The Lightness, by Emily Temple: This isn’t a “closed room” mystery (or, necessarily, a mystery at all, though it is suspenseful) – it takes place on a mountain – but it has that feeling all the same. And I thoroughly loved spending time there. The narrator’s verbal tics cloyed a little (“and etc,” “what have you,” “as they say” and defining words/tracing lineage) – perhaps in part because I recognize them (the linguistic elements, at least, not so much that repeated phrases) in my own writing and so am more sensitive to whether they’re working or not. I think the use of “etc” undercut the narratorial voice, as if hedging its bets about whether what it was saying was worth saying, and that it would have been much stronger without it. But this is a quibble.
Mill Town, by Kerri Arsenault: This work of nonfiction opens in 2008, and it was easy for me to imagine the long, arduous process of gathering stories and compiling them as they were still taking shape – I was so impressed thinking about her decades-long process (which is very much part of the book). The “mill town” in question is Mexico, Maine, where Arsenault grew up and where a paper mill operated for many years. Some of the prose is straightforward and factual, but the book is pocketed with sections of incredible description – combinations of words I’ve truly never seen placed together before – that create a coherent mosaic of styles. The writing in these sections is utterly mesmerizing. I don’t think I ever describe writing as breathtaking, and I would gladly describe some of Arsenault’s words in this way. The book’s content is, of course, 90% depressing.
The Divines, by Ellie Eaton: Is this “dark academia”? I’m not up on literary trends or new categorizations, just as I’m not caught up on the latest neighborhood designations in NYC, but I’ve certainly been reading many novels that take place in high school/college settings…though maybe it was ever thus? (Evergreen?) **After finally Googling “dark academia literature” (I was thinking Secret History but hadn’t gotten much further than that), it’s mainly what I expected – one of the novels from my last post, Catherine House, shows up, as does Trust Exercise, the National Book Award winner that it seems everyone but me loved. Perhaps Oligarchy and The Divines belong to a separate boarding-school (all-girls, specifically) backdropped set of dramas (even The Illness Lesson, which I need to deliver back to the library by hand tomorrow, would figure in here, though set in a much earlier time).
The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, by Clarissa Goenawan: The atmosphere in this narrative is impeccable, as is the structure (three parts, each from the perspective of a different main character affected by the death of the title character, who remains inscrutable until the end of the novel). The themes of invisibility, being known, and holding onto secrets are drawn out deftly, though I did feel that the story ended more abruptly than it could have. Perhaps I just wanted more.
Writers and Lovers, by Lily King: Before the first chapter had even concluded I’d stopped at least ten times to think, “Damn, I wish I had made that statement.” It’s not just that the writing itself is fantastic, but that these extremely acute observations are scattered so densely throughout the prose. Somehow, when I put this on hold at the library, I had forgotten that Lily King wrote Euphoria. I was thinking of Writers and Lovers as a debut (there is a reference to Sons and Lovers in the first half of the book – I haven’t read it but I’m conjecturing that the similarity in titles means there’s some homage or riff on the D.H. Lawrence in King’s book). My nitpick is that there are a lot of men’s names flung at you in the first few chapters and I couldn’t keep landlord from ex-boyfriend from brother from other ex-boyfriend straight, especially since most of them were not present in the novel’s current time. As it’s set in 1997 with a writer protagonist just three years younger than King herself would have been then…of course I wonder how much is autobiographical. In any case – truly great.
