What I read in quarantine
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“Will you think me affected if I number a small illness among the minor pleasures of life? Work is impossible and one can read all day for mere pleasure with a clear conscience.”
Having opened with that line from Lewis, which came back to me again and again as I quarantined with COVID a few weeks ago, let me offer two caveats: First, COVID was no joke. My throat burned, my head ached, I coughed until I threw out my back. (Oddly, I never lost my senses of taste or smell, the one symptom almost everyone experiences.) It was a small illness in the ultimate sense—I was never in danger of death or even hospitalization—but still painful and wearying. I’m still working against the fatigue from it. Second, I couldn’t read with a totally clear conscience. Unlike the thirty-year old Lewis who wrote this letter, I have a wife and three kids, and it was a struggle to listen to her feeding, keeping up with, and cleaning up after them in another part of the house and do nothing.
But I did read—and read and read. And that was a pleasure.
I read eleven books while I was in quarantine at home. I include here the nine works of fiction I read in hopes there will be something here to pique your interest if—God forbid—your quarantine time ever comes.
HHhH, by Laurent Binet
This novel dramatizes the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most evil and feared men in the SS, the man Hitler himself praised as “the man with the iron heart,” in Prague in 1942. HHhH is also a novel about the author’s interest in, research into, and despair over the story, and how he grapples to make it comprehensible as a novel. Compulsive, suspenseful, hypnotically written, and—for something so postmodern—sincerely and surprisingly moving. One of the best novels I’ve read so far this year. I wrote a full review on the blog here.
A Man at Arms, by Steven Pressfield
The latest from one of my favorite novelists, Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire. This novel revisits Telamon, a minor character who recurs across several of Pressfield’s other books regardless of time or place: Telamon shows up in the Peloponnesian War, in the campaigns of Alexander, and even in a speculative future in which an American Caesar returns from abroad to take over as dictator. Here, Telamon is an ex-legionary at large as a mercenary in first century Judaea, where he finds himself pulled into a mission to track down and stop a messenger sent by the notorious Paul. The messenger carries a letter with subversive contents, and Telamon’s pursuit, capture, and his dramatic change of attitude toward his mission clips along at a very fast pace.
There is vintage Pressfield here—the blunt violence, the evocation of a faraway time and place, the vivid sensory quality of his descriptions of heat, exhaustion, and pain—but in its pacing, its spareness, and its willingness to keep the characters mysterious to us it also reads like late Cormac McCarthy. This is a good thing. I enjoyed A Man at Arms immensely, and if a cross between Ben Hur, Gates of Fire, and No Country For Old Men sounds good to you, you probably will, too.
52 Pickup, by Elmore Leonard
Harry Mitchell, a prosperous factory owner, a veteran who worked his way to the top, cheats on his wife once and suffers the consequences—blackmail. And it gets worse from there. The blackmailers have film, they have the girl, and they make it clear that they have no qualms about killing. But they’ve also underestimated Harry and how hard he’ll fight back.
The setup doesn’t sound terribly original, but Leonard’s execution is impeccable. This is one of the best and most suspenseful of his crime novels that I’ve read. It’s also the sleaziest, as it takes its hero into the underbelly of 1970s Detroit in his search for the blackmailers. These are a uniformly wicked lot—stoners and pornographers and murderers-for-hire—who, like so many of Leonard’s teams of bad guys, eventually fall foul of each other through jealousy, backbiting, and greed. Eventually, they start murdering each other. Only the most evil of them will remain, by that point a desperate and deadly threat to Harry and his wife. When the various strands of plot developed through the novel come together at the end, the tension is magnificent.
In the insightful University Bookman review that first convinced me to check Leonard’s work out, writer Will Hoyt notes Leonard’s focus on “moments of truth” in his fiction as well as the influence of Leonard’s Catholic upbringing on his work, an influence one can feel palpably in his Westerns, to be sure, but elsewhere once you’re attuned to it. Read 52 Pickup with the sacrament of confession in mind—and what is confession but a literal moment of truth?—look at the role that the confession of sin plays in the plot—not only for our compromised hero Harry but for the other characters as well—and you begin to understand why Leonard’s highly commercial crime fiction can also be so thematically rich.
This is a great work of genre fiction and, like all of Leonard’s best work, it’s elevated by his style—his sound—and the difficult proving that he puts his characters through.
Later, by Stephen King
A young boy who can see ghosts, a mother at her wits’ end, messages delivered from beyond the grave, and a crisis that must be resolved—to the possible detriment of the boy himself. Later is The Sixth Sense as told by Stephen King. This is not a put-down; it’s vividly imagined and the scenarios dreamed up by King are engaging, with the narrator’s gifts always employed or used in inventive ways.
But the story lagged or proved predictable in places, especially the climax, and I found myself most interested in the middle chunk of the plot, in which the narrator’s mother—a literary agent teetering on the brink of bankruptcy owing to the 2008 crash—recruits him to take dictation from a recently deceased author who died with the final book of his series left unfinished, a long episode that proved genuinely original and even funny. I was also annoyed by some of the inevitable Stephen King attitudes he just can’t help throwing into the mix: the too-breezy narration he’s relied on for the last twenty years, a galumphing structure, and especially the simplistic characters. For example, you know one character is bad because she owns a gun, once harbored suspicions about Obama’s birthplace, and likes John Boehner (has anyone ever liked John Boehner?). Further, the narrative voice, so often a strong suit in King’s first-person narration, slips from believability all too often; I just did not believe the narrator was a teenage boy of the early 2010s.
It also—and I doubled back to make sure I mentioned this—has an utterly atrocious surprise revelation at the end. It’s not really a twist as it’s not plot-related, but it’s so ludicrous and has implications so appalling that King’s casual handling of it, an “Oh, by the way” approach incommensurate with what he’s revealing, is the biggest surprise of all.
But Later was still a fast-paced and enjoyable read. I blitzed through it in two days and didn’t regret it, even with King’s annoying tics on display and that terrible final act surprise.
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
I last read Animal Farm my freshman year of college, in the fall of 2002. I reread it in an evening. A masterpiece. This novella is richer and more meaningful, more deeply steeped in history and human nature than I could possibly grasp at the time, and is probably the best-conceived and executed allegory in modern English literature. Furthermore, Orwell’s message—and it is a message novel—is still relevant in our age of wannabe revolutionaries.
The Great Gatsby, by F Scott Fitzgerald
I somehow made it to the age of 37 without ever having read The Great Gatsby, which, if not the Great American Novel, is certainly the Great American High School Reading Assignment.
Do I need to summarize the plot? Probably not. But I approached it already knowing the broad outlines and was still drawn in thanks to the economy and power of Fitzgerald’s writing and especially thanks to the world he evokes, the tides of emotion and personal history flowing through each character as part of a larger scene. It’s evidence that a good story is essentially spoiler-proof.
In a way, I’m glad I didn’t read it until now, as Fitzgerald is doing things here that I’m not sure high schoolers can fully comprehend at their age and with their lack of experience. A friend on Instagram suggested that the best parts of Gatsby would be lost on them, and I suspect he’s right. This is a carefully crafted and powerful novel, beautifully and evocatively written, and I can understand now why it has become a classic.
The Eighth Arrow: Odysseus in the Underworld, by J Augustine Wetta, OSB
The best surprise and perhaps most enjoyable read of my quarantine, The Eighth Arrow follows Odysseus in a last-chance bid to escape Hell. Yes, that Odysseus, and yes, that Hell.
The novel begins just after Dante and Virgil have passed by Odysseus and his old comrade Diomedes where they burn together in the circle of the frauds. A mysterious woman, a Parthenos but explicitly not Athena, responds to Odysseus’s cry for deliverance and the pair find themselves back at the gate of Hell, armed and armored. For food they have a bag of bread that the denizens of Hell—be they the damned or the demons guarding them—all react to violently. All they know, thanks to one fallen angel, is that “It isn’t just bread.” It also has the strange property of restoring to bodily form any of the shades who eat of it. And the Parthenos sends them on their way with one command: to prefer mercy over justice.
There’s a lot going on here.
The Eighth Arrow draws deeply on Homer, on Dante, and on Christian theology in this energetic and wildly inventive new story of grace and salvation. Odysseus barely knows what’s happening to him, why he has gotten this second chance and to what end he is being drawn, and he only slowly becomes aware of the transformation taking place in him as he climbs lower and lower, a man of violence and guile forced to work differently and slowly, through no power of his own, becoming able to.
This is one of the best fictional depictions of grace at work that I’ve ever come across. But it’s not just a theological treatise, a basket of Easter eggs for mythology nerds, or another iteration of a great Christian allegory. The Eighth Arrow is also a blast—a gripping adventure story, a brilliantly imagined fantasy, and a profoundly moving meditation on death, loss, and our relationships to each other. Odysseus’s reunion with Penelope moved me almost to tears, and the Odysseus and Diomedes of this novel are one of the best realized male friendships I’ve come across in fiction.
A great novel on many levels. I hope y’all will check it out.
Under the Lake, by Stuart Woods
This novel came recommended on the basis of its setting—an artificial lake in the northeast Georgia mountains, a setting with which I am intimately familiar. And I have heard rumors that the fictional Lake Sutherland in Woods’s novel was inspired specifically by Lake Burton in my home county. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but Woods writes well enough that I could see his imagined lake and even smell the old cabin his protagonist retreats to at the beginning of the story.
The setting is well done, as is the setup. A Pulitzer-winning former newspaper reporter takes an unwanted commission to write the memoirs of a fried chicken restaurateur and heads to the lake to work on the project. As soon as he arrives, strange things happen. He is greeted brusquely by the grand old man of the town, who is no kind and gentle soul but seems unnecessarily hostile. He hears bits and pieces of rumor from various folks in town, none of which they are willing to elaborate upon. He recognizes a young secretary at the sheriff’s office as an up and coming Atlanta reporter. A friendly gas station employee lets slip that he wouldn’t be caught at that cabin after dark. A blind albino repairs the cabin’s piano, the boy’s mentally handicapped brother brings him firewood, and both speak mysteriously of their mama and her powers. And, late one night, he has a vision of a young girl standing in his cabin, staring out at the cove beyond the cabin’s dock.
This is a brisk page-turner, and though it transforms from a Southern Gothic tale—Woods really lays this on thick at the beginning, as you can probably tell—into a pretty standard detective story about midway through, there’s still enough of the eerie and uncanny to keep you reading. The characters are interesting but largely one-dimensional, and I didn’t for a minute believe that so many nubile and licentious young women would throw themselves at the balding middle-aged protagonist the way they did. And the final act goes totally off the rails, with twist upon twist coming one after the other and revelations so over-the-top that I just couldn’t believe it any more. At this point it becomes a melodramatic potboiler and doesn’t look back.
But even with its silly final act—including, oddly, a revelation with parallels to that in King’s Later above—Under the Lake was a fast and enjoyable read. I’ll probably check out more of Wood’s fiction one of these days.
The Son of Laughter, by Frederick Buechner
One of the best for last. I’ve recommended Buechner’s fiction here before. His novels Godric and Brendan shaped my artistic sensibilities at a pivotal moment, and I got The Son of Laughter years ago meaning to read it. I’m sorry it took COVID to make me get around to it, but I’m not sorry to have read it when I did or to have ended my quarantine reading on such a high note.
The Son of Laughter retells the biblical story of Jacob. That’s all I’ll say about the plot. If you know Genesis you know Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. This is a multigenerational character study and an exploration of a family’s covenant with the Fear—which is how Buechner’s Jacob refers to God throughout. It’s incredibly powerful, and succeeds especially well at perhaps the most difficult challenge facing a novelist who dares retell such a familiar story—it makes the story strange, unexpected, and surprising again. It even made me admire Esau, something I never would have expected.
The strangeness especially is crucial. These characters are not flannelgraph cutouts or 1950s Hollywood types in bathrobes. These are flesh and blood people from an utterly alien time and place doing what people of that time and place must—fighting, sacrificing, making vows, marrying and procreating, and, especially, working—and all under the promises made to them by the Fear. Buechner brings this world to life in vivid detail, from the omnipresent idols to the startling way men seal their vows to one another, making this story real and powerful in a way I haven’t before experienced. Especially powerful is his emphasis on—to repeat myself—the flesh-and-blood lives of these people. A late section in which Jacob suddenly realizes that the rowdy brood he is raising, offspring of four women and begotten on the backside of the desert, is the Fear’s promise moved me to tears. Jacob’s three reunions—first with Esau, then with his father, and finally with Joseph—are equally moving.
This is only the third of Buechner’s novels that I’ve read, but it may be the best. I highly recommend it, especially if you’d like to see an old story in a new way or desire a vision of how God uses real people, flawed as they are.
Conclusion
So of the nine works of fiction I read during my two weeks of coughing, sleeping, and drinking Earl Grey, the following are the three best: HHhH, by Binet; The Eighth Arrow, by Wetta; and The Son of Laughter, by Buechner. Animal Farm and The Great Gatsby are classics that it feels pointless to judge against the others. 52 Pickup and A Man at Arms, in the middle tier, are solid entertainments that offer a bit more substance to them than you might expect. Under the Lake and Later stand at the bottom, though I enjoyed and read rapidly through both. Perhaps I should say you aren’t missing anything if you miss those, but you’d be foolish not to read the ones at the top.
Thanks for reading! I’m glad to be mostly recovered from that bout with the ‘rona and grateful to have been able to read so much. I hope y’all have enjoyed these short reviews and that you’ve found something here you’ll enjoy.
