Reading between the Frames

The last two weeks have been filled with art stuff for me and I am not complaining. It does mean, however, that I’ve had less time to read so I’m a little behind on the coming soons. Still, we persist!

Village in the Dark by Irish Yamashita (Berkley, 2/13)

Village in the Dark is a second in procedural/thriller duology (series?). The first entry, City Under One Roof finds detective-on-leave Cara Kennedy snowbound in a self-contained city that doesn’t particularly want her and definitely doesn’t want her investigating a murder that happens in the tunnels beneath the complex. What impressed me most about City was Yamashita’s ability to bring the tension despite the characters’ inability to really move. The only thing I can think of to compare it to is… okay, did anyone besides me see Phone Booth? 2002, Colin Farrell, playing a philandering asshole, trapped in what is purportedly the last phone booth in New York (I think it may actually have been the last phone booth in New York) for ninety minutes being psychologically tortured by someone who knows all of his dirty secrets? It’s that kind of intense.

While Village in the Dark brings us back to the claustrophobic co-op, it also shows us a wider world, including: small-town (but more traditional so) Alaska, Anchorage, a commune in the woods, and the vast reaches of Denali. Yamashita maintains the tension, however, by chasing Cara, her band of off-beat usual suspects, and the reader, into remote corners and personal spaces, with a threat that has innumerable tentacles of all shapes and sizes. A well-armed threat with licenses to murder in fashions as grisly as needed with prejudice.

Yamashita also juggles multiple story threads with ease, neither dropping nor tangling a single one, teasing each out often enough to remind the reader it’s in play without confusing her, and making sure the braid is neatly tied off at the end.

My only quibble, and it’s a tiny one, is the resolution of the romance and it’s not even how it resolves; the people I was pulling for ended up together. My issue is the way they ended up together which I don’t want to lay out because it’s a huge spoiler but if you end up reading Village in the Dark, let me know what you think.

An Education in Malice by S.T. Gibon (Redhook, 2/13)

This book was not what I expected from the jacked description although, in retrospect, one of the character’s names sort of gives it away (in my defense, said name could have also been used to give the story genre cred so…). To be honest, once the ah ha moment hit, I was a little irked that I had been tricked into reading a (redacted) novel when I thought I was getting a creepy, Shirley Jackson-esque, “the real monster is people,” queer story. I haven’t read a (redacted) book that wasn’t a poke fun (pun intended) at itself comedy since the introduction of sparkle tits but you know what? I got over it because An Education in Malice is dark and weird and a little uncomfortable for the right reasons and I might have skipped it if I had known exactly what was involved going in.

In addition to asking the right questions about lust, love, youth, and eternity, Gibon knows her genre and has given us a scenery-chewing masterpiece draped in crimson velvet in a perfect package of midcentury manners and mores. Embrace the tantrums, the prissy doms, the prep-school flouncing, and the weird, unhealthy obsessions. It’s all to a very necessary purpose, you see. And if you don’t, you’re going to miss out on a very good time.

Don’t get book FOMO, people. It’s the worst FOMO.

Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X by Deborah Davis (Tarcherperigree)

I first learned about John Singer Sargent in a History of American Art class in college. Which is ironic because, while the child of Americans and, technically an American citizen, Sargent spent only a sliver of his life in the States. I was lucky, however, that both the National Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum were walkable from campus and both had several Sargents each so when I had to study for I test I just… went and hung out in front of the paintings for a while. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has a Sargent room that I frequented when I moved to that city for grad school, which had several of my favorites, including Carnation, Lilly Lily, Rose (on loan from the Tate at the time). And yes, it does glow like that in person.

I have always been most obsessed, however, with Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X. Why? Honestly, I’m not sure. Sometimes I can explain why I like art, sometimes I can’t. When the portrait was painted in 1883, everyone knew who the subject was; the scandal it created, however, led Sargent to request, when he sold the painting to his friend Edward Robison, director of the Met, in 1916 that it be displayed without Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau’s name (hence Madame X).

Robison did his job so well that when I learned about this portrait in the mid-90’s, my professor told us no one knew who the subject actually was.

Enter Davis. While she wasn’t the first person to reconnect Gautreau with Madame X, she is the one who wrote an intricate, engrossing story of a woman who was entirely erased from history for decades because no one bothered to check her copious correspondence closely enough to notice she used her middle name rather than her given first name so as not to be confused with her mother, another Virginie.

While I sometimes have difficulty reading non-fiction (I get hung up on trying to remember everything), Davis’s conversational style and ability to pinpoint both the most important and most interesting details of the story kept me moving through the book and this, “the more things change, the more they don’t” tale of a man thriving while a woman suffers the consequences of a scandal to which both of them contributed equally story. And yes, suffering is relative when one is as rich as Gautreau was but remember that she lived in a time when a woman’s job was to earn social caché for her husband to exploit for the financial benefit of the family - losing that ability meant losing not only her station but her purpose and her utility.

Definitely recommend for art history buffs, history fans, and lovers of society gossip who are sick and tired of the Tik Tok era.

Light From Uncommon Starts by Ryka Aoki (Tor/MacMillian Audio)

The above is the physical book link for Light From Uncommon Stars but I did the audio and I highly recommend it (only, and again very minor quibble is that the reader occasionally carries an accent over to a character it doesn’t belong to for a line or two. Listen, I said it was minor).

This is one of those books that’s really hard to describe. It’s about a deal with the devil and musicians and the fight for trans joy and aliens and donuts and finding love and also not actually about any of those things but definitely about all of them.

It’s absolutely beautiful and sometimes tragically sad and it will make you want tangerine juice and to learn to play and instrument and dream.

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Harper Audio)

Again, book link for one of my audio choices.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is much more lit fic than my usual and I can’t remember where I heard about it or why I decided to put it on hold at the library but I’ve waited almost six months for it because I missed my first turn in a flurry of having to finish Other Things. I’m really glad I remembered to put it on hold again.

This is a quiet story about a small town and the things that happen to the people in it, some of which are earth-shattering and most of which aren’t. It all centers around the town’s small aquarium and its “remarkably bright” octopus Marcellus, who’s absolutely smarter than most humans and who contrives to give the people he cares about their happiest possible endings.

Much of the novel is told, if not through internal monologue, than from the point of internal honesty, with the reader knowing what the voice character is doing and saying, and why, even if they don’t care to explain it to the people with whom they’re interacting directly. It’s an interesting place to be, and a little awkward; I spent much of the time wanting to help, wanting to resolve the tension, but unable to do so, a similar place to where I often find myself in life and I wonder if someone else reading or listening to the same book might feel differently. And if that is what Van Pelt intended, to write one book that evokes a variety of experiences, which damn, but also, well done.

And hey, she wrote an octopus I have an intellectual crush on, so she can probably do pretty much anything.

Current reads are: Convergence Problems by Whole Talabi and Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. More on those soon.