In Through the Out Door
Reading Log, Winter 2022-23
Dancing Bear, by James Crumley. Trapped in an emotional fog and desperate for distraction, I picked up this 1983 anti-heroic potboiler on a larky trip to the Tribeca Barnes & Noble, not even sure if I had read it before. It served its purpose just fine, but it felt like a sad and defeated business. The macho-poetic drugs-and-fucking stuff has lost some of its brashness, but its general tone of weary disillusionment seems perfectly to encapsulate the sour, ashy hangover of the countercultural dream.
Acts of Service, by Lillian Fishman. This debut novel from another member of the relentless ranks of the newly minted MFAs wants desperately to be thought of as a shocking and sinister psychosexual drama of erotic obsession or what have you, but it ends up skirting the disastrous near-edge of unintentional comedy. The plot concerns the dynamics of an ongoing ménage à trois among two young bisexual women and a masterful older man. The older man is a billionaire with his own company, private jet, etc., and as it turns out, he has a secret kink by way of a domination fetish … (Sorry, hold on, I am being told that this is the plot of Fifty Shades of Grey. This book is not that. I don’t think. I will clarify.)
The Complete Works of George Herbert. Not straight through, of course; but what a revelation and welcome relief it was to lose oneself in the semi-archaic, clotted byways of this great late Renaissance poet’s mind. Herbert was a religious poet, of course, but — as with gospel and blues (OK, stretching, I know) — the language and cadence of a worshipper petitioning God for mercy and relief works almost harrowingly well when mentally adapted to a, uh, secular context. Emotionally bracing, even necessary.
On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays, by Emily Ogden. This knotty, tough-minded, and yet graceful collection of essays ranges over a salmagundi of topics — sex, motherhood, nature — with formidable intellectual and stylistic brio. The author’s mind is so quick and dense with ideas that it becomes difficult at times to keep pace, but its affect is ruthless, fatalistic, and elemental. “Our aggression towards those we love might feel like a failure,” she writes. “Hooded like falcons, we pass in and out of love.”
Appointment in Samarra, by John O’Hara. Many things to admire and enjoy here, but in the end this 1934 novel feels akin to work by O’Hara’s contemporaries Dos Passos, Lewis, and Dreiser: dated and somewhat labored, vividly sociological but in some essential way second-tier. A strong point in its favor: as Chip McGrath (in his introduction) and others have observed, the novel’s female characters have cheerful and energetic sexual agency — not a universal characteristic of fiction by male writers, either in 1934 or now. It’s a Christmas story, too, in the same way that The Corrections is a Christmas story.
A People’s Guide to Capitalism, by Hadas Thier; The Origin of Capitalism, by Ellen Meikses Wood. Having faked my through fifty-four years of life as a soi disant Marxist without ever having read any of the great man’s works, I have long felt the need for an accessible primer to the concepts that underpin the ideology. Thier’s book mostly met this need; there’s a lot of hand-wringey kapock, but the conceptual and financial backbone of the theory is illustrated with great clarity. Wood’s book, meanwhile, is considered a classic for its radical revisionism of the idea of capitalism as an urban, industrial phenomenon. It’s jargon-y and repetitive, but provides an outstanding example of theoretical in-fighting among Marxist scholars, circa 1950 and on.
City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, by Abram C. Van Engen. My continued fascination with all things Puritan received reinforcement via this excellent work of literary history. Van Engen’s project is to provide a nuanced history of the phrase “city on a hill,” which first appears in a sermon by John Winthrop and received its most famous expression in a jingoistic speech by Ronald Reagan. The passage between these two points, as Van Engen shows, was a complex and often hidden tangle of historiographical agendas and documentary happenstance. An elegant and accessible performance.