Tag: USA

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

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.

ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner

This guy is seriously having a lot of trouble working through his parents’ divorce. 

I read his lightly (very lightly) fictionalized memoir, BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN, a few months ago.  I enjoyed it so tried ANGLE OF REPOSE, for which he won the Pulitzer, a story of the very early days of mining in the American west.  Despite the apparently wildly different subject matter they are in fact essentially the same story: a woman who wants a home marries a man who wants to keep moving.  Rather charmingly, when asked if he had noticed the similarity he replied:

It never occurred to me that there was any relation between ANGLE OF REPOSE and BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN till after I had finished writing it.

It’s fascinating how little insight we all have into our own minds. How you write a 600 page novel and not notice that the main relationship is basically the relationship of your parents, about whom you already wrote a 600 page novel?

The best bit of this book were the letters, which the wife, a highly educated and artistic woman from the East Coast, wrote back to her friend (or more than friend), Augusta.  Here apparently lies a controversy, because these are in fact extracts from the real letters of Mary Hallock Foote, whose life pretty closely followed that of the heroine. 

The story cuts back and forth between the distant past and a present day author trying to write her story, apparently some version of Stegner himself.  From this I learnt that Stegner is a pretty hardcore Republican who doesn’t mind bitching about young people.  Also apparently not too much worried about plaigirism.

This lady was clearly a huge badass, having three kids in super dodgy desert locations while keeping up a career as an author illustrator.  I found it especially interesting to learn about the economics of the early West.  As the author puts it:

The West of my grandparents, I have to keep reminding others and myself, is the early West, the last home of the freeborn American.  It is all owned in Boston and Philadelphia and New York and London.  The freeborn America who works for one of those corporations is lucky if he does not have a family, for then he has an added option: he can afford to quit if he feels like it. 

Interesting to think that we’ve all always been working for The Man.

OHIO by Stephen Markley

I guess I’m not the first person to notice this, but these opiods are a real problem, huh?

I feel like I’ve really been wallowing in the lives of disaffected Americans. It’s remarkable how miserable people in small towns in the Midwest are. Everyone’s a failed high school athlete, a drug addict, a confused lesbian, etc. No wonder they voted for Donald Trump.

OHIO tells the story of four friends from high school who happen to return to their home town on the same night. The reasons are not super believable, but it’s a fun device for having long distant lives intersect, full of drugs and lesbianism, this book being what is it. There is also murder.

This part bothered me. One girl was drugged and raped in high school as a virgin, and developed a searing case of Stockholm Syndrome, which involved her becoming his girlfriend and ‘consenting’ after a bit of beating to all sorts of terrible things. She plots and successfully executes his murder. It is great. Then she gets caught. I can only assume this is because the author is male. I don’t think a female writer could have brought herself to it.

It’s a great in-depth, super specific tour of small town Ohio life. I recommend it.

THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI by Andrew Sean Greer

We are each the love of someone’s life.

I wanted to put that down in case you become so disturbed by the facts of my confession that you throw it into the fire before I get to tell you of great love and murder.

An amazing beginning. I loved Greer’s Pulitzer winning novel LESS, so had great hopes for this book, which is the story of a man who ages backwards.  Set in the early twentieth century, some of it was charming. Lightbulbs are described as “. . . resting on a bed of cotton like the newly deposited eggs of a glass lizard.” Or here is Max’s mother:

She sat sideways in her chair as if she still wore a bustle; she was of a generation that had learned to sit this way in their youth, so she still did it out of habit and out of a sense that this antique pose was the essence of beauty.  The women who sat this way are all dead now. 

Leaving aside how poignant this is, how do you even do the research to know this is a thing of that period?  This sounds like a rave review, but in fact, surprising myself, far from actually really liking this novel, I could not even get up the enthusiasm to finish it. 

The key story is supposed to be his love for some girl.  He barely knows her, and lots of the novel descends into overwrought imaginings of her as the ideal woman.  Somehow this just struck me as very boring.  I’ve don’t know if it was because I had just finished THE HUMAN STAIN, but I just felt like I didn’t need any more of mens’ internal struggle with the idea of women who never actually appear. 

I don’t know if I’m overly woke, or what.  I don’t thinks so though.  I think I’m just very much feeling life’s brevity at the moment, so I’m all about quitting what I’m not enjoying.  So quit it I did, without worrying too much about my reasons.  That I’m not having fun is enough.  I strongly suspect that that, my friends, might be the beginning of adulthood.    It’s been a long time coming.