Naoki Urasawa, Henry Hoke, Catherine Lacey: The Pajiba February 2024 Book Recommendation Superpost!

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | February 28, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | February 28, 2024 |

20th Century Boys by Naoki Urasawa

While I’m a pretty solid anime fan, I don’t read a ton of manga. I have enough books as it is and the idea of committing to a story that could go on for literally tens of thousands of pages is too lofty a prospect, even for me. Recently, however, I’ve found myself gravitating towards the work of mangaka Naoki Urasawa, who wrote one of my all-time favourite anime, Monster. That led me to the work many consider to be his magnum opus, 20th Century Boys. My friends, I got obsessed very quickly.

How to even begin to describe it? Well, here’s the basic plot (and I do mean ‘basic’): In 1969, on the eve of the Moon landing, a group of young Japanese boys spend their Summer conjuring up dramatic sci-fi stories wherein they save the world from nefarious forces that hope to destroy it. In the late 1990s, the boys are adults with less-than-fulfilling lives. The proto-leader of the group, Kenji, is raising his sister’s baby and working in a failing convenience store. After one of their group dies by suicide, Kenji stumbles upon a growing cult led by a mysterious masked figure known as Friend. He has grand plans for the world that look suspiciously like the stories Kenki and friends wrote as children…

To detail anything more would be to fall into a rabbit hole of 22 volumes of story that takes place over several decades and encompasses dozens of characters. It’s a true epic, one that is simultaneously nostalgic for a more innocent time but also damning of the ways that a rose-tinted view of the past can poison us all. It feels like Urasawa’s version of Stephen King’d It, a massive narrative where a group of childhood friends who reunite as adults to deal with all their issues and stop the monster they created. I love Urasawa’s sketchy artistic style and how it conveys such a vast spectrum of emotions and character. Every time he diverged from the central plot to hang out with some side character we didn’t know, I found myself all the more engrossed, especially since he had an uncanny ability to tie everything together. I have no idea if he had this wide-reaching story planned out from the beginning or made it up as he went along — honestly, at times it reads like he somehow did both — but I couldn’t stop reading. All that AND he stuck the landing?! A bloody miracle.

Now, I’ve moved onto another Urasawa series, Billy Bat. What’s that about, you say? Well, imagine if Mickey Mouse was God…

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

One of my most beloved niche subgenres of fiction is fake memoirs. I love novels wherein we get the (auto)biography of someone who doesn’t exist, and how the author can use this frequently dry format to make me believe their creation was a living breathing being. The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara is my personal favourite example of this. Catherine Lacey’s 2023 book is now another.

The X of the title is an artist, an enigmatic and divisive figure of modern art and music who has recently died. Her widow, distraught by a recent book on X that got everything wrong, has decided to pen her own version that corrects everything. The major problem is that she has no idea how well she truly knew her late wife, and the more she digs into the past she desperately tried to conceal, the more questions she has about what her marriage truly meant to them both.

the story of X blends with a familiar cultural history populated by the likes of Tony Visconti, Tom Waits, and David Bowie. X, who used various pseudonyms over the decades and never set the record straight on her own mythos, delighted in provocations yet hungered for the attention of the masses. She seems recognizable as any number of public figures, like an American queer Marina Abramovic or a Bob Dylan who did performance art. The familiar, however, slowly falls away to reveal an alternate timeline of American history that has shattered the concept of national identity. Shortly after the Second World War and the election of a female socialist President, the American South seceded from the union and established a theocratic dictatorship behind high walls. The North evolved into a progressive wannabe utopia while the West became a libertarian middle ground of sorts. As of the writing of this biography, the nation has united once more but the scars run deep. Discovering the truth of X means finding her real origins in these still dangerous Southern territories, as well as how she got out and became a new person.

As the novel continues, you see the true ambition of Lacey’s vision and the urgency of her themes. It’s a dystopian sci-fi novel thoroughly grounded in the real and fascinated by how our backgrounds shape both our own ideas and others’ perceptions of them. X’s widow cannot help but wonder how much of her wife’s work, which she often claimed was meaningless or beyond explanation, is rooted in her youth in the South under a patriarchal thrall. Is that fair to X or just lazy hypothesizing? Does it even matter? And for X’s widow, an accomplished journalist whose marriage was forever dominated by her more famous and older spouse, will any of these answers actually solve anything? Lacey gave herself a lofty task with Biography of X and it’s a testament to her balletic rhetorical and stylistic skills that she made it seem so real.

There There by Tommy Orange

Plans are underway for the Big Oakland Powwow, a local gathering of Native Americans in one of the biggest cities in the Bay Area. There are many people involved with its planning and many others eager to attend. Edwin Black, a depressed loner living at home with his mother, has just landed a job there. Dene Oxendene was awarded a grant to film first-hand accounts of the Native American experience there. Orvil Red Feather wants to enter one of the competitions, although he hasn’t told his adopted grandmother Opal that he and his brothers will be attending. Their estranged grandmother Jacquie is newly sober and hoping to return home and make amends. Then there’s Tony Loneman, a drifter affected by foetal alcohol syndrome. He has a 3D-printed gun and plans to rob the powwow.

Tommy Orange was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize with his debut novel, and having devoured it in less than two days, I can’t help but wonder why it didn’t win the top prize (no offence meant to Richard Powers and The Overstory.) In less than 300 pages, Orange tackles a dozen perspectives that intertwine in various ways and offer a deft, honest, and often challenging perspective on the urban Native American population. It’s humane, angry, but also layered in its historical context. The conflict between America as it was and what it evolved into, at the expense of the people who were there first, runs through There There, particularly in a flashback section set during the occupation of Alcatraz. We know what this story is building to, how it will end in tragedy, but Orange offers a remarkable strain of hope to this bleak situation. Community matters, in whatever shape it takes, and the indigenous population has endured throughout it all. Luckily for me, there’s a sequel coming out next month!

Open Throat by Henry Hoke

Sometimes, you can’t say no to a book. When you pick up a title and the blurb describes the protagonist as a queer mountain lion inspired by the late great P-22, who on Earth are you supposed to put that back on the shelf and move on with your life? I am only human, dang it, and I wanted to know why the queer mountain lion was sad!

The unnamed mountain lion of Open Throat lives in the mountains above Los Angeles. They prowl a camp where unhoused people live, eavesdrop on the conversations of annoying influencers hiking through the area, and find themselves obsessed with one whip-wielding visitor with an alluring vein on his throat. Our poor lion is going through a lot, dealing with residual daddy issues, wondering if they can get one of those therapists all the humans talk so effusively about, and fighting off the endless craving to just eat one of those hikers already.

If lions are culturally seen as grandiose creatures of strength and respect, our lion is more akin to the frail and self-doubting nature of us poor bipedal mammals. ‘I can’t eat everything I’m afraid of’, they say at one point, watching on as the humans treat their home like an expanded garbage can. They seem ill at ease with their lot in life, but hey, who doesn’t? Their way of coping also feels hilariously familiar: take a road trip and go to Hollywood, baby!

This concept shouldn’t work. You read Hoke’s stream-of-consciousness style, where the lion turns words like L.A. into ‘ellay’ and has a Disneyland fever dream, and cannot help but imagine the version of this book that is terrible. It could have been cloying or mocking but instead Open Throat is surprisingly tender, funny, and ultimately heartbreaking. It’s about identity, queerness, ecological destruction, why Hollywood sucks, and the universal fear of wondering how much your parents messed you up. And yes, it’s about a mountain lion. RIP P-22, you would have loved this.