Reviews and Comments

In The Voice of the Violin Montalbano becomes interested in a seemingly abandoned car. Frustrated in his attempts to learn more, he pulls a black-bag job, finds a corpse, and the story’s off and running. In The Sicilian Method it’s Auguello’s try at this bit, but, keeping in character, he’s fleeing a cuckold, out the window and down into the apartment below. Auguello’s body disappears, but is replaced with another, this time of a theatrical impresario/director and loan shark, and it stays around so Montalbano and crew can get some detecting done.

In every Montalbano story there’s a short bit, half a page or so, that I think of as the Three Stooges Bit, some slapstick between Montalbano and whomever’s around at the time (there’s probably a more dignified Italian term for it, perhaps opera buffa or commedia dell’arte). Here the bit’s slathered on all over the place, particularly at the beginning. It has some justification given Auguello’s balcony gymnastics, but a little of this stuff goes a long way, even when looking forward to it.

Montalbano the babe magnet is another recurring bit that gets overworked in The Sicilian Method. That sort of thing is fine as part of the story, but is tricky when used as character development, particularly for the protagonist. Not even Elmore Leonard handled the aging Lothario bit well, so expectation isn’t high for Camilleri; the disappointment is Camilleri leaning so hard and clumsily on it in Sicilian.

The main story is mildly complicated, split between loan-shark suspects and theater suspects. Given Camilleri’s background in theater and TV, it’s not surprising the theater side attracts most of the narrative. The dead man’s auditioning techniques are psychologically intense to the point of abuse, and a script in development provides some nudges. The secondary mystery involves young lovers, hostile families and a shooting. This story reads like a good short story plopped down amid the main story. The resolution of the main story, including Auguello’s missing body, is essentially by coincidence, although probably an inevitable one.

Andrew Livingston — Harvard man, banker, political operative — comes to grief in New York City. He settles the rest of his family with his sister and heads west to the Bad Lands in the Dakota territories. As he scouts for land and crew for a cattle ranch, Livingston meets Lord Machray, a newly established large-scale cattle rancher who has big plans backed by money from back east. Livingston also meets Yule Hardy, a long established cattle rancher and head of the local stockraisers association and its auxiliary, the local vigilante group. Livingston gets his ranch up and running, and finds himself front and center in the battle to determine the character of the territories in the final years before statehood.

A straightforward western, then, where newcomers clash with the established, which gets worse when the newcomers change from cattle ranchers to farmers (I expected sheep headers to show up to make matters extra nasty, but they don’t). Hall makes the story deeper and more complex by weaving in characters and subplots, chief among both is Machray, an extravagant and flamboyant Scottish adventurer who has a bagpiper, erupts in poetry and entertains his workers with highland flings. Women ably carry the story too. There’s a madam (of course) with an extremely sharp business sense who takes up with Machray, and Hardy’s daughter, who despises the Bad Lands and sees Livingston as a way out.

Hall tells the story vigorously, but at a measured pace. Livingston is also an artist, which lets Hall present the landscape (and occasionally people) with details and perspectives you wouldn’t expect from ranch hands or cattle barons. The subplots are laid out with varying degrees of subtlety. The fitness of the Bad Lands denizens for the life that’s coming gets leaned on a little too heavily. Livingston’s belief in organized and official channels of law and justice is slightly less tedious, saved by the ambiguity of his reaction to the failures of official channels after the malefactors in the final battle are handed over for trial (although the Afterword may resolve the ambiguity depending on your point of view).

You know that guy? Carl Sagan? That guy who said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”? Garry Wills knows that guy, or at least that quote, because before he can tell you why he’s a Catholic, he has to invent the Church, starting from the debate over which of Peter or Paul should be the foundational rock.

In the Introduction to Why I am a Catholic, Wills discusses his previous book Papal Sin, which I haven’t read. He divides the responses to Papal Sin into two groups. The first, less thoughtful, group wanted to know why he remains a Catholic if he hates the church so much. The second, more thoughtful, group wanted to know how he found the wherewithal to remain a Catholic after Papal Sin. It is mainly the second group to whom Wills responds in Why I am a Catholic. Keeping in mind a more accurate title, such as “Why I Remain a Catholic,” might be helpful in reading Why I am a Catholic, although I didn't find it so.

Why I am a Catholic has a triune structure. The first third covers Wills’ education and early career from St. Mary’s grade school to a National Review staff writer. The second third, roughly three-quarters of the book, is a selective history of the Catholic church from the Peter-Paul debate to Vatican II. The history can also be divided into thirds: before papal primacy, papal primacy and after, and Vatican II. The final third is a close reading and appreciation of the Apostles’ Creed.

The first part can be taken to answer the “why I am” question. And the answer is — to, um, paraphrase Richard Dawkins — religion is hereditary, you get it from your parents (The title of this part is “Born Catholic”). The novelty of Wills’ education may excite some interest in a comparative sense; otherwise occasional nuggets of interest pop up here and there. For example, Wills’ Chesterton-adjacent attempts to stick with his Jesuit training, or the casual mention that Renata Adler wrote for National Review.

The third part answers the “why I remain” question. And the answer is rooted somehow in his appreciation for the Apostles’ Creed. But in the introduction to this part Wills subtly changes the question to “what do I believe in if I remain a Catholic after Papal Sin?” The analysis Wills presents is the kind of thing he does well, but unlike previous efforts, the effort here is specialized and seems aimed at a specific audience.

The second, largest, part of the Why I am a Catholic is a history of the Church with an emphasis on the papacy up to Vatican II. Wills seems to have two objectives in this part. The first is to show the papacy had no primacy in the Church for a long time; in particular, it was not present at the beginning. The point seems to be the elaboration of some concerns that may have been raised in Papal Sin (again, a book I have not read). The other objective is to describe the unfair treatment some liberal Catholics received in matters around Vatican II. The point here seems unclear. On its face, doesn't seem to have much to do with why one is or remains a Catholic, nor does it seem to relate too deeply to the preceding Church history. Nevertheless, Wills’ writing is good enough to carry the skeptical along, assuming a sufficiently high tolerance to substantial diversions, or an interest in the subject.

Cho Jun-su is an eleven-year-old school boy in North Korea when he finds a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook. Written in English, the book remains an excessively wordy, not too interesting comic book until he gives it to a teacher. The teacher translates enough of the book to let them play a version they call the House of Possibility. This sets the course of the rest of Cho’s life. He becomes a poet, and as a teenager wins a nation-wide contest, besting another poet who will also have significant influence in Cho’s life. His success leads to attendance at Kim Il-sung University. At University he introduces his friends to House of Possibility, which starts the roller coaster that will be the rest of his life in North Korea.

For a short book (240 pages), Theroux puts together an interesting structure. He flashes the knife in the first few pages when he describes a leftist professor (“the world’s leading English-speaking expert in Juche thought”) and his son, who leaves the rulebook behind in a hotel room. Then he puts the knife away and turns to grade-school primers to describe Cho’s early life (the professor, and the knife, come back towards the end, but by that time he’s well out of the story). The change in tone disappoints, and becomes annoying right up to Cho’s witnessing a school-yard demonstration of the other side of the government’s hand. Thereafter the writing echoes Cho’s growth and maturation, although there’s a confusing crack in the narrative around the mid-point that foreshadows the end of the book.

Apart from the carpentry with which Theroux assembles The Sorcerer of Pyongyang, the story is carried by Cho and the North Korean government. Cho, despite his obvious intuition and imagination, remains modest and calm. One mark to lay against Cho might be his saintliness in situations that call for, at least, lacerating irony. Instead, he gets a grip on himself, thinks himself down, and responds with phlegmatic political cant. But even this behavior serves, adding credibility to Cho’s actions at the end of the story. Oddly, despite their butchery, the North Korean government provides much of the humor to be found in Sorcerer. There’s Dear Leader, being driven here and there, offering on-the-spot suggestions for improvement. There’s also the analogies, handled with a mercifully light touch, between the fantasy worlds constructed by dungeon masters and the government.

Women in Can Your Forgive Her? have trouble with marriage. Alice Vavasor, the her of the title, loved her paternal cousin, but sensed life with him would not be smooth, and broke the engagement. She recovered with a wealthy squire, but her senses now point in the opposite direction, and she breaks with him because she feared her life would be too smooth and featureless. In rebound she ends up back with her cousin, who has, in the meantime, become the scoundrel she sensed him to be.

Alice’s paternal aunt Arabella Vavasor married well-off and old, and was left a youngish, rich widow. She attracts two suitors, a prosperous, highly-self-regarding farmer and an impoverished, ne’er-do-well soldier. The two suitors battle it out, while the widow referees and tries to decide which, if either, of them she will marry.

Alice’s maternal cousin, Glencora M’Cluskie, the second richest women in Britain, is deeply in love with a spend-thrift wastrel. Her family, horrified, breaks up the couple, and marries her to the future Duke of Omnium, an extremely wealthy dry stick who’s almost entirely concerned with his future in government. Glencora’s unrequited longing for her first lover, and her husband’s emotional obtuseness, threaten to shake her to pieces.

These are the problems Trollope sets up in Can You Forgive Her? They seem like problems of love and marriage, and they are to some extent, but the real problems are the ones underneath, driving everything: money and the question of what a woman can do. All three women have enough money to make them independent: Alice comfortably so, Glencora fabulously so and Arabella somewhere between them. Their independence lets them reconfigure their relation with men to make it more equal and more responsive to their needs in the relation. In this sense the rankings are revised: Arabella is set fabulously, playing the game for all it’s worth; Glencora has nothing, crushed between two families; and Alice wavers between them, exercising her independence, but unable to decide and unhappy with the pressure to have to decide.

Trollope goes at all this with wide scope and fine detail. Arabella is brassy and right out in front; there’s no doubt what she’s doing. Glencora is equally relentless but more sedate, going after everything, especially her husband’s propriety, with petulant brattiness that is as amusing to watch as it is ineffective. Alice is the subtlest of the three, uncertain of her choices and of her decisions, requiring attention to the hints and shades Trollope puts around her to delimit her character. There’s plenty more going on in the story too; depending on how an e-reader handles it, the story is from 750 to over 800 pages long. Alice’s scoundrel cousin creates much plot: running for Parliament (Forgive is the first in the six-novel Parliamentary, or Palliser, series), fighting with his grandfather over inheritance, repeatedly confronting Alice’s other suitor. But despite the external ferment, the action takes place internally, where desires and social conventions grapple to reach a conclusion satisfactory to all.

Piketty has three objectives in presenting a brief history of equality. The first is to define equality, and describe its behavior over the past couple of centuries. The second is to determine the motivations and mechanisms supporting and opposing equality. And the third objective is to extrapolate supportive motivations and mechanisms into the future to extend and improve equality. There are a number of subsidiary objectives, the most important of which is to establish restorative justice for people and places ravaged by the economic and political systems set up to feed the growth of colonial and neocolonial empires.

The notion of equality shifts between equality of opportunity for intangibles, such as suffrage and education, and equality of outcome for tangibles, such as income and property. Measures of equality should be multidimensional (social, economic, environmental) to provide both broad determinations of equality and guidance for governance. The mechanisms are principally taxation, both progressive and confiscatory; a redistributive state, mainly in terms of welfare, but also for reparations and compensation; and democracy in social and corporate governance. The motivations, apart from the titular one, are the development of a transnational or global infrastructure to support continued progress, redressing past injustices and the downward and outward diffusion of power and resources.

A Brief History of Equality is a response, in part, to requests that Piketty write a concise summary of his other, more massive and detailed books (Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Capital and Ideology, Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century — none of which I've read). Given that motivation A Brief History of Equality is heavy on vision and light on details.

Piketty is a socialist, but not of the fire-breathing, smash capitalism kind. He's more of a social democrat, wanting to harness capitalism using taxes and democracy to evenly distribute capitalist benefits while ensuring that capitalist processes are always directed toward socially beneficial ends. Like Marxists, Piketty has a totalizing worldview, but one grounded in practical matters, such as finance and democracy, rather than in hypothetical armies (eventually) driven forward by metaphysical conceits. The grounding in practical matters adds weight and force to Piketty's ideas, as argued by the historical analysis in Equality. But even granting full credit to Piketty's analyses of cause and effect (which are light, and largely have the flavor of “after, therefore because” without further digging into the references), the scope of his worldview makes it hard to understand the mechanisms by which these matters are extrapolated into the future, and how they would work in the future to achieve their ends. The latter problem Equality handles by reference to democratic governance in corporate, transnational, and global scope; the former problem Equality does not handle at all.

One of Montalbano’s acquaintances draws his attention to a set of home movies, each showing the same view of a wall. Notes on each box indicate they were shot at the same time on the same day from 1958 to 1963. This piques Montalbano’s interest, and he promises to look into it. While that’s going on, a more serious situation develops at a local middle school when a pair of gunmen in Anonymous masks terrorize a classroom. There’s also some business about a Swedish-Italian film crew making a movie about love-struck kids in 1950s Vigàta. This business provides a couple of minor plot points, but seems to be in the story mostly to give Montalbano something new to complain about.

Montalbano’s informal investigation recalls his work in The Terracotta Dog: both require unraveling long-ago events, and both involve him staring at walls. The school case is Augello’s because Montalbano is up north with his girlfriend when it happens. As you might expect, Montalbano comes back and develops the intuition that breaks the case. The detection is typical Camilleri — intuition, dreams, timely revelation, folk psychologizing — enlivened with an extra dash of Catarella because computers figure in the school case. Camilleri apparently wants to complain too, because he has Montalbano go on about these kinds today and their damn computers and cell phones. Montalbano also speculates philosophically about the difficulty of providing protection come what may, establishing a thread, however thin, among the three situations in the story.

Both cases have muted endings. Montalbano decides it’s best to bury the results of his informal investigation into the wall films, and farms out the resolution of the school case to someone outside the police department. Although both resolutions make sense, the school case isn’t Montalbano’s to dispose of (technically I suppose it is because Montalbano is Augello’s boss). This goes undiscussed, which is a bit of a surprise because part of the story involves, as usual, friction between Montalbano and Augello.

Impastato was beaten to death, and then tied to the railroad tracks and blown up with tnt. His case was treated as a suicide until 1997, when it was reopened.

Fighting Sicilian Corruption, One Vine at a Time
by Marie Dozema in Gastronomica, Fall 2012

Camilleri occasionally indicates, in an Author’s Note, when the story was based on real events. He didn’t do that for this story, but he could have. There are two substories; the first is night after night of refugees from North Africa landing in Montalbano’s jurisdiction (the time is somewhere in the mid 2010s), and the second substory is a seamstress’s murder. The refugee story is apparently there so Camilleri can have his characters rile against the idiocy of national and super-national governments, although Montalbano does glean a clue from a knife fight between two refugees. After handing off the refugees to Augello, Montalbano spends most of his time working on the seamstress’s murder.

The murder story is fine, well constructed and not excessively complicated. The ridiculous bits of the story are ridiculous; for some reason I was willing to let them slide, but I can understand the hesitation to do so. The detective work, unfortunately, leans heavily on ancient Sicilian peasant wisdom. There’s usually a little of that in every Montalbano story, but here it’s all over the place, including, alas, a cat that keeps Montalbano on the job when he thought he was done. The ending is a mystery itself: did Montalbano put his foot in it, or did he “put his foot in it”? Recalling how Montalbano elegantly “put his foot in it” in The Patience of the Spider, it seems clear he put his foot in it in here, an ominous harbinger that is nevertheless consistent with Camilleri’s theme of age-related decline.

Clytemnestra weds Agamemnon, catching him on the rebound after being rejected by Helen, Clytemnestra’s sister. They become rulers of Mycenae, and have three daughters, including Iphigenia and Elektra. Agamemnon and the other suitors assuaged their disappointment at Helen’s rejection by pledging to defend her should anyone sully her honor. This sets a trap sprung by Paris, who flees with Helen to Troy. Keeping the pledge, Agamemnon assembles an army and sails off to the Trojan War. During preparation, Agamemnon betrays Clytemnestra and Iphigenia, leaving Clytemnestra prostrate with rage and grief that burns into an implacable urge for vengeance against her husband.

Elektra sees her father off to war and spends the next ten years pining for his return. Her mother tires to get her to understand Agamemnon’s betrayal, but Elektra finds her father’s conduct honorable and grows impatient with her mother’s insistence. Elektra also learns of the curse on Agamemnon’s family, and so on her. When Clytemnestra takes a lover connected with the curse, Elektra sets her course against her mother. Her father returns in victory, her mother has her vengeance and Elektra gets a turn at the family curse.

Cassandra, a princess of Troy, is fascinated by her mother’s spells of foresight. Ignoring her mother’s warnings, she becomes an Apollonian priest in hopes of receiving foresight too. Apollo obliges, but she rebuffs him when he tries to claim what he considers his due. Enraged, he curses her so no one will believe her prophecies. Her inability to convince anyone of the impending doom for the Trojans and for Troy slowly drives her mad.

Elektra is a story of the Trojan War as experienced by Clytemnestra, Elektra and Cassandra. The three stories are interwoven, chapter by chapter, with Clytemnestra carrying the majority of the story until Elektra takes over towards the end of the book. Clytemnestra has the motive, means and method to drive the story forward. Elektra is less successful, mostly being sulky and bratty until her mother is done, leaving her to drive the story. Even then she is sunk in her monomania to a degree that exceeds her mother’s. Cassandra is a puzzle. She is tangential to the Trojan War. She is unable to prevent it, or change it in any significant way, and ends up claimed by Agamemnon as a spoil of war. Her story is interesting allegorically — people who are disbelieved are still called Cassandras, usually by those who forget that the other half of Cassandra’s curse was to always tell the truth — but the connection between her and the Mycenian women is at best coincident.

For two of the three women, the Trojan War is at a remove; they hear of it only through messengers and the occasional returning combatant. For Cassandra the war is immediate, but as an observer until the end when she becomes a prisoner. This lets Elektra emphasize the women’s conflicts, both internally and externally: Clytemnestra and Elektra with each other, and Cassandra with everyone. Saint’s writing handles these currents well, delineating and distinguishing the three women, and exposing their inner drives. Readers familiar with the Trojan War may feel a tinge of guilt when Clytemnestra rages against those in on Agamemnon’s betrayal of her and Iphigenia. Saint makes a nasty little reversal against Cassandra sting: her father perceives she will act against the Greeks’ horse, and convinces some guards to stand alert to the possibility. Cassandra is thwarted when she tries to burn the horse; her father's successful prophecy places a final check on her attempt to react to her unheeded prophecies, sealing Troy’s fate.

When Marek was born, his mother died, or so he was told. He lives with his father, a shepherd, in Lapvona, the fiefdom of a corrupt, feckless and incompetent lord. Marek is the line that runs through Lapvona. He was born with skeletal deformities that earn him the contempt of Lapvona villagers, including his father. However, he makes friends with the lord’s son, although the prince treats him more as a hunting dog than as a friend. The relation between Marek and the prince is the feeble engine driving whatever plot there is in Lapvona. Overall, Lapvona reads like a truly terrible year, from spring to spring, at a tyrannically-run Ren Faire: murderous bandit raids, drought and starvation, relentless poverty and grinding work. Add to that humanity’s propensity to lie, and the almost impossibility of meaningfully connecting with another person, and you get a Boschian horror-show from which there is no escape but death, and no dignity even in death.

It’s hard to say what kind of story Lapvona is telling. Despite the corrupt, feckless and incompetent lord, it’s not a political allegory because there’s no politics. Although the fantastical happens, it’s not a fantasy because there’s no quest or rescue. It might be a fairy tale — a pauper does become a prince — but there’s no moral, and it’s hard to make up an edifying one that’s even tenuously connected to the story. It might be journalism, but the narration is omniscient and shifting, and the fantastic moves it into some other world despite the medieval-like, middle-European-like setting. It might be satire — the priest and the lord examine a pregnant nun and conclude she’s a virgin, even though they have no idea what they’re looking at, or what they’re looking for — but repeatedly hammering the same few nails becomes numbing. The story’s God-soaked, but not in any way that can be considered sacred. It’s more accurate to consider it an anti-God story, but the arguments against are a thin thread of commonplace hypocrisies. Probably the best way to take Lapvona is as it’s offered: a carnival ride of gross-outs and horrors.

So, are there trigger warnings? Oh yeah, there are trigger warnings out the ass: rape, incest, body horror, child abuse of various kinds, animal cruelty, blasphemy, cannibalism and its aftereffects, some kind of crypto-Aryanism, shit play of various kinds (you thought that “out the ass” was gratuitous, didn’t you?). Fortunately, Moshfegh’s prose style works well with this problematic litany. The flat and characterless descriptions efficiently move the reader from one gross-out or horror to the next, and give no reason to tarry; on the other hand, they also provide no place for the reader to hide. Occasionally Moshfegh waxes lyrical, usually about nature, and only for a sentence or two, otherwise it’s this atrocity, then this one, then this one.

Somebody cracks wise on the Internet (I know, I know, but stay with it, it’s fiction after all), and it goes viral. Interviews, guest lectures, panel discussions and world travel ensue until... Until something terrible happens, and everything collapses to the point of disruption. In Ohio, so you know it’s serious. Then, maybe, we see what matters in this big ol’ world of ours.

That’s mostly the story; as you read along, that’s what you’re reading. The story’s written in two parts: the happy part and the sad part. The happy part is happy, jouncing along with one-liners, wry observations and winsome meditations, a bit like a Steven Wright routine, except more Internetty. The sad part is sad, and, unlike the happy part, is capable of being spoiled, which cramps the review a little. It’s probably safe to point out if you’re familiar with Oscar Wilde’s (alleged!) comment about little Nell, then you’re equipped to handle the sad part, except you probably won’t laugh, but more like eye-roll, because Internet.

No One Is Talking About This is written like it’s from the Internet, which it calls the Portal. The effect is possibly supposed to be Twitter-like, but it reads more like it’s from an earlier era: Flutterby, Wonkette or — St. Berners-Lee protect us — InstaPundit. That works fine for the happy part (assuming you overlook the meme-slippage, which, if you couldn’t, they wouldn’t be memes), but it cuts into whatever it is the sad part is supposed to be doing; the pitch turns somber, but the register remains the same. Unless that’s the point: even the Portal-poisoned can recover their humanity, or maybe the hive-mind strength of the Portal can help you through tough times, something like that.

A Tunisian reporter is machine-gunned at sea, and a retired Sicilian is knifed in an elevator. Inspector Montalbano avoids the first case and investigates the second, but eventually finds the threads from his case weave through the other case.

Camilleri was apparently still finding his way around his characters in the story, the third in the series. The plot is good, complex and integrated yet clear, but overlaid with fussy, scene-setting business. Montalbano is particularly assholish: hair trigger, jealous and moralistic. His northern-Italian girlfriend Livia has a role in the story, and is also burdened with outlining the contours of her and Montalbano’s relationship; Montalbano chips in by writing her a letter explaining how he sees things. And, for some reason, Montalbano has a dying father to contend with. Camilleri is wandering around a lot in the telling. This story also signals the commissioner’s retirement, which is doubly unfortunate. The relation between Montalbano and the commissioner was a warm and humane part of the first three stories, a respite from frenetic aggression otherwise in play. In subsequent stories Montalbano’s relation with the new commissioner is buffoonish and ridiculous. On the positive side, Catarella is still a background character, his shtick not yet developed and hardened into the annoyance it will become in later stories.

He’s acutely aware of the confusion surrounding one of MoviePass 2.0’s biggest innovations: a new feature called PreShow that will play ads on users’ phones in exchange for credits toward the purchase of movie tickets. PreShow’s facial-recognition technology tracks people’s eyeballs to ensure subscribers are really watching — as opposed to putting their phones on the sofa and walking away

MoviePass 2.0 Wants (to Sell) Your Attention by Chris Lee in Vulture, 2022 Mar 11

Delaney Wells got screen-addicted in her early teens, but recovered. Her parents’ health-food store was driven out of business by a national chain acquired by the jungle, the world’s biggest on-line department store. Delaney becomes a foe of the source of these problems: the Every, a merger of the jungle and the Cirlce, the world’s largest social-media/indexing service. She wants freedom from the Every, and schemes for a decade to join the Every and destroy it from the inside. With the help of her friend and co-conspirator Wes, she lands a job; Wes later follows her coattails to an Every job too. Once inside, Delaney begins her orientation by rotating through several Every departments, all the while looking for leavers to wrench and gears to spike.

First and foremost The Every is satire. There’s lots of low-hanging fruit, and Eggers makes sure he puts an arrow through every one, sometimes to good effect, and sometimes more like St. Sebastian. The Every’s using eye-tracking software, spandex and social-media canceling to vanquish a political antagonist was clever and funny. New employees have to arrange a field trip, and Delaney organizes a trip to watch sea lions, which comes together with all the usual difficulties, falls apart spectacularly during the trip, and has a long, drawn-out postmortem. This too is funny, but the humor runs a little too close to “wow, look at all these weirdos and dimwits.”

The Every also wants to be novel of ideas, with concepts like freedom, autonomy, and privacy rubbing up against concepts like security, safety, and transparency. In this The Every is less successful. Ideas clash several times throughout the book, but it usually goes like this: Surveillance capitalism good: you won’t forget to take your pills. Surveillance capitalism bad: freedom.

Early in the book it becomes clear Wes is going to drink the Kool-Aid, and many of these arguments are between him and Delaney. Occasionally Delaney engages a co-worker, but because she’s undercover, those arguments are even more tepid and over reliant on irony. Delaney has a favored, Shoshana-Zuboff-like professor who sends an occasional (snail-mail) letter, but those grow more despairing.

The third role The Every tries to play is as a dystopian warning, but for that to be compelling it has to wrestle with the satire and win, which it doesn’t (a truck bomber wears a Tim Berners-Lee mask to foil surveillance cameras). Delaney’s attempts to spark revolution-fomenting dystopias show diminishing returns; it’s hard to ramp up much further after introducing a lie detector into a friend app. And the ending, though foreshadowed, is completely unearned. The intention was probably to produce a “gosh, how terrible and ruthless and ominous” cliff-hanger for a likely third book in the series, but instead produces (at least in me) a feeling of “huh, Eggers went there” (readers of The Parade are rolling their eyes and thinking, of course he went there).

The Every follows up The Circle, which I haven’t read. I don’t know if it’s necessary to read The Circle before The Every, but I don’t think so. The Every’s satire is so broad there isn’t anyplace to hide subtle call-backs to the earlier story (the reference to the movie was not subtle); the story is so thin it needs no other explanations than Delaney vs. the machine; and the main human character in The Circle hardly appears in The Every.

Gilda, the main character in this story of debilitating obsessions, is a woman in her late 20s unable to get it together enough to establish a reasonable life. She checks out a therapy group at a Catholic church, is mistaken for a job applicant and is offered an administrative assistant position recently opened by the previous assistant’s death. Despite being lesbian and an atheist, she accepts. Apart from having a job, this seems like a disastrous decision, but it becomes clear further into the book, if it wasn’t already, that there’s not much that can slow her descent into despair and dissolution.

Putting someone like Gilda at the heart of a story is tricky because she’s incapable of generating plot. The plot shreds that exist are the result of other people or things bumping against her, and watching what happens: she searches for a missing cat, she’s fixed up with an obnoxious male life coach, and, in the most serious shred, questions come up about the previous assistant’s death. Left by herself, she obsesses about death — hers and particularly her pet rabbit’s when she was ten — about her having a skeleton under her skin and about being an infinitely small object in an infinitely large universe. Other people paralyze her with the fear of causing sadness or disappointment. She got an inappropriate job because she didn’t want to embarrass a priest, it’s why she goes out with an obnoxious male life coach and why she continues an e-mail correspondence with a friend of the former assistant who doesn’t know she’s dead.

This sounds grim, and from one point of view it probably is, but Austin’s straightforward, sharp writing uses basic shapes and primary colors to present delicate matters. The story is schematic — How tall is Gilda? What color is her hair? — which moves it along at a good clip, unobstructed by sentimentality or pathos. It isn’t black comedy, but it has its moments. Like a good prole, Gilda steals stuff from work, but in her case it’s the blood and body of Christ, which she discovers when she goes on-line to leave a negative review at the web site of the manufacturer of the bland and insubstantial crackers she’s been eating. And, of course, the ol’ favorite: at confession she admits to eating pork. In the other direction, there’s her horrible family, the shameful way she treats her girlfriend, and her habitual lying. And her mental health. Austin’s firm, sure grip turns all of this into a good, if not necessarily edifying, ride.

A British intelligence agent gets shaken up while on assignment. Soon after the agent retires to a coastal resort town, but it provides no relief, and the agent's restlessness attracts the attention, and later the concern, of former intelligence colleagues.

The story is straightforward spy vs spy, but it has an interesting structure. The two peripheral characters — the daughter and the book-seller — are made central and the two central characters — the rogue-spy mouse and the internal-affairs cat — work in the periphery. It takes about half the book before it dawns (at least it did for me) that the internal-affairs agent is something more than a device for advancing the plot by going around and interviewing people to reveal backstory.

The book reads like a second draft in need of a third, and possibly a fourth. This is not only because the jacket copy says the book’s posthumous, but because of the story. The book-seller is cryptic: a successful financial shark gives it up in the prime of life and takes over a book store in a resort town. A common fantasy, but perhaps not among financial sharks, successful or otherwise. He’s in a resort town and wants to run a high-end bookstore that makes money moving Tom Clancy and Mary Higgins Clark (or whoever the British equivalents are) to the summer crowd. I don’t think you get to be a successful financial shark by misreading the market that badly. Plus, the high-end book-seller has never heard of Chomsky or Sebald or his book The Rings of Saturn. All of this looks like masterful story-telling misdirection, but the more you read into the book the more you realize it’s not: this is the way the book-seller is.

The killer, however, is the ending. Positively, it’s a satisfying ending, depending on your politics; negatively, it relies on a great gaping plot hole. I read the ending three times to make sure I wasn’t missing anything or being excessively obtuse, but no: the ending turns on a ridiculous twist. I worked up a fool-me-once explanation from a prior event in the story, but it requires turning the intelligence service into a Monty Python skit. On the other hand, Le Carré’s son writes in an afterword that he found the manuscript “fearsomely good,” and made only a few minor changes before publication, so maybe there’s something I’m not seeing, or seeing something that isn’t there.