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Scott Walters’s Year in Reading, 2024

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Pleased to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his fourth, is by Scott Walters. Scott launched the much-lamented blog seraillon in 2010, and expects to return to it one of these days. He largely follows Primo Levi’s model of “occasional and erratic reading, reading out of curiosity, impulse or vice, and not by profession.” He lives with his partner in San Francisco.

Barring surprises, here ends the 2024 edition of the EMJ Year in Reading series: except, I hope, for my own. (Gotta write that…) Thanks to everyone who contributed–and all who read these engaging lists.

Balthus, The Passage of Commerce Saint-Andre (1954)

Thank you, Dorian, for inviting me again to participate in The Year in Reading. [Ed. – Pleasure all mine, Scott!] Mine meandered mostly pleasurably through some 60 books. I abandoned others, was surprised to have read fewer Italian works than in previous years, and experienced a number of unpremeditated pairings, reading two works each by a dozen authors plus more thematic linkages. I’ll get straight to 2024’s highlights:

The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins (1860)

I nearly lost my head when I interrupted my spouse’s reading of the final pages of The Woman in White, but her abrupt “Ssh!” made total sense as I plunged into the book myself the next day. Abstracted, the “detective-ish” book’s nutty plot—starting with its mysterious woman in white and moving to family secrets, confused identities, unlikely coincidences, shady interlopers, and convoluted inheritances—would hardly seem encouraging. But over 650 pages Collins never lets drop any of the knots of intrigue he has in the air, a master class in plotting with the ending so neatly and satisfyingly resolving the novel’s myriad conflicts that the book should have come tied up with a pretty bow. I found equally impressive his crafting of splendid characters, including the flamboyantly louche and unforgettable Count Fosco and Marian Holcombe, the novel’s moral center, surely one of the great characters in English literature. [Ed. – Now read No Name!]

[Paired with Collins’s The Moonstone].

The Purple Cloud, M. P. Shiel (1901)

If The Woman in White stands at the peak of the Victorian era, Shiel’s The Purple Cloud levels the period to the ground: an apocalyptic horror story, to be sure, with a body count beyond reckoning, but also an existential tale that takes Jules Verne’s brand of adventure in the direction of Lovecraft (and maybe even Kafka and Beckett). Into the tale of the sole-surviving member of a polar expedition returning to find worldwide catastrophe, Shiel mixes dazzling epic catalogues with itinerant wanderings—by dogsled, boat, rail, and on foot—that make Odysseus seem nearly an armchair tourist. A magnificently macabre tour of England unfolds from the coasts to the moors to the mines to the vacant house of Arthur Machen (to pay a literary debt) before the novel’s agonist traverses the infernal hellscape as far as Tokyo and San Francisco. Adding to the panorama of ghastliness is the misogynistic unpleasantness of the narrator himself, though having a murderer inherit such a lonely place is certainly a twist on the “last man” genre. Shiel lightens his grotesqueries by upscaling his inventiveness and gallows humor, even taking a few swipes at the Empire’s Victorian sensibilities. His idiosyncratic, nimble writing prompted me to mark down passages, though left me wondering whether the “purple” in his title may have referenced florid elements infecting his sheer writing bravura. Half-way through I wondered why the book didn’t regularly appear on English literature reading lists. Two-thirds of the way through, an abrupt turn sent the tone spiraling from Brueghel’s Triumph of Death into the schmalz of W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, underscoring a built-in problem of last man narratives: how to bring things to a close, what with destruction being so easy and rebuilding such a struggle. Shiel regained his footing towards the end but stumbled again on his way out the door. Maybe some goody-two-shoes editor had stuck their nose in. Still, The Purple Cloud’s grandiose conception and relentlessly ghastly anti-pleasures made it a singular reading experience—and fitting B-side to Collins.

Bel-Ami, Guy de Maupassant (1885)

At age 4, my French goddaughter presented me with a paper “cootie-catcher” featuring appealing green designs on three sides and a frightening mess of scribbled red and black on the fourth. I inquired. “This is a flower, and this is a tree, and this is grass, and this is a vampire.” [Ed. – Reasonable.] Now that she’s 21 I’ve come to expect this kind of thing regularly, but when she insisted that I read Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, I fell right into her trap. The story of a down-on-his-luck former soldier, Georges Duroy, whose life is transformed by a chance meeting with a war buddy who helps get him into journalism, is a superb depiction of the writing life; an existential examination of class, morality and gender relations; and one of the most sordid narratives I’ve come across. Duroy is a terrific antagonist, an arriviste with attractive qualities tinged by inexperience and raw ambition, not above prevarication and cruelty when it suits him. Maupassant manages the story so skillfully that I naively believed it to be heading towards a treatment of the subject of friendship between men and women, the source of Duroy’s “Bel-Ami” nickname—an ironic one, I was soon to realize, as what Maupassant does with Duroy makes Zola’s take on human debauchery look like a Sunday school picnic. [Ed. — !] The novel contains great set pieces, including a drawn-out death scene where a post-mortem odor drifts off the page like something out of D’Annunzio, and a party in a mansion on the Champs-Elysée that contrasts with the grim lives of Duroy’s rentier parents rotting away in Rennes. Maupassant levels the world of journalism too, its appetite for influencing public opinion, its writers seeking short-cuts to fame—a subject altogether too relevant today. Duroy’s talent, which emerges bit by bit, takes flight in social situations, where during one visit with a group of women he extemporizes on the writing of the French Academy. Maupassant, of course, was writing against the Academy grain, and few writers have woven a French of such sublime beauty from a tissue of such splendid decadence. [Ed. – Well, damn!]

[Paired with Manon Lescaut (1731), by the Abbé de Prevost].

Dark Back of Time, Javier Marías (1998) (Esther Allen, translator)

It would be unjust to pigeonhole Dark Back of Time –“a book of digressions”—as a campus novel, and equally unjust to separate it from its co-joined twin, All Souls (1992). But taken together as a campus novel, these two works, set at Oxford, slay all comers. Someone once quipped that the campus novel was about settling scores. Dark Back of Time seems aimed at undoing any barbs present in All Souls and even any notion of that book’s having been a roman à clef (this too, of course, may be a fiction). While the first part of Dark Back of Time engages weighty questions about fictional representation of real people, the joyousness of the novel’s explorations often had me in stitches, including a scene in which an academic negotiates with the narrator/author how he will be represented in the new novel, and another in which the narrator/author, timidly attempting to clarify for owners of an Oxford bookshop that what he’d written in All Souls was not about them, finds that the couple revel in their fame and petition to be included as themselves in a film version. It seems fitting in these books that Marías, Spain’s late greatest novelist, has evoked echoes of the most iconic of Spanish fictions, for, like the first and second books of Don Quixote, the two novels form an essential unit in which one could read only the first volume and miss out dramatically on what the second volume does with the first. (I’d love one day to see All Souls and Dark Back of Time boxed as a set; Cervantes would approve.) I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to suggest that these volumes, taken together, may be the finest contemporary literary work to address the question, “What is fiction?” Two other elements to recommend the book: The first is Marías’s inclusion of the fascinating story of Redonda, the “literary” nation of which Marías served as most recent and presumably final King (M. P. Shiel had been the first). [Ed. – Wait, that dude you just wrote about?? Is this real? Am I being punked??] The second is that Dark Back of Time contains some of Marías’s most exhilarating writing; I think immediately of a moving passage about the dawn crepuscule and streetlights that persist for a time into the day. Time having ever been one of Marías’s great preoccupations, I also winced at his narrator imagining life at age 85—a full 15 years past the premature end of Marías’s own. Unconscionably, The New York Times left Marías off of its recent list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century to date, but it is certain that the lamp of Marías’s work will live on to see its day.

[Paired with Marías’s short travel book, Venice: An Interior (2016)].

The Charwoman’s Shadow, Lord Dunsany (1926)

Fantasy is not among my favorite genres, but I’ve been fond of everything I’ve read by Edward Morton John Dax Plunkett, a.k.a. Lord Dunsany. Dunsany’s stories seem more like a new model of fairy tales, exploring interstices between reality and the imagination and dealing with moral issues without being moralizing. The Charwoman’s Shadow features a young Spaniard sent by his family to learn alchemy from a woodland magician, and exhibits Dunsany qualities in abundance: a deep gratitude for the richness of life, where nothing can be taken for granted; a genial wit and wordplay; a careful attention to nuance. The centerpiece of the novel is the value of one’s own shadow, the disappearance of which, through a Faustian bargain, produces unexpectedly dire consequences. Another Dunsany treasure is the lyrical quality of his writing, for example when he takes on that most magical of hours, l’heure bleue:

bright over the lingering twilight the first star appeared. It was the hour when Earth has most reverence, the hour when her mystery reaches out and touches the hearts of her children at such a time if at all one might guess her strange old story; such a time she might choose at which to show herself, in the splendour that decked her then, to passing comet or spirit, or whatever stranger would travel across the paths of the planets.

And then there is the book’s splendid ending, which I will not spoil other than to say that with no apparent thought of producing endless sequels like some contemporary writers of fantasy fiction, Dunsany gently places his chief protagonist off stage and sweeps into a realm of wistfulness drenched in the glow of a glorious sun setting at the height of Spain’s Golden Age.

[Paired with Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924)].

Fulgentius, César Aira (2017) (Christopher Andrews, translator)

At 163 pages, Aira’s Fulgentius straddles novella and novel, and not simply as matter of length. Aira’s intimate, vividly imagined tale of a Legate of the Roman Empire who also happens to be a playwright expands as it follows the aging Fulgentius and his 6,000 soldiers from Rome to reconquer Pannonia. Along the way, Fulgentius mounts performances of his sole work, a tragedy written when he was an adolescent, starring himself as tragic hero—and most important audience member. As Fulgentius has already written—or thinks he has already written—the tragic outcome of his own story, the plot tension is carried by a familiar Aira conceit around the entwining of fiction and reality. As a prime example one of Aira’s works that graft a fictional character onto history, Fulgentius offers a vivid sense of what such a march must have been like for the soldiers, the general, and the populations in their path. Deviating from the author’s more typical surrealist gymnastics, the language here takes on an unusually elegant lyrical register.

[Paired with Aira’s Alexandra Pizarnik (2001), an appreciation of the Argentine poet].

The Catherine Wheel, Jean Stafford (1952)

I found a copy of Jean Stafford’s The Catherine Wheel when I was 18. Had I read it then, I doubt I would have fully appreciated its adult nature—for it really is an adult book, dealing with adult things, things terrifying enough that I approached the novel’s final pages with a shudder of complete dread (completely vindicated). But in The Catherine Wheel Stafford also reckons with youth, entwining her two main characters, 38-year-old Katherine Congreve and her 12-year-old cousin Andrew Shipley. Devastated in love at an earlier age when Andrew’s father John married her sister Maeve, Katherine now occupies a position as the town’s most prominent unmarried curiosity, but also a magnet to John and Maeve’s children, left behind while the parents “summer” in Europe. Twin betrayals connected to this departure have set both cousins spinning: John’s surprise declaration of love for Katherine and determination to divorce Maeve while abroad, and the disappearance of Andrew’s playmate of previous summers, Victor, now entirely occupied with the post-war return of an older brother. Dually abandoned, the cousins shift focus to one another. Stafford thus sets up an unusual device in which youth attempts to divine the mysteries of adulthood while adulthood frets over the crises of youth, in a marriage story focused on impacts beyond the absent couple’s own strife. [Ed. – This feels like some Henry James-level melodrama!] A kind of third eye—that of the people of Hawthorne, who notice when Katherine’s light stays on into the wee hours—levies its own social pressure on the house’s inhabitants. Stafford’s densely poetic sentences frequently had me reading her aloud, relishing her words, marveling at the perfect limning of some little thing or creation of a resonance that rippled out towards subjects beyond the proximate ones. Though rooted in a realist, formalist literature that prioritized and exalted language, the novel still felt raw and new, bursting out of old molds, totally unsettling. Not a novel for the squeamish, but certainly one for any reader ready to appreciate some of the finest American writing of the period.

[Paired with Stafford’s The Mountain Lion (1947)].  

whose names are unknown, Sanora Babb (1936/2004)

Sanora Babb’s novel has been highlighted in recent articles recounting editor Bennett Cerf’s decision that two Dust Bowl novels in a single year would not stand. The other, of course, was The Grapes of Wrath, allegedly constructed in part on notes Babb had collected concerning hardscrabble farmers in her native Oklahoma, and which Cerf provided to Steinbeck. Though Babb published other well-received works, her Dust Bowl novel languished unpublished for nearly 70 years. whose names are unknown borrows its title from an eviction notice served on a family of Oklahoma farmers. What the novel may lack compared to Steinbeck’s elegant structure and majestic sweep, it makes up for in granularity of detail and visceral impact relating the farmers’ desperation and poverty, with particular attention to the lives of women, whose interactions give the work some of its strongest scenes. Babb’s direct, declarative sentences come across as hard as the land worked by her characters. She describes the knife-edge on which her people live, where even small luxuries—such as butter for the biscuits—must be used sparingly “so that it will last until the next churning.” Where Steinbeck set his novel on the back of hope for a better life in California, Babb spends a long time in Oklahoma before heading west, zeroing in on the encroachment of the Dust Bowl, poor farming practices colliding with a change in climate and the shifts within and without people as they try to wrestle with such environmental change. Babb’s powerful novel deserves at least to be taught alongside Steinbeck’s, or rather, as the debt is all his, the other way around. [Ed. – Pretty telling/damning that I’d never heard of it.]

Écoute, Boris Razon (2018)

It’s clear from which chapter of French journalist Boris Razon’s novel Écoute (“Listen”) Jacques Audiard plucked the seed for his film Emilia Perez, but Écoute differs almost entirely from the film. As the book’s title suggests, Razon focuses here on listening, various forms of which coalesce the book’s entwined stories and capture the complex, fraught texture of contemporary communications. Set mostly on a single block near Place d’Italie in Paris (with detours to Mexico City and Lisbon), and with the November 2015 terror attacks continuing to resonate, the novel touches on the surveillance state by encompassing listener, the listened-to, privacy, and identity (here’s where Emilia Perez came in, but so, to my surprise, did Fernando Pessoa). In conveying the rapid-fire chatter and laconic banality of so many electronic communications, Razon employs a good deal of verlan, texts and texting abbreviations, and emoticons, prompting one character to muse on the absence of a dictionary adequate to capture today’s modes of information sharing. Running beneath this surface noise is a current of desire to disappear from a world in which privacy has all but vanished. The stunning first chapter presents a scene of the Paris street that surely ranks among the richest in that city’s literature, an “audioscape” as experienced from the inside of a police surveillance van by an officer quietly being undone by his job of attempting to cull signal from the noise and by the uncanny valley between electronic input and what he perceives with his own senses. [Not yet available in English translation, though that may well change should Emilia Perez win the Oscar for best film].

Edward Hopper, Solitary Figure in a Theater (1903)

Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land (2020) and Thunder and Lightning: Weather Past, Present and Future (2015), Lauren Redniss

2024 was the year I came late to Lauren Redniss’s party, pairing her powerful Oak Flat with her larger format Thunder and Lightning. The former explores the fight around the proposed Resolution mine on tribal lands in Arizona, while the latter treats weather phenomena both straightforwardly (i.e. Rain, Heat, Wind) and in more abstract terms (i.e. Chaos, Dominion, Profit, War). Using an anecdotal approach, Redniss displays in both books a knack for ferreting out the most interesting possible interviewees and unearthing fascinating hidden tales. But what makes the work of this MacArthur award winner stand out is its exploration of text and image. Using full page illustrations, Redniss skillfully advances her story through images of such impact that I found myself gasping at turning a page and being confronted with an image perfectly tuned to the tone she had set. The large format of Thunder and Lightning lends itself particularly well to her subject. In Fog, the text crawls along the bottom of pages of vast gray. Redniss’s deliberateness in matching image to text and letting the image carry the narrative feels like a new form of text/image interaction. In a section about cloud seeding, she describes a proposal to use weather balloons to heft a pipe with multiple nozzles to spray chemicals that could help cool the planet. I could not help see this as a metaphor for the way her illustrations lift her text in air. These images, easily mistaken for colored pencil washes, are in fact mostly acid etchings in black and white that Redniss has hand-colored (Thunder and Lightning includes a description of her processes). I read Redness not long after finishing James Elkins’s novel, Weak in Comparison to Dreams, another work that relies heavily on images, by a leading theorist of text/image interaction, no less, and now find myself dreaming of a Redniss/Elkins collaboration. Come on, you two. Make it so. [Ed. – Either way, I’m tracking down these Redniss books!]

Moonlight Elk, Christie Green (2024)

I know Christie Green but was wholly unprepared for her first book. Each time I put Moonlight Elk aside, I could not wait to get back out into it. That awkward prepositional formulation feels apt, as Moonlight Elk, a book framed around Green’s experiences in across New Mexico hunting wild game, largely for sustenance, takes one to wild spaces in an intensely intimate manner. Exploring the borders between interiority and exteriority, animal and human, life and death, the book’s dozen interlocking pieces, indexed to a hand-drawn map of the state, might well be the New Mexico state book of the year (if such a thing exists). With solid research behind her narrative, Green leverages her experience as hunter, mother, landscape architect, land use expert, designer, naturalist, activist, and writer to traverse territory of essay, short story, meditation, and what one might call an anthropology of relationship. Memoir might also come to mind, but resistant to definability, Moonlight Elk seems more like an exorcism, a courageous self-interrogation in quest of a “free range” existence that refutes facile answers, upends convention, moves into spaces predominantly occupied by men, and attempts to rid the cultural body of a toxic detachment from nature. Hunting—particularly as a woman alone—foregrounds the narrative, but Green is after larger game. She inhabits the lives of animals, their cycles and patterns, how they move, what they sense, how they see her. The mysterious, miraculous complexity of bodies, not least Green’s own, forms the beating heart of the book: details of muscular structure and bone, of blood and feathers and sex, the quickness of eyes, the sharp sense of smell. Her hunts force self-reckoning, as when she discovers a fetus moving within the abdomen of a cow elk she has shot, or when she ends the suffering of another cow that comes to her after being gruesomely wounded by poachers. Green, who grew up in Alaska, integrates into her experiences a wealth of issues impacting the American West, from private vs. public land and water use to tribal and border concerns (in the boot heel of New Mexico, a quail hunt collides with Border Patrol conducting their own kind of hunting). Only at the narrative’s end did I grasp the extent of the subjects Green had covered. More personally affecting, as she moves through forest, desert and chapparal, shadowed by cliffs and trees, illuminated by dreams and the changes of the moon, she offers, with keen animal sense and without escapism, an orthogonal, conscientious response to received ideas, convenient consumerism, and mediated experience. Hyper-alert, alive, intuitively creating her path, Green renders wilderness almost otherworldly. I emerged from Moonlight Elk seeing this world anew, as though a physical alteration had taken place. [Ed. – Sold! Might pair well with Joanna Pocock’s Surrender.]

Gallery of Clouds, Rachel Eisendrath (2024)

The title: irresistible. The cover too, a fresco of clouds at sunrise or sunset from the ceiling of the Rose Main Reading Room in the New York Public Library. And the opening especially, the author recounting a dream of carrying her manuscript through heaven and meeting: Virginia Woolf. Both ostensibly and in fact, the subject of Gallery of Clouds is Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th century, 900-page pastoral romance, Arcadia, about which I knew nothing and which overwhelms even Eisendrath, a Sidney scholar: “I find that my memory of the plot has already started to dim, to blur…I can no longer keep track of the basics…” I say “ostensibly” because Eisendrath uses the obstacle, Arcadia serving here as a nexus to send her fertile mind wandering down winding paths, from observations on the genre of Romance to the use of images, Shakespeare to Little Nemo, Poussin to Walter Benjamin, Montaigne to manicules (!), the marriage of hunting with desire to the cat dozing on Eisendrath’s bed.

But these seemingly inexhaustible spin-offs never seem gratuitous. Eisendrath subtly constructs an Arcadia of our own era, her black & white photos echoing the pastoral romance’s means of advancing its airy infinities through “images in words,” her “clouds” of thought (which she pointedly distinguishes from mere fragments) paralleling the episodic nature of the romance, her grounding her observations on Sidney in a relatable contemporary manner underscoring the genre as a response to grim realities. At the same time, Eisendrath engages proliferating modes in contemporary writing, such as the use of the fragmentary, the merging of the academic and the personal, the punctuation of text with images, the grappling, through a need to say, with an unraveling world. Though she is writing about a 16th century romance, her small, enthralling, sui generis book has volumes to say about how we read and write. And in Eisendrath’s few references to her own teaching, Gallery of Clouds, more than anything I have read in decades, has me wanting to be a student again.

The Waves, Virginia Woolf (1931)

Rereading The Waves 40+ years after I first read it and in the same copy I’d used then, my margin notes served to measure the distance between that young reader and this old one. I experienced pride regarding the young stranger’s underlining of particular lines; I noted too that he’d missed a lot. Passages of time of this sort span The Waves, entwined temporal arcs that longitudinally capture Woolf’s six characters through alternating interior soliloquies as they move from childhood to university [ed. – well, some of them get to go to university…] to the workplace to middle age and beyond, while brief impressionistic pieces preface each chapter and, over the course of the novel, trace the sun’s path across the sky during a single day at the shore. Here as in many of her works, Woolf, the great writer of immediacy, obsesses over capturing sensations, gestures, glances, discreet moments, the wave at the point of breaking, of ebbing. Rafts of glorious sentences ride Woolf’s exquisite phrasing, as she simultaneously questions the inadequacies of language, frustration with these limits reaching a crescendo as mortality nears for her characters, and a voice longs for:

some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then undeniably. Lying in a ditch on a stormy day, when it has been raining, then enormous clouds come marching over the sky, tattered clouds, wisps of cloud. What delights me then is the confusion, the height, the indifference and the fury. Great clouds always changing, and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch. Of story, of design I do not see a trace then.

[Ed. – Is this Bernard? Sounds like Bernard.] Woolf described The Waves as a “playpoem,” but its approach to polyphony is unusual. In the first chapter, she goes inside the heads of her characters as young children while at the same time supplying them a vocabulary beyond their years, a device through which they speak both as themselves and as the writer, the latter’s presence made manifest when the children catch a glimpse through a window of a woman writing. Throughout the novel, her six characters’ voices float like spheres governed by gravity, now apart, now coalescing, as waves gather force and crash, exploding in spray and froth. But her characters also serve to question the nature of identity: clearly creations of the writer and facets of her circle (the roman à clef aspects interested me little), they are also beings in whom a “self” is merged inextricably with other selves. For all of its prose-poeminess, The Waves stands as a remarkable and grounded philosophical inquiry into what constitutes a self—and whether it even makes sense to speak of a “self.” [Ed. – Yes, the latter especially!]

In my first reading, I scarcely noticed the centrality to the novel of the death of Percival, a “seventh” character never given a voice. But in Paris shortly after finishing The Waves, I caught director Elise Vigneron’s theatrical adaptation of the novel, an extraordinary work employing both live actors and corresponding marionettes made of ice, such that as the play progressed, these figures melted, with much of the later action occurring in a resulting pool center stage. [Ed. — !] The physical presence of these characters and their doubles rendered Percival’s invisible presence powerful, a black center in Woolf’s “six-sided flower; made of six lives.” As with the shell-shocked Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, Percival represents a generation of young people damaged or lost to conflict and war. The cumulative effect of Woolf’s meditation on loss, whether through ordinary aging or via the injustice of an early death—and a palpable sense of darkness again descending upon Europe—left me overwhelmed by emotion at the story’s close.

What attracted me to Woolf at age 18 held firm: her sumptuous sentences; the tension between a love of people and aloof solitariness; the desperation of time passing fused with the fever to glean something lasting from the fleeting and ineffable. Also: recognition at last of Woolf’s lament for life lost at an early age, for the unshakable impact on those left behind, pushing The Waves into a work far greater than I’d registered the first time around. I’ve been thrilled, moved, and humbled by revisiting this extraordinary novel while the sun sinks toward a darkening horizon, so many years after I first read it, when the sun still mounted the sky. [Ed. – Beautifully put, Scott.]

[Paired with Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts (1941)].

Felix Edouard Vallotton,The Sunny Street (1922)

Others works I could have included: D. H. Lawrence’s powerful Sons and Lovers [Ed. – Ph hell yeah]; Italian critic Cristina Campo’s The Unforgiveable;  the Strugatsky brothers’ The Snail on the Slope; Georges Simenon’s Arizona noir La Fond de la Bouteille; Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale; a pair of short books by Helen DeWitt (may she please complete her novel-in-progress set in Flin Flon, Manitoba) [Ed. – Wait what now]; Andrés Barba’s Two Small Hands and Andrés Neuman’s The Things We Don’t Do; poet Susan Nguyen’s second gen take on the American South in Dear Diaspora and other of her poems on-line; and, Most Unexpected Literary Object, the first volume of Ahmed Fāris Al-Shidyāq’s Leg Over Leg, a daring four-volume novel completed in 1885 with the modest ambition of catapulting the whole of Arabic language and literature into the modern age. In sum, a Year in Reading that elicited joy, snark, bon courage, resolve, humility, and defiance for challenging times ahead.

[Ed. – To which I can only summon both the raised fist and the thank you hand emojis: this is wonderful, Scott. May we draw on those good emotions in 2025!]

The Paying Guests–Sarah Waters (2014)

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Just so you know, I reveal details of the plot here, so maybe bookmark this for later if you’re planning to read the book anytime soon.

Near the beginning of The Paying Guests, Frances Wray, the novel’s protagonist, looks in on her mother before going to bed. Mrs. Wray is sitting up in bed with “a book in her lap, a little railway thing called Puzzles and Conundrums: she had been trying out answers to an acrostic.” Near the end of the book, after dramatic events that Frances has kept secret, she feverishly speculates that her mother has guessed part of what has happened: “But how long before she worked out more? How long before the whole thing knitted itself together, like one of her wretched acrostics?”

These references are quite disparaging (“a little railway thing,” “wretched”), which is surprising, since, on the face of it at least, The Paying Guests is greatly interested in puzzles, mysteries, enigmas, and the like. In the great tradition of Golden Age British crime fiction, these mysteries concern unlikely protagonists. The Paying Guests’s Wrays live in a respectable London suburb. The Great War has been over for four years but its effects persist, not least in their household. Frances’s two brothers died in the fighting, and her father of ill health and grief soon after, leaving behind an unpleasant surprise: his investments turn out to be nearly worthless. Mother and daughter live on in the family home, a home that is too big for them, and too expensive. They have long since let the servants go; now the only solution to their financial straits is to let part of the house to strangers.

The novel begins with the arrival of the lodgers, the Barbers. (Mrs. Wray calls them “paying guests,” in keeping with her willingness to delude herself about anything she doesn’t want to face.) Leonard and Lilian are a young lower-middle class couple: he works as an insurance agent, she looks after their home and dreams of art school. They are the novel’s first puzzle: we share in the Wrays’ half-horrified, half-fascinated efforts to figure them out. Their manner of speaking, their gramophone, their rooms decorated in garish bohemianism: all set them apart from the fastidious, self-regarding, and yet increasingly threadbare world of their landladies (a term Frances uses to shock her mother).

Frances is a character we’ve come to know from some of Waters’s other books, especially The Night Watch (2006): the melancholic lesbian. Much of the great sadness of the Wray household arises from her thwarted hopes. We learn of her pacifist and suffragist activism during the war years (she was briefly arrested for throwing a shoe at an MP), and the woman, Christina, she met and fell in love with during that time. Later we learn of the crisis when Christina asks her to live with her and Frances bows to her sense of family obligation and breaks the relationship off. Frances cares for her mother and the household, she manages the finances as best she can. The book is a study in the exhaustion that comes from making small economies at a time when the daily business of keeping up a household was much more labour intensive than it is now. Waters describes the housework in detail: the fires to be made and kept up, the dusting and sweeping, the scrubbing by hand of the tiles, twice, first with vinegar to remove the dirt, then again with water to get a shine (which of course soon fades). Bathwater must be heated; the WC is across the yard. Even going to bed is “a round of chores—the gatherings, the turnings-down, the cushion-plumpings and the lockings-up.”

Frances, though a puzzle to her family (her mother in particular effects not to know about her daughter’s sexual orientation, holding out hope that she will find a man, and therefore a purpose to her life), isn’t one to herself. She knows the solution to her ennui (meaningful work, recognition, a room of her own, love, life) but can’t imagine where it might come from. To her surprise—but not to ours, at least not to those of us who have read Waters before—the solution turns out to be right in front of her, right under her roof in fact.

Frances and Lilian, who are often alone in the house together, slowly become friendly, their relationship characterized, on Frances’s part at least, by a muted gallantry that is part of the way she keeps all the important things about herself in check, hidden from everyone, even, almost, herself. Eventually Frances outs herself to Lilian, telling her about Christina. Lilian’s responds with wary reserve; Frances curses herself for saying too much; the intimacy dies as quickly as it had flared. But one night everything suddenly changes, Lilian’s reserve is revealed to have been fear of her feelings, and the two fall headlong into a charged relationship that consists, like the experience of being closeted, of hiding in plain sight: they steal moments together whenever they can, even under the very noses of Leonard and Mrs. Wray.

Then a lot of things happen at once. Lilian reveals she is pregnant and asks Frances to administer some pills she has purchased illegally from a shady chemist’s. The night she induces a miscarriage is the same night Leonard comes home early from a business meeting. He assumes the child is a sign that Lilian has been involved with another man. When he threatens Lilian, Frances tells him the truth. Leonard attacks her in a rage; a desperate Lilian beats him off with an ashtray, the first thing that comes to hand; the blow to the back of the head kills him.

The women subside in relief that quickly turns to shock. Lilian convinces Frances not to call a doctor or the police. Instead they manage to remove the body—Waters is great on the physicality of bodies, especially as revealed through sex, work, and death: the scene in which they desperately drag the corpse downstairs, out through the garden, and into the lane behind the house, before Frances’s mother comes home from her bridge night is a marvel of suspense and horror—and erase the signs of the struggle. Here the descriptions of cleaning that earlier seemed only to remind us of the emptiness of Frances’s life take on new urgency; so too do the earlier meditations on its futility (everything fades, everything decays: the porcelain collection always collects new dust, the freshly scrubbed floor always attracts someone’s muddy boots) take on new irony: some traces of the crime (bloodstains on the carpet, for example) simply can’t be expunged.

Murder, it seems, will out. The police become increasingly suspicious about the crime. It seems inevitable that the women will be found out. Their actions drive a wedge between them: they are physically separated, Lilian’s family takes her to stay with them, and emotionally separated, caught in a series of emotional upheavals ranging between fear of getting caught, elation at how everything seems to be breaking their way, paranoia that the authorities know more than they’re letting on, shame at having their comfortable lives mixed up in murder, and guilt at the idea that someone else might be held accountable for their actions.

Yet whenever the book seems to become conventional, it shrugs its shoulders, reveals conventionality to have been a red herring. Take for example its decision to limit its narration closely to Frances. We only really know how Frances is feeling. Lilian remains much more shadowy. Thus we too become suspicious of her motivations, her loyalties, her responses. We share in Frances’s suspicions. Did Lilian know, for example, about the large life insurance policy Leonard had taken out on himself only a few months before his death? Does Lilian love her—she’s never been with a woman before, after all—or is she taking advantage of her?

Lilian is the novel’s greatest enigma. We always have to read her through others’ perceptions. Even her most direct utterance—a love letter she sends Frances when away on holiday with Leonard—turns out to be open to more sinister interpretations. Added to this inscrutability are the facts that come to light about Leonard after his death. He turns out to have been having a long-standing affair with another woman, Billie, whose sometime boyfriend/fiancée, Spencer, had beaten him savagely several months earlier. Leonard’s best friend Charlie, meanwhile, was involved with Billie’s sister, which explains why he maintained to the police that he and Leonard were together on the night of his death: he was with that girl and didn’t want his fiancée to know about it. (Are you keeping up with all this? It gets a bit complicated, though Waters is admirably lucid with her details.)

The book’s most interesting surprises have to do with the ease with which the women get away with their crime. No one notices those bloodstains on the carpets, especially after Lilian’s family and the police trample over the Barbers’ rooms. It rains heavily the night of the murder, washing away evidence and ensuring that the only possible witnesses (a spooning couple) couldn’t see anything. Suspicion, which had first fallen on Charlie, comes, after the revelations about Leonard’s affair, to rest on Spencer, a young tough with a record of assault. He admits to the earlier attack on Leonard and relishes, at least at first, being accused of a crime he insists he didn’t commit but which he is glad about. Even when the boy goes on trial for murder, prompting the women to agonize over their responsibility in letting an innocent man be accused, this problem too goes away: a new witness, a fellow lodger of Spencer and his mother—they let rooms in a house much shabbier than the Wrays’—comes forward at the trial to confirm that Spencer had been at home the night of the murder. This man—a war veteran who loses his sales job by testifying (he was meant to have been in Leeds on business)—is the most admirable character, the only one we can unreservedly sympathize with.

Significantly, the man is never named, and so stands, not as a British Everyman, but as a symbol of the possible integrity that might remain in a society that has been thoroughly transformed by war, no matter how people like Mrs. Wray try to pretend it hasn’t. Like so many other veterans, various examples of which flit through the novel, the man is scraping to make ends meet, trying out all sorts of odd jobs. To lose this one is a hardship: doing so reinforces his bitterness at the society that fails to acknowledge the things he went through on its behalf.

Unacknowledged sacrifices are everywhere in the book. These losses are as much of people as of ideals, most obviously of sons and brothers, but also of lovers, especially same-sex ones. They are losses of expectation and hope. Is this, various characters ask, what we fought the war for? In this regard, the paying guests of the title might be everyone in England, or almost everyone. Certain no one seems at home in the new order, and everyone has had to pay.

Everyone except, suddenly, Frances & Lilian. The jury is convinced by the ex-serviceman’s testimony and finds Spenser not guilty. Leonard’s death is destined to remain unsolved. The women are free, their consciousnesses mostly assuaged. And just when it seems as though none of those things are enough to overcome the harm that’s come to their relationship, just when Frances has contemplated suicide from the Battersea bridge (but, in her sensible way, quickly rejected it), at that very moment Lilian breathlessly arrives and the novel concludes by intimating a new beginning for the two of them.

In this way, The Paying Guests uses its crime story framework to ask the question, what would happen if you got what you wanted, if all the obstacles to your desire melted away? One answer is that there’s no such thing: there are always obstacles, we never get what we want. That’s the lesson of most crime stories, from Macbeth to Patricia Highsmith.

But the novel’s more interesting answer is that this crime does pay, because of the desire that motivates it. The most ingenious thing Waters has done here is to use the conventions of crime fiction to make her point about the invisibleness of same-sex, especially lesbian desire. Although Waters creates a lot of suspense as to whether suspicion will fall on Frances and Lilian, ultimately, she suggests, that suspense is beside the point. The law—exclusively, even obstreperously male here—simply cannot imagine Frances and Lilian as co-perpetrators, as co- anything. The police are no different from Leonard, who assumes his wife must have been with another man. We can imagine that, had the women confessed, the police would have been as unforgiving as Leonard was. But they’ll never get there on their own. Only other women—Lilian’s sisters in particular—can even begin to imagine the truth—not about the murder, but about the nature of Frances and Lilian’s relationship. But that “knowledge” can’t extend beyond an inarticulate suspicion of something queer.

Waters is too attuned to historical reality to paint too optimistic a picture of the possibilities enabled by the invisibility of lesbian desire. After all, the relationship between Frances’s former lover, Christa, and her artist friend Stevie appears only at the margins of the story: their life together seems precarious. And Waters doesn’t show us what Frances and Lilian’s life together looks like. But the absence of robust, open, healthy lesbian relationships isn’t just an acknowledgement of history. It’s also, more interestingly, a function of the book’s narrative form.

Waters hasn’t always handled similar material in the same way. The Night Watch, for example, is another story of war and homosexuality. There too, forms of life, expressions of desire, that are possible in wartime (in this case, WWII) become much more difficult afterwards. But that novel qualified its narrative of the rise of peacetime conventionality by telling its events in reverse (that was the source of much of its power), so that the narrative of the book countered the narrative of history.

By contrast, the conventional structure of The Paying Guests left me unsatisfied. Although suspenseful, it more often feels inert, as if it were leading to something it chooses not to develop. It’s not just my naïve desire to know whether things turn out happily ever after that was disappointed by the ending. I wanted the book to take on the challenge of imagining what Frances and Lilian’s life would look like, as two women living together, let alone two women who bore the burden of the secret of their responsibility in a crime.

I think the book is aware of this failure, if not in terms of its characters then in terms of its form. Remember those references to acrostics I started with. Although it’s helpful of Waters to use the second reference to remind us of the first, there’s an obviousness here—aren’t we supposed to make the connection between the daughter’s situation and the mother’s puzzles?—that makes me think about what kind of book The Paying Guests wants to be. For not all books are supposed to be puzzles. In this regard, the part of these passages that seems the most important is nothing to do with puzzles per se but rather with the kind of book the puzzles are in: “a little railway thing.” The dismissal is Frances’s, though it might equally be her echo of Mrs. Wray’s sensibility: its snobbishness disguised as self-deprecation suits her to a tee. It doesn’t really matter, since, at the beginning of the book, mother and daughter quite agree, at least on matters of social class.

But does Waters agree? I don’t think so. I think she wants to write “a little railway thing”—though, to be sure, and this is a significant difference, a queer one. Waters has always loved popular late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literary forms (sensation fiction, detective fiction, gothic fiction, suffragette memoirs). But her desire to re-write them from a queer perspective means she can never inhabit them fully. In her past work, this has felt like an enlivening tension. But here the ambivalence comes across as more uncertain. One way to take the measure of that uncertainty is to consider the novel’s allusions to canonical literary modernism, a movement that prided itself on being puzzling.

The opening line—“The Barbers had said they would arrive by three”—feels like a flat echo of the one that famously begins Mrs. Dalloway: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Frances’s meditation on her neighbourhood’s seclusion—“you’d never guess that a mile or two further north lay London, life, glamour, all that”—sounds like a drier, less rhapsodic version of Clarissa’s hymn to “what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.” (Waters’s book, by contrast, begins on “a wet April evening.”) But when Frances does slip into the city, she sounds like the much-wealthier Clarissa:

She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail; or else, like a battery, to become charged… It was like being a string, and being plucked, giving out the single, pure note that on was made for. How odd, that no one else could hear it!

The rush of metaphors, the sensual attunement to the world, the exclamatory free indirect discourse: why, Frances here almost makes herself into the peals of Big Ben that boom and dissolve across Woolf’s novel.

As I read on, I kept finding other modernist references: the flower-seller Frances dashes over to as she accompanies Christina reminded me of the destination of Clarissa’s initial errand. Other references seemed more overt. The description of a sudden, pregnant silence—“She was aware of rain, in a sudden shower”—echoes the line from “The Waste Land” about the summer that surprises “in a shower of rain.” Frances’s hysterical vision, as she waits for Lilia not return from the chemist’s with the abortifacients, of a London overrun with infants—“Everywhere she looked she saw prams, she saw babies with pink, alive faces”—echoes Vivienne Eliot’s similar yet much more horrified vision in a letter to her husband. And Lilian’s exclamation about a poor world reminded me of Stevie’s heartfelt cry in The Secret Agent, “Bad world for poor people!”

At times I thought Waters might be thinking of her own novel as a kind of dialogue with that earlier novel, Conrad’s own remarkable exploration of the uses that genre fiction (spy stories, detective fiction) might be put to. I haven’t the energy to check if I’ve remembered this correctly, but Leonard stays in my mind as fleshly, rather like Conrad’s Verloc, and there is, of course, the similarity between the novels of a murder committed from outraged despair at the thought that the person one most loves might be threatened. Conrad subordinates genre convention to modernist imperative much more than Waters; and his book is much more pessimistic, even deterministic. So I don’t want to suggest they’re in any way the same book. I’m similarly willing to admit that I may be finding these allusions where they don’t really exist. (Did anyone else notice them?) But they struck me as signs of Waters’s own uncertainty about what kind of a book she’d written: a conventionally, if carefully structured crime story that might while away a railway journey that sometimes willfully disdains the more experimental literature of the period in which it is set yet which sometimes yearns for, even needs that very experimentalism as a way to be able to tell what, in the actual genre fiction of the period, would have been an untellable story. (Again, maybe I’m wrong. There might be a ton of Golden Age lesbian crime fiction that I don’t know about. If so, please enlighten me!)

I certainly don’t regret reading The Paying Guests (it’s long, probably too long, but a quick read). I’ll read anything Waters writes. But I don’t think this one quite came off. Perhaps we might think of it as a bit of a paying guest amongst the more established instances of her impressive body of work.