It's rare when I go through a contemporary short story collection where I'm not flipping forward to find where the blissful end is—you can't wait to finish these stories, and you also don't really want to leave them. On the whole, the stories are, dare I say, remarkable fun. Which is weird because woven throughout are dire dystopian undertones, one of which is the disintegration of language and expression. I'm gonna read this one again. Four stars.
"Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular" by Rust Hills (1977)
So it's a book about writing by a guy who doesn't even claim to be a writer: he was a long-tenured fiction editor at Esquire. So that means there are no writing exercises, and there are no lofty flights about the magic and power of the written word. It's basically just one long essay explaining what exactly differentiates great literature and moving works of art from, say, "Cat Person" by Kristen Roupenian. A discussion I’ve, stunningly, rarely run into throughout my 20+ years of studying writing—perhaps because Hills isn't really a writer he feels less protective of allowing people to plainly see how literature does what it does (I mean, if I fully understood how to create literature the last thing I'd ever do is blab about it all to you.) Does he do it though? Does he explain what literature is? I think so. And it was way simpler than what I was attempting to do. Four stars.
"Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson (1919)
Oh dear, where to begin ... (1) I can't explain why, but knowing little about the book beforehand you're kind of expecting "The Wonder Years". Instead, almost off the bat, you kind of get something more akin to a David Lynch film; (2) How does this series of short character pieces somehow work as a unified whole? It's a little hard to tell: the book seems to deemphasize proper literary form in favor of the author's intuitive, almost arbitrary whims, like a chef who arrives at their final dish by taste and taste alone; (3) A recurring image is of a character inexplicably, breathlessly running away—what's interesting about the book is the image of America it paints as something that's free and enormous and wide open and full of possibility, but at the same time chokingly restrictive and smothering, in a deeply unfathomable way; (4) It's a short, 200+ page book. But I found the individual stories so uncomfortably intense, the book turned out to be a surprisingly slow read; (5) While the diverse character studies don't always 100 percent ring true all of the time, the revelation of people's private lives and personal logics as being somewhat bizarre, somewhat inexplicable, and more than a little believable in its nonsense is piercingly perceptive—early on, the book declares, we each decide to follow a truth, and we each age into truth-molded grotesques who perhaps learn too late that maybe we had it all wrong all along; (6) Personally, did the book in spots make me think about my own embarrassments, make me feel a tinge of horror in the pit of my stomach over my own past behavior? Yes; (7) Once again, I feel I should reiterate: if you're expecting "Our Town", THIS IS CERTAINLY NO "OUR TOWN"; (8) Upon finishing, out loud, I remarked to myself, "That was a wonderful book!" You know what's thrilling in a novel? When you're not sure how the author is going to stick the landing after a turbulent flight but somehow they manage, even as you deplane feeling weak-kneed and naggingly unsettled—My god, you think, even if we all survive it's likely none of us are ever going to be okay. Four stars.
"Washington Square" by Henry James (1880)
If the name Henry James conjures thoughts of baroque, infinitely tangential clauses, miniscule type, brick-sized binding, and a crochet of psychological threads, Washington Square is kind of like his 200-page "pop novel". You get the same deeply human characterization—be it an unusually plain and awkward debutante, an extremely intelligent, plainspoken, vindictive bastard, or an emotion-besotted, meddling sweetheart—but it feels more like fun and less like a highly detailed owner's manual for the human heart (not like these manuals are unenjoyable reads on their own, mind you, they're just much more effortful.) Washington Square is the psychologically deep Henry James we all know and love, except it's fun. I couldn't put it down. Four stars.
"What to Listen for in Music" by Aaron Copland (1939)
Is this truly a guide to classical music for the non-musical layperson? Well, no—there were far too many things in here that went way over my head. But as far as steering you towards noteworthy compositions through the guidance of an accomplished, passionate composer goes (so passionate, apparently, he frequently forgets most people don't understand what the fuck he's talking about; also, Copland is the one who wrote the "Beef, it's what's for dinner" theme) I don't think you can beat it. I think I really like Bach now. Four stars.
"W-3" by Bette Howland (1974)
I've never seen someone with such rich observations and such rich material (observing the characters around her in a Chicago psychiatric ward following a suicide attempt) keep repeatedly tripping over their own writing. It's almost heartbreaking because the book is crazy interesting, if only you can get past a writer who can pull a pretty good (if often ill-timed) turn of phrase but who also appears to constantly, seemingly inadvertently, confuse you. Two stars.
"Transit" by Rachel Cusk (2016)
The first time I read this book was in the middle of last week. And I found it maddening, confusing, impossible, and pedantic but I finished it. The second was over the past couple days when I found it delightful, engrossing, fascinating, and insightful. Both are right and neither are right and if you can get over how oddly profound and thoughtful every single character seems to be about their own lives, this might all start to make sense. But you'd still be wrong. Four stars.
"The Wide Net and Other Stories" by Eudora Welty (1943)
One way to describe it is to say this book is full of the kinds of short stories they'd force you to read in school—they reek of a high school library. Another way is, it's as if the artsy fartsy kid you knew who dabbled in mythology and the supernatural and was fond of speaking in cryptic tones ended up getting pretty good at the technical aspects of writing. Yet another way, I guess, is if Flannery O'Connor actually attempted to do what William Faulkner did (according to O'Connor, she wouldn't even dare to compete with him.) Or maybe James Joyce is a better analogue. Regardless, I wouldn't go so far to say the collection is bad, but I will say that I intensely hate it. Mainly for the "it feels like the stories I was forced to read in school part." One star.
"The Sellout" by Paul Beatty (2015)
Reads like a mainstream movie. One with a personality-less protagonist, satire that alternates between sharp and sloppy, jokes that tend to hit you over the head like a hammer, and one that grows more tiring as you approach the climax. If I hadn't already read Black No More (1931), which treads similar waters, I probably wouldn't demand more than the one laugh-out-loud moment it gave me. And if I hadn't just finished a Faulkner novel, I probably would find the metaphors and analogies here completely serviceable. Two stars.
"There Are No Children Here - The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America" by Alex Kotlowitz (1991)
I become embarrassed when I think back to my attempts at emotion as a young writer—don't get me wrong, an unusual number of my attempts were actually good and they worked (I'm professionally paid to write stuff that makes people cry, you know.) But you do certain things in your youth, like temper the police killing of a well-respected non-gang member with scenes of children literally chasing a rainbow down Chicago streets, things you wouldn't do when you're older and you perhaps realize that one can easily smother their own emotional seedlings simply by working the soil a little too hard. A review said this was the better of his two books on Chicago inner city life, but I disagree. In fact, I think Hoop Dreams, the movie which covers similar territory, is better than this book, a book that's fascinating though naggingly facile (as opposed to engagingly real.) You know, like a middling This American Life story. I'd go read "An American Summer." Three stars.
"The Neon Wilderness" by Nelson Algren (1947)
I can't tell if stories about low-lifes, drunks, petty criminals, gamblers, brawlers, down-and-out Polacks, prostitutes, Dagos who refer to themselves as Dagos, liars, strippers, and general good-for-nothing ragamuffins are inherently boring, or whether Algren's writing style makes their lives feel boring (they all seem to speak in the exact same clipped, late night Chicago slang, to the point where it all grows cartoonish; outside of that, sometimes the narrator launches into odd, out-of-place poetic flourishes; and even outside of that, the characters' names all have an odd, Aaron Sorkin-like plasticity to them.) A lot has been made about how Algren focused on the lives of people who tend to get overlooked. At the same time, a criminal who doesn't think about much besides committing crimes, and a gambler who doesn't think about much besides gambling, for instance, really aren't all that interesting, no matter how eventful their lives are on the surface, no matter how much blood gets spilled. Maybe the reason all these lives are overlooked in literature isn't because us privileged straights prefer to avert our eyes away from the shadowed corners of the city. Maybe it's because the lives you find there, at the heart of it, sound really fucking boring. Which, again, might be entirely Algren's fault. One star.
"Theory of Literature" by Paul H. Fry (2012)
It's a Yale Open Courses class so there are YouTube videos, but I found Fry's speaking style so grating I decided to buy the book. There are 26 chapters, and most chapters have you read two or three outside essays, which are fairly easy to find on today's internet, and fairly difficult to read because (as I should have guessed from the book’s title) it turns out the class is less about literature and more about philosophy (I would describe reading philosophy as equivalent to drinking out of a container labeled "HEADACHE JUICE".) You'll span hermeneutics, modes of formalism, semiotics and structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalytic approaches, Marxist and historicist approaches, theories of social identity, and neo-pragmatism (and that's just what's written on the back cover, and also, hardly scratching the surface) which turns out is a lot for the brain to soak in when not spread out over 13 weeks. But, considering the density and breadth of the material, Fry does a pretty good job of keeping the class focused on its core ideas, even as he's seemingly steering everyone off-course. Would I say I got what I was expecting? Well, no. Was I exposed to far more ideas than I was expecting, far more than I ever needed? God, yes. Did I retain most of them? No—seemed like any new information I learned would push whatever previous information I learned out of my brain. Lucky I was taking notes. Four stars.
"The Man Who Loved Children" by Christina Stead (1940)
I can't remember the last time I became angry when something pulled me away from reading a book. I also can't remember the last time I got through 500 pages and just said, "Wow," out loud to myself upon closing it. If I were you, I would read this book. Four stars.*
*Perhaps the book didn't do well because the title is kind of bad, though once you get through enough pages the title starts to feel quite fitting.
"The Leaning Tower and Other Stories" by Katherine Anne Porter (1944)
It's so odd with her. "Ship of Fools" was her first novel, after several decades of highly lauded work. It was so highly anticipated, even by haughty critic types, that it became the best selling book of 1962. And critics seem to agree: "Ship of Fools" is probably one of the worst novels ever published—Katherine Anne Porter has this weird habit of producing astonishing work and then, just when goodwill reaches its highest point, just completely shitting the bed. Aside from the very last pages, she actually doesn't do that here: I thought these highly unusual, winding stories were all really quite good—even when you're spending page after page sort of lost in the brambles, when you arrive at the clearing you usually find that oddly drawn path was actually well worth it. I thought "The Old Order," about a southern family that straddled emancipation, was probably one of the best short stories I've ever read. "Holiday," about a very traditional large German farm family in Texas, started out like an anthropological study and ended with a very affecting human truth. "The Leaning Tower," about a young American painter in Berlin, had one of the better drawn "drunk scenes" I've come across. "The Downward Path to Wisdom," about a confused little boy battered by swirling family drama, was written in a way that took you back to your own young, confused state. And "A Day's Work," about an unhappy Irish couple living in New York City, was a great urban story about screwing over and being screwed—the stories go all over the place and highlight very different people and yet, until the final pages, you never really sense an odd-sounding note. If there was someone who just absolutely nailed the nuts-and-bolts craft of writing better than anyone, I'd say it's Katherine Anne Porter. It's weird that we've largely forgotten her. But I guess it's easy to overlook someone who knows how to, say, construct a solidly built table in favor of someone who had the sense of showmanship to build a bigger, flashier, more ornate one. It's too bad, really. Five stars.
"The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Ronald Wilks (2002)
Well, the first sign things were amiss is that whenever a lower class character would pop up, they'd adopt a cockney British accent. Then I compared one short passage with the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations: you get the sense that things are bit too cleaned up, a bit too smoothed out, some of the oddball magic seems to have been sucked out. Basically, and I'm not 100% certain, I think this Wilks translation might be really bad—I've seen "angular Russian enthusiasm" translated through "logical British reserve" before and along the way something gets severely corrupted. I picked this one up because it contains two stories that are difficult to find elsewhere, but it's a shame that due to the branding (Penguin Books) this is probably one of the more popular Chekhov translations out there. And I was wondering how people could mistake him for being a strict, hardcore realist when it's clear to me that Chekhov is very much an impressionist author. Find the Pevear and Volokhonsky versions. They get the nuances right. Chekhov's artistry is all in the nuances. One star.
"The Golden Apples" by Eudora Welty (1949)
There's a reason this novel/short story cycle is largely forgotten, and I think it's due to its avant garde nature—Ever hear of the Russian Formalists? One of their theories was that art should make the familiar, unfamiliar, so you can look at the familiar again with fresh, naive eyes. Welty does this CONSTANTLY: off-center metaphors, angular clauses, time shifts, prismatic perspectives, flights of fancy, a flood of characters, description that teeters into the bizarre—presumably to make this story of one generation of neighbors in a small southern town seem grand, even as nothing extraordinary ever really happens. Now don't get me wrong, I think Welty is a remarkably skilled writer, and she pulls off the avant garde quite well, in the technical sense. It's just fucking irritating: even as I found some of the characters very affecting (the best relationship is between a piano teacher and her student) I simply couldn't wait to finish this god damn book; in fact, that it's all somewhat difficult to process made that speedy desire all the more frustrating. That all that is at service to a story, seemingly, about people who feel a desperate need to go somewhere but can't figure out for the life of them where that is, unfortunately, in the end, feels naggingly unsatisfying. To say the book doesn't wield a unique sort of magic would be a lie. To say that Welty knows how to use the avant garde in a Faulkner-esque way that intrigues more than it frustrates would also be a lie. Two stars.
"The Fun Parts" by Sam Lipsyte (2013)
To be honest, I picked up this book expecting to run into "what NOT to do" as far as humor in literature goes. And I think I wildly succeeded. (Something tells me though, if you were in your 20s and it was the early 2010s, you would absolutely love this book. Unfortunately, it is not the 2010s, and virtually everything you like while you're in your 20s ages into humiliating garbage.) One star.
"The End of Me" by Alfred Hayes (1968)
Of the three books in this unofficial "aging Jewish male writer stumbles into an unusual romance" trilogy, this one had the most plot complications, and therefore was the most engrossing, but also the most predictable. It's your typical "Sad old man suffers enormous failure, flees to his hometown, tries to recapture youth, or any sort of feeling for that matter, by stealing his nephew's girlfriend, fails miserably" plot. (Is that common? I don't know, it felt common to me.) I'm up and down about a lot of the elements in this book—I liked the depiction of 1960s New York City; I was a bit bored with the sad old writer routine; his prose poetic style didn't step over itself except for a couple glaringly obnoxious places; I liked how he wrote twentysomethings, though I liked the girlfriend who was far too adept with wearing teasing masques of confidence more and thought the temperamental poet boyfriend a caricature. Yet it hung together. If the other two books were probably great books held back by some unraveling thread, this was a somewhat bland one that had undeniably solid stitching. Did you know Alfred Hayes wrote "Joe Hill"? I didn't know where to put that so I thought I would put that here. Three stars.
"The Day of the Locust" by Nathanael West (1939)
As far as books about Los Angeles go, this genuinely FEELS like LA. From the setting to the characters to the situations to the way the sky is often described like paint. Which is noteworthy because it makes an (ultimately) heavy-handed point about how the dream of Hollywood, California, is really quite bleak (I know there are a lot of "LA is actually bleak" stories, just know in this case I don't use the word "bleak" lightly—the 1975 film version is often described as a disguised horror movie.) For LA in the 30s, this too feels accurate: a stage mom boasts about how she's following a raw diet while sucking her adorable child actor son bone dry. Strangely, a lot of it reminded me of life in your twenties, full of unmoored people seeking big dreams but really only finding stunning boredom, a boredom that can somehow teeter into either soulful magnanimity or senseless violence depending on the day. It's really quite a good book. And that's because it's more than about Hollywood, it's really about boredom and how it makes us behave, set in a town built to be the ultimate antidote to American boredom (is the solution also the source of the problem?) It's also well written, it's compelling (in some parts, it's actually too much to handle), it's truthful, it's weird, parts of it had me howling with laughter, and parts of it were horrifying. It really ranks among the best books no one has ever read (Christina Stead is also on that list.) That combination Miss Lonelyhearts/The Day of the Locust book? You should really pick it up. Sidenote: there's a character in the novel named Homer Simpson. And the reason The Simpsons only contains one reference to this in its 30-odd years is because, in the novel, Homer Simpson murders an 8-year-old child, coldly and cruelly, stomping on their now lifeless body again and again and again and again and again, and then again and again and again, right in front of a huge crowd of people. Four stars.
"Three Sisters - A Drama in Four Acts" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Peter Carson (1900, 2004)
If you were to sum all of this up as "a heavily existential soap opera" it feels tautly apt, if a tad bit flippant. There's a 1966 televised version. And I was a little shocked when I thought: This isn't just the best interpretation of a Chekhov play I've seen, this might actually be some of the best theater I've ever seen. Turns out it was by the Actors Studio, who have a direct line to Stanislavski, who originated Chekhov's plays in Russia. For such an extremely busy, centerless play, a somewhat lengthy play that I would describe as having a "constantly swirling" structure, you're almost grateful that such talented theater people bothered to grapple with the material. Because there were so many things I didn't catch by reading the play alone, and I could easily imagine all this being utterly unbearable in lesser hands. I guess the question I have is, does this odd, swirling structure serve the theme? The theme seemingly being: No amount of education, intelligence, faith, or virtue can prepare you for the unpredictable vicissitudes of life, exponential, ever-evolving, incomprehensible vicissitudes that are idly set in motion simply when one human being collides into another. If you wanted to illustrate such existential confusion, then perhaps it does. But was reaching that point worth all the effort? I'm not sure. I almost want the point to be even more out-there, even more ambitious, even more soul-shaking. As it stands, I ended the play thinking: Well, yes, I find life confusing, and yes, my beliefs probably are delusions, and no, I suppose I don't really know anything about anything. Good on you, Chekhov: you nailed me. Now, why exactly did you feel the need to point this out? Because I kind of already knew that—that's what my delusions are for! But perhaps I'm again being flippant: it's really a remarkably written play, short of extraordinary, even. Where the rub is, is you feel like there's something holding it back from really blowing your brain wide open, and here I offer my best guess as to what that brain-blowing dampener might actually be. Three stars.