Speedboat and Pitch Dark, Renata Adler

At the Rumpus, Menachem Kaiser well evokes the "special sort of mystification" of reading Adler's (anti-)novels. In the spirit of Kaiser's excellent essay, I present a few of my favorite renatas---Kaiser's preferred term for Adler's discursive "observations, anecdotes, pensees, diatribes, jokes, tragedies, mini set pieces, monologues, and etc."

From Speedboat, on the point and pointlessness: 

What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is a momentum, a fact, a quality, a voice, an intimation, a thing said or unsaid. Sometimes it's who's at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life.

And another from Speedboat, on finding one's way: 

.. what if one's son (or, and this seems unimaginable, daughter) simply, from the first and in every way, doesn't turn out right, or is unhappy all his life, what then? I don't know what then. 'You can't miss it' always means you're never going to find it. The shortest distance between two points may well be the wrong way on a one way street. All the same, all the same, I think there's something to be said for assuring the next that the water's fine---quite warm, actually---once you get into it. You can't miss it. It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime.

From Pitch Dark, on losing and finding:

What I wish I had not lost is the photograph of him, the only nice one. What I wish I had not lost is the ticket for my raincoat at the shoe repair shop. What I wish I had not lost is the suitcase with the letters. What I wish I had not lost is the time, or the inventory of the lost things, or the consciousness of all the things that are not lost.

And again, from Pitch Dark, on the sentences that bend your ear:

I look at you for signs of leaving me and find to my despair that one of us has already left. Maybe it’s me. But, if it’s me, I always do come back, or always have. Please don’t go. Writing is always, in part, bending somebody’s ear. As reading is. In the matter of the commas. In the matter of the question marks. In the matter of the tenses. In the matter of the scandal at the tennis courts.

Giving Up the Ghost, Eric Nuzum

Nuzum's meditation on otherworldliness covers everything from rock music to mental illness, spiritualism, death, and so much more.  But are there really ghosts in our midst? “I don’t believe that places are haunted," he reflects, "but I do believe people are haunted. People carry around the ghosts of their pasts, the people they’ve known, the world they’ve experienced. Most of the time, we never notice they are there.” What follows you around?

The Cranes Dance, Meg Howrey

This novel tells the story of two sisters, dancers with a New York ballet, and how they cope (or do not) in the world of this taxing art. Quick moving, with well-drawn characters, I quite enjoyed the book (much of which I read during jury duty). 

One bit that was particularly intriguing was an observation about the changing nature, if you will, of entertainment and audiences' expectations: 

The number of people who will accept being an audience to anything is getting smaller and smaller. Mostly people seem to want to be the person looked at, even if they don’t know what they are doing, even if what they are doing is horribly embarrassing.

Does everyone want to be the person looked at now, or will things swing in the other direction, at a certain point, once we reach Peak Selfie? I'm not sure, but I, for one, am content to sit in awe as others work their magic; it's not the Kirov, but I do quite enjoy seeing the feats of athleticism on So You Think You Can Dance? , which just began its tenth season. 

 (Below, Anna Pavlova, obviously not a SYTYCD contestant, but a dancer I thought of as I read The Cranes Dance nonetheless.)

Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg

Much has been said, in so many other venues, about Sandberg's manifesto on women and work. What I found most compelling---and what I see emphasized less in the conversations this has sparked---is the local call to action, the imperative to start today, with ourselves.

“We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small,” she writes, “by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in. We internalize the negative messages we get throughout our lives---the messages that say it’s wrong to be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men. We lower our own expectations of what we can achieve. …. My argument is that getting rid of these internal barriers is critical to gaining power.”

There are more things that need to happen---cultural changes, policy changes, and so on. But those bigger shifts may well depend on many (perhaps small) actions in our everyday lives. As Sandberg notes, “These internal obstacles deserve a lot more attention, in part because they are under our own control. We can dismantle the hurdles in ourselves today. We can start this very moment.”

Her message is clear, compelling, and a call to action. I was a skeptic, but I have to admit that I came out of the book energized, maybe even inspired.

The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets, Kathleen Alcott

Overarching narrative aside, there were some undeniably beautiful passages in this story of two families that intertwine over the years; it's always exciting to encounter a turn of phrase that makes me see familiar words as new again.​ And again, I stumble on a passage on the theme of memory (reading Proust, perhaps, has made me fixate?):

[T]here's no guarantee that someone standing at precisely the same longitude and latitude as you will remember the view the same way, no promise that one person's memory of a moment or a month will parallel yours, retain the same value, shape the years of living that follow.​

Matilda, Roald Dahl

I reread Matilda, a childhood read I fondly recall, in anticipation of seeing the Broadway adaptation of Roald Dahl's book. I was surprised to find I had  suppressed the fact that, by the end of the book, nominally intellectually satisfied, Matilda loses her magical powers: I had imagined she was simply otherworldly, but really, it is circumstance that necessitates she use her gift to tip over glasses, levitate chalk, etc.

The show was really rather lovely, although it took some creative liberties (including the introduction of an Italian dancing partner, Rudolfo, for Mrs. Worwood)​, and featured excellent musical numbers, interesting choreography (including a number with a fascinating swing sequence, which you can see a glimpse of in "When I Grow Up," below), and rather good casting. All in all, a fun tribute and a great night out.

Incidentally, Mara Wilson, Matilda in the 1996 American movie adaptation, has been doing ​a bit of writing here and there: on Cracked, she pontificates on what makes child stars break down; on the Daily Beast, she reviews Matilda the musical. 

The Lost Art of Walking, Geoff Nicholson

This idiosyncratic look at walking---and the philosophy, the art, the history, the literature of it---​is a refreshing read, a brisk stroll through the subject that doesn't sacrifice its structure in taking the reader down less-trodden paths. Nicholson resists the sentimentalism I've come to acquaint with much chatter about the putting of one foot in front of the other (see: the rhetoric of charity walks, epic cross-continent journeys); rather, he holds, "Walking is special but it's not strange. It's not a stunt. it's worth doing for its own sake.​"

He also discusses, to some degree, how intertwined the acts of writing and walking are, both rather simple acts at their core: "[W]ords inscribe a text in the same way that a walk inscribes space. ... writing is one way of making the world our own, and ... walking is another." ​Indeed. 

Loitering With Intent, Muriel Spark

Life imitates art in Muriel Spark's Loitering With Intent, the recollections of a novelist's involvement with the ill-fated Autobiographical Association. The eccentrics peopling the book were engaging, but particularly provocative were some of Spark's observations about the act of writing itself (an act that, for the narrator, "took up the sweetest part of my mind and the rarest part of my imagination; it was like being in love and better").

I also quite liked this, on memoir versus fiction:​

It strikes me how much easier it is with characters in a novel than in real life. In a novel the author invents characters and arranges them in convenient order. Now that I come to write biographically I have to tell of whatever actually happened and whoever naturally turns up. The story of a life is a very informal party; there are no rules of precedence and hospitality, no invitations.

Life as an informal party: just lovely. One can never plan for the uninvited guest, just pass the canapes and pour them a glass of wine, yes?​

(Above, at left, is Spark's author photo from the dust jacket of the copy I read. Fantastic, right? She appears to be wearing a long necklace from which hangs a golden pig charm.)

The Magic Circle, Jenny Davidson

Billed as "The Secret History​ as directed by Whit Stillman," it's near-impossible to read The Magic Circle ​and not think of Donna Tartt's 1992 book. (Tartt's next book, The Goldfinch, is slated to be published this October; that's one to look forward to!)

Davidson's short novel, ostensibly about game designers staging a live-action role play of the Bacchae​, calls on many elements of Greek tragedy, updated for the Internet age. It's a quick read, but perhaps too freighted with references; my mind wandered, and I found myself thinking of, say, the maenad season of True Blood ​(season two?). 

The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals, Elizabeth Smart

​I'd written down on a piece of scrap paper an Elizabeth Smart title---By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept---that I wanted to pick up, but I couldn't find a copy at the library, and so I took a chance on one of Smart's other books. The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals is short, hardly a hundred pages, the prose rather poetic (or the poetry rather prose-like?).

I found myself scribbling down passages almost every other page.

On the changing of seasons:​

Out in the garden it is May, but the sun keeps going in, and I have been frustrated too many times to be able to withstand its uncertainty. The lilacs and the fields of buttercups and the birds' eggs in the hedges are mere statistics, like the inventory of a house whose inmates have no meaning or connection, a catalogue of the world, without passion or caprice.

Who can I talk to? Who can I be angry with?

On writing: 

A pen is a furious weapon. But it needs a rage of will. Everything physical dies but you can send a mad look to the end of time. You can manipulate the bright distracting forever-escaping moment.

On keeping on:​

You brought it upon yourself. You have only yourself to blame. True. True. Perfectly true. Too late to desert. Too late to heave off your crippling kit and head for the hills. The problem now is how to put one foot forward, never mind best, just foot, foot, foot. Forward. On. Just keeping your feet from going numb. Just keeping them functioning.

Where I Was From, Joan Didion

Not fully memoir nor fully academic nonfiction, this treatment explores Joan Didion's California through the years---from World War II through the 1992 riots and beyond.  It's a fascinating mix, Didion's reminiscences about her family woven into thoughts on, say, Frank Norris's The Octopus​, the reach of the railroad, the Donner Party, and the Spur Posse. 

As I pick through my own family history, so situated in California and the Sierras in particular, Didion's thoughtful prose is a balm. But not everything can be ordered, as she notes, sorting through what's left when her mother dies. She puts what she wants to keep in a large box: "letters, photographs, clippings, ​folders and envelopes I could not that day summon up the time or the heart to open." Later, in her own home, she finds things to give to loved ones, things to pass along. But after a time, "I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose."

Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods, Christine Byl

In keeping with my interest in all things outdoors (while being trapped in the confines of a city), I checked out Christine Byl's Dirt Work​. The memoir recounts Byl's days as a trail dog in Glacier National Park and Denali Nature Park & Preserve. It serves as a good complement to Cheryl Strayed's Wild, I suppose---who helps build the trails that we traverse? My heart belongs to Yosemite, but now I'm itching to visit more national parks. And in addition to explaining the uses of a shovel and a clinometer, Byl has some wisdom to pass on.  

On parts of speech and finding what's real:​

An authentic life will be built, at least in part, of ordinary verbs: wake, plant, dig, mend, walk, lift, listen, season, note, bake, chop, store, stack, harvest, give, stretch, measure, wash, help, haul, sleep.​

On finding your way in a new situation:​

​The only way to enter a new world without humiliation or offense was to keep ears open and mouth shut. Quiet is better than stupid.

On the changing of the seasons, and how being attuned to them affects us:​

I love fall in part for its contemplative underpinnings, the way it makes me notice the concrete world (everything's dying) and think about the abstract one (everything dies). When trees and brush go aflame right before leaves and blooms pale at winter, I also wonder: will I have even minutes as full of purpose as these plants do, when my hue is tinted by the tasks of my hands?​

​Lovely. The rain falling on the concrete this morning smelled, just for a second, like sweet pea; then the tangy metallic of industry overwhelmed it---a fleeting reminder of the powerful call of nature, of what I miss about the Northwest and the Sierras, always in my thoughts when I read books that invoke the great outdoors.

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson

I'm going to be thinking about this one---the story of Winterson's growing up adopted, and finding her biological mother, but about so much more than that, too---for quite some time. ​

One of the most powerful aspects was her emphasis on reading as redemption, as a means of expanding one's world when it feels impossibly small. Read broadly, she says:​

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.​

And read to unleash yourself; let literature take you in a new direction:

There's a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations. Reading is where the wild things are.​

Z, Therese Anne Fowler

I didn't much care for this fictional retelling of Zelda Fitzgerald's life with F. Scott; it's entertaining enough, but I suppose a straight-up biography like Nancy Milford's Zelda---or even a great piece on reading Zelda, like this one in the Oxford American---would do just as well. 

If you're looking for a historical fiction fix, I'd suggest Fever (on Typhoid Mary) or Marisa Silver's superb Mary Coin (on Dorothea Lange and ​her Migrant Mother​). But my finishing the book coincided with the University of South Carolina's digital release of F. Scott Fitzgerald's ledger, discussed in Z. The fascinating document is worth a look: ​you can see Scott's notes on "published miscelani," gawk at "Zelda's earnings," or even view an "outline chart" of his life.

Bright's Passage, Josh Ritter

I’ve long been a fan of Josh Ritter’s music; I return to the epic “Thin Blue Flame” (video embedded below) again and again for comfort, for fortification. His lyrics invoke fantastic images and often weave story into the song. (“The Temptation of Adam,” “To the Dogs or Whoever,” and “Harrisburg” should give you a sense of some of this.) And so I was rather excited to pick up his novel, Bright’s Passage, and see how that translated across media.

The short novel tells of Henry Bright, a West Virginia boy back from World War I, an angel in tow, his first child just born. It’s odd, and upon finishing, I’m not quite sure what to make of it; I want more, more of Henry, more of the angel, more of the villainous Colonel and his motivations. Perhaps it’s better to leave a reader intrigued and grasping, rather than utterly disgusted; and, it’s true, the glinting language is enough that I would pick up another book if Ritter wrote one.

Within a Budding Grove, Marcel Proust

My progress on In Search of Lost Time ​continues unabated; at turns I find the prose difficult, and then I am swept up in the beauty of his words and find that I've raced through hundreds of pages. I don't have much to say that hasn't already been said, and so I leave you with a thought from Proust on why solitude is essential to artistic creation:

We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute ...

Reminiscent, really, of Susan Cain's book on introversion.​

Dare Me, Megan Abbott

Abbott chillingly invokes the savagery of teenage girls, this time in the world of competitive cheerleading. This page-turner focuses on the lives of the squad and their coach, wrapped up in an affair that goes awry and has consequences no one could have anticipated.​

Mary Coin, Marisa Silver

Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother​, left, is the jumping off point for Marisa Silver's novel examining the way images persist and interact with history.

Silver weaves three narratives---that of the photographer, the migrant mother, and a professor---together masterfully. But just as entrancing as the arc of the story itself is Silver's writing, reflective and revealing and beautifully strung together. She offers new ways of looking at history, emphasizing the importance of critically examining our world. Perhaps the inquisitiveness of the professor character best demonstrates this:

He doesn’t know what the project will ultimately yield. He doesn’t want to know. Not now. Because answers are inert things that stop inquiry. They make you think you have finished looking. But you are never finished. There are always discoveries that will turn everything you think you know on its head and that will make you ask all over again: Who are we?

Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner

Lerner's meditation on artistry and displacement, translation and mistranslation, recalled for me the time I spent in India, to a degree. Not belonging there, but also not not belonging there, fills you with a sense of possibility. "I had the endless day, months and months of endless days," the narrator reflects, "and yet my return date bounded this sense of boundlessness, kept it from becoming threatening. I would begin to feel a rush of what I considered love, first for the things at hand: the swifts, if that's what they were, hopping in the dust, the avenues of old world trees, the stone statues of kings and queens with whom the tourists pose."​

The most deeply felt, though, was something else: "... most intensely [I loved] that other thing​, the sound-absorbent screen, life's white machine, shadows massing in the middle distance, although that's not even close, the texture of et cetera itself."

In coming and going, feeling lost and struggling for words, there is a great deal of ambiguity; still, great things can come of that muddling through.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain

Susan Cain is speaking up for those who don't necessarily want to raise our voices: "Today, " she writes, "we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles. We're told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable. We see ourselves as a nation of extroverts---which means that we've lost sight of who we really are." (That is, because a third to a half of the US population is introverted.)

​Quiet ​articulates well the cultural expressions of introversion and extroversion, and it emphasizes the importance of balance; mixing introverts with extroverts, each capitalizing on their own strengths to stem problems that might erupt from the overly narrow vision that results from groupthink. Moreover, it discusses ways to broach relationships, career, and more, taking into account that you might have to "code switch" to make headway on the projects you're most passionate about. 

​Most valuable, though, is the grace and compassion the message affords: for introverts and extroverts alike, Cain says, "Love is essential; gregariousness is optional. Cherish your nearest and dearest. ... Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you're supposed to. ... Whoever you are, bear in mind that appearance is not reality. Some people act like extroverts, but the effort costs them in energy, authenticity, and even physical health. Others seem aloof or self-contained, but their inner landscapes are rich and full of drama." Sensible, pragmatic, and reassuring counsel.