fiction Archives - Page 18 of 21 -

FIND ME by Andre Aciman

Never ever read the sequel to any novel you have loved. I take this as a general rule. There’s a risk that what you found heart-breakingly unique is in fact a tired old trick of that particular author, and the novel you love will be tainted in retrospect. I broke this rule by reading FIND ME, a sequel to the wonderful CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, and yes, it was a big mistake.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME is the story of Elio, and his teenage infatuation. It a powerful and terrifying story of the one who got away. In FIND ME, the father of Elio, who is in his fifties, meets a beautiful twenty-something woman on a train, and they begin a wild romance.

I mean, okay. I’m not saying this could never happen, but for sure in this telling it seems unlikely. Even if you assume a lot of unspoken daddy issues, there is just no way a 24 year old is referring to some old guy’s penis as a ‘lighthouse’ and listening to him talk awkwardly about Goethe. I don’t want to be super harsh, but it kind of read like an extended and slightly pitiful exercise in wishful thinking by a middle-aged man.

Part way through the book we go back to Elio himself, who is now in his thirties. And there I had to stop. So far it had just been such a lot of unmotivated and unlikely drivel, I just couldn’t face the character being polluted by more of the same. So luckily I can’t tell you how it turned out.

DEPT OF SPECULATION by Jenny Offill

Here is someone who has a mental breakdown because she gets cheated on. I don’t know, I know it’s not very nice, but my view is: toughen the f**k up.

Partly this view comes from the fact that this novel refuses to give any character a name, calling the main one ‘the wife,’ and the other one ‘the husband.’ I always find this profoundly pretentious. Even worse, at the end, it abruptly shifts to using the first person singular. I mean: VOM. And all this to mostly tell the story of this couple who moves out of Brooklyn to the suburbs because it is cheaper.

That said, here are two things I did like:

One, a quote from an 1896 book on advice for brides:

The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to .which ‘a married woman can be subject. Besides the false views of human nature it will impart . . . it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and contempt for ordinary realities

I have long wondered why I am indifferent to domestic duties.

Two, this which I find sadly and profoundly true:

But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

PREP by Curtis Sittenfeld

This book reminded painfully me of the nightmarish self-involvement that is adolescence. It tells the story of a girl, Lee, who gets a scholarship to a posh boarding school and spends the entire time behaving as if it is a concentration camp designed for in-depth examination of her choices by everyone concerned. I mean check it out kids: you are not that interesting. No one cares.

PREP covers Lee’s four years of high school, and is an exhausting accounting of all the stupid things she worries about. This includes even positive interactions with others:

This anxiety meant that I spent a lot of time hiding, usually in my room, after any pleasant exchange with another person. And there were rules to the anxiety, practically mathematical in their consistency: the less well you knew the person, the greater the pressure the second time around to be special or charming, if that’s what you thought you’d been the first time; mostly it was about reinforcement. Also: the shorter the time that elapsed from your first encounter to your second, the greater the pressure; . . . And finally: the better the original interaction, the greater the pressure. Often, my anxiety would set in prior to the end of the interaction – I’d just want it to be over while we all still liked each other, before things turned.

Eventually as a senior she starts to hook up with a guy she has had a crush on for a long time. It remains ‘secret’ for reasons that are unclear to her.

Before and after I was involved with Cross Sugarman, I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can’t make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.

This did make me laugh. It’s a lot of peoples’ experience, but it’s not something often admitted.

I enjoyed the book, it was very more-ish, but quite interestingly it didn’t actually go anywhere. She got older, but no wiser. I guess we typically assume that books have a shape and some kind of resolution (especially when they appear on the surface to be coming-of-age stories) but in this case, there was none. For a while I found it annoying, but perhaps it’s just honest. Sometimes I guess it’s true you just don’t change, but stay trapped on the same old hamster wheel.

THE GLASS CASTLE by Jeannette Walls

In this memoir, a wealthy gossip columnist lives on Park Avenue while her parents live on the streets. Bizarrely, your sympathies are 100% with the gossip columnist.

There are many memoirs of rough childhoods. Usually, this comes from some clear cut cause, as for example addiction, mental illness, etc. Here, it seems to come from an over-abundance of romance and self-indulgence.

The dad kind of has a semi-excuse, being an alcoholic. But first, weren’t most peoples’ dads alcoholics in the 1970s? I’m not really sure that that cuts it. And second, he declines the most basic of help (e.g.,food stamps) even when he is sober. And this is when these small kids have not had anything other than popcorn to eat in three days.

The mum meanwhile is a whole other story. She refuses to work, despite being a trained teacher, for the strong reason that she does not want to. She wants to paint, write novels, and eat chocolate. When they do get her to briefly work, she complains every morning: “I’m a grown woman now. Why can’t I do what I want to do?”

I mean I can’t say I don’t see where she is coming from. Less attractive is when she tells her daughter, who has been groped, that sexual assault is a “crime of perception,” and even less attractive is when she hides a family size Hershey bar from her very hungry children so she can eat it herself.

The parents are well educated, and so early on, while they are still young and maybe classifiable as ‘alternative,’ they do provide the children with lots of excitement and interesting experiences. Over time though, without money, ‘alternative’ becomes ‘gross.’ Their children escape them to go live in New York, where they mostly thrive. The parents follow, and weirdly decide to be homeless, despite the offer of help from their (remarkably forgiving) kids and – strange twist – the revelation that the mother owns very valuable land in Texas, and has done for their entire, impoverished lives.

The book has a highly suspicious amount of detail about the author’s life before the age of ten. I googled it when I was done, fully expecting lots of libel suits, but apparently her family agrees that this is indeed, really bizarrely, how this all went down. I finished the whole thing in a night, something I haven’t done in a while.

SEA WIFE by Amity Gaige

In this novel a man goes off to live his dreams. He ends up dead. Why is this so often the way? I suspect on some level we don’t want to read about someone leaving their life to do something crazy and it ending well. Because that raises questions about our own life.

Michael convinces his wife to go sailing for a year with their small children. He does not know much about sailing, and his wife is resistant at first, and also at last. But they do it. As the husband says, to the many people who raise objections:

. . I think there’s something wrong with the line of thought that it’s reasonable to defer your modest dream for several decades. What are we, characters in a Greek myth? Waiting for the eagle who comes to our liver every day because in a Greek myth, that’s normal?

SEA WIFE is about their year at sea, but also about their marriage. At first your sympathy is with the wife, because truly the husband does seem kind of crazy, and he apparently voted for Trump. Over time though, I had to say I came round to his side, because the wife really is useless and whiney. She is horrified to find they are in debt, because as she explains:

I never asked questions about money

As if this is a reasonable excuse! How about you are an adult? Like what is the guy supposed to do? She also is relentlessly lazy about learning to sail, and then when the husband gets Dengue fever mid-ocean she acts like a lost puppy. I mean why did Emmeline Pankhurst even bother?

WRITERS AND LOVERS by Lily King

It’s been a long time since I read a book that had a straightforward happy ending. I enjoyed it: it gave me hope. Modern literature never ends on “Reader, I married him.” More like: “Reader, I married him. And that was the beginning of our problems.” It’s like we can’t accept that there can be such a thing as happiness – it always has to be equivocal, and coloured by upcoming death. It’s like we think we are too good for happiness.

WRITERS AND LOVERS is about a woman in her thirties who is deeply in debt (student loans), recently bereaved (her mother), recently dumped (poet!), and has been working on her first novel for six long years, with no end in sight. She pays the bills by waiting tables. Clearly Lily King has waited tables, because there is a lot of detail on this, and I gained a lot more respect for what is involved in waiting tables.

Here she is thinking about this ex-boyfriend, or was he a boyfriend, this was part of the problem:

You taste like the moon, Luke said out in that field in the Berkshires. Fucking poet. On the path a few people are holding hands, drinking from bottles, lying in the grass because they can’t see all the green goose poop.

For all she is now so miserable she has two competing suitors, and much of the book involves her going back and forth between them. She also receives rejections for her novel, and I was reminded how many people sacrifice hugely so we eventually get to those few people who manage to do something wonderful. It’s like the gods of art demand blood.

At one point she starts to have what appears to be a breakdown. This for me is always a red flag: here we go with ‘dream sequence’ type writing, but we avoid this. She sells her novel, she chooses her man: happily ever after.

COOL FOR AMERICA by Andrew Martin

I adore Andrew Martin’s first book, EARLY WORK, in a way that makes feel gnaw-my-own-arm-off crazy. I’ve read it twice, here and here. So when his second book COOL FOR AMERICA came out, I bought it straight away, even though I don’t really approve of buying hardbacks, because it is decadent.

I don’t love these short stories as much as EARLY WORK, but let’s face it, there is almost nothing I love like I love EARLY WORK. The stories are sort of similar to EARLY WORK (I just like typing the name) being about writing, and drinking, and cheating.

As one character puts it:

The pursuit of unavailable women was the closest I could get to a life’s passion.

And the book is much about the beginning of relationships, and about their endings, often overlapping. Try these various thoughts about possible romantic partners:

. . . .maybe it was his lack of anxiety about his literary status that made him so good in bed. Leave it to somebody else to pierce the human heart with punctuation

Or this, about an effort to write a grown-up email to an ex:

. . . these thoughts wouldn’t form themselves into coherent sentences on the screen, maybe because she wasn’t sure they were true. She hadn’t forgotten the ugly melodrama of their final months together and she hadn’t forgotten the ugly melodrama of their final months together and she hadn’t forgiven him for going off to Italy for a fellowship without her, like a punk-ass. The worst thing about studying art history was the artists.

There is lots of other stuff I love. Here a character is going home:

. . .he wished he could justify not returning to the primodial slop, which, no matter how hard he tried for it not to, left him dizzy with despair every time he was re-immersed in it.

I don’t especially like short stories. I don’t like being pulled into something just in time for it to end, and I don’t like that very often that ending feels awkward and forced, trying to squeeze out meaning like a difficult pimple. But despite all this I still enjoyed COOL FOR AMERICA. I can’t wait for him to write something else

HOUSE OF HUNGER by Dambudzo Maruchera

Dambudzo Maruchera lived a short and remarkable life. He was born in Rusape (a small town in Zimbabwe) to a mortuary attendant and a maid, and had a rough childhood. He excelled at school, and went to the Universities of Rhodesia and then Oxford, neither of which worked out. He drank a lot, maybe had some mental health challenges, and was dead of AIDS at 35. And somewhere in there, he wrote a handful of books that revolutionized African literature

HOUSE OF HUNGER is his most famous book. It begins with this amazing first line:

I got my things and left.

I love this. I don’t know why. Humour me by letting me quote extensively. Here he is talking to his mother and his brother:

That hoarse bass voice of hers had not always been like that. She blamed it on the way she had ‘come down in the world;’ which was merely a euphemism about her excessive drinking. . . She liked nothing better than to nag me about how she had not educated me to merely sit on my arse. And when nagging me her language would take on such an earthy hue it made me wonder why I ever bothered to even think about humanity. . .
“I sent you to University,” she said. “There must be big jobs waiting for you out there.”
“Tell that to Ian Smith,” Peter butted in maliciously. “All you did was starve yourself to send this shit to school while Smith made sure that the kind of education he got was exactly what has made him like this.”
I did not like this so I began to whistle ‘Little Jack Horner Sat in a Corner.’
Peter, as usual when something indistinct disgusts him, farted long and loudly and spat in my general direction, and muttered something about capitalists and imperialists.
“And the bloody whites,” I added, for this trinity was for him the thing that held the House of Hunger in a stinking grip.

One of the most interesting things about the world is how he inhabits two worlds, local and global at the same time. Try this, on the local prostitutes:

Most of them had nowhere secret to take their numerous clients. They used the bush instead. The countryside, up to then, had left me cold and indifferent; later a hasty affair with Wordsworth’s Prelude swung me to the opposite extreme.

An amazing mashup. It’s a bold, weird, exciting book, and makes me proud to be a Zimbabwean.

MR SALARY by Sally Rooney

I didn’t know what the aftershave was called but I knew what the bottle looked like. I saw it in drugstores sometimes and if I was having a bad day I let myself screw the cap off.

Truly I am becoming a superfan. This is just vintage Sally Rooney and I am super into it. This is a single short story, sold in paperback, and apparently I bought it. Due to be a huge superfan.

It is often a mistake to read more of an author when you really like any single book of theirs, for the reason that you begin to see through their tricks (e.g., don’t read BLOOD MERIDIAN after THE ROAD. You find out McCarthy just has a thing for men in transit). But somehow this isn’t happening for me with Rooney, despite the fact that this tiny 33 page story, MR SALARY is straight from her playbook (i.e., tortured love affair, emotional distance, clever conversation).

Here a young woman who is pining for her much older housemate:

My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all

While being a super hard core millennial.

My suitcase was ugly and I was trying to carry it with a degree of irony

Honestly I am not sure any other generation has ever been so afraid of sincerity. Eventually she becomes brave enough to suggest they get together. This is triggered by, bizarrely, her seeing a sleeping bag in a river. Along with everyone else on the bridge, she thinks it is a body. When it is clear it is not, she realizes:

. . .I had stood there waiting to see the body in the river, ignoring the real living bodies all around me, as if death was more of a miracle than life was.

Write faster Sally Rooney! I need MORE!

SEVERANCE by Ling Ma

Here is an unusual and enjoyable apocalypse. People are infected by a fungus that slowly removes their higher functions, so that eventually they are only able to go through the routines of their life, repeating familiar loops, till they die of exhaustion/starvation. It’s weirdly poetic, with – for example – a single Gap store remaining pristine, because one of ‘the fevered’ is stuck in a routine there, endlessly folding and refolding.

The protagonist, Candace, is just getting dumped by her boyfriend as the book begins. He wants to be an artist, and doesn’t want to have to have a ‘job.’ Candace also wants to be an artist, and also doesn’t want to have a job, but is more on the realistic suck-it-up end of the spectrum. The infection comes out of China (this book is really eerily Covid-y), and she agrees to stay as the skeleton staff in her office in New York, enjoying the familiarity of her routines as the city empties.

Eventually she escapes the city and falls in with a group of survivors, the leader of whom very quickly loses his sense of proportion. One of the members of their group visits her childhood home and almost immediately gets stuck in a loop. Apparently familiarity is a trigger:

The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in.

Don’t need a pandemic to learn that.

So a mysterious and interesting book, albeit with some unnecessary and exceedingly woke sidebars about capitalism and immigration. This concept of your routine as both comforting and deadly I keep thinking about. As she says towards the end:

To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless.
To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?

I feel there is something important about this, but I can’t quite figure out what it is