There’s multiple Substacks and blogs that are devoted to summarizing and reviewing all of Cheever’s stories, but I’m not sure I’ve seen any of them talk about “Brimmer,” a story he published in 1959 in Esquire. It’s about this guy taking a ship from New York to Naples, Italy, who meets a Italian named Brimmer. The whole story revolves around the licentiousness of Brimmer compared to the uprightness (very New England WASP) of the narrator. Cheever seems like he was more like Brimmer than the narrator in real life, but obviously Cheever knew a ton of people like the narrator in his suburban 1950’s community. The story succeeds because of how much Cheever is willing to empathize with the narrator, even he grows increasingly more frustrated about how Brimmer isn’t punished for his many misdeeds.

To reference some of my other books from this quarter, Brimmer is a kind of Dionysus (The Bacchae) or a kind of devil (The Private Memoirs…) or a Lenu-like character (My Brilliant Friend) or a holy fool like the doctor in Nightwood. He’s definitely similar to the devilish music and film executives in The Wayback Machine and Money. The narrator is a kind of Dante (The Divine Comedy), or a Lila (Brilliant Friend), who never directly tells the sinner that they will be punished, but always hopes they will be.

Enough about Cheever’s collection of short stories, which isn’t even in the below list because it’s 1000 pages long and I haven’t finished it yet. I know that the next 12 weeks will be about Goethe’s Faust and I’m ready for gloomy gothic stuff. I hope it’s at least as weird as James Hogg’s Private Memoirs or The Bacchae.

11. Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico

I didn’t even finish Money and I still like it more than this book, which I did finish, because at least Money is willing to be unpleasant. This is a book that can’t even condescend to be boring. Latronico has talent, but he lacks the courage to say anything. Fine, cast your characters and plot into late-capitalist limbo: you don’t care about them, and neither do I.

10. Money, Martin Amis

Despite my disgust with it I'm interested in trying Amis again, just not right now. John Self is so monstrous that Amis' continual "it's just about how Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan suck" business gets tired. 14 more bottles of beer, 10 more cheezeburgers, and a cigarette: if "it's Ottessa, bitch" didn't steal this whole schtick to write the odious My Year of Rest and Relaxation, she at least stole the continual invocation of ingesting fast food and prescription pills to indicate how messed up her first person narrator is.

I liked this more than MYRR, and that's why I'll come back to Amis. He writes a TON of great sentences, and occasionally a great paragraph, but again: this monster of consumption is not fun to hang out with, and nearly all of the people he hangs out with (besides Martin Amis and a lesbian screenwriter) are just as monstrous and stupid, so after I made it to page ~160, I gave up.

9. Nightwood, Djuna Barnes

I read this on the recommendation of , and I really hated it. I can definitely see a lot of the connections between this work and his Major Arcana, but I think Pistelli is giving Barnes way, way too much credit. Pistelli would never write a character who speaks like the Doctor, who’s like a cross between Oscar Wilde, Ezra Pound, and a total idiot. There's a couple of good moments, but mostly this is a plotless and painfully obscure series of conversations between mostly unlikable people about three failed relationships.

8. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

The only reason this book isn’t ranked behind Money is that it’s extremely short. This is pretty obviously a novella that was extended into (barely) a novel. To understand Bradbury, just go read “The Veldt” or “The Sound of Thunder” instead.

It's not as engrossing as most sci-fi (or most of Bradbury's short stories) and it's definitely not as deep as it thinks it is. The literary allusions are pretty obvious ("Ecclesiastes") when they're not misplaced ("Dover Beach," The Republic). Montag's relationship with Clarisse is frankly creepy, while his relationship with his wife is nonexistent, and his boss is a really, really silly villain.
I'm pretty glad I don't teach this.

7. The Wayback Machine, Daniel Falatko

The tone is almost perfect, but not quite; these are my indie rock bands, my copies of Vice Magazines sitting in the display windows of my American Apparels, my mumblecore movies, my acquaintances starting assonantly named pizza joints in Bushwick: they failed to matter, but I don’t have some grand sense of betrayal about it. I think Falatko almost knows this, but I’m not totally sure he knows this. This isn't about likability, it's about the view of the world that's all about how gentrification is a plot of the rich and powerful. I have some sympathy for this view, as I was gentrified right out of my hometown. But on the other hand...I know actual working class or middle class artists and restaurant industry people who’ve benefitted immensely from the gentrification of my hometown.

New York City continues to be not America even though it’s my favorite city in United States and only second to Chicago in the number of times I’ve visited it, and the chances that I’ll actually like a contemporary book set in the city go down every year. If you want to be a writer, move to Chicago! There’s a lot more material there.

I basically agree with LWS that the ending is rushed, but I sympathize even more with her concern because Falatko writes contemporary gentrified Los Angeles pretty well, and I would have enjoyed that novel more. I love BoJack Horseman, and the ways in which The Wayback Machine became somewhat Horsemanesque at the end were actually enjoyable.

6. Here, The Bees Sting, Will Caverly

I enjoyed this self-published novel a lot more, until the ending. It is most definitely not set in New York, and Caverly obviously cares about and enjoys the Appalachian Mountains. Caverly doesn't overdo the idea that humans would be better off communing like bees than fighting like coyotes thing, and I found the bee sci-fi much more convincing than the paranoic sci-fi of The Wayback Machine.

5. The Odyssey, Homer

I read this in classics 101 in 2008 and remember enjoying the Fitzgerald version more than the prose version (W.H.D. Rouse) I read this time for my book club. Maybe that's because I liked the idea of this being an epic poem instead of this being a genre action-adventure story? And probably because I read this with a professor who gave me much more of the context for it, instead of this (kind of annoying) interlocutor in Rouse? He has a long explanation at the end of why he made the choices he did, but a lot of it feels like an imitation of a 19th century novel, not an attempt to get the idiomatic sense of reading Greek lyrics in plain English.
I'm not sure that was my only problem here. Odysseus was smarmy and mean, I didn't really understand the point of Telemachus' quest, and I found Penelope kind of annoying.
The Cyclops and Hell parts are still awesome, and everything involving the ships and the Trojan war is fun, and the ending is obviously quite good.

4. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, James Hogg

I planned to write a long post about this and didn’t quite get around to it, because Hogg’s writing can be unpleasant to read, especially the sections written in low Scottish dialect. Imagine Cockney English, but even weirder!

But so much of this book is gloriously strange and often better than the works that (seemingly) draw inspiration from it: Frankenstein, Dracula, and Fight Club. It’s got an insane point of view switch TWICE, it’s got an epistolary confession that’s so beyond bizarre it can’t be quite described, and most importantly, it’s got a DEVIL that barely speaks. He’s not the devil of Paradise Lost, and he’s not the devil of The Divine Comedy. He is, truly, the devil of Brad Pitt in the David Fincher movie. He’s wonderful.

The worst part of the book isn’t quite at the ending. It’s in the last section of the epistolary section: just kill this motherfucker already, and let us switch back into the point of view from earlier in the book (this isn’t a spoiler, it’s in the table of contents). If Hogg cut about twenty pages from the epistolary section, this book might crack the top twenty of the 19th century for me. As is, it’s definitely my favorite book of the 1820’s (thanks ), because it’s the only other book from the 1820’s I read was The Last Man and I didn’t like it at all.

3. My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante

This is an uncompromising book. When I read this for the first time in 2021, it wasn’t the best book of the first 25 years of the 21st century, so I found the first 100 pages to be something of a slog. Then it all started to come together as the paths of Lila and Elena diverged and the meaning of the title came into focus. It finished late one night and immediately went back to the beginning and the first few pages were just as good as the last few.

It's not a slog the second time, when I’m reading it along with ! Everything in here foreshadows the next few books, and it's all also perfect in its brutal imperfection. Lila is one of the great narrators in fiction, full stop, and there's something extremely eerie in her relationship with Lenu. Why does anyone call this autofiction? It's so clearly planned and mapped out...

2. The Bacchae, Euripides

If Antigone is the founding of the philosophical question of what we owe to each other, The Bacchae is the founding of anti-philosophy: sometimes we're just animals, sadly, or hilariously. This play is the invention of horror.
I know the #joke here would be something about why you shouldn't join the party unless you're ready for some freaky stuff, but Dionysus is such an irresistible weirdo in this play: referring to himself in the third person, goading his followers into completely macabre acts, taking human form and getting himself arrested...every single line of this proves Euripides’ sick genius.

1. The Essential Commedia/The Divine Comedy/Digital Dante/The Princeton Dante Project, Prue Shaw/Dante Alighieri/Teodolinda Barolini & Allen Mandelbaum/Lino Pertile

My middlebrow ass read Claudia Roth Pierpont’s review last December and thought, well, now’s the time to read The Divine Comedy. So I checked out the Longfellow version of the poem from my lovely Des Moines Public Library and was immediately bored to tears. I looked back at the article and realized that Pierpont had reviewed Prue Shaw’s brand-new The Essential Commedia as the best way to get at what Dante’s trying to do. So I asked the library to get Shaw’s book on interlibrary loan and they did me one better: they bought it and checked it out to me. I’ve read The Essential Commedia nearly every day for eight weeks, and I have to return it next week, and I’ll miss it. I’ll probably check it out again in five or ten years.

My method: sit down after a kid has been put to bed, turn on Lino Pertile’s Italian audiobook on the Princeton Dante Project, and read along with the Italian and English side by side using the brilliant “Digital Dante” website run by Teodolinda Barolini, a Columbia professor who has taught Dante for over three decades and received permission from Allen Mandelbaum to post his translation on the website.

Then I read The Essential Commedia and review everything alongside Shaw. Sometimes I reverse this order, and it works just as well. Either way, I end up listening to and reading a lot of each canto of this poem twice, which is the bare minimum required to understand it.

I’ve had Dante on the brain in all sorts of places by reading one, two or three cantos for nearly every day for the last eight weeks. His ability to create a long narrative with a lot of intersecting structures, to quickly and effectively conjure up interesting characters, and to present indelible imagery is unmatched in anything else I’ve ever read. As I head into reading Faust, I’m fairly certain that the modern Devil (Milton and Goethe and Bulgakov and Crowley and the Rolling Stones) isn’t actually realistic to me. Vice is boring. Vice is Dante’s Devil in the ninth circle of hell, a kitchen sink garbage disposal waiting at the bottom of an icy lake for sinners to fall in and be ground to bits:

Da ogne bocca dirompea co’ denti
un peccatore, a guisa di maciulla,
sì che tre ne facea così dolenti.

Within each mouth—he used it like a grinder—
with gnashing teeth he tore to bits a sinner,
so that he brought much pain to three at once.

One of my biggest takeaways from the Comedy is that Dante has not convinced me to become more of a Christian, or even more of an agnostic. I’m still an atheist to the core. If someone is cruel and greedy and hypocritical, I fail to be convinced that there will be any divine judgment for them. But a sinner’s life on earth is a series of ever-shrinking circles, as their continued failure to find pleasure through selfishness eventually leads them back to their own tortured consciousness (like Brimmer, or John Self, or Lenu).

The other is that, although I get why it’s hard to recommend Christian literature to someone else, I don’t think the Comedy is as tough of a sell as something like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which I loved last year and would still recommend. Living in a Rust Belt state that becomes more evangelically Christian by the second makes it impossible for me to think positively of the effects of faith on the public sphere. However, Dante doesn’t seem that excited about religion in the public sphere, either, and despite being obsessed with divine justice, Dante just can’t help being frustrated with how random the Christian god seems to be in his justice. He’s got Catholic popes Human Centipeding each other in hell because they’re all so evil, and in heaven, the souls that are closest to heaven live in Saturn because they used to be monks. The most important character in the poem, Virgil, isn’t even a Christian, and gets to live in the fairly chill first circle of hell, because Dante loves the Aeneid so much. Other non-Christians are grandfathered into heaven.

This isn’t really a book to excerpt at the Inferno, which is something I know a lot of high schools do. I may have even enjoyed Purgatory more than the Inferno, because the contradictions of waiting for justice are often richer and stranger than being condemned to suffer forever for evil.

However, the Paradise section of the Comedy is often boring, because Beatrice, Dante’s guide to heaven, is way more boring than Virgil, his guide to Inferno and Purgatory. She’s your classic Medieval courtly muse, vaguely dominating a Dante who can’t help but be subservient to her beauty. I could see stopping at the end of Purgatory…but I didn’t, and I wouldn’t recommend that anyone who’s loved the first two sections stop there either, because they’d miss scenes like this, where Beatrice asks Dante to pause one more time at the edge of the ladder leading to the final sphere of heaven and reflect on everything he’s seen so far:

«Tu se’ sì presso a l’ultima salute»,
cominciò Bëatrice, «che tu dei
aver le luci tue chiare e acute;

e però, prima che tu più t’inlei,
rimira in giù, e vedi quanto mondo
sotto li piedi già esser ti fei;

sì che ’l tuo cor, quantunque può, giocondo
s’appresenti a la turba trïunfante
che lieta vien per questo etera tondo».

Col viso ritornai per tutte quante
le sette spere, e vidi questo globo
tal, ch’io sorrisi del suo vil sembiante;

e quel consiglio per migliore approbo
che l’ha per meno; e chi ad altro pensa
chiamar si puote veramente probo.

“You are so near the final blessedness,”
so Beatrice began, “that you have need
of vision clear and keen; and thus, before

you enter farther, do look downward, see
what I have set beneath your feet already:
much of the world is there. If you see that,

your heart may then present itself with all
the joy it can to the triumphant throng
that comes in gladness through this ether’s rounds.”

My eyes returned through all the seven spheres
and saw this globe in such a way that I
smiled at its scrawny image: I approve

that judgment as the best, which holds this earth
to be the least; and he whose thoughts are set
elsewhere, can truly be called virtuous.

We’d taken a couple of classes together in college, and I never remembered her contributing to the literary journal. I didn’t remember if she was an English major or not. I had no context for what her writing would be like. What she wrote about on her social media was not obnoxious: thoughts about working as a psychologist, about the high cost of living on the West Coast, about meeting up with friends or acquaintances, some mutual. Some part of me expected that she’d be impressed with what I’d written, since I’d given it to a couple of friends who said they enjoyed it and it was, indeed, literary fiction like she had been attempting to write.

But what happened instead is that I liked her novel much more than my own. There was one significant change towards the beginning of the book that she definitely needed to keep the story coherent1, and she was perfectly pleasant about enjoying what I’d written, but her novel was also obviously much better plotted, characterized, and thought through than mine. Even though it involved a plot about AI and a soupçon of what might have been virtue signaling around race (the protagonist is biracial and black, the author’s white), it was rendered well enough that I didn’t feel like she was preaching about anything. The action scenes were vivid and exciting. The run-in with a cult was appropriately strange. It all flowed together. I knew this place she was talking about, and the novel helped me see our current world with fresh eyes. I hoped she’d be able to publish it.

The creator of the contest also picked the best book as her finalist

Merritt Graves’ Drive A was Naomi Kanakia's finalist for the Samuel Richardson Award, which she created last summer as a way to get more attention toward self-published novels. It’s also the best of the ten finalists for the Award.

I’m obviously a fan of Woman of Letters (that’s why I agreed to help judge), but I didn’t read her review of Drive A before reading the novel, because she hadn’t posted it yet. I’d already decided that GLITTERBALLS would be my finalist in the contest from my pile of six novels, I wanted to get a jump start on the other finalists, and after she emailed the judges reminding us to post our own reviews and telling us that she was going to post her review the following week, I asked her for a copy.

Once I started reading Drive A I liked it enough that I decided I wouldn’t read Naomi’s review until I finished it, and then by the time I finished it the following week, her review just ended up getting buried in my inbox and I didn’t read it until last week.

It’s a great review, so I won’t recapitulate her points. If you’re pressed for time and don’t want to read her whole review (which would be weird, since you probably ended up here because of her), Graves is also one of the only Samuel Richardson authors to solicit a Kirkus Review of the book, and it’s a very positive and accurate summation of the plot and its general vibes.

Both reviews get at the idea that this book might be too much of a genre sci-fi book to be appealing to most readers. Kirkus says this in a (typically) gentle way:

Readers may have trouble penetrating the novel’s dense jargon—it’s typical SF future slang plus Wall Street investment-speak—but once dialed in, they will find the revealed world to be rich and immersive.

Naomi worries that her affection for Drive A might simply seem like another version of her occasional argument that her deep reading of and continued affection for science fiction enables her to see how most literary fiction is pretentious and vague because it’s cool to act that way in that style, rather than because it reveals a greater truth about the world:

This novel is exactly the type of novel that I most loved when I was in my teens and early-twenties: the New Wave science fiction novel—the slightly-gonzo science-fictional extrapolation of current trends. It gives major Big Jack Barron and Stand On Zanzibar vibes. Another judge, someone less well-disposed to this genre, might have easily been turned off by the novel's aggressive enthusiasm for the details of its science-fictional premise.

I definitely did get turned off by the aggressive enthusiasm that some of the 16 novels I ended up reading for this contest had for the details of their genre premises, and I have not only not read Big Jack Barron or Stand On Zanzibar, I’d never even heard of them until Naomi mentioned them. But Graves’ use of jargon never got in the way of my enjoyment of Drive A, and his commitment to his premise worked for nearly the entire novel.

I was wrong about genre before

While I disagreed with Kanakia this summer about Woodworking and what she calls “women’s fiction,” and how it is very often superior to literary fiction, I can at least affirm that I have somewhat changed my mind after reading fifteen self published novels and giving up on eight of them after suffering through the required hundred pages. To quote her:

The best literary fiction is extremely good, of course, but the average literary novel is unreadably dull.

Out of my original pile of six novels in the Samuel Richardson Award, GLITTERBALLS , the novel I picked, is the most similar to Woodworking, and it was not only the best out of my pile, it was the third-best novel of any of the ones I’d read. Another novel about the lives of nuns fleeing a monastery to meet Hildegard of Bingen was also mostly good, and had some characteristics of women’s fiction.

The literary fiction novels I gave up on were so incoherent that I couldn’t even call them dull, because I barely knew what was going on. The writers may have been inspired by Cormac McCarthy or Doris Lessing or some autofiction from the last couple of decades that I’ll never read, but they lacked the skill to strategically drop in enough narrative to keep me engaged. Their novels could have been a bildungsroman or a confession or a metafictional commentary on the writing process, but they didn’t have the chops to pull them off.

I’ve never been a literary fiction absolutist, and a significant reason for my distaste for Woodworking was probably because I don’t read that many novels published in the past 20 years or so. I live in the 20th century, where I’ve read nearly all of the consensus best genre writers of the last 75 years or so: Patricia Highsmith, John le Carré, P.D. James, Philip K Dick, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Stephen King, William Gibson…and a lot of comic books, and not just the ones that were eventually called graphic novels. But reading these self-published novels, and reading my acquaintance’s novel last year, has ultimately made me appreciate my continued engagement with commercial fiction.

Besides the science fiction of Drive A and women’s fiction, the rest of the best of the 16 novels were thrillers. One was paranoid and post-colonial, one was satirical and pop-cultured, one was Appalachian (the best one), but despite the many positive aspects of those novels, the commercial fiction parts were both essential because they helped the authors avoid the formlessness of literary fiction and ultimately self-defeating because the action scenes weren’t realistic enough to compete with the best thrillers. When there was a relentless focus on action, it also derailed more interesting points the authors were trying to make about the world or their characters.

Drive A mostly avoids this problem, because it’s so concerned with the fine-grained details of the near-future world in a way that somehow avoids being dull, even though not much happens. Since I haven’t read (even close to) as much sci-fi as Kanakia, the works that it reminded me of were things like William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Graves definitely has a “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” poster up in his apartment, or tattooed somewhere.

Drive A is so nerdy, so filled with jargon and so concerned with the details of its world, that I am honestly not sure if it would be attractive either to a literary imprint or to a science-fiction imprint.

Besides the beginning of the book (more on that below, where I slightly disagree with Kanakia), the ending is the only section that has a lot of action, and I didn’t need it, even if it helped Graves to structure his work. Without the novel’s ending (and its first chapter, more on that below), it’s quite possible it could be called “literary fiction,” because it is mostly about upwardly mobile or permanently rich people meeting in boardrooms or restaurants and apartments and dinner parties and talking about trading futures on (usually) poor people. It’s The Great Gatsby (a book some high school students complain about because it’s “a bunch of people sitting in a room and talking, then moving to a party and talking”) for San Francisco in the near future.

Don’t call it speculative fiction (don’t call anything that)

I’ve half-read the unfortunate attempt at a thriller called The Flamethowers that Rachel Kushner wrote before she wrote a new boring book that was I guess a spy novel, and I’ve read the shockingly overrated “speculative fiction” Chain Gang All-Stars, which was nominated for a National Book Award two years ago. Kanakia has written elegantly about the hollowness of this kind of commercial fiction written by people with MFAs from the best schools who are slumming it until they return to literary fiction. Graves is moving in the opposite direction. He never tries to be too smart. Most of the characters are doped up with brain enhancers and fancy degrees from elite schools, but our protagonist is just like us: amazed, weary, and wary. The hyper-meritocracy of Graves’ world is never boring.

As Kanakia pointed out in her review, the heart of this book is Cable Rostenfarm’s point of view, and she believes that the first chapter of this book is maybe only of its biggest missteps because it removes that point of view. The “I” in the section below is the first time that the narrator shows up after 15 pages written in the third-person perspective of Traeger Logan, who becomes a secondary character for most of the rest of the book:

“That’s some real edge-of-your-seat metatainment, Rems,” said Taz Labrie, leaning back in his chair as Traeger was lowered to the ground by the makeshift squadron of hobbyist drones. “Top drawer sub-bait if I do say so myself—barbed hooked, booster maxed. But shares have already 30x’d into low earth—everyone’s already aboard.”

Across the sprawling, transparent conference table blinking with real-time updates, Rems Carlson switched off the projection screen. “Including the shorts.”

“Mostly naked,” he added a few moments later. “This came out of nowhere and there’s hardly any inventory.”

I knew what shorting was, obviously, but wanted clarification on the naked part—quietly pulling up the definition in a tiny window on my contact display and assigning the text to track beside the current speaker. This let me get up to speed without looking like I was staring off into space or working on something else, the exact kind of scenery you wanted, modeling away on the meeting’s outskirts.

Naked Short Selling: Borrowing shares of a security that may not exist inside its tradable float with the obligation to return those shares at a later date, at an expected lower price.

“Yeah,” said Wendy Ellsmore from a chair down. “’Cause this guy’s a neutron bomb.”

Wendy, Rems, Taz, and Cable had been watching Traeger (the guy lowered by the drones, whose point of view we inhabited) seem to authentically try suicide because the subscribers to the live feed (from his glasses, or something, I never really cared how this worked) he used to support himself had become so demanding that he felt like he had no other choice. The former three characters are long(ish)-time analysts at the company (Navarium) that Cable’s recently joined. They will eventually lay out an opportunity from Traeger’s failed suicide: manipulate his life so he lives long enough to crater the naked shorts that a rival company (Clearpoint) borrowed against Traeger’s stock price (which, upon suicide, would become zero).

Someone like William Gibson wouldn’t define a naked short; he’d just leave the jargon out there for you to eventually figure out on your own. But Graves is mostly generous with the definitions, because Rostenfarm is an eager student, and on rereading the first chapter after finishing the book, it’s obvious that Graves has foreshadowed much of Rostenfarm’s lack of moral development from the very beginning. Cable knows about and has to ignore the ghoulishness of Navarium’s business, because he’s supporting his entire family from this tech money, and he’s been recommended for this job by the Chandleys, one of the most powerful families in San Francisco.

On rereading, the first chapter feels kind of exactly right, even if it might alienate someone who’s suspicious of a self-published science fiction novel that begins on a live chat inside someone’s head as they contemplate suicide. The rest of the book isn’t like this, but it is haunted by it! All of the abstractions that Cable and his Navarium cronies contemplate have consequences for the little people they’re betting on, and that little bit of friction is what makes Drive A more fascinating than a novel that opened its arms immediately. I trusted Graves’ anger at the way algorithms and gamified thinking and gambling have made modern life more miserable because he started his novel this way.

An unfair comparison

Without saying much more about the plot (again, read Naomi’s review), it’s possible that one of the reasons I liked Drive A so much is because I was reading it at the same time as I was finishing a classic of literary fiction: Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. While I find that book “extremely good,” it’s possible that a lot of the folks who consume massive amounts of commercial fiction would be turned off by a book that is written by and sympathetic to the most elite section of New York society during the Gilded Age. However, unlike most of Wharton’s works, Custom proceeds from the point of view of a family outside of the 400 who are desperately trying to get into it, and Wharton doesn’t seem wholly dismissive of this effort.

Instead, she suggests that the 400 will fail to keep people like the Spraggs or Cable Rostenfarm out of their ranks, because those protagonists’ ambition will always mean they are willing to cut ethical corners and use the power of money to make more money and eventually achieve at least a simulacrum of prestige, if not the real thing. Even if the Chandleys in Drive A or the elites who make up the 400 in Custom know that these people are not one of them, no one else in the mob who look up to the elites will. Just as in Drive A, the behind the scenes machinations to get the money to make the elevation to a high social class possible in The Custom of the Country also involve a lot of jargon:

Mr. Spragg considered the vista of chimneys without speaking, and [Elmer] Moffatt continued: “I don’t suppose you care to hear the story of my life…Just at present I’m one of Harmon B. Driscoll’s private secretaries, and some of that Mealey House loafing has come in more useful than any job I ever put my hand to. The old man happened to hear I knew something about the inside of the Eubaw deal, and took me on to have the information where he could get at it. I’ve given him good talk for his money; but I’ve done some listening too. Eubaw ain’t the only commodity the Driscolls deal in.”

Mr. Spragg restored his watch to his pocket and shifted his drowsy gaze from the window to his visitor’s face.

“Yes,” said Moffatt, as if in reply to the movement, “the Driscolls are getting busy out in Apex. Now they’ve got all the street railroads in their pocket they want the water-supply too—but you know that as well as I do. Fact is, they’ve got to have it; and there’s where you and I come in.”

Mr. Spragg thrust his hands in his waistcoat arm-holes and turned his eyes back to the window.

“I’m out of that long ago,” he said indifferently.

“Sure,” Moffatt acquiesced; “but you know what went on when you were in it.”

“Well?” said Mr. Spragg, shifting one hand to the Masonic emblem on his watch-chain.

“Well, Representative James J. Rolliver, who was in it with you, ain’t out of it yet. He’s the man the Driscolls are up against. What d’you know about him?”

Mr. Spragg twirled the emblem thoughtfully. “Driscoll tell you to come here?”

Moffatt laughed. “No, SIR—not by a good many miles.”

The full story of how Mr. Spragg ended up in New York with his daughter who he hopes to elevate into the 400, and the role of this mysterious “Elmer Moffatt,” won’t be revealed even later into Wharton’s book, because it’s literary fiction, and it’s withholding, just like life. Unlike Cable Rostenfarm, Mr. Spragg’s daughter breaks all the rules and emerges victorious; unlike the world of Gilded Age New York City, mid-21st-century San Francisco has no list of families who are automatically allowed to remain at the top of society.

But both novels are fundamentally about how money can actually buy a kind of happiness. The characters in both novels who try to keep some semblance of ethics or morality outside of acquiring money are destroyed. Society responds to the destruction of these people by shrugging: that’s just the custom of this country, the United States, a idiotic colossus that forgets itself every century or so.

A More Fair Comparison

Drive A is not as good as The Custom of the Country, which I called my favorite novel of the 1910’s when asked the readers of his weekly blog for a list of books, one from each century, none repeating the choices of other readers. I’m sure Wharton’s book (along with her other two great novels) would make a list of my favorite novels of the 20th century, and Drive A would have ended up at number 35 or 36 in my list of the 43 books I finished in 2025 if I’d included it (I think I finished it just before the end of last year, but I’m only counting for myself at this point).

None of the self-published novels were in sniffing distance of Pistelli’s own Major Arcana, which I probably ranked a little high at 11 (it’s more reasonably 18 or 19: better than Intermezzo, not as good as Skippy Dies). Pistelli self-published a bunch of books before Major Arcana and it’s a much, much better book than anything I read in the Samuel Richardson Awards. It’s literary fiction, but without giving much away, it’s also fantastical (in the first half) and maybe even a little bit sci-fi (in the second). Pistelli wants to bare his soul, like I did in my failed literary fiction, but he also wants to write a “straight-shot” family history novel like Franzen or D.H. Lawrence or Dickens. It can be done! I don’t know if Merritt Graves wants to try it or if he wants to keep writing sci-fi or if he wants to be a writer on Severance instead (so he can actually make a living at this thing), but if he ever tries literary fiction, he should send it to me.

My grandmother has lived in Iowa her whole life, all of it between or in Des Moines or in a 70 mile stretch up state highway 141 that bisects I-80 at a 45 degree angle and heads northwest towards the Dakotas. She was the volunteer librarian in her small town until the town got larger as it became an exurb of Des Moines like all towns everywhere in the United States are doing: becoming exurbs or dying.

She used to read 100 books a year, many of them series books, and I’m not sure how many she still reads. She still reads at least six books a year for her book club. She doesn’t actually attend it any more: she reads the books, then talks to the members of the book club on the phone or in person when some of them visit her house throughout the week after they’d met all together.

I’m also in a book club, one that’s mostly families. It seems inevitable that it’s mostly families, even though people without children are invited. We all want more adults without children there, but these childless people quickly realize that there are children running around interrupting conversations or sitting on a lap while their parent is discussing the sex scenes in Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt and they don’t come back. I’m really only talking about one person. The other childless person who once attended a book club moved away from Des Moines, which is also a thing that childless people always do.

I really like my book club. The parents are smart, we read a lot of classic literary fiction (Wuthering Heights, The Odyssey, Tale of Two Cities, Sula, Bleak House, The Turn of the Screw, Lady Chatterley’s Lover) and classic genre fiction (The Price of Salt, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Murder on the Orient Express, Night in the Lonesome October). What we mostly don’t do is read contemporary literary or genre fiction. When we’ve done that, it’s mostly been a bad idea! Edward Ashton’s Mickey 7 was really bad. Donna Barba Higuera’s The Last Cuentista was really, really bad.

I was talking about my upcoming book club (we ended up meeting on Super Bowl Sunday and discussing the Odyssey) when she said that last month they read the worst book she’s could ever remember discussing at a club.

“All of the ladies hated it. It was some new book.”

“Yeah I rarely like the new books.”

“It was some Oprah pick.”

“I think I know what book you’re talking about now.”

I was grinning.

It’s been about six months since Ocean Vuong’s novel Emperor of Gladness was savaged on Substack and in basically every reputable book reviewing publication and then proceeded to sell a million copies, a phenomenon that Naomi Kanakia wrote about insightfully. I’d forgotten about the whole thing until my grandmother brought it up last week.

She used to be the volunteer librarian in her small town. She also used to be a lunch lady at the elementary school that my dad and his siblings attended. By the time we were visiting her when I was a kid (my dad moved away from Iowa when he was 20 and never returned) she was in the process of retiring from a job as a janitor at that same elementary school. It’s across the street from the house that she’s lived in for over fifty years.

My grandmother is, for so many reasons, not the least of which the fact that she can’t actually attend her book club in person, not the kind of person Kanakia is talking about when she says that “Emperor of Gladness is a godsend to book clubs, because if you pick this book, people will actually come.” Kanakia’s trying to get a certain kind of upper-middle-class person in San Francisco who doesn’t read 100 books a year like my grandmother to read 6 or 12 books a year, and she knows that those people will not come out for classic “sentimental novels” like Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities, or Lady Chatterly’s Lover, even if those books do what Emperor of Gladness does much better (the last one is more of a social problem novel than a sentimental one, but I bring them all up because my book club of mostly lawyers and teachers with small children actually read all of them). They will come out to a book club on one of Ocean Vuong’s books, for one of many reasons:

a) the book was recommended by Oprah

b) the book is by a queer person of color

c) the book is by a working-class author (I think Kanakia correctly points out that this was only formerly true but also that if Vuong’s whole thing is grift there’s easier ways to do it)

d) there are a ton of copies of it at their local library (as there are at mine)

e) they want to show everyone that fascism is bad.

My grandmother doesn’t care about any of those things. I think her favorite politician of the past 25 years was probably John Edwards. She’s a union Democrat who lives in a Republican small town in a Republican state. I think my grandmother is the exact person who could judge the verity of these two sentences in Kanakia’s article:

I don’t think this fantasy of working-class nobility [in Vuong’s work] is inherently without merit. But one does wonder if Vuong actually believes in it. I too was quite struck by the part from his interview with Oprah (it starts at around 5’ 30”) where he claimed that Oprah’s book club had given working-class Vietnamese people like his mother the courage to read books. It didn’t feel totally genuine—It seemed a bit much to ask us to believe that working-class Vietnamese women are reading The Corrections or Light In August or even Eckhart Tolle and Wally Lamb.

I don’t know how old the other women in my grandmother’s book club are, or whether they’re all as working class as she is. I’d guess they’re all white. Here’s how the conversation with her continued:

“That book was horrible. I don’t know what the point of it even was. One of the ladies in my club said she only read the first ten pages and quit. I wished I’d done that. I ended up finishing it.”

“I get it. I didn’t like his first one and I couldn’t finish it. What didn’t you like about this one?”

“It was just a bunch of sad things, one after another. That Oprah book club, it’s always like that.”

“I don’t know, I like a lot of the books she’s recommended.”

“Maybe. It’s been a while since we’ve read one of hers. Maybe they’ve changed. I did think the one about slavery was pretty good.”

“The Color Purple? Or Beloved?”

“It’s been a really long time. I don’t know.”

I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to say here about book clubs and my grandmother and Ocean Vuong. Maybe just that Substack discourse, whether it’s about him or Madeline Cash or Jennette McCurdy, may be both more off base and more accurate in a strange way than it first appears. Ocean Vuong really might be getting forced on old ladies who’d rather read Toni Morrison or Alice Walker!

The times in the Upper Midwest in the United States right now are extreme in every way: thirty degree temperature swings in twenty-four hours, fascist takeovers of nearby metropolitan centers, children waking up at 3a.m. to vomit on the bathroom rug…all I want to do is carve out some time to think about whether I like The Bacchae more than The Wayback Machine, to preview two books that I’ll be writing about in 2026!

1. The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt

This is the greatest debut novel of the past 25 years, for sure. It’s probably in my top ten for the past 100 years. There’s something fundamentally mysterious about the capacious love for others at the heart of this book, a love that endures despite their stupidity and cruelty and banality. I found it completely insane that Ross Barkan said something about getting actual hypothetical parenting advice from this, but there is something so audacious and unique about putting parenting at the center of a modern book in a world where parenting is mostly the domain of anxious lefties or xenophobic righties and barely exists at all in fiction.

This has been a problem for a long time, given the massive overrepresentation of men in the literary canon, and the fact that they seem not to understand how parenting works: see “what baby?”. The tenderness of the relationship between Sib and Ludo makes the postmodern language game stuff go down so much easier than it does in, say Infinite Jest, and while I found DFW’s sentimentalism and attempts at humanism ultimately kind of grating compared to his often funny and brilliant satire, I find basically every single thing that DeWitt did in this book perfect: the satire, the bildungsroman, the portrait of modern London, the portrait of the Midwest, the explications of Kurosawa’s filmic techniques…it’s a novel I’m going to read again, for sure.

2. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

So now I need to read all the other fiction that Franzen wrote in the 21st century.

It’s obviously ironic that in his most famous essay, published before this novel, he said that “what’s perceived as the antisocial nature of ‘substantive’ authors, whether it’s James Joyce’s exile or J. D. Salinger’s reclusion, derives in large part from the social isolation that’s necessary for inhabiting an imagined world.” He seemed to have understood that social isolates (like him, like me) WANT to connect to people, but they also need to connect to the imaginary world that sustained them through a lonely adolescence: aka, novels that they had to work to understand and then loved. So becoming a minor celebrity (as he did after the publication of this novel) is a problem. Again, to quote that big essay: “no matter how attractively subversive self-promotion may seem in the short run, the artist who’s really serious about resisting a culture of inauthentic mass-marketed image must resist becoming an image himself, even at the price of certain obscurity.” The image that Franzen created after rejecting Oprah, the image of a snob and an awkward interview, is so different from the generous, curious author who wrote this book. That image poisoned this book for someone like me, who was self-consciously rejecting the swaggering male archetype around the time that this book came out. I didn’t read it for twenty-four years, because I was sure that it wasn’t for me. David Foster Wallace, but kind of dumber? No thanks.

But don’t believe the reputation. This is a book that wants to revive Dickens for the 21st century, that wants to speak to the way that consumerism and meritocracy and the therapy industry have isolated families, that wants to speak across divides of identity and shake us out of whatever narrative is making us and the people around us unhappy. Too intellectual? Chip is your warning. Too striving? Check out Gary. Too aimless? See Denise. Too selfish? See Alfred. Too much of a people pleaser? See Enid. Each of their stories is overlaid with a carefully devastating but sympathetic setting of a striving New York, Philadelphia, St. Jude (St. Louis suburbs), and they all meet and intersect in a narration that deftly switches between stories and perspectives in a way that defies the gasping acolytes of close third person. Franzen makes the wan little husks of today’s autofiction look even huskier; he makes the novels of identity that refuse to grapple with the particular historical circumstances of their identity (I’m not going to name the ones I’m criticizing here, except obviously Brandon Taylor, but the ones that I’m NOT criticizing, that DO grapple with those historical circumstances and have the verve of Franzen if not always his ambition are from Morrison, Whitehead, Everett, Erdrich, Melchor, Hannaham, Sahota...) look like the overworkshopped products they almost certainly are. I’m glad that, unlike Foster Wallace, he refrains from attempting to “get inside the head” of people who are really different from him. He’s middle class and downwardly mobile! So are most of us!

There’s not a hint of virtue signaling in this novel, and there’s lots of bad behavior, but there’s also a lot of people trying to be virtuous, and who couldn’t love something like that?

Fuck the haters: Franzen loves the people, he loves making something both readable and smart, and he wants to create an imaginary world that shows all of the ways that middle-aged and older people might regret their choices while also showing how those choices were damn circumscribed in the first place.

3. The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton

I was driving to work this morning and thinking about Undine Spragg. There’s a particular intersection in the small town I teach in that I often do my best thinking at, because it’s usually about two minutes from when I’m about to park. What’s the grand conclusion of your commute, my brain says. My conclusion is that I love how deftly Wharton handled Undine. She’s a type, for sure, but Wharton’s anger is so clearly directed at the country that creates and encourages the growth of the Undine Spragg personality and not at the scarily ambitious woman herself. I think of Ralph Marvell, her second husband, cowering next to his secret drawer, the one Wharton hid from the reader until the last possible moment. I think of her line towards the end of the book, when Spragg gets tired of Elmer (obviously) and she combines Ralph and another husband together in some composite that she wishes she could still have.

In The Custom of the Country, it’s not, as it was in The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence, that there is a special world (one Wharton belonged to) that could be saved if the corruptible people in that world simply insisted on remaining virtuous. No: everything in America is soaked through with corruption. We are only left to admire the small moments where people naively or tragically stand up for some older tradition or some set of values that can’t be bought by money, but we know that it’s useless.

4. Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang

The only competition that Ted Chiang has in the short story in the 21st century is George Saunders. Every story in here is entirely different and they’re ALL successful. This is the kind of thing that makes you want to give up writing or start immediately.

There’s stories here that feel like Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and even a little Octavia Butler. The title(ish) story that got adapted into Arrival is probably my favorite one here even though I already knew exactly what was going to happen. Chiang renders it a little different from the movie and I loved being inside the protagonist’s perspective, which the movie couldn’t quite do. I even enjoyed the quasi-epistolary, second-person direct address of it, and usually that style is a big mistake.

However, there’s simply no weak spots here. There’s even a micro-fiction that I enjoyed and fit in perfectly to break up the generally longer pieces.

5. The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams

The first time I read this I didn’t like it all, the second time I read it I kind of loved it (this is when I was making a whole slideshow with all of the “screen legends” from the stage directions so the high school kids could perform it) and when the kids finally read it while I ran the slideshow and the music and the whole thing I totally loved it.

The tone is weird. The use of screen titles seems so cruel at times that it’s almost campy; Amanda’s monologues are almost certainly supposed to be funny. This recent review of a staging of the play says that Tom “will leave [Laura] to the rough treatment of their garrulous, agitated mother, Amanda...the same as leaving her to die,” which sounded completely absurd to me. Why would we actually fear for Laura’s life? Because she struggles to walk down stairs? Because she doesn’t want to get a job? This is definitely a play for anyone (Beatniks in the 1950’s when it was written, but then hippies in the 60’s and early 70’s, and then slackers in the 90’s, and maybe a few folks who stayed on unemployment for extra time in 2020-2021) who graduated into a new economic boom after a depression and decided they needed to chill out for a few years instead of getting a job...and good for them, and good for Laura!

It was extremely satisfying to read this after studying Streetcar so much with the kids. Williams even has an essay at the end of Menagerie explaining how fame and success ruin your career, and the horrific cruelty and violence of Streetcar now makes so much more sense as Williams’ petulant response to the fame he got after baring his soul in Menagerie. It’s a more honest response than trying to reproduce what people loved about you from your breakout work, and I respect it, even if Williams eventually seemed to be chased down and destroyed by fame after Streetcar was even more successful than Menagerie.

6. Preparation for the Next Life, Atticus Lish

I read this on a recommendation from that month’s-old discussion about why there’s a lack of white male authors in the literary world today. I basically disagree with the article and come down on the side of “stop whining” (see below), but I’m glad it prompted me to read this novel, because it is one of the best ones written in the last decade, and it had to be written by someone outside of the typical literary system.

Lish refuses to fall into the sad white boy literary trap and instead opts for something that reminds me much more of Steinbeck or Dos Passos, updated for the present. These are stories of the broken and dispossessed, but presented without piety or sentimentality. I’m not sure I totally buy his initial characterization of Zou Lei; at times the broken English close third person perspective of a Uyghur being pushed out of her home felt like more of a caricature than an authentic portal into her consciousness, but eventually I succumbed to the attention that Lish obviously paid to the community of Flushing, Queens and his beautiful, horrific evocation of the setting made me feel less suspicious of her characterization in China in the beginning of the novel. I love what he didn’t give away about her journey to the U.S., and by the end of the book her characterization feels utterly complete and earned.

In general, if white dudes want more people to read their books, they should write about more interesting people! I can’t imagine that someone with Zou Lei’s exact life experiences is going to write a book, so if Lish isn’t going to do it, well, you can read Tahir Hamut Izgil’s Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide, I guess? I’ve read that book, and there was nothing in it that contradicted anything of the characterization that Lish created in his book, and he definitely didn’t read it since it came out after Preparation was written.

There are two white dudes characterized in this book, and neither one wants to write a book, and neither one has been within miles of a college, and the way they interact with Zou Lei has none of the stink of identity politics on it. Lish helpfully decides that the disposition of one of them is purely evil and the other purely good, and both of them have been warped by their circumstances and social environments into much weirder versions of those core dispositions. This is an extremely violent book, but so is the world, especially recently!

For evidence of just how outside of the system Lish is, check out this interview with Lauren Oyler (who also loved the book) back in 2015. Helpfully, neither Oyler nor Lish reveal much in the way of plot in the interview.

7. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Part One, Emil Ferris

I own this monster. I think I must have bought it at a comics shop around 2018, but I’m such a cheapskate about owning books that I don’t know what possessed me to drop nearly fifty bucks to own something that would only take a couple of hours to read.

Yet I’ve read it twice now, and I’ll probably read it again. If I ever have a friend staying with us (we’ve got a futon in the attic!) and they haven’t brought a book, I’ll give this one to them. Welcome to Ferris-world. Drop in. Is it autobiography? How can this be true, this world of almost unimaginable cruelty? And yet I’ve spent weeks near the North Side of Chicago, since most of my friends live there or have lived there, and Ferris captures some part of the texture of that place so perfectly, and even though that place has definitely changed, the kind of working-class people who used to live there have spread to other neighborhoods that I’ve also visited in Chicago, and I’ve met these people, the Brains, the Deezes, the Irish boys whose alderman fathers would protect them if they raped someone. And I’ve visited the glorious Art Institute, just like like Karen, and it’s just as transporting as Ferris lays it out in these pages.

Ferris’ terrifyingly exact crosshatching, done in pencil or pen over wide-ruled notebook pages, is like the labor of a Bellow or Melville; the work reveals itself through its attention to detail, its sucking in of the whole world and its spitting out of a twisted, insane point of view.

8. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

Begin with Catherine: brightness and wildness crushed under the weight of falseness and social expectation. Enter Heathcliff: language as pure id, desires sociopathic, (self, other-) destruction total. Everything else in this novel bows down to their cracked relationship, which is literally over in about 30 pages in the beginning of the book but lingers on for all of the rest of it. I finished it at 1 a.m., after being wakened by a tree branch falling with a giant crash into my front yard during a wind storm.

This novel is half-formed, shuddering, provocative; the sentences can wind on interminably and sometimes indeterminately: first novel, unedited stuff. The lack of polish is inextricable from what's good about it. Bronte was possessed by something: the wind, the rain, the moss, the hills. Heathcliff is an invasive species, with all of the problematic associations that go along with continually characterizing another human being as, you know, not human. And yet: Heathcliff is obviously Bronte's favorite character, and his ambiguous racial identity (a child of the Empire and maybe a soldier of it later in life) isn't what alienates him from everyone else. The social world of class and name, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, doesn't allow anyone else in. The Earnshaw patriarch seems devoted to Heathcliff in a way that either ignores or devotes itself completely to the difference between them. In other words, he's a race-blind humanist or a difference-chaser, but he certainly isn't a savage-tamer.

And when Bronte (brilliantly) reenacts this Mr. Earnshaw-Heathcliff dynamic in the next generation between Hareton and Catherine Linton , she never resorts to the racialist trap of savage and civilization. Each time, education is simply a way to escape the bleak moors that these people are trapped on (by their own choice, strangely enough, as Heathcliff, Lockwood, and Isabella make clear in their relatively easy exits).

Emily Bronte isn't a great writer on the sentence level, but this is a classic.

9. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

It’s very funny that a member of my book club had never read this (I haven’t reread it for 20 years) and also very funny that I read Bleak House for the first time in 2024 and mostly loved it, and also reread Great Expectations in 2023 after hating it as a teenager and unreservedly adored it. I think I’m probably going to simply have to read or reread a Dickens novel every year for the next decade or so and then turn forty (ha ha, I am not at all thirty).

Despite this being one of his last books, it almost seems less mature and more sentimental than his earlier books. It’s a strange direction for a old author to go in, yet it also does represent Dickens’ relentless effort to try something new, and I applaud him for that.

10. Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford

This was absurdly smart and densely planned and plotted, as if Spufford was himself the Big Boss Catholic Cahokian Prince who occupies one of the power centers of the novel (along with a race-baiting capitalist, a ruthless princess, a feckless mayor, and a funny-talking Irish police chief).

The way the novel shifts from the partner detective pair of Drummond and Barrow to the solo adventurer Barrow is subtle and a classic example of function meeting form: the whole thing is classic Dashell Hammett in plot, but Hammett wasn’t trying to use the partner relationship to say something about the problems between white people and Native Americans for the last 500 years. Barrow’s growing confidence away from Drummond reinforces the novel’s somehow unpatronizing attitude towards Native Americans. Maybe the speculative part is what frees Spufford and allows him to portray Native culture as complex and shifting rapidly, as opposed to a white American culture that’s dumb and brutal when it tries to philosophize about its own superiority.

There’s really not a single thing wrong with this novel except maybe that Barrow’s knack for finding himself in the middle of seemingly the most pivotal moment in Cahokian history over and over in the span of four days is obviously unbelievable and an kind of quirk of genre fiction. This beautiful, doomed vision of a much better, if still fatally flawed United States would have been my favorite book of quarter two, though like the next three books, it’s not quite at the level of a Classic like The Last Samurai from quarter one.

11. Major Arcana, John Pistelli

I’ve already wrote nearly 5000 words about this. I like that it ALMOST fits into a top ten with Emil Ferris, Atticus Lish, Bronte, Williams, Charles Dickens and Francis Spufford here, because it’s got all of that in it: the whipsaw back and forth between characters from extremely different backgrounds, the present with its anomie and internet-addled blankness, the bildungsroman, the evilness of moors and magic, the graphic novel, and the sentimental, sympathetic campiness of someone like Williams. Lish, Ferris, Williams, Bronte, Dickens and Pistelli know the world is hard, and believe art has to reflect that hardness, but they also want to have a good damn entertaining time while making it.

12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe

I love that Dickens talked shit about this and Tolstoy loved it, because it feels like it’s in between their styles. It’s messier than Dickens, but it’s also much clearer on a moral level than most of his work. Dickens backs off when his class critique gets too intense, because he wants to return to his plots and characters, but Stowe pushes on the bruise. Like Tolstoy, she doesn’t care if she gets annoying, and also like Tolstoy, she’s really not that annoying, except when she positively stereotypes Black people as acutely sensitive and receptive to Christianity. I suspect that this book’s bad reputation comes more from the fact of Stowe’s sex than it does from her racism. Stowe kowtows to no one. She’s so obviously not trying to build a literary reputation; she’s trying to tell a story that’s so convincing that it actually changes the minds of people who are convinced that Black people don’t have souls. And she kind of did it by selling more books than any other literary work in the entire 19th century, and so of course other writers (aka the dudes) are going to be jealous! She cuts through the bullshit, and as in our time, American politics in the 1850’s was full of bullshit.

The problem her positive stereotyping created on a character level wasn’t in the form of Tom, who suffers and dies like all Christian martyrs do and didn’t feel flat in the way his reputation seems to suggest he will. The problem was in a minor character, George Harris. I loved his characterization in the beginning of the book; he’s Tom’s foil, and his presence and his atheism actually serves him far, far better than Tom’s religiosity. The problem is when he converts to Christianity at the end of the book, because I just didn’t believe that. George is too smart! He’s like St. Clare! He could be an agnostic, but not a Christian. Sorry Christians, George has seen how white Christians are too often hypocrites, and he’s seen how Black Christians are too often martyred, and it just doesn’t seem worth it, even if a lot of the abolitionists who help him are extremely religious, too.

That’s a small problem in the grand scheme of the book, though, and ultimately I found it better plotted and detailed and characterized than 99% of books I read, and I just skipped most of the heavy Biblical quotes and allusions because I don’t believe in any of that stuff and it was still incredibly satisfying. It turns out that if you are actually writing something revolutionary and against the grain, it’ll feel that way!

13. The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne does make me fall asleep so quickly, but I refuse to call this book boring, because it really is not. Most of it is extremely funny and prescient and moving. I am so glad my parents no longer live in my childhood home. The past is such a prison! Your ancestors are weighing you down! Also, you are doomed to repeat their mistakes, but in subtle variation, though if you are young and optimistic and naive enough, you may be able to blithely escape their mistakes!

My only note is that this starts a little too slowly. I really felt trapped in that house with Hepzibah by the time we meet another human being. But once we meet the gingerbread-face-stuffing boy, we are really off, and this RIPS.

14. The Last Picture Show, Larry McMurtry

wrote a really great review of this that made me want to read it, especially because Rebecca loves Lonesome Dove (which I have to read now). For some reason, I checked it out and then Rebecca read it first. I think I was trying to read something sort of long (The Corrections?) and so she got to it first. She loved it, but also looked totally disgusted at a bunch of parts while reading it.

When she finished, I asked Rebecca if it was a genre novel like Lonesome Dove and she said something like, no, this it’s an anti-genre novel, it’s an anti-romance. This is people frantically putting themselves into each other in the hopes that it will numb them from the bleakness of their lives. I said, man, I've got to read it now.

I'm not sure it's THAT bleak. However, McMurtry is such a skilled and fluid writer that he can make some pretty unpleasant shit just sort of pass away like a prairie wind in West Texas. This novel is mostly written from the perspective of an boy on the verge of his high school graduation, but McMurtry gets into the perspectives of other residents of Thalia, Texas with barely a shrug. The narrative flies by, even though very little happens. Sometimes long stretches of time disappear (the late winter and early spring). Sometime McMurtry lingers on a weekend. No matter what, Thalia remains a cold, brutal place where seemingly no one cares is willing to risk the embarrassment of too many human feelings.

Welcome to rural America! Nothing has changed.

15. Acting Class, Nick Drnaso

We had a very fun time talking about this in my book club.

There is something incredibly pandemic-coded about this one on re-reading it. I still think it’s very good, but it’s not one of the greatest graphic novels I’ve ever read which is how I felt about it in 2021. However, this is why I’m glad I entered this with open expectations the first time. A lot of the power of this relies on the plot, and more of the characterization (whether through setting, dialogue, or internal monologue) could have been beefed up. However, the mystery and menace and propulsive tone could have been blunted if he slowed down? I’m not totally sure this still isn’t a genius work just because it didn’t hit me quite as hard the second time.

16. Skippy Dies, Paul Murray

The library shelved this under mystery and I was picking up a copy of Gone Girl for Rebecca so I thought I’d grab it. I knew about Murray from a list somewhere of young Irish writers. He’s a funny one. There’s a lot of ambition here and some extremely “literary” moments of stream-of-consciousness, but he’s also devoted to telling a great yarn, so the chapters are short and the perspectives shift extremely often and if he gets a little over his skis when he’s trying to describe a how a 15-year-old might experience smoking heroin or taking a bunch of painkillers he whips back into something much more straightforward in just a few pages. Some blurb called this “the Moby-Dick of prep school novels” and that’s totally incorrect in most ways (Murray’s not clearly a genius like Melville and Skippy doesn’t have one consistent perspective like Ishmael’s) yet there’s something to it in the formal structure of the chapters here, and the way that Murray approaches this monster of a Catholic prep school designed to suppress dissent and make the richest Irish families richer does have something of the quixotic quality of Melville’s tome.
Anyway, there’s also something Dickensian, not Joycean about this book, because it really does aim to please despite its occasional rhetorical flourishes. It’s an old-fashioned mystery for most of the runtime, and saves about the last third of the novel for a satisfying description of the way the school reacts to the titular death that’s revealed in the first page of the novel and explained in the first two thirds. A more conventional mystery would maybe have ended around the four hundred page mark when we find out exactly why Skippy died, but Murray wants to savage the whole system of prep schools and entitlement that drive much of the inequality in Ireland, and so Skippy becomes a vehicle for critique rather than simple pathos as he was in most of the book. It works!

17. Dawn, Octavia Butler

I guess everyone was reading Parable of the Sower in February when L.A. was on fire (2025, what a year), but I’d tried it a few years ago and didn’t like it and decided that Butler was overrated and I knew this wasn’t a popular opinion so I didn’t share it. I thought I’d give her one more try and this was a book without holds at my local library. I’m glad I did: this is one of my favorite sci-fi books of the last few years, for sure, and I get why people like Butler so much, even if I don’t want to read her books set in our world.

I’d rather read her aliens, and enjoy how she uses her protaganist’s identity as a Black woman to comment on how most first contact narratives use a colonizing mindset because they’re written by and star white men. Lilith is far more interesting in her wary cynicism about the aliens, and the other humans she’s been tasked with liberating from their destructive patterns.

Butler draws Lilith out without using any of the typical exposition information dumps. Instead, she uses the aliens as a kind of refracted mirror for aspects of her psyche; we get to know her as they get to know her. Then she continues to raise the stakes as we find out more and more about what “trading” really means.

I found myself thinking about artificial intelligence as much as I did about aliens as the book started to wrap up, which is a sign that Butler, like Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, succeeded in making something durable and transferable across many historical and technological eras. The ending felt a little rushed and “setting up the sequel” after a lot of patient world-building and was my only issue with this one.

18. The Underground Man, Ross Macdonald

Genre part deux, and from another Angeleno, in fact one who grew up right in the shadow of the fires. For something seemingly completely different, how about a mystery genre novel written in the 1970’s? I’m not even sure Macdonald would have called it a “literary” mystery, because there’s not really anything wrong with genre novels if they’re done well, and I haven’t read a mystery novel I’ve enjoyed more since P.D. James, or maybe Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia.

The New Yorker review mentioned how it was a rare mystery book to eschew the conservative politics of retribution and sin that obsess Chandler and Hammett. This is true, though it’s still a bit of a product of its time in its Freudianism. Oh well. Is it sort of ghoulish for them to recommend this novel right after the fires? Maybe, though if I lived in L.A., I’m sure I would enjoy this even more: the backdrop of a wildfire and the conflation of social, moral, and ecological destruction in Los Angeles is perfect. It probably had been done before and it’s definitely been done since, but it’s difficult to pull off a narrative as compulsively readable as this one while avoiding most cliches and locating the evil of Los Angeles squarely where it always belongs: in land speculation and the suburbs.

19. The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

Highsmith is such a sicko. I knew Tommy was going to get away with it because this is “Ripley, #1” on goodreads, and also because there’s a Netflix anthology show (and thus there’s more material than one book) with Andrew Scott, who seems perfectly cast as Ripley to me in a way that Damon really isn’t (though Jude Law was a perfect Dickie Greenleaf).

I recently watched Manhunter and I’ve read these Macdonald crime books and Ripley is kind of between the steely intellectualism of Hannibal Lector and Will Graham in the Hannibal books and the dum-dums who inhabit the seedy world of Los Angeles that Macdonald writes about in the Lew Archer series. Highsmith brings the reader behind the scenes into Ripley’s life, where he alternates between creepily trying to reproduce other people’s lives through copying their mannerisms and whining about why no one likes him.

The queerness in this novel, as in Carol, is remarkably ahead of its time. The fact that he defines himself as asexual in the novel doesn’t necessarily mean anything since he’s such a liar, but Tom’s pathology can’t be reduced to his sexual preferences. He certainly seems like he mostly hates women and femininity, and in the glimpses we get of other characters’ impressions of Tom, he seems fairly effeminate. But Highsmith traps us in Tom’s mirror world and the logic here is only about power.

20. Intermezzo, Sally Rooney

I can’t really understand the hate for Rooney on this platform or in any space except that maybe people haven’t read Conversations with Friends? If you did read it, and you were filled with any emotion except either jealously or admiration, I’m also confused. I could not believe someone younger than me had written something so unique and smart and compulsively readable, something that seems both eloquently tossed-off and obsessively plotted. Now, is Conversations with Friends as good as The Last Samurai? Absolutely fucking not. But it is one of my favorite books of the last 25 years, probably.

Anyway, I root for Rooney who just seems like she wants to do a good job writing books every time she releases a new book and I know every time it will not hit me the way Friends did, and every time it doesn’t, and that’s ok.

This is probably my second favorite of her books. It feels a little looser than the middle two and I see her starting to overcome that anxiety about what her debut meant and just letting it rip.

21. The Complete Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

On rereading this I found myself more impressed with the second book than the first one; there’s a wordless scene about two-thirds of the way through it that’s one of the best moments in any memoir comic that I’ve every read. I like Satrapi’s bleak tone and often-unlikable characterization in the second book too. She’s someone who feels textured, who grows and changes both rapidly and believably.
In contrast, the first book now feels a little underbaked. She’s trying to do about ten things at once (bildungsroman, Persian history, drawing in a style that blends French and Persian art influences, telling the story of the Iranian Revolution, showing the effect of the trauma of war on both children and adults) and she doesn’t succeed in all of them.
Obviously Maus had a huge influence on this, as well as the work of the French artists in L’Association. Those works are a little more allusive and strange and I like them more for that.

22. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

It is hard to keep track of the characters, though basically all of the mothers went through some sort of insanely awful experience that made them want to immigrate, and all of the daughters are disappointments to themselves or their mothers in some way. The book’s not really a narrative in the traditional way of a novel, it’s more of a set of interconnected short stories. But that’s not really a problem: Tan is talking more about “being American with Chinese characteristics” as a cultural or social phenomenon than she is about specific cases, though every specific case is vividly and beautifully rendered.
If there’s a protagonist, it’s definitely June Woo, and her set of stories are probably the strongest, though none of the stories were bad and none of them bored me. If Tan’s trying to prove to her mother’s generation (the ones fleeing Maoism) that Boomers have something interesting to say...she’s totally succeeded!

23. Orestes, Euripedes

I’ve been teaching Antigone for the last three years and loving it, so I thought I’d dip deeper into some Euripedes. This is so relentlessly dark, it's perfect for the end times (now) and I'm guessing it was also perfect for the decadent end times of the Greeks! Orestes and Electra are some like, Red Scare Dimes Square motherfuckers, and hey kids, good luck with your tradwife marriages!

24. The Sportswriter, Richard Ford

I think I enjoyed Independence Day just slightly more than this one. It was eerie how closely some of this matched my actual life in the sense that Bascombe is about my age, has two kids, and was experiencing an unseasonably cold Easter. On the flip side is all of the tragic stuff that Bascombe “dreamily” endures, while my life has had little to no tragedy in it for a good decade and a half or so, besides a few unfortunate bureaucratic snafus at various jobs.

Now that I have the stability that crumbles under Bascombe’s feet, I can understand what it would be like to be unmoored, as Bascombe is, and in the ending of this book ultimately Ford seems to suggest that his coping mechanism of just floating through it since his unmooring did not work out as well as he hoped it might.

However, much of the middle of the book seems to implicitly endorse Bascombe’s cheery indifference and rambling uncertainty, and this grated on me a little bit. Bascombe’s rejection of a character who seems to be his foil as a divorced dad seemed both too forceful and not forceful enough, and though I appreciate the way that this character set up the ending of the novel, something in it felt disjointed, too.

25. Flights, Olga Tokarczuk

I like Drive Your Plow more, but not exactly much more: they’re both so imitably Polish, so redolent of Krystof Kislowski, Wisława Szymborska, or Stanisław Lem. What a bunch of weirdos, the Poles! How in-between and mixed up and wonderful they are, and how great it is that Tokarczuk uses that mixed-up identity to craft this cracked mirror of stories about flight. It’s a collection more than a coherent narrative, but it’s also frequently thrilling in its jumble of flash fiction and multi-part stories spaced out over hundreds of pages. Tokarczuk has a clear point of view and she’s able to keep her thematic focus from getting boring; any time there are a few too many stories in a row about preserved organs she drops a stunner about a lost family or a wayward mother. “Godzone” and the Kunicki chapters are probably the best ones, but Josefine Soliman’s letters and the Dr. Blau narratives are also excellent.

26. Ripley Under Ground, Patricia Highsmith

There’s some chance that I might read the other books in this series but it’s unlikely. I’m still in love with Highsmith’s style, and I definitely don’t regret reading this, but Tom Ripley’s rich wife just doesn’t work as a character, and when she goes, everything else goes too. It don’t buy that anyone could marry evil Tom Ripley, even if they spoke limited English!

The second death by suicide in this book, and Tom’s cremation of the body, was really one of the ickiest things I’ve read for a while, and I mean that as a compliment.

27. A Night in the Lonesome October, Roger Zelazny

It was a book club book and I don't mind owning it now because someone else in my library system totally overstayed their hold by two weeks (the tyranny of library systems getting rid of fines). I've got a sparking new copy with a wolf on it which is kind of...cool-looking, but not actually true for who Snuff is? I wish I'd gotten a copy with the insane dinner party look on it, which is also not very representative of The Game.
This is about as much humor as a horror/fantasy book can stand without collapsing into total farce. Zelazny is such a nerd.

28. Ruth Hall, Fanny Fern

I’m pretty sure Naomi Kanakia recommended this book. It’s exactly her kind of thing. If kids were assigned this in school they’d have a very different vision of what 19th century literature could be. It’s very funny that this novel was WAY more popular during its time than Hawthorne and Poe and Melville were. Fanny Fern is (mostly) not boring, though she sometimes overemphasizes the awfulness of Hall’s relatives in a way that gets repetitive, since the relatives are never characterized in a way that lets the reader understand why they are so awful (except for Hall’s brother, another aspiring writer who is hilariously obsessed with the opinions of other writers). The trials that Ruth goes through are interesting and the use of the epistolary form in the novel’s final third is effective.

I didn’t find myself extremely eager to pick it up each time, because the last third of the novel felt so clearly telegraphed by the teleology of the entire book: one must be good in order to be misunderstood by an evil world, one must suffer because of how one is misunderstood, one must turn suffering into art because it is the only escape from the evil world, and the good people in the world must eventually, on the eve of the destruction of the good artist, suddenly discover her goodness and elevate her to ranks of genius. I was going to say “if anyone wrote this today,” but…there was just a takedown of Ocean Vuong’s work, and he basically covers this whole teleology!

I don’t like this kind of journey and I prefer fiction that’s more imaginative, but if we’re gonna have autofiction, I’d rather read Ruth Hall than 95% of what’s come out in the last 15 years.

29. The Way Some People Die, Ross Macdonald

Ted Gioia had a solid post about what made The Underground Man so good that I didn’t spot when I wrote about it in my first quarter book ranking. With that one along with the New Yorker review, I became convinced that I should read all of Ross Macdonald’s work. I stopped two novels in, with this one.

Gioia’s idea that Macdonald wrote an “anti-mystery” more like Italo Calvino or Nabokov’s Pale Fire than a genre novel feels like an accurate assessment of The Underground Man. And there’s a little bit of that in The Way Some People Die: the image of the suburban development in the desert where one of the criminals hangs out is so perfectly drawn that it seems to comment more about the anomie of the suburbs than the putative subject of the novel (a wandering daughter whose mother, a landlord in Santa Monica, enlists Lew Archer to find). Lew Archer’s trip up to San Francisco is similarly eerie—it’s a silent world, full of heroin and cheap hotels, in total contrast to Los Angeles, which is bumping with (violent, evil) energy.

However, the big villains of this novel are forgettable and silly, just as they were in The Moving Target, and Macdonald can’t string the whole thing together to make any sort of really interesting comment on the 1950’s the way he can once he gets to the 1960’s and places Lew Archer in a world that seems finally modern.

30. The Moving Target, Ross Macdonald

The Underground Man was one of my favorite books from the first quarter of this year, so I thought I’d try to read the first book in the series. Even this first book is better written than most crime fiction, and I’d rather read it than any of the DNFs, but this also reads like historical fiction, and Macdonald is just so much more incisive when he’s writing during the 1960’s. The Moving Target was written in the early 50’s, and there’s too much here that is nearly an exact ripoff of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett: swanky hotels, jazz clubs, two-timing dames…now, Chandler and Hammett probably wouldn’t have had a subplot featuring a guy who smuggles migrant workers from Mexico in through the guise of being a New Age mystic, but Underground Man is nearly bursting with plots that feel modern and relevant, and Moving Target only had one.

31. Mating, Norman Rush

I had this idea a while ago that someone should write a novel in the style of Moby Dick again. Melville had a good idea there: focusing on one overriding symbol, using short chapters, writing in a distinctive first person voice, using lots of different forms (fables, taxonomy, short narrative stories).

Well, Rush did it in 1991.

The White Whale here is a dude, and that’s from the first four pages or so of the novel. The issue here isn’t the White Whale, who is as close to as interesting in Mating as he is in Melville’s novel. You get swept up in the journey. There’s some real life or death stakes, and they don’t feel entirely fake.

My problem is the unnamed narrator. She’s no Ishmael. Melville’s narrator definitely seems like more of a reflection of himself, endlessly transposable into odd situations, ironic, strange, and possibly insane. I mostly admire Rush’s courage in diving into a first-person female perspective as a, um...pretty manly-looking man, based on the jacket cover, and I mostly admire the way he has his narrator let it all hang out. Her sexual frankness and her general assertiveness and courage are appealing, but her neuroticism got to be extremely tiring over nearly five hundred pages. I didn’t want to hang out with her like I wanted to hang out with Ishmael. Rush’s plotting and sense of place were exciting and ambitious, but she was just so unreliable and self-involved as a narrator that I kept feeling like I couldn’t understand the other characters well. She just kept inserting herself into the story in unwelcoming, unappealing ways.

I guess this novel’s been coming up because Lauren Oyler is a fan of it, though I’m not sure what it has to do with her execrable Fake Accounts besides starting the reader in a state where the narrator knows a lot more than we do and doling out information bit by bit. Also, both books are extremely boring for 20-30 pages at a time, which is a bigger problem for Oyler than for Rush since her book is so much shorter.

32. Spent: A Comic Novel, Alison Bechdel

This is messy, and despite the unfortunate pandemic references, it still succeeds. Bechdel and her friends are sometimes annoying and not at all relatable, but they’re all ultimately charming. I don’t want them to all lose their jobs and get swept away in our current Kulturkampf! I hope the authoritarians who run our country know that these people are fundamentally harmless and unserious even if they’re all sort of obsessed with being good leftists.

33. Exhalation, Ted Chiang

Stories of your Life and Others is the great one. The best ones here are better than nearly all the short stories I’ve read in the past few years and rise to the level of those stories, but I didn’t enjoy the novella-length one in the middle much and some of them felt more like exercises than fleshed out narratives. The audiobook did a really annoying thing where it put the author’s notes directly after the stories and that made these worse. I don’t want to hear Chiang explaining what he’d read that inspired each of these, though all of them kind of read like exercises in a way that the ones in his other collection really don’t.

34. China Mountain Zhang, Maureen McHugh

Good, not great. It’s trying to bite off a lot more than it can chew in its current form, and I would have preferred a whole book from Zhang’s perspective, because the other characters are not even close to as interesting as he is. McHugh doesn’t quite build out the world (what...is up with the western U.S.? Global warming? Nuclear apocalypse?) but the Chinese/Chinglish post-colonial thing is well done.

35. Erasure, Percival Everett

This is much better than The Trees, but I enjoyed Dr. No more, and I’m probably just done with Everett in general. I’d waited a while to read it because of reading the other two books, and this one still sounds like the other two, which means it’s kind of like a sketch for a novel more than a novel and I don’t need to read these any more.

I definitely loved parts of this. Most of the first third of the book, the exposition and most of the rising action is funny and smart, and “My Pafology” is actually hilarious. Monk is not a particularly relatable or even likable protagonist, but Everett uses him in some interesting ways to get at the problems with a Black novel in the 21st century.
However, I started to not really care about what was happening in the last third of the novel. Maybe it was the ways that Ellison was trying to say that Monk was going crazy, or play with the novel form in some way, but the jokes just got less funny, the interruptions to the text with italicized dialogues between contemporary artists got more and more frequent, and the ending felt somewhat pat.

The family drama just fell apart for me, most of all. Bill felt extremely caricatured as an out-of-the-closet, relentlessly cruising gay guy who’d disappointed his dad. The depiction of Alzheimer’s with Monk’s mom was often moving, but it sometimes felt like Everett was trying to milk some humor out of the situation which fell a little flat.

The problem might have been that I’d already seen American Fiction and that movie was much more tender towards Monk and his family and the whole situation he finds himself in as a Black middle class intellectual than Everett seems to be. Or maybe Jeffrey Wright was better at communicating that tenderness than Everett was.

36. Metallic Realms, Lincoln Michel

This one is like a friendly Erasure, mixed with a much lighter version of the sci-fi in Butler’s books.

Michel’s biggest problem is setting this novel in Brooklyn, because our narrator is such a homebody and thus the reader must endure descriptions of sidewalks, bodegas, and pizza that have now, twenty years into the movement of every single literary person to Brooklyn, become worse than cliché. I kind of understand the idea that this is a satire of literary fiction that uses sci-fi as a loving counterpart or foil, but there are people writing literary fiction…everywhere? For example, in Queens, where Preparation for the Next Life is set? And the problem with Brooklyn, besides the banality of the setting, is that it seems to require that the characters recite the progressive catechism far too often: debt, climate change, the internet, fascism, gender as a social construct, in some order.

I liked the narrator’s pathetic whininess, but the pathetic whininess of his friends reciting the catechism over and over got boring. The narrator definitely seems to hate them in a repressed way, and that’s probably the most interesting thing about the novel—the idea that the narrator’s obsession with his friends’ sci-fi writing is something of a distraction from his desire to, uh, kill them or destroy their lives. Michel’s not quite willing to go all the way there, and that’s what made it hard to love this.

The stories that the narrator’s friends wrote are perfectly pitched and one of the best parts of the novel. They’re at the perfect level of competency for the narrator to get obsessed with them: not actually genius, but better than replacement-level sci-fi. The narrator’s glosses of the stories (the Pale Fire thing) are extremely funny and well-constructed. Again—maybe a little more tension here, more action, and the world of the Orb 4 and the real world of B—lyn would have had worked more for me.

37. Glitterballs, Michelle Howarth

I mostly liked it! It’s better than about 20 other novels I read this year.

38. Cane, Jean Toomer

I read Nella Larson’s Passing a couple of years ago and thought, damn, why did I wait so long? I think that’s when I added Cane to my list. They are absolutely nothing alike.

Passing is small and focused and intimate. It goes deeper and deeper into Irene’s psyche until the whole premise becomes merely a device to think about race and marriage and New York more broadly.

Cane, on the other hand, just keeps getting wider and wider. It never gets into the psyche at all. It’s insanely ambitious, but rarely pulls off its ambition. It should be more widely read, because if an author was actually able to pull off what Toomer was attempting to do here, it would have been the best book of the Harlem Renaissance AND would have ranked up there alongside Woolf and Joyce in the great books of Modernism. As is, this is both too messy and too repetitive to really achieve what Toomer wanted it to.

39. Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon

I almost don't want to reread the Pynchon I loved in my twenties now, because I'm afraid I only enjoyed about 100 pages or so of this and was then relentlessly bored for the next two hundred. Pynchon seemed to get bored with his protagonist before I did. I didn't mind him bringing him across the Atlantic, but why couldn't he give Hicks a chance to reprise the brief burst of antifascism that drew him away from strikebreaking and into PI work in a place that has, uh, actual fascism? His protagonist has no dark night of the soul, because Pynchon has no interest in exploring the actual fucking Holocaust, just winking at it. It’s about two too many winks to say, well now, it was just as fascist in Milwaukee as it is in Eastern Europe as the Nazis begin to take over Germany!

I know Pynchon's critics always say "too many characters, no development," but I guess my memory is that the plots and dialogue pull the characters through. You know it's all basically just one character, but I remembered that character as funny and soulful, not cynical and tired.

40. Train Dreams, Denis Johnson

I’m not sure if I totally get the hype. I found the nature/industrialization and family-life/loneliness-death thing to be a little bit more telegraphed than it needed to be. For a novella (though it’s kind of also a collection of short stories) Jesus’ Son is much better, even if its also a lot messier. Train Dreams is pretty, weightless, and forgettable.

41. My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Part Two, Emil Ferris

Her style is still technically impressive, but all the loose ends from the first part of the series either didn’t need to get wrapped up, or were wrapped up in bizarre ways that took me out of the flow of the narrative. The examination of the narrator’s queerness was much more subtle in the first book, and while her love interest Shelley is funny and smart and interesting, I guess I wasn’t totally convinced she’d be attracted to Karen, who just seems like kind of a giant bummer in this book (besides being an artistic genius who drew this whole thing!).

The panel about college-ruled versus wide ruled totally killed me, but I wanted to know what happened with Anka Silverberg…and Ferris obviously doesn’t really want to know, or she’s saving something for part three, which I’ll still read, but with less anticipation.

42. The Magic Fish, Trung Le Nguyen

I’d highly recommend this to basically any kid interested in graphic novels in middle or early high school. I like it a LOT more than American Born Chinese, which was probably the book that it reminded me of the most. It’s much more subtle and elegant.

43. Cubafruit, Alexander Sorondo

This was still better than about 20 books I read this year, and I'll probably end up having more to say about this in a different venue, but given how consistently great his blog is I thought I would like this more. It's long. I wanted to quit reading 2/3 of the way through, when it started to just feel like endless scenes of over-the-top violence...and I kind of wish I had, because the book didn't wrap up in a way that rewarded sticking with it.

I’m not including pans and DNFs, but I had them in my first three quarters of reviews. Go check them out if you’re interested!

Glitterballs deserves more attention than 6 reviews on Goodreads. Howarth is a talented writer, and she easily rose to the top of my pile of novels for the Samuel Richardson Award from the first paragraph of the introduction:

1978

Sometime between the birth of the world’s first IVF baby and Jim Jones blowing out his brains in Guyana. Sometime between The Hair Bear Bunch and Granada Reports. Sometime between masturbating into a face flannel and noodling on his guitar, seventeen-year-old Neville ‘Howie’ Howden’s mother shouted, ‘Fancy a Vesta?’ up the stairs. And, in that moment, Howie’s planets lined up like Ray Reardon’s snooker balls. A stellar pop career launched off the back of a rehydrated ready meal.

I was immediately more interested in this novel than the one about a guy addicted to porn, or the historical fiction detective story, or the autofiction. I won’t look up “The Hair Bear Bunch,” or a “Vesta,” or “Ray Reardon,” or even what a “face flannel” is (I think it’s a hand towel? There’s nine of them in the novel, and Howie “wanks” into three of them, “masturbates” into three more, and plans to jack off into three others but doesn’t), but despite some of the problems that happen later in the novel, I continued to enjoy the allusions. Howarth emphasizes the cheap, fast, and stupid aspects of British culture: songs called “Fancy a Vesta?” played by dirtbags named Neville who go by Howie who eat TV dinners. Howarth also uses the odd sentence fragment. At first a tasteful amount. Then too many.

Howie is from the north of England. I also liked this. I’m from the middle of the U.S., and just like people in the north of England, we’re forced to read so, so many novels set in New York City (London) and almost none set where we live.

The novel skips all of Howie’s adolescence and most of his middle age and plunks him straight into a time when he should be retiring. From 1978, the action quickly shifts to April 2019, with Howie on the way to visit his ailing mother in a nursing home. He finds “those 200 miles from his home in Surrey to his birthplace of Stockport [to be] the most grueling of slogs.” I’d heard of Surrey before GLITTERBALLS; it’s that place where all the rich people in 19th century British novels already live, somewhere near London. Stockport, not so much: turns out it’s near Manchester, and despite decades of deindustrialization, still has about 200,000 people in it. Let’s call it the Milwaukee to the Chicago of Manchester. I have no idea if this comparison if fair, true, or accurate.

58-year-old rock stars who spend all of their time chasing women, doing drugs, driving expensive cars and staying in expensive hotels need to keep making money. It’s not as if they’ve saved any during their career. So we need to know about Howie’s neglected girlfriend, Stina, his melancholic manager Eddy, and his manager’s assistant, Tony, and the ways that Howie continues to debase his (already mediocre) music to keep the cash flowing. The novel switches between these four perspectives in short chapters, and the first 41 pages are a whirlwind: Howie’s mother dies, Stina and her child are basically ignored by Howie at the funeral and the wake, and Tony has to fill in for Eddy because he’s suffering from some unknown injury. It’s a lot. Maybe a bit much, though it’s justified by passages like this, from Eddy’s perspective:

But although the drift into mainstream pop had afforded middle-of-the-road success, any creative satisfaction had melted away as Howie migrated from John Peel to Dave Lee Travis, before finding a permanent home on Steve Wright in the Afternoon. Howie’s later songs had failed to garner the critical acclaim of his early work, but his long-standing female fan base were reliable as bums on seats, and his back catalogue provided a decent income through occasional use in adverts, TV and films. But Eddy had found himself sidelined by Howie’s money men: wily characters who struck deals in private members’ clubs, and on golf courses and grouse moors. They’d invested Howie’s wealth into offshore tax avoidance schemes – his money helping to fund the construction boom that had thrown up bland office blocks and identikit housing estates on brownfield sites across the north-west. Howie, seeing his wealth accumulate with little input or effort, had done nothing to counter it. He seemed happy to be the cash cow for the sycophants and Yes Men who’d burrowed their way into his life. Eddy had become the only person prepared to stand up to him. The only person in Howie’s circle brave enough to say no. He knew it was an endgame.

This first section of the novel is full of these kinds of details, narrated by Eddy or Tony or Stina, marveling at Howie’s gluttonous venality. In Howie’s sections, he is nothing but a monster of sensation, constantly hoovering up drugs and alcohol, groping women (not Stina), and whining (or “whinging,” truly one of my favorite Britishisms) about how Eddy or Tony or Stina are profiting off of his hard work. It’s a little unpleasant, but Howarth’s keen irony, short chapters, and fine-grained details kept me interested.

The problem in GLITTERBALLS starts on page 42, when the novel backs up to “Mid March, 2019.” The giant middle section of the novel, from 42 through 312, takes place two weeks before the death of Howie’s mother, and it is simply too long for a flashback.

Howarth adds another character, Eddy’s estranged wife Una, and five perspectives is too many. To name an example of a novel I recently read that pulled off five perspectives: Howarth isn’t Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections. The five main characters in that novel were all compelling in completely different ways. In the Mid-March section of GLITTERBALLS, I always enjoyed Tony’s sections and often enjoyed the sections from Howie or Stina’s perspectives, but I almost always hated the sections from Eddy and Una, and those sections end up unfortunately dominating this flashback. While I enjoyed his caustic cynicism in the first 41 pages, I didn’t need more of it in this section, and I definitely didn’t enjoy Una’s perspective on how Eddy had sold his soul by working for Howie for forty something years.

Una had seen the work he’d put into strategising Howie’s career; how he’d micromanaged every twist and turn, how he’d delegated work to other people, only to double-check they’d done it, then do it all over again himself. She knew the toll this had taken on both their relationship and his mental health.

‘No one gets to the top by themselves,’ she’d argued, during one of their many spats on the subject. ‘Even Bowie had help, whatever your man might think.’

‘Leave Bowie out of this,’ Eddy had said, sitting at the kitchen table, finishing off a bowl of breakfast cereal at two in the afternoon.

Una knew she was dangerously close to stepping over a line by taking a pop at one of Eddy’s heroes, but she was furious enough not to give a shit. She’d been loading the dishwasher at the time and was paying little heed to the crockery that she was chucking in. The clatter of plates echoed her rage.

‘I mean it. He hadn’t a pot to piss in when Angie styled him, it was Ronson’s missus who came up with the haircut and his manager bankrolled him when he was skint.’

‘So what? It was all about Bowie’s talent.’

‘Yeah, but take away their contribution and instead of Ziggy Stardust you’ve got some bloke with pipe dreams and bills.’

The novel spends too much time in sections like this, where these two miserable people talk about how much of an asshole Howie is and drop allusions to the dark side of rock and roll instead of getting into the more interesting business of why anyone keeps coming back for more. Or even worse: a long section of the middle part of the novel involves Eddy’s ill-fated trip to London for Howie’s appearance on the Graham Norton Show and his struggle to return to Stockport without a wallet or cash after a Howie-initiated bender goes sour.

Tony is the one who pulls these sections through; she’s a working-class lesbian tuba player with crushing student loan debt from her conservatory education who Eddy brought in as his personal assistant because he was impressed with her work at the nursing home with Howie’s mother. Tony’s ex-girlfriend is trying to use her proximity to Howie to make some extra cash and Tony’s trying to keep Eddy from killing himself after the debacle in London. If the middle part of the novel was shorter and featured only Tony rather than the other four characters, I could wholeheartedly recommend Glitterballs.

But as is, the soggy middle of the novel doesn’t exactly lift up in the novel’s ending, the last forty pages after the flashback is over and it returns to April. Howarth attempts to shove something of a mystery into the the latter half of the middle of the book, and the resolution of the mystery in the final pages doesn’t justify the slog in the middle. The bad guy (Howie) gets punished, the flawed ones (Eddy and Una) get a new start, and the good ones (Tony and Stina) get a new boost. It’s not exactly a moral vision as much as it’s a requirement: the music industry’s mediocre misogynism must be defeated somewhere, so the reader can feel like the middle of the book meant something. But (besides Tony) it really didn’t.

Howarth still writes some beautiful sentences in these last pages. Here’s an example from the last time Tony visits Eddy at his house. Meredith is her dastardly ex-girlfriend:

Despite her taped wing mirrors sitting at the wrong angle, Tony skillfully manoeuvred her car into what appeared to be the last space in the postcode, her textbook parking skills testament to the teenage joyrider who’d taught her in stolen vehicles. She’d spent hundreds of hours driving the East Lancs Road in cars, vans and even once a milk float. She’d explored the flatlands of Cheshire in a footballer’s Ferrari, which they’d left abandoned but undamaged, with only a half-sucked Chupa Chup stuck to the leather upholstery to indicate the age of the driver. Tony dreamed of owning a more reliable car. Her own was held together with little more than gaffer tape and prayers to St Christopher. She remembered the Mini Convertible that Meredith’s parents had bought for her birthday, the keys in a gift box, the car wrapped in a bow. It was the same car Meredith had written off, having flipped it onto its soft roof – an accident she’d walked away from, like most things in her life, blasé and unscathed.

Again: I’d love a Tony novel. I’d have loved to know more about her childhood, or what it was like to work at the nursing home before Eddy recruited her as an assistant, or what happens after GLITTERBALL’s denouement. There’s a whole novel in there worthy to Howarth’s skill.

I didn’t end up loving this self-published novel, but it was the best of the ones I read for the Samuel Richardson Award contest, run by at . I originally joined as a reviewer of these novels because I read a lot of old stuff and I liked an excuse to read something newer, and because I have a college acquaintance who sent me her sci-fi novel in the spring as part of a novel exchange (I sent her my pandemic novel) and I thought it was one of the better things I’d read that month, certainly superior to the novel that I wrote in 2020-21. As far as I know, she’s gotten an agent but hasn’t gotten any bites in the world of sci-fi genre publishing, and I thought that lack of interest was kind of annoying. Naomi writes a lot about how often this happens, and so I thought I’d help her use her platform to get a worthy novel more attention.

I’d read Howarth’s next book, especially if it’s a novella. This one’s not a disaster, and it could end up being my favorite of the Samuel Richardson entries I had.

Just under two months ago, reviewed Emily St. James’ Woodworking, and issued a challenge: if any of her readers also read the book and reviewed it in the next two months, she’d link to their review:

Woman of Letters

Women's fiction still gets ignored

When I was first trying to write professionally, I had a very simple understanding of genre. I was writing science fiction and fantasy novels, and these books had their own section of the bookstore. When I went to the store, I exclusively shopped the sci-fi section. And this section made sense: if you had magic or the book took place in the future, then…

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a year ago · 102 likes · 25 comments · Naomi Kanakia

I liked this framework, so I put Woodworking on hold at my local library. It took a while to make its way to me, because as she says, it’s doing well. But I liked it less than she did, and less than most folks on, say Goodreads seem to like it, where it currently has a score (4.35) that puts it higher than Pride and Prejudice (4.29). Now, Pride and Prejudice also has 4.6 million ratings, so if about 4.59 million more people review Woodworking, that score might go down. Still, it’s only been out two months! It’s doing well!

Most of what follows is a response to Kanakia’s initial post, and I can’t guarantee I’m going to make that clear every time, so I’d recommend reading it first.

A Brief Tangent

When I moved states and needed to be recertified as a high school English teacher, the state I was moving to required me to take an “Adolescent Literature” class, which was annoying, because I’d already been teaching for nearly a decade. However, in the U.S. education system, each state can set their own strange requirements for certification, and the state I’d been teaching in hadn’t required “Adolescent Literature” for English teacher candidates. I enjoyed the class, mostly; we read three or four young adult novels, and we read some articles about why young adult fiction is actually important for most kids to read. One of the things I remember from the articles is the idea that if teachers in high school are going to require kids to read Literature (To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo and Juliet, you know the drill), then teachers in elementary and middle school, as well as hopefully parents, should require or persuade or cajole them into reading a massive amount of young adult literature before high school, because it builds a strength base (I’m borrowing this term from strength training) for that kind of literature. Good readers need the repetition of stock characters and plots written at an entertaining level of emotional intensity and with experiences that mirror their own so they can move into a more difficult world of characters and plots that are either kind of boring at times or are easier to understand as an adult.

I thought this concept of the utility of young adult literature and of genre fiction overall made a lot of sense. I read a ton of young adult, sci-fi and fantasy literature in elementary and middle school. I remember eventually getting bored with genre fiction in early high school, so when my teachers required me to read The Great Gatsby or Catcher in the Rye or Grapes of Wrath or The Awakening or Heart of Darkness or Beloved (these are the ones I remember that I liked, there were more) I experienced them as better, more interesting versions of stuff I’d already liked in middle school. I didn’t really care what the teachers had to say about how to read these books, I found my own ways of understanding them from the strength base of genre fiction that I’d built. Grapes of Wrath has a structure like some fantasy or sci-fi novels. The Awakening has a plot structure that is mostly similar to a young adult novel (except for the ending). I didn’t totally abandon young adult literature or genre fiction; when the new Harry Potter books came out, I bought and read them. But I felt much more excited by books that were more difficult.

If one of my current students is struggling with reading a work of classic literature, I’m not going to necessarily tell them, “well, you should have read about a hundred young adult or fantasy or sci-fi novels at this point, and if you haven’t, it’s not a surprise that you’re struggling with this one.” But if they bring a Colleen Hoover book to class and finish their assignment and start reading that instead of getting ahead in the classic literature they’re reading, I’m not going to object, because if we’re reading Pride and Prejudice, reading a bunch of Colleen Hoover will probably help you understand it.

Woodworking was fine

After reading Woodworking and Kanakia’s review, I don’t have much to add to the heart of what she found there except that I just couldn’t get as excited about it as she was. I agree completely with her that the “highlight” of the novel was Abigail, and that her sections of the book read like a young adult novel. I’d also agree that I “much preferred” the Abigail sections to the Erica sections. So: Woodworking is a good young adult novel, with sections in between written in a “plain, but not annoying” style that is typical of what Kanakia calls the genre of women’s fiction.

The protagonist of the novel, the English teacher Erica, is a character from women’s fiction: she has complex feelings about her job and life and on again/off again ex-wife that St. James spends a lot of runtime of the novel narrating in a close third-person style. In this style, St. James tells us a lot about Erica’s emotions and thoughts, but the descriptions of those emotions and thoughts are always straightforward: “Erica imagined the future again. No matter how many times she tries to picture her and Constance with a child, she imagines herself as a man.” While the Abigail sections are profane and funny, the Erica sections are mannered, distant, and full of middle-aged longing that’s expressed in often plain language. “Erica swallowed. She had always been unable to perform sexually when still pretending (badly) to be a man.”

It’s not exactly badly written, but it doesn’t make me wish I’ve read more of these kinds of books, and if my book club suggests reading one of these books, I might try to steer us towards sci-fi or fantasy fiction from author’s I’ve already read, or towards reading the classics. I’m not going to avoid the word that Kanakia said she couldn’t avoid: I’m mostly bored by “middlebrow” fiction, but I can be entertained by lowbrow (other genre fiction) or highbrow fiction.

My main problem with middlebrow fiction, whether it’s cast as women’s fiction or not, is how resolutely topical it is. Kanakia kind of gives the game away here when she says that women’s fiction “isn’t easy to define,” but it’s “targeted towards women” and “about serious themes.” These themes make the novels preachy. They could be about trans issues (Woodworking) or the morality of transracial adoption and how the suburbs are racist (Little Fires Everywhere) or about the morality of adoption in general (Girls in Trouble) or neurodivergence (A Man Called Ove) but they’re all “about” something. And so against the thrust of Kanakia’s piece, it actually does seem somewhat incredible to me “that some works of women's fiction might possess literary merit.” The whole point of Woodworking is to tell an interesting, but plain story through the character of Erica, and convince mostly left-of-center or centerish women that they are insufficiently empathic to the desire of teenagers to medically transition before the age of 18 through the character of Abigail. I’m not making this up: in St. James’ author’s note, she says that the book is not directed at right-wingers who make up most of the supporting cast in the novel. Instead, she says she hopes to address the “many, many well-meaning, left-of-center people and publications who see the global right tearing trans lives apart and don’t leap to defend our right to live as ourselves.”

As Kanakia notes, most of the audience for women’s fiction is “college-educated and sincerely trying to better themselves.” Emily St. James wants this audience to stop reading the New York Times’ coverage of trans youth and read her book instead. I barely read the New York Times at all, but if I did, I certainly wouldn’t read their trans coverage. Instead, of course, I simply treat the trans youth that I teach in a town that’s similar to Mitchell, South Dakota with dignity and respect.

And to that point: I did find the characterization of the principal and the other teachers in Woodworking to be slightly absurd. The very first scene of the novel involves the far-right-wing (there’s a plot point that involves him outing someone to an evangelical preacher) principal praying to help the protagonist Erica through her divorce. The Lean Cuisine in the teacher’s lounge is certainly correct, but Hank isn’t. The reality is that even in conservative towns (the one I teach in has elected only Republicans for many decades) the teaching staff is nearly all left of center to some degree, and the ones who are right of center (who are, indeed, most often principals or assistant principals) are only slightly so. No one acts like Hank. He’d get fired. He works at a public school, and when they misgender a student or are too welcoming to evangelicalism, they’d get in trouble with liberal parents in the town (who, to Woodworking’s credit, actually exist in the narrative).

I hate to confirm the stereotype of woke teachers, but in agreeing with Kanakia’s critique that the novel could have used a little more bigotry in the middle (it sags, and leaves us with too much exploration of the mostly boring Erica character), I’d just add that the bigotry nearly always comes from the parents, who transfer it down to their kids in unpredictable ways (that is, some of the kids spew out the bigotry undigested, while others become super-woke in response to their parents’ bigotry). The teachers just keep their opinions to themselves. We know who the (less than 10%) right-of-center teachers and admin are, and we try to avoid them, and we offer subtle or not so subtle hints to the kids about how to get around problems that those staff create.

A book that worked through some of the dynamics in the paragraph above wouldn’t necessarily be “literary” in the way that Woodworking isn’t. But Kanakia says that “it's hard to imagine this novel would be better if it had purple prose, overtly lyrical language, or languorous descriptive passages,” and I disagree here too, because the book actually does hint at this kind of story once the bigotry goes into full swing.

There’s a third character besides Erica and Abigail, and her narration is actually weird in a literary sense, because it’s not in the young adult first person voice of Abigail or the women’s fiction close third person voice of Erica. The section written from Brooke’s perspective is in an ironic second person point of view like a Lorrie Moore short story, with an occasional burst of first person. Brooke is, to me, by far the most interesting character in the whole book, more interesting even than Abigail. And the language of her section is extremely literary beyond just the use of second person, because the descriptions of her world go beyond plain to something like tersely, brutally bleached of emotion. I won’t say much more about that character, except that if the whole book was written in that character’s voice:

a) This book would read more like the famously unwatchable (yet rated as the best film of the 20th century by highbrow critics) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles than a work of young adult fiction or women’s fiction

b) This section gripped me when I was considering just not finishing the book, and so maybe St. James actually knew that some of her readers were getting bored by how conventional this book mostly is

c) It reminded me of how weird and great Detransition, Baby is.

But Detransition, Baby is much better, so maybe read it next

I know it made it on to the NYT 100 list this spring, but it was only #87 (below multiple novels that try to be literary fiction instead of genre fiction and fail at both), and I’ve read over half of those and Detransition, Baby is better than at least half of the ones I’ve read. I know Kanakia said that Woodworking is her favorite trans novel besides Detransition, Baby and Nevada, and Emily St. James loved both of those books, as she mentions both of them in her Acknowledgements.

However, if a book club is mostly reading women’s fiction and reads Detransition, Baby instead, they’re going to be reading a significantly better book, and it’s going to be divisive. Detransition, Baby has a lot of ratings on Goodreads, but it’s more divisive: while 3.93 seems like a good score, it’s actually kind of middling, and the two most popular reviews (in terms of likes) are a five-star review and a one-star review. So, in the vein of my brief tangent above, I’d simply suggest that if someone really enjoyed Woodworking, they should read Detransition, Baby next, and they might be primed to enjoy it more than they would have without reading both books. It didn’t work for me, because I read them in the wrong order.

Some of the members of this book club will appreciate how unapologetically the protagonist of Detransition, Baby fucks up the lives of straight men or ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends. Some will find the unapologetic descriptions of rough sex or sex work realistic and interesting. Some might also find the unconventional and often depressing arc of the plot hilarious. But most of them will probably wish they were reading Woodworking instead, and I don’t think that’s because they’re “crypto-dumb,” as Kanakia says people who insist on the middlebrow distinction are saying about women who enjoy women’s fiction.

Instead, most people who read women’s fiction simply don’t have time to read a ton of fiction. They’ve got busy lives. They don’t have summers off. They don’t enjoy lowbrow genre fiction like sci-fi or fantasy (except for, perhaps, romantasy, which, fine). They do read The New York Times every day, and maybe spend a decent chunk of their work day looking at lifestyle blogs (or Substack). They don’t want to read Detransition, Baby because it can be kind of depressing and they find the protagonist unlikable and because Torrey Peters offers zero actionable ways to improve the lives of trans people. It even features a character who commits the sin of detransitioning (it’s in the title and the first chapter) which every smart liberal person hopes doesn’t exist because it would confirm right-wing stereotypes about trans people.

But it also makes sense that Torrey Peters didn’t want to compromise. She wanted to write a book that couldn’t fit into neat political categories. There are no trans youth heroes to fight for and no right-wingers to fight against in her novel, since she sets it in 2010’s New York City among middle-aged adults. The cis men in the novel are mostly kind of evil (except for the detransitioned one, he’s just confused), as in a lot of women’s fiction, but the protagonist is drawn towards that evil and doesn’t really succeed in figuring out why. The cis woman in the novel isn’t exactly evil, but she’s not a saint, and since she’s also not white, the political valences of her actions also get more complicated.

Detransition, Baby has a few moments of purple prose and significantly more evocative descriptions of 2010’s New York than St. James had of Mitchell, South Dakota. I don’t actually know what any of the buildings in Woodworking look like, but I can definitely describe Reese’s apartment in Detransition, Baby without having to look it up in the book. The descriptions even somehow mostly avoided making me hate them even though I hate most descriptions of most settings in New York because the city has been so overused in the last century or so as a setting for literary fiction. This is probably because Peters is describing some of the most opulent parts of the city and some of the dingiest and avoiding most of the middle, it’s that high/low thing again.

But again, the most distinctive literary quality of the novel is Peters’ refusal to avoid the messy details of life as a trans adult that the characters in Woodworking either haven’t experienced yet (in the case of Abigail) or are too trapped in the closet to experience (in the case of Erica). She could have written a novel in the voice of Brooke, but it would have been too unpleasant, and it wouldn’t have convinced any center-left readers that they were wrong about youth gender dysphoria. It’s totally fine for St. James to want to use her novel as a way to entertain college-educated people and convince them of her particular political project, but I’d be very surprised if novels like it from the imprints that Kanakia is saying we should read more of are going to be the source of the next great novel of the 21st century.

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1. Preparation for the Next Life, Atticus Lish

I read this on a recommendation from that month's-old discussion about why there's a lack of white male authors in the literary world today. I basically disagree with the article and come down on the side of “stop whining" (see below), but I'm glad it prompted me to read this novel, because it is one of the best ones written in the last decade, and it had to be written by someone outside of the typical literary system.

Lish refuses to fall into the sad white boy literary trap and instead opts for something that reminds me much more of Steinbeck or Dos Passos, updated for the present. These are stories of the broken and dispossessed, but presented without piety or sentimentality. I'm not sure I totally buy his initial characterization of Zou Lei; at times the broken English close third person perspective of a Uyghur being pushed out of her home felt like more of a caricature than an authentic portal into her consciousness, but eventually I succumbed to the attention that Lish obviously paid to the community of Flushing, Queens and his beautiful, horrific evocation of the setting made me feel less suspicious of her characterization in China in the beginning of the novel. I love what he didn’t give away about her journey to the U.S., and by the end of the book her characterization feels utterly complete and earned.

In general, if white dudes want more people to read their books, they should write about more interesting people! I can’t imagine that someone with Zou Lei’s exact life experiences is going to write a book, so if Lish isn’t going to do it, well, you can read Tahir Hamut Izgil’s Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide, I guess? I’ve read that book, and there was nothing in it that contradicted anything of the characterization that Lish created in his book, and he definitely didn’t read it since it came out after Preparation was written.

There are two white dudes characterized in this book, and neither one wants to write a book, and neither one has been within miles of a college, and the way they interact with Zou Lei has none of the stink of identity politics on it. Lish helpfully decides that the disposition of one of them is purely evil and the other purely good, and both of them have been warped by their circumstances and social environments into much weirder versions of those core dispositions. This is an extremely violent book, but so is the world, especially recently!

For evidence of just how outside of the system Lish is, check out this interview with Lauren Oyler (who also loved the book) back in 2015. Helpfully, neither Oyler nor Lish reveal much in the way of plot in the interview.

2. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Part One, Emil Ferris

I reread this to prepare to read the second novel of the series since the second one randomly showed up on a library shelf when I was getting some other holds and I had to grab it.

I own this monster. I think I must have bought it at a comics shop around 2018, but I’m such a cheapskate about owning books that I don’t know what possessed me to drop nearly fifty bucks to own something that would only take a couple of hours to read.

Yet I’ve read it twice now, and I’ll probably read it again. If I ever have a friend staying with us (we’ve got a futon in the attic!) and they haven’t brought a book, I’ll give this one to them. Welcome to Ferris-world. Drop in. Is it autobiography? How can this be true, this world of almost unimaginable cruelty? And yet I’ve spent weeks near the North Side of Chicago, since most of my friends live there or have lived there, and Ferris captures some part of the texture of that place so perfectly, and even though that place has definitely changed, the kind of working-class people who used to live there have spread to other neighborhoods that I’ve also visited in Chicago, and I’ve met these people, the Brains, the Deezes, the Irish boys whose alderman fathers would protect them if they raped someone. And I’ve visited the glorious Art Institute, just like like Karen, and it’s just as transporting as Ferris lays it out in these pages.

Ferris’ terrifyingly exact crosshatching, done in pencil or pen over wide-ruled notebook pages, is like the labor of a Bellow or Melville; the work reveals itself through its attention to detail, its sucking in of the whole world and its spitting out of a twisted, insane point of view.

3. Major Arcana,

I've already written nearly 5000 words about this. I like that it fits in between Emil Ferris, Atticus Lish, and Tennessee Williams here, because it’s got all of that in it: the whipsaw back and forth between characters from extremely different backgrounds, the present with its anomie and internet-addled blankness, the bildungsroman, the graphic novel, and the sentimental, sympathetic campiness of someone like Williams. Lish, Ferris, Williams and Pistelli know the world is hard, and believe art has to reflect that hardness, but they also want to have a good damn entertaining time while making it.

4. The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams

The first time I read this I didn't like it all, the second time I read it I kind of loved it (this is when I was making a whole slideshow with all of the "screen legends" from the stage directions so the high school kids could perform it) and when the kids finally read it while I ran the slideshow and the music and the whole thing I totally loved it.

The tone is weird. The use of screen titles seems so cruel at times that it's almost campy; Amanda's monologues are almost certainly supposed to be funny. This recent review of a staging of the play says that Tom "will leave [Laura] to the rough treatment of their garrulous, agitated mother, Amanda...the same as leaving her to die," which sounded completely absurd to me. Why would we actually fear for Laura's life? Because she struggles to walk down stairs? Because she doesn't want to get a job? This is definitely a play for anyone (Beatniks in the 1950’s when it was written, but then hippies in the 60’s and early 70’s, and then slackers in the 90’s, and maybe a few folks who stayed on unemployment for extra time in 2020-2021) who graduated into a new economic boom after a depression and decided they needed to chill out for a few years instead of getting a job...and good for them, and good for Laura!

It was extremely satisfying to read this after studying Streetcar so much with the kids. Williams even has an essay at the end of Menagerie explaining how fame and success ruin your career, and the horrific cruelty and violence of Streetcar now makes so much more sense as Williams’ petulant response to the fame he got after baring his soul in Menagerie. It’s a more honest response than trying to reproduce what people loved about you from your breakout work, and I respect it, even if Williams eventually seemed to be chased down and destroyed by fame after Streetcar was even more successful than Menagerie.

5. The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

Highsmith is such a sicko. I knew Tommy was going to get away with it because this is "Ripley, #1" on goodreads, and also because there's a Netflix anthology show (and thus there's more material than one book) with Andrew Scott, who seems perfectly cast as Ripley to me in a way that Damon really isn't (though Jude Law was a perfect Dickie Greenleaf).

I recently watched Manhunter and I've been reading these Lew Archer crime books and Ripley is kind of between the steely intellectualism of Hannibal Lector and Will Graham in the Hannibal books and the dum-dums who inhabit the seedy world of Los Angeles that Macdonald writes about in the Lew Archer series. Highsmith brings the reader behind the scenes into Ripley's life, where he alternates between creepily trying to reproduce other people's lives through copying their mannerisms and whining about why no one likes him.

The queerness in this novel, as in Carol, is remarkably ahead of its time. The fact that he defines himself as asexual in the novel doesn't necessarily mean anything since he's such a liar, but Tom's pathology can't be reduced to his sexual preferences. He certainly seems like he mostly hates women and femininity, and in the glimpses we get of other characters' impressions of Tom, he seems fairly effeminate. But Highsmith traps us in Tom's mirror world and the logic here is only about power.

6. The Sportswriter, Richard Ford

I think I enjoyed Independence Day just slightly more than this one. It was eerie how closely some of this matched my actual life in the sense that Bascombe is about my age, has two kids, and was experiencing an unseasonably cold Easter. On the flip side is all of the tragic stuff that Bascombe "dreamily" endures, while my life has had little to no tragedy in it for a good decade and a half or so, besides a few unfortunate bureaucratic snafus at various jobs.

Now that I have the stability that crumbles under Bascombe’s feet, I can understand what it would be like to be unmoored, as Bascombe is, and in the ending of this book ultimately Ford seems to suggest that his coping mechanisms over the past couple of years since his unmooring have not worked as well as he hopes they might.

However, much of the middle of the book seems to implicitly endorse Bascombe’s cheery indifference and rambling uncertainty, and this grated on me a little bit. Bascombe’s rejection of a character who seems to be his foil as a divorced dad seemed both too forceful and not forceful enough, and though I appreciate the way that this character set up the ending of the novel, something in it felt disjointed, too.

7. Metallic Realms,

Is this one autofiction like the next one? I’d have preferred that Michel set this novel anywhere outside of Brooklyn, because our narrator is such a homebody and thus the reader must endure descriptions of sidewalks, bodegas, and pizza that have now, twenty years into the movement of every single literary person to Brooklyn, become worse than cliché. I kind of understand the idea that this is a satire of literary fiction that uses sci-fi as a loving counterpart or foil, but there are people writing literary fiction…everywhere? For example, in Queens, where Preparation for the Next Life is set? And the problem with Brooklyn, besides the banality of the setting, is that it seems to require that the characters recite the progressive catechism far too often: debt, climate change, the internet, fascism, gender as a social construct, in some order.

I liked the narrator's pathetic whininess, but the pathetic whininess of his friends reciting the catechism over and over got boring. The narrator definitely seems to hate them in a repressed way, and that’s probably the most interesting thing about the novel—the idea that the narrator’s obsession with his friends’ sci-fi writing is something of a distraction from his desire to, uh, kill them or destroy their lives. Michel’s not quite willing to go all the way there, and that’s what made it hard to love this.

The stories that the narrator’s friends wrote are perfectly pitched and one of the best parts of the novel. They’re at the perfect level of competency for the narrator to get obsessed with them: not actually genius, but better than replacement-level sci-fi. The narrator’s glosses of the stories (the Pale Fire thing) are extremely funny and well-constructed. Again—maybe a little more tension here, more action, and the world of the Orb 4 and the real world of B—lyn would have had worked more for me.

8. Ruth Hall, Fanny Fern

I’m pretty sure recommended this book. It’s exactly her kind of thing. If kids were assigned this in school they'd have a very different vision of what 19th century literature could be. It’s very funny that this novel was WAY more popular during its time than Hawthorne and Poe and Melville were. Fanny Fern is (mostly) not boring, though she sometimes overemphasizes the awfulness of Hall's relatives in a way that gets repetitive, since the relatives are never characterized in a way that lets the reader understand why they are so awful (except for Hall's brother, another aspiring writer who is hilariously obsessed with the opinions of other writers). The trials that Ruth goes through are interesting and the use of the epistolary form in the novel's final third is effective.

I didn’t find myself extremely eager to pick it up each time, because the last third of the novel felt so clearly telegraphed by the teleology of the entire book: one must be good in order to be misunderstood by an evil world, one must suffer because of how one is misunderstood, one must turn suffering into art because it is the only escape from the evil world, and the good people in the world must eventually, on the eve of the destruction of the good artist, suddenly discover her goodness and elevate her to ranks of genius. I was going to say “if anyone wrote this today,” but…there was just a takedown of Ocean Vuong’s work, and he basically covers this whole teleology!

I don’t like this kind of journey and I prefer fiction that’s more imaginative, but if we’re gonna have autofiction, I’d rather read Ruth Hall than 95% of what’s come out in the last 15 years.

9.Ripley Under Ground, Patricia Highsmith

There's some chance that I might read the other books in this series but it's unlikely. I'm still in love with Highsmith's style, and I definitely don't regret reading this, but Tom Ripley's rich wife just doesn't work as a character, and when she goes, everything else goes too. It don’t buy that anyone could marry evil Tom Ripley, even if they spoke limited English!

The second death by suicide in this book, and Tom's cremation of the body, was really one of the ickiest things I've read for a while, and I mean that as a compliment.

10. My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Part Two

Her style is still technically impressive, but all the loose ends from the first part of the series either didn’t need to get wrapped up, or were wrapped up in bizarre ways that took me out of the flow of the narrative. The examination of the narrator’s queerness was much more subtle in the first book, and while her love interest Shelley is funny and smart and interesting, I guess I wasn’t totally convinced she’d be attracted to Karen, who just seems like kind of a giant bummer in this book (besides being an artistic genius who drew this whole thing!).

The panel about college-ruled versus wide ruled totally killed me, but I wanted to know what happened with Anka Silverberg…and Ferris obviously doesn’t really want to know, or she’s saving something for part three, which I’ll still read, but with less anticipation.

11. The Way Some People Die, Ross Macdonald

Ted Gioia had a solid post about what made The Underground Man so good that I didn’t spot when I wrote about it in my first quarter book ranking:

The Honest Broker

The Underground Man at Age 50

I’ve written a lot on West Coast crime fiction, but have never published any of those pieces. I haven’t even shown them to anybody. I often write things simply for my own enjoyment—in fact, I usually write for fun, even when working with an eye toward publication. But operating on Substack tends to blur the dividing line between writer and publisher. So…

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4 years ago · 16 likes · 5 comments · Ted Gioia

Gioia’s idea that Macdonald wrote an “anti-mystery” more like Italo Calvino or Nabokov’s Pale Fire than a genre novel feels like an accurate assessment of The Underground Man. And there’s a little bit of that in The Way Some People Die: the image of the suburban development in the desert where one of the criminals hangs out is so perfectly drawn that it seems to comment more about the anomie of the suburbs than the putative subject of the novel (a wandering daughter whose mother, a landlord in Santa Monica, enlists Lew Archer to find). Lew Archer’s trip up to San Francisco is similarly eerie—it’s a silent world, full of heroin and cheap hotels, in total contrast to Los Angeles, which is bumping with (violent, evil) energy.

However, the big villains of this novel are forgettable and silly, just as they were in The Moving Target, and Macdonald can’t string the whole thing together to make any sort of really interesting comment on the 1950’s the way he can once he gets to the 1960’s and places Lew Archer in a world that seems finally modern.

12. The Moving Target, Ross Macdonald

The Underground Man was one of my favorite books from the first quarter of this year, so I thought I’d try to read the first book in the series. Even this first book is better written than most crime fiction, and I’d rather read it than any of the DNFs, but this also reads like historical fiction, and Macdonald is just so much more incisive when he’s writing during the 1960’s. The Moving Target was written in the early 50’s, and there’s too much here that is nearly an exact ripoff of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett: swanky hotels, jazz clubs, two-timing dames…now, Chandler and Hammett probably wouldn’t have had a subplot featuring a guy who smuggles migrant workers from Mexico in through the guise of being a New Age mystic, but Underground Man is nearly bursting with plots that feel modern and relevant, and Moving Target only had one.

Did not Finish

The Last Man, Mary Shelley

Someone on Substack was trying to convince people to read this. I tried to read it because obviously I love Frankenstein. This is not a misunderstood classic. This is an understood not classic, because even though it has the hysterical tone, unlikable characters, and quirky plot structure of Frankenstein, it is also boring. I don’t care about Lord Byron and do not find him charming in literary form!

Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata

So, so, so, so boring. I can’t believe one can write thousands of words about someone who writes novels that are this boring.

Less, Sean Andrew Greer

It’s not exactly boring; it’s just aggressively banal. Who’d have thought that gay male writers in San Francisco wouldn’t have health problems and could just travel the world with magic money? The midlife crisis here is sort of funny, but it’s mostly just pathetic, and not in a charming way.

In a sort of cosmic, occult coincidence that might enjoy based on the way he writes on his blog and in Major Arcana, I feel somewhat similarly about his recently republished novel as I did about the same-titled Speedy Ortiz album from 2013 and decided to write a (sort of ridiculously long, spoiler-filled) book review scored by the album.

Both of them are products of a very specific time and place that feels like it’s rapidly shifting into something else. Alternative comics: Speedy Ortiz is named after a Love and Rockets character just like Pistelli is obsessed with Alan Moore. Talking shit: Ortiz spends some of their first major profile in a music publication questioning the shift from guitars to synths in indie rock, while Pistelli loves to dish about how novels that are referenced on the back cover of Belt’s edition Major Arcana as an influence are actually terrible. Pitchfork was shifting in 2013 from snotty rockism to toothless poptimism, and Ortiz definitely fits in the old rockist vein. They’re proud of it:

[We] aren’t expecting anyone to care about rock music anymore. And it doesn't matter if they do care, because we're playing music that we like.

In the same way, Pistelli wrote a novel in the tradition of Walker (The Color Purple), Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March) or Dickens (Great Expectations), and knows that such novels are deeply unfashionable at the moment and believes that more readers want them anyway.

Ortiz inspired a bevy of female-fronted rock bands with hyperliterate singers who would eventually offer an alternative to poptimism; perhaps Pistelli will inspire a bevy of bloggers to write their own sprawling, imaginative novels outside of the poptimism of the publishing industry.

Without any further ado, ten thoughts about Major Arcana (2025), each thought connected to about 10% of the novel (35 pages in the Belt edition I checked out from my local library, usually about 2-3 chapters) through the lens of the ten songs on Major Arcana (2013). Consider it as contingent as a tarot reading, an attempt to reorganize and randomize my thoughts about the novel to keep my attention (and hopefully yours).

I score this novel, and album, an 8/10.

“Pioneer Spine”

But you've still got your sound
And I see you staring down
I want a name
Even though you spoiled the one I came with

This song’s lyrics sound like an interrogation in a detective novel written by Phillip K. Dick and its music sounds like a mix of Sonic Youth and Sleater-Kinney. All of these descriptions could apply in some odd way to the first 35 or so pages of Major Arcana, as well. Jacob Morrow and Simon Magnus, the two main characters in this part, are a mashup of old school rock and roll and new ideas about androgyny and gender. Morrow is comically (this is a novel about comics) masculine (and thus sacrifices himself on the second page of the novel because this a novel in many ways about the power vacuum left when masculinity becomes an inadequate solution to the problems of the world); Magnus is comically (he’s a writer and professor of graphic novels) androgynous.

There’s a repeated lyric in the song: “I want a name.” I didn’t hate the way that the sections of Major Arcana centered on Simon Magnus respect the character’s wish to remain genderless by repeating the character’s name hundreds and by the end of the book likely thousands of times and used the character’s name in the reflexive form as “Simon Magnessself”, but it’s a gambit at least equal to the confrontational dissonant chords of “Pioneer Spine.” There’s something very online or at least digital about the gambit; it’s hard to imagine that a book written by hand would feature a character’s name that many times, but inside the screen it’s a simple matter of a CTRL-V here and there, or a search for all of the “he”s or “his”es or “himself”s in a chapter and a “find and replace” to “Simon Magnus” or “Simon Magnus’” or “Simon Magnesself.”

I’ll revise that (as revision is a key theme of Major Arcana): the gambit of Simon Magness is less like Speedy Ortiz using dissonant guitar chords, a technique which has been around in American music since critics started calling Black music “jass,” and more like sampling guitar feedback at the beginning of a song and then running the feedback through a random number generator and having a machine spit it out at prescribed random intervals. It’s annoying, but if the rest of the song is beautiful and there’s a reason for the noise, I don’t have a problem with it. And I don’t have a problem with it in the first part of Part One of Major Arcana because Part One as a whole is just about perfect as far as exposition goes: exciting, brutal, and surprising. “Pioneer Spine” isn’t as exciting or well structured: nearly two minute verse sections, interrupted by one quick, satisfying chorus in the middle and at the end. It’s a lot of verse. However, the song sets you up for all of the brilliance of this album that follows, and in that way is a proper exposition. Great rock albums never give you their hit singles in the first song. They save some of their powder for the next few songs, and Major Arcana is no exception.

“Tiger Tank”

“Do you know what a haruspex is?”

Simon Magnus did; Simon Magnus always had a very large vocabulary.

“I’ll help you,” Simon Magnus said.

That is how Simon Magnus always ended the story when repeating it to the press as part of the Simon Magnus myth—that, and a jump-cut to the epilogue: her body broken on the train tacks, blood and bone scattered across wood and iron.

This is a song that connects with characters all over Major Arcana who throw each other into the “tiger tank” and destroy themselves. Some emerge limping, some don’t emerge at all.

“Tiger Tank” isn’t quite as hooky as some of the next few songs on Major Arcana, but like pages 35-70ish in the novel, it’s got a classic sound that sets up the nearly perfect ones that follow. It’s the inciting incident of the album. In the novel, Pistelli deftly transitions into his own climaxes by bringing in a Gothic energy that was absent from the first few pages of the book: dark forests, dusty books, and cruelty to minors.

Two bastards (Jacob Morrow and Simon Magnus) find spiritual homes in literature: the former in Middlemarch and other classics provided to him by the beneficent bookstore owner Mr. Penhurst (who later turns out, in a Dickensian twist, to have something of a dark side), the latter in the split mentorship of the ghost of Grandfather Magnus haunting Simon’s wrecked, Hawthorne-esque New England manse and Simon’s “first love,” the “Goth girl” Valerie Karns.

Karns is introduced by way of her later suicide and her status as the muse for all of Magnus’ later comic book writings. In the constant shifting of archetypes of the various characters in Major Arcana, Morrow is “Strength” (or in the Crowley deck referenced later on in the book, “Lust,” the “Beautiful Boy,”) while Karns, as the title of the chapter where she and Magnus build their relationship to its suicidal climax declaims, is the “High Priestess.” Morrow was vital, good, and lovable, and I desperately wanted to know why he kills himself in the beginning of the book after learning about who he was in these chapters of Major Arcana. Karns is bad in the most appealing way: bad because of the dark woods of her environment, bad because she’s messing with forces beyond her understanding or control.

“Tiger Tank” is also lovable and ugly. It’s got a theme of bodily abuse: she “smoked her senses,” her “gut absorbed the fiercest blows,” and she “don’t even care if they take my legs.” Similarly, Pistelli describes some memorably painful masturbation scenes in this section of Major Arcana, scenes that lead both Morrow and Magnus to look for satisfaction in literature and the occult, respectively, rather than in erotic connection with other human beings. Absent a few small moments, Major Arcanas are more about missed connections than seduction.

“Hitch”

Sell every bet on your hard horse
I won't go down
Though my knees spasm
Though I want to grey out
And you could call me a hard horse

Speedy Ortiz is a “hard horse.” A horse that “you” want to ride: “is that a challenge or something?” But you shouldn’t ride this horse: “keep below, I don’t want to throw you.”

This song is even more conventionally structured than the previous one, with a memorable but complex hook, and so are pages 75-109 of Major Arcana. They’re also both some of my favorites.

If “Tiger Trap” was all pain, “Hitch” certainly has some pleasures. Dupuis still shreds, but the shredding moves ever upward, towards a fun, memorable chorus. There’s plenty of dissonance, but her lyrics are a dare—they’re as close to seduction as she approaches in the first half of this album.

In the same way, the relationship between Simon Magnus and Ellen Chandler in this section is as close to conventionally satisfying as any in this novel. It yields Magnus’ Marsh Man (a thinly veiled version of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing) and Fool’s Errand (a thinly veiled The Killing Joke). I love the things that Ellen Chandler loves in this section (Virginia Woolf, Wings of Desire, Swamp Thing) and hate the things that Simon Magnus loves (Alastair Crowley, Contempt, The Killing Joke). In a brilliant stroke, this section of the novel also braids in the story of Marco Cohen, who becomes a third wheel in every sense: perhaps he is the “Wheel of Fortune” that drives Magnus and Chandler to new heights (and new lows), or perhaps he is the Hermit (there’s a scene later on the beach that confirms the Hermit interpretation), living outside of the small world that Magnus and Chandler create together, showing them a new way to enlightenment. He arrives in the novel at nearly the same time as Ellen Chandler and it’s not clear until later on why his story belongs inside hers, but when that revelation comes, it’s been well-earned.

Pistelli also sneaks in one last character in this section who doesn’t appear again for a while, and by then has completed his three-card Tarot spread. Diane del Greco is a model in Marco Cohen’s art class, and she finally busts through the hermetic seal he attempts to place over his feelings and artistic practice. As he draws her, he abandons his strict representationalism and draws her with “an ink wash, gray gradients.” His art teacher, Anne LaMar, who has frequently encouraged him to adopt a less rigid style, chides him:

“No boundary lines, Mr. Cohen?” Anne LaMar asked over his shoulder. “What would your Mr. Blake say? I’m glad our new model has roused you to experiment.”

He blushed, said nothing, went on distinguishing the darker gray of her lips from the lighter gray of her face—except that Diane de Greco, who had caught Anne LaMar’s remark, curled those lips in a little snorting giggle, and Marco Cohen lost control of his breath.

Hitch, meet horse. Or, as Speedy Ortiz might say in “Hitch”:

Though his knees spasm

Though he wants to grey out

I heard them call me a hard horse.

Cohen is the hard horse, greying out as he meets The World through the form of Diane del Greco, who we already know will become the mother of Ash del Greco, the destroying angel of death from the beginning of the book. Cohen, Chandler, and Del Greco all circle around Magnus as he creates the art that will hold millions in thrall, though one of those millions will not be Cohen, and it definitely wouldn’t be Speedy Ortiz, fighting back the hitch at every step.

“Casper (1995)”

And the sicko police

Gave me perfect marks

at the sycophantic academy

Diane del Greco is one of Pistelli’s perfect characters, and she owns this section. She’s The Empress. She seeks pleasure. She wants it all, but knows she’s missing what Simon Magnus, Ellen Chandler, and Marco Cohen have: the knowledge gained through suffering and alienation. She’s attracted to these artist types (first Cohen, then Magnus, then Chandler) and she wants to nurture them, and while they want to be nurtured, they also…all hate their mothers. It’s a classic setup, but Pistelli doesn’t make it feel trite.

One way he makes it work is through Chapter 9 in this section, which details del Greco’s first infatuation with a girl named Ashley Bradley. Their relationship functions as yet another double or mirror for the one between Ash del Greco and Jacob Morrow from later in the book, though we already know how that relationship turns out from the beginning of the book.

Bradley is a minor character, but her deception of del Greco shows how easy it is for a strong personality to convert Diane into a sycophant. She’s surrounded by “sickos,” a pattern that begins with her pothead parents and moves onto evangelical Christians like Bradley, then onto the artists who are creating Overman 3000, and finally the ultimate sicko Ash del Greco (her “daughter”).

But unlike in "Casper (1995),” del Greco never gets “perfect marks” from the sickos for her sycophancy. They get tired of her, and she gets tired of them. In these forty or so pages, Diane is thrilled, disappointed, thrilled, disappointed, and thrilled again. It’s not hard to predict what’s going to happen next.

“Casper (1995)” is also one of the great songs of this album. It’s spooky (the background vocals are a perfect touch) and rocking, funny and sad. I’ve seen the movie and I don’t remember it, but I doubt that Speedy Ortiz are rehearsing plot points in this song. It’s more of a half-remembered dream of adolescence, like the Ashley Bradley section: “kids keep trading spectre stories/just to get each other horny.” The guitar line ascends like a staircase up to an attic and then drops into the basement, hiding away in the dark like Casper.

“No Below”

Simon Magnus fell asleep in her lap. In Simon Magnus’s dream, it was the day of Valerie Karns’s funeral again, Simon Magnus was in mourning clothes again, Simon Magnus had again snuck to her room to rescue her dresses, her scent, whatever remained of her presence. In life, tears had dimmed her final Tarot spread in Simon Magnus’s eyes. In the dream, the center of the Celtic cross glowed, brighter than day, iridescent, and Simon Magnus could read which card crossed the other. Simon Magnus woke up crying in an empty bed and smiled for almost the first time in months.

“No Below” is one of the best rock songs of the 2010s. It does sound a lot like Pavement, who Speedy Ortiz reference in their Pitchfork profile, but Pavement’s lyrics are too often blankly ironic, while the lyrics here are genuinely affecting: a story of teenage alienation and suicidal ideation that shifts into a desire that an adult romantic partner “knew you when you were a kid.”

The song was featured in a video game and it’s by far the most streamed song that Speedy Ortiz ever made. It’s probably not streamed enough to make them any real money, but it’s almost certainly the song that haunts them in the tiny clubs that they play like the one I saw them in two years ago with about fifty or sixty other people. I don’t recall anyone yelling a request for it, but they dutifully played it in the encore.

The description of the video game featuring “No Below” is eerily similar to a proper description of Major Arcana (the novel). And so this section of the novel is of course where the novel shifts from Simon Magnus (the Stephen Dedalus of the novel, its antihero) to Ash del Greco and Jacob Morrow (the novel’s Leopold/Molly Bloom, the doomed and then redeemed protagonists). I’m aware that many of the attributes of those characters are reversed in Ulysses, but like Joyce (and Speedy Ortiz), Pistelli is playing with perspective, and it betrays a superficial reading to say that Magnus is the protagonist of the novel (see footnote three here):

Grand Hotel Abyss

Weekly Readings #169 (04/28/25-05/04/25)

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed…

Read more

a year ago · 40 likes · 19 comments · John Pistelli

“No Below” moves from “I was better off being dead” set to an earworm of a guitar hook mirroring the syllables of each word to a redemptive climax where the narrator emerges out of the ice, healed and swimming. This section of Major Arcana moves from Simon Magnus using all available resources (people, plots, drugs, occultism) making create Simon Magnus’ great gesamtkunstwerk to an utterly abased anti-climax where Simon Magnus loses everything and ends up drunk and crying in the arms of a prostitute in a hotel, dreaming of Valerie Karns. And yet Simon Magnus emerges from the dream with a smile. Simon Magnus touched the Universe, and it didn’t kill him. He became Overman 3000.

Hopefully, Speedy Ortiz was paid well by that video game company. Maybe that’s why they’re still touring mid-sized American towns and playing small clubs: they can afford it. By this point in Major Arcana, we know almost everything about why the book started the way it did except for one thing: who’s Ash del Greco?

“Gary”

When a play date ends

do you call your other friends or do you go home?

Do you lock your door?

Do you lay down on your carpet

Counting threads till you get to one?

Ash del Greco has some of the best parts of Major Arcana and some of the worst. These 35 pages (what Valerie Stivers contemptuously called “backstory”) is the best part. All of the accumulated genius and neuroticism of del Greco’s four parents (Simon Magnus, Diane del Greco, Marco Cohen, and Ellen Chandler) is synthesized in various ways in one character, and this section lays it all out there: she’s got Magnus’s ambition and attraction to darkness, del Greco’s tendency to be utterly subsumed by others (Ari Alterhaus and Jacob Morrow), Cohen’s misanthropy, and Chandler’s deadpan irony.

The generational wheel has turned, and the knot of parental cruelty and neglect that bound the backstories of Ash’s four parents together has been reproduced in Diane del Greco’s treatment of her daughter. Ash isn’t an artist like Magnus, Cohen, or Chandler; she’s a fan like her mother Diane. Pistelli is slyly commenting here on what nature and nature can do: did Ash gain her critical, editorial eye from her true mother Chandler, and the lack of artistic confidence from her adopted mother Diane? At least in this section, she doesn’t really create anything: she just consumes. She begins to consume Jacob Morrow, she consumes (melancholy) classic literature, she consumes graphic novels, and she consumes a Tumblr from someone named “Undergirl.” And by the end of this section, she prepares to consume Ari Alterhaus.

In “Gary,” Speedy Ortiz is also a misanthropic, homebound critic like Ash, obsessed with someone named “Gary.” It’s a perfect song for this section: it’s full of menace, but it’s also propulsive and nearly joyful. Speedy Ortiz is rushing headlong into disaster, and so is Ash.

“Fun”

She didn’t know if she believe in God or the god. The manifestation gurus always hedged on this topic by referring to God, if they ever did, as synonymous with “the Universe” or "the Source.” As for other gods, the only manifestors who mentioned them were the ones who also spoke of Tarot or astrology. Ash del Greco spent a few days trying to learn these occult sciences, but she quickly abandoned them on the same principle that had led her to abandon novels: stable archetypes, determinate personalities written in the stars, a panoply of emperors and priestesses and magicians to keep track of—these violated her sense of contingency and her attraction to intensity.

The part of Major Arcana that begins and ends in Chapters 5-9 of Part Three reminds me of Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, though I’m 99% sure that both Pistelli and Schoenbrun haven’t seen or read each other’s work and would have some serious misgivings about each other’s work. The plots and the engagements with the internet and fandom and the media are all eerily similar in all three texts. They’re both relentlessly dark visions that play with symbols and archetypes but ultimately reject those schema as inadequate for the problems that Zoomers face as internet babies. As the section of Major Arcana above indicates, Ash turns to manifestation as the only solution to the problem of Ari Alterhaus, but it’s a solution that can’t possibly be as satisfying as the ones her parents found for their art problems in Part Two of Major Arcana.

I am comfortable with the “magical realism” in both this section of the book and in Schoenbrun’s films because the dyads in all of these works are profoundly psychologically damaged. I don’t need to return to realism to explain what happens in their plots, but if I did, it’s not hard to explain how Ash and Ari, Owen and Maddy (TV Glow), or Casey and JLB (World’s Fair) simply had psychic breaks because the pressures of identity formation in adolescence are impossible to withstand for kids who don’t fit into a gender binary and who grow up with neglectful or abusive parents. I don’t expect that “most of this plot didn’t actually happen, they just aren’t living in the established reality of the film/novel and neither is the viewer/reader” is either necessary or sufficient to convince viewers or readers of Schoenbrun or Pistelli who don’t like these characters or don’t think that “magical realism” is an appropriate way to approach issues of gender identity that they’ve misinterpreted what’s happening here. But revisiting this section reminds me that Pistelli succeeded at shoving one more world into his novel, a world that feels vital and relevant for our tortured present.

“Fun” could be how a kid with an ambiguous gender presentation feels about being the object of some much discourse and scrutiny over the past five years or so. Of course, Sadie Dupuis already “identified as panromantic and demisexual” back in the old days of Tumblr 2013, so she/they was/were ahead of the curve.

The best stanza in the song is at the end:

I don’t understand what makes you want to shoot around me Because I'm just made of clay
I go and puncture the clouds instead with a limb or a hand
First you paved, so I can
And I'm getting my dick sucked on the regular
On the regular

This quote is a combination of the repeating chorus (the part about being clay and getting shot at and carving out clouds with their limbs) and the hilarious coda. The protagonist of the song is a “criminally twisted/puny little villain” like Ash del Greco, one who brims with the same kind of misanthropic confidence. I wonder if there’s a draft of Major Arcana out there that includes Ash telling thanking someone for paving the way for them to get their dick sucked.

“Cash Cab”

I wanna be with somebody just like me
Someone who laughs at a crashed car rental
Someone who hurts in an accident
Someone as scared of abandonment, ooh

Unlike Ash del Greco, I haven’t abandoned novels, but like her, I’ve got a strong aversion to Tarot and astrology. However, I’ve got to admit that this project has spooked me a bit: this album really maps well on to my feelings about this book. “Cash Cab” is a tough listen, and this is a tough section of the book for me. Though the “internet novel” began in the previous section of the book, the relationship between Ash and Ari was combustible and vivid, even if both of them hated their bodies and sexuality.

Here we live instead inside Ash’s world, and as Jacob Morrow enters and exits it, we find nothing but a blankness, a black hole, the dreaded uzumaki, which is, of course: the Internet. Morrow’s death meant something if it was some grand sacrifice in the (super)heroic tradition, but in the (post)modern world, it can’t mean anything. Just like Junji Ito’s manga comic, this section of the novel spirals around and around but doesn’t quite achieve liftoff. I remember reading Uzumaki and thinking it was one of the most viscerally disturbing pieces of art that I’d ever consumed; here, the endless descriptions of Ash’s decaying and sickening body created a similar feeling. This is a horror novel, scored by chat rooms and YouTube influencers.

“Cash Cab” is somewhat more successful, though it also documents a relationship like del Greco and Morrow’s that is doomed from the start: “as above, so below.” It has a spiraling, stop-start structure, with repeating, high-pitched guitar squeals throughout and nearly inaudible vocals. Someone’s in distress! However, the crunchy pop-punk power chords that cut through the morass during the song’s choruses and the in the breakdown at the end of the song offer a respite from the noise. They’re a respite the reader never gets in the Major Arcana.

“Plough”

Marco Cohen, who hadn’t believed in magic or religion, didn’t reply, unless the fury of the agitated air was his riposte. Who would he be now if he’d lived? Ellen Chandler wondered…Would he have become a potbellied, graybearded paterfamilias going twice as year on the comics convention circuit in an Hawaiian shirt and making most of his money in commissions? Would he in his middle age have started voting Republican at last? She couldn’t imagine such a fate for so passionately earnest a young man…She voted Republican now. Christ, she thought, with the chaos our country was in—the crime, the prices, the wars, the gender theory in preschool and all the rest of it—how could you possibly not?

I appreciate the realism of the unlikability of Ash del Greco and Ellen Chandler in the latter part of Part Three and in the beginning of Part Four of this book. Most artists curdle. They can’t ferment forever. However, this isn’t a novel about realism, it’s a novel about fantasy, and so I wish these sections didn’t exist.

Things aren’t wrapped up in a neat bow, but they’re wrapped up anyhow, and that section above stuck in my craw. If Chandler knows that “passionately earnest” people don’t vote Republican, then why does she so earnestly give a shit about the culture war bullshit of the Republican party? I get that there’s something classically conservative about Chandler—the love of literary modernism, the discomfort with drugs and sexual promiscuity, the prim Englishteacherness. But I know (and I am) some of these people, and I’d either refuse to vote or still vote Democratic if I felt like Ellen Chandler about any of those issues. There’s nothing conservative about the Republican party. Pistelli’s maybe just provoking here, but it’s cheap. He’s already brought in the world of contemporary American politics in the stories of Simon Magnus and Ari Alterhaus, and he successfully poked at the woke and anti-woke tendencies with those characters. Why bring Ellen Chandler into the mess? The less said about Chandler’s fling with a former student, or her reunification with Magnus, the better, but it all feels a little forced and weird to me.

Similarly, I find “Plough” unsubtle. Since when did our band care about virginity, or actual Tarot readings? All of these themes are better explicated through implication in the other songs on Major Arcana. “I was never the witch you made me to be/still you picked a virgin over me” pales in comparison to many of Sadie Dupuis’ lyrics throughout this album. I do like her shaky vocal on “stop shaking, why you freaking the fuuuuck out,” but mostly, I’d recommend nearly all the songs on this album over this one.

“MKVI”

Why you take and take me, my friend?
I've got nothing, I've got nothing
Moral is, you're moral-less
But you left something on my lips: a mark so sick

We are left, at the end of Major Arcana, with nearly nothing, and certainly not a moral: Ash del Greco’s famous spiral mark, and a mark on Speedy Ortiz’s lips. The new child replaces the sacrificed one (as in Overman 3000). The new song replaces the old one. Put on a new album tomorrow. Strike a match, begin again.

Both works have ended well: in the album, a blast of noise shaking the roots of my eardrums, like a plane delivering Ash and her child to someone new, off to parts unknown. The song starts as a dirge but ends up in the clouds; similarly, the ending of Major Arcana carves an impressive denouement out of a falling action that I considered the worst part of the book.

Like Cohen, Magnus, Chandler and Diane del Greco with Overman 3000 or Ash del Greco with Ulysses, I’ve tired myself out with this project, which ballooned far outside of what I’d wanted to attempt. I wonder if the same thing happened to Pistelli in the end of Part Three and much of Part Four of this book. I often think that third act problems are seeded in the first act, and the too-onlineness of Ash del Greco in the beginning of the book might have come back to bite Pistelli by the end. He shows in the last few chapters of the book that del Greco could be redeemed in some way, and I wish he’d done it a little sooner.

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