Summer Reading #5

Freedom, being one of the most eagerly awaited novels of 2010, has already been reviewed all over the place, so I don't have much to add to all of that. If you've stopped by before, you may know that I'm a bit of a Franzen fangirl (a Franzgirl?), although I think I have greater enthusiasm for his essays than his novels, which is not to say I dislike his novels at all.

Once again, Franzen has successfully, painfully captured human beings' scope for truly banal unhappiness, and if this ending is anything to go by, I think it's starting to get to him. I suppose it must be difficult to be a bird enthusiast without cultivating at least some sense of hopefulness, in something. In The Discomfort Zone, Franzen describes the propensity for bird watching to transform into a competitive sport (which may have some bearing upon the nature of familial and conjugal interactions in Freedom), but surely it is also, ultimately, an optimistic pastime?

Considering that, then, perhaps my conclusions about Freedom are unfair. Am I alone in thinking that in the last quarter of the novel, some punches were unsatisfactorily pulled? Should I try to be more open to the pure, unadulterated joy of catching a glimpse of an almost-endangered warbler in the wild?

Telling the truth, helplessly

Obviously, not a lot of blogging is getting done. I am reading a lot though, mostly because I am reading to avoid spending time on set texts for my class. How will this affect my final essay? Who can tell.


I have almost finished Sloane Crosley's latest collection of essays, How Did You Get This Number. I love good writing about the mundane (or not-so-mundane - I guess not everybody has run over a bear in a car full of bridesmaids) bits and pieces of everyday life. Imagine a younger, midwestern-but-now-New-Yorker, female David Sedaris. Anyone who uses the phrase "I was going to get the shit smote out of me" is fine by me.

Great American Novels

I have been struggling my way through this, for class:

so have failed utterly to have any interesting book/blog related thoughts. I'm disappointed in myself for not enjoying this more - for some (obviously unfounded) reason, I thought James would be my cup of tea. Perhaps it will all become clear at the end?

I had to have a brief mental-palate-cleansing read, so I went for this:


the eighth and final book in Sara Shepard's unapologetically trashy and fabulous Pretty Little Liars series. Henry would be rolling in his grave, but I have no regrets (and now I FINALLY know who killed Ali - YAY)!

BEE, again

Fiona Crawford has posted a great write up of Bret Easton Ellis' recent appearance at the Byron Bay Writer's Festival over on The Book Burgler, for those who are so inclined.




Obviously I am a huge fan of Ellis' work and it was a great pleasure to hear him speak at his Oxford Art Factory event on this tour. I was unsure of what to expect (it's foolish but easy to mistake authors for their characters, isn't it?), but I was surprised and pleased to find him a very engaging, self-deprecating and clever guy. I haven't yet started Imperial Bedrooms but I am looking forward to it all the more now.

The first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone

Going on holidays has killed my blog momentum (and trying to read postmodernist Mexican literature (at least, that's what I think it is) that isn't really to my taste has killed my reading momentum).

I will say though, that these are my favourite non-fiction books, and Franzen is probably my favourite non-fiction writer.



[Charles] Schulz wasn't an artist because he suffered. He suffered because he was an artist. To keep choosing art over the comforts of a normal life - to grind out a strip every day for fifty years; to pay the very steep psychic price for this - is the opposite of damaged. It's the sort of choice that only a tower of strength and sanity can make.

There is such tenderness to his writing, and clarity, even when he writes about his own doubt or guilt or failure to understand. It has been a while since I read How to be Alone but his essays on the Chicago post office and reading William Gaddis (a novelist who I am sure I will never actually be capable of reading) are still vivid in my mind.

Read these books, they will make you feel good about having a brain.

Fear never shows up and the party ends early

I decided to re-read Less Than Zero when I found out that Bret Easton Ellis' forthcoming novel will be a kind of sequel, Clay and Friends 20 years on (great interview here). I have a bit of strange relationship with Ellis' books, in that I don't find them at all pleasurable to read but for some reason, I keep coming back. Is it because I want to cultivate hipsterish literary taste, or is there really something more there?


My first introduction - and I'm sure I'm not alone in this - to Ellis' work was American Psycho. I picked it up in my late teens in order to tick some late-20th-Century controversial literature boxes (see also: Trainspotting, which, incidentally, remains one of my favourite re-reads today as well - there goes that hipsterish taste again). American Psycho is a kind of good/bad introduction to Ellis' work, as it is what Ellis does best, but obscured, or maybe so grotesquely magnified it is difficult to recognise when you look directly at it. I recall being astounded, not by the violence, although that could be pretty heart-stopping at times, but by the absence of... something. Humanity? I don't think that's quite right, because really, on reflection I think Patrick Bateman could be embued with more pathos and desperation than any other character I've encountered. His lack of humanity is humanising, if that is ever possible. Whatever that absence is, I found it far more terrifying than any of Bateman's acts of unbelievable violence.


It's been a few years since I first encountered Less Than Zero - I first picked it up in 2005, which I realise now was 20 years after its first publication. It's hard to conceive of 1985 as being that long ago, but now that I revisit it, it strikes me as a surprisingly modern novel, despite the characters' continual discussions of The Human League. It could be yesterday, or this morning. It's vicious and funny and thoughful. But the lack, that gaping, suffocating black hole of emptiness that he somehow captures by cataloguing the minutiae of his characters' actions and reactions is everywhere. In this second reading of Less Than Zero I am choking on it. I have read and re-read that passage where Clay describes his dream of being sucked underground, fear and paranoia of the house sliding down into the canyon during the nights of rain, prank calls, a dead fish in the jacuzzi. The city is a monster and we are all monsters.

I'm not sure what has changed - my expectations, my tastes? - but this is incredible.

Dead Men are Heavier Than Broken Hearts

My first run-in with Philip Marlowe and Raymond Chandler. Having recently seen the film for the first time, it hard to shake thoughts of Bogart's crackling delivery. It seems like a role he was born to play.

Although I enjoyed every word of the novel, in some ways perhaps the film is more interesting, or at least more complicated. The mystery of the novel is almost straightforward when compared to the opaque twists and turns of the film - a lot of that is due to the limitations of the Production Code, and the fact many of the subtleties used to get around those limitations are lost on a modern audience (ie, me). Still, I find it interesting the film is able to create a shadowy, almost occult noir-land of organised (and disorganised!) crime and ultimately ends with Marlowe all loved-up, whereas the novel is much less... spooky? But it concludes in rather a different way. Maybe I'm overstating this; of course the film would've been less useful as a Bogart/Bacall vehicle had they not wound up together in the end. I don't think it rings false though, their deadpan "I suppose I'm in love with you"s seem true to Chandler's form.

Get up angel, you look like a Pekingese.

It can be difficult to overcome the book/film obstacle - whichever you have encountered first will likely inform your experience of the other. In this instance, my reading of the novel had a little more Bacall in its Mrs Regan, a little more smoke and fog, and no doubt my next watching of the film will seem a little less romantic, if it was romantic at all.

I think my current studies have seeped into my reading so that I can't think about this novel without thinking about what its implications are for the idea of the American social order. There's plenty to say on that note, but I'll save that for the essay.

None of This Is Made Up

The Age of Innocence

"The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergences as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation."

Edith, you slay me! And everyone else, for that matter. It has been about eight years since I last read this book. When thinking of it since I've been mostly preoccupied with that melancholy final scene and I had entirely forgotten how funny and brutal she is.