April Book Reviews

I post reviews to Twitter, Instagram and Literal within a day of finishing a book. Here are the books I read in April.

The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz by John Crowley

It’s hard to review a 400-year-old satire — especially when my own knowledge of the occult texts it lampoons is dilettantish at best — but this was a trip!

In this dreamlike, highly symbolist story, the magus figure Christian Rosenkreutz attends a royal wedding that spans seven days, spending each in a series of tests of his spiritual and moral valor. It’s a picaresque, maybe most directly comparable to Candide.

Gene Wolfe heads who follow me would probably find this story VERY interesting. There are some fascinating parallels to The Book of the New Sun and the story feels more Wolfe-y than any modern fiction I’ve read (outside of Borges, at least), and I doubt that’s a coincidence.

Crowley approaches The Chemical Wedding as a literary artifact, a contender for “first SF story” and humorous commentary on 1600s interest in alchemy. His notes feel more personal than academic, and take a skeptical view of some of the more strained interpretations from the past.

It’s a deeply weird, deeply confusing story. One that I don’t expect to understand until I’ve read it a few more times, maybe along with some of what writers like Jung and Borges had to say about it. But it’s also pretty fun, just a goofy alchemy allegory from end to end.

French Exit by Patrick deWitt

This is the third of deWitt’s novels I’ve read, and while I might like The Sisters Brothers and Undermajordomo Minor a bit more, deWitt is definitely operating on a similar level in French Exit, with these flailing upper-class characters a great canvas for his sardonic wit.

I find myself comparing DeWitt more to filmmakers than other novelists because of how he applies his distinct voice to different kinds of stories in the same way that the Coens or Soderbergh or Jarmusch can bring the same particular aesthetic sensibility or writing style to wildly different narratives. Here’s a genre stylist — whether the story is a western or a class-based family drama, it still feels uniquely deWitt.

And Exit is certainly a genre piece — a take on midcentury upper-class lit like Salinger or Cheever, with financial ruin and marital stress as central themes. But it’s a weird take, too — maybe more like Cheever’s “The Swimmer” than more mundane stories — with the undersold supernatural elements at the core of the story taken completely seriously. The characters feel like well-written and performed screen roles, stylized and heightened but still lived-in and natural. Frances Price is a Lucille Bluth-caliber broad, gin-soaked but razor-sharp, a quantifiably Bad Person you love anyway. Her son Malcolm is a passive, overgrown mama’s boy — not really likeable, but starts trending in that direction as he gets dragged into maturity by his mother’s increasingly erratic behavior.

I mainly approached French Exit as a black comedy, but there’s more to it than that. The novel’s subtitle labels it “a tragedy of manners,” and while I initially took that as another joke, this really is a novel about defective parenting, destructive relationships, wealth disparity, and death. Some real shit goes down, the characters have to figure out how to deal with it, and they come out the other side irreversibly changed. But deWitt manages to pull that off in such an entertaining and stylish way that the humor and tragedy only inform and amplify each other.

The City of Brass by SA Chakraborty

The best way to get me to read a boilerplate fantasy novel is to swap a medieval European setting for something different. And this setting, drawn from Middle Eastern and Islamic folklore, is cool as hell. Middle Eastern culture isn’t presented here as a monolith — instead, it’s a culturally complex world, with intersecting allegiances and murky histories, which makes for some great tension and shifting morality. There are no clear heels or faces, and I like that.

But beyond the fresh setting, this book left me cold. I’m not into world-building, and political plots don’t do much for me. The central characters don’t have a lot of agency — and while that’s key to their arcs, it doesn’t change enough by the end of the novel to keep me invested. This is the first of a trilogy, and it feels like the story has been stretched out to accommodate that publishing paradigm. By the end of this volume not much had happened, and while the ending indicates a major turn for the main characters, it doesn’t make a complete story.

There is certainly a lot to like here, and I bet it hits the sweet spot for folks looking for a Game of Thrones-lite political epic in a well-written, imaginative setting. But I want a lot more from a novel of this length, regardless of what’s to come in the sequels.