The Longest Summer
A return to publishing; a goodbye; a new project; a reading log
This has been, in many ways, the strangest, hardest summer I can remember, yet one blessed with at least one piece of terrific good news. As some readers here know, on July 17 I received a call from Dennis Johnson, the co-publisher of prestigious Brooklyn-based press Melville House, offering me a position of managing editor.
Not quite three days later, my mother died of cancer in a hospice facility in Dunmore, Pennsylvania.
Two such life-defining events of such diametric affect occurring within three days was emotionally whip-sawing, of course, and there is either too much or not enough to be said about such a time. I will say that my tenure at Melville House has started out, I think, on a strong note. I feel admiration and respect for my new colleagues, confidence — and a bit of anxiety — about my new duties, and a blooming satisfaction at being engaged in such a simpatico endeavor; MHP is, as many know, ardently progressive, with an explicit mission of publishing leftists, socialists, feminists, whistle-blowers, and other writers of rabble-rousing stripe.
Every season of my life, tragic or celebratory or both, is dominated by reading, of course, and I will here embark on a scattered and long-overdue reading log, before imparting one final bit of news. So, in semi-chronological order:
- Stay Up With Hugo Best, by Erin Somers, and The Last Book Party, by Karen Dukess. I was unable, in the end, to feel much engaged by either of these pert millennial novels, thus making them exemplars of my new mantra that not every thing is for every one. A solid notch above stands Anna Pitoniak’s Necessary People, which at least had some good old-fashioned class-based heat to it, along with a top-notch twist.
- Lydia Kiesling’s The Golden State is an extraordinary novel. Kiesling’s debut tracks the mental state of a young mother named Daphne who spontaneously leaves her job as a mid-level university administrator and heads for the hills of California with her toddler daughter in tow. Nothing much happens over the ensuing week: they meet a salmagundi of eccentric characters, they eat at failing chain restaurants, Daphne gets drunk and sprains her ankle. What is so hypnotic about the novel is its glacial pace; if you are able to accept its peculiar rhythm, you may end up finding it utterly transfixing. Living dangerously, I will add (as a cis-het non-parent) that the common reaction to this book as an “untroubled analogy between the landscapes of motherhood and the American West,” as Sarah Blackwood put it in the New Yorker, seems to me considerably to under-sell the fundamentally radical nature of the narrative project. Casting your debut novel as a neo-Woolfian stream of consciousness centered on motherhood requires what once might have been called artistic courage; it is also, to my mind, an example of truly organic feminist praxis.
- And now for something completely different … John Barton’s book The History of the Bible: The Story of the World’s Most Influential Book is a marvel. (I am always amused at this kind of tacked-on subtitle, surely the work of some mid-level marketing executive—it’s rather charming, in a way, that someone felt that the importance of the Bible needed to be made explicit to the browsing reader poised on the knife edge of non-purchase.) That aside, this book is outstanding: a clear, thorough, and genuinely enlightening history of the tortuous genesis of Hebrew scripture, the New Testament, and the Apocrypha. It is written at just the right level for, well, me — thoughful, a little academic, but not inaccessible.
- On which note I will pause to relate, regretfully, that I have made yet another failed run at Talcott Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action, and must yield the field. I have been defeated; I cannot make sense of the relentless abstractions; the limits of my intelligence have been reached. So it goes.
- When troubled, I turn to Shakespeare. I will never stop re-reading The Tempest, which illustrates again the maxim that Shakespeare, truly, is endless.
- I have not yet made up my mind about Leslie Jamison in general, and Make It Scream, Make It Burn specifically. Her oeuvre stands like a massive boulder at the periphery of my vision; I cannot make it out.
- I have no such difficulty making an evaluation of John Schulian’s delightful anthology The Great American Sports Page: A Century of Classic Columns, from the ever-reliable Library of America. It has long been my contention that the slangy, tough-but-tender argot of midcentury sportswriting stands with screwball-film dialogue as an authentic expression of American folk culture. It doesn’t, of course, hurt that fully half the pieces collected here are about baseball, even though (*calculator*) 95.7% of them are by white men.
- Spending a plurality of the workweek getting our upcoming Last Interview installment on Graham Greene ready for the printer was perfect context for finally getting to The Quiet American, which I inhaled in three long gulps over the weekend. For an amateur Vietnam historian, a fan of noir, and a connoisseur of chiselled prose, the book — a minor masterpiece — sits firmly in the wheelhouse.
And finally: others of you may know that my other colleagues and I are working feverishly if sporadically on the launch of Majuscule, our soon-to-be brand-new online journal of literature and culture. Recent exigencies have pushed our probable launch back to September 15, but I have several of the essays in hand, and they are knockouts. If our mission is to deliver some good writing with no frills, and it is, I feel confident that we are well on our way. More to come soon; in the meantime, please, please follow us on Twitter!
