The wars are devastating. Navalny is dead. The world is screaming, soaked in blood. A rabbi was quoted at a recent Jewish Voice for Peace meeting, saying, “you can act, even without hope,” and the line has stayed with me. I try to act / I am bereft of hope.
I packed Patrimony, Philip Roth’s account of his father’s decline and death, when I went to visit my own father in New Jersey a few months ago. It’s actually his copy. Very 90s cover. I must have pilfered it during one of his moves. Probably to impress my father — or bond with him — I first read this book as a teenager. I read and loved and ranked the whole Roth catalog alongside my dad. I’ve since revisited a few of those books, tempering my admiration for some and doubling down on my love for others, even as Roth has undergone posthumous scrutiny for his attitudes toward women in literature and life. (His reputation was further damaged by sexual assault allegations against his biographer.) Unrelated to that accounting, let me say: this book really hits different thirty years later. Am I Roth’s age? Am I Roth? I thought, as he navigates his aging father’s health issues in the north Jersey of his youth. As his father wraps sherry glasses in last Sunday’s Star-Ledger for him to take back to the city. The milieu, to me, is almost achingly familiar. In fact, that first night at my dad’s, the opening pages of Patrimony — containing a description of the facial paralysis that will reveal Herman Roth’s brain tumor — so overwhelmed me that I returned it to my suitcase for the duration of the trip and didn’t finish it until this month.
I’m glad I picked it up again. This volume, the only one of its kind that Roth wrote in his lifetime, is poignant, philosophical, and very funny. Recalling one passage in particular, about the anxiety of selecting a good cantaloupe, is making me laugh right now.
To be sure, Patrimony produces a few cringy moments. And as a chronicle of another person’s failing health, it is impressively exhaustive and by extension occasionally a bit exhausting. But it’s also deep, extremely moving, and a work in which Roth the man, unencumbered by any auto-fictional apparatus, comes through. He appears here as a keenly observant, sensitive, and devoted son. I’d recommend this to anyone who cares about his work or anyone grappling with the mind-fuck of sudden onset mortality.
I moved on to another memoir by a towering male literary figure: Avid Reader by Robert Gottlieb, editor at Knopf and The New Yorker. My dad and I read this one at the same time. He called it “delicious” and I concur. It is chock full — really, every page — with gossip about a slew of Hollywood actors-turned-memoirists as well as every writer you can imagine, from Joseph Heller to John Cheever to Doris Lessing to Toni Morrison. (The reader learns, for example, that Beloved was supposed to be a three-volume work about race in America, but Morrison changed tack after she wrote the first volume!) Don’t forget Robert — sorry, Bob — Caro. Every Robert, it turns out, is a Bob, and they all worked with this Robert, also Bob.
This book was such fun to read but also made me very depressed. Gottlieb’s career is, above all, a relic of a time gone by. While reading Avid Reader, I got an email from a recruiter gauging my interest in working as a writer at an AI company. I could have a hand in making large language models (LLMs) more reliable! went the pitch. I think that means I could train the very robot that will replace me! Of course I know things were just as complex and fucked up in Gottlieb’s heyday, but I long for the pencil-behind-the-ear sincerity, the integrity of the literary world he details here.
Others this month:
Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn
I find myself drawn to books about grief, I suppose because it’s one of the most disorienting, indeed psychedelic, of earthly experiences. Those who represent it well are almost always saying something interesting about living, too. Such is the case with Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, Death in Long Beach, California. In it, a woman named Coral discovers the body of her brother, who has committed suicide, and reacts by digitally impersonating him, answering his texts and thereby keeping news of his death from his daughter and his friends. It would be easy to see the move as one of disavowal or disrespect, but there’s something intimate and beautiful about the narrator’s need to try slipping into her brother’s skin. It’s a gesture of obstruction but also protection. The plot makes for a wild ride, as does the collective voice of the characters from Coral’s sci-fi graphic novel, which form a kind of parallel text.
I love a text within a text. Here, the device is sometimes confusing but that only adds to the general (and appropriate) psychological cacophony of the novel. Blackburn’s writing is complicated and richly amusing. She is especially good at lists: stacks of unlike bits of capitalist detritus that accumulate throughout the book like so many piles of compacted trash bound for the Pacific garbage vortex. I really liked this one and have decided I’m entering a Venita Blackburn phase.
Dear Edna Sloane by Amy Shearn
I hung out with Amy Shearn in Kansas City at my first AWP conference recently and loved her, so it was especially fun to devour this epistolary novel on the way home, about the disappearance and reappearance of a once-famous novelist and the torments of working in publishing while caring about art. The word “propulsive,” overused in blurbs, is actually accurate to describe this book.
Crazy for Vincent by Hervé Guibert
Fragments of diaries, memory, and auto-fiction about the devastations of romantic obsession and AIDS by a French writer and photographer I associate primarily with Foucault. (More on that here.) The object of lust in this very short, sad, sometimes beautiful book is a teenager who we know from the first page is dead. The book is filled with desperate yet half-hearted and drugged-out attempts at sex that either triggered or just depressed me. Undaunted, I’m moving on to Hervelino by Guibert’s friend Mathieu Lindon.
Weirdo by Sara Pascoe
Probably the six hundredth book of its kind that I’ve listened to while cooking dinner for my children. Dark, British, awkward-girl musings about bartending, unrequited love, loneliness. The usual. But this one, when not generic, is witty and probing. If your appetite for these books is similarly inexhaustible, you’ll probably find something to like here.
Shy by Max Porter
A kind of rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness, experimental mini-novel about a teenage boy in a boarding school for troubled kids. This book is affecting and I enjoyed its inventive language. However, this damaged male mind wasn’t a particularly pleasant place to be, maybe because I already feel like the world itself is a projection of the minds of troubled men and we’re all just along for the plummeting ride. That’s likely the point, but I was relieved when it ended.
Dirtbag by Amber A’Lee Frost
A memoir-in-essays about the author’s participation in the so-called dirtbag Left, which is to say, the waves of activism that cohered around Occupy Wall Street and later, Bernie Sanders’s campaigns. Frost was a co-host of Chapo Trap House, the “Bernie bros” podcast many loved to hate and which I never listened to. Frost’s writing is smart, acerbic, and bratty — if the book were a record, the sound would be called “snarling.” Her whole brand is she pulls no punches, says what’s on her mind, gives the finger to liberal pieties, doesn’t care who’s offended, blah blah. “Rudeness can be extremely politically useful,” she wrote in 2016. That pose is pretty tired/tiring to me at this life juncture. Or maybe it just feels like the wrong people are trying to make use of rudeness. Still, a bit in spite of myself, I found this book — part democratic socialism primer, part memoir, part record of a moment in American history — genuinely informative and, I think, worthwhile?
Ghosts by Dolly Alderton
Spectacularly satisfying and entertaining Bridget Jones-style novel about dating and dealing with family. So excited she has a new one out. And speaking of comfortingly formulaic…
Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame by Olivia Ford
What if everything was cozy, there were always baked goods in the oven, and you DID know exactly what was going to happen? This novel, about a 77-year-old woman (deeply in love with her 82-year-old husband) who secretly applies to a British baking show and is chosen as a contestant, is lighthearted and civilized and has all the familiar “bakes” (Black Forest GAT-eau, anyone?) and it truly buoyed me for the few days I was reading it. As Jenny Rosenstrach wrote in the NYT review, “If you were in charge of the closed captioning for Olivia Ford’s ‘Masterpiece’ production, you would be writing ‘[lively strings music]’ on every other frame.” The story has just a pinch of darkness in the form of an unprocessed past event. Mostly, it dramatizes what I consider a very sad but compelling aspect of the real-life Bake Off: the punishing self-doubt of its women contestants (and some of the men, too). Part of the thrill of the show is watching confidence bloom over a season. And even though the reader knows that’s just what’s going to happen to Mrs. Quinn, it’s rewarding when it does.
Anyway. We all have our diversions. This is mine, and it is sweet.
More soon. Happy reading! 📚
Oh thank you for including Dear Edna Sloane! I loved getting to hang out with you -- truly a highlight!
I throughly enjoy your reviews