Conspicuous Consumption

 I’m pretty sure this is the first novel I’ve read by an “internet sensation.” The author, who writes under the pseudonym Uketsu and appears on his YouTube channel wearing a mask and using a voice modulator, writes novels that are at the same time puzzle mysteries and horror, and employ visual aids—strange pictures—as important pieces of the puzzle. In Jim Rion’s translation, the prose in Strange Pictures is simple, making for a quick and easy read. I’m guessing the target is young people, less sophisticated readers who enjoy the dark and mysterious. And this is quick, simple, and enjoyable, but also very dark. Indeed, almost no characters who could be called good even in the simplest way appear until toward the book’s end. They’re not missed. It’s a fun diversion.

Every time I think I’m done with contemporary American literary fiction, especially of the divorce in the suburbs type, I stumble upon work in that tired category that convinces me it can still be worth one’s precious reading time. Edith Pearlman is definitely an author whose work is worth one’s time. I guess one reason I enjoyed her stories is that she’s willing to venture far outside the generic bounds which bind so many other writers. Several of the stories are set in a fictional Boston suburb, and yes there are divorces, but several venture far beyond it to Europe, for example, and Central America. The connected stories featuring a woman who works with “displaced people” (Jews escaping the Nazis) in London are among my favorites. Likewise, the view she gives us of a community slightly removed from the mainstream, the Jewish bourgeoisie in the US, is fresh. Mostly though it is her skill as a writer. Her characters are alive, and it is her exquisite prose which makes them so. My only...

   I'm on record as saying that I don't like children's literature. This is not because there is anything wrong with children's literature, but I'm not a child, and neither am I a "kidult" (I thought Will Self had coined that, but apparently it's much older) who revels in the books and media he or she enjoyed or would have enjoyed as a child. I've never read Harry Potter, and probably never will. And yet, here I am writing about a children's book that I enjoyed. I enjoyed the first in the series The Wolves of Willoughby Chase , more, but that's by way of saying that this is not even the first children's book I've read in recent years. I moved on to the second book in the series because I had enjoyed the first a great deal. What both books share is a clever plot, elegant writing, and rollicking humor.   The thing that makes it possible for even as curmudgeonly a reader as me to enjoy these novels is that Aiken does not assume that ch...