Category Archives: Prize Winner

September 15, 2023 · 2:42 am

Real Life: It’s (not) fine.

Brandon Taylor’s Real Life follows Wallace as he tries to decide whether to stay – in life, in his graduate program, in relationships – and while he wanders grief for his dead father. A grief that lurks but that Wallace insists – over and over – is fine. It’s all fine. And while I’m still not sure what Wallace wants (out of life, out of his sexual/friendship/relationship with Miller, from his friends) or that Wallace knows.

What Wallace does know is that being a gay, black man (the first black graduate student in something like thirty years in his program) is an exercise in indignities – the small and the grotesque – and that each time he waits for his white friends to Do Something and they Do Not he is never surprised, but again disappointed.

Taking place over the course of a weekend, the narrative packs in so much in the compressed time, a case study of ‘show don’t tell’ where we learn so much from the small and subtle moments, and come to want for Wallace anything other than where he is, but like him, can also hardly imagine what else he will do.

It is beautiful, wrenching writing. And maybe a little bit hopeful in the way it imagines that maybe friendship and connection can improve (not just improve something for Wallace, but just as a thing-itself improve).

And yet novels have no obligation to be uplifting (this is not a kid’s climate change book that ends with how you can help the planet! in! five! easy! steps!). It isn’t fine. None of it is fine. Except maybe the novel itself, which is excellent.

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September 15, 2023 · 2:22 am

Lucy By the Sea (and My Name is Lucy Barton)

I had brunch with S. recently where she reminded me of the amazing-ness of Elizabeth Strout. So I promptly ordered My Name is Lucy Barton and Lucy by the Sea. In no small part because of my own L. Minor hiccup about 2/3rds into My Name is Lucy Barton when I realized I’d already read it, but no matter, it was a good refresher before Lucy takes to the sea.

And off she goes at the start of the pandemic and the book is so beautiful. It captures painfully and brilliantly the uncertainty of March and April 2020 for rich people living in North America. The dread and loss and fear. Reading it knowing how the course of the pandemic runs (and runs) it takes an extra sort of writerly magic to find a way to suspend that knowledge for the reader – to bring right back the ways time folded and expanded, compressed and ballooned.

I did find some of the writing grating – don’t get me wrong: extremely beautiful – but also the short sentences and declaration of feelings or thoughts just a bit much. Maybe only because I read the two so closely together that Lucy became a claustrophobic mind to occupy (though again it’s probably a credit to Strout that we so fully occupy Lucy’s perspective).

Anyway, it’s a fast, beautiful read, if you’re ready to revisit those days.

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August 18, 2023 · 7:29 pm

I Have Some Questions for You: So great.

In 2019 I told you that Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers was the one book you should read that year (still true), and while I’m not yet prepared to say I Have Some Questions for You is the best thing you’ll read this year, it’s certainly in the running.

Following Brodie Kane, a podcast producer, as she returns to her high school boarding school to both teach a class and investigate the murder of her former school roommate, the book has the distinct feel of a true crime podcast (I’m sure someone has done a comparison to Serial. And… they have), but one that artfully and consciously plays with the ‘just asking questions’ element of exploring a closed murder case, the retrieval of lost memories, the unearthing of new evidence, the exploration of how changes mores of sex and race influence how crimes are investigated and prosecuted, the risks to the families of victims, the exploitation of trauma, and on.

And while all of that makes for great reading – and the murder mystery element itself is captivating – it’s the sections peppered throughout about the all too frequent ways violence against women is normalized, make routine, made mundane and forgettable that utterly gut punches.

The careful way Makkai has Brodie explore the pendulum of #metoo stories through an accusation made against Brodie’s ex-husband is nuanced and challenging not simply in how Brodie reacts, but in how Brodie reacts to the reactions, how so much of what gets told – and believed – is in the interpretation.

And that, I guess, is the heart of the book. How an innocent person can spend years in prison for a crime they obviously didn’t commit because of a story that gets told and believed. How narratives we tell ourselves about our teenage lives get made real and real and real, until we meet that story retold through another perspective as an adult and are forced to consider whether we might have believed a fiction. How everyone we know and everything with think is necessarily a story and that the real failure – of individuals and institutions – is in not recognizing the way this story is made, made up, and reified.

It’s really good.

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March 26, 2023 · 5:38 pm

David Copperfield and Demon Copperfield: Truly Genius

Ahhhhhhhhh.

I know generative AI is all like ‘I can write a thing in the style of so-and-so’ but with due respect to the robots, you cannot write like THIS. Jesus but Barbara Kingslover Hit It Out Of The Park with Demon Copperfield.

I’d heard it was good – well reviewed and on all the lists from last year, plus some personal recommendations – but felt held back by having not read David Copperfield. Some told me you didn’t have to have read David to appreciate Demon, but I thought I’d better check out the original just in case. And well. Guys. Did you know Dickens was a pretty good writer? Like I know you ‘know’ but maybe you’re like me and you haven’t actually read anything by him (or if you did it was a 100 years ago and a blur of high school English) and so you don’t really know. I mean don’t go out and drop what you’re doing, but I’m here to report: Charles Dickens was no slouch. But then, I cheated. I listened to it on audiobook (double speed and it still took 40 hours) and so maybe I’m a fan because of the British accent reading it to me and the aid of different voices. But probably it’s just a good one.

Anyway. So David Copperfield if you missed it: not an orphan from the outset, but an orphan, spends some time hungry, doing child labour, exploited, left for lost by institutions that should have – could have – protected him. Demon Copperfield? Same plot a few centuries later and this time it’s opioids and underfunded schools and exploitative companies and willful neglect that take center stage for judgement. [As an aside, if you don’t to read David Copperfield, then please, please, read Empire of Pain before you read this one – as it contextualizes (and layers the outrage) in incredibly helpful ways.]

Even while both books brilliantly attack institutions for the unmitigated failure (and not just passive failure, but active harm) of the young and the poor, they simultaneously argue for the profound – life changing – impact of individuals on one another. What harm, what hope might be possible in how we show up (or don’t) for one another.

So sure, all the institutions you can think of are (probably) failing, but they’ve been failing for centuries! Optimistic spin! AND as it always was and is also now true – we aren’t helpless in the face of it. While Demon and David both narrate exceptions – characters who are themselves exceptional and find themselves surrounded by others who – despite the structural failures that crumble – are kind. Kindness and caring are very small in the face of it all, and what we really need is revolution. And still. This reader clings to that tiny thing. Being kind, showing up, despite it all, holding hope.

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