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.
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!]
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.
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.]
Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau 