Good evening!
A busy old week — I’ve had a lot of work to do, and popped down to London for a couple of days. I went to the Faber Spring Party which was lovely — Faber’s authors gave us a small preview of the books and collections they have coming out this summer, and I picked up a couple of proofs (plus a tote bag, obv).
What I’ve been reading and what I think about it
I read Susanna Moore’s In The Cut (1995), which is unbelievably good. It’s a crime thriller, and reads as if it has been written by Joan Didion. I usually don’t like making comparisons between writers like that but it’s really the only way I can describe it. It’s about a University teacher Frannie, who lectures in creative writing. She becomes entangled with a string of murders in lower Manhattan, after visiting a bar where a young woman was killed. The whole novel hinges on the very first scene, when Frannie witnesses the woman with a man in a private room in the bar.
It’s difficult to talk about the novel without giving anything away, but I will say that it has some brilliant character studies. Frannie herself isn’t so much an unreliable narrator, given that there is a lot of unreliability in the novel thanks to its genre. She does suffer from paranoia and memory lapses, but given that there a lot of murders she is connected to in some way, you can’t really blame her. The whole thing does feel very authentic and subtle.
One thing that is not subtle, but is still feels authentic, is the use of language and dialect. Frannie specialises in local vernacular and is in the process of compiling a New York slang dictionary, localising words and phrases geo-socially. Her own word use is very deliberate, and she is constantly noting down phrases that she likes that other people use around her. She is in contact with homicide department of her district, and they all speak exactly how you’d expect New York cops written in the ‘90s to speak. A lot of ‘Getthefuckouttahere’s (written like that as well), and so on and so forth. It’s entertaining, and, at times, surreal. Frannie seems to experience reality fracturally, which may speak to the weird time of her life we’re meeting her in, but I think it captures a lot of the surrealism of actual, everyday dialogue. If you write down real conversations, they often seem very strange and don’t make as much sense as when you’re actually speaking to another person. Because of the language element of the novel, I think it is gesturing towards that.
I’ve become a lot more interested in written-down dialogue recently, and how successfully it captures reality. Fiction absolutely does not need to capture reality, but when it clearly seeks to replicate it, it is interesting to think about how successfully it does this. The awkwardness of a real conversation is really difficult to get down on the page, while also being legible and pleasant to read (not a deal-breaker for me but can be for some). I really like it when this strangeness is at least alluded to, and I appreciate anyone who takes the time to do it.
I am about 100 pages into Jen Calleja’s Vehicle, which was published earlier this month with Prototype Publications (a fave!). I’m really, really enjoying it so far. I would kind of describe it as a goth dystopia, and I’m unable to put my finger exactly on why (the goth part, not the dystopia part — it’s clearly a dystopia). I' have a real weakness for dystopian novels and stories, because it fascinates me to think how each of us would act in the event of near-apocalypse, and what kind of factors contribute to it in the first place. It’s also fascinating how we’ve landed on certain tropes within this genre, as if we’ve collectively decided what the end of the world would look like, despite us really having no idea. Travelling bands or choruses, for example — this element of entertainment on the move that is continually imagined into the apocalyptic landscape is quite sweet. Vehicle has travelling music as its central image, with a woman at the centre who seems to have the same aesthetic as Ethel Cain. I’m looking forward to seeing how it progresses.
Books on my radar
I picked up a proof of Gary Younge’s Dispatches from the Diaspora: From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter at the Faber party. Younge spoke so well on his career in journalism and his time in America, and I’m really looking forward to reading this collection of his pieces.