Spring 2020 New Books
Recollections of My Non-Existence by Rebecca Solnit
I’ll read anything Rebecca Solnit writes, and have read seven or so of her twenty-plus books. Recollections of My Non-Existence is a bit different from the other Solnit that I’ve read though. Where this book does fall under Solnit’s usual category of essayistic non-fiction, it’s really also a memoir. Solnit writes about her years as a young adult exploring and making a home in San Francisco for the first time. Much of the book is an ode to the city, and anyone who has spent time there will appreciate the way she writes about San Fransisco. The book overall charts Solnit’s struggle to find her voice - and, significantly, to make that voice be heard. From her early publishers and editors not taking her seriously as a writer, to the constant effacement demanded by a society in which violence against women is so pervasive (“don’t walk alone at night,” “don’t take up too much space,” “don’t make eye contact on the street,” etc.). Solnit also writes about the process of writing her now famous essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” which if you haven’t read I highly recommend.
Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
Naoise Dolan seems to be marketed as the “next Sally Rooney,” a comparison that’s understandable given the fact that Dolan is also Irish and Exciting Times also focuses on millennial relationships. Personally though, I feel that’s about where the comparison ends. Exciting Times follows Ava, a young woman who has just moved from Ireland to Hong Kong to teach English. Ava is in a pseudo-relationship with a British banker named Julian (she sleeps with him and lives with him but they’re not together?), and seems to be drifting aimlessly through her life. When Julian leaves for a work trip, Ava continues living in his house but befriends, and then starts to date, Edith, who is Hong Kong-born and recently returned from Oxford.
The plot of the book sounds intriguing, but I found the characters completely one-dimensional and boring. As I’ve said in other reviews, I don’t think you need to “like” the characters for a book to be good, but they have to have a personality. Ava is cold and apathetic towards everyone and has no interests (we also learn very little about her backstory). Julian is a shell of a character who is basically only ever described as “a banker.” While that conjures a vague image of a person and would be enough description for someone peripheral to the story, he’s supposed to be one of the book’s three main characters. Edith is slightly more interesting and fleshed out, but we mostly see her as an object of Ava’s fascination rather than a person in her own right. I think we’re supposed to think that Ava’s fascination with Edith turns into love and affection at some point, but it never got there for me. Ava was too shallow of a character and, it’s probably a really harsh reading, but honestly she came off as very dull and uninteresting. One of the things I love about Sally Rooney is that she captures dysfunctional and unhealthy romantic relationships in a way that feels authentic, and that makes you care for the people involved, even when you think they’ve made terrible or harmful decisions. Dolan seemed to be trying to achieve something similar with this book, but it just didn’t work. There were a lot of witty one liners, but I couldn’t help but think that nobody needs or wants to read a book about such boring people.
Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey
Miranda Popkey’s Topics of Conversation is a story told, unsurprisingly, through conversations. Each chapter is titled with a place and a year, and we learn about the book’s narrator through her engagement in, and/or witnessing of, intimate conversations over the span of twenty years. The book’s cadence took me a minute to get used to, but I think it’s one of Popkey’s strengths as a writer. The reader hears the conversations that are the subject of the book only through the filter of the narrator, and as a result the narrative has breaks and pauses in ways that are quite authentic to the experience of actually having a conversation - with trailed-off sentences, interrupting thoughts, and awkward silences.
Popkey’s narrator and the women to whom the narrator speaks are not likable characters, but as ever, I think that’s not really the point of literature. They are, however, complex and interesting in all the ways that I thought Dolan’s characters were not. Popkey writes about individual women more so than, and even while, writing about their romantic relationships, and I appreciated that she preserves the female characters’ struggle for autonomy even when their actions could be deemed “bad” or “wrong” or lead to unhealthy situations. The narrator skinny-dips with a woman who has abandoned her daughter, she has a falling out with another woman in their “single-mothers-and-wine” group, she visits a hotel bar with the intention of cheating on her partner, etc. The brilliant thing about the book is that the narrator passes more astute judgment on the situations described than the reader can, and at times it even felt Popkey withheld judgement in deference to the narrator. I always think it’s brave of a writer to create characters that are difficult and unlikable - it’s a decision that usually doesn’t win the praise of most readers, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Goodreads crowd don’t like this book.
Overall I don’t know that I would describe Topics of Conversation as a “fun” book, and I don’t even know that I have many friends that I would feel comfortable recommending it to. It’s very raw, and I think you’re meant to feel quite unsettled by it. There are moments of real poignancy, but they often resonate in all the wrong ways. Take the following paragraph, from a late-night conversation with girlfriends after a party during the narrator’s years in grad school: “I was pretty sure I knew where this story was going, not only because the man in the story had been identified as a sexual predator but also because it was late and it was only women and we were all a little drunk and under those conditions there is only one place a story about a boy and a girl ever goes.” Popkey isn’t wrong, but she often names things that most people are reluctant to acknowledge and put words to.
What’s Left of Me Is Yours by Stephanie Scott
What’s Left of Me is Yours is set in Japan and follows a young woman named Sumiko as she searches for the truth about her mother Rina’s murder at the hands of Rina’s lover Kaitaro, a man who was hired by Rina’s husband Sato to break up their marriage and win him a divorce. If that sounds confusing and far-fetched it’s worth noting that the book is a novel, but it was inspired by a true crime and would likely appeal to fans of that genre. We know the bare bones of the story immediately, but the why of the crime is what drives Scott as a novelist. What does love look like and why do the characters do the things they do to one another? I found the format interesting, but I almost wish the novel was written more as a mystery. We knew Rina would be murdered and we knew who would kill her, but I found that that knowledge distracted me from the rest of the story. Where true crime thrives off of twists and surprises, there weren’t many in Scott’s novel, a decision that may appeal to some, but left me wanting more.
Weather by Jenny Offill
Jenny Offill is one of those writers who seems to be revered by other writers (see also Ben Lerner, Alexander Chee, Olivia Liang, Ocean Vuong, Lauren Groff, etc.). That may just be the impression I get from Lit Hub and Twitter, but having now read Weather I do think Offill is a writer’s writer. Weather’s protagonist Lizzie is a deadpan librarian with a son, partner, and addict-brother. She dolls out wry commentary on the oddball patrons of the library and her ever-looming sense of existential dread provoked by the climate crisis. The book reminds me in a lot of ways of Liang’s Crudo, though I found Weather more readable and engaging. I also appreciate that Offill peppers the novel with references to our current political climate without ever actually writing the T-word. The book is composed of paragraphs that are basically the length of a tweet, and is inset with weird Q&A and survey things (they’re part of the novel, not for the reader to answer) - to be honest I didn’t understand the function of these at all and skipped past most of them. Overall I really enjoyed Weather though, and will now make it a priority to read Offill’s 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation, which has always seemed to have a bit of a cult-following.
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
Kate Elizabeth Russell’s debut novel My Dark Vanessa follows Vanessa Wye’s journey to understand her complicated relationship with her former teacher Jacob Strane. When the book opens in 2017, Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a number of former students. Vanessa was 15 when she first had sex with Strane in 2000, but in 2017 she still doesn’t consider their relationship abusive. Theirs, she thinks, is a fraught love story, and she was not a victim in the way these other women are saying they were. Vanessa has defined her life around her romance with Strane, and unravelling the idea that that relationship may not have been a love story threatens to destabilize everything she knows about herself.
Though Vanessa is confused and uncertain at times, and at others insistent in her own complicity in the relationship, Russell’s writing makes clear that Strane is a repulsive character and a cunning abuser. Russell does a brilliant job of capturing the ambiguity Vanessa feels without projecting that ambiguity onto the reader; though Vanessa attempts to romanticize her relationship with Strane, Russell herself does not write in a way that romanticizes abuse. This is a delicate distinction, but it allows Russell to create a nuanced character struggling to understand her trauma, without subjecting the reader to some sort of abusive erotica. We root for Vanessa and we loathe Strane, but the reader also understands Vanessa’s reluctance to name her abuse - it doesn’t negate the abuse or make it any less wrong, but it does make Russell’s portrait of Vanessa more complicated and interesting. My Dark Vanessa is a novel that perfectly captures the #MeToo-era, but Russell has been working on the book for eighteen years, and, unfortunately, the rough outline of the abuse is a story as old as time. In interviews Russell notes that she didn’t intend and doesn’t want My Dark Vanessa to be held up as a kind of exemplar of an abuse novel; Vanessa’s story is one story, and as Russell concludes her author’s note in my UK edition, “this novel you hold in your hands is just one story, written by one author. Other stories of abuse, survival, complicity and victimhood are yet to be written and read. And while I did my best to delve deep into these complicated issues shaping Vanessa’s experience, there are more questions to grapple with.”
