I’ve written before about Conrad’s contemporary relevance and his interesting narrative design. Under Western Eyes delivers on both accounts. The novel is something like a response to Crime and Punishment, in that the story is about a crime in St. Petersburg, involves a cat-and-mouse game with the police, and concludes with a confession. Unlike in Dostoevsky, Conrad’s protagonist, Razumov, turns a terrorist into the Russian autocracy, and that is something of a spiritual crime the bulk of the novel comes to terms with.

The narrative is told from the point of view of an English teacher in Geneva, where Razumov eventually winds up. The narrator possesses a copy of Razumov’s diary and interprets it for the reader, adding his own commentary and experience with Razumov and with the love interest, Natalie, the terrorist’s sister. The teacher represents the west, and continually references how he and other westerners cannot truly comprehend Russian customs and the Russian soul. The novel is dialogic in nature, and interpretation and understanding is, I think, a crucial theme.

I’d like to reread this some day, because while it was an interesting read I’m not sure how to take it. On one hand, it’s like a character study (like Crime and Punishment), where the reader, like the narrator, attempts to interpret the characters by their actions and their words. But on the other hand, it’s a political novel that feels strikingly relevant. Just as the westerner cannot understand the Russian in this novel, so too (I think Conrad would argue) the westerner today cannot truly understand Islamic terrorism. One thing I haven’t settled on is where Conrad fits. Seems like I read somewhere that he didn’t care for the all the passion in Dostoevsky, and Under Western Eyes is a much cooler book than Dostoevsky would have written. At the same time, both authors are asking similar questions about liberalism and democracy and freedom, on the one hand, and autocracy on the other.

Whew, Jones is a wild writer. Many of the stories in this collection are told from the first person about a similar character (not sure if it’s meant to be the same character over and over, though it could be), a reconnaissance Marine during Vietnam and afterward. The man is a boxer whose father committed suicide when he was younger, and the stories spiral around that childhood loss and the loss of innocence in war and explores the violence in this character’s core. The character is an erudite womanizer, who holds his girlfriends at arm’s length and who waxes poetic about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. My favorite stories were “The Pugilist at Rest,” “Break on Through,” and “The Black Lights,” a trilogy of hallucinatory, drugged out violent stories set in Vietnam, as strange and punchy as anything out of Denis Johnson. For instance: “As I moved out of the jungle again with my new pack, I sounded like a couple of skeletons fucking on a tin roof and had to stop and repack it.” I also liked some of the post-Vietnam stories, especially “Wipeout,” where through humor and sharp insight he captivates you with a really unlikeable character. If I have a qualm with the collection, it’s that Jones doesn’t let his guard down much. These are dark, tight stories, and the heart is there, but it’s buried behind a tough-guy front, so I could only read so much at a clip before I needed to take a breath and regroup. Kind of like listening to a rock ‘n’ roll album loaded up on distortion and drum solos — I have to be in the right mood.

I’m a few years late to the Ben Percy party, but I’ll add my voice to the chorus of people who say Refresh, Refresh is a pretty good read. For one thing, Percy’s prose is sharp and driving; for another, he’s not afraid to play with genre; for a third, he tackles contemporary America admirably; and finally because he makes use of the Oregon landscape like a southerner would Mississippi (maybe he’s invented the genre, “Oregon Noir”). One could argue these stories are actually well-written horror stories, and that the collection could have been written by Stephen King if King made more use of loftier rhetoric. I’m thinking specifically of “The Caves of Oregon,” a ghost story (minus the ghost) about a couple exploring underground caves, or “The Woods,” where a father and son find dead bodies on a hunting trip. I like it when short story writers make use of form.

I will say, though, that some of the stories are stronger than others. “Refresh, Refresh” and “The Killing” are two of the better stories I’ve read all year, the first being about teenage boys whose fathers have been called to duty in Iraq, the second about a man whose daughter moves home after her boyfriend has beaten her black and blue. On the other hand, I couldn’t finish “Meltdown,” which takes the cool premise of life in a post-nuclear apocalypse. Percy is very precise in his descriptions of REMs and how the nuclear meltdown occurred, but he gets some facts wrong, confusing graphite fires (i.e. Chernobyl) with meltdowns from loss of coolant (i.e. Three Mile Island) and ignoring altogether the fast process of nuclear decay. U.S. reactors don’t use graphite moderators, so we wouldn’t have a Chernobyl situation, and while a meltdown is possible (and could create quite a mess), the nuclear dangers would wane quickly under the 7-10 rule (i.e., after 7 hours, the radioactivity is 1/10th as potent; after 49 hours, 1/100th as potent, after 2 weeks, 1/1000th as potent etc.). Maybe it misses the point to concern yourself with the physics behind a short story, but I think it shows a case where the horror plot is getting in the way of the art (assuming the art derives from a measure of verisimilitude, the vivid and continuous dream). All of that said, I like what Percy has aimed at in this collection, and admire his wild imagination.

In the Sunday NY Times, Silas House published an Op-Ed piece, “My Polluted Kentucky Home,” about the perils of mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. Do read it and pass it along.

I’m finding that I love Walker Percy, but maybe only in small doses. I got bogged down with The Last Gentleman, his second novel, much in the same way I got bogged down in some of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe trilogy. (I bring up Ford because he seems very influenced by Percy, both stylistically and philosophically.) Overall, The Last Gentleman has moments of sheer brilliance, such as oft-referenced Chapter 4, but maybe not a good one of Percy’s to start with.

The book is about a young man, Will Barrett, a southerner living in New York City and suffering from spells of amnesia and deja vu. He’s grappling with the meaning of life, drifting around aimlessly, when he meets up with the Vaughts, also southern expatriates. Barrett gets roped into accompanying the dying teenager, Jamie, balancing the wishes of boy’s father, his brother’s ex-wife, and his sister the nun. Meanwhile, Barrett falls sort-of in love with Jamie’s other sister, the somewhat empty-headed Kitty.

Barrett and the Vaughts hit the road, traveling through Richmond, Charleston, Georgia, and eventually ending up in New Mexico. As such, the novel is something of a picaresque, the form heightened by Percy’s satiric tone (Barrett is almost always referred to as “the engineer”). I enjoyed the panorama of the South, but I didn’t really connect with the characters, maybe because of the satire. Perhaps it’s not Percy I can only want to read in small doses, but rather satire. Much longer than a short story, and I tend to find satires tedious.

Yesterday I finished part 2 of Updike’s Rabbit series, and I blew through it as quickly as I did Rabbit, Run. I don’t have as much to say about this one as I did the first one. I think Redux is probably a better novel than Run, but what I liked most about Run was the culture of the late ’50s. I’m less inclined toward the culture of the late ’60s, which has been done and overdone. I will say it was interesting to see how Updike had his finger on the pulse of the time period, offering at times a shrewd analysis that seems like you would only have in hindsight. This book was published in 1971, and it seems written to engage with Nixon’s “silent majority” speech of 1969 (in this case, Harry is part of the silent majority). Granted, there are two years in between the speech and the publication, but that would be like a book coming out in spring 2013 that was written to engage with Obama’s Sputnik moment speech. That kind of turnaround seems tough to pull off. Maybe the book world was different 40 years ago.

Anyway, here we find Harry 10 years along, 36, doughy, working a dead-end job, and generally living an uninvolved life. His wife is having an affair with a car salesman, and that provides the catalyst both for the plot (Janice moves out, Harry starts his own affair with 18-year-old Jill, a junkie who brings with her to Harry’s house her black drug dealer, who is on lam) and for the book’s philosophical concerns (women’s liberation, civil rights, Vietnam, and ultimately an individual’s engagement with the greater socio-political world around him). It would pair well with Robert Stone’s A Hall of Mirrors, and with what’s happened recently in Egypt now is a good time to read a book like Rabbit, Redux. As in the first novel, Harry is something of a jerk, but unlike the first novel nearly everyone else here is a jerk as well. Nevertheless, I still found it engaging and am  looking forward to reading Rabbit Is Rich.

The stories in van den Berg’s debut collection are about young women who are unmoored, somehow, in their lives. In the opening story, “Where We Must Be,” a failed actress stops on her way back to northern California from Hollywood and takes a job as Bigfoot, where she gets paid to roam around a forest and scare tourists. Another story, “Inverness,” is about a botanist searching for a rare flower in Scotland while other scientists are searching for the Loch Ness monster. These characters tend to have jobs as scientists, to live lives of exploration, but what struck me about the collection was van den Berg’s tone. Her language is clear and unadorned, but there is a sad, searching in the voice here that really pulled me along. Take this quote from “Still Life With Poppies”: “Her marriage ending was not a shock; it was the spectacular strangeness of it that had left her staggering. She had been an ordinary person with an uneven marriage and a good job and the occasional adventure, unprepared for this life of peculiar and slippery grief.” Van den Berg’s characters are all in a place of “peculiar and slippery grief,” and for me it was the seamless blend of the peculiar and the ordinary that made these stories worth reading.