I read The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker a while ago, and recently decided to re-read it. It is the story of a newly created female golem who immediately loses her master, and a jinni trapped in human form, both of whom end up in fin de siècle New York and have to create new lives for themselves. It is a book that is easy to get lost in, and makes me excited about the mixing of literary and genre fiction. They’re excellent separate, of course, a good literary dissection of a marriage, or a life, where the drama comes from everyday triumphs and tragedies. And I love a good pulpy fantasy novel, with serviceable prose, and well-worn tropes make the reading feel like putting on comfy old sweatshirt.

But I am thrilled about novels like this, a literary novel with an urban fantasy plot. Like the best literary novels, it creates complicated, not always likable characters, and wrings as much drama from the little ways that they choose to get through their days as the more operatic confrontations of the ending.

I also admire the way the author narrates the novel in an omniscient voice. I am more familiar with omniscient voice in 19th century novels, where the narrator has a particular point of view and that voice is as much a part of the novel as any of the characters. Who is it that tells us that “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” if not the author? (I will leave aside whether that author is Jane Austen or the persona that she is putting on for another day.) It is Thackeray’s voice for Vanity Fair that endears Becky Sharp to us, because his affection for her is so evident, even with all her cruelties and vanities.

The voice in The Golem and the Jinni is more subdued, but still very skillful. The point of view moves from character to character, smoothly, and when necessary, tells the reader about things outside the characters’ sphere of knowledge. It also goes deeply into individual characters so that we know them inside and out. It has all the advantages of a shifting third person, with just a bit more. It helps give the novel a slightly old fashioned feel, in keeping with its setting. Omniscient third has fallen somewhat out of favor these days.

What it accomplishes by going so deep into point of view and then coming out of it, is an intimacy that many modern books in omniscient third lack. The switches happen so seamlessly that it gives the narrator a remarkable freedom.

By creating two creatures who are new to turn-of-the-century New York City, she gets to give them the joy of exploring this place and time, and letting the reader explore with them. That is not something that I’ve gotten to do in the historical fiction I’ve written so far, where all of my characters are more or less familiar with their milieu, although each of them pushes their boundaries. This book is a good reminder to sit in those moments when my characters are in a new situation, a new place, give them time to discover it, be inspired by it or afraid of it, whatever their personality dictates.

I’ve never wanted to write reviews here, rather to talk about books that I’ve enjoyed, and what I’ve learned from them. It’s interesting to see some reviews on Goodreads saying that it has far too much description of old New York, when I could have read twice as much. I don’t think it’s a perfect book–I’m not sure such a thing exists–but it worked, and it was intelligent and thoughtful, charming and moving, and I highly recommend it.

While I was on traveling over Thanksgiving, I read The Son by Phillip Meyer, which is a literary western, in the tradition of Larry McMurtry. Indeed it is kind of a fusing of McMurtry’s historical and contemporary novels, with three parallel storylines, one beginning in the 1840s, one in 1917, and one stretching from WWII to today.

The Son has a particularly bleak worldview. A few types of people make an appearance: those forged of iron, who take and know they take, who know that there is no fairness in the world. They are not good but they are the best of a bad lot. There as those who take, but pretend they have some moral right to the things they take. These are hypocrites, but perhaps not particularly interesting as they do not make up any of the major roles in the book. Then there are the weak, with moral qualms, who will not take, and so are stolen from again and again. There are no nurturers, no care-givers.

The 1800s storyline follows Eli, the family’s progenitor, who is captured by Comanche, then goes on to fight in the Confederate army, and found a cattle operation and later an oil business. The early 1900s storyline follows his son, who is tortured by the way his family takes and takes, and his inability to accept it is his downfall. The modern storyline follows his grand-daughter, a woman who has nothing in common with other women. She wants to have the strengths and successes of a Texas man, but her sex denies her that.

This is an ecological Western, as perhaps, they all are: concerned with a dying way of life that was dying even as it was born. The frontier can only be conquered once, and then it is settled, and the qualities in men that made them capable of the cruelty necessary to settle it are no longer the skills needed. Those who survive must change to steal and pillage in new ways.

A scene from this novel that stayed with me is when an Easterner interviews the returned captive of the Comanche with a narrative already in his mind: that the savages are noble in some way. To which our hero responds that they may be, but where was this concern for the nobility and perfection of the native when the Easterner’s grandparents were killing off their natives? It’s an unanswerable question. What is the use in feeling badly about the deaths that bought today’s prosperity?

Is there any kind of wealth that is not bought from death and injustice? The Son answers no. This is a Western for the new millennium, tracing the death of the Texas ecology, through overgrazing and then the depredations of oil, and what is the future after that? Does the world go the way of frontier Texas?

And yet, this is a deeply conservative book, in the way of conservative, strict-father morality. The only kind of communal society that works the Comanche, and it is rapacious, like nature, red in tooth and claw, but controlled by the challenges of survival. Other tribes and band that act as a check on any tribe that becomes too big and rich. There is no room for liberal, nurturing government, for fairness, for caring for the weak simply because they are weak. The Comanche practice a harsh communism, where loyalty to the collective is so strong that in lean times, blind children are killed, so they will not eat food that could go to more useful members of the tribe. They exist in a state of pure nature, as, I suppose do the Texas oilmen, obeying their nature to become as fat and wealthy as possible, no matter the cost to anyone else.

This book left me with the feeling that nature will balance out us humans soon enough and with as much blood and violence as ever we visited on others. For millenia, humans lived in places, in a balance with nature, but in 100 years, Texas became a desert, and we took oil out of the earth. The Comanche dropped seeds when they traveled, which grew up into the trees that made the straight shoots they cut into arrows. We don’t do this anymore. We borrow from the future instead of seeding for it.

I gave this book five stars on Goodreads, even though it wore its philosophy on its sleeve, and all the characters were given to internal monologues about the difficulty of their lives–or perhaps because of it. I can respect a book with such a relentless, and to me, seductive worldview. The worldview of this book is not mine, but I am attracted to it, and while I was reading the book, I could not reject it, as I could with, say Gone Girl, whose worldview is so alien to me that I could only enter into it occasionally. I couldn’t stop thinking about The Son, for a long time after I finished reading it. Its view of humanity, and its implications for our future are too frightening and close to my own nightmares, to be easily forgotten.