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HALF EMPTY by David Rakoff

Here is another example of how hard it is to write the personal essay.  Truly, it is a formidable form. 

I did enjoy this part, where he lays into the musical Rent for avoiding the inalienable fact that one of the hardest parts of being an artist is in fact paying rent.  He doesn’t like any suggestion that art is glamorous:

. . . the only thing that makes you an artist is making art.  And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out. 

. . . . . . most folks would opt for the old fantasy of the carnal chaos of drop clothes, easels, turpentine, ratafia-wrapped Chianti bottles  . . . forgetting momentarily the lack of financial security and the necessary hours and hours of solitude spent fucking up over and over again.

These essays may not be so wonderful, but he at least suffered over them.  Also this I  found this interesting.  Not many people will admit that children can be unattractive, and certainly not themselves as children:

Tight as a watch spring, skittish as a Chihuahua, when I wasn’t bursting into tears, I covered my over-arching trepidation with a  loud-mouthed bravura.  I was highly unpleasant.  I am not fishing here.  It dawned on me recently that even though I have published books and lived through a bout of cancer, barely a handful of people from my childhood have ever attempted to contact me, and I don’t blame them one bit. 

I did have to give up after a while though.  Try this sentence:

The House of the Future was simultaneously sleek and voluptuous; imagine a gigantic furturistic cold-water faucet: a lovely white plus sign of a building with the  mid-cetnry grace of Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal, gently inflated like a water wing. 

Indeed, art is hard.

AND QUIET FLOWS THE DON by Mikhail Sholokhov

Here is a novel that assumes you have a much more detailed knowledge of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks than in fact you do.

It begins in a Kossack village, and you learn all about the rural life and the casual rape of the early twentieth century.  There is, as befits any self-respecting nineteenth century Russia novel, a big cast of characters, all of whom have multiple names.  There is lots of bracingly Russian stuff. Here’s an old man:

It’s time – I’ve lived my days, I’ve served my Tsars, and drunk vodka enough in my day

Here’ a wife finding her husband drunk:

Daria thrust two fingers into his mouth, gripped his tongue, and helped him to ease himself

I mean I’ve heard of doing anything for love, but this is ridiculous.  All of this is all just very much prep for what the author wants you to know about, which is the First World War, the Revolution, and the ensuing Civil War.  The author was in involved in the two latter (from age of 13) and it shows.  Try this:

All the objects around were distinct and exageratedly real, as they appear after a night’s unbroken watching

I love the suggestion that we all know what it is like after a night on sentry duty.  He also appears to think we are all equally informed about Russian politics.  The end of the book becomes a haze of revolutions and counter-revolutions.  What was most interesting was to see how the idea that your class was more important than your country took over on the Russian side, and how many people escaped with their lives because of it.

The front broke to pieces. In October the soldiers had deserted in scattered, unorganized groups; but by the beginning of December entire companies, regiments, divisions were retiring from their positions in good order, sometimes marching with only light equipment, but more frequently taking regimental property with them, breaking into warehouses, shooting their officers, pillaging en route, and pouring in an unbridled, stormy flood-tide backto their homes.   

You so want it to end well for them. I guess we know it did not. But at least a good chunk of these young men got the chance to live long enough to see it all go wrong

DEPENDENCY by Tove Ditlevesen

I wondered when I read the first book in this autobiographical trilogy why the author was so cheerful about her childhood, which overall looked pretty ropey what with the diphtheria and the rickets and everything.  Having read this third book, about her adulthood, I now understand. Her childhood does look pretty cushy in comparison.

She first marries an old guy largely because he published her first poetry and she wants to be financially looked after by him.  To modern eyes, it’s kind of amazing how straightforward she is about this; but  what I got from reading it is that in the 1940s you were more or less expected to be in a transactional relationship, where you provide domestic work and sex and he provides money.  I know I say this on this blog about once a month but THANK GOD IF I HAD TO BE BORN FEMALE IT HAPPENED NOW AND NOT EARLIER.

Anyway, this guy does not get what he bargained for, because what Ditlevsen is interested in is not domestic work but writing.  This is what she spends her days on

I’m just writing; maybe it will be good; maybe not.  The most important thing is that I feel happy when I’m writing, just as I always have.  I feel happy and forget everything around me. .

Even this is not enough though.  Here she is standing at the window watching young lovers:

I am only twenty years old and the days descend on me un-noticeably like dust, each one just like the rest

She leaves the old guy for WHOLE NEXT PARA IS FULL OF SPOILERS BECAUSE A LOT GOES ON a younger guy, and they have a baby.  She then has a hair-raising illegal abortion, and then gets pregnant again from a one-night stand with this one doctor. She insists he gives her an abortion, and this is where her problems begin, because he uses Demerol during the procedure, and she is immediately addicted.  She leaves her husband to marry this doctor, even though she does not like him and indeed thinks he has mental health issues, so that she can continue to get Demerol. He also gives her methadone, choral, etc.  He also isolates her so no one knows what is going on.  She is close to death when she saves herself by using a moment of lucidity to phone a friend.  She ends up in rehab and her husband in an asylum. 

She recovers and tried to get back with her second husband.  He rejects her.   

I cried when I read his letter.  No man had ever turned me down before.

Like, FYI, Tove, don’t tell people things like that.  No one wants to hear how popular you are.

She fall in love (at first sight!) with a guy who becomes her fourth husband, and he moves her to the countryside, so that it is harder for her to acquire drugs.  

What’s curious about this novel is that despite so much going on – four husbands, two abortions, three children (one adopted, I didn’t even tell you about that), many best-selling books – the appeal of this novel is not at all in its story.  In fact I never read such really salacious material presented so un-salacioiusly.  You feel weirdly connected to the real life of someone in Copehagen decades ago.  Here she is making dinner, about to leave some husband: 

While I’m standing in the kitchen turning on the potatoes, my heart starts hammering and the white tile wall behind the stovetop flickers before my eyes, as if the tiles were starting to fall off.

The strange fascination of this book is its total lack of sentimentality or excuses.  I don’t think I would be capable of giving an account of my life so utterly without justifications or apologies.  It’s really remarkable for its honesty and makes you feel like you maybe know her better than most people you actually do know. 

At the end she seems in a better place, being away from the chemists and their jars of methadone, but I am sorry to say that I checked date of publication and date of death ,and the poor lady only had five years left.  She killed herself in 1976, so while I have not checked Wikipedia I can suppose that indeed the addiction did not let go.  I feel sad about it, as if she just died today, rather than decades before I was born.

I WAS TOLD THERE’D BE CAKE by Sloane Crosley

This collection of comic essays show you how hard it is to write comic essays.  It was an easy read, but let’s just say David Sedaris’ crown is secure. 

It’s my second book in under a week by a young woman living in New York, after MY MISSPENT YOUTH , so perhaps it is just I am a bit tired of the pitfalls of trying to make it in publishing.

It’s kind of dated, having been written ten years ago.  You can tell because she explains vegetarianism like we are going to find it really freaky.  Also the reviews!  I see that some male reviewer at the Guardian comments that he has a ‘tendency to be disappointed by the most well-rewarded female columnists. . . ” As if female columnists are both exceedingly rare and all very similar. 

Some of it however was pretty funny.  Let’s end with her father’s obsession with fire:

For major holiday dinners, there is no such thing as a ‘fire in the background.’  The flaming abcess in the living room is always in the foreground, dominating the attention and the conversation.“It’s a good fire, Denis,” says my mother, standing yards away from it.
My father contemplates this, having conducted a staring match with the fire for almost an hour.  It’s hard to say who’s winning.

To be honest I’ve already largely forgotten this book.  So: nothing further.  

HOW COULD SHE by Lauren Mechling

 This is a depressing novel about the implosion of the publishing industry.  It’s like reading a book written about the social life of weavers just as the loom has been invented.

It’s not marketed as such.  In fact it is marketed as jolly chick lit, which it sort of tries to be, but chick lit in the context of the collapse of the chicks’ careers.  The author is a magazine writer, so I guess she is writing what she knows.

It’s about the friendship of three women after that friendship has died.  One of them moves to New York to try and find a job in publishing after a brutal breakup, and the other two variously pity and avoid her.  Here she is, at her first cocktail party.

“Hey,” she said, a desperate edge to her voice. “Are you going to the drinks thing?”“Where is it?”Something lifted within her. “I don’t know—I can ask Sunny?” “Nah.” Gus shook his head and looked down. “I’m supposed to meet someone in the city, actually.” He didn’t need to say any more. Another woman was written all over his face. Geraldine’s heart snapped. ….. She was humiliated, but also slightly relieved that he was leaving so she wouldn’t have to spend the drinks portion of the evening being rejected.

Ouch.  But where the book really shines is in the workplace:

All the staffers had gone to Ivy League schools and had the social skills of staplers.  They stared at her from their workstations and waited for her to talk, and she had to fill the air with references to her quirky travels and friends and obsessions.  There was something profoundly sad about these once-brilliant people who clung to their perches in corporate media as if there were a chance in hell the industry would take care of them.  Get out while you still can, Sunny wanted to tell them all, but she had to pretend to be operating under the same misapprehension as the rest of them.

Overall it didn’t quite work out for me as a book – I couldn’t get up a head of steam to care about the characters, and their relationship.  But I enjoyed the world.  Makes me feel like while I may not have made the perfect career choices, it could have been worse.

MY MISSEPENT YOUTH by Meghan Daum

Apparently 2001 was really a long time ago.  Enjoy this extract from one of the essays in this book:

I am not what most people would call a “computer person.”  I have utterly no interest in chat rooms, news groups, or most Web sites.

Imagine a world where you get to not be a “computer person.”  Imagine a world where there is a concept called “computer person.”  Today that is just a person.  

 These essays are about Daum’s experience of being in her late twenties and her life not having worked out as she planned.  (Whose life has worked out as planned?  Only the most extreme sociopaths, and maybe Taylor Swift, I would say). 

The extract is from the first essay, which is about the time she had an online romance, and is probably the best in the book.  This is not so much for thoughts on these “Web sites,” about which she indeed has not much idea, but about what it is that makes romance so painful:

Of all the troubling details of this story, the one that bothers me most is the way I slurped up his attention like some kind of dying animal.  My addiction to PFSlider’s messages indicated a monstrous narcissism.  But it also revealed a subtler desire that I didn’t fully understand at the time. My need to experience an old-fashioned kind of courtship was stronger than I had ever imagined.  For the first time in my life, I was not involved in a protracted ‘hang-out’ that would lead to a quasi-romance. 

The other good essay was about her $70,000 debt.  This is largely from her choice to get a graduate education in that most remunerative of fields, creative writing

And even though I was having a great time and becoming a better writer, the truth was that the year I entered graduate school was the year I stopped making decisions that were appropriate for my situation and began making a rich person’s decisions. 

She blames this on knowing too many rich people.  I can vouch that this is a problem.

. . . my years at Vassar did more than expand my intellect.  They expanded my sense of entitlement so much that, by the end, I had no ability to separate myself from the many extremely wealthy people I encountered there.  . . . Self-entitlement is a quality that has gotten a  bad name for itself and yet, in my opinion, it’s one of the best things a student can get out of an education.  Much of my success and happiness is a direct result of it.  But self-entitlement has also contributed to my downfall, mostly because of my inability to recognize where ambition and chutzpah end and cold, hard cash begins. 

The rest of the essays I didn’t find particularly interesting or insightful, but I admire the ambition.  Thinking that in just writing about you own ordinary life you can come up with interesting insights is a bold move. That it paid off twice in ten essays is not terrible odds.

ON WRITING: A MEMOIR OF THE CRAFT by Stephen King

Full disclosure, I haven’t actually read very much Stephen King.  I may be minded to after reading this book. It’s charming and unpretentious guide to writing, mixed up with his life story, which is similarly charming and unpretentious. 

Interestingly for someone whose reputation is based on thrillers, he is not a big believer in plot as the engine of the story.  He says he tends to start with a setting, a theme, or a ‘what-if, and just go from there, trusting the plot with find him as he goes along.  He believes you should write the first draft fast

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub.  . . .If I write rapidly . . . I find that I can keep up with my original enthusiasm and at the same time outrun the self-doubt that’s always awaiting to settle in.

He advises when you begin at least 1000 words a day, with only one day off a week (no more; you’ll lose the urgency and immediacy of your story if you do.), though he does 2,000. He also has advice on re-writes

When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,; he said.  ‘When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story’

He even has an equation for this, being second draft = first draft – 10%

Also of interest was the story of his life.  He has always been a big reader, and even today he carries a book whereever he goes (“You just never know when you’ll want an escape hatch.”). He grew up working class, and worked as a high school teacher, struggling to cover the bills for his wife and the two kids he had within five minutes of graduation. This is a tough time.

If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then.  I could see myself thirty years on, wearing the same shabby tweed coats with patches on the elbows, potbelly rolling over my Gap khakis from too much beer. . . . and in my desk drawer, six or seven unfinished manuscripts which I would take out and tinker with from time to time, usually when drunk.  If asked what I did in my spare time, I’d tell people I was writing a book . . . and of course I’d lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn’t too late, there were novelists who didn’t get started until they were fifty, hell, even sixty.  Probably plenty of them. 

Then he writes CARRIE.  He hopes he might get a $10,000 advance if it is accepted. He nearly blacks out when they offer him $400,0000.

He struggles with various substance abuse issues (he doesn’t really remember writing CUJO apparently), and has a hilarious take on a number of different writers, who:”largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair”  He doesn’t think it is co-incidental that they are mostly alcoholics.  This seems a pretty good description of the emotional environment of much of the twentieth century literature, and I never considered that is was just because all the big writers were even bigger drinkers.

YOUTH by Tove Ditlevsen

This memoir makes you glad for the invention of the internet.  Tove is a working class teenage girl who is moving between various depressing and menial jobs while trying to become a poet.  (Poetry obviously being the most direct route out of poverty).  

Her problem is she knows no one who is even tangentially associated with poetry or publishing, so spends her time moping around cleaning floors by day and drinking soda pop with sweaty young men by night.    The whole time I just felt like screaming : just google it!  But it is unfortunately 1945. Tim Berners-Lee won’t even be born for another ten years.

The first book in the trilogy, CHILDHOOD, was a sadder book than this one, which covers her adolescence.  Unlike most people, she was happier as a teen than as a child.  She has some money of her own and no longer has to live with her parents.  Some would call this exploiting underage labour, she calls it freedom.  Eventually she manages to connect with someone who publishes a journal, and he publishes one of her poems.  She is so thrilled that the book ends with her considering marrying him, despite him being old and fat.

I hope she doesn’t do it, but I suspect she will.  The final book in the trilogy is called a Danish word which means both poison and marriage.  Signs are not good.  I’ll report back when I get there. 

THE SECOND SLEEP by Robert Harris

I rarely read thrillers, but this came up on a lot of ‘best of 2019’ lists so I gave it a try.  It was fun.  The cover screams ‘book for boys,’ complete with stupid gold font for the author’s name, while the name itself sounds like it could have been created by some kind of generic best-selling-man-name generator. 

It begins with a priest going to bury another priest, who was a noted antiquarian.  You think at first it is set in the medieval period, SPOILER ALERT, but then when he gets to the dead priest’s house, he examines his collection of antiquities and you find it is lots of bits of plastic and glass, and one smooth and shiny box, with “on the back the ultimate symbol of the ancients’ hubris and blasphemy –  an apple with a bite taken out of it.”

BOOM! That’s right, it’s not the far past, it’s the far future, and my particular favourite far future, which is the post-apocalypse.  Side point, it’s interesting how no one ever calls the present day the pre-apocalypse, even though that’s clearly what it is. 

This setting is so fun that it triumphantly carries us through the book.  These future people are so mystified by  our leavings – the concrete pillars that supported motorways; an item which:

 opened like a book.  A pane of glass on one side; on the other, squares of black plastic, each inlaid with a letter of the alphabet. 

It makes you see the modern world in a whole new way. 

That said, I can’t say the book exactly went anywhere.  There was a lot of plot, but not to very much effect, and the author at the end clearly recognized his difficulties and without shame SPOILER ALERT randomly killed off everyone in a mudslide. That’s what I call efficiency in novel writing.  

PRIESTDADDY by Patricia Lockwood

This memoir got a lot of good reviews, and it seemed like I would like it.  It tells about the author’s family, and in particular her father, who is a very eccentric Catholic priest..  Some of it was very funny.  Try this: 

(My father) seems overjoyed to see me.  Has he forgotten what I’m like?

And

When we came home later, my father was wearing his most transparent pair of boxer shorts, to show us he was angry, and drinking Bailey’s Irish cream liquer out of a miniature crystal glass, to show us his heart was broken

And

My father despises cats.  He believes them to be Democrats.  He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur

Though I must comment: surely everyone knows cats are Republicans. Also, why the pretentious failure to capitalize Hillary Clinton’s name?

The book was sometimes beautiful.  Here is a night time drive in the American South: 

Through our rolled down windows we could hear the round rattle of the palms, crickets applauding, bullfrogs belching out their personal ads

But overall I found I couldn’t really connect with it.  This is partly a matter of style – it is so intensely poetic, my query would be, why not just write a poem?  Example:

Tomorrow, in that church, the songs I like best will flame out their brief lives, there and then gone, while the people hold soft and slumping candles under their chins and circles of cardboard catch the notes of hot wax.  They will return again next year.

I know some love this sort of thing, but for me, I am like: M’KAY.

But a more profound problem for me was what seemed to me a lack of heart.  Truly her family were strange and her path odd.  Her father chose to buy a guitar rather than pay for her college.  She ran away to marry a man she met on the internet back when the internet was just message boards.  And yet somehow I don’t feel I understand how she felt about any of it.  Everything is filtered through a distant ‘amusement’ which is no doubt where many people eventually get to with their families.  But for me, for a book so ‘revealing’ I didn’t think it revealed much of anything.