September report

Hi! Don’t worry, I read this month. More than one book, even. But I also am in the middle of a book that I like to think I’d have finished—Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (2024)—if I weren’t so occupied with my new project of fostering 3 little baby kittens named Gin, Gus, and Fjord. As you can see, they are trying to help. But they’re only 7 weeks old, so it’s unclear how much of Rooney’s novel they understand, let alone whether they’re even allowed to read fiction this dark and, frankly, horny.

What I read in September:

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)—Well, I loved this book. It was just what I needed (a classic thriller) when I needed it (sports ended!).

I’d seen the 1999 film adaptation, probably when it came out—I was an animal for going to the movies every week in my teen years—and thought I’d remembered a lot of the movie when I started reading the book. Turns out I hadn’t and that the only thing I really remembered accurately was Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as Freddie.1 As I read through the first 150-odd pages, I really thought “yeah the movie was a faithful adaptation!” and then it took what I thought was a different path than the movie had and I really started enjoying this narrative that felt so new to me.

Anyway, back to the novel, which is genuinely unsettling and also hilarious? It truly inspired “he can’t keep getting away with this!!” vibes, but I guess Tom Ripley is just that talented. Talented at manipulating people into seeing what they want to see and challenging them to admit they might be wrong, or stupid, or conned.

I think that’s what I loved about the opening frame of the book, how really grimy Ripley’s life is, what a genuine hustler he is. He puts so much work into schemes that he hopes will help him have to not work at a job, any job. Jobs are where people are, people whose existences remind him of who he is—a nobody. When I say that they do not make them like this anymore, I mean that authors do not write books with so much showing and so little telling. The way Highsmith shows us Ripley’s transparent hatred of himself, of women, of people from his own economic class, of gay men, of rich people, of all people—I wish they would write them like this anymore! Like this, meaning, he never once had to say “I hate you” to any of the other characters, but we still knew. We knew he hated them all.

Tom Ripley only loves THINGS. Possessions, “he loved possessions. . . . They gave a man self-respect . . . reminded him that he existed and made him enjoy his existence.” Can you imagine Tom today? Would he burn up in envy, evaporate out of pure jealousy, before he could even get a multi-network grift off the ground? Who can say, really. All I can say is that this is a thrilling novel and has the right amount of everything in it so that by the end I was left feeling like even one page more would have been too much and one less, too little!

Hilary Leichter, Terrace Story (2023)—Speaking of books that are just the right length for what they are, Leichter’s second novel popped back onto my radar recently (I read that it was coming out in paperback). It sounded vaguely Oyeyemian—a family of three living in a cramped apartment discovers a hidden terrace accessible through their closet, a terrace that only exists for them and is invisible to the rest of the world, but which nevertheless brings real-world consequences with its magical existence3—and I’d had enough time away from contemporary fiction to be curious about it again.

While it starts off a little too “MFA exercise” for my tastes (Edward and Annie, parents of a newborn, “lik[e] inventing proper nouns for their world. Yellow Tree, Pigeon Tunnel, Closet Mystery”—aside from reading like the “precious darlings you’re supposed to kill” that a character later winkingly references, this cutesy characterizing detail grew immediately old for me), it quickly enough moves on to the interesting engine that drives the novel. Early after the first appearance of the Terrace in Annie and Edward’s lives, Leichter’s omniscient narrator reveals who has made the Terrace and then, reveals who has made the Terrace. That is, devotes a large part of the narrative to the story of the life of the Terrace’s creator, giving the reader answers that the creator yearns for the people in her life to want instead of treating her like a freak of nature. Woven into these stories are stories of Annie’s parents and of her grown-up daughter, thus building out a small universe of remarkable yet unremarkable lives.

I did enjoy this novel. If I write much more about it, though, I might make myself dislike it 😂 Because the thing is, it does all read like the short story it grew out of, and I could see that well before I reached the end and read the acknowledgments where Leichter thanks those who helped her build it out into a novel. It stays MFA exercise in the sense that her scaffolding was too strong, so strong that it stayed visible even after she dismantled it.

In Terrace Story, not only can I see Leichter’s fingernails, I can see what color they are painted and the prints her fingers themselves leave all over the novel. And I feel kind of bad saying it, but I’m saying it because they’re kind of not even her fingerprints. They’re the prints of all her classmates in her MFA workshops. But that’s not an inherently bad thing!! And if I love mess so much, maybe I should be reading more experimental novels that take risks that don’t always pay off?? Then again, sometimes I want to read the “pleasure to have in class” style of novel. So, to end on a genuinely positive note—I enjoyed this novel, which was an interesting imaginative exercise executed with skill and which was exactly the length it needed to be.

United States v. Eric Adams (2024)—As noted above, I love mess. I love it as much as I dislike the mayor of New York City and as much as I love great writing, great writing like this 57-page indictment, which I printed out and read in full. I would love to be able to confirm whether US Attorney Damian Williams wrote this riveting document or whether he wrote it with a team only so that I could be sure that I am praising everyone responsible for the clear, crisp, incredibly paced, and downright engaging prose that details the clownish, grimy, and nefarious actions taken by the mayor and his cronies to first advance their personal interests at the expense of the public and its trust and tax dollars and second to attempt to cover up their actions.

It is probably fair to say that in my life outside the Report, I am a known hater of Eric Adams, going back to when he was Borough President and engaging in “small” abuses of power that only ever obviously hinted at much larger abuses happening behind closed doors, like a sick version of broken windows theory that turns out to actually be true. Which is to say, even if this indictment had read like stereo instructions, I would have read every word. But it didn’t! What a gift to be able to write in such a compelling way while still delivering pure facts. It simply shines through that Williams is taking Adams’s et al’s abuse of the public trust as seriously as one wishes everyone would take such instances of corruption among elected (AND APPOINTED) officials. Simply some of the most exhilarating writing I’ve read in years.

What I’m looking forward to reading in October:

Sally Rooney, Intermezzo (2024)

Ina Garten, Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir (2024)

?????? Is it time for my annual question of whether I should reread Middlemarch (1871-1872)