"The Day of the Locust" by Nathanael West (1939)

As far as books about Los Angeles go, this genuinely FEELS like LA. From the setting to the characters to the situations to the way the sky is often described like paint. Which is noteworthy because it makes an (ultimately) heavy-handed point about how the dream of Hollywood, California, is really quite bleak (I know there are a lot of "LA is actually bleak" stories, just know in this case I don't use the word "bleak" lightly—the 1975 film version is often described as a disguised horror movie.) For LA in the 30s, this too feels accurate: a stage mom boasts about how she's following a raw diet while sucking her adorable child actor son bone dry. Strangely, a lot of it reminded me of life in your twenties, full of unmoored people seeking big dreams but really only finding stunning boredom, a boredom that can somehow teeter into either soulful magnanimity or senseless violence depending on the day. It's really quite a good book. And that's because it's more than about Hollywood, it's really about boredom and how it makes us behave, set in a town built to be the ultimate antidote to American boredom (is the solution also the source of the problem?) It's also well written, it's compelling (in some parts, it's actually too much to handle), it's truthful, it's weird, parts of it had me howling with laughter, and parts of it were horrifying. It really ranks among the best books no one has ever read (Christina Stead is also on that list.) That combination Miss Lonelyhearts/The Day of the Locust book? You should really pick it up. Sidenote: there's a character in the novel named Homer Simpson. And the reason The Simpsons only contains one reference to this in its 30-odd years is because, in the novel, Homer Simpson murders an 8-year-old child, coldly and cruelly, stomping on their now lifeless body again and again and again and again and again, and then again and again and again, right in front of a huge crowd of people. Four stars.

"Three Sisters - A Drama in Four Acts" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Peter Carson (1900, 2004)

If you were to sum all of this up as "a heavily existential soap opera" it feels tautly apt, if a tad bit flippant. There's a 1966 televised version. And I was a little shocked when I thought: This isn't just the best interpretation of a Chekhov play I've seen, this might actually be some of the best theater I've ever seen. Turns out it was by the Actors Studio, who have a direct line to Stanislavski, who originated Chekhov's plays in Russia. For such an extremely busy, centerless play, a somewhat lengthy play that I would describe as having a "constantly swirling" structure, you're almost grateful that such talented theater people bothered to grapple with the material. Because there were so many things I didn't catch by reading the play alone, and I could easily imagine all this being utterly unbearable in lesser hands. I guess the question I have is, does this odd, swirling structure serve the theme? The theme seemingly being: No amount of education, intelligence, faith, or virtue can prepare you for the unpredictable vicissitudes of life, exponential, ever-evolving, incomprehensible vicissitudes that are idly set in motion simply when one human being collides into another. If you wanted to illustrate such existential confusion, then perhaps it does. But was reaching that point worth all the effort? I'm not sure. I almost want the point to be even more out-there, even more ambitious, even more soul-shaking. As it stands, I ended the play thinking: Well, yes, I find life confusing, and yes, my beliefs probably are delusions, and no, I suppose I don't really know anything about anything. Good on you, Chekhov: you nailed me. Now, why exactly did you feel the need to point this out? Because I kind of already knew that—that's what my delusions are for! But perhaps I'm again being flippant: it's really a remarkably written play, short of extraordinary, even. Where the rub is, is you feel like there's something holding it back from really blowing your brain wide open, and here I offer my best guess as to what that brain-blowing dampener might actually be. Three stars.

"The Complete Short Novels" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2004)

So Chekhov only wrote one full-length novel, which I've never heard anyone talk about. The rest were short stories and novellas. This contains all five of his 100-page-long-or-so novellas: The Steppe, The Duel, The Story of an Unknown Man, Three Years, and My Life: A Provincial's Story. And the most noteworthy thing about Chekhov's writing is that his depiction of human behavior is so well observed very little of it feels dated, even over a hundred years on, traversing language, country, and several political revolutions (comparatively, Tao Lin's 2000s output feels HELLA DATED.) Story (1) is a loosely plotted coming-of-age story; (2) is inspired by the concept of natural selection; (3) involves a revolutionary assassin; (4) is a fucked-up romance; and (5) is a hive of volatile twentysomethings. (1) and (5) are oddly plotted, and therefore, somewhat tedious. (2), (3), and (4) are riveting reads from beginning to end. All of them feature characters so objectively true to life, it kind of makes the people you see on TV (and even most of the characters you come across in books, and also many of the people you meet in New York City) look crassly, offensively, two-dimensional. None of them, however, can smack you in the face like some of his 6-page-long short stories can. Is that something to hold against him and his longer works? No, I guess not—judging by how rarely you see dramatically strong stories where no one quite knows what they're doing, where nobody's right and nobody's wrong, where winning may not mean progress and where losing may not mean defeat, even after decades of successive, ever-accumulating stories, Chekhov's writings remain stunningly singular works. Four stars.

"The Company She Keeps" by Mary McCarthy (1942)

Early on, I was thrilled: I've never read a novel—nor even seen a story—about a professional woman navigating 1930s New York City alone before. And it opens on an intimate look at a woman who's cheating on her husband. “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment” is surprisingly frank, surprisingly honest (this woman seems to really enjoy “the spectacle”, the show of it all, because it puts her in the director's seat) and is the story that turned me onto the novel. It contains no dialogue, which is actually really refreshing. Refreshing, that is, until you realize most of the rest of the book is written the exact same way. As the vignettes move onto less and less interesting subjects (notably ones that don't focus on our Margaret Sargent), most of which involve the 1930s socialist intellectual scene, the steady drumbeat of exposition told in the exact same sharply-written style grows rather tiresome, like that funny person you meet at a party who excites at first, but can't seem to ever go beyond one tiring note. Of the six vignettes, only two of them are worth reading (and one of them is about a 1930s Trumpian schemer.) But “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment” is such a great story, and the novel's subject matter: an intelligent woman who restlessly, compulsively?, moves from one affair to another without much shame is so unique (all the socialism stuff?; meh) it salvages the book. Two stars.

"The Tyranny of Virtue - Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies" by Robert Boyers (2019)

Elderly liberal academic and steward of long-running literary magazine attempts to deconstruct, one-by-one, censorship inflicted by liberals upon themselves—examining in turn notions of privilege, safety, diversity, appropriation, identity, ableism—in cold, dense, academic prose. I could express more of my own thoughts on what Boyers actually says about it all but I’m afraid I might get cancelled. Four stars.

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs (1961)

Having grown up in a city, I got the impression that most people didn't really like them—I never saw city life as I knew it depicted on TV, and in fact, throughout my adult life I rarely run into another person who was also raised inside the city proper. I loved them, though, to the point that in my 20 years in New York I've never lived in a high-rise, because I don't like separating myself from street life; it's why I've spent the last 10 of them living in a place like Crown Heights. So reading Jane Jacobs I couldn't be more thrilled to run into someone who was just as enthusiastic about cities as I am. And not just the fancy, fun parts: Jacobs is in love with the complexity, with the mess, the collisions and the contradictions. In essence, she's spending the entire book trying to shine lights on a mystery no one seems to understand, both then and now: how can a confused, massive throng of people actually succeed together? So I'm all about this book; I can see why it's considered revolutionary. I'm even thrilled that she spends a lot of time questioning what I consider an overwhelming human epidemic among people my age and younger, the lust for control where control is a fantasy. Sure, there are some spots where it seems like she's backing up an assumption with nothing more than a confident-sounding voice, but it's a five-star book. At a certain point though, lightheaded, you lift your bleary eyes from the dense, small type and say, to nobody in particular, "Geez, she just sort of kept going on and on for a bit now there, didn't she?" Four stars.

"The Craft of Fiction" by Percy Lubbock (1921)

I'm not sure if this is considered "New Criticism"; if anything, it feels like a precursor to that movement, which apparently took off in the 1940s. Both this book and that movement import to the ordinary reader that in order to fully appreciate literature a reader needs to go beyond the pleasures of story and implant within themselves some understanding of the workings of craft. I buy that in the sense that ... well, remember how in the 90s people thought Harry Potter would usher in this renaissance of reading? And all that ended up happening is now there are a whole bunch of grown adults pushing 40 reading books that were explicitly intended to be comprehended by children? Well, so, to backtrack, I buy that in the sense that understanding the mechanism of story might help people expand beyond the things they already like, in the same way that someone who understands the game of baseball can watch and appreciate games played by teams other than their favorite. So should this book, which is focused entirely on the role point of view plays in accomplished novels, be read by the casual reader? Well, no. But if you aspired to be a writer, there's great stuff in here! What's interesting is, as writing instruction became more formalized in the 20th century, it seems like the "rules" actually grew more and more rigid, even as the field became more and more democratized. I think that's what happens if you want to open up the field to more people: it's hard to organize (hard to sell) a big tent if you tell everybody: Hey, fundamentally, there are actually no rules whatsoever! The New Criticism crowd seemed to understand that, even while pointing out exactly how the gears turned. It's interesting to read thoughts about writing from this era, to me, because I keep running into fundamentally sound arguments that seem to have been entirely forgotten/ignored/rejected, for whatever reasons, none of which seem good. Four stars.

"The Seagull - A Comedy in Four Acts" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Peter Carson (1896, 2004)

Here's where Chekhov's obtuse idea of theater actually starts to cohere, nearly ten years after "Ivanov". Still, I left this with largely the same feeling I had when I read it the first time, with much less exposure to Chekhov's "I hate everything that came before me" sensibility. And that feeling is: What the fuck is this?—the exposition is laid out much too plainly as exposition to be accidental, everybody's hopelessly in love with everyone else, the play parodies plays, the writer character wants to create new and different forms of theater (in a piece that bucks traditional form,) the seagull symbolism is recognized by the characters themselves as a symbol they find difficult to understand, I mean, what the fuck? I'm gonna try to watch the play. I'll say it definitely reads better than Ivanov, but for now, gosh, I'm nonplussed! Two stars.

Found a 1975 PBS staging. It works, and the play makes a little more sense, but I can't explain to you how it works and how it makes sense. I really really can't. I don't know where to begin. It's kinda good, but I don't know why. Gosh, I'm nonplussed! It's hard to believe Frank Langella hadn't been born an old man! Three stars.

"The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick" by Elizabeth Hardwick, Selected by Darryl Pinckney (2017)

She's a very very good writer, but it's striking how her writing style didn't change all that much from the first essay published in 1953 to the final one published in 2003. For contrast, Flannery O'Connor's writing style matured exponentially in just the 18 years between "The Geranium" and "Judgement Day". Kind of gives me pause, considering. Anyway, you probably shouldn't read this book if you don't particularly like reading (Hardwick on Joan Didion: "The inclination to pedantry in instances of piddling, measly inconsequence are sometimes the only protection one has against the witchery of this uncompromising imagination, the settings so various and the sometimes sleepwalking players who blindly walk through windows and fall into traps of great consequence such as the Vietnam War or the world of the Contras.") But if you do, it's a BONANZA. Four stars.

"The Art of the Novel - Critical Prefaces" by Henry James (1934)

It's one thing to read Henry James' dizzying writing style in a piece of fiction—you work at it because you trust he's leading you somewhere. It's another thing when he's speaking as himself, reflecting on his own work, the sentence structures splintering into a winding, sprawling train consisting of his own lightly tethered thoughts. Don't get me wrong: he's brilliant. And unlike most accomplished writers, he's not coy. In fact, he's very generous about the process of creating and crafting fiction. But he's also an overthinker. And reading this book has been difficult for me because the result is akin to one person directly injecting their craziness into my brain. (Strangely, though, you leave the book with the impression "American literature's biggest snob" might actually have been, deep down, a really nice guy.) Two stars.

"The Cherry Orchard - A Comedy in Four Acts" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Peter Carson (1904, 2004)

Ah, the last of Chekhov's plays. Presumably, this is the one where he figured it out, the final attempt at his then-unusual, and now EXTREMELY unusual, swirling, "centrifugal" form, where the story elements chaotically spin away from the center, interweaving, colliding, stuttering, rather than neatly converging straightaways towards clarity. A lot has been made about how the theme concerns people being comically inactive, too mired in the past, to confront their own looming demise, but that seems to me to be too facile to be the point—if someone you loved were dying I doubt you would kill them prematurely and move on just because it was decisive and made perfect financial and logical sense; in fact you're much more likely to behave foolhardily just for the sake of holding onto something, anything. To me, it's more noteworthy that the characters can't seem to understand each other, due to selfishness or impatience or lack of life experience or insecurity or status or what have you, while at the same time desperately demanding that their own peculiar selves be understood. In fact, whenever the characters are flat-out offered clarity and resolution, they refuse it, as if they found more comfort in not knowing. If we know for certain everything is coming to an end, maybe we'd rather be lost, and foolish, and deluded, telling people who try to shake us out of our ruts to SHUTUP, because at least being lost in our own way is something we already understand. That seems like a bit of a soul-shaking point. In a sort of similar way, I liked his more ambitious, messier attempts better than this fairly well polished one, even if they weren't totally successful (it's the same reason I like "Billy Madison" more than "Happy Gilmore.") The feeling of "God, Chekhov, what the hell are you doing?" is far more thrilling than "Okay, Chekhov, I see what you're up to: perhaps the reason people don't seem to advance and evolve as sentient beings is simply because we don't want to. Also, Chekhov, remind me never to invite you to any parties. You're kind of a bummer." Three stars.

"The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories" by Eudora Welty (1955)

I think I hate Eudora Welty. I suppose I should clarify: I think I hate Eudora Welty's work. And it's not because I think she's a bad writer. In the past I've spoken about how her stories can seem old-fashioned, and about how a reader can feel they're jumping through a whole host of challenging hoops for nothing. Perhaps maybe I can equate her stories to a game of chess: each character seems to serve a specific function, and each piece moves around the board, stiffly, according to their assigned function, interacting with other pieces/functions in different ways to achieve a certain goal. Now, even though each piece may be meticulously hand carved and striking in appearance, and the board may be handsomely colored and designed, and the collisions of pieces may be somewhat inventive, the last thing you ever want recounted to you is the full picture of the ins and outs of a particular chess game, even a thrilling one. I guess what I'm saying is, the stories—with the shared theme of journeys into the unknown—don't ever feel alive to me. You can say Greek mythology essentially takes on a "chess game" form, but with one key exception: there was one captivating, unpredictable human being in there running amok, upsetting everybody's clockwork function (Odysseus actually makes an appearance here but, perhaps unsurprisingly, he comes across as boring.) Even in the most interesting story, "No Place for You, My Love," about two strangers who decide to venture south of New Orleans on a whim, the evocative and lengthy descriptions of that very unusual, very swampy, bug-clouded world eventually begin to reek of dried paint, and the people begin to feel plasticine. Eudora Welty was such a skilled writer, it's possible that this is exactly what she wanted her work to feel like: not a flowing filmreel of ongoing life, but a past rendered in swirling, melodramatic oils that's been framed and encased in protective glass. That's entirely possible. But if I die and find out that the world of death smells exactly like dried paint, I wouldn't at all be surprised. One star.

"The Bear" by William Faulkner (1942)

Is this novella worth talking about, considering it's really a part of the larger novel "Go Down, Moses"? Maybe. I'll start by saying it feels like a somewhat straightforward and pleasant five-chapter adolescent adventure story, except for Chapter 4 where, seemingly, Faulkner COMPLETELY LOSES HIS MIND. Fortunately, at this point the main character is kind of losing his mind as well, trying to justify walking away from a major inheritance, which he does by compressing all of his family's history, and southern racial history, and all of American history, and all of Earth's history, and all of mankind's existence, and all of God's intentions, into one singular thought (I suppose if this were simply a story about killing a legendary bear we wouldn't still be talking about it.) Needless to say, this chapter gave me a headache—apparently, a radical compression of time and experience involves a 60-page chapter made up of only 15 sentences (or so) and the identities of scores of characters, across generations, somehow being merged and confused (if you imagine that the wilderness, the bear's home, can be considered an everlasting cycle of chaos, birth, death, and destruction, all happening simultaneously, without reward or reason, the past never being past, then you can sort of see Faulkner's unique stylistic choices here.) Is it possible for one man to exit this endless morass of recycled sin, committed by every single person on earth, committed by every single family on earth, committed by every single race on earth? Well, you can say an awful lot of contradicting things about this story—loaded, intertwining symbols are pretty much ripe for the picking in this one—but it's noteworthy to me that our overthinking, idealistic main character in the end, despite plotting the only escape he could think of, achieves absolutely nothing but near paralysis (the symbol he becomes instead is also of note.) If anything, the problem with this story is that the characters feel so symbolic, it's difficult to relate to them as people, though I also suspect that was Faulkner's intent: "Don't focus on the people, focus on the enormous ideas! Gahd!" But! Is it a good read? Yeah. It is. It's a really good read, in fact. Especially if you like getting mad. Three 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.

"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.