Broken Glasses

Catching up, in a way.

Oh, hello. Substack keeps sending along passive-aggressive nudges informing me that writers who send more than one newsletter every few months “grow” their audiences (how poorly they understand me, ha!). But I do find myself teetering on the ridgeline of platform abandonment. Substack seems to cultivate a strange stew of sincerity, over-written and under-edited prose (guilty), and semi-desperate sales pitches, with a few scattered oddball gems here and there, and the company’s dithering response to swastika-bedecked accounts did not exactly inspire respect.

It’s a weird place, Substack, like Etsy for writers, and like Etsy in the early days, it seems to be selling the illusions that anyone can be successful (they can’t), that talent is enough (it isn’t), and that running a creative business is somehow different from just running a business (it’s not). Not to mention the notion that being a great writer and making a living writing are related in any way (they aren’t).

A few friends have mentioned how some corners of Substack remind them of the early days of blogs, which I see, though the signal difference is that in the internet era of yore, people were writing for the love of it and out of a quietly frantic need to connect, driven by variously stymied creative impulses that had nowhere else to go. It made what they made weirder and better, and because no one expected to be paid or really knew what they were doing, unexpected and wonderful communities and friendships could develop. Fandoms and audiences and subscribers aren’t quite the same thing—the power dynamics are too skewed by the creator/consumer split. And I can’t help thinking that the pressure to publish, to grow those numbers, forecloses the possibility that anything produced on here could possibly transcend that wretched category, content, the gross and ugly conceptual blight of our time.

This, perhaps, is why FRANNY AND ZOOEY moved me so deeply. I’m a sneaky idealist, even though I should know better. I can’t help myself.

J.D. Salinger, FRANNY AND ZOOEY: This is a deeply irritating book to read until it isn’t. The style is the irritant—it is so much—and its dazzle wards you off, tests your patience, rubs you raw. And then, when you have reached the point of exasperation and exhaustion, that is when Salinger gets you; at least, he gets me—it feels like he stands there and opens a door into this other room of meaning and gestures to it, and you catch your breath, because that is the room you are always looking for in everything you read, though it is never the same room or found in the same way, the addictive glimpse of something bigger and beyond. Franny and Zooey are sister and brother, the youngest of the Glass children, all former prodigies and minor radio celebrities born to a pair of washed-up vaudevillians, and Franny is having a spiritual crisis, and Zooey, maybe against his instincts, tries to help. That’s it, that’s the story, plus a shit-ton of smoking. So much smoking. The pages reek of ghost nicotine. Reading this made me think of Asteroid City, maybe the most fascinating movie I saw last year, and how considered, extravagant, unmistakeable style can be a manifestation of generosity to the viewer/reader—because there is no misleading illusion of reality, because you are in a created space and acutely aware of it, truth can come in through the art. (Sidebar: Janet Malcom is good mental company on this book (NYR paywall) and the ways it (and Salinger) have been misread.)

Lorrie Moore, I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME: I remember ANAGRAMS, the first Lorrie Moore book I ever read. I must’ve been about 15, and reading this, I recalled how that book struck me. It was startling, strange, and singular, not really like anything else I had read. And this appealingly weird story of a man beset by grief—he’s waiting for his brother to die and toting the sentient corpse of his ex-girlfriend to a forensic farm—and a Reconstruction-era landlady writing letters about her mysterious, insinuating border—is also startling, strange, and singular. And also deeply enjoyable—what a gift to be able to write sentences out of your brain that feel wholly your own, unmistakable, funny as hell and also sharp as knives.

Steven Millhauser, THE WIZARD OF WEST ORANGE: A dreamy and sinister novella seemingly documenting experiments at an Edison-like compound with a feeling machine—a mechanism capable of inducing sensation—sometime at the end of the 19th century.

A.S. Byatt, ANGELS AND INSECTS: Say you’d like to be whirled away by Victorian tales of troubling beauty, blending science and faith with a piquantly rancid edge of depravity. Here are the novellas for you—the first traces the seemingly charmed, semi-somnolent life of an explorer drawn into the bosom of a British family some time in the late 19th century, only to realize he has been snared. Fable-like, ants and an overlooked woman are the key to his escape. In the second, a pair of women, one possibly with true psychic gifts, sit at the center of a circle seeking communion with the dead. Mesmeric, rich, and strange.

Margaret Drabble, THE SEVEN SISTERS and THE PURE GOLD BABY: A pair of fascinating novels—the first, about a woman trying to rebuild her life after a late-in-life divorce; the second, tracing the life story of a friend who has a beloved child with an unnamed developmental disability. Both are really about the way stories are told—what we see and choose to record and why; what it means to set a story down. (Drabble and Byatt, sisters (!), make a formidable literary pair.)

Edith Wharton, SUMMER: Some people suffer from a tendency to valorize the past, especially the idea of tight-knit small communities, but not Edith. Read this and shudder to think of insular small town existence! Charity Royall is thwarted by the circumstances of her life—rescued from dire mountain poverty to be the ward of a dimly lecherous small-town lawyer—and Wharton ruthlessly depicts the failures of her mulish temperament and broken-winged struggle for freedom. A smiling, unsettling lady abortionist makes an appearance; it’s a doozy.

Rodger Lyle Brown, PARTY OUT OF BOUNDS: A very dude-ly music writer history of the scene in Athens, Georgia, in the 1970s and ‘80s, which was fueled by abundant, super cheap housing and artists’ access to well-paid, part-time union jobs. Great for the parts with the B-52s (Fred Schnieder waiting tables at the local dive diner in a bikini), less fun once it gets into the bro-y hustle narrative around R.E.M.’s rise (really made me dislike Michael Stipe, actually, “Strange Currencies” notwithstanding).

Other capsule reviews of books I read before the end of the year can be found in this book gift guide on my blog, including LOLLY WILLOWES (middle-aged witches), POOR THINGS (man-made monsters), LETTERS TO GWEN JOHN (artists), BEA WOLF (wild children), THE SWIFTS: A DICTIONARY OF SCOUNDRELS (child sleuths), and THE MANIAC (tormented geniuses and AI; I have a 2k word review drafted on this book and a couple of others that have colonized my brain—who knows if it will ever see the light of day, though). I also mention FRANNY AND ZOOEY and I AM NOT HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME there, because I love to repeat myself, ha.

Kid stuff:

Jeanne Birdsall, THE PENDERWICKS: This tale of four sisters summering on a cottage adjacent to a grand estate and their ensuing adventures is like a big bowl of Cream of Wheat: smooth, bland, and very white.

Diana Wynne Jones, HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE: Amusing yarn about the adventures of a Lothario wizard and an accidental witch; not as engrossing or magical as the Miyazaki movie, though.

Louise Fitzhugh, HARRIET THE SPY: I don’t know how many times I have read this book, and every time, it startles me. It’s just terrific. So much writing, especially for children, is lying and/or propaganda—you can sense the writer trying to sell you a story, feel the synthetic fibers worked into what they’ve made for you; not here. Is this the only kid’s book where the trusted adult ultimately advises a child to lie? This was published in 1964, a generation after THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, which was written in the 1940s and published in 1951, and Holden and Harriet have always struck me as sort of literary cosmic twins—Holden has too much empathy, and Harriet too little, but both reckon with moving from the clear space of absolute and certain child-self-assuredness to the murkier territory of compromised adulthood.

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Currently reading:

SHELLEY:THE PURSUIT; AN ELEMENTAL THING; THE WRITING OF STONES.

Bookmarked:

AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GARDENING FOR COLORED CHILDREN; JAMES.

Blogged:

Convalescing; silver joy.

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Images:

Detail from “Saint Augustine,” by Philippe de Champaigne, ca. 1645-1650.

Roger Filliou, postcard from Ample Food for Stupid Thought, 1965, via stoppingoffplace.

Antique scherenscnitte.

Lynn Goldsmith: Publicity photo of the B-52s, ca. 1980 for Wild Planet.