Red, White, and Royal Blue showed up in my mail last Thursday. I had intended to go back to the Saramago book I started before The Memory Police when I finished the latter book, but thought I could use a fun break – and it was just that. The book exists in an alternate reality where a woman (not Clinton) won the 2016 election and the events of the book all take place in a completely unrecognizable 2020. It imagines a romance between the half-Mexican-American son of the sitting U.S. President and an English prince. The British royalty in the book exist in an even more altered reality, I suppose to avoid using any existing members of the royal family; so, while Obama was the last US president in this book, Queen Elizabeth has never existed. Instead, there is a Queen Mary, who's about Elizabeth's age; to be followed in line by a Princess Catherine, who married a film star; she, in turn has three adult children the youngest of whom is the love interest in the book. (He is the Prince of Wales despite being the youngest, a detail that confused me for a long time -- we meet him at his brother's wedding but the relative ages of the royal kids is not totally clear early on in the book, and I kept assuming as Prince of Wales he must be first in line for the throne, but no. I hardly consider myself to be informed on the Royals, and perhaps this wasn't so much an oversight as something else to clarify that these aren't the real Royals? Who knows.) There were all kinds of bits in this book that were just a little too far-fetched and I didn't particularly believe in the characters, but it was a quick enough and fun enough read to overlook all that for the most part.
I think I've written before about how I wasn't much of a reader growing up, but perhaps what I haven't written about is the fact that I grew up surrounded by books. My father worked in bookstores when I was a small child, and when I was about seven he moved over to publishing. Our apartments were full of books. When I was little I remember stacks of books on the floor inside our bay window. Later, we moved into a bigger apartment and my dad built shelves that covered one full wall and went all the way up to our high ceilings. Most of our collection – at least what I remember – was art books and fiction. My mom had books of her own too. She was a French major in college, and she always had a small collection of French language books. In publishing, my dad worked in trade sales, so he visited bookstores constantly and attended Book Expo America (ABA back then) every year. The publisher my dad worked for was one of the larger independent houses, and he distributed a bunch of smaller independent publishers, among them New Directions. This is why a lot of the books we had around our house were New Directions publications. I think I believed, even as a child, that they were somehow different and important. Here I am as a tween, proudly wearing my New Directions t-shirt. (I wish I still had it! And I wish I could tell what cassette I'm holding too. Can you?)
I was thinking about all this on Sunday,* when I went to the Little Free Library by my apartment to drop off
Red, White, and Royal Blue and, while there, grabbed Sam Munson's
Dog Symphony. I'd never heard of the book or its author. The little New Directions logo on the spine – an image that's been familiar to me my whole life – was enough of a selling point for me. I started it as soon as I got home (despite the fact the stack of other books I was ostensibly already reading). It's a slim book and I thought I would be done with it the following day, but events took an unexpected turn and I didn't read at all between Sunday and yesterday, so I finally finished
Dog Symphony this evening. It's a very strange book, set in a post-epidemic Buenos Aires, a city haunted by packs of dogs roaming the streets each night. There's a sinister pseudo-police force; competing factions of humans, some of whom believe the dogs are the reincarnated dead; a belligerent narrator who gets progressively more bruised and beaten as the novel goes on; and an odd assortment of characters who are just trying to live normal lives in far from normal circumstances. The book was bizarre, short, and satisfying.
* Funnily enough, the day after I wrote the first part of this I heard John Darnielle being interviewed on All Of It. The conversation was partly about books and at one point Darnielle was talking about a New Directions book from the 1950s, where there was a list of other books published by New Directions. He said interspersed with familiar names like Sartre, were authors and books that were completely unfamiliar to him and then he said something like, "If it was good enough for New Directions in 1951, it's probably good enough for me." I'm not alone in trusting them implicitly.
