I was certain Apeirogon was going to win The Booker Prize. It was at the top of my shortlist.

The structure of the book is fascinating: 1001 fragmented sections, modeled from One Thousand and One Nights (a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age), and built around a gathering at a monastery where two fathers — one Palestinian, one Israeli — talk to an audience about how the occupation cost both of them their young daughters. Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan are actual people, and their daughters Abir (10) and Smadar (13) were actually killed by a rubber bullet and a bomb respectively. The book’s sections count up to 500 and then in the exact middle, after a section numbered 1001, it counts back down to 1 from 500. At the literal and figurative middle of the novel are Bassam and Rami’s individual testimonies about what the occupation and consequent conflict has cost them as fathers and ‘citizens.’ 

The first five hundred sections, organized around the journey to the monastery detail how the girls died. These details include how bombs are made, the history of rubber bullets and the weapons that fire them, descriptions of internment, and the transformations in the natural world as Israel develops its fortification apparatuses against Palestine. The second 500 take up their journeys home after speaking at the monastery and the sections counting back down to one detail more of Rami’s and Bassam’s friendship and their time together on an international speakers’ circuit.  In this way, Apeirogon structurally inhabits the ethos of its title and casts the complexity of this particular conflict as a polygon with an infinite number of sides. 

Lest we think though that the symmetry in the novel is about conflation and sameness between the plights of Israelis and Palestinians, its parallel treatment of Bassam and Rami instead demonstrates how a reality of institutionalized and quotidian violence contrastingly impacts each of their families. At the level of plot this looks like heads of state wanting to sit shiva with Rami and his wife Nurit when Smadar dies, and Bassam’s wife Salwa being strip searched in the airport — in front of her children — when the family returns to Palestine from England. The young children are also stripped searched after their mother. Beyond Rami and Bassam, this book isn’t so much about equity in suffering as it is about widening the scope of conflict globally and historically in a contrasting ways. 

Apeirogon takes the reader through a range of emotions: rage, grief, frustration, and surprisingly often, awe. For me, it was at the ways a much longer history of global conflict, beyond Israel and Palestine, contributed to the creation and fraught existence of occupied territories. This and its worlding of quotidian violence is what made me think it would win. But alas, it didn’t even make the shortlist.

This is not to say this is a loss for the prize. 2020’s shortlist is monumental in part because the literary field that Apeirogon exists in is far more expansive, and dare I say inclusive, than it used to be. That is, the net of great books has grown wider. We know McCan’s work in this novel is brilliant, but this year, the collective strength of the field meant that even with its impressive structure, there are six other books, just as gorgeously structured and transfixing in ways that tell us definitive things about what the novel is able to do in our present. Read Apeirogon because its weaving of fiction out of nonfiction, across centuries and continents, is cinematic and rhapsodic.

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟/5 

To be honest, I don’t know why this made the Booker long list. It’s a fine book, but unlike Reid’s Such a Fun Age that builds up to a wickedly smart commentary on racism,  Redhead By the Side of the Road does not pivot into anything provocative. In a field with as many American novels as there are this year, I just haven’t figured out yet how Tyler’s novel fits in with this cohort. It stays, like its protagonist, safe in the calm safety of routine.

Of course, who couldn’t use a quiet soother of a novel right now? We all could, right? The story centers around a fastidious geeky oddball, Micah Mortimer who is 43 years old, lives alone and rent-free in the basement apartment of a Baltimore building where he works as the super, while also moonlighting as tech-help dude for his own company called Tech Hermit. Get it? Because Micah is a bit of a hermit. The action of the novel happens around Micah. Or more accurately he walks into it, observes it, and relays it to the reader. Like when he goes to his sister’s house for his nephew’s engagement party, or he goes into customers’ homes to repair their computer equipment, or when an ex-girlfriend’s son mysteriously shows up on his doorstep. 

This quiet novel gets its momentum from unravelling the plot of why this young man, Brink Adams, has sought Micah out. It also comes from trying to figure out Micah’s deal. He’s a bit of a goofball, going about his scheduled housekeeping chores with a German accent and cooking hamburgers for him and Brink with a French one. But where he can have a witty repartee with a young woman who needs to find the password for a fancy computer inherited from her grandmother, he has zero introspection about his role in his failed relationships with women. You don’t get the sense that this novel bothers itself too much with this lack of introspection though, because this isn’t a thing it unambiguously resolves at the end. 

In such tumultuous times as ours though, it is absolutely worthwhile to read quiet and calm fiction. Micah’s dedication to his routines are comforting in a present where all our routines have been upended in traumatic ways. I like to think of this novel as a lovey in book form and as the Booker’s nod to appreciating narratives that offer comfort and ease. 

All that said, in this particular literary field that contemplates economic downturns on a national scale, the settling of the American West, and the vagaries of casual racism, this navel gazer seems out of its depth. This is not to say there isn’t room in this field for highly individual and personally centered narratives. Reid and Dashi crush it in this regard.  But also that Redhead By the Side of the Road centers on a middle aged white dude pushes my generosity on this to its limit. I mean, there are a lot of non-white, non-cishet, non-male characters who could use a soothing plot to rest in, but that’s probably not where we are in life or in fiction right now. 

Depending on what you like, Redhead By the Side of the Road may be a soother or a snoozer. I go back and forth on my thinking on this. There are more than a few heart to hearts that leave the reader feeling warm and fuzzy, and are genuinely lovely to read in their sincerity. The dialog in this novel is entertaining. But I’ve read one too many books about white dudes contemplating themselves, in ways that dont get far enough outside of themselves, to fully appreciate this one. 

🌟🌟/5 

One might wonder why a novel that is as invested in portraying a glamorous and spirited, yet troubled woman isn’t named after her instead of her son.  “Every day, with the make up on, and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high,” is how her son Shuggie describes his mother Agnes. And sure, Shuggie Bain’s descriptions of its titular character, a refined and sensitive boy who struggles throughout with being different from the other boys, are very well done, but it is Agnes who is all things in this novel. There’s a scene where she’s on the invincible side of drunk and she throws a garbage can through a window. As the reader, you root for her refusal to be derided and discarded, even in its futility. The book’s beginning tells us things don’t end well for Agnes and so it is all the more devastating when for a small section of the novel, she is sober for a whole year. Her banter with Eugene in the Texas-inspired restaurant is brilliant because of how she molds kitschiness into delightful wit. She is cautiously happy. We already know it won’t last.  

The story is retrospective, looking back at 1980s Glasgow, in the wake of wide scale coal pit and shipyard closures. It all has the feel of a wet and dark postindustrial, post-apocalyptic hellscape. Children roam and hide from their abusive households in deserted palette yards; they salvage copper from abandoned warehouses. They are abused by predatory men. If the unemployed men form a huddled indistinguishable mass, going off to the bar along the same schedule that was once for work, the women are vividly drawn in individual ways as vivacious, proud, inventive, and intrepid in their pursuit of alcohol. There is so much pain in this novel. The slow deaths from alcoholism are intense, but also inflected with a sad humor that makes the circumstances seem all the more heartbreaking. The novel is drawn largely from moments of vulnerability and so when there are tender, happy moments, they are intense and joyful. 

The novel is called Shuggie Bain because Shuggie is the last man standing at the close of the novel in 90s Glasgow. Despite Agnes’ prolonged neglect and shortcomings throughout his childhood, Shuggie isn’t overwhelmed into escape in the same way his older siblings are, and neither does Agnes’ painfully slow suicide by alcohol completely crush the joy and music in his spirit. He inherits the best of her; this is perhaps why he survives as he does. At the end we hope he fares better than Agnes did.

It is easy for a novel as intensely focused on postindustrial economic fallout as this one is to fall into the trap of poverty porn, but it redeems itself through rich descriptions. Even as it brings the bleak and damp coldness to a landscape pocked with ruined warehouses and coal pits to such vivid life that you’ll want to put  sweater on, the novel also diligently and gorgeously seeks out every single moment of love, tenderness, and humor that its families can afford. 

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟/5