There's a lot -- A LOT -- going on in this book. Some of it feels a bit overdone, but there are profundities hidden amid the swift-moving story of a journalist trying to unravel an auteur's daughter's mysterious death. To wit, nestled in a chapter about how one character got herself to New York is the following observation: "It was never the act itself but our own understanding of it that defeated us, over and over again." It's rather interesting particularly in light of the way that Pessl plays with shifts in perception, of what's real and what's not.
The Zodiac Arch, Freya Stark
This interesting, if uneven, collection of essays by fearless Freya Stark was a good companion on a few quiet nights. One piece that's really quite special is "Himyar, the Lizard," which I could read and reread and probably still cry every time I come to its close, thinking of the little reptile taking to Parma violets for sustenance, at a cost to Freya of a shilling a day.
I could go on and on, but I suppose I'll keep things brief. "Lunch with Homer" is another excellent piece; some of her meditations on memory, and how we grow accustomed to the world, are just lovely:
... the memory has come down thin and pastoral, a hard survival amid rocky hillsides and the thorny, scented thyme. ... [but] voices have become small and dry, dusted over by a century or more of everyday toil that a man can deal with and put the unexpected out of mind. The origins of memory are anyway out of reach.
What begins it may be out of reach, but what remains I can almost touch, taste. It's her evocative imagery that makes the best of these essays sing; that, perhaps, is her project entire, if you take this line from "On Silence" at face value:
A part of all art is to make silence speak.
A joy to listen to the words she brings forth.
Understood Betsy, Dorothy Canfield
A perfectly nice book for young readers about finding a place that feels like home; my favorite part, though, was probably the illustrations by Catherine Barnes in the old edition I picked up. (For some notes on a Canfield novel for adults, see a few thoughts on The Deepening Stream .)
The Interestings, Meg Wolitzer
Wolitzer's novel tracks the lives of six friends who meet at summer camp in their teens. I was concerned this would be a simple coming-of-age yarn, but it's more than that: as she writes, "... clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well." We see the protagonists shift over time, and the narrative is broad -- at times almost too ambitious in its scope.
In detailing so many lives, much of what the reader takes in verges on the mundane, which in the end is part of the book's beauty. It takes a lot of bravado to title a work The Interestings (cue the critics: "More like The Uninterestings!"). But Wolitzer suggests an alternative to the idea that we all must be stars -- that being fascinating is less important than simply being human. "You didn't always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up," the narrator observes. "You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting. Anyway, she knew, the definition could change; it had changed for her." It might change for you, too.
The Universe Versus Alex Woods, Gavin Extence
It's strange, sometimes, how fiction eerily echoes our lives. I finished The Universe ... while sitting in an ER, waiting to be seen, and I read this passage: "X-rays revealed a clean fracture in his left little finger, which had to be bandaged and splinted to his little finger. He also required about a dozen stitches for his head wound."
For me, it was the right little finger and staples instead of stitches, but the parallel sent a chill down my spine.
The Panopticon, Jenni Fagan
Again, I come back to the subject of kindness, in a book where kindnesses are few and far between for the residents of a home for juvenile offenders:
Hayley was quiet, and kind. Kindness is the most underrated quality on the planet. I feel hollow just now. Hollow where a heart should be. Like when you know someone loves you, but you urnay good enough---that it will go. That you'll make it go, it's only a matter of time.
It took some time to get used to the patter (umnay, dinnae, urnay, tae, and so on), but once I did, it was hard to put The Panopticon down. Anais, Fagan's protagonist, called to mind the anti-heroines of Vanessa Veselka's Zazen and Lidia Yuknavitch's Dora, good company for dark times.
Inside, Alix Ohlin
Where does empathy get you? In the past week or so, I've been thinking a lot about how to be, perhaps prompted by George Saunders's call to Syracuse University graduates to "err in the direction of kindness" (his address to the Class of 2013 was reprinted on a New York Times blog).
In Inside, Ohlin presents three stories of people working to let others in, to tend to the needs of others with little kindnesses, but I'm not really sure where we come out, at the end. One character, Tug, reveals a bit of himself to the woman so desperately trying to bring him back from the brink of his own great despair, and yet this still doesn't much help him: "'You can tell people your story,' he said, 'or any terrible story, and it doesn't make any difference. Things just keep happening, over and over again.'"
There's a fatalism to this observation, and perhaps it is true---certain patterns seem to govern our lives. But I like to hope that telling and listening, connecting, can make a difference to a person. Saunders wrote, "What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded…sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly." Even if it doesn't seem like much, being present, trying to muddle through it together, might just be enough.
The Faster I Walk The Smaller I Am, Kjersti A. Skomsvold
In this strange little book, translated from Norwegian by Kerri A. Pierce, there is Mathea, waiting for death. She passes through the world largely unnoticed, wearing her apricot wedding dress and her dead husband's broken wristwatch, carrying a plastic baggie full of teeth (few of which are her own).
You might think that all this would be depressing, but it's not, really; it is what it is, and sometimes someone plants a lamppost over the time capsule that you've just buried, after laboring endlessly to select the perfect message to leave behind---no big deal.
It's this nonchalance, this working against the momentousness of life, that is so compelling. In the end, clinging too dearly to anything can be problematic, Skomsvold seems to say. "When I reach the water's edge, I kneel in the sand," she writes. "I open the sandwich bag and empty out the teeth. I remember how sure I was that I'd find a use for them and that they'd have some sort of significance. But sometimes you have to give meaning to meaningless things."
Indeed, sometimes you do---and you hold onto those things until the time for significance fades, then you find a way to let the littleness, the small gesture, speak volumes.
The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit
I have a talent, it seems, for picking---without knowing much about them---books that will cut me to the core. Solnit's thoughtful, carefully observed nonfiction blends personal essay with literary criticism and historical survey; the first chapter, "Apricots," is a breathtaking meditation on aging, Alzheimer's, and unlikely inheritances.
I've been thinking a lot about place and a sense of belonging one feels in a familiar domain; this passage captures so much of what I haven't been able to put words to:
... when everything was at its worst, I was asked to talk to a roomful of undergraduates in a university in a beautiful coastal valley. I talked about places, about the ways that we often talk about love of place, by which we mean our love for places, but seldom of how the places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer a familiarity that allows some portion of our own lives to remain connected and coherent. They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is a balm to loss, trouble, and ugliness. And distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren’t so deeply entrenched and we can imagine other stories, other selves, or just drink up quiet and respite.
The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest. Being able to travel both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that sometimes comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story.
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
I've been picking through Highsmith's work here and there, and as many well know, The Talented Mr. Ripley is a classic thriller. Tom Ripley is a model anti-hero, disconcertingly sympathetic even as he's drowning a pal and assuming his identity or thudding the friend of a friend over the head with a heavy ashtray to kill him. Highsmith may have been one of the first to evoke a psychopath so clearly and dispassionately; I saw a bit of her influence in Alissa Nutting's Tampa, where the character of Celeste is a well-drawn predator with a lack of remorse similar to Ripley's own.
Highsmith's life was colorful in its own right; in Carmela Ciuraru's Nom De Plume, I seem to remember an anecdote about Highsmith (who used the pseudonym Claire Morgan to write The Price of Salt) smuggling snails into a country by nesting them in her bosom. Joan Schenkar's The Talented Miss Highsmith is calling to me from the shelf, but it might have to wait until I read the rest of the Ripley books.
Silver Sparrow, Tayari Jones
A man takes two wives, and has two daughters, about the same age, by them; try as he does to keep them separate, the center cannot hold. "There is no way to know for sure who has heard what," Chaurisse, one of the daughters, observes, "so all you could do was live your life like no one knew anything while being scared that everyone knew everything." A well-plotted, beautifully written book.
Stay Awake, Dan Chaon
Quick, oddly chilling stories of worlds falling apart. I found this melancholic meditation particularly touching:
She is fond of this kind of vague philosophical conundrum, and perhaps that is why her life feels sad to her even though she should be happy. She wants to find connections where there are none, meanings and structures that she can't completely discern, that are perhaps indiscernible.
You can search, indeed, but what you find may not be what you set out for.
Tampa, Alissa Nutting
Terrifying and near-impossible to put down, Alissa Nutting isn't afraid of making her protagonist rather repulsive: it's with stunned horror that you make your way through her story of Celeste Price, a 26-year-old middle-school teacher who has an untoward fondness for her young male pupils. When the jig is up for Celeste, it is a detective's disgust with her that is disturbing. "[He] was looking at me as though I was some obscene spectacle of nature," she says. "I realized he was watching me with a curious revulsion." That's about the best assessment of the reader's place here, too---the text may be troubling, but it's hard to abandon. I finished the book in two sittings, pushing through the pages not because they offered any great pleasure but because I needed to see how Celeste sails through.
The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner
The title promises a conflagration, and the simmering narrative does not disappoint. It's a strange survey, of the art world in 1970s New York and politics in postwar Italy, motorcycle racing, rubber harvesting in Brazil, and Land Art in the American West, but somehow, it all works near perfectly.
An interesting observation, in passing, on art:
Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.
The Guermantes Way, Marcel Proust
It is in this volume, of course, that the Narrator's grandmother perishes, and so we spend much time meditating on the pitfalls of living in the skin we're in:
It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognize that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.
Another important theme is the Narrator's evolving appreciation of art, and by extension his maturation as a person:
To succeed thus in gaining recognition, the original painter or the original writer proceeds on the lines of the oculist. The course of treatment they give us by their painting or by their prose is not always pleasant. When it is at an end the practitioner says to us: ‘Now look!’ And, lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear.
Halfway through In Search of Lost Time , now; onward, onward!
Big Brother, Lionel Shriver
A bit heavy-handed with her message about Obesity in Our Times, it's nonetheless worth sticking it out to the end of the book to discover the much-talked-about plot twist that up-ends your sense of the narrative landscape. Big Brother isn't what I would call "easy" reading; I felt nervous paging through it, stress-eating to cope with some of the ugly truths Shriver puts forth. Like this pronouncement, bleak but still resonant:
It wasn't that eating was so great—it wasn't—but that nothing was great. Eating being merely okay still put it head and shoulders above everything else that was decidedly less than okay. In which case I was surrounded by millions of people incapable of deriving pleasure from anything whatsoever besides a jelly doughnut.
American Gods, Neil Gaiman
Need a literary page-turner this summer? Try Gaiman's 2001 book, now slated to be turned into an HBO series. A man just released from prison falls in with a pack of gods intent on destroying one another; there are coin tricks, road trips, and a woman who rises from the dead. I devoured the book, about 500 pages, in a single day.
There are many brilliant little turns in American Gods , but one of my favorites was about the art of telling stories itself:
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
A life, which is, like any other, unlike any other.
Black Light, Elizabeth Hand
Enjoyed this, much as I enjoy many a magic-inflected, teenage tale of Dionysian excess. Hand masterfully shows how you extract yourself from a situation you can't control; a few thematically similar (though narratively distinct) stories:
- The Secret History, Donna Tartt
- The Vanishers, Heidi Julavits
- The Magic Circle, Jenny Davidson
I'm sure there are others; suggest some for me? To get another taste of Hand's work, I'd highly recommend her short-story collection, Errantry , which came out recently.
The Vanishers, Heidi Julavits
Although the narrative gets a little muddled at the end—perhaps the writer's remit was overly ambitious?—I couldn't put The Vanishers down.
It's a story of a psychic community, of mothers and daughters, of sickness and health and death and life, of memory and those consciously trying to expunge it. But it's also so much more, an expert study in miniature, an exploration of the beauty of little moments that inform that bigger, almost unwieldy, world.
Our narrator Julia, studying at an institute for psychics, has a gift for regression that earns her the wrath of her mentor when she shows her up; others, though, think Julia might be useful in their own search for an avant garde filmmaker. But the narrator, really, is seeking only one woman: her mother, who committed suicide when the girl was only a month old.
Julia's father, though destroyed, seems resigned to the loss, to the questions left in the wake of his wife's act:
Once I’d asked my father why my mother hadn’t left a suicide note, to which he’d replied, We are not that sort of people. To his mind, this oversight of hers was less a mark of insensitivity than of the tensile strength of her character.
“Most meaningful sentiments are cheapened by articulation," my father said.
Julavits's command of language is on display here, and even in the most fleeting set pieces, the shortest asides, a well-chosen word serves to illuminate, allowing the reader to see the familiar through a new lens. The text itself contradicts his assertion; even the most mundane sentiments can be elevated to the sublime by a discerning observer.
The Fat Woman's Joke, Fay Weldon
The titular fat woman, Esther, who has left her husband after they embark on a diet together, is now hell-bent on eating anything she pleases, regardless of the toll this takes on her thighs. Not so much a person who jokes as one who sneers, Esther lays it out for her friend Phyllis, still preening and striving to please others with her appearance:
I suppose you really do believe that your happiness is consequent upon your size? That an inch or two one way or the other would make you truly loved? Equating prettiness with sexuality, and sexuality with happiness? It is a very debased view of femininity you take .... It would be excusable in a sixteen year old---if my nose was a different shape, if my bosom was larger, if my freckles were gone, then the whole world would be different. But in a woman of your age it is vulgar.
Largely cynical, this book is still an interesting case study of someone trying to break away from the conventions of her coterie. But don't expect a cheery ending (or beginning, or middle): these are the kinds of people who observe, "It is the memory of past happiness that makes the present so intolerable. Better never to be happy at all.” Is it?