2022: Year in Review

Another year where I'm pleased with my reading! I completed 36 books, though I didn't write about most of them. In the fall, I began a self-directed "independent study" on Kentucky writers. I've taught in the state for over a a decade, and yet I know little about the area's literature or history. Since my students live close to Cincinnati, they're in many ways Cincinnati suburbanites, but there are still many historically "Kentucky" elements that shape their identities, whether its the preponderance of fishermen and hunters or a rural conservatism. I suppose my entre into Kentucky writing is meant to probe the area and my students' lives, coming to some sort of better understanding of both. I'm also hoping, eventually, to translate my readings into some sort of unit for my students. 

Fortunately I began my Kentucky exploration with Wendall Berry's fantastic The World-Ending Fire, much of which I listened to via Nick Offerman's appropriately plainspoken audiobook narration. I followed with novels, short stories, essays, and poems. Some day I'll put it all together. I did mark the Kentucky authors below (eight altogether). 

I found Cloud Cuckoo Land immensely enjoyable. I also really liked Nightbitch, which captures a mother's identity after the birth of a child (though I could empathize with the narrator, I was also able to feel a bit smug now that I'm past the intensity of the baby/toddler years). Other good contenders: The Right to Sex (I need to read more essay collections), Groundskeeping (another KY writer!), Lost Daughter (love the film).

1. Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So
2. Problems by Jade Sharma
3. The Natural Man by Ed McClanahan [KY]
4. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
5. The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan
6. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
7. Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
8. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
9. Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
10. Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson
11. Passing by Nella Larsen
12. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
13. Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward
14. The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood
15. Groundskeeping by Lee Cole [KY]
16. The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
17. The Idiot by Elif Batuman
18. In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders
19. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
20. Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
21. The Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
22. All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir
23. The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen
24. Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
25. Matrix by Lauren Groff
26. World-Ending Fire by Wendell Berry [KY]
27. Midnight Magic by Bobbie Ann Mason [KY]
28. Think Like a Freak by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
29. The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson [KY]
30. Kentucky Straight by Chris Offut [KY]
31. Liberation Day by George Saunders
32. The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon [KY]
33. The Truth about White Lies by Olivia A. Cole [KY]
34. Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
35. Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson
36. Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

Other stats: fifteen male writers, twenty-one female; ten books by writers of color. Five short story collections, five nonfiction. Six books published before 2000. Welcome 2023.

"Oh William!" by Elizabeth Strout

I was recently sick--far more than I usually get--and I had to take about a week and a half off from my normal physical routines (rock climbing and a twice-a-week weight-lifting class). When I finally resumed, I was surprised (even though I shouldn't have been) at how sore I was. In just a short period of time, my body somehow lost its conditioning.

I've written about this many times before, but it's funny how my mind does the same with writing. When I take even a little time off (and usually it's a lot of time, not a little), I feel like I lose all skill and eloquence. I fear I've become dull and unable to write. So here's me attempting to resist the pull of inaction. 

Oh William! marked a break in my "unit" on Kentucky writers. It's also my third Elizabeth Strout book, though I only recalled Olive Kitteridge (which makes sense given that I gave a withering review to The Burgess Boys). What I remember most about Olive Kitteridge is the voice Strout gave to her characters--one that was unique and clearly defined.

The same is true--and is, in fact, the hallmark--of Oh William!, in which the voice given to the protagonist and narrator, Lucy Barton, is what makes the novel. On its own, the story isn't particularly interesting. Lucy's second husband has recently passed, and she has a complicated but amicable relationship with her first husband, William, with whom she has two adult daughters. William is in disarray after his third wife leaves him, and he unexpectedly learns that his late mother had a child (unbeknownst to William) with her first husband. Lucy joins William on a trip to Maine to learn about this half-sister.

Again, none of this should be particularly interesting, but somehow Lucy, with all her faults and insecurities, is a fascinating character. Oh William! is a sequel of sorts to My Name is Lucy Barton, which details Lucy's upbringing in an abusive home. Lucy references that book and her traumatic upbringing a number of times throughout Oh William!. I think it would be easier to long for the first novel (which I haven't read) and its more sordid tale, but somehow I didn't. Instead, I was engaged with Lucy's attempts to understand her ex-husband, and her attempts to understand her strengths and faults. As she notes, she's a rare success story as a woman who escaped an awful childhood and became a famous novelist, but Lucy hasn't shed the fear and anxiety of her childhood. She still feels invisible and often becomes unreasonably frightened. She realizes that a large part of why she married William was because he exuded the strength and confidence that she lacked. She admires William, but in doing so, she also makes excuses for him (notably from his many affairs). Part of the novel's trajectory is Lucy coming to terms more honestly with William's strengths and weaknesses.

Late in the novel, William tells Lucy that what drew him to her was her joy--a particularly unexpected joy given where she came from. Despite Lucy's fears and anxieties, her joy also permeates the book: her adoration for her children; her care for William and her second husband; her appreciation for the small details in her life. 

Though I wish I'd read My Name is Lucy Barton first, I'm not entirely sure I want to go back and read it now. I prefer to see Lucy not as a battered youth but as an adult woman who has managed to get through--not unscathed, but not destroyed.

"Matrix" by Lauren Groff

Matrix is an odd book stylistically, even though its material seems solid fodder for contemporary fiction. The novel follows Marie, a young noblewoman sent by the queen to become prioress over a ruined and starving abbey. Through Marie's strength of will and ambition, she grows the abbey into immense prosperity and wealth, defying the patriarchal standards of the day (even, at the end, delivering communion and confession as a priest would). The story is very loosely inspired by the real Marie de France, a 12th century writer and poet about whom little is known. 

But though this is sufficiently juicy backstory for a novel that works to reclaim historical women into feminist idols, Groff resists such a narrative. Instead, she's created a dreamy, hazy novel about love and ambition, the body and the soul. The novel covers most of Marie's life, from her arrival at the abbey at age 17 until her death in her seventies. And while Marie is clearly the protagonist, much time is spent on Queen Eleanor (whom Marie is deeply infatuated with), other nuns, and the abbey and its lands. Marie's successes do not come off as stunning victories, but rather the result of wisdom, planning, and team-work. Her failures, likewise, arise from luck as well as foolhardiness.

Thus perhaps what's most surprising about the novel is that Marie's incredible ambition and success, unheard of for most 12th century women, is attributed to many things, the least of which is girl power. Towards the end of the novel, Marie's former maid, Cecily, recounts the many opportunities--including Marie's unattractiveness--that allowed her the success she had. Such opportunities don't diminish Marie's successes, but they do contextualize them. And her successes do not come without real costs to the land, the nuns, and the other women who serve under her. 

In the end, it's an unusual novel, one that sometimes annoyed me (I really wanted Marie to stop mooning over Eleanor) but that nonetheless kept me reading. 

"The Copenhagen Trilogy" by Tove Ditlevsen

The Copenhagen Trilogy is a collection of three short books by the Danish poet and author Ditlevsen, who was famous in her home country in the mid-20th century and died by suicide in 1976. Like most Americans, I had never heard of Ditlevsen, and though she acknowledges her success as an author in Trilogy, her professional success is not the real focus of the book. Instead, the book provides unusual insight into a complicated figure. She was extraordinarily ambitious and felt most at home when writing. We know she lived for her art, but of her art, we hear little. Instead, but most of the book focuses on her intimate relationships--her ambivalent relationship with her mother; her four husbands; and, finally, her drug addiction.

The first book in the trilogy, Childhood, has a foggy sense of helplessness. It reminded me intensely of the young narrators in Elena Ferrante novels, and I had to laugh when I read two reviews that both said the same thing. Youth is focused on her pursuit of romantic and professional success, though Ditlevsen doesn't separate the two much, as her first marriage is a sexless one to a much-older publisher. Dependency is the most affecting part of the novel, as her third husband Carl turns her into a drug addict and her life spirals. Ditlevsen describes this descent dispassionately. There's no attempt to turn herself into a victim or to ask for the reader's sympathy. Instead, she neutrally describes the absolute primacy of drug addiction in her life. It superseded everything, including her children and her work. She undergoes a needless surgery, which leaves her deaf in one ear, in order to secure more drugs. She has all the help money, fame, and love can provide, and none of it matters. Ditlevsen and her fourth husband have to flee Copenhagen to try to save her. On the last page she writes she was finally "rescued from [her] years of addiction," but even without foreknowledge of her suicide five years after the book's publication, the reader knows the assertion is hollow. Ditlevsen does too. After all, the book ends not with the generic absolution, but instead with this grim declaration: "the shadow of the old longing still returns faintly if I have to have a blood test, or if I pass a pharmacy window. It will never disappear completely for as long as I live" (370).

It was this chilling awareness that made the last third of the book so powerful for me. I've read a number of novels about addiction, but none with total clarity of Ditlevsen. She knows the destruction of the drugs. And she also knows she will not resist them if given the opportunity.

Ditlevsen is a complicated figure, and it's often hard to be sympathetic to her. She easily switches from one husband to the next, and she seems to care little for others, including her children. It would be interesting to hear, from an outside point of view, what made her so famous in Denmark, as there's nothing in the book to endear her to the reader. Yet The Copenhagen Trilogy is still a captivating read of a deeply troubled woman.

"All My Rage" by Sabaa Tahir

It's been awhile since I've read YA fiction, and there's some pleasure in sinking into the trials and tribulations of being a teenager. Of course, like a lot of YA these days, All My Rage isn't about simple issues like high school gossip or first crushes. In fact, it grapples with a huge range of issues: immigration, racism, alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual assault, and domestic abuse. Its two protagonists are Noor and Salahudin, children of Pakistani parents who have been best friends since childhood. Their tumultuous backgrounds and current trauma intersect throughout the novel amid their love for each other. 

One of the elements the novel does best is acknowledge and take seriously its characters' anger. It can be easy to dismiss the strong feelings of teenagers as frivolous, but Noor and Salahudin have a lot to be angry about, suffering within structures outside of their control.

There are some things the novel does poorly. Like a lot of teen fiction, it get most about the college admissions process wrong and furthers the idea that the only colleges that exist are the top-twenty elite ones. Its primary villains--Noor's uncle Chachu and racist classmate Jamie--are broadly defined and one-dimensional. It has a pat ending, with villains getting comeuppance and heroes getting the happy ending.

But to be fair, I don't think the novel would have been improved with a grim ending. In fact, I was so anxious I skipped ahead a hundred pages and read the end to be sure all would be okay. Even with a reassuring ending, Tahir is still able to address a number of issues thoughtfully and with nuance.

"The Great Circle" by Maggie Shipstead

I enjoyed The Great Circle quite a bit. I rooted for Marian Graves' happy ending, even when all seemed dim (I didn't care as much about actress Hadley's parts of the story). But I've been thinking about the novel's protagonist--a lone wolf who never says goodbye (or hello, really). Her aloofness and reticence to discuss her feelings are key elements of her personality, something those who love her--her brother Jamie, her neighbor-turned-lover Caleb--are forced to accept. In some ways this stoicism, in a woman, in the early 20th century, feels a little heroic. But in the end I'm left feeling how not-heroic it is. Her lover Ruth dies never hearing Marian's feelings for her. Her lover Caleb pines after her his entire life. Her niece doesn't even get to know her. Obviously an individual has no obligation to another. But ignoring those who love us, and whom we love, does make us a jerk. Shipstead certainly acknowledges Marian's many failings, and I don't think authors must or should write entirely admirable characters, and yet... 

For what it's worth, the Marian-Barclay-Caleb triangle gave me a lot of Twilight vibes. 

"The Candy House" by Jennifer Egan

The Candy House is a sequel of sorts to Egan's massively-successful A Visit From the Goon Squad. It follows the same structure--multi-genre, interwoven narratives--and even returns to characters from the first novel, though only on rereading my review of Goon did I realize just how many characters and stories reappear. I found this book to be far more forgettable than Goon, perhaps because the interlocking narrative is so common now (eg the recent Cloud Cuckoo Land). At far too many points did the book seem an exercise in connecting the disparate narratives, but I found it far too hard to keep the various characters straight in my head and eventually gave up. 

Even more disappointing, the novel centers around a social media invention called "Own Your Unconscious," where users upload all their memories and share them online. Weirdly, there's no questioning of the product itself. In the book memories are apparently akin to video recordings, rather than a product of individual experience and bias; two people witnessing the same event would have different memories, particularly if those memories were recalled years later, but the book accepts without question that the memory uploads reflect accurate recall. But this is ultimately a minor quibble because the sci-fi element is mostly ignored to explore general relationship issues. In fact, I'd argue Own Your Unconscious could have been dropped entirely without changing the book, so why include it at all? It feels like a red herring.

The individual stories are largely well-written, and Egan is good at capturing a variety of voices, even if (again) some--like the autistic counter--have been overdone at this point. A more patient reader, willing to connect the dots between stories and between this book and Goon, might have more fun.

"Cloud Cuckoo Land" by Anthony Doerr

I've written multiple times about my struggle to find the "right" books (for me) to read. I tend to scour literary reviews and awards lists, which has led me to a lot of fantastic literature but can also, at times, feel like a slog. In fact, I've abandoned three books already this year: No Gods, No Monsters; The War for Gloria; and Behold the Dreamers. It's frustrating to put 100+ pages into a book only to decide it's not worth more of my time.

I was reluctant to start Doerr's 600-page Cloud Cuckoo Land, especially because I wasn't especially moved by his well-reviewed All the Light We Cannot See (or, at least, that's my memory. There's no record of me reading it on this blog, which is weird). Thus, what a surprising pleasure it was to be completely sucked in by a beautiful story.

In the realm of high-brow literature, there's plenty to pick apart in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Things work out a little too well in the end, and its ode to the power of storytelling is a bit trite. Still, I love a good inter-weaving narrative, and I'll always be a sucker for fundamentally good characters struggling to survive in an indifferent world. Doerr tells several interlocking tales, from those set in the siege of Constantinople in the 1450s to modern day to a future spaceship. Its ultimate message is that reading--and the sharing of stories--matters. And I can't quibble with that.

"The Natural Man" by Ed McClanahan

This review is brought to you by a widespread ice and snowstorm, which has closed schools for the day, and by our 9-year-old neighbor, who has entertained my children today. Thus, I'm (shockingly) without something to do! And so I'm going to write a review. Funny how hard these are to write when I haven't exercised the skill in several months. 

The Natural Man is a coming-of-age story set in the nothing Kentucky town of Needmore (the name intended quite literally) in the 1950's (?). It follows the life of high-schooler Benny, whose life seems to be shifted by the arrival of Monk McHorning, an oafish orphan brought to town to turn a winning season for the high school basketball team. But, surprisingly, the book isn't really about McHorning and his relationship with Benny, though McHorning does push Benny outside his traditional comfort zone. Instead, the book is more about Benny's stumbles through late adolescence, his lack of clarity over what he wants. The book is bawdy and quite funny, particularly about Benny's feelings for "Oodles," a local girl without charm. There's no romanticizing of teenage affection here, but McClanahan does empathize with his hapless protagonists' muddling feelings.

McClanahan is a native Kentuckian, and it shows. The book is chock full of minute details of the people, buildings, and attitudes. It feels real and immersive in a way that's rare to find. Ultimately The Natural Man is a snapshot of a very particular group, time, and place--it's a narrow focus, but McClanahan does it so well, it's hard to complain.