Category Archives: American literature

November 8, 2025 · 3:25 pm

Dream State: Strong start and then

I made a mistake in telling a few friends to read Eric Puchner’s Dream State when I was only a third of the way in. It’s such a strong start – evocative writing, a pulling theme (how does one major decision or one major event shape the rest of your life?), interesting characters. Set amid the present and near future of climate catastrophe to make the aging of the characters over the course of the novel vivid against what can feel in our incremental experience of time unnoticed in the sharp changes for the reader between decades for a glacier or a lake or an endangered species.

And it’s not like the writing changed – the scene on the mountain with Elias is haunting and beautiful – it’s more I lost conviction that I knew why any of the characters were making any of their decisions. I suspect it’s a form thing – with the big jumps in time (with the exception of one incredible passage where the two children age together over summers over the course of the passage and the reader feels the slipperiness of time in the verb tenses and the dialogue) happen between chapters the reader is given snapshot moments to make sense of Big character decisions, and honestly, so much happens ‘off stage’ that it’s hard to believe the impact of those decisions on the characters and how they behave next. We have to take it on the faith of third person narration that yes, indeed, Garret and Cece still love on another because that’s what a long marriage means? I guess?

So sorry to M. and K. for forcefully recommending this one before reaching the end. If you haven’t yet started it, I’d say it would be a fine beach read, but not something I’d interrupt a year of comic book reading to go out and get.

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August 21, 2025 · 12:37 pm

Let Us Descend

I can’t place what I didn’t love about Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend but it was something about an uncertainty of what would be/was the trajectory of Annis’s story. Which makes sense, I know, in a book of slavery and the experience of uncertainty and alienation for those enslaved. And maybe love of a book focused on the slave experience is the wrong aspiration – something closer to appreciation and awe for the brilliant writing, the evocative and rich descriptions, the pacing and poetry.

The novel focuses on Annis and her journey of enslavement from a time with her mother to a slave market to a sugar plantation and beyond. The physical journey is marked by spirits and hauntings that make manifest (or as manifest as a ghost can be) the intergenerational trauma of slavery and violence – and the ways resilience come from the stories we have been told and tell ourselves. I suppose my uncertainty about what the novel was going to be about (like it felt like I kept waiting for the plot to begin? or the core conflict to be made clear?) misunderstands that the story is one of survival – and that the meaningful trajectory of experiencing endless uncertainty of place, people and threatened and real violence – and when and how we can claim autonomy and community amid the most abject dehumanized moments – is itself the life of Annis and the plot we are meant to follow.

So in this instance I think the problem was me as a reader – expecting or wanting something different from the story – while the book itself is an expertly crafted, compact gem.

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August 21, 2025 · 1:09 am

Three Days in June: Smooth and swift

You could read Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June in one sitting. A quick little slip into the world of Gail – socially awkward, a little aloof, a little out of touch even with herself – as she prepares for her daughter’s wedding. Over the three days she is (at first forced) reintroduced to her ex-husband, Max, comes up against the kind of relationship she has with her mother and the kind she wants with her daughter, and also forced to question her career choices to date and to come. It’s a compact and (I think) successful way to show how change – big change – can happen in a few days when the build toward it has been a long time brewing and there’s a big enough event(s) to make the change possible.

Lovely, too, to return to Anne Tyler, who I haven’t read in years and years, but who I used to read Every Single Book she wrote.

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August 10, 2025 · 3:21 am

The Burgess Boys: If You Don’t Like Elizabeth Strout I Don’t Want To Hear About It

For years if someone liked a food I found disgusting I’d explain to them why they were wrong and how whatever it was was gross. Turns out this is neither a polite, nor particularly well received exchange. You’re meant to just say ‘oh’ and privately think the other person is wrong and their food choices disgusting. Is it different for book (and movies and TV)? Probably it’s meant to be the same. But my face clearly outwardly flinches when someone tells me how much they enjoyed a book that is objectively bad . (And this from the reader who unashamedly told her boss about the glories of Fourth Wing.)

All this to say I love Elizabeth Strout and at the park the other night was explaining to some other parent (who, to be fair, definitely didn’t care about the book I was reading and definitely didn’t want to be listening to me *at length* describing how great it is, but was trapped both by my enthusiasm and No Clear Exit) and she told me she just didn’t care for Olive Kitteridge. The moment was worse – surely worse – then some partisan political exchange. I looked at her with utter disbelief. What is wrong with this woman, I thought, and thankfully didn’t say. But surely my face and eyes did because I am me and I cannot control my face.

All this to say. I loved The Burgess Boys as I have loved everything else Elizabeth Strout and I do not want to hear about it if you didn’t.

I’ve said before that books find me (all of us) at odd times. Or maybe we read into them whatever it is we need in that time. With The Burgess Boys when the young nephew of Bob Burgess is arrested and detained for throwing a pig’s head into a mosque, and then is surprised by the scale of reaction and consequence and the rest of the book follows how this one decision reverberates through a family I thought ah. Ah.

Which is all to say had I read it another time, or in different circumstances, I might have been struck instead by the way Bob’s entire sense of identity is shifted by his brother Jim’s revelation about the death of their father. Or the thread of the novel that is about how we make our own stories and that these stories are all that matter (not any fact you might claim as such). Or the thread of a marriage betrayal. Or that of discovering love when you aren’t expecting it. Or of the gap between celebrity and individual experience. Or.

But we find in great novels what we need in the moment we read them. And in this Strout novel I found consolation, and beauty, and the reminder that whatever we are in – it is already changing. And that these, the stories we tell of ourselves, our mistakes, our worst moments – are ours to make.

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