You want to write a novel that explores, as a theme, the fundamental irrationality of the human spirit? Well, one way to do it is to wrap it all—behavioral contradictions, unfulfilled intentions, unexplained hatreds, incongruous humors, self-inflicted harms, underserved friendships, and general fluttering moodiness: action in conflict with the soul, basically—within a deceptively simple outline: a mother is extremely upset by her son experiencing a love apart from her own. You don't expect the novel to be as fast and as jumpy as it turns out to be, given the era. And, being sold a fable, you don't expect to be given a narrative that really makes no logical sense, and characters who don't behave the way storytelling deems they should; in fact, the omniscient narrator doesn't seem to even know what the big picture is, often hovering the camera closely over the shoulder of someone who doesn't seem at all to know where they are going. Can a writer tasked with placing the world into narrative order actually get away with telling a story about how the world doesn't really have any, where causes have no effects, effects have no causes, lessons don't seem to even exist, there are no villians, and there are most certainly no heroes? I don't know, but this one sure comes close. Four stars.
"Sanctuary" by William Faulkner (1931)
I bet you could make the case that "To Kill a Mockingbird" stole a great deal from this book, except making sure good was good, bad was bad, facts were facts, and giving all the characters a Full House-like sheen of adorableness. Also many fewer mobsters, whores, and pitch-black instances of sexual terror. Four stars.
"Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog" by Dylan Thomas (1940)
Whenever he drops in a poem, it makes his prose look like trash. One star.
"Pale Horse, Pale Rider" by Katherine Anne Porter (1939)
It's three short novels (Porter hated the term "novella" and, much like the kinds of people who are particular about these sorts of things, was apparently a huge jerk in real life) give or take 40 pages each. The first was this fascinating indictment/celebration of storytelling itself, about how stories, which in current times tend to be hailed and exalted as some sort of magical enlightenment elixir, are in reality very very very very effective tools of delusion and deceit, in its cloaking way almost a celebration of decay, even as we can't help but rely on the lies stories feed us as a means of managing to continue trudging through life day by heavy plodding heavy plodding day. The second was an unheralded classic, such a richly woven, complex exploration of morality, responsibility, sin, laziness, and all their inherent confusions, contradictions, blessings, benedictions, and rationalizations, and about the almost inherently fatalistic way us human beings, having been granted limited intelligence, believe we can possibly, reasonably cogitate our ways through all this, because on some level we all—every last one of us!—believe our existence on Earth must (MUST!) be linked to some sort of intrinsic, universal good, even while we all secretly suspect we may actually be nothing more than spiritual orphans, abandoned, leftovers, to our own mercurial wiles, that it's a marvel the whole thing manages to hold together so extraordinarily well. These two stories, "Old Mortality" and "Noon Wine", explored enormously complex things you NEVER saw writers of this time explore in short, 40-page works, and did it in a way that was richly compelling and unsettlingly rewarding. And then the final story lands like this enormous, overwrought, sentimental, adolescent butt-turd. You'd think it wouldn't, because it's the title story, because it's an early story about a single female urban professional, because it's about the 1918 pandemic, considering what we all just went through. But it's sooooooooo boring (there are numerous dream sequences) it kills what could have been an extraordinary collection of work. I suppose the overall effect is akin to watching all three Godfather movies in one sitting. It's a god damn shame. Apparently, her entire career is just like this: wildly, frustratingly uneven. Sadly, kind of like how life is. Two stars.
"Outline" by Rachel Cusk (2015)
I really enjoyed this story the first time I ran into it, when it was called "My Dinner with Andre". Three stars.
"Never Come Morning" by Nelson Algren (1942)
I know this is an early book, but if I were to explain why I think Nelson Algren isn't nearly as good a writer as some seem to think (mostly people who hail from Chicago) it's not because he isn't capable of turning a nicely poetic phrase, it's that he tends to overwrite what probably should be underwritten and underwrite what probably should be overwritten—in other words, I think his writing instincts are wildly off. One star.
"My Face for the World to See" by Alfred Hayes (1958)
It made me vividly remember relationships I found volatile, female gaslight-y, and far too melodramatic, which are the relationships I usually spend a great deal of energy trying to erase from memory. And while it paints a far more realistic, far more nuanced picture of two mismatched Holllywood dreamers than, say, the movie "La La Land", you're also left with the nagging sense that it didn't go far enough. That's speaking with a psychological eye. As far as the sensual eye goes, I don't know how the book does it, because it never gets explicitly sexual, maybe it's an exquisitely arranged accumulation of images, maybe it's the confused fragments of thought, a writerly way to capture the struggle to recognize and connect with another person's signals, but I thought the touch of flesh came across rather tactile-ly, especially given that most of it was achieved through indirect techniques. Bravo to that; I would have just used an outpouring of moist, evocative, three-syllable words. So overall, it just smacks of nothing all that novel. Still kinda good though. Three stars.
"Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf (1925)
Is this considered a classic just because it's written oddly and structuralist matrices get quite the workout out of it? Because it did exactly what Ulysses did or exactly what Middlemarch did but in a much less compelling, much more tedious way? I could see how aspects of it (the bisexual attraction, the female viewpoints, the metaphysical connections, the prismatic modernism) sort of stood your hair up back in the day. But now that those things aren't so rare, they don't feel strong enough to carry the book—I suppose you could make the argument that I'm not empathetic enough to get it, but I would counter that empathy isn't something that you can demand from people point blank; empathy is such a difficult emotion for people to attain that, once you're enveloped within a fictional work, it's the responsibility of the author to find a way to help you ascend there. But here, as it stands, you drift in and out of the minds of a large cast of characters and it was done in such a way that, no matter whose mind I went into, I barely cared. I mean, what the fuck. This is a classic? I don't get it. One star.
"Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville (1851)
Honestly, I went in expecting to be bored out of my mind. But it's great, it works! I think if you read it in a straightforward way it might bore you tremendously, but if you read searching for some sort of meaning it's terribly engaging. And what is that meaning? My guess, having only done one pass: it feels similar to Raiders of the Lost Ark, honestly. That no amount of knowledge can equip people to take on The Great Unknown. Anyone who thinks otherwise is MAD. Four stars.
"Miss Lonelyhearts" by Nathanael West (1933)
Does a 50-page novella count as a book? If it does, my god, this one is bleak. Russian literature is (hilariously) stereotyped as bleak but within the first three pages of this one we're already exposed to depression, helplessness, Christ, sickness, abortion, suicide, mental disability, and rape—I don't recall Chekhov ever overloading his first act gun in quite the same way. The novella is also a weird, jittery comedy (how West achieves this is nothing short of a miracle.) This is the premise: A New York newspaper advice columnist receives daily pleas for help from desperately lost people with very serious problems; the combination of being exposed to the worst of humanity along with the fact that "Miss Lonelyhearts" (a stepping-stone gig taken by an ambitious, and very flawed, 26-year-old reporter) is viewed as a sort of unerring savior by the entire city completely batters his ill-equipped, genuinely empathetic/genuinely violent psyche. Hilarity ensues. (There's actually a lot of similarity to a pitch-black Joe Orton farce; maybe West was an inspiration.) Four stars.
"Middlemarch" by George Eliot (1872)
This is the novel version of a "talker," all 800 pages of it. There are probably fewer than 10 locations seen in this isolated British manufacturing town, and all are barely described. That leaves an enormous amount of text dedicated to the inner thoughts and emotions of our cast of a dozen or so disparate character types. And Eliot is generally quite sharp with the human insights, stuff like: "Politeness in a man who has placed you at a disadvantage is only an additional exasperation," or "Prejudices, like odious bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle—solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness," or "Does any one suppose that private prayer is candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action? Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?"—and that's just 0.001 percent of what you get in this book. Now, you might guess that an 800-page book that consists of little more than the densely webbed thoughts and emotions of only a dozen or so people might begin to feel overwhelming, and you wouldn't be too off-base. I will grant the experience is much more pleasant than reading an 800-page psychology textbook, but her writing style is also not exactly tailored towards ease-of-use (I suppose getting readers to follow the deeply entangled, deeply rendered psyches of your highly intellectual soap opera requires difficult-to-digest, high-fiber prose.) Is it all worth it, though? Well, you're likely to give a healthy boost to your emotional intelligence and you might earn some quality meditation time over the true nature of providence and you might excite some weird lit kicks, falling into the spell of a (now rare) fully omniscient narrator—and it's an exceptionally well written book, don't get me wrong! But to tell you the truth, there were certain times when I wished someone would just take this brick of a book and end my life with it so I would be relieved of the responsibility to finish it (God dammit, Eliot, just fucking tell me what Bulstrode did, you *told* me literally everything else! WHY ARE YOU DRAGGING THIS OUT AT PAGE 700?!!! I'M TOO EXHAUSTED TO PLAY SOME DUMB GAME WITH YOU!) However, I'm told providence doesn't quite work that way. Three 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.
"Lot" by Bryan Washington (2019)
All the drugs and gay sex was, in the end, kinda tedious and boring. Two stars.
"Light in August" by William Faulkner (1932)
As you get older, running into art that you find powerful but impossible to articulate becomes a rarer and rarer commodity. I can't explain why I loved this book—there's a lot of talk about borders, and running away, and chasing after, allusions to Christ and religion, and much ado about collective society. There's an overwhelming amount of humanity, the complicated maddening kind, stuffed into 500 pages of text. The narrative is modernist and angular, scrambled but not indecipherable. The language is typical Faulkner, the kind of fecund sentence structure that rewards those who have learned how to read slowly (which nowadays I would argue is a virtue absorbed by virtually no one.) It isn't a logic puzzle. It isn't a book that rewards the mind over the heart. It isn't even what you expect or have been told it's going to be because, again, it's impossible to articulate what the story is, at least in a couple of sentences. I know I just finished it, but I love it. You don't really love Faulkner books. But I love this one. Four stars.
"Laughable Loves" by Milan Kundera, Translated by Suzanne Rappaport (1969, 1974)
A short story collection looking at romance, mostly from the point of view of the heterosexual male of 1960s communist Czechoslovakia (remember that?), from the sexually inexperienced and overeager, searching-in-the-dark twentysomething to the extremely experienced and somewhat calloused, mocking, reflective, overly-lit older intellectual, from the oft-defeated bashful type to the over-rationalizing forward type. They're all comedic, a couple even downright farcical (the one communism-themed story is actually by far the funniest one) which seems about the right sort of energy, jittery, for this sort of mission, which apparently involves exposing the messy, confused sentient being (who, really, never even asked to be born) behind the throbbing, perplexing, often caricatured testosterone fiend we never really ever even asked to be. Which is to say, it's a surprisingly enjoyable read from beginning to end. Similar to how watching the movie "Swingers" is a surprisingly enjoyable experience, even as it reminds you of all the romances in your life that you completely and totally fucked up and perhaps then even of several ineradicable sins you'd like to believe have long been out-run. I wish I could explain to you exactly what elevates this sort of comedy into actual literature, but I don't think I can, not immediately, not right now, though the writing is exquisitely strong, exciting even, in the meticulously plotted, musical way worthwhile comedy often is. The best I can do right now is say, rather than be entirely a force of idle distraction, or a force that lures you straight into pious, family-adoring treacle, the laughter seduces you instead into standing before and looking squarely at a harshly lit and coldly polished mirror for an uncomfortably long time. And I suppose if you happen to have been born a woman, perhaps you'll enjoy stumbling upon a number of solidly plausible explanations for your male partner's chillingly bizarre life decisions. Four stars.
"Kudos" by Rachel Cusk (2018)
Book three of The Outline Trilogy. Was this whole thing a meditation on femininity the entire time? Featuring a main character whom you barely ever see? If so, wow. Four stars.
“Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte (1847)
Dickensian, in effort, that is to say alternately wasteful and worthwhile. A paltry tale of feminism, I think not. To decry "feminism" of this work deems most simplistic and, hence, most degrading. Difficult, dear reader, to impart modern tribes to so distant a world, duly acknowledged. The portrait of a woman is drawn strong, indubitably, but perceived strength oftwhile yields insufferable ignorance, hurtful to those perhaps underserving. Characters as symbol, by definition, hardly bests character as character, indecipherable and mystery full, I fain. Maybe that, reader, is the impart: the truly honest don't make any rational goddamn sense. Three stars.
"Insurrecto" by Gina Apostol (2018)
This book kind of makes you wish the story of the Philippine-American War and its aftermath were written by a white person, or any other ethnicity really. At least that way, using an outsider's point of view, they would know what to edit and how best to curb one's excesses. One star.
"In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" by William H. Gass (1968)
(1) You know those books that people gush about, especially in educated circles, but when you push them to explain exactly why they liked it so much you can never really squeeze out a clear, considerable answer? Partly because its reputation, particularly in educated circles, seems to have surpassed its actual quality? Something, among certain educated circles, you're supposed to like more than anyone actually does? Something you'll spend a proud year telling everyone about, all your educated friends, and years later struggle to remember? This is one of those books; (2) Maybe the reason revisiting postmodernist works feels so deeply unpleasant is that time has proven their “things are so fragmented truth no longer exists” theory absolutely, 100 percent correct. One star.
"In Love" by Alfred Hayes (1953)
There's this danger if you write a long prose piece using the rhythmic, structured beats of poetry, that the rhythm eventually becomes so incessant, like the steady drip of a faucet somewhere in the background, that the story actually takes a back seat. So while I kind of get it, that short, clipped, kinda calloused, clauses strung together can capture both the neurotic energy of New York City and the elevated inflammations of love, eventually all I heard was that damn dripping faucet—it was hard to absorb the story of a (somewhat standard, and therefore interesting) love affair because technique drifted into the spotlight. As if the disciplined grammar of poetry makes the story the writer's to dictate, not the reader’s to hold and inhabit. Still kinda good though. Three stars.