The Bad Angel Brothers by Paul Theroux

Published by Mariner Books on September 6, 2022

Paul Theroux always takes me to worlds far from my own. Surfers in Hawaii (Under the Wave at Waimea). The jungles of Honduras (The Mosquito Coast). High-end escorts in London (Doctor Slaughter). The Bad Angel Brothers is set in more familiar terrain — the East Coast and Arizona), albeit with trips to Alaska, Columbia, Zambia, and the Congo — but the subject matter — prospecting for gold and jewels in the modern world — is well beyond my experience.

Still, after scenes are set, the novel becomes a domestic drama, the kind of drama most readers have either experienced or closely observed: sibling rivalry, failed marriages, the acquisition and loss of money. I enjoyed the settings and the prospecting more than the core story, but I never lost interest in the protagonist’s plight.

The Belanger brothers are polar opposites. Frank is a successful lawyer, admired by most residents of his small community, apart from the clients he cheats. Frank is a hypocrite who pretends to help his neighbors while only helping himself. Cal leaves his brother and the community behind after earning a degree in geology. He becomes a prospector, finding peace in solitude. He discovers enough flakes of gold in Arizona to support himself before contracting with mining companies in South America and partnering in a small emerald mine in Zambia. His hometown views him as an outsider, even when he returns to visit his mother. Frank is seen as the reliable brother, the one who stayed in time to share his success.

To please his mother, Cal endures uncomfortable lunches with Frank, but Frank is insufferable. Frank steals Cal’s stories and envies his success. When he loses his assets in a divorce, Frank borrows money from Cal and tries to swindle Cal out of repayment. When his mother wants to give the family home to Cal, Frank persuades her to add his name to the deed to assure that the brother with a secure job will always be there to pay the mortgage. In fact, Frank is not to be trusted — a lesson Cal learns when his own divorce rolls around, despite his hope that he has been giving his brother insufficient credit.

The domestic drama has a contrived feel. A competent lawyer could put a stop to Frank’s shenanigans and probably have Frank disbarred, circumstances that detract from the story’s credibility. Cal’s grievances about Frank are legitimate but they become redundant. Theroux piles on evidence that Frank is dishonest and a bad brother long after the case has been made.

More interesting is the arc of Cal’s life: his marriage, followed by prolonged absences from home to pursue business opportunities that he hides from his wife; his chance encounter in the Arizona desert with the member of a Mexican drug cartel; his relationship with a woman in Zambia; his dangerous trip to the Congo, where he placates his wife by investigating Chinese companies that put children to work in cobalt mines. Cal experiences more adventure than most of us could manage in five lifetimes.

One of the novel’s highlights is Cal’s comparison of rocks to people: undifferentiated aggregate surrounding an occasional unpolished emerald that is distinguished by its impurities as much as the “glittering and verdant garden” of its interior. Cal compares the inclusions in precious stones to Frank in the way they devour the light. That’s clever writing.

Theroux strives for a suspenseful ending but given the nature of Cal’s character, it never seems likely that the story will proceed to its telegraphed destination. I suppose Cal is blinded by anger, but the final pages had me wondering why it took him so long to devise the obvious remedy to his problems. While the journey in The Bad Angel Brothers is better than the destination, the journey is too rich in detail to be spoiled by the disappointing ending.

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About Face by William Giraldi

Published by W.W. Norton & Co./Liveright on September 6, 2022

 “Some days you get up, you get going, and before you know it, you get lost, all your meanings muddled.” Seger Jovi (a pen name based on his two favorite rock stars) has a string of those days after he writes a scathing celebrity profile of Val Face for a Boston magazine. Seger is summoned to meet Face and, within minutes, succumbs to the man’s charisma, apologizes for even thinking of writing a harsh word about him, and signs on to be Face’s scribe. Seger narrates About Face. Although Seger makes hapless attempts to change his wardrobe and blend in with Face’s entourage, Seger allows the reader to evaluate Face from an outsider’s perspective.

When he was young, Valentino Detti stumbled upon a plaque in Boston’s Copley Square commemorating Kahlil Gibran. Valentino read The Prophet and mastered Gibran’s talent for “glib paradoxes.” He began to preach a philosophy of self-help on street corners. As it evolved, his motivational speeches involved finding a purpose or meaning — something he called your “devotion,” the thing that will define you. Valentino, a supernaturally handsome lad, rebranded himself as Val Face and became a celebrity. He is 33 when he meets Seger.

Seger notes that Face says “fairly obvious stuff” when he’s saying anything that isn’t a glib paradox (“Unhappiness results from your rush to happiness.”). While Seger recognizes Face as a charlatan and grifter, he’s also drawn to the man’s charisma. As Face observers, “If dollar signs are the great American language, then happiness is the great American religion.” Seger sees Face promising both while denying the importance of either.

About Face explores themes of self-improvement, celebrity, and family. Face has spirited his family away from public view and installed them in a country mansion. His mother worships him and feeds him meatballs; his father has never gotten around to reading Face’s memoir or attending his events. Face’s sister Talia declined an opportunity to share his wealth because she refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Talia represents the authenticity that Face has abandoned.

Face has achieved celebrity status for no obvious reason, much like Dr. Oz. Seger wonders whether Face will inevitably follow the path of Elvis, becoming “a drugged glutton” and “perspiring self-parodist.” Yet Face sees himself as a man of the people. He accepts the trappings of celebrity (he hasn’t turned down the fruits of merchandising) because (he claims) he has a large staff of people who depend on him, but he admits that he feels breathless trying to keep up with his Big Bang. His dark secret is that he must be what people want to see, not what he wants to be.

Face preaches the importance of authenticity, but celebrity compromises his authenticity by impairing his ability to make untainted connections. Solitude may be necessary to recognize and cultivate the benefits of an inner life (at least that’s what Seger argues), but Face never has a moment of solitude. Apart from his followers, Face is always surround by assistants who have assistants who have assistants. How is it possible for Face to be the person he claims to be? The answer to that question is found in the novel’s climax.

While the novel’s themes are serious, the mood is light. Tongue-in cheek humor pervades the novel. Celebrity self-improvement gurus are easy to mock and families are typically a fertile source of humor. Some of the humor flies in from left field, as when Face’s bodyguard and father debate the relative merits of Barry Manilow and Neil Diamond.

Music also fuels the novel’s serious moments. One of the highlights is a spirited argument about the relative merit of Springsteen’s older and later albums. The discussion starts with Seger’s observation that Springsteen’s raw voice in the 1970s and 80s is more of a treat than his grunting in the 2000s. The argument morphs into a track-by-track comparison to determine whether Born to Run or Darkness at the Edge of Town is his best album. All of this leads to a discussion of the philosophy underlying Springsteen’s work. Is “Thunder Road” advocating escapism as a remedy to “a town full of losers” (escape as a means of avoiding responsibility and compromise with family and community) or is it about a man who is taking the initiative to enlarge his life, to cast off anchors and pursue ambition? The same questions could be asked of Face. Did he run away from his life instead of dealing with it or did he have the courage to make his life into something bigger? As Seger sees it, Springsteen got back to his roots in Darkness while Face has turned his back on his roots. Face's disagreement may explain why he prefers Born to Run.

William Giraldi suggests the possibility of feeling compassion for certain celebrities, at least those (like Elvis) who might have been caught up in something they can’t control, as opposed to those (like Dr. Oz and Tony Robbins) who are phony from the start. The theme of celebrity nods at the phenomenon of celebrity melodrama — the public glee when celebrities suffer a meltdown, all the better if it produces a viral mugshot. Seger believes that the reaction to melodrama is driven by the belief that celebrities are spoiled and deserve whatever misfortune befalls them, and by the “Aristotelian formula” that “the witnessing of tragedy, in its stirring of pity and fear, endorses the catharsis of those emotions.” But we forget (or don’t care) that the suffering celebrity is still a human.

Perhaps someone like Face deserves our sympathy. Is it possible that celebrities like Face might learn to be a better person because of misfortune? In the spirit of celebrity melodrama, the novel’s ending offers an encouraging but ambiguous answer. And the last paragraph offers a bit of self-help advice for readers who didn’t grasp the point of the amusing story.

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Has Anyone Seen My Toes? by Christopher Buckley

Published by Simon & Schuster on September 6, 2022

The fear of dementia probably strikes most people as they age, at least those who have a mind they would miss if they lost it. On the theory that humor conquers fear, Has Anyone Seen My Toes? could be a therapeutic read for older readers who wonder whether they should end their lives before they forget the combination to the gun safe.

The nameless protagonist is a writer. He’s staying in a small community in South Carolina, the location of his disastrous movie about patriotic prostitutes during the Revolutionary War (a movie that still sells well in hotel pay-for-views). He’s gained weight during the pandemic. In fact, he put on so much weight he can’t see his toes when he stands on the scale and his I-phone no longer recognizes him (he believes the phone is fat shaming him).

The protagonist’s behavior is becoming increasingly erratic. His wife complains when he sits in the dark at night, prepared to shoot moles that are ruining his yard (he suspects her of siding with the moles). He has started a screenplay that turns out to a version of the movie The Eagle Has Landed, substituting Roosevelt for Churchill. He is certain that he has seen attack ads in an election for coroner, but his inability to recall his conversations about the ads with the candidates suggests that he is suffering from the onset of dementia.

On the other hand, a different sort of mental disturbance might be to blame, one that counts paranoia among its symptoms. The writer is convinced that Putin is trying to sway the coroner’s election and that only he can thwart Putin’s dastardly plan. At the same time, he’s certain that the mortician running against Putin’s favored candidate has been burying people alive. It’s no surprise that the writer visits a psychiatrist before the story ends.

Has Anyone Seen My Toes? is a novel of digressions that magically add up to a plot. The progtagonist is always looking things up. We learn obscure details about Gone with the Wind, Carl Reiner, and celebrity deaths. We learn that Donald Sutherland’s tongue is periodically ravaged by parasites. We learn the etymology of several fun but useless words. We learn about writers who committed suicide. We learn the many reasons why the protagonist (like me) has never been able to force himself to finish reading Proust’s unbearably dull Remembrance of Things Past (or whatever they’re calling it these days).

It might not be politically correct to build a comedy around dementia (or any other disease) but Has Anyone Seen My Toes? is awfully funny. And no spoilers here, but maybe the writer’s problem isn’t quite what it seems. In any event, confronting the fear of dementia with humor might be the best approach to mental health, given the failure of expensive but profitable drugs like Aduhelm.

While the novel’s focus is on the fear of dementia, its humor is wide-ranging. The writer pays $7500 a year for a concierge doctor because, for that price, the doctor won’t hassle him about his bad habits. Christopher Buckley makes fun of the South, “where people start driving at fourteen and by eighteen are competing in NASCAR.” He mocks plantation tourism and its tendency to overlook the slave quarters.

Buckley also has fun with Trump and the far right. The doctor responds to COVID by prescribing whatever drug Trump has most recently mentioned. The writer goes along with it, although he would draw the line at “injecting Clorox or shoving a lightstick up my ass.” And when the writer takes the 5-word memory test that Trump regarded as proof of his genius, he comes up with a 5-word phrase from his screenplay, possible proof that he is even more demented than the last president. Quotations from Mein Kampf illustrate how American propagandists on the right are following Hitler’s advice: tell bold lies, repeat them endlessly, appeal to emotion rather than reason, and wait for weak minds to bow to your authority.

Buckley’s political humor scores bullseyes because he aims at unmissable targets. For the most part, however, the story is apolitical. The pandemic, with its toilet paper shortages and spreading bellies, is the source of familiar humor. By giving his protagonist an addled mind, Buckley takes the story a step or two beyond the familiar, sometimes reaching toward the absurd, but he never has to reach far to get a laugh.

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Terraform by Brian Merchant and Claire L. Evans (eds.)

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux /MCD x FSG Originals on August 16, 2022

Terraform is an anthology of science fiction stories that were published digitally on VICE’s “digital speculative story destination” of the same name. Corey Doctorow’s introduction to this collection suggests the value of Luddites, defined not as people who oppose technology but as people who oppose the use of technology to benefit owners at the expense of workers. He embarks on a riff about the gutting of antitrust law before he talks about the need for science fiction that imagines alternative technologies, or uses of technology, in ways that benefit people rather than capital.

In a preface, the editors of this anthology are less ambitious. Boiled down, they explain that Terraform publishes stories by new or unheralded sf writers. An unacknowledged risk of focusing on new writers is that prose will unpolished and ideas will be insufficiently developed. Many stories in the volume suffer from those flaws. When an anthology collects a large number of sf stories from newer writers, the quality will inevitably be uneven.

The stories in the first section focus on technology. An online service streams cute animals without disclosing the ways in which the animals (and the people who work for the service) are abused. Archived records of personal activity are deleted by drastic means. A kid explains to her school why she’s opting out of technology that enhances her sensory experiences. Letters smuggled across the border are the only way for deported migrants to keep in touch with relatives in the US because they are not allowed to communicate over wires or wirelessly. A male prostitute whose body is occupied by other men is asked to allow an artificial intelligence to use his body. A ghost who looks like Ernest Borgnine becomes a guest on Jimmy Kimmel’s show in an effort to obtain justice.

The best story in the first section is “The End of Big Data” by James Bridle. A data crash made all private information available for the taking. Governments responded by criminalizing the electronic storage of data. The UN monitors compliance with satellites that seek out evidence of server farms. The UN’s response to its discovery of illegal data storage is drastic.

The stories in the second section are set in the future. An archivist talks about maintaining biobots in the form of moths. A girl’s life is influenced by a talking head she finds floating down a stream after it was separated from its organically grown body. An artificial womb permits external gestation. Sentient drones enforcing agricultural rules that regulate all of society are offered a safe haven in a cooperative community that gives freedom to humans and drones. A dog that receives an intelligence enhancement yearns for a simpler time. The failure of technology portends a devolution of humanity that inspires philosophers to ask whether humanity really matters.

I have a couple of favorite stories in this section. Robin Sloan’s “The Counselor” addresses society’s response to the public expense of caring for the aging as medicine finds new ways to prolong life. The solution: assign an AI counselor whose job is to encourage older people to end their lives. In Lincoln Michel’s “Duchy of the Toe Adam,” all that is left of a religious colony has devolved into worshippers of the toe who are at war with worshippers of the nose (having defeated worshippers of other sacrilegious body parts).

The third section is devoted to dystopian stories. The rebooted dead are plotting a revolution. Revolutionary elephants have taken over Phuket. Space alien refugees are treated just as poorly as refugees from Earth’s nations. A school transport drone mistakenly returns a refugee to her original home in Mexico. A band member wakes up on the tour bus and discovers that everyone on the bus, and perhaps everyone in Texas or the world, has disappeared. Zombie capitalists. All green card holders are deported. A corporation has been gaming carbon credits by storing all its carbon emissions.

The first of my three favorites in this section is Russell Nichols’ “U Won’t Remember Dying.” A kid who was shot by the police texts his future self as he waits for his consciousness to be transferred to a cloned body. The story is a powerful and timely. The second is Bruce Sterling’s “The Brain Dump.” Oppressed Ukrainian hackers suddenly become moguls in Sterling’s 2014 commentary on the difficulty of maintaining anarchy in a pure form. My favorite story in the collection is Jeff VanderMeer’s “Always Home.” The New People were originally machines. Now they are everything. They oversee the planet’s restoration to a natural state. One of the few remaining Old People wonders why the New People brought back nature but not humans. A battle for the future ensues.

Sterling and VanderMeer are the only writers in this anthology whose work I am certain I’ve read, although I recognize the names of a few other contributors: Tobias Buckell, Meg Elison, Sam J. Miller, Tochi Onyebuchi, E. Lily Yu. Doctorow’s introduction is interesting but, sadly, he did not contribute a story to the collection. Too many of these stories are insubstantial, more ideas for stories than stories given flesh, but more than half are entertaining.

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My Dirty California by Jason Mosberg

Published by Simon & Schuster on August 30, 2022

My Dirty California that does not comfortably fit into a single genre. It seems to be a crime novel about multiple murders and a missing person or two until a character shows up who believes in the simulation hypothesis. She wants to leave her reality and cross into another, adding an element of science fiction to the story. Yet the character who believes in the simulation hypothesis might be mentally disturbed, so the story might be more psychological drama than science fiction. The murder mystery begins to intertwine with other crimes, although some time passes before the nature of those crimes becomes clear. Ultimately, the story reads like a thriller that moves forward on multiple fronts. Maybe it’s best not to worry about giving My Dirty California a label.

After being absent for a decade, Marty Morrel travels from California to Pennsylvania and walks back into the lives of his brother and father. Soon after he reappears, someone kills Marty and his father. Marty’s brother Jody is too late to save them, but he briefly chases the killer, a man he can only identify by the disparate lengths of the man’s legs. As he dies, Marty says something to Jody that sounds like “De Nada.”

During their brief time together before the murders, Marty told Jody that he had been documenting his experiences in videos he posted to a website he called My Dirty California. Some of the novel reads like a detective story as Jody tries to piece together clues buried in Marty’s videos that might explain his death.

Before his brother’s body is in the ground, Jody drives to California in search of the killer. Jody learns that Marty wandered and charmed, finding opportunities for short-term work everywhere he went. Marty met Renata while playing pick-up soccer. Renata told Marty she had been invited to a place called Pandora’s House, a haunted house that seems much larger on the inside than it does on the outside. Marty was supposed to see her again the next day but Renata disappeared.

Some of the novel follows Renata, including her backstory as a migrant who came across the border unlawfully and her strange adventures after visiting Pandora’s House. Jason Mosberg plants doubt about the true nature of Renata’s experiences is his effort to straddle the line between genres.

The last key character is Pen(elope), a documentary maker whose embrace of UFOs and the simulation hypothesis makes producers wary of working with her. Pen might be a nutcase but she might be right. The simulation hypothesis suggests that the reality in which we exist is actually a computer simulation. Elon Musk is an advocate of the simulation hypothesis, which might be a reason to reject it, but the idea does have some appeal. Whenever something happens that we can’t explain, a possible explanation is that the anomaly is a glitch in the computer program.

Pen not only identifies glitches, she believes that the glitches represent breaches in the simulated reality that allow travel between different simulations. Pandora’s House is, in her view, such a breach. Pen also attributes her father’s disappearance to his travel into a different simulation.

To make a documentary about the simulation hypothesis that nobody wants to produce, Pen hits on the idea of disguising her premise in a documentary about Marty’s disappearance. She thinks he went through a breach (he mentions Pandora’s House in a couple of videos), but she needs to investigate his California experience to advance the documentary. Her investigation coincides with Jody’s.

The story would be complex even without Pen and Renata. For much of the novel, the reader wonders whether Marty was killed because he was a bad guy. One of the people who knew Marty described him as “a free spirit trapped in a cage.” The bars of his cage were constructed from a moral code, making it unlikely that Marty was evil, although he may have found himself in the company of evil people. That ambiguity is one of many plot points that hold the reader’s interest.

The story is driven by linkage. One character links to another who links to a third who links to two more. Jody leads to Pen who leads to Tiphony and her imprisoned husband Mike who leads to the criminal at the center of the story. Marty’s blog leads Jody to Shiloh; Shiloh leads Pen to Nicole. Renata’s experience in Pandora’s House leads her to Coral. All of these characters play significant roles in a carefully constructed but free-wheeling story.

My Dirty California is marketed as a literary thriller. In the post-modernist literary world, it isn’t cool to leave a reader feeling satisfied with a story. Nor is it cool to allow a reader to become lost in a story. Post-modernism strips illusions away and prevents readers from using fiction to escape reality. All of that falls by the wayside in a novel that suggests reality as we perceive it might itself be an illusion. Even without the simulation hypothesis, there is no hint of post-modernism in My Dirty California. It is literary in the sense of being well-written, not in the tendency of literary fiction to emphasize characterization to the exclusion of plot. The novel is an exercise in traditional storytelling, the kind that recognizes the primacy of plot but doesn’t short-change character development or atmosphere.

With one exception, the ending ties up loose ends in a way that will please readers who feel an attachment to the surviving characters. The exception is Mosberg’s decision to let the reader’s imagination write an ending (or a continuation of the story) for one of the principal characters. My Dirty California might be a good choice for readers who embrace old-fashioned storytelling while remaining open to new ideas.

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