Books of 2017 Part 1: 50-41

This year, despite a reduced train commute and a small creature constantly moving and yelling and throwing things around my house, I managed to get through 61 books. As I do every year, I'll be counting down each one through to #11, then taking an abrupt turn to count up my bottom 11 from 50-61 before launching into the top ten. I'm aiming to get one post up per day, which means you should get my top ten on the 5th of January. It's easier to keep to a schedule with my books since I tend to write them up as I go; therefore to get a post ready for publishing I just need to edit and extend my mobile phone shorthand from where I keep the notes.

Oh and the usual drill of course: links to Goodreads, and pointless hashtags that explain why I've chosen to read certain things. So let's get things started with...

50) Purity – Jonathan Franzen

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Kicking things off with the latest from the writers of one of my – and everybody’s – favourite novels. While I was reading this, I couldn't shake a lot of the criticisms that Franzen has brought on himself in the past couple of years with his hot mansplainy takes on what women really need to do to get ahead in the world, but in particular this March 2016 tweet from Megan Amram that reads (for those who can’t be bothered clicking the link), in its entirety, "Jonathan Friendzone". There's certainly an unconfortable awkward maleness to the way Franzen writes - in particular - his young female protagonists, and in this more than in his other work there's a weird reflexive magnetism towards sex as the objective of love and life itself. That said, I think this book's problem is similar to the problems with Freedom, in that its ambition far outstrips its execution. At its core, it's effectively a soap opera, full of coincidences and people trying to save other people and being outfoxed by further coincidences. The concept of "Purity" that Franzen explores is at best intriguing. I can't help but find an oblique Dr Strangelove reference in it, and the overarching thematic exploration here – as in Strangelove - is that the world will implode not through any great calamity or omnipotent force, but through the petty and insane machinations of one or two men. And the character who is "free" from all these machinations here, the title character Pip/Purity, exudes this purity in many ways: largely it's the purity of naiveté, of simply not knowing enough about the way the world works to be a part of its ugliness. However, there's also a more explicit purity portrayed, that being the freedom from the corrupt influence of money, something which those responsible for Pip invariably impose on her. As Franzen takes it further though, there's just this clumsy and muddled idea of nobody being really pure, and being unable to escape the inevitable scumminess of humanity. As always it's entertaining reading from Franzen, but it's very flawed and kind of troubling in its sanctimonious white knightedness, like he knows better than the rest of us how horrible we are.

49) The Good Earth – Pearl S Buck

#ClassicsIShouldRead

This feels a lot like the family saga style of storytelling that I quite like. In many ways too, it reads like a bildungsroman, only taking a young man as its starting point and following the tribulations of him and his family until his death. Or thereabouts - he's still alive at the end, too. It's written in a very matter-of-fact way, which made some aspects, like the assumed status of girls as slaves, and the general treatment of women and some specific female characters, quite uncomfortable. That was the case at least for me, though I’m aware you have to take it in context - that it's neither condoning nor condemning the treatment, just narrating it as it would have been. It also makes parts of it quite effective, like the figure of O-lan, our protagonist's wife for most of the book, who performs the Christ-like role of suffering and serving in stoic silence, and for the most part is really the most heroic and noble character in the story - kind of an Uncle Tom figure except through Buck’s matter-of-fact style, her suffering isn't fetishised the way Tom's was in Stowe's novel (my bottom read of last year). Apart from the ambivalent key character Wang Lung who's both an exemplary everyman and a troublesome morality mirror, I did enjoy the narrative. I was, though, a bit bothered by this repeated motif of Buck's where she would write "this is the way it would have gone on, had not..." which is meant to evoke this sense of fatalism, but when it keeps being employed it feels redundant: the concept of fatalism and people's interference could have been implied instead by the fairly obvious fact that when some things happen, they affect other things. It became a bit of a self-conscious tic that bothered me a little after a while. I didn’t mind this as much as its lowly position might imply, but I did find it a little unlikeable, its characters mostly unsympathetic, and it just didn’t wow me.

48) Them - Joyce Carol Oates

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This was a weird one, and it took me far longer than it should have to read. Part of the problem is that it's kind of a blurting, stop-start stammering kind of narrative that frequently takes sudden leaps ahead in time and then retrospectively fills us in on what’s happened in the meantime (synchronously with telling us the new present narrative). But I think the main challenge I had was just this emotional disconnect with the characters. Maybe if I'd read the Wonderland quartet (of which this is the third book) in sequence, I'd kind of grasp the themes better, but I had trouble a lot of time understanding he characters’ motivations for acting in a particular way even while I was engaged by the narrative overall. I just found the central protagonists, Jules and Maureen, a bit enigmatic, struggling through poverty, feeling misunderstood and disenfranchised by family and society (and each other) and trying to conform to social expectations while also attempting to find and forge an identity. I guess Oates' point is that in trying to discover themselves, they are always at the fickle whim of societal pressures and dangers within this cultural milieu of mid-century Detroit, but I just found their psychology a bit intractable because I feel like they could easily have made different choices and led better lives (based on the information I have at hand – i.e. Oates’ elusive narrative). The title is an interesting enigma as well; it gets hinted at throughout the book with this idea that Jules & Maureen are trying to distance themselves from 'them', the normal people who have made civilisation and the cultural-economic climate what it is, but there's also frequent allusions to 'them' as just any 'other' - most tellingly, their mother Loretta's frequent references to People of Colour - and the idea that someone else, some ‘other’ group, are all to blame for her own misfortune. It feels like a bit of a patchwork sketch of life in Detroit, and while parts were captivating I had trouble embracing the whole thing because it did seem so patchy. I feel like the other three books in this quartet are harder to obtain, but I'll see if they enrich this experience retrospectively, if I can get them, and be bothered.

47) A Brief History of Seven Killings – Marlon James

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I can think of at least two things wrong with this title: it's not brief, and there are significantly more than seven killings in this book. But yeah, I’m aware the title takes its name from one of the plot points of the book, where one of the characters writes about the events and calls it ‘A Brief History of Seven Killings’, and other characters question the same title in a similar way. I can't say I really enjoyed this book. It's a very haphazard, interminable epic that feels like Marlon James just got into a groove and never wanted it to end (like how Pynchon strikes me at his worst - sometimes there are just so many plot lines and characters that you don't really know how to or want to tie it all up). It's got an impressive scope though, and in particular an impressive narratorial voice - in that each chapter is written from a different character's perspective and the resultant heteroglossia is very well worked. I completely felt the voice of each narrator in turn, so that felt very genuine and let me forget that I was reading one man's vision. A lot of the more Jamaican slang and more thuggish characters' narration I found a bit impenetrable, and the chop and jump and the sheer number of narrators who are unreliable witnesses made it really inscrutable to really understand in the moment what was going on. I got it by the end, but for the most part it felt quite rudderless in that I didn't really know what the point of it is. I think the final chapter did bring it home to me, and in particular the subject of that chapter - a young Jamaican woman trying to escape her past and disappear through a sequence of new identities and locations - is the most engaging part of the book. She’s also the most incongruous character, in the sense that she is only peripherally connected to all the action and killings, whereas every other character is more directly linked. I feel like she's the real heart of the story and I found her sections far more engaging than nearly all the rest of it. Amidst all the drug dealing and gangland killing and Bob Marley legacy, it's a book about Jamaica: its light and its very dark side, how it both captivates in its beauty and culture but also traps you in its neon claws, and how the gang and drug culture within its underbelly becomes as inescapable as the country and culture itself. Aside from the afore-mentioned character, it's relentlessly brutal, esoteric narration, with largely unpleasant characters and a big, challenging epic vision of a gangland war and all its factions. I can respect James' writing and his vision, but the execution was far more of a slog than I'd hoped; I just wasn't gripped for much of it at all.

46) Sweet Tooth – Ian McEwan

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This is an intriguing Mcewan novel; a combination of an espionage romance (let's go and make the inevitable comparison to Hitchcock’s Notorious) and a literary intrigue, about a female spy who gets involved with the writer she is charged with recruiting to contribute unwittingly to the anti-communist cause (confused by that sentence? How apt, it’s a confusing premise). There's a funny kind of layering to the levels of unreality to the story that ultimately brings to light a question I asked very early on in reading this, about McEwan’s use of first person narrative: why would she be writing this? It's not usually a question that I necessarily bring up, but here it's an intriguing question to ask throughout. The other question I enjoyed asking throughout was how many of the "writing" parts were based on McEwan's own experience in getting edited, reviewed, slammed, etc? I couldn't help but detect a sense of satire in it, whether self-directed or otherwise, it certainly felt self-conscious. Being in McEwan's safe hands, it's easy to like this, but it kind of lacked the emotional heft or punch of many of his other works. It felt somewhat low-stakes and a lot of the drama was self-inflicted by characters, and therefore the falls and tribulations felt somewhat deserving. It seems odd but I was a bit disappointed by the lack of violent misanthropy in this book, it was almost romantic by McEwan's standards.

45) The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway

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Speaking of romantically-toned books from misanthropic writers, this is a very romantic tale from Hemingway. It was a bit of a disappointment, really, because I knew nothing about the content of this book and I'd always hoped it would be this bleak, nature conquers everything sort of tale, like a really condensed and truncated-sentences version of Moby Dick, but it's really very sentimental. Ultimately it’s just a long drawn-out fishing tale that's of most interest to people who like fishing adventures. Well written and bitesize but it just seemed like a one-off adventure rather than anything more about nature's invulnerability which, content-wise, it totally could have been.

44) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Díaz

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I found this book a bit frustrating. It's quite fragmented in its narrative, and ultimately a bit unclear what the ultimate point is. It starts out narrating the story of a nerdy Dominican misfit – the titular Oscar - and essentially the ultimate goal of his character seems to be to get laid (this is at least partially affected by the lens of our first-person narrator, a charming Dominican playboy who dates Oscar's beautiful sister Lola). It does, though, also go back and forth in time, telling the story of Oscar's mother and her star-crossed love, Oscar's grandfather and his ill fate, etc. The point of all this scope seems to be to instil the mythology of the family ‘fukú’, or curse, that ostensibly leads to Oscar's downfall and the inevitability (given the book's title) of him not living out a full life. It also seems to paint the picture of Oscar's very existence being so unlikely that one wonders how this complete iconoclast - intellectual, socially awkward, obsessed with sci-fi and fantasy, in a milieu full of toxic masculinity and machismo - came to be. But where reviewers seem to have found heart and soul in this book, I found nothing but cold fatalism which left me feeling cynical and detached. For one thing, Oscar is not a relatable character at all. He evokes pathos, perhaps, but not engagement. There's a lot of input - from our vantage point - of his suffering, but very little about his psychology, and I found that a big shortcoming since his whole raison d'etre seems to be to be apart from normal social interaction - hence unrelatable as a character. By contrast I found Lola, his sister, very engaging and likeable, and in all honesty I feel Díaz could have kept the story, the characters, even the title, intact, but drawn more of the story from Lola's point of view, and her worrying about the inept brother she loves. I feel I would have gotten so much warmth from it if this were Lola’s story about Oscar more than Oscar’s self-pitying memoir. As it is currently structured, it basically has the message: Oscar wants to lose his virginity, repeatedly fails, dies. Oh and Dominican figures of power are assholes. There are amusing and very entertaining parts to this book, but ultimately it left me cold and unenlightened, and I can see ways where it could have been much better.

43) The Aunt’s Story – Patrick White

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My second attempt at liking White, after The Tree of Man got my runner-up worst book of 2016, and again I'm just not on board with him. The first part of this book is quite engaging, telling of Theodora (Theo) Goodman, the ugly, aloof sister to the beautiful and charming Fanny, and their upbringing. Theo finds herself generally kept apart from others, while nevertheless having people form isolated attachments to her almost like they see her as another part of themselves or possibly as her saviour. Then the second part takes Theo, after coming into her mother's inheritance, staying in a French hotel among a cast of variously unruly and unstable characters, and it's such a far throw from part one in terms of stakes and focus that the whole thing feels completely discombobulated. The final coda seems to take this discombobulation deliberately, as Theo's mind has fractured and she wanders aimlessly through further travails. I was just lost on what White was trying to achieve throughout the whole second part as it just seemed like a different book and different story, and Theo's agency became less and less. That said, I derived a bit of value by putting a Jungian lens on the story, seeing Theo as other Fanny's 'shadow' or darker self and, when she separates herself by travelling, finds herself lost in the darkness. Fanny's final cutting off of Theo in part 3 then becomes less about disowning her sister as it is about embracing and regathering her complete animus. The trouble with this reading is I feel it's a clever interpretation by me to ameliorate a disjointed narrative, and is more to my own credit than White's (go me). Still, it does bring an additional depth to the narrative and is useful for getting some value out of this disjointed narrative. I'd appreciate some specific White recommendations though if I’m not to give up on him entirely.

42) Sophie’s Choice – William Styron

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This is a weird and difficult read. Going in knowing/thinking I know the essentials of the plot - that it's about a mother having to choose between her two children in a concentration camp (oh yeah, spoilers but seriously, also Darth Vader is Luke’s father, I mean does anyone not know this yet?) – it begins in a completely disparate milieu, a first-person narrative about a writer and his dissatisfaction with his publishing job at McGraw-Hill. I actually checked ahead to make sure I hadn't accidentally started with the unrelated introduction from Styron. But in fact, the whole thing kicks off being about him, and in fact the whole book is about him: he meets the eponymous Sophie a couple of dozen pages in, and the story really doesn't become properly about her and her 'choice' until an unfeasibly long time. In fact the whole book reads like the novel "Sophie's Choice" plus a twice-longer novel about "how the novel Sophie's Choice came to be written". There’s more emphasis throughout the book on the narrator's libido than there is on Sophie and her experiences in Auschwitz, and the reasons why she is so reticent to talk about them. And therein kind of lies the issue with reading this long after the concept of Sophie’s choice has become such a cliché (yet knowing, as became evident, so little else about it): the crux of the story and its effectiveness lies in Sophie slowly, piece by piece, opening up about her experiences, revealing the lies that she earlier told to cover up the pain and horror of what she went through. But knowing it beforehand, the mystery is removed and therefore, all the endless preamble and diversions that make the story far less about her and more about ‘Stingo’ the writer seem like bloated filler. It's not the book's fault that I knew the main spoiler going in, but it emphasised how peripheral all of the first-person narrative is. Basically it could be just as effective and provocative a story if it really were just a 300-page novel about a Polish woman and her experience with her kids in Auschwitz, instead of a 600-page novel about an aspiring writer trying to have sex with a Polish woman who had an experience in Auschwitz with her kids and instead of having sex with her he ultimately uncovers the story about her and her kids in Auschwitz. The truth is, it's well written, and really effective when it has to be, but I felt like the endless and frequent passages about Stingo's yearning, as well as the turbulent relationship between Sophie and the volatile Nathan (who is revealed as schizophrenic very very late in the story too, at a really odd point to find a twist to a relevant but not central character), very much distracted from the central crisis of the book rather than building up to it. Really bizarre proposition for a novel; maybe it was groundbreaking but I found it ineffectual and self-indulgent.

41) My Name is Red – Orhan Pamuk

#ClassicsIShouldRead

This is an interesting book, largely from an intellectual perspective. It definitely belongs in the conversation with those great books about the value and power of art, and has as much to say about the interplay between religion and art as Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev (my #2 book of 2016), but obviously shares a lot more kinship with Eco’s The Name of the Rose (my #21 book of 2014), since both novels centre around a murder mystery. This is also largely a romance, as well as a bit of historical fiction, and I feel like Pamuk tries to do too much so none of the elements is  quite as engaging as it could have been. It's definitely a skilfully written book, but it's not quite as engaging as The Name of the Rose, which is funny because even that I felt over-intellectualised the story and mired it all in this academic artifice. The multi-narrator aspect of this, and Pamuk’s choice to narrate some parts from the point-of-view of illustrations, or figures in illustrations, is an interesting take on art and its part in history. I feel like there's plenty of interesting things to say here, but the overall effect on me was more bafflement than enlightenment.