2012 National Book Awards: Discussion of the finalists and personal preferences

Later tonight, the winners of the 2012 National Book Awards in Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature will be announced.  This is the second year that I have read all twenty finalists (in addition, I have also read/am in the process of reading the related 5 Under 35 authors that the National Book Foundation has selected; reviews of those will appear over the course of the next few days) and overall, I found the twenty finalists this year to be slightly stronger than the 2011 finalists, at least in Non-Fiction and Fiction (Young People's Literature was slightly worse and Poetry was not as strong).

There are those reading this who no doubt feel that it is not worth their time to read any of these finalists because the National Book Awards cover "literary fiction" and thus presumably are unfriendly to "genre fiction."  It is hard to know what to say to these people.  No wait, it is not difficult at all:  they are missing out by presuming that they know what qualities of fiction/non-fiction work for them and which do not.  It goes beyond a mere noting that Junot Díaz is a vocal fan of SF/F fiction and is currently working on a SF novel (an excerpt of which appeared recently in The New Yorker) or that some of Louise Erdrich won the World Fantasy Award for The Antelope Wife.  There just are a wide array of fictional styles and motifs on display here that should appeal to a wide readership.

This year's shortlists contained moving memoirs, well-researched biographies and histories, as well as a YA fantasy, a middle grades-oriented history of the atomic bomb, a harrowing story of survival, and so forth.  Although some of these finalists failed to achieve all of their ambitious goals, it is safe to say that the majority of them at least managed to craft stories that capture the reader's attention quickly and fail to let go until story's end.  With possibly a couple of exceptions, I would not hesitate for a moment to recommend these to family members, friends, former students, and to readers here, even for the stories that I found to be relatively weaker than in past years.  Sure, there are alternatives that I would have loved to have made this list (Steve Erickson's These Dreams of You immediately comes to mind), but for the most part, these stories were well worth the time and money I spent on them.

Below are my personal preferences in the four categories (I'll edit this after the awards are presented to note the winners with an asterisk), with links to the reviews:


Fiction:

Junot Díaz, This is How You Lose Her 
* Louise Erdrich, The Round House
Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds
Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King


Non-Fiction:

Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson:  The Passage of Power
Domingo Martinez, The Boy Kings of Texas 
Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain:  The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1945-1956 
Anthony Shadid,  House of Stone:  A Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East
* Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers:  Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity 


Poetry:

Susan Wheeler, Meme
Tim Seibles, Fast Animal
Alan Shapiro, Night in the Republic
Cynthia Huntington, Heavenly Bodies
* David Ferry, Bewilderment


Young People's Literature:

Patricia McCormick, Never Fall Down
Carrie Arcos, Out of Reach
Eliot Schrefer, Endangered
Steve Sheinkin, Bomb:  The Race to Build – and to Steal – the World's Most Dangerous Weapon
* William Alexander, Goblin Secrets


Edit:  Well, I didn't pick any of the winners this year, but even those I selected as last in their categories are far from poor books.  Hopefully, you will give these winners and others on the shortlists your reading consideration, as they are deserving works.

2012 National Book Award finalist in Fiction: Junot Díaz, This is How You Lose Her

Let me tell you about Magda.  She's a Bergenline original:  short with a big mouth and big hips and dark curly hair you could lose a hand in.  Her father's a baker, her mother sells kids' clothes door to door.  She might be nobody's pendeja but she's also a forgiving soul.  A Catholic.  Dragged me into church every Sunday for Spanish Mass, and when one of her relatives is sick, especially the ones in Cuba, she writes letters to some nuns in Pennsylvania, asks the sisters to pray for her family.  She's the nerd every librarian in town knows, a teacher whose students love her.  Always cutting shit out for me from the newspapers, Dominican shit.  I see her like, what, every week, and she still sends me corny little notes in the mail:  So you won't forget me.  You couldn't think of anybody worse to screw than Magda. (p. 5)

Ever know (or been) one of those guys, that confused yet confident, bold yet timid, sweet and adorable asshole son-of-a-bitch who just takes forever to understand that he's a (if not the) cause in all sorts of relationship fuck ups?  There's something about them that's fascinating, like watching a NASCAR race, waiting for the inevitable crash after left turn after left turn leaves them right back to where they started from.  Why do these dolts ever become cool in the first place?  Surely it cannot be for the dim views they have on women and (ultimately) themselves, can it?

These questions lie near the heart of Dominican-American (the hyphen is essential here) writer Junot Díaz's second collection, This is How You Lose Her.  Over the course of nine stories, we follow the course of Yunior (who has made prior appearances in both Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) as he fucks, fucks around, and fucks up, often in spectacular fashion.  Yet although Yunior appears throughout these stories, he is not as much the "central" character as he is the perpetually peripheral personage whose interactions with a wide variety of women, Dominican, other Latina, and American-born, serve to underscore their characters and situations.

"The Sun, the Moon, the Stars," the first story, sets the stage for the various ways in which Yunior's relationships collapse.  Yunior has taken up with a Cuban octoroon, Magda, that he had first met when both were in college at Rutgers.  Notice the way in which Yunior describes her, with a mixture of awe and sexualized objectification.  She is the saintly soul with the sinful body, the hot, the crazy, the sweet and unknowable.  Magda fascinates Yunior, even though he never comes to understand her.  As he narrates their slow breakup after he cheats on her with a co-worker (who then proceeds to mail a description of the not-so-great sex to Magda), it becomes painfully clear that in his self-justification after self-justification, after moments of acting protective of her while failing to understand her grief during their "honeymoon" in the Dominican Republic, that Yunior will never understand her, even as he relates her latter views of him as a "sucio" and an asshole.

This failure by Yunior to recognize (or rather, to admit, as it becomes apparent later on that he has some self-awareness of his role in these relationship collapses) his inability to understand the women around him finds a mirror in the story "Otravida, Otravez", which deals with a young woman, Yasmin, and her lover Ramón, as they settle into a dilapidated house in New Jersey.  The story turns on letters that arrive from the Dominican Republic, missives from the family that Ramón abandoned when he immigrated to the United States.  Told through Yasmin's PoV, the impending heartbreak is poignant precisely because we see its inevitability coming each step of the way.

The most powerful story of the collection perhaps is "The Pura Principle," in which Yunior's sick brother, Rafa, Rafa's questionable girlfriend Pura, and Yunior and Rafa's mother.  Here Díaz tells perhaps the most complex tale in the collection, that of a son who while dying has taken up with a woman who seeks to use him as a sponge, drawing into herself what Rafa possesses with his family.  It's a story of a mother's love for her favorite, a younger brother's confusion over how to view the relationship, and an older son's mixture of love and disrespect for his mother.  There are no easy ways out in this sort of situation and Díaz does not try to take one.  Instead, as the story unfolds, the various connections and dividing points between the three family members become more apparent, with the girlfriend Pura near the center of this tangled web, feeding like a bloated spider.

Each of the nine stories contain their own twists and turns to the idea of relationship collapses.  Although six of the nine stories originally appeared in The New Yorker or Glimmer Train, there is an internal cohesion between the stories, as they are in a sort of thematic dialogue with one another, teasing out and exploring different aspects of relationship dynamics to explore.  The women in particular stand out in their varied approaches to the jerks and not-so-lovable losers that surround them.  By book's end, there is the sense that in telling of how the men have "lost them," that really at least half of the story is about how the women are more than just objects of affection; they are dynamic characters in their own right.  Díaz's portrayals feel true to life not just because he is talented with mixing formal and informal speech and description, but also because his characters convey the sense that these are very real situations being acted out in the barrios and neighborhoods, not just in New Jersey or the Dominican Republic, but universally as well.  This is How You Lose Her is the strongest of the five National Book Award finalists as a result of these elements all being done so expertly.

2012 National Book Award finalist in Fiction: Louise Erdrich, The Round House

He started walking again and from time to time I glanced at him, but he didn't speak.  Finally, when we turned into the trees, he said, Evil.

What?

We've got to address the problem of evil in order to understand your soul or any other human soul.

Okay.

There are types of evil, did you know that?   There is material evil, that which causes suffering without reference to humans but gravely affecting humans.  Disease and poverty, calamities of any natural sort.  Material evils.  These we can't do anything about.  We have to accept that their existence is a mystery to us.  Moral evil is different.  It is caused by human beings.  A person does something deliberately to another person to cause pain and torment.  That is a moral evil.  Now you came up here, Joe, to investigate your soul hoping to get closer to God because God is all good, all powerful, all healing, all merciful, and so on.  He paused.

Right, I said.

So you have to wonder why a being of this immensity and power would allow this outrage – that one human being should be allowed by God to directly harm another human being. (e-book p. 289, Ch. 10)

Unlike the other finalists for this year's National Book Award in Fiction (with the possible exception of Junot Díaz, who utilizes a character who has appeared in his other books, although rarely in a central role), Louise Erdrich's The Round House is the fourteenth novel in a loosely-connected "series" set on a North Dakota Ojibwa reservation.  Yet despite my relative unfamiliarity with her novels (I had only previously read a couple of her shorter fictions that appeared in anthologies), The Round House was a very sad and moving novel that highlights several of the injustices that the nations experience when it comes to "jurisdictional matters" regarding crime on the reservations.

The Round House is a combination of a who-dunnit mystery and a coming of age tale.  Thirteen year-old Joe Coutts, the son of the tribal judge, becomes concerned after his mother suddenly becomes withdrawn from the family, barely emerging from her room.  After he and his father learn that she is the victim of a brutal rape, one in which the rapist unsuccessfully tried to set her aflame after pouring gasoline on her after the rape, Joe begins investigating the actions and motives of non-reservations regulars after the non-tribal police refuse to do more than a cursory investigation into that heinous crime. 

Erdrich does a mostly excellent job in developing Joe's character over the course of the novel.  We see his maturation of character, as he learns that his earlier guesses as to who might be the rapist are unfounded, as well as he learns to cope with the inequities involved in tribal/non-tribal interactions.  The slow reveal to the rapist, fraught at times with red herrings and a few unsavory characters that feel less developed than others, has a conclusion that pays off not just on the level of a crime/police procedural novel, but also on that of a Bildungsroman, as Joe's character changes quite a bit.

One problem, if "problem" is the word for it, that I had with The Round House is that despite the story being mostly self-contained, there was the sense that I got that some characters were "hidden" in the sense that for those who had read Erdrich's previous novels, their motivations and character traits would be well-known and logical, while for a neophyte such as myself, there was a mystery to them that The Round House does not explain.  I have heard other reviewers before compare the structure of Erdrich's novels to that of Faulkner's tales set in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi in that certain characters might appear central in one tale and be a background character in another, yet still have influence on the latter story by their very presence.  The "lack" in this case isn't anything that is the author's fault, but rather is a situation in which some readers (such as myself) have not read the related stories and thus lack understanding of certain characters and their actions that would make the story even more enjoyable.

Yet even this "lack" is more than offset by the power of the story that Erdrich tells.  The degree of social injustice in this story, the very real problem of ill-defined federal/tribal jurisdictions on what happens on tribal lands that is perpetuated by outsiders, is a sobering reminder of the long history of nigh-powerlessness that the nations have had in relation to the federal and state governments (only in 2010 was an attempt to rectify this passed into law; a related 2012 bill that would cover related women's issues has been blocked to date in Congress).  It is easy to be outraged, but it is much more challenging to show those injustices in a way that doesn't detract from the story, but instead informs the tale, making it an integral part of the story without seemingly to be a didactic exercise.  The Round House succeeds as a novel because the depth of the injustice and the power of Joe's (and others) outrage is so strong that by the novel's conclusion, the reader will find herself caring deeply not just about the fictional situation, but also the very real underpinnings that shape the novel's narrative.

Out of the five finalists for the National Book Award in Fiction, The Round House is the story that saddened and enraged me the most in terms of my reactions to the characters and situations.  Whereas the other finalists reviewed to date have touched upon disillusionment and the search for identity in a world that is rapidly changing around them, the characters in Erdrich's novel seek justice in the face of historical injustice and their struggles are a poignant reminder of the historical atrocities inflicted upon the nations by the federal and state governments over the past few centuries.  Although the few minor issues that I noted above do not make The Round House the best out of this strong shortlist, it certainly is in my estimation the second-best out of the five nominees.

2012 National Book Award finalist in Fiction: Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

The war tried to kill us in the spring.  As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns.  We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers.  While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.  When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dark.  While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation.  It made love and gave birth and spread through fire.

Then, in summer, the war tried to kill us as the heat blanched all color from the plains.  The sun pressed into our skin, and the war sent its citizens rustling into the shade of white buildings.  It cast a white shade on everything, like a veil over our eyes.  It tried to kill us every day, but it had not succeeded.  Not that our safety was preordained.  We were not destined to survive.  The fact is, we were not destined at all.  The war would take what it could get.  It was patient.  It didn't care about objectives, or boundaries, whether you were loved by many or not at all.  While I slept that summer, the war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose:  to go on, only to go on.  And I knew the war would have its way. (e-book p. 6, beginning of Ch. 1)

Each generation produces its own soldier narratives.  The 1920s had the "Lost Generation," drained of optimism and embittered by the seemingly-pointless slaughter within the trenches; this was most eloquently expressed in novels such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, John Dos Passos' The Three Soldiers, and Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun.  World War II inspired Joseph Heller's satirical comment on the US Army's "chickenshit" regulations, Catch-22 and Norman Mailer's gripping The Naked and the Dead.  While the Korean conflict did not produce classic literature on par with the previous two wars, the Vietnam War brought forth a flood of memoirs and cinematic experiences like Apocalypse Now that illustrated the ambushes and disillusionment of soldiers real and fictitious alike. 

A little over eleven years after the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts began, the first narratives on that two-front "war on terror" are beginning to emerge.  One of the first, if not the first, novels written by a soldier from those conflicts, Kevin Powers' National Book Award-nominated The Yellow Birds, appears to present this current generation's own take on the soldier narrative.  The Yellow Birds is a poignant look at how the still-current wars have managed to shatter the narrator Private John Bartle's life, through comrades lost, civilians killed in ambuscades, and the dull, growing realization of the meaningless of it all.

The Yellow Birds jumps in time, from September 2004 Al Tafar, Ninevah Province in Iraq to December 2003 in Fort Dix, New Jersey to a rotation in Kaiserslautern, Germany in March 2005 back to Al Tafar to Virginia in 2005 and then back and forth in the 2004-2005 timeline until the concluding chapter, set in April 2009 at Fort Knox, Kentucky.  It is a look at how the war affects its soldiers, consuming their humanity, spitting out shells of lives, some of which have been corrupted by the violence they've experienced/had to inflict.  Powers does a very good job capturing this shift in view, from the noble (such as when Bartle promises the mother of a younger friend, Murph, that he would protect them; quickly we learn that he is unable to keep this promise) through the cynical (the observation that the candy being tossed to the children in the streets of northern Al Tafar will be food tossed to those who may be planting the next IED) to violence (which lands Bartle in military prison).  There is nothing simple about war and while the general impact on the soldiers may be similar, the particulars in which they are affected vary from conflict to conflict.  Powers' narrative feels "fresh" because he imbues with what he experienced as a machine gunner in Iraq during the early years of the occupation; it has the feel of an alternate autobiography.

Powers' prose often verges on the poetic; this is not surprising, considering his graduate degree in poetry.  For the most part, his careful balancing of evocative description with a faithful reproduction of soldier talk (including references to "fucking the dog" and "it's a real goat fuck") works, as he delves into Bartle's mind with a precision of voice that belies the fact that The Yellow Birds is his debut novel.  However, there are a few occasions where a plainer, less adorned narrative voice might have availed him more in capturing the raw, visceral emotions that Barth feels.  Although they do not occur frequently enough to derail the carefully laid-out psychological minefield of Bartle's life, the reader may find herself knocked out of the narrative just enough in processing the lush prose that the flow of the narrative falters just enough every now and then to be noticeable.

Despite these occasional narrative hiccups, The Yellow Birds is a very good novel, one that seems to bode well for Powers' future as a novelist.  Yet the occasional beginner's mistakes, such as not having total control of the narrative flow, instead choosing to elaborate further than is strictly necessary, are those that can be easily corrected in future novels.  However, these shortcomings do stand out in comparison to the other National Book Award finalists, making The Yellow Birds a middling contender in a very stacked field.

2012 National Book Award finalist in Fiction: Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

A kind of coagulatory effect attends Bravo's route as people stop, shout out, gape, or grin according to their politics and personality type, and Bravo blows through it all, polite and relentless, an implacable flying wedge of forward motion until the crew of a Spanish-language radio station grabs Mango for an interview, and all that good clean energy goes to hell.  People gather.  The air turns moist with desire.  They want words.  They want contact.  They want pictures and autographs.  Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.  With his back to the railing Billy finds himself engaged by a prosperous-looking couple from Abilene who have their grown son and daughter-in-law in tow.  The young people seem embarrassed by their elders' enthusiasm, not that the old folks give a damn.  "I couldn't stop watching!" the woman exclaims to Billy.  "It was just like nina leven, I couldn't stop watching those planes crash into the towers.  I just couldn't, Bob had to drag me away."  Husband Bob, a tall, stooped gent with mild blue eyes, nods with the calm of a man who's learned how much slack to give a live-wire wife.  "Same with yall, when Fox News started showing that video I just sat right down and didn't move for hours.  I was just so proud, just so" – she flounders in the swamps of self-expression – "proud," she repeats, "it was like, thank God, justice is finally being done."

"It was like a movie," chimes her daughter-in-law, getting into the spirit. (p. 44)

After eleven years, thousands of American deaths and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Iraqi and Afghan deaths, the twin conflicts of the Iraq and Afghan Wars are finally winding down.  It has been the longest sustained conflict (the escalation phase of Vietnam lasted only from 1964-1973) in American military history, with a cost, both in terms of economic and psychological impact, much greater than the relative paucity of lives lost in the conflicts.  During these past eleven years, old symbols from older conflicts, like the ubiquitous yellow ribbons and American flags, have been revived and given almost sacrosanct status.  If one does not "support the troops," then one must be disloyal to them,  according to some of the current rhetoric (perhaps guilt from the perceived treatment of soldiers returning home from Vietnam?).

Yet at what cost do we "support the troops?"  Is it possible that in trying so hard to be supportive, that the well-meaning just don't get it?  This premise lies at the heart of Ben Fountain's debut novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.   One of two National Book Award finalists that deal with the Iraq conflict and its aftermath (the other, Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds, is written by a former soldier who participated in Operation Iraqi Freedom), Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a snapshot look at the experience that a fictional Bravo squad has in the aftermath of their heroic defense in the face of an Iraqi ambush as they pushed toward Baghdad, as they are sent on a two week "victory tour" that culminates in a halftime recognition at a Dallas Cowboys game in Texas Stadium in late 2003.  Over the course of its 307 pages, Fountain does an outstanding job of portraying and then exploding a wide range of civilian reactions to a conflict and the soldiers that they just do not understand.

In reading Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, I was reminded favorably of a telling scene late in Erich Remarque's classic 1929 novel on World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front.  In Remarque's novel, the frontline soldier Paul Bäuer is rotated "home" to recuperate from an injury and during that time, he receives vacuous well-wishes and endures jingoistic statements from the "old lions" that show that they have no idea what the conflict was doing to him and his comrades.  Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which (minus the flashbacks) transpires over the course of a single afternoon and evening, encapsulates much of Remarque's attitude toward "the home front," yet with a very different approach.

The novel utilizes Billy Lynn's stream of consciousness-like PoV as a counterpoint to the numerous people he meets during the preparations for an elaborate halftime "celebration" that ends up being more of a sop to those in attendance than anything that the Bravo squad soldiers themselves care to experience.  There are occasional "cut-ins" to Billy's thoughts, such as this one that occurs after he finishes his interaction with the rich family quoted at the beginning of this review:

          terrRr,

wore on terrRr

          double y'im dees

                              proud, so proud

and

praaaaaay

                   we

        pray and

                 hope and

                            bless and

                                       praise

                                                                    from whom all things

blow

HOOAH BRAVO

PACK YOUR SHIT!

(p. 45) 

These looks into Billy's fractured thoughts/reactions to the steady drizzle of vacuous platitudes that he endures is used judiciously; there is rarely ever the sense that Fountain overextends these sardonic commentaries on the well-meaning yet meaningless comments of the civilians to Billy and other members of his squad.  These interactions (and Billy's stream of consciousness internal monologue reaction to them) serve as a counter to Billy's reflections on his life, his comrades, living and fallen alike, and what he has learned about humanity during his two years in the army after he was almost forced to join the Army at 17 after a singular incident of vandalism and assault that occurred in a Texas town not too far away physically from Texas Stadium but worlds away psychologically from where he was demonized before this current lionizing.

Often first-person and limited third-person PoV narratives that focus on the experiences and reactions of a single character risk reducing the supporting characters to caricatures of human beings.  Fountain manages to avoid this, as the vignettes with the well-wishers, the cheerleader who wants to sleep with Billy, the overexcited prop members, the crew that jumps Billy in reaction to "ruining" his big moment on-stage, etc. are almost all pitch-perfect in presentation.  It is easy for us to picture those around us acting in exactly the same ways that the other characters in the novel do. 

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk captures the subconscious hypocrisies of American attitudes toward war (it is like a movie!) and its soldiers (heroes, yet there is no recognition of their frail humanity and their need for something more than pats on the back and chest thumps of pride).  It is a very accomplished debut novel and is a serious contender for this year's National Book Award in Fiction.  Highly recommended.

2012 National Book Award finalist in Fiction: Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

– Well, it's pretty interesting, Dad.  I'm here with Reliant, and we're pitching an IT system to King Abdullah.  We've got this remarkable teleconferencing equipment, and we'll be doing a presentation to the King himself, a three-dimensional holographic meeting.  One of our reps will be in London but it will look like he's in the room, with Abdullah –

Silence.

Then: – You know what I'm watching on TV here, Alan?

– No.  What are you watching?

– I'm watching this thing about how a gigantic new bridge in Oakland, California, is being made in China.  Can you imagine?  Now they're making our goddamned bridges, Alan.  I got to say, I saw everything else coming.  When they closed down Stride Rite, I saw it coming.  When you start shopping out the bikes over there in Taiwan, I saw it coming.  I saw the rest of it coming – toys, electronics, furniture.  Makes sense if you're some shitass bloodthirsty executive hellbent on hollowing out the economy for his own gain.  All that makes sense.  Nature of the beast.  But the bridges I did not see coming.  By God, we're having other people make our bridges.  And now you're in Saudi Arabia, selling a hologram for the pharoahs!  That takes the Cake! (e-book p. 65, Ch. XII)

Globalism confuses quite a few people, when the concept does not terrify them.  Made in ________, a locale most reading this will likely never visit.  Fruits grown a hemisphere away, cheaper than produce from a local farmer.  Outsourcing of jobs, of products, of patents – all of these part and parcel of an international economy that no longer is fully threatened by any single government's policies.  Only a few people seem to understand their niche in this, only the select seem to have some say as to what products are pitched to others and where these products will be assembled.  For the 99% of the global population that are the workers, the engines of the global economy might as well be on Cloud Cuckooland.

Over the past twelve years, Dave Eggers has written a series of acclaimed fictions and a couple of non-fictions that frequently featured characters who in divergent ways were set adrift in a rapidly changing and often callous world.  In his latest novel, A Hologram for the King, Eggers explores the effects that globalization has had on American business through the experiences of a middle-aged sales executive, Alan Clay, whose experiences trying to sell a prototype holographic IT system to Saudi King Abdullah is in equal parts a Godot-like wait of futility and a vivid depiction of the uncertainties that face American businesses and workers alike.

A Hologram for the King is written from a limited third-person PoV.  There are frequent asides to Clay's past experience working as a salesman for Schwinn Bikes, before their business collapsed some years ago and the century-old business was liquidated, their name and products being divvied up and sent outside its traditional Chicago base to other countries, where the bike parts could be made cheaper.  In his conversations with his younger co-workers at Reliant, Clay's growing pessimism regarding American businesses being able to survive in the new international economy of outsourcing and patent licensure  to non-American corporations provides a sobering look into a mindset that more and more Americans, particularly those approaching or passing middle age have developed.  This brave new world does not seem conducive for business – and friendships among business partners – as usual.

For a relatively short novel (barely 230 e-book pages on my iPad), A Hologram for the King contains a lot of character interactions, from the nouveaux riches among the Saudi subjects (a sandal manufacturer and his playboy son and a surgeon who removes a cyst from Clay's neck late in the novel are but two examples out of many), to a European fellow business traveler who initiates an aborted romance, to others who struggle to understand if the King's planned King Abdullah's Economic City (KAEC, pronounced like "cake") will actually come to fruition outside of Jeddah.  Yet for the most part, these characters and their situations feel too much like symbols for globalization and its positive and not-so-positive aspects rather than fully-fleshed simulacra of human beings.  Even Clay feels like a metaphor for the failing American (business) dream, with his slight stirrings of activity/lust, only to be disappointed by sluggish performance and baggage.  By the novel's end, there were hints of intriguing characters from Dr. Zahra Hakem and a relative of King Abdullah, but ultimately they were just glimpses of some substantive and only Clay possessed any depth of emotion or character.

A Hologram for the King works well as an extended metaphor for the decline of the United States' importance in the global economy.  However, it falters when it comes to its characterization and that lack of fully-realized characters robs the novel of some of its impact.  Ultimately, it is a good novel that could have been a great novel if more time had been devoted toward developing characters that were more than representations of the global changes that Eggers wanted to explore.  Compared to other National Book Award finalists in Fiction, A Hologram for the King is a weaker entry for the noticeable flaw mentioned above.

2012 National Book Award finalist in Non-Fiction: Robert Caro, The Passage of Power

The 1960 bill, Rauh says, was "a pile of rubbish and garbage" disguised as a statute.  It "was a joke," he says.  "Everybody knew it was a joke.  Nobody who was really for civil rights then could have supported it," much less have pushed it through the Senate.  And Johnson was not really for civil rights, Rauh felt.  Not that he was against civil rights; he was simply for anything – on either side – that would help him become President.  "It wasn't that he was a conservative or a radical or anything else; it was simply that he was trying to be all things to all people."  The revered liberal senator Paul Douglas of Illinois went further.  Johnson had remained at least ostensibly neutral in the cloture fight only because he had known the South would win, Douglas said; had the result been in doubt, Johnson would have thrown his full weight behind the fillibuster. (p. 176 e-book, Ch. 3)

Nearly 50 years after the tragic events of 11/22/1963, much of the American populace is still entranced by the "Kennedy mystique."  The glamor, the smiles, the speeches, the sense of hope and optimism.  All of these are associated with a Presidency that lasted roughly 1000 days.  Yet perhaps what is most enduring about 1960s governmental policy (itself a far less "sexy beast"), even despite the arguments presented during the 1996 and 2012 Presidential elections that its programs should be reduced, is the Great Society program of President Kennedy's successor, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, or LBJ.  For over 40 years, the mere initials "LBJ" have sparked fierce reactions from Americans old enough to remember his Presidency (or his earlier stint as Senate Majority Leader).  Some have lauded him for passing the most sweeping social policy reforms since the 1930s New Deal programs.  Others have lambasted him for his increasing militarism and the Vietnam War escalation of 1965-1968.  A few have mocked his thirst for power, claiming that he had no vision other than what would garner him power; for those, Senator Douglas's comments doubtlessly would reinforce their opinions of LBJ.

In his fourth volume of his critically acclaimed biography series on Johnson, Robert Caro explores a critical time in Johnson's life.  The Years of Lyndon Johnson:  The Passage of Power focused on the period between 1958 and 1964, when Johnson transforms from a powerful Senate Majority Leader (perhaps one of the most powerful in the Senate's history) whose dedication to civil rights was at best viewed as dodgy by the Northern liberals in Congress and at worst seen as a blind meant to obscure his solid history of supporting Southern causes (not just those directly related to segregation) to a President who managed to get the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, cloture rules governing filibusters changed, and whose adept maneuvering of congressional leaders assured the passage of several important programs (minimum wage expansion, WIC, school lunch program, to name just a few).  This period has long fascinated Americans and historians of the period alike.  What motivated a man often disparaged by Kennedy staffers as "Rufus Cornpone" to get Congress to pass legislation that he himself rarely supported when he was in the Senate?  Was it simply political opportunism, the chance to put "his mark" on the Presidency?  Or was there something deeper, more sincere, about his sweeping policy proposals?  And what led to these noble programs being subsumed by the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam?

The Passage of Power originally was meant to cover all of these issues, but due to the amount of space needed to cover just Johnson's actions from his failed bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1960 to the seven weeks following Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 leading up to his historic declaration of a "war on poverty" in his January 1964 State of the Union address, Caro found it prudent to just focus on this period in which Johnson's behavior was at odd with his earlier (and later) public stances.  In exploring LBJ's motivations, Caro presents a complex, conflicted soul, a person who remembered his family's descent into "genteel" poverty in the 1920s and who favored the underdog, while also possessing a meanness of character that would lead him to humiliate those who worked for him and whose desire for acceptance would often lead to such fawning over those who could give him what he needed politically that his ability to "brown nose" is still remarkable even in a career where ingratiation is a necessity.

Caro's biography is divided into five parts:  the lead up to the 1960 Democratic Convention and Kennedy's surprise choice of him as Vice President; Johnson's humbling (and humiliating) time as Vice President; the assassination; the immediate aftermath of the assassination; and the transition period from the initial shock fading in early December 1963 to the historic January 1964 State of the Union address.  In each of these sections, Caro exhaustively explores Johnson's actions and interactions with people he had known for years, both in Texas and in Congress, and those he now had to deal with as an increasingly marginal player in the Kennedy administration.  Caro's sources include an impressive amount of primary sources, particularly interviews he or others had conducted with those involved with the events of the day (there were a few who refused to be interviewed by Caro, but for the most part the key players' reminisces were cited).  Yet a biography could contain a plethora of excellent primary sources and be weak if the biographer does not shape a compelling narrative from them.

Caro, however, is just that sort of biographer that can take these excellent sources and construct an even superior narrative from them.  Caro's LBJ is presented in all of his facets, with each sparkling in turn as the situation demands.  Caro does an outstanding job speculating as to what might have motivated Johnson to break with his past political record and to display personality traits during the crisis following Kennedy's assassination that very few who had known him for decades could have ever suspected that he possessed.  LBJ's faults are not neglected; they are present within even his greatest triumphs and Caro's willingness to take Johnson as he was rather than what he wished others to view him as being makes The Passage of Power a gripping political biography.

For those (such as myself) who have not read Caro's three previous LBJ volumes (each of which won prestigious American awards for non-fiction/biography), The Passage of Power contains enough references to events Caro discussed in those volumes that there is little sense that the reader is picking up Johnson's life in media res.  As a biography, it is one of the best that I have ever read of a political leader.  As noted above, Caro's sources are impressive and he presents conclusions that are cogent and which offer possibilities for historians to consider for years, especially when there likely will be a flood of new Kennedy/Johnson-related books released in the immediate aftermath of the 2017 unsealing of the final classified documents related to the assassination.  The National Book Award shortlist in Non-Fiction is a very strong list of finalists, but The Passage of Power perhaps is the best of a very stacked field of strong biographies and very good to excellent histories.

2012 National Book Award finalist in Non-Fiction: Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain

Eastern Europe, along with Ukraine and the Baltic States, was also the site of most of the politically motivated killing in Europe.  "Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow," writes Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands, the definitive history of the mass killing of this period, "but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between."  Stalin and Hitler shared contempt for the very notion of national sovereignty for any of the nations of Eastern Europe, and they jointly stove to eliminate their enemies.

***
Above all, Eastern Europe is where Nazism and Soviet communism clashed. Although they began the war as allies, Hitler had always wanted to fight a war of destruction against the USSR, and Hitler's invasion Stalin promised the same.  The battles between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht were therefore fiercer and bloodier in the east than those that took place further west. (e-book pp. 54, 55-56, Ch. 1)

Each generation seeks to redefine its own past, or rather to understand through their own concerns what transpired to motivate the previous generation.  In Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, there was a lag of roughly 25 years between the end of World War II and (leaving aside early yet influential works by Alan Bullock and Hugh Trevor-Roper) the first substantive volumes on Adolf Hitler and National Socialism that did not reduce the subject to mere quasi-demonic status.  Even today, the arguments are fierce in support or detraction of the Intentionalist or Functionalist schools of thought regarding the implementation of the Holocaust.  These seemingly (and likely) eternal debates over the past is what makes history a valuable field of study, as frequently new light is shed on past events with each passing generation.

It has been 23 years since the 1989 Revolutions broke out in Eastern Europe (and China's failed uprising; the Soviet Union's dissolution followed two years later) and the time is ripe for more reflective studies regarding the formation of "the satellite nations" of post-World War II Eastern Europe.  There have been a relative dearth of histories on the formation of the communist regimes of the 1945-1948 period, which is a shame, considering how important this era is for understanding not just the successful 1989-1991 revolutions, but also the unsuccessful ones of 1953, 1956, 1968, and 1981.  Journalist Anne Applebaum's National Book Award-nominated Iron Curtain:  The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1945-1956 provides an extra primer for those who want to learn of the haphazard and often self-conflicting fashion in which communists rose to power in parts of Eastern Europe.

Although communist regimes sprung up over the 1945-1948 period all across Eastern Europe (with the notable exceptions of Greece – which managed to stave off a communist-led civil war after the end of World War II – and Turkey), Applebaum has chosen, minus asides, to limit the focus of her history to three countries:  East Germany, Poland, and Hungary.  In her introduction, she notes that she chose these three not because of their similarities, but because of their very different histories leading up to their communist takeovers and the subsequent approach that the governments there took toward internal and external protest, as well as their divergent leadership styles.  Certainly there are questions regarding this approach.  Are these three nations emblematic of the different politburos that controlled the other communist regimes?  Or could it be argued that each of the eight "satellites" differed too significantly for only three of the eight to be considered at length in a single history?

Applebaum does not come out and say it, but I suspect part of the reason why she focuses on East Germany, Poland, and Hungary is that she is more familiar with the three (and had more available sources, including interview subjects) than she is with the other nations.  It is a shame, because it would have been interesting to read more on her take of Tito's early break with the Soviet Union, which she discusses briefly at a few points in regards to the actions of the leadership in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary (another view of this split is presented within John Lewis Gaddis's 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning biography of Cold War American diplomat George F. Kennan, George F. Kennan:  An American Life).  This 1948 split, predicated on a more "national" form of communism in Yugoslavia (cruelly ironic, considering the events of the past 21 years), could be viewed as a precursor to the later events that Applebaum covers, particularly the 1956 Hungarian uprising.  Yet this noticeable lack of coverage is perhaps the weakest element in a book that otherwise provides a good blueprint for other histories of the time/region to consider.

Iron Curtain is divided into thematic chapters, with the responses of the East German, Polish, and Hungarian governments covered within.  There are two roughly chronological parts, "False Dawn" and "High Stalinism," within are found chapters with labels such as "Victors," "Violence," Ethnic Cleansing," "Youth," "Reactionary Enemies," "Internal Enemies," and so forth.  A key early chapter would be the one on Violence, which argues that from the very beginning of the Soviet occupation of the former Nazi territories, that the communists' goals originated in their use of violence.  While the indiscriminate decimation that was a hallmark of the Red Army's push westward in 1944-1945 was abandoned after the war in favor of highly-targeted forms of political violence (police crackdowns on demonstrations, arrests at night, show trials, prison camps, and the occasional execution announced to the public), much of Applebaum's subsequent arguments about the problems that the communist regimes perceived centered around elements of violence, whether it be the ways that others sought to protest against them and their responses to them.  While a theorist might have attempted to tie this into Marxist notions of power relationships, Applebaum concentrates more on the personal reactions to communism, including the collaborationist and passive resistance models that archbishops in Poland and Hungary used to blunt or oppose government power.

This focus on selected individuals, both the communist leaders as well as the opposition leaders, makes for an excellent political mass biography.  However, as a history it feels somewhat incomplete in regards to structures.  Of course, this complaint is more the expression of desire that Applebaum had gone further and deeper into exploring the relationships of the regimes with each other, the Soviet Union, and ultimately how the peoples in these three countries (and the other satellite countries) than an argument that her survey of the responses that the East German, Polish, and Hungarian governments had during the crucial 1945-1956 era of political transformation is poorly-written or presented.  Iron Curtain is a solid, occasionally excellent historical survey of how the communist takeovers of 1945-1948 affected the peoples of three Central/Eastern European countries.  Compared to the other National Book Award nominees in Non-Fiction, it is very good, but the few omissions and lack of further development that I noted above make it just slightly less than the best in that category.

2012 National Book Award finalist in Non-Fiction: Anthony Shadid, House of Stone

The village market is an old tradition in the countryside, a legacy of Bedouin culture, and many towns around Marjayoun had them.  Qlayaa's was on Sunday.  Monday was Nabatiyeh's.  The most famous was Suq al-Khan, on Tuesday, near Kawkaba.  They were really no more than amalgamations of hastily erected tents and rickety stalls, where everything from scarves and screwdrivers to corkscrews and pirated CDs were hawked.  "Beautiful prices!" vendors shouted, to no one in particular.  However pronounced the tension, and even in times of war, Shiite butchers hung out their meat, willing to cut a slice and grill it, and Druze famers, in their white knit caps and baggy pants, kept coming to sell pickled wild cucumbers and cauliflower.

Shibil sometimes called himself Oklahoman, but he was really, inexorably, a son of this town, a belief confirmed as I watched him cringe when a black goat crossed our path.  Like the evil eye, it was an omen, and omens mattered.  In winter, he would never walk outside without splashing cold water on his face.  His superstitions continually announced themselves.  "Beware of split teeth and blue eyes," he warned me as he scanned the market crowd, deadly serious.  "Small foreheads, too." (p. 54)

I recall once hearing (or did I read it or is it all a dream?) that family histories are like ripples in a pond caused by a stone's throw, each wave reaching the far side before returning, diminished yet still maintaining its shape.  So many of us are products of our forebears.  We may not look exactly like them nor always act in precisely the same fashion, but there is that sense of an inheritance that leads us to look back to our ancestors in order to understand ourselves.  In his memoir, House of Stone:  A Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East (published posthumously weeks after the author's tragic death from allergy-induced asthma), acclaimed journalist Anthony Shadid recounts a pivotal point in his life, in the summer of 2006, when he returned to the Lebanese village of Marjayoun, the place where centuries of Shadids and Samaras had lived and practiced their Christian faith before the early 20th century exodus of Arab Christians (as well as Muslims and Druze, to a lesser extent) began.  It is a memoir of a family as well as of the bayt, which constitutes many things, the least of which is the physical "house."  Or perhaps "home" would be more suitable, as that contains hints of emotional and familial interactions within a physical boundary.  Regardless, House of Stone is a very touching story of Shadid's family and of Lebanon's recent history.

House of Stone operates on two levels:  that of Shadid's experiences in Marjayoula rebuilding an ancestral home and (in italics) reflections on his family's experiences ever since the first Shadids immigrated to the US, particularly Oklahoma City.  In chapters that are as much thematic as they are chronological in order, Shadid explores not just what drove his grandparents (and grand-uncle) to emigrate, but what Lebanon's history has been as the sort of crossroads between Europe and Asia, between Christianity and Islam.  Through all of this, the bayt that he is reconstructing, to the bemusement of some, to the amazement of others, looms as a central metaphor for these intertwined histories.

Shadid was a famous war correspondent in the Middle East, covering not just the 2006 Hezbollah/Israel border conflict, but also the 2011 Libyan Civil War and the 2011-2012 Syrian Civil War before his tragic death.  He possessed a keen eye for personal detail, noting local beliefs and customs, not with a wry smile and a small, sad shake of the head but instead with compassion and understanding.  Take for instance the passage quoted above.  Shadid's friend Shibil, who had lived some time in the US before returning to Lebanon, is shown to be of two worlds:  convinced that he is outside local superstitions, yet reinforcing them all of the same subconsciously.  Shadid does not mock his friend for those beliefs, but instead refers to them as a symbol of the confluence of the old and new, with the old possessing more strength than what might be expected.

The people that Shadid meet are fascinating because their concerns are at once familiar (how can we afford to pay for the things we need each day?) and foreign to affluent westerners (will the war resume?  Will the Israelis take over again?).  Shadid touches upon this in discussing the reasons why his grandparents and others from the last years of the Ottoman Empire until the present have left Lebanon (and by extension, other parts of the Middle East) in a great Arab diaspora.  At the heart of it is the duality of family and culture (including religion; a large number of the Arabs that emigrated were Christians of all of the regional sects).  Shadid touches upon these issues in his recollections of his experiences rebuilding the family bayt, noting the tragedy of the former collegiality of the local Muslims, Christians, and Druze before the French mandates of Syria and Lebanon set the powder keg of religious conflict before lighting the fuse of political/social control that finally blew up spectacularly in the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990.  There is a sense of wistfulness in his writing of the issue, a sense of loss of what was treasured in the days of his ancestors.

The "flashback" scenes where Shadid discussed his family's reasons for emigrating and their subsequent adventures in the American Southwest are integrated nicely into the memoir.  The pressure to "become American" (which involved the adoption of American nicknames, such as Abdullah/Albert and Miqbal/Mack) is contrasted with the desire to remain true to their Lebanese roots.  If anything could be pointed out as a shortcoming in House of Stones, it is that perhaps there could have been even more of these scenes added to flesh out Shadid's reasons for coming back to Lebanon to reside for a spell before resuming his correspondent duties.

House of Stones is a very good memoir.  It captures well the internal and external conflicts of the Lebanese and Lebanese-Americans when it comes to matters of home, family, and faith.  It touches upon several tragedies of the past century and it shines a light upon the myriad and sometimes conflicting attitudes that the Lebanese have in regards to the tumultuous events of the 20th and early 21st centuries.  It compares favorably with the other National Book Award finalists for Non-fiction and it certainly is a book that deserves a wide readership.  It is unfortunate that Shadid died so soon after writing this book; there is the sense that there are stories left untold.

2012 National Book Award finalist in Non-Fiction: Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers

July 17, 2008 – Mumbai

Midnight was closing in, the one-legged woman was grievously burned, and the Mumbai police were coming for Abdul and his father.  In a slum hut by the international airport, Abdul's parents came to a decision with an uncharacteristic economy of words.  The father, a sick man, would wait inside the trash-strewn, tin-roofed shack where the family of eleven resided.  He'd go quietly when arrested.  Abdul, the household earner, was the one who had to flee.

Abdul's opinion of this plan had not been solicited, typically.  Already he was mule-brained with panic.  He was sixteen years old, or maybe nineteen – his parents were hopeless with dates.  Allah, in His impenetrable wisdom, had cut him small and jumpy.  A coward:  Abdul said it of himself.  He knew nothing about eluding policemen.  What he knew about, mainly, was trash.  For nearly all the waking hours of nearly all the years he could remember, he'd been buying and selling to recyclers the things that richer people threw away. (Beginning to the Prologue, p. 10 e-book)

I was wary when I saw that Katherine Boo's National Book Award-nominated non-fiction, Behind the Beautiful Forevers:  Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, would be tackling the issue of dire poverty in one of India's largest cities.  Too often, there's this sort of "poverty porn" that I have seen crop up in relation to places like India, even though India today has one of the world's fastest-growing economies and the middle class there has expanded substantially in the past two decades.  "Feed the Children" may be OK for those who want to feel sorrow at the plight of the impoverished and give "just pennies a day," but the realities involved in these slums is much more complex than what one can gather from a single viewing of Slumdog Millionaire.

Yet it turns out that Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a very different sort of tale.  Yes, there is crushing poverty, but the poorness of material possessions is not emphasized here.  Instead, in the Annawadia slum, Boo, herself a regular reporter on urban poverty in the United States for several years before spending years in Mumbai, concentrates on telling a few family histories to illustrate the various survival mechanisms and adaptations that take place.  Normally, I would not recommend the method in which readers choose to read the text, but Boo's story is most effective if one purchases the enhanced e-book edition that contains several short clips filmed by her or the slum locals, each of which complements the text.

It is clear even within the first chapters that Boo has spent an extensive amount of time among the villagers, although she herself has never quite mastered Hindi.  She talks of Annawadians like the Muslim Abdul and his family and their precarious position in the slum.  Much of the focus of Behind the Beautiful Forevers is on the trash recycling/selling business that Abdul and his father operate and the competition that they have.  There is the tragic case of a one-legged (actually, one healthy and one stunted leg) woman who suffers third-degree burns over most of her body; Abdul and his father are blamed and several chapters toward the end are devoted to the Mumbai police system.

But there are more positive stories, like Manju, a young woman who has managed despite her family's desperate straits to be able to attend college.  In the evening hours, she runs Annawadia's quasi-school system for the elementary school-age students, before returning late at night to do her chores and get perhaps four hours of sleep before she has to rise early to begin her day again.  Boo balances the optimistic and pessimistic views of the villagers nicely, giving them a greater voice than her own commentary.  She does not judge (she never quite reveals the amount of guilt, if any, Abdul and his father had in the burning), but she observes as impartially as she is able.

Of course, there are several moments where Boo's status as an outsider precludes her from understanding the full import of what is transpiring.  She is very aware of this and in her conclusion, points out that this was a recurring issue during her time with the slum residents.  Yet on the whole, Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a fascinating look at a Mumbai shantytown, one that tries (even if it occasionally fails) to let Annawadia's residents speak with their own voices as to what is transpiring within.  There is pride and hope among the residents, coupled with the occasional bitter resignation to their fate among the indigent poor, but there is never the sense that Boo is trying to recast their lives to suit the prejudices of western audiences.  Compared to the other National Book Award finalists in Non-Fiction, Behind the Beautiful Forevers is in the middle of a very tight pack.  It is a poignant story, yet there are just enough questions as to what Boo has failed to see/refuses to discuss to make it lesser than some of the other finalists.  However, it is still a book well worth reading.

2012 National Book Award finalist in Non-Fiction: Domingo Martinez, The Boy Kings of Texas

This fight had been city versus farm, and the city had repeatedly conned its way out of a sound beating at the hands of the farm.

Dennis's mother had called Dad, had explained what happened, and Dad said he would be right over.  Since both Dan and I have been the victims of Dad's explosive and illogical temper, we both expect and dread the further punishment headed our way, when he gets there.  I think he'll have a fit over Dan losing the contact lenses, for not winning decisively, for the potential trouble from the school, the cops, anything that would occur to Dad, but it doesn't happen.

Dad is uncharacteristically understanding, comforting even, and he and Richard had dropped all they were doing that afternoon and drove to Dennis's to pick Dan up and take him to the emergency room.

They x-ray his nose (no fracture) and his wrist (hairline fracture) and his thumb (clearly fractured).  They they take Dan to dinner and buy him a beer.

Dan had fought, and survived, like a man.  He was in the club.  The club that Dad and Richard had never been able to enter.  Maybe make deliveries there, through the tradesman's entrance, but certainly never enter through the front door. (p. 178)

Machismo.  This untranslatable word contains stories within it.  Stories of pride, sure, but also stories of deep, raw hurt that threatens to burst its dams and spill over into the lives surrounding it.  It is a code, a way of life, yet so little of it could be defined precisely.  One either had machismo or not; there was no middle ground.  One bound by it could find himself doing the illogical for reasons of honor...and other things.  There is a sense of tragedy in the word, ma-chis-mo, that can make a grown man cry or stiffen up and become like stone.

Domingo Martinez's debut book, the memoir The Boy Kings of Texas is as poignant as the rancheros and corrídos of singers such as José Alfredo Jiménez, whose "El Rey" ("The King") Martinez views as a key to unlocking the machismo code and from which he derived the inspiration for his memoir of his time growing up in Brownsville, Texas during the 1970s and 1980s and what led him and his older brother Dan to flee to Seattle by the early 1990s.  The Boy Kings of Texas is a complicated, complex affair, reading as a love/hate letter to a family bound by machismo.

The Boy Kings of Texas is roughly in chronological order, although key events are sometimes narrated years or even decades after other events narrated in prior chapters.  Martinez sets out to describe the fractious lives that he, his older brother, their three younger sisters, and occasionally his youngest brother live in a barrio on the outskirts of Brownsville with their parents, paternal grandmother, and their stepuncle, Richard.  Told more in a looping, thematic fashion, similar to what a patient might relate to his therapist, the events in The Boy Kings of Texas revolve around the ways that the Martinez family members cope with their situations.

Race certainly plays a role in the book.  The Martinezes are descended from a largely criollo background and their fairish skin allows members of the family, particular the three sisters (the three Mimis, as they were nicknamed) to pass as white, especially after they refused to wear anything but the most fashionable clothes possible and after they dyed their hair blonde.  The older brother, Dan, who is 18 months older than Domingo (the fifth out of six), is a complex soul and Domingo's recollections show this through his recounting of the fights Dan would get into, often for Domingo's sake (even if Domingo rarely asked for help and usually felt ashamed when family members would intervene), usually over matters of race or ethnic slurs thrown at the more bookish Domingo.  In passages such as the one quoted above, Martinez reveals a lot of the family dynamics and how machismo governs them:  the fight itself, the way in which it ended (with a tragic end a few months later for the other participant), the lyrical description of how their dad, Domingo Sr. (Domingo was called "Yunior" or "June" by the family) , and their step-uncle, Richard, long for the sort of acceptance that comes to Dan in the aftermath of this brutal fight.

Violence looms large in The Boy Kings of Texas.  Domingo finds it both abhorrent and fascinating.  He is not the fighter his brother is, he sometimes tries to shrink back from the violent demands that machismo puts on the boys of his barrio, but he is again and again entrapped within its web.  Casual descriptions of his father beating on his mother, brother, and self are not meant to downplay the significance of his father's actions, but instead are part and parcel of what drives this lonely "loser" of a man (as much in how he sees himself as how his family views him) to infidelities, inappropriate sexual talk with Domingo (the scene where he worries that his wife might have AIDS due to his screwing around and yet he is not the one who wants to know the result) is pitifully funny.  There's such a sadness in Domingo's prose whenever he writes about his father that it is obvious that there is much more to him than he is ready to admit; after all, openness about familial feelings don't usually mesh well with machismo.

There is also a lot of humor within these scenes, from the beer sharing, the pot smuggling, Domingo's first sexual experience, awkward dates, etc.  These humorous anecdotes leaven the narrative, relieving the depressing sense of fatality that sometimes threatened to overwhelm the narrative.  Martinez has excellent comedic timing, with the humor never feeling forced nor does it ever detract from the weightier issues being described.  But even more impressive than his melding of comedic scenes with the more brutal ones is his honesty.  There is never the sense that he covers up his feelings or reactions to events.  He does not see himself as a hero, but rather as a survivor.  This veracious portrayal makes for a fascinating read of not just a typical family, but of a Latino family caught between the dual worlds of Mexico and the United States, of white and brown, of aspiring to advance and trying to remain true to one's roots.  And through it all, machismo threads its way, coloring everything.

The Boy Kings of Texas is an outstanding memoir.  It is one that I likely will re-read in years to come.  Compared to the other National Book Award finalists in Non-Fiction, it ranks very highly, as the story told is moving, with excellent character descriptions.  If there were any quibbles that I would have with it, perhaps it could have been divided into two books, pre-move to Seattle and post-move, but that is more because I would like to have more of his story to read than any real flaw with the memoir's narrative.  The Boy Kings of Texas is simply one of the best books on a very strong shortlist.

2012 National Book Award finalist for Young People's Literature: Patricia McCormick, Never Fall Down

Tonight it's another meeting.  These meeting, sometime they last four hour.  Always, someone talking about Angka.  Sometime, you so tire, you fall asleep.  But you too afraid the Khmer Rouge will see, so your sleep, your eyes open.

This night one Khmer Rouge, a high-ranking guy, he take money from his pocket and rip it into shred.  I wake up for this, to see someone so crazy he tear up money.  "No need for money now," he says.  "No school, no store, no mail, no religion.  No thing from the American, from the imperialist.  In Cambodia, now it's Year Zero."

No one can talk at these meetings.  No one allowed.  But one old lady, she mutter.  "This guy is not the prince.  The prince, he's the only one who can decide; only he can say this."

I think the Khmer Rouge gonna kill her, but the man, again, he make a Buddha face.  "Angka," he says, "sees what inside your heart.  The prince, he has two eyes.  Angka, as many as a pineapple." (Ch. 2, e-book p. 20)

Patricia McCormick's National Book Award-nominated Never Fall Down straddles the line between fiction and non-fiction.  Based on two years of interviews with Cambodian refugee Arn Chorn-Pond, Never Fall Down is Chorn-Pond's tale of survival in the 1970s during Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror in Cambodia just before the Vietnamese invaded to overthrow that genocidal regime.  McCormick notes that although the main basis of the book lies in Chorn-Pond's own recollections, she conceived of it as a novel (similar to what Dave Eggers did with Valentino Achak Deng's life in What is the What) in order to "connect the dots" of Chorn-Pond's recollections with the events of the day. 

As a novel, Never Fall Down succeeds brilliantly.  McCormick chose to use Chorn-Pond's distinct use of English in order to convey a sense of loss and terror.  Too easily, this approach could have been viewed as stereotypical, yet there's a brutal honesty within this narrative that does not allow for anything other than Chorn-Pond's own voice to be used.  Considering the tale of his time as a young boy playing music for the Khmer Rouge operatives while fearing each night would be the night that he would be the next one to "disappear," there is a sense of immediacy and utter, abject fear that makes for a compelling read.

Never Fall Down's narrative is graphic and evokes a vivid sense of the sort of misery that Chorn-Pond and the other children in his group experienced.  Take for instance this description of the perils of camp life from Ch. 3:

We kids, so hungry now, we hunt for food for ourself.  Insect, frog, maybe mushroom or plant.  So many kids crawling for food all over, maybe three hundred kids still living, it's hard to find this food.  And some kids, lotta kids, eat poison plant, maybe spider, and die.  Me, I eat the tamarind fruit.  Very sour and very good.  But also give you diarrhea.  Already I have diarrhea, but I can't help it; I still eat the tamarind.  You eat some, your mouth wrinkle up inside, and you want some more.  You eat more, your stomach pain you so much, you can't stand straight.

All the kid have diarrhea now.  With this diarrhea, you feel like you have to shit a hundred times each night.  You so tired, you work all day, you almost think, maybe I can shit right here in my bed.  Some kid do.  Then Khmer Rouge get very angry, beat them.  So you don't care how tired, you get up.  You go to the latrine, and it's crawling with maggot; just one board, very slippery, over a ditch, also crawling with maggot.  Some kid so weak, they fall in.  I think they die too. (p. 25 e-book)

It is one thing to hear of the killing fields of 1970s Cambodia, but the reality of the depravity of the Khmer Rouge in their attempt to out-Mao Mao and to enforce a brutal form of peasant collectivization on Cambodia after their rise to power in the early 1970s is stomach-churning.  Chorn-Pond, through McCormick's deft weaving of his recollections with those of other camp children, had been removed from his family by the Khmer Rouge and sent to a camp in the fields.  There he made a precarious living playing music for hours for the local troops, hoping that he will be the one that when he is cook gets to cook the human livers harvested for meals rather than being the one whose liver will be fried next.

The Cambodian genocide was perhaps the second-worst genocide of the twentieth century after the Holocaust.  Estimates range that between 1-3 million people died over a four-year span from 1975-1979, out of a pre-Khmer Rouge population of 8 million.  The events narrated within Never Fall Down are brutally true to the reality, as there are references to the various ways in which the Khmer Rouge deposed of the "surplus population" that were removed from the cities, with the mass live burials (the killing fields) being the most infamous.  It was tough to read the descriptions of what happened, the callous brutality of the Khmer Rouge soldiers, the suffering of children such as Chorn-Pond, but McCormick does an outstanding job detailing just what Chorn-Pond and others experienced.  Never since I first read Elie Wiesel's Night had I read such a terribly accurate and graphic depiction of the suffering of children at the hands of a cruel government.

The only quibble I had with Never Fall Down is trying to decide what might be the best age group for reading this.  Certainly it is not an account that early middle school students would be ready to handle; perhaps high school or even beyond is best for readers who might be sensitive to such graphic depictions.  Other than that, Never Fall Down is easily the best of the 2012 Young People's Literature nominees.  It easily could have been finalist in the Fiction category, as its subject matter and the quality of McCormick's prose make it a fitting read for teens and older.  One of the best 2012 releases in any genre that I have read this year.

2012 National Book Award finalist for Young People's Literature: William Alexander, Goblin Secrets

A goblin stepped onstage.

Rownie stared.  He had never seen one of the Changed before.  This one was completely bald, and taller than Rownie thought goblins could get.  His sharp ear-tips stuck out sideways from his head, and his eyes were large and flecked with silver and brown.  His skin was green; the deep green of thick moss and riverweed.  His clothes were patched together from fabric of all different colors.

The goblin bowed.  He set two lanterns at both corners of the stage, and then stood in the center.  he held several thin clubs in one hand.  He watched the audience in a cruel and curious way, the way molekeys watch beetles before they pull off their wings and legs.

Rownie felt like he should be hiding behind something.  When the goblin moved, finally, throwing the clubs in the air with a snap of both sleeves, Rownie flinched. (p. 37 e-book, Act I, Scene IV)

I have struggled for hours trying to think of how best to approach writing a review commentary on William Alexander's National Book Award-nominated Goblin Secrets.  It is a different sort of book from the other finalists, not just because it is the only fantasy, but because its structure differs in key regards from the others.  Goblin Secrets is not a "poor" book, but it is not necessarily a work that will immediately captivate a reader and perhaps within that lies the crux of my quandary regarding how to approach discussing it.

Goblin Secrets utilizes a three act, multi-scene alternative to traditional chapters.  There are additional drama elements that can be detected within the prose:  the masks that some of the characters sport, the way in which the titular goblins (who are the only ones permitted to perform on stage) act, both in dialogue and in movement, and the rise and fall of dramatic action from the introduction to the denouement.  This approach does enliven matters to a degree, as there is a greater sense of "movement" within these scenes, as characters such as the young orphaned Rownie, in search for his older brother Rowan (who disappeared suddenly after performing in an illegal secret play), progress through the city of Zombay.

In addition to the goblins, the fantastical elements include an apparent magical connection between the masks and certain prophesied events related to the city's nearby river.  Much of the narrative is devoted to exploring these mysterious connections, which Alexander does deftly, with vividly-told (acted?) scenes that move from act to act with rare longeurs.  Usually, these elements, when done as well as Alexander does in this novel, denote a satisfying read, yet oddly this was not my experience while reading Goblin Secrets.

There is a lot that is going on within the narrative and "behind the scenes."  Almost too much, as there were times that it seemed that there was too little exposition to explain what all was transpiring.  Furthermore, the Act/Scene structure is a bit convoluted at times.  While it does generally adhere to the introduction/rising action–climax–falling action/resolution of three-act plays, in novel form the action felt a bit too unbalanced toward the former "act," with the latter two feeling less defined and vital as the first. 

The characterizations for the most part fall along certain archetypes:  the innocent orphan waif (Rownie), the mysterious lost brother (Rowan), the evil stepmother-like figure (the witch Graba) and the fulcrum-occupying goblin actors.  Yet what Alexander does well is to imbue these characters with just enough distinctive traits as to make them feel life-like while still leaving just enough "space" for readers to imagine themselves (or others they know) in certain roles.  The masks are both figurative and literal in the tale and the switching of them does change character perspectives a bit, sometimes leading to bits that were confusing upon a first read.

Goblin Secrets is a work that frustrated me when I read it, particularly the first time a few weeks ago.  It contains a lot of elements that I typically enjoy in a fantasy (unique setting, different narrative structure, decent characterizations), but it just did not mesh well here.  There was little "wonder" by novel's end, just a wish that there had been.  Compared to the other fictions on the Young People's Literature shortlist, Goblin Secrets is perhaps the most flawed and least-realized.  It is a decent book, perhaps one that readers 10-14 might enjoy more than I did, but it pales in comparison to the other finalists.