November 10, 2023 · 9:15 pm

One Last Thing Before I Go: Meh

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Jonathan Tropper’s One Last Thing Before I Go has a nice conceit: protagonist Drew Silver is a washed up musician, divorce husband, absent father and disconnected son and brother. In the early chapters he has some kind of Heart Incident (that sounds entirely made up) that means if he doesn’t have surgery he can drop dead at any moment. And because he thinks his life isn’t worth living he declines the surgery, choosing instead some kind of protracted surprise suicide. For the remaining time he has he makes a list of what he will do that boils down to be a better father and man. It does, and doesn’t, go well.

But while this reader found the first few chapters a sort of delight in the creative descriptions of misery, these quickly wore and became grating and predictable. Likewise, the initial interest that the somewhat novel plot offers wanes as it becomes pretty clear that he’s not going to die and will get the surgery in the end and so any suspense or emotional investment just kind of… peters out.

That said there are some funnier moments and some gentle scenes of someone Trying To Be Better. But I’d file this one away under mostly forgettable, if somewhat heart warming (but not so heart warming as to cause a Heart Incident).

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November 8, 2023 · 7:26 pm

The Book of Joan: Underwhelming

I have a generally favourable opinion of books that get included in the the New York Times top 100 of the year, and there’s never been a better time to read a dystopian novel that shares shattering similarities to the present but sheesh this one was a thump lump No.

Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan is set sometime in the near future when earth has run out of resources or climate change has destroyed those resources or some combination, and what remains of humanity has taken to a space-pod where reproduction has failed and is living itself out in barbie-style bodies with ill defined purpose and organization. What is mostly clear is that scarification is some kind of marker of wealth and prestige, and so people walk around with layered grafts of scars that this reader found unsettling to contemplate.

Our protagonist, Christine, is some kind of skin grafting genius capable of writing full narratives in scars, and in some, again ill defined, way is supposed to be resisting the powers in charge of the space-pod, with the uninspired name Jean de Men, by writing the story of a powerful eco-activist, Joan (aka: Joan of Arc) onto her body.

It’s never clear how this writing is supposed to change anything, but then, isn’t that the promise of all art – that it will make some measurable change in an immeasurable way, shift culture or politics through the radicalness of its writing (or music, or art, or dance, or or or). Which, let’s be clear, I do believe art has this capacity, my problem in the Book of Joan is that the aims are so buried in science fiction uncertainty (like where are we in space, and time, and politics) or maybe more precisely that the world building is so opaque that the reader barely cares to find out if art will succeed in changing anything because the stakes of the change are so difficult to place.

Please do find yourself some comforting dystopian book that will make our current circumstances more reasonable (I cannot imagine what such a book might be), but let it not be this one.

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October 14, 2023 · 11:57 pm

Hello Beautiful: What is the word for syrup when it’s spread across the pages of a novel.

Given the extremely limited time I have available for reading given my other commitments to staring absently out the window looking for explanations of How It Has All Come To This and What We Are To Do, I was extremely annoyed by Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful for taking up weeks of my reading time with the faint promise that it might realize itself into something good. It does not.

We follow Julia, Sylvie, Cecelia, and Emeline (lest we maybe miss the parallels to Little Women the book is sure to include direct scenes where the sisters act out or talk about being similar to those characters. Nothing inspires more confidence as a reader that your author trusts you that having the author literally explain the intended parallel) as they try to find love and purpose and family and meaning. Julia – type A extraordinary is only satisfied when she is giving order to someone else’s life and only feels herself come into her true power as a mother (#sure #whynot #ummm) – marries the ‘broken’ William (as with so much in this book any possible opportunity to make a theme literal is seized – so here the emotionally broken William who has absentee parents breaks his… knee. Again and again). But of course her sister, Sylvie, (like the Plath!) is on a quest for True Love (#sure #whynot #ummm) and ends up with William because they are soul mates who can see the brokenness of one another and “hold space” for that with one another. The other sisters do some things, too, and they are all trying to make sense of what it might be like to be adults without parents taking care of them, and to sort out where the bonds of sisterhood reach limits.

But please. It’s so saccharine and pat and convinced that you are not a reader who can be trusted to just understand a theme unless it is painfully explained.

I will not do the same. The thrust of this review is…. _________.

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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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