All Hat: Thoughts on Justified

Of all the many pleasures that television offers me, the one itch it rarely scratches is eloquence.  I love a beautifully written piece of prose, but there's something so much more satisfying about beautiful speech.  We live in a society in which eloquence is a vanishing commodity, and public speech and conversation have become homogenized and diluted.  It's rare for any of us to have even a small fraction of our vocabulary at our immediate, unconsidered disposal, or for unrehearsed speech to have a cadence or poetry that reflect the speaker's personality and the full breadth of their intelligence.  This is, of course, because true eloquence is rare even when it's prized and nurtured, but that's exactly where the scripted media, which offer a marriage of the performance of spontaneity and pre-written and -edited words, should come in.  Alas, most television characters just talk the way most of us would if we didn't have to pause for thought or backtrack over our mistakes.  It's a rare series that actually tries to invent its own patterns of speech or highlight those that break the mold, and I tend to love these unreservedly.  It's why I fell in love with Deadwood and Firefly, and to a lesser extent one of the major draws of Joss Whedon's other series and Aaron Sorkin's work--because they give their characters and the settings they move in distinct voices.  And it's what won me over to FX's new crime drama Justified.  The series has other strengths, and several weaknesses, but what made me a fan almost from day one was that everyone talked so pretty.

BOYD: In your dark imaginings, Raylan, what is it that you think I'm up to?
RAYLAN: Given the talent pool you got here, I assume you're gonna do what you always done, steal money and blow shit up.
BOYD: We will not be robbing banks.
RAYLAN: Could you be any more vague?
BOYD: All of us here, every single one of us, repaid our debts to society.
RAYLAN: No, no, no, no.  Not you.  Not by a long shot.
BOYD: Well out here, in our church, we can begin to repay our debts to God.  By righteous living, righteous action.
RAYLAN: Gotta go now.
BOYD: Are you sure you don't want a meal?  Our food is simple, but it's good.
RAYLAN: No, I stopped at a Hardee's on the way.  I wouldn't mind addressing the congregation before I went.  Would that be alright?
BOYD: [to his followers] Excuse me!  We have us a guest speaker today.  Please, have at it.
RAYLAN: Yeah. [pauses, doffs his hat] Dear Lord.  Before we eat this meal we ask forgiveness for our sins.  Especially Boyd, who blew up a black church with a rocket launcher, and afterward he shot his associate Jared Hale in the back of the head out on Tate's Creek Bridge.  Let the image of Jared's brain matter on that windshield not dampen our appetites, but may the knowledge of Boyd's past sins help guide these men.  May this food provide them with all the nourishment they need.  But if it does not, may they find comfort in knowing that the United States Marshals Service is offering $50,000 to any individual providing information that'll put Boyd back in prison.  Cash or check, we can make it out to them or to Jesus, whoever they want.  In your name, we pray.  [puts on his hat]  Amen.

(What's missing here, of course, is the acting, and as much as that the Southern accents, which are a rare commodity on TV as anything but a curiosity or a means of marking a character out.  Unfortunately, most of the Justified clips online are behind Hulu's US-only walls.)

The two men here make up one side of the cross-generational quadrangle of friendship, enmity, and strained family relationships that drives Justified's first season.  Raylan is Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant, whose casting is either an attempt to cash in on his Deadwood cachet or karmic compensation for the way the writers of that series sidelined his character in its second and third seasons; either way he does good work here), who in the series's opening scene guns down a drug cartel captain in Miami.  The shooting is, strictly speaking, justified--as Raylan repeatedly points out, the other guy drew his gun first--but it's complicated by the fact that Raylan had targeted his victim, warned him to get out of town or else, and all but goaded him to reach for his weapon.  His career now a political hot potato and with the cartel hot for vengeance, Raylan's superiors decide to stash him in his home state of Kentucky while the shooting is investigated, which brings Raylan back in contact with places and people he had hoped and planned to leave behind forever: there's Boyd Crowder, a boyhood friend with whom Raylan used to dig coal; Boyd's father Bo, who ran protection in his and Raylan's home town of Harlan; Raylan's father Arlo, a crook who sometimes worked for Bo; Raylan's ex-wife Winona, now remarried; and Ava, Raylan's boyhood crush who used to be married to Boyd's brother.  No sooner does he arrive in Kentucky than Raylan tangles with Boyd, who runs a white supremacist group and commits the bombing and murder referred to above in the series pilot before being shot by Raylan and experiencing a spiritual awakening as a result of his near-death experience, and his entanglement with the Crowder clan deepens when Bo is released from prison and sets about trying to regain his criminal empire, recruiting Arlo for the task and partnering up with the same cartel now out for Raylan's blood.

Interspersed with the season-long power struggle between Crowders and Givenses--Raylan tries to puzzle out what criminal scam underlies Boyd's newfound faith, Arlo tries to get back in Bo's good graces, Arlo and Bo try to manipulate and control their sons--are its standalone crime stories, the fugitive criminals, reluctant witnesses, and other various scraps that Raylan stumbles into (frankly, given the Marshals Service's not-too-sexy purview of witness protection, prisoner transport, and court security it's impressive that the show's writers have managed to find so many exciting stories to drop Raylan in).  In both of its aspects, Justified delivers a lot of talking and a lot of shooting, both of which it handles admirably.  The standalone episodes are less crime stories as they are windows into the lives of the people perpetrating those crimes, and it's through their eloquence that we get to know these characters not as criminal masterminds or black-hearted villains but as people who are often short-sighted and dim-witted (a comment I encountered today about the show called it a catalog of human folly, which sounds about right) but who have more facets to their personality than their criminal one.

Raylan functions as a witness to these characters' stories.  With a quiet, unruffled demeanor, bemused but not judgmental, he lets them tell their stories and tries to give them as much of an out from the predicament they've landed themselves in as he can.  This is not what the series pilot leads us to expect, from either the character or the show.  The pilot (based on a short story by Elmore Leonard, who created the Givens character and featured him in two novels, though the series apparently retools him quite considerably) introduces Raylan as a maverick, a cowboy cop who plays by his own rules and his own sense of justice.  The man he kills in the opening scene, we learn, viciously murdered an innocent bystander in front of Raylan, and as he admits to Winona in the pilot's closing minutes, he doesn't know what he would have done if the man hadn't drawn his gun--would he have killed him anyway?  These scenes create the expectation of a Southern-set Life on Mars, with Raylan playing the Gene Hunt role and rebelling against a too-polite, too-impersonal notion of justice that leaves out the traditional Western-derived values of right and wrong.  Certainly the season's early episodes, in which Raylan's affectation of a cowboy hat and his Old West-inspired demeanor are constantly commented upon (most notably in a scene in which he and a man he suspects of wrongdoing discuss the mechanics of the quick-draw), sometimes in admiration but more often in dismay, suggest a character who is not simply a fish out of water but out of time, a throwback to a bygone and perhaps mythical era.

So it's a surprise when Raylan turns out to be a thoroughly modern policeman, comfortable with the tools that technology and bureaucracy provide him (as opposed to Bradley Whitford's Gene Hunt-esque character in the new cop comedy The Good Guys, a 50ish man who complains that in his day he didn't have all these newfangled forensics tests and computers) and unruffled by the PC craze that prohibits him from planting evidence or beating up suspects.  Partly this is because the show's writers have rethought the character since the season started--as they say in the link above, they've started downplaying the hat and all that it implies.  But it's also a way of subtly distinguishing between Raylan's notions of how to use violence and those of the people around him.  Raylan is a fearsome shot--so many of the season's episodes end with him coolly surveying the prone figures of his opponents and calmly calling for an ambulance that the season finale seems to be poking fun at itself when it shows him making the call, then pausing and asking for a coroner's van as well--but seems to lack any sort of bluster or bravado.  In a mid-season episode he's assigned to guard a judge, known for his harsh sentences and for wearing a gun under his robes, who has been receiving death threats.  It turns out that the judge asked for Raylan especially because of the incident in Miami, which leads him to believe that he and Raylan are birds of a feather, fellow travelers on a crusade to rid the world of evildoers by any means necessary and with no remorse.  You can see Raylan's distaste at being thought the equal of this overzealous person, and when he talks the judge's attacker down rather than kill him, the judge, who has finally had a taste of violence, thanks Raylan for stopping him from killing.  Nor does the show balk at emasculating Raylan--when he calls out a pair of loud drunks at a bar, we expect him to deliver an ass-kicking.  Instead the two men not only trounce him but steal his hat (the absence of which is, hilariously, commented upon by every character he meets for the rest of the episode).  Instead of coming back for revenge, Raylan apologizes nicely and asks for his hat back.

Of course, another way of looking at this is that Raylan's even temper (for all that the pilot concludes with Winona telling Raylan that he's the angriest man she knows, there's precious little evidence of this in the series) and measured approach to violence are actually an amplification of his role as Justified's Western-style lawman.  The man in the white hat knows how to use violence but will only do so when it's absolutely necessary, and he is the only one who can infallibly distinguish between necessary and unnecessary violence.  It's a bit amusing that I should have picked up Justified in the same TV season in which I became a fan of The Good Wife, because if that series is an examination of different ways of being a woman, Justified often seems to be concerned with the construction of masculinity, particularly among working class men.  Raylan is the prime example, but name a (white) TV character actor from the top two or three tiers and they'll have shown up on this show at some point in the season to give their take on how to be a man.

The white supremacist dogma that Boyd spouts at Raylan is rife with slogans about reclaiming America for (white) Americans, but it's also a way for men who feel that the world has gotten away from them to reclaim their manhood.  When Raylan lambastes Arlo for his criminal career, his father angrily retorts that "You'd have rather seen me down in the mines my whole life, dead of black-lung like my old man," suggesting that for men of his class and background, masculinity comes down to a choice between a hard, poverty-stricken honest life and the 21st century stereotype of the Southerner as a hard-drinking, meth-cooking redneck.  Characters who are not from a working class background, meanwhile, run the gamut between living uneasily with new-style masculinity and playing gender expectations like a fiddle.  A witness that Raylan lost several years ago worked as a mob accountant and has since retrained as a dentist, but with both Raylan and his former employers on his trail he finds his inner Capable Man--capable of both outwitting his pursuers and committing murder--but ends up carrying this newfound badassness to its logical conclusion of sacrificing his life to save his girlfriend.  The state's attorney Raylan deals with plays the beta male to Raylan's alpha to the hilt, deferring to his judgment in emergent situations and privately expressing sympathy for the shooting in Miami, but he turns on a dime, using the same deference and friendliness to put Raylan at his ease, and then on the spot, when questioning him about another dubious shooting.  When Winona's husband Gary finds himself in trouble with gray market moneylenders he turns to a friend, a former footballer now living in luxurious retirement, to play the heavy with his creditors.  The friend, eager to recapture his past glory, quickly agrees, but when he returns home to decant a bottle of wine and prepare a gourmet meal for his family, the real tough guys are waiting for him.  Most interesting is Gary himself, who Winona defends to Raylan in that same episode as a man with vision and dreams.  This seems like a paltry defense in an episode that up until that point has portrayed Gary as foolish and even craven, but when Raylan catches up with him Gary tells him about the shopping area he was going to develop on the land he bought with the borrowed money, and something wonderful happens--the project sounds genuinely inspiring, the sort of place you'd like to be able to visit in your own town, and Winona's reasons for choosing Gary suddenly become clear (which makes it all the more disappointing when at the end of the season she out of the blue separates from him and starts pursuing Raylan).

(Of course, between its setting and this emphasis on masculinity one can't help but eye the show suspiciously when it comes to women, and that suspicion is sadly repaid.  With almost no exception women, both recurring and regular characters, are portrayed as driven by the men in their lives and making choices based on their relationships with men.  One-off criminal characters are almost invariably brought into the crime by the men in their life, and on two separate occasions they betray one lover to another, realize that the first lover will be killed because of their actions, and help Raylan in order to save him.  On the main cast, Raylan has a female colleague who is also black and who in a mid-season episode complains that he gains professional status by playing on the cowboy image that is unavailable to her because of her race and gender.  He dismisses that concern, which is very nearly the last we see or hear of this character for the rest of the season--one senses that the writers knew that they needed a professional women on the cast but had no idea what to do with her.  Raylan's stepmother has tolerated and even enabled Arlo's criminal activities for years, not because of greed or criminal tendencies on her own part but because she loves him.  Winona I've already spoken about, but Raylan's other love interest over the course of the season is Ava, who had the potential to be a very interesting character.  In the pilot episode Ava kills her abusive husband, which causes not an eyelash to bat as everyone agrees that he was a bastard who needed killing, and the state's attorney quickly makes her a deal for a suspended sentence.  But--and I say this with a full awareness of what a delicate subject this is and in the hopes of not sticking my foot too deep down my throat--Ava does not seem at all like the sort of woman for whom the battered wife defense was created.  She is spirited, independent-minded, and furious in her own defense and in the defense of others.  It's hard not to conclude that rather than being so emotionally tormented and so terrified for her life that the only recourse for Ava was to kill her husband, she simply had enough and killed him out of anger and wounded pride.  So it might be said that Ava embodies the concept of Old West justice much more powerfully than Raylan does, and much could have been done with this point.  Alas, she spends most of the season pursuing Raylan, and even gets kidnapped twice by people who want to get his attention.  It's possible to enjoy Justified despite its troubling treatment of its female characters because, like the men, these women are so vividly and vibrantly brought to life, but one almost wishes that the show's writers had given up on writing women entirely if they couldn't come up with more varied roles and motivations for them.)

Justified pokes and prods at its characters' concept of masculinity, but it leaves Raylan's alone.  This has the unfortunate consequence of suggesting that Raylan's is the true masculinity, the one to which all other men can merely aspire--unfortunate because Raylan's version of manhood is so very tenuous, based on a fictional construct probably garnered from TV shows, rooted in a culture a hundred years gone to which he has no personal connection (I don't know if they have cowboys in Kentucky, which is not a Western state, but they probably don't have them in mining towns), and quite obviously arrived at due to his burning desire to leave Kentucky and Arlo Givens in his rearview mirror. As I've said, Raylan often acts as the silent witness to other men's struggles with their manhood, only coming out of his shell when the season's overarching plot, involving the Crowders and his father, heats up.  It's only in these scenes that we see Raylan's polite exterior crack, and only in his interactions with Arlo that he comes close to earning Winona's characterization of his as the angriest man she's known.  But it's also in these scenes that the cowboy persona is most tamped down, so that the question of Raylan's anger and his relationship to violence is never really addressed.  The result is to make both the character and the series feel more than a little centerless, and the conclusion of the Crowder-Givens arc, which is essentially an hour-long shoot-'em-up, has much the same effect.  It feels like the endings to the season's standalone episodes writ large--a chance for Raylan to show off his cool head, quick draw, and superior marksmanship skills, and for the rest of the cast to show off their folly.  None of this is badly done, of course, but given the season-long buildup to the confrontation between fathers and sons, former friends and former enemies, one would have expected a bit more.

It's hard not to wonder whether Justified can't simply be summed up as a show with a lot of talking and a lot of shooting, both very well done.  Or, to put it another way, whether it isn't a series with more style than substance, whose writers are more successful at writing perfectly-crafted, quirky one-off characters for Raylan to smile indulgently at for a single scene or episode than they are at constructing a season-long arc.  That's not a bad thing, of course, and there's a lot that Justified does, and does well, that is all too rare on our screens--the fact that it is set in the rural South, that it depicts working class characters, that it's giving work, and good, meaty work at that, to so many character actors, that its writers know what pleasure can be wrought out of a story that lingers on the humanity of even its most incidental characters, and of course, that very eloquence that won me over.  But there's is constantly a sense that the series could do more--with Raylan, with the women in his life, with his notions of what a man is.  As I said at the beginning of this post, eloquence is a good way to win me over, but to truly win my heart you have to have something to say with all those pretty words.  Here's hoping that Justified finds it.

A Real New Coat of Paint

No sooner do I wish for more variety in Blogger's available templates than they create a new tool to do just that and stock it with quite a few fancy-looking options.  The result of my tinkering is before you, which for me is a feeling not unlike the experience of leaving the hairdresser's five minutes after getting a shorter-than-you-expected cut.  Good?  Bad?  Somewhere in between?

With Both Feet in the Clouds: Fantasy in Hebrew Literature, edited by Hagar Yanai and Danielle Gurevitch

This isn't something that I think about very often, but I live half my life in a foreign language.  It's the language I'm writing in right now.  My actual, physical life, is lived in Hebrew.  It's the language I work in, the one I shop and bank and commute in, the one I use with friends and acquaintances and people on the street.  But it's not the language I write in, because it's not the language I read in.  I'm not sure when exactly it happened, but somewhere around the point that I transitioned from children's books to adult fiction, I stopped reading Israeli writers, for reasons that I suspect will be familiar to many Israeli genre fans--because the books that caught my fancy, the Asimovs and Tolkiens and Pratchetts, were foreign.  Unlike many of my fellow fans, I had the command of English that allowed me, eventually, to read free of the mediation of Israeli translators and publishers.  So from a very early age I learned to gravitate to the English section of the bookstore, and when my literary horizons broadened beyond genre, that's where I looked for reading material to scratch my new itches (and then online bookselling happened and I all but abandoned the Israeli bookstore).  These days my tastes are varied enough that if I had the proper introduction I could probably read quite happily in Hebrew, but the reason I stepped away from it in the first place was that no one was writing genre in it.  That's changed somewhat in the last 15 years (right around the time that I was discovering English-language fantasy and science fiction), but Israeli genre works are still thin on the ground.

The question, of course, is why, and it's one that Hagar Yanai and Danielle Gurevitch have tried to address in their essay collection With Both Feet in the Clouds, from the Israeli genre publisher Graff.  As Yanai puts it in her introduction, how is it possible that in a country that garnered the inspiration for its very existence from a piece of utopian science fiction, the fantastic has been all but exiled from the cultural scene?  This is a question I'd been thinking of in slightly different terms since the Jewish fantasy conversation exploded all over the internet this winter, spurred on by Michael Weingrad's essay "Why There is No Jewish Narnia" (in which Yanai, who has written two volumes of a YA fantasy trilogy, is one of two authors discussed).  My interest was in the Israeli aspect of the question, and when I became involved with content planning for this year's ICon convention it was the first topic that came to mind.  Which is when I was made aware of Yanai and Gurevitch's book, which Rani Graff was kind enough to send me a copy of. 

With Both Feet in the Clouds is geared, as its editors and publishers freely admit, at the non-fan, mainstream-reading Israeli audience, and frequently functions as a work of advocacy.  Look, its essayists seem to be saying, this is fantasy!  And this too!  To this end the book opens with two essays that seek to define the genre.  One, by Gurevitch, is academic and taxonomic (and flies the colors of that camp of genre scholarship that sees science fiction as a subset of fantasy), while the other, by translator Emmanuel Lotem (best known for translating The Lord of the Rings and other Tolkien works), is fannish and offers a more traditional definition of the genre, dividing it into the secondary world and urban types.  A reader with some background in genre scholarship will find both essays a bit thin, but they are followed by one of the best pieces in the collection, Gail Hareven's "Thinking About the Unthinkable" (all translations of titles and texts in this post are my own).  Hareven, winner of Israel's premier literary prize for her 2002 novel The Confessions of Noa Weber, is also the author of the science fiction collection The Way to Heaven (a story from that collection, "The Slows," was translated and reprinted in The New Yorker last year).  In a wry, energetic essay, Hareven considers the absurdity of a literary establishment that casts out the unthinkable in a country where the unthinkable happens so very often.  It's not simply, she argues, that the fantastic is rejected from Israeli literature in favor of reality, but that that reality is so carefully, narrowly mundane: "Most Israeli authors--though certainly not all of them--focus on the domestic scene, and even when they depart it they tend to tread lightly, crafting plots that move safely between the kiosk and the army base, between a "psychological problem" and an easily solved "dilemma." ... I do not know of a single Israeli author who would dare to inflict, as T.C. Boyle does in The Tortilla Curtain, a car accident, a robbery, a rape, a fire and an earthquake on their characters".

Hareven's persuasive answer to the question of Israeli literature's aversion to the fantastic and even the melodramatic is that rather than be amazed that the country that was inspired by Altneuland has failed to produce new flights of fancy, we should be looking to that book for the reasons for our stolidness.  Israelis, she argues, are still (or were, until the last couple of decades) in the process of bringing Theodore Hertzel's vision to life, and while that real life worldbuilding effort is ongoing it is both difficult and potentially dangerous to immerse ourselves in the building of a fantasy world.  "To dedicate himself to a task that seems 'unrealistic,' a person must believe that he himself is 'realistic.'  He must assume that he understands reality and the ways in which it works"--fantasy, in other words, is the privilege of those whose reality is solid and secure, while the retreat to the quotidian and predictable in fiction is a defense mechanism employed by those whose real lives are lived on shifting sands.

After these introductory essays, With Both Feet in the Clouds dedicates a chapter to instances of the fantastic in contemporary Israeli culture.  It's here that the collection makes its most damaging blunder, already commented on by several Israeli reviewers, of ignoring the halting but undeniable emergence of fantastic Israeli literature in the last 15 years.  The absurdist novels of Orly Castel-Bloom, for example, are mentioned in asides in several of the articles in the collection, but no single piece is dedicated to them.  Etgar Keret, Shimon Adaf, and others who have been introducing fantastic elements into the Israeli literary fiction scene for years are hardly even mentioned, and neither are instances of more traditional genre writing in Hebrew (such as Yanai's own novels).  In online conversations with their critics, Graff and Yanai have explained this absence not as an oversight but as a conscious decision, made to prevent scaring off mainstream readers who have learned to associate Keret, Castel-Bloom, and their ilk with a strange and incomprehensible mode of fiction.  That's a defensible choice, but also an unfortunate one, as many of the articles deemed non-threatening enough for inclusion in this chapter are also unpersuasive.

Menachem Ben's "The Messiah Won't Stop Calling--Fantastic Poetry in Hebrew" breathlessly makes its way through nearly a century of Israeli poetry, with stops for luminaries such as Nathan Alterman, David Avidan, and Yona Wallach among others, but his argument seems to be that any instance of metaphor and poetic imagery counts as fantasy.  In contrast, there is no question that the children's novels of Nurit Zarchi, covered in Noa Manheim's "The Grand Witch of Dreams," are fantastic, but looking for instances of the fantastic in the children's section of the bookstore feels like reaching for low-hanging fruit.  Far better is Mirit Ben Israel's "Fantasy and Science Fiction in David Grossman's The Book of Intimate Grammar," a close reading of the novel whose protagonist, a preteen in early 60s Jerusalem, tries to gain control of his changing body by inventing scientific experiments and magical rituals meant to halt its growth, and imagines an interior world into which he can disappear when these fail, leaving behind his now-adult husk.  Ben Israel does a good job of selling me on the book, but is less successful at arguing that it constitutes a work of fantasy or science fiction.  Her descriptions remind me of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, another novel whose protagonist tries to control their world by inventing rituals and creating totems, and one that I would never have thought to call a fantasy because Jackson makes it clear--as Grossman apparently does--that these are the manifestations of the character's mental instability.

It's probably telling that the most convincing article about literature in this section, Yanai's own "The Demons Who Didn't Make Aliyah: Thoughts on the Fate of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Hebrew Literature" discusses an author who, as the title notes, made the conscious choice not to become an Israeli, and concludes that this choice was necessary for his literary success.  Yanai discusses Bashevis Singer's fiction but also wonders what would have happened to him had he chosen a life in Israel, concluding that his brilliant literary career, which culminated with the Nobel prize, could never have occurred in an environment that was not only hostile to the Yiddish that Bashevis Singer wrote in, but which couldn't tolerate the type of fantasy he wrote, in which characters are at the mercy of supernatural powers beyond their understanding or control.

Passivity very nearly led to the destruction of the Jewish people in the Holocaust, and it is therefore destructive, dangerous, and not to be permitted in Israel.  In a literary context, it seems that one could argue that an excess of imagination leads to helplessness, as with Don Quixote. ... Bashevis's characters are buffeted by the external forces of fate and history and the internal forces of lacerating passions.  At best they can choose how to meet their fates, but choosing, shaping, or steering that fate is beyond them.  This dangerously passive approach could not be reconciled with the effort to create a new Jewish state in Israel.

Happily, the section on contemporary Israeli fantasy also includes two articles about non-literary media, both of which present a much more optimistic outlook than the articles about literature.  Film reviewer Shmuel Duvdevani is somewhat ill-served by the placement of his essay, "Magical Realism in Israeli Cinema," right after Hareven's piece, in which she pointedly argues that fantasy is permitted in Israeli culture only if it serves an elevated purpose--"Fantasy should have a moral; it should have some correlation to 'the fiery reality of our lives'; it should examine some degraded national symbol and generally, in the words of Gogol, be 'of use to the state.'"  Duvdevani's choice to take precisely this approach--he argues that magical realist elements in Israeli cinema are a means of undermining the dominant, moneyed, Tel Aviv-dwelling Ashkenazi class--thus seems a bit like self-parody (it is also a little over-argued).  But he supports this approach with close readings of the films he's chosen to focus on--Sh'Chur (1994), The Flying Camel (1994), The Appointed (1990), Forbidden Love (1997), New Land (1994), Saint Clara (1995), and Life According to Agfa (1992)--which use fantastic elements to discuss the Israeli establishment's fraught relationships with Sepharadic Jews, Palestinians, the ultra-orthodox, and immigrants, along the way creating a portrait of the Israeli film scene as vibrant and multifaceted.  It is a shame, however, that the essay includes almost no discussion of the films of the aughts, a decade in which Israeli cinema is widely considered to have come of age.

Another excellent essay comes from theater reviewer Eitan Bar Yosef.  In "Dybbuk, Husband, House: Shmuel Hasfari and the Fantastic Tradition in Israeli Theater," Bar Yosef gives an overview of Hasfari's deliberately fantastic plays, which include such elements as Moses traveling in time to the present day ultra-orthodox neighborhood of Mea She'arim, the devil bringing about the apocalypse while camped out with messianic settlers, and angels who crash an Israeli family's Passover seder (Hasfari, who also directed the Israeli production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America at the Cameri theater in 1993, describes his shock at discovering that another playwright had "already developed the style I was thinking of, with the same universal Jewish associations").  It's a window to a world of Israeli letters that I'm entirely unfamiliar with, and made me very eager to discover Hasfari's work for myself.

In its third section, With Both Feet in the Clouds discusses cross-pollination of fantastic elements between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures.  Gurevitch, for example, in "The Kingdom of David in the Arthurian Legends," suggests that Geoffrey of Monmouth and Robert de Boron, the earliest known compilers of the Arthurian legends, consciously modeled the image of the once and future king on that of the Biblical David: "a military leader, a wise strategist who doesn't act alone but is accompanied by a respected religious authority figure, a determined, decisive but charismatic king who can deliver fair judgments, victory on the field of battle, peace and security, and most of all, who can unite a divided people into a single, strong nation."  It's a convincing theory on the macro level, though Gurevitch's evidence on the micro level often seems a bit strained.  Hananel Mack stretches the point a little in "The Christian Use of Jewish Fantasy" when he describes the co-opting of Rabbi Moshe Hadarshan's messianic writings by the 13th century priest Raymondus Martini for his work Pugio Fidei (the dagger of faith), as it seems clear that Hadarshan was writing theology, not fantasy (in general there is a tendency in With Both Feet in the Clouds to conflate the two) and that he was simply a messianic Jew.  Happily, this segment also includes Ilana Gomel's "The Alien With the Yellow Star of David" and Yael Sela-Shapiro's "Fantasy--It Sounds Better in English?", two of the best pieces in the collection.

Gomel, who emigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union, delivers a fascinating and all-too-brief history of Jews in Communist Russia and their transition over the second half of the 20th century from the heart of the revolution to its discard pile, and interweaves it with a discussion of the science fiction novels of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky--which, she argues, deliberately reflected the Soviet Jew's dilemma, their growing realization that they were different but that, having lost much of their cultural heritage, had no idea what that difference entailed.  Gomel describes the Soviet establishment's efforts to remove Jews from public and professional life by establishing ethnic quotas, and to erase their part in history (the memorial at the site of the Nazi massacre at Babi Yar describes the victims as 'Soviet citizens,' not Jews), and she describes Soviet Jews' conflicting feelings of superiority over the unwashed, uneducated masses and inferiority before the state's persecution of them.  All of which, she argues, is reflected in the Strugatsky brothers' novels, who provided Soviet Jews with an outlet for their frustrations and a consoling fantasy of their intellectual superiority triumphing over the maliciousness of their persecutors.  Just about the only thing wrong with this article is that I would have liked it to be twice as long.

Sela-Shapiro, a translator who has rendered Pullman's His Dark Materials and Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire into Hebrew, discusses the difficulty of translating fantasy, and particularly the Tolkienian, medieval-set variety, into Hebrew, a difficulty rooted not only in the absence of a shared linguistic and cultural heritage, but in Hebrew's unique status as a revived language.

During its long period of dormancy Hebrew was used primarily for ritual purposes and as a Lingua Franca between Jewish communities in different countries, while the day-to-day lives of these communities were lived in their local language.  As a result, the development of the Hebrew language skipped over nearly every historical, social, cultural and technological advance made during this period, and no new words were invented to describe these advances.  The revivers of the Hebrew language invented and repurposed thousands of words, but their limited resources were dedicated to adapting Hebrew for the modern world.  What is the point, they may have asked themselves, of inventing appropriate Hebrew analogues for obsolete terms when contemporary ones remain untranslated?  As a result, the terms introduced into modern Hebrew were those relevant for the 19th century and onwards.

The difficulty of translating fantasy into Hebrew, Sela-Shapiro goes on to explain, is rooted in 'semantic voids'--cultural and environmental concepts for which there exists no analogue in Hebrew, such as types of weapons (arquebus, stiletto), gradations of social class (manservant, lady in waiting), and fantastic creatures (daemon, harpy).  She goes on to describe some of the techniques used by herself and other translators to nevertheless produce an accurate and satisfying translation, which include commissioning new translations of poetry (the existing translation of Paradise Lost, a line from which is used as an epigraph for Philip Pullman's books, translates the phrase 'his dark materials' into the singular), and, in one of my favorite examples, substituting Jewish cultural references for European ones, so that Harry Potter's Wizengamot becomes the magical Sanhedrin.

In its final section, With Both Feet in the Clouds discusses instances of the fantastic in Jewish history and tradition.  Some of these articles needed quite a bit more editing.  Ruth Kalderon's "The Cave," a comparison of two versions of the story of Honi HaMeagel, an important figure in Jewish myth, is somewhat too focused on academic minutiae, and doesn't do enough to invite lay readers into the topic.  Dov Schwartz's "Notes on the Limitations of Messianic Imagination in Jewish Thought," which discusses theological hair-splitting between different messianic thinkers in the time of the Rambam (who was deeply opposed to, and tried to stamp out, messianic fervor), feels like too deep a discussion of too trivial a topic (the central question seems to be whether, after the coming of the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead, there will be eating and drinking), and once again seems to conflate theology with fantasy.  Hagay Dagan and Anat Aderet offer two too-short pieces, the former on the tale of Rabbi Yosef Dela Rena, a Kabbalist who decides to bring about the salvation of the Jewish people by taking the devil head-on (in a rather unpersuasive parallel, Dagan calls Dela Rena a "Jewish Frodo Baggins").  Aderet offers a much more interesting report on a 17th century Yiddish travel narrative describing a trip to the holy land, concluding with a fantastic description of the traveler encountering the ten lost tribes of Israel, and finding them living in peace, prosperity, and most importantly, self-rule (making the narrative a sort of proto-Altneuland).  As Aderet says, "it is plain that [the author]'s visit created a nearly irreconcilable gap between the reality he encountered and the image of the holy land embedded in the collective consciousness of his readers in the diaspora," hence the resort to fantasy.  It's an interesting corner of history, but Aderet does little more than mention its existence.

Happily, Ido Peretz's "Ghost Stories in the Medieval Jewish Folktale, an Examination of Two Story Collections: Sefer Hasidim and Shivchei HaAri" is both interesting and suitably comprehensive, reproducing several stories from each collection--the former a 13th century work of moral instruction whose stories seek to encourage correct behavior in all walks of life, the latter a work of hagiography in praise of Rabbi Isaac Luria, who founded his own stream of Kabbala--while comparing the different treatment of ghosts in both stories, and the different uses to which the two collections put their ghostly characters.  In Sefer Hasidim, the ghost stories are cautionary tales.  They describe how Jews who failed to show proper reverence and humility in life are punished in the afterlife--a woman who hurried out of prayer while others lingered in the synagogue is constantly harried after her death; another woman who would weave linen instead of preparing for the Sabbath is afflicted with burning linen--while those who were devout are rewarded--a man who sang his prayers particularly beautifully is granted an eternal reward.  In Shivchei HaAri, meanwhile, the purpose of the stories is to extol the Kabbalist, and they therefore describe him saving Jews from damnation (a butcher who accidentally served treif meat to the congregation is reincarnated in a goat, and his kosher slaughter secures him his rest) or condemning them to it (an evil tax collector begs the Rabbi, in the form of a raven, to help him, but Luria sends him away). 

It is inevitable that a collection like With Both Feet in the Clouds will have its high points and low points, but with the exception of the flaws I've already pointed out--the absence of any discussion of modern Israeli fantasy, and the tendency to conflate theology with fantasy--Yanai and Gurevitch have produced a fascinating collection of essays.  Though there is room for expansion, both in individual essays and in the book's overall scope, this is only to highlight the necessity of such a work, which casts a light on instances of the fantastic in Jewish tradition that the modern Israeli reader might not be aware of, and tries to puzzle out the reasons for Israeli culture's weakening but still-present antipathy towards the fantastic.  I don't know whether an English translation of With Both Feet in the Clouds is likely (and if it is, I hope that is is of a revised edition that includes a discussion of the missing modern Israeli fantasists), but I hope that I've done a good job of summarizing it for English readers, and maybe whetting their appetites for it.

The 2010 Hugo Awards: The Novelette Shortlist

Yet another reason that this year's Hugo shortlist reviews are going to be on the brief side: my thoughts about this year's novelette shortlist are almost exactly what they were last year.  To wit, that one of the worst consequences of taking one's Hugo nominating duties seriously enough to read through a substantial portion of the year's genre short fiction output is that it becomes a lot harder to enjoy the novelette ballot, which is usually the highlight of my award-reading season.  Though this year's ballot is, as usual, much stronger than the one for short story and in fact contains two of my favorite stories of the year, it's hard not to be upset at the presence of stories I liked well enough, or didn't like at all, instead of the ones I loved.  In previous years, I always looked forward to reading the novelette ballot, certain that the stories on it would surprise and delight me.  This year and last, the good stories on the ballot had already surprised me months earlier, while the stories (story, actually) I hadn't read turned out to be only pleasant.

I'm not sure whether Charles Stross's "Overtime" left me so cold because I'm not a big fan of his writing, or because it's a comedy about subjects--Christmas and the British civil service--that don't resonate with me.  Probably a little of both.  "Overtime" is one of Stross's Laundry stories, which take place in "that part of Her Majesty’s government that deals with occult technologies and threats," and is narrated, as were the other stories I've read in this sequence, by Bob, a junior-but-rising member of its bureaucracy.  Bob has drawn the short straw for the Christmas holiday, and has to remain on duty during the long weekend in case some Earth-shattering catastrophe should occur.  He's just settling in for four days of reading and playing computer games at triple pay when, of course, an eldritch monster from the beyond interrupts him.  What little plot there is is in thrall to the story's Christmas theme--I'll give you three guesses who the monster of the week pretends to be, and the first two don't count--so the appeal of "Overtime" is presumably rooted in Stross's juxtaposition of bureaucratic obtuseness, office politics, and workplace culture with Lovecraftian horror.  It's a rich seam that better comic fantasists like Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams have mined for material funny enough to cross the cultural divide separating me from much of the experiences described here (the tradition of the Christmas party, for example), but Stross's jokes are leaden--"when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn’t a C++ programmer.)"--and his attempts to inject horror and urgency into the story are crushed by its jokiness.  "Overtime" comes off like a bit of seasonal fluff, a Christmas gift for the fans, and it's a bit sad to see in on the Hugo ballot in June--though given that this is the same fandom that keeps nominating and even awarding Connie Willis's Christmas stories, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.

Like "Overtime," Paul Cornell's "One of Our Bastards is Missing" (PDF) is part of a series, following up on "Catherine Drewe," from Fast Forward 2.  The two stories take place in an alternate universe in which post-singularity technology has been developed in a feudal, vaguely 19th century setting.  The protagonist of both is Jonathan Hamilton, a soldier who also moonlights as bodyguard, assassin, and spy, and whom Cornell has quite obviously envisioned as a sort of Great Game-era James Bond.  I first read "Bastards"--in which Hamilton, working as part of the British crown princess's security detail, starts an investigation when a foreign diplomat disappears into thin air from the princess's engagement party--before reading "Drewe," and was sure that I was missing details provided by the previous story.  It's an enjoyable piece--more for the details of the alternate universe, which include space-folding technology whose uses are as mundane as corsets and as sinister as secret hideouts for kidnappers, and a very rigid and stratified social structure against which Hamilton, who is in love with the princess, struggles not to rebel, than for the plot, which is actually pretty simple once you get a sense of where the story is happening and what the rules of the world are.  But there was clearly a lot of missing information--the full nature of the entanglement between Hamilton and the princess, a cryptic comment made to him by a priest.  It turns out that "Catherine Drewe" doesn't answer any of these questions, and Cornell's comment on his website that he hasn't yet revealed the jonbar point between the Hamilton universe and ours but will in an upcoming story confirms me in my feeling that these are pieces that will make a lot more sense, and have a lot more weight, as a fix up novel than as individual works.  It's hard, therefore, to know just how to rate "One of Our Bastards is Missing."  It suggests a lot of potentially interesting avenues of story, but doesn't go down any of them.

Rachel Swirsky's "Eros, Philia, Agape," and Eugie Foster's "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" are both stories that have gotten a lot of critical attention and praise (Foster has already won the Nebula award for her story), and have both generated lively discussion.  They also both leave me a little cold.  "Eros, Philia, Agape" is well-written (though for my money not as nicely done a story as Swirsky's other Tor.com publication from 2009, "A Memory of Wind") but also somewhat on the unexciting side.  It tells the story of Lucian, an android purchased by the rich and damaged Adriana to be her lover and companion.  After his personality has molded itself to suit hers and to love her, Adriana decides that she wants a free partner.  She marries Lucian and gives him the freedom of his personality-editing capabilities as a wedding present, after which they also adopt a child.  As the years pass Lucian has a growing sense of how much of himself is defined by Adriana's needs and desires, and decides to exercise his freedom.  My ambivalence towards "Eros, Philia, Agape" is probably rooted in the fact that its every plot twist feels obvious and foreordained--in one sense, literally, as the story begins by telling us that Lucian leaves his family and then flashes back to its beginning, but also by hammering in Adriana's blinkered self-centeredness and Lucian's emotional dependence on her (for example, the slightly trite parallel drawn between Lucian and Adriana's pet bird, who believes himself to be her mate, and is heartbroken, and later dies of his grief, when she replaces him with Lucian).  The only part of the story that doesn't feel signposted is Lucian's decision to not only leave Adriana but leave humanity entirely and learn what it means to be a robot.  It's an interesting idea, but nowhere near sufficiently set up.  The result is a story that feels stately, like a dance with carefully laid out steps, but that is nowhere near weighty enough in its subject or central ideas to justify that stateliness.

The Foster story is an entirely different matter.  It is anything but stately or predictable, and may feature one of the most inventive fantasy premises I've encountered in some time.  In the story's world, people literally wear their personalities in masks, choosing a new one every morning that determines who they are and what story they will be playing out.  It's a richly, vividly described story, which seems appropriate for one in which personality is determined by props.  The protagonist gets a peek behind the curtain when they're invited to be the consort of the day to their queen, and even more so later when an unmasked woman teaches them about the history of their way of life.  "Sinner, Baker" is one of those stories that are remarkable more for their worldbuilding and its inventive central concept than for anything that happens in them.  The second half of the story, in which the protagonist learns the truth about the origins and purpose of masks, is a little underwhelming, following too closely in the footsteps of other stories about rebellion in restrictive, closely-regimented societies.  The unexpected twist ending saves the story a little, though at the same time it also feels unearned--it's meant to be a revelation of who the protagonist is without their mask, but up until that point they are such a blank, reactive character that their sudden emergence into brutal action isn't really believable.  Much as I admire the flight of imagination that drives "Sinner, Baker," and Foster's evocative writing, I can't help but wish that the story had a bit more substance to it.

One of the reasons that I was underwhelmed by Swirsky's "Eros, Philia, Agape" is that I read it after reading Nicola Griffith's "It Takes Two," (PDF) which touches on many of the same subjects in a way that is, to my mind, much more exciting and thought-provoking.  Like the Swirsky story, "It Takes Two" deals with the artificial creation of emotional attachment, with the protagonist, Cody, hacking her own brain and paying to have the brain of a stripper named Susanna similarly hacked so that they can fall in love at first sight.  As I wrote in my 2009 short fiction roundup in Strange Horizons, the story's premise doesn't quite work, particularly Cody's motivation of wanting to seem like one of the guys when a prospective client takes her to a strip club.

Even leaving aside just how convoluted and tenuous a method this is of securing a deal (are there really executives, even Atlanta good ol' boys, who will sign a deal with someone because "I like the way you handle yourself . . . no boasting, no big words, you just sit quiet then seize the opportunity"?) the structure of the story is off: story, story, story, exposition, exposition, exposition, dilemma—as Cody has to decide whether to take what Griffith rather cleverly dubs "RU486 for the brain" and destroy her artificial feelings for Susanna, or embrace them.

Why then, do I still think that "It Takes Two" is a brilliant story? Because it is just so damnably creepy. We all know, even if we don't like to be reminded of it, that even the loftiest of emotions are chemical fluctuations in our brains, and that those chemicals can and are being manipulated on various levels and with various degrees of finesse. What makes "It Takes Two" disturbing is not so much that it adds love to the list of reactions that can be externally, medically controlled, but that it takes the obvious next step of assuming that once that ability is achieved it will be commodified, that the next step in prostitution will be whores who really do mean it when they say "you're special, I wouldn't do this with anyone but you" (in that sense "It Takes Two" covers much of the same ground as Joss Whedon's recently cancelled Dollhouse). "It Takes Two" doesn't shy away from the fact that Susanna has sold herself in the most profound way possible, and that Cody has bought her, but at the same time it encourages us to root for a romantic ending. The resulting tension between romance and revulsion is what makes the story, what makes it possible to ignore the problems in its premise and structure, and what makes its ending simultaneously satisfying and horrifying.

Peter Watts's "The Island" (scroll to chapter 2) feels almost like the odd story out on this shortlist.  It isn't the only piece of science fiction on the ballot, but it is the only space-set, hard SF story on it, and it feels almost quaint besides Swirsky's semi-allegorical future or Cornell's steampunkish one.  The premise, as I wrote in my post about 2009's best short stories, is a familiar one: road crew discovers that they are about to pave over a rare lifeform.  In this case, the road crew is on a spaceship that left Earth hundreds of years ago to seed the galaxy with hyperspace gates.  Watts does a great job of making us feel, through the voice of the narrator, Sunday, the disaffection and ennui that this kind of life breeds--long stretches of cryosleep punctuated by brief builds, short, low-maintenance relationships with people who may not be awake or even alive the next time you're defrosted, and most of all a sense of disconnection from humanity, which has changed and evolved in the years that Sunday has spent frozen.  Complicating that is the fact that the ship's crew are engaged in a centuries-long cold war with its semi-deranged AI, who resents their unwillingness to conform to its rigid protocols, and has set about creating a second generation of engineers under its thrall.  Into this messed up dynamic comes the titular island, which Sunday believes is an intelligent alien life form but which the AI insists is just a piece of space junk.  A lot of the pleasure of this story comes from watching Sunday learn about the alien, trying to communicate with it and demonstrate its intelligence, in the process waking up from her emotional stupor, becoming, for probably the first time in her life, an explorer rather than a glorified road-cutter.  Of course, this being a Watts story, a happy ending is not on the cards, though not in the way that one might expect from the story's premise, but rather in one that reinforces the typically Watts-ian ethos that people, be they human, AIs, or weird aliens, are all shits.  Despite this, "The Island" is too exciting and interesting to be a downer story.  The sheer pleasure of learning Sunday's world and discovering the alien with her outweighs the shittiness of that world.

I'd be happy with either Watts or Griffith taking the Hugo, and, despite my ambivalence towards their stories, not deeply saddened by either Swirsky or Foster's victory.  I suspect that the actual winner will come down to either Stross or Watts, with personal associations bolstering both their chances--Stross is a perennial Hugo nominee but an infrequent winner, and Watts has gained a lot of attention and sympathy from genre fandom due to his infuriating tangle with the American immigration and legal system last year.  As I say above, it's hard not to be underwhelmed by a Hugo shortlist when you've already read most of the nominees, but if I set that disappointment aside there is the usual pleasure to be had from this year's novelette ballot, and even more so from the fact that, though I wouldn't have nominated all of the stories on it, there are no pieces here that were an actual chore to read.  That may sound like damning with faint praise, but given how uncommon an event it is when it comes to the short story or novella ballots, I think it's something to be celebrated.

Feminine Wiles: Thoughts on The Good Wife

Looking back at what I've written about The Good Wife this year, it's both surprising and a little embarrassing to see how long it took me to come out as an unabashed fan of this show.  Unlike Community, another of my new favorites which had a so-so pilot and took a few weeks to come into its own, The Good Wife was already firing on all cylinders in its pilot episode.  The problem was in me, and in my difficulty in seeing myself as someone who could become fannish over a lawyer show.  I know I'm not alone in this--many of my friends have expressed shock at their growing affection for the series, and I've even encountered one genuinely resentful response from a fan complaining that their entire internet circle had gone over to a series whose topic they found so completely uninteresting.  But after an entire season in which The Good Wife has often been the TV-watching highlight of my week, it's time to face facts, and ask the more interesting question: why this show and not others?

The fact is that as a lawyer show, The Good Wife is only middling.  The cases of the week are rarely very complicated or interesting, and the writers themselves often seem to share this sentiment, abandoning standalone stories half-told or wrapping them up in a few lines of dialogue (see, for example, the otherwise quite excellent season finale).  But then, most lawyer shows aren't really about lawyers any more than doctor shows are about practicing medicine or cop shows are about protecting and serving.  What these occupations have in common is that they throw their practitioners in the path of many different clients/patients/citizens, each with their own, probably dramatic, story, since most of us don't approach a doctor, lawyer or policeman unless something's gone wrong, and that they are all capable of producing moments of great intensity.  Despite the oft-repeated claim that American TV is obsessed with the workplace, there's really only one series, The Office, that actually describes work as most of us would recognize it.  Most other workplace series simply use that environment to weave together single-serving guest stories with the main characters' ongoing arcs.  Which is exactly what The Good Wife does, so once again, what sets it apart from other lawyer shows?

There are two answers to that question.  The first is that The Good Wife is, quite simply, spectacularly well-written, paying a great deal of care and attention to each of its main and recurring characters (if not, most of the time, to the one-off clients) and featuring sharp dialogue and strong acting (for which we can apparently thank Julianna Margulies's insistence that the show be filmed in New York, making it the go-to destination for moonlighting theater actors who can no longer rely on Law & Order to pay the rent).  The second and more interesting answer is that unlike most workplace series, the overarching stories woven through the client of the week plots aren't primarily concerned with relationships.  Yes, the question of whether Alicia Florrick is going to forgive her philandering, possibly corrupt politician husband Peter, or run off with her old friend and current boss Will, has been central to the show's first season, but even that romantic storyline is inextricable from the story of Peter's legal problems, the still-open question of his corruption, and his political ambitions.  When it comes right down to it The Good Wife is a show about politics, which makes it, I think, the first time this subject has graced the American television screen since The West Wing went off the air four years ago.

This is not to say that The Good Wife is merely Peter's story, to which Alicia provides a window.  Politics extends far beyond Peter's nascent campaign for state's attorney.  As The Good Wife has it, politics is the air that all of the characters are breathing, the water through which they swim.  Politics is the reason that Alicia got a job at Stern, Lockheart & Gardner and the reason she kept it instead of her more productive colleague Cary.  It's the reason that Diane is approached for a position as a judge, and the reason that she's dropped from consideration after helping to expose the corruption of another judge.  It plays a part in every single interaction between defense and prosecution lawyers, and between different law enforcement agencies.  The Good Wife very quickly makes it clear that the division between public and private power in the Chicago it describes is thin and possibly nonexistent, that amassing power and influence in a firm like Lockheart & Gardner can be a means of amassing it in public office, and that having connections to public officials can be a stepping stone in private practice.  As much as it is about politics, then, The Good Wife is about power, and specifically the kind of power that has been, until only a few decades ago and in some places still is, kept out of the hands of women.

What excited me about The Good Wife's pilot even as I scoffed at the possibility of becoming the fan of a lawyer show was that it wasn't simply a show about women, but a show about women in a man's world.  That's still remarkably rare.  It's still very common for television series to field only one female character of any importance, whose job is basically to be The Girl.  If she's the main character and the series takes place in a largely masculine environment, then she's usually explicitly or implicitly special, able to defeat the patriarchy, or simply wave it out of existence, by the sheer virtue of her awesomeness.  Other series focus on a largely- or exclusively-female enclave, whose members might venture into the male-dominated world but always with each other's support (this is no longer such a common approach when it comes to women, but it's still applied to non-white or gay communities).  The Good Wife is unique in that, though it is a story about a woman in a man's world, it surrounds her with examples of other women in exactly the same position, none of whom are super-special, none of whom get a pass on dealing with the patriarchy, none of whom have chosen to band together and leave the world of men behind (there are, presumably, such women in Alicia's world, but her choices mean that she's not exposed to them).  All of these women want the same thing--power--and each of them has come up with a different strategy of achieving it without waiting for men to hand it to her, sometimes working against her femininity, sometimes trading on it.

(The exception is Kalinda, which is the reason that I've started to sour on the character.  When she was introduced Kalinda seemed to represent the confidence of inexperienced youth as opposed to Alicia's knocked-about middle age.  Later episodes skewed the character older--which was a good idea for no other reason than that, lovely as she is, Archie Panjabi simply doesn't look 25--without dampening her confidence.  On the contrary, they increased it and accommodating responses of the people who bump up against it.  The result is that Kalinda is close to becoming the kind of female character to whom the rules, magically and inexplicably, don't apply, which makes her a lot less interesting, and an incongruous figure in the show's landscape.)

The most powerful woman on The Good Wife's cast is Diane Lockheart, a senior partner at Alicia's firm and the only woman on the cast who has gotten where she was planning to go with her career (at this point, the only way up for Diane is becoming a judge--which briefly became an option and was just as briefly withdrawn--or running for office, which she hasn't expressed an interest in).  Between her age and what we've heard about her past, it's a fair guess that Diane got to where she is the old-fashioned, second-wave feminist way--by banging on tables and working twice as hard to be thought half as good as her male colleagues (being the scion of old Chicago political family probably didn't hurt either).  The Good Wife has a lot of respect for Diane--it's probably one of the writers' best decisions that they decided to walk her back from the stern and possibly resentful authority figure she was in the pilot--while at the same time making it clear that her path to power isn't one that a lot of modern women would choose.  For one thing, it leaves room at the top only for extraordinary women, and probably only for those willing to forgo having a family, and for another, it's a method designed to face head-on the sexism that Diane encountered in her youth--a mindset that can't imagine women having any sort of power.  In the circles in which Alicia and the women of her generation move, that kind of sexism has been mostly replaced by a more subtle kind to which Diane's approach may no longer be suited (a point that is brought home when Diane falls head over heels for wannabe Marlboro Man Kurt McVeigh, who has a signed picture of Sarah Palin in his office).

The younger women that Alicia encounters take advantage of sexism as often as it takes advantage of them.  Recurring character Patty Nyholm feigns pregnancy-related distress in order to justify pulling her client out of a deposition that is going badly, and in her second appearance brings her newborn child to an emergency court convened at a hospital, and uses the baby's crying and demands for food to gain continuances.  Another young lawyer amps up her Midwestern wholesomeness to present a figure of naive helplessness, in order to secure leniency from the judge and the sympathies of the jury when she, for example, blanches at the sexual exploits of Alicia's client.  Most interesting is Alicia's new rival for Will's affections, law student Giada Cabrini.  In a mock court presided over by Will, Giada uses feminine wiles to triumph, taking advantage of Will's attraction to her to get him to advise her on her case, then arguing that he should be disqualified for favoritism towards her.  When she pursues him romantically, her tactics are aggressive--she takes him to dinner at a fancy restaurant where she's well known, not-too-subtly drops it into the conversation that she's the daughter of the third richest man in Europe, and later sends him a very expensive gift.  In other words, Giada uses traditionally feminine tactics in a professional setting, and traditionally masculine tactics in a romantic one.  What interests and surprises me about The Good Wife is how ambivalent it is about all of these tactics.  Alicia clearly disapproves of her opponents using their femininity to score points in court (though she's not above it herself--when recruited by the firm's divorce lawyer, she immediately assumes the role of the scorned woman eager to avenge herself on all men in order to scare the opposing counsel into settling), but the characters who do so are so vividly and sympathetically portrayed that it's impossible not to admire them just a little.  Why play fair, the characters seem to be saying.  When the deck is stacked against you, why not use every card in your hand?

But then, that is the central question of The Good Wife.  In the vicious, dog-eat-dog world of private and public politics, where does one draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable abuse of privilege?  Is Cary wrong to drum up support from the firm's senior associates when he learns that Will and Diane are going to choose between him and Alicia?  Is Alicia wrong to ask her husband's spin doctor Eli Gold to help her get the clients that will save her job?  Is Eli wrong to expect quid pro quo for doing this?  When Peter pushes his would-be political supporters to switch their legal services to Lockheart & Gardner, is he promising quid pro quo, and is Alicia wrong to accept these clients?  There's something almost laughable when Cary--young, white, well-educated, obviously born to privilege--complains to Alicia that he doesn't have the advantage of her political connections, and that it isn't fair that she should have gotten the job instead of him because of those connections, but the fact remains that nearly every character in the show is privileged in some ways and disadvantaged in others.  So the question becomes, how does one exploit that privilege, and overcome those disadvantages, in an honorable way?  Is there ever a way of doing so?

The one problem I have with The Good Wife's handling of his question is, oddly, Alicia herself.  I enjoy the show's characterization of her (and Margulies's restrained, layered performance) very much,  but what's missing from it is what every other character, male or female, seems to possess--a thirst for power.  Alicia walked away from a job at a high-powered law firm to raise her children, and given that her two love interests seem to have quite a few character traits in common it could simply be that she's rather be at the side of someone powerful than possess that power herself.  But the choice to make her not only uninterested in power but also the moral center of the series has some unfortunately implications.  It's become a pernicious commonplace, not only of fiction about politics but of politics in the real world, that ambition is always a hallmark of evil, and that the only people who deserve power are the ones who truly don't want it.  It's an attitude that gives us leaders who are either accomplished liars or easily-led fools.  That Alicia feels such disdain for the games of influence and power that surround her (even as she occasionally plays them herself) suggests that the writers don't believe it's ever possible to be both ambitious and moral.  It would be more interesting to watch Alicia try to figure out where her lines fall if she wanted her job for more than just an escape from her tangled domestic situation and a means of supporting her family, and if her much-vaunted saintliness didn't sometimes shade into breathtaking naivete.

Of course, that may very well be on the cards--Alicia has only started to wake up from her long dormancy, and I wouldn't be surprised if some way down the line she begins to express her own political ambitions (for all the Clinton vs. Palin undertones of Diane's courtship with Kurt McVeigh, it's clearly Alicia who is the Hilary Clinton analogue on this show).  There are, in fact, a lot of interesting avenues of story that The Good Wife's characters could go down, and the show's writers have certainly proven that they can handle them well.  That said, despite my finally-confessed fannishness for this show, I don't think that The Good Wife will ever be the sort of show that leaves me desperate to know what happens next (which is why the season-ending cliffhanger, with Alicia caught between joining Peter on the stage on which he's just announced his candidacy for state's attorney and answering Will's phone call, seems like a trite and unnecessary device).  There is no easily conceived end-point for this story that I'd like to see, no outcome I'm rooting for (I don't know, for example, whether I want Alicia to divorce Peter or not).  Instead, what interests me about the show are the unanswerable questions at its core: how to exercise power and privilege without losing sight of your morality?  How to be woman in a man's world?  So long as The Good Wife keeps highlighting the complicated ways that its characters and guest characters try to address these questions, I suspect I'll remain a fan.

A New Coat of Paint

I've made some much-needed changes to AtWQ's layout and functionality.  Not, as this post's title would suggest, to the extent of changing the template--I'd like to, but none of Blogger's other default templates are appealing (I don't even like the default version of my current template, which has a completely different color scheme) and I haven't got the HTML know-how (nor the visual sensibility) to write my own--but still some substantive changes.  Comments, suggestions for further improvements, and other thoughts are welcome.

• I've replaced the blog's search feature with one powered by Google which, unlike the previous one, seems to actually work.  It claims to be able to search outgoing links and the blogroll, but so far these features don't seem to be working and I may remove them.


• I've added a recent comments application to the sidebar (after trying Blogger's default widget, which doesn't have the option to display the post title, I went third party).  It's not as nice as Wordpress's implementation, but I think it'll do.


• The blogroll, which to my shame has been updated maybe once or twice in the blog's existence, has been brought up to date and rearranged.  I may tinker with it some more--for example, right now all my LJ links are covered by a link to my friends page, but this seems unfair to the LJ writers I read and I may replace that link with individual links to their LJs.  I've also removed the links segment, most of which was out of date.


• I've removed the about me segment, which was also woefully out of date--I haven't been a student at the Technion for four years, for example.  I'm also no longer as sanguine as I used to be about providing a link to my old Amazon reviews, most of which are best left to oblivion.  I would have liked to keep a link to my Amazon wish list, but can't quite decide where to put it.


• The Elsewhere Online segment on the sidebar, which linked to my writing on other websites, has been moved to its own page, linked to at the top of the blog. 

Self-Promotion

My review of Kelly Link's YA collection Pretty Monsters appears today in Strange Horizons.  The very concept of a Kelly Link YA collection (and my previous experiences with her YA stories) put me right off, and if the book hadn't been sitting before me at reading week I probably wouldn't have picked it up.  But though, as I conclude in my review, Pretty Monsters is a mixed bag, there are some stories in it that it would have been a terrible shame to miss.

The 2010 Hugo Awards: The Short Story Shortlist

After two years of being a Hugo nominator, I've come to the conclusion that you can have interesting, in-depth discussions of this award and its nominees before they're announced or after, but that there isn't really enough to say to justify doing both.  For example, I've already written at some length about two of the stories on the short story ballot.  Which leaves me not only with less to say but also feeling a little tired of the topic.  After spending several months trawling through a sizable portion of the year's short fiction output, the actual announcement of the shortlists felt like a bit of a letdown.  Even though I have little to complain about, quality-wise, in the short story and novelette categories, the fact that a consensus had been reached about the stories that would be on them some time before the shortlists were announced, and that the shortlists mostly reflect this consensus, takes some of the fun out of writing these reviews.  (The exception, of course, is the novella shortlist, in which I've read only one nominee, but right now the easiest and perhaps only way of getting hold of all the nominated stories is the Hugo voter packet, which would involve becoming a Hugo nominator again next year.  To be honest, I was looking forward to a break, so it's possible that I'll give this shortlist a pass.)  So this year's short story post is going to be shorter than usual, starting with this change: I am not writing about the Mike Resnick story (PDF).  For years I've felt honor-bound to read Resnick's nominated stories, only to end up making the same criticism and expressing the same exasperation at their presence on the ballot, and this year I just haven't got the energy.  So let's just take it as read that I'm going to like least of all the nominees and move on to the others.

The one big surprise on the short story ballot--on any of the short fiction ballots, actually--is Lawrence M. Schoen's "The Moment."  Published in Footprints, a small-press anthology edited by Jay Lake and Eric T. Reynolds, as far as I was aware neither the story nor the anthology had garnered much in the way of buzz or critical attention, and its nomination seemed to come entirely out of the blue.  It would be nice to be able to report that "The Moment" is not only a surprise but a delightful one, but unfortunately reading the story only deepens my confusion at its presence on the ballot.  Footprints's theme is the discovery of the remnants of human civilization by aliens, long after we've died out or left the planet.  It's a neat concept, but Schoen's treatment of it doesn't extend much beyond neatness.  "The Moment" is made of up of a series of vignettes, each describing a stranger and more advanced form of alien life discovering a footprint on the moon, and at some point discovering the remnants of those who have discovered it before them.  There's some potential here, as the story extends to a futuristic setting a known and slightly disorienting fact of archeology--that what's left to us of the vast and complicated civilizations of the distant past is only the faintest and most inscrutable of evidence, which is often obscured by those civilizations' descendants--and Schoen's execution is, for a time, enjoyable, a riot of inventive descriptions as the aliens visiting the moon change and evolve, from a minuscule generation ship populated by identical clones who populate the grooves of the lunar footprint to an empire of sentient plants.  After a while, though, the parade of ever-stranger beings starts to pall and Schoen's inventiveness begins to seem a bit twee, and then comes the very ending, in which the purpose of the entire story turns out to be a mawkish paean to humanity's spirit of exploration.  Hugo nominated short stories are often not much more than vignettes, meant to capture a single impression or idea--a moment--but Schoen tries to sustain this single note for too long, and for too insipid a reason.

Will McIntosh's "Bridesicle" (PDF) is told from the point of view of Mira, who has woken up after her death in a car accident in a "dating center," where lonely men offer to pay for her resurrection from cryogenic suspension in exchange for her hand in marriage.  As I wrote in my Strange Horizons short fiction review, this premise doesn't quite work:

Why doesn't Mira know about the dating centers if she's got cryogenic insurance? Why buy cryogenic insurance at all if she can't afford to be revived? Why, most of all, go to all the trouble of storing and then reviving dead women in a world in which live ones sell themselves into marriage all too often? For that matter, why are there only women in the "dating center"? "Bridesicle" works because it's not at all subtle about paralleling real-world mercenary marriage arrangements, and because, no matter how contrived and manipulative it is, Mira's predicament is too stark and too horrifying to be denied. The bulk of the story is spent in her brief respites from oblivion, which are often decades apart, in which she desperately tries to please her current wife-seeker. Along the way, we learn more about Mira's life before her accident, itself no picnic—guilt-tripped into integrating the preserved consciousness of her domineering, homophobic mother into her own, Mira was unable to mourn the death of her partner or try to find a new one. Again, there's a lot of obvious manipulation going on here, and again, that manipulation is effective despite its obviousness. The story's ending is perhaps a little too neat, with Mira having found a way not only to be revived without selling too much of herself, but to be reunited with her lover, but it's a victory that is just partial and just costly enough to be believable.

For the third year running, Kij Johnson is the author of one of the most talked-about genre short stories of the year, and for the third year running, I find myself left out of the party.  The difference being that in previous years, Johnson's stories--"The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change" in 2008 and "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" in 2009--left me cold because I found them both charming but effervescent, and I certainly can't apply either of those adjectives to "Spar," her story on the 2010 Hugo ballot.  The story's first sentence--"In the tiny lifeboat, she and the alien fuck endlessly, relentlessly."--sets the tone.  "Spar" is the story of a nameless woman who is stuck on alien lifeboat with an alien passenger, the sole survivors of a collision between their spaceships, and its entire narrative is the description of how she and the alien--a non-humanoid, boneless, slimy blob--have nonstop sex.  But is it sex, or rape, or assault, or masturbation?  There is no possibility of communication between the woman and the alien, no way to know if it is responding to her actions, seeking her pleasure or pain, if it recognizes her sentience or even existence, or if it is sentient itself.  I like "Spar" a great deal better than either "Dogs" or "Monkeys" because it is such a well-done, concentrated bit disturbing and disorienting writing (Alvaro Zinos-Amaro has a nice write-up of it in Strange Horizons), but like those two stories, I find myself hesitant to join in the near-unanimous praise of it (it has already won this year's Nebula award) because really, there's so little here.  I'm honestly of two minds here, because on the one hand, "Spar" knows what it wants to do--to disturb and unsettle--and does that job very well--and on the other hand these strike me as if not modest then at least very narrow ambitions, and I'm more interested in stories whose scope is a bit wider.

N.K. Jemisin's "Non-Zero Probabilities" is the perfect antidote to the creepiness of the McIntosh and Johnson stories.  A low-key, deliberately mundane story about a woman trying to live an ordinary life in the shadow of an extraordinary event, the story sometimes seems to go out of its way to be pleasant, an effect it achieves through the character of its protagonist, Adele, a no-nonsense young woman who knows how to protect herself--in this case, from the never-explained transformation of New York into a realm where one in a million chances crop up nine times out of ten--but who is also open to new experiences and new relationships.  As I wrote in Strange Horizons,

"Non-Zero Probabilities" is more a character piece, studying Adele's adaptation to her altered landscape, than a worldbuilding piece, but nevertheless Jemisin does a good job constructing that landscape, outlining the dangers and wonders of this new world—Adele waits for an auspicious day to hire a car to go to Ikea, but on the other hand, cancer and AIDS patients have experienced miraculous recoveries. What's most enjoyable and refreshing about "Non-Zero Probabilities" is that despite describing a New York that has reverted to A Simpler Time—no one drives, everyone eats locally because out of town food supplies are sporadic, people know their neighbors—it is decidedly unsentimental about the city's transformation. It ends with Adele weighing both the good and bad aspects of her altered life, and leaves it to us to decide whether a return to normal would be a good thing.

Given the attention that both have received, I'm guessing that the Hugo will go to either Johnson or Jemisin.  I prefer the latter, but can certainly see arguments for the former.  Either way, there's no denying that these two stories, and the McIntosh, make for an interesting shortlist.  They're very different--two are SFnal, one a fantasy; two are futuristic, one contemporary; two do a lot of worldbuilding, one is a chamber piece; two set out to unsettle, one to make the unsettling mundane--but all three are women's stories, and all are imbued with an ambivalence towards wonder--be it technological or magical--and with a deep-seated doubt about its ability to better our lives, that I'm not used to finding on Hugo shortlists.  I'm not saying that this is the direction I'd like to see the award move in exclusively, but it's a refreshing change, and so long as I can count on Mike Resnick continuing to show up on award shortlists, it's nice to know that other, more thoughtful kinds of genre work also have a place on the Hugo ballot.

Horns by Joe Hill

I picked up Joe Hill's second novel, Horns, with the clear understanding that it would be my make-or-break experience with this author.  Hill wowed me with his debut collection, 20th Century Ghosts, a work that sits alongside Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others and Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners on the shelf of essential genre collections of the last decade, whose stories were both of and about the horror genre, constantly asking what it means to write or consume a genre rooted in misery and fear.  If 20th Century Ghosts skewed towards the literary end of the genre, Hill's first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, leaned towards the pulpy end, touching only lightly and with less nuance on the questions that were at the heart of his short stories.  It was a good book, but not a very interesting one, and with Horns I hoped to discover whether the writer Joe Hill wanted to be was one I would want to follow.  My results are mixed.  Horns is a better book--tighter, better written, more engaging--than Heart-Shaped Box, and though still primarily an entertaining rather than thought-provoking work, it delves more deeply into its central questions, which are here about issues of theology as much as they are an investigation of Hill's genre.  The answers that Hill gives, however, are at best puerile, at worst deeply objectionable.

Hill's crowning achievement in Horns is its beautiful, instantly captivating structure.  The book launches readers straight into its action--the story's opening paragraph tells us that the protagonist, Ignatius "Ig" Perrish, has woken up with horns, and within two short chapters both he and we understand their power.  Under the influence of the horns, the people Ig meets tell him their darkest secrets and most shameful desires, and lose the self-control and better nature that held the latter in check, leaving them open to Ig's influence for better or worse.  Hill also wastes no time in establishing Ig's background--a year ago, his childhood sweetheart Merrin Williams was raped and murdered.  Ig was blamed for the murder, but when the forensics lab processing the evidence from Merrin's crime scene burned down the investigation was terminated, leaving Ig a free man but, in the eyes of everyone who knows him, including his and Merrin's families, a guilty one.  Since then he's cut himself off from his former life and spiraled towards self-destruction, but now, with the horns' power, he sets out to discover the truth about Merrin's murder.  The investigation at the heart of the novel, however, is not a whodunnit--the perpetrator is revealed within less than a hundred pages--but a whydunnit.  The novel moves back and forth through Ig and Merrin's lives, constantly complicating our understanding of them and their relationship--we learn, for example, that hours before her death Merrin broke up with Ig because she felt trapped by a decade-long relationship that had left her with no opportunity to explore other lovers or become her own person--as we close in on the reason for Merrin's death.

There are two issues with Hill's choice of structure.  The first is that Merrin's killer, whose point of view in the weeks leading up to the murder takes over the novel in its later chapters, is such a broad caricature of reactionary, misogynistic evil that one almost senses Hill ticking boxes on a form: he's a former bedwetter, he tortures animals, he hates his mother (and later, when she becomes ill, tortures her to death), he's a racist, he's a homophobe, he's anti-choice, he's a Republican.  This is better, I suppose, than having a villain who is a left-wing, gay feminist, but what it smacks of is an author who is aware that violence against women is the bread and butter of his genre and that there is something creepy and exploitative about this fact, and who overcompensates for his choice to make a rape-murder the crux of his novel by turning his villain's misogyny up to eleven.  It's not that I wanted to sympathize with or understand this character, but Hill's construction of him is familiar from so many other authors who have gone down this path that there were hardly any surprises or revelations in the pages the novel spent inside his head.

The second issue is that though we spend a lot of time getting to know Ig as a teenager and in the last days of his relationship with Merrin, post-transformation the character is something of a blank.  His purpose is to explore the people around him and use his powers to plumb the depths of their souls, but on the question of how, or even whether, he feels about turning into a demon the novel is frustratingly silent. Early in the story, for example, Ig has a hellish meeting with his family, in which he learns that to a one they all hate him and believe that he's guilty of Merrin's murder, and snaps, attacking and seriously injuring his grandmother.  We never learn how he feels about this--guilty, pleased, scared?  This would work if Horns were merely, as the novel's final chapters strongly suggest, a superhero's origin story, tracking the process by which Ig the person is subsumed into Ig the rooter out of sins, who punishes people for the crimes they've committed and tries to steer them away from the ones they want to commit, but it sits less well with a more prominent theme in the novel, Ig's struggle with The Problem of Evil.  Raised a Catholic, Ig had a reflexive and thoughtless belief in the church's teachings until Merrin's death shook it out of him.  In the novel's key scene, Ig hears voices in a fire, and delivers a sermon to a crowd of snakes that encapsulates his new take on religion.

Merrin and I were to each other like man and wife.  But she wanted more than me, wanted freedom, a life, a chance to discover herself.  She wanted other lovers and wanted me to take other lovers as well.  I hated her for this.  So did God.  For simply imagining she might open her legs to another man, He turned His face from her, and when she called to Him, as she was raped and murdered, He pretended He did not hear.  He felt, no doubt, that she received her due. I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be.  The author is unworthy of His own characters.  The devil is first a literary critic, who delivers this untalented scribbler the public flaying He deserves.

Assuming that this is not simply another attempt by Hill to weasel out of responsibility for structuring his novel around the rape and murder of a woman by hanging a metafictional lantern on that fact, what are we to make of this strange passage?  The Problem of Evil is a tough one, and should be approached with an appropriate tough-mindedness, but if we're to take Ig's sermon seriously--and given that the only person who might argue with it, Ig himself, is almost entirely absent from this part of the novel we have little choice but to do so--then Hill's treatment of it is depressingly wishy-washy.  I can respect a character whose suffering leads them to believe that God doesn't exist or that God is evil.  I can even respect a character whose response to suffering is to side with evil--one of the few subplots that really worked for me in Jesse Bullington's The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart was the one about a man whose family is murdered by the title characters, and who is so incensed by the thought that while his loved ones, who died unshriven, are in purgatory, the brothers might see heaven if they confess their sins before dying, that he sells his soul and knowingly becomes a demon.  Ig's response to suffering, however, is not simply to lay all evil in the world at God's feet, but to minimize the devil's wickedness.  In his cosmology, God is a sadistic prig who punishes fornication with rape and murder while the devil has all the best tunes, winks at the sins of the flesh, and throws a good party.  It's hard to associate any depth of grief or rage with such a juvenile moral outlook, which smacks of teenage short-sightedness--Mom and Dad are evil because they set rules and boundaries, while the cool uncle who lets you smoke and drink is the good guy.

Implicit in Ig's take on God is the belief that drinking and screwing are worse sins than murder and rape, and though there are, of course, people in the world who believe this, our glimpses of Ig's upbringing and religious background don't suggest that he was raised in such an environment (in fact, when his parish priest comes under the influence of the horns, the man gleefully confesses to adultery but castigates Ig for Merrin's murder).  So it's unclear why he should have decided that Merrin's death was punishment for wanting her sexual independence (again, this is where a deeper exploration of Ig post-transformation, or even immediately following Merrin's death, would have made for a much stronger book), but to be fair to Hill, the novel's ending explodes this take on the murder when it reveals that at the time of her murder Merrin was ill with the same type of cancer that had already claimed the life of her sister.  In a letter to Ig, Merrin expresses the fear that, like her sister, she will spend the last months of her life succumbing to her darkest impulses, allowing fear and bitterness to take her over and poison her relationships with the people she loves.

I would like very much to believe in a Gospel of Mick and Keith, where I can't get what I want--which is you, Ig, and our children, and our ridiculous daydreams--but at least get what I need, which is a quick, sudden ending and the knowledge that you got away clean.

This is, to put it mildly, a problematic twist.  Again, in all fairness to Hill, he does not use the fact that Merrin was dying or the fact that she desired a quick death to minimize the awfulness of the death she got (though, of course, the devil's progressive acceptance of her right to want other lovers is somewhat undermined by her confession that she only ever wanted Ig).  By the time we learn these facts about her we've already witnessed the rape and murder first hand and know that she fought for her life (on the flip side, we also know that for what it was, Merrin's death was mercifully quick).  But if Horns just barely avoids the creepy implications of making a rape and murder the solution to a woman's problems, it doesn't avoid the complete collapse of Ig's theology under the revelation that Merrin's murder was God giving her what she needed.  If God--not the devil, and not her actual killer--is responsible for Merrin's unnatural death, shouldn't he be held even more responsible for the cancer that caused her to need it in the first place?  And are we to understand that all of the people in the world who suffer fates as terrible as Merrin's, or worse, are getting what they needed?  Ig's construction of God as sadistic and judgmental is immature, but it's replaced by something risible--the notion that all the evil in the world is part of God's convoluted, Rube Goldberg-ish plan to do good.  Hill is by no means the first author to try to solve The Problem of Evil with this horribly over-literal take on the platitude that God works in mysterious ways--see also Signs and the ending of Battlestar Galactica--and like the authors of those works, he only ends up compounding it.  This is why the equivalence he draws between God and a horror writer is so wrongheaded.  Fiction, famously, has to make sense where reality can simply be, and whereas the revelation of a clever underlying plan, however horrific its components, can give meaning to a work of fiction, to overlay that plan on reality is an act of unspeakable callousness.

A glance through the novel's other reviews suggests that for many reviewers, the simple fact that Horns offers sympathy for the devil is innovative enough to set it apart from other works of horror.  Perhaps the reason that I don't share their enthusiasm is that the devil plays almost no part in Jewish tradition, a fact that Hill himself touches on when he has a character point out, near the end of the novel, that in non-Christian religions the devil is sometimes God's ally.  As far as Judaism is concerned, this is putting the cart slightly before the horse.  The word satan appears several times in the Bible, meaning adversary, and in the book of Job--an ancient treatment of The Problem of Evil which Horns quite consciously parallels--he is God's servant, but it was probably much later that the term came to be associated with the Christian devil, who is a force for evil.  What Hill tries to do in Horns is to have the best of both worlds.  The creature that Ig transforms into gets to keep the Christian devil's outer signifiers--horns, red skin, flaming nostrils, pitchfork--while playing the Jewish devil's more mundane, more tolerable role as a heavenly prosecutor.  That, and the forced comparison to the book of Job, which forces its readers to accept their inherent inability to comprehend the universe as God does, only serve to show up the shallowness of Horns's engagement with The Problem of Evil.

This might sound a bit strange given the drubbing I've just given it, but I did genuinely enjoy reading Horns.  It's a quick and absorbing read, and while I was caught up in Ig's adventures and his quest to avenge Merrin the problems with its theology didn't bother me very much.  It was only once I finished the novel and thought about it for a bit that it became so deeply objectionable, and I imagine that for a lot of readers who won't choose to take that step Horns will simply be another enjoyable read from Joe Hill.  For my part, I think I'm going to leave him alone from now on, and wait to see if he's once again acclaimed for something more thoughtful like the stories in 20th Century Ghosts.