I'm kicking off 2018 by reading some of the best of 2017. Here are the maybes; here's list.
"I emerged from my own mother in tI'm kicking off 2018 by reading some of the best of 2017. Here are the maybes; here's list.
"I emerged from my own mother in the form of a tiny psychic covered with tits," says Patricia Lockwood, so you know it's going to be that kind of a memoir. Lockwood comes off as some unholy bastard child of bloggers and poets; she carries the Wonder Woman bracelets of sarcasm and the invisible jet of metaphor. She describes her cat's inexplicable love for her father's horrendous guitar playing:
Alice answers him, writhing on the hood of his Corvette, purring in every cell of her, her whiskers vibrating as if they were recently strummed. Her body is a leotard, her fur is a perm.
Of some habitually pregnant women she writes, "They were happy the way crabgrass is happy, doing what they were designed to do." When she gets around to namechecking Renata Adler, you just nod: of course.
So obviously this is the kind of book about which people crow, "I kept cracking up in bed and disturbing my wife," which they think is a cute thing to say but let me tell you, your wife doesn't think it's cute. She already knows what book you're reading. No, she does not want you to read that passage out loud.
Lockwood is better known as a poet. And she is surprisingly well-known, for a poet - so well known that even I've heard of her, and I think poetry is essentially stupid. In 2013 her poem went massively viral - on the level of the recent New Yorker story It's a devastating poem, entirely fresh and furious, and it made her career. And two things had to happen there, right? The second thing was writing a poem about the first thing. The first thing - "This was the price?" she asks. "This was the purchase of entry, into that closed and impregnable world?" Her husband reminds her that it's a happy ending: "'You did it,' he says, bursting into tears. 'This is just like when an animal succeeds in a movie.'"
The book loosely chronicles the period during which Lockwood's career is taking off, with a lot of flashes back. Broke, she and her husband have moved back in with her parents in Missouri: her doomful mother, from whom she got her sense of humor, and the priestdaddy of the title, a towering figure dressed in terrifyingly loose boxer shorts, carrying a guitar in one hand and a bible in the other. Meanwhile, "Rape Joke" is published. She writes this book, almost a la minute, sitting at the table and writing down what her family says, which, as you can imagine, makes everyone feel self-conscious. There's nothing that requires being called a plot, so by the second half I found my attention wandering a little; I'd gotten accustomed to her voice, as unique and hilarious as it is, and nothing new was happening.
She's mostly interested in writing about writing. Lockwood's family couldn't afford to send her to college; she began her career with no connections, no mentors. It gave her a complex that she still seems a little raw about. She hasn't been seen as a Wonder-Woman-bracelet kind of person; she's small and from Missouri and easily overlooked. But "On the page I am strong," she says, "Because that is where I put my strength...I am no longer whispering through the small skirted shape of a keyhole: the door is knocked down and the roof is blown off and I am aimed once more at the entire wide night." I think she's speaking to other young people who are sitting in the backs of classrooms, writing their ways through life. I hope they find her! Look for, I guess, the tiny psychic covered with tits....more
I'm kicking off 2018 by reading some of the best of 2017. Here are the maybes; here's list.
We're talking about Toni Morrison I'm kicking off 2018 by reading some of the best of 2017. Here are the maybes; here's list.
We're talking about Toni Morrison here. Jesmyn Ward lifts almost everything from her: the ghosts, the savage and unflinching violence, the stream-of-consciousness flourishes, and unfortunately also Morrison's deep corniness when it comes to family and love. She's updated Morrison, who didn't particularly need updating but here we are and now we have meth.
We also have this wonderful character Leonie, who's one of the most impressive balancing acts I've seen in a while because she sucks: she's a shitty mom and a basically shitty person, a failure at almost everything. Also she does meth. But even in the exact moment that she's making a shitty decision, she's aware that she's doing it, aware that she's not a good enough person to not do it, and you both feel bad about it. Leonie's just another human trying to get by. She has no tools and nothing going for her. She'd like to be better but she doesn't have it in her. She's marvelous.
Also well-drawn is her son Jojo, who at thirteen is more of an adult than Leonie will ever be. As they all take off on a road trip to meet Jojo's father, he takes charge of his toddler sister Kayla because someone has to. Kayla herself is a well-written toddler (you can tell Ward's a parent) but serves mostly as a source of drama; she spends most of the book barfing, which kept me in a state of panic about what the fuck was going on with her and was she okay. I am super alert to barfing toddlers.
One of the major themes of this book is meth; another is barfing.
But there's also history, and how generations of oppression change people. Everyone here has a connection to prison. There's a flashback story running through the current-day one, about Leonie's father's time in prison trying to protect a boy Jojo's age. (view spoiler)[Eventually the boy gets the Lenny treatment. (hide spoiler)]
It's all perfectly well done. Ward is an assured writer with a real gift for subtlety in her characters. It's just that you're so aware of Toni Morrison the whole time. I mean, couldn't you just go read her? Not if you want meth and barfing....more
I kicked off 2018 by reading some of the best of 2017. Here's my list; here's list.
"All the Hooters waitresses get pregnant aI kicked off 2018 by reading some of the best of 2017. Here's my list; here's list.
"All the Hooters waitresses get pregnant at once. No one will say why. 'This is not really a case,' Benson says, exasperated."
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I'm sorry, that gif is just going to be there blinking until you scroll past it or something, but it was also blinking in my head during the centerpiece of this short story collection, which is called "Especially Heinous" and told entirely through capsule descriptions of episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. My ex used to watch this show for hours upon hours, and I was always a little creeped out by the whole thing. It seems lurid, doesn't it? "Now with especial heinousness!" Carmen Maria Machado agrees with me but also with my ex. The story follows Stabler and Benson, who are these two
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(I had to look it up and I'm sure this whole thing would have been even better for me if hundreds of in-jokes weren't flying over my head) as they try to deny their lust for each other. Benson is haunted by dead, raped underage models with bells for eyes. A pair of doppelgangers appear, Abler and Henson. Copycats? I don't know. The thing with women is that they're always getting raped, is sortof the feeling you get from the show, which, actually, is not entirely as untrue as you would like it to be, and it is - what's the phrase I'm looking for - especially heinous.
It works an awful lot better than you'd think it would, which I mean you'd think it wouldn't work at all - it's just 272 fake episodes of Law & Order: SVU! How can that not be an annoying disaster? It isn't, but my favorite is the other novella here, "The Resident," a Gothic set at an artists' retreat in the woods that manages to mash up references to madwomen in attics, grotesque body horror (oozing cysts!) and maybe a Fatal Attraction riff? I don't know but that bunny is dead. If Machado is planning on expanding something into a novel, as one does, it ought to be this one and she's onto something.
She's onto something generally. There's a lot of mashing up going on in art these days, so to find Machado throwing Angela Carter in a bucket with internet porn makes sense. "It is my right to reside in my own mind," says the narrator of The Resident. Machado's mind is dangerous and brilliant.
"Benson accidentally catches a rapist when she Google-stalks her newest OKCupid date. She can't decide whether to mark this in the 'success' ('caught rapist') or 'failure' ('date didn't work out') column. She marks it in both."...more
I kicked off 2018 by reading some of the best of 2017. This was the last book of the project. Here are the selections; here's I kicked off 2018 by reading some of the best of 2017. This was the last book of the project. Here are the selections; here's list.
Pachinko is like gambling on pinball machines, so I don't know how that hasn't destroyed civilization yet, good lord.
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Here's if you wanna get the general idea. You shoot the ball, it bangs around, things light up, you win or you don't.
So this makes an effective metaphor, if a pretty thudding and obvious one: "Life's going to keep pushing you around, but you have to keep playing," someone tells you toward the end, just in case you missed it. And that's pretty much the thing with this whole book: it's effective but a little dumb.
"Multigenerational family epic about people from a different culture" might not totally fire your jetpack but it does mine, I hear that phrase and I'm like sign me the fuck up, I get all excited. I don't know, why are you reading books? I'm trying to broaden my mind up in here. This one is about Koreans in Japan; did you know they were super discriminated against? I didn't! I'd never thought about it at all! What happened is Japan invaded Korea in 1910, and then they totally ruined the whole country, and some Koreans moved to Japan because at least there was food there, but they lived in shitty ghettos and Japanese people were dicks about it. Still sortof are.
Then after World War II the Allies split Korea in half: the Soviet Union got to do communism in the North and the United States got to do capitalism in the South, which I am literally a socialist and even I have to admit that the optics on that experiment are not great for my team. This part isn't really covered in the book though, I had to look it up myself. The book goes from 1910 to 1989 but it only alludes to the two-country thing.
Anyway some of the Koreans were Christians, too, I guess? And this is basically a Christian novel, which, like, it's fine, Min Jin Lee's not an asshole about it, but you know how that Christian stuff goes. They're always doing wack stuff like taking inspiration from Bible quotes or, like, finding grace. Barf.
And it's a little sloppily written. There are a few actual typos, someone just left a stray word kicking around - but worse, a lot of it is just clunky as hell. Here's a sentence: "'Bando-San,' a woman shouted. It was the radical beauty on campus, Akiko Fumeki." See what I mean? Punched in the face by exposition! That's some fan fiction-level shit there. And it skips a little weirdly, too - a chapter will start like "Following [someone's] death, life was different" or something, and you're like oh, I guess they're dead now? Glad you didn't get all maudlin about it but maybe you overcorrected?
The book is fine. I love that I learned new things. It kept me turning the pages; I was invested in the characters. It's a little dumb and obvious. If multigenerational family epics set in other cultures are your thing, read it; if they're not, don't....more
I'm kicking off 2018 by reading some of the best of 2017. Here are the maybes; here's list.
Young people are always right abouI'm kicking off 2018 by reading some of the best of 2017. Here are the maybes; here's list.
Young people are always right about everything. Every generation picks a couple of fights and sometimes the older generation thinks they're silly - "Our fights were good," they say: "these fights, though, seriously?" But young people are always right.
One of the many clever ideas Naomi Alderman throws out over the course of her feminist allegory is that The Power - the power to generate electricity, mostly as a weapon - manifests first in the young, and they can pass it on to olds by...well, by literally shocking them. (Keep in mind that you don't know for a fact that you can't give olds super powers by electrocuting them in real life, and there's only one way to be sure.) I was reminded of a few on this whole sexual harassment reckoning, older women all "They call this sexual harassment?" Well, I mean, they do now.
And there's an avalanche more clever ideas where that came from. I love the "Years later..." framing device: In A World dominated by women, some dude is submitting this manuscript to his leering, sexist boss (her name is Naomi) and he keeps having to butter her up by saying things like "You're one of the good ones." "Of course women are naturally more violent," she womansplains to him: "They're genetically coded to protect babies."
If this all sounds a bit Oh-So-Clever, well, okay, yes. What surprised me about this book is it's basically YA fiction. Really good YA fiction, don't get me wrong! But it's, you know, it's exciting and it explains itself clearly. I don't know, it shows up on the NY Times list and I sortof expected something subtle. Subtle isn't what this is.
But it's also extremely entertaining. It turns out that Alderman's mentor is Margaret Atwood - like seriously, Atwood was involved in helping her get this book written - and that makes perfect sense to me. I was reminded of The Handmaid's Tale a few times while reading it: both books do this thing where part of your brain is like "Well that's not realistic at all!" - genital mutilation, in this case - and someone has to remind you that it totally happens IRL. I could see this being a formative book for a whole bunch of teenagers who are about to go to college and pick brand new fights. Some of the olds, you know, they might - get ready, I really am going to say it - drumroll - they might find it....shocking....more
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