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.
