Recent Reading

Let’s see — what have I been reading recently? I finished Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence. I liked it, but didn’t love it. I kept thinking the whole time I was reading how much her subject matter is like Anita Brookner’s, but I like Brookner better. Pym has a lighter tone and is more satirical, whereas Brookner strikes me as working in a darker mode, and maybe that darkness appeals to me more. I did like the characters’ interactions in the Pym, especially the workplace dynamics she describes, and I liked the contrast between city and small town life. But I never felt fully absorbed in the story or in the novel’s ideas.

I also finished Ali Smith’s new novel, There But For The, which was also a little disappointing. I really liked The Accidental, and this one wasn’t as good. The two books have a similar structure: they are divided into four parts, each from a different point of view, each part adding a different perspective on the story. But in the new novel, the four parts don’t hold together very well, and they aren’t equally interesting. The last part was my favorite, told in the voice of a young girl who is brilliant and funny. I also liked the part describing the dinner party — the novel is about a dinner party guest who goes upstairs, locks himself in a bedroom, and refuses to come out — because it was wickedly satirical and funny. But it just never came together into a coherent whole. The four different perspectives in The Accidental were much more tightly focused on one story, so the reader can compare how the different characters made sense of it. There isn’t the same pleasure to be had in the new book.

Hmmm … it’s good that I’m happily in the middle of Tana French’s In the Woods, or this post would be almost entirely negative, since I discontentedly set aside Ben Marcus’s new novel The Flame Alphabet after about 90 pages. I liked his novel Notable American Women, but struggled with the new one, partly because it was too similar in tone, style, and theme to the earlier one. His books are strange and powerful, and need to be read in small doses, I guess. I think I can handle darkness and ugliness in my fiction, but somehow there needs to be something appealing about it, in some way, no matter how unexpected or perverse, and I wasn’t finding that here. Also, I had a hard time grasping the world he was creating because it seemed arbitrary and I didn’t really believe it — it’s a world like ours but where children’s language has suddenly become toxic, so adults are being stricken by horrible illnesses merely by living with their offspring. I would be okay not believing in the world of the novel if the ideas it is exploring are engaging, but Marcus’s interest in language as dangerous doesn’t resonate with me.

So, after reading a bunch of experimental fiction (or “experimental” or whatever — not counting the Pym, of course), some of which I liked — The Last Samurai — and some of which I didn’t, I figured it was time for something more traditional, hence In the Woods. It’s an absorbing story, which is exactly what I wanted.

Pulphead

I’m currently reading Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan, and oh my god, what a good book it is! I’ve read six of the 14 essays so far, and while they aren’t all at the same level of fabulousness, they are all pretty close. I just finished an essay on Michael Jackson, which sent me off to watch this video and appreciate him in a way I never have before. The first essay is on a Christian Rock festival, which he captures perfectly in all its weirdness, and there are also essays on Hurricane Katrina (with a haunting ending), his brother’s near-death experience, and the TV show The Real World. This last essay is written in a funny, hyped-up, super-informal tone befitting the subject:

I’d suspected there were puppeteers involved in The Real World, invisibly instigating “drama,” but to think that the network had gone for it like that and hired a shrink? One who, as the kids went on to assure me, was involved not only in manipulating the cast during shooting but also in the casting process itself? And she’s worked on other shows? This explained so much, about The Real World, about all of it. When I wrote that business earlier about how the casting people have made the shows crazier and crazier, I didn’t know I was right about any of that! This person is an unacknowledged legislator of the real world. Turns out Dr. Laura is a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, which is better, when you think about it, because psychologists don’t have to take the Hippocratic oath, and she’s definitely, definitely done some harm. No chance I was going to call her.

Or there’s this somewhat more serious passage from the same essay (don’t miss the last line):

People hate these shows, but their hatred smacks of denial. It’s all there, all the old American grotesques, the test-tube babies of Whitman and Poe, and great gauntlet of doubtless eyes, big mouths spewing fantastic catchphrase fountains of impenetrable self-justification, muttering dark prayers, calling on God to strike down those who would fuck with their money, their cash, and always knowing, always preaching. Using weird phrases that nobody uses, except everybody uses them now. Constantly talking about “goals.” Throwing carbonic acid on our castmates because they used our special cup and then calling our mom to say, in a baby voice, “People don’t get me here.” Walking around half-naked, with a butcher knife behind our backs. Telling it like it is y’all (what-what). And never passive-aggressive, no. Saying it straight to your face. But crying … My God, there have been more tears shed on reality TV than by all the war widows of the world. Are we so raw? It must be so. There are simply too many of them — too many shows and too many people on the shows — for them not to be revealing something endemic. This is us, a people of savage sentimentality, weeping and lifting weights.

Those are good passages, but not even the best I’ve found, just the ones I read recently. Sullivan’s voice is amazing. I love discovering a new great essayist.

In the Freud Archives

I recently finished another book by one of my favorite nonfiction authors, Janet Malcolm; I’d already read The Silent Woman, about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and Two Lives, about Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, and now I have finished In the Freud Archives, a book about psychoanalysis and Freud scholars. The Silent Woman is my favorite so far, and will probably stay my favorite, but In the Freud Archives is a close second, and possibly is second only because psychoanalysis isn’t all that interesting to me, whereas Plath and Hughes are. With Malcolm, though, it doesn’t matter much whether the topic at hand is inherently interesting or not, because she makes it interesting. All these books follow a similar format: Malcolm takes an academic, literary, or cultural controversy and digs deep into the story, interviewing the major players and charting out the various sides of the conflict. She herself is a part of the narrative; although she is good at keeping the focus on the story at hand, she does give her personal impressions of the major characters and offers her particular slant on the story.

In the Freud book, as in the others, Malcolm is writing on a number of different levels. In the Freud Archives (published in 1984) is a book about controversies among Freud scholars, specifically about who will control the archives with many letters that scholars have not had a chance to study. It’s a story about Dr. Eissler, a distinguished Freud scholar and analyst, and Jeffrey Masson, a younger man who started his career as a Sanskrit scholar and found his way into the world of psychoanalysis. Eissler becomes a mentor to Masson, grooming him to take control of the archives. But Masson is a controversial figure among analysts; he is too pushy and too overtly ambitious, he seemed to come out of nowhere and made his way to the top of the field all too easily, and his views on Freud are increasingly unorthodox. The “plot” of the book is about the relationship between Eissler and Masson and about Masson’s status in the psychoanalytic world.

But In the Freud Archives is about Freud, too; we learn about what kind of a thinker and analyst Freud really was and about the development of his thought in his early years, the focus of Masson’s research. We learn about the history of the discipline and of scholarship on Freud. The way Malcolm describes it, psychoanalysis and Freud studies seem to be at a crisis point in the 1980s — or at least at a vulnerable moment — with a comfortable scholarly establishment too willing to overlook flaws in their theories and in their founder, an environment ripe for someone like Masson to come in and shake things up.

The book is also about Malcolm as well; she describes the settings in which she conducted her interviews and her impressions of all the major players. It’s also about her in a sense she couldn’t have predicted when she first wrote the book. My edition, from NYRB, contains an afterward written by Malcolm that describes the book’s aftermath: Masson sued her for libel and she spent 10 years fighting him in the courts. She was ultimately successful, but the episode shows the dangers of writing this kind of nonfiction. It’s impossible to know how one’s subjects will react to having their lives and careers dissected in print.

I kept thinking as I read the book that it would be interesting to have some one pull a “Janet Malcolm” on Malcolm herself — to write about the making of this book, the book’s reception, and the ensuing lawsuit and to follow up on what has happened in psychoanalysis and Freud studies in the years between then and now. In the Freud Archives is an absorbing read and an intriguing look into one corner of the scholarly world, but I have the feeling that there’s more of this story to be told.

The Last Samurai

I’m not entirely sure where I learned about Helen DeWitt — from blogs of course, but I can’t remember which ones — but she’s been on my mind lately because of her good showing in this year’s Tournament of Books. I thought The Last Samurai might be a better place to start than the most recent Lightning Rods, though. What a fun book it turned out to be! It’s over 500 pages, but a fast read and very absorbing. It tells the story of a mother and son living in London, both of whom are brilliant, but the son, Ludo, is particularly so, and the mother, Sibylla, doesn’t quite know how to handle him. He has a desperate hunger to know things, and is studying Greek and other languages at the age most children are barely ready for Sesame Street. At the novel’s beginning, he wants Sibylla to teach him Japanese, inspired by her obsessive rewatching of Kurosawa’s film The Last Samurai. For her part, she is struggling, both because money is very tight, and because she needs time to do the typing that brings in what money she has. It’s hard to find time, though, when Ludo constantly asks questions and begs to be taught more — and more and more.

What I liked particularly about the book is the style: DeWitt captures the craziness of Sibylla’s and Ludo’s experiences by throwing it all out on the page. There are pages where the sentences go back and forth at a dizzying pace between Sibylla’s thoughts and Ludo’s questions, or between a description of The Last Samurai and Ludo’s questions, or between comments they get from strangers as they ride the Circle Line all day to keep warm and Sibylla’s thoughts and Ludo’s questions. There is also a lot of Greek and Japanese and other languages in the pages, as well as numbers and math formulas. The novel has so much energy that it threatens to overrun its boundaries at times, both because it’s frequently breaking out into other languages and different fonts and because it’s constantly veering off into different stories. As Ludo grows older, he becomes more and more curious about his father and asks Sibylla more and more insistently to tell him who he is. Sibylla refuses, so Ludo goes on a quest to find him, or to find someone worthy of being him. Part of this quest is discovering stories of brilliant, adventurous, potential father-figures, and these stories become part of the novel.

It’s here that the novel faltered the only time; in the second half of the book, the narration settled down into a pattern that threatened to get dull. But only threatened — the energy and humor of the writing saved it, as did the relationship between Sibylla and Ludo and the fondness I had for Ludo throughout the whole book.

I think the thing I like best about the book is the great sense of openness it has. Even though Sibylla frequently feels harried and trapped by her situation, she’s able to offer Ludo so much intellectual possibility and so much freedom that it’s satisfying to watch him figure out the world and begin to make his way in it. He struggles with boredom, frustration, and uncertainty, but he also has great resourcefulness to match his intelligence. It’s a pleasure to watch him take on the world.

Bookish Podcasts

I wrote a post a little over a year ago in which I discussed some of my favorite literary podcasts, and I thought I would do a little update of that post, since I’ve found some new ones lately that I like. I’m still listening to Radio Open Source, and to the occasional author interviews on The Leonard Lopate Show and (less often) The Brian Lehrer Show and Fresh Air. But I’ve added to those The Bat Segundo Show, which is devoted solely to author interviews and in-depth discussion of books. Also, I’ve recently discovered Other People, which is author interviews conducted by novelist Brad Listi. While Bat Segundo is all about digging into the details of the books, Other People often doesn’t get to the book at all; I’ll sometimes get to the end of an interview and have no idea what the book is about. But I like it anyway because I learn a lot about the author and the conversations are amusing, and, more often than not, I finish the show wanting to read the book. The first time I listened to the podcast I was surprised to hear the host monologue about his personal life for 10 minutes or so, and I thought, wait, why do I care about you? Get to the interview! Shut up about yourself! But by the time I listened to the podcast again, I’d begun to like the opening monologue, and now I make a point of listening to it. These things grow on you.

And more recently I’ve discovered a bunch of other podcasts, some of which I’m still figuring out whether I really like or not. There’s Books on the Nightstand, which offers book recommendations from its two hosts, as well as news about the book world and issues related to reading and publishing. I like the concept of this podcast, although I haven’t figured out how much my reading tastes coincide with theirs. There’s also The Readers, which is done by two British guys who chat about books they like and host a summer book club. Again, I’m not sure how much my reading taste overlaps with theirs, and sometimes their show is a bit too giggly for my taste, but still, it can be interesting and fun.

There’s also the New York Times Book Review Podcast, which is basically supplemental material to the book review with author interviews and discussions of the best seller list. And there’s the Bookrageous Podcast with more book chat, and the BBC World Book Club with author interviews.

I’m a little afraid to ask if there are others you recommend because I have so much to listen to already, but … are there?

Recent Reading: April

Another summary post, for now:

• In March I read Ben Marcus’s Notable American Women, which I liked, mostly. I’ve been talking about Ben Marcus a lot with a friend who has been curious about Marcus and his ideas about experimental fiction, and I thought I’d try his one book that was currently available in the library. I’m looking forward to reading his most recent novel The Flame Alphabet when the hold comes in. But for now, Notable American Women was strange in a very interesting way. It’s about a cult of women in Ohio who try to cut language and movement out of their lives as much as possible. They basically try to shut themselves down entirely, removing themselves from engagement with the world. The main character is named Ben Marcus (I don’t get why experimental writers so often name their characters after themselves. It surely was a good idea the first time or so someone did it, but to be doing it still??), and he lives in this cult, trying to find his place in it and to figure out how to relate to his distant mother, and his father, who appears to be buried in the front yard. I liked the first part of the novel very much, which takes the form of a letter from the father to the reader, and the last part is also great, in the form of a letter from his mother. The middle describes the rules and procedures of the cult, and it’s strange — strangely fascinating at times and at times a little dull. All in all, it’s a memorable take on language, power, and family relationships.
• Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water: A Memoir was a harrowing read. A friend asked me what it’s about, and I started to describe it — her difficult childhood, her rebellion, her struggles with addiction, her complex relationship with sexuality, her redemption through writing — and it all sounded so cliche. But that’s not how the book felt, largely because the writing is powerful and the story isn’t told in chronological order. It’s told in a loose, impressionistic, associative way, and the sentences move into poetic territory at times and at times collapse in on themselves. Mostly, I liked this. There is something compelling about Yuknavitch’s persona, something I liked about her, even though she practically dares you not to like her. At times the aggression of the writing was too much for me and at times the persona was just too prickly for me to handle. But there is a power in this book that made it hard to put down.
• I don’t remember where I heard about Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, but I’m glad I paid attention to wherever it was, because I loved this book. It’s a short meditation on the color blue, written in brief numbered sections that look at “blue” philosophically, biologically, poetically, autobiographically, sociologically, and probably in other ways as well. It’s also the story of a breakup and the suffering that came with it. As always with a book like this, my enjoyment of it comes down to the persona, and in this case, I loved her, especially for her emotional rawness and sexual frankness mixed with a careful, philosophical thoughtfulness. There’s a confessional quality to the book that works beautifully because of the way it’s part of a larger context of ideas.
• David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is basically a transcript of a multi-day interview Lipsky did with David Foster Wallace in 1996, just after the publication of Infinite Jest. Lipsky has written an introduction to the transcript, and has also inserted short explanations and commentary into the dialogue, but mostly it’s just the two of them talking, complete with sentences that trail off into nothingness and awkward transitions between topics that probably didn’t seem awkward at the time. Their conversations are interesting, for the most part, many of them about the process of writing Infinite Jest and Wallace’s attempts to make sense of his new-found fame and success. He was desperately worried about getting so caught up in the whirl of publicity that he would come to rely on it. You can see him both enjoying the attention of the interviewer and waiting eagerly for it all to be over, so he could get back to his normal quiet writing life. Lipsky’s book was published after Wallace’s death, and much of what Wallace says about suffering takes on a new meaning in that light. I don’t think this book would be that interesting for anyone not familiar with Wallace, and probably it’s best to have read Infinite Jest first, to understand a lot of the references in their conversations. I stumbled now and then over places where the conversation bordered on incoherence, but mostly I found the book absorbing, and I loved the insights into Wallace’s character and his writing.

Recent Reading

First, some numbers:

• bike miles logged since January 1st: 1,775.
• Hours ridden: 114.
• Races completed (in unspectacular but acceptable fashion): 1.
• Books read: 16.
• Hours worked: too many.

Rather than writing reviews, I’m busy enough to be reduced to lists, but that’s better than complete silence, so here’s what I’ve been reading since I last posted:

• I finished Zadie Smith’s essay collection Changing My Mind, which was absolutely fabulous. If you like essays on literature and culture, read this! Smith is brilliant and charming, and I have become a fan (I read White Teeth a while back and liked it fine, but my response to this essay collection has been much stronger).
• I finished Essayists on the Essay, a collection edited by Carl Klaus, which is exactly what the title promises. It’s very good if you want to get a sense of the essay as a genre and also if you want essay recommendations.
• My mystery book group read Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park, which I can appreciate as a very good example of a particular kind of mystery/thriller, but which I struggled with a little. I’m not a plot person, basically, and this was a lot of plot. I get tired of struggling to keep everything straight. But still, lots to appreciate here.
• David Shields’s Reality Hunger deserves its own post, which it may not get. I give it five out of five stars for articulating a nonfiction aesthetic that I like very much and for having awesome book recommendations, and two out of five stars for being obtuse when it comes to the value of fiction. Also, I was never completely won over by the argument it implicitly makes about collage, quotation, and plagiarism.
• Lorrie Moore, Anagrams, which was funny and inventive. It has an interesting structure, with four chapters or so that give you the same two characters but in different permutations: with different backgrounds, personalities, careers, etc. Eventually it settled down into one version of these characters and told a more coherent story. I was a little disappointed the opening structure didn’t continue through the whole book; once it settled down into one story, the whole thing got a tiny bit less interesting. But still, very good.
• Darin Strauss, Half a Life: A Memoir. This tells Strauss’s experience of accidentally hitting and killing a high school classmate in a car crash when he was 18 and about to graduate. The accident wasn’t his fault, but of course the experience was still devastating. The story is well-told, and Strauss does a great job articulating what the experience was like. At times, I found the writing too vague and abstract for my taste; sometimes it was hard to wrap my mind around the thoughts and images. But still, it’s a brave book.