“I was not in the mountains. I had the sea. I could go any day I wanted to the sea, but that was too easy. I wanted the mountains. There was probably some boy in the mountains dreaming about the sea, and why was that? Because he could not have the sea. Who likes to read about money more than the poor? Who likes to read about beauty more than the ugly? What are our favorite stories about? Flying, magic, living forever: the things we cannot do. There might be some planet where people fly around and never die and what would their favorite stories be about? Walking and death. And do you know what our most popular fantasy is? Do you know what is the core of every human story? Somebody changes. Somebody always changes.”
I didn’t know this book was (sort of) about bike racing when I picked it up, and when I realized this was the case I had very low expectations. I ride bikes and occasionally watch racing, have lined up in little local amateur events myself—but as a topic of conversation (or novels) I think of it like whistling: fun if you’re the one doing it; everyone else wishes you’d shut up.
This book surprised me, though. Reed writes lifelike, interesting characters in spare prose; in their story the race is simultaneously “just” a backdrop and an illuminated mirror. Though the jacket copy makes Ascent sound like some kind of thriller, in reality much of the book is even-paced and placid—much like a bike race, of course. Events that might from the right angle look extraordinary are written to appear mundane, the effect of which is to leave you questioning, along with the protagonist, whether any given development is significant or not.
“Are you sure you’re not doing this because you haven’t the courage to stand up to the work that’s before every American now? Oh, I know you’re working in a way, but isn’t it just an escape from your responsibilities? Is it more than just a sort of laborious idleness? What would happen to America if everyone shirked as you’re shirking?”
“You’re very severe, honey,” he smiled. “The answer to that is that everyone doesn’t feel like me. Fortunately for themselves, perhaps, most people are prepared to follow the normal course; what you forget is that I want to learn as passionately as—Gray, for instance, wants to make pots of money.”
In real life “a young man on a spiritual odyssey” is probably the last person I want to hear about at any length, especially if his “spiritual odyssey” involves, at they so often do, blowing off his girlfriend, quitting his job, and going to India. But Maugham’s great gift is to make this young man and every other character in The Razor’s Edge—tragic alcoholics, vain socialites, various cunning women—resonantly sympathetic, even as he seems to describe them at all times with only the mildest of journalistic interest.
Also: I would like to read (but am far too lazy to write) a comparison of Larry to Gatsby, and of Maugham to Forster. Who teaches comp lit and is down to assign it out?
Improbable events happened all the time, she tried to explain to her students, because improbability is an illusion based our preconceptions. Often it has nothing to do with statistical truth. After all, it’s wildly improbable that any one person is alive.
Maybe it should have been obvious from the title or all the talk about it, but I actually had no idea what Vanishing Half was about when I started reading it and was pleasantly surprised to find out—misadventures of the racially ambiguous being a genre of interest to me. I thought often, of course, of my own sister: of an INS office back in the day, fluorescents and linoleum, of the officer who looked from her to me, to my mother, to my father, to our paperwork, who checked one race box on hers and another on mine.
Anyway, if Vanishing Half has a few flat sentences here and there and gets a little too tragic mulatto for my personal taste, I didn’t mind. It’s a good story and an engaging read and I will happily watch the HBO series if/when it comes out. I hope Early Jones is cast as ffffine as he sounds in writing. Ahem.
In 1864—in response to the New York draft riots and general white resistance to fighting in the Civil War—the Union’s Department of the Gulf, along with the American Missionary Association and the National Freedman’s Relief Association, presented a national campaign using white-presenting former slave children to solidify support for the war effort. In the January 30, 1864, issue of Harper’s Weekly, readers were presented with the images of seemingly white children, dressed elegantly in the manner of wealthy family portraits. In some of the photos, the white-looking children were posed with brown-skinned ones, the cherubs serving as an empathy conduit for the darker children as well. The captions for the photos announce, repeatedly, “Slave children.”
Impossible to say how it breaks down now—how many of the mixed or ambiguous vanish, for safety or convenience or profit, and how many instead serve as “empathy conduits,” with or without their own consent. To the extent that any of us has a choice, it remains, of course, a fraught but enormous privilege.
“They’ve grown comfortable with their money,” I said. “They genuinely believe they’re entitled to it. This conviction give them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.”
“I have trouble imagining death at that income level,” she said.
“Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.”
Though there were glimmers of hope for me, I abandoned this early: not enough happening, too many children to keep track of, and the Hitler gag, which got old for me within pages. I’m not sure whether my problem with Delillo—and Pynchon, and DFW, et al.—is that I’m too stupid, too lazy, or too resentful of the fact that only a very few people are ever allowed to publish books that take this much work to read, and pretty much all of these people are white guys.
Aside #1: Though I was too lazy to read the book I was not too lazy to spend a half-hour conducting elaborate cyber forensics on myself to try and recall why I had wanted to read Delillo in the first place. It was this review of The Topeka School, for what it’s worth—Ben Lerner being proof that there are some exhausting white guys I’m perfectly happy to read.
Aside #2: As with David Foster Wallace, I think I would do fine with Delillo confined to a shorter format. Going to try The Angel Esmerelda instead.
She explains the difference between the beautiful and the sublime this way: The stars are beautiful—diamonds, twinkles, something you can wish upon. The space between the stars is the sublime—cold, black, and infinite, something at inspires awe and fear.
Enjoyed this in two of my favorite ways. One, by prose: spare and direct, nothing like the what you’d expect from jacket description of a (Florida!) courtroom-drama plot. And two—unrelated and quite by accident—by procedural trivia. I had somehow never heard of jury sequestration and am now fascinated by both the idea and the operational details, although I also cannot imagine that Ciment meant either to be the point of this book. Whatever!
I saw these dynamics, thought seeing them protected me somehow, which is a the stupid mistake psychologists make, a very Foundation mistake; we thought that if we had a language for our feelings we might transcend them.
He did and he didn’t. To my ear, “The Topeka School” passes through three phases. The first is enjoyable but strangely normal: I wondered if the editor or publisher had issued instructions to dial it down. In the middle the book becomes again Lerner-like: all the poetry and stoner moments I had been expecting, layers and parlor tricks and flights. And then at the end … oh, dear.
(Mild spoilers ahead)
The last few chapters are abrupt, unnecessary, and unconvincing, as if Lerner got suddenly nervous about mean Tweets or imminent revolution or checking boxes for The New York Times. It’s true that Peak Woke may dismiss any white guy’s book about white guys out of hand. But even should you care about this audience enough to ruin your own story for them, a white guy’s book about white guys is not saved from being that by arbitrarily sending your character to an anti-ICE rally in the last 30 pages, or arranging him a convenient marriage to a nonwhite woman, or having him perform playground heroics for a suspiciously articulate child. (Seriously, I don’t believe even Ben Lerner’s children would speak like this.)
Nor need it be saved! Ack! Stop groveling, my dudes; that’s not the point!
I felt nothing. I could think of feelings, emotions, but I couldn’t bring them up in me. I couldn’t even locate where my emotions came from. My brain? It made no sense. Irritation was what I knew best—a heaviness on my chest, a vibration in my neck like my head was revving up before it would rocket off my body.
“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” was, in a shrill coincidence, the last thing I finished before a nine– or ten-month period in which I did not read (or write) anything at all.
The pandemic ought to have meant more time and energy for reading, my first and ostensibly most constant love. Instead, at the same time that it plunged the world at large into the Big Wait, it obliterated all my own small waits—for buses, for my subway stop, for take-out, for friends running late, for the crosswalk light to change, for my turn at the counter—every workaday liminal moment of city life in which a book in hand is natural shelter. In place of the outside, where I might go anywhere but controlled nothing, I passed the time alone, at home, where I could go nowhere and controlled everything, a setting in which of course I most often did nothing at all.
I encountered a basic fact forgotten since leaving school: when a book is the task, rather than the alternative, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to pick up off the desk. So with the ambient excuse that we’ve been told to be gentle with ourselves—that plague times are heavy enough—I instead watched, to be honest, more TV than I have ever done in my life. And as I watched myself watching screens I wondered seriously whether this was any worse or even any different than reading, any different, for that matter—and to come back to this book in particular—from actual, pharmaceutical drugs.
It isn’t, I decided. I truly don’t believe it is. I compulsively analyze even the dumbest TV, perhaps even more than I do an “intelligent” book. And the fog through which I emerge, wheezing and blinking and vaguely angry, into the glare of the world and my physical body, is the same after the last episode as the last page as, I would guess, the last pill.
Me, nothing really weighed on me, nothing unique. Me, I held down an office job and fiddled around with some photography when the moon hit the Gowanus right. Or something like that, the usual ways of justifying your life, of passing time. With the money I made, I bought Shiseido facial exfoliants, Blue Bottle coffee, Uniqlo cashmere.
I avoid apocalyptic plague novels; they’re too plausible and give me nightmares. But this is hype-worthy, hurts your heart—hangs perfectly suspended between reality and metaphor. My only objection is that it ends too soon: I wanted the next 10 chapters, at least.
Similar to The Collective, it’s also an immigrant story without being An Immigrant Story: another thin line to walk.
She’d had the misfortunate of being talented and capable in many areas without being expert in any of them. This, he’d noted, makes one interesting when young but usually, when middle-aged, disappointed. Or a teacher.
If I just keep reading riffs on my existential fears of never finding love or purpose or real estate, I’ll have a library of possible solutions and at least one of them is bound to work for me in real life. Right? Note to self: acquire resourceful, kindly gay ex-lover.
Fun read, familiar characters, good jokes. Bonus points for eliciting pissy Goodreads reviews from pearl-clutching readers offended that *imaginary* people don’t want them at parties.