October report

It’s hard to look back on the month and try to sum it up when I spent the last 31 days channeling my inner Michael Jordan, the part of him that lived in an eternal now during games, never looking back or ahead,1 staying completely in the present and “never anywhere else.” At first, I wanted to dwell in every precious moment with the kittens before they got adopted. And then, after the kittens were gone, I thought I’d try not having anxiety for once in my life! A groundbreaking idea.

What I read in October:

Sally Rooney, Intermezzo (2024)—Where do I start? I’m bummed out but I can’t say I’m surprised. I don’t say that I was a Day 1 U.S. adopter of Sally Rooney—buying Conversations With Friends (2017) as soon as I finished the first article I ever read about Rooney—in order to brag. I say it to provide context and to acknowledge that I learned of Rooney like many have over the years, as part of a strong marketing effort behind the publication of her books. After the success of Normal People (2018) and the emergence of voices contradicting the overwhelming enthusiasm surrounding Rooney’s writing, I adopted a conscious media blackout toward her subsequent publications. I can be easily influenced! And because I really, really loved Conversations With Friends, I wanted to meet each of Rooney’s following novels without anyone else’s opinions rattling around in my mind.

So wither my lack of surprise at my reaction to Intermezzo, if I’m so good at closing my eyes and ears to the takes? This interview, which I did read before opening Intermezzo, specifically Rooney’s comments on her process and approach to writing characters and narratives, and in certain styles. The fact that I didn’t love Normal People as much as I loved Conversations With Friends. That last chapter of her last novel. This is a risk we take sometimes, following an author’s career in real time, from the first book—a risk that the author might take a course different from the one we envision for them.

The truth is that while I don’t wish for Rooney to write the same story again and again, Intermezzo takes many of the aspects I loved about Conversations With Friends and does the opposite: focus on male characters instead of female ones, brothers instead of friends, an intentional romantic and sexual relationship among 3 people instead of the more classic love triangle of a man cheating on his estranged wife, a happy rather than ambiguous ending, a highly stylized narrative voice prioritizing interiority instead of a plain voice that mimics speech and spotlights the development of identities through, yes, conversations with friends. About the only thing she didn’t swap out was the “tender sex”2 between fraught, skinny lovers that appears at length and without fail in all her novels. And that’s fine! Maybe that’s on me for not reading Romance and therefore not recognizing how much of Rooney’s fiction draws on the genre’s conventions.

But now, 7 years after first reading her first novel, and now really struggling to get through the stylized interiority that honestly reads like it was poorly translated from German or Latin, as well as knuckling my way through what to me is the only thing worse than holding up the successful sexual reproduction of the nuclear family (Beautiful World, Where Are You [2021]) as a symbol for radical hope—presenting a throuple as a new and radical and vaguely anti-capitalist way of organizing relationships—and then muddling through too much explaining about grief and not nearly enough showing, I’m out. I read it all the way to the end. Despite that noun-forward prose, it was overall readable. But I guess this is growing up and it’s time for me to move on.

Before I do, one last thing. I don’t have to speculate why the bits explaining grief about the death of a loved one read like a brochure on the subject written by someone who’s only ever researched the subject and not yet lived it. Rooney can say “The relationship between fiction and the life of the author is a very live relationship in the minds of readers and critics, and it’s a completely unknown relationship in [her] life,” meaning that because she does not draw on personal experience for her fiction, she shouldn’t need to have experienced grief in order to be able to write authentically about it. And I am sure she believes that. In the same interview she says:

The closing paragraph of Intermezzo affirms the belief: “To imagine also is life: the life that is only imagined. Clatter of saucepans, steam from the kettle. Even to think about it is to live” (447-448). Call me old fashioned—and here’s your Part II of the Joyce Report—but James Joyce was a genius and I don’t think he could have written that first chapter of Ulysses (1922) while his mother was still alive!

While we’re on the subject, as I was riffling through my copy of that book, my suspicion that Rooney was continuing in Intermezzo to lean into Joyce was affirmed. One of her novels and 3 years ago, I said I admired her talent for “acknowledging Joyce’s influence, at entering into conversation with his fictional Dublin without seeming like she wants to draw on it as a shortcut to legitimacy or like she wants to rewrite/overcome his representation.” With this latest novel, it kind of did feel like she lost that balance and that her attempts at using fiction to “fly by those nets” of “nationality, language, religion”3 only look so much thinner next to Joyce’s because she has invited the comparison to him.

She’s taken a different course from the one I imagined she would based on what I brought to my first read of Conversations With Friends. I’m not saying whether this course is good or bad because it’s not a matter of good or bad. But I am saying that I was mistaken in thinking that she writes something beyond genre fiction and that maybe people were right when they said she writes YA/romance! Or maybe I never grew out of my “The Lesson of the Master” phase, believing that Real Art and personal happiness/healthy relationships are fundamentally incompatible. I’m off to read the takes, now!

Ina Garten, Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir (2024)—I went into reading Ina’s memoir with no defined expectation beyond encountering the same delightful and wholesome figure whose shows and recipes have brought joy to me throughout my adulthood. Of course that’s what I found while reading, but I also learned so much more. Thinking about it now, how could Ina not be an exceptional human being? She is brilliant and we are all so lucky that she has chosen to share her gifts with the world.

Ina knows what is important—from people to ingredients to how we spend our days. At risk of getting too vulnerable on main, reading her memoir (which, it felt more like listening, because her voice is so distinct even in writing), I relearned how special a meal, any meal, can be when it is made and shared with love. I forget that sometimes, caught up in daily routines where food feels more functional than anything else and a menu just another to-do list. Ina’s memoir made me excited to cook for the sake of cooking, to try new recipes and revisit old favorites. To enjoy meals with friends and really enjoy the meals in addition to the conversation.

Be Ready When the Luck Happens pairs well with Julia Child’s memoir, both being stories of incredibly smart women who come to cooking later in life and who transform the world’s ideas of what is possible. I feel like Ina kind of raised a generation via television the way Julia did and I also feel simply blessed to be part of the generation who grew up learning from Ina! This memoir is a balm, a hug, a total comfort.

Margaret Kennedy, The Feast (1950/2023)—I had no particular direction planned after Ina. Middlemarch was out of the question—sports were happening again and watching the MLB playoffs was like a second full-time job. A good spontaneous browse at the South Street Seaport McNally Jackson brought this reprint of Kennedy’s “upstairs-downstairs comedy with an old-fashioned morality play tucked inside” to my attention.

For someone who allegedly wrote about British middlebrow fiction from the first half of the twentieth century, where was I when it came to knowing about Margaret Kennedy? Friend of the Report, Alyssa, reminded me that I’ve certainly read about Kennedy, but where did that information go when I first encountered it? Better not to dwell too much on it and start wondering what else I’ve forgotten I once knew.

Anyway, I love this book. I love it so much I want to read more Margaret Kennedy.

In this novel, it’s summer 1947, and 23 people are living at the Pendizack Manor Hotel, a house in Cornwall that has been commercialized by its owners in their efforts to recover from war and post-war austerity measures. The Feast opens with a conversation between two priests, remarking on the tragedy that befell the hotel, when a landslide wiped it out, killing 7 of the residents. It then flashes back to the week before the landslide, tracking the lives of the hotel’s inhabitants building up to the disaster and thus presenting a full picture of the various types of people and ideas circulating post-war England. This book really has everything! Elizabeth Bowen said it best: “tense, touching, human, dire, and funny, The Feast is a feast indeed.” I devoured it. Exactly the type of novel I want to disassociate to when it’s really just too much to think about the world these days.4 

What I’m looking forward to reading in November:

Daphne Du Maurier, Jamaica Inn (1936)5

Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake (2024)

?????? Maybe more Ginzburg or Ferrante?