Conversations With Friends, by Sally Rooney: It’s sometimes hard to read a book objectively when it’s been so widely discussed/acclaimed (I haven’t researched too deeply, but my assumption is that Sally Rooney’s other book, Normal People, is much more recent and came out to huge praise, and that that caused everyone to go back and read this first one (or I’ve been living in a tiny hole far away from the rest of the reading world, but it definitely seems like everyone has been talking about Sally Rooney in the latter half of 2019, not years ago). Most of what I’d heard about Conversations With Friends was “it’s amazing” and “how did she write this at 26”? I’ve heard it compared to Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be. The former comparison seems like it’s based more on content (two friends, one brasher, the other a writer) than writing or plot, though there’s something similar in the directness of the writing. The Heti comparison I don’t see at all, but then I didn’t connect with How Should a Person Be (but loved all of Ferrante). As with virtually any hyper-successful novel, I’ve also heard the resulting backlash, “it’s just a romance,” “I don’t get the hype,” etc. I have to say I found it pretty extraordinarily well done – it’s only “ordinary” in the sense that the characters are incredibly realistic. They aren’t realistic or ordinary in a generic way – they’re all really specific. And that, I think, is much harder than writing a larger-than-life character. It reminds me of seeing one actor in different movies in which the characters are nominally the same/have the same characteristics/don’t have anything dramatic happening to them – but feel and behave entirely differently. That’s talent.
Women Talking, by Miriam Toews: I had a hard time keeping the characters straight for the first 50 pages. I also kept stopping to think about how many books I’ve read recently have eschewed question marks for dialogue. Why is that? It does have the effect of making the reader feel like she’s farther enclosed in the world of the book, ears plugged to the outside world, and it’s not new, but it does seem to be in fashion of late. It gives the sense, also, that the words are being set on the page more gently. Somehow, even with exclamation marks and italics or capitals, it doesn’t feel like anyone is being loud if there are no quotation marks. The critique I’d heard going into this was: Why does it need to be framed by the perspective of a male narrator? And this is valid…even if, in the interest of verisimilitude, the author didn’t want to have a close third or omniscient narrator (because the Mennonite women can’t read or write and so can’t narrate the events?), it felt more at times like the women and the events of the novel were the framework for August’s story, not the other way around.
Normal People, by Sally Rooney: Going into this, I was most curious to see if Rooney pulled off what I suspected she was capable of (that is, creating characters that are “ordinary” but not generic, that are fully realized without relying on dramatics, and doing so in two different novels with characters that don’t feel like echoes of one another). She does, pretty unequivocally, though you could say one of the main characters in Normal People is more extreme – as a movie role, it might not be unfair to call it “Oscar bait” – but at the same time, she’s so interior that it would have taken a real deftness to write her. Not spoiling anything, the depiction of abuse here is really chilling, and the book is pretty bleak overall. I’m curious if the ending was intended to be a small triumph or despondent – really, I’m not sure. In both this and Conversations With Friends there’s a serious vein of existential emptiness running through, which isn’t merely alluded to yet is never a focal point. That I found particularly interesting (and it would make me more likely to compare these books to Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels). Final thought: it’s not a critique per se, but it frustrates me beyond coherence when characters constantly misunderstand one another because each refuses to say what she means and instead says what she thinks the other person wants to hear. I understand that these characters are very young and the whole point is that they’re misaligned in communication, but I wanted to shake the book hard enough to force the real words out of them and onto the page as dialogue (though there is no conversational punctuation in Normal People, furthering my conjecture that lack of quotation marks is a trend), instead of leaving them as internal dialogue.
Blacklight, by Kimberly King Parsons: Kim was a year ahead of me in my MFA program. This collection of stories is phenomenal on both the idea level and the sentence level. Just after I went to Kim’s NYC reading, bought the book, had her sign it, and went to her book party, National Book Award long list nominations came out, and this was on it. I had only read the first story by that point, but I wasn’t surprised, and now I’ve read all of the stories. In addition to being complete gems individually, the stories in Blacklight are really a cohesive collection (like Barry Hannah’s Airships, as opposed to something like Barry Hannah’s Bats Out of Hell, which is longer than airships and thus contains more amazing stories but feels like an anthology or a retrospective – maybe it is, now that I think about it – more than like a collection).
Fire Shut Up in My Bones, by Charles Blow: I can’t remember where I saw this recommended. O Magazine? The prose in this memoir shades purple at times, but the story is compelling. His descriptions and commentary on fraternity hazing could have used…more reflection and unpacking.
