What a stretch! Nearly every book I picked up in the past three months has been a winner. In no particular order, these are reads I’m happy to recommend.
I’d been put off by early reviews of All Fours, by Miranda July, because it was described as raunchy. (It is.) My friend Flora (thank you) pressed it on me over New Year’s. Her eyes said it all: this is a must read, especially for women.
Its unnamed narrator had me at hello. A performance artist, she wants more than the suburban L.A. life she shares with her filmmaker husband and ungendered child. With a $20,000 paycheck from a whiskey company that used some of her work, she sets out on a road trip to New York, but gets no farther than a few exits on the freeway. There, she transforms a motel room into a Parisian boudoir. There, she tries and fails to seduce Davey, a would-be dancer who parks cars for his uncle’s Hertz outfit.
I’m sure I’ve never read such agonizing non sex. It’s hard to make me squirm; Miranda July succeeded.
All Fours falls cleanly in the long line of feminist works where a woman of any age makes a choice, with devastating consequences. Our narrator does not end up laying across train tracks, or dying of sepsis from a botched abortion. She debases herself for sex, and love, with men and women. The ending is as happy as it could possibly be. This is a funny, smart, rich read.
For a Columbia University book club that meets in Chicago, we focus on a country or region and choose three books: fiction, classic, and nonfiction or historic fiction. For Korea, we read Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (and met the day she was awarded the Nobel Prize), Kim Man-Jung’s The Nine Cloud Dream, and Hwang Sok-Yong’s The Guest. It’s a fascinating way to approach literature, learning and conversation. Each book played off the others and gave me a deeper understanding of Korean culture and history. Next, we’re in India. We’re reading A Burning by Megha Majumdar, Beyond the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, and Ramayana by Arshia Sattar.
Traveling, I picked up (and devoured) The Magnificent Ruins, by Nayantara Roy. This is a home-going story about Lila De, a young woman in the thick of New York City publishing and in a chilly love affair with Seth, one of her writers. With the death of her grandfather, Lila inherits the family palace in Kolkata, India. Lila returns there, even though she hasn’t been since age 15. Lila has a strained relationship with her mother, who lives in the palace with her own mother and the extended (delightful, messy, troubled) family. Why did grandfather leave Lila the family home? Will she sell it? Improve it? Why is the boy she loved as a young teen, now married, back in her life? Seth shows up, professing his love. Will she stay, will she go? This is a well crafted page-turner. I loved it.
If you enjoyed Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (book and movie) you’ll like this linked novel, Long Island. Our heroine, Eilis, is betrayed by husband Tony in a way that’s impossible for her to forgive. To get away, Eilis returns to Enniscorthy, the small town in Ireland where her mother lives. There, Eilis reunites with an old love from the earlier book. Trouble follows, in interesting and agonizing ways.
My friend Jennifer says the best gift you can give is a short novel. I can recommend two, both of which are great reads.
Penelope Fitzgeralds’s Off Shore, (181 pages) is set among a houseboat community on the Thames. It’s charming, weird, sad, triumphant. We root for young truants Martha and Tilda, as they survive and thrive, as their mother tries, and fails, to win back their father.
Another short read is Joseph Andras’s Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us (133 pages) recommended by my son Evan Dent (Substack: Evan Reads). This one is heartbreaking: a young revolutionary plants a bomb that doesn’t go off, for which he’s convicted of terrorism. Will he be freed? This is 1956 in Algiers. So, not likely…