Tremor of Intent, by Anthony Burgess

Sometimes I underestimate my younger self. I think back to myself at age 23 and all I can think is how little I knew, how young I was, how underdeveloped as an adult. When I was 23, on the other hand, I believe I thought myself mature for my age. Maybe both things can be true. I first read Tremor of Intent at age 23 – in the fall of 1999, a window of time that has always, in retrospect, felt specific and significant to my early adulthood. 

I lived in Philadelphia for roughly the calendar year of 1999 and I always say I can remember the things that happened in 1999 with more specificity because if they happened while I lived in Philly, it must have been 1999. I remember the movies of 1999 because I saw them in Philly theaters: Eyes Wide Shut, The Thin Red Line, Magnolia, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Cruel Intentions, American Beauty, Go, Shakespeare in Love (which I have actually never seen, but my father and boyfriend went to see it in Philly while I was at work one evening).

Most of the books I read in 1999 were for school, and I remember some of those well too. I took my first college English class – a course called "The Twentieth Century" (a course name that seemed more profound in the final year of that century), in which I read a mix of poetry, short and long fiction, and theory. T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Alfred Jarry, Samuel Beckett, Zora Neale Hurston, Norman Mailer, David Foster Wallace, and Salman Rushdie. That was in the spring semester. In the fall semester my course load was in German and Linguistics. Also in the fall semester, things changed a lot for me, personally: my boyfriend who had been living with me in Philly moved to Boston to go back to school himself. I found myself alone in a city I didn't know very well. I also found myself taking frequent trips to Boston or to meet my boyfriend (who soon became my fiancé) halfway in New York. And so, even though I was still in school and also working, I had some time to read for pleasure. 

I think Tremor of Intent must have been the second Anthony Burgess book I read. A few years earlier, I had read his first book, The Long Day Wanes, which took me forever to finish, but I liked in the long run. I have no idea why I decided to start with that one. I think I may have started Napoleon Symphony sometime after that, but I'm pretty sure I never finished it, and I'm almost sure I started The Doctor is Sick in 1998, but also didn't finish that. After Tremor of Intent I read The Right to An Answer and perhaps Honey for the Bees, but I never liked anything as well as Tremor of Intent or The Long Day Wanes. I was very determined to read Anthony Burgess it seems (but not A Clockwork Orange, which I still haven't read). In any case, in the fall of 1999 I read – and loved – Tremor of Intent. Over the years, I've continued to remember it fondly, while the plot faded to the barest outline in my memory. I've given it as a gift at least once, I believe more than once.  

The decision to reread Tremor of Intent was partly to see if it held up, and partly to see if my 23-year-old self did. I'd say both of us came out mostly okay. What I remembered about Tremor of Intent was that it was a hilarious and suspenseful spy novel set on a cruise. I think I found it less funny this time. There were some troubling bits I didn't remember being troubled by before: the general condoning of a sexual relationship between a teen girl and the middle-aged protagonist, the perhaps too light treatment of actual pedophilia in another character, some uncomfortable stereotypes. It also had some wonderful bits that I didn't remember from before: mainly the incredible descriptions of the food served on the cruise (which was a gastronomic trip, a fact I hadn't remembered). Then there was the pleasure of reading again what I did remember in a general sense, but not in the specific – what must have made me love the book the first time around: Anthony Burgess' incredible facility with language, the wordplay, the double (and more, I'm sure) meanings. And this is where I get back to where I started this post. Reading Tremor of Intent now I found myself wondering, Did I really get this when I was 23? How much of it went over my head? Does it matter if it did, when I still loved it? I don't have answers for any of these questions. Myself at 23 – half my life ago – is hardly a person I remember anymore. 

The Trees, by Percival Everett

It is a rare writer who could write a comic novel about the history of lynching in America, but Percival Everett has done it. 

To be fair, some parts of The Trees are not comic. The underlying message of the book is that we should remember those who were killed by white supremacy. That we should remember that the history of lynching is American history, and that it represents a massacre spread out over years. This book is an act of remembering. 

About two thirds of the way in there is a chapter that goes on for several pages and consists almost entirely of a list of names. Early on, I found myself wondering, Were these actual people? They can't be. They must be. Emmet Till's name shows up on the 7th page, but even then I wasn't really sure. The first name I recognized after that was Matthew Shepard, and I can't even say that's when I was sure. It was on the page after that where suddenly there were so many names I recognized, starting with Ramarley Graham. I assume the list is chronological or approximately so, but even in the last couple pages there will still many names I'd never heard. It's powerful. (Incredibly, I didn't notice until after finishing the book that this list of names is right there on the cover.)

Of course the list brought me back to two books I've talked about together before: 2666 with its list of murdered women in Mexico and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ with its list of martyrs. I felt sure I had seen this done somewhere else more recently, but I'm not sure where. Perhaps I'm thinking of EEG, which I described when I read it as "a catalogue of under-reported atrocities," and which, like The Trees, is very much a command to remember.

To return to the comic part of the novel: maybe we need humor in the face of trauma. This book certainly offers it. There is a dark comedy to the whole story, but there are also individual lines that are laugh-out-loud funny. (Maybe you had to be there, but the appearance for one page of a "Detective Wesley Snipes, no relation and White" had me screaming laughing. He could have had any name. He's never mentioned again.) To quote Lynn Steger Strong, the judge who selected The Trees as the winner in the first round of the 2022 Tournament of Books, "There’s so much sad and shitty in the world; so many books are so earnestly enmeshed in their own certainty and self-seriousness. The winner is The Trees, because in addition to all its many other accomplishments, it also made me laugh."

The Kiss Quotient, by Helen Hoang, and Lucky Breaks, by Yevgenia Belorusets

I've been in a reading slump for a couple months now. I've started some books I really wanted to read but have found it hard to stick with them. May was a really busy month for me at work and outside of it, and I just didn't feel like reading much. To close out the month, I added a couple days to my Memorial Day weekend and planned a trip to Montreal. I packed two books to take with me: Hamnet, which falls into the above mentioned category of books I really wanted to read but haven't stuck with; and Lucky Breaks, the next selection for my Women in Translation book club, which I had to finish by today.

Events took an unexpected turn last Saturday: my early morning flight was overbooked and I decided to volunteer (in exchange for rather a lot of money) to delay my departure by 12 hours. I could have gone home. I could have gone out and done something in Queens. Instead, exhausted, I checked into the Delta Sky Club and spent the entire day there. I read a few chapters of Hamnet, did some crosswords on my phone, ate the free snacks, and then somewhere in the early afternoon a friend texted me to say he was tearing through The Trees by Percival Everett and to remind me of the existence of e-books that can be checked out of the library. I promptly downloaded the SimplyE app and after first checking out Trust by Hernan Diaz, I realized I would need a different kind of book if my intention was to read on my phone for several hours at the Delta Sky Club. I remembered having heard good things about Helen Hoang's The Kiss Quotient when it came out a couple years ago and found it was available. I read two-thirds of it there at the airport, until the news came in that my replacement flight was delayed until the following morning. Then I went back home, set my alarm for 5am, and did it all over again. I read some more on my flight – though not much, since it's only an hour – and I finished reading  about an hour after checking into my B&B not quite 24 hours after I had expected to arrive there. I wouldn't say I loved The Kiss Quotient, a romance novel about a professionally successful and very rich woman with autism who hires a male escort to learn about sex and relationships, but it was exactly the right book for the circumstances. 

Unsurprisingly, I got no reading done during my actual vacation but on my flight home, I knew I had to start Lucky Breaks if I was going to finish it in time for my book club. It's a very short book – just about 100 pages – made up of several very short chapters/stories. The book seems to sit somewhere on the edge of fiction and non. Most of the stories recount the almost invisible narrator's encounters with women in various parts of Ukraine. Our book club decided to read a Ukrainian book because of current events, but I must say reading it with everything that's in the news was a strange sensation. Much of the book deals with the aftermath of the 2014 Russian incursion into Crimea and the Donbas region, including stories of women who live in those regions and those who have been displaced from them. Obviously, the book predates the current war, but it came out just as it was starting and reading it one feels the war was really no surprise at all. 

It is with good reason that people are criticized for writing about global events in a way that makes them "about me," but I think to do so is also the most natural thing in the world. So, I hope you will indulge me for a moment. For most of my young life, Ukraine wasn't a place I was independently aware of. I knew it as a region of the Soviet Union, I'd heard of Kyiv (though spelled Kiev and mostly just its eponymous preparation of chicken). When the Soviet Union broke apart, I can't say I was ever particularly aware of Ukraine as an independent nation. (The Baltic states are the ones I really remember becoming independent, and while I was certainly more aware of Ukraine as a place than, say, the Central Asian SSRs, it wasn't a place I knew much about at all.) I can place the moment when Ukraine gained some sort of distinction in my mind. Around 2002, I took a literature class with Svetlana Boym. One of the readings for the class was Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog, which takes place in Yalta. Professor Boym had a home in Yalta and the way she talked about it—well, I've wanted to go there ever since. When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, I'll admit I was selfishly disappointed as well as being appalled generally. Something similar happened with the war this year. While Yalta still seemed out of bounds, I had started thinking about visiting Ukraine in the last couple years – inspired by some combination of things: some friends I made from Kamianets-Podilskyi several years back; Olia Hercules' cookbook, Summer Kitchens; reading about Joseph Roth's childhood outside Lviv; and most immediately this article by Rosa Lyster from the September 2021 NY Times Magazine "Voyages" issue. How could I know that war was right around the corner? And yet now, as I read Lucky Breaks, I realize I could have known. Maybe not specifically, but it wouldn't have come as such a shock of dissonance.