When young and full of fellow feeling, Professor Joseph Skizzen had been tormented by the thought that the human race (which he naïvely believed was made up of great composers, a few harmlessly lecherous painters, maybe a mathematician or a scientist, a salon of writers, all aiming at higher things however they otherwise carried on) … that such an ennobled species might not prosper, indeed, might not survive in any serious way—symphonies sinking like torpedoed ships, murals spray-canned out of sight, statues toppled, books burned, plays updated by posturing directors; but now, older, wiser—more jaundiced, it’s true—he worried that it might (now that he saw that the human world was packed with politicians who could not even spell “scruple”; now that he saw that it was crammed with commercial types who adored only American money; now that he saw how it had been overrun by religious stupefiers, mountebanks, charlatans, obfuscators, and other dedicated misleaders, as well as corrupt professionals of all kinds—ten o’clock scholars, malpracticing doctors, bribed judges, sleepy deans, callous munitions makers and their pompous generals, pedophilic priests, but probably not pet lovers, not arborists, not gardeners—but Puritans, squeezers, and other assholes, ladies bountiful, ladies easy, shoppers diligent, lobbyists greedy, Eagle Scouts, racist cops, loan sharks, backbiters, gun runners, spies, Judases, philistines, vulgarians, dumbbells, dolts, boobs, louts, jerks, jocks, creeps, yokels, cretins, simps, pipsqueaks—not a mensch among them—nebbechs, scolds, schlemiels, schnorrers, schnooks, schmucks, schlumps, dummkopfs, potato heads, klutzes, not to omit pushers, bigots, born-again Bible bangers, users, conmen, ass kissers, Casanovas, pimps, thieves and their sort, rapists and their kind, murderers and their ilk—the pugnacious, the miserly, the envious, the litigatious, the avaricious, the gluttonous, the lubricious, the jealous, the profligate, the gossipacious, the indifferent, the bored), well, now that he saw it had been so infested, he worried that the race might … might what? … the whole lot might sail on through floods of their own blood like a proud ship and parade out of the new Noah’s ark in the required pairs—for breeding, one of each sex—sportscasters, programmers, promoters, polluters, stockbrokers, bankers, body builders, busty models, show hosts, stamp and coin collectors, crooners, glamour girls, addicts, gamblers, shirkers, solicitors, opportunists, insatiable developers, arrogant agents, fudging accountants, yellow journalists, ambulance chasers and shysters of every sleazy pursuit, CEOs at the head of a whole column of white-collar crooks, psychiatrists, osteopaths, snake oilers, hucksters, fawners, fans of funerals, fortune-tellers and other prognosticators, road warriors, chieftains, Klansmen, Shriners, men and women of any cloth and any holy order—at every step moister of cunt and stiffer of cock than any cock or cunt before them, even back when the world was new, now saved and saved with spunk enough to couple and restock the pop … the pop … the goddamn population.
Ever since the birth of our nation, White America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race. She has been torn between selves: one in which she proudly professes the great principle of democracy, and another in which she madly practices the antithesis of democracy. This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to take a step backward simultaneously with every step forward on the question of racial justice. It is a state of being at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love and to hate him. There has never been a solid, unified, and determined thrust to make justice a reality for Afro-Americans.
The step backward has a new name today; it is called the white backlash, but the white backlash is nothing new. It is the surfacing of old prejudices, hostilities, and ambivalences that have always been there. It was caused neither by the cry of black power nor by the unfortunate recent wave of riots in our cities. The white backlash of today is rooted in the same problem that has characterized America ever since the black man landed in chains on the shores of this nation.
This does not imply that all White Americans are racist; far from it. Many white people have, through a deep moral compulsion, fought long and hard for racial justice. Nor does it mean that America has made no progress in her attempt to cure the body politic of the disease of racism or that the dogma of racism has not been considerably modified in recent years. However, for the good of America, it is necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country, even today, is freedom and equality, while racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists.
Racism can well be that corrosive evil that will bring down the curtain on Western civilization. Arnold Toynbee has said that some twenty-six civilizations have risen upon the face of the Earth; almost all of them have descended into the junk heap of destruction. The decline and fall of these civilizations, according to Toynbee, was not caused by external invasion but by internal decay. They failed to respond creatively to the challenges impinging upon them.
If America does not respond creatively to the challenge to banish racism, some future historian will have to say that a great civilization died because it lacked the soul and commitment to make justice a reality for all men.
A woman who was only just a little flighty went to town to buy something good for supper for herself and her husband. Of course, many a woman has gone shopping and in so doing been just a little absentminded. So in no way is this story new; all the same, I shall continue and relate that the woman who had wanted to buy something good for supper for herself and her husband and for this reason had gone to town did not exactly have her mind on the matter. Over and over she considered what delights and delicacies she could buy for herself and her husband, but since she didn’t, as already mentioned, exactly have her mind on the matter and was a little absentminded, she came to no decision, and it seemed that she did not exactly know what she really wanted. “It must be something that can be made quickly since it’s already late, my time is limited,” she thought. God! She was, you know, only just a little flighty and did not exactly have her mind on the matter. Impartiality and objectivity are fine and good. But the woman here was not particularly objective, rather a little absentminded and flighty. Over and over she considered but came, as already mentioned, to no decision. The ability to make a decision is fine and good. But this woman possessed no such ability. She wanted to buy something really good and delicious for herself and her husband to eat. And for this fine reason she went to town; but she simply did not succeed, she simply did not succeed. Over and over she considered. She wasn’t lacking in good will, she certainly wasn’t lacking in good intentions, she was just a little flighty, didn’t have her mind on the matter, and therefore didn’t succeed. It isn’t good when minds aren’t on the matter, and, in a word, the woman finally got disgusted, and she went home with nothing at all.
“What delicious and good, exquisite and fine, sensible and intelligent food did you buy for supper?” asked the husband when he saw his good-looking, nice little wife come home.
She replied: “I bought nothing at all.”
“How’s that?” asked the husband.
She said: “Over and over I considered, but came to no decision, because the choice was too difficult for me to make. Also it was already late, and my time was limited. I wasn’t lacking in good will or the best of all intentions, but I just didn’t have my mind on the matter. Believe me, dear husband, it’s really terrible when you don’t keep your mind on a matter. It seems that I was only just a little flighty and because of that I didn’t succeed. I went to town and I wanted to buy something truly delicious and good for me and you, I wasn’t lacking in good will, over and over I considered, but the choice was too difficult and my mind wasn’t on the matter, and therefore I didn’t succeed, and therefore I bought nothing at all. We will have to be satisfied today with nothing at all for once, won’t we. Nothing at all can be prepared most quickly and, at any rate, doesn’t cause indigestion. Should you be angry with me for this? I can’t believe that.”
So for once, or for a change, they ate nothing at all at night, and the good upright husband was in no way angry, he was too chivalrous, too mannerly, and too well-behaved for that. He would never have dared to make an unpleasant face, he was much too cultivated. A good husband doesn’t do something like that. And so they ate nothing at all and were both satisfied, for it tasted exceptionally good to them. His wife’s idea to prefer nothing at all for a change the good husband found quite charming, and while he maintained that he was convinced she had had a delightful inspiration, he feigned his great joy, whereby he indeed concealed how welcome a nutritious, honest supper like, e.g., a hearty, valiant apple mash would have been.
Many other things would have probably tasted better to him than nothing at all.
I was quite excited earlier this week to get a pair of books in new English translations from the Czech publisher Twisted Spoon Press.
I started in on Gerhard Rühm’s Cake & Prostheses (translated from the German by Alexander Booth) late last night and kept reading and reading, greedily consuming the surreal, poetic “mini dramas” as thought experiments played out in my head. Here’s an early example of one:
practiced biblical saying
catechist : love thy neighbor as thyself.
exegete: i hate myself! (gives the former a hard hook to the chin tho crumples him to the floor).
I’ll admit I didn’t know of Gerhard Rühm, but I’m enjoying Cake & Prostheses and hope to muster a review in the next week or so. Here’s Twisted Spoon’s blurb:
An inveterate experimenter with image and text and music, Gerhard Rühm is truly one of the major figures of the postwar European avant-garde. Yet reprehensibly little of his work has appeared in English. This edition brings together a selection of his work spanning the past seven decades, displaying a wide thematic range (as he has remarked, “there is nothing that cannot become part of one’s poetic universe”) and ingenious combinations of music, pornography, banality, humor, and mythology. The first section comprises “mini dramas,” the text often combined with images and musical notation to create sensorial episodes, the expression of a singular aesthetic perception. The second section is a wry deconstruction of Grillparzer’s play Hero and Leander that juxtaposes original passages with images from a swimming manual and with a more contemporary erotic retelling of the mythological tale. The final section presents 24 short prose pieces: 12 from the early 1950s and 12 from the past few years.
I had heard of the surrealist Romanian poet Max Blecher, but am still largely unfamiliar with his work. Twisted Spoon is publishing his 1934 collection Transparent Body along with some, uh, other texts, in a translation by Gabi Reigh. Blurb:
Blecher’s very first book, the poetry collection Transparent Body, appeared in 1934, in a limited edition for bibliophiles. Yet general recognition as one of the most inventive European writers of his day came only with the publication of two of his three “novels” a few years later. And then he died, at the age of twenty-eight. But since 1930 Blecher had been publishing his poetry, short prose, essays, critiques, and other texts in the leading Romanian periodicals, some even appearing in important French publications, such as Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. In addition, the past half century has seen the posthumous first publication of many texts in a variety of Romanian editions.
Transparent Body & Other Texts brings together Blecher’s entire output of poetry and short prose, from the earliest texts published during his lifetime to those appearing for the first time only recently. They range from stories in the vein of his fantastical, hallucinatory longer work to aphorisms, reportage, and notebook fragments. The volume also includes a selection of his correspondence with such major figures of Romanian interwar modernism as Geo Bogza, Ilarie Voronca, and Saşa Pană to give a fuller picture of Blecher’s engagement with the avant-garde and literary life even as his health was progressively deteriorating over the course of the 1930s.
I keep hoping the corporations will realize that publishing is not, in fact, a sane or normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism. The practices of literary publishing houses are, in almost every way, by normal business standards, impractical, exotic, abnormal, insane.
Parts of publishing are, or can be forced to be, successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a proof of that. And how-to books and that kind of thing have good market predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature: art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It is seldom a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other. Their definitions of what profiteth a man are too different.
So why don’t the corporations drop the literary publishing houses, or at least the literary departments of publishers they have bought, with amused contempt, as unprofitable? Why don’t they let them go back to muddling along making just enough, in a good year, to pay the printers, the editors, modest advances and crummy royalties, and plowing most profits back into taking chances on new writers? There’s no hope of creating new readers other than the kids coming up through the schools, who are no longer taught to read for pleasure and anyhow are distracted by electrons; not only is the relative number of readers unlikely to see any kind of useful increase, it may well keep shrinking. What’s in this dismal scene for you, Mr. Corporate Executive? Why don’t you just get out of it? Why don’t you dump the ungrateful little pikers and get on with the real business of business, ruling the world?
Is it because you think if you own publishing you can control what’s printed, what’s written, what’s read? Well, lotsa luck, sir. It’s a common delusion of tyrants. Writers and readers, even as they suffer from it, regard it with amused contempt.
There were two vessels, the Ouachita and the City of Camden, and they ran on about a two-week cycle—New Orleans-Camden-New Orleans, with stops along the way. The round-trip fare, including a bed and all meals, was $50. Traditional steamboat decorum was imposed, with the men required to wear coats in the dining room. At night, after supper was cleared, the waiters doubled as musicians for a dance.
It was Dee Brown of Little Rock, the author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, who told me about this, and how as a teen-aged boy in the late 1920s he took the Ouachita from New Orleans to Camden. He had a summer job at a filling station between Stephens and Camden, and had often watched the steamer tie up and unload. “‘I’ve got to ride that boat,’ I kept telling myself.” He saved up a bit more than $50 for the adventure—“an enormous sum in those days”—but then thought better of this extravagance. He would keep half of it back. “So I made a reservation for the other end and hitch-hiked down to New Orleans. Hitch-hiking was easy and safe then, and faster than the boat.”
His timing was good, which kept expenses down. He paid a dollar for a night’s lodging at a boarding house near the French Quarter. The trip back was a delight, as Mr. Brown remembers, a leisurely voyage of five or six days. He got full value for his $25. The big splashing wheel pushed the steamer up the Mississippi, the Red, the Black, and at last into the Ouachita at Jonesville, with the two walls of the forest closing in a bit more day by day.
There were fine breakfasts of ham and eggs, when ham was real ham, with grits and hot biscuits. At lunch one day he found a split avocado on his plate, or “alligator pear,” as it was called on the menu. “I had never seen one before. I wouldn’t eat it.” Young Mr. Brown was traveling light and so had to borrow a coat from a waiter at each meal before he could be seated. He had a tiny sleeping cabin to himself with a bunk bed and a single hook on the wall for his wardrobe.
He enjoyed the nightly dances, though he had to sit them out as a wallflower because he didn’t know how to dance. Townsfolk along the way came on board just for the dance, and among them were young Delta sports sneaking drinks of corn whiskey and ginger jake. These were Prohibition days. A young girl from New Orleans, traveling with her family, offered to teach Dee Brown how to dance. “I wanted to dance with her, too, sure, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.” This family, he recalls, who had never seen any high ground, marveled over the puny hillocks of the upper river. He remembers an Arkansas woman vowing never again to eat sugar, after seeing the deckhands, dripping with sweat, taking naps on the deck-loaded sacks of sugar.
From “The Forgotten River” by Charles Portis. Collected in Escape Velocity.
A few years ago, spurred by a conversation with a colleague, I decided to blog about the best books from half a century ago. I enjoyed riffing on the possible “Best Books of 1972” so much that I did repeated the project last year with the possible “Best Books of 1973.”
As in the previous two posts, I’m again primarily interested in novels here, or books of a novelistic/artistic scope. I’ve also focused on books published in English in 1974, and will not be including books published in their original language in 1974 that did not appear in English translation until years later. (For example, while Georges Perec’s excellent Species of Spaces was first published in 1974, it was not published in English translation until the late nineties, and thus will not appear in this blog post, other than in this parenthetical example.)
I also will not be counting English-language books published before 1974 that were published that year in the U.S. So, for example, Richard Adams’s wonderful novel Watership Down dominated The New York Times bestsellers list in the summer of 1974, when it was released in U.S.—but the book was first published in the U.K. in 1972 (and thus appears in my “Best Books of 1972” post). Richard Adams’s follow-up Shardik was released in 1974 though. I tried reading it in my teens and never finished.
I brought up the NYT bestsellers list. I think it’s an interesting barometer to consider a book’s value fifty years after publication. Just four titles dominated the 1974 list: Gore Vidal’s Burr (published in the previous year), followed by Watership Down, then John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and finally James Michener’s Centennial. Two of these titles I think have made their case over the decades.
While the four novels essentially split the NYT fiction bestsellers list by season, the nonfiction list was dominated by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s All the President’s Men, a work that still remains culturally important (despite Woodward’s best efforts to ruin his legacy).
In their year-end round up of 1974, the editors of The New York Times include plenty of titles that didn’t sniff the bestsellers list, like John Hawkes’s Death, Sleep & the Traveler, Donald Barthelme’s collection Guilty Pleasures (“Barthelme’s easiest book,” the editors suggest), Grace Paley’s collection Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. The English translation of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities makes the list, but translator William Weaver is left out. James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk makes the cut, as do Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm, Iris Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 follow-up, Something Happened. My favorite pick from their list is Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers. (The editors also include Toni Morrison’s Sula, which was actually published in 1973—likely a make-up call for its absence from the previous year’s round-up.)
Some of the strongest entries from the NYT 1974 notables list come in the “Young Readers” section, which boast three bona fide classics: Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, Virginia Hamilton’s M.C. Higgins the Great, and Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends.
In his personal round-up at the NYT, critic John Leonard discusses how the book review section came to their selections before adding some of his favorites, including works by his critical brethren (Elizabeth Hardwick’s Seduction and Betrayal, Irving Howe’s The Critical Point, and Dwight Macdonald’s Discriminations). For fiction, Leonard includes heavy hitters like Vladimir Nabokov (Look at the Harlequins) and Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man, two novels I haven’t ever heard of until now. He also praises James Welch’s Winter in the Blood and Gail Godwin’s The Odd Woman.
Godwin’s The Odd Woman also appears on the American Library Associations’s list of notable books for 1974, along with other titles duplicated in the NYT list. The ALA list also includes Wendell Berry’s The Memory of Old Jack in their slim fiction selection, and Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair in their nonfiction selection. (I don’t think we would count Zen as a work of nonfiction today, right?)
The Booker Prize winners and finalists for 1974 offer a less USAcentric list: Nadine Gordimer (The Conservationist) and Stanley Middleton (Holiday) split the prize for the first time ever. The shortlist included Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up, Beryl Bainbridge’s The Bottle Factory Outing, and C.P. Snow’s In Their Wisdom.
In other literary prize news of the day, Michael Shaara’s 1974 Civil War novel The Killer Angels won the Pulitzer for Fiction in 1975. In 1974, no Pulitzer was awarded; infamously, the Pulitzer board opted not to follow the jury’s recommendation to give the prize to Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow.
Like the Booker, the 1975 National Book Award split its fiction prize as well: Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers shared the prize with Thomas Williams’ The Hair of Harold Roux. Virginia Hamilton’s M.C. Higgins, The Great won the NBA for children’s literature. Hamilton’s book also won the Newberry Medal that year.
The Nebula Awards short list for the best novels of 1974 included Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, T.J. Bass’s The Godwhale, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed—which won top honors. (I am likely to give The Dispossessed top honors too by the time I get to the end of this post.)
J.G. Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island did not make Nebula’s short list, but to be fair it’s not really sci-fi. But it is pretty good. (Also, not a sci-fi, but an island book, Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island was published in 1974). Leonora Carrington’s excellent surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet also is sci-fi adjacent, but is again overlooked. Oddball novels in general I suppose have to find their way to a cult—fifty years later, novels like Gerald Murnane’s Tamarisk Row, Ishmael Reed’s The Last Days of Louisiana Red, and Fran Ross’s Oreo have all found wider and more dedicated audiences in the last half century.
Speaking of cult books: Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders was published in 1974. Bugliosi’s book was part of a select library we passed surreptitiously around in high school (along with Stephen Davis’s Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Go Ask Alice, and Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—the aforementioned Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair and Kerouac’s On the Road were part of the underground informal book loan, but I never really cottoned to them). Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood—published too in 1974—could have been in that secret library if we had known about it.
And 1974 spit out some books would-be hipsters would likely eschew, Peter Benchley’s beach read Jaws and Stephen King’s Carrie. (Both novels spawned fantastic films.)
As I mentioned above, 1974 was a standout year it seems for children and adolescent literature–Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, Virginia Hamilton’s M.C. Higgins the Great, and Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, of course, but also James Lincoln Collier’s My Brother Sam Is Dead, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door, and Judy Blume’s Blubber. I loved all of these.
A few other books of note: J. M. Coetzee’s debut Dusklands (haven’t read it), Muriel Spark’s The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark (read it when I was devouring Spark in 2020), Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (haven’t read it), and James Herbert’s The Rats (guess who read their mom’s copy of this novel in secret when he was about ten years old?).
I have undoubtedly missed many, many books of note that were published in 1974. I wonder how available, say in 1999 at the 25-year mark, a novel like Ross’s Oreo or Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet might have been. Again, my fun in this project comes down to a basic idea I have about literature—we really don’t know what books will retain their importance (or gain importance) until decades after their publication. None of this is to discount year-end lists of new books—I had four on my list this year!—I just aim to say something like: Books aren’t time capsules, they are time machines.
My list of the best books of 1974:
Blubber, Judy Blume
The Chocolate War, Robert Cormier
Concrete Island, J.G. Ballard
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Grace Paley
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, Philip K. Dick
Guilty Pleasures, Donald Barthelme
The Hearing Trumpet, Leonora Carrington
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, trans. William Weaver
In some cases, I’ve self-plagiarized some descriptions and evaluations from my old tweets and blog posts.
Night Business, Benjamin Marra
Sleazy, crude violent fun cribbed from the best seventies and eighties action flix you vaguely remember watching in a closet-sized room with six other kids you didn’t know while the adults drank themselves into merriment.
Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T., Benjamin Marra
One of the better satires on The War on Terror™ I’ve read, Marra’s comic assaults the flimsy veil of morality that the neocons threw over their two-front Near Eastern misadventures in mass death.
Benjamin Marra, from Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T.
A Funny Little Dirty War, Osvaldo Soriano, trans. Nick Caistor
A Funny Dirty Little War will in no way explain the Dirty War to those unfamiliar with its history. The causes and effects here unfold in the most basic way (all in a neat Aristotelian unity of action, place, and time). There is no introspection, no analysis—the violence just escalates. Absurd farce hurtles into absurd tragedy. Yet for all their outlandish, grotesque contours, Soriano’s characters are ultimately sympathetic. Or at least pathetic. In any case, this short novel will reward those who don’t mind their black humor extra bitter, with a heavy dose of violence.
The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy☉☆
Cormac McCarthy published his last two novels in the Fall of 2022 and died in the Summer of 2023. Over the last twelve months I’ve reread pretty much all of his novels (going through a fourth or fifth reread of Suttree just a few weeks ago). The Crossing is one of his best, and it might be understood as the bridge piece of a literary career from the acme of Suttree to the capstone of The Passenger. I also think that The Crossing is the perfect starting place for those interested in McCarthy’s oeuvre. I wrote about rereading it here.
A.V. Marraccini’s book is generative, creative, fruitful, a hybrid that points to something beyond the lyric essay. It is stuffed with art and poetry and life; it is erudite and frequently fun; it is moody and sometimes melodramatic, but tonally consistent.
CardinalNumbers, Hob Broun☆
I picked up Hob Broun’s underread, underappreciated 1988 collection Cardinal Numbers a few years ago, ate up most of the stories, and then shelved it with just two tales left, a move I’ve done many times in the past for reasons I can’t fully explain. I guess that I want to leave something in the bag, so to speak. Anyway, I read the whole thing straight through earlier this year—Broun is one of the funniest writers I’ve ever read. Fans of Barry Hannah, David Berman, and Charles Portis will appreciate his stuff.
Cities of the Plain, Cormac McCarthy☉
About thirty pages into the final book of his so-called “Border Trilogy,” McCarthy devotes two entire pages to a description of changing a tire. Beautiful.
The Road, Cormac McCarthy☉
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy☉☆
Child of God, Cormac McCarthy☉
The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy☉
Like I mentioned above, I spent a lot of the last year rereading McCarthy. I did not find his death a shock or especially sad, or even really, a loss, I think, because of this fact: I was so grounded in all that he’d given us. The man really left all that he had out there, I believe. In an appreciation written after his death, I wrote that I had recently reread so much McCarthy because
The Passenger left me wanting more McCarthy–not in an unsatisfied way, but rather to confirm my intimations about its status as a career capstone. I reread All the Pretty Horses in the lull before Stella Maris arrived. I went on to reread The Crossing (much, much stronger than I had remembered), Cities of the Plain (weaker than I had remembered), The Road (about exactly as I remembered), Child of God (ditto), and The Orchard Keeper (as funny as I had remembered but also much sadder than I had remembered).
Gina Siciliano, from I Know What I Am
I Know What I Am, Gina Siciliano☆
Siciliano’s comix biography of Artemisia Gentileschi is a wonderful achievement—a rich, evocation of genius at work, genius in defiance against the social dicta that sought to suppress her light. Lovely stuff.
The Letters of William Gaddis, William Gaddis, ed. Steven Moore
I read most of the Dalkey edition a few years back; NYRB’s updated edition prompted a full read. I had initially planned to cover the book in a series of posts, but only managed one, covering our man’s youth. The Letters prompted me to finally read A Frolic of His Own, which I’d been “saving” for over a decade now.
Solenoid, Mircea Cărtărescu, trans. Sean Cotter
Unwieldy, uneven, wonderfully surreal and gross at times, simultaneously encyclopedic and introspective, plodding and thrilling, abject and ecstatic. The conclusion splits the elect from the preterite in a literary trick ultimately made ambiguous by everything that’s preceded it. It’s satisfying unless you think too hard about it.
Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azerrad☉
An entire generation passed between my first reading of Azerrad’s well-researched semi-oral history of 1980s American indie rock and listening to a newish audiobook recording of it, read primarily by people inspired these bands. The conceit for the audiobook is gimmicky but works: a different musician reads a chapter on bands they love (Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth reads the Black Flag chapter; Jeff Tweedy does The Minutemen; Jon Wurster does The Replacements, etc.) What most fascinated me was how my tastes have changed—mellowed maybe? I still love Sonic Youth, Fugazi, and Hüsker Dü, but I’m more inclined to listen to The Replacements these days.
Blood and Guts in High School, Kathy Acker☉☆
Fever dreaming holds up.
The Stronghold, Dino Buzzati, trans. Lawrence Venuti
…takes place in an unidentified time in an unidentified country. The novel’s eerie, fable-like quality—a quality that resists historicity—is what most engages me. Buzzati’s book captures the paradox of a modern life that valorizes the pursuit of glory (or at least happiness) while simultaneously creating a working conditions that crush the human spirit. We can find this paradox in Herman Melville’s Bartleby or Mike Judge’s Office Space; we can find it in Antonio di Benedetto’s Zama or Mike Judge’s Enlightened; we can find if in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King or Dan Erickson’s recent show Severance. I could go on of course.
My Stupid Intentions, Bernardo Zannoni, trans. Alex Andriesse☆
Absolutely loved My Stupid Intentions. It’s a coming-of-age novel narrated by a stone marten, a picaresque howl that seeks to find meaning in being a creature. It’s full of cruelty and heroism and humor and pathos, and, like I said, I absolutely loved it.
Escape from the Great American Novel, Drew Lerman☆
Escape from the Great American Novel is the latest collection of Drew Lerman’s Snake Creek strips, and the most cohesive collection to date. The strips collected here span August 2019 through August 2021; it ends up being an unintentional pandemic novel (while not about the Covid-19 pandemic at all, to be clear). In my review, I wote:
The strips collected in Escape from the Great American Novel span two years that often felt in “real time” like an eternity. Many of us were separated from friends and family over these months. Lerman’s gambit, intentional or otherwise, is to keep his central characters separated, which adds real tension to a comic novel that otherwise might be a loose collection of funny riffs. As I stated before, Roy and Dav are the heart of Snake Creek, so when Lerman finally reunites them the moment is not just cathartic, it’s literarily metaphysical. For all its sardonic jags, ribald japes, and erudite allusions, Escape from the Great American Novel is in the end a sweet, even heartwarming read (Dav and Roy would find a way to mock this sentiment, I’m sure). I loved it. Highly recommended.
Drew Lerman, from Escape from the Great American Novel
The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Jennifer Croft ☆
I’d been interested in Tokarczuk’s historical fiction 900-pager since hearing about it in English translation a few years ago (via Fitzcarraldo Editions). The US edition came out in 2022, but I never came across it used. I have a habit of browsing my campus library before the end of each term though, and at the end of our Spring session there it was, big and fat and propped outward. I didn’t expect to sink into the book the way I did, but quickly gave into its many characters, its simultaneous alienating qualities and deep humanity. Fantastic stuff.
Platitudes, Trey Ellis
Ishmael Reed praised Ellis’s 1988 debut as “delightfully rad,” noting that he was zapped by it. I felt the same. My review here.
Great Expectations, Kathy Acker☉
Bits and bobs, bites and pieces, unpeaceful, savage, a splatterpunk recapitulation of Dickens’ classic.
The River and the Child, Henri Bosco, trans. Joyce Zonana☆
If someone were to have described the simple plot of Henri Bosco’s 1945 novel The River and the Child to me, I might have passed on it—too rustic, too naive, too tender. But, having been sent a review copy of Joyce Zonana’s new translation, I opened it, began reading, and just kept reading. From my review:
I loved reading The Child and the River; I loved the feeling of reading it. It took me back to books I’d loved as a child: Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, abridged and bowdlerized versions of Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn, and countless Robinsades. In a letter to a friend, Bosco suggested that The Child and the River was “a novel very good, I think, for children, adolescents, and poets.” Is there a better audience?
Inside the Dream Palace, Sherill Tippins☆
This summer, my wife and I celebrated our anniversary by staying at the venerable Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan. There, we were lucky to enjoy a visit and brief tour of room 629, the former residence of the artist Vali Myers. The current resident, photographer Tony Notarberardino was hosting a party later that night, and the theater curtains outside of his door, accompanied by ethereal music, attracted us to peer in as we were looking around the hotel. Tony graciously invited us for a brief peek before his party, and the rooms are simply otherworldy, covered in murals by Myers along with beautiful paintings, furniture, and other sundries. Among other books, he recommended Sherill Tippins’ history of the hotel, Inside the Dream Palace. Tippins’ book can be read as a history 20th c. modernism focused around one locale. Heroes include Harry Smith, Patti Smith, and Andy Warhol. Fantastic stuff.
This Is Not Miami, Fernanda Melchor
This is not to say that I was disappointed by This Is Not Miami, but in my not review of the collection, I wrote that
This Is Not Miami reads like a minor work, but one nonetheless vital to its creator’s artistic maturation. For me, This Is Not Miami is most appreciable as an apprenticeship work that points toward the Bigger Thing to come. And of course I want more.
Excellent and slight. Did Williams mean to mix Kafka and David Markson, or just arrive at her own place? (She arrived at her own place.) From her collection, a piece called “Nevertheless”:
At some point, Kafka became a vegetarian.
Afterwards, visiting an aquarium in Berlin, he spoke to the fish through the glass.
“Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don’t eat you anymore.”
I saw a very interesting-looking person reading an actor’s edition of Philip Ridley’s play Mercury Fur on a train. The title of the play was interesting too, so I picked it up and read it (not the interesting-looking person’s edition.) The play was fine; perhaps actors might have enlivened its dystopian hysterics. Maybe my inner-voice was a poor director. I worked with the script I had.
Mockingbird, Walter Tevis
Tevis’s dystopian novel, published in 1980 and set centuries in the future, posits a future where humanity has basically forgotten everything, letting cyborgs and robots run the world for them. The premise and sentiment exceed the prose and execution.
Rubicon Beach, Steve Erickson
Three strange strands tangle together in a surreal mess. The parts together do not synthesize, exactly; the whole is not greater than the parts. But Rubicon Beach is vital and odd and singular.
A Frolic of His Own, William Gaddis☆
After a few years of false starts, I finally finished the last Gaddis I hadn’t yet read. I wrote a kinda long riffed onA Frolic, concluding that,
Many contemporary reviewers suggested that A Frolic of His Own was Gaddis’s most accessible novel to date, and it might be. Whereas J R and Carpenter’s Gothic are composed almost entirely in dialogue, Gaddis provides more stage direction and connective tissue in A Frolic. There are also the fragments of other forms: legal briefs, depositions, TV news clips, Oscar’s play… A Frolic of His Own is not the best starting point for anyone interested in William Gaddis’s fiction, although I don’t think that’s where most people start. It is rewarding though, especially read contextually against his other works, in which it fits chaotically but neatly, underscoring the cranky themes in a divergent style that still feels fresh three decades after its original publication. Highly recommended.
Stone Junction, Jim Dodge☆
I just went back and read the review of Stone JunctionI wrote this summer. I put the little star guy up there, because my impression of the novel was that it was one of the best things I read this year—I remember the plot, the imaginative contours that it opened up; I remember the paths it took me on—rereading The Once in Future King, in particular, as well as Riddley Walker. But my actual review hedges a bit more: “In its strongest moments, Stone Junction reads like a YA Pynchon novel; in its weakest moments, it reminded me of Tom Robbins,” I wrote. I think it’s stronger than YA Pynchon, I think I think! But I continued:
The stronger moments prevail, however—Stone Junction is a fun, flighty, and at times unexpectedly heavy summer read. The novel might also be read in (stoned) conjunction with Pynchon’s 1990 twin Vineland. Both novels diagnose the fallout of the 1960s counterculture wave crashing against the Reagan eighties; both seem attempts to, at least in the world of letters, check the burgeoning nostalgic romanticization of that turbulent decade. Pynchon’s is the more flawed, sillier, and better-written effort; Dodge’s is likely his magnum opus… I called Stone Junction “YA Pynchon” above, but I didn’t mean it as an insult—it’s YA in an older sense, in the sense of the novels handed me when I was young, hardly adult, novels that etched their own versions of reality onto our own banal reality; realities more real: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Outsiders, The Once and Future King, The Lord of the Rings, Hatchet…Stone Junction is about youth, but it’s also about maturation, and the ache and melancholy of aging out of the game…
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters is not a great starting place for anyone interested in Le Guin’s worlds. Interested parties would do better to start with The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, or The Left Hand of Darkness—but interested parties are probably aware of that. The book is better suited for folks like me—folks who tore through the Hainish cycle and the Earthsea books and collections, and still wanted a little more. The Wind’s Twelve Quarters is ultimately most interesting as a document of a writer coming into the prime of her powers, and, as such, is indispensable for hardcore Le Guin fans.
Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg, trans. Jenny McPhee
Listened to the audiobook; great stuff, my first Ginzburg.
The Once and Future King, T.H. White☉☆
A perfect book, made perfectly imperfect when capped with its posthumous footnote, The Book of Merlyn—a didactic screed tacked on to a grand Modernist epic, which I hadn’t previously read. It’s probably been thirty years since I’d read The Once and Future King in full; I’d read the first book, The Sword in the Stone, to both of my children when they were young, and before that in my teens, and before that as a kid (big thank you to my cousin Tripp who gave me a paperback copy for Christmas decades ago). But reading the four + one epic (I don’t think Merlyn counts) as a “real” adult was a different matter—I missed so much of what makes The Ill-Made Knight so tragic and what makes the final moments of The Candle in the Wind so unbearably sad and moving. I urge anyone who remembers the contours of this book to return to its rich prose.
Beasts is little big: each of its nine chapters might be read as a short story in which we get a glimpse from one perspective at a balkanized, dystopian post-USA. A species of genetic hybrid called leos are corralled on reservations or outright hunted by the militant Union for Social Engineering; what remains of the Federal Government vies for control with various Autonomous zones; utopian cultists try to hide from the world; slavery has returned under the guise of contractual indentured servitude. A mutant fox, the trickster Reynard, plays kingmaker behind the scenes. The nine chapters refuse to explicitly connect the pieces of the world the present; that is the job of the reader.
Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, César Aira, trans. Chris Andrews☆
A perfect little book, which ends, or nearly ends, with this lovely little line: “The artist, as artist, could always be already dead.”
My Death, Lisa Tuttle
A creepy, cozy literary mystery that blooms into an abyssal loop. I reviewed it here.
Based on a True Story, Norm Macdonald☆
I was not expecting Norm Macdonald’s fake-not-fake-memoir-cum-novel Based on a True Story to be as good as it was. I listened to Norm read his book, which in its finest moments is painfully funny and terribly sad, and in its worst, just goofy—the kind of self-sabotage one might expect from a genius who made sure to derail every track he was otherwise sailing along.
I love how it’s written; I love its themes, its layering, its construction. It’s a dense book that feels light; it’s serious and erudite but also psychologically drawn. Ford eschews exposition. In fact, at times he even sets the reader up to look the wrong way. And this fits with a lot of the themes and motifs and bits of the novels—illusionists, forgers, secret agents, disguises, spies, thieves, and so on. So it’s not just happening in the plot; it’s also happening at the rhetorical level.
Schattenfroh, Michael Lenz, trans. Max Lawton ☆
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Sonic Life, Thurston Moore☆
“I really loved reading Sonic Life. It’s not a perfectly-written or balanced book, but it feels real,” I wrote in my review of Moore’s memoir.
Yaroslav Schwarzstein, from The Sugar Kremlin
The Sugar Kremlin, Vladimir Sorokin, trans. Max Lawton
This forthcoming collection of Sorokin’s novel-in-stories unfolds like a horror-comedy on power, coercion, and Russian soul.
Atticus Lish, from Life Is with People
Life Is with People, Atticus Lish
Doodles.
Poor Things, Alasdair Gray☉
A nice reread. Still haven’t seen the film. My review here.
Aladair Gray, from Poor Things
Suttree, Cormac McCarthy☉☆
Possibly the best book.
(Or at least the best book by an American published in 1979.)
A late year reread—I can’t believe how many connections to The Passenger I’d missed (for example, Sutt has an Aunt Alice he visits in a mental ward). Such a rich, fertile thing, this novel, especially in the way it refuses to be grander than it is, but also is much, much grander than it pretends not to be.
Lapvona, Ottessa Moshfegh
I listened to the audiobook of Moshfegh reading her 2022 novel over my Xmas break. I hadn’t read anything by Moshfegh before; I was aware of her hit novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation though. A colleague had suggested I read Lapvona though, promoting it in the most enticing way: “I really, really hated this, Ed, but I think you’d like it a lot.” She was right—Lapvona is a grimy mix of faux-medieval evil fabulism and insane comedy (I think?) — and wholly abject. A story where Nothing Good Happens—except that’s not right. I loved the end.
The Norm, Vladimir Sorokin, trans. Max Lawton ☆
An intense abject antitotalitarian antiauthoritarian howl against language itself. Fun, funny, gross, grand.
Inside the bowl, the two goldfish are making a Pisces sign, head-to-tail and very still. Penelope sits and peers into their world. There is a little sunken galleon, a china diver in a diving suit, pretty stones and shells she and her sisters have brought back from the sea.
Aunt Jessica and Uncle Roger are out in the kitchen, hugging and kissing. Elizabeth is teasing Claire in the hallway. Their mother is in the W.C. Sooty the cat sleeps in a chair, a black thundercloud on the way to something else, who happens right now to look like a cat. It’s Boxing Day. The evening’s very still. The last rocket bomb was an hour ago, somewhere south. Claire got a golliwog, Penelope a sweater, Elizabeth a frock that Penelope will grow into.
The pantomime Roger took them all to see this afternoon was Hansel and Gretel. Claire immediately took off under the seats where others were moving about by secret paths, a flash of braid or of white collar now and then among the tall attentive uncles in uniform, the coat-draped backs of seats. On stage Hansel, who was supposed to be a boy but was really a tall girl in tights and smock, cowered inside the cage. The funny old Witch foamed at the mouth and climbed the scenery. And pretty Gretel waited by the Oven for her chance. . . .
Then the Germans dropped a rocket just down the street from the theatre. A few of the little babies started crying. They were scared. Gretel, who was just winding up with her broom to hit the Witch right in the bum, stopped: put the broom down, in the gathering silence stepped to the footlights, and sang:
Oh, don’t let it get you,
It will if they let you, but there’s
Something I’ll bet you can’t see—
It’s big and it’s nasty and it’s right over there,
It’s waiting to get its sticky claws in your hair!
Oh, the greengrocer’s wishing on a rainbow today,
And the dustman is tying his tie . . .
And it all goes along to the same jolly song,
With a peppermint face in the sky!
“Now sing along,” she smiled, and actually got the audience, even Roger, to sing:
With a peppermint face in the sky-y,
And a withered old dream in your heart,
You’ll get hit with a piece of the pie-ie,
With the pantomime ready to start!
Oh, the Tommy is sleeping in a snowbank tonight,
And the Jerries are learning to fly—
We can fly to the moon, we’ll be higher than noon,
In our polythene home in the sky. . . .
Pretty polythene home in the sky,
Pretty platinum pins in your hand—
Oh your mother’s a big fat machine gun,
And your father’s a dreary young man. . . .
(Whispered and staccato):
Oh, the, man-a-ger’s suck-ing on a corn-cob, pipe,
And the bank-ers are, eat-ing their, wives,
All the world’s in a daze, while the orchestra plays,
So turn your pockets and get your surprise—
Turn your pockets and get-your surpri-ise,
There was nobody there af-ter all!
And the lamps up the stairway are dying,
It’s the season just after the ball . . .
Oh the palm-trees whisper on the beach somewhere,
And the lifesaver’s heaving a sigh,
And those voices you hear, Boy and Girl of the Year,
Are of children who are learning to die. . . .
From Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow.
Biblioklept 
