April Books

 Finished eight books, mostly novels. one mega meh, one meh, one dud, one "well I see why the Nazis loved him!" (On the Marble Cliffs by Juenger, I do not feel like people need to read this but it's not bad) My real complaint is that everyone hates MFA novels, but they're not hating on them correctly... Everyone says, they're pretentious! they're about affairs! and I'm like, Big Swiss is the author’s third novel, but it still feels like it was made to appeal to a workshop of the writer's three cherished friends and four treasured enemie,. and on top of that it is not funny??? I think humor should only be deployed by people who are not going to tell me that it's worth writing a novel just to explain what's wrong with their protagonist.

Anyway, onto the books I actually liked.

The Lives of Mothers and Daughters, Sheila Munro - as part of my stalking the relatives of New Yorker writers (see Morante post), I read The Lives of Mothers and Daughters, Sheila Munro’s attempt to marry her memoir with a biography of her mother, the famous Canadian short story writer Alice Munro. Alice apparently requested Sheila to write her biography some years prior, and Sheila felt as though she couldn't accept the job except as a memoir. This book really feels like it's out here for the Alice Munro fans--I felt a bit sheepish reading through it, as later chapters express some pain about the difficulty of trying to be a writer when your mother is one of the Famous Canadian Fiction Writer. Lots of fascinating familial anecdotes, including Alice’s father writing a book and sending it to Alice and asking for her honest opinion as he was dying?! Really made me realize that oh, Alice not just a little old lady who lives in a cabin in the woods... she wears leather pants and encourages her daughter to smoke pot and gave up a teaching post because it sucked. She's just like us.

Couplets, Millner - I didn't actually like it, but I earnestly congratulate the author for writing a book in couplets that were not so humiliatingly bad that she was fired from poetry altogether.

Erasure, Everett - enjoyed this, didn't love it--I think it's a pretty chilly and chilling book, imo. It did make me in retrospect dislike the film adaptation American Fiction... The movie seems too tame and conciliatory for a text that ultimately feels like it's saying that to compromise is to be defeated, identity is a series of self-delusions, etc.

The Plains, Murnane - Murnane's a writer I've only discovered recently--if you're interested, you can check out his fascinating short story, “When the Mice Failed to Arrive,” available online. He has a pretty charming style, apparently plain but with a lot of tricks on a paragraph to paragraph level... this is Murnane's first novel and trying to describe gets me all kernumpkined... man goes to the plains to make a video and find a patron, lies about his project, finds a patron, stays there for twenty years, writes a lot of notes, uhhh the end? Allegorical and hypnotically plotless with a a comedy of self-referentiality/absorption at the conclusion. You won't laugh, but you will be like, hold on... how did I get here?

Motherhood, Heti - I've read Pure Colour and liked it well enough and have read a few scattered articles here and there by Heti and thought, wow, she's got a really easy to read style... usually when people say this, they mean like, workman-like (in other words, the Ikea of prose) or without substance, but she manages to come off as light, conversational, warm, and curious in everything she writes without smarm or self-delusion. Read a few other reviews, and she's known to be an autobiographical writer who's trying to tease out form from her conversations and life. Ten years ago, I would've been pretty annoyed ("imagine something, won't you!") but now I'm like, man, do I have to read Rachel Cusk again?? Not a ton of plot to this one, but deeply charming and I cannot help but find the deus ex machina at the end kind of funny. All those questions about motherhood answered by antidepressants, and the antidepressants are entering the war on the side of NO! Heti makes reading and writing seem easy.