It’s been hard to sit down and write this newsletter because I’ve been so caught up in the election turmoil—an endless stream of anxiety-producing tweets, fed directly into my bloodstream via my dry and staring eyeballs for hours at a time. Tonight, as I watch Massachusetts give itself halfheartedly over to Joe Biden’s myopic, maybe-less-than-able hands, I’m depressed! It’s one thing to know that you will vote and campaign and make calls for (maybe) Joe Biden in the fall, and it’s another thing to try to convince yourself to be excited about it. To those of you reading who may love Joe, please appreciate that love for the gift that it is.
When the larger world is baseline depressing, as it has been for the last four to fifteen years, depending on whether you’re counting by Trump or by climate change (we could also count by many other metrics, the list of which is depressing in and of itself), one micro-consequence is that reading books that are themselves depressing becomes harder to do. I read a few of those books this month—books that were well-written, well-crafted, important, even interesting, but whose vision of the world or the people in it was hard to keep returning to.
It’s harder in some ways to read a good book that’s depressing than a straightforwardly bad book. I can delight in the absurdity of the truly bad, as the archives of this newsletter attest to. I can skim through the boring mediocrity of the mostly-bad. But when something is good, and insightful, and careful, but its vision of the world is bleak and dark and unrelenting (note that this is different than a book that’s sad)—that’s when picking the book up starts to feel like a chore. I simply don’t want to go to the place that the book is trying to take me to. I want to read the book, because it’s worth having read. But I don’t want to be in the book for very long.
What helps is keeping in mind the reward: the books that will come next, once I make it through the difficult ones. On my shelf right now I have the first book in Dorothy Dunnett’s Niccolo series, which I know will be full of Dunnett’s sheer joy in adventure and in the world. I have Lily King’s Writers and Lovers, which I picked up at the bookstore and could barely put down again; just a few pages into the first chapter and I’d felt both sadness and a kind of ringing sense of delight. And then there’s the last book I read this month, my gift to myself after a handful of hard ones, the perfect antidote to darkness—a re-read of Patti Smith’s Just Kids, her wild love letter to art and to life in which struggle and tragedy don’t so much darken the world as they do coexist with its joys, the crisp light and dark of a perfect photograph.
February books
The Warden, Anthony Trollope [****]
The first of Trollope’s series of Barsetshire novels, I began this almost as a matter of form—the book I’d need to get through to read Barchester Towers, his most well-known work (and also one that has been languishing on my bookshelf for years). It definitely has the feel of a prequel, slim and introductory, but its streamlined story of local pride and politics is simultaneously delightful and meaningful, even moving. Trollope balances comic characters with real human emotion adeptly, and I can’t wait to read the longer books that follow in the series.
Neverworld Wake, Marisha Pessl [****]
I appreciate a YA novel that doesn’t pander. Neverworld Wake isn’t quite as inventive or excellent as Pessl’s other two adult novels, but it comes close—a group of friends are stuck in a day-long loop that ends in their own deaths, and they can only escape by agreeing, unanimously, on which one of them will get to live on. Pessl writes realistic teenagers, interesting characters, and twisting, deftly managed plots. This book isn’t groundbreaking, but it is the kind of solid, interesting, creative, well-written novel that is depressingly hard to find in today’s YA market.
The Little Friend, Donna Tartt [***]
If To Kill a Mockingbird was about class in the deep south in the middle of the century instead of about race, and if it chose gritty reality over sweeping statement, you’d get The Little Friend. I don’t know that either of those choices is more correct, or even better, but one of them is certainly more difficult to read: The Little Friend is gorgeously written, carefully constructed, spilling over with jewel-like detail, and it’s also an increasingly depressing 500 page slog, devoid of much of the humor that allows Tartt’s other books to stand up to their own brutality.
Tartt sets up the book like a mystery novel or thriller, and then refuses to play by the rules of those genres—instead, she tells the story (of a young, neglected girl setting out to find the person who murdered her brother 11 years ago) exactly as it really would happen: no spoilers, but try to imagine the unsentimental reality of that attempt. Tartt is a wonderful writer, and in many ways I think it’s worth doing the kind of genre-twisting interrogation that she does here. But it’s also okay to draw a line and say that a good and worthwhile book isn’t always a delight to read—something that dawned on me as, with every page, this book led its protagonist (and its reader) deeper and deeper into what began to feel like a bleak smog of hopelessness and cruelties, big and small.
The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates [***]
This book, which looks at the brutal legacy of family separations during slavery, is a wonderful and moving fable of a story, and it centered an aspect of the brutality of slavery that I, certainly, had not so much overlooked as under-mourned before. But it also committed two of my major book pet peeves. First, it was a good 300-page novel that would have been a triumph of a 100-page novella: the central theme is moving and powerful and would have shone much more brightly without the slow, circular plot and drawn-out conversations that mired it.
Second, all of those conversations (unsparingly edited in my fantasy novella version of this book!) were written in the same fable-voice as the rest of the book, and what works for description and narration rings false when we’re supposed to read it as happening between two real people—where every other sentence is a sweeping, oracular pronouncement ringing with wisdom. Writing dialogue like that does characters a disservice, I think. They become archetypes instead of people, and the things that happen to them become lessons instead of events. In a book about real events this horrifying and this important to remember, that disservice was the book’s major flaw.
Year of the Monkey, Patti Smith [***]
I have read three Patti Smith books now, and while they become more and more disjointed and plotless and meditative with each successive publication, I don’t mind. I think it’s helpful to remember that she began her career as a poet, and to see her slim, experimental memoirs as closer to poetry than to prose. It is still lovely each time to give myself over to them, whatever they are, and to see where she will take me.
Topics of Conversation, Miranda Popkey [***]
I went to college with but did not know Miranda Popkey—I only knew of her through a vague cobweb of friendships, and I am sure she has never heard of me—but there is still kind of a simultaneous pride and jealousy wrapped up in reading a novel written by someone so close to your age and background, a weird kind of displacement where it feels like you’re seeing a potential version of yourself that happened to this other person instead. Which is not fair to either of us—I have never tried to become a novelist, and Miranda Popkey didn’t become one by some accident of fate—but it does explain something about how it can be hard to read books like this objectively. I am alternately tempted to be overly critical and overly kind, half-bitter and half-awed.
Trying my best to work through those strange layers of feeling leaves me with the sense that this is a good book: inventive, well-written, telling a kind of unflinching truth about womanhood and female friendship that I always delight in discovering. But it’s also, maybe, too eager to be incisive, cutting away any moments of warmth or joy in its rush to show us that women can be selfish and wrong and bitter, too.
Just Kids, Patti Smith [*****]
I think this is one of a handful of nearly perfect books that I’ve read in my life. Maybe the fact that I read it—the story of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe struggling and making art and being young in New York City in the seventies—for the first time during the first summer I lived in New York has something to do with that sense of utter perfection, but it’s also borne out by the number of people who approached me during this re-read to tell me what an amazing book it is. People love this book. Which is not surprising, because the whole book is itself a love letter—to New York, to the seventies, to Robert himself, to music and poetry, to art, to youth. Patti Smith’s writing is spare and precise, and she offers up perfectly faceted memories like individual jewels, doling them out one at a time; opening her hand again to show us another waiting there, shimmering. You can’t help but fall into them—fall in love with what she loves, so that reading it gives me, each time, the ache of missing things unrelated to me.
Near the end of the book, she describes a breakfast that she makes for herself in her apartment—a bodega roll, some anchovies, olive oil. Nothing has ever seemed so necessary or perfect as that breakfast: a tiny memory of hers that I could steal for myself, and eat in my own kitchen.
A note — anyone can now leave comments on a Substack post! Let me know what you’re reading, your thoughts about what I’m reading, or how wrong I am about a rating:
While I do not know Sally Rooney personally (wouldn't that be wild!), I have a similar feeling of half bitterness, half awe when I read her books. She's so close in age to me and writes exactly the kinds of books that I wish I were writing (and aren't even close to the book I actually am writing). Such a weird feeling.
I have Year of the Monkey checked out from the library, and since the libraries are indefinitely closed because of the coronavirus I have plenty of time to get around to it. I enjoyed reading her book Devotion recently, but somehow have never read Just Kids. Adding to my TBR!