Since last issue, I’ve read: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (not my favorite writing style, didn’t love The Martian, but Rocky is one of the best alien characters ever); The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland (bizarrely enjoyable Anne Rice-style gothic vampire story transplanted into a domestic drama in upstate New York in the 1980s); and The Expectations by Alexander Tilney (rich privileged angsty youths playing squash at a stuffy boarding school). Waiting on my bedside table stack: Good Material by Dolly Alderton and A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko.

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Two weeks ago the New York Times published a “100 best books of the 21st century so far” list to an immediate flurry of tweets and takes and thinkpieces. Enough friends have texted me asking my opinion of the list that I am giving in and adding yet another take onto the collective pile.

For starters, if the excuse for doing this list was the first quarter of the century, it should have come out at the end of this year (2000 through the end of 2024 comprising the first 25 years of the century). But they were too excited to wait, I guess?

Let’s also remember the primary reason for doing such lists is to spur engagement, and it certainly worked in this case. I saw scores of tweets outraged a certain author was left off, or criticizing the process, or dunking on the top 10, but every social share only further spreads the list, so the whole exercise has been a success and also surely a traffic hit.

As far as the presentation goes, there’s some nice interactivity: as you scroll the full list, you can check off the books you’ve read and those you would like to read, and the page keeps track for you and shows your results at the bottom. I would have liked them to go a step further and offer a filter to categorize by year published (there was some recency bias, but not as much as you’d think), fiction vs nonfiction (the list is about 75% fiction), or authors with multiple books on the list (Bolaño, Edward P. Jones, Mantel, Denis Johnson, Alice Munro (!), Zadie Smith, and Philip Roth each got two books on the list; Elena Ferrante, Jesmyn Ward, and George Saunders have three).

The methodology: The Times says 503 “novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics, and other book lovers” voted by selecting their top 10 books published since 2000. The Times did not define “best” for them and left it open-ended. (Maris Kreizman, who was one of the participants, writes that the Times did send a link to all of their “best book” lists since 2000 for reference, but that didn’t mean voters had to choose something from those lists.) They don’t list all 503 voters but separately have shared 53 ballots publicly, including those of Stephen King, John Irving, Knausgaard, Sarah Jessica Parker (?), Roxane Gay, and Marlon James. The Times doesn’t say whether its own critics are included in the 503 voters.

Overall, unlike with the paper’s annual “10 best books” or “100 notable books” rankings, any issues people have with this list they can’t really blame on the Times. Or at least not only on the Times. I suppose you could take issue with the sample size (only 503 voters?), or the elite backgrounds of the voting group (presumably? if that list were made public), but in general, if you’re stunned an author or book was left off, well, sorry, it didn’t get the votes.

So: to the list. Who was “snubbed?” Karl Ove Knausgaard (Dwight Garner writes that votes were split among the six-book My Struggle series, but that didn’t stop two of Ferrante’s Neapolitan series from making it), David Foster Wallace (The Pale King and Oblivion both have a strong case—did his posthumous cancellation keep people from voting for him?), Martin Amis, Amor Towles, Stephen King (he charmingly voted for one of his own books on his top ten, Under the Dome, and I agree it’s his best since 2000), Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, Sally Rooney, Joshua Cohen, Michel Houellebecq, Emma Cline, Salman Rushdie (I’d put his memoir Joseph Anton on), Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake is a shocking omission), Jonathan Lethem, John Irving (I’d put Last Night in Twisted River on), Tom McCarthy (Remainder and C would both make my list), Will Self, Meg Wolitzer, Jane Smiley, Richard Russo, Richard Ford, Jon Krakauer (despite a fair amount of narrative nonfiction on the list), Haruki Murakami, Steven Millhauser (especially surprising with so many short story collections), and Susan Choi all missed the cut. There are many more, but those are the authors that stood out to me. As for individual books, A Little Life and The Art of Fielding were two novels I remember creating massive moments in the literary world, and neither made it. And (unpopular take?) I’d put Freedom over The Corrections. And only one Cormac McCarthy, and it’s The Road? I’d put The Passenger on the list.

But again, overall, if you have beef with any snubs, your beef is with the 503 voters. My gripe is more with the approach of mixing genres: I’d separate fiction and nonfiction. To say The Warmth of Other Suns is the second-best book of the past 24 years feels… strange? When the rest of the top 10 are novels? The Looming Tower and Say Nothing make the top 100, but Columbine by Dave Cullen doesn’t? Nor any Erik Larson or David Grann? I’d have done two separate lists: 100 best novels and 100 best nonfiction books.

These lists are obviously extremely subjective. How did the voters even interpret “best?” Did they choose the 10 books they think were the most towering literary achievements, or the 10 books they most enjoyed reading?

This is the tyranny of lists: you roll your eyes, broadcast your gripes, but everyone still wants to see what/who made the list, and then everyone wants to share it. The tyranny of lists is that they pester and annoy, but boy do they click. The tyranny of lists is that everyone loves to complain about them, but they all want to make the list. This all applies to book rankings, “40 Under 40” and “30 Under 30” business lists, awards, every subjective exercise in ranking art or people.

The Times smartly lets you submit your own top 10, which is fun but nearly impossible. My first stab at my own top 10 looked like this:

Then I realized I’d left off The Pale King and Submission, two novels that are absolutely on my ten best of the century. So I revised by removing nonfiction.

Then I remember The Namesake, which not only should have been on the Times top 100, but I would think belongs in the top ten or so. I also remembered The Three-Body Problem, first published in China in 2008, then in English in 2014, which I recommend to everyone lately and which has got to be, along with Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, is the most original sci-fi series of the century so far. You can also see I couldn’t decide on Telephone or The Trees by Everett—both incredible, both have stuck with me, both better in my view than Erasure, his one title that did make the list (perhaps buoyed in voters’ minds by the recent film adaptation “American Fiction”).

So my next conceit was: why don’t I remove nonfiction and remove any titles that already made the NYT list, and keep it to my top 10 the Times missed, and here’s what I have for you:

Suffice it to say that the exercise of choosing just 10 is impossible (but fun!) so it’s no wonder voters forgot, or were forced to leave off, some very deserving books. Choosing 20 would have been much easier.

Last comment: many people were sharing their screenshot showing how many of the 100 books they’ve read. I shared mine on my Instagram, then got the recognizable icky feeling of tallying books and boasting about the tally, a ritual I wrote about here and again here. Books should be savored and enjoyed. You never want to get into the habit of whipping through them purely to count how many you read and tout your count.

But hey. We all do it… 😉

Thanks for reading.

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In the two months since last issue, I’ve read: Devil’s Bargain by Joshua Green (about Steve Bannon’s pivotal role in getting Trump elected the first time—fascinating read for right now, with history repeating itself with Trump as candidate for the third consecutive cycle); Wellness by Nathan Hill (satirizes and nails so much of contemporary life in suburban America for married couples with children, highly recommend); The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach (a recommendation from a W.A.R. reader and friend, quick-and-funny read for Jewish humor lovers that loses steam toward the end); Knife by Salman Rushdie (one of my heroes, this is his devastating but necessary account of the attack on his life in August 2022 at the Chautauqua Institution in New York in which he lost an eye—it is by no means where you should start if you’ve never read Rushdie, start with Satanic Verses or Midnight’s Children, or Fury or Shame for something shorter, or his first memoir Joseph Anton); North Woods by Daniel Mason (this sprawling, brilliant, “impossible-to-summarize” novel told in multiple formats by multiple narrators spans 300 years in the life of one Massachusetts house, and is stuffed with ghosts, seances, insects, catamounts, and so much more); Down the Great Unknown by Edward Dolnick (an account of one-armed geologist John Wesley Powell’s brazen 1869 expedition down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon—recommend for lovers of Jon Krakauer and outdoor adventure/disaster nonfiction); and Until August, the just-released posthumous novella by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the book I want to ruminate on today along with another posthumous novel I know intimately.

What have you all been reading?

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As a guiding question for today’s issue: Is it right to publish an author’s unfinished work after they’re dead without their explicit permission? How about in direct opposition to their stated wishes?

That appears to be the case with Until August, published in March on what would have been the author’s 97th birthday (he died in 2014).

I should say as background that the only Marquez I had read was One Hundred Years of Solitude, back in high school, and I remember only that the writing was beautiful, that it was an Important Novel, and that Marquez is associated with magical realism. Until August is not magical realism. (In this way, starting with Until August as your entry to Marquez’s body of work would be like how my first Murakami was Norwegian Wood.)

The review of Until August in the latest NY Review of Books (one of my cherished print subscriptions) written by the playwright Ariel Dorfman (a personal friend of Marquez), captured my interest with the publishing backstory: Toward the end of his life, Marquez suffered from dementia. After his death, the manuscript of Until August ended up in the Ransom Center archives at the University of Texas Austin, until his sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo took it back and published it—this even after Marquez’s final comment on the matter was: “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.”

They did the opposite of destroying it. Here’s their defense, explained in a brief preface to the English edition: “Judging the book to be much better than we remembered it, another possibility occurred to us: that the fading faculties that kept him from finishing the book also kept him from realizing how good it was. In an act of betrayal, we decided to put his readers’ pleasure ahead of all other considerations. If they are delighted, it’s possible Gabo might forgive us. In that we trust.”

As Dorfman writes, the publication of Until August “has stirred a considerable amount of controversy, with many arguing that it is a disservice to allow such an unfinished minor work to circulate.”

Until August is a short work (144 pgs, including notes), but it doesn’t feel “minor.” The story is tightly told and carries you along gracefully as it escalates. Ana Magdalena Bach, a 46-year-old woman, happily married, takes a solo trip to visit her mother’s grave on an island off the coast of Colombia every August on the anniversary of her mother’s death. On the visit that opens the novel, she does something rash: she has a one-night-stand with a stranger she meets in the hotel bar, “a step that had never occurred to her in her entire life, not even in dreams, and she took it without any mystique: ‘Shall we go up?’” She’s the pursuer, she’s the driver of the action, and she greatly enjoys herself that night.

In the years that follow, she attempts to have a one-night stand on every trip, always with a different stranger, not always with happy results. And the first man had left a twenty-dollar bill for her after the encounter (tucked into the book she was reading, Bram Stoker’s Dracula), which enrages and haunts her for the rest of the novel. She returns home from that first dalliance feeling that things at home have changed, until she realizes “the changes were not to the world but to herself… She did not know why she’d changed, but it had something to do with the twenty-dollar bill she carried around at page 116 of her book. She had suffered unbearable humiliation, without a moment’s serenity. She had wept with rage from the frustration of not knowing the identity of the man she would have to kill for debasing the memory of a happy adventure.”

The writing is wonderful and understated. (One quick example: “After the second drink she felt that the brandy had met up with the gin in some corner of her heart.”) And when the climactic moment of the book arrives, it is relayed as suddenly and nonchalantly as the first moment she cheats on her husband: “She got up determined to take the plunge she hadn’t known how to take during her bad island nights.” What plunge? An act that no reader will expect. I’ll stop just short of sharing what she does next, for anyone who plans to read the book. I recommend you do.

Okay, so I’ve summarized the controversy here, and I’ve relayed that the book is wonderful—even if it was unfinished, in Marquez’s eyes. What I haven’t done is answer my own question of whether it was right for the sons to publish this book, against the stated wishes of their father.

First, let me invoke a very different posthumous novel: The Pale King by David Foster Wallace.

I am something of a DFW nut, though nowadays that is considered extremely uncool, even embarrassing. I wrote my college senior thesis on the journalism tricks of Wallace and Hunter S. Thompson, I’ve been on the Wallace list-serv for over a decade, and I’ve written about Wallace for Salon, NPR, Berfrois, and other places. I am not an Infinite Jest fanboy (read it, didn’t love it); I’m far more interested in his non-fiction essays (though his short story collections are also outstanding). It feels to me a hallmark of this American cultural era that one of the most gifted writers of his generation has been half-canceled after his death when he is no longer here to defend himself, but I’ll leave that thread alone for this issue and focus on this one book.

Wallace died by suicide in 2008, and The Pale King, his third novel, was published in 2011. I reviewed the novel for NPR.org when it came out. The backstory goes like this: after his death, Wallace’s widow Karen Green and his agent Bodie Nadell found the novel in fragments across hard drives, paper notebooks, and files on his computer. He had attempted to organize the fragments into apparent chapters before his death, suggesting his intention that it be published, but he left no explicit directions. Wallace’s editor Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown, did the grunt work of culling more than 1,000 pages down to 538. Even at 538 pages, the story is unresolved, and might have been twice as long if Wallace had had his way. As John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote in GQ in 2011, “He left us this book—the people closest to him agree that he wanted us to see it. This is not, in other words, a classic case of Posthumous Great Novel, where scholars have gone into an estate and unearthed a manuscript the author would probably never want read. Wallace seems to have laid this book before us in an all but do-with-it-what-you-will sort of way… Think of a big mural that was half done.”

I loved The Pale King and (hot take!) think it’s a more enjoyable read than Infinite Jest (1,079 pages). It has stretches of occasional intentional boredom, as it’s set at an IRS office in Peoria, Illinois, but it also has hilarious characters and stretches of brilliance unmatched in any other Wallace fiction. One long section, the first-person backstory of a character named Chris Fogel, was published as a standalone novella by McNally Jackson in 2022 (a la “Pafko at the Wall” from DeLillo’s Underworld) that they titled Something To Do With Paying Attention. That section boasts one of the most incredible scenes Wallace ever wrote:

I was by myself, wearing nylon warm-up pants and a black Pink Floyd tee shirt, trying to spin a soccer ball on my finger and watching the CBS soap opera “As The World Turns” on the room’s little black-and-white Zenith… at the end of every commercial break, the show’s trademark shot of planet earth as seen from space, turning, would appear, and the CBS daytime network announcer’s voice would say, “You’re watching ‘As the World Turns,’ ” which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ” until the tone began to seem almost incredulous—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ”—until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement… It was as if the CBS announcer were speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns.’” I didn’t stand for anything.

Anyway, I don’t want this issue to become a paean to The Pale King. I mention it in contrast to the circumstance around the publishing of Until August. David Foster Wallace, presumably, would not be angry that The Pale King was published, though perhaps he’d quibble with many of Michael Pietsch’s editing decisions. He took actions to indicate that he wanted it to see the light of day. Gabriel Garcia Marquez told his family not to publish Until August, in fact he said it must be “destroyed.” (Again, he was also suffering from dementia.) They directly disobeyed him.

But in the end I feel that wonderful writing deserves to be read. I think Marquez’s sons framed it perfectly, and lovingly, in their preface: if the book delights readers, they reasoned, perhaps their father would forgive them.

I was delighted by it, and I believe he would.

If/when a great author leaves behind an unfinished work that still possesses some of their greatness, you take it, do your best to package it, and give it to their readers.

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Keep reading.

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Real quick, what I’ve read since we last hung out: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (really enjoyed the surprising places it goes); McTeague by Frank Norris (holy shit, hold on to your teeth, might write an issue on it later); and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (picaresque, recommend to everyone).

Oh, and I finally read Underworld, the 827-page Big American Novel that had been sitting on my shelf for years, my fifth Don DeLillo book.

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This is Issue 27. I wrote it at the home of the Hollywood Pirtheads.

The first DeLillo novel I read was White Noise, his 1985 National Book Award winner and most famous work. I was in college. I did not enjoy it.

It felt to me like he kept beating us over the head with his point: consumerism, commercialism, death. The incessant lists of products and brands grated, like, yeah, we get it. But I had also read the (in)famous 2001 B.R. Myers essay “A Reader’s Manifesto,” with its incisive send-up of White Noise, before reading White Noise, and that surely colored my experience.

This key part from Myers rang true to me as I read White Noise, but would I have felt that way without having been told to beforehand?:

“This is the sort of writing, full of brand names and wardrobe inventories, that critics like to praise as an "edgy" take on the insanity of modern American life. It's hard to see what is so edgy about describing suburbia as a wasteland of stupefied shoppers, which is something left-leaning social critics have been doing since the 1950s… DeLillo's characters talk and act like the aliens in 3rd Rock From the Sun, which would be fine if we weren't supposed to accept them as dead-on satires of the way we live now. The American supermarket is presented as a haven of womblike contentment, a place where people go to satisfy deep emotional needs.”

I tried DeLillo again when he published his first (and only) short story collection, The Angel Esmerelda, in 2011. Here was a chance to dip back into this Great American Novelist’s vibe in bite-sized helpings. I loved the stories. They felt brutalist and unflinching, especially “Baader-Meinhof,” which ran in the New Yorker in 2002. Now I had improved to a 50/50 track record on enjoying DeLillo.

Next I read End Zone (1972) and adored it: high school football as nuclear war. It was the convergence of 1970s American anxiety, omnipresent violence, and teenage apathy, all with a coating of West Texas dust over it. More “North Dallas Forty” (the gritty 1979 Nick Nolte movie) than Friday Night Lights.

Then I read The Silence, DeLillo’s slim 128-page 2020 novella imagining a mysterious national power outage. I thought it was cartoonishly bad and simplistic—the characters mostly just rattle off lists of vaguely ominous things as they sit around wondering what’s going on—and yet the book kind of stayed with me, part of a recent streak of vague-disaster-not-fully-explained novels. (The Silence has multiple mentions of crypto, by the way.)

And finally, last month, I pulled Underworld from our home shelves. It was one of a handful of Big Books I’ve long owned but hadn’t gotten to yet. (And yes, the original cover depicted the Twin Towers, shrouded in fog, just four years before any image of those buildings would take on a different meaning forever.)

There is a vague byzantine skeleton of a plot in Underworld: the backstories of the many people who come into possession of the home run baseball Bobby Thomson slammed to give the New York Giants the NL pennant over the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951. Indeed, the opening 96 pages of Underworld, originally published as “Pafko at the Wall” in Harper’s in 1992, are an incredible, indelible panorama of characters real and fictional dropped into a real-life moment of sports history.

I also appreciated the intricate structure of the novel, in which everything is told in reverse, finally ending in the reveal of the night when teenaged Nick Shay accidentally shot a man.

But Underworld as a whole is more pastiche of New York images than cohesive plotted novel. Its scenes and set pieces serve to illustrate DeLillo’s pet themes, the things usually called “DeLilloan”: nuclear warfare; waste and trash; collective national anxiety; urban systems; sports as a metaphor for society; the specter and inevitability of death. But in Underworld, they rang far less didactic for me than in White Noise.

In my 2018 piece about End Zone at The Paris Review, I wrote that the character Gary Harkness becomes “fascinated by words and phrases like thermal hurricane, overkill, circular error probability, post-attack environment, stark deterrence, dose-rate contours, kill-ratio, spasm war. At this point, we are squarely in Don DeLillo territory: the language is meant to exhaust, to glaze eyes. The melding of Gary’s football routine with his inner nuclear preoccupation is a macro effect.”

But your eyes never glaze in Underworld.

The simplest and best way I can convey my lasting impressions of Underworld is to share some of the passages I underlined with delight.

Here’s Nick Shay describing how obsessive he and his wife Marian become about garbage collection and disposal after he starts working in waste management: “Marian and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn't say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make? Safe, clean, neat, easily disposed of?”

Marian trying to convince Brian Glassic, her husband’s coworker with whom she’s having an affair, to smoke heroin with her—absolutely brutal: “I want to get you in deeper. Take a chase. I want to get you in so deep you’ll stop eating and sleeping. You’ll lie in bed thinking about us. Doing our things in a borrowed room. You’ll be able to think about nothing else. That’s my program for you, Brian.”

This comparison of how people behaved when news broke of the JFK assassination made me think of my generation’s closest equivalent shared experience, 9/11: “When JFK was shot, people went inside. We watched TV in dark rooms and talked on the phone with friends and relatives. We were all separate and alone. But when Thomson hit the homer, people rushed outside. People wanted to be together. Maybe it was the last time people spontaneously went out of their houses for something. Some wonder, some amazement. Like a footnote to the end of the war.”

After Nick Shay, now 57, catches up with the artist Klara Sax, now 72, in the Nevada desert, decades after the affair they had when he was a teenager—this rings so true to me of the experience of reconnecting briefly with someone you haven’t seen in years: “Seventeen. That’s how old I was last time I saw her. Yes, that long ago, and after all this time it might seem to her that I was some invasive thing, a figure from an anxious dream come walking and talking across a wilderness to find her […] I could lift the younger woman right out of the chair, separate her from the person in the dark plaid pants and old suede blazer who sat talking and smoking […] We’d said what we were going to say and exchanged all the looks and remembered the dead and missing and now it was time for me to become a functioning adult again.”

This description of the preparation and first few minutes of any house party: “First there was an empty room. Then someone appeared and began to put things on a table, to move the magazines and picture books and put out bowls and crocks and cut flowers and then to reinstate some of the picture books but only the ones that claimed a status of a certain sumptuous kind. Then a few people arrived and there was sporadic conversation, a little awkward at times, because not everyone knew everyone. Then the room slowly filled and the talk came more easily and the faces shed some layers.”

And finally, as a MetroNorth commuter myself, this stuck with me more than any other passage in the book—it’s about an utterly minor character, but that’s beside the point, and Underworld’s genius is in conveying so many vivid New York moments using its entire cast of characters, major and minor:

“Charlie walked through the semiswank lobby, done in Babylonian art deco, and nipped around the corner to his Swedish masseuse, who karate’d his aching lumbar for ten minutes. Then he wheeled into Brooks Brothers and picked up a couple of tennis shirts because what’s more fun than an impulse buy? He double-timed it across Madison to the Men’s Bar at the Biltmore, where he massively inhaled a Cutty on the rocks and was out the door in half a shake and skating across the vast main level of Grand Central, the Bobby Thomson baseball jammed into the pocket of his topcoat—a Burberry all-weather that he loved like a brother and that went especially well with the suit he was wearing, a slate gray whipcord made for Charlie by a guy who did lapels for organized crime—because he’d decided the ball was no longer safe in his office and he wanted his son to have it, for better or worse, love or money, real or fake, but please Chuckie do not abuse my trust, I could fall down dead passing the stuffed mushrooms at dinner and this is the one thing I want you to take and keep and care for, and he went striding through the gate just in time to make his train, which was the evolutionary climax of the whole human endeavor, and he bucketed up to the bar car, filled with people who more or less resembled Charlie, give or take a few years and a few gray hairs and the details of their evilest dreams. The last express to Westport.”

There is some sense of pride and achievement in finishing a Big Book. Underworld was one of a handful on our shelves that I’ve checked off in the past year, along with Bleak House and Magic Mountain. But an ability to finish off a Big Book doesn’t mean you can get through every Big Book, or should even try. I’m unashamed to share I could not get through JR by William Gaddis. I’ve tried twice. (I’m suspicious of people who claim it’s one of their favorite books—is it, really?) And while I adored Ulysses, I could not get through Finnegan’s Wake, and don’t expect to try again in this lifetime. People have told me they can’t get through Infinite Jest. (I’ve read it, but I tell people it’s not DFW’s best work anyway, and I mean it; read his nonfiction essays or his short stories or The Pale King instead.)

It’s okay to give up on a Big Book slog. (I recently wrote about the merits of quitting.) But if you’re up for it, Underworld is worth the investment of time and mental patience, whether you’ve read DeLillo before or not.

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Let me start by welcoming those of you who arrived here via my piece in the Washington Post this week about the Dune books. (First time I’ve used my author bio anywhere to pump my Substack.) I launched this newsletter in 2020 to write casually about books I liked, in particular books I think of as less obvious / under-covered / overlooked. But really this was/is also place to put my writing about books when I don’t have the time or patience to polish and belabor an essay to the point where it’s publishable for a major books publication. I’ve written about and reviewed books for great places like The Paris Review, Salon, The Daily Beast, Air Mail, NPR, The Millions, and many more, but on this Substack I can freely gush/whine/instruct/future-gaze all I want, with no concern for news peg or word count.

My “Dune” piece in WaPo had an obvious news peg: the new “Dune: Part Two” movie came out last week. I thought it was terrific, better than the first one (my wife commented that a person who hasn’t read the books could probably still enjoy and understand the second movie without having seen the first, and I agree) and mostly very faithful to the books (with the exception of its handling of Paul’s sister Alia, who is a major player toward the end of the first Dune book but has not yet been born when the second movie ends). As a reminder, the two Denis Villeneuve “Dune” movies cover the first Dune book; he has said he would like to make just one more movie to complete the trilogy, and I suspect that “Dune: Part Three” will focus mostly on the second book, Dune Messiah, but also take elements from the third book, Children of Dune. (A new hot take at The Hollywood Reporter declares: “Dune 3 Has a Big Problem: The Next Book Isn’t That Great.” Disagree!)

As entertaining as the new “Dune” movie was, even more exciting to me is how it has reignited excitement around big blockbuster movies—specifically seeing them in movie theaters.

Back in September, I used my issue about “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” to gush about movie theaters and how my wife and I cherish their existence and root for their survival, so I won’t repeat myself too much. But with those two summer blockbusters and now “Dune 2” you’ve got three movies in the past seven months that were truly cultural events. They demanded to be seen promptly (in the theater) not only because they were best enjoyed on a large screen but also so that you won’t fall behind in the social media discourse. My entire Twitter feed has been “Dune 2” memes for the past week; if you want, you could add “Saltburn” to that list for the same reason—for two weeks, the internet was obsessed with it.

It seems to me 2023 was a great year of movies. Not a great year for the movie business, of course; two prolonged strikes will have consequences for years to come.

In a March 1 New York Times op-ed, Mark Harris writes, “For Hollywood, 2023 was not so much a disaster as a preview of disasters to come. Sure, one of the big stories last year was the Barbenheimer phenomenon — two celebrated hits that marched arm in arm toward a combined 21 Oscar nominations — but everywhere else you look, the prognosis is grim… 2023 was a time of downsizing, diminishment, shelving, sidelining, retrenching, retreating and bet-hedging. And 2024 is the year of consequences… As for new projects, the industry’s current whispered motto seems to be: Just survive till ’25.” I note the date of the op-ed because the headline, “How Bad Can It Get for Hollywood?”, looks a little silly one week later amid the smash box office success of “Dune 2.”

But if you look at the Oscar nominated films from 2023, there’s so much to love. We’ve seen all ten of the Best Picture nominees (after watching “Maestro” this week just in time) and I can’t remember a year where I so enjoyed every single one on the list.

“Poor Things” was probably my favorite movie of the year in terms of pure enjoyment—so creative, hilarious, and surprising; I’d like to see Mark Ruffalo win, but it looks like it’s RDJ’s year for one of those Oscars given more for career achievement and goodwill than for the specific performance nominated. “The Holdovers” was such a triumph too (Giamatti is my favorite actor, period), graceful and empathetic while still being very funny, much like “Sideways,” the previous Payne/Giamatti collab. “American Fiction” has so much to say and such cultural urgency right now, and such outstanding performances by the whole cast, and especially Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown. “Past Lives” was wonderful and subtle. “Maestro” was anything but subtle, but featured two jaw-dropping performances by Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan; I’d be equally happy to see her, Gladstone, or Stone win Best Actress. (One quick aside on Bradley Cooper: I think he has been unfairly mocked for his obvious Oscar campaigning, and two pieces sum up the trap he fell into quite well: this one at Variety and this New Yorker piece that points out “an actor must somehow be dedicated but not try-hard, authentic but not award-hungry”—in other words, Cillian Murphy.) “Barbie” was subversive and smart and more than a comedy, and deserved a Best Director nomination. (Speaking of movies that were deserving, The Iron Claw got shut out of the Oscars and while it’s a brutal watch, and it feels like no one saw it, the performances were outstanding and I would have liked to see Zac Efron and Holt McCallany nominated.)

It just feels so different from the year prior, when “Everything Everywhere All At Once” swept the categories. (I will only say we didn’t really ‘get it’ and this was the review that best captured my feelings.)

Sure, “Oppenheimer” is likely to sweep the big categories, which will make Sunday an anti-climactic evening. I’m rooting for Giamatti or Wright, but expecting Murphy. Rooting for Ruffalo or Brown, but expecting Downey. But I won’t complain if/when “Oppenheimer” wins Best Picture and Director because even though so many of the other films were terrific and deserving of recognition, I don’t think you could say any other was more of a Big Masterpiece With Something to Say than “Oppenheimer.” Maybe “Killers of the Flower Moon,” but if you read the book, it’s hard not to see the movie as imperfect.

And that brings us to the books. Five of the best movies of the year came from books. (“Barbie” being on the Adapted Screenplay list rather than Original Screenplay is stupid and is based on Barbie being a “pre-existing character” from Mattel.) I’ll start with the three I’ve read.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” (not nominated for Adapted Screenplay!) is based on Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read. I’d put it in my pantheon of reported books that are about real world history but read like thrillers, along with In The Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson (about the U.S. ambassador to Germany in the 1930s, just before things in Berlin turned truly ghastly) and The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright (about Al-Qaeda and 9/11). The book reads like a mystery because it doesn’t reveal to the reader for quite a while who was pulling the strings behind the Osage murders; the movie chooses to show you immediately, which makes it a lot less suspenseful, though still plenty compelling.

“American Fiction” is based on the 2011 novel-within-a-novel Erasure by Percival Everett, a brilliant and extremely underrated writer who may now finally get his due thanks to the movie. It would be impossible for any movie to fully capture the extent of an Everett novel, with its caustic satire and byzantine plot twists, but “American Fiction” comes close. If you’ve never read Everett, I highly highly recommend him, and would point you to The Trees, Telephone, or I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has a new book out later this month, James, narrated by Jim from Huckleberry Finn.

“The Zone of Interest” is a (very partial) adaptation of a 2014 Martin Amis novel of the same name. It is one of my favorite Amis novels, and I remember it being very darkly funny. The film, of course, is not funny at all. As far as adaptations go, it departs dramatically from the novel. Amis’s story focuses on three characters at Auschwitz: Paul Doll (based on the real-life Commandant Rudolf Hoss), Angelus Thomsen, a young officer who reports to Doll; and Szmul, a Jewish prisoner commanded by Doll to do inhumane grunt-work like cleaning out the ovens and hauling dead bodies. (I’m aware this all sounds as brutal, or even more brutal, than the film, but Amis manages to make it comedic). In the novel, Angelus and Paul Doll’s wife Hannah flirt at a possible affair, and both are privately disenchanted with the Nazi regime. For the movie, director Jonathan Glazer zooms in on the Dolls, uses their real names (Rudolf and Hedwig Hoss), skips Amis’s other characters, and never takes the viewer over the wall into the camp whatsoever. It all makes the film so different from the novel as to not even feel like an adaptation, but it certainly made for a powerful statement.

“Oppenheimer” is based on a Pulitzer-winning, 720-page biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, that, as I wrote in September, sounds plenty fascinating, but if I’m being honest I’m not sure I’m up for it. What I wish I had done was read the book first, but now that I’ve seen the movie, the motivation to read the book is admittedly much less.

Finally, many moviegoers likely don’t realize “Poor Things” is based on a 1992 Scottish novel (that I haven’t read) by Alasdair Gray; here’s a great piece about the book and its weirdness from WaPo critic Michael Dirda. (Let me also recommend this fun WaPo piece about fictional books in this year’s Oscar movies.)

That’s about all I’ve got. Read books. See big movies in the theater. And when big movies are based on books, read the book first.

Got thoughts on this year’s Oscar nods? Don’t just reply directly to my email, post a public comment! Thank you to those who commented on my last issue. See you next time.

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I’m finishing up The Making of Incarnation by Tom McCarthy (huge fan of his stuff, wrote about him here, and this is maybe his most byzantine novel yet) and Underworld by Don DeLillo (it’s a doorstop, but I’ve absolutely loved it; I wrote about End Zone at The Paris Review in 2018). My last few reads were Red Pill by Hari Kunzru (started out really strong, then lost me in second half); The Midcoast by Adam White (crime potboiler set in Maine that is also about writing and family); and Bad Cree by Jessica Johns (very cool indigenous horror involving dreams and spirits, continuing my recent horror streak that started with This Thing Between Us, then Militia House, then The Boatman’s Daughter, and I enjoyed all of them).

What are you reading?

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Some quick housekeeping:

• When I mention books in this newsletter, I link to Bookshop.org (supports indie bookstores) rather than Amazon. The link is an affiliate link, which means I earn something like $2 when you buy a book through my link. I obviously don’t write this newsletter to make money, and don’t charge for it, but if you enjoy the newsletter, this is one tiny way to support it; I’ve earned a hefty $48.50 in Bookshop commissions since 2020. I do admit it’s cool to see when someone purchased a book through my link. (Which of you bought Big Swiss last week after I mentioned it?) On my personalized Bookshop page, I’ve also made a few “lists” of my favorite novels, short story collections, nonfiction, etc., if that interests you.

• Substack has a new(ish) feature called Notes that I keep resolving to use more. They are a way for me to put up a shortform update rather than sending out a whole issue; I might start using them to share great passages from books I’m currently reading. One drawback (or advantage?) is that you won’t see my Notes unless you use the Substack web site or app. I highly recommend trying one or the other if you subscribe to multiple Substack newsletters; it’s a nice dashboard of all your newsletter subs.

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Now, let’s talk about quitting books.

I’ve always tried to follow the common rule of giving a book 50 pages to hook me and if I’m bored, I’ll move on. There are simply too many good books to read in a lifetime to spend any of the precious reading time you have on something you’re not enjoying.

But it’s easier said than done, especially if it’s a book you bought. (This is a good case for using the library—no guilt in returning a library book.) In practice, I’ve quit books very rarely. 50 pages usually slips to 100 pages. I’ve often found myself rationalizing, 50 pages in and bored, that there’s reason to give it just a little longer to get good.

Often that’s because if something is really bad, it’s bad in an interesting way. For example, if it’s a hot novel getting widely praised, how can I account for the gap between the critical acclaim and my own experience? I must find out, must keep plodding… et cetera, et cetera.

It happened with Martin Amis’s recent novel/memoir Inside Story, which was so unnecessarily long and had such snoozy stretches about Saul Bellow and Philip Larkin that, 250 pages in, I started skimming. But I couldn’t bring myself to fully give up on it because I usually love Amis.

Sometimes, sticking with it does get rewarded. I mentioned up top I’m nearly finished with Tom McCarthy’s newest novel; the first 50 pages were all over the place, but right around there it got good, and I started loved it—he nicely pulled together all the disparate characters and scientific strings and general confusion.

Usually, there is no reward for your slog, and it’s a mistake to waste your time.

My latest example of not taking my own advice was with The Thorn Birds, the 1977 mega-bestseller (it’s the bestselling book in Australian history) that also became a mega-successful 1983 TV miniseries.

I stumbled on this book in RJ Julia, a wonderful bookstore in Madison, CT, last May. The cover below caught my eye (you may reasonably say: that cover?) and, as I’ve written repeatedly, covers matter; I happily “judge a book by its cover” in bookstores all the time. I also love paperbacks that are small but thick (pocket-sized fatties).

I didn’t know anything about the novel, or the miniseries, but vaguely remembered that there was a running joke on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” involving the book. (The full story is that during peak pandemic in 2020, when Seth was doing shows from the attic of his in-laws’ house, there was a stack of books behind him and The Thorn Birds was on top, and he made it a recurring gag. He told Deadline, “It is amazing what has the capacity to tickle you when you’re slowly losing your mind. It came from the idea that the earliest observation of this time was what books have people got, and it struck me as the funniest book to have.”)

The copy in Seth’s attic, by the way, was the original first edition cover, much cooler / retro now than the current reissue cover.

I think I thought the novel was a cult classic, a sweeping epic, and would be… funny? I think maybe I hoped it would read like Lonesome Dove.

It was not.

I started reading it in September. And man, it was a weird ride. I probably should have known I was in for something extremely dated when I tweeted that I was reading it and someone replied, “Evidently you are a lot older than you look.”

The Thorn Birds spans 54 years in the life of an Irish farming family that relocates from New Zealand to Australia. When the book opens in 1915, Meggie (the closest thing to a protagonist) is turning four years old. She’s one of six children (!) of Paddy and Fiona Cleary, with more on the way (!); the parents are extremely stoic and emotionally withholding; Meggie attends a Catholic school where the nuns are brutally mean. If all of this sounds like an exciting setup, let me assure you, it is not. I was bored immediately, and the book is 692 pages. But I expected that eventually, the action would come.

And to be fair, there is action. Quite a lot happens—sometimes things so dramatic as not to be believed. One son dies from getting charged by a boar while inspecting damage from a lightning storm. Another drowns while out for a spontaneous swim in the ocean.

I laughed frequently, but usually from the awkward, dated lines. (An early description of the father Paddy mentions casually, “His temper was very fiery, and he had killed a man once,” then just… moves on.)

Every so often there’s some trenchant aside about human nature or behavior that I dog-eared and really liked, and this also kept me going. Just one example: Meggie pines for a willow pattern tea set that her Italian friend Teresa owns, and she receives it for her birthday. But after she gets lice from Teresa, and Paddy beats the shit out of Teresa’s father (“I took the horsewhip to that blasted Dago and threw him into the horse trough”) (don’t worry, it’s not just Paddy who’s racist but Fiona as well, she calls Teresa “that Eyetie girl”), Meggie can’t really enjoy the tea set because it’s a reminder of the dramatic end of her friendship. Even at four, she understands that she must pretend to like it, because her parents spent so much of the little money they have on the gift: “It had lost every bit of its enchantment. But dimly she understood why the family had beggared itself to get her the thing they thought dearest to her heart… so she continued doggedly to use it for years, never breaking or so much as chipping a single piece. No one ever dreamed that she loathed the willow pattern tea set.”

Have I just accidentally made it sound like I recommend the book? If so, that’s because every fifty pages or so I would be charmed by one passage or scene. But that happened in between hundred-page stretches of drought, unrequited romantic pining, or yet another Cleary son dying in a tragic way.

I haven’t even mentioned the romance that carries the entire novel: a burning passion between Meggie and Father Ralph de Bricassart, a priest who first meets Meggie when she’s 9 and he’s 27. If you’ve done the math there: he’s 18 years older. He’s also bound to a priestly vow of celibacy. Spoiler alert: he breaks his vow. (Any fans of “Grantchester” reading this?)

There’s no happy ending for anyone in this story, but there’s grim fascination in witnessing their spectacular bad luck. I do hope someone amongst you will read The Thorn Birds so we can talk about it!

In the end, it took me three months to get through, and while I suppose I’ve at times here sounded like I actually enjoyed the novel, I think, on the whole, I mostly regret that I spent so long slogging through when I could have been reading something else.

I am here to tell you: If you’re not enjoying a book, it’s all right to move on. And if you’re even considering it, you should do it promptly.

I am here to tell you: give up.

Today’s issue is more kitchen-sinky than when I zoom in on a single book or author. I think of these kitchen-sink / macro posts as outliers for this newsletter, but then again, the issue on not rushing through books and the issue on audiobooks are my two top posts, so maybe I’m wrong to keep doing single-book dives?

My planned end-of-year post in December got left for dead, so if you scroll down, you’ll also find my favorite reads of 2023, in capsule form.

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I’m constantly asked by friends who aspire to read more books: “Where do you hear about books?”

I’ve addressed this before with a rapid-fire list of publications, but have long thought about going more in-depth. To get this post done, I tried to clinically study my own discovery habits over the past couple months. What are the magazines, web sites, and email newsletters that directly lead me to books I didn’t know about before?

The first thing I tell people is that if you’re looking for more diverse places in which to get book recommendations, you’re already on the right track, because you need to branch out from the NY Times. To be clear, I certainly keep an eye on their book reviews, and their end-of-year “10 best” and “100 notable” lists (hate-read catnip). And my favorite thing they do is “By the Book,” where authors list the books on their nightstand. But if you only read what the NYT highlights, you’ll miss fiction that might even be more in your personal zone of interest, and you’ll only hear about books that have reached critical mass / mainstream approval. (I wrote about this w/r/t Trust.)

I’ll start with print. (Not completely dead!) I subscribe in print to Bookforum, New York Review of Books, Literary Review, and Harper’s. The first three are entirely devoted to book reviews Harper’s is broader in scope, but heavy on reviews and short excerpts from new books. (Businessweek is my other print mag subscription, but not relevant to this discussion.)

It won’t surprise you to hear I have a bunch of draft posts for this newsletter that I’ve started, then had to put on the back-burner as other things took over. One of those drafts, from January 2023, was an obit/paean to Bookforum. In December 2022, the magazine announced it would have to shutter; the news felt like a dear friend had received a terminal cancer diagnosis. But before I could get around to finishing the post, the patient made a miraculous recovery: in June 2023, Bookforum announced it would return to print thanks to a new publishing partnership with The Nation. Phew.

Bookforum certainly reviews the same hot novels of the moment everyone else is reviewing and buzzing about. But in every issue, I also learn about a new title I haven’t seen covered elsewhere.

And while NYRB (heavy on political books) and Literary Review (extremely British, with lots and lots of history and academic books) both have sections I skip past, there are almost no reviews I skip in an issue of Bookforum.

Reviews in these places will often mention another book (maybe the author’s prior novel) that interests me more than the one being reviewed. There was an example in the latest issue of Bookforum: Lexi Freiman’s first novel Inappropriation sounds a lot more fun to me than her new novel The Book of Ayn: “Inappropriation is the story of a nerdy, neurotic, underdeveloped fifteen-year-old Jewish girl named Ziggy who is trying to find her place in the hierarchy of an all-girls prep school in Sydney, Australia. Her best friends are Lex, a cancer survivor with a prosthetic arm, and Tessa, a Bangladeshi adoptee with dreams of a rap career… The Book of Ayn resumes Inappropriation’s line of inquiry with a very different set of stakes. Whereas Ziggy is coming of age agonizingly slowly, Anna’s middle age is coming at her like a runaway train. She’s thirty-nine years old, hasn’t had a serious relationship in years, and is living in an apartment that belongs to friends of her parents. She’s been frozen out of teaching and freelancing, also dropped by her publisher and most of her friends.” That’s sometimes all it takes, a quick mention that piques your curiosity. I’m going to seek out Inappropriation soon.

All that said, there is also a drawback of these review journals: their reviews are often so in-depth that, after reading one, I don’t need to read the book that was reviewed. It’s like a movie trailer that gives the whole arc of the movie away. (I often wonder if authors are ever annoyed by this.) For me, this tends to happen mostly with nonfiction books. Two recent examples come to mind. There was an NYRB review last year of a new book about how Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary got really into mysticism and trying to contact the dead after their son Willie died. Wild, right? Sounds fascinating, like a nonfiction companion to Lincoln in the Bardo. The other example was in the latest issue of Literary Review, a review of a new book about the affairs of John le Carré—reviewed by one of his lovers! Both reviews were so extensive that I walked away feeling like, “That sounds interesting, but I’ve got the full idea.” There are only so many books you can make the time to read. In the case of fiction reviews, once I get to the point in a review where I decide I want to read the book, I stop reading the review.

Next up: literary sites and blogs, for the non-paper-inclined. Here are just a few of my favorite literary sites, and I’m leaving a ton out. (I’m also proud to have written for many of these.) The Millions runs a fun twice-annual “most anticipated” preview of the new releases coming out over a six-month period; skimming it always gives me a few new titles to add to my watchlist. LitHub has a whole vertical, Book Marks, devoted to tracking the average reviews of new releases, almost like a Rotten Tomatoes for books (though it doesn’t quite work as well, since scoring the tone of a review is subjective and imperfect). Five Books runs themed recommendation lists, both expert-submitted and reader-submitted (I just bought one of the books on this “books like The Secret History” list.) Reactor, the blog of sci-fi publisher Tor, is an excellent discovery engine for sci-fi fans. The Paris Review Daily is the blog of the vaunted Paris Review print mag, and runs wonderful essays about books, usually without any attempt at a news peg. Same goes for the blog of The Sewanee Review. The LA Review of Books runs consistently high-quality reviews and essays.

Of course, all of these sites also have email newsletters, which is a nice way to get a quick skim of what kind of stuff they cover on any given day/week.

That brings me to newsletters, a great alternative directly to your inbox for those who don’t want to commit to getting a review journal in print and aren’t likely to remember to hit up literary site homepages. These are the bookish newsletters I love and often discover books from (most of these are not specifically ‘book review newsletters’ per se, but I end up discovering books from these frequently): Ann Kjellberg’s Book Post; Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press; Maddie Stone’s The Science of Fiction; Christian Lorentzen’s newsletter; Robin Sloan’s newsletter; Lincoln Michel’s Counter Craft; Brandon Taylor’s Sweater Weather; Caleb Crain’s Leaflet; Simon de la Rouviere’s newsletter; J.E. Petersen’s Dispatches From Inner Space; Ken Whyte’s SHuSH; Washington Review of Books; FSG’s Work in Progress.

A newsletter carries less visible pressure than a physical magazine, which arrives at the house and, until you read it, sits there reminding you that you haven’t read it yet; I suppose newsletters do the same thing in your inbox, but it feels like the stakes are lower. If unread issues are piling up, you can simply… delete one.

If nothing else on this list—if you don’t subscribe to any of the print mags, or any of the newsletters, or check out any of the web sites—there’s something else you can do to find cool books that aren’t all over Instagram or selected by celebrity book clubs: go to indie bookstores.

This is my final bucket of how I discover great literary fiction that isn’t being widely covered. I see it on the shelves or tables at my favorite bookstores. And usually, those moments are when covers matter. I’ve written about this w/r/t William T. Vollmann covers. There are a number of books I’ve pulled off the table purely because the cover grabbed me. (I adore the cover of the widely-reviewed new release Martyr! by the way.)

You will find something great for you using your eyes in your nearest bookstore.

When my wife and I go to a new city, a bookstore is the first place we seek out. It feels stupid to name any bookstores at all when there are so many wonderful ones across the country, and I’m about to leave many out, but to rattle off just a few I love that come to mind. Near(ish) me: Booksy in Pound Ridge, NY; Books on the Common in Ridgefield, CT; RJ Julia in Madison, CT; and Bank Street Books in Mystic, CT. In the Boston area: Trident Books and Brattle Book Shop. On the Cape: Brewster Book Store and Sea Howl in Orleans. In Brooklyn: Books Are Magic (Cobble Hill); Greenlight (Fort Greene); Spoonbill & Sugartown (Williamsburg). In Manhattan: McNally Jackson; The Strand; Rizzoli; and Housing Works. Other shoutouts: Powell’s in Portland; South Congress Books in Austin; Square Books in Oxford, Miss.

So, that was the long answer to “where do you hear about books?” The short answer is: from newsletters, litmags, and litblogs. And shmying around in person.

My favorites of 2023

Of course, there’s one more category for book discovery: word of mouth / recommendations from people you know. Does that qualify as a segue to list my favorite books I read in 2023? Only two months late. Not all of these were new releases in 2023, but this is my list. I’ll be very brief (for once) and I’ll remind you that all of my links go to Bookshop.org if you want to purchase:

Big Swiss, Jen Beagin: It’s laugh-out-loud funny, sexy, the premise is extremely creative (a woman in Hudson NY knows everyone’s private business because she works as a transcriber for a local sex therapist), and it goes to surprising places.

Little Monsters, Adrienne Brodeur: One of the best depictions of the difficulties of adult sibling relationships I’ve ever read. And set on the Cape.

The Guest, Emma Cline: Reads like a slow-motion trainwreck, you keep cringing as you turn the pages to the unsurprising conclusion.

Under the Dome, Stephen King: Had never read this one (and certainly did not watch the CBS miniseries) but obviously the premise is unsubtle and ridiculous: one morning a town wakes up encased in a dome. But his vision of all the different mini-disasters that arise, and how a town full of very flawed people would respond and behave, is extremely smart and believable.

The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy: Wrote about it here. Ironic to say this since it was his final novel (I do not count Stella Maris), but I believe it could be a good place to start if you’ve never read him.

Inland, Tea Obreht: Wrote about it here. Wonderfully weird Western.

Here I Am, Jonathan Safran Foer: I can’t begin to summarize this long, epic family drama with a couple sentences. I’ll just say it’s the most Jewish novel I’ve ever read, and that it contains dozens and dozens of scenes where I wanted to underline every piece of dialogue for three pages straight. It also presciently foretold, sadly, another full-on Israel-Palestine war.

Stop counting

One last thought for this issue: At this time of year three years ago, I wrote about when you catch yourself rushing through books just to achieve volume, and I urged everyone to try to slow down your reading. If you’re a voracious reader, it’s only natural to whip through books on your way to the next one on your nightstand. That year, I noted that I read 53 books (and felt that was an unseemly total). I see in my reading log that in 2023, I read just… 39 books. That’s surely in part from having welcomed a baby in June (!) but I also read some longer novels last year that took up more time. I also turned to more audiobooks.

But I think the healthiest thing would be not to count at all.

I’m bringing this up again because I’ve seen a lot of tweets lately (on the algorithmic hellscape formerly called Twitter and now called X, on which we all now see the exact same viral engagement-farming posts because that’s what gets promoted to us in the feed) in which people either share their goal for this year (50 books! 100 books!) or boast about their tally from last year. This is a map/territory problem: stating how many books you read in a year doesn’t say anything about how you read them (probably not closely) or what you got out of them (probably not everything you could have) or what kind of reader you are. It doesn’t say you’re smart, or erudite, or interesting, or really anything about you at all, other than that you made the time to rack up a lot of books.

I write down every book I read in a physical notebook (just title, author, the date I finished, and a star if I thought it was outstanding; no other comments). I’ll keep doing that for the sake of my own memory, but at the end of 2024, I’m going to stop myself from looking at the final tally for the year. I’d encourage everyone not to read for the sake of volume.

If you made it all the way to the end of this lengthy one, thank you so much for reading. Forward to your friends! Leave a comment! I love hearing from you, otherwise why am I writing these?

Happy book discovering.

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I’m in another stretch where I find myself reading four books at once. I’m halfway through Underworld by Don DeLillo, switching back and forth between the audiobook and the physical doorstop (800 pages, as excellent as everyone has always said, and my fifth DeLillo—I wrote about End Zone at The Paris Review years ago); halfway through The Thornbirds (700 pages, trashy and dated and I mostly hate it, but I’ve gone this far and now feel I must soldier on); I’ve just started Israel Is Real by my friend Rich Cohen (I’ve had my mom’s underlined copy for a decade and never read it, but now the time is right—urgent, actually—to self-educate on the topic); and in honor of Halloween I have the portable Poe on my nightstand. Lots of fun.

What are you reading? I like to hear about it.

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Halloween gave me a good excuse to write about monsters.

After highlighting an excellent new horror novel last issue, my first time writing about horror, apparently I’m not done with the subject. Two recent novels I liked both adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—though neither of them would fall under horror.

Quick digression: I considered making this a simple horror fiction rec issue but didn’t have enough to say about my favorite scary reads beyond recommending them; here in rapid succession are my picks if you want the creeping feeling I like and got from these: If You Could See Me Now, Peter Straub; Ill Will by Dan Chaon; Universal Harvester by John Darnielle; Horns by Joe Hill (Stephen King’s son); I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (the movie is also great, but the movie’s ending is completely different and watered-down); The Glass Kingdom by Lawrence Osborne; Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer; A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet; (those two are more like sci-fi horror); The Militia House by John Milas (brand new, just read, slow to start but then it gets gripping); and a special shout-out to It, a classic for good reason. I read it a few years back and was floored. The book is good, the movie adaptations are good, all of it.

Anyway: Frankenstein.

One of the most obnoxious things to say to someone when they reference “Frankenstein” and they mean the monster is “Frankenstein is the doctor, not the monster,” but to be fair, it’s an important distinction: Dr. Victor Frankenstein is the monster’s creator (and arguably the real monster). It’s also worth noting that Mary Shelley’s 1818 subtitle was “The Modern Prometheus,” a reference to the Greek god who shaped humans out of clay, then stole fire from Zeus and gave it back to mankind, and was punished for all eternity for it. (Hence the title of the J. Robert Oppenheimer biography that became the movie “Oppenheimer”: American Prometheus.) Nowadays, most editions of Frankenstein don’t even include Shelley’s subtitle on the cover, which surely loses part of her intent: reminding readers that Dr. Frankenstein was attempting to give something beautiful to the world, but instead created something terrible that appalled even him.

Frankenstein is surely one of the most adapted/retold/remixed works of fiction ever, along with Dracula (the book I most often think of when I think of Frankenstein; both are epistolary novels, and both feature one “monster” and one pursuer) and, off the top of my head, Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Ulysses, Moby Dick, Alice in Wonderland, Emma, and Little Women? And stories from The Bible, obviously.

Shelley’s story continues to fascinate now as much as ever. The band The National’s newest album is called “First Two Pages of Frankenstein” and the band teased it last January with a video of frontman Matt Berninger reading Frankenstein at a piano.

Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013 in Arabic, translated in English 2018) takes the bones of Shelley’s story (sorry) and relocates them to Iraq during the U.S. invasion of Baghdad. Victor Frankenstein’s stand-in is Hadi the junk dealer, a “scruffy, unfriendly man in his fifties who always smelled of alcohol.”

The novel opens with an explosion. (And many, many explosions follow throughout, a commentary on life in a besieged city.) Hadi, we learn in disjointed order through his tall tales to local friends (many of whom know him as “Hadi the liar”), started finding and stitching together assorted body parts after his friend Nahem died in a prior car bombing and there was no body to identify. After this second explosion, Hadi at last finds a nose, which he had been waiting for, and goes home to sew it onto the large corpse he has sitting in his shed. All of this is told matter-of-factly, making it very wry.

He creates the corpse, which he calls Whatsitsname, with 'good intentions: to deliver an identifiable body to the forensics department so his friend can have a burial. But his friends are quick to push back on his self-proclaimed heroism:

“I wanted to hand him over to the forensics department, because it was a complete corpse that had been left in the streets like trash.”

“But it wasn’t a complete corpse. You made it complete,” someone objected.

“I made it complete so it wouldn’t be treated as trash, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial,” Hadi explained.

Walking along one day after completing the corpse, Hadi realizes he can’t exactly just drop it off at the morgue. “The only good solution was to go home, take the corpse apart, and restore it to what it had been—just disconnected body parts.” But when he arrives home, surprise: the body is gone.

There, I’ve given you the opening. A lot more happens, all of it pretty clever and crazy, yet written in a mostly serious tone (it somehow never feels slapstick): Hadi’s neighbor, an old woman named Elishva, thinks the corpse is her long-missing son Daniel and snuggles up with it (I kept thinking of the Jewish children’s book The Chanukkah Guest where Bubbe Bryna mistakes a bear for her rabbi and feeds him latkes); “Daniel” records an interview for a journalist; and the monster begins avenging the deaths of each prior owner of its body parts one by one, losing a body part every time he kills.

Through it all, Saadawi artfully makes Hadi himself a foil to his monster, especially after Hadi is injured in yet another bombing and walks away from the explosion disfigured and dragging one leg. The police investigating the murders become convinced Hadi himself is the monster of local lore.

The novel reads to me like “Young Frankenstein” crossed with American War. Lost body parts and social misunderstandings.

Worth a read if this all sounds fun to you.

Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019) is a very different take on Frankenstein—cornier, less clever, less exciting, and yet it has sort of stayed with me more than Frankenstein in Baghdad did.

Frankissstein starts in 1816, as Mary Shelley is writing her novel while on a very weird vacation with her husband the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (“Ozymandias”), his friend the poet Lord Byron, their friend the doctor John Polidori, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont. All of these people were real, of course; this was the setting in which Shelley came up with Frankenstein, though Winterson adds her own touches.

Then the novel brings us to modern times, where a transgender doctor, Ry Shelley, is following and admiring the career of the celebrated professor and A.I. researcher Victor Stein. (Get it? The parallel names are far from subtle.) We first meet Ry at a tech trade show where the cartoonish businessman Ron Lord is exhibiting his innovative new sex bots. It’s a hilarious scene, mostly thanks to Lord’s “step right up” crowd pumping. To give just one passage:

“I have based my franchise model on the rent-a-car business. Pick up in one city, drop off in another. And I’ve got five styles of XX-BOTs — including the Economy model here on the couch. She’s the cheapest.

She’s got nylon hair, so you do get a bit of static, and she whirrs a bit, but she’s a good, straightforward, no-frills, budget fuck…

And they all VI-BRATE! Any hole, any position. Vibrate!

Nice limb movement too. You can position her how you want. All the girls have an extra-wide splayed-leg position. It’s popular with our clients, especially the fat ones.”

Dr. Stein, meanwhile, is running sinister experiments in a series of underground tunnels. But before we can find out what he’s messing with, he and Ry have a lot of hot sex and conversations about how Stein feels about being with a trans person and how Ry feels about their physical body.

The book toggles back and forth between the real Shelley in 1816 and the current day characters, but the flashbacks to Shelley’s time don’t add much to the novel beyond showing that Shelley was pondering many of the same questions, 200 years earlier, as Ry, Victor, and Ron Lord debate in the present (automation, personhood, human agency, mortality).

Frankissstein for me was one of those books you don’t feel impressed by while reading (so cheesy sometimes, so many cartoonish speeches, so many digressions!), but then you’ve whipped through it and find that you keep thinking about it long after.

Is the “villain” Ron Lord with his femme bot business, or Dr. Stein with his attempts at creating “post-humans?” Stein wants to take humans beyond A.I., and defends himself to Ron thusly: “Bots are our slaves; house slaves, work slaves, sex slaves. The question is us. What shall we do with ourselves? In fact we have answered that question already. Enhancement, including DNA intervention… The real question, though, is that however we enhance our biology we are still inside a body. To be free from the body completes the human dream.” Sounds like Elon Musk. (The novel’s questions about A.I. and automation, by the way, make it even more timely right now than when it came out in 2019.)

Saadawi’s Hadi and Winterson’s Victor Stein belong with Dr. Moreau, Henry Jekyll, Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, and other great mad sickos in fiction. But these two modern twists on Frankenstein also add something I don’t recall much of in Shelley’s original: black comedy.

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I just finished Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré, my fourth of his and my favorite so far. I started with A Most Wanted Man a couple years ago because I stumbled on a copy in Oregon in a take-and-leave little library (aren’t those the best?), then read The Constant Gardener, then Silverview. I know, I’m doing Le Carré “ass backwards,” a friend says, by starting with his later stuff. I’ve got A Perfect Spy (Philip Roth was a huge fan) and Our Kind of Traitor waiting on my shelves, but should probably cool it on le Carré for a bit or the plots will all start to meld in my memory…

What are you reading right now? I’d love to hear it.

For Issue 22 of this thing, I want to get back to focusing on a single book I liked. And for the first time in this newsletter, it’s horror—though I don’t like pigeonholing fiction by genre, and I suspect this one in particular would appeal to many readers who don’t think of themselves as fans of horror (like me). So perhaps I shouldn’t even introduce it that way. Too late.

I saw the cover of Gus Moreno’s This Thing Between Us by chance when tooling around on the web site of MCD, an imprint of Farrar Straus that publishes stylish fiction by (mostly, not all) new writers, heavy on sci-fi. MCD’s first title was Borne by Jeff Vandermeer, which I adored and have mentioned in past issues. As a MCD blog post last year framed it: “Borne pioneered so much of what would become hallmarks of MCD: gleefully blending genre and literary ambition; an obsessive interest in themes of ecology and identity; mind-blowing design by Rodrigo Corral & team.”

Indeed, all the MCD titles have eye-catching covers, and that’s how I spotted This Thing Between Us. As I wrote way back about Vollmann’s books, covers matter. The dog (is that the RCA Victor dog?), the horizontal and vertical lines, the ransom-letter font of the title, all of it pulled me in. Then I clicked to read the description, and it had me at “the mysterious evil inhabiting his home smart speaker.” I ordered it.

Much is made of the haunted smart speaker in reviews of this novel and its promotional materials, since the detail itself is so interesting and creative (and, at first thought, funny). But the speaker is merely a starting plot point, not at all what the book is about. The speaker is merely how the haunting begins.

Because of the evil smart speaker, I thought this was going to be a dark humor type of sendup of modern technology and our reliance on it. But what’s so impressive and fun about This Thing Between Us is how it begins in the modern and ends up in the old world. It also goes from urban to remote rural. Thiago, our (unreliable?) narrator, moves from an apartment in Chicago to a lonely cabin in the woods of Colorado to escape what’s following him.

The book opens with the funeral of Thiago’s wife Vera. They weren’t married very long and didn’t have kids, but they were in love. Her family never thought highly of him. She died in what looks like a freak event in a train station: wrong place, wrong time. All of these details will come back around deftly.

The circumstance of Vera’s death causes a brief media frenzy that is described quickly, but wisely not dwelled on, or the novel would become something far less timeless. Thiago says: “I had to figure out how to deactivate my social media accounts because complete strangers were telling me either how sorry they felt or how angry they would be if it was their wife, and what the country should do about illegals.”

Thiago’s immediate isolation from the people who were in their shared life (mostly her family and their friends) makes us feel for him and side with him; he’s our Dante through the Hell that unfolds after Vera’s death. Thiago is also likable because he’s never a passive victim; he pretty fearlessly resolves to investigate/hunt/kill the thing that is dogging him.

I wouldn’t describe the book as scary (some horror really keeps you up at night or gives you bad dreams). It’s not cheap or schlocky in that way, more eerie and relatable. If you’ve ever lived alone in an urban apartment, this will hit home: “At night I would wake up to these loud, hammering noises coming from the front of our place, like a semitruck was being unloaded in our living room. Clanging metal. The noise would reverberate like a scream.” (Great sentence.) He hears floorboards creak, sees a silhouette on the wall, and when he gets up to investigate, nothing’s there. But this is no simple ghost story.

When Thiago and Vera first moved in, there was a door painted on one wall of the apartment and a skinned animal carcass. So a story that starts out with references to modern tech (the smart speaker is an “Itza,” sold by “Sahara Prime”; Thiago and Vera first met when he was the TaskRabbit tasker who came to set up her TV) ends up moving toward the realm of ancient Mexican curses. People and animals become possessed. A giant stone wall shows up in multiple places. Words in books transform into messages. Shades of “The Exorcist” and Stephen King’s The Outsider. (All of this could make a great film adaptation.)

The one moment that gave me goosebumps happens when Thiago is driving away late at night from a strange conversation with a cook at an isolated diner on his drive to Colorado: “In the rearview mirror I saw the red glow of the brake lights on the blacktop, and out of the dead night something scrambled, like an animal, into the red. It was crawling on all fours, except its legs were spread out on either side of its body like a spider. A spider the size of a person. Its hind legs were covered in denim, something white flapping under its belly, what could have been the cook’s apron. His eyes had completely fallen into his head, leaving two yawning gapes.”

This Thing Between Us gets kind of busy, and a little confusing, at the very end—it’s not ambiguous what happens to Thiago (don’t worry) but the explanation is murky enough that there are Reddit threads devoted to theories. All that matters to me is the feeling it leaves you with, the getting there. I don’t need a story like this to be neatly tied up with every event perfectly explained—we’re talking about curses and ghosts here, after all; it can’t all make sense.

Whether Thiago “wins” or “loses” is beside the point for me. What stays with you is the mood and set pieces. In that sense, it reminded me of three other extremely memorable novels that were spooky in sophisticated ways: Ill Will by Dan Chaon; If You Could See Me Now by Peter Straub; and Universal Harvester by John Darnielle (his latest, Devil House, is also a MCD title). And of course, for timeless horror in this vein, I love the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson. (Moreno winks to his influences: Thiago sees “Lovecraftian clouds” overhead as he drives through Iowa and Nebraska on his way to Colorado.)

I hope to get this feeling again. It’s a different feeling from the feeling I get from stories about aliens making contact. I’ve had people recommend Lauren Beukes to me to scratch this itch, so I’ll try her soon. What else you got?

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I’m reading (and loving) Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur, about a family on Cape Cod, and The Big House by George Colt Howe, about a family on Cape Cod. (Yes, yes, well, it’s summer.) I recently finished and really enjoyed The Guest by Emma Cline (a page-turner that artfully refuses to give any backstory or break from its trainwreck-style action), The Trackers by Charles Frazier (starts out like a Norman Rockwell painting, becomes a hardboiled noir), and This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno (horror with a smart tech twist). Next up on my nightstand: The War for Gloria by Atticus Lish and The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough.

But in this issue of this books newsletter, I want to talk about movies.

What else but the two movies that have defined this summer in pop culture? “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” (Do stick around, there will be a small book angle here.)

I’ve wanted to write about these films since seeing them in the same week earlier this month: “Barbie” at a drive-in theater on Cape Cod (perfect environment for it) and “Oppenheimer” at an arthouse cinema (sadly not in the full-frame 70mm IMAX format Christoper Nolan demanded, but only 30 theaters in the U.S. have that capability anyway).

I really liked both movies. I doubt I have much to say about them that hasn’t already been said. My quick thoughts: “Barbie” is clever and winking (though not often laugh-out-loud), and it has a message that I didn’t find overwrought. Ryan Gosling’s Ken discovering the patriarchy is a brilliant scene. Will Ferrell was predictably annoying. Rhea Perlman was a lovely surprise. It strikes me as a very Jewish movie, though I’m not sure I can articulate why. I don’t know that it’s going to go down as any sort of classic, but it’s a perfectly weird comedy for right now. “Oppenheimer” was gripping visually and conceptually, and will stay with me a long time. How about those performances! Especially from supporting characters like Jason Clarke and David Krumholtz. I saw scattered complaints on social media that not enough happened in “Oppenheimer” and I had to laugh—they built, tested, and dropped a bomb, and that was all in the first half of the movie. I found the deposition drama of the second half equally compelling and thought-provoking. For a three-hour movie, it really moved. I didn’t check my watch or dare a bathroom break.

But I’m not a professional film critic, and I come not to review these two movies as much as to write about the cultural moment they created, and the joy of seeing movies in movie theaters.

I love that these two extremely dissimilar films will forever be tied to each other because of the timing of their release. Obviously Nolan’s film wouldn’t have done nearly as well if not for benefiting from the opulent Mattel marketing budget of Gerwig’s. As David Auerbach wrote, how often does a movie get the benefit of “branding an actual color as advertisement” and “being a self-compounding lifestyle brand, well beyond a toy”? But anecdotally, I also think each one buoyed the other, leading people to see both movies who I suspect would only have seen one.

Memes drove this; internet culture memed “Barbenheimer” into the zeitgeist.

“Barbie” hit $1 billion at the box office in a little over two weeks, making it the highest-grossing movie ever from a female director, and the highest-grossing Warner Bros. film ever (beating out, ironically, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight). “Oppenheimer” has brought in nearly $800 million globally, making it the No. 3 movie of the year (behind “Barbie” and “Super Mario”) and the second-highest-grossing R-rated movie ever (after “Joker”).

People came out for these movies. 22% of people who saw “Barbie” had not seen a movie in theaters since pre-Covid. (Not that much has changed since the below segment I did in late 2020.) I think they wanted to feel like part of the conversation.

More often, over the past decade, it’s been television series that create cultural moments. “Game of Thrones,” “Breaking Bad,” “Billions,” “Stranger Things,” “Succession.” I remember what it felt like to rip through the first season of “House of Cards” in a few days—I was like an addict. The plot itself was thrilling, and you knew you had to hurry or it might get spoiled by seeing something on Twitter, because everyone was watching; same for the final season of “Succession.”

Even though we talk about big shows together online, television is something we experience siloed, alone in our homes; movies in a theater we experience with other moviegoers.

My wife and I adore seeing movies in theaters—movies of all kinds, from quiet indie films to Marvel mega-franchises. We make time to see movies. And something that always surprised us, amid the “streaming revolution” that has led Hollywood to its current economic impasse and labor strike, is how many people our age (since long before Covid) say they never see movies in theaters anymore, and don’t care to. Some of them almost brag about it. I’ve heard friends say they won’t care if movie theaters die off. That kills me.

In the past 12 months we saw 22 movies in theaters. In reverse order: “Oppenheimer”; “Barbie”; “The Talented Mr. Ripley”; “Showing Up”; “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”; ‘You Hurt My Feelings”; “Guardians of the Galaxy 3”; “The Lost King”; “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret”; “Air”; “Emily”; “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”; “My Favorite Year”; “The Fabelmans”; ”Aftersun”; “Babylon”; “The Menu”; “Black Panther 2”; “Tar”; “Don’t Worry Darling”; “See How They Run”; and “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris.” I liked most of those (I’m pretty easy to please), but even the ones I didn’t were fun to see. (Except “Showing Up.” That was criminally boring.)

We also watched many movies at home, obviously, and the experience is never quite the same. Your phone is within reach; you pause to go to the bathroom or talk to each other about something mundane; you turn it off if one of you gets tired, and you might not finish it until days later, if at all. It’s disjointed. You blunt the movie magic.

I’m not optimistic the current strike will lead to anything much better in the long-run for writers and actors—the economics are only getting worse for everyone involved other than the big studios. But I do hope that the situation shines a light on how much work goes into a movie, how many people work hard on it.

I am painfully aware that this whole tribute may sound naive or Pollyannish, and you can roll your eyes and sneer at it if that’s what you choose to do. You could certainly tell me there’s absolutely nothing inspiring about these two summer blockbusters: one movie enjoyed a mega marketing blitz by a major toy brand, and the other reaped the benefit of a media narrative that paired them.

My broader retort would be that if you don’t care about movie theaters, picture a world in which they don’t exist, and all movies are released straight to your home television, always consumed on your couch with your phone in your hand.

Does that sound good to you?

Anyway, where do books come into all this? Only this tangential thought: “Oppenheimer” is based on an acclaimed 2005 biography of Robert J. Oppenheimer called American Prometheus. (I recommend this Atlantic interview with Kai Bird, one of the co-authors of the book; I tweeted out one funny part of it and ended up with one of those random unpredictable hit tweets.)

My wife, dad, and I all left “Oppenheimer” remarking at how fascinating the man’s life was. Fascinating enough to make me want to read a 720-page biography of him? It’s tempting, but I doubt I will—not only because I read very little nonfiction (ironic for someone who writes and edits nonfiction for a living), but also because I think it’s hard to feel motivated to read a book after you’ve already seen the movie. It’s like doing the steps in the wrong order.

Watching the film adaptation of a book you’ve already read and liked is logical and easy, and I’d argue that even when you didn’t love a book, when you see it’s been made into a movie it motivates you to see it, if only to see how they went about adapting it. But how often have you liked a movie, then gone back to read the book the movie was based on? In my case I can think of only a few examples where I saw the movie first, then read the source material: “No Country for Old Men”; “Fight Club”; “Cider House Rules” (my first John Irving, then he became one of my favorite authors); the Ted Chiang short story that inspired the movie “Arrival”; the Philip K. Dick short story that inspired “Minority Report.”

How often have you done it?

Since we’re on the subject of book-to-film adaptations, what are some of my favorites? Those rare cases where a great book is also made into a great movie? (Rare but not unheard of, but rare; I pray they never adapt The Secret History.) Since you asked, these are just a few of mine, off the top of my head: “Nobody’s Fool” (Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith!); “Remains of the Day”; “Adaptation” (from "The Orchid Thief); “American Psycho”; “Annihilation”; “It” (Chapter One better than Chapter Two); “The Green Mile”; “Misery” (yes, Stephen King books make great movies); “The End of the Tour” (not a great movie, to be clear, but a very faithful and perfectly cast adaptation of a book that was aweird choice to turn into a movie in the first place); “Never Let Me Go” (Ishiguro again); “A Hologram for the King”; “Lonesome Dove” the 1989 miniseries; Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women”; “Hamlet 2000”; and Cary Fukunaga’s “Jane Eyre.”

And to name some very good book-to-TV adaptations (at the risk of undermining everything I just wrote praising movies over streaming television): I thought the Hulu adaptation of Catch-22 a few years ago (that no one watched) nailed Joseph Heller’s novel; the Hulu series of Stephen King’s time-travel novel 11.22.63; the 2016 BBC “War & Peace”; “Silo” on Apple TV recently… there’s more to add, but that list is a good start.

Thanks for reading this far. And thanks for subscribing, sharing, and forwarding.

Related reading here from me on the Dune series and the 2021 film version.

Looking for a good film podcast? I recommend Cinephile with Adnan Virk.

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I’m finishing up Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer, and I’m loving it, which has surprised me since I didn’t like his first and mega-famous novel Everything Is Illuminated, and I only kind of liked his second novel Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close. But this 570-page doorstop about marriage, divorce, raising kids, and being extremely fucking Jewish, is so funny and so sad and really wonderful. Next on my nightstand: Telephone by Percival Everett and The Nursery by Szilvia Molnar.

What are you reading?

When I launched this newsletter in September 2020, my stated goal was to turn you on to books you might not know about, or in some cases give my own take on books you have already heard a lot about, but either way, I’ve strictly highlighted books I enjoyed and want to recommend to you. My private rule was: Why waste my time and yours telling you about a book I didn’t like?

For Issue 20, I have to break that rule.

Trust, which came out in May 2022, is so decorated with literary awards they can’t fit all the stickers on the cover of the paperback. It shared the Pulitzer this year with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, won the Kirkus Prize, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and made the NYT’s 10 Best Books of the Year and every other list.

The Times called Trust “exhilarating.” Oprah Daily called it “enthralling.”

Did they read the same book as I did?

Trust has of course already been optioned for an HBO drama series starring Kate Winslet. But if the series is true to the book, it’s going to be a pretty boring show.

Trust is four books in one, all about the same man, a Wall Street tycoon in the 1920s. But three of the four books are terribly dull.

The first 124 pages comprise a novel called Bonds (written by a Harold Vanner, whom we’ll learn more about in the third book) about a titan of finance (far from self-made, he starts off with generational wealth) named Benjamin Rask and his wife Helen. Bonds doesn’t have a single line of dialogue and reads like a Wikipedia summary of the life of a famous financier. Most writers detest that overwrought “show, don’t tell” idiom, but man, this novel-within-a-novel is all telling, with no showing. Rask has absolutely no passions, his marriage is joyless, and nothing of note really happens to him until his wife deals has a medical crisis and he handles it poorly. You get the impression Harold Vanner hates his own fictional character. (As we’ll learn, he does; and his character isn’t totally fictional.)

The second book is billed as a memoir: My Life by Andrew Bevel, who in a preface makes clear that he’s writing this memoir to “address and refute some of these fictions” about himself. The memoir is pompous and self-aggrandizing, and even though the joke is on Bevel (this section is intentionally badly written), it still manages to be boring. Bevel begins before his own birth, mapping out the lives of all his illustrious ancestors. The narrative voice is so unselfaware it’s shocking that this section of Trust isn’t funnier. (There is close to zero humor in Trust.) It becomes clear pretty quickly that there are parallels between Bevel and Benjamin Rask, except that in his memoir, Bevel colors himself a great public philanthropist who pulled out all the stops to care for his wife (unlike Rask in Bonds.)

Mercifully, My Life only lasts 60 pages; it peters out into mere manuscript notes, which is the only moment it becomes enjoyable: laughing at the author’s shorthand notes for what he plans to write in a certain chapter. (In a section called Early Years, he’s written: “MATH in great detail. Precocious talent. Anecdotes.” A section called Apprenticeship is left empty. A section on his success in the market ends with: “Brief paragraph on Mildred, domestic delights.”)

Warning: here come some minor spoilers about structure; maybe pause and come back to this issue later if you’re going to read the book.

The third section (180 pages long) is called A Memoir, Remembered by Ida Partenza, and it’s the book’s only vibrant portion. It has some intrigue and a Harriet the Spy feel (Partenza is given almost too much wild backstory of her own), but it begins 195 pages in to Trust—a long time to expect readers to wait.

I was always taught that a novel needs to grab you from the first sentence; who would give a novel 200 pages to get interesting? You wouldn’t, unless you’ve already read universal raves (could all these reviews be wrong?), which is a reminder that so often today, people select what to read from a short list of highfalutin arbiters, social media buzz, and celebrity book clubs. (Perhaps Trust’s most impressive achievement is getting readers to stick with it through the first 195 pages.)

If you read mostly new/current fiction (most of the people I know who are big readers do), think about how much you’re influenced by a tiny number of sources: magazine Top 10 lists, The New York Times Book Review, and awards. (I also just read Rabbit Hole by Tess Gunty, this year’s National Book Award winner, and was equally baffled.)

Literary awards are rarely given based on readability anymore. They too often stand for politics, public image, and other considerations apart from whether a book was the best book published that year. They too often award a perceived milestone. They’re like The Oscars.

My friend Ethan is one of the few readers I know who actively avoids reading brand new fiction. He likes to say almost all the books that are buzzy and hyped right now won’t stand the test of time, and I suspect he’s on to something. I’ve recently enjoyed some very memorable “cult classic” novels from the 1950s to the 1980s (Stoner by John Williams; Small World by David Lodge; Desperate Characters by Paula Fox, to name just a few), and every year I read a couple Dickens or Hardy novels, but the vast majority of books I choose to read were published in the last five years at the time I read them, and I think I should get away from that habit.

But I digress. Back to Trust: it’s worth asking why it’s been so emphatically critically acclaimed.

The answer, it seems, is that critics and readers are impressed with its structure. One story, told from four perspectives. Earlier this month, after I finished the first section of the novel (Bonds) and tweeted that it was boring, the gist of the replies I got were: keep going. One person told me, “It’s like a deconstructed novel.” Another said, “Wait for the turn and then the prestige… the first act is slow and tbh dumbed down by design. This book is a magic trick. Gotta be patient for the payoff.”

The problem is that I don’t think there is much of a payoff.

Warning: here come more major spoilers, which I’ve avoided until now.

The first twist, revealed through Ida’s section, is simply about the nature of the first two books: Vanner’s novel is a lightly fictionalized version of Bevel’s real life, and Bevel’s memoir (manuscript) is his attempt at image control, ghost-written with Ida’s paid help and never published anyway. The final slim section of Trust (40 pages), Mildred Bevel’s deathbed diary, gives us the final twist: Mildred was the brains behind Andrew’s financial success and brilliant market moves.

Since Mildred was conspicuously absent from the entire first couple hundred pages of the book—a sickly shadow in Vanner’s novel and a colorless victim in Bevel’s version of their life, it didn’t feel like a shock that in the end we’d finally get her perspective.

Even more to the point: the novel’s clear unsubtle message is about the stories we tell about ourselves and others, unreliable narrators, TRUST, etc etc. Three different people can recall the same events differently (see: Rashomon) and can have very different experiences of one person. Except that the takeaway from all four books within Trust can only be that Andrew Bevel was a self-delusional pompous ass. There’s no alternate version given that confuses things or gives us reason to side with him; his own memoir makes us laugh at him, and his wife’s diary finishes the job.

In support of the structure, I’ve also had people tell me that the opening two books are intentionally dull—after all, Ida Partenza later reports that Bevel complained that people only read Bonds because they knew who it was about: “I can tell you why this book is a sensation: because it’s patently about my wife and me. And because it makes us look bad.” In other words, even in the fictional Andrew Bevel’s world, Bonds by Harold Vanner became a bestseller despite it being an obviously boring novel. So why do we have to read it? Couldn’t a sneering fictionalized version of Bevel’s life story have opened Trust without it being so flat, and still had the same effect?

At least I’m not the only person on the planet who felt this way about Trust. Adam Mars-Jones nailed it in the London Review of Books: “Not a great deal has been done to bring curiosity to the boil, or even above room temperature… Whether it’s Benjamin and Helen or Andrew and Mildred, these are bloodless figures.” Mars-Jones also points out aptly, “It would have been a shrewder move to present Bonds only in extracts, as Ida reads them to understand what Bevel wants from her (this is where the story proper gets going anyway), rather than starting the book with an uncontextualised slab of prose that isn’t engaging as narrative.” Meanwhile, John Self (a great follow on Twitter) wrote in The Times of London, “The first two parts, Bonds and My Life, feel like a preface to the real thing, yet they take up half the book. That’s a lot of homework.”

If people are so impressed with the novel-within-a-novel as a literary device, I can think of far better examples: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen; & Sons by David Gilbert; Erasure by Percival Everett (first recommended to me by Adam Wilson, author of Sensation Machines, which I capsule-reviewed in May); The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker (made into a very good 2018 miniseries starring Patrick Dempsey, though you should read the book first); The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips (for which the author wrote an entire fake Shakespeare play—I enjoyed the play more than the story built around it); and of course, the all-timer, Nabokov’s Pale Fire (poem within a novel).

If you’ve made it this far, I appreciate you, and I figure you’ve either already read Trust and have your own take, or you don’t intend to read it. If you read it, I would truly love to hear your review. (And if you choose to read it even after reading my take, then I’ll really be interested to hear your review.) As always, you can reply directly to this email or (even more fun for the subscribers) you can comment on this issue publicly.

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I’ve just finished Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer (disappointing followup to the great Borne) and Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson (clever if not quite fully cohesive reimagining of Frankenstein through the lens of AI and transsexuality). Now I’ve finally started Trust by Hernan Diaz.

You surely saw the news this past week that Cormac McCarthy has died at 89. The literary internet flooded with obits, remembrances, and listicles. But you should still go back and read my entry, focused on the Border Trilogy and The Passenger, if you missed it last month. If you’ve never read McCarthy and the news of his death has you wondering where to start, I recommend All the Pretty Horses or The Passenger.

(As a reminder, all my book links go to Bookshop.org, and if you buy a title from my affiliate link, I get a tiny fee—usually $1 - $2.)

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Just two issues after writing about McCarthy’s Westerns, I’m returning to the West to recommend Téa Obreht’s Inland, which started slow for me, then picked up steam and finished with the strongest ending of any novel I can remember in a long time.

Inland alternates between two protagonists in 1893: Lurie, an outlaw traveling the frontier states falling in and out with various ragtag groups; and Nora, a mother of three in the fictional Amargo, Arizona, dealing with drought and a missing husband.

The novel starts out challenging—not due to lack of plot, but intentionally confusing. Obreht’s style is to hint and tease with veiled references you won’t fully understand until much later. I found the first Lurie section and first Nora section hard to get into.

Lurie’s story (and the book) begins with him addressing someone about an incident that happened “last night” in which his companion was shot and a girl was hurt; then he’s suddenly summarizing his life story: he emigrated to New York from Southeast Europe with his father, who was named Hadziosman Djurić, which got anglicized to Hodgeman Drury and eventually to Hodge Lurie; the father died in New York of an illness shortly after they arrived, leaving the son, Lurie, to fall in first with a grave robber, then with criminal brothers named Donovan and Hobb Mattie, together forming the “Mattie Gang,” so he becomes Lurie Mattie. All of that action “happens” in the first twenty pages, enough to make your head spin.

Nora’s situation has less going on at first blush, but more emotional toll than Lurie’s adventuring: her town of Amargo, Arizona is going through terrible drought, so she’s running out of water while also waiting for her husband (and within a few chapters, her two older sons) to return to home as she tends to her youngest son Toby (who is blind in one eye) and her niece Josie (who is a handful). As her story continues, we learn the local powers that be want to move the county seat from Amargo to the nearby Ash River, which would all but bury Amargo in the dust; her absent husband Emmett owns and operates the local newspaper, the Amargo Sentinel (journalism subplot!) and opposes moving the county seat, but was hesitant to print a rebuttal to the plan in his paper. Lurie’s sections span years, while Nora’s span just a single day.

A layer of dust covers everything in this story—everyone is parched and desperate.

I should say here that Obreht’s language is beautiful, even when just describing, say, a suspicious door left ajar on a springhouse on the farm: “The springhouse crouched in a copse of scrub oaks at the far end of the yard, but nothing was visible for all the branches, save a glimpse of light-stippled tin Nora supposed must be the roof, and a sliver of door, which jawed a little on its hinges, first this way, then that, clattering faintly where it slapped back off the jamb.”

There is a blurb of praise from The Guardian on the paperback that says, “More convincingly Cormac McCarthy than McCarthy himself” that I find pretty silly—Obreht’s language is more ornate than McCarthy’s severe terseness, and also more playful. (If there’s any hint of McCarthy, it’s in the way Lurie speaks.)

Inland is a true Western, but with two major twists that make this story so special: camels and ghosts.

The camels: Lurie is narrating his story to his camel, Burke, we learn deep into the novel, after he falls in with the Camel Corps., a real-life, short-lived U.S. Army experiment in the 1850s that brought camels to the West (with Arab and Turkish hired guides) to serve as pack animals for troops.

While Lurie comes into contact with a host of interesting characters in his travels—including a lawman hunting him down for an accidental murder in New York and the Syrian camel rider Hadji Ali (which gets anglicized to Hi Jolly), a real person who was one of the first cameleers hired by the Army, and who helps Lurie embrace his immigrant (and possibly Turkish) identity—his most lasting relationship is with Burke. Once he steals him from the Camel Corps, they are never parted again, and some of the best descriptions in Lurie’s chapters are tributes to the camel, even as others they encounter ridicule the animals.

The ghosts: Lurie speaks to the dead; Josie claims to be able to speak to the dead (she calls them “the other living”); and Nora hears the voice of her dead child Evelyn in her head at all times, responding to stress and critiquing Nora’s actions in the sometimes-snarky voice of a teenager, even though she died from heatstroke as a toddler.

The explanation of Nora’s embarrassment over telling her husband she hears Evelyn’s voice was fantastic. She had told him one night in bed when he came home drunk, thinking it was safe to share; much later, when Nora is annoyed by Josie holding séances in town, and doesn’t believe Josie’s claims, Emmett, defending the girl, says to her, “Don’t you talk to Evelyn?” Nora replies, wounded, “That is not the same thing.”

In Nora’s sections, we are far more inside her head than we are in Lurie’s in his tale. This one memorable exchange immediately made me understand her: one of her sons, Dolan, is in love with Josie, and tells his parents that if he ever gets to marry her, they will need to move to somewhere more comfortable than Amargo “to ensure her comfort.” Nora, offended, says, “I been living here half my life, and no one’s ever asked after my comfort.” Emmett, supporting Dolan, says to Nora, “Well, doesn’t one always hope for better where one’s children are concerned?” Then her husband and son go out into the hallway, leaving her alone in the kitchen, and she overhears Emmett say to Dolan, “Hard living is for hard people. And hard women are a particular sort to which Josie does not belong.” Nora is deeply hurt. Her interpretation: Emmett sees his own wife as a hard woman, and he doesn’t mean it as a compliment.

“Emmett hadn’t just meant one wants better for one’s children. What he had meant was: one wants better for ladies—and one wants ladies, not hard women, for one’s sons. Hadn’t he considered her a lady, once? […] Emmett had managed to bypass her wholesale. He not only failed to see her as a lady—he wouldn’t even trouble himself with the comparison. She was a tough, opinionated, rangy, sweating mule of a thing, and the sum total of her life’s work was her husband of twenty years enumerating what he desired for his sons—which did not include a companion with her qualities, but did include moving to a more favorable clime to secure the affections of a person with not one-half of Nora’s merits.”

Great character-building.

The book hits its stride 150 pages in (I know that may sound like a long time to wait) when Nora returns to the house after multiple stops in town and we start to realize she is an unreliable narrator. I don’t want to spoil anything, but multiple situations she represented a certain way are not that way, and she gets disabused of her self-deceptions in rapid fire by multiple supporting characters.

In this stretch of the novel there’s also one chapter narrated by someone other than Lurie or Nora, a villain of sorts delivering a villain monologue to Nora and Sheriff Harlan Bell, a fun structural departure. His section includes this excellent bit of theater as he explains how he obtained information with which to blackmail the sheriff: “You know who else keeps a man’s secrets? His wife. A funny thing, matrimony. Never found much solace in it personally, but I’m given to understand that it supersedes everything of consequence—pasts, friendships. Not in perpetuity, of course, which is what makes it so dangerous. For the end of such a union turns each spouse into a vault of the other’s secrets. A kind of unopened letter, if you will, waiting for the right reader.”

Nora has been trying her damnedest to keep it all together, but it crumbles in explosive fashion.

Meanwhile, you’re waiting the entire novel for Lurie and Nora, the two protagonists, to finally converge in some way, and when it doesn’t happen and the book has only a few scant pages left, just when you’re thinking it will never happen, it does, and I audibly gasped. Obreht truly obeys Chekhov’s gun rule: all the pieces she introduced in the first act go off in the final act.

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Right now I’m reading Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer (sequel to Borne, which I mentioned loving in Issue 16) and Inland by Téa Obreht. Waiting patiently on my beside to-read table are Trust by Hernan Diaz and Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer. What are you reading? I’m interested, I mean it, and you can use the public comment feature or reply to this email to tell me.

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All of my past few issues started by focusing on one book and ended up being a much broader survey, either of an entire series (Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy; Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall series; Frank Herbert’s Dune sequels) or a sub-genre of fiction (metaverse sci-fi; alien sci-fi). I’d like to get back to doing a breezy issue about a single novel I loved. The last time I did this was with Normal People in March 2021; also see my issues on The Apartment and The Friend.

In that spirit, let’s get high.

Just like it’s very challenging (or so “they” say) for actors to plausibly play drunk or high, I believe it’s not easy to write well about characters who are drunk or high. But Jeet Thayil represents an extreme form of “write what you know”: he is a recovered heroin addict whose wife died suddenly in 2007 at age 27.

Those experiences directly informed his first novel Narcopolis (2012), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Low (2020), which in my view was criminally overlooked by the literary establishment. (Could timing have been a cause? Publishing a novel in 2020 proved unlucky for many.)

The two novels have the same narrator, Dominic Ullis, though in Narcopolis you don’t learn his name until 19 pages before the end, when the still-unnamed narrator returns to Bombay years after the action of the book and someone recognizes him: “You’re Dom Ullis. We used to call you Doom or Dum… sometimes I called you Damned Ullis because of the things you said.”

Narcopolis followed a panoply of drug addicts who frequent an opium den in Mumbai in the 1970s. Though Ullis is the all-seeing narrator, the story drops in on all the many characters in turn. Where Narcopolis is sweeping, Low is zoomed-in, focused wholly on Ullis. Narcopolis spans a period of years, Low takes place over a single weekend. Narcopolis is about poor people smoking opium, Low is about rich people doing cocaine, heroin, and meow meow (mephedrone). Thayil told Vice, “In Narcopolis the drugs are our vehicle from which to look at a certain era that has absolutely vanished. In Low, drugs are the vehicle to look at grief.”

It’s decades after Narcopolis and Ullis has come back to Bombay to spread the ashes of his wife, who killed herself in Delhi with little warning. After the cremation, Ullis gets in a cab and heads to the airport on a whim rather than going home to the empty apartment he shared with his wife. He has nothing with him but a box of her ashes.

That may sound like a grim setup, but the brilliance of Low is how much humor Thayil wrings from a tragic character in a tragic moment of his life. I repeatedly laughed out loud—an impressive feat to wring humor out of a grief plot.

It’s funny from the very beginning, when a rich older woman next to him on the flight to Bombay steals the airline silverware and headphones, and gets up too soon when the plane has barely touched down and gets scolded. She asks his name, he says “Ullis,” and she mishears and calls him “Ulysses” for the rest of the book.

Later on, in one of many howling passages, the woman (Payal) is left alone with Ullis’s bag (containing Ullis’s dead wife’s ashes) and she does this:

After he toddled off on his chore, she’d felt compelled to open the backpack and take a look inside. The white box had intrigued her - imagine, a backpack that held nothing more than a mid-sized box of powder - and she’d been further compelled, even duty-bound, to try a cautious initial line. It wasn’t the best coke she’d ever had, and it certainly was not the worst, not by a long shot. She cut a few more lines, remarking at the lumpiness and strange colour. But she had enjoyed the effects, delicate and refined, as good as the best Colombian. Without a doubt it was designer stuff.

When Payal introduces him to some of her friends, she says, “Meet my dear friend Ulysses, who has come a long way to join us tonight,” and does it “with a flourish of the hands, as if she were presenting a Homeric hero rather than a shoeless grief-struck stranger half out of his mind on Chinese heroin and the ashes of his own dead wife.”

Much of the humor comes from the characters Ullis encounters as he, the straight (but drugged) man, coasts along. Text messages from Danny, his local drug dealer, are especially funny: “Got me this time excellent stone white stuff on rock form untouch plus cooked one crack n lsd crystal mdma n h-in.” Ullis wonders in response to that one: “Did Danny really think it was okay to list crack, LSD, crystal meth, and MDMA in a text, but heroin alone required a coy ‘h-in’? What was wrong with him?”

As Ullis floats on different drugs through various bizarre social encounters, we get memories of his marriage, and these are the sections where Thayil can kill you with one interjection, like when he’s remembering a conversation in which his wife called him Dommie, and he thinks, “Who would call him Dommie again?” Or when a cabbie driving him around assures him, “I am exceedingly safe driver” and Ullis reflects, “Of course he was right. Nothing bad could happen because the worst had occurred.”

He blames his own “fatal inaction” and his “abject failure as a husband and a man” for her suicide.

But the drugs help. After getting sick from too much drugs, he’s ready for more drugs: “The sight of the vomit made him feel better almost instantly. At least now he was ready for more heroin.”

In both novels, there’s a strong sense of apathy from the addicts, like once you’re an addict, there’s not much more to do but keep at it. From Narcopolis:

That was when Dimple asked the question I couldn’t answer for many years. She asked why it was that I, who could read and write and had a family that cared enough about me to finance my education, who could do anything I wanted, go anywhere and be anyone, why was I an addict? She didn’t understand it.

At the time, I couldn’t either. I didn’t know my own compulsions well enough to reply. Instead, I broke out the pharmaceutical morphine I’d stolen from the office stores and made myself a small shot.

And the addicts take their habit seriously. In Rashid’s opium den, “the room made people talk in whispers, as if they were in a place of worship, which, the way he saw it, they were.”

Thayil is an accomplished poet, and it shows in Narcopolis in particular, which opens with a seven-page sentence—but never fear, this is no dense Faulknerian or Proustian slog, it’s graceful, easy, and funny. Here’s just the first part:

Bombay, which obliterated its own history by changing its name and surgically altering its face, is the hero or heroin of this story and since I’m the one who’s telling it and you don’t know who I am, let me say that we’ll get to the who of it but not right now, because now there’s time enough not to hurry, to light the lamp and open the window to the moon and take a moment to dream of a great and broken city, because when the day starts its business I’ll have to stop, these are night-time tales that vanish in sunlight like vampire dust – wait now, light me up so we do this right, yes, hold me steady to the lamp, hold it, hold, good, a slow pull to start with, to draw the smoke low into the lungs, yes, oh my, and another for the nostrils, and a little something sweet for the mouth, and now we can begin at the beginning with the first time at Rashid’s when I stitched the blue smoke from pipe to blood to eye to I and out into the blue world – and now you’re getting to the who of it and I can tell you that I, the I you’re imagining at this moment, a thinking someone who’s writing these words, who’s arranging time in a logical chronological sequence, someone with an overall plan, an engineer-god in the machine, well, that isn’t the I who’s telling this story, that’s the I who’s being told, thinking of my first pipe at Rashid’s…”

But I digress. I come to praise Low, which you can read and enjoy without reading Narcopolis.

Back in 2011, the “it” novel of the moment was Open City by Teju Cole, a perambulation diary in which a man walks around New York City encountering various characters, and not much happens. That novel was breathlessly compared at the time to Sebald, and raved about by the important critics—but I found it painfully boring. Low feels to me like a similar type of novel, but one that actually succeeds for its wit and self-deprecation. Low doesn’t take itself too seriously, even though what’s happening to Ullis is plenty serious.

And because its protagonist exists in a state of almost constant high, it feels totally natural that at some point he begins talking to the ghost of his dead wife, pestering her to explain herself and her actions. (He sings “Stupid Girl” by Garbage to the backpack containing the ashes, in the hopes his wife will hear it.)

The same thing very briefly happens to Ullis in the final pages of Narcopolis when he finds the ghost of his dead friend Dimple sitting on the toilet in her old apartment, and she tells him, “I’m not a ghost. I’m still here. I’ve been here all this time but I kept out of your way. Dead do not always become ghosts. We are like dreams that travel from one person to the other. We return, but only if you love us.”

The title, by the way, comes from Ullis’s dead wife’s own name for the place she’d go, emotionally, when depressed: she would tell him, “I’m going to the low.” Ullis spends the novel both “in the low” and also extremely fucking high, and the combination makes for a bewitching concoction.

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I’m currently reading The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro—my fifth of his; if you’ve never read Ishiguro, I recommend starting with Never Let Me Go or Remains of the Day.

This week, I finished Sensation Machines by Adam Wilson, and it would have fit perfectly in last week’s metaverse issue. Wilson’s vision of the very near future is clever and just dystopian-lite enough to feel not only plausible, but probable. His metaverse element is an augmented reality game called “Shamerican Sykosis,” played by putting on a helmet, with its own cryptocurrency (Sykodollars) that become a hedge against the crashing markets (sound familiar?) as the Senate debates a Universal Basic Income. One of the two main characters is hired to create a secretive social media campaign to turn people against the UBI while also promoting a new product: a biometric suit (called The Suit™) that gathers data on everything from your breast feeding to your bowel movements and airdrops it to the cloud to improve your life (sounds awesome, jk, but actually? but jk). This novel matches my thesis from last issue that reading about digital dystopias is not exactly uplifting. But fiction isn’t always supposed to be uplifting, and it contains a few brilliant scenes I will never forget, including an attempted threesome that gracefully weaves in Patrick Bateman-style narration about Eminem’s oeuvre and is funny and tragic at the same time.

But for Issue 17, let’s log out of the metaverse, emerge back into the natural world, and… saddle up.

As a kid, I wanted to be a cowboy so badly that I dressed up as one for multiple consecutive Halloweens. What East Coast Jew hasn’t fantasized about riding a horse through the American West?

The first Cormac McCarthy I ever read was The Road, in 2010 (a paperback with the Viggo Mortensen movie poster cover—awful), and I thought it was a miserable read. Not just because of the plot (there are ways to do post-apocalyptic without making the reader as unhappy as the doomed characters; Station Eleven is one example) but the sparse, brutalist writing and dialogue. Yes, it scored the Oprah Book Club sticker and won McCarthy the Pulitzer. But I have suspected for years that The Road is McCarthy’s most “basic” novel and wondered if I’m the only person who doesn’t rave about it as a life-affirming experience. This comment from Justin Taylor in Bookforum earlier this year made me feel vindicated: “it’s a silly, forgettable piece of YA that desperately wants you to believe it is the Book of Job.”

I didn’t try McCarthy again until late 2020, on a Covid-distanced family road trip through West Texas, when I (appropriately) read All the Pretty Horses. It was love at first gallop.

McCarthy’s prose can be famously unforgiving (no commas, no quotation marks) but once you learn how to read him, it carries you along and has a way of conveying the characters’ voices even in non-dialogue. When he does use dialogue, it’s so pitch-perfect I find myself underlining a lot of it. Two examples from Horses: thirteen-year-old Jimmy Blevins saying “Whoo, I’m drunkern shit”; Rawlins trying on boots in a store and saying to the saleswoman, “Shit, you’re lookin at a dancin fool.”

This, from page 23 in Horses, is to me a perfectly representative McCarthy paragraph: “The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been.”

You either enjoy that or find it insufferable, and if you find it insufferable, you probably won’t like reading Cormac McCarthy.

I recently recommended All the Pretty Horses to two friends and both said they gave up after five pages, which was disappointing. This is the book’s opening paragraph:

The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forebears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscotting. He looked down at the guttered candlestub. He pressed his thumbprint in the warm wax pooled on the oak veneer. Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.

I think that grabs you right away, but the writing style certainly will be exhausting to many. I remember giving up on David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas twice initially, because of the way the opening section is written, before finally making it far in enough to love it—same with Will Self’s The Book of Dave, one of my favorite novels ever.

What’s happening: it’s 1949 in San Angelo, Texas, and John Grady Cole is at the funeral of his grandfather. He soon learns his mother plans to sell the family ranch, so he takes off for Mexico with his friend Rawlins to find work as cowboys. Action and adventure ensue. Romance and violence ensue. John Grady and Rawlins end up in a Mexican jail. (Even though the writing style is spare, let no one tell you McCarthy lacks plot—things happen in his novels.)

Having now read the Border Trilogy and five other McCarthy novels, I see how much of an outlier The Road was. The Border Trilogy is far more representative of his overall body of work. And while the tone of All the Pretty Horses has been called sunny compared to the bleakness of Outer Dark, Child of God, Blood Meridian and others, there’s plenty of darkness here, and plenty of utterances that hint at McCarthy’s worldview, like when an old man tells Cole, “among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion.”

In the second novel, The Crossing, Billy Parham traps a wolf that was killing cattle on his family’s land in New Mexico and decides, bizarrely, to return her across the border to the mountains of Mexico—by himself. Another very McCarthy passage here (page 105) with man preferring the company of animal even when animal cannot respond: “He talked to her a long time and as the boy tending the wolf could not understand what it was he said he said what was in his heart. He made her promises that he swore to keep in the making. That he would take her to the mountains where she would find others of her kind. She watched him with her yellow eyes and in them was no despair but only that same reckonless deep of loneliness that cored the world to its heart.”

The third book, Cities of the Plain, is my favorite because of the satisfying way it brings the stars of the first two books together and puts them on a ranch in New Mexico, where things are pretty good until they go wrong because of John Grady falling for a girl he shouldn’t touch, just like in the first book. And like in the first book, his friend nearly suffers the consequences. (The friendship between John Grady and Billy gives us banter like this, after they set traps for wild dogs that keep killing their calves, only to find the traps dug up by the dogs, unsuccessful: “I didn’t know dogs were that smart” // “They probably didn’t know we were that dumb.”)

The knife fight that ends Cities of the Plain is one of the most visceral and memorable scenes I’ve ever read in fiction.

While characters in these three novels occasionally philosophize about life, death, human nature, and evil (usually random supporting characters who make a single appearance), they are mostly just trying to work and live—to survive everyday life in their part of the country, survive weather and disaster and animals and men.

Sure, there is a somewhat-dated-these-days lionizing of traditional tough-man masculinity in these cowboy stories that may turn some readers away. (“I will always prefer the earlier Tennessee novels — Outer Dark, Suttree — to the later westerns; the former had an otherworldliness that in the latter risked stiffening into a sort of baroque machismo,” John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote in the Times last year.)

But the Border Trilogy felt like the closest approximation of my childhood cowboy fantasies: get on my horse and ride away. And while McCarthy may be first thought of as a writer of the South (he grew up in Knoxville, and The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, and Suttree are all set in Tennessee), his Westerns alone (Border Trilogy + Blood Meridian) form a body of work that rewards rereading and have prompted much deserving literary scholarship.

And that brings me to The Passenger, his first novel in 16 years (along with the slim companion novel Stella Maris) and surely his last (he’s 89). It is a fantastic book that is utterly different from everything I just wrote about.

This one is set mostly in New Orleans and Mississippi, with a few excursions to rural Tennessee. And while the content might be the most insane of any of his novels (which is saying a lot considering Child of God is about a vagrant who stores a dead body in his attic and fucks it), I think it is probably McCarthy’s most accessible novel for newcomers to his work.

I said “content” above rather than “plot” because, while there are a series of extremely inventive characters and back stories here, they don’t really add up to a plot per se.

The book opens with Bobby Western discovering the body of his sister Alicia Western hanging from a tree in the woods, so we know from the first page that her life will end in suicide. Then her first chapter takes us back to a year earlier, and introduces us to the Thalidomide Kid, usually shortened to The Kid (not to be confused with The Kid of Blood Meridian), a snarky midget with flippers for hands, and his merry band of vaudevillian freaks. They are hallucinations of Alicia, who is severely schizophrenic but also a brilliant mathematician. Meanwhile, Bobby’s chapters begin in 1980, eight years after Alicia’s suicide.

The chapters alternate between the siblings; all of Alicia’s chapters are italicized conversations/encounters with her imaginary friends. This time-switching has the effect of making both Bobby and Alicia feel alive in the reader’s present, even though for Bobby she died nearly a decade ago (though he is far from over it). Bobby and Alicia were in love (yes, in that way, though it sounds like they never acted on it).

Bobby is a deep-sea salvage diver, and in his first chapter he and his friend Oiler (the names here are pretty unsubtle) investigate, on a job in the Gulf of Mexico, a sunken plane full of corpses—with one passenger missing, along with the black box.

That mystery doesn’t really matter as much as what happens to Bobby afterward: quite a lot, although with very little direction to it. He goes to jobs; meets up with friends for drinks, including a beautiful trans woman named Debussy Fields; friends die suddenly; he drives to visit his grandmother in Wartburg, Tennessee; and all the while he is increasingly messed with by federal agents who have questions. He meets with a private investigator, Kline, who ends up becoming his confidante but doesn’t do much to help him. The feds cut off his bank account and steal papers from his apartment—it’s unclear if they’re dogging him because of the plane, or who his father was (he worked on the atomic bomb with Oppenheimer), or some other reason. He hides and re-hides his final letter from his dead sister. He gives plenty of righteous anger to the Feds (“I dont care who you are… I actually believe that my person belongs to me, I doubt that sits well with chaps such as yourselves”). But almost every new development is a red herring.

It’s Alicia’s sections that entertain most, even though they sometimes devolve into nonsense, and even though one could argue they carry no narrative momentum since we know what Alicia will eventually do. Her exchanges with The Kid are often laugh-out-loud funny, if you can forget for a moment how dark they are for happening at all. He repeatedly calls her different names, anything but Alicia, always alliterative; he ridicules his companions, who keep trying to do little performances for her and failing.

Alicia’s arguments with The Kid are also revealing of backstory, even when it might seem like he’s not saying anything important. For example, while mocking her, he says, “You told Granny that you wanted to live in the woods with the raccoons and she hauled you off to see Doctor Hard-Dick to have your head examined except that’s not all that got examined is it?” (“You dont know anything about it, and his name is Doctor Hardwick,” is all Alicia can retort.)

There is humor throughout Bobby’s sections too, of a less sinister type, usually coming from his colorful circle of friends. (This has got to be McCarthy’s funniest novel, and the one with the most dialogue by far.) Early on, he goes for a drink with a group of people, most of them “looking for work,” we are told, and we get this incredible job interview story from a character named Brat:

I just blew it. Something came over me. This breather kept going on about this policy and that policy. Finally he said: And another thing. Around here we dont watch the clock. And I said well I just cant tell you how happy I am to hear you say those words. I’ve had a lifelong habit of being up to an hour late for just about everything.

What did he say?

He got sort of quiet. He sat there for a minute and then he got up and left. It was his office. After a while the secretary came in and she said the interview was over. I asked her if I’d gotten the job but she said she didn’t think so. She looked kind of nervous.

(For no good reason, The Passenger uses no apostrophes in contractions like can’t and don’t.)

Bobby’s bombastic friend John Sheddan gets a lot of the best rants, crude and funny and self-pitying, mostly about money or booze or women: “It’s hard to keep them entertained, Squire. They keep upping the ante. You think you’ve done a workmanlike job of fucking them but that’s just the beginning. God. The hoops a man will put himself through. At some age you fancy you might rise above these sorts of things and at some age you dont… I suppose that when a man is sick of pussy he is sick of life but I do think the bitches may have finally done me in.”

Dark as its setup is, The Passenger is fun and absurdist, and you will vividly remember The Kid, and Bobby all alone on an empty oil rig, and what happens to his friend Oiler, and what happens to Sheddan. You will forget all about the sunken plane.

The Passenger offers no answers, no resolution, nothing final (apart from death), which sets it apart from the Western novels, in which there is typically a Manichaean sense of good and evil, and in which the events and their consequences are not in any way unclear.

I believe this novel is where I’ll now recommend McCarthy newcomers start, with the warning that it is an outlier in content, but not style. And you can skip Stella Maris, the "prequel” novel also released this year. The entire book comprises conversations between Alicia and her therapist, Dr. Cohen (of course), and doesn’t have any of the cleverness or pleasure of The Passenger. Justin Taylor, in his great Bookforum review, warned people to skip it (“there’s no reason for Stella Maris to be this boring; but then, there’s no reason for it to be at all”), but I still read it for completion’s sake, as I’m sure many will. But you really shouldn’t.

McCarthy’s voice, across his novels, feels to me like an all-knowing ghost, or Death itself, speaking timeless Manichaean truths in blunt poetry.

None of McCarthy’s novels reckon with the internet, by the way, and there is a lot of joy and peace in that, a break from our mad present.

As always: thank you for reading my writing about my reading.

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This is usually where I share what I’m reading right now. This week, it’s Sensation Machines by my friend Adam Wilson. In the past few weeks, I finished: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (as good as advertised); Under the Dome by Stephen King (audiobook performed by Broadway’s Raul Esparza!); Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy (do read The Passenger, but skip this unnecessary, dull companion); and Big Swiss by Jen Beagin (most fun novel I’ve read this year, highly recommend).

And now, for Issue 16, we’re going into the metaverse.

In February, I reread Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson’s seminal 1992 sci-fi novel that is credited with coining the word “metaverse.” I reread it as homework of sorts before getting the chance to interview Stephenson on the Decrypt podcast in March.

I first read it in middle school, circa 2002, age 15, when a boyfriend of my older sister gave me his copy. It felt like being passed down something cool and illicit, and the reading experience felt like a revelation.

On reread, at age 35, I was struck by how much Stephenson got right, and also how much he got wrong.

In Snow Crash, the hero/protagonist, named Hiro Protagonist (pretty great), works as a delivery boy for the pizza mafia, but spends his free time in the metaverse as a mercenary hacker/stringer gathering information and gossip for pay.

In Stephenson’s 1992 imagining, the metaverse is an open cyber realm where anyone can choose whatever avatar they wish, though most people are lazy and just rent a Clint or Brandy, two default male or female avatars (a touch that is both funny and logical, as is common in Stephenson’s stuff). Hiro, who is half Black, half Korean, wears a black kimono and totes two samurai swords.

The first two chapters of Snow Crash are a thrill ride. Hiro is rushing to deliver a pizza on time, lest he incur the wrath of the feared Uncle Enzo, and needs the help of Y.T., a minivan-harpooning teen girl on a skateboard, after Hiro crashes into a backyard pool. (Stephenson also introduces the term “burbclave” here, and those are a very real thing today.) Great world-building. But the byzantine plot spins out from there, bringing in ancient Sumerian language and multiple shadowy agencies, and the story kind of lost me this time around.

But I’m more interested in thinking about Stephenson’s metaverse, and other visions of the metaverse in science fiction, than in reviewing Snow Crash as a reading experience. I’ll just say that if you consider yourself a sci-fi devotee and haven’t read Snow Crash, you should.

What Stephenson got right: Hiro is believable to me. In our era, he’d be a TaskRabbit tasker or Uber Eats delivery guy. And the metaverse of Snow Crash is believable, because a digital realm, where you can explore and meet other avatars, exists today, and we even call it by the same name. No one can ever take that proof of influence away from Stephenson, even if Mark Zuckerberg is trying his best to co-opt the concept. (William Gibson should also get credit for the “cyberspace” of Neuromancer (1984) which obviously influenced Stephenson.)

Of course, people debate what “metaverse” actually means today. Is there one open metaverse, or multiple distinct metaverses? When you log on to an internet-connected game, are you in the metaverse, or the closed universe of that game? In crypto, there are game realms that explicitly call themselves a “decentralized metaverse” (Decentraland; and The Sandbox, where Snoop Dogg bought virtual land). In non-crypto gaming, there have been games for years that look to me like they could reasonably be called metaverses (Half Life; The Sims; Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which came at the perfect time at the start of the pandemic and built a virtual society so intricate that the Bank of Nook cut interest rates to spur spending).

On the Decrypt podcast, I asked Stephenson straight up: What do people get wrong when they talk about the metaverse? He said it’s when they “talk about a metaverse, or multiple metaverses… that's always a signal to me that somebody doesn't get it." So in the view of the author who coined the term, there's one metaverse, like the one internet. Sounds nice, but I don’t think we’re there yet, unless you define the entire social web as the metaverse. (My developing take is that any platform or app on which you’re represented by a digital persona—Twitter, Discord, Reddit—is basically akin to the metaverse.)

The other common assumption people get wrong, Stephenson said, is something he got wrong too, and it’s part of the reason the metaverse of Snow Crash feels very dated today: goggles. In Snow Crash, people don a headset to enter the metaverse; same in Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011), though he added haptic gloves. Stephenson now says: “It seemed like a logical assumption at the time that that would be the the output device. But that's not what happened. What happened is that everyone is accessing these 3D worlds through through two-dimensional flat rectangles on flat screens. And that works really well.” Indeed, one reason expensive VR headsets still haven’t gone fully mainstream is because you don’t need them to access virtual worlds. It works well enough for most people to do it on your computer. (Apple nonetheless has its own long-anticipated headset coming very soon; it’s hard to see how it will be a big hit, but on the other hand, it’s Apple.)

In fairness to Stephenson (and Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, Ursula LeGuin, and to an extent JG Ballard and Doug Coupland), the main reason seminal sci-fi novels like Snow Crash feel dated now is because they got so much right that what was then prescient now looks familiar.

The biggest impression rereading Snow Crash left on me was the reminder that I simply don’t want to spend time in the metaverse—any metaverse.

The metaverse, in almost all representations in fiction, is dystopian and unappealing. It is where dark, evil things happen. That’s not Stephenson’s fault, but it makes reading fiction about the metaverse somewhat unappealing. (One exception from a very recent release: the very clever “Pioneers” chapter of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow—that game was a metaverse, in my view, though the word “metaverse” never appears in the novel.)

Decades of depictions of the virtual world in books and film (have you seen “Don’t Worry Darling” yet?) have firmly established: the metaverse is bad. Even when it’s good, it’s bad, because it becomes a drug: in the very underrated Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh (2014), the virtual world is so appealing as an escape from the apocalyptic real world that the rich plug into beds, nourished through IV drips, so that they can spend weeks in a row there. (Shades of Infinite Jest.)

The big tech companies now pitching a sunny version of the metaverse, in which you hold staff meetings or see a friend in a virtual bar for a virtual beer, are pursuing a dead end and should rebrand away from the metaverse entirely. Even for fun/social activities, it’s not very appealing.

As Stephenson said, “If you want lots of people going into the metaverse and having experiences, you've gotta create experiences that they enjoy having. It seems like a stupidly obvious thing to say, but there you have it. If it's purely a social space / cocktail party / endless people talking to each other kind of thing, then you can get some traffic with that kind of experience, but sooner or later people want to do something besides just talk to each other.”

But I digress. (How many readers have I already lost by this extended tangent on the mechanics of the metaverse? Oh well, back to books now.) Re-reading Snow Crash made me realize a nuance in my own sci-fi preferences: I prefer sci-fi set in space or other planets (Dune; Ender’s Game; Three-Body Problem; The Left Hand of Darkness; The Disposessed; Sea of Tranquility) to sci-fi set in a virtual computer world.

The other sci-fi sub-category I like: set on our world, but slightly altered (“through a mirror darkly”) in a recognizable near-future or dystopian future (Fahrenheit 451; Never Let Me Go; The Road; Station Eleven; American War; Wool; I Am Legend). I suppose those are all dystopian novels. Snow Crash and Neuromancer could also be called dystopias, but the difference is the examples I’ve listed are all set in the physical world, not a digital realm.

I think I prefer to inhabit the physical world, even when reading fiction. Maybe that’s surprising coming from someone who spends his working life on the internet.

That brings me at last to another genre I’ve only recently gotten more into: eco sci-fi. I read Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance) back in 2015 after the books first came out and I was floored. (Pro tip: skip the movie.) It was our world, but with changes to the natural environment that are scary and plausible—perhaps caused by our own actions, perhaps not. (I mentioned Annihilation in this 2021 issue as an example of a novel that gives me the same tingly feeling I get from Three-Body Problem and “Contact.”)

Last month, I read one of Vandermeer’s newer books, Borne (2017) and couldn’t put it down. The world is Earth, but in a ravaged landscape where plants have covered much of what’s left of the planet we ruined, and the surviving people live in the shadow of the remains of The Company and its biotech creations. Borne himself is a plantlike being with strange natural abilities, and it’s unclear whether he’s a piece of biotech created by The Company or a natural creation of the world. T(There’s also a giant evil flying bear and his legion of smaller bear minions.)

Climate change, erosion, pollution, endangerment of animal species, are all phenomenons that are very real today and are also ripe for riveting near-future sci-fi if followed to their worst possible conclusions. Other eco-fiction or eco-fiction-adjacent novels I’ve liked: On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee; A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet; Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood; The Vorrh by B. Catling.

Dune, at its heart, is eco-fiction too. Frank Herbert, in a foreword to Heretics of Dune (book 5) called “When I was writing Dune,” wrote that among many other things Dune was meant to explore (Messiah myth; energy sourcing; politics and economics; and predictive powers): “it was to be an ecological novel.” Over the course of the Dune series, Arrakis is at different points: dry and sand covered, green and verdant, dry and sand-covered again, and ultimately destroyed.

Could that happen to Earth?

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I’m halfway through Silverview, the final novel from the late great John le Carré, and I’m re-reading Snow Crash (which I first read back in middle school, very formative) as homework before we get the pleasure of interviewing Neal Stephenson on our Decrypt podcast in a couple weeks.

Now, without further ado, arrange your face and come with me to England in 1500.

I think of myself as not being a big fan of historical fiction. There have been some exceptions (I loved David Mitchell’s Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), but for the most part I’m usually not excited by novels set more than, oh, 200 years in the past.

But you should throw all your preconceptions out the window to read Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, who was born a poor blacksmith’s son and rose skyward to become the right hand of King Henry VIII, holding illustrious titles like Master of the Rolls, Lord Privy Seal, Baron of Wimbledon, and Earl of Essex. The series is so vivid and absorbing, and her Cromwell is so plausible (even… relatable) that it shouldn’t be pigeonholed as historical fiction. I would recommend it to almost any type of reader.

Rather than try to convey all the thrill of these three novels (1,758 pages in total—don’t be scared), I want to zoom in on just a few repeated qualities of the writing that add to Mantel’s alchemy.

The first book, Wolf Hall (2009), starts in disorienting fashion: “So now get up.”

We don’t know right away who’s speaking, or who’s being told to get up. There’s blood: “blood from the gash on his head—which was his father’s first effort—is trickling across his face.” Okay, so we know someone’s father hit him. And kicked him. (“He can see that the stitching of his father’s boot is unraveling… a hard knot in it has caught his eyebrow and opened another cut.”) Then we learn the father is named Walter, and Walter is a mean son of a bitch: “Look what I’ve done. Burst my boot, kicking your head.” He mocks his son while his son heaves and vomits.

We can assume the boy is Thomas Cromwell, but we aren’t told explicitly until five pages in, when he’s getting cleaned up by his sister, who warns her husband, Morgan Williams, to stand back: “You don’t want bits of Thomas on your London jacket.”

In time, we come to understand, though nothing is stated in any overly explicit way (there’s no false exposition in this series, you pick things up by reading closely), that Thomas Cromwell’s father Walter beats him up all the time, and this time is the last straw. Thomas flees Putney by boat, crossing the channel to continental Europe.

The second chapter starts 27 years later: Cromwell is married with children, and works for Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, a close adviser to the king. Within a few dozen pages, Wolsey has fallen from the king’s favor and is stripped of his privileges and title. From this point on, Cromwell, whose association with Wolsey should have been an impediment, embarks on a rise to power that lasts until late in the final book.

Throughout the series, we continually return to his youth in Putney and his misadventures in France and Italy, often to extremely specific memories that have clearly left indelible marks on him. One example: he picked up a snake in Italy on a bet, and held it for ten seconds. After four seconds, the snake bit him—and he didn’t let go. When he finally does let go, it’s the snake who sounds worse from the encounter: “The snake looked sick; when they had all reached ten, and not before, he eased its coiled body gently to the ground, and let it slip away into its future.”

The point is obvious: Cromwell is tough, fearless, can hold writhing snakes without flinching. And in case the message of the scene isn’t clear enough, the same story is recalled again in the third book, and snakes or serpents are mentioned throughout all three books. He compares Anne Boleyn to a snake, others call him a snake, King Henry compares him to a “bag of serpents” (in praise), and in the final volume he recalls being struck by a fresco in Italy, when he was eighteen, depicting infant Hercules crushing a snake in his hand.

The repetition of memories over the course of the series is not tedious—far from it, when they arise on second and third mentions it’s like we share Cromwell’s memories. We remember when we first heard that story, and he feels very alive and real to us.

Mantel also likes repetition of phrases in Cromwell’s head. And for the entire duration of the three books, we live in his head. We never witness anything Cromwell is not present for, much like in “Tar.” (Some of the people on the internet who believed the final shot of “The Sopranos” signaled that Tony died reasoned that we saw through his eyes the entire series, so if the screen went black it meant Tony had died, but that wasn’t true, we witnessed tons of scenes that Tony wasn’t present for.)

About halfway through Wolf Hall, Cromwell counsels himself to “arrange your face” and not react too obviously to something Henry says. Later in the book, he catches Nicholas Carew with a “downturn of his mouth” while being bossed around by Anne Boleyn, and in his head, he warns him: “Arrange your face, Nicholas Carew, your ancient family face.” Later in the book, the phrase appears a third time, and this time it’s Cromwell’s nephew Richard turning it around on him, telling Cromwell, “Arrange your face” before they go in to see Bishop John Fisher, who will be executed. The phrase makes it all the way to the final book, when he scolds his nephew Richard, his son Gregory, and their helper Dick Purser to stop horsing around as Henry Howard (Earl of Surrey), a little shit and the son of Thomas Howard (Duke of Norfolk), approaches: “Stop that. Arrange your faces. Here is Norfolk’s boy.”

There’s another scene in Wolf Hall that will be referenced again and again over the course of the trilogy: the day Cromwell’s wife Liz dies. That morning, Cromwell wakes early. The bed sheets are damp and Liz is “warm and flushed,” but he thinks nothing of it. He kisses her and she says, “Tell me when you are coming home.” His barber comes to the house to give him a shave. “He sees his own eyes in a polished mirror. They look alive; serpent eyes.” (Ahem.)

Then, this weird moment: “As he goes downstairs he thinks he sees Liz following him. He thinks he sees the flash of her white cap. He turns, and says, ‘Liz, go back to bed…’ But she’s not there. He is mistaken.”

When he arrives home that evening, he knows something is wrong. “You see the dismayed faces; they turn away at the sight of you.” Liz has died, and his two daughters are also sick (they’ll die too). Mercy, the house maid, gives him the news (“but here is no mercy”). But what Cromwell will remember the most—and he recalls the moment again in the later books—is that trick of his mind when he thought he saw Liz on the stairs that morning, like she was already gone at that point, a ghost.

The second book, Bring Up the Bodies (2012), starts with a confusing action scene just as the first did, and holds onto the confusion for longer. The first line is: “His children are falling from the sky.”

Is it a bad dream? We’re told only that he’s on horseback. Grace Cromwell “hovers in thin air. She is silent when she takes her prey, silent as she glides to his fist.” Anne Cromwell “bounces on the glove of Rafe Sadler.” The only hint is the chapter name: “Falcons.” You could perhaps figure it out from contextual clues, but I had to re-read the first few pages to get it, and not until page 11, having moved on to a completely new scene, do we get the explicit reveal, when John Seymour says: “I don’t know, Cromwell, all these falcons named for dead women… don’t they dishearten you?”

It’s another memorable image: Anne Boleyn and other treacherous women of the court are snakes, while the women Cromwell loved and buried are falcons.

There’s a lot of this type of imagery throughout the series, people as animals. There’s also a lot of metonymy. (Or is it synecdoche? Remember learning these terms in Latin class? “The crown” to represent the monarchy is typically cited as the classic example of metonymy—using a concrete thing to represent the larger abstract thing—but I always thought it could equally be argued that “the crown” is synecdoche—using a part of something to represent the whole—since the king or queen wears the crown.) The constant rain is repeatedly used to represent all of England. And Cromwell himself is a metonymy for all the people of England, the King’s subjects. He reflects that his former master Cardinal Wolsey “was a man whose emotions would master him and wear him out,” whereas, “He, Cromwell, is no longer subject to vagaries of temperament… The courtiers see that he can shape events, mold them. He can contain the fears of other men, and give them a sense of solidity in a quaking world: this people, this dynasty, this miserable rainy island at the edge of the world.”

The entire trilogy might better have been called The Crown, in fact, and the book predates the Netflix series by six years. What’s strange about Mantel naming the first book Wolf Hall, which naturally became the way people refer to the entire trilogy, is that Wolf Hall, home of the Seymour family, is only mentioned a very few times in the first book, in the context of a scandalous rumor: that John Seymour has sex with the wife of his son Edward, his daughter in law. Thus Wolf Hall, the house, is quite aptly named. I’ve seen online forums where people say this is why it’s a fitting title for the book, since the men and women around the king are like wolves. But it would be a more fitting title for the second volume, ironically, which is focused on Anne Boleyn and the many men she sleeps with, truly a den of wolves. Cromwell doesn’t even visit Wolf Hall until the second book; the first book ends with the plan to go there: “End of September. Five days. Wolf Hall.” The very clever title of the second book, Bring Up the Bodies (a legal term), would be better for the first book, since it applies to all three books, in which Cromwell and the rest of the king’s men execute dozens of characters at the king’s whim.

Or she could have called the series Cromwell.

The third book is the longest, baggiest, and the most brutal, but Mantel thought it was her finest.

The first book is very tightly focused, plot-wise, on Cromwell’s rise and his efforts to help the king figure out a way to divorce Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The second book is tightly focused on the infidelity, trial, and death of Anne Boleyn and her many suitors. The third book spans far more action: Henry’s marriage to Jane Seymour, the birth of his son (finally), the death of Jane Seymour, multiple attempted revolts, the rebellion of Henry’s cousin Reginald Pole, and Cromwell’s arranging of Henry’s fourth marriage, to Anna of Cleves (Cromwell’s downfall).

Befitting of the years of action it must cycle through, the third book begins in brutal reality, in the very instant after the second book ends: “Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away.”

The third book rewards those who’ve been with Cromwell since page one of Wolf Hall: so many repeated and re-referenced memories, stories, and experiences.

The entire trilogy ends, again, by falling back on the indelible power of memory and spoken quotes; we end where we began, the very first line of the first book. At the moment of his death, kneeling awaiting the executioner’s axe, Cromwell is transported back to Putney as a child, with his father’s cruel challenge ringing in his ears: “So now get up, so now get up.”

--

I hope I’ve whet your appetite to get to know Mantel’s version of Thomas Cromwell. As always, I welcome your comments (posted publicly or sent to me directly) and hope you’ll forward and share this issue with friends.

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I started 2023 by re-reading Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies to get my brain back in Thomas Cromwell mode for Hilary Mantel’s third installment, The Mirror and the Light. It was terrific, but probably my least favorite of the trilogy. Trilogies usually go that way, no? Since finishing that, I’ve also read A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball, Us Against You by Fredrik Backman, and Killings by Calvin Trillin.

But today’s issue is about the books I read last year—about how I read them.

I read 42 books in 2022, and upon review, I see that with exactly half of them I listened to some portion on audiobook. That feels insane since, prior to the pandemic, I had never listened to an audiobook in my life.

I touched on audiobooks briefly in my January 2021 letter, but since then, I guess I’ve gone a little audio-crazy.

Here’s my process: I start out with a print copy of the book I want to read, and then, unless it’s brand new fiction (like The Trees by Percival Everett) or somewhat obscure fiction from the eighties (like Small World by David Lodge), I can almost always find the audiobook on either Libby or Hoopla (free library apps) or Libro ($15 per month, which includes one free audiboook credit; the rest are highly discounted). And then (stay with me here), if I also borrow the e-book from Libby or Hoopla, I’ve got the book in all three formats and can be making progress at every possible free moment: in bed at night (print book); on the train or subway or any time I am able to read but don’t have the print book with me (e-book on my phone); and while performing any task at home where my hands aren’t free: washing dishes, folding laundry, even showering (audiobook).

Another benefit of having the e-book version at any given time is that it’s searchable. So let’s say I suddenly hear a character name I don’t remember (this happened with the Cromwell trilogy—so many dukes), I’ll pop open the e-book and search for the name and instantly find the first mention of that character.

There’s another venue in which audiobooks have been a game-changer for me: running. I got back into running last spring, and have been running twice per week or so ever since (4-8 miles per run, always outdoors). When I first started running again, I wouldn’t listen to anything at all, I’d run in silence and just hear my own breathing. Then I started playing audiobooks from my phone on speaker while holding the phone in my hand—annoying for other people on the trail, but at least I run relatively fast, so they’re not hearing my book for very long once I pass them. Still, not ideal. Finally, I found the perfect running headphones and now I always listen to an audiobook while running. It not only makes the run more interesting, but it also tends to make me think less about the run and the distance—I’ll suddenly find I’m so wrapped up in the book that I’ve gone more miles than I planned. (Strava briefly interrupts the book after each mile to tell me my pace.) You lose yourself in the narration.

But the best remainder of an audiobook is the permanent memory of where you listened to the book.

My wife and I will always remember that we listened to Olympus, Texas by Stacey Swann while driving through Yosemite National Park (read by Karissa Vacker, who gives each of the uniquely-flawed characters their own distinctive twang). We listened to a large chunk of The Dutch House by Ann Patchett on a very long walk across the dunes on Cape Cod in winter during the pandemic (read by Tom Hanks, which was obviously a pleasure, and is what led us to choose a book I think we would have otherwise skipped based on the plot description—that was my first Patchett and it led me to read Commonwealth too). I listened to most of Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle doing yard work (it’s a short book) after I read his newest novel Devil House in print, then discovered all his books are read by the author, who has a perfectly matter-of-fact tone for his haunting plots. (Darnielle is the lead singer of The Mountain Goats.)

And this applies to runs, too: after reading most of Horse by Geraldine Brooks in print (one of my very favorite reads of 2022), I listened to the heartbreaking final section on one long 10-mile run, on which I was motivated to keep running because I didn’t want to stop listening. (Horse is performed by a whole cast of pitch-perfect actors.) All three of Mantel’s Cromwell books are read by Ben Miles, the same British actor who played Cromwell on the stage for the Royal Shakespeare Company's adaptations of the novels; his voice is the one in my head now for Cromwell, and I’m good with that.

Some books are obviously enhanced by the performer. The Mission Song by John le Carré is read by David Oyelowo, famous from playing MLK in “Selma”; Song of Solomon is read by Toni Morrison herself, whose voice is legendary. I think I enjoyed The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs, which has a lot of exhausting repetition for comedic effect, much more than I would have in print thanks to the performer, who did a very funny voice for the quirky astronomer, the book’s primary narrator.

But sometimes the performer ruins it for me. I couldn’t bear the readers of The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem or Trust Exercise by Susan Choi; gave up and finished both books in print.

A few other audiobooks I’ve loved: The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (read by Edoardo Ballerini, Marin Ireland, and Dion Graham; the voice for Duchess, the novel’s con man and main fascination, is perfect); Less by Andrew Sean Greer (Robert Petkoff makes the hapless narrator very charmingly sympathetic), and Edward Snowden’s memoir Permanent Record (not read by Snowden, disappointingly, but the actor Holter Graham acts as stand-in).

So, who cares about any of this? What’s the point of over-sharing the granular specifics of my audiobook routine?

I suppose because literary people appear to feel some type of way about audiobooks. There’s a vague stigma around them. They’re sometimes cast as cheating in some way, or lazy, or for less serious readers. Are you really getting the same experience as you would from reading the text? Are you seeing the language, the clever turns of phrase, the actual writing, as closely as you would in print? Are the performative choices of the audiobook reader coloring the book for you in subtle ways you don’t realize?

Those questions are perfectly reasonable, but they all pale in light of one fact that seems to me far more important: people consuming books, in whatever way they choose to consume them, is a good thing.

There are too many people now who don’t read books at all. If listening to them is more doable in light of all the other distractions we have in our lives, great—you’re still reading, and that’s what matters.

So if you find that you haven’t had enough time lately to get through a print book, try listening to one.

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Thanks for reading with me! If you enjoyed, please forward to your friends.

Coming up next issue: metonymy and repetition in Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy. And after that: a funeral for two great lit mags.

I started this newsletter one year ago (Oct. 3, 2020) and while I (luckily) didn’t commit to it being a weekly or bi-weekly at the outset, I certainly hoped to write more often than monthly. My day job has been extremely time-consuming, but the pleasure of sitting down to write one of these entries remains—in fact it feels like more of a treat to myself than ever before. I did 12 issues in the first year, and it was fun to wax about everything from horse-racing to baseball to real American politics in 2020 to fictional French politics in 2022 to dogs and the civil war over oil.

There’s more fun with reading to come, right here on your screens. If you were forwarded this email and haven’t subscribed, get on this lit train:

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And now: Hop aboard my thopter, let’s go to Arrakis.

Dune was published in 1965 (first serialized in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 1963) and is one of the best-selling sci-fi series of all time, but I didn’t discover it until 2016, when I was nearly 30 and the book was 51. I had certainly heard of it and for years I noticed the thick 2005 Ace paperback on the front table at The Strand, but even as a big fan of sci-fi—especially Orson Scott Card, Diana Wynne Jones, Neil Gaiman, and Philip K. Dick—no one had ever personally recommended Dune to me.

This is purely anecdotal, but I have the sense that Dune never quite hit with my generation (b. 1987) the way Ender’s Game or the Harry Potter series did. I know the 1984 David Lynch movie was terribly reviewed, and I wonder if that also threw cold water on the popularity of the book for a while. Dune was not an immediate commercial success when the book first came out; it took a feature in the culture bible Whole Earth Catalog to ignite mass attention.

I love what Frank Herbert wrote in his foreword to the fifth book about the success of the series: “Following the first publication, reports from the publishers were slow and, as it turned out, inaccurate. The critics had panned it. More than twelve publishers had turned it down before publication. There was no advertising. Something was happening out there, though… By the time the first three Dune books were completed, there was little doubt that this was a popular work—one of the most popular in history, I am told, with some ten million copies sold worldwide.”

After I finished the first book, I could see how every sci-fi novel I have ever read owes Dune a debt. Like the apocryphal comment that “we all came out of Gogol’s overcoat,” it seems to me that all sci-fi after Dune came out of Herbert’s desert.

Paul preparing to leave his home planet of Caladan for Arrakis made me think of Ender Wiggin being plucked from home and brought to battle school. And the pain test that opens Dune with the gom jabbar (very well depicted in the new Denis Villeneuve movie, I felt) reminded me of the tests Colonel Graff puts Ender through.

The rules and beliefs of the Fremen of Arrakis reminded me of the customs on Gethen in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. And Dune’s ecological concerns (a dry, parched planet that was once green with plant life; Liet Kynes the imperial ecologist as one of the book’s heroes) are echoed in The Three-Body Problem, especially its Silent Spring references. (And in so much other eco-fiction.)

Star Wars, which came a decade after Dune, clearly owes a debt. The Jedi look a lot like the Bene Gesserit; Luke Skywalker before he becomes a Jedi looks a lot like Paul Atreides before he’s worshiped as Muad’Dib; and highly coveted spice is mentioned throughout the movies.

Avatar in particular took a lot from Dune: an outsider arriving on a new planet and immediately “going native,” not merely joining the locals but becoming their savior. Three quarters of the way through the book, when Gurney Halleck and Paul watch a group of Fremen harness and ride a sandworm, Halleck can’t believe his eyes, and Paul says, “You heard my father speak of desert power. There it is. The surface of this planet is ours. No storm nor creature nor condition can stop us.” Halleck reflects: “Us… He means the Fremen. He speaks of himself as one of them.”

Of course, many of Dune’s themes and messages are universal. In the first few pages of the book, after the test of pain from the Reverend Mother, she tells Paul, “Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” Paul replies by quoting from the religious texts of his time (Dune is set in the year 10191), “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind.”

Writers before Herbert, like Isaac Asimov, had grappled with fears of machines in revolt (I, Robot was published in 1950), and writers after would too. I recently read and enjoyed Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber, the first book in the “Safehold” series. The premise is that in the future, humans have been nearly wiped out by an alien species called the Gbaba (sounds like the Buggers in Ender’s Game) that discovered us because our technology became too visible. To survive, the humans in power create a pre-industrial society (Safehold) that has no awareness of technology whatsoever. But they go too far and make them believe all tech is religious blasphemy; a female soldier from the past, preserved for hundreds of years and then re-awoken, visits in disguise as a man and shows them the truth. I saw heavy Dune influence in it.

But for all of Dune’s influence and wonder, the series truly takes off after the first book. It also gets much, much funnier.

And it’s all about Duncan Idaho.

I suppose this constitutes a spoiler for anyone who hasn’t read the book or seen the movie, but my essays here always deal with the entirety of a book, so this shouldn’t shock you unless you’re new here. Head for the exit now if this will upset you…

Duncan Idaho, who dies in the first book fighting the Sardaukar soldiers, returns in the second book, Dune Messiah. And in the third, and the fourth, and the fifth… because the Tleilaxu from the planet Tleilax, which is reviled but has advanced tech, create a ghola from Duncan Idaho’s dead body. (You’re meant to think of a golem, the creature in Jewish folklore created out of dust and brought to life by dark magic; but as the series goes on, I thought more often of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and the movie Moon with Sam Rockwell, and the movie Oblivion with Tom Cruise.)

In Dune Messiah, the ghola of Duncan Idaho goes by the name Hayt, and he has been pre-programmed to kill Paul when Paul utters a certain phrase, and Paul’s sister Alia falls in love with him.

It only gets crazier from there. By the third book, Children of Dune, Paul Atreides aka Muad’Dib aka the Kwisatz Haderach, now blind, has disappeared into the desert, but Duncan (the ghola) remains. Paul’s children with Chani, the twins Leto II and Ghanima, are now running Arrakis and have special powers. And Alia (their aunt) is possessed by the dead spirit of Baron Harkonnen. Duncan dies again—this time to protect Alia—and even he sees the irony of his situation, uttering as he falls, “Two deaths for the Atreides. The second for no better reason than the first.”

In the fourth book, God Emperor of Dune, Duncan is back again. It’s my favorite of all the books.

By this point, Paul’s son Leto II has lived and ruled Arrakis for 3,000 years, become part sandworm (seriously), and has the Tleilaxu sending him a steady stream of Duncan gholas from their assembly line. Each new Duncan keeps trying to kill him, and Leto simply has a new one sent over each time. (I think this is hilarious.)

In the opening of God Emperor, the newest Duncan reveals “a small explosive from the folds of his uniform robe,” signaling his intent to kill Leto, and we get this bit of comedy: “Leto loved surprises, even nasty ones. It is something I did not predict! And he said as much to Duncan.” Duncan, taken aback, says, “This could kill you,” and Leto says, “I’m sorry, Duncan. It will do a small amount of injury, no more.”

I was laughing out loud. After Leto dispatches this Duncan, the replacement Duncan becomes the main character of this book, rather than a supporting character like in the previous installments. I’d even argue Duncan is the true protagonist of the entire series. (If it’s not Duncan, it’s the planet of Arrakis itself.)

I cannot stress enough that these zany plots are a pleasure. The series truly becomes a joy after the first book; it’s like Frank Herbert unclenched.

The first Dune book is deadly serious (as is the 2021 movie; there is zero levity). The next four books are aware of their outlandishness, and revel in it.

Duncan Idaho is the constant presence and witness of the whole series, even more so than Paul. That’s why I liked the casting of the new movie: Jason Momoa is a perfect Duncan Idaho. I don’t want to discuss the movie too much here, but I felt it got a lot right; it was never going to be perfect, trying to cram 800 pages into 2.5 hours, which is why Denis Villeneuve didn’t try to do that, and instead split it into two movies.

The characters are where the series shines, and throughout the books I noticed how Herbert gives equal attention to fleshing out the villains. Other than the grotesque Baron Harkonnen, played perfectly by Stellan Skarsgard, the new movie barely gives any time to the Harkonnen henchmen who are all so colorful in the book: Feyd-Rautha, the spoiled favorite nephew of the baron; Beast Rabban, the fumbling other nephew of the baron; or Piter de Vries, the baron’s ruthless right-hand man and a mentat, like Thufir Hawat on the Atreides side.

So in the end, what is the Dune series about?

In August, the official Twitter account of the new movie asked, “Explain Dune in one sentence.” The replies were outstanding, and mostly from people who have clearly read the books. Some of my favorites:

“A 15,000 year-long lesson in why mixing monopoly power, religious fanaticism, drug addiction, and eugenics is probably not a great idea.” (Matthew Feeney)

“The one fucking guy in the universe who understands exactly how badly it will turn out for everyone still decides revenge > everything else.” (Michael J. Anderson)

“He’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!” (Multiple people; it’s from Monty Python’s Life of Brian but definitely applies to Paul.)

But my very favorite reply and summation of the series is this:

Happy reading.

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Since we last chatted in March about Normal People, I’ve been on a nonfiction diet. I tore through Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (on the Osage Indian murders over oil fortunes), American Fire by Monica Hesse (about a bizarre string of abandoned-house arsons in Virginia in 2012), Cult of Glory by Doug Swanson (on the Texas Rangers—the bloodthirsty militia, not the pro baseball team), and Taken By Bear in Yellowstone by Kathleen Snow (subject self-explanatory). I also read and loved the novels Klara and the Sun (Ishiguro), Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison, it blew my mind), Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (had been on my list for a very long time), and The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs (the good kind of weird).

What have you read and liked in 2021 so far? As always, I really do want to hear. And as always, if you enjoy this space and want to share it with friends, please forward this email. If you aren’t subscribed, or your friends aren’t, here you go:

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For Issue 12, I want to tell you about a sensation I privately think of as the feeling.

It’s the feeling I get from a certain kind of book or movie that makes me think about our cosmic insignificance. Some of these works involve “aliens,” but not all of them do. Most of these works get classified as sci-fi, but not all of them are.

The earliest I can remember getting the feeling was from the movie “Contact,” which we watched one day in 1999 in sixth grade life science class at Wayland Middle School.

In the key scene in “Contact,” Jodie Foster’s Dr. Ellie Arroway travels through space in a gyroscope via a series of wormholes (or thinks she does) and ends up on a beach where she meets her dead father. But after an emotional hug, she pulls away and says, “You’re not real. When I was unconscious, you downloaded my thoughts, my memories.” And her father (an alien) confirms, “We thought this might make things easier for you.” But that’s not the moment that most strongly gave me the feeling: it was when she returns and her colleagues tell her nothing happened on their end, the gyroscope simply fell to the ground and the feed was lost for a few seconds. (At the end of the movie, we find out the footage also recorded 18 hours of static.)

I should say here plainly that I fully believe there’s other life in the universe. The kookier-sounding way to phrase that is to say I believe in aliens, but this belief appears to have lost its stigma in recent years; just a couple months ago, CBS Sunday Morning ran a segment on UFO sightings. Of course, the most famous line in “Contact” is: “If there wasn’t, it would be an awful waste of space.” But the reason I believe in life beyond Earth is because it strikes me as absurd, and solipsistic, to conclude there isn’t simply because we haven’t discovered them yet.

I get a hint of the feeling from a few other alien or interplanetary travel movies like “Arrival,” “Signs,” and “Interstellar,” though not quite as strongly. I got the feeling from Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, but not from the next two books in the trilogy.

The feeling isn’t about being creeped out or scared, more like stunned silent. It’s when an artwork makes me think deeply enough about the likelihood that we are not alone, and thus not so special, and thus even more infinitesimally small than we already comprehend. It’s like a tingle. This, from a 2020 Stephen King short story I happen to have just read (“The Life of Chuck”), is a good description: “a small and not entirely unpleasurable chill.”

There was an article in Rolling Stone I read at least a decade ago in print that gave me the feeling, and I have been trying in vain to find the piece online ever since. (If you can find it and send it to me, God bless you.) The article was about people who have had near-death experiences, and as I recall (you know how it goes when your memory of an experience, book, or moment becomes more important than whether you remember it correctly) it quoted one person who was able to describe something that happened in the same hospital as them while they were in a coma, and another person who said that they met God, and God laid out before them all of their possible futures as a series of panels. I have never forgotten that article.

Season 1 of the Netflix show “The OA,” which is about a group of people who all had near-death experiences and are rounded up by a mad scientist of sorts, also gave me the feeling. (I appeared in a scene in the first episode of Season 2 of the show, which was very cool.)

Most recently, I strongly got the feeling from The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu.

The novel was published in China in 2008, where it was a massive success (the best-selling sci-fi novel in China in many decades), but didn’t get an English translation until 2014. It’s the first in a trilogy, and maybe I shouldn’t write about the series until I’ve read the second two books, but I’m also not sure I want to continue, in case the second two aren’t as breathtaking as the first.

What surprised me about the novel is that it doesn’t even read like science fiction until hundreds of pages in. It opens during China’s cultural revolution in the 1960s, when an astrophysics student, Ye Wenjie, witnesses her father, a professor, get beaten to death in an auditorium by student supporters of the Red Guard. Ye’s own mother and sister cheer on the beating. Ye gets branded a traitor as well, and sent to a labor camp where a journalist befriends her, then betrays her, and she ends up in prison. (This whole start to the book felt more like Darkness at Noon than, say, Dune.)

After reading a copy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (you could argue Three-Body Problem is eco-fiction) Ye concludes: “The use of pesticides had seemed to Ye just a normal, proper—or, at least, neutral—act, but Carson’s book allowed Ye to see that, from Nature’s perspective, their use was indistinguishable from the Cultural Revolution, and equally destructive to our world. If this was so, then how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteous were, in reality, evil? […] It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race. This thought determined the entire direction of Ye’s life.”

Ye eventually gets sent to a top secret Chinese government facility to do satellite research, only to discover the facility’s true purpose is to scan for messages from other planets. She intercepts a message from a planet called Trisolaris (three suns) that warns Earth not to respond, or else Trisolaris will invade Earth. Ye, disgusted with her own people (justifiably so), makes a terrible decision: she responds and dares Trisolaris to invade. This is the moment the book really got its tentacles in me.

In case you’re thinking that it sounds like the book starts slow: it does. But it also carries you along with an eerie guile, despite many complicated explanations of scientific theories. It is also an unemotional novel, not very concerned with character development. It’s far more about scope and vastness.

To wit: Late in the book, two scientists, Wang Miao and Ding Yi, are talking about what subatomic particles would look like to the naked eye (I know, I know, this might sound exhausting). Wang says the particles would just look like a tiny point. But Ding demonstrates how much can be contained in one tiny point by opening up a cigarette butt and revealing “the yellowed spongy material inside.” He says, “If you spread this little thing open, the absorbent surface area can be as large as a living room.” A pipe uses the same kind of filter inside as a cigarette, but it’s a longer tube filled with active charcoal, and Ding explains that if you take the active charcoal out, “the absorbent surface formed by the tiny holes inside is as large as a tennis court.” Wang asks (and you, too, might ask), “What are you trying to say?” Ding says (after some more sciency stuff): “Because God was stingy, during the big bang He only provided the macroscopic world with three spatial dimensions, plus the dimension of time. But this doesn’t mean that higher dimensions don’t exist… In the universe, an important mark of a civilization’s technological advancement is its ability to control and make use of micro dimensions… From the perspective of a more advanced civilization in the universe, bonfires and computers and nanomaterials are not fundamentally different. They all belong to the same level. That’s also why they still think of humans as mere bugs. Unfortunately, I think they’re right.”

The point, for me, beyond the science, was: look how much can be contained in a single point; how vast the universe is; how tiny we are.

This scene in The Three-Body Problem also reminded me of a specific detail in Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction that my friend Ryan loves to cite: Kolbert writes that in one hundred million years, every single thing created by humans will be “compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.”

It’s difficult to truly contemplate that. But thinking about is strangely satisfying, even if also upsetting, like picking at a scab. That’s the feeling.

The Three-Body Problem truly hits its stride when some of the characters discover what the reader already knows: that the computer game they’ve been playing (“The Three-Body Problem”), set on Trisolaris, was designed by the aliens of Trisolaris to recruit supporters on Earth. The game gets its players so enwrapped in its world and levels that by the time the Trisolarans behind the game reveal themselves, the players have been groomed to feel more kinship with Trisolaris than with Earth. And the big-picture intentions of the Trisolarans are… not friendly.

The first book leaves you pondering a scenario that really gives me the feeling: What would we do if we found out aliens exist, and are coming to invade Earth, but they won’t get here for hundreds of years?

Would we immediately drop everything we’re doing and band together as a planet to focus on preparing for war? How would regular people react? It’s really hard to predict with certainty. For many people, their entire belief system would crumble. I can imagine law and order immediately collapsing and some people going insane, but can also imagine many people shrugging and continuing to live their current lives.

There are certain sci-fi novels I love dearly that don’t give me the feeling, by the way. Ender’s Game was seminal for me; I’ve probably read it six or seven times. Dune was a revelation when I finally read it a couple of years ago and then tore through the next three books in the series. The Left Hand of Darkness is up there for me. But none of these novels set on other planets give me the feeling.

That’s not to say it’s only from books about contact with aliens. It can be about contact with God, or about what might happen eons in the future, long after us, so I think the idea of our own cosmic smallness is the key for me.

Three other books that do it for me that I’d highly recommend, each of them extremely different (but bound by the common feeling they give me, and how long they’ve stuck with me): The Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian, in which the Earth is flooded again and one hospital becomes the Ark, selected by God to survive and build the next society (holy shit, right?); The Book of Dave by Will Self, about a society far in the future that adopts an angry diary written by an angry London cabbie in our time and printed on metal as its Bible, thinking its author is God (brilliant); and Everything Matters! by Ron Currie Jr., in which a man born in Maine in 1974 is told, by a voice in his head, exactly how and when the world will end, and given a chance to save it.

You can see an obvious theme here. And folks, the truth is out there.

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Further reading: How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America (New York Times Magazine)

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I’m currently reading Deacon King Kong by James McBride (after loving The Good Lord Bird—the book and the show); The Circuit by Rowan Ricardo Phillips, an elegant account of the 2017 men’s pro tennis season; and I’ve just finished Kings of Crypto, a well-timed look at the origins of the soon-to-go-public crypto company Coinbase by my friend and colleague Jeff John Roberts (no relation!).

And now: Let’s talk normalcy.

I started this newsletter last September to write about and recommend books, old or new, that you might have missed. Apartment by Teddy Wayne, for example, was reviewed in most of the prestige places, but I felt it went overlooked by many readers; The Natural by Bernard Malamud is known nowadays mostly as a movie, not widely read anymore; The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan is one of the best contemporary sports novels I’ve read, but it hasn’t had the long-tail of, say, The Art of Fielding; Hunter S. Thompson is first associated with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, while fewer people have read his book on the 1972 presidential campaign.

Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018) is not like those examples. It did not go unnoticed. Everyone read Normal People. It has sold more than a million copies in America.

The book enjoyed that rare combo, a writer’s dream: critical and commercial success. Raves and sales.

But the smash-hit Irish novel also became a lightning rod for sneering debate over whether it truly deserved all that success. The New York Times, in particular, raised the hackles of jealous writers everywhere when it hailed Rooney, then 27, as the “First Great Millennial Author.” (And the Google search results for “Sally Rooney voice of a generation” go on and on—sorry, Hannah Horvath.)

Then came the backlash.

Will Self, one of my favorite writers, was asked about Rooney in a 2019 interview with The Sunday Times. “It’s very simple stuff with no literary ambition that I can see,” he said. “What’s now regarded as serious literature would, 10 or 20 years ago, have been regarded as young-adult fiction.”

That is a deeply disappointing take.

Self is certainly a writer associated with ambition: his trilogy of novels Umbrella, Shark, and Phone runs 1,520 pages; The Book of Dave, my favorite novel of his, is written in a Cockney-inspired, completely original language Self created. Good for him. But here he’s dismissing an author’s work simply because she’s a young person, writing about young people, without using experimental language.

Self’s comments also remind me of Garth Greenwell’s essay in Harper’s last year (which I mentioned in my newsletter issue about Apartment) that rejected dismissal of art based purely on whether its subject matter is “relevant”: “It is always ethically suspect to speak of any human experience as irrelevant to our common human experience.”

Then Lorrie Moore, the celebrated short story writer, penned a piece last year in the New York Review of Books that opened with an acidly funny laundry list of millennial personality traits that was celebrated on Twitter…

To generalize sweepingly, and in a way that is not contradicted by Rooney’s work, some of the mutterings—I am only reporting—include the following: millennials seem wedded to ideas of status and conventional success, but they want to “infiltrate” plutocratic institutions as “Marxists” and prized guests; they will deride yet exploit all privilege; raised to be competitive, they find envy is not a form of hate but a legitimate aspect of success-culture and an expression of congratulations […]

Millennial virtues, to an older eye, include a non-specific gentleness and a deep, unfeigned, and generationally unprecedented acceptance of gender and sexual diversity. They are intolerant of bullying and have a broad definition of its related infractions. They give priority to vulnerability over courage and demand safe spaces. They are the Occupy Wall Street people, but once they occupied it, they appeared, rather endearingly, a little unclear on what to do next. Planning for the future is not a millennial strength. (How could it be? The college of their choice was the future they aimed for; the dull, work-saturated steps from here now to there later are often invisible to them; born to older parents, they did not witness their parents’ laborious professional beginnings.) They say, “No problem,” instead of “You’re welcome”—they are not good liars. They seem like nice people. But not normal. They often seem like nice people who privately are doing terrible things to themselves.

…only to end up pushing the entire list onto Rooney and her characters, and concluding that the Hulu show based on the book is better than the book. “The series portrays states of mind much better than the novel does. Rooney is not likely to hear from viewers that ‘your book was better,’ at least not very often or accurately, but she also may not care a whit.”

I disagree. The show eventually became exhausting for me and the characters grew annoying, something I never felt with the book. Beyond saying that, I’m not super interested in talking about the show here.

Here’s where I come in. I saw the abundance of breathless praise, and what felt like a year of fawning profiles of Rooney, and skipped the book at first. When you see the same snide take in enough places, you get influenced by it.

I finally read it in the fall, and loved it.

The word I keep coming back to when I talk about the novel is “relatable.” That may sound like damning with faint praise; a Twitter meme can be relatable, that doesn’t mean it’s fine art. But Rooney paints her picture of two people continually making the same mistakes in such a relatable and often sad way that it ends up being indelible.

The plot is extremely simple: two kids in a small coastal town in Ireland, one a popular jock (Connell), the other a geeky introvert (Marianne); they hook up, but Connell is socially embarrassed of her, and demands she keep it a secret; later, they both end up at Trinity College Dublin, where their social standing has reversed. (Plus one socioeconomic wrinkle: Marianne is rich; Connell is not, and his single mother works as a maid in Marianne’s mansion.)

That’s about it. They continually break apart and come back together, and emotionally hurt each other and themselves through their misunderstandings and assumptions. It’s their dialogue with each other, as well as their own private thoughts, where Rooney’s writing shines.

When Connell tells Marianne early on that she acts differently outside of school (when they secretly hang out) than she does in school, she thinks to herself, “He seemed to think Marianne had access to a range of different identities, between which she slipped effortlessly. This surprised her, because she usually felt confined inside one single personality… She had tried to be different in the past, as a kind of experiment, but it had never worked.”

That one passage is basically a preview of the entire book. Both characters keep trying to become someone else, but in the end they can’t escape themselves. And what’s more high school than trying to put on a more appealing personality? (Later, when they’re at Trinity, Connell reflects that back home, in high school, “His personality seemed like something external to himself, managed by the opinions of others, rather than anything he individually did or produced.”)

It’s artful how Rooney shifts our allegiances back and forth between her two protagonists. Connell is popular, but crippled by his desire to maintain his popularity.

He’s aware of that shortcoming: “Marianne lived a drastically free life, he could see that. He was trapped by various considerations. He cared what people thought of him.”

But that awareness of his problem does nothing to help him overcome it. After sleeping with and adoring Marianne for months in private, he nonetheless asks a different (popular) girl, whom he actually hates, to the Debs, a Prom-like formal ball. The moment he does it, “He felt as if he had just jumped off a high precipice and fallen to his death, and he was glad he was dead, he never wanted to be alive again.” He knows he’s done something cruel and completely unnecessary, but he’s so weak that he still has to do it, in some effort to upkeep his social status.

It’s a crippling moment in the book, but even more quietly devastating is Marianne’s response. She’s heartbroken, but also expected this kind of treatment. “It obviously was kind of funny,” she reflects, “just how savagely he had humiliated her, and his inability to apologise or even admit he had done it.”

When Connell’s mother finds out what he did, she tells him, “I’m ashamed of you,” and the reader is deeply relieved to finally hear a character say that to Connell explicitly. The reader’s relief is echoed by Marianne herself, when Connell’s mother says to her, “He doesn’t deserve you.” From hearing that, Rooney writes, “Marianne felt a relief so high and sudden that it was almost like panic.”

Marianne skips the Debs ball, and basically skips school for the rest of the year in embarrassment. At the ball, one of Connell’s friends mentions so nonchalantly that they all knew he’d been seeing Marianne (and don’t much care), that Connell finally realizes “the secret for which he had sacrificed his own happiness and the happiness of another person had been trivial all along, and worthless.” (I remember all too well the things you would resist doing out of some misplaced fear of what your friends would think about it—at that age, you lack the foresight to know that in just a few short years, you’ll understand that nothing from high school mattered.)

We still don’t get Connell’s full acknowledgment of his shame until later, when he’s now at Trinity and, looking back on the school year prior, Rooney writes that he “felt a debilitating shame about the kind of person he’d turned out to be.” By then, their social statuses have flipped: Marianne, with her brains and self-assuredness, makes friends right away; Connell, shy and hung up about his socioeconomic background, finds himself without many friends, and soon clinging to Marianne’s group.

Their ever-shifting balance of power drives the story. In high school, Connell has sex with Marianne but demands she not tell a soul, and Marianne complies. She “would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted.” (Self-harm, both physical and emotional, is a recurring specter for Marianne.) But in college, she’s the one surrounded by adoring friends, and Connell is at first the ‘friend from home,’ a hanger-on of sorts.

Almost all of the fights or splits the two of them have in college are caused by brainless misunderstandings that drive the reader mildly insane, while also feeling extremely familiar.

One of the finest-wrought of these moments is when, toward the end of their first year at Trinity, Connell goes to tell Marianne (they’re now dating again) that due to money being tight, he has to move out of his apartment for the summer. He intends to ask her if he can live with her for the summer—the reader knows that would have received a resounding “yes”—but loses his nerve. They know each other so intimately, and yet they’re each terrified, for most of the novel, of saying what they actually want out loud.

“He couldn’t understand how this had happened, how he had let the discussion slip away like this. It was too late to say he wanted to stay with her, that was clear, but when had it become too late? It seemed to have happened immediately.”

Then, the self-sabotage: Connell, bizarrely, tells her, “I guess you’ll want to see other people, then, will you?” leaving Marianne with no option but to say, “Sure.”

Yes, it’s maddening. And it strikes me as a bullseye-accurate portrayal of the stupid, rash things young people do and say to themselves and others.

If there’s anything annoying about the book, it’s the intensity of every little interaction. Occasionally you do want to roll your eyes and ask, Does it all have to be so fucking serious? But then you remember that’s how high school and college often felt; every romantic relationship had the equal potential to be blissful or catastrophic.

So, does all that make Normal People unambitious? Hardly.

And, to state the obvious, might there be a reason for why the lion’s share of the negativity toward Rooney comes from other writers?

In January, I saw a friend of mine, who is a very smart published novelist herself, post an Instagram Story photo of a copy of Normal People with a GIF that said: “Basic!”

It didn’t sit well with me. When I think of “basic,” at least in the context my generation (which is Rooney’s generation) uses it, my first associations are with Ugg boots, North Face vests, Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes, avocado toast.

I DM’d my friend and asked her: “Why basic? I don’t understand the Sally Rooney hate.” She replied: “Isn’t the definition of basic anything that’s super popular and kind of middlebrow? I don’t think the hate is really about her, it’s about the phenomenon.”

But see, there’s Garth Greenwell’s point again in that Harper’s essay. We must not dismiss entire genres of literature based on a loose theme—millennial malaise, in this case, but plug in whatever you wish: boarding school novels; workplace comedies; novels about slavery; bildungsromans about aspiring writers. And we must not penalize popular novels out of hand due to their popularity.

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I’m currently reading Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam and Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (if you’ve read the last few issues, you know I’m on a Denis Johnson kick). On the television side, we’ve been watching “The Good Lord Bird” on Showtime, and I think it’s a perfect adaptation of James McBride’s excellent, hilarious novel.

But it’s difficult right now to think or talk about anything beyond what happened on Jan. 6, and what’s happening right now in America writ large. And although the Trump Era ends on Jan. 20, the aftershocks will remain for a very long time.

Over the past four years, political dystopias have been in vogue in fiction and on television, for obvious reasons. In 2017, The New Yorker declared a new “golden age for dystopian fiction,” including Omar El Akkad’s American War, which I wrote about in Issue 5.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” premiered on Hulu in 2017, the perfect timing, 32 years after the novel was published. The continued dystopian nature of real life created an ideal moment for Margaret Atwood to publish a sequel, The Testaments, in 2019. It was similarly perfect timing for Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, in which Nazi sympathizer pilot Charles Lindberg is elected president and touts an “America First” agenda to keep America out of WWII.

Meanwhile in new fiction, Mark Doten’s smart 2019 novel Trump Sky Alpha imagines a nuclear war started by President Trump, who flies around in a zeppelin, broadcasting his own absurdist reality show from the sky. Gish Jen’s 2020 novel The Resisters paints a near future in which the wealthy elite live in comfort and answer to an Autonet (“Aunt Nettie”) that sounds a lot like Siri or Alexa (or the in-home telescreens of 1984), while the poor live in dilapidated houseboats and survive on a basic income.

Some of those novels felt a little too on the nose for our current situation. (The same goes for Lawrence Wright’s The End of October—why would I want to read about a fictional pandemic while living through a real one?)

The dystopian novel that has stayed with me most in the past few years, since I first read it in 2016, is Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, published in 2015 in France as Soumission. (The German is even better: Unterwerfung.)

The novel is set in France in 2022, when the country elects a Muslim Brotherhood candidate as its new president. Mohammed Ben Abbes (fictional) defeats the real-life far-right leader Marine Le Pen, and promptly institutes Sharia law: women stop wearing revealing clothes; men are encouraged to take multiple wives; schools separate boys from girls; professors are forced out unless they convert to Islam. The novel’s protagonist Francois is a professor at the Sorbonne, and when he returns from a hiatus spent in a monastery, the school has been renamed The Islamic University of Paris, and all of his colleagues have taken multiple wives.

I can’t quite call Submission a dystopia, which the dictionary defines as “an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.” Dystopias are typically hellscapes. The twist of Submission isn’t that Ben Abbes gets elected, it’s the peaceful aftermath. The French happily submit to Islamic fundamentalism. That’s the book’s big punch line. Most people are happy with Ben Abbes’s regime. (Except for the Jews. They leave France.)

None of that sounds very funny, perhaps, but the novel is frequently hilarious, as are all of Houellebecq’s novels, if you can see the misogyny of his angry male characters as satire. (I’m not very interested in debating the real-life views and perceived offenses of the author himself, though many people detest him; I’m interested in the text.)

And none of that sounds like America over the past four years, perhaps, but the experience of a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, who assigned Submission in a European history seminar, is telling. Nathan Ristuccia wrote:

I discovered, to my shock, that in 2017, University of Chicago students did not read Submission as being about Islam. They read it as being about Trump. Trump’s name was never spoken. Yet he haunted the classroom, lurking behind pregnant looks and awkward laughter. “Centrists are pathetic,” said one student, explaining why the novel’s mainstream French politicians lose to the Muslim Brotherhood and the National Front. “All the energy today is in radicalism.”

I had the exact same reaction when I read the novel in 2016: I read it as being about Trump. Not intentionally about Trump, since it was written before Trump was even a candidate. But history can color a piece of fiction differently, and after four years of Trump, Submission reads to me as prescient.

That’s not to say Ben Abbes is Trump. He’s actually more like Emmanuel Macron. As Nathan Ristuccia writes, Ben Abbes sounds like a voice of “reason, moderation, economic centrism, and European integration: Emmanuel Macron with headscarves.”

Ben Abbes sweeps into power through charm, touting a return to faith and traditional values. “His real stroke of genius was to grasp that elections would no longer be about the economy, but about values,” Francois says. Ben Abbes “campaigned on family values, traditional morality and, by extension, patriarchy.”

Trump campaigned on bluster and insults. He occasionally referenced his Christianity, but everyone knows his faith is fake—look no further than the stunt when Ivanka handed daddy a Bible from her $1,500 Max Mara purse and he proceeded to hold it aloft, upside down. (In a 2019 Bloomberg interview, Trump could not cite a single specific Bible verse.)

But Trump also succeeded. And as different as Ben Abbes is from Trump on paper, Houellebecq’s fictional France, after electing an Islamic fundamentalist, has strong shades of America during the Trump presidency. As NPR wrote in 2015, “Few will disagree that Michel Houellebecq's Submission… is a novel of ideas — even though most of them are deeply discomfiting if not downright offensive.”

Okay, here a brief digression about Houellebecq’s body of work, and his reputation, may be necessary.

My first Houellebecq was Platform (2001), which I read in 2013 after the cover caught my eye. (Again: covers matter!) It was scathing, hilarious, and then, in its violent climax, devastating. It’s about a lonely forty-something man who takes a trip to Thailand, meets a beautiful woman and has lots of sex with her—and then a terrorist event happens.

I immediately read The Elementary Particles (1998) (published in the U.K. with the title Atomised, for some reason), about two sex-obsessed brothers, and liked that too.

I would come to learn this is the basic formula of every Houellebecq novel: An angry, self-pitying, sex-obsessed man (“In the end, my cock was all I had,” Francois reflects in Submission) has a few sexual flings, or has no sex but ruminates sadly about past sexual flings, all amid the backdrop of a political shift that crescendoes in a violent political event. (The New York Times wrote in 2018 that Houellebecq “understood what it meant to be an incel long before the term became common.”)

But there’s a lot of humor along the way, as well as trenchant observations about sex, culture, and politics. For example, Valerie, the (disillusioned) love interest in Platform, tells the protagonist: “The men I know are a disaster, not one of them believes in love; so they give you this big spiel about friendship, affection… I’ve reached the point where I can’t stand the word ‘friendship’ anymore, it makes me physically sick. Or there’s the other lot, the ones who get married, who get hitched as early as possible and think about nothing but their careers afterwards. You obviously weren’t one of those; but I also immediately sensed that you would never talk to me about friendship, that you would never be that vulgar.” (The word “vulgar” is doing strong work there.)

Although Houellebecq’s men can be brutal in their assessments of women, they are at least also equally hard on themselves. They are painfully self-aware. The protagonist of his newest novel Serotonin (2019), before meeting up with an old girlfriend for coffee many years after they dated, asks the reader, “Did I really want to know what had become of Claire? Probably nothing very brilliant… The meeting of two forty-year-old losers and former lovers could have been a magnificent scene in a French film, with the appropriate actors—let’s suggest Benoit Poelvoorde and Isabelle Huppert for the sake of argument; in real life, was that what I wanted?”

Yes, his humor will offend the easily offended. In Platform, a man in a bar remarks, “All anti-Semites agree that the Jews have a certain superiority. If you read anti-Semitic literature, you will be struck by the fact that the Jew is considered to be more intelligent, more cunning, he is credited with having singular financial talents, and greater communal solidarity. Result: six million dead.” I can laugh at that, though I can think of specific people in my life who would not. (The joke could also be written as: “Hitler was just jealous.”)

Houellebecq in real life, like his characters, has said controversial and offensive things. And every time he publishes a new novel, reviewers devote much of their word counts to enumerating his past offenses and provocations. He once called Islam the “stupidest religion”; he has been sued by Muslim groups; he has been accused of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism alike. But in an era of daily ad hominem attacks by the President of the United States, I can’t gather the energy to be triggered by Houllebecq.

Submission had the misfortune of being published in France on Jan. 7, 2015, the day of the terrorist attack on the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo, something Houellebecq could not have foreseen—and a cartoon of Houellebecq was on the cover of that week’s issue. The terrible timing killed the book’s rollout, and then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls even said on TV that day, “France is not Michel Houellebecq. It is not intolerance, hate, and fear.”

Serotonin depicts a farmers’ revolt toward its conclusion that looks a lot like the Yellow Vest protests in France in 2018, even though the novel was written before those events. In a review of Serotonin, Quillette asked whether Houellebecq is “prophet or troll.”

Amidst all the controversy, there is still something close to consensus around his talent and his predictive abilities. As the Times wrote, “While Houellebecq has always been a polarizing figure — admired for his provocations, disdained for his crudeness — he has turned out to be a writer of unusual prescience.” (In Platform, the protagonist says, “I had never considered elections as anything more than excellent television shows,” presaging the ultimate reality television president.)

To return to Submission: What has stuck with me, and what interests me most, is the concept of submission.

Francois observes his country’s embrace of Islam with mild shock, then inevitable acceptance. When a fellow professor who has converted to Islam tries to convince Francois to convert, he uses the French bondage novel The Story of O to illustrate his case: “It’s submission. The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission.”

Salman Rushdie describes the same effect, with almost exactly the same language, in The Satanic Verses. After Mahound (Rushdie’s stand-in for Mohammed) returns to Jahilia from Mount Cone with a revelation about false verses, Abu Simbel, the Grandee of Jahilia, “institutes a policy of persecution,” Rushdie writes. “The name of the new religion is Submission… its adherents must submit to being sequestered in the most wretched, hovel-filled quarter of the city; to a curfew… And, by one of the familiar paradoxes of history, the numbers of the faithful multiply, like a crop that miraculously flourishes as conditions of soil and climate grow worse and worse.”

Trumpism is a form of submission. His supporters submit wholly and passionately. They attempted an insurrection in his name. (Now they’d like him to pardon them.) Republicans like Lindsey Graham happily submitted—better to sacrifice your own values to stay in power, and in the chief’s good graces—than stand for something.

The rest of the country also submitted, I’d argue, in a different way: to the relentless daily Trump news cycle. To the tweets that moved markets. To the public insults (Rosie O’Donnell was a “disgusting” “fat” “slob”; Mika Brzezinski was “bleeding badly from a facelift”), and the barbs about foreign leaders (“little rocket man”).

As Andrew Sullivan wrote in in February 2017, just one month into the Trump presidency, “One of the great achievements of free society in a stable democracy is that many people, for much of the time, need not think about politics at all. The president of a free country may dominate the news cycle many days — but he is not omnipresent — and because we live under the rule of law, we can afford to turn the news off at times… In that sense, it seems to me, we already live in a country with markedly less freedom than we did a month ago.” (Political think-pieces roasted this as a bad take that expresses a longing for political apathy, but I didn’t read it that way.)

We became inured. Yes, people kept tweeting “This 👏 is 👏 not 👏 normal!” and “RESIST!” but it stopped meaning much.

Then Trump lost reelection, and still those who had submitted did not believe it. Then, Jan. 6 happened, and many of those who submitted appeared to snap out of it, like emerging from a long stupor. Big Tech platforms, which submitted and enabled the invective for four years, shut off Trump’s faucet at the eleventh hour in a vacuous appeal to the incoming Dems about to take power. (Please withhold your applause.)

Houellebecq’s ultimate joke in Submission is that it feels good to submit. (To quote 1984: “He loved Big Brother.”) But what about the casualties?

At the end of Plot Against America, Lindbergh vanishes, Roosevelt becomes president again, and as Washington Post book critic Ron Charles wrote this week, “It's as though the paroxysm of violence that tore across the country never happened.” Except for the Newark Jews whose lives were shattered.

Roth’s seemingly tidy ending, Charles writes, “anticipated with eerie accuracy the efforts of many politicians like Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). They spent months flaming the rage of Trump’s racist thugs, but hours after the deadly assault on the Capitol, these same politicians started insisting that we must quickly move on, forget the president’s culpability and learn nothing.”

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