Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross

Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross

“I think you’re obsessed with him,” my oldest friend told me over lunch when I told her about the book for the second time. It wasn’t him, the author, but yes it was his first book and I found myself blushing, which only enforced her suspicion.  What I am also obsessed with is the secret of marriage, of every marriage. Yet my relationship to this book was love/hate.  The next day I told another friend the book was, “the definition of misogyny.” She asked why I was reading it. The answer was I could not put it down.

In the sticky days that followed, as I both eschewed it and then drew it to me as I climbed into bed, I tried to understand the power of Mr. Peanut.  It’s an unsuitable, light title for a book filled with death and wife-murder.  As for misogyny—I meant it quite literally. It starts off as a sort of mystery about a man accused of killing his wife, but then the detective on the case also has a depressive wife who he dreams of murdering and then there’s a second matricide in there too; the victim is the oft betrayed, overburdened wife of a womanizing surgeon. Yet Ross describes so well the way the surgeon liked to wear scrubs with no underwear and feel himself swinging as he walked the hospital halls. He details with such precision the numbing and also comforting morning routines of couples, the endlessness of their meals and their beds and their coffee, the almost unbearable predictability of intimacy and also its addictive power.

Sentence by sentence his earthy yet precise writing redeems him. And his very flawed obsession (wife murder!) is something, to his credit, that we come to see actual humanity in.  Aggression—as it appears in many forms—is the engine of this book. Like Updike and Roth, Ross writes so well and with such pathos about what is essentially base, that we (I) forgive him.

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

There is a mole on a young, French girl’s neck and she works in a patisserie. It’s all conjecture in the mind of the narrator who sits across from her on the train. Yet we see it and know it. Of course she works in a patisserie. She couldn’t possibly work anywhere else. The utterly new familiarity—of skin, cows, train windows, small black shoes–the sense that we always knew what things were yet never knew how to name them, propels this great, small book. Salter’s is an unusual, aesthetic reverie that elegantly compiles, simple layer upon layer until his vision achieves profundity. He’s daunting and inspiring, capturing the lush and fleeting sensation of experience. Reading him we are made richer, our own surroundings suddenly more elegant and meaningful.

Sugar in My Bowl edited by Eric Jong

 

 

Sugar in My Bowl essays edited by Eric Jong

OK so it’s a funny list of summer reading, I know, but I’m an aesthete and a feminist. And I am, I suppose, fairly obsessed with the nature of intimacy (which includes sex.) I love the men like Salter who are alpha-artist-studs but I also have to love Erica Jong who spoke her truth at a time when my mother was busy having me. She paved a way for my generation of women in which we could not only like sex but also speak and write about it. And so I wanted to see what her cadre of women writers had to say on the subject. All good writing seems to be an act of sifting, shaking the colander for a rough arrangement of gold and also the ordinary sand of storytelling; its an effort to reveal the right amount and conceal the right amount. I found remarkable work here by Daphne Merkin about an early, sadistic lover, Anne Roiphe about a children’s game of “doctor,” Elisa Albert’s “A Fucking Miracle,” about the stormy sex after a fight which created her first child, and Meghan O’ Rourke’s gorgeously elegiac story of a nostalgic tryst following her mothers funeral. These stories had sifted in just the right way, revealing the personal, yet not unloading every detail and thus stripping the story of mystery or interpretation. (This was the, albeit well- intentioned, flaw of some of the other stories.) Still others were clever but coy and revealed nothing, leaving a dry, unappealing, magazine-like aftertaste, the writer’s claim (or cop out) being that they were “prudes” or simply squeamish about all things sexual.  Can you be a writer and omit from your oeuvre a whole component of human experience? Jong, most emphatically, says no. The bulk of these works displayed a bravery, grace and sheer skill rarely as abundant in an anthology. I loved reading it.

Open City by Teju Cole

Open City by Teju Cole

Teju Cole is not pretentious.  As a writer, art historian, photographer, novelist and an intellectual, he is the real thing. Yet, when first reading this original novel, it is hard not to think that his solitary, observant narrator, of similarly erudite pedigree, isn’t pretentious.  The narrator, a researcher at Columbia, and an avid classical music fan, wanders the city after work, encountering various people and scenes and relaying them in an oddly, nineteenth century manner, as if at a lectern, or to a loyal listener willing to stay for the long haul.  I admire Cole’s plain rush of detail, the way he lets no process of nuanced thought or observation go untold.  This unabashed building of the internal, of the solitary and interior is now unusual in novels which tend to prize action and the “realism” of dialogue within scenes. Yet it’s fascinating to peer into intelligent human minds and relaying the way we think may be the novel’s highest calling. No other art form can do this as precisely and exhaustively.  I’m grateful Teju Cole has done it so well.