2020: Year in Review

Everyone, including me, has agreed that 2020 has been the worst, but shockingly, it's been fantastic for my reading--and even more fantastic for writing about my reading. This year I wrote 22 (!) reviews, the most since 2014, before I had children. I also read 30 books, equaling my 2014 total (and in 2014 I spent a whole summer hugely pregnant, sitting around the house, doing nothing!). I had attributed my continued reading to my book club, but with that on pause since March, I realized I'll read plenty on my own, and maybe even more without the pressure of a deadline.

Partly I read because I didn't want to think about this year. Reading was an escape and a distraction. I wrote because I felt stupid and ineffective sitting at home. Writing was a way to prove to myself that I'm still capable, still have intelligence to offer, even if it's rarely called on these days. 

Even so, writing the reviews was a struggle at first. I had fallen out of the habit of composing reviews in my head, something I used to do as a way to occupy idle time. When I do sit down to write, my brain resists the necessary effort to make my swirling ideas into coherent thought. I feel myself getting lazy--putting down ideas but not taking the time to form them into a cohesive whole. 

But I decided permitting some of the laziness was a necessary compromise in order to write. If I demanded A+ work every time, I'd stop doing it altogether. So I wrote 22 reviews. Some I'm happy with, some I'm not. Some expressed my thoughts about a book well, and others are just glimpses of still-inarticulate thoughts. That's okay, which is probably the biggest lesson of 2020. 

Books read in 2020:

1. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Jan)
2. Lanny by Max Porter (Jan)
3. The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Feb)
4. Ghosts of Eden Park by Karen Abbott (Mar)
5. Three Women by Lisa Taddeo (Apr)
6. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (Apr)
7. Tell the Machine Goodnight by Katie Williams (May)
8. Normal People by Sally Rooney (Jun)
9. Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham (Jun)
10. Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin (Jun)
11. Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson (Jun)
12. White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo (Jun)
13. The City We Became by NK Jemisin (Jul)
14. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (Jul)
15. Wordslut by Amanda Montell (Aug)
16. A Burning by Megha Majumdar (Aug)
17. Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (Aug) 
18. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (Sept, a reread)
19. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (Sept)
20. Pew by Catherine Lacey (Oct)
21. There There by Tommy Orange (Oct)
22. Space Invaders by Nona Fernandez (Oct)
23. The Grammarians by Cathleen Schine (Nov)
24. The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown (Nov)
25. Survival Math by Mitchell S Jackson (Nov)
26. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (Nov)
27. Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh (Dec)
28. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver (Dec)
29. Cleanness by Garth Greenwell (Dec)
30. Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh (Dec)

Twenty-one of the books were written by women, a huge shift from when I started blogging and oddly favored men. In addition, about a third of the books were written by people of color. Almost a third were non-fiction, also a big change from a decade ago. Most of the books were published in the last three years, with only four written before 2010.

There were some fantastic books this year. I'm still proud of myself for finishing Ducks, Newburyport. It's an English lit fanatic's dream, and I'm still thinking about it. Little Women was an absolute delight (as is the Gerwig movie adaptation). Perhaps Normal People wouldn't have resonated as much if I hadn't watched it alongside the Hulu miniseries, but it nonetheless has stuck with me. Though there were some I didn't love, there weren't any real stinkers.

So as I close out 2020, I'll just reiterate that this year was the worst, except for the books. 

"Homesick for Another World" by Ottessa Moshfegh

After teasing for weeks, I've finished Ottessa Moshfegh's short story collection! The collection that I reacted to so strongly, I had to put it down twice in favor of the sparseness of Carver and the poetry of Greenwell. I've learned a few things. I don't like reading the same author back-to-back (just as I don't like binge-watching TV shows). For me, the magic of artistry falters when examined in repetition; the artist's skill becomes a trick exposed. I also don't like reading short story collections back-to-back. Stories demand savoring, yet a collection demands to be read as a whole. I find it hard to balance the needs of the individual story with the theme of the whole in a single collection, let alone three.  

But none of that ultimately says anything about Homesick. In most fiction, the characters’ emotions are relatable, even if their actions are not. I alluded to this as much in Greenwell's Cleanness. Though the protagonist and I have little in common, his feelings were something with which I could empathize. Moshfegh’s characters, on the other hand, exist very much on the periphery of human experience—little about them is relatable or understandable. They're scarcely believable as human beings half the time.

I tell my English classes that they can’t argue a character is “crazy” because it stops the conversation. “Crazy” (in literature, anyway) means meaningless, arbitrary. I don’t think Moshfegh crafts stories that are either, so what, then, to make of her undeniably “crazy,” delusional, and (as I put in my Greenwell review), psychotic characters? Characters who have no lucid grasp on reality or other people?

Beyond existing on the periphery, her characters are similar in many other ways. Moshfegh’s protagonists are united by a common revulsion for fat people, by disgust at the classless-ness of the poor. Yet they have a fascination with the human body at a base and visceral level. They’re the kind of people who casually use the word “retarded” or refer to gay people as “homosexuals.” They’re also arrogant and proud; their fringe existence confirms (for them and only them) their specialness.

The same type of protagonists occupy the two Moshfegh novels I’ve read—My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands—but isolated from other “crazies,” their protagonists’ actions can feel like a reflection of a crazed society. Placed together in a short story collection, however, the protagonists appear separate from society. Their psychosis seems to be about them, not a broader whole.

 So while I didn't see any larger meaning or message to the stories, there does exist within them a weird energy, a sense of life in their absurd characters. There's "The Surrogate," about a woman hired to play the attractive face of a business. It seems like a story that should take a dark turn, but it doesn't really. In "Dancing in the Moonlight," a man who spends all his money on luxury clothes but is essentially homeless decides he's in love with a woman who remodels furniture. He goes on a tragically comic adventure to convince her he has an ottoman that needs reupholstering. "The Beach Boy" maybe works best as a whole. In it, a middle-aged couple returns from a trip to Mexico; the wife's unexpected death leads the husband to reconsider everything about his marriage (in absurd fashion, of course). They're all unsettling and fantastical.

Ultimately I don't know what it all means, or whether it means anything. I wouldn't universally recommend Moshfegh--she's something to be taken in small doses--but there's undeniable skill in her craftsmanship of crazy. 

"Cleanness" by Garth Greenwell

It's rather odd that I've felt the need to begin both this and my last review (of Raymond Carter's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) by referencing Ottessa Moshfegh's short story collection Homesick from Another World. Partially it's because all three books are essentially short story collections (though Cleanness has a single narrator), which inevitably invites comparisons. Partially it's because twice I picked up Moshfegh only to set it aside for another.

Even more so than Carver's collection, Cleanness exists opposite Homesick for Another World, which could probably be subtitled "Dirtiness." There's plenty about Moshfegh that enthralls, but coming off her novel Death in Her Hands, I couldn't handle even more nearly-psychotic narrators, nor her minute and all-consuming focus on the disgusting nature of human bodies and habits. Though Greenwell's novel also focuses intensely on the human body and the inner self, its focus, tone, and style have almost nothing in common with Moshfegh's cynicism.

Greenwell's narrator, a gay American professor living and teaching in Bulgaria, goes through a range of emotions, including depression, but unlike Moshfegh's protagonists, he never feels psychotic--even his tendency toward self-harm is understandable, natural. And though Cleanness contains the most explicit descriptions of sex I have ever read, Greenwell writes in such a way that the acts don't inspire disgust or titillation, nor laughter or grimace; instead, they read as pure expressions of need or love or feeling. So maybe ultimately it's love that's absent from Moshfegh's work and which sets her and Greenwell most apart.

While Moshfegh's characters are usually alone, Greenwell focuses on love--and its mate, pain--through the relationships of human bodies. The explicitness of the sex in Cleanness was what most stood out in the New York Times review that led me to pick up the book, and undoubtedly it's something that could turn off readers (especially the second chapter about a BDSM encounter gone wrong). I thought of a teachers' Facebook group of which I'm a part; in a recent post, a member asked about the acceptability of a teenager using casual profanity in an essay. I was shocked by how many teachers were horrified--it was a sign of lack of intelligence, they bizarrely argued; they would never read anything with profanity. I think English readers as a whole (or maybe just Americans?) have a similar attitude toward sex, particularly in the written word. Sex can exist "off-screen," but any detailed description is pornographic, a sign of smuttiness and poor writing (unclear which is worse). 

Greenwell seeks to challenge that assumption, writing about sex in exquisite detail and beautiful prose. For Greenwell's narrator (and Greenwell himself), sex is an essential part of one's true self--to remove sex or to deny sex's role in life is to deny one's humanity (a metaphor that is especially apt for the queer community. Though the protagonist is an openly gay man, he lives in Bulgaria, a country with rampant homophobia that demands his relationships be kept somewhat hidden). In the novel, sex is a vehicle to explore love, hope, heartbreak, and shame in ways that we hide in our day-to-day interactions.

But to focus only on the sex is to do a disservice to the rest of the book, much of which goes beyond sex. The first chapter, where a student comes out discreetly to the professor and the professor finds himself unable to offer the comfort or solace the student seeks, is incredibly heartbreaking, as is "Decent People," about pro-democracy protests in Bulgaria that attack simultaneous LGBTQ-rights protests. The largest section of the book, about the narrator's relationship with R., a Portuguese man, is one of the most moving depictions of love and heartbreak I've read. 

In trying to determine what it is about Greenwell that's so moving, eventually I realized it's the prose itself. It's not a surprise that Greenwell started out as a poet--there's a rhythm through his sentences that carries the emotional content. In an interview in The Paris Review, Greenwell describes his syntactical style: "The kind of sentence I'm drawn to, which constantly falls back on itself in correction or hesitation or defeat but is also drawn forward by the demands of rhythm and cadence, feels mimetic of desire to me, even of sex" (yeah, okay, there's a lot of sex; in the same interview, he says "the great human virtue is promiscuity"). I do think that Greenwell's recursive style is part of his appeal, so at odds with the assertive, "masculine" style of an author like Carver or Cormac McCarthy. Maybe I felt reassured that the prose itself assumed a lack of knowing rather than bold pronouncements; that the prose invited one to be washed over by emotions. 

Maybe I also felt reassured by the fact that, despites its sadness, Cleanness seems hopeful about love. Moshfegh's characters are hopeless and alone, but Greenwell suggests meaningful connection is possible, even if fleeting.

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" by Raymond Carver

Though focused on the mundane rather than the fantastic, Carver's short story collection reminded me most of Haruki Murakami's short stories. They're concise to the point of the reader feeling like she's missing something. I'd finish a story and feel like something had happened--I just wasn't sure what.

I started Ottessa Moshfegh's short story collection Homesick for Another World immediately after (a bad idea, short story collections shouldn't be read back to back. Good ones demand percolation), and I felt almost revolted by her focus on the grotesquely detailed inner workings of her characters' minds. That's not a criticism of Moshfegh, but rather an awareness of how sparse Carver is in comparison. He sets the stage (and does so well), but then the reader is put to work. Characters' lives remain largely hidden, open to enigmatic glimpses, not revelations.

In an apt comparison to Moshfegh, there's an undercurrent of violence and anger in Carver's stories, particularly against women. There's a sense that heterosexual relationships require an intensity of feeling that inevitably manifests itself violently. That's most true in the titular story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," where married couple Mel and Terri debate whether a violent ex-husband's abuse was love. Terri is certain it is, but I was struck by the tension between Mel and Terri. He doesn't appear to be abusive, but there's a level of violence there too. Not all the stories end violently--"Everything Stuck to Him," by comparison, has a fight that appear to resolve lovingly. Yet even the most positive ones, including "Everything...," ultimately have an unresolved edge.

One of the most frequent topics brought up when Carver stories are discussed today is his contentious relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish, who cut considerably from Carver's stories against Carver's wishes. I know little about the drama involved, but it does give an increased sense of mystery to the stories themselves. What did Carver want? Is the story better or worse for the editing? Perhaps their tension is manifested in the stories itself (or maybe that's too Freudian).

Ultimately, I'd recommend Carver's stories, though they're somewhat of a paradox. They're very short, and thus appealing to readers wary of length. On the other hand, they're probably too enigmatic for impatient readers. Maybe perfect for literary readers with not a lot of time. :)

"Death in Her Hands" by Ottessa Moshfegh

I chose Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation for my book club last year, and I was as fascinated with the novel as with the author herself. Death in Her Hands certainly shares similarities with My Year, particularly its unreliable female narrator, though its dissonance from reality seems somewhat less significant, and its mystery (if there is one) ultimately unfulfilling.

The most important element of Death in Her Hands is that it begins with a note 72-year-old Vesta Gul finds in the woods while walking her dog, Charlie. Vesta has recently moved to a rustic cabin in the woods in the small town of Levant after the death of her husband. The note reads, "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body.” There is no body nor any evidence of a crime, but Vesta becomes obsessed with the mystery of Magda's death anyway.

Soon, Vesta has created an entire backstory for Magda, whom she has decided is a young immigrant illegally living in Levant. She's decided the note was written by a young man named Blake who has a crush on Magda and has allowed her to live in his mother's basement. She crafts an entire range of suspects, from a monster named Ghod who takes the form of a police officer to a disfigured man named Henry who works at a gas station.

There's some pleasure in this absurd build-up, as Vesta cluelessly attempts to use a computer in the library and "finds" further clues. Eventually, she even "meets" much of her cast of characters, including Blake's mom "Shirley" and Officer Ghod.

While Vesta is obsessed with the mystery of Magda, perhaps the real mystery is of Vesta herself, whose life we learn about in small snippets. Her disdain for her late husband eventually becomes clear: he was cold, controlling and condescending; he preyed on female college students and belittled his wife. It's obvious why Vesta would want to escape him and find some independence, though we also learn that Vesta, while a victim, is not a hero. She herself is condescending, particularly to the other residents of Levant, and there's a sense that for a long time she bemoaned her vacant life without trying to alter it. By moving to Levant she's made a large outer change, but she's not "living the dream." She's eating cold, grocery story bagels each morning and fiddling the day away with her dog. 

As the novel continues, Vesta's derangement is clear, but it's not quite clear where the derangement is going. There's something engaging of the paradox of a mystery without an actual mystery, but eventually, after pages of Vesta inventing Magda's life and increasingly bizarre encounters with actual (maybe?) people, there's an expectation of some sort of meaning in the end.

Instead, Vesta just seems crazy. The final scene--involving a showdown with her previously loyal dog--is pretty fantastic, and I wanted to laugh as Vesta improbably leapt into the wilderness in her black camouflage suit, but I also wanted it to amount to something. "Crazy old lady" doesn't seem sufficient.