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…. _________.

Leave a comment

Filed under Worst Books

Tagged as , , ,

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Fiction, National Book Award, New York Times Notable, Prize Winner

Tagged as ,

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.

1 Comment

Filed under Fiction, New York Times Notable, Prize Winner

Tagged as , , , ,

August 30, 2023 · 10:40 am

The Librarianist: Some laugh out loud moments and some gem lines amid a lot of other words

Patrick de Witt’s The Librarianist comes out as one of those literary fiction books that you know a book club you’re in is going to suggest reading, or will be on one of those tables at the front of the book store. And that will be fine. It won’t knock your socks off, but there are enough truly laugh out loud moments (de Witt’s The SistersBrothers remains one of the funniest books – no qualifier, just the funniest) and bright writing that it’s worth it.

At its heart its a novel (as the title suggests) about one character – a librarian, Bob Comet – and how that character in the last chapter (get it? librarian? chapter?) of his life changes how he sees himself and interacts with the world. That question – can a person change, to what degree can they change, do they only change in our expectations of them – circles the book but lands squarely on Bob.

Tied up with these questions of how we each see ourselves are those of aging and death, as Bob (in his early 70s) reviews his life and his decisions against his own expectations (one thing I liked about Bob was how very little he seemed to care about what other people expected of him) for what he could and should have done. For those Unitarians in the audience there’s a definite thread of individual journey amid community, with community

Warm and gentle – like any library I’ve ever visited – The Librarianist doesn’t ask too much of its reader, but delivers in beautiful writing, sweet moments and some really funny scenes.

Leave a comment

Filed under Canadian Literature, Fiction

Tagged as , , , , ,