November report

Still working on not feeling bad about “only” reading 3 books in a long month with a holiday break. I’m not trying to do a weird, sad brag either! This is a Book Report, not a Friends I Hung Out With Report, Pizzas I Made Report, or TikToks I Frittered My Life Away Watching Report. Anyway, reverse shout out to the climate crisis for a very warm November—I’m looking forward to a cold December so I can really get started on my annual transformation into an Onion article.

What I read in November:

Kate Beaton, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022)—This graphic memoir is a masterpiece. Wow. Wowwwwwwwwwwwww. Wow.

Let me start by saying that I love Beaton. I loved her in the mid-aughts when I first started reading her Hark! A Vagrant comics, which felt like an inside joke between Beaton, me, and millions of other Liberal Arts dorks. (To this day! The image of her Daisy Buchanan sitting on top of an infant she forgot about and snarling “what baby” floats into my consciousness at least weekly). I didn’t know it then but those comics were part of my golden era of the internet, Web 2.0, when we had blogs not platforms and RSS feeds not algorithmically driven streams.

Ducks recounts Beaton’s first years out of college, when she traveled from her home in Cape Breton to the Alberta oil sands to make the kind of money she needed to pay off her student loans before the compounding interest could trap her for the rest of her life. In the camps where she lived and worked and where men outnumbered women 50:1, she started making her comics and publishing them online. This is the first thing I love about Ducks—how something that brought me so much joy during the years I was figuring out what to do with my post-college life was born out of such an alien and hostile environment, how Beaton was able to make such a thing in the slivers of time she had between working 60- to 70-hour weeks.

The second thing I love is how she captures such a full1 and varied experience of the oil sands. In her afterword, she says “[t]he humanity of camp workers is often lost in the popular image we have constructed about who goes there and why.” As someone who knew embarrassingly little about the oil sands camps, I can attest that Beaton really does show a range of humanity, all of its aspects, from good to bad. Incredible how she is able to capture the worst and the best of people, to navigate through complexity and take us along with her.

Another thing I love about Ducks is how it couldn’t possibly be as good as it is in any other genre. The way Beaton uses images and words to tell her story—sublime. Really! From the stunning full-page landscapes that say everything without having a single word on them to the details of facial expressions that convey even more, the graphics are just as perfect and essential as the words in this memoir.

Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose (2022)—Unfortunately, to me this is a book whose description is more compelling than the actual novel. It’s possible that I set myself up to be disappointed, taking from the summary an idea that this would be a novel about friendship and writing that could be as captivating as the Neapolitan novels. I cannot stress enough how much the problem here is me, that The Book of Goose is very likely objectively its own interesting and engaging narrative, a metafictional postmodern bildungsroman that varyingly evokes The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), Based on a True Story (2015/2017), and, of course, My Brilliant Friend (2011/2012) and The Story of a New Name (2012/2013).

As I read, I really expected something sordid or terrible to happen. The opening chapter, where the protagonist, Agnés, receives news of the death of her childhood friend, strongly telegraphs that Agnés is now free to reveal the horrible secret she’d long been hiding, something even worse than the fact that she hadn’t written the books she’d published as a teenage prodigy (her friend, Fabienne, functionally had). But there isn’t more than that! And Agnés writes the book we are reading, The Book of Goose, proving that as with her earlier books, she was only able to write them because of Fabienne. So I read the whole thing with (in retrospect, unfulfilled) curiosity and dread, which left me with not a little disappointment!

I guess the real issue with reading something life-changing, like the Neapolitan novels, is that it forever changes your ability to appreciate stories that approach similar ideas and themes, if those stories are not as life-changing as the one you already read.

Imagine my relief, shortly after writing the above, when I came across Nan Z. Da’s recent essay on The Book of Goose. I hadn’t been unfairly comparing Ferrante and Li, but I had been unable to see the different things that Li explores and the different contexts she brings to her iteration of the post-WWII girlhood friendship/poverty bildungsroman. Yes, Da notes, “The Book of Goose is unabashedly similar to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. It’s as if Li wished to run a slightly different, more controlled experiment.” Drawing on generic conventions of fairy tales and putting much more emphasis on the subjective experience of coming to self-consciousness (vs prioritizing the socio-historical context for that experience), Li really is bringing a different perspective to the questions Ferrante explores.

Now, do I feel a little bit like I did after I read Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), meaning that it was as if Pynchon said to himself, “what if The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) but 700 pages longer?” Yes. Except where I preferred the shorter version of Pynchon, I clearly here prefer the longer Ferrante over the shorter Li.2

E. M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930)—imo one real test of humor is whether something is still funny nearly 100 years after it was first written. And let me tell you, Diary of a Provincial Lady is hilarious. It is hilarious in the way that its uncannily accurate descriptions of types of people and social dynamics read as if they could have been written yesterday. Delafield’s provincial lady is a wry participant-observer of English country life, mystifyingly relatable given the fact that she has literal tennis courts at her house. I have to believe that Delafield was in on the joke about bourgeois consumption and precarity induced by the drive to produce a stable middle class status. I have to because I want to laugh at the rich and I want to laugh at myself, for ever believing I can buy my way out of or into specific moods.

There’s not much more to say about this book except that it is the origin for my nom de plume! Helen Wills was a tennis player, but I didn’t name myself after her. I named myself after the cat in Provincial Lady, who is named after the tennis player. There’s something about a cat not only with a human name but also a first and last name that simply delights me!

What I’m looking forward to reading in December:

Lynn Steger Strong, Flight (2022)

Dionne Irving, The Islands (2022)

Rešoketšwe Manenzhe, Scatterlings (2022)

Maggie O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait (2022)3