It’s not as though the first version of “An Obedient Father” was ignored. It met with the kind of success few first novels receive. It was excerpted in The New Yorker and won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and Sharma received a Whiting Award — career milestones for any writer. Novelists reached out to its 29-year-old author out of the blue. Sharma was not shy to say that among them was the Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. Still, the book would sell only adequately for a literary novel: according to Sharma, 6,000 hardcover copies and then 11,000 paperback copies over the next two decades, taking 17 years to earn back what the publisher advanced him for it and certainly not paying well enough that it let Sharma live off his writing.
Aside from those encouraging/discouraging realities, Sharma was secretly displeased with the novel when he published it. He’d had doubts, yes, but he had been arrogant enough, or insecure enough, or hopeful enough to want to be hailed as a genius, and when it was clear that, despite the praise the book received, “genius” was not a word being thrown around, Sharma’s sense of failure, of not living up to his hopes for the novel, was confirmed. In that little way, what he already knew to be true was borne out: Whatever the book did well, aesthetically, it had real things wrong with it, formal problems he hadn’t been able to name, much less fix.
In Iowa, I had dinner with an elderly woman who introduced herself only as “Mrs. Alvarez.” The train was rocking from side-to-side as it shot forward in the darkness, and she almost lost her balance when she sat down across from me at our booth. Mrs. Alvarez was short and stout, with curly grey hair cut in a bob. She wore a dark dress with large, round buttons.
“Would I offend you if I said grace?” Mrs. Alvarez asked me. “I believe in God, but I wouldn’t want to impose Him upon anybody else.”
“Not at all, please go ahead,” I replied, bowing my head as Mrs. Alvarez recited her blessings. When you’re travelling alone on the California Zephyr, the two-and-a-half-day Amtrak train from Chicago to San Francisco, you take your blessings as they come.
It can be hard to know where to start with Category Unknown, given that the book itself is already playing havoc with time frames in the prologue, which turns out to be anything but. But the central timeline is 1978 – 2008, accompanying the rise of Margaret Thatcher (and Debbie Harry) and the fall of Lehman Brothers. Its startling opening salvo, and interpretation of ‘prologue’ to mean a potted London pop cultural history, feel broadly suggestive of some desire to subvert expectations, be they literary, readerly or purely linear. Is this a bildungsroman, campus farce, or a big city drama? At times it seems as though it might be all three, reblended with wanton disregard for the conventions of genre. What is clear though is the referencing of a real-life backdrop – the 1981 New Cross Fire and its horrific fallout, as well as the wider racial antagonisms of the time – to remind readers that many of the issues around social justice today have in fact got far older roots. And indeed Category Unknown does not shy away from the less edifying aspects of this earlier historical period, be that the racial profiling of the hated SUS laws, intra-ethnic tensions, sexual violence or class-bound prejudice. It is one of its strengths though, that it manages to do so without any descent into diatribe, leaving the reader instead with the slightly queasy feeling that these are just everyday banalities, albeit mired, as Hannah Arendt would have it, in their own discrete forms of evil: bureaucratic, societal, individual.
Albert’s achievement in Human Blues lies in creating a character so difficult and contradictory that the reader can both love and hate her at the same time, like a friend whose strengths are inseparable from her flaws. Much like a real person, in fact. The other great accomplishment of this novel is that it is very funny. Aviva may be a recognizable type, but her type involves a heavy dose of self-awareness: “Aviva was ‘process-oriented,’ which meant a lot of floor time, a lot of candles, a lot of tunes on shuffle, and regular cannabis edibles.”
Where novels are often described as ambitious, and omnivorous, short stories are rarely presumed to have appetites — to run rampant through the reader’s mind, ravenous, devouring, feral. The most common metaphors that try to sum up the particular work a short story can do are postcards and photo albums, icebergs and carefully etched cameos: still, patient objects putting themselves on calm display. Perhaps that’s why the fierce little machines found in the Taiwanese American writer K-Ming Chang’s first collection, “Gods of Want” — the successor to her gutsy debut novel, “Bestiary” — feel so unexpected: Each one is possessed of a powerful hunger, a drive to metabolize the recognizable features of a familiar world and transform them into something wilder, and achingly alive.