Three “Love” or “Heart” Books for Valentine’s Day: Ephron, Lischer and Nin
Every year I say I’m really not a Valentine’s Day person and yet put together a themed post featuring books that have “Love” or a similar word in the title. This is the eighth year in a row, in fact (after 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023)! Today I’m looking at two classic novellas, one of them a reread and the other my first taste of a writer I’d expected more from; and a wrenching, theologically oriented bereavement memoir.
Heartburn by Nora Ephron (1983)
I’d already pulled this out for my planned reread of books published in my birth year, so it’s pleasing that it can do double duty here. I can’t say it better than my original 2013 review:
The funniest book you’ll ever read about heartbreak and betrayal, this is full of wry observations about the compromises we make to marry – and then stay married to – people who are very different from us. Ephron readily admitted that her novel is more than a little autobiographical: it’s based on the breakdown of her second marriage to investigative journalist Carl Bernstein (All the President’s Men), who had an affair with a ludicrously tall woman – one element she transferred directly into Heartburn.
Ephron’s fictional counterpart is Rachel Samstad, a New Yorker who writes cookbooks or, rather, memoirs with recipes – before that genre really took off. Seven months pregnant with her second child, she has just learned that her second husband is having an affair. What follows is her uproarious memories of life, love and failed marriages. Indeed, as Ephron reflected in a 2004 introduction, “One of the things I’m proudest of is that I managed to convert an event that seemed to me hideously tragic at the time to a comedy – and if that’s not fiction, I don’t know what is.”
As one might expect from a screenwriter, there is a cinematic – that is, vivid but not-quite-believable – quality to some of the moments: the armed robbery of Rachel’s therapy group, her accidentally flinging an onion into the audience during a cooking demonstration, her triumphant throw of a key lime pie into her husband’s face in the final scene. And yet Ephron was again drawing on experience: a friend’s therapy group was robbed at gunpoint, and she’d always filed the experience away in a mental drawer marked “Use This Someday” – “My mother taught me many things when I was growing up, but the main thing I learned from her is that everything is copy.” This is one of celebrity chef Nigella Lawson’s favorite books ever, for its mixture of recipes and rue, comfort food and folly. It’s a quick read, but a substantial feast for the emotions.
Sometimes I wonder why I bother when I can’t improve on reviews I wrote over a decade ago (see also another upcoming reread). What I would add now, without disputing any of the above, is that there’s more bitterness to the tone than I’d recalled, even though Ephron does, yes, play it for laughs. But also, some of the humour hasn’t aged well, especially where based on race/culture or sexuality. I’d forgotten that Rachel’s husband isn’t the only cheater here; pretty much every couple mentioned is currently working through the aftermath of an affair or has survived one in the past. In one of these, the wife who left for a woman is described not as a lesbian but by another word, each time, which felt unkind rather than funny.
Still, the dialogue, the scenes, the snarky self-portrayal: it all pops. This was autofiction before that was a thing, but anyone working in any genre could learn how to write readable content by studying Ephron. “‘I don’t have to make everything into a joke,’ I said. ‘I have to make everything into a story.’ … I think you often have that sense when you write – that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you’re free of it. And you’re not, of course; you’ve just managed to set it down on paper, that’s all.” (Little Free Library)
My original rating (2013): 
My rating now:
Stations of the Heart: Parting with a Son by Richard Lischer (2013)
“What we had taken to be a temporary unpleasantness had now burrowed deep into the family pulp and was gnawing us from the inside out.” Like all life writing, the bereavement memoir has two tasks: to bear witness and to make meaning. From a distance that just happens to be Mary Karr’s prescribed seven years, Lischer opens by looking back on the day when his 33-year-old son Adam called to tell him that his melanoma, successfully treated the year before, was back. Tests revealed that the cancer’s metastases were everywhere, including in his brain, and were “innumerable,” a word that haunted Lischer and his wife, their daughter, and Adam’s wife, who was pregnant with their first child.
The next few months were a Calvary of sorts, and Lischer, an emeritus professor at Duke Divinity School, draws deliberate parallels with the biblical and liturgical preparations for Good Friday that feel appropriate for this Ash Wednesday. Lischer had no problem with Adam’s late-life conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism, whose rites he followed with great piety in his final summer. He traces Adam and Jenny’s daily routines as well as his own helpless attendance at hospital appointments. Doped up on painkillers, Adam attended one last Father’s Day baseball game with him; one last Fourth of July picnic. Everyone so desperately wanted him to keep going long enough to meet his baby girl. To think that she is now a young woman and has opened all the presents Adam bought to leave behind for her first 18 birthdays.
The facts of the story are heartbreaking enough, but Lischer’s prose is a perfect match: stately, resolute and weighted with spiritual allusion, yet never morose. He approaches the documenting of his son’s too-short life with a sense of sacred duty: “I have acquired a new responsibility: I have become the interpreter of his death. God, I must do a better job. … I kissed his head and thanked him for being my son. I promised him then that his death would not ruin my life.” This memoir brought back so much about my brother-in-law’s death from brain cancer in 2015, from the “TEAM [ADAM/GARNET]” T-shirts to Adam’s sister’s remark, “I never dreamed this would be our family’s story.” We’re not alone. (Remainder book from the Bowie, Maryland Dollar Tree) 
A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin (1954)
I’d heard Nin spoken of in the same breath as D.H. Lawrence, so thought I might similarly appreciate her because of, or despite, comically overblown symbolism around sex. I think I was also expecting something more titillating? (I guess I had this confused for Delta of Venus, her only work that would be shelved in an Erotica section.) Many have tried to make a feminist case for this novella about Sabina, an early liberated woman in New York City who has extramarital sex with four other men who appeal to her for various not particularly good reasons (the traumatized soldier whom she comforts like a mother; the exotic African drummer – “Sabina did not feel guilty for drinking of the tropics through Mambo’s body”). She herself states, “I want to trespass boundaries, erase all identifications, anything which fixes one permanently into one mould, one place without hope of change.” The most interesting aspect of the book was Sabina’s questioning of whether she inherited her promiscuity from her father (it’s tempting to read this autobiographically as Nin’s own father left the family for another woman, a foundational wound in her life).
Come on, though, “fecundated,” “fecundation” … who could take such vocabulary seriously? Or this sex writing (snort!): “only one ritual, a joyous, joyous, joyous impaling of woman on a man’s sensual mast.” I charge you to use the term “sensual mast” wherever possible in the future. (Secondhand – Oxfam, Newbury) 
But hey, check out my score for the Faber Valentine’s quiz!
Recent Releases by Nathan Hill, Hisham Matar, Sigrid Nunez and More
One key way in which 2024’s reading has already differed from previous years’ is that I no longer avoid doorstoppers. I now classify any book with over 400 pages as a doorstopper, and by that definition I have already gotten through three this year: The Tidal Year plus two of the below, with Wellness standing out as the true whopper at 597 small-print pages. January offered a set of releases full of variety: gritty yet funny flash fiction; a novel of big ideas and big empathy for its flawed characters; an exile’s elegant love letter to Libya from London; a coy pandemic-era reflection on connection and creation; and a tour of nature close to home.
Universally Adored and Other One Dollar Stories by Elizabeth Bruce
This was a great collection of 33 stories, all of them beginning with the words “One Dollar” and most of flash fiction length. Bruce has a knack for quickly introducing a setup and protagonist. The voice and setting vary enough that no two stories sound the same. What is the worth of a dollar? In some cases, where there’s a more contemporary frame of reference, a dollar is a sign of desperation (for the man who’s lost house, job and wife in “Little Jimmy,” for the coupon-cutting penny-pincher whose unbroken monologue makes up the whole of “Grocery List”), or maybe just enough for a small treat for a child (as in “Mouse Socks” or “Boogie Board”). In the historical stories, a dollar can buy a lot more. It’s a tank of gas – and a lesson on the evils of segregation – in “Gas Station”; it’s a huckster’s exorbitant charge for a mocked-up relic in “The Grass Jesus Walked On.”
The tone ranges from black comedy (“Festus”) to high tragedy (“Votive Candle”), but the book mostly falls within the realm of dirty realism with the attention to working-class country folk, so I’d recommend the collection to fans of authors who perch on the lighter side of that subgenre, such as Barbara Kingsolver or Denis Johnson. A few of my favorite stories, in addition to the above, were “Ice-Cold Water,” which I appreciated for the Washington D.C. setting and the way that an assumption about who would be racist was overturned by a moment of simple compassion; “Dolores,” in which a slick humanitarian fundraiser meets a waitress who has his number; and “Boiling the Buggers,” a window onto Covid-exacerbated mental illness. (Read via BookSirens)
Wellness by Nathan Hill
Somehow nearly eight years have passed since Hill’s debut novel, The Nix, which I dubbed “a rich, multi-layered story about family curses and failure.” I admired it as much for its prose as for its ideas, and Wellness is just as effervescent and insightful. It’s a state-of-the-nation novel filtered through one Chicago family: experimental photographer and underperforming academic Jack; his wife Elizabeth, a placebo researcher at Wellness; and their YouTube-obsessed son Toby. They’ve recently invested their life savings in a new condo and are considering trendy features like open shelves and separate master bedrooms. It would be oversimplifying, but true, to say that this couple is experiencing midlife and marital crises. Their nineties college romance – and a time of life when everything felt open and possible – is so remote now. When Elizabeth suggests they join a friend at a swingers’ club and a patient of hers who’s also a parent at Toby’s school sees them outside, chaos ensues.
Some elements from The Nix carry over, such as campus politics, the American Midwest, and mother–son relationships, but also broader questions of authenticity, purpose and nurture. Is love itself a placebo? The novel spends time with Jack and Elizabeth at the dawn of their relationship and in the present day, but also looks back to their early careers and first years of parenthood. Hill is clearly fascinated with the sort of psychological experimentation Elizabeth engages in (there’s a whole bibliography of scientific papers consulted) but also turns it to humorous effect, as when Elizabeth subjects Toby to the marshmallow test. A lot of information is conveyed through dialogue, yet it never feels forced. A couple of long asides, on Elizabeth’s family history and the algorithms guiding Jack’s interactions with his conspiracy theorist father, tried my patience, but I loved a four-page chapter on a funeral supper where every sentence starts “There was.” Sooooo many quotable lines throughout.
The only fault in an addictive and spot-on novel (how did he know?! you’ll find yourself thinking about your own attitude to work/marriage/children) is that Hill is so committed to excavating these characters’ backstory of stunted emotion – Jack estranged from his religious Kansas farmer parents after a traumatic incident you feel right in the gut; Elizabeth glad to jettison her father’s wealth with his anger – that he hurries through the denouement. Still, this is sure to be a fiction highlight of my year. It’s one for readers of Jonathan Franzen, sure, but I also thought it reminiscent of Katherine Heiny’s Standard Deviation and Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings.
With thanks to Picador for the proof copy for review.
My Friends by Hisham Matar
“Benghazi was the one place I longed for the most, it was also the place I most feared to return to.”
Taking a long walk through London one day, Khaled looks back from midlife on the choices he and his two best friends have made. He first came to the UK as an eighteen-year-old student at Edinburgh University. Everything that came after stemmed from one fateful day. Matar places Khaled and his university friend Mustafa at a real-life demonstration outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984, which ended in a rain of bullets and the accidental death of a female police officer. Khaled’s physical wound is less crippling than the sense of being cut off from his homeland and his family. As he continues his literary studies and begins teaching, he decides to keep his injury a secret from them, as from nearly everyone else in his life. On a trip to Paris to support a female friend undergoing surgery, he happens to meet Hosam, a writer whose work enraptured him when he heard it on the radio back home long ago. Decades pass and the Arab Spring prompts his friends to take different paths.
I’d previously only read Matar’s short nonfiction work A Month in Siena. The slow, meditative style I enjoyed so much there didn’t translate well into doorstopper length; by the 300-page mark I found myself skimming to see if anything else might happen. Despite the title, we come to know Mustafa and Hosam much less well than we do Khaled. I would happily have had the book’s plot and sentiment concentrated into a taut 200 pages. However, I’m still interested in trying other books by Matar. In the Country of Men is significantly shorter and available from the backroom storage area of my library, and his Folio Prize-winning memoir The Return, too, is on shelf and I reckon will be right up my street.
With thanks to Viking (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
I’m a huge Nunez fan after reading The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and especially A Feather on the Breath of God. Her last three books have been very much of a piece: autofiction voiced by an unnamed woman who has a duty of care towards a friend or a friend’s pet and ponders, in wry meta fashion, the nature of autobiographical writing and the meaning of life and death at a time of climate breakdown. Alas, The Vulnerables seems like no more than a rehashing of The Friend, with flanking main characters chosen at random from central casting: a parrot named Eureka and a mentally ill college drop-out called Vetch. This quirky trio is thrown together in a lavish New York City apartment during lockdown and nothing much happens but conversation brings them closer.
A second problem: Covid-19 stories feel dated. For the first two years of the pandemic I read obsessively about it, mostly nonfiction accounts from healthcare workers or ordinary people looking for community or turning to nature in a time of collective crisis. But now when I come across it as a major element in a book, it feels like an out-of-place artefact; I’m almost embarrassed for the author: so sorry, but you missed your moment. My disappointment may primarily be because my expectations were so high. I’ve noted that two blogger friends new to Nunez were enthusiastic about this (but so was Susan, who’d enjoyed her before). That’s not to say this wasn’t a pleasantly fluid and incisive read, even if its message of essential human vulnerability is an obvious one. Anyway, I’ll take Nunez musing on familiar subjects over most other contemporary writers any day:
“Never write ‘I don’t remember,’ Editor says; it undermines your authority. But write as if you remember everything and Reader will smell a rat.”
“You can start with fiction or start with documentary, according to Jean-Luc Goddard. Either way, you will inevitably find the other.”
“I like this clarification by the narrator of a book by Stendhal: ‘It is not out of egotism that I say “I”; it is simply the quickest way to tell the story.’)”
(À propos of the doorstoppers above)
“Does that mean a long novel is easier to write than a short one? / Um, no. But, to borrow from a certain critic, in almost every long book I read I see a short one shirking its job.”
With thanks to Virago for the proof copy for review.
And a bonus work of nonfiction:
Local: A Search for Nearby Nature and Wildness by Alastair Humphreys
Lev Parikian alerted me to this amiable record of weekly discoveries of the nature on one’s home turf. Humphreys has been an international adventure traveller and written many books about his exploits. Here, by contrast, he zooms the lens in about as far as it will go, ordering a custom-made 20-km-square OS map that has his house at the centre and choosing one surrounding grid square per week (so 52 out of a total of 400) to cycle to and explore. He’s chosen to leave his town unnamed so this can function as an Everyman’s journey through edgelands. And his descriptions and black-and-white photographs really do present an accurate microcosm of modern England: fields, woods, waterways, suburban streets.
From one November to the next, he watches the seasons advance and finds many magical spaces with everyday wonders to appreciate. “This project was already beginning to challenge my assumptions of what was beautiful or natural in the landscape,” he writes in his second week. True, he also finds distressing amounts of litter, no-access signs and evidence of environmental degradation. But curiosity is his watchword: “The more I pay attention, the more I notice. The more I notice, the more I learn.”
Each week’s observations send him down a research rabbit hole, with topics including caves, land management, mudlarking, plant species, and much more. The nature of the short chapters means that there can only ever be a cursory look at huge issues like rewilding and veganism, but Humphreys is nimble in weaving in the brief, matter-of-fact discussions. His eagerness is irrepressible. “How you look, what you see, and the way all this makes you feel: a single map and the best of all possible worlds.” (See also: Paul’s review.)
With thanks to the author for the free copy for review.
Review Catch-Up: Monica, Bibliomaniac, Family Meal, Fudge & More
I’m catching up with reviews of the many October releases I read, including these four sent by publishers…
- a genre-bending, Technicolor graphic novel in the form of short comics
- a book-addict’s memoir of an ambitious Covid-times tour of Britain’s bookshops
- an understated novel about queer men of colour coping with death and mental illness
- and a quirky contemporary poetry collection I read in one sitting.
Followed by a bonus list of October books I reviewed for Shelf Awareness, similarly varied in genre: autofiction, flash fiction, horror-tinged historical fiction, graphic memoirs and more.
Monica by Daniel Clowes
Daniel Clowes is a respected American graphic novelist best known for Ghost World, which was adapted into a 2001 film starring Scarlett Johansson. I’m not sure what I was expecting of Monica. Perhaps something closer to a quiet life story like Alison by Lizzy Stewart? In any case, not this jumble of 1970s nostalgia and supernatural horror. The book is in nine loosely connected stories that make the head spin with their genre and tonal shifts; one thing that stays constant is Clowes’s drawing style, which combines vibrant, campy colour with exaggerated faces and blunt haircuts.
At first it seems there will be a straightforward linear narrative: the prologue, “Foxhole,” has two soldiers dreaming of what life will be like Vietnam, with the one looking forward to a simple life with his fiancée Penny. “Pretty Penny” shatters those illusions as we see that Penny has fully embraced sexual liberation while he’s been away. She rejects her mother and, in a countercultural decision, keeps the baby when she gets pregnant. Young Monica has a sequence of stepfather figures before Penny dumps her with her parents and goes AWOL.
To an extent, the rest of the book is about Monica’s search for her parents. We see her as a young college student communicating with her dead grandfather via a radio, as a successful entrepreneur selling candles, and as an older woman caretaking for a California Airbnb. But in between there are bizarre sci-fi/folk horror interludes – “The Glow Infernal” and “The Incident” – about unconnected characters, and Monica’s involvement with a cult inevitably turns strange. I couldn’t get past the distasteful story lines or grotesque style. Mostly, I wasn’t convinced that Clowes liked or cared about any of his own characters, so why should I? (This might be Tom Cox’s dream book, but not mine.) I suppose I might try a classic work by Clowes one day, but only if I can be assured that it has more plot and heart.
With thanks to Jonathan Cape (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
Bibliomaniac: An Obsessive’s Tour of the Bookshops of Britain by Robin Ince
Do you know anyone who can buy just one book? Do you know anyone who leaves a bookshop only with what they walked in to buy?
I understand that Robin Ince is a radio personality and comedian who, though holding no formal qualifications, often delivers presentations about science. He was meant to undertake a stadium tour with Professor Brian Cox in the autumn of 2021, but a Covid resurgence put paid to that. Not one for sitting around at home – he comes across as driven, antsy; positively allergic to boredom – he formulated Plan B: 100+ events, most of them in independent bookshops (the oddest venue was a Chinese restaurant; he was speaking to the Plymouth Humanists), over the course of two months, criss-crossing Britain and hitting many favourite places such as Hay-on-Wye, Hungerford (my local indie) and Wigtown. The topic of his previous book was curiosity, which gave him free rein to feature anything that interested him, so no two talks were the same and he incorporated lots of ad hoc book recommendations.
Ince is not just a speaker at the bookshops but, invariably, a customer – as well as at just about every charity shop in a town. Even when he knows he’ll be carrying his purchases home in his luggage on the train, he can’t resist a browse. And while his shopping basket would look wildly different to mine (his go-to sections are science and philosophy, the occult, 1960s pop and alternative culture; alongside a wide but utterly unpredictable range of classic and contemporary fiction and antiquarian finds), I sensed a kindred spirit in so many lines:
“A bookshop with a proximity to an interesting graveyard is a fine combination.”
“I like charity bookshops, because I can delude myself into believing that I am committing an altruistic act by purchasing too many books. I am not satisfying my consumer lust – I am digging a well in Uganda.”
“This is one of the wonders of books: the delight of being a species that can chronicle and preserve. I pick up a book from a shelf, and someone who is no more than ash or bone can still change me.”
He’s also refreshingly open-minded, determined not to become a white male dinosaur: he once spent a wonderful year reading only women authors, and gratefully accepts the gift of a Black queer feminist work – at which he knows a younger version of himself would have scoffed. I took lots of notes on shops I hadn’t heard of, but also appreciated the witty asides on British ways and on the rigours and coincidences of the tour. If you liked White Spines, this will be right up your street, though to me this was universal where the Royle was too niche. And it didn’t matter a jot that I was previously unfamiliar with Ince as a public figure.
Bibliomaniac came out in paperback on 5 October. My thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.
Family Meal by Bryan Washington
After the verve of his linked short stories (Lot, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize) and the offbeat tenderness of his debut novel, Memorial, I couldn’t wait for Bryan Washington’s next book. While it’s set in the multicultural Houston of his first book and similarly peopled by young queer men of colour, Family Meal shares the more melancholy edge of Memorial with its focus on bereavement and the habits and relationships that help the characters to cope.
Cam has moved back to Houston from Los Angeles after the untimely death of his boyfriend Kai, who had a budding career as a translator and spent part of each year in Japan. Cam works in a failing gay bar, crashes with his boss and has mostly stopped eating. Although he still loves cooking Asian food for others, he rarely tastes it himself; his overpowering appetite now is for pills and sex, leading him to arrange as many as four hook-ups per day. Kai still appears and communicates to him. “Easier to spend time dwelling on death than it is to live, says Kai.” Is it to escape this spectre, or the memory of what happened to Kai, that Cam descends into his addictions? Meanwhile, his estranged friend TJ, with whom Cam grew up at TJ’s Korean American family’s bakery after the death of Cam’s parents, has his own history of loss and unhealthy relationships. But a connection with the bakery’s new nonbinary employee, Noel, seems like it might be different.
If you’ve read Washington before, you’ll know what to expect: no speech marks, obscenity-strewn dialogue, sexually explicit scenes that seem to be there for the sake of it (because sex is part of life, rather than because they particularly advance the plot). An issue I had here, like with Memorial, is that having multiple first-person narrators doesn’t add anything; Kai and TJ sound so much like Cam, who narrates roughly the first half, that it’s hard to tell their affectless accounts apart. Such interchangeable voices two books running suggests to me that Washington hasn’t yet managed to fully imagine himself outside of his own personality.
The novel has much to convey about found family, food as nurture, and how we try to fill the emptiness in our lives with things that aren’t good for us. However, it often delivers these messages through what wise secondary characters say, which struck me as unsubtle.
“You don’t have to do this alone, says TJ.”
(Kai:) “My mother would say, Cooking is care. The act is the care.”
“Love can be a lot of things though, says Noel. Right? It’s pleasure but it’s also washing the dishes and sorting medication and folding the laundry. It’s picking out what to eat for dinner three nights in a row, even if you don’t want to. And it’s knowing when to speak up, and when to stay quiet, and when, I think, to move on. But also when to fight for it.”
“Sometimes the best we can do is live for each other, she [Kai’s sister] says. It’s enough. Even if it seems like it isn’t.”
There’s no doubting how heartfelt this story is. It brought tears to my eyes at the beginning and end, but in between did not captivate me as much as I hoped. While intermittently poignant on the subject of bereavement, it is so mired in the characters’ unhealthy coping mechanisms that it becomes painful to read.
In my mind Washington and Brandon Taylor are in the same basket, though that may be reductive or unimaginative of me (young, gay Black authors from the American South who have published three books and tend to return to the same themes and settings). Before this year I would have said Taylor had the edge, but The Late Americans was so disappointingly similar to his previous work that Washington has taken the lead. I just hope that with his next work he challenges himself instead of coasting along in the groove he’s created thus far.
I wish I could get a copy of this into the hands of Sufjan Stevens…
With thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.
Fudge by Andrew Weatherhead
I read this over a chilled-out coffee at the Globe bar in Hay-on-Wye (how perfect, then, to come across the lines “I know the secret of life / Is to read good books”). Weatherhead mostly charts the rhythms of everyday existence in pandemic-era New York City, especially through a haiku sequence (“The blind cat asleep / On my lap—and coffee / Just out of reach” – a situation familiar to any cat owner). His style is matter-of-fact and casually funny, juxtaposing random observations about hipster-ish experiences. From “Things the Photoshop Instructor Said and Did”: “Someone gasped when he increased the contrast / I feel like everyone here is named Taylor.”
The central piece, “Poem While on Hold with NBA League Pass Customer Support Nov. 17, 2018,” descends into the absurd, but his four hours lost on the phone are reclaimed through his musings on a sport he once played (“I had begun to find meaning in art and music / I was always too cerebral a player anyways … That feeling—of perfect grace and equanimity— / must be what we’re all searching for in this life”) and on life in general. This is poetry that doesn’t feel like poetry, if that makes sense. I have a hunch that it might appeal to readers of David Foster Wallace.
Published by Publishing Genius. With thanks to publicist Lori Hettler for the e-copy for review.
Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:
(Links to full text)
The Flowers of Provence by Jamie Beck (Gift books feature): A gorgeous book of photographs, perfect for gardeners, romantics, and armchair travelers. Her still lifes are as detailed and colorful as medieval paintings.
Edith Holler by Edward Carey (forthcoming): A dark fairy tale about a precocious girl confined to her family’s theatre in Norwich, England yet driven to reveal the truth behind her city’s child disappearances. Reminiscent of Dahl, Dickens, and Shakespeare at their goriest.
I Must Be Dreaming by Roz Chast: A laugh-out-loud-funny tour through her dream journal as well as a brief introduction to dream theory. Delightfully captures the randomness of dream topics and dialogues.
Tremor by Teju Cole: A kaleidoscopic work of autofiction that journeys between the US and Nigeria as it questions the ownership and meaning of Black art. The sophisticated structure is a highlight of this elegant study of art criticism, suffering, and subjectivity.
Our Strangers by Lydia Davis (Review and Q&A): In her ninth collection of mostly flash-length stories (a whopping 143 of them), an overarching theme is the mystery of human communication and connection. A real cornucopia of genres, structures, and voices. [Only available via Bookshop.org and independent bookstores.]
Lotería by Esteban Rodríguez: Lotería is a traditional Mexican game of chance. Each Spanish-language card is allotted a one-page poem in a creative, poignant recounting of his Mexican American family history.
Glass Half Empty by Rachael Smith: The British comics artist third graphic memoir is a refreshingly candid account of her recovery from alcoholism after her father’s death. In some panes, her adult self appears alongside her younger self, offering advice.
The Dead Peasant’s Handbook by Brian Turner: The final installment – after The Wild Delight of Wild Things and The Goodbye World Poem – in an intimate, autobiographical trilogy. Love is presented as the key to surviving bereavement and wartime trauma.
October Reading Plans
My plans for the rest of the month’s reading, in pictures.
A handful of October releases (not counting the ones I’ve reviewed in advance for Shelf Awareness et al., one for a blog tour, or what I’ll be reading for November deadlines).
I turn 40 on the 14th, so have made a halfhearted attempt to gather my last four unread from The Novel Cure’s books to read in your thirties before that milestone passes. Whether I’ll actually read them, I’m less sure about. I’ve owned this copy of The Jungle for decades; I’ve not enjoyed Trollope since my student days. Time runs short, anyway, but I’ll see how I get on with the Sinclair at least, and perhaps skim the Trollope to get a sense of why Berthoud and Elderkin chose it for that list.
[The others are London Fields by Martin Amis, which is on loan just as I need it, and The Best of It All by Rona Jaffe, which I borrowed once and didn’t get far in; now it appears to have been withdrawn from the system. (My DNF review from 2018: “I read the first chapter and had a weird reverse case of déjà vu: this is awfully similar to Mad Men, Suzanne Rindell’s Three-Martini Lunch, and A.J. Pearce’s Dear Mrs Bird, though of course they would have been based on Jaffe’s novel rather than the other way round. Caroline Bender, fresh out of a broken engagement, arrives for her first day as a typist at a New York City publishing house and has to adjust to the catty office politics. I think I’ll truly enjoy this, but I need to find another time when I can give it my full attention. It’s nearly 450 pages of small print, so I need a chunk of time when I can really sink into it, like a flight or a long train ride.)]
Also in conjunction with that big birthday, I’ve collected some notable 1983 releases, including 5 out of the 10 most popular on Goodreads’ list. (The Ephron and Hill would be rereads for me.) I’ll work on them in these last few months of the year.
A lesser-known Margaret Drabble novel for our women’s classics book club subgroup; Pale Fire for 1962 Club; two potential books for AusReading Month.
Some spooky or death-themed R.I.P. options (I know the challenge technically starts in September, but I only ever think to read such books as Halloween approaches).
I’ll be spending my birthday weekend in Hay-on-Wye, one of my special places. Here’s my Wales-themed and/or Hay-related pile. I’ll take all of these and probably many of the above as well; I like to have lots to choose from!
Short Stories in September, Part II: Brautigan, Doyle, Minot, Simpson
Every time I do this self-set challenge, I am amazed anew by how different short story collections can be in mood and theme – even if their overall concerns are the same as in most fiction: life and death, relationships, identity, choices. Today I have one debut work, two new-to-me authors, and a disappointing showing from an old favourite.
Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962–1970 by Richard Brautigan (1972)
There are more than five dozen stories in this slim volume, most just one to three pages and in the first person (55 of 62); bizarre or matter-of-fact slices of life in the Pacific Northwest or California, often with a grandiose title that’s then contradicted by the banality of the contents (e.g., in the three-page “A Short History of Religion in California,” some deer hunters encounter a group of Christian campers). The simple declarative sentences and mentions of drinking and hunting made me think of Carver and Hemingway, but Brautigan is funnier, coming out with the occasional darkly comic zinger. Here’s “The Scarlatti Tilt” in its entirety: “‘It’s very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who’s learning to play the violin.’ That’s what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver.”
In the absurdist “Homage to the San Francisco YMCA,” a man replaces his plumbing with poetry: “He took out his bathtub and put in William Shakespeare. The bathtub did not know what was happening. He took out his kitchen sink and put in Emily Dickinson. The kitchen sink could only stare back in wonder.” Brautigan has an incomer’s admiration for California: “I come from someplace else and was gathered to the purpose of California like a metal-eating flower gathers the sunshine.” Many of the flash stories feel autobiographical and bridge country and city life with themes of bear hunting versus movie-going and riding buses.
There are some macho attitudes towards women, who are generally objects of male desire rather than subjects in their own right. But I appreciated this flash fiction collection for its unexpected metaphors and tonal range, from the over-the-top humour of “Complicated Banking Problems” to a pathos-filled rundown of a life in “The World War I Los Angeles Aeroplane.” (Secondhand – Westwood Books, Sedbergh, 2023)
I Meant It Once by Kate Doyle (2023)
A debut collection of 16 stories, three of them returning to the same sibling trio. Many of Doyle’s characters are young people who still define themselves by the experiences and romances of their college years. In “That Is Shocking,” Margaret can’t get over the irony of her ex breaking up with her on Valentine’s Day after giving her a plate of heart-shaped scones. Former roommates Christine and Daisy are an example of fading friendship in “Two Pisces Emote about the Passage of Time.”
The title phrase comes from “Cinnamon Baseball Coyote,” one of the Helen–Grace–Evan stories, when the sparring sisters are children and the one writes down “I hate my sister” and saves the paper in her desk because, as she tells their father, “I don’t mean it anymore. I only kept it because I meant it once.” Moments of great drama or emotion, and the regret that comes in their aftermath, are the stuff of these mainly New York City-set stories.
Across nine first-person and seven third-person stories, the content and point of view are pretty samey and minor; nothing here to make you feel you’re reading a rising star of American fiction. I only found a few standouts. “Hello It’s You” is about Meg’s history of same-sex partners: though she’s with Sara now, she can’t stop thinking about Jenny, her college girlfriend. “Aren’t We Lucky” has a soupçon of magic as it imagines a house and its ghosts resisting renovations. But my favourite was “Moments Earlier,” about Kelly’s medical crisis and the friends who never get past it. 
With thanks to Corsair for the free copy for review. See also Susan’s review.
Why I Don’t Write and Other Stories by Susan Minot (2020)
Minot was new to me (as was Brautigan). These stories were first published between 1991 and 2019, so they span a good chunk of her career. “Polepole” depicts a short-lived affair between two white people in Kenya, one of whom seems to have a dated colonial attitude. In “The Torch,” a woman with dementia mistakes her husband for an old flame. “Occupied” sees Ivy cycling past the NYC Occupy camp on her way to pick up her daughter. The title story, published at LitHub in 2018, is a pithy list of authorial excuses. “Listen” is a nebulous set of lines of unattributed speech that didn’t add up to much for me. “The Language of Cats and Dogs” reminded me of Mary Gaitskill in tone, as a woman remembers her professor’s inappropriate behaviour 40 years later.
Eight of the stories are in the third person and two in the first person. They’re almost all accomplished in terms of scene setting and creating characters and motivations, but I can’t say Minot won me over such that I’ll seek out more of her work. Only a few stories will stay with me: “Green Glass,” in which a man encounters his ex-girlfriend at a wedding and cuts her down to size in a way that alarms his current partner; “Boston Common at Twilight,” an account of a strange but ultimately non-consensual sexual encounter; and my favourite, “Café Mort,” the only one with a speculative edge, about an establishment that only serves the dead. (New bargain purchase – Dollar Tree, Hagerstown, Maryland, 2023)
Hey Yeah Right Get a Life by Helen Simpson (2000)
This was my sixth collection from Simpson, who only appears to write short fiction. This was one of my least favourite of her books, unfortunately, because her common theme of frazzled mothers trying to balance parenting with career felt tired. The title story is about Dorrie, mum of three, and this set of characters recurs in the final piece, “Hurrah for the Hols.” Simpson does get the mindset just right:
She had to be thinking of other people all the time or the whole thing fell apart.
I can’t see how the family would work if I let myself start wanting things again, thought Dorrie; give me an inch and I’d run a mile, that’s what I’m afraid of.
The whole pattern of family life hung for a vivid moment above the chopping board as a seamless cycle of nourishment and devoural.
It was like being on holiday with Punch and Judy – lots of biffing and shrieking and fights over sausages.
But I’ve read too many of her exasperated-mum stories at this point. Two here were about female bankers. One, “Burns and the Bankers,” set at a seemingly endless Burns Night supper, rather outstayed its welcome and made overly obvious its message about this being a man’s field. Do read Simpson, but maybe not this (despite the amazing title); I’d recommend Four Bare Legs in a Bed or In the Driver’s Seat (UK title: Constitutional) instead. (Secondhand – Books for Amnesty, York, 2023)
I’ll have one more set of reviews and a roundup on the last day of the month.
Currently reading: If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery; The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners, ed. Lauren Groff; How to Disappear by Tara Masih; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro; The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer; Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, ed. Christine Park; Small, Burning Things by Cathy Ulrich
20 Books of Summer, 5: Crudo by Olivia Laing (2018)
Behind on the challenge, as ever, I picked up a novella. It vaguely fits with a food theme as crudo, “raw” in Italian, can refer to fish or meat platters (depicted on the original hardback cover). In this context, though, it connotes the raw material of a life: a messy matrix of choices and random happenings, rooted in a particular moment in time.
This is set over four and a bit months of 2017 and steeped in the protagonist’s detached horror at political and environmental breakdown. She’s just turned 40 and, in between two trips to New York City, has a vacation in Tuscany, dabbles in writing and art criticism, and settles into married life in London even though she’s used to independence and nomadism.
For as hyper-real as the contents are, Laing is doing something experimental, even fantastical – blending biography with autofiction and cultural commentary by making her main character, apparently, Kathy Acker. Never mind that Acker died of breast cancer in 1997.
I knew nothing of Acker but – while this is clearly born of deep admiration, as well as familiarity with her every written word – that didn’t matter. Acker quotes and Trump tweets are inserted verbatim, with the sources given in a “Something Borrowed” section at the end.
Like Jenny Offill’s Weather, this is a wry and all too relatable take on current events and the average person’s hypocrisy and sense of helplessness, with the lack of speech marks and shortage of punctuation I’ve come to expect from ultramodern novels:
she might as well continue with her small and cultivated life, pick the dahlias, stake the ones that had fallen down, she’d always known whatever it was wasn’t going to last for long.
40, not a bad run in the history of human existence but she’d really rather it all kept going, water in the taps, whales in the oceans, fruits and duvets, the whole sumptuous parade
This is how it is then, walking backwards into disaster, braying all the way.
I’ve somehow read almost all of Laing’s oeuvre (barring her essays, Funny Weather) and have found books like The Trip to Echo Spring, The Lonely City and Everybody wide-ranging and insightful. Crudo feels as faithful to life as Rachel Cusk’s autofiction or Deborah Levy’s autobiography, but also like an attempt to make something altogether new out of the stuff of our unprecedented times. No doubt some of the intertextuality of this, her only fiction to date, was lost on me, but I enjoyed it much more than I expected to – it’s funny as well as eminently quotable – and that’s always a win. (Little Free Library)
Books of Summer, 3–4: Anthony Bourdain and Meron Hadero
Back to the foodie lit. A chef’s memoir of adventurous travel and eating, and a short story collection about Ethiopian American immigrants – for some of whom learning how to cook traditional American food is a sign of integration.
A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal by Anthony Bourdain (2001)
Anthony Bourdain also appeared on my summer reading list when I reviewed Kitchen Confidential in 2020; I have both books in an omnibus edition. The chef acknowledges there’s no such thing as a perfect dining experience as there are many subjective factors apart from the food, but a few of his meals here are pretty close to ideal. Others are horrific. But everywhere he goes, from England to Cambodia, he gives a fair try. Four interspersed chapters are set in Vietnam, a country he falls in love with, but the rest are like individual essays with a different destination each time: Spain, Russia, Morocco, Japan, Scotland…
Some places are chosen due to personal significance or professional connections. He goes back to where he spent childhood summers in France, but it doesn’t live up to expectations: “I’d thought everything would be instant magic. That the food would taste better because of all the memories. … But you can never be ten years old again.” His boss arranges a pig roast for him in Portugal; he travels to the state in Mexico where most of his kitchen staff come from. With several other chefs, he journeys to Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry in California for a 20-course tasting menu – the rundown of the dishes takes him several pages. The key ingredients of this and the other near-perfect meals seem to be excellent quality of food, innovative flavors, a variety of dishes, and a languid pace with the alcohol flowing.
Bourdain sheepishly confesses that his travels were documented for television; the Food Network made him agree to some filming opportunities he would otherwise have avoided. Vegetarians be warned: some of these involve slaughter, and/or eating exotic animals. Aside from the pig, there’s a whole lamb cooked over a fire in the desert in Morocco, a turkey he beheads, and rabbits he shoots. And while you might think he’d eat anything with pleasure, there are in fact a few meals that leave him feeling ill: iguana tamales, bird’s nest soup, and dishes that use up all parts of a cobra. A notorious vegetarian hater, he even agrees to attend a vegan potluck in Berkeley, but reports that “not one of them could cook a f***ing vegetable.”
This was fast-moving, brash and funny; just as good as Kitchen Confidential and something I’d recommend to anyone who enjoys cooking shows or stunt travel. (Free – swap shop)
A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times by Meron Hadero (2022)
Debut author Hadero won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing for this work in progress, many of whose stories had been published in periodicals in 2015–20. The 15 stories are roughly half in the first person and half in the third person, and apart from a couple whose place or character origins aren’t specified, I think all are about Ethiopians or Ethiopian Americans. Often, the protagonist is a recent immigrant. Yohannes, in “Medallion,” is recruited by his taxi driver almost immediately upon his arrival in Los Angeles, but finds that his American dream never comes through. In “The Thief’s Tale,” an old Ethiopian man who speaks no English is lost in Prospect Park. When the man who holds him up at knifepoint realizes there is no watch or wallet to take, he lets him call his daughter from a payphone and, as they wait, the two strangers share their stories of failure and regret.
Sometimes Ethiopia is the setting instead. “The Suitcase” has Saba getting ready to return to the USA after a one-month visit to Addis Ababa, her bag 10 kilograms too heavy because of everything people are sending back with her. In “The Street Sweep,” Getu hopes to impress a departing NGO worker enough at his leaving party at the Addis Sheraton that he’ll get a life-changing job offer. This one was a standout, though distressing for how it rests on misunderstanding.
My favorites seem like they could be autobiographical for the author. “The Wall” is narrated by a man who immigrated to Iowa via Berlin at age 10 in the mid-1980s. At a potluck dinner, he met Professor Johannes Weill, who gave him free English lessons. Six years later, he heard of the Berlin Wall coming down and, though he’d lost touch with the professor, made a point of sending a note. The connection across age, race and country is touching. “Sinkholes” is a short, piercing one about the single Black student in a class refusing to be the one to write the N-word on the board during a lesson on Invisible Man. The teacher is trying to make a point about not giving a word power, but it’s clear that it does have significance whether uttered or not. “Swearing In, January 20, 2009” is a poignant flash story about an immigrant’s patriotic delight in Barack Obama’s inauguration, despite prejudice encountered.
The title story is the only foodie link, but it’s a sweet one. Two women who attend church Amharic classes in New York City admit that they can’t cook, but want to impress at the PTA bake sale, so go in search of a quintessential American cookbook, and in the years to come prepare dishes from The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook every time there is a crisis. “When Yeshi’s husband left her for a blonde waitress, they made Broiled Hamburg Steak, just the once. … When Jazarah’s credit cards were stolen and maxed out, they made trays of Corn Fritters.” Eventually, they start to make a living from their own food truck.
There were no bad stories here per se, but several too many, and not enough variety. I also didn’t warm to the couple of political satires involving manuscripts. “The Case of the Missing _______,” set in 2036 and counting backwards from Day 100, is a document full of erasure, produced by the Minnesota newspaper The Exile Gazeta and concerning an absent authoritarian leader. It made me think of Ella Minnow Pea, or perhaps novels by Jonathan Safran Foer and Hernan Diaz, and felt different to the rest, but not in a good way. It would be interesting to try a novel by Hadero someday. See also Liz’s review. (Other challenges this met: review catch-up, set-aside) 
With thanks to Canongate for the proof copy for review.
Rathbones Folio Prize Fiction Shortlist: Sheila Heti and Elizabeth Strout
I’ve enjoyed engaging with this year’s Rathbones Folio Prize shortlists, reading the entire poetry shortlist and two each from the nonfiction and fiction lists. These two I accessed from the library. Both Sheila Heti and Elizabeth Strout featured in the 5×15 event I attended on Tuesday evening, so in the reviews below I’ll weave in some insights from that.
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti is a divisive author; I’m sure there are those who detest her indulgent autofiction, though I’ve loved it (How Should a Person Be? and especially Motherhood). But this is another thing entirely: Heti puts two fingers up to the whole notion of rounded characterization or coherent plot. This is the thinnest of fables, fascinating for its ideas and certainly resonant for me what with the themes of losing a parent and searching for purpose in life on an earth that seems doomed to destruction … but is it a novel?
My summary for Bookmarks magazine gives an idea of the ridiculous plot:
Heti imagines that the life we live now—for Mira, studying at the American Academy of American Critics, working in a lamp store, grieving her father, and falling in love with Annie—is just God’s first draft. In this creation myth of sorts, everyone is born a “bear” (lover), “bird” (achiever), or “fish” (follower). Mira has a mystical experience in which she and her dead father meet as souls in a leaf, where they converse about the nature of time and how art helps us face the inevitability of death. If everything that exists will soon be wiped out, what matters?
The three-creature classification is cute enough, but a copout because it means Heti doesn’t have to spend time developing Mira (a bird), Annie (a fish), or Mira’s father (a bear), except through surreal philosophical dialogues that may or may not take place whilst she is disembodied in a leaf. It’s also uncomfortable how Heti uses sexual language for Mira’s communion with her dead dad: “she knew that the universe had ejaculated his spirit into her”.
Heti explained that the book came to her in discrete chunks, from what felt like a more intuitive place than the others, which were more of an intellectual struggle, and that she drew on her own experience of grief over her father’s death, though she had been writing it for a year beforehand.
Indeed, she appears to be tapping into primordial stories, the stuff of Greek myth or Jewish kabbalah. She writes sometimes of “God” and sometimes of “the gods”: the former regretting this first draft of things and planning how to make things better for himself the second time around; the latter out to strip humans of what they care about: “our parents, our ambitions, our friendships, our beauty—different things from different people. They strip some people more and others less. They strip us of whatever they need to in order to see us more clearly.” Appropriately, then, we follow Mira all the way through to her end, when, stripped of everything but love, she rediscovers the two major human connections of her life.
Given Ali Smith’s love of the experimental, it’s no surprise that she as a judge shortlisted this. If you’re of a philosophical bent, don’t mind negligible/non-existent plot in your novels and aren’t turned off by literary pretension, you should be fine. If you are new to Heti or unsure about trying her, though, this is probably not the right place to start. See my Goodreads review for some sample quotes, good and bad. 
Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
This was by far the best of the three Amgash books I’ve read. I think it must be the first time that Strout has set a book not in the past or at some undated near-contemporary moment but in the actual world with its current events, which inevitably means it gets political. I had my doubts about how successful she’d be with such hyper-realism, but this really worked.
As Covid hits, William whisks Lucy away from her New York City apartment to a house at the coast in Crosby, Maine. She’s an Everywoman recounting the fear and confusion of those early pandemic days, hearing of friends and relatives falling ill and knowing there’s nothing she can do about it. Isolation, mostly imposed on her but partially chosen – she finally gets a writing studio, the first ‘room of her own’ she’s ever had – gives her time to ponder the trauma of her childhood and what went wrong in her marriage to William. She worries for her two adult daughters but, for the first time, you get the sense that the strength and wisdom she’s earned through bitter experience will help her support them in making good choices.
Here in rural Maine, Lucy sees similar deprivation to what she grew up with in Illinois and also meets real people – nice, friendly people – who voted for Trump and refuse to be vaccinated. I loved how Strout shows us Lucy observing and then, through a short story, compassionately imagining herself into the situation of conservative cops and drug addicts. “Try to go outside your comfort level, because that’s where interesting things will happen on the page,” is her philosophy. This felt like real insight into a writer’s inspirations.
Another neat thing Strout does here, as she has done before, is to stitch her oeuvre together by including references to most of her other books. So she becomes friends with Bob Burgess, volunteers alongside Olive Kitteridge’s nursing home caregiver (and I expect their rental house is supposed to be the one Olive vacated), and meets the pastor’s daughter from Abide with Me. My only misgiving is that she recounts Bob Burgess’s whole story, replete with spoilers, such that I don’t feel I need to read The Burgess Boys.
Lucy has emotional intelligence (“You’re not stupid about the human heart,” Bob Burgess tells her) and real, hard-won insight into herself (“My childhood had been a lockdown”). Readers as well as writers have really taken this character to heart, admiring her seemingly effortless voice. Strout said she does not think of this as a ‘pandemic novel’ because she’s always most interested in character. She believes the most important thing is the sound of the sentences and that a writer has to determine the shape of the material from the inside. She was very keen to separate herself from Lucy, and in fact came across as rather terse. I had somehow expected her to have a higher voice, to be warmer and softer. (“Ah, you’re not Lucy, you’re Olive!” I thought to myself.) 
Predictions
This year’s judges are Guy Gunaratne, Jackie Kay and Ali Smith. Last year’s winner was a white man, so I’m going to say in 2023 the prize should go to a woman of colour, and in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if all three category winners were women of colour. My own taste in the shortlists is, perhaps unsurprisingly, very white-lady-ish and non-experimental. But I think Amy Bloom and Elizabeth Strout’s books are too straightforward and Fiona Benson’s not edgy enough. So I’m expecting:
Fiction: Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser
Nonfiction: Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson
Poetry: Quiet by Victoria Adukwei Bulley (or Cane, Corn & Gully by Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa)
Overall winner: Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson (or Quiet by Victoria Adukwei Bulley)
This is my 1,200th blog post!
#ReadIndies and Review Catch-up: Hazrat, Nettel, Peacock, Seldon
Another four selections for Read Indies month. I’m particularly pleased that two from this latest batch are “just because” books that I picked up off my shelves; another two are catch-up review copies. A few more indie titles will appear in my February roundup on Tuesday. For today, I have a fun variety: a history of the exclamation point, a Mexican novel about choosing motherhood versus being childfree, a memoir of a decades-long friendship between two poets, and a posthumous poetry collection with themes of history, illness and nature.
An Admirable Point: A brief history of the exclamation mark by Florence Hazrat (2022)
I’m definitely a punctuation geek. (My favourite punctuation mark is the semicolon, and there’s a book about it, too: Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark by Cecelia Watson, which I have on my Kindle.) One might think that strings of exclamation points are a pretty new thing – rounding off phrases in (ex-)presidential tweets, for instance – but, in fact, Hazrat opens with a Boston Gazette headline from 1788 that decried “CORRUPTION AND BRIBERY!!!” in relation to the adoption of the new Constitution.
The exclamation mark as we know it has been around since 1399, and by the 16th century its use for expression and emphasis had been codified. I was reminded of Gretchen McCulloch’s discussion of emoji in Because Internet, which also considers how written speech signifies tone, especially in the digital age. There have been various proposals for other “intonation points” over the centuries, but the question mark and exclamation mark are the two that have stuck. (Though I’m currently listening to an album called interrobang – ‽, that is. Invented by Martin Speckter in 1962; recorded by Switchfoot in 2021.)
I most enjoyed Chapter 3, on punctuation in literature. Jane Austen’s original manuscripts, replete with dashes, ampersands and exclamation points, were tidied up considerably before they made it into book form. She’s literature’s third most liberal user of exclamation marks, in terms of the number per 100,000 words, according to a chart Ben Blatt drew up in 2017, topped only by Tom Wolfe and James Joyce.
There are also sections on the use of exclamation points in propaganda and political campaigns – in conjunction with fonts, which brought to mind Simon Garfield’s Just My Type and the graphic novel ABC of Typography. It might seem to have a niche subject, but at just over 150 pages this is a cheery and diverting read for word nerds.
With thanks to Profile Books for the proof copy for review.
Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel (2020; 2022)
[Translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey]
This was the Mexican author’s fourth novel; she’s also a magazine director and has published several short story collections. I’d liken it to a cross between Motherhood by Sheila Heti and (the second half of) No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. Thirtysomething friends Laura and Alina veer off in different directions, yet end up finding themselves in similar ethical dilemmas. Laura, who narrates, is adamant that she doesn’t want children, and follows through with sterilization. However, when she becomes enmeshed in a situation with her neighbours – Doris, who’s been left by her abusive husband, and her troubled son Nicolás – she understands some of the emotional burden of motherhood. Even the pigeon nest she watches on her balcony presents a sort of morality play about parenthood.
Meanwhile, Alina and her partner Aurelio embark on infertility treatment. Laura fears losing her friend: “Alina was about to disappear and join the sect of mothers, those creatures with no life of their own who, zombie-like, with huge bags under their eyes, lugged prams around the streets of the city.” They eventually have a daughter, Inés, but learn before her birth that brain defects may cause her to die in infancy or be severely disabled. Right from the start, Alina is conflicted. Will she cling to Inés no matter her condition, or let her go? And with various unhealthy coping mechanisms to hand, will her relationship with Aurelio stay the course?
Laura alternates between her life and her friends’ circumstances, taking on an omniscient voice on Nettel’s behalf – she recounts details she couldn’t possibly be privy to, at least not at the time (there’s a similar strategy in The Group by Lara Feigel). The question of what is fated versus what is chosen, also represented by Laura’s interest in tarot and palm-reading, always appeals to me. This was a wry and sharp commentary on women’s options. (Giveaway win from Bookish Chat on Twitter)
Still Born was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in the USA on August 8th.
A Friend Sails in on a Poem by Molly Peacock (2022)
I’ve read one of Peacock’s poetry collections, The Analyst, as well as her biography of Mary Delany, The Paper Garden. I was delighted when she got in touch to offer a review copy of her latest memoir, which reflects on her nearly half a century of friendship with fellow poet Phillis Levin. They met in a Johns Hopkins University writing seminar in 1976, and ever since have shared their work in progress over meals. They are seven years apart in age and their careers took different routes – Peacock headed up the Poetry Society of America’s subway poetry project and then moved to Toronto, while Levin taught at the University of Maryland – but over the years they developed “a sense of trust that really does feel familial … There is a weird way, in our conversations about poetry, that we share a single soul.” For a time they were both based in New York City and had the same therapist; more recently, they arranged annual summer poetry retreats in Cazenovia (recalled via diary entries), with just the two attendees. Jobs and lovers came and went, but their bond has endured.
The book traces their lives but also their development as poets, through examples of their verse. Her friend is “Phillis” in real life, but “Levin” when it’s her work is being discussed – and her own poems are as written by “Peacock.” Both women became devoted to the sonnet, an unusual choice because at the time that they were graduate students free verse reigned and form was something one had to learn on one’s own time. Stanza means “room,” Peacock reminds readers, and she believes there is something about form that opens up space, almost literally but certainly metaphorically, to re-examine experience. She repeatedly tracks how traumatic childhood events, as much as everyday observations, were transmuted into her poetry. Levin did so, too, but with an opposite approach: intellectual and universal where Peacock was carnal and personal. That paradox of difference yet likeness is the essence of the friendships we sail on. What a lovely read, especially if you’re curious about ‘where poems come from’; I’d particularly recommend it to fans of Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty.
With thanks to Molly Peacock and Palimpsest Press for the free e-copy for review.
The Bright White Tree by Joanna Seldon (Worple Press, 2017)
This appeared the year after Seldon died of cancer; were it not for her untimely end and her famous husband Anthony (a historian and political biographer), I’m not sure it would have been published, as the poetry is fairly mediocre, with some obvious rhymes and twee sentiments. I wouldn’t want to speak ill of the dead, though, so think of this more like a self-published work collected in tribute, and then no problem. Some of the poems were written from the Royal Marsden Hospital, with “Advice” a useful rundown of how to be there for a friend undergoing cancer treatment (text to let them know you’re thinking of them; check before calling, or visiting briefly; bring sanctioned snacks; don’t be afraid to ask after their health).
Seldon takes inspiration from history (the story of Kitty Pakenham, the bombing of the Bamiyan Buddhas), travels in England and abroad (“Robin in York” vs. “Tuscan Garden”), and family history. Her Jewish heritage is clear from poems about Israel, National Holocaust Memorial Day and Rosh Hashanah. Her own suffering is put into perspective in “A Cancer Patient Visits Auschwitz.” There are also ekphrastic responses to art and literature (a Gaugin, A Winter’s Tale, Jane Eyre, and so on). I particularly liked “Conker,” a reminder of a departed loved one “So is a good life packed full of doing / That may grow warm with others, even when / The many years have turned, and darkness filled / Places where memory shone bright and strong. / I feel the conker and feel he is here.” (New bargain book from Waterstones online sale with Christmas book token)
There are haikus dotted through the collection; here’s one perfect for the season:
“Snowdrops Haiku”
Maids demure, white tips to
Mob caps… Look now! They’ve
Splattered the lawn with snow
Have you discovered any new-to-you independent publishers recently?
Book Serendipity, Mid-October to Mid-December 2022
The last entry in this series for the year. Those of you who join me for Love Your Library, note that I’ll host it on the 19th this month to avoid the holidays. Other than that, I don’t know how many more posts I’ll fit in before my year-end coverage (about six posts of best-of lists and statistics). Maybe I’ll manage a few more backlog reviews and a thematic roundup.
I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. This is a regular feature of mine every few months. Because I usually have 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. The following are in roughly chronological order.
- Tom Swifties (a punning joke involving the way a quotation is attributed) in Savage Tales by Tara Bergin (“We get a lot of writers in here, said the rollercoaster operator lowering the bar”) and one of the stories in Birds of America by Lorrie Moore (“Would you like a soda? he asked spritely”).
- Prince’s androgynous symbol was on the cover of Dickens and Prince by Nick Hornby and is mentioned in the opening pages of Shameless by Nadia Bolz-Weber.
- Clarence Thomas is mentioned in one story of Birds of America by Lorrie Moore and Encore by May Sarton. (A function of them both dating to the early 1990s!)
- A kerfuffle over a ring belonging to the dead in one story of Shoot the Horses First by Leah Angstman and Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth.
- Excellent historical fiction with a 2023 release date in which the amputation of a woman’s leg is a threat or a reality: one story of Shoot the Horses First by Leah Angstman and The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland.
- More of a real-life coincidence, this one: I was looking into Paradise, Piece by Piece by Molly Peacock, a memoir I already had on my TBR, because of an Instagram post I’d read about books that were influential on a childfree woman. Then, later the same day, my inbox showed that Molly Peacock herself had contacted me through my blog’s contact form, offering a review copy of her latest book!
- Reading nonfiction books titled The Heart of Things (by Richard Holloway) and The Small Heart of Things (by Julian Hoffman) at the same time.
- A woman investigates her husband’s past breakdown for clues to his current mental health in The Fear Index by Robert Harris and Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth.
- “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” is a repeated phrase in Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson, as it was in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.
- Massive, much-anticipated novel by respected author who doesn’t publish very often, and that changed names along the way: John Irving’s The Last Chairlift (2022) was originally “Darkness as a Bride” (a better title!); Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water (2023) started off as “The Maramon Convention.” I plan to read the Verghese but have decided against the Irving.
- Looting and white flight in New York City in Feral City by Jeremiah Moss and Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson.
- Two bereavement memoirs about a loved one’s death from pancreatic cancer: Ti Amo by Hanne Ørstavik and Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.
- The Owl and the Pussycat of Edward Lear’s poem turn up in an update poem by Margaret Atwood in her collection The Door and in Anna James’s fifth Pages & Co. book, The Treehouse Library.
- Two books in which the author draws security attention for close observation of living things on the ground: Where the Wildflowers Grow by Leif Bersweden and The Lichen Museum by A. Laurie Palmer.
- Seal and human motherhood are compared in Zig-Zag Boy by Tanya Frank and All of Us Together in the End by Matthew Vollmer, two 2023 memoirs I’m enjoying a lot.
- Mystical lights appear in Animal Life by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (the Northern Lights, there) and All of Us Together in the End by Matthew Vollmer.
- St Vitus Dance is mentioned in Zig-Zag Boy by Tanya Frank and Robin by Helen F. Wilson.
- The history of white supremacy as a deliberate project in Oregon was a major element in Heaven Is a Place on Earth by Adrian Shirk, which I read earlier in the year, and has now recurred in The Distance from Slaughter County by Steven Moore.
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 