Tag: books

Recently finished Three Women by Lisa Taddeo and it drove over me like a steamroller. It’s a thousand things at once: First, an exploration of female desire, as the book states clearly as its objective; but also a stunning document of the decline of America, the soulessness of its cultural infrastructure, the way it terrorizes women then demonizes them for fighting back; it’s the most relevant, urgent book I’ve ever read. 

The book’s mission is to document these things unflinchingly, not to resolve them. There’s no hypothesis it seeks to prove. The course of the three women is frustrating, upsetting, admirable, horrific, enviable, joyous, and depressing all at once, and it doesn’t care what you think. In fact, it doesn’t even want you to think. It’s simply presenting three lives as they stand, with as much truth and emotional accuracy as possible, no matter the contradictions. It’s so precise a book that it could be carved in stone. 

I walked away from it wanting something fixed—not knowing what, but knowing that something needed done, something changed—but I’ve only recently come to terms with the fact that the book doesn’t care, that that isn’t the book’s intent. Any reaction the reader has is his own gut reacting, nothing else. The book’s only job is to exist like a monument. It’s a chilling exchange.   

I also read Trust Exercise by Susan Choi just before Three Women. (I wasn’t consciously planning on a deep dive into sexual politics and demagoguery but that seems to be exactly what I did!) Trust Exercise was a frustrating book to read in a lot of ways, entertaining in others. It’s very much a writers’ book, with its playing around with perspective and reader expectations. Like Three Women, the visceral experience of the book itself is the point of its existence; it’s not making a ruling on its own complicated case. 

If anything, Trust Exercise wants you to question who owns a story. Is your own retelling of an experience automatically betraying the truth? Does the mere fact of perspective distort any attempt at fact and impartiality? Does the violence of trauma just rip everything to shreds? The “exercise” at the heart of Trust Exercise sits uncomfortably alongside the unwavering (nearly stagnant) presentation of the Three Women. If we’re meant to question everything and no lens to look through is correct, then what exactly is the point? 

I think, out here in the pits of 2019, that the whole point of both books is to champion the act of just looking. Just have a look. There’s not enough of it going round these days. 

(Sidenote: I love that I can just END these posts without any proper wrapping-up or conclusion. Just blah, blah, blah, then bye! It’s a blog!)

I finished reading Stoner by John Williams the other day. It’s been having a prolonged renaissance in publishing lately—it’s been reissued several times since its was first published in 1965, it’s been called a “perfect novel” by the New York Times, its author was made the subject of a book literally called The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel, it’s been blurbed by Tom Hanks for some reason. All of these things both attract and repel me, of course, because how could you not read a “perfect novel”? And a blurb from Tom Hanks is basically a blurb from the Goodyear blimp.

And it’s not a Goodyear blimp novel, I’m happy to report—whatever that would mean. It’s not in over its head, it’s not syrupy, it’s not inflated. It’s a strange little book that’s not really sitting with me the way I want it to sit with me and I can’t quite make my mind up about it.

On one hand, it’s a classic campus novel that illustrates a slice of post-war American life in the sort of quiet, effortless style of William Maxwell (one of my all time favorite writers). But then on the other hand, it’s a classic campus novel in the worst sense—it trips on its own sense of entitlement, narrow worldview, treatment of women, etc. It’s both a very modern, but also very 60s novel, cancelling itself out, making me just want to read William Maxwell instead. Still, it’s a moving book.

Stoner is about the life of the fictional William Stoner, a mediocre professor at the University of Missouri and that’s about it. His entire life spans the course of the novel and therein lies one of its biggest foibles. Near the end of the book and of his life I stopped recognizing the Stoner from earlier chapters, and I would be fine with that if Williams had somehow made note of that in the text, but he doesn’t. Stoner simply evolves—from quiet farmboy to quiet student to quiet teacher—without much introspection, and every time he’s given the chance to really come alive on the page, he comes off feeling like a completely different person from the last iteration.

The thing that makes this book stand out the most is its examination of a life in education. I’ve never read a book that so perfectly captures the feeling of the joy of learning—and a special kind of learning at that, not for the purposes of creating something, not for gain, but simply for the sake of learning. The first few chapters cover this brilliantly as they describe Stoner’s bleak family history, their eternal servitude in manual labor, and then the lucky break that whisks Stoner away to university and his position between those two worlds.

Perfect novel? Stoner has moments of perfection, sure, but I don’t think such a thing as a perfect novel exists—and I’m sure Stoner would be the first to agree.

I’m reading the book Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which is actually three books wrapped up in one! Books, not parts. It’s always a nice surprise when a book does that. It forces your reading-brain to recalibrate itself and think “OK, what I just read was a book. Now this next bit is also a book,” and figure out what the story was (or wasn’t) and what that means. The breaks feels more solid as opposed to a book that’s only broken up into parts.

The structure is surprising because Pachinko has no story! Jokes. It does, but it doesn’t. If you were to ask me the plot of the novel, I wouldn’t be able to say anything other than, “It’s about a Korean family in Japan, whose lives thicken and complicate and expand with every generation.” The specifics of that thickening and complicating are less important than the simple observation of it, which Lee seems to be aware of and writes so that it take precedence, but not in the ways you would expect from this kind of book. A lot of rules get broken. There’s a lot of “head-hopping,” with the reader weaving inside and outside the heads of different characters, sometimes within the same paragraph, which is jilting (and I want to know the internal conversations that had to have taken place about this choice), but it’s a clear choice by Lee.

The more I read (and yes, I’m still reading it, almost finished), and the more the book strays from Sunja into the lives of her sons and other peripheral characters, the more I start to understand the choices Lee makes. It’s cheap to say the characters don’t matter, or that history itself is a character, or some kind of “joy in the journey” type thing, because Pachinko does what it does so much better than most generational Dramas with a capital D. A few points while reading I got the strange, uncomfortable feeling that I was holding a slimy, beating organ, not a book. The story morphs into its own thing and it refuses to be precious. But then there were other points while reading where everything felt rote, almost phonebooky. It’s a book that never wants you to think you know what it’s doing so you’re passive and meldable and open to its massive history—and it’s an incredibly good history book.

No ending for this little review because I haven’t finished reading!