Good evening!
I hope everyone is well and enjoying the onset of Spring. Even though I am a known Winter Lover, I do like wearing a lighter jacket and mooching around with a bit of sun on my face.
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My twitter/X is @jessf_white and my Instagram is @lunchpoems.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
After a successful (and bumper) update last week, I’m sad to report that I have had a rubbish reading week. I said in the last edition that I was thinking about picking up Rachel Khong’s Real Americans based on how she seemed to be friends with some authors that I love. I did start it, got 80ish pages in, and then abandoned it for good. It was, I’m afraid to say, a complete dud.
I often look at what the authors of books that I like read or interact with, because it’s usually a good way to find something good. I don’t think that writers necessarily read in a different way than non-writers, but I do think they are a bit more cautious with their choices because they’re less invested in things like meeting a reading goal or keeping up with what is popular on social media, and more invested in reading things that will complement their practice. There’s also an issue of time; much of their creative time is spent writing their own stuff, usually around full or part time jobs and/or other freelance work. If you’re ever stuck on what to read next, then having a look at what your faves are recommending can bring some gems your way.
It is not, however, always a successful way to find something new. At first, I thought Real Americans was quite good -- it has a pretty strong opening, and an intriguing premise. It’s about a Chinese-American woman called Lily, who is carrying out an unpaid internship at a New York-based travel magazine. She does odd jobs and relies on her credit card in order to survive, until she meets a rich man, the nephew of the editor,at the magazine’s Christmas party. They start dating until she has a crisis of identity -- he is overwhelmingly wealthy (in that old money, much-makes-more, New York way) and he occupies a very white section of culture. She, on the other hand, feels shabby in comparison, not least because she is the daughter of immigrants and a Florida transplant. The blurb tells me that the first section follows their relationship, and the remainder follows her son’s story as he tries to find out more about his father and his identity. I was tempted to see how things unfolded, namely how Lily came to have a son by this man and where things ultimately went wrong, but I gave up before that point.
What was grinding on me was how there was only a surface level of introspection and reflection present in the text. I couldn’t tell you anything about Lily, aside from the movements she made in her life. In 60 pages we had zipped through 4 years of her life, and not in a concise, summative way, but in a ‘I did this and this and this, and then two years later I was doing this and this and this.’ It makes for a very boring reading experience, and it is probably why I connected so well with Philip Roth when I read his American Pastoral last year. Roth dissects the minutiae of his character’s thoughts, feelings and actions -- sometimes for pages at a time -- while also covering a lot of ground in their lives, which makes for a far better novel overall.
Sometimes, this kind of prose is intentional, in a ‘I’m only going to let you in on a portion of this character’s interiority’ kind of way, which unfolds into a larger statement on bigger textual themes. Sparse prose and story-telling is fine, and when done well, can be very enjoyable. I don’t think that this was happening here, however -- I think the form of writing eluded Khong in favour of getting a narrative down on paper. This seems to be a bit of a recurring thing in contemporary literary fiction (although it is not exclusive to the present). Perhaps it is a fear of introspection, or a fear of writing like people like Roth, or a result of American writing MFAs. Maybe it isn’t something that can be attributed to a collective, and just a result of individual skill. I can’t really provide a definitive answer, but a mishmash of those elements is probably a contributing factor.
You can’t win them all! After putting Real Americans down, I felt a weird sense of guilt, like I had been wasting my time and I had only myself to blame. This is, of course, ridiculous. A while ago, I stopped counting the amount of books I read in a certain time period -- if you were to ask me how many books I read last year, or how many I’ve read so far this year, I genuinely wouldn’t have an answer for you. This has been healthy for me, because it has stopped me seeing my leisure time as a kind of chore that is quantifiable (although I recognise that lots of people don’t approach it in this way). Although reading is (in my opinion) more than just a ‘leisure time activity’ because of its cultural and artistic possibilities, it is not something that intrinsically instils moral goodness or intellectual excellence. Selecting a badly-written book is not a moral failing, as dramatic as that conclusion might be. What disappointed me is that I am usually very good at picking up books that are crafted well for a myriad of reasons, but sometimes a dud does sneak through.
It’s for that reason that I really carefully picked my current read, which is also a gifted book, this time from Pushkin Press. I don’t actually remember receiving Overstaying by Ariane Koch, translated by Damion Searls, but I picked it out of my pile of proofs because its cover is gorgeous and very different to anything else there. The premise is that a woman who lives alone in a small, rural town becomes obsessed with a stranger that appears in her community, and she takes him into her oversized home. Eventually, he overstays his welcome. The blurb calls it a ‘witty, absurdist novel about hospitality, difference and belonging’ -- what drew me in was the absurdism and how this is about hospitality. I love a good absurdist novel and I think that hospitality is a bit of a neglected concept in contemporary lit, largely because most people live in rented houses or in unstable situations and so this meant something different to writers say, 50 years ago. So far I’m getting along really well with it, which is reassuring.
More next week!
Books on my radar
When I’ve read something a bit rubbish, I usually fall back on more obscure, usually translated fiction, because there’s a better chance of it being good, or at least it having things in it that I can get something out of. So I’ll probably be reading some left-field, weird stuff in the coming weeks.