The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma

Published by Viking on March 21, 2013

Whether The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards is a novel (as the title advertises) or ten connected short stories (plus versions of a preface and epilog) isn’t entirely clear -- the structure (each story has its own title and is complete within itself) and the changing names of the characters suggest the latter, while the unitary themes (and a wristwatch that appears in nearly every story) imply the former -- but I don’t think it matters.  Kristopher Jansma plays with form in a way that reminds us he’s writing about creators of fiction, inventers who shape and reshape reality to suit their own ends.

Although Jansma pokes fun at the writer’s life and at literary criticism, his stories are serious dissections of recurring characters at various stages of their lives.  The stories share the same narrator, a writer who rarely writes, and who has lost every book he’s ever written.  The first story describes a seminal event in the narrator’s young life, one to which he often returns in subsequent stories, although a key detail eventually changes.  What begins as a cornball tale of class-defying love becomes an insightful story about fleeting moments and the impact they make on our lives.  The next four stories revolve around the narrator’s friendship with two other characters.  The narrator meets Julian in Freshman English and they bond over their mutual love of writing.  Julian eventually finds success that eludes the narrator.  Julian’s friend, a beautiful girl who becomes a successful actress, also bonds with the narrator, although not in the way the narrator would like.

Jansma uses those friendships to explore the role of a writer.  One story asks how much literal truth a writer should reveal in a work of fiction -- a vexing question that results from his decision to base a story upon his relationship with the actress.  Another poses the flip side of that question:  how does a writer, intent upon the creation of illusion, avoid hiding from the truth?  One story, purportedly the only story the narrator managed to get published, casts the narrator as a character in his own fiction.  The fifth story, in which the narrator contemplates ruining the actress’ wedding, asks whether he is motivated by love or by the desire to control her like a character in a story.

If the first five stories (collected under the subtitle “What Was Lost”) highlight the hope, promise, and angst of youth, the second five (subtitled “What Was Found”) display the down slope of life’s arc.  The narrator is now a failed writer who has managed to find a job teaching at a second-rate university by assuming his more successful friend’s identity -- the latest in a series of lies the narrator tells about his name.  The narrator’s approach to teaching journalism is to teach the art of writing fiction -- the art of lying.  By arguing against the notion that art contains truth, he hopes to convince himself of the opposite.  Yet whether the narrator is capable of discerning the difference between truth and fiction -- whether, in the end, there is a difference -- is one of the book's central questions.

The narrator moves from his teaching job to ghostwriting term papers to writing the unauthorized biography of his successful friend, all the while making faltering steps to write meaningful fiction of his own.  His friend (Julian of the earlier stories becomes Jeffrey in the later ones) has disappeared (doing “a full-Salinger”) after producing a single novel, a work of genius that is both popular and critically acclaimed.  As he explores his friend’s life, the narrator begins to wonder whether he is his friend’s doppelgänger, but the reader suspects that the friend is the narrator’s alter ego (or vice versa).

The narrator visits Africa and Iceland in stories eight and nine, but the last story takes place in Luxembourg, a country that excites no expectations and therefore deprives the characters of the pleasure of feeling let down.  Perhaps that is a metaphor for the narrator’s life -- full of expectations and disappointment -- but it might be Luxembourg’s national motto that sums him up:  “We wish to remain what we are.”  For much of the book, the narrator is in motion, but he isn’t moving forward, while his friend is often moving in reverse.  The last story asks whether that’s something they can change -- whether they can find themselves.

Viewed individually, Jansma’s stories are fun and insightful and occasionally brilliant.  Viewed collectively, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards has the heft of a serious novel, one that builds characters word by word until they become whole, then knocks them apart and rebuilds them -- as does life.  It is one of the best fictional explorations of what it means to be a writer that I’ve encountered.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Wash by Margaret Wrinkle

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on February 5, 2013 

Wash is an examination of slavery -- more specifically, the breeding of slaves as if they were horses -- from a variety of perspectives. Although some of the novel is narrated in the third person, the text is frequently divided into sections that tell the story from an individual character's point of view. Wash (more formally known as Washington) is a slave whose service as a stud is made available to other slave owners. James Richardson owns Wash, having purchased his mother, Mena, when she was pregnant. Mena's story is told by Wash and by Thompson, who leased her from Richardson. Thompson's son, Eli, fleshes out the story of Wash's youth. Pallas, a midwife who works on a neighboring farm, is Wash's lover of choice.

Wash is both a riveting portrait of inhumanity and a life-affirming story about healing. From its vivid description of manacled captives aboard ships to the art of branding the face of a runaway slave, from Pallas' administration of herbs to cure Wash's fever to the mixture of love and spiritualism that restores Pallas after three years of sexual abuse, the novel captures all points along the spectrum of good and evil. The nature of freedom -- freedom of the mind versus freedom of the body -- is one of the book's driving themes. Another is the difficulty of understanding, and the risk of error in judging, a person whose life you have not lived. For Pallas and Wash, and even for Richardson, the novel is a story of survival and growth.

The novel begins near Nashille in 1823, moves back in time to North Carolina, then returns to Tennessee and again moves forward. Richardson, a veteran of the Revolutionary War and a failed general in the War of 1812, is now a farmer, a land developer (he's building a new town called Memphis), and a breeder of slaves. Although he has doubts about the morality of the latter business, Richardson's business partner, Quinn, has convinced him that breeding slaves is a surer way to eliminate his debt than hoping for profitable cotton harvests. Quinn, however, disagrees with Richardson's strategy to breed for intelligence. Quinn thinks slaves should have strong backs and weak minds, the better to foster obedience and discourage insurrection.

Richardson is a multi-dimensional character, a product of his time and upbringing who, nagged by self-doubt, broken by the war, torn by his dependence on slavery, and detached from his family, confides only in Wash. In his senior years, he comes to question all the assumptions upon which he has built his life. Wash is also a deep-grained character, a man locked in a constant struggle to suppress his rage. Pallas comes into focus in the novel's second half. She provides the novel with its moral center. She is both forgiving and understanding: "people didn't mean half the things they did and sometimes, slack was all we had to give each other."

The story is dramatic but the drama is never overdone. Margaret Wrinkle's sentences are like velvet ribbons uncoiling and connecting, textured and luxurious. If her prose has a flaw it is that the voices of her characters are equally eloquent and, for that reason, not particularly distinctive. Wrinkle draws wonderful parallels between horses and slaves: the fierce ones need to be broken, the strongest serve as profitable studs, and some, especially the ones who have been abused, will never be tamed. The horse imagery, Wash's connection and identification with horses, gives the novel some of its best moments, including a memorable ending.

The downside to telling a story from different perspectives is the redundancy it creates. Seeing the same scene from different pairs of eyes gives the reader fresh insights, but a few of the scenes don't alter the perspective enough to warrant the repetition. That's a minor quibble and certainly not one that diminishes my enthusiasm for this fine novel.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Raised from the Ground by José Saramago

First published in Portuguese in 1980; published in translation by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on December 4, 2012

José Saramago’s death in 2010 was a sad loss for the world of literature, but his novels endure.  It is often difficult to know what to make of a Saramago novel.  He infuses drama with humor so as to make them indistinguishable, relies upon fantasy to illuminate reality, distorts history to help us understand the present.  Saramago merges philosophy with storytelling.  With keen observation, he chronicles moral failings while remaining an extraordinarily forgiving writer.  Unlike nature, which “displays remarkable callousness when creating her various creatures,” Saramago displays compassion and understanding when creating his flawed characters.

Raised from the Ground is the story of the latifundio, the Portuguese landed estates and those who toil upon them. The laborers are the victims of "infinite misfortune, inconsolable grief, both of which lasted from the nineteenth century to the day before yesterday." Plagues, famines, wars, and the cruel overseers of the latifundio are the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the "great evils" that devastate the working poor. The workers spend their lives as if "tethered to a stake," governed by arbitrariness, and in a state of perpetual hunger. Is death the only escape, or is change possible? Fighting for a minimum wage and an eight hour day may seem futile, but futility is a way of life in the latifundio. It is the need to fight for change that compels the narrator to proclaim: "we are not men if we do not raise ourselves up from the ground."

With their meager possessions loaded onto a donkey cart, the shoemaker Domingos Mau-Tempo and his wife (Sara da Conceição) and son (João) make their way to their new home in São Cristóvão, the first of several relocations Domingos will impose upon his family. Domingos' miserable story (briefly interrupted in 1910 by the arrival of the Portuguese Republic and the end of the monarchy) segues into Sara's sad story and eventually becomes João's. Circumstances turn João into an unwitting labor leader, or at least he is mistaken for one; his support of a strike becomes the defining event of his life. The meandering story eventually introduces João's son António, who is drafted into the army despite his illiteracy, his daughter Gracinda, who wants to marry João's friend despite her poverty, and his granddaughter Maria, who shares his blue eyes. In 1974, the Carnation Revolution overthrows Portugal's dictatorship, an event that brings the living and dead together in celebration, a fitting end to a powerful story.

The novel's run-on sentences, assembled from words seemingly poured from buckets, flow with a rhythm that is uniquely Saramago's. Dialog is buried haphazardly in the text, always in keeping with the rhythm of the narrative, never set off by quotation marks, and while it's usually easy to understand who is speaking, some readers will be put off by the unconventional style. Although the narrator's identity is neither clear nor consistent, the narrator's chatty editorial voice is always present. As if conversing with a friend, the narrator will mention a town and say "you probably know the place." The narrator sometimes professes not to understand the mysteries of life that he is relating, sometimes says "let's see how things turn out." He gives the reader information that, he says, won't contribute to an understanding of the story, but will let us "know each other better, as the gospels urge us to do." He reminds us that "the seemingly unimportant and the seemingly important form part of the same narrative," and all of it, taken together, is "as good a way as any to explain the latifundio." He suggests that people who might take a different view of the latifundio "clearly don't know much about life." All of this is vintage Saramago: tongue-in-cheek, playful commentary masking profound wisdom shaped by boundless compassion.

Compassionate wisdom is abundant in this haunting story. Saramago reveals the dignity and tribulations of the working poor and the indifferent cruelty of those who exploit them. He explores poverty and charity and the great equalizing force of death. He bemoans wars that tax and kill the poor while benefitting the rich. He ridicules the labeling of striking farm workers as terrorists and exposes the true terrorists: the government agents who have the power to brand those who speak for the powerless as "dangerous elements." He describes the torture of a man from the standpoint of an ant that, unlike the torturers, has a conscience. He lampoons priests who pray for the landowners and lecture the poor. Most importantly, amidst all the agony and suffering that his novel documents, he wryly acknowledges that "life has its good points too." Travel and beauty and sex and birth bring joy and renewal, even if only for a moment. Yet if "each day brings some hope with its sorrow ... then the sorrow will never end and the hope will only ever be just that and nothing more."

Saramago's matter-of-fact presentation of the absurd is filled with deadpan wit and goofy digressions. He treats the reader to hilarious descriptions of peasantry sex ("they huff and puff, they're not exactly subtle"), a political rally ("Where do I go to take a piss?"), middle age ("if this is the prime of life, then allow me to weep"), and the revolution ("what kind of name is junta for a government, there must be some mistake"). António's tall hunting stories, including his technique for catching a hare with pepper and a newspaper, are reason enough to read the book. Yet even the funniest stories are in some sense allegorical. They illuminate life in the latifundio, which isn't much different for rabbits and men.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

First published in 1956

There are more ideas in The Stars My Destination -- profound ideas about human potential -- than you're likely to find collectively in the next dozen novels you read. The Stars My Destination begins as a tale of obsession and vengeance. The protagonist is an anti-hero, not the sort of person for whom a reader would normally root, but he is sympathetic compared to most of the novel's other characters, including a powerful corporate executive who makes Gordon Gecko seem like a mischievous boy. In Alfred Bester's future, people have acquired the ability to teleport over long distances, the colonized planets are at war with each other, and cities are filled with people who belong in carnival sideshows. But that's all window dressing for Bester's deeper exploration of a man who is "nothing but hatred and revenge," an Ahab of the twenty-fourth century chasing his own version of a white whale, a spaceship called Vorga. Ultimately, The Stars My Destination is a novel about the limits of idealism, the meaning of justice, the nature of power, and the transcendental ability of the human species to overcome its self-imposed limitations.

Gulliver Foyle, a common man who lacks ambition, a brute raised in the gutter school and "among the least valuable alive," is a crew member on the Nomad when it is attacked during the war between the inner and outer (colonized) planets of Earth's solar system. Foyle, the only member of the Nomad to survive, lives for months in an airtight tool locker not much bigger than a coffin. On his way to madness, he becomes obsessed with a rhyme that ends: "Deep space is my dwelling place/And death's my destination." When a ship called the Vorga ignores his distress signal, Foyle makes it his mission to repair the Nomad's engines so he can track down and destroy the Vorga. He manages to get himself to the asteroid belt (populated by descendants of stranded scientists who tattoo a grotesque tiger-design on Foyle's face) before he makes his way back to Earth. Once there, however, he's captured by employees of Presteign, CEO of the company that owns the Vorga. Presteign wants to know where to find the Nomad and its valuable cargo, a weapon that could shift the balance of power in the interstellar war. Foyle's captivity brings him into contact with Jisbella McQueen, with whom he falls in love -- but love is a small emotion compared his consuming hatred of the Vorga. He later falls in love with Presteign's daughter Olivia, who sees the world in infrared. But love is a cruel emotion, particularly when it clouds the overwhelming desire for vengeance.

New and strange twists appear regularly as the story progresses. Foyle creates the ability to move at accelerated speed. An entity called The Burning Man pops up from time to time, a fiery creature who looks like Foyle. While Foyle wonders if The Burning Man is his guardian angel, a more creative and satisfying explanation for the entity eventually comes to light. After a series of adventures that lead Foyle back to the Nomad, Foyle reinvents himself, becoming Fourmyle of Ceres, an illusionist and circus master whose clout matches Presteign's own. Foyle uses and abuses telepaths in his attempt to track down the person who ordered the Vorga to ignore the Nomad's distress call. The truth, when he finally learns it, shocks him.

Bester gives the uneducated Foyle a unique dialect that is a joy to read. Bester's vivid prose is well-suited to the story, but the novel was ahead of its time in its unconventional use of font placement, creating pictures with fonts to emphasize the confusion that besets Foyle's mind.

The Stars My Destination is a seminal work of science fiction that succeeds on a number of levels. It is a rollicking adventure story and an imaginative tale of the future, but it is more fundamentally a psychological exploration of a troubled soul in need of redemption. It is a cautionary tale about the arrogance of leadership and the virtue of restoring power to the people. Finally, it is a touching story about acceptance and self-determination and the possibility of achieving greatness. To achieve his ends, Gully Foyle must remake himself, and that is where the novel's genius lies. Foyle is no Ahab, incapable of change, consumed by a hatred that will eventually destroy him. Foyle's obsession motivates him to acquire knowledge and strength to serve his need for vengeance, but once he has those new resources, he begins to see the world anew -- as does the reader. Foyle recognizes that he is a freak, but so what? "Life is a freak. That's its hope and glory." We're all freaks, but we all have the ability to become something glorious.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

First published in 1953

More Than Human explores what it means to be human, a question made relevant by the evolution of an entity that Theodore Sturgeon calls Homo Gestalt, a group of individuals who reach completeness only by functioning together as a single being. The 1953 novel is written in three parts. The middle (and weakest) section first appeared as a novella in Galaxy magazine. Sturgeon, whose writing career focused on short stories, turned the novella into a novel by adding the first and third sections. Of the few novels he produced, More Than Human is by far the best.

The first section introduces most of the principle characters. Lone is feeble-minded but has the ability to control the minds of others. Jane can move objects with her mind. Mute twins named Bonnie and Beanie can teleport. While appearing to be developmentally disabled, Baby has the intellectual capacity of a supercomputer. The characters can barely survive as individuals; linked together they constitute a superior form of humanity.

In the first section, Sturgeon uses lush and riveting prose to remind the reader, primarily through the character of Lone, what it means to be human: to know the joy of anticipation and the pain of reality; to accept the necessity of loss as a condition of growth; to be loved and reviled; to lose friends and connect with strangers; to experience the awakening of compassion and empathy after years of comfortable numbness. There are deeper and more profound lessons in this novel than in any ten self-help books. One of my favorites has to do with the continuing struggle for self-realization: "So it was that Lone came to know himself; and like the handful of people who have done so before him he found, at this pinnacle, the rugged foot of a mountain."

The second section takes place several years later. It introduces Gerry Thompson, a disturbed sociopath with an impaired memory. Thompson, like Lone, has the ability to control minds, but it is not an ability that has served him (or humanity) well. He becomes involved with the Gestalt in a less than positive way, losing much of his identity in the process. This section begins and ends with Thompson in the office of a psychiatrist who is trying to help him recover his memory.

Section three takes place after the passage of another several years. It focuses on Hip Barrows, an Air Force engineer who (like Thompson) has lost his memory. Barrows is in jail and likely to be insitutionalized when he meets Jane. With Jane's assistance, Barrows begins to remember the events that led to his incarceration, and ultimately the event that triggered his memory loss -- an event that relates back to something Lone and the Gestalt did in part one. Barrows and Thompson come into conflict when Thompson decides that the Gestalt's behavior need not be governed by human standards.

The third section gives Sturgeon an opportunity to explore questions of ethics. He posits that traditional laws of morality cannot apply to a vastly superior entity, any more than human morals apply to ants, while new concepts of morality cannot arise to govern Homo Gestalt when only one such entity exists. Yet how can Homo Gestalt be complete without a conscience? Sturgeon steers the characters on a path toward self-awareness, much like a Brahmin might act as a spiritual guide to the ways of the universe. There is, in fact, something of a Buddhist or New Age philosophy at work in More Than Human, or at least one that is deeply humanistic (an ironic term, perhaps, to apply to an evolved entity that is more than human).

In many respects, More Than Human is nearly perfect: the dialog is particularly strong, the prose is some of the finest that science fiction has produced, and the message is inspiring. The supporting characters are drawn in finely detailed strokes: a farmer who endures despite losing everything that gave his life meaning; a innocent woman who has been sheltered from life by her deranged, ultra-religious father; a psychiatrist who exemplifies the caring empathy that should characterize his profession.

More Than Human reflects an optimism about the future of humanity that was a common trait of 1950s science fiction, before the genre succumbed to postmodern bleakness. Sturgeon envisioned a destiny for mankind that is not "guided by an awesome Watcher in the sky ... suffused with the pale odor of sanctity," but one that humanity achieves as the inevitable result of progress. Perhaps twenty-first century readers, awash in novels that envision the "posthuman" as a mechanical blend of brain and technology, are too jaded to consider humanity "sainted by the touch of its own great destiny." Jaded or not, the ideas that Sturgeon develops in More Than Human deserve a twenty-first century audience.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED