As God Commands by Niccolò Ammaniti, Translated from the Italian by Jonathan Hunt. Grove Atlantic/Black Cat, 400 pp, $14. 95.

Crime and Punishment

In 2001, Niccoló Ammaniti’s novel Io non ho paura (“I’m Not Scared”) was published to great acclaim in Italy. The novel takes place in Tuscany during the so-called “Years of Lead, ” when both right and left-wing paramilitary groups carried out numerous acts of terrorism across the country. In 1978 alone, more than 600 kidnappings took place in Italy, mostly of Northerners transported and held for ransom in the South. “I’m Not Scared” tells the story of Michele, a nine year-old boy who, while out playing with his friends one afternoon, happens upon one of these kidnapped children in a giant hole dug near an abandoned farmhouse. It isn’t long before Michele realizes that nearly all of the adults in his small town, including his own parents, are in on the crime.

The cinematic adaptation of “I’m Not Scared” was one of my favorite films of 2004, and when I went back to read the novel, it proved equally compelling. Many books take on the disillusioning moment when a young boy first sees his father’s flaws, but Michele’s coming-of-age was particularly poignant. His parents had committed an unforgivable crime, and Michele’s struggle to reconcile his love for them with that fact lent the novel both an exterior and an interior drama.

Michele’s eventual attempt to save the kidnapped boy became at once an act of selfless bravery and of traditional rebellion, and the kidnapping was recast as yet another manifestation of the inscrutability of the actions of adults when one is young. In this way, Ammaniti seemed to me less like another Mario Puzo than an Italian David Mamet, creating a realistic criminal universe without any of the grandstanding or glorifying that gave us Michael Corleone and Tony Soprano.

His new novel, “As God Commands”, revisits much of the territory covered in “I’m Not Scared”. Again, there is a crime at the heart of the book, as well as a young protagonist. Christiano Zena is thirteen, the son of a neo-Nazi skinhead named Rino. The complexity of the father-son relationship emerges slowly and gracefully. In the first scene, Rino, in a drunken rage, wakes his son in the middle of the night and orders him to kill a neighbor’s dog with a handgun. But only a few chapters later, father and son are cleaning the house and baking together in order to convince their social worker of the healthiness of their domestic situation. The lengths to which Christiano eventually goes to protect his father leave no doubt in the reader’s mind that a strong bond of love exists between them.

In addition to Christiano and Rino, “As God Commands” features a sizable ensemble. There’s Beppe Trecca, the social worker mentioned above, who embarks on an affair with his best friend’s wife, Ida. Then there’s Danilo Aprea, whose plan to rob an ATM sets the tragedy of the novel in motion. Most disturbing of all is Quatro Formaggi (meaning “four cheese,” as in pizza, in Italian), the victim of an accidental electrocution that left him physically disabled and mentally deranged, who spends his days building a model village out of action figures and toys from fast food restaurant kids’ meals.

The action of the novel takes place over the course of six days, divided into three sections: Before, The Night, and After. While the middle section is ostensibly dedicated to the night of the heist, it quickly becomes something far more terrible. Just like Michele’s family in “I’m Not Scared,” the characters here are already well on their way to perdition by the time the novel starts, and their punishments come with a Biblical swiftness. While a subplot lifted almost whole cloth from Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair” unfolds somewhat mechanically, the overall narrative carries the same tragic weight as that author’s best works.

In addition to the expanded cast, “As God Commands” differs from Amminiti’s earlier novel in that it is set in the present day. Though this robs the book of any historical resonance, it gives Ammaniti the opportunity to pepper his prose with pop culture references. Considering the tribulations of his young life, Christiano finds comfort in “the notion that great men have always had to struggle through shit on their own. Just think of Eminem or Hitler or Christian Vieri.” During the funeral of a girl who is raped and murdered sometime during the fateful evening at the center of the book, her schoolfriends can’t help but take photos and video on their phones: “In the dim light of the church the screens of the cell phones lit up like funeral candles.” Far from distracting, Ammaniti’s nods towards youth culture always ring true, deepenning the reality of his world.

“As God Commands” falters only when the plot threatens to overwhelm the subtle development of the characters. In the course of one evening, we get rape, murder, a coma-inducing aneurysm, a billboard somehow cutting a trailer in half as if it were a tin can (and exposing two adulterous lovers into the bargain), a hit and run, and a possibly miraculous recovery from said hit and run. While many novels revolve around a single fraught evening (“The Ice Storm”, “Atonement”, and “Mystic River” come to mind), it’s still a lot to take in at once. If novels had volume knobs, these would be turned up to eleven.

Still, “As God Commands” is far more stimulating than your average page-turner. Once again, Ammaniti has succeeded in telling a captivating story while developing convincing characters and relationships. Though this novel may lack the sharpness of “I’m Not Scared,” it makes up for it in scope. If the older book can be read as Ammaniti’s “American Buffalo,” this one is his “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Would it be crass of me to say I can’t wait for the movie to come out?

Oh, excitement! My name in the lights of Salon!

I’ve included the text of the review below the screenshot, or you can click here to read it on the site proper. Sweet!

Sept. 11, 2009 | Muriel Barbery’s last book, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” was a massive bestseller both in France and in America. But while the story of a depressed concierge and an angsty teen girl had moments of lyricism, I found its near-constant literary and philosophical allusions pretentious, and its characters unlikable. Thankfully, Barbery’s new book (or old book, technically, as it was written first), “Gourmet Rhapsody,” manages to transform these weaknesses into strengths.

"Gourmet Rhapsody" by Muriel Barbery

“Rhapsody” is the tale of the masterly food critic Pierre Arthens, who lies on his deathbed struggling to remember the one flavor that he believes has defined his life. Every other chapter is narrated by Arthens and centers around a single food item, such as “Toast” or “Mayonnaise,” moving in the manner of a detective story toward the mystery flavor. The other chapters each feature a different narrator who has known Arthens in some capacity. Everyone from his granddaughter to his cat to the statuette of Venus in his study gets a chance to weigh in.

Barbery is at her best in the Arthens chapters, writing with all the gusto of a true gastronome. A tomato is “crimson in its taut silken finery, undulating with the occasional more tender hollow.” An octopus is “loath to divulge its secret liaisons to one’s bite,” a poeticization of “chewy.” Arthens’ evocative descriptions are balanced with passages of painful pomposity, such as when the act of watching another person eat is described as a moment “exempt from the infinite vanishing line of our own memories and projects.” However, the pretension that was so problematic in “Hedgehog” is forgivable, even enjoyable, here, because we’re allowed to dislike the protagonist.

Arthens is a man who cheats on his wife, describes his children as “monstrous excrescences,” and is effectively blind to everything but food. But it is that very single-mindedness that makes his deathbed confession such a joy to read. As his eventual revelation makes clear, Arthens has lived his life worshiping a false idol. But all monomanias are pure, and so the critic becomes a kind of tragic hero. Barbery’s triumph is in managing to tell his story while simultaneously conveying his passion. Like any good work of food writing, one puts it down a little bit hungry.

The Armies by Evelio Rosero. Translated from Spanish by Anne McLean, 224 pages, New Directions, $14.95

Of Violence and Beauty

Colombian writer Evelio Rosero’s work is notorious for being brutally realistic, even hyperrealistic, and this book, which won 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, is no exception.

At the beginning of Evelio Rosero’s novel “The Armies”, the protagonist, Ismael, a retired professor in his seventies, spies on his young neighbor Geraldina over the wall between their properties. Geraldina enjoys walking around her yard naked, knowingly teasing Ismael. “I ask nothing more of life than this possibility,” Ismael thinks, “to see this woman without her knowing that I’m looking at her, to see this woman when she knows I’m looking, but to see her: my only explanation for staying alive.”

It’s a typical statement from the typical creation of a typical older male novelist. Perhaps from reading too much Marquez and Roth, I thought I could pretty well predict where the story was going: Ismael would eventually conquer the beautiful woman, body and soul, and there would be an extended (and slightly nauseating) sex scene. That instead the book would end with mass murder and necrophilia never crossed my mind. Disturbing political novels ought to carry a warning label.

Evelio Rosero has been writing about the miseries of his native Colombia for three decades now. His novels, many of which take on the internecine wars, kidnappings, murders, and political upheavals of his country, have won numerous awards (including, humorously enough, the National Literature Prize from the Colombian Ministry of Culture). His work is notorious for being brutally realistic, even hyperrealistic, and “The Armies” is no exception.

To highlight the horror, the novel begins with a brief idyll. The setting is San José, a small town somewhere in Colombia. For a few pages, we enjoy Ismael’s thwarted lust, his wife Otilia’s resigned patience with his wandering eye, and the pleasures of small town life. But darkness quickly seeps in. There is an invasion of soldiers, guerrillas or paramilitaries of some sort, and the police charged with protecting San Jose are no better than the invaders. Soon, Otilia has been kidnapped, along with Geraldina’s husband and children.

What we are given to understand is that this is only the latest in a long string of attacks. Most of San Jose’s residents have lost loved ones, either to violence, or to the threat of violence. There are almost no young people left in San Jose:

“They’ve all gone in this past year.”
“All of them?”
“All the girls and all the boys, Is mael.” She gave me a reproachful look. “The most sensible thing they could do.”
“It won’t be any better elsewhere.”
“They had to leave to find out.”

“The Armies” doesn’t have much by way of a plot; another attack begins soon after the first one, and it is still going on when the novel ends. But in spite of all the terror, Rosero manages to get in some beautiful writing (aided in no small part by his translator from the Spanish, Anne McLean). A grenade is “an animal with jaws of fire that will dissolve me in a breath”. Dawn “descends from the mountaintop like fluttering sheets”. Best of all is the ways in which Rosero connects sex and death, as when Ismael watches Geraldina in her misery:.

“I proceed behind Geraldina, trying in vain not to recognize her besieging scent, my eyes involuntarily exploring her black-clad back, and catching a glimpse, beneath the mourning, of her legs, her sandals, the radiant movement of her body, her whole life diffusing and proclaiming, beneath the veils of fatality she is suffering in this world, the perhaps inclement desire to be possessed as soon as possible, albeit by death (by me?), to forget the world for one moment, albeit for death.”

There is also plenty of time left over to wonder at the inanity of war, and this war in particular. We are told very little about who or what the armies are fighting for, aside from the fact that San José represents a “strategic location”, and is surrounded by thousands of hectares of coca.

Instead of a lot of political explanation and historical background, we get anecdotes. The chief of San José’s police force has a mental breakdown and kills a handful of civilians, then is promoted to work in another city. A bomb-sniffing dog is buried with military honors while men lie rotting in the streets. When Ismael is told that his name is on a list of collaborators to be killed, he laughs, “Why do they ask for names? They kill whoever [sic] they please, no matter what their names might be. I would like to know what is written on the paper with the names, that ‘list’. It is a blank sheet of paper, for God’s sake. A paper where all the names they want can fit.”

The only thing that can really be said against Rosero’s novel is either irrelevant or a deal breaker: it isn’t particularly fun to read. When the darkness falls over Ismael, it is never to rise again. Nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse. The manager of a local café receives the index fingers of his kidnapped wife and daughter in order to extract a higher ransom. The city’s empanada vendor’s severed head is found in his grease boiler. One woman watches her son die, then is killed and raped (in that order) by a group of soldiers.

What we’re supposed to take away from all this brutality is unclear, and the moments of light are so few and far between that they seem almost rote when they arrive. Near the end of the book, Ismael sits with Geraldina, and his trembling hand falls on her knee. Old habits die hard, apparently.

“It is the emotion, Geraldina. Or it is my lechery, as Otilia would say.”
“Don’t worry, profesor. Stick with love. Love conquers lechery.”

That may be so, but the armies in San José are fighting for neither love nor lechery. They are fighting for greed, which it seems nothing can conquer.

Here’s another song in my series of videos on YouTube, some of which have been featured on the front page! This is a cover of one of my favorite standards. Hope you enjoy!

This post was originally written for my arts and culture blog on Salon, Buzzkiller. All postings from that blog will also be reposted here.

The New York Times reported today on a new music festival that came and went last week in Lake Tahoe, CA. Called Wanderlust Festival, it brought together loads of famous musicians—Andrew Bird, Jenny Lewis, Broken Social Scene—with, wait for it…the world’s most famous yogis. I myself haven’t heard of any of these yogis, but to be honest, I haven’t really kept up with the scene since Berra retired. What interests me most about this festival is not the weird juxtaposition of attractions, but what it says about the live music scene in America.

As a musician myself, I rarely go out to shows anymore unless a friend of mine is playing. Truth is that high profile bands tend to charge too much (and I can always find their videos on YouTube), and bands I’ve never heard of tend to suck so bad they make me wish that sound waves didn’t propagate through Earth’s atmosphere. However, though I go to fewer and fewer individual shows, I find myself at festivals more and more often.

The website Festival Finder counts more than 2500 music festivals in its database. Many of these, such as California’s Coachella, Tennessee’s Bonnaroo, and the Pitchfork Music Festival, began in the last decade. Others, such as Texas’ South by Southwest, have become as important to the music scene as Sundance is to the film world. Every serious music magazine and website is expected to have a large journalistic presence at all of these festivals (assuming there are any journalists left to cover them). And this is to say nothing of the literally hundreds of niche festivals, such as Tanglewood (classical/jazz), Hardly Strictly (bluegrass, since ‘01), or what used to be called the Newport Folk Festival (folk, duh).

What explains the sudden proliferation? Are we seeing another painfully self-conscious Woodstock-ian rennaissance for Generation Y’ers? Is the music being played so loud that the majority of crowds are neighbors coming over to complain? Are we feeling particularly festive at watching the music industry go down in flames?

Actually, the explanation is far less hippy-dippy. Festivals mean big money for promoters and advertisers, and where the money goes, so goes the music. Because of shared costs and centralization, festivals are more economically efficient than individual shows,  for everyone involved. And it’s not just the sponsors that see benefits, but the cities that host the festivals. According to Wikipedia, SXSW is the highest revenue producing special event in Austin, with an estimated impact of $110 million dollars in 2008.

And musicians love festivals, too. According to Jon Eaton of The Spinto Band: “Festivals have a celebratory vibe that isn’t usually found at a bar or nightclub show. We are usually done with our festival requirements by 4 or 5 in the afternoonand can unwind and head out to listen to the headliners for the rest of the evening.” Glancing at current hipster favorite Andrew Bird’s touring schedule, one finds him at Lollapalooza on August 7^th, Big Chili Festival on the 9^th, Oya Festival on the 12^th, Way Out West Festival on the 14^th, and Haldern Pop Festival on the 15^th. Of his next sixteen shows, only three look to be individual shows at traditional venues. It is the summer, which is when a majority of festivals take place, but that’s still an impressive ratio.

As for the average concertgoer, the choice between a single show and a festival is easy. The first batch of tickets to June’s 3-day Bonnaroo Festival went for about $210, and a driven musicophile with good shoes can see $1000s of dollars worth of shows in that time. This year’s Bonnaroo lineup included many acts that are far more expensive on their own: Bruce Springsteen ($104 at a traditional show), Nine Inch Nails ($55), Phish ($50), Elvis Costello ($65), and a hundred other bands, comics, and performers.

This is to say nothing of the entertainment efficiency of a festival. Let’s admit it, one of the joys of seeing some past-their-prime throwback like The Beastie Boys (also at Bonnaroo) or a ridiculous self-parody like Snoop Dogg (ditto) is to be able to say you’ve seen them. So why not check off a few dozen boxes in one go? Ten years ago, I saw Lou Reed at Bumbershoot perform his musicalization of Poe’s The Raven, and I’ve been bitching about how awful it was ever since. The truth is, I only ended up watching him because there weren’t any other good bands on during that afternoon. Only at a festival can one experience the musical equivalent of channel surfing.

And now one can do it while practicing Yoga. Finally.

Start Making Sense

In Yoko Tawada’s latest novel alienation becomes downright alienating.

A reviewer courts considerable danger when he or she condemns a book that is densely surreal or murkily allegorical. Complaining that the story’s symbols are foggy may invite charges that subtleties in the plot were missed; objections to the lack of a clear narrative will lead some to think that the book’s deeper political or moral themes were ignored. But promises of profundity are no defense for rampant obscurity; I read Yoko Tawada’s “The Naked Eye” in constant suspense, convinced that at any moment it must start making sense. It never did.

This may be a matter of taste, or a lack of patience with arty difficulty for its own sake. The prolific Tawada has a considerable reputation in Europe: her writing — novels, plays, poems, essays, and short stories — has garnered a number of awards, including the Akutagawa Prize and the Goethe Medal.

As far as I can discern, her latest novel revolves around a Vietnamese teenager (known sometimes as Anh Nguyet, or “the pupil with the Iron Blouse”; for clarity’s sake, I’ll just refer to her as “the girl”) who is invited to give a speech on Communism at an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. The time period is unclear, as is the duration of the novel (trying to parse the passage of time in the book turns out to be as frustrating as trying to locate the hour on a Dalí wristwatch). Once in Berlin, the girl meets Jörg, a German radical who is either her boyfriend or her kidnapper. She fails to show up for her speech and then decides to go back to Vietnam by way of Moscow. Unfortunately, when a stranger lies down in front of a train to stop it, the girl gets on and ends up in Paris. Here, she takes up with a French prostitute named Marie, and becomes obsessed with the films of Catherine Deneuve.

This is where the novel really starts to get weird.

Each chapter in “The Naked Eye” is titled after a different Catherine Deneuve movie, from Repulsion to Dancer in the Dark. The girl spends her days watching the same films over and over again: “…the silver screen was the bedsheet upon which I did all my living and sleeping.”

As the book progresses, the content of the chapters becomes more and more related to the chapter’s title film, until we are left reading what feel like essays written for an undergraduate cinema studies class. The girl’s philosophy, a childlike regurgitation of Ho Chih Minh’s propaganda, proffers the only readerly fun in these long and tortuous critiques. Upon meeting a prostitute for the first time, the girl isn’t scandalized by the thought of sex being sold for money, but by the fact that rooms are rented out to facilitate the sex. Renting rooms, after all, is a capitalist crime.

Describing a scene from Les Voleurs, the girl narrates, “Juliette is surrounded by many male eyes. The eyes of the policeman Alex are windowpanes made of frozen tears; the eyes of his brother are glasses filled with golden whiskey.” It’s a beautiful image, and there are more than a few of them served up in Tawada’s descriptions, but a couple of trenchant or evocative takes on obscure French cinema does not a satisfying novel make.

“There was no longer any woman whose name was ‘I,’” the girl gushes to the imaginary Deneuve in her head. “As far as I was concerned, the only woman in the world was you, and so I did not exist.”

This points out one of the major flaws in the book. The nameless protagonist really doesn’t exist. She has no agency, and is content to wander the streets of Paris watching films and suffering. She takes a job as a test subject for beauty products, but the position’s dramatic potential is wasted. She nurses certain homosexual fantasies, but never acts on them. When we find out at the end of the book that she has gone blind, though still goes to the movies just to experience the sounds (“In a film without images, most people are merely footsteps.”) the irony is supposed to be affecting. But we have learned nothing about her, really, and so can’t summon up any empathy.

Tawada asserts in the forward of the novel that she wrote the book simultaneously in Japanese and German (her two native tongues), and then translated backwards to produce two full texts, one in each language. She explains that she began in German, but then “certain parts of the story began occurring to her in Japanese.” This is unconvincing as well as pretentious. A story is a story, and language is language. A story never arrives in words; it must be translated. Perhaps if Tawada had been more concerned with creating a narrative, rather than deconstructing one, the language wouldn’t come off as so forced. Whatever the explanation, Tawada is every bit as culpable as translator Susan Bernofsky for sentences such as this one, to be found three lines into the first chapter: “The gaze of the nameless lens licks the floor like a detective without grammar.” Come again, please?

Fallout Girl

Another take on the post-apocalyptic novel proves that this venerable genre is anything but a wasteland.

“Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol the dingy city. I’ve been doing it so long that I’m shaped to it, like a hand that’s been carrying buckets in the cold.”

So begins author Marcel Theroux’s “Far North,” a novel of post-apocalypse set in Siberia. It’s an interesting geographic choice for this kind of story, as Siberia is one of the few places in the world that already looks as desolate and ravaged as a post-apocalyptic landscape. Theroux, who has both spent time on the Great Steppe, and also filmed a documentary on settlers who have chosen to move back to Chernobyl, does a remarkable job evoking the breath-freezing cold of that world, giving even the novel’s most implausible ideas the ring of truth.

In “Far North,” climate change, along with the attempts to delay climate change, has led to world war, which may or may not have resulted in the end of human civilization (it’s never made entirely clear what has happened to the world outside of Siberia). The protagonist of the novel, Makepeace, is the sole remaining citizen of the town of Evangeline. Early in the book, we learn that this noir-ish, hard-nosed character is not at all what we expect: “Killing always sits heavy with me,” Makepeace muses after taking the life of a violent thief, “Whether that’s because of my being a woman, or because my disposition is naturally softhearted for another reason, I don’t know.”

Far from seeming gimmicky, Makepeace’s gender lends a tension to Far North that most examples of the genre lack. Post-apocalyptic novels tend to center around a taciturn male unafraid of kicking some ass (“I Am Legend,” “The Road,” “Dhalgren”), or if the author does choose a woman for a protagonist, she is invariably described as a passive sufferer (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The Unit”) or a maternal wise-woman (“The Stand”). I can’t think of another example of a character like Makepeace, who acts as any woman would if she wanted to survive in a post-apocalyptic world—in short, like a man.

Makepeace’s parents had moved to Siberia before the apocalypse, as part of a social movement aimed at escaping the twisted values and moral decadence of modern life. When survivors of the war arrived in Evangeline, they came into conflict with the settlers already living there. “It was like two different species colliding: the world that had a choice, and the world that had none. The strains between us were ratcheting up in secret. And even those who noticed it didn’t like to admit to it. The trouble lit slow, like one of those lazy damp leaf fires in autumn.”

When the story begins, Makepeace’s position as sheriff of Evangeline has become something of a sinecure, as she’s the only person still living there. So when a plane crashes right before her eyes, the time seems ripe for adventure. Makepeace leaves Evangeline behind and heads off in search of whatever new civilization has re-conquered the skies. What follows is a vaguely episodic account of her travels through the North. Everywhere she turns, Makepeace finds corruption and lawlessness. She is accused of being a spy, starved, beaten, and enslaved. And whenever you think things are about to take a turn for the better, they just get worse.

For example, Makepeace spends several years working as a slave at a place called “the base”. After years of service, she is promoted and made a guard. Her responsibilities in this position including choosing prisoners to work in “The Zone”, a derelict city once known as Polyn, where the most advanced technologies of the old world were collected just before the apocalypse. Makepeace chooses her only two friends to do salvage work in Polyn, thinking it a favor, but it turns out that an anthrax attack during the war has made the place poisonous. All those who enter the city are killed afterwards, just to recover a few batteries or bits of circuitry.

Theroux posits that the wide distribution of knowledge and skills would prove the greatest impediment to rebuilding civilization after a worldwide catastrophe:

“We had been so prodigal with our race’s hard-won knowledge. All those tiny facts inched up from the dirt. The names of plants and metals, stones, animals, and birds; the motion of the planets and the waves. All of it fading to nothing, like the words of a vital message some fool had laundered with his pants and brought all garbled.”

Both the world and the characters of Far North are immaculately designed, so it’s a shame that the plot sometimes comes up short. A short love interest for Makepeace results in an unsatisfying coda to the primary action of the novel, and a tricky reveal in the final chapters seems similarly contrived. Theroux’s decision to make his protagonist a slave removes some of her agency, and slows down the middle of the book. That said, I felt a similar lack of action in Cormack McCarthy’s recent apocalyptic novel, “The Road,” and that book won the Pulitzer, so I suppose it’s not really much of a complaint.

In Makepeace, Theroux has given us a protagonist at once recognizeable and original, struggling to survive as a woman in a world that no longer has much need for the feminine. Her struggle finds a counterpart in the struggle of her world, a wounded creature itself on the brink of barrenness and death. In this way, Makepeace becomes a metaphor, both for the physical degradation of the planet, and the human impulse to survive. As she describes herself, “I thought that whatever hopes and convictions she had cherished, Makepeace was just another mask that life wore as it fought to renew itself, unsentimental, unsparing, fighting ugly.”

The Old Maid’s Tale

Ninni Holmqvist’s  speculative novel about the treatment of the elderly is harrowing but implausible.

The use of the term “speculative fiction” as a more respectable sounding synonym for “science fiction” is attributed to Robert Heinlein, writing for The Saturday Evening Post in 1947. But since then, the two genres have diverged: “science fiction” now describes stories about the future, aliens, and quasi-magical technologies; “speculative fiction” concerns itself with alternate versions of our present reality—dystopias (worlds that suck), anti-utopias (worlds that are supposed to not suck, but actually do suck), and alternate histories.

The greatest exemplars of the latter category don’t test the limits of believability any more than do the greatest literary novels. George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 use exaggerations of actual historical and cultural phenomena to comment on the present. Because of this, speculative fiction must always be, first and foremost, believable. An implausible character in a novel is easy enough to ignore, but an implausible reality is like a shirt five sizes too small—no matter how elegantly it’s designed, we’re not going to get into it.

All great anti-utopian novels focus on a disturbing aspect of the present, pushing it to its most horrific conclusions. In 1984, it’s the panoptic police state. In Brave New World, the sexualization and Americanization of England. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the subjugation of women through the sanctification of childbirth. In Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, the issue in question is the way the childless, especially the childless elderly, are looked down upon as irrelevant.

Dorrit Weger, a moderately-successful novelist, begins Homlqvist’s book becoming part of the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. Here, women over the age of fifty and men over sixty—if single, childless, and without “important” jobs—are sequestered for their final years. The Unit is a glorified retirement community, with restaurants, movie theaters, and indoor gardens. The only catch: all the residents are expected to take part in potentially fatal medical tests, and over the course of five to ten years, donate their vital organs to less “dispensable” people (i.e. those with kids).

It was this term that first signaled to me the weakness of Homqvist’s anti-utopia. Any government sponsored program like the unit would come up with a far more convincing euphemism than “dispensable” for their test subjects: “the selfless” maybe, or “the martyrs.”  And just why would the elderly be desirable organ donors anyway? Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent novel, Never Let Me Go, creates a far more convincing organ farm, where cloned children are bred from birth to be donors (a plot explored with far less subtlety and far more explosions in Michael Bay’s 2005 thriller, The Island).

Not all of the political stuff is as tough to swallow, though the more plausible aspects of it may be unfamiliar to American readers. In a description of all the legislative developments that led to the unit, Dorrit tells us “first of all there was the law stating that parents must divide their parental leave from work equally between them during the child’s first eighteen months.” Many readers won’t know that this is an actual Swedish law (though the “minority” parent, generally the father, is only compelled to rear for two months at present).

Dorrit goes on to explain how this law led to compulsory day care, which then led to the expectation that everyone should have a child, and thus those who didn’t were labeled dispensable. But isn’t compulsory day care the very opposite of paid maternity/paternity leave? And doesn’t that just mean it would be so easy to have a kid that there would be plenty, so it wouldn’t matter if some people chose to be childless? In general, it seemed to me that Holmqvist was less concerned with creating a plausible reality than with making a philosophical point.

“I’ve never understood the point of winning just for the sake of winning,” one of Dorrit’s friends tells her early in the novel. “What’s the point in putting all your energy into being better than other people at just one thing, which is in fact completely irrelevant?” The Unit is a polemic against the world’s strivers, filling the world with their children and waste and infuriating presence. Dorrit mourns for her lost relationships with her sister and her dog, for her many novels which didn’t make her famous but brought her joy. Her very happiness in lonely dotage becomes the question at the heart of The Unit: how does one define a successful life?

When she meets a man in the unit, falls in love, and manages to become pregnant, the question becomes less academic. Holmqvist skillfully steers the novel away from a simple escape thriller, but the anti-utopia begins to fall apart at the seams. If Dorrit had a baby, she would no longer be “dispensable,” so why isn’t she allowed to keep the child and leave the unit? And why doesn’t she anyway? The answer is that it wouldn’t serve the plot, which ends with an unconvincing repudiation of Dorrit’s rebellious nature.

Holmqvist raises provocative issues, and Dorrit is a pleasant guide down the thorny philosophical slalom. Unfortunately, inconsistencies and implausibilities keep the novel from joining other classics of anti-utopian literature. It’s always fun to speculate, but somewhere along the line, The Unit leaves both speculative and science fiction behind, and enters the realm of fantasy.

This is a new-ish song of mine, sung in an airless cube in the Stanford music building. No external microphones! No amps! Absolutely no talent involved!