This was another insomnia read, picked up in the dark hours when no one but me is awake. Pretty much with an insomnia read I’m just looking for readability, which is one of those terms that is probably not that helpful. Maybe I should go onto Karen’s Reader’s Advisory group and try to define this readable beast.
Tone: light to medium
Pace: fast
Setting: not contemporary, possibly with magic, aliens, gadgets or other neat ideas that are fun to watch play out
Romance: light
Narrator: inobtrusive
Admittedly, these are just my criteria, but this is my insomnia and I’m sticking to it.
The Native Star by M.K. Hobson, on the dust jacket, is likened to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
But! The other thing I like about likening this to Strange & Norrell is that neither one is steampunk, a label I see applied to this one. Forsooth, arguing about genre is a losing business, but just because something is an alternate history set in the late 1800s, that isn’t enough to make it steampunk. Magic ain’t gadgets, and a certain kind of fetishized retro-technology porn is an inextricable part of the (sub)-genre. But! I’m willing to concede that this is in the odd dash-punk edge of alt-history. I noticed some similarities between the sanguimages from this book and the warlocks in Bitter Seeds
It’s like there is a cluster of dash-punk genres – alternate histories that keep coding and recoding history with various magics and the magics of technologies, pushing the true history to reveal itself. Mike has noted that most alt-histories have alt-histories written within them, and Native Star is no different: here, it is a series of pulp novels that comment on the magic-working characters, which is not dissimilar to the pulp novels in Raising Stony Mayhall
So far, this is the worst book report ever, me blathering about things only interesting to me. So, to the plot summary:
The Native Star starts with a small town witch, Emily, with money problems putting the whammy on the town babbitt, in an move that backfires into zombies and some irate townspeople. She ends up with a magical stone lodged in her hand – don’t ask – and then the story is off and tumbling in a post-Civil War Old West. Her compatriot through these tumbles is a man called Dreadnought Stanton, which is possibly the stupidest name ever, and I never did figure why Emily was the only character with a non-stupid name. The beginning rankled a bit, what with the silly names and the poor characterizations – yes, Emily is smart but uneducated; yes, Dreadnought (ugh) is a stuffed shirt patrician type, but with seeeekrits. But – and this so rarely seems to happen for me – the characterizations completely tighten up as the book progresses, the stock characters thawing into something resembling humans. The action is well-written, and the banter ranging from not-distracting to super fun. I was expecting certain inevitable twists that ended up being different enough from my expectations to be satisfying. I’ll just say: fuck yeah, hubris!
I even came to peace with the names, which end up being often Dickensian and sly. There’s a lot of really funny hat-tips in this book, like the bounty hunter with an Italian accent who seems to have walked off the set of a Spaghetti Western. I found this delightful, especially because it was underplayed. And – this is going to be huge tangent – but can someone please write on of these dash-punk action thrillers in the Reconstruction South? There seems to be a lot of fictions that center on the myth of the Old West in narrating our American discomfort with Manifest Destiny, the Civil War, and – you know – all that blood let to forge the melting pot in the first place. And how the culture wars still rage along lines set down at the time.
The bestest of these fictions, to me, is the HBO series Deadwood
So. There are things I could bitch about (not excited about the Native characters) and things I could praise (excited by the proto-feminist characters), but what it comes down to is that this was the right book at the right time. And not just to sound like I’m faint-praising this book for being a pretty midnight tumble, I spent the day thinking about the characters and the alt-history, unknotting some later plot developments and choices. There’s a lot of smart and funny here in all of the relentless action. Hot damn, that’s something, insomnia or not.
which was written roughly ten years before this, at the other end of the country and at the very beginning of the sexual revolution that is about to crash into the Jewish New Jersey suburbs in Wifey. I think that Oedipa from Lot 49 and Sandy from Wifey have strains of the same DNA in their blood. I’m feeling a little stupid comparing Pynchon to Blume here, but seriously. Oedipa is a useless housewife, as is Sandy; despite their transgressions, both are incredibly socially conservative; they both go on their little journeys of sex and discovery, and both novels fall completely apart, in the end, although one is much more personal a failure than the other. There’s other commonalities too – I think that the Nazi shrink in Lot 49 has something in common in creepiness with the gynecologist brother-in-law in Wifey, both of them trying to enact their institutional fuckery on the principles of these books. (I’m not using the term Nazi metaphorically here, although Pynchon might be. Dr. Hilarious was a bona fide Nazi doctor.) The difference may be that Pynchon treats his Oedipa with disdain & misunderstanding, in a gendered, satire kind of way – I’m pretty sure the only thing that makes Oedipa a woman is that her heels clack – Blume treats her protagonist with the pointed cruelty of understanding. Sandy does not just have clacking heels, she has an itchy vagina which she scratches to bleeding. Sorry, this is gross, but it’s the vagina-that-shall-not-be-named, the spooky specter of female libido.
who never writes what she means, and that not writing it is an act of subversion. I’m groping, again, as I have been in all of this review, because I feel like a definitive reading of this book is severely impossible. But as I’ve found in reading this women’s fiction in the group, I take Sandy a lot more personally than I do Oedipa, which is sometimes a mistake. If I’d written this review the minute I finished reading, it would have been one-star outrage – I would have read myself, as a wife & mother, into Sandy, and I would have taken personally the outrages committed and perpetrated by Sandy. I never had that reaction to Oedipa, because she’s not really a woman, and I’m less sensitive to what I perceive as sexist twaddle coming from men, rightly or wrongly.
by Colson Whitehead follows with an intimate third person a character called Mark Spitz. He’s not the Olympian Mark Spitz, his name instead a post-armageddon macabre joke about his relentless averageness. Whitehead tosses off a lot of incisive, tending towards over-wrought descriptions of other characters and places, but his lead is so blank, so lacking in affect that you feel the chill of loss despite the semicoloned literary style. The action of the book takes place over three tight days, but the true incidents are lappingly recounting in flashback, the scum of the blood-tide peeled back layer by dried layer. Much of the supporting cast could dissolve into quirk-fests if it weren’t for constant reminders of the sources of these quirks, the almost laughingly named disorder PASD – Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. PASD when spoken aloud sounds like “past”, a sometimes funny, always awful double entendre. 
in the first few sentences.
Before I left for my visit with Grandma who is dying, on a slow Saturday, my husband pulled me down onto the couch and made me watch that film. Not all. In sections as I ran the dishwasher or packed that forgotten thing or talking on the phone to a distraught family member, imagining the family ugliness that is inevitable once she’s gone. We’re all considering the end, mapping out alternate futures of the end and after her end. I’ve had my problems with von Trier in the past that aren’t worth getting into, but Melancholia was a series of images that burned me quietly, this end of the world that is both metaphor and fact. Science fiction stories can be a lot of different things, but the ones that get me scrying my own overturned guts are the ones about our personal universes as alien planets, the hard gravities of our emotions and what we tell ourselves are our emotions. The way Melancholia ran this apocalypse through a series of family connections, bright loosely connected images, the hovering close-ups and near-static tableaus – ah ah ah ah.
, someone changed subtly or largely in someone else’s sleep. It will be hours before I know she’s gone — this is the way of things; the phone-tree is long and branching — and in those hours will she continue as if that end hadn’t happened? Will she be gone in those hours? There’s questions like that everywhere here.
by Catherynne Valente, or been indifferent, or been casually affectionate, and then left the next morning – or even just as it ended – and then called four days later and been polite but firm that it was over. Books can be – they are – often like lovers. We hold them in our hands – or if the lights are off and we cannot see – they whisper in our ears, and it raises gooseflesh all over our bodies. Sometimes our teeth clank, or they are too rough, or not rough enough. Sometimes they fill us up. Sometimes the same lover is all of those things: teeth-clanking, giggling, shuttering, and perfect – but you met them on the wrong day, in the wrong mood, and its fumbling and awful. I met this book on the right day, the right days, and I loved it. 