WEDNESDAy, MARCH 18 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST eZ re c3
What if the Nazis had won World
War II? What if the space race had
never ended? What if...?
Alternate-history novels take
significant events and ask how things
might have turned out differently. At
their worst, these books may seem like
an empty exercise in world building. At
their best, they can offer an insightful
examination of history and a
commentary on our present day. Like a
funhouse mirror, alternate history can
cast back our own reflection and make
it both wondrous and strange.
The granddaddy of the genre may be
Philip K. Dick’s “The man in the High
Castle” (1962). Dick’s elegiac
examination of various actors in an
America divided between the Japanese
Empire and the Nazis remains
compelling today, and has spawned a
successful TV series. Several writers,
such as the venerable Harry Turtledove,
have made alternate history their main
output — be sure to take a look at his
Worldwar series, in which an alien
invasion in the midst of World War II
irrevocably changes history.
But more typically a writer will
produce only a single work or two in
the genre. “The Calculating Stars”
(2018) by mary robinette Kowal, an
alternate history of the American space
program, swept up all the major genre
awards, including the Sidewise — an
award specifically for alternate history.
Given annually since 1995, Sidewise
winners include “Underground
Airlines,” by Ben Winters and Ken Liu’s
short story “The Long Haul.” So which
books would we nominate?
Silvia: “The Dragon Waiting” by
John m. ford. originally published in
1983, the book comes out in a new
edition this year. many people have
said it’s perfect for “Game of Thrones”
fans, and I can see the reason for the
comparison, even if this novel takes
place not in a fantasy land, but in a
medieval Europe rife with political
machinations and vampires. It’s the
War of the roses meets Dracula. And
speaking of Dracula, Kim Newman has
been writing alternate histories with
vampires ever since “Anno Dracula”
made a cocktail of Victorian London,
the undead and Jack the ripper. His
latest book, “Anno Dracula 1999:
Daikaiju” takes place in Tokyo. Are the
199 0s now historical, Lavie?
lavie: I think the ’90s are going to
be the next ’80s, Silvia! “A nno Dracula”
is a great series, asking what if Dracula
won at the end of the original novel
and leaping ahead from there. my
favorite in that universe may be Kim
Newman’s novella “Coppola’s Dracula,”
which imagines the director shooting a
vampire movie in Transylvania instead
of “A pocalypse Now” — with real
vampires, of course. my pick, though:
mary Gentle’s “Ash: A Secret History.”
It came out in 2000 and looked like it
could be the next big book of the
decade (and I do mean big — it’s more
than 1,000 pages!). It’s a fantastically
rich novel, an alternate history set in
15th-century Europe, following the
adventures of Ash, a female mercenary.
Things get weird fast, with a darkness
falling over Europe and a threat from
Carthage which, we eventually
discover, is manipulated by black
pyramids who are sentient A.I.s! The
whole thing is presented as a
manuscript discovered by two
scientists from our time, but events
soon begin to influence each other.
Silvia: Another somewhat obscure
book was “Darwinia,” by American
Canadian author robert Charles
Wilson. It has a bonkers premise:
one day, Europe disappeared and
was replaced with a mysterious
continent full of strange flora and
fauna. I loved the “Land of the Lost”
vibe even if I didn’t quite like how
things were resolved. And for
something more recent there’s
“Everfair” by Nisi Shawl, in which
the people of the Congo acquire
steampunk technology early on,
therefore averting the colonial
horrors of our timeline. It’s an
ambitious, sprawling book.
lavie: I loved “Darwinia”! Another
recent trend in this category is postwar
Jewish diaspora alternate histories,
enough at least to fill a (small) shelf.
The late Nava Semel’s “Isra-Isle” (Jews
in Niagara falls), translated by Jessica
Cohen, is an excellent alternative-
alternative. Then there’s Simone
Zelitch’s “Judenstaat” (Jews in Saxony)
and of course michael Chabon’s 2012
“The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” (Jews
in Alaska), which is terrific fun. It
might be niche, but it’s an example of
how alternate history can deal with
powerful historical themes.
[email protected]silvia Moreno-garcia is the author of the
novels “gods of Jade and shadow,” “signal
to noise” and, most recently, “untamed
shore.” Lavie Tidhar is the author of
several novels, including “the Violent
century,” “A Man lies Dreaming,” “central
station” and “unholy land.scI-fItHe WAsHIngton Post IllustrAtIon; IstocKbook world
BY BETHANNE PATRICK“Deacon King Kong,” the new book
from author and musician James
mcBride, is a hilarious, pitch-perfect
comedy set in the Brooklyn projects of
the late 1960s. This alone may qualify it
as one of the year’s best novels. However,
mcBride — the author of the National
Book Awa
rd-winning “The Good Lord Bird” —
has constructed a story with a deeper
meaning for those who choose to read
beyond the plot, one that makes the
work funnier, sweeter and more pro-
found.
first, the overview: Cuffy “Sportcoat”
Lambkin is an elderly African American
man, a deacon of the five Points Church
in South Brooklyn that serves a project
known as the Cause Houses. on a warm
September morning in 1969, Sportcoat,
addled by moonshine known as “King
Kong,” slowly makes his way to a com-
munal courtyard and shoots 19-year-old
drug kingpin Deems Clemens i n the face.
Clemens loses his ear but not his
memory or his network of toughs. As he
recovers at home, Sportcoat’s friends,
including Hot Sausage, Dominic Lefleur
the Haitian Sensation, Sister Bum-Bum
and a Nation of Islam member named
Soup, urge him to flee, leave the neigh-
borhood, the state, the region. “You a
walking dead man, Sport,” says Hot
Sausage. As Sportcoat makes his agoniz-
ingly slow decisions about the situation,
mcBride raises and lowers the curtains
on a community of African American
and Latinx characters whose lives and
needs intersect constantly.
Clemens isn’t the only person with a
grudge against Sportcoat; the ladies of
five Points Church believe his late wife,
Hettie, absconded with their Christmas
Club money (which might amount to
$50 or $5,000), and they want it back.
Thomas “The Elephant” E lefante, a near-
by mafia don who’s better at gardening
than serious crime, also materializeswhen he realizes his father (“the Gover-
nor”) may have hidden his notorious l oot
somewhere in the Cause Houses.
Beneath the characters and comedy is
a story about how a community and its
religious institutions can provide a cen-
ter to keep things from falling apart
completely. These men, women and
children regard five Points Church as a
beacon and a yardstick even when they
have not worshiped there for weeks or
decades. But the church is also theIthaca in mcBride’s
unlikely epic, Sport-
coat its even more
unlikely odysseus.
Instead of crossing
seas and tying him-
self to a mast, Sport-
coat scuttles from one
unnoticed location in
the projects to anoth-
er, interacting with
friends and threats.
Instead of a witch
named Circe, our
hero must contend
with the formidable
ghost of Hettie, who
remains mum on the
location of the Christ-
mas Club funds but is
quite chatty on her
opinion of how low
her husband has fallen.
But “Deacon King Kong” is not simply
a retelling of an ancient epic. mcBride
revels in constructing a hero’s journey
for Sportcoat, but that does not mean he
relies on typical tropes or traditional
endings. If Sportcoat’s finale takes a
darker turn, well, it is at least one of his
own choosing. There is something to be
said for that.
[email protected]Bethanne Patrick is the editor, most
recently, of “the Books that changed My
life: reflections by 100 Authors, Actors,
Musicians and other remarkable People.”DeAcoN KINg
KoNg
By James
McBride
riverhead.
370 pp. $28In the character Sportcoat, a hero who’s tailored after an epic
cHIA MessInA
James Mcbride, the author of “deason King Kong,” which follows an aging deacon
whose mysterious actions set a sprawling plot in motion.sentences that t ried t o hide the n arcissism
and misogyny of their stories.” Such acer-
bic insights ensure that “Writers & Lov-
ers” isn’t just a novel for other writers. It
explores a culture determined to shame
young women’s sexuality, hobble their
motivation and mock t heir ambition.
With Casey, King has created an irre-
sistible heroine — equally vulnerable and
tenacious — and we’re immediately in-
vested in her search for comfort, for love,
for success: a triple prize that seems en-
tirely impossible. But as the story pro-
gresses, the desolation of pining for a
partner flips into the chaos of balancing
two fellow w riters vying for h er affections.
That artistic anxiety and romantic strate-
gy i ntroduces a new s et o f pressures.
Jane Austen said, “man has the advan-
tage of choice; woman only the power of
refusal,” but Casey is determined to hold
out f or a plot on her o wn terms. T he r esult
is an absolute delight, the kind of happi-
ness that sometimes slingshots out of
despair with such force you can’t help but
cheer, amazed.
[email protected]ron charles writes about books for the
Washington Post and hosts
totallyHipVideoBookreview.com.on March 30 at 7 p.m., lily King will be at
Politics & Prose, 5015 connecticut Ave. nW,
Washington, D.c.convince Casey that she still uses “her
imagination when she walked through
the houses and invented a new life for h er
clients.” r est in peace, d ear friend.
When the novel opens in the 1990s,
Casey is living alone in a converted pot-
ting shed in Cambridge, mass. She wants
to be a writer — s he is a writer! — b ut most
days the manuscript she’s toiling over
feels clogged and doomed. The phrase “I
am wasting my life” thumps through her
body like a heartbeat. She works as a
waitress at an upscale restaurant owned
by a Harvard social club to cover her rent
and p ayments o n $73,000 of s tudent d ebt.
“A ll I can do now is manage it, pay the
minimums until — a nd this i s the thing —
until what? Until when?” she asks.
“There’s no answer. That’s part of my
looming blank specter.”
This is a bracingly realistic vision o f the
economic hopelessness that so many
young people are trapped in: serving ex-
traordinary wealth but entirely separate
from it. Casey has spent six years on her
novel, barely supporting herself with an
exhausting restaurant job that gives her
horrible hours and no benefits. And like
far too many artists, she’s ignoring a con-
spiracy of frightening bodily ailments be-
cause she c an’t a fford h ealth insurance.
Giving up now would be sensible but
demoralizing, an admission that all her
booK world from C1 “I have a pact with myself not to
think about money in the morn-
ing,” she says. “I’m like a teenager
trying not to think about sex. But
I’m also trying not to think about
sex. or Luke. or death. Which
means not thinking about my
mother, who died on vacation last
winter. There are so many things I
can’t t hink about in order to write.”
As in her previous novels, King
explores the dimensions of
mourning with aching honesty,
but in “Writers & Lovers” she’s
leavened that sorrow with an i rre-
ducible sense of humor. Her hero-
ine experiences life in the weirdly
bifurcated way that writers often
do: feeling the pain while also harvesting
it for comedy. As C asey endures the h umil-
iations of p overty a nd the mistreatment o f
various suitors, her own wry commentary
on life as a young woman in modern
America is the only compensation that
gets h er through.
Now on her fifth novel, King has a
lifetime of experience with the pressures
and absurdities of being an aspiring writ-
er — and a successful one. She’s also in a
position to cast a knowing, satiric eye
across the whole enterprise of fiction
workshops, graduate seminars, bookstore
readings and publishing parties. Casey
endures the condescension of insecure,
egotistical men who “wrote t ender, p oetic
past struggles were for noth-
ing. Her landlord greets her
one m orning by noting, “I just
find it extraordinary that you
think you have something to
say,” but that’s no more dis-
couraging than her own i nter-
nal doubts. Sitting at her desk
later that d ay, she c onfesses, “ I
don’t write because I think I
have something to say. I write
because if I don’t, everything
feels even worse.”
feeling even worse is a con-
stant threat. Her last boy-
friend, Luke, was a poet who
worried that “the Devil” m ight
be behind their relationship
while he wrote about bees and dead chil-
dren. Now Casey’s alone again, trudging
through a perpetual state of shock at the
sudden loss of her mother. Her sorrow
sends her into fits of crying, which the
manager at t he restaurant f inds annoying.
I know: I’m doing a horrible job of
making this novel sound funny o r roman-
tic. But this is the grim terrain that King
lays out at the opening of “Writers &
Lovers.” A nd i t’s what makes the arc of t his
story so enchanting. All of t hese tragedies
and obstacles are drawn with stark real-
ism and deep emotional resonance. But
even during the early pages, we can sense
Casey’s spirit crouching in determined
resistance:WrITers &
LoVers
By lily King
grove. 324 pp.
$27‘Writers & Lovers’ finds the humor in coping
MArIner;tor;tor