Reading round-up

You'd think being cooped up in the house for several months might facilitate getting some reading done, but not really. Still I've managed to take in a few novels, in addition to the eels.

East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee
Younghill Kang

Published in 1937, East Goes West is a pathbreaking autobiographical novel about a young Korean man's attempts to make a life in America. It begins with Chungpa Han's arrival in New York City, with nothing but a few dollars, a couple of contacts and references, and a love of literature and learning. Between his traditional family's expectations and the Japanese occupation, he envisions no future in Korea, but a world of possibilities in the United States. Much of the novel revolves around what it might mean to be "westernized," and Han's closest Korean immigrant friends serve as alternative models: George Jum, the wannabe playboy, always on the make, and To Won Kim, the cynical aesthete, who cannot feel at home in either culture.

It is altogether a wonderful novel, for its singular depiction of the immigrant experience from an uncommon perspective, its vivid descriptions of pre-Depression New York, rural Canada, and Boston, its cast of flawed, lifelike characters, and its nuanced vision of the foibles, bigotry, and possibilities of life in the west. It is full of humor and pathos. Some of the best set pieces revolve around Han's various employments– as a traveling salesman, a farmhand, a waiter, and a domestic. Kang writes with an observant eye; his outsider's perspective makes him particularly empathetic in his portrayal of African-Americans and other minority groups. His women, although mostly secondary characters, are fully formed agents.

For all his experiences, Han never seems to settle on his own vision of the American dream or assimilation. Without giving too much away, the ending is indeed unsettled and sad, but not without some measure of optimism. 

Agency
William Gibson

The latest from Gibson is a sequel/prequel to his previous novel, involving a future civilization that has figured out how to access parallel histories ("stubs"), thereby allowing it to meddle with the past without bumping up against logical contradictions of time travel. Between at least one of those pasts and the future's present (!), there was some kind apocalyptic event that we'd like to avoid if possible. In another stub, Hillary won the election. In our real-life stub, of course, Hillary lost, and the victor is eagerly advancing the cause of apocalypse. Isn't it nice to think there could be an alternative path in which the future people will come back and fix things up?

The Mirror & the Light
Hilary Mantel

Fans of the first two installments in Mantel's Cromwell trilogy– and I am emphatically among them– had to wait a long time for the finale, and as the wait grew longer, I worried that she might suffer from writer's block and never get it done, or, perhaps as bad, that she was writing a mountain of words, unable to bring herself to end it by killing off her hero, one of the greatest literary creations ever, her Thomas Cromwell. Well, she got the deed done.

The book is a long one, weighing in at 753 pages. The reviews were mixed, and I'm sorry to report that The Mirror & the Light disappoints. As one would expect from Mantel, stylistically the writing is exquisite, and there are many compelling scenes. But the book meanders and lacks the dynamism of the first two. In part, it seems that history itself is to blame. History, after all, provided Mantel with the key dramatis personae of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies– Thomas More and Anne Boleyn, respectively– and the key dramatic problem for our hero: how to eliminate each of them. Both are the most worthy of adversaries, from a literary point of view. And there's much more to both novels, including Cromwell's rise from humble origins to nearly the pinnacle of power, the events of his domestic life, the management of a great house and a court, the details of trade and diplomacy, Cromwell's secret support of protestantism, his generosity and earthiness, and always, the King. But these two killings– their calculation, their evil, but also their necessity– drive both stories.

Another execution of course marks the culmination of The Mirror & the Light. The series must end there, because the light glowing in the narrator's soul is extinguished in the act. Unfortunately, by Act 3, the compelling momentum of Cromwell's narrative has slowed. Commerce and organization building have given way to the tiresome workings of bureaucracy (even when it is the bureaucracy of execution); religious conflict has come down to delicate power struggles. And in the end, Cromwell's demise is the consequence of what seems like a most mundane power struggle, over money and political access as much as religion, in which he finally gets outfoxed and earns a taste of his own medicine.

Cromwell remains Cromwell, but the rest of the characters here are less vividly drawn. Henry has become a caricature– though a dangerous one, to be sure. Cromwell's entourage of young men, whom he has pulled up by their bootstraps, turn out to be both unreliable and, increasingly, indistinguishable. Symptomatic of the problem here is that some of the most interesting characters are invented: an illegitimate daughter, Jenneke, and Cromwell's profane and rough-and-ready French servant lad, Christophe.

Oh, am I suggesting you not bother reading it? No, I am not. The novel is still rich in history, intrigue, and language. And you've come this far with Crumb; you owe it to him to find out how it all ends, don't you?