Jeremy
Adam Levin is a wry, and clever, and - perhaps most importantly - fun author. That is the easiest takeaway one can have upon completion of his thousand page debut novel, The Instructions. It is almost glaringly clever, buzzing neon signs of cleverness that leave afterimages floating behind your eyelids as you speed your way towards his next clever sentence, clever passage, clever chapter. In the context of The Instructions, this elevates the material rather well, it being the story of not just a singular gifted child, but a group of gifted children and their endless socratic debates over playground politics and religious zeaolatry.
The style fits the content, a pitch perfect recreation of that cloying way a precocious child will flaunt his rhetorical talents for your praise. I am all too familiar with it as a formerly state-recognized gifted child myself. However, this voice that Levin nails so well does tend to get grating in the back half of such a massive work, does tend to feel a little one-note at times. I really did struggle between pages 600 and 800 to decipher how many Gurion-isms were actually Levin-isms and whether I was being too charitable with my (to that point unchallenged) assumption that the whole of The Instructions was an excercise in a character with verbosity-as-avoidance syndrome. I do think Levin mostly sticks the landing in that regard, but for those lengthy passages where the book ceased to be as fun as I knew it could be, and instead seemed more trapped in its character's meandering proselytizing, I had to knock down my rating a bit.
I also don't really understand the comparisons with Infinite Jest. I know from reading one of his interviews that Levin would agree with me there. The Instructions is much more narrow in scope, much more focused in voice. It's really a one-mode work, which makes its ability to hold attention for over a thousand pages all the more impressive. The only comparison I'd really make between the two (other than their status as doorstoppers) is that the politics of both seem to have grown more vital and contemporary as they've aged, at least in my opinion.
I think I could craft an argument for rating this book every gradiation above the one I have given it. In fact, I wonder, if I were smarter, or perhaps more patient, would this be an unabashed five star read?
The general consensus around this novel is clear. It is a victim of an intentional kind of unfocus. Structurally, it is a novel that presses pause on the action for around 250 pages, the bulk of the text, offering a quasi-character driven rounding out of the themes, world, and cast. These diversions are clearly necessary, in fact, due to the sheer amount of space they take up, they are in many ways the whole point of the work, but that doesn't mean the act of actually reading them doesn't occasionally become frustrating.
I respect the endeavour, but I can't say I always enjoyed it. There is a pervasive notion that the protaganist, and, in many ways, the author, are tiptoeing around saying certain things aloud, creating recurvsive loops, spirals, that the patient reader will eventually follow to the kernel of truth at the center. It is a potent idea, creating experientally this very modern-feeling anxious thought pattern, the things we talk about, the things we don't say that we hope our loved ones can find by reading between our lines, it even calls to mind the younger generation's self-censorship on social media, the dulling of oneself, of life's sharper edges, in pursuit of algorithmic purity. There's a lot you can pull out here if you look for it, big ticket themes, gender roles, misogyny, immigration, isolation, abuse, trauma and assault, dysfunctional families, academia, art, history, art history, its all there for you to discover.
A recurring motif is the sculpture in Life is Everywhere, so I want you to consider a block of marble. Now, when you read a book by a clearly brilliant writer, you want them to take the block of marble that is language and build you a sculpture. Instead, Lucy Ives has built you a block of marble. She hands you a photograph, lets you look at it for maybe five minutes, and then pulls it away. It is your job to do the work, to experience the frustration of writing, the frustration of finding the emotional center of whatever story you are compelled to pull from the many threads Life is Everywhere offers you, to choose whether to work with that photograph you glimpsed at the start or to ignore it. At the end she's going to hand you the photo again, and you get to see how your work stacks up. It's interesting, it's bold, it's definitely genius, but it is kind of exhausting.
I don’t typically read essay collections, but this was worth the hype. Didion weaves an affecting tapestry of an America that had only just begun to realize its capacity for decline.
The titular essay reminded me a lot of Inherent Vice by Pynchon, although it was written contemporary to the period it covers, as opposed to Pynchon’s retroactive examination. It makes Didion’s ability to tinge it with irony and nostalgia all the more impressive.
I appreciated how accessible Emma Southon made this book. I'm a total novice when it comes to reading history and I felt like this was a fantastic choice for someone like me, who was just trying to dip their toes into gaining a broader historical perspective. I think, at times, I found the pop culture references and other quirks of the writing style weren't jiving, but also how can I complain when the author's readable style is what helped to create a non-fiction work that I was able to follow so clearly? I also think Southon is very intentional in this style, helping to humanize these figures who have been mythologized and deified to such an extreme that its hard to see them as human. Overall, I'm left a little conflicted on the prose stylings, but I can't deny that it was effective.
My first Baldwin. This whole work contains this deep melancholy, infused into nearly every sentence. A deeply human hurt propels the narrative forward, and it gets uglier, and it hurts you in turn because at some point, you start to remember the pains you've accumulated, forgotten or not, and Baldwin pulls them out of you and forces you to confront them in stark black and white. I'm unsure if it was akin to therapy or confession, but there is a piece of the human soul in this book, and I found myself deeply moved by it.
Shoutout to Vivaldo, maybe the most resonant character I've ever read.
With War and Remembrance, Herman Wouk cements himself as one of my favourite novelists of the 20th century. Despite this, I struggle to explain what makes his writing, and in turn this novel, such a standout for me. His prose is workmanlike, his plotting can meander, and he can get bogged down in superflous detail. However, what Wouk has created in his saga of the Henry Family and their experiences in World War 2 is nothing less than a Homerian epic chronicling the great global and cultural transformations the Second World War wrought.
He breathes life into every player of the drama, from Simon Anderson, who is given less than 30 pages across the duology's combined 2000 to chronicle his involvement in the Manhattan Project, to towering historical figures like FDR and Josef Stalin. At times, with this vast cast weaving in and out of each other's narratives, War and Rememberance begins to feel like a drama crafted in the oral tradition, emerging from some primordial unconcious and shared to it's reader after centuries of refining its episodes.
This is Wouk's greatest feat in constructing this novel, his understanding that the readership encountering it would likely remember the broad strokes of the war, and the clever ways he uses the audience's foreknowledge to mount anticipation for what comes next. War and Remembrance. It's right there on the tin.
Today, the day after I finished Americana, it being my first novel by postmodern legend Don DeLillo, I walked past a cardboard box of books left out on my street. Sitting on the top of the pile, free for the taking, was another of his works, a novella called The Body Artist. I snatched it up without a second thought, feeling an incredible sense of luck and synchronicity. Really, that's all you need to know about what I thought of Americana. Unfortunately, that hardly constitutes a review.
The difficulty in writing about this book is in finding how to begin. The plot? Yes, I can assure you, in Americana you will find a beginning, middle, and end, and they are even presented in that order (mostly). However, despite the potent-sounding mix of American Psycho and Easy Rider, it is not from the plot where Americana derives its central momentum. The characters, then? Well, yes, they're there too. Although, in actuality, I would be so bold as to suggest this book really has one character, one who finds himself surrounded by a cast of fables and punchlines. Even him, David Bell, the novel's protagonist, is more a philosophical concept than an entirely fleshed-out person. He's a symptom of the mass existential malaise, or the flickering spirit of the American soul. The only times David feels tangible are the brief insights we get into his life before the novel begins.
What Americana really is, is a series of impressions. There are books that you can read somewhat passively, and books where you get what you put in, where a little bit of elbow grease and close reading is necessary to truly enjoy the experience. With Americana, you get what it takes out of you. From the desiccated husk where the heart of Corporate America should be, to the suffocating silence of small town life, this novel will pull pieces of you into its environments. And as it hurtles forward, increasingly fractured and listless, the sense that this is less of a book and more of a mirror grows stronger. Not a mirror to society, or to a moment in time, but to you.
Americana is a reflection of its reader, the desperate artist, the office drone, the mind shackled by freedoms. The entire book is an exercise in decay, in stripping away everything in the desperate bid to find a soul somewhere deep down. That hole that exists in David, the gap he is so desperately trying to fill with his cross country escapades, lives in you too. After all, it is that void the book reaches into, filling its pages with the emptiness inside every reader.
(Minus half a star because the first third of the book is quite dull and cynical, a necessary evil for the rest of it to pack a punch, but one that makes the experience a lot less enjoyable)
This book is a ton of fun. I bought it from an indie press (shoutout Malarkey Books) I discovered on Twitter, and I was blown away by how polished and intricate this read was. It's a fun book to discover on your own, so I won't get too bogged down in the plot details, but it starts out as a light and clever story with an intriguing bent to it and then becomes something else entirely. An entirely unqiue stream of conciousness style narrative showcasing the thoughts process of a writer forming a narrative, while still providing an entertaining narrative in it's own right. Check it out if you're interested in seeing an author play with form like it's a jump rope and he's Corbin Bleu in the Disney Channel Original Film Jump In!
The Moon and Sixpence is a beautifully written novel about the personal cost of being an artist. W. Somerset Maugham has a very clear focus for this slim volume, intent on exploring what feels like an age old question - should we seperate the art from the personal life of the artist? It's a topic that has become increasingly relevant in the current era of online activism, accountability, and cancellation. Maugham makes his feelings clear from the novel's first chapter, suggesting that not only are the artist's personal failings a worthwhile sacrifice to make for their art, but indeed it's those failings that allow an artist to ascend from merely great to infamous.
I enjoyed a lot of the drama to be found in the novel, especially in the first 60% or so. The characters posed interesting dilemmas. There was tragedy, and comedy, and an unnamed narrator watching to relay each of painter Charles Strickland's sordid affairs to readers. However, just past the midpoint, I began to struggle with a dilemma of my own. Not as worthy of an entire novel like Maugham's, maybe, but a prickly one which, nonetheless, began to actively diminish the novel's hold on me. Am I capable of appreciating this novel, despite the language and ideas contained within that have aged horifically? Now, I'm no stranger to disagreeable social attitudes in books from before my time. It goes with the territory. However, for such a short text, Maugham has managed to pack in a lot to make the modern reader cringe.
I don't have a good answer to the question this novel gave me. I can't lie, however, and say the endless stream of misogyny and slurs in the book's back half didn't lower my esteem for it, nor that that fact isn't reflected in my rating. Maybe you will have a better stomach for these facets than me, and I don't begrudge any reader the experience. There's a good story to be had in these pages. However, for me personally, The Moon and Sixpence started out as a palette cleanser and transformed into an excercise in finding the line where a book begins to actively spoil in my hands. Despite that, I have a feeling this won't be my last book by Maugham (the prose really is that good), and it may not even be my final reading of The Moon and Sixpence. In fact, that may be the strongest endorsement of Maugham's thesis - the art above all else - that I can give.
When the pot boils, the scum comes to the surface.
That is my main takeaway from The Winds of War. I've read a few of Herman Wouk's novels now and, like the rest, this one is another incredibly compelling drama detailing the conflicts and relationships between a well-drawn cast of characters. In this case it's a military family, the Henry's, and how they orbit the days of World War II.
While the characters and the situations they found themselves in kept me turning the pages, it was the setting and cultural attitudes which left me thinking about the book long after I closed the cover. Wouk's exploration of the larger social attitudes which allowed Nazism to flourish in Germany, as well as the indifference displayed by many Americans, made this book feel almost vital in this moment.
It is all too easy to draw parallels between the mass unrest which allowed facism to take hold in the early 20th century and the modern shift in the West towards ideaologies of bigotry. When speaking on the duology as a whole, Wouk noted that Winds of War was the prologue, setting the stage for the story he really wanted to tell in War and Remembrance, which covers America's experience upon entering the Second World War. Reading today, this first volume isn't prologue but prophecy, and a damning condemnation of how American exceptionalism has made many blind to the mainstream fascism which has taken root in the West today.