More fiction
I seem to be on a fiction-reading kick lately, and I think that’s bad for my book reviews, because there’s not a thesis for me to explain and argue with. Sorry.
I finished two books this week, and they couldn’t be more different.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessel got a lot of buzz last year when it came out. It’s the other book that my brother and sister-in-law gave me for Hanukah last year, along with The Places Inbetween. As you can tell by the fact that I’m just finishing it now, it wasn’t exactly a page turner, at least for the first 300 or so pages. I kept picking it up, reading a bit, and putting it down. I’m not sure I’d have finished it if it hadn’t been a gift.
I’m generally a sucker for stories about intellectually precocious teenage girls. (See Arkady Darell) But I never really believed in Blue, or cared about her. You know from the beginning of the book that Hannah is going to die and Blue is going to live (and go to Harvard),
so the question isn’t what is going to happen, but how, and why. And I found the endless literary references (both real and made up) more annoying than anything else. Lots of people have compared this book to The Secret History (because both involve elitist cliques and things going horribly awry), but it reminded me most of Infinite Jest. At least Special Topics had an exciting 100 or so pages at the end to reward you for the long slog.
The other book I read is Alice McDermott’s After This, which is a series of vignettes about moments in the life of an Irish Catholic family in New York in the 60s and 70s. The trick here is that McDermott repeatedly breaks the narrative flow to tell you what is going to happen to these people 10 or 20 years down the road. It gives the whole book an Our Town-ish feel, where ordinary moments are bathed in a golden light by virtue of hindsight.
Here’s a bit I liked:
"Annie had cried herself to sleep every night that her mother was gone, in full misery the first night, in anticipation, on all subsequent nights, of her brothers’ sweet solicitation as they climbed onto the cot with her and said kindly in the dark, without teasing, that their mother would be home soon, with a new sister for her to play with, and she shouldn’t cry."
