Words of Wood

Syr Hayati Beker's What A Fish Looks Like is perhaps the weirdest/coolest/most interesting thing I've read so far this year -- an apocalyptic collage novel(la), told in letters, posters, angry breakup notes, and a series of strange fairy tale riffs about breakups and loss and change and transformation on both the personal and the planetary level.

In the frame story for What A Fish Looks Like, a queer radical collective in a city living through massive climate collapse has gotten its hands on 100 tickets for the last big trip off-planet. It's T minus ten days: who's going? Who's staying? Who heard the gossip about Jay and Seb making out on the dance floor, even though they had a really messy breakup and Jay has a ticket out and Seb has no interest in leaving, and who wants to use the Saga of Jay and Seb to distract themselves from the fact that the oceans are rising and the skies are red and this year's bad fire season never ended?

In the interstitials, a community outlined in personal letters and party invites and notes on the bathroom door of a favorite bar counts down to the point of decision. In the stories themselves, a person has a bad break-up and and takes on some polar bear DNA about it; a closeted teacher loses a student to a big wave in the new and frightening ocean, and meets a mermaid about it; a stage manager forges ahead with a production of Antigone in a burning city and turns into a spider about it. The people who appear in the stories also appear in the interstitials, part of the community; the book is slippery about to what degree the stories are meant to be read literally as an accounting of events and to what degree they're metaphors, wishes, retellings. The interstitials make it clear that there is certainly a theater and a fire. Probably nobody actually turned into a spider about it, but who could say. The world is getting weirder, and who knows what's possible or plausible anymore?

I'm including a screenshot of one of my favorite pages of the book -- most of the stories are text but a lot of the interstitials are in images like this one -- which I think gives a good sense of the kind of community portraiture that makes What A Fish Look Like stand out so much to me.



Highly recommend checking this one out: you might be confused, you might be depressed, you might be inspired, you absolutely won't be bored.

I went into Lessons in Magic and Disaster somewhat trepidatiously due to the degree to which her YA novel Victories Greater Than Death did not work for me. The good news: I do think Lessons in Magic and Disaster is MUCH better than Victories Greater Than Death and actually does some things remarkably well. The bad news: other elements did continue to drive me up a wall ....

Lessons in Magic and Disaster centers on the relationship between Jamie, a trans PhD student struggling to finish her dissertation on 18th-century women writers at a [fictional] small Boston college, and her mother Serena, an abrasive lesbian lawyer who has been sunk deep in depression since her partner died a few years back and her career simultaneously blew up completely.

Jamie does small-scale lower-m magic -- little rituals to make things go a little better in her life, that usually seem to work, as long as she doesn't think about them too hard -- and the book starts when she takes the unprecedented-for-her step of telling her mother about the magic as a sort of mother-daughter bonding ritual to see if her mother can use it to help herself get less depressed! Unfortunately Serena is not looking for a little gentle self-help woo-woo; she would like to UNFUCK her life AND the world in SIGNIFICANT ways that go way beyond what Jamie has ever done with magic and also start blowing back on Jamie in ways that eventually threaten not only Jamie and Serena's relationship but also Jamie's marriage, Jamie's career, and Serena's life.

Serena is an extremely specific, well-observed character, and Serena and Jamie's relationship feels real and messy and complicated in ways that even the book's tendency towards therapy-speak couldn't actually ruin for me, because yeah, okay, I do think Jamie would sometimes talk like an annoying tumblr post, that's just part of the characterization and it doesn't actually fix everything and sometimes even hurts. But the book's strengths -- that it's grounded very much in a world and a community and a type of people that Charlie Jane Anders clearly knows really well and can paint extremely vividly -- are also its weaknesses, in that it's also constantly slipping into ... I guess I'd call it a kind of lazy-progressive writing? The book is full of these sharp, vivid, messy moments whenever it's focused on this particular relationship and Serena in specific, and without that flashpoint, the messiness vanishes. Jamie goes into her grad school classroom and thinks about how the white men are always so annoying but the queer and bipoc students Always pick up what she's putting down. Jamie's partner Ro sets down boundaries in their marriage after a magic incident goes wrong and they are Always right and Jamie is Always humble and respectful about it, because respecting boundaries is Always the Correct thing to do. (Ro is the sort of person who says things like "this is bringing back a lot of trauma for me" while Jamie's mother is actively, in that moment, on the verge of death. I'm all for honesty in relationships but maybe you could give it a minute?)

I don't know. I think there is quite a good book in here, but I also think that good book is kind of fighting its way a little bit to get out from under the conviction that We Progressive Right-Thinking People In The Year 2025 Know What Righteous Behavior Looks Like. You know. But sometimes it does indeed succeed!

I did really enjoy the book's hyper-local Cambridge setting. Yeah, I see you name-checking those favorite restaurants, and yes, I have been to them and they are pretty good. Also, as a b-plot, Jamie is uncovering some lesbian literary drama in her dissertation that gives Charlie Jane Anders a chance to play around with 18thc pastiche and write RPF about Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier, and Charlotte Clarke and sure, fine, I didn't know very much about any of those people and she has very successfully made me want to know more! There were a bunch of times she'd drop something int he book and I'd be like "that's SO unsubtle as pastiche" and then I'd look it up and it was just a real thing that had happened or been published, so point again to Charlie Jane Anders.