Ali Smith, Autumn

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Ali Smith, Autumn

As we feel our way into how to adjust to our new circumstances, wherever we are in the process, I’m appreciating the pieces that writers are sharing to help us look after each other. One of the writers in my current advanced novel-writing class told us that Toni Morrison’s essay “Peril” had helped her through a very hard time right after the election. It’s an intensely useful reminder of how authoritarian governments respond to artists, as well as a reminder of why we have to keep reading and writing: “…stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art. Those writers plying their craft near to or far from the throne of raw power, of military power, of empire building and countinghouses, writers who construct meaning in the face of chaos must be nurtured, protected.” Another writer then shared a Vaclav Havel poem that led me to his writing on hope (as quoted in Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, currently available as a free e-book from Haymarket Books) not as “an estimate of the situation” but “an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.” So as a way of reclaiming our minds and, yes, the hope Havel describes, I want to share some delight with you, from Ali Smith’s first novel in her seasonal quartet, Autumn, about friendship and mortality, bureaucracy and Brexit, “arty art,” time, loss, and the real-life artist Pauline Boty.

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Lillian Howan on Wakako Yamauchi

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Lillian Howan on Wakako Yamauchi

(Guest post by Lillian Howan)

I like the dry heat, the bitter landscape. I like the still sorrow of emptiness. I was born to it.

  – Wakako Yamauchi, Rosebud and Other Stories 

Wakako Yamauchi wrote into her eighties, often about the desert farmlands of the Imperial Valley where she was born in October 1924. The date on her birth certificate is October 25, but she was actually born earlier: there was a delay in officially recording home births in farming communities. During her long life, Yamauchi would explore this gap between an official account and reality, with all its layers of ambiguity.

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Venita Blackburn, Dead in Long Beach, California, Alta’s California Book Club's July book

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Venita Blackburn, Dead in Long Beach, California, Alta’s California Book Club's July book

Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California has made me think (again but also in new ways) about how we deliberately and accidentally splinter our consciousness in the face of the unbearable. I wrote about the book for Alta’s California Book Club: I am wild about the books they choose and the smart, great essays people post and the wonderful live Zoom conversations. Also, I count myself very lucky to keep learning from Anita Felicelli, brilliant writer and brilliant, respectful editor. Here’s the beginning of my piece about the book:

In Venita Blackburn’s original, fierce first novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, Coral E. Brown, a graphic sci-fi novelist, finds her brother dead by suicide and splinters into separate selves. As she fends off grief and horror, the futuristic machines she’s invented to narrate her own novel step in to tell the story with tender, wry curiosity about humanity. As these machines say from the start, “We are responsible for telling this story, mostly because Coral cannot.” Of course, since the machines are her creation, she is telling the story, but obliquely, as a novelist does. They investigate her deep past and family and report on her thoughts and actions after her brother’s death. They draw conclusions about human relationships to destructiveness, debt, desire, minor fame, avoidance, denial, fan fic, and the devastating, insatiable human craving for “More.”

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Zadie Smith, The Fraud

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Zadie Smith, The Fraud

Zadie Smith is fed up. Her most recent novel, The Fraud, is about a famous criminal trial of a potential grand fraud and his obsessed followers, about the bombastic pettiness of the literary world (in 19th century London, but…), and also about the historical crimes and disasters that take place while we’re looking elsewhere, or that we’re seeing through our own layers of misinformation. In particular, she’d like us to actually face up to our tendency to place ourselves and our preferred stories about the world at the center of everything. She is, however, fed up in a particularly Zadie Smith way: insightful, nuanced, hilarious. She’s not just judging bad behavior, she’s curious about confusion and self-delusion. She wants to know everyone’s stories, and though she definitely has opinions, she understands how and why we get it so wrong. Which doesn’t stop her from being wicked funny about pretension, self-inflation, and the excuses we make for ourselves.

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Jessica Hagedorn, The Gangster of Love, and Alta’s California Book Club

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Jessica Hagedorn, The Gangster of Love, and Alta’s California Book Club

In a short essay that’s both a poetic spill of memories and an artistic manifesto, “Why I Write: Blood, Exile, Longing, Obstinate Memory,” for this month’s Alta’s California Book Club, Jessica Hagedorn writes, “I write to exist: to feel everyone & everything,” and, later on, “…& everyone’s a gangster & everything’s a story / guitar & gun / lost brothers / & black pearls & black tears & blood of a poet.” I’ve been loving these California Book Club meetings, the subtle and terrific interviews with a series of extraordinary writers, mostly in conversation with John Freeman and exciting guests. You can also read a variety of short essays about each month’s book. I was excited to have the chance to write one of these pieces about The Gangster of Love (note, the book club webinar is this Thursday, free and open to everyone…registration info below!). Here’s the beginning of my piece, “‘Only Because It’s Forbidden’: Seduction and loss in Jessica Hagedorn’s The Gangster of Love”

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Debra Spark on William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow

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Debra Spark on William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow

(Guest post by Debra Spark)

This will be a celebration of a writer I love that begins with what I am weary of: narratives in which other people are the problem. This is because I am weary of people who cast others as the problem, when that very tendency is the problem. If we cannot see the harm we have done, as well as the harm that has been done to us, we cannot see. As a writer and as a person, I’m interested in what seems truer: shame, self-analysis, owning your own crap.

This mini-rant leads me to one of my favorite books, William Maxwell’s autobiographical novel So Long, See You Tomorrow. The author-narrator are one and the same in this book, and the only person Maxwell really blames is himself, and this even though the story concerns a murder.

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Kikuko Tsumura, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job (Polly Barton, trans.)

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Kikuko Tsumura, There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job (Polly Barton, trans.)

I’ve been rereading Kikuko Tsumura’s weirdly hypnotic There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job. This book comes back to me often, like a song, where you remember the feeling and bits of the tune more than the words. The novel’s narrator, whose name we never learn, is trying, through her series of jobs, to find a place in the world that she can reasonably inhabit. An “easy job.” A job “practically without substance, a job that sat on the borderline between being a job and not.” One that won’t tear at her heart. The character became completely burnt out in her previous work (we don’t learn what that was or what happened until quite late in the book). She’s been living listlessly with her parents, unable even to read, and when she returns to work, at first all she asks for is a job close to home. The book is funny, weird, and still captures something of what it means to earn a living at these precarious jobs: the mixture of confinement, repetitive tasks, tentative or unexpected companionship, loneliness, and a struggle against pointlessness, which the narrator here manages through a sprightly cheerful thoughtfulness. Her obsessively wandering mind runs underneath and around her helpful daylight self, both insightful and in denial. Her delightful, confiding direct way of talking to the reader offers an apparent intimacy that initially hides anything deeper, not only from us but, it seems, from herself. 

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Dara Horn, Eternal Life, and Kevin McIlvoy, Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels

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Dara Horn, Eternal Life, and Kevin McIlvoy, Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels

If you had lived for 2000 years and knew that you wouldn’t (couldn’t) die, how would you spend your days? (Not in a Groundhog Day way, but with a life where each day could potentially “count.”) What would be meaningful to you if you were immortal? Or, if you knew that you had very little time left to live, what would matter most to you? How would you see the world? In Dara Horn’s novel Eternal Life, a woman trades the possibility of her own death for a miracle that saves her son’s life. Through her centuries of life, first in Roman-occupied Jerusalem and then in a variety of places around the world, including in the U.S. in the 21st century, she gets very, very tired of being reborn over and over and especially of watching generations of husbands and children die. In Kevin McIlvoy’s Is It So? Glimpses, Glyphs, & Found Novels, a writer facing his imminent death breaks his perceptions, anecdotes, and secrets into tiny stories and prose poems, seeing the world in glittering, exact detail, longing even for its grotesqueries.

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Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

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Katie Kitamura, Intimacies

The hypnotic quality of Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies comes in part from watching the brackish waters of moral complicity rise around the unnamed narrator, and in part from that narrator’s guarded, mysterious interiority. She leaves out so much in telling the story. Sometimes a book holds back its secrets until late in the story, as part of the narrative tension, but here the restraint is not in the timing of revelations. Those withheld secrets seem to come from Kitamura’s decision about what readers need to know. Or maybe we only learn what the narrator can stand to tell us. Either way, the strategy eliminates so much unnecessary explanation. Questions that come up for me: What is unnecessary? What in a particular novel is necessary and why? How does the strategy of withholding relate to a book’s themes, aesthetic, and project as a whole? 

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Mary M. Slechta, Mulberry Street Stories

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Mary M. Slechta, Mulberry Street Stories

Mary M. Slechta’s brilliant new collection, Mulberry Street Stories (winner of the Kimbilio National Fiction Prize), unfolds a puzzle box of treasures, pulling the reader in as if the book were an engrossing, fractured novel, visiting and revisiting characters from different viewpoints, offering up an intimate, inventive, sometimes hilarious, often heart-wrenching view of all of their secrets. The book starts as the story of a street and a neighborhood and then expands its perspective dramatically, without ever losing its focus on its particular people in their particular place. Characters (living, dead, and somewhere in between) appear, reappear, and disappear. Very human families love each other, fight, try to take care of their young and old, mourn their dead, and lose their possessions and sometimes their memories. They are, or become, or are pursued by, gods (maybe), ghosts, zombies, and vampires. Their children fall or leap off the edge of the world.

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Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: Artful Wildness

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Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: Artful Wildness

“I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night,” says Janina, the narrator of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Some books you read melt away, some lodge in you like a burr: I read this one a couple of years ago, and it’s still playing in my head. Janina, a wild, unforgettable creation, lives in the snowy woods of rural Poland, looks after the summer homes of city people, and teaches in a village. She has just a couple of year-round neighbors, men she thinks of as “Oddball” and “Big Foot.” She holds forth to the reader about Blake, village life, animals, the police, and astrology; Olga Tokarczuk has apparently given herself, and Janina, permission to say absolutely anything.

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Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other: Breaking Forms

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Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other: Breaking Forms

Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other branches and coils through a dozen lives (all the metaphors that come to mind are natural: trees, rivers, lava), unfurling beautifully and peaceably in some places, wildly in others. I’ve been thinking off and on about this book for years, have taught it, sometimes start an MPP entry about Evaristo, decide this isn’t a format in which I can capture anything about what she does, realize that “capturing” is antithetical to this book’s project (though analysis and second guessing are part of what Evaristo does so brilliantly), give up. And start again. So today, without capturing anything at all, I’m going to go ahead and celebrate the way she breaks forms.

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Tove Jansson, Fair Play and The Summer Book

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Tove Jansson, Fair Play and The Summer Book

They lived at opposite ends of a large apartment building near the harbor, and between the studios lay the attic, an impersonal no-man’s-land of tall corridors with locked plank doors on either side. Mari liked wandering across the attic; it drew a necessary, neutral interval between their domains. She could pause on the way to listen to the rain on the metal roof, look out across the city as it lit its lights, or just linger for the pleasure of it.

They never asked, “Were you able to work today?” Maybe they had, twenty or thirty years earlier, but they’d gradually learned not to. There are empty spaces that must be respected—those often long periods when a person can’t see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone.

                                                (From “Videomania” in Fair Play)

Tove Jansson knew these empty spaces well. She came from a family of artists and, in addition to being a writer, was serious about her painting and illustration. She and her partner of more than forty years, visual artist Tuulikki Pietilä, spent winters in Helsinki and thirty years of summers alone together on the tiny island of Klovharun in an archipelago off the coast of Finland.

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David Haynes on Right by My Side

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David Haynes on Right by My Side

(Guest post by David Haynes)

“I’m a very dangerous boy. I’ve been known to say almost anything.”

Marshall Fields Finney said that.  He’s the narrator in Right by My Side, which was my first novel. It’s fair, I think, to consider the first paragraph of my own book for the MPP—since I don’t remember much about writing the book, and it is, after all, now an official “Penguin Classic.” Which has been my occasion for revisiting Marshall and company, thirty years after publication and close to thirty-seven years after hearing that first line in my head. When a book is reissued, you are assigned by your editors to read it again in search of necessary updates, mostly copyediting errors that slid by the first time (a painful subject for a different essay). So, I did, and it very much felt like reading any book that’s new to you for the first time—until it wasn’t, until it was like, “Oh, I remember this guy.”  Both Marshall and the guy who dreamed him up, that is. And still that first paragraph blows me away, in that way that openings that stick with us tend to do. 

“I steal.”[1]

“I was not there, yet I was there.”[2]

“When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy.”[3]

“I am born.”[4]

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Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow

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Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow

Rilke wrote a famous assertion about distance and intimacy, which one can find all over the web and also quoted in a zillion books: “Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.” When I was younger, I wanted to argue with those “infinite distances” (probably I still do?), but now I wonder about seeing “the other whole against the sky.” Do the distances between us help us see each other?

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Zadie Smith, On Beauty, and Jeanette Winterson, The Passion: Domesticity and Wildness

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Zadie Smith, On Beauty, and Jeanette Winterson, The Passion: Domesticity and Wildness

Right now I’m teaching On Beauty and The Passion to an advanced novel-writing class and so have been rereading both novels. Maybe one of the reasons I love them so much is that they are about errant or unexpected love and that they each, in their own way, subvert domesticity. They remind me of my childhood family parties. Back when my parents were alive, we used to celebrate all the extended family birthdays, and every other occasion, with as many family members as we could gather, friends, and people invited on the spur of the moment. Not many of my father’s university colleagues were invited, even before the divorce, since according to my mother the mess of our family and chaos of the house embarrassed him. All the strange art covering the walls, the hoarded and treasured supplies, and then, at parties, fiery words and messy apologies, someone crying in a bathroom or hallway, people embracing afterward and assuring everyone of their love. Immersive family theater.

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Marcy Dermansky on Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here

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Marcy Dermansky on Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here

(Guest post by Marcy Dermansky)

Anywhere But Here by Mona Simpson is one of the books that made me want to be a writer. I loved everything about it so much: the writing; Anne, the teenager protagonist; the complicated relationship with her mother. I loved the cover. I wanted to be able to create something like that. Basically, all of the short stories I wrote in my early twenties were about sad beautiful girls wanting more, and there it was, perfect in a book.

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Elena Ferrante, Days of Abandonment and The Lost Daughter: Hypnotic Intensity

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Elena Ferrante, Days of Abandonment and The Lost Daughter: Hypnotic Intensity

The first time I tried to watch the movie version of The Lost Daughter, I stopped about a quarter of the way through: the level of emotion felt unendurable. I’ve since talked to at least a couple of friends who stopped and never went back. But I couldn’t get it out of my mind, so I read the novel, took a week or so to recover, then watched the rest of the film. Both versions still recur to me, a few months later, and with so much happening in life and in the world, I wondered what makes them so hypnotic, how they can feel so strange and dreamlike (full of actions no reasonable person would take) but also touch home for so many of us."

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[Name of author] on Carole Maso’s Ava: An Uncommon Refrain

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[Name of author] on Carole Maso’s Ava: An Uncommon Refrain

(Guest post by [Name of author])

Rarely do I marvel at the standard paragraph. (Forgive the strict literalism with which I’ve approached my “marvelous paragraph” essay.) It’s a bit much and not enough for me. I prefer it broken up into stray lines or drawn out into full pages (/whole novels). The paragraph is where poetry gives up the ghost, signaling the advent of “prose” (let’s pretend this is an unproblematic assertion), and as a failed poet turned “experimental” “novelist,” I have a contrarian (/juvenile) resistance to structural stability. An aversion to all things…congealed?

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Yang Huang on George Eliot’s Middlemarch: Owning up

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Yang Huang on George Eliot’s Middlemarch: Owning up

(Guest post by Yang Huang)

George Eliot’s Middlemarch changed the way I think about reckoning in fiction. A sprawling novel about provincial life in 19th century England, Middlemarch is endowed with an urgent plot and slow-burning character development. Eliot is not protective of her characters; she takes them to the cliff and makes them jump. Dorothea is a high-minded young woman who marries a shriveled old scholar. Mr. Casaubon suffers almost as much as Dorothea in their incompatible marriage; the spirited young wife, with all her good intentions, perhaps drives him to an early grave.

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