Good evening!
Happy Good Friday! I love Easter, and I’m very excited for Lent to be over so I can eat a pastry.
Another bumper edition this week because I once again didn’t send out a newsletter last week. I’m not making a habit of it, I was just busy! (I was drunk).
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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
I finished Symeon Brown’s Get Rich or Lie Trying (2022), which I loved. It was such a fascinating look at the different ways people get taken in by social media, whether that be through pyramid schemes or feeling the pressure to get cosmetic work. One thing the book gets very right is its deconstruction of how the influencer economy relies on being hypocritical, especially in how it brands positive lifestyle changes or viewpoints through rampant capitalism that benefits the individual selling it. I was particularly taken with this passage, on the ‘body positivity’ movement:
The body positive movement has historically centred on women who were fat, dark-skinned, disabled or all three.to help them feel comfortable in their bodies when mass advertising suggested that to be beautiful was to be the opposite. In contrast, at the helm of this new body positive movement are curvaceous and traditionally beautiful models who call themselves activists but operate more like private enterprises. The most high profile do not unite behind a single campaign like environmentalists or other political campaigners. Instead, each model has launched their own campaign, had their slogan copyrighted and turned it into merchandise.
I’ve long been suspicious of ‘activism’ or ‘awareness raising’ that ultimately makes one or a small number of people money, within body positivity and outside of it. There are exceptions, of course, but the premise of ‘Hi, do you know about this thing? Show everyone you are aware of it by buying something at the link in my bio’ is clearly not the same as promoting something because you feel passionate about it. There is a lot of good criticism in Get Rich or Lie Trying that chimes in with this, and I feel better equipped to argue against some of the more annoying, money-grabbing aspects of the internet now. I am, however, quite taken by Nara Smith. Sorry.
Next, I picked up a novel that has been sitting on my TBR pile for a long time, George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). I have previously read (and taught) Saunders’ CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), which I loved, so I’m not sure why it has taken me so long to get to another of his books. Lincoln in the Bardo was truly excellent -- a really affecting book that does some genuinely interesting things with form. (I love saying that don’t I, ‘genuinely interesting things to do with form’. Sometimes writers do, indeed, experiment with form in ways that work!)
Lincoln in the Bardo takes place over one night, after Abraham Lincoln’s recently deceased young son has been entombed in a cemetery. His son, Willie, died after contracting a very short illness and finds himself in ‘the bardo’, a transitional realm found in Tibetan tradition, in which souls that have not accepted they are dead are stuck, until they finally move on. A cast of characters surround Willie, and watch as the President visits his son.
The novel is told in short sections, with different voices chiming in telling a surreal narrative that plays with tense and point of view. Characters narrate what other characters are doing or have done, telling the reader what that other person has said or is thinking, making the cast a kind of mushed-together force. Other times, characters are distinct from one another in their feelings, actions and vernacular, especially as they come from different historical eras. The surrealism of the text serves to show how these souls are in denial about their situations, and have learned to accept the strangeness they experience in whatever capacity it comes to them. It’s a book that is difficult to summarise and difficult to ruminate on, but it is a very successful experiment with what writing can achieve. Despite the evident and intentional strangeness of the text, it felt intoxicating -- although there are times in it where it is difficult to parse what is going on, it’s a very visual text that invites its readers to bend their imagination slightly. It is also extremely moving, and a really fantastic reflection on death and grief; it would make a good companion to Lorrie Moore’s I am Homeless if This is Not my Home (2023).
The next book I read was intentionally completely different to Lincoln in the Bardo, because I felt that I could fall into a bit of a slump if I wasn’t careful. I picked up Sara Gran’s Come Closer (2003) from my fave, West Kirby Books, a slim horror about a woman who gets possessed. It was quite good, but I don’t feel that I have much more to say about it than that really. It is about a woman called Amanda who leads quite a normal life as an architect, living in an outer-city town with her reliable and sturdy husband Ed. Both she and Ed start to hear a strange clicking noise in their apartment, which they cannot get to the source of. Amanda starts to have vivid dreams about an imaginary friend she had when she was young, and then her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic. I liked the concept, I liked a lot of the images, but the prose wasn’t as sophisticated as some of its ideas. There were a few jarring turns of phrases and prose choices that didn’t ruin the book, but also made it just an okay read.
Next I read an advanced copy of Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot (2024), a book that was actually published by Daunt yesterday. Daunt has some of the best acquisitions on the market I think, because I’ve never read a dud from them, Headshot being no exception. I really, really loved this. It’s set around the Daughters of America competition, a girls boxing championship which is, in the year of the novel’s setting, taking place at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, Nevada. It is told through the matches between girls, delving into their backgrounds and their motivations, as well as more abstract themes like how each girl experiences time, or what they think of when they think of their home, and what their relationship to water is. These teenage girls have come from all over the country, either driving themselves if they are old enough, or being accompanied by guardians who are either a bit too invested in their wellbeing, or bemused by the entire spectacle. It’s a real ‘state of America’ text without being overbearing with it -- it shows its readers what life is like for different people, who have all, somehow, ended up in a cheaply constructed gym in the desert.
What I think Bullwinkel does especially well is her presentation of how individuals experience the same thing, and how radically different it can be based on the person’s outlook (constructed in their very deep psyche), and their social and geographical background. The ‘same thing’ that the individuals of her text experience is the boxing match they are taking part in, something that almost comes secondary to the deep dive into each girl in the ring. There is a lot of love for women’s sports to be found in Headshot, but what makes this a standout novel is its character studies, and how it takes quite abstract concepts and presents them as something we take seriously, because it is how a person is in the world. There is a section that describes how bits of each girl are layered on top of each other above the boxing ring, haunting it and being added to with each fight. This seems quite strange as an isolated image, but it is how we sometimes remember or visualise experiences as a series of images that can’t be filed in a traditional way, so we put them in the air, or layer them in our memory. The action of thinking about something is actually quite a strange concept, because we can’t fully describe how we think, but it is one of the things that impacts how we interact with the world -- which is what a lot of what Headshot is about. Please buy!
More next week!
Books on my radar
I think I will read the advance copy that has been sent to me of Real Americans by Rachel Khong, published by Hutchinson Heinemann in April. It looks really good, but I also saw that Khong is in both literary and seemingly personal cahoots with Rita Bullwinkel, Amina Cain and Kathryn Scalan, three excellent writers, so that did swing it. I love literary friendships!
I started Lincoln in the Bardo a while ago but didn’t manage to get into it. After reading your thoughts I’m going to give it another try!
Loved loved loved Lincoln in the Bardo - I've heard its INCREDIBLE on audiobook, just an amazing cast list and is done like a play, but I've still not got around to it...