Fantastic Metropolis

I doubt I need to draw attention to these since they’ve received considerable attention from reviewers, but Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (Bloomsbury, 2004), Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004), and Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw (Tor, 2003) (which has just won the World Fantasy Award) were all fine reads. Earlier in the year, when I still had time for reading, Eileen Gunn’s description of Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles beguiled me into trying The Game of Kings, which in turn seduced me into reading the remaining five volumes. About this I will say only that although I was intensely aware of how manipulative Dunnett’s narration is, I lost more than one night’s sleep to the addiction. (Gunn, that wretch, likens the experience of reading this series to a love affair: and so it was—one that was short, violent, and intense.) A couple of months later, I dipped into a second historical series, Mary Gentle’s four-volume The Book of Ash. I found this an interesting but frustrating read. Gentle records nearly every breath her hero takes, an impressive feat of narrative that occasionally becomes a little like watching paint dry. Since one can’t help but be aware that the author is playing the reader, if one wants to have one’s guesses about what kind of fiction the novels are confirmed or denied, one must read every sentence lest important details appear for only a fleeting moment as the paint continues to dry… On the other hand, I absolutely loved Vonda N. McIntyre’s Nebula-winning sf novel The Moon and the Sun (Pocket Books, 1997), which many reviewers have mistakenly labeled fantasy. McIntyre does a beautiful job getting the setting—the Court of Louis XIV —right and depicting the powerful tensions between science and religion in seventeenth-century Europe. (Admittedly, her protagonist’s experience as a young woman composer resonated powerfully with my own experience more than three decades ago.) A bona fide fantasy, Nina K. Hoffman’s A Fistful of Sky charmed me, first for the imaginativeness and psychological sophistication of her treatment of magic, second because she did not give in to the genre-pressure to transform her heroine (through magic or dieting) into a sleek, sexy fox, and finally because the novel did not throw itself away on an easy ending.

I’d like to conclude by praising the three most impressive novels I read this year. The first of these, Shirley Jackson’s The Bird’s Nest, first appeared in 1954. Jackson ’s protagonist suffers from multiple personality disorder; interestingly, Jackson shows the protagonist’s aunt and doctor as developing not only relationships with her various personalities but also echoes of such splits within themselves The novel is just brilliant.

William Gaddis’s last novel, Agapē Agape (Viking, 2002) is a haunting tour de force offering a glimpse for a brief passage of time inside the mind of a seriously ill intellectual. The narrator searches helplessly through his papers (haplessly knocking stacks of them over and spilling water over piles of unopened mail) as his mind (perhaps affected by the prednisone oxycodone he habitually takes) makes connections, sifting continually through a vast accumulation of ideas, facts, and insights, virtually unable to synthesize them into a coherent, consistent whole. At the end, it all comes down to “Age withering arrogant youth and worse, the works of arrogant youth and the book I wrote then, my first book, it’s become my enemy, o Dio, odium, the rage and energy and boundless excitement the only reality where the work that’s become my enemy got done and the only refuge from the hallucination that’s everything out there is the greater one that transforms you…” (95-96) Gaddis’s last work is sublime.

Samuel R. Delany’s new novel, Phallos (Bamberger Books, 2004), is a graceful jeu d’esprit exuberant with gorgeous, scintillating prose. The title takes its name from the putative text of a novel that one Randy Pedarson of Moscow, Idaho claims to have synopsized. (Pedarson’s synopsis is virtually the text of Delany’s novel.) The synopsis quotes liberally from the putative novel and is buttressed by extensive speculation on its origins and a series of entertaining footnotes, but the synopsis focuses primarily on the plot of the putative (apparently pornographic) novel, which is set in the second century of the Christian Era and involves an endless search for the jeweled phallos of the statue of a nameless god believed to hold the secrets to acquiring vast knowledge and wealth. The plot, rich in symbolic significance, is pure Delany. To keep from spoiling the story, I’ll say only that Delany’s Phallos is a joy.

L. Timmel Duchamp’s most recent publications are Love’s Body, Dancing in Time (sample story), a collection of short fiction, and The Grand Conversation: Four Essays. An ample selection of her essays and a few of her stories can be found at her website.