Tag: Coville

  • Review: The Ghost in the Third Row

    Review: The Ghost in the Third Row

    How to even get in the door

    The house lights dim to orange. Kindly find your seats. Irresponsible actors scramble to their places; air pressure billows out the curtain each time one of them goes by. We know they’re up there. We know the actors are on the stage, but we can’t speak to them, nor they to us; we don’t know where their places are, nor why they waited until now to get get their butts in gear. The only proofs of their existence are the scurrying of scuffed sneakers, and somewhere a stage manager who growls, “Go around!” The actors (and the stage manager, too) are beyond the veil.

    Notorious communist Alasdair MacIntyre (since reformed) said it best: “If you want to become a better actor, you gotta do, technical term here, ‘the whole theater thing.’ No philosopher, no textbook can introduce the whole theater thing to you, only theater kids who in turn have done the whole theater … thing.”1 Anyone who’s lived this life understands, anyone who’s been there when strangers become family, when rising stars become fixed in the pantheon, when elders raise up the new generation.

    Now the house goes dark, and a wavering luminescence near the stage comes into focus. A human figure, beautiful, tragic. Elbow over the back of her seat, she looks directly at us. Allow me to introduce The Ghost in the Third Row. She has seen it all play out, from beginning to end; she understands. Today she speaks to us from beyond the veil.

    This is a story about friendship

    Please don’t throw my article on the ground when you discover this, but the ghost is not the main character. Word by word, the majority of the novel depicts two (2) preteen children rampaging through their small town un-chaperoned in a state of perfect unselfconsciousness, enjoying no filter at all on their emotional expression, intoning, “The Emperor has no clothes,” here, talking to imaginary creatures there, learning (haltingly) to become, if not well-behaved, at least legible members of society, but blissfully unaware that this learning process will change them, themselves.

    This is known as innocence. This is known as fearlessness. As the Cossack said to the nanny when she caught him conveying catapults to kindergarten, “It takes a child to raze a village.” Stage managers out there are nodding their heads, yes.

    But, because Alasdair MacIntyre does not write for the eleven-year-old demographic, we have unanswered questions about how, how? when social and professional institutions are cobbled together from preconceptions and nepotism, when gatekeepers have no patience and no incentive to explain their own standards … how to even get in the door. Coville’s answer: “I get by with a little help from my friends.” Here’s how it works.

    People have motivations. Children have fewer motivations than we, the aged, because they don’t know how “things” work, yet. But children are very motivated to make their loved ones happy. A negative example: children have no professional ambition. A steely parent could order their kid to hurry up and find some. The child can’t, so they are punished; they can only pretend, so an untrue version of themselves is praised; but it might appear to be working because, as you know, children are very motivated to make their loved ones happy.

    The positive example? That old nanny’s standby: walking two by two, the buddy system. A child could never navigate accession by themselves into any institution. Children learn social behavior by socializing with their friend. The magic is that, from the adult point of view, making their loved ones happy is now revealed to fulfill the requirements of what gets them through the door. Adults didn’t design institutions this way rationally; institutions are this way because the adults who believe they have designed them, were once children. (Once. Hah!)

    So, like Quixote and Sancho Panza, our (s)heroes contrast and complement each other. The story captures the moment in the girls’ lives when they cross a hazy boundary; they cease to be outsiders and become theater kids. Coville’s thesis is that accession works on the buddy system, so the novel has two protagonists: the best friend and the leading lady.

    If only the ghost had had a best friend in her time. But then I guess we wouldn’t get to enjoy the drama.

    Ghost stories

    In this century, we have an answer to the question, “Which genres make up genre fiction?” For each manuscript, someone’s job is to get out their best shoehorn and belt out Rihanna’s unavoidable refrain. And for many, standing under her umbrella means the difference between advertising and obscurity. But it wasn’t always this way.

    You may have heard this narrative. The first genres, as such, were 1) crime, 2) science fiction and 3) Western; but small publishers of 4) romance became so successful that the cigar-chomping misogynists who used to run the Big Thirty-Six (whoops! make that the Big Five) grudgingly hauled romance onto the podium and gave it a biff on the shoulder. Well, I regret to inform you that none of this happened (except the merger of all the publishers).

    What did happen was that the genre-less pulp magazines of the roaring ‘20’s (help me strain this metaphor, here) published a dissertation on supply-side economics, To Each His [stet] Own Umbrella. Editors, not fans, exhort writers to write prolifically within genre conventions, to make already chewing-gum stories more digestible. Not everyone can sideline as a registered nutritionist. Oh, yeah, and romance had to fend for itself, but now gets to laugh, as they say, all the way to the bank.

    Maybe some ghost stories could be published as horror. The Ghost in the Third Row had better success elsewhere, and is subtitled, The Nina Tanleven Mysteries, Book One. Makes sense, right? When you meet a ghost, you know something titillating happened back when they were alive. If there had been no crime, there would be no ghost story. (Following the Hayes code, the Crime genre has been renamed Mystery for fear of glorifying Judas Priest, British Steel, track 1, “Breaking the Law.”)

    Besides their mysterious heritage and criminal influence, ghost story conventions have bought into the paranormal trend (how is such a trend even possible?) in which paranormal investigators—debunkers, professional skeptics—who once exposed con artists, now undergo a postmodern turn, and investigate Stuff They2 Don’t Want You To Know About.

    Thinking about Nina Tanleven as a genre novel, the protagonists are not just any sleuths but kid sleuths, a much-beloved sub-genre with its own tropes and formulae. What are the rules of kid sleuths? People sometimes endanger kids, but sleuthing itself is moral and therefore never dangerous. Just the opposite: detective behaviors—research, critical thinking, stalking—give kids exposure to the grown-up world and help them make informed decisions about their future. Saccharine they may be, but the job of kid sleuths is to be good role models for kid readers, not to scare them.

    Lastly, ghost stories predate the genre press, predate the written word for that matter. So there is an influence of folklore in these stories: ghosts instruct the plastic, cynical modern child about the hard-wearing, honorable world of their grandparents. Why? when they never seem to listen, I couldn’t tell you.

    Synopsis

    On the first page, in the first sentence, The Ghost in the Third Row homes in on this idea that theater is a tradition, a MacIntyrian ‘practice’ complete with history, hierarchy, canon, convention, script and yes, superstition. The story begins at an audition, a situation where you will be tested (and found wanting). Well, our heroes make the cut. The more tomboyish sidekick is Chris Gurley; the hero hurltling from childhood toward something else is Nina Tanleven. Chris is the muscle; Nine is the brains. This is how far we will follow them: from audition to opening night.

    But, like paranormal stories, The Ghost in the Third Row also supports herself on the irony between fake supernatural events, and real ones. A series of ghost attacks? Who could be responsible? Ironically, only those who believe in life after death can solve the mystery, because the real ghost must be exonerated before our heroes can track down the all-too-human saboteur.

    The novel is kind enough to itemize the prerequisites for admission into this ‘practice,’ very instructive for any reader who has never been initiated and may be curious about the rules. Stage fright, check. Crush on the director, check; jealousy due to crush, double check.

    Stand by helplessly while leading lady gasps through a panic attack, check. Shrink away from powerful modern woman stage manager who has no time to baby every actress that passes through, check. Invisible, magical creature recognizes honesty in young girls’ hearts and gives them her blessing with the emotional tenor of your basic Good Witch of the North, check.

    Nine and Chris are learning how the industry functions, behind the scenes. Those trade secrets; you’d be amazed; one day it suddenly looks like you know what you’re doing.

    There is a rival kid actress, the one who has to fake professional ambition because her mother is Joseph Stalin. Argue whether the ‘practice’ belongs to the rich or poor, but learn toleration enough to share trade secrets across class and perhaps ethnic lines, check. (Rich, abused white girls communicate through hazing. So check that off, too, I guess; how the hell are you going to stop them?) Put a hand on the director’s shoulder while he has the good old rehearsals-moving-too-slowly meltdown, check. Rescue the production, its ticket sales, and ultimately the musty edifice of the main street theater itself from vandalism, arson and worst of all the small-town rumor mill, check.

    Fulfill these same requirements, young reader, and you, too, could be promoted to Thespian, Private, First Class.

    It must be said that The Ghost in the Third Row takes her sweet time getting around to the mystery formula, and the kid sleuths don’t turn in their list of suspects until at least the halfway point of the novel.

    Suspecion, exoneration. Process of elimination. Readers of mystery know this structure forwards and backwards. Each time the sleuths stalk a suspect, they discover three things: proof of innocence; some juicy personal drama that explains why they looked suspicious to begin with; and finally a clue leading them to the next suspect.

    The appeal of the straight mystery plot, in this century, is not inductive reasoning. No locked room here; no briar wood pipe. Instead, for each suspect, we indulge in a short character study. The reader graphs out their relationships, studies their tell. When interviewed, the suspect is called on to give a humane emotional response to the crime; hilariously, they all flub. A hangman walks into a bar. Gallows humor.

    The rational motive given why each suspect might wish to sabotage the show? Not the novel’s strong point. Coville lampshades this fact: kid sleuths don’t always understand grown-up motives, and our heroes’ imaginations matter to the story more than proving reasonable cause. Anyway, the investigation brings the reader a degree of intimacy with each of the characters who labor in the small-town drama industry, resulting in sympathy, even gratitude. Overworked composer impatiently rewrites a song to fit your vocal range, check. Overworked costumer drops jaw-dropping gossip for the low price of sticking you impatiently with a pin, check.

    And atmosphere. Ghost stories, like fog machines, are held to high standards of churning out atmosphere. More important to the novel than clues qua clues—a sepia photograph here, a matchbook there—are the paragraphs that develop the milieu. Sneak into the balcony seating while the theater is dark, check. The cast mobs the stage after curtain on opening night to exchange hugs, in a state close to intoxication or mania, check—Coville can’t muffle that yearning for human unity. Lie down in coffin in the props storage, check. There’s a trapdoor in there somewhere, check.

    Are these clues? They’re more like play-clues. The kids persuade each other that playing around with the theater’s most ambiance-laden paraphernalia might help their investigation. Drool over a famous autograph, check. Ogle the program from some schmaltzy prewar production, check.

    I guess that leaves our new inductees only one more milestone to pass, one that could never take place except at the conclusion of a ghost story: a final laying to rest, a line to the past that can never be thinned, much less severed, the protagonist’s stepping into a place where others have stood before her. The repair of the veil that has been pierced; drawing the curtain. With the arrival of a new generation, the old guard just fade away. A first and last dance.

    Applause, check.

    Oh, and the solution to the mystery? Well, just like our grounds for suspicion are not the strongest part of the story, the saboteur’s reasons may well have been shoehorned in after the rest of the manuscript was complete. But I’ll tell you: it’s not the old man. The set-builder is not the saboteur. In fact, arguably the reason the place is haunted by a pretty lady is because he’s been building up her memory this entire time, keeping it in repair, under the spotlight, burnished and presentable, see? Suffice it to say that the real saboteur suffers from jealousy and neglect that is connected to the ghost. So the solution is that if everyone had stuck to the buddy system then none of this would ever have happened.

    Metaphor; symbolism; sensory imagery

    Let’s spell out the heady, abstract structure of the novel. By living the life after death, ghosts bridge generations; by walking through walls, ghosts bridge instutions. Death is a metaphor for accession: you know there are people on the other side but they no longer deign to talk to you. Those who have never bothered with MacIntyre—most people—could weigh a ghost story with a kid protagonist and conclude, death is a metaphor for growing up.

    Accession should not be a form of torture imposed on children by a Soviet mother; normally, accession feels good—really good. The Ghost in the Third Row has a happy ending. It is only when Nine is finally at home in the theater that she can witness the ghost fade away one last time; and she feels joy, joy for the ghost’s ultimate triumph, joy for being there in the audience, there on the spooky balcony, to receive the ghost’s great performance. Being murdered did not make the ghost resentful, hurt, or frightened. The ghost did not mind dying. As a human person, perhaps even as a child, her wish was to do the whole theater “thing” and amazingly, with little more than hard work, dedication and in her case a thin white body but what do you want? it was the ‘20’s … she achieved that goal, indeed, even death did not rob her of that experience, that self-determination, that self-actualization. She performed and achieved triumph onstage. She died onstage. She lingers onstage. Her haunting, and her way of appearing selectively to pure-hearted virgins—“young women”—have been a way of sharing her love for the stage. Her life (and death) have been joyous, beautiful, an aspirational example for Nine. Work complete, she fades away from the stage.

    Her work. Coville summons the ghost as gargoyle, as if to say, every place needs its pagan protector. She ensures that the building—and the ‘practice’—known as The Grand Theater, survive. Nine will now do the same. Nine’s success as a singer, her immature goal before she learned how the industry functions, may not have been able singlehandedly to carry the theater forward into the new generation. But herself and Chris together—and, yes, they patch things up with the abused, abusive rich girl—together they can do it. On page 1, the Grand is in financial danger, and the theatrical tradition is endangered by forces including white flight, the decline of the nuclear family and postmodern ennui; on page 144, everybody is on a stable footing. Nine and her generation have taken up the work that the ghost used to do.

    I’ve made the claim in another article that, much more so than literature per se, middle-grade fiction has elements of role-modelling; that is, the reader learns that the protagonist’s experiences are plausible. The Ghost in the Third Row heavily models friendship as a basis for otherwise institutional interactions. The most difficult part of rehearsals is waiting your turn? Sit with your friend. Trapped yourself in a prop coffin from another show? You’re gonna need a buddy to run for help. Stalking someone? You can cause a distraction while your friend gets the information. Without examples like these, kids can’t be expected to know how to function within the confines of any profession.

    To back up briefly, realize that the saboteur and the ghost don’t know about each other; or, if the ghost knows about the saboteur, she doesn’t seem to care. Nine’s mystery is the mystery of the ghost. The cast and crew’s mystery is the mystery of the saboteur. When the two come together, we have the story of Nine’s relationship with the theater. A kid reader might take this as role-modelling, “how to decide if a ‘practice’ is right for you.” I’ll explain.

    What if Nine had decided not to get involved with the mystery of the saboteur? Perhaps she never became friends with Chris, and had no one to steer her in that direction. The production would have been ruined. No other dynamic duo was coming to save the day. So how is the Grand Theater saved? By Nine’s heroism? Her choice? Far from it. The actions Nine and Chris undertake that save the day were actions in which they couldn’t help themselves. They are two kids just out here having fun.

    And, clearly, if they had been two very different people, self-deputized sovereign citizens or something like that, and had pursued the saboteur because defending others is the right thing to do, what would that be like? That would be a world in which childhood is just a wash; the most unfair outcome you could imagine. Eleven-year-olds, researching murder and stuff that happened before their time, putting themselves in peril, straining their undeveloped brains to outfox a dangerous grown-up? Bringing the panicked saboteur in under arrest? We would never stand for a story like that. If someone submits that manuscript to you, you had all better give it a ruthless panning.

    No, the advantage that Nine and Chris have over the saboteur is, I know it’s saccharine, it’s friendship. They’re in the right place at the right time because they encourage each other’s curiosity, and agency. They tell each other, “knowledge is power.” When one is distracted by eleven-year-old concerns, does the other one tell her to stay focused? Never; she proceeds doing her own part of the detective work, because it’s fun, and if it isn’t, the two of them come at the problem later from another angle. There’s no martyrdom in this novel, not on the kids’ parts anyway.

    In real life, accession is not some purely antagonistic experience of overcoming excessive and arbitrary barriers only to see any material reward negotiated away before one ever attains the power within one’s new community to defend oneself. Black American readers are getting a good laugh out of that remark. But at least, we can imagine a society in which a profession or tradition, while maintaining necessary boundaries, also maintains internally redistributed resources, which empower the initiate in ways that make the whole mess worthwhile. So here. Composers collaborate with singers; that’s part of what makes theater, theater. Nosy stage managers try to keep tabs on the physical location of cast and crew; this safety (safety from each other, and from the outside) is a resource that is thrust upon new members from day one without negotiation.

    The ghost is a metaphor for these resources. From the moment of audition until after opening night, she demands nothing of Nine and Chris, but she is there for them. She was there for them long before they arrived.

    The thematic material for The Ghost in the Third Row is varied and a little tangled, but that’s normal for an insider-perspective novel. (The self-insert character is Nine’s dad.) Coville wouldn’t, couldn’t write a community theater novel if he wasn’t a community theater kid. That perplexity is verosímil; it is realism unembellished. It makes for a nice read; the plot doesn’t feel like it runs on railroad tracks.

    Love letter to the old main drag

    The setting for The Ghost in the Third Row is the author’s long-time home in Syracuse, NY, undeniably a small town, ineluctably American, a setting so typecast for shameless nostalgia that I wonder whether Coville chose ghost stories or ghost stories chose him. Scenes depicting the two best friends’ silliness and earnest self-expressions work well in the small-town setting. No one in Syracuse has ever before uttered the kinds of salt-of-the-earth, far-afield metaphors that Chris comes up with. You couldn’t say the same if the story took place in the Lower East Side. The suspension of disbelief required to get two untrained, unknown nobodies up onstage is very light. In the small town theater scene, enthusiasm counts for more than formal training.

    The nostalgia element hums along when we’re in the theater; it’s less powerful in town. Unlike your slasher flick or the colonial guilt nostalgia of your Stephen King, the purpose of the supernatural is not to punish the protagonists for squandering the bounty of a land that their ancestors so effortfully emptied. (In that kind of horror story, the supernatural used to be held at bay precisely because men used to be real men, etc.) The decline of culture and society is tragic only because of the beauty, richness and indeed opportunity that real people used to experience; adults wish wistfully that kids these days could have experiences like their own.

    At least, this is the portrayal. If we took the novel as describing reality, this would not be an uncontroversial set of claims. When there are fewer children to compete with locally, what are the experiences of the children who live somewhere else? When there are fewer adults to present a danger, and when everyone knows everyone, an attacker is better able, not less able, to threaten a victim by saying that calling for help will be worse than submission. (When Nine develops crushes on grown men, she’s in no danger from the men, from other girls, or from herself—in the story world. In real life, would this be true in a small town? Would it be any more or less true in the city?) Finally, the types of people making up both the past and present communities are subject to selective memory.

    There are zero black (or indigenous) characters in this novel. We will generously assume that, however this got to be the case, it’s an honest depiction of one or more small towns in 1987, and that not every middle grade novel can give adequate coverage to settler-colonialism and Jim Crow.

    A wrinkle: I read The Ghost in the Third Row as a kid, and can at least try to compare the racial story as I perceived it then and now. The striking difference: back then, I (mis)interpreted Nina Tanleven as … not black, but not white either, with a single dad who is not white. Perhaps I thought she was intended to be Puerto Rican. I think I was waiting, as I made my way through the book, for the moment when the mean girl refers to her as a Mexican and she replies, either, “Mexico is a large country and there’s no shame in being born there,” or more typically as the 90’s became the early 2000’s, the triumphant correction, “I’m Guatemalan,” or whatever, a trope that lamentably causes hives in many documented cases. But what is going on here?

    Two things.

    “Tanleven” is a made-up name as far as I can tell; please write in if you have information otherwise; still, I feel confident when I make the claim that all made-up names nevertheless fall into real life racial, ethnic, linguistic categories. More likely than Latino, maybe the author thought of Tanleven as an East Slavic name. Maybe his goal was to invent the most unplaceable, ethnically un-ethnic made-up name in the history of fiction; even in that case he must have known about readers’ proponsity to try to place everything and, I guess in this case, to try to race everything.

    What’s indisputable is that the protagonist’s peers perceive her name as being unlike their own. Other characters do not make fun of her name, not in Book One, anyway, but the possibility that they might do so adds tension to Nine’s social interactions. So, if she’s not canonically differentiated from the mainstream by race, she’s clearly differentiated by something. Thinking about her single dad, and how rare that family structure was in 1987, and the symbolic phenomenon that names come from dads, let’s say she has a non-mainstream background, a word that sometimes paraphrases race but could certainly embrace blowing up the nuclear family structure. Now, everyone in community theater has an insecure relationship with society; they’re bohemians, weirdos, at best a wannabe. Nine’s background gives her the same insecurity within theater; this is called intersectionality. The reader is meant to know that, at any time, bigotry could make an entrance, and then Nine’s entrance into the profession would be denied. In the story as written, this never takes place. So community theater is a harbor not only for perverts, addicts and the terminallly idealistic, but now also for people with made-up last names.

    Is this the best possible mapping of this idea through metaphor onto the page? Probably not. It’s one of those times when Coville’s writing, while not hateful, and while suggesting the stories we need, falls short. But assuming my interpretation is valid, let’s see where it leads us.

    When the new child joins the profession, the profession grows. You see? Not just by gaining a new member, but by proving that it can accommodate people from a background who have never achieved success in the profession before. We alluded to traditions maintaining boundaries of their choosing; when a tradition grows, it does so independently of the mainstream, sometimes in opposition to the mainstream. For a twentieth century writer, the political parallel is unavoidable. Sometimes the mainstream is capable of mass suicide, and in hindsight, in all of these cases recent enough to stand in living memory, had the professions maintained a greater sense of their own internal values, they would have been powerful enough on their own, temporarily, to prevent this behavior by everyone else.3

    Coville clearly feels not only that accession is a very nice experience to have, but that it’s in the institutions’ best interest, that institutions have almost a duty to facilitate the accession of new types of people, that theater is in this way a good role model for the rest of society. Every other institution in the social universe could benefit from embracing new backgrounds; only in this way can society as a whole work out how “things” should be. The alternative, as MacIntyre indeed argues, would be “… some kind of top-down approach, which, just, ugh.”

    So there’s my understanding of the book. The ghost represents the things kids need from institutions. Nine represents the kind of person who needs those things (because they aren’t redundantly supplied by her background). The best friends represent best friends. And Coville wants to color nostalgia with his peculiar gel sheets: institutions of the past could’a, would’a, should’a behaved pro-socially. This farm-to-stage nostalgia is anti-Enlightenment; it is MacIntyrian in that our only hope for improving society today comes from insider knowledge of closed-door traditions of the past.

    In closing, I will disclose that the bologne that Coville undertook to write into Chris’s mouth caused me multiple times to laugh out loud while sitting in a quiet room—previously quiet—by myself. If you aspire to do the same, then maybe The Ghost in the Third Row is the institutional resource you need. So until next time, everyone, break a leg.

    1. Quotations attributed to MacIntyre in this article are purely fictitious. Any resemblance to his actual publications in purely coincidental and unintended. ↩︎
    2. They? yes, They ↩︎
    3. I represent that this claim about history enjoys a sort of consensus. I do not represent that this claim is the consensus. For one thing, the other side would (and did) argue that traditional institutions have no such power anymore; hence the need for a virile, socially conservative strongman. ↩︎
  • Review: Robot Trouble

    Review: Robot Trouble

    An Etymology of Childish Things

    There is a room whose walls billow muslin. Sun unseen, illuminance shuns human hands. As suspended in the airy night of mind, where primally structure the technical, so here, we work by feel.

    We aspire to bridge heart to heart, a feat of engineering proof against earthquake’s resonance. Our primary model resembles a clothespin, an ovoid, root vegetables, the little goddess. If we could see ourselves! We talk to the model, carry it in the crook of our arms, sit down across from it, respond to its concerns. We show hospitality to the model. We serve tea.

    The model need not be a model; it could be a rock, a sock, a psychological projection flickering atop a beleaguered cousin—or nothing at all; it could be imaginary, friend. The model does what we say it does, says what we say it says. What kind of friend are we? At dawn we make our bed; at play time we make up our mind. In the room where walls waver, we make trials; we make errors; we ­grow.

    Puppet derives from the diminutive of pupil.

    Muppet derives from the diminutive of mop. We can’t be all serious all the time.

    Machina ex Thea

    How to write the second installment in a trilogy? Chalk up all of the story’s action scenes and lever them onto a moving stairway: this is escalation across the board. We readers want a book to reveal the tenderness of the human condition—for twelve pages, until it becomes bo-ring. Double meanings are out; sugar crash is in. C’est en effet une pipe after all. But, what do I escalate when I escalate … everything?

    Originally, The A.I. Gang trilogy was outlined as a quartet; Robot Trouble was Book Three. Flashback scenes from the deleted second book appear in this one; the conflict between the A.I. Gang girls, Wendy and Rachel, almost all takes place offscreen; it passes the Bechdel test, but the simplistic imagery approaches the trope of a catfight. I find four loosely braided threads here: 1) the catfight, where like in an art school darkroom, the background does not develop in any detail; 2) classic science fiction imagery of mechanical servants; 3) a musical theme that tests the limits of communication and empathy, a Coville favorite; and 4) the spy story, stating the theme of fun, or power, or “the social and the somatic.”

    Not one of the four threads convincingly resolves; yet, to begin Act II, the heroes for the first time go on the offensive against the main villain. Team leader Roger repeats his words from Book One: “Stand back, everyone—I think I’m about to be brilliant.” The plot of Book Two is: the A.I. Gang baits a trap for Black Glove using an innocent orbital traffic control robot named after the Greek goddess Euterpe. (The rocket that will launch Euterpe into space is the perfect place for Black Glove to conceal a new radio transceiver.) The characters improvise a rickety structure out of mismatched parts, just as a writer does when he rebuilds two novels into one, or a mad scientist when he violates the boundary between man and God.

    The second novel in a trilogy lives in the moment. All that offscreen stuff? That’s the stuff that you can no longer do anything about.

    Synopsis

    The author loads several metric tons of robots into this one little paperback, not one of which ever operates the way it was intended to, hence the title.

    Nemesis and comic relief Sergeant Brody has a bunch of monstrous new security robots patrolling the facility’s warehouses, one of which is depicted on the cover terrorizing a bunch of children, perhaps authorial self-actualization. But “Deathmonger” fails to guard any electronic equipment against being “temporarily repositioned”—beginning with itself. Other adults who indulge in the creation of servants and frenemies include Ray’s dad, who prototypes all of his video game characters as cybernetic toy monsters—maybe he’s a poor sketch artist—and A.I. Gang ally, Soviet defector Stanley Remov, who has a gentleman’s-gentleman type for his chess opponent.

    And the story’s inciting incident is when Rachel meets Dr. Leonard Weiskopf’s creation, Euterpe, daughter of Mnemosyne, which does not appear in the cover illustration, likely because its design resembles litigious monopolistic megacorporation prized property, Artoo-Deetoo. Euterpe’s purpose is to calculate safe orbital paths for humanity’s congested satellite inventory. But it tragically fails to harmonize the orbits of a swarm of tween nerds; I guess that task, like many, requires the human touch.

    Speaking of human defining features, Weiskopf’s musical talent charms Rachel in Book One; now she herself begins studying music. A career flunky of the military industrial complex, Weiskopf warns that emotions are easily manipulated, that this is music’s “dark side, if you will. Everything has one, you know.” To all you foreshadowing enthusiasts out there, you’re welcome in advance.

    Rachel eventually confides in Weiskopf about the catfight. “More friendships are lost over careless words than anything else,” says Weiskopf pointedly. “If there was only music, we might all be better off.” On the surface, this contradicts his earlier claims that war and hate arise from passion (claims that Ibram X. Kendi would rebut: hate arises from opportunism), but Weiskopf shows empathy by giving voice to Rachel’s beliefs—at that moment, she would trade her words for music in a heartbeat.

    What Weiskopf admires about music is its connection to human passion, but this power is never tested in Robot Trouble. Where is the scene in which passion per se is the decisive factor in a spy conflict, or an interpersonal one? In the novel as we have it, conflict is resolved by action, dryly, in moments of repressive silence, which strikes this reader as horrifyingly realistic.

    This includes the new miniboss, who tiptoes into the narrative in Chapter One. For every incentive of Black Glove’s to play a slow game, the Fleming-derivative post-Soviet pursed-lipped mercenary has an incentive, as they say, to move fast and break things. Ramon Korbuscek defines Robot Trouble as a spy story, giving the heroes (and the reader) an excuse to play with spy toys. His cover identity, Brock A. Rosemunk, is an anagram. If you caught that at age 10, dear reader, your future is as bright as Nancy Drew’s herself. He falls to his death in Chapter Twenty-One, in stark contrast to the miniboss from Book One, who gets arrested. If that’s not escalation, what is?

    Korbuscek analyzes the tidy reception area kept by secretary to the project director, Bridget McGrory (too tidy). He sneaks into the office of power-obsessed Sergeant Brody, puts his feet on the desk, and snoops through his mail. His former mentor is none other than Remov; Korbuscek hopes to “finally get rich on what I learned from the old man,” ironically, by photographing Remov’s classified documents. (Get it?) Korbuscek applies makeup; climbs through windows; picks locks; tells time by the moon. The heroes never see these things. The narrative is «глаз в небе»; glaz v neve; ein Auge im Himmel.

    Remov loses a fistfight with Korbuscek at the novel’s midpoint. Remov only survives by speaking a trigger word; Korbuscek is under post-hypnotic programming, and flees in terror. Remov enlists the team’s help: it was dark, and Korbuscek will have “had his face altered half a dozen times by now.”

    Mercury happens to arrive at the infirmary while Remov is already holding court with the kids. To gain entrance, Mercury must shout down Dr. Clark, who wants Remov to rest. Suddenly vulnerable, prideful and enraged, Mercury says, “I will not be prevented from seeing my friend.” Reading as an adult, this is the only line in the series that strikes me as an overt portrayal of the gay experience.

    In the Act II subplot, Remov teaches the heroes to chart all their clues to Korbuscek’s identity using paper and pencil—the table is reproduced in the text to make sure the reader learns this method. But they are outfoxed. When his decoy gets perp-walked away, Korbuscek is inwardly beaming. During the novel’s climax, he still has not been ousted from his cover identity as a security officer; he gloats about his access to any place in the facility.

    At the story’s climax, a sprawling three-chapter romp, the team stakes out the rocket launch silo, drawing Black Glove into their trap. But Korbuscek’s mission, ironically, is to hack Euterpe; and he infiltrates the silo via an unlit network of tunnels that he memorized beforehand (a detail that could be one Fleming trope too many, or a refreshing, unexpected dash of The Tombs of Atuan). Like in Book One, it is the miniboss who locks two team members into a deathtrap together, this time Hap and Roger, who catch Korbuscek on his way out of the rocket, successful in his mission. (That robot sure is in trouble now).

    Korbuscek knocks out Hap and Roger, not with his fists but with sleeping gas, and leaves them tied together with “thin but incredibly powerful polyester twine” at the base of the rocket to be incinerated. Meanwhile, Rachel leaves her post, and as a result confronts Black Glove, an event the kids were trying to avoid. Black Glove does knock out Rachel with a “sudden blow,” and leaves her locked inside the rocket with no tools except her pennywhistle and the muse of music.The boys, after much philosophizing and reassurance never to give up, free themselves. Rachel, in contrast, wakes up alone, and must calm herself using her Mentat training. Now she sends an SOS—Euterpe is broadcasting on its own dedicated radio frequency, and expands the pennywhistle notes into a chamber orchestra, but retains the rhythm—which is what summons Korbuscek to reenter the silo, because he believes, incorrectly, that his tampering has been discovered.

    The remaining team members heroically halt the launch. Wendy gains ingress by amassing the security robots, which the team has long since hacked, and slamming them into the control room door until it (and they) break down.

    A fistfight is a rare occurrence for Coville, and Robot Trouble has two, another form of escalation. In Chapter Twenty-One, on Fleming’s inevitable metal-grate catwalk, Korbuscek soundly out-fights Roger and Hap, this time using an unnamed but still vaguely racist style of martial arts. The boys, after messily sawing through the zip-ties earlier, dangle from the catwalk, their grip impaired, distressingly, by their own blood. Remov saves them by speaking Korbuscek’s trigger word again, into a very convenient loudspeaker. No one ever asks him, afterward, what the hell that was about; they’re all distracted. But among the adults who helplessly watch the fistfight from the control room … is Black Glove, whose own tampering with the rocket is eventually blamed on Korbuscek, ensuring that the kids will hack again next week in another episode of The A.I. Gang.

    The Trouble With Robots

    or, Hello, Dolly

    The trouble with robots is really trouble with us. “User error,” as they say, and that error is projection. The mafia lapdog believes everyone is ripping him off. The spook believes he’s under the tightest surveillance of all. In that case, he is, but the reason he believes it … is that that’s what he would do, if the roles were reversed.

    So here. Elegant, polite nerd, Hugh Gammand, knows that what people want, himself included, is Thugwad the Gross; that’s why he can’t restrain himself from tinkering at the breakfast table and that’s why Thugwad destroys his fried eggs. The reason Rin Tin Stainless Steel’s functionality is negated by incessant pranks, is that precocious buttoned-up prep, Roger, has no other outlet for his immaturity. Deathmonger is everything Sergeant Brody wishes he were: big, scary, mindless. Dr. Weiskopf attained his scientific career only after military service in which he would “kill without mercy;” and Euterpe’s high-minded purpose is subverted to encourage global thermonuclear war. Remov, whose own gender presentation is not above reproach, remarks of his chess opponent, Egbert, “Gender’s the one thing they [robots] don’t have—and never will, if we’re lucky.”

    Rachel is frustrated in all of her attempts to create harmony: with Wendy, with her protective single father, with her male teammates who can’t form sentences in the presence of the beautiful female scientists. But she learns Euterpe’s musical pitch activation sequence, and studies functional tonality.

    Every time irredeemably spoiled, ­uncultured Wendy gets her hands on a robot, including Deathmonger, she puts a pretty red ribbon on its head and instructs it to sing its horrible heart out, just as her irredeemable yuppie parents have done with her. They are her fellow aberrations.

    Even Korbuscek has been sent with a device to end life on earth, precisely because he is a mercenary. Only a sociopath could install such a device. When he hears Euterpe’s music, “nothing had affected him like that in a long time” … well, that’s his whole problem!

    The human insecurity revealed by so-called Robot Trouble reveals an underlying loneliness. Uncertain of good reception by a friend or partner, the characters instead model behavior using a doll. All they want is for the doll to accept them as they are. Unfortunately, it’s easier to direct radical acceptance at Artoo-Deetoo than at a real person. (No offense, buddy.) The novel is a meditation on friendship, where personality flaws coexist and harmonize. Gammand and Korbuscek, WW and Weiskopf are each wrapped up in an egoistic little drama precisely because they crave inclusion. Like all of us, they would be happier if they paid more attention to the people around them.

    No Robot? No Trouble

    A cold war snaps and crackles between unkempt California wunderkind, Wendy, and preppy Massachusetts team player, Rachel. The catfight is initiated in Chapter Twelve when Rachel, without thinking, spills Wendy’s biggest secret. I guess Rachel is so accustomed to obeying the rules and therefore having nothing to hide, that she forgot Remov would be duty-bound to report on them.

    During the climax, it is Wendy who recognizes, just in time to save Rachel’s life, that the procedurally-generated music on the loudspeakers is seeded by an SOS: Rachel extends her mind in a plea for comprehension, and Wendy meets her on her own grounds, indeed without verbal communication, that oh-so-symbolic human unity. In the epilogue, the repayment cited “in lieu of a long-overdue apology” is indeed Wendy’s deciphering of Rachel’s SOS.

    The puzzle is this. Rachel’s original slip-up makes Rachel look bad; Wendy is fine. Yet, the drama emerges after Rachel apologizes. Instead of accepting the apology, Wendy blows up in her face, implying that something deeper has offended her. So two possibilities spring to mind for what Wendy cannot forgive.

    Maybe it’s Rachel being so entitled, so obedient, so accustomed to having the adults on her side that she can lower her guard, whereas Wendy lives in a vigilant world of disdain for the rules, disdain for adults, and disdain for tofu. When Wendy rips into a burger, she embodies the defiant spirit of unschooled human potential. She needs the team, because they enable her lifestyle of relatively civil disobedience. But Rachel, and therefore an important subset of the A.I. Gang, cooperates with the very institutions—the military industrial complex, gender, laundry—that have inflicted upon Wendy a cleaning maid robot, a bedtime, and her mother’s dictum, “This isn’t punishment, dear; it’s nutrition.”

    The novel does not portray Wendy in the most sympathetic possible light.

    Frustratingly, we never examine how Wendy squares her anti-authoritarian ideals with her life of privilege, so perfectly encapsulated in the example of the computer mainframe, where a twelve-year-old can hack into a higher security area only if she is given unsupervised access to a lower one.

    The second possibility is that Wendy is jealous of Rachel. The usual regressive catfight trope would have this structure: jealousy over male attention, or over attractiveness, or over station. But if Wendy of all people felt that Rachel unfairly uses her prettiness and sweetness to obtain advantage—and we’ve never seen Rachel do this—that would never prevent hard-nosed realist Wendy from stating the issue aloud. The girls’ prior relationship is nothing like this: Wendy respects Rachel as a fellow nerd. Just, a nerd who habitually grips flatware.

    My interpretation of Wendy’s wound is that Wendy perceives Rachel not as an anti-libertarian collaborator, but as an anti-feminist collaborator. It is not male attention Wendy is jealous of, but female solidarity. Positive reinforcement from others for Rachel’s feminine-coded traits is fine; but for Rachel herself to feel positively about her own feminine-coded traits is a dereliction of duty. True, Rachel’s crime, telling Wendy’s secret to Remov, is not gendered. (Maybe in the deleted second book, the original crime was “being too girly.”) But Wendy looks to women (including her very respectable, controlling mother) for protection as she pursues her future in STEM, and she looks to women to reinforce of the righteousness of women’s liberation.

    There is a rich unfulfilled potential in this unique relationship, each girl with exactly one female friend, a condition of responsibility and influence over each other, which neither one entered into voluntarily. What is the nature of gender in inherently asymmetrical interactions: mentor and pupil, old money and new? Does gender necessarily reinforce inequality, or is it sometimes incidental, even lenitive?

    Wendy’s ideals are compelling because they are intersectional. She doesn’t want to be superior; she just wants to be left alone. Just to be left alone, a feminine girl such as Rachel must do twice as much as a boy, but a gender-nonconforming girl such as Wendy must do ten times as much. That’s the premise that deserves its own separate book.

    What Is the Ionosphere But Liminal Space?

    The defining scene of the trilogy takes place in Chapter Eleven after the kids temporarily reposition Deathmonger. In order to reverse-engineer the thing and create a remote control, they require privacy, so their designated work site is a convenient cave that no one else knows about. In another article somewhere, the author explains that the imagery of this scene sprang from his mind one day fully formed: the cave, shadowy, sheltering; the kids sharing group inclusion due to their shared secret; and the work, scientific work by which such humble gadgets as lanterns and screwdrivers open a service panel to a wondrous future. The cave bares “great rocky fangs,” which throw “shadows like giant fingers groping for a lost dream.”

    This is somatic storytelling. You had to be there. The characters feel, physically feel that working in the cave will give them power over their environment. Our actions must succeed, and our actions must be our own; this is power. And in the moment we know in our mind how to obtain power, a feeling manifests in our body, and this feeling is fun.

    We trace a line through the Hardy Boys back to Tom Sawyer. We have identified the missing ingredient in the Montessori system, where kids spend the day within the white plaster walls of a soft, sanitary play room. A schoolhouse is still a bounded environment. Human beings discover a sense of self only after emerging from a liminal space.

    Children play with dolls to learn about society. The doll is our puppet: it behaves as we imagine it to behave. Play is theater: by observing play, we observe our real social world. Play takes place on the threshold of “the unreal and the real;” it is liminal. Robot stories have only ever been written by people who were already familiar with dolls, with puppets, with toys. The delight in robot stories stems partially from the liminal nature of robots themselves: robots are lifelike machines, animated but inanimate. When a robot frustrates its creator, like in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the dissonance between expectation and reality reveals the creator’s imagination, which they had thought private, for all the audience to see.

    I’m not the first to assert that grown-ups project their own minds onto their toys, toys ranging from the Met Gala to nuclear submarines, from judicial robes to shell companies. We’re all in robot trouble out here. But that doesn’t mean that we have to take high-ranking persons seriously. We’re not under post-hypnotic suggestion; and the behaviors of the powerful are truly ludicrous. If we must die, best to die laughing.

  • Review: Operation Sherlock

    Review: Operation Sherlock

    General Electric has the same abbreviation as the country of Georgia


    One important thing to remember on those days when your superiors have it within their power to delay your violent death, along with their own, and they choose to do nothing, is that right up until it doesn’t anymore, life goes on. If you live near the ocean, appreciate the patient persistence of the breakers, the grandeur of the tides. It’s no sin to pour a long summer evening into holographic parallel terahertz processor powered video games. Go for a swim if you like to swim. Painting with oils is nice: maybe a landscape. Everyone has their own tastes; the irredeemable masochist can always wire a breadboard by hand. Computer science 101. Proof of concept.

    Or, when you can no longer distract yourself from the fear of pain and the senseless insult of those who would destroy us all in a vain attempt to preserve for themselves the power to do so, remember that fear forces the mind to prioritize the self, that fear magnifies one’s own significance and erases the possibility of presenting one’s vulnerabilities to another, that fear persuades the subject into self-imposed isolation. So does insult. Propaganda 101. Remember this, and then organize with your peer group—or anyone, really—for mutual preservation.

    Quick aside: in real life, very few people have very many dollars

    Today we’re discussing Operation Sherlock (published 1986) the first book in Bruce Coville’s The A.I. Gang trilogy, but we’re not going to discuss real-life AI. Maybe next time, if, unlike a cybernetic life-form, I have the stomach.

    There’s a simple reason why it’s pointless to compare the significance of AI in fiction, even those flavors of science fiction interested in predicting technological development, to the significance of AI in real life. In real life, the most important facts about AI are not facts about AI at all; they are facts about white-collar crime, about financial instruments, and about the culture of barefaced robber-baron tactics that grew in the years leading to 2008 and then kept growing. Exploitation of labor is not the product of AI; it is the product of business. Fear-mongering is not AI; it is a way for social media companies to maximize ad revenue. Baseless promises about the miraculous processor chip of tomorrow (you’d only be hurting yourself if you don’t buy in today), do not come from AI; they come from business. Ugh; I’m discussing what I said I wouldn’t.

    If this article had been written before NYT learned to spell GPT … if I were a rich man, we wouldn’t be this way: a day late and a dollar short.

    Green Adventure has the same abbreviation as the state of Georgia so now you can tell them apart

    Allow us to manage expectations: The A.I. Gang is not where edgy machine minds hang out listening to ska. If you want that, you know what they say: write it yourself. But hey! the trilogy does take place after the advent of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, and by the way, if you’re reading this, so do you. Reagan died of old age, whereas all of us …

    And Thunberg’s exact point is that individual action, no matter how compelling your sense of entitlement, is insufficient to save humanity, right? Only group decision-making will save us—by large groups—maybe if somehow everyone has a voice. Whoops, did I just say that? Well, this article was never destined for publication in the DPRK, or, like, Kentucky. But Coville understands that survival requires a sort of pluralism, a value of proactive inclusiveness. That value, arguably, does not come naturally to human beings, because the people who need to share the most, never learned to share; and the people most motivated to scrub the atmosphere, are those about to be scrubbed out. We need to disrupt this clout-chasing culture just long enough to reassess.

    Have an adventure; you could do worse.

    In the dedication, Coville mentions Tom Swift, raising the question of whether the progressive mirror-image of colonial propaganda is still reactionary. (“This is my destiny,” said Tom manifestly.) Tom Swift is a flat character, but boys’ genre heroes are minimally characterized for the same reason shōnen anime heroes are drawn with few lines: to facilitate the boy audience identifying with the hero. (“I would do fine in the Army,” Tom told them straight.) When Tom robs ancient treasures, he improves the world, for the same reason that sex is an unknown topic to him: because Tom is pure. (“My girl back home would love some of these Scythian artifacts,” said Tom, rushin’ into the museum.) Tom is not upwardly mobile because he, and his America, are already perfect. (In this exotic locale, Tom’s phenotype was fairly noticeable.) By coincidence, the very best Twitter accounts owned and operated out of St. Petersburg use the same tropes today.

    In contrast, a team adventure has at minimum two plots: the adventure, and the gluing together of the team. Because the adventure in Operation Sherlock is challenging, it proves to the heroes that they need one another. But because the other children are frightening and grotesque, they each learn humility, learn to tolerate the initial awkwardness of making friends, even though their American upbringing taught them only individualism and worship of the fragile ego.

    Climate fiction is persuasive when it works but, paradoxically, few writers know a successful formula. Where’s the emotional payoff for participating in the global energy revolution, loser? Coville, shockingly, noticed that setting aside ego is a hook, and that if—if—your formula for some kind of near-future green sub-genre were, “The heroes must set aside their ego to survive, repeatedly, and it never ends,” that would by sheer coincidence also describe reality.

    So divest your fossil fuel portfolios, charge up your most efficient e-reader, and log off the app where bots posing as your peer group offer you a subsidy of a million bucks to vote laissez faire. Sea level is rising; let’s dive into climate fiction.

    Synopsis

    Like all good team adventure, we’ll begin with a straightforward dramatis personae, in anticipation of all the personality clash. Trapped together when their respective parents join a secret project on tiny, fictional Anza-Bora Island (got to be a contraction of ANZAC and Bora-Bora, right? But this is ironic: Bora-Bora and local capital Tahiti are not territories of any American Empire but a collectivity, naturally, of France) we have the following.

    Twins Roger and Rachel become the team’s glue—everyone else suffers only child syndrome. Roger possesses social intelligence, which is undervalued and underestimated. Rachel studies psychology and mnemonics and is her own experimental subject. (In this world, like in the ‘hard’ SF novels of Poul Anderson or Larry Niven, ESP can be developed by practice, practice, practice.)

    Wendy Wendell the Third (WW III, just like the upcoming war, haha …) wore baggy sweats way, way before it was cool, and eats a smash-burger for every meal. Her irreverent robots might be inspired by Blade Runner (1982) or Gremlins (1984).

    Tall, clumsy Trip is stunted by privilege. From his technically adroit mother he’s learned computer science. In his artist father, he has witnessed inner peace, concluded that that’s sissy, and has learned male insecurity instead.

    The (half) black kid with the basketball dreams of the terminally short, is Ray Gammand. Emotionally tough, a good troubleshooter, still he, like Trip, has something to prove.

    This concludes Chapter One. But then, all-American Hap Swenson appears as if in a barista AU, masculine in every way: blond, tragic, car-obsessed, brooding, proud, isolated. He could be Neal Stephenson’s grandpa. He could play the protagonist in the Star Wars prequels. The team’s only public school kid, he’s worse at teamwork than any of them.

    In Chapter Two, they survive the story’s first bombing by the facility’s secret saboteur, then break for snacks. The kids behave selfishly, showing off skills and gadgets, including Ray’s current detector, which in Chapter Five alerts them to a surveillance device attached to Rachel’s shirt collar.

    The reader knows, with a little page-flipping, that every adult on the island had the opportunity to plant the bug at some point that day. We can officially declare: everyone is a suspect! That makes close to 120 people, seventeen of whom have security clearance. Those are the facts from pp 57-58.

    And in Chapter Six, Rachel delivers these facts, including the names and specialties of those seventeen.

    So the others reply, golly, you’ve unlocked eidetic memory? In this moment, unlike our other respective skills, that is not only awesome, but relevant, therefore you may have something new and greater than our participation; you have our respect. No longer just a bunch of rival entitled snots, they are now a team, a secret research project within the secret research project.

    It falls on Roger in Chapter Seven to lay out the plan of action. They’ve got a crime to solve; the suspects list is large, but finite; they’ve got a supercomputer; it’s dark and they’re wearing sunglasses. The five of them will program the computer to tabulate data on the suspects. Genius! They will call it Operation Sherlock. Oh, yeah, and on the side they’re gonna develop a self-aware machine; everyone’s doing it.

    They formally meet Hap when he’s driving too fast one day, and causes Trip to roll his (electric) dune buggy; he stops to help but still gets the freeze from the rich kids. To spell this out, the book has twenty-one chapters. Roger says the name of the game in Chapter Seven; Hap, contrasting James Dean, skids to safety in Chapter Eight; but he doesn’t join the team until Chapter Fourteen. The entirety of Act II is taken up with this “How Will I Know (If He Really Loves Me)” drama.

    The reason to spend one-third of the book on this subplot is to convey a message of pluralism. The elite children swoon over their privilege of mainframe access; Hap sends ominous messages as a prank and makes them mistrust the computer. Wendy wants burgers without any commitment; Hap flips burgers but makes her feel guilty for using him in this way. Trip and Ray will never be blond and bad like Hap. Roger smiles; Hap frowns.

    Hap exists to remind the other five (and the reader) that there was a time before the A.I. Gang, a time when they, too, were alone, when they, too, depended on someone else to take a risk by freely offering unconditional friendship.

    In Chapters Ten and Eleven, Trip and Ray show us around the facility’s tidal power plant, which works using a bizarre technology that Coville has got to have made up out of whole cloth; please, someone, tell me if you know otherwise, but there’s never been a design anything like this; it’s inefficient; it’s insane; and it just might work.

    In Chapter Twelve, the kids land on the doorstep of the resident expert in “code systems,” Stanley Remov, and his “friend,” Armand Mercury. Remov delivers exposition re the team’s nemesis, Black Glove. The story problem of the trilogy is: who is Black Glove?

    With Remov’s help, in Chapter Thirteen the kids surveil an abandoned house—already a far cry from hacking arcade games. They now understand that the most reliable method of surveillance, and sometimes the most appropriate, is to get off your butt and follow somebody. In an intercut scene, we learn that the saboteur has only now constructed a bomb big enough to destroy the computer mainframe as well as all the scientists (and their families). In Chapter Fourteen, the team finally confronts Hap.

    Fans of John Le Carré recognize this beat: the debriefing that changes everything. Because Hap’s messages leave no other trace, they have already deduced that his method is a back door, i.e. purpose-built surveillance software. “How does the back door work?” they ask. And he replies truthfully, “I don’t know.” He only discovered it; the back door was already there.

    The debriefing concerns four (and a half) story problems: the bomb from Chapter Two, the bug from Chapter Six, Trip’s dune buggy from Chapter Eight (the day after the crash, the buggy was inexplicably intact) and the anonymous messages (and the back door). Hap repaired the buggy. Hap sent the messages. But he did not design the back door. So, in the approved mystery novel way, by the process of elimination, the team has proof that one (or more) of the adults is responsible for the bomb and the bug (and the back door; that’s alliteration).

    Surveillance on another kid is one thing; but it would be foolish to go after Black Glove by themselves. In Chapter Fifteen, they ask for help from the project director, Dr. Hwa, but he brushes them off. Only Remov ever takes them seriously.

    In Chapter Sixteen, Trip and Ray have their courage bolstered by Hap, and they all tail a suspicious person. It’s the saboteur. (They caught her!)

    She locks them inside a convenient tidal compartment inside the tidal power plant and, in Chapter Seventeen, leaves them to die when the train when the tide comes in. The saboteur is Dr. Sylvia Standish, the power plant operator; she was a Christian fundamentalist all along; creating a machine intelligence goes against her faith. Jesus doesn’t only love guns and petroleum; He’s okay with green energy, too.

    But Dr. Standish did not, and had no reason to bug Rachel. Now Trip, Ray and Hap can prove that Black Glove exists independently from the saboteur—if they survive!

    In Chapter Eighteen, water begins to pour into the compartment—agonizingly slowly, yet terrifyingly quickly. A classic. Roger and Rachel use deduction to establish their missing friends’ location; they gather with Wendy at the power plant. (The girls have arrived to rescue the helpless boys.)

    In an intercut scene, we learn that, when Dr. Standish planted her new bomb inside the mainframe, she accidentally disconnected a secret radio transmitter belonging to Black Glove. Black Glove now rushes to fix it. Hap convinces Trip to show courage in the face of certain death, and they sing, “Many Brave Souls [sic] Are Asleep In The Deep,” an error which I would like to take credit for catching personally—it should be, “Hearts.” The text doesn’t specify which version; therefore Chet Atkins is not ruled out. Wendy breaks down the power plant door using traditional California karate.

    Roger confronts Dr. Standish. She attempts to intimidate him, using primed concepts such as grown-up and administrator. Roger recognizes what she’s doing, and intimidates her right back, using the primed concepts that he is defending his friends and that she is obviously guilty of something. Dr. Standish is not an international super-spy; she’s an American, and falls for this trick immediately, revealing not only that she built the first bomb but that there is now a second. She escapes. The kids steal her notebook, which confirms her admission of guilt.

    Chapter Twenty is the climax of the story. Wendy steals her parents’ VW (everything in their household has a W) and the team uses it to break down the doors of the computer center. They drive down the halls in a scene unmistakably reminiscent of the False Eizan Electric Railway scene in Uchōten Kazoku by Morimi Tomihiko, in which a man who is about to die goes on a drunken high-speed drive in a magical streetcar that is also his shape-shifting second son while bellowing the mantra, “What’s fun is good,” and which was published in 2007 in Japanese and not translated to English in any form until the anime in 2013, so what’s the shared reference? At the doors to the mainframe, the boys, especially Ray, fistfight the remaining guards, reclaiming their masculine dignity. The kids enter the mainframe.

    Rachel and Roger are in the lead when Black Glove catches sight of them, and they witness Black Glove’s silhouette, from afar, but the light is very dim and there are “wires and crossbars” in the way. Black Glove flees. Rachel identifies the bomb; Roger disarms it. Rachel also discovers Black Glove’s transmitter. The transmitter self-destructs. Chapter Twenty-One, denouement.

    Dr. Standish steals a motorboat and gets caught. Dr. Hwa personally thanks the team, a great honor. They plead with him to believe that the transmitter was built by Black Glove; Rachel is a sensitive and it burned her hands when it burned itself. He concedes that the transmitter was real; but reveals that a second motorboat has turned up missing, so presumably the spy is gone, and anyway he will increase security in the Book Two. In an epilogue, Black Glove, obviously still on the island; reflects that since it was the kids who discovered the transmitter, opposing the kids will become their top priority … in the next volume about The A.I. Gang.

    If you were to write a partial list of attested motivating factors for defection from a Kremlin intelligence agency in any century you choose

    That’s gay.

    Is this climate fiction?

    Actually, there is something to say about the defector. In Chapter Twelve, the kids come to Remov with a concern about cybersecurity—his field—and he takes them seriously. The fun of the story is in testing the kid/adult boundary, so the one adult who admits that Black Glove is real, calls the kids into the adventure twice, once by exposition and again merely by existing. And who listens to Cassandra? Another outsider. The story only works because gay people are omnipresent, and persecuted. But then, the sexless quality of the entire text has the odd effect that Remov’s closet door is like the unicorn: visible only to those who search, and trust. Remov and Mercury are only ever “his friend,” “my friend,” “the two friends.” Certainly, silence is death. In 1986, epidemiologists understood AIDS and virologists had isolated HIV, but the authorities responsible for warning the public intentionally quashed this information, so we can only speculate what Coville’s information space was like at that time.

    But for a middle grade book that stays on the safe side of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, this gay romance is not the worst possible representation. There is characterization. The two men are both intellectual, educated, successful; they appreciate material comforts; they are able to live together due to high status. Each provides accountability during the other’s healing process: Mercury frequently performs the mechanical operation of smoking a pipe, with soap bubbles; Remov was traumatized by his “years in intelligence work;” he frowns; he drinks. Sometimes he lashes out; Mercury communicates the hurt in a gentle tone of voice and gives him space. They are thoughtful, dignified, adorable.

    The gay story is inseparable from the defector story, which is undeniably relevant to the present day. On Anza-Bora Island, the one person who can accurately explain to you why and how your server is being hacked is the Russian expat—which Russian expat?—the one at odds with the virtues of old Tom Swift. Well, this gratifyingly reinforces what we know. It also shapes the story more firmly into a division between a mainstream and everyone else, a mainstream from which one may be excluded arbitrarily and unfairly, a division that at times must be crossed in order to survive, which can only be crossed with teamwork. When Remov is at his most honest, he is at his most childlike, in that his truth is unacceptable to the authority figures responsible for protecting him.

    Is this climate fiction?

    But back to our scheduled program. Comparing the kids’ lives at the beginning and end of the book, what changes? Yes, they form a team. But the specific choices of imagery in this science fiction story now fall into place. These are not public school kids, but the offspring of the best minds in the country. All they have to do, to gain access to information age wonders such as this nostalgic Pacific Theater military intelligence daydream, is wait to grow up. But the very power of the mainframe, its massive publicly funded contract and its opaque corporate management, the power to destroy the world or save it, the power with which they are quietly obsessed—nerds—is also the reason they demand their right to question the purposes to which that power is put. Children wear watches powered by body heat; adults build power plant full-scale prototypes.

    In this story, pluralism is so important that it is worth pushing against the child/adult boundary to change yourselves from isolated putative insiders into pluralistic outsiders. And by the way being gay, gay and traumatized but doggedly pro-social, is another metaphor for the same thing. We can assume given the publication date that homosexuality is criminalized in both the Soviet and the American military (still in this unspecified near future year). Remov knows that other scientists see him as frightening and grotesque; this promotes a value of pluralism in him, which he expresses as a willingness to organize with frightened children although they are his inferiors and he would be within his rights to brush them off.

    I’m confident Coville intended the child/adult boundary to be felt, and for crossing the boundary to be felt, because it is present in the story on two levels. First, within the story world, as in most adventure, transgression already takes place in the heroes’ minds when they organize as team, because they communicate their true priorities without prior permission from society; in this moment the eventual rule-breaking becomes not only effortless, but conceivable. The reader understands the power of teamwork to save the heroes’ lives when society cannot, so the reader also reconceptualizes transgression within the story world as incidental. Second, on rereading, especially at an age older than some of the villains, the idea that real kids should have experiences like these is impossible to take seriously, yet the reader, by opening the book, accepts that the fictional kids will take on adult responsibilities at some point. The reader is primed to inquire how the child/adult boundary works in the story world, because the difference from reality is highlighted.

    My claim is that this portrayal of adventure, and the thrill that it provokes, functions as a metaphor for good advice on climate action.

    The story works as climate fiction only if “the adventure” is indeed a metaphor, because in reality all of us are treated like children when our truth, our pleading for our lives, prove unacceptable to the judges who allow the fossil fuel corporations to purchase the politicians who allow fossil fuel corporations to delay the transition away from fossil fuels. In reality, the task of those who want to live is to unite enough individuals, so that the group can achieve the power to build a clean energy economy that downwardly distributes basic human needs, in order to minimize mass death during the ongoing crisis, which is necessary to hold together the coalition we are talking about.

    In reality, we are not like children after all, because what prevents us from doing this is not youth or ignorance, but our own racism, greed, in a word, entitlement. That, and gerrymandering and a court system packed to the gills, but how did we get here, if not by the lack of pluralism?

    Metaphorically, everything you need to know is communicated by the image of uniting with fellow outsiders whenever it becomes impossible to pursue pluralism within the mainstream—like now, for instance, like always. Metaphorically, we are all like gay defectors, because they share what they know. We are all like The A.I. Gang, because they go on adventures, because this time the adults are not going to do it for them.

    We are all like The A.I. Gang, because in their egotistical and grotesque teammates, they see themselves, and are inspired to learn humility enough to form a coalition. Perhaps, as we try to broaden our own coalitions, our limitations were the friends we made along the way.

    Days at the beach

    Or, perhaps we can learn to work on ourselves first.

    In the novel, an unspecified amount of time passes in Chapter Fifteen after the team has finally coalesced. They have “a nagging feeling that they were working against a deadline,” yet they are happy. Coville delivers exposition on their daily routine: hacking, scrounging, building, a drive, a picnic, a swim, return to work refreshed, scuba lessons and hiking, in the evenings arcade games or classic films. What genre does this come from? It’s a green cyberpunk near-future, but it’s nostalgic military Americana. It’s an elite fantasy but a classless fantasy. (Post-class?) It’s a spy story, a wistful glimpse of civilian bliss reflected in the found family during the operation. If only it could last.

    This is the image that I anticipate when I reread the novel, not the gadgets and skills, not the death trap, not the climax. There’s no practical reason most people’s real lives couldn’t resemble this schedule, give or take the joint American-Chinese-Soviet occupation of a Polynesian island conveniently free of Polynesians. Give or take the clean energy changeover that has not yet happened in the story, this idyllic half-industrialized setting could be built anywhere.

    The days at the beach also depict a detente re the child/adult boundary. The kids are neither lonesome nor suffocated; they are fed, clothed, and turned loose, sometimes supervised, sometimes a phone call away. On the island, there are no drugs, no interpersonal violence (only mass violence, haha), no poverty, no abuse. This is a fantasy of the world that adults, with a sufficiently serious pluralist mindset, could create for children, but parents can never do it alone, and not by prioritizing children alone; it will take all of society working for all of society.

    In the middle of the novel about humanity’s power to save or destroy the world, the days at the beach remind us why it’s worth the trouble.

  • Review: The Monster’s Ring

    Review: The Monster’s Ring

    Welcome!

    Let’s begin the main series on Coville. Today we will be discussing his earliest book that I have read personally, The Monster’s Ring (1982). Coville authored two earlier books, The Foolish Giant (1978) and Sarah’s Unicorn (1979), but they are less often reprinted and I suffer a limited ability to review them. So:

    Wander back with me to the era of power suits and hair metal, of aerobics and Reaganomics. Thriller tops the charts; E.T. triumphs at the box office. At Carnegie Mellon, emoticons have to be typed out, one :-) at a time; meanwhile, the world’s first computer virus is spamming across Pennsylvania on 5 ¼-inch floppies. Lech Walesa is behind bars in Poland; the Phalanges Libanaises are unleashed upon Beirut. In the Rust Belt, steel production falls off a cliff. The Satanic panic (which I imagine as a fearlessly fashion-forward way to panic) is ramping up.

    The last clock to strike was the grandfather clock in the study. It made a noise like a steamer trunk full of tin plates falling slowly and solemnly down a flight of stairs.

    John Bellairs, The House with a Clock in its Walls

    John Bellairs is collaborating with Edward Gorey. Bruce Coville publishes a fantasy novel, at the climax of which a boy named Russell transforms into the devil. Well, a devil. “A king among monsters.” But fear not: Russell has the time of his life.

    Simplicity

    This is a plain, spare, lean novel. I’m serious. Not only does the vocabulary utilize probably the most common 1,000 words in English, not only is the rhythm built on short sentences and short paragraphs. But the ideas, you know? Each image, each emotion is stated very plainly. There’s a sentence break. Then, an explicit link, a logical connection to the next image. Bedroom. Stairs. Front door. That kind of thing. Magic ring. Magic words. Success!

    An adult reader will remark that the book is short, and it is short at 128 pages, but not every kids’ book, even of this length, is so simple. I mention this because it seems inescapable to me that the writer must have chosen the subject matter to fit these stringent constraints, not the other way around. “Great, a 200-page, fair-to-middling vocab monster story. Aw, rats; the kids say it’s a bit too hard. Just a quick revision …” It would never work. The characters, the props, the entire drama must have been shaped by compromise: to accommodate very young readers, and still guide the reader through some premeditated thought process toward “meaning.”

    Russell wanted to be a monster for Halloween—but this wasn’t what he had in mind!

    cover copy

    To a kid, you know, the real world is just as new as an imaginary world.

    If you were inspired to write a novel that very young children could follow and retain, what would you say in it?

    Sub-genre

    Coville places this book in his Magic Shop series, and it shares a very regular formula with later entries. The formula begins with exactly two mundane problems: a tragic problem that stems from the protagonist’s tragic flaw (hubris etc.) and a story problem in which their environment, in the guise of consequences of the tragic flaw, attacks them because they are undeveloped (small, weak, naive). The attack is embodied by a school bully; the hero flees; the setting is a town “too small to get lost in,” inspired by Coville’s own childhood home in upstate New York (way upstate); the sensation of fear magically transports the hero to the magic shop. A Bradbury-esque modern American wizard, characterized as “a weird old man,” sells the hero a magical item for a quarter (not 25¢), seizes them by the wrist, and utters a crucial piece of advice, which the hero will later—and we can all relate to this—forget. The magic item turns out to be a perfect compliment to the hero’s strengths and flaws; they begin making progress on their tragic flaw.

    They also learn to love magic, but because they failed to follow the important advice, magic causes them to become slightly “weird” themselves, and for the rest of their life they can never fully immerse themselves in a gray, conformist existence again—but maybe, just maybe, dear reader, maybe that’s for the best.

    Synopsis

    So, obviously in The Monster’s Ring, Russell’s flaw is that he is actually too tractable, trapped in his timidity, unable to form honest relationships because he knows he’s expected to be “nice.” The dramatic foil is Eddie, an emotionally abused child who can’t get a break because, presumably, American men have a lot in common with Phalangists. The magic shop owner is Mr. Elives, explained in an author’s note as, “Mystery Lives.” (What, is Coville afraid that it has all withered and died?) The magic item is a ring that can turn you into a little monster, or a lot of monster (or a demonic creature). Russell, fan of E.T. and voracious reader of campy comic books, knows exactly how to take advantage of this power: the traditional come-as-you-are Halloween.

    For the first time he must deal with the consequences of not acting “nice” enough; he hides the horns on his head from his mother and she accuses him—him! of all children—of stomping around upstairs; he attracts unwanted attention from his classmates; he yearns to be timid again. He has a devil of a time; raises hell; speaks to Eddie in the language of threats, the only one he understands. He considers abusing some civilians since they’re in his power, but discovers that behaving like a Phalangist actually feels like crap; God knows why people do it. Agoraphobic so far outside his accustomed role, he pines for his parents and their vapid aspirations; but saves himself from that whitewashed, concrete world by inhaling the musk of autumn leaves and the steam from spiced cider. Too late, he remembers that the moon is full and therefore using the ring is forbidden; plus, Mr. Elives warned him that turning into a fiery red demon would be a brick too far.

    Something evil’s lurkin’ in the dark / Under the moonlight

    lyrics written by Rod Temperton and popularized by Michael Jackson

    To reiterate, there’s no room for asides in a novel of this design. For the first eight out of thirteen chapters, with the possible exception of the scene inside the magic shop, every single event portrays the emotional pendulum Russell is living out: first he burns up inside under the pressure of obedience, then, with the ring’s influence, he lashes out. This pattern reaches its climax in chapters nine and ten, at which point something must be done to curb the effects. In chapter eleven, “wrapping up,” rivals cooperate; disguises are shed, but too late; and the reader grasps the true scale of Russell’s built-up resentment and the consequences thereof.

    Chapter twelve: everything is cured by a good night’s sleep.

    Chapter thirteen is the denouement: Russell sheds his shyness. Then, epilogue, another denouement: something of the devil is with him still. Iris-out on a harvest moon.

    The novel’s first and last meaning

    If you had the inspiration for a genre novel that was pared down to the ultimate simplicity, what would you want that novel to say? Russell, here, learns to stand up for himself, but if I had to paraphrase the novel’s meaning, I would go one step deeper, and ask how we know who or what to stand up for to begin with: “What do I stand up for when I stand up for myself?” The Monster’s Ring says, “Your interests, your tastes, your feelings are inherently true because they are true to you, and therefore they are never immature, undignified or inappropriate. When you stand up for yourself, defend your right to joy.” If that sounds too precious, well, maybe our labeling the child-hero’s tragic flaw as “timidity” should have been a warning to you. So, how did I reach this conclusion?

    Repression, not bedlam, is the novel’s antagonist.

    In fantasy we engage in magical thinking, in which, even if the hero couldn’t use magic to do anything, it so happens they can use magic to do their favorite thing. The themes of the fantasy genre include wish fulfillment and finding your heart’s desire. Russell lives in suburban ‘82. The reason Mr. Elives sells him the monster’s ring is that, for Russell, there’s nothing better in the whole shop—nothing in the whole world. Does the novel say to the reader (who still has their shoes stuck in the concrete), “You’re gonna get your heart’s desire?”

    Obviously not—not without caveats. Recall the limits of magical thinking in folktales, such as The One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, the source where Coville must have gotten the “twist it once, twist it twice” theory of magic rings. In folktales, a jinn or slave may attempt to subvert their orders if they deeply hate their master, which, inexplicably, they always do, the spiteful creatures. Therefore a wish, granted, frequently backfires.

    Maybe the novel says, “There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.” But I could have figured that out myself. And frankly, it’s not at all clear in The Monster’s Ring that Russell suffers from too much pulp fiction horror in his life. At the very end of the book, he’s perfectly happy to bear the lingering stain of magic on his soul. He would hate it if his life were boring! And he’s not alone. When his school buddies finally witness “their” monster, it’s love at first fright, and they lead him down the hallway with their arms halfway around his hairy hunched back. During the novel’s wrapping up moment, we learn that, if things had played out only a little differently, foil Eddie could have felt the same. Turns out Eddie speaks at least one language besides Threats, after all; he also understands Cool, and Satan is Cool.

    Even during the novel’s most uncomfortable scenes, real danger arises from (socially conservative) human behavior in human situations. Local police are ill-equipped to prevent Russell chasing cars; uncontrollable children pull his horns and hair, asking to see how they’re glued on; at the height of his power, Russell seriously considers doing real harm, since there’s nothing to stop him, and since some people, arguably, deserve it. Repression, not bedlam, is the novel’s antagonist.

    This hero, small, polite, clean, resigned Russell, is a deeply repressed character, hardly a glutton for power or violence. Power in this story, normal mundane power such as that of a parent, or of men, is wielded without shame; Russell loves genre fiction precisely because it supplies a more complete palette of emotions, ironically, than his real life does. If he is exaggeratedly naive, so is the rest of Syracuse, NY. His use of the ring forces him to learn how to stand up for himself for the first time; the novel is hardly a cautionary tale against doing so.

    He took an instant dislike to the handsome prince.

    Bruce Coville, The Monster’s Ring

    The key to the story is the hero’s learning process. From page 1 to page 128, what changes? Russell learns that wielding strength and violence with no consequences is too much? Nonsense; he hates violence. When he interrupts shameless, sadistic abuse, even his own indignation actually frightens him. Perhaps Russell learns that he was destined to grow up eventually, and—good fortune—as you grow up, fewer people are your direct superiors. Well, Russell doesn’t grow up during this novel. The Magic Shop books are not coming-of-age stories; they are unambiguously children’s stories. Childhood lasts a long time; children learn and grow as children. And Russell learns to stand up to his superiors; that’s the whole point.

    But here’s one thing that does change. One page 1, Russell is already a little weird himself—he’s probably heard of this Michael Jackson guy, you know, and is that music really part of our virtue-signaling, white American culture?—but he believes this is a flaw in himself. In fact, he believes any number of things about his life are personal faults, including his small size, yes, but also his supposed cowardice; his love of comic books; his resentment toward his mother for babying him; even his father’s pedantic habit of speaking over him. One page 128, all of these facts still obtain, but he no longer believes they are his fault. This is especially true of his relationship to his own imagination.

    Magic in fantasy raises a question that I have always found very meaningful … beautiful, even. “To have what you wish, must you know what you wish?” Or, in keeping with our folktale inspiration, “Suppose you were going to be granted one wish, fully, freely granted, so that all social and practical concerns were lifted; even then—especially then, lacking all context—what do you wish for?” In fantasy, we play through the inconvenient consequences of our wish as a way of finding out whether it was all worth it. Dear Diary, chased by cops … got away … could have gotten caught; if seriously threatened with arrest, might well have bitten their faces off to get away … must be sure not to take this risk when I use monster’s ring again tomorrow night :-) Fantasy can also help to disentangle our true feelings from social expectations, as the child whose mother needs to refrain from babying him, despite still being his mother. It can help to disentangle our true feelings from costs we have resigned to pay, as the bully’s victim who is unjustly instructed not to lash out, as if the victim, by being attacked, became responsible for keeping the peace. This is one of our most difficult challenges in real life. We compare our feelings to those of the fantasy characters, in order to learn … how to learn … our own wishes.

    At the beginning of this novel, the protagonist feels dullness; at the end, joy. This is how I discovered that the novel compares all of our real-life expectations, our tangles, to Russell’s exaggerated submissiveness, because they both feel dull. It advises us to search for a joy that fulfills us the way Russell is fulfilled by becoming a comic book creature—and not to apologize for that joy. “Human beings have an inherent right to joy; to embody our joy and, when others have difficulty understanding our weird campy freak shit, to defend our joy, to express ourselves without fear of persecution.” If the monster’s ring has words engraved on the inside of the band, I think that’s pretty close to what they would say.

    What is not the meaning?

    Other reviewers have characterized The Monster’s Ring as a story with an anti-bullying message, and I got to tell you, folks, the way I see it, the man wanted to sell books. Nineteen Eighty-Two was a good year to make noise about bullying.

    Sure, the Magic Shop books don’t exactly convey a pro-bullying message. But Russell’s tragic flaw certainly isn’t being a bully. It’s not being a victim, either; that wouldn’t even make sense. Eddie is characterized as a bully, but Russell’s relationship with him is ancillary to Russell’s monster fantasy. For that matter, if the book’s meaning were to say that other children can and should deal with bullies the way Russell deals with Eddie … maybe it wasn’t just Satanic panic after all, right? Here we are, bearing Satanic witness. No, this book gives no realistic advice about bullying, no message; it’s just part of the landscape.

    By the way, it really bothers me when people mistake communication for “messaging.” Whatever’s your cause, sure, bullying, if we must … making it look bad won’t help you. That’s messaging. But bullying is already bad; and everyone already knows that. Ideally, people should engage with the problem, not just “message” about it. Now, meaning, on the other hand, is when a book actually provides some insight into the problem—the problem itself, not people’s supposed superficial grasp of the problem, or changing consumer trends as a result of the problem, or something. How many child bullies have grown up to become inspirational speakers who do nothing all day but accept payment to speechify toward a captive audience in a school auditorium? So, an assembly convinces some of these parents that the administration is doing something about the problem? Come on! We can do better. Anyway, enough of that.

    Based on reading Coville’s later books, and indeed other genre fiction, I considered whether The Monster’s Ring asks the reader to sympathize with those who are different from ourselves. On the contrary, the monster’s behavior is portrayed as something Russell gets away with, never something to emulate, never something that needs sympathy.

    The ring, except during the full moon when he was forbidden from using it anyway, throws him into a state resembling shock or an extreme adrenaline rush, combined with unmistakably animal thinking. He experiences uncontrollable impulses to chase, to scratch, to flee. He is easily disoriented by a smack with a broom. Windows are too small for him to climb through. After turning back into a child again, his memories return with a selective focus, and out of order, when they return at all. Most of all, his monster self feels an unfamiliar instinct to frighten—not only an instinct, but a joy, unsurprisingly, because everyone knows monsters love to frighten people. I love this feature of the story and spent a lot of time thinking about why Coville envisaged the transformation as so psychedelic. But whatever the author’s creative process, the character’s psychological separation from his monster self creates a narrative separation that prevents the reader sympathizing with the monster at all—in contrast to Coville’s way of writing space aliens, goblins, talking animals, ghosts or indeed A.I. The reader comes to feel about the monster the same way Russell himself does: frightened, perhaps ashamed, sometimes all too familiar, sometimes a little wiser for the experience.

    And the shock, you know, the lightheadedness, the adrenaline: is this any less than the way we all feel when we first learn to stand up for ourselves?

    I feel compelled to address the comparison with The Lord of the Rings, less because I see anything there than because I’ve never seen someone else address it. Coville had certainly read Tolkien. Both stories achieve high drama when a character finally realizes their magic ring is antagonistic, but can no longer resist. And although the two fantasies strongly contrast in their portrayal of magic—for Tolkien, the ring is a Freudian psychoanalyst, which dredges up the evil lurking in the id of otherwise heroic men (and women); whereas for Coville, the good, nice boy is a repressive, frustrated mess, and the ring aids his character growth—in both works, magic is discussed in vague enough terms that any investigation into the narrative significance of each would require very close reading.

    But it seems clear that Coville, not to mention Tolkien, recognized a nice juicy symbolism in the wearing of rings as a signifier of social status, emotional connection, self-image, in a word, magic, something children can playact using rings made of tin or for that matter grass. And if wish-fulfillment can work on an imaginary ring, well, there you go.

    A tin ring is a great toy; that’s why The Lord of the Rings is a great fantasy.

    Lastly, The Monster’s Ring has a recurring motif that can only be called “nakedness.” When Russell runs from Eddie in the first scene, it’s because no other human being is nearby to protect him. When he runs home in the second-to-last scene, his clothes have been destroyed as if by the power of Grayskull. The first time he transforms, he is intoxicated by the pale moonlight. And in the scene where he terrorizes the school until this behavior backfires, he flees once again, precisely because the adults are incapable of protecting him from the mob; he is alone, and his personal space, his body, are no longer respected.

    Genre fiction has an interest in the contrast between nature and artifice. Is this novel a treatise on that contrast?

    Scrambling up an old oak, he hid behind the scarlet leaves, where he leaned against the trunk, gasping for breath.

    Bruce Coville, The Monster’s Ring

    In real life, the human body is manufactured by nature but sustained by other people; these people have intellect and theory of mind; we share traditions and tools, architecture and accumulated wealth; so society is counter-natural, or artificial. For a monster to hide in a tree is only appropriate because a monster exists in the category of nature; but to transform back into a child and still hide in a tree is to be robbed of society’s protection. The contrast interests the reader, whose body is also animal, whose social role is also contingent, who daily confronts the reality that they are, you might say, naked under their clothes. But the contrast especially interests the child reader, who has only partial membership in society. The child is well aware that they have more limited means of demanding inclusion—protection—than adults do.

    Well, “nature and artifice” does not describe the pendulum action of Russell’s feelings. And we already established that Coville makes no claim to be an authority for children on how to achieve safety in an unsafe world; that claim would be irresponsible anyway. Let’s settle for reading nakedness, aloneness, the visceral feeling of a lack of the protection needed for human life, as an authorial impulse to honesty. It’s not that, when the inspiration for a novel of elevated simplicity arrived, that inspiration already spoke to this motif. It’s just that, obviously, children think about nature and artifice, about visceral feelings, about personal space and other kids’ lack of respect for it. So this motif, like bullying, is part of the palette.

    Coville wouldn’t want the monsters of the real world to respond to his novel the way Russell responds to fifth-grade storytime, by taking “an instant dislike to the handsome prince.”

    If we were in fifth grade together and played a game during recess called Monster’s Ring

    It’s easy to tell what the game would look like. I jump; you roar. This one glowers; that one gives chase. After five minutes each of us touches our right ring finger, grinning, reciting the spell to change back, but gripped instead by the ring’s magic. In Halloweentown, it’s always the night of the full moon. Oh, no! The game must go on.

    Not exactly a world-spanning fantasy epic, our Monster’s Ring. Very limited interpersonal intrigue. But Coville is at his strongest with embodied drama, physical self-expression, somatic imagery, somatic symbolism, somatic play. This feature has got to be the kernel that inspired The Monster’s Ring—inspired the inaugural magic shop book, and told him this was the time for an exercise in simplicity. That directness, you know? He’s striving for a practice of storytelling that touches you right on the belly button and says, “Visceral.”

    Aren’t we all?

    image credit Katherine Coville
  • Theme #3: Pluralism

    Theme #3: Pluralism

    The person writing these words is not you. Well, that’s obvious, give or take the previous entry’s attempt to blur the edges of the individual. (You got to open your mind, man.) It’s obvious, but does the reader believe it? You can understand the words; they’re written in your language. For you and the text to share the world together requires, frankly, no effort at all. You can relate to the text like an entitled child who does not consider the needs of others. You can relate to the text like an entitled adult who does not consider the needs of others.

    Let’s try again.

    The person writing these words is not like you.

    Does that sentence scare you? There is no immanent threat; it’s a simple statement of fact. Each person is unique; did you know that, dear child? … But does that sentence scare you? Fear is a relationship to the unknown. Let yourself be reminded that much, very much of other people is unknown to you. In light of that, you should be scared. It’s probably not healthy to feel fear of other people too keenly too many hours per day, but to feel none at all would be dishonest. That would be a state of denial. An important part of human life is this rhythm: the known and the new. The familiar and the strange. Family and strangers.

    Inhale. Exhale.

    Feel fear. Feel calm.

    This rhythm: the reader receives this from the writing. The text has no needs but it is not naive; it is dead but not dumb. Now, the act of reading is not inclusion, coexistence, toleration; those things require other people. And other people are not you; that’s why we call them the Other. A beginning is a birth. Dawn is danger.

    This is our third and final article inquiring into Bruce Coville’s recurring themes, the persistent, indeed preoccupying tropes of genre fiction. No such inquiry could be complete without posing two key questions, “monsters!?” and, “aliens!?” Coville could admiringly be categorized as a post-Silver Age science fiction writer, an intimation of the New Weird (RIP; it was fun while it lasted), who expresses delight in the fantastic, even the phantasmagorical, for its own misshapen sake. He is also an early post-Cold War writer, laboring to democratize The Other, essentially saying, “You’re weird, but it’s okay; I’m weird, too; goddamn everybody is weird around here,” and to prove the point, occasionally saying nonsense. It would be no surprise if we were to learn he was a follower, in his personal life, of statesman and spiritual leader Oingo Boingo, known for the adage, Weird science(!). Fans of Coville will also be familiar with the children’s chapter books of William Goldman, who wrote that someone wrote that someone said, “Life is pain.” Coville’s message is closer to, “Life is bonkers.”

    I have to admit, though—I already knew life was bonkers before reading Coville. Didn’t you? So why—why does he (like Oingo Boingo) keep saying that over and over again?

    In this article, we think we have the answer, and it’s nothing to do with the weirdness of some third party. It’s nothing to do with the weirdness of the writer (well, maybe a little bit, but stay focused). The reason has to do with the reader.

    From the point of view of everyone else on earth, you’re the alien. You’re the monster. Yet, we are prepared to share this earth with you. We, the aliens, sympathize with you, not despite, but because of your alien-ness. Weird … !

    My word for Coville’s doctrine here is, “pluralism.” Those who read the previous article will notice that pluralism strongly contrasts assimilationism—in fact, my claim is that Coville intends the one to inoculate against the other. I hate to go out on a limb, but you can imagine someone, somewhere, saying, “Separate is inherently unequal.” Stepping briefly into the world of grown-up literature and nonfiction, although like Coville I was a child of the United States, I don’t get my understanding of pluralism mainly from the USA melting pot with its Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, its Jim Crow and its McCarthyism. I only wish it were otherwise.

    No, I understand pluralism as that basic necessity, humanity’s ABCs, which has been shared with the world by those who spent their nursery days with the East Blocks. Of course Ukrainian resentment of shared Polish-Ukrainian history is unfair to Poles living today. Of course labor grievances fail to take into account the costs, financial costs, geopolitical costs, that striking workers incur from Poland’s party elite. But even the most staunchly nationalist Pole knows that Polish sovereignty must be defended, and that it cannot be defended by the military if Moscow controls the black earth, and cannot be defended in the Sejm if the labor unions of Gdansk in 1980 are treated the way Thatcher’s Britain will treat the labor unions of Nottinghamshire in 1984. So, in at least one real example in Poland, pluralism triumphs over the ideology of fear. The Polish nationalist listens to the wishes of the Ukrainian minority and offers a compromise, and the ethic minorities in turn listen to the worldview (even though it’s scary) of the nationalists. The Polish military defends the existence of a Ukrainian state (until 2013 but that’s another story). The ascending middle class pays, literally pays part of their gains to the newly self-determining but newly unprotected proletariat.

    In Solidarity, the cooperating parties don’t have to agree—don’t even have to understand each other. But they have to try. It’s one of those magical things. Making an honest effort is good enough. If the two parties draw apart, they will both cease to exist. If they defend one an other’s right even merely to exist, they succeed, as surely as if they did understand each other. This requires the ability to live, maybe for a long time, more or less comfortably, maybe permanently, with uncertainty. This is the confrontation with the unknown.

    So a doctrine of pluralism in politics can at least be conceived of. And Coville’s writing occasionally references the Cold War—space aliens in small-town USA are mistaken for Russian spies; the entire population of an earth-like planet dies simultaneously due to a nuclear exchange; scientists endure administrative panics over spying on a secret project. In a thinly-veiled retelling of Star Trek (the original series), members of a spaceship crew come from contrasting backgrounds that resemble East and West. But can the reader ever understand pluralism as a doctrine that speaks to the individual?

    Many of Coville’s novels center images of (almost too-idyllic) daily life that totally decline to speak to geopolitics: the small town, the local wetlands, the country veterinarian. The progressive Jewish-coded elementary school teacher. Starting a new school. Walking through the forest. Antiques for sale in an old house. Thrown into a small group with the children of your parents’ co-workers. The list goes on and on. What unknown must we confront, and live with, in these scenarios? Who is the Other?

    You are.

    Pluralism is a two-way street. This pattern rests so deeply in Coville’s storytelling that his scenarios sometimes leave out the successful end-stage of cooperation altogether. But in every single narrative, the protagonist must cope with an other’s point of view, and not an easy point of view to relate with, but one that is incomprehensible, or unpredictable, or unfair, or uncaring, or factually wrong. You can never guarantee that the other will listen to your concerns; you can only guarantee that you listen. Once you’ve listened, by all means, use your capacity for reason to decide how to reply, but you can only make a truly reasoned decision after you do the hard work of confronting the unknown.

    This is a very scientific mindset. It’s also a mindset that remarks on the human sciences, saying, the subject doesn’t always cooperate. Good luck; you’ll need it!

    So, I would summarize the doctrine of pluralism on the individual level as an instruction, an injunction. You have to try to understand the other; and you will never understand. In light of that, what can you do? Obviously, you’ll just have to give the other as much grace as possible. The benefit of the doubt. Remember: they’re more afraid of you than you are of them. They don’t understand you, either!

    Be kind.

    That’s the injunction: be kind. That (and a little elbow grease) is all you need for solidarity to work in the end. It’s not easy, because you’re afraid, too, but making an honest effort is enough. Be … as kind as possible.

    To clarify, here’s a long short-list of examples of symbolism in Coville’s stories that represent an incomprehensible, Other point of view. See? When I phrase it like that, it’s easy. This is the entire project of the New Weird. Space aliens, with their gross bodies and their gross food, with their big scary teeth and their music that is painful to human ears, with their customs that are only explained after the child hero has committed some violation, are a symbol for the Other. You’ll never understand them. Yet, if you give up on understanding them, they’ll be forced to kill you. Coville writes multiple stories in which the aliens are more scared of us than we are of them. The only strategy for self-preservation is to be kind.

    Magic that transforms people’s bodies is a symbol for the Other. Animals have feelings. You might get turned into an animal. Goblins only feel okay when they are allowed to be goblins. Being a movie monster could be a fashion statement; in that case, it would be rude to shrink back in terror; anyway, monsters are cool; anyway, monsters are good to have on your side, so be kind.

    Magic that grows or shrinks people’s bodies is a symbol for the Other. A giant has feelings, too. If a giant is cruel, the cruelty is evil, but the gigantism is not. Maybe a giant started out small; maybe a person smaller than you is the right size for themselves. When we are the wrong size (like a child), we move through a world that was explicitly not built for us. This gives us a feeling of alienation; we require grace.

    Pets are a symbol for the Other. We do not perfectly understand our pets, but we try. Some pets are mean or spoiled; others, stupid. That doesn’t make them bad; they can still be a loving companion. Aliens have alien pets. Coville’s work would have a perfect score on www.DoesTheDogDie.com (the dog never dies; that would not be good storytelling; it would not be entertaining).

    A mind that is wholly or in part artificial is a symbol for the Other. This mind has a different structure, a different history from your own. It is unreliable, unpredictable and, once set on a course, terrifyingly intractable. How different is it? You will never know even that. But from the point of view of your fellow human beings, the same is true of your mind.

    Nakedness or wrong clothes is a symbol for the Other—indeed, a symbol that foregrounds the interplay between our discomfort with the other and their discomfort with us. Trying on different clothes does not injure children, but bullies do.1 The hero trapped in a magically transformed body, finally returned to his child self and discovering that the magic destroyed his clothes, has to streak through the suburban neighborhood as one last trial to reach safety. His nakedness is as new to him this morning as his magical body was yesterday. The neighbors will never understand.

    Teachers, symbolically, help us relate to the Other. They make the incomprehensible, hence. They prevent us from making fools of ourselves. They allow us to make fools of ourselves.

    The trope of alien abduction is a symbol for the Other. The stranger uses their power over us to bring us into their strange world, to make us strange, like them. Of course, in real life, when we bring each other into our plural cultural worlds, we do so accidentally. We do so precisely because the victim, no matter how xenophobic, has the innate human ability to learn, to comprehend, to become multilingual, to become a citizen of the world, of the galaxy. Those who are not shown around the galaxy: they’re the only ones who foolishly interpret the expansion of your horizons as some kind of wickedness on the part of your alien neighbors.

    A story with an ambiguous ending is a mode for our relationships to the Other. The story’s job is to be the way the story should be, not necessarily to solve all problems. In some of Coville’s stories, the hero, by having touched magic, is themselves touched, and is permanently alienated from the “real” world. They don’t need your help. There are some things you will never understand. Let them be weird. Let them be.

    The person writing these words is not you. You are not the person writing these words. Suppose I hurt you? Don’t hurt me back. Or, if you must, at least try to improve things between us, afterward. These are words that a text can say, which a person can also say. When the writer writes these words, they bridge the distance between solitude and society: be … as kind as possible.

    1. (Money spent on Harry Potter is a political donation to Hate.) ↩︎