The Which Way Tree by Elizabeth Crook

The question come to us then as to whether we was tracking the panther or if, by some unknown hand we was dealt, the panther might be tracking us. I am uneasy to wonder at it even now, and I was sure uneasy at that time. I had seen the size of that panther twice. I had beat its hind end as it gone up the tree after Sam on the night it done in Juda. I had seen the lantern light in its yellow eyes in the goat pen. But the thought of them eyes being on me whilst I slept, and watching me in the dark unawares, was a worse thing to think about than meeting face-on with the creature. It give me a frosty feeling in my soul.

Benjamin Shreve is a young boy living in the Hill Country of Texas during the Civil War. His half-sister, Samantha, is the daughter of his father and his new wife, a formerly enslaved woman named Juda. One day, when Benjamin's father is away, a panther attacks Samantha, leaving her scarred--"cat-marked," as one character later calls it--and kills Juda, who leaps into defend her daughter. Samantha becomes obsessed with tracking and killing the panther, and when it returns years later, she ushers herself and Benjamin into an adventure that will encompass a genteel Mexican horse thief, a kindly preacher, a ragged old panther-hunting dog, and a two-bit criminal named Clarence Hanlin.

The jacket copy of The Which Way Tree compares it to Clinton Portis' picaresques like Dog of the South. I don't know about that, but I'll let you know soon enough. What it reminded me most of, actually, was Huck Finn. The Which Way Tree is narrated by Benjamin as a series of letters to a Texas court judge, who is intent on trying Hanlin in absentia for the murder and robbery of a traveling party. Benjamin knows Hanlin is guilty, and was the last one to see Hanlin alive, and the whole story, which Benjamin tells over the course of several long missives, is, ostensibly, a way to help the judge understand what happened to Hanlin and how. Benjamin's voice is one of the best aspects of the novel. It has a rustic quality, like Huck's, and like Huck an insight belied by the voice's obvious youth. The simplified language of a young teen, steeped in backcountry ways, without a need or capacity for flights of prose, makes the novel brisk and readable.

Benjamin makes allusions to a book he's picked up somewhere called The Whale, one of the few he's ever owned or read, but he claims to have read it cover to cover more than once. The parallels are so obvious, you don't really mind when Crook spells them out: Benjamin's sister Sam is like Ahab, obsessed with bringing down the panther, whom we learn is a legendary mankiller called Demonio de Dos Dedos--the demon of the two toes, an allusion to the bits of the cat that Juda chopped off with her cleaver in saving her daughter's life. The adventure itself could be a little cinematic for my tastes--too much action, too little clarity and insight--but time and again, both Sam and Benjamin must confront the tension between a desire for vengeance and other human needs, like family, kindness, and belonging. Benjamin accuses Sam of being so caught up in bloodlust that she is blind to the way that he has taken care of her since their parents' deaths, and he's right. It's the essential goodness in Benjamin that the judge recognizes over the course of their apparently long correspondence. But vengeance is a hard thing to break free from, and the closer they get to the panther, the more intensely it burns.

God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State by Lawrence Wright

I drove back to Austin, under a Turneresque sunset with a gibbous moon rising from a bank of pink clouds. A herd of Black Angus cattle moved like shadows in the places where the buffalo once grazed. I thought about how unintentional most of life is. Part of me had always wanted to leave Texas, but I had never actually gone. Sometimes we are summoned by work or romance to move to another existence, and for me those moments when there is no reasonable alternative to departure have always been joyful, full of a sense of adventure and reinvention. Staying is also a decision, but it feels more like inertia or insecurity. Most of the time I live in a state of vague discontent, tempted by the vision of another life but unwilling to let go of the friends and daily habits that fill my time. When I am in other states or countries, I'm always aware of being in exile from my own culture, with all its outsized liabilities. I wish I lived in the mountains of Montana or on the Spanish Mediterranean. I wish I had a condo in a high-rise overlooking Central Park, with a piano by the window. These thoughts have been at play in my imagination for decades. Now here I was, on a darkening highway in Texas, with so much more road behind me than what lay before.

How hard it must be to write a book about Texas. Alaska may be bigger, but it's relatively unpeopled; to encompass Texas, you'd have to write about Houston's oil booms, Austin's weirdness, tensions on the Rio Grande. You'd have to talk about Dallas and Dealey Plaza, about the great nothingness in the middle, about Big Bend and the far west. Lawrence Wright's essay collection God Save Texas might not be Texas-sized; it's hard not to sense that in its attempts to cover every corner, it's missed some of the true mystery that lies along the way, but it's good enough for an outsider like me. From the first moment, when Wright describes biking along the path between San Antonio's historic Spanish missions, it whetted my whistle for the trip I'm taking next week, where I hope to do exactly that. (Let's hope those predictions of rain are exactly that.)

Wright brings a set of necessary skills to the project: he's a journalist, and much of the novel reads like well-researched journalism, especially the section about Houston that traces the history of the oil boom. Wright clearly has access to the chambers of the statehouse in Austin; he devotes two sections--titled "Making Sausage" and "More Sausage" to the conflicts within the Texas Legislature between moderate and ultra-conservative Republicans, and no one, it seems, is unwilling to talk to him--not even Karl Rove, who pops in for a queasy hello. I could have done with less of this stuff, maybe, because Texas's political scene is the least pleasant thing about the whole state, and I'd rather not think about it. But Wright, writing during the Trump administration, makes a powerful case that Texas is--shudder to think--the crucible of the American political scene. Ironically, given its iconoclasm, Wright suggests that Texas is at the forefront of American politics, and what we see there is soon to be what we see everywhere. It's hard to say he's wrong about that.

But Wright is a playwright, too, and much more pleasant are the sections where he uses his more writerly gifts to extol the state's grandeur and beauty. I loved the section about far west Texas, a severe desert where modern artists like Donald Judd found a landscape that could match the pure shape and color of their innovations. Chapters like "Borderlands" and "The High Lonesome," the latter ostensibly about the mid-Texas landscape that birthed musical icons like Buddy Holly, manage to capture in words something of Texas's sheer, mind-altering scale.

Wright, a Texan by birth, writes about returning to his ancestral land after sojourns in New York, Atlanta, Tennessee, and even as far away as Egypt. It's beautiful and difficult, I think, to return to the place whence you came, like the spiral returning; it has an air of backwardness, or perhaps of the final stages of something. But I find it easy, actually, to imagine that returning to Texas feels like home.

The God of Nightmares by Paula Fox

During the months I lived in New Orleans, I loved more people than I had ever loved in my life. I drowned in waters of love. My heart beat strongly in anticipation of seeing them. I never wearied of their faces, their voices.

Helen lives with her mother in upstate New York, in the long shadow of her father's abandonment. When word comes that her father has finally died, her mother's tenuous hopes of reunion are shattered, and the life that they've been living together suddenly seems dreary and intolerable. Her mother sends Helen to New Orleans to find her sister, Helen's aunt, who, like Helen's mother, was once a glamorous cabaret girl. Ostensibly, Helen is sent to ask Aunt Lulu to return to New York and help manage their humble inn, but as soon as she sees Lulu in the flesh--drunk and nude, cantankerous, living in a converted old ballroom where the ceiling is plastered with stars--she understands that her mother has really sent her to free her, to show her other ways she might live. And sure enough, she finds in New Orleans a new community with whom she falls deeply in love: bohemians, poets, and queers.

Among them are Len, an enigmatic and silver-haired young man whom she falls for, and Nina, a fellow northern emigre, whom she falls for equally intensely, but in a different way. Among these Helen navigates the changing world of the American South in the 1940's: in Europe, the specter of the Nazis is looming, and here in New Orleans the old orthodoxies of race and gender fight jealously for preservation. Claude, the beautiful scion of a wealthy family, faces the threat of vengeance by the local mafia who resent Claude's attentions to one of their own young scions. Her poet friend, Gerald, suffers a lifelong injury inflicted by the very rural swamp-dwellers who form, to their great chagrin, the core of his poems. Helen, out of her stony northern element, treats these conflicts as challenges to be navigated. It's Nina, on the other hand, who shows up at the department store where Helen works and impulsively drinks from the Colored water fountain, inviting the attention and ire of witnesses. It's this boldness that both attracts and terrifies Helen.

I loved Fox's novel Desperate Characters, which takes place over a couple of days in Brooklyn, and has a kind of Sparkian slightness that you know I'm into. The God of Nightmares, with its larger cast, richer backdrop, and wider temporal scope, is a different kind of book entirely, and yet it has something of the same slightness, two qualities which I thought were rather at odds with one another. The novel evokes New Orleans less effectively, I found, than it does the spartan Hudson Valley of Helen's childhood. But the central triangle of Helen-Len-Nina is an effective and fascinating one, with Helen's aunt as a kind of star around which these planets orbit. The most interesting part, I thought, was actually the novel's slim "Part Two," which sees Helen, married to Len and living in New York, reencountering Nina for the first time in decades--only to understand for the first time that Nina and Len had had a brief affair all those years ago. That moment, where a whole history is upended by the slight turn of revelation, reminded me most of Desperate Characters.

Falling Man by Don DeLillo

Every time she saw a videotape of the plans she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept watching. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting spirit that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into some other distance, out beyond the towers.

The skies she retained in memory were dramas of cloud and sea storm, or the electric sheen before summer thunder in the city, always belonging to the energies of sheer weather, of what was out there, air masses, water vapor, westerlies. This was different, a clear sky that carried human terror in those streaking aircraft, first one, then the other, the force of men's intent. He watched with her. Every helpless desperation set against the sky, human voices crying to God and how awful to imagine this, God's name on the tongues of killers and victims both, first one plane and then the other, the one that was nearly cartoon human, with flashing eyes and teeth, the second plane, the south tower.

Who else but DeLillo could write a novel about 9/11? In a way, he wrote one already with White Noise, the ultimate novel about disaster and mass destruction in modern America, a novel about how, even faced with the bare physical fact of our own destruction we are too wrapped up in the images and signs to really see. As television has failed to enable Jack to accept his own mortality--incarnated as a tower of black smoke--so television, and our primitive computers, failed to enable us to understand the crushing force of history. Even those who experienced it firsthand, like Keith in Falling Man, must live with the long life of the image, the video, the photograph, always keenly aware of the ways in which it does not quite match the horror that was not quite legible, even in the moment. 

Keith is a businessman who worked on a high floor of the first tower; after he escapes it he hitches a ride to the apartment where his estranged wife and son are living. His arrival is necessitated by circumstance--his downtown apartment is dangerous--but it also harkens to, perhaps, a rekindling of their relationship. That would be the easy story, and it's kind of DeLillo's, too, though he's too canny a writer to make it that simple. Keith comes back, but he's transformed, part of him has been left behind. He's carrying a briefcase that's not his own; when he returns it to the woman who does own it, they strike up a brief affair predicated on those stories about the falling tower which neither of them can share with anyone else. 

In the weeks and months after "that fateful day," people in the city begin to see a street performer called the "Falling Man", who hangs from a harness in the position of the famous photograph of a man plummeting to his death from the height of the tower's top floor. What's the man's intention with this? In a way, it reminded me of the Guilty Remnant from The Leftovers, whose gruesome antics are meant to remind people of the horrors they'd rather forget. But the man never speaks for himself. He's only an image; the image. Images are signs and portents, but they never speak for themselves, only within the eye of the beholder. This is, I think, something that sets DeLillo apart from some of his peers. Whereas a guy like Pynchon suggests that signs have no meaning, have become space for pure play, in DeLillo everything seems meaningful, though meaning itself is elusive. Keith's wife Lianne notes that "Keith stopped shaving for a time, whatever that means. Everything seemed to mean something. Their lives were in transition and she looked for signs." The Falling Man is another piece of, in the words of White Noise, "psychic data," of "waves and radiation," and the baffling inexpression of his image is only an emblem of the larger inexpression that is the attack.

What I thought was best about Falling Man, and most DeLillo, is the way that Keith and Lianne's son Justin interprets the events. He and a couple of neighbor kids invent a kind of mythos around the event: they search the sky with binoculars for planes, which they believe will return--there's a kind of cargo cult element to it--and finish the job, not understanding that the towers have already fallen. Their cult fixates on a figure called "Bill Lawton," who only belatedly Lianne and Keith discover is their mishearing of Bin Laden. Who can say whether their understanding, their ordering and sense, is any truer than ours?:

They talked to him. They tried to make gentle sense. She couldn't locate the menace she felt, listening to him. His repositioning of events frightened her in an unaccountable way. He was making something better than it really was, the towers still standing, but the time reversal, the darkness of the final thrust, how better becomes worse, these were the elements of a failed fairy tale, eerie enough but without coherence. It was the fairy tale children tell, not the one they listen to, devised by adults, and she changed the subject to Utah. Ski trails and blue skies.

The riskiest choice, perhaps, are three brief interludes written from the perspective of the attackers. These sections could have gone very wrong--through cultural chauvinism, poor research, whatever. Just look at how Updike biffed that book Terrorist that everyone hated. But DeLillo makes it work by keeping the language simple, and focusing on the ways that the attackers are themselves not so different from the people whom they target, having found in an apocalyptic form of Islam a kind of code or key to understanding the world. The final section in which--spoiler alert, I guess, if you've never heard of 9/11--the viewpoint attacker crashes into the tower and the point-of-view leaps into Keith is one of the most audacious things DeLillo's ever done. 

I have a vague sense that this book was not well-received when it came out. Even in 2007, I wonder if we were ready for a book like it. I think time will show that it's among DeLillo's best, because it speaks powerfully to our century's most pivotal moment. It's probably the most written-about day of our lifetimes, if not longer, and yet I think we are still struggling to understand what it meant, or what it means to say "what it meant." No one but DeLillo, I think, could speak so clearly about the anxieties, the mysteries, the interpretations, the images, that have agglomerated around it.

Women of Sand and Myrrh by Hanan al-Shaykh

He sat up in bed, and to my surprise he announced that he'd been afraid of me the previous day and felt disgusted by me. My thoughts strayed back and I couldn't think of any reason. Was it because I'd bought another piece of jewellery, or told him that I preferred life in the desert to here? 'Why? Why?' I asked him, irritable in my curiosity to find out what sin I'd committed. He answered that I'd done things for my own pleasure like a man. When again I sifted through what had happened the day before and still couldn't guess what he meant, I shook my head questioningly, and he said calmly and gravely, "God created you to bear children, and to give pleasure to a man, and that's all.' I didn't understand. Perhaps I hadn't understood his English? Naturally I'd had children, and naturally a man enjoyed me just as I enjoyed him. Wide awake by this time, Maaz repeated seriously, 'God created woman to make children, like a factory. That's the exact word, Suzanne. She's a factory, she produces enjoyment for the man, not for herself.'

Suha is a Lebanese woman living in an unnamed Arab country where she must hide in a cardboard box from the religious police, always on the lookout for women who have committed the sin of having jobs. Nur is a local woman who longs for the brief freedom she experienced abroad, and who meets Suha at her lowest moment of profound need; Suha is shocked and troubled when their relationship becomes physically romantic, though Nur is not. Tamr is a woman who has been divorced many times, and who dreams of opening her own tailor's shop and hair salon, though she must rely on the legal permission of men to do so. Suzanne is a white woman who has fallen in love with an Arab man; her obsession with him is so strong she is willing to undergo any indignity, even longing to become his second wife.

Hanan al-Shaykh's Women of Sand and Myrrh allows each of these four women to tell their own story in a country where their lives are hidden and their voices muzzled. The country is not named, but it's certainly one of those Gulf petrostates like Qatar, Kuwait, or Bahrain--or, more likely, Saudi Arabia--flooded with money and luxuries that promise to soothe the sting of repression, but which can do very little. Each of the four women struggles in her own way with the stifling culture that keeps them little more than vassals to the men in their lives--husbands, brothers, fathers. Suha and Nur dream of returning to the places where they felt truly at home, Lebanon and London, though the possibility of leaving together seems to be one that is left totally unexplored; Suha cannot accept about herself what Nur can. Tamr, by contrast, tries her best to work within the system, carving out a space for herself and her business with a little deception, a little bribery, and a great deal of resolve.

The most interesting of these stories, I thought, was Suzanne's, who has arrived in this country as the wife of an (English?) petroleum engineer. Her narrative is the strangest, the wildest, and the least easy to understand; al-Shaykh manages to capture the mania, close to true madness, of a woman who would sacrifice her freedom so readily. Even Suzanne, willing to adapt and conform in ways the novel's Arab women struggle with, runs afoul of the contempt of men in her life; in the passage above, Maaz is disgusted by her compliance: it's not enough for her to submit to him; she shouldn't even be enjoying it. Maaz, of course, like the other men of the novel, is a child, reduced to an infantile understanding of women and relationships by the same repressive ideals that keep their thumb upon women's lives.

Now, I'm no expert in the Middle East, but it seems to me that in this novel, published in 1992, al-Shakyh captured something vital about the tension between the modernizing and fundamentalist impulses of the Gulf. There are echoes here of someone like Mohammad bin-Salman, a stunted child with too many toys, and of modern Saudi Arabia, a place where economic and technological explosions have done little to stem the effects of Wahhabism. And yet, al-Shaykh's characters feel not like allegories or parables, but real women.

With the addition of Lebanon, my "Countries Read" list is up to 90!

Noli Me Tangere by Jose Rizal

"The government is terrified of raising its hand against the people and the people of the forces of the government. And out of that comes a simple game that seems like what happens to frightened souls when they visit lugubrious places. They take their own shadows for ghosts, and their echoes for strange voices. While the government has no real understanding of this country, it will not get out of such a relationship. It will live like those idiotic young men who tremble at their tutor's voice, though they seek his approval. The government has no dreams of a strong future. It is only an arm, the parish house is the head, and their inertia allows them to be dragged from one abyss to another. They end up as a shadow, they disappear as an entity, they are weak and impotent, and they entrust everything to mercenaries."

Don Crisostomo Ibarra has returned to his native Philippines after a lengthy education in Europe, and to his betrothed, the beautiful Maria Clara. The country is not as he left it; his father is dead, and the parish priest he once counted as a family friend has turned against him, spreading foul rumors about his father. Don Crisostomo has brought home a notion that his people might be elevated by the kinds of education and erudition he himself received in Europe, and begins to raise funds to build a schoolhouse. But the Spanish Catholic priests who actually run the country--using the weak colonial government as a limb to enact their own bidding--are suspicious of his efforts. They hatch a scheme to foment a popular rebellion, which they will blame on Don Crisostomo, and have him hanged. But in the meantime, the real rebels have also identified Don Crisostomo as a man who might champion their cause; the malevolent priests may find that they really have created a rebel after all.

Apparently, Noli Me Tangere is required reading for all high school students in the Philippines. Literally, by law. It captures an emerging spirit of Philippine nationhood, which develops as a reaction to the excesses of Spanish clerical rule. The cruelty and malicious of the priests is drawn with extremity--both the fiery Father Damaso, who hates Don Crisostomo because he is secretly Maria Clara's father, and the mild-mannered Father Salvi, who is secretly in love with Maria Clara, and who is the true animating force behind the scheme to kill Crisostomo. The Filipino people, by contrast, are presented as simple and earnest, the possessors of a culture that inherits both Spanish and Indigenous customs, which often sit in an uneasy tension with one another. The most comic and pathetic characters are those Filipinos who affect a kind of Spanish noblesse to which they are not born; one character is presented as having learned her Spanish poorly but also having had to abandon her Tagalog so that she is nearly unable to communicate in any language. Among this setting, Don Crisostomo emerges as a kind of avatar of the Filipino spirit, which claims an allegiance to European revolutionary principles at the same time it rejects European rule.

Noli Me Tangere is an interesting historical and cultural document. But I wish I'd read something else for my Philippines book. It has a familiar kind of late 19th century-ness: stagey, talky, over-reliant on the revelation of Dickensian secrets, like the true identity of Maria Clara's father, and women whose traumas make them go mad. (You never see women going mad anymore.) As for the Filipino schoolteachers, I can't imagine how they get their kids to read a 450-pp. book from 1887, no matter how patriotic its spirit.

That said, with the addition of the Philippines, my "Countries Read" list is up to 89!

Kudos by Rachel Cusk

To return to the subject of the college's award, he said, the name they had chosen for it was 'Kudos.' As I was probably aware, the Greek word 'kudos' was a singular noun that had become plural by a process of back formation: a kudo on its own had never actually existed, but in modern usage its collective meaning had been altered by the confusing presence of a plural suffix, so that 'kudos' therefore meant, literally, 'prizes,' but in its original form it connoted the broader concept of recognition or acclaim, as well as being suggestive of something which might be falsely claimed by someone else. For instance, he had heard his mother complaining to someone on the phone the other day that the board of directors took the kudos for the festival's success while she did all the work. In light of his mother's remarks about male and female, the choice of this fabricated plural was quite interesting: the individual had been superseded by the collective, yet he believed it still left the question of evil entirely open. Admittedly, despite extensive research, he had been unable to find anything to corroborate his mother's use of the word in a context of misappropriation. Could prizes be given to the wrong person, without malintent coming into it?

At one point in Kudos, the final book in Rachel Cusk's trilogy that began with Outline and continued in Transit, an interviewer tells Cusk's stand-in Faye that he is going to interview her as if he is a character in her books. We know instantly what this means, because we are reading one of "Faye's books": he's going to talk at length about some subject, social or philosophical, with a slightly elevated language, and a kind of erudition that seems to emanate from Faye herself rather than any interior source. The interviewer proceeds to spend his allotted half hour doing nothing but this, and in the end, Faye isn't even given a moment to answer any of his extemporizing "questions." This is, I think, a little joke on us: Yes, Cusk says, I know the characters in my books all sound alike, and that they don't exactly sound like real people. You might be thinking, she continues, how tedious and long-winded all these people are, but don't worry, so am I. Yet, it might be the highest kind of praise to note that Cusk's characters, like Shakespeare's and Austen's, all sound like their author and yet are manifestly different. The arrogant interviewer may sound like the bedraggled man in the next airplane seat, or the autistic teen who leads the tour group, but he is clearly not like them. These are variations within the same music.

What sets Kudos apart from the previous two novels--though to be honest, I don't remember them all that well--is its interest in children. Everywhere Faye goes at the literary conference that forms the book's setting (in some sunny but unnamed southern European city), people are talking about their children. It's remarkable, actually, how many of the people in this novel seem to have children with autism or developmental delays, or just hobbled personalities and limited social abilities. On the plane, the seatmate describes at length his shock that his autistic daughter turns out to be an oboe virtuoso; a depressive but much-lauded writer at the conference describes his despair at the shallow-mindedness of his own son, who does nothing but watch soccer and eat candy. Children in Kudos are the locus of the struggle between father and mother, man and woman; Faye's interlocutors are constantly describing their divorces and unhappy marriages. And of course, they always have intelligent, discursive things to say about What It All Means.

I wonder if, going back to the former two novels, I would find that Faye disappears quite as completely as she does here. Faye really is the "invisible eyeball" of Emerson; she floats through the conference recording the discourse of others, only offering her own response from time to time, and much more briefly. (After the interview with the man, Faye is interviewed by a woman, who is forced to talk and talk about marriage and literature in the same way the man was because the sound crew needs to test her microphone--but not Faye's. This is, I think, another joke, another aware wink.) All this children talk made me expect some final climax that involves Faye's own children. And when it comes, it's rather muted: her son calls, desperate because he has gotten in trouble at a local pool thanks to convoluted events mostly outside of his control. Faye assures him that he's done the right thing, and promises he can come stay with her when she's back from the festival. It's a moment that is surprisingly simple and sweet--OK, we see that you are the novel's one good mother--and shorn of the heavy psychic drama that seems to lay over all the other struggles shared by parents in the novel. More shocking and pointed is the novel's final scene--the trilogy's final scene, which is kind of amazing, when you think about it--in which Faye goes for a dip at the local nude beach, where a male stranger locks eyes with her and pees in the adjacent water. Symbolism.

The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut

Something changed in Jansci before the end.

After he was diagnosed with cancer, his head began to explode with ideas of a kind he had never entertained before, and in such copious quantities that I came to fear that, if the disease did not kill him, mental overexertion surely would. This sudden, formidable fecundity was, of course, nothing new in him, it was as if he had recovered, seemingly overnight, the same zeal that he lost after Godel thwarted his attempts at entangling the entire world in a web of logic. Much more curious still was the fact that he also developed (though perhaps it would be more precise to say that he was beset by, as it was a violent and abrupt transformation) feelings that he had no prior experience with: spells of almost overwhelming empathy and a deep concern about the general destiny of humanity. These anxieties, which he could neither contain nor deny, would at first send him into flights of blind panic, though later, when he became more accustomed to the invasion of his psyche by all that he had previously chosen to ignore, he learned to channel these thoughts into himself, where they became the source of a fantastic thirst, an unquenchable curiosity regarding all matters of the spirit.

Perhaps it's because Hungarian mathematician and physicist John von Neumann dabbled in so much that he is rarely remembered today: he was an instrumental part of the Manhattan Project, and later basically invented game theory, before turning his attention to the self-reproducing "automata" that are the basis of today's artificial intelligence programs. He would fit in nicely among the mad geniuses of Benjamin Labatut's previous novel, When We Cease to Understand the World: a brilliant man who outpaces all his rivals, caught up in the whirl of wartime, and then suffers a breakdown of the psyche and spirit. Labatut's von Neumann is a dangerous man, whose intelligence allows him to be cruel to his wives and collaborators, and who expresses little interest in the deadly consequences of his work. In his last days, riddled with cancer, he is struck by a sudden attack of empathy, but at the same time his brilliance has been dulled: his daughter describes leaving his sick room in tears, as he struggles with adding together single-digit numbers. Von Neumann dies relatively young, but his legacy is profound. How much of his cruelty is contained within the ideas and systems he bequeathed the world? How much empathy? How much madness?

The Maniac is bookended by two sections only tangentially related to von Neumann's life. The first is about physicist Paul Ehrenfest, who killed his disabled son in 1933 before turning the gun on himself. Ehrenfest knew what the ascendant Nazis would do to his son if they were able; he so no future either for his son's disability or his own genius. Among other things, this section roots von Neumann's story in the grand political struggle of World War II, which evolves into the Cold War conflict of mutually assured destruction--a concept born not just from von Neumann's work with the Manhattan Project but his invention of game theory--and the destabilizing affects of modern AI. But it also introduces a question about the mental processes that animate men like Ehrenfest and von Neumann--is madness the handmaiden of genius? Or are they a single creature with two faces? The later bookend is a short history of AlphaGo, the AI program that defeated the world Go grandmaster.

In between, Labatut chooses to tell von Neumann's story through the first-person voices of his friends, family, and colleagues. Some of these are wildly entertaining--the whole book, I think, would have been better if it had been narrated by Labatut's version of Richard Feynman--but this strategy ultimately struck me as a mistake. The voices feel false as often as they are convincing, and are inherently less interesting and engaging than Labatut's own erudite voice that begins and closes the novel.

It's the last section, actually, about AlphaGo, that struck me as the best part of the novel. Labatut explains that Go is not like chess; whereas a chess board begins with a large but limited number of possible future configurations, a Go board is a blank space on which the pieces unfold. The number of possible Go boards dwarfs the number of chess boards by many degrees of magnitude; many believed even after Deep Blue's victory over Garry Kasparov that such a program for Go was nearly impossible. But the AlphaGo program takes down the braggadocious Go champion, Lee Sedol, down four games to one, a moment Labatut literally describes as epoch-making. It's funny, actually, to read this section at the moment, where intelligent people (as far as I can tell) are rather down on the power of AI. The language learning models that can't draw hands, or count to ten, are a far cry from the artificial intelligences that Labatut finds frightening, and which men like von Neumann and Turing thought had the power to outstrip their human creators. But perhaps those LLMs are not the same thing as programs like AlphaGo, which have no root or interest in language or art, only the cold purity of mathematics.

But it's not the four AlphaGo wins that make this section fascinating--it's AlphaGo's single loss. Beaten and discouraged, Sedol manages to find a move that baffles AlphaGo so badly it essentially begins making random, desperate moves with no strategy whatsoever. Spectators, having seen the program bait Sedol into mistakes before, assume that the machine is thinking a thousand steps ahead, but the programmers know the truth, because they have seen this before, the program descend into a kind of madness. In this, the program comes to resembles its godfather von Neumann in the most frightening way: it, too, has exploded genius to madness. In this way Labatut suggests that artificial intelligence may resemble our own in ways more frightening than we conceive; they, too, may be prone to psychic unraveling. 

The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf by Kathryn Davis

Because, of course, anything can happen in a dream. A fierce old woman can be turned into a soft and trusting creature; she can be made to act in ways which betray her true nature. In the dream the dead can come back to life, and make you do things you'd never have done when they were still alive. They can make you let them touch you, make you open your body to them. They  can make you doubt your own true nature, leave you lying there on your bed sick with spent desire for something you never thought you wanted in the first place. How many times did Helle show up in my dreams, her skin like a sheet of water, thin and clear, an insufficient disguise for the glassy stalk of her will? Watery hands, watery mouth, turning suddenly, unexpectedly, to soft, pliant flesh.

When Helle Ten Brix, a Danish emigre to upstate New York, dies of a long illness, she leaves a great burden to her friend Francie Thorn in her will: The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, an unfinished opera based on a Hans Christian Andersen folk tale. Helle's operas have always been rooted in the experiences of her own life: the early death of her mother, her cruel and cow-like stepmother, the unrequited loves foisted upon other women, who spurned her to become ordinary housewives, or worse, Nazi collaborators. It's these moments that make up the ur-text of operas like Det Omflakkende Mol, "The Erratically Flying Moth," whose moths are the same ones that flew out of Helle's stepmother's pantry, or The Harrowing of Lahloo, whose diva, pinned in place in the role of the figurehead of a great ship, perhaps mirrors the immobility of a woman's life in mid-century Europe. To finish The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Francie must go all the way back and recount the story of Helle's life, looking for the truths that might have emerged upon the blank staff of music.

The folktale at the heart of the opera goes something like this: a young woman, not wanting to spoil her new shows, lays a loaf of bread intended as a gift for her parents on the surface of a bog. Stepping on it, she's punished for her selfishness by being dragged to the bottom of the bog by the Bog Queen, who turns her into a statue. The loaf, perhaps, represents all those things that are not appropriately appreciated--perhaps a symbol of the love that Helle wastes on her girlhood crushes?--but really, it's the bog itself that matters most. It's a symbol for that hidden life, the depths hidden within a person, the dark place where love and pain reside alongside the capacity for creation. It's funny, this book reminded me so much of Robertson Davies' The Lyre of Orpheus, another book in which people come together to write an opera at the behest of a particular estate. Davies is all Jungian archetypes; his opera emerges almost deterministically by the sortition of mythological patterns. But it's Davis, I think, who understands the depth and turmoil of the real psyche, and the operas in The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf are infinitely more interesting. I was especially struck by the description of Fuglespil, the Nightingale, who enlarges himself over the course of the play by gruesomely stealing the eyes and parts of the other birds.

Yet, something made me feel as if I was skipping along the surface of the bog for much of the novel, rather than plumbing the depths. Kathryn Davis is, I think, one of the great living sentence writers, and The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf is certainly the best of her novels I've read since having my life changed by her debut novel Labrador several years ago. The language is, as you might guess, appropriately operatic, all sturm and drang, rich and stormy. But its richness prevented me, in some small way, from really understanding Helle in the way I think the book wanted me to. The book's ending--spoiler alert--struck me as so discordant that I felt that I must have totally missed something: Helle, having invited the whole town to a costume party, shoots Francie's married lover Sam three times in the heart. Well, I suppose I did notice that Helle had expressed a romantic interest in the much younger Francie, though I had never really imagined with the intensity of her schoolyard love for Inger. Perhaps that is part of Francie's, and the novel's surprise; perhaps we are gulled into not paying enough attention. Or maybe it was just me. Or maybe Helle's final act before she takes ill and dies is to do something truly operatic: a show-stopper.

Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson

I have dwelt on this sequence of stories, one after another, exploring the ways in which the faithfulness of God is manifest in the world of fallen humankind. This kind of interpretation might seem ingenious and little more if there were not essential truths lying behind it. The first of these is that these divine likenesses among whom we live are of the highest interest and value to God. We have been given the coin of wealth to barter among ourselves for the things we need or want. We assign worth to persons, consciously or not, and then to prestige and property and ease, all the things that compete so successfully with the claims of justice and righteousness, kindness, and respect, which would follow from a true belief that anyone we encounter is an image of God. and the second is that we do not know how to judge or where to blame because events are working themselves out at another scale and toward other purposes more than we can begin to grasp.

I had the good fortune to be able to see Marilynne Robinson speak about her now book, Reading Genesis, at the New York Public Library last week. Robinson is, to me, a living avatar of wisdom. She looks wise, with her leonine gray hair and bearing; she sounds wise, with her quiet and well-measured statements. Reading Genesis, which might be described as a work of theology, seems to me a part of that old and forgotten tradition called wisdom literature, of which Robinson herself perhaps is the last and greatest living practitioner.

Robinson begins by observing that it is trendy to pick Genesis apart. A common viewpoint holds that it is the work of many authors, and that each author's particular political or cultural agenda can be traced in the text. In this way, the text is deconstructed and falls apart; it is a text at odds with itself. So the first thing that Robinson does that is quietly radical--in our times at least--is to read Genesis as a single text, with themes and ideas that animate it from beginning to end. For me, too, this was rather radical, because even growing up in the evangelical church, I don't think I was ever asked to read Genesis, or any book, from beginning to end. I know all the stories here, but seeing them laid out as a single narrative made me understand that I'd been missing something fundamental by dealing with them piecemeal.

What does animate Genesis? For Robinson, it is that fundamental truth which lies at the heart of scripture: that human beings are at the heart of creation. Robinson makes much of comparisons with Babylonian and other Near Eastern literature, like Gilgamesh, many of which have been taken as the "sources" from which Genesis stories, like the flood and the tower of Babel, have been borrowed. But Robinson points out that in these stories, the gods have a tense, inimical relationship with human beings, whose sacrifices they must have in order to eat. The God of Genesis, of course, does not eat; he does not need human beings, yet he created them and the world for their purpose and enjoyment. Genesis is a creation story, and one that places mankind at the center of everything. It's a story that unfolds in the lives of very ordinary people, shepherds like Abraham, Isaac, Joseph; it's through these humble people that God will create a chosen lineage, and through this lineage with which he communes with the entire world. (She asserts also that the family trees of Genesis clearly show that Gentiles are more closely related to the chosen people than one might think; in Genesis, we are all neighbors.)

The other big theme that animates Genesis for Robinson is mercy. She takes exception to the image of the raging, vengeful Old Testament God, and the belief common even among Christians that the God of the New Testament is somehow a different character. Look, for example, at the story of Cain: God spares Cain's life for the killing of his brother, and the famous "mark" that is placed upon his forehead is not actually one of shame, but a kind of protection; it demonstrates that wherever Cain goes he is to be protected from those who wish to slay him for his misdeeds. Cain is the ancestor of the human race, and by saving him from what he deserves--punishment for his murder of Abel--a greater purpose is worked. Robinson notes that this kind of story is told over and over again; characters in Genesis are made to suffer far less than we might think they deserve: Noah, Isaac, the brothers of Joseph.

I often wonder who Robinson writes for. Her firm Calvinism puts her out of step with most of the secular world, and her understanding of scripture certainly doesn't seem to fit in with that of Christian America; I can't imagine Reading Genesis on an endcap at Lifeway, if Lifeway still exists. And yet, the room at NYPL was packed with people who came to enjoy her wisdom. She speaks to some much deeper need in us, I think, to understand the way in which we ourselves are part of a universe that has only become stranger and less familiar in the age of the Big Bang.