French Exit, by Patrick DeWitt; Erasure, by Percival Everett

It is my habit to spend the week between Christmas and New Year's reading. Usually it's a cold time, when being curled up under a blanket on the couch with a book seems like the best way one can spend a day. Not so this year. I have my living room window open and still my apartment is too warm. 

A year is an arbitrary unit of measure in reading life, but I find it's a useful one. In addition to always squeezing a few fast, intense reading stretches in at the end, I also use the end of the year to clear out the backlog. Either I finish the books that I started earlier in the year and left to lie with bookmarks still in them as I moved on to other things, or I declare them abandoned. I used to find it very hard to give up books, and so setting a December 31 deadline is useful. Each year I start with a clean slate and I don't allow myself to feel any guilt about unfinished books hanging over me. This year I abandoned three books; each returned to my shelf with a bookmark still in place in case I do one day get the urge to return to them. (Usually this doesn't happen, but I like to be prepared. I still have my bookmark on page 350 of Moby Dick which I started in July of 2008 and abandoned at the end of that year. I think I could pick it up today and not need to retrace my steps.)

After finishing Dummy Boy on the morning of December 29, I figured I had time to squeeze in one more book before the year was out. I'd had French Exit for a while. I believe it came originally recommended by someone I follow on Twitter. I think it was its appearance on this list that made me think it would be a good choice for this particular moment (not that I was in a rut; more a rush). Before the day was over, I was halfway through it and I realized I probably had time for two more books in 2021 if I really committed myself to it. French Exit was everything that was promised: dark, funny, extremely readable, and featuring a cat.

When I finished French Exit on the morning of December 30, I had already decided that Erasure would be the next book I'd take up. At 265 pages of what appeared to me to be a very small font, I was slightly concerned I might not meet my (arbitrary) deadline. I started it after lunch yesterday, brought it with me to read while I waited on a ~3-hour line for a covid test, then read a bit more before dinner. When I picked it up again this morning I had 195 pages remaining, and when I got to page 130, where the novel-within-the-novel concludes, I realized I could pace myself. I had plenty of time.

I didn't write much about Telephone when I read it last month, but I liked it a lot. When I picked up Erasure, I found that the voice was familiar, the pacing was familiar. I fell right into it. While I did have two of his books (Erasure being one), I didn't know much of anything about Percival Everett when I read Telephone, but after I finished it I read what I could find, most notably this illuminating New Yorker article. It made me want to finally pick up Erasure, which I'd had a copy of for quite a while, and his other books. (What are the reasons it took me another 2 months to do so? Hard to say.)

Anyway: Erasure. I loved it. It has these layers of satire, and they live comfortably inside a story that isn't satire. A story about the difficulty of family; about loss and grieving; about being alone in the world. While the stories are utterly different, I think this was where I saw the similarity with Telephone. The characters are suffer from deep, personal loss. They feel profoundly alone. And yet there's humor; a lot of it. There are other things going on. Life is going on. (It seems likely, in both cases, the way life goes on – the decisions the central characters make, is driven by the experience of loss, but it's not so explicit.) To say that Erasure is a hilarious send-up of the publishing industry being taken in by its own racist assumptions about the Black experience would be true, but not complete. It's much more besides. 

Dummy Boy: Tekashi 6ix9ini and the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods, by Shawn Setaro

Let me start with a disclosure: Shawn Setaro is a friend of mine. As anyone who is familiar with my reading habits will know, Dummy Boy is not my usual fare. So, my decision to read it was not unbiased, and my review probably won't be either, but I do believe the fact that I tore through Dummy Boy cover to cover in less than 24 hours is a testament to Shawn's writing and storytelling abilities. I listened to hip hop a lot as a teen and young adult – and I still love a lot of what I listened to back then, but my listening habits have not kept up with the times. I have, as far as I know, never heard a Tekashi 69 song. Inasmuch as I was aware of the events surrounding his career and trial, it was because of my friendship with Shawn – I read some of his reporting on it at the time. I'm not a podcast or a Spotify person, so I never did listen to the podcast that Shawn created (sorry!). This might be considered a good thing in that it meant that most of the material covered in this book was new to me. Anyway, this story was a wild ride!

Dummy Boy is divided into two parts. The first half provides some biographical background on Tekashi's early life and then goes into a lot of detail on his career development, his rising fame, and his gang connections in Brooklyn. I was a little alarmed to discover how many key events in Tekashi's short career as a gangster took place within a few blocks of my home. The second half of the book is a play-by-play of the racketeering trial in which Tekashi was a key cooperating witness. Both halves are told with enough context for even someone wholly uninformed about the events to understand, and the story is compelling enough that I never lost interest in reading it – even lacking any specific interest in the people involved. While I imagine most readers who pick up this book will do so with some knowledge and curiosity about the events, I can attest that it's a thoroughly engaging read even for the reader who has neither. 

The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim

I only became aware of Elizabeth von Arnim a little more than a year ago when I picked up a copy of her book Love at the Goodwill in Downtown Brooklyn without knowing anything about it. Later I realized I had been vaguely aware of her, without knowing her by name. I remembered the existence of the movie Enchanted April – I could picture the poster, though I never saw it. But the book was recommended to me – I would have been interested anyway after reading Love – and so when I found a copy at a used bookshop in Philadelphia earlier this year I bought it. And then I brought it home and shelved it. It was its appearance in "Read Like the Wind" on December 18 that brought it to the front of my mind, and so I determined I would read it next.

The Enchanted April takes place not long after the Great War. Four English women who are nearly strangers, together rent a small castle in Italy for the month of April. Each has her own reason for wanting to get away. In their new setting, each is transformed. This is the premise, but it's Elizabeth von Arnim's telling of it that makes this book. She has a sharp insight into people, and how they relate to one another and the way she describes these intrigues is funny and a little wicked. We see at once the surface interactions and the currents underneath. 

As someone who travels frequently and often prefers to be alone when I do so, I was presented with a possibly unflattering picture of myself when I started this book. Earlier this year – in April, in fact – I went on a trip with one woman I knew and two women I didn't. Did I, like the book's Lady Caroline conspicuously sneak off on my own for entire days? I don't claim her other qualities – startling beauty and wealth – but I recognized her fear of being attached to. I'd rather imagine myself (as would anyone I think) as like the book's Mrs. Wilkins, who on arriving in their castle is suffused with love and sympathy. For the first time, she finds the competence and independence to be truly herself. Her transformation is nearly instant, while the others' take time, but it is Mrs. Wilkins who really brings it all about. 

The Enchanted April was delightful and now I so want to go to the Ligurian coast some April (if nothing else to see the flowers so vividly described in this book!). It's a shame that possibility feels so remote today.

Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski

Yesterday was my last day of work in 2021 and I have been looking forward to my traditional year-end week of reading for a long time. The first thing on the agenda for my time off was finishing Fieldwork, which I started early last week. I had expected to get through it more quickly – I had a round-trip train ride to Philly over the weekend, which I was sure would get me through the book – but the last week and change proved busier than I anticipated and I wasn't always in the mood to read during what little downtime I had. Fieldwork is another book I found via Molly Young's Read Like the Wind newsletter. Like the last book I read on her recommendation, it's an anthropology novel. 

Fieldwork follows a journalist named Mischa Berlinski around Thailand as he investigates an anthropologist who has settled in the community where she started her fieldwork until being sent to prison for murdering a missionary, and her victim. Berlinski interviews several sources to learn about his subjects, and the book tells the story through these conversations, shifting its focus from the anthropologist murderer to the Dead Head missionary and back as he uncovers new information about one then the other. The resulting story reveals itself slowly and indirectly, but keeps our interest. So much so that when the narrative is occasionally interrupted by the narrator's own life and troubles, they feel very out of place. 

Now it's time for me to decide whether to return to any of the three books I started and set aside earlier this year, or to spend the next week and a half on new material. Stay tuned!

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, by Penelope Mortimer

Several months ago when the first series of McNally Editions were announced, I subscribed and ordered the whole set. The first three arrived last weekend, just as I was in need of something new to read. I had never heard of Penelope Mortimer, but I selected Daddy's Gone A-Hunting to start with on the strength of its first paragraph. It turned out to be an excellent choice and an unexpectedly timely read.* 

Originally published in 1958, this book must have been scandalous at the time. It centers on Ruth, now in her late 30s and married to a man she doesn't love, a man who terrorizes her, in fact, whom she was pressured into marrying after becoming pregnant by him at 18. As the book begins, the daughter she had a few months after that wedding is now 18 or so herself and studying at Oxford. She becomes pregnant and Ruth is driven to save her daughter from the misery she herself lives with. Mother and daughter agree that an abortion is the solution, and though they share this confidence, they seem unable to communicate or connect. In 1950s England, abortion isn't legal, so getting one involves several hurdles: finding a willing doctor, getting down to London without arousing suspicion, and figuring out how to fund an abortion, among others. 

These are the events of the book, but what really made it a compelling read was Mortimer's writing and perception. There is a brilliantly told change in Ruth's psychology over the course of the novel.  Mortimer does an incredible job of showing us how Ruth is perceived by others, and how she's aware of it herself. Her husband thinks she's mad and hires a caretaker to stay with her because he only comes home at weekends. Sometimes, Ruth does sink into her own depressed state, but sometimes she can use the way others see her to her own advantage. We readers witness Ruth take control of her own narrative, even as the change in her goes totally unnoticed by everyone around her. It's quite something.

* I read this incredible story in the NY Times midway through my reading of Daddy's Gone A-Hunting and they were echoing against each other in my mind all week. 

Mourning, by Eduardo Halfon

I was on the second paragraph of Mourning when I asked myself why I had waited until now to start it. It's a dumb question; I would have asked myself the same thing whenever I decided to start it I think. I got it a little over a year ago and it's not like it would have had significantly more meaning to me then than it did now (in fact, perhaps more today as, at one point, Halfon mentions reading Joseph Roth, a writer I hadn't read until February of this year). As with Halfon's other books, Mourning seems to lie somewhere between fiction and memoir; perhaps a collection of short stories, but not clearly so. The first story/chapter of Mourning recounts a trip to Calabria, where the narrator Halfon has been invited to deliver a talk. Only after accepting does he learn the talk is to take place at a former concentration camp (which, he discovers on arriving, is in fact a reconstruction of a former concentration camp that was destroyed in the 1960s to clear the way for a highway). The town Halfon arrives at in Calabria is the same one where George Gissing landed in 1897, which I drove through in 2018. I had no idea there had been a concentration camp in the vicinity. I didn't know Italy had had camps at all, though I can't say I was entirely surprised – particularly that one was located in Calabria, a malarial backwater in Mussolini's Italy. As we know, he was fond of exiling political dissidents in Italy's deep south. But I was surprised I'd never heard of it. Looking at the map, I must have driven right past it (right over it perhaps on the autostrada that it was cleared for) on my way to find Carlo Levi's Aliano. 

The bulk of Mourning consists of a long chapter called "Mourning," which takes us in and out of the past, to Poland, Germany, Lebanon, Corsica, La Havre, New York, Miami, and Guatemala tracing Halfon's family's movements, his own movements, the secret story of his uncle who died as a child. It's heartbreaking and beautiful at every turn. 

In the Company of Men, by Véronique Tadjo

I was rushed to pick out a book to read as I headed out the door on Wednesday evening and I pulled out In the Company of Men before I had a chance to second guess myself. Somewhere I had heard something about it but I didn't remember where or what. I mostly made note of it because it was from Côte d'Ivoire, a country I had not yet read a book from. And then a few months ago I was visiting my dad and he had, independently, come across a copy and set it aside for me. (This isn't so surprising in that he often sets aside books for me and knows I'm interested in African literature, though it's not very common that he sets aside a book I was already seeking.) But I still didn't know anything about it, so when I sat down on the subway and opened it to read on Wednesday evening I almost had to laugh. I had been looking for a slim book that would be quick reading and I had, unknowingly, selected a book about the twenty-teens Ebola outbreak in West Africa. It was a slim book and it did turn out to be a quick read, but it certainly wasn't what I'd imagined when I pulled it off the shelf.

In the Company of Men tells the story of the Ebola outbreak through many different voices. Each chapter is narrated by a different individual who has been affected by the disease – those who've been infected, the doctors and nurses treating them, those who've escaped infection, the researchers investigating the virus, those who are paid to bury the dead, and even some non-humans the baobab tree, the bat who carries the virus, and Ebola itself are given voices to tell their piece of the story. The book is clearly informed by real events (I stopped midway to read a short online history of Ebola and immediately saw reflections in the text) and it is, in a way, instructional. But it's also poetic and felt, in some way, like a call to action.

In the Company of Men was originally published in 2017, but the English translation just came out this year. The acknowledgements in the English edition note how Ebola research served as a precedent to inform Covid-19 research, echoing something I heard on the radio just this morning.