Novel Readings

I’ve been meaning to catch up on my recent reading for weeks now: it has been a month since I wrote up Sarah Moss’s Ripeness, and it isn’t as if I haven’t read anything since then! The problem (for posting, anyway) is that I haven’t read anything that made me want to write about it. I didn’t used to use that as an excuse: I just wrote up everything! And in the process I often found I did have things to say. Let’s see if that happens this time as I go through my recent reading.

I had put in some holds on some lighter reading options that all seemed to come in at once. The timing wasn’t bad, as I was too distracted by the rush to get the term underway when the lockout ended to dig in to anything very demanding. Even as diversions, though, none of these were particularly satisfying reads: Katherine Center’s The Love-Haters seemed contrived to me; Beth O’Leary’s Swept Away was (as Miss Bates had already warned me in her review) good until it wasn’t; Linda Holmes’s Back After This wasn’t terrible but it also seemed contrived—a reaction that I realize may be less about the books than about my chafing for some reason at the necessary contrivance of romance plots. But I’m rereading Holmes’s Evvie Drake Starts Over now and liking it as much as I did before, so maybe it is at least partly the books’ fault that they seemed so formulaic.

I read Patrick Modiano’s So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood for my book club, which met to discuss it on Wednesday. It was the first Modiano any of us had read, and we chose it because we wanted to follow up Smilla’s Sense of Snow with something that offered a more literary twist on the mystery genre. So You Don’t Get Lost certainly does that—maybe, we thought, it goes (for our tastes) too far in the other direction: it is so far away from being plot-driven that, as any reader of the novel will know, following the plot is like pushing on a cloud. I think I would have found it annoying if the novel had been longer, but it’s novella-length, and once I realized all the noir premises and promises of the opening were going to remain unfulfilled, I enjoyed just going where it took me. It is wonderfully atmospheric, and Modiano managed to keep me wondering about what had happened while also frustrating my curiosity at almost every turn. “In the end,” his narrator says, “we forget the details of our lives that embarrass us or are too painful. We just lie back and allow ourselves to float along calmly over the deep waters, with our eyes closed”—which is not a bad description of how I decided to read the book. I don’t think I want to read anything else by Modiano, though. For a better-informed commentary, read Tony’s post.

I read Kate Cayley’s Property, which I thought was well written and artfully constructed but (again, for my taste) too much so, too deliberate, never gripping until its final sequence, which then annoyed me by being manipulative and melodramatic. Kerry liked it better than I did. I didn’t dislike it; I just never really wanted to pick it up again when I’d put it down, and I also kept forgetting which character was which, which in a fairly short book with a tight cast of characters seems like it might not be all my fault.

I read Lily King’s Heart the Lover because I’m reviewing it for the TLS, so you’ll have to wait to find out what I think about it! (I’m still figuring that out as I reread it, anyway: I can say that it is a book that has so far elicited a lot of equivocation from me!)

I am currently reading Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy. This too I am not eager to pick up again after I put it down, but when I do pick it up, I keep coming across hard-hitting gems of sentences (is that a mixed metaphor?) “Wherever you turn,” says narrator Tove, “you run up against your childhood and hurt yourself because it’s sharp-edged and hard, and stops only when it has torn you completely apart.” On the brink of youth,

Now the last remnants [of childhood] fall away from me like flakes of sun-scorched skin, and beneath looms an awkward, an impossible adult. I read in my poetry album while the night wanders past the window—and, unawares, my childhood falls silently to the bottom of my memory, that library of the soul from which I will draw knowledge and experience for the rest of my life.

It seems unfair to characterize as a “reading slump” a period that includes both this and (in its very different register) the Modiano, and yet that is how the past few weeks have felt. Good thing that today in class we began what will be nearly a month of work on David Copperfield! Dickens has rescued me before and already, six chapters in, I can tell that whether or not I read any other books in the next little while that excite me, he’s going to show me all over again what a great reading experience is like.