It's quite the rollercoaster ride, this book. Any attempts to reduce it to something pithy and sharp feels off in some respect. Is it a metaphysical farce? Is it a screwball satire on art and artists? Is it a highly intellectual adventure? You spend the entire book with one man, perhaps the world's most insufferable overthinker, as he gets overwhelmed by an extremely elaborate, continents-spanning plot. You eventually get the impression of a man, presently consumed with Rudolf Steiner's thoughts on spirituality, who so desperately wants to distance himself from a messy humanity (mainly characterized by a scheming, grimy, lawless, 1970s Chicago) whose constant propulsions and collisions become more and more impossible to evade (viewed through a modern lens, it can actually be considered a book-length argument for how the term "introvert" is nothing more than a sympathetic rebranding of "being a crassly antisocial, isolated jerk.") Can you sustain a one-thing-after-another, coincidence-laden, farce-like pace over 500 pages of text, though? Maybe? Almost? You never quite get lost, even as yet another name is thrown onto the pile, and yet another secret is unraveled, and yet another philosophical treatise is expounded. But, at the same time, there were too many moments where I slid my bookmark in at night and said, "No more. No more book. Please, please, no more book," and not at all in a teasing, curious way. I feel like this one's been forgotten, which it shouldn't, it's quite the unique novel—I can't think of too many modern urban novels that remind you of a relentless Indiana Jones film. But you kind of end the rollercoaster ride sensing the whole thing was soundly built, craftily designed, even inspired (I mean, instead of a giant boulder, the guy's trying to outrun humanity itself) but still lacking some sort of ... hard to place ... perhaps even harder to conjure ... spark. Maybe it simply needed more laughs. Three stars.
"Heart of Junk" by Luke Geddes (2020)
Well, it's good in the way seeing some random improv troupe pull off a surprisingly successful Harold is: even though it's kind of sloppy it's extremely satisfying, maybe uplifting even. You might even recommend the troupe to others, if it ever comes up in conversation. Maybe one day, it wouldn't surprise you if you ended up seeing that troupe on TV. For now though, chances are you're not going to remember any of it come tomorrow. Three stars.
"Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales" (1993)
I'm only on page 200 of 600 but I'm just gonna go ahead and call it: After you get past the novelty of finding out the original, violent versions of the Disney fairy tales we all know, you start to come across a bunch of German folk stories that seem to have been collected from the town insane lunatic—they have no point, they go nowhere, and they read like a series of wacky, random events all crammed together into one short story. If it wasn't depressing enough that a lot of stories feature innocent people getting chopped into little bits for no reason, and evil people humiliating the good, and oftentimes end with a moral that just basically says, "Welp, the world sure is unfair," soon the stories make you remember the time you were trapped at a party and the marijuana ran out before it got passed to you. I can't believe I have 400 more pages of this. (I suppose I should caveat that even as a child I couldn't stand fantasy—"What? People can't have wars in space. Why are you making me watch this?!") One star.
"Good Behaviour" by Molly Keane (1981)
I suspect the book is better than I'm giving it credit for—it's hard for a Filipino kid who grew up in a Chicago bungalow to easily relate to the horsey goings on at an Anglo-Irish estate in shambling decline at the turn of the 20th century. But I'll say it's a very densely packed book that gives you a hell of a lot to think about. Let me attempt to explain: the bulk of the book is spent inside the head of a Michael Scott-like character, an unusually tall, unusually self-conscious, unusually put-upon misfit named Aroon St. Charles who's prone to avoiding harsh realities and desperate to feel loved. Now, marry this with the revelation in the very first chapter that she eventually ends up ruthlessly murdering her own mother. All the tension is found in between those two spaces. And it's a neat little trick that kind of lingers with you even after you've left behind the final word. Possibly four following a re-read, but for now. Three stars.
"Franny and Zooey" by J.D. Salinger (1961)
The strangest, most engrossing meditation on Christ you'll ever read, buddy. Four stars.
"Flying Home and Other Stories" by Ralph Ellison (1996)
I guess most of these stories are from before "Invisible Man" and were published posthumously which might explain why most of them read like small character sketches rather than complete stories. Honestly, while reading these I couldn't help but think back to my writer's workshop classes, where even the most talented students would routinely turn in works that felt clunky and incomplete. If "two stars" would indicate flawed but not worthless, and "one star" would indicate pretty much worthless then I guess I really have no choice here. Reading this book was unpleasant. One star.
"Flowering Judas and Other Stories" by Katherine Anne Porter (1935)
It seems like every time I'm about to proclaim Katherine Anne Porter the best writer of her era, I stumble upon one of her enormous, stinking turds. Not like the stories here, among her earliest, should be stamped in gold or something, but the way she draws her characters is nothing short of exquisite—a frustrated artist, a dying woman, an Irish (County Sligo) immigrant living in Connecticut, a Mexican bride-turned-murderer, a 15-year-old Mexican girl who's never been kissed, a Mexican revolutionary's female confidant, a husband and wife who get into an enormous fight after he randomly decides to buy rope—the people and their relationships are all so finely detailed, densely woven, and true-to-life they carry you through some rather thin narratives. I'd imagine a writer, like any craftsman, who masters the basics would become eager to take bigger and bigger swings. And here her big swing is a huge whiff, a convoluted, overcrowded story about Russian filmmakers from California working in Mexico that pretty much bored me to tears (for the record, her later enormous swings in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" knock it out clear of the park.) I guess I can't in good faith say you should all run out and read this book, unless you happen to want to study the characterization techniques of someone who probably did it better than anyone. So, yes, that’s right, most of the stories here feel like little more than character sketches but, I gotta say, they're pretty god damn great sketches. Three 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.
"Everything That Rises Must Converge" by Flannery O’Connor (1965)
Flannery O'Connor said she was intimidated by William Faulkner, a Southern contemporary, but I honestly think if she hadn't been dying of lupus in the process of writing, this book could have been one of the all-time greats. She's better than Chekhov. She's better than Hemingway's god damn baby shoes schtick. Her short stories are better than any of the stories Faulkner tried to write, and I've read most of them. However, if you've read her earlier, much more famous stuff then you might just label her a God-tooting moralist—“Wow, a good man really is hard to find!” But here, you come out of these stories feeling mostly confused: (1) Why would the guy who got a huge tattoo of Jesus Christ on his back end up crying against a tree? (2) Why would someone who's merely trying to behave as virtuously as she possibly could, only going by what she's been taught through sheer circumstance, still get ruthlessly punished by God? (3) Why would an author who uses the n-word liberally end another story by depicting a woman who hallucinates a bunch of n-words entering heaven before she did? It's a cycle of nine stories that illustrates the title, that each of us, race-gender-class-location-citycountrywhathaveyou, will have to meet and confront each other if we both intend to climb any further than we already have, and that (except for one story) doesn't necessarily portray faith as something that elevates: Jesus-loving woman believes she's saved by following Sunday school theology to a tee for all her life, but hates LITERALLY every other human being alive = Jesus-mocking tattooed man somehow finding the lure of God literally inescapable = seemingly kind woman finds stray bull teasing her herd, tries to raise children: fails, tries to run farm: fails, tries to steamroll over other people: fails, tries to be a strong woman: fails, yet when she gets gored by that stray bull you're kind of glad it happened to her. Flannery O'Connor makes it look easy. But what she tried to achieve with her stories was really hard, and must have taken an inordinate amount of thought. And a lot of mystery. And they almost get to "classic level," they really almost get there. What is it that I think that stops them? There are a few times throughout the book where your view doesn't feel expansive, but instead feels restrictive and plain—in other words “bad simple.” As if she was too tired to think about it all. Considering how successfully the rest of the book hides enormous complexities within simple-seeming frames, this feels like a sin. Four stars.
"El Filibusterismo" by José Rizal, Translated by Harold Augenbraum (1891, 2011)
You know when someone accomplished in non-literary fields, someone very intelligent, says they're going to write a novel? And the descriptions are fine, and the dialogue is fine, and the characters are fine, and the ideas are fine, and the cliffhangers are fine, and maybe there's a liberal heaping of esoterica, in this case many many Latin phrases, and maybe it follows that escalating plot curve thing to a tee, and maybe Chekov's gun ends up going off, and at first glance it all appears to be fairly competently put together? And even the writing itself as a whole seems perfectly fine, everything except for the sense of joy experienced by the reader, which falls jaw-droppingly flat? This book does that. The joy part, it turns out, is screamingly difficult to engineer. One star.
"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.
"Collected Stories" by William Faulkner (1950)
I'm only 200 pages into a 900-page book but I feel I have enough: If you're interested in reading stories that were sort of shat out whenever Faulkner was strapped for cash and oftentimes very much read like it, then this door stop is for you. Also, don't be fooled by the 1951 National Book Award for Fiction—he probably won it more for the earlier series of extraordinary novels everyone ignored at the time; in fact, many of these stories feel like a writer working out his ideas more than one who dearly cared for the craft of the short form. One star.
"Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage" by Bette Howland (2019)
Off the top of my head I'm not totally sure of her background but I'd imagine these are the kinds of short stories you'd get if a lifelong copy editor decided to try their hand at fiction—meticulously assembled and boring as fuck. "Public Facilities" is pretty good though. One star.
"Birds of America" by Lorrie Moore (1998)
I pulled this off my shelf expecting to be enchanted. Instead, I finished it bored out of my mind. I've read this before and what's striking is none of the stories except one seemed familiar—apparently, I had easily forgotten them. Now, the one story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" is still pretty fantastic, but coming after 200 pages of quippy protagonists who are fond of wordplay, and starring yet another quippy protagonist who is fond of wordplay, to be followed by yet one final quippy protagonist who is fond of wordplay and also accidentally murdered her friend's baby, even this stellar story caused my eyes to glaze over at one point. The cynical thing to say is, stories about white people who work in academia can't possibly be all that interesting. But if I were to try to dig for a deeper reason for its failure, I think it's that the book perfected writer's workshop tenets at the time: it's the epitomy of Carver-like minimalism. It's the "epiphany of the tiny moment, the power of the unsaid" writing writ ideal. In 1998, this book was considered a remarkable gem. By those rules, this book is an unprecedented triumph. Little did anyone at the time realize though, the rules they enforced and celebrated were arbitrary and not universal. One star.
"All Around Atlantis" by Deborah Eisenberg (1997)
Fiction via overthinking. Fell asleep twice while reading. Two stars.
"A Guardian Angel Recalls" by Willem Frederik Hermans, Translated by David Colmer (1971, 2021)
Admission: I didn't choose this book because it was about people dealing with the first few days of unexpected war; I chose it because the unusual title was written in my exact same style. That said, the plot keeps a striking number of balls in the air, too many for me to even attempt to list here. But there are bombs, and heartbreaks, and World War II, and trials, and interlopers, and 6-year-old girls accidentally getting hit by cars, and angels and devils and modernist paintings—a steady stream of complications all held together quite well by the internal moral dilemmas of Burt Alberegt, an unextraordinary public prosecutor who's just trying to do the right thing for the right reasons, all while our narrator, his assured guardian angel (and unwitting accomplice to a manslaughter cover-up) hovers nearby. It could easily become didactic, but doesn't. And it could easily become farcical and satiric, and almost does early on, but as winding and frenzied and coincidental as the journey becomes, war just seems to put a heavy damper on any hilarity. It's a book that definitely sticks with you, and it's a book that's difficult to set aside for too long, but something holds it back. Maybe, by never quite going in the direction you think it's going to go, in the end, that ethos stops the novel from truly ascending. Like a driver who insists they're going to reach their destination by only making left turns, eventually novel fun becomes routine. At least that's my guess for now. Three stars.
"A Curtain of Green and Other Stories" by Eudora Welty (1941)
Welty is one of those writers where every story I've seen of hers, in collegiate fiction anthologies, came from this, her first book. And while those excerpted stories are great, you can also already see why her literary standing would sort of peter out. Unlike other older writers I've read recently, the bulk of this feels very much of its time, it doesn't quite transcend it. Maybe it's the tendency towards overwrought description, maybe it's the "young writer" character choices: old people, deaf mutes, freaks, slow people, hitchhikers, traveling salesmen, and adolescents, all similarly "flat"; maybe it's the overreliance on narrative obliqueness, an overreliance on simile—honestly, I can't pinpoint why it all feels so dusty to me. Stories that feel more like character sketches? That end with unexplained deaths? Too many sensitive characters who have unusually vivid daydreams? Comedy that's a tad too broad and drama that's a tad too serious? Pulp irony that might be nothing more than actual pulp? Before TV, there used to be a divide between "pop short stories" and "serious literature," and this kind of feels like it's trying to bridge that divide—it's not "Criminal Minds" and it's not "The Wire", it's more like "NYPD Blue". And who wants to watch NYPD Blue over the other two? The "complete trash" show and the "prestige serial" show are both great. Two stars.