Tag: fiction

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

MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION by Ottessa Moshfegh

In this book, the general principle that you will feel better after a nap is here taken to its extreme.  A young woman is tired and miserable, so she decides to go to sleep.  For a year.  She does this by finding an irresponsible psychiatrist and medicating herself in dangerous ways.

This lady is a major hater, and much of the enjoyment of this book is seeing how she goes about her hating.  Let me make one extensive quotation to give you a flavour:

 “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook. Beer bellies and skinny legs, zip-up hoodies, navy blue peacoats or army green parkas, New Balance sneakers, knit hats, canvas tote bags, small hands, hairy knuckles, maybe a deer head tattooed across a flabby bicep . . . They would come into Ducat, the gallery I ended up working at, with their younger—usually Asian—girlfriends. “An Asian girlfriend means the guy has a small dick,” Reva once said. I’d hear them talk shit about the art. They lamented the success of others. They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror. They were all on Klonopin, was my guess. 

Truly it was hilarious.  There is lots of hating like this.  I haven’t read pure joyful rage like this since LUCKY JIM (side bar, I bet there aren’t too many reviewers connecting those two books). 

Of course the obvious question about this book is about the rent, and how she paid it.  Answer, rich parents.  You got to swallow that one down to enjoy the book, and it’s a tough one.  But there you go: rich people even get to have better misery than poor people.

This aside, I enjoyed MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION, though fair warning, it does not resolve.  At the end of the year, in the last few pages, she wakes up, suddenly feels better, and then, for no reason, 9/11 happens. I mean, I nearly laughed.  Never mind, endings are hard. 

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam

Everyone knows it’s much easier to write the set-up of a sci-fi novel than it is to satisfyingly resolve it, so in this book the author des not even bother to try.  Surprisingly, it works.

A family of four head to a rural Airbnb outside New York.  They go grocery shopping and we learn a bit too much about their sex lives.  Then in the middle of the night an older couple knock on their door.  It is the owners of the Airbnb, who have fled New York because ‘something’ has happened.

SPOILER ALERT: you never find out what the something is, and it doesn’t matter.  Things get very creepy.  For one thing, the deer start to mass into huge herds.  For another, there is an incredibly loud noise.  And then some flamingos arrive and the childrens’ teeth start falling out. 

I wish LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND had been longer. I wanted to know where it was going, because while it did mounting terror very well, it was strange for it to end, as it did for me, mid-mount. 

I also struggled slightly with how literary it was.  I love the author’s twitter feed (you should follow @rumaan) which is hilarious and contemporary and unfussy.  The novel had a bit too much philosophizing for me, basil chopping, and etc. 

And yet I would indeed feel very proud if I had written it.  Strongly recommend.  Makes you feel COVID’s not that bad. 

THE TOPEKA SCHOOL by Ben Lerner

Here is a book that confirms abundantly my suspicions about books with long sections in italics. Authors seem to feel like as long as it is in italics it is going to be okay for it to be sort of rambling and non-rational. There is only so much of this kind of thing I can take.

These italics parts are reserved for a developmentally disabled teenage boy who is being treated cruelly by the cool kids. The main character is one of these cool kids. Or maybe not that cool, because he is a debate star, and debate is not cool. On the other hand the whole thing takes place in Kansas, so who knows, the bar may be lower there.

In any case, THE TOPEKA SCHOOL is very much a boys’ book, packed full of boys’ issues. It was rapturously reviewed, so maybe I am missing something, but I just couldn’t get into it. Apparently the fact that in high school debate you are rewarded for building arguments you don’t believe in is problematic and speaks to larger issues in America. Or similar. I don’t know.

AUGUSTUS by John Williams

John Williams wrote the novel STONER, a novel that this blog tells me I read in 2013. So profoundly wonderful is this book that the author’s biography is called THE MAN WHO WROTE THE PERFECT NOVEL. You will note that it does not refer to perfect novel(s) and this is because AUGUSTUS is unfortunately not a perfect novel.

Don’t get me wrong, it is much better than what most people could achieve on their very best day after a lifetime of trying, but still in comparison to STONER it can only be meh.

It is a deeply researched account of the life of Augustus Caesar, told through the letters of his contemporaries. Apparently ancient Romans were great letter writers – Cicero wrote eight to ten a day (did he not have a job?) – and so this is not as unlikely a device as it at first seems.

It is an interesting story, but for my taste a little bit too much sandals and togas and boys impressing each other. But perhaps it’s just that it’s not STONER. Sadly nothing can be STONER.

Sometimes one regrets seeing how high the bar can go, because it makes one realize how low it is usually set.

THE GREENGAGE SUMMER by Rumer Godden

Here is a novel about getting your period.  It also involves some jewelry theft and desecration of the Glorious Dead.  

It’s 1923 and a single mother of five children gets so tired of their sass that she decides to take them to a First World War battlefield so they will be shamed into good behavior. Once in France she is bitten by a horse fly and nearly dies because before antibiotics everything was apparently serious. She spends the summer in hospital while her children run unsupervised around an elderly hotel that smells of “warm dust and cool plaster… Gaston the chef’s cooking, furniture polish, damp linen, and always a little of drains.”  The hotel makes a business of the battlefields. They re-bury a soldier’s skull in the garden for the dogs to dig up before each group of tourists arrive, and make sure the machine gun holes are never painted over. Good behavior from the children does not markedly improve. 

Instead they spend the summer exploring their budding sexuality (older children) and the greengage orchard (younger children).  The oldest girl has a romance with someone who turns out to be a murderer and a diamond thief, which sounds about right for the judgement calls you make when you are 16. Our narrator, her 13 year old sister, is very jealous, through the thief kindly helps her getting her the female sanitary products she needs.  

This also sounds wildly unbelievable as I write it, but was in fact based on the author’s own experience.  What I really enjoyed about the book in fact was not so much the lurid plot, as the great charm of her vivid recollection of her siblings and the French countryside. It was somehow very sweetly melancholy as a bottled memory of a time and a place, that is now slipping out of human memory.  Only the very oldest people still recall that summer of 1923, and it was touching to hear about it as we approach 2023.

THE NONESUCH by Georgette Heyer

In this novel a wealthy man falls in love with the governess.  Based on the novels, I’ve read, apparently this used to happen all the time in the old days.  I don’t know what these governesses had going on but it was REAL effective.

Of course the other option is that this is all wish fulfilment, and that in the past, just as today, people typically ended up with someone who was in the same income, same age, and same level of attractiveness.  Also, and this is very important, same level of willingness to settle and decide they can’t do any better. 

Definitely I prefer the wish fulfilment.