November report

Well, we all know what happened in November.

It got me looking back at the earliest Book Reports, hatched in the first months of a global pandemic that continues thriving to this day despite monumental efforts to pretend otherwise, and in the last year of a presidential administration that I hoped would be the worst of my lifetime.

The thing about readers is that they are—like the books they read and the reports they write (!)—products of their moment and of everything that led up to that moment. Which is to say that what happens in the world necessarily influences what, why, and when I read any given book, though I try not to write too much about that, out of a demented self-imposed obligation to “stick to book reports sports” that really just boils down to me acknowledging that this is a little book blog and probably whoever reads it partly reads it for one of the same reasons I read books—to escape, if momentarily, from the real concerns of the day.

Now, having acknowledged reality above and throughout this month’s Report,1 I hope to return next month to a Report that brackets as much of that reality as possible in order to focus on what really matters—acting like what I write about books isn’t just me livejournaling in my public internet diary.2

What I read in November:

Daphne Du Maurier, Jamaica Inn (1936)3—If I had a nickel for every time I read a twentieth century novel set in Cornwall I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice. And in a row, no less! What can I say, I yearn to visit the beautiful beaches and moody moors of this region in England.

A little BTS for you readers is that at every Book Club meeting, each member nominates a book for the next month and we do 2 rounds of anonymous voting to make our selection. At our last meeting, in October, I voted for Du Maurier’s book in both rounds because at the time I was feeling strongly about escaping into books written before things like “the internet” or “iphones” ever existed. Not because those times were better per se but because their bullshit seems less complex than today’s. Also, Rebecca (1938) is one of my favorite books/Du Maurier is simply a great writer.

Du Maurier is so good, in fact, that I was not even a little scared about this novel being historical fiction (it’s set in the early 1800s) and also a romance. The book was good! It clipped along. It’s as broody as the moors. Did I see the twist from a mile away? Yes. But that’s okay. We come to this place for magic, because we need that, all of us.

Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake (2024)—I have a confession to make! Until this month, one of my most toxic traits was that I had an active Amazon Prime subscription dating back to 2006. Long after I understood how harmful that company was to functionally everyone who works for it, and long after I started making a living wage, I stayed subscribing, almost exclusively for the “deals” on books that could only be “possible” through the exertion of monopoly power. And like a little worm, I rationalized my choice because a $29.99 list price for a new release hardcover novel seemed like a lot and sometimes I didn’t want to wait for a library copy.

Why am I revealing all this here, now? Because Kushner’s latest is the last thing I ever bought on Amazon and even though it’s a fine book, after I finished reading it I felt like “was that worth it? Saving $10 to read the book now?” To be clear, I cancelled my subscription because Jeff Bezos is the real worm4—not me—but the experience of reading this particular newish release really gave me some perspective about the Real Cost of convenience.

Anyway, this is all also tangentially relevant to the themes of Creation Lake, which is narrated by a classically unreliable (and funny) narrator, “Sadie Smith,” a privately contracted secret agent hired to infiltrate and disrupt an eco-commune in rural France. Being partly “about” a group that seeks to prevent the introduction of corporate monocropping to the region, this novel necessarily traffics in questions about what it means to live during this current “phase” of capitalism.

Let’s start with what I liked:

• If I had to bet, I’d say this will be as close as Kushner ever gets to “climate fiction” and I really respect how she approaches contemporary issues without removing them from the present moment and placing them in some “near future”

• The narrator is hilarious and, I’d say, even funnier because she doesn’t seem aware of how hilarious she is. Prone, like nearly every one of the novel’s male characters, to grand pronouncements about Culture and The Way We Live, she routinely and casually makes statements about herself, others, the past that are simply laughable

• It was interesting even when a little boring (there are a lot of emails from an old philosopher about neanderthals and Ancient Ways), and I couldn’t predict what would happen next

And now what I did not like:

• I don’t get the hyper-short chapters. They don’t even always mark a break in setting or time. They feel arbitrarily short and made it difficult to stay in the book

• I’m not sure there’s a there there—Kushner’s more than a bit of a cool girl and sometimes I wonder if that’s all there is to her, a coolness founded in a refusal to commit to anything sincerely, driven by a need to be above or outside all the little things people care about. I think there’s more than that to her, based on the only other book of hers I’ve read,5 but I may never know for sure! I don’t plan on reading her other novels, ones that feel “motorcycle heavy” and therefore uninteresting to me!

• The unforgivable misspelling of “chaise longue” as “chaise lounge” on page 272

If this report interested you and you don’t want to buy the book or wait for it from the library, let me know and I’ll get my copy to you. I don’t regret reading it but I also don’t feel compelled to keep it on my shelves.

Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep (1927)—As “enjoyable” as I found it to read a novel of and set in the present moment, it was time for me to return to fiction from nearly 100 years ago so that I could “enjoy” reading something whose subject matter was still so relevant that the book could have been written yesterday! Wharton did it again!! And by “it” I mean wrote a trenchant analysis of the pervasive corrosion of capitalist systems through her depiction of an archetypal wealthy New York family and their milieu.

Twilight Sleep, which I saw described online as “Wharton’s The Great Gatsby (1925),” describes a world of excess in which those who have the most spend their time doing almost anything to avoid thinking about reality. Since the characters in this novel don’t have Tik Tok, they instead pursue dissociation through things like: sex, drugs, work, shopping, travel, and what we today call “wellness culture.”

Wharton’s Jazz Age New York is so frenetic and consuming that it cannot even be mediated by a participant-observer who narrates from the fringes and imagines it possible to remain separate from that world. When the novel opens, Wharton’s midwestern interloper—Pauline Manford—has been long established in society life, having cannily wedded her new money (from her family’s automotive manufacturing empire) to an old money name, and having successfully weathered the twin scandals of divorcing her impoverished, substance-abusing husband and marrying the workaholic divorce lawyer she hired to leave the first husband. Pauline overschedules every minute of her waking life to avoid the terror of simply sitting alone for more than 5 minutes with her own thoughts. Her family members—ex-husband, husband, daughter, son, daughter-in-law, distant minor aristocrat European cousin—pursue different vices toward the same end, though all characters share at least one avoidance technique in common: meddling in each other’s lives.

What I loved about this novel is how it positively vibrates from the collective energy of its characters’ rejection of even the idea of reckoning with their spiritually bankrupt existence. When I want to avoid thinking about reality, what better distraction is there than a 97-year-old novel about rich white people “solving” their “problems” through yoga, plastic surgery, and running away to a nunnery?

What I’m looking forward to reading in December:

Han Kang, tr. Deborah Smith, Human Acts (2017)6

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World (2023)

Maybe something by Nancy Mitford or a biography of the Mitford sisters