I’ve started reading fiction again. I’m not entirely sure when I entirely stopped. I never stopped reading (unlike some people), but at some point I convinced myself that I was too busy with research to bother with novels, and that when I wanted to scratch that itch I could invest a long Saturday in watching some epic, corpus callosum-expanding non-linear epic movie, or at least some twisty, buzzy prestige TV mini-series.
Fast forward a few years, and every 2.5 hour “epic” movie could have been a taut 90 minute thriller, every premium streaming TV series could have been a movie (epic or otherwise), and Hollywood’s alliance with dipshit private equity and fascistic Silicon Valley has me boycotting streaming subscriptions in favor of scouring garage sales and used book stores for “new” sources of entertainment.
It started when I helped move the Harry Van Arsdale labor center out of our Hudson Street location, to smaller digs on Park Ave. There was a pile of copies of August Wilson’s Fences that would have been pulped. I’ve long been interested in Wilson’s American Cycle, so I took a copy, read it and quite enjoyed it. Then, I spent an entire year reading Moby Dick. Yes, Ishmael is an hilarious narrator and the book is packed to the gills with interesting “fish facts” (I know, I know), but I’ll confess it was a slog.
At that point, I made a New Year’s resolution to myself to read Wilson’s entire American Cycle of plays. Much of it is great, although I’m not a huge fan of Wilson’s trope of having most of his plays end with a shocking act of violence. I’m surprised by how much of Jitney I was familiar with through a rabbithole of research I had done on the numbers game while writing We Always Had A Union. From what I recall of the New York Times’ long-ago review of Radio Golf, they thought it was a slightly tired and cliched tale of “buppie” gentrification. With the benefit of time, I’d say that Wilson captured the 1990s quite well, and would rate Radio Golf among his best plays. My favorite, Joe Turner Come and Gone, is actually having a revival on Broadway right now, but I’ll never be able to afford those tickets. I found its tale of re-slavery and thwarted love quite affecting and I wonder (this may be a strange connection to make) if it didn’t inspire the ending of the movie Castaway.
I read George Orwell’s 1984, while researching my history of dissident communism, Generals Without An Army. I’m a fan of Orwell as an essayist, but I’ve avoided this book. It’s one of those that’s ruined by its “fans,” who completely misunderstand Orwell’s real-life socialist beliefs. I was surprised by how tied some of Orwell’s details are to dissident communism. Big Brother’s opposition is an obvious stand-in for Trotsky, and their critique of Big Brother is a clear reference to a U.S. Trotskyist off-shoot called the Shachtmanites, who deemed Soviet society “bureaucratic collectism,” a new class society without any real socialism in it. One of “bureaucratic collectivism’s” theorists, James Burnham, turned right-wing and decided that a technocratic society run by a strata of managers would be a good thing. He had a crossover hit with his book, Managerial Revolution. Orwell gave it a negative review, but clearly borrowed Burnham’s prediction of “great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America” (in Orwell’s words) when creating Oceania (which “had always been at war with Eastasia.”) Apparently, Orwell found Burnham’s hopes for the future more chilling than anything Stalin could come up with.
I’m very judgy about dystopias, and I find the all-encompassing totalitarianism of 1984, narratively, too hard to just just go with. Such societies have to have in-groups (to whom the rules do not apply) and out-groups (against whom the rules are employed as a weapon. Margaret Atwood portrayed this dynamic quite well in Handmaid’s Tale. Still, 1984 is obviously a great book; a quick, bracing read. And I’m noticing more references that get peppered into extremely lazy editorial writing than I had previously realized. Seriously, don’t ever describe something as “double plus ungood.” You won’t come across as a serious person.
I stayed close to “political novels,” as I got back into the habit of reading fiction. I dived into Philip Roth’s “American Trilogy” next, starting with I Married a Communist. I will say this: Roth really did his historical research and really captured the sudden, dizzying reversal of fortune for Communist celebrities (and activists) in the late 1940s. But American Pastoral is the book that blew me away (no pun intended). I loved the way it played with perspective and memory. The account of the young woman who shook the Swede down for money for his daughter, with no apparent connection to his daughter, really gnawed at me as an unsettled plot detail. But the more the reader thinks about it, the more you realize that it’s a detail made up by Nathan in the book he’s writing. It’s not something that the Swede or the Swede’s brother told him. It didn’t happen! But, then, none of this happened. The entire novel is just a story made up by Philip Roth, who clearly enjoys fucking with you.
By now I’ve pledged to myself to always be reading one piece of fiction at any time. I find it a good transition at the end of the day to relax and read one chapter. And it probably improves my own craft to read good writers with an eye towards characterization and dialogue.
My wife reads a lot of fiction and tends to buy the books. I find this slightly horrifying, since I get most of my non-fiction books for free from the publishers, but it does give me a home library from which to borrow. I finally read Comrade Sally Rooney’s Normal People, which was a very compelling book. I don’t know if it’s because I’m less familiar with the peculiarities of Irish class society, or if I’m just out of touch with young people, but I found myself constantly thinking about how a simple direct conversation between the couple at the center of the book would clear up a lot of confusion about their situationship.
I had a slightly more breathless reaction to Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere. I enjoy Celeste’s postings on Bluesky, and her down-to-earth approach to activism. I had previously read Our Missing Hearts, but because I am judgy about dystopias I could get out of my own head of second-guessing if that’s how it all could really go down. But Little Fires Everywhere felt very real, and moving. I like her trick of just setting the story in the 1990s instead of having to research how teenagers communicate today with text messages and DMs. After the book is a couple years old, it’s not even a “period piece.” It would just read to most readers as if it was written and published in the 1990s. (It also helps that I must be the exact same age as Celeste and feel every single rock and roll reference in my bones.) There are little narrative details that stick with me, like how Mia is a virgin mother, or how the Richardson son would spend the rest of his life thinking his girlfriend had an abortion and skipped town. I generally hate the idea of sequels, but I wouldn’t mind seeing the author check in on Izzy or Pearl 20 years later.
I’m now working on Lonesome Dove. I can’t read this a chapter at a time, because it’s over 800 pages and the library won’t let me renew the book because there’s a long list of patrons waiting to borrow it. I got into this a little backwards. Larry McMurtry’s son, James McMurtry is a singer-songwriter that I enjoy. I figured writing talent must be in the genes, so let’s see how good his dad was at writing novels. I thought my wife would make fun of me for reading a “dad book,” but apparently it’s also become a Reddit book and a true modern-day classic. They just hanged Spoon. Maybe I’ll write more when I finish reading.