Sleeping in Flame by Jonathan Carroll

There are writers you read avidly for a decade or more and then just stop, suddenly. Sometimes you can define a reason - but no one ever needs a reason not to read a book. We all are not reading millions of books, every second of every day. It's the default state of humanity.

I read Jonathan Carroll's books, up to about Glass Soup, I think. I discovered him probably in high school, read backwards and forwards from there, and he was SFF-adjacent enough that keeping up with his work in my SFBC days was simple. But at some point I started saying things in public like "All Carroll novels are basically the same," which indicates a certain weariness.

I think he stopped getting published in as-large ways about the same time I stopped being as plugged-in to publishing, so it's possible I never even noticed he had any new work, these last twenty years. The literary world is vast, and you need to go out of your way to explore it.

I came back to Carroll for a re-read - his 1988 novel Sleeping in Flames was reprinted in the Vintage Contemporaries series, and I still have a shelf of those books for a semi-broken reading project I originally planned to run about a decade ago. (Super-short explanation: read the books in rough Vintage-publication order, basically thirty years after publication. I started just fine, but then fell afoul of the kind of literary novel that kneecaps your entire reading life.)

Carroll writes magic realism - assuming anyone born in North America and mostly resident in Europe can do so, which may be a point of contention - lightly-plotted books, floating along on amiable narrative voices and slice-of-(privileged)-life, in which fantastic elements accumulate slowly but come to be central before the (usually fairly muted, smaller-scale) endings. His first couple of books were published in the fantasy genre, but he's never been solidly at home there: his strengths are much more on the literary side of the divide.

This is the one about screenwriter Walker Easterling, who is not quite an author-insert but is an expatriate American working as a writer and living in Vienna, so he certainly has a lot of points of similarity with his creator. It's partly about his meeting and falling in love with Maris York, but even more so about learning his true origins and dealing with the consequences of that. But, again, Carroll is a discursive writer rather than a plotty one - we learn that Walker was raised by adoptive parents early, but what that means doesn't become clear until nearly the end.

To say much more would be to explain the entire plot, but Walker does have a fantasy background, to be vague about it, and real magic does exist in this fictional world, usable both by Walker and by one other very important character. And the ending sees all of the important questions, including Walker's origins and that magic, resolved neatly.

Carroll is a pleasant writer: enjoyable and discursive, a novelist of books with more depth than they appear and more connections than is immediately evident. He can turn a bit same-y in large doses - as I discovered twenty years ago - but most people don't read in large doses, and that's easy to avoid. This would be a good one to start with, and the fact that it was published on the literary side probably means there are a lot of copies floating around to be found.