Alan DeNiro's Total Oblivion, More or Less

One of the fiction writer's principal aims, regardless of genre, tends-- at least for writers who want to do more than distract and amuse their readers-- to be about depicting and representing the world in which the writer lives. Representing the world one lives in is less straightforward than advocates of the style of "realism" (which is less concerned with verisimilitude than with supplying the reader with familiar and comfortable conventions that produce the illusion of "transparency") would have one believe-- and that's without taking into account that "the world" differs considerably from person to person.

To me, it makes eminent sense that in trying to find a way to write about our world-- a world which is shifting constantly around us, altering radically, often without our even noticing it, and, for middle class white people in the United States, a world in which the institutions that produce and secure white middle class values are, under the onslaught of neoliberal capitalism, inexorably disintegrating and vanishing-- a writer would choose to represent the current and near-future state of US life and culture in the way in which Alan DeNiro does in Total Oblivion, More or Less, his debut novel, released last month by Ballantine. (I almost wrote Bantam instead of Ballantine, because the imprint is Spectra.) I would go so far as to argue that DeNiro offers us one of the closest representations to the current state of life in "Middle Amerca" than any I've recently read.

In my discussion of the novel that follows, I will talk about the entire book, without worrying about spoilers. This is not the sort of book that draws the reader on by way of suspense and desire to know what happen next. Rather, it is an and-then-this-happened, and-then-that-happened, and-then-this-other-thing-happened kind of story, from beginning to end. The mysteries of the narrative lie in other areas entirely, which I will only begin to unveil and hint at.

So here's the novel's basic story: sixteen year old Macy Palmer is displaced, with her family, from their "normal" middle class existence in Minnesota, becoming economic and war refugees. Her mother is the chief casualty: there is no place for the traditional stay-at-home mom in the world the Palmers now find themselves in; her brother becomes a soldier or terrorist (depending on how one interprets his loyalties), her father-- previously a professor of astronomy-- becomes an astrologer, her sister--previously a college student-- becomes a slave, and the fetus in her mother's plague bubo-- her brother, apparently-- becomes a dog. Macy spends a large part of the trip traveling on assorted dubious craft down the Mississippi.

Macy herself is a 21st-century Candide: self-confident, impatient with everyone around her, largely trusting of people she doesn't get a nasty vibe off of, not much understanding the world she lives in, lacking in self-direction, unthinkingly bestowing her affection on those who have bestowed it on her. Through the book she moves from one bad situation to another, for the most part unscathed. The turning point in her story comes when her family is broken apart and her movement and action takes on direction, that of attempting to find and rescue her siblings from the dire fates that never threaten her. As she writes of herself:

I was desperate, beside myself as to how fucked up my family situation was. One brother a dog, the other in prison, my sister an indentured servant. And I hated being sorry for myself, because their problems were a hell of a lot worse than mine. The worst problem I had was not understanding myself one lick, and I could at least hobble along with that. It wouldn't' kill me. (262)

The basic structure of the novel corresponds perfectly to the constraints of honest representation of US middle-class reality in the first decades of the 21st century. The narrative voice is that of a teenager (i.e., Macy), occasionally supplemented by interpolated snippets that might not have been written by Macy. (The reader seems to have been meant to infer that someone other than Macy put her narrative together with the snippets to make a book. Or else an older Macy, the one who wrote the epilogue, did this.) Macy's narrative "I" presents the illusion of ego stability as it continually shifts to reconstruct itself to fit the different, almost episodic narratives it strings together into the kind of shaggy-dog road-trip narrative arcs people typically make of their lives. But while her ever-shifting narrative logic remains familiar and reassuring despite its passages through harrowing experiences, the world around her constantly alters, making her the center-- or even the eye-- of a chaotic hurricane. Surely the most familiar narrative voice found in fiction in the first decade of the 21st century is that of someone whose "worst problem I had was not understanding myself one lick," someone who knows the problems of most people around her are "a hell of a lot worse than mine." The familiar stories, the narratives that "work" because they are intelligible and accessible, are precisely those written about people who fit the description Macy gives of herself in the passage above.

But DeNiro then takes that familiarity and stability and messes with it. The reader may feel comfortable with the illusion of Macy's stability, but in the meantime, the social, economic, political, technological, and ecological landscape around her is radically shifting and alien-- just as our real world actually is. I've seen a few reviews of this novel, and so I know that at least some readers have constructed a narrative in which an "ordinary, middle-class family are set down" in a "post-apocalyptic" setting, or in which ordinary reality is invaded by 16th-century armies. But for me, neither of these readings work (any more than the catch-call "surrealistic" label works). What I find obvious is that DeNiro has found a way to depict the reality we live in that gets at that very instability in the way in which the changes constantly underway are immediately recuperated into the norms of middle-class American life and rendered ordinary and virtually invisible to those who are sufficiently privileged. If other readers don't recognize our world in this book, I suspect it's because they've got great shielding.

Grace and Carson Palmer and their children see their world and reality as "normal" until they slip out of their comfortable, middle-class lifestyle. The book offers us examples of people who have retained that lifestyle and sense of normality that the Palmers lose-- people who may be vaguely aware of the chaos people less privileged than themselves live in. Within the novel, whether the world looks chaotic and overwhelming depends entirely on whether one's socioeconomic status is sufficiently resilient and privileged to allow one to live a "normal" life. And since the various members of the Palmer family have different experiences of "normality," they almost never share a single collective vision of their world.

But we all know, don't we, that in our world (not the book's), such chaos and displacement in reality can befall any middle-class family through, say, catastrophic illness. We all know that it happens all the time. (Don't we?) And we know that all over the world (and in the US as well), being a refuge and immigrant (for a whole variety of reasons) has thrust millions of people into that same situation of chaos and displacement and loss of "normality." People who live "normal" lives need to believe it won't happen to them-- that someone in their family won't fall sick and/or lose their jobs, that they won't as a result lose their homes, that they'll end up in a camp with other homeless people (or in a shelter or living in alleyways), that they won't end up drifiting along without the rudder that normality provides. And so it is in Total Oblivion, the "'values" of middle class Minnesota life belong to those who can afford the middle class lifestyle.

Thus for Crystal, also from Minneosta, the wife of an ad executive who owns slaves and lives in Neuva Roma, Minnesota "is our homeland, and we should be proud of it, the values it stood for." But for Macy, who has, with her family, "fallen through the cracks," "Minnesota was broken and ravaged."(233) Concomitantly, the "values" that gave her mother a place in the world are vanished, taking her mother with her.

The narrative offers numerous clues, scattered throughout the book, to help the reader see that this is a head-on depiction of post-911 neoliberal capitalist society. We all know that science has fallen under serious attack in the US on ideological grounds. More to the point, though, science that doesn't pay for itself is of no value to our neoliberal capitalist system (which may be something many people don't like to think about). Carson, Macy's father, goes from being an astronomy professor to an astrologer: the fact is, neoliberal capitalism, which takes no interest in protecting the practice (or teaching of) pure science, has no need for astronomy professors. Pure science, like literature or philosophy, and like the basic liberal arts education, is considered a luxury. And so it is not beyond the realm of possibility that once classics and philosophy and literature departments are abolished, astronomy departments that aren't underwritten by NASA or defense contractors will soon follow. For neoliberal capitalism, universities are trade schools and the laboratories for profit-oriented science. That's why the federal and most state governments aren't interested in preserving them through hard economic times.

The Empire, which has its capital in Nueva Roma, strikes me as a version of the Bush regime made permanent and allowed to achieve its dearest desires. Here's a bit on the Empire's attitude toward science:

One of the prized conquests from the Empire's counterinsurgency was the laboratory of an immunology lab [sic] from the Centers for Disease Control, and five immunologists. The lab was a small one, in relative terms, and some of its sanitary nature was compromised by its transport and final internment. The Emperor didn't want anyone to see the lab, or take credit for its potential future accomplishments. Science was dead-- head had declared this. On the other hand, science, being a lost art, needed to be recovered to a point, and then reconfigured into something else more useful and unnameable. (283)

Isn't this brilliant? It captures perfectly the attitude of neoliberal Christian fundamentalists who hate science for being Darwinian, hate science for revealing global warming in all its gory details, hate science for discovering that genes for race don't exist and that smoking tobacco can cause cancer and heart disease, and yet need science for keeping big business going and producing ever bigger and more powerful weapons of mass destruction.

Another brilliant touch is the narrative's Tower of Justice in Nueva Roma. First, you need to understand that in Nueva Roma, "the street" (literally located at street level) is irrelevant: it's inhabited by the underclass and ruled and fought over by gangs of charioteers distinguishable by their colors (teal and turquoise being the most prominent) who murder and maim one another and anyone who gets in their way. (These gangs are apparently sponsored by corporations.) People who aren't in the underclass get around via the skyways linking the skyscrapers in which people and businesses reside. One of these skyscrapers is the Tower of Justice. Macy accesses the twenty-fifth floor of the Tower of Justice via skyway, and then Wye, the secret police spy, leads her

down a side corridor that got darker... I noticed faint writing carved on all of the walls. It was an alphabet I didn't recognize, wavy in places, blocky in others. I asked Wye about it.

All the laws and codes of the Empire, he said, are written on these walls. The oldest regulations are on the lower floors, and they get newer the farther up you go. That's why they keep adding floors to the Tower, because they keep writing and reinterpreting laws. The script here-- he ran his fingers along the walls-- is a few hundred years old. It's readable, but barely. Only a few scholars can read the script on the lowest floors.(247)

An apt allusion, I thought as I read it, to the Bush Regime's approach to law and "justice." Nueva Roma, by the way, is located just south of the Mississippi delta. As I read, I wondered what (if any) relation it bore to New Orleans. DeNiro chooses to leave that open to speculation. It is striking, though, that the Empire has no need of New Orleans and doesn't recognize it (which fits the Bush Administration's take on Katrina, certainly.)

And then of course there's the narrative's slave trade, which the narrative tells us was restarted by the oil companies when they could no longer sell oil, and which the narrative shows us has been taken up by backwater penny-ante entrepreneurs looking to make a buck. What DeNiro shows of it is a bit more benign than the current existing versions, but again, it's something that can happen to anyone who has "fallen through the cracks" of middle class existence. Its function for DeNiro's world is to allow the wealthy to retain the comforts that technology previously afforded them (before technology and oil failed): slave-power basically makes up for the loss of technology.

Macy's sister Sophia, naturally buying into the neoliberal ideology she has spent her entire (albeit young) life steeped in, believing she is striking out on her own and proving her autonomy, signs herself into slavery. She is strong, she is smart, she is willing to work hard: as far as she is concerned anything at all that she chooses to do is an act of agency, especially if it means doing so without anyone to help her. Let's hear it for personal autonomy! The narrator--Macy-- says when her sister leaves (not revealing whether this is hindsight or her thought of the moment:

I tried to be happy for my sister, I really did, but I didn't think personal choice and personal freedom--whatever that was-- worked well as a survival tactic anymore. (123)

And so Sophia's ecstatic, confident exercise of personal choice and personal freedom is to hand herself over to slavers. She will do anything for her career, she assures them, and a moment later finds herself owing "5000 golden horns" and has no career in sight. (Surely there's a certain uncomfortable resonance here with the sad all too common occurrence of young people, anxious for a professional career, succumbing to a terrible burden of debt they'll be bound to for decades to come.)

Though he depicts some of the ugliest parts of our world, DeNiro's Candide retains her optimism: because in spite of it all, in the world as he depicts it, people are basically decent, there are beautiful things in the world, and love is as real and as strong as the coldness and indifference of those who profit from and even delight in the misery of others.

If I ever had any doubts that DeNiro wasn't depicting current and near-future US middleclass culture, the third paragraph to the end, from which the title is taken, nails the connection between the narrative voice with its illusion of stability and the flux and strangeness of the landscape it negotiates and leaves the reader with a lot to think about. But that's to be expected. Total Oblivion, More or Less, is for people who like to think.

Ana Clavel's Shipwrecked Body

Carrie Devall has sent AAtA a review of a speculative gender-bender by Mexican writer Ana Clavel. Sounds like something many Aqueductistas will want to read.

Shipwrecked Body (Cuerpo náufrago), by Ana Clavel, translated by Jay Miskowiec, translation edited by Juan Arciniega, Aliform Publishing, Minneapolis and Oaxaca, 2008.

Review by Carrie Devall, April 2009

When I went to the library the other day, the New Books shelf happened to be filled with Mexican and Brazilian novels about ghosts and shape shifters, novels one or two steps over from speculative fiction - basically magical realism in contemporary urban settings. Having read reviews in Rain Taxi, I took out two novels by Ana Clavel, a writer born in Mexico City in 1961 and one of "Mexico's new literary pack" according to the book-cover blurbs. Her earlier novel Desire and Its Shadow (Los deseos y su sombra) and Shipwrecked Body were both translated and published by the same people. The earlier one is more dense, and I’m not finding it as interesting, so I haven’t finished it; but Shipwrecked Body is a wickedly funny, insightful, fast-moving riff on gender, identity, and sexuality that might appeal to readers of feminist speculative fiction.

Antonia, a young heterosexual woman in Mexico City, wakes up one morning to find that she has turned into a man. She quickly realizes that women react to her differently, and with the help of a gay friend, Francisco, and some other men that he recruits, she explores the world of men and homosociality that was previously inaccessible to her. She gets involved with several women and a man and makes discoveries about sex, love, and identity.

The prose, as translated into English, is lush but not dense, and full of witty turns of phrase, wordplay, questioning of various psychological theories, and literary and mythological allusions. I found the analysis of gender and sexuality to be fresh, with a good balance of light, playful observations and deeper, more troubling insights about how they play out in everyday life on the personal level. Nothing is hugely problematized and dissected, but I didn't think the analysis was simplistic either; maybe I didn't care because I found the protagonist really likeable and her adventures entertaining.

The one aspect of the book that readers are either going to love or hate is the photos of urinals on the cover and throughout the book. Antonia and a male photographer become obsessed with the design of urinals, with how they are shaped like a voluptuous woman’s hips or like wombs. I thought this ongoing discussion was intriguing and amusing, but it may not be everybody’s cup of tea. However, if you’re looking for something that reads like speculative fiction (it reminded me a lot of Geoff Ryman’s Lust in terms of style and content) from a contemporary non-U.S. writer, I’d recommend giving this book a try.

Style! Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise

A couple of weeks back I posted a quotation from Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise. This is an interesting book, originally published in 1938, that's recently been reissued by the University of Chicago Press. Chip Delany urged me to read it, and so I did. The book addresses the situation of "writers of promise"-- that is to say, it's a book about writing for writers who are neither beginners nor satisfied merely to make a living from their work (even when it's a very good living). What does it take, Connolly wonders in the first chapter, to write a book "that will hold good for ten years afterwards"?

Part 1, "Predicament," discusses the hazards that entangle every aspect of writing, placing a special emphasis on style and the continual shifts in literary fashion that sweep respected and even popular works into the dustbin of obscurity. His elucidation of style is fascinating and makes great sense to me (perhaps at least partly because it resonates powerfully with my recent reading in ms of the revised edition of Delany's Jewel-Hinged Jaw, which Wesleyan will be publishing next spring.) Some of it is a bit dated, and obviously its scope is restricted to early twentieth-century English literature, but there's much here to interest writers and critics today.

Part 2, "The Charlock's Shade," analyzes "the conditions which govern the high rate of mortality among contemporary writers"-- specifically politics, daydreams, conversation, drink and other narcotics, the "clarion call of journalism" (which includes writing reviews), worldly success, sex with its obsessions, and the ties of duty and domesticity. And he begins by citing Samuel Butler: "What ruins young writers is over-production. The need for money is what causes overproduction." His analysis, of course, is (unconsciously) gendered. Though women writers face the same obstacles men writers face, their resources and internal obstacles tend to be different from those of men writers, and these create differences it doesn't occur to Connolly to attend to.

Part 3, which is fully half of the book, "A Georgian Boyhood," is autobiography that culminates with an intense, almost novelistic description and analysis of his years at Eton. (His schoolmate George Orwell appears as a figure that haunts its margins.) It is only after finishing Part 3 and returning to the first two parts of the book that one realizes that an unstated reason for Connolly's writing the book must have been his need to explain to himself the dissipation of his own "promise" as a writer (ironically, of course, since the book was reprinted in 1948 and then again another 60 years later).

Of course Delany forcefully demonstrated in the Jewel-Hinged Jaw that "Style," as Connolly says, "is manifest in language." Connolly continues:

The vocabulary of a writer is his currency but it is a paper currency and its value depends on the reserves of mind and heart which back it. The perfect use of language is that in which every word carries the meaning that it is intended to, no less and no more." (10-11)

And so,

One might say that the style of a writer is conditioned by his conception of the reader, and that it varies according to whether he is writing for himself, or for his friends, his teachers or his God, for an educated upper class, a waiting-to-be-educated lower class or a hostile jury. This trait is less noticeable in writers who live in a settled age as they soon establish a relationship with a reader whom they can depend on and he, usually a man of the same age, tastes, education, and income, remains beside them all their life. Style then is the relation between what a writer wants to say; his subject--and himself-- or the powers which he has: between the form of his subject and the content of his parts. (10)

My oh my. So many he's and his'es, typing them out wearies my spirit. And yet, I do appreciate its clarity.

Connolly classifies all styles as being either "Mandarin" or "Vernacular," and then makes subdivisions within these two classifications as he examines the advantages, limitations, and pitfalls of various styles. I particularly liked this passage:

The quality of mind of a writer may be improved the more he feels or thinks or, without effort, the more he reads; and as he grows surer of this quality, so he is the better able to make experiments in technique or towards a simplification of it even to its apparent abandonment and the expression of strong emotion or deep thought in ordinary language. The great speeches in Lear and Samson Agonistes do not seem revolutionary to us because we do not recognize them as superb and daring manipulations of the obvious. Any poet of talent could write: "The multitudinous seas incarnadine" or "Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed," but only a master could get away with "I pray you undo this button," or "Lear's quintuple "Never."

Style is a relation between form and content. Where the content is less than the form, where the author pretends to emotion which he does not feel, the language will seem flamboyant. The more ignorant a writer feels, the more artificial becomes his style. A writer who thinks himself cleverer than his readers writes simply (often too simply), while one who fears they may be cleverer than he will make use of mystification: an author arrives at a good style when his language performs what is required of it without shyness.

I recommend this book to writers with ambition, and anyone interested in the writing life.

Unthinkable Thoughts

I'm just emerged from that strange, muffled space known as a migraine. Books, catalogs, and newsletters are flowing in here from Aqueduct's printers, about more of which soon, when we've got our ducks better organized. But in the meantime, a note about a book Jeff VanderMeer recently recommended, Charles Baxter's The Art of Subtext, published by the always excellent Graywolf Press of St. Paul, Minnesota. I enjoyed reading this book, though I think his previous book of criticism, Burning Down the House, gave me more to think about. It's prose style is pleasing-- seemingly effortless, and wonderfully lucid. The categorization "writing" provided on the back by the publisher for the use of booksellers, though, is inapt. It is actually a book about reading. This sort of analysis of reading can, I believe, help writers indirectly, for I am utterly convinced that perceptive, skillful reading is of immeasurable help to writers in learning their craft (which ambitious writers never stop doing). But this is really a book for readers interested in heightening their consciousness of what makes fiction effective. It should, really, be classified as "literary criticism."


To give you a taste, I'll quote one of my favorite passages:

Although we live in a post-Freudian, post-humanist, postmodern, post-everything age, there are still plenty of unthinkable thoughts around, and in the Chekhov tradition they serve as the hard core of narratives. An unthinkable thought is not one that hasn't occurred to somebody, nor is it a thought that someone considers to be wrong. An unthinkable thought threatens a person's entire existence and is therefore subversive and consequently can be thought of and has been thought of, but has been pushed out of the mind's currency and subsumed into its margins where it festers. Dark nights of the soul are lit by inconceivable ideas. Any story may draw its source of power from an unthinkable thought.

This passage is by way of discussing the powerful subtext (of that unthinkable thought) driving a scene in a story by J.F. Powers. All in all, an enjoyable read. I heartily add my recommendation to Jeff's.

Book Recommendation: Carol Emswhiller, The Secret City

I’ve loved Carol Emshwiller’s fiction since I first encountered “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison” in the late 1970s in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology[1], and she’s never disappointed me. Emshwiller plays and gambols with sf conventions as no author I can think of—not to mock them, but as conceits for helping us to think about and understand our world. This combination of playfulness with dead seriousness suffuses her narrative imagination, extending even to her narrative voice, which in The Secret City (Tachyon Publications, 2007), her latest novel, is slyly ironic without being cynical.

The Secret City features extraterrestrial aliens from a planet called Betasha who live in the western United States as homeless, undocumented migrants (literally “illegal aliens”) who when they are discovered are classified as surviving “Neanderthals” rather than recognized as extraterrestrials. Clute and Nicholls’ Encyclopedia of Science Fiction classifies the “first contact” trope as falling within the scope of its entry titled “Communication.” “First contact” may entail state diplomacy, or a consciousness encounter between two species meeting for the first time, or a scientific study by one species of another. The Secret City offers none of these.

Although the Betashans apparently have strong reasons for visiting Earth, they also want to conceal the existence of their planet from humans, and so they callously kill humans whenever they believe they’re at risk of discovery. Interestingly, though, because they are successful in preventing their discovery (which is to say, they are not in a true “first contact” situation with humans), individual Betashans who are in effect second-generation immigrants lack identity and therefore are as socially invisible as most homeless persons in our society must be. Emshwiller’s novel gently, ironically, and yet soberly explores the social marginality and lack of identity that follows on homelessness. In doing so, she refuses the delights of the sense of wonder that usually characterizes encounters between alien species in sf novels even as she offers us the dry, ironic insight of fresh perspective. The Betashans may be extraterrestrials, but the difficulties of communication in this novel result from homelessness and social displacement, not neurological disparity.

The novel’s protagonists, Lorpas and Allush, are the children of extraterrestrial tourists inadvertently stranded on Earth. By the novel’s opening, most of the original visitors have died, waiting for rescue. A servant remains, as well as the now adult (and even aging) children of the “tourists.” While they were waiting for rescue, the tourists’ efforts to indoctrinate their children against human society and culture effectively made it impossible for the second generation to assimilate. None of them owns property or has the education and skills to take any but the most menial jobs. Lorpas, who is the most assimilated of them, sleeps outdoors and takes the occasional odd job---and, lacking a permanent address, is frequently busted by the police for vagrancy. Allush, by contrast, grew up in the “secret city” in the mountains, where Betashans hid themselves as they waited together for rescue.

The “Secret City,” though secret, is not a city. Bored and determined to impress their children with the beauties of “home,” the tourists constructed false doors and arches leading nowhere, carved with Betashan symbols. It is a terrible life, and as the secret city’s population ages and the original generation dies off, the grown children are left with a peculiar notion of “home,” a set of rules they blindly obey, a harsh, tenuous day-to-day existence, and a longing to escape “Down.”

In the first chapter, which I’d read previously as a standalone short story, Lorpas is busted by the police for sleeping in an old lady’s yard; when he escapes, he returns to the old lady’s house (in search of his few possessions, which he concealed under a bush) and for a while lives with and takes care of her. I read the standalone story as ambiguous until the ending resolves it, and constantly wondered: is Lorpas an alien, or is he (or his parents) delusional? (The copy on the book’s back cover makes the answer obvious to the reader.) The signs of his non-humanness are his extraordinary strength—“Here on this world with less gravity, we’re stronger”—and his belief that he possesses the power of “the Freeze.” We get a glimpse of his strength on the first page. Because the police grab him while he was sleeping, before he knows what he’s doing, he’s inflicted physical damage on the officers (because he’s exceptionally strong). He’s locked up with the likelihood of being charged not just with vagrancy, but with assaulting a police officer. When he’s planning his escape from custody, he says

The three Fs: Flight, Fight, or Freeze. I hold one of the mice in my stare. He doesn’t move. I count to twenty, then I let him go. Or maybe he held me and let me go. Or maybe we just stared at each other, one creature to another, and then decided that was enough.(12)

And then he notes, “I won’t need to test the freeze. My strength is why I’ve never needed to try it.” In the standalone story, of course, this passage usefully preserves the ambiguity that is absent in the novel. Later, in an incident parallel to the arrest that opens the novel, he resists being “rescued” when Betashans with weapons confront him. His opponents may be Betashans and therefore stronger, but they “look flabby and pale and ridiculous.” Lorpas, it soon emerges, has been shaped by his social marginality into as autonomous and independent a person as it’s possible for an individual to be.

Regardless of his social marginality and his mother’s efforts to prevent his assimilation into human society, however, Lorpas is well enough socialized into human society to enjoy friendly relations with his jailers (despite his assault on their colleagues). He also manages to make a place for himself in the old lady’s household, and is useful to her even as he makes use of her resources. Later, he wins the trust of a temporary employer even in the face of the trouble Lorpas’s presence brings into his and his daughter’s life. Interestingly, although the individuals Lorpas comes to care most for—Allush and the old servant, Mollish—are Betashans who’ve been living in the secret city for years (whom he loves as a potential mate and a sort of foster mother respectively), he is on the whole more comfortable with humans than with Betashans who have not lived among humans. And when it comes right down to it, he instinctively resists being returned to Betasha. If Earth is not “home,” neither is Betasha.

Perhaps one of the most effective—and also charming—aspects of this novel is the shift in thinking that Emswhiller’s choice of viewpoint characters not only permits but demands of the reader. At the outset Lorpas appears to be a homeless man who believes he’s an extraterrestrial being rousted by the police. I found the voice of his first-person narrative so genial and decent that I was immediately invested in his escape from custody; and by the time he takes up uninvited residence with Ruth, a fragile old lady, my sympathies were full engaged (which would ordinarily not have been the case given similar circumstances and a less engaging character). And at the end of the chapter, when his presence in the old lady’s house ends badly for her, I didn’t hold him at all responsible. Rather, I saw him as allied with humans against Betashans he can’t understand because “they haven’t bothered to learn our language.” Our language, he says: though up until now Lorpas’s “we” has referred to Betashans, and “home” has referred to Betasha.

But on the run from both humans (the police) and “rescuing” Betashans (who behave like police or soldiers), Lorpas stumbles on the Secret City and bonds with another “we”: Allush and Mollish. The Secret City, though, is not a hospitable home, not least because a sociopath named Youpas, another second-generation Betashan stranded on Earth, hates him on sight and is determined to kill him. Lorpas notes several times that Allush is the first woman of the right age who looks like him that he’s ever met, and that her physical appearance appeals to him more than any human woman ever has. Fleeing Youpas, Lorpas again goes on the run, this time with Allush and Mollish, only to be intercepted on a narrow mountain ledge by a second team of Betashan “rescuers,” a situation that results in a couple of deaths and Allush’s instant arrival on Betasha. When Lorpas resumes his flight, it is with a Betashan companion he calls “Jack,” whom tells people is his “retarded brother” (to explain the Betashan’s cultural and linguistic ignorance); and although “Jack’s” learning curve is sharp enough to call the designation of “retarded” into question, as Lorpas says, to humans, all Betashans look alike. Repeatedly, Lorpas passes into new situations that he takes in stride. Repeatedly, Lorpas must evaluate the ethics of each new situation. In Lorpas, Emshwiller gives us a character of integrity, able to adapt to and find an ethical basis for acting in each new circumstance he encounters, despite his social marginality. How can we not cheer him on, seeing our world through his eyes?

Allush, on the other hand, lacks Lorpas’s adaptability and “Jack’s” self-confidence, likely because she knows only the world of the Secret City, which she has been taught is inferior to Betasha; Jack, on the other hand, knows himself to be from a superior world, and so can confront the novelty he encounters as an adventure. The pain of Allush’s marginality is, for that reason, considerably acute. The narrative presents us with a parallel situation: while Lorpas mentors “Jack” in adapting to human culture, Olowpas mentors Allush in adapting to Betashan culture. Jack is fascinated by everything he sees and has a sexual attraction to a teenaged girl, which speeds his acculturation. Allush, who is as ignorant of Betashan language and customs as “Jack” is of English and human customs, by contrast, gets little help and is acutely aware of being a figure of derision on the homeworld; repeatedly her sense of wonder is drowned by the misery of social marginality and her disgust with Betashan food and drink. All her life she has been taught that Betashans are far superior to humans; but from the moment of her arrival on Betasha, she realizes that the apparent glories of Betasha may not be for her. It comes as a great relief to her when she is sent back to Earth on a mission to retrieve “Jack” and the other Betashan rescuer.

If the narrative had been told from “Jack’s” point of view, perhaps it would have been infused with the sense of wonder typical of first contact narratives, for it’s all an adventure to him. But Allush’s narrative, though affording us the perspective of someone repeatedly encountering new and strange technologies and mores, focused as it is on her need to cope with a lack of a place, her lack of status, and her painful losses, is entirely devoid of glamour. Similarly, Lorpas’s narrative is in no way glamorous simply because it is told from the perspective of someone who has been homeless and temporary migrant labor for years. He spends the novel trudging through the mountains on foot, securing food and shelter and clothing while trying to remain invisible to as many as three different parties at a time who may be hunting him.

Similarly, the usual toys of extraterrestrial sf are mere props in this tale, props that not only don’t inspire a sense of wonder, but also demand that the reader take them as givens that won’t bear much scrutiny. The weapons that are also transporters are conveniences of the narrative. But it doesn’t matter, because they simply aren’t the point. Emshwiller’s story is a fable about social marginality and immigrants and homelessness. Her characters’ experiences, emotions, and actions work brilliantly and bring us insight into our world. When I read a story like The Secret City, I have to wonder what Geoff Ryman is talking about when he complains that writing about “magic interstellar travel” (which we find in this novel), extraterrestrials (“there is no evidence whatsoever of intelligences elsewhere in the universe”) is “harmless fun” and wish-fulfillment, “a dream of escaping being human.”[2] But then he seems to be saying that science fiction is supposed to be about creating and living in the future. I myself, however, have always agreed with Samuel R. Delany and so many others who insist that sf is about the world we live in now; to the extent that it helps us understand who we are, it will help us figure out where we want to go and how to do that. For those interested in that kind of window into the future, I highly recommend The Secret City, which is Carol Emshwiller at her brilliant best.

______________________________________

[1] I’ve written about this in “Carol Emshwiller: An Apreciation,” which is available at http://ltimmel.home.mindspring.com And my essay “What’s the Story? Reading Two Early Stories by Carol Emshwiller,” is available on my site as well.

[2] See Geoff Ryman, “Take the Third Star on the Left and on til Morning!” in The New York Review of Science Fiction, June 2007.

Story Recommendation: Karen Joy Fowler, “Always”

Last night I read Karen Joy Fowler’s “Always,” which can be found in the April/May issue of Asimov’s SF. I knew last night, immediately after reading it, that the built-in ambiguity of whether or not the story has a speculative (i.e., fantasy or science fiction) element would likely make it controversial in the same way “What I Didn’t See” was controversial. I also knew that beneath the apparently simple surface of a narrative written by an old woman who hadn’t finished high school (but since the woman attended high school in the 1930s, this of course means something different than it would for someone attending high school today) lay a sophisticated edifice and interesting subtext. As often happens with me in all matter exegetical, a night’s sleep brought some clarity. Karen Joy Fowler is always, of course, subtle. But I read this story as engaged in a conversation with the genre and its conventions, much as “What I Didn’t See” is—and again, written from a distinctly twenty-first-century feminist perspective.

I expect to be writing about this story at some point, probably in this space. But I won’t be able to do so without introducing spoilers. It’s very short—a mere ten pages long. Go read it, my friends. And then we can talk about it here.

Book Recommendation: Samuel R. Delany, Dark Reflections

Samuel R. Delany, Dark Reflections. Carroll & Graf, 2007. 295 pages. $15.95

Delany’s Dark Reflections is now out and available. Delany’s twenty-fifth novel offers a literary narrative about the black gay poet Arnold Hawley, written in a deceptively simple, elegant style that evokes a profoundly lonely soul’s powerful emotional experiences over a lifetime—embedded, of course, in a subtle and insightful depiction of his social and economic reality, just as one would expect from Delany. It’s a surprisingly fast, smooth read; I gobbled it down in two days, knowing as I did that I’d be returning to it soon. Though it ended just as it should, I wanted it to go on and on because I so loved inhabiting its language and ideas and texture.

Besides the novel’s texture, what I liked best was the sense it gave me of Arnold Hawley: he became so real to me that I feel as though I know who he was and what it would be like to be in a room with him. I loved the effect the novel creates by working backwards in Arnold Hawley’s life, by which every moment of the life acquires a complex historicity. Here Delany captures not only the difference age makes to one’s consciousness and understanding of the world, but also the difference in tone and style of the three historical settings he depicts; this novel’s 1972 matches my memory of what 1972 felt like more closely than do many of the novels actually written in 1972. (The section set in the mid-1970s, “Vashti in the Dark” has some of the feel of Dhalgren though it is definitely not Dhalgren. But then Dhalgren, for me, is the quintessential novel of the mid-1970s.) I especially loved the novel’s thematic use of certain details that continually resurface to take on different meanings at different times, as well as the poignancy of the role confusion played Arnold Hawley’s his sexual loneliness.

Dark Reflection gets my highest recommendation.