Here is a genre romcom I read on the beach in an afternoon. It was a genre romcom, so what can I tell you? Boy meets girl, it ends happily, this is what we are looking for in genre fiction. However, one interesting part was that the girl believes she has a terminal illness, and will likely be dead in two years. She therefore lives her life as fully as she can, always getting the good wine, always doing the trips, etc, and it really made me think how funny it is that because we have (maybe) fifty years instead of two, we think we should not get the good wine. It’s not as if fifty years is so very long.
Tag: USA
MARTIN DRESSLER by Steven Millhauser
Here is a Pulitzer-winning book that I despised. This just goes to show how incredibly personal taste in fiction is, because it is not easy to win the Pulitzer, and objectively speaking I can see that this is good writing, but god, I just found it irritating. It has a lot of lists. I don’t think there is any object in nineteenth century New York he does not list. I guess this could be called dense world building. I found it annoying. It tells about a young man who has a drive for success and gets rich off building hotels while mysteriously marrying a woman who is obviously unsuited to him. I mean: why? I could not get it. I’d also whacked my head hard on a car door and was icing it for much of the reading so perhaps that came into it.
WORRY by Alexandra Tanner
I thought I was going to like this book. Despite selling well in the US, it’s kind of hard to get in the UK – only being sold through Blackwell’s – so I went to some effort to get it. It tells about a girl whose sister comes to live with her in her tiny New York apartment. It’s very GenZ, with lots of anxiety and self-harm and talking about the internet.
It had lots of lines like this: “There’s never been a reality in which I could be a serious thinker, a serious writer. I’m a Floridian. I’m a consumer.”
When I started to write this, I thought I had quite liked this book, but now as I try and think what to say, I wonder if I did like it. I actually can’t remember a single other thing about it. It’s already mixed up for me with all the other books I know where women talk about anxiety and self-harm and the internet. Honestly, we need to work on our sh*t.
THREE CAME HOME by Agnes Keith
This was a memoir about a woman and her toddler who spent three years in a Japanese prison camp in Borneo in WWII. As you can imagine, it was not too good a time.
The part that really blew my mind was that everyone knew the Japanese were coming, and she had multiple opportunities to get out (e.g., the wonderfully poetic ‘last boat to Singapore’). She declined because she did not want to leave her husband. DAMN.
She is extremely, extremely hungry, so much so that she has to avoid watching her son eat so she will not steal from him. When she is finally freed, she is so malnourished her sight is affected, and she cannot read. She only cries twice: once, when they are interned, and then once again, when the Australian army drop flyers on the camp to say that Japan has surrendered. This was already rumoured, and so the Japanese prison guards had suddenly been treating them very well, including inviting them to a – get this – farwell banquet?!? This reminded me of COLD CREMATORIUM, another story about someone who made it to the last day of the war in a camp, and lived to see the prison guards start to worry about consequences.
The reason they had already heard about the surrender was that the British soldiers had managed to create a radio. It took them one month to make the radio, but three months to make the tools to make it. It is completely from scratch from various bits of waste metal, and one elderly civilian’s hearing aids. GodDAMN people in the 1940s knew how to do things! It ran on a hand cranked generator, and the strongest man was given extra food so he could crank it.
I think the most horrifying part was the section where the womens’ camp is moved on, and they believe the men, who are left behind, will be executed. The wives and husbands are allowed to speak to each other across a ditch. She thinks this is the last time she will ever see her husband. When the Australians finally arrive, and she is given paper to write home, she writes this:
“We are all alive. George thin, but well. The day we have lived for has come at last. There are no words to tell you what this means to us. I have no words to say what I feel. Peace and freedom at last. Thank god.”
Imagine the state you have to be in, that the first thing you right is, ‘We are all alive.” It was the first news her family had had of her since the beginning of the war.
BORED GAY WEREWOLF by Tony Santorella
This book had a fun premise, in which a twenty-something slacker who is incidentally a werewolf gets sucked into a dodgy self-help movement. But then it went a bit sideways, and kind of trite, complete with fight scenes and ‘found family.’ I am not sure where I wanted this book to go, but it was not that way. But it was fun in any case.
THE MOUNTAIN AND THE SEA by Ray Nayler
I gave up on this book, but I still enjoyed it. The 300 pages I did read were jam-packed with ideas. Basically it asks the horrifying question on what would happen if octopuses acquired our level of intelligence. This I consider a really big concern. Because let’s say dolphins did, or parrots, they don’t have opposable digits, so basically nbd. But octopi have four times our number of opposable digits! Its set in the far future, and is one of the few really believable far futures I’ve ever read. There’s a slave ship for scraping the last protein from the ocean, which has slaves on it because they are cheaper than robots, there’s a cyborg whose feelings are hurt because academics can’t agree if he is conscious or not, there’s customized hologram boyfriends, and that’s before the octopi get super intelligent.
There’s also a cool part about how our brain floats around in total dark, and our whole sense of the world comes from electrical impulses sent to it in its black chamber. I love this image.
WE HEXED THE MOON by Mollyhall Seeley
Here is a book the author describes as being about: “four best friends who fuck around with The Moon and then very quickly Find Out about The Moon.” As you can maybe tell, it is a triumph of voice, and specifically GenZ voice.
The friends do a spell that pulls the moon from the sky.. The moon then comes to their house and wants answers. This plot, while wild, is really neither here not there. What matters is the vibe. Let me not talk about it, let me just quote extensively from the first page:
“Twitter is crumbling, fittingly, into a timeline of what is no longer called Tweets, now called Xs. Twitter is dead & so is nature, probably. Jen’s never having kids. That’s what Jen’s college application was about, framed through a lens of climate grief, ‘the sense of loss that arises from experiencing or learning about environmental destruction or climate change.’ Jen’s college counselor thought grief was a very powerful world. She said Why say grief and not sadness & Jen said Sadness is local, grief is cosmic. Global heating. Universal heating, maybe, who knows. So Jen’s not having kids but she is going to Yale.”
I’ve never read a book quite like it. I can’t say I know what it was ‘about’ – my female friendship? I didn’t care about the characters or anything like that, but I don’t think that was the point.
VIOLET CLAY by Gail Goodwin
I don’t know why this wonderful book is not more famous. I loved it. It tells about a woman trying to be an artist, and covers the terrible fear and dread of that activity better than anything I’ve ever read. Apparently there is a name for the coming-of-age novel of an artist, and it is kunstelrroman, and this is considered by some to be the first female one. (How do we feel about that this only happens in 1978?)
The book is written from the perspective of her early 30s, and covers her confidence as she graduates college (she won a college prize!), to the hard road of the next ten years, during which she has to do commercial illustration, and does less and less of her actual art. She has a LOT of casual sex (is this what the 70s was like? Does not seem hygenic), and suffers very much over how she is intentionally wasting her time and distracting herself from the fact that she is failing – not just in the world’s eyes, but in her own. She is interested in the dates of birth of famous artists, so she can calculate their age at the time of their first big success, and give herself hope that it is not too late for her.
Try this: “New York from across the river resumed the manageable proportions of a maquette, a harmless little table model on which I could project my dreams. It had looked like this when I rode the Carey bus into its center nin years ago from Newark. I still felt the old twinge when I looked at it now. I still wanted to leave my mark on it, even though it had left so many marks on me.”
Substitute London for New York, and I hear you Gail Goodwin, god I hear you. I see this author is still alive and was last published in 2020, so I am for sure going to read more.
GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL LIFE by Emily Henry
I don’t really read genre fiction, except for Emily Henry. She writes clever, fun rom-coms. I was excited for this new one to come out. But it wasn’t really for me. It is about two authors striving to be given the chance to write a celebrity’s memoir, and the main story is intercut with a summary of memoir’s plot. This means half the book is a summary of another, less good book? So I was underwhelmed, though the other half of the book was fun, standard, Emily Henry.
OH THE GLORY OF IT ALL by Sean Wiley
In this memoir we see what happens when selfish people get divorced. The book is by the son, who was nine when his parents split up. His father was immensely wealthy, and did a good job of making sure his mother (third wife) got very little. She responded with high drama, asking Sean (the son) to DOUBLE SUICIDE WITH HER, and then GUILITING HIM when he didn’t. You would think his weeks with his father could only be better than this, but the new wife, the step-mother, is Snow White levels of bad. As a small example, at the dinner table, she has herself, the dad, and her kids sit at one end, and then leaves some chairs before Sean’s chair on his own. There are much more, and much harsher rules for him, and she tells Sean a lot about how his father doesn’t love him.
Predictably, Sean explodes as an adolescent. He is clearly a loving person, and this book is as much about the friends who get him through it, as the parents who are the ‘it’. The book in my view was a little long – we could have lost 100 pages without trouble – but I still enjoyed it, and admired the author rising above his childhood so magnificently.