It's rare when I go through a contemporary short story collection where I'm not flipping forward to find where the blissful end is—you can't wait to finish these stories, and you also don't really want to leave them. On the whole, the stories are, dare I say, remarkable fun. Which is weird because woven throughout are dire dystopian undertones, one of which is the disintegration of language and expression. I'm gonna read this one again. Four stars.
"Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson (1919)
Oh dear, where to begin ... (1) I can't explain why, but knowing little about the book beforehand you're kind of expecting "The Wonder Years". Instead, almost off the bat, you kind of get something more akin to a David Lynch film; (2) How does this series of short character pieces somehow work as a unified whole? It's a little hard to tell: the book seems to deemphasize proper literary form in favor of the author's intuitive, almost arbitrary whims, like a chef who arrives at their final dish by taste and taste alone; (3) A recurring image is of a character inexplicably, breathlessly running away—what's interesting about the book is the image of America it paints as something that's free and enormous and wide open and full of possibility, but at the same time chokingly restrictive and smothering, in a deeply unfathomable way; (4) It's a short, 200+ page book. But I found the individual stories so uncomfortably intense, the book turned out to be a surprisingly slow read; (5) While the diverse character studies don't always 100 percent ring true all of the time, the revelation of people's private lives and personal logics as being somewhat bizarre, somewhat inexplicable, and more than a little believable in its nonsense is piercingly perceptive—early on, the book declares, we each decide to follow a truth, and we each age into truth-molded grotesques who perhaps learn too late that maybe we had it all wrong all along; (6) Personally, did the book in spots make me think about my own embarrassments, make me feel a tinge of horror in the pit of my stomach over my own past behavior? Yes; (7) Once again, I feel I should reiterate: if you're expecting "Our Town", THIS IS CERTAINLY NO "OUR TOWN"; (8) Upon finishing, out loud, I remarked to myself, "That was a wonderful book!" You know what's thrilling in a novel? When you're not sure how the author is going to stick the landing after a turbulent flight but somehow they manage, even as you deplane feeling weak-kneed and naggingly unsettled—My god, you think, even if we all survive it's likely none of us are ever going to be okay. Four stars.
"What Maisie Knew" by Henry James (1897)
On the surface it’s a sober drama about a six-year-old London girl whose deeply dysfunctional parents divorce and, against the wishes of both parties, are forced to split the poor little monkey’s time. But it reads more like a spy thriller full of distrust, suspicion, intrigue, speculation, and suspense, centering around a bright, cunning, watchful, and—most notably—woefully inexperienced protagonist: it's actually a pretty tense and taut 265 pages. The neat trick here is, this isn't a strange, exotic world full of razor-sharp heroes and eccentric rogues, it's a world full of people you know and people you may have once been/may also currently be: you identify with the lonely child agent caught in this whirlwind of adult charms, and you identify with the "villains"—parents, stepparents, and caretakers—doing their best to keep the child innocent of their own personal desires and their own lurid, interpersonal schemes. This one doesn't get brought up a lot, as far as Henry James's work goes, perhaps because it really has more in common with the dime store potboiler, but it might actually be my favorite one so far. You may get turned off by his dense style (though it's not nearly as dense as his style would get just a few years afterwards,) especially because it forces the reader to drastically slow down. Perhaps that's the point though? That it primes you for James's more involved psychological and behavioral depths, and the exploration of emotions that mix like chemical reactions (though, again, things would get far more entangled just a couple books beyond this.) James, I'm told, was reacting against the stereotypical, sentimental depiction of children common at the time and wanted to explore something more complex—Maisie is unusually bright, yes, but she ain't that bright, she can't be! And what's striking to me is that, even today, a complex child character that doesn't fall into an easily recognizable type is still extremely rare. I mean, the last one I can think of was Kevin Arnold from "The Wonder Years." Hell, we tend to see children in our own actual lives as sentimental stereotypes, and if they don't quite fit something known and familiar to us, we'll find a drug that forces them to. So, for me, it was extremely refreshing to meet one who never knew where she stood, never knew who to trust, never had any confidence in anything, didn't understand morality, and didn't even quite understand what was really best for her. And then to see this definitely no longer innocent person struggling to wing through an extremely complex, extremely perilous situation, surrounded by some very deeply flawed human beings, was simply thrilling. She's not quite realistic, yes, (I mean, she's spouting off Henry James dialogue) but she's multidimensional enough to be real. What a fantastic story, what a fantastic book—how come none of you people can write like this? I'm starting to get real sick of reading everybody's lame, wheel-spinning crap. Four stars.
"Washington Square" by Henry James (1880)
If the name Henry James conjures thoughts of baroque, infinitely tangential clauses, miniscule type, brick-sized binding, and a crochet of psychological threads, Washington Square is kind of like his 200-page "pop novel". You get the same deeply human characterization—be it an unusually plain and awkward debutante, an extremely intelligent, plainspoken, vindictive bastard, or an emotion-besotted, meddling sweetheart—but it feels more like fun and less like a highly detailed owner's manual for the human heart (not like these manuals are unenjoyable reads on their own, mind you, they're just much more effortful.) Washington Square is the psychologically deep Henry James we all know and love, except it's fun. I couldn't put it down. Four stars.
"Trust" by Hernan Diaz (2022)
I found this book so god damn boring I actually looked at the endorsements on the back cover and added every single name to my personal shit list. Do I feel the need to explain exactly why it's so boring? Not really. Though I will say I get the impression that the sweet spot for publishers nowadays is "YA complexity"—nothing more, nothing less. One star.
"Transit" by Rachel Cusk (2016)
The first time I read this book was in the middle of last week. And I found it maddening, confusing, impossible, and pedantic but I finished it. The second was over the past couple days when I found it delightful, engrossing, fascinating, and insightful. Both are right and neither are right and if you can get over how oddly profound and thoughtful every single character seems to be about their own lives, this might all start to make sense. But you'd still be wrong. Four stars.
"The Wide Net and Other Stories" by Eudora Welty (1943)
One way to describe it is to say this book is full of the kinds of short stories they'd force you to read in school—they reek of a high school library. Another way is, it's as if the artsy fartsy kid you knew who dabbled in mythology and the supernatural and was fond of speaking in cryptic tones ended up getting pretty good at the technical aspects of writing. Yet another way, I guess, is if Flannery O'Connor actually attempted to do what William Faulkner did (according to O'Connor, she wouldn't even dare to compete with him.) Or maybe James Joyce is a better analogue. Regardless, I wouldn't go so far to say the collection is bad, but I will say that I intensely hate it. Mainly for the "it feels like the stories I was forced to read in school part." One star.
"The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." by Robert Coover (1968)
My God, this book is boring (though the depicted decline of a cleanly innocent society into messy, violent, conspiratorial factions preoccupied with the past and confused by identity sort of saves it, somewhat.) One star.
"The Sellout" by Paul Beatty (2015)
Reads like a mainstream movie. One with a personality-less protagonist, satire that alternates between sharp and sloppy, jokes that tend to hit you over the head like a hammer, and one that grows more tiring as you approach the climax. If I hadn't already read Black No More (1931), which treads similar waters, I probably wouldn't demand more than the one laugh-out-loud moment it gave me. And if I hadn't just finished a Faulkner novel, I probably would find the metaphors and analogies here completely serviceable. Two stars.
"The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader" Edited by David Levering Lewis (1994)
The very first sentence in the Introduction reads, "The Harlem Renaissance was a somewhat forced phenomenon, a cultural nationalism of the parlor, institutionally encouraged and directed by leaders of the national civil rights establishment for the paramount purpose of improving race relations." So, it was a more of a top-down activist movement than it ever was a sudden, bottom-up flowering of Black literary and creative talent, and towards the end, there was a bit of an artistic, proletariat revolt against the many rules and restrictions imposed from on high. Another way of saying this is: talent was never the leading light (W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the leaders, warned that indulging in artistic beauty would lead to decadence—you actually get the impression if the leaders had their way, every piece of Harlem Renaissance literature would resemble "The Cosby Show.") Lewis scatters these sorts of critiques throughout the book, so it doesn't at all read like the fawning hagiography you might expect. All that said, while I was excited to run into writers like Claude McKay and Countee Cullen and Walter White and Rudolph Fisher and Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen and Jean Toomer and George Schuyler and Eric Walrond and Zora Neale Hurston—the more rebellious writers being among the more interesting ones—I spent most of the 700-page collection being pretty danged bored. Two stars.
"The Portable Beat Reader" Edited by Ann Charters (1992)
I'm only 200 pages into this 600-page collection but I think I'm gonna call it now—Do I think The Beat Generation was extremely influential in regards to the way we thought about art and creativity towards the end of the 20th century? Yes, very much so, particularly in the 1990s, in ways both enriching and deeply damaging. Is the work they produced worth reading? Good god, no. Two stars.
"The Neon Wilderness" by Nelson Algren (1947)
I can't tell if stories about low-lifes, drunks, petty criminals, gamblers, brawlers, down-and-out Polacks, prostitutes, Dagos who refer to themselves as Dagos, liars, strippers, and general good-for-nothing ragamuffins are inherently boring, or whether Algren's writing style makes their lives feel boring (they all seem to speak in the exact same clipped, late night Chicago slang, to the point where it all grows cartoonish; outside of that, sometimes the narrator launches into odd, out-of-place poetic flourishes; and even outside of that, the characters' names all have an odd, Aaron Sorkin-like plasticity to them.) A lot has been made about how Algren focused on the lives of people who tend to get overlooked. At the same time, a criminal who doesn't think about much besides committing crimes, and a gambler who doesn't think about much besides gambling, for instance, really aren't all that interesting, no matter how eventful their lives are on the surface, no matter how much blood gets spilled. Maybe the reason all these lives are overlooked in literature isn't because us privileged straights prefer to avert our eyes away from the shadowed corners of the city. Maybe it's because the lives you find there, at the heart of it, sound really fucking boring. Which, again, might be entirely Algren's fault. One star.
"The Man Who Loved Children" by Christina Stead (1940)
I can't remember the last time I became angry when something pulled me away from reading a book. I also can't remember the last time I got through 500 pages and just said, "Wow," out loud to myself upon closing it. If I were you, I would read this book. Four stars.*
*Perhaps the book didn't do well because the title is kind of bad, though once you get through enough pages the title starts to feel quite fitting.
"The Leaning Tower and Other Stories" by Katherine Anne Porter (1944)
It's so odd with her. "Ship of Fools" was her first novel, after several decades of highly lauded work. It was so highly anticipated, even by haughty critic types, that it became the best selling book of 1962. And critics seem to agree: "Ship of Fools" is probably one of the worst novels ever published—Katherine Anne Porter has this weird habit of producing astonishing work and then, just when goodwill reaches its highest point, just completely shitting the bed. Aside from the very last pages, she actually doesn't do that here: I thought these highly unusual, winding stories were all really quite good—even when you're spending page after page sort of lost in the brambles, when you arrive at the clearing you usually find that oddly drawn path was actually well worth it. I thought "The Old Order," about a southern family that straddled emancipation, was probably one of the best short stories I've ever read. "Holiday," about a very traditional large German farm family in Texas, started out like an anthropological study and ended with a very affecting human truth. "The Leaning Tower," about a young American painter in Berlin, had one of the better drawn "drunk scenes" I've come across. "The Downward Path to Wisdom," about a confused little boy battered by swirling family drama, was written in a way that took you back to your own young, confused state. And "A Day's Work," about an unhappy Irish couple living in New York City, was a great urban story about screwing over and being screwed—the stories go all over the place and highlight very different people and yet, until the final pages, you never really sense an odd-sounding note. If there was someone who just absolutely nailed the nuts-and-bolts craft of writing better than anyone, I'd say it's Katherine Anne Porter. It's weird that we've largely forgotten her. But I guess it's easy to overlook someone who knows how to, say, construct a solidly built table in favor of someone who had the sense of showmanship to build a bigger, flashier, more ornate one. It's too bad, really. Five stars.
"The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Ronald Wilks (2002)
Well, the first sign things were amiss is that whenever a lower class character would pop up, they'd adopt a cockney British accent. Then I compared one short passage with the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations: you get the sense that things are bit too cleaned up, a bit too smoothed out, some of the oddball magic seems to have been sucked out. Basically, and I'm not 100% certain, I think this Wilks translation might be really bad—I've seen "angular Russian enthusiasm" translated through "logical British reserve" before and along the way something gets severely corrupted. I picked this one up because it contains two stories that are difficult to find elsewhere, but it's a shame that due to the branding (Penguin Books) this is probably one of the more popular Chekhov translations out there. And I was wondering how people could mistake him for being a strict, hardcore realist when it's clear to me that Chekhov is very much an impressionist author. Find the Pevear and Volokhonsky versions. They get the nuances right. Chekhov's artistry is all in the nuances. One star.
"The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling" by Henry Fielding (1749)
I guess, if I were to continue with my ongoing attempt to capture the gist of a large work in just one paragraph, I would agree with those who contend that Tom Jones more than anything (and there's certainly a lot to parse) is an extraordinary example of literary form and structure. If, on a very dispassionate level, you can characterize a novel as deliberately designing intersections between tone, character, theme, voice, language, plot, humor, social criticism, showmanship, temperament, morality, tension, and reader response (among many other things) such that the whole stands many multitudes above the sum of its parts, then I'd argue that Fielding manages to reach fairly high multitudes by finessing a very intricate, very subversive set of levers. An example: many of the characters are marked by their behavioral contradictions, which is, of course, a depiction of human nature—Tom Jones, for one, strives to behave according to the highest of moral ideals, and yet he also just can't help fucking. But it's very difficult to get a reader to accept the many conflicting, prismatic sides of human nature inside fictional narratives that only properly function when they accede to demands for cleanliness, clarity, and compression. So Fielding makes sure you understand the rules of his work follow a realistic "history" and not a fantastic "fiction", choosing to center his history on "a heroic bastard". To this end, he has an unusually transparent, sincere, and sometimes snarky narrator/author lead the way—"I'm a flawed, vain human trying to write this book the best I can, so maybe you'll better understand a group of flawed characters who also don't quite know where they're going." So the comic meta narrative, already, is more than just a cheap novelty: it's designed to encircle a wider swath of human nature than an audience is probably accustomed to. As for why, you eventually learn that the reason the book focuses so intently on capturing the nuances, contradictions, missteps, misinterpretations, perplexities, and grotesqueries of human nature is to make the thematic case that forgiveness is perhaps more essential, if not primarily essential, to our shared existence than we realize. While that's far too oversimplified, the point is that this grand moral is difficult to credibly convey without having previously arranged all the right formal levers in just the right way—a fundamentally moral story, in the wrong hands, could easily be a plodding, preachy slog (or, conversely, a distraction-laden joke fest.) That the juggling of such a high number of technical mechanics (also includes a discursive, soap opera-esque narrative, more telling than showing, frequent narrator interjections, meditations on storytelling, literary and philosophical references, an odd limited omniscience, an odd sort of comedic restraint) in such a large, (seemingly) unwieldy tome results in such a delightfully entertaining read is pretty remarkable, though I suspect there are legions of high school students out there who would disagree. To that point, I suppose it's hard, without a wealth of experience, to recognize and be charmed by the many concrete depictions of human nature within if all you're really running with is a set of inchoate ideals—whatever they may be—imposed upon you from on high. Which is funny, since the book is primarily concerned with human nature and morality, and how human nature and morality are hopelessly, inextricably intertwined—the majority of its nearly 900 pages concern itself with depicting both human nature and morality in frank detail—and how it's difficult, perhaps impossible, and even probably extraordinarily damaging, to concern yourself with one without ever bothering to understand the other. Yet here we are. Five stars.
"The Golden Apples" by Eudora Welty (1949)
There's a reason this novel/short story cycle is largely forgotten, and I think it's due to its avant garde nature—Ever hear of the Russian Formalists? One of their theories was that art should make the familiar, unfamiliar, so you can look at the familiar again with fresh, naive eyes. Welty does this CONSTANTLY: off-center metaphors, angular clauses, time shifts, prismatic perspectives, flights of fancy, a flood of characters, description that teeters into the bizarre—presumably to make this story of one generation of neighbors in a small southern town seem grand, even as nothing extraordinary ever really happens. Now don't get me wrong, I think Welty is a remarkably skilled writer, and she pulls off the avant garde quite well, in the technical sense. It's just fucking irritating: even as I found some of the characters very affecting (the best relationship is between a piano teacher and her student) I simply couldn't wait to finish this god damn book; in fact, that it's all somewhat difficult to process made that speedy desire all the more frustrating. That all that is at service to a story, seemingly, about people who feel a desperate need to go somewhere but can't figure out for the life of them where that is, unfortunately, in the end, feels naggingly unsatisfying. To say the book doesn't wield a unique sort of magic would be a lie. To say that Welty knows how to use the avant garde in a Faulkner-esque way that intrigues more than it frustrates would also be a lie. Two stars.
"The Gambler / Bobok / A Nasty Story" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Translated by Jessie Coulson (1966)
I don't think Penguin even sells this version anymore, which translates short works published in Russia roughly 100 years prior. It seems, even when he's doing light, engaging comedy, he draws main characters who possess very complex layers of inner torment. Somebody needs to let everyone know that we can do that. Three stars.
"The Fun Parts" by Sam Lipsyte (2013)
To be honest, I picked up this book expecting to run into "what NOT to do" as far as humor in literature goes. And I think I wildly succeeded. (Something tells me though, if you were in your 20s and it was the early 2010s, you would absolutely love this book. Unfortunately, it is not the 2010s, and virtually everything you like while you're in your 20s ages into humiliating garbage.) One star.
"The End of Me" by Alfred Hayes (1968)
Of the three books in this unofficial "aging Jewish male writer stumbles into an unusual romance" trilogy, this one had the most plot complications, and therefore was the most engrossing, but also the most predictable. It's your typical "Sad old man suffers enormous failure, flees to his hometown, tries to recapture youth, or any sort of feeling for that matter, by stealing his nephew's girlfriend, fails miserably" plot. (Is that common? I don't know, it felt common to me.) I'm up and down about a lot of the elements in this book—I liked the depiction of 1960s New York City; I was a bit bored with the sad old writer routine; his prose poetic style didn't step over itself except for a couple glaringly obnoxious places; I liked how he wrote twentysomethings, though I liked the girlfriend who was far too adept with wearing teasing masques of confidence more and thought the temperamental poet boyfriend a caricature. Yet it hung together. If the other two books were probably great books held back by some unraveling thread, this was a somewhat bland one that had undeniably solid stitching. Did you know Alfred Hayes wrote "Joe Hill"? I didn't know where to put that so I thought I would put that here. Three stars.