Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (review by Mr. Hurshman, Teacher)

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The action of this lengthy bestseller takes place in the first twenty years of the 19th century, when the two titular characters attempt a revival of magic in the British Isles. After several hundred years of dormancy, "practical magic" is making a comeback—just in time to serve England's interests in the Napoleonic Wars—but will the resurgence prove a blessing or a curse?

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is the only novel of its kind that I've ever encountered—a work at once of fantasy and of historical fiction that nevertheless seeks to replicate the realist style and comic sensibility of authors of the century in which it's set (think Austen or Thackeray or Dickens). In combining these elements, Clarke carries out a daring experiment that doesn’t really seem as if it should work. But the result is an unexpected alchemical triumph.

I would recommend Clarke’s novel to lovers of fantasy and lovers of 19th-century literature alike, but its ideal audience consists of those who love both. Its greatest pleasures depend on an acquaintance with the historical context that forms its backdrop and with the literary tradition that Clarke mimics and gently parodies.

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The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (review by Andrew R. '17)

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The premise of The Golem and the Jinni has an irresistible sort of cosmic balance to it: when a female homunculus named Chava and a male fire spirit named Ahmad collide in nineteenth-century New York, earth meets fire, the mythology of the West means that of the East, the Judeo-Christian tradition collides with one far older, and the ancient past meets the modern era. If only this novel could shed its affected writing, its chronically flat characters, and about a hundred and fifty pages, it might be able to meet this impressive potential. Wecker makes the unfortunate decision to relay the entire story in a faux-historical voice, weighing her sentences down with unwieldy vocabulary and convoluted syntax in a misguided effort (like so many other writers of historical fiction) to stay true to the literary style of the time she portrays. Uninspired prose might be excusable, but, in my view, weak characters are not; populating a fantasy world as Wecker does with transparent characters, single-minded and invariably “good at heart,” is a cardinal sin in any sort of fiction. I have to give the author credit for the alluring symmetry of her premise, but her execution is unremarkable and doesn’t nearly deserve the 500 pages it takes up.

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The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (review by Andrew R. '17)

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To call The Handmaid’s Tale a dystopian novel would be to do it a disservice: while the near-future mockery of American society in which the novel is set does, technically, fall under that category, the freedom-fighting and romantic entanglements that we’ve come to associate with the genre have no place in this book. On its surface, the story follows Offred, a young woman assigned to a high-ranking official in the Republic of Gilead and tasked with bearing him children. With birthrates falling below crisis level, Offred and the other “handmaids” of this brutal patriarchy represent the society’s only hope, but Gilead’s fanatical and fundamentalist codes of conduct force all women into submission, their lives characterized only by traumatic memories and a fervent hope for pregnancy. Atwood intends this novel, it seems, to be a thought experiment that extends systemic gender inequalities and the “family values” that perpetuate them to their most oppressive extremes, which may explain why Gilead is sometimes so hard to distinguish from the postmodern America it replaced. The novel’s dystopian conceit is so complete that its cast of characters tends to feel more like symbols than humans in their own right; still, The Handmaid’s Tale achieves a level of social-justice-minded indignation that very few other works of science fiction manage to attain.

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The First Bad Man by Miranda July (review by Lisa L. '16)

The First Bad Man by Miranda July
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Imagine aliens. Imagine supernatural creatures. Now, imagine that those things are your neighbors, behind the placid faces of housewives and the lady who works behind the desk at the local dentist’s office, and you have a basic idea of Miranda July’s eccentric novel. Like she does in her other works, July plays with interpersonal relationships in an extreme way; sex is like vanilla yogurt and violence is like a commercial break. Everything plays out in an almost hyperrealist way, with everything totally ludicrous but also plausible at the same time. The main character accidentally buys a hundred snails and they end up all over her apartment. And that’s a tame plot point. Miranda July has managed to infuse the banality of suburbia with madness, the kind of madness that lies quietly in all of us, the kind that only shows if we’re only brave enough to admit that it’s there. The First Bad Man is a contemporary novel that's definitely worth the read.

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