Author: Andres Kabel

Brilliant Irish novelist John Boyne has now tilted towards satire, with “The Echo Chamber” chronicling tumultuous days in the lives of a silver-spooned British family, the Cleverleys: broadcasting icon George; bestselling novelist Beverley; and their three messed-up children. All five are thriving, according to their individual desires, in the social media world. As the novel’s title makes clear, Boyne’s target is the capricious, savage world of Twitter and Facebook. When George haphazardly tweets about a transitioning secretary, the worlds of all the five Cleverleys tumble willy-nilly into the darkest crevasses of online justice and injustice. Boyne is supreme at dialogue and the entire book glitters with clever conversation upon witty exchange, and his plotting of the absurd trajectory of his subjects is masterful. Most importantly, from my point of view, the author feels for his characters even as he skewers them, and his calibrated tone of realism merged with outrage is wonderful to read. The Echo Chamber is neither high tragedy nor visceral commentary, but is all the more sparkling for being a humane, funny, intelligent window onto our connected world. All of John Boyne’s novels come highly recommended and this is a fine example.

Trent Dalton’s debut, Boy Swallows Universe, was a bravura coming-of-age delight. “All Our Shimmering Skies” arcs up the core features of the debut – the focus on a troubled youth, the elements of magical realism, the fizzing style – but overreaches. The story of Molly, graveyard orphan girl, and her quest across the fantastical terrain of the Northern Territory at the time of the WWII Darwin bombings, is impressive at the page level, but I found its unrelenting appeal to talking skies, talking spirits, and Grand Guignol plot escalations leached away any character identification. Whereas in Boy Swallows Universe, Eli, the starring boy, seemed heroic, this time Molly is rendered as a declaiming cardboard heroine. The core villain is straight out of gothic Victorian novels. Only one character retains any life beyond the page: Japanese kamikaze pilot Yukio. Dalton conveys Darwin with great gusto, yet the drama-imbued Australian bush somehow comes across as a movie set. All in all, there is much to admire in the literary gymnastics in All Our Shimmering Skies, and it delivers a quick read in spite of its length, but we will need to await Trent Dalton’s third novel to see him at his most potent.

Susan Orlean is a brilliant writer and indefatigable researcher driven by her startlingly varied fancies. “On Animals” gathers up sixteen essay articles from the last quarter century, mostly from The New Yorker. A self-confessed animal lover, albeit one more typically at home in an American city, Orlean writes about laboring donkeys in Morocco, her own chicken-owning experiences, the strangeness and popularity of pandas, a “lion whisperer,” the world of taxidermy, and pigeon racing in Boston. She is a smooth, individualistic stylist, able to throw in barbed humor whilst expounding history and technicalities in a readable yet intelligent manner. I was most swept up by the author’s wry but heartfelt narrative of the life of Keiko, an Orca whale who achieves stardom, and a spotlight essay on Biff, a prizewinning show dog. Entertaining and educational (in the best way), On Animals is sure to delight anyone curious about our non-human earthly neighbors.

I thought I had read some Robert Olen Butler back in the eighties but none of his huge list of works chimes with me, so “Late City,” written at age 70, could be a first for me. And I’m delighted. A decidedly literary novel, written from a hazy but erudite viewpoint of a dying 115-year-old man on the eve of Trump, it posits a final earthly dialogue with God (a decidedly jaded deity), which then sashays through our hero’s life. A country boy, a soldier, a newsman, a husband, an old person’s home resident … all these phases of his life are recalled, reflected upon, and synthesized. Butler is a poetic stylist and his dreamlike scenes are a pleasure to read. A final mild plot twist failed to excite me, and somehow a century of recollections about America did not amount to much more than broad opinions on war and race, but overall, Late City is a minor readerly pleasure.

Daniel Kehlmann is a top German author and in “Tyll,” he employs the trope of the eternal trickster, in this case the legendary Tyll Ulenspiegel, to span the tumultuous Thirty Years’ War that wracked central Europe in the early sixteenth century. Charismatic Tyll connects a range of participants, lowly and kingly, as he strives with wit and grace and almost supernatural sleight of hand to survive when most don’t. Kehlmann is a consummate stylist and his eclectic scenes are convincing, but from the outset, I felt Tyll mainly suits those intrigued by the times, for the plot bogs down into treacle again and again. The bit-player characters are evocative but I found our juggling and tightrope-walking hero unfathomable and often uninteresting. Reader, check this out if the cover blurb intrigues you; Tyll was not for me.

Deeply imbued with military knowledge and spycraft, “The Stranger” is a tumultuous entry into the modern post-Le-Carre spy thriller field. Starring a stubborn, wayward British operative thrust into blowback from a long-ago rendition, with a huge cast of complex characters from different nations, the first third skirts with plot overkill, but thereafter the storyline settles into a globe-trotting race that culminates gracefully (if in bloodthirsty fashion). Action scenes pulse with tension and threat. The author is an assured stylist, the dialogue is sharp, the double-crossing ambience is well portrayed. The Stranger makes for a one-night read that promises a welcome sequel.

Having tagged Charles Yu as a science fiction author (his wonderful How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe cluing me in), it took me a couple of pages to realize that “Interior Chinatown” is a quirky and quirkily told literary novel tackling stereotypes (Asian, Hollywood) and roleplaying in life. Daringly told in the second person, it walks in the shoes of Willie Wu, a downtrodden Chinese American stuck playing the part of Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy but dreaming of attaining Kung Fu Guy. His life swirls among his family’s in a blur of performance and longing, until love arrives and he must choose between ambition and happiness. Super playful, forever inventive, often chuckle-aloud amusing, Interior Chinatown is a bracing corrective to my 2020 diet of seriousness, at the same time thrusting a sharp epee at my preconceptions. And Yu’s style is so nimble that the novel races along. A wonderful novel.

Chilean author Benjamin Labatut has created a tour de force fiction-nonfiction hybrid, “When We Cease to Understand the World,” that in a slim volume barely longer than a novella pulses through key early 20th Century physics, mathematics, and mass evil, focusing on key luminaries. Fritz Haber invents poison gas, Schrodinger and Heisenberg engage in a titanic battle over the invention of quantum physics, Karl Schwarzschild invents the black hole … all these tales told as pithy education but also imagining personal battles commensurate with the scientific ones. A final chapter sees the narrator engage with a “night gardener” about the merits of all this thinking. To an ex-mathematician like me, the most spellbinding chapter concerns Alexander Grothendieck, a mathematical prodigy of such obsession that he mesmerized a generation, and his baffling disciple Shinichi Mochizuki who in 2012 published six hundred pages of proof of a key conjecture, but published it on his own blog, and no one, but no one, could understand it! Labatut writes with a lyrical fervor that hypnotizes, even if sometimes you wonder where he is going. “The quantity of fiction grows throughout the book,” confides the author, and the mixing of “real” and “imagined” could irk some readers. I rode with the flow and experienced a sustained rush of intellectual and emotional pleasure. When We Cease to Understand the World is a maverick, kinetic boon.