California

California, by Edan Lepucki, is gripping. I read it in three days, slowed only by the birth of my son. Otherwise, I probably would have knocked it out in a day. Usually, reading puts me to sleep, but I stayed up late with California, coming to bed only after my wife yelled at me from the bedroom to get some sleep. Only guilt, dramatic life changes, and interruptions from hospital staff kept me from the novel.

Set in the title state a generation from now, California is the story of a married couple trying to survive in the crumbling remains of society. It's a frightening, believable post-apocalypse. The novel is propelled not by action, but by unfolding answers to the creepy mysteries of a world after the internet, where the ways that power and economics work are not easy to research. It all holds up. Exploring subject matter that could be maudlin or juvenile in other hands, Lepucki creates characters and situations that are multi-layered, unsettling, and thoroughly human.

My Struggle: Book 6

My Struggle: Book 6 by Karl Ove Knausgaard is 1232 pages long. It took me three months to plow through, and not just from its length. Emboldened by the success of the previous five books in his magnum opus, Knausgaard gives himself permission here to be at his most indulgent. He'll write about wrangling his children for 300 pages, for example. He'll meditate on poetry and narrative voice for 200 pages. He'll revisit his wife's mental illness, making their marriage fraught at best and terrifying at worst (they've since divorced). And he'll read Hitler's autobiography and examine it for hundreds of pages and still, frustratingly, never answer the obvious question: Why did he name his book after Hitler's?

Still, Book 6 was a fine read and a fitting cap to the most interesting piece of work I've probably ever read. For me, Knausgaard's appeal comes from his treatment of time, his structure, and his pacing. He's able to keep momentum, whether spending 50 pages on a single afternoon (the effect of reading in real time) or transcending it all and exploring the eternal: God, art, significance. It's brilliant. Jeffrey Eugenides put it best: Knausgaard broke the sound barrier on the autobiographical novel. It's honest and evasive, thrilling and tedious, stupid and brilliant. It's everything. I think Hamlet, Moby-Dick, and My Struggle belong on the top shelf, books that come closest to really getting at the human condition in the imperfect medium of the written word. 

Actual Air

Actual Air by David Berman was the only collection of poetry I read last year. I normally don't read whole collections of poetry, unless they're written by people I know (Joseph Millar, Bonnie Arning), or genius Poet Laureates (Kay Ryan). But Berman released an album last summer, under the name "Purple Mountains." And I had been listening to a lot of Silver Jews. And he died by suicide in August. 

Actual Air was written in 1999, a totally different time. He wasn't married then, or separated; he hadn't hit the low points of addiction or his estranged relationship with his conservative lobbyist father. He was a young nineties artist making wry, ironic observations about a pre-internet world. The collection is mostly a delight, with a few high points ("Snow," "Self-Portrait at 28"), and a few more forgettable, too-cute experiments in wordplay. Still, I was entertained. A surprise favorite was the last poem, "The Double Bell of Heat." A deaf adult man returns to his parents' house and brakes for their "Slow Deaf Child" sign. It's funny and strange and a little sad: exactly how I think of David Berman when I remember him, which is often.

White Fragility

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo is a short, powerful look at a phenomenon that, once pointed out, exists everywhere. It's controversial, though, and I've had several people laugh aloud when they see the title of the book I'm reading. Potential readers need to accept the following: almost no one considers themself racist; racism persists; unexamined, often subconscious assumptions allow racism to persist. DiAngelo, who is white, understands the reflexive defensiveness that almost all white people adopt when confronted with white fragility, and she guides the (presumably white) reader as gently as possible to see the topic. As mentioned, white fragility exists everywhere.

I'm reading two other books in this season of my life about this topic: How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi and Biased by Jennifer Eberhardt, PhD. Together, they make up a sort of anti-racist trilogy that pushes me outside of my comfort zone. White Fragility was deeply personal, and at times the voices that DiAngelo would challenge ("I was taught to treat everyone the same"/"I don't see color"/"I judge people by what they do, not who they are") sounded like they were coming from inside my head.

Vertigo

Vertigo by W. G. Sebald is the first in a series of strange, beautiful works by a true original. Like The Emigrants and Rings of Saturn, other Sebald novels I've enjoyed, Vertigo is a plotless, meandering exploration of the European past. Driven by theme (in this case, titular) and containing hazy, mostly related photographs, the novel sets the template for Sebald's later works, the greatest of which, by my estimation, is Rings of Saturn. Sebald is weird and dense and singular. I'll reread him.

I actually finished Vertigo a few weeks ago, but didn't update this important blog immediately because I received a heavy package in the mail: my wife had ordered Volume 6 of My Struggle! Karl Ove Knausgaard's final installment is fantastic. I've been reading it at night and in school when I get the chance. I'm about 300 pages deep, with only 900 to go. Life, right now, is vivid and meaningful.

Appointment in Samarra

Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara is a troubling, fast-paced, funny, and thoroughly engaging read. It takes place among the upper classes in the American 1920's and is easy to compare to F. Scott Fitzgerald's work, notably "Winter Dreams." O'Hara doesn't write with the beautiful, poetic sheen of Fitzgerald; the novel is at times clunky or obvious. But Appointment in Samarra is more realistic than "Winter Dreams," and much more in-depth. The plot developments are surprising, yet believable, and I was genuinely unsettled by the decisions of Julian English, the protagonist. 

I'd first encountered Julian English in Joan Didion's essay "On Self-Respect." In that fine essay, she compares English's lack of self-respect to Jordan Baker's (from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby) possession of it. It took most of the text for me to see what Didion meant. English and Baker both careen through life carelessly and selfishly. On the outside, they are both immoral and worthy of contempt. But throughout Appointment in Samarra, we see how English implodes from his behavior, while Baker maintains her cool detachment from the effects of her conduct on others. Julian English's inability to own up to his actions--his lack of self-respect--is ultimately the most destructive force in the novel.

Mosby's Memoirs

Mosby's Memoirs by Saul Bellow is a slim collection of short stories. All of the stories are good, and one ("The Old System") is excellent. They're thematically linked by ambition and finance, glancing not infrequently at the elusive American Dream. I might teach one in class this next year. It's been a while since I've read Saul Bellow, and I was happy for the reminder.

I chose Mosby's Memoirs for its size, above all. My 1969 edition is a physically small book, perfect for squirreling away in backpack. I did just that last weekend, when my buddies and I completed the Timberline Trail around Mt. Hood in four days. I read Bellow at night, while wind roared in the dark pines above my tent. 

So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch

So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl One Knausgaard is an interesting work of criticism by one great Norwegian artist about another. Knausgaard, the biggest literary celebrity in his country, wrote this extended essay as a companion to an instillation that he curated at the Munch Museum in Oslo. As Edvard Munch is best known for The Scream and Knausgaard is best known for My Struggle, there's a nice existential companionship they seem to share. The book can be dense, and it feels incomplete. Still, the strongest moments, when a great novelist compares his medium to another, and the general observations about art and form, are worth the read overall. 

The text is pretty academic. I can mostly keep up with art criticism; I understood about 85% of So Much Longing in So Little Space. (That said, if I hadn't read What Are You Looking At? by Will Gompertz, or taken an excellent art history class at Oregon State by the late John Maul, I would have drowned in this text. My gratitude, then, to Gompertz and Maul.) Knausgaard assumes a lot from his readers. This can be daunting, but there's a point, two-thirds of the way through, where he interviews others artists and reveals his own ignorance about Munch. This fills him with shame, and also makes me love him. It's nice to stay with a writer that is ambitious enough to take on any subject, but honest enough to reveal his own limitations. 

Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff

Shadowlands, by Anthony McCann, chronicles the 2016 takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by right-wing protestors. McCann, a poet and MFA instructor, approaches the subject from several angles. The book is a blend of research, reflection, personal reportage, and extended poetic vignettes. While some of the "plot" has gaps and assumes the reader can just research the story, and while some of the poetic snapshots feel overwrought, in total the book is a huge achievement. It's an example of the wide possibilities of nonfiction. (It helps that Maggie Nelson, the genius behind 2015's The Argonauts, helped McCann with the completion of Shadowlands.) This is all fitting, as the story requires multiple approaches. The Malheur occupation only lasted for a few months of the cable news cycle, and it was easy to fit it into a polarized, Trumpian narrative of our divided country. But the reality, as is true with most media narrative, is infinitely more complex. At 400 pages, Shadowlands is a long book because to understand the story, you need to understand things like indigenous history, public land use, the relationship between the 1st and 2nd Amendment, grazing rights, prison reform, online militias, jury nullification, and Manifest Destiny.

I was enraged at the Malheur occupation when it happened. I had been to that refuge. That news story hit me personally--as an Oregonian, as a champion of public lands, as a pacifist. One of the remarkable aspects of Shadowlands is that McCann changed my mind. He has essentially the same politics and temperament that I do. But in the course of the text, he interrogated his own anger, spent countless hours with the characters, and examined the situation honestly. In the closing chapters, my politics remained more or less the same, but I was forced to view the occupation with a deeper empathy. As misguided and silly as the takeover had been, the protesters were right about a lot, and they followed their beliefs with a religious zeal. In fact, spirituality is a major theme of the book. Its questions go beyond policy, biology, and history. Really, the effect of Shadowlands is a greater appreciation of the huge complexities of life as a social organism living in this wonderful land, during this time in our country's history. Like the author wandering through a beautiful public reserve, at the end of the text, the only appropriate response I felt was humility, and wonder. 

The Summer Book

The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson, belongs to the genre of literary fiction where characters work through grief. Usually, the loss is barely mentioned, as it is here. Usually, the characters behave strangely and sometimes destructively, often unable to articulate their sense of dislocation. The Catcher in the Rye is a good example of this genre. In Jansson's novel, a small girl and her grandmother deal with the loss of the girl's mother on an island in the Sea of Finland. The girl's father is present but ghostly, given almost no space on the page and often preoccupied with some kind of "work." So in their own way, the two generations-spanning women forge a unique sense of family and understanding, all against a spectacular natural backdrop. 

The Summer Book is written in a skein of small vignettes. Often hypnotic and preoccupied with natural things, like birds and seaweed, the novel drifts through the title season, making the landscape its protagonist. Minor characters, when they emerge every two chapters or so, don't feel real, as if they were under water or out in a deep fog. What's interesting is the book's persistence on strange metaphors, like an excellent late meditation, by the small girl, on earthworms separating and still living. This is as close as the reader gets to a clear theme, the sense that emotionally shattered people will fixate on the minutiae at the edge of perception, hoping to find truth. 

Against Everything

Against Everything is a collection of essays by Mark Greif that is, well, against everything. He criticizes reality TV, exercise, the Iraq War, pop music, consumerism, and so on. Two of the sixteen essays were great--one on Octomom (connecting her vilification to the 2008 financial crisis), and one on modern warfare (with heroic, mythological soldiers fighting in one-sided campaigns that cannot be considered war). As Greif is an English instructor at Stanford and an editor at a literary magazine,  his essays are well written and rooted in theory and philosophy. That said, I had a funny response to the book: I found Greif overly sensitive and alarmist (against exercise? really?), and yet the strength of the writing and his surprising connections buoyed the reading overall. In other words, I disagreed with most of the book, and also liked most of the book. 

The root of my disagreement with Greif is right there in the preface. He is inspired by Thoreau. He grew up near Walden Pond. Though it's implicit, he considers himself Thoreau's spiritual descendent. I'm more of an Emerson man myself. To me, Thoreau is every affluent teenager judging those with less privilege. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," Thoreau claims, with no basis, and then continues his hippie, freeloading condescension. Since Mark Greif aligns with Thoreau philosophically, I find many of his conclusions incorrect. But purely as a writer, I would much rather read Greif than the famous--sententious--transcendentalist.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway is much, much longer than The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to Arms, and yet it covers a shorter time period, only about four days. The effect of this is that we seem to encounter every action, spoken word, and even private thought of those days. This is deliberate, as one of the themes is that a lifetime can be condensed into important events that last less than a week. The novel is more plot-driven than other Hemingway texts I've read, and the outcome of those four days is an important question that emerges early.

I really like Hemingway. By my estimation, The Sun Also Rises is a rare perfect novel. The short story collection In Our Time is right there as well. Some of his later work varies in quality a bit, and while For Whom the Bell Tolls may not be perfect (a little too much plot, some awkward dialogue/translation choices), it's still one of the best books in all American literature. A secondary character named Pilar is among the great voices in Hemingway's work, and her storytelling contains some of the most beautiful and challenging vignettes I've ever read.

Bright Lights, Big City

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney is the literary equivalent of a Cocteau Twins song. It's a cocaine-fueled binge through New York in the early eighties, where everyone wears sweet outfits and the women are rated on their statuesque, art-deco "cheekbones." It's hazy and decadent and fun. The protagonist--"you" in the novel's strange second-person point of view--is a fact checker at a magazine exactly like the New Yorker who parties all night to get over his wife's departure and, we later learn, other personal tragedies. Apparently there's a Michael J. Fox movie based on the novel, and I'd like to see it. The book mostly held up, though the last thirty pages veered toward the maudlin, then back again, as though flirting with, but not totally committing to, a Hollywood ending. 

McInerney is a member of the literary "brat pack," the small group of writers that led gaudy, precocious lives in the 1980's. The only other brat packer I've read is Bret Easton Ellis. I found Ellis's Less Than Zero well written but nauseating in its subject matter, and I probably won't go back to him. Still, something about early summer makes me want to crank up a synthesizer-laden dance track, drive around at night under neon lights, and come home to a good brat pack novel. 

Killers of the Summer Moon

Killers of the Summer Moon by David Grann is a suspenseful, absorbing true story of the Osage killings of the 1920's. Until Grann wrote this book, this event was mostly forgotten to history. It tells  of how the Osage Tribe in Oklahoma secured mineral rights to their own land just before an oil boom, subsequently becoming some of the richest people in the world. Within a few years of the boom, many of the tribe began to be killed. The book charts the quest for justice, and seems to reach its conclusion two-thirds of the way through, but the last third is the best, and saddest, and most compelling read. 

A combination of racism, lax state law, and an almost nonexistent federal government allowed the violent plunder to last as long as it did. Grann credits the FBI with mostly stopping the killings (though he's quick to applaud specific agents, not the director, J. Edgar Hoover), along with the desperate actions of the Osage. As the book drew to a close, my overwhelming feeling was of sadness. Killers of the Summer Moon is an exciting detective story, and then subtly, and rightly, transitions into a longer meditation on the injustices of this piece of American history. It's sobering. While the book does its best, and is fantastically researched, in all likelihood, some questions will never be answered about the Osage killings.

Braving the Wilderness

Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown was loaned to me by a staff member at my school. I intended to politely thumb through it and ended up reading the whole thing. It's a fast-paced nonfiction text that I suppose would fall under the "self-help" genre, but it's probably a bit more than that. The "wilderness" in the title is the fraught cultural environment that we all inhabit during these social-media-driven times. It's hard not to like Brown. She's a big-hearted Texan researcher with a complicated background, and she authentically  desires human kinship and understanding. Her book reads like a TED Talk, and sometimes New-Age feel goodery, but I liked the message.

The reason the staff member loaned me Braving the Wilderness was that one of the chapters ("People Are Hard to Hate Close Up. Move In.") reminded her of a graduation speech I gave a few years ago. In my speech, I discussed how true dialogue only happens face-to-face, never on social media. Brown agrees. As I scroll through my Bookface feed, I am constantly bombarded by second-person, straw-man, if-then attacks. (A recent meme berated "me" for not supporting queer people of color, and thus promoting rainbow capitalism and police brutality.) This hostility is one of the great problems of our times, and if Brené Brown wants to use her growing cultural influence to promote peace and harmony, then more power to her.

Kudos

Kudos by Rachel Cusk is a satisfying ending to her Outline Trilogy. I don't mean "satisfying" in any moral sense--if anything, it ends with one of the most hopeless images I can imagine. I mean that Kudos maintains the sheer nerve of her whole vision, which is to create a series of novels in which the narrator reveals almost nothing about herself and yet, somehow, thoroughly explores the unspeakable. In a broad sense, the series is about a woman coming out of a brutal divorce. We learn this only through the ways that others speak to her, as each novel is a stream of one-sided conversations from everyone she encounters. On any further examination, however, the trilogy is also a meditation on identity, feminism, fate, literature, celebrity, family, captivity, the indifference of nature, and on and on and on. There are so many ways to encounter the texts that they demand multiple readings, and I'm excited to start them again. 

Cusk ignores some literary elements: plot totally, and mostly setting. But she's eager to include clear symbolism, like feral dogs, or airplanes, or fire, or the ocean, or architecture. These are relentlessly present in her slim works, and as readers we know that she's circling back on herself, fixating on these images. Since she leaves out so much, the spotlight shines brightly on what she chooses to observe. And yet, what are we to make of the dogs, tearing through houses, feasting on wild animals, ripping families apart as the members choose loyalty to pets more than to each other? Like Flannery O'Connor, the symbols are in one sense blunt and obvious, and in another sense very resistant to easy interpretation. I feel like whole graduate-level courses could be  taught on the Outline Trilogy, with each student writing volumes on one aspect of this incredible work. 

Whiskey When We're Dry

Whiskey When We're Dry by John Larison is a big western novel set in the 1880's in a state somewhere near Colorado. Its protagonist is a hardscrabble teenage girl, recently orphaned, on a quest to find her outlaw older brother. Larison is a proud Oregon State MFA grad and instructor, and this fine novel has attracted notice in Hollywood, where its story has been acquired by the same people that made the new Planet of the Apes reboots. If the film (or TV adaptation) follows the book at all, it will be fast-paced, violent, and surprising.

Whiskey When We're Dry is balanced in that the action never lags. The setting would change every page and a half or so, but the writing wasn't gimmicky--ending each chapter with cliffhangers, for example. But because it moved so quickly, it felt light and cinematic. I was reminded of the Coen brothers' Hail, Caesar! or Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! While the novel mercifully lacked an exclamation point in the title, it often was as breezy as those films. All three works were masterfully made, with consistent and inviting voices, but Whiskey When We're Dry achieved a greater depth in its high stakes, eventually inhabiting the territory of Cormac McCarthy or Herman Melville. Actually, the closest comparison I can think of is another great western, John Williams's Butcher's Crossing. In that novel, a young transcendentalist heads west and, after unspeakable violence and calamity, becomes a cold-blooded early modernist. Both novels are adventurous. Both include coming-of-age protagonists. And both use the vehicle of the western novel to transport the reader into much darker and introspective places.

Spring

Spring by Karl Ove Knausgaard is the third in his "seasons" tetralogy. Each is a letter to his daughter, who is in utereo, and then an infant, in the year the series covers. Spring, and the entire series, resists easy genre definitions. They're a blend of essay and memoir, leaning heavily on one in one installment, and abandoning that form in another. This one is mostly a long memoir that drifts around one horrifying event. The whole book hovers over the tragedy like a haze, and it's as gripping as it is uncomfortable. 

Knausgaard is probably my favorite active writer now. He's weird and banal and dour--and absolutely fantastic. I could read him write about anything. He usually does write about anything: making breakfast, finding a parking spot, arguing with his kids over TV time, mowing the lawn. Somehow, it's great. He's figured out how to describe the most tedious events with enough suspense and tension that later, after about twenty pages or so, you're in a completely different place. When the shattering event does happen in his work, you've been inhabiting his world for so long, in such a believable way, that it's all the more devastating.  

Political Fictions

Political Fictions by Joan Didion is a series of extended essays ranging chronologically from the Dukakis campaign in 1988 to the 2000 Election. As it was released a week after September 11th, 2001, it was immediately forgotten. I rarely see this book in bookstores, and even though Didion is my favorite writer, hadn't read it until now. The central thesis of the book is that during that time the American "political process did not reflect but increasingly proceeded from a series of fables about American experience." Didion's own politics are mentioned in the foreword, a disillusioned, laissez-faire Goldwater conservatism that switched to the Democratic Party in the wake of Reaganism. If she ran for office and had a constituency, it would be the enormous percentage of Americans that prefer not to vote in elections. 

Political Fictions is great, of course, but it's a product of the times. A lot has changed since 2000. I wonder how she'd write about the Trump Administration. On one hand, President Trump appeals to a hazy sense of spiritual nostalgia, exactly as she describes political language in her essay "God's Country." On the other hand, the nonsensical campaign discourse that she spends a good portion of the book deconstructing is absent in his unorthodox rhetoric. Political Fictions was a good document of its era, and I wish that we still had Didion's laser focus on our own. 

The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin keeps the streak alive. It's the third great book I've read from her--totally different than her others, but still terrific. In it, a man in the dystopian near future discovers that his dreams have the ability to alter reality. The natural consequences of this, when revealed to his therapist, become the stuff of fable. Indeed, the novel is a brisk 180 pages, and reads more like a parable than her other works. 

One thing I loved about the story is its specificity. Le Guin is a proud Oregon writer, and in the novel we encounter small towns like Zigzag and French Glen, Portland landmarks like the Lloyd Center and the St. John's bridge, and geology like the Coast Range and Mt. Hood. Aimee Bender, another good writer prone to the magical and fantastic, takes the opposite approach, deliberately making her worlds vague and universal. But I liked Le Guin's persistence in rooting her spiritual fantasy to a very real place. The Lathe of Heaven had just enough authority, in its reality, to make the subconscious flights of fancy that much more jarring. 

This House of Sky

This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind by Ivan Doig is a ruminating, reflective memoir of early-life sheep ranching in Montana. Doig is a well-known western voice, one of the giants, and this is my first time reading him. I liked it: it's a thoughtful, well-constructed book--maybe a little dense, but satisfying. It reminded me of the works of William Kittredge, an Oregon State grad and fellow western thinker. Both writers situate their lives' stories within the context of colonization and the changing American West.

I liked Doig's description of Glacier National Park, as seen from the East: the mountains "armored with rimrock and icefield . . . all the hundred miles of gashing skyline . . . the reefline of the entire continent." I've seen that, too, and he gets it right. I've spent some time in the Big Sky State--my wife and I try to get over there every few years--and there's something about that place that amplifies the West. For the unintroduced, This House of Sky is a good place to begin. 

Lincoln in the Bardo

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders won the Booker Prize in 2017. It's about one night, in a cemetery, in Washington D. C., in 1862. "Bardo" is a Tibetan term for the transitional period between death and rebirth, and this novel literally involves Abraham Lincoln, grieving over the recent death of his son, as he moves sadly among the undead. Most of the narration is the voices of these souls, many of whom are in denial about their condition. Interestingly, Saunders also includes a variety of actual nonfiction sources about Lincoln, and the effect is an echoing, kaleidoscopic mosaic. Although the voices are at times repetitive or juvenile, the meditations on grief and slavery are transcendent, and elevate the novel. There are passages I read and reread, struck by the beauty of Saunders's language. 

The novel is a quick read--over one hundred chapters in 340 pages. I feel like I've been tearing through these books. In the last month, I've been reading about one a week. It's mostly the works themselves: I am a slow reader by nature, and when the paperback edition of Karl One Knausgaard's My Struggle: 6 comes out later this spring, it'll take me at least a month to knock that one off. Still, it's satisfying to add notches to my belt. 

Transit

Transit by Rachel Cusk is the second in her "Outline" trilogy. I read the first, Outline, in January. Transit is terrific. It continues to follow the London writer, Faye, as she navigates the post-marriage expectations of middle adulthood. It is still mostly focused on longer dialogues between Faye and a variety of characters: her contractor, her hairdresser, her extended family. While every conversation is believable and ordinary on the surface, underneath there's a brutal tension that, in this novel (unlike Outline), sometimes explodes to the surface. Fueled by this momentum, Transit is a quick and satisfying read. Cusk is becoming one of my favorite writers: she treats the reader like an adult and her sentences are as well crafted as anything by Didion or Hemingway.

I love the point-of-view choices in Transit. It's all in first-person, from Faye's perspective, and yet you are told almost nothing about Faye. For example, she describes a reading she gives with two other writers at a literary festival somewhere. She devotes twenty pages to those writers, both memoirists, as they describe their childhood trauma and their sexuality. When it's her turn to read to the audience, she narrates "I took my papers out of my bag and unfolded them. My hands shook with cold holding them. There was the sound of the audience settling into its seats. I read aloud what I had written. When I had finished I folded the papers and put them back in my bag, while the audience applauded." I imagine that Faye revealed something at that reading: reflections on divorce, struggles with children, etc. But I wasn't going to read it. Almost every conversation or exchange is like this: you only hear her respond to and absorb others, never reveal. And yet, in this decision, there is so much to infer, and Cusk is brilliant about carrying us along. 

Dreamland

Dreamland by Sam Quinones won the National Book Critics Circle Award for its exploration of America's opioid epidemic. It's one of those amazing nonfiction books that you tear through, carried on by the momentum of the fascinating subject matter. I am reminded of my experiences reading Born to Run by Christopher McDougall or Evicted by Matthew Desmond. None of those books would be "literary" in an artistic sense, but the writing in all is clear, strong, and passionate. Dreamland traces the convergence of two unhappy trends: the loosening of restrictions on opioid prescribing and the efficient trafficking of black tar heroin. Quinones spent about half his adult life in Mexico, so he has a unique perspective on the cultural and economic forces at work. He also strikes me as empathetic, big-hearted, and intelligent.

When I was in college, I would sometimes take evening walks with friends and enjoy a cigarette (or two). As a moody English major, it seemed to fit. Cigarettes, it turns out, are hard to shake. I spent the first few years of my career sneaking a drag (or two), finding opportunities to smoke. Only the sheer force of peer pressure--my wife and all my friends did not smoke--led me to quit. We make funny choices when we're young. Had I been injured, during that time in American history, and prescribed a powerful pain killer, well . . . there, but for the grace of God . . .

The Tortilla Curtain

The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle charts the intersecting paths of two married couples living in Los Angeles in the mid-nineties. One is wealthy, and white, and culturally liberal; the other is poor, and Latino, and undocumented. It's an exciting story: the plot turns are violent and dramatic, and the symbolism, while a bit obvious, is thought-provoking. At one point late in the novel, the rich whites literally build a wall around their housing development, so thematically, The Tortilla Curtain aligns exactly with our moment.

Half of Boyle's novel is a ballsy exercise in what Jim Shepard calls "the empathetic imagination." The close-third-person narrative on the Mexican couple is well-researched and multi-dimensional. It also struck me as slightly "off." Something about the characterization seemed more removed than Boyle's familiar group, the buffoonish whites. I don't know if Boyle would take the same risks in perspective in 2019 as he did when it was published in 1995. I don't know if he should, or shouldn't. I haven't decided on the morality of the point-of-view experiments in The Tortilla Curtain, but the uncomfortable overall narrative and themes haven't left me, either.

The Left Hand of Darkness

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin blends philosophy, religion, sociology, gender studies, and probably all of the "hard" sciences. It's a remarkable read. The protagonist is a human ambassador to an alien world where the inhabitants have no fixed sex: they are able to switch (like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park!) to fit the needs of whatever breeding cycle they're in. The ambassador attempts to coerce this species to join a type of intergalactic alliance, and the plot more or less tracks that process. More important, though, is the vivid world of spirituality and cultural exchange, echoing around through different voices, that make up the narrative.

I enjoyed this novel. The first book of LeGuin's I read, called Lavinia, was about Aeneas' wife, a minor character in The Aeneid. It was fantastic. LeGuin died recently, and she was an Oregon writer, and I'm just now beginning to read her works. What made me put it off for so long was the trappings of genre. Something about our culture's propensity to treat superheroes and space fantasies with an adult seriousness makes science fiction really off-putting to me. It's usually derivative and stupid, something that I might have consumed when I was 11, but have outgrown a long time ago. LeGuin is something else though, and she spent her entire life considering herself a literary writer first. She's the real deal, and I look forward to reading many more of her books in the coming year.

Listen to the Marriage

(When asked, I often forget what I've recently read: I'm usually too absorbed in my current book. I'll try to keep better records in 2019. Each post will be a finished book.)

Listen to the Marriage by John Jay Osborn only has three speaking characters: Steve and Gretchen--a separated couple--and their marriage counselor, Sandy. Over the course of this extremely fast read, the couple reunite despite their myriad problems. This book is fine, I guess. I blew through it in two days and would probably loan it to a bored friend with a long plane ride. 

I read Listen to the Marriage because I heard an interview with Osborn on NPR and I liked his perspective on marriage. He had a high view on the institution, which I share, and he wasn't afraid to promote counseling, which I also believe in. But my counseling experiences are much more prosaic than the fictional couple. My wife and I have a different set of assumptions about child rearing, time with extended family, and home remodels, for example. Steve and Gretchen, on the other hand, are openly committing adultery throughout the course of the entire book. As I read, something was lost in the disconnect between our experience, and the writing wasn't strong enough to bridge the gap. 

Outline

(When asked, I often forget what I've recently read: I'm usually too absorbed in my current book. I'll try to keep better records in 2019. Each post will be a finished book.)

Outline by Rachel Cusk takes place over the course of a few weeks in Athens. The narrator has ten conversations--with strangers, with colleagues, with students--as she teaches a writing class and attempts to find meaning after her divorce. It's good. The sentences are precise and composed, like Marilynne Robinson. The subject matter is everyday and observational, like Karl Ove Knausgaard or W. G. Sebald. And the meaning of the novel (what's within the "outline" of the title) is submerged, like Hemingway's iceberg, cloaked in hints and allusion. Lately I've enjoyed plotless, oblique works that circle around an unspeakable main idea.

Outline is the first in a trilogy. The second volume, called Transit, is on my shelf and I'll probably read it a few books from now. I finished Outline on a rainy afternoon when I'd come home from school and my daughter was still asleep. My wife was checking the patient list at the hospital: she had to work the next day and wanted to know what to expect. A few pages before the end, I looked up and saw three teachers run past our house. They run every Tuesday and Thursday. We waved at each other through the glass and they disappeared down the street.