Sometimes I think about this Report. Specifically, I wonder whether I’ll one day look back and see 2023’s posts more as death rattles than anything else. After how many months of unease and ennui do I begin to sound querulous? Feeling like I’m in my Prufrock era. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. But don’t worry, I’m trusting the process—this moment will pass and I’ll keep finding books that I want to read. In fact, after letting myself go off-list this month, I am only excited to see which books my mind will lead me to next month!
What I read in November:
Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables (2023)—I spent the first weeks of the month starting and abandoning books.1 Nunez’s latest arrived in the mail and I became afraid. What if this autofictional portrait of lockdown, where the older female narrator finds herself stuck in someone else’s apartment with a parrot and a vegetarian Gen Zer, would simultaneously be too real and also too gimmicky? I didn’t want to read something by Nunez that I wouldn’t end up loving. So then I started thinking, maybe what I really want right now is an Old Book, maybe what I really need to do is reread Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937). But I didn’t like my fragile hardcover copy of that novel, so I ruminated some more and finally opened The Vulnerables. And what do you know? Nunez opens her novel with the opening line from The Years! God’s plan.
I read the whole book easily, grateful for the loose plot and literary reflections that I love so much in her recent fiction. She is such a deep thinker and elegant communicator. Often, I disagree with her! And I think this is why I love her so much—she’s not a writer I like just because her writing validates my existing worldview. At the same time, she regularly puts into words feelings or moods that I recognize but struggle to articulate.
The Vulnerables is about people with different kinds of vulnerabilities—for some it is more the physical sense, ie, more likely to experience severe health issues due to COVID; for others, it’s more social/psychological, being susceptible to loneliness and loss of sense of self or purpose whether from the acute isolation of a specific period of time or the more chronic isolation of living in our present moment. Looking back on those early months of self-isolating in order to preserve her physical health, Nunez’s narrator—a writer who has always been something of a loner—reflects on her life and her life’s work and in the process opens up (makes herself vulnerable?) to the reader regarding questions about her work and its potential legacy.
At a time when I’m often wondering my true reasons for reading/reading fiction and especially when I feel a strong aversion to contemporary fiction, Nunez’s meditations about fiction help me see that maybe it’s not all in my head, the sporadic bouts of antipathy that compel me toward fiction written in eras where the novel held cultural dominance.
Growing consensus: The traditional novel has lost its place as the major genre of our time. It may not be dead yet, but it will not long abide. No matter how well done, it seems to lack urgency. No matter how imaginative, it seems to lack originality. While still a powerful means of portraying human character and human experience, somehow, more and more, fictional storytelling is coming across as beside the point. More and more writers are having difficulty quieting a voice that says, Why are you making things up? (227)
All of Virginia Woolf’s writing was produced in complex and uncertain times, though the complexity and uncertainty may have varied in degree and intensity over the decades. In the 1930s, as she wrote and then rewrote and then rewrote again (!!) The Years, Woolf was also wrestling with questions about the role of fiction in a world of extreme inequality and the rise of fascism. What she ultimately published was a failed experiment, the fictional half of what was to be, in Nunez’s narrator’s words, “a new form[, t]he essay-novel” (232). The traditional novel as Woolf’s generation had known it had by then long been remade into something new, and Woolf wanted still more invention—she knew the novel needed to continue to change with the times. It just makes so much sense that Nunez would bring The Years into The Vulnerables, as they are both products of moments when it wasn’t so easy to make a case for fiction’s relevance or greater purpose.
And where am I going with all this? Your guess is as good as mine. Did I love all of The Vulnerables? No. But that’s okay because I liked a lot of it and I learned that I can still love a writer even if I don’t love everything they write.
Virginia Woolf, The Years (1937)—Speaking of which!! Reading The Vulnerables obviously in no way diminished my desire to reread The Years. I can’t say exactly when I first read this novel, only that it was sometime between 2011 and 2013.2 By now, I didn’t remember anything about it except that it had a generational element and that it was among the less formally challenging works by Woolf, sort of a normie version of The Waves (1931). And it turns out I remembered correctly!
When the weather turns cold, when I start feeling like I simply Do Not Like contemporary fiction, and when I also don’t want anything to do with nonfiction, the only thing to read is something old!
This time around, I had great fun reading with Google Maps open on my phone, looking up all the places the characters of the Pargiter family walk, cab, train, and bus to over the course of nearly 60 years. Woolf loved a walk, loved to map the city in her fiction. And the best bits of The Years are the parts that describe the city and the weather. I cannot emphasize enough the top-tier weather writing.
Nunez’s narrator in The Vulnerables says that The Years “was not a great novel. It was not even a very good novel” (233),3 but I love that Woolf’s attempt to create a new form ultimately yielded a novel that, when read today, feels extremely traditional.4 Sure, it doesn’t follow a traditional plot and yes, it has many characters who broke with the traditions of their time, but it is also fully linear, a generational saga. It is no wonder it was her bestselling book during her lifetime.
Where The Vulnerables led me naturally to The Years, The Years led me just as naturally to The Waves—more on that in the next report!
What I’m looking forward to reading in December:
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)
Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience (2023)5
Adania Shibli, tr. Elisabeth Jaquette, Minor Detail (2020)
????? Tbh I’d love to hear recommendations for upper middlebrow thrillers/mysteries that don’t focus on killing women? Think Columbo in book form? I like Dorothy Sayers (except when her characters are overwhelmingly racist) and I’ve liked Tana French.
Lan Samantha Chang’s The Family Chao (2022) was Not For Me—I wanted a literary mindless mystery, but 50 pages of what felt like trying too hard to be mass market and of trying to deconstruct but ultimately reinforcing stereotypes did not appeal to me.
Ok, looking at my old hardcover copy—I got it at The Strand in 2013. It’s a sixth printing from 1937 🤪 and my notecards with quotes about gossip were still tucked into its pages 🥹
I thought I disagreed but now that I think about it, I kind of agree? It might not be a great Virginia Woolf novel, but her worst is better than almost anyone else’s best!
At times a bit too traditional—heads up for a sprinkling of bigoted attitudes among some of the characters in their twilight years.
Book Club selection for December.
Love city mapping novels and always try to find a geographically matching book on vacation! Maybe time for you to reread some Wharton.