Sachar, Louis. Holes

Books that are about the way the world should work tend not to be very good; or at least, I tend not to like them very much. Sometimes it's because they reflect an idea of how the world should work that I find fairly horrible, or overly simplistic; other times they're just about the world as it ought to be, so that it starts and ends with wishful thinking and nothing else.

I think it takes a lot of guts to write a novel where the hand of fate, and cosmic justice, is clearly visible, and a lot of skill to pull it off; and Holes is a very, very good book. It has a sort of magical-realist, American tall-tale atmosphere about it; a protagonist called Stanley Yelnats IV and a dystopic desert of a reform camp prevent one from taking it literally, but not from taking it seriously.

Wrongly convicted for stealing a pair of very expensive sneakers, Stanley is sent to a "camp" where everyone has to dig holes for hours in the endless expanse of a dried-up lake. He is cursed; the lake is cursed. And it is a book about these curses, a book about how the past rings through to the present. Things work metaphysically, not logically; they happen because they should, not because they actually would. Everything weaves together beautifully, and it's satisfying when justice is done in the end; mostly because, in the end, justice doesn't come from some external entity, but from two people trying to do the right thing and walking forward on a path they don't even know they're walking.