September report

Welcome to the “last two weeks of September” report, as the first half of my month was spent not reading but rather mainlining US Open coverage.1 

Happy to report that I got something of a grip and was able to read 3 books. Amazing how easy it is to read and make time for reading when the books one reads are . . . good.

What I read in September:

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970)2—Toni Morrison was a genius. I knew this before reading The Bluest Eye, her first published novel, but as happens whenever I read a certified Work of Art, I learned that there are always new depths to understanding what “genius” means.

Can you believe I’d never read this book before? In a way I am glad I “waited” until now because I don’t know that younger me would have appreciated it as much as present me did. Morrison began writing The Bluest Eye when she was 34 years old and published it when she was 39. It is as if she put all 30-odd years of her life into this narrative, distilling personal experiences and everything she’d ever read3 into a literal masterpiece. Being in my 30s, I feel as though I am at the right age to fully comprehend4 all of the things that make this book so remarkable.

What are those things? Well, first,5 it’s the formal structure—opening with an Americanized echo of James Joyce’s “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. . . .6” that tells us the novel is about coming to consciousness in several ways and that also heralds the novel’s interest in the consciousness-shaping forces of class, race, gender, and region. It’s the way this novel unfolds over the course of four seasons, narrated by one character at two different points in her life (childhood and adulthood) as well as an omniscient narrator, and seamlessly moving in and out of different moments in time. But it’s also how the not-fully-linear structure remains grounded, largely through plain language and humor. The language is not always plain and sometimes even when plain it conveys profound insights that seem like they come out of nowhere though the narrative had been building to that moment all along. And just—

This book has been around for half a century and I’ve never read a more perfectly vivid phrase than when the narrator, talking about a particular woman of ill repute, says that “although [she] thought [the woman’s] face . . . was really sweet, [she] had . . . seen too many mouths go triangle at the mention of [the woman’s] name to dwell on any redeeming features she might have.” I made my mouth go triangle when I read it and then my jaw fell down like a yokel upon realizing that that’s exactly what she described.

Anyway, what a book. It’s devastating! But not, I am sure, as devastating as it is to live with “casual racial contempt . . . [and] the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze,” as Morrison puts it in her foreword.

Some “classics” continue to be read and taught for reasons I don’t understand or at least reasons I don’t respect. But The Bluest Eye? It’s literally one of the greatest pieces of fiction to ever be written by an American.

Christine Lai, Landscapes (2023)—From one debut novel to another! I wish I could remember how Landscapes got onto my radar or what made me so open to reading a novel about art written by someone with an English PhD.7 No, I do remember what made me curious. It was the back cover summary that claimed Landscapes “reinvents the country house novel for our age of catastrophe.” Tall order, and I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say reinvention has happened, but Lai absolutely created the exact kind of country house novel I wanted to be reading as the stubborn remnants of Tropical Depression Ophelia lingered over the tristate region.

I found this to be a nearly hypnotic book, fully compelling despite the simplicity of plot—a woman archivist-resident of a decaying English manor keeps a diary in the year leading up to the house’s planned demolition. She describes preparations for the event while reflecting on the time in her life when she first arrived at the house 20 years earlier.8 

The narrator repeatedly meditates on J. M. W. Turner, an artist about whom I did not know as much as I thought I did. Lai’s writing on this artist and his works was so intriguing that I paused my read to watch Mike Leigh’s 2014 biopic, Mr. Turner.

Back to Landscapes: it’s very much a novel of our present moment. I appreciate it for being about timely concerns without making me feel like its author merely wants to cash in on a trending topic.

I would love to see the small publisher of this book succeed enough to buy a spellchecking program that flags misspellings of “minuscule” as “miniscule.”

Paul Murray, The Bee Sting (2023)—Well, I did it. I read all 643 pages. They flew by, tbh. I really love Paul Murray’s writing!

Much went through my mind as I made my way through the book, eg:

• (page 24, specifically the sentence, “Cass agreed this was the best was [sic] forward) Farrar, Straus and Giroux is by far the publisher most hostile toward copy editing. Every single book I read from them is always littered with embarrassing typos

• (~200 pages in) This is a novel about a family in crisis, each member of the family going through their own situation and none of them talking to each other—I enjoy what I have read so far, but how will I possibly sit through 400 more pages and enjoy it? How much mileage could he truly get out of this premise?

• (on the last page) That’s it???????

• (at the first section narrated by Imelda, wife of Dickie and mother of Cass and PJ) Do Irish writers reference Joyce because they want to or because they think they have to? Do I think Murray is successfully pulling off a market-friendly Molly Bloom by having Imelda’s section be the only one without punctuation? Or is it more giving the Patty chapters in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010)?9

• (throughout) One thing about Murray is that he does the screen-ready multiple perspectives and flashbacks much better than many authors. It’s because he spends time with each narrator and because it all builds to something in a way that is definitely transparently telegraphed and yet doesn’t feel overdetermined (and yet, it is very much overdetermined!)

• (also throughout) I am not LOLing as much as I had expected, though I am still laughing a lot

• (after, in retrospect) He opens the novel with two teenage girls—Cass and her friend Elaine—lamenting the lack of adversity in their lives. He doesn’t do it in a way that’s mean but he does show the silliness of it. I love that the entire rest of the novel not only reveals the adversity that Cass’s parents “overcame” in order to give her a life of ease, but also shows that pain is of course relative and that loneliness can be an adversity that drives people to do unhinged things. I guess I simply love the deep irony he sets up with this opening scene, as the ensuing 600+ pages document a litany of adversities that Cass and her family experience. To me, that is funny10 

• (at the 2 mentions of the word) Thank god this book at least spells “minuscule” correctly

• (throughout, but especially at pages 518-519, when the omniscient narrator says, “Maybe every era has an atrocity woven into its fabric. Maybe every society is complicit in terrible things and only afterwards gets around to pretending they didn’t know. When the kids ask, tell them that no one meant any harm.”) To write a novel in the present day, more specifically to write one within the genre of literary realism, one must address climate catastrophe. A century from now (assuming the world has not yet gone full Mad Max: Fury Road [2015]), what will readers of literature from the early twenty-first century think about how fiction incorporates the hyperobject of our ruined climate into “the everyday”?

Do I recommend this novel? Only to those who read and like Murray’s New York essay from earlier this year.

What I’m looking forward to reading in October:

Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories (2023)11

??????????? I’m still working on getting a grip. Who knows where the month will take me.