An engaging page-turner, William Gibson’s “The Peripheral” offers a richly detailed sci-fi future populated with some tough characters looking to get theirs.

The novel flip-flops between two settings 70 years apart. The far-future setting takes place after the “Jackpot,” a slow-rolling catastrophe that wiped out much of humanity, leaving crime families and high-tech builder bots in its place. The past setting is a crummy Wal-Mart future filled with drones and drug manufacturers and veterans still glitching from the ghosts of their combat haptics.

The two settings meet through some cryptic server, one that allows for the flow of information, and thus money. People can even cross the barrier if they make use of neural cutouts to transfer their consciousnesses to genetically engineered bodies: the “peripherals” in the title. Still, the connection is mostly a novelty…until one of the visitors from the past witnesses a murder, sparking a cross-time arms race between those seeking to identify the killer and those seeking to hide him.

The tech and the characters are gritty and believable. Gibson always does a good creating settings that are down and out, with characters struggling to get by; he nails what it’s like to be broke. He also has a knack for reckless characters, impatient sorts with a bias toward big swings. “Rigorously selected by the military,” as one puts it, “for an unusual integration of objective calculation and sheer impulsivity.”

The book starts slow, but once the conflict incites, the jockeying escalates exponentially. The future folks shake the past’s economy like a piggy bank, risking destroying the whole thing to get their side on top. Killers are dispatched, bombs deployed, “assemblers” directed to reduce human bodies to their atomic components. It’s exciting stuff.

As caveats go, I think the lead character, Flynne, is likeable but ends up feeling “down-home” in a forced kind of way, one exacerbated by a male author writing a female character. Similarly, while the plot builds some wonderful complications, the finale sees them resolved too easily. (Or maybe I was just too keyed-up for a Matrix style betrayal by a key character that never arrived.)

“The Peripheral” is intelligent, insightful and future-looking in the best tradition of Gibson’s work.

Blunt and visceral, “There There” jumps between a cast of largely Native American characters as Oakland prepares for a big powwow. In crafting these voices, Tommy Orange shares stories of trauma, addiction and good-old twenty-first century anxiety, all while exploring the larger, impossible theme of “what it means” to be Native American.

On the whole, the cast of the novel isn’t doing that well. Even the best of the bunch are trying to find the energy to lose weight and get out of mom’s basement or trudging the same mail route they’ve had for decades while trying to scrape enough cash together to raise three step-grandkids. Others are barely holding on: they’re shakily sober, selling drugs or trying to figure out how to pay back large sums of cash to seriously shady people.

Orange gives us chapters devoted to each member of his cast as the book progresses, moving forward and backward through time, seeing lives cross and reconnect. His phrasing is direct–overly direct as the novel starts, like a conversation you might overhear on the bus.

I found myself longing for more lyrical passages, but I also found myself drawn in as I spent time with the characters. The flatness of the voices seems almost like a protective facade as we learn more about their hopes and failings and, most notably, the deep disappointments etched into their lives.

Everything builds to the powwow, and the book earns its explosive finale. Orange shows us an example of the trauma that has marked his characters’ lives, but he does so without cheapening it.

Quotes

“I’m twenty-one now, which means I can drink if I want. I don’t though. The way I see it, I got enough when I was a baby in my mom’s stomach. Getting drunk in there, a drunk fucking baby, not even a baby, a little fucking tadpole thing, hooked up to a cord, floating in a stomach.”

“‘Listen, baby, it makes me happy you want to know, but learning about your heritage is a privilege. A privilege we don’t have. And anyway, anything you hear from me about your heritage does not make you more or less Indian. More or less a real Indian. Don’t ever let anyone tell you what being Indian means. Too many of us died to get just a little bit of us here, right now, right in this kitchen. You, me. Every part of our people that made it is precious. You’re Indian because you’re Indian because you’re Indian,” she said, ending the conversation by turning back around to stir.”

“Jacquie isn’t listening anymore. She always finds it funny, or not funny but annoying actually, how much people in recovery like to tell old drinking stories. Jacquie didn’t have a single drinking story she’s want to share with anyone. Drinking had never been fun. It was a kind of solemn duty. It took the edge off, and it allowed her to say and do whatever she wanted without feeling bad about it.”

A gripping post-apocalyptic tale, “Station Eleven” skillfully captures the collapse and aftermath of “the Georgia flu.”

Author Emily St. John Mandel adds a welcome wrinkle, though, in introducing the Traveling Symphony into the world after. She places us among a troupe of actors and musicians who loop around Michigan’s mitten, entertaining the small communities that remain with Shakespeare and symphonies while dodging cults and creeps trying to Mad Max their well through the End Times.

By placing us with the Symphony, and using flashbacks to conjure the connected lives of an actor, an artist, a paparazzo and other creative types, St. John Mandel conjures something more literary than your standard post-disaster fare. As the Traveling Symphony’s motto (lifted from Star Trek) reminds us, “survival is insufficient.”

Her characters are sensitive, vulnerable, and often flawed. She does a good job showing us how their heartbreaks and imperfections made them the people they now are, even as the flu, with its 99% mortality rate, made the world we see in these pages.

The interconnections between the characters are deftly drawn, but I did find my disbelief strained as the different threads overlapped at the book’s conclusion. St. John Mandel also cheats a little to undermine the darker ending the book seemed to be building toward. Still, “Station Eleven” was an exciting, engaging read.

Quotes

“This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret. He had done some things he wasn’t proud of. If Miranda was so unhappy in Hollywood, why hadn’t he just taken her away from there? It wouldn’t have been difficult. The way he’d dropped Miranda for Elizabeth and Elizabeth for Lydia and let Lydia slip away to someone else. The way he’d let Tyler be taken to the other side of the world. The way he’d spent his entire life chasing after something, money or frame or immortality or all of the above. He didn’t really even know his only brother. How many friendships had he neglected until they’d faded out? On the first night of previews, he’d barely made it off the stage. On the second night, he’d arrived on the platform with a strategy. He stared at his crown and ran through a secret list of everything that was good.”

Set in the heart of the pandemic, Hari Kunzru’s “Blue Ruin” is a meditation on a life in art, exploring the hazy spectrum between compromising, committing, quitting.

Our title character, Jay, seems like he belongs in that last bin as we start the novel. He’s delivering groceries and sleeping out of his car, still sick from an early bout of COVID that got him kicked out of his New York City squat.

Fulfilling an order at a cozy estate upstate, he recognizes an old face behind a mask. It’s his ex, Alice. They haven’t seen each other in decades, but seeing his condition, she practically drags him to crash at an old barn tucked away on the site. It’s an impulsive act of kindness, one that triggers a reevaluation of their art-school days in late ’90s London–and possibly a reckoning too.

Alice, it turns out, is married to Rob. Now a well-known painter, Rob is formerly an art school friend/rival of Jay’s…and the man she left him for. As Jay recovers, we discover how the group met, flashing back to squats and hash and the jousting of young egos before returning to the diminished circumstances of May 2020.

Kunzru does a good job evoking the excitement of the past and the dual slog of the pandemic and middle age. Jay can’t stay hidden on the estate forever. The absentee tech-guru owner has a state-of-the-art security system that’s eventually called into service. When Jay finally meets the rest of the pod taking shelter there–Rob, art-dealer Marshall and Marshall’s girlfriend, Nicole–the drama deepens.

Can Jay’s appearance really be a coincidence? What has he done since he disappeared decades ago? Is Jay still making art? And can Rob get his act together to finish some paintings before his family, and possibly Marshall, go broke?

As a COVID-era novel set among an isolated upstate crew of creatives, “Blue Ruin” can’t help but be compared to Gary Shteyngart’s, “Lake Success,” a much funnier book covering similar terrain. Still, Kunzru does strong work capturing the dichotomies of the art world. One scene conveys the absurdity of scrabbling for sales; another convinces you that a life lived for art may be worth the sacrifice.

Kunzru’s characters feel more like “types” than individuals. This is the kind of book where people say things like, “So there we are, another white man wanting to burn down the world to salvage his fragile ego.” Each role is structured to illustrate a point the author wants to make, and it feels on the nose, even if it’s not necessarily off the mark.

This makes sense, though, because “Blue Ruin” is a book of ideas: about art and striving, rich kids and poor kids, what happens when we succeed and what happens when we fail. It’s engaging and well crafted, particularly if you’re interested in the underlying concept.

Quotes

“There are really only two kinds of artist. You’re either an intellectual or a savage, and you don’t really have a choice about which. Rob was a savage, of course. He liked to approach making things in the manner of a hominid discovering tools. What you have to do, he said, is paint like you’ve never painted before, like you’re seeing color for the first time. I did my best to emulate him, but it was no good. For me, making art was inescapably cerebral. I approached it as a problem, a puzzle that I needed to solve. I was ashamed of that. It felt like a dirty secret, a creative weakness that I had to hide.”

***

“Alice’s competence had survived even the last year of our relationship, when we were actively trying to crash and burn, to let ourselves go to hell. It was a kind of weakness in her. If you’re a problem-solver, sooner or later people learn that they can bring their problems to you, and after that you’re never free.”

***

“She was a rich person, used to interactions in which she was respected, even courted. On the rare occasion when her status wasn’t recognized–by some official or service provider–it was, I imagined, a memorable outrage. She’d find it hard to understand that I had no relationship with the company outside terms set by the app. It was designed that way. Even if you stayed on the phone for hours and finally got to speak to someone in a far-away call center, they had no agency. You could never appeal to anyone’s humanity.”

***

“To twenty-something me, an artist was primarily someone who was trying not to get captured. The world was dominated by the interests of the rich and powerful. It was organized to lure you, to trick you into their service. An artist ought, I thought, to live like a spy, a spiritual fugitive. Art itself consisted of finding ways to say no, to become invisible to power. Only then could an artwork have any claim to authenticity. Even if you found it difficult, or it caused friction with others, it was necessary to refuse entanglements, because they were a way to force you to conform. When I wouldn’t speak to anyone and locked myself in my studio, I was holding a line, taking my vocation seriously. In practical terms, it amounted to the same thing. Rob and I both expected other people to pick up after us. Of the two of us, I was probably the more self-righteous about it.”

***

“‘The artworld likes nothing better than someone who doesn’t seem to want it. That’s always been my problem. They can smell it on me. It’s a dirty smell.'”

Daniel Clowes’ “Monica” is rich and confounding, an artful comic exploring what it’s like to seek but never fully find.  

It’s told in vignettes centering on the title character, a girl whose mother gets caught up in the counterculture and ends up abandoning her. Monica spends much of her life trying to figure out that act. Even in what should be a successful adulthood, she remains trapped in the past, snared by the need to understand what happened to her mother, and by extension, to her.

This quest is anything but straightforward. There are hippie cults, Lovecraftian figures, ghost radios and vague intimations of some apocalyptic event. But there’s also the normal stuff of life: ex-boyfriends, aimless youth, the possibilities of late-life romance. To complicate things further, Monica is prone to writing stories, and some of these fictional accounts enter the narrative, weird little sections in the vein of old Creepy Comics or the “Tales of the Black Freighter” interludes in Watchmen.

Clowes is assured at capturing it all, from cult derangement to edge-of-apocalypse noir to the day-to-day vibes of just never quite fitting in. I found the least fantastical scenes the most engaging. My heart sank with each dippy new lover Monica’s mom takes on; when Monica meets a man she can share her stories with, I was eager for her “October” romance to work out.

The art is excellent throughout, detailed, expressive, carefully blocked and plotted. Clowes’ lines are precise and fine, like something John Severin might offer. But the story itself resists easy explanation. I typically resist ambiguity in this vein, but Clowes is so assured and intentional with what he offers here that I ended up being captivated instead.