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 Ambassadors" by Henry James (1903)
Just how difficult is it to read Henry James? Apparently, Chapters 28 and 29 were accidentally reversed in an early printing, and not one person noticed this discrepancy over the course of the next 40 years. How would I describe the experience myself? Well, it's not necessarily that he's fond of obnoxiously syllabic words, or winding endless sentences, or disorienting modernist tricks, cheap manipulations of time; it's more like James surrounds you with a very straight, very embroidered narrative that's so thickly layered, so densely detailed, and so intricately and so tightly and so deliberately woven that the only way to fully comprehend what you're reading is to betray such psychic stores of concentration and energy that, especially nowadays, but even back then, even among esteemed, unfairly or not, literary scholars, very few sensible people are willing to surrender such intimate sensitivities (his own, similarly intellectually entangled, brother urged him to dumb things down for the sake of the people.) If you happen to lapse, to break, to absently trip, it's rather easy to find yourself mindlessly scanning over a very long series of words, only to regain clarity after losing what feels like roughly fifty or so logical threads over the course of one blessed paragraph. I get the sense that this one is underread—I'm not sure telling you that this is the story of a nice guy from Massachusetts who gets sent to Paris to retrieve his fiancé's son is enough to communicate the novel's immense, entrenching charms. I'm not sure it conveys just how thick, billowed, and silvered is the undulating, turgid, entrancing cloud of story that builds atop this milquetoast logline. It doesn't convey how strikingly deep and tangled it gets concerning the psychology of human relationships and personality. And it, moreover, doesn't tell you how splendidly fun the novel actually is—at heart it's basically a detective story, featuring the world's sweetest, least cunning, most well intentioned, most idealistically forgiving sleuth, a not wholly unfrivolous man named Lambert Strether, a man I would rank among literature's greatest protagonists, but for silently selfish reasons. Which is to say, for reasons I somewhat intimately understand, the book is a difficult sell. I can't even begin to think of how I could sell the people on this book (especially since I feel I could point to any given sentence on any given page, ask even the smartest person I know to explain to me what said sentence is attempting to say, and permit them the breathing room and time to fully cogitate its proper and very well considered intentions—a demanding ask; what I'll say in James's defense is that, unlike most difficult writers I know, I really don't think the guy is merely "showing off" his intellect—I think he merely wanted to give the people the best story he thought he possibly could.) I would argue, more than any writer I've ever been fortunate to come across, Henry James tried to show the people the sheer heights of what we, as a collective people, are capable of achieving, disregarding sheer luck, as a lowly, hopeless, simple, yearning, deeply confused, deeply lost, deeply deluded lot. So I think I'll just leave it there, for all of the people. Five stars.
"Lucky Per" by Henrik Pontoppidan, Translated by Naomi Lebowitz (1904, 2019)
I would describe it as the Danish version of Ellison's "Invisible Man", which is itself a remarkable book and which I have often referred to as my favorite. While both are preoccupied with identity and belonging (in its deft handling of confusion, this one might be the best, most accurate depiction of twentysomething life I've come across) and both are epic in scale, the scope here is absurd. It's so ridiculously epic I'm awestruck that, in the end, he sticks a perfect three-point landing. Five stars.
"Fifty-Two Stories" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2021)
I think of all the fiction I've absorbed over my life—books, TV, movies—and I find it stunning that I can read Chekhov and think that I've never seen humanity depicted so accurately before. The all-confused whole of humanity is so acutely depicted, in classes grand and wanting, I actually find it difficult to explain to you just what he did (in one story, Chekhov repeatedly mocks a novelist for writing stories about people that could never happen in reality.) What does that say about us now? That a guy in 19th-century Russia could look at another person and see a wealth of contradictory motivations, whims, desires, behaviors, and inner thoughts and we just look at people and attach to them the comfort of familiar archetypes and little much else? It's really quite remarkable what he did, simply and economically. And it's also quite remarkable if you consider where we all eventually ended up. I really hope you get to read "The Name Day Party" some day. Five stars.
"Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes, Translated by Edith Grossman (1615, 2003)
There's really a lot you can say about this book, a lot of truly deep things too, about human nature and comedy and what constitutes a great story and philosophy and religion and eternal life and modern literature and pratfalls and all of that—you really can go on for quite a while (even if you exclude all the drearily facile takes concerning the power of imagination and just who's the crazy one here.) So I'll attempt to summarize everything I feel by saying this: Don Quixote is the most perfect, most wildly imperfect book I have ever read, and probably ever will. What a great ride. Five stars.
"Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, Fourth Edition" by Edward P.J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors (1999)
It's a 500-page book about classical rhetoric, so I'll try to keep this brief. Maybe it's too late for you to become a stronger writer, but in the event your child shows a knack for words it might be a good idea to get this book on their radar. For some reason, I went through most of my life never once hearing about it, until it was referenced in an academic paper I was reading about advertising. Which means either the state of the humanities had been in decline for much longer than we thought, or narrow-minded parents were desperately dissuading their children away from writing as a career. I've found, if you dissuade a talented, budding writer away from a writing career, you're pretty much sentencing your peculiar, creative child to a long, sad, unfulfilled life (an unusually large number of these children grow up to be financially secure, emotionally damaged Asians.) So if you want to spare those kids a future, decades-long SSRI/Xanax dependency, just know this might actually be the best book on the nuts-and-bolts craft of writing I've ever read. (Sidenote: I can now recognize, thanks to this book, the advertising agency Fallon McElligott, in their heyday, more than anyone else, made use of classical rhetoric precepts in their work.) Five stars.
"An American Summer - Love and Death in Chicago" by Alex Kotlowitz (2019)
Two things alarmed me recently. One was hearing a Radiolab producer say that they never once aired a story that didn't have some sort of positive ending. The other was when I noticed how obsessed YouTube reviewers are with "character development". Alarming because that means people's idea of what the "golden rule" story consists of is becoming narrowed and calcified, which means a lot of stories that do not fit that idea do not get told. So it's downright shocking to read a nonfiction book full of stories that don't end well, that have no justice, where characters don't grow, where those that try to grow can't, where moral behavior is not rewarded, where immoral behavior is not punished, and where people's stories end more confused than where they started. Of all the books you hear tossed around anti-racism book clubs, I'm floored that this one never seems to come up. Because I would think that understanding how inner city people actually live their daily lives is far more valuable than understanding theories of systemic racism. Will you feel uplifted when the book ends? No, most certainly not. Because many stories worth telling aren't clean like that, and assigning quality to the satisfaction of character development is what unthinking, ignorant people do. Five stars.