Zadie Smith and Nick Laird

    Quite by chance I have just read two books, one written by the wife, and one by the husband.
    The name Zadie Smith was enough for me to grab her book from the shelf in the library. I didn't need to read the blurbs. The other was a novel by Nick Laird--a name
unknown to me, but what caught my eye were praiseworthy blurbs by Martin Amis, Dave Eggers, and Michael Chabon. So I checked out the book, entitled "Modern Gods."
     Only when I googled Nick Laird did I discover that he is the husband of Zadie Smith and a poet who has won multiple awards. He was born in Ulster, educated at Cambridge and Harvard, and teaches creative writing at New York University. And 'creative' is certainly an adjective that can be applied to "Modern Gods."
    I went to the acknowledgements in each novel. Here is Laird's--"As always thanks to Zadie for everything." And Smith's--"Nick, Kit, Hal--with love and gratitude." Kit and Hal are their two children.
    "Swing Time" is the title of the Zadie Smith novel. A first person narrator is the daughter of a Jamaican mother and a white Londoner, and her life is closely linked in a somewhat obsessive relationship with Tracey, a near neighbor in a North London council estate. Tracey's father is Jamaican and her mother a slatternly white woman. The narrator moves with Tracey through childhood and adolescence, both going to dancing classes, where Tracey wins lots of prizes: and as their lives develop in different ways they are drawn together again and again. With Tracey's dancing career over, she is now the single mother of children by different fathers. And the narrator's relationship with her mother, who works her way from an elected position on the local council to MP, is also a major theme as the novel progresses. 
     The narrator (who is given no name) becomes a personal assistant to a billionaire singing star--just known as Aimee--and much of the novel is devoted to Aimee's establishment of a school for girls in a West African village. Aimee is a Madonna or Oprah figure.
    Zadie Smith is a terrific writer and I would certainly recommend the book. My only criticism--saying, perhaps more about me than Smith--is that there is too much detailed and lengthy attention paid to the West African scene, and--yes--I started skipping. The book is 450 pages. I sometimes wonder if in a book of this length the writer has no feel for how a reader's interest might be flagging--in spite of the quality of the writing, and whether an editor would ever dare to say to the author, "Zadie, this needs cutting."
    Nick Laird's novel is shorter by a hundred pages. It deals with a family in Ulster, with the historic backdrop of "the troubles," now supposedly sorted by the Good Friday Agreement. There are the elderly parents, she with a growing tumor, he increasingly tetchy. There are the three children, two of whom face life changing situations. Alison, divorced with two small children, is to marry Stephen, a man with a mysterious past that turns out--after the marriage--to be much worse than expected. Liz, an anthropologist teaching in New York, who finds her boy-friend in bed with another male and leaves New York to go--via Ulster for Alison's wedding--to New Ulster, an island off the Coast of Papua new Guinea, where she is to work as a presenter for a BBC documentary on a primitive new religion that has sprung up, led by a charismatic middle-aged woman who is clearly delusional. Strangely, I had the same reaction (it must be me) to Liz's sojourn in the primitive society of New Ulster as with Smith's West African scenes--just too much. I felt a better balance was needed between Alison's problems (and perhaps also with the scant detail of the life of the brother, Kennedy) and the macabre adventures of Liz in New Ulster.
    But--to be clear--I do recommend these two novels for the quality of the writing and the exploration of the minds of the characters, even if one does end up with a bit of skipping...

"Katalin Street," by Magda Szabo

    This is the third book I have read by Magda Szabo, the Hungarian auther, winner of many prizes in Europe. The first two--noted earlier in my blog--are "The Door" and "Iza's Ballad"--both of which I enjoyed,  and both of which I admired as excellent pieces of fiction.
      The novel covers three families that live together on Katalin Street in Budapest--the widowed Major and his son Balint and his housekeeper (perhaps more than housekeeper): the Elekeses--he a head teacher, with his wife, and two daughters--Iren and Blanka: and the Helds--a Jewish dentist and his wife and daughter, Henriette.       
      The families are all friendly--in and out of each other's houses, the children performing plays together, and Iren growing up desperately in love with Balint, who reciprocates in the earlier years (or does he have a soft spot for Henriette?), but after his prisoner of war experience in Russia there are problems...
       The novel is broken down into the events of years: 1934, 1944 (when the Helds disappear, and Henriette is killed), 1952, 1956 (the year of the uprising), 1961, and 1968. And we see the developments in the story through a number of different eyes.  As in the two earlier novels, there is a great deal of analysis of what is going on in the minds of the characters. In addition, Henriette comes back from the dead, as a wraith and observer, and once actually in the flesh, when she meets with Balint and he does not recognise her.
     We have the complexity of human relationships, love, jealousy, despair, mingled with the changes that occur over the courses of intertwined lives. Strongly recommended.

"The Sympathizer" by Viet Thanh Nguyen

    This book is lavishly praised, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2015. It was also one of NYTimes Best Books of the Year. I think it is terrific up to page 307, and then I found that boredom set in, and I skipped a lot of the final 75 pages.
    The narrator is an agent for the North Vietnamese, working undercover as a loyal South Vietnamese for a General of the South's Secret Police. The start of the book deals with the fall of Saigon and the evacuation of the narrator and the General and his wife and daughter to Guam. These opening chapters are a tour de force of writing, and thereafter the book never really recaptures the drive and drama of this opening. The General and his family end up in Orange County, California, and there is a strong satirical vein running through this section of the book as the narrator 'discovers' the United States, has a love affair, and gets involved in some nasty emigre killings. Eventually he gets caught up in a rag-tag collection of emigres who are intent on the hopeless task of reconquering the South. The narrator goes back with a small group into Thailand and ends up making an incursion across the Mekong River, where he is captured.
    The novels first 307 pages are written as a confession, addressed to the "dear Commandant" And then we move into the re-education camp where the narrator has spent a year in solitary confinement writing the first 307 pages of his confession. Thereafter, the author lost me.
    There are lots of glowing blurbs on the covers of the paperback edition...all quite brief..'sparkling and audacious,' 'Pulses with Catch -22-style absurdities,' 'Scenes worthy of Dostoevsky,' 'Astounding,' 'Powerful and evocative,'
And from The New Yorker, "The novel's best parts are painful, hilarious exposures of white tone-deafness....the satire is delicious."