Updated: 1 day ago
In April, prompted by reasons I can’t fully explain—or, OK, it had to do with a social media feed—I asked a friend who I consider knowledgeable on the subject about the author Laurie Colwin. The next time we saw each other in person, she brought two of Colwin’s books: story collections The Lone Pilgrim, which she qualified as the most well-known Colwin and said that I could keep, as well as Passion and Affect, her debut, which she told me that I would have to return as she had only the one copy. I brought the books home to my apartment, and within a matter of days had cracked open Passion and Affect and started reading about a middle-aged man in the habit of taking naps in a rooftop aviary. Maybe it was my own recently heightened predilection for nap-taking, but on that first breaching of the text, still contented to know the fellow on the page was having his habitual dozing in a choice location (until one day a stranger arrives, breaking up the routine), I did not make it much further.
For much of the year, the coffee-table in my den was occupied by materials for making a lit mag, specifically issue No. 5 of the Brazenhead Review. Unfolded, untrimmed risographed covers, bottles of glue, plastic scoring tools for crafting the spine of each issue, brushes, two rulers, paper towels for blotting up moisture and excess glue, an awl that I used mainly to pierce the spout of a glue bottle when it became blocked up. During the early months of the year, I read the contents of the issue obsessively, over and over—five stories, eight poems, two short essays, and the auxiliary text including my editor’s note and a memorial page for an author friend who had passed away the previous December. At the same time, I was reading Percival Everett’s Erasure, resolved to complete the novel before allowing myself to view American Fiction (and succeeded at that), while harboring grand designs to read as well Everett’s The Trees, an ARC of which I’d borrowed from a friend in the depths of a night prolonged by a group hang well beyond any reasonable hour. The friend, who had been in the process, that very night, of moving out of his place, requested solemnly that I return the copy to him when I finished it, and recognizing that he didn’t know how likely I was to follow through, I said with gravity and respect that, yes, I definitely would. Years later, I still haven’t, even if I still mean to. When I mentioned this to him, some time after borrowing the book, he didn’t seem to mind.
Along with The Trees, I meant to read my own ARC of James, in unison with a re-read of Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Robert Coover’s Huck Out West. Having completed this river journey of the mind I would then write a piece telling the tale. In fact, I did begin Huck Finn again and was struck both by how keenly, going on a full century and a half, it cuts to the quick of the American soul, and also how swiftly, and without much let-up, that certain word starts to fly. I think you know the one I mean. Social realism: a document of its time and a cri de coeur against it. Huck escapes the cabin where his drunken father has locked him up, fakes his own death, and is startled to encounter escaped Jim (James?) on the island in the Mississippi closest to the town he has fled. And that is where responsibilities, my obligation not only to the Brazenhead Review, but also freelance editorial work that helps keep food on my table, took me away.
I meant to go back. I did. But then James launched, and the accolades started pouring in, including a cover story in New York Magazine by a writer I’m friendly with, and at a certain point, what’s one more voice in a flood?
For different reasons, I decided I would re-read the novel Speedboat, which over the course of the year I started, and put down, and started, and put down, but Speedboat, like a social media feed, seems extraordinarily forgiving of this kind of fragmentary reading, and even to anticipate it, to encourage it.
I had grand designs, too, on Ed Park’s recent magnum opus Same Bed Different Dreams, which I knew from the launch event at Center for Fiction had been inspired, in part, by a novel that I’d written about years earlier at the late Michael Seidenberg’s behest. David Bowman’s Big Bang is a sprawling, historically minded tour of 20th century hip, both fizzy and decidedly deranged. In the pandemic year that followed, I’d drafted a likewise historically minded epic partially inspired by Bowman’s “nonfiction novel” (one he derived, in part, from Don DeLillo and Libra), a novel manuscript that I eventually found an agent for, and am still in the process of sending around to publishers (Golden Age Hollywood, young progressive Ronald Reagan, labor politics, if, hey, you know anyone who might uh—?). Not that I wouldn’t have attempted Same Bed Different Dreams, anyway, but there’s an unspoken feeling that pervades New York City, close to the source of the corporately minted fiction that commands so much of the spotlight, that a writer ought to read the new work on the same valance as what that writer is doing within his own—macho rivalry deemed a thing of the past, and so we ought not feel competitively toward our imagined peers, but embracing of them, or so the magnanimous spirit goes—and it seemed abundantly clear that Park, my much more accomplished elder and decidedly imagined peer, was doing something bearing a resemblance to what I had set out to do, even to the point where Marilyn Monroe plays a part in both of our narratives. A piece of paper with a message that dissolves in a character’s pocket is what you will find at the outset of Same Bed Different Dreams, but that dissolving message is as far as I have so far managed to make it.
I did read Park, though. Read him online, in short bursts. An interview with the author David Gordon in BOMB Magazine(in-person, at a diner, with an intercession recorded in the text of the interview by a waitress) and in an essay-review that he wrote about the Village Voice. This, if I’m being honest, amounts to a theme in My Year in Not Reading: It isn’t really that I didn’t read, but that so much of what I did was from opened tabs containing articles or short pieces I’d flagged, for one reason or another, as meriting of my attention. I could not even begin to account for what all I read online this year, whether the officially published, the blogged, or the dashed off self-platformed update. The Instagram stories I try not to click on: in how many different directions can your care and concern travel? Suffice it to say that my attention has been shot through with online prose, and so many open tabs to go before I sleep, so many…
Finally started on Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine. I had landed a used copy at Brazenhead Books, and got as far as the end of that first footnote about straws before closing the Baker and thinking, No, not right now. The Mezzanine’s protagonist, though, whose journey up an escalator comprises the entirety, shot through with footnotes, of the novel’s plot, may still serve as an apt representation of my state of mind in this election year during which any trip I made on the subway, however short or extended, was shot through with online takes read on my phone. Or maybe it’s exactly the opposite: Baker’s protagonist exists as a deliberate rejection by his author of every one of the exterior world’s aspirational narratives in order to drill down, instead, on the right here, right now, one foot in front of the other, as he attempts to grasp all the teeming minutiae that typically escape our attention as we busy ourselves grappling with world-historical propositions. (I should read the novel.)
I started Tyriek White’s We Are a Haunting. I started, multiple times, Griffin Hansbury’s some strange music draws me in (both are in a stack next to me as I write these words). I read more than half of Joseph Earl Thomas’ virtuosically voiced Sink. I took David Goodwillie’s American Subversive on at least one subway ride, and got far enough with it to think, “OK, someone worked hard here at hammering out a breathless opening.” Starting a narrative text, a reader gets the tenor of the prose, the pacing, hints of what will unfold. Nowadays, a ludicrous amount of emphasis is placed, by the industry, on openings. Just this afternoon, I took Paul Auster’s final novel, Baumgartner, off my shelf, and fielded its first page. On the release of his prior novel 4 3 2 1, I had interviewed Auster at his home, where our conversation centered in part on mortality, the miracle of living consciousness. During the time that he was writing that preceding novel, Auster reckoned with the fact that he was now older than his father had ever been—it is a particular feeling when someone you are speaking with in person looks you in the eyes and says that—and so every day, Auster felt, was a marvel, the continuing to be here. And now, with Baumgartner, Auster has gone, such that in the opening paragraph, which describes a creeping discovery driven by pure chance, I read all sorts of augury, and felt myself possessed by the narrative, by Auster’s concentrated presence on the page, until I closed the book to have lunch and, eventually, to start this essay.
And now will I ever get back to Baumgartner? I know that I mean to, and yet professional obligations and deadlines pull me to complete texts—narrative, self-help, or academic—that I am contractually bound to honor, whereas what I would read “for pleasure” is fine to let go, because of course there’s the belief that yes, for sure, at some point I will be able to get back. Maybe that’s just the result of plain old capitalism? In the socialist republic to come, could I and the great majority of our people again have the widespread luxury of scores of hours of reading time? And wouldn’t that, the great amassed attention of a serious reading public, finally be commensurate to the world-shaking ambition of some writers I have had the chance to meet over twenty years here in New York City? It isn’t, after all, only about a paycheck, right? Or getting one over on the other guy? Or is it just that, and that’s all it is, and always has been, and will continue to be, and no socialist republic is forthcoming but only the continual unfolding of the long slope we’re on, and what I and anyone else who shares my ambitions had better hope for instead is a lottery-winning type event, a fortune past caring about the vicissitudes of making a living that would wrench any dedicated reader from the walled pasture of a novel.
The big hefty books that sit on top of the bookshelf in my den—Gotham, Greater Gotham, New York by Gaslight, The Power Broker, Michael O’Brien’s John F. Kennedy, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, the three-volume Complete Works of Primo Levi—had been arrayed in stacks on top of the chessboard on my coffee table for much of the year as weight to press flat each new issue of the Brazenhead Review made one at a time, through July, through August. It has been said that literature serves no practical purpose, and yet, here, at least each tome was doing the work of helping foster more literature. Do we read to escape our lives, the tedium and blockages and held off fears, or to fathom unexamined depths of our own experience—or necessarily some ever-changing, ever-shifting blend of both? To know new frontiers or to settle with greater understanding into what is? To empathize with a character, experience a kind of ego blur with the figment on the page, or to hover above such travails like a vampire feeding on the judgment of mere mortals? Not this year, but maybe early last I asked Tony Tulathimutte at an issue release party for the Paris Review what all he was working on now, manuscript-wise, and he said a story collection around the theme of rejection, but was wrestling with how to end it. Having then recently stumbled across Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, which opens with a series of avowedly genuine rejection letters from publishers who had received on submission the novel manuscript Mulligan Stew, I said, half-joking, that he should have a rejection letter at the end, and he laughed and said he’d already been thinking of doing that. “You’re a genius,” the friend to whom I initially texted this anecdote after Rejection published. “You forgot to add ‘stable,’” I texted back. Did the conversation with Tony ever even happen? You know, I believe so, but also, Paris Review parties are famously slippery affairs. I now have Tony’s Rejection, along with Isle McElroy’s People Collide (a borrowed copy, thank you, Katie) and Zach Williams’ Beautiful Days on my bedside table, where they have remained since I brought them in the door, months ago, having only read the published excerpts, or in the case of People Collide up to the moment when the protagonist discovers the fate of what appears to be a cat in the street.
Perhaps writing all this down and making it public will serve as a kind of Catholic confession that could set off a burning desire to make amends by completing my own private journey down the corridors of each set of pages I have named, in the way that I have often felt impelled to shake preconceived notions anybody might have of me, like, yes, the title of that Arctic Monkeys album. Or perhaps I truly am pushing up against a hard line, the reality of limitation, “mortal finitude” some might call it, if feeling grandiloquent?
Is it possible for a reader, like a runner in a Nike commercial, to get primed at the starting line, flex every perceptual muscle, and push himself to previously unrealized heights of textual consumption? See the way he sits in a chair. See how the light falls across the words on the page. See how he breathes in, shifts a leg, how he looks up as if to confront the eyes of an onlooker. But is anybody there?
This year I re-read a few stories from my paperback of The Stories of John Cheever, whose tattered red cover lost a few more pieces, and did not yet manage to crack open James Marcus’ Glad to the Brink of Fear, a Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson, despite having every intention of doing so. Larry McMurtry’s All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, of which I tracked down a used copy on a former professor’s recommendation, started off well, and continues to admonish me to complete it every time I pass the shelf on which it now lies horizontal in front of the ordered vertical row behind it.
I have, maybe it’s clear, read a number of books. Some might say, too many. Not so many as some, but probably more than most? I am standing, in My Year in Not Reading, atop the countless number I have already read, which is what gives the character to my own vista. I have had the thought, at certain points this year, that perhaps I should return to Beckett. Or to Dostoevsky. Or hey, to Pynchon? Perhaps, this year should have been my year of reading only Jewish authors. Or is that next?
For months, Passion and Affect was alternately in the stack on my bedside table, and then, more recently, as my intention to read it became more urgent with the recognition that, after so many months, I really would be obligated to return the book to the friend who had lent it to me, the Colwin occupied on some nights the place next to me in bed where a partner’s head might lay. Other books, maybe two at a time, held that same position, so that if I, say, grew tired of reading the one to which I was giving primacy at the end of a night, I might jog over to the Colwin. But most of those nights I just nodded off.
In the aftermath of the election, I did a shift at the Park Slope Food Coop returning carts, which entails walking members with their groceries back to their homes, or cars, waiting for them to unpack their purchases from the cart, then wheeling it back to the Coop. This practice is often a good driver of conversation over top the rattling of the cart wheels on the sidewalk, and I used my time that day to talk with people about how they were feeling. One member maintained a stony silence for most of our walk. I wasn’t trying hard to break it up, but made a stab or two, until gesturing to the used bookstore we were walking past and asking whether she’d ever been inside? No, she said, but maybe someday. “What are you reading?” I asked. “I’ve really been kind of scattered for a while,” she answered, and that was it, candor in response, which she might have felt was personal to her, and yet I wonder if maybe “scattered for a while” isn’t somehow “general across Ireland,” as the line goes, from the Joyce story, which I love for the life of me. Meaning, I wonder if this wasn’t a year when so many have felt, a constantly growing number, “really kind of scattered for a while.”
What am I forgetting?
My coffee table is mostly cleared now, the big tomes having retaken their place of pride atop the shelf in my den, held together by heavy copper bookends, one a relief of Dante, the other of Homer, alongside a model of Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis and a white-haired, blue-pantsed troll from Denmark that a babysitter gave me when I was probably about four, one of my earliest memories.
At the November 18th New York launch for Ryan Ruby’s history of poetry contained in one long, tongue-in-cheek poem that culminates, monomaniacally, in apocalypse, what was to have been a conversation with the novelist Gary Indiana became a conversation with Christian Lorentzen, because a month before the novelist Gary Indiana had passed away. At the bar afterwards, as he signed my copy of Context Collapse, Ruby answered my question as to whether he considered himself an accelerationist, saying that he had, at times, held to that stance, but that he’d found there are many who lack the endurance—giving great emphasis to the word, ‘endurance’—to follow it through to its less nihilistic implications. Did you not see there having been a reason to push for one outcome over the other in the presidential election? He said that there was a time when we could have changed the course of history. But that that time was over, and we had lost. I took a deep breath and asked him how he felt as the father of a son. He looked down at the bar-top: “I feel bad.” I’ve opened Context Collapse to see Ruby’s signature and to read his introduction to the mock epic poem. Deft introduction, to be sure.
Next to my bed, on the floor, is Jess Walters’ Beautiful Ruins. It has been there for the better part of the year.On top of the cushions on the futon-sofa in my den is a copy of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, which this year I started twice. Nixon. The Rosenbergs. A wildness in the novel’s voice.
I had made it halfway through a book-length essay called Limbo when I met the author after an author event for another writer. A week before I met the author of Limbo a young woman at a gallery opening asked what I was reading and as I described the book I watched her face blanch and she took a step away from me. When I met the author, he said that he really wasn’t satisfied with it, and our conversation turned to Noir films streaming on Criterion. I recognize that authors adopt rhetorical stances for effect, and I don’t necessarily assign any great meaning to what he said that night, but did stop reading Limbo shortly afterwards. It may be possible to meet too many authors.
Aside from those I’ve named there are many other books this year that I did not read.
When, finally, the December day came when I was sure that night I would see my Colwin-knowing friend, I set aside afternoon hours to read as many stories from Passion and Affect as I could manage. Daffy humor, large-hearted patience for the romantic precarity of her characters, the way they choose to order and disrupt their own lives. Their flights of fancy, the turn-on-a-dime reckonings. The title story, one that ends on a note of, well, happiness?
After I passed the book back to her, my friend asked me what I had thought and I said something to the effect of the above.
“But some of the stories are dark,” she said.
And yes, there were probably those too. Books and/or reviews mentioned, in order of appearance: Laurie Colwin, The Lone Pilgrim Laurie Colwin, Passion and Affect Brazenhead Review No. 5 Percival Everett, Erasure Percival Everett, The Trees Percival Everett, James Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Robert Coover, Huck Out West Renata Adler, Speedboat Ed Park, Same Bed Different Dreams David Bowman, Big Bang Don DeLillo, Libra J.T. Price, A Leading Man (still in manuscript form, as of the time of this writing) Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine Tyriek White, We Are a Haunting Griffin Hansbury, some strange music draws me in Joseph Earl Thomas, Sink: A Memoir David Goodwillie, American Subversive Paul Auster, Baumgartner Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1
Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham George G. Foster, New York by Gaslight Robert Caro, The Power Broker Michael O’Brien, John F. Kennedy Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1 Primo Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection The Paris Review Gilbert Sorrentino, Mulligan Stew Isle McElroy, People Collide Zach Williams, Beautiful Days: Stories John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever James Marcus, Glad to the Point of Fear, a Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson Larry McMurtry, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers Samuel Beckett (all of Beckett) Fyodor Dostoevsky (all of Dostoevsky) Thomas Pynchon (all of Pynchon) all the books I’ve forgotten Ryan Ruby, Context Collapse Jess Walters, Beautiful Ruins Robert Coover, The Public Burning Dan Fox, Limbo
I don’t know if we all have that romance, if everyone can relate to what it’s like to yearn to become a category of person generally understood to be in foreclosure by circumstances writ large (such as, say, a Legend of the Western Frontier, or a Renown Author of Serious Fiction), and to find someone who shares your ambition whereon the two of you serve as kind of mirrors to one another, in the process of cutting the strings that keep you bound to the straight world, so-called, out of a desire to pass over whatever threshold it might be that could change you into the desired being you’re both so hungry to become, as possessed by that hunger, you devour all before you, not only the words of many idolized authors, yes, but also myriad experiences and vistas and such meals as you are able at this younger stage in your life to string together, and finally of course, and perhaps most crucially of all, one another. The simple fact of one another, the mirror show, the tidal desire under the sway of a drunken moon. Who knows what I’m going on about? I barely do myself, though I can recall in sharp detail the time in my life that most fit this bill, and the person I shared it with, and the many things that felt possible then, the multiplicity of a future warm and vibrant and even, yes, keen with laughter, while on the flip side of that coin and never exactly forgotten spun perennially the specter of ruin.
My sense, anyhow, is that Kevin Barry gets it, if his latest novel, The Heart in Winter, provides fair indication. A doomy sweet romance set in and around and parts westerly from Butte, “the black heart of Montana, as it was so-called at the time by writing men with a penchant for the high style” Heart begins with one Tom Rourke, a squirrely Irish immigrant with a refined sense of what constitutes quality writing, such that he is in the habit—when not in the photography studio where he (almost but not quite) earns his keep—of penning swoony letters on behalf of his co-habitants on the raucous late 19th century bar scene to attract would-be brides for them from back east. And he’s good at it, too. When a bride arrives, inevitably the new couple appears at the photography studio where Tom assists in minting the image of their union. Some of these last, others don’t, but no one is ever the wiser about Tom’s part in the wooing, as he spends rollicking obscene nights chasing chemical highs and doing his best, but often failing, to steer clear of the local establishment for ladies whose loving is for sale. As Barry writes in the voice of Tom Rourke’s landlady, once she’s compelled to recall details about him by a local sheriff: “The boy Rourke was in the employment of the night... He did not sleep so much as the churchyard bat… It was as though he was trying to make contact with such figures as might be found on the far side of the night. Maybe he wanted to be with them.”
Into this picture arrives one Polly Gillespie, a woman of intrigue, sly and cleverly deceiving, and in flight from a bout of trouble from whence she came. Tom, given to improvising song lyrics, tries on a new set, “And if I met Polly in the woods/ I would kiss her if I could/ For that’s a thing that would do her good/ And a cup of tay in the morn-in’.” Only thing standing in the way of that cup of morning tea is how she’s bound in marriage to one Captain Harrington, he of the masochistic rectitude and repressed violence, a man who works as an overseer in the copper mines on the outskirts of Butte. Tom, in due time, finds himself talking to a fancy horse, a palomino—“who the fuck’s are you anyhow?”—and soon enough, Tom and Polly atop that palomino are cutting out for a new life in San Francisco, after having robbed the aforementioned landlady on whose motherly indulgence Tom once lived, and also burned down her boarding house. In addition to the unlawful commandeering of the horse. And Captain Harrington isn’t too pleased with these developments, either.
Barry has given us a careening adventure tale (“by the nails of the claw this young pair was clinging on”) that doubles in stretches as a picaresque reminiscent of Charles Portis, or more recently, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams and Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers (albeit true that DeWitt’s novel, like Barry’s recent Night Boat to Tangier, is concerned mainly with relationships between men whereas Heart is most definitely centered in the space between a boy-man and woman-girl’s longing, “Her dreams slipped into his, and infected them, and his to hers, and the infection was squared.”); there’s a touch, too, of Terence Malick’s film Badlands, at least one prominent Leonard Cohen-style lyrical accent, and a heavier dose yet of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. The title itself brings to mind a famous phrase of Seamus Heaney’s: “If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere.” A native of Ireland like the late poet Heaney, Barry writes prose that sings, alternately visceral and moony, of the body’s beefy solidity and of the tides’ swirling evanescence, as he renders an Irish immigrant frontier milieu both romantic-hearted and prone to vicious turns. The assurance of the writing, the very groundedness of his literary footing, akin in spirit to the signature cadences of Nathan Englander’s Jewish-American or Victor LaValle’s (circa Slapboxing with Jesus) African-American vernaculars is of the kind to inspire jealousy in the more thoroughly diasporified among us, those whose language has been whitewashed, so to speak, by assimilation across generations. (But we’ll always have the self-invented American-ese of the likes of Raymond Chandler, won’t we?) Much is made of the Elegant Variation, the artful aversion to cloddishly repeated words and phrasing, but perhaps the greater skill is in how an author leans on the repeated word, a repeating phrase, to deepening effect.
Will the lovers make it? Barry’s fugitive pair delight in what’s illicit about their union and in the zero-sum-ness of it all as they flee through the frigid woods and desolate valley: they feel bad, too, but through the wild, unrestrained thick of sex, especially in the throes of mind-bending substances they receive from friendly parties along the way, something else surfaces. As seen by Tom, Polly’s eyes have a “deathloving shine” while “the hooktip of her nose was cold and blue as a berry and he kissed it.” For her part, Polly is concerned by “the way his accent would change… It was like he was trying on new versions of himself all the time as if they was jackets.” And she understands, regarding that palomino, “without passing remark on it that he didn’t know jackshit about horses.” Barry’s prose, relatively spare as it is, casts the kind of wide net in whose thematic capture you might discern the preoccupations of a Werner Herzog: “The foxes and the coyotes in the meantime those howling bitches were in a contest to see who could make the night sound more full of crazy sex and the bone evils and they was both winning…” Which, for those who know Herzog, might suggest a less than sparkling outcome for Tom and for Polly.
“Americans!” Tom Rourke cries out in a moment of reflection on their adventures and who they’ve met en route, not stopping to marvel at how he’s well on his way to becoming one, these people ever-changing, ever-evolving until such time as, until such time as—what exactly? “If there was a next life,” Barry writes, “they wanted to be hand in hand in that one too, come what may.” The novel’s conclusion, like that oft-inked snake ouroboros, gives out again onto its beginning, with at least one of the pair facing up to “the drag of the past.” Such a relationship, once it sets in and however things turn out, is always in some sense there, inside you. The excellence of The Heart in Winter lies not simply in the pleasures of Barry’s prose but the sneaky perspective shifts that slip into the novel proper, a record of how the ballad of Tom and Polly passes into the stuff of local legend. If there happens to be the rare unanswered logistical question in this historical novel (at some point, the lovers order room service, but how they did so, in 1891, on the western frontier, without benefit of a working telephone, isn’t spelled out) that’s the kind of detail only the narrow of mind, or small of heart, would dwell on. As a man who calls himself the Reverend declaims, “Belief goes in at gut level. Understand? Not at brain, at gut.”
Or, in Polly’s version, speaking to Tom at a quieter register in a more intimate moment on their way to San Francisco Bay, “She blew into his ear slowly and controlled it and said hey now listen up coz this is the sea.”
The Heart In Winter by Kevin Barry
Doubleday, pub date: 7/9/24
256 pages