good stuff, end of summer edition

books only, will do movies and TV next time

My last batch of posts have tended toward the negative, probably revealing a negative downturn in my mood more than anything else. I’d like to try to balance that out today, not for some abstract “gotta hear both sides” bullshit, but because I personally don’t like or trust critics who are always haters. I am never not thinking of the skinny critic in Ratatouille who said, “If I don’t like it, I don’t swallow.”¹ This is supposed to be a person who once loved food enough to devote his life to it, but over the years the work of picking everything apart has curdled his love to hatred and disgust. And then he’s only moved to joy and a positive review when he eats ratatouille (the food, not the rat) that reminds him of his childhood. This is treated as a glorious moment in the movie but I think it’s deeply sad. The critic is only happy when presented with something that reminds him of something he once loved before he became so cynical. Nothing really new will ever penetrate.

But while I don’t trust critics who are haters, I also don’t trust critics who are lovers, the sort of person who giddily enjoys just about everything they encounter. Because there’s no specificity to their love, and usually not to their language either. Everything is “wow” “a triumph” “an important new voice.” Real love is particular; that’s why it’s so important to us. The person who loves everything doesn’t really love anything at all, because he doesn’t really engage with it: he doesn’t take it seriously enough to notice when it bothers him. It’s all just interchangeable praiseworthy content; just as for the hater, it’s all just differently-flavored fodder for vicious one-liners. The professional hater and lover alike could usually do their job by algorithm. They already have a fair idea, going in, of what they’re going to say.

Anyway, time to talk about two books I loved this summer, because I do love them, as particular and irreducible things.

Cahokia Jazz (2023)

I will never stop yelling about this book. You can’t make me. Cahokia Jazz is, briefly described, a 1920s alternate history noir set in Cahokia, a thriving Native American-dominated city that has an uneasy relationship with the broader United States. Francis Spufford—somehow, a white British academic—really considered each detail of his alternate history, and what sort of events would have needed to occur for this surviving Cahokia to have been possible, and what sort of myths would spring up (or have to be enforced) around it. In genre terms, it’s excellent world-building. The characters are also distinct, delightful, and morally complex in classic noir style; the murder at the heart of the story has all of the precisely-calibrated twists and turns and red herrings that are so necessary to the genre.² At the same time, Spufford avoids the linguistic trap that most neo-noirs fall into, where they attempt an exaggerated imitation of Raymond Chandler’s cadence and wordplay, and mostly come across like a little kid playing dress-up in a trenchcoat. Spufford’s language is largely sparing, though vivid when necessary, particularly during a scene with a cavalry charge that was—for all you genreheads out there—one of the most exciting action sequences I’ve read in a long while. I was literally cheering out loud. It’s been a long time since any book made me do that.

Anyway please read Cahokia Jazz, I am pounding on your door and I won’t go away until you do. Put your phone down. The police aren’t coming. I am the police.

(Also when you’re done reading you should listen to my friend Phil Christman talk about Cahokia Jazz on a podcast. Do it. I have a gun.)

Tam Lin (1991)

The woman who sold me my copy of Tam Lin couldn’t wait to tell me how much she hated it. She couldn’t believe I was so excited to have found a copy (the one I read as a teenager having been lost somewhere in my parents’ house, or given away.) “But nothing happens!” she said. “A girl goes to college, and there’s a ghost…and then nothing happens! For 400 pages! And this is supposed to be a fantasy novel!”

This is somewhat accurate. Tam Lin is not a fantasy novel like the last decade of fantasy novels, where everything exciting happens in the first 1-3 chapters or publishers won’t take it.³ Tam Lin would probably be called in contemporary terms a “slow burn” or “dark academia” (ugh): a story where layers and layers of institutional swaddling hide a deep eldritch secret.⁴

I don’t want to give too much away here—not that there is too much to give away, the novel is a retelling of the 16th century Scottish ballad “Tam Lin,” populated by classics and English majors at a Minnesotan liberal arts college in the 1970s—but I want to address for a moment how Tam Lin treats the pursuit of learning, and how different it is from many other campus novels. The best comparison might be with The Secret History, which came out the year after Tam Lin and is also about classic majors doing fucked-up things. I never quite understood the appeal of The Secret History, since I’d already read too many books which I thought were similar but better (Tam Lin; also a novel by Elizabeth Hand called Waking the Moon which I loved twenty years ago but haven’t re-read and can’t vouch for.) But anyway in The Secret History (as I recall, anyway), the classics are treated largely as a cultural stepping-stone for the clever but shallow group of main characters. Insofar as these characters really engage with the Greek and Latin texts, it’s to invoke them as excuses for the kind of aristocratic depravity (incest, murder of a school friend) that they want to engage in anyway. But the much more earnest and warm-hearted characters in Tam Lin really love the classics, and Shakespeare, and Keats: they memorize poetry and quote it to each other, with a depth and an intelligence that seems absolutely improbable in a modern setting, and maybe not that likely in the 1970s either. The difference between these two novels, born a year apart, is—more than anything else—a difference of genre. The Secret History is concerned with the social realm and class mobility, and “high culture” as a cynical cultural vehicle: this is what makes it realism. Tam Lin, which imagines loving art for its own sake—in fact, loving it too much, as a beautiful, deadly, and immortal thing, which itself attracts beautiful, deadly, and immortal things—can only be fantasy. It’s as sincere as fantasy can get.

1. He really emphasized “I don’t swalllllowww.” Ratatouille was a kid’s movie! where were the angry parents for this one????

2. I also really noticed (again) while reading Cahokia Jazz how often noir is engaged with questions of chivalry and self-sacrifice in a depraved world. All novels really are responses to Don Quixote—this is my new beat, I hope you like it because I intend to be very annoying about it for a while.

3. An exception here for The Empress of Salt and Fortune, which has a pleasantly slow start.

4. Many books categorized as “dark academia” are still terrific (looking at you, Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series) but the overuse of trope terms in book marketing is murdering me personally.