September 27, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Biopics, Blades, and Balloons By The Paris Review Brandon Taylor. Photo: Bill Adams. David Ferry’s poem “At Lake Hopatcong” has its narrator considering a family portrait taken a year before he was born. He knows everyone in the photo, and yet it is “of no country I know.” Over and over again, I tried to picture the lakefront in Brandon Taylor’s debut novel, Real Life—I who toured endless college campuses, lived on several, visited friends on still more, I who am white and have lived in majority-white communities for deep decades at a time. In the descriptions of this life with which I am so familiar, I both recognized and didn’t recognize the world displayed, so fresh and frank are Taylor’s observations of the daily hurts of being Other. Taylor’s protagonist, Wallace, is a bright, lovable biochemistry Ph.D. candidate at an upper-Midwestern university who as a queer black man is repeatedly made to feel he is neither bright nor lovable—I kept thinking of Waugh’s line “a blow, expected, repeated, falling upon a bruise.” He feels the felted insularity of specialized academic life: complaints muted, seasons distorted. Everything is endless semesters and claustrophobic cohorts, which both bring him closer to that community and highlight his distance from it. Real Life asks questions many of us shy from: Who is entitled to pain? How useful is an apology? Can sharing our feelings free us from them? How much is empathy? Taylor is a student of the Master, and at times fire catches the taut laces of dinner-table talk as in any Jamesian parlor. Taylor isn’t above a bit of play: a life preserver becomes an erotic harness, nacho cheese becomes sexual effluvia—or does it? If there was as much attention paid to good writing about sex as there is to bad sex writing, Taylor would sweep the top prize. Amid the flurry of new novels drifting down like so many balloons, Real Life is the one weighted with confetti, each flake moving at half speed, a silicon membrane away from free fall. —Julia Berick Read More
September 20, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Ducks, Dubs, and Dung By The Paris Review Nicole Flattery. When I moved to New York, I was overwhelmed by the sense that everyone I encountered was desperately holding themselves together. I could not escape the feeling that I, too, must be very careful, that if I were not, some crack in my skin would open and spill my insides onto the sidewalk. Accompanying this vigilance was an impulse toward rebellion, the sense that if only I were reckless, I could finally have some fun. I came to fancy myself somewhat deranged and decided to leave it at that. There are many such women in Nicole Flattery’s outstanding collection Show Them a Good Time—women who are holding themselves together or flagrantly resisting the mandate to do so, in worlds both horrifying and hilarious. “Abortion, a Love Story” is a standout, a lengthy piece that merits the patience it requires. Natasha, engaged in a “tedious liaison” with her pathetic professor, believes she must “keep her emotions quiet and fixed in place or her whole face [will] break apart.” Out to dinner, she returns from the bathroom to find herself replaced by her inverse, a girl named Lucy. Lucy is “monstrously drunk” and looks like “what was promised men when they returned from war.” This Gogolian turn does not end in tragedy but in rapturous joy, the women holding hands as the lecherous professor quite literally fades into the background. I hope one day to be so united, warring impulses finally in harmony. In the meantime, Flattery’s collection will be my wry and devastating companion. —Noor Qasim Read More
September 13, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Metaphors, Messengers, and Melancholy By The Paris Review Jacqueline Novak. Photo: Monique Carboni. Everything about the comedian Jacqueline Novak’s Off-Broadway stand-up show—recently extended through October 6—is clever, beginning with the title: Get on Your Knees. Before the curtain rises in the West Village playhouse, there is the theater within the theater of the audience—on a recent visit, amid the sea of bespectacled, fashionable young women, a famous British television host and an actress from the HBO series Succession were in attendance. As the lights go down, it is impossible not to feel a pang of anxiety for Novak, who has promised to entertain this crowd for seventy-five minutes, alone, on a barren gray stage. But she breaks the ice quickly, comparing the moment of approaching the microphone to the palpitating anxiety of moving your way down a lover’s torso until you reach their … She stands pointedly behind the mic, positioning it at her mouth. “Will she be able to do it?” she asks wryly. The show delivers on its premise: essentially, a dissection of the art of the blowjob, with all the critical faculties and language of a graduate-level seminar. Novak runs through the various words for male anatomy, lingering on the two syllables that make up penis, and encourages the audience to whisper the word to themselves. Doggy style, she tells us, should be given a more dignified name: “I prefer to call it the Hound’s Way.” The show is structured around anticipation, the erotic tension of will-she-or-won’t-she, and the ending, an explosion of poetic mania that expands into the profoundly philosophical, is worthy of her buildup. In a moment when the boundaries between high and low culture have all but dissolved, Novak has found one of the few remaining tensions to play with. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
September 6, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Men-Children, Motown, and Middle Age By The Paris Review Jennifer Croft. Of late, I’ve encountered a cluster of victorious, independent teens in my reading. In Tara Westover’s Educated, Tara splits from her Idaho family’s abuse to thrive in the British education system. In Lara Prior-Palmer’s Rough Magic, Lara decamps from a posh English upbringing to ride a pony across the Mongolian-Manchurian steppe. A similar narrative even springs up in the latest Sally Rooney novel, Normal People: Marianne quits her hometown to find some version of herself and success at Trinity. These stories detail train wrecks and triumph, following young women going it alone to overcome anything, everything. Jennifer Croft’s new memoir, Homesick, takes that same fabric of the young woman finding her way and makes an entirely different garment. Here is a young woman refusing to let go of her family: little sister Zoe gets sick, and Amy (Jennifer’s stand-in) frets and fumbles her way through treatment, waiting for news. Amy goes away to college early, but the broadened horizons are hardly a panacea to the troubles at home—instead it opens up a new level of longing and absence. And while the propulsive narrative of the aforementioned books is compelling (there’s even a race, that most rocket-fueled of story lines), in Homesick Croft teaches us to read another way: the story is told between long, potent subtitles and short vignettes, between the focus of Croft’s photos and what might be out of the frame. It’s a slower sort of storytelling, a family wound up together, heading not toward victory but acceptance. And in creating that intricate web, one built of ambitious form, unflinching recollection, and her own style of multifaceted lyricism, Croft has arrived at a triumph of another kind. —Emily Nemens Read More
August 30, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Family, Fleece, and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos By The Paris Review Michael Paterniti. Photo: Joanna Eldredge Morrissey. Earlier this month, I visited family on Cliff Island, off the coast of Portland, Maine. It’s a lovely place, with pebbled beaches and raspberry bushes. And it’s small. Very, very small. The whole island is about two miles from end to end; the total population, according to the most recent U.S. census, is sixty-one. There are no cars or restaurants or hotels. People get around on foot or bike, or with the occasional golf cart. But what Cliff Island does have is a library—and a great one. Run out of an old house and open for only a few hours a day, the Cliff Island Library contains a large and eclectic selection of books, many of which have been collected over the years by the island’s residents or else donated by tourists passing through. On my aunt’s recommendation, I picked up Love and Other Ways of Dying, a delightfully strange and sensitive essay collection by the journalist Michael Paterniti. Paterniti’s writing defies traditional categorization. Is it journalism? Is it poetry? At times it reads like both. At times it reads like something else entirely. In “The Man Who Sailed His House,” for instance, Paterniti embodies the voice of Hiromitsu Shinkawa, a Japanese man who was stranded on a piece of flotsam for three days following the 2011 tsunami. This is a so-called true story, but the empathetic imagination Paterniti brings to bear on it is all his own, drawing upon nearly unbelievable levels of detail—like the purple fleece the man wore, and the notes he scrawled in desperation on various pieces of garbage with a marker he fished from the sea—to conjure the fear and hope and loneliness of the situation. Near the close of the story, just before the man is saved, even the prose itself seems to reflect his condition, becoming somewhat ecstatic and dreamlike, as though Paterniti were right beside him on that plank of wood, lost in a hunger-induced hallucination. In the end, the reader is grateful for these liberties. They leave us with a feeling of expansiveness—a sense that, within the world of the book, anything is possible. —Cornelia Channing Read More
August 23, 2019 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Screen Tests, Souvenirs, and Sam Ospovat By The Paris Review Kate Zambreno. Photo: Tom Hines. When I was very, very young and very, very unhappy working in a bookstore, I read on my lunch breaks Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl, a novel about another very unhappy shopgirl, and felt as though I understood it on a cellular level. Zambreno’s books have a way of getting under your skin, and her willingness to write ugly, to approach the banal and the cliché as just another tool and subvert it into works of rage and oftentimes real beauty, is part of the appeal. Screen Tests, her latest, pairs a first half composed of very short, very funny pieces of fiction (some of which were published in the Spring 2019 issue) with a second half of longer essays, and the effect is that of a particularly devastating form of déjà vu. Sentences repeat themselves; nameless characters are named; consequences are experienced. The pernicious effects of class, money, and gender reoccur. Is there a way to break the cycle? Art seems like part of the answer—and in an era in which it feels as though we all constantly need to market ourselves, it’s refreshing to read a book that explicitly champions art that is raw, art that is messy, art that cannot be contained. —Rhian Sasseen Read More