Amy P. Knight

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

This book strikes me as a project where the writer undertook a kind of post-modern experiment in exploring or communicating something about certain aspects of humanity by taking things to the extreme. Not exactly satire, although it has those elements (especially in the descriptions of contemporary art pieces and the invention of certain pharmaceuticals), but a literalization of something we usually look at as an abstract phenomenon.

An unnamed character–a superficially pretty young woman, graduate of Columbia, menially employed in an art gallery–experiences absolutely everything (e.g. the death of both of her parents) with deeply detached irony, and has no capacity for sincere emotion. (Or maybe it’s there, but she’s so incredibly twisted up that she’s completely unable to express it?) So she finds an unscrupulous psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle, to prescribe her fistfulls of sedatives and hypnotics, both real and fictional (she takes Ambien, and Lunesta, and Seroquel, but I started to catch on that not everything was real when she gets one called Prognosticrone. . .), and endeavors to spend the year sleeping. Attended by an annoying, bulimic friend named Reva and an insufferable contemporary artist named Ping Xi, she largely accomplishes this. That’s pretty much it.

There’s a lot that could be said about the sociological stuff packed in here. The novel is set in 2000-2001, and includes a fair amount of technology that was outdated even then. There are odd obsessions with unlikely celebrities. There is also 9/11, although this, mercifully, would not fall in the bucket of novels that started coming out around 2005 that dealt earnestly with the impact of those events on New Yorkers. There are clearly questions about the role of art , and surely something to say about the fact that the narrator’s inheritance quietly renders money–including residence in a doorman building in Manhattan–a non-obstacle. But I don’t particularly feel the need to mine all that, because really, although it seems like Moshfegh ably accomplished what she set out to do, I prefer fiction that trades in sincerity.

Who Is Rich by Matthew Klam

Rich–an early-40’s illustrator/cartoonist, married with two kids and never enough money–returns to a yearly arts conference in a Provincetown-like setting where he teaches. And sleeps with a woman who is a zillionaire. (And falls in love with her?) Well-worn ground–tepid self-flagellation, self-pity stuff. It’s to some degree satirical–at least I hope so–and that’s a mode that rarely works for me, especially when it’s ambiguous (or ambivalent?) Klam is a skilled writer, but I’m not sure he actually had much to say.

The Ensemble by Aja Gabel

A pleasant, enjoyable novel about a string quartet, centering on the musicians’ relationships over the course of their lives/careers, looking at love, art, family, sacrifice–nothing earth-shattering, but it held my attention. It also managed to pull off feeling like all four members were equally central characters–no small feat. If I have complaints, they are occasional over-writing and some degree of predictability. (And do I feel unsatisfied by the novel’s careful refusal to pick a hero? That’s clearly the point–but I’m not sure.)

The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon

Will, an ex-evangelical college student, andPhoebe, with whom he falls in love–Phoebe drawn into Jejah, a cult that is vaguely connected to North Korea. I had two problems with the book. The first one–which may not be totally fair–is that the jacket copy says, “When the group bombs several buildings in the name of faith, killing five people, Phoebe disappears.” But that happens on page 170, our of only 210. What seems like it should be the set-up for the book (the author of the jacket copy certainly thought so) is actually its climax. The run-up is long, the part that seems more interesting very compressed. The second problem is that I just never believed it. I think if you’re going to write something kind of sensational, you need either to include enough detail to make it eminently real and plausible, or to write with an unwavering authority. Kwon does neither. Moments of drama are glossed over so smoothly you could miss them, motivations are incomplete or insufficient, and the facts just don’t seem tethered to the reality of what would happen in this situation. Oh well.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

I have to say, this was delightful. It chronicles decades of the life of Count Alexander Rostov, under house arrest in the Metropol Hotel–but somehow, barely leaving the building, it’s full of adventure. Adventure arrives–people enter from the world–but largely, he makes it himself.

The book is old-fashioned–it is in possession of a third-person narrator prone to making observations about general truths, for instance–but in a way that feels comfortable, not stodgy. It plays explicitly with the tropes of Russian literature, invoking Chekhov and Tolstoy repeatedly. It is long, and concerns itself wit human experience not defined by time or place. And it simply tells stories.

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

This is the story (is story the word?) of Nathaniel and his sister Rachel, abandoned by their parents in London at the end of World War II, as teenagers. The first half narrates this era in Nathaniel’s experience, with the two men who are looking after them, known to the siblings as The Moth and The Darter.

In the second half, Nathaniel in his 20’s reconstructs what actually happened during that time. His mother, it turns out, was a spy. But none of this is narrated in very straightforward ways. There aren’t many actual scenes. Rather, there are impressions. Layers of experience. It’s a book that settles upon you like mist, rather than raindrops falling on your face.

Upstate by James Wood

Alan–a divorced and now re-partnered father of two adult daughters–goes with the younger daughter, Helen, to visit the older one, Vanessa, whose newish boyfriend has summoned them out of concern. (Vanessa, it seems, is depressed.) The craft is technically well executed, as one would expect from a critic who wrote a book called How Fiction Works, and the emotional truths often quite resonant–Alan navigates a business proposal from Helen and the as-yet-undisclosed knowledge that Vanessa’s boyfriend is in fact on the way out. It’s a book of talk, not a book of action.

My complaints, such as they are, are to do with things being at times a little too explicit or on the nose. Vanessa is a philosophy professor, which allows for a (to me unwelcome) aside with some of Woods’ thoughts on thoughts. And then there are the evangelical Christian next-door neighbors, conveniently placed to bring up another favorite Wood topic. And when Alan needs a bit of a jolt–oh, good, a car accident. None of that is wrong, per se; it’s just perhaps a bit wanting in imagination.

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

So incredibly engaging–yes, it’s a book about the AIDS epidemic, but it’s so personal. It’s truly a story about Yale, and perhaps even more, about Fiona, and what this major historical (if ongoing) event did to them. It was obviously meticulously researched, but I never felt like he’d put details in there just because she knew them. I never detected an off note in the whole 400 pages, never a word choice that tripped me up. There were a lot of characters, but she made it easy to keep clear on who was who. The necessary questions were answered with minimal fuss (where are Yale’s parents?) and the whole thing maintains an engaging plot, both within and across storylines. I trust her–she knows things.

One other thing about this book–she’s talked some in interviews about the choice to give over a decent part of the book to the experience of a straight white woman wrapped up in all this. Sure, one could criticize that–but I see it as a good use of the Shreve principle — after the Faulkner character, a northerner whose experience of Mississippi lets a reader   understand in a way he couldn’t if he had no guide whose experience is perhaps more familiar. It takes real talent for a writer to capture both the inside and semi-outside perspectives of a culture at the same time, in the same book.

The Gunners by Rebecca Kauffman

I liked the idea of this book–a group of six childhood friends, one of them dies, the other five come back for the funeral–but I found the execution lacking. It seemed that various different balances were off–between past and present, for instance, or among the different characters. Two of them were drawn with more detail, which left the other three feeling like sketches, almost like afterthoughts (or, in their worst moment, like caricatures). And the notion that these enormously different people had stayed in touch into their 30’s somehow without telling each other the essential contours of their lives just didn’t ring true for me.

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday

This book is unusual in a lot of ways, but the one that surprises me the most is that it is a concept book in many ways, but it is absolutely engaging on the level of scene and character. There has been a lot of talk about the novel’s themes and messages–what novelists can and can’t do, power dynamics between men and women, east and west, blurred lines between imagination and reality–but for me all that would have failed if Halliday had not written, first and foremost, an engaging story about a love affair, and a second engaging story about an Iraqi American navigating the early 2000’s and recalling earlier parts of his life. The Alice/Ezra section grabbed me in particular in the way it revealed information–never with exposition or even really any interiority, but through offhand remarks or subtle cues. All the more cerebral stuff is a bonus.