May report

I think I have to admit to myself, after 4 straight years,1 that watching the NBA playoffs is a full-time job for me in May. Thankfully, this month I also had some travel to balance out the screen time and so I did manage to read more than one book!

What I read in May:

Lauren Groff, Florida (2018)—Long-time readers of the report know that I love to sync my reading with my travels by reading something set in the place I’m visiting. That’s how I found myself reading Groff’s short stories, the second book I’ve read by her. The first time I read a book by her was nearly 9 years ago (!), and I mention this because I think it’s interesting that I remembered feeling like she was a really good writer and that her dominant skill was in generating Emotions—I also clearly didn’t feel compelled to read more by her at the time!

This is the beauty of books, though. We are lucky when we read the right book at the right time. And it was indeed the right time for me to read Florida this month, mostly on South Beach or between demented, Cheever-like bouts of laps2 in the building pool of Friend of the Report, Julia.

Groff is very much a bard of her adopted state. She’s tuned into the effects of its humidity, riotous vegetation, commonplace exotic creatures, and general sense of possibility and rot. Her stories can often feel mildly hallucinogenic; they convey that shimmery, hazy perspective that infiltrates a brain left long enough in the sun. But there’s structure, too, always structure. The stories feel classical but also as though she is communicating something not yet communicated in that specific way.

Florida was a wonderful beach read for me because the stories are so riveting and also because there’s a sort of luridness to them, having to do with the way Groff skillfully and purposefully seeks to generate big emotions within the reader, inviting her to share the rage, the jealousy, the fear, and the despair that the characters experience. It’s a specific move! And because Groff is good at wielding this technique, I enjoy it for what it is. But it’s also decadent, overwhelming, not the kind of writing that makes me want to immediately dive into another of her books. To be clear, I would enthusiastically recommend this book for people who want something to read when they go to Miami.

Joan Didion, Miami (1987)—It was only logical that I would move from the feral lushness of Groff’s short fiction to the austere coolness of Didion’s nonfiction. Not because I needed a palate cleanser—more like, I was ready for history and it was hard to find something not written by a man!

J. Diddy! As my students 15 years ago called her. I think it’s been that many years since I last read something by her. Back then she didn’t have a mythic hold on so many brains of women my age. Her packing list hadn’t yet once again become the Jesus Prayer of a specific subset of a generation. I was of course at that time uncritically obsessed with her. As the years went on, I read more about her than I read things by her. I came to see the inherently small-c conservative outlook of her reportage, which caused me in turn to reconsider what it was about some of her most famous lines that made them so apparently compelling. Returning to her own words now, I was curious to see what she would say about Miami and what I would think of what she had to say!

Well, not knowing nearly enough about the specifics of the city and its history, I won’t be commenting on whether Didion’s portrait of Miami adequately captures the lived experience of its people. But I will say that in the mid-80s, Didion was in her Journalist Era and she most strongly wanted to focus on the messy politics of Miami vis-à-vis Washington, D. C. and Cuba. I get that she was really in the weeds, talking to those sources, knitting together a narrative, but some combination I’m sure of my physical and temporal distance from 1980s Miami makes it all feel in retrospect like maybe she wasn’t really onto something after all. Maybe she had a lot of detailed notes and a limited perspective that she thought was deeper than it was. Then again, maybe that’s just how things go around Miami! Maybe it’s as difficult to wrestle clarity out of generational memory and political allegiances as it is to keep the flora, fauna, and water from overwhelming the city’s infrastructure.

The parts of Miami that I liked best were the parts that weren’t a swirl of names and chains of associations. In other words, the parts where she talked about the language, and food, and climate, and people. Interestingly, Didion’s Hemingway-inflected minimalist prose rarely appears in this book. More often, her writing swelled with the enumerative, an impulse to list facts and dates and locations—not unlike Susan Orlean would do a little over a decade later in The Orchid Thief.

I found Miami a frighteningly persuasive place—one of the last places I imagined I’d find myself saying “should I move here??”—but it has a certain psychic power. In fact, I had a few chapters to go in Miami when I returned home, and I found it profoundly difficult to finish the book once I was no longer in that city. Coincidence?? Maybe! Maybe not!3

Dorothy Sayers, Whose Body? (1923)4—The less I say about this the better. I understood with a sharpness I did not possess the first time I read this book why modernist scholars love it for their “fun” reading. Sayers, who was herself an academic, brings a meta-analytical framework to her detective story, cheekily unpacking the tropes of the genre. Great, wonderful. The rest? She was just so casually and relentlessly bigoted—I don’t see ironic distance between the author and her characters, not in this regard. It was hard to read even if the racism was “positive” racism 🤮

What I’m looking forward to reading in June:

Alice Munro, Runaway (2004)5

???? I’m going to London, the Netherlands, and Barcelona, and I’m welcoming recommendations of books by women set in these locations!!