A stunning meditation on the hope that religion can offer, as well as the damage that it can do, within a brutal world. Should be required reading forA stunning meditation on the hope that religion can offer, as well as the damage that it can do, within a brutal world. Should be required reading for all....more
A scarily prescient, emotionally gutting, edge-of-your-seat dystopia that tackles issues of race and gender with insight and deep compassion. I don't A scarily prescient, emotionally gutting, edge-of-your-seat dystopia that tackles issues of race and gender with insight and deep compassion. I don't think I've ever read anything quite like this book, and I know I'm the better for having read it....more
An intriguing premise and I appreciated the trans representation being front and center, but ultimately suffered severely from lack of rigorous editinAn intriguing premise and I appreciated the trans representation being front and center, but ultimately suffered severely from lack of rigorous editing (there were a lot of "first novel" issues like sudden [multiple] POV shifts mid-scene and the pacing felt off at times). The attempts to engage race were clumsy at best and problematic at worst....more
Pitch perfect voice that tells an increasingly haunting story. I wish all the mid-century English country house novels I had to read for quals were haPitch perfect voice that tells an increasingly haunting story. I wish all the mid-century English country house novels I had to read for quals were half as good as this one....more
Really enjoyed the first two encounters and the voices with which they were written, but the book unraveled for me a bit in the second half. For one, Really enjoyed the first two encounters and the voices with which they were written, but the book unraveled for me a bit in the second half. For one, I think Mitchell is just much better and more convincing when he ventriloquizes men. The first two stories are spooky and then horrific in just the right ways, creating sympathy for two characters that weren't particularly great people (particularly the racist/sexist detective inspector). I really wanted the book to leave the science-fictional aspects in the background, but as the plot proceeded, it moved away from horror toward somewhat over-explainy worldbuilding (including a giant exposition dump right in the middle of the book). Mitchell's penchant for tweaking word definitions (the usual suspects of orison, lacuna, etc all appear) was a bit precious for my tastes here. I didn't realize that Slade House was set in the same universe as The Bone Clocks (which I haven't read), and I wonder if I would have enjoyed it more if I'd read TBC first. Overall, however, I found myself wishing that Mitchell hadn't tried to join Slade House up to the mythologies of his other work, but rather let it be a cozy, horrific, self-contained little book. I guess in that way I, too, fell prey to Slade House's innocuous appearance and its many initially-unseen layers....more
1.5 stars Yet another book where comparisons to Jane Austen reveal 1) the book's enormous shortcomings of plot, language, and characterization, and 2) 1.5 stars Yet another book where comparisons to Jane Austen reveal 1) the book's enormous shortcomings of plot, language, and characterization, and 2) reviewers/marketers misunderstanding of what makes an Austen novel. While lifting the genre of consumption voyeurism out of its typical New York City setting felt fresh, absolutely everything else in the novel was a worn out cliche. Now, cliche and satire can be deployed to great effect, but Kwan sketches his characters so broadly here, so entirely one-note, that satire tips right into farce. What makes the satire so delicate and so cutting in Austen is how the characters are rarely cardboard cutouts. She always finds a way of hinting at a rich inner life, at making them feel like real people with gross follies, rather than one-dimensional allegorical stand-ins. Whereas there's simply no there there with the characters who populate Crazy Rich Asians; more damningly, the supposedly normal central couple that we're asked to cheer for are so flat and boring themselves that there ends up being no engine to the marriage plot. I can't imagine anyone actually caring about whether or not Nick and Rachel's relationship would overcome the obstacles in its way. (Also, this is a petty aside, but I am inordinately sick of books wherein characters find themselves on the ivy league tenure track by the age of 27. If you're going to say that your protagonist is brilliant enough for that to be possible, then you really better make sure that brilliance comes across in the characterization, or at least show the character working all. the. time. Rachel's and Nick's life in academia was, for me, the most far-fetched of far-fetched details in this book. And that's really saying something.) The only character who really drew me in was Nick's cousin, Astrid. I found myself wishing we could have spent more of the book's interminable 400+ pages on her plotline.
Speaking of length, this book could have really benefited by being cut by about half. There's a lot of self-indulgent info-dumping throughout that detracts from any sense of natural worldbuilding. The scattered footnotes containing translations or historical/cultural facts were a nice touch, but Kwan should have stopped there when it came to explaining aspects of Singaporean society. There's a ton of "Well, Rachel, this is how things work here" embedded in the plot, with the net result that entire paragraphs feel like clunky lectures. Then, in the final fifty pages, the plot finally speeds up to an ending that blatantly sets the stage for sequels. No thanks. The dialogue is so wooden throughout that I could've built myself my own top of the line yacht by the final page.
My last gripe is that everything that drives the plot of this book is instigated by men. It's Nick who hides his wealth from Rachel (he claims not to consider himself that wealthy, which is hilariously untrue, and I kept waiting for Rachel to call him out on that excuse -- if he was really so self-actualized as to not care about his family's money, why keep it a secret?) and brings her to meet his family without at all preparing her for what she encounters. (view spoiler)[It's Nick who flies Rachel's mother in to tell her the true story of her parentage at the novel's end. And even Astrid's storyline is superficially resolved when her spurned ex-fiance enters the action seemingly for no other reason than to buy her husband's company at a sum that places Michael closer to her level financially (because of course any man would feel emasculated by his wife making more than him *eyeroll*). (hide spoiler)] It's not that I don't think men can or should write chick lit, but when all the women in your novel are either petty, materialistic, back-biting shrews, or angels whose outer beauty shows their inward goodness, and when none of these women are allowed to be the movers of their own stories, I have to give massive side eye....more
Between the World and Me was published amidst so much buzz and so many thinkpieces that there is really nothing I can add to the critical conversationBetween the World and Me was published amidst so much buzz and so many thinkpieces that there is really nothing I can add to the critical conversation surrounding it. It feels presumptuous to write anything as paltry as a "review" of this important work. So, instead, I'm going to write a highly personal list of some of the things I appreciated about it:
1) This is not a book that panders to white people. It calls on those with race and class privilege to bear witness, but make no mistake, it is not meant for white people. What I mean is that I believe that the feelings of white Dreamers are completely incidental to Coates' project. If Between the World and Me makes whites uncomfortable, that's fine. If it makes them angry, that's fine. If it makes them feel helpless, then all the better. Welcome to a feeling many POCs experience all the time. The point of the book, however, is not to stir up white feeling, because it is a text on race in America that addresses itself primarily, pointedly, toward black bodies. In that sense, it is nothing short of revolutionary that Coates has found such a wide white audience. At the end of the book, he writes to his son that white Americans have their own struggle, but that his son should not "struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed for us all." So many texts on race relations are written toward and for white people. So many of them depend upon the conversion of whites to the cause of justice as the means of ending systemic racism. So many of them feel they must engage in respectability politics in order for the message to be heard by whites. Even in liberal circles, POC are often recruited by white "allies" to explain and educate them on race relations, and the demand is always for us to do it nicely, to reassure our white friends that oh no, you're one of the good ones, I see that. This is exhausting. So I deeply appreciate that Coates does not tie the black struggle to the white one. This book recognizes and embodies Audre Lorde's injunction that you cannot use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. It tells POC to lay the master's tools down and to walk out of the master's house. The feelings and fate of the master are not their responsibility anymore.
2) There is, I believe, in this country a fetishization of black forgiveness of white sins. And while I differ from Coates in that I identify with a faith that calls upon its followers to do the work of forgiveness, I find the position he can take vis-a-vis his atheism to be a powerful and much-needed antidote to the kind of "reconciliation" that finds its conclusion in POC forgiveness rather than justice and equity. He is clear-eyed that without the hope of a next life in which the soul can find peace, what is left is a materiality in which the integrity of the body matters supremely. Christian readers who have objected to the hopelessness of Coates' writing would do well to remember that ours is a religious tradition that at its best recognizes the importance of the body and that our holy book is one that calls for us to work for justice and righteousness on earth as it is in heaven.
3) I was aware prior to reading that there have been some excellent critiques written by black feminist scholars about the marginalization of the black female experience in this book. I am not the person to argue for or against this critique, but I have three reflections around it: a) given Coates' emphasis on the black body as a site of violation, and given the intersecting but different violations black male and female bodies have been subjected to in this nation, I'm not sure that vocalizing an experience that hasn't been his wouldn't have been a further violation or silencing of the female body; b) I am grateful for the scholars who've pointed out the insufficiencies of this book's scope, particularly around feminism and hegemonic globalism; and c) let's do better. Let's demand from publishers more excellent theory by WOC, queer, transnational writers, marketed to the same level of media saturation, so that no one book has to be The Only Book....more
Marilynne Robinson's novels have long made me an admirer of her mind, and these non-fiction essays on American religion, education, and democracy are Marilynne Robinson's novels have long made me an admirer of her mind, and these non-fiction essays on American religion, education, and democracy are no different. Robinson's depth of knowledge and breadth of engagement on these matters are impressive, but what is even more impressive is her compassion, particularly for those with whom she disagrees. Sure, she might get in a gentle jab here or there for those she sees as willfully misunderstanding Scripture, history, or other people, but for the most part she takes very seriously the idea that all individuals are fearfully and wonderfully made. What results is that she is able to turn all the sharpness of her intellect and critique onto ideas, rather than the people who hold them, and to sift through concepts to distinguish the wheat from the chaff. The writing itself is dense and rich enough, both in syntax and content, that it demands that the reader pay close attention. I am not the humanist that Robinson calls herself, nor am I as optimistic about the potential good of democracy as she is, but the fact that a mind like hers ascribes to both these things makes me want to do so a little more myself.
Standout essays: Everyone on every side of every imaginable political or ideological debate should be made to read "Imagination and Community" and "Austerity as Ideology."
"Open Thy Hand Wide" is a passionate defense of Calvin's legacy in America, and it radically re-envisions what "liberality as a society might look like." This essay is up there with Dorothy L. Sayers' writings on vocation and wartime austerity for me in terms of its instructiveness on my personal understanding of generosity and charity as means to combat late capitalism. "Wondrous Love" follows on the lines of taking an incisive look at those who would call America "a Christian nation" without taking seriously Christian teachings on generosity.
(Finally, I enjoyed the meditation in "When I Was a Child" on the cultural differences between the Eastern United States and the Midwest/West, particularly re. attentiveness to class differences and views on lonesome-ness, but I take enormous issue with the essay's complete disregard of First Nations genocide and treatment of the settlement of the Western frontier as relatively benign. A really glaring and perplexing misstep in an otherwise impressive collection, for which I knocked off one star.)...more
(3.5 stars) For readers who've followed Lauren Winner's career, Wearing God feels like the natural next step from her 2012 work Still. In the author q(3.5 stars) For readers who've followed Lauren Winner's career, Wearing God feels like the natural next step from her 2012 work Still. In the author q&a at the end of that book, Winner notes that "Among other things, divorcing has shaken up the assumptions I bring to reading scripture. In leaving my marriage, I was doing something that was simply not permissible, not in the way I have always interpreted scripture, and that is something I remain troubled by, confused by--it is not something about which I feel cavalier. I don't know, as neatly as I once knew, what my hermeneutic of scripture is. What does it mean to be someone who affirms scripture's authority, someone who wants to live inside the scriptural story, but who has made a major life choice that contradicts something about which Jesus in the Gospels is pretty clear? I don't have a straightforward, stable answer to that. I expect I will be trying to work it out for a long time." Wearing God feels like a lovely result of that working out.
In this book, Winner examines some of the less familiar descriptions of and metaphors for God in the Bible. Of particular note are the chapters on God as clothing, God's laughter, God as laboring woman. For any readers who worried, like I did, that part of Winner's working out of her hermeneutic would involve a lower or more cavalier view of scriptural authority, it quickly becomes evident that this did not happen and that Winner's approach remains thoughtful, creative, and rigorous. The two notes that bookend the text -- a short note on attempting to avoid gendering pronouns of God throughout and a short note on not including a chapter on the troubling metaphors of God as domestic abuser based on her work in a women's prison -- are particularly fine. In both, Winner balances between acknowledging troubling aspects of tradition/Scripture and not getting overly caught up in them, nor attempting to bend them or scriptural authority to her own preference. Throughout, there is a high view of the story that Winner finds herself in, even when it's complex and baffling. Maybe particularly when it's complex and baffling. I particularly appreciated the encouragement for the reader to link metaphors directly to their own lives (Winner argues that we're meant to do this, hence the many images of God as shepherd, God as king, etc, in the texts for an ANE audience who would've had such figures in their everyday lives) and the final chapter on Deus absconditas, how the hiddenness of God often is made manifest through language.
I did knock off a star for how the book overpromises -- in the introduction Winner talks about the richness of unexpected metaphors like God as beekeeper, tree, dog, metaphors which are ultimately left out of the text at hand. While Winner brings great insights to God as bread and wine and God as fire, neither of these images are unfamiliar to modern churchgoers (and maybe are as used and overused as God as shepherd/father/king). I would have loved to see more on the other, more radical metaphors in place of these two chapters. And while I appreciated the inclusion of lengthy quotations from various sources, I thought the book would have been better served by placing them all at the end of the chapters they were attached to, or as an appendix, rather than interspersed with the main text throughout. It made for a somewhat disjointed reading experience, personally.
The other way that I see Wearing God as being the natural next step of Winner's writings is how little she talks about the events/people of her own life. Unlike Girl Meets God, Still, and to some extent Real Sex, Wearing God really isn't in any way a spiritual memoir, even though Winner delves pretty deeply into her own feelings about the various metaphors. I couldn't tell if this was a kind of gun-shyness in the aftermath of the negative reactions to Still or if Winner felt like she had overshared in the past... or if it's the kind of humility that C.S. Lewis writes about -- not thinking less of oneself, but rather simply thinking of oneself less. At any rate, no one could accuse Winner of oversharing in this book (her new husband and congregation are mentioned rarely and typically only in passing), which may frustrate longtime readers of Winner's who are more used to the tone of her earlier books. To me, the restraint felt respectful and appropriate to the subject matter, though I would find it a shame if it came about mostly through Winner being burned so badly as a public figure in evangelical circles.
In all -- there are some real gems in this book, and it's made me want to be more on the lookout for unexpected metaphors as I read scripture....more
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