“Hole” (excerpted from Jen Beagin’s Pretend I’m Dead) is featured in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading with an introduction from Emily Gould. Pretend I’m Dead is available from TriQuarterly Books.
Melissa Ragsdale: One of the most striking features of Pretend I’m Dead is the stark Mona-ness of Mona: she has this frank, strange, lovable flair to her that is all her own, from her nosy imagination to her habit of calling God “Bob.” Following the recent Claire Vaye Watkins “On Pandering” essay, there has been a lot of buzz lately about audience, voice, and where it comes from. How did you find Mona’s voice? Do you see your own self in her?
Jen Beagin: Oh, definitely. Mona is a version of me, for sure, except I’m much better looking. Just kidding. We’re about equal in the looks department. I do have slightly better taste in men and vacuums, but not much, and I did a lot more drugs, but overall, Mona is lonelier, and also more assertive, than I was at her age. I had a younger brother from whom I was estranged for several years and then reunited, and also a couple of besties, so I doubt I would have moved to New Mexico alone at that stage in my life–I was too attached to other people, and I didn’t have my shit together enough. In fact, I don’t think I had a bank account until I was 25.
In terms of the Watkins essay, I think that, for better or worse, I was pandering to myself at age 19, which was when I first attempted to write fiction, as a studio art major at UMass Lowell. It was also when I first wrote about someone named Mr. Disgusting. This was–yikes–over twenty years ago now. I ended up dropping out of college a year or so later and pulling a geographic to Santa Cruz, CA, where I cleaned houses and lived with my brother, and I didn’t write fiction again for 17 years. So, when I revisited Mr. Disgusting as a character, well over a decade later, I was very conscious of watching, and writing toward, my nineteen year old self. My aim was to write something she would have appreciated and admired, or at least wouldn’t be too embarrassed by. Watkins mentions “the little white man deep inside all of us” and, for me–at age nineteen–the little white men were mostly dirtbags, drunks, and addicts: Burroughs, Bukowski, Carver, a spoken word artist named Steven Jesse Bernstein, and, weirdly, Updike, who probably wasn’t a dirtbag, at least not in the same way, and whose characters I definitely couldn’t relate to, but boy, could he write a sentence.
MR: Addiction, recovery, and cleansing are huge themes of this book. Most of the characters are hanging onto something–whether a drug addiction or an event from their past–and many are engaged in elaborate stop-gaps. (For instance, Betty’s constant attempts to psychically spy on Johnny.) What does recovery mean for you? Do you see any of your characters as fully recovered?
JB: I don’t see myself, or any of my characters, as fully recovered, but rather somewhere on the path towards self-awareness. I was badly out of focus for many years, and by that I mean my primary focus was on other people and what they thought of me and/or the terrible things they’d said or done to me. Put another way, my head was always up someone else’s ass. Recovery, for me, starts with becoming aware of my own triggers, motivations, and fucked-up behavior, and I think most of my characters are on a similar path. Betty, though, is perhaps not very far along.
MR: One of the central points of this book is Mona’s move to New Mexico, and Mr. Disgusting ascribes great importance to New Mexico. What draws you to New Mexico as a setting?
I was a cleaning lady in New Mexico just before I went back to college in my mid-thirties. I didn’t live there for very long–I went broke after eight months–and I don’t feel as though I know the place all that well, but when I started writing, I knew I would set something there. Mostly, it was the landscape that spoke to me–it’s really dirty and really clean at the same time, and also both alive and dead, peaceful and unsettling, and I’ve always been drawn to those extremes.
MR: In this excerpt, we see Mona’s intense relationship with Mr. Disgusting play out, and eventually Mona begins seeing him in shifting perspectives between “aging hipster” and “total creature.” How did you go about creating this duality in Mr. Disgusting’s character?
JB: Mr. Disgusting is a composite of a bunch of guys I hung around out with in my twenties, all of whom were simultaneously young and old, beautiful and hideous, funny and dead serious. So the duality of Disgusting wasn’t something I felt I needed to create; it was already there, and very attractive to me.
MR: Mona’s relationship with photography is in flux throughout this book. While she’s under the influence of Mr. Disgusting, she blows off art school, and when she tells clients that she’s a photographer, she describes it as a “lie” to make them more comfortable with a white cleaning woman. Yet, we see that she’s both prolific and gifted at photography. For you, how much is Mona deluding herself? What does it take to label yourself as an artist?
JB: I took hundreds of pictures of myself cleaning houses, one of which was used for the cover of the book, because I was bored out of my mind, but I was also interested in making meaning out of the work I was doing. I cleaned a lot of houses all over the place, in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, and Taos, but I didn’t have much going on otherwise, and I wanted all the cleaning to count for something, even if it was “just for my records.” The pictures I took were mostly terrible or else vaguely creepy, and not in a good way, but I felt like I was doing something “other than,” which was vital to my sanity at the time. But was I an artist? Is Mona? I have no idea. I’ve always disliked that word. We are both photographers, though, for sure, and obsessive documenters.
MR: We see that Mr. Disgusting has a lot of power over Mona. However, in many aspects of his life, he is not in control–he’s a heroin addict, in failing health, close to impotent, and poor. In your view, where does Mr. Disgusting’s influence over Mona come from?
JB: Attraction is often a mystery to me, but I know that Mona feels invisible in her daily life and she feels seen by Disgusting, at least initially, and that’s very powerful. It doesn’t matter that he’s toothless, dickless, and penniless, because well-adjusted, well-heeled, conventionally handsome men don’t hold much interest for her. Yoko and Yoko would say that she manifested him for a reason, that he was the perfect vehicle for her to start dealing with her past, and blah, blah, but she also feels emotionally met by him on a level she hadn’t found with boys her own age, boys who perhaps hadn’t suffered enough. I remember being very attached to my suffering at that age, and also being drawn to people who had suffered in a similar manner.
***
Jen Beagin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine and has published stories in Juked and Faultline, among other journals and literary magazines. She lives in Boston. Pretend I’m Dead is her first novel.
According to some rumors on the Internet, a completely new Star Wars movie is being released in select theaters around the world on Friday. If this is true, it could mean a lot of Star Wars fans are going to very casually be posting their reactions intermittently to social media. It might be difficult to discern exactly what these Star Wars fans are on about, but one this is for sure: they’re going to be salvating for more stimulation that is similar to Star Wars.
So, here’s a list of books to read in preparation for the new Star Wars or for after you’ve seen the new Star Wars. These books are not actually Star Wars books, but will remind you more than a little bit of Star Wars.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
This novel tells the story of one family over the course of several, several generations. What does this have to do with Star Wars? Well, at the beginning of most good versions of the novel you’ll find a family tree diagram that will help you distinguish “Remedois the Beauty” from “José Arcadio Buendía” from “Remedios Moscote” and so forth. Star Wars films have no such family tree diagram thing to help you sort all of this out, but they really should! (In the old Star Wars novels there’s not only Anakin Skywalker but Anakin Solo and Ben Kenobi, not to mention Ben Skywalker. Marquez eat your heart out!) Doubtlessly there will be new branches of the Skywalker and Solo and Organa family tree in this movie. Plus, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Star Wars share something else in common other than both being an epic family drama: ghosts of ancestors and mentors showing up to shoot the shit with the living.
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Egan’s award winning 2010 novel doesn’t tell a single story but instead a myriad of different stories, which eventually lead to numerous “ah-ha!” moments on the part of the reader when you realize yes, everything is connected. From the shoplifting in the first chapter, to the heartbreaking PowerPoint chapter, to the story of friends who upon meeting after years apart, find that their once bright potential has faltered. The Force Awakens has given us glimpses of beloved — once youthful — characters who are now older, and possibly estranged from one another. Luke Skywalker and Han Solo maybe having a falling-out is not too different from Scotty marching into Bennie’s office in Goon Squad and throwing a gross fish on his desk. If Luke turns out to be a weird old hermit and Han is somewhat “normal,” it doesn’t get any more Goon Squad than that.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
Finding out that the previous generation of “good guys” wasn’t all it cracked up to be seems to be a theme not only in the existing Star Wars films, but also in the new one. Rowling borrowed from this notion pretty hard in her fifth Harry Potter novel, in which we learn the newly anointed “Order of the Phoenix” was not the first “Order of the Phoenix.” In big fantasy epics, it seems like awesome orders of magical people are constantly getting disbanded and then getting back together in a different generation. Star Wars has already done this once with the Jedi Order, and now it looks like it’s poised to do it again. Rowling also gets bonus Star Wars points in The Order of the Phoenix because the showdown between Voldemort and Dumbledore is almost straight-up Vader and Obi-Wan.
Many Waters by Madeleine L’engle
You might think you know the universe of A Wrinkle in Time because you’ve read A Wrinkle in Time and maybe A Swiftly Tilting Planet, but who do you know who has read Many Waters? This one is the most Star Wars of L’engle’s books for the simple reason that it revolves around Twins, specifically Dennys and Sandy Murry. In it, they also end up in the middle of a desert seemingly by magic and eventually end up riding unicorns. Pseudo-outer space twins in a magical desert? The Force is strong with the Murry family!
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
This one is fairly obvious because there are so many references to ’70s and ’80s science fiction in it, but Ernest Cline’s debut novel also has true Star Wars structure. His protagonist Wade literally goes from zero to savior of the entire world, and does it primarily from being good at video games. In almost every single way, Wade is what Luke Skywalker would be like if Luke Skywalker were a real person. Ready Player One then is the meta-Star Wars; both less literary and deep than Star Wars, but somehow more-so on both counts because it’s more “real” in its overt fakery and homage.
Postcards From the Edge by Carrie Fisher
The themes of this novel don’t directly dovetail with Star Wars stuff, unless of course you think of the Dark Side of the Force as a metaphor for drug addiction. (Which it basically is.) Anyway, this novel was written by Carrie Fisher and it remains one of her strongest pieces of work. (Her one-woman shows are pretty solid too.) If you worry that Princess Leia doesn’t have enough agency in Star Wars, here you can check out her real-life alter-ego’s incisive writing and legit pathos.
The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
In almost every way, this 1949 analysis of myth and how myth functions is where it all began. George Lucas and Star Wars fans/scholars have been shouting at the top of their lungs for decades now that the reason Star Wars is so pervasively likable is that it’s all about Campbell’s observations about Jungian archetypes present in certain kinds of epic quest narratives. How about you read The Hero With a Thousand Faces and make up your own mind? I bet you’ll probably only agree with, like, half the things Campbell says, which is honestly the best kind of book.
What non-Star Wars book are you reading that are actually somehow all about Star Wars?
10) For the Writer Who Imagines a World Where Colleges have been established based on the philosophies of Marcus Garvey, Audre Lorde, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver and James Baldwin.
Literary chameleon, film professor, and ping-pong wizard are some of the labels that come to mind when thinking of American novelist Jerome Charyn, but one label that often slips people’s minds is graphic storyteller. Charyn may have no talent for drawing or painting, but that hasn’t barred him from collaborating with some of the most respected comic artists in the industry, including Francois Boucq, Jacques de Loustal, and Jose Muñoz. The recent re-release of The Magician’s Wife, published by Dover Graphic Novels, marks Charyn’s reintroduction into the American comic book world nearly thirty years after receiving the 1986 Prix Alfred Award at Angoulême for best graphic novel. Despite having many of his comics exclusively published in Europe, Charyn’s comics are written with the same love for NYC that he describes in his Bronx-centric crime fiction.
The Magician’s Wife tells the story of a woman and her turbulent relationship with a traveling Magician with powers that may go beyond simple illusion, and the lingering effects of her broken marriage. The book, masterfully brought to life by artist Francois Boucq, was released this past October and is the first of Charyn’s comics to be published by Dover, soon to be followed by the never-before translated, The Boys of Sheriff Street. Mr. Charyn was gracious enough to talk to me over Skype where we discussed the impact comics had on his early upbringing, his affinity with European artists, and where new talent in the medium may be discovered.
Matthew Laiosa: I’ve read that comics were a major part of your early education. What were some of the comics that inspired you at a young age, and how did those tastes mature into adulthood?
Jerome Charyn:Since I grew up in a very poor area of the Bronx there were very few books so I basically learned how to read from comic books. My favorite was Captain Marvel because even at an early age I felt there was something so unusual about the art. Superman was very realistic, so was Batman, but Marvel had a very strange almost surreal touch to the art and it really pulled me in. I read Donald Duck, the Disney comics, and also Classic Comics were very important to me. They took the place of books, but again the art wasn’t that interesting in the Classic Comics. It was only in Captain Marvel, and that’s why when I went to Europe and I saw some of the graphic art it was a revelation. I had never seen art of that quality in comics. It was a shock.
ML: Many consider you a great American novelist, but almost all of your comics were made in Europe. Why is that?
JC: I got involved with DC, and I did something for Paradox called Family Man, but DC was a real labyrinth. It was not an easy world to break into. I hadn’t done graphic novels here, and they didn’t really know anything about the graphic novels in Europe. There was a divorce between both worlds, and little rapport between one and the other. I offered to do a Batman, but I don’t know how good it would have been. That’s how much of a separation there was.
ML: It’s definitely improved, but some of that divorce still seems to linger considering that many of your comics have still never been translated from French to English.
JC: Most of them are coming out with Dover, and a few of them were published here earlier, but the craze for graphic novels in America is very recent. I think that the great European artists are finally being recognized, artists such as Bilal, Tardi, and Liberatore. I wanted to work with Liberatore, and at first we were going to do it, but then it was just too difficult. Anyway, I was more interested in the European artists. I did love V for Vendetta.
ML: So some of the British stuff?
JC: Yeah, the British stuff was quite good.
ML: The Magician’s Wife won the best book award at Angoulême in 1986. Do you think comics have changed much in that time in either Europe or the U.S.?
JC: I think we’ve seen a more personal approach to comics in the United States, and that’s in part because of Art Spiegelman and Raw Magazine. In fact, he won a special Pulitzer Prize. Art has done extraordinary work. He is a real author.
In France you have more of a tradition of the artist and the writer. You have some artists who do their own work, and others who work with writers, and I think you can create great art in both formats. I’m not sure whether Boucq could tell a long story on his own, but I think when he gets the right story he does extraordinary work. There’s nobody like him, nobody who has that sense of movement. It’s almost like a motion picture. It’s very powerful.
ML: After establishing yourself as a novelist for over twenty years what made you want to write The Magician’s Wife as a comic rather than a novel?
JC: I was in France, and I was interviewed by the magazine, À Suivre. It was a magazine that the Belgian publisher Casterman put out, and what it did was provide a showcase for its own artists by reprinting their graphic novels in the magazine. They happened to review one of my novels, so just out of the blue I wrote the editor of À Suivre and said, “I would love to do a comic, and can you find an artist for me?” They introduced me to Boucq, and I’d always wanted to work with Loustal, so I was able to work with Loustal. I was able to work with Muñoz, and there were others I would have worked with, but it wasn’t that easy to maneuver.
ML: Who were some of the artists you wished you had worked with?
JC: I would have liked to work with Tardi, but the occasion never arose. And there are a lot of Italian artists I would have liked to work with.
ML: Manara?
JC: Yeah. The erotic side would have been very interesting if I had done some kind of sadomasochistic story. (Laughter)
ML: So did any of your peers ever question why you were doing comics?
I think it’s a question of how you make the connection with an artist; that’s the most difficult thing to do.
JC: NO! They wanted to do it. I remember when Joyce Carol Oates read The Magician’s Wife she said she would have loved to do a graphic novel. It’s very powerful because you see the written word turned into images, and when the work is good its every bit as complicated as a novel. I think it’s a question of how you make the connection with an artist; that’s the most difficult thing to do.
ML: Even though you were writing comics for a European audience The Magician’s Wife feels quintessentially American.
JC: Yeah, all of my graphic novels in some part take place in the United States except for the one I’m doing now about Charlemagne, and what I’m going to do is see if we can get a co-production with Dark Horse, or Marvel. If it works out, I’ll have the script in English and I’ll just show some of the sample pages to Dark Horse and see what happens.
ML: What relationship does your comic Billy Budd, KGB, also illustrated by Francois Boucq, have in common with Herman Melville’s Billy Budd?
JC: I love Melville, so I wanted to find some way of using the hero of Billy Budd, KGB as some kind of Melvillian character, so the title is appropriate. I couldn’t use that title in France because the French wouldn’t have understood it. It was called Devil’s Mouth, or Bouche du Diable in French, and that’s just been reissued and it’s doing very well in France.
ML: How do you choose what stories to tell in comics and what stories to tell in prose?
Give me the location, and a few hints and I can put it together in my own way, in my own crazy way.
JC: If I remember, The Magician’s Wife was something I was going to do as a novel, and I realized that it probably wouldn’t work, so I already had the idea in mind. The graphic novel I’ve just done with Boucq, which will also be published by Dover, is called, Little Tulip, and I think it’s the best work we’ve done together. It came from an idea that Boucq had about the Gulag. It can work both ways. The idea can come from me, or from him. So if you give me something about the Gulag, and you want the hero to be an artist, then it’s not that difficult for me to put it together because I love to tell stories. Give me the location, and a few hints and I can put it together in my own way, in my own crazy way.
ML: A lot of your books exist in a sort of augmented reality. Even when you write prose it exists in an almost comic book world of extremes.
JC: I’m not interested in the quotidian, in everyday life: the raising of children, family problems, or ‘realistic stories.’ They just don’t interest me. I always have to deal with a kind of extreme. I like to work at the edge. There has to be a certain kind of slant.
ML: You have also written a few books of historical fiction. What attracts you to these different worlds?
I like heroes and villains. I like adventure, as if we’re telling children stories for adults.
JC: With historical fiction, I’m dealing with people I admire, such as Emily Dickinson and Abraham Lincoln. JohnnyOne-Eye was about the Revolution and George Washington. I like heroes and villains. I like adventure, as if we’re telling children stories for adults.
ML: Some argue that a comic is a kind of wannabe movie told in still images vs. moving pictures, but as a professor of film, are there certain storytelling capabilities unique to comics?
JC: That’s a good question. I think what you are able to do in a comic, let’s say that Boucq is the closest to action on the screen, but what’s unique to the medium is the stopped frame. In other words, you can stop the action and look at individual images, but you can’t do that in a movie because it exists in time. The propulsion forward is inevitable. There are only certain filmmakers who can slow down the frame, and do that with a constant skill. You look at the films today and they’re ninety-nine percent action, even the very best of them.
ML: And in comics between two panels you can fluctuate time from one second to millennia.
JC: Exactly. You can have a whole world between two panels and you can switch the landscape between the panels, which you can’t do as easily in film. But there is a real connection. Its no accident that comic book superheroes have worked so well in the cinema because it’s basically a very primitive art, and superheroes are just perfect. I’m not particularly interested in that, but in terms of the screen it works very well.
ML: You’ve written a number of non-fiction books including books on film. Have you ever been interested in writing a book on comics?
JC: Not really because I have a very distorted view of comics, and I’m not sure I would be able to tell the story accurately, and also it was like a childhood disease. I mean, there has been great work done with Batman, but that’s because the scripts are wonderful. And I’m not sure I’d be the right person to tell the history of comics.
ML: You have also written a few memoirs. For better or worse, the memoir-comic has become a popular genre within the medium. Are there any untold moments from your life you would want to tell in a comic book?
JC: I started out as an artist, and one reason why I’m so drawn to these European graphic artists is that I admired them and envied their skills. I wish I could do comics, I wish I could be a comic book artist and I could combine the novel with the image and that would be a perfect world, and then I probably would go into autobiography or I would range anywhere I wanted, but I don’t have the gift. I started out as an artist, and I have no talent whatsoever.
ML: You started as a painter right?
JC: Yeah, and there’s nothing I can do about it. On the other hand I’ve done some work for television and I thought I would be so pleased when I was able to hear the dialogue that I had written when it was on the TV screen, but it didn’t do anything for me at all. However, when I did Little Tulip, and saw what Boucq had done with the story, it was completely magical.
ML: What makes Boucq’s art so extraordinary?
JC: If he doesn’t have a good story you’re not going to get a good graphic novel, but if you give him a good story he is going to do a great comic because he can do anything. He can be satirical. He can be lyrical. He can be brutal. He has that gift, and that’s why it works.
ML: I think by being someone traditionally considered outside of comics you have a ‘rules-need-not-apply’ attitude. Do you think the comic book medium could benefit with greater participation from other novelists and/or storytellers outside of the medium? And if so what writer would you most like to see enter the comic book field?
JC: I would say rather than novelists, screenwriters would fit closer with the idea of writing scripts for graphic novels, but since they earn so much money working in film I’m not sure they would want to work in graphic novels. In the future, if someone like Tarantino came along, he would be able to do extraordinary work in the graphic novel. His films are almost like graphic novels in motion.
ML: You mentioned Joyce Carol Oates’ enthusiasm and interest in writing her own comic book, so what keeps her, or say someone like a Don DeLillo from scripting a comic book?
It’s not meant to be realistic. One reason why I love Krazy Kat is that the landscape changes from panel to panel and you never knew where you are going to be next
JC: It would be great if Don did a graphic novel, and maybe if he expressed a wish to do it I’m sure it would be done. I don’t know how interested he would be. I’d have to ask him. Remember it’s special to me because I grew up in this world and it’s how I learned to read. Also, if you look at my writing, it is very related to the graphic novel. The movement from sentence to sentence is like a graphic novel, and this is maybe why certain readers have such difficulty because it’s not realistic. It’s not meant to be realistic. One reason why I love Krazy Kat is that the landscape changes from panel to panel and you never knew where you are going to be next
ML: It’s more dreamlike.
JC: Yeah.
ML: I believe comics have the most potential for breaking new ground in changing the way stories are told, especially when you look at work such as Chris Ware’s, Building Stories, which uses fourteen separate printed components in order to tell a single story that can be read in any order. Where do you see the future of the book and where do you see the future of the comic book?
JC: First of all, you have very young readers who are growing up in a world with images and they’ll be able to deal with all the complexities. Now you need the genius to go along with the vision, and that’s always hard to deliver. You can’t tell where genius will come from. It could be a painter who turns to graphic novels, or it could be a songwriter. I would love to see a graphic novel with a story by Bob Dylan. It would be incredible. As far as books are concerned, it’s very difficult to say where the future lies. I don’t think anybody knows.
“When you write to me and say you love her work, I have a moment where I think, “But … Elena is my friend! My private relationship with her, so intense and so true, is one that nobody else can fully know!”
Claire Messud
To say that I have a few autobiographical similarities to the narrator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, also named Elena (“Lenu”) Greco, would be an understatement. Born into a close-knit yet violent (Italian) neighborhood that no one ever seemed to leave, I, like Lenu, fantasized about ‘getting out,” and used education as my primary propeller towards a different fate. Like Lenu, I became a writer, married a brainy introvert, raised children, struggled with the dichotomies between family life and making art, had a passionate affair, found myself constantly returning to the city I’d once sworn to escape, ultimately left my marriage… I could go on. Most significantly, at the heart of Ferrante’s series, I also had a childhood marked indelibly by my intimacy with a more beautiful, more charismatic and powerful girl who, despite her many gifts, seemed doomed: in Lenu’s case, her best friend Lila, and in mine, my same-aged cousin who lived next door to me, whose name coincidentally also begins with an L.
Of course, Ferrante (whose real remains unknown) writes of girlhood in 1950s Naples, whereas I came of age in Chicago in the 1970s and 80s. The turbulent political landscape of Italy during the some sixty years covered by the four novels is divergent in many ways from the (also turbulent) history of the United States, and the quintessential Italianness of the Quartet is integral to the fate of its characters. Whereas in my old neighborhood, boys growing to men in a state of hopeless poverty and stagnation often turned to gangs or became small-time workers for the Mob, those in Lenu and Lila’s world are as likely to become involved with Communism or Fascism, go on the run for political crimes, and attend political meetings in secret, as they are to become “gangsters” of sorts — in fact, the two things seem somewhat inextricable, in a way less true of organized crime in the United States, where politics and the Mob are more financial bedfellows than ideological ones.
The novels’ immersion in Italy — in particular Naples, and more specifically one poor, dialect-infused neighborhood in Naples — is crucial to the understanding of how intensely personal readers’ responses to Ferrante have tended to be. Because although I am Italian-American and grew up below the poverty line in a neighborhood quite similar to Lenu and Lila’s, that fact — or any other biographical fact — seems irrelevant when considering the fact that almost all Ferrante’s women readers seem to feel much as I do: as though these books were written for them, to them, about the insides of their own messy guts and brain. To love Ferrante has almost become akin to a secret handshake in certain circles (similar to Anne Carson but on an explosive scale), yet it is fair to extrapolate that many of her avid American fans had upbringings radically different from Lenu’s and Lila’s in Naples. What readers relate to most are her characters’ fearlessly naked, almost unfathomably nuanced interior lives and relationships.
You don’t have to be Italian, or poor, or have a “getting out” story, or ever to have known anyone in organized crime, to feel Ferrante’s novels read your mind and cut closer to the bone more than other books, and on the strength of word of mouth buzz, Ferrante has become Italy’s best known writer. In our era of social media accessibility, shameless self-promotion, and hot young celebrity culture, this is nothing short of astounding: an anonymous Italian woman of a certain age, of whom James Wood wrote, “Compared with Ferrante, Thomas Pynchon is a publicity profligate,” has managed to make droves of American readers feel the way one feels when a favorite indie band signs on a major label: wait, that’s my band — they were writing about and singing for me!
It’s difficult to talk about Ferrante without talking about gender. By anecdotal and critical evidence, her audience is almost entirely female, and even male critics who laud her see her work as highly gendered. Writes Wood, “Ferrante may never mention Hélène Cixous or French feminist literary theory, but her fiction is a kind of practical écriture feminine.” One certainly doesn’t have to be a woman to appreciate Ferrante…but to what extent might being one change the experience? When I was halfway through My Brilliant Friend, the inaugural novel in the series, I posted on Facebook that the book should be “required reading for anyone who wants to understand female psychology.” Having now finished the powerful finale of the four, The Story of the Lost Child, I would stand by the sentiment, but at the same time have grown wary of my own description. “Nothing quite like it has ever been published,” writes Meghan O’Rourke of the series in The Guardian: “four novels that make up a single book… a kind of quasi-feminist bildungsroman that also happens to be a history of Italy in the late 20th century.” What is clear is that these novels are profoundly ambitious literary feats, unique in tone, style and scope, when it often seems everything has already been done. Ferrante’s achievement — one novel, told in four luminous volumes — manages to also be written with a complete absence of what Claire Vaye Watkins recently discussed as “pandering” to the male literary establishment. If anything is clear from Lenu’s voice — from Ferrante’s writing across all her books — it is that she implicitly writes for the universal She. Her prose — passionate, intimate, urgent, confiding — show no aesthetic concern for courting either male literary traditions or, perhaps, even male readers as a means of legitimizing her art, and indeed, she hasn’t “needed” them. Still, she is so scarily good that I can’t help but wonder: why doesn’t she have them anyway?
The Neapolitan Quartet is arguably the deepest, widest and richest portrait of a lifelong friendship between two girls/women ever documented in literature. Ferrante often draws comparisons to Lessing in this regard, but the depth of her exploration of Lenu and Lila, over four books, truly has no rival. The critics, too, seem in overwhelming agreement on Ferrante’s merit, and that in the Neapolitan series, she is at the top of her game. That said, it is hard to imagine some of the ways she is discussed in reviews ever being applied to a male writer.. Her core focus on female friendship seems to have led some to approach the novels’ complexity and multiplicity as so genre-busting and defying of categorization that it can smack of patronizing cloaked in praise. Writes Elizabeth Lowry in the Wall Street Journal: “How should we classify Elena Ferrante’s magnificently complicated Neapolitan quartet? The three previous titles in the series — My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013) and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014) — defy categorization. Are they genre or literary fiction? Soap operas? Political epics? Some form of memoir?” Though it is not in itself in any way an “insult” to have one’s novel seen as multidimensional or not conforming to one specific literary tradition, I find myself wondering whether a series of novels that explored the male psyche and relationships, while also involving politics, class issues, and a certain amount of meta exploration of literature itself, would be described as though its diverse themes were… so surprising. Didn’t Updike attempt much the same in his Rabbit series, and Roth through Zuckerman, and Elroy in his Los Angeles Quartet? Is serious fiction that chronicles characters over time and explores both the innermost depths of their intimate relationships, along with the political climate of the times and a profound interrogation of class struggles, truly such a confounding thing as to call into question whether we are reading a soap opera, or, as Lowry later invokes in her review, a thriller? Or does it only seem so because the focal characters are girls/young women for most of the pages?
If the lives of girls and young women are sometimes trivialized by the literary establishment (here and in Europe), they are treated with almost mythical devotion by Ferrante. Indeed, the one weakness of the Neapolitan Quartet may be that Ferrante devotes so little page time to Lenu and Lila as mature women. The singularly defining event of their lives (Ferrante’s titles are full of spoilers) occurs, in the final novel, when they are not yet forty, and the rest of their lives (especially once past fifty) are sped over in strokes so broad as to be positively un-Ferrantean. Here is a writer who can spend an entire thick novel on the every thought and deed of girls between the ages of six and sixteen, yet the same women, once menopausal, no longer seem to interest their author much. Likewise, Lenu’s daughters — three women with their own complicated history — are painted with none of the intricacy of the dozens of characters in her old neighborhood, and never rise above “types.”
Lenu’s lovers, as she ages, seem to merit no scenes; if she has close friends after she and Lila part ways forever, we don’t ever meet them. Perhaps Ferrante initially gave herself free reign and then, after some 1,000 pages, panicked and felt she had better wrap things up already. Whatever the reason, the final third of the final novel feels that thing one never feels when reading a Ferrante novel: rushed. While the first three books — and The Story of the Lost Child as well — have a quality of breathless emotional fervor, they also unapologetically languish on any detail or side plot that strikes the narrator’s fancy. Guns are delightfully introduced in Act I that are not fired by Act III — people drop away, major concerns shift. Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, though full of returning characters and at times coincidences that strain at realism, follow the rhythms of a life, not a curated narrative arc. It is disappointing, therefore, when the author who specializes in reading women’s minds and hearts seems to indicate that said minds and hearts are inherently less engaging in advanced age.
Of course it is arguable that Lenu’s story simply becomes less relevant once she “gets out” — something it takes her until her fifties to fully do. Because as much as Lenu’s and Lila’s stories excavate iconic themes of womanhood, the Neapolitan series is also a quintessential rags-to-riches story, in which the two girls’ different ascents from abject poverty, and the both beautiful and abhorrent neighborhood that keeps its claws in them, are as crucial to the story as any feminist themes or as the characters’ elaborate personal lives. Ironically, a recent piece Buzzfeed on held Ferrante up as a great writer of The American Dream. Writes Alissa Quart, “Where is the American equivalent of Ferrante? […] The inequality novel that Americans will read in droves, that critics pay attention to? There was once The Great Gatsby, Bellow’s Augie March, Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and The Financier, even Raymond Carver’s working-class silent men of 30 years ago. Certainly those who claim the neorealist caption — Jonathan Franzen, recently dubbed an author of ‘failed-marriage razzmatazz’ by one critic — have neglected this story.” Though the claim that no American writers are writing novels interrogating social class and either upward or downward mobility seems unfounded (Junot Diaz comes to mind as exploring similar terrain as Ferrante on American soil; recently Helen Phillips’ The Beautiful Bureaucrat took on the hopelessness and stagnation of new adults trying to make their way in a numb, corporatized world without opportunities), Ferrante’s prowess as a chronicler of class, place and history are not to be overshadowed by her focus on female friendship and motherhood.
In the end, however, no single “topic” can fully explain Ferrante’s resonance. As Claire Messud writes —
Politics and feminism are compelling and important subjects but they won’t make readers long for the novels with the zeal of a nine-year-old. Only the human heart can do that, the emotionally truthful depiction of the complex web of love, desire, loathing, envy, compassion and pain that binds people over a lifetime. Ultimately, Ferrante has framed her magnum opus — for all its tremendous ambition, and in spite of the tumult of events that resounds through the pages at ever-greater, eventually exhausting, speed — as a simple love story. These books deal above all with the perpetually unrequited but never extinguished Platonic passion…
I would extend this further to say that Lenu and Lila’s relationship, though central, is not the only uncannily rich relationship propelling the books, and that character — characters in interaction with one another and, of course, with themselves — is Ferrante’s rarest of gifts. She seems capable of transmitting the untranslatable alchemy of human psychology onto the page in a whole other league from even other contemporary masters of character like Franzen. Accordingly, her audience identifies fiercely with what her characters feel about motherhood, ambition, jealousy, desire, justice, writing, aging — Ferrante writes so ferociously, so from the inside out, that we know the inhabitants of Lenu’s world more intricately than we could ever hope to know such a large ensemble cast in even our own lives. It is easy to emerge from the Neapolitan Quartet feeling slightly dazed, as though everything we have ever heard about “character development” was little more than a bullet point list in the hands of other writers.
And Lila, of course is both Ferrante’s and Lenu’s piece de resistance. As Lenu says of her friend, in a cross between rhapsody and lament, “She possessed intelligence and didn’t put it to use but, rather, wasted it, like a great lady for whom all the riches of the world are merely a sign of vulgarity. She stood out among so many because she, naturally, did not submit to any training, to any use, or to any purpose. All of us had submitted and that submission had — through trials, failures, successes — reduced us. Only Lila, nothing and no one seemed to reduce her.” In my own life, my “Lila” did not disappear without a trace at 66, leaving a wake of mystery behind, rendering herself forever my obsession. As people often will in real life, she instead kicked most of her self-destructive habits by her late 20s, settled down with a nice woman, became a police officer, bought a dog. In other words, in Lenu’s eyes, she was “reduced.” The Lila of the page — who is both one of the most multidimensional, characters in literature, yet also a metaphor, a riddle, a philosophical question with no answer — can never just resolve. “A hallmark of Ferrante’s writing,” O’Rourke says in The Guardian, “is [this] juxtaposition between matter-of-factness and metaphor, between hyperrealism and hallucinatory distortion.” Such is the magic of Lila, and of the series.
To commit to the Neapolitan Quartet is a rigorous and impassioned endeavor, not for every reader. For those who don’t go in for digressions, who don’t care for the distinction between live-wire emotional prose vs. sentimentality, who cannot be persuaded to care about the lives of girls and young women no matter how artfully and intelligently presented, the books would be an exercise in frustration, sure to be thrown across the room (where, heavy as they are, something would be broken, just as Lila might desire). For readers willing to be seduced, however, these four intoxicating novels comprise nothing less than a singular masterpiece.
Few things can throw me into a rage. Mostly only gun nuts, racist email forwards, and men who tell me to smile. Add to that today’s I-just-barfed-in-my-mouth announcement of Narrative co-founder Tom Jenks’ 400-page, six (6)-chapter craft book, humbly titled A Poetics of Fiction, priced at $225. No, I didn’t misplace the decimal point.
Just in time for Christmas!
Jenks, whose magazine charges writers $23 to submit stories and yet fills many of its slots with solicitations, defends the book’s hefty cover price in this morning’s email blast: “It represents a relatively small amount compared to what I charge for material given in much smaller portions in workshops and tutorials. The book represents an extremely good value in terms of how it can help you across a lifetime of writing.”
What’s inside? Magic spells? An invitation to Yaddo? Roofies for agents and publishers?
Tom Jenks wants you to think he’s doing you a favor by charging only ten times the cost of a normal hardcover. And even though you’ve never heard of him, he’s clearly talented; just look at how he manages to type one-handed (the other hand is patting his own back) the following deluded self-love: “…the information in A Poetics of Fiction is more than useful — it’s essential and not readily available anywhere else.” The 1,523 books that searching “craft of writing” brings up on Powells.com must not cover, as Jenks’ book promises to, “diction, point of view, characterization, patterns of imagery, plot, and theme.”
This is such bullshit, and it’s offensive to writers who have written both critically acclaimed, beloved works of fiction as well as fine craft books — many of which discuss diction, point of view, characterization, patterns of imagery, plot, and theme. And they cost less than thirty bucks.
Jenks, interestingly, feels the need to justify himself further. “Over the years, I’ve received positive feedback from many students and authors,” he promises. He chooses as a lengthy example (the testimonial takes up almost half of the 1200-word announcement) praise from a student “who as an undergraduate at Princeton, studied with Toni Morrison.” Why is it important that she went to Princeton and, while there, studied with Toni Morrison?
It just is. Just like it’s important that he name-drop Raymond Carver in the third paragraph. Because if there’s one writer the poor suckers who have enough money to buy this book have heard of, it’s Raymond Carver, who died 27 years ago.
Save your money. Buy a plane ticket to see your mother instead. She misses you. And if you or the writer in your life is looking for a craft book, I leave you with this:
11 Essential Craft Books You Can Buy — All of Them, Together — for Less Than Tom Jenks’ Craft Book:
Yesterday, Electric Literature ran a story, which hasbeen widelyreported inothermedia, about Friends’ Central School in Wynnewood, PA removing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from their 11th grade American Literature syllabus. “That’s my high school!” I exclaimed, not expecting to see the Quaker institution where I received an excellent (and by all accounts liberal and tolerant) education in connection with a story about book banning.
FCS is the kind of school where teachers spend their entire careers, and having just reconnected with many of them when I was invited back to speak as a Distinguished Humanities Lecturer in December 2014, I got on the phone with Bill Kennedy, the 11th grade dean and one of the teachers of the American Literature class concerned here. (I took a nonfiction novel elective with him back my high school days, in which we read In Cold Blood and Nickel and Dimed. I did read Huckleberry Finn in another class, but I don’t remember much else about it.)
Right away, he wanted to clear up some misinformation that was circulating, much of which was reproduced in our article. “The book hasn’t been banned. It hasn’t been censored,” he began, and went on to clarify that it is still being offered as extra credit and will possibly be taught in elective seminar courses. He also clarified that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not being replaced by Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave despite the reports. Both books have been taught alongside one another for many years at FCS. The book has only been removed from the American Literature course until a decision is made otherwise; it has not been banned from being taught elsewhere on campus, nor has it been removed from the school library. Kennedy noted that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been dropped from the class in the past and reinstated: “This is not something that is unprecedented for us. But evidently the current climate is such that the decision was received in a different way than when we dropped it earlier.”
The gap left by Huck Finn in the syllabus will eventually be filled, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is among the titles the faculty is considering.
Here is another suggestion, from Okey-Panky Editor-in-Chief and novelist J. Robert Lennon.
Maybe Huck Finn hasn't stood the test of time, and, as @thorazos says, we ought to represent that era with a book by an actual black person
But more important than the specifics of a particular syllabus at one particular high school, is that the reactionary response from many publications (Electric Lit included), fails to account for pedagogical concerns and practical responsibilities of a teacher. “As an English teacher, one of the things that I do, and one of the things that the other English teachers do here, is that we’re always evaluating and re-evaluating what we’re teaching,” Kennedy explained. “We’re also looking to add things that are new, things that might speak to a couple of other texts or speak to a theme in a different way.” In other words, in order to update a curriculum with contemporary and important books, other books must be put on the back-burner. To equate that necessary re-evaluation with book-banning or censorship is reductive at best.
“The fact that a book isn’t being taught doesn’t mean it’s a book we think isn’t worth being taught,” Kennedy concluded. “There are hundreds and hundreds of titles that I would love to teach.”
Each year, Electric Literature polls our staff and regular contributors to pick our favorite books of the year. For fairness sake, books by Electric Literature staff were disqualified (although we encourage you to check out Michael Seidlinger’s novel The Strangest and Lincoln Michel’s story collection Upright Beasts.)Otherwise, there were no restrictions, and the resulting list of nominated books was long and eclectic. We then collected the books that received the most nominations to make our final lists. You can also read our list of the Best Short Story Collections of 2015 and Best Nonfiction Books of 2015.
Below, in no particular order, are our favorite novels of 2015. The resulting 21 books include literary luminaries such as Kazuo Ishiguro and Michel Houellebecq alongside exciting debuts by the likes of Alexandra Kleeman and Sarah Gerard. These are stories of tooth auctioneers, figure skaters, talking crack cocaine, dragons, and much much more. Put them in your to-read pile if they aren’t already.
Alex Kleeman, in her magnificently realized You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, [contemplates] the yoke between individual body and singular self. As this story from the book reflects, not only are her characters shorn of even their names — they are, simply, A and C — but the world’s larger population has begun fleeing the demands of stress, and chores, and even love itself. And yet, she reminds us, even under such ascetic conditions, some things are irreducible… and perhaps the most irreducible fact of all, our physical selves, has become the foundation of an alimentary-industrial complex that feeds upon us daily.
Alex Kleeman’s work will likely stir the “gift-curse of recognition” (her typically tart phrase) within you. Happily, though, it should also have you laughing through the existential horror.
Delicious Foods…begins in a swampy hell. Our hero, Eddie, who has no hands, struggles to drive a stolen car to a sweeter place off interstate 45, where his aunt lives, in order to escape a horrible series of events that are not revealed until the end of the story. Darlene, Eddie’s mother, is grief stricken by the sudden death of her black activist husband; her identity becomes entirely eclipsed by crack cocaine. Darlene is literally held captive and drugged by a sinister food chain, human trafficking operation. Although the book is primarily focused on desperate acts born out of grief, drug addiction and rough terrain, “Delicious Foods” is, on a larger scale, an ambitious story about systemic racism and self-destruction — traps that can lead us to our own demise.
In The Buried Giant, an elderly couple sets off on a journey through a mythical England populated by ogres, dragons, knights and giants. Axl and Beatrice are in search of their son, whom they can’t quite remember how they lost. This is because the inhabitants of The Buried Giant’s mythical world suffer a collective amnesia, a ‘mist’ that keeps them from holding onto certain memories, both personal and historical. As we travel with Axl and Beatrice, the novel asks us what memory (and forgetting) means to a person, to a couple, to a society. In many ways, the book is surprising (The New York Times calls it ‘a departure’), but it also showcases some of Ishiguro’s most essential qualities as a writer: subtle prose, a dreamlike atmosphere, and powerful questions about loss and memory.
Like Schindler’s List, The Book of Aron is haunted by a great man, in this case, Janusz Korczak, the pediatrician famous throughout Europe and appointed caretaker for a set of Jewish orphans. Central to the lives of saints, the act of bearing witness — to Korczak, to the struggles of friends and family — is performed by a boy who is not a model of moral purity, even as the occupiers’ crimes dwarf his own. Wracked by guilt, Aron needs to believe in Korczak. And Korczak knows it.
Shepard’s no sap, and his hunger for certified historic fact is voluminous, practically what underlies his entire literary career. As in another of his most impressive works-to-date, a short story titled “The Netherlands Lives with Water” set in Holland of a not-so-distant-future, inundated by relentlessly climbing ocean levels, the characters in The Book of Aronfind themselves practicing “a sort of apocalyptic utilitarianism: on the one hand they were sure everything was going to hell in a handbasket, while on the other they continued to operate as if things could be turned around with a few practical measures.”
There is something astonishing that the Mexican novelist Valeria Luiselli has achieved across the space of her three books — Faces in the Crowd, Sidewalks, and her latest The Story of My Teeth — by writing into and out of relingos, the forgotten, inexplicable open spaces of Mexico City…Luiselli has a talent for satire. She puts us in the room with a pile of old teeth — as Siddhartha has put Highway’s old teeth in the Jumex Juice Factory Art Museum — and shows us how far people will go, how a story is the only thing that gives objects value. A book without a story is worthless paper, we know deep down. The pleasure of reading, and living, exists in traversing the passages of the labyrinth and not in discerning the route to its center.
– Geoff Bendeck in our review of The Story of My Teeth
The Small Backs of Children requires the reader to let go and give into the prose and story. Why do the writer’s friends so determinedly latch onto the idea of saving the young girl and bringing her to the writer? Once I had finished the book, I knew I had read something brilliant…The Small Backs of Children is ultimately an examination of the spectrum of creation — whether of self or art — and how often creation can uneasily exist along with destruction.
This novel will be talked about for its ability to test boundaries, particularly the boundaries of sexual labels or forbidden love. But it’s worth mentioning the readability of July’s prose. Her success in carrying us through the strange world of Cheryl Glickman is a testament to her skill. This is a bizarre story, but an alluring one, and one that ends in a moment of satisfaction. July creates a character in Cheryl who elicits our empathy, but also a visceral response. Her conviction in her specific belief system makes her a character we want to understand, if not become. She understands herself, and she is most certain of the genesis of Kubelko Bondy. “I didn’t make him,” she acknowledges, “but I did each thing right so he would be made.”
Some have called Submission satire, others a dystopia. Is it a warning cry, a near-reality to be feared, or a conception of the darkest fears of the ignorant? The truth lies somewhere in between. Houellebecq himself — interviewed extensively following the novel’s now-infamous publication on the date of the Charlie Hebdo massacre — said in a September interview with The Guardian, “The role of a novel is to entertain readers, and fear is one of the most entertaining things there is.” Houellebecq’s work is emblematic — a re-spinning of — the fear-driven headlines that sell magazines and newspapers and keep TVs tuned to 24-hour news commentary. By distilling the traditionally hysterical language of news into the very plausible and mundane life of his narrator, Houellebecq forces his readers — of every ilk — to consider the effect of the stories we tell ourselves daily in 2015. Fear is a powerful seductress, and Houellebecq, with his description of a disconnected, academic life, understands that the most powerful way to explore something is to put it into the context of the ordinary.
– Heather Scott Partington from our review of Submission
It is a fiercely intelligent work of fiction — often hysterically funny, often painstakingly reminiscent of my own college years — and, while reading, one knows oneself to be in the hands of an extremely gifted writer. I eagerly anticipate whatever Rachel B Glaser does next, and I know that when Paulina & Fran finds its audience, I will not be even remotely alone in that.
Sarah Gerard’s new novel Binary Star is an intense story about a young astronomy student struggling with anorexia and her relationship with a long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend. Together, the destructive couple takes a road trip around the United States and experiments with veganarchism. As she starves and purges, he consumes. The prose reflects the characters’ behavior. Sparse and lean, Gerard’s writing hurtles forward with a momentum that seems bent on burning up, much like the stars her protagonist studies. It’s a novel that takes risks, both in style and subject matter. Women are told that writing about eating disorders is cliché, or that if they write about their bodies or their own narcissism they won’t be taken seriously. Sarah Gerard refuses to let those experiences be devalued and instead puts them at the center of a serious literary work.
Tracy O’Neill’s The Hopeful, set in the mind-warping world of competitive figure skating, ranks among the best, most transcendent sports novels in recent memory. Alivopro Doyle is a “hopeful,” one of thousands of girls skating endless hours at her local rink and dreaming of the Olympics. A fall breaks two vertebrae and launches her into a course of therapy, chemicals, and regret over one elusive jump, the triple Salchow. The book revels in physical elegance (skating as “flying without wings, contorting through the cold”), but its finest moments examine not achievement, but aspiration and disappointment: the moment before the jump, the ice after the fall, the stale locker rooms, the hospital beds. The novel, O’Neill’s first, earned her recognition as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 for 2015.
Beatty’s fourth novel is another biting satire on race in America. Kiese Laymon in the Los Angeles Times called it “among the most important and difficult American novels written in the 21st century . . . It is a bruising novel that readers will likely never forget.” In the Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks described it as “Swiftian satire of the highest order . . . Giddy, scathing and dazzling.” We call it one of the best novels of the year.
I told Helen Phillips that her novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat, is an “existential thriller.” That might sound like an oxymoron: after all, existential literature is known for its lack of action. Existential texts are usually about being stuck: waiting for Godot, or trying to escape an insect’s body. The Beautiful Bureaucrat demands that you keep turning its pages to find out what happens. And yet Phillips’s book — absurd, uncanny, tinged with dread — owes more to Beckett and Kafka than to Lee Child or Stephen King. […] The Beautiful Bureaucrat is as much about the mysteries of marriage as those of human existence. Phillips has created an abstract world, but the see-saw of Josephine and Joseph’s relationship is realistic. Their essential connection gives meaning to the absurd landscape.
Grief is a difficult home to leave, everything outside it seeming foreign and incomprehensible. Though it’s musky and poorly lit, at least this home is familiar, protected. At least it’s yours.
Most of the characters in Kathleen Alcott’s richly layered second novel, Infinite Home, are pacing the dusty corners of loss and estrangement, but they also share a literal roof, the brownstone where they all rent apartments from Edith, their elderly landlady who is descending into dementia. Edith’s tenants — Edward, a burned-out comedian, Thomas, an artist mournfully recovering from a stroke, Paulie, a young man with a rare neurodevelopmental syndrome, and Adeleine, a woman nostalgic for an era in which she never lived — slowly creep out of their private stagnations and into each other’s lives in surprising ways.
Sara Nović has an agenda. The violent conflicts in Croatia, where she has many friends and family, and the complicated history of that region have been obsessions of Sara’s for many years. Her powerful debut novel Girl at War (Random House, 2015) tells the story of Ana, a 10-year-old girl who is living in Zagreb when war breaks out in the early 1990s. In telling Ana’s story, Sara hopes to shed light on a time and a place about which many people still know very little.
Sara’s novel gives us familiar childhood settings of school and play and family life, as well as harrowing scenes of civilian war and make shift armies, of teenagers-turned-soldiers in abandoned buildings called “safe houses,” where the inhabitants are playing cards one minute and shooting their enemies the next. We travel through this world with Ana, at an age where she is just starting to make sense of the world around her, while the world keeps refusing to make sense.
– Catherine LaSota from our interview with Sara Nović
Cradle-to-grave novels require the kind of ambitious, ambiguous specificity Groff wields. Rather than describing every year of her characters’ lives, an ensemble of scenes, moments and memories are utilized to great effect. In the first half of the book, Fates, we follow Lancelot — ironically called “Lotto” — through a thicket of traumas and life-defining moments, starting with his birth during the eye of a hurricane in Florida. A boisterous college party introduces us to Mathilde, a lanky girl whose beauty relies on a magnetic oddness. She lurks in the background during this first part, though we can sense the galaxy of her love slowly colliding with Lotto’s, all through his aspiring and failed dreams of becoming an actor, and then his victorious triumph as a New York City playwright. […]
What rescues Fates and Furies are Groff’s sentences, as always lithe and poetic, unrolling like a glimmering carpet to the gray and uncertain territory of her characters’ inner conflicts. She wields an almost-wizardly command of language, specifically metaphor. Each page contains sumptuous pieces of imagery. “A tiger of light” prowls in a bedroom in the morning. Tree branches are “stunned as soldiers after an ambush.” Mathilde’s blood is “humming like a beehive.”
– Zack Hatfield from our review of Fates and Furies
You can also read our interview with Lauren Groff.
Beatlebone tracks an imagined excursion taken by John Lennon in 1978 to Dorinish, his uber-remote private island off the Mayo coast. With the help of a philosophical local fixer named Cornelius, John evades the British tabloid press; falls down a psychological rabbit hole with a sinister communal trio of Primal Screamers inside an abandoned hotel; and considers his relationship with his wife and parents, his music and memory. All of this while trying desperately to make it to a gnarled, inhospitable piece of rock in the stormy Atlantic, where he can finally be alone with his thoughts.
– Dwyer Murphy from the intro to our interview with Kevin Barry
The news delivered in Joshua Mohr’s novel All This Life is captured by the second headline. Mohr’s bleak view of our wired present is clear from the opening scene, where we find the “Bluetooth chain gang” enduring rush hour traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. The chain gang universally hates their jobs, and they long, Mohr tells us, for “a day to feel free. To be alive.” Why these emotions are any different than those felt by every commuter, in every age, is never explained, but what is explained is the reason for the unusually awful traffic: a brass band that has been marching across the bridge begins, one by to one, to jump into the bay, instruments and all. Paul and his teenaged son, Jake, are two of the commuters that witness the mass suicide, and Mohr describes Jake’s reaction with the following emoji: “a head with a can opener spinning around its crown and peeling up the skull and plucking out the brain and whirling it around on an index finger like a basketball.” Jake captures the entire scene on his phone, and then, like any modern teenager, he immediately uploads the video to YouTube. […]
The novel’s strength is that it dramatizes the implications of our online selves; Sara at one point refers to her video as her “digital, conjoined twin,” and this twin is definitely the evil sort, the kind that stalks you and makes your life miserable. We all have these digital twins, with varying degrees of evil depending on your browser history, and if you allow your mind to concoct worst case scenarios, we might all jump off a nearby bridge.
After Birth roars with the anger of betrayal. Albert is abrasive and sharp, intelligent and painfully real. There is no room for gentleness in her novel, no time to waste looking for a kinder way of speaking. It’s as if After Birth, while raging against the isolation of motherhood, wants to reverse it. […] After Birth comes twenty years too late to truly be Riot Grrrl literature, but something about it begs that you put on the new Sleater-Kinney, notch up the volume, and breastfeed (in public, why not) while you’re at it. Because After Birth is looking for a fight, it’s unladylike, it’s pissed off, and it’s going to tear everything you thought about birth and motherhood to shreds.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is an unsparing novel that follows the lives of four college friends as they achieve the successes they once dreamed of and strived for. There is a fairy tale quality to the wealth and fame these men achieve, but like all fairy tales there is an underlying darkness. The darkness at the center of this novel emanates from Jude St. Francis, a successful lawyer by any measure, but a man who remains an enigma to friends and family nearly to the end. The reader bears witness to the aftermath of the childhood abuse Jude St. Francis suffered, and barely survived, with the understanding that the brutality of the witnessing cannot compare to the experience itself. Unable to heal himself, or be healed by others, Jude is a character that calls into question the redemptive narrative arc we too often expect from stories of trauma. Yanagihara would argue that this isn’t a story about trauma but about life. Either way, she asks the tough questions: how do we live, and why?
– Adalena Kavanagh from our interview with Hanya Yanagihara
The subtitle of The Story of the Lost Child, “The fourth and final Neapolitan Novel,” broadcasts to Ferrante devotees and momentous and bittersweet occasion: the conclusion of the emotional, intellectually stimulating, and, at times, soap-operatic saga of Lila and Lenù, and their lifelong friendship that begins and ends in a working-class neighborhood in Naples. The Neapolitan novels are habitually referred to as a story of female friendship, however that description, especially in light of this stunning fourth novel, has always felt reductive. They are less the story of female friendship that the story of female identity, particularly female intellectual identity, and how relationships — platonic, romantic, and maternal — threaten, challenge and shape that identity.
Readers are highly recommended to enjoy these books sequentially, beginning with My Brilliant Friend, but for those who can’t wait to dive into The Story of the Lost Child may refer to our study guide, “Previously on the Neapolitan Novels.”
– Halimah Marcus, Editorial Director, Electric Literature
Winter darkening brings its own intensities: snowdrifts on rooftops, red berries in the trees, and for the lucky few, maybe a pub fire roaring in the grate. As the nights draw in and the season’s grand finale approaches, many of us still brighten our world with carol singing, high street lights and Christmas stories — key ingredients in the mix of paganism, consumerism and religion we call Christmas. The stories we read now first appeared 150 years ago. Dickens established the modern form, publishing one in most years of the mid-nineteenth century, and soon everyone from Anthony Trollope to Louisa Alcott was trying their hand. Few could resist the temptation of sentimentality, and a reputation for the maudlin persists. “The very phrase Christmas story had unpleasant associations for me,” says Paul Auster’s narrator in “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story” (1990), “evoking dreadful outpourings of hypocritical mush.” Despite this, Auster understands that though the Christmas story is a low form (a literary ‘turn’), it sets challenges few writers would run away from, which is why so many grandees (Tolstoy, Waugh, Spark, Updike) have bothered with it. Part of the attraction is that Christmas is one of the few events still bound by tradition, making the Christmas story — a thing of retrospection and repetition — peculiarly literary and self-conscious.
Christmas is one of the few events still bound by tradition, making the Christmas story — a thing of retrospection and repetition — peculiarly literary and self-conscious.
Christmas present, Dickens saw, always contains Christmas past (explaining why so many of its stories are inhabited by ghosts or children), and this gives rise to a moment of reckoning. In A Christmas Carol (1843), the accusation leveled at Scrooge is one of stinginess; the counting house turns men into creatures of rote, incapable of empathy or conviviality. Spiritedness is what matters, and even the poorest can revel in festivity. So on his ghost-flights Scrooge encounters miners, lamplighters and lighthousemen, all “blithe and loud” as they dance round fires and tell tales to one another. It was this lost spirit of Christmas that interested Washington Irving, whose sketches of customs that were dying out in England had first inspired Dickens. Irving included among these a lament about the disappearance of the Lord of Misrule — a figure older than the Anatolian Saint Nicholas, older even than the Dutch Sinterklaas or Nordic bearded elfman — who was outlawed during the English Civil War, along with the Christmas holiday and its twelve day riot of feasting and carousing.
No doubt it was Irving that Angela Carter had in mind when she wrote “The Ghost Ships” (1993), a fable about relations between the puritan New World and the superstitious old one. Even in Boston Bay, where Christmas was prohibited, citizens were still vulnerable to the witching hour. Into this permeable moment slip three ghost ships. One decorated in apple, holly, ivy and mistletoe. One fronted by a boar’s head, belching “swans upon spits and roast geese dripping hot fat.” And one carrying mummers and masquers, “large as life and twice as unnatural” (men dressed as women, bells jingling at their ankles) — the revenants of once Merry England. All three ships come sailing by and all are sunk by the puritans’ “awesome piety.” But something in their meaning will not be denied. As the Lord of Misrule falls into the Atlantic, he hurls a contraband pudding onto the shore. The next morning its plump raisins have scattered into the shoes of every child rising to pray in the “shivering dark.”
As the Lord of Misrule falls into the Atlantic, he hurls a contraband pudding onto the shore.
Inevitably, the struggle between Christianity and a barely-suppressed paganism is at the heart of many Christmas tales. Among the wintry Russians, Tolstoy and Chekhov produced stories in which Christian goodness prevails. But in “The Night Before Christmas” (1832), Gogol, writing in the folk tradition passed down to him by his Ukrainian mother, tells a wild tale that begins in the witching hour (literally, with a witch on a broomstick), where the devil gets his due. Gogol’s magic is not Christian (miraculous and didactic), but that of a trickster who steals the moon and hides it in his pocket. As in Dickens, a man is flown about by a spirit, but for the purpose of mischief-making rather than moral instruction.
A century later, Nabokov wrote two stories typical of his canon in their cunning and tenderness, while at the same time pinning the essential elements of the Christmas genre. “Christmas” (1925) is about a father visiting his country manor after the death of a beloved son, whom he remembers netting butterflies. When he moves one of his son’s pupae into the heat of the house it emerges unexpectedly, a rebirth as fantastic as the Resurrection itself. This is fiction as consoling and full of powerful magic as any religion. It is written wittingly, inside, and out of, tradition — Christian, rather than Gogol’s paganism — and, like the smartest of these tales, knows its place, even as it tries to usurp it.
Three years later in “A Christmas Story,” Nabokov conducted the discussion of a story’s “place” out in the open, pondering the fate of the imagination under tyranny and reconsidering the debate about puritanism. Wondering how to write fiction in a manner acceptable to Soviet Russia’s cultural commissars, an old writer, a novice writer, and a critic all discuss how Christmas can be viable in times that insist only on the real. Finally, the old man comes up with a story in which well-fed Europeans are mesmerized by a shop-window Christmas tree stacked with ham and fruit, all the while ignoring a body slumped “in front of the window, on the frozen sidewalk — ”. The sentence needs no completion: the winning formula has been found (decadent foreigners blind to the suffering of the poor). As one might expect from Nabokov, it is a knowing piece — the old writer struggling to describe Christmas in the critically-approved language (the “insolent Christmas tree,” the “so-called ‘Christmas’ snow”), and the critic, who writes for a journal called Red Reality, praising the novice’s depiction of peasant lust, but dismissing his portrayal of an intellectual because “There is no real sense of his being doomed…”
In the second half of the twentieth century writers continued to take the Christmas story apart, alerting readers to its dialogism; sometimes, as in Dylan Thomas’s unruly tale, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” (1955), even granting them a walk-on part. Here, a memoirist channelling “distant speaking…voices” conjures a reader who queries his fantastic account of a time long ago when there were “wolves in Wales…and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears.” Paul Auster’s tale comes less directly and innocently out of a folk tradition, but seems the most consummate of Christmas stories in the way it assembles and disassembles itself. There are multiple narrators and a story within a story; there is the “business about the lost wallet and the blind woman and the Christmas dinner”; notes to the reader about trusting the storyteller (“he knew exactly what he was doing”); lessons in the suspension of disbelief and fictional ‘truth’; and discussion of the “out-and-out conundrum” of the unsentimental Christmas story. Finally, there is a polite reminder to pay the piper.
For Grace Paley and Alice Munro the mystery is no longer a matter of miracle or spirit but a modern question of identity and doubt.
Other writers have reformulated the Christmas story by putting a new spin on the old tale. For Grace Paley and Alice Munro the mystery is no longer a matter of miracle or spirit but a modern question of identity and doubt. They find fresh perspectives with young girls as protagonists who speak distinctively in the first-person, though without a hint of Thomas’s orotundity or Auster’s complicity. Their stories, echoing the Teaching of the old story, are about education.
In Paley’s “The Loudest Voice” (1959), Shirley Abramowitz, child of the noisy Brooklyn street, is chosen to read the text in her school’s Christmas play. But she and her friends are Jewish immigrants and their involvement in a Christian drama creates tensions in a community divided in its views on assimilation. “This is a holiday from pagan times also, candles, lights, even Hannukah,” her papa says, arguing for his daughter’s inclusion, “So we learn it’s not altogether Christmas.” When the play is over, the parents debate in Yiddish, Russian, Polish. Why had so few American kids gotten big parts? “They got very small voices,” Shirley’s mother points out, “why should they holler? Christmas…the whole piece of goods…they own it.”
Munro’s heroine is too young to become a waitress so she takes a job as a turkey-gutter. “Are you educated?” is the first question anyone asks her in “The Turkey Season” (1980), and an education is precisely what she gets observing relationships in this family firm. She learns whose power is ostensible and who really runs the place; about the skill involved in dissecting a carcass; how seriousness and curiosity can overcome disgust (“Have a look at the worms…Now put your hand in”); even that there are some mysteries, “voluptuous curiosities,” such as the sexuality of her supervisor, which will not yield to scrutiny.
This one has a curmudgeon to match Scrooge — not in asceticism (she orders far and wide on the Internet) but in her refusal to get into the Christmas spirit.
In the twenty-first century, there has been a revival of the Christmas story, with examples from Jeanette Winterson, Will Self, A. L. Kennedy and Jackie Kay. One of the most attuned to the times is Ali Smith’s pointedly titled, “Do You Call That a Christmas Present?” (2008). This one has a curmudgeon to match Scrooge — not in asceticism (she orders far and wide on the Internet) but in her refusal to get into the Christmas spirit. What this woman wants for Christmas are comforters: wine and cake, socks and scarves; what she gets is a block of ice, a skeletal tree with dirty roots, a mad girl standing outside in the snow, serenading her. At first she is appalled, but her lover’s enthrallment to the season is infectious. Despite her cynicism, when a girl dressed as a boy soars through the air at the pantomime, she finds her face “wet with tears.” Soon she is watching Christmas films and singing Christmas songs. “Have yourself a merry little Christmas,” she hums and, at last, she is.
The whole piece is traditional as can be, hitched to “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” By the eighth day, she is “telling stories of Christmas past,” ones spent with lovers and family, and ones alone. She thinks about the old, old story (“no room at the inn”) and other exiled, lonely people. On the eleventh, she goes night-walking, marvelling at the snow’s “constellations” and the glistening, lit-up windows; she is already regretting the passing of the shortest day. Finally, on the twelfth, she shows her true love how much she has learned, giving her a present of logs and matches. Together they set a fire that throws “companionable shadows,” and sing to one another of the partridge and the pear tree.
As Irving and Dickens showed in their early attempts to resurrect the spirit of Christmas, and as Smith sees so clearly today, there is real, assayable value in the old traditions and great enjoyment to be had from them. Even in our prickly individualism, hemmed in by consumer goods, there are moments when we can escape from safe, homogenized lives to experience the tingling pleasures of heat and cold, of icy days and starry nights. The Christmas story reveals these freely available good things in front of us as it binds us to custom and continuity, drawing us back. Amid plenty and diversity it acts cohesively, bathing us in Platonic firelight and seating us at an imaginary hearth with ancestors for whom storytelling “in the light and the dark” was the greatest delight.
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