book-review – Novel Readings

Novel Readings 2024: Part II

January 2, 2025January 3, 2025Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

What a nice conversation unfolded under my previous post! I suppose it isn’t surprising that those of us who gather online to share our love of books also share a lot of experiences with books, including making often difficult decisions about what to keep. Acquiring books is the easy part, as we all know, especially because our various social channels are constantly alerting us to tempting new ones. I have really appreciated everyone’s comments.

Now, about the books I actually read and wrote about in 2024!

My Year in Reading

When Trevor and Paul once again invited me to share my ‘book of the year’ with them for their year-end episode, it took me no time at all to decide on J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country. I haven’t had any second thoughts about that choice—it is, as I said to them, pretty much a perfect book. But I think there was some recency bias in my selection: going back through my notes and posts, I see two other books that I loved every bit as much. The first of them, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, was one of the first books I read in 2024 and I thought it was completely marvelous, so I was thrilled to see it go on to win the Booker Prize. The second, Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World, is a thoughtful and wide-ranging and sensitive and thought-provoking meditation on art and life: I read it in a library copy, but I keep thinking (after all that talk about pruning and purging!) that I’d like to have my own copy so that I can go back to it whenever I want. I do wish there was a fully illustrated edition—it would have to be very expensive, I suppose, but it would be worth it.

There are another dozen or so titles that stand out to me as particularly rich reading experiences. My blogging was a bit fitful in 2024, but usually when a book really excited me (for better or for worse) it got its own post, instead of being included in a hastier round-up, so it wouldn’t be hard to find out which ones they were by just scrolling back through my year’s posts! But I will highlight a few. One absolute delight, which I did not in fact write up individually (but I read it in February, the month I actually moved, so it’s amazing that I wrote anything at all!) was Herbert Clyde Lewis’s Gentleman Overboard. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Its premise is so simple (it’s about a man who falls overboard—surprise!) but between his thoughts as he tries to stay afloat and the reactions of those left behind on the ship, the little episode takes on real philosophical, even existential, weight without every becoming ponderous. Another book, in a completely different style, that also takes on Big Issues is Joan Barfoot’s Exit Lines, a darkly comic novel about what makes life worth living, and who has the right to decide what those reasons have run out. Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment, which I reviewed for the TLS, also takes into questions about the meaning of life, but with such delicacy and tenderness; it is my favorite of Perry’s novels to date (although if your tastes are more Gothic, I highly recommend Melmoth, which I thoroughly enjoyed). I suppose it stands to reason that someone whose favorite novelist overall is George Eliot would appreciate novels with a philosophical dimension. The challenge, as Eliot herself noted, is never to “lapse from the picture to the diagram,” and I think each of these novels in its own way invites us to contemplate important questions without becoming programmatic.

I read two fabulous memoirs in 2024: Mark Bostridge’s In Pursuit of Love (which deserved but did not get its own post) and Sarah Moss’s My Good Bright Wolf (which did). Bostridge’s book is actually a hybrid of biography and autobiography. It is mostly about the sad life of Adele Hugo, Victor Hugo’s younger daughter, who broke away from her father’s overbearing presence and confining household to follow the soldier she’d fallen in love with all the way to Halifax and then to Jamaica. Unfortunately, he was not in love with her, which makes the whole saga both more dramatic—imagine the daring it took, in the mid 19th century, for a young woman to cross the oceans to get what she wanted—and more tragic. Bostridge weaves into this reflections on his own relationship with his father and his own pursuits of love. It’s a compelling narrative on both counts, and the local colour added to its interest, as Bostridge retraced Adele’s journey to Halifax and explored her haunts here (and had dinner with me, incidentally).

Ann Schlee’s Rhine Journey has been highlighted by many others in their ‘best of’ lists; I was very impressed by it too, as I was by Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding. Neither of these is exactly a feel-good read! Another book that has consistently had a lot of buzz in my reading circles is Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man; I finally read it and yes, it is indeed excellent. I think I consider In a Lonely Place a slightly better novel (more subtle, more artful) but The Expendable Man is so clever and does such important things within its noir-ish form that I couldn’t resist adding it to the reading list for my Mystery & Detective Fiction class this coming term. I was not so enthralled by Claudia Piñeiro’s Time of the Flies, which was the least intelligible and satisfying of her novels for me so far. I got a lot out of reading and thinking about Denise Mina’s The Long Drop, but I’m still not entirely on board with true crime as a genre—although, perhaps inconsistently, I am not bothered by historical true crime, and along those lines I quite enjoyed my King’s colleague Dean Jobb’s A Gentleman and a Thief, about the jazz-age jewel thief Arthur Barry.

In lighter reading, I loved David Nicholls’s You Are Here—he seems to be a really reliable sort of writer, one whose fiction is accessible without being hasty or flimsy. I still think often about Us, which I read well before my own separation, not because its protagonists are like my own family at all, but because it shows them grappling with changing needs, and just with change, in really perceptive but not melodramatic ways. I discovered (belatedly!) Katherine Center and found much to enjoy in her intelligent romances; I read several of Abby Jimenez’s novels and then decided I’d had enough.

My book club got on a French kick that began with Diane Johnson and took us through de Maupassant, Colette, and Dumas (fils). (I also read Zola’s La Bête Humaine—the One Bright Book people made me do it! Ok, they didn’t make me, but I was inspired to read it so I could properly appreciate their episode. The novel is . . . a lot! And Sarah Turnbull’s astute and lively Almost French was an unanticipated connection between these French books and the other memoirs I read.) We chose Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera for our last book of the year and it is another I highly recommend, especially if you read and liked Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Vera has a lot in common with Rebecca—the whole plot, really—but the tone is quite different, darker, I would say, because the shadows in Rebecca are Gothic ones and so can be shaken off more easily than the more chillingly realistic menace von Arnim offers up.

If I had to identify a low point of my reading year, it would probably be Noémi Kiss-Deáki’s Mary and the Rabbit Dream, though I’m a bit reluctant to characterize it that way. There is so much that’s interesting about it, and its style (while off-putting to me) does have an idiosyncratic kind of freshness to it: it doesn’t sound like any other book I’ve read, not just in 2024 but maybe ever! Was the author being innovative, taking an artistic risk in writing it this way? or is she just not a very good writer? If you read it, I’d be interested to know what you decided!

These are not all the books I read in 2024, of course, but they’re the ones that stand out when I look over my notes and posts. One other change in my book habits seems worth mentioning: I experimented quite a bit with audiobooks this year, partly because of all those extra hours I’ve found in the day, which have meant more time on things like crafts and puzzles. In the past I have not had much success with listening to books, but some of them were great. I would especially highlight Dan Stevens’s wonderful reading of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None; Naomi Klein’s reading of her own (exceptionally thought-provoking) Doppelganger, which is really worth reading (or listening to) as we head into the second (sigh) Trump presidency; and David Grann’s The Wager, read by Dion Graham, which kept me spellbound.

My Year in Writing

I’m a bit disappointed in how much (or, I should say, how little) writing I got done in 2024. It was my slowest year yet for reviews at the TLS, with just two, of Perry’s Enlightenment and, “in brief,” Sara Maitland’s True North. (I am working now on a review of Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June, so they haven’t quite forgotten me!) I reviewed three novels for Quill and Quire in 2024: Elaine McCluskey’s The Gift Child, Jenny Haysom’s Keep, and Ayelet Tsabari’s Songs for the Brokenhearted. And I did my second review for the Literary Review of Canada, this time of Tammy Armstrong’s Pearly Everlasting, about a girl whose brother is a bear. (What is it with CanLit and bears?) I worked quite a bit on my “project” (I hate that word, but what else is there?) on Woolf’s The Years as a failed ‘novel of purpose’; I kept myself motivated by putting myself on the list for our department’s Speaker Series. I think the presentation went fine. As always, the tough questions I anticipated and fretted about greatly beforehand were not the ones asked, and in fact I really enjoyed the Q&A.

As we head into 2025, I am thinking about how to “level up” a bit in my writing. I do really like doing reviews that have a limited scope, which I find creatively and intellectually challenging (what can I do in just 700 words?), and also comfortable, in their specificity. But I used to sometimes publish more essayistic pieces too, and I want to give some thought to what else I might do along those lines. I also don’t want all that Woolf work to stop with the presentation version, but at the same time I find it very hard to feel motivated to turn it into an academic article, even though that was my initial plan. I think I need to crack it open and reconsider it as something that might (might!) work for the kind of venue I used to dream of getting into—and did, unsuccessfully, submit to a couple of times—in the past, something like the Hudson Review, maybe. A writer’s reach must exceed her grasp, right?

My previous, somewhat paradoxical, experience has been that writing more means I write more—when I kept up my blog more faithfully, for example, I published a lot more other writing as well. Of course, a lot of other things were different in the past, and I don’t know if 2025 will be the year I get my momentum back. I hope I at least try, because I don’t feel altogether satisfied with my recent output, which is not about “productivity” but more about the kinds of things we were talking about in a more tangible context in the comments on my previous post: what matters, what lasts, what remains.

And on that note—is it sobering or uplifting, aspirational or anxious? all of the above!—I think that’s a wrap on this year-end review. It’s hard to imagine that 2025 can be even a fraction as tumultuous as any of the past three years, personally at any rate (politically, on both sides of the border, it seems likely to be a big old mess). Whatever happens, at least there will always be books, right?

“Eternally Incomplete”: Han Kang, Greek Lessons

December 17, 2024Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

That instant, the memory of a long-lost word rises up in her, cut in half, and she tries to grab hold of it. She had learned that, in times past, there had been a word, a Hanja word . . . by which people had referred to the half-light just after the sun sets and just before it rises. A word that means having to call out in a loud voice, as the person approaching from a distance is too far away to be recognized, to ask who they are . . . This eternally incomplete, eternally unwhole word stirs deep within her, never reaching her throat.

I had looked at Greek Lessons more than once in the bookstore before Han Kang won the Nobel Prize, partly because she’s a writer I’d read about as far back as J. C. Sutcliffe’s excellent review of The Vegetarian in Open Letters Monthly, and partly because the title kept catching my eye: what could a novel called Greek Lessons be about? Language, certainly, and lessons, both of which already hint at themes of (mis)communication, translation, and (mis)understanding. It was the Nobel Prize that finally tipped the balance for me to try one of her books, and my curiosity about its (to me) promising title that made me choose Greek Lessons.

I’m not sure how I feel about Greek Lessons now that I’ve read it, and I’m not sure if I will read any of Han Kang’s other novels. I suspected going in that it was not exactly the kind of novel I typically like, but I often try to test these expectations, to challenge myself a bit. It’s funny, maybe, that a novel as quiet as Greek Lessons could be a challenge, but I often struggle to engage with novels that are more mood or experience than plot and character, that are evasive or elliptical—and Greek Lessons is all of these things.

It could hardly be more explicit or expository, of course, and still preserve its “aboutness” (a librarian’s term I find so useful!). An incredibly simple story, on the surface, about a relationship slowly and haltingly developing between a man who is losing his sight—the Greek teacher—and a woman who has lost her voice—one of his students—it is also a delicately profound, wistful exploration of gaps and silences and the struggle for expression, the ways language clarifies but also obscures our feelings and our meaning. One of the clearest accounts of this comes fairly late in the novel, when she is reflecting on why she stopped speaking: Greek Lessons – The Book Lounge

She knows that no single experience led to her loss of language.

Language worn ragged over thousands of years, from wear and tear by countless tongues and pens. Language worn ragged over the course of her life, by her own tongue and pen. Each time she tried to begin a sentence, she could feel her aged heart. Her patched and repatched, dried-up, expressionless heart. The more keenly she felt it, the more fiercely she clasped the words. Until all at once, her grip slackened. The dulled fragments dropped to her feet. The saw-toothed cogs stopped turning. A part of her, the place within her that had been worn down from hard endurance, fell away like flesh, like soft tofu dented by a spoon.

The paradox here, of course, is that Han Kang’s own language is expressive and evocative: surely that passage, ostensibly about the failure or abandonment of language, is its own rebuttal?

But other parts of the novel are more fragmented, especially (and again this felt paradoxical) as these two wounded, lost, and lonely people move closer to each other:

At one moment, moving your index finger over the flesh of my shoulder, you wrote.

Woods, you wrote, woods.

I waited for the next word.

Realizing that no next word was coming, I opened my eyes and peered at the darkness.

I saw the pale blur of your body in the darkness.

We were very close then.

We were lying very close and embracing each other.

It is perhaps a failing in me—in my reading habits, or my reading sensibility, or the way I have trained as a reader—that I find this kind of writing portentous rather than captivating or moving. It provokes a kind of impatience in me; it distracts me with attention to the writing, rather than immersion in the written.

희랍어 시간 | Greek Lessons - Han Kang And yet overall I was captivated by Greek Lessons, not so much by its particulars as by the melancholy space it created. Ordinarily I prefer some forward momentum in a novel (both cause and effect of my specializing in the 19th-century novel for so long!). What Greek Lessons offers instead, or this is how it felt to me, is a kind of time out, from that fictional drive and also from the busy world that these days overwhelms us with “content” and noise. In the intimacy of the portrayal of these two people, both of whom are retreating from the world partly by choice but mostly from the cruelty of their circumstances, there is some recognition of how hard it is to be ourselves, to be authentic, to see each other. The quiet sparseness of Han Kang’s writing could be seen as an antidote to the pressure to perform who we are and to insist on making space for ourselves out there. (Pressured by her therapist to break her silence, the woman thinks, “she still did not wish to take up more space.”)

The novel isn’t consoling, though: it’s deeply sad, almost tragic. Even the connection the two people achieve feels less like a triumph or a happy ending and more like a concession: this is the best we can do. “It felt like I was being kissed by time,” he thinks;

Each time our lips met, the desolate darkness gathered.

Silence piled up like snow, snow the eternal eraser.

Mutely reaching our knees, our waists, our faces.

Novels in November!

December 6, 2024December 6, 2024Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Vera November wasn’t a bad reading month, considering how busy things were at work—and considering that “work” also means reading a fair amount, this time around including most of both Lady Audley’s Secret and Tess of the d’Urbervilles for 19thC Fiction and an array of short fiction and poetry for my intro class. (I have not managed to get back into a routine of posting about my teaching, but I would like to, so we’ll see what happens next term.)

My book club has been trending French for a while: in November we wrapped up a thread that began with Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce back in April, then took us to Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami in July and Colette’s Gigi in August until we arrived at Dumas’s The Lady of the Camellias. I’ve known the story of Dumas’s novel for most of my life because La Traviata has been my favorite opera literally since I was 5, so what was most surprising to me about actually reading The Lady of the Camellias (in English translation, sorry) was how exactly Verdi’s opera maps its every scene. I kept half expecting the characters to burst into song! It was pretty funny to be reading a scandalous French novel at the same time as I was reading about Robert Audley’s scandalous habit of lazing about reading French novels—and I have to say that Dumas’s novel really lived up to the bad reputation French novels have in English novels of the period. Within just the first few chapters there’s an abortion and an exhumed corpse, and the novel as a whole is much more sexually explicit than any mainstream Victorian novel I’ve ever read. (I mean, by contemporary standards it’s more implicit or suggestive than graphic, but compared to the nearly imperceptible details of Hetty’s pregnancy in Adam Bede that so outraged some 19th-century critics, Dumas is really out there!). The Lady of the Camellias: Dumas fils, Alexandre, Kavanagh, Julie, Schillinger, Liesl: 9780143107026: Books - Amazon.ca

Somehow we didn’t find The Lady of the Camellias that conducive to discussion, and we decided we would head off in a fresh direction with our next book. At the suggestion of one of our members, we chose Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera, which I also read in November, and it is superb. It is a lot like Rebecca but more domestic realism and less Gothic melodrama, which actually makes it more chilling. I don’t think I’ve read a better account of the kind of coercive control he exercises over her, and her attempts—so loving at first, so gutting as it goes along—to figure out how she can possibly anticipate his ‘rules’ and demands and so avoid his unpredictable rages. As I got nearer and nearer to the end, I got more and more puzzled about how this naïve young second wife was going to get out from under the shadow of her predecessor and/or out of the clutches of her increasingly terrifying husband in the few pages that remained. I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone who hasn’t read the novel yet but I will say that I found it pretty devastating.

To Say Nothing of the Dog: A novel of the Oxford Time Travel series eBook : Willis, Connie: Amazon.ca: Kindle Store I felt the need for something cheering in the wake of The Election and landed on Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog: it was a great choice, genuinely comic and warm-hearted but also endlessly clever. I had a lot of LOL moments over its characterizations of the Victorian period, and it is chock full of literary allusions, many of which I’m sure I didn’t catch. A lot of them are to Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers: who know that Gaudy Night would be one of its main running references. I liked it enough that I’ve put The Doomsday Book on my Christmas wish list, even though I don’t ordinarily gravitate towards this genre.

I also really enjoyed Clare Chambers’s Shy Creatures, which I picked up on the strength of her earlier novel Small Pleasures. I remarked on Bluesky that it reminded me of Anne Tyler, in that it is a very unassuming book but everything it does, it does well—this kind of fiction can be too easily underestimated, IMHO, especially if, as with both Chambers and Tyler, the seeming simplicity of the writing is accompanied by quietly persistent insight into what makes people tick and what makes things matter. My first review assignment for 2025 is Tyler’s forthcoming Three Days in July and I am really looking forward to both reading and writing about it. I haven’t loved all of her novels equally, but I’m never sorry I’ve read one of them.

I managed to finish Claudia Pineiro’s Time of the Flies and wrote up my thoughts about it already; I also wrote about my rather vexing experience with Mary and the Rabbit Dream. In lighter options, I read my first novel by crime writer Jane Casey, Let the Dead Speak, and thought it was good enough that I will look for more by her the next time I’m at the library; and I read Katherine Center’s The Rom-Commers, which I enjoyed.

Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris: Turnbull, Sarah: 9781592400829: Books - Amazon.ca All in all, then, there was a lot of variety in both style and quality across the month. December is off to a good start: I’ve just finished Sarah Turnbull’s very engaging memoir Almost French (thank you, Helen!), and at the top of my TBR pile is Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, though I may actually turn next to Mark Bostridge’s The Pursuit of Love, which looks fascinating and which I also have a very small peripheral connection to because I had a nice dinner with Mark when he was in Halifax a few years ago doing research for it. (We have a mutual interest in Vera Brittain, which is how we first got in touch.) December is often one of my best reading months, with the constant busywork of the term calmed down and “just” (ha!) papers and exams to deal with. So thanks to all of you who have already put out your “best of 2024” lists, as I browse them happily looking for treasures to wrap up my own reading year.

Pest Control: Claudia Piñeiro, Time of the Flies

November 13, 2024Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Claudia Piñeiro’s Time of the Flies is, like the other novels of hers that I’ve read, a crime novel. Sort of. It is about a convicted murderer, Inés: she killed her husband’s lover, but at the time of the novel is out of prison and making her living running an environmentally friendly pest control business. Then she is approached by one of her clients to provide a deadly pesticide—so that she too can kill “a woman who wants to take my husband the same way yours was taken from you,” or so she tells Inés. Inés, who is not in general a murderous person and who also would very much like not to go back to prison, is tempted only because her friend Manca urgently needs treatment for breast cancer but can’t afford to pay to get it right away. The situation gets more complicated when a connection emerges between the client and the daughter Inés has not seen since her imprisonment.

Already, then, we are in what seems like a familiar mix for Piñeiro: women whose troubles and also whose transgressions are partly the result of individual characters and circumstances and partly symptoms of a world in which women are constrained, ideologically as well as socially and economically. What are the limits of justification for striking back against patriarchy, or against the men who embody, however unthinkingly, its privileges and advantages? What counts as a crime in a context that is itself systemically unjust? What do women owe each other, in the name of friendship, or motherhood, or solidarity?

This is promising stuff! But. By the end of the novel, its various strands, though cleverly plotted, did not cohere in a very satisfying way, I thought—but that isn’t what made Time of the Flies a struggle to read. Piñeiro is a good enough storyteller that the parts of the novel taking us through Inés’s decision and its consequences would have kept me engaged, and in fact those parts of the novel did. The challenge is that interspersed with Inés’s story there are long discursive sections made up of this kind of debate, or commentary, or polemic, or analysis: Time of the Flies by Claudia Piñeiro | Goodreads

Let’s set the insects and fumigations aside for a moment and get to the bigger issue: one woman killing another woman. Are you talking about Bonar or Inés? Bonar wants to do it, Inés already did it. And is the woman being killed just because she’s a woman? No. Yes. Is she the husband’s lover ‘just because she’s a woman’? In a way. Really? Don’t be silly. What are you saying? That it’s not femicide. I don’t agree. Yes, the killer has to be a man. Can’t a woman kill another woman just because she’s a woman? It’s not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorise where violence comes from and what we can do about it a lot more productively.* There are violent women. That’s the exception, she said, ‘on the whole‘, didn’t you hear? Inés isn’t violent. But she committed a violent crime: she killed Charo. That’s different. Charo’s death wasn’t femicide. Yes it was. Let’s not get bogged down in a theoretical legal debate when we’re not even the jury. What are we? We’re the chorus. We’re an assembly.

*Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things To Me, Haymarket Boks, 2014, p. 24.

Another sample, from near the end of the novel, after the revelation that a key instigation for the client’s murderous intentions is actually her daughter’s transitioning to become a son:

Should we have a go at the issue or just stick to Inés and her poison? What issue? The issue of Timo-Tamara, Tamara-Timo. We address every issue. Not necessarily. But why wouldn’t we address this issue? Because it’s one of the most polarising issues in twenty-first century feminism. We should proceed with caution. We are not cowards. Let’s be careful. I’ll sit this one out. If it’s controversial, all the more reason to debate it. Is it controversial in Latin America, though? Less so, we understand marginality. It has nothing to do with where you are in the world. It would seem that it does at least somewhat. Feminism has to be committed to gender freedom, to radical equality, and to alliances with other minoritarian positions, sexual dissidents. Transphobic feminism is no feminism, that cannot happen.* Are there really people who want to leave trans people out of feminism? Incredible. I can’t believe it. Yes, that’s what they want to do. I think we should take some time to think about it a bit more.

*Judith Butler, from the ‘Pandemia, democracia y feminismo’, Lecture Series, Universidad de Chile.

EL TIEMPO DE LAS MOSCAS / THE TIME OF THE FLIES. CLAUDIA PIÑEIRO. Libro en papel. 9786073825030 Clearly Piñeiro is doing something experimental here, creating a genre hybrid in a way that is actually reminiscent of Woolf’s The Pargiters, which I’ve been thinking about for some time because I’m fascinated by Woolf’s attempt to combine fiction and non-fiction, story and commentary. Woolf considered it an unsuccessful attempt and gave it up, turning her “novel-essay” into a novel (The Years) and an essay (Three Guineas). Maybe, I found myself thinking as I made my way to the end of Time of the Flies, Piñeiro should have done the same: if she didn’t trust her story to raise these questions for us, to stimulate those debates, she could have written a companion essay, or a different work altogether, leaving us the crime novel we expected when we picked the book up. It’s awkward, distracting, sometimes (to be honest) boring to have the plot, the suspense that Piñeiro is so good at building, constantly interrupted with these more abstract political sections, especially when they take such an uncertain form, voices themselves interrupting each other, offering competing arguments, incorporating references.

Until I copied out these samples, I hadn’t really thought about these as choric. I do find that a useful way to understand their role, and it also helps me appreciate that (I think) Piñeiro is trying to avoid didacticism by presenting topics precisely as debatable, though (as in the section on trans-inclusive feminism above) it is pretty clear that not every issue has, in her view, more than one legitimate side. Clarifying as the idea of a chorus is for the form of these sections, though, it doesn’t help me like them any better as part of my reading experience, which may e my own fault for resisting them as part of the book I thought I was reading. Hey, who spilled their feminist theory all over my mystery novel? But of course a lot of crime fiction has specifically feminist underpinnings, even before they got really explicit with the ‘feminist turn’ in the genre in the 1970s and 1980s. Piñeiro is just going much further, using her crime story as a provocation for feminist analysis.

The Body Lies: A novel eBook : Baker, Jo: Amazon.ca: Kindle Store That might be a good explanation for the hybrid nature of Time of the Flies, but it doesn’t necessarily make the book a success. I’d probably have to read it again (and again) to make up my mind about that, which I might do, given that I offer a course called “Women and Detective Fiction.” Last time around I almost assigned Elena Knows for it. Another title I’ve considered for the book list is Jo Baker’s The Body Lies, which is quite unlike Time of the Flies except that it too is a crime novel that turns out to be about crime novels, and especially about the roles and depiction of women in them, the voyeurism of violence against women, the prurient fixation on their wounded or dead bodies, the genre variations that both do and don’t reconfigure women’s relationship to the stories we tell about crime and violence. I thought Baker’s novel was excellent. I certainly didn’t have any trouble finishing it, in contrast to the concerted effort I made to get to the end of Time of the Flies. I really did want to know what happened! But I felt like I had to wade through a lot of other stuff to get there. If I do reread it, maybe that stuff will turn out to be the real substance of the book.

September Reading: Mostly Light

October 6, 2024Rohan Maitzen13 Comments

I read a lot less in September than I did in August—which makes sense, of course, given the return to the many immediate demands of the teaching term. That said, it seems fair to say that in addition to the books I’ll mention here, I also read all of Bleak House for class and most of Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting (though I didn’t actually finish it until October).

Because I was busy and distracted, most of my personal reading was on the lighter side. I read another of Katherine Center’s novels, Hello Stranger: I liked this one quite a bit, even if the Big Surprise was painfully obvious all along (if you’ve read it, you know what I mean). I don’t think that’s a flaw in the novel, really; it creates a cute bit of suspense and dramatic irony as we wait for the penny to drop for our heroine.

I also read two novels by Abby Jimenez: The Friend Zone and The Happy Ever After Playlist. I enjoyed both of these as well, maybe The Friend Zone a bit more, though (and this is definitely just a matter of personal preference) I wish Jimenez would keep her hero and heroine apart longer. The trend in contemporary romances seems be to heat things up really quickly and then draw us along to the HEA not through sexual tension and the push-pull of figuring out if this is the right person but through some kind of crisis that breaks the central pair up (often in a very emotionally fraught way) and eventually gets resolved. I am generalizing from a pretty small sample, as I don’t read tons of romance (contemporary or other) these days. But the pacing of a lot of the ones I do read just feels a bit off to me, because the hot sex happens too soon and then there has to be some other kind of tension to provide the momentum. Imagine Heyer’s Devil’s Cub if Mary and Vidal actually got together a single moment sooner than they actually do in the novel! The delight is knowing they will get there eventually but not until everything else has been properly sorted. Does anyone else feel this way with current romances, or is my reaction idiosyncratic, or (another reasonable possibility) am I just reading the wrong ones (not in general, just for me)? Finally, another lighter read, also basically a romance but packaged a bit more as comic fiction, was Eleanor Lipmann’s Ms Demeanor. This looked fun but in the end I didn’t really find it so: it was OK, but did not particularly interest or entertain me.

The other three novels I finished in September were more “literary” or serious, and none of them really excited me either. Jane Smiley’s A Dangerous Business looked like exactly my kind of thing, and I have quite enjoyed some of her other novels (especially Private Life), but I have already forgotten almost everything about it except its premise. It’s a Western, with a protagonist who works in a brothel and begins trying to detect some mysterious disappearances inspired by her reading of Poe—you can see why I expected to enjoy it more than I did! In contrast, I picked up Anne Michaels’s Held in spite of suspecting it was not for me, because a lot of smart readers have raved about it (including Sam Sacks, one of my most-trusted critics!) and I thought it was worth a try. I suppose it was, but it has that “unfinished” approach to fiction that usually leaves me wishing the writer would actually do their job and write the book, not scatter fragments artfully around gaps. Kent Haruf’s Where You Once Belonged held my attention raptly until the very last page—and then I felt let down by its just ending and not really concluding. It’s not nearly as tender a novel as the ones of his I have liked the best (Plainsong and especially Our Souls At Night); I think if it had been the first of his I read, I would probably not have sought out more.

The Bee Sting was by far my favorite September reading (besides Bleak House of course), but by the time I finally finished it a few days ago, I was honestly a bit tired of it and just really wanted to get to whatever catastrophe was clearly going to happen at the end. (It’s clear from the outset and also from the jacket blurb that it will end in catastrophe, so the suspense is from wondering exactly what that will look like and how bad it will actually be—which is, it turns out, pretty bad.)

While I was reading The Bee Sting and mostly enjoying it, I was also thinking about Murray’s earlier hit novel Skippy Dies, which sticks in my memory less because of the novel itself and more because I so distinctly remember ordering it online late one night in 2010 because I was hearing so much about it and feeling so eager to be part of the wider book conversations I was just starting to participate in. At that time I didn’t buy a lot of books, as (given our overall financial situation and immediate priorities) they still seemed like relatively expensive luxuries, especially with good libraries close at hand. Of course I did always buy books, for myself and as gifts, but I was careful about it, not casual, and clicking a few buttons on my computer and having a book turn up in my mailbox a few days later was both a rarity and a novelty—and a sign that the balance of my world was shifting a bit in some new direction. As I recall, I ordered Skippy Dies from the Book Depository, which was still independent in those days, but I’m so old I can also remember when Amazon was a brand new and thrilling phenomenon—a giant online bookstore that seemed to have everything!—rather than an evil empire.

I realize this is not a particularly momentous memory, and I’m surprised how vivid it is. Clearly that small action felt significant at the time, though, and recalling it now adds to my current rather vertiginous sense of time passing and of the pieces of my life shifting around yet again.