So Chekhov only wrote one full-length novel, which I've never heard anyone talk about. The rest were short stories and novellas. This contains all five of his 100-page-long-or-so novellas: The Steppe, The Duel, The Story of an Unknown Man, Three Years, and My Life: A Provincial's Story. And the most noteworthy thing about Chekhov's writing is that his depiction of human behavior is so well observed very little of it feels dated, even over a hundred years on, traversing language, country, and several political revolutions (comparatively, Tao Lin's 2000s output feels HELLA DATED.) Story (1) is a loosely plotted coming-of-age story; (2) is inspired by the concept of natural selection; (3) involves a revolutionary assassin; (4) is a fucked-up romance; and (5) is a hive of volatile twentysomethings. (1) and (5) are oddly plotted, and therefore, somewhat tedious. (2), (3), and (4) are riveting reads from beginning to end. All of them feature characters so objectively true to life, it kind of makes the people you see on TV (and even most of the characters you come across in books, and also many of the people you meet in New York City) look crassly, offensively, two-dimensional. None of them, however, can smack you in the face like some of his 6-page-long short stories can. Is that something to hold against him and his longer works? No, I guess not—judging by how rarely you see dramatically strong stories where no one quite knows what they're doing, where nobody's right and nobody's wrong, where winning may not mean progress and where losing may not mean defeat, even after decades of successive, ever-accumulating stories, Chekhov's writings remain stunningly singular works. Four stars.
"The Company She Keeps" by Mary McCarthy (1942)
Early on, I was thrilled: I've never read a novel—nor even seen a story—about a professional woman navigating 1930s New York City alone before. And it opens on an intimate look at a woman who's cheating on her husband. “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment” is surprisingly frank, surprisingly honest (this woman seems to really enjoy “the spectacle”, the show of it all, because it puts her in the director's seat) and is the story that turned me onto the novel. It contains no dialogue, which is actually really refreshing. Refreshing, that is, until you realize most of the rest of the book is written the exact same way. As the vignettes move onto less and less interesting subjects (notably ones that don't focus on our Margaret Sargent), most of which involve the 1930s socialist intellectual scene, the steady drumbeat of exposition told in the exact same sharply-written style grows rather tiresome, like that funny person you meet at a party who excites at first, but can't seem to ever go beyond one tiring note. Of the six vignettes, only two of them are worth reading (and one of them is about a 1930s Trumpian schemer.) But “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment” is such a great story, and the novel's subject matter: an intelligent woman who restlessly, compulsively?, moves from one affair to another without much shame is so unique (all the socialism stuff?; meh) it salvages the book. Two stars.
"The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories" by Eudora Welty (1955)
I think I hate Eudora Welty. I suppose I should clarify: I think I hate Eudora Welty's work. And it's not because I think she's a bad writer. In the past I've spoken about how her stories can seem old-fashioned, and about how a reader can feel they're jumping through a whole host of challenging hoops for nothing. Perhaps maybe I can equate her stories to a game of chess: each character seems to serve a specific function, and each piece moves around the board, stiffly, according to their assigned function, interacting with other pieces/functions in different ways to achieve a certain goal. Now, even though each piece may be meticulously hand carved and striking in appearance, and the board may be handsomely colored and designed, and the collisions of pieces may be somewhat inventive, the last thing you ever want recounted to you is the full picture of the ins and outs of a particular chess game, even a thrilling one. I guess what I'm saying is, the stories—with the shared theme of journeys into the unknown—don't ever feel alive to me. You can say Greek mythology essentially takes on a "chess game" form, but with one key exception: there was one captivating, unpredictable human being in there running amok, upsetting everybody's clockwork function (Odysseus actually makes an appearance here but, perhaps unsurprisingly, he comes across as boring.) Even in the most interesting story, "No Place for You, My Love," about two strangers who decide to venture south of New Orleans on a whim, the evocative and lengthy descriptions of that very unusual, very swampy, bug-clouded world eventually begin to reek of dried paint, and the people begin to feel plasticine. Eudora Welty was such a skilled writer, it's possible that this is exactly what she wanted her work to feel like: not a flowing filmreel of ongoing life, but a past rendered in swirling, melodramatic oils that's been framed and encased in protective glass. That's entirely possible. But if I die and find out that the world of death smells exactly like dried paint, I wouldn't at all be surprised. One star.
"The Bear" by William Faulkner (1942)
Is this novella worth talking about, considering it's really a part of the larger novel "Go Down, Moses"? Maybe. I'll start by saying it feels like a somewhat straightforward and pleasant five-chapter adolescent adventure story, except for Chapter 4 where, seemingly, Faulkner COMPLETELY LOSES HIS MIND. Fortunately, at this point the main character is kind of losing his mind as well, trying to justify walking away from a major inheritance, which he does by compressing all of his family's history, and southern racial history, and all of American history, and all of Earth's history, and all of mankind's existence, and all of God's intentions, into one singular thought (I suppose if this were simply a story about killing a legendary bear we wouldn't still be talking about it.) Needless to say, this chapter gave me a headache—apparently, a radical compression of time and experience involves a 60-page chapter made up of only 15 sentences (or so) and the identities of scores of characters, across generations, somehow being merged and confused (if you imagine that the wilderness, the bear's home, can be considered an everlasting cycle of chaos, birth, death, and destruction, all happening simultaneously, without reward or reason, the past never being past, then you can sort of see Faulkner's unique stylistic choices here.) Is it possible for one man to exit this endless morass of recycled sin, committed by every single person on earth, committed by every single family on earth, committed by every single race on earth? Well, you can say an awful lot of contradicting things about this story—loaded, intertwining symbols are pretty much ripe for the picking in this one—but it's noteworthy to me that our overthinking, idealistic main character in the end, despite plotting the only escape he could think of, achieves absolutely nothing but near paralysis (the symbol he becomes instead is also of note.) If anything, the problem with this story is that the characters feel so symbolic, it's difficult to relate to them as people, though I also suspect that was Faulkner's intent: "Don't focus on the people, focus on the enormous ideas! Gahd!" But! Is it a good read? Yeah. It is. It's a really good read, in fact. Especially if you like getting mad. Three stars.
"The Ambassadors" by Henry James (1903)
Just how difficult is it to read Henry James? Apparently, Chapters 28 and 29 were accidentally reversed in an early printing, and not one person noticed this discrepancy over the course of the next 40 years. How would I describe the experience myself? Well, it's not necessarily that he's fond of obnoxiously syllabic words, or winding endless sentences, or disorienting modernist tricks, cheap manipulations of time; it's more like James surrounds you with a very straight, very embroidered narrative that's so thickly layered, so densely detailed, and so intricately and so tightly and so deliberately woven that the only way to fully comprehend what you're reading is to betray such psychic stores of concentration and energy that, especially nowadays, but even back then, even among esteemed, unfairly or not, literary scholars, very few sensible people are willing to surrender such intimate sensitivities (his own, similarly intellectually entangled, brother urged him to dumb things down for the sake of the people.) If you happen to lapse, to break, to absently trip, it's rather easy to find yourself mindlessly scanning over a very long series of words, only to regain clarity after losing what feels like roughly fifty or so logical threads over the course of one blessed paragraph. I get the sense that this one is underread—I'm not sure telling you that this is the story of a nice guy from Massachusetts who gets sent to Paris to retrieve his fiancé's son is enough to communicate the novel's immense, entrenching charms. I'm not sure it conveys just how thick, billowed, and silvered is the undulating, turgid, entrancing cloud of story that builds atop this milquetoast logline. It doesn't convey how strikingly deep and tangled it gets concerning the psychology of human relationships and personality. And it, moreover, doesn't tell you how splendidly fun the novel actually is—at heart it's basically a detective story, featuring the world's sweetest, least cunning, most well intentioned, most idealistically forgiving sleuth, a not wholly unfrivolous man named Lambert Strether, a man I would rank among literature's greatest protagonists, but for silently selfish reasons. Which is to say, for reasons I somewhat intimately understand, the book is a difficult sell. I can't even begin to think of how I could sell the people on this book (especially since I feel I could point to any given sentence on any given page, ask even the smartest person I know to explain to me what said sentence is attempting to say, and permit them the breathing room and time to fully cogitate its proper and very well considered intentions—a demanding ask; what I'll say in James's defense is that, unlike most difficult writers I know, I really don't think the guy is merely "showing off" his intellect—I think he merely wanted to give the people the best story he thought he possibly could.) I would argue, more than any writer I've ever been fortunate to come across, Henry James tried to show the people the sheer heights of what we, as a collective people, are capable of achieving, disregarding sheer luck, as a lowly, hopeless, simple, yearning, deeply confused, deeply lost, deeply deluded lot. So I think I'll just leave it there, for all of the people. Five stars.
"The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" by Michael Chabon (2000)
If I read the one-page summary of this novel, I probably would have been equally as satisfied. Two stars.
"Storm" by George R. Stewart (1941)
The main character of this novel is an unusually large storm named Maria. The narrative winds through the lives of meteorologists, flood control officials, highway plow managers, air traffic controllers, streamliner staff, and a couple wild animals over the course of the storm's 12 days moving over the Pacific towards California. The depiction of people who surround engineering fields feels fairly accurate—they tend to be more matter-of-fact than melodramatic. And the writing is really quite good; there's a lot of (seemingly) accurate descriptions of winds and fronts and barometric pressure and such that's rendered in an entertaining way. And the conflict of man and their machines vs. the whims of nature is well drawn. But, despite its achievements, it's really hard to connect to a novel where the human characters are secondary: it just never became something I eagerly looked forward to. However, if you're one of those animal-loving types who actively avoids considering the lives of other people, you might really enjoy this. Two stars.
"Speedboat" by Renata Adler (1976)
It's one of them fancy postmodern collage novels, made up of hundreds of well polished, sundered fragments, scenes, observations, and episodes, told from the point of view of a well bred, well salaried journalist living in 1970s New York City. It's a little intriguing, at first, wondering how this might come together, watching it build a unique, half-lidded tension between coyness and overexposure, at times feeling seduced and at times feeling repulsed by the rhythmic, metered style, annoyed and excited by its nagging, neurotic inscrutabilities, often in the same beat. And then some time around page 100 something snapped and I just started reading the rest of it as fast as I could, just so I could get it over with, having grown deathly tired of whatever game this book is playing, almost solely just to spite the distant, somewhat patrician way it's speaking to me, toying with me. Is this more style than substance, you begin to wonder? Not that there isn't any substance—the disparate images, altogether, give you some insight into what cavorting around town as a privileged, well educated, highly observant white woman must feel like—but is there enough substance here to justify any concentration, any focused investment? Call me ignorant, but I just don't get the sense, that no, there is enough.* Two stars.
*Rachel Cusk would do pretty much the same thing but much more effectively in her Outline trilogy nearly 40 years later. Honestly, if I hadn't read Outline first I probably would have admired this one more.
"Sons and Lovers" by D.H. Lawrence (1913)
You want to write a novel that explores, as a theme, the fundamental irrationality of the human spirit? Well, one way to do it is to wrap it all—behavioral contradictions, unfulfilled intentions, unexplained hatreds, incongruous humors, self-inflicted harms, underserved friendships, and general fluttering moodiness: action in conflict with the soul, basically—within a deceptively simple outline: a mother is extremely upset by her son experiencing a love apart from her own. You don't expect the novel to be as fast and as jumpy as it turns out to be, given the era. And, being sold a fable, you don't expect to be given a narrative that really makes no logical sense, and characters who don't behave the way storytelling deems they should; in fact, the omniscient narrator doesn't seem to even know what the big picture is, often hovering the camera closely over the shoulder of someone who doesn't seem at all to know where they are going. Can a writer tasked with placing the world into narrative order actually get away with telling a story about how the world doesn't really have any, where causes have no effects, effects have no causes, lessons don't seem to even exist, there are no villians, and there are most certainly no heroes? I don't know, but this one sure comes close. Four stars.
"Ship of Fools" by Katherine Anne Porter (1962)
In my opinion, Katherine Anne Porter is one of the best writers America ever produced, why she doesn't get brought up more often is beyond me. She also, in my experience, has the habit of sometimes producing work that's stunningly bad. And this, her only novel, was, by many credible accounts, supposed to be particularly stinky. By its critical reputation you wouldn't know that it was the number-one selling book in the year of its release, or that they turned it into Vivien Leigh's final big screen appearance, or even that it had been eagerly anticipated: Porter spent twenty years teasing a forthcoming novel after publishing very highly regarded short stories and novellas in the 30s and 40s, only to drop a 500-page brick in everyone's laps one year before Thomas Pynchon published his first book. So is it really that bad? Well, if you consider that the book juggles 49 characters (according to the opening list), that none of them are particularly pleasant (which is a bit of an understatement—the only instance of a main character behaving positively happened on page 312, I noted), that the opening exposition didn't seem to end until you were nearly 200 pages in, that the disorienting, episodic style and the density of the prose can make you feel like you actually were facing only day 3 of a crawling, interminable 30-day boat trip across the Atlantic, then it's a small wonder that I didn't think the book was really all that foul: the first two chapters (pp. 1-360) actually take you to a pretty thrilling place—at some point in the middle of the book you learn that most of the German passengers are anti-Semites, and there are only two passengers on board with strong Jewish ties. In fact, I thought the book's many-colored threads were forming an intriguing (nasty, bitter, trembling) harmony as they were being pulled taut, and that I might actually be reading some sort of overlooked classic. It's in the final, third chapter where the fragmented structure starts to feel more like a soap opera, the experimental thrill starts to feel like cheap tricks, the empathetic, complex, maddening characters start to feel more like flat, baffling cartoons, the meticulous arrangement of the sprawling cast starts to feel sloppy, and the events start to feel contrived. Even the big, climactic gala lands like an undercooked farce. If you got the sense that any of the race, class, moral, romantic, political, religious, or societal issues explored were ratcheting up into something worthwhile, they never do. And if you wanted to witness the kind of well wrung brilliance you saw in Porter's earlier work, you only get it here in scattered patches. Really, what you're left with is less of a novel and more of a 500-page encyclopedia cataloging vile and sundry human cruelty. In that sense, I can recommend it, but unfortunately only in that sense. Two-thirds of a great novel is, sadly, a bad novel. Two stars.
"Sanctuary" by William Faulkner (1931)
I bet you could make the case that "To Kill a Mockingbird" stole a great deal from this book, except making sure good was good, bad was bad, facts were facts, and giving all the characters a Full House-like sheen of adorableness. Also many fewer mobsters, whores, and pitch-black instances of sexual terror. Four stars.
"Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog" by Dylan Thomas (1940)
Whenever he drops in a poem, it makes his prose look like trash. One star.
"Pale Horse, Pale Rider" by Katherine Anne Porter (1939)
It's three short novels (Porter hated the term "novella" and, much like the kinds of people who are particular about these sorts of things, was apparently a huge jerk in real life) give or take 40 pages each. The first was this fascinating indictment/celebration of storytelling itself, about how stories, which in current times tend to be hailed and exalted as some sort of magical enlightenment elixir, are in reality very very very very effective tools of delusion and deceit, in its cloaking way almost a celebration of decay, even as we can't help but rely on the lies stories feed us as a means of managing to continue trudging through life day by heavy plodding heavy plodding day. The second was an unheralded classic, such a richly woven, complex exploration of morality, responsibility, sin, laziness, and all their inherent confusions, contradictions, blessings, benedictions, and rationalizations, and about the almost inherently fatalistic way us human beings, having been granted limited intelligence, believe we can possibly, reasonably cogitate our ways through all this, because on some level we all—every last one of us!—believe our existence on Earth must (MUST!) be linked to some sort of intrinsic, universal good, even while we all secretly suspect we may actually be nothing more than spiritual orphans, abandoned, leftovers, to our own mercurial wiles, that it's a marvel the whole thing manages to hold together so extraordinarily well. These two stories, "Old Mortality" and "Noon Wine", explored enormously complex things you NEVER saw writers of this time explore in short, 40-page works, and did it in a way that was richly compelling and unsettlingly rewarding. And then the final story lands like this enormous, overwrought, sentimental, adolescent butt-turd. You'd think it wouldn't, because it's the title story, because it's an early story about a single female urban professional, because it's about the 1918 pandemic, considering what we all just went through. But it's sooooooooo boring (there are numerous dream sequences) it kills what could have been an extraordinary collection of work. I suppose the overall effect is akin to watching all three Godfather movies in one sitting. It's a god damn shame. Apparently, her entire career is just like this: wildly, frustratingly uneven. Sadly, kind of like how life is. Two stars.
"Outline" by Rachel Cusk (2015)
I really enjoyed this story the first time I ran into it, when it was called "My Dinner with Andre". Three stars.
"Oreo" by Fran Ross (1974)
Of all the novels I've been told were "really funny" I'd say maybe 2 percent actually were. This one's packed with wacky characters and jokes, mostly of the kind kids in honors classes might find funny—upon hearing his Black daughter was marrying a Jewish man, an anti-Semitic father goes into a paralyzing coma, his body rigidly molded into the shape of a half-swastika. The main character, Christine Clark, is called "Oreo" not because she's necessarily "white on the inside," or because she's of mixed Black-Jewish blood, but because her Black grandmother speaks with a heavy southern accent and tried to give her the nickname "Oriole"—it's humor like that. It's also postmodern and Pyncheon-esque and it parallels Theseus of Greek mythology and it's littered with Yiddish and mixes math jokes with dick jokes and mixes wordplay with physical comedy set pieces and mixes feminist bad-assery with a naggingly odd fixation on Jewish culture and there's a mute man who has to hold up a series of cartoon bubbles next to his head in order to speak and if this all sounds like a try-hard tedious mess to you I can assure you that it very much is. One star.
"Never Come Morning" by Nelson Algren (1942)
I know this is an early book, but if I were to explain why I think Nelson Algren isn't nearly as good a writer as some seem to think (mostly people who hail from Chicago) it's not because he isn't capable of turning a nicely poetic phrase, it's that he tends to overwrite what probably should be underwritten and underwrite what probably should be overwritten—in other words, I think his writing instincts are wildly off. One star.
"My Face for the World to See" by Alfred Hayes (1958)
It made me vividly remember relationships I found volatile, female gaslight-y, and far too melodramatic, which are the relationships I usually spend a great deal of energy trying to erase from memory. And while it paints a far more realistic, far more nuanced picture of two mismatched Holllywood dreamers than, say, the movie "La La Land", you're also left with the nagging sense that it didn't go far enough. That's speaking with a psychological eye. As far as the sensual eye goes, I don't know how the book does it, because it never gets explicitly sexual, maybe it's an exquisitely arranged accumulation of images, maybe it's the confused fragments of thought, a writerly way to capture the struggle to recognize and connect with another person's signals, but I thought the touch of flesh came across rather tactile-ly, especially given that most of it was achieved through indirect techniques. Bravo to that; I would have just used an outpouring of moist, evocative, three-syllable words. So overall, it just smacks of nothing all that novel. Still kinda good though. Three stars.
"Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf (1925)
Is this considered a classic just because it's written oddly and structuralist matrices get quite the workout out of it? Because it did exactly what Ulysses did or exactly what Middlemarch did but in a much less compelling, much more tedious way? I could see how aspects of it (the bisexual attraction, the female viewpoints, the metaphysical connections, the prismatic modernism) sort of stood your hair up back in the day. But now that those things aren't so rare, they don't feel strong enough to carry the book—I suppose you could make the argument that I'm not empathetic enough to get it, but I would counter that empathy isn't something that you can demand from people point blank; empathy is such a difficult emotion for people to attain that, once you're enveloped within a fictional work, it's the responsibility of the author to find a way to help you ascend there. But here, as it stands, you drift in and out of the minds of a large cast of characters and it was done in such a way that, no matter whose mind I went into, I barely cared. I mean, what the fuck. This is a classic? I don't get it. One star.
"Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville (1851)
Honestly, I went in expecting to be bored out of my mind. But it's great, it works! I think if you read it in a straightforward way it might bore you tremendously, but if you read searching for some sort of meaning it's terribly engaging. And what is that meaning? My guess, having only done one pass: it feels similar to Raiders of the Lost Ark, honestly. That no amount of knowledge can equip people to take on The Great Unknown. Anyone who thinks otherwise is MAD. Four stars.
"Miss Lonelyhearts" by Nathanael West (1933)
Does a 50-page novella count as a book? If it does, my god, this one is bleak. Russian literature is (hilariously) stereotyped as bleak but within the first three pages of this one we're already exposed to depression, helplessness, Christ, sickness, abortion, suicide, mental disability, and rape—I don't recall Chekhov ever overloading his first act gun in quite the same way. The novella is also a weird, jittery comedy (how West achieves this is nothing short of a miracle.) This is the premise: A New York newspaper advice columnist receives daily pleas for help from desperately lost people with very serious problems; the combination of being exposed to the worst of humanity along with the fact that "Miss Lonelyhearts" (a stepping-stone gig taken by an ambitious, and very flawed, 26-year-old reporter) is viewed as a sort of unerring savior by the entire city completely batters his ill-equipped, genuinely empathetic/genuinely violent psyche. Hilarity ensues. (There's actually a lot of similarity to a pitch-black Joe Orton farce; maybe West was an inspiration.) Four stars.