Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett

What a strange and wonderful little book. As far as I can tell it really has no plot or action, and just one real character, who gives us an extended monologue, but not really an interior one. She is talking to someone, self-consciously at times. What really struck me is how familiar it felt. Maybe because what it captures has some similarities to my own brand of neuroticism–but the psychology of it never feels, even for a moment, manufactured or contrived. So many passages just felt true, and sort of shameless in a way, just documenting her inner world and experience, that I stopped marking them.

Could there really be another person–the writer, her character–who shares all these different bits of my strangeness?

How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball

This was incredibly engaging in a way I wasn’t sure was possible in a stream of consciousness novel about a troubled teen. The character is so intelligent, so fully formed, so eminently credible. I don’t know how a late-30s man could so convincingly do this, without judgment, without melodrama. Lucia Stanton. So sad, so vivid.

She’s incredibly intelligent, and has such a consistent voice, self-assured in a way that’s rather startling. There is a plot, although a somewhat loose one, enough to keep the pages turning but the focus is still on the interior. I know a book is well executed when I react to the sadness of what has happened to a person, more than I react to it as a piece of writing.

So sad:

We’re just running down a fucking slope carrying these little flags, and one by one we get shot and we slump and our little flags are in the mud and no one picks them up. No one is going to keep running with your flag.

Nutshell by Ian McEwan

Clever, certainly, and the main is a master of language, but the book felt like all head and no heart. Sardonic observations on mankind’s failings–and a conceit that lasts the book and (of course, in retrospect, ends with birth).

It was well executed, and certainly a challenging goal, but not one I really care for. Maybe this is just a natural stage in his evolution but I hope he comes back around to the humanity of Saturday and Atonement. 

I don’t know that it would be possible to get real, deep humanity out of that type of artificial observer, with all the distance, with the externally dictated drama. It’s a neat little nugget of a book but it left me a bit cold.

You’ll Grow Out of It by Jessi Klein

I so enjoyed this–but I think that’s largely because I like her. We have so much in common (Vassar; hating the word “horny,” liking big, bearded, Jewish-seeming men, being cheered up by corgis)–but conveying all that in a coherent book is no small feat. That she does it thematically rather than chronologically adds to the balancing act. And throw in a killed insight about women (poodles vs. wolves) and this is exactly the light-but-not-too-light feminist entertainment I want.

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

When I finished this, the first thing I thought is that I need to read it again. It’s layered, and its control of information is masterful. She manages to create suspense about what exactly happened in a past moment, even though many of the narrating characters were there, and she reveals it in a way that never feels like cheating to me. (cf. the finale of Breaking Bad. That was cheating.)

It has thematic echoes of LaRose, in the intermeshed families, and Atonement in the terrible things done in childhood without ill will. There are a lot of important characters and perhaps not all of them needed voices–but it still emerged as coherently Franny’s novel.

The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai

This was enjoyable certainly, but I kept having the sense that it was overly constructed–that a plot identified at the outset that sounded cute was driving the thing even when it strained credibility. That’s okay–the plot is cute enough–but it ended up shortchanging the book. There were much more interesting things in there that perhaps this book really wanted to be about but they couldn’t fit inside the structure, so they just stayed in the background, dominated by the silly story.

The story about the father leaving Russia, about his daughter who’d long resisted his help needing it, learning his past, discovering that she was more like him than she thought–all of that is such better material than the stated premise (and much more the sort of thing I found in Makkai’s short stories).

The book also suffered from the narrator telling us too baldly what the realizations were and what the point is at various stops along the way. It’s a greater pleasure to simply let them emerge, to float up and settle on the readers who want them.

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

I read this more for its content than anything to do with literary value. The essays sometimes contain personal stories but they are not personal essays; they are observations of, critiques of, and suggestions for society.

Solnit writes elegantly–it’s smooth and unobtrusive, an almost transparent conduit for ideas that it’s all too easy to forget to think about.

And perhaps irrelevant but on my mind: I love the cover. It’s just a bold bright blue with the title and her name in big white text. So simple. So striking.

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast

This is a memoir of her parents’ decline and her experience of dealing with their deaths. It’s unblinkingly rendered, and it’s interesting to contrast such grim subject matter with the format of cartoons–but ultimately it just read like a log of what happened, largely devoid of reflection, connection to the modern world, or anything surprising.

Perhaps my expectations were off because my only real standard for comparison here is Alison Bechdel, whose memoirs are much more complex.

It’s well written and drawn, and I see how it has been an important book for people who have shared her experience (some startlingly similar to what my mother experienced with my grandmother) but the power is in the material, and perhaps its accessibility, more than the rendering.

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes

I can’t recall if I’ve ever ended up really liking a novel that was part biography of a real historical figure–this one, Shostokovich. Maybe it’s that I can feel the limits of authorial choice, or that entire lives don’t make very good novels. Part of the craft of the novel is finding the piece of life that has the right shape, beginning and end points centered around certain amounts of drama.

I had high hoes after Sense of an Ending, but I didn’t ever get absorbed in this. It never got personal or emotional. I felt as if the author had ingested a lot of facts and ideas and was faithful in relaying them but I never got human struggle. Maybe Barnes meant to do that–communism erasing individual experience and all that–but in the end, for this reader, it didn’t work as a novel.

Maybe some additional developed characters would have helped. For instance, the women–they’re just props. All of them. Seems like a wasted opportunity.

Shrill by Lindy West

I really liked this–but it’s hard to pin down why. I really like how she approaches things as a person, or I suppose a version of a person as edited to whatever degree for public consumption–but the way she conveyed this surely had a role in my reaction.

It must be very hard to hit the balance between personal and sociological. This definitely tips more toward the personal, but it’s clearly deeply considered and highly self-aware, all that on top of the content,  which is just impressive on a human spirit level, even if there are moments I don’t agree with. Definitely a book I will keep thinking about.