A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver

I read this book in one sitting, prone on the couch, drained by Sunday and sure that I was redeemed by beauty.

How Fiction Works by James Wood

Every critic should be like Wood; wise, seasoned, passionate and erudite. His graceful prose is a balm.

The Fun Stuff by James Wood

This book contains harshness not found in the previous one; ie saying Paul Auster essentially stinks, but it is fun.

The Blindfold  by Siri Hustvedt

I re-read this book after I finished writing my own, certain that hers had been a book that in some deep way had inspired me. I first read it in my twenties and it is spare, formal, nearly remote but written in such a lucid style that it’s almost hyper-real.

Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst

The title alone is compelling (not to mention scary) and she’s hilarious. She approaches writing about EGO –her own, her father’s, all artists– with blunt, refreshing candor.

May We Be Forgiven? by A.M. Homes

I read A.M. Homes early on and love her use of language, and the way she comfortably traipses around an edge–of death, of sex with the wrong person, of popping pills with your nephew–like no one else. This book has a wonderfully engaging propulsive plot;  the situation Homes creates is allegorical and fierce and impossible to turn away from.

Dear Life by Alice Munro

Every once in a long while you read work that makes you question the form. And so you say, what is this thing, a short story? You are dumfounded, stumped, awed in the same way that we can’t fathom the complexity and richness of life itself or of another human being.  Munro is a master of omission, artfully sculpting the matter  (life) and leaving only the very deliberate remains.

NW by Zadie Smith

Another genius. Critics might say she tries to be Joycean. She succeeds and does more. We are fully inside consciousness.

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

It’s my first time and I’m in love. The letters are spectacular.

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

I once lived in Madrid for no good reason. Ben Lerner writes so well about it.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson

I’m surprised I missed Markson in graduate school. He is a  deceptively simple writer. Incremental statements build and accrue and then become complex. My friends, a married couple who read to each other in bed, gave this to me.

Far From The Tree by Andrew Solomon

Solomon is a conversational writer who fully employs manners on the page; he’s always engaging, never dull or pedantic, and never interrupts (his own stream of  thoughts) thus your own stream of thoughts.  Like the smartest of smarties, he’s never pretentious. It’s a pleasure to follow him down any path.

Carry The One by Carol Anshaw

I’m just dipping my toe in. Lovely.

A Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes

The dialogue among childhood friends—British, bookish boys in the 60’s—provides a full sense of their worldview and the dynamics of any teenaged group. Barnes is wonderful at portraying them at the micro level  and then pulling back twenty years into the future to provide the macro lens and the inevitable distortion of time.

 

Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson

This is an amazing first novel full of visceral energy (in particular what it is like to be a teenager, the child of hippies, in the drug-fueled 80s;) the raw, unadorned doom of adolescence; and the fate of biology.  I gobbled it up.

 

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

I feel like Harbach is a clairvoyant and a ventriloquist. Oh, and he’s experienced past lives and knows, for example what it is like to be a sixty-something college president who’s in love with a student. He knows what it is like to be his daughter, Pella, a young woman struggling to find herself, to be an uber-gifted athlete and a person like Schwartz who’s ambition and wisdom and drive outstrip his own talent. These creations are unforgettable and true.

 

Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta

Dana Spiotta like De Lillo, is a modernist; she gives us the story in the most elliptical, spare, deliberate, gorgeous fashion she can while insisting that the way it’s told is of equal value with what is told. The story itself is a one of the modern obsession with image, fame and identity: Spiotta tracks the sister of a would-be rock star through their interactions and through his own homemade scrapbook of invented concerts and self-generated rave reviews.  We come to question the difference between a life of true fame versus imagined, and, at the same time, feel the tragedy of a life and a talent that remains unrealized.

 

This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman

Helen Schulman does a rare thing: she satirizes her characters (they are upwardly mobile, private -school New Yorkers) with such a light touch that we are also able to see the distinctions among them—some host parties for six-year-olds at the Plaza and some, like our protagonist, Liz, merely attend them—and to feel the pain of their imploding marriages, and lost dreams.  The beautiful life is falling away in the midst of a sex scandal and the Internet and the beautiful children and adults within the story, who love one another with ferocity, are revealed.  I’ve always loved her prose style, a lyricism and precision that are rarely concomitant.  With each careful sentence, the pieces are stacked. And then they fall beautifully.

The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger

In Amina, a Bangladeshi woman, new to this country, Nell Freudenberger has created a character with a tangible inner life. This may be the essential job of the novelist yet often we are not lucky to see it. Instead we may find signifiers for who a person is—their clothing, the material world around them—external markers. Freudenberger reveals Amina  first in these material ways, the ways that perhaps Amina sees herself, aspiring as she does to obtain all the outward signs of American success, and then later, internally.  She’s a character who doesn’t know her thoughts, suffers from self-deception, perfectionism, her own outgrown ambitions and her buried desires.

As its title suggests it’s a book about marriage. The relationship depicted is at first deceptively simple. It thickens incrementally as Freudenberger reveals its origins. In the end I came to see the institution in a new way: it’s a formal bond that may start from an authentic connection or from nothing more than a contractual exchange of needs (Amina needs to become an American with George’s help, George needs to create a family with her help.) Yet within that dry, almost mercenary start, a true connection blooms.

Her method is never flashy; slow, incremental, precise and clear, she guides us into her characters and their position in the world. The feat is huge: Amina convinces you that Freudenberger has been possessed by a Bangladeshi woman when she is truly an American from LA. (Amina’s perception of Bangladesh when she returns is searingly vivid and palpable.) In the author’s full identification with this character, we gain full access to what feels like a real life.

 

The Marriage Plot by Jeff Eugenides

Leonard is insane. He’s also the most compelling character in this book about three Brown students in the late eighties.  The hollow grayness of boredom, the fear of growing up, the high of being in love, a sense of failure and then grandiosity, are all depicted as—not just the heart of his illness– but the heart of human nature. The pages in which Leonard decreases his medication in order to feel himself (whatever that inimitable thing a self, actually is) are pages of genius; he is not just compelling, he is sympathetic. As we read, he is no longer a freak but a tragic figure.

A friend commented that Eugenides must have suffered manic depressive illness himself or have known someone who had.  That’s irrelevant. It’s his imagination (whether connected to an ill or “normal” mind) and his use of language that has enabled him to create this indelible, painfully accurate portrait.

 

Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman

Can your baby wait for a marshmallow? The answer may determine their future success. Druckerman describes a study in which toddlers are asked to delay gratification; such an ability, she writes is endemic to French children in contrast to their American counterparts. Living in Paris and raising three children, Druckerman writes beautifully about the cultural differences among French and American parents. Her tone is humorous, relying at times on good doses of generalization.  I found her lament familiar and hilarious while my mother and her peer didn’t seem to connect to it. My guess is that the divide about parenting is perhaps not only national but generational. Our parents knew to make us wait for gratification, but somehow our generation can’t make our children do the same. My American friend living in Europe put it this way, “French parents say “non” more than any other word.”

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

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 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

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.

Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

Desperate Characters was published in 1970 yet amazes with it’s timely portrait of malaise and fear in reaction to a chaotic and changing world.  In a gentrifying Brooklyn, Sophie and Otto’s marriage is fragile thing, both touching and intimate and also distanced and layered with secrets and small, everyday meanness. The book follows Sophie in the aftermath of a cat bite as she tries to negotiate what to do about the bite, her connection to Otto and the recent estrangement from close colleagues.  It’s not the plot that drives us through but Fox’s vision, which is at once miniature and epic. Is it offensive to call novels by women domestic? The term seems to imply that men don’t also live in domestication, as if our coffee, our food, the beds we sleep in, our bodies and the doorway we come home to everyday isn’t absolutely essential to our lives regardless of our sex.  Yet the lens through which we see the world falling apart is necessarily domestic and central to our lives. Like Fox’s our view is limited (it’s a short novel) fractured, ambivalent, and above all, detailed. A portrait of a marriage is the lens here and through Sophie and Otto we see race and class and life unfolding in America and also intimacy itself—a delicate yet strengthening, embroidered and mysterious thing. Often termed a “writer’s writer,” Fox has written a book that remains central among her peers—Roth, Updike, Delillo—and beloved by younger authors like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen. (The latter wrote the book’s forward.) In its stylish, Franzen writes, “carved” prose she shows us all, writers and readers how each word is precious.  I know I will return to savor its elegant prose many times.

Remainder by Tom McCarthy

Remainder is a rare novel that is both seemingly simple and ultimately profound.  In basic increments we hear the facts that build to something we couldn’t have imagined: In the accident something fell from the sky. Our protagonist knows nothing about what is was but a lawsuit has granted him 8 million pounds for damages. The London world he lives in passes before him like a dream with a few concrete images holding it in place—a phone booth, his car parked in a certain spot on the street, the plain couch and TV which hold him in the months of unemployment following the accident.  His essential detachment from all that came before (a kind of exaggeration of our alienation) enable him to see the world as comprised of the building blocks of objects and strings of events in which objects move or are affected. In other words, narrative.  The engine for the book becomes what he does with the money. There are no grand scale bacchanalias or missions to stop hunger and save the world as his various friends suggest. In fact there is little morality or pleasure in Remainder. What is there is cold observation, the accumulation of events and objects and the eerie remaking—via architects, set designers, builders– of reality. Some may maintain that this remaking is in fact the making of art. I admire McCarthy’s chilly method but am left wondering what—aside from method and technique– constitutes the making of art.