February report
Ah, time. Anniversaries are occasions to mark the passage of it, to reflect on what’s changed between then and now. Well! It has been one year since I started writing this monthly report, and I think we all have a good idea of what’s changed since last February 🙃.
Nevertheless, it feels important to highlight that if you had even a shred of awareness this time last year, you felt the vibes changing, like something was Going To Happen Soon. That must partly have been why I liked Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020) so much—she really captures a low-simmering, atmospheric dread that, when I read it, seemed unique to life in a climate emergency, but which, I’m sure if I read it now, would also map neatly onto those last few weeks before everything shut down.
Anyway, I don’t want for Year 2 of the Book Report to turn into that Chris-Farley-interviewing-famous-people skit, so I’ll leave it at that,1 with a note that reading was a lot easier last February than it was this time around!
What I read in February:
Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts (2021)—I love starting out a month by immediately going off-list, but how could I resist my favorite critic’s debut novel, which is also about some of my favorite things?2 Set mostly in the first seven months of 2017, this novel is “about” what happens between the time when a woman discovers that her boyfriend secretly runs a popular conspiracy theory instagram account and when she really “begins” life anew in Berlin.
Oyler’s unnamed narrator is a softer, less grotesque, but no less self-loathing type of modern woman that increasingly appears in contemporary fiction. Given that this narrator is as Online as Patricia Lockwood’s narrator is in No One Is Talking about This (2021) (though way less chaotic), I wondered how and whether these fictional characters would interact on twitter.
Would I recommend this book to anyone? I am not sure! The first part is kind of very Ben Lerner-y in a way that I like but am not sure is for everyone? The second half kept me up until 2:00 am to finish it because I was simply riveted. Oyler is truly one of my favorite living readers, and I loved how she made a novel that builds out of and stays true to her critical stances. There’s a line in Fake Accounts—I won’t spoil it for you—that’s so breathtakingly mean and true that I gasped and wrote “Lauren!!!!” in the margin.3
Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (2010)—I don’t know why I like to act like I don’t really read/like to read short fiction, because the truth is that I love short stories that are done well and the only time I don’t want to read short stories is when I’m in the mood for a long story. The point is, Danielle Evans has to be in the top 5 of living short fiction writers? In terms of: her sentences, her plots, her characters, the ~moods~ she creates, and generally any other criteria for what makes a short story an exceptional short story. And, of course, like all the best short stories, I wanted them to be longer but understood that what makes them so perfect is that they are precisely the length that they are.
Te-Ping Chen, Land of Big Numbers (2021)—This is a collection of short stories I’ve been waiting to read for over a year, ever since my friend4 hyped it up to me, and I’m here to tell you that the hype is real! Each story is so compelling, with moments of delight and joy5 but also dread, melancholy, and quiet devastation. Chen captures so many different Ways We Live Now6 in stories that feel true and slightly fantastic yet also realistic. I had to pause between reading each story so that I could just sit with/process the one I’d just finished. WOW!!
Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X (2020)7—There’s a highly specific and specifically satisfying feeling that comes with breezing through a book that’s meant to be breezed through—not raced, because Schaitkin’s debut novel is very much an intellectual “mystery.” Particularly when you’re finding it hard to focus or get into any book. Schaitkin’s story of a wealthy, white 18-year-old woman’s death while vacationing on a Caribbean island, and how her family’s lives and the lives of the two men suspected of killing her unfold in the following decades is, I think, probably as responsibly approached as any narrative about such a setting written by a white woman can be!8 Does that mean that I feel 100% OK with, among other things, the novel’s opening chapter relying heavily on the voice and narrative perspective of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988), even if Schaitkin explicitly recognizes her critical and stylistic debt to Kincaid in the book’s Acknowledgments? Not really :(
Then again, who am I to talk, when I re-read A Small Place while vacationing in Anguilla a little over a year ago!! Then again again, this is a smart take on the genre! And I feel like it would be good for people who like mysteries and/or beach reads, especially if they are people from the same background as the main character is, to read Saint X. It is well written, interesting, and grounded in real research. It also fulfilled my own personal criterion for a “good” mystery, which is: I couldn’t predict where it was going or how it would end—in other words “who done it.”
Brandon Taylor, Real Life (2020)—I had forgotten that I’d pre-ordered the paperback version of Taylor’s debut novel, so it was a real treat to receive it in the mail and read it this month. What a book!! When I finished I said “well, no wonder it was a Booker Prize finalist.” This is a beautifully written narrative of one weekend in the life of a Black, queer graduate student in Wisconsin, which, like all the best modernist books, manages to capture so much about ~life~ in what seems like such an everyday story. I really can’t put into words how this novel made me feel and what it made me think about, except to say that I trusted that the experiences I am not personally familiar with that were depicted must be profoundly true/accurate because the experiences narrated that I was personally familiar with—wondering what it might mean to quit grad school, the fear that keeps you in grad school, the fear of what “real life” outside of grad school might be—T R U E and A C C U R A T E.
Put another way, Taylor has a powerful gift for dramatizing/describing really complex moods and moments. Also, his meditations on time?? I am still reeling. The narrative itself and its explicit references to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) reminded me of all the best things about Woolf, and made me want to re-read To the Lighthouse so that I could feel again what Real Life made me feel, which is what To the Lighthouse made me feel the first time I read it. What I mean to say is that Taylor is his own singular writer, and part of what makes his novel so good is that he achieves the same effect in this reader that Woolf does, but he does it in his own way. And to me, that is awe-inspiring! Shoutout to my friend Laura for raving about and thus pushing me to read this book.
What I’m looking forward to reading in March:
Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby (2021)9
Christine Smallwood, The Life of the Mind (2021)
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021)
Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (2021)10
Dantiel W. Moniz, Milk Blood Heat (2021)
And you can look forward in the March Report to reading about how I stay home all the time because I like it (OK, I do like it).
Reading too much internet, mainly.
A hint: it regards a kind of style currently popular in fiction and may or may not relate to some of the things I linked to in this very newsletter!
Full disclosure—my friend works at this book’s publisher but isn’t involved in its marketing.
If you read this book, when you get to the story called “New Fruit,” just know that that’s me eating sumo oranges.
Like, I really don’t want to talk about how often I’ve been refreshing my little stonks app all month as though I’m not too much like the main character in the title story.
Book club selection for February.
Actually, and Book Club was unanimous on this point, she didn’t need to and shouldn’t have done dialect for the characters who were from Saint X.
Book club selection for March.
All disrespect to Louis DeJoy (and none to the actual USPS) because this book was supposed to arrive in my mail on its release day, February 23, and it’s still not here 😡 .