I loved Aravind Adiga’s first novel, White Tiger, and so I was eager to read Selection Day. It was just okay. Following a father and two sons in the slums of Mumbai as the father abuses them in his efforts to secure them a place on the Indian cricket team, and with that spot, a new life. I don’t care very much about cricket, and I didn’t care very much about these characters, so it was a stretch to make it to the end. I was carried along by the relationship between the youngest son, Manju, and his friend-competitor-would-be-lover, Javed. I wondered and wanted Manju to figure out what *he* wanted for his life (I guess I want the same for my own) and struggled with the resolution to this question as it felt… disappointing. Not in a narrative way, it makes narrative good sense, but because of the lost potential. Mourning possibility and all that. In those painful moments of life where it’s abundantly clear you are making a Big Decision, how do you know you’re making the right one, until decades later when the regret has found its way to you?
Tag Archives: choice
The Nest: You’ve Already Read This Book; or, On Doubting Your Memory Because This Book is So Unoriginal and Terrible
Three chapters in to Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s The Nest I checked the publication date (2016) and decided no, despite the nagging feeling, I hadn’t read the book before. Four chapters in I checked this site to be absolutely sure I hadn’t read it before. I have been known to forget things like books I’ve read (or meetings, or words, or…) on occasion constantly. Trusty site confirmed that it was a “new” read. Continue reading
Filed under Bestseller, Fiction, Funny
Swing Time: Was this Book-fate?
A week ago Donald Trump was elected President. A week ago I put out an urgent plea for book suggestions that would give my mind somewhere else to be. The same day as my request, Zadie Smith’s Swing Time arrived for me to review. I won’t claim to believe in book-fate*, but it sort of felt like book-fate.
It wasn’t book-fate. It was a great read, yes. Continue reading
Filed under British literature, Fiction, Funny, New York Times Notable
Ghost Light: How to get out of paying your taxes
Lydia Millet’s Ghost Lights is so great. It’s funny, dark, complex. It’s a fast read. It takes on the complicated and fraught questions like what agency do we have as individuals? what are our responsibilities to our children and spouses? how do we make sense of tragedy?
*Minor spoilers to come (as in all this gets revealed in the first 40 pages*
You want more context? Sure.The book folks Hal, the IRS tax-guy, as he figures out what his life means in the present and what parts of that life he can control. Hal’s wife is cheating on him. His daughter, paralyzed after a car accident, makes her living as a phone sex… what’s the noun? operator? When Hal’s wife boss Thomas Stern (who prefers to go by T. – a choice he’s made, but can’t control sensing a theme here) goes missing in Belize, Hal decides to go and find him. After years of feeling and acting tethered to the loss of the life that could have been have been (had Casey not been paralyzed), Hal throws himself into the present. Realizes that there’s not much he can properly control. Realizes “he should not think too much. As a rule he set too much store by thinking. Or at least, complacent in the knowledge that thought was the most useful tool available to men – and one so often neglected by his fellow Americans – he relied on it to the exclusion of other ways of filtering information. Thought was the act of conscious cognition but there were alternative processes of the mind that could work around or alongside it” (77).
It’s a novel that looks at what happens when you radically shift your approach to decision making – and realize that you still can’t control anything and that ‘choice’ is entirely dependent on circumstance. Into this realization comes Hal (no accident then that Hal works for the IRS: the only things you can’t avoid in life being death and taxes) who in his effort to do something (rescue Stern, have an affair) proves the limits of choice and action: he spends good chunks of the plot passed out from drinking and having his life happen to him.
So what can you choose? What can you decide? Probably only that you should read this book. Probably not even that.
Stern has gone AWOL from running his fancy-pants company and making bazillions of dollars.
Filed under American literature, Bestseller, Prize Winner
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