Happy Independence Day!

The Librarianist by Patrick DeWitt

Published by Ecco on July 4, 2023

Sometimes I finish a book and think, “I’m glad I read that.” On multiple occasions while reading The Librarianist, I thought, “I’m glad I’m reading this.” I didn’t need to wait for the end to know I was having a good time.

The Librarianist takes the reader on a journey through Bob Comet’s small and unremarkable life. Except that no life is unremarkable, even one as ordinary and seemingly uneventful as Bob’s. There’s always something that sets us apart from each other. That, I think, is the novel’s point. But the book also reminds us that “part of aging, at least for many of us, was to see how misshapen and imperfect our stories had to be. The passage of time bends us, it folds us up, and eventually, it tucks us right into the ground.” Only as we near the end of our time do we gain the perspective to appreciate the unique strangeness of the life we lived.

Bob begins the novel in 2006 as a librarian in Portland. He’s happy living a life in which he is surrounded by books that substitute for friends. He’s never done well with friends. His only adult friend ran off with his wife. Maybe his life hasn’t been so uneventful after all.

When Patrick DeWitt takes us a few decades into Bob’s past, we learn that Bob’s friend Ethan lived across the street from the library. Ethan was charming and handsome and a bit of a rogue. He met Bob when he ducked into the library to avoid someone lurking in his apartment who wanted to do him harm.

Bob also met Connie in the library when the head librarian banished her father from the premises. Connie was direct where Bob was shy. Connie was funny where Bob was reserved. Connie and Ethan met on the bus when they were both coming to see Bob. Bob loved them both but, for obvious reasons, regretted that his life brought them together.

So now Bob has the library and not much else. One day, Bob encounters a woman who is staring into space and helps her back to the senior center from which she has wandered. This leads Bob to a stint as a senior volunteer, although what Bob has to offer is unclear. The residents don’t seem interested in his lectures on Russian literature. Still, he becomes a fixture; his silent presence adds something of value. The volunteer work eventually connects Bob with his past in a surprising way.

When DeWitt takes another detour into Bob’s backstory, we learn that Bob’s past was more adventurous than his present might suggest. In 1945, Bob ran away from home. He latched onto two women while hiding in their train compartment. Ida and June were traveling thespians who performed for ever smaller crowds. Their dancing dogs were likely the highlight of their shows. They decided that Bob could be their drummer until something better came along.

Ida and June are quirky and given to witty observations, the kind of characters who are perfect for an offbeat comedy. If only people spoke in the formalities and circularities of Ida and June (neither pays much attention to what the other says about anything, except to disagree), the world would be a more entertaining place.

Bob ended up in a town that is the epicenter of a riot, but people in the town don’t take much of anything seriously, including the rioters. The townspeople all tend to be philosophical, including a sheriff who responds to the observation “everyone goes his own way in this world” with “you’ve got yourself a morbid point of view.” Few perspectives that Bob encounters are morbid; people generally seem happy to be part of the town’s life, even when that life doesn’t make much sense.

Most of the novel’s characters are happy enough, although sometimes in a melancholy way. Bob and Connie have thought about each other over the years, but life moves on. That too is the point of the story. We wonder about the things that did and did not happen in our lives, but the life we lived is the one we need to appreciate.

Every bit of this gentle story is delightful and surprising. Most of the novel maintains a tone of low-key amusement, but every now and then the subdued humor gives way to belly laughter. DeWitt reminds us that thriller heroes and dramatic moments don’t dominate the real world, even if they dominate fiction. Viewed properly, the small moments are just as satisfying.

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The Militia House by John Milas

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on July 11, 2023

The Militia House combines the story of a Marine deployed to Afghanistan with a horror story. War is horror even without a supernatural element, which might be the story’s point.

The novel begins as a conventional story of a soldier in Afghanistan. It has the uncertain feel of many debut war novels told by veterans who want to write about their military experience but aren’t sure what they want to say.

Alex Loyette is a corporal who leads three other Marines in the routine tasks associated with establishing landing zones for helicopters. Alex joined the Marines because he was failing in college. He wanted to make people think he was doing something important, but he didn’t care about military service. His brother was the war hero, someone who died after stepping on an IED, whose sacrifice meant more to others than to Alex. Alex knows he will never be a hero, will never be perceived in the same light as his brother.

Alex has given up on everything. He doesn’t want to try to live up to a potential that he can’t recognize. He doesn’t want to do good things or be a good person or please people who cared about him. He just wants to be left alone. He comes to realize that by joining the Marines, he ran away from one lost cause to join another.

The novel’s hook is a building just outside the wire called the Militia House. British soldiers claim that the Militia House is haunted. It was at one point occupied as barracks by Soviet soldiers who fought their last battle against the Taliban in its confines. Bullet holes riddle the interior walls.

Creepy events occur before Alex visits the Militia House. He sees a dog with porcupine quills stuck in its nose. Quills eventually turn up at other locations. Drawings pinned to the walls seem to change, as if they are being redrawn. A notebook in which Alex scribbles his thoughts reappears every time he burns it. One of Alex’s men talks in his sleep and appears to be sleepwalking.

The creepiest events occur in the Militia House, where time is distorted and a stairway to a basement appears and disappears. Alex should know better than to return to a haunted house, but when one of his team disappears, he leads the rest on a rescue mission. It doesn’t end well.

The novel captures the frustration of miliary life. John Milas establishes Alex’s backstory and insecurities effectively. Unfortunately, there isn’t much else to the novel. Perhaps Alex is under the influence of the supernatural. Perhaps he’s gone off his nut. Whether the supernatural threats are meant to be taken seriously or are the product of Alex’s disturbed mind is never clear, although the reader sees little to suggest that Alex has any reason to be haunted by war. For that reason, the story feels insubstantial, even a bit pointless, despite some vivid images.

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Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo

Published in Italy in 2022; published in translation by Grove Press, Black Cat on June 27, 2023

Dysfunctional families can be charming, at least in Rome. As children, Verika and her more intelligent brother were rarely allowed to interact with a world that their protective parents regarded as far too dangerous. They devised meaningless games to escape boredom, games at which Verika invariably but pointlessly cheated. From this, Verika learned a life lesson. “Whenever I feel like I’m trapped in a room, in a game with rules, rather than try to escape from it I try to taint the logic of the room, of the rules.” She invents her own reality. Perhaps this reality invention makes Verika an unreliable narrator as she tells the reader her life story.

Both parents are strange. Verika’s father often says, “We have reached the height of paradox.” He loves to build walls, not just metaphorically. He has created multiple small rooms in their small apartment, cutting windows in half and making the bidet inaccessible. He wraps Verika in paper towels as a protection against perspiration, which he regards as the source of dangerous illnesses. Verika smells bad because her father thinks a good scrub with paper towels and alcohol is preferable to bathing.

Verika’s mother is convinced that her children are in danger and bombards them with calls when they are not in her presence. When Verika enters the world to attend school, her mother or father drives her or her brother walks with her, but their protectiveness cannot shelter her from the experience of life. Verika’s mother is horrified when Verika learns about the male appendage from a flasher who was lurking outside the school. When her mother tells her teacher “the girl believes she’s seen a wiener,” her classmates pass her sketches “that looked nothing at all like my vision of the reddish protuberance, which turned out to be reassuring.”

Yet for all their protectiveness, Verika’s parents are willing to let her visit a grandfather and sleep in his bed well beyond the age when a girl should be sharing a bed with an adult male relative. It isn’t clear that anything inappropriate happens, but it also isn’t clear whether Verika would recognize any activity as inappropriate, given her limited frame of reference.

Verika loses her fear of wieners when she learns that a girl can hold one in her hand (she finds one unexpectedly in her grasp while riding on a crowded tram and politely returns it to its owner). When she reaches her late teens, Verika has more experience with wieners but is less certain whether the things she’s done with them constitute sex. Those things seem to have been consensual, but Verika is lost in a world of her own, making it difficult to know whether she is suppressing the truth.

Lost on Me is Verika’s look back at her life. Verika tells her story factually (although not linearly), leaving it to the reader to deduce how the strange way in which was raised might have had an impact on her present. For the most part, Verika’s memories are amusing. To the extent they might be disturbing, Verika simply chooses not to be troubled by them. Her discussion of an abortion, for example, is unemotional. It’s just another thing that happened in her life.

As a young adult, Verika makes a number of discoveries in rapid order — about touch, about sex, about infidelity, about Berlin — although her narrative cuts those events into slices that she serves out of order. She is later astonished to learn how men can be so generous while asking so little in return — asking, that is, for something that means so little to her. She has boyfriends but she isn’t relationship material. She travels to Mexico with a female friend (where she is inevitably bombarded by calls from her mother) and later considers (without emotion) how that friendship just drifted away. The friend is easily replaced by Amory Blain, the main character in This Side of Paradise.

In the present, Verika and her brother are authors. Verika writes books when she’s staying with people in Berlin. Lost on Me is her latest. Because Verika is honest about her dishonesty, it is difficult to know when her narrative is meant to be reliable or even whether that matters. She describes a 14-year relationship with A, yet none of her friends seem aware of A’s existence, perhaps because A changes bodies. Is he any more real than Amory Blain? Verika’s mother sends texts to A on his own phone, so it’s hard to know. Maybe Verika is lying about the phone.

Verika describes her father’s death, her mother’s loneliness (reported in telephone calls ten times a day), her dismal efforts to conquer insomnia with pills and masturbation. She claims a fear of physical contact yet feels a need to watch others touching each other. She tells people vague stories about friends unseen for the last two years who have two-year old children. Two years seems a sensible distance and age when she has no clue about the true number.

One of the novel’s most interesting themes is the malleability of memory. Verika is untrustworthy not just because she tells deliberate lies but because her memories are hazy. They “change in the process of forming.” That’s true of all memory. Two witnesses will remember the same event in very different ways because that’s how memory works (or doesn’t work). Lost on Me is impressive in its honesty, even if the reader might not know what to believe, because Verika understands more than most of us that having a memory doesn’t mean the memory is true.

Identity (more precisely, Verika’s lack of identity) is another key theme. Verika claims she is regularly mistaken for a male, perhaps because she often wears male clothing. She is convinced that others do not recognize her, but perhaps they are strangers who have never seen her before. Even her grandfather always photographed her facing away from the camera, taking pictures of a back that could belong to anyone. At times, her mother sees someone else in a photo and believes it to be Verika. She has felt, at every moment of her life: “Oh whatever. Let’s just say this is me.”

The “fullest expression” of Verika’s identity is the manipulation of truth “as though it were an exercise in style.” She claims to keep a “glimmer of truth” inside her but confesses that she often forgets it or conflates it with the lie.

Lost on Me, with its ambiguous truths and confusions of reality, comes across as an exercise in style. While it seems to be narrated as a stream of consciousness, its loose structure belies its careful construction. Veronica Raimo ends the novel by confessing that she writes “things that are ambiguous, frustrating.” She also says she’s “fine with that.” Readers who are not fine with ambiguity should probably look for a more concrete story. While Lost on Me can be frustrating, it is also an intriguing exploration of the often illusory distinction between truth and fantasy.

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Loot by Tania James

Published by Knopf on June 13, 2023

Blending historical drama with an adventure story and spiced with forbidden romance, Loot is difficult to categorize. That’s one reason the novel is so special. The story is anchored by Tipu’s Tiger, a popular attraction at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. While the tiger exists, Loot is an inventive work of fiction.

The story begins in the Kingdom of Mysor. Before it fell, the kingdom was in the southern peninsula of India. In 1794, it is ruled by Tipu Sultan. Lucien Du Leze, a French clockmaker and master of automated figures, has been living for some time in the Sultan’s court. He is impressed by toys carved from wood by a boy named Abbas, including a horse that moves its legs when its tail is lifted up and down. Through no fault of his own, Abbas has incurred the Sultan’s wrath and would likely be executed if not for Lucien’s intervention.

The Sultan has instructed Lucien to make an automaton in the shape of a tiger. The Sultan wants the tiger to be eating an infidel. As conceived by Lucien, the infidel’s arm will move and he will moan in pain when a crank is turned. Bellows and an organ in the beast’s belly will produce the moans, while tunes can be played on an external keyboard to entertain the Sultan as the tiger lunches on the infidel’s throat. Lucien can handle the automation, but he needs Abbas to carve the tiger.

The first part of the story develops the character of Abbas as he apprentices with Lucien, separates from his family, learns to speak French, and vows to learn the secrets of clockmaking and automation. After some time, as the East India Company is poised to invade Mysore, Lucien arranges his return to France. Abbas is not ready to accompany him; he wishes to serve the Sultan in his doomed defense of Mysore. The decision is unwise, but Abbas will survive a harrowing battle and later embark on a journey to reunite with Lucien.

More adventures follow as Abbas becomes a ship’s carpenter in the hope of finding passage to France. Pirates, British naval vessels that conscript crew from other ships (not much different from pirates, really), and disease are all barriers to the achievement of Abbas’ goal.

When he was still in Mysore, Abbas carved a top for a little girl named Jehanne. Lucien came to be her guardian after her mother died in childbirth. Jehanne has traveled to France with Lucien, where she assists him with a shop that sells curios and clocks. Abbas will eventually make his way to Jehanne.

The tiger, on the other hand, has made its way to England. Like palace jewels and attractive women, it became part of the “loot” with which conquering soldiers were rewarded. The tiger was gifted as a spoil of war to a British officer named Selwyn who knew it would delight his eccentric wife.

After Abbas reunites with Jehanne, he wants to recover the tiger, or at least a part of its internal mechanism, as an end to achieving his larger goal of learning the skills that Lucien promised to teach him. To that end, Abbas travels to England with Jehanne with a plan to scam Lady Selwyn.

Lady Selwyn is secretly sleeping with Rum, an Indian servant who is suspicious of Abbas and Jehanne. His suspicions are well founded, but Lady Selwyn is taken with Jehanne. Interracial romance adds to the intrigue in the novel’s last half and, in the case of Jehanne and Abbas, contributes to the novel’s tension — will they or won’t they? They both bear “a wound that the other understands, being severed from their bloodlines, their homeland. Each is all the other has, and this can sometimes be a burden, but also a solace.”

It’s impossible to convey an adequate flavor of a plot that travels in some many directions and touches upon so many subjects, from war to romance, from subjugation to the struggle for self-realization. Despite its average length, the novel feels like an epic. The French Revolution and British colonialism shape many of the novel’s events, but Abbas is barely aware of the political and discriminatory forces that drive his life. He only knows that his experience working on the tiger with Lucien changed his life, left him wanting more, a “more” he initially defines as a life of clockmaking and automaton creation. Only at the end does he realize that his life is open to so many more possibilities. Other characters come to the same realization.

Tania James’ prose is exquisite. Lyrical descriptions of life in Tipu Sultan’s court and in Lady Selwyn’s estate bring the settings alive, while powerful images of war and life at sea give the story a cinematic feel. Careful research adds an illusion of authenticity. James keeps the story in constant motion, joining tragedy with moments of comedy as the story advances to a satisfying conclusion. Readers in search of something different and readers who value good storytelling might want to add Loot to their reading lists.

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