Reviews

The preceding posts are the full-length versions of reviews excerpted for Emily Toth's Ms. Mentor Column in the Chronicle of Higher Education this month. (It's her annual review and recommendation list for summer academic novels.) Because so many books made the list, and, alas, space is at a premium, very little of the original reviews could make it to print.

However, writing the reviews was a lot of fun, so I decided to post the full versions here.

I'm not sure this is going to be come a regular thing here. More like a sporadic halfassed thing, like many of the things I do halfassedly and spooradically...

The link to the CHR article is here. (I'm a judge, see?!)

Unseen Academicals: A Review

Like many of its counterparts in the real world, Unseen University, the leading training ground for wizards in Terry Pratchett’s Diskworld, is facing a budget crisis.

In Unseen Academicals (Harper, 2009), the wizards learn that Unseen’s dwindling treasury stems not from draconian budget cuts from the city’s Tyrant (he favors higher education), but from an obscure clause in a bequest from a long-deceased benefactor: the wizards have to field a football team, or lose their funding.

In practical terms, the loss of money means slashing the food budget by 88 percent. The wizards will have to reduce their nine meals a day to three, and cut the selection on their daily cheese cart from 30 to three varieties (“‘Three cheeses isn’t a choice, it’s a penance!’” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes”). But the austerity measures at this university, though deeply silly, are as unthinkable to the faculty as more serious cuts might be in the real world.

Crippled by their lack of athletic ability, and by the prohibition on the use of magic during matches, the wizards have one thing going for them: they don’t have to win. This is fortunate, because Pratchett’s version of the “foot-the-ball” game preserves the carefully calibrated on-field violence of Rugby and American football, while combining it with the unofficial bloodshed among soccer fans. Fatalities are common, though the police frown on property damage during matches. But the wizards want to win. They’re wizards. Allowing the townsfolk and yobbos to best them at anything would be inconceivable.

The story unfolds with the help of a polite young goblin with the crossing accuracy and striking power of a demi-human Gareth Bale. There’s a parodic Romeo and Juliet love story, as partisans of the two most powerful teams in the country fall in love (Think Boca and River, Real and Barca). There are just barely enough clever moments to balance out the occasional reprehensible pun, the inevitable obvious, eye-rolling joke, and the overall outright silliness.

While it satirizes higher education, Unseen Academicals also skewers heroic sports tales. There’s plenty of opportunity to root for the bespectacled underdogs—even when the “Distinguished Professor of Post-Mortem Communications” gets sent off the pitch after attempting to stab a defender. (“Who’s the bastard in the black?” the crowd chants.) There’s a rather good parody of R.W. Emerson’s “Brahma,” recast as an ode to Pedestriana, Goddess of Football.

An advantage to all this absurdity for summer readers is that this book will make the same amount of sense before the first daiquiri as it does after the fourth.

Unseen Academicals is a wild romp. All of Pratchett’s work is a wild romp, complete with clever nudges and winks for the well-informed. If you like wildness and rompery of this type, then the book is for you. If not, not. [B+]

[NOTE: this review was written as research for Ms. Mentor's column in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The link to the CHR piece is here.]

Pym: A Novel (Mat Johnson)

Mat Johnson’s Pym: A Novel (Spiegel & Grau, 2011) revisits Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel: the incredibly weird Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. This novel is no less weird, but a lot funnier.

Denied tenure for refusing to serve on his college’s Diversity Committee, African American Literature professor Christopher Jaynes stumbles on a previously unknown slave narrative that seems to confirm Poe’s fictional account of an unlikely paradise in the midst of the African Diaspora: a tropical island in the Antarctic where black people live free. Smelling fame, freedom, and the revival of his academic career, Jaynes procures a ship (the Creole), and assembles an all African-American crew: his ship-captain cousin (a foremer civil rights activist), two lawyers (who happen also to be the love of his life and her second husband), two gay engineers/extreme bloggers, and his childhood best friend: a laid-off Detroit bus driver who loves Little Debbie snack cakes and the twee, sentimental paintings of “Thomas Carvel, the Master of Light.”

But what begins as a quest for a black people’s utopia turns swiftly into an expedition into the Antarctic Heart of Whiteness, a region secretly populated by colossal, brutal, whiter-than-white natives (“super ice honkies” one of his companions dubs them). Johnson tweaks Conrad and Poe, and references Jules Verne and H.P. Lovecraft along the way. The protagonist of the original novel, Arthur Gordon Pym, makes an appearance as well.

Johnson’s work is fierce and funny satire. It’s more than parody of expedition literature, and not only a set of sly inside-reference puzzles for literati. It is also a serious meditation on racial identity and on the danger of falling prey to our own fictions.

[NOTE: this review was written as research for Ms. Mentor's column in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The link to the CHR piece is here.]