Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler

 I've been enjoying Lauren Oyler's critical essays for awhile (this recent one, on the new Sebald biography, is absolutely brilliant), and, full disclosure, have also been enjoying hanging out with her and talking to her about literature and people and life, etc. I hadn't gotten her book yet, despite being curious about it, because I refuse to buy books in hardcover, but then she gave me a copy, so yay, I could read it! And surprise surprise (not really), it's great. 

There are so few really funny novelists working today — the only two contemporary writers who have really made me laugh that spring immediately to mind are Maria Semple and Taffy Brodesser-Akner — so it was such a treat to launch into a book that literally had me cackling on damn near every page. It is very, very funny. Oyler has a razor-sharp wit, and, like the best Millenial authors, finds the perfect balance between a wry irony and a vulnerability that evinces a commitment to being a part of the world; a sense of proportion that ensures that the narrative doesn't remain suspended in the clouds mocking the mere mortals below. 

The novel is surprising, less because of the more spectacular plot fireworks of the opening, as for the slow, subtle work that follows them. It made me reach once again for Stephanie Insley Hershinow's Born Yesterday, a book that brilliantly analyzes (18th-century) realist novels in which characters resolutely do NOT develop (thereby showing us new things about our idea of character, and realism as a form. It's just so smart, and has made me notice things about novels featuring young women protagonists that I otherwise wouldn't), because here, too, we have a story about a character who doesn't know what to do with herself, which therefore turns out to be a story in which not much really happens. Or so it seems, because there isn't the neat and tidy plot of Bildung that we tend to expect — the formative lessons of the Grand Tour that bring some kind of clarity and purpose to the protagonist's life. 

But actually, all kinds of things are happening — indeed, the book is a startlingly accurate portrayal of what it's like to be an American living abroad on a day-to-day basis, rather than in the tidied up Story of An American Living Abroad version. The little frustrations, the odd quirks you notice about the culture, the loneliness, the sense that you're trying to be cosmopolitan and interesting, or perhaps the main character in the Story of An American Living Abroad, while suspecting/worrying that maybe your life... isn't really all that interesting. There was an added pleasure in it, for me, because I lived in Berlin for a year in high school, and have had my own sort of experience of being a confused young woman in that city, and so some things were extra familiar, but also from the perspective of an older person, in a Berlin that has changed in some ways but not others (and is still one of the greatest cities in the world, just saying). 

It's also interesting, as a work of realism, for the way that it minutely describes various things that seem utterly obvious, but are of course incredibly of-the-moment. So, for instance, what an iPhone home screen looks like, how you open an app, how instagram works. It's startling at first, and then incredibly fascinating (and really well done — if you've never tried to write descriptions like that, I'm telling you, it's HARD. I used give my comp students an assignment along such lines and I stopped because they were terrible and reading them was no fun). In many ways, the novel is a really precise ethnography of a very specific cultural moment.

Finally, amidst all this apparent lack of action, things are happening conceptually, as the ideas that the book circles coalesce and combine in really intriguing ways. I guess people probably think of this as a novel about social media and inter-personal relationships in the internet age, and it is that, but it's more broadly a novel about identity, authenticity, and social life. The internet gives a particular inflection to those issues, sure, but they also aren't fundamentally different simply because they're mediated through Tinder, I don't think. Perhaps because I know Lauren, and thus could recognize parts of the story as drawn from her life, and because we've had a lot of conversations about auto-fiction (and what that term even means), I was also musing on the book's own playful blending of fiction and reality, which is heightened by the moments when the narrator pauses to comment on the form of the novel. 

The ultimate effect, for me, is a text that dazzlingly brings together literary form and self-presentation, and playfully questions (challenges?) the notion of straightforward honesty in both art and life, and the idea of intimacy. 

It's a cool novel, definitely on my top 10 of books published in 2021. Check it out.

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, Katherine Angel

 Every year in my Intro to Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course, I teach Kristen Roupenian's "Cat Person" and ask my students whether the sex in the story is consensual. And every year, but increasingly more so, over the course of our classroom discussion I am distressed to realize how much work the notion of consent is doing in current cultural conversations about sex, such that it seems as if they have no way to conceptualize sex that is consensual, but bad, or consensual but unwanted. It is, however, very difficult to convey such notions without verging on sounding like a rape apologist. Or without potentially undermining the very positive and worthwhile work being done by all those who are promoting notions of affirmative consent.

So I appreciated this book so much, because it did an absolutely spectacular job of explaining why the idea of consent, though very important in some ways, is not the gateway to liberation that it is often presented as being. As Angel convincingly argues, to rely so heavily on the notion of affirmative consent is to demand, not only that people express what they want — but that they know what it is, exactly. Such a demand is not only unrealistic, is also fails to account for the ways in which desire is both responsive, and social. It's a really powerful meditation on what we actually want from our "sexual revolution", and how current approaches are falling short. The book is definitely centered on the experiences of cis-het women, but it's up-front about that, and is also careful to acknowledge some of the complications attendant to thinking about sexuality for woman of color, especially Black women. 

A short, compelling read, well-researched, and with some great examples from a variety of films (and some really good ones at that). Strongly recommended!

Soft Science, by Franny Choi

 I'm pretty sure that I was introduced to Franny Choi when Anjuli Raza Kolb quoted her poem "The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On", and I looked it up and read it over and over and over, and saw this  collection at the bookstore a few days later and of course bought it. 

 

  These are smart, tough, and deeply unsettling poems. They bring together the human/cyborg distinction, and stereotypes about Asian women, and dissociation as a response to violence and awfulness, in really remarkable ways. Extremely powerful stuff.

Interior, Chinatown, by Charles Yu

We've been living in an age of irony for years now, it seems, but more recently, at least in literary fiction, there's been a wave of really dense satire about race. I know people have written, and are writing, about this, and I need to read that stuff, but I will confess that I often struggle with the novels. They are, of course, intentionally inhospitable, so it's not surprising, but my discomfort is not that I feel called out so much as that it can often feel like telling rather than showing. Everything is exaggerated, when it feels like nuance would be more illuminating. But sometimes, in the most successful versions of this kind of thing, the exaggeration is so extreme that it goes all the way through and back to nuance again, forcing you to excavate the specificity within the outsize shapes. That, I think, is how Interior, Chinatown works. 

It took me awhile to get into it, because you have to negotiate the utter artificiality of the conceit, the intense layers of irony and parody. The novel is a script/story about Willis Wu, Generic Asian Man, who yearns to become Kung Fu guy — but also to break free of cliche roles. The commitment to the form means that the story can be frustratingly rote, emotionless, and of course, that's the point, as is the disorientation of not knowing whether this is a movie or "real life." 

But once you get into it, it's absolutely brilliant, and quite lyrical. I'm realizing that I've read more than a few texts this year by Asian American authors that are grappling with the complexities of Asian American identity in the racial eco-system of the US — not out of a concerted effort on my part, more by happenstance, but doubtless inspired by the reckoning emerging as a response to the increasingly blatant outbursts of anti-Asian violence. This one is more specifically engaged in the question of representation in movies and tv shows, and how that shapes identity, and it examines these issues in really powerful ways.

Summer, by Ali Smith

 I can't really write about Summer without writing about the rest of the quartet, though actually, I might have liked it more if I hadn't read the others. I've complained enough on this blog (though maybe not recently) about how much I despise the "multiple unrelated stories that get woven together" form (or better to say, how picky I am about it; I actually love it when it's done well, but usually I find it trite). So you'll understand why I say that I might have enjoyed this book more if I didn't know that the characters had appeared in previous books. The fact that I didn't completely remember their stories from earlier didn't actually help (or maybe it did!). 

The thing is: I loved Autumn. I read it 2 years ago and thought it was just gorgeous, and a wonderful meditation on different forms of love, and so clever in the way it subtly referenced extremely recent events. I was already a huge Ali Smith fan, and I was so excited to read the rest of the quartet, but decided I'd wait until all of them were out, and read each in its season. I read Winter in March, and liked it not quite as much as Autumn, but appreciated its slightly surreal quality, and its loving meditation on Shakespeare, and the way it really did capture a feeling of winter, just as the previous book had gotten something right about autumn. But then I kind of hated Spring. I hated the way it used magical realism to talk about some of the more appalling aspects of the political present, and I even started to find Smith's style somewhat grating. 

I disliked it so much that I put off reading Summer for as long as possible, so that I wouldn't still be annoyed when I read it. And so I didn't actually start it until summer was over, in late October, and then things got veryvery busy, so I only just finished it. And it was fine. I was surprised by how heart-rending it was to read about characters experiencing lockdown and the beginnings of the pandemic (too soon?). It did, at moments, evoke a very specific kind of summer feeling (but I am still in the thrall of Garden by the Sea which is just the perfect summer book). I was mostly charmed by Smith's style, though I definitely think it will be a good long while before I pick up another book of hers. But mostly, I found the novel largely forgettable.

Autumn Quail, by Naguib Mahfouz

 I picked this one up at Cherry Valley Bookstore, a cool little shop with a really excellent selection of high quality used books. Mahfouz is one of the authors in my personal pantheon, that is, one of the authors whose works I am trying to read all of. He's an especially fascinating one, because there are observable changes in his style over the long arc of his career, from more typical realist-style fare (though with a goodly dose of symbolism) to more formally experimental (which I prefer, I think). He writes a lot of bitter, angry male protagonists, which I initially found abrasive, but now have grown accustomed to, I guess. 

Anyways, this one was especially interesting, because it's set in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1952, and chronicles the story of a man who is on the outs with the new regime. I am not especially knowledgeable about Egyptian history and politics, but I was really struck by the way this novel captures a sense of frustration, confusion, and malaise connected to massive political changes, and I kept thinking of it in relation to US politics of the last 10 years or so. The thing about political upheaval is that life goes on, in many ways, unchanged, but then it also doesn't. Your individual life is deeply shaped by those various forces and happenings, but there are also aspects of it that seem entirely separate (even if they aren't). There was something about the way this story see-sawed between broader social concerns and deeply selfish individual ones that was really compelling to me. And is curiously echoed in the way that I, in turn, read it as both a particular account of a specific time and place (one I know very little about — but I was dimly aware of the ways that the novel was referencing its particular moment) — and a more universal, or at least transportable, story that resonated with my own time.

 

Transit, by Anna Seghers

 This has been recommended to me more than once, so I was somewhat surprised not to like it more than I did. I think the big problem is that the plot device of, "I saw this woman once and instantly became obsessed with her and completely reorganized my life to stalk her" is just...not that interesting to me. Or convincing. It's kind of hard to believe that this is such a cliche, because really, wtf?

That said, this is in many ways a wonderfully atmospheric novel about bureaucratic morass, and the absolute misery and panic of people caught in its clutches. It has a distinctly East German feel to it, I was thinking to myself, and then I wondered what I meant by that, and decided that it's mostly that something about the prose reminds me of Christa Wolf. 

That I finally got around to reading it is in large part because of a tweet from Dan Sinykin calling for someone to do a Buzzfeed style ranking of all the NYRB books,* which inspired me to collect all my unread NYRB books in one area of my to-read shelf:

                                                    Of course, I immediately found 4 more I'd left out, but whatever

...and to really make a point of starting to read them. And then I was on a TRAIN, and I had a bookmark from TRANSIT BOOKS, and it was just irresistible.

It's not a bad book, but I'm not sure why so many people have specifically recommended it to me.

* It also inspired me to take a stab at selecting my top 10 NYRB books, here it is:

1. Fair Play 

2. Dud Avocado 

3. Skylark 

4. A High Wind in Jamaica 

5. Season of Migration to the North 

6. Late Fame 

7. The Captain's Daughter 

8. Berlin Stories 

9. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes 

10. The Door