What A Novel Idea
I’ve been inhaling novels lately. I’m on such a roll. Some time between 7 and 8 on most nights, I get in to bed with my six year old, both of us in our pajamas, she on a screen, and I just read and read and read until I’m ready to fall asleep, at which point I put her to bed with a couple of Peppa Pig stories and the singing of three songs. This is the predictable heaven section of my life. There are other pleasures, here and there, some catch me by surprise, some are planned, but this little slice of the day, it’s the little piece of perfect I know I will have in a complicated life in a world gone mad.
The books on this roll, you’re wondering, what have they been? Well, first there was Big Swiss, a raunchy satire of Hudson, NY. Then there was The Anniversary - a 400 plus page literary thriller that takes place in the agonizing weeks after a writer’s husband falls - or gets pushed off - a cruise ship. Then I read Rachel Cusk’s Transit - with another moody narrator I was happy to be hooked to, and then Less is Lost, Andrew Sean Greer’s hilarious follow up to his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Less.
Something I only realized a minute ago - the last three novels all had novelists as protagonists! In The Anniversary, the book tour was the monster. You know the classic narrative conflicts, Man V Man, Man V Himself Man V Nature? This was Writer V Book Tour. The book tour was perpetually coming close to killing the writer. I need at least a few of you to read this book and tell me what you thought. (Could it have been shorter? Yes! But wasn’t it a long astonishing companion?)
The pleasures of Transit, well I can’t explain them. The narrator’s glum, she’s introducing us to a series of frustrating scenarios, there’s no plot, there’s not much humor - but I loved it. Some writers just have great tension in their sentences and scenes, and they have a glare. They’re glaring at things, so intensely, so unwaveringly, that as readers, we’re compelled. I don’t think I would enjoy an evening in real life with Rachel Cusk’s protagonist but I never want her books to end.
Funny isn’t it, what we want from characters versus what we want from people, what we want from novels that we can’t get from memoir or television series, what modes of escapism leave us feeling calmer and which in greater states of disarray.
Thanks for reading and thanks especially to my paying subscribers, who support my writing and keep this newsletter free for all.
I will leave you with this gem. It’s perfect.
xo Lizzie