American Histories by John Edgar Wideman

Published by Scribner on March 20, 2018

American Histories is John Edgar Wideman’s new story collection. The four stories I’ll first mention here are masterful. The others are quite good, and the volume as a whole is another tribute to an important American writer who crafted a style that is uniquely his own. In a couple of the stories, Wideman describes his writing as unimportant, as compared to the things that smarter people do. I hope Wideman understands that his work is not just important: it’s vital.

“Williamsburg Bridge” is narrated by a man standing on the bridge where Sonny Rollins used to play his sax. The improvisational nature of jazz, its controlled chaos, fuels this story. The man has shed nearly all of his clothes and is preparing to jump, or not. He equates death with freedom, although he wonders if the bridge cops might shoot him before he has a chance to kill himself, taking away his freedom to choose, as freedom has so often been taken from people of color. He catalogs the many reasons he might want to commit suicide, but none are his motivation. It isn’t clear whether he even understands why he might choose to die, or to live. He hears “that question — why? —drum-drum drumming in my eardrums, the only evidence of my sanity I was able to produce.” He asks the reader whether you’re grateful that it’s his turn, not yours, at the edge. The story plays with images of color, from skin color to whitespace to colors in the East River ranging “from impenetrable oily sludge to purest glimmer.” (Edges and color are among several recurring themes in these stories.)

“Maps and Ledgers” is about families and hard times, the family histories that people don’t talk about — the father who killed a man, the son sentenced to life in prison, the grandmother with serial husbands. Bad things happen and the only thing you can count on is that life will get worse. Black and white families live apart, interacting but not really. The narrator speaks white English to whites and black English at home in his segregated neighborhood, in a society divided by laws and power that serves itself. “Don’t let the ugly take you down” the narrator’s mother says, and that’s the story’s lesson, but the lesson is easier to say than to live.

“JB & FD” are John Brown and Frederick Douglas, two men who tried to free America from the oppression of slavery. Told as an imagined conversation or correspondence over time, the story is about their fundamental agreements and disagreements, their differing strategic approaches to abolishing slavery. Douglas wishes to offer his life, not his death, to his people. Brown is convinced that an armed raid on Harper’s Ferry will spark a slave rebellion that makes the risk of death worth taking. Both men believe that change must come. The story ends with the rambling narrative of another John Brown, the son of Jim Daniels, who was rescued from slavery by John Brown and named his son after the man who gave him freedom. Wideman’s story reminds us that freedom is too precious to waste.

“Nat Turner’s Confession” takes on the controversial “confession” that Thomas Gray claimed to have received from Nat Turner. Most of Wideman’s story, like William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, is told in the first person from Turner’s perspective (“I am called Nat Turner, a name made up for the convenience of sellers and purchasers of me”), providing an alternative to the “confession” that Gray likely fabricated, at least in part. But other voices intrude in Wideman’s story, including Turner’s mother (representing the tribulations of all enslaved women) and a confession by Nate Parker (who made a movie about Nat Turner several years after being acquitted of rape). Wideman imagines Turner having a love/hate relationship with white people, a fear that he will miss them if he kills them all, a belief that “until they are gone, we will not truly cleanse ourselves of the belief that we are nothing without them.” Like many of Wideman’s stories, this one overflows with the joy of language and its rhythms.

Most of Wideman’s stories are deeply personal. “New Start” uses an aging couple watching Downtown Abbey to ask whether all our lives are performance, whether we need an audience of at least one to make them real. Our lives are stories, true stories “until we tumble out of them and then they are different and true again,” the ending unwritten and feared. In “Examination,” a visit to the doctor’s office triggers a riff on edges and democracy and social constructs and death, real and imagined. “The Writing Teacher” is about a professor, very much like Wideman, who tries to help students understand that their stories won’t appeal to every reader and that their fiction probably won’t change an intransigent and unfair world, admirable though it is to want to topple empires or to expose naked emperors. (Empires are another recurring theme.)

“Dark Matter” is about the things people discuss over dinner, but more importantly, it’s about the fact that friends go out to dinner and discuss things. “Shape the World Is In” is a monologue by a guy who is thinking about life as he sits on the toilet. “Yellow Sea” is about the evil in the world that keeps the narrator awake at night.

“My Dead” is more a contemplation of Wideman’s dead relatives than a story, but it is also a contemplation of mortality, of the impudence of life and the arbitrariness of death, of the recognition that only after people die do we really begin to give their lives the full consideration they deserve. “Bonds” is a sweet story about a woman who struggles not to give birth on an unlucky day to a child who will have enough bad luck being born into poverty and prejudice.

A few of the stories are sketches or vignettes. They discuss lines and names and death, the way things change and don’t, the divisions of people within an empire, the whiteness of snow. All of them are interesting, although I would classify some as essays rather than stories. A longer essay in the form of fiction imagines conversations between Romare Bearden and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In the end, it doesn’t matter how these pieces are categorized, because good writing has value for its own sake, and American Histories is a collection of very good writing.

RECOMMENDED

Time Was by Ian McDonald

Published by Tor.com on April 24, 2018

Time Was begins with a bookseller’s discovery of a letter in an old book of poetry. The bookseller, Emmett Leigh, is intrigued by the letter from Tom Chappell to his lover Ben Seligman, who has gone off to fight the war. Leigh feels compelled to research the story of Tom and Ben. To that end, he tracks down people in the present who can give him clues about the past. His investigation leads him to the diaries that Reverend Anson kept of his chaplaincy in 1940s Egypt. Anson, whose diary describes Tom as “gay” in the old-fashioned sense of the word, is apparently oblivious to the nature of Tom's relationship with Ben.

Although Tom introduced Ben to Anson as being in photoreconnaissance, Leigh can find no record of a Ben Seligman occupying that position in Egypt during the war. Hence a mystery arises that the bookseller feels the need to solve. Anson’s granddaughter provides photographs and an archivist identifies two men of the same name and appearance in her voluminous records of war. The two men, however, served in an earlier war: World War I. A witness described them as part of a battalion that vanished in Turkey while assaulting entrenched Ottoman soldiers — a battalion known as the Lost Sandringhams. As the witness described it, the two men vanished into a cloud of smoke. Were they deserters? Were they taken prisoner and executed? Were they abducted by aliens?

But the bigger mystery is why, twenty-four years later, Tom and Ben were photographed standing in front of the Sphinx, having not aged a day. The deeper Leigh digs, the more questions arise. He finds more copies of the book of poetry and more letters. Time Was contains some surprising twists, culminating in a final surprise that requires the reader to rethink the events that took place up to that point. I love stories like that.

I also love Ian McDonald’s prose. McDonald composes masterful phrases (Tom pushes a bike “under a sky the color of judgment”) and sentences (“All written art is an attempt to communicate what it is to feel, to ask the terrifying question: Is what I experience in my heart the same as what you experience?”). Time Was is a novella, exactly the right length for the poignant story it tells, and it tells that story in exquisite prose. Readers who enjoy serious literature while generally shying away from science fiction will be well rewarded by spending some time with Time Was.

RECOMMENDED

Ultimate Power by Stephen Frey

Published by Thomas & Mercer on February 13, 2018

For the sake of a good story, I can accept an unlikely premise. Ultimate Power imagines a conspiracy that hopes to unseat (or worse) the president in a military coup. Unlikely, but most thriller conspiracies are unlikely and suspending disbelief is increasingly necessary in the modern world of thrillers. On the other hand, even after suspending as much disbelief as I could manage, Ultimate Power was so far over the top that I couldn’t buy into its premise. For that reason, I didn’t become lost in the story, which is my primary goal when reading a thriller.

Ultimate Power imagines that a liberal woman (much more liberal than Hillary Clinton) has been elected president, having narrowly defeated a candidate who almost won by appealing to white nationalists. Apparently Stephen Frey started writing Ultimate Power before the 2016 election. The real world doesn’t matter since this is the world of fiction, so we begin with a liberal president. The story involves a conspiracy to assassinate her (and the veep) because of her popular plan to slash the military budget by 80% — as if that would be a popular plan, even among liberals — while vastly increasing wealth taxes on the rich, as if that’s something Congress would ever consider. Politically, the premise is so divorced from the political reality of today’s America that it’s difficult to take the story seriously, but that’s only a small part of the problem.

The conspiracy also calls for instigating a race war and manipulating funds available in red state banks to make sure that the white population supports the coup. The race war scheme involves a social justice organization that is in the pocket of the schemers. Assassins are being paid a lot of money to kill cops. They need to get a lot of money because they know the cops will kill them in turn. I can almost imagine an orchestrated race war, given the current political climate, but I didn’t buy any of the characters who try to bring the scheme to fruition, or the plan they concoct to implement it. Frankly, the collective lot of the conspirators seem to lack the brainpower to fly a paper airplane, much less get a complex scheme like this one off the ground.

The protagonist and only character with a modicum of depth is Andrew Falcon, a hedge fund manager in his early 30s who makes a billion a year for the shady investment bank that employs him. The bank, of course, has a connection to the conspiracy. Falcon isn’t married and the only person he really cares about is his niece Claire. Just after the investment firm makes him a partner, he learns that Claire has been kidnapped.

Falcon is the novel’s only believable character who plays a significant role in the story. Stephen Frey is at his best when he’s in the world of finance. I like his work when he sticks to financial thrillers. When he strays into conspiracies involving military coups, he loses his footing. Unfortunately, there’s too little of Falcon and finance in this novel and too much focus on the silly military/race war conspiracy.

The rest of the characters are underdeveloped. There isn’t much substance to President Karina Hilton, but she seems well-rounded compared to the villains. General George Fiske depends on Colonel John Brady to supply him with a disposable woman every few months. Fiske also depends on Brady to help advance his vision of white supremacy. Even by standards of modern thrillers, Fiske is an over-the-top villain. I found it difficult to believe that his minions would murder six innocent people just so he would have an isolated cabin in the woods where he could rape, torture and kill his latest victim. The fact that he’s a white supremacist makes him sufficiently evil without stirring in his predilection to abuse and murder strippers.

There are enough good moments in Ultimate Power that, despite the negative tone of this review, I won’t give it a “Not Recommended.” I think Frey’s heart is in the right place, but the story didn’t grab me, and it certainly didn’t convince me. I’d like to see Frey go back to writing the financial thrillers that he does so well.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

James Bond Casino Royale by Ian Fleming, Van Jensen, and Denis Calero

Published by Dynamite Entertainment on April 24, 2018

Casino Royale is my favorite of the Ian Fleming Bond novels. It is, at least, the one that stands out in my memory, primarily for the scenes of Bond first losing and then winning at baccarat. It’s also my favorite Daniel Craig Bond movie, in part because it bears some resemblance to the novel, particularly when Bond’s delicate parts are being pummeled in the torture scene.

Casino Royale is notable as the first of Fleming’s Bond novels. It also features the first appearance of M, of Felix Leiter, and of SMERSH. As Fleming fans know, the movie Bond and the Fleming Bond are quite different. The movie Bond generally appreciates Bond girls (and in recent movies, generally accepts them as equals); Fleming’s Bond finds seduction and disentanglement (the before and after of sex) unacceptably boring. The movie Bond is portrayed as sophisticated; the Fleming Bond is more of a tough guy who happens to be a good card player. The movie Bond is sassy when Le Chiffre whacks him in the balls; Fleming’s Bond more realistically passes out.

The Fleming Bond is also philosophical in sort of a fatalistic way. Queen and country is all well and good, and it’s nice to have the respect and admiration that comes with being a double-0, but getting your manhood beaten is enough to make anyone rethink the spy game. Playing a hero and killing villains doesn’t have the same appeal when the tables are turned. And perhaps it’s wrong to kill villains, because they provide a contrast that enables the virtuous to feel, well, virtuous.

Both Bonds are cold in a masculine way, but Fleming’s Bond is acutely aware of his harsh qualities and is disturbed when they are endangered by warmth. In Casino Royale, at least, the idea of caring about a woman is positively disturbing — almost as disturbing as the fear that he won’t be able to have sex with one after the beating he endured. He wants to use Vesper to test the functionality of his equipment after being tortured, but is unsettled when he realizes that she has crept under his skin. Of course, trust does not come easily to Bond, and in Bond’s world women can never really be trusted. Or perhaps Bond cannot trust himself to judge them properly.

This graphic adaptation is faithful to Fleming’s novel. It keeps the best stuff and doesn’t sacrifice intellect for action. It would be a good introduction to the book for people who don’t want to take the time to read it. While the adaptation preserves some of Fleming’s best prose, much of the text is replaced by art, which is exactly what should happen in a graphic novel. Although the graphic novel is a condensation, all the critical scenes are present, and the most important scenes (the developing tension in the casino as Bond faces off against Le Chiffre, the torture scene, Bond’s philosophical discourse, Bond’s interaction with Vesper) are played out in enough panels to give them their full weight. Most of the art is straightforward, but some panels are enhanced by diagrams and sketches that provide insight into Bond’s thoughts. The art captures a reliable sense of the novel’s mood, accented by some surprising choices of coloring. I enjoyed revisiting Casino Royale in this graphic version of Fleming’s first and best Bond novel.

RECOMMENDED

Killed in Action by Michael Sloan

Published by St. Martin's Press on January 30, 2018

I remember the television show The Equalizer as being shallow and boring. I thought the novelized version would be better. It isn’t. (I can’t comment on the 2014 movie because I haven’t seen it.) I could try to pick apart all the logical flaws in Killed in Action — I actually started listing them — but there are so many that the effort proved to be exhausting. Nor does it matter, because the brain-numbing nonsense that passes for a story here is less important than the fact that the novel just isn’t written very well. The sentences that don’t depend on a cliché are lifeless. The novel reads like something composed by a screenwriter who is used to setting down simple declarative sentences and letting actors and directors fill in the gaps.

Part of the problem is that Michael Sloan tries to do too much. There’s a human trafficking plot and a jihadists attack America plot and a rescue the wounded soldier from Syria plot and a bad landlord plot and an escape from a Korean prison plot and a “someone is pretending to be the Equalizer” plot on top of a conspiracy to eradicate all evidence that the head of a spy agency ever existed. None of the plotlines are developed in sufficient detail to be convincing, and the overabundance of stale ideas is draining to a reader who just wants to latch on to an interesting story. Sloan never delivers one.

In a novel like this, no character takes “a gun” from another character. No, they take a Marakov P-64 nine millimeter or a Glock 26 with an Osprey 9 silencer or a Heckler & Koch VP9 because gun porn fans need to know exactly what gun is in the character’s hands (or belt or shoulder holster) before he’s disarmed or killed. Warfare fans will also enjoy the scene in which a 9K114 Shturm antitank missile is fired from a Mi-24 helicopter into a UAZ-469 military vehicle. All the model numbers are apparently meant as a substitute for engaging storytelling. The novel takes note of the nutcases who make violent nuisances of themselves thanks to the gun culture that pervades parts of the country, but there’s a certain irony in pointing to the evil caused by people who too easily obtain guns while writing a book that is clearly meant to appeal to people who love their guns.

Anyway, the story revolves around ex-spy Robert McCall, who calls himself the Equalizer and does good deeds gratis for people who are facing poor odds. The same idea has more recently been adopted in the Orphan X novels, which at least have the virtue of being written with a bit of gusto.

McCall has no friends (probably because he has no personality) but he has a colleague named Kostmayer and a former boss named Control, both regulars on the TV show, who pop up in one of the endless subplots (or maybe the main plot, it’s hard to tell) in Killed in Action.

McCall’s ability to fight and defeat four men armed with knives is a common feature of tough guy fiction. In this case, it’s so common as to be dull. Sloan creates no sense that McCall might actually lose a fight. Even Superman had kryptonite to worry about. McCall is an unerring shot who is never at risk. No risk means no suspense. And, of course, hot women are dying to jump into bed with McCall, who is cool and indifferent about when and how he gets laid. No suspense there, either. I’d like to find something good to say about Killed in Action, but the book is a serious mess.

NOT RECOMMENDED