I think Priest does approach several hairy aspects in the right way. I thought the historical aspects were handled well--in so far as people's worldviews were truly informed by their environment. Briar in particular felt like a fully realized character. However--and this is something I'm not quite sure a novel that's all about worldbuilding can ever overcome--there were instances where you could almost feel the story grinding into a halt in order to pay lip service to exposition.

 An erudite and gripping thriller, Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Flanders Panel uses two arguably low-key elements (art restoration and chess) and turns them into the building blocks for an intelligent puzzle. I tore through my copy of this book in a couple of days until the reveal at the end, swept away by the descriptions of the Madrid art scene, the sharp dissection of chess gameplay and motivations, the reimagining of political intrigue in 15th Century Flanders.

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So this book is not perfect. It has a fault endemic to many literary writers, which is how their attempts to write in the vernacular of youth culture and hip hop often end up feeling dopey. You also need to have the ability to continue reading about characters who fuck up in a theatrical fashion. But this book still struck me in the heart parts in ways that took me by surprise, not least because E.M. Forster’s Howards End resonated between its lines. On Beauty follows the travails of the Belsey family as they navigate the subtle politics of their bourgie college town life, with all its requisite posturing and hypocrisies. As children of a biracial marriage between a white British intellectual and a practical African-American woman, the kids use different strategies of dealing with a privileged and liberal life where issues of race are not supposed to touch them anymore. (But of course it does.) Their parents aren’t faring any better, since infidelity has exploded their former facade of familial happiness.

Reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah has most likely prepped me into reading this kind of fiction, a non-fantasy that is essentially non-realist. That this book (over?)relies on resonances with other works of art makes it difficult for me to suss out whether its bones book can stand on its own, however. What does it say about a book that you need to read another book beforehand in order to "get" it?

There are so many ways that this kind of setup can go wrong, and at times the story does threaten to spin out of its orbit. But there’s a great depth of emotion that underscores the clash of ethical, aesthetic, and moral viewpoints. I kind of admire Zadie Smith’s gumption to come out with a messy yet fiercely intelligent book like this, where you can almost feel her working through an argument with herself, her upbringing, her nonrational yet deeply held beliefs.

It's like reading a festering open wound. Holy shit. The journal entries for me was the weakest part--Greene is at the top of his game when he's trying to scald your face off. The observations about post-war London is also beautiful in its restraint, a nice contrast to the characters and their big, salty emotions. Overwrought like Swan Lake is overwrought, like Caravaggio is overwrought.