Two strange and beautiful novels

Two novels I read recently have gotten me thinking about strangeness.  Both Shine Shine Shine, by Lydia Netzer, and The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern, are appealingly strange.

Shine Shine Shine tells the story of bald Sunny, at home in her old house in Norfolk, VA, and her husband Maxon, an Aspergian genius robot-maker and astronaut, who’s off in a rocket, on a possibly doomed mission to the moon.  And their autistic son Bubber, who’s about to get kicked out of preschool.  And Sunny’s sick mother Emma, who is still trying to mother her daughter.

The novel’s narration feels Asperger-ish at times, the way it describes events in tiny chunks, as if the story’s readers might be from outer space themselves.  The backstory zooms around a range of vivid settings: post-colonial Burma, rural western Pennsylvania, outer space.  By contrast, the main story’s setting, Norfolk, is limited, almost neglected.

At times Shine Shine Shine feels like a mash-up of a French novel with lots of philosophical asides, or maybe something Kundera-ish, with a commercial women’s novel, along with a dollop of science fiction — strange!  Yet Sunny and Maxon emerge out of this strange, sad narration as vivid, yearning, desperate characters.  It’s a compelling love story.

The Night Circus likewise crosses genres too — it’s part historical fiction, part fantasy, part romance.  Made out of magic, the Night Circus, the Circus of Dreams, travels from town to town, in both Europe and the U.S., opening only at night, drawing people in and mesmerizing them.  This Circus of Dreams is nothing like the usual circus, but instead contains seemingly endless tents full of wonders and delights.  The story is set in the late nineteenth century, but with only vague time markers.  The narration gives vivid attention to dress, costume, fabrics, little details of London and other cities, and old-fashioned dialogue.  And of course, the rooms of the circus.  At times these details are just beautifully visual.

Like Shine Shine Shine, The Night Circus is at its heart a love story, with two characters who are bound together in a kind of desperate magic competition.  But perhaps because the beautiful, mystical circus is such a strong character here, Celia and Marco, the two doomed lovers, never come as alive as I wanted them to.

These two novels really have little in common with one another, but for me their strangeness — unusual narration styles, unpin-downable genre, strange subject matter, and an underlying sadness — made for beautiful writing.  I’m glad both writers persevered.