"Chekhov Becomes Chekhov" by Bob Blaisdell (2022)

It focuses on two years of Anton Chekhov's life at the beginning of his literary stardom in Russia, 1886 and 1887. At the time, Chekhov was 26 years old, a bachelor, a practicing doctor, and in constant debt because he had assumed the role of breadwinner for his immediate family. He wrote for the newspapers, which means he wrote his stories quickly, prolifically, and on deadline, mostly for the money. The book premises that, together with his extensively collected letters, you can piece together how his fiction was inspired by his life. This turns out to be more tedious than it sounds—it would be one thing if his seven stories or so-a-month pace produced one masterpiece after another, but this is more like if Lorne Michaels sat you down and explained the origins and production of every SNL sketch aired from 1976 to 1978: after a certain point you just don't care. I will grant the tightened focus gives you a much more nuanced picture of the overworked, tuberculosis-hiding human being than you tend to get elsewhere. And there's some insight into how he could keep the quality of his writing high despite publishing at least 176 pieces in those two years.* And Blaisdell often folds in fun, quippy, "excitable lit teacher" interjections (which I personally found irritating) to break up his lengthy story summaries. But, in total, it just all feels like empty speculation: did he write a story about a murder-suicide just because he happened to be depressed that week?; did the dog Kashtanka leave the circus and return to her abusive owner because, like Chekhov, she disliked fame? Maybe. And, also, so what? Chekhov is an extraordinary writer because of how perceptively he captures the nuances of human behavior—in comparison, everything else seems cartoonish—and you see that demonstrated here in excerpt after excerpt. But for a book that explicitly aims to shine a light on that sensitivity, you end everything feeling somewhat unsatisfied—How did Chekhov become so perceptive, you ask? Well, apparently, it was because he was really, really good at noticing things. Two stars.

*"Chekhov determinedly resisted writing fine quotable sentences. Wit and wisdom were to be suppressed in the service of description, so that only the description left its impression."

"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.

"Black Dada Reader" Edited by Adam Pendleton (2017)

What I thought I could finish in two or three days ended up taking two-plus weeks. It's interesting; I often put the book down and found myself dizzy; I enjoyed the deep dives into art school academia; I did not quite enjoy the art. Gertrude Stein was a great poet. Gertrude Stein was a Nazi sympathizer. Am I convinced abstraction is an equalizer? I can be talked into it. Three stars.

"Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought - Selected Letters and Commentary" Edited and Annotated by Simon Karlinsky, Translated by Michael Henry Heim (1973)

The audience, I'd imagine, is limited. And you can pretty much tell what you're going to get from the title, so let me just add this: Every letter features extensive footnotes which offer a look at 19th century Russian history through its street life and pop culture, if that sort of thing interests you—it might be the collection's leading virtue. Also, Karlinsky takes on an oddly catty tone throughout, gleefully debunking the many misperceptions of the man, Soviet-bred or otherwise (maybe he adopted that tone because a lot of the selected letters are kinda flat.) As for the letters themselves (185 here, out over 4,000 to choose from) one thing I noticed, having read other collections, the letters here seem much more even-keeled and less emotionally all over the place—you get the impression that Chekhov was a person who tried to maintain his sincerity in all situations, but only once in a while does any of the messiness sincere people tend to get themselves caught up in, and that I've seen expressed elsewhere, peek through the editing process (he, memorably, in more than one letter, brags about banging a bronze-colored Hindu woman under a tree in Singapore; his final recorded words involved mocking the way German women dressed; and he sent the following letter in its entirety to some kid who asked him to take a look at their story: "Cold, dry, long, not youthful, though talented. -Chekhov.") It's kind of funny how the truth about sincere people somehow becomes badly mangled, actually—one collection I read painted him as an eternal fount of saintly wisdom, one as an emotionally messy, deeply flawed human being, and this as a practical, sober-minded, stately celebrity. I'm betting the messy, flawed one is the honest one (somehow the story of a trained doctor who flat-out ignores his own tuberculosis for nearly 10 years, and the story of someone who said he wanted to be married as long they remained independent and apart, frustrating his new wife who was shocked to find out that he actually meant it, tends to get buried.) Three 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.

"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.

"Actual Minds, Possible Worlds" by Jerome Bruner (1986)

I frequently re-read these things and go back in and edit the shit out of them so keep in mind this review may change. But I was directed here by Maria Popova. You know, the longtime, yellow-tinged "inspiration porn" queen of the creative Internet? She told me that this was a deeply insightful inquiry into the narrative arts by a reknowned psychologist. What I found was, someone who spent nine chapters out of 10 laddering, in excruciating detail, a proof leading up to a psychological point, only, after hours of torturous logic, to finally arrive at the psychological point: when people read things, they combine what they already understand with newly presented information and then use this entwined knowledge in order to form new thoughts. OH, GEEZ, THANKS A LOT, EINSTEIN. Maybe next you'd like to explain to me why exactly human beings enjoy eating tasty food, or why human beings try to avoid experiencing pain, citing a whole bunch of meticulously researched studies. A rare, genuine: No stars.

Sidenote: I'm beginning to think Maria Popova doesn't actually read the books that she promotes.

"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.

"A Swim in a Pond in the Rain" by George Saunders (2021)

You know how there's this huge gulf between the kinds of stories "literature people" like and the kinds of stories "non-literature people" like? How you can't understand why anyone could possibly think, say, Rachel Cusk's "Outline Trilogy" is required reading when Emily Giffin at least writes books that actually make me feel joy? Well, I'm no George Saunders fan but I'd say this does a pretty good job of at least trying to bridge that gap. Three stars.

"A Rhetoric of Irony" by Wayne C. Booth (1974)

(1) I read this very slowly. Turns out, there's only so much irony one person can handle in one sitting; (2) If you have no interest in literature then you’ll probably feel intense hatred if you attempted to read this; (3) But if you did, you'd find the writing style surprisingly enjoyable, even as he never bothers to dumb things down; (4) I suppose if you wanted a lengthy defense of why irony isn't necessarily the insouciant societal cancer it's often made out to be, this would be the place to turn; (5) You might even be surprised to stumble upon existential discussions of meaninglessness and knowledge and truth and human communion and, briefly, even God; (6) Have you ever thought of irony as frighteningly powerful? Well I didn't, until I read this; (7) One of his main attacks is on the notion that works of literature mean whatever one perceives them as meaning (which I understand to be part of postmodernism and multiculturalism,) which particularly triggered me because I feel my formal English instruction was dominated by that philosophy, and I do not now believe it served anyone's brains well; (8) Can I assure you that you'll feel enriched and rejuvenated upon completing the book? No. I find right now that I just wish all thinking would stop: my eyes hurt. Three stars.