As I was writing this, I discovered that (most of) the books I read over the past 2 months are companions—either mirror images, cousins, or horseshoe ends from each other. Completely by accident! This post does not include the books I enjoyed at family beach week this year. In keeping with tradition (I guess?), those books will have their own post.
I have a love-hate relationship with short story collections. I so desperately want to love them! (I've started Ted Chiang's Exhalation collection at least three times...) But for some reason, my attention always wanders. Of notable exception is my recent adoration of Claire Keegan's works and, now, Lydia Millet's Atavists. (I do wonder if the fact that Lydia's collection is an anthology so we encounter characters that interact with each other throughout each of the stories helped focus my attention...?)
"Atavism" means the act of returning to one's natural form. Lydia's choice of title, then, casts all of her characters as personae in transition/metamorphosis/regression/uncovering. All of the personalities and plot lines that populate these stories are highly familiar to anybody living in contemporary America. There's an incel bodybuilder, a professor on the verge of cancellation due to plagiarism allegations, porn addicts, adolescents acting out (and egged on by the internet)...
Much like the critiques I've lobbed recently at works by Amanda Hess and Eula Biss (2 nonfic works, which is notable that my mind is connecting Atavists so heavily to nonfiction), part of me left some of Millet's stories (and thus the collection as a whole) wanting more resolution. What point are you trying to make, Lydia? What are you SAYING about incel culture? But I also think this is an unfair expectation to foist on an author, especially a fiction writer.
I take issue with some of the critiques of this collection I've seen from NPR and the NYT. The Times review reads, "Atavists concedes ground to the disillusioned among us." I'm not convinced that's true. Ignoring the "disillusioned" that populate our culture is to ignore the vast majority of people who participate in contemporary Western culture (there's more nuance to be unpacked here, but I'm genuinely trying not to write an essay here...). I didn't walk away thinking the main affect of her writing is despair, either.
My July mat book was Mia Birdsong's beautiful instruction manual on building community. Unlike the (mostly) disconnected characters that populated Lydia's Atavists (with 1 notable exception—the young lady who unites her neighbors to better everyone's quality of life), Mia's book is full of the wisdom she's collected from the community leaders, activists, & elders she's encountered.
Some parts of this book were reminiscent of my experience reading bell hooks' All About Love, about which I wrote: "I find that I am already familiar with (most of) the ideas & principles she's putting forth, but her language and the depth of her careful, studied, researched mastery of the topic have knocked me on my ass several times."
Other parts of Mia's book were fresh ideas for me. One example that jumps to mind is the chapter about restorative justice. I am familiar with the larger concept of restorative justice, but to experience the concept become tangible through intentional practice in Mia's reporting of her lived experience with it was incredibly moving. That chapter provoked a lot of self-reflection about the societal, familial, social, and personal processes that I take for granted or accept simply because I don't want to upend the status quo. Who are these rituals serving? Do they actually serve their intended goals, or do they secretly uphold a system that perpetuates more harm by acting against my/our values?
I love Mia's palpable reverence for her citational practice*, to use a seemingly bland term to describe the way she thoughtfully tends to her lineage of knowledge-making. This is something that is evident across all of Mia's work.
*I think a lot about citational practice in my work even outside of The Academy.™ I learned the term first from Sara Ahmed's sensational 2013 blog post: "Making Feminist Points", which I read as part of a Digital Rhetoric class taught by Dr. Caddie Alford.
Pair #2: Dysfunctional families on stage
My infatuation with plays continued with two classics: August Wilson's Fences and Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. Wilson's masterpiece is a tight examination of Black American life and the masculinity trap. The main character is Troy Maxson, a washed-up baseball player entrenched in his own bitterness, guilt, and shame. Of all the elements in this work to admire, I loved the way Wilson wrote the character of Rose, Troy's wife. Rose so easily could be afforded no energy in his work, the way that she is obstructed within the plot. She could've been written as a pitiable victim, and yet! In many ways, Rose reminds me a lot of Pilate Dead from Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon—she finds new ways to embody the role assigned to her and, in doing so, she reclaims the agency that could be denied her.
The flavor of familial dysfunction in Fences revolves entirely around Troy. His bitterness at being stuck in a dead-end job after having been such a promising young athlete stymies his ability to support his son, whose legacy he fears will surpass his own. He also harbors a great deal of resentment towards Rose—a projection of his own self-loathing—which (spoiler alert) fuels his long-term affair with another woman.
And then we have the Wingfields. Reading Williams' play in concert with Wilson's was an accidentally beautiful parallel journey. This play appears to center on the man of the household, like Fences, but the real story is about the women: mother Amanda and daughter Laura. Like Wilson, Williams' play is written by a man that features male narrators and protagonists experiencing a tremendous amount of ennui and restlessness that seem to overshadow the desires of the women in their lives. I wish there were stronger shades of agency afforded to the Wingfield women, TBH. Laura and Amanda don't ever fully overcome their victim status, trapped by the generational confusion of aging (for Amanda) and by the weight of expectations, not to mention chronic illness (for Laura).
I've discovered an exquisite kind of frustration when reading plays. There is an acute blockage that happens when you read a play because the externalization of the playwright's words and stage directions is constrained entirely by my imagination. I can only project my own interpretation of the play onto a stage of my own making, and that's kind of antithetical! To experience a play without the influence of the artistic choices made by directors, actors, and production designers is to experience only half of the work, if that.
Pair #3: College kids confronting "The Truth"
Welcome to Hampden College, the small Vermont liberal arts school of your dreams. At least, on the surface it appears that way. When you look closer, you discover a cult of sorts has sprung out of the Classics department. Richard, our narrator and incredibly unreliable navigator of this story, is an outsider at Hampden—a poor, brilliant kid from the West Coast who desperately longs to join the ranks of the cool kids studying Greek with an enigmatic and highly secretive professor. Of course, Richard manages to snag an invite to the cult and all hell promptly breaks loose.
One of Donna Tartt's talents as a writer (and I can attest to his as a fan of The Goldfinch) is her masterful ability to evoke the particular anguish assigned to those with outsider status. A common complaint I've heard about this novel is the "lack" of character growth. (A complaint I lodged very recently at Lynn Steger Strong's The Float Test!) But I think readers who make that argument are confusing Richard's core identity with lack of change. I think he does change! And it happens in very small, subtle ways, as opposed to one fell swoop. Grandiose gestures like that are certainly not Tartt's style, anyway. Her writing unfolds like a steady, maddening dripping faucet.
I do wish we got to see more of Julian, the supposed ringleader of this band of overly intellectual assholes. The greatest influence we feel from Julian is actually that of his absence, and that's not in keeping with the plot. He is God to these kids in many destructive ways—I want to see more of him!
Technically, the students that populate this play are not in college (anymore). But! The play is set at the chaotic afterparty of a conservative Catholic college's presidential confirmation ceremony and the students are alumni of said school + the daughter of said new president. So...
Arbery's play is a brilliant examination of contemporary right-wing culture's appropriation of religious belief. Set soon after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, the four young adults that star in this brilliant work represent four unique identities along the spectrum of political and Catholic belief. Arbery's dialogue is SO smart and quite literally made me gasp aloud at certain points. These characters—Teresa, in particular—know exactly the words to say to cause the most damage to each other, and sometimes they delight in the inflicting of those wounds. The pacing is entirely correct, the imagery is rich, and the caustic message(s) carried by each of the characters is incredibly potent for contemporary audiences.
Zoe and Jack are brilliant(?) Harvard undergrads who believe they've discovered a cure for aging. Hot on the cusp of this incredible (and potentially highly profitable) potential, they rush into the ruthless world of tech startups. Demanding VC firms, Harvard lawsuits, and viral Ted talks ensue. But when the science starts to look a little shakier than they've led the world to believe, the cofounders (and soulmates?) are faced with some extremely difficult questions they are wholly unprepared to answer.
I really wanted Taylor to explore Zoe and Jack's internal thoughts, feelings, questions, hopes, and anxieties about (im)mortality and science-as-ersatz religion and technology as the new God. Alas, we only get little whiffs (think: a few sentences here and there) along these lines. (I recognize also that this is my own bias based on my own interests shining through.) Also, I take issue with how little page space Jack gets to develop in comparison to Zoe. He has a far more compelling backstory than she does (IMO...there was more potential for Zoe than we saw, too), and we are entirely rushed through it in the final few chapters. And then Jack's entire reason for being becomes, simply, Zoe. While Romantic, it would've been much more powerful to watch this happen alongside Zoe's complex arc of feeling-development as opposed to a breeze-through to wrap the story up. In this way, the end of Notes on Infinity reminded me a lot of my issues with Yael Van Der Wouden's The Safekeep.
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