NEVER LET ME GO (BY) KAZUO ISHIGURO

Published 2006, 304 Pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B+

Plot: B
Pacing: B+

Poignancy: B+

Set in an ever-so-slightly-alternate universe England over a period roughly analogous to the end of the last century, Never Let Me Go is a retrospective first-person tale narrated by a 'carer' named Kathy.  Kathy lives in a world that seems hostile to her very existence, but this is not quite dystopian lit.  It's a world where science has led us in new directions, but it's not quite sci-fi.  It's hard to gauge just what Never Let Me Go is, exactly, and Ishiguro wisely keeps his cards close to his chest.  This short novel has no action, few characters and only a couple barely noticeable scene changes, yet unravels with such precision and deft timing that it should be a quick, engaging read for almost anyone.

Though this is not a mystery novel, either, Ishiguro creates an artificial one as his main hook — we know from page one that Kathy does something strange and possibly dangerous for a living, but we're never told directly what.  There's a general feeling of inevitability and fear that plays out beautifully in the narration as the smallest of details clue us into the fact that her world is different from ours — and after all, when are alternate universes ever not malicious places? We're told of Hailsham, a special private school in the countryside where Kathy grew up and was prepared by secretive teachers to do... something. The characters, when children, are as oblivious to their purpose as We The Reader are, but as we skip around in time and they age, they seem to absorb an understanding of their purpose through rumors and whispers, while we do not.  Ishiguro loves foreshadowing — a little too much, perhaps, though his writing is solid in every other area — and Kathy is a bumbling, hesitant narrator, so it's clear that the children are at this special school for some strange and sinister purpose.  But what?  To become wizards? It's an entirely artificial mystery, especially when Kathy and her friends are teenagers free to explore the outside world, but it doesn't quite detract from the story.  Without it, the slow pacing would become a distraction, but as it is, the story slips by as quickly (and blurrily, and often confusingly) as a memory.  Unlike certain writers and producers of Lost, Ishiguro doesn't use his narrative mystery to force artificial tension or misdirection — it's simply there, lingering in the background, with the understanding that we're to pay attention to the character's interactions rather than try to unravel any secrets a few pages early.

Never Let Me Go is wonderfully paced and nearly-always engaging, but this brevity could be taken as a weakness as well.  I often wished for more depth, in nearly every area of the story.  The school, Hailsham, is established as an enormous emotional investment for Kathy, yet I never felt it come to life.  Most of her classmates — including Kathy's friend Ruth, one of the most important characters in the novel — are adequately characterized, but little more.  Even the novel's main foil, Kathy's friend and sometimes love-interest Tommy, isn't given enough time to bond with Kathy, which severely diminished the ultimate payoff.  Their relationship is convincingly sketched out, earnest and natural, yet I felt it never really went beyond the page — it never became emotional to me, and maybe not even to the characters themselves, who remain strangely distant and guarded throughout.  For all the little details that Ishiguro slips in to "show" rather than "tell," their relationship simply isn't there for long enough to make the reader feel as much as they could.

Ultimately, Never Let Me Go is still incredibly readable and largely satisfying.  It is a novel that lacks any show-stopping faults, but it isn't a heavy-hitter either.  I'd recommend it, but I wouldn't rave about it.  Considering how poorly constructed the majority of novels are, when you really analyze them, Ishiguro should be commended for this solid and thought-provoking genre-bender.

NAKED (BY) DAVID SEDARIS

Published 1998, 224 pages
Characters: N/A

Writing: B-

Plot/Pacing: B

Poignancy: B

It's always an interesting experience re-reading something you enjoyed a great deal in the past.  I was a huge fan of David Sedaris in college, so I've already read every one of his books. Recently I needed a quick book to kill some time, and there was Naked, sitting on my shelf, untouched for probably six or seven years. I was curious to see how it fared, since I seem to be awfully jaded when it comes to comedy, of late.

Naked, like all of Sedaris' stuff, is a collection of autobiographical short stories, mostly detailing his childhood, family, wacky college adventures and difficulty coming to terms with his homosexuality.  The events in Naked are probably mostly true, but embellishment is part of Sedaris' authorial voice, so there's really no point in pondering how he could possibly remember a detailed conversation from 30 years ago. It's the events that matter, and the rest is clearly filled in by the author, writing retrospectively.  With that said — and having read his other books, which cover various other periods of his life — Sedaris has lived a remarkably tumultuous life that gave him plenty of material.  It's often difficult to believe that all these stories are about the same man, especially when the focus of one piece — his OCD, for example, which must have been a major part of his childhood — disappears entirely from the rest.  This is partly due to Sedaris' casual, flippant story construction.  He shapes each piece much like a sitcom, taking unrelated elements and weaving them into a purpose-driven plot, usually ending in some conclusion or retrospective revelation.  The fact that his OCD provided the basis for one story seems to have been enough, and he barely mentions it again — a sign of good focus and plot construction, I suppose, but it gives the collection a lightweight, surreal tone.  This is comedy, after all, and given the "PG-13"ish rating of some of the material, Sedaris plays it very tame.  Nothing really carries any weight — not his OCD, not his near-rape encounters with strangers while hitchhiking, not even his mother's death.  And that's fine; it fits his style.  Sedaris manages to produce tales that seem sharp and quick and enjoyable, regardless of their content.

If I can pinpoint one main reason that I failed to enjoy Naked as much as I did the first time around, it's that the stories are too tidy. Everything is so droll, skipping from one event to the next with little fanfare. Cleanly-presented material needs a bit of shock value to produce laughs.  Being older and more jaded, nothing in the collection was cringe-worthy or outrageous anymore, and most of the time it seemed like Sedaris was going out of his way to interact with the stupidest, most-ignorant people he could find.  He plays himself off as incredibly passive, a naive victim blundering from one bizarre event to the next with a sort of recklessness and ambivalence that eventually begins to raise flags.  How could someone so passive find himself in these situations again and again?  It's not that I don't believe him, but you start to see through his tone, and the authorial voice seems like just that — a style, something manufactured and deliberated upon. Since Sedaris mostly reacts as a narrator, and rarely as an in-the-action character, he seems to be merely drifting through life, prodding those around him in the hope that they'll produce material.  Despite this, there isn't a whole lot of comedy in the prose itself.  There are no jokes, per se, just funny situations.  It's entertaining, easily-digested, and little more.  I know I laughed the first time around.  But now, I honestly had a hard time trying to decide what was supposed to be funny about these stories. 

So perhaps its best to put aside expectations that this will be an outrageous laugh-fest, as most reviews would have it.  It's decently funny, in the way that a competent sitcom is decently funny, or at least entertaining.  And really, that's all it needs to be.  Considering that his material is far beyond anything you'd find in a sitcom, Sedaris doesn't take many risks with his narrative.  I suppose part of my disappointment is the contradiction in this — for everything that happened to him, for all the insanity he faced, Sedaris himself should be at least slightly unhinged, and yet he comes off as far too even-tempered.  He's condescending and snarky, but he never makes much effort to earn it, as if he's worried one of his victims might still find him out.  Still, by all means, read Naked at least once.  Just don't expect to die laughing.  Life is weird enough as it is, and it's all in what you make of it.

TALES (BY) H.P. LOVECRAFT

Published 2005, 807 pages
Characters: C-

Writing: B-

Plot/Pacing: B-

Poignancy: A

Most people have heard of H.P. Lovecraft, or at least something he created, but many that I talk to don't seem to realize it.  Mostly unknown during his lifetime, with no singular novel or story to stand as his masterpiece, Lovecraft's immense catalog of short fiction was left to slowly seep into the public consciousness, creating the sort of cult phenomenon that people casually reference without fully understanding.  A pioneer of macabre fantasy, Lovecraft clearly took after one of his idols, Edgar Alan Poe, and the two are together responsible for nearly every trope and cliche of modern fantasy horror.  Lovecraft introduced the world to Cthulhu, the Necronomicon, and a mythology of cosmic terror that drew from the forward-thinking pulp fiction of the day. For a reader only now discovering his writing, it's hard to know where to start, but a bit of research led me to Tales, The Library of America anthology of his most notable works. Even at 800 pages, it still excludes a great deal of Lovecraft's stories, but by all accounts includes all the vital ones.

Undoubtedly the best time to read Lovecraft is when you are a 15 year old boy.  That's not to say his work is immature, or won't appeal to anyone else, but there is a reason why fantasy is extremely popular in that demographic, and Lovecraft really hones in on that sense of unbridled imagination and limitless fantastic potential.  Possibly to the point of fault — his stories, no matter their length, pretty much all follow the same formula. Characters are secondary to Lovecraft's vision of vast, secret planes of reality and lurking ancient terrors, and his protagonists are unfailingly upper-middle class white males of an inquisitive yet reserved nature.  They are generally from an intellectual background, so as to be appropriately skeptical, and upon discovering a hint of intrigue, they investigate and uncover, expressing strained disbelief, shock, fear, and ultimately revealing some terrible, dangerous secret that threatens their very sanity.  In many of the stories, nothing actually happens to the protagonist himself — he merely uncovers some earlier events, or discovers a mystery so terrifying that he must flee it at once.  Lovecraft didn't write tepidly, and it's both the reason for his success and the major flaw of his stories.  Everything that happens is so earth-shattering that grown men regularly faint with terror, and these revelations are usually described with every colorful, antiquated adjective Lovecraft could get his hands on.  By the end of the collection, you'll wonder if he was getting paid by the number of times he used the word "eldritch".  It was clearly not the strength of his prose that made Lovecraft a horror-fiction icon, but his imagination.

With that said, I very much enjoyed this collection, despite Lovecraft's flaws.  It's the sort of fiction that functions best in hindsight, in the reader's own imagination, where it was meant to exist.  Lovecraft was ahead of his time in the scope of his stories, yet somewhat limited by his own technical abilities and publication niche — I can only imagine the sort of tale he would have been forced to concoct if he'd been contracted to write a full-length novel.  His world is a grim, hopeless place, where mere humans are helpless against the ancient gods that sometimes awake to harass them, and the overwhelming sense of entropy and nihilism in his stories is one of the reasons Lovecraft endures so well, and remains unique.  His protagonists are helpless to confront the things they face, often questioning their own sanity as a result.  Unlike most fantasy authors, Lovecraft never suggested that any man would be able to stand in the face of true evil and survive.  It is the primary reason for there being so little action in any of Lovecraft's stories, and the reason his expositional narratives ultimately work.  In most of these tales, the protagonist is forced to flee, and human bravery rarely has any consequence.  When the world of humans survives for another day, it is not by heroics or cunning but sheer luck.  Lovecraft made it explicitly clear that he expected our species to be extinct within a short time, that we were but one of many intelligent civilizations that might inhabit the earth.  Such a dismal view of humanity is still quite rare, even in horror fiction.

When his stories are taken together, it's clear that Lovecraft often flailed about, finding horror in far too many things to be taken entirely seriously.  Every run-down house or distant hill, every gust of cool air or strange smell, every cave and crevasse and distant mountain range might conceal some terrible secret.  Foreigners are all "swarthy" racial stereotypes linked to a sinister cult — The Horror at Red Hook is interesting if only because it so clearly links the "otherness" Lovecraft feared from supernatural horrors to the "otherness" born of racial tensions in 1920's New York City, revealing both as essentially the same psychological mechanism, the fear of the unknown. With such broad material, Lovecraft often comes across as just a paranoid, racist old man.  Nonetheless, there was an astoundingly rich vision behind these tales, a mind that was imaginative enough to write about entities so vast that no human could fully comprehend their existence, and yet realist enough to see that such things were contrary to our own existence, that even glimpsing such unnatural beings only meant that our end was near, like an ant finally comprehending the great shadow above it moments before it is crushed.