The Great Man Theory by Teddy Wayne

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on July 12, 2022

Like Loner and Apartment, The Great Man Theory is about a man whose true nature is at odds with his self-image. Paul is a 46-year-old academic, an instructor (demoted from lecturer for budgetary reasons) at a private New York City college for rich kids who can’t get into NYU. Paul has never been able to make the jump to professor, largely because of his limited publication history. He teaches writing but his own obscure essays are rarely published, likely because few people would want to read them. That’s fine with Paul, because anything that appeals to the masses is too trendy or superficial for Paul’s refined sensibilities.

Paul prides himself on eschewing technology (his mobile phone isn’t a smart phone) and won’t let his daughter Mabel watch significant amounts of television or have a phone with a screen. Paul is writing a book, The Luddite Manifesto, about the negative impact of social media and digital communications on attention spans, civility, and intellect. He has a publishing contract with an academic publisher and hopes the book will put him on track to a better academic job.

To make ends meet until he can conjure the life he believes he deserves, Paul becomes a rideshare driver, a gig that requires him to purchase a cheap smartphone. After an internal struggle, he begins leaving comments on a left-leaning news site, justifying his participation in social media as research for his book. To justify his thrill at receiving likes, he begins to post long comments as an antidote to the brief comments that (in his view) dumb down discourse. He gains a certain following, all while telling himself that he is elevating the digital form by posting meaningful analysis.

Paul’s is the story of a deteriorating life. He has a talent for shooting himself in the foot. Adderall doesn’t help him write as much as he thinks it does. To save money, he moves in with his mother but soon damages his relationship with her. He then damages his relationship with his daughter, his ex-wife, his employer, his colleagues, and his publisher.

Paul isn’t necessarily an evil person (or not until the novel ends), but he’s judgmental and a hypocrite. He fails to recognize any of those traits, in part because he is convinced that his critical judgments are reasonable and warranted. He bashes his students and the entire generation to which they belong because they don’t read printed books. He accuses them of expressing themselves in soundbites instead of nuanced thought. When a student writes a clever essay (in images and soundbites) that pushes back, Paul gives her an unwarranted D out of spite. The novel suggests that critics who view social media as dumbing down the populace should listen to the perspectives of bright young people who are no more dumbed down than boomers who grew up watching television.

Paul criticizes fellow liberals as elitist without bothering to learn about the work they are quietly doing to make society better. Yet Paul is not fundamentally different than his “elitist” friends; their tastes are the same and Paul’s meager resources stem from professional failure, not from sacrifice. But Paul doesn’t listen to his friends, his students, his daughter, or anyone else. He’s too busy being self-absorbed.

Paul isn’t necessarily creepy, but he gives off a creepiness vibe. It comes through when he insists on applying lotion to his daughter’s body, when he feels sad that, at age 11, she no longer wants to sleep in his bed, when he wants to sit in his parked car with a student to help her with an essay. The student — the one who got a D — may have misconstrued Paul’s intent (their conversation is ambiguous) or may be retaliating for a bad grade when she complains about harassment, but the truth is never entirely clear.

The Great Man Theory pokes fun at academia, bigots, Trump, and liberals who are too quick to judge others for not rigidly adhering to liberal doctrine. Wayne skewers schools that tell professors to avoid assigning books that have “trigger words,” schools that presume the fragility of marginalized students and fear disturbing them — as if education should never disturb students, never challenge students to understand the context in which a writer like Richard Wright or Mark Twain might have used a trigger word.

The novel lampoons the anti-feminist attitude of a woman who produces a show for a conservative media organization, a job she only has because of feminism. The producer is irate when Paul asks her to pay for one of the expensive dinners they’ve had. She earns several multiples of Paul’s income but wonders if she can date a man who isn’t capable of taking care of her. Paul dates her because he imagines he might get booked as a guest (with a host who might be modeled after Hannity) so he can offer unexpected but well-reasoned arguments from a liberal perspective. It isn’t much a plan but Paul isn’t good at distinguishing realistic from foolish plans.

As the story nears its resolution, it becomes clear that the ending will be dark. The nature of the darkness is foreshadowed a bit, but the details are surprising.

While the story is apparently meant to be dark comedy, it is more amusing than funny. Still, my interest in Paul’s self-destruction never wavered. The Great Man Theory isn’t a particularly insightful dissection of the idiotic culture wars that divide America, but Teddy Wayne does offer some insight into how people who take themselves too seriously — people who love their own minds but don’t bother to consider how their words and actions might affect others — can become the kind of people they claim to despise.

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The City Inside by Samit Basu

Published by ‎ Tordotcom on June 7, 2022

Samit Basu creates an astonishingly detailed near future in The City Inside. It is so detailed that the story is sluggish. Far too much time passes before the outline of a plot leaks through the background data. Still, the background is impressive.

Basu imagines a future India dominated by the Flow: live streams that allow fans to follow social media stars through their carefully orchestrated daily lives. Real World meets live streaming You Tube. Fans get customized Flows depicting different versions of a Flowstar’s life to match their interests. The biggest Flow star in India at the moment is Indi, whose Flow is managed/directed by his ex-girlfriend, Joey Roy. Her job title, fittingly, is Reality Controller. She hires Indi’s writers, casts his friends, manages the different versions of reality that are served to different fans. Some fans think Indi is a serious gamer; others believe he is an artist. Most just watch him hanging out with friends and being charming.

Joey is the best Reality Controller in a competitive industry but she’s beginning to hate her job. Her employers are mid-level oligarchs. Unlike many, Joey can pay her bills, but she belatedly realized she made a huge mistake by staying in Delhi.

The background is tech heavy. People wear smart tattoos that communicate with a personal AI who is even more annoying than Alexis. Joey’s personal AI is Narad, a combination of work assistant and life coach that defines itself as a happiness sherpa, constantly noting when Joey feels stressed and offering mantras or an appointment with a therapist. Fans live their lives vicariously through Flows, as do many of today’s consumers of celebrity news and viewers of reality television.

In the political background are riots, dysfunctional government that betrayed India’s founding principles, and natural disasters enabled by global warming. Water mercenaries hijack water trucks. Discriminatory citizenship laws have cemented division. “India is about staying the same but acting like you’re going to change soon,” a character explains. We learn little about India’s Years Not to Be Discussed because they aren’t discussed, but mass graves are discovered in their aftermath. Some sort of purge occurred during the Years that convinced people to remove their opinions from social media. Joey’s father lost his job over a Facebook rant while her mother failed to recognize that “it was a loyalty-based economy now.” She “hadn’t been able to adjust when an oligarch bought her ad agency.” Joey urges her parents to be cautious because people are still disappearing after saying the wrong things. Technology (even a toothbrush) is listening to every word; privacy no longer exists, a road paved by social media. Joey spends much of her time figuring out how to protect her parents and minor characters, although why they need protection is not always clear.

Several characters contribute their personal melodramas to the story. Tara is recruited to be Indi’s new love interest but she wants to be a Flowstar, not a sidekick. Tara views herself as an intellectual but doesn’t mind her gig as Indi’s new girlfriend because he’s good in bed. She has no reason to be concerned when hidden cameras in his bedroom catch him shagging another woman unless the scenes end up on the Flow and make her look bad. The cameras don’t bother Indi much (any publicity is good publicity, as Paris Hilton proved), even when the video suggests sexual violence (he’s certain his fans will forgive him). When new writers decide that Indi needs a girlfriend who is more Hollywood than Bollywood (they’re trying to make Indi an international star despite the view that in the West, he’ll be just another immigrant), Tara is offered the role of the new girlfriend’s best friend. Tara assumes the audience will adjust. One point of the story seems to be that social media followers are easily manipulated.

Rudra is in Joey’s orbit despite (or because of) his estrangement from his wealthy family. He will be confronted with a difficult choice when he is invited back into the fold. As is true of Joey, his choice is whether to sell out or fight the power.

The story is heavy with exposition and lectures. Near the story’s end comes Joey’s lengthy plea for more diversity and inclusion in this imagined world. Diversity and inclusion are good in any world, but this is one of many bits of extended dialog that substitute for a plot. To the extent that the story is more than its background, it follows Joey through a slice of her dissatisfied life until she finally decides that she could be something more subversive than a Reality Controller for meaningless Flowstars. It’s a long walk to that destination. I’m recommending The City Inside for its elaborately constructed near-future Delhi rather than the meager story that unfolds inside the city.

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The Earthspinner by Anuradha Roy

First published in the UK in 2021; published by HarperVia on July 5, 2022

The Earthspinner is in part a story of forbidden love. More fundamentally, it is a story of creative obsession and prejudice against art that crosses implied boundaries. Elango is a potter, carrying on the tradition of his caste. To make ends meet, he also drives an autorickshaw. His favorite passenger is Zohra, a girl who walks with a limp. Elango falls in love with Zohra but “they belong to tribes that hated each other and he knew they could never be together.” Elango “could not utter what she was, a Muslim. The space between the two was a charnel house of burnt and bloodied human flesh, a giant crack through the earth that was like an open mouth waiting to swallow him.”

Elango dreams of an earthen horse and comes to believe that if he shapes the horse from clay, Zohra will be his. The novel follows Elango as he devotes his free time to creating the horse of his dreams. Zohra’s grandfather, a blind calligrapher, carves into the horse a beautiful poem about riding the freedom of imagination. But Anuradha Roy wants the reader to understand that freedom in India only lives in the imagination. Elango is not free to marry Zohra. Nor is he free to express himself with a horse that does not suit the arbiters of his religion.

Elango’s grandfather once made horses for temples. People who see the horse believe a temple is where it belongs. They do not realize that the poem decorating the horse is written in Urdu, “the language of mullahs,” a desecration of a temple horse — at least in the view of Hindu temple priests.

Elango’s story is narrated by Sara, whose mother is a journalist. As a young girl, Sara learned the craft of pottery from Elango — to the chagrin of neighbors who thought she had no business learning such things.

The story begins and ends in the present. Five years have passed since Elango’s story ended. Everything has changed; the villagers have made new lives; the village has melted into the earth, taking with it the memories of the horrific event that is the novel’s defining moment. Sara remembers her father telling her that “change was the work of the earth spinning, spinning as it always had.”

Sara is studying English literature in England and making pots to relieve her stress. She notes the difference between rural India, where neighbors are nosy, and England, where “curiosity is bad manners.” One of Sara’s friends is experiencing, like Elango, a form of love that is forbidden by her culture.

The collegiate Sara catches up with Elango and becomes an audience to whom he can unburden himself, “a girl who shared his language as well as momentous bits of his past.” She decides to tell his story. Sara emphasizes how he has changed, how life has taken him on an unexpected path. She also assesses how she has changed, solidifying change as one of the novel’s themes, embodied in Sara’s understanding that the cosmos is “hell-bent on doing things we can neither anticipate nor prevent.”

A dog is central to the story, adding further evidence to my conviction that every work of fiction is improved by the addition of a dog. The dog is lost when its owners suffer a carjacking. Elango adopts the dog and it becomes beloved by the village. The dog creates tension for a character who knows that its former owners are searching for him, but the character is convinced that the dog is happy and should not be uprooted again. Uprooting and rebirth are among the novel’s themes. Sara explains that where she comes from, “we have always known that ordinary days can explode without warning, leaving us broken, collecting the scattered pieces of our lives, no clear idea how to start again.”

Religious fanaticism is the story’s darkest theme. Yet Roy makes clear that religion is not necessarily to blame for the fanatics that turn religion into a vehicle for hate. Sara’s father helps her realize that the war between Hindu and Muslim is not about religion at all, but it more like the blood feud that underlies Romeo and Juliet. The story’s most hopeful theme is the possibility of repair and restoration, of fixing what’s broken or learning that we don’t need the broken thing after all.

The Earthspinner might be viewed as an allegory of the teacher and student. It might be viewed as a love story or the story of a young woman’s unrequited (and perhaps unrecognized) love. It might be viewed as an indictment of prejudice in India and the larger world. It might be viewed as a commentary on the challenges and costs of artistic creation. It might be viewed as a reflection on tests of character, how we pass or fail them or fail to recognize them. The Earthspinner is a deceptively simple novel that works on many levels, giving the reader a trove of possibilities to unpack. Like all of Roy’s work, The Earthspinner is worthy of a careful unpacking.

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After the Lights Go Out by John Vercher

Published by Soho Press on June 7, 2022

Xavier’s father is suffering from dementia. Xavier and his mother are black. Xavier never suspected his white father of racism, but he’s starting to understand that his father made racist comments to his mother while watching rioting after the Rodney King verdict. As a child who worshipped his father, Xavier did not understand that his father’s emerging racism prompted his mother’s decision to leave.

Xavier is a professional cage fighter. He’s long been on the verge of moving up the ranks and making real money, but never quite reached that level. Coming off a one-year suspension for steroids, it looks like he never will. He’s taken so many blows to the head that he’s suffering from headaches, blackouts, memory lapses, and moments of uncontrollable rage. He fears he will become his father, out of touch with reality. When a nurse asks Xavier if he sees his future in his father, Xavier replies “It’s like looking in a mirror with the lights off.”

Xavier works for his cousin, a manager and fight trainer who goes by Shot. Shot lost his eye and his fighting career to a police beating. Xavier is in the doghouse with Shot after losing control and nearly beating the life out of one of Shot’s fighters while sparring. Shot is taking money from the mob and Xavier’s rage has made Shot’s life difficult.

While Xavier is an MMA fighter, the plot is standard for a boxing novel. The fighter is instructed to take a dive. The mob will take revenge if he doesn’t. Will he or won’t he? The novel departs from the formula by focusing on Xavier’s brain damage. Whether Xavier will even remember that he’s supposed to take a dive is the question that gives the novel its tension.

The main plot is secondary to the subplots that construct Xavier’s character. Xavier must reinterpret his relationship with his father now that he understands his father’s racism. Xavier is conflicted about whether to keep his father in his house or in an assisted-living facility. Xavier has unresolved issues with his mother that the story gives him a chance to resolve. Xavier’s relationship with a dog is heartbreaking, as is the betrayal of a brain that has taken too many knocks. Xavier is a gentle beast at heart, but his damaged brain is increasingly losing its violence barriers, impairing his ability to recognize the person he is becoming.

John Vercher’s prose moves with the swiftness and certainty of a skilled fighter. He gives the story a feeling of authenticity by detailing Xavier’s struggle to sweat out 10 pounds before his big fight. The only choice Vercher made that doesn’t work is an internal voice, words spoken in a bold font, perhaps the devil’s voice, that speaks to Xavier from time to time, representing the dark side of human nature. The voice that tells Xavier not to care about anyone but himself. Maybe blows to the head make fighters hear voices, but the contrivance is an unnecessary distraction.

Still, All the Lights Go Out tells a powerful story. Like Xavier, it pulls no punches. The plot contains no surprises, the ending seems inevitable, but the story ends as it should. The juxtaposition of a character in the grip of dementia and a son who is becoming his father gives the story more depth than a typical novel of its kind.

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Planes by Peter C. Baker

Published by Knopf on May 31, 2022

Planes begins by inserting the reader in the head of an Italian woman who changed her name from Maria to Amira when she converted to Islam after marrying Ayoub. Amira did not convert because she has any strong religious belief but because she thought supporting Ayoub’s religion would give him stability and strengthen their marriage.

In the opening pages, we learn that Amira is living alone. She is saying at least some of her daily prayers to feel closer to her husband. Ayoub has been detained without charges for two years, presumably on suspicion of terrorism. His lawyer believes he’s being held in a prison in Morocco, but his heavily censored and irregularly delivered letters reveal little about his life.

The first section of the novel reveals Amira’s fear that everyone in her neighborhood is judging her for being married to a terrorist. She is also afraid to be seen with a friend from her childhood, the boy who took her virginity and who has resurfaced in Rome. Amira is scraping by, using all her earnings to pay rent to maintain their apartment in the hope that Ayoub will return, allowing them to resume their life together in a familiar environment.

The novel then begins a journey through the lives of connected characters — the kind of characters who dominate mainstream American fiction. Melanie is liberal who serves on a school board in Springwater, North Carolina. The long-term best friends of Melanie and her husband Art bonded years ago over their commitment to social activism, but now their friendship seems like a habit. Melanie is tasked with making a compromise with Bradley Welk, a Republican member of the school board, so naturally they end up negotiating in bed. The affair becomes complicated. That’s the nature of affairs.

When the story circles back to Amira, we get Ayoub’s backstory. He is working in a pizza shop when Amira first meets him. She is bored and looking for a “symbol of difference. A new thing. A discovery. Foreign.” The story follows their marriage and the developments that strain it, beginning with all the people who tell her it is wrong to marry a Pakistani or any Muslim. Their story eventually returns to the present.

How are the stories linked? The plane that transported Ayoub from Italy to the secret prison in Morocco took off from Springwater, using a local air charter service that is a CIA front. Local residents were in the dark about the charter service, except perhaps for Welk, who is listed as one of its owners. It’s bad enough to have an affair but having an affair with someone who enables torture is particularly rough for a liberal, compounding Melanie’s anxiety about her selfish choice.

The best scenes in the novel involve Ayoub’s attachment to a stray cat — a cat that, like Ayoub, survives deep wounds and needs to be healed, a cat that brings back memories of a cat who served as a symbol of love in a place of darkness — and Amira’s resentment that Ayoub does not display the same attachment to her.

Planes benefits from Peter Baker’s fluid prose and careful exploration of how a false accusation of terrorism devastates lives. The Springfield characters are also built with solid characterization, but their story is familiar and less interesting. My knock on the novel is Baker’s complete failure to resolve any of its storylines. That’s a trend in modern novels, a reflection of the reality that each moment in life is a shapshot in time and who knows what might happen next? The high school teachers who told us that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end turned out to be wrong, at least to modern novelists who see no need to work out endings. Still, it’s frustrating not to have at least a partial resolution of at least one storyline. Characterization and fluid prose earn Planes a recommendation, but the novel isn’t for readers want to know what happens next.

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