Tag Archives: Evan S. Connell

Hope Coulter’s Year in Reading, 2023

Posted on by under book review, Guest post, lists, review, year in review

Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, her fourth, is by Hope Coulter, (@hopester99), whom I’m lucky to call a colleague. A fiction writer and poet, Hope directs the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation at Hendrix College.

Eveelyn Hofer, Girl with Bicycle, Dublin, 1966

2023 may have been my Year of the Binge. A quarter of the books I read were by a single author, Michael Connelly, as I continued a 2022 obsession and chowed through the rest of his Harry Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer series. Now I’m left with the dregs of the feast and plenty of questions. Has Bosch retired for good? Is cancer going to polish him off? And how am I going to get by without a steady intake of seedy murder scenes, sandwich shop tips, and Bosch’s saturnine musings floating over the lights of L.A. from his cantilevered deck? Sigh. No regrets for this gluttonous spree; I only wish I could find another such homicide cop to devour.

Speaking of, Robert Galbraith’s majorly enjoyable detective novels continued strong for me last year. I read The Ink-Black Heart via audiobook, parceling it to myself morsel by morsel so as not to rip through it too fast. Much of the novel unfolds through tweets, which are hard to follow either by ear or on the page, so that one wasn’t my favorite, but the series is overall terrific. If Strike and Robin settle into domestic tranquility and draw the curtain of privacy over their agency door (please no spoilers; I’m still finishing up Book Seven), I’ll be in a bad way indeed. [Ed. – I loved the first few of these books, but I must confess I had to give up on them, the author’s politics having so soured me…]

I went on a lesser bender with John Boyne, starting with The Heart’s Invisible Furies, which I happened to read while traveling in Dublin and southwest Ireland—moving through some of the very settings of the novel in a pleasurable kind of Binx Bolling-esque rotation. That sent me to a handful of other Boyne books. All the Broken Places, The House of Special Purpose, and The Absolutist were highlights, though none of them surpassed the dark, funny, moving experience of Furies.

Completing previous years’ jags, I knew I had to get hold of Paulette Jiles’s latest, Chenneville, reviewed here by Dorian late last year. All Jiles’s books have won me over. This one wrapped up too fast for my taste, but like her other works, it flares a light onto regional history with convincing detail and taut storytelling. [Ed. – Agree, especially re: the ending.]

Eh, maybe here my conceit ends. Although I regularly teach Zadie Smith’s “The Embassy of Cambodia” and have read several of her novels, I can’t really call that a tear. Even so, I was intrigued to hear that Smith had turned to historical fiction and couldn’t wait to check out The Fraud, which is based on a 19th-century trial, little known now but sensational in its time. The book gripped me in unexpected ways. Every character was so believable, so not-a-type, so idiosyncratically shaped by their history and personality—supremely so in the case of the main character, Eliza Touchet. Mrs Touchet’s epiphanies in the course of the novel involve -isms of race, class, and sex that quietly echo our own era. At the same time her keen intelligence, her self-understanding, her fierceness and restraint, and her willingness to examine the tangles within her own heart are quintessentially Victorian.

As I read I found myself marking passages the way I do in my old copy of Middlemarch, quotes with a similar sage quality. (Even though Dickens and Thackeray feature as characters in the book, the sensibility that saturates it is really Eliot’s.) Here Eliza considers her long, complicated relationship with her cousin: “Theirs was a fellowship in time, and this, in the view of Mrs Touchet, was among the closest relations possible in this fallen world. Bookended by two infinities of nothing, she and William had shared almost identical expanses of being. They had known each other such a long time. She still saw his young face. He still saw hers, thank God.” And here she ponders how women often can’t see their own beauty for what it is at the time, not appreciating their appearance until looking back on a younger stage after a lapse of years: “But it is the perverse business of mirrors never to inform women of their beauty in the present moment, preferring instead to operate on a system of cruel delay.” Introspective moments like these, combined with the unspooling action of the trial plot, place this book at the top of the literary heap for my year’s reading.

Other newish novels that I loved last year were Donal Ryan’s The Queen of Dirt Island—a multigenerational saga of tough Irish women, inspired by the kitchen storytelling of his mother and grandmother—and Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, about a love triangle that arises and devolves in unpredictable ways. I also enjoyed Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt. I had steered clear after hearing critics call it appropriative, but when a friend told me it held up well for her I gave it a try. I found the story compelling and plausible. Cummins addresses the criticism directly in her afterword, and I’m persuaded by her account of the writing and her authentic connection to the material.

I also read, and loved, Viet Tranh Nguyen’s short story collection The Refugees, tales of Vietnamese migrants resettled in southern California: this is art on a level with Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth. And I returned to some old favorites that thankfully not only proved to hold up over time but blew me away all over again: Gabriel García Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera; Willa Cather’s O Pioneers and A Lost Lady; Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge (which Donal Ryan mentioned as inspiration for the super-short chapters in The Queen of Dirt Island), and Robert Crichton’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria.

Then the nonfiction. Oh, the nonfiction. Fiction is great when it’s great, but it disappoints so often and in so many different ways—by trying too hard, being too earnest, too arch or too tough-guy, or showing something nobody would say or do (on the human level I mean, not that it’s surreal or fantastic), or just plain old getting on my nerves. For some reason nonfiction is less prey to these faults. More and more I find myself turning to nonfiction for that “ah” of relief when I can settle into a writer’s style and voice and relax into the story at hand, losing the awareness that I’m reading. Last year I took in some wonderful memoirs. There was Javier Zamora’s Solito, about his experiences as a nine-year-old traveling solo from El Salvador to the United States (it’s like the nonfiction version of American Dirt). There was Monica Potts’s The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, which looks at the deterioration of American small towns based on her growing-up in Clinton, Arkansas, not many miles from where I teach. [Ed. – Definitely on my list. Heard her read at the Lit Fest last year and I still remember the opening scene.] Tracing the divergent life stories of herself, her sister, and her close friend, Potts narrates a tale of narrowing prospects for many young women in this climate. There was Jane Ferguson’s No Ordinary Assignment, chronicling her life as a reporter in the war zones of the Middle East (no forgotten girl she, determined as she was to get out of Dodge after an emotionally deprived childhood in northern Ireland).

I’m chagrined that I had never read the slender Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave until this year. As many have said, it’s profound: unforgettable not only for its first-person testimony to the horrors of the slave system in its heyday but also the candor, economy, and precision of the writing. Acquiring even baseline literacy was a miracle in that context—and an interesting story within the story—but Douglass’s literary prowess vaults so far beyond that initial limit, and is so supremely suited to relaying his experiences, that it’s humbling to take in his words. 

A mid-year bookshelf cleanout led me to another, far different memoir that I’d somehow missed before, J.R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar, about the New Jersey barflies who were his surrogate family growing up (and including one of the funniest sexual initiation scenes I’ve ever read). My enjoyment of that book sent me back to current times and a brand-new book that Moehringer ghost-wrote: Prince Harry’s memoir Spare. Come for the royals’ dirty laundry; stay for the Shakespeare allusions that, alas, are probably attributable to Moehringer rather than Harry.

In the realm of general nonfiction, meaning not memoir, there were three standouts this year, two by 30-something Irish writers whom I heard in person at the West Cork Literary Festival last summer (thank you, Hendrix College and the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation). In My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route, the Irish journalist Sally Hayden details the grim migration sagas happening in the seas north of Libya and makes a case for the EU’s complicity in perpetuating devastating outcomes. Cal Flyn turns to a different crisis, that of environmental havoc and habitat destruction, in Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in a Post-Human World. The book examines many sites around the globe that toxic damage of various kinds has rendered uninhabitable—or at least not prey to further human disturbance—and where, curiously, plant and animal forms are rapidly speciating. It’s probably too much to call the book hopeful; as Flyn says, it’s not like she’s advocating for toxic damage in order to foster speciation. Still, I can’t think of another environmental book in recent years that has left me with a flicker of optimism. [Ed. – Agreed!]

Edward Burtynsky, Sawmills #1, Lagos, Nigeria, 2016

Poets and poetry fans who have borne with me this far may be wondering, what about verse? I tend to read poetry less systematically and don’t track it as I do prose. With that said, a number of poetry books meant a lot to me as I spent time with them this year, including works by Garrett Hongo, Sharon Olds, Katie Farris, Ilya Kaminsky, A. Van Jordan, Phillip Howerton, and Ada Limón. Dorian’s comments on Wisława Szymborska here, as well as his fellow podcasters’ insights, sent me back to her work with pleasure. Individual poems sometimes linger with me for days.

My final read of 2023 was Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. In it she takes up the question of what we as readers, moviegoers, concertgoers, and art audiences do with the knowledge that makers of works we love have committed terrible deeds. Starting with Roman Polanski, she touches on artist wrongdoers of many times and places, along the way considering art theory, cancel culture, liberalism, men, childcare, consumerism, celebrity and fandom, asshole-osity, motherhood, beauty, effort, and love. [Ed. – the asshole-osity is really going around these days.] She inventories her own aesthetic and emotional responses and reckons with the old biography-versus-art-alone conundrum. Dederer does not land in a simple place or tie this all up neatly. As much as her conclusion, I like her forthrightness, the searching quality of her mind, her unwillingness to rest with skewed or kneejerk reactions. Worthy of Eliza Touchet, you might say.

Alex Prager, Applause, 2016

Thank you for reading this—I welcome your opinions on any of these books and writers!—and to Dorian for inviting me to share. This virtual alp of books is something I enjoy throughout the year. [Ed. – Thnk you, Hope: always a pleasure to have you here.]

Hope Coulter’s Year in Reading, 2021

Posted on by under Guest post, lists, review, year in review

Today’s reflection on a year in reading, her second, is by Hope Coulter(@hopester99), whom I’m lucky to call a colleague. A fiction writer and poet, Hope directs the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation at Hendrix College.

Look for more reflections from a wonderful assortment of readers every day this week and next. Remember, you can always add your thoughts to the mix. Just let me know, either in the comments or on Twitter (@ds228).

Alex Colville, Dog in Car, 1999

I tend to read erratically, not methodically, and my favorite books of a given year are always an eclectic list. For 2021 this was more the case than usual. I’m at a loss to discern any overall theme, what my college professors would call an organizing principle, in my reading life of the past twelve months. I seemed to bounce between serious works that might help me make sense of the grim circumstances overtaking the globe and marvelous, much-needed diversions from the same.

In nonfiction, one stand-out read was Barack Obama’s Promised Land. America’s 44th President is simply a terrific writer, with an ear for the rhythms of language and an eye for telling detail. This memoir tacks back and forth between two main narrative lines, one a chronicle of the administration’s initiatives and setbacks and the other—thankfully—the more personal side of life in the White House. The latter sections, relating everything from travel and cultural thrills to trying to find some kind of normalcy as the First Family, were merciful oases after long slogs through the housing crisis, the auto bailout, and never-ending Congressional acrimony, which kindled angst that not even Obama’s elegant telling could dispel. This book doesn’t touch the greatness of his earlier memoir, Dreams from my Father. Still, it wowed me, and I flagged many passages about race and democracy as keepers.

Slight but strong, and thoroughly entertaining, was The Actor’s Life: A Survival Guide by Jenna Fischer (aka Pam from the U.S. version of The Office). It’s fresh, unaffected, and utterly absorbing—fun reading not just for aspiring actors or anyone interested in an inside view of Hollywood, but for creative artists of any type who have to cope with rejection, ignominy, and professional jealousy. Along with a frank account of her own loopy path to success and some behind-the-scenes stories from The Office, Fischer gives practical tips on how to persevere.

In the surprising-oldie category of nonfiction, I stumbled upon Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, an Englishwoman’s account of her 1873 travels through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. What a woman! What adventures! Bird was tough as nails, a skilled equestrian who dismissed injury, privation, and subfreezing conditions with less complaint than most of us bestow on two seconds’ delay in our Netflix buffering. [Ed. – But it’s so fucking irritating, Hope!]  The edition that I read provided zilcho context to her prose—no editor’s note, no prologue, no afterward, no jacket copy—and the utter absence of context made me somehow enjoy her acquaintance even more. Bird is an efficient narrator who knows what to skip over or leave out and what to leave in, and a good describer, if one excuses a bit of 19th-century excess when her sunset rhapsodies go a bit over the top.

Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century absorbed me from start to finish. I had not appreciated the extent of the nomadic van culture that has swelled since the 2008 economic collapse, and was struck by so many slices of that experience that are portrayed here, from jobs in national parks and Amazon warehouses, to ad hoc communities that have sprung up around this culture, to the Earthship vision that is gaining attention as the climate worsens. The movie starring Frances McDormand was based on this, and while I admired her performance, I’m not sure I could have made much sense of the movie if I hadn’t already read the book.

I enjoyed Edwidge Danticat’s The Art of Death: Telling the Final Story, another in Graywolf’s fine series of craft books commissioned from current writers; but then I’m a Danticat fan and love pretty much everything she writes. [Ed. – Hmm, that seems a bit backhanded…]

My final nonfiction standout was Gene Lyons’s Widow’s Web, which I reread last year for the first time since its publication in 1993. [Ed. – Arkansas, represent!] A riveting true crime story, it also exposes a fascinating picture of Arkansas politics of that era: jockeying police and sheriff’s departments, ambitious prosecutors and defense attorneys, criminal lowlifes, and, yes, venal liars, evildoers, and demagogues. This time around I was more aware of the challenge Lyons faced in figuring out how to pace, frame, and sequence all the byzantine storylines (I remember running into him frequently in the late 1980s in the aisles of the then-Safeway in Little Rock’s Hillcrest neighborhood, and hearing him air the difficulties of his process while my ice cream melted in my cart). This book proved as zesty and trenchantly told as I remembered from my first reading nearly thirty years ago. (Gene, if you read this, I don’t begrudge the ice cream.)

Segueing into fiction, let me lift up Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies, which dazzled me at first, though my enthusiasm cooled some as the chapters wore on. Memoir, novel, autofiction? Who cares? I liked the hero less by the end of the book; but then again one has to admire a writer honest enough to present an obviously autobiographical self on the page warts and all, allowing readers like me to sit back and make judgments about them. As one more take on the migrant search for identity—arrivees simultaneously attracted by American ideals and repelled by the failure to live them out—it was a fine read. Two more terrific novels about migration that I read last year are The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri and The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota. I also reread some of Mohsin Hamid’s work in connection with his April visit to my campus: How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a wonderful read; and Exit West remains one of my top-tier favorite novels, debonair, quietly funny, and bearing much significance for our time.

Other memorable novels from the past year: Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone(1947), a story of Nazi resistance that’s just as grim as the title suggests [Ed. – God I love that book]; Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, a post-pandemic apocalypse novel, dark fun and strangely prescient of our current plague, although published in 2014; and Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William—not as good as her Olive Kitteridge novels, in my opinion, but still enjoyable.

Thanks to Our Fearless Blogmeister [Ed. – Please, call me OFB], I read Arnold Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tales (bad title, good book) for an online group-discussion experience that he co-led with Rohan Maitzen last summer. I enjoyed it for two main reasons. First, if you like 19th-century fiction at all you probably have a soft spot for description, and Bennett is a top-notch describer: he serves up well-chosen, well-rendered detail of both the mundane and the weird, affording us the sheer pleasure of learning how things were in certain times and places. Second, there are the character arcs. One advantage of getting older is the ability to see more and more of the complete trajectories of the lives transpiring around you. Sometimes this is surprising (who would think she would ever have become XYZ?) and sometimes it’s droll because so completely predictable (of course that person would turn out ABC, they were just the same way in kindergarten). Either way, long observance of the crooks and bends and straightaways of other people’s fates, not to mention one’s own, is something I value in fiction as well as real life. Bennett chronicles the lives of the two protagonist sisters and their circles with this sort of long-view verisimilitude. In his effort to represent entire lives, wielding omissions and foreshortenings and jumps in perspective, it seemed he was feeling his way toward modernism.

Balthus, The Game of Patience, 1954

Audiobooks, for me, are reserved for dog walks (this pairing helps keep my dog and me well exercised, and my commutes are long enough that listening in the car would gulp up the chapters way too fast). [Ed. – Too fast? These words seem to be English, but I do not recognize them.] In March I finished Troubled Blood, the fifth in the Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith, aka J. K. Rowling. If you admire the Harry Potter series and want to see Rowling’s talents applied to adult material, check these out: for plot, wit, and rich evocations of contemporary Britain, they’re unbeatable. (If you don’t admire the Harry Potter series, well… just… oh, go talk to someone about Proust instead.) [Ed. – It’s me, she means me.] Robert Glenister, who reads the audio version, is on a par with Jim Dale, Grammy-winning reader of the HP series. [Ed. – Glenister makes the Strike books a thousand times better, IMO; I loved them, but I confess the worse Rowling gets, the less taste I have for anything she touches.]

What do you call the fear of running out of something good to read? Bibliolackaphobia? or maybe it’s not a phobia but an addictive behavior. At any rate, I was afflicted with a fresh bout of this particular anxiety around Thanksgiving, and desperately downloaded as many books as I could from the library as an antidote. Out of this batch there were a few passable reads, several that deserved the Dorothy Parker treatment (“not a book to be tossed aside lightly—it should be thrown with great force”), and one absolute delight: Hilma Wolitzer’s new collection, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket. The stories span a number of years, from 1966 to 2020. In their understatedness, their quizzical humor, their recurrent portraiture of New York women in different roles, they are reminiscent of, say, Grace Paley, and I became a Wolitzer fan by the time I was a few pages in.

In the last and most moving story, “The Great Escape,” the protagonist mentions a book she’s eager to discuss with her book club. The title didn’t ring a bell, but because I liked the sensibility of the collection so much I looked up this novel and ordered it, too, from the library. It was Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, which became my final great discovery of the year. The novel concerns a post-World War I Kansas City housewife, a woman whose life is circumscribed by wealth, enforced idleness, and the rigid values of her social set; who senses something lacking from her life that she cannot even express. It’s told in very short chapters that refrain from plot contrivance or heavy-handedness and are often funny, in an oblique, Lydia Davis sort of way. [Ed. – I’m listening…] There are sharp observations about race and feminism, and stirrings of change on the horizon, but at every point the novel resists collapsing into the artifice of having a theme or Social Meaning. (It was made into a movie starring real-life wife and husband Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, but of course the book’s artistry and restraint were savaged when they went through the sausage-grinder of screenplay adaptation. So if you’ve seen the movie don’t hold it against the novel.) I can’t think of another instance when I’ve sought out a book based on the recommendation of a fictional character, but this one turned out so well that I might have to consult other made-up people for their tips.

Meanwhile, you real people out there are serving quite well too. Thank you for your guest columns and your comments, and thanks, Dorian, for inviting me to chime in. I’m humbled by the opportunity. [Ed. – Nonsense, the pleasure is all ours!]