Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
336 pages
Published 2014
Read from December 19 to December 21
Rating: 4 out of 5
It's strange to read about apocalypses when you're living through one. The climate is changing, the obscenely rich hold all the power, right-wing authoritarianism is triumphant around the globe. Species and ecosystems are dying everywhere. The oceans are acid, whole continents are burning. The apocalypse is no longer science fiction. Novels about it feel all too real, more like "ripped from the headlines" current events than entertainment. Yet it almost seems quaint, during the slow collapse of capitalism and the slow apocalypse of carbon dioxide, to read about civilization falling due to a sudden, sweeping pandemic.
The Georgia Flu that kills most of humanity in Station Eleven feels like a throwback to Captain Tripps. At first not much seems to distinguish Mandel's pandemic die-off from the one in The Stand, aside from the salient fact that Mandel is a better writer than Stephen King and can construct a riveting story without resorting to Magical Black Folk plot devices. But as Station Eleven slips with precision between time periods—the final night before the collapse, its immediate aftermath, twenty years afterward, the years before it—the story Mandel wants to tell sketches a much different, much odder shape.
Station Eleven uses a population bottleneck event to examine ideas of fame and immortality, about art and what is worth remembering, about the stories that speak to us and the stories we shape with others. It took a while for me to understand where Mandel was going when she interrupted the tense adventures of the post-apocalyptic Traveling Symphony to depict in detail the (somewhat cliched) tabloid love life of an Old Hollywood-style Leading Man, a character type already anachronistic in 2014. But Mandel's strengths as a storyteller gave me confidence that she would tie it all together in a satisfactory way. My one complaint, funny enough, is the opposite of what one might say about a Stephen King tome: there are too few characters, even in the pre-pandemic years, making it feel like the entire post-apocalyptic world revolves around one tabloid-staple actor who died the night of the collapse, one artist who at one point was his wife, and another ex-wife with whom the actor had a son. And while the non-linear structure was accomplished beautifully, I felt that certain stories within the timeline—particularly that of Kirsten and the Traveling Symphony, twenty years after the Flu—weren't given enough space and didn't add up to much. But stylistically and emotionally, Station Eleven is a gorgeous work that tells the sort of tales not usually associated with the apocalypse.
Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Sunday, November 24, 2019
2019 read #21: Resurrection of the Wild by Deborah Fleming.
Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio's Natural Landscape by Deborah Fleming
182 pages
Published 2019
Read from November 19 to November 24
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
With a title like that, I expected this book to focus on a subject dear to my heart: the restoration and rewilding of landscapes and waterscapes. It turned out to be a series of essays, some published as long ago as 2000, all of them only vaguely connected by the book's subtitle. The overall theme is not rewilding so much as attempts to create a sustainable relationship between human beings and the natural world we dwell in. There are pocket biographies of John Chapman ("Johnny Appleseed") and sustainable farming innovator Louis Bromfield; there's an examination of how problematic and coercive Amish communities can be, followed without apparent irony by a wistful account of a young family building a counterculture homestead in the 1970s. Like a Midwestern answer to Roger Deakin's descriptions of Walnut Tree Farm, Fleming devotes a chapter to humble-bragging about the history and bucolic charms of her own farm, Wedding Pines.
Much of the rest of the book examines just how thoroughly factory farms, subdivision developments, strip mining, and horizontal fracking have destroyed the land, the soil, the water, the air, the landscape, human health, the natural world, and the future. "I did not think the human race worth saving," she remarks during a tangent about the missionaries who barge onto her farm. Far from resurrection, the impression Fleming leaves is one of defeat and erosion—the loss of our liberties to the wealthy few who keep county commissioners and state agencies in their pockets, a feeling of futility as urban sprawl devours more and more of the land. I've grown to appreciate and love the natural world of Ohio during these ten months of living here, which makes this book all the more depressing.
182 pages
Published 2019
Read from November 19 to November 24
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
With a title like that, I expected this book to focus on a subject dear to my heart: the restoration and rewilding of landscapes and waterscapes. It turned out to be a series of essays, some published as long ago as 2000, all of them only vaguely connected by the book's subtitle. The overall theme is not rewilding so much as attempts to create a sustainable relationship between human beings and the natural world we dwell in. There are pocket biographies of John Chapman ("Johnny Appleseed") and sustainable farming innovator Louis Bromfield; there's an examination of how problematic and coercive Amish communities can be, followed without apparent irony by a wistful account of a young family building a counterculture homestead in the 1970s. Like a Midwestern answer to Roger Deakin's descriptions of Walnut Tree Farm, Fleming devotes a chapter to humble-bragging about the history and bucolic charms of her own farm, Wedding Pines.
Much of the rest of the book examines just how thoroughly factory farms, subdivision developments, strip mining, and horizontal fracking have destroyed the land, the soil, the water, the air, the landscape, human health, the natural world, and the future. "I did not think the human race worth saving," she remarks during a tangent about the missionaries who barge onto her farm. Far from resurrection, the impression Fleming leaves is one of defeat and erosion—the loss of our liberties to the wealthy few who keep county commissioners and state agencies in their pockets, a feeling of futility as urban sprawl devours more and more of the land. I've grown to appreciate and love the natural world of Ohio during these ten months of living here, which makes this book all the more depressing.
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
2019 read #20: Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
163 pages
Published 2016 (English translation published 2018)
Read from November 18 to November 19
Rating: 4 out of 5
Alternately hilarious and infuriating, Convenience Store Woman examines the dysfunctions and dissociations of late capitalist society from the viewpoint of someone who feels happiest as an efficient cog within the machinery of a convenience store. Keiko Furukura has never been able to process social cues or understand people's expectations. Work at a convenience store provides her with a literal manual of how to behave and perform her duties, instructions she adheres to with gusto. Social expectations pressure Keiko: Date! Quit your go-nowhere job and pursue a career! Marry and raise a family! Happy in the convenience store, satisfied with a role she understands, Keiko wonders if she should be doing more to conform to the social role others seem to expect of her, that of a "human woman" instead of a reliable convenience store worker—concerns that reach a desperate level just as she crosses paths with a petulant, sniveling manbaby of an InCel.
Shiraha whines about how society hasn't changed since the Stone Age, how the best hunters still get the prettiest girls, how the village will chase you out if you don't conform—and how men have it so much worse than women. He is one of the most infuriating characters I can remember from any of my recent reads, so vividly realized that I wanted to wring his neck every time I turned the page.
Shiraha serves as a sort of warped mirror to Keiko's own inability to satisfy the social expectations of those around her. Keiko has no trouble seeing Shiraha's bullshit for what it is, for the most part, but sees bits of truth in his tantrums. My own reading is that both characters are reacting to the malaise of capitalist culture in different ways, neither one of them understanding the structural dysfunctions underlying their respective inability to "fit in." While Shiraha becomes a self-pitying grifter who bewails his constant victimhood, Keiko realizes of her own sister, "She's far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine."
Convenience Store Woman is a brief and breezy little novel that packs in so much insight into modern human life within its short length.
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
163 pages
Published 2016 (English translation published 2018)
Read from November 18 to November 19
Rating: 4 out of 5
Alternately hilarious and infuriating, Convenience Store Woman examines the dysfunctions and dissociations of late capitalist society from the viewpoint of someone who feels happiest as an efficient cog within the machinery of a convenience store. Keiko Furukura has never been able to process social cues or understand people's expectations. Work at a convenience store provides her with a literal manual of how to behave and perform her duties, instructions she adheres to with gusto. Social expectations pressure Keiko: Date! Quit your go-nowhere job and pursue a career! Marry and raise a family! Happy in the convenience store, satisfied with a role she understands, Keiko wonders if she should be doing more to conform to the social role others seem to expect of her, that of a "human woman" instead of a reliable convenience store worker—concerns that reach a desperate level just as she crosses paths with a petulant, sniveling manbaby of an InCel.
Shiraha whines about how society hasn't changed since the Stone Age, how the best hunters still get the prettiest girls, how the village will chase you out if you don't conform—and how men have it so much worse than women. He is one of the most infuriating characters I can remember from any of my recent reads, so vividly realized that I wanted to wring his neck every time I turned the page.
Shiraha serves as a sort of warped mirror to Keiko's own inability to satisfy the social expectations of those around her. Keiko has no trouble seeing Shiraha's bullshit for what it is, for the most part, but sees bits of truth in his tantrums. My own reading is that both characters are reacting to the malaise of capitalist culture in different ways, neither one of them understanding the structural dysfunctions underlying their respective inability to "fit in." While Shiraha becomes a self-pitying grifter who bewails his constant victimhood, Keiko realizes of her own sister, "She's far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine."
Convenience Store Woman is a brief and breezy little novel that packs in so much insight into modern human life within its short length.
Monday, November 18, 2019
2019 read #19: The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault.
The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault
447 pages
Published 1956
Read from September 14 to September 18
Rating: 4 out of 5
As a kid, first reading my older brother's social studies textbook and then branching out into history books scavenged from wholesaler warehouse sales, I idolized Athens. I felt proud of their democracy, even though I had absolutely no connection to it. I felt prouder still when, in summaries of the Peloponnesian War, Athens made temporary headway against those Spartan louts; I felt corresponding grief when Athens' fortunes turned.
Western Europeans have loved to claim cultural continuity with Rome ever since the Dark Ages, and with ancient Greece ever since the Renaissance. This is a long-standing cultural myth. There is no neat progression of one culture feeding into another, no diffusion of cultural "light" from one cradle of civilization to another. Western Europe was always a cultural backwater, and the only continuity is what they appropriated for themselves after discovering classic Greek writings when they fought against Greece's true cultural heirs (at least in terms of mathematics and philosophy) during the Crusades. America's Founding Fathers certainly bought into this myth, adding further legends of America's inheritance from republican Rome and democratic Athens. Perhaps that's why I championed that middle-school textbook version of Athens as a kid; printed around the end of the Cold War, my brother's textbook no doubt laid the propaganda on thick.
As an adult, I've developed a better understanding of just how ghastly and horrible republican Rome and democratic Athens were, and how they truly presaged the ghastly and horrible first two centuries of the American experiment. Athenian men discoursed on the meanings of freedom, human goodness, and good government, all while owning slaves, invading and genociding rival city-states for economic gain, and regarding women and children as essentially livestock, subject to the whims of their male heads of household. It's hard, really, to tell any difference between them and the framers of the Constitution. To this day, maintained as propaganda for America's forever-wars in Southwest Asia, we cling to this myth of Greece (read: conservative White Europeans and Americans) as a bastion of liberty and personal freedom fighting for survival against the despotism of "the East" (read: Islam, Jews, brown people, homosexuals—somehow all conflated into an all-encompassing Other that HATES OUR FREEDOMS). If you see a decal of a Corinthian helmet on someone's car, odds are they're a white supremacist on some level, someone who embraced the symbology of 300 as it metastasized throughout right-wing America.
The Last of the Wine was one of the first books mentioned when I asked for recommendations after getting my library card in 2012. (I forget who suggested it—it was over seven years ago, somehow.) Though published in 1956, it explores this tension between the high-minded ideals of Athenian philosophy and the ugly reality of its cultural norms. It tells a beautiful love story between two men who are drawn into the philosophical circle around Sokrates, while demonstrating that the cultural celebration of male love (as in many martial, patriarchal societies) was built upon a foundation of utterly nauseating, literally dehumanizing misogyny. Its two noble heroes become staunch democrats and fight against tyrants and oligarchs for almost a decade, yet their philosophical high-mindedness is only possible thanks to their vast privilege of wealth, status, and gender affording them leisure and education. One could write a library of dissertations dissecting the intersectionality of these characters and Renault's vividly realized Attica. The parallels between Sokrates' Athens and the conservative myth of America, whether intended by the author or not, were impossible to ignore.
All that said, I adore this book. The story is poignantly told, rich with eroticism and devotion, bitter with jealousy and generation upon generation of trauma. I started reading it after all this time after seeing it name-checked in Jo Walton's Among Others (which I partially reread recently, after encouraging my partner to read it); fittingly, The Last of the Wine stirred my deeply buried urge to write. The sweep of its historical setting, the antique dialogue nonetheless sparkling with personality and cadence, the interplay of love and war—it all made me want to write fantasy stories, and helped me to understand why so much fantasy fiction before the 1980s (and continuing on to today, if The Priory of the Orange Tree is any indication) seemed to borrow so much from the trappings of historical fiction. In brief: I want to write something that captures the feel of this book, without having to do all that labor-intensive research first.
447 pages
Published 1956
Read from September 14 to September 18
Rating: 4 out of 5
As a kid, first reading my older brother's social studies textbook and then branching out into history books scavenged from wholesaler warehouse sales, I idolized Athens. I felt proud of their democracy, even though I had absolutely no connection to it. I felt prouder still when, in summaries of the Peloponnesian War, Athens made temporary headway against those Spartan louts; I felt corresponding grief when Athens' fortunes turned.
Western Europeans have loved to claim cultural continuity with Rome ever since the Dark Ages, and with ancient Greece ever since the Renaissance. This is a long-standing cultural myth. There is no neat progression of one culture feeding into another, no diffusion of cultural "light" from one cradle of civilization to another. Western Europe was always a cultural backwater, and the only continuity is what they appropriated for themselves after discovering classic Greek writings when they fought against Greece's true cultural heirs (at least in terms of mathematics and philosophy) during the Crusades. America's Founding Fathers certainly bought into this myth, adding further legends of America's inheritance from republican Rome and democratic Athens. Perhaps that's why I championed that middle-school textbook version of Athens as a kid; printed around the end of the Cold War, my brother's textbook no doubt laid the propaganda on thick.
As an adult, I've developed a better understanding of just how ghastly and horrible republican Rome and democratic Athens were, and how they truly presaged the ghastly and horrible first two centuries of the American experiment. Athenian men discoursed on the meanings of freedom, human goodness, and good government, all while owning slaves, invading and genociding rival city-states for economic gain, and regarding women and children as essentially livestock, subject to the whims of their male heads of household. It's hard, really, to tell any difference between them and the framers of the Constitution. To this day, maintained as propaganda for America's forever-wars in Southwest Asia, we cling to this myth of Greece (read: conservative White Europeans and Americans) as a bastion of liberty and personal freedom fighting for survival against the despotism of "the East" (read: Islam, Jews, brown people, homosexuals—somehow all conflated into an all-encompassing Other that HATES OUR FREEDOMS). If you see a decal of a Corinthian helmet on someone's car, odds are they're a white supremacist on some level, someone who embraced the symbology of 300 as it metastasized throughout right-wing America.
The Last of the Wine was one of the first books mentioned when I asked for recommendations after getting my library card in 2012. (I forget who suggested it—it was over seven years ago, somehow.) Though published in 1956, it explores this tension between the high-minded ideals of Athenian philosophy and the ugly reality of its cultural norms. It tells a beautiful love story between two men who are drawn into the philosophical circle around Sokrates, while demonstrating that the cultural celebration of male love (as in many martial, patriarchal societies) was built upon a foundation of utterly nauseating, literally dehumanizing misogyny. Its two noble heroes become staunch democrats and fight against tyrants and oligarchs for almost a decade, yet their philosophical high-mindedness is only possible thanks to their vast privilege of wealth, status, and gender affording them leisure and education. One could write a library of dissertations dissecting the intersectionality of these characters and Renault's vividly realized Attica. The parallels between Sokrates' Athens and the conservative myth of America, whether intended by the author or not, were impossible to ignore.
All that said, I adore this book. The story is poignantly told, rich with eroticism and devotion, bitter with jealousy and generation upon generation of trauma. I started reading it after all this time after seeing it name-checked in Jo Walton's Among Others (which I partially reread recently, after encouraging my partner to read it); fittingly, The Last of the Wine stirred my deeply buried urge to write. The sweep of its historical setting, the antique dialogue nonetheless sparkling with personality and cadence, the interplay of love and war—it all made me want to write fantasy stories, and helped me to understand why so much fantasy fiction before the 1980s (and continuing on to today, if The Priory of the Orange Tree is any indication) seemed to borrow so much from the trappings of historical fiction. In brief: I want to write something that captures the feel of this book, without having to do all that labor-intensive research first.
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
2019 read #18: A Particular Kind of Black Man by Tope Folarin.
A Particular Kind of Black Man by Tope Folarin
262 pages
Published 2019
Read from November 1 to November 13
Rating: 4 out of 5
This book was an emotionally draining read, but not for the reasons I expected. Going into it blind, without having read the jacket summary, I envisioned a brutal tearjerker about racism in America and the violence of the police state, assuming (in my white liberal ignorance) that every Black story in 2019 would be akin to The Hate U Give. Instead, while racism in America very much played a role in the tale, A Particular Kind of Black Man dealt with themes of family and identity, of mental illness and heredity, of coping with loss by editing the past—all things painfully personal and relatable for me.
It says something about my own internalized racism, absorbed from my upbringing and still visible even in my attempts to become a decent person, that I wasn't prepared to relate so strongly to a Nigerian American's fictional narrative. That's an embarrassing fact to have to admit to. I grew up with a schizophrenic parent; I was abandoned by my own mother at a young age; I've sabotaged relationships through my own insecurity. Turning each page was a challenge because of how deeply I cringed at Tunde's social self-destruction. I knew his story all too well; I didn't want to see it happen again, no matter how fictionalized.
I feel embarrassed for expecting a thunderous rebuke of state violence instead of a narrative with its own fully realized ends. I feel ashamed of how little Black fiction I've read. Owning up to it is one step forward, I hope: reading more is another.
262 pages
Published 2019
Read from November 1 to November 13
Rating: 4 out of 5
This book was an emotionally draining read, but not for the reasons I expected. Going into it blind, without having read the jacket summary, I envisioned a brutal tearjerker about racism in America and the violence of the police state, assuming (in my white liberal ignorance) that every Black story in 2019 would be akin to The Hate U Give. Instead, while racism in America very much played a role in the tale, A Particular Kind of Black Man dealt with themes of family and identity, of mental illness and heredity, of coping with loss by editing the past—all things painfully personal and relatable for me.
It says something about my own internalized racism, absorbed from my upbringing and still visible even in my attempts to become a decent person, that I wasn't prepared to relate so strongly to a Nigerian American's fictional narrative. That's an embarrassing fact to have to admit to. I grew up with a schizophrenic parent; I was abandoned by my own mother at a young age; I've sabotaged relationships through my own insecurity. Turning each page was a challenge because of how deeply I cringed at Tunde's social self-destruction. I knew his story all too well; I didn't want to see it happen again, no matter how fictionalized.
I feel embarrassed for expecting a thunderous rebuke of state violence instead of a narrative with its own fully realized ends. I feel ashamed of how little Black fiction I've read. Owning up to it is one step forward, I hope: reading more is another.
Friday, October 11, 2019
2019 read #17: The Quick by Lauren Owen.
The Quick by Lauren Owen
526 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 6 to October 11
Rating: 4 out of 5
Short stories have broken my heart within an efficiency of pages—James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" (reviewed here) comes to mind. The Quick, however, might be the very first novel to have me bawling my eyes out within the first ten pages.
I've been wanting to read this book essentially since it came out; I found it on the new books shelf at my former local library and was immediately taken with its cover. This month, I've been feeling an urge to read horror, something I say every October, but this time I'm finally acting on it to some extent. The Quick seemed like the perfect place to begin.
In a Late Victorian London populated with enough vampires to round out several competing factions, bloodshed and grisly deaths can be found in spades, yet The Quick seems less interested in being chilling than in finding the tragedy woven throughout. It never again quite broke my heart with the same intensity it did in the beginning (though the last chapter came close), but sadness pervaded the novel like fog. It is a total bummer of a novel—but a beautiful bummer that earns every heartbreak.
526 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 6 to October 11
Rating: 4 out of 5
Short stories have broken my heart within an efficiency of pages—James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" (reviewed here) comes to mind. The Quick, however, might be the very first novel to have me bawling my eyes out within the first ten pages.
I've been wanting to read this book essentially since it came out; I found it on the new books shelf at my former local library and was immediately taken with its cover. This month, I've been feeling an urge to read horror, something I say every October, but this time I'm finally acting on it to some extent. The Quick seemed like the perfect place to begin.
In a Late Victorian London populated with enough vampires to round out several competing factions, bloodshed and grisly deaths can be found in spades, yet The Quick seems less interested in being chilling than in finding the tragedy woven throughout. It never again quite broke my heart with the same intensity it did in the beginning (though the last chapter came close), but sadness pervaded the novel like fog. It is a total bummer of a novel—but a beautiful bummer that earns every heartbreak.
Sunday, October 6, 2019
2019 read #16: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh
289 pages
Published 2018
Read from September 29 to October 6
Rating: 3 out of 5
Can I recognize the quality of this book's prose, its emotional lucidity, and its narrative structure, while admitting that nothing about its characters or scenario appealed to me in any way?
When my partner MacKenzie recommended this book to me, I wondered how a book-length narrative could be sustained by the conceit of "someone with unacknowledged clinical depression tries to sleep for an entire year." Moshfegh's text is masterfully structured, establishing and expanding upon the concept by exploring how the "year of rest and relaxation" affected each aspect of the narrator's life, how she kept herself fed, how she sourced her sedatives, how she arrived at the desire for a year-long sleeping reset of her life in the first place. The pragmatic and emotional foundations of the narrator's "project" having been laid over the first third of the story as a sort of prologue, the middle depicts a single week or so around New Year's, the midpoint of the titular year of rest, as a new (fictional) drug causes her to have disconcerting blackouts and venture out from her sleeping bubble and quickly begin to spiral out of control.
The dry, detached quality of Moshfegh's prose provides an emotional scalpel that cuts uncomfortably deep, a descriptive inventory of a mental state in slow-motion collapse. There are also illuminating asides about the money- and fashion-driven fads of the high art world—insights that are likely routine in this sort of cynical, darkly humorous social satire, but felt fresh to me.
No doubt it seemed new to me because, frankly, I don't often read this sort of thing. I have an aversion to this sort of novel, the kind centered on a privileged and emotionally disconnected child of wealth who craters hard into drug abuse and self-absorption. Had, say, Bret Easton Ellis (or any number of interchangeable lit darling dudes) written this, I wouldn't even have cracked the cover. "I have too much money and my mom never loved me!" falls flat for me, never having had money or a mother. The narrator's dry inventory of her life includes numerous unadorned descriptions of her own appalling thoughts and prejudices, further alienating my sympathies.
Yeah, I know unappealing narrators are supposed to be artsy and au courant, but that's also another faddish affectation; there's absolutely nothing more refined or significant about enjoying stories about shitty people, and there's nothing wrong with preferring narrators who aren't awful.
I did find myself tearing up toward the end, as—spoiler warning!—a regimen of keeping herself drugged out for the final five months finally leads to the desired outcome, and the narrator finds herself softened and receptive and aware of the world around her at last. But then the last page has to go and become absolutely, preposterously silly, shoehorning on some tacky attempt to find grace and meaning in the fall of the Twin Towers. That last page ends a worthwhile and (to me, personally) challenging read on such a hack note. My year (and My Year) would have been improved had that been left on the editing room floor.
289 pages
Published 2018
Read from September 29 to October 6
Rating: 3 out of 5
Can I recognize the quality of this book's prose, its emotional lucidity, and its narrative structure, while admitting that nothing about its characters or scenario appealed to me in any way?
When my partner MacKenzie recommended this book to me, I wondered how a book-length narrative could be sustained by the conceit of "someone with unacknowledged clinical depression tries to sleep for an entire year." Moshfegh's text is masterfully structured, establishing and expanding upon the concept by exploring how the "year of rest and relaxation" affected each aspect of the narrator's life, how she kept herself fed, how she sourced her sedatives, how she arrived at the desire for a year-long sleeping reset of her life in the first place. The pragmatic and emotional foundations of the narrator's "project" having been laid over the first third of the story as a sort of prologue, the middle depicts a single week or so around New Year's, the midpoint of the titular year of rest, as a new (fictional) drug causes her to have disconcerting blackouts and venture out from her sleeping bubble and quickly begin to spiral out of control.
The dry, detached quality of Moshfegh's prose provides an emotional scalpel that cuts uncomfortably deep, a descriptive inventory of a mental state in slow-motion collapse. There are also illuminating asides about the money- and fashion-driven fads of the high art world—insights that are likely routine in this sort of cynical, darkly humorous social satire, but felt fresh to me.
No doubt it seemed new to me because, frankly, I don't often read this sort of thing. I have an aversion to this sort of novel, the kind centered on a privileged and emotionally disconnected child of wealth who craters hard into drug abuse and self-absorption. Had, say, Bret Easton Ellis (or any number of interchangeable lit darling dudes) written this, I wouldn't even have cracked the cover. "I have too much money and my mom never loved me!" falls flat for me, never having had money or a mother. The narrator's dry inventory of her life includes numerous unadorned descriptions of her own appalling thoughts and prejudices, further alienating my sympathies.
Yeah, I know unappealing narrators are supposed to be artsy and au courant, but that's also another faddish affectation; there's absolutely nothing more refined or significant about enjoying stories about shitty people, and there's nothing wrong with preferring narrators who aren't awful.
I did find myself tearing up toward the end, as—spoiler warning!—a regimen of keeping herself drugged out for the final five months finally leads to the desired outcome, and the narrator finds herself softened and receptive and aware of the world around her at last. But then the last page has to go and become absolutely, preposterously silly, shoehorning on some tacky attempt to find grace and meaning in the fall of the Twin Towers. That last page ends a worthwhile and (to me, personally) challenging read on such a hack note. My year (and My Year) would have been improved had that been left on the editing room floor.
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