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Hey everybody, and welcome to the Little Oracles podcast, an oracle for the everyday creative. I’m Allison Arth.
So today I’ve got four little book reviews for you, and I’ve collected these books around the concept of fallout, and this, kind of, post-crucible and personal-crisis space set in near-future, post-apocalypse social collapse for two of these books — Harrow by Joy Williams, and How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu — and postwar reconstruction-slash-social upheaval for the other two, Space Invaders by Nona Fernández and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
As always, check content warnings before you pick up anything we talk about here on the podcast, because reading should be safe and enjoyable; but, without further lollipops and lithographs, let’s get into the Little Reviews.
First off, let’s talk about Harrow by Joy Williams, one of our ABC picks for June. So this novel is so, so odd, and so, so quiet; and yet so, so cosmic and consuming, that I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to some of my favorite passages in Cormac McCarthy — specifically in The Crossing, the central novel of The Border Trilogy — and also work by Pola Oloixarac, particularly Mona, which I read at the end of last year. But even with those echoes bouncing around my head as I read, it became really clear to me that Harrow was occupying its own galaxy in that universe of, like, books that chronicle bizarre human minutiae and yet imbue it with this weighty, almost planetary, meaning — you know, when every character, and every relationship, and every action is just so uncanny and weird that it kind of comes back around to being familiar, like, allegorical and representational in that operatic, commedia dell’arte way? [laughs] You know what I’m saying, right? [laughs] I mean, few things really “happen” in Harrow, in the plot sense; it’s really a novel of social collapse and inversion, told largely through dialogue, which is such a fascinating choice, I think, because even though most of the characters sound alike in their, kind of, stilted, philosophical speech, the predominance of their voices and their words in the narrative — and, like, literally on the page — blurs and almost diminishes the authorial voice, which, in a way, mirrors this social collapse that the book is all about. Like, nobody’s watching the ticket booth anymore [chuckles]; nobody’s stamping the passports, you know what I mean?
So, while this book isn’t action-packed by any means, and while the nature of the apocalypse is a bit cloudy, and while characters themselves feel like cut-outs —like these mannered, mask-wearing archetypes from some edge-case folklore — I’m so intrigued by this depiction of a society unraveling, and grasping for familiarity within crumbling systems and old, outdated social orders, that’s couched in this really, kind of, donnish prose that’s so self-aware and awkward and Frasier Crane-like that it becomes laughable, and really kind of lovable. So basically, I really loved this book [laughs], for its slowness and its strangeness, and if you’re a fan of those qualities, you might like Harrow, too.
So next up, How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu, which was one of our ABC picks for July. Straight talk, my experience of this book was so mixed: so up, so down, so thrown, so grounded. It’s sold as a novel in stories — though I’d be hard-pressed to call it a novel, really; it’s more like a collection of lightly connected short fiction — about how global society fares following the re-emergence of an ancient plague when scientists unearth a body from the Arctic in the year 2031.
Now, the plague’s nature is really kind of poetic: so, effectively, it transmutes organs from one type to another — so, like, a heart develops into kidneys, et cetera — and it also creates these, kind of, subcutaneous, light-show hemorrhagics, which could be interpreted by a generous reader [chuckles] as symbolic somatics of grief as it moves in and, in a way, changes a person. So this book has its fabulist moments, and kind of surrealist moments in all of that; and it has its heart-tugging moments, too, and some head-nodding moments at the ways Nagamatsu imagines how a massive, near-extinction event affects social ecosystems, particularly the healthcare, medical research, and funerary industries.
But.
I just wasn’t fully immersed, or fully engaged, or fully on-board with stories that felt a little repetitive, and bogged down in their own examinations of grief — particularly on a global scale — and it fellt kind of hamstrung by pop culture references that we might use today, in the year 2023 — you know, references to Tom Petty and Arthur Fonzarelli. And these references are used to kind of illuminate or fill out characters who couldn’t have been born before, like, the year 2000.
And I know this seems kinda small potatoes, and maybe it’s an attempt to show that the world kind of stopped and crystallized when the plague hit, but, legitimately, I ask you: what young person, even in the year 2031, is referencing The Fonz, you know what I mean? And I’m kind of skipping around my primary issue, here, which is this: context matters, and anachronism needs to be intentional, because if it isn’t, if I can see the author through it, and it doesn’t feel diegetic in some way, then, like, I’m out of the story. I’m thinking more about this contextual dissonance than I am about the thing that I’m reading. And that’s a bummer, man! [laughs] Like, I wanna read your book, and get lost in your story; I don’t wanna, like, do the math on how old some character was when Happy Days was floating around in the popular consciousness.
And I’m not even going to get into the, kind of, gotcha ending; this, like, mauve thread that theoretically connects everything together. So, I don’t know; if you read How High We Go in the Dark, let me know what you thought; hit me up on Instagram, let me know if I missed something, because I’m just kinda adrift. [laughs]
So next up, Space Invaders by Nona Fernández, in translation by Natasha Wimmer, and another of our ABC picks, this time for June, alongside Harrow. Okay, bottom line is: I loved this book. That’s it; that’s the review. [laughs] No, no, I’m not gonna leave you hanging on this one, but, honestly, this little novel: it’s told from multiple perspectives, in these tiny, crackling vignettes; it’s a book about growing up quick, and growing up mean, to quote Shel Silverstein; it’s a book about a group of friends who are looking back on their youth, and the final, bloody years of the Pinochet regime in Chile, and they’re looking back on their hazy understanding of the social powderkeg they were living in at that time.
But that’s just the armature, you know? This book is about time; and it’s about the emblems we acknowledge as kids, and the meanings we ascribe to those emblems; honestly, it’s about the stories we tell ourselves to survive, and to step from one day to the next, once we recognize the nature of those emblems.
And it’s just pitch-perfectly written, too; kind of jagged, and tumbling, and foggy. Here’s an excerpt, and I think this’ll show you what I mean — and just so you know, this is a single sentence: “Time isn’t straightforward, it mixes everything up, shuffles the dead, merges them, separates them out again, advances backward, retreats in reverse, spins like a merry-go-round, like a tiny wheel in a laboratory cage, and traps us in funerals and marches and detentions, leaving us with no assurance of continuity or escape.”
So, if you’re interested in books with that quality of haze — which I talked more about in episode 3 this season, Books About the Aftermath, and I’ll link that episode in the show notes — and if you’re interested in books about, kind of, the lasting, almost generational effects of social tension and pressure, and an unavoidable violence baked into the culture — books like Hades, Argentina by Daniel Loedel, and The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch, and Salt Houses by Hala Alyan; those come to mind — then you might like Space Invaders.
So, finally, let’s talk about Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, one of our original January ABC picks that we also returned to in March. [sighs] I just need to breathe for a second. [laughs] Oh my god. [laughs] To be perfectly honest with you all, I have anxiety about lit-critting Virginia Woolf, because there’s just so much scholarship out there about her work, and so many big and glorious brains have considered, like, single paragraphs of hers with this microscopic intensity. [laughs] So rather than fall back into the terms or categories of literary analysis — you know, the stuff of college essays that proves some kind of facility with the lingo, and some level of overall comprehension of the work — I’m just gonna talk about how this book affected me, and what engaged me, and what kept me reading, and what will entice me to read it again someday, because that’s what you care about, right? [laughs] Like, you’re not here to adjudicate my dissertation, right? [laughs]
So you probably know the broad strokes of Mrs. Dalloway, even if you haven’t read it: it’s a deeply interior novel, one that takes place in a single day, and it shuffles between the perspectives of Clarissa Dalloway, a prim and proper socialite, and Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked World War I veteran. And that’s one of the things I love so much about this novel — and this was my first time reading it — I was just enraptured by the way Virginia Woolf kind of slips and slides between these two characters, both of whom are haunted by the past in their own ways, and both of whom have these incredibly vibrant and intense interior lives, and both of whom really suppress and even repress their emotions because of social mores or expectations, at least to one degree or another.
So, like Harrow, nothing really “happens” in Mrs. Dalloway — with some exceptions — but those “happenings” are these jumping off points for the interiority of our point-of-view characters; they’re like the edges that signal a new plane of some character facet: some foible or false hope, or some wish or mental wandering that reveals something new about our characters.
And, as with Space Invaders, time is fluid in Mrs. Dalloway, and memory can be mushy, and our experience as the reader is as the fly on the proverbial wall: just kind of a witness to the gradual realization by both of these characters that, basically, something’s gotta give; life as-lived is too much; too regimented; too rigid; too unwilling to accept the whole of these characters, and their wills and their wants as human beings.
So, ultimately, this is a book about recognition; and life coming into focus; and awakening, and the choices people make when faced with that eye-opening moment, or that moment of clarity, when their conviction is really called on, and when they’re positioned at this, kind of, crossroads of: “Who am I? Does my history define me, and, moreover, does it drive me?” So if you’re interested in those really big, like, destiny-and-free-will kinds of questions in fiction; if you like books like The Awakening by Kate Chopin, or the graphic novel A History of Violence by John Wagner and Vince Locke, or even movies like Terminator — and I bet you never thought anyone would align Virginia Woolf with a blockbuster action movie, did you? [laughs] — then you might like Mrs. Dalloway.
[laughs] Whew, we did it; we did it! That’s the episode. [laughs] Thanks so much for being here; I appreciate you all so very much. And if you appreciate me, and this podcast, I invite you to share an episode of Little Oracles, and leave us a rating or a review wherever you listen. Check out our Instagram (at) little oracles, and the blog at little oracles dot com, for continued big book energy and creativity content, and, as always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine.
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