Category: books

I  loved Teju Cole’s Open City—  it’s the best new novel I’ve read in quite a while. Everyone cites W.G. Sebald, and yes, it definitely recalls him in its wandering, melancholy, essayistic qualities (no photos, though, too bad!), and the impression it conveys of a permeable boundary between the fictional and the autobiographical– although the tone is lighter and the voice more (albeit ambivalently) American than in Sebald’s work, immersed in the media-saturated everyday of the 21st century U.S.

It would be a great novel to teach as a test case in an introduction to critical theory; it has a lot to say about mourning and melancholy, memorialization, repression, urban space, race, class, and identity, violence, whiteness, empathy, migration, nationalism. And about classical music (Mahler plays a key role) and literature, and psychiatry and medicine: its Nigerian narrator Julius is a psychiatric intern at what seems to be Columbia University, working on a research project about affect and depression in the elderly. This may all sound heavy-handed or a bit much, but these topics emerge naturally within the thought process of a narrator who simply happens to be educated, intellectually curious and interested in philosophy, theory, and such.  (Also in humbler topics like bedbugs.) The episode in which Julius, on a visit to Brussels, befriends a politically-radical Moroccan named Farouq also reminded me of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. James Wood comments about the passage in which Farouq explains how his academic advisors failed his dissertation on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space that it is “one of the very few scenes I have encountered in contemporary fiction in which critical and literary theory is not satirized, or flourished to exhibit the author’s credentials, but is simply and naturally part of the whole context of a person.”  Nicholas Dames in N&1, similarly, counts Cole as a member of a new “Theory Generation” of novelists for whom critical theory is taken for granted as part of the intellectual atmosphere: “what allies [Sam] Lipsyte’s Milo, Cole’s Julius, and [Ben] Lerner’s Adam …is how fundamentally diagnostic they are. Theory has taught them to treat the world as a set of deceptive signs; they doubt, reflexively, the communications of others.” [I love those novels too, btw: Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station.] Julius reads, among other books, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, and once back in New York, he sends a copy of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism to Farouq as a sort of guilt offering; Farouq is one of several less-privileged interlocutors who inspire guilty responses from the psychiatrist-in-training Julius, who struggles in locating himself in relation to “blackness,” class, and Africanness. The question of whom he calls “brother,” and vice versa, recurs throughout.

Another book Open City recalled for me, although I read this many years ago and so my recollections of it are pretty vague, was Saul Bellow’s early novel Dangling Man. Like Bellow’s narrator, Julius is a “superfluous man,” a free-floating wanderer in the wartime city, in danger of drifting loose from all social connections.

It’s certainly one of the best, if not the best, “post-9/11” novels I’ve read, fundamentally concerned with the question of how nations, cities, and individuals mourn, memorialize, and repress trauma. And although it can feel nearly plotless, I’ll say without any spoilers that there is more to the story than may initially appear to be the case, and that Julius emerges, only towards the very end of the book, as a more morally-complex and less “reliable” narrator than he’d previously seemed to be. It’s a novel that looks different in hindsight, so that now I feel I need to go back to reconsider various details that seemed random or happenstance when I first encountered them.

I liked The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman (her 1st novel) more than I expected to.  This portrait of a caddish, former-nerd 30-year old Brooklyn freelance writer and his love affairs sounded very Girls-ish, and probably fun but shallow.  But it turned out to be a better novel than that.  Things I liked about it:

• it offers a vividly detailed, often witty portrayal of a very particular place and time — hipster literary Brooklyn today — inhabited by equally particularized individuals who are also types; Nate and Hannah are quirkily particular, but one also always sees how they’ve been shaped by broad socio-cultural dynamics.  (Odd that she’d be named Hannah given the inevitable comparisons with Girls (whose protagonist is named Hannah Horvath)… But it seems that Waldman’s been working on the novel for a while.  There’s also the great Vampire Weekend song “Hannah Hunt” come to think of it.)
• It’s good on the gender dynamics, and particularly the balances of power between men and women in the urban dating market (shifting more in the men’s favor by age 30). Waldman implied in an interview that she decided to make the male character the main protagonist as a challenge to herself and (I think she said this?) to ensure that the novel did not become too autobiographical. One does feel that Hannah, Nate’s love interest and one of his girlfriends — a smart, pretty but not gorgeous, witty writer-editor type — must have a lot of the author (and her friends) in her.  And I did feel that this strategy worked well; we sense a lot of personal investment and experience in the depictions, but the novel’s focus in Nate rather than Hannah keeps it from falling into certain autobiographical-novel paths.
• [That said, probably my one criticism would be that at moments the free-indirect-discourse dipping into Nate’s thinking can feel rather broad in its critical perspective: “But did any of it make him an asshole?  He had never promised her anything…” Early on you quickly feel, “yes, this guy is an asshole,” and then the novel guides you toward at least limited sympathy for him.]
• Perhaps along slightly comparable lines to Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot [my post about that one], it’s deeply steeped in a longer history of the novel and does some interesting things in updating marriage-plot novelistic conventions for our moment. Here is Waldman’s recent essay on how she stopped being a Richardsonian and learned to appreciate Henry Fielding.  And in this NYT interview she explains how Balzac’s Lost Illusions was a “lodestar” for her own book: “It nails the literary scene in every city, in every time,” she said. “A sense of people being motivated by a mix of idealistic commitment to the arts and love for it and vanity, ego, ambition.” [Oh and I just saw on Waldman’s Twitter feed that she’s an Elizabeth Gaskell fan and recommends Wives and Daughters.  Yes! — that might be my pick for the best-but-least-known Victorian novel.]
• The novel is satirical and brightly amusing about Brooklyn/ NYC literary-world mores, but also has a strong undertow of sadness in its portrayal of relationships and the ways these young men and women use one another, strategize, and develop layers of self-protecting cynicism, irony, and low expectations about romance.
• It was fun to think about possible models for certain characters– e.g. is Greer Cohen, the sexy & flirtatious recipient of a big advance for her “memoir about my teenage misadventures,” a version of Elizabeth Wurtzel?  (Or am I out of date…)

Have not checked this out thoroughly yet, but it seems a neat & handy site/blog: the New Canon: the Best in Fiction Since 1985.  One could object that the choices veer a bit predictable, but then, that’s kind of what a canon is all about definitionally, and it strikes me as a fairly solid list.  A little surprised to see David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion on there, I don’t think of that as a book that has produced an enormous amount of readerly pleasure, but then DFW’s works do seem generally difficult to figure out how to place in a canon once you get past Infinite Jest (I’d include the essays before the stories, personally).

The recent Nick Paumgarten profile of James Salter in The New Yorker made me want to read his 1975 novel Light Years, which I’ve now done.  It’s a really beautiful novel that sometimes reads a bit like To the Lighthouse if it had been written by the Hemingway of A Moveable Feast… with a lot of explicit post-1960s sex. And a touch of, I don’t know, Joan Didion or maybe better Renata Adler. It’s a portrait of a happy marriage and then its dissolution. For the first half of the novel, I once in a while felt just a touch irritated by, or at least slightly resistant to, the novel’s luxuriating in all the sensuous, tactile, lavish detail of the Berlands’ envy-producing life in a farmhouse outside NYC. All the fabulous, drawn-out meals sometimes make you wonder, do these people ever just throw together a sandwich? And a few of the sex scenes made me giggle -e.g. when Nedra is described as moving “like some marvelous beast.” But when the marriage disintegrates and the house is eventually sold, that luxuriating feels, in retrospect, poignant and sad, and idealized in hindsight:

The feast was ended. Like the story he had read to them so many times, of the poor couple who were given three wishes and wasted them, he had not wanted enough. He saw that clearly. When all was said, he had wanted one thing, it was far too small: he had wanted to give them the happiest of homes.

He has a very distinctive, crystalline prose…  Gorgeous sentences, like a prose poem. I can see why (as the profile explains) so many contemporary novelists admire him.

Oh, this is too cool!

As part of James Salter month at the Paris Review, the journal’s blog has posted some of Salter’s notes and scribblings, documenting a little bit of his process coming up with the title for his 1975 novel Light Years: “At every magazine or publishing house, there’s always an editor or two with a knack for titles. But even so, rarely does one come in a flash of divine inspiration. There are iterations and themes and the same words written over and over. Here is a glimpse of what James Salter’s process was like with his 1975 novel Light Years…. Salter seems so close at points, circling back to light and years, sometimes on the same page but not always the same line, ranking his favorites and weighing the opinions of others.”

Tortoise Years would have been kind of hilarious– but fitting (the novel contains a very poignant and symbolically resonant tortoise).