The Exiles: Good but Not Transcedent

 

THE EXILES (2020)

By Cristina Baker Kline

HarperCollins, 384 pages.

★★★

 

In her latest work, Christina Baker Kline returns to a subject that has interested her in the past: orphans. It is set in the 1840s, the height of British imperialism and a time in which the slightest infraction led draconian judges to impose exile sentences to ill-begotten colonies. Said judges were seldom moved by the age or circumstances of the accused.

 

Evangeline is an intelligent preacher’s daughter who became a governess when her father died when she was still a minor. How many Victorian novels involve rakish sons of privilege ruining a trusting female? So too this one, whose only twist is that a stepson is the culprit. In the eyes of English law, Evangeline’s word is no good when leveled against a prominent family, so it’s exile to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania).  

 

Aboard the transport ship she meets pickpocket Hazel Ferguson, the daughter of an absent alcoholic mother. Her skills as an herbalist and midwife also make her suspicious in the eyes of the ship’s crew, though physician Dr. Caleb Dunne is impressed by her. Also on board is salty-tongued Olive, who is with child. It is implied that she was a prostitute. Post for present status scarcely matters; all the women are viewed as disposable trash. Moreover, a long ocean journey exposed females to danger of physical assault.

 

On the other side of the world, an Aborigine named Matthinna, is taken from her homeland on Flanders Island for no good reason other than that Sir John Franklin of Arctic exploration infamy and his wife wish to undertake a social experiment they believe will fail. They seize a child to see if they can civilize it. The lighter-skinned Matthinna is chosen because she’s not “too” black as to be irredeemable. She too is bound for Van Diemen’s Land, where Franklin is governor.

 

One of the more fascinating details of the novel involves the little-known aftermath for those exiled from England. Did you know exiles were jailed when they went ashore? They had to earn their way to freedom (of a sort) in a place where European men vastly outnumbered women. And remember the time period. The idea of a woman earning her own bread was not impossible, just mostly so.

 

For a time, Matthinna fares better. She lives amidst luxury, though she’d rather be with her own people. She is smart enough to know that her ticket home is compliance. Rechristened as Mary, she excels in her studies and deportment. But she still a “black,” as Europeans reference Aboriginals– when they’re being semi-polite. The Franklins use Mary as a French-speaking trained monkey at parties. For Mary, the calculus is simple: Will she play out the game or succumb to hubris?

 

As you might anticipate, the worlds of the ship’s European white girls and that of Matthinna, will collide. The Exiles is a test of the reach of women’s networks under unusual circumstances. The immigrant story is often told in triumphant tones. The usual arc is that the first generation struggles but works hard to leave a solid bequest for their children. Kline knows it’s messier than that. What do words such as success, acceptance, and freedom mean?

 

Kline does her homework but it’s not quite enough to push this novel over the fence that divides good from extraordinary. Several slips mar an otherwise noble effort. First, she builds sympathy for her characters by placing them in her peril’s way. That’s effective, but she often resorts to melodramatic moments of double Kleenex sentimentality. Kline also breaks historical character in places. This introduces anachronistic contaminants in which characters act as if they are plucked from the 21^st century not the 19^th.

 

This is related to another picked nit. Exiles is an odd mix of imagination and convention. The central protagonists are so compelling that we come to expect much of them. Their flights, though, sometimes thud where they should soar and vice versa. I wonder if Kline realized this as well. Is this why she introduces a vendetta coda set 20 years in the future? It fleshes out several characters, but the device isn’t done with enough nuance to make readers unaware of the author’s intervention.  

 

If these critiques suggest that I lamented reading Exiles, that’s not so. I admire Kline’s work and you will find a glowing review of A Piece of the World in this blog’s archives. It is merely the case that Exiles never surmounted the aforementioned fence. Kline tells her story well, which is a good reason to read it. That it could have been more is a reason not to re-read it.

 

Rob Weir

 

All the Devils are Here a Middling Louise Penny Effort

 

 

ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE (2020)

By Louise Penny

Minotaur Nooks, 448 pages.

★★★

 

If you are a Louise Penny fan, a new Armand Gamache novel is a call for celebration. In all candor, All the Devils are Here is worth reading, but is not Penny’s strongest offering. The title comes from Shakespeare: “Hell is empty, all the devils are here.”

 

Here, in this case, is Paris. Unlike most Gamache tales, the Quebec village of Three Pines gets only passing mention in the 16^th book in the series. Armand and his wife Reine-Marie are in the City of Lights to visit their son Daniel and his family; and daughter Annie, who is about to have her second child with Jean Guy, Gamache’s former second in command at the Sûreté du Quebec. Paris is also home to Stephen Horowitz, Gamache’s godfather and the man who helped raise him when his parents died in a car crash when Armand was just nine. Thus, Armand knows Paris very well and he and Reine-Marie maintain a small apartment there.

 

Stephen, a very rich investor, is 93 and slowing down, but his mind is still sharp. Why though, would someone deliberately run him over in a Paris crosswalk. That’s a question Gamache wants answered and he enlists the services of an old friend, Claude Dussault, who is now prefect of police for all of Paris.

 

Readers of Penny’s previous novel know that Jean-Guy left Quebec to stop dodging bullets and take a job with an engineering film in Paris. That company, GHS, factors into All the Devils. So do many other things: the Rodin museum, venture capitalism, security forces, the Eiffel tower, rare earth minerals, a Patagonian disappearance, corporate politics, magnetic coins, and France’s shameful past treatment of Jews. On the micro level, Gamache wrestles with the unknown cause of Daniel’s estrangement from him, and with issues such as childhood trauma and the past bleeding into the present.

 

There are lots of characters in All the Devils – perhaps too many – and that also goes for all the irons in the fire. As in previous books, there is suspicion of malfeasance in high places. It is to Penny’s credit that we do not know until the end which ones are real and which ones are red herrings. Gamache comes to distrust everyone – including Daniel – but he has many from whom to choose, especially after he visits Stephen’s apartment and finds the corpse of a man later identified as Alexander Plessner. Among the many dodgy characters are Irene Fontaine, Jean-Guy’s resentful underling at GHS; Eugenie Roquebrune, its CEO; security guard Xavier Loiselle; Alain Pinot, another corporate bigwig; and perhaps even the Paris police and Dussault himself. At times the novel reminded me of a scene from I Claudius in which Herod tells Claudius, “Trust no one, little marmoset.”

 

Gamache has much to unravel, including what the mysterious letters AFP mean. (There are numerous possibilities, including that they mean nothing important at all!) There is also the matter of why Stephen, who had a luxurious art-filled apartment, was spending a king’s ransom to stay at a hotel near where he lived.

 

So many threads, and there is the sense that Penny got a bit lost in them. When the beat-the-clock resolution and aftermath come, both feel forced and tacked on. Maybe it’s Paris and all of its visual and visceral distractions.  Book # 17 is due this year and I, for one, hope it’s set in Three Pines amidst familiar faces and places. Perhaps fewer devils will make for a tidier mystery.

 

Rob Weir

 

Tenet is Junk Science

 

 

TENET  (20200)

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Warner Brothers, 150 minutes, PG-13 (fake physics)

★

 

On the website RogerEbert.com, Brian Tallerico nailed it when he called Tenet a film “crafted for YouTube explainer video culture.” Another way to say this is that it is a pretentious video game tricked out to look more profound than it is. Still another is to call it a James Bond movie marred by pseudo physics.

 

The intellectual bankruptcy of Tenet is masked by its biggest bit of chicanery: all of the explanations for important plot pivots come in machine gun-like verbal bursts that are too fast to deconstruct. And who in their right mind wants to stop and rewind a film that’s already an hour longer than it needs to be? By now you can probably tell that I hated Tenet. Were it not for its shimmery exteriors and its superb performances from John David Washington and Kenneth Branagh, I would have given this bloated waste of time zero stars.

 

In brief, which is more than can be said of the film, Washington is “The Protagonist,” a spy/secret agent charged by his boss (Martin Donovan) with saving the world. OK, hero territory, but with a twist. Humanity’s Armageddon-triggering event has already happened. Huh? It seems that the present has been invaded by those from the future who wish to alter the past. But they already have. Double huh? If this premise is true, then none of the other stuff in Tenet matters a fig, so roll the credits already.

 

Instead, we have subplots involving international arms dealers, characters meeting themselves inside of temporal inversions, and a sappy bit of nonsense involving The Protagonist trying to save a woman named Kat (Elizabeth Debicki) from her cruel husband, Andre Sator (Branagh), the arms dealer linchpin of the story, (Or not, if all this has already happened.) At one point, The Protagonist hands over the piece needed to complete a Doomsday Machine because Sator threatens to kill Kat and her son if he doesn’t get what he wants. Moral dilemma test time: Would you save the kid or the mother if by doing so meant that the madcap father will now destroy the world?

 

If only that were but the only thing that made no sense. There is, for instance, a weapon that looks as if a demented five-year-old assembled a tinker toy from random steel lugnuts and washers. There is also an idiotic ending that’s a mere baby step above “it was all a dream.” To follow any of the movie involves asking who is temporally inverted and who isn’t. A better question to ask is: Who cares?

 

 I will say this for Tenet: it looks good. How can you go wrong with a visual travelogue that takes us from Kiev to Denmark, Norway, Estonia, India, Siberia, and –best of all –the Amalfi coast? A few good performances also make the film semi-bearable. Washington – I had no idea he was once a pro gridiron player – is a nice combination of smarts, charm, and intensity. Branagh once again proves that no one does accents as convincingly as he; this time he’s Russian. Dimple Kampedia and Robert Pattinson are also decent as arms dealer Priya and agent Neil, respectively, though both roles are mere contrivances. Speaking of which, the rail-thin Debicki appears to have been cast for no better reason than looking good when diving from a yacht into the Gulf of Salerno.

 

Tenet has been $100 million bomb for Warner Brothers, which sank way too much money into production and distribution. As for Director Christopher Nolan, let’s just say that Tenet is no Dunkirk or Memento. It’s not even Inception II, though some explainers have cast it in that light. But who knows, maybe the explainers are from the future and are just trying to offload a toxic turkey.

 

Rob Weir

Never Rarely Sometimes Always a Gem

 

 NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS (2020)

Directed by Eliza Hittman

Focus Features, 101 minutes, PG-13

★★★★ ½

 

What do you do if you’re an unpopular small-town girl from a dysfunctional family and find yourself pregnant at age 17? That’s the dilemma facing Autumn Callahan (Sidney Flanigan). You might try the local pregnancy center, but only if you can stomach the patronizing faux concern of its staff or the anti-abortion video they ask you to watch. You might also consider a termination, but if you’re 17 and live in Pennsylvania, that requires parental consent and who wants to fight such a battle with an ineffectual mother and her jerk of a partner?

 

Never Rarely Sometimes Never is a quiet but deeply moving look inside the world of a not-a-kid but not-quite-an-adult from Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. The film’s town, Ellensboro, is fictional though its profile is similar to that of Sunbury: small (<10,000), along the Susquehanna River, overwhelmingly white, conservative, paternal, played out, and inhabited by just enough shady characters to intensify whatever attitude comes naturally to an adolescent.

 

Autumn knows she can’t be a mom or carry a child to term in a community in which some already think she’s a “slut” and don’t even know about her condition. Internet research suggests she needs to go to New York to deal with her pregnancy. The film thus evolves into a road trip for Autumn and her sole support: her 18-year-old cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder). This entails a 175-mile bus ride to New York and entering a city they know mostly in the abstract. Their ignorance and youthful nonchalance might be good things–too much information could have driven them despair.

 

To say things don’t go in-and-out smoothly is an understatement, but full credit to director Eliza Hittman for keeping the focus on Autumn’s choices rather than turning the movie into a hokey run-from-danger potboiler. There is uncertainty–is the young man they meet on the bus trustworthy? –but the worries remain psychological rather than physical. Add a bad Ellensboro misreading of Autumn’s condition and the need to be in New York for two days to the list of things Autumn and Skylar need to figure out.

 

Almost no one saw this movie in a theatre, though it garnered praise and prizes at Sundance and other indie film festivals. Blame COVID as one reason why it quickly went to video-on-demand, though I can’t help but think that its subject matter, lack of recognizable stars, slow pacing, and hot-button politics would have deterred wide distribution in the best of times. That’s a crying shame, as this is a very good movie. Watch for Flanigan and Ryder in the future, as both show promise, especially in their ability to dribble out emotion rather than resorting to histrionic floods.

 

They also know how to get inside the logic systems of the liminal not kid/not adult world I mentioned above. There are several scenes that might make you wonder why they did illogical A rather than rational B. Remind yourself that they are still tethered to what they were, not what they are becoming. Autumn is stoic and brave, but she’s also teen-like in her sullenness, her devotion to her phone, her weak interpersonal skills, and even her working-class semi-Goth style. And know this: The film’s title references response prompts to intake questions at Planned Parenthood clinics. These include questions such as: Has anyone harmed or threatened you? Has anyone ever forced you to have sex? Have you ever had unprotected sex?

 

Unless you can answer “never” to queries such as these, be wary of judging Autumn. Perhaps it would be better to redirect sanctimony toward those who condemn or condone without walking in her shoes. Among the many virtues of an interior film such as this is that it forces us to imagine rather than offering bromides or laurels.

 

Rob Weir

Piranesi a Unique Mindbending Tale

 

 

 

PIRANESI (2020)

By Susanna Clarke

Bloomsbury Publishing, 272 pages.

★★★★★

 

Piranesi may not be the most literary novel I’ve read this year, but it’s certainly the most fascinating. Explaining why without giving an aerial tour of the entire book is difficult; Piranesi is that unique.

 

Most of the book is set in an alternate universe, but of what sort? Another dimension? A different planet? Mind castles? An underworld? A post-apocalyptic city? A wormhole? It consists of clouds, birds, fish, monumental buildings, and water. Clarke describes it as, “where architecture and oceans were muddled together.” The ocean sustains and endangers; that is, it provides food and makeshift clothing and tools, but walls cannot contain it. Piranesi is both the narrator and chronicler of a world he calls “The House,” that is apparently occupied by just two people: Piranesi and an older man he calls “The Other.” One of his tasks is to keep track of the ocean tides, lest he or The Other be swept away by periodic surges that drown the halls.

 

When I use the term “halls,” think something akin to where Pompeii and Versailles meet M. C. Escher and ancient Crete’s minotaur maze. Or, at least, that’s what it conjured for me. In other words, it’s vast, enigmatic, and parts of it are in ruin. Some might know that Piranesi is also the surname of an 18^th-century Italian archaeologist and artist best known for his 16 “imaginary prisons,” engravings that were Escher before Escher.

 

Our Piranesi spends 11 years investigating The House one hall at a time and recording observations in journals. His explorations tell him that great civilizations once thrived­–their statues occupy marble niches and artifacts strew the halls–but insofar as he can tell, it was a long time ago, as he finds the remains of just 13 other individuals. They are the ones whose bones Piranesi has collected and whom he has given names such as Biscuit-Box Man, Fish Leather Man, Concealed Person, and Folded-Up Child.

 

Piranesi’s relationship with The Other is essentially that of servant to master. He is allowed to speak with the brusque Other only briefly and at specified times. Piranesi, though, is content. Plus, he is aiding The Other in the search for a “Great and Secret Knowledge.” Piranesi is essentially Robinson Crusoe, if the latter had little desire for the company of others. Piranesi needs The Other for occasional supplies and food items, but where he gets things that don’t seem to be in any of the halls mildly perplexes Piranesi.

 

One day, Piranesi briefly spies another person he calls “16.” (Also the number of the other Piranesi’s prisons.) He does not approach him because The Other has warned that “16” is dangerous and will make him insane. Piranesi does, however, expand his exploration of The House, discovers other journals, and finds messages that baffle and intrigue. At this point, things take an ominous turn. Before the book concludes, the novel veers into subjects such as rituals, magical incantations, transgressive behavior, pseudo-science, and the biographies and fates of the 13 whose bones Piranesi lovingly tends. There are other issues and mysteries as well, but to enumerate them would reveal too much.

 

Piranesi is, to evoke Monty Python, a “now for something completely different” novel. Clarke’s is one of the more creative mash-ups I’ve encountered in some time. Her novel is evocative of Neal Gaiman’s Neverwhere as filtered through Greek mythology, Plato, C. S. Lewis, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung. It dislocates readers and sends them down the same twisty paths as its central character. After all, we are reminded, Piranesi is “a name associated with labyrinths.” In this case, we also relate it to child-like innocence. Add John Milton to the list of inspirations. In case you can’t recall why that name is famous, he wrote Paradise Lost.

 

Rob Weir

Everywhere You Don't Belong

 

 

 

EVERYWHERE YOU DON’T BELONG (2020)

By Gabriel Bump

Algonquin Books, 288 pages.

★★★

 

Claude is a young black man raised by his grandmother and her partner Paul–more she than he, who is a bumbling gasbag–on the South Side of Chicago. Claude is a straight arrow in a quiver full of Windy City bad news. 

 

 His early education in a Catholic school vanishes when grandma has it out with the nuns. The city’s public schools and neighborhoods induce the feeling that Chicago is a place where he doesn’t belong. He gets along with most of the cast on the streets–people with handles such as Nugget, Bubbly, Teeth­–but he’s also aware of the drugs, gangs, and bullies. Claude is more of a principled appeaser than a fighter, which leads to conflict when he informs “Principal Big Ass,” as he’s been dubbed, that star high school basketball George Burns routinely beats him up and won’t back down on his accusation, though it means Burns is off the team. You can imagine Claude’s social isolation after that.

 

The Chicago sections of the book are set when Barack Obama has just been elected to the U.S. Senate. I don’t know if author Gabriel Bump intended a critique of how the South Side was ignored, but one certainly doesn’t get a sense of much being done to help folks there, quite a few of whom vanish in one way of another. One player on the streets is “Big Columbus,” a drug dealer and key member of the violent Red Belters gang, but also a community activist, Still another is local sports star Chester Drexler, who goes to fabulous parties outside the ‘hood and always has a bevy of attractive young women around him. One of them, Janice, takes a fancy to Claude. The alternative to Big Columbus is Baggs, a white cop into community policing–until he isn’t.

 

The crunch comes during a street protest led by Big Columbus that clashes with the Chicago police. If you know anything about Chicago, you know that its police are better at cracking skulls than defusing tension. What do you do if, like Claude and Janice, you are literally caught in the middle of a riot pitting a gang versus the police? Or a situation in which cops choke to death a 14-year-old they falsely thought was stealing? Maybe get out of Dodge? As Claude observes, “people coming and going, valuable things left in a hurry.”

 

Claude decides to become one of the people “going.” Everywhere You Don’t Belong is a novel in three acts, Chicago, Missouri, and points unknown. When it’s time for college, Claude decides to major in journalism at a school in Missouri. If he didn’t belong in Chicago, imagine how out of place he is in a backwater town in the Show-Me State. What is shown mostly is white privilege and arrogance. Claude is uncomfortable with the inanity of college life, the piggish behavior of white males, the gibberish from one of his professors, and the fact that he and another black student are always asked to write “black” stories. After all, Obama has just been elected president, so they can speak for African Americans, right? Umm… Claude doesn’t relate to much about his past life, which is why he’s in Missouri in the first place.

 

Janice reappears, but brings trouble with her. Much of the last part of the novel involves capers and chases that flush Claude from Missouri and send both he and Janet on the road. Where’s a good place to be if everywhere is a place you don’t belong? This part of the novel reminded me a bit too much of clichéd Hollywood on-the-lam films.

 

Kudos to Bump for presenting black urban life as multivalent and for presenting Missouri rednecks and Chicago Red Belters as cut from the same indifferent-to-human life cloth. His is a solid debut offering, even when Bump leans too heavily on formulae. Not everything coheres. Though the two novels differ in content, Bump’s look at street life lacks the vividness or tension-cracking humorous digressions of James McBride’s Deacon King. Bump gives us three mood shifts­ related to where Claude finds himself: Chicago, Missouri, and in flight. The first two work, but the third feels disconnected, as its tone shifts from psychological to atavistic.

 

Overall, though, Bump’s novel is an attention-grabbing book. Although I am white, I grew up working-class poor and moved up in status. That often means feeling ill at ease in both blue-collar and bourgeois company. Everywhere You Don’t Belong is a wonderful title and I’m sure many readers will relate to its central dilemma.

 

Rob Weir

The Silence: DeLillo Mails It In

 

THE SILENCE: A NOVEL (2020)

By Don DeLillo

Scribner and Sons, 120 pages.

★

 

Read my review of Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind. Now imagine a crappy novel that covers a lot of the same turf and you have Don DeLillo’s The Silence. It’s not really a novel at all–more like a short story inflated like an unappealing Christmas lawn blowup.

 

Jim Kripps and Tessa Berens are returning from Paris in time to watch the Super Bowl with friends. As they approach New York, there’s a bump, and systems shut down. They survive a crash landing and encounter the mayhem of a downed power grid, stalled elevators, closed subways, and barricaded story fronts. An airport authority remarks, “Whatever is going on has crushed our technology.”

 

Married couple Diane Lucas and Martin Dekker and an acquaintance named Max Steiner munch upon prepared food. When the football broadcast goes off the air, “Max looked at the screen as he ate and when he finished eating he put down the plate and kept on looking.” Diane and Martin sit in the dark with no heat, no email, no working appliances, and no word on when Jim and Tessa will arrive.

 

On the street people wander in confusion, but the city is mostly silent. Jim and Tessa eventually make their way to the apartment and a five-way conversation ensues that’s like a pretentious version of the Barry Levinson film Diner. Their chatter is the only thing that breaks the silence. They speculate on the phenomenon: “cyberattacks, digital intrusions, biological aggressors… minds [being] digitally remastered?” It doesn’t help that Martin is a conspiracy nut fond of invoking (but not grasping) Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. Diane is a rational physicist, Tessa an alarmist, and Jim and Max mostly silent partners, as it were.

 

That’s it and “it” is utter rubbish. Earlier I said it’s not a novel, and I stand by that. I may, however, have slighted short stories. This is a lazy work from DeLillo and is easily the worst of his 17 books. At its best, The Silence reads as if DeLillo simply published his ideas for a book; at worst, it’s like the first treatment of a John Carpenter movie. I half expected to hear one of the characters say, “There’s something in the fog!” No one did. Too bad; that would have been more interesting than the conversations that actually do take place. If I thought the world was ending, I wouldn’t waste my remaining time with anyone as boring as Jim, Tessa, Diane, Martin, and Max.

 

Silence can be the subject of an enthralling work. One example of this Jose Saramago’s brilliant Seeing (2014), in which an election is held, citizens record blank ballots, and stunned officials parade through streets where curtains are drawn and no huzzahs greet them. DeLillo gives us nothing of that ilk. Instead, he gives us a book that would not have been published from an author of a lesser reputation. It comes perilously close to being contemptuous of his audience–a smugness borne of the belief that his name alone is all that is needed to sell books. There are those who will fawningly read anything DeLillo writes, but you can abstain. As in Saramago’s Seeing, you can vote through silence. There are scores of more worthy books to read.

 

Rob Weir