John Crowley (1) (1942–)

A man of New York City marries into a family from the country who have a remarkable relationship to the world of fairy. That other world is always present in the story's background, sometimes more explicitly, and yet John Crowley can do the literary equivalent of making things visible in the corner of your eye that disappear as soon as you look directly at them. I relate entirely to the male family members who try to catch those glimpses by every means, surrounded by the female members who show more seemingly always understand more than they're letting on or else are just wiser about not questioning. The language and style of this novel are fantastic. They force a slower read if you don't want to miss any hint of what's happening, or all of the fun allusions to Thorton W. Burgess, The Wind in the Willows, the House that Jack Built, Alice in Wonderland, etc., or those glimpses of fairies that might be more than just your imagination.

There's a strong resemblance here to Morgenstern's "The Night Circus" (mystery abounds, conflict is muted), Helprin's "Winter's Tale" (the city and the country, those who do and do not marvel at magic) and Clarke's "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" (opening doors between worlds, while deeper workings are afoot), in almost that sequential order. And yet it predates all of them, and wins in comparison with each. This felt like discovering some ancient predecessor dinosaur that is more impressive than all the dinosaurs I know, a clear antecedent that the others only imitate. Crowley here presents more plot than Morgenstern, more logic than Helprin, more mystery than Clarke.

I don't love everything about it - the pace is often slower than I preferred, conflicts too easily brushed aside - but I loved and appreciated a lot. It achieves what surely no author can purposely aim for but only succeed at by happy accident, that feeling so evasive since childhood and difficult for any adult reader to experience: the sensation that stepping through the looking glass is not so very impossible or far a journey after all. show less

Heading into my read of an advance review copy of John Crowley's forthcoming Four Freedoms, I was unsure what to expect. The publisher's blurb told me that it was a book about "a disabled man...among a crowd of women" at "the height of World War II." It didn't seem obvious that this scenario would be a setting suited to the artful exploration of ideas I had enjoyed in the author's AEgypt cycle, a set of four novels that develop a complexly interwoven text about the human experience of magic show more and the magic of human experience. I needn't have worried.

The Four Freedoms of the title are the ones articulated in FDR's 1941 State of the Union speech: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. The fact that the novel is divided into four parts suggests a correspondence, but there's no obvious one-to-one relationship between those parts and the freedoms. They seem more like the four movements of a symphony, and here is the key to the esoteric dimension of Four Freedoms: the Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinees generales (1808) of Charles Fourier. Crowley is very coy about this element of the novel--unlike his free admission of the historical and scholarly grist for his mill in AEgypt--he never even mentions Fourier by name, either in the novel or in the afterword that discusses his research sources. Still, the unavoidable fact is that Four Freedoms character Pancho Notzing's "Bestopianism" is Fourierist though and through: a magical ur-socialism founded in "Passionate Series" generating "Harmony" through the satisfaction of dynamic and heterogeneous desires. Pancho himself is even a biographical cipher for Fourier. Where Fourier was the son of a prosperous cloth merchant and had a career as a traveling salesman, Pancho is retiring from a career as a traveling salesman of luxury cloths.

The Theory of Four Movements is Fourier's earliest and most bewildering exposition of his system. The mouvements themselves are enumerated only in a footnote and some brief glossary material, where they are given as social, human, animal, and organic--in descending order. The hierarchy of the Fourierist movements perhaps accounts for the sparing but curious use of the first-person plural in the frame of Four Freedoms. The "we" narrating the novel could be the collective identity of the quasi-phalanx of the Van Damme Aero manufacturing plant, a "Temporary Harmonious Zone"--cousin maybe to Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone.

Both the little society of the Ponca City plant and the greater society of WWII America with its socialized command economy are especially worth readers' attention at a time when the US is confronted with a need to fundamentally reorganize its material and industrial bases. The historical setting of Four Freedoms is bracingly topical while we confront a "great recession" or even "greater depression" that seems bound to displace what "postwar" generations have been taught to consider the American "way of life." A gasoline ration of four gallons per week? That was a reality of the home front.

I cried once in the course of reading this book. If it has that effect on anyone else, I wouldn't necessarily expect it to be at the same place: there's a lot emotional power distributed through many personal stories over the course of the novel. As I have come to expect from Crowley, his narrative voice is sure--both efficient and beautiful--and his characters are compelling. The plot is largely subordinate to the characters, and tends to fan out from them in individual tributaries of memory, told to one another or simply recalled.

Crowley's AEgypt (especially as read backwards from the final realizations of Endless Things) can be considered a meditation on "neurodiversity": the idea that there are many necessarily partial and complementary ways of perceiving and understanding the world. Four Freedoms can be read as a corresponding exploration of physical diversity expressed through sex, age, disability, and race. But this is no moralizing, didactic exercise. I recently had a conversation with a literal fellow traveler on an airplane, regarding the importance of storytelling in the learning process. The stories in Four Freedoms can remind us of the kind of learning we all need to do, and that we will do whenever we remember our diverse radical passions. show less

I've put off reviewing this book because I don't think I can well articulate my thoughts on it. I vacillate between rating it as mediocre and as excellent. Ultimately, for its poignant final paragraphs, for its untiring imaginativeness, for the quantity of cleverness—of which, no doubt, a great deal was lost on me—and for its evocation of the wonder and mysteries of make-believe, I have to give it close to my highest rating.

Little, Big is a multigenerational family saga, of a family show more with a close but complicated relationship to Faery, though the glimpses of that magical land are only out of the corner of the eye, perhaps dreamed. Though the action spans (I guess) from some time around the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries until (I guess) some time later in the 20th, there is an odd, anachronistic feel to the more modern parts, as though they were suspended in time, in some imaginary steampunk era. "The City" from which some of the characters hail and to which some of the characters migrate, though presumably New York, is unrecognizable as such, and almost unrecognizable as a modern city at all.

The story ultimately assumes mythic proportions, but it is told simply through the everyday events and actions of members of the Drinkwater clan. Some of those descriptions are so apt and familiar that I could immediately relate with them, some so well-put that I immediately recognized experiences or emotions that I could never have put into words, so that by the time some of the more outlandish events took place, I was transported right along with the characters. For example, there are some of the most accurate descriptions I have ever read about being in love: what it actually feels like, how it is experienced and unfolds in one's day-to-day life. And I am firmly convinced that should I ever be transported to a make-believe land, I will experience it exactly in the way George experiences his trip to the Woods.

After writing this, I think that whatever misgivings I have about this book that made me want to rate it less highly are probably not worth mentioning. Their source is, I think, the same dreamy (and distancing) quality that makes the book succeed at what it does so well. The un-pin-down-able quality that kept me Somehow confused, that kept my feelings about the characters Somehow vague, that made the narrative seem Somehow out of focus, also made the magic possible and is rather the point of the whole book. show less

Still the speculative fiction the novel I love the most. I re-read it every few years and I never tire of it, and never will, I think. Like the crystal that records the tale, it has many facets, impossible to appreciate all at once, or in a single reading. Crowley's writing, here as in Little, Big, is flawless. But it's his particular vision of how the world is transformed and what that says about being human that I fell and remain in love with. If you don't share a sense of longing for its show more poignant and melancholy beauty and a wonder at the aliveness of that vision, this book won't be for you. show less