"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.

"Storm" by George R. Stewart (1941)

The main character of this novel is an unusually large storm named Maria. The narrative winds through the lives of meteorologists, flood control officials, highway plow managers, air traffic controllers, streamliner staff, and a couple wild animals over the course of the storm's 12 days moving over the Pacific towards California. The depiction of people who surround engineering fields feels fairly accurate—they tend to be more matter-of-fact than melodramatic. And the writing is really quite good; there's a lot of (seemingly) accurate descriptions of winds and fronts and barometric pressure and such that's rendered in an entertaining way. And the conflict of man and their machines vs. the whims of nature is well drawn. But, despite its achievements, it's really hard to connect to a novel where the human characters are secondary: it just never became something I eagerly looked forward to. However, if you're one of those animal-loving types who actively avoids considering the lives of other people, you might really enjoy this. Two stars.

"Speedboat" by Renata Adler (1976)

It's one of them fancy postmodern collage novels, made up of hundreds of well polished, sundered fragments, scenes, observations, and episodes, told from the point of view of a well bred, well salaried journalist living in 1970s New York City. It's a little intriguing, at first, wondering how this might come together, watching it build a unique, half-lidded tension between coyness and overexposure, at times feeling seduced and at times feeling repulsed by the rhythmic, metered style, annoyed and excited by its nagging, neurotic inscrutabilities, often in the same beat. And then some time around page 100 something snapped and I just started reading the rest of it as fast as I could, just so I could get it over with, having grown deathly tired of whatever game this book is playing, almost solely just to spite the distant, somewhat patrician way it's speaking to me, toying with me. Is this more style than substance, you begin to wonder? Not that there isn't any substance—the disparate images, altogether, give you some insight into what cavorting around town as a privileged, well educated, highly observant white woman must feel like—but is there enough substance here to justify any concentration, any focused investment? Call me ignorant, but I just don't get the sense, that no, there is enough.* Two stars.

*Rachel Cusk would do pretty much the same thing but much more effectively in her Outline trilogy nearly 40 years later. Honestly, if I hadn't read Outline first I probably would have admired this one more.

"Sons and Lovers" by D.H. Lawrence (1913)

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.

"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.

"Oreo" by Fran Ross (1974)

Of all the novels I've been told were "really funny" I'd say maybe 2 percent actually were. This one's packed with wacky characters and jokes, mostly of the kind kids in honors classes might find funny—upon hearing his Black daughter was marrying a Jewish man, an anti-Semitic father goes into a paralyzing coma, his body rigidly molded into the shape of a half-swastika. The main character, Christine Clark, is called "Oreo" not because she's necessarily "white on the inside," or because she's of mixed Black-Jewish blood, but because her Black grandmother speaks with a heavy southern accent and tried to give her the nickname "Oriole"—it's humor like that. It's also postmodern and Pyncheon-esque and it parallels Theseus of Greek mythology and it's littered with Yiddish and mixes math jokes with dick jokes and mixes wordplay with physical comedy set pieces and mixes feminist bad-assery with a naggingly odd fixation on Jewish culture and there's a mute man who has to hold up a series of cartoon bubbles next to his head in order to speak and if this all sounds like a try-hard tedious mess to you I can assure you that it very much is. One star.

"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.

"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.