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A young urbane couple leaves New York for the Connecticut suburbs. April had gone to acting school and Frank had attended Columbia and fought in The War and planned to “find himself” in some general academic pursuit. A pregnancy caused them to move and Frank to get an office job at the company his father had worked for. After a second child and several years of suburban living April stars in a local play which is an embarrassing failure. This starts a chain of events where April and Frank examine their suburban life and their previous dreams while searching for a way to find a more exciting life. 

This is one of the most miserable books I’ve read (and in a similar vein to also depressing “White Noise” and “Stoner”). No one here is happy, there are plenty of victims but no heroes, and everyone feels very much above their friends. This novel plays out largely in a series of arguments and plans to improve their situation made tolerable only by large numbers of drinks. 

Lots of comparisons are made “Gatsby” as they both call into question their outwardly indulgent, inwardly miserable era (1920s or ’50s). This novel much more directly parallels Lewis’s “Main Street,” picking up where it let off (a play which failed to inject culture into a provincial area) but a few decades later. In both cases there is an urbane wife and dawdling husband, they move to a small town/the suburbs but insist that the will make the most of it and not become dull and domestic like their neighbors. There is certainly no success but the husbands are able to make do (more or less). I really like Lewis, but “Revolutionary Road” is the better of the pair and retains more relevance (although they’re both certainly of their time). 

What a weird book! One of O’Connor’s two novels (although there are a lot of short stories sitting on my shelf) it follows Hazel Motes as he moves to a new town and tries to start his new religion–The Church Without Christ. He has a deep sense of (Catholic?) shame about his faith and tries to rebel by becoming blasphemous. He meets a preacher who blinded himself as an act of faith and a young man who is obsessed with a mummy in the city museum. These encounters lead to a series of more extreme events for Haze.

Things move fast here and the significance really lies in the strange actions of the characters. Not really a case of subtle writing or introspection, O’Connor narrates a series of strange events for several characters that are loosely intertwined. It’s strange without trying to push any limits or toe any lines. Hardly what I tend to go for but completely enjoyable.

“The Suicides” opens with a quote from Camus so I figured it was time to stop putting it off. 

I received “The Suicides” from the NYRB Classics Club subscriptions that I had last year (which have mostly just gone to a colorful stack). Can’t say why I chose this over the others but I’m glad that I did. 

The book opens like “The Stranger.” An unnamed narrator realizes that he’s about to turn 33–the age his father committed suicide. As a journalist trying to sell stories to magazines, his boss assigns a story about three suicides with no information besides pictures. He spends the remainder of the novel trying to find details from the three pictures while also following new suicides in the region. He is quick to ask favors and put others in uncomfortable positions to find any small amount of information. However, he’s much more interested in the women he meets along the way (though not his girlfriend) while he spends time at the fights of movies.

The writing is sparse and interspersed with statistical studies of suicide from one of the characters. The story moves and reaches conclusions in a way but generally is very stagnant. The narrator feels trapped for most of the novel with only a few glimmers of hope. Other reviews connect this to the political state of affairs around this time in Argentina. 

Maybe the situation reaches Camus’s absurd where the narrator finds little reason to continue living or go along with any typical role. At times there is passion and revolt, but hardly freedom. Certainly his job is Sisyphean. But maybe the situation is more Kafkaesque which, according to Camus, is too hopeful to capture the absurd, but somehow “The Suicides” might also have some hope. 

Gary Shteyngart’s new novel shows a marriage falling apart from the eyes of a ten year old in the milieu of a fascist America somewhere in the relatively near future. Vera is trying to navigate school and friendships in a “gifted” education system full of high expectations and entrance exams largely motivated by her step-mother who clearly prefers her younger brother. Conversations about this with her AI chess set convince her to try to find her birth mother in Ohio (where she met her father in college at “the school of fading repute” which is definitely not Oberlin). While this is happening her father is trying to sell his magazine to someone who doesn’t like its general political direction so they can go from having “cultural capital” to “capital capital.”

I read “Our Country Friends” in ~2022 and thought it was good, all things considered. There are a lot of similar characters here: pretentious writer husband with a borderline drinking problem that resembles the author, exasperated wife, Korean-American daughter, strained relationships all around. And apparently the “cultural capital” vs “capital capital” thing is a bit of a leitmotif for Shteyngart. Which is all to say that this feels almost like a continuation of some previous works despite the plots being non-connected. 

But it’s been a few days and I’ve really forgotten about most of it. Maybe I prefer Shteyngart’s “reporting” for the New Yorker or the Atlantic (on martini’s and probably tax write-off luxuries)–here the wit and “Russian pessimism” really shine. Nothing wrong with novel and I enjoyed it, but it won’t stick with me and that’s fine.  

A modern fable of a boy with an incredible sense of smell but no scent of his own. “Perfume” follows Grenouille (Frog) from his abandonment at birth through his childhood in ~foster care, adolescence as a tanning then perfume apprentice, time in isolation, and finally early adulthood learning enfleurage to make his ultimate perfume.

A main theme through this novel is how the often imperceptible sense of one’s smell contributes to their identity and perception by others. Since Grenouille gives off no scent, he is not perceived and found to be unsettling when people see him. Upon realizing this, Grenouille sets out to create the ultimate scent so others will perceive him as beautiful.

Writing in third-person omniscient, Süskind provides a sense of gravity and timelessness to the work without much personal introspection from Grenouille. He certainly isn’t an antihero that generates empathy. It’s an uncomfortable and unsettling read but also feels timeless. As a bonus, Süskind provides lots of interesting details about perfumery through Grenouille’s training.

Is it a romance or a coming of age novel? Critique of Edwardian manners? Forster’s novel plays a lot of parts for being relatively short length. To add, it feels like a victorian novel that’s been torn back and loosened up a little (not quite modernist). 

I guess it’s really a novel of conflicts modulated by manners. Lucy is in conflict with her mother, Charlotte, Cecil, and George but not really with her philosopher Mr. Emerson. Charlotte and Mrs. Honeychurch are in conflict with George and Cecil. All of their conflicts have to go through Edwardian customs and concerns of what others may think. 

Maybe I came in expecting a little bit of a lighter, lusher novel based on the descriptions of the book (and film). This has some weight to it which I wasn’t really expecting. 

Maybe this is more for the spring than the summer, or maybe my criticism is that LP Hartley’s “The Go-Between” exists.

Picked this one off of the shelf because it had a nice cover and I had never heard of it. So I went into this not knowing anything beyond what was written on the cover. I had previously read a couple of Mieko Kawakami’s novels and a Murakami during a heat wave last year so I thought it was a good time. 

This is a short novel covering about 1.5 years in the life of a woman and her child after being left by her husband. It plays out in 12 short (~15 page) chapters which are only loosely connected and extremely sparse in narrative detail. 

The daughter is acting out (maybe related to the separation), the mother is beyond her capacity to deal with working and raising a child while meeting cultural expectations for motherhood, and the husband is exacerbating the situation. Light and shadows/darkness are one of the most used visual descriptions throughout the book. 

“Territory of Light” is about a mother trying to find her feet after a separation. It spares no detail about the struggles and missteps. This novel almost feels like a diary of all the unpleasant things that happened during the process which makes it a but of an uncomfortable read at times. Maybe this was more of an interesting read than one that I really enjoyed. 

Dorothy Thompson, wife of Sinclair Lewis was expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934 for her journalism criticizing the regime. One year later, Lewis published “It Can’t Happen Here” as a speculative work about a fascist dictator running for US President and then becoming a dictator. This book largely follows the newspaper editor Doremus Jessup as he reports on and experiences the effects of the campaign and new regime. 

Lewis’s most famous works–“Babbitt” and “Main Street”–focus on restlessness and middle class ambition in the face of the mediocrity and pressure to socially conform. In “Arrowsmith” he described the slowing of scientific progress caused by bureaucracy and meritocracy. Those works generally proceed slowly and often in a circular manner as characters are caught in traps working against social pressures.  The writing is witty and fully of humorous irony. 

“It Can’t Happen Here” is quite different. The plot moves much more quickly and maintains story-lines for many characters as well as plot points following the new government. The writing is much more plain and urgent. A lot of time was clearly spent in adapting the politics to the US (the political aspects largely follow Germany) in particular the persistent strain of anti-intellectualism and desire to return to “traditional values.” But largely this offers much less analysis on the American psychology than Lewis’s most famous works. 

This book is similar to Feuchtwanger’s “The Oppermann’s” (written in Germany in 1933) which follows the rise of the Nazi’s from the viewpoint of a Jewish merchant family. The questions posed are little more interesting with “when should we start to worry” and “how much of these politics can be tolerated.” 

It’s an interesting novel and well written but not a standout among Lewis’s novels. And there’s the whole question of whether the resurgence in popularity this novel saw in 2016-2017 was justified or a bit alarmist…

It’s a book about writing a book about separating the art from the artist. A book about monstrous people who do great things but also an account of the author trying to come to terms and find a way to handle the conflict. 

I probably wouldn’t have read this book if I knew the format, but luckily I read one of the chapters published in some magazine (Paris Review?). But I’m glad I read it.  “Monsters” gives no clear answers or framework for where to draw the line. Instead, it provides a framework for thinking about these issues. It addresses the thorny issues of “back then they didn’t know better,” redemption, and monstrousness coming from abuse in childhood or from the entertainment issue. Mostly it deals with the idea that great art and bad behavior may be intrinsically linked (and how, historically, this tends to skew masculine). 

A main focus of this book is the author trying to reconcile her love of Roman Polanski’s films with her disgust over his actions and the admitted tragedies of his life (mother died in the Holocaust and wife in the Manson murders). Much of the conversation revolves around what the films mean to the author personally and takes into account the dramatic shift in biographical detail that is only recently accessible to everyone. There are no easy ways out (i.e. don’t financially support them if they’re alive) and no panacea for all bad behavior. There is a reasonably good take on cancel culture. 

After some 200 pages of careful discussions about the complications of trying to reconcile behavior and art there is a bit of an unsatisfying conclusion that feels a bit rushed or even unnecessary given the rest of the book. A bit unsatisfying, but there is still a lot to take from this book and it’s wonderfully stand-alone-worthy chapters. 

Ostensibly very similar novels. Both are semi-autobiographical stories from the early adulthood of poets (turn novelists) struggling with addiction and their American/foreign identity. They both follow depressed young men lacking a sense of purpose and trying to start writing but caught up in the tedium of work and relationships. 

Vuong’s novel follows Hai who is living with Grazina, an old lady helping her through the throes of dementia while working at a fast food restaurant with an interesting cast of characters. The story largely follows the relationship between Hai and Grazina and his cousin/coworker Sony’s attempts to make bail for his mother and afford a trip to visit his father. 

Emperor of Gladness examines the struggles and expectations of immigrants along with the struggles of work in the service industry. Nearly every character has a sad backstory and often some dream deferred from illness, medical bills, or general financial instability. There can be no expectations of happy ending from Vuong (hardly a spoiler) but there’s a wonderful sense of beauty in the mundane moments and shared burdens. 

This is certainly a more stylistically mature novel than “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” but also feels less urgent and personal. Still very enjoyable. 

Akbar’s novel follows Cyrus, a young man in recovery attempting to write a novel about martyrdom. He is first occupied by the famous religious martyrs along with his experience of growing up as an Iranian-American in the 2000s. These feelings are enhanced by the death of his mother on Iran Flight 655 and his day job as a medical actor. He is largely preoccupied with death and generally unable to cope with both death and general uncertainty. 

His feelings about martyrdom change upon meeting with an artist whose last exhibit is to put herself on display as she dies of cancer. Throughout this section, more information about his mother and uncle unfold in the context of the Iranian revolution. The unfolding of these two storylines make up the last third of the book and are fairly propulsive. 

It didn’t quite work for me. All of the characters seemed to try to hard to liked and to explain their grand struggle and bad behaviors. They ended up feeling a bit flat and overwrought. Many of the ideas presented felt underdeveloped and presented as over profound. It’s not an entirely unsuccessful first novel, but it really felt like a first novel.