I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—it is a marvel to me that I’m still here writing a book report (the fourth time I’ve written a February Report!), that you are still here reading it! And maybe it’s time to stop thinking that it’s a marvel and start accepting that I can be a woman of routine, that in fact I have often been a woman of routine, because of course it isn’t too difficult to keep a routine for something you genuinely like doing.
What I read in February:
Tommy Orange, There There (2018)—I can think of only a few better feelings than reading the right book at the right time, than listening to the book you’ve had on your shelf for at least a year call to you, and finding that it is just the thing you wanted to read without knowing why! To be clear, I knew this book—which Friend of the Report, Burcu, gave to me—was going to be extremely good. Burcu has a beautiful mind and impeccable taste. It just wasn’t the right time for me until this month!
The subject matter seems heavy, for lack of a better word. Doing what one of its characters does with a film documentary project, There There presents “the Urban Indian story” (40) by tracking the lives of loosely connected people in the months leading up to a big powwow in Oakland. It contains characters who’ve experienced traumas and whose various coping strategies range from harming themselves or others to isolating and disconnecting from their community. Despite individual and generational histories of pain/exploitation/abuse, this novel never once feels like trauma porn. I think that’s because Orange’s characters read like full humans, not caricatures.
The narrative culminates with an event the reader has dreaded since the first 30 pages, a conclusion that feels inevitable but is still surprising. I have opinions about violence in novels! Almost as many opinions as there are kinds of violence! My opinion of this book is that it is one of the few I’ve read that depict violence not gratuitously, not in the bad manipulative way,1 but in a way that is clear-eyed about the violence inherent to the “American” project, how that violence structures so many daily lives. There’s so much more to There There than that, too, and that’s why I loved this novel. It’s the everyday but in a way I’d never seen before and I’m so glad I finally read it.
Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch (2022)2—The tricky thing about this book is that if it had been just 10% less to my liking, I would have stopped reading it and therefore would not have to report that I belong to the small minority of people who think The Rabbit Hutch is not that great! As it was, I found it interesting enough to wonder whether I would start to like it if I just kept reading. On the one hand, I am glad I did finish the book—the ending was the most surprising (to me) aspect of the whole thing, and the least problematic part. On the other hand . . .
It’s actually pretty funny when I dislike a book that does things like have rants about technology that I completely agree with, or focus on areas (the midwest) and people (not the bourgeoisie) who do not frequently appear in contemporary literary fiction. Well, I don’t like the rants when they sound like Dawson’s Creek AKA when they are delivered by a teenager with the coherence, endurance, and vocabulary of an experienced litigator. When a novel reads like a set of arguments in search of characters to deliver them, I’m out.
There was something also about the structural consciousness beneath the narrative that made me very curious about Gunty’s background—that something was the creeping sense that the person who wrote this novel about young people who grew up in foster care and other kinds of “less privileged” people had not herself personally experienced these kinds of hardships. Not to be a Holden Caulfield about it, but it seemed phony! A bit condescending, even! Which, now that I’m writing it out, no wonder so many members of the literati raved over this book. It was giving a little bit like when David Brooks invented a story about his non-yuppie friend not being able to understand some sandwich ingredients.
I promise you that I really do not believe that an author has to have experienced something firsthand in order to be able to authentically depict such an experience in fiction.
I do believe that the mark of an impressive imagination and skill is when the writing is so good that it doesn’t even occur to me to suspect that the author is depicting something they haven’t personally experienced.
And speaking of arguments, other things that were a barrier to me enjoying The Rabbit Hutch include:
Its overreliance on direct quotations of Catholic mystics. The quotations could have come from any kind of source and I still wouldn’t have liked them because they reminded me of all the times in grad school when I’d use a block quote because I didn’t actually understand it well enough to paraphrase it OR because it was making an argument I wasn’t skilled enough to articulate
The graphic sex scenes. Listen, there are arguments to be made about the role of the erotic in fiction/popular culture. I won’t be making them here because this is a Family Book Report. Just kidding. I won’t be making them here because if I wanted to read smut I’d read a romance novel
Sub-point: A very key element of this novel’s plot is a sexual relationship between a high school girl and her school’s music/theater teacher. While Gunty never ever comes close to suggesting that the relationship is good or beautiful or understandable, and also while she does not depict sex between the teacher and student at length, I still didn’t like the soliloquies she gave to those characters during their ostensible “conversation” about what transpired between them. They were also Dawson’s Creek-esque and if I never read another exploration of the dimensions of morality via the fundamentally nonconsensual sexual interactions between a teacher and a student I will die happy3
The violence against animals, depicted GRAPHICALLY
The multiple perspectives/flashbacks structure. Tommy Orange is a tough act to follow here, because he pulled it off, but The Rabbit Hutch just reads like something written first and foremost to be adapted into a prestige miniseries. I don’t need narratives to be chronological. Your girl studied modernism for Christ’s sake. But I’m tired of this style in novels because so few authors are able to hide how much their novel is a spec script!
(To be fair, this one isn’t on Gunty) The unforgivably low quality of copy editing/proofreading. Only a publisher with utter contempt for its writers and readers would let a book go to press with sentences like “Hoods of cars peaking above [water]” or “She places [the vaporizer] in the [car] consul”
If you’ve read this far, thank you. If you’ve read this far and you’re thinking “did a hater write this Book Report?” I have no comment on that but I encourage you to check out the aforementioned rave reviews if you would like another perspective on The Rabbit Hutch.
Franny Choi, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (2022)—I love when a book of poems is so good that it makes me remember that I really do like reading poetry. Choi’s latest also re-taught me that collections have something for everyone and that I don’t have to connect with every single poem in order to love the whole thing! What an evergreen lesson.
Per the book jacket, while “[m]any have called our time dystopian . . . these poems remin[d] us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized people.” Choi’s poems explore various personal and collective apocalypses of the anthropocene, taking on different shapes and styles to reflect the endless variety of ways a/the world can end and also keep going on. That last bit, about the world continuing after it ends, is where Choi both describes reality and gives the reader a sense of what it looks like to make a life/meaning in a world that keeps ending (and has always been ending?? She does a lot of cool, smart things with time in this collection).
One of the most surprising (but in retrospect, rational) things about this book is how funny it can sometimes be and how often peaceful/serene it is.4 The whole point of it, I think, is that life goes on! Anyway, one of my favorite poems in the collection is "Science Fiction Poetry," a hypnotic list of dystopias that ranges from the minor but very real "[d]ystopia of the ankle prone to getting sprained again," to the infuriating "[d]ystopia $800 a month but the debt stays the same," to the cynical "'[d]ystopia congratulations you were right to be paranoid," and a bunch of other ones that are too horrific/true to be funny about.
I had never read a poem of Choi’s before this and in my experience The World Keeps Ending was a wonderful introduction to their work!
What I’m looking forward to reading in March:
Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men (1995/2018)5
Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind (2023)
Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood (2023)
Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (2023)
Alba de Céspedes (tr. Ann Goldstein), Forbidden Notebook (1952/2023)
The not-bad manipulative way is the baseline reality that art wants to manipulate its viewer. The bad way is the way where it’s used like a blunt tool to force emotions strong enough to make the reader believe that eliciting strong emotions is what makes something “good literature.”
Book Club selection for February. Shout OUT to Book Club for sharing many of my opinions (though they phrased them more charitably, lol) and therefore for making me feel less like an unjustified hater.
This book won the National Book Award last year. In 2019, Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise (2019)—also about a sexual relationship between a high school theater teacher and a student—won. Why are the judges so obsessed with that kind of plot.
The serenity can be spooky, too, but not in a scary way.
Book Club selection for March.