All Fours by Miranda July (read by the author)
Figured the author is about my age. Searched her name and – lo! – it was her birthday the day I started listening to the audiobook via Spotify, read by the author, accelerated slightly at 1.4x speed, the day after Valentine’s Day. The night before, as a special Valentine’s Day present to my special spouse-type person, I agreed to watch the most recent installment in the Bridget Jones series. And with that movie in mind, at first as I listened to this I thought it was the literary equivalent. Older woman, younger man, semi-implausible, oft cringe-y — something I would have probably put down after 50 or 75 pages if the story were silently streaming to my eyes instead of effortlessly proceeding into my ears. But also, early on, she won me over with humor, with Family Guy-like ideation cut-aways, like a bit about how after working all day on some art project in the garage when she reentered family reality she felt like Buzz Aldrin returning from orbit being expected to immediately unload the dishwasher. One of four or five legit LOLs but I made other sounds as I listened: OH DUDE or NO or C’MON or GROSS or something along those lines, myself the embodiment of shocked bourgeois (“epatered” not by surrealistic imagery but running one’s hand through another’s urine stream).
The day I finished listening I looked at a hardcover in a bookstore to see how long it was: nearly 300 pages. My estimate was 578 pages. It felt like it could’ve been much shorter but its perceived length, its return to its system of established time, space, and thought (dis)locations, ultimately started to seem thorough, not at all spare, fully filled with the stuff of life.
And it feels absolutely real throughout — when she revealed the cover on IG she said the novel is “close to the bone,” suggesting it’s close to real life, with author/narrator overlap, but it doesn’t quite seem like so-called autofiction, in part because it’s about something in particular — the narrator’s crackup, losing her shit under the cover of art, or in service of an artistic sensibility, which is all fine and cool etc when you’re single and twenty-seven but in your forties, married, with a child, with lunch-packing and drop-off responsibilities, it comes off kinda eye-roll repellant? Which is maybe in part the point?
And they live in such rarefied territory, in a $1.8 million home, blowing a $20K windfall on gloriously redecorating a motel room, creating an aestheticized padded cell from which to deconstruct her family. Interesting about perimenopause — and consistently committed to its bit, to seeing the novel through, attending to its issues not half-assing it, although this somewhat undermined the sense of reality in the last chapters when loose ends with Erkanda and Davey were tied up, conforming to expectations of conventional narrative despite otherwise comfortable with other ways of content (both meanings intended).
To a degree, for someone essentially my age, the emphasis on sex seemed icky, immature, almost adolescent, as though she doesn’t realize that after Davey and after Kris some other new big love will surely come along. The sex scenes too were a little much, not oblique or suggestive or lyrical or “poetic” — that is, nothing like Salter or Updike, surely intentionally.
But generally I respected and “enjoyed it” for its thorough depiction of a crack-up, despite the narrator’s crazy-pants approach to middle-age parent life. It elicited strong emotions. I yelled out while driving, streaming it from phone to car stereo. And that too is something I admired — it infected me with feelings, mostly reactionary, replusionary, in a way that made me look upon myself and consider myself lucky not to feel the need to lavishly and lasciviously redecorate the motel rooms of my life.
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (read by various readers)
Author is super-talented, the language unfurling non-stop, the intelligence obvious, the concerns absolutely modern.
Single lingering impression is I don’t think there’s a single description of weather, of trees, of rain, of ice, of snow, of a human gesture or trait that’s not knowingly typecast (“a thing” indicative of a type of person).
Listened to the audiobook on Spotify and I imagine I would have been impatient with it more than I was if I’d been reading. I skipped ahead at 15-second intervals through the final 12 minutes of BDSM instructions, which made me think there’s something about these stories — their persistence, their thoroughness, their extreme fluency in 21st century internet lingo, their overt application of intelligence, their identity-political/interpersonal rational calculation — that made them seem rendered rather than written. There’s nothing expressive or romantic or uncontrolled or loose or intuitive-seeming about these stories. They’re alive not so much with the stuff of life as the ick of the internet.
That’s not necessarily a critique.
Reminded me of some of Franzen’s recent novels (Purity, mostly) in which everyone’s just so icky. After listening for a while I’d turn it off, relieved to return to the life I’m living “IRL” — the tasks, responsibilities, half-recognized fluctuations of energy levels and feelings, concerns about unsettled weather/wind gusts causing limbs to fall, the knife slipping off the avocado skin and slicing my finger while making guacamole after listening to this while shopping and driving to the store. That is, like Twitter of yore, this one’s concerns feel limited to their medium, caught in the text, and generally nauseating and exaggerated and not really what it feels like to be alive both online and off, despite obvious displays of narrative and linguistic talent.
A line Frank Conroy had famously said about a friend’s story came to mind — “it lacks the milk of human kindness.” Even the kind characters like Justin come off as types instead of people. There’s talk of dealing with people as who they are instead of as representatives of identities but I didn’t really sense that any of the characters really achieve real personhood, in part because they’re trapped in a sort of authorial intelligence limited to the complexities of limitless cringe found online. And I think that’s in part the point. IRL personhood is nearly impossible for these characters and this impossibility causes IRL suffering.
The author, again, seems super-smart, knowing/immersed, fluent and talented and ambitious, with a dark sense of humor, and I’m glad to have listened to this — and I’ll definitely consider his future books and may even read (or at least listen to) his first novel fairly soon.
The readers of the audiobook BTW are fantastic, particularly the dude bro who narrates “Our Dope Future.”
The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen (read by the author, David Duchovny, and someone else)
Listened to this on Spotify every now and then over six weeks. David Duchovny reads a chapter and someone else who does a great job for another chapter, but mostly it’s read by the author who sounds more or less exactly like Jesse Eisenberg, who’s from East Brunswick, NJ, not Atlantic City like the author. Cohen reads fantastically well, at least as well as Eisenberg would have. But the single lingering impression after having listened to this is that I always pictured Jesse Eisenberg behind the mic. Worth it for the “extra credit” epilogue about how the novel emerged from visits with Harold Bloom. Reminded me of a long phone conversation I had with Michael Silverblatt (Bloom’s LA analogue in some ways) who spoke well of Cohen and mentioned that they often talked. Anyway, I appreciated this as an essayistic novel, how it presents a fictional skeletal system to support what’s essentially nonfictional vital organs and skin. It’s essayistic but not essayism, in that it’s delivering history and making points, not associative or ecstatic or poetic. But overall for a major prize winner, this one is certainly unconventional, for the most part sans set pieces or exagerrated/memorable characters yet it’s an intriguing, almost unhinged, concept for a novel. There’s something to it, too, supported by the audiobook production, that seems a little klezmer-y, stereotypical Jewish-y, which at times made me almost turn on it. The jazzy drumming that crept in during longer essayistic passages was distracting and unhelpful and should be avoided in the future (if anyone at Pushkin ever reads this). Not sure how I would’ve felt about this if I’d read it, how I would’ve felt about the language, how it looked on the page, but as something to throw on the headphones every now and then on a walk through the woods or at the gym, it exceeded expectations.
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To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please acquire a copy of Like It Matters, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).