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.
"The Day of the Locust" by Nathanael West (1939)
As far as books about Los Angeles go, this genuinely FEELS like LA. From the setting to the characters to the situations to the way the sky is often described like paint. Which is noteworthy because it makes an (ultimately) heavy-handed point about how the dream of Hollywood, California, is really quite bleak (I know there are a lot of "LA is actually bleak" stories, just know in this case I don't use the word "bleak" lightly—the 1975 film version is often described as a disguised horror movie.) For LA in the 30s, this too feels accurate: a stage mom boasts about how she's following a raw diet while sucking her adorable child actor son bone dry. Strangely, a lot of it reminded me of life in your twenties, full of unmoored people seeking big dreams but really only finding stunning boredom, a boredom that can somehow teeter into either soulful magnanimity or senseless violence depending on the day. It's really quite a good book. And that's because it's more than about Hollywood, it's really about boredom and how it makes us behave, set in a town built to be the ultimate antidote to American boredom (is the solution also the source of the problem?) It's also well written, it's compelling (in some parts, it's actually too much to handle), it's truthful, it's weird, parts of it had me howling with laughter, and parts of it were horrifying. It really ranks among the best books no one has ever read (Christina Stead is also on that list.) That combination Miss Lonelyhearts/The Day of the Locust book? You should really pick it up. Sidenote: there's a character in the novel named Homer Simpson. And the reason The Simpsons only contains one reference to this in its 30-odd years is because, in the novel, Homer Simpson murders an 8-year-old child, coldly and cruelly, stomping on their now lifeless body again and again and again and again and again, and then again and again and again, right in front of a huge crowd of people. Four stars.
"Three Sisters - A Drama in Four Acts" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Peter Carson (1900, 2004)
If you were to sum all of this up as "a heavily existential soap opera" it feels tautly apt, if a tad bit flippant. There's a 1966 televised version. And I was a little shocked when I thought: This isn't just the best interpretation of a Chekhov play I've seen, this might actually be some of the best theater I've ever seen. Turns out it was by the Actors Studio, who have a direct line to Stanislavski, who originated Chekhov's plays in Russia. For such an extremely busy, centerless play, a somewhat lengthy play that I would describe as having a "constantly swirling" structure, you're almost grateful that such talented theater people bothered to grapple with the material. Because there were so many things I didn't catch by reading the play alone, and I could easily imagine all this being utterly unbearable in lesser hands. I guess the question I have is, does this odd, swirling structure serve the theme? The theme seemingly being: No amount of education, intelligence, faith, or virtue can prepare you for the unpredictable vicissitudes of life, exponential, ever-evolving, incomprehensible vicissitudes that are idly set in motion simply when one human being collides into another. If you wanted to illustrate such existential confusion, then perhaps it does. But was reaching that point worth all the effort? I'm not sure. I almost want the point to be even more out-there, even more ambitious, even more soul-shaking. As it stands, I ended the play thinking: Well, yes, I find life confusing, and yes, my beliefs probably are delusions, and no, I suppose I don't really know anything about anything. Good on you, Chekhov: you nailed me. Now, why exactly did you feel the need to point this out? Because I kind of already knew that—that's what my delusions are for! But perhaps I'm again being flippant: it's really a remarkably written play, short of extraordinary, even. Where the rub is, is you feel like there's something holding it back from really blowing your brain wide open, and here I offer my best guess as to what that brain-blowing dampener might actually be. Three stars.
"The Complete Short Novels" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2004)
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 Tyranny of Virtue - Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies" by Robert Boyers (2019)
Elderly liberal academic and steward of long-running literary magazine attempts to deconstruct, one-by-one, censorship inflicted by liberals upon themselves—examining in turn notions of privilege, safety, diversity, appropriation, identity, ableism—in cold, dense, academic prose. I could express more of my own thoughts on what Boyers actually says about it all but I’m afraid I might get cancelled. Four stars.
"The Sociology of Fun" by Ben Fincham (2016)
You want the entire book in one sentence? What you find fun isn't an outward expression of your soul, it's actually a construct forced upon you by your society. For instance, that super weird kink you like in the bedroom? Not only isn't it uniquely yours, there happens to be a whole American industry out there eager to profit off of it. There, I saved you from reading a typo-ridden, two-star book. Two stars.
"The Rhetoric of Fiction" by Wayne C. Booth (1961)
First off, I'm a little shocked that, nearly 30 years into a writing career, this book was only brought to my attention by my own stumbling, searching self in 2023 (I actually threw out most of the writing books people had once recommended, notably the ones with the word "Dream" in the title.) But seeing as it's an academic work of limited interest, let me just highlight the one thing I feel is worth crowing about: if, like me, you were clamoring for a 400-page-long argument for why "show don't tell" is an incredibly, unbelievably, undeniably stupid thing to teach aspiring writers, then boy oh boy is this the book for you. Four stars.
"The Odd One In - On Comedy" by Alenka Zupančič (2008)
No matter what you think about her basis in Lacanian psychoanalysis ("It doesn’t stop not being written. Since it cannot be written, it doesn’t stop not being written, it doesn’t stop, it persists as necessary in its very impossibility,") even if you're no neophyte comedy wonk, you come away with the impression that no one in the history of philosophy nor the history of comedy has ever thought about it all this intensely.* Four stars.
*"Human beings are composed neither of the biological and the symbolic, nor of the physical and the metaphysical—the image of composition is misleading. Human beings are, rather, so many points where the difference between the two elements, as well as the two elements themselves as defined by this difference, are generated, and where the relationship between the two dimensions thus generated is being constantly negotiated.
There is no 'pure life' or 'pure Symbolic' prior to this curious intersection. The generating point of the Symbolic is this paradoxical joint, and the Symbolic as a wholly independent, autonomous realm is something produced—it is produced at the periphery of the movement generated by the intersection, and retroactively affecting its own point of generation—its own 'birth,' so to speak. The nature of this intersection is such that we can precisely not see it as an intersection; we cannot put a finger on it and say: Voilà, it is here that 'nature' is becoming 'culture.' This passage can be noticed and established only from the latter point, that is to say, from where it has already taken place. In other words, the double circular movement described corresponds in fact to the movement along the surface of the Möbius strip: we start, say, at an extreme point of one side, and without ever passing to the other side, we end up at an extreme point of it. This brings us back to the point—or, more exactly, two points—made in Part I of this discussion of comedy. First, what the topology of the Möbius strip reveals is that the missing link that structures our reality is not a missing link between two neighbor elements, the connection between which would thus be interrupted—instead, its very missing is the linkage between two neighbor elements; it is what makes it possible for them to 'fit' into each other. Second, comedy forces this constitutive missing link to appear as something—not by trying to provide its own version of the (always fantasmatic) moment of the passage of one side into the other, but by producing a short circuit between two sides, and sustaining it ('playing with it') as a possible articulation of the impossible. It is here that comedy fully affirms itself as the genre of the copula that articulates together, in its specific way, the two heterogeneous dimensions of the same reality."
"The Managed Heart - Commercialization of Human Feeling" by Arlie Russell Hochschild (1983)
The centerpiece of this sociological study of "emotional labor," or how businesses profit off employee feelings, is a look at flight attendants and debt collectors, the flight attendants being extracted of cheer and the debt collectors being extracted of aggression. That's the most interesting part of the book, and it's unfortunately also very small. I suppose the theories of the way feeling acts as a form of currency in our personal lives are interesting too, but that's just supposed to be the preamble to the meat, which you end the book wishing there was much more of. Although that could be a function of the book's conclusions no longer really being all that surprising (corporate emotional extraction=bad), that is, at least for older folks—the "fake it 'til you make it" and "hustle culture" generation was apparently oblivious to everything that was in here; businesses needed to extract human resources and these people just sort of fought to be the first in line, tearing open their own veins. And now YouTube hides "burnout" videos, and these people are our bosses. Three stars.
"The Formal Principle in the Novel" by Austin M. Wright (1982)
Even though this is very much an academic book, I feel the nagging need to highlight it. Have you heard of University of Chicago Neo-Aristotelian literary theory?* It's apparently preoccupied with the form of literature, in other words, a story's unity and shape. So, say, rather than spotlight Jhumpa Lahiri's multicultural provocations or her feminist/political intentions, the formal theorist is much more concerned with the functions of her story structure, and how that structure affects reader experience. This critical practice, apparently, disassembles form and its components at such off-putting scientific lengths it didn't gain much traction even among the erudite lit crowd (though, between you and me, people seem to have a weird disdain for academics based in the American Midwest.) So, basically, this book here is an accessible, easy-to-read, highly discerning explainer of Neo-Aristotelian theory, centering on "the formal principle". Austin, in fact, has a great knack—for lack of better phrasing—for answering "stupid" questions (questions like, Must Henry James really write like that?) But that's not the real reason I believe this deserves a shoutout. The real reason, basically, is: NO ONE EVER FUCKING TALKS ABOUT FORM!!!—if there had been more of a focus in school on how novels are constructed and why (as opposed to the overwhelming focus on my sweet, sensitive, little feelings) then maybe I wouldn't have found myself staring at a copy of The Sound and the Fury sometime in my 20s, thinking: "What in the holy fuck am I reading?!" The form of that novel, along with the forms of The Portrait of a Lady, Invisible Man, and Pale Fire are all examined here, as four closing proofs of concept, demonstrating how asking yourself questions of form can lead to less gooey speculation when it comes to meaning. I suppose the one thing I can say that might make such abstract a notion as literary form more clear is: Why do those four novels feel so richly satisfying even if none of them end on traditional notes of closure? It must have something to do with the peculiar and complex ways those novels are built. Does that help? I sure hope so, because that's the best I think I can do. Four stars.
*Wright explains in a 1998 essay: "Chicago formal theory gave primary attention to the larger structural features of a work, such as plot or sequence or unifying principle of progression. It was interested in beginning, end, and the movement between those two points. It dealt freely with elements like action and events and characters, discoveries, thoughts, feelings, and effects, because these play their important parts in the hierarchical structure of the whole."
"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs (1961)
Having grown up in a city, I got the impression that most people didn't really like them—I never saw city life as I knew it depicted on TV, and in fact, throughout my adult life I rarely run into another person who was also raised inside the city proper. I loved them, though, to the point that in my 20 years in New York I've never lived in a high-rise, because I don't like separating myself from street life; it's why I've spent the last 10 of them living in a place like Crown Heights. So reading Jane Jacobs I couldn't be more thrilled to run into someone who was just as enthusiastic about cities as I am. And not just the fancy, fun parts: Jacobs is in love with the complexity, with the mess, the collisions and the contradictions. In essence, she's spending the entire book trying to shine lights on a mystery no one seems to understand, both then and now: how can a confused, massive throng of people actually succeed together? So I'm all about this book; I can see why it's considered revolutionary. I'm even thrilled that she spends a lot of time questioning what I consider an overwhelming human epidemic among people my age and younger, the lust for control where control is a fantasy. Sure, there are some spots where it seems like she's backing up an assumption with nothing more than a confident-sounding voice, but it's a five-star book. At a certain point though, lightheaded, you lift your bleary eyes from the dense, small type and say, to nobody in particular, "Geez, she just sort of kept going on and on for a bit now there, didn't she?" Four stars.
"The Craft of Fiction" by Percy Lubbock (1921)
I'm not sure if this is considered "New Criticism"; if anything, it feels like a precursor to that movement, which apparently took off in the 1940s. Both this book and that movement import to the ordinary reader that in order to fully appreciate literature a reader needs to go beyond the pleasures of story and implant within themselves some understanding of the workings of craft. I buy that in the sense that ... well, remember how in the 90s people thought Harry Potter would usher in this renaissance of reading? And all that ended up happening is now there are a whole bunch of grown adults pushing 40 reading books that were explicitly intended to be comprehended by children? Well, so, to backtrack, I buy that in the sense that understanding the mechanism of story might help people expand beyond the things they already like, in the same way that someone who understands the game of baseball can watch and appreciate games played by teams other than their favorite. So should this book, which is focused entirely on the role point of view plays in accomplished novels, be read by the casual reader? Well, no. But if you aspired to be a writer, there's great stuff in here! What's interesting is, as writing instruction became more formalized in the 20th century, it seems like the "rules" actually grew more and more rigid, even as the field became more and more democratized. I think that's what happens if you want to open up the field to more people: it's hard to organize (hard to sell) a big tent if you tell everybody: Hey, fundamentally, there are actually no rules whatsoever! The New Criticism crowd seemed to understand that, even while pointing out exactly how the gears turned. It's interesting to read thoughts about writing from this era, to me, because I keep running into fundamentally sound arguments that seem to have been entirely forgotten/ignored/rejected, for whatever reasons, none of which seem good. Four stars.
"The Seagull - A Comedy in Four Acts" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Peter Carson (1896, 2004)
Here's where Chekhov's obtuse idea of theater actually starts to cohere, nearly ten years after "Ivanov". Still, I left this with largely the same feeling I had when I read it the first time, with much less exposure to Chekhov's "I hate everything that came before me" sensibility. And that feeling is: What the fuck is this?—the exposition is laid out much too plainly as exposition to be accidental, everybody's hopelessly in love with everyone else, the play parodies plays, the writer character wants to create new and different forms of theater (in a piece that bucks traditional form,) the seagull symbolism is recognized by the characters themselves as a symbol they find difficult to understand, I mean, what the fuck? I'm gonna try to watch the play. I'll say it definitely reads better than Ivanov, but for now, gosh, I'm nonplussed! Two stars.
Found a 1975 PBS staging. It works, and the play makes a little more sense, but I can't explain to you how it works and how it makes sense. I really really can't. I don't know where to begin. It's kinda good, but I don't know why. Gosh, I'm nonplussed! It's hard to believe Frank Langella hadn't been born an old man! Three stars.
"The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook" Edited by Martha Bayne (2019)
I get the sense most good writers in Chicago end up moving away. One star.
"The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick" by Elizabeth Hardwick, Selected by Darryl Pinckney (2017)
She's a very very good writer, but it's striking how her writing style didn't change all that much from the first essay published in 1953 to the final one published in 2003. For contrast, Flannery O'Connor's writing style matured exponentially in just the 18 years between "The Geranium" and "Judgement Day". Kind of gives me pause, considering. Anyway, you probably shouldn't read this book if you don't particularly like reading (Hardwick on Joan Didion: "The inclination to pedantry in instances of piddling, measly inconsequence are sometimes the only protection one has against the witchery of this uncompromising imagination, the settings so various and the sometimes sleepwalking players who blindly walk through windows and fall into traps of great consequence such as the Vietnam War or the world of the Contras.") But if you do, it's a BONANZA. Four stars.
"The Art of the Novel - Critical Prefaces" by Henry James (1934)
It's one thing to read Henry James' dizzying writing style in a piece of fiction—you work at it because you trust he's leading you somewhere. It's another thing when he's speaking as himself, reflecting on his own work, the sentence structures splintering into a winding, sprawling train consisting of his own lightly tethered thoughts. Don't get me wrong: he's brilliant. And unlike most accomplished writers, he's not coy. In fact, he's very generous about the process of creating and crafting fiction. But he's also an overthinker. And reading this book has been difficult for me because the result is akin to one person directly injecting their craziness into my brain. (Strangely, though, you leave the book with the impression "American literature's biggest snob" might actually have been, deep down, a really nice guy.) Two stars.
"The Art of Fiction" by John Gardner (1983)
If you retitled the book "Irritating Man Explains It All", you wouldn't be far off. Four stars.
"The Cherry Orchard - A Comedy in Four Acts" by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Peter Carson (1904, 2004)
Ah, the last of Chekhov's plays. Presumably, this is the one where he figured it out, the final attempt at his then-unusual, and now EXTREMELY unusual, swirling, "centrifugal" form, where the story elements chaotically spin away from the center, interweaving, colliding, stuttering, rather than neatly converging straightaways towards clarity. A lot has been made about how the theme concerns people being comically inactive, too mired in the past, to confront their own looming demise, but that seems to me to be too facile to be the point—if someone you loved were dying I doubt you would kill them prematurely and move on just because it was decisive and made perfect financial and logical sense; in fact you're much more likely to behave foolhardily just for the sake of holding onto something, anything. To me, it's more noteworthy that the characters can't seem to understand each other, due to selfishness or impatience or lack of life experience or insecurity or status or what have you, while at the same time desperately demanding that their own peculiar selves be understood. In fact, whenever the characters are flat-out offered clarity and resolution, they refuse it, as if they found more comfort in not knowing. If we know for certain everything is coming to an end, maybe we'd rather be lost, and foolish, and deluded, telling people who try to shake us out of our ruts to SHUTUP, because at least being lost in our own way is something we already understand. That seems like a bit of a soul-shaking point. In a sort of similar way, I liked his more ambitious, messier attempts better than this fairly well polished one, even if they weren't totally successful (it's the same reason I like "Billy Madison" more than "Happy Gilmore.") The feeling of "God, Chekhov, what the hell are you doing?" is far more thrilling than "Okay, Chekhov, I see what you're up to: perhaps the reason people don't seem to advance and evolve as sentient beings is simply because we don't want to. Also, Chekhov, remind me never to invite you to any parties. You're kind of a bummer." Three stars.