text:
Mentioned in:
A Year in Reading: Kate Gavino
At the time of writing this, I've read 83 books this year. Of those 83 books, 60 were audiobooks, 12 were e-books, and 14 were physical books. I read 45 works of fiction, 27 works of non-fiction and/or memoirs, seven YA books, and five graphic novels. Twenty-three and a half books I read this year involved a love affair ruining someone's life. (The .5 comes from Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman, in which the main character thankfully comes to her senses at the very end.)
I know all of these stats because I keep a
detailed spreadsheet of my reading habits. At first, I only recorded titles and
authors. Then I branched out to include genre and book format. In 2017 I
noticed I was reading a fair amount of books in which people were having
illicit affairs and ruining their lives, so I added a column for this arbitrary
category. I enjoy this nerdy, slightly narcissistic hobby because each time I
add a book to the spreadsheet, I take a moment to think about the stories that
have kept me company over the past year.
A partial screencap of the Spreadsheet
The Spreadsheet, however, doesn't tell the whole story of my year in reading. Last winter I moved to Paris, France, from New York City, and along with the shift in culture, a major shift in my reading habits occurred as well. I used to work for the Brooklyn Public Library, a job that meant I took home stacks upon stacks of physical books every week. Now, I am a full-time freelancer. As an illustrator, I find myself obsessively listening to audiobooks while I ink and sketch. I've passed days engrossed while listening to books like Know My Name by Chanel Miller, A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee, Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, Gina Apostol's Insurrecto, and Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams.
On weekday mornings, I am also (if I do say so myself) a sought-after dogwalker in the 6th arrondissement. Like illustrating, dog-walking is another ideal activity for audiobooks. I remember a particular memorable walk with Lola, the half-schnauzer, half-water dog, as we walked from the Tuileries to Gare de Lyon, listening to Lauren Wilkinson's American Spy.
I've listened to so many audiobooks this year that certain streets and train lines bring to mind a specific book. I cried on the RER A while listening to Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. The 95 bus makes me think of all the what-the-fuckery in Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country. Walking up to Montmartre past Opera reminds me of the piercing stories in Kali Fajardo-Anstine's Sabrina & Corina.
Next year I'll probably add a column to keep track of the books I've been reading in French. This list is nonexistent so far, as I read French at a glacial pace. The three books I'm currently slogging through are Albert Camus's The Stranger, Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and the first installment of the Hunger Games series.
My move to France also meant that I had to find a home for the sprawling library I had amassed over a decade in New York. I donated more than one thousand books, gave away hundreds, and stored a few dozen at my parents' house in Houston. I moved to Paris with what I decided were my 10 favorite books (a stack that included Colette, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ann M. Martin, and Victor Hugo, among others.) But living in an apartment without books depresses me, and I've been trying to re-build my library here, despite the size constraints of a 30 square meter apartment.
I found myself regularly attending a bi-monthly book swap, where a group of women meet in a cafe to exchange books and talk about them. That was how I ended up acquiring and loving Nina Lacour's We Are Okay and Zinzi Clemmons's What We Lose. On occasional trips to the States, I'd come back with a suitcase full of books that included Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror, Randy Ribay's Patron Saints of Nothing, Mira Jacob's Good Talk, Malaka Gharib's I Was Their American Dream, and Bryan Washington's Lot. These books, along with my "Original Ten," formed the base of what I hope will someday become my sprawling library in France.
Despite no longer working at the Library, I borrow more books than ever before thanks to my Overdrive app and the online collections of the Brooklyn and Houston Public Libraries. I've always kept my e-reader on my bedside. In the hazy minutes before falling asleep, I read Juliet Escoria's Juliet the Maniac, Rachel Khong's Goodbye, Vitamin, Angie Cruz's Dominicana, and Tressie McMillan Cottom's Thick.
All of these books are dutifully recorded in the Spreadsheet, but I know the act of reading these books will most likely fade over time. I may always be able to recount the story of The Remains of the Day, but will I eventually forget that I read the novel on the hottest day in Paris history, when it got so scorching in my un-air-conditioned apartment that I had to check into a cheap hotel?
I'll leave that question up to my own memory,
but there is one book in my 2019 spreadsheet that brings with it a reading
experience I never want to forget.
I took a quick trip to Amsterdam in September, my first time in the city. Rain drizzled, and my fingers were frozen. Earlier that day I had purchased a paperback copy of Anita Brookner's Incidents on Rue Laugier in a used bookshop. To escape the cold, I went inside the American Book Center, a large, cozy bookstore in the middle of town. I found an armchair in the corner and proceeded to read the Anita Brookner from cover to cover in one sitting. When I finally looked up from the book, I was slightly disoriented, not completely remembering where I was. For the rest of the day, I thought about this all-encompassing experience, relieved that such a thing could still happen to me after decades of reading. That was the 61st book I read that year.
More from A Year in Reading 2019
Do you love Year in Reading and the amazing books and arts content that The Millions produces year round? We are asking readers for support to ensure that The Millions can stay vibrant for years to come. Please click here to learn about several simple ways you can support The Millions now.
Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
Dear Match Book
In her New York Times column "Match Book," Nicole Lamy "connects readers with book suggestions based on their questions, their tastes, their literary needs and desires." Some of those questions, tastes, literary needs and desires are stranger than others.
1.Dear Match Book,
like sympathetic protagonists who become slightly, but not too, unsympathetic
following some kind of loss, then gradually become sympathetic again while
coping with said loss. Close third-person narration preferred, with some epistolary
bits (email only) judiciously sprinkled in. No second person please! A strong
sense of place is a must, though that place need not be named as long as the
protagonist is—or vice versa.
advice would be to write this book yourself, and then check back in after it's
published so l can recommend it to you.
2.Dear Match Book,
I love trilogies: Olivia Manning's Fortunes of War, Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour, and more recently, Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy. My problem is I can't stand quartets! The very thought of four books in a series—or their readers—makes me physically ill. And yet I've heard great things about Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. Help!
Fourth Wheel,
I am terribly sorry to hear about your tetralogical dysfunction, which is barring you off from experiencing the wonders of Ferrante's Naples and Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria. Has your therapist already suggested breaking the foursomes into two twosomes? (You do have a therapist, right?)
Alternatively, you could try wetting your feet with books with "four" in the title (e.g., Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's bibliophile mystery The Rule of Four)? I don't know. I'm grasping at straws here.
What about Ali Smith's in-progress Seasonal Quartet? Why don't you read Winter, Autumn, and the forthcoming Spring, and then pretend that Smith got tired of the project? Next, hole up in a cabin somewhere. After 10 to 15 years, emerge from seclusion, visit a bookstore, and thumb through a copy of Summer. If you don't retch, you're cured!
3.Dear Match Book,
Is this a booty call? If so, this is a first for me at Match Book. I am indeed up, but I'd prefer to keep this professional. I can, however, recommend some saucy books to get you through the night. Philip Roth's Deception and Nicolson's Baker's Vox each are dazzling verbal displays that plumb the depths of desire.
4.Dear Match Book,
I earn $400 a day working from home! Want to learn more? But first, do you have any well-observed family dramas to recommend? I loved the latest Ann Tyler.
Domestic drama has been at the core of literature since Greek tragedy, so there is much to choose from. What about the Eca de Queiros's 19th-century epic The Maias, which tells of forbidden love in a lively Lisbon? Or for something more contemporary, try Barbara Kingsolver's Unsheltered, her era-spanning chronicle of two New Jersey families.
could think of more, but I'm intrigued by your offer. $400 a day you say? Would
I still have to write this column?
Please advise.
5.Dear Match Book,
A veritable and unrepentant gourmand, I've devoured Valerie Luiselli, inhaled Karl Ove Knaussgard, delected Ben Lerner and glutted on Ottessa Moshfegh in the last month alone. I really don't need a recommendation. I was just writing to communicate how well read I am.
Voracious Reader,
6.Dear Match Book,
books is simply a matter of data analysis. For example, with the right
algorithm I could tell you which novel to read based on the kind of paper
towels you buy.
Bot Book,
You'll never replace me with a machine, Bezos!
Sorry about Queens. And the dick pics.
7.Dear Match Book,
I'm looking for the perfect bathroom read. It doesn't necessarily have to be thematically related to defecation—though bonus points if it did—just gripping enough to get me through my morning ritual.
Dear Multitasker,
I believe the best time to ingest knowledge is when one is expelling waste. The urbane musings of Joseph Epstein are my favorite companion, but perhaps it's easiest to tell you what's in our bathroom here at The Times: Clives James's Cultural Amnesia, his sharp, sardonic portraits of 20th-century intellectual and artistic figures; Marcel Schwob's Imaginary Lives, a toilet-friendly collection of mesmerizing biographical vignettes; and The Selected Poems of Kay Ryan, whose whimsical, technically proficient verse helps to move things along, so to speak.
There's also The Penguin Book of Similes, but that's in Dwight Garner's personal stall.
8.Dear Match Book,
I've always looked forward to reading the latest from Michael Chabon, whom I believe to be our greatest living author. This is an impossible question, but if you could choose just one masterpiece from his incredible oeuvre, what would it be?
Michael Chabon,
As I
tell you each week, I am particularly attached to The Yiddish Policeman's
9.Dear Match Book,
been hosting a book club on the Victorian novel for several years now. Reading Daniel
Deronda, Our Mutual Friend, and the Barchester novels has taught us
the indispensability of timeless literature and great friends.
problem is I can't stand one member of the group—let's call him Uriah. Can you
recommend a "loose baggy monster" that will get him to quit the club?
(Middle)Marching Orders,
Part of what makes Victorian literature so compelling are its villains, from Alec d'Urberville to Becky Sharpe. Why don't you try Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White? Embrace your inner Count Fosco to lie, scheme, and gaslight the son of a bitch until the mere sight of a triple-decker sends shivers down his spine.
10.Dear Match Book,
recently murdered someone during an unfortunate encounter. I'm coping just
about as well as could be expected and devoting myself to self-care, including
reading literature about the ethics of killing a (former) friend. Any tips?
N.B. The Times in no way condones murder. Having said that, reading is a great way to begin the healing process. I would start with Albert Camus's haunting existentialist novel The Stranger. Another book to help you come to terms with your homicidal instincts is Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. And finally, for a more recent novel to help you cope with brutally ending another life, try Oyinkan Brathwaite's delightful satire My Sister, the Serial Killer.
you don't like these, don't shoot the recommender! Please, don't shoot me. I
have a family and a lot of readers dependent on my help.
11.Dear Match Book,
was a world-renowned roller-coaster engineer, but he couldn't control the
precipitous decline of our marriage….
Dear Thrown for a Loop,
Let me stop you right there. I believe this is a "Modern Love" submission that was sent to me in error.
Image credit: Unsplash/Josh Felise.
What to Do After Decades of Teaching 'To Kill a Mockingbird' Wrong?
My English department colleagues and I can spend a whole lunch break making fun of To Kill a Mockingbird. A literary roast punctuated by sarcastic regurgitations of Atticus Finch's sanctimonious advice. Just, you know, take a walk in her shoes, dude, I might sneer, interrupting a teacher's account of an encounter with a difficult student's unpleasant parent. Most of us have to teach the novel every year, and our irreverence springs from discomfort. We're tasked with teaching a book that doesn't live up to its longstanding responsibility.
In ninth-grade English classes around the country, To Kill a Mockingbird is supposed to deliver a reckoning with American racism. In the 2012 documentary Hey Boo, Oprah Winfrey calls it "our national novel." Written by a white woman, To Kill a Mockingbird was published at the dawn of a civil rights movement distant to high school students accustomed to dutiful but shallow observations of Black History Month. The teenagers of today, in my experience, chortle (and bristle) at racist memes on Instagram, explore trollish sectors of Reddit, and absorb frequent police shootings of unarmed black men. As a chronicle of our country's racism, To Kill a Mockingbird is quaint, ill-equipped to deflect turds flung by an evolved state of bigotry. Even before the 2015 publication of a controversial sequel, Go Set a Watchman, and a more recent legal battle over Aaron Sorkin's newly opened Broadway adaptation, writers have scrutinized Atticus Finch's flaws, some suggesting that the novel be excised from high school curricula.
The problem isn't To Kill a Mockingbird as much as how teachers have learned to teach the novel—the way our teachers taught us when we were in high school, which reveals more about our past and present relationship with race than the book itself. I agree with much of the contemporary criticism I've read (although not complaints that the book is too audacious in its message or raw in its language). Still, To Kill a Mockingbird lets students assail a book's long-proclaimed importance, which is common in college, but less so in high school, where literature is usually presented as something to "get" more than attack. With To Kill a Mockingbird, I can help students, like Scout Finch, lose some innocence (and ignorance) about their country. A book exemplifying our ailments may be a better starting point than one that claims to have transcended them.
I teach very few black students in Marin County, a punchline for moneyed liberal dippiness, home of hot tubs with Mt. Tam views, elk reserves, and George Lucas. Yet my public high school's student body is 65 percent Latinx, and in the days after the 2016 presidential election, a handful of these students reported heckling by town residents as they walked to school. Both white and Latinx students marched out of class in protest of the election results, but a contingent of white counterprotesters wore familiar red hats and swaggered among them. Three boys whooped in a jeep booming the late, racist country singer Johnny Rebel. Months later, a Latino student accidentally grazed one of their cars in the school parking lot. Via slur-riddled Snapchat posts, the owner of the car, let's call him Darren, threatened to deliver a beatdown. After serving a suspension, Darren left school to avoid tension with classmates and teachers. His friends considered a retaliatory walkout. Some faculty fretted over Darren's diminished college prospects while others wondered how bigotry could bubble over in enlightened Marin. But most knew racism had always been there—in the isolation of newcomer immigrant students, in the white students' domination of student government and Homecoming courts. Brown students walk to the bus station after school as white classmates steer newish cars out of the lot. After the Darren incident, the school convened student panels and hired consultants to lead professional development lessons, but I figured that my approach to teaching could help heal my school too. From experience, I knew a classic (and mandated) text like To Kill a Mockingbird could make discussions less immediately confrontational. The responsibility felt even more urgent at the beginning of the 2017 school year when unrest over a Confederate monument saw a self-professed neo-Nazi kill a counterprotester in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In To Kill a Mockingbird, when a racist jury threatens to condemn a black man for a crime he didn't commit, defense attorney Atticus Finch valiantly tries the case he's supposed to throw, insisting upon the purity of an obviously flawed American justice system. "Some men were born to do our unpleasant work for us," says Finch family friend Miss Maudie. Lawyers, like former FBI Director James Comey for instance, or former President Barack Obama, often revere Atticus. Perhaps in homage to both Gregory Peck and the character he immortalized, actor Casey Affleck named a child after him. In 2017, Atticus was one of the most popular American baby names, a testament to his towering status. Still, nearly 25 years ago, in my Louisville, Kentucky high school English class, the Finch family patriarch was badly miscast as a civil rights crusader. From listening in on the lessons of teacher colleagues at multiple schools, despite the recent critiques, I'm pretty sure many (probably most) teachers in the United States still peddle some version of the worshipful narrative I was expected to embrace at age 14: Atticus, a hero for his time (the 1930s), his author's (the late 1950s and early 1960s), and our ever-shifting present.
This pedagogical tradition reflects a lazy analysis of the book. Transforming Atticus Finch from icon to naive man of fundamental decency but narrow vision doesn't require a deviation from the text, just an honest interpretation.
For a well-read lawmaker whose family name is synonymous with fictitious Maycomb County, Atticus poorly understands how much bigotry shapes its inhabitants. He relentlessly, gravely sees the essential good in people who present to contemporary teenage and adult readers as various strains along the spectrum of villainous to ignorant and misguided. In the book, he's almost lynched along with his client, Tom Robinson. His children are nearly knifed by a racist, drunk sex criminal Atticus refuses to ever consider a serious danger despite his repeated threats. When Jem asks about the influence of the Klu Klux Klan in mid-1930s Alabama, Atticus dismisses his concerns with privileged detachment. The Klan may have lost members in the late 1920s, but it didn't feel like "a political organization" without "anybody to scare" to the families of four black girls murdered in Birmingham three years after the novel's 1960 publication. In a mockery of evidence, Atticus supplies the story of a lone Jewish citizen embarrassing some faint-hearted Klansmen with the revelation he'd sold them the sheets covering their faces. Even Scout's half-literate classmates (themselves young bigots-in-training) understand that "old Adolf Hitler" is evil, but Atticus makes a grand show of telling her and Jem that it's not okay to hate him—or anyone for that matter.
As a member of the Maycomb County elite, Atticus has little experience with being on hate's receiving end, and once he gets his taste, unlike Tom Robinson, he sustains relatively minor wounds: insults from Ms. Dubose, spittle in his face courtesy of Mayella Ewell's real tormentor, and injuries to his children's bodies that leave them bruised, even, in Jem's case, slightly disfigured, but certainly alive. Atticus saves his fiery passion for threats to the courts (those "great equalizers") because they theoretically involve white law enforcement officers, judges, and jurors doing the right thing; readers have no evidence the book's events reshape his view of Maycomb and America. Considering Atticus emphasizes the essential niceness of "most people" to a convalescing Scout on the last page of the book, it seems likely, Go Set a Watchman's unpopular revisionism notwithstanding, that Atticus maintains his status quo. He luxuriously learns nothing, hardly coming of age at all, and although Martin Luther King arrives in a few decades and America trips forward, it's pretty clear that Tom Robinson will presage other deaths, real deaths.
Harper Lee gives students alternatives to Atticus. In her only appearance in the book, Lula confronts Scout and Jem when Calpurnia brings them to church for Sunday service. The Finch family housekeeper, Cal, has applied Atticus's maxim about walking in the shoes of others, a worn piece of advice that most years I simulate by asking students to document routines in one another's homes. At the town's black church, where white people gamble weeknights, Lula is the sole member of the congregation to question the white children's presence. Rebuking her, the congregation proves as welcoming as the white community is exclusive. At Tom Robinson's trial, after Atticus concludes his stirring closing argument about the importance of fair courts, the congregation stands respectfully from their prescribed section. Does Lee mean to show that black people reject segregation because they know the pain it causes? That Lula's separatist impulse mirrors the sentiments of white people who question her humanity and intelligence? Maybe we're supposed to clap when the community backs Jem and Scout intruding on a rare black safe space for healing, for solidarity, for strength-building, but I prefer to have faith in Lee's talent. For all her supposedly "contentious," "haughty," and "fancy" ways, Lula never reduces the humanity of Scout and Jem. She just notes that they're invaders, giving them a tiny taste of what she has always known (and also pointedly asking if Cal is considered "company" at the Finch house). Lula and Cal would never be welcomed into a white congregation, regardless of who brought them.
Ironically, when I ask students to compare, in a response essay, Lula's prejudice with that of white townspeople, typically a slim majority of them see no difference. To many, judging someone on the basis of skin color is wrong, and the power of white people to define and exclude black people doesn't make racism worse than the self-preserving actions of black people. Maybe Lee wants us to see that prejudice is a two-way street (as some of my students claim in their writing). But given Lula's limited screen time, Lee does too masterful a job at portraying her as powerless as well as impassioned, incapable of being heard by her own people, much less altering the white power in her midst, even when its envoys are two timid children. As Reverend Sykes harangues his congregation for abstracted sin with the same fervor as the white preachers Scout knows (and collects money for the Robinson family), Lula comes across as brave and realistic, attacking the essential unfairness of the scenario.
Students are usually surprised when I remind them that Atticus never explicitly denounces racism or impugns the characters of townspeople who revel in it. His warning that his children's generation may have to "pay the bill" for crimes against black people smacks of fear, not hope. He stands against hate, but not, specifically, white people's hatred of black people. Everyone has their blind spot, Atticus likes to say. Yet he proclaims to Jem that it's "sickening" to take advantage of a black man. He places black people in the role of wayward children—ignorant, foolish, gullible. This is not an empowering message.
I don't want to ban To Kill a Mockingbird. While there are novels I'd certainly rather teach, in her portrayal of Atticus and his community of hypocrites and bystanders, Lee wrote a book far more relevant than she's often given credit for by teachers. Bombarded with daily evidence that the United States remains hobbled by institutional racism, a contemporary reader may come to a pessimistic conclusion: The noblest adult with any power in the novel offers up no assault on bigotry itself, just the notion a spectacularly innocent client doesn't even deserve counsel. Chipping away at Atticus elevates the book to bitter tragedy, both about the legacy of racism in this country and our inability to identify and combat it effectively.
Every year, I am more enthusiastic about sharing Beloved with my seniors. Its "malevolent phantom," far grimmer than Boo Radley, comes to torment a formerly enslaved mother who made the profoundly human decision to try to kill her children instead of allowing them to be enslaved. The horrors of Sethe's past have scattered mines throughout her present, walled off her future, and fragmented her autobiography. The book ends on an ambiguously ominous note. Yet in giving us Denver, her (possibly) Oberlin-bound adult daughter who finally steps off the porch of the old haunted house at 124 Bluestone Road, Toni Morrison offers some hope. Even with Denver's bedridden mother adding a question mark after the pronoun "me," as if she's not quite sure of the self Paul D assures her she freely possesses. Once incapacitated by fear of an enslavement she never experienced firsthand, Denver brims with potential, a reminder to students that tattered stories can be stitched. In contrast, To Kill a Mockingbird leaves wounds gaping and, more offensively, ignored. Tom Robinson's hopeless trial and eventual off-screen death is, as Roxane Gay suggests in this recent NYT piece, a formative event in the childhood of a precocious white girl. His imprisonment and casual annihilation is swallowed up by Ewell's attack on Scout and Jem. Tom's wife and three children live on, and I always wonder what it'd be like to read their pain, to trace the vacuum in their lives. I ask students to envision it. Beloved allows students to imagine how the surviving Robinsons live with that vacuum and the accompanying bitterness, for generations to come. As Sethe says, some things go, pass on, others just stay.
Predictably, white students often clam up during the Beloved unit. "I can't relate to it," shrugged Nick, a good student, when I asked why his quiz grades on Beloved had slumped. He'd probably never wondered why his Guatemalan and Mexican classmates might have struggled to connect to 1984 or The Stranger. He could not find himself in Beloved unless he wanted to slip into the white skin of a slave owner, aging abolitionist cynic, or abused teenage girl. He was used to finding himself, if not in the behavior of Meursault or Winston Smith, at least in their bodies. Tracy, a transgender student who once pointed out the unfairness of teachers addressing class as "boys and girls," insisted that slavery was over and that dwelling on its horrors didn't help anyone. An English major friend from college has never read Toni Morrison, and when I once asked why, he responded almost exactly like Nick. Melanie, conscientious and quirky, seethed when I pointed out that the Bodwins' boarding arrangement with Baby Suggs borders on slavery, and that Mr. Bodwin himself characterizes his radical political phase as a romantic episode that, by the end of the war, and with his advancing age, has lost its luster. Bodwin fights against slavery without understanding its evil. Atticus fights for the law without understanding the people expected to obey, serve, and be abused by it.
Race is such a severe line of demarcation for the quality and character of the American experience, white students find contemplating it daunting and disquieting and try to avoid it as much as most white adults. In an interview published shortly after the book's publication, Morrison called slavery our "national amnesia" and suggested that she struggled to write Beloved because she felt like she was "drowning" in a history she'd gone out of her way to duck.
"We haven't forgotten; we never knew," says lawyer John Cummings in a short New Yorker documentary about the Whitney Plantation, the unique Louisiana slavery museum he founded in 2014. In his 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told, Cornell professor Edward Baptist compares slavery to the first crucial years in America's retirement portfolio; it juiced our economic strength and permitted political and military power to expand in the 20th century. Sharing such ideas over the course of the Beloved unit is my way of asking students to entertain the tattered narrative from which they initially recoil. What's much harder is having them feel invested in its repair.
I've sometimes debated amicably with colleagues, the same who join me in tweaking Atticus, about the extent to which class material should be tailored to the interests and lives of students. To foster buy-in, teachers need to make material relevant. Sometimes that means students essentially only end up thinking and writing about themselves. Facing To Kill a Mockingbird, Latinx students often turn the discussion toward immigration. White girls tend to focus on gender, LGBTQ students on sexual orientation, and so on. As a conclusion to my To Kill a Mockingbird unit, I have students write appointed and elected officials proposing potential solutions to symptoms of America's continuing struggle with racism. To date they have received responses of varying depth from Department of Education representatives and Sen. Kamala Harris's office. When I assigned the project, students had no qualms asking if they could avoid writing about race and instead focus on marriage equality or the environment. One girl picked an alternative topic and submitted a letter without asking permission. The point of my assignment is not to strip students of agency. I want them to get out of their comfort zones and practice empathy. To imagine themselves in someone else's shoes, as Atticus says.
My colleagues agree with me: a teacher can provide bridges between the unfamiliar and the known, but to be serious students (as well as decent human beings), kids have to learn to be curious and uncomfortable. They can't loll in the padded cells of their own personal experiences and social media feeds.
I came to my current school from a school in Los Angeles that served only low-income students of color. When I made the move, I told a grad school friend that I felt a little guilty, like helping relatively more affluent students embrace their power and potential might make my work feel less meaningful. He saw no discrepancy. "Your white students need to understand power maybe more than anyone," he said.
For six decades, To Kill a Mockingbird has been taught with the comfort (and power) of white students (and their mostly white teachers) in mind. Ensuring this comfort has led millions to an absurd reading of a seminal work of literature. It's this misreading, and misteaching, ironically, that truly makes it our national novel. A To Kill a Mockingbird unit needs to be about the way this book was taught to students' parents, and those parents' parents, and why that problematic understanding of the book hasn't benefited any generation. The repetition of the teaching mirrors the repetition of errors, from Selma to Charlottesville, the narrative tapestry shredding again and again. It's good if, through English class, all students—Darrens as well as those they might target—come away with a rich understanding of how racism is foundational to America and how it affects the lives of black and brown people. It's better if they recognize that all marginalized groups in the United States and abroad can find common ground. It's a profound thing if they come away more empathetic, less likely to contribute, as a hound of Twitter or meme-sharing troll, to a culture of ignorance, callousness, and knee-jerk antagonism. It's worth noting that Atticus, who preaches such magnanimity, never once suggests his kids slip into the skin of someone who isn't white. Students in 2019 can learn from his weakness even more than his wisdom.
A Year in Reading: Namwali Serpell
I've been thinking a lot about pettiness lately. I live in the U.S. and right now, the American media landscape is all blah blah incivility blah anger blah blah hate. But it feels to me like the great fever of rage-mourning prompted by the 2016 election has now settled down into a less intense, more pervasive atmosphere of snark and slights, subtweets and sarcasm. SNL spoofs rapists. Twitter memes hate crimes. And then there's the hilarious string of alliterative names for white people losing their minds over black people existing. We're squarely in an era of pettiness, the Age of the Drag.
Petty comes from petit, the French for small: Think small-minded, mean, snide. Pettiness might seem to trivialize social issues, but it doesn't necessarily diminish them, at least no more than bad-faith grandstanding does. Plus, intense emotions like love and hate can get you killed. You might lose money or pride off of petty, but nobody's dying from a subtweet. To mock hateful things like racism, misogyny, and elitism lets us think about them with some distance, without getting caught up in self-seriousness, fury, or despair. If nothing else, it makes them survivable. I'd say "y'all trifling" and strut off with a fluttering hand, but I kinda love pettiness: It's witty and clever and often contagious.
For example: I've wanted for a while to teach a graduate course on everything Roland Barthes ever wrote, as an excuse to read it. (Most professors are just perennial students: We teach the courses we wish we could take.) So I mocked up a syllabus. I titled it, "Everybody Loves Roland." I was inordinately excited. But then I was asked to teach another course I'd proposed as a second choice, "American Genres," because it would help students fulfill a program requirement. Well. OK. Fine. I scrapped my syllabus of American Genre-ish fiction by high literary authors—Toni Morrison and Hannah Crafts as "Gothic," Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler as "sci-fi," Raymond Chandler and Walter Mosley as "noir." And I went full bestseller: Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, Iceberg Slim's Pimp, Stephen King's Carrie, Charles Portis's True Grit, Danielle Steel's The Gift. It was a petty move over a set of novels that are themselves often considered trifling—the fast food of fiction.
And so, given my usual reading habits, and the black sci-fi class that I taught again last year, this was My Year of Reading Genre Fiction. I wasn't alone. Genre is all the rage—this is especially clear in television and film—though it sometimes feels less like a key ingredient and more like a spice that contemporary artists have started shaking over their works (to say nothing of the disavowals). The thing is, it has always struck me as bizarre that professors mostly teach students how to read (and imitate) the "literary canon"—essentially the same one I was tasked to ruminate over as a student. You'd think this recycling project would be less tenable now that some of our greatest living writers (Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) have publicly embraced genre fiction. Haven't we diversified the syllabus, if not decolonized it, by now? Maybe, but let's be real: Even the non-white, non-male, non-rich writers on our reading lists are still mostly "literary"; as Du Bois might have put it, they "sit with Shakespeare and wince not." Our anti-elitism is still elitist.
The question of how and what we (ought to) read is political for me in this sense: If we believe in democracy and equality, why are our aesthetic priorities shaped by an elite minority? Why do we dismiss our engagement with genre works as "love-hate," "hate-watching," and "guilty pleasure" when we spend so much time doing it? Why do we refer to these works as "low" or "lite" when they are read by millions more people than the classics? In short, why don't the numbers matter? Maybe these texts aren't read much in academia because they don't require scholars to explain or analyze them: The story we tell ourselves is that they aren't difficult or ambiguous; they're self-evident, simplistic even. But maybe that's just some petty nonsense to justify the need for literary critics?
As it turns out, many of the novels I read this year, while they fit the "formula" of genres like crime fiction, the Western, fantasy, romance, the spy thriller, and science fiction, are actually really weird and interesting and worthy of analysis. In fact, I've been developing a theory that the most recognizable of these non-canonical texts—the highest of the lowbrow, so to speak—are all deeply interested in their own form. That is to say, they are metafictional—they are self-aware about these genre categories we use to dismiss them. Now, a text's self-investigation of its own condition is one of the marks of sophistication, of high literary value: Think Shakespeare's "all the world's a stage." But I found it all over formulaic novels. It's like they're formally petty: They draw attention to and even drag the qualities we're so used to valuing automatically. Let me give you three examples:
James M. Cain's noir The Postman Always Rings Twice ends with the main character in prison saying this of psychology: "There's a guy in No. 7 that murdered his father, and says he didn't really do it, his subconscious did it. I asked him what that meant, and he says you got two selves, one that you know about and the other that you don't know about, because it's subconscious. It shook me up…. To hell with the subconscious!" This is a hilarious send-up of the psychological depth of high literature, whether or not it embraces Freud. As it turns out, Albert Camus's L'Étranger was strongly influenced by Cain's novel. Why is the absence of conscience, a refusal of psychological complexity, and an action-based philosophy valued in the existentialist classic but dismissed as "brutality" in the crime novel? The very existence of Cain's novel calls portentous, intellectual fictions into question.
Madeleine L'Engle's "science fantasy" A Wrinkle in Time dwells on the way time, space, and feeling get enmeshed in the literary setting. Tessering is explained in diagrams—famously an ant crawling along a string—and the setting is strangely book-like: when the characters tesser through a two-dimensional space, they become "flat," as if they are literally made of the paper on which we're reading about them. The novel seems to me to spoof the narrative questions familiar to us from Journalism 101 with characters like Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which, and the Happy Medium, a jolly clairvoyant with a crystal ball, whose name puns on the equanimity to which Meg aspires while offering an apt description of L'Engle's bizarro religious novel itself. In this way, the novel offers a metafictional meditation on the use of the objective correlative—using the setting to convey emotion—in the high literary novel. It even begins: "It was a dark and stormy night."
Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity is a (long-winded) spy novel about, yes, identity, but also about the literary category of the character. The amnesiac protagonist is a blank slate—who happens to have the default unmarked identity of a straight, white male—trying to figure out who he is. But he never really does and neither do we. Instead, the novel gives us a paradoxical refrain that seems to connect his code names with the names of his targets: "Caine is for Charlie and Delta is for Caine." This odd phrase doesn't make sense, though—is the character "for" as in substituting for or as in created for? "Spy," whether it functions as a noun or a verb, comes to invoke metafictional questions about the visibility and identification of characters: Whom are we as readers asked to slip into and why? How "blank" or "recognizable" should characters be? This page-turner suggests the fascinating possibility that character—and perhaps identity itself—might be a matter of interchangeability.
Maybe I'm overreading—this is congenital for me, I admit. But it seems to me that even on their own terms, these genre fictions explore a set of formal questions that take us beyond the usual truisms about the satisfactions of "psychology," "emotion," and "the human condition" in literary fiction—which comes more and more to look like just another genre. So what happens if we take this truth to be self-evident: that all genres are created equal? I believe each genre offers its own specific value and way to think through literature, by which I mean both to think about literature and to use literature to think. My own fiction writing has become increasingly informed by this sensibility. My debut novel, The Old Drift (Hogarth 2019) embraces "low" genres even as it ironizes them. Regardless of how my publishers and reviewers see it, for me, genre is a lens—a mode of seeing the world—not a label.
I adore those contemporary fictions, like Mitchell's Cloud Atlas or Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, that sing genre with their whole chests, that don't pull punches or bleed it of its fun, color, and momentum, and respect it enough to engage with it. I read two books this year that fit this description. Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties reimagines fairy tales and surrealism, and one of its standout stories, "Especially Heinous," is a set of evolving synopses of episodes of Law and Order: SVU, a genre show if ever there was one. I love the unaccountable weirdness of that story—the girls with bells for eyes, the ubiquitous dun dun—and how it imitates the longueur of watching crime shows: the running jokes, the strange entanglement of voyeurism and misogyny in "hate-watching," and that thrumming desire for release, however implausible.
After a casual exchange with Victor LaValle on Twitter about the creepy eugenical subtext of one of the animated movies I love-hate, The Incredibles, I plucked his novel The Changeling from the middle of my stack and opened it. Twelve hours later, I closed it, cheeks streaked with tears, throat sore from laughter. A beautiful, moving Gothic/fantasy/fairy tale, The Changeling is a masterful novel that doesn't try to smooth away any of the dark, rough edges of its genres. It doesn't shy from realism either, though—as when it literalizes the internet "troll" as a pale gross dude who sits in front of screens and gets paid for webcam views. This is clearly dragging fantasy and its fans, but LaValle has mad love for the genre, too. His novel The Ballad of Black Tom is essentially a love-hate letter to the virulently racist H.P. Lovecraft. It's next on my list, along with a growing set of recent Afro-fantasy novels. Pettiness is not just a trifling game, it can be immensely generative. After all, we pay close attention to what we "haterate," and sometimes that attention can yield glorious acts of creation.
More from A Year in Reading 2018
Do you love Year in Reading and the amazing books and arts content that The Millions produces year round? We are asking readers for support to ensure that The Millions can stay vibrant for years to come. Please click here to learn about several simple ways you can support The Millions now.
Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
Singing the California Blues: On Ranbir Singh Sidhu's 'Deep Singh Blue'
Before moving to California from Canada, I thought of the state in binaries. NorCal was wine, technology, Berkeley, redwoods, and the irresistible melancholic appeal of Haight-Ashbury. SoCal was Hollywood, surfer beaches, theme parks, fitness, and kidney-shaped pools–all about mainstream glamor, and hey, I was ejected from that game long ago. I was also peripherally aware (having read Steinbeck in high school) there was farmland toward the east. And wasn't there a desert, too, near the border with Nevada?
When I did move to the San Francisco Bay Area, into the hive of H1-Bees, I was, as expected, in the land of the dosa delivery, unfathomable home prices, and kindergarten coders. Then I learned more about California and realized the NorCal/SoCal binary was false, as most binaries are. Sure, you can divide California into a geographic north and south, but half an hour east of my city I'm in the Central Valley, home to an agriculture-based economy which produces over half the fruits, vegetables, and nuts consumed in the United States. The region is sole supplier of all the almonds, olives, and pomegranates in the country. Toward the southern part of the Valley on the San Francisco-L.A. route lies Kern County, where not very long ago, KKK activity levels were comparable to those in the Deep South. Today, the population in Central Valley is mostly white and Hispanic, but there's a small Hmong community as well. There's also a sizable number of Punjabi Sikhs, some of whom arrived as early as the 1860s; the largest wave arrived in the 1970s. This area and subculture has received little to no coverage in mainstream media, art, and literature—not when there's so much #disruption elsewhere.
Ranbir Singh Sidhu's Deep Singh Blue (Unnamed Press, 2016) is set in the Central Valley of the 1980s. The protagonist Deep Singh is born in a "no-name Central Valley town" to Sikh parents who'd immigrated from an Indian village. "They weren't doctors or engineers, neither had much of an education; they were the other Indians, the ones who don't get talked about and whose stories don't get written–the children of farmers, not even farmers themselves when they left. …Dad came to look for work, Mom came to marry him. They had no handholds to keep them secure, and the world they encountered was as mystifying as it was terrifying." Deep's parents, unable to settle, move from town to town, "each one held fast in its own [Central] Valley noose." They finally end up literally and metaphorically at the very edge of the Central Valley, overlooking the Bay Area but unable to cross over, in a town with a missile base, a strong KKK presence, and a used bookstore full of romances and Bibles.
Sixteen-year-old Deep, refusing to be dwarfed by his universe, tries to understand his place and his community but is doomed to eternal displacement thanks to his family's frequent moves. Full of rage, teenage hormones, and sheer dumb bravado, he drops out of high school to attend community college, where he meets 27-year-old Lily, a half-Chinese woman with an "all-American," "biceps and blue sky and engine oil" husband. Lily gives him his first cigarette and first taste of gin, and soon they're in a knotty, destructive relationship. Meanwhile, Deep's older brother Jag is withdrawn and sullen, walking on the edge of violence, with a messy inner life that causes him to shut off from the world. The parents live in desperate denial of their isolation, mindlessly watching television and refusing to acknowledge their older son's mental issues or Deep's frustration.
Deep, for the most part, engages with the world in a blackly comedic way, walking into the girl's locker rooms on a dare "to see what would happen," running away from home (but in the wrong direction, d'oh!). He is compassionate one moment and massively cruel the next. The lack in Deep's environment is reflected in his behavior—he is complicit in Lily's deranged, desperate acts of racism and oblivious to the consequences of his stupider actions. You want to clout him on the head, yes, but you also want to rescue this boy from his brutal surroundings and whisk him to a city abloom with museums and libraries, where he can talk to random strangers about Baruch Spinoza and Albert Camus (The Stranger is one of the central motifs of this novel). The only paths open to Deep seem to be futile resistance or passive acceptance, until life lessons, delivered through experience and through tragedy, bring Deep to a recognition of what he truly needs—and values—in his world.
Sidhu pulls no punches when discussing the themes of alienation, voluntary exile, and the search for meaning in an absurd world rendered even more surreal through cultural difference. Deep is constantly othered, and his statelessness stands in sharp contrast to the (white) locals' deep affiliation with the nation-state and to his uncle's vision of the Sikh people carving a separate country (Khalistan) for themselves out of India. Sidhu's prose illuminates Deep's inner life as well as his California surroundings; altogether, the novel is deeply and rightfully unsettling in its exploration of topics such as masculinity, dislocation, and white nationalism.
Lest all this sounds too earnest, let me tell you again that this book is very, very funny. Here's Deep's dad, telling a prospective daughter-in-law, who looks like "the unhappiest girl who ever lived," that his son works in oil; Jag was formerly employed in a warehouse in a refinery. Here's Deep getting ready for his future–by practicing to be a drunk "like Dylan Thomas." Here's Deep's uncle, persuading Deep to fly to India and join the secessionists in Punjab: "I'll buy your ticket. No worries. Lots of fun for a young man. You'll be a freedom fighter, like George Washington? They'll give you fresh rotis every day, like home." Oh, yes. The next time someone asks me to recommend a California novel, I'll point to Deep singing the blues.
The Things My Books Carried
I am in the habit of slipping objects between the pages of whatever book I am reading: sometimes to mark a place, more often because a book is the safest place I know for letters or receipts or tickets or whatever I need to bring with me somewhere.
I have carried books for over two decades of adult life now, years spent largely in Illinois and New York, but also on vacations and trips that go much farther afield. Earlier this month, I went through every book in our Manhattan apartment to see what I could discover. This meant flipping pages in roughly 700 books, mostly novels, but also poetry books, memoirs, and essays, searching for pieces of my own history.
The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy
A slim copy request slip from Columbia's writing program, circa 1999. I was workshopping my first novel and adjusting to life in New York City. McCarthy's rustic prose was like a postcard from the woodsy plain in Michigan where I grew up. On the flip side of the slip, a handwritten list of obscure words in the text I admired — slewed, purl, wale, rictus — words that, alas, I then tried to jam into my own doomed manuscript.
The Blue Estuaries by Louise Bogan
Torn strips of paper mark dozens of poems that I liked as an undergraduate at Northwestern, back when I wanted to be a penniless poet when I grew up. I remember announcing this career path to my parents one chilly bright autumn afternoon while we milled outside Ryan Field before a football game. They took the news remarkably well. Today, I remember nothing of what drew the 20-year-old me to poems like "The Frightened Man" or "Betrothed."
John Adams by David McCullough
A full sheet (minus one) of Forever Stamps from the U.S. Post Office. The picture on the stamps: the Liberty Bell, of course
Stamboul Train by Graham Greene:
Two colorful ticket stubs, mementoes from an official starting point of my own: Flight 438 from Lisbon to Paris on May 30, 2004, Seats 23E and 23F, one for me and one for my wife, Raina, on the flight back home from our honeymoon.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The business card of a Vice President of Strategy for Razorfish, a major Internet consultancy in the '00s — and perhaps the strangest bedfellow possible for a book about Stalinist oppression. But these were my late-20s, a time of routine contradictions, when I fancied myself a professional Web geek by day but a self-serious failed novelist at the night.
Christine Falls by John Banville (writing as Benjamin Black)
The inspection certificate for our brand new Toyota RAV-4 from May 6, 2009. Despite having sworn never to have a car in the city again, Raina and I leased the Toyota because our daughter was two and we wanted to improve our ability to flee for the suburbs and the helpful hands of her parents whenever our nascent parenting skills failed us.
A Multitude of Sins by Richard Ford
A small card reminding me that I have a haircut on Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2006 at 6 p.m. on Waverly Street. A decade later I still get my hair cut at the same place, though I now prefer Thursdays.
Devil's Dream by Madison Smartt Bell
The floor plan for the apartment that Raina and I moved into in 2011, right before our son — our second child — was born. Our new neighborhood's streets were littered with more trash than our previous, and car alarms would trumpet the start of the work day for livery drivers at 6 a.m., but the apartment felt big enough for all four of us, plus our dog, and in New York City having enough space means having everything.
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
A yellow Post-It note that says "Waverly and Mercer" and "penne and chocolato," written in my hand. I know I met many friends near the intersection of these two Village streets over the years — before we'd get pints of Belhaven at Swift or maybe cheap margaritas at Caliente Cab Company — but the meaning has gone just as those friends have left for Westport, Conn., or Chicago, Ill., or wherever friends go.
Love Always by Anne Beattie; Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin; Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre; and many more.
For 10 years, from 2003 through 2013, I commuted from New York to New Jersey each day — an hour each way. I used to tell people that I didn't mind, because I had so much time to read books. And it's true, I did a lot of reading then. But I did mind. I slipped three off-peak round trip passes for New Jersey Transit trains in the Beattie; 4 more receipts and three canceled tickets in the Baldwin; and, in the Sartre, six receipts, more than six round trips, perhaps a signal of how hard I worked to find joy in that joyless fusion of philosophy and fiction.
The Stranger by Albert Camus
A greeting card and a blank envelope. The card has a cartoon king on the cover and inside it says, "You rule!" There is nothing else written anywhere.
City of Glass by Paul Auster; A Rage to Live by John O'Hara; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut; This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff; The 9/11 Commission Report; Ma Rainey's Black Bottom by August Wilson; Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima; and on and on.
During that long commuting decade, I often took not just the New Jersey Transit train but also a local tram in Newark. To ride the Downtown line, I had to buy a lavender ticket from a machine at the top of a long escalator. On the platforms at select stops, conductors would surprise commuters and demand proof that we each had used the ticket punch clocks to validate our 50-cent passes. I find these lavender alibis slipped in the pages of dozens and dozens of books.
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Inside this hardcover I find the phone number for a taxi company and words written in Spanish: Buena Vista Villas en la picinade abajo. Also, a receipt for a $26 car ride. I know that Raina and I were in Costa Rica for my brother's wedding in 2005. But I don't speak or write Spanish. And I don't know where the taxi brought us.
The Master of Petersburg by J.M. Coetzee
A full-color 3×2 photo strip. Two duplicates of a portrait still from my daughter's kindergarten year, her tiny face smiling out, forever five years old. I brought this book with me when I went to a writer's retreat for a week in 2013. I tried but failed to engage in the Coetzee, never finished it. Spent a lot of time looking at the little girl.
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
A piece of notebook paper from 1999 with phrases from the text that I liked ("the smell of lavender," "like a person who is listening to a sea-shell held to her ear"), and a toll-free telephone number. I dial the telephone digits now, curious, but a recording says the number is no longer in service.
The Triumph of Achilles by Louise Glück
There is, technically, nothing in this book. But it is hardly empty. I can still find the poem marked with a hard diagonal line at the page corner, as if the paper were folded over a knife. "Sooner or later you'll begin to dream of me," the poem promises. "I don't envy you those dreams." A haunting line called out by an ex-girlfriend who borrowed the book after we broke up. Two decades later, the curse has yet to come true.
Atonement by Ian McEwan
A tiny, white, blank, one-inch-by-a-half-inch Post-It note.
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
A Polaroid taken last year when it was my son's turn to be in kindergarten: We are seated together in his classroom on a morning I don't precisely remember — just as, I suppose, the father in The Buried Giant cannot quite recall his own son — although anyone can see this moment still matters by the bright and radiant looks on our faces. And will always matter, I like to think. Even if that's not possible to prove.
After I finished this long walk through the books of the last 20 years, I asked myself whether I should leave the found objects or take them out. Should I strip the books clean for whoever comes through next — perhaps for my children when they are adults, if their taste in books resemble mine at all? Or shall I leave the objects more or less where I found them, a story-within-the-stories that tells the tale of one reader's life for anyone who cares to sleuth out the details? This wasn't a hard decision, as you'd guess. The objects go back. The page turns.
A Year in Reading: Claire Messud
One of the great pleasures of this year for me was the last volume of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan tetralogy, The Story of the Lost Child. It's not to be read on its own, though — you've got to devour the other three books first. Ferrante builds her rich and textured world over time, and this last volume would not, I think, truly make sense without the others. I also highly recommend the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud's response to Albert Camus's The Stranger: entitled The Meursault Investigation, it retells the iconic story from an Algerian's perspective, and gives us a view of contemporary Algerian life in the bargain. The Sympathizer, a terrific first novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, was another of my year's discoveries: narrated by a Vietnamese double-agent who ends up in the United States, the book is rich, surprising, and often darkly funny. And last, but by no means least, while helping my teenage daughter to find some great books she might enjoy, I've had the joy of rediscovering some old favorites, including Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart and — delicious, always inappropriate, and oddly perspicacious – André Gide's The Counterfeiters.
More from A Year in Reading 2015
Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews
Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.
Social Media Existence Precedes Essence
Over at McSweeney's, Sarah Solomon has undertaken the Sisyphean task of bringing existentialism into the twenty-first century. In a series of brief vignettes, Solomon gives the oft-maligned Millennial generation the existentialist makeover they never asked for. Continue your study of the absolute indifference of the universe with this essay by Zach Pontz on The Meursault Investigation, a new novel by Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud that imagines Albert Camus's famous The Stranger from the perspective of the unnamed Arab antagonists.
The Crime of Life: On Kamel Daoud's 'The Meursault Investigation'
Since publishing his debut novel, The Meursault Investigation, in his home country in 2013, Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud has been accused of much, but being unambitious is not among the many charges.
That's what happens when you take as your inspiration Albert Camus's 1942 absurdist masterpiece, The Stranger, and craft a complex and clever piece of storytelling that operates on multiple levels, simultaneously acting as a personal confession and an indictment of present-day Algeria.
Camus, the French Nobel-Prize winner, took the literary world by storm with his debut novel in 1942. It told the story of a detached French Algerian, Meursault, who kills an Arab on a beach for no apparent reason other than sun and sweat clogging his eyes. Meursault's later conviction is based largely on the judgment of his character, including his inability to exhibit emotion following his mother's death — or any emotion at all, really — rather than on the fact that he committed the crime.
Daoud's novel has had something of the same rousing effect as Camus's — written in French, it's sold 100,000 copies in France alone. Taking as his novel's main conceit that The Stranger is a true story, and that Meursault is its author, The Meursault Investigation tells the story from the perspective of the brother of the Arab murdered by Meursault.
The brother, Harun, now an octogenarian, shares many similarities with Meursault, even acknowledging as much during the course of the novel, which is really one long monologue in the style of Camus's The Fall. "I was looking for traces of my brother in the book, and what I found there instead was my own reflection, I discovered I was practically the murderer's double." Here is what he sees: Two men driven to murder, two men haunted by their mothers, and two men who approach religion with disdain.
But the two do diverge.
For one thing, Meursault and Harun are moving in quite opposite directions.
Meursault has divorced himself from history, has, as he tells the investigator tasked with questioning him following his crime, given up analyzing himself. Assigning meaning to the world is something he has lost the energy to do.
Harun, on the other hand, is driven by the desire to impose form on a lifetime of quasi-intelligible incidents, the foremost of which is the murder of his brother and its aftermath, which has sentenced its victims — Musa, Harun, their mother — to anonymity.
"There's not a trace of our loss or of what became of us afterward," Harun tells his interlocutor. "The whole world eternally witnesses the same murder in the blazing sun, but no one saw anything, and no one watched us recede into the distance."
If Meursault is the stranger, Harun's brother is the invisible man. But the tragedy here is that Harun understands he can't will his brother into being, that he's forever been written out of history by Meursault, in whose book "The word 'Arab' appears twenty-five times but not a single name, not once."
In this way does Daoud, a popular columnist in Algeria who has become a vocal critic of the government, set up one of his main theses: that both the French colonial system, the French Algerian population of which (known as pied-noirs) populated Algeria for a century and a half, and Algerians themselves are complicit in the country's current state of affairs.
As Daoud sees it, the Arab continues, in a way, to be shot over and over again on that same beach, sentenced to a posthumous anonymity, but instead of Meursault being at fault, today it is by his own hand. As he explained in The New York Times, the current Algerian government uses French colonialism as a fear tactic, and has turned Algeria into a "typical" Arab country operating under the control of "a de facto dictatorship with Islamists, oil, a vast desert, a few camels and soldiers, and women who suffer."
It is important to note that Algeria did not partake in the Arab Spring. Maybe it's the fact that two devastating, and devastatingly long, wars wracked the country over the last 60 years — the Algerian War of Independence, which lasted from 1954 to 1962, and the Algerian Civil War, which lasted most of the 1990s and left tens of thousands of people dead. Whatever the case, as Daoud noted in an essay in Guernica in 2011, while Algerians are often outspoken individuals, the last time there was anything like a national will was 20 years ago.
All of this carries deeper resonance when one considers how this atmosphere has impacted Daoud, who had a fatwa placed on his head by a little known imam last year.
In an absurd twist both Camus and Daoud could admire, The New York Times reported it wasn't even clear what the fatwa was for, whether it stemmed from "Mr. Daoud's outspoken television appearances abroad or his novel's character, who rebukes a neighborhood imam. Or perhaps both."
What was clear was that a religious figure in the country thought Daoud's words worthy of death and a threat towards him socially acceptable. And he was right; authorities were nonplussed by the incident.
Harun's final act is certainly provocative, heretical even. It echoes The Stranger's own denouement, in which Meursault denounces God as a waste of time, and life as meaningless. But even more than that, Daoud's narrator, while recounting his story, is also recounting that of his homeland, one that has taken a few bullets of its own in the last half century.
As in The Stranger, where no Arab is ever addressed by name, so too do Algerians of today operate nameless in the shadow of their rulers. And just like Harun, just like Meursault, they've come to recognize the absurdity of their predicament and, instead of rising up, have capitulated to the crime of life.
Harun knows that his time is running out. He's come to terms with this, inasmuch as he can. The real question is what lies in store for his country.
A Year in Reading: Matthew Thomas
Old School, by Tobias Wolff:
This limpid novel offers up a vivid anatomy of the adolescent sensibility. The challenge in writing about high-school age kids — particularly the sort of generally well-off and healthy kids that populate this book — is that the whole world lies before them, and even if they fail, they have years to recover. The stakes always feel high to adolescents, but adults tend to look back on all but the worst dramas from that period with the wistfulness of veterans who have stared down life's real problems. Wolff, though, manages to make the stakes inOld School feel high even to an adult reader by never condescending to his characters. He gives them baroque angsts and passionate urges, but he also gives them a sense of proportion and an innate understanding of their own moral failings. Wolff takes seriously the predicament of a narrator, at any age, who wants more than he has and is willing to sink into a morass of moral turpitude to get it. He allows his narrator to fail and to know that he's failing. After visits by Robert Frost and Ayn Rand (both personalities are dramatized unforgettably here), some gamesmanship around a chance to meet Ernest Hemingway provides the narrator an opportunity to enact the sort of calamitous bad judgment that can lead to profound regret and tip one over into adulthood. Adulthood, the book seems to argue (and this is where Wolff's lack of condescension to his teenage characters comes through most beautifully) is just childhood with greater responsibilities and without the benefit of an apparently limitless future. The stakes, we feel at the end of this book, were really as high as they felt all along. The child is father to the man. Our regrets stay with us. Dean Makepeace set up the visit with Hemingway and hinted at knowing him personally, but he had no acquaintance with him. The dean put himself into a mental prison as a result of that bit of dissembling, but how much different is that prison from the tortures of adolescence? We may run from ourselves, Wolff seems to say, but we'll never get very far — which sounds like a curse, but looks like a blessing at the end of this affecting book.
The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes:
What's chilling in this book, beyond the dramatization of the way memories are corrupted by time, is the notion that it's possible to see one's present self in a positive light and not realize how much one's own past actions have negatively affected others. The selves we take pride in, the parts of us we're willing to be readily identified by, this book reminds us, are filtered versions of ourselves. Over the course of the novel, the narrator strips away the layers of his own illusion — or rather, he has them stripped away from him by force. And that is probably what is most disturbing about this beveled gem of a book. We cherish the progressive notion that if there is a moral imbalance in our lives, we will address it, but how can we address what we've allowed ourselves to forget the existence of entirely? We bury our mistakes so successfully that we no longer feel accountable for atoning for them. Much of life is a détente between whom we want to think we are and whom we are. This book is a draught of cold air, a slap in the face, a wakeup call.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by Mohsin Hamid:
The way the second-person narration functions in this novel is a thrill to behold. Hamid keeps things tense by keeping them indeterminate. Part of that tension springs from the extraordinary politeness and deliberateness of Changez's overtures to his unheard interlocutor ("if you will permit me") which read as sinister somehow — something more out of the register of "The Cask of Amontillado" than any book of etiquette. The very fact that that politeness scans as sinister is part of the driving engine of this book. The frisson one feels in reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist comes from the way Hamid implicates the reader in the narrator's disillusionment. One is forced to interrogate one's own assumption — the title leads us to it, archly — that the narrator has chosen the path of jihad. Could he not simply harbor non-violent objections to a way of life he's come to disagree with? And his interlocutor, about whom we know so little — is he a regular civilian or an intelligence agent of some sort? I was spellbound by the artistry of a book that succeeds at the challenging task of making possible two diametrically opposed interpretations — that Changez is a jihadist, and that he is an ordinary man in an intense conversation who may be being radically misunderstood. As the book approaches its climactic final moment, the pitch of emotions rises subtly, inexorably, and one feels like a lobster in a slow-boiling pot. The book is a triumph of form, but it's also an opportunity for an extended self-analysis on the reader's part, and an argument for a more empathetic understanding of the lives of people on the margins.
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell:
So much has been said about this extraordinary book that one wonders what one might add to the conversation. Still, it ought to be observed that in another writer's hands, this material might have yielded a series of bloodless experiments. Instead, what we have is a full-blooded, big-hearted, human story. Mitchell's triumph is to make every leap in time, every technological novelty feel utterly necessary, and to wring an astounding amount of emotion out of settings that could easily have felt cold and clinical. By scrupulously rendering the everyday reality of his characters' lives, Mitchell earns the right to go to outlandish places in his telling. There is no ironic distance from the more conceptual material, no winking at the reader. He's taking it all seriously, even the oddball stuff. We relax in the hands of a storyteller who will see to every detail and think through the larger implications of every choice. We settle in for the ride. And what a ride it is. One of the under-remarked aspects of this book is what a page-turner it turns out to be, how thoroughly engrossing. Mitchell's talents seem to know no bounds.
The Easter Parade, by Richard Yates:
A book whose astringent worldview makes Revolutionary Road seem at times almost cheerful. These characters fail each other over and over, and fail themselves. I felt a keen sympathy for the divorced Walter Grimes when he's visited by his young daughters at work. He's not a reporter, the way they think he is; instead, he works at the copy desk. He's not ashamed, just a little embarrassed, but their disappointment is palpable, and it sets the stage for this story of disillusionment on a grand scale. These sisters are estranged early and spend their lives running on parallel paths toward disappointment in men, in marriage, in careers, in life itself. They fail to meet, even when they're in each other's presence. There aren't a lot of people to "like" in this book, but The Easter Parade provides the greatest antidote I can think of to the assertion that a book has to be populated with likable characters for it to be enjoyable. The impossible beauty in Yates's sentences would be balm enough by itself, but when you combine it with the extraordinary perception about humanity on every page, one is left feeling less alone on the planet knowing that someone like Yates once walked around taking things in and caring enough about people in their flawed humanity to attempt to reproduce them convincingly on the page, however odious they could be at a given moment. He somehow loves everyone, even when he's skewering them. The gorgeousness of Yates's prose and the heartbreaking accuracy of his insight into our sometimes-dark hearts provide enormous emotional sustenance. The care he takes in getting his sentences right, in staring accurately into a moment, is its own kind of embrace. One need not get the milk of human kindness from Yates's characters to get it from his books.
10:04, by Ben Lerner:
Among the many pleasures in reading this astonishingly nimble book is watching to see where this consciousness will take you. There are so many surprises here, so many things seen afresh with that particular sort of attention that Ezra Pound calls for in ABC of Reading, wherein to know a fish really well is to know it back and forth, to study it for weeks until it is a moldering pile of bones, but one has learned something about it. The thing that's known in this case is the way the mind works, the tortuous byways one's thoughts can wend on the path to an ever-receding but tantalizing total understanding of the workings of the universe for a fleeting moment. Lerner gives his narrator extreme perceptiveness, hyper-articulacy, great curiosity, and a laconic voice that suggests more emotional exposure at any given moment than he is prepared to handle. The triumph of this book — with its impacted sentences that involute on themselves and interrogate the meanings of words and pack as much signification as possible into each unit of cognition — is to present observations of such freshness, originality, and vivacity that they instantly feel like old wisdom one has had access to for years. Everything in this book one hadn't seen before Lerner wrote it suddenly becomes an article of longstanding faith, a core principle one has lived by. I was particularly captivated by his discussion of the numinous power in "totaled" art, damaged works that have been declared valueless by an insurance company. Lerner spins the word "totaled" into a captivating riff that extends in several meditative directions. Seeing that art for what it was was just one of many new ways of perceiving the world that this book gave me as gifts. But the greatest gift this book gives is its willingness to slow everything down, to stop time for long enough to get everything thought and everything said that can be thought and said in a given moment. This preoccupation with accuracy and comprehensiveness makes the narrator a prison of his perceptions at times, because he sees with a fly's eyes, taking in every stimulus around him and folding it into whatever thesis he is constructing in his mind at a given moment. In a culture that insists on speed and thoughtless consumption, Lerner's willingness to parse a moment down to its component parts is a welcome corrective.
My Sunshine Away, by M.O. Walsh:
This gutsy book (coming in 2015) examines the effects of a rape on both the victim and the community she grows up in in Louisiana. The identity of her attacker is unknown. The narrator is a classmate of hers who also happens to have had an obsessive crush on her for years. Right away, we know we're in complicated territory. Like Lolita and The Stranger before it, My Sunshine Away understands that every confession is also an attempt to convert listeners to the speaker's worldview. We're not sure whether this confession will end in a revelation of evil or renew our faith in humanity, but the deft structural control, artful prose, and extraordinary psychological acuity on display mean we're riveted either way. As we parse the narrator's words to determine what he's capable of, we conspire with him to direct attention away from the person who needs it the most, namely the victim. Walsh captures how the fear of discovery in untidy urges can turn ordinary people into monsters of pragmatism. The last third snaps with a tautness of a thriller, and Walsh keeps the reader guessing until the very end, as the best mystery writers do, but this is literature of the highest order, an elegy for lost youth everywhere and an argument for empathy at all costs. This book asks the essential questions: How much responsibility do we have to each other? Can we reassemble the pieces of broken lives? Walsh hints at answers, but none is more potent than the fact that he's engaging such profound questions in the first place.
Small Mercies, by Eddie Joyce:
Small Mercies, also coming in 2015, is the Staten Island novel you didn't know you were waiting to read. It's also the best novel yet at capturing the human suffering that resulted from the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Rather than writing a safe-remove "systems" novel about the roots and impacts of the attacks, Joyce takes on the more ambitious task of bringing vividly into focus one of the 3,000 people who died that day and the family members and friends who pressed on in the wake of their unspeakable loss. In telling the story of the demise of beloved Bobby Amendola — son, brother, husband, friend, lover of life, Staten Islander, firefighter — and the divergent ways his loved ones responded to it, Joyce tells the story of all New York during that heartbroken, haunted period. Joyce understands the role one's native place plays in the development of one's character, and he has a gift for choosing resonant details and peeling back the layers of emotion in ordinary moments. He builds his story around the negative space created by Billy's absence, alternating perspectives throughout to provide a kaleidoscopic portrait of a people in grief. Small Mercies effortlessly tackles weighty subjects — the value of the bonds of family in changing times, what debts we owe the dead and ourselves, what to make of the American Dream of prosperity in an era when America's influence is on the wane — without being weighed down by its own seriousness of purpose. The high-spirited characters in this book have such a good time even when grieving that it's easy to fall in love not only with Billy's memory, but with most of the flawed-but-human people who will carry that memory around in them for the rest of their days.
Redeployment, by Phil Klay:
Klay does outstanding work to make the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar. We think we know war stories, and he makes us see that we don't know these war stories. Whatever our preconceptions about war are, Klay estranges us from them. The bewildering array of technologies, the arcane system of acronyms, the rules of procedure in the contemporary theater of war, with military contractors, ubiquitous improvised explosive devices, and a direct engagement with civilians that dwarfs even that in Vietnam — all these are, for the reader who has never seen them personally, deeply unfamiliar, and Klay makes that unfamiliarity palpable.
In the end, though, war stories or not, these are stories about people in different states of crisis on either side of a divide, American or Iraqi, and Klay makes their experiences feel familiar enough to allow an enormous transference of empathy. The way the soldiers eat cobbler at the end of "Frago" stands in for so much about the way they try to preserve their humanity in the midst of inhuman psychological challenges. And the end of the title story, "Redeployment," is a heartbreaker, with the narrator's mind fuzzy as he tries to remember what he was going to do with the body of the beloved dog he has killed. It's a perfect encapsulation of the mental disturbance he is going to have to deal with going forward, as he tries to live a normal life.
When the narrator of "After Action Report" says, "It was another three weeks before I got home and everybody thanked me for my service. Nobody seemed to know exactly what they were thanking me for," it captures the predicament of civilians dealing with veterans in an era when there isn't pervasive military service, and wars are fought on distant shores for reasons that remain abstract or inscrutable to ordinary people, and the experience of war, in part due to the technological advances, departs so radically from the one described in history books or movies. Part of this book's argument is that the story of the senselessness of war needs to be told afresh in every generation for it to be heard at all.
More from A Year in Reading 2014
Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews
Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.
Book Sightings
With the advent of e-readers, books on the subway are getting harder and harder to spot. It takes dedication to get a sense of what people are reading these days. At The Awl, Ben Dolnick sets out to catalogue a week's worth of sightings, which included a man reading Cloud Atlas and The Stranger and a teenage girl reading Thornton Wilder's Our Town. You could also read our own Nick Moran on the question of whether e-readers are really green.
A Year in Reading: Claire Messud
I read a lot of wonderful books this year, many of them new, and others simply new to me. I loved Amity Gaige's Schroder, and Victoria Redel's Make Me Do Things, Roxana Robinson's Sparta – to name but a few.
But this year was, for me, most profoundly about re-discoveries and re-readings. I wrote an article on Albert Camus which had me, for some months, living again with those books I felt so passionately about when I was young: not just The Stranger, The Plague and The Fall, but also The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel, and his earliest writings, the glorious little book of essays Noces, which is essentially a love letter to his native Algeria, and which can be found in English in his Lyrical and Critical Essays.
Then, too, I've been writing an introduction for a forthcoming reissue of Jane Bowles's wonderful only novel, Two Serious Ladies, a book I consider almost my blood relation. I came upon it by chance years ago in college, and felt so strongly about it that I wrote my undergraduate thesis on her work. Her astringent wit, her particular eye, her combination of levity and profound seriousness – Jane Bowles is unlike anybody else. You can read about her all-too-brief life in Millicent Dillon's fine biography, A Little Original Sin.
In the Venn diagram of the apparently vastly disparate Albert Camus and Jane Bowles, there are more overlaps than you might think (eg North Africa: Algeria for him, Morocco for her), but chief among them is Simone Weil, whom both writers admired and whom Camus championed. So now I'm reading Simone Weil – Waiting for God, to begin with – in order to make sense of why both Camus and Bowles have such significance for me.
More from A Year in Reading 2013
Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews
Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.
The Man Who Blew the Dust Off James M. Cain's Lost Last Novel
Vladimir Nabokov recently did it. So did Ralph Ellison, Roberto Bolaño, David Foster Wallace, and Stieg Larsson. Now an immortal god of noir fiction, James M. Cain, has done it too – published a novel from the grave, a move that's sure to delight Cain's fans while dismaying those who feel that the publishing world should have the decency to let dead authors rest in peace.
Cain's lost last novel is called The Cocktail Waitress. Like two of his early masterpieces, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, it tells the story of a sexy young woman, Joan Medford, who's caught in a vise between a prosperous older man and a younger, more desirable, more dangerous one. Since this is a James M. Cain novel, you know there will be lust and there will be blood and things will not turn out well for either of these guys. Same goes for Joan Medford's first husband, who is already dead when the book opens.
There are stories behind this book's classic noir story. One is the story of its author, once famous but nearly forgotten late in life, still sweating out the words as his health fails and death closes in. Another is the story of the manuscript – or, more accurately, the manuscripts – the last things Cain produced, which never got published, then got lost for 35 years, then got found. Luckily – or unluckily, depending on your bias – the manuscripts got found by a dedicated Cain fan who also happens to be an accomplished writer and editor. And he was willing to take on the daunting task of sorting out and polishing the chaotic manuscripts, then bringing the finished book to light.
The story of the publication of The Cocktail Waitress began to unfold at the corner of Broadway and 112th Street in New York City on a fall day in 1987, when Charles Ardai, a bookish freshman English major at nearby Columbia University, was walking past a table of used books. The title of a slim volume caught his eye: Double Indemnity. He had never heard of its author, James M. Cain, but he was about to become a hopeless junkie.
"I read it in one gulp and needed more," says Ardai (pronounced ARE-die), now 42. "I found Cain's bleak worldview shockingly sympathetic. His world was brutal, unfair, unjust. As the son of two Holocaust survivors, you learn that the world is an uncaring place. It's indifferent to your suffering."
Ardai, who had started selling articles about video games while still in high school, sold his first short story, "The Long Day," to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine for $250 while he was at Columbia. He was specializing in the British romantic poets at the time and embarking on a program to read every word James M. Cain ever published.
After graduation, Ardai put his writing ambitions on hold and went to work for a finance/tech company called the D. E. Shaw Group, where he worked on the early free e-mail service, Juno. Down the hall a co-worker named Jeff Bezos was putting together the concept for an online bookselling service he would eventually call Amazon.
One day Ardai and another co-worker, the graphic designer/novelist Max Phillips, were having a drink and chatting about their shared love for Cain and his pulp peers, the writers of fast-paced, blood-drenched tales that used to appear between colorful paperback covers featuring slinky women wielding a knife or a gun – or a nice dependable baseball bat. The two friends lamented the fact that the genre was in a state of eclipse, and many of the form's masters were either dead or getting there quick.
"There's a body on page one," Ardai says, ticking off pulp fiction's irresistible appeals. "The cover art is classical realism with a heightened sense of sexuality and menace. The stories are heart-stopping, a wonderful blend of high and low culture. Max and I asked ourselves: Why doesn't anyone produce books like that anymore?"
They decided to do it themselves. Phillips did some mock-ups of cover art, and three years later he and Ardai launched a new line, a blend of reprints and paperback originals called Hard Case Crime. Their first book, Grifter's Game by Lawrence Block, has been followed by more than 70 others by such writers as Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, Madison Smartt Bell, David Goodis, and Ardai, writing under his own name and the pen name Richard Aleas. Some of the titles will stop your heart, such as Blood on the Mink, The Vengeful Virgin, and The Corpse Wore Pasties. Stephen King's The Colorado Kid has been Hard Case Crime's best-selling title by far, and it became the basis for the TV series Haven, now in its third season on the SyFy channel, for which Ardai has served as consulting producer and occasional scriptwriter.
Which brings us back to James M. Cain.
In 2002, while Hard Case Crime was still in the larval phase, Ardai was exchanging e-mails with Max Allan Collins, a prolific crime writer and dedicated student of the genre. While discussing possible authors for the series, they discovered they shared a passion for Cain's work. This put them in good company. André Gide and Jean-Paul Sartre were also admirers of Cain's stripped-down prose and bleak worldview. So was Albert Camus, who said he used Postman as a model for The Stranger.
Ardai thought he'd read every word Cain ever wrote, but Collins mentioned a book Ardai had never heard of, one that Cain had noted in an interview shortly before his death in 1977, a book that was sketchily summarized in Roy Hoopes's 1987 biography of Cain. The book, Collins told Ardai, was called The Cocktail Waitress.
Ardai then embarked on an odyssey that would last nearly a decade. He started digging for the missing manuscript, contacting Otto Penzler, the founder of Mysterious Press, as well as academics, the Cain estate, book collectors, fellow writers. No one knew a thing. Then serendipity intervened. Ardai's agent, Joel Gotler, inherited the business of an old-school Hollywood agent named H.N. Swanson, who had died in 1991 at the age of 91. Swanson once represented many famous writers, including William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, and, as it happened, James M. Cain.
"I asked Joel to look into Swanson's files," Ardai said, "and a week later an envelope showed up in the mail. It was a photocopy of The Cocktail Waitress manuscript."
Ardai then learned that there were Cain papers in the Library of Congress, and he promptly took a train to Washington and made a heart-stopping discovery worthy of a pulp novel: more than 100 boxes of papers from all stages of Cain's life, including other completed versions of The Cocktail Waitress, along with partial manuscripts and fragments of the novel, notes Cain wrote to himself, lists of possible names for characters, alternative titles, different versions of key scenes.
"It was like a moment out of Indiana Jones – prying the lid off the sarcophagus, blowing off the dust," Ardai says. "It was breathtaking. I was thrilled. To find new words from an author you thought would never speak again – it was magical."
Ardai spent three months sifting through the drafts and notes, cutting, stitching, smoothing. If anything, he had too much material to sift through. Here's how he describes the arduous editing process in the Afterword to the published book:
Not only did Cain try out multiple variations of key scenes, he went back and forth with regard to his choices…. All of this leaves an editor in a somewhat odd position of having to choose the version of each scene – where there are multiples – that works best in and of itself and also fits best into the overall architecture of the plot. And that means deciding what pieces to leave out, a painful set of decisions. Editing the book was difficult for other reasons as well. Some lines and paragraphs needed to be excised or altered for consistency…or for pacing and focus…. On the other hand, a few excellent scenes Cain wrote in his first draft inexplicably didn't make it into later drafts and I took the opportunity to fit them back in…
I gave particular care to the sections Cain worked over the most himself, aided by the notes he left behind, which ranged from details of setting…to chapter-by-chapter breakdowns of events and motivations…and notes on atmosphere…. It almost felt – almost – like having Cain sitting there with me at the keyboard, watching over my shoulder, keeping me on the straight and narrow.
And now we arrive at an unarguable conclusion and a delicate question. The conclusion is this: While The Cocktail Waitress has its virtues – most notably the unease Joan Medford stirs in the reader, the way it's impossible to know if she's a repeat killer – the book simply is not in a class with Cain's three early masterpieces, Postman, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce. Despite Ardai's deft job of editing a messy mass of material, the book tends to lose its sharpness from time to time. You'll cringe every time Joan Medford says "lo and behold." For me, the setting in a bland Maryland suburb gives the proceedings a fatally tepid feel, the opposite of the smoldering dread and doom that bled through the California sunshine in Cain's dark early masterpieces.
Ardai disagrees, sort of. "Some writers peak early and their powers wane," he says. "Cain tried screenwriting in Hollywood and was a failure. He moved back to his native Maryland, and he hated it. He tried to write a novel set during the Civil War, and it failed. He tried to get labor unions and politics into his fiction. He seemed to have a desire to deal with Big Issues, and he just wasn't good at it. It was almost like he was embarrassed by what he was good at – depicting individuals whose lives are coming apart. With The Cocktail Waitress he was trying to get back to the kind of story that he was known for and that he did best – brutal stories about desperate people in dire circumstances doing terrible things."
The delicate question is this: Shouldn't books that went unpublished in a writer's lifetime, for whatever reason, remain unpublished after the writer's death – especially if the writer expresses the wish that they not see print?
"If an author expressly asks that a book not be published, I would respect that," Ardai says, quickly adding that he believes there are exceptions even to this rule. He cites the case of Franz Kafka, who ordered his friend and biographer, Max Brod, to destroy his unpublished manuscripts after his death. Brod ignored the request, and we now have him to thank for three enduring classics, The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.
Ardai also cites the more recent case of Vladimir Nabokov, who ordered his family to burn the manuscript of his final, unpublished novel after his death. The "manuscript" consisted of 138 index cards, in no discernible order. Nabokov's son and literary executor, Dmitri, kept the cards in a bank vault, occasionally showing them to scholars after his father died in 1977. Finally, in 2009, Dmitri contravened his father's wishes and published The Original of Laura (A Novel in Fragments). "In fact," David Gates wrote in the New York Times, "it's simply fragments of a novel." Even so, Ardai believes that Max Brod and Dmitri Nabokov did the right thing."If it's a cultural treasure – a book by a Kafka or a Nabokov – I would make an exception," he says. And while he doesn't claim that Cain is in Kafka's and Nabokov's league, he makes no apologies for bringing The Cocktail Waitress into the world.
"I don't think it's a classic," he says, "but I definitely think there are things in it that are exceptional. I'm proud to publish it because of the exceptional parts and because of its historical value. You publish it not to cash in, but because major writers deserve to have their entire catalog available not just to scholars, but to readers. And it's a good read."
No argument there. It falls short of Cain's best work – most books do – but Charles Ardai has done us all a service by unearthing it, lovingly shaping it, and sending it out into the world.
Image Credit: Bill Morris/[email protected]
A blog by any other name
The New Yorker announced that their literary blog, The Book Bench, will henceforth be called Page-Turner. The name change signals a "building on the work of the Book Bench blog, and expanding on it." In an inaugural post, Ryan Bloom translates the deceptively simple first line of The Stranger.
Woke Up With A Fever: The American Journals of Albert Camus
"Obliged to admit that for the first time in my life I feel myself in the middle of a psychological collapse."Albert Camus was in Montevideo, nearing the end of a lecture tour of South America, when he entered those words into his diary. American Journals, chronicling Camus' 1946 voyage to North America and his 1949 visit to South America, shows a humane soul with a sharp mind who's teetering on the brink, one minute penning astute observations on human suffering; the next – perfunctory, and seemingly overwhelmed almost to the point of paralysis by the simplest, most mundane, obstacles.The North American trip in spring of 1946 came four years after publication of The Stranger, and mere months before Camus would complete The Plague. The diary begins on board a ship as Camus struggles with an ocean voyage and girds himself against odd and intrusive fellow passengers. By the end of the crossing, he's figured them out."Everyone prides himself on being elegant and knowing how to live. The performing dog aspect. But some of them are opening up."On such extended voyages as these, false fronts fade after a while and forced impressions begin to wear away. One's fellow-passengers begin to reveal their true nature, or at the very least one catches on to their facades.Once in New York, Camus observes the many sides of the American character. After noting how funeral homes and private cemeteries operate ("you die and we do the rest"), Camus comments that "one way to know a country is to know how people die there. Here, everything is anticipated."Of American generosity, Camus has nothing but admiration. While he was giving a lecture, someone had made off with the box office takings which were to have gone to a children's charity. When the audience finds out, a spectator proposes that everyone give the same amount upon exiting as they gave upon entering. In fact, they gave much more."Typical of American generosity,"Camus lauds. "Their hospitality, their cordiality are like that too, spontaneous and without affectation. It's what's best in them."Camus travels through New England and on up to Quebec. He also visits Philadelphia and Washington D.C. By the time he's back on ship for the return voyage, he's begun to lose interest in his fellow passengers, and his musings reveal his frustration and hopelessness:"Sad to still feel so vulnerable. In 25 years I'll be 57. 25 years then to create a body of work and to find what I'm looking for. After that: old age and death."In fact, Albert Camus would die 14 years later in a car crash. But not before yet again braving the Atlantic – this time for a lecture tour of Brazil, Argentina and Chile.Amusingly, Camus provides loose sketches of fellow shipboard passengers. It seems like a mystery or intrigue novel or film noir just waiting to be written – especially as this was 1949. If anything is frustrating about the journals, it is simply that one wishes that Camus would flesh out his often skeletal thoughts."Woke up with a fever." I tried to calculate just how many of Camus' shipboard entries began with "Woke up with a fever" or some variation. But I lost count. I'm now wondering whether a shipboard memoir could even exist without that sentence. Still, despite his physiological reaction to the voyage, or perhaps even because of it, Camus is deeply enamored of the sea in all its raging power – often remaining transfixed by it. It is "a call to life and an invitation to death," and leaves him with "inexplicably profound sadness."His exhaustion and his ocean fixation clash on one occasion, when he enters this into his diary: "Too tired to describe the sea today."Arriving in Rio, Camus notes: "Never have I seen wealth and poverty so insolently intertwined." Finding himself in the company of a Brazilian poet, Camus offers this scathing assessment:"Enormous, indolent, folds of flesh around his eyes, his mouth hanging open, the poet arrives. Anxieties, a sudden movement, then he spills himself into an easy chair and stays there a little while, panting. He gets up, does a pirouette and falls back down into the easy chair."The corpulent poet later points out "a character from one of your novels" – a thin, gun-toting government minister. But Camus silently decides that it is the poet himself who is in fact a "character."In the hills outside of Rio, Camus is taken to a macumba – a trance-inducing spiritual dance where the dancers attempt to arrive at a state of ecstasy. Camus, hanging back and observing with his arms crossed, was told to uncross his arms so as not to impede the descent of the spirits. In the end, Camus yearns for fresh air rather than heat, dust, smoke and writhing bodies: "I like the night and sky better than the gods of men."After Rio, Camus travels to Recife (A map somewhere in the book would be nice. My edition has none). He describes it as Florence of the tropics. (Although while in Recife, he did "wake up with the grippe and a fever.")Then it was off to Bahia: "In bed. Fever. Only the mind works on, obstinately. Hideous thought. Unbearable feeling of advancing step by step toward an unknown catastrophe which will destroy everything around me and in me."For every journal entry soaked in fever and depression, there's one that lifts you up. Camus writes of a radio program in Sao Paulo where people can go on air to make a public entreaty. An unemployed man went on the air one day and said that since his wife had abandoned him, he was looking for someone to temporarily take care of his child. Five minutes after the program ended, another man came into the station, half-asleep, half-dressed. His wife had heard the plea, woke her husband, and dispatched him to go get the child.After Sao Paulo, it was off to Montevideo, then Buenos Aires, across to Santiago, Chile, then back to Brazil and then home.A slight volume, American Journals nevertheless reveals a fragile man at the height of his fame, who can still, through all of his medical and psychological problems, offer observations which are astute and often amusing, and it offers some personal context to the ideas that would show up in his later works of fiction.
National Poetry Month: Jamey Hecht
Jamey Hecht is the author of Limousine, Midnight Blue: Fifty Frames from the Zapruder Film and other books. You can visit his website, and check out his blog, POETRY, POLITICS, COLLAPSE.A line of poetry by Jamey: "God is logic's corpse, a wound in reason, grammar's empty skin."At AWP in NYC last year I saw a book for sale with a poem in it that included seven blank pages. When I read it and John Cage came to mind, I felt sophisticated. Then I got hungry and ate some wood, just to be original.When there's a particular type of poetry book you want to criticize, it helps to give as many different examples of it as you can find. That way, as the examples heap up, their areas of overlap start to resolve into the outline of the target. The drawback of that method is that it makes more enemies, jabbing a number of poets before breakfast. I'll spare them those jabs and spare myself their enmity by simply omitting their names, the titles of the books, and the quotations from the poems. That way nobody's annoyed, and yet I still get to call bullshit on a composite of overrated 21st Century American poetry books known herein as:[Book X by Author Y][Book X by Author Y] was not for me. Having written a dissertation on Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas, I was no stranger to difficult poetry. But the poems of Crane and Thomas are always about something beyond their own language, and you get to find out what it is when you read the poem. To appreciate Book X, by contrast, you have to experience the language primarily as a flow of auditory stimuli, not necessarily as meaningful discourse. Does it ramble in search of phonetic surprises, without creating a picture, asking a question, or making a point? Does it have the dissociated, aimless quality of Camus' The Stranger, where no real motives arise? Is it good for some purposes, but no fountain of wisdom? Call it language poetry.Not all practitioners of that art like to admit that this is indeed what they do; I doubt Author Y would accept the term. Y's amorphous, fragmentary, desultory poems can create atmospheres and impressions, but only rarely do these cohere. Each of the poems in Book X is an array of fragments; each fragment is off on its own little jag. There are plenty of beautiful moments in these pages, but they aren't often memorable because they rarely fit into anything that's got much detectable insight or joy attached. Conversely there are moments of pain but they don't snap into place either; they, too, float like the dollar after 1971. Book X is not on the gold standard; it is "backed" not by life but by theory. That is to say, the poems don't activate in the presence of the reader-as-person; they only turn on when they are held up at the correct angle and illuminated with a special wavelength of lit-crit that Author Y also happens to have demanded ex cathedra one fine day.Whitman begat Williams and Stevens. Behold, Stevens begat Ashbery, and Ashbery begat Author Y. S/he has imagination, but the poetry doesn't make enough sense for me. S/he's all over the place. Even when the reader is done with the set of chores Y has assigned as the price of admission, the poem still amounts to little more than a semi-random stream of thought, cast in a "post-apocalyptic" conceit and/or a post-modern fragmentary mode and/or a Post-Supersugarcrisp Warhol Way.There is plenty of excellent American poetry being written today. But [Book X by Author Y ] isn't it.More National Poetry Month at The Millions
A MySpace for Books (and Nerds)
Goodreads is a vibrant and feisty place – if you can even call an online community a place. Its slogan boasts, "it's what your friends are reading!" and perhaps that's true: the site's more dedicated members are so busy posting the books they've read, and want to read, or are currently reading, that you might assume they no longer have time to actually read. But the opposite is true for me – since joining the site, and becoming obsessed with it, I've been reading quite voraciously. Chalk it up to a pure-hearted love of sharing my thoughts about literature; or to some illusory sense of accountability ("Everyone's breathlessly awaiting my opinion of Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao!"); or to my desire to read a novel as soon as it's lauded by a friend ("Wow, Katie gave 5 stars to The Dud Avocado, I must see what's so great about it!"). Or maybe it's just a primitive lust to build up my roster of books read, to assert myself as the most bookish.Goodreads allows you to organize your books in self-created bookshelves (mine include "Theory" and "Tried but Failed to Read"), and to see if you and a friend have similar reading tastes (apparently, my taste is 100% similar to the aforementioned Katie's, which is just creepy). Most importantly, the site lets you rate books on a star system, one star signifying "I didn't like it," and five signifying, "It was amazing." The fact that there isn't an "I hated this piece of crap" option suggests that Goodreads is generally promoting a positive reaction to books. You can, however, say whatever you want in your reviews, and your friends can respond as they wish in the comments section. On my page, for instance, there's a 33-comment thread that covers Jonathan Lethem (the original subject of my review), Haruki Murakami, Miranda July, Michael Chabon, hipsters, blonde women, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Kelly Ripa and Faith Ford (that is, who's hotter), Rushmore, irony, Colson Whitehead, and more. Another friend's two-star rating (denoting "It was okay") of On The Road caused another friend to comment, "You also gave two stars to The Stranger, you tool. For that I should bypass this comment box and toss a flaming bag of shit at your house." This, unsurprisingly, led to a heated ping-ponging of comments. My, my, reading is more fun than I thought.I'd say more, but I must get back to that Junot Diaz novel – which is definitely already 4 stars-good, if not 5.
A Year in Reading: The Bibliosphere
Brandon of The Bibliosphere weighed in with the best book he read during a year in which he got around to catching up on a bunch of classics, new and old:I couldn't resist joining in on the fun of all the best-of lists making the rounds: the New York Times Book Review printed its own list, as did Publisher's Weekly. My reading is pretty varied, but I always seem to be a few years behind: the most recent books I read this year were published in 2004.2006 was more of a year for me to play catch-up – Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Albert Camus' The Stranger were among my favorite books this year. They exemplified everything I love about literature; they were thought-provoking, obsessive, and deeply unsettling. Franz Kafka's The Trial disturbed me on a level no horror novel can reach. Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, while treading a fine line between pretentiousness and genius, obliterated the very idea of what a novel is supposed to be. And Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time gave me one of the freshest and most sympathetic heroes I've come across in a long time.But Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is, without a doubt, the best book I read this year. It's funny, infuriating, tragic, and beautifully-written. Neither too long nor too short, this book is, in a word, perfect.Thanks Brandon!