As a reminder, I only review books I’ve loved.
Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips
As a young poet in New York, during college, I came upon Black Tickets, Phillip’s first work. It’s fragments. I read it repeatedly, so often it fell apart. I’ve followed her career since then and picked up this one after it deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize. Like her other novels, this one is densely told and a little hard to follow. At its simplest, it’s the survival story of a mother and daughter in West Virginia, around the time of the Civil War. The girl’s father has gone missing in the war. The mother is made into a sex slave by an outlaw who tires of her and deposits her and the girl at a mental institution. That’s where much of the story and drama — lots of it — takes place. When I finished reading, I realized the importance of this novel in the story of our nation. It’s worth a read.
Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, by Carrie Courogen
Elaine May and Mike Nichols were the fresh and smart comedy duo of the early ’60s. This biography — a first — of Elaine May is thorough, funny, and sympathetic. Elaine dropped out of high school, married, and had a child. To scratch an itch, she left the baby with her mother in L.A., and went to Chicago, where she joined the Compass Players, an early improv group. There she met Nichols; together they became stars. Over the years, she wrote and directed plays and movies and doctored scripts. Even with flops, her genius is indisputable. Always, she guarded her privacy. This is a full life, richly told.
Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel
This was recommended to me by my son’s bookstore colleague. “Your mom would love this.” I did. It’s a novel but reads as a scholarly meditation on the life and work of Herman Melville. Was his a happy marriage? Did he have a fling with Nathaniel Hawthorne? The sleuthing is carried out by a poet, during the pandemic, while she’s home with her writer husband and young daughters, who take their lessons via Zoom. Is theirs a troubled marriage? The poet necessarily includes the fractured marriage of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, who wrote a slender biography of Melville. This is a book about ambition, heartbreak, loyalty, betrayal, failure. An exquisite read.
The Millstone by Margaret Drabble
I’ll read anything set in 1960’s London. In this, we meet Rosamund Stacey, a young scholar living alone in her parent’s posh flat in Marleybone. To her friends, she pretends she’s dating both Roger and Joe, which makes her seem racy. In fact, she’s sleeping with neither. One night she awkwardly loses her virginity to George, a BBC radio announcer. Pregnant from that one encounter, Rosamund turns down a marriage proposal and decides to have the baby on her own. Rosamund reasons that her academic career will insulate her and her daughter from the stain of illegitimacy. There’s a quiet tension in all of Rosamund’s decisions, and we cheer her on as she discovers the happiness that comes from mothering baby Octavia. I haven’t read much Drabble; her work is smart and engaging. I’ll be sure to read another.
The Singularity, by Dino Buzzatti, translated by Anne Milano Appel
In 1972, a professor of electronics is summoned by the Italian Ministry of Defense to a secret project at a research facility in the mountains. The pay is hefty and housing is free. Off he goes, with wife Elisa, whom he loves but dismisses as uneducated. What is the project? Why the secrecy? Are they building an atomic bomb? Elisa asks better and more perceptive questions than her learned husband. Settled in, Elisa learns the truth behind the project: they have built a “brain” that never rests, a “human” depository of ideas and information that works at warp speed. What could possibly go wrong? As in Buzzatti’s A Love Affair, this is a story of obsession. Built into this “brain” is Laura, the dead wife of one of the inventors. Her pleas for release are worthy of an opera. At 127 pages, this is a wild and wonderful read.