Tag: USA

IN THE CUT by Suzanne Moore

Writing about sex is famously hard, but this book makes it look easy.  It’s a thriller, in which a woman becomes involved with a homicide detective who she suspects of having himself committed the murder he is investigating, and of thinking of murdering her too. She gets lots of sex from him, and lots of sexual harassment from everybody else. 

I can only wonder what New York was like in the 90s.  For example: at one point she sits down to eat a hamburger alone in a bar, some guy starts bothering her, and she leaves.  What is weird about this is that apparently it was clear to her (and to him) that eating alone was asking for trouble, and when that trouble comes, she does not at all expect anyone to help her.  She barely objects.  Imagine!  I never think twice about eating alone.

The book is so very thriller-y that I was continually surprised to see it was written by a woman, and was interested by this, from the Guardian

Today, speaking to me from New York, (the author) says she realised she had been pigeon-holed as a “woman’s writer”. “And I found that quite limiting. So I decided that I would write a noir thriller, which is more commonly associated with male writers. It was very conscious on my part that I would make it tough and as erotic as possible.”

It’s kind of pot-boilerish, but that’s just what she is going for. And really, she’s  a fine writer.  Not just about sex, but try this description below, which I find very true of big talkers:

Like most people who are anecdotal, he told me nothing.  He revealed nothing about himself.  He talked a lot, but he only told me what he wanted me to know.  Which wasn’t much.

DEAR GIRLS by Ali Wong

Here is a set of essays by a stand-up comic, structured as letters to her young daughters.  It is fun and silly.  Here she is on a failed one night stand:

That’s what happens when you spontaneously go home with a fellow struggling stand-up comic or, even worse, an improviser.  (Please says say ‘fuck no’ to those ‘yes and’ mother fuckers).

I have for some reason read quite a few books by stand-ups, and I’m always struck by how incredibly rough it sounds: the travel, the horrible venues, the silent audiences.  I admire it.  I was especially touched by her early twenties, which sound a lot like mine:

Every day in NYC was about spending as little money as possible. 

People don’t talk about that too much, preferring to focus on having genius or technique or whatever, but in my experience being able to live on nothing is way more important

THE STRANGER IN THE WOODS by Michael Finkel

Here is the true story of a man who camped in the woods, completely without human contact,  for 27 years.  I take it back: in the 1990s, apparently, a hiker said ‘hi’ to him. 

This is a mind-boggling story.  This guy from Maine, one year out of high school, leaves work one day and drives to Florida.  Then he drives all the way back to Maine, past his childhood home, and keeps driving, deeper and deeper into the woods, until he runs of petrol.  He puts the keys on the dash, and heads into the woods with nothing.  And then he just doesn’t come out again.

I don’t want you to get the impression that he was there, wandering through glorious vistas and living off the land.  He essentially found a small clearing, behind some rocks, that was minutes away from holiday homes, and just stayed there.  All winter, he did not move.  Even in summer, he only left to go steal necessities form the holiday homes.  He just sat there, in this clearing, for 27 years.  Once finally caught, police noticed how pale he was, and he accounted for this as follows:  ‘I’m from the woods, not the fields.’  His main concern once police were in his camp seemed to be for his mushroom, that had grown from being coin-size to dinner-plate-size while he sat there.  He apparently concluded he could not have a mammal pet, because he did not want to have to ever be forced to eat a pet. 

This was a possibility, because every winter he got close to dying.  He stole as much as he could in the summer, but it was hard to make it through the whole winter on that.  He woke up every night at 2am to walk around so he didn’t freeze to death.  And all the time there was a convenience store not 10 minutes away. 

Probably the weirdest part of this whole story is that this guy does not seem to be crazy.  In the woods he listened to the radio, and read books.  After getting out of prison he went back to live with his family (who btw he did not tell that he was leaving).  It just seems he did not much like human interaction, so he cut it out.  He opted out. 

He spent a lot of his time in the clearing apparently not fixing stuff, or reading, or whatever, but just sitting there.  He cannot well describe it, but it is clear he had the experience of going out of himself.  Because you don’t need a self when there is no one else to have a self for.  He just listened to the wind and looked at the leaves.  And then there was the pet mushroom.

I mean it does make you doubt your own choices.  Somewhere the author quotes the line, attributed to Sophocles, of ‘Beware the barrenness of a busy life,’ and I’ve been thinking about that.

FOREVER YOUR ROGUE by Erin Langston

I read this romance because it was recommended in the New York Times. I was not quite prepared for how genre it was. It was full of smouldering eyes and things that throbbed. That said, I enjoyed it! The author pulled off the difficult feat of writing historical fiction in a way that felt contemporary and real without being ridiculously anachronistic. I also think genre writers don’t get nearly enough credit for how difficult it is to re-tell the most re-told stories in a way that is fresh and interesting. Also, I must confess I read it on a hot beach with a cold beer. How dead inside would I have to be to not enjoy that?

WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDES OURSELVES by Karen Joy Fowler

I so loved Fowler’s BOOTH that I decided to immediately turn to the much more famous WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDES OURSELVES.  It is full of fun snippets.  As for her example, her landlord:  “Ezra Metzger, a name of considerable poetry. Obviously, his parents had had hopes.” And when two people come to enquire about him:

They said he’d applied for a job in the CIA, which struck me as a terrible idea no matter how you looked at it, and I still gave him the best recommendation I could make up on the spot.  “I’ve never seen the guy,” I said, “unless he wants to be seen.”

LOL.  And all this for a super minor character. Or try this, on her childhood toy:

. . . Dexter Poindxter, my terry-cloth penguin (threadbare, ravaged by love – as who amongst us is not) . . .

I love that parenthesis.  That said, I did not like this novel nearly so much as BOOTH.  It has a twist that I don’t want to give away, so it is hard to tell you too much about it, but while jokey it is actually a novel about grief.  And that I just found too much like hard work.  It was a long journey through loss, and I wasn’t really ready for that.

THE WAGER by David Grann

A tale of shipwreck and cannibalism to at beat all stories of shipwreck and cannibalism. In 1742, thirty men wash up in Brazil in a makeshift open boat. They have travelled an astounding 5000kms up the coast of South America after being shipwrecked.

It is a totally astounding story. Their ship, the Wager, left the UK to go fight the Spanish. They had been desperate for sailors, so had pressganged anyone, and by anyone I include limbless invalids. They go down the coast of S America (“below the forties there is no low; below the fifties there is no god”). They are running out of food and have scurvy, so in addition to losing their teeth they are losing their minds. They shipwreck and about 140 of them make it onto a desert island, with the limbless ones drowning in their hammocks. The island has nothing much on it but seaweed, which is not so bad because at least it has Vitamin C in it so some sanity returns, but then they face the very real prospect of starving. It all goes on: manslaughter, cannibalism, and eventually mutiny. The captain has a mad plan to save them, so they go with the plan of the lowly gunner. 80 survive to get on the lifeboat, of whom 30 make it to Rio.

A few months after they arrive, 3 more make it: the captain’s mad plan did indeed fail, but then some local people agreed to walk them half way up the continent to the Spanish. On the outskirts of the city, a free Black British man who made it all this way, is kidnapped and enslaved: horrifying.

Then they make it back to Britain and there is much argument about who ate who and who mutinied when. What I found overall hilarious about this story was that a few days after the shipwreck the men were in fact found by some locals, who gave them food and tried to help. The men harassed the local women and tried to steal their boats. So the locals went away and left them to it. Can you IMAGINE? All of this was completely unnecessary. All they had to do was behave relatively normal around the locals and nobody would have had to get eaten! And still they could not do it. Colonialism was sometimes pretty intense.

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.