The title of this newsletter is inspired by a recent piece in The Guardian called “Books by women that every man should read.” They asked a bunch of male writers for their recommendations and were given laughably perfunctory answers, mostly books people are assigned in high school. (Oh, Mrs. Dalloway? Thanks for that, Salman.) Anyway, it was roundly mocked on Book Twitter, but it did make me want to make a list of books by men. And because they are not associated with the frivolities of the season, they so rarely get to appear on summer book lists, the poor lads. I aim to correct that here.
I happen to have read a whole lot of books by men recently. Very good ones. Here are some:
The Great Concert of the Night by Jonathan Buckley (New York Review Books, 2020)
One of those books that makes you wonder Why have I never heard of this writer? Why didn’t everyone talk about this book? Apparently this is Buckley’s tenth novel, so maybe everyone is talking about him and I’ve just been in the dark. This one is a nearly plotless yearlong account of grief, in diary form. (Three things I love in a book: plotlessness, grief, and diaries.) The protagonist, a curator at a regional museum of oddities in southern England, has lost his love to cancer and over the course of a year he reconstructs parts of their relationship, muses on his preceding marriage, meanders through philosophy and history, contemplates jealousy, deepens his friendship with a vagabond, faces precarious employment, mourns. Imogen, the lost love, was a film actress, and a great deal of the book is devoted to watching her in films or remembering watching them or hearing about the details of their filming. All of this sounds dreadfully boring, and yet. The world Buckley constructs is so real you forget that it’s fiction. The diary form lends an intimacy and sense of unpredictability. And the writing is incredibly smart and nuanced. I was trying to remember the last time I felt so favorably disposed toward an older male narrator. This one is very much not a cad, and it’s wonderful.
The Great Concert of the Night made me think of Julian Barnes’s Before She Met Me, which I remember loving in my 20s. That one is about the arousal of sexual jealousy — a middle-aged professor falls for a younger woman who acted in a few bad films; their relationship is going fine until he watches the films and starts to unravel. I probably loved it because it could be read as a horror story about the male gaze, and Barnes is funny.
Buckley’s book has many funny or amusing moments (the narrator is particularly incisive when judging his ex-wife’s self-help-y new wife), but it is above all a chronicle of the year in the life of a sad person. I’ve read a number of books with grieving narrators this year, and this one is my favorite. (Ella Baxter’s oddball debut New Animal is another contender.)
The Long Corner by Alexander Maksik (Europa Editions, 2022)
This was a refreshing chaser after Buckley. A bracing, very funny, cynical novel about Sol, a writer-turned-advertising-hack who is invited to a mysterious artists’ colony owned and operated by a rich Goop-y weirdo named Sebastian Light (and his pretty assistant, Plume).
This could have just been a fun skewering of the dystopian present, particularly the unnervingly dogged, narcissistic pursuit of optimized individual wellness (which so often parades as a communal endeavor) and the ways we are tempted to participate in it. (Against his better judgment, the narrator is lulled into relative passivity by the luxurious surroundings: he wakes each morning beneath white muslin sheets and finds a fresh papaya waiting on the table in his room.)
But the novel is so much more interesting because the tentpoles of its morality are two brash and strident Jewish broads — the narrator’s mother and grandmother — who raised him to be a bohemian and a leftist, not a douche in advertising. The mother is a communist who becomes a Zionist zealot and the grandmother a Holocaust survivor who devotes her life to art and pleasure. Because of their indoctrination, poor Sol is not merely compromised by his descent into Sebastian Light’s sinister capitalist-utopia art-hell. He is tortured.
I know we don’t talk about W**dy All*n anymore but I did recall the massive, literally overbearing mother addressing his character from the sky in New York Stories. Maksik’s writing also puts me in mind of Philip Roth. The love between Sol and his grandmother is like: picture a young Jewish boy rolling his eyes in simultaneous annoyance and euphoria as he’s hugged too hard into his bossy bubbe’s bosom. That’s the vibe of the whole book.
This novel is fun and hilarious, but also dark. All the big questions are here: what does one need for a fulfilling life? Can we take shitty people’s money to make art? Do material comforts weaken our moral fiber? They’re a joy to contemplate on this ride.
I also recommend:
Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci (Gallery Books, 2021) Is this guy for real? So dashing, witty, charming that’s it’s almost sleazy. Many would argue it is at least smarmy, but for better or worse I’m a sucker for this type of human and I love a passionate food memoir. This one delivers.
Saint Sebastian’s Abyss by Mark Haber (Coffee House Press, 2022). See below.
More to come! What are you reading this summer? 🌊☕️📘
Now that I think about it, I'm not sure I've ever read a novel by a man in recent years. If I have they obviously don't stand out hugely. I'm not sure if that says more about me or them. Must add these recs to my 'to read' list!