Recent Reading Roundup 61

Most recent reading roundup are a grab-bag without much of a unifying theme. This batch of novels, on the other hand, seem to share a certain sense of the unheimlich. They are stories about apocalypse, war, environmental collapse, or just people who are struggling to find their place in a hostile world. I suppose there are conclusions to be drawn from that—about the kinds of books I'm reading, or the kinds of books that inspire me to write about them. Either way, this means that alongside my recommendations—and this is a particularly strong group of books—I also have to issue a warning. If you're particularly worried about the state of the world right now, these might not be the books for you; if you're looking for something weird and disturbing, however, you might find your next read here.

• The Invisible Hotel by Yeji Y. Ham - For most of its length, Ham's debut novel keeps you guessing about its genre. Is it a horror story, or a naturalistic one? Another way of putting it is that the novel leaves it unclear—perhaps especially to readers like myself, for whom its setting is a foreign one—whether the events it describes represent the intrusion of the otherworldly into normal life, or whether they are a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. Narrator Yewon is a young woman who lives with her mother in a small village in South Korea. Her older sister has married and left home, and her younger brother has recently departed to complete his mandatory military service. Yewon herself is stuck, drifting between odd jobs while considering various paths forward with her life—she can go back to school, or apply to a language program in Australia, or move to Seoul with a friend. But when each of these options is presented to her, the withdrawn, anxiety-ridden Yewon demurs, retreating into depressive episodes that can last for days. One reason for her fragile mental state is the recent death of her father, which has left the entire family reeling and unable to connect with each other. But that trauma has been folded into something broader, a family tradition that has confused and terrified Yewon her whole life, the obsessive care and cleaning of their ancestral bones. Yewon's mother spends days seeing to the bones, which belong to a variety of ancestors—Yewon tells us that as a child, she used to pore over anatomy textbooks in an attempt to organize the bones, only to conclude they represent several skeletons mixed together, and perhaps not even whole. Other neighbors practice the same tradition, and young women from local families are expected to return home when in labor, to give birth over the bones.

  For all its strangeness, and for all that it looms over Yewon and her cohort—her sister got into a screaming match with their mother when she refused to give birth over the bones, and her best friend is obsessed with leaving town so that she can surrender her responsibility to them—the bone ritual is not where the novel's weight of horrific imagery actually lies. In fact, before long it starts to seem practically normal. Yewon accepts a job driving an elderly woman to the prison where her brother is incarcerated. On their journeys, the woman reveals that she is a North Korean refugee, and that she was separated from her brother as a child and hasn't seen him in nearly seventy years. Yewon, who like many Koreans of her generation is largely ignorant of her country's neighbor, begins learning about the Korean war, along the way discovering that many people in her vicinity still carry trauma from it—her mother's neighbor, whose ancestral bones are practically ash because she sifted them out of the wreckage of her family home; the village madman, who is still trying to save the family members who were burned alive by North Korean soldiers. As she listens to these stories, Yewon begins to have visions of the titular hotel, where she witnesses surreal scenes of destruction and carnage—a barricade constructed of human bodies, an algae-clogged swimming pool with something lurking beneath the surface. Eventually Yewon learns that the hotel was a real place where residents of Seoul hid during the North Korean invasion, at once a refuge from worse horrors happening outside, and a symbol of the complete loss of normalcy. As Yewon's mother grows more anxious about her brother's safety—from his commanders, as well as the risk that hostilities with the north will resume—Yewon becomes convinced that she will find him in the hotel, and must rescue him from it.

  Stories set in South Korea have been enjoying global popularity for years, but the ones I've encountered have tended to focus, when they deal with politics at all, on the more recent trauma of the military dictatorship (Human Acts by Han Kang) or on current issues such as pervasive sexism (Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo) or growing inequality and debt (Parasite, Burning, Squid Game). The Invisible Hotel argues that even people of Yewon's generation, for whom the war is distant history, carry generational trauma, and are consumed with worry over the possibility of its resumption. A powerful scene sees Yewon working in a historical museum where carefree young people take selfies amidst displays about the war. But when a technical mishap makes it seem that missiles from the north have been launched, their panic reveals the anxiety that lurks just beneath the surface. Amidst this constant, rarely-acknowledged fear, rituals like the bone worship start to seem less irrational, and more like a way of exerting control in an irrational world. For Yewon and people of her generation, other rituals are necessary, and the hallucinations of the hotel eventually start to seem like a way for her to grapple with a trauma she hadn't even been aware of, enabling her to get her real life back in order. But the novel's conclusion avoids any pat consolation. The fear of war and destruction, Yewon concludes, will always be with her. In some ways, she will always be trapped in the hotel.

• Sleepaway by Kevin Prufer - In the world of Prufer's debut novel, unexplained weather events sweep across the land, causing everyone in their path to lapse into an immediate, uncontrollable sleep that lasts anywhere between a few seconds and a few hours—and from which some people, mostly adults, never wake up. Our perspective on this phenomenon and its world-changing effects is deliberately narrow and close to the ground. Twelve-year-old Glass has already lost his father to the sleep sickness, and is being cared for by a family friend. As teachers and authority figures become distracted—by the growing number of sleepers, by scientists' failure to produce a cure, by the realization that eventually, they too will fail to wake up—Glass and his best friend Scooby are more and more often left to their own devices, wandering around their small Missouri town and getting into trouble. On one of these misadventures, they encounter Cora, a wannabe playwright turned waitress who has become dependent on Crazy Eight, a drug that allows her to stay awake during the sleep events, while causing intense pain and dissociative episodes. When Glass's guardian also fails to wake up, and Cora's supply of Eight begins to dwindle, the two set off on a road trip of vaguely-defined aims, trying to outrun their troubles.

  Though not officially a pandemic novel, one can sense the influence of COVID-19 wafting through every page of Sleepaway, whose tone is not the apocalyptic one its premise might lead us to expect, but a sort of bemused resignation. The authorities in the novel's world seem mostly preoccupied with downplaying the sleep epidemic's seriousness. Smiling news anchors assure viewers that a cure is just around the corner, while sleepers are transported to out of the way holding facilities, to be forgotten and, eventually, disposed of. A silent but insistent pressure from above encourages people to continue working, shopping, and going about their lives as if nothing were happening. Bubbling up from below, however, is a growing realization that things have irrevocably changed. Glass's teachers keep disappearing, not because they've fallen asleep, but because, having realized that they will eventually do so, they've decided to run off and live a little before the inevitable. When it becomes clear that people of European ancestry are more likely to lapse into permanent sleep, Cora observes that a subtle reversal has occurred—suddenly, it is people of color who move through the world with security and equanimity, while white people like her become riddled with anxiety. At the same time, incidents of racist violence are on the rise, and Cora learns that the reason the supply of Eight has dried up is that rich people have begun cornering the market, planning for a future in which they are the rulers of the Earth.

  All of this, however, happens deep in the novel's background, occasionally referenced but mostly ignored as its characters try to cling to a sense of normalcy—or to rebuild it out of the ashes of a shattered life, as Glass is forced to do several times over. Prufer's background is in poetry, and his facility with words is on full display here as he effortlessly constructs a character portrait or a family history in a few sentences. He's able to sweep us with him as he describes the thoroughly mundane—Cora's abortive plans for plays she never manages to write, Glass and Scooby exploring the artifacts and bones collected by Glass's archeologist father—while also teasing gargantuan events—a blackout that leads to violence and looting, Glass stealing Scooby's father's gun, a gigantic sleep storm that Glass and Cora try and fail to outrun. Again and again, the mundane turns out to be what's truly important. What Sleepaway ends up being concerned with is how Glass, Cora, and other people around them process the disruption of their world not as a finite event, but as something ongoing that they will have to live through, and weave into all the normal minutiae of their lives. For Glass, this means obsessively reading and rereading a series of YA dystopia books. For Cora, making repeated attempts to win the forgiveness of her sister, whom she alienated years ago with a deeply selfish act. For the two of them together, forming a new family with each other, even as they realize that it, too, will eventually be torn apart by events greater than themselves. As Cora is told near the end of the novel, just because the world is ending for you doesn't mean it's actually ending, and though not all the novel's characters will be able to see it, Sleepaway ends on the promise of a new, transformed world.

• Sufferance by Charles Palliser - The narrator of this dark, disturbing novella is a low-level government clerk in a nameless city, which has recently been occupied by an invading army. To begin with, life continues largely as it was before, except that the narrator's younger daughter informs him that one of her schoolmates, whose father is a wealthy man and a member of an ethnic minority, has been left on her own, her parents stranded in the now-cut-off capital city. (Eventually it becomes clear, from the progress of the events Palliser recounts, that Sufferance's setting can only be Poland under Nazi occupation; but the narrator continues to use non-specific terms throughout the story, referring to "the occupiers", "the capital", or "the community" to which the girl belongs, and whose rights are increasingly constrained.) The narrator and his wife decide to invite the girl to live with them, a decision they reach through a combination of genuine compassion and concern, motivated self-interest—the narrator reasons that the girl's father will not only reimburse him for the expense of her care, but will offer him a job in his business—and an apparent inability to grasp the seriousness of the situation. This last trait is shared by the girl herself, who is not only convinced that her parents will soon return to claim her, but continues to cling to her sense of superiority, lording her family's wealth over the narrator's two daughters, and insisting that he continue to give her the allowance she was accustomed to receive from her parents.

  This failure to see, or to acknowledge, what is happening around them soon infects all the characters in the novel. In his work life, the narrator soon observes the curtailing of "the protected community"'s rights, becoming involved in the project of cataloguing, and eventually appropriating, their property. Workplace closures and an economic downturn cut the family's income to a fraction of what it was. The narrator's older daughter is unable to find work, and soon begins associating with local hooligans who support the occupying force. But within the home, the family and their guest continue to enact a seemingly ordinary domestic drama. The girl's selfishness leads to squabbles with the two daughters, the narrator's wife complains about the girl's supercilious manners and sense of entitlement, and when outside restrictions are placed on her—when she's forced to hide in the apartment full-time, for example—her response, as well as that of everyone else in the family, is to complain. 

  At the same time, one wonders how much of this obliviousness is an act. The narrator's voice is analytical and detail-oriented, reporting with equanimity such events as his brother in law being forced to divorce his wife, who is also a member of the protected community. It's easy to suspect that there are considerations beneath the surface that he is concealing—from himself, perhaps, as much as the readers. When he somehow arranges to take in the girl without anybody else knowing where to find her, is this a simple, bumbling error, or a sign that he always had sinister designs against her? When he goes back to her home to try to access her father's safe, is he safeguarding her property, or trying to take it for himself? Our impression of the girl, too, feels incomplete. Is she truly as oblivious as the narrator describes? Or are her foot-stamping threats to report to her father how badly she's been treated a desperate coping mechanism, a way of avoiding acknowledging the immense danger she's in, and her inability to trust her protectors?

  For most of its length, reading Sufferance is an exercise in mingled dread and bemusement. At some points in the novel the narrator seems on the verge of abandoning his charge out of sheer lack of awareness—having realized that he has committed an illegal act by hiding the girl, he tries to convince her to slip into the newly-formed ghetto, reasoning that she will be happier among her own kind. Other times, it almost seems as if the family will unwillingly, and with only partial awareness of having done it, fall into becoming righteous gentiles. But as time passes and the trap into which the protected community has been led begins to close, it becomes clear that what Palliser is writing is neither a moral parable nor a dark comedy. We spend the novel frustrated that its characters are not better, more aware people, but instead keep almost stumbling into either heroism or perfidy. As their options dwindle and the danger they are in mounts, however, we eventually have to recognize that even the best version of these people might have found themselves helpless in the face of the great machine of evil that has surrounded them. Sufferance ends with an unspeakable act, and Palliser, without excusing it, uses it to remind us that heroism is rare not only because people fail to embody it, but because the world around them is designed to stamp it out.

• The Default World by Naomi Kanakia - Several years sober and on HRT, Jhanvi, a trans woman, returns to her old haunts of San Francisco with a plan: she will cajole, browbeat, or manipulate her college friend and occasional fuckbuddy Henry into marrying her, which will give her access to the generous trans healthcare package offered by his tech company employers, to surgeries and treatments that on her own she can never hope to afford, and which she sees as necessary to feeling, and being seen as, a real woman. It's a plan that seems to accord with the non-conformist values of Henry's roommates, a group of tech workers and trust fund babies who call themselves "the fire eaters", purport to reject the heteronormativity, enforced monogamy, and nuclear family obsession of "the default world", and who regularly spend vast amounts of money on drug-addled sex parties. 

  Very quickly, however, Jhanvi finds herself clashing with her new housemates. Henry and his non-monogamous partner Audrey claim to be excited about the marriage plan, with its potential for sticking it to the man and redistributing wealth on behalf of a marginalized person. But somehow, Henry always manages to waffle out of making concrete plans, even as his relationship with Jhanvi grows more intimate. Den mother Katie is quick to launch into lectures about how to safely and ethically engage in everything from dealing with the local homeless man to group sex, but somehow the boundaries she draws always seem to leave Jhanvi outside—in one case, literally, when the house security code is "accidentally" changed, leaving a phone-less Jhanvi wandering the streets overnight. Oddball loner Roshie decries the rest of the group's impracticality and seems to be alone in truly thinking about Jhanvi's needs, but Jhanvi soon realizes that accepting her friendship will leave her on the outs with everyone else.

  Despite its oh-so-modern trappings, The Default World is blatantly a riff on the gilded age novels of Edith Wharton, with Jhanvi—who has dubbed herself an "adventurer", recalling the penniless marriage-seekers of those novels—as a modern-day Lily Bart or Undine Spragg. Like those characters, she survives by becoming at once a hanger-on—she quickly takes on the role of go-between for Roshie and the rest of the house, smoothing over conflicts and giving Roshie, whose practical management is the only reason the sex and drug parties go ahead without a hitch, someone to vent to—and a manipulator—after the lock-out incident, she plays on Katie's liberal guilt to achieve a more secure place in the household. With keen, almost anthropological insight, she studies the fire eaters' insular, incestuous group to understand what they really want and how she can get what she needs from them—deducing, for example, that despite their protestations to the contrary class is a major force in their interactions. At the same time, there are aspects of the fire eaters that continue to baffle Jhanvi. Why, she keeps asking, do they insist on seeing themselves as revolutionaries or activists? Why can't they admit that they're just rich people who want to do drugs and have sex?

  It would be easy for The Default World to resolve into a satire in which clueless wannabe-anarchists are outsmarted by a street-smart fortune-hunter. This is the story Jhanvi tells herself, deciding to become "a villain" in her pursuit of the life she wants. Again and again, she insists to anyone who will listen that despite the housemates' claims to the contrary, there is no such thing as unconditional friendship; that the alternative community the fire eaters believe they can rely on is porous and fickle, and that the people who will always show up for you will also attach strings to that help—for Jhanvi, this is her Indian family, who expect her to go back in the closet, or other trans people, who want her to embrace a working class lifestyle. This is how Jhanvi justifies her manipulation of Henry and the rest of the house, and the book doesn't exactly disagree with her. But the more we learn about her, the clearer it becomes that there is real injury driving Jhanvi's cynicism, and it's left to us to wonder whether she is clear-eyed, or simply hurting—whether, for example, her insistence that she's been left out of the fire eaters' sex parties because they find her mostly-unaltered body disgusting is an incisive cutting through of platitudes, or an expression of her deep-seated dysphoria and self-loathing. The more we wonder this, the more plausible it becomes that the fire eaters are not the selfish monsters we might prefer to think of them as—that for all their flaws, they can be prodded into doing the right thing. As the novel approaches its end, it becomes clear that while Jhanvi hasn't found the fabled "found family" that will support her no matter what, neither is her relationship with the fire eaters purely exploitative. For all the compromises and frustrations involved, in them she may have finally found a home.

• Dry Land by B. Pladek - In the tradition of environmental science fiction such as Richard Powers's The Overstory and Rebecca Campbell's Arboreality, Pladek's debut is both a closely-observed tale of nature in all its variety and interdependence, and a meditation on humanity's role within it. In 1917, newly-minted Forestry Service employee Rand Brandt discovers that he has the power to grow plants instantaneously, in any soil and any season. For Rand, an adherent of the new science of ecology who is distraught over the destruction of natural environments—from the clear-cutting of old growth forest to the draining of wetlands near his childhood home—this power seems to offer the possibility of restoring his beloved wilderness. For his fellow forestry agent Gabriel, with whom Rand has struck up a tentative romance, it is a means of revitalizing his family's overgrazed New Mexico ranchland, which might allow Gabriel to pursue his dreams of a musical career. For their superiors, it is a way of establishing the still-new service's utility and independence. Rand soon finds himself enlisted and dispatched to Europe, tasked with growing timber for the war effort, and then recruited as a propaganda figure extolling America's new, "scientific" agricultural capabilities. Behind the scenes, Rand and a team of scientists try fruitlessly to understand his power, most especially the aspect of it that has been carefully kept out of the public eye—that the plants Rand grows all die within days, leaving poisoned earth behind.

  As Rand makes his way to Europe, to bohemian haunts in Paris, and then back to the States, he encounters differing attitudes to nature and humanity's role within it. The older forestry agents who are quick to deploy him in the war effort see their role as rooted in agricultural husbandry. They are stewards of America's forests and seek to promote their conservation, but only so that the forests can be exploited by future generations as well as the current one. They have no sense or appreciation of the complexity of a natural ecology—Rand's immediate superior, a eugenicist, looks at the unnaturally symmetrical trees Rand grows and sees in them the possibility of "perfecting" nature, starting with plants, and progressing all the way to people (that Rand is both gay and chooses to fraternize with the Latino Gabriel enrages this man and provokes an enmity that runs through the novel). Younger scientists who are more able to see wilderness as valuable in its own right nevertheless have views that Rand struggles with. They consider European forests "spoiled" by centuries of human interference and husbandry, essentially drawing a stark dividing line between humanity and nature. But as Rand observes, it is possible for humans to live as part of the wilderness, and equally possible for an environment with no human presence—such as the timber forests he grows in Europe—to be a sterile monoculture. (It's understandable given the setting and people involved, but still a shame that Dry Land does not find a way to acknowledge that Native Americans practiced forestry and land management, and that the environment that European explorers discovered when they arrived in the Americas had not been pure wilderness for centuries.)

  These warring philosophies all clash against Rand's growing feelings of guilt as the limits of his power become clearer, and as the service's control over him increases. Unable to admit what he is doing to the natural landscape he loves, he withdraws from the people who care about him—Gabriel, his family, his best friend Jonna, an aspiring radical journalist—and becomes consumed with charting and understanding the full, dizzying complexity of natural environments, hoping that by doing so he will be able to fully recreate them. Pladek delivers long stretches of rich nature description into which the reader, like Rand, can sink, feeling both awed and overwhelmed. But the more Rand devotes himself to his studies, the clearer it becomes that he has taken on himself all the blame for centuries of rampant exploitation and the destruction of nature. His desire to repair this destruction in one fell swoop transmutes, in the face of repeated proof that he can't actually do this, into ever-worsening acts of self-denial and self-sacrifice, in what eventually comes to feel like an early version of modern-day climate despair. Though the novel's framework recalls many recent superhero stories, its journey ultimately points in the opposite direction, with Rand realizing that despite his power, he can never stand outside of nature. The result is less an ecological fable as a tale of coming of age, of a man who must understand that his love of the natural world doesn't absolve him of the responsibility to live an everyday human life.