Tag: USA

QUIETLY HOSTILE by Samantha Irby

Irby is the only author I’ve read who comes close to Sedaris. I love her three previus books, MEATY, WE ARE NEVER MEETING IN REAL LIFE, and WOW NO THANK YOU. She writes personal essys in the voice of the internet, which I feel is a whole new form, no doubt to be quickly replaced by the voice of or AI overlords.

This fourth book, QUIETLY HOSTILE, I also enjoyed, though perhaps not as much as the others. In part, I guess, I am used to her style, so it delights me less. In part, also, she is doing better in her life, and somehow that always make for a less fun essay. I noticed the same thing with Sedaris: no matter how charming you are, it hard to really warm up to anecdote that involves buying trousers for $300.

In the first books, Irby is a single receptionist in Chicago with a long list of health problems. In QUIETLY HOSTILE she is happily married and living in rural Western Michigan. You ae fond of her, so glad it has gone well, but somehow its not quite as funny. That said, I’ll buy the next one on pre-order too.

BOOTH by Karen Joy Fowler

I really liked this one.  It is the story of the family of John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln.  It is a fiction, based on their actual lives, and their actual lives were extraordinarily loopy.  Their father was a celebrated actor, who also seems to have been lightly crazy.  He did a lot of physically attacking good friends, holding funerals for pigeons (?), and digging up his dead children to try and embrace them back to life (this I actually find not that crazy).  His wife slogged her way through ten children, a good chunk of whom died of infancy, and much of the book is haunted by this loss.  (This I wonder about: did people really feel this way when children were so much less voluntary than they are today?)

Then we find out that the wife is not really the wife, and he has a wife in England, who comes over to Maryland and spends her time following the family around loudly declaiming they are whores and bastards.  I do find this a cool thing to do, and if I am ever betrayed I will 100% be following this path and not being suckered into having ‘dignity.’  I would much rather have revenge.

We are very close to the perspectives of three of the siblings, two of Wilkes sisters and the brother Edwin (who goes on to be a very famous actor himself), but not actually ever to Wilkes.  It is kind of interesting to see how his family do not realize that Wilkes is drifting into extremism.  It is in that way a very modern story.  But the heart of the story is really not at all the assassination, but more a picture of family life in nineteenth century America, and it is compellingly lively and interesting.  Try this, after Edwin’s young wife dies:

He leans forward, elbows on his knees, head in his hands.  He closes his eyes.  He hears birds, the murmured stream of conversations, children laughing as they run.  It’s a peaceful scene, offensively so.  He rejects it, this thin skin of happiness over the dismal world.  Say good-bye to it, Hattie, and go straight to God.  I’m going to need you there, making me coffee and toast, when my turn comes. 

It was a very complete world.  This last paragraph of the book was I thought great, maybe because it summed up the whole sweep of the thing:

More than a century has passes since they clapped and shouted and cheered him.  All of them, every person in every seat in every theater, now dead.  One by one, they go, winking out of existence.  The enslaved . . . though only ten years old I sold for . . . and the free, the civilians, the soldiers . .. wherever they fired on our boats we burnt everything that would burn . . . the spies, the thieves, the overseerers, the auctioneers, the nurses . .  I have forgotten how to feel . . . the clerks and the clergy, the critics, the poets and politicians, the profiteers, the postboys, the lion tamers, the pigeon killers, the mummers, the mourners, the farmers, the famous, the failures, the fortunate, the fallen, Frederick, Mary Ann, Elizabeth, Henry, John, June, Asia, Rosalie, Edwin, Joe.  One by one, they go. 

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES by Jane Austen and Seth Graham-Smith

Here is a book based on a hilarious idea for a title. I just love the fact that this title exists, but more than that, that someone decided to make a book of it, and more than that, that it became a best seller.

This is the first line:  “It is a truth universally recognized that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”

And it goes on from there, cutting back and forth between the original and scenes of bloody violence. I read an interesting article with the contemporary author, who said it seemed to him obviously very adaptable to zombies, because it involved so much going about the countryside, and a whole platoon encamped nearby for no real reason. I had never thought of this, but it’s true, and I guess a great book contains multitudes.

Towards the end I just started skipping the zombie bits and enjoyed a re-read of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. It’s just extraordinarily, intimidatingly good, and funnier even than zombies.

THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder

In this strange book, a bridge collapses in 18th century Peru.  The focus is on the lives of the five people who die,  which, according to the author is trying to answer the question: “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?”  

This is hardly a burning question, you don’t need a whole book, answer is clearly no.  

In any case it won the Pulitzer in 1929, showing people had some very different concerns back in the day.  That said, it does have some gorgeous bizarre writing. I know Thornton Wilder as the writer of the exceedingly sweet, very American, and rather wonderful play OUR TOWN.  Clearly I had no idea of the scope of his interests, because this one is a real wild ride through metaphysics, South America, twins, nuns, and smallpox ridden actresses.

IT ENDS WITH US by Colleen Hoover

I bought this book because it has a billion hashtags on TikTok. People like to be dismissive of it, because it is romance, and it is wildly popular with young women, and to be fair because main characters have names such as ‘Ryle Kincaid’ and ‘Atlas Corrigan.’

It tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a neurosurgeon (LOL). It slowly emerges he struggles to control his temper and is violent. What is interesting is that he is presented very sympathetically, so you understand how hard it could be to leave.

What I found interesting is the story of the author, Hoover, who was living in a trailer when she started to self-publish her romances which then by word-of-mouth go on to be on the NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER? I mean SRSLY anything can happen.

THE TWO KINDS OF DECAY by Sarah Manguso

A fine memoir about a rare illness. The author has an autoimmune disease which begins by paralyzing your feet and slowly moves up your body, killing you if it gets to your diaphragm (so you can’t breath). As treatment she has all the blood in her body replaced every other day (!!!). This goes on at various periods for years, until she goes to a new doctor who prescribes her massive doses of steroids. This stops the problem but gives her profound depression.

It’s a pretty horrifying story, especially as it begins pretty randomly, with a head cold, in her early 20s, and then dominates the next ten years of her life. What I particularly enjoyed was the fact that she avoided giving it a clean ‘narrative’ – she writes it to us sort of in bits, as she remembers it, which I found very affecting. It was less factually true but seemed closer somehow to how real experience is.

RIDDLEY WALKER by Russell Hoban

Here is a novel of the post-apocalypse. It is all written in a strange made-up mashed up language, like language might be thousands of years and a few nuclear bombs into the future. It is extraordinarily believable and clever, also very annoying. A sample:

If the way is diffrent the end is diffrent. Becaws the end aint nothing only part of the way its jus that part of the way where you come to a stop. The end cud be any part of the way its in every step of the way thats why you bes go ballsy

I couldn’t finish it. As a younger, more eager person I probably could have. I can’t figure out if that is my loss or my gain.

EAT PRAY LOVE by Elizabeth Gilbert

I don’t know why this bestseller has such a terrible reputation. I quite enjoyed it. It is a memoir of a woman whose marriage, and then affair that ended that marriage, both explode spectacularly. She decides to heal herself by going on a year long holiday. What is really impressive about this is she sells a book proposal about this and so funds it upfront.

It is maybe a little obvious that this book was written off the back of a book proposal, and not one for a very sophisticated audience. She plans to travel to three countries: Italy, to explore pleasure: India, to explore religion; and Indonesia to explore balance (?). I’m amazed in 2006 someone could with a straight-face describe whole countries as representing things, but here we are, and it was a bestseller. Let us just be grateful she did not get around to Africa.

I was very interested by her time in the Indian ashram, and her sincere attempts to meditate for hours every day. I try for ten minutes and that is tough enough. I liked this as an explanation of silent retreats:

The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendance emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I’m a failure . . . I’m lonely . . . I’m a failure . . I’m lonely . . ) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.

Now I just need to find a way to fund my holidays with book proposals.

MY FATHER’S DIET by Adrian Nathan West

I bought this book because Andrew Martin (whose book EARLY WORK I adore) recommended it. I can see why he likes it. I liked it too. But I can’t say I really understand it.

It is written from the perspective of a college aged man, who tells us about his father’s efforts, after a divorce, to win a bodybuilding competition. That’s it: that’s what it’s about. A really detailed account of watching his fat, 55 year old father engage in this probably impossible undertaking.

Some readers might think the father a sort of pathetic figure (and indeed the Guardian review thinks this book is about failure), but I did not. I rather admired him. At least he was out there, taking the big swings. The son, on the other hand, mostly sits in his room and tries to skate through college doing the least work possible. He’s a classic narrator of the modern novel, directionless and annoying. Go to therapy already! Or become a drug addict. Enter a body building competition.

I did really admire the super careful use of language in this book. It must have taken huge work. There were many moments when I stopped to admire the specificity of the writing. One time he mentions ‘a procession of eighteen wheelers entering and exiting the pale radiance of a service station.’ Pale radiance! I love it

EILEEN by Otessa Moshfegh

It is often a mistake to read a second book by an author you enjoy, because you start to be able to see their tricks. Such is the case with EILEEN. I enjoyed it, and I especially enjoyed her deeply unpleasant female narrator, but I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t just read MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION, which has the same ingredients but done better.

But who cares, I guess. As long as something is still fun. Most of this book is about the many ways the main character is unhappy, and how much she makes it worse for herself. Eventually, she makes a friend at work. This sounds like a positive development but in fact it ends in murder.

One thing I did not especially like was the inclusion of child abuse. Not that this can never be written about, of course it can, but in this case it seemed to me a little too much of a plot device – as if it was included just to ramp up the tension – which I did not think was needed, or earned. Eileen was capable of murder without anywhere near that much motivation.