I was sitting in front of a fire, drinking a glass of wine with a friend and chatting, thinking how nice it would be to curl up with a book in front of the fire....
Alas. I had other things to do, and was struggling with my current novel. I remembered, however, that I hadn’t written a book post since September, when I had attempted a marathon catching-up. I am still behind, but rather than delve into another huge post, I am going to start with October, which is easier in a way, because I only finished four books.
There were several reasons for this: travel, stress, perhaps a touch of depression, but also some good things. I am increasingly more interested in diving deeper into whatever I am doing, letting time slip away. This means that for now my reading is slowing down, becoming more reflective and conversational even. Perhaps I am simultaneously reading and rereading. Life is not a contest after all, although for me sometimes my biggest struggle is accepting that, letting go of behaviors that were once adaptive but have become maladaptive, preventing me from being the best person I can be, according to my own understanding of what that entails.
And so on to the books — except that somehow my reading and my understanding is not all that straightforward:
Devil In the White City was the first book I finished, although not the first book I started. I had read it years ago, was rereading it for a book club, and found myself fascinated by the juxtaposition of the stories. And it is a book about two stories, stories that happen to take place in the same place at the same time but seem unrelated. Or are they? I saw a lot here: the rise of industrialism and the dream of a shiny future; a book about opportunism but also about the not so pretty underside of opportunism; a book about dreams and hopes for but also a book about how our dreams can blind us. I kept turning back to David Graeber’s book Debt, and to David Brooks’ books The Road to Character and The Second Mountain, which I was reading simultaneously (and savoring slowly, not finishing until this month).
I am not sure that Erik Larson pulled off that grand sense of connection, but the book still haunts me, haunted me through the reading of Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte, which I also read slowly, beginning in September and continuing throughout October, savoring every morsel. Reading and rereading. Sometimes I would put it aside confused by a reference that seemed just beyond my ken, until the meaning hit me and I was back. The book is fun, smart, witty, terrifying and sometime deliciously sarcastic. But it is also thought-provoking and filled with challenges. Rushdie puts his own spin on modern life, mixing our obsessions with surfaces, our yearnings for depths despite our inability to hold on to them. In some ways he is exploring the same malaise as Graeber and Brooks, Larson as well, although less obviously so.
Quichotte also came uncomfortably close to Katherine Eban’s revelations about fraud in the generic drug industry in Bottle of Lies, which I had just finished at the end of September. He was referencing a different case, one I had forgotten, but I remained unsettled, and perhaps felt the boundaries of my own bubbles pushing in a little more closely than I might prefer.
All of these books explore uncomfortable truths, our ongoing struggles with cognitive dissonance and the kind of moral dishonesty it inculcates, despite our best, and mostly well-meaning intentions. This is the same kind of moral dishonesty that was also painfully evident in the portrait of the lives of free blacks in the movie Harriet. Necessary, probably yes, at least for free slaves in the south, but what may be adaptive and necessary in one setting can become blindness, self-justification and maladaptive in others.
The other two books played perhaps a smaller role in my thoughts, although I have no regrets for having read them. I did not find Anne Thurston’s book Knowing Her Place: Gender and the Gospels, to be completely successful, although I did find it thought provoking and insightful in places. The author appeared to want to explore the way we read and understand biblical stories based on our own cultural gender biases blinds us to possibilities and meaning, meaning that can be beyond gender itself, but the book often became mired down in the very gender details the author was attempting to uproot, to the detriment of the very issues she seems to want to explore.
Kudos is the third in Rachel Cusk’s trilogy that began with Outline, and in some sense the author has come full circle. In the first book the narrator seemed to be in the process of rediscovering herself, having lost one view of herself, and in this, the final novel, she has reached the goal, only to find that the success itself becomes another loss of self, exploring the way “successful writer” is itself a role outside of the self. Throughout the novel Cusk explores both the internal and external person of the writer, as she absorbs the narrative of others, and they project their narrative onto her. In short, self can never be defined by success, and, as the author rather pointedly reminds us in the final scene, whatever internal or external success we might achieve, it is only the internal that can sustain us as we can never quite escape the roles others assign to us.
