If you’re into books, you should probably be reading Bookslut, a monthly online journal featuring interesting, thoughtful essays about all things literary, plus interviews with writers and reviews of new books. If you don’t already read it, September’s issue is a great introduction (and contains a couple of fiction reviews by yours truly).
September 6, 2011
If There Are Cameras Everywhere…
Yesterday, I celebrated Labor Day by reading The Hunger Games. Two thoughts:
1. So…did they, like, go to the bathroom at all?
2. Really, bludgeoning each other to death for status and a share of the resources would definitely be simpler and probably more dignified than job-hunting in this economy.
June 20, 2011
Book Review: The Lacuna
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
There’s a lot to like about this book, but even if I hated the story, I think the beautiful, loving descriptions of life in Mexico would still have captured me. It made me want to move there right now and paint my house blue! (Although realistically, I realize now is maybe not the best time to relocate to Mexico – this book is set in the ’30s.)
At first, I thought the book’s second half didn’t live up to the promise of its first. The first half is all Mexico, and Frida and Diego, and revolution and Trotsky and assassination attempts and unrequited love in a small bunk room and boat rides through flower petals and murder and sorrow, and the second half is all letters and North Carolina and writing time and housecats and lawyers and stenographers and repression and hiding away to lick your wounds. You get halfway through, and you’re like, “The book’s over. What are all these pages?”
But then I realized this structure is intentional, of course, and works really well. It echoes themes and whatnot, I don’t feel like getting into it.
Blue house!
June 16, 2011
Excerpts From May Reading
The brother of a schoolfriend owned a photography gallery in the East End, and maybe she was going to have an exhibition there later in the year. Nowadays I would see through this kind of thing immediately; but this was the first occasion I had come across someone for whom art was a means of avoiding reality rather than confronting it head on, an idea so strange to me that I didn’t fully comprehend it at the time. - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday
…I remarked upon the extraordinary clouds above us. He barely glanced up at them and made no comment. Then, remembering, brightening, he said, ‘Constable did some amazing paintings of clouds; I must show you pictures of them.’ A tree, a painting of a tree: he would always choose the painting. – Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday
Because even then I understood that theatre, if it was any good at all, wasn’t something you saw, it was something that happened to you. – Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday
We threaded our way around a group of journalists who were disclosing to each other their coastal preferences… – Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
“Ahaha,” I agreed politely while Cookie ratified her little witticism with raucous braying. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
“You know,” he said after a moment. “I never meant you to think, that time, that I was saying you were self-absorbed, or something of that sort.” “Oh, I know,” I said. When had he said I was self-absorbed? “I don’t think of myself as a particularly self-absorbed person, so it wouldn’t really have struck home in any case.” How strange. So Rafe had accused me of being self-absorbed. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
‘Dark feelings can become a habit,’ he’d said to me once when we were talking – arguing – about this. ‘And if they’re strong enough, like many strong feelings they can even be enjoyable.’ He said that this was why the peace process wasn’t working, that the whole population was locked in a trance of grief that they didn’t break out of because it defined them, it made them feel real. - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday
Palestinians are beginning to discover the possibilities of nonviolence, which Israel, with its ethical and political traditions, would find far harder to resist than rocks and rockets. The longer the occupation lasts, and the larger the Arab and Palestinian populations grow in territory under Israeli control, the more untenable Israel’s future as both Jewish and democratic becomes. – Hendrick Hertzberg, The New Yorker
‘…Conventional life always expects you to meet it more than halfway. You should give yourself the benefit of the doubt from time to time.’ - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday
It was years before I could see why he was doing it – alarm, I suspect, at the unadorned reality of my own personality. Be that as it may, once you’re conscious of what’s happening, it’s incredibly tiresome. - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday
Sometimes the most important and powerful element is an absence, a lack, a burnished space in your mind that glows and aches as you try to fill it. - Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday
Natalie must have been just about my age, but there might be an infinite number of ways to be twenty, I saw, shocked. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
You could put a blond wig on a hot-water heater and some dude would try to fuck it. – Tina Fey, Bossypants
We can’t expect our gay friends to always be single, celibate, and arriving early with the nacho fixin’s. And we really need to let these people get married, already. – Tina Fey, Bossypants
Ellen calls and asks what I’m doing with myself. When I say I don’t really know, she says, “Well, I mean, you get up, and then what do you do?” Sometimes it seems to me that there is a growing number of women, and that I am not among them. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
It angers me that I must be so assertive on such shaky grounds to make people believe that I run, and that when they believe me, they don’t care. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
I see Ellen today, and before she gets a chance to ask what I’m up to, I tell her that I’m running a lot lately. She is delighted to hear it. It seems that she, too, after getting home from the office, reading to the kids, clearing up after the dinner guests, studying for her orals, and knocking off an article or two for some little journal, likes to get in a few miles. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
But Al Qaeda long ago fled to all corners, changing its mailing address to franchise cells in Waziristan, Peshawar, southern Yemen, and housing projects in European cities. Bin Laden’s death underscores the question of why we go on losing young men and women daily in the defense of an indefensibly corrupt government in Kabul. – David Remnick, The New Yorker
That’s the kind of trouble you get when diverse groups of people actually cross paths with one another. That’s why many of the worst things in the world happen in and around Starbucks bathrooms. – Tina Fey, Bossypants
Strether had become acquainted even on this ground with short gusts of speculation — sudden flights of fancy in Louvre galleries, hungry gazes through clear plates behind which lemon-coloured volumes were as fresh as fruit on the tree. – Henry James, The Ambassadors
I cry like a three year old who just wants to take her toy cash register into the bathtub. - Tina Fey, Bossypants
Men I had met before suddenly paid attention to me…and I hated them for it. - Tina Fey, Bossypants
If only I could be lifted up and borne off to someplace further along in time, to where the hours would move forward in a benign, steady procession and I would spend the modest coinage of daily life among pleasant people. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
But there is not one management course in the world where they recommend Self-Righteousness as a tool. - Tina Fey, Bossypants
My hat goes off to them. It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist. - Tina Fey, Bossypants
…she had sat through numbers of futile interviews and sent out numbers of futile resumes. The city, in fact, appeared to be quite overstocked with women, each more ornamental and accomplished than any nineteenth-century young lady, huge quantities of whom, Patty noticed with growing terror, were waitresses. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
This is what I like to tell young women who ask me for career advice. People are going to try to trick you. To make you feel that you are in competition with one another. – Tina Fey, Bossypants
Eunuchs are considered relentless scolds in South Asia, and the threat of being hounded by one is somehow supposed to take the place of audits. – Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker
Darrow wasn’t a philosopher; he wasn’t even an iconoclast. He was an agonist. He would argue one way; he would argue another; he just didn’t want to see bigotry thrive or watch a man die. He liked to say that creeds were dope: “No one can find life tolerable without dope. The Catholics are right, the Christian Scientists are right, the Methodists are right, the drunkards are right.” – Jill Lepore, The New Yorker
I asked the demonstrators around me, “What are we protesting today?” A university student named Latifa said, “The Interior Ministry refuses to let women be photographed for their identity cards wearing the hijab . . . They force women to remove the hijab,” she continued. “This is an insult to Islam. We are demanding that the ministry allow us to wear the hijab at all times.” Oh. - Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic
…sessions covered everything from search engine optimization for doctors’ Web sites to “The Blue Plate Special,” a urogynecologist’s advice on how to persuade a patient to add cosmetic-gyn to an incontinence surgery. – Marie Myung-Ok Lee, The Atlantic
“What are you doing?” he said, aghast. “Out. Now. Out, out.” She picked up the suitcase in one hand and shooed Stuart to the door with the other. “This is enough to get by on for a while. Let me know where you are and I’ll send the rest on to you.” “You know,” Stuart said as he trotted down the hall in front of her, “Marcia kept saying, ‘Oh, Patty is so centered. Patty is such a woman,’ but actually, Patty, you’re a very nervous person.” On the street Patty flagged down a taxi. “Take this guy to Port Authority,” she said, giving the driver a ten. She shoved Stuart into the back seat next to his suitcase and ran along behind the taxi as it took off, flapping her skirt. As she walked back down the hall, whimpering, Mr. Martinez peered out from his doorway. “The mens – the mens-” he said, his voice vibrant with commiseration. “They must do this thing. Do not cry, missy. He will come back.” - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
And when Patty returned to George’s table later, she found only more change than he could afford, she knew, and on his plate a pile of little bones that suggested he’d curled up there and died. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
I don’t get drunk; I don’t pursue the ladies; I don’t spend money; I don’t even write sonnets. But nevertheless I’m making up late for what I didn’t have early. I cultivate my little benefit in my own little way. It amuses me more than anything that has happened to me in all my life. They may say what they like – it’s my surrender, it’s my tribute, to youth. One puts that in where one can – it has to come in somewhere, if only out of the lives, the conditions, the feelings of other persons. . . . The point is that they’re mine. Yes, they’re my youth; since somehow at the right time nothing else ever was. – Henry James, The Ambassadors
It came to him in fact that just here was his usual case: he was forever missing things through his general genius for missing them, while others were forever picking them up through a contrary bent. And it was others who looked abstemious and he who looked greedy; it was he somehow who finally paid, and it was others who mainly partook. – Henry James, The Ambassadors
Did the government believe its citizens would survive nuclear attack by hiding in holes in their back yards? Not really, Roy said. The security technologist Bruce Schneier coined the term “security theatre” to describe certain measures, such as post-9/11 T.S.A. pat-downs and subway bag checks, which, he says, improve feelings of security while doing little or nothing to protect people. – Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker
Getting patients to acknowledge their own disorders also has become an ethical imperative. Implicit in the doctrine of informed consent is the notion that before agreeing to take medication patients should be aware of the nature and course of their own illnesses. In balancing rights against needs, though, psychiatry is stuck in a kind of moral impasse. It is the only field in which refusal of treatment is commonly viewed as a manifestation of illness rather than as an authentic wish. - Rachel Aviv,The New Yorker
Deinstitutionalization was a nationwide social experiment that did not go as planned. Overgrown hospitals were shut down or emptied, but many fewer community centers were opened than had been proposed. Resources steadily declined; in just the past three years, $2.2 billion has been cut from state mental-health budgets. “Wishing that mental illness would not exist has led our policymakers to shape a health-care system as if it did not exist,” Paul Appelbaum said in his 2002 inaugural address as president of the American Psychiatric Association. Today, there are three times as many mentally ill people in jails as in hospitals. Others end up on the streets. – Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker
Strether paused anew, on the last flight, at this final rather breathless sense of what Chad’s life was doing with Chad’s mother’s emissary. It was dragging him, at strange hours, up the staircases of the rich; it was keeping him out of bed at the end of long hot days; it was transforming beyond recognition the simple, subtle, conveniently uniform thing that had anciently passed with him for a life of his own. – Henry James, The Ambassadors
Outside, too, was the London Marta had come to but had never before entered. - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
From the moment she was born people had been happy to tell her what to do, down to the most minute detail; Eds. Clarke & Melton knew just what was happening; there were admonitions and exhortations plastered all over the walls – this is how to behave, this is what to think, this is how to think it, that’s then, this is now, this is where to put your sock – but no one had ever said one little thing that would get her through any five given minutes of her life! - Deborah Eisenberg, The Collected Stories
June 15, 2011
Book Review: The Ambassadors
The Ambassadors by Henry James
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’m sure Henry James is a genius and all, but untangling his prose is like trying to talk to a verbose, over-educated person who’s drunk off his ass but refuses to pass out. For example, he might start off with “The effect of the man’s speech was as if he were a tippler who…” then meanders here, there, and over there to the other bar, and then wanders back toward you, but veering off at the last second, borrows several drinks (by which I mean to imply words) off surrounding tables (by which I mean, words that ought to belong to other sentences entirely), and then, seeing the end of the sentence approaching (which, by continuation of our metaphor, would be meant to suggest the end of the night, or bed, or the end of drinking festivities, which drunk would prefer at all accounts to avoid and so stalls to keep off at a distance), he throws any number of adverbs, barstools, prepositions, gerunds and the like in between himself and that end, and once you are fully convinced he has lost all sight of his aim in telling you the original anecdote he had introduced, he sometimes arrives back at that point, but other times, he does not, and if you were to map his meanderings, it would take a smarter person than most readers nowadays to derive any sense from it, and at that point, the other woman whirled right out of the room, and the first, though not affected by the same thing to the same degree of the latter, or rather, it was the same thing, but she did not derive from it the same intent, but was nevertheless affected in a different way of her own, said, “My word, what a lot of…” but then hung fire.
So, that’s what reading The Ambassadors is like all the way through. The other problem with the book is that it was written in a time when Americans had a hard time believing anybody on Earth was actually fucking, since nobody in America was. The premise of the book is that the narrator has been sent to bring back his fiancé’s son, who is having an illicit affair with a married (she’s permanently separated from her abusive husband) woman in Paris, but when he gets there, he really likes the woman and he really likes Paris, and he really likes the son more than he did before, and so he decides the son might be better off there. But he convinces himself (somewhat) that maybe the son’s relationship with the married woman isn’t technically sexual, and then (spoiler alert…?) at the end, he has this big realization when he can’t pretend anymore that it isn’t. Except, being a modern young woman, I didn’t get that AT ALL, and read the whole thing assuming that he knew they were a full-fledged couple, but that he didn’t, in these particular circumstances, think it was immoral. So then, when his grand realization came, I was all, “Oh, wait, hold on. This was a thing? Oh, I guess it was THE thing. Where have I been?”
JUST SAY WHAT YOU MEAN, HENRY JAMES!! Actually, this is a really hilarious novel when looked at in hindsight, but as you’re thwacking through the jungle of it, it’s pretty tiresome, and also, I think I am far too stupid to understand this book.
May 20, 2011
Does Your Reading List Ever Make You Mad? (and Other First-World Problems)
I have some sympathy for Carmen Callil. Her actions are counterproductive, though, because now everyone’s going to be passionately defending Philip Roth’s literary reputation for weeks (well, days) and complaining about sour feminists, when if they’d just given him the prize without any controversy, everyone would have been like, “Roth again? Yawn! Why didn’t they give this one to Marilynne Robinson?”
But I think she just snapped, and we’ve all been there – as a reader, how many times are you told, “Okay. This guy was really messed up about women, but you just have to ignore all the blatant horrifying misogyny, and then, you have to admit, he’s a genius!” It’s constant. And most of the time, because women are great about doing this, because we – and it can’t be said often enough – do it all the time in every form of culture ever, we concede the point. We forgive the constant brutal, graphic rapes and the ‘mothers are manipulative, evil hags’ stuff and ‘I just want to kill my castrating wife’ stuff and the constant reducing of all women to two-dimensional jizz receptacles, and we overlook all that and say, “Yeah, you’re right. If you overlook the 90% of it that’s repeatedly telling us that we better never for a second think we have any power or status in our society whatsoever, it really is an amazing work of art.” (Meanwhile, ask some guys to come with you to see a movie with women in it, or pink somewhere on the poster, and it’s like you’re asking them to lick a public toilet.)
Anyway, eventually every single reading woman (and sometimes, a reading man) reaches that point where she just goes, “That’s it! That is it! I’m done! I do not have to overlook it and admit the genius! I do not have to admit any fucking knob’s genius anymore! I’m done! I am only ever reading stuff by women from now on forever and that’s it! YOU can overlook the dress descriptions and the stupid wedding at the end, and admit that this woman is a genius! YOU OVERLOOK SOMETHING FOR ONCE, DAMN IT!”
And then you have to go off by yourself for awhile and take some deep breaths, especially since you weren’t even talking to anyone specific, but just yelling at the air in front of your face, and you weren’t even reading anything at the moment, but just sitting there, thinking about stuff and seething. Plus, some of your favorite writers are men.
Ideally, you do not throw this tantrum publicly, while you are serving as one of the judges for a major literary prize.
Anyway, we’ve all been there. I can understand how Callil feels, although I don’t have an opinion as to whether or not Roth should have won – I’ve only read American Pastoral (I read it in Vietnam, which I think informed and added to my reading experience1), and I haven’t read everyone on the shortlist, but most current readers are not all that sad that the days of RothMailerUpdike dominance are ending (although I still plan to get around to reading those dudes some day).
If you ever have a moment of literary despair, it pays to remember that contemporary fiction is absolutely exploding with awesome writers, many of them women. Look at Jennifer Egan! I mean, I didn’t like her book that much, but everybody else loved it, and she won both the NBCC Award and the Pulitzer. Additionally, up-and-coming male writers have finally realized that being entirely dismissive of and confused about half the world’s population rather limits your ability to be a great recorder of the human condition, and literary misogyny is (I really think, though some people will argue with me) on the wane.
Here are some fantastic books I would recommend for anyone who needs a little break from being reasonable and open-minded about offensive content. Not only are these great books about women (I think? Maybe a couple are about men2), but they are not about “women’s issues”. They are not specifically about feminism or stifling marriages or dealing with abuse or anything like that (well, maybe some of them are a little bit, but those are not the elements I primarily remember about them)(and not that there’s anything wrong with books on those topics, but that’s not what we’re after here):
- The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (Everyone should read this! Why has everyone not read this?)
- Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden
- Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky
- Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida
- Here They Come by Yannick Murphy
- Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
- Wetlands by Charlotte Roche (warning: look into this before you read it; it is not for everyone)
- Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willett (Hilarious! Read it!)
- The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
- Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
- Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins
- Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick
- The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
- anything by Marilynne Robinson
- Any others? What can you recommend in this category?
And I don’t even know, so many more! Those are just the ones I happened to think of, that I’ve read recently. So never feel like you have to read Philip Roth, and never feel like you have to not read Philip Roth, either. Read everything! There’s enough great stuff out there for anybody in any kind of mood, is all I’m saying.
(Image via)
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1I know, aren’t I tiresome?! If we were at a party, you would have just spotted someone you had to go talk to over there.
2Actually, two of these books (Atmospheric Disturbances and Novel About My Wife) are about men searching for their mysteriously missing (and not actually missing) wives. Weird!
May 9, 2011
Book Review: Molly Fox’s Birthday
Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This short novel deals with a surprising number of themes (art, theater, religion, The Troubles, the nature of the self), but to me, it is most interestingly about intimacy, friendship and communication, and about how sometimes a certain distance is essential to a more meaningful and lasting closeness between people.
The story’s narrator is a renowned playwright who has temporarily house-swapped with her good friend, Molly Fox, a famous stage actor. Molly lives in Dublin and the narrator is borrowing her house in order to work on a new play. The action takes place over the course of a single day, Molly’s birthday. Molly herself is in New York, and emphatically does not recognize her birthday, since it is also the anniversary of her mother’s abandonment. The relationships between Molly, the narrator, a third friend, Andrew, and their families are mostly explored through the narrator’s reminiscences throughout the day, but as evening falls, the characters we’ve been introduced to appear in person.
The narrator is a playwright from a big, loving, conventional family she never felt she could truly fit in with. She is closest to her eldest brother, Tom, a Catholic priest. At college, the narrator befriends Andrew, a disgruntled academic who resents his small, vulgar family and his older brother, a Loyalist paramilitary who is later murdered. Later, the narrator meets Molly Fox, who also has a close, complicated relationship with her troubled brother, Fergus.
These three friends are self-contained, undemonstrative people who remain close – but not too close – over the years without really ever acknowledging the nature of their connections. Molly is repeatedly described by everybody as particularly difficult to know (“Molly doesn’t do intimacy.”). She throws out important information and personal confessions at noisy, odd moments, but spends long, quiet evenings revealing nothing at all. The narrator, a playwright, is a keen observer of human nature and spends paragraphs describing the minutiae of any particular interaction while (sometimes hilariously) missing its broader implications entirely.
All the characters are particularly interested in objects – knick-knacks, jewelry, clothing – and these symbols are dwelt on in great detail. People are contained and known entirely through these tokens of their person, even when they themselves are absent. As the narrator wonders upon waking in Molly’s bedroom in the novel’s first pages: “What kind of woman has a saffron quit on her bed? Wears a white linen dressing gown? Keeps beside her bed a stack of gardening books?”
Thus, Andrew’s brother is contained in a ring. Molly’s house, with its carefully considered tokens, is more expressive about her life than she ever is herself. Andrew comes to know the world through the contemplation of artistic objects, and his own laborious personal transformation is entirely described by the clothes he wears and the way he furnishes his home.
In a representative passage, the narrator is angered by Molly’s ironic purchase of a fiberglass cow because, she says, “What bothered me most about this was that I had thought I knew Molly well. We had been friends for over twenty years now, and with the exception of Andrew, she was the last person I would have expected to go in for this type of whimsy. . . . I wondered why I hadn’t said this to her. I had always thought we knew each other well enough to be completely honest, at least about something as trivial as this.”
After wondering about the saffron quilt and the white linen dressing gown in the scene quoted above, the narrator interrupts herself: “I was reluctant to pursue this line of thought because I suddenly realized that, lying in my bed in London next week, she might do exactly the same thing to me. Given her particular gift she would be able to reconstruct me, to know me much better than I might wish myself to be known, especially by such a close friend.”
“Especially by such a close friend,” “at least about something as trivial as this” … these sort of qualifiers are frequently included as if they would be self-evident to anyone, because these friends respect nothing so much as each other’s space. As the narrator sits with Andrew in the garden at the end of the day, she tells us, “He fell silent again, and as he sat there quietly thinking about all of this, I almost did something extraordinary, something that might have ruined the delicacy of the moment. I almost closed my hand gently over his hand, where it lay resting on the table.”
That she does not do so, and would never do so, is the key to these three people – their reserve is probably the reason for their friendships’ longevity, but, as the narrator perhaps realizes too late, it is also what keeps them from establishing anything more. For the reader, however, it is what makes these people and this novel so interesting, endearing and unique.
January 19, 2011
Loving by Henry Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Henry Green’s most beloved novel focuses on the complicated relationships between the servants of an Irish country house during World War II. At the time of the novel, Ireland is neutral territory, remote from the escalating conflict and mostly abandoned by the English gentry who own homes there. The servants are left alone with their employers’ children, and thus free, they fight, love, ally, steal and work.
Green is a master at painting beautiful pastoral settings and then focusing on the myriad, nagging daily stresses of the people living in them – both in this novel, and in my personal favorite of his novels, Concluding. While the servants at the Tennants’ manor are removed from the horrible war and mostly left alone to do their chores and mind their own affairs, every character in Loving is plagued by innumerable stresses. These are not carefree people. They worry about putting away enough for retirement, they worry about their families back in England, they throw themselves into power struggles, they lie, they steal, they torment each other. They fall ill, they throw tantrums, they emotionally blackmail each other. They deliberate about enlisting, moving, staying put, escaping. They fear the Germans, they fear the IRA.
The best scenes in the novel are those which Green describes carefully in close focus, and where the events occurring are so closely wedded to the setting that one relies entirely on the other – the dovecoat where the children play and the lovers meet, the cavernous gallery where Edith and her charges play a game of blind man’s buff, the eccentric lampman’s saddleroom with the window into the peacocks’ shed where the maids are caught snooping by the butler. The central figures of the novel – the butler, Charley Raunce, and the housemaid, Edith – are clearly made for each other. Both dim and conniving, they negotiate an ever-changing workaday morality all their own – skimming off the top of the house’s finances is only smart, but stealing property is over the line…mostly. Raunce is constant in his affections, but produces a never-ending torrent of unnecessary falsehoods whenever he feels himself cornered or disrespected, and is often suspected of more cunning than he possesses. Edith is ever careful of the feelings of the staff, but tucks away information on them for when she might need it. Innocent and easily scandalized on the surface, she is in fact a master of manipulation, sexual and otherwise. Loving is a novel overshadowed by a great war and made up of many small ones, and in the end, we know that Edith, at any rate, will be among the survivors. And that is as it should be, because in Green’s Britain, the manor is but the playground of the servants.
January 14, 2011
I’m Usually Not Interested In Displays of Precocity…
…in literature or anything else, unless of course said precocious one’s story turns out to be HORRIBLY DEPRESSING, as in this article about a doomed child author in the 20s. If you happen to be looking for something to read just now, read that there thing.
January 5, 2011
A Breakdown of the Books I Read In 2010
I read 52 books this year. Here’s how they break down across various categories:
Rating:
I loved 12 of the books I read this year. By loved, I mean both that I thought they were brilliant, and also that I really enjoyed reading them – that I read them quickly and without effort, and that I responded to them emotionally. My favorite books are generally satires and dark comedies, and many of these books fit into that category:
Castle by J. Robert Lennon
The Birthday of the World by Ursula K. Le Guin
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake by Breece D’J Pancake
The Columnist by Jeffrey Frank
God Knows by Joseph Heller
On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction by Karl Iagnemma
Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins
The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester
Concluding by Henry Green
Room by Emma Donaghue
I thought 10 of the books I read this year were very good. Very good means that I thought they were just that – very good – but they were maybe less enjoyable and easy to read, either because they were a little dry, or they were about disturbing or upsetting things. Or they were involving enough, but they just weren’t quite as amazing as the books listed above, or maybe I intellectually appreciated them more than viscerally loved them. These were:
Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live by Joan Didion
Stories by Anton Chekhov
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
Blue Angel by Francine Prose
An Intimate History of Killing by Joanna Bourke
Fat City by Leonard Gardner
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken
To the Castle and Back by Vaclav Havel
The Best American Short Stories 2010
I thought 13 books were good, but not amazing, or they weren’t my sort of thing or didn’t make a huge, lasting impression on me, but I could appreciate that they were well-written, intelligent books, or even that I really enjoyed them but not quite as much as those listed above:
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Disquiet by Julia Leigh
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Notes From No Man’s Land by Eula Biss
Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom
Telex From Cuba by Rachel Kushner
Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year by Anne Lamott
Prague by Arthur Phillips
Doting by Henry Green
The Hole We’re In by Gabrielle Zevin
Nothing by Henry Green
Dzanc Books Best of the Web 2010
The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat
I thought 11 books were ok, which means they were sort of meh, or that maybe they were good and all, but didn’t reach me personally or I wasn’t in the right mood or place to receive them, or that they weren’t bad but I would just as soon not have read them, or they were original but seemed half-baked, or they had one or two really great elements, but as a whole weren’t that impressive:
The Funeral Party by Ludmila Ulitskaya
Slippage by Harlon Ellison
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
The Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian
Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick
The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick
Miles From Nowhere by Nami Mun
The Hidden Life of Deer by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Flying to America: 45 More Stories by Donald Barthelme
Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat
Likewise by Ariel Schrag
I thought 6 books were bad, in that they were stupid or unoriginal or poorly written or pointless (also, I suspect I just don’t really care for mysteries):
Woman On the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy (note: I’m aware this book is kind of a feminist darling, but I’m sorry – as much as I agree with Piercy’s Utopian vision, the book is really poorly written)
Don’t Look Back by Karin Fossum
Cost by Roxana Robinson
The Good Parents by Joan London
A Thousand Cuts by Simon Lelic
A Clubbable Woman by Reginald Hill
Type of Book:
I read 30 novels (3 of which were mysteries), 4 novellas, 10 volumes of short stories, 2 volumes of essays, 3 memoirs, 2 nonfiction books and 1 graphic novel.
Author Diversity:
I read multiple books by the same author, and a few story collections that were by various authors, so not counting those, I read 43 authors this year. Of those, 24 were women and 19 men. If you count repeat authors, I read 27 books by women and 23 by men. I read 9 dead authors, and 34 living. Only 4 of the books I read were translated works. Fourteen of the authors I read were white women from the US, 10 were white men from the US. I read one biracial woman, one Korean-American and one Haitian-American, all from the US. I read one each Irish man and woman, and four men from the UK (all 6 white). I read one woman from Russia and two Russian men, one German man, one Czech man and one Norwegian woman, and two each white women from Australia and New Zealand. All of which means, I did not do so hot with diversity in my reading this year.
Overall, my favorite novels that I read this year were God Knows by Joseph Heller and Room by Emma Donaghue. My favorite story collection was On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction by Karl Iagnemma, and my favorite memoir was An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken.
December 18, 2010
The Tournament of Books
The long list for my favorite annual literary event, The Morning News’s Tournament of Books, has been posted! I post about this every year, so if you’re still not following it, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. You don’t have to read the books to enjoy it – I’ve rarely read more than one or two by the time the thing starts, thought I always intend to read them all.
__Image via.
Related Articles
- A Slumbering Rooster Begins to Twitch (themillions.com)
December 13, 2010
Why I Love The Atlantic, But Don’t Read It Anymore
At some point in my early 20s, I suddenly realized that I was dumber than shit, and so I started making myself read a lot of stuff I wouldn’t have bothered with before, trying to absorb it. The Atlantic was one of the first of these things that I actually enjoyed. I began working through it with an effort, but I quickly developed a true appreciation for its long-form political journalism, which was extremely well-written and involving, even for someone with very little context. So, I’ll always have a soft spot for The Atlantic, and I’ll put up with a lot of bullshit from it, because in the end, despite its frequent misses, when it’s good, it’s great.
Apparently, the magazine is on track to turn a profit this year:
The Atlantic, the intellectual’s monthly that always seemed more comfortable as an academic exercise than a business, is on track to turn a tidy profit of $1.8 million this year. That would be the first time in at least a decade that it had not lost money.
Getting there took a cultural transfusion, a dose of counterintuition and a lot of digital advertising revenue.
“We imagined ourselves as a venture-capital-backed start-up in Silicon Valley whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic,” said Justin B. Smith, president of the Atlantic Media Company, who arrived at the magazine’s offices in the Watergate complex in 2007 with a mission to stanch the red ink. “In essence, we brainstormed the question, ‘What would we do if the goal was to aggressively cannibalize ourselves?’ ”
They’ve basically embraced the internet and free digital content, as opposed to fighting it, and it seems to be paying off.
My only issue with their web presence is that you can’t get an RSS feed of just the monthly issue. I refuse to read anything that won’t show up in my RSS, because I can’t be bothered to remember when things publish, so I haven’t looked at The Atlantic in years, unless something else in my feed has linked to it and reminded me of its existence. You can get feeds for other, more frequently updated web-only content from them, but not of the actual monthly issues. I don’t know why. They’ll send you a weekly or monthly email with a list of links to the magazine contents, but I’m never going to read something out of an email. My feed is where I read stuff, and if I want to read a longer article, I’ll star it or keep it unread and come back to it, but I don’t come back to old emails looking for stuff to read. So, until The Atlantic makes that extremely simple fix, I’m not reading it, because I’m a Millennial and I’m entitled and lazy.
Related Articles
- The Atlantic Turns a Profit, With an Eye on the Web (nytimes.com)
November 15, 2010
Revisions
Wells Tower interviewed Barry Hannah (RIP) for the October 2012 Believer, and Hannah says, of teaching writing students:
I tell these students there’s no use in revising something that’s bad. I believe that, for short stories. It’s brief, very brief, from four to twelve pages, getting something done. I don’t believe in rewriting this one goddamned story. If the first draft is no goddamned good, it’s no good. It’s stupid to revise it, to me. The first draft has got to be loaded with most of it. Does it not? It can’t just be a shell of what’s going to be. I think it’s got to be exciting.
That’s refreshing to hear. I’m a terrible workshop participant, because 9 times out of 10, the only thing I can think to say to people is, “This really doesn’t seem much worth messing with.” I feel the same way about my own stories. It’s just that 99 out of 100 stories are so slight. You have to keep looking for that 100th story; anything else wastes everyone’s time and makes people depressed about the state of fiction.
The writing community has been largely negative about this article by Laura Miller in which she slams Nanowrimo and other efforts to encourage writing, but I pretty much agree with everything she says.
So I’m not worried about all the books that won’t get written if a hundred thousand people with a nagging but unfulfilled ambition to Be a Writer lack the necessary motivation to get the job done. I see no reason to cheer them on. Writers are, in fact, hellishly persistent; they will go on writing despite overwhelming evidence of public indifference and (in many cases) of their own lack of ability or anything especially interesting to say . . . it’s the readers who are fragile, a truly endangered species. They don’t make a big stink about how underappreciated they are; like Tinkerbell or any other disbelieved-in fairy, they just fade away.
There’s already more worthy literature out there than a single person could possibly get through in a lifetime of reading – and also, no one is even reading anything at all, apparently – so the question inevitably arises, why be so insistent about writing more of it? And the answer for most aspiring writers is, “Because I deserve to have interesting days full of thinking and creative labor rather than boring days full of dull labor, and also, I deserve for other people to pay attention to me.” To paraphrase Carrie Fisher in When Harry Met Sally, everyone thinks they have good taste and a sense of humor and should be doing something creative, but they can’t all. I’m not excusing myself from that; I mean, I “write,” too. What else are you going to do?
But in general, I think writing teachers could afford to be a lot more discouraging. The ones I’ve had were all incredibly encouraging, and, with very few exceptions, they should not have encouraged what I was writing at the time. They should have told me to burn it and bury the ashes, and that if I ever had the gall to trot out something similarly lazy, vapid and dishonest for their review, they’d have me expelled.
November 12, 2010
More Havel
The more of these discussions I have . . . the more I realize one important difference between America, or rather Washington, and the Czech Republic, or rather Prague. Here people enjoy politics; in our country they don’t. Here they really enjoy talking about politics; in our country they merely complain about it. Here politicians, scientists and academics, journalists, and other important people appear to stay fresh the whole day, and perhaps they say the cleverest things in the evening. In our country, by the evening, such people are either tired or desperately trying to catch up on work, or they’re drunk or just glad to be home watching television with no need to talk to anyone. . . . Why is it we Czechs are always so harried? Always so irritated? Why are we always complaining about something instead of doing a decent day’s work?
- Vaclev Havel, To the Castle and Back
Maybe I should move to Prague…
November 4, 2010
How To Be Punk
I received a free copy of The Sun magazine, and while I don’t much care for it overall, there’s a great short piece by some guy named Sparrow entitled “How I Went Punk.” It’s written in diary form, and it’s about a 56-year-old hippie suddenly getting really into The Clash:
How can I be more punk in my life? I live in a Victorian house next to a small forest, and much of my day is taken up by spiritual practices and physical exercises for my aging body. For me, being punk doesn’t mean dyeing my hair purple; it means courting intensity. When I sit on my meditation cushion, I must close my eyes with flaming conviction and be ready to meditate unto death.
I would like to hang out with this guy.
October 3, 2010
Vaclav Havel
Simply put, the global world of today can hope for for a decent and peaceful life only if, among other things, there is an absolutely evenhanded cooperation among various large supranational or regional entities, defined in terms of their civilization, their history, their culture, and their geographical position. A necessary condition for such cooperation, however, is a clear agreement on where a particular sphere begins and where it ends. In short, there must be a clear agreement on mutual borders. Only clearly delineated and defined entities can be genuine and creative partners; in the future, any vague or blurred or disputed border can only be – as it was with nation-states in the past – a source of instability, tension, and ultimately war. That’s why I think that the creation of a new political world order requires that special attention be paid to the problem of borders between individual spheres of civilization, a problem that can be solved only if the spheres that are momentarily wealthier cease to consider themselves superior to those that are momentarily poorer.
– on Ukraine, 4/9/05
Also:
In the period of communism the Nobel Prize would have considerably invigorated our struggle, that’s obvious. During my presidency, however, I would have felt awkward about accepting it. I think that politicians in office have a duty to work for peace and for a better and more just world; you might say that’s what they’re paid for, and so it’s better that the prize go to someone who works for a good cause voluntarily, and possibly at great risk. That kind of recognition always emboldens such people and their struggle in very concrete ways, and therefore it must not merely be a reward for past merits.
– on failure to win the Nobel, 4/9/05
Also:
First some brief news about myself: I spent the first two days of Easter (Friday and Saturday) in a rather poor state. I was angry at the whole world; either because I have no Easter and I have to work (along with emergency room nurses and train drivers), or because I have to write so many speeches at once, or because I have such a thick file of documents and altogether so much weekend reading from you (circa three hundred pages), or because my printer isn’t working and without it it’s practically impossible to write speeches, or because I can’t find anyone to repair it because everyone’s away somewhere for the holidays. I felt as if I were out on a limb, a man betrayed by history, which has burdened him with endless tasks and now mocks him for his inability to master them, and I’ve paced back and forth like a lion in its cage consumed by anger at an unspecified perpetrator (even though the lightning rod that drew my ire was my staff). In the end, however, the situation took a turn for the better: on Saturday evening people were found who could at least make temporary repairs to my printer, and on Sunday morning, that is, today, I finally began to work.
– to his staff re: his printer, 4/16/95
(All from To the Castle and Back)
August 24, 2010
Oops
When I was a kid, I had a terrier named Tulip. Obviously, I had no idea that this controversial novel existed, and now I wonder if anyone I ever introduced Tulip to thought her name was an homage.
Next, I’ll find out that Thomasina Rabbit is an obscure novella by the Marquis de Sade. Oh, well.
June 15, 2010
May Books
Cost by Roxana Robinson: This novel, about a family’s upheaval when it becomes apparent that one of its grown sons has become addicted to heroin, reads like a Lifetime movie complete with clunkily interwoven PSA information about heroin. Robinson devotes a good chunk of the novel’s beginning to introducing multiple interesting characters, but the novel drifts away from their concerns and never fully returns. Much of the novel is repetitive. Not recommended.
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Blue Angel by Francine Prose: A creative writing teacher at a small, less-than-impressive liberal arts college becomes enamored of a student’s work, with disastrous results. Prose is tartly hilarious on many levels here, from the pricelessly dreadful short stories the writing students submit for workshop, to her protagonist’s own self-delusional mental whining. Many of the reviews I’ve read on this novel make the mistake of assuming Prose shares her protagonist’s point of view. But while the novel is undoubtedly an indictment of college campus PC police, Prose is far too careful and interesting a writer to stop at so simple a message. She is an emphatic champion of close reading, and a close read of Blue Angel doesn’t let the teacher off so easily. Highly recommended.
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The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson: What happens when a sacrificial lamb is sent to spend a few weeks summering in a haunted house? Three guesses. A psychological thriller set in a wonderfully bizarre mansion (clearly inspired by the Winchester Mystery House, name-checked in the novel), Jackson’s novel is deeply unsettling and thoroughly absorbing. Highly recommended.
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Notes From No Man’s Land by Eula Biss: Eula Biss’s debut book of essays, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Biss is chiefly concerned with race in America, and has much of interest to say on the subject; as far as style, she has palpably modeled herself on Joan Didion, as of course, any aspiring young essayist should. She is at her best when focusing on large themes and research, made personal by her own life experiences. In “Relations” (which I’ve linked to before), she draws from her own mixed heritage to explore race as social construct. In “Land Mines”, she relates her experiences teaching in New York public schools, and bravely indicts public education as a tool of social control. In “Is This Kansas”, Biss is gobsmacked by the utter lack of social conscience or awareness of privilege in her students at University of Iowa (I particularly enjoyed this piece, having gone to a similar state school myself). In “No Man’s Land”, Biss meditates on America’s pioneer heritage (specifically Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family’s experiences with Indians), and how this history relates to current American fear, territoriality, racism and paranoia.
On the other hand, Biss is at her weakest when attempting to extrapolate her own experiences into some broader, universal meaning, as in “Goodbye to All That”, in which Biss tries to flesh out her own post-college loneliness into some statement about New York City, or in “Letter to Mexico”, in which Biss’s own self-consciousness as a traveler eclipses whatever she is attempting to say about her subject. Still, far more winners here than otherwise. Recommended (and several of the best are available to read in full online; click through links above).
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An Intimate History of Killing by Joanna Bourke: This book is about violence in warfare – specifically, how different people think about, experience, and react to the actual act of killing. Bourke doesn’t even attempt to discuss war itself as a moral good or ill; her focus is strictly on how men and women experience combat. A fascinating look into a rarely broached topic. Highly recommended.
May 6, 2010
April Books
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy: Sci-fi novel about an impoverished Chicana woman committed to a mental institution by her awful family. She finds herself communicating with a Utopian future society. The characters are original and compelling, but novel’s premise doesn’t go anywhere. And unfortunately, Piercy’s bold political protest is undercut by hyperbole and poor writing. You’re better off reading Ursula Le Guin. Not recommended.
Don’t Look Back by Karin Fossum: I have no idea why this horribly written mystery novel was on my reading list. It’s the first book by this Norwegian author to be translated into English, but I don’t think the badness of it is down to poor translation. Not recommended.
The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake: Pancake’s stark, beautifully written stories set in his native West Virginia are nearly all winners. Everyone should at the very least read “Trilobites,” and lucky you, it can be read online here! (Insert obligatory mention of the author’s tragic, early suicide here.) Highly recommended.
