Top Five!

Drum roll, please...

It’s Part IV of IV of my 2021 reading round-up, the top five. (Life got in the way of my weekly newsletter schedule, and last year is already starting to feel far away, but I suppose it doesn’t matter as a list of recommended books should have longevity. You can read Parts I-III of the reading round-up in the archive.)

Presenting these book opinions as a countdown to #1 was feeling off, and I’ve realized it’s because when reading onscreen one tends to pay attention mostly in the beginning and ends up skipping and scanning by the end of the article, essay, whatever it is (or at least I do), which, in this case, gives the stuff I liked most the least importance, as it comes last. But, in the spirit of consistency, I’ve kept the countdown format and maybe you will make it till the end…

So: THE TOP FIVE in order of how likely I am to recommend the book, how much it changed my thinking, how much I enjoyed it at the language level, how much of it remains with me, etc…

5. To Walk Alone in the Crowd by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated by Guillermo Bleichmar (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021)

This sort-of novel is a sprawling anti-narrative. The main character wanders various cities (mostly Madrid and New York), collaging every bit of text he finds in a kind of quest to understand what the mass of marketing, restaurant menus, street signs, etc. add up to. In between are his ruminations of flâneurs of the past (Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincy) and many other writers and artists. It has so many things I’m drawn to - advertising as found poetry; the city as subject and metaphor; descriptions of the creative process (writing and painting); obsessive horror at the current flow plastic waste - it felt written for me at times. The perpective is very much a man of the 20th century coming to grips with the 21st, which is the way I feel sometimes, too. It’s a big book, ambitious, generous, sometimes excessive, but I do love the boldness of going too far. There’s a lot more to it, it’s very diffcult to summarize, but my review is here if you’re curious to hear more.

Aside on its reception: Other reviews were mostly lukewarm about this novel, it seems generally because of what I labelled as its “20th-century quality.” Reviewers objected to “the maleness of the gaze” and the relative absence of references to women writers. Others accused it of endlessly cataloguing without providing further insight. I did notice the absence of women artists (with exceptional references to Dickinson and Alice Munro), but forgave it given the context, and it was also clear this wasn’t because of a sexist blindness to women’s writing or belief in their intellectual inferiority. The author is writing about his own education and youth (Spain in the 70s), while the theme of 19th-century flâneurs doesn’t offer much space for women. There are also a number of passages describing the narrator’s relationship to his wife which make heterosexuality seem like an acceptable proposition (loving, tender, sensual but not in a gloppy or gross way), unlike a lot of other writing by men about women. I didn’t mind that it didn’t offer a way through the jumble of text we face every day, I found the writing interesting enough for its own sake.

4. Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast (Bloomsbury USA, 2014)

This is a graphic memoir by New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast about the years of her parents’ decline from old age to their eventual death. It’s a full picture, with all of the difficult details - physical, financial, emotional - and it’s also often funny. Something about her wavy line is so expressive and speaks to the neurotic characters and everyday exasperations that characterize her work. Ultimately I was haunted by this book, though. I kept thinking about particular scenes and reflections afterwards, the everyday horror and tragedies it captured. It made me realize how no one talks about this part of life at all, though it’s one we will all have to confront in some form another; how very, very difficult it can be; and how so many people at any given moment are going through the experience (either dealing with a physical/mental decline or acting as a caregiver). I don’t see this story being as effective in any other form. The humor is necessary to balance it out, and the visual elements let Chast go in so many different directions (from funny scenes of her childhood, to photos of the hoarded stuff in her parents apartment, to drawings of her sleeping, dying mother). I also admire her searing honesty, the comprehensive vision of this porcess. She explores her troubled relationship with her parents, in particular her mother, and the way her childhood echoed throughout their interactions, until her mother was in her 90s and Chast had her own children.

It’s interesting this was Chast’s first narrative book (previous books were compendiums of her cartoons), coming later in her career, and influenced by other artists. From a wonderful 2019 profile of Chast by Adam Gopnik, on this memoir: “Chast gives credit to the graphic storytellers who came before her, along with her, and after her. ‘With that book, like everybody else, I just . . . dove into it,’ she says. ‘I was so fatootsed by the whole thing, my shrink said, ‘What about chapters?’ And I was’—she electrifies her face. ‘Unless you’re a better hack than me, every project has its own rules and its own complexities. Only by making a million mistakes and taking a million false turns could I get there. I couldn’t have done that book without the example of Art Spiegelman and that whole generation of graphic novelists,’ she says, citing Marjane Satrapi, the author of Persepolis, as another important influence.”

Proof that you never know what an artist will come out with, even later in their career, which is a happy thought. I love these unexpected and mind-blowing second, third, and fourth acts.

3. Childhood, Youth, Dependency: The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from Danish by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman (2021, originally published in 1967)

This book is like broken glass. Crystalline clear prose with sudden jagged edges. It should be handled carefully. The Times critic Parul Sehgal described the experience of reading it as being like watching something burn, which is an amazing way to put it. The three parts (Childhood, Youth, Dependency) were originally published in the 1960s in separate volumes, though they’re novella-length, and I think they do work better as a single book. Ditlevsen recalls her poverty-stricken childhood in working class Copenhagen, her young adulthood in various jobs and eventual breaking into the literary life of the city, and then falling into a morphine addiction. It is almost comically grim at times, and her style is acerbic and matter-of-fact, even through horrific experiences, like pursuing a dodgy illegal abortion. She has killer, cutting metaphors. For me it highlighted how rare it is to have a firsthand, literary account of living on the fault-line, and in this case, the specific world of Denmark in the 1930s. Her life is a wild ride, moving from a struggle to control the shape and direction of her existence to then making incredibly chaotic, often self-destructive decisions.

The last third, on her addiction, was a visceral experience for me, like a horror movie. In fact I did have a nightmare based on one of the episodes. Is that an endorsement? I think it’s a testament to the effectiveness of the writing and her devotion to revealing the truth above all, at the expense of her self-image or propriety. It was only after finishing it that I realized what was obvious - that it’s a story shaped into a particular form with intention, not an account of the whole truth, or her whole life. Somehow it felt that way as reading it, with the typewriter being Ditlevsen’s beacon, raison d’être and salvation - the image is of herself as writer above all.

Aside on its reception: This was a real break-out book in 2021, I think the first full English translation. It appeared on many best-of lists, and while I obviously thought it was excellent, I do wonder why this one caught on, when so much excellent fiction in translation is ignored every year. (The editors at NYRB, for example, have a flawless instinct and publish so much good stuff it’s impossible to keep up.) Is it the auto-fiction adjacent narrative? The lurid quality of her story? Did it get extra publicity? Celebrity book club pick? Something to look into (and feel free to comment if you have any idea.)

2. Heavy by Kiese Laymon (2018)

Heavy is Laymon’s memoir of growing up Black in Mississippi with his mother and grandmother, and becoming a writer and professor. It’s intimate and intense, in part because the whole book is addressed to his mother, a troubled and passionate college professor, with whom he had a close but volatile relationship. In the memoir he describes aspiring to write in a way that centers the Black, specifically Southern, experience, not to write for a white readership, and I think this device (writing to his mother) was a way towards this. It was perhaps also a way in to the difficult topics he takes on - sexual and other forms of abuse, addiction, eating disorders - in a family and community where resilience is a code, at times a performance, often as a form of survival. It’s a conversation to demand the truth. He digs into the stereotype of the strong Black woman and the harm it does, what it denies and withholds. He writes with such empathy and understanding for the women in his life, and Black women more generally; it’s intrinsic to his perspective, which made me feel relief while reading it.

Trying to explicate this book is tough, as it feels reductive and almost insulting in a way, in part because the writing is everything - Laymon takes so many dazzling risks with his style and it’s so much his own, an incredible accomplishment. He’s so sharp in his insight and expansive in his language. These descriptive sentences feel puny beside it. (Thank you to Mark V. for the recommendation!)

1. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)

I realize that, out of the books I read, this is the one to put at the top if you want to seem like a Very Serious Reader Who Still Appreciates the Classics, or if you are eternally trying to impress your high school English teacher. But I’ve ranked it first precisely because I’ve generally stopped reading anything published before the 1920s and feared I’d lost the attention span, and this book rekindled my faith in the power of language to speak across time. Granted, Wharton’s language is closer to ours than say Shakespeare, but she undoubtedly lived in a different time with a different approach to language, and it was such a delight to reach that point where I was no longer struggling to focus, but rather enjoying her long sentences, her stealthy wit. I was fully in the world of Gilded Age New York, and stressed by Lily’s predicament, and the pages started flying by. My brain is not entirely rotted out by the internet, hurray. (Also, I’m confident that my high school English teacher likes me, she subscribes to this newsletter in fact (love you, Monica)).

This novel felt like such an important document of gender roles and class in late 19th-century America, from a woman’s point of view. It’s so alive to the subtle power plays that take place under the surface between women, and between women and men, mostly without men taking notice. By centering the women Wharton also subverts the world order - Wall Street and other places of men’s work and affairs is in the background. Vast sums of money are expected to flow into the households, and its generation does not hold much interest, whereas the social hierarchies, the ups and downs of each season, the weekends in the country, summers on the Mediterranean, are the real arena of action. This reconfiguring of what’s “important” is implicit from the start. I was in New York when reading it, and it was a thrill to feel these places reverberating across time (a train along the Hudson River, Bryant Park).

Historical and sociological interests aside, it’s just a fantastically constructed novel. There’s the immediate tension of financial precarity (which I find the most stressful type of conflict when I read!), and then the ticking clock on Lily Bart’s youth and marriageability. My heart stopped when she spotted the first line on her face. She’s a fascinating protagonist, aware of the hypocrisy and disloyalty of the society she comes from, but unfit to exist in any other. Her persistent, inadvertent self-sabotaging of marriage prospects is almost Freudian, as I don’t recall her specifically articulating what might be objectionable to becoming a wife, but it’s a very loud, unspoken question raised by her actions. So many novels feel expendable, which I think is part of why I’ve been reading more non-fiction, but this one reminded me of what fiction can do.

Aside on the Jonathan Franzen kerfuffle: I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time as I hadn’t read Wharton, but I read his 2012 New Yorker essay on Wharton (which raised hackles at the time) and have to say that we must never forgive Franzen for this. I don’t care if his new novel is good: fuck this guy. There is so much that is objectionable and insidiously sexist in this essay, it is probably not worth responding to it all (especially 10 years later, I know, but he is considered one of the best of contemporary American novelists, and this was in the pages of the most successful American arts and culture publications). So I insist, he must not be forgiven for it. The premise is that Wharton is hard to warm to because she came from wealth and privilege, but she becomes more likeable when you realize she was ugly. His insight into The House of Mirth is that Lily Barton is totally unlikeable and “the worst sort of party girl” and she is only vaguely likeable to the reader because she is beautiful and that the novel is Wharton’s “sadistically slow and thorough punishment of the pretty girl she couldn’t be.” It’s such a profoundly obtuse misreading of the book (which so clearly establishes beauty as one of women’s very scant sources of power!). Actually, not even a misreading, it’s a pointless commentary based on his opinion of the author’s looks. (Wharton wasn’t known to be unattractive. Her alleged ugliness is not a thing, even in a historic way that makes one uncomfortable about the way women were viewed! This is a thing he came up with on his own!) On the privilege issue, he disregards that Wharton absolutely skewered the society she inhabited, and if we’re talking biography, he omits to mention that she was quite aware of her wealth and privilege, and used it to help the unemployed, refugees and other people in need during WWI, and received the French Legion d’Honneur for her work. I have read two of Franzen’s very long novels and was disturbed by his vision of humanity, particularly his assumption that people will always make the most self-serving choices, at the expense of others. Which I find makes him hard to like. /end tirade

***

So that’s it for 2021. What to read next?

I’m making my way through Elizabeth Hardwick’s Collected Essays. On my to-read pile is Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book and I’m looking forward to Sheila Heti’s new book, Pure Color, which is coming out soon. I have dozens of books I haven’t read at home, but these are the ones calling at the moment... I’m curious about Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby, a buzzy novel published last year, but am trying not to buy anything else for the moment, though I am always open to enthusiastic recommendations. In that spirit, I’d love to hear about the best books you read last year! Shout them out here: