Why We Can’t Sleep, by Ada Calhoun: Ada is a friend of a friend and my primary memory of her is from that friend’s wedding, where Ada had the best shoes and her husband’s karaoke of “The Thong Song” was so good that his preteen son was impressed and not at all embarrassed. I knew of and about this book already but, possibly, had avoided it because I was afraid it would give me ideas for a future mid-life crisis, or confirm that said crisis was quickly approaching and nearly nigh! The book focuses on Gen X women specifically, so some of the elements of childhood and adolescence (the Challenger Eruption, the pre-HIV era, trying to find a job amid the dot-com bubble bursting) weren’t as resonant for me as an elderly millennial (though I probably have more in common with Gen X in growing up primarily without a computer, since my family got one late compared to the rest of my cohort), but I found myself gritting my teeth in recognition over the omnipresent anxiety, fears about money, worries about when and if you’ll be able to have kids and your parents’ health…and then feeling guilty over stressing about your very lucky and privileged life. (Also, in some mild irony that I suspect was widespread because the book is hard to let go of even when you’re tired, I read it until 3:30 am one night, so it sort of answered its own implicit question). “Please let there be an uplifting ending,” I thought as I read, and as I tried to remind myself that typically my fear of what might happen is worse than the actual happening (sometimes, at least?). It does! Phew.
Detransition, Baby, by Torrey Peters: I think this was the most-recommended book of the year – so much so that two of my colleagues chose it for our office holiday party book exchange, and I was able to snag a copy there. A few recent novels this reminded me of: Seating Arrangements, by Maggie Shipstead and Fleishman is in Trouble, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner – but also wholly original. And hilarious. At first I read the title as “Detransition, Baby!” like “Achtung Baby” or as an imperative; then I realized that it could quite literally refer to the sequence of events Ames experiences: detransitioning, then having a baby. This was so good, so smart, so sad and so hopeful. (Also: so funny). On a craft level, in addition to the amazing sentences, I was impressed by the deftness of execution in her choice to write two (the two? Two of? The two, I think) main characters in close third narration and a third narrated from an outside perspective.
Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro: Although the obvious comparison for this novel about a robotic “artificial friend” is Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (clones instead of AI, but tonally and thematically similar), this most reminded me of Samantha Schweblin’s Little Eyes, which I loved. Structurally they’re very different – Little Eyes is a series of vignettes, some containing characters we meet only once and others that reappear and build throughout the book, and this is a linear narrative following one “AF,” Klara – but they’re exploring the same ideas of surveillance, suspicion, and humanity. The last Ishiguro I read (maybe I’ve read all of them? I just checked and the only one I haven’t read is The Unconsoled) was The Buried Giant, which I found incredibly bland, so I personally consider this a return to form. There were a few choices that felt off – the housekeeper’s dialogue – but the intertwining of the two major pursuits, one (literally) natural and the other technological, wove together well. And it was the idea of the Sun that shifted this beyond feeling like an iteration of the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back,” among other near-future dystopian media. Elements of the world are revealed slowly – one major piece of information comes near page 250 of 300 – and there are subtle, sinister details throughout. The ending was a bit of a slow fade, but that was thematically appropriate.
The Indifferent Stars Above, by Daniel James Brown: What a genius title for an examination of what one woman’s trip along the Oregon trail with the Donner party would have been like – in parts details are necessarily imagined, but events are not. Somehow this read almost as a thriller, with no disrespect toward the characters and what they endured (and in some cases inflicted), even though we all know the stories of the Oregon trail and the Donner party and there was always a fixed endpoint (well – only kind of – after all, many did survive the journey to the west). The scope of the danger, the harshness of the landscape, the unbelievable hunger and cold – all of it would be almost unfathomable but is described with such care it becomes horrifically imaginable.
The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen: This has been on my to-read list (and many others’ lists, I’m sure, given the Pulitzer prize and the forthcoming TV series…) for what feels like years – possibly since the beginning of the pandemic. I had no idea that it was Nguyen’s first novel! It’s both incredibly smart and mordantly funny, but its most outstanding feature (in my biased opinion) is Nguyen’s use of metaphor. Genius, of an echelon that – in my consumption of books, which is obviously not exhaustive – may contain only Nguyen and Karen Russell. (From what I’ve seen, it sounds like it was a little too dense with metaphors for some readers – but not for me!) I did anticipate some of the plot points, but not all of them, and it’s not a heavily plot-driven book at heart so that didn’t bother me much. I have intentionally read very little about the sequel, The Committed, so I have no idea if it features any of the same characters (though I assume it does).
