Thanks to NetGalley and to Scribner for providing me with an ARC copy of this book that I freely chose to review.

Sometimes, I’d try to write them down, but they were just bad poems, limping down the page: Training a horse. The next line. Cut with the knees.

It stays with me, a bruise in the memory that hurts when I touch it.

I would throw up everything. All of it: food and bile and stomach and intestines and esophagus, organs all, bones and muscle, until all that was left was skin. And then maybe that could turn inside out, and I wouldn’t be nothing no more. Not this…

“Because we don’t walk no straight lines. It’s all happening at once. All of it. We are all here at once. My mama and daddy and they mamas and daddies.” Mam looks to the wall, closes her eyes. “My son.”

Both of us bow together as Richie goes darker and darker, until he’s a black hole in the middle of the yard, like he done sucked all the light and darkness over them miles, over them years, into him, until he’s burning black, and then he isn’t. There…

“Let’s go,” I say. Knowing that tree is there makes the skin on my back burn, like hundreds of ants are crawling up my spine, seeking tenderness between the bones to bit. I know the boy is there, watching, waving like grass in water.

I decided to start with some quotes (and I would happily quote the whole book, but there would be no point) because I know I could not make its language justice. This is a book about a family, three generations of an African-American family in the South and it has been compared to works by Morrison and Faulkner, and that was what made me request the book as they are among my favourite authors. And then, I kept reading about it and, well, in my opinion, they are not wrong. We have incredible descriptions of life in the South for this rural family (smells, touch, sound, sight, taste, and even the sixth sense too), we have a nightmarish road trip to a prison, with some detours, we have characters that we get to know intimately in their beauty and ugliness, and we have their story and that of many others whose lives have been touched by them.

There are two main narrators, Leonie, a young woman, mother of two children, whose life seems to be on a downward spiral. Her white partner is in prison for cooking Amphetamines, she does drugs as often as she can and lives with her parents, who look after her children, and seems to live denying her true nature and her feelings. Her son, Jojo, is a teenager who has become the main support of the family, looking after his kid sister, Michaela, or Kayla, helping his grandfather and grandmother, rebellious and more grown-up and responsible than his mother and father. Oh, and he hears and understands what animals say, and later on, can also see and communicate with ghosts. His grandmother is also a healer and knows things, although she is riddled with cancer, and his baby sister also seems to have the gift. The third narrator is one of the ghosts, Richie, who before he makes his physical (ghostly?) appearance has been the subject of a story Jojo’s grandfather has been telling him, without ever quite finishing it, seemingly waiting for the right moment to tell him what really happened. When we get to that point, the story is devastating, but so are most of the stories in the novel. Fathers who physically fight with their sons because they love an African-American woman, young men killed because it was not right that a black man win a bet, men imprisoned for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and for being the wrong race… The stories pile up and even the ghosts fight with each other to try and gain a sense of self, to try to belong.

This is magic realism at its best. As I said, the descriptions of the characters, the locations, and the family relationships are compelling and detailed. But there are elements that break the boundaries of realism (yes, the ghosts, and the style of the narration, where we follow interrupted stories, stream of consciousness, and where the living and those who are not really there are given equal weight), and that might make the novel not suitable for everybody. As beautiful as the language is, it is also harsh and raw at times, and incredibly moving.

Although it is short and, for me at least, a page turner, this is not a light read and I’d recommend approaching it with caution if you are particularly sensitive to abuse, violence, drug use, or if you prefer your stories straight, with no otherworldly interferences. Otherwise, check a sample, and do yourselves a favour. Read it. I hadn’t read any of this author’s books before, but I’ll be on the lookout and I’ll try and catch up on her previous work. She is going places.  

[This is a review of Morrissey's novel List of the Lost.
However I am unable to "connect" my post to the book as it is only available in the UK.

I also tried to "connect" this post to my own book because I mention it briefly, and I learned that booklikes has misspelled my name. Thanks so much, booklikes.]

I loved this novel. It was so strange and idiosyncratic, so different from anything else I’ve ever read. Morrissey writes like Daisy Ashford all grown up. Ostensibly set in Boston in the 1970s, the story actually took place in a surreal landscape that was not meant to have the verisimilitude of any particular time and place. I enjoyed the lyricism of the writing, and in particular I don’t think I have ever read any finer descriptions of death or awkward sex.

Usually in a book, you get a lot of warning when a character is going to die, but I was taken by surprise again and again and again here. And that’s what it’s actually like in real life. The random cruelty of death is put across very effectively in this story, and this is the realism created by the seeming unreality of the plot.

List of the Lost reminded me a lot of Gertrude Stein’s book of poetry Tender Buttons, which is also extremely unusual and non-conformist. Both of those books are so far from the mainstream that I struggle to explain/defend why I like them so much, because they’re indescribably lacking in point of reference. I think the key is that with these two books, I had to engage and grapple with them and so the experience is about me plus the book, rather than the usual experience where a book conforms to my expectations and plays a movie in my mind so I don’t really have to do any work.

I’m a writer, and in the publishing industry as a whole there’s incredible pressure to conform, conform, conform and please the gatekeepers and grab the reader by the throat in the opening paragraph. I really appreciate how Morrissey totally short circuited all that. It’s incredibly refreshing to see someone follow their own star and write whatever the hell they want and then get published by Penguin.

I was delighted or deeply moved from the first page to the last. One of the most affecting and true-to-life parts was the death of one of the character’s mothers. And something that just tickled me tremendously was an extended description of the TV show Bonanza. List of the Lost also surprisingly turned out to be something of a page turner. I started off reading it very slowly, wanting to savor it all and make sure I comprehended it, but by the end I was just racing through, wondering what would happen next.

As a big Morrissey fan, I enjoyed reading his time-honored themes (such as the perfidy of: the royal family, the police, the meat/murder industry, Margaret Thatcher, and child murderers) but this time through the medium of fiction. It was so his voice that I felt as though I was hearing him read aloud.

One of the most striking things was Morrissey’s iconoclastic disregard for what anyone thinks. It’s not just the evil people in power he’s unafraid to offend, it’s everyone. Does it seem backward and unhelpful to have the villain who’s a child molester and murderer also be a gay man who frequents drag clubs? Sure. Does Morrissey shrink from having one of his characters opine that some child victims are asking for it? No, he goes right ahead and includes this abhorrent idea. Although I’m usually so easily offended, none of this bothered me because I was just so taken with the irrepressible spirit of the story. (But trigger warning for these things!)

I can’t help but notice that a lot of people really don’t seem to like this book. I’m kind of baffled. Yes, it’s weird but it’s good. I do feel a special kinship with Morrissey’s unique sensibility, but so do a LOT of other people, and Morrissey fans are ten a penny. So...? I was wondering when I was reading it if part of the reason I loved it was just that I love Morrissey. But context can’t be escaped from, it’s always there, and if I like him wearing one hat why wouldn’t I like him wearing another hat, especially when he brings the same originality, passion, and elegiac quality to fiction as to songwriting. But I don’t think you need to bring some special knowledge to this novel in order to like it or “understand” it. In the opening, List of the Lost seemed plotless and it brought Balanchine’s plotless ballets to my mind. And I started thinking about what Balanchine said about watching ballet; you don’t have to know anything, you just open your eyes and look at it and think, Is this beautiful? Does this mean something to me? Do I like this? That was kind of what I was asking myself as I read this unusual book and the answer was always yes, yes, yes. But I am going to lend List of the Lost to my friend Rebecca who is one of the smartest people I know (and yet she does not listen to Morrissey and she teaches college English) to see what she makes of it. Obviously, as with any book, it’s a matter of taste, but where are the other folks who think this tastes delicious? Part of me wants to be this book’s champion because it isn’t being appreciated, but the rest of me realizes that this book can stand on its own two feet and does not need me of all people to be its champion. (Also, if Morrissey were unable to withstand bad reviews and mockery, then he could not be still alive today.)

Morrissey’s novel also made me think a lot about my own so-called writing. As it happens, my most recently published book was also a gothic romance. My number one concern was the portrayal and representation of marginalized people, but beyond that literally my only aims were to make the book as accessible and entertaining as I could. And now I feel like, why? Okay, I write YA instead of literary fiction, but what is so great about trying to please people? (Which by the way does not work.) Isn’t there more to writing than trying to churn out a potboiler that adheres to certain conventions of how a story is supposed to be told? What do I really have to say? If I cast aside everything I think I know about my narrative identity, who or what am I as a writer? Or am I even a writer? I believe I have a lot to learn from the unabashed individuality of List of the Lost.

Now I am going to get specific about some things that happen in the story, so if you don’t want to know what happens, it’s time for you to stop reading. Spoiler alert, okay?...

List of the Lost is about a college men’s relay team on the cusp of incredible success in their sport. The four runners are physically at the peak of perfection and they have an easy and loving friendship. Then they are at some sort of runners’ retreat, and in the woods they unexpectedly encounter a repulsive old vagrant who however has a sympathetic backstory which he relates in a long soliloquy. At that point I had to stop reading, so my mind was spinning about what would happen next. In the hands of a hack (i.e. like myself), the old man would lay a curse on them and then one by one some terrible supernatural thing would befall each runner and they would certainly not win their big race and perhaps some or all of them would die. Well, in a way that’s not too far off, but my version would be very Lois Duncan/Final Destination. What Morrissey actually chose to do, though, is for the old man to try to sexually assault Ezra, one of the runners. Ezra hits him and the man falls down stone dead. (Let me say again, people die very abruptly in this novel!) The friends hide the body and run off. Then not long after, Harri’s mother dies and while Harri is at the very bottom of despair, a drug dealer who may be some sort of ghost or may be just an ordinary drug dealer, sells Harri everything he needs to end his pain and die by suicide. The remaining three are wracked with sadness and start to question the point of everything. Then a ghost appears to Ezra asking him to uncover the body of her child who was murdered decades ago. Actually, I’m going to leave it at that. List of the Lost turned out to be far from plotless; there were a lot of exciting things that happened and there was a very clear trajectory to the action. But the plot was not the main thing. And I can’t deliver the “main thing” to you in a book review. You’re going to have to find out for yourself.

Translations are problematic in general, and translations of classical Chinese poetry are particularly difficult (I discuss some of the reasons for this in my review of a book of translations of some of Wang Wei's poems:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/696533663

I also explain there why I feel it is still worthwhile to read such translations.) But there is another consideration of note, which, I think, may contribute (along with the significant differences in cultural context and assumptions) to the repeated use of words like "flat" and "boring" by many GR reviewers in reference to the great Chinese lyricists. Although I have read that Chinese admits, where necessary for precision (after all, governing a huge empire for centuries does require precision at times), extensions to indicate number, tense, mood, etc., I have also read that in much of classical poetry the authors deliberately neglected such extensions. The aim in using the concept and association agglomerations indicated by the "pure" noun, verb, attribute characters was to invite the reader to use his imagination/literary and cultural experience to take a walk on his own in a setting proposed by the author in the poem. This goes beyond the usual "much is left unsaid or implied" (which is certainly also at hand); in such poetry the reader is expected to be active in a manner which goes well beyond the "deciphering of meaning" familiar to readers of Western poetry. (This is not to say that readers of Western poetry do not, on their own, take such walks, inspired by the poem they have just read. I know I take such perambulations through the associations/emotions/memories/etc. the finest Western poetry generates.) So, already for purely grammatical/semantic reasons, a translation of such a Chinese poem into a Western language is a proposal for one of the many possible walks the original leaves open; in other words, any translation into a Western language is necessarily limiting, against the intention of the author of the poem. (This is all well illustrated in Eliot Weinberger's 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei , which I review here

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/735804067

I have read Burton Watson's Chinese Lyricism (1971), with the subtitle Shih Poetry From the Second to the Twelfth Century , as another step along the path to obtain a clearer glimpse behind the curtain set up by the process of translation from Chinese to English. As I understand it, the word shih is often used to mean poetry in general, but it also refers to a particular lyric form going back to the very first collection of Chinese poetry, the Shih-ching ( Book of Songs , sometimes also called the Book of Odes ) which was assembled around 600 BCE and contains poems and songs dating from the 11th to 7th centuries BCE.

Watson's book is not a systematic or comprehensive history of the shih form. As he writes


Instead it has been my aim to present groups of poems, arranged, except for minor departures, in chronological order, that seem to me to illustrate the most important formal, stylistic, and thematic developments in its long process of growth.


To this end, Watson gives us translations of approximately 200 poems accompanied by lengthy commentary.

Together, these translations and this commentary have cleared up a great deal in my understanding of classic Chinese poetics. There is so much information in this relatively slender volume that I cannot possibly indicate its richness within the bounds of this review. I'll only mention a few points more or less at random.

It is of interest to note that the poems were written in classical Chinese, the Chinese of the Han dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE), even though, as time passed, the distance between the quotidian Chinese and the classical Chinese grew larger and larger. That is not to say, however, that there was no evolution in the literary language. Indeed, as Watson writes, "Poetry in particular, presumably because of its close affinity with song, often borrowed phrases and turns of speech from the vernacular, and showed itself bolder and more experimental in its modes of expression than the prose tradition." But, nonetheless, one must imagine a contemporary English-language poet writing in the style of Spencer, or even Chaucer!

Of further interest to me is the information about the evolution of the tones(*) used in the Chinese language Watson offers in this book. For example, from the 5th century on the tones were recognized as an important element in Chinese prosody, and the tones used during the T'ang dynasty are definitely different than those used today (just as one knows that the sounds of vowels in the English used in the Elizabethan Age are definitely not those used today in the many, many dialects of English). So modern Chinese readers sounding out classical Chinese poetry are mispronouncing the poems, just as we do when we read Shakespeare or Donne aloud.

Those of you who have read my review of Eliot Weinberger's 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei , or the book itself, may be interested to know that Watson suggests an interpretation of the sole poem treated in that book which is compelling and which truly heightens my appreciation of "Deer Park", a poem I had thought decomposed into two fairly unrelated pairs of lines. Not at all! I fear that, as much as I already admire Wang's poems, I've yet only scratched the surface of their content...

I would like to close by citing one of the translations Watson gives us, this one the opening lines of a poem by Tso Ssu (fl. 300 CE):


Flutter, flutter, bird in a cage,
raised wings beating against the four corners;
lost, lost, scholar of hard-luck alley,
in an empty room sitting, clasping my shadow.


Does this cut a bit close to the quick for anyone else? I strongly recommend this fine little book.

(*) Chinese, like Thai, Lao and Vietnamese, is a tonal language, so that the syllable "shih" pronounced with different tones has completely different meanings.