We could all use a laugh right about now, a couple hundred pages in which to feel untroubled, buoyant. Maybe believe in the possibility of effervescence again.

Year of the Goose is the book that delivers laughs — irreverent, a little bit mean, morbid and happily cutting, before it slyly pulls the laughter out of our throats. Damn. A muffled sob before we know what’s come over us. But just as soon, another sensation: true levity. This absurdist satire is chameleonic. It goes deeper as it becomes lighter. By that I mean it transcends the bounds of its own genre and even its own ostensible aims. In the end it emerges into the transcendence of hope, which has an unmistakable sound. It’s the beating heart of humanity itself.

The novel begins silly, focused on the misdeeds of one Kelly Hui, 24, Audi-driving, Hermès-toting, junk-food-addled, supremely entitled daughter of the New China’s richest man, Papa Hui, founder and president of the Bashful Goose Snack Company (products include Watermelon Wigglers, copious snack cakes, Tangerine Treats). She can hardly believe she has to go to a business meeting — as the company’s Head of Corporate Social Responsibility, a position that unsurprisingly has never called upon her to actually do anything — in a provincial city that “doesn’t even have a California Pizza Kitchen.” In a corrupt giveback deal (there is no other kind in China’s Rising Dragon era of ecstatic capitalism) she promises her company’s funding for a new program to fight childhood obesity, Fat People Fat Camp. There is going to be no good end here, we can tell. It turns out far worse than that.

This no-gooder starts the novel’s pinball on its lickety-split trajectory, bells ringing and lights flashing, disappearing down one hole and popping out another. A silver streak, it enters one person’s story and then another. Hallman is a master plotter, and a master observer of contemporary foible. She touches on every stupid irony of the modern age, from political doublespeak to corporate management self-help to consumerism’s empty abundance and the search for meaning in a world where it is now found on a shelf, barcoded. She portrays a nation punch-drunk at capitalism’s open bar, as well as a country torn between an ancient belief system based in the supernatural and a headlong embrace of anything superficial, anything Western, and anything expensive (if that isn’t redundant). Along the ragged tear runs an infected scar of angry cynicism.

Humor is a bull’s-eye on the target of intelligent comprehension. It is also a form of poetry because its primary mechanism is compression. Satire is the way humor plays it both smart and dangerous. Jonathan Swift and his Modest Proposal; Alexander Pope and The Rape of the Lock; Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Will Rogers: these and more used the sharpest blade, of wit, to cut directly to the bone of hypocrisy in their times. Ours is neither more nor less hypocritical, for along with death and taxes it remains the third certainty in life. Only the specificities of its manifestation change with the locale and the date (and the iPhone presents an especially attractive target).

Carly Hallman, an American who lives in Beijing, is hardly the first to satirize the modern Chinese brand of insincerity — Mo Yan and Yan Lianke are among the best known to Western readers, though a wide, vibrant literary subculture of mordant comedy persists in China against official efforts to suppress it — but she wields her own genius on the details of the genre. She knows from the inside her own sex’s peculiar weaknesses when it comes to vanity, for instance, not that the female has a lock on this; it’s so universal it afflicts whole landmasses, reference here an official proclamation on “our nation’s burgeoning vanity.” It is the most vain who blame vanity on others.

Speaking of vanity, once Hallman has Kelly lead the reader straight into the viper’s pit — her hair extensions come from a celebrity stylist who has built an empire by setting up an “organic” hair farm staffed by people he calls the Heads — the next arc of this circular journey runs through the cautionary tale of this amoral hair pusher. She pauses to detonate character and culture both in a sentence-length compression. It is in the “Birth of a Capitalist” chapter in the section titled “Memoirs of a Chinese Hair Tycoon” devoted to the personal history of Wang Xilai. As a tender youth, he saw his future in the alluring scissors of a barber.

I heard my grandmother, who’d followed us outside in her cloak, gasp, but all I saw was the metal point before me and the “important” man in front of that, royally irked but also clearly terrified that he might fall victim to one of those killer kids you read about in the papers — the ones who seem like sweet and studious angels until the day they snap and gouge their mothers’ eyes out with chopsticks after being told to eat one last piece of broccoli, or “accidentally” electrocute their father with a hairdryer while he’s in the bathtub after being ordered to spend less time watching anime and more time training to be an Olympic ping pong champ.

This leads to the kind of faux–official propaganda headline she writes so magnificently: “‘Local Boy Wields Scissors Atop Hair Salon, Attempts, Fails to Disrupt Socialist Society.’” Later, naturally, the hair mogul discovers he himself is going bald.

It is in the section devoted to Lulu, the head Head with the most lustrous hair of all, that matters become more serious. Hallman by no means abandons her strategy of lampooning the strike-worthy, but she is in addition a gifted fabulist, inventing transubstantiations that have the feel of Eastern creation mythology — the meaningful fables that inform a civilization’s very self-conception — sprinkled with glitter procured at today’s most au courant stores. A particularly beautiful example is an epiphany that arrives through the portal of Nirvana — the band, as well as man’s desperate search for the real thing. Now people start to appear, then disappear. Literally and figuratively.

“The moral is supposed to come at the end, but the problem with real life is that our stories don’t end. They go on and on.” Hallman foretells the way her novel will “end” — not really — while expertly landing a high-flying truth down the center of literature’s runway.The book’s final import may not be neatly packaged, and couldn’t be as deepy affecting if it were, but the links connecting its many characters are miraculously forged.

Lulu’s existential malaise (bereft of ambition to attain any position available to a young woman of her qualities, she has become the de rigueur mistress of a businessman with no interest in consummating their relationship, keeping her only to save face) is addressed by a turtle who is a reincarnated Tibetan Buddhist monk. His story pokes at the open wounds of China’s claim on Tibet and the greed-driven degradation of its land and people. He also, yes, delivers wisdom: “the pursuit of peace has always given rise to the most violent of struggles.”

Today’s One True Religion is based, as Hallman asserts, on the foundation “myth of the millionaire.” One theology is as good as another, Year of the Goose implies. Or as bad. Our cults are many, our eternal desire for meaningful happiness singular. And elusive. So little is as it seems. Lulu ponders this fact as its sadness permeates the novel’s ending, settling like a damp fog on every surface. As our proxy, she searches for happiness through chance, through magic and disaster. In the time called the After after The After, she may have found what she is looking for. Or maybe not. It is in that shifting place, which we might now call literary miracle, we find something that looks very much like an answer.

Vladimir Sorokin’s novel, The Blizzard defies strict categorization. The dialogue and detail of the novel are immediately familiar as echoing the 19th century Russian novelists. This would appear to be a tale set in Tolstoy’s time; its characters’ speech and way of life seem to reflect the same sensibilities in many other long, cold Russian novels. But Sorokin plays with his reader’s assumptions, and before long The Blizzard is as much fantasy and grotesque as Romanticism. Sorokin’s hero, Garin, is a doctor trying to get to Dolgoye, where people are being afflicted with a virus that turns them into zombies. Yes, zombies — and he has the vaccine. The author’s blend of realism with the fantastic — and the hallucinatory — make The Blizzard an Odyssey through a bizarre, irreverently-conceived world.

The driving force (pardon the pun) of The Blizzard is Garin’s impatience to get to Dolgoye, where he is needed. The blizzard he faces is harsh; the world he travels through is bleak. But in the tradition of many narrative journey stories, the doctor’s tale is imbued with the tension of not being able to move quickly enough, or to keep focused on the task of travel. “‘You have to understand,’” he says in the first few lines, “’I simply must keep going! […] There are people waiting for me. They are sick. There’s an epidemic! Don’t you understand?’” Unable to make those around him realize the importance of (or the speed with which he must undertake) the journey, Garin is at odds with the people as much as the weather. Sorokin taps into his reader’s common sense of frustration, and this sense of futility traveling through the storm offers the book a constant sense of conflict. Like Odysseus and many before him, Garin just can’t seem to stop running into bag guys and things that stall his travel.

What makes this story such a unique animal is its blend of a tone from classical Russian prose with the sensibility of dystopian science fiction. The reader begins to realize that some of our darkest imaginings have their basis in real life hardship. Sorokin describes the oddities of the doctor’s world with the same considerate beauty offered to the idealized pastoral scenes of the 1800s. Sorokin’s, however, always have a twist. As he describes the doctor entering a stable to find horses for his journey, he notes, “In the middle of the workbench was a ceramic cup filled with tiny kopeck-sized horseshoes. Next to it was another cup that held tiny nails for the shoes. Little wooden yokes were strung in rows on the nearby wall, like dried mushrooms. A large kerosene lantern hung over the forge.” In the passage, details like the small dried mushroom yokes and the tiny shoes could seem like symbolic minimalization. But no. “Each horse was no bigger than a partridge.” This is a world where horses under the hood are literal, and sleds are driven by the machinations of animal effort. Tiny animal effort. Sorokin’s world is not reality, but it winks in reality’s general direction. “‘Nowadays there’s so many things that ye cain’t figure out what they’s for,’” the doctor’s companion tells him. And we know early in the book that Sorokin’s characters consider their own world bizarre. Through their eyes and their tale, we begin to consider our world in the same way.

“Drive into the wind, overcome all difficulties, all nonsense and foolishness, move straight on,” the doctor tells himself, “fearing nothing and no one, move along your own path, the path of your destiny, move onward steadfastly, stubbornly. That is the very meaning of our lives!” Though his journey is bananas, it taps into familiar archetypes. The people he encounters are large and small — as Swift does with Gulliver, Sorokin uses these grotesques to parody and poke at the awful reality of their human counterparts. Whether his story correlates strictly to contemporary Russia as a political satire or is just an adventure story reeling in the absurdity of detail is neither apparent, nor necessary to understanding the plot. At times, The Blizzard seems caught up in the absurdity of its own detail, sometimes at the expense of transparency in the story. (For example: when the Chinese show up, why do they have cell phones? What are the mysterious “pyramid” drugs the doctor uses to hallucinate?) We don’t need to know. Not really. The thing about The Blizzard is the journey. Movement through a strange world.

Meaning in Sorokin’s work in The Blizzard is not always plain. That seems not to be the point. This is a wild quest through both a snowy landscape and the author’s imagination.

by Megha Majumdar

In 1926, anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard lived with the Azande in what is now South Sudan. One day, he came upon a hut burnt to the ground. The owner of the hut was distraught. He had been preparing pots of beer for a feast. The previous night, he had gone to check on the beer, and in darkness, had lit a handful of straw for light. The thatched roof had caught on fire.

Later, the anthropologist met a boy who had cut his toe on a stump of wood in the bush. The boy blamed witchcraft for the festering wound. The anthropologist argued that the boy had simply been careless. It was natural for tree stumps to grow in the path.

How would the boy respond?

The boy accepted it. He knew that the wood caused the cut, and he knew that the wood grew naturally. But why, he pointed out, had he hurt himself this time? He had walked safely in the bush hundreds of times. And why did this particular wound refuse to heal?

For the boy, witchcraft explained the peculiarity of this injurious event.

Evans-Pritchard noted: The man and his companions were convinced disaster was caused by witchcraft. Witchcraft did not supplant, but it did complement, the logic of the physical world.

In The Witches, a rare moment of disappointment arrives when Schiff writes, “[T]he seventeenth-century mind … consisted of a crazy quilt of erudition and superstition.” Medicine, we are told, “blurred into astrology, science into nonsense.”

When Evans-Pritchard published his ethnographic account of Zande life in 1937 — a book called Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande — he offered a provocative argument. For the Azande, he wrote, witchcraft was a coherent, logical system. It was far from nonsense. It was an interpretive structure that heeded intentionality where you and I might acknowledge coincidence. He was responding, you can tell, to the argument that “primitive” people had a “pre-logical” mentality.

So in Schiff’s refusal to dig deep into the logic of seventeenth-century witchcraft as it appeared in Massachusetts Bay, The Witches loses what might have been an enthralling opportunity to stand us at the doorstep of a different rationality.

This is a mode of thought that persists in the world. Consider how, in parts of Sierra Leone, the Ebola outbreak was read as an outcome of powerful witches losing control of malevolent forces; consider the rise of occult economies — the sale of body parts, “ritual murder,” and so on — which grapple with the punctured promises of global capitalism in rural South Africa. The point, of course, is not that we ought to believe in witchcraft. Rather, it is to comprehend the existence of thought categorically different from our own.

From the spring of 1692 to the summer of the following year, an epidemic of bewitching swept through several Massachusetts Bay communities. The first to be accused of witchcraft was a slave woman from Barbados, Tituba, who appeared in court and defended herself (“I no hurt them at all”) before launching into a confession. The devil, she admitted, had appeared to her, a yellow bird perched on his shoulder.

The Witches captures and distills the lives and anxious days at the heart of the witch-hunt. Its attention to the political instability of the time nudges us to some comprehension — the witch-hunt occurred, we remember, in a new colony in which property, propriety and freedom remained ambiguous. The settlers watched for “marauding Indians” while establishing their own boundaries. Salem tussled over the demarcation of territory. In such a precarious environment, it is perhaps not strange that people looked with fear upon even the most ordinary of injuries.

Here too, as in Zandeland centuries later, witchcraft made sense of misfortune. Witchcraft allowed explanations for “the sick child and the rancid butter.” When Schiff writes that we will never know what truly happened to the girls, indicating that their symptoms — twitching and grimacing, curled tongues, delirium — match what would be called, in the nineteenth century, hysteria, the conceptual translation discourages our comprehending witchcraft on its own terms. It could be that the disease that gripped the people of Salem rose from an “overtaxed nervous system.” It is also possible that those who endured “a claustrophobic winter housebound, under ashen skies and drifted snow, between whitewashed walls, amid undecorated surroundings” may have succumbed to visual hallucination.

How dreary their world, and how a touch of magic might have supplied a charge of life. The social implications are clear: Isn’t it in misfortune that relations are activated? Isn’t it in suspicion and malice that the weave of community shows itself?

One wonders, though, what knowledge might await us if we resisted this exercise of translation — if we paused our reading of conviction as error, and tried to apprehend the logic, rather than forgive the illogic, of witchcraft.