Paul Constant

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  • In, Memory, Of

    In, Memory, Of

    Emma Cline’s latest novel, Switzy, is about a wealthy old man who is going to Switzerland to die. Because he’s got dementia and his memories are failing him at ever-increasing speeds, he’s planning to commit suicide in one of the only clinics in the world where the procedure is totally legal.

    As someone who has lost several people to dementia, the narration of Switzy feels a little too convenient—the important goals that our protagonist can remember seem immutable, set in stone, in a way that never seems to happen in real life. If you’re looking to experience something like the feeling of losing someone to Alzheimer’s or dementia, Switzy does not feel like a genuine rendering. (The Anthony Hopkins film The Father is probably the art I’ve experienced that likely feels truest to what the experience is like from the inside.)

    But accuracy isn’t everything—it’s not even in the top ten qualities that I look for in a novel. What Cline is doing here is something a little different—she’s sketching out the life of a man in his last minutes, paring away everything except what’s most important. Memory loss is the perfect plot device to serve the concept—to commit a literary act of sculpture, chipping away one piece of the protagonist at a time until only the essential pieces remain.

  • I Have No Ideas but I Must Write

    I Have No Ideas but I Must Write

    If you consider yourself to be a sci-fi fan and you haven’t read Harlan Ellison’s short story about an artificial intelligence at the end of human history, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” you should do everything in your power to amend that error. Not all of Ellison’s work is aging well, but this story is the rare sci-fi classic that feels more relevant here in the far-flung future than it did on its publication.(It’s also a noteworthy work because it has one of the best titles in the entire history of fiction.)

    There’s a fancy new edition of the story in a standalone volume with all the special-edition clichés—supplementary documentation, a look at the history of the story and its impacts over time, that kind of thing.

    Unfortunately, this new edition also includes a piece in which sci-fi author J. Michael Straczynski interviews an AI about “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and reverentially reports back the AI’s hackneyed observations. It’s the kind of flighty idea that might have been forgiven had it been published three years ago when LLMs first made a big splash, but at this late date, when authors and artists are actively protesting everything that AI stands for, it feels weirdly credulous and incurious. It’s a shame that the latest publication of Ellison’s classic story has the stink of Straczynski’s essay stuck to its shoe.

  • When the Gossip Behind the Book Is Juicier Than the Book Itself

    When the Gossip Behind the Book Is Juicier Than the Book Itself

    If you’ve been paying attention to literary news over the last few months, you know that Rachel Cusk’s new novel, The Life of M, is supposedly a roman á clef about Natalie Portman. Cusk was supposedly friends with Portman, and rumor has it that Portman was furious that Cusk mined anecdotes that were shared between friends for a book.

    Unfortunately, the backstory is the only noteworthy thing about the book. The Life of M feels like a novel-length version of a Deuxmoi blind item. The reader is left to wonder about the realities of all the anecdotes in the book—who is the dancer who insulted M’s dancing in the “ballet film,” for instance? It’s hard not to imagine Cusk chuckling and muttering “wouldn’t you like to know?”

    I hated this book. It made me feel complicit in something dirty, and it didn’t offer anything beyond its sleazy backstory. The experience of reading The Life of M makes me retroactively question my enjoyment of Cusk’s other books. Avoid this one at all costs.

  • American Murder

    American Murder

    Anand Giridharadas’s latest book, Man in the Mirror, is a sharp left turn from his most recent two books, The Persuaders and Winners Take All. While Giridharadas became widely known for the broad social and class critiques of those two books, he has a long history as a practitioner of shoe-leather journalism.

    With Man in the Mirror, Giridharadas returns to those journalistic roots. This book, about the murder of a homeless Black Michael Jackson impersonator named Jordan Neely at the hands of a white ex-Marine named Daniel Penny on a crowded subway car, is the latest in a long tradition of great non-fiction explorations of an American city, like Mike Royko’s Boss or Sam Anderson’s Boom Town.

    Based on thousands of hours of interviews with eyewitnesses, policy experts, government officials, and friends and family of both Neely and Penny, Giridharadas builds a collage of New York City in the years 2023 and 2024. He correctly identifies 2024 as an important pivot point in how Americans talk about race and homelessness. The empathy that emerged in civic conversations during the Black Lives Matter protests and the pandemic seemed to run out, and conversations turned instead to sweeps of homeless encampments, increased policing of transit, and imprisonment as a deterrent for people experiencing mental health crises.

    Man in the Mirror is not a book full of easy answers, but it is a book that is full of human experiences, detailing the lives touched by mental health crises, violence, and deepening inequality in American cities. It’s a book as big, and as frustrating, as America.

    (Anand Giridharadas reads at Town Hall Seattle tonight.)

  • Assassination in Triplicate

    Assassination in Triplicate

    Murder Bimbo, Rebecca Novack’s paranoid thriller novel, features a textbook case of an unreliable narrator. The unnamed protagonist tells us the same story, three different ways.

    The basics of the story are usually pretty similar: She’s a sex worker who is recruited to kill a politician. But the details are always different. Was she recruited by CIA agents, or by some weird randos, or by white supremacists? How did she kill the politician, who she always calls Meat Neck? How does she feel about what she’s done?

    I really enjoyed the first third of Murder Bimbo but I have to admit the conceit failed to work its magic on me. As soon as the story started over the second time and the narrative became a kind of spot-the-difference game, the compelling characterization and powerful inevitability of the story came to an ear-piercing halt, and it never fully started up again.

    I do think Murder Bimbo would make a spectacular movie in the right hands. The visual cues of each telling of the central story would be fascinating to watch. But as a thriller, it stops to shoot itself in the foot twice, and it never limps to a satisfactory finish line, just staggering around in circles until the book runs out of pages.

  • Origin Story

    Origin Story

    I’m a ride-or-die reader of R.F. Kuang, which is to say I will read everything that she publishes just about as soon as it is available to read. She’s earned my fandom by being fearless in her career—she’s published a young adult fantasy series, a scathing publishing industry satire, an extended allegory about academia as hell, and a kind of anti-colonialist retort to Harry Potter. That’s some range! And each book is thoughtful and inviting in its own way.

    Kuang’s latest novel, Taipei Story, is yet another departure from the rest of her body of work. It has no fantasy tropes in it. It’s realism at its most pure. In fact, the reader gets the sense that the book is barely concealed memoir about Kuang’s time in a Chinese-language immersion program. (In the acknowledgements, Kuang thanks a professor who has the same name as a professor in the novel.)

    I imagine that this book will lose some of the people who gravitated to Kuang for her bold thesis statements about academia, language, and capitalism. This is a subtle portrait of someone taking an intensive course that is probably just a little bit over her head. Undoubtedly, some fans of Kuang’s fantasy work will be bored with the subtlety.

    But in many ways, Taipei Story is the purest distillation of Kuang’s many interests. People who have read her shelf’s worth of novels will find the source of themes and concerns that have vibrated through all of her work. And if the plot feels a little anticlimactic—it’s literally just tracing the experience of taking this class—that undramatized quality allows her the space to explore her interests more fully and thoughtfully than in any of her other works. I was mesmerized all the way through.

  • Her Own Worst Critic

    Her Own Worst Critic

    Taylor Tomlinson is my favorite working stand-up comedian. She’s a genuinely funny person who excels at crowdwork and spontaneous jokes, but the thing that really appeals to me is her writing. Her jokes are often exquisitely shaped and delivered, often with one word landing in just the right place to completely change the meaning of everything that came before.

    So I was excited to read Tomlinson’s new memoir-in-essays, Actually, Nevermind. If you enjoy her comedy, I recommend listening to the audiobook, which she reads herself. But if you’re not already a fan, there’s probably not a lot here that you can’t already find in one of her four Netflix specials.

    In general, I found the book to be kind of depressing because Tomlinson is incredibly hard on herself. She continually talks about how unattractive she is, she mocks her weight, and she throws off a few jokes that undermine her intelligence. They’re little asides—all unfounded, as far as I’m concerned—that suggest her internal critic has possessed uncontested control over Tomlinson’s self-image for probably her entire life. After a while, the negativity bummed me out.

    And a significant portion of the book is given over to Tomlinson’s story about what happened when she launched a late night game show following Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. It feels as though Tomlinson is doing damage control for a situation that didn’t need defending. She hosted two seasons of the show and then wanted to step down because it wasn’t working for her, but people in her orbit seem to have painted the whole experience as a betrayal of God, Colbert, and country that she must atone for.

    If you’re new to Tomlinson, I’d urge you to just watch her comedy specials rather than starting with this book. But if you’re a fan, why wouldn’t you want to spend a few hours with her in your earbuds? I’ll take all I can get.

  • TV Network Executives Are a Cowardly, Superstitious Lot

    TV Network Executives Are a Cowardly, Superstitious Lot

    Batman: The Animated Series was probably the last TV show I fell in love with as a teen. I was still in high school when it came on the air, and I made it a point of landing in front of the TV every day that it aired.

    It’s hard to explain to a non-comics fan how incredible that series was to someone who had been reading Batman comics since before he could actually read. It distilled the characters down to their purest essences, telling streamlined stories that stripped away years of silliness and waste. But most importantly, it took the comics seriously in a way that no other adaptation ever did.

    Daniel Dockery’s book I Am the Night is an unofficial history of the animated Batman series, piecing the narrative together from a patchwork of sources.

    It’s interesting how the show was slapped together in an effort to ride the impending success of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie, and just the right people happened to be in just the right place at just the right time to build something exceptional out of it. The cartoon could have just as easily been a quick and obnoxious cash-grab, but Hollywood happened to be fostering a new generation of animation artists who met the moment just as they were at the height of their powers.

    There are points where Dockery overreaches. I don’t think, for example, that it’s fair to compare Batman: The Animated Series with the works of Shakespeare for instance. But most of these nerdy works of journalism tend to suffer from moments of grandiosity, and they’re easy enough to ignore.

    If you have any emotional connection to the Batman cartoon or the decades of shows and movies that it influenced, you’ll probably enjoy I Am the Night, if just because it will confirm your suspicions that it was truly something special—a rare work of art jutting up awkwardly in a baldly commercial landscape.

  • If You’re a Book-Lover, There’s a Saturday Ferry Ride in Your Near Future

    If You’re a Book-Lover, There’s a Saturday Ferry Ride in Your Near Future

    This Saturday, September 26th, I’ll be interviewing Garth Stein and Miranda Mundt about their graphic novels at the Bainbridge Island Book Festival.

    Stein is the writer of Cloven, a series of graphic novels about a young Seattle boy who has the proportionate powers and abilities of a goat. The series, which is drawn by the fabulous Matthew Southworth, is doing something very interesting with Seattle as a setting—it’s holding a mirror up to the city and heightening our most difficult conflicts with the clever application of science fiction conceits.

    Mundt is the writer and artist of Muted, a polyamorous coming-of-age witch story that is, I think, just as relevant to comics fans now as the original Spider-Man comics were to kids in the 1960s. The comic was a smash sensation on Webtoons and is now collected into two beautiful volumes.

    This is going to be a fun conversation—I love bringing together a comics writer and someone who does the writing and art because they have such different ideas about the capabilities of the medium.

    Best of all, the Saturday programming at the Bainbridge Island Book Festival is entirely free. You should come and make a day of the festival—but be sure to join us at 1 pm at the Stan Pocock Legacy Rowing Center for what’s sure to be a fascinating conversation between these two comics creators.

  • Tossing and Turning Through the Pages

    Tossing and Turning Through the Pages

    Hildur Knútsdóttir’s debut, The Night Guest, is the kind of cagey thriller that begs you to read it in a single sitting. That’s how I read the book, and Knútsdóttir rewards antsy readers who are rushing toward the story’s climax with plenty of stub-short chapters and blank pages that play up the drama of the plot.

    It’s a story about an Icelandic woman who always wakes up feeling even more tired than she did when she went to sleep. There’s no medical reason for her weariness, or for the bruises and cuts that she wakes up with occasionally. As she explores her bizarre condition, the city of Reykjavik becomes the setting for a cat-and-mouse chase that could be nothing more than a cat chasing its own tail.

    I whipped through this book, and if you’ve been having trouble focusing on a novel I’d easily recommend The Night Guest. It’s one of those thrillers that’s almost more difficult to not read—a dirty, messy little thriller that leaves plenty of its gory details to the reader’s imagination.