Good evening!
This is a little late because I’m coming down with a cold and moving at a snail’s pace while needing comfortable surroundings, so I have been cleaning after work but doing it very slowly. This might be the most boring way to open a newsletter ever, sorry.
Not much else to report!! I wish my muscles were not so heavy!!!
If 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
Last week I was part way through Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023), which I have now finished and really loved. I mentioned last time that when I started reading it, I wasn’t sure if the concept of the novel could be sustained for its entirety. Adjei-Brenyah’s collection of short stories, Friday Black, is excellent, and so I did wonder if a novel of his could have the same punch that most of those stories do. I definitely didn’t need to be concerned, because in his debut novel, he shows a real ability for layering in details, characters and subplots that made for a completely satisfying novel.
One of the best elements of Chain-Gang All-Stars is how it picks up on details of social phenomena and then runs with them. As an example, there is a section set in a farmer’s market, in which the prisoners that are part of the Chain-Gang fight system are enlisted to assist on different stalls, and people pay obscene prices to gain entry so that they can meet them. (If you’ve subscribed in the last week, I provided a synopsis and summary of themes in last week’s newsletter -- aware that all of this might sound bonkers). This, to me, was just so good, because ‘farmer’s markets’ are a bit overdone now and removed from their roots, largely selling overpriced rubbish in places that have easy access to supermarkets and convenience shops. They sell an experience as much as they sell goods, and are more of a lifestyle marker than a necessity, as they have been (and still are in lots of places in the world). Putting the prisoners in this kind of place as part of the ‘experience’ by charging an entry fee and doing meet-and-greets is a really wonderful way to show how the commodification of every bit of our lives contributes to and sustains larger systems of inequality.
This novel is also a great prison abolitionist text, providing real facts about the American justice system and blending them with satire and complex characters who openly ask difficult questions about the reordering of society and sound out answers. I think the acknowledgment of how real structural change needs to happen in order for prisons to be abolished sitting alongside the acknowledgment that this would not be easy shows real maturity, not just in authorial outlook, but in writing ability. Getting these ideas across in fiction is difficult, but it never feels forced or as though these arguments are better suited to non-fiction writing.
After Chain-Gang All-Stars I read Sarahland by Sam Cohen (2021), which I was absolutely blown away by. Sarahland is a collection of short stories that each have characters called Sarah in them, who are almost all queer and Jewish. The stories span over time and planes of consciousness, with Sarahs at college, Sarahs in Biblical times, Sarahs moving to new cities, Sarahs falling into dreamscapes in the desert, Sarahs in machines and Sarahs in the sea. As whole, it was so fun and sad and genuine.
My favourite stories were ‘The First Sarah’ and ‘All the Teenaged Sarahs’, which between them show the breadth of the collection. ‘The First Sarah’ is set thousands of years ago, not long after the Creation, when ‘bodies came in all different combinations of planar and bumpy,’ and ‘people identified with masculine and feminine dress in ways that matched their genitalia and body type or ways that did not and no one was mad about it yet.’ This is one of the longer stories in the collection and probably its most focused, about a newly married couple of undefinable genders who are in close communication with God, and who want to have a baby. They come into possession of a new servant girl, and Sari (the first Sarah) becomes confused about her feelings, especially when she does become a mother in a world that is becoming increasingly patriarchal. It’s quite moving, but still fun with moments of real humour, and the very ancient setting doesn’t seem out of place or forced.
‘All the Teenaged Sarahs’ is the penultimate story in Sarahland, about a Sarah who received a pink television for her birthday as a pre-teen, which had a VHS loaded into it about a magical horse camp. Sarah believes that she remains mentally 12 years old while everyone grows up around her, made especially apparent when she attends a prestigious university and can’t fit in. Throughout her life, she believes that she will become fulfilled if she visits the horse camp and she finds herself subconsciously looking for it and yearning for it. This one resonated very much with me, especially in how it depicts feeling scared or confused when you’re at an age at which you think you should know better. It also brought to mind a childhood fixation I had on a particular video of My Little Pony, which was set in a kind-of dreamworld in maybe a castle, maybe a house, that was also set on top of a hill? It’s something that I know I was obsessed with, and even rationed watching because I didn’t want it to lose its magic, but also kind of falls apart if I think about it too overtly. I know the vibe of it very well, even the aesthetics, but not the details, and I think this story is getting at how we chase those kinds of feelings and images from when we were young but can never adequately recapture. It is also about being queer and not having the right words for it.
I have an American edition of Sarahland, bought on a trip to New York, and I’m not sure if it's a particularly ‘American’ thing, but I do feel a bit bamboozled by the blurb and quotes on the back. I bought the book because the cover is gorgeous, Andrea Lawlor blurbed it and because I read a bit of it in the shop. I’m not sure I would have bought it if I had read the back, which promises an exploration of ‘the ways in which traditional stories have failed us’ and ‘new possibilities for life itself,’ as well as a ‘polyphonic voice and a kaleidoscopic face to the exuberant possibilities of modern identity.’ Call me a dullard but I think that is doing too much, as well as over-promising on what the collection actually delivers. Much of it is taken up with how a lot of life, including (perhaps especially) queer life, follows patterns, especially where consumerism and capitalism is involved. Although Cohen offers depictions of people who go slightly against the grain, either by feeling differently towards their partner who is a corporate graphic designer or by learning to put a language against their newly-discovered identity, much of it is to do with emotion over political praxis (which several of her characters openly say they’re too lazy for). I actually read this as a really good commentary on how we’re often expected to do amazing, bamboozling things but can’t often deliver on that because we’re human. I don’t think this is a collection that offers new possibilities, but it does do exciting things with form and setting, and is a really good queer book.
Books on my radar
I’m really not sure what to read next which, long time subscribers will know, is a nice feeling for me. I am free!! Who knows what will be in the next newsletter!!
I finished Chain-Gang All-Stars last week. The author did a fantastic job highlighting what is wrong with our prison system. I can't say it will be a favorite, because it is so brutal, but it was one of the best books I have read in a long time.