The Maris Review, vol 12

At a time when I’m feeling increasingly helpless about the future of our country I immediately go to what I think I can help change. Which is why I’m always looking for the book angle...

What I read this week

State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg

Laura is a genius at depicting how time and space can both become squiggly and fluid in the aftermath of trauma. Her novels reveal the strange beauty in both the surreal and the mundane, and State of Paradise is no exception. It’s also set in Florida, which must be the capitol venue for strange beauty and surrealism and mundanity. The novel is set in post-pandemic lockdown Orlando, where the narrator and her husband are staying with her mother, while her sister who lives next door gets carried away with a VR headset that’s right out of The Three Body Problem. The narrator is a ghostwriter for a famous Florida crime novelist whose prose is loaded with cliches like “everything is not as it seems,” but guess what, when weird shit starts to happen and the narrator’s belly button mysteriously goes from outie to innie, everything is indeed not as it seems.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

I’ve been trying to go back and reread the books that I consider to be my all-time favorites, and it was time to revisit Arundhati Roy’s masterpiece given that she recently made headlines for winning the PEN Pinter prize for writers “who cast their ‘unflinching’ gaze on the world” while simultaneously facing prosecution by the Indian government for comments she made in 2010.

I remembered the tragedy at the center of the novel, set in Kerala, India in 1969, and I remembered how adeptly Roy writes children’s perspectives, and how so much joy and despair are mixed together in an extended sequence where a family goes to see The Sound of Music in a movie theater.

But what I forgot, maybe because the story feels so Important with a capital I, is how mean and petty and funny the characters can be. Take, for instance, this perfect, brutal description of the family’s maid: “Her head was too large for her body. She looked like a bottled fetus that had escaped from its jar of formaldehyde in a biology lab, and unshriveled and thickened with age.”

How is this real?

One of my eternal gripes is that fact-checking is not a proscribed step in the publishing process. I know people in the industry think I’m naive for expecting books to be fact-checked, just as I’m naive to think that labor conditions in publishing need to improve. I’m happy to be naive and right.

At a time when I’m feeling increasingly helpless about the future of our country I immediately go to what I think I can help change. Which is why I’m always looking for the book angle in the face of political disaster, I’m sorry! The Supreme Court has just ruled that the President of the United States can do whatever and not face any consequences. Checks and balances are gone.

So I wrote a plea to publishers in my column on Lit Hub.

Fine, platform all of Trump’s cronies. They have the right under the Constitution to be published, and Vivek Ramaswamy’s books have done well for publishers in the past. But I beg of the publishing community to demand that known liars who are supposedly working to overthrow our democracy are subject to a rigorous fact check when they publish books. It’s the very least we could do.

On thinking about Alice Munro in a terrible new context

New releases, 7/9

Big one today!

State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg

See above!

The Coin by Yasmin Zahar

My writeup from The Maris Review, vol 6

The Woman Unravelling is one of my favorite micro-genres, and The Coin is an ugly and beautiful addition. The unnamed narrator is a wealthy young woman in New York City who refers to herself as a “dirty Arab” and has a terrible case of mysophobia —she channels Lady McBeth with the most labor intensive skincare regimen ever. I’m reminded very much of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, with tones of After Leaving Mr. McKenzie and After Claude, books that detail the loneliness and narcissism of mental illness, but also the structural reasons (misogyny, for starters) why such angst is the only reasonable response.

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş

Reading now and loving.

Mourning a Breast by Xi Xi

Our Long Marvelous Dying by Anna DeForest

More, Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for Enough by Emma Specter

Toward Eternity by Anton Hur

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Lo Fi by Liz Riggs

This Great Hemisphere by Mateo Askaripour

And now a sneak peek at my NYT 100 Best Books of the 21st Century ballot