(1) "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer. This absurdly beautiful book reminds me a bit of "In Cold Blood." (Maybe the title is a deliberate echo. Certainly, Krakauer was reusing his own successful formula when he came up with the title for "Into Thin Air.") What is the similarity? When Truman Capote wrote "In Cold Blood," he allowed himself to digress. The digressions are mesmerizing. In one chapter, he recalls, at length, the various brutal murders Perry's cell mates committed. He also goes on for a bit about Mrs. Clutter's apparent mental illness. And he shares long-winded, poetic thoughts on "the land." In the same way, Krakauer's "Into the Wild" isn't really just about McCandless. There's a startling chapter that tells the tale of other loonies who have wandered into the woods (or the brutal desert) and never returned. There's a gripping and painful account of Young Krakaeur's own flirtation with death, on top of a mountain. There's the weirdly mesmerizing saga of the potato seeds, at the very end of the book. Like Capote, Krakaeur wants to take a vilified, or semi-vilified, figure, and make you question what you think you know about this guy. Both the Capote work and the Krakauer work have generous and unsettling quotations--journal excerpts--from the figures profiled. Though both stories are deeply sad, they leave you with a renewed sense of wonder; how mysterious this planet can be! Great artistic material often comes from a Divided (Troubled) Self--people are struggling with this, right now, with all the Junot Diaz discussions--and Krakauer bravely lays bare many of his own problems in his early work. "Into the Wild" is a once-in-a-lifetime match between a fascinating, bottomless story and a brilliant writer.
(2) "You Think It, I'll Say It" by Curtis Sittenfeld. There is sometimes a sourness in Sittenfeld's work that becomes frustrating (I know, I know: Who am I to talk). But maybe that's just because it's too close to actual life--and, really, Sittenfeld never says she is offering us "escapism." The story from this book that is haunting me is "Volunteers Are Shining Stars." In this tale, a young woman helps out at a daycare for "under-served" children, and Sittenfeld fearlessly describes the tensions in this kind of setup. The children have very few toys; wars erupt over which kid gets to hold onto various plastic farm animals. We briefly see the children's mothers, upstairs, asleep, or in cell phone battles with absentee men. The narrator is a stickler for rules, and we think we trust her, until, Ishiguro-style, it becomes clear that she is borderline-insane. She has intense OCD, and the arrival of a perky colleague, who is very free with the kids, "sets her off." The narrator's discomfort in the world begins to remind you of "Prep," Sittenfeld's first book, and the uneasiness builds until a moment of inevitable violence. Sittenfeld says she is drawn to characters who are both "intelligent and wrong." One narrator has an internal story about her missing wallet, and her Trump-loving cab driver, that turns out to be an over-simplification, at the least. Another falls in love with her married neighbor--they play a bitchy, taboo-breaking game, where they bluntly name everything that is wrong with everyone around them--and, ultimately, the narrator discovers her neighbor's romantic plans are actually different from her own. The dialogue is consistently smart, bracing, uncomfortable. "I can't believe I was once obsessed with you, and now you're a boring, fat man, talking about your Fitbit. Did I upset you? I was just trying to make an observation." Expect Sittenfeld's book to be a small sensation--along the lines of Maile Meloy's "Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It."
(3) "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee. Like Lee herself, I'm convinced that this book is actually not for children. I'm reading it with one of my middle-school tutees, and I sense that he picks up maybe thirty percent of what is happening on the page. And he's a smart kid. But I have a grand old time reliving the events of the story, while my kid doodles and thinks about Minecraft. Mainly, what I'm noticing, now, is that Atticus is really insufferable. A part of me wants that Ewell character to target *Atticus* with his knife. Good God. The sermons about Ewell deserving redemption, "hurt people hurt people," "we are poor like everyone else"--Shut the fuck up, Atticus. I love that the shrewish Alexandra turns out to be right about Ewell, while Atticus turns out to be wrong. (This seems to be a moment where Harper Lee is winking at us, saying, I know you sort of dislike Atticus, and I'm throwing you a bone.) Anyway, the thing I really appreciate in this story is the sense of a dual-consciousness: Scout is a mature woman, quietly nudging us even as she seems to re-inhabit her childhood thoughts in a plain, sober voice. "Commonwealth," "A High Wind in Jamaica," and "Do Not Be Alarmed" are all novels that give us a child's view of the world, and show us, subtly, how the child is wrong, and also wring great tension and satisfaction from the gap between a character's perception of reality and the inconvenient, dangerous thing that is reality itself. It seems to me that no one has pulled off this particular trick more effectively than Ms. Harper Lee. (And the thought of an Aaron Sorkin adaptation sort of makes me want to shoot myself.)
(4) "Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates. Yates was an angel and a genius, and basically everything he wrote was world-shaking; he is my literary hero. There's so much to savor in the relentless bleakness of "RR": the bourgeois young man who imagines he has a rebellious Parisian future but who really, secretly enjoys his desk job, the middling young woman who insists she has acting talent, and is wrong, the guy who is running out the clock on his wife's eventual death, and who copes with her by covertly turning off his own hearing aid. (The silencing of the wife--This is how this bitter, exhilarating novel ends.) As a side-note, the biographer Blake Bailey is a great guide to a particular kind of funny, burn-all-your-bridges writer, and I find this therapeutic. When you finish with Yates, you can go on to Cheever and to Charles Jackson. (And I hope that Bailey may one day turn his attention to the Patrick Melrose novels, by Edward St. Aubyn.)
(5) "I Feel Bad about My Neck" by Nora Ephron. Ephron was not blessed with genius; she just worked really hard. I think she herself would admit this. Her essays were better than her movies. Better by leaps and bounds. She made a name for herself by writing at length about the ways in which her own breasts were a disappointment to her. People were stunned by her candor--intimations of an Amy Schumer-ish, Barbara Ehrenreich-ish future here. You might also think of Daphne Merkin. Ephron's late-in-life essay collection took off when she recognized that older women were--ridiculously--getting coached to see aging as a pleasure; "this is nonsense," she said. "Aging is miserable, and we should call a spade a spade." And the world responded. Ephron has many moments of greatness in this collection: "Never marry someone you wouldn't want to be divorced from." "If you're a parent of teenagers, you should get a dog, because it's important to have someone in the house who is excited when you come home." "Buy an absurdly expensive bath oil, and use excessive quantities, all the time." Ephron describes her growing disillusionment with Bill Clinton as if this were the tale of a break-up. She becomes a friendly alien, describing her own life, zooming out, out, out, so that entire marriages become the scope of just a one-sentence paragraph. "Be the protagonist in your own life," Ephron said to Lena Dunham. And, to her children: "Everything is copy." Even the way Ms. Ephron died was sort of ballsy and no-nonsense--and there are many worse ways to spend an afternoon than re-reading her stuff (and taking notes).
(2) "You Think It, I'll Say It" by Curtis Sittenfeld. There is sometimes a sourness in Sittenfeld's work that becomes frustrating (I know, I know: Who am I to talk). But maybe that's just because it's too close to actual life--and, really, Sittenfeld never says she is offering us "escapism." The story from this book that is haunting me is "Volunteers Are Shining Stars." In this tale, a young woman helps out at a daycare for "under-served" children, and Sittenfeld fearlessly describes the tensions in this kind of setup. The children have very few toys; wars erupt over which kid gets to hold onto various plastic farm animals. We briefly see the children's mothers, upstairs, asleep, or in cell phone battles with absentee men. The narrator is a stickler for rules, and we think we trust her, until, Ishiguro-style, it becomes clear that she is borderline-insane. She has intense OCD, and the arrival of a perky colleague, who is very free with the kids, "sets her off." The narrator's discomfort in the world begins to remind you of "Prep," Sittenfeld's first book, and the uneasiness builds until a moment of inevitable violence. Sittenfeld says she is drawn to characters who are both "intelligent and wrong." One narrator has an internal story about her missing wallet, and her Trump-loving cab driver, that turns out to be an over-simplification, at the least. Another falls in love with her married neighbor--they play a bitchy, taboo-breaking game, where they bluntly name everything that is wrong with everyone around them--and, ultimately, the narrator discovers her neighbor's romantic plans are actually different from her own. The dialogue is consistently smart, bracing, uncomfortable. "I can't believe I was once obsessed with you, and now you're a boring, fat man, talking about your Fitbit. Did I upset you? I was just trying to make an observation." Expect Sittenfeld's book to be a small sensation--along the lines of Maile Meloy's "Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It."
(3) "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee. Like Lee herself, I'm convinced that this book is actually not for children. I'm reading it with one of my middle-school tutees, and I sense that he picks up maybe thirty percent of what is happening on the page. And he's a smart kid. But I have a grand old time reliving the events of the story, while my kid doodles and thinks about Minecraft. Mainly, what I'm noticing, now, is that Atticus is really insufferable. A part of me wants that Ewell character to target *Atticus* with his knife. Good God. The sermons about Ewell deserving redemption, "hurt people hurt people," "we are poor like everyone else"--Shut the fuck up, Atticus. I love that the shrewish Alexandra turns out to be right about Ewell, while Atticus turns out to be wrong. (This seems to be a moment where Harper Lee is winking at us, saying, I know you sort of dislike Atticus, and I'm throwing you a bone.) Anyway, the thing I really appreciate in this story is the sense of a dual-consciousness: Scout is a mature woman, quietly nudging us even as she seems to re-inhabit her childhood thoughts in a plain, sober voice. "Commonwealth," "A High Wind in Jamaica," and "Do Not Be Alarmed" are all novels that give us a child's view of the world, and show us, subtly, how the child is wrong, and also wring great tension and satisfaction from the gap between a character's perception of reality and the inconvenient, dangerous thing that is reality itself. It seems to me that no one has pulled off this particular trick more effectively than Ms. Harper Lee. (And the thought of an Aaron Sorkin adaptation sort of makes me want to shoot myself.)
(4) "Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates. Yates was an angel and a genius, and basically everything he wrote was world-shaking; he is my literary hero. There's so much to savor in the relentless bleakness of "RR": the bourgeois young man who imagines he has a rebellious Parisian future but who really, secretly enjoys his desk job, the middling young woman who insists she has acting talent, and is wrong, the guy who is running out the clock on his wife's eventual death, and who copes with her by covertly turning off his own hearing aid. (The silencing of the wife--This is how this bitter, exhilarating novel ends.) As a side-note, the biographer Blake Bailey is a great guide to a particular kind of funny, burn-all-your-bridges writer, and I find this therapeutic. When you finish with Yates, you can go on to Cheever and to Charles Jackson. (And I hope that Bailey may one day turn his attention to the Patrick Melrose novels, by Edward St. Aubyn.)
(5) "I Feel Bad about My Neck" by Nora Ephron. Ephron was not blessed with genius; she just worked really hard. I think she herself would admit this. Her essays were better than her movies. Better by leaps and bounds. She made a name for herself by writing at length about the ways in which her own breasts were a disappointment to her. People were stunned by her candor--intimations of an Amy Schumer-ish, Barbara Ehrenreich-ish future here. You might also think of Daphne Merkin. Ephron's late-in-life essay collection took off when she recognized that older women were--ridiculously--getting coached to see aging as a pleasure; "this is nonsense," she said. "Aging is miserable, and we should call a spade a spade." And the world responded. Ephron has many moments of greatness in this collection: "Never marry someone you wouldn't want to be divorced from." "If you're a parent of teenagers, you should get a dog, because it's important to have someone in the house who is excited when you come home." "Buy an absurdly expensive bath oil, and use excessive quantities, all the time." Ephron describes her growing disillusionment with Bill Clinton as if this were the tale of a break-up. She becomes a friendly alien, describing her own life, zooming out, out, out, so that entire marriages become the scope of just a one-sentence paragraph. "Be the protagonist in your own life," Ephron said to Lena Dunham. And, to her children: "Everything is copy." Even the way Ms. Ephron died was sort of ballsy and no-nonsense--and there are many worse ways to spend an afternoon than re-reading her stuff (and taking notes).
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