At the Breakfast Table with the Morning Newspaper, L. A. Ring, 1898
First, some light housekeeping. About two months ago my Twitter was hacked by a lovely Polish man looking for some ransom. It hasn’t been returned to me, so if you know anyone at Twitter who might be able to help, drop me a line.
And now, the first in an occasional series (I will not be held to self-imposed artificial timelines) of some of the best of what I’ve been reading lately, from all sorts of sources. I’m a vibes-based reader, the kind of person who looks for books set in hot, dusty places and then reads A Place in the Country and five similar novels in one gulp, or settles into three books that are all set in London after World War II, the kind where career girls dry their stockings on radiator pipes and put dimes in the gas meter when they arrive home. The unity (and divergences) let me look out for patterns and stylistic choices I can’t always see otherwise.
So here are some places where my mind has been lately. If you’re interested, I’d love to hear in the comments about what you've been reading and enjoying.
1. The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk
Perhaps, like me, you experience a strange joy when you discover that a perfectly wonderful novel has escaped your grasp until now. My stomach gets especially fizzy-feeling when it’s a novel by an author whom I mistakenly believe I’ve deeply read, like Rachel Cusk. I read her nonfiction first, years ago, when critics (by which I mean amateurs and some pros) ripped her a new one for daring to write honestly about the knockout punch to the ego that is motherhood (in her memoir A Life’s Work). Then I read some of her early fiction like Arlington Park, her essays, her divorce memoir Aftermath, the Faye Trilogy of course, and her recent stuff like The Second Place. But I’d missed The Bradshaw Variations, a novel that feels a lot like a sketch that Picasso might have made just before he went ahead and reformed modern art with Cubism. It’s the last novel she completed before she wrote Outline (the first book of the Faye Trilogy, followed by Transit and Kudos) and you can read it as a bridge between her limber earlier work and the genius of what Sally Rooney called the “formal perfection” of her more recent writing.
The Bradshaw Variations is concerned with typical Cuskian things: how the physical structure of a house turns us towards or away from our families, how much of a marriage is played out in public vs. private, how much an author can know that a character doesn’t. And plot-wise, it has a classic marital premise: Thomas and Tonie have been married for years but have suddenly switched roles: she’s gone to work in a demanding, full time academic job and he is staying at home with their tween daughter. But the significant, unique pleasure of The Bradshaw Variations is in Cusk-as-psychologist, ripping these people to shreds and patching them back up again. She diagnoses a character’s ruthless cleaning as “hoping to arrive at beauty by the route of annihilation.” Middle-age is “the phase of atemporality that lies between childbearing and visible decay.” And as for art? “It is, perhaps, a distillation of the difficulty … a kind of knowledge after the fact, a description of what cannot be known until it is lived, by which time it is too late to know it.” I was a little afraid of my own self-judgment while I read it.
2. Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter about how to spend your time
I never know what to do with my time. I’m either bemoaning how little there is, or recriminating myself for spending it poorly, or standing in my living room, literally spinning in a circle rather than decide how to use it. (Time is all we have! is what the panicked little voice that is and isn’t me says to itself.) So I assumed Oliver Burkeman’s 2021 book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, would just be something else that I’d guiltily look into and then fail to heed properly. Instead, it rewired me. Though he has ostensibly written a productivity book, Burkeman is essentially anti-productivity, in the sense that he thinks efficiency tips and tricks are all just slightly varied ways of going about life all wrong. Instead, Four Thousand Weeks, and his twice-monthly newsletter called The Imperfectionists, offer a kind of holistic (but never preachy, blech) approach to thinking about your limited (it’s true, sorry) time on this planet. Burkeman’s basic philosophy is this: we all believe we are just a few life hacks away from summiting our To-Do lists and living a much simpler, less frantic existence. But we’ll never climb that high. As he writes, “You should give up on trying to reach a phase of life that’s problem-free. … You should stop trying to clear the decks and instead just get on with doing stuff that matters, while tolerating the fact that the decks aren’t clear.” God, this newsletter sustains me, mostly by serving as an oft-needed reminder that we cannot plan or optimize our way out of pain or difficulty or inconvenience.
3. “A Case Study” by Daniel Mason
I must admit that I don’t follow the short story scene. Some critics do; they read every new issue of Granta and Tin House in an attempt to stay on top of things. (Also, I presume, because they enjoy short stories.) My slow evolution into A Short Story Person is a tale for another time, but Daniel Mason’s “A Case Study,” which is in the Spring 2023 issue of The Paris Review, is still sliding around in my chest right now. It’s the story of a patient/psychologist relationship over decades: though skeptical at first, therapy proves “immensely comforting” for the young man, “as if he had both left something in the office and taken something with him.” But over the course of time, the patient learns that the psychologist may have a very particular self-interest in his case, which leads him to further and further doubts about the entire endeavor. As someone who frequently thinks about the bond between therapist and patient, how estranged it is from typical relationships, how beneficial but mysterious, “A Case Study” burrowed into my mind. Is there a balance to be paid, beyond the fee, for such vital services? Can both parties enter and exit the relationship on equal footing? Is a patient’s story partially owned by the person who heal their mind?
4. Andrea Barrett’s Fiction
If Mary Oliver and John McPhee had teamed up to write historical fiction, you’d get Andrea Barrett. At least, that’s my working theory. A few months ago I read Barrett’s story collections Natural History, Ship Fever, Servants of the Map, and Archangel, along with her novel The Voyage of the Narwhal, all in a row. (The Air We Breathe is up next.) Barrett’s calm, rhythmic voice is so alluring, like a breeze rustling a field of wildflowers, that it’s hard to move onto flashier, more pyrotechnic work after reading her. Plus, there’s the added benefit that many of her characters show up multiple times across her stories, making her oeuvre a tangled web that reveals itself in increments.
Her fixation is on the natural world, and particularly on the moments of transcendence (or despondency) that often accompany scientific inquiry. In “The English Pupil” the great Swedish classifier Carl Linnaeus rides his sleigh through the snow-crusted countryside in 1777, one last foray out into the world before his famous memory abandons him entirely. In Ship Fever’s title story, a gorgeous 90+ page novella, an Irish immigrant named Nora lands at a quarantine station outside Quebec; she recovers from typhus with the help of a physician and incidentally becomes party to one of the most horrific medical disasters in history. In other stories young botanists reject Scripture to embrace Darwin, husbands travel the daunting Himalayas to make their name and fortune, and young artists attempt to climb the ranks of scientific Philadelphia in the nineteenth century.
But Barrett isn’t bogged down by factoids and minutiae: she’s a great chronicler of the disappointments that loom large for any innovator, and she’s especially drawn to stories of the women who are often unjustly tucked between the olds of natural history. Most importantly, her work breathes and heaves and forms long, if tenuous chains between all living things. She’s an under-read wonder.
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