In the years that I’ve been writing / podcasting about movies, one question has come up again and again: “what do you think of The Room?” And the answer is I don’t. At least not often or emphatically. Like the Cha Cha Slide, it only makes sense as a participation sport. In an inebriated group, it’s a blast. Alone in your living room, it’s awkward and sad.

The Disaster Artist is another story. It’s a blast in any context, made all the more impressive by the myriad terrible possibilities it threads the needle between — down-punching satire v historical-revisionistic inspiration, “You’re tearing me apart” fan service v overexposition, cringe comedy v sanitized biopic, beating the joke to death v losing the funny. It’s a bit like Frank, or Eddie The Eagle, in that sense: you don’t necessarily understand the protagonist’s ambitions (at least not in any he’s-exceptional-and-must-be-rooted-for-by-virtue-of-his-talent underdog sense), but you love watching him chase those dreams because to him they are real. Anchored by James Franco’s shockingly rich portrayal, The Disaster Artist keeps those dreams front and center. Maybe The Room was a bomb by critical standards, and Wiseau never quite became the star he intended to be. But in the more important sense, he did prove Hollywood wrong. He became a hero. And watching him get there is a helluva lot of fun.

October-November Fiction Roundup! A slow October tumbled into a overcompensating-ly productive November as far as reading is concerned. All in all I finished thirteen works of fiction, split fairly evenly between full-length novels and short story collections / novellas: Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish (3.5/5), The Refugees (3/5), Swing Time (5/5), All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers (2.5/5), What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (4/5), Moonglow (5/5), Exit West (4/5), The Orphan Master’s Son (4/5), You Are Not A Stranger Here (4.5/5), Half of a Yellow Sun (4/5), Gilead (4.5/5), A Safe Girl To Love (4/5), No One Belongs Here More Than You (3.5/5). This is a big list, so pardon the length. (NB: my rating system is arbitrary and totally nonlinear and is liable to change every few days. Apples to oranges, etc.)

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish (3.5/5) had no right to be as moving as it was. The novella (by frequent This American Life contributor David Rakoff) is written entirely in rhyming verse, and, yes, that is absolutely a gimmick. Here’s the thing, though: sometimes gimmicks work. Here, the audacity of the conceit (telling a very adult drama via sing-song couplets) acts as a sort of emotional Trojan Horse; like the opening scene of Up or the ending of Tangerine, its moments of pathos hit harder precisely because you’d let your guard down. Rakoff’s nonfiction tended to be shrouded in self-conscious irony, more interesting in perceived “wit” than whatever point it happened to be making (see: the majority of Half Empty). Here, he is nothing if not sincere. Hearing him gently narrate this, his own voice was weakened from the cancer which would soon take his life, made the conceit feel…daring. Powerful. Made it feel like a thesis.

“The facts were now harder, reality colder His parasol no match for that falling boulder. And so the concern with the trivial issues: Slippers nearby and the proximate tissues He thought of those two things in life that don’t vary (Well, thought only glancingly; more was too scary) Inevitable, why even bother to test it, He’d paid all his taxes, so that left … you guessed it.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s latest collection, The Refugees (3/5), continues with the same themes as his Pulitzer-winning (and, I might add, fantastic) The Sympathizer: the hardships of immigration, the gap between Western perceptions of the Vietnam War and the experience of its participants, the particular strain that gap has on the psyche. At only 200 or so pages, it’s a quick read — but, for whatever reason, it took me longer than anything else on this list. I just couldn’t seem to fully latch on to it: every time I tried picking it up, something else would immediately dislodge it as being more pressing. The writing is top-notch, filled with tenderly-constructed characters who Nguyen clearly cares about. It’s everything I ought to love. But it’s a slow, slow burn. Maybe I have a tendency to pigeonhole authors (e.g. why do I love Jhumpa Lahiri’s near-identical pace?), but from Nguyen, I was craving something more urgent, more insisting. This one didn’t quite do it for me.

“The world was muzzled, the way it would be ever afterward with my mother and father and myself, none of us uttering another sound on this matter. Their silence and my own would cut me again and again. But what pained me the most was not any of these things, nor the weight of the men on me. It was the light shining into my dark eyes as I looked to the sky and saw the smoldering tip of God’s cigarette, poised in the heavens the moment before it pressed against my skin.”

Oh, Zadie. Maybe I’m becoming too predictable in my tastes, but I absolutely loved Swing Time (5/5). And, oddly, it has few of the stylistic trademarks that attracted me to White Teeth and NW — those multi-page sentences, manic fourth-wall-breaking asides, giddy deconstructions of language. What it has, instead, is the benefit of maturity; of an artist in complete control of her work. Chronicling the life of two childhood friends with a love of dance, Swing Time is a perfect evolution of the themes she’s been exploring since her debut: the impact of class and race on person identity, and the messy moral negotiations we’re forced to make to participate in a world that seems to have nothing but skeletons in its past. The way Culture’s (near-infinite) sins also make it so intoxicating, so impossible not to engage with. I loved this book too much to give away any twist, or even outline the narrative structure. It’s a rumination on so many things, but its central metaphor — if it can be reduced to that — speaks louder than plot. We can wring our hands and moralize, telegraph all our noble intentions, hold the world at arm’s length, halfassed and cautious. Or we can turn up the volume on that messy, exploitative history and dance it into something new.

“I could turn time into musical phrases, into beats and notes, slowing it down and speeding it up, controlling the time of my life, finally, at last, here on a stage, if nowhere else. I thought of Nina Simone dividing each note from the next, so viciously, with such precision, as Bach, her hero, had taught her to do, and I thought of her name for it—“Black Classical Music”—she hated the word jazz, considering it a white word for black people, she rejected it totally—and I thought of her voice, the way she could extend a note beyond the point of tolerability and force her audience to concede to it, to her timescale, to her vision of the song, how she was completely without pity for her audience, and so relentless in pursuit of her freedom!”

“Why did he think it so important for me to know that Beethoven dedicated a sonata to a mulatto violinist, or that Shakespeare’s dark lady really was dark, or that Queen Victoria had deigned to raise a child of Africa, “bright as any white girl?” I did not want to rely on each European fact having its African shadow, as if without the scaffolding of the European fact everything African might turn to dust in my hands. It gave me no pleasure to see that sweet-faced girl dressed like one of Victoria’s own children, frozen in a formal photograph, with a new kind of cord round her neck. I always wanted life—movement.”

All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers (2.5) by Larry McMurtry left me feeling mixed at best. On the one hand, I fully understand why so many people resonated with it: it’s a free-wheeling, booze-infused, irreverent road epic centered around an aspiring young author in the lonesome, crowded west. Could there be anything more 1972? Hunter S Thompson meets On The Road meets Rio Bravo. On the other, it is very 1972. Female characters are severely underwritten, hysterical at best, and uniformly in love with our male protagonist. Like so many problematic Murakami heroines, they exist to pine and be pined over, to make love to the hero then step aside once he’s learned his whimsical lesson. All this is intentional, of course. More than many in the era, McMurtry seems to know exactly which tropes he’s plowing through, and the literary conceit (a novelist gathering material for his next work) adds a level of meta fun. In theory, at least. In practice, I couldn’t get past the tropes. Even with its tongue-in-cheek self-awareness and uniquely Texan spin, it’s a story I’ve heard too many times.

“He said there were going to be literary parties. I tried to imagine a literary party and was unable to. It was a very abstract effort, like trying to imagine a triangle or a cube. Wearing a suit made me feel even more abstract. I had a mental picture of me inside my suit, inside a party, inside a building, inside San Francisco. I didn’t know what I was doing, inside so many things that were unlike me.”

Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (4/5) is, to me, a wonderful example of the short story form. Englander does for Jewish heritage what Lesley Nneka Arimah does for Nigerian; weaving together a variety of characters (Israeli settler, Brooklyn schule-kid, Hasidic retirees in florida) and genres (sharp comedy, cutting drama, folksy parable) into a single messy tapestry. Or maybe a geological survey, variations on a shared history: here’s the valley where faith becomes cynicism, there’s the idealistic overgrowth some never leave. Each is wonderfully written (and clever to boot), but for my money, the best are the two that toy with autobiography. The first is “The Reader”, a story of an out-of-vogue author performing readings for a lone fan. The second is “Everything I Know About My Family On My Mother’s Side”, about discovering a letter written by his grandfather who’d lost a brother in WWII.

“Forgive the author his relentless commitment. Forgive him his belief that even if the next city promises nothing more than this one old man, still it’s his obligation to drive on. A writer never knows if perseverance is his terrible weakness or his greatest strength. And with all those headlights floating divided in his rearview mirror, Author never can tell which belong to his reader, which pair is his beacon, a North Star, split, cast back, guiding him on.”

“Here is me, fictionalized, sitting on the couch with a letter, written in my grandfather’s hand. I am weeping. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen his handwriting before. I think to call my mother, to tell her what I’m holding. I think to call my brother, or maybe Cousin Jack. But really, more than anyone, I think to call that missing love—that missing lover. Because it’s her I wish were with me; it’s her I want to share it with right now. And more so, to find myself weeping from a real sadness—not anxious, not disappointed, not frustrated or confused—just weeping from the truth of it, and the heartbreak of it, and recognizing it as the purest emotion I’ve ever had. It’s this I want to tell her, that I’m feeling a pure feeling, maybe my first true feeling, and for this—I admit it—I am proud.”

Oh, hey, while we’re on the subject of heavily fictionalized autobiographies about Jewish men learning about their grandfathers’ lives during WWII…Michael Chabon’s Moonglow (5/5) is an absolute joy. I loved his Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and I loved it for reasons I could barely explain. Something about his whimsical toying with history, lush descriptive prose (can anyone describe the sky as richly as Chabon?), and unapologetic romanticism — metaphors and plot twists that shouldn’t work but 100% do. Like Mad Men, he is constantly toeing the line between Serious Art and Indulgent Pulp. Moonglow proves that my experience with Kavalier and Clay wasn’t a fluke; it was the work of a studied alchemist. A semi-fictional memoir of Chabon’s rocket scientist grandfather, Moonglow truly has everything: mystery, adventure, philosophy, pop science, soapy drama. It’s a rich character study, a Forrest Gump-esque romp through Americana, a profound meditation on mental illness, and a wildly entertaining history lesson to boot. It’s a book about memory and the craft of storytelling. Also, it’s almost definitely a lie. Or, well, parts of it. All of it? Is the “Michael Chabon” of the story, the author who is compiling his grandfather’s memoir, a total work of fiction? Or is that the deeper lie — hiding behind the guise of fiction to express feelings and motivations which nonfiction has no claim on? This is a book that loves toying with you, and happily lets you in on the process. I don’t care what’s real. For writing like Chabon’s, I’m willing to believe just about anything.

“At the sight of the cover with its grid of colored blocks, the memory of that afternoon returned to me: a slant of submarine light through the eucalyptus outside the guest bedroom, my grandfather’s brown face against a white pillow, the sound of his Philadelphia vowels at the back of his nose like a head cold.”

“The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth’s gravity and all its analogs in suffering, failure, and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place. To pack the thing with a ton of amatol, to hobble it so that instead of tearing loose once and for all from the mundane pull, it only arced back to earth and killed the people among whom it fell, was to abuse it. It was like using a rake to whip egg whites, a dagger to pick your teeth. It could be done, but to do so was a perversion.”

“Most of all he was tired of mourning my grandmother. Even after intermittent full-blown madness had subsided to chronic nervousness and the limitless insecurity common to actors, she had been an exhausting woman to love. But he had loved her no less passionately for the hard work. If there were times when the weight of the secret she carried, whatever it had been, made it impossible for her to love herself and thus to return his love, the fierceness with which she had clung to him even at those moments was recompense enough. It had fed his various hungers. Now there was only the daily scutwork of missing her. He wanted to rest. He wanted, like all the mourners of Zion, to be left in peace.”

Sometimes you want genre-bending metafiction, and sometimes you crave simplicity. Exit West (4/5) is a deceptively simple little novel. Shortlisted for the 2017 National Book Award, Mohsin Hamid’s latest work is effectively a single question writ large: what would happen in a world without borders? Its protagonists, Nadia and Saeed, are refugees, fleeing an unnamed civil war in an unnamed Middle Eastern city. Their method of transport? Doors. No one knows how. No one knows why. But everywhere on earth, from Tokyo to Marin County, a handful of doors are slowly turning into portals. Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where Narnia is Anywhere But Home. Migrants hop from city to city, around the globe, seeking safe haven en masse in neighborhoods that never asked — never planned — to shelter them. Some react warmly, others with fear and aggression, often mirroring real-world situations in those same cities today — there’s no mistaking the political statement at play. It’s a powerful metaphor for the modern crisis in Syria, appropriately heavy-handed but never preachy. It’s also a tender love story; or, rather, a story of two people carving out love from the temporary spaces they inhabit. And if Hamid’s writing is sometimes a bit too ornate, tripping over its own attempts to be flowery (some of those “and…and…and…” marathons got exhausting), it’s hard to fault him for overindulgence. This is, after all, a fairy tale. It exists to be heightened.

“Saeed and Nadia knew what the buildup to conflict felt like, and so the feeling that hung over London in those days was not new to them, and they faced it not with bravery, exactly, and not with panic either, not mostly, but instead with a resignation shot through with moments of tension, with tension ebbing and flowing, and when the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called the calm before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.”

I’d been looking forward to Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son (4/5) for a long time, and it didn’t disappoint. In many ways, this is an excellent companion piece to The Sympathizer: set in modern-day North Korea, it tells the story of a man reckoning with, and bruised by, the conflicting narratives of his identity. And it spins that dissociative feeling into a sort of psychological mystery-thriller. Is Nguyen’s Sympathizer a hero or a traitor, a Western sellout or a Communist spy? Is Johnson’s Jun Do an orphan or a willing servant, a patriot humbly aiding his country or a warrior hell-bent on escape? The difference, of course, is that Viet Thanh Nguyen is Vietnamese: Adam Johnson isn’t from North Korea. He is, for obvious reasons, an outsider. Given that status, Johnson takes what I consider to be an extremely bold stance, diving headfirst into extremely difficult (and easily abused) territory: soul-crushing propaganda, unspeakable famine, dehumanizing prison camps, perils of defection. These ought to be things that come from personal experience / tragedy, or else handled with extreme subtlety — and The Orphan Master’s Son sure as hell isn’t subtle. It’s nightmarish, exhausting, (arguably) manipulative, and yet, somehow, masterful. I was amazed by the scope of his vision, the way he pieced together what little we know about life inside the DPRK into an epic, fleshed-out narrative. The ingenuity involved in making this is just staggering. It reminded me, a bit, of Inglorious Basterds: wild blending of history and wish-fulfillment fantasy, heightened to a pulp but never to the detriment of truth. I don’t know if it’s remotely accurate, or fair. I do know it’s brilliant.

“The Orphan Master had bent his fingers back and removed food from his very hand. And the other boys at Long Tomorrows, as they died in turn, stole from him the notion that your shoulder should be turned against death, that death shouldn’t be treated as just another latrine mate, or the annoying figure in the bunk above who whistled in his sleep. At first, the tunnels had given him nothing but terror, but after a while, they began to take it away until suddenly gone was his fear, and with it inclinations toward self-preservation. Kidnapping had reduced everything to either death or life. And the mines of Prison 33 had drained, like so many bags of blood, his ability to tell the difference. Perhaps only his mother had taken something grander by depositing him at Long Tomorrows, but this was only speculation, because he’d never found the mark it had left … unless the mark was all of him.”

Adam Haslett does one thing incredibly well: he writes about mental illness with extreme specificity. I don’t know that he does it accurately; I only know that he does it in a way I believe. After reading Imagine Me Gone, his Pulitzer-nominated family saga, I wrote that “Haslett’s isn’t a story of mental illness deflected by humor; it’s a story about how that same illness can be simultaneously tragic and hilarious, can inform a personality, can become a thing you miss when it’s finally gone.” Going back to his debut collection, You Are Not A Stranger Here (4.5/5), I can trace the root of those instincts. This is exactly why I love short story collections from first-time authors: so much messy passion, and stubborn resolve, finally given an outlet. We meet a septuagenarian with delusions of grandeur, a teenager coping with tragedy through pain, a son struggling to piece together the root of his father’s mania. Like Imagine Me Gone, it has so much to say about mental illness, and the way it flows through generations like an unwanted birthright. It’s also, despite the subject matter, a total blast — devastating and fun in equal measure. It’s hard to explain that dynamic unless you dive in, but I loved every one of these stories.

“…sitting in the car on the motorway north, Samuel studied the back of his father’s head, his shoulder, the thick branch of his upper arm, the dark-haired forearm, his hand gripping the knob of the gearshift. The tired look on his face when he came through the back door from work, the distracted way he ate his dinner, the blur of weekend afternoons when he napped on the front hall couch, all this disappeared when he got behind the wheel of the car. He spoke more, seemed alive in a different way. Samuel thought of this as his father’s real self that for some reason only appeared in between places.”

“They sit on the couch a while, listening to Lou Reed singing from downstairs. The borderline defeat in his voice seems alien to the objects in the room: the coffee table books, the dried flowers, the waffle-patterned bed skirts, the beige clock and ruffled curtains—these things they’re supposed to want one day. The objects persist blandly in the bland intention of their owners. For Ted, they have the sadness of the things in his own house, the maple living room set his parents bought the year he was born, the dining room table they used to sit at when he was younger, reminders of old marital hope. He and Lauren are just florid detritus in a room like this, drifting past on the dead river of time that never ceases here.”

It’s irresponsible to draw a conclusion from two data points, but I’m going to go with my gut on this: Nigerian women are uniquely good at writing fiction. Half of a Yellow Sun (4/5), Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s epic saga of the Nigerian Civil War, is intimate and expansive, instructive and poetic. When I say “instructive”, I mean that quite literally: beside the epic drama, Adichie is giving a serious history lesson from scratch. Don’t know what Biafra is? Can’t place Lagos on a map? By the end of the book you will, and it won’t feel hamfisted or pedantic. Narrated from the point of view of three interrelated characters, Adichie breaks the story of the war in two parts: the simmering tensions of the early 60’s, and violent response of the late. This isn’t a particularly showy work — the writing rarely draws attention to itself in the way much on this list does — but the narrative reveals itself at exactly the right pace. Like Hamid with Exit West, Adichie instinctively knows when to go big and when to focus on tiny, interpersonal details; veering between the two in a way that never loses our attention. A classic.

“And in his lucid moments, death occupied him. He tried to visualize a heaven, a God seated on a throne, but could not. Yet the alternative vision, that death was nothing but an endless silence, seemed unlikely. There was a part of him that dreamed, and he was not sure if that part could ever retreat into an interminable silence. Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.”

“She wanted him to truly talk to her, help her to help him grieve, but each time she told him, he said, “It’s too late, nkem.” She was not sure what he meant. She sensed the layers of his grief—he would never know how Mama had died and would always struggle with old resentments—but she did not feel connected to his mourning. Sometimes she wondered if this was her own failure rather than his, if perhaps she lacked a certain strength that would compel him to include her in his pain.”

Speaking of 21st century classics: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (4.5/5). Wow. How can I describe it? Wendell Berry meets memoir meets theological treatise? This book singlehandedly lowered my blood pressure by about 20%. It’s a smoldering rumination on life, mortality, family, and faith — this is probably the best treatment of spirituality I’ve ever seen in a work of modern lit. Gilead is framed as as a single, long letter, from dying reverend John Ames to his future adult son. The conceit gives Robinson free rein to veer into whatever territory she’d like: his thoughts on the afterlife, memories from his childhood, the way fog rolls in over the prairie just so. “Pastoral” and “meditative” are words that come to mind: with its depiction of a small Midwestern town at the turn of the century, Gilead is as much an ode to solitude as it is a story with somewhere to go. That might sound like a bore (and, in lesser hands, it would be), if not for Robinson’s uncanny sense of character. Authors often talk about characters being revealed rather than discovered, and I think I finally know what they mean. Reverend Ames is, as far as I’m concerned, a very real person with seven real decades of hard-won wisdom to impart on his son. And, by extension, on us. His memories are real and tender, and his theology has been wrestled with for a lifetime. By the end of the book, I was smiling at his tics as if I’d known him my whole life. It’s an incredible literary accomplishment.

“‘It don’t matter.’ It was as if she were renouncing the world itself just in order to make nothing of some offense to her. Such a prodigal renunciation, that empty-handed prodigality I remember from the old days. I have nothing to give you, take and eat. Ashy biscuit, summer rain, her hair falling wet around her face. If I were to multiply the splendors of the world by two—the splendors as I feel them—I would arrive at an idea of heaven very unlike anything you see in the old paintings.”

“Once when Boughton and I had spent an evening going through our texts together and we were done talking them over, I walked him out to the porch, and there were more fireflies out there than I had ever seen in my life, thousands of them everywhere, just drifting up out of the grass, extinguishing themselves in midair. We sat on the steps a good while in the dark and the silence, watching them. Finally Boughton said, “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” And really, it was that night as if the earth were smoldering. Well, it was, and it is. An old fire will make a dark husk for itself and settle in on its core, as in the case of this planet. I believe the same metaphor may describe the human individual, as well. Perhaps Gilead. Perhaps civilization. Prod a little and the sparks will fly. I don’t know whether the verse put a blessing on the fireflies or the fireflies put a blessing on the verse, or if both of them together put a blessing on trouble, but I have loved them both a good deal ever since.”

I’ve probably read more fiction in 2017 than in any five-year period before it. The catalyst? A particular moment when I realized that, despite a professed love of literature, I couldn’t name three modern female authors I enjoyed. Not even loved! Just enjoyed. I was ashamed at how narrow my world was; how easily I could read and re-read the same handful of neurotic white dudes (which are still a more-than healthy part of my diet, of course) without even considering that other voices might be equally worth my time.

All that to say, one of the great perks of this year has been discovering my own massive blind spots. If the magic of fiction is getting to inhabit a perspective you’ve never lived, this year has brought a ton of new perspectives to the table. Casey Plett’s A Safe Girl to Love (4/5) is a wonderful example of that perk. Her stories revolve around trans women, and — much like Englander’s collection — that’s just about the only thread they have in common. Young love in Brooklyn, a mother and daughter in Eugene, house parties in North Dakota, Mennonites in Winnepeg. Some are comfortable, some aren’t. Some are passing, some don’t care, and others telegraph not-caring to avoid that patronizing look of reassurance by strangers. Some are in desperate need of an encouraging word. Far more cringe at encouragement, at being called “brave”, as if their entire existence were in service to someone else’s inspirational suffering porn. Yet, reading this book, I honestly can’t find a better word to describe Plett’s writing. She approaches difficult subjects with candor, humor, and a fearless refusal to tidy what ought not be tidy. There are no halos to polish here; we meet her characters where they’re at, raw and unexceptional and human. What a refreshing read.

“If she says, “I’m sorry,” listen. If she tells you a story in kind, listen. If she says, “I wish I could protect you,” hunch your knees and fold your body in and say you wish she could too. And listen. If she tells you how to use pepper spray or any such thing, small and simple and solid, listen. If she uses the teaching-sixteen-year-olds-voice again, if she snorts and says, “Sure you want to do this?” if she bitterly says, “Welcome to being a woman!” if she says, “Hon, I know exactly what you’re going through,” swallow and shutter windows in your heart. Need her with an intensity that has no exit. Give. Give. Give. And if she says, “But, like, you’re happy now… right?” say oh, well, of course! Say you feel great. Say you feel better every day. She’ll beam and say she misses her country boy sometimes but she’s so so proud of you. You’ll shine through.”

“[I] would rather wait for him to die, she said. I honestly don’t want to know how he’d react if I came out to him. I don’t know if he’d cut me out. Maybe he would. Maybe he wouldn’t. But I don’t want to find out. I don’t want to see him looking at me like a space alien, and I don’t want to get letters in the mail about my soul, I don’t want to hear from all thirty of my relatives about how sad I’m making him. And I doubt he would cut me out entirely. He would probably still let me in the house, though I doubt I would be invited, exactly. But it’s not like I would stop calling and going up there every couple months. I wouldn’t care how shitty he’d be, Carla, I’d still go. I’ll never not love him, I’ll never leave him. He’s sick. He’s old, I can fulfill one last responsibility as a grandson. That’s a thing I can do, I can actually do it. I have to and I will do it.”

After so much heavy material, it felt right to end this sprint with something light. As a budding indie film snob, I really enjoyed Me and You and Everyone We Know. So I was excited to check out Miranda July’s debut collection No One Belongs Here More Than You (3.5/5), a work that seems to spur adoring fans and outraged critics in equal measure. My impression was mixed, but ultimately positive. Putting on my critical hat, I could say that July’s tone hasn’t aged particularly well: it’s a bit twee, overwritten, and edgy-for-edginess’ sake in a way that was rare in 2007 but abundant today. It’s also a bit irresponsible with certain themes (a handful of borderline-pedophilic twists are played for shock, but come off as cringey and unnecessary). But on the whole, criticism be damned. This is a charming, bizarre little collection which is fun far more often than it’s not. Hearing it narrated by July, I couldn’t shake a comparison to Garfunkel and Oates or Portlandia — that brand quirky self-awareness which makes trying-too-hard cave in on itself and become a part of the joke. Her primary strength, in my mind, is less as a novelist than a humorist; sharing observations about daily life that happen to be fictional, but might as well not. An aspiring writer finds herself awkwardly standing in Madeline L’Engle’s pillow-filled living room; an aging factory worker falls in love with someone’s fictitious sister; two women share a hug during a New Age-y self help class on romance. At its best, it’s surprisingly moving (see: “Something That Needs Nothing”, a coming-of-age story centered around an uncomfortable female friendship); at it’s worst, it’s inoffensive and breezy. An enjoyable read if you want something light.

“The snaps on our jeans pressed into each other and our breasts exchanged their tired histories, tales of being over- and underutilized, floods and famines and never mind, just go. We wetted each other’s blouses and pushed our crying ahead of us like a lantern, searching out new and forgotten sadnesses, ones that had died politely years ago but in fact had not died, and came to life with a little water. We had loved people we really shouldn’t have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond. Always running and always wanting to go back but always being farther and farther away until, finally, it was just a scene in a movie where a girl says hello into the cauldron of the world and you are just a woman watching the movie with her husband on the couch and his legs are across your lap and you have to go to the bathroom. There were things of this general scale to cry about.”

“He used to rent two offices, his own and a tiny one for me. But then he said things were getting tight and we should share an office. Tight. He adds thirteen to seventy-two. Two plus three is five, check the e-mail, one plus seven is, check the e-mail, eight, check the e-mail, which comes to a total of, who the hell am I anyway, eighty-five. This is how he dismembers his day, in the most painful way, moment by moment. A bigger man would just shoot it, put it out of its misery. Or a better accountant might actually account for something instead of hiring another, slightly cheaper accountant to do the accounting, and skidding by on the difference.”

When you’re wrong, you’re wrong. When I saw the trailer for Coco, my initial reaction was lukewarm at best: the premise felt thin, the voicework overly “Disney”, and the spectre of co-co-cultural appropriation implied either tone-deaf cringiness or (more likely) bland, committee-engineered inoffensiveness.

You guys. Coco is so good. It’s the sort of Pixar flick that does just about everything right. Wonderful set design, charming characters, a kid-friendly plot with just enough adult-friendly winking to keep things interesting (see: everything about Frida Kahlo). It’s smart and culturally sensitive without ever feeling Very Special Episode patronizing — it takes bold risks, and invites kids to really care about, and understand, its unfamiliar world. It’s moralizing in the most heartwarming, earnest way possible. And while it’s far more predictable (and, yes, “Disney”) than some of their more audacious movies, Coco’s is a cozy, instantly-nostalgic brand of predictability. The kind you want to watch, and rewatch, and melt in. Like a marshmallow in a cup of hot…ugh.

I’ve never seen a Martin McDonagh play. But, from his first two films, I was certain I knew his brand: wildly witty, self-aware nihilism; the irreverence of Tarantino and panache of Guy Ritchie blended with quaaludes to a sweet, sludgy black. In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths were both favorites of mine, but their message — if one could charitably call it that — was “Let’s watch the world burn through a fogged-up funhouse mirror.”

Three Billboards is a different, more mature animal. It has all the cleverness, and gleeful blasphemy, of his earlier films — unquotable monologues, manic fits of disproportional violence. But it also has something serious to say, and is willing to take its brooding time saying it. In that sense, it’s hard not to compare it to his brother’s film Calvary. If Calvary asked the question “What use is faith in a world whose institutions fail to earn it?”, Three Billboards asks “What good is anger when there’s no one to absorb the blame?” It’s a story of characters filled with righteous indignation and no proper place to funnel it. Mildred Hayes can’t believe her daughter’s murder hasn’t been solved. Sgt Dixon can’t believe his boss’s good name is being dragged through the mud. In typical playwright fashion, improbably heightened events are used to tease out real emotions from real people: the point isn’t what happens, it’s how these characters would respond if it had. Perfectly scripted and wonderfully realized (Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson are particularly great), those responses are always earned. If you go in expecting an A-to-B storyline with lovable heroes, you’ll be sorely disappointed. But if you’re ready to soak in a few hours of gray, you’d be hard pressed to do better than this. One of my favorites of the year.

Director Sean Baker, first caught critical attention with 2015’s Tangerine — a Christmas dramedy about transgendered sex workers in LA, shot entirely on iPhones and starring amateur performers in semi-autobiographical roles. If you find that description a bit bizarre, you aren’t alone. Tangerine was a film of lovely contradictions: abrasive naturalism with near-slapstick romanticism, guerrilla filmmaking offset by a gorgeous color palette, “edgy” subjects with traditional holiday cheer. In The Florida Project, those contradictions aren’t exactly gone, but they tend to meet each other halfway. Take the lead, Moonee, a six-year-old member of Orlando’s “hidden homeless” population residing in a motel just outside of Disneyworld. Adorable and infuriating in equal measure, all heartwarming giggles and earsplitting squeals — in short, she’s a six year old. She’s rough around the edges, to be sure, but it’s a roughness we’re primed for; we know exactly how to love her and the little fantasies she builds in dark places. Or consider the visual style: that same gorgeous color palette sans iPhone tremble, brightly lit and meticulously composed, like a grungier Wes Anderson. Even the performances, for all their committed realism, are gentler on the audience: for every three minutes spent with the amateur tenants, we get one with Willem Dafoe’s big-hearted manager — soft-spoken, warm, and (if there’s any justice) a shoo-in for a Supporting Actor nod. Across the board, Florida an easier pill to swallow. But it’s still a much more bitter pill than its Sundance-ready trailer might have you believe. There’s no grand catharsis to be had here, no sweeping arc marked with soundtrack cues, none of the transcendent moments that made American Honey so hypnotic or Short Term 12 so potent. Moonee’s story is slow, aimless, and relentlessly true to life; its drama more docu- than melo-. And there’s just something a bit uncomfortable about that middle-ground, between saccharine and abrasive, soft and hard, which a nudge in either direction might have solved. I love the humanism at Baker’s core, and the way he puts a spotlight on unconventional stories. I just don’t quite know where this one fits.

August-September Fiction Roundup! After a slow start and detour into Hillary Clinton land, I wound up finishing five works of fiction. The Underground Railroad (3.5/5), Unaccustomed Earth (4/5), NW (5/5), What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky (4.5/5), Lincoln in the Bardo (5/5). Maybe I was just in a hyperbolic mood this past two months, but I really dug this mix.

There are books you respect, and books you love. The winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize, The Underground Railroad (3.5/5) is a book I respected in the present, and am increasingly warming to in hindsight. I’ve started to think of reading a bit like drinking beer: you start with the basics (Bud and Guinness), fall for the extremes (the IIIPA, the 20% imperial stout, the sour so bretty it’ll burn off your tongue), but eventually — if you get far enough into it — crave something harder to define. Subtlety. The perfectly balanced pilsner. The pale ale that didn’t even want to impress you. Fictionwise I’m still somewhere up in 15% ABV territory; I still want to be obviously dazzled by the perfect phrase or feat of lyrical dexterity. This book is a perfectly balanced wonder — a sort of 19th century Gulliver’s Travels following a formerly enslaved woman as she journeys through the American South to escape her captors, with each stop on the (literal) railroad functioning as its own mini-allegory. It’s elegant, moving, and endlessly creative; extraordinarily heavy without toppling under its weight, wise without feeling overtly didactic. But it never set out to dazzle, and that (intentional) unshowiness often left me feeling like I was missing some grander point. A brilliant central metaphor and some truly wonderful passages make for a great read, but the pieces never quite connected for me.

“Looking down over the universe of the park, she saw the town drift where it wanted, washed by sunlight on a stone bench, cooled in the shadows of the hanging tree. But they were prisoners like she was, shackled to fear. Martin and Ethel were terrified of the watchful eyes behind every darkened window. The town huddled together on Friday nights in the hope their numbers warded off the things in the dark: the rising black tribe; the enemy who concocts accusations; the child who undertakes a magnificent revenge for a scolding and brings the house down around them.”

OK, so that beer analogy was a lie. Because if there’s one thing Jhumpa Lahiri is not, it’s extreme. Her writing is almost defiantly non-urgent: it employs few rhetorical flares and rarely draws attention to itself. It’s slow, nourishing, and radiating with softness; like reading the private diary of a friend you’ve known your whole life but somehow forgotten. There isn’t much to say about Unaccustomed Earth (4/5) that I didn’t already say about Interpreter of Maladies, because I’m not entirely sure where one ends and the other begins. It follows similar characters (Bengali immigrants) in similar contexts (New England, usually Cambridge Square) facing similar life decisions (meshing their history with their past; finding truth in their marriage; reconciling with overbearing parents). There’s a method to it, if not exactly a formula — and I can’t get enough of it. So, so good.

“And yet he felt justified. Wasn’t it since Monika’s birth that so much of his and Megan’s energy was devoted not to doing things together but devising ways so that each could have some time alone, she taking the girls so that he could go running in the park on her days off, or vice versa, so that she could browse in a bookstore or get her nails done? And wasn’t it terrible, how much he looked forward to those moments, so much so that sometimes even a ride by himself on the subway was the best part of the day?”

“Now she was free of both of them, free of her past and free of her future in a place where so many different times stood cheek by jowl like guests at a crowded party.”

NW (5/5) will certainly have its share of haters. I am not among them. Zadie Smith is possibly the most brilliant punch in the face you will read. Her use of language is addictive, steering through tense and voice with the confidence of a lifelong London cabbie who knows all the best routes and trust me, yes it does say One Way and I suppose that was a median but, trust me, we’re getting somewhere. White Teeth showcased her skill with ferocity, but it came with its share of first-novel baggage: outlandish characters, oversized plot points, dialogue which bordered on caricature. Here Smith goes inward, following the stream-of-consciousness thought life of three Londonites…and that’s…basically it. Tonally it veers between dark humor and poignance, mockery and empathy, often within a single sentence. Can I recall exactly what happened, or what the thesis was? Can I find the perfect quote to justify why I devoured the entire book over two consecutive flights when I should have been sleeping? Do I have any reason to think you won’t get 3 pages in, find it to be self-indulgent nonsense, and wonder what I’ve been smoking? I can’t and don’t. This is a IIIPA brewed in habanero peppers and also, somehow, a warm cup of sleepy-time tea. I loved it.

“The train pulls in and Leah watches Pauline regard it calmly, step forward to the yellow line. This realm of Pauline’s—the realm of the so sad—is immutable and inevitable, like hurricanes and tsunamis. No particular angst is attached to it. Normally, this is bearable; today it is obscene. So sad is too distant from Pauline’s existence, which is only disappointing. It makes disappointing look like a blessing. This must be why news of it is always so welcome, so satisfying.”

“The cap, the hooded top, the low jeans, it’s a uniform—they look the same. From where Leah stands anyway it is still all dumb show, hand gestures and primal frowns, and of course some awful potential news story that explains everything except the misery and the particulars: one youth knifed another youth, on Kilburn High Road. They had names and ages and it’s terribly sad, an indictment of something or another and also not good for house prices.”

Completing the trilogy of female-authors-of-color-who-write-primarily-about-immigrants-and-whose-debut-works-were-so-friggin-good-they-made-me-angry: Lesley Nneka Arimah’s What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky (4.5/5). I’m sure I live in a bubble, but I honestly have no idea who this short story collection wouldn’t appeal to: Arimah has heart like Lahiri, pizazz like Smith, and the wild creativity of Kelly Link. Her Nigeria functions like Junot Diaz’ Dominican Republic: a chaotic undercurrent which propels every story but never condescends you with a Wikipedia history lesson. She’s quotable, confident, and always writes with purpose. She also has one quality virtually no author has the first time around: the sense to know exactly when to stop. This is a dazzling, concise collection. You should read it. Whoever you are, you’ll probably like it.

“Ezinma fumbles the keys against the lock and doesn’t see what came behind her: Her father as a boy when he was still tender, vying for his mother’s affection. Her grandmother, overworked to the bone by the women whose houses she dusted, whose laundry she washed, whose children’s asses she scrubbed clean; overworked by the bones of a husband who wanted many sons and the men she entertained to give them to him, sees her son to his thirteenth year with the perfunction of a nurse and dies in her bed with a long, weary sigh.”

“It was the new mother’s face. The child was as plain as pap, but the mother’s face was full of wonder. One would think the baby had been spun from silk. One would think the baby was speckled with diamonds. One would think the baby was loved. Mother cradled mother, who cradled child, a tangle of ordinary limbs of ordinary women.”

My first introduction to George Saunders, and boy what a doozy. I truly didn’t know how to approach Lincoln in the Bardo (5/5). I started with the Audible production, whose all-star cast (Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, Megan Mullally, Ben Stiller, Julianne Moore, Jeff Tambor, and literally 159 more) caught my eye. 8 minutes in and I gave up. It was total cacophony, and it didn’t make a lick of sense. The next day I came back at it with my Kindle, and…it still didn’t make sense. It sat there for a few days, taunting me, till I reluctantly came back for a third (and final) attempt. That time it clicked. I dove back into the cast recording, zig-zagged between audio and text, and devoured it two or three times in one go — re-listening to whatever I’d only read, re-reading whatever I’d only heard, and repeating both whenever I felt particularly floored. Which, apparently, I felt a lot.

This is a difficult book to explain. It’s takes place toward the beginning of the Civil War, as Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie is dying of typhoid fever. Most early chapters consist entirely of quotes: snippets of eye-witness accounts of the same moment in Lincoln’s life, many from real sources but some almost certainly invented by Saunders (though it never tells you which is which). It reads less like a novel than a piece of anthological found art. Then young Willie dies, and we hear a different set of voices: a chorus of ghosts, speaking over one another, recounting their interactions with him in the afterlife in the same documentary style. The format is as chaotic as you’d expect, and it never relents. Soon you don’t want it to. A traditional narrative — very Pilgrim’s Progress or Great Divorce, but also, nothing like those things — somehow develops in that dreamscape, as fact and fiction bounce off of each other. It’s gorgeous, absurdly inventive, witty, sentimental, difficult, profound, silly, sad. It’s a deeply personal account of grief (both from the eyes of the griever — Abraham — and the eyes of the grieved — Willie and his hundred-plus companions who refuse to move on). It’s also an historical account of the contradictions of the civil war, a sweeping parable about life and death, and roughly 163 other things (including, but not limited to: a satire of said parables, a mockumentary?, Our Town, science fiction, a ton of Wendell Berry). I can’t fathom what kind of mad genius could conceive of all this, and I can’t praise it enough.

“Mr. Vollman turned to me, smiling in a pained but kindly way. None of that ever was, he said. And it never will be. Then he drew a deep breath. And stepped into the burning train.”

“Everything nonsense now. Those mourners came up. Hands extended. Sons intact. Wearing on their faces enforced sadness-masks to hide any sign of their happiness, which—which went on. They could not hide how alive they yet were with it, with their happiness at the potential of their still-living sons. Until lately I was one of them. Strolling whistling through the slaughterhouse, averting my eyes from the carnage, able to laugh and dream and hope because it had not yet happened to me. To us.”

“I was in error when I saw him as fixed and stable and thought I would have him forever. He was never fixed, nor stable, but always just a passing, temporary energy-burst. I had reason to know this. Had he not looked this way at birth, that way at four, another way at seven, been made entirely anew at nine? He had never stayed the same, even instant to instant. He came out of nothingness, took form, was loved, was always bound to return to nothingness. Only I did not think it would be so soon. Or that he would precede us. Two passing temporarinesses developed feelings for one another. Two puffs of smoke became mutually fond.”

Grand Hyatt, Jin Mao Tower, Shanghai. Sappy nostalgia o’clock. The last time I stayed here was May of 2011. I was 21. It was 4am and I was sitting in the 54th floor lobby, making last-minute changes to my first-ever conference presentation and feeling petrified with dread. I was honestly, non-self-deprecating-ly terrified; certain I wouldn’t be able to get any words out, let alone ones relevant to the subject. That’s not an exaggeration. I would break down crying in front of every professor I’d hoped to someday work with, in a giant convention center on the other side of the planet, all while Sameep filmed it and Pieter and Mario averted their eyes in academic shame. The lobby was dark, and I was totally alone, and I was drinking coffee because I couldn’t fathom sleeping — if I slept it would be morning, and if it was morning then “it” would really happen. Without sleep it still happened, of course, and I’ll never forget that morning’s hollow death march to the convention center with Arjun, or the knot in my hyper-caffeinated stomach, or the plastic smile I forced myself to wear, or the silly pump-up jam (Mumford and Sons’ “Winter Winds”) I’d blast to drown out the doomsday clock’s ticking, or the conference room doors which were all the way in the back and impossible to escape through without making a scene, or the walls’ uncontrollable spinning as the last speaker finished her Q&A, or the zen calm which washed over me when the area chair called my name and I levitated to the podium and realized I’d been worked up over pretty much nothing. I’d be fine then and I’ve been fine every time since, but the lobby was before all that and I was a total wreck. It wasn’t even a question: I knew it was over. I’d have a panic attack on stage, be revealed as a fraud, book an early return flight out of pocket and do something else with my life. At least I’d know I tried, right? In between pointless rehearsals I’d take a sip of my cappuccino, look out at that crazy, blinking skyline, and think “How the hell did I get here?”

It’s 2017 and I’m still not sure. But I’m really glad I stuck around.

I’ve been seeing a lot of “even-handed” posts, lately, about the dangers of trying to erase history. The Civil War happened, it is what it is, and by taking away flags or monuments America is trying to blot it out of its collective memory.

Here’s the thing though: history isn’t going anywhere. We have immediate access to details which, a few decades ago, would have required years of independent research (if discoverable at all). The Indonesian genocide of the mid-60’s? You can watch tearful stories from the victims, and laughing re-enactments from the perpetrators, on iTunes right this second. With one click you can have a massive Robert E. Lee biography delivered to your pocket. Or Mein Kampf. Or the complete works of Shakespeare, Salman Rushdie, and Rush Limbaugh. Or hear Obama narrate his own childhood. Or view literally weeks’ worth of footage devoted to proving that JFK’s death was a government conspiracy. Or pro-slavery propaganda. Or abolitionist poetry. Did you know Charles Manson released a folk album before going on his murder spree? You can stream it.

Our ability to erase anything, on a global scale, is lower than it has ever been. It’s so low, voices which used to be silenced — the history which “winners” always overwrite — have finally been given a chance to speak. I can watch beautiful films about Hiroshima from the perspective of Japanese children. I can read eye-witness accounts of both sides of the Iraq/Iran war. I can, alongside that Robert E. Lee biography, read countless stories about how the legacy of slavery continued long after abolition; about the vicious cycles it spun off, or the ways it lived on in symbols and language, wielded like a blunt instrument against people with minds I could never fully know. I can stack up those truths against the weight of a statue, and if the scales tip, I can choose to act accordingly. It isn’t an erasure, but a deepening, of history. All that sadness is still there, forever encoded in literature and art and museums. But we get to choose what subset we worship. We get to reserve our public pedestals for things we’re proud to display. And when each of us has a pocket-sized Library of Congress and megaphone our disposal, we have a moral obligation to make that call.

What the absurd Alt Right coverage of Charlottesville demonstrates, though, is that for a specific subset of the population it is indeed possible to rewrite not only history, but the present. If you choose to burrow yourself into the narrowest of unsourced media, to surround yourself with only likeminded people, it’s possible to erase absolutely everything that matters. Erase the reality of current events. Erase the definition of hate even when it holds up a swastika and sieg heils at you. Erase the meaning of a Holy Book that doesn’t give a damn about “States’ Rights” but has plenty to say about mourning with those who mourn. None of this gets erased from the rest of the world, of course, but you get to opt in to a pocket-sized universe that no longer sees it. A universe where you’re right about everything, unchallenged, forever.

So how do we actually inoculate history and culture? Step outside that tiny universe. Leave your homogenous group. Diversify. Listen to people who hurt when you don’t; people who look nothing like you, who didn’t always have a platform to speak. Take their pain as valid and honest, rather than assuming some elaborate ploy. And when their experience conflicts with your own way of seeing the world, use that knowledge to deepen and grow. Ironically, the very thing the Alt Right is fighting — the “White genocide”, the supposed erasure of culture — is the antidote to what they claim to fear. More voices, more growth. Less of whatever inward ideology would rush to the defense of Nazis and klansmen; would consider racist and anti-racist protesters as “equally wrong”; would erase the spirit of our shared history. That side of protest, for all the pseudo-philosophical Ayn Randian justification in the world, doesn’t get to be a valid side. Hate — or whatever knowingly emboldens hate — isn’t a valid side.

Art always has an obligation towards truth. When I say “truth”, I don’t mean the literal “this happened, then this happened” play-by-play of real-life events; that slavish devotion to facts which tranquilizes so many direct-to-TV biopics. Documentary precision is a valuable type of truth, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat. A film might compress timelines to convey deep character truths — Jobs, Selma, and The Imitation Game come to mind as recent examples. Or it might act in service to a cultural truth: hyperbolizing real characters to better tease out the Zeitgeist (The Social Network, American Hustle), or fabricating new ones whole cloth to show, by synecdoche, what a direct-telling might obscure (Dunkirk, Life Is Beautiful). That truth might even be emotional or aesthetic or intentionally cryptic — it hardly matters to me. What matters is that it exists: some silent contract, however vague, between the creator and the audience. We don’t necessarily know the terms, but we feel it when they’re violated.

Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film, Detroit, can’t seem to decide which truth its wants to tell. Set in 1967’s Detroit, it devotes most of its runtime to a single night in a single location: the Algiers Motel, where white police officers in search of a nonexistent “sniper” brutalized (and ultimately murdered) innocent black tenants. Structurally it unfolds a bit like OJ Made In America, opening with societal context (the riots) and closing with a procedural. This setup lets the film operate on two levels: presenting the Algiers incident in handheld, documentary-style specificity, and examining the broader climate which the incident exemplified. It also makes it excellent and infuriating, in equal parts.

Excellent, because Bigelow knows how to convey chaos. She knows how to thrust you in the middle of the action, the stress, the claustrophobic anxiety of a silent battlefield — a skill which /ought/ to be perfect for capturing the deep, structural issues of race relations and police brutality. For showing us what happens when real people are confronted with tense situations: the choices they make, the protective callouses they wield as blunt instruments, the biases and gut-reactions and uneven power dynamics which blur into something toxic and explosive. The Hurt Locker makes us sympathize with a war-torn adrenaline junkie. Zero Dark Thirty forced us to reckon with the mindset of those who justify torture. And for maybe 20 minutes, Detroit lets us feel the fear of both oppressed and oppressor. It’s remarkable.

Infuriating, because the film is reckless with both levels of truth. It wants to have its cake and eat it too; or rather, it wants to put us on a socially conscious diet while shoving nothing but cake in our faces. Bigelow cares about broader context in the abstract, but she refuses to trust us with any specific context from scene to scene. Every character is either Good or Bad, and which camp they fall in is self-evident from the moment they appear. Will Poulter’s officer is cartoonishly, devoid-of-subtext Bad: a racist, sadistic power junkie who abuses residents just for the thrill of abuse. John Boyega’s security guard may have been present at the event and complicit in his silence, but he is Good with a capital G. Victims are borderline angelic, and even other officers (who look the other way in disgust but never lift a finger to stop the mayhem) have an aura of wrong-time-wrong-place innocence. Not only does this make the film irresponsible with the literal truth of the night at the Algiers; it hurts the emotional truth of brutality in general, and makes its own narrative fuzzy and weak. It substitutes legitimate, complex issues for the actions of a lone super-villain. It’s too timid, somehow, avoiding the rough edges which a bolder film (think Do The Right Thing) would prod and expose. By straining to prove what side it’s on, it condescends to the audience and diminishes its own point. It’s easy, and cheap, to root for pure good over incomprehensible evil. Seeking justice for the flawed, against evils we recognize and understand — that’s what empathy demands.

Chris and I grapple with Detroit in this week’s episode of The Spoiler Warning

June-July fiction roundup! 7 books this time (so bear with the length): Emerald City, Universal Harvester, The Sympathizer, Interpreter of Maladies, Get in Trouble, Norwegian Wood, Runaway. Now with quotes and film pairings, because why the hell not.

I love Jennifer Egan’s writing, and I can’t explain why. Like many authors on this list, she has a knack for voicing emotional truths; but there’s a certain balance to it, an empathizing-but-never-wholly-complicit tone that absolutely draws me in. Emerald City (3.5/5), her earliest publication (and only proper short story collection), isn’t quite as refined as A Visit from the Goon Squad, but there’s something alluring about those rough edges. Her stories revolve around hurting people on the verge of liberation — glitzy fashion photographers, hedge fund managers, daughters coping with their parents’ failures. It’s not a major work, but each tiny arc of hurt and redemption felt cleansing, exhilarating.

• Film pairing: Francis Ha or Listen Up Philip
• Quote: “He searched the dark shopfronts for something, some final thing at the core of everything else, but he found just his own reflection and Stacey’s. Their eyes met in the glass, then flicked away. And it struck him that this was New York: a place that glittered from a distance even when you reached it.”

John Darnielle is another author whose diction alone captivates me, with or without an accompanying plot. Universal Harvester (3.5/5), like Wolf in White Van or any given Mountain Goats song, isn’t showy: it’s content to strike a wistful, plodding, lyrical tone and float from page to page. Where Wolf was a fairly straightforward tragedy, Harvester is more difficult to pin down; a moody piece about loss, and the way familiar places, devoid of context, might eventually haunt or consume you. Don’t let the “horror” or “mystery” synopses fool you. This is less a narrative than a folk tale; less about horror than dread, and less about dread than the cathartic letting go thereof. I particularly loved his blending of abstract concepts with physical space, and his empathetic narrator who pauses to dissect the story.

• Film pairing: Personal Shopper or A Ghost Story.
• Quote: “The highway abutting the fields is miraculously uniform for miles on end; this is true on both the east-west and the north-south routes. Are they separate fields on either side of the highway, or does the road mark an artificial division through a single, uniform field? It’s a stupid question, because it only matters to whoever owns the land, but you get all kinds of thoughts when the sun’s strobe-lighting through the driver’s side window all day; and if you let yourself start thinking about the field without the highway, something happens to the way you take in the land. Your inner vision shifts. You think about fields with no one to see them, all that quiet life continuing on with no purpose beyond self-propagation. Tassels rotting in October. It gets to you, if you let it.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (4.5/5) is an outlier in pretty much every respect on this list. Where other stories are personal, his is sprawling; where other narrators are emotional and confessing, his is duplicitous, coy, and self-consciously clever. It took me a couple hours to click with this book, but once I did it was virtually impossible to put down. The way the narrative conceit unfolds over time, and the joy of constantly playing chess with the narrator, reminded me a bit of David Foster Wallace’s “Good Old Neon” — that is, either delightful or infuriating depending on your mood. I loved seeing the Vietnam War unfold from such a different perspective, and particularly Nguyen’s take on the immigrant experience — offset with just enough wit and sarcasm to keep the darkness in check.

• Film pairing: Apocalypse Now, with biting irony.
• Quote: “I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit. I was maddened by my helplessness before the Auteur’s imagination and machinations. His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created (with all due respect to Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis, who never achieved global domination). Hollywood’s high priests understood innately the observation of Milton’s Satan, that it was better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, better to be a villain, loser, or antihero than virtuous extra, so long as one commanded the bright lights of center stage. In this forthcoming Hollywood trompe l’oeil, all the Vietnamese of any side would come out poorly, herded into the roles of the poor, the innocent, the evil, or the corrupt. Our fate was not to be merely mute; we were to be struck dumb.”

Another book about the immigrant experience, on the polar opposite end of the emotional spectrum: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (5/5). I adored this short story collection in the most uncool way possible. To my tastes, it’s about as close to perfect as the form can get: each character is presented and laid bare with deft pacing and incredible tenderness. Maybe it was the time and place (having read this entirely on airplanes at night), but I struggle to remember a time such small moments have moved me so much. Each piece was lovely, but my favorite was the first: a story about a couple who turn their nightly power outage into a tiny therapy session.

• Film pairing: Museum Hours or The Lunch Box. But the real pairing I couldn’t shake was a line from the Mountain Goats’ “There Will Be No Divorce”: “We were rising from the grave”
• Quote: “When I saw it that night, as he wound it and arranged it on the coffee table, an uneasiness possessed me; life, I realized, was being lived in Dacca first. I imagined Mr. Pirzada’s daughters rising from sleep, tying ribbons in their hair, anticipating breakfast, preparing for school. Our meals, our actions, were only a shadow of what had already happened there, a lagging ghost of where Mr. Pirzada really belonged.”

Kelly Link’s Get In Trouble (4/5) shows that there’s more than one way to skin a cat; more than one way to tease out the emotional core. If Lahiri is a gentle therapy session, Link is electroshock treatment, using bizarre and intensely creative plot points to reveal something universal and small. Murakami on Adderall. A stripper pines for a superhero; a girl falls in love with a mail-order ghost; a woman with two shadows drinks away her loneliness till a pocket universe pulls her away. It’s hard to explain why this works — why this never feels like Creative Writing 101 — but it really, really does. My two favorite stories, “I Can See Right Through You” and “The Lesson”, arguably have no fantastical elements at all. But they never feel out of place: fantasy, in Link’s world, is always overshadowed by the mystery of daily life.

• Film pairing: Amélie or Big Fish.
• Quote: “Days go by. Months go by. Years. Sometimes Thanh remembers Bad Claw, the procession of wedding dresses, the caterers, the boat coming toward the island. The place where he picked up a pebble. Sometimes Thanh wonders. Was this it, the thing that he had wished for, even as he had tried to wish for nothing at all? Was it this moment? Or was it this? Or this. Brief joys. The shadow of the valley of the shadow. Even here, even here, he wondered. Perhaps it was.”

When I compare Kelly Link to Murakami, I’m talking about magical realism. Which is precisely what Norwegian Wood (3.5/5) isn’t: this is by far the most straightforward, soulful work of his I’ve read. Even without his fantastical tricks, though, it might be the purest distillation of his voice. Most of that is a complement: this is a wistful, romantic, achingly simple story which breezes by in a way few novels could. Its best passages are better than anything I’ve read of his, particularly when dealing with grief and loss. But it also includes his most predictable cliches: name-dropping classical music junkies, manic Pixie dream girls who exist only to fall in love with (or be saved by) the protagonist, and an indulgent eroticism which borders on voyeurism. That blending of high and low, of course, is exactly what makes him such a joy to read. But with a story this simple, this lovely, I couldn’t help but wish he’d shown more restraint.

• Film pairing: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl or Tumbledown
• Quote: “I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot-of-air kind of thing. And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simple form, a form that I am able to put into words, like this: Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. Translated into words, it’s a cliché, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists—in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table—and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.”

Alicia Munro’s Runaway (4.5/5) showcases exactly that restraint: each character reveals precisely as much of themselves as they mean to, precisely when they should. This collection is like a hot cup of tea by the fire: warm, nourishing, simple. With its stories of women on the brink of emotional escape, it’s tempting to draw parallels to Jennifer Egan. But where Egan is dazzling and showy, Munro is content to slow down and enjoy watching the scenery change. Give it time, she says with a hush. Leave space for it to sink in. I loved how she infuses her writing with a distinct voices and points of view. She tells each story exactly as her characters might tell it; or would, if they could somehow find the words. My personal highlight was three connected stories about a girl named Juliet.

• Film pairing: Before Sunrise, for two very specific reasons. Or, I assume, Almodovar’s Julieta — which he based on Juliet.
• Quote: “What was Grace really looking for when she had undertaken this expedition? Maybe the worst thing would have been to get just what she might have thought she was after. Sheltering roof, screened windows, the lake in front, the stand of maple and cedar and balm of Gilead trees behind. Perfect preservation, the past intact, when nothing of the kind could be said of herself. To find something so diminished, still existing but made irrelevant—as the Travers house now seemed to be, with its added dormer windows, its startling blue paint—might be less hurtful in the long run.”