Tag Archives: American literature

October 22, 2024 · 1:11 am

Wellness: Book Club Gold

In the end I didn’t love Nathan Hill’s Wellness (I’m not even sure I liked it): it was bloated, self-important, unselfconscious about the privilege of its themes (like how Hard it Must Be to not be able to move in to your Forever Home on schedule), aggressive in making sure the reader got the themes (your life and its meaning come from the story(ies) you tell yourself about it!) and over-weighted with symbols to reinforce those themes.

But. But! I keep thinking about some of those pressing themes – to what extent you choose anything, to what degree we are all just making choices in reaction to our past or because someone told us something one time that made us sure of some truth, what shreds of identity remain consistent over time and geography and circumstance – in a way that makes me wonder whether a book you don’t like can also be a good one if it helps you reconsider something or see something anew.

If nothing else there is enough in this book for most middle class white lady book clubs to chew on for at least a few hours. Questions of open marriages, of hating your partner but staying married, of whether you too had an Adbusters subscription in the 90s and now find yourself buying bulk paper towels at Costco with nary a thought to the Corporate Giants, of placebos, of the purpose of art, of messages you’d leave your future self, of whether you can love someone for a lifetime, of how we forgive our parents and how we ask our children to forgive us, of the injustices of generational wealth and on.

But I can’t really imagine most book clubs (certainly not mine that has in its four year history only managed to read one book) wading through this 700 page commitment. And so it’s left to S. who suggested this one, and maybe to you, to tell me if this it the bottom of the U-curve and have we started the rise? I think maybe. I think maybe.

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July 19, 2024 · 12:47 am

James: Just excellent

I’d requested Percival Everett’s James from the library before my week of holiday, but it didn’t arrive on time. Oh well, I thought, it’ll take me a month of reading six pages at bedtime to get through it. Not so! The kind of book – the excellent, brilliant, unstoppably great – book that you hungrily read in snatched seconds before someone-needs-help-with-their-sunscreen or you-work-a-regular-job-and-have-to-do-that-job-and-that-job-is-not-regrettably-reading-this-excellent-book.

A rewriting of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (a story I know well because I had a record – a record! – recording of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as a kid, and listened to that record until it was beyond scratched and no longer playable, but could still recite long stretches – and if this was the 80s answer to the exhaustive library of audiobooks R and L listen to I’m not sure who comes out the winner as That Was a Good Record. ANYWAY), but told from the perspective of Jim, Huck’s slave.

The early ‘adventure’ narrative of Jim attempting escape and Huck joining him while he tries to escape the inevitable violence of his father, continues with the set-piece adventure scenes you’d expect: near misses, narrow escapes, and confounding characters up to no good. All the while the book explicitly and implicitly explores how race means, how it matters and when and to who and what the literal and bodily consequences of racism and violence look like. And how utterly absurd – and crushingly consequential – slavery is as an idea and a practice.

Perhaps not more than race, but alongside it, James is a book about the significance – and here I mean importance and the quality of signifying or giving meaning – of writing, reading, naming, crafting, telling and hearing stories, speaking – and how you speak – and of representation. Scenes of James claiming his name, or the costs of keeping a pencil, or the risks of telling – or not telling – Huck of his family. All wrapped up in what power is made and held in those who own narrative in who they will write/tell about, when and how (in a way that is obvious in a book that is a retelling of the story from the perspective of the historically marginalized-dehumanized Jim into the protagonist, author and creator but is nevertheless threaded consistently and brilliantly throughout the book).

As I write this I worry you will think this is a dry, boring book that is meant to be taught in second year literature courses (it is definitely not dry or boring but will also almost certainly be – or already be – taught in second year literature courses). Not so – this one has plot pacing that moves, all the while dropping impeccable sentences that just hang with gut pulling perfection.

So stop reading this rambling but enthusiastic review and go get the book already.

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October 8, 2019 · 7:15 pm

The Underground Railroad: Twice More

It took me two times to read Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. On my first effort I made it about a hundred pages in and decided it wasn’t for me. I was distracted when reading, I guess, or missed what was certainly in front of me: a tremendously good novel of (historical) fiction.

Set in the 19th century we follow Cora on her escapes from a slave plantation in Georgia. If you know anything about this book you know that it features a literal underground railroad: think boxcars and steam engines moving along metal tracks. And Cora does take that physical railroad with many stops along the way. The function of the railroad as a mode of transportation is one also to transport us to different scenes of racial inequality, white supremacy, brutality and horror – demonstrating the ways racism manifests in physical chains and in refusals of opportunity. That is the novel unravels what is ‘structural’ about racism, even while making structured the metaphorical railroad of history.

The novel explores these scenes and the complicated ways white characters live, exercise and wield their privilege with nuance. The efforts of sympathetic abolitionists are complicated by their own fears for their lives or standing in the community; the abhorrent beliefs of slave catchers are revealed as explanatory by the circulating ideas and belief structures of their time. Individuals are culpable, though their actions are positioned in relation to, or explained through, the wider structures that surround them in ways that offer if not empathy or absolution, than a profound recognition of the ways in which the readers’ present beliefs and actions must similarly be filtered through imperfect and unjust structures that are both bigger than and constituted by individuals.

Cora herself is great because she comes in to the narrative as a woman relying on no one, willing and able to exert power in the limited ways she has available to her, and sensitive to the dependencies and needs of those around her without being defined by them.

So yes, if you haven’t read this one yet (you probably have!), go! make haste! And if the first 100 pages don’t grip you… keep on.

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April 2, 2018 · 12:13 am

My Absolute Darling: Why Reading is Tougher (and better) Than Watching a Movie

Gabriel Tallent might be a sadist. For the pain inflicted on the characters in My Absolute Darling and the attendant pain for the reader. Geeze but it is an intense read. Our protagonist, Turtle, is physically and sexually abused by her father: a survivalist/prepper who has isolated the two of them in the coastal forest of California.

For all the pain the novel describes, it does so with exquisite beauty. Like this reader felt uncomfortable for how frequently I stopped to admire the writing in scenes that are violent and disturbing.

I’d say the book is as much a character study as anything. Turtle is one of the most evocative and fully realized characters I’ve read in ages. It took me some time to adjust to the pain and disturbance of her inner world, but the third person limited narration was pitch perfect. It allowed for the reader to experience with Turtle the subtle and significant moments of character change, all while holding a necessary distance that (for me anyway) made the reading possible.

It’s also a book obsessed with setting. There aren’t many books that manage to make setting exciting. Sure lots of books make setting vivid, or integral to the plot, or thematically appropriate, but here the setting contributes to the violence: in its oceanic power, in its isolation, in the threat of (coming) fecundity.

Every so often I had to remind myself that Tallent imagined this story (I hope). Sat somewhere and thought okay, now Turtle is driving the truck and [this] happens. I had to remind myself because there are so many scenes that combine surprise and inevitability (what is the word for something that is both a surprise and inevitable?), so many moments of creative juxtaposition.

It was also a novel that reminded me how painful reading can be (especially compared to watching a film). In many of the scenes I wanted to close my eyes, but of course the only way to get through the scene was to read it and so to experience it. Sometimes I’d skip ahead, or skim, but felt I was cheating Turtle and so would go back and read properly, if with intense discomfort.

So while it’s an extraordinarily well written novel, I’d be remiss if I didn’t underscore (again) how difficult it was to read. And how it’s okay if you’d rather watch the news. Because that’s less distressing. Oh wait.

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