Good evening!
I hope you’re all well, living your life, enjoying the nicer weather and so on and so forth. A funny anecdote about this newsletter is that I couldn’t remember the word for ‘RV’ and had to ask Eliza what a ‘car joined to a caravan’ is.
I have been thinking about this blog quite a bit, which started off as a place to dump my thoughts, which it still is, but with a much bigger readership than I ever expected. I am thinking about developing it a bit, with maybe a paid subscriber element that would have author interviews and essays and whatnot. I’m not sure yet, but feel free to comment if you think it’s a good/bad idea.
I spend the majority of my time reading and writing in coffee shops because I work best in them (I like people watching and background noise), so if enjoy whatever this is and you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
Happily, I’ve continued on with my run of great reads, firstly in Dan Chaon’s Sleepwalk (2023). I received an advanced copy of this earlier in the year but was slow in the uptake, so it’s out now in the UK (it’s been out for a while in North America). Sleepwalk is a literary thriller set in the near future, so not quite a dystopia, but most definitely verging on one. It follows Billy, a contract worker who has no fixed address, no social media, no birth certificate -- basically nothing to track where he is, or what he is doing. This is intentional, as he was born to a woman who also lived in this way, and who was legally dead, meaning that she was not forced to register his birth. In the future that Billy lives in, there has been another flu pandemic and various climate related catastrophes, meaning that martial law has been invoked in many US states and around the world, among other things. Billy works for a shadowy company involved in various nefarious projects, and he is contracted out for assassinations and to move contraband (sometimes people). He has various aliases, a pitbull-mix called Flip that he rescued from a dog fighting rig and an RV that he is very emotionally attached to.
This could easily be a gritty noir, but it’s not because it’s extremely funny. Billy himself, despite the horrible things he does, is a jolly, kind of goofy protagonist who has a skewed view on things that make this a really different kind of book to others that are similar to it. One of the premises of the story is that there are a lot of conspiracies, and even though the people that theorists think are evil, they’re not exactly evil for the reasons that they think up. The billionaires of Sleepwalk are not in a cult, but they are in cahoots and connected in weird ways. They’re not doing satanic rituals, but they are invested in odd scientific experiments. In short, they’re just kind of vain and socially awkward. Billy is used by these people and often can’t see that he’s being used in the way that he is -- he doesn’t easily connect the dots with things, which becomes evident as he slowly reveals details from his past so that the reader can see how he’s been manipulated.
Sleepwalk is a satire, and some of the billionaires that feature in it most definitely invite comparisons with some of our current tech overlords. It basically does what Knives Out; Glass Onion thought it was doing, and would have done if that film wasn’t so basely opaque in its criticisms (and dull to boot). This is a much more successful portrayal of why our current iteration of capitalism is bad, while also gently poking fun at people who take their conspiracies too far. It also has, to me, an extremely satisfying ending. I haven’t heard a lot of talk about this novel since its release (but I understand it was successful in the US, where Chaon is much better known), and I’d like to see more discussion on it. (There is a slender review on it by The Big Issue, a NYT review and this recorded event by Politics and Prose available on Youtube).
I’m now about halfway through Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which was kindly sent to me by Faber. On the day I started reading it, it won The Pulitzer Prize for fiction, along with my joint-favourite read of 2022, Trust by Hernan Diaz. The Pulitzer is something that fascinates me, because it’s seen as such a global marker for good work despite being distinctly American, in that it is an American prize, but it also awards work that attempts to describe and define what ‘American’ means. Both Trust and Demon Copperhead certainly fit that description; the former for its depiction of New York at the turn of the last century, especially in the growth and decline (and growth again) of the Stock Market and the latter for its depiction of the South and the opioid crisis.
Demon is a retelling of Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850), which is one of his best (in my humble opinion) (it’s not that humble I do know a weirdly large amount of information about Charles Dickens, and I have taught, researched, and written on him -- including for the Christmas episode of You’re Dead To Me). Despite being familiar with the kind if narrative arc that Kingsolver’s novel is taking, this book is continually throwing me for a loop. I don’t often cry at fiction, but there was one chapter that I was actually silently weeping while reading. (Weirdly, I cry at most films that I watch, most recently Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and that was because it was so good).
It’s set in the southern Appalachian Mountains in Virginia (‘hillbilly country’ as Demon terms it), and largely takes place in the 90s. Demon is actually Damon, a redheaded boy born to an eighteen year old woman who is a drug addict at the time of his birth. He is looked after by his neighbours at the trailer park he lives in, the Peggots, as his mother works long hours at Walmart. The title takes ‘Copperhead’ from both his red hair, as well as how copperhead snakes are said to live in his trailer park, but he, and all the other residents have never seen any. Copperheads become a metaphor for how people will ascribe danger and negativity to places where it doesn’t exist, and in turn make it dangerous for other reasons -- which is very like Demon’s own story. I’m really enjoying it, even though it is very upsetting. Will write more on it next week! I will say it’s been a good accompaniment to Sleepwalk because it feels very ‘this is how we end up in a situation like that’.
Speaking of Dickens, which I often am, I’m currently editing my PhD thesis section on his A Tale of Two Cities (1859). I had forgotten how great this novel is -- I’ve been skim-reading it to remind myself of the major plot points, and it’s wild how complex of a narrative he got into what isn’t really a very long book. Anyway, not much else to say on that because I have been writing about it a lot and don’t care to think about it more than I need to, lol.
Books on my radar
I think I’d like to read more of Chaon, especially You Remind Me of Me (2004), his collection of short stories that seems to be v acclaimed in America.