This month I read books that frustrated me, books that amused me, books that bored me, and books that gave me nightmares, plus one book I loved, probably problematically.
Filed under clever har-har!, was George and Weedon Grossman's The Diary of a Nobody. I'm sort of compiling an idiosyncratic reading list on suburbia and suburbanites (with Danielle Dutton's Sprawl and Lucy Hellman's Ducks, Newburyport in the to-be-read stack), and this 1892 novel in the form of a diary seemed as though it might be some sort of foundational text for the rich vein of complacent literary derision dedicated to all things suburban (have to dig more, though, to get to the roots of that). It is a mock diary of one Charles Pooter, happy, dull, and oblivious, faithfully jotting down the events of his small life in a London suburb sometime in the late 1800s (the format and tone will be familiar to anyone who ever read any of Sue Townshend's Adrian Mole books) .
Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time (1951) was more of a clever, ho ho! read. Inspector Allen Grant is laid up in a hospital bed recovering from a back injury, but his agile brain demands occupation, so he begins to unravel the mystery behind the disappearance of the little princes in the Tower of London, allegedly done to death by their uncle Richard the Third. Grant, a British police inspector who prides himself on discerning character through a person's face (cue 21st-century wince), sees a portrait of Richard and concludes he does not look like a villain. It's an entertaining inversion of the classic whodunit, with the inspector stuck in one place and shadowy suspects lurking between the lines of suspect historical accounts, that expands into a meditation on how (and why) we construct "truth."
John Banville's Snow (2020): Ireland, 1950s, Catholic priest gruesomely murdered in a decaying Protestant country house, mad women and damaged young men and a sinister reform school for boys ... the plot here hinges on easily guessed horrors. It mostly left me wondering just exactly what a sex scene is supposed to do in a book that seems mostly written to entertain. The ones in this book come in three flavors—sordid, boring, and abusive—and none of the them felt particularly illuminating or necessary (except maybe to indicate that BAD people have BAD sex and GOOD people have WHOLESOME sex). If you want to write about sex between consenting people, go crazy, but once you start writing about someone sexually abusing children, for me, you've just skipped right out of the "reading for fun" zone into "this needs to be worth it, somehow." It wasn't.
As a brain cleanser, I read about disastrous fungal pandemics in Nicholas P. Money's The Triumph of the Fungi (2006). It was a welcome corrective to the current wave of pop-culture mushroom veneration, and a reminder that fungus are complex living things, not merely agents of redemption or inspiration for humans. The author's pop-culture references were eye-rollers (amazing to find a Britney Spears slam in a book detailing various fungal blights!), but he compellingly illustrated how human choices (clear-cutting forests, monoculture agriculture, global trade) set the scene for predictable catastrophes.
Next, I gave myself nightmares reading Jessica Bruder's Nomadland after watching the equally unsettling movie. Bruder spent years following a group of older Americans living in RVs, vans, and cars, piecing together seasonal work at factories, Amazon fulfillment centers, and campgrounds, eventually building out her own van and working at some of the same jobs in an attempt to understand the experience. A sixty-something woman named Linda May is her main touchstone and guide through this precarious world; Linda May also appears in Chloe Zhao's film adaptation of the book. Richard Brody wrote a snitty review of the movie, lamenting the way it blurs real people and actors—"it’s two movies in one: a documentary and a fiction" (Note to RB: 21st-century literature is going to be a real bummer for you...) and "exalts the working class, but doesn't let working people present themselves." Other writers have similar complaints, arguing that Zhao somehow makes Amazon and the gig economy look great, which left me wondering if we had watched the same movie, because what I saw was a depiction of a person moving through purgatory, aware enough to feel moments of grace but knowing hell was a hand's-breadth away. (The filmmakers described Frances McDormand, who plays a wholly imagined character, as a "docent," which made me think of Virgil leading Dante through the various rings of eternity.) And while Bruder's account is sobering, Zhao's movie hit me on a deeper emotional register, because there was a power in hearing people speak and watching McDormand listen.
I find myself wondering whether the people playing versions of themselves got paid; something I don't think they do in documentaries or for subjects of nonfiction books. Reading about how Zhao and McDormand approached the project of the movie—imagining a story between the truths Bruder reported, working closely with the people she knew and including their input and perspective—strikes me as perhaps a more ethical choice than trying to bend someone's actual lived life into a narrative arc, but maybe that's because my mind lives mostly in various sorts of stories where real and true are not always the same.
Take, for example, "autofiction," a genre of stories that mostly feel neither true nor particularly real, at least to me. These are novels, usually with a nameless narrator or a narrator that shares the author's name (though not always), that use elements of the author's own life in a story somewhat fictionalized, sometimes resulting in good books, but mostly leading to boring hermetic claustrophobic reads about anxious writers living their writerly lives thinking writerly thoughts, or "wan little husks," if you ask Joyce Carol Oates (cue performative online writerly outrage, Twitter being mostly a platform for real-time autofictional creation). But this is where my brain and its blindspots (theater major from an engineering school here) gets tripped up. From St. Augustine to Sylvia Plath, tweaking lived stories for various effects is nothing new, yet somehow, sometime in the 2000s, "autofiction" arose as a category unto itself. In a Vulture piece from 2018, Christian Lorentzen argues that the "fiction" is more important than the "auto," but I am skeptical. Autofiction is a very handy label for authors—as personalities, it sticks them smack dab at the center of the story and the reader's attention, grants them unassailable power (because only the writer knows what is really "true"), and provides the helpful cover of ambiguous lived experiences as a "right" to write about whatever it is they are writing about, even if they really don't have anything illuminating to say about it and only want to use it as a pretense to talk about their own special selves (see: Sheila Heti, Motherhood).
Peter Ho Davies' The Fortunes (a series of four stories about the experiences of Chinese immigrants to the U.S.) was wonderful, so when I saw his new book, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, on my library app, I checked it out. Here, Ho Davies is in full autofictional mode, with a nameless neurotic writer narrator recounting the particular anguish and implications of parenthood shaped by choice—the choice to terminate one pregnancy, the choice to continue another, the choice to turn the experience into content:
Telling a story about a child, though? Telling a version of a life that is still soft, still forming? Like a fontanel. In his writing classes the father talks about appropriation, the taking and telling of other people's stories. Young writers get exercised about these things, what they are and aren't allowed to write. They just want to be good people, he knows, except that he's not sure writers are good people ... Certainly they're no respecters of rules. All fiction is appropriation. Only the narrowest, most solipsistic memoir—of life on a desert island, say—doesn't appropriate from others. Still some appropriations, he knows, are more charged than others. It's a challenge for a woman to write a male character, but it's a different challenge for a man to write a female character (and yes, for a man to write about abortion). For a Black writer to write a white character is one thing, for a white writer to write a Black character something else again. Something shaped by society, and history, by the power and the abuse of power. Writers are no respecters of rules, of "don't" or "can't," but he wants his students to understand them in order to break them. To be good writers, if not good people. Yet isn't the ultimate power imbalance between parents and children? For a child to write about a parent is one thing; for a parent to write about a child something else. And he still wants to be a good parent.
And this, I think, is why we have FICTION. Throw off the shackles of the narrated self, writers! Give your friends and loved ones and colleagues and children the friendly scrim of MAKE BELIEVE!
It's such a good scrim:
Maybe this is my real problem with a lot of autofiction—it's mostly a genre of writers writing to be read by other writers.
The last two books I read in March unabashedly mixed facts, memories, assertions, and exaggerations, and both were a pleasure. I hadn't read Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia (1977) for years, and was startled to see in it traces of things that became very important to me much later (Osip Mandelstam being one). Chatwin's books were lightning bolts for me when I first read them in my teens, illuminating whole new landscapes of what a book could do, what a book could hold. I knew very little about him as a person, or how the books came to be, or even whether they were "true" or not. I didn't really care; what was fascinating was watching his mind work, following along as he constructed a story from scraps of mylodon fur, lost colonies of Welsh settlers, half-true tales of Butch Cassidy, and fading pieces of family history.
I finished Paul Wilson's new translation of The Gentle Barbarian, Bohumal Hrabal's memories of the artist Vladimir Boudnik, on the last morning of the month, then lay in bed for fifteen minutes marveling at the strange turns of history that made it possible for me to read a '70s-era piece of samizdat Czech literature describing the antic lives of radical artists and poets and writers on a little hunk of plastic.
Behind the scrim of fiction, the writer is able to stop performing as an author and devote his energies to being a storyteller instead.
Maybe this is my real problem with a lot of autofiction—it's mostly a genre of writers writing to be read by other writers.
The last two books I read in March unabashedly mixed facts, memories, assertions, and exaggerations, and both were a pleasure. I hadn't read Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia (1977) for years, and was startled to see in it traces of things that became very important to me much later (Osip Mandelstam being one). Chatwin's books were lightning bolts for me when I first read them in my teens, illuminating whole new landscapes of what a book could do, what a book could hold. I knew very little about him as a person, or how the books came to be, or even whether they were "true" or not. I didn't really care; what was fascinating was watching his mind work, following along as he constructed a story from scraps of mylodon fur, lost colonies of Welsh settlers, half-true tales of Butch Cassidy, and fading pieces of family history.
I finished Paul Wilson's new translation of The Gentle Barbarian, Bohumal Hrabal's memories of the artist Vladimir Boudnik, on the last morning of the month, then lay in bed for fifteen minutes marveling at the strange turns of history that made it possible for me to read a '70s-era piece of samizdat Czech literature describing the antic lives of radical artists and poets and writers on a little hunk of plastic.
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Moomin panel by Tove Jansson.
