This is Not a Romance Novel: Thoughts on Scandal

Up until a few days ago, Shonda Rhimes was someone I admired greatly without really liking anything she did.  One of the few women (and people of color) to gain entry to the small and exclusive group of superstar TV producers, what sets Rhimes's series--juggernaut Grey's Anatomy, its less successful but still long-running spinoff Private Practice, and also-ran Off the Map--apart from the crowd is their being, by and large, the stories of women.  And more importantly, of a broad variety of women, many of whom don't often get their stories told on TV: fortyish and middle-aged women, women of color, gay women, women who don't look like runway models.  Despite that fact, and despite finding Rhimes's shows compelling--when I come across an episode of one while channel-flipping I almost always end up watching it to the end--I've never been fannish, or even particularly interested, in any of her series.  That's less because of their romance slant--though the fact that the serialized aspect of Rhimes's doctor shows is rooted almost entirely in romantic drama does dampen their appeal; I like a good love story as much as the next person, but I find the endless stream of breakups and makeups that comprise a soap opera more than a little depressing--as it is because I never got the sense that Rhimes was trying to do more than make slick, well-constructed, often extremely watchable soap operas.  No small accomplishment, to be sure, but also not something I could sink my teeth into.

At first glance, Rhimes's latest series Scandal, which debuted with a short, seven episode season last spring and returned for a full, triumphant second season in the fall, seems cut from the same cloth, a Grey's Anatomy in the beltway, minus the doctor slant.  High-powered DC fixer Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) is the person you call when you're in the middle of a PR disaster.  Along with her team--smooth-talking lawyer Harrison (Columbus Short), high-strung investigator Abby (Darby Stanchfield), creepy tech guy and leg-breaker Huck (Guillermo Díaz), and new hire Quinn (Katie Lowes)--she massages the truth, spins the message, and keeps dirty little secrets tightly under wraps, employing methods that are just this side of legal--and which sometimes cross that line, to the repeated consternation of her foil in the US Attorney's office, David Rosen (Joshua Malina).  The pilot also sets up the show's requisite central couple.  Before she went into business on her own, we learn, Olivia worked on the campaign, and later in the White House, of the current president, Fitzgerald "Fitz" Grant III (Tony Goldwyn), with whom she had an affair.  She left in order to put a stop to the affair, but when the two are reunited in the pilot--after Olivia is called in to quash rumors that Fitz has been sleeping with a White House aide--it's clear that the spark is still very much there.  As Olivia investigates the aide story over the course of the first season, she and Fitz move back and forth from recrimination to yearning, from "no, we mustn't!" to "yes, we can," in the process running afoul of Fitz's ambitious wife Mellie (Bellamy Young), and his dirty-dealing chief of staff, Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry).

The familiar Rhimes tics are all here.  The characters are all the very, very best at what they do and prone to announcing this at the drop of a hat, the emotions are always turned up to 11, epic speeches are delivered with clockwork regularity, and supposedly professional adults behave like high school students in thrall to their raging hormones.  If we've grown accustomed to doctors and lawyers who behave like soap opera characters, however, there's something quite jarring about porting these tropes to the corridors of power, which can make the Scandal pilot rather hard to swallow.  Not that a president would never take a mistress, or that TV isn't prone to taking even the most interesting settings and telling stories in them that revolve largely around who's sleeping with whom.  But what Rhimes has done with Scandal is something much more audacious--she's turned the White House into the setting of a romance novel, and the president into its hero (which is to say, its object).  Like all romance heroes, Fitz is focused, one hundred percent, on his heroine.  He's the sort of character who says things like:

You own me!  You control me.  I belong to you.  You think I don't want to be a better man?  You think that I don't want to dedicate myself to my marriage?  You don't think I want to be honorable, to be the man that you voted for?  I love you.  I'm in love with you.  You're the love of my life.  My every feeling is controlled by look on your face.  I can't breathe without you.  I can't sleep without you.  I wait for you.  I watch for you.  I exist for you.  If I could escape all of this, and run away with you...

That's some serious, Edward Rochester-level shit there, and it is more than a little ridiculous to put it in the mouth of a character who is allegedly the most powerful man in the world.  But Scandal leans into that ridiculousness, doubles down on it when it situates all power in its political system within the bond of marriage.  When Olivia joins Fitz's campaign, her first piece of advice is that he and Mellie seem like a cold couple, and that making their marriage seem viable on screen is crucial to his success.  "[Voters] put George W. in office because he and Laura seemed like a fun couple to have a beer with," she says, in brazen defiance of the fact that no one in the entire history of her political career has ever thought such a thing about Laura Bush.  In reality, what American voters mainly seem to want from their first couples is that they not be the Clintons--that his philandering, and her ambitions, stay on the down low.  It was only once the Obamas reignited the myth of Camelot that presidential marriages became a story again, and Scandal takes that newfound preoccupation and spins it into a political system in which it is the only thing that matters.  Fitz can get things done, as a candidate and later as a president, because he and Mellie seem like a strong couple.  When their bond weakens, so does his power.

The result is a political system that more closely resembles a royal family than a democracy.  Though the show offers comparisons like Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings (in one of the few overt acknowledgments of a fact that the characters are clearly always cognizant of, that Olivia is black while Fitz and Mellie are white), its central triangle is actually more reminiscent of Diana, Charles, and Camilla.  The second season even features a presidential pregnancy plot, whose handling feels eerily prescient of the media circus that surrounded the royal baby this summer--the baby is even dubbed "America's Baby" by the voracious media.  At least, that is, until you realize that in the world of Scandal, the political elite, just like the British royal family, are merely another variety of celebrities, engaged in what is essentially a lifelong reality show.  When Mellie hears Olivia's critique of her and Fitz's marriage during the campaign, she stages a "spontaneous" breakdown during a campaign event with Fitz, tearfully telling a crowd of listeners that the reason she's been so distant is that the stress of the campaign caused her to miscarry a pregnancy (a miscarriage that, of course, never happened).  In the real world, no one would believe that such an outburst had really been unrehearsed, and Mellie would be seen as calculating and manipulative.  But in the world of Scandal, the voters are romance readers.  If they believe the performance--if it makes them go "awww" and hope that those crazy kids can make it work--then you'll get their vote.

As different and unusual a choice as this is, what it ultimately comes down to is that Scandal puts all its eggs in the romance genre basket, and if that's not the sort of story that appeals to you--for the most part, it doesn't appeal to me--then the show's first season will quickly rub you the wrong way.  "What kind of a coward was I, to marry her and not wait for you to show up?" Fitz asks Olivia shortly after they meet.  That's a very romance novel thing to say, but to me it just makes Fitz seem either unreal or unappealing.  No matter how utilitarian or unloving, a marriage is still a marriage--a shared life, full of intimate moments and secrets.  A man who can just wish away twenty years of successful, albeit cold, marriage doesn't come off as terribly sympathetic in my book (certainly not when you consider that said marriage has also given him two children; but then, Scandal tends to ignore the older Grant children, who have never even been seen).  But the show clearly intends for me to take this line as deeply romantic (and, to its credit, works hard on both the acting and production levels to sell that viewpoint), and to engage deeply with the Olivia/Fitz romance.  If you're not rooting for them to somehow find a way to be together despite their impossible situation, the first season doesn't leave much space for you.

Which is why Scandal's second season comes as such a shock.  It is essentially Rhimes piling high the tropes and conventions that have made her super-successful, dousing them with gasoline, and lighting a match.  The hints planted in the first season about the real reason Olivia left the White House and the dirty secrets that lie in her own past come to fruition when it's revealed that she was part of a conspiracy to steal the election for Fitz, which was followed by a cover-up in which several people died.  As David Rosen and members of Olivia's own team investigate this cover-up from different directions, and as Olivia and Cyrus Beene, who was also part of the conspiracy, race to conceal evidence of their wrongdoing, Rhimes methodically dismantles the assumptions that lie at the core of all of her work--assumptions about love, about her characters, and about who we're expected to root for.  Rhimes shows are characterized, as I've said, by outsized emotions and big speeches that extoll the characters' virtues.  Scandal is the show that takes those big feelings and bigger words and asks: what if those emotions are twisted and unhealthy?  What if those big words are nothing but spin?  What if the characters who we've been told are heroes are just selfish, clueless cowards?

"That man was born to be a leader.  He was born to do this.  Anything else would diminish him and deprive this country."  Cyrus tells Olivia.  "Some men aren't meant to be happy; they're meant to be great."  But if there's greatness in Fitz, the show is slow to let us see it.  He is, after all, a man who ascends to the highest office in the land and then immediately turns around and complains that it prevents him from being with his girlfriend.  And while marriage, and love, are the source of power in Scandal, that love is more often corrupting than it is nurturing.  Fitz and Olivia's love brings out the worst in them.  It undermines Olivia's judgment, her frequently referenced "gut" which unerringly points her towards the right choice, and causes her to betray herself and her principles when she agrees to steal the election in order to give Fitz what he wants.  It turns Fitz into a whiny brat, who crawls into a bottle when he and Olivia are on the outs--as it turns out, depriving him of happiness is not the way to bring out his greatness.  This is love as an addiction, one that reveals its sufferers' weakness and ugliness; even when they're together, Olivia and Fitz are toxic as often as they are loving--Fitz, for example, has a nasty tendency to treat the word "no" as an invitation.  Cyrus, meanwhile, deeply loves, and is loved by, his journalist husband James (Dan Bucatinsky), but their marriage is rife with lies and manipulations, as the two of them hold James's investigation into the vote-fixing conspiracy, and Cyrus's promise of an adopted baby, over each other's heads.  The only relationship that seems healthy and honest, between David Rosen and Abby, is also the one that is most easily destroyed, when Olivia, deciding that Abby represents a security leak, plays on her friend's history of spousal abuse to sow doubts in her mind about David.

That act of manipulation is one of several that cast a pall on the alleged bond between Olivia and her people.  Among TV writers, Rhimes is far from alone in elevating the team--that found family of people from different and often difficult backgrounds who come together for a common cause--above all other bonds, and in extolling the values of loyalty and friendship that bind it together.  But as the show's second season draws on, it increasingly seems to suggest not only that that loyalty might be misplaced--as in the case of Olivia breaking up David and Abby for her own purposes--but that what the characters think of as loyalty is actually dysfunction and codependency, that Olivia's team are loyal to her not because they've freely chosen to be, but because they desperately need her to define them and give their lives meaning.  The more we learn about the team, the more obviously damaged they seem--Abby's brittle strength conceals a self-loathing bred by years of abuse, Huck is a psychopath with a proclivity for torture and murder who hangs all hope of his salvation on Olivia, Quinn is one of the victims of the vote-fixing scheme who has nothing left in her life but the guilty generosity of the woman who destroyed it, and Harrison, who crows about being a "gladiator in a suit," is driven by the near-crippling fear that, in reality, he's just as powerless as everyone else.  Though the characters all view Olivia as their savior, as the season progresses the show increasingly seems to suggest that far from saving them, Olivia has, however unwittingly, trapped them in bonds of obligation and dependence--as when Abby, despite learning about Olivia's manipulation of her, steals evidence from David because she knows that it could hurt Olivia.

None of this, of course, would work if Scandal were not impeccably well-made and a hell of a lot of fun to watch.  The plot, which rollicks along like the better seasons of 24 (and is often just as absurd), is compelling and beautifully constructed.  The show is stylishly shot and edited, its frequent use of still photographs and split-screens amplifying the tension of its storytelling without ever becoming hectic or confusing.  Though the character work occasionally leaves something to be desired--Quinn, for example, feels more like a plot point than a person; the decision, in the second half of the second season, to make her Huck's enthusiastic wetworks trainee feels like a last-ditch effort to make her interesting, rather than something organic to the character--where it truly matters, Scandal gets the job done.  In particular, the show wouldn't work if Washington and Goldwyn didn't have terrific chemistry, not just as lovers but as partners.  Goldwyn can sell overheated speeches like the one above, as well as the less savory aspects of Fitz's obsession with Olivia.  But the reason that Scandal's handling of their relationship is so deliciously ambiguous is that for every overwrought, dysfunctional scene between them, there's another, quieter exchange in which Fitz and Olivia come off like an old married couple and a great partnership, in which it is easy to imagine what a great First Lady Olivia would make for Fitz.

But if it was perhaps to be expected that Scandal would put the effort into making its central couple appealing to the audience, putting a similar effort into the show's two most marginal, antagonistic characters was less predictable, and ends up paying great dividends.  As David Rosen, Malina plugs into his Sorkin-honed schlubbiness, squawking "I am the law!" at Olivia's casual flouting of it and him, and growing increasingly frustrated as she runs circles around him and his investigation of her.  Another show might have made David into a caricature, but Scandal instead reveals more and more of his dignity even as Olivia chips away at his professional standing, using him to suggest that Olivia and her team's obsession with the appearance of strength misses out on the reality of it.  When a seemingly defeated David uses his facade of weakness to outsmart Olivia at the end of the second season, it's both a triumphant moment and a worrying one, signifying that he may have learned too much from his former enemy.  Even more interesting is Mellie, who is both the castrating, harpy wife that her story casts her as, and so much more than that.  If every other character on the show is spun around by love, Mellie is immune to it.  What she wants--what she had with Fitz before Olivia turned up--is a partnership, two people striving towards a common goal, in this case power, and she is genuinely puzzled and distraught by the way that love seems to destroy Fitz and Olivia.  In her own way, Mellie is the most honest character on the show (for a value of "honest" that takes into account the fact that she habitually lies to three hundred million people when she assumes her doting, devoted First Lady persona), the only one willing to say what she feels and what she wants, who is then frustrated because the more romantic characters on the show dismiss her words as cold and calculating.

Despite all this, what's most intriguing about Scandal's undermining of its own tropes is that I'm still not entirely convinced that it's intentional.  The show plays its tropes with such a straight face that, though it seems impossible that we're not intended to see how toxic they are, there's rarely anything in the show that confirms this interpretation.  The cues that tell us to root for Olivia and Fitz's reunion, for example--the music, the lighting, the dialogue, and of course the actors themselves--are never allowed to let up, even when the things that Olivia and Fitz do to themselves and each other cross the line into abuse.  And when Harrison tries to convince Abby not to leave after she finds out about his and Olivia's interference in her relationship with David, he delivers a classic Rhimes speech:

She had a reason!  I don't know what it is.  I don't need to know.  She asked me to do something; I did it.  You know why I did.  There's a problem, you fix it.  You and David Rosen were a problem.  You know who we are, you know what this is, and don't pretend you don't.  We do what needs to be done and we don't question why.  You put the personal to the left.  It doesn't matter who gets hurt.  It doesn't matter what gets broken.  If it's not the thing that needs fixing, it does.  Not.  Matter.  You want to cry about your feelings, huh?  Really?  Here?  You don't get to have feelings.  That's the job.  Gladiators don't have feelings.  We rush into battle.  We're soldiers.  We get hurt in a fight, we suck it up and we hold it down.  We don't question. 

It seems impossible that we're meant to watch this scene and not think that Harrison is either a blowhard or seriously messed up.  His speech encapsulates how much of Olivia and her team's shtick is empty posturing.  Throughout the series, they swoop onto the site of the latest PR disaster, barking orders, frantically placing calls, and assuring everyone around (including, it often seems, themselves) that they're the only ones who can save the day.  Harrison's speech throws a light on how much of that behavior is simply self-aggrandizement--to which end he's willing to valorize even blind loyalty to people who manipulate and lie to you (or who ask you to hurt your friends).  But the delivery, and Abby's reaction, are completely straight-faced, and in line with a million other speeches in other Rhimes shows (and in other shows in general) which do seriously extoll these virtues.  It still seems possible to me that Scandal wants me to root for Olivia and Fitz to get together, for her team to remain loyal to her, for more and more characters to recognize Olivia's awesomeness and give in to it, even though the show as it is written has in fact convinced me of the opposite.  (In reality, I find Olivia sympathetic enough that I don't want bad things to happen to her, and I want her and Fitz to be together because clearly they're not fit for anyone else's company.  But I also want them to go off where they can't bother or hurt anyone and leave Mellie to be president, and for Abby, Huck, Quinn, and Harrison to disentangle themselves from their boss and find healthier, more rewarding relationships.)  When Cyrus, in the second season finale, lambastes Olivia for her determination to have a future with Fitz (which at that point extends to ignoring credible threats to her life), and insists that "Life is not a romance novel," it's not at all clear to me whether he's delivering the show's mission statement, or protesting too much.

And then there is the simple fact that, even if she is engaged in a wonderfully subversive act of trolling her audience, Rhimes may not be able to keep it, or the show's quality, up for much longer.  Already at the end of the second season there are signs of material fatigue--the overarching plot of the season's second half is weaker and less purposeful than the first, and the constant back and forth between Fitz and Olivia as they veer from vowing to stay together no matter what to breaking up forever has already started to become tedious.  Grey's Anatomy is famous for having two generally beloved seasons and then collapsing into a still-satisfying but increasingly ridiculous mess, and Scandal, which already rates pretty high on the ridiculousness scale, is obviously in danger of falling into that trap.  So it's possible that I'm recommending Scandal just as it's about to go sour, and that in a few months I'll go back to admiring Shonda Rhimes but not liking anything she does.  For the moment, however, Scandal is one of the most intriguing shows on TV.  It's certainly one of the most fun. 

Review: The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

Over at Strange Horizons, I review Helene Wecker's debut The Golem and the Jinni, in which the titular magical creatures meet in early 20th century New York.  Though there are aspects of the novel that I enjoyed, it ended up making me question its very choice of genre, and my review discusses the way in which magic as a metaphor for mundane realities can end up being used as a crutch to shore up a flawed work.

History, Repeated: Two Views on The Wars of the Roses

We all know that history is written by the victors, but the matter doesn't end there.  History is also written by the powerful, the educated, the privileged.  By people who toe--and sometimes the ones who shape--the party line.  People of the wrong gender, race, class, or nationality not only don't get to write history, they often don't even get to appear in it.  It's one of the tasks of historians to address the gaps and deficits in the official record, but this is also where historical fiction can come in, giving a voice to those who were denied it at the time.  In the last few weeks I've consumed two different works that take on the same historical period with this goal in mind, but from two different perspectives.  The BBC's ten-part miniseries The White Queen tells the story of the Wars of the Roses by stressing the role of women within them, highlighting the fact that in a dispute in which marriage and succession played such an important role, women's bodies were often a field, and a weapon, of battle.  Sharon Kay Penman's 1982 novel The Sunne in Splendour, meanwhile, retells the dynastic struggle between York and Lancaster through the lens of the life of Richard III, whom Penman tries to rehabilitate from centuries of Tudor-instigated character assassination (not the least of which, of course, is the Shakespearean play that bears his name).  For two works with such different goals, the miniseries and the novel are surprisingly prone to employing the same devices.  They also end up evincing some of the same prejudices and preconceptions, and undermining themselves and their projects in very similar ways.

Based on the Cousins' War novels by Philipa Gregory (The White Queen, 2009; The Red Queen, 2010; The Kingmaker's Daughter, 2012), and adapted by Emma Frost and Malcolm Campbell, The White Queen focuses its story on three figures: Elizabeth Woodville (Rebecca Ferguson), a commoner whose impolitic marriage to the first Yorkist king, Edward IV (Max Irons), drives a wedge between Edward and his greatest supporter, the Earl of Warwick (James Frain), which fuels the later stages of the wars; Margaret Beaufort (Amanda Hale), a Lancastrian supporter whose son, Henry Tudor, will take the throne as Henry VII, bringing the wars to an end; and Anne Neville (Faye Marsay), Warwick's younger daughter who is initially a pawn in her father's scheming against Edward, and then marries Edward's younger brother, the future Richard III (Aneurin Barnard).  Other important figures include Elizabeth's mother Jacquetta Woodville (Janet McTeer), who is quick to take advantage of her daughter's meteoric ascent by advancing her family's fortunes through marriage and royal appointments, Isabel Neville (Eleanor Tomlinson), Anne's older sister, who marries Edward and Richard's brother George (David Oakes) in a failed bid by Warwick to secure him the throne, and Marguerite d'Anjou (Veerle Baetens), the French wife of the deposed Lancastrian king Henry VI, who spearheads the fight to restore her husband to the throne and secure her son's inheritance.  Gregory adds her own twist to the story by making the Woodville women witches (as they were accused of being in actual history), who use their powers to advance their goals, thwart their enemies, and divine the future (though not always avoid it).

Equally wide-ranging is The Sunne in Splendour, a 900-page behemoth which follows Richard from early childhood to his death at Bosworth Field.  Though much of the book is written from Richard's perspective, Penman gives nearly every player on both sides of the wars (and some invented, minor figures such as servants and ladies in waiting) a point of view, creating a multifaceted portrait of the dispute and the personal, political, and economic motivations that lay at its heart.  Nevertheless, Penman's ultimate project with the novel is to present a new kind of Richard III, not the usurper of his brother's throne, or the murderer of his nephews, familiar from history.  Her Richard is intelligent, thoughtful, and kind; a fearsome and brave soldier but also an honorable one; a devoted brother, husband, and father whose participation in so much bloody history comes about because of his loyalty to Edward and his belief that he is doing the best for England, rather than personal ambition.  Penman stresses Richard's popularity in the north of England, where he ruled for years on Edward's behalf, suggesting that the hostility that greeted him in London when he took the throne was politically motivated rather than a reflection of his actual performance as a ruler; and she casts Richard and Anne Neville's courtship and marriage as a sweeping love story, in which Richard rescues Anne from the scheming of her father (who marries her off to the son of Marguerite d'Anjou, the Lancastrian heir) and his brother George (who tries to get his hands on Anne's property).

Despite their different goals and apporaches, both miniseries and novel suffer from the same problem, which is endemic to historical fiction (not to mention novel adaptations)--they feel less like a coherent work of fiction, and more like a whole mess of events happening one after another.  The White Queen's project to retell a male-dominated slice of history from the perspective of women is an intriguing one, but beyond achieving it, Gregory and her adapters appear to have had no artistic goal--a fact that seems particularly apparent from The White Queen's ending, in which the story simply stops after Richard's defeat without any attempt to put a cap or any sort of emotional spin on events.  Only a few of the miniseries's characters become interesting as people, rather than as tokens moving the plot along--chiefly, Margaret Beaufort, whom Hale plays with a wounded awkwardness that makes her terrifying, fanatical belief in the divinely ordained triumph of the Lancaster side (and specifically, her son) seem almost endearing.  Though there are a few scenes that try to get at the real, human truth of living through this period--when Warwick's machinations force him to escape to France, his daughter Isabel undergoes a gruesome, bloody childbirth aboard ship, and the series lingers over her and her sister's horror at the visceral, inescapable truth of what it means to be a woman, even a rich and high-born one, in this period--for most of its run The White Queen doesn't seem to be reaching for this kind of humanity.  Its characters act not because it's what the people their authors conceived them as would have done, but because this is what happened at this stage of the story.

The Sunne in Splendour, too, gives the impression of not trying to be a work of art in its own right, but a retelling--with an obvious slant--of a historical story.  This is brought home in particular through Penman's style, which can only be described as artless.  Her characters speak in a cod-medieval argot that consists mainly of using the word "be" instead of any of the verb's conjugations ("There be this I must tell you"; "My lord, the King is here!  They be below in the great hall even now") and a liberal sprinkling of the verb "do" in sentences where it serves no purpose ("In July, he did sign a treaty with Burgundy"; "I'd not be surprised if the deaths do number fully fifteen hundred").  Which may, for all I know, be the way people talked in the fifteenth century, but if so it sits very ill with Penman's liberal use of modern turns of phrase, such as Richard telling George to "stay out of [Anne's] life" or Anne reflecting, of Richard's mother, that "We all have to find our own path and the way she's found be right for her."  The omniscient narrator is similarly confused--some passages are written in modern English, and some replicate the "be" and "do" style.  In some chapters, the narrative voice is contemporary to the characters, sharing their assumptions and worldview, while in others, Penman pauses to explain everything from medieval battle tactics to basic household tasks to her readers. In the book's final chapters, characters repeatedly launch into recitations of the various arguments for why Richard couldn't possibly have murdered his nephews, sounding more like a history lecture than actual human beings--which, among other things, draws an unflattering comparison between The Sunne in Splendour and Josephine Tey's 1951 novel Daughter of Time, which presents the same argument with a great deal more style and wit.

Nevertheless, The Sunne in Splendour is profoundly readable--perhaps more so than The White Queen is watchable.  Artless though her style may be, Penman writes clearly and concisely.  This is particularly noticeable in the novel's battle scenes, in which she effortlessly sets the scene and takes readers through the beats of the battle (these scenes are anyway a point that The Sunne in Splendour has over The White Queen, which has neither the viewpoint nor the budget to stage big battles; one wonders if Elizabeth's magical powers were intended to compensate for this lack of excitement, but if so then either Gregory or her adapters have failed to use them as such).  And, of course, Penman has the benefit of her subject matter--if all she's done with her book is to make a story out of history (no small accomplishment in its own right, it must be said) then that history is fascinating enough to make for an engrossing read.

In fact, both The Sunne in Splendour and The White Queen are at their weakest when their authors step away from the task of storying history and try to inject their own agenda into their rendition.  For Gregory, this is the beatification of Elizabeth Woodville, who is clearly the favored of the miniseries's three heroines.  This is a problem because Elizabeth is, by far, the least interesting character in the miniseries, a fact that has less to do with her role in history, and more with her author's obvious love for her.  Though, as I've noted, very few characters in The White Queen achieve a true complexity, most have some shades of grey--Anne Neville, for example, spends most of the miniseries being frightened yet plucky, but she's surprisingly savvy when she maneuvers her way out of George's control, and later unleashes her inner Lady Macbeth when her husband comes within reach of the throne.

Elizabeth, however, is caught in an epic (albeit, to a modern viewer, not entirely convincing) love story with Edward, which leaves her incapable of developing much of a personality.  Her defining trait is that she loves her husband and children, and she seems to want nothing more than to be with them and to protect them.  Though Gregory allows Elizabeth to occasionally be bitchy to Margaret or Anne, she doesn't allow her to acknowledge the political reality in which she's living--the fact that she is a social climber whose family has benefited enormously from her fortunate marriage.  The White Queen seems to have a horror of making Elizabeth seem in any way mercenary or ambitious, and so it paints an entirely unbelievable portrait of a woman who married, for love, a man who just happened to be the King of England, and who is repeatedly shocked, shocked to discover that this marriage has earned her enemies and puts her and her family in danger.  The result, paradoxically, is to make Elizabeth seem monstrously self-absorbed, so focused on her marriage that she appears genuinely not to have noticed that there's a war going on and that her marriage has intensified it.  In one scene, Elizabeth, who is dealing with a crisis of conscience, pensively asks Margaret Beaufort is she has ever experienced loss--when, after decades of civil war, there surely isn't anyone in Edward's court who hasn't experienced it, as Elizabeth should well know.

Gregory's love for Elizabeth Woodville, however, pales next to Penman's love for Richard III, and as much as The White Queen whitewashes Elizabeth, The Sunne in Splendour vilifies her and her family, the better to clear Richard from the charges that history lays at his feet.  The core of the dispute between the two characters and their partisans is the early death of Edward IV, which leaves a boy on the throne of England.  Richard and the Woodvilles immediately scramble to gain control of the young king, which leads to Richard declaring his brother's children illegitimate and claiming the throne for himself, and the disappearance of both of Elizabeth's royal sons, the famous Princes in the Tower.  If you want to make one of the parties in this final stage of the Wars of the Roses look like the good guy (and, just to be clear, I think that this is a dubious project whose result will be bad history as well as bad fiction), you have to make the other into a villain.

This Penman does, and with gusto.  In the early chapters of The Sunne in Splendour, Penman describes Elizabeth as arrogant and power-hungry, but also extends some sympathy towards her--in one chapter in particular, we see Elizabeth musing about the loneliness of her situation, hated by everyone except for her narcissistic husband.  As the story draws on, however, Elizabeth becomes more and more of a caricature of grasping ambition--her dying regret is that she couldn't convince Edward to kill the priest who proves that their marriage is invalid.  She is frequently castigated for behavior that in other characters would be considered entirely justified.  When Edward tells her that he was already married when he met her, the narrative undermines Elizabeth's entirely justified rage at the damage he's done to her and their children by having Edward comment (and Elizabeth silently confirm) that "We both know I've given you what you did want most, that Queen's coronet you take such pleasure in wearing.  Even had I told you about Nell, you'd still have married me.  To be Queen of England, I don't doubt you'd have willingly bedded a leper."  Later in book, after Richard has seized the throne, Elizabeth joins forces with Lancaster to unseat him, and is criticized by her oldest daughter for being willing to plunge the country into civil war in order to reacquire her lost power.  In a novel that spans a quarter century of dynastic disputes, in which at least seven different characters seek to unseat a reigning monarch, and several battles are fought in which tens of thousands of people die, Elizabeth is the only character who is so rebuked.

If Elizabeth has it bad, her family get it even worse.  Penman not only puts the worst possible spin on the Woodvilles' social climbing, describing them as avaricious and unfit for the posts Elizabeth wins them, but she also paints the family, individually and as a whole, as generally worthless people.  Elizabeth's brother Anthony and her son from her first marriage Thomas Grey are depicted as craven, uncouth, and foolish.  They are frequently the target of Richard's, and often also Edward's, disdain, which they accept because they have no sense of honor and care only about money and power.  Much like Elizabeth, they are called to task for behavior that in other characters is treated as par for the course--when Elizabeth objects to Edward pardoning Warwick, who has killed her father and brother, Edward dismisses her anger; later in the same scene, when Anthony makes a somewhat possessive reference to the deaths of Edward's father and brother in the early stages of the war, Edward explodes at this perceived lack of respect for his grief; the narrative treats Edward's outburst with gravity, and makes no reference to his obvious hypocrisy.  Thomas Grey is described as having "a taste ... for intrigue" for being able to place spies in the houses of the Woodvilles' enemies, a generally useful skill that several other characters in the novel employ with no authorial censure.  He is also described as having "the family flair for hating," and later in the novel he rapes an unconscious woman, one of the most innocent and likeable characters in the novel, just so we're clear who the bad guys are.

That Penman needed to make Elizabeth and the Woodvilles into villains is perhaps understandable--though it must be said that Gregory is much more even-handed with Richard than Penman is with Elizabeth; in her version of the events that follow Edward's death, Elizabeth and Richard both start with equal parts distrust and a desire for compromise, but their paranoia, and some helpful prodding from Margaret Beaufort, tip them into all-out war.  The specific terms chosen by Penman to describe that villainy are less understandable, however, and as one progresses in the novel that choice increasingly seems to have less to do with wanting to rehabilitate Richard, and more with the Woodvilles' class.  You see this, for example, in the contrast Penman draws between Richard's honorable good manners, the seriousness with which he takes his role as feudal lord, and the Woodvilles' bungling crassness.  Or in the way that Penman repeatedly paints the Woodvilles as stupid and unsophisticated, but never explains why, despite their general lack of ability, they continue to flourish and present a meaningful threat to Richard and his supporters.  One almost expects her to refer to their "low cunning." 

What I find most interesting about this is how these two very different approaches to their subject matter on Penman and Gregory's parts end up revealing a similar prejudice in both works.  The White Queen and The Sunne in Splendour both seem to have a horror of social climbing.  Penman addresses this issue in the more familiar way, by making her story's social climbers into villains, and attaching to them all the classist stereotypes that such characters are prone to.  Gregory, though she wants Elizabeth to be her heroine, obviously has the same problem with the idea that she might have married primarily, or even just in part, in order advance herself and her family.  And so she pretends otherwise, and makes of Elizabeth a wholly unbelievable, and quite tedious, figure, who somehow manages not to notice that her marriage comes with undreamt-of financial and political perks.

In the documentary produced by the BBC to coincide with The White Queen (which, though interesting, includes too much of the unfounded speculation that eventually crops up in the miniseries), Gregory says that the purpose of the Cousins' War books was to highlight the ways in which, even in a period that accorded them no rights or status, women were actors in their own right, and often the architects of their own, or their families', fate.  For all my problems with The White Queen, it does accomplish this task, not least in the way that it charts the boundaries of that power and the pitfalls of exercising it.  Isabel Neville, for example, does everything that her husband and father tell her to, and ends up as the most tragic figure in the story because of it.  Her death from postpartum infection is an almost too-perfect encapsulation of the inescapable trap of womanhood in the miniseries's period.  Marguerite d'Anjou, on the other hand, repeatedly defies traditional feminine roles.  We're told that she effectively ran the country when her mentally unstable husband wasn't up to the task, and after he's deposed it is Marguerite who leads the Lancaster side, even riding with her son's troops.  For this, she is unsurprisingly reviled.  The Yorkists use Marguerite's influence on Henry VI as their justification for rebelling and eventually claiming the throne in the wars' early stages.  Later on, it is the perception of a similar influence on Elizabeth's part that motivates Warwick to turn on Edward, and which later convinces Richard that she can't be trusted with the young king.

Between these two characters, Gregory perfectly captures the double bind that greets women when they to exercise power in a patriarchal, medieval system.  Women who can't control their destiny end up being used up and spit out like Isabel Neville; women who try to grab as much power as they can, however, end up being branded as Bad Girls, and sometimes, as in Elizabeth Woodville's case, as witches.  The Sunne in Splendour plays into this bind without seeming at all aware of it.  Penman is sympathetic towards both Isabel Neville and Marguerite d'Anjou but doesn't seem to have considered how their fates reflect the system they lived in.  And, as noted, with her version of Elizabeth she is perfectly happy to parrot the view that a woman who is ambitious, who marries for advancement and takes advantage of her position to amass power for herself and her family, is a Bad Girl (though it is interesting to note that she omits the accusations of witchcraft brought against Elizabeth and her mother by, respectively, Richard and Warwick; perhaps she feared that the associations modern readers would draw from a powerful man accusing a troublesome woman of witchcraft would undermine her pro-Richard argument).  But Gregory, who does see this bind, and the system that created it, is nevertheless unable to escape the Bad Girl mentality.  She must strip Elizabeth of her ambition before she can make her into a heroine.

I can't help but be reminded of Anne Boleyn, another English queen who appears quite frequently in historical fiction, and who was also branded--by her contemporaries and, often, by modern authors--as a Bad Girl.  Anne and Elizabeth, in fact, have a great deal in common.  They're both English-born queens of England (Elizabeth was the very first), both women who were expected to settle for being the King's mistress, and instead held out for marriage and crown, and both women who earned themselves a great deal of enmity for doing so.  More importantly, Anne and Elizabeth both amass power in the only way available to women in their period who have no property or connections--by attaching themselves to a powerful man.  Unlike Anne Neville, who is a great heiress even before she marries Richard, or Margaret Beaufort, who is the mother of a Lancastrian claimant to the throne, the only power Anne and Elizabeth have is that there is one man who considers them special, and that he just happens to be the most powerful man around.  (To be clear, this is speaking relatively.  Though Elizabeth is called a commoner, her family were minor aristocracy, and her mother was related to the royal court of Burgundy; the Boleyns, meanwhile, were a branch of the powerful Howard family.  Elizabeth and Anne could both have made very good marriages within their social stratum, but they didn't have the money or connections to aspire to a crown.)

This is, obviously, an incredibly dangerous tactic.  If your man tires of you, as Henry VIII did of Anne, you end up with your head chopped off.  But even if he doesn't, if you're the perfect wife, if you turn a blind eye to his infidelities, if you give him many healthy children, including sons (something that both the novel and the miniseries ignore is how much of the Wars of the Roses are driven by the fact that many of the York and Lancaster claimants didn't have children or outlived them, while the Woodvilles were incredibly fertile; to bring this back to the issue of class, I can't help but think that this is what happens when you don't spend four generations marrying your cousins in an effort to keep your property in the family and the riffraff out)--even then, your position is precarious.  If your only power comes from being special to one man, then all the other men who have power will not only resent you, they will treat you as morally inferior, as a Bad Girl, for using sex to get power, and for wanting power in the first place instead of being born with it. 

In her novel Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel tries to do some of the same things as Gregory and Penman--to rehabilitate a historical figure usually cast as a villain, in her case Thomas Cromwell, and to draw attention to the ways that women used power in periods that officially gave them none, and to the dangers of doing so.  Mantel could have made the choices that Gregory and Penman do.  She could have made Anne Boleyn a blameless woman in love, or Cromwell a saint driven to evil acts by a conniving woman.  Instead, Mantel recognizes what neither of these authors seem to--that to look for good guys and bad guys, and to root for a particular side, in a dispute like the Wars of the Roses is a fool's errand.  Instead, she focuses on her characters' humanity.  Her Anne is not an appealing figure.  There is little romance between her and Henry VIII, and as he grows tired of her and she grows more desperate, she seems to shrivel up until there's nothing left but ambition and arrogance.  Nevertheless, she is still human, and Mantel doesn't judge her for her choices or ambitions.  Her Cromwell, too, is more than a hero or a villain (though in my reviews of Bring Up the Bodies and its prequel Wolf Hall I've taken Mantel to task for going too easy on him and downplaying his less savory actions).  He has many admirable qualities, and though over the course of the book we watch his soul atrophy, and the worst in him emerge as he engineers Anne's death, we never lose sight of the good that is still in him.

It's that humanity that is missing in both The White Queen and The Sunne in Splendour.  As you may have noticed, I've said virtually nothing about Penman's Richard, which is because, like Gregory's Elizabeth, he is interesting more for what happens to him than for who he is.  When given the chance to explore Richard's humanity--to imagine, for example, how despite his inherent goodness he could have been spurred to terrible acts after his brother's death, one small step after another--Penman instead chooses to present apologia, to painstakingly detail how none of the terrible things that happened during Richard's reign were his fault.  The result is a character to whom things happen, far from the magnetic figure that Penman obviously wants him to be.  The White Queen and The Sunne in Splendour both have their pleasures (if I had to rank them, I would say that The Sunne in Splendour is more enjoyable, but also more aggravatingly overt in its attempts to push its take on history, which ultimately mars the novel beyond recovery), and both work well as an introduction to a fascinating bit of history.  But what they mainly made me wish for was that an author of Hilary Mantel's caliber would take hold of this material, and make some real art out of it.

Recent Reading Roundup 34

I'm not sure why, but the floodgates appear to have opened. After more than a year of struggling with my reading, I've found myself doing nothing but. I'm not that interested in examining the situation for fear of scaring my resuscitated bibliophilia away, but I will note that this year's Tournament of Books seems to have done well by me--I've read four of the participating novels (three of which are covered here), and though I have reservations about all of them, it's certainly an eclectic and interesting selection. Onward to the reviews.

• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn - On the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne's wife Amy disappears in what appears to be a home invasion.  Nick's chronicle of the days following Amy's disappearance, in which a media circus develops around the case, alternates with Amy's diary entries describing the history of her and Nick's relationship.  As both narratives progress, it becomes clear that Nick has been keeping secrets from both the readers and the police--an affair with a younger woman, financial difficulties, problems in the marriage with Amy--and Amy's diary entries grow less romantic and more fearful as she approaches the day of her disappearance.  Gone Girl is a novel with a twist, which, given that it's probably the most successful and widely-discussed thriller of the last year, was pretty hard to stay ignorant of before I picked the book up (in fact, knowing the twist is the main reason I decided to read Gone Girl, since otherwise a thriller about a man who appears to have murdered his wife would be pretty far outside of my interests).
  
  
  
  To my surprise, however, I found that knowing the twist made the first half of the novel, in which readers are meant to be bamboozled into suspecting Nick, a lot more fun.  Knowing that both of the narratives in this segment of the book are unreliable made it a sort of puzzle, as I tried to work out where the truth lay in the gap between Nick and Amy's increasingly conflicting accounts of their marriage.  The book actually loses a lot of energy in its second half, when the twist is revealed and that sort of active participation in the story fades away, making it easier to notice its flaws: that Flynn's plot only hangs together because the usually intelligent and calculating Amy suddenly becomes stupid and irrational just when the plot needs her to be; that the novel's descriptions of the economic deterioration of Nick's midwestern home town, or of the way the media, led by a Nancy Grace analogue, gleefully spins a narrative of his guilt, don't really connect to the central mystery plot or the examination the breakdown of Nick and Amy's marriage; and that towards the story's end, Amy engages in some stereotypical Bad Girl behavior (false rape accusations, stealing sperm) whose straight-faced, unexamined presentation left me feeling rather uncomfortable.
  
  Despite these flaws, Gone Girl is a tense, involving read, one that I gulped down and enjoyed immensely.  For that reason as well as several others, I was reminded while reading it of another massively successful, much-discussed potboiler, Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin.  Like Gone Girl, Kevin is an epistolary novel that revolves around a heavily publicized crime, and has a twist that everyone probably knows by now.  More importantly, Gone Girl and We Need to Talk About Kevin both seem to be using their propulsive plots to do the same thing--launch a discussion of a social institution (motherhood in Kevin, marriage in Gone Girl) that women are expected to desire and enjoy, and of the ways in which that expectation can warp and damage them.  They both also undermine that discussion in exactly the same way--by making one of their main characters a sociopath.  Gone Girl piles high the reasons for the implosion of Nick and Amy's marriage--Nick's immaturity and self-absorption, Amy's impossibly high expectations, financial difficulties, meddling parents, Nick and Amy's mutual belief that they need to assume a cool, carefree persona to please one another, and their disappointment when the other stops putting in the effort to maintain that facade.  But the more we get to know Amy, the clearer it becomes that she is incapable of love, and that even if none of these problems existed, she and Nick would still have a sham of a marriage.  Where Gone Girl improves on Kevin, however, is in not taking itself nearly as seriously as Shriver's novel, which aspires to a political significance that it can't really achieve.  Gone Girl, in contrast, is consciously shlocky, which not only makes the problems of its plot easier to swallow, but also suggests that the best way to read the novel might be as a very dark satire, in which Nick and Amy become trapped by the narrative that has been spun around them, forced to perform the perfect, effortlessly happy, Hollywood rom-com marriage for the cameras while behind closed doors the only thing keeping them together is mutually assured destruction.  If Gone Girl does have anything to say about the institution of marriage, it is this deeply cynical conclusion, that the only way to achieve this romantic fantasy is to be insane.
  
  
• Seraphina by Rachel Hartman - It's hard to know where to start discussing Hartman's debut, a busy, wide-ranging story with more characters, plot strands, and worldbuilding details than such a relatively short novel should be able to support.  So perhaps I'll start with the dragons.  Hartman's dragons are coolly logical creatures who, when they're not amassing hoards of gold coins or devouring human flesh, enjoy math and philosophy, and neither understand nor approve of emotions.  They can also take human form, which is how the titular heroine came to be conceived.  Considered an abomination by both races--to dragons because she represents her mother's succumbing to the emotion of love, and to humans because despite a peace that has lasted decades, the dominant religion of the novel's world still teaches that dragons are soulless, inferior beings--Seraphina has spent her life hiding what she is and coping with the unpredictable effects of her mixed heritage, such as psychic contact with people she's never met, or inherited memories from her mother that overwhelm her at inconvenient times.  Despite which, and the danger of being discovered and executed, Seraphina, who is also a gifted musician, takes a position as assistant choirmaster to the royal court, where hiding her heritage presents not only practical but emotional difficulties.  Is Seraphina a bad person for lying to her new friends?  Can she ever trust someone completely?  What about the observant captain of the guard Kiggs, whose attraction to Seraphina is repeatedly hamstrung by his conviction that she is lying about something?
  
  You would think that all this would be quite enough for any author to be getting on with, but the difficulties and emotional toll of passing for human make up only one of the novel's plot strands.  In others, Seraphina helps to prepare for a visit of the dragon king marking the anniversary of peace treaty between dragons and humans, and to investigate an assassination plot spearheaded by warmongers on both side; she discovers the existence of other dragon/human hybrids, and learns more about her dragon powers and ancestry; she deepens and repairs her relationships with her human father and dragon uncle, both of whom still carry the wounds left by her mother's transgression and death; and she gives us a guided tour of her world, its politics, history, religion, geography, and culture.  The ease with which Hartman weaves together these plot strands and subplots into a narrative that never feels overstuffed, and whose pace never slackens, reminded me of the early Harry Potter books (though Seraphina is pitched at an older audience).  And like those books, the result is a world that feels fully lived in and real, and some ways more interesting in its own right than the story used to illustrate it.
  
  Just as interesting as what Hartman does with her premise is what she doesn't do with it, the YA clichés she doesn't indulge in.  Seraphina is special, but not precocious; burdened, but not angsty.  Being skilled or special, in this novel, isn't an excuse for the narrative (or the other characters) to treat you like a special snowflake, but for the people in charge to give you more work--though her musical talent is frequently commented upon, most of Serpahina's work as assistant choirmaster is logistical, and involves wrangling musicians, arranging performances, and placating her ornery boss; when her hybrid superpowers are discovered, they too are wondered at only briefly before Seraphina is conscripted to help keep the peace.  Seraphina's matter-of-factness reflects both her and the narrative's recognition that though her experiences are transformative, and will affect the rest of her life, neither they nor she are the most important part of the story she's living through.  It's a recognition that is also reflected in the refreshingly undramatic resolution of the novel's romance, in which Seraphina and Kiggs recognize that they can't be together because what's going on around them is more important, but also promise not to give up on each other.  Even the novel's most resonant theme, Seraphina's passing and the self-doubt it breeds in her, are treated with a bracing practicality that doesn't obscure how difficult it has been for her to live with the constant threat of exposure.  Though I found the resolution of this strand a little too neat--Seraphina's friends are perhaps too quickly and uniformly willing to accept that she is something they've been taught to hate and fear--that resolution doesn't undermine the work Hartman does throughout the novel to put us in Seraphina's headspace, and I suspect that the novel's sequels will complicate the seeming ease with which Seraphina's secret has been accepted.  For that reason, as well as the chance to spend more time in this wonderfully detailed and realized world, I'm looking forward to what Hartman does next.
  
  
• Zero History by William Gibson - I had made up my mind to pass on the third volume in Gibson's Bigend trilogy, but coming across a copy of it in a used bookstore convinced me to give it a try.  I wish I could say that it turned out to be a fortuitous find, but my suspicions about Zero History proved correct.  Despite some cosmetic alterations, it is more or less a retread of the previous books in the trilogy, full of meditations about consumer culture in the post-9/11 world delivered by disaffected jet-setters who always know the exact brand name of all the objects they use, own, and see (a car isn't simply a Toyota, it's a Toyota Hilux, and always referred to by that full name).  This was new and unusual in Pattern Recognition, and overdone in Spook Country.  In Zero History it's pretty much unbearable--not to mention that the trilogy's "the future is now" slant on technology, which felt like a revelation in 2003, is practically old hat in 2013.
  
  
  
  Gibson's focus this time around is on clothing, as Spook Country heroine Hollis Henry is dispatched by PR wunderkind Hubertus Bigend to find the maker of a super-exclusive, highly secretive, high-end brand of jeans, so that Bigend can commercialize and market it.  Meanwhile, former drug addict Milgrim, another Spook Country character who is now working for Bigend, is sent to do a little industrial espionage on designers of military clothing, on the grounds that these styles influence commercial streetwear.  There are some interesting ideas here--though Gibson loses me on the connection between military and street fashion when he illustrates it through a character who wears a particularly utilitarian bra and claims that it was designed by the IDF; we are now at least two decades past the point where any reasonable person could still believe that all Israeli women are Mossad commandos who can strip an Uzi in their sleep, and as a former woman in the IDF I can assure you that I, and all my fellow female soldiers, bought our bras in the lingerie store like normal people--but they end up drowned out by an action plot that reiterates the previous two books even more than Gibson's fondness for dropping brand names.
  
  Where Zero History deviates from its two predecessors is in finally coming out against Bigend, who here is presented as almost a devil, and his attempts to monetize the jeans that Hollis is looking for an act of corruption that she must protect their designer from.  Which ends up rubbing me the wrong way.  Pattern Recognition and Spook Country were filled with an appreciation for objects that transcended their love of brands, an appreciation rooted in how well those objects had been designed and made, how perfectly they fit their purpose.  When Zero History fetishizes Hollis's mysterious jeans, it does so not simply because they're well made, but because they're exclusive, and it treats Hollis's efforts to keep them that way as almost a holy quest.  There are a lot of things wrong with the global fashion industry--its reliance on cheap, near-captive labor and poor working conditions, its perpetuation of distorted body images, the damage it does to the environment--but I don't think that the near-universal availability of cheap clothing is one of them.  To valorize an object because it is exclusive, and available only to those in the know (and, implicitly, those who are rich enough to drop everything and fly to Australia on a moment's notice when the designer announces a release there) doesn't strike me as the blow against evil that Gibson clearly intends me to see it as, no matter how problematic the commercialized, homogenized alternative is.
  
  
• This is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz - Díaz's second collection, and his follow-up to the Pulitzer-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, doesn't break new ground.  Once again, the focus is on the lives of first and second-generation Dominican immigrants to the US, and once again, the narrator is Díaz's alter-ego Yunior, a smartass with good grades and a bad attitude who can never get far enough away from the country he was born in or the neighborhood he grew up in.  As the title suggests, the topic of most of the stories here, as it was in Yunior's strand in Oscar Wao, is his inability to remain faithful, and the way that his infidelity destroys one relationship after another.
  
  Though Yunior's Dominican background and his family history play a role, as they did in Oscar Wao, in his behavior, Díaz isn't interested in making excuses, and indeed the point of the stories isn't to assign blame--Yunior is always willing to admit to being a fuckup.  What the stories in This is How You Lose Her try to do instead is get at Yunior's humanity, painting a portrait of a man who knows that he's the one destroying his own happiness, but still wants to be loved and forgiven, and is still heartbroken when the relationships he betrays actually do break down.  (Reading between the lines, Yunior comes off like the male equivalent of the romance heroine who doesn't know who she is without a man; he can't stop himself from cheating, but he doesn't know what to do without a woman in his life.)  Keeping all this running is, of coure, Díaz's narrative voice, a sing-song, fast-flowing blend of English, Spanish, and slang that is still, after two collection and a novel, stunning in its immediacy and vitality.  It makes the slight repetitiveness of the ideas in This is How You Lose Her--and in Díaz's career--seem worthwhile, but still I wish that Díaz would do something different--that, as promised, he'll expand his apocalypse-in-the-DR story "Monstro," from the New Yorker's science fiction issue a few years back, into a novel, and use that remarkable voice to tell us stories we haven't yet heard.
  
  
• Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple - Told through email exchanges, newsletters, magazine articles, and the connective tissue of its teenage narrator's reminiscences, Where'd You Go, Bernadette describes the events leading up to the disappearance of Seattle housewife Bernadette Fox.  A pioneer of green architecture and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Bernadette built only two houses before flaming out spectacularly and retreating to the suburbs of Seattle.  As the book opens fifteen years later, Bernadette is a shut-in, living in a dilapidated mansion she'd intended but never got around to renovating with her Microsoft genius husband and their precocious daughter Bee, who is just on the cusp of working out how abnormal her life and parents are.  Most of the comedy in the novel's early chapters comes from Bernadette's snobbish disdain for her mundane neighbors, and their part-curious, part-scandalized fascination with her, a madwoman who lives on the hill and never participates in the school bake sales.  These chapters, with their skewering of suburban small-mindedness and groupthink, have a whiff of Nicola Barker about them, but there's a dark undertone to them that Semple won't quite acknowledge.
  
  
  
  As Dan Hartland writes in his review, the narrative castigates Bernadette for her misanthropy, and her neighbors for being judgmental (and, since this is ultimately a benevolent comic novel rather than a satirical one, allows them to outgrow it) but it has nothing to say about her privilege.  One of Bernadette's methods for avoiding the world is to hire a personal assistant in India who handles shopping, household repair, travel arrangements, and even doctor's prescriptions for $30 a week.  This assistant is later revealed to be an identity thief who nearly clears out Bernadette's bank accounts, which absolves both her and us from having to wonder about the kind of person who sees nothing wrong with paying so little for so much work while sprinkling her emails with thoughtlessly privileged proclamations about her and her assistant's relative quality of life.  Instead, the only criticism that is expressed towards Bernadette is over her choice to give up her creative work--if you do not create, a former teacher tells her, you will become a menace to society--and if Where'd You Go, Bernadette has a message underpinning its social humor it is this examination of how to be a brilliant, creative person while dealing with the frustrating realities of a world that won't always let you do the work you were meant to do (one of the book's more interesting and subtle touches is that as she discovers her own genius--for investigating her parents' lives--the previously happy-go-lucky Bee starts to exhibit some of her mother's impatience and misanthropy).  The fact that some geniuses are never given the opportunity to exercise their creativity because they lack Bernadette's privilege is never discussed, and that, along with the slight sentimentality of the novel's resolution, undercuts what is otherwise a sharp, witty story about what it means to be special, and the obligations--to yourself and to others--that come with it.
  
  
• The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson - The premise of Johnson's novel--a bildungsroman set in North Korea--put me off as soon as I heard it, and its winning the Pulitzer prize (an award whose previous winners include Memories of a Geisha) wasn't an enticement either.  It was the repeated and consistent praise from the judges of this year's Tournament of Books (which Johnson went on to win) that finally persuaded me to give the book a try, and though what I found certainly justifies the tournament judges' praise, it also confirms my doubts about the novel's project.  Beautifully written and expertly plotted, the novel follows Jun Do, the titular orphan master's son, as he alternately rises and falls through the strata of North Korean society, going from lowly army grunt to professional kidnapper to spy to envoy the US to prisoner to the inner circle of Kim Jong Il.  What he's searching for is an identity he can bear to call his own in a nation that doesn't give its citizens the option of living a righteous life.  At the same time, his story is repeatedly being appropriated--as propaganda, as patriotic, anti-American lies to keep himself and his colleagues out of prison, as a cover to fool his American hosts into taking him seriously, and as a means of rescuing the people he cares about from Kim's clutches.  The malleability of story and identity lie at the heart of the novel, as do their twin uses as instruments of both oppression and liberation (by the end of the novel, Jun Do is modeling himself on Rick from Casablanca, and like him, sacrificing himself so that the woman he loves can escape oppression).  So it could be said that Johnson's use of North Korea is purely symbolic (as indicated by protagonist's punning name), a backdrop of oppression against which to set his story of an individual finding freedom through reinvention.  But The Orphan Master's Son is also painstakingly researched and detailed.  Though I can't speak to its accuracy, there is an obvious sense that Johnson isn't merely writing a parable, but trying to give his readers as complete a picture of life in North Korea as he can.
  
  Which, paradoxically, is why I finished the novel feeling uncomfortable at the fact that Johnson is speaking for people who have been denied their own voices, and has been rewarded for it.  As a corrective, I followed the book up with Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, an oral history based on Demick's interviews with North Korean defectors.  Nic Clarke, who called my attention to the book, has already written eloquently about its power, so I'll just add that as a counterpoint to Johnson's novel, the testimonies of Demick's interviewees make for powerful reading, and helped to crystallize some of my problems with the novel.  Even taking into account the selection bias that affects the book's subjects--these are the people who had the courage, the strength of will, and sometimes though not always the resources to leave their home--I was struck, while reading their accounts, by a vitality and a will to better their lives that is missing from almost all the characters--including, sometimes, the lead--in Johnson's novel.  Even before they gave up on North Korea, Demick's interviewees were working hard to survive, even if doing so meant rejecting, in action if not in word, the dogma they'd grown up with.  They start businesses, read illicit literature, and try to contact their relatives in the South.  Their minds are free, even if their lives aren't.
  
  In contrast, the prevailing tone among most of the North Koreans Jun Do meets is one of fatalism.  They survive by not acting, and by parroting the newspeak of the day, agreeing that up is down and black is white in order to survive--as when Jun Do steals the uniform of a high ranking official who visits his prison and escapes despite looking nothing like the man, because everyone he meets is too afraid to challenge him.  This is obviously in service of Johnson's project, which mimics the absurdist fiction of Soviet writers, who tried to put the insanity of living under a totalitarian regime into words by taking it to its illogical extremes.  But unlike those writers, Johnson isn't writing about his own country; whether or not he intended it, one of the results of his choice to write a North Korea in which everyone but the hero simply accepts things as they are is that it echoes a tendency of Western writers to treat foreigners as if their strange culture makes them less human, less likely to strive for better things and to use all their intelligence and ingenuity to achieve that goal.  The Orphan Master's Son is an excellent piece of literature, but I can't be entirely happy at its success.
  
  
• Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi - Oyeyemi's most recent novel (which is the first of her works that I've read) is possibly a novel in stories, and definitely a novel about stories, and about the way that they both shape and are shaped by reality.  Mr. Fox, an author in the pre-war US, is visited by his muse Mary Foxe--who may or may not be a figment of his imagination--who complains about his penchant for killing women in his fiction.  The two--or rather versions of them--then star in a sequence of stories, in which Mary tries to show Mr. Fox the error of his ways (or just to punish him for them) while he tries to get his wayward muse under control.  Meanwhile, in the framing story, Mr. Fox's wife Daphne believes that her husband is having an affair, but is Mary Daphne's competition, or an inspiration to take up her own creative work?
  
  
  
  Most of the stories in Mr. Fox take fairy tales as their starting point, in particular the title work, a variant on Bluebeard in which the storyteller is the intended wife and victim, who is able to turn the tables on her future husband and murderer by telling his story and revealing him for what he is.  One of Oyeyemi's focal points is the prevalence of wife murder in fiction (and in real life), the way that the husband, so often the hero in the traditional romantic narrative, can become its monster; but she is also treating that murder as something more symbolic, the murder of ambitions and talent, as one partner (usually the wife) sublimates their creative drive to please the other, sometimes without even realizing that they've done so.  That slipperiness, the shift between symbolic and actual murder, between good husband and bad, between fairy tale and modern fiction, is reflected in the stories that make up Mr. Fox, as Oyeyemi and her two storytellers/protagonists riff and extemporize on the title fairy tale in a way that makes shifting roles the central idea of the novel.  Authors become characters, animals become human, loving husbands become murderers,  supportive wives become consumed with their own work--and vice versa.  The result is a rich stew of allusions, references and parallels that chime against each other and come down not to an answer but a set of questions: can Mr. Fox be a good husband and stop killing women, both as an author and in real life?  Can Mary Foxe trust him instead of seeing him only as a monster?  Can Daphne Fox be a wife who is the equal of her husband, and an author in her own right?  What they also come down to, however, is a love story--with a particular screwball tone that suits the framing story's 30s setting very well--between three people who despite their shifting roles in it still emerge from the novel as vivid characters.  Both thought-provoking and delightful, I'm sure that Mr. Fox won't be the last of Oyeyemi's books that I will read.

Review: Big Mama Stories by Eleanor Arnason

My review of Eleanor Arnason's new collection Big Mama Stories appears today at Strange Horizons.  I've been a fan of Arnason's short fiction for more than a decade, since reading "Knapsack Poems"--still, to my mind, one of the finest short stories in the field--so a chance to review more of her stories seemed too good to pass up.  In Big Mama Stories, Arnason tries to invent a folk figure for the technological age, and the result, as I write in the review, feels like a cross between Brer Rabbit and Doctor Who--which is to say, utterly delightful.

Surface Tension: Thoughts on Hannibal's First Season

The first time I read Thomas Harris's Red Dragon was more than fifteen years ago, in the white heat of having discovered and been wowed by its more famous sequel, The Silence of the Lambs.  Standing in such stark comparison to the later book, which takes the elements that Red Dragon innovates--cutting between the points of view of the killer and the FBI agent pursuing him, focusing on the psychology of, and extending compassion to, both of them, featuring competent, multifaceted female characters at every turn of the plot--and does them better, Red Dragon couldn't help but come off badly, and for years I've thought of it as a disappointing work (it probably didn't help that my favorite character in the Lecter sequence, Clarice Starling, does not appear in this book).

Coming back to Red Dragon this week in preparation for writing this piece, I discovered a much stronger book than I had remembered, a smart, engaging thriller with an undertone of melancholy that only seems to make its moments of tension and excitement more effective.  It's also a more conventional work than I was expecting, or perhaps a more accurate way to put it would be that what was unconventional about Red Dragon when it was first published in 1981 is now commonplace.  Harris focuses, in great detail, on the investigative and forensic procedures which enable the FBI to catch serial killers, and clearly takes a great deal of pleasure in showing off his research in these areas (he also seems to enjoy wowing readers with the space-age technology and resources at the FBI's fingertips: "Wired to a Gateway telephone, in minutes the Datafax was transmitting the employment roll simultaneously to the FBI identification section in Washington and the Missouri Department of Motor Vehicles."  In minutes!).  Nowadays, that's the stuff of every cut-rate procedural, so it's probably not surprising that, when given the reins of a franchise that has never quite managed to live up to the iconic status of its most famous character (some might say, that has been dragged down by that character's popularity) Bryan Fuller, TV's most idiosyncratic creator, has taken another path.  His Hannibal draws its power less from the taut storytelling that makes Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs (and the films based on them) such a thrill, and more from visuals, and an atmosphere of dread and looming disaster.  The result is one of the most intriguing and unusual television series of the last few years, but also one of its most frustrating.  It's a series whose moments are frequently brilliant, but whose whole often feels empty.

Like a lot of prequels (the series begins some time before the events of Red Dragon), Hannibal draws its power from the irony of the audience knowing things that the characters don't, and like shows such as Smallville, or films such as X-Men: First Class, it roots that irony in a friendship between people who will one day become enemies--FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), the protagonist of Red Dragon, and cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen, in a performance whose reserve and undertone of dry bemusement put it in stark, clearly deliberate contrast to Anthony Hopkins's famously hammy turn in the role).  The crucial difference here is that unlike Lex Luthor or Magneto, Hannibal has no illusions about who he is and what role he plays in the story.  At the time the series starts, he has for several years been an active serial killer, dubbed the Chesapeake Ripper by the FBI.  His friendship with Will, for whom he functions as a therapist and a sounding board while growing more involved with FBI investigations over the course of the season, is thus both a means to track and obfuscate the investigation of his own crimes, and an opportunity to indulge his psycopathic impulses.  As they grow closer, Hannibal manipulates Will--who is described as suffering from an "empathy disorder" which allows him to get into anyone's head, including killers--undermining his sense of reality and of self, concealing the fact that he is suffering from a neurological illness, convincing him and his colleagues at the FBI that he's losing his mind, and framing him for several murders.

Despite telling a very different story, Hannibal draws heavily from Red Dragon (and, to a lesser extent, from The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal the book; for all I know the show also cribs elements from the fourth Lecter novel, Hannibal Rising, but I haven't read it), borrowing lines of dialogue, images, and even whole scenes, so that one wonders what the show will be left with when it does the Red Dragon story (Fuller has laid out a multi-season plan for the show in which Red Dragon will be covered in season 3).  This can sometimes be awkward, as when Will, quoting directly from the book, says that he sees the Chesapeake Ripper as "one of those pitiful things that are born in hospitals from time to time.  They feed it, and keep it warm, but they don't put it on the machines and it dies."  It's an uncomfortable turn of phrase in the book, which is clearly of its time, but it's almost impossible to imagine someone in 2013 expressing themselves that way. 

For the most part, however, Fuller's extensive drawing on his source material is playful, often deliberately contravening the expectations of viewers who are familiar with it.  He recreates several iconic scenes from the books, but in a way that reverses their meaning.  In one scene, a patient at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where Lecter will eventually be incarcerated, fakes a heart attack and attacks the nurse who tries to treat him.  In the books, this is Lecter, as described by Dr. Chilton to Will Graham in Red Dragon the book, and to Clarice Starling in the film of The Silence of the Lambs, as a way of illustrating the danger posed by Lecter.  In Hannibal, the patient is a murderer played by Eddie Izzard who has been manipulated by Chilton into believing that he is the Chesapeake Ripper--so the danger becomes, as it will be for Will, not the psychotic murderer but the seemingly benign psychiatrist offering to help.  Another episode opens with Laurence Fishburne's Jack Crawford flashing back to a time when he recruited an FBI trainee, played by Anna Chlumsky, to help him pursue a killer, but the trainee isn't Starling but a new character called Miriam Lass, who preceded her.  Her existence makes Crawford, and the quasi-paternal relationship he forges with Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, seem seedy, as if Starling were just the latest in a string of trainees that Crawford uses and discards--or has discarded for him, as Miriam stumbles onto Lecter (in exactly the way that Will describes in Red Dragon) and is killed by him.

Perhaps the most intriguing play on the Lecter canon in the series is the character of Hannibal's psychiatrist, the improbably named Bedelia du Maurier.  Played by Gillian Anderson, whose most famous character was modeled on Jodie Foster's turn as Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, and who was widely discussed as a frontrunner for the role when Foster declined to reprise it in the film version of Hannibal, du Maurier is semi-retired after having been attacked by a patient referred to her by Hannibal.  We don't learn the exact details of the attack in the first season, but du Maurier does tell Jack that the patient died during the attack when he swallowed his tongue, and later implies to Hannibal that there is more to how he died than she has told--swallowing his tongue being the way that Lecter persuaded a fellow prisoner who had insulted Starling to kill himself in The Silence of the Lambs.  In one of the season's final scenes, Hannibal visits du Maurier in her home with a prepared dinner, which may or may not be the flesh of his most recent victim (one of the show's more interesting choices is that it rarely confirms whether Hannibal is feeding his guests human flesh or not).  du Maurier's hesitation before she takes a bite--as well as the oblique hints she drops that she's aware of Hannibal's nocturnal activities--are a reminder that eating a cannibalistic meal prepared by Lecter is how Hannibal the book signals that Lecter has succeeded in breaking Starling down, stripping her of her pesky conscience, and making her the companion he desires.  With that in mind, it's hard not to wonder if the season's end, in which Will is committed to the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane and visited by Hannibal, is less a Homeland-style downfall for the sake of a triumphant resurgence in the second season, and more an indication that in Fuller's upside down version of the story, the role of Dr. Lecter, psychopathic consultant to the FBI, will be played by Will Graham.

As fun as these riffs on the canon are, I can't help but wonder if Hannibal wouldn't have been better off without them, because veering into recreations of Harris's tight, purposeful plotting only throws into sharper relief the fact that Hannibal's own original plotting is nothing of the sort, often driven by a combination of coincidence and the characters' stupidity.  The entire premise of the series is rooted in the coincidence that the psychiatrist referred to treat the FBI's top profiler (Hannibal gets the job because his former student Alana Bloom, a gender-swapped character from the books played by Caroline Dhavernas, refers Will to him) just happens to be the FBI's most wanted serial killer, and the first season only shakes out the way it does because Will just happens to develop a rare, virtually undetectable form of auto-immune encephalitis at precisely the same time (Will's health issues are quite obviously drawn from the experiences of New York Post journalist Susannah Cahalan, whose article on her experiences is terrifyingly informative but also drives home just what an unlikely confluence of events this is).  As if that were not enough, Hannibal needs to throw random sociopaths into its characters' path just to make its season-long plot work--when Will insists that his symptoms could have a neurological origin, Hannibal, who has been trying to convince him that he is mentally ill, takes him to a neurologist friend who diagnoses Will's illness, and is then persuaded by Hannibal to conceal it so that they can "observe" Will's deterioration.  And then there is the simple fact that Hannibal spends the entire season surrounded by FBI agents who have made it their life's mission to catch him, and never arouses even a hint of suspicion in any of them--even Will, who is defined by his intuitive powers of observation, only sees Hannibal for what he is when the plot needs him to, and no sooner.

Writing in The Vulture, reviewer Matt Zoller Seitz acknowledges the ridiculousness of the show's plotting, but suggests that to get hung up on it is to miss the point.  Hannibal, he argues, proceeds with the logic of a dream, or rather a nightmare.  The excesses of its one-off killers (almost all of whom arrange the bodies of their victims into grisly environmental art, and frequently consume parts of them in a seeming homage to the series's title character), the apparent indifference of the FBI to anything resembling proper investigative procedure, the failure of any of the characters to acknowledge just how absurdly and improbably weird their lives have become, these are all, Seitz argues, in service of the show's project to put its viewers in a certain, deranged headspace.

I can't think of a better example on TV of Roger Ebert's famous dictum that what matters isn't what a movie's about, but how it's about it. Simply by showing us things in a particular way, Hannibal communicates (subtly, almost imperceptibly at times) that it's dealing in metaphor, and that the only thing we're meant to take at face value are the feelings expressed by the show's characters, in much the same way that the only thing we take at face value when dreaming are the emotions we experience as we toss and turn in our sleep. That doorway, that pit, that castle, that naked body writhing beneath us: none are real. But the fear, lust, and curiosity we experience as we encounter them is as real as the air you're breathing now.

To a certain degree, Seitz is obviously right, especially when he stresses Hannibal's execution of this effect.  The show's plotting may be lackluster, but its visuals and atmospherics are some of the most stunning and effective that I have ever seen.  They suggest, as I wrote about a very different show earlier this year, that television may be moving away from the primacy of plot, or even psychological realism, and dipping its toes into more experimental, less linear storytelling.  Hannibal draws its visual power from carefully composed interiors--Hannibal's cavernous, book-lined office, Will's homey, slightly rustic house, full of DIY and fishing paraphernalia, Jack's neat office with its ugly institutional furniture--and by situating characters within them in what almost seem like tableaux--when Hannibal has sessions with his patients, or with Dr. du Maurier, the camera frequently catches them sitting opposite one another, perfectly still while they converse.  It's a show that demands (and rewards) attention to detail, as the camera is focused on such seemingly impossibly wrought creations as Hannibal's dishes, or the grotesquely arranged bodies left behind by Hannibal and his fellow killers.  (That demand for attention is auditory as much as it is visual; unlike most network shows, where characters repeat themselves and spell out their conclusions and motivations to keep the viewers up to speed, Hannibal's dialogue is opaque.  Characters frequently make leaps in conversation that are rooted in professional knowledge or their own personal experience, leaving viewers who weren't listening carefully scrambling to catch up.)

From the season's first episodes, the show trades in dream imagery as well as its nightmarish reality.  As Will's grasp on sanity deteriorates, these interludes--they quickly come to comprise hallucinations and waking dreams as well as sleeping ones--become more elaborate, and more difficult to distinguish from the show's reality.  Recurring elements start to appear, and are left to the viewers to decode--who, for example, is the stag that Will keeps following in his dreams and hallucinations?  By the season's end the show has, as Seitz argues, taken on the tone of a nightmare, with viewers never entirely certain about the narrative's solidity, always ready for yet another scene to devolve into horror and be revealed as a dream.  

Where Seitz and I disagree is on the effectiveness of this approach.  To me it eventually collapses under its own weight, and is undermined, rather than bolstered, by "the feelings expressed by the show's characters," whom I find less well-constructed than Seitz obviously does.  Seitz classes Hannibal as a horror show (which is to say, a slightly different genre than Harris's books or the films based on them, which were mostly horror-tinged thrillers) whose power is in its affect.  But unlike, say, American Horror Story, Hannibal doesn't reach for feelings of disgust or outrage at the grand guignol that its characters witness (and, sometimes, perform).  Nor is the series's sense of horror achieved through the murders that Will investigates--which though initially grotesque quickly become too absurd to have any meaningful effect (by the end of the season, a killer of the week is digging decades' worth of murder victims up, chopping them up, and arranging their body parts on a totem pole)--or through our fear that Hannibal will kill the main characters--between the timeline laid out by the books and the series's relatively simple plotting, it's easy to guess which characters are safe for the time being and which are likely to be killed sooner rather than later (there are, incidentally, more women in the second group than the first).  

The horror effect in Hannibal is achieved through tension--the tension of knowing what Hannibal is while the rest of the cast remains oblivious, the tension of watching our heroes wander trustingly into Hannibal's orbit like sheep playing with a wolf, the tension of watching Hannibal tighten the screw on Will's sanity one more notch as we wait to see whether Will will snap or finally realize what's being done to him, the tension we feel every time Hannibal serves a meal as we wonder what the characters are putting in their mouths.  But humor is the mortal enemy of horror, and whenever Hannibal makes itself ridiculous--when Hannibal's ability to hide in plain sight is rooted not in his own cleverness but in the other characters' stupidity, or in a nonsensical turn of plot--that tension is dispelled, and the show's affect is nullified.  Hannibal may not care about plot, but it needs plot to justify the emotions it asks us to feel on behalf of its endangered, clueless characters.  Otherwise, the fact that these characters are endangered and clueless seems like nothing more than a consequence of their own stupidity, or worse, writerly fiat, and being asked to feel tension under those circumstances is like being asked to do the writers' work for them.

One of the surprises of Red Dragon is how little Lecter actually appears in it--only two scenes, and a few letters to Will--but nevertheless his one shared scene with Will has struck me, since I first read it more than fifteen years ago, as getting at the heart of the character in a way that none of the subsequent books or movies have managed to do, precisely because they're too enamored with him.  Trying to goad Lecter into helping him with his current case, Will tells him that "I thought you might be curious to find out if you're smarter than the person I'm looking for."

"Then, by implication, you think you are smarter than I am, since you caught me."
"No.  I know I'm not smarter than you are.
"Then how did you catch me, Will?"
"You had disadvantages."
"What disadvantages?"
"Passion.  And you're insane."

It is precisely that insanity, or indeed any sense of interiority, that is missing from Hannibal's depiction of the character, and that makes it impossible for me to accept Seitz's argument that the shortcomings of the show's plotting are acceptable because the characters remain real.  Hannibal's Hannibal is not real.  He's a collection of amusing, slightly exotic affectations, mannerisms and hobbies that amount to, as Dr. du Maurier puts it in her first appearance "a very well-tailored person suit."  This would not be a problem given what Hannibal is, but what is a problem is the fact that throughout the show's first season the audience is never given a glimpse of what lies under that person suit (or, indeed, if there is anything under it).  Even when we're privy to Hannibal's crimes, we never understand why he's committing them (or, for that matter, their purpose--at various points over the course of the season Hannibal appears to be trying to kill Will, kill Jack, drive one or the other of them crazy, frame them for murders, help them, or become their friend; it's finally most useful to conclude that he just does whatever seems most interesting at the moment).  Unlike Dexter, Hannibal doesn't give us an inside track on what's going on its title character's head, a view on his humanity or his monstrousness.  Given that almost every other character on the show is clueless and, in the case of Will, completely reactive--he doesn't work out what's being done to him until the season's final twenty minutes, at which point he quite accurately pronounces himself "self-aware"--the result is a little like what I imagine Dexter would be if its focus were solely on Deb and the other secondary characters as they wander around obliviously, unsure why their lives have become so weird and full of horror.  

While this is obviously something the show could address in later seasons, I can't help but believe that the reason Hannibal doesn't let us see inside its title character's head is that it can't find a way to make what's going on in there look cool.  This is, after all, a man who likes to kill people, chop them up, make meals out of their flesh and organs and serve them to his guests.  You don't do something like that unless you really get off on it, and the image that Harris, the movies, and now the TV show have created of Lecter, as someone urbane and sophisticated who likes good food and just happens to murder people he finds rude, can't accommodate something so ugly and perverse.  Like a lot of fans, I didn't care for Hannibal the novel, but looking back I can at least respect its attempt to give Lecter an origin story that stresses that something very bad had to have happened to him, and twisted him up in a truly horrible way, for him to do the things he does (though even then, it feels as if Harris wants us to feel sorry for Lecter--and thus to desire the ending in which Starling is destroyed so that she can become his keeper as well as his accomplice).  Hannibal does not even hint at this sort of damage, and treats Lecter as an inhuman devil--which, again, given that he is the only character in the first season with agency, leaves the show emotionally hollow.

If Hannibal works despite the problems with its handling of its characters--despite suffering from the same problem as too many other Lecter adaptations, and eventually the books themselves, of not being quite sure who its main character is--it is because of its actors.  Dancy and Mikkelsen's jobs are seemingly impossible, asked to portray, respectively, a man who loses himself in other people for a living and spends the season losing what little sense of self that occupation leaves him, and a monster hiding behind good manners and better suits.  If Mikkelsen can't quite find the humanity (or the true, ugly monstrosity) in Hannibal, he at least leaves us perpetually guessing about where it lies--is Hannibal crying crocodile tears over Will at the end of the season, or does he feel genuine affection for him?  Is his facade of detachment a true expression of his sociopathic nature, or does he feel genuine hate for Jack Crawford, and joy at his suffering?--in a way that promises that, if the series ever raises its game where the character is concerned, Mikkelsen will be able to take it there.  Dancy, meanwhile, cuts a more heroic, more compelling figure that is perhaps less complicated than the show needs him to be (unlike Claire Danes's turn in a very similar story in Homeland, he doesn't manage to make Will offputting as well as heroic, though the writing isn't really there to support that--much like Red Dragon, Hannibal tries to but can't convincingly argue that Will carries a similar darkness to the murderers he hunts).  But the vulnerability he brings to the role is heartbreaking, especially when Hannibal begins to take advantage of it, and makes it all the more heartening when Will finally discovers his core of self at the end of the season and manages to resist Hannibal's manipulation.  (Fishburne, meanwhile, is excellent in a role that is arguably the most successfully constructed and morally complex in the season, while Dhavernas is sadly wasted as a character who should have been the show's moral center but ends up being shunted into Will's romantic orbit too often.)

If there's a conclusion that I come to after watching the first season of Hannibal, it's that perhaps creators (and I include Thomas Harris in this group) shouldn't take a crack at Hannibal Lecter until they understand what he is and what kind of story they want to tell about him.  Is he a monster?  Then make him your villain, or commit to the fact that you are telling a story about a monster (something that could have been very interesting, especially in light of Dexter's increasing unwillingness to face up to that fact in its most recent seasons).  Is he a damaged man?  Then show that damage, and be willing to acknowledge how ugly and unappealing it should be.  Going by the first season they've produced, Bryan Fuller and his writers don't know the answer to this question, which is why Hannibal often feels as if it has no center, and as if it amounts to little more than its horrific, nightmarish affect.  That doesn't mean that there isn't anything here to watch for--the visuals are stunning, the actors breathe life into the characters no matter how flawed their construction, and that affect is impeccably achieved even if, to my mind, it often falters.  But the result is that I enjoy Hannibal while I'm watching it and then feel as if there was no substance to it when the episode or season have wrapped up.  It's a rich meal, but it leaves you feeling curiously unsated.