Author: Lark

Maybe your reading list just now includes bestsellers A Higher Loyalty by James Comey and Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff. If so then I suggest you ditch them both and read these two novels instead, to understand what is going on in the world— because Amelia Gray and Samanta Schweblin are the perfect oracles for our Gaslit Age.

Threats and Fever Dream were published two years apart, in different countries and in different languages, and yet they each capture the what is going on in the world miasma we’re living through, in the way only good fiction can. Fact and reason aren’t enough to help us cope just now. What are the facts, anyway? Why can’t we get a straight answer about anything at all from our elected officials? What is going on? And why is that guy still in office? If any of these questions plague you, then ditch the nonfiction bestseller list and pick up these novels instead.

Start with the book jackets. Look how similar they are. The images are fragmentary and dismembered. Something is not right. The all-caps titles shriek out at us that the stories inside are not meant to make us comfortable. And they don’t.

Threats is about a man coping with the sudden loss of his wife. Fever Dream is about a woman dying in a hospital bed. Or maybe not. Reading both of these novels you will find yourself thinking what is going on? over and over again. But never mind. The particulars don’t matter. Both of these novels, at their core, are about the anxieties of living in a modern urban culture. We live in a perpetual news cycle of random violence, terrorism, chemical warfare, police brutality, political conspiracy and environmental collapse. These novels are about none of these things, and yet all of them hover at the edges, just as they do in our daily thoughts. Having my anxieties distilled and poured into the pages of a novel helped me recognize the way my daily life is overrun with similar threats that have no easy solution. I recognize the paranoia of these novels as the rhythms of today’s reality.

Make no mistake: I was disoriented and upended by this writing. Each book left me to flounder on my own. But then suddenly I found myself making connections. As I read, I also would have feelings of compassion, recognition, joy, and agency. Somehow at the end of each of these short novels I felt ready to face the world as it is. Read them.

Red Clocks was one of those rare, very-pretty-good reads for me. Zumas creates women with lovely endearing individuality and humaneness. I was concerned for their welfare and wanted them to turn out to have happy lives, almost to the degree that I feel about characters in Kent Haruf’s novels. On the downside the characters’s story arcs were not particularly interesting and their reactions to menstrual-related events never strayed much beyond the obvious, with the exception of the mender, whom I adored.

The person who designed this cover should get a medal. Brava–I’m assuming you are a woman–forgive me if you’re not and my admiration for you has grown all the more strong–and shame on Hachette for not giving you a named credit on the jacket you designed.

I want to say a few things about the novel Knucklehead by Adam Smyer, published this year by Akashic. The novel could not be more timely, and I urge everyone who has found their way to my blog to buy a copy and read it.

The novel is the diary of a black man whose law degree and loving wife and fancy job can’t shield him from a culture where he is continuously demeaned and threatened because of his race.

The writing in this novel is very loose. There is a casualness about the prose that is both endearing and distancing–it’s a style where you never know what the narrator is going to do or say next. In one scene after another the protagonist continues a debate with himself, the debate of his lifetime, about whether this is the time when he’ll resort to deadly violence to solve his problems. From moment to moment he relies on some outward sign that will give him permission to unleash his rage, and you keep expecting him to do great harm to someone, and at the same time you are kind of rooting for him to go ahead and do it, given the horrible things that happen to him, and given how dismissively he is treated even by those who supposedly love him.

The perpetual threat of violence, in almost every scene, was a very uncomfortable place for me to be as a reader, but an instructive one. I finished the book with a terrific headache, and I felt it was exactly the right way to feel about what happens in the story, both in terms of the real historical events it documents, and in terms of the fictional journey the main character takes from beginning to end. The chapter about the 1991 beating of Rodney King that was captured on video–a time when everyone was briefly filled with the hope that finally something would change, now that the evidence of police brutality was there for all to see–is heartbreaking to read given where we are now.

Now that I’ve written all of the above I also want to add that at times this is a very funny book. It’s a remarkable book. You should go in open-eyed and open-minded and see what happens.

Here is a link to the Akashic website where it’s currently $11.95:

Knucklehead

 

I read over a hundred books this year and now that I’ve come to the end of it I find that Hunger by Roxane Gay is the one book that has stuck with me the longest, and has changed me the most. It’s the one book I want to write about tonight, as my last post in 2017.

I was lucky enough to hear Roxane Gay speak this year when she came to my hometown for a reading. She was warm, empowered, strong, confident, and most of all she felt aware of all these things about herself.  She had a supreme graciousness toward others, and a patience, especially with those readers and fans and people in the crowd that night, some of whom seemed overpowered by their own hurt and in need of someone who would listen to their stories and understand. Roxane Gay was able to listen. She was able to say exactly the right thing.  Her strength and presence were extraordinary.

And then there is this book. As I read it, the strong confident voice I listened to at the reading seemed to completely shrink into a hesitant and cautious voice, one that was afraid of its own conclusions. I believe Roxane Gay when she writes that this book the hardest thing she has ever tried to write. Because what I experienced, while reading the book, is that it was nearly too hard for Roxane Gay to write her story. The writing felt guarded and circuitous and almost stuttering. The strength and confidence I felt from her when I heard her speak fell away toward silence and hurt. And I thought as I read: Where is the strong confident person I saw on stage?

But here’s the thing: Now I’ve come to realize just how strong it was for Gay to write exactly this way about her past.  Maybe she had no choice. Extreme honesty seems to be the core of who she is. The book demands faith and acceptance from the reader at all times. It doesn’t take care of the reader. Indeed it forces the reader to take on the role of patient loving listener. The reader is asked to take care of the writer, rather than the other way around. It’s as if, through the act of reading this book, you’re being patiently guided to become the kind of person who can listen to another person’s trauma, and understand.

The novel feels like a watershed of sorts, written before #metoo, and apart from it, but pointing toward this extraordinary change in our culture, where women in future might begin to get angry and speak out against those who abuse them, rather than feeling shame and punishing themselves and their bodies for what happened to them. So quite unexpectedly and for all the reasons above I find myself tonight realizing that Hunger by Roxane Gay was my personal Book of the Year.

-lark benobi

 

 

With Trump in the White House,  journalists are battling to keep words attached to facts, to the point where CNN runs adds explaining why an apple isn’t a banana.

But fiction is immune to Trumpism. It’s a language apart.  And just now fiction can tell truths that non-fiction can’t.

Here are some of the most truthful, most political novels I’ve read–the links will take you to three independent bookstores who deserve your business:

Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish should replace The Grapes of Wrath on every high school reading list. A novel about New York from the point of view of the most disenfranchised. A book that is never sentimental, never condescending. One of the best books I’ve ever read.

 

 

 

The Sarah Book by Scott McLachlan taught me more about despair in West Virginia than sixteen billion profiles on Trump voters.

 

 

 

 

Blood of the Dawn by  Claudia Salazar Jiménez– I’ve read of political violence and state terrorism before, but not from within such a female perspective. A woman leaves her family to become a resistance fighter and it occurred to me while reading it that I had read so many times of a man going off to war while the woman stays home with the children, a trope so often repeated that it feels natural, and yet here the woman goes, and she is so much a mother, and her choice feels wrenching and unnatural, part of the terror of the times.

Blood of the Dawn is published by Deep Vellum. The Sarah Book and Preparation for the Next Life are both published by Tyrant.

 

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