The year in reading continues…
Fiction and Nonfiction
13. Blue Nights by Joan Didion (Vintage, 2012)
This is the last book Didion wrote. I found it upsetting not only because of its subject matter, which is Didion grappling with the death of her daughter, as well as her own mortality, but also because it’s the only work of hers to show cracks - in her thinking, in her self-awareness, in her skills. This all feels a bit taboo to write, not only because she is so vulnerable in this work (which makes it feel unfair to critique), but also because of the mythic status she has attained. It feels sacrilegious to question any of her choices. (Four friends scattered around the world texted me when Joan Didion died, which shows the extent of my proselytizing about her greatness, so the taboo is largely in my mind.)
Didion’s non-fiction is characterized by her control. Even her self-deprecating persona in her essays, where she discloses her distractedness, her fragile state of mind, or even her unsuitability as a journalist (as she does in The White Album) is a construct, whether for atmosphere, pacing, or to win over the reader. Here, it’s all very loose. One chapter is even about her noticing her loss of control over her pacing and sense of direction, which she had been so certain of her in her youth, she could even notate her direction in a kind of shorthand. When I read Didion’s essays I get the sense from the first word that she sees so far beyond what she gets down, and she’s circling the subject, making connections to guide the reader to an approximation of her own insight. In this book I got the disconcerting sense of seeing what Didion could not. (She dismisses, for example, how being adopted might have affected her daughter’s sense of self.)
This is getting a bit long, but I could write a whole essay about this question of persona in the work of Didion, including a fascinating outburst in this book where she defends against charges (by unnamed accusers) of privilege. Didion was able to mostly evade criticism of privilege I think in part because of that self-deprecating stance, although her privilege is a key aspect of her public persona and glamour (the house in Malibu, she and her husband writing from the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the Hollywood connections, etc.) In terms of her subjects and intentions in this book (memory, grief, the passage of tiem), The Year of Magical Thinking remains her master work.
12. Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick (Picador, 2020)
This was my first encounter with Gornick, who is from that astounding generation of American women publishing in the 1960s and 1970s who were not mentioned either formally or informally in my school years, and whom I’ve had to discover on my own (Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Renata Adler, Susan Sontag, etc.) This is a more recent work by Gornick, a collection of essays on works she’s read throughout her life, and how her interpretation has shifted over time, based on her life experience. It includes essays on D.H. Lawrence, Colette, and Marguerite Duras, which are still interesting and worthwhile even if you’ve not read the books in question. The first few essays are cohesive, all touching in some way on how Gornick’s perception of love, sex, and marriage changed radically (along with the times), and how this is reflected in her interpretations on the novels. Perhaps an unfair critique, but I wish the whole book had grappled with this theme. It goes in all sorts of directions in the second half, including a consideration of Doris Lessing’s writing about cats, after Gornick adopts two cats.
11. The Easy Life by Marguerite Duras translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan (Bloomsbury, 2022 (originally 1944))
This is Duras’ second novel (written when she was about 25), translated for the first time in English. It’s a difficult read both because of the subject matter (death in many forms, envy, grief) and her style, which in the second half becomes highly internal and opaque. It’s short but took me a while to get through as I wasn’t in the right mood for it. My full review for the Chicago Review of Books is here. I discovered after the review came out that her publisher nearly rejected it because he found it too similar to Camus’ The Stranger. I was sorry I didn’t have this information earlier, because the similarity struck me while reading, though I wasn’t sure how aware she would have been of Camus. I thought if she was inspired by The Stranger, it was in a deliberate rather than derivative way, exploring how a woman’s story would fit into the same scenario, in a kind of Lady Macbeth (not as the perpetrator of a murder, but as mastermind and accessory.)
10. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (4th Estate, 2021)
This is the last book Joan Didion published, though it’s a collection of early, uncollected essays. Honestly, it felt a bit like a cash grab (by the publisher, I wouldn’t fault Didion) - it’s slim, maybe 130 pages, with a huge font. There was scope for more. But any nonfiction by Didion will be worth a read (and as a physical object the book is lovely). An essay on Hemingway was the most interesting to me. Frankly I can’t recall the other essays clearly. None were life-changing, like “The White Album” or her piece on the Central Park Five in other collections (I know there was one about working at Vogue), but no doubt I’ll revisit this book again at some point.
9. Weather by Jenny Offill (Knopf, 2020)
A spare novel about a librarian, trying to keep it together through climate anxiety and the Trump years, while fulfilling her many care-taking roles, as mother and wife, and most significantly, as sister to a recovering addict. It reads like someone’s private journal or notes, but I don’t mean that as a critique - I loved the elliptical quality. The writing is lyrical and understated and I admired how much Offill accomplished in 150 pages or so. This is definitely a document of the Trump presidency. It captures the palpable daily dread, and the temptation to despair for the greater, long-term future (hence the climate anxiety). Reading it after the Trump years, I felt it almost gave Trump too much power - he’s a kind of evil that must not be spoken, or a presence so outsized, it’s not necessary to name him. Hopefully in 10 years the book will be confusing for this reason. I would have advised Offill to have the narrator name him, not just allude to him.
8. Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Random House, 2019)
On the surface this would seem to be an entertaining novel exploring familiar themes of divorce and middle age, as it unfolds the summer in the life of a recently divorced Upper East Side doctor (Fleishman) whose ex disappears without explanation, leaving him with the kids and a chaotic, emotional puzzle to solve over the course of a hot summer… But its formal inventiveness elevates it into more complex territory, exploring the insidious nature of gender dynamics (especially when they seem to be resolved in our more enlightened times), and how our perspectives on our precious long-term relationships, both friendships and romantic partnerships, are ever-shifting. We discover some 50 pages into the novel that the apparently omniscient narrator is actually Libby, Fleishman’s old college friend, who increasingly begins to insert herself into the story. As a reader I first resisted this device, but I soon realized how necessary and clever it is.
The themes and style are in part an homage to Roth and Bellows - the pulsating horniness that animates a lot of the writing, the vexed relationship with the comforts and restraints of domesticity, the bewitching promises of New York and its crushing betrayals. But Brodesser-Akner is also offering the contemporary, female response (note: not an outright rejection) to the 20th century American novel as represented by male, often Jewish writers. Libby eventually reveals the ex-wife’s point of view, in a single chapter, and again, I first thought the asymmetry of the points of view was a flaw, when really it’s a nudge to the reader to figure out why. I was underestimating at how many levels this novel operates, in part because it’s so readable - funny, voluble, full of juicy detail. (Lots more to say, but too long for this format.)
Note on the TV adaptation (on Hulu): I caught about half of it and thought it was generally well done, though didn’t feel a need to watch the whole thing. The narration felt excessive for a visual medium - too much needed to be explained in voiceover, which points to the strength of the narrative devices of the novel.
7. American Splendor by Harvey Pekar (Ballantine, 2003, first published 1987)
A collection of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor comics spanning the 70s to the 90s, which quietly revolutionized concepts of what a comic could be. Autobiographical comics telling stories about everyday people seem routine and natural, but he was one of the first, in a landscape of superhero comics and wacked-out underground comics. Pekar was the writer and worked with several artists. As luck would have it, R. Crumb became a friend when he was passing through Cleveland. In the early comics Pekar grapples with depression, racism, and the limitations of masculinity, in his gruff way. The ones about his work, as a file clerk at a hospital, are probably the funniest, proto-Seinfeldian in the discomforts and quirks of other people. I liked seeing the work of different artists, too.
Aside on this cover: Pekar’s story was made into a film starring Paul Giamatti, which is pretty good (included Pekar’s collaboration), but I always get angry when scenes from movies are used for book covers, and this was especially infuriating because it’s the cover for a book in a visual medium that offered any number of excellent possibilities. UGH!
6. Jane Jacobs, the Last Interview and Other Conversations (Melville House, 2016)
These conversations with Jane Jacobs really felt like they were speaking to me directly, as I read this collection soon after moving back to the U.S. from Europe, and was feeling especially sensitive to the way American city planning took a wrong turn at some point, and how precious downtown Manhattan continues to be as a walkable, dynamic place at a truly human scale. Her ideas and passion still resonate 100%. (For those who haven’t heard of her: Jacobs led the grassroots resistance to a project to run a highway through downtown (including Soho and Greenwich Village), and later another project to run a major avenue through Washington Square Park (WTF?!). Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities sounded the alarm about terrible ideas about city planning in her time (privileging the automobile), set out precisely what actually makes cities wonderful (mixed commercial and residential blocks, walkability, centrally accessible green spaces, etc.), and continues to inspire city planning today. That’s the shortest version, but her whole biography is worth looking up.) Jacobs describes the interests behind the project as being the very wealthy, including the Rockefellers, who envisioned the city as a marvelous Futureland, cars zooming around on elevated highways beside glass towers, entirely blind to what make cities appealing to people. The last rather long interview, conducted in the 1990s, mostly concerns Canadian politics and I only just skimmed. (Jacobs moved to Toronto in the 70s to help her sons escape being drafted to Viet Nam.)
Aside on the publisher: I have to give a shoutout to Melville House for the brilliant concept of publishing little books of collected interviews with amazing people. I want to pick up every single one in this series (I own the volumes featuring Borges, Hanna Arendt and Prince. Interviews with Prince are on my TBR.)
Thanks for reading and feel free to comment below!
For lovers of comics, I can recommend a new newsletter, Jazzed About Life, by Dan Meth (who also happens to be by husband). If you are wondering about his name, the first issue explains it all: