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.
"Our Aesthetic Categories - Zany, Cute, Interesting" by Sianne Ngai (2012)
A dense academic book (accordingly, a fairly slow read) nonetheless it might be interesting for the casual reader as it focuses on three things we're culturally, irresistibly drawn to: things that are cute, things that are interesting, and things that are zany. Why these three and not, say, the most familiar aesthetic category: beauty? Because Ngai believes a focus on these three will help us understand much more generally "what hits" in our current era, the postmodern era*—cute is a "claymation"/dollhouse Airbnb commercial, interesting is an ongoing Wendy's "staffers" campaign, and zany is Flo's ever-shifting role in Progressive ads—you see these three "hooks" pop up again and again and again, and in combination, in any commercial break or, for that matter, in any social media post (YouTube video essays commonly, strenuously aim for all three at once.) Now, I'm not going to claim I've read enough books on philosophical aesthetics to confidently say exactly where Ngai is or isn't off-base with her arguments (cuteness=commodity, interestingness=information, zaniness=performance), or whether her focus on these three aesthetic categories is even justified, though I certainly have some thoughts (tying zaniness to the ever-consuming demands of capitalism on femininity kind of makes sense, but still feels somewhat shoehorned in—I don't think that explains why I enjoy watching "I Think You Should Leave.") I sure don't want to drag this out too long, so what I'll say is: there must be a reason why people in, say, advertising or social media reliably turn to these three things in order to nab our attention/affection in a crazily overstuffed field, and there must be a reason why these three things are often relied upon by ourselves to procure our own likes. And in a very extensively, very diversely sourced book that gets you to pause on and consider these seemingly disposable aesthetics—things we encounter every day that actively and powerfully and somewhat silently influence our behavior, things we barely give a second thought to—any serious examination is welcome, even if inevitably at times it feels "off," even if it's naggingly dominated by Marxist ideas. There's more than enough "on" there to encourage eyeing the world through an askance view: Ever notice that tech companies overwhelmingly embrace a cute visual style? Ever notice that whenever you're drawn to something cute, they're usually "little" and "submissive" and "weaker," which implies a power differential between you and the cute object? Ever notice that that power differential, much like with a newborn baby, inspires a kind of protectiveness, which means that the cute object is now making demands off of you? So who exactly is the powerful one here?—Ngai makes you think about stuff like that. Four stars.
*"The zany, the cute, and the interesting are not really 'minor' in the sense of being unimportant or marginal. The specific social transformations and/or aesthetic problems to which they intimately speak—the convergence of art and information; the loss of tension between art and the commodity form; the rise of an increasingly intimate public sphere and of an increasingly exchange-based private one; the proliferation and intensification of activity in both public/private domains that cannot easily be dichotomized into play or work—are ones that significantly affect the making, dissemination, and reception of all culture. These three particular categories thus help us totalize the contemporary repertoire of 'aesthetic categories'; indeed, they help us understand the meaningfulness of this very concept for doing aesthetic theory in general."
"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.
"On Writing" by Eudora Welty (2002)
I feel like we all forgot about her—sure, Flannery O'Connor wrote better short stories, and sure, Flannery O'Connor was so enticingly mean, and sure, it's a little odd that a fellow Southern writer wouldn't mention Flannery O'Connor once in her book about writing (Faulkner gets gushed upon), but Eudora Welty was still good. At the very least, Eudora Welty was more generous in her thoughts about it, even in this short, 100-page book (Flannery O'Connor's mysteries and manners kind of feels like a scolding.) What's different about this one? First, it starts from a base of: Not everybody can write. So it immediately dispenses with "Writing 101" issues. Hence, it also dispenses with the Writing 101 idea that writing should be a mirror reflection of life, and insists that good writing is really more an imitation of life, similar to how Van Gogh's sunflowers don't quite look like real sunflowers, and that's what makes it beautiful. The rest of her thoughts lie on this elevated level: how does the writer work with the reader to, together, create something beautiful? The effect is to expand your understanding of how beauty is achieved beyond, say, describing landscapes using exquisite words. And you could see her focus on beauty across each page: this is probably the best written treatise on writing I've ever read, wordsmith-wise. As I went through this I couldn't help but think that the prevailing writing advice I've received: "Just keep reading and writing," is flat-out horrible advice—yes, I've learned how to pack an enormous amount of big thoughts into one small paragraph and still make it digestible, but is what you just read beautiful? I would say no. Four 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.
"Of Elephants and Toothaches - Ethics, Politics, and Religion in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s ‘Decalogue’" Edited by Eva Badowska and Francesca Parmeggiani (2016)
It's an academic book that's only worth reading if you enjoyed watching all 10 hours of "Dekalog". That said, because of the film's subject matter—10 films based on The Ten Commandments, centering on realistic stories about everyday people during communist Poland—the book is allowed to dive into psychology, theology, cinematic craft and analysis, philosophy, morality, the nature of love, drama, politics, human behavior, parenthood, the legal system, and even comedy, all in less than 230 pages or so. Of course, with so many different perspectives you won't necessarily agree with everything, but one of these 12 scholars is bound to talk about something intriguing that viewers hadn't before noticed. In fact, it's a little astounding that the film can bear this much scrutiny and still maintain its integrity. I think, in all the years I've spoken to people about this movie, I've convinced roughly 0.0 percent of them to sit down and watch it. Which, I suppose, is just as well. Three stars.
"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.
"Nonconformity - Writing on Writing" by Nelson Algren (1996)
A humanist railing against how "being American" is a dehumanizing force, a treatise teetering on the edge of unhinged rage. Good thing I didn't really get into Algren when I was younger. Because if I did I would probably now be dead—I didn't really need an avowed nonconformist to fan my flames; if so, I would have exploded. Three stars.
"Nickel and Dimed - On (Not) Getting By in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
Something irked me about the book back when it was prominently displayed in all the Borders, and I never picked it up. But over the course of 20 years I became a bit of a fan (her take on breast cancer was the kicker) and after she died I figured, sure, why not read her most popular book. Well, I find it irksome. I won't bore you with the obvious reasons why it's irksome, and in fact I won't even mention them. I'll just say that, given the subject matter of the book, of all the lives I've come across in these pages the one I least care to be around all the time is hers. Two stars.
"New Yorkers - A City and Its People in Our Time" by Craig Taylor (2021)
Makes Humans of New York seem like one long series of sentimental, cloying lies. Three stars.
"Natural Causes" by Barbara Ehrenreich (2018)
You would imagine a book that tries to marry biology with religion, psychology with philosophy, quantum physics with selfies, astronomy with medicine, oncology, sociology, holistic wellness, immunology, history, exercise, cellular anatomy, diet, and humanism to be a bit of a mess. And it is, very much so. But I will say after reading it, the everyday behavior of many people I know now and have known then seems flat-out moronic. Four stars.
"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.
"Middlemarch" by George Eliot (1872)
This is the novel version of a "talker," all 800 pages of it. There are probably fewer than 10 locations seen in this isolated British manufacturing town, and all are barely described. That leaves an enormous amount of text dedicated to the inner thoughts and emotions of our cast of a dozen or so disparate character types. And Eliot is generally quite sharp with the human insights, stuff like: "Politeness in a man who has placed you at a disadvantage is only an additional exasperation," or "Prejudices, like odious bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle—solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness," or "Does any one suppose that private prayer is candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action? Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?"—and that's just 0.001 percent of what you get in this book. Now, you might guess that an 800-page book that consists of little more than the densely webbed thoughts and emotions of only a dozen or so people might begin to feel overwhelming, and you wouldn't be too off-base. I will grant the experience is much more pleasant than reading an 800-page psychology textbook, but her writing style is also not exactly tailored towards ease-of-use (I suppose getting readers to follow the deeply entangled, deeply rendered psyches of your highly intellectual soap opera requires difficult-to-digest, high-fiber prose.) Is it all worth it, though? Well, you're likely to give a healthy boost to your emotional intelligence and you might earn some quality meditation time over the true nature of providence and you might excite some weird lit kicks, falling into the spell of a (now rare) fully omniscient narrator—and it's an exceptionally well written book, don't get me wrong! But to tell you the truth, there were certain times when I wished someone would just take this brick of a book and end my life with it so I would be relieved of the responsibility to finish it (God dammit, Eliot, just fucking tell me what Bulstrode did, you *told* me literally everything else! WHY ARE YOU DRAGGING THIS OUT AT PAGE 700?!!! I'M TOO EXHAUSTED TO PLAY SOME DUMB GAME WITH YOU!) However, I'm told providence doesn't quite work that way. Three stars.
"Lucky Per" by Henrik Pontoppidan, Translated by Naomi Lebowitz (1904, 2019)
I would describe it as the Danish version of Ellison's "Invisible Man", which is itself a remarkable book and which I have often referred to as my favorite. While both are preoccupied with identity and belonging (in its deft handling of confusion, this one might be the best, most accurate depiction of twentysomething life I've come across) and both are epic in scale, the scope here is absurd. It's so ridiculously epic I'm awestruck that, in the end, he sticks a perfect three-point landing. Five stars.
"Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics" by Anton Chekhov, Selected and Edited by Louis S. Friedland (1924)
I picked this up because I assumed it would be filled with insights into his writing process, a distillation of his much larger collection of letters into select, juicy nuggets of creative wisdom. It's not. The vast majority of it, actually, reads like gossip. In fact, you get the sense that Chekhov wrote these letters believing that there was no way in hell his survivors would ever approve the commercial publication of his private correspondence,* which can be characterized by their emotional erraticism, the sense that he found the state of modern culture entirely stupid, and his hatred of seemingly every other human being on earth (I laughed out loud at the harshness he doled out on this female writer for saying, "The aim of life is life itself," calling it bafflingly insincere, and then ending his tirade by basically saying, "Ah, she's a good lady"; there's also a very memorable exchange where he tells the head of a young writer's association that, no, he won't join their young writer's association because young writer's associations are stupid.) There's a much more recent collection of his "writings for writers" which edits things to give you only a spiritually uplifting picture of an esteemed, moral thinker, which is pretty much wholly anti-Chekhov, and which seems to me a book to cherish only if you happen to be dumb. As for this one, there are perhaps loads of grand statements (he really hated grand statements) to be made connecting his realistic fiction with the stunning emotional range of what is said here (in turns: wise, scared, demanding, childlike, mean, kind, horny, ascetic, probably drunk.) Though, for the purposes of writing instruction, maybe this should simply be considered an endorsement for the energizing, even inspiring, power of creative hatred. Three stars.
*I’ve read Flannery O'Connor's letters and in comparison, in hindsight, they now feel very, very, very carefully controlled.
"Lot" by Bryan Washington (2019)
All the drugs and gay sex was, in the end, kinda tedious and boring. Two stars.
"Light in August" by William Faulkner (1932)
As you get older, running into art that you find powerful but impossible to articulate becomes a rarer and rarer commodity. I can't explain why I loved this book—there's a lot of talk about borders, and running away, and chasing after, allusions to Christ and religion, and much ado about collective society. There's an overwhelming amount of humanity, the complicated maddening kind, stuffed into 500 pages of text. The narrative is modernist and angular, scrambled but not indecipherable. The language is typical Faulkner, the kind of fecund sentence structure that rewards those who have learned how to read slowly (which nowadays I would argue is a virtue absorbed by virtually no one.) It isn't a logic puzzle. It isn't a book that rewards the mind over the heart. It isn't even what you expect or have been told it's going to be because, again, it's impossible to articulate what the story is, at least in a couple of sentences. I know I just finished it, but I love it. You don't really love Faulkner books. But I love this one. Four stars.