The Book of Night Women v. Big Machine
presented by
QUARTERFINALS
The Book of Night Women
v. Big Machine
Judged by Carolyn Kellogg
Carolyn Kellogg is a critic and blogger for the Los Angeles Times. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I think we’re good—I tally one drink, two phone interviews, and two and a half passing meetings. I reserve my vacations in Turin to Nobel prizewinners. Weeks after judging the two books, I found myself sitting next to Marlon James at a dinner in New York.”
Oh goody: It falls to me to knock one of two brilliant young black male novelists out of the race. Thanks a lot, Tournament.
This is a contest of new fiction versus tradition. LaValle’s Big Machine is a mash-up of literary horror and quest tale, family drama and underground adventure, sprinkled with dry humor, and aflutter with loose ends, slipstream-style. Then there’s The Book of Night Women by Marlon James, a slave narrative. Or should I say, another slave narrative.
When I tell you that I have a Pynchon tattoo, you won’t be surprised that I started with Big Machine.
The first hundred pages are a slow, cold slog, as protagonist Ricky Rice, a 40-ish ex-junkie, is summoned by the mysterious Washburn Library in Vermont, where he and a handful of other African Americans with slightly sordid pasts become a new class of unlikely scholars, researching unexplained phenomena. There is a lot of reading in isolation, which, with its dubious real-life merits, is fatally dull in fiction: Imagine the first season of The X-Files showing nothing but Mulder sitting at his basement desk. It’s hard not to picture a residency-anointed novelist, ensconced in a snowy retreat, lunches delivered (just as Ricky’s lunches are delivered), staring out the window with nothing to write.
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The momentum picks up when the narrative splits: Ricky is sent on a mission and he remembers his childhood in a religious cult. But it’s artificial—why did Ricky spend 100 pages in contemplation without his mind wandering to his childhood, only to have it surface so prominently once he’s on the road? In a too-long run of tiny alternating chapters, the childhood and his quest are on equal footing. LaValle ends these chapters with cliffhanger after cliffhanger—thrilling at first, it soon feels as manipulative as a bad soap opera. Slap! Cut to commercial.
New elements thrown in the mix make the story less and less cohesive—an awkward religious allegory, swamp things, a mysterious illness, suicide bombers—and LaValle leaves many essential questions of how the whole thing fits together unaddressed. There is something like a battle for good and evil going on, but the lines can’t stay put.
Nor can the narrative voice, which begins with Ricky saying he’s a career janitor working at a bus station. He gets an envelope and goes into the bathroom to read it in private.
I went into the third stall, the last stall, so I could have my peace. Soon as I opened the door, though, I shut it again. Good God. Me and my eyes agreed that the second stall would be better. I don’t know what to say about the hygiene of the male species. I can understand how a person misses the hole when he’s standing, but how does he miss the hole while sitting down. So, it was decided, I entered stall number two…. [He opens the letter, finds a bus ticket, is interrupted, and a slip of paper falls from the envelope.]
I saw that little cream-colored sheet, no bigger than a Post-it, flat on the floor of filthy old stall number three.
Let me be more precise.
Flat on the floor, in a gray puddle, in filthy old stall number three.
Forget it.
Better to leave it behind than dip fingers in the muck on that floor. Even wearing gloves didn’t seem like enough protection. Maybe a hazmat suit.
He doesn’t sound like someone who deals with shit all the time, he sounds like an amusing novelist. The character’s cracks are showing—and that’s in the first five pages.
This is not the case for The Book of Night Women. The narrative voice rises up from the page and in a frenzy demands attention. Devotion.
People think blood red, but blood don’t got no color. Not when blood wash the floor she lying on as she scream for that son of a bitch to come, the lone baby of 1785. Not when the baby wash in crimson and squealing like it just depart heaven to come to hell, another place of red. Not when the midwife know that the mother shed too much blood, and she who don’t reach fourteenth birthday yet speak curse ‘pon the chile and the papa, and then she drop down dead like old horse. Not when blood spurt from the skin, or spring from the axe, the cat-o’-nine, the whip, the cane and the blackjack and every day in slave life is a day that color red. It soon come to pass when red no different from white or blue or black or nothing. Two black legs spread wide and a mother mouth screaming. A weak womb kill one life to birth another. A black baby wiggling in blood on the floor with skin darker than midnight but the greenest eyes anybody ever done see. I goin’ call her Lilith. You can call her what they call her.
Now that is a motherfucker of a first paragraph.
And The Book of Night Women lives up to its promise. Sticking close to Lilith, it tells her story, from a childhood in the sort-of-free house of a whore to her adult years living in the plantation house. The voice has a rhythm of its own—how Jamaican slaves spoke 200 years ago may be largely lost to history, but James’s invention is complete, convincing, and beautiful.
Eighteenth-century Jamaica is written from the inside out, from basements and kitchens, in fervent conversations between women named Homer, Gorgon, Circe, and Pallas; at the Montpelier estate, the overseer Jack Wilkins had a thing for Greek mythology.
This might be heavy-handed if another author tried it, but James pulls it off. The book is so immersive that there’s no space to wonder about allegories until you set it aside. And you may have to—there is horrific violence. Blacks in Jamaica outnumbered whites 10 to one, and the measures white slave-owners and black johnny-jumpers would take to maintain order are suffocatingly brutal. Whereas I set aside Big Machine out of exasperation and boredom, I only put down The Book of Night Women when I was so full up with its stories and intensity that I couldn’t take in any more.
It all hangs on Lilith, a character maddening in her self-centeredness and self-effacement, her bullishness, her distrust. She often behaves badly, falling for the wrong guy, pushing away allies, saying the most unwise things. She lives, fiercely, at the intersection of impossible loyalties, driven by anger and occasionally hope. Even when she’s petulant and contradictory, she feels like a whole person, one who can and does make surprising choices. Lilith is impossible, imperfect, and unforgettable.
Slave narratives, like Holocaust stories, are supposed to come with some nobility-of-spirit theme. This is, thankfully, not that kind of book. Lilith, who comes into the world bathed in blood, is both shaped by external violence and empowered by the darkness inside; it’s that least human part of her that enables her to survive. This is troubling and complex, yet not without grace.
For all this book’s terrors, there is the beauty in the language, the remarkable Lilith, and the unfolding of a secret history. The Book of Night Women is stunning.
The winner? Marlon James. It was really no contest.
Advancing:
The Book of Night Women
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin: Obviously we didn’t deliberately construct this year’s ToB in order to force Carolyn Kellogg to oust a promising young black novelist from the tourney, just as we also didn’t plan on me writing a cogent commentary while trying not to think about the location of Carolyn Kellogg’s mythical Pynchon tattoo. I guess we’re even.
John: Given Pynchon’s reclusiveness, I have to wonder exactly what that tattoo might be. Is it of Pynchon himself? Perhaps this old, Ed Grimley-esque version? The mind reels.
Kevin: Let’s continue the conversation we had yesterday about the kinds of novels that stimulate our pleasure centers. Knowing nothing about these two books other than the jacket copy, I would have chosen Big Machine over The Book of Night Women. I just dig that kind of book. What are we calling it now, speculative fiction? (I guess that’s also sort of what I write, now that I think about it.) The Book of Night Women has been praised so eloquently by so many people I respect, however. There is you, whom I have known for more than a decade, and Max Magee, and now Carolyn Kellogg, whom I have read for years and about whose bicep or ankle or possibly left shoulder blade I have recently started daydreaming. I will read that book now. And also Big Machine, but probably Night Women first. This is how the TBR list shuffles.
Speaking of which, yesterday you generously volunteered to recommend books to readers based on the last five books they enjoyed, kicking off an internet phenomenon. (Due to the high-volume demand, the recommendation machine is closed for now, but we’re looking into ways to revive it later.) It was great fun and kind of fascinating to watch.
I’ll also argue without any proof that this is fundamentally different from the kinds of recommendation machines offered by Amazon, which base their suggestions on customer purchases, or even Netflix, which bases recommendations on customer ratings. You are looking at the books these readers like and turning that into assumptions about the person, which leads you to a particular title. There’s a human element that tries to address the voodoo of reading we discussed earlier. It’s a Rorschach test of sorts. Even though it’s nothing more than a list followed by your recommendation, it feels almost voyeuristic to read through them.
John: I’m actually a big user of the Amazon suggestions, not in the sense that I click away, virtually hurling things into my online shopping cart, but it often puts books on my radar that I’m unlikely to be aware of otherwise.
As Carolyn Kellogg well knows, the shrinking review space in our major media outlets means there’s just a lot less coverage of books, and the coverage that does exist tends to cluster around a relatively small handful of titles. Because of the massive Amazon customer base, we’re looking at a true wisdom-of-crowds-type phenomenon where I can get access to the radars of everyone who reads books remotely similar to me. It’s what makes Amazon really function like a bookstore because it replicates (using data and algorithms) what independent booksellers do—establishing an ongoing relationship to a reader and helping to guide their choices into the most promising territory.
It’s why I think a store like tourney sponsor Powell’s remains so vital. At the amazing flagship store specifically, they have literally everything and there’s actual human beings inside that can help you work through the choices.
I’ve mentioned this in previous commentaries, but my mother owned an independent bookstore from when I was age one to 22, and it was this service, the ability to suggest books that her clientele would like, that kept it going. (It still exists, meaning it’s closing in on 40 years. Even when Crown came to town in the ‘80s with their loss-leader bestseller discounts, my mother’s shop was able to weather the storm because she provided a demonstrably valuable service.
We talked about it in a previous commentary, how books tend to resist mass marketing, and I think people’s willingness to take a recommendation from me illustrates that. My belief is that advertising and marketing books can only achieve one thing: awareness. After that, if a book is going to succeed, it’s going to be a function of word of mouth.
I worry as much as anyone about the hegemonic tendencies of Amazon, particularly in the burgeoning digital market, but the free marketer in me has to be impressed with their ability to create a place that extends far beyond a simple act of e-commerce and helps to create a kind of book community.
Kevin: I’m not at all trying to dump on Amazon (which also offers customer reviews, etc.), but I’ll also argue that there is something qualitatively different between a person making a recommendation and the Cyberdyne netbots making one. There’s a value to that, but it’s not equal to a person who considers not just that you once purchased a particular book or even that you once enjoyed a particular book. The human being also factors in why you enjoyed it and compares that to her own reading experience.
The pleasure of reading is surely one of the things that makes us human and I’m not ready to turn the process over to artificial intelligence.
One reason to resist a complete surrender to the e-book is that physical books lined up on actual shelves remind us that art is not a commodity. Consuming it requires thought. It requires thoughtfulness. It’s the one thing I disagreed with in that Craig Mod article you linked earlier. Most novelists do not perceive their books as being formless waterfalls of text. They do think about how their words will look on a page, and how they will be absorbed. I’m not a Luddite and I also will be tackling certain novels on an e-reader—but when we do that I think it’s important to remember what we’re trading for convenience.
Novels are not like orange juice that can just be poured indiscriminately into your Kindle. Or they shouldn’t be, according to me.
I also want to point, humbly, to a very generous article by Salon’s Laura Miller that I think captures the essence of the Tournament of Books, at least the way we have always seen it. We thank her especially for the part where she says the ToB “has bloomed into a rare pocket of civility and informed intelligence.” I’m guessing that was written before Tuesday.
John: I too am pleased and humbled by Ms. Miller’s article, but feel undeserving of such praise. You’ve pointed out our failure on the civility test. Let me throw the flag on the informed-intelligence front by setting the way-back machine to 2006, where in the Semis, as Ali Smith faced off with Sam Lipsyte, rather than commenting on the actual books, I instead proposed a national kidney lottery.
Kevin: Your pre-Tournament prediction that The Book of Night Women would go deep into the brackets completely eliminates the lead I’d been slowly building throughout the tourney. You placed it very high in your confidence rankings (second only to Let the Great World Spin) and you now lead our side bet, 157-154.
Most importantly, we have our Semifinal matchups. Tomorrow we take a break from competition for more excellent statistical analysis, courtesy of Andrew Seal. Then on Monday Let the Great World Spin takes on The Lacuna, and on Tuesday Wolf Hall meets The Book of Night Women. After the Semifinals will be our Zombie Round, in which the winners of those matches must fight their way past books left for dead but resurrected by the secret results of a pre-Tournament poll of TMN readers.
Big Machine cannot crack that list of Zombie younglings, however. I.e., in our pre-Rooster poll, these Zombie hopefuls received more votes from you, the readers. The list remains, alphabetically:
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
Fever Chart
A Gate at the Stairs
Miles From Nowhere
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