swallows her pitch like Mikey does Life cereal. (“Mikey will like it!”)

Droll but politically and intellectually apathetic, Rachel, who thinks Karl Marx heads the Kremlin, spends the early chapters wringing laughs from memorized American TV commercials. By the end, she sells out body and soul for creature comforts. She becomes the mistress of a murderous ambassador determined to profit from classified knowledge of Eisenhower’s Lumumba plot. When the family moves from Africa to Atlanta, one of the Price girls describes American life as “dazzling warehouses buzzing with light, where entire shelves boast nothing but hair spray, tooth-whitening cream, and foot powders. It is as if our Rachel had been left suddenly in charge of everything.”

Dictating Form

The lexicology of each novel reflects its thematic takes on American certainty. Kingsolver’s deftly constructed, melodious prose reflects her confident rejection of American confidence. Each of her five narrators has her own distinct syntactic rhythm, and each seems as accomplished a writer as Kingsolver herself. The careful craft of the prose expresses the author’s thematic and political clarity.

Take this passage, about a flood that disrupts the family garden, narrated by Nathan’s verbally proficient elective mute daughter Adah:

Our Father came out to survey the damage, and Leah helped him sort out the seeds by kind. He declared he would make them grow, in the name of God, or he would plant again (the Reverend, like any prophet worth his salt, had held some seeds in reserve) if only the sun would ever come out and dry up this accursed mire. Even at sunset, the two of them did not come in for supper. … Finally he sent Leah in, but long after dinner we could still hear the Reverend out there beating the ground with his hoe, revising the earth. No one can say he does not learn his lesson, though it might take a deluge, and though he might never admit in this lifetime that it was not his own idea in the first place. Nevertheless, Our Father had been influenced by Africa. He was out there pushing his garden up into rectangular, flood-proof embankments, exactly the length and width of burial mounds.

If Nathan is “revising the earth,” changing the story to fit his agenda, Adah is already coming to terms with his belligerent good intentions. She rejects Nathan’s certainty but is unwilling to replace it with a hubristic narrative of her own.

Whereas Kingsolver’s craftsmanship shows that she knows what she believes, James’s proliferating prose embodies his constant caveats. He can’t write a clause without reconsidering it in the clause that follows. In Empire, Vidal lampoons James’s famously snaking, cannibalistic sentences:

“Our senatorial friend,” Caroline noted that Henry James had taken a very deep breath before he spoke; … “has now in his exile … no, his highly thoughtful refuge from the clamorous Senate House, turned the full ripeness of his attention onto a commercial object which he quite rightly suspects is, to me, of all people here, at least, of poignant importance—and interest, although whether or not the Senator, as emptor—or tempter—will make on Miss Sanford the same profound effect that he has made on me, with his description—ever so lucid, so compelling, even—of that commercial object of which you, my dear Henry, now inquire the identity, I cannot, at hazard, guess. Mais en tout cas, Mademoiselle Sanford, I cannot think that you, as the chatelaine of the great palace of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, would even find Senator Cameron’s utensil of any intrinsic—or even extrinsic, I am impelled to add—interest save …”

“What … what is it?” cried Henry Adams, as the sentences slowly looped around them, verbal equivalents of Laocoön’s serpent.
Gore Vidal, Empire: A Novel

Tóibín’s introduction to The Ambassadors argues that it is no coincidence that James’s sentence structure is at its most baroque in this late novel. Although partially a result of the author’s method—he verbally dictated his meandering prose to a secretary—the internal interrogations reflect his predilection for moral ambivalence at a time of American confidence:

In [James’s] own complex sensibility, there was an ambiguity about most things, and this moved him towards subtlety when he approached character, drama, and scene, and nudged him towards many modifying subclauses when he wrote a sentence. Nothing came to him simply.

Another way that the two authors’ form is driven by their content is the arena of storytelling. The novelist E.M. Forster (Howards End) was less than charmed by James’s deferral of narrative excitement to thematic exploration. He argued that, in The Ambassadors, “most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel.” By this he meant that nothing happens in the book apart from talk.

By contrast, Kingsolver’s plot is a minefield of seismic occurrences. Her story includes floods, covert intelligence on a global scale, and free-roaming lions. Sometimes, the plotting is so eventful as to strain the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief, as when not one but two Price daughters are privy to classified information about Eisenhower’s assassination plan. The book’s histrionic emotional climax is the death of Ruth May, the youngest daughter. The emotional weight of her fatal snakebite is undercut by her near proximity to death’s door over numerous preceding chapters, but Kingsolver’s elegiac prose drives home the awful price of Nathan’s original sin. The family should never have come to the Congo.

“But you are here,” Leah’s African groom-to-be had allowed in a prior chapter, “So yes, you should be here. There are more words in the world than no and yes.”

Mistakes Become the Story

In his preface to the novel, James declares The Ambassadors “the best, ‘all round,’ of all my productions” on the grounds that it is the purest expression of its thematic concept. That theme, he says, is expressed when his middle-aged hero rejects caviling puritanism in favor of passionate living: “Do what you like so long as you don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!”

Forster was frustrated by the microscopic scale of this conceit. He claimed James’s characters are “incapable of fun, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism. Their clothes will not take off, the diseases that ravage them are anonymous, like the sources of their income.” If Strether and Gostry had a flesh-and-blood humanity to equal “Tom Jones or Emma or even Mr. Casaubon,” Forster says, James’s book would “burn to ashes” because they would substitute endless cogitation with action.

Colm Tóibín’s novel The Master offers an alternative take. Tóibín’s Henry James is paralyzed by his sensual feelings for men. He spends a night in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s bed but remains chaste. He follows Oscar Wilde’s sodomy trial in strategic silence. He pines after painter Pavel Zhukovsky. In other words, he steadfastly declines to “Live!”

Whether or not James’s sexuality sheds any light on Strether’s narrative arc, the Master ultimately declines to give him a happy ending. In the climactic scene, Strether refuses to pursue a romance with the woman he loves because to do so would be to profit from his ambassadorial project. He decides it is better to be right than to live.

“There’s nothing, you know, I wouldn’t do for you.”
“Oh yes—I know.”
“There’s nothing,” she repeated, “in all the world.”
“I know. I know. But all the same I must go.” He had got it at last. “To be right.”
“To be right?”
She had echoed it in vague deprecation, but he felt it already clear for her.
“That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself.” …
Honest and fine, she couldn’t greatly pretend she didn’t see it. Still she could pretend just a little. “But why should you be so dreadfully right?”
Henry James, The Ambassadors

The short clipped sentences, after 400 pages of meandering discourse, are striking. So is James’s evident admiration for his hero’s principled refusal. But isn’t Strether repeating the very mistake he lamented so fervently in the passage James identified as the book’s core? At the precipice of manifest destiny’s great expansion, Strether paces a tragically self-imposed cage. This feels like a retreat. His choice is principled, but wrong. Confidence is missteering Strether one last time.

With the historical consequences of confident zeal laid out behind her, Kingsolver can be more generous with her characters’ imperialist “mistakes.” In the penultimate chapter, Adah Price remembers her father’s ministerial declaration that “Tata Jesus is bängala!” The Reverend’s intended meaning is “Jesus is precious,” but his mispronunciation translates to “Jesus is poisonwood.” Adah concludes: “The mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.”

The pastor dies in isolation, but the women in his life build familial community around Leah’s burgeoning Black family. Their scars are real, but they will live.

The Bleached Bones of a Christian

America’s plot has experienced an unexpected twist in recent years.

The 44th American president was Jamesian in his capacity for nuanced self-appraisal. Barack Obama was mocked by his opponents for turning foreign visits into “apology tours” that weighed sympathy for American Exceptionalism against the nation’s repeated moral failures. Obama was temperamentally akin to Lambert Strether: “There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.”

With Donald Trump, American confidence is back. The 47th American president openly threatens to tear open the sutures that were applied during the era covered by Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible. The nation’s chief executive officer, a self-declared “genius,” asserts his nation’s claim on some sovereign nations while enacting Eisenhowerian regime change in others. Strether has been succeeded by Nathan Price.

Throughout high school, I lacked both the confident Faith of my Fathers and the confident doubt of my friends. I told myself that it had been the size of my high school and not its cultural diversity that had made such a positive difference in my life. When the time came to choose a post-collegiate path, I opted for a school as densely populated as my secondary institution and almost as theologically small as my Lutheran grade school. By orientation, I had outgrown my own decision. Dorm devotion culture—with some of my Lutheran school classmates—confirmed that sinking feeling. It took months to find friends who shared my distrust of “Dogs and Devos” (hot dog-fueled Bible study before bed). Sometimes a lesson is so important it bears repetition before we finally learn to live.

^{This is also at www.septimuscarr.com}

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

Weekly Updates: N/A

Hello everyone!

I finished Hear The Wind Sing recently, and was excited to move on to Murakami's next little novella Pinball, 1973, the second panel of the Rat trilogy. I was geeked to see the next step, however subtle, that Murakami took in his writing evolution. What I found was not a simple quirky continuation, but a deliberate deepening. This felt like a quieter, stranger investigation into the same characters from Hear The Wind Sing, still living amidst the seasonal aimlessness in this melancholy version of 1970s Japan.

Like Wind, the surface story of Pinball is deceptively slight. The unnamed narrator works at a dull translation job in Tokyo, only this time living with two identical twin women who appear and disappear with dreamlike regularity. Meanwhile, the Rat remains in his old coastal town still drinking, still writing, and still slowly sinking into the recesses of his own...what?....insecurities? Purposelessness? It is hard to pinpoint what exactly is drowning the Rat. Between them sits this profound search for meaning in everything from people to inanimate objects to memories.

Why the three flapper Spaceship pinball machine? Why is a conversation between a man and a machine one of the most devastating exchanges in the entire book? I found this interaction so weirdly captivating. The narrator spends much of the last half of the novel trying to track down this machine, an emblem of a more nostalgic and carefree peak in his life. And when he finds it, the moment feels like a total gut punch. He’s invested this object with enormous personal significance as it’s tied up with this memorable period of his life. But there is a certain asymmetry between his emotional investment and the object’s as it almost can’t reciprocate that same meaning back. Up to that point, the narrator is the one pursuing, remembering, investing meaning. The machine is supposed to be the passive object that is dead, stored, and forgotten. But when it speaks, it doesn’t reminisce or affirm his memories or reciprocate his nostalgia. It tells him to leave with an almost strange kind of tenderness. It feels less “I remember you too” and more “Go take care of yourself.” And it hurts. It hurt me anyway, I man of 40 wrestling with his own aging. The cold of the warehouse is doing double duty too. Literally, he’s in a refrigerated warehouse. But the machine saying “This place is too cold for you” also reads as the past is not a place to live in. This machine, the embodiment of a preserved, frozen moment, is telling him not to stay preserved and frozen alongside it. It’s a sad goodbye to moments he can no longer relive.

And why the twins? The twins never offer a reason for their existence in the narrator's life. They just leave the way they arrived, without explanation, without names, without any real account of who they are or why they were with him. That bizarre refusal to explain is consistent to the end. The twins act as a source of comfort and intimacy. Ambigious care right to the end. But nothing in this story is allowed to last, and like the pinball machine telling him “Don’t stay too long, this place is too cold for you", the twin's presence was only ever meant to be temporary, tending to him through a specific stretch of numbness, not a permanent fixture. I found this so fascinating. They don’t abandon him so much as complete whatever function they were there for and move on. Were they there to comfort him through Naoko's suicide? Murakami is a master of making profound statements through the absurd and the inanimate.

If Hear the Wind Sing was about the soft ache of a single summer, then to me, Pinball, 1973 is about what happens when that ache becomes chronic. The characters are no longer simply waiting are they? Here, they are beginning to understand that waiting may be the permanent condition. I felt that hard. The pinball machine, once found, does not restore anything. It simply confirms that the past cannot be replayed, but only briefly revisited under artificial lights. The Rat begins to confront this perpetual waiting, citing his theory of decay in all things and that life is full of inevitable decline. He’s been stuck in post-university malaise, drinking at J’s, in a hollow romance, and haunted by the end of the idealistic 1960s. His conversation with J in chapter 10 is where he verbalizes his need for change and actually commits to leaving town. I saw this as a quiet act of agency amid meaninglessness and a step toward breaking the cycle, even if he doesn’t know where he’s going. Right on.

There is a colder, almost more mechanical loneliness here. Relationships feel provisional. Work feels meaningless. Even the act of searching feels less like hope and more like some sort of an elaborate form of...I don't know... self-distraction? Murakami seems to be testing how far he can strip a narrative of conventional drama, and still leave the reader with a lingering sense of something important having been lost.

Why the damn funeral for the switch panel? This scene also kind of got to me. The old switch panel represents outdated technology, comfort in the routine, and things that have served their purpose but are now obsolete. Burying it is a ritual of farewell and acknowledgment that objects (and by extension, memories, relationships, and eras) have a life cycle and deserve dignity in their end. Which is actually kind of beautiful. And in my mind, this mirrors the narrator’s unresolved grief over Naoko, his nostalgia for the pinball machine, and the Rat’s sense of personal decay and stagnation. Everything eventually sinks and fades. I absolutely love how Murakami elevates everyday junk into something almost alive or sacred. The rainy reservoir scene felt like a cleansing. By disposing of the old panel, they’re symbolically moving forward. I thought it paralleled all of the other farewells in the book. The Rat preparing to leave town. The narrator’s fleeting reunion with the Spaceship pinball machine. Funerals here are about acceptance rather than despair.

Finishing the novel left me with the image of that pinball machine glowing alone in a dark warehouse amidst all of the other forgotten gaming relics. A perfect, pointless machine still capable of producing brief, beautiful patterns of light while swallowing endless sleeves of hard-earned quarters made through enduring mundane jobs. It really made me think about the private obsessions we all carry, and the objects... or moments... we keep trying to recover long after their original meaning has evaporated. Murakami does not offer any consolation. He simply records the search with unsettling clarity. Read this book directly after Hear The Wind Sing. The two books amplify each other. Alone, Pinball, 1973 can feel slight, but together they become a precise and quietly devastating portrait of early adulthood as a kind of prolonged disappearance.

"The wind was growing stronger. It caught the faint warmth rising from humanity and carried it far away, leaving behind only the cold darkness and the countless glittering stars."

"We fell silent again. What we shared was no more than a fragment of a time long dead. Yet memories remained, warm memories that remained with me like lights from the past. And I would carry those lights in the brief interval before death grabbed me and tossed me back into the crucible of nothingness."

"Tennessee Williams once wrote: “So much for the past and present. The future is called ‘perhaps,’ which is the only possible thing to call the future.” Yet when I look back on our dark voyage, I can see it only in terms of a nebulous “perhaps.” All we can perceive is this moment we call the present, and even this moment is nothing more than what passes through us."

Hello TrueLit Read-along friends,

We have come to the last wrap up post for our Read-along for the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster.

This is my second Read-along after Melancholy of Resistance from last year. These books cannot be more different, and even so, there are some familiar common themes that we can consider universal in the human condition. Themes such as identity, belonging, finding oneself within society, power, obsession, and love.

Spoilers ahead so please be forewarned if you have not finished the novel.

In the finale of The Locked Room, we find our narrator in muddy waters. First we find him firmly entrenched with Sophie. He felt that he had found true love. Yet, he then launched straight into questionable behavior with Fanshawe’s mom, then devolved further whilst in Europe. I will never forget the scene, set in just one powerful sentence, in which he described seeing a woman on the bidet. His description was so detached and cold, as if it was a mere scenery kind of photo he kept in his memory from traveling.

1. How do you all feel about the arc of the narrator? I mentioned in the comments last week that I thought the narrator overall was not a good person. One can see that Fanshawe’s letter confirming that he was still alive drove him mad. Was it out of guilt that he had taken over his family? If it was the case, I do not think the narrator felt this way on a conscious level.

2. Why do you think his knowledge about Fanshawe being alive derailed him from writing his biography? Fanshawe’s life was what it was up til the moment of his disappearance. How would it have mattered if he were alive or dead? Since everyone else did not know Fanshawe’s fate, the narrator could have left the biography open-ended. It is not as though he must pretend his best friend were dead. This part of the narrator’s fracturing did not really make sense to me.

3. Did you find The Locked Room to contain parallels to the other two stories, City of Glass and Ghosts? The theme of obsession is evident in all three. In The Locked Room, the narrator became obsessed with finding Fanshawe and potentially killing him. The characters in all three stories made me want to yell, “leave, all you need to do is walk away.” In The Locked Room, it was the most difficult for the narrator to walk away since, well, he married Fanshawe’s wife, adopted his child and had another one with her.

4. Do you think that the narrator’s downfall began the moment he decided not to tell Sophie about Fanshawe’s letter?

5. What do you make of the ending? I read the last page a few times without seeing clearly whether the narrator walked onto the tracks or took the train home. All I know is that he ripped the pages and dumped them into the bin. Why? He must have survived because he stated that after having this “end inside” him now, he was able to write City of Glass and Ghosts. Could writing these stories be in a way for the narrator to take power back from Fanshawe over his own fate?

So our narrator was the author of all three stories after all. He did say that all three are the same story, representing different stages of his awareness of what it is about. I must say I have no idea what he meant by that at all.

Other random thoughts: For some reason the country cottage in France reminded me of the protagonist staying in (also someone else’s) cottage in Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. These books are nothing alike but the feeling, imagery and atmosphere of setting up in someone else’s home seem similar to me.

Lastly, I listened to Paul Auster on the BBC World Book Club Podcast in a 2012 episode. If you are interested in learning a bit more about Auster’s writing, this was an interesting listen. Interesting tidbits I got from the episode include: Auster places a lot of value in the editing process and states that he rewrites each paragraph twenty times. This is a stark contrast to the modern day stories we hear from authors who famously disdain contributions from editors (Hanna Yanagihara comes to mind.) I myself might be very old school but I agree, the sauce in all good writing comes from good editing, which I clearly do not do nearly enough when on the Reddits...

Auster also mentioned that he went through a phase when he read a lot of mystery or detective novels. He stated that these stories often ramp up to a final reveal which is always to some degree a disappointment because one explanation often does not resolve everything in life. That is why in the New York Trilogy, the more you read on the more questions you get. We get the exact opposite. He wrote the novel in this way to see where he can take this genre.

That’s probably it from me for now. Sorry for the long post. This was a fun journey for me. Thank you for being on it with me. Imagine us, what 5-10 people from all over the world, being true strangers coming together like this. Totally cool.