This week’s Fab 5 features Colm Tóibín on Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, Brittney Cooper on Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre, Zack Graham on Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness, Justin Taylor on The Collected Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, and Dan Chiasson on David S. Brown’s The Last American Aristocrat.
“The Scottish novelists have it in for clear plotlines, for gentle or melancholy stories, for bourgeois destinies, for old-fashioned or boring narrative systems. They write spectacularly well about drunkenness, drug-induced antics, long nights wandering in the lower depths, states of alienation, bad sex. This is the tradition out of which Douglas Stuart writes … In a Scottish novel, if there is a dream of better public housing, it will end in a high-rise slowly falling apart, just like the buildings that house the Bain family, which are desolate and badly constructed. And, in Scottish fiction, if there is a line of dialogue, it will be filled with the flavor of demotic Scottish speech. Stuart, in Shuggie Bain , is particularly skilled at creating a credible, energetic, living speech for his Scottish characters … Shuggie Bain is peppered with Scottish usage (‘gallus’; ‘foustie’; ‘smirring’; ‘huckled’). This adds to the sense of gritty truth in the book and to the feeling that the novel is not being written to explain Scotland to outsiders … On the surface, the novel is unremittingly bleak … Against this, however, there is an undercurrent that becomes more and more powerful, as Stuart, with great subtlety, builds up an aura of tenderness in the relationship between the helpless Shuggie and his even more helpless mother.”
–Colm Tóibín on Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain (Bookforum)
“In Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, Ijeoma Oluo punches up rather than down, reckoning culturally, politically and historically with white men … Oluo historicizes the creation of a violent and profane American white masculinity. Rooted in ‘muscular Christianity,’ this conception of manliness, she ably demonstrates, also gave us American football … Wide-ranging in the cultural history it provides, Mediocre illuminates the various ways white men work to maintain racial power. They abandon tough political positions when those positions undercut their ambition … Oluo argues that all of us, ‘regardless of demographic, have played a part in upholding white supremacy.’ It’s the one claim in this book that strains credulity, given the clarity with which Oluo shows how white men’s mediocrity—entitlement tethered to unearned power and accolades—makes life harder for everyone … For many, this book will appear to be a closed fist, but for the keen eye, it is an open hand.”
–Brittney Cooper on Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America (The New York Times Book Review)
“Cook forces readers to question the limits of their humanity in the face of extreme circumstances—supernatural, environmental, futuristic, or a combination of the three … Cook’s debut novel The New Wilderness towers above the stories in her collection. It takes on a future Earth so polluted that people are struggling to survive in urban society … The emotional core of the novel—and its true source of brilliance—lies in the relationship between Bea and Agnes, the most intricate and morally arresting relationship Cook has conjured to date … Cook asks: How can we morally balance the initial sacrifice with the later abandonment? How much are we willing to justify such a reprehensible action, considering the brutality of life in the Wilderness to which Bea was exposed? … If you strip away its apocalyptic backdrop, the novel presents fresh commentary about group-think, human psychology, and governance … Cook undergirds these human dynamics with bewildering, otherworldly terrains … Cook makes the appeal of climate fiction apparent: Novels like hers can help us more deeply understand the estrangement and horror produced by each extreme weather pattern or mass extinction event we read about in the news.”
–Zack Graham on Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (The Nation)
“Between 1974 and 1976 he either started or finished nine of the twelve stories that constitute his life’s work, a small bright star in the firmament of twentieth-century American short fiction … Pancake’s depictions of the culture and geography of Appalachia and the Trans-Allegheny were all but unprecedented. The hills and hollows of West Virginia were largely neglected in American literature, even the intensely regionalist literatures of the South, possibly because West Virginia had fought with the Union during the Civil War, and so had little to contribute to the revisionist horseshit of Lost Cause sentimentality. Pancake seems to know everything about this place, from its hilltops to its coal mines to its barrooms, and he has an eye for the small, sharp details that bring it to life … The enduring value of the foreword and afterword then are as primary-source documents, eyewitness accounts. The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake has been in print for nearly forty years and every edition that I’m aware of contains both McPherson’s and Casey’s essays. At this point, they feel as much a part of the book as the stories themselves. For better or worse, their intimacy and reverence establish the collection as a reliquary: they are the gilded box and velvet pillow that hold the sacred bones … Pancake’s stories offer a rare glimpse of genius in late gestation, fighting to be born. The rough edges, loose ends, false steps, and psychic self-exposure are all part of that difficult birth, and it hardly diminishes the writer or the work to say so. One does the stories no favors by holding them to a standard of individual excellence and collective effect that they cannot possibly meet.”
–Justin Taylor on The Collected Stories of Breece D’J Pancake (Bookforum)
“The title The Education of Henry Adams recalls novels like The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. But its structure reverses the classic formula of a charismatic nobody rewarded, in a final turn, with his rightful wealth and pedigree. ‘Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he,’ Adams writes of himself. Just like that, one very useful narrative structure, that of adversity overcome, is ruled out. Instead, Adams tells the story of failing up: he notes, with each unearned success, the bankruptcy of the very distinction between winning and losing … The pace of the book in its early chapters implies an even distribution of these life incidents across its length, as in a conventional autobiography. But The Education is not conventional, and not even quite an autobiography. Adams usually refers to himself in the third person, adding a grand study of failure to the library of volumes written about his family’s legendary statesmen. Adams saw himself as a passenger in his life, riding his own name … And so we have, in his book, the eerie double exposure of a person from the distant past almost stepping on our toes as he describes the technological future. ‘After so many years of effort to find one’s drift,’ Adams writes, ‘the drift found the seeker, and slowly swept him forward and back, with a steady progress oceanwards.’ When I read the last chapters of the book, I always think of another great work that ends with a delegate of historical time gazing at his own obsolescence: Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Henry Adams, who considered himself ‘a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,’ who washed ashore in the twentieth, knew that he’d glimpsed our world.”
–Dan Chiasson on David S. Brown’s The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams (The New Yorker)
