Peter Galen Massey

In The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides tells the story of the five Lisbon sisters who kill themselves over the course of a single year, and along the way writes a mash note to youth and innocence, age and disappointment, and the Detroit of the 1970s at the moment when the city’s wealth and vitality begin to rot away.

Eugenides’ story is twee, and fantastic, and too cute by half until the last twenty pages, when he slips his knife under your breastbone, cuts out your heart, and holds it up, beating and bleeding, with a silent question: “This is life. Can you endure it?”

In Nick Hornby’s best books – High Fidelity and Fever Pitch – he manages to be a popular writer, a comic writer, and a serious writer all at the same time. Hornby equals the achievement of these books in his 2009 novel, Juliet, Naked.

Juliet, Naked tells the story of Annie and Duncan, an English couple slipping into middle age, and how they are affected when the reclusive ex-rock star, Tucker Crowe, enters their lives.

Annie and Duncan are exemplary Hornby-esque characters. They possess intelligence and some taste, but they are adrift in their work, and deeply uncertain of their feelings for each other. Duncan is also obsessed with Tucker Crowe and his most famous album, “Juliet”.

Annie tolerates this obsession until they disagree about a demo recording of the album’s songs – known as “Juliet, Naked” – that Crowe releases after twenty years of silence. The disagreement causes their relationship to fray. Annie attracts the attention of Tucker Crowe himself through a review of “Juliet, Naked” she posts online. And the story is off and running.

Hornby is a virtuoso of romantic ambivalence, and his talent is fully realized in Annie and Duncan. They are a portrait of all the dissatisfactions that develop when a relationship is based more on familiarity and convenience than on affection, and the scenes between them are funny, painful, and persuasive.

For example, here’s part of the scene in which Duncan tells Annie that he’s seeing another woman:

“Are you telling me you want out?” [Annie asked.]

“I don’t know. I did know. But now I don’t. It suddenly seems like a big thing to say.”

“And it didn’t earlier on?”

“Not … not as big as it should have done, no.”

“Who are you sleeping with?”

“It’s not … I wouldn’t use the present continuous. There’s been an incident. So ‘Who have you slept with?’ is probably the question. Or ‘With whom did this possibly one-off incident take place?’”

Annie was looking at him as if she might kill him with her cutlery.

“She’s a new colleague at work.”

“Right.”

Annie waited and he began to babble.

“She … Well, I was just very attracted to her immediately.”

Still nothing.

“It’s been a long time, in fact, since I’ve been as, as drawn to somebody as I am to her.”

Silence, but of a deeper and altogether more menacing quality.

“And she loved Naked. I played it to her last…”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

Tucker Crowe is not as convincing in his role of former rock star as Annie and Duncan are in theirs. Hornby tells us that Crowe was a talented musician who’s famous for recording a poor-man’s version of “Blood on the Tracks” and for possessing a series of beautiful, angry ex-wives.

But Crowe doesn’t seem like a man who was ever passionate enough to have recorded a minor masterpiece or destroyed multiple relationships. Instead, he comes across as the kind of funny, feckless, and self-centered Hornby character that excels at doing nothing with his life.

There are other problems. In the middle of the book, you can hear the machine of Hornby’s plot going clang, clang, clang and he falls back on his considerable comic gifts to keep the story moving. This part of the novel is still funny, but the humor comes from Hornby’s efforts, rather than rising from the characters and situations, and so loses its depth of feeling.

The good news is that Hornby produces a satisfying ending to Juliet, Naked once he manages to maneuver Duncan, Annie, and Tucker into a position where they all can meet. Hornby also does a pretty job of resolving many – but not all – of the discrepancies between Tucker’s rock-star past and his current personality.

The final pages of Juliet, Naked do leave questions about the story unanswered, but it suits the characters perfectly. To them, life is something of a muddle and never complete. It’s fitting that the ending of the novel they inhabit shares those qualities.

In 1Q84, the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami tells the story of a freelance assassin and an aspiring writer as they slowly become entangled with a sinister religious cult and the mysterious supernatural beings the cult worships.

Murakami sets his book in a parallel world that resembles 1984 Tokyo, except for the presence of two moons in the sky. (The title of the novel is a reference to this other world, with a “Q” that stands for “question mark” replacing the “9”.)

1Q84 combines elements of fantasy, thriller, and detective stories with questions about the nature, function, and meaning of fiction. The English version, translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, was published in the fall of 2011.

Murakami’s novel was widely expected to be a masterwork, but the reception among English speaking reviewers was mixed, with some hailing it as a major work of literature and others seeing it as a 1,200 page novel of no great substance.

I liked 1Q84 more than some of its critics, but I agree with those who think the novel is unlikely to find a permanent place among the world’s great books.

As an entertainment, I thought it was successful. I was never enthralled by the novel, but I did finish reading it, and I found its main actors, Aomame the assassin, and Tengo the writer, well drawn and appealing.

Only one character, however, a grotesque but finally sympathetic private detective name Ushikawa, burned with the convincing life that distinguishes great literary characters from their lesser brothers and sisters.

I also didn’t think all the references to artists, discussion of metaphysical ideas, or the novels-writing-reality and reality-writing-novels tricks (which are at least as old as Andre Gide’s 1895 Paludes), added up to very much.

They seemed more like the kind of fruits and nuts you might throw into a satisfying, but ultimately unremarkable cake, to make it tastier.

Finally, I thought 1Q84 lacked quiddity, lacked that strange and delicate alchemy which makes a novel deeply idiosyncratic on one hand and broadly universal on the other, and which distinguishes great books from merely good ones.

Fans of 1Q84 may offer two substantial objections to these opinions.

The first is that I don’t know if Rubin and Gabriel’s clear and workmanlike translation of 1Q84 reflects Murakami’s work or whether English readers have lost the rhythm and music of the original prose, not to mention the subtle resonances and associations which are particular to different words in different languages, but which are essential to writers of any talent.

To this I can only reply, true. That is a difficulty with any translation.

The second problem is the (reasonable assumption as it turns out) that I am largely unfamiliar with Japanese culture and society.

This means that if Murakami created a metaphorical history of Japan in 1Q84, or included large amounts of sociological comment, or has written significant elements of parody or satire into the novel, the chances are something better than 95% that I don’t get them.

To this I can only reply, also true. But it is a quality of literature that it transcends the time and place of its composition, and speaks powerfully to readers in other places and other times. That 1Q84 falls short on this measure does not make it a bad book. But it doesn’t make it an important one, either.

Fans of science fiction, with two weeks of glorious vacation reading time before them, could do much worse than pick up The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.

This four-novel series follows Severian, an exile from the guild of The Seekers of Truth and Penitence (ie, torturers and executioners) as he pursues his picaresque and ultimately momentous destiny on an earth so far in the future the sun is burning out.

Severian’s adventures keep the reader cheerfully turning pages, and Wolfe seeds the novel with enough time-bending, past-is-future plot twists and vague mythological-theological themes to feed late-night bull sessions in college dorm rooms everywhere, but the real delight – and the major accomplishment – is in the details.

The plants, animals, machines, buildings, cities, humans, and aliens of The Book of the New Sun consistently enchant with their originality and strangeness. And by creating a decaying medieval society, mostly forgotten and abandoned by other humans who fled to the stars long ago, Wolfe smoothly unites fantasy and science fiction. Excellent, guilt-free reading for August.