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30) Charisma by Steven Barnes

Um... Not too much to say about it. Competent genre fic, but not a book I'd rave about. I wish there were more substance to the romance between Renny and Vivian, I suppose. It felt impossibly inconsequential, like a sketch of a romance more than the real thing, and especially felt thin compared to the complicated and confusing relationship between Vivian and Otis.

The main children characters were relatively well-written for the trope of 'precociously adult children', but that's really all there is to recommend the book, unless you're the type who reads this sort of book regardless of its quality, like I sometimes am.


31) White Teeth by Zadie Smith

On the other hand, this was fantastic. Deep, subtle, and consistently hilarious. Smith's wit and imagination saved this book, I think, from becoming like a billion others it resembles.

White Teeth tracks the lives of three families in North London from the 1970s through the 1990s, dealing with immigration, assimilation, identity, religion, technology, family, and a host of other issues. And when I say a host of other issues, I mean it literally. There is a massive quantity of ideas crammed into this novel and a surprising number of them resurface in the dense, complicated, and dramatic concluding section.

The first family is Archie Jones and his wife Clara, a white middle aged Englishman who marries a toothless Jamaican teenager in a quest to reinvent himself and find direction in his life. It's an obvious mismatch, but Smith plays it with beautiful ambiguity, leaving the possibility of happiness open without hiding any of the reasons why happiness is an elusive goal.

Then we meet Archie Bengali former Army mate, Samad Iqbal, who has immigrated to Archie's neighborhood from Bangladesh with his equally young wife (Samad and Alsana were betrothed before she was born) in search of a new chance in the new world and finds instead a job as a waiter in a Bengali restaurant.

And then we advance time, slowly, and watch as their children grow up, become entangled and disentangled and struggle through the chaos and uncertainty of the '70s, '80s, and '90s, constantly moving toward a final confrontation when everything will be laid on the table.

None of these characters feel like stick figures. They're all given moments where Smith accords them respect, explains their motivations and their world view, and makes you sympathize with them. And then she moves them around expertly like chess pieces in the service of both elaborate and breathtaking jokes as well as deeper, more serious moments of truth.

This was the book, and Zadie Smith the author, that led to the coining of the term 'hysterical realism' to describe a movement in modern literature that encompasses Pynchon and DeLillo and Rushdie and Wallace and Smith. I like this movement, even if I recognize the coinage to be disparaging.

Can anybody recommend other 'hysterical realist'/maximalist authors of color?


tags: a:smith zadie, a:barnes steven, postmodernist, sff, bangladesh, british, jamaica, african-american