The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Book #181 of 2020:

Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

This American history title offers an in-depth look at Reconstruction — the short period immediately after the Civil War, marked by a measure of meaningful progress towards racial equality — and the Jim Crow era that followed, in which black citizens were gradually subjugated under the pernicious caste system that replaced slavery with a new patchwork of official and unofficial rules governing their behavior. The text is heavy, both for the occasional dry academic tone and for the horrifying examples of racist imagery, including slurs and depictions of lynchings, that author Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has assembled.

The narrative loses a little focus in its discussion of the Harlem Renaissance and the ‘New Negro’ movement, but the early part is a detailed deep dive into how and why Reconstruction gave way to its polar opposite. Gates also calls out a similar pendulum swing in recent years from the election of our first black president to the subsequent resurgence of white nationalism, a fascinating observation that could easily be expanded into an entire book on the parallel. As here, it demonstrates how rapidly racism can shift to accommodate different paradigms and, perhaps, how to push back against that.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Last Day on Mars by Kevin Emerson

Book #180 of 2020:

Last Day on Mars by Kevin Emerson (Chronicle of the Dark Star #1)

I’ll give a charitable three stars to this middle-grade sci-fi adventure, which hasn’t quite gripped me but may prove more exciting for younger readers. I do like that it’s basically a junior version of The Martian, with a twelve-year-old hero separated from his colony ship and trying to avoid getting left behind on the red planet. Unfortunately, however, the pacing suffers from a surplus of exposition, and there’s too much attention devoted throughout to some mysterious alien saboteurs that never really coheres together into an understandable plot. The sequels may well improve on those fronts, although I doubt I’ll personally check them out myself.

I think my favorite part of this book is the subtle tension that stems from the protagonist having known no other life than Mars, when his parents and the rest of the older colonists view it as only an overlong layover between Earth and their ultimate destination. It reminds me of the children who grow up in new dystopia stories like Earth Abides or Station Eleven, and is a neat play on the first-generation immigrant experience. I just wish the narrative held more thematic focus on that element and fewer of the somewhat repetitive action scenes.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Street by Ann Petry

Book #179 of 2020:

The Street by Ann Petry

Upon reading this novel from 1946 I am stunned, both by the sheer raw power of the text and by the fact that I’d never even heard of it before seeing a friend’s rave review earlier this year. The title clearly had an impact at the time, reportedly making Ann Petry the first black woman author to sell over a million copies, but for some reason it seems to have fallen out of our broader cultural awareness in the decades since. And that’s a shame, because this is a story that demands and deserves to be held up with works like The Color Purple and Their Eyes Were Watching God as another classic of African American literature. (A few frank scenes of domestic service put the white-saviorism of The Help to shame, too.)

Petry’s grasp on her characters is achingly poignant, particularly in the ways they understand themselves to be trapped by the forces of poverty and racism. There’s a real timelessness here, with such insights into hierarchies of race, color, class, and gender that the book practically could have been written today. And although fierce single mother Lutie is undoubtedly the core protagonist, the narrative builds up an entire community ecosystem for her with other viewpoint figures who are no less well-drawn. As a result, the titular Harlem setting breathes off the page with absolute realism.

Some of the plot threads feel truncated by the abrupt ending, but that’s a stylistic choice I can respect for how it underscores the thematic message of the piece. Life on ‘the street’ as Petry depicts is messy, angry, and above all inexorable. If she leaves us with unresolved tension and no tidy answers, that says something about it too.

[Content warning for stalking, sexual assault, and slurs.]

★★★★★

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Book Review: Jingo by Terry Pratchett

Book #178 of 2020:

Jingo by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #21)

This is a reasonably funny satire on the pointlessness of war, but as with many of Terry Pratchett’s books, there’s a certain degree of low-level racism and sexism underpinning some of the jokes. (Although the most overtly bigoted characters are generally positioned as fools, the worldbuilding itself relies on some tired Middle-Eastern stereotypes for the enemy nation, and a real slur appears rather than an invented alternative.) Witty puns and droll observations on human nature are always a great reason to visit Discworld, but with those problematic elements and a somewhat convoluted plot, this volume is perhaps not the best showcase.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Shameless, season 8

TV #29 of 2020:

Shameless, season 8

What a messy and under-written year of an already shaky program. Shameless has been growing into more and more of a soap opera as it ages, and part of that transition unfortunately involves pruning back the long history that makes these characters so resonant at their best. Sometimes that’s a gradual process that introduces meaningful new relations and plot concerns to supplant the old, but too often in this season it’s just a complete flattening of everyone’s situation into the most basic version. The main cast are largely kept siloed in their own storylines, and while some are at least moderately interesting — in increasing order: Frank’s early efforts to go straight; Fiona’s fresh challenges as a landlady; Lip’s struggle to stay sober as his support structures crumble around him — they don’t feel particularly connected to one another or to the larger ongoing Gallagher narrative. And other threads, like Ian’s bizarre “Church of Gay Jesus” thing, seem to come out of nowhere and never generate any interesting stakes.

There’s so little interaction amongst the family in this batch of episodes, and almost no conflict save a contrived Fiona/Ian fight over real estate that soon gets forgotten in his move to start a cult. (Her NIMBY attitude at least feels grounded in her recent arcs towards independence and a career, but his position standing up for his ex’s youth shelter doesn’t seem motivated by anything at all.) The series really needs to find a better way to integrate its various stories, or at the very least strive for moments of greater pathos in the scenes when they do come together again.

[Content warning for amputation.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D.

Book #177 of 2020:

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D.

An interesting yet not particularly surprising look at the Trump dynasty from the president’s estranged niece, detailing her grandfather’s emotional abuse of Donald and his other children and how that unloved arrogant boy has been enabled to fail upwards his entire life. The author is bitter and disdainful, but her version of events seems plausible enough, and I don’t begrudge her airing the dirty laundry like this. I do think it’s wildly inappropriate for her as a clinical psychologist to attempt to diagnose her uncle within these pages, however, and those sections are far less convincing than when she merely relates her understanding of their dysfunctional family history instead.

I’m vacillating between a two-star and three-star rating for this book, but the thinness of the text ultimately pushes it to the lower end of the scale for me. Although I haven’t read any other Donald Trump biographies, I feel like this one skips over too many salient details, focusing more on Mary’s father with only snapshot cameos from the title figure himself. That approach could be fine for a memoir that happens to feature a famous relative, but since the apparent aim of this account is to shine a light on that other person, there’s nowhere near enough support to bracket the narrative — let alone validate the unprofessional armchair diagnosis of mental problems and personality disorders.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Running Man by Richard Bachman

Book #176 of 2020:

The Running Man by Richard Bachman

I still love the propulsive adrenaline rush of this pseudonymous Stephen King dystopian piece, but I had forgotten just how needlessly steeped in bigotry it is. Presumably in an effort to make his protagonist more of a hard case, the author has him think and say some things that are pretty shockingly racist, sexist, homophobic, and antisemitic, including slurs and an offhand rape fantasy. It’s a frustrating distraction from what’s otherwise a pulse-pounding adventure, and while I don’t particularly enjoy the campy Arnold Schwarzenegger film adaptation, I can understand why that script largely starts over with his role rather than staying remotely faithful to the book.

If you can get past the hero’s odiousness, this is a neat exercise in telling a tightly-focused sci-fi story with just enough details to suggest an interesting wider world. Its premise of a televised manhunt game show was ahead of its time in 1982, foreshadowing both modern reality TV and subsequent genre fare like The Hunger Games. (Some deepfake-like manipulation of video footage feels eerily prescient too.) The short staccato chapters carry the action well, and their countdown format adds a further tension to an already taut narrative. I only wish “Richard Bachman” could have come up with a better shorthand for character toughness.

[Content warning for claustrophobia, gun violence, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko

Book #175 of 2020:

Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko (Metamorphosis #1)

This Ukrainian novel offers a dark spin on the fantasy boarding school trope, more in the vein of The Magicians than Harry Potter. The pupils are essentially blackmailed into enrolling via threats to their family, the curriculum consists of memorizing arcane texts that expand one’s understanding of reality at terrible costs, and except for a few neat time loops, there’s very little whimsy to be found anywhere. I’ve rarely seen a set of wizards so dour, or a magic so unmagical.

Now, that’s all fine for atmosphere, and I’m even reasonably on-board with the heroine’s journey to learn more about her situation, but this is ultimately a narrative that keeps things murkily ominous for most of its length, regularly telling the protagonist / reader that we still aren’t ready to know exactly what’s going on — only for the eventual reveal to seem like something that in fact could have been spelled out in a few plain words from the start. Perhaps the rest of the trilogy improves from here, but with no sign of an English translation for those sequels, I can’t help but wish that this volume had gotten to its point sooner.

[Content warning for body horror, infant endangerment, and forced prostitution.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Empty by Susan Burton

[CW: Eating disorders. Cover removed due to concerns raised that it might be triggering itself.]

Book #174 of 2020:

Empty by Susan Burton

Well-written but tough to face head-on, this is a fairly agonizing account of the author’s childhood and adult anorexia, bookending her arguably worse difficulty with binge-eating in high school and college. Susan Burton expertly conveys the awful compulsions of these eating disorders, as well as the accompanying feelings of shame and self-loathing. It’s a difficult read whether you share those battles or not, and I’d advise anyone currently struggling or sensitive to relapse to proceed with the greatest caution. Nevertheless, there’s power in naming and revealing your private trauma, and it’s clear that Burton is in a healthier place now than in the periods she relates.

She’s also a gifted memoirist, both insightful about her experiences and with a good memory for the details that bring them to life. I’m not familiar with the broader literature on disordered eating, but the writer notes that bingeing in particular remains poorly understood and under-studied (although less so than when she would wonder as a teen if she was the only person suffering with it). Her contribution in this book, laying her pathology bare, will hopefully build further on that body of knowledge and help others from feeling so alone.

[Content warning for panic attacks, alcoholism, and domestic abuse in addition to the above.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu

Book #173 of 2020:

The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu

Mozart’s older sister is one of those great lost tales from history, a fellow child prodigy who toured Europe with him and received widespread praise for her musical abilities. We even know from Wolfgang’s letters that she was a composer too, although none of her works have survived to today (unless they were misattributed to him, as some people have claimed). But as a young woman in the 18th century, she was kept from pursuing her talents into adulthood, and she settled down into a quiet family life as her brother’s career took off.

That’s already a strong basis for a historical fiction novel, but author Marie Lu incorporates a fascinating obscure detail from Nannerl’s biography as well: the siblings had a game they played on tour that involved trading stories of “Das Königreich Rücken,” a magical kingdom where they were king and queen. And so, Lu posits, what if the Mozarts really were traveling Pevensie-like to that other land, and what if the girl’s thwarted desires to shape her own fate were caught up with the machinations of a dangerous prince of the fey?

It’s a lovely idea, and although some of the fantasy elements can feel a tad generic, the heroine’s frustrations and willingness to be tempted are well-drawn; if you can accept the basic leap of the speculative premise, this is a plausible enough account that fits with the recorded facts. It’s also a passion project for the writer, who mentions in an afterword that she first drafted the book twelve years ago and has been tinkering with it ever since, even while some of her subsequent titles have gone on to become bestsellers. Bringing this forgotten figure to a new audience clearly means a lot to Lu, and that shines through across the resulting text.

★★★★☆

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