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Sep
22
Crime Fiction in Disguise (The Bare Necessities—Emily St. John Mandel)
2010 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
The Bare Necessities is a series in which writers and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of the books they love.
Emily St. John Mandel is the author of The Singer’s Gun, a literary thriller about identity, corruption, and human trafficking (and one of the best books I’ve read this year).
I’ve been having an interesting time with genre lately. I write novels, and what I’ve tried to do in my work is to write fiction that’s as literary as anything out there, but to do it with the strongest possible plotting and narrative drive.
An unexpected side effect of this has been that the focus that I’ve placed on plot seems to have pushed my novels into the borderlands of genre fiction, and it’s forced me to think about questions of genre in a way that I hadn’t before. I really thought I was writing literary fiction when I wrote both my first and second novels, but I know of at least one genre bookstore that sells my novels in their Mystery section, and my second novel, The Singer’s Gun, was reviewed in Mystery Scene.
Which raises an interesting question: if The Singer’s Gun—a love story, a political novel, a book in which illegal immigration plays as important a role as does the crime alluded to in the title—is crime fiction, then what else is? Lolita, obviously. Crime and Punishment. And, when I stand in front of my bookshelves and consider the matter, any number of my other absolute favourite books.
The Way the Crow Flies, by Ann-Marie MacDonald
One of the great pleasures in this book lies in being transported back to a lost age. The setting is a Royal Canadian Air Force base in Centralia, Ontario, 1962; life is good and Bei Mir Bist du Schon is sung in the Officer’s Club on Saturdays, but the Cold War is a shadow overhead. The book is narrated mostly by Madeleine McCarthy, age eight; her father Jack is a Wing Commander in the RCAF, and as the book opens they’re in the car en route to Centralia after several years at an RCAF base in Germany. It’s a scene of utmost tranquility, except that by the time you reach the benign sunlight and ice cream of the first chapter—“It is possible, in 1962, for a drive to be the highlight of a family week”—you’ve already read the short, poetically vague prologue, the first line of which is “The birds saw the murder.” As the book shifts in time between a crime scene in the forest—details are sketchy, but the corpse is an unnamed little girl wearing a blue dress and a charm bracelet—and Madeleine’s first days and months at RCAF Centralia, the tension builds to an almost unbearable pitch. Madeleine receives a blue dress as a gift, and your heart sinks a little. Madeleine has a charm bracelet. The murder of a child is the axle around which the plot revolves, but it’s as much about Cold War politics and espionage.
2666, by Roberto Bolaño
I was intimidated by the sheer size of this book—it weighs in around 900 pages—but it’s among the best I’ve ever read. A trio of European intellectuals travel to Mexico in search of an elusive German writer. An American reporter travels to Mexico for the first time to report on a boxing match. A professor marooned in the border city of Santa Teresa fears for both his sanity and the safety of his teenaged daughter. All of this transpires against the backdrop of a seemingly never-ending series of crimes; the ceaseless murders of women and girls that have haunted Ciudad Juarez. The crimes are described in clinical and wrenching detail—“That same month of November 1994, the partially charred body of Silvana Perez Arjona was found in a vacant lot. She was fifteen and thin, dark-skinned, five foot three.” But to call this crime fiction would be terribly reductive.
The City & The City, by China Miéville
A police procedural set in a city state somewhere in Europe, but that’s not quite accurate: it’s set in a city state and also in the other city state that overlaps the first one. Tyador Borlú, a detective in the city state of Beszel’s Extreme Crime Squad, is called one morning to a crime scene in a decrepit neighborhood. A woman has been killed. But what at first seems like a straightforward murder of a prostitute rapidly becomes much more complicated, when it begins to seem that the crime may have transpired in the parallel city of Ul Qoma. Beszel and Ul Qoma occupy precisely the same geographical territory, but moving between them requires a passport, and relations between the two countries are strained. Citizens of Beszel are trained from birth to see only the citizens and structures of their own city, and to “unsee” the citizens and structures of Ul Qoma that exist all around them. On a given street, the first three houses might be Ul Qoman, while the fourth might be Besz; a citizen of Beszel, trained from birth to pick up on the most subtle visual cues, will see only the fourth house. A wild story about perception, the power of mental constructs, and the weight of living in a repressive state.
The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer
This book changed the way I write. The simplicity of the prose is deeply appealing to me. There’s something quintessentially American about the book in a way that I find difficult to articulate. It’s partly a matter of setting—Utah, the only state in the union that was once a religious empire—and partly something intangible in the style. It’s a curious hybrid of a book, a novelization of real events. The crime is Gary Gilmore’s murder of two men in the summer of 1976, and his subsequent execution by firing squad. (Shot in the Heart, his brother Mikal’s memoir, is an interesting counterpoint to this work.) It isn’t quite fiction, and it isn’t quite not. It’s as much about damaged lives as about the crime itself.
Check out Emily St. John Mandel’s website for more information about her books and future projects.
Related posts:
Review of The City and The City
Other Bare Necessities annotated reading lists
Related posts:
Okay…I have Singer’s Gun and I have had The City and The City on my list. I NEED to read these books right away. Thanks for the reminder! Great guest post!
If I thought I might have a girl crush on Mandel before, I definitely do now. I loved The Singer’s Gun (need to get her other book!!!!) I read it in one sitting. She is right, she really pushes the genre envelope. She has mystery but so much more, it just makes my brain hum. I am deep into the audio of The City and the City right now, and I think I’ll just take her summary when I write the review. It is so totally clever. Must check out the Mailer book. I love Mailer.
Sandy´s last [type] ..Wordless Wednesday- San Francisco 2
Glad you loved the list, and I SO wish I’d had this description of the Mieville book to borrow from when I reviewed it.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jennsbookshelf, Rebecca Schinsky, Rebecca Schinsky, Rebecca Schinsky, Michelle Bonanno and others. Michelle Bonanno said: The Singer's Gun is amazing! RT @bookladysblog @unbridledbooks author @emilymandel explores Crime Fiction in Disguise: http://bit.ly/aEe1Rs [...]