books

Roy Lichtenstein, Lincoln Center Poster, pen and ink on paper, 1966.

The Cold Millions Jess Walters Harper Collins October 2020

Jess Walter’s The Cold Millions against the wild, a mad rush to log

centers around 16-year-old Rye Dolan and his 23-year-old brother Gig. The pair have spent months tooling around the western United States, working odd jobs and hopping rails as it suits them. As the book opens, they’ve landed in Spokane, Washington in 1909 just as the nascent union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) (see Beyond the Book), is poised to battle the town’s wealthy business owners and corrupt police force over free speech issues. The idealistic Gig is drawn into the conflict, pulling the idolizing Rye right along with him into the fracas, setting each on a path that will forever impact their lives and their relationship.

The author has chosen a very specific time, place and event for his novel: it is based on the Spokane Free Speech Fight of 1909, which resulted in the incarceration of hundreds of activists and workers and unfolded much as Walter outlines in the book. Many of the characters, too, have real-life counterparts, such as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a pregnant 19-year-old union organizer from New Hampshire, and among others. Beyond just the events, though, the author’s attention to historical detail is impressive, truly transporting readers to an earlier era. Even his prose seems appropriate for the time period; its cadence may be challenging to get into at first, but once one adjusts, the writing style enhances the book’s feel of being set in a Western city at the turn of the century.

Spokane felt like the intersection of Frontier and Civilized, the final gasp of a thing before it turned into something else – the Last Rush Town, Gig called it, for the silver rushes in the foothills, but also the rush of railroad and bank, school and merchant, brick, stone, and steel, old-growth timber turned to pillared houses, hammers popping nonstop

Spokane Police Chief John Sullivan, and pave the whole world.

Most of the story is told in the third person from Rye’s viewpoint, with an occasional first-person chapter narrated by one of the other characters. Unlike many novels where the narrative voice changes from chapter to chapter, here the firstperson sections make up just a small percentage of the novel and seem more like a break in the story than just a shift in perspective. The main characters each get one or two of these interludes, and in it they “break the fourth wall,” so to speak, directly addressing their story to an unknown audience. It’s a different spin on this technique, but one I thoroughly enjoyed.

Rye is clearly the heart and soul of the book; at one point he remarks that he feels like he’s being carried along by the tide of history without being able to impact it, and indeed he’s not wrong. One of the things that makes the book brilliant, though, is how the teenager learns to adapt to the events swirling around him, maturing into a man with his own thoughts and will.

In addition to Rye, The Cold Millions is rife with three-dimensional characters, and whether they’re historically based or not, they come across as real. Readers could spend a lot of time googling them (as I admit I did), but it’s a distracting exercise; in the acknowledgments, the author urges readers to “treat even the historical figures as fictional characters,” and it seems like that’s the best approach to take. In spite of there being a relatively large cast, each character is so well-drawn that I had no problem keeping track of who was who and delighting in each one’s quirks. Given publishing timelines, Walter certainly began writing this novel well before 2020’s protests, which have sparked debate about citizens’ rights under the First Amendment. Despite the events on which it is based taking place a century ago, I found the plot extremely relevant to today’s concerns.

Historical fiction doesn’t get any better than this; its fast pace, stellar writing and compelling characters make The Cold Millions a winner, and I highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in this period of American history. Walter’s fans will certainly find much to love about the book, and it will likely attract him many new followers as well.

Book reviewed by Kim Kovacs . An Inventory of Losses Judith Schalansky Harper Collins December 2020

With each passing year, parts of the world are lost. Species become extinct. Old texts fade from print. Artifacts are buried. Islands slip into the ocean. In An Inventory of Losses, Judith Schalansky surveys some of the things that have not held up to the test of time. From the Caspian tiger to the love songs of Sappho, readers are sure to learn something new about something that no longer exists.

Judith Schalansky is a German writer, editor and book designer based in Berlin. She has written five books that have been translated into over 20 languages. Her most famous publication to date is Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will, an imaginative ode to obscure places. An Inventory of Losses debuted for German readers in 2018. Now, two years later, translator Jackie Smith brings it to an English-speaking audience.

The book is organized into twelve chapters based on the twelve marvels Schalansky explores, including

“Kinau’s Selenographs,” “Tuanaki Island,” “Villa Sacchetti,” “Palace of the Republic” and “The Seven Books of Mani.” It is a hand-selected museum of oddities, united only by their temporal existence. Because of this story-by-story, object-by-object structure, casual readers will enjoy dipping in and out at their leisure.

An unusual and somewhat unexpected feature of this book is the writing style. Instead of simply describing the objects, animals and places that no longer exist and explaining their significance – what one might expect from nonfiction – Schalansky chooses distinct fictionalized voices for each chapter. She creates these narrative voices through her research into these disparate treasures, pieced together from contemporaneous sources such as scrolls, maps, ancient tales, song fragments, slabs of stone and captains’ diaries. In one chapter, readers are brought along to the ancient Roman games, witnessing the bloody showdown between a now-extinct Caspian tiger and a lion. In another, readers are in the mind of a lonely, distraught, age-obsessed movie star wandering the streets of New York in 1952. In “Tuanaki,” readers meet a researcher who stumbled upon lost islands documented on an outdated library globe; the researcher imagines how Indigenous people and colonizers may have understood one another or interacted over the course of time.

Although this narrative style allows Schalansky to be historically accurate while experimenting with storytelling techniques, it can be disorienting. Points of view change often, from first to second to third, as does the gender and time period of the narrative voice. One downside of this is that the voice offers no sense of continuity in terms of the larger themes in the book, and the start of each chapter can be clunky as the reader tries to figure out where and when they are situated in the story and how the narrative will relate to the subject at hand.

Circling around ideas of loss, memory and ruin, Schalansky offers readers an unorthodox take on endings. In the preface, she explains that “Fundamentally, every item is already waste, every building already a ruin, and all creation nothing but destruction.” Yet, she concedes a sort of optimism centered around second chances, particularly those instances when someone unearths something spectacular after years, decades or centuries of hiding and the past lives again.

An excerpt from An Inventory of Losses, an essay called “The Von Behr Palace,” is published in Asymptote.

Reviewed By Jamie Chornoby .