News of the World by Paulette Jiles

News of the World feels like a book I've read before, even though I'm sure I haven't. It has a classic odd-ball pairing: a grizzled, road-weary old man befriending a young, outcast girl. It touches all the right heartbreaking notes without being overly sentimental.

The story follows Captain Jefferson Kidd as he travels through Texas, where he makes a living by reading newspapers from around the country and world to small towns. He agrees to transport 10-year-old Johanna, who had been taken captive by the Kiowa, back to her relatives. Johanna's parents were killed in the Kiowa raid, and after living with the Kiowa people for several years, Johanna sees herself as one of them: she neither speaks English nor remembers her birth family. Not surprisingly, the book's primary focus is the growing friendship and respect between the Captain and Johanna. Existing somewhat outside of society himself after the death of his wife, the Captain understands Johanna's position in a way few other white characters do.

Traveling through Texas during Reconstruction, the Captain and Johanna must face lawlessness and constant threats. The dramatic dime-fueled shoot out is especially intense. But most of the novel is more languid, as the Captain considers his purpose and drive at this point in his life. Ultimately, the book suggests, life is about relationships and knowing what drives you. 

"Parable of the Talents" by Octavia Butler

I was ambivalent about Parable of the Sower, though I found it compelling despite myself. In many ways, Parable of the Talents is a better book, despite some the rush at the end. While both Sower and Talents are comprised of Olamina's journal entries, the entries in Talents are interspersed with reflections from Olamina's adult daughter, Larkin, who was born in the Earthseed community Olamina founds at the end of Sower. Larkin's perspective gives some needed balance to Olamina's single-minded devotion to Earthseed. Larkin rightly calls her mother a cult leader and is aware of the collateral damage of her mother's cause. Larkin's perspective doesn't make Olamina a villain--and she certainly shouldn't be viewed as such--but she does raise needed questions. Olamina's choice to build a self-sustaining community based on respect and loyalty is inherently good, but she insists on that community existing to promote her religion of Earthseed. It's that leap that's hard to swallow, even for people (and readers) sympathetic to her cause. Plenty of religions embrace change--the Christian "Serenity Prayer" comes to mind--but Olamina adds to her religion a goal of achieving the "Destiny": humankind's future belongs (literally) in the stars through space travel and human population of other planets.

There's an argument to be made (though it's not made convincingly in the novel) for such travel, but framing a religion around that travel seems doomed. Heaven, as a concept, works because it can't be proven/disproven and can't be achieved while alive. It's never-ending. Space travel, on the other hand, is finite and fallible. Olamina believes in the Destiny because she believes humankind needs a grand purpose--if not eternity in heaven, then a genealogical eternity on other planets. But what happens when they reach and populate another planet? Does Earthseed end? We don't find out, though Parable (improbably, given the apocalypse in Sower) ends with the first humans heading out to the stars.

But I'm quibbling with points that aren't particularly important to the novel. Instead, the bulk of the novel follows Olamina as Acorn, her Earthseed community, is founded and then later destroyed and turned into a Christian Reeducation Camp. The camp is run by fanatical followers of President Jarrett (who really does have the slogan "Make American Great Again"). The camp guards steal Larkin, kill Olamina's husband Bankole, and enslave the remaining community members. Olamina's time in the camp, filled with brutal violence and rape, is the hardest to read. The violence is important to establish the regime they're living under, though the didactic criticisms of fundamental Christianity are tedious, even if wholly deserved.

Given the detail given to Acorn's founding and later destruction, the ending of the novel rushes by, with Olamina almost immediately finding success and financial support for Earthseed. Again, given the apocalypse in Sower, it's hard to believe so many people are well-off and eager to support a single-woman cause. If nothing else, it speaks to the strength of Olamina's character, something that was clearly established in Sower. She's a young Black woman, but no one doubts her leadership or competence. There's enough strength of will to almost make the reader want to believe in Earthseed.

I've mentioned two of the novel's perspectives--Olamina and Larkin. The third comes from Marc, Olamina's younger brother who was sold as a sex slave. After being freed by Olamina, he becomes a preacher in the Christian church that enslaved Olamina, and he chooses to hide Larkin's existence from Olamina for years. Marc should be a villain, but he never quite goes there, a testament to Butler's writing. Like Olamina, he finds certainty and solace in a belief system that provides him with purpose.

Talents probably should have been two books (perhaps would be two books today), but it's no less forgettable than Sower and definitely more thoughtful.

Miscellany:

• In my review of Sower, I noted my confusion with Olamina's hyper-empathy syndrome, which seemed unimportant to the novel and inconsistent. It's even less important in Talents, and no additional information is provided, so I'm fully flummoxed by its use in the books.

"Moby Dick" by Herman Melville

I've done it. I've conquered the "white whale," the endlessly-metaphor-ready novel of English literature. And like Ahab (of course, because we're all Ahab), the path was long and treacherous, with high hopes, fits and starts, and (okay, the simile's not particularly apt) an entirely benign conclusion.

I started Moby Dick a few years ago, inspired by an educator's event at the Contemporary Arts Center on an exhibit inspired by the novel. One artist had drawn an illustration over each page of the book. "I'll read a page each day!" I had decided. I think I imagined I'd write some sort of response too. Though I did occasionally make annotations, the page-a-day petered out almost immediately. Still, I made some progress over the years, picking it up here and there. This year, realizing I had perhaps 100 pages left, I decided it was time to resolvedly confront the Leviathan.

It's funny how hard the book is. It shouldn't be. I've read significantly longer books. The prose is archaic by today's standards, but it's not more challenging than the prose of Melville's contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne (whose The Scarlet Letter I teach), and it's certainly easier than the more opaque post-modernist writers. It's simplest to blame the challenge of reading on the novel's structure, its frequent departures from the primary narrative. After all, Melville dedicates more pages to arguing that whales are fish than he does on the final chase of Moby Dick--but, then again, I love non-traditional books. Or perhaps it's the awareness that there's meaning that's just above your head, a sense that the teacher would laugh at you the next day when you innocently asserted the novel was "about a whale." But I'm an English teacher!

Probably it's a combination of all of the above, in conjunction with Moby Dick's vaunted position in the English canon. It's a book I found frustrating, boring, and tedious but also fascinating, funny, and compelling. I'm glad I read it.

Reading what I've written so far, it's clear that reading Moby Dick is more about the reader's journey (oh, the metaphors!) than the novel itself. Still, Moby Dick is, nominally, about the monomaniacal Captain Ahab's pursuit of the white whale, Moby Dick, who cost Ahab his leg. It's narrated by Ishmael, whose character frames the opening of the novel before dropping out completely. In fact, though Ishmael continues to narrate and is present during the final chase, he doesn't insert himself back in until the epilogue, after everyone else on the whaling ship Pequod has met their watery doom. The linear narrative plays only a minor role in the novel, however. Instead, the reader learns a lot about whale anatomy. About the heavenly feel of spermaceti. About Biblical references to whales. About other ships the Pequod encounters. About how easy it is to weave the word "unctuous" into prose. 

And we also learn about human purpose and fate, about our drive even in the face of insurmountable odds. I just finished teaching The Road to my juniors, and a student remarked that McCarthy's message seems similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald's closing line of The Great Gatsby (which we studied in the fall): "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." It's the same final message we get in Moby Dick, maybe the American message, or maybe simply the message of humanity. 

Come for the spermaceti. Stay for the message about us all.

"The Liar's Dictionary" by Eley Williams

The Liar's Dictionary has the appearances of a fluffy novel, or at least what "book people" would consider a fluffy novel. It's full of wordplay and obscure vocabulary; it treats lexicographers and dictionaries ambivalently, befitting both the seriousness and absurdity of their work. On a straightforward level, the novel is about a Victorian lexicographer who enters his own made-up words into the dictionary--and a modern assistant who discovers them. Much of the pleasure of the book comes from the recognition in these invented words, the sense of "ah, yes, that should be a word," or even just the sense that, despite the expansiveness of the English language, our words can only say so much. 

But Liar's Dictionary is a quirky book that doesn't quite meet expectations. By the end it's also a mystery or maybe a spy thriller or... I'm not sure? I was more baffled by the ending than I expected, leaving me to wonder if I'd missed something all along.

The novel alternates chapters. First, there's Winceworth, our sad-sack Victorian lexicographer, working on the "S" section of Swansby's Encyclopedic Dictionary. A hundred years later, there's Mallory, the sole intern for the never-finished Swansby's Dictionary, who mostly answers phone calls from a mysterious caller threatening attacks on the building.

Winceworth's chapters focus primarily on his relationship with Sophia, the fiancé of Winceworth's pompous colleague Fransby. What appears to be a story about a burgeoning romance between the two suddenly takes a turn when Winceworth ends up in an exploding train (for real) and Sophia turns out to be a Russian spy (?). The primary message, then, from Winceworth's story is his attempt at immorality through the invented words he sneaks in the dictionary. He realizes his actual person will leave no legacy, but his words can.

Mallory's chapters attend to her dry work at the dictionary, where she's assigned to find the mysterious invented words littered through the dictionary. She also has to contend with the threatening caller, who's presumably angry at the dictionary changing the definition of marriage to include the queer community. Mallory has an enthusiastic girlfriend, Pip, but is not quite out as a lesbian. Mallory and Pip's relationship is more satisfactorily concluded, though her section ends with an exploding building and insurance fraud (?) that I also found largely inexplicable.

Endings and overall cohesiveness aside, The Liar's Dictionary is still largely a fun book. Plus it reminded me of fantastic real words (such as "apricity," the warmth of sun in winter) and contrived ones (such as "agrupt," the irritation caused by having a denouement ruined," which I probably should have understood as a sign of the book's ending).