Happy (maybe?) fall! I read eight books this month, including two Halloween-adjacent ones, mostly by accident but maybe subconsciously because I can’t wait for soups! Football! Reading with a cup of tea while it is cold and gross outside!
(As always, scroll down to jump straight to the reviews.)
I also read The Testaments, the Big New Book of the month, which is how I think of any new release that everyone is talking about and writing about and doing podcast interviews or whatever about. One of the people who read it and formed opinions about it and talked about it was my father; I came over for dinner one night and left the book behind, asking him to drop it off at the library for me (please it’s so heavy!! thank you i love you!) and the next time I saw him he’d read it.
I read it first, and I liked it—or I thought I liked it. But my opinions about books are a strangely fraught thing. For every book I snap shut and think “ugh,” or “God, I loved that,” there are two more books whose final chapters I spend agonizing—four stars, or three? Or god, maybe two? Was it really that bad, or is it because of the genre? Am I being unfair to compare it, or is this purely about enjoyment, and if so, that plot, okay, maybe four? But GOD, the writing was just not good, so it can’t be, it has to be three at the most, and then—. You get the point.
And so when I’m debating the precise number of stars to give a book, deciding the nuances of my feelings about it, I avoid other reviews. I’m too easily influenced without the hard shell of my surety. I let a book sink in, sometimes changing its rating once or more between reading it and finally coalescing my ideas about it in this newsletter. But until then, I try not to be unduly influenced by a well-written argument. After all, I think, I promised my opinions, not the opinions of the New Yorker or whatever Goodreads user the algorithm chose to appear first on the book’s review page.
But I can’t exactly click away from a conversation with my dad, and besides: I’m always curious about what my parents think of the books I read, whether we agree or not. I love to talk about books with them. Plus, good-natured arguing is practically my family’s national pastime—where did you think I inherited these strong opinions from, anyway?
So my review this month needs a footnote. Here’s my source—a transcript of our second conversation about the book, recorded once I realized that, yes, my dad had swayed me. It’s not that good of a book. But I’ll let him make the argument:
David Slaney on Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments
(If you haven’t met him, it helps to sort of picture and hear a slightly younger and more Bostonian but equally disgruntled Bernie Sanders.)
Cokey: I found it hard to put it down. I thought it was a quick read, engaging, hard to put down, but it did not have the same impact as The Handmaid’s Tale and there were definite flaws in the book that I was able to sort of overlook overall, but were hard to fully ignore. But you had stronger feelings about it. What did you feel about it?
Dave: Well, what I said before, I don’t have much more to say. But The Handmaid’s Tale—what makes it a great book is its description of a dystopian society, and the plot is almost secondary or mostly irrelevant. In this book, you already know the dystopian society, and the plot is everything. And it’s just a ridiculous plot. It totally jumps the shark in the middle of the book, when—
You can say!
—when this fifteen-year-old girl is enlisted in a mission to save the world, and it’s just completely—it’s absurd. So, it was very hard to take it seriously after that point, and I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t getting any of the pleasure of the description of this society. It was all repetitious. So. Anyway.
I mean, it definitely had those sort of, like, YA-y elements, it did have sort of that YA feel with the ages of some of the—
I didn’t read—I haven’t read or seen those, so. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Two of the three main characters were teenagers!
You said it was repetitive, but did you feel like there was anything interesting about seeing, like, the justification for some of the actions of—or seeing the book through the eyes of some of the villains from the previous one?
By villain, you mean the—
Aunt Lydia.
Aunt Lydia. Well, the other thing that I found to be hard to take about the book, although on second thought it was one of the more interesting things about it, was to really understand how she could have allowed herself to become the person that she became when the dystopia was launched.
Yeah, but—I felt like it sort of skimmed over that a little bit.
Yeah, it was like all of a sudden, she’d agreed to become this evil person, when she was very much the opposite up to that point. So that wasn’t given—the plot just wasn’t well-developed, I don’t think.
How many stars would you give it?
Two and a half. Maybe.
I think I’ve landed at three, for the pure, like, readability and enjoyability. But it certainly is not a masterpiece. I agree with all the flaws that you’ve—
Yeah, and I agree: I did want to read to the end to find out how it came out, although—[throws hands up in the air and shrugs]—it came out exactly like you’d think it’s gonna come out, right? So, anyway.
Do you think she wrote this book, now, because of Trump?
There was a long review of it in what was it, the New Yorker?
Yeah, the Jia Tolentino one*.
And they made a big deal about the TV series, which I haven’t seen. And they talked about her involvement in that, which I was really surprised at, because it would seem like she had too much integrity to allow her work to be—well. Anyway. So I’m thinking, well, if she was willing to cooperate with the TV series, maybe she’s just trying to make money! Is that plausible?
[Laughter in the room.]
Well—you hate television.
Well, but the TV series is, the first season is apparently based on the book—she’s some kind of technical director, I don’t know, I don’t remember. She had some official relationship with the TV show, I don’t know, it wasn’t done over her opposition or her objection or anything. Not only sold the rights, but then became involved in the production! And I didn’t read the review carefully and I have never seen the TV show, so I couldn’t really evaluate that. But I came away thinking, hey, she figured out this is a way to, you know, this is a popular thing all of a sudden, because of Trump, and the TV series was an attempt to take advantage of that. And now she’s come out with this second book in order take advantage of it.
And it’s—you know, it’s not a good book. It’s not a good book!
*I still haven’t read this review, but Jia loved it! Maybe I’ll feel settled in my curmudgeonly opinion enough to read it in a month.
September book reviews
[Click each title for a plot summary]
Say Say Say, Lila Holmes [*****]
I liked this slim and sparse book, which is not so much a novel with a plot as it is an extended narrative essay (or a set of multiple short interconnected essays) about love and grief and human connection (all of those things experienced particularly as a young queer white woman who is caring for a mentally ill woman and, by extension, that woman’s family). I was sometimes bored reading this and I was sometimes stunned, overwhelmed by echoes of things that I have felt or experienced or been that I saw staring back from the page. Those moments are precious to me (read: I’m a sucker for them), and hard to find, and, here, they merited a full five stars: well worth the short and lovely and uneven book that is their price of admission.
Costalegre, Courtney Maum [***]
As a novel, this book—based loosely on Peggy Guggenheim’s daughter’s life in Mexico at the outbreak of World War II—failed in many ways: no real sense of plot, characters introduced and then wasted, left to rot unexplored.
As a thought experiment, it's more successful. Certainly, the author found a compelling historical character and then explored her in an interesting way, really writing about her as a teenager might have written about herself—disjointed, mythologizing, unburdened by the demands of coherent narrative. I appreciate what this book tried to do, but I didn't really enjoy it, and in the end I think that the interesting aspects of how this was written failed to make up for the loss of telling a real story about characters (all those artists, loosely sketched and then left flat and blank!) who merit one.
Magic for Liars, Sarah Gailey [**]
This wasn't a bad book, but I think I'm just tired of books like it: short novels where the writer imagines a fantasy world (here, a modern high school for magic and the non-magical private eye who’s called in to help it) and then just lightly skims the surface of it, using all of its creative elements as a way to spice up a bland-ish story about a halfhearted mystery, complete with predictably boring romance. It's not enough to tell me "but there's magic in this mystery!" if the mystery itself isn't memorable and the magic isn't either—I need at least one of the two, or the books ends up like this one was: pleasant, readable, and utterly unremarkable.
The Testaments, Margaret Atwood [***]
In addition to my father’s well-made points, above, I will reiterate that this book was enjoyable. The uncanny, just-too-close-to-possible-ness of the world draws you in, and the new details we do get about Atwood’s dystopia—the lives of upper-class girls, the way the outside world views Gilead—are gripping. It’s an imposing book but it’s a quick read, the plot trotting along, until it finally ends and you sit there thinking: oh—that’s it?
I haven’t seen the TV show, and I wonder if this book would feel more significant if I had. As it is, it felt like a halfhearted effort at eking more meaning out of a story that already had enough of it. The Handmaid’s Tale is an all-time classic for a reason, its ambiguity a large part of what makes the story work so well—reading it, you feel compelled to work to avoid its possibilities and to think through how you might escape a Gilead that threatens. The Testaments asks so much less of its reader. “Here,” it seems to say, “it’s okay—a biologically fated hero will save us, anyway.” The onus of doing small work every day to fix and change things is gone, replaced by a savior narrative that turns Atwood’s world from warning to fairy-tale.
Marilou is Everywhere, Sarah Elaine Smith [****]
This book, about a neglected girl who inserts herself into the former life of a teenager who went missing from her rural community, was strange and wild and so much darker than I expected—full of the feral cruelty of desperate children and the messy, abusive love they fight over. Even the moments of goodness—a brother’s kindness, the joy of having an animal to love—made the dark parts that much starker, even as they formed the beating heart that drove the rest of the narrative.
But what made the biggest impression on me in this sharp and thorny book was the unbridled energy of the writing, which edges very close to pretentious but ended up landing, I think, safely in “original and refreshing.” To see an author really take joy in words and what they can do is lovely, and so is the way that that joy mirrors the cautious, fragile, heartbreaking joy that the central character finds in losing herself in the overwhelming details and messy, bloated wonders of her stolen life.
Small Spaces, Katherine Arden [****]
I read this middle-grade children’s ghost story because it was written by one of my favorite adult fantasy authors of all time, and in many ways I got all I could have asked for. While a book aimed at sixth-graders is, predictably, less detailed and luscious than Arden’s adult novels, I found the same emotional depth, complexity of characters, and beautifully alive descriptions of place and family. As with all very good children’s books, I wish I had been lucky enough to read this when I was twelve.
Under the Pendulum Sun, Jeannette Ng [**]
This was a strange book that I think I should have liked but ultimately, almost defiantly, did not. It’s a Victorian-era fantasy that critiques colonialism and imperialism through the lens of Christian missionaries sent to the recently-discovered lands of the Fae; all things that should be straight up my number one alley, and yet! This book was dense, boring, and so un-fun to read that even the truly strange element of incest that popped up was almost, perversely, a relief because it was—dramatic? a plot point? An actual moment of characterization and conflict? That’s gross, I know, but at least it was a slap in the face, waking me up in the middle of a book where everything else was dream-like in the worst ways: disconnected, wandering, unimportant, difficult to hold on to or remember.
Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir, Ruth Reichl [***]
Ruth Reichl has written a lot of books, beginning with the excellent Tender at the Bone, and all of them follow the same essential pattern: a cozy, gossipy, richly written memoir that includes luscious details about the food she eats and a sprinkling of chapter-ending recipes thrown in to complete the package. The only thing that makes Save Me the Plums the weaker link in the Reichl production chain is that the part of her life on which it focuses is harder to be cozy and intimate and lovely about—life as a Condé Nast editor pre-2008 was about luxury, not warmth, and it’s just not the same to read a Reichl memoir that focuses on five-star hotels and advertising sales and photo production and only briefly, almost desperately, on any food at all.
By far the best part of the book is one of the late chapters, when she goes to Paris in the midst of the recession to write about re-discovering the city on a budget. There it is, finally—her joy in the unexpectedly delicious, intimately rustic, warmly generous food, its nuances and details, that was missing from both her book and, she admits, her life. When the book and her time at Gourmet came to a simultaneous end, I was more relieved for Ruth than anything else: neither she nor her writing really belonged there.
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