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Wading through the PNW Book Awards finalists

A warning for fans of fiction

This year's winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Awards in fiction is Seattle's Kim Fu
This year's winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Awards in fiction is Seattle's Kim Fu (Photo courtesy of L D’Alessandro)
By Michael Byers CDN Contributor

Your friendly critic enjoys writing good reviews. Good reviews are so pleasant to put together. You pass an evening by the fire taking notes with the hounds at your feet and a finger of whiskey in a tumbler, then you head to the keyboard and send your reader trotting to Village Books with a happy heart. It’s a win-win, plus the writer, lonely in their garret, may enjoy a moment’s brightness when scouring Twitter for mentions of themselves.

On the other hand, bad books ask for a global reckoning. How did such a terrible thing come into being? What went wrong; where? How big is the problem? Bad news is a bummer, you don’t help your local economy at all, you make no friends and you risk a reputation as a crank.

Thus it is with a heavy heart that your friendly critic advises you to neither buy, borrow, rent, steal or otherwise voluntarily encounter any of the books shortlisted for the Pacific Northwest Book Awards (PNBA) in fiction. Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, they are all unhappy in their own ways. In this case they are, respectively, unserious, dull, muddled and inept. 

Something dire is afoot in writing, or publishing, or judging, or all of the above. Whatever the case, I’m afraid the news is not good.

This year’s winner of the PNBA in fiction is Seattle’s Kim Fu, whose collection of stories “Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century” features an elementary-school girl who becomes a bird, a bridezilla who is actually a sea monster and a number of nearly weightless stories in which some future technology engenders some minor havoc. Fu’s book is the best of the bunch, for what it’s worth, and can be light on its feet, though it grows repetitive, the characters are faint, the stakes are low.

But it is the three other finalists who deserve our fuller scrutiny here. They are not just bad, but interestingly so.

photo  Fu’s book can be light on its feet, though it grows repetitive and the stakes are low. (Image courtesy of Tin House)  

 

Least bad is Montana resident Jamie Ford’s “The Many Daughters of Afong Moy.” Early in this novel, an onlooker remarks, “Hey, tofu. My favorite,” helpfully setting expectations for the flavorless pages ahead. In the year 2045, Dorothy Moy subjects herself to an experimental therapy that activates genetic memories of her ancestors — an excellent premise, though readers will prefer the version in Blake Crouch’s sci-fi thriller “Recursion.” In Ford, traumas are confronted, love is discovered, lessons are learned and it is all soft and safe enough to earn a talk-show book club endorsement from Jenna Bush. 

Another futurist, Portland’s Lidia Yuknavitch, gives us “Thrust,” a novel set in a flooded New York City, in which a girl travels through time by swimming through the streets with the aid of a talking turtle and a magic amulet. 

How can I put this gently? Your critic struggles to believe, or to convey, the incoherence of this book, the unreadability of the prose, the catastrophic shifts in tone, the amateurishness of its technique, and the absence of anything resembling a character, let alone a protagonist, with whom even a generous reader might empathize. 


And plot? Laisve, our youthful time-traveling free-diver, encounters people in history, sort of, whose lives intersect with the construction of the Statue of Liberty. But without narrative direction, the book deteriorates into a series of stagnant vignettes, extra-narrative “ethnographies,” epistolary exchanges and expository information dumps. 

It is all so muddled, and the prose so unskilled, that I suspect very few people — aside from Yuknavitch and her copy editor — have managed to read this book from cover to cover, including, possibly, not only the PNBA judges but her editor, agent and every one of the people who blurbed it. And me. And now you, I hope.

Another Portlander, Emme Lund, is responsible for “The Boy With a Bird in His Chest,” a novel in which a boy named Owen houses a talking bird behind his ribs. The bird, named Gail, serves as a figure for Owen’s trans-ness, repeatedly, as Owen comes of age in and around Olympia. 

Here I wonder, quite seriously, whether anyone other than Lund — this time including the copy editor — has actually read her novel. (There are several remarkable passages that would never have escaped an attentive blue pencil.) The book is so static, so bumbling in its management of time, character and emotion, that the patient reader loses heart. Worse, the novel seems to perpetuate some grievous stereotypes concerning transgender youth. Lund strikes me as a decent person, so this must be unintentional, only another measure of her lack of facility.

So: there is an industry problem. But where is it? Not, I dare say, with the writers. I assume they are doing their best. And in fact, they are finding career success, so who is to say they are not succeeding? 

Is it their chosen mode of storytelling? No: strangeness and magic play an important role in the history of world literature, notably in the work of such Latin American greats as Jorge Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose writing depicted, through metaphor, realities that could not safely be described otherwise. Like the songs of the enslaved, these works of genius contained hidden information to be discovered by the oppressed and used to navigate the way to freedom — even if that journey was only ever through literature itself. Your critic will grant neither Ford nor Yuknavitch nor Lund the honor of comparison to such masters.

What about the publishers? Are they at fault for producing such lousy books? To be sure, but are they not succeeding, too? They receive praise, and even get nominated for nice regional awards.

Ah, so here, at last, must be the worst of the culprits: those in the business who promote bad books knowingly — or, worse, maybe unknowingly, having not actually read them. Why do they do it? A big, fraught subject for another time. But enough reason to keep writing tough reviews — to warn you, good reader, away from rotten and mediocre product, when the judges and blurbers will not. 

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