currently reading: Y/N by Esther Yi
books purchased
- Lise Lillywhite by Margery Sharp
- Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes
- Sculptor’s Daughter: A Childhood Memoir by Tove Jansson, trans. Kingsley Hart
books received
- Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality by Lyta Gold (out 10/29)
- Small Rain by Garth Greenwell (out 9/3)
- If Only by Vigdis Hjorth, trans. Charlotte Barslund (out 9/3)
Hey you,
You’re freaking out right now, thinking “where’s the ‘books finished’ list?” Not to worry. Here’s exactly what I have been reading:
All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess by Becca Rothfeld
I know Becca, and I know this fact will mean anything I can say about her book will make you think, OK, you have to say that, you’re her friend. But hear me out: when I was in college, I made a pledge to myself that I would not recommend any book I didn’t actually like. Like all promises one makes, privately, to oneself, this oath has proved inviolable.1
In all seriousness, it’s important to me as a matter of personal and professional integrity that I don’t go around saying “This book is a work of absolute genius!!!!!” about every book I read or even every book written by a friend.
With that preamble out of the way: this book was a work of absolute genius. Becca is just on a whole other level. It is one thing to have brilliant ideas, and another to be able to express them brilliantly; so often authors have one skill but not the other, I’m sorry to be the first person to ever report, but Becca succeeds in both. Here’s an example from the introduction:
There is no way around the sense, lodged hard in the throat, that the greatest human longings exceed any possible fulfillment. To want something with sufficient fervor is to want it beyond the possibility of ever getting enough of it. Is it this longing, phenomenologically keen enough to strike some of us as fact, that has led religious thinkers to posit the existence of eternity, the logic being that we seem to need it? Desire is as good a guide to truth as anything else, but until eternity arrives, we will have to find somewhere else to fit our appetites. One way to proceed is to shrink them—first by making concessions to smallness, then by framing contraction as wisdom or virtue… [But] There is nothing admirable in laboring to love a world as unlike heaven as possible.
While reading it, I kept thinking, How is she doing that? One can ask this question jealously, and I often do; indeed, if the sentences were an iota less skillful, I think I would’ve been left envious. But in this case the book was such a joy to read that instead the feeling was awe.
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
Perfectly fine, like most books.
The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle
I heard that this was a modern classic, and I took that into account when I picked it up—I would not have picked up a book called The Last Unicorn if it wasn’t hailed as a work of genius—but to be honest, I just wanted to read about a unicorn having adventures. Unfortunately for me, the unicorn takes non-unicorn form for half the book, and you also have to read a lot about Schmendrick the Magician, who is decidedly not a unicorn. So if you have any critically acclaimed books about unicorns hanging out, I’m still taking suggestions.
North Woods by Daniel Mason
A work of historical fiction containing a series of what are arguably interconnected short stories, interspersed with poetry—a capsule summary designed to ensure that I never pick up the book, and it worked for a couple of years. But I kept hearing about it, and I got curious. North Woods is therefore a perfect example of the recurring theme of this newsletter: I have no understanding of my own tastes and should probably not be allowed to choose what I read for myself. An excellent novel. I got it from the library on my e-reader and had no urge to check the “percentage read” indicator at any point, the way I always do with ebooks. I am happy to work with the publisher to figure out how to phrase this in a way that fits on a sticker and affix it to copies of the novel.
Molly by Blake Butler
Butler writes of his life with his wife, Molly Brodak, before her suicide, then he writes of his life after. The book was published a little less than four years after she died. As someone talking about the book, you have to mention that he reveals her secrets, that these secrets are horribly unflattering to her, and then you have to give your feelings on that. Here are mine: I didn’t have any qualms about the book being “unethical,” either to write or to read. She killed herself; he is a professional writer; that context matters. I find, reading reviews of the book, that people struggled with their feelings about it existing at all: I am not surprised to hear it, but it’s not the experience I had of the book. It felt nothing at all like “revenge porn,” or an airing of grievances; I wouldn’t quite say it was an act of love, either, but the love was really there, you could really feel it. In fact, I read Hannah Pittard’s “memoir” We Are Too Many a few months ago (some of the content is explicitly imagined by the author, hence the quotes) about her husband leaving her for her best friend, and I felt considerably more ethical reservations about that project than I did about this one.
Here’s what I am struggling with: is it horrible to be surprised that the book was lacking some literary merit? And why was I so surprised to find it lacking, a memoir written by a man whose wife killed herself only a couple of years before, who found out after her death she’d been harboring secrets?
To be clear, the book is not lacking all literary merit. Some of it is even great. But there are passages, especially towards the end of the book, that I find difficult to parse—passages about Butler’s encounters with Molly after death, about out-of-body experiences, for example. OK, so I don’t understand them, I can’t relate, that’s fine. It’s harder to write off the whole sentences that I can’t make sense of, which give the book as a whole the feeling of being a first draft: “Anyone who didn’t hate their childhood, as Molly saw it, as through clenched teeth, must either be a glutton or a fool, and therefore unable to relate to those unlike her, much less to love her, and maybe most of all those close enough to cause new harm.”
And I know, trust me I know, it is difficult to write about grief without resorting to the realm of the cliché—this sentence I am writing now is a cliché!—but they appear so often among these pages that I noticed, and started to find it a bit grating, and, frankly, I’m not that observant of a reader.
So I’m left with my original question: why am I surprised by all this, that I am left disappointed by the prose? I suppose I hoped, or assumed—against reason or fairness, against my own experience—that if one was to survive something so horrible, at least perhaps great art could be wrung out of it. But of course that is not what happens.
Is the fact that I feel bad reporting this to you warranted? That’s the ethical question I’m sure everyone will be writing about next.
Your friend,
Smalls
1. Except for when I was working at the bookstore, where recommending books I hadn't read was like half the job. ↩