Tag: USA

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.

 

THE YELLOW HOUSE by Sarah M Broom

I wanted to like this novel.  It was rapturously received, and has an interesting concept.  It tells the story of the family home of the author, and so is a story of New Orelans, of African American life, or hurricanes, and etc. 

However I found it sort of dull and uninsightful.  I’m not sure I’ve ever read so many thousands of words of memoir and come away with so little understanding of someone.  Let me give you this taste, here, speaking of her parents:

As Simon and Ivory settled into life in the rebuilt house, time moved in the usual distinct increments (morning, afternoon, evening; weekends and weekdays), but after a while, everything new turned old and they stopped seeing time as composed of moments.  The years blurred.

I mean, really?   This seems a bizarre imaginative leap into the inner life of your parents.  One point of interest was that the author has two names, Sarah and Monique.    She says:

In its formality, the name Sarah gave nothing away, whereas Monique raised questions and could show up as a presence in someone’s mind long before I did

This I found to be true.  As a fellow Sarah, I can say that the name is wonderfully anonymous.  It gives away absolutely the most bare minimum about you, and makes you fantastically difficult to Google. 

CHERRY by Nico Walker

Emily used to wear a white ribbon around her throat and talk in breaths and murmurs, being nice, as she was, in a way so you didn’t know if she were a slut or just real down-to-earth. And from the start I was dying to find out, but I thought I had a girlfriend and I was shy. 

This is the amazing opening of this amazing novel.  It’s the story of an Iraq veteran with PTSD who pays for his opiod addiction by robbing banks.  It’s semi-autobiographical, as you can tell by the fact that the author is currently in jail for robbing banks.  It sounds bleak, which it is, but it’s also very funny. And so apparently raw that I can only wonder at the huge artistry that went into it.

Let’s enjoy first his descriptions.  A frat house basement:

 done out in plywood, some kind of beer-pong sex dungeon, everything dismal as murder

His fellow recruits in the army:

. .  there was a lot of inadequacy to be seen in the big room.  Fat kids. Acne.  Acne on the face.  Acne on the body.  Skinny kids.  I was a skinny kid.  I wasn’t strong.  We looked like shit.  We’d grown up on high-fructose corn syrup, with plenty of television  . .

He has a terrible time in Iraq, reminding us that while it was not Vietnam it was bad enough.  He’s a medic, so there is a lot of putting corpses in body bags.  It’s so bad his relaxation is looking through the IKEA catalogue to decide what he will buy when he gets home.  In fact, when he gets back he does not buy furniture but OxyCotin.  He ends up robbing banks to pay for his habit, offering good advice:

One thing about holding up banks is you’re mostly robbing women, so you don’t ever want to be rude. 

And

I don’t imagine that anyone goes in for robbery if they are not in some kind of desperation.  Good or bad people has nothing to do with it; plenty of purely wicked motherfuckers won’t ever rob shit.  With robbery it’s a matter of abasement.  Are you abased?  Careful then.  You might rob something. 

Things are really bad; he is so sick from withdrawal that he repeatedly pukes into his own shirt while waiting in line to show his gun to the teller. He is almost relieved when he hears sirens as he leaves the bank and knows he is caught.  He waits for them:

There’s a fuckload of starlings gone to war over a big wet juicy bag of garbage – look at them go!  The big swinging dick starling’s got all the other starlings scared.   He’ll be the one who gets the choicest garbage!

I had no reason to add this last quote, just only I thought it was so wonderful

THE HUMAN STAIN by Philip Roth

I couldn’t finish this book because there was so much whining.  It tells the story of an older college professor who slowly pushes himself out of his job, because he can’t stand the clamour around an allegedly racist statement he made.  He then has a fling with this female janitor which involves a lot of concerns about his erections.  It’s just like, snore. 

It’s not like I don’t think he has problems, what with needing to time the Viagra and his younger colleagues leveraging the scandal to secure their own promotions, but what I found annoying was the novel’s inflated sense of how unjust this was.  And not even that it was unjust, but that it ought not be unjust. It’s as if they are amazed to learn that life is not fair, and have no equipment for dealing with it  I guess that’s what’s called male privilege.

I so loved PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, but looking back on this blog I see I also hated the first book in this trilogy, AMERICAN PASTORAL.  I think I better give up on Roth.  Though let me end on a sweeter note, as I did like this description of someone giving up dating:

. .. I had altered deliberately my relationship to the sexual caterwaul, and not because the exhortations or, for that matter, my erections had been effectively weakened by time, but because I couldn’t meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience — or the toughness, or the shrewdness, or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism — to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings.

Erotic professionalism. I love that.