What Are We Reading?

June 2007

The world of fiction has delightfully exploded in the months I went underground to finish work on my novel, with enticing new works by Michael Chabon, Sherman Alexie, Ian McEwan, Peter Ho Davies, Nathan Englander, and Michael Ondaatje out and in bookstores. Lauren Fox's Still Life with Husband and Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics call from my nightstand. The fiction has never been better (see Granta 97 below). The irony is apparently how little time Americans spend reading books anymore. I'm puzzling about that, since Oprah's Book Club proved emphatically that people are hungry for engrossing stories and will buy and read them in droves. It matters who is doing the recommending, of course. But undeniably, our lives have sped up with the Internet, cell phones, and a peculiarly American obsession with work that leaves everyone too tired to consider much else at the end of the day, including the political activism everyone talks about but few have the energy to actually pursue (e.g., Why are we still in Iraq?). So, I guess it comes down to a personal decision to slow down, shut off the computer, turn off the cell phone a few hours a day, and spend some quality time with ourselves and some good reading material. Here are a few things I've enjoyed recently.

Granta 97: The Best of Young American Novelists 2 - This British literary journal has been prescient in picking the finest writers of a generation, beginning in 1983 when they fingered Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Martin Amis in their first Best of Young British Novelists edition. Their first Best of Young American Novelists issue appeared in 1996, and included Lorrie Moore, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Edwidge Dandicat and Sherman Alexie. They also missed a glaring few, as editor Ian Jack points out in his introduction to the 2007 issue, such as Nicholson Baker, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Richard Powers and Donna Tartt. Ouch. At any rate, I've rarely read a collection of stories featuring so many authors - 21 to be exact - that has left me more exhilarated. Some shift is afoot in this generation of writers, and it bodes well for the present and future of fiction. Reading these pieces, I caught myself thinking about the Indie musician Sufjan Stevens, and about bands like The Decemberists, The National, The Postal Service, and Canada's Arcade Fire. Not that these artists sound in any way alike. The connections are more about expansiveness in the music of their generation (like the writers, they are roughly 25-35 years of age), and the hugeness of their ambitions: complex instrumentation, references to historical or classical forms, lyrics of disarming honesty with heady flights of imagination. It struck me that this new batch of novelists is working with the same sort of lush ambition, and a straight-ahead clarity of observation that can cause a reader to look up from the page and grin in surprise. The stories that stayed with me longest, Christopher Coake's "That First Time," and Dara Horn's "Passover in New Orleans," have little in common besides straightforward storytelling and moments of astonishing insight, but honestly, this is a volume of writers worth keeping an eye on.

The Namesake (A Mariner Book, Houghton Mifflin Company) by Jhumpa Lahiri - I had been meaning to read this for years and then finally Mira Nair's movie was going to come out, and I couldn't bear not to have read the book first. I am sooo glad I did. Lahiri's prose is so deceptively simple, it's easy to lose track of the complexity of the story she tells with such economical precision. The movie had its pleasures, but the richness of emotional detail in the book never quite makes it to the screen. Just lovely.

While I Was Gone (Ballantine Books) by Sue Miller - According to Amazon.com, this book was an Oprah pick in 2000, but I was completely out to lunch on that when I picked the book up to read over Memorial Day weekend (long airport layovers, etc.). I was looking for a gripping read with prose I could bear to stay with. I got both in spades. Not only was I completely gripped by this story of a middle-aged woman who juggles the reappearance of her past in the midst of the discontentments of her seemingly placid middle age, but I admired the writing every step of the way. The characters seemed so real that I felt by the end as if I'd met them in life. Great story, carefully rendered detail, brilliant pacing.

Veronica (Pantheon) by Mary Gaitskill - Gaitskill writes with unsparing honesty about the things people do to themselves and each other as if she's wired to keep staring long after most of us look away. In this, Alison, a former B-list fashion model, talks to us in a voice that is precise, sensuous and elegiac about her teenage years on the street, her model years in Paris and Manhattan, her friendship with the eccentric Veronica, and schisms and reconciliations with her family. Places and times, their particular fashions, energies and musical themes, all come alive as if each strand of memory were extracted whole from Gaitskill's brain. This is a stunning book, savage with all of life's grief, exaltation and mystery.

Archives