Books I've Read Recently and Highly Recommend
The Cost of Living
by Deborah Levy Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky This is Not a Book About Benedict Cummerbatch by Tabitha Craven Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman Utopia for Realists by Walter Bregman |
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Reviews of Books I'm Not So Sure About
The Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
Like Zelig, X is everywhere and knows everyone. Like Forrest Gump with a higher IQ, X is in all the right places and hangs with all the right people. And X is an Artist, with a capital A. She’s like Yoko Ono, crossed with Patti Smith, crossed with Robert Mapplethorpe, crossed with Cindy Sherman, crossed with - well just about anyone you can think of who is alternative and much cooler than you could ever be. X is cool. Oh so cool.
Catherine Lacey's The Biography of X reminded me somewhat of Daisy Jones and the Six because it goes into excruciating detail about things that don’t exist. In this case, music, photographs, novels, fine art, performance art. You name it, X has her enigmatic hands in it.
But Catherine Lacey takes this one step further. X is also a master of personae who writes songs that do actually exist and are massive hits both commercially and artistically. Remind you of anyone? No, silly, X isn’t David Bowie. As if. She merely helped him achieve greatness. Bowie’s Berlin period couldn’t have happened without X. She wrote “Heroes” for goodness sake.
X also, among other things, taught Kathy Acker to be a badass. And she taught, inspired, and collaborated with other real people. Cool people like Tom Waites, and a gazillion others whose names I can’t now remember. Oh and X is also a polyglot, an acclaimed novelist, the most famous fine artist of her generation, and even a publisher. Is there nothing X can’t do?
The better question could be, how might it feel to be an important cultural figure of the late 20th Century who Lacey didn’t appropriate for this novel? And I imagine much of the archival material included closely resembles reviews, interviews, catalog notes, and the like, written by real journalists and critics. Are they happy to be included or pissed to be appropriated.
I am not quite sure what separates huge parts of The Biography of X from fan fiction, except perhaps its pretensions and the fact that it isn’t any fun, but critics are falling over themselves to fawn over this novel. Perhaps they are worried that not getting its greatness might consign them to the sort of scorn X shows towards people who don’t get her and her work.
This “biography” is written by X’s widow, an ex-journalist who writes snappy lines like “all this to say” and “I couldn’t help but notice.” It contains endless evidence of X’s greatness from X’s archives, reviews of performance pieces that didn’t happen and liner notes for retrospectives of bodies of work that didn’t exist. If it sounds boring, it is. In fact, at one point, the narrator calls a lengthy review of something X had created, “not inherently interesting, well not to me anyway.” Well, not to me either. But thanks for the warning.
Perhaps worried that all this high falutin stuff would limit her audience, Lacey throws in a little touch of The Man in the High Castle and has X do some spying on the side. I told you X could do it all.
To be fair, there are a few pages in the novel when Lacey’s narrator describes things that happened to her, rather than reporting what other people tell her happened or what other people wrote about X. These pages rise above the turgid stew of pretension that is the rest of this novel. Indeed, towards the end of the book, the narrator describes X’s last work, an unfinished piece that appears to depict the life she and X shared. She raises questions about how impossible it is to know the truth about anyone, even one’s self. If Lacey had finished here, I might have forgotten how much I hated the rest of the book, but she followed it up with more codswallop, including the transcript of an interview between X and Barbara Walters, so I didn’t.
Catherine Lacey's The Biography of X reminded me somewhat of Daisy Jones and the Six because it goes into excruciating detail about things that don’t exist. In this case, music, photographs, novels, fine art, performance art. You name it, X has her enigmatic hands in it.
But Catherine Lacey takes this one step further. X is also a master of personae who writes songs that do actually exist and are massive hits both commercially and artistically. Remind you of anyone? No, silly, X isn’t David Bowie. As if. She merely helped him achieve greatness. Bowie’s Berlin period couldn’t have happened without X. She wrote “Heroes” for goodness sake.
X also, among other things, taught Kathy Acker to be a badass. And she taught, inspired, and collaborated with other real people. Cool people like Tom Waites, and a gazillion others whose names I can’t now remember. Oh and X is also a polyglot, an acclaimed novelist, the most famous fine artist of her generation, and even a publisher. Is there nothing X can’t do?
The better question could be, how might it feel to be an important cultural figure of the late 20th Century who Lacey didn’t appropriate for this novel? And I imagine much of the archival material included closely resembles reviews, interviews, catalog notes, and the like, written by real journalists and critics. Are they happy to be included or pissed to be appropriated.
I am not quite sure what separates huge parts of The Biography of X from fan fiction, except perhaps its pretensions and the fact that it isn’t any fun, but critics are falling over themselves to fawn over this novel. Perhaps they are worried that not getting its greatness might consign them to the sort of scorn X shows towards people who don’t get her and her work.
This “biography” is written by X’s widow, an ex-journalist who writes snappy lines like “all this to say” and “I couldn’t help but notice.” It contains endless evidence of X’s greatness from X’s archives, reviews of performance pieces that didn’t happen and liner notes for retrospectives of bodies of work that didn’t exist. If it sounds boring, it is. In fact, at one point, the narrator calls a lengthy review of something X had created, “not inherently interesting, well not to me anyway.” Well, not to me either. But thanks for the warning.
Perhaps worried that all this high falutin stuff would limit her audience, Lacey throws in a little touch of The Man in the High Castle and has X do some spying on the side. I told you X could do it all.
To be fair, there are a few pages in the novel when Lacey’s narrator describes things that happened to her, rather than reporting what other people tell her happened or what other people wrote about X. These pages rise above the turgid stew of pretension that is the rest of this novel. Indeed, towards the end of the book, the narrator describes X’s last work, an unfinished piece that appears to depict the life she and X shared. She raises questions about how impossible it is to know the truth about anyone, even one’s self. If Lacey had finished here, I might have forgotten how much I hated the rest of the book, but she followed it up with more codswallop, including the transcript of an interview between X and Barbara Walters, so I didn’t.
Lessons by Ian McEwan
This book was a disappointment. I love a long novel with great writing and plenty of plot. But Lessons never achieves the focus necessary to pull that off. McEwan tries to do too much, and he gives in to the airing of grievances that Virginia Woolf warned was incompatible with great art.
Lessons gives the reader a potted history of England and Germany post 1939 (with a couple of dips into the deeper past). There is also an exhausting number of characters to keep track of. The novel includes a couple of half-baked love stories, including a vintage-McEwan kinky one at the start of the novel and a triangle later that on their own and better developed might have made more satisfying reads. Mainly Lessons suggests great art isn’t possible without being a monster, or at least going against society’s conventions or even laws.
McEwan gives us characters whose choices lead to their artistic failure and lives of mediocrity, and characters who put themselves first and succeed. It is hard not to see McEwan, himself, in the novel’s main female character. The writer in the novel only achieves vast success after ditching her first family. She is considered by many her country’s greatest writer but loses out on the Nobel Prize to someone else. There are gripes about the public getting confused by books that veer from the expected genre path, and her late career is blighted (comparatively) by misinterpretation by the woke police. Her latest, huge novel (that sweeps through history, countries, and is densely populated) might not receive the reception it deserves because it’s not easy being CIS these days.
Lessons includes a precis of this novel, and it is one of the dullest parts of the book. Given the fictional writer’s literary celebrity, it is hard to imagine it will go on to receive the criticism it deserves, and looking at the gushing reviews for Lessons, it seems that McEwan is also in the clear.
Lessons gives the reader a potted history of England and Germany post 1939 (with a couple of dips into the deeper past). There is also an exhausting number of characters to keep track of. The novel includes a couple of half-baked love stories, including a vintage-McEwan kinky one at the start of the novel and a triangle later that on their own and better developed might have made more satisfying reads. Mainly Lessons suggests great art isn’t possible without being a monster, or at least going against society’s conventions or even laws.
McEwan gives us characters whose choices lead to their artistic failure and lives of mediocrity, and characters who put themselves first and succeed. It is hard not to see McEwan, himself, in the novel’s main female character. The writer in the novel only achieves vast success after ditching her first family. She is considered by many her country’s greatest writer but loses out on the Nobel Prize to someone else. There are gripes about the public getting confused by books that veer from the expected genre path, and her late career is blighted (comparatively) by misinterpretation by the woke police. Her latest, huge novel (that sweeps through history, countries, and is densely populated) might not receive the reception it deserves because it’s not easy being CIS these days.
Lessons includes a precis of this novel, and it is one of the dullest parts of the book. Given the fictional writer’s literary celebrity, it is hard to imagine it will go on to receive the criticism it deserves, and looking at the gushing reviews for Lessons, it seems that McEwan is also in the clear.
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
I know smart people who read Hamnet and were amazed by what they’d learned about Shakespeare’s life, even though it’s highly doubtful they’d actually learned anything very much because much of this book is the product of O'Farrell's imagination .
At first the liberties O’Farrell takes turning the very little we do know into a dramatic story annoyed me so much that I found the novel hard to stomach. And, unlike Stephen Greenblatt, who looked at Shakespeare’s plays to try to fill in some details of his life, O’Farrell either doesn’t know them well enough or chooses to ignore their evidence when creating her own cast of characters.
Fathers don’t abuse their sons in Shakespeare’s plays, which would have been an ideal venue for Will to get it out of his system, but O’Farrell has John Shakespeare abuse his son. After her brief gender nonconforming entrance, O’Farrell’s Anne Hathaway becomes more like a witchy version of the heroine of This Must be the Place, the only other book of Farrell's I’ve read, than one of Shakespeare’s women.
Having said all that, the last third of the novel sucked me in and allowed me to suspend disbelief just enough to enjoy the book. Without having modernized Anne and Will, this probably wouldn’t have been the case.
At first the liberties O’Farrell takes turning the very little we do know into a dramatic story annoyed me so much that I found the novel hard to stomach. And, unlike Stephen Greenblatt, who looked at Shakespeare’s plays to try to fill in some details of his life, O’Farrell either doesn’t know them well enough or chooses to ignore their evidence when creating her own cast of characters.
Fathers don’t abuse their sons in Shakespeare’s plays, which would have been an ideal venue for Will to get it out of his system, but O’Farrell has John Shakespeare abuse his son. After her brief gender nonconforming entrance, O’Farrell’s Anne Hathaway becomes more like a witchy version of the heroine of This Must be the Place, the only other book of Farrell's I’ve read, than one of Shakespeare’s women.
Having said all that, the last third of the novel sucked me in and allowed me to suspend disbelief just enough to enjoy the book. Without having modernized Anne and Will, this probably wouldn’t have been the case.
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
A Visit from the Goon Squad ends in an imagined future, with paid “Parrots” offering early positive opinions, and tipping the scales of public opinion making the success of a singer-songwriter a foregone conclusion. Apart from the name, and, perhaps, the exchange of cash, this isn’t exactly anything new. After the first gushing reviews came in for Egan’s novel, it must have been difficult to not parrot the foregone conclusion… to say, hey, wait a minute…
Indeed, Egan puts on quite a show. Her novel, which is really more of a collection of short stories cobbled together by recurring characters, including members of a band called Conduit (get it?), pulls out all the stops. It swerves from time to time, from east coast to west, to somewhere shady and unnamed in the Middle-East, to Kenya, to Italy.
The focus of the chapters and their narrators are constantly changing, too. Sometimes the narrators are third party, but other times they are the characters, themselves, often leaving this reader an uncomfortable couple of pages trying to figure out which one was up. Egan even toys with the second-person in a story of young adults despondently trawling NYC that draws unfavorable comparison to peak Jay McInerney.
Another story that calls to mind another writer, again without doing Egan any favors, is with her tale within a tale of a fabulous New York party gone awry. While Tom Wolfe would have made this scenario stingingly satirical and hilarious, Egan’s exertions are painfully on display, her characters caricatures and her set piece blindingly obvious.
Some writers are funny, and other aren’t, no matter what the critics say. And that’s okay… if they offer something else, say, interesting characters with compelling stories. Unfortunately, another problem with this novel is that the constantly changing cast means that virtually none of the characters ever become fully-fleshed, their stories are only fleetingly developed. The only one I cared even slightly about is in the strongest chapter of the novel. In the origin story, of her initial lead, kleptomaniac Sasha, Egan finally gives us a character to care about, Sasha’s uncle, as he searches for his niece in the scary streets of Naples, which are famous for, among other things, pickpockets.
Until this chapter, I had decided to write Egan off, having been unmoved by her trickery and flash – which includes a magazine article, complete with footnotes, and a PowerPoint, that everyone but me seems to love. (I really hate PowerPoints in life, so I don’t want to see them in my novels!) But Ted’s short stay in this book shows Egan is capable of doing better, of being more real. So, I might give her another try, not that she cares, if the critics are less giddy and I get a sense she has written something that gives her characters room to breathe and develop their dimensions.
Indeed, Egan puts on quite a show. Her novel, which is really more of a collection of short stories cobbled together by recurring characters, including members of a band called Conduit (get it?), pulls out all the stops. It swerves from time to time, from east coast to west, to somewhere shady and unnamed in the Middle-East, to Kenya, to Italy.
The focus of the chapters and their narrators are constantly changing, too. Sometimes the narrators are third party, but other times they are the characters, themselves, often leaving this reader an uncomfortable couple of pages trying to figure out which one was up. Egan even toys with the second-person in a story of young adults despondently trawling NYC that draws unfavorable comparison to peak Jay McInerney.
Another story that calls to mind another writer, again without doing Egan any favors, is with her tale within a tale of a fabulous New York party gone awry. While Tom Wolfe would have made this scenario stingingly satirical and hilarious, Egan’s exertions are painfully on display, her characters caricatures and her set piece blindingly obvious.
Some writers are funny, and other aren’t, no matter what the critics say. And that’s okay… if they offer something else, say, interesting characters with compelling stories. Unfortunately, another problem with this novel is that the constantly changing cast means that virtually none of the characters ever become fully-fleshed, their stories are only fleetingly developed. The only one I cared even slightly about is in the strongest chapter of the novel. In the origin story, of her initial lead, kleptomaniac Sasha, Egan finally gives us a character to care about, Sasha’s uncle, as he searches for his niece in the scary streets of Naples, which are famous for, among other things, pickpockets.
Until this chapter, I had decided to write Egan off, having been unmoved by her trickery and flash – which includes a magazine article, complete with footnotes, and a PowerPoint, that everyone but me seems to love. (I really hate PowerPoints in life, so I don’t want to see them in my novels!) But Ted’s short stay in this book shows Egan is capable of doing better, of being more real. So, I might give her another try, not that she cares, if the critics are less giddy and I get a sense she has written something that gives her characters room to breathe and develop their dimensions.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marissa Pessl
I read this because I started reading Night Film (see below) and couldn’t believe how bad a book by a supposed genius could be.
Well, this novel is certainly better written but it also goes on and on and on. And it staggers under the weight of the author’s pretensions. Citations and parenthetical asides are, presumably, there to prove the narrator’s, and the author’s, intelligence, but they are like putting an exclamation mark at the end of a banal sentence (Thomas). They just highlight how hard the author is trying.
And then there are the verbs. It is easy to imagine Pessl finishing writing and deciding her book needs a little something special, so she digs back in, throws in the citations and other parenthetical information (see above), and then makes far too many of the verbs her own. Arms don’t link, they pretzel, and while that might work the first time you come across it, it quickly loses its charm, especially when swimming in a sea of all the other quirky verbs which I should have written down but was too exhausted from the reading to be able to. Believe me. You’ll see them.
This novel has been likened to the Secret History, and while Donna Tartt is definitely a little heavy-handed with the signifiers of wealth and culture (and that’s not what people meant, anyway), at least that novel is fun…and the murder and it’s aftermath properly placed and intriguing. Pessl situates her murder 2/3 of the way through the book and it’s…not.
I’m sure the author is a very nice person and I wouldn’t write this had her novel not been a best seller and my opinion, therefore, meaningless. (TBH, it would be equally meaningless had it sold badly.) But I am trying to break the habit of abandoning books. So I feel compelled to voice my disbelief that novels like this do so well. I wonder how many of those who bought it got the whole way through?
Well, this novel is certainly better written but it also goes on and on and on. And it staggers under the weight of the author’s pretensions. Citations and parenthetical asides are, presumably, there to prove the narrator’s, and the author’s, intelligence, but they are like putting an exclamation mark at the end of a banal sentence (Thomas). They just highlight how hard the author is trying.
And then there are the verbs. It is easy to imagine Pessl finishing writing and deciding her book needs a little something special, so she digs back in, throws in the citations and other parenthetical information (see above), and then makes far too many of the verbs her own. Arms don’t link, they pretzel, and while that might work the first time you come across it, it quickly loses its charm, especially when swimming in a sea of all the other quirky verbs which I should have written down but was too exhausted from the reading to be able to. Believe me. You’ll see them.
This novel has been likened to the Secret History, and while Donna Tartt is definitely a little heavy-handed with the signifiers of wealth and culture (and that’s not what people meant, anyway), at least that novel is fun…and the murder and it’s aftermath properly placed and intriguing. Pessl situates her murder 2/3 of the way through the book and it’s…not.
I’m sure the author is a very nice person and I wouldn’t write this had her novel not been a best seller and my opinion, therefore, meaningless. (TBH, it would be equally meaningless had it sold badly.) But I am trying to break the habit of abandoning books. So I feel compelled to voice my disbelief that novels like this do so well. I wonder how many of those who bought it got the whole way through?
Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors
Cleopatra and Frankenstein took Coco Mellors seven years to write, and it shows in its unevenness.
Some scenes seem straight out of creative writing class, with cliched “fabulous” characters we are supposed to find as interesting as the author appears to. Then, just when I was ready to give up, there would be a scene that digs much deeper and shows Mellors to have some talent. Then it it would be to the hi jinks from the kind of rich kids who make spectacles of themselves at the table next to yours and ruin your dinner. Mellors attempts to humanize a couple of them by making them “poor.” Hahaha.
Half way through the novel the manic pixie dream girl heroine has some competition from a more solid and interesting woman. Even though this “ordinary” woman still manages to get a cartoon series she has created into production, and even though shifting the voice to the first person for her scenes doesn’t really work, it’s as if we’re seeing Mellors mature as a writer in real time.
It’s hard for writers to throw away pages they’ve labored over, (especially if they were highly praised in creative writing workshops, as I suspect was the case here). And it is harder still for writers to excise characters they’ve grown to love (and who are perhaps based on friends…). This novel has been wildly successful, so what do I know? But I still think it could have been so much better if she’d done those things - or done them more ruthlessly.
Obviously, I’m only guessing here. But I will probably read Mellors’ second novel, in the hope that she has used up all her old stuff in this one.
Some scenes seem straight out of creative writing class, with cliched “fabulous” characters we are supposed to find as interesting as the author appears to. Then, just when I was ready to give up, there would be a scene that digs much deeper and shows Mellors to have some talent. Then it it would be to the hi jinks from the kind of rich kids who make spectacles of themselves at the table next to yours and ruin your dinner. Mellors attempts to humanize a couple of them by making them “poor.” Hahaha.
Half way through the novel the manic pixie dream girl heroine has some competition from a more solid and interesting woman. Even though this “ordinary” woman still manages to get a cartoon series she has created into production, and even though shifting the voice to the first person for her scenes doesn’t really work, it’s as if we’re seeing Mellors mature as a writer in real time.
It’s hard for writers to throw away pages they’ve labored over, (especially if they were highly praised in creative writing workshops, as I suspect was the case here). And it is harder still for writers to excise characters they’ve grown to love (and who are perhaps based on friends…). This novel has been wildly successful, so what do I know? But I still think it could have been so much better if she’d done those things - or done them more ruthlessly.
Obviously, I’m only guessing here. But I will probably read Mellors’ second novel, in the hope that she has used up all her old stuff in this one.
Night Film Marissa Pessl
Night Film by Marissa Pessl is basically a bad genre novel (or maybe genres) tarted up as something much more literary, or genius even. The first part is a poorly executed noir, the second a tedious meander through horror/occult, the third…well I am not well versed enough in genre books to be able to identify those that are merely exposition, but it was one of those.
The final chapters come after this endless exposition, because, guess what? the expositor might not have been reliable. The last bit of the book keeps seeming to wrap, but then a new chapter begins. I actually laughed out loud a couple of times when I turned the page to discover yet another chapter. It was like being trapped in a sketch that never ends about the repeat endings of bad books. Added to the mix are cardboard characters - and no, that this starts as a noir doesn’t excuse Pessl — endless explanations of the bleeding obvious, and insane tutorials on cultural references. The publishers fob this off as a serious book and then treat the readers like morons.
The text is littered with itallics, perhaps to wake the stunned reader. I suspect the line editor lost the will to live part way through working on this massive tome because there are glaring syntax problems that had me itching to fix them. And the actual editor seems to have misplaced her red pen, or why would lines like this be in the book?
“The only thing I could think to say was Goodbye. ‘Goodbye’ I said.”
Perhaps she was intimidated by Pessl’s undeserved reputation.