Reading Roundup: July 2023

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. There’s a charming, affable character in this novel who is referred to by several other characters as an “NPC,” who quietly becomes the main character, if this novel could be said to have a main character. At any rate he gets to narrate one of its most moving and formalistically interesting chapters.
That’s how I feel about this book. I underestimated it at first. For the first quarter, I expected it to be a pleasant and juicy read, combining a classic love triangle with an insidery look at a fictional gaming company and appealing nostalgic references to 90s and 00s culture, in gaming and beyond. By the last quarter, I had to admit how attached I was to its improbably charismatic characters and how personally I took their wins and losses. There are a few oddities that contributed to my first impression–although it does so deftly, the narrative seems to feel obliged to explain both what video games are and what the 90s were, as if trying to appeal to the widest possible age range. Which is weird, because this is a story aimed squarely at people my age, and probably yours: the Oregon Trail generation, the ones who remember life before video games and thus have deep emotional attachments to the first ones we fell in love with. Everyone else can fall in love with these characters and their relationships to one another, but their relationships to gaming belong to us.

The Upstairs House by Julia Fine. I thought I knew what I was getting into when I read the summary: a new mother, physically and mentally exhausted from giving birth, finds that the ghost of Margaret Wise Brown has taken up residence in her building. Margaret Wise Brown is the author of Goodnight Moon and other childrens’ stories, but I’d had a glimpse of her biography; she seemed glamorous to me, tragic given her premature death, but a kind of feminist hero in a sense. I expected the kind of narrative you get when an exhausted mother meets a feminist hero.
This book is so much better than that. It is visceral and unrelenting in the way it depicts the physicality of the narrator’s postpartum body, her chaotic emotions, her guilt and anxiety about the academic life she put on hold, her craving for the company of the mature, intellectual woman she perceives Margaret Wise Brown to be. But Margaret is, after all, a ghost–and ghosts are unpredictable, frightening, something other than human. This was a suspenseful, compelling read.

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link. There are seven fairy tales in this collection, and each and every one is a banger. They are such a delectable and impeccably crafted balance of the earthly and the eldritch, the universal and the particular. Many of her characters are traveling, as befits a fairy tale; whether they are walking along a road or trapped in an airport awaiting an ever-delayed flight, they have to avoid the traps that lie in those liminal spaces. My favorites, to my surprise, are the romances; unlike the flat, transitional nature of love in folktales, love in these stories is painful and complicated, yet absolutely worth descending to hell for. (The queen of hell reigns in a surreal suburb; it’s easy to accidentally eat the food of the fairyfolk when it comes in such a mundane guise.)

I Keep My Exoskeletons To Myself by Marisa Crane. This odd but riveting book made a good companion to The Upstairs House; both narrators must find a way to parent and protect their brand-new infants while feeling (and being!) relatively isolated. And Exoskeletons has the kind of fragmented prose that suited the narrators of Dept of Speculation and What We Lose when they suffered loss and tried to hang onto their identities after becoming mothers. But that’s where the resemblance stops; this post-partum narrative takes place in a dystopian surveillance state, where characters are watched via cameras in their homes and some have been assigned additional shadows to warn others of supposed crimes they committed. Including the narrator, as well as her brand new baby who is saddled with the blame for her second mother’s death by childbirth.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. I read half on my flight to Memphis and the rest on the way back, which was helpful, because this would have been a slow read if not for that space. The plot and main characters are fascinatingly twisty, centered on a New Zealand estate that abuts a national park. The estate owners, recently knighted by the British monarch, struggle to sell their land after a deadly landslide. A radical farming collective wants the land to grow crops to give to the needy. An American billionaire wants the land, and tells everyone different reasons why. The author’s style is a little on the dry and didactic side, which I sort of remember from her first book; different chapters feature different POV characters and present more as psychological profiles than as narratives. I can see the point of that, just as I can see the point of the bleak and abrupt ending, but I don’t think I care for it.

Some short poems and prose I liked:
Love and the deli counter by Jill McDonough
My X by Molly Giles
How Many by Bryan Washington

Elsewhere

This is an old post, but I’ve been thinking about it again: Kelly Link described a writing strategy where she makes a list of everything she loved in other people’s fiction, and then seamlessly begins riffing and generating her own story ideas on top of that. As I read White Cat, Black Dog, I imagined that I could see places where she did this. “The White Road” could have taken place in the traveling Shakespeare troupe from Station Eleven, if the pandemic was replaced by a scourge of fae-like monsters. “The Game of Smash and Recovery” reminded me of some of my favorite recent sci fi books and games. I get the sense that Kelly Link is a voracious reader of new fiction, but also able to transmogrify the things she loves into something entirely new.

That article also comes in this delightfully collegial conversation between Kelly Link and Carmen Maria Machado, where they also touch on some of the stories behind the stories. And if you, like me, simply cannot spend enough time in this space mulling about fairy tales and what makes them meaningful, you can watch this conversation with Link, Machado, and Aimee Bender.

I love advice columns and I love Isabelle Allende and bringing the two together is wickedly genius.

As an art minor, I can explain what I find visually, historically, and philosophically interesting about many artworks that I love. I cannot explain why I love Louise Nevelson’s art. I just do. There’s something primal in me that responds to her strange, dark cabinetry. I used to eat lunch by an enormous outdoor Nevelson sculpture when I worked at the art museum; that same sculpture has been moved to my university’s campus, and I feel that same sense of homecoming and heart-lifting when I see it: recognition.
All this to say, I will be leaping on this new Nevelson monograph just as soon as I can.

This newsletter gets at exactly what I didn’t like about Birnam Wood, although he seemed to feel more positively about it: Genre writing, show don’t tell, and what actually sells

BARBIE and the Cinematic History of Weaponized Pink

Minutiae

I went back to the Pine Barrens with some friends of my gentleman, and wandered the trails in a different part of the preserve, picking and eating wild blueberries as we went. Afterward we swam in a cold, cedar-colored creek. I met up with some tree tenders to check on trees that were planted last fall; we wrapped dressmaker tape around their slender trunks, assessed the vitality of their crowns, and weeded and raked the soil in their pits so they could soak up the summer storms. I pulled invasive purple loosetrife out of the lake in my favorite park one hot, gorgeous morning; despite the heat, I felt really happy and satisfied identifying birds and plants, and wandering through the park’s weekend outdoor market for sesame balls and fresh mango.

With my ecology class, I explored a serpentine barrens, where wildflowers clung to the little bit of soil that gathered on greenish striated rock, and a forest seep, where groundwater simply flowed out of the slopes and created little pools for skunk cabbage and frogs. We had plans to visit a superfund site which were cancelled due to rain; I spent that morning quietly finishing a novel and loving it. I’ve learned so much and enjoyed so much on these outdoor excursions, but as the heat and humidity ramped up in July, I have found it pretty exhausting also.

I spent a long weekend in Memphis, swimming and getting sunburned and playing games with my family. We mostly stay home and enjoy being together, but we did go to Beale Street one day. It stormed so hard that we were trapped in A. Schwab for a few hours, so we got ice cream floats from the soda fountain and watched a trash can blow along the street in the downpour.

My friends gathered at an apartment complex for a swim day, but it stormed all afternoon, so we ate pizza and played Tears of the Kingdom and screamed like we were having a slumber party. Another night, we went to see Jaws in a movie theater and spent the entire next week yelling about sharks in the group chat.

For Dance Day, I brought my gentleman to some partner dance classes. My knee still needs a little support, but I enjoyed the workshops so much I remembered why I started dance classes in the first place. Afterward, we went to the recital and saw all the different classes perform–including my class, who looked stunning and danced beautifully that I got a little teary. I am hoping to get back to the barre in August.