Victoria N. Alexander

A young man tries to deal with conspiracy theories and the reality of how politics and governance work, having been brought up in a very sheltered, uninformed, but 'healthy' home. Written as a sort of retelling of Hamlet, but set in a small town in Massachusetts, Hamlet and his mother Gertrude create a new life for themselves after Gertrude's husband is killed in the 9/11 terrorist attack. 8 years later Hamlet is unwilling to let his mom move on and remarry, and his dislike for Claudius, her new husband, becomes vicious once Hamlet runs into his old science teacher, Horatio, who has become an embittered conspiracy theorist.

There is plenty to discuss and to think about in this short novel, and it actually does sort of work as a modern take on Hamlet, though it brings out Hamlet's irrational and naive side. Hamlet is woefully ill equipped to deal with the conflicting information offered to him concerning 9/11, having spent all his life not paying attention to the news. He also is no expert in any of what he is trying to understand, but he doesn't have the maturity to recognize that all his information is equally second hand. Instead of making his family and friends wake up to the truth he thinks he's discovered, he simply destroys the lives of everyone close to him. There are other ways to read this book, too, of course.

I was a bit distracted from actually getting into the story by the heavy-handed application of Shakespeare's Hamlet to the story the author is telling. Even keeping in mind that this book is satire and a dark comedy of sorts, the Hamlet layer to this story got in the way of the storytelling more than I would have wished. There aren't really any great female roles in Hamlet that aren't walked all over by the men in the story, so while I wasn't thrilled with how Gertrude and Ophelia were portrayed in this book, they were reasonable characters given what the author was doing. I wanted Gertrude to put her son in his place a bit more about his assumption that she should stay single for the rest of her life- 8 years seems like quite a long time to wait before marrying and moving on. The way she and Polonius allowed Hamlet to carry on with Ophelia while Ophelia was just an 8yr-old kid was also a bit creepy, though if all the characters are meant to be a bit off, it works. The only spot where I really couldn't suspend disbelief was where Hamlet is being searched before a flight, while disguised as a woman. Surely any woman doing a body-search of a man dressed as a woman would notice that the subject is in fact male.

On the whole, this book was pretty good, but there were too many bits that bugged me to give it a full 5 stars. The way Hamlet is written in this book reminded me very much of typical YA genre storytelling, so perhaps readers who stick to that genre will enjoy it enough not to notice the bits that bugged me.

I won my copy of this book through a Goodreads First Reads giveaway.… (mehr)

A wandering read, this is a sort of quiet book with a meandering plot, and characters and story to match. There are moments when the characters are vibrant and unique enough that they sort of transcend the story itself, and those are the parts where the writing itself shines--where the book almost devolves into character study or dissection. At others, things are just a bit too easy, too wandering. Only in the end does the plotting seem to pick up and be more focused, but that focus comes with a rushing that takes away a lot of the beauty that the first half of the book found its way toward.

So, I suppose I have to say this was a nice enough escape, and something to wander through on a quiet day, but probably not something that will stick with me. Little things about the book also bothered me--seemingly forgotten details that would have better been mentioned later in the book or remembered, mostly--which made it feel like the book could have used more time and more editing prior to publication.

Probably, this isn't something I'd recommend, though the writing itself makes it easy enough for me to think of trying something more by the same author.… (mehr)

A 9/11 widow and her son find sanctuary on a farm in upstate New York, but something is rotten in the state of the States as our despairing narrator, the son, describes the incursion into their idyll of a second husband, whose arrival only serves to exacerbate the boy’s spiraling estrangement—from his childhood sweetheart, from the stories he has told himself about his father's death, and eventually from self, sense and sanity. The widow is Gertrude, the son Hamlet, the unwelcome stepfather Claudius, the childhood sweetheart Ophelia. Yes, Victoria Alexander aims high and, on the whole, hits her target.
Oddly enough though, the preface to the novel actually put me in mind of another, no less illustrious model. Citing personal experience of local politics, Alexander says the state of the nation is such that "I groan at the prospect of taking on this subject, with which I would much rather have nothing to do," irresistibly bringing to mind Bartleby the Scrivener's mordant, "I'd prefer not to". Happily, Alexander succumbs and tackles not just one subject, the complacency and conformity that cripple American life, but many more, too, ranging from the meta-conspiracy that keeps its citizens mired in lard, consumerism, debt, populism, patriotism, and jealously guarded ignorance, to the more closely focused conspiracies of 9/11 'truthers'.
The first part of the novel effectively sets the scene, evoking the aching void of grief felt by the bereaved as well as the pastoral paradise the refugees create in their flight from misery and modernity. It also establishes the theme of intrusion that runs throughout the book, because Gertrude and Hamlet, the one a liberal do-gooder, the other a wise-cracking wise young head, old beyond his years, are outsiders in rural America and the locals, narrow of mind and wide of girth, don't take kindly to Gertrude's well-meaning attempts to educate them in the ways of healthy eating, healthy living, and healthy thinking.
This is the funniest section of the book as Alexander mercilessly pins down (no small task in the United Starch of America) the rednecks who refuse to be anything other than what they are and what their government wants them to be. She has some cracking one-liners, the narrator describing his obese neighbors as looking "like a bloated tick", "walking himself across the floor as if he were a refrigerator" and telling another character, "You’re obviously not from around here. Your arms hang at right angles to the floor.” However, the scorn never quite tips into total contempt, and Alexander is all too aware of the sad, limited lives imposed upon these sad, limited people:
"The locals work hard at two, and sometimes three, part-time service jobs so that they can drive an hour to a Walmart to buy lots of plastic crap they don’t need, get themselves deeper into debt, and pay their taxes—often with high interest credit cards—to support undeclared wars and to bail out banksters. They actually vote, right and left, to remain enslaved, instead of throwing off their partisan shackles, waving crowbars with half-articulate shouts of fury. When these Neo Uncle Toms die, I expect they will go straight to Terrordise, a celestial gated community where cavity searches are the routine safety procedure for all ages, all foodstuffs are engineered and radiated, and all information carefully filtered of meaningful content."
Reading that, you'll probably understand why I found myself thinking that in some ways LOCUS AMOENUS is a book addressed to the rest of the world rather than America, saying things most Americans won't want to hear but which the rest of the world is all too happy to hear. Alexander's Hamlet is an interloper, a stranger in this strange land, dislocated in time and place, a boy brought up in books, for whom storytelling is more natural than human interaction (he was the one who told his Dad stories, not the other way round), despising both the specious diversions of modernity and the hicks that surround him. He describes himself as "an experiment. Some may claim 'gone awry' . . . I completely slept through American popular culture, knowledge of which, it appears to me, could be as important as knowing last year’s weather predictions."
But Hamlet is not the only interloper because LOCUS AMOENUS is a book peopled by interlopers: urbanites interloping on the countryside, the new husband interloping on the pastoral idyll of mother and son, collective emotion masquerading as catharsis interloping on private grief, xenophobia interloping on a nation built by displaced underdogs, disillusionment and soma interloping on young love, a renegade teacher interloping on what the powers-that-be deem to be truth, the United States' army interloping on other people's countries, above all vested interests and a covert tendency toward fascism interloping on everything that American democracy promised and failed to be.
Initially, the archaic names can seem intrusive and distracting (Gertrude, OK, but Polonius? Hamlet? Laertes?), leaving one with a sense that the Shakespearian model would have worked better as a hidden structuring device rather than an overt template. However, the parallels are handled deftly and it does lend a sense of foreboding, since we know all too well what's going to happen to these people. Moreover, as the dark comedy shades into something darker still, there's a dreadful fascination as we wonder, "How's she going to pull off that particular scene then?"
It should be emphasized, it's not all darkness. The humor, which is premised more on language than character or situation, coats many a bitter pill: "it was pointless, we realized, for me to go to school, if the objective was to receive an education"; Gertrude and Hamlet were "so condescending our backs hurt"; the chief villain of the piece has a "smile (that) is the expression of someone carrying heavy furniture" (she’s particularly good on this sort of imagery: visual, evocative, concise, and very funny). There is also a touching account of childhood romance, while the wit and insights (no matter how excoriating) suggest dumbing down has not totally homogenized the nation, and there is a nice paean to an alternative rural America, saner and more functional, pieced together by the marginals, hippies, dropouts and alternative lifestylers, people for whom Emerson is not the first name in a dimly remembered prog-rock band and who don't mistake Thoreau for some dodgy sounding foreigner.
By the same token, although the book has a distinct political agenda and a clear sense of who is right and who is wrong in America, the satire is even handed. Despite or perhaps because she is probably a part of it, Alexander neatly skewers the processes of gentrification brought about by liberal, educated outsiders settling in the countryside, and she is painfully funny on Gertrude's painfully labored attempts to improve her new neighbors, blissfully unaware that nobody takes kindly to being improved.
The author is also careful to present alternative arguments to her central theses, both on the micro level and the macro. The Claudius figure, who has "a PhD in engineering, (but) . . . a negative degree of knowledge about humanity", is a bureaucratic 9/11 investigator with a talent for stating the totally obvious at great length, a talent that served him well in his job, but he is also a boring unimaginative man crushed by boring unimaginative and above all meaningless work. Likewise, the townspeople are not just dimwitted oafs, they are also real people with real problems, muddling through as best they can in a world beyond reckoning. And when the 9/11 conspiracy comes to the fore, a conspiracy the denouement implies is real, the alternative arguments for the official story are clearly and convincingly rehearsed.
Hamlet's long dark night of the soul, when he is apparently in possession of evidence to support the conspiracy theory and is going off his head, is well done and rendered entirely plausible. In a topsy-turvy world where even Catch-22 has been inverted and the irrational reigns supreme, a world where anyone who thinks or (worse) asks questions is put on medication, it seems eminently reasonable that he should elect to 'go' mad. Needless to say, it all ends badly, and the deus ex machina is no generous Fortinbras but a homicidal moron. The implications are bleak, but along the way there is much to entertain and enlighten. Indeed, for me the real pleasure in this book, what lingers, is not so much the plot, still less the conspiracy, but the portraits of people, places, communities, and relationships. For a novel based on Shakespeare, that's about right: big ideas anchored in human lives.… (mehr)

Imagine Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, written from the point of view of an American teen. Imagine Shakespeare’s Hamlet set in post 9/11 America. Then cross the science of good health with the politics of consumerism, add a pinch of conspiracy theory, follow some sheep, and you’ll have a pretty fair picture of Victoria N. Alexander’s Locus Amoenus.

With names changed to protect, 9/11 and his father’s death have precipitated young Hamlet and his mother’s relocation from big city to small town America. There they struggle to fit in, while city visitors are decried as “citiots.” An interest in healthy food and lifestyle makes these new country-dwellers seriously suspect, while local children overeat, overindulge in inactivity, and overly follow the edicts of internet and television like helpless sheep. Meanwhile Hamlet-the-shepherd ends up homeschooled and very well-schooled in the ways of his mother’s flock—a problem perhaps if the plan is to eat meat.

Hamlet’s voice carries the cruel dismissal of an awkward teen, making his humor more serious and sharp than might be expected at times in this dark tragi-comedy. But Hamlet’s relationships are convincingly youthful and strong. And his fury at his mother’s impending remarriage is wholly believable, even if his descent into madness might be as pretended as his name. Then comes the final straw, in an Act where conspiracy theories dominate the plot, and dire consequences seem almost sure to ensue.

Yes, the novel’s divided into Acts, just like Hamlet the play. Yes, all characters are present and accounted for, and perfectly named. And yes, the plot’s parallels are not hard to see. But the story’s darkly humorous, harshly compelling, and cruelly relentless, even when the global argument feels wrong. Hamlet’s personal grief is subsumed by the flocks who want to own him; the leader is led; the sheep loses its way, and no one is left to make sacrifice worthwhile.

The ending promises a pancake supper night, with expected obesity. But whatever you do, don’t turn to that last page until the story’s done.

Disclosure: I was given a free bound galley by the publisher and I offer my honest review.… (mehr)