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?
Tag: USA
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.
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.