The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: The Americans, season 2

TV #37 of 2021:

The Americans, season 2

A second fantastic run of this spy-drama period piece, this one built largely for considering its central couple as parents — struggling to keep their kids safe and raised with like-minded ideals as any of us would, but with the extra tensions that necessarily stem from their secret life as deep-cover Russian operatives. Henry is still a bit of a nonentity at this point, but Paige is beginning to sense that something doesn’t add up about her folks, and although her exact suspicions are wildly off-base for now, her questioning simultaneously adds complications to the agents’ regular missions and exposes a growing rift in their family, shattering my heart a little in the process.

I often think of this show together with Dexter and Breaking Bad, two series likewise structured around a criminal element with a close associate unwittingly investigating them. This is a tad simplistic, but I’d argue that one of those titles presents its protagonist as moral and the other as immoral, with narratives that encourage audiences to cheer for Dexter Morgan yet revile Walter White respectively. As the third panel of that triptych, The Americans is typically amoral, not casting judgment on the Jennings duo for the worthiness of their larger enterprise one way or another, but content to get us invested more in their personal relationships and frustrations with the distant superiors who lack their on-the-ground expertise / bias. From that studied neutrality, we can root for our heroes without even caring whether the U.S. or the Soviet Union is occupying the superior ideological position and therefore should win the Cold War.

The focus on their daughter — not to mention the surrogate children like Jared and Lucia circling about this season — offsets that dynamic, to some extent. Stan Beeman’s pursuit of the Directorate S. figures under his nose is generally a cold angle in the script; we rarely feel that he’s particularly justified to catch his perps in the same way that Hank Schrader is, but he’s also not the sort of clownish oaf who deserves to be outsmarted by the Miami Metro Police Department’s resident serial killer. That amorality lets us support Stan as a separate hero in his own right, and it lends itself well to the conflicts with Nina that touch on our main characters less directly. But it’s a different story now with Paige, who has a shining authenticity of purpose alongside her stubborn teenage pride. With her aligning with the FBI as a force looking closely at her mother and father’s activity, it’s suddenly not so easy to automatically side with Philip and Elizabeth ourselves.

I love how this program is able to bring out such thematic depths in its storytelling, and while the plot itself can sometimes seem a bit slow-paced and repetitive, it’s fun to both watch the thrilling espionage antics in the moment and ponder the bigger picture as the credits roll. This year is a solid improvement over an already-strong debut, and I can’t wait to see how matters escalate further from here.

[Content warning for gun violence and rape.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: A Universe of Wishes: A We Need Diverse Books Anthology edited by Dhonielle Clayton

Book #105 of 2021:

A Universe of Wishes: A We Need Diverse Books Anthology edited by Dhonielle Clayton

I love how works like this aim to spotlight authors and characters of under-represented backgrounds in literature, but for me as a reader, the YA sci-fi and fantasy stories in this collection are generally more good than great. As refreshing as it is to see so many protagonists who are queer and/or POC taking center-stage, largely from #ownvoices writers of the same identities, I don’t know that this ends up being the finest showcase for them overall.

It’s less uneven than most genre anthologies, at least! In fact, there’s just one real dud among the lot, which is also the lone entry that seems to star a straight white cis person: The Scarlet Woman by Libba Bray. I understand that the Gemma Doyle trilogy does have some diversity in it — I only ever read the first novel, and that was a while ago — but there’s little on display in this odd tie-in tale, and I’m frankly quite flummoxed as to its inclusion here.

On the brighter end of the scale, I’d highlight Tochi Onyebuchi’s Habibi, a magical realist piece about two prisoners in solitary confinement on opposite sides of the world who discover they can somehow pass messages back and forth, Anna-Marie McLemore’s Cristal y Ceniza, a Cinderella retelling with a Latina heroine and a transgender prince, and Zoraida Córdova’s Longer Than the Threads of Time, a dark romance (and loose Rapunzel riff) featuring an all-new cast within the bounds of her existing Brooklyn Brujas series. These titles wholly live up to the promise of the book, but there’s a bit too much of the solid-yet-unremarkable packed in around them.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Slaughterman’s Daughter by Yaniv Iczkovits

Book #104 of 2021:

The Slaughterman’s Daughter by Yaniv Iczkovits

If the Coen Brothers were to produce an updated version of Fiddler on the Roof, it might look a lot like this 2015 novel by Israeli author Yaniv Iczkovits, his first work to be translated into English. Set in the Pale of Settlement, the region of Imperial Russia where Jews were permitted to live but still subjected to economic precarity and regular outbursts of pogrom violence, it’s a loose picaresque that follows a handful of surprising miscreants as they push against their assigned societal roles, acting out in ways they barely know how to express.

The inciting incident in the plot is one woman’s choice to track down her brother-in-law, who left to find employment in the big city and never returned, but events spiral out from there, especially once the knife skills she learned from her father the kosher butcher prove bloodily useful on the road. Throughout the ensuing action, the narrative often wanders back to fill in extended character histories, and although audiobook reader Tovah Feldshuh gives a phenomenal performance, accents and all, I think it probably would have been easier to grasp everyone’s connections in print (or if I had taken notes while listening).

Iczkovits nails the atmosphere of the historical setting and the subtle #ownvoices Jewish touches, and I’ve laughed aloud at how his stubborn protagonists ride the line between exasperating and endearing. This mode of storytelling is prone to a certain deal of shagginess, and I can spot plenty of areas here that seem a bit extraneous to the heart of the tale, but it’s overall a great change of pace to the sort of books I normally pick up. To some degree, it reads almost like a lost Russian classic — only one where the antisemitic element is purposeful on the writer’s part, rather than reflective of an open outside bias.

[Content warning for sexual assault, gore, and racial slurs.]

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Dawson’s Creek, season 2

TV #36 of 2021:

Dawson’s Creek, season 2

Sophomore year on this soapy 90s teen drama offers a fantastic character arc for sidekick Pacey Witter (and an acting tour-de-force for Joshua Jackson, growing into the mix of heartfelt emotion and snarky charm that he’d later use to good effect on Fringe). Seriously, I love nearly everything about his corner of the narrative here, from the prickly sniping that blossoms into tender romance to the ways in which his new girlfriend challenges him to be a better student and person to how he finally stands up against his abusive father. Jealous best friend Dawson has it exactly wrong when he complains that Pacey is a boring saint now — the sheriff’s son is practically the only thing worth watching in Creekside this season.

It’s certainly not our title figure himself, who is even worse of an insufferably pretentious Nice Guy than ever, passive-aggressively lashing out at anyone who doesn’t reciprocate his feelings or recognize his self-identified talents in filmmaking. I’m not saying that Joey is particularly well-defined as a protagonist at this point — in fact, she seems exceptionally jerked around by the demands of the plot, as though the writers are panicking to rush her from lover to ex before that new relationship from the previous finale can even begin to define itself — but her choice to dump the nominal hero proves wise many times over amid the ensuing angst.

It’s a shame that her subsequent rebound with a coworker and then short-lived decision to get back with Dawson are so poorly motivated, as the series needs more people who see the Leery boy with clear eyes just as it needs to work on agentive roles for its female leads. But Jen spends much of this run floundering away from the group, and Joey shows little of those fun sparks of anger that used to drive her. Andie at least gets a stronger throughline with her overachieving and mental health struggles, although her status as a special guest star is a blinking reminder to viewers each episode that her time among us will likely be limited. But for the most part, while it’s great that the program has figured out how to use one of its core cast members so effectively, the rest of the ensemble is in dire want of retooling.

[Content warning for drowning, ableism, suicide, and homophobia including slurs.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Truth by Terry Pratchett

Book #103 of 2021:

The Truth by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #25)

Overall this is a fine comic romp through the fantasy city-state of Ankh-Morpork as it’s introduced to the concept of print journalism, and the novel comes late enough in author Terry Pratchett’s career that it largely avoids the needless sexism and classism that sometimes populate his older works. The plot and the jokes are each pretty loose, however, with little of that special shine to make this particular volume stand out from the wider Discworld crowd. (I also think I just don’t find the character of Gaspode the talking / gaslighting dog to be as funny as the writer clearly does, even or especially when he’s acting as a shadowy informant called Deep Bone.) This sort of title is tough to review, because it’s not doing anything egregiously wrong with its various elements, but they never really cohere together in the compelling way that this series can accomplish at its best.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Lovecraft Country, season 1

TV #35 of 2021:

Lovecraft Country, season 1

This series requires a major content warning for everything from domestic abuse to jump scares to homophobia to gore, but first and foremost for racism in practically all of its vile and violent forms. As I noted in my 2017 review of the title it’s loosely adapting, “Jim Crow was a time of horror for black Americans, which makes it a natural fit for this novel about an extended black family coming up against the sorts of cosmic nightmares written about by H.P. Lovecraft… [who] was also an infamous racist, so there’s an element of reclaiming his narratives here” as well. That parallel remains inspired and fruitful for dramatic impact, but it is so much more visceral an experience to see the lynch mobs and other acts of mid-century bigotry play out on-screen. Tread carefully if you think you might be at all sensitive to that sort of subject matter.

The TV writers have done a fine job of tightening up this narrative, but they maintain the key insight of the original text, which is that a sundown town would be just as scary as a vampire, and just as serious a threat for someone encountering them both together. All manner of Lovecraftian weirdness goes on in this tale, from arcane rituals to unknowably monstrous beings outside the universe, but it generally sounds an accompanying tempo to the everyday terror facing our protagonists, rather than standing out as the prime focus. Or really, it’s all meshed into one omnipresent danger, where a warlock is as deadly for his twisted powers as for his white skin in our society.

It’s a powerfully thought-provoking piece of storytelling, and although it sometimes falters in terms of legible plot and character motivations beyond pure survival — and often succumbs to that variety of nihilism endemic to the horror genre, which can seem to glorify a body count for its own sake without any real hope for agentive heroism to defy it — the ideas and the visuals alike are striking. Whether due to COVID considerations or because they’ve already used most of the material from the book in this debut year, HBO has still neither officially renewed or canceled the program. But the network has made something special here, and it would be great to see where they could take the concept next.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Angels Flight by Michael Connelly

Book #102 of 2021:

Angels Flight by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #6)

This 1999 novel is interestingly (and depressingly) timely two decades on, as it plays out against a backdrop of police brutality and an ensuing race riot. Author Michael Connelly may have been drawing on the recent high-profile Rodney King and OJ Simpson cases, but his lurid tale of a murdered attorney who had been suing the city on behalf of a black man tortured by cops interrogating him about a missing white girl almost feels like it could have pulled from today’s headlines instead. The characters voice a lot of arguments that sound familiar as well, and it’s to the writer’s credit that protagonist detective Harry Bosch is both more enlightened than his average peers and willing to listen to the African American colleagues who challenge his biased perspective further. That’s a step up from his attitude in the last book, and while the series may be ‘copaganda’ overall, at least in volumes like this it’s not afraid to call out the problems in law enforcement that systemically enable and protect abusers.

The procedural element is fairly straightforward, but that conventional plot still throws a decent number of red herrings at us to disguise the ultimate solution to the lawyer’s death. The main flavor of the text, though, is in the fraught atmosphere of a people fed up with racist misconduct and poised on the verge of boiling over as the department investigates and potentially exonerates its own officers. And that’s why this works so well as a Bosch story, with the investigator continuing to come into focus as a man determined to find justice for every victim who crosses his path, no matter the political fallout. It won’t win him career advancement from the higher-ups looking to sweep everything under the rug, but he’s the ideal agent to uncover the truth of a crime at any cost.

[Content warning for child sex abuse, gun violence, homophobia, and racism including slurs.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

Book #101 of 2021:

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

In the parlance of this novel: “I’m in this photo and I don’t like it.”

Which is to say, a lot of the story is an attempt to portray what it’s like to be Extremely Online, tapped into that stream of global consciousness that delivers up milkshake ducks and memes and post-ironic viral tweets in an ever-accelerating cycle, a brilliant but toxic but mostly just weird digital ecosystem that’s hard to fully grasp from the outside. Author Patricia Lockwood captures that essence perhaps better than any novelist I’ve seen, and I can definitely relate to her protagonist’s difficulty explaining what’s made her laugh to a spouse who’s less plugged-in.

At the same time, the writer is much harsher towards that uniquely modern mode of technologically-enhanced existence than I think is entirely fair, although her critiques are largely by implication rather than expressed outright. And that’s the biggest problem with this project: it is incredibly disjointed and aimless, achieving the occasional sharp insight but couching everything in needlessly florid language. Donald Trump is called only “the dictator.” The internet itself is “the portal.” And for more than half the book, there’s no plot to speak of whatsoever.

Then a little past the midway point, our heroine gets news of complications in her sister’s pregnancy, which helps ground the narrative in emotional stakes and a structure that has been completely absent before. (It’s also based somewhat on Lockwood’s own family history, I gather.) I greatly prefer that part of the work, despite the clumsily offensive ignorance-is-bliss metaphor linking the baby born with minimal brain function to people who can manage to keep themselves off social media.

The text as a whole, though, isn’t great. The bifurcation between its separate halves is too acute, and the larger early section is a fever dream of nonsense even for those of us who can generally follow along. I’ve picked up on many references to real events, but I couldn’t rightly classify the rest as either items I happened to miss over the past few years or pure invented hyperbole standing in for them satirically. It channels the experience of virtual life in the Trump era, floundering in a tide of rising extremism egged on by the bully-in-chief and rapid-fire swings in the zeitgeist of acceptable discourse, yet it does so in a way that’s already off-putting now and seems guaranteed to age poorly from there. I can barely imagine anyone loving this title upon publication in 2021, let alone once time has robbed future readers of any easy context.

[Content warning for ableism including slurs.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Mistborn: Secret History by Brandon Sanderson

[Review originally written 4/1/16, updated 4/10/21]

Book #100 of 2021:

Mistborn: Secret History by Brandon Sanderson

This novella is honestly not one of Brandon Sanderson’s strongest examples of self-contained storytelling. But that’s fine, because it’s not aiming to be. It’s instead a behind-the-scenes sort of deal, showing one particular character’s actions during the second and third Mistborn novels when they seemed to have largely left the narrative. I’m sure some readers will see this as a retcon, but the author’s note says Sanderson knew all along that this story was happening simultaneously to the others — and I can now confirm there are neat clues to it that can be spotted on a careful reread of the core volumes.

It’s hard to discuss such a hidden tale without spoilers, but aside from its initial premise, the plot isn’t particularly gripping by the usual standards of this world. I am excited for what it sets up, however. This book was released alongside Mistborn #6, the ending of which raises the idea that there’s more to the the original trilogy than might have first met the eye. (The writer in fact suggests that the ideal time to read it is right after #6, but I personally disagree, unless the forthcoming #7 goes in a very different direction. Both thematically and plotwise this one fits best before #4 so far. That moves up a certain reveal, but it doesn’t really “spoil” it any more than Revenge of the Sith spoils The Empire Strikes Back for viewers watching Star Wars in chronological order.) Anyway, the belated background subplot is well worth exploring once you know the main version of events, and will likely be of great importance in the sequels yet to come.

The work is also exciting for its revelations about the cosmere, the larger universe where most of Sanderson’s fiction takes place. There’s an epic saga going on around the fringes of his books, and it’s always been fun to try to connect together various implications of that. But Secret History is the earliest to put its cosmere business front and center, and that’s a refreshing and intriguing change of pace.

Despite being published as an ebook with minimal publicity, this piece appears pretty important to the ongoing continuity, so I’m glad it now has a more fittingly prominent position as part of the collection Arcanum Unbounded, where it’s joined by the less-essential but still worthwhile prequel “The Eleventh Metal.” Check it out if you’ve already finished the classic Mistborn series, or else between #3 and #4 when you get there.

[Content warning for ableism. And disclaimer: I’m Facebook friends with this author.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad

Book #99 of 2021:

Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad

A searing first-hand account of author Suleika Jaouad’s experience contracting a rare form of leukemia in college, the years of medical anguish that followed, and her faltering attempts to rejoin regular life after being one of the lucky few to eventually make it out of that condition alive. Like the best memoirs, it draws us into a world that most readers will never witness for ourselves, laying bare both the awful physical pain and the spiritual / emotional toll on the writer and her close relations. Her crumbling romance with an initially-stalwart boyfriend reduced to unhappy caregiver is particularly heartbreaking, although I think Jaouad extends the selfish lout more grace and understanding than I feel inclined to myself.

For the most part this book is fairly apolitical, focusing on a few individuals’ encounters with the hospital system rather than any flaws in it as a larger whole. Yet it’s difficult to read and not be struck by how suddenly any healthy person like Suleika can lose that status and then require so much intervention and assistance just for even a chance to go on living. A parent’s insurance helped pay the mountain of bills in this case, but there’s a powerful argument implied here to support greatly expanded healthcare and disability access for anyone who needs it — because as her story makes plain, any of us easily could.

[Content warning for graphic descriptions of bodily functions and death of a friend.]

★★★★☆

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