Ghost Lights

 Ghost Lights

By Lydia Millet

I'm not sure if the reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey was intentional, but the main character of this

installment of Millet's cycle, Hal, is definitely on autopilot. He works for the IRS and, even after a decades-long career there, is still a true believer. He is happy to be a cog: in the governmental machine, in his marriage, in life in general. Especially since the accident, on a snowy Colorado night, that left his daughter, Casey, paralyzed. That loss, in which he had no direct role, is all Hal seems to have room for in his brain. 

But then the machine turns against him. He returns home early from work one day to find his wife's co-worker, Robert, leaving his house. Huh. He finds said wife, Susan, showering. And in the folds of the rumpled bed, a shiny piece of metal packaging. His heart races. Could it be...? No. Yes? No? Yes. He follows her to the office the next day and witnesses it: she is having an affair. 

Autopilot off. He is due at a dinner party at Casey's house, and decides to have a few drinks beforehand, something quite uncharacteristic. When talk turns to Susan's boss, T. -- who we met in How the Dead Dream -- Hal stays out of character. Someone needs to go to Belize to find T., Susan insists. I will do it, Hal insists back. It's no problem. The true believer has months of vacation time accrued.

Down Hal goes. Finding T., who against all odds is not dead, is actually easier than anticipated. All he had to do was ask for Marlo, the foreman on T.'s now-destroyed island resort project. But Hal doesn't know that. So he accidentally enlists the help of a German couple with two tow-heads. The patriarch, Hans, is all business and somehow calls in the U.S. Coast Guard to search the area where T. was last seen. The matriarch, Gretel, takes a shining to Hal that results in some inebriated, late-night beach sex. 

One morning, Hal, sleeping on the pool chaise, is woken by Marlo, who takes him to the island. T. is there, feral, with a new perspective on life. The pursuit of money for money's sake, he avows, is silly. He is bearded. He is dressed in rags. He is, after speaking with the brother of the guide who died on his jungle journey, taken into custody.

Hal freaks out. He goes to the embassy and finds cynical help, who insist there is nothing to worry about. T. insists there is nothing to worry about. Hal is not so sure. Still, things are looking up. He has confronted Susan on the phone; there will be a future for their marriage. He has confronted his autopilot tendencies; he will be different upon return. 

The machine, though, will not compute. Just as he feels like he has made some peace with the world, an unnoticed boy, who Hal tries to make room for on the sidewalk, stabs him, takes his wallet, and leaves him for dead. Will he die? It certainly seems so. But I thought T. would die, too.

Hal's final thoughts are on the nature of Jesus, and the way that the lives of the rich are antithetical to who he was. He meditates on the way the many suffer and die for the few when it was actually supposed to be the other way around. Though not rich by American standards, he is a bit astonished to realize that he is, in fact, one of the few. Not as much as T., though. Does he die for T.'s sins?

How the Dead Dream

 How the Dead Dream

By Lydia Millet

After reading A Children's Bible I thought I'd go down a bit of a Lydia Millet rabbit hole. This book is the
first in a trilogy of sorts with a similar story line.

This book focuses on T., which, we learn later in the book, is short for Thomas. It's a fitting nickname for a character focused on efficiency in all aspects of his life. Everything he does is meant to move toward an end goal of wealth. Even in college, his "friendships" with wealthier frat brothers are in the interest of potential business connections.

For a long while, T.'s life plan seems to be working out. His lifetime pursuit of trading for profit works well in New York and then in Los Angeles, where he breaks into real estate. His relationships with people, and the earth, remain purely transactional. 

But then his mother shows up. His father, she says, is missing. No note, no phone call, no ideas about where he could be. At the same time, he begins to fall in love -- real love -- with a woman named Beth. He sees a future in which they are partners and he is no longer alone. As in A Children's Bible, though, cracks appear in the Edenic plan. 

T. finds his father -- slinging drinks at a gay bar in Florida. His whole life, up until that point, was a lie, he says. His father files for divorce, which sends his mother into a tailspin. Then Beth suffers a heart attack, which leads to a car crash, which leads to her death. All of a sudden, T. feels what it is like to lose. Always alone in the world, he now begins to feel lonely.

For comfort, he begins to seek out endangered species in zoos, imagining them to be feeling what he is feeling: the last of their kind, lonely. He takes lessons in picking locks and finds himself napping with them at night. He takes an interest in the endangered kangaroo rats displaced by his mega development in the desert outside L.A. 

He next has his eyes on an island in Belize, where he hires a guide to take him into jaguar country. The odds of seeing one, he knows, are very, very low. But just to be in their presence is enough. But then, more loss. His guide has a heart attack, and T. is now very, very alone. He attempts to find his own way out of the jungle. At the end of the book, though, it doesn't look good for him.

Up next: Ghost Lights.

A Children's Bible

 A Children's Bible 

By Lydia Millet

Another recommendation from the Anthony Jeselnik book club. 

It starts off dreamily: "Once we lived in a summer country." The "we" here is a group of several families vacationing in a mansion built by a robber baron by the sea. The kids, including the narrator, Evie, have free run of the place and are turning more and more feral by the moment. But soon cracks appear in the Edenic vision.

The kids aren't given freedom -- they're neglected. The parents, who never have names, engage in a pattern of "hair of the dog", "drink and conversation", dinner, and then boozing for real. They disgust the kids, most of whom seem to be in their late teens with the exception of Evie's brother, Jack and a friend (whose name I forget but who only speaks through signs). Then more cracks. The troupe of kids decide to camp out on the beach for the night. There, they meet the scions of an Uber wealthy family sailing their yacht up the coast. They smoke weed and party -- but also talk about survival compounds. The book feels contemporary, but it's either a few decades in the future or a bit of an alternate reality. Are there "preppers" out there? Sure. But they are fringe elements at the moment. 

And then the thing falls apart. A storm hits. Jack and his companion, who have recently been given "A Children's Bible" take on the role of modern-day Noah's and gather any and all animals they can. They store them in a tree house, where they ride out the storm. The parents don't notice. Instead, they take Ecstasy and have an orgy. The teens clamor to the tree house. The storm is bad; it ruins the house and, it seems, the surrounding countryside. 

One day, a man named Burl appears. He's been paddling for days, and is glad to find respite. When the waters recede, he joins the teens in an effort to escape to one of the family's Rye, NY, compound. They don't make it, instead holing up on a different compound somewhere in Pennsylvania. For a moment, it seems like they have found another, truer Eden, one bereft of their bothersome parents. But cracks appear again, this time in the form of an armed, roving gang drunk with power and motivated to horde as much food as they can. Things are, after all, bad out there.

In the end, the kids are fine. The parents, though, they somehow disappear into the ether.

It is, it seems, a metaphor for the impending climate crisis. The older generation, which may or may not include me, parties on as the earth falls apart, giving into their hedonistic tendencies while leaving the inevitable destruction to their kids. 

I really liked this book. The description above sounds intense, but there were moments of levity and humor. It was, in a way, absurdist. One of the blurbs on the back compared Millet to Vonnegut, and I think it's an apt comparison. I'd never heard of her, and I've decided to dig deeper and check out some of her other novels. 

The Department of Speculation

 The Department of Speculation

By Jenny Offill

This was part of the Anthony Jeselnik book club. The book is a series of vignettes exploring the
dissolution of a relationship. You don't even know the character's names, but you do know that the husband has an affair that blows up the relationship and the wife is trying to figure out what to do. It was funny at times, heartbreaking at others. But, in this middle age of mine, it was tough to read. Don't let this happen to me!

The Three Body Problem

 The Three Body Problem

By Cixin Liu

My friend Zach loaned me this book after a party at his house. I think I was talking about trying to read
some science fiction, and he recommended this. It won all sorts of awards, including the Hugo Award. Apparently, it was the first translated book to do so.

The basic plot is that, in the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government set up a secret base with a radio telescope to search for alien life. One day, it receives a message from near the star Alpha Centauri. The scientist who receives the message, Ye Wenjie, tries to keep it under wraps. Then she receives a second message, warning her not to reply to the first one. Doing so, it says, will allow the alien civilization to find earth and conquer it. Wenjie, who just saw her father beaten to death by the Red Guard among other horrors of the Cultural Revolution, has lost faith in humanity. So she replies in the hopes that the invading aliens will not just conquer but also reform human civilization.

Wenjie does not keep her secret to herself. She befriends an heir to an oil company fortune who is spending his time reforesting clear cut sections of the woods in the hopes of saving endangered songbirds. He, too, has lost faith in humanity and welcomes the idea of an alien force not just conquering but destroying humanity in the hopes that it will save other life forms on earth. 

The two form a movement devoted to aiding the aliens, known as the Trisolarians because their planet has three suns (which dooms them to eventual destruction). One of their strategies is to foil human scientists so they cannot develop the technology to repel the invading aliens when the time comes, which, even with the Trisolarians' advanced science, is still 450 years in the future.

Enter Wang Miao. He is a scientist working on nanotechnology that could allow humans to venture farther into space than ever before. He is recruited by a group of generals from multiple nations who have learned of the alien plot and are working to stop it. Wang enters a game called the Three Body Problem, which simulates the Trisolarian's solar system. There are three suns, whose erratic orbit cause unpredictable periods of calm and of either fiery destruction or chilling cold. The point of the game is to help the civilization develop a model to predict these periods. Ultimately, it proves impossible. 

This novel, which is the first in a trilogy, ends with the Trisolarians developing some kind of electron technology that will allow them to reach earth, Wenjie captured and her co-conspirator dead. Is earth doomed? I guess you have to read on to find out.

I can't say I loved this book. I appreciated the plot, but some of the science was over my head. Multiple dimensions folded within a single proton? Huh? I guess I'm not super excited to pick up the next book.

Swamplandia!

 Swampladia!

By Karen Russell

I picked this up a few weeks ago because it is set in the brackish swamp near the Everglades, which we

were about to visit over April break.

The book tells the story of the Bigtree family who operate a theme park, Swamplandia!, on an island, or hammock, in the Everglades area of Florida. Everything is going swimmingly until the star of the family, Hiolia, dies. She had been the main attraction of Swamplandia!; her act involved diving into a gator-filled pool and swimming around it unscathed. After her death, visitors stop coming, which is compounded by the opening of a nearby rival theme park, The World of Darkness. Or, just The World.

All of this pulls the rest of the Bigtree family -- Osceola, 16; Kiwi, 17; Ava, 13; and Chief, middle aged -- to the breaking point. Kiwi is the first to leave. He heads to the mainland to work at The World, both to scout its features but also to try to make some money that might get Swamplandia!'s creditors off the family's back. Next is the Chief, who goes on one of his semi-annual but mysterious business trips (which turns out to be emceeing at a depressing strip club). Osceola (Ossie), meanwhile, seems to have something of a psychotic break and begins spending her time with a Spiritualist book that, she believes, allows her to commune with the dead. She goes through a series of ghost boyfriends before deciding to elope with one of them, a former dredge boat worker who takes her deep into the swamp to a portal to the underworld that will allow them to marry. Ava, now alone, is distraught. She shares her story with an itinerant "bird man", whose "job" is to scare away buzzards from area businesses and homes. The bird man says he knows all about the underworld, and promises to take Ava there in an attempt to save Osceoloa.

The thing about the Bigtree family is that they've always lived in a fantasy world. Their last name, Bigtree, is, in fact, made up, designed to associate Swamplandia! with vague Native American roots. The Chief isn't a chief of anything. This idea is reinforced by a "museum" at the theme park that preserves various "artifacts" of the Bigtree story. They are, in fact, simply mementos from the family's life, trumped up to fill a kind of grand story.

And so it is easy to believe that Ava believes in this underworld, especially given the author's lovely description of the environment in which the Bigtree's live. It starts to make sense that there would be a portal to the underworld out there, and I was totally ready for this book to be about the magic that exists in the most special places in our world, in nature. It seemed like it would be, even more than 250 pages in.

But that was not to be. The Birdman is not who Ava thinks he is. As a reader, I wanted to see him like Ava did. Looking back, though, it was clear: this is a shady character. In a scene that shocked me, that seemed to rip me from the charming and, many times, funny, tale I had bought into, Ava is raped. It still turns my stomach thinking about it. Ava is very violently torn from her fantasy world. 

And so it goes with the other Bigtrees. Kiwi learns that he cannot single-handedly save the family's home. He learns, too, that his sense of himself as a scholar -- no schools at Swamplandia!, only homeschool -- is misguided. He has a lot to learn. Osceola's ghost leaves her, just in the nick of time, the noose that would serve as a "portal" swinging in the background when she is rescued. And the Chief accepts that he will have to become a mainlander after all. The silver lining: when the fantasy bubble is burst, the family realizes that they are far stronger together than they are apart.

This was certainly an engrossing book. I found the ending jarring, to say the least. The rape scene made me feel a little betrayed by the author and, after looking at some online reviews, others have felt similarly. I still wonder whether it was necessary. I wonder whether Ava could have gotten away and the story would have been the same. 

Buckeye

 Buckeye

By Patrick Ryan

Cal is born with one leg significantly shorter than the other, and so can't go off and fight in World War II.
Which, it turns out, is a blessing and a curse. He does his best to help out, joining the local defense patrol to keep a watch on the streets and skies of Bonhomie, OH, but, soon enough, he'll be one of the few men of a certain age left in town. His father is glad; he is not.

Still, it works out okay for him. He meets a girl, Becky, who soon becomes his wife. Becky's dad runs a local hardware store and offers him a job that is a good sight better than his work at a local cement factory. His father-in-law pays for a house. A child comes. Life is good.

But, then, trouble. Becky is...quirky, some might say. She reads. She works at a stationary store. She wears a beret. She says things. Oh, and she might be able to commune with the spirit world. What else can explain how she was able to locate the body of a man who went missing and wound up dead in his car on the side of the road? With war in full swing, Becky uses her gift to help the many people hoping to reconnect with their loved ones.

But Cal doesn't believe.

Which is fine, for a while, until one day, when Cal, at the behest of his father-in-law, runs out of town a quack author who is ostensibly writing a book about spirit mediums but apparently just wants to get into Becky's pants. Becky is not amused -- she can handle herself. And then it comes out: Cal really doesn't believe. The two move into separate bedrooms.

So when the woman who came into the basement of the hardware store to listen to the radio and kiss him on what turned out to be VE day reappears and seems to suggest that perhaps they could do more than kiss, Cal is in a rough enough place emotionally to accept. 

The woman, Margaret, has a husband overseas. But their marriage isn't what Margaret had hoped for. She's said yes to Felix's proposal because, frankly, she didn't know better. She'd grown up in an orphanage, and was looking for stable ground. Plus, Felix was handsome. That said, he seemed far less interested in sex than the men Margaret had been seeing casually, and his libido didn't seem to pick up in matrimony. Felix, it turned out, was gay, though she didn't know it. Two things filled her with dread: Felix dying and Felix returning home.

He does return home after his ship is torpedoed and the man he had fallen in love with dies. He comes back an even more broken and confused man than he was when he left. He is able to make love to Margaret on the first night of his homecoming. So the baby that comes could be his. But it isn't. Which is when the lies begin.

Felix is able to find peace through Becky, who is able to contact Augie, Felix's love, from beyond the grave. The message: live -- for both of them. But in connecting with Augie, Felix inadvertently introduces his son-not-son to Becky and Cal's son, Skip. So things become complicated. Especially when Margaret learns of Felix's affair and Felix learns of Margaret's affair and Margaret tells Becky about her affair -- and then Margaret, overwhelmed (or something else) leaves town. 

The news she leaves, and her departure itself, is like a bomb for the two families. But eventually they heal. And it is in the telling of this healing -- even after Skip dies in Vietnam and Tom, his half brother, distances himself from everyone after learning the truth -- that the beauty of this novel lies. It is sweet, and tender, and sad, and uplifting all at the same time. I loved it.