The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three Ellises (for fiction), McClellands (for essays), or Whitakers (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Ellis, McClelland, or Whitaker indicates a generally positive review.

⏰ Fiction

“The Quiet House” by Tessa Hadley. Two Ellises. men, mess, memory. A fairly masterful portrait of two very different women with a long, tangled history together – in many ways a love relationship, though I’m not sure to what extent Hadley wanted the reader focused on the Adrienne Rich of it all. While the close-third-person protagonist Geraldine exists in a world shaped by memory, her friend Jane lives resolutely in the present, and Hadley is deeply attuned to the ways this activates kindness and cruelty in each at times. Jane is honed to the sharp, judgemental point of the moment, but this also makes her quick to forgive; she hates Geraldine’s husband until he takes ill, then effortlessly pivots to “cheering him up with her boisterous camaraderie”. Geraldine has a softer affect, but the love she casts out toward past people hits no one that’s still real, and she’s somewhat submerged in her own loneliness as a result. (The opening sentence suggests that aging is its own Kafkaesque transformation, which the piece bears out without needing to emphasize.) Yet neither is miserable, and both seem essentially satisfied, even in the ways their individualities have rendered them gnarled. The history here, while needed to propel things along, is not really the story’s heart; that Jane is interested in “a serious theme” and Geraldine only in “sentences” is a funny detail, but this is a story full of both carefully honed prose (its dialogue feels a bit over-honed) and thematic signifiers (I don’t love the title, but at least it’s not Memory). Still, the beauty and resonance of this tale suggests that themes plus sentences really is a more-than-decent formula.

⏰ Weekend Essay

“The Country That Made Its Own Canon” by Colton Valentine. One McClelland. resident, relative, reaction. A big part of this is about how much Valentine enjoys being a student at Harvard, something I had to willfully ignore to enjoy this; it’s college-essay straightforward but not as dull as you may fear, building toward a defense of canonizing that might not stand up to a political philosopher’s quibbles (he willfully ignores that the deeper issue is not with the choosing but with the reification of authority by those choosing), but is plenty good for a popular audience. I am very pro-list and I reject the received wisdom that listmaking is a low form of criticism. I tend to think that the way out of the authority problem is simply by establishing fair, rigid, public, and well-advertised rules and systems by which a list (or award) will be chosen, thereby emphasizing the process at least as much as the chosen product. I wish Valentine had focused more on the how and less on the what of this Swedish canonization, which, arriving with 300 pages of accompanying text, is as much a work of literature as of listmaking. Whether canons can achieve solidarity is the question Valentine ends on, suggesting that canons build cohesion without fully unpacking the trouble cohesion can cause (and specifically whether national solidarity in Sweden is possible without White Nationalism); it’s a weird conclusion (let a hundred canons bloom, or boom, maybe…) but taken at face value it does make me wonder – what would the migrant canon look like? Surely displacement breeds cultures worth preserving, too.

⏰ Random Pick

“Problem Novel” by Malcolm Cowley. No Whitakers. prejudice, propaganda, problematize. Cowley is essentially correct that Sinclair Lewis¹’ take on race relations in Kingsblood Royal, despite its relative prescience, has faded from memory – apparently because it just isn’t a very good book. Lewis’ plot, in which the square protagonist Kingsblood learns he has one distant Black relative, tries to connect with Black people, and loses his job and house in the process is not unbelievable in its broad strokes but much harder to believe in its specifics; he’s also copied many characters from previous books, alleges Cowley. (In a much later piece in the magazine, John Updike calls the book “a melodramatic, slashing work”.) This review is just a few short paragraphs and not really worth browsing unless you’re a Sinclarian; still, it’s interesting to learn of the failures-despite-moderate-scandale of yore.

⏰ Something Extra

The last few Under the Radar and Exponential shows I caught were just so-so, not quite worth calling out by name in either direction. And then the snow hit, preventing me from intended outings to both the Met and the Met², but I’ll squeeze in the latter by hook or crook before the Man Ray show closes. More then.

Sunday Song: