The Guest is set in the contemporary kingdom of what I am assuming is the Hamptons—“the city” is never quite named, but there is a passing reference to geographic directions (Alex is quoted as “out east”) and I spotted at least one ubiquitous Citarella shopping bag. It projects an aura of sadness; When Rand al’Thor is wandering around without any money and sleeping in hedges, it’s an expected part of an epic bildungsroman. When Alex does it, here at the beach, she’s tragically lost.
Read MoreWhat you are looking for is in the library falls directly into the path of “cozy” by way of social-structural integration. It is a delightful collection of interdependent stories, each one focusing on a character that “betters” themself through a quirky recommendation from an insightful buddha-esque librarian:
"Is being a sales assistant in a department store really not such a great job?”
I don’t know what to say. Ms. Komachi waits patiently for my reply.
“Well, I mean…Anybody can do it. It’s not like its was my dream job or anything I desperately wanted to do. I just kind of fell into it. But I live on my own, so I have to work to support myself.”
Each chapter, I found myself rooting for the character to find happiness. Each time, they did. The book is joyful, within the metes and bounds of proscriptive, achievable success. It is formalistic in a non-derogatory sense of that word: in the library overflows with comfortable and expected rhythms.
Read Morenothing will come close to the early moment in the book where our narrator is at a small dinner party–it is still before her true internality has been reveled, so experiencing her interpersonal uncertainity and self-castigation over offering compliments (“In bourgeois milieus, people rarely compliment each other.”) might shunt us off into a class-and-standing novel, where the crux is an Eliza attempting to fit in with a My Fair Lady crowd. At the conclusion of one of the parlor games, the possibility that her perspective is accurate or even relatable has gone out of the window:
Read MoreSo my husband thinks his best friend is married to a pineapple, while he married a clementine. He lives with a winter fruit, a banal and cheap fruit, a supermarket fruit. A small, ordinary fruit that has none of the indulgence of the orange nor the originality of the grapefruit. A fruit organized into segments, practical and easy to eat, precut, ready for use, proffered in its casing.
Contemporary poetry now exists to me not as an abstraction I must force my way into (“April is the cruelest month”? Sure, I guess.) but in vibes I lived and can internalize, re-express and appreciate.
To want the same things as you age is not always a failure of growth. A good city will not parent you.
We know things, now, our generation of urban nomads and digital natives. We’ve lived our lives and want to see it spoken back to us in meaningful and cryptic ways, in flashes of emotion and broken shards of imagery that push deeper than expected.
Read MoreA wish fulfilled for fiction lovers–unlimited time with unlimited books. Outside of that singular moment with the spooky TV, I was never again outside of the pages; the book completely, and seemingly effortlessly, brought me into someone else’s life. Even though nothing particularly profound seemed to happen, the experience was pleasant enough.
Read MoreIt lives in the beat between being graced with a haphazard “Be careful” and having the speaker finish the injunction, with specificity, clarifying of what one should be careful. You, the reader, are made aware something requires attention but are left to wonder whether it is simply the entire world of which one must be wary.
In thrall to the same lack of specificity that can shade a child’s world in unknowable and constant danger, the book opens with its title: here there are details of a subculture to be gleaned, but if you, like me, are a relative child within the genre, its signifier will land without even signifying that it is a genre’d work:
Read MoreThat’s sort of the theme of this book– “I dunno” with a mild shrug. I liked all the people. They’re likable. The villain is comically despicable so no one cares that he’s dead. Vera herself…oh boy, somebody put their finger on it. She’s a treat. Who doesn’t love a bossy, nosy old lady? More Vera Wong in more books, please. But aside from being a vehicle for platforming Vera, there’s not a lot I cared about here. The plot felt secondary to Vera being Vera.
Read MoreThat math is a fundamentally confusing false structure, superimposed on our world, makes it function similarly to a fantasy novel’s magic system. But, in reality, math needs to relate to something—to point to some underlying structure of the cosmos—to be consistent. It has to tie to some underlying process, unless it is solely solipsistic, and therefore functionally worthless in application. Consistency in the real world is power.
Read MoreOriginally Agamemnon was a story about Cassandra, but she was exiled from it by the history of literature. She was made a foreigner in her own story. On the border she stands waiting, century after century, while all of the other characters come home.
…
Everyone, including Agamemnon, was always telling Cassandra not to speak of this. Her mouth was full of madness and birds, the chorus was dismayed by all the blood and small bones.
The reader is to be forgiven for thinking that, while the narrator is to become Sappho, the author already embodies Cassandra. Each motion and movement on the page begets the next with such fluidity that I can’t help but want to read it again.
Read MoreThe two game developers, Sam and Sadie, could have been musicians working on an album, or visual artists painting the next Guernica (when Guernica was referenced, it did some actual heavy imagery lifting, which did not happen when alluding to Zelda or Mario games), or, heck, even a duo of authors writing a novel together. There’s nothing beyond a few bon mots about playing together being more intimate than sex and an overuse of the word ludic that makes this a book about video games:
Read More“What is a game…[i]t’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
It is possible–really, truly, non-hyperbolically possible–that i will never read a book better than Mirth in my lifetime. Living under modern capitalism is a sickness that produces a “growth at all cost” mindset, and it can be slightly jarring to realize I might have already experienced the peak of reading fiction for pleasure for my entire life. But, again, I don’t think I’m going to win marathons and I still run them, so I think I’ve come to terms with the concept that things don’t have to be perfect to be worth doing; I am pretty sure I’m okay with reading books that place 6135th on the shelf. However, if I had read Mirth in college–if I was the same person then as I am now (I am not), if I knew how to read it in college (I did not)–I would have dedicated my studies to it. Honestly, I am slightly grateful for the travesty of literary education that didn’t lead me to it for forty years.
Read MoreImagine watching the Olympics. You see a peak athlete breeze through a mile. There is no context.
“I could run like that.” It skews your understanding of how fast a person should be. So you lace up some New Balances where the heels are worn down to a forty-degree angle, and attempt to push out an easy six-ten-for-four. Ten blocks out from the apartment, and reality sets in: a nine-minute mile would be a blessing. How much further is a mile, again?
Fake Accounts does that, but for writing.
Read MoreRight, so, cue this this book called Strange Weather in Tokyo. There’s a woman who is just sort of faffing about, working a job and existing in the normal—but not literary—sense. If she was just a person you knew, she’d be fine: a job, a home, stuff to eat, hobbies, etc etc. But if you’re reading about her, well, it seems a little flat. Something’s gotta happen, right?
Read MoreThere is real bravery in presenting so many disjointed and abrupt tales, real danger that as many will fail to hit the reader as land in any meaningful way. Some stories are shorter than a page, some are thicker than mud, and it might serve as Rorschach test of Buzzfeed quiz to map out which stories meant what to whom. My Father and His Slim Beautiful Brunettes was, to me, the first remarkable note in the collection.
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