Tag: USA

FUNNY STORY by Emily Henry

This is fun genre romance. I have never been much of a reader of genre fiction, but I like this lady Emily Henry. She writes quick, funny novels that make a vacation fly by. She is an enormous best seller, and I was interested to read how she thinks about the ‘romance genre’ tag. See below, from CBC. It is continually weird that somehow Stephen King (genre: thriller) is so much more respectable than any female genre writer I can think of

For Henry, it’s important to call herself a romance writer because she’s tired of people looking down on the genre and dismissing its value. 

“There is still a lot of snobbery around the genre and I find it really bizarre because it’s one of the very few genres that is so centered on women,” she says. “Obviously, it’s not just for or about women, but the authorship is dominated by women, the readership is dominated by women and I just don’t think it’s really a coincidence that it’s the genre that gets dismissed so readily…. Romance is so significant because it values women’s stories.”

A YEAR ON EARTH WITH MR HELL by Young Kim

The review I first read about this book was illustrated with a photo of a young Asian woman holding the hand of a much older European man.  The review spent much time discussing whether or not the book is revenge porn, and to my surprise the pornographer is in fact the young woman.

Basically, the guy was married, and had an affair with this lady, and this is the story of that affair.  This is all sounds very salacious but in fact for a book with really a lot of sex in it, it is remarkably straightforward.  There’s a lot of chat about what she wore, and when he did or not text her back.  It was drafted in real-time, as the relationship was happening, which gives it an interesting kind of immediacy.

What I found especially interesting was what this lady did for a living, which, as far as I can tell, was nothing too much.  She had previously been with another much older man, Malcolm McLaren, who she met when she was a student at Yale, and after his death (about which she is clearly heart-broken) she mostly curates his artistic legacy.  She spends her year going between New York and various European capitals, having dinners, going to openings, and wearing designer shoes. I tried not to think the word ‘parasite,’ as of course that is uncharitable.  I guess I like my artists starving.

HELP WANTED by Adelle Waldman

It is striking how few novels there are about the world of work. I wonder why that is? Work is the place where most people spend most of their adult lives, and yet somehow it doesn’t seem to qualify as literary content. Maybe it’s because jobs are too specific? Or maybe on some level we are don’t feel that they are our ‘real’ lives, and so don’t deserve real consideration? In any case, here is one. It’s about the team that unloads boxes at a lowbrow department store. It’s enjoyably about the mechanics of the work (not easy) and about their efforts to get rid of their noxious boss by getting her promoted away from them. It’s unavoidably also about how stressful and precarious it is to work a minimum wage job in the US. This aspect of it veered a little awkwardly close to education/lecture/etc, but Waldman is a good enough writer that the book survives all the same.

As side note on the author. Waldman’s first and only other book was the magnificent THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF NATHANIEL P, a brilliant evocation of a literary Brooklyn, which I have read multiple times. That was however overa decade ago; apparently the author did not write another because (to her own surprise) she did not have any other ideas. It’s funny how minds work.

SALEM’S LOT by Stephen King

This is an imagination of what would happen if a vampire moved into a small town in New England. It’s was fun and very easy-reading, but I find I kind of forgot about it seconds after reading it. It’s King’s second novel, after CARRIE, which is a book that I find I often still think of even years later. I guess it’s because there are tons of vampire stories, but not too many about period-power. Though curiously both involve a lot of blood 🙂

DIRTBAG MASSACHUSETTS by Isaac Fitzgerald

This book of personal essays was reviewed rapturously in the New York Times. I did not quite get it. You don’t need to have had an ‘interesting’ life to write interesting essays about that life. But this is not his problem – Fitzgerald does seem to have had an interesting life : Catholicism, bar work, porn work. And yet the essays were, for me at least, rather vanilla. It’s hard for me to imagine how you write a tame essay about your time in porn, but there you go, seems to have been done. I guess others loved this book, but it wasn’t for me.

THE MANDIBLES by Lionel Shriver

A fun novel of the near future, in which America slips into hyperinflation and then economic collapse.  It was written with real joyful sizzle of wide-eyed surprise and horror, with a  strong vibe  of this-could-never-happen, which is quite fun for a Zimbabwean, to whom it has already happened. 

I have not Wikipedia-ed the author (who I know from the wonderful WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN) because I am a little worried about how much time she spends on Twitter reading about questionable topics like Replacement Theory (snore). That said, there were lots of fun parts of this book. I really enjoyed imagining a world in which the young work low-level jobs (the rest taken by robots) and pay 90% tax so the old can live lives of luxury.  That feels uncomfortable close to likely to me.     

There is lots of juicy writing here.  Try this couple, who are well-off but love to bargain hunt:

Which is how they ended up in a pretty drab apartment in Florida: it was a steal.  Caught up in money-as-a-game, they mistook their raffle tickets for the prize.  Because the only thing that bargain hunting ‘won’ was more money.

Or this, about looking after grandparents:

After all, old people have a horrible habit of kicking it right after you ducked seeing them at the last minute with an excuse that sounded fishy, or on the heels of a regrettable encounter in which you let slip an acrid aside.  To be dutiful without fail is like taking out emotional insurance.

Or this, about someone regretting her choices before the collapse:

But assumptions about her angelic nature were off-base.  After she’d scraped from one poorly paid, often part-time position to another, whatever wide-eyed altruism had motivated her moronic double major in American Studies and Environmental Policy at Barnard had been beaten out of her almost entirely.

I love that phrase –  ‘moronic double major.’  This book is full of the author proving to us how wrong we all are and how stupid.  I really enjoyed picturing her banging away at her keyboard.  Every page absolutely pulses with the rage of the well-fed.  It made me LOL.

THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS by William Maxwell

In case you feel like you have not had enough pandemic content, here is something for you. It’s about the 1918 flu, and is based on the author’s own experience of losing his mother to it when he was just 10 years old.

After the loss he was made to go and live with his aunt, so he lost not just his mother but his whole world. For this reason, the book is actually less about the flu itself and more a sort of memorial to the ordinary days of his childhood just before it.

What is particularly interesting is to be reminded of what childhood was like when boredom still existed. They spend hours in this book doing nothing much, being with their own thoughts. It’s strange to think what childhood is like now, when children have so many books and activities and phones and television. Imagine having to generate your own content!

THE WOMAN IN ME by Britney Spears

I chose this on impulse as an audiobook to listen to on a long car ride, and I did not expect to emerge as TEAM BRITNEY. I am not sure what I thought the #freebritney movement was all about, but WOW I did not realize how right they were.

I knew that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was quite common to get rid of difficult women by putting them in asylums, but did not realize how very much this is exactly what happened to one of the more famous pop stars of our generation. Britney’s father knew exactly what he was doing, because both his mother, and his step-mother, were put in asylums by his father. I am not saying Britney is 100% well, but she was well enough to be forced to do Vegas shows 7 times a week, tour the world, go on morning TV shows, etc. She certainly was well enough to have her own cell phone and choose her own boyfriends and eat french fries if she wanted to!

I can’t believe it went on for thirteen years! It is an appalling story. I recommend it. Britney had a wild and interesting life even before she was imprisoned in plain sight by her father, and it makes for a great memoir.

NORMAL WOMEN by Ainslie Hogarth

There were lots of bits of this book that I liked. Try this:

One of the cats levitated to the porch railing, where it lifted its leg, long and straight as a geometry compass, and made a noisy, jubilant feast of its asshole.

Or this, in a mall food court:

They saw men’s pale legs. Frail as roots. Buried all winter. Exposed, now, too soon. Cold. Tortured. Standing in line for fast food. Bringing their trays to small tables, tucking in the attached chairs, alone, knees pointing in opposite directions. Too much thing. Unsettling tendons. Dry knees. Leg hair. White socks. Sneakers.

But in the end I could not finish it. I just got too irritated. It was about a rich woman who never organized herself to have a real job, and now that she is married and a full-time mom, is anxious about unlikely scenarios in which her husband can no longer earn money. I mean I sort of feel for her but on the other hand she is so checked out she doesn’t even know whether their mortgage is expensive for them or not. I mean?!? It just seemed super-whiny. Suffragettes did not go to jail for this I can tell you that much.

STAY TRUE by Hua Hsu

Here is a book about grief. It is written by someone born in the same year as me, and tells about his best friend in university, who died when he was a junior. It was eerie to read a book so exactly of my time-and-place. That rarely happens for me. I enjoyed this for example, something I had forgotten about:

Back then, years passed when you wouldn’t pose for a picture. You wouldn’t think to take a picture at all. Cameras felt intrusive to everyday life. It was weird to walk around with one, unless you worked for the school paper, which made picture taking seem a little less creepy.

I’d forgotten about a time before photos were the default.

The story was a sad one. What struck me was how much I now recognize what grief looks like: the guilt about what you could have done differently (oh GOD, the guilt), the retrospective wondering what your relationship meant, and etc. I can’t imagine how the author got together the emotional resilience to write it. I barely had the resilience to read it.

One thing I have been thinking about recently is how anytime someone dies, you read about them in the paper after a stabbing or whatever, there is almost always really bereft family and friends left behind. It’s kind of beautiful to think that every random person you see in the street is so surrounded by love.