Stuff I’ve Been Reading

— My good friend Charlie Taylor is on fire in the LA Review of Books, reviewing Steve Erickson’s American Stutter.

— Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney. Like everybody else on the planet, I read and loved Rooney’s Normal People (I did read it a full year after everyone else read it, because I was being a contrarian and was resisting the zeitgeist. Then I read it and thought, “Oh. Okay. That’s why everyone is talking about this book.”) If I had more free time, I’d probably finish Conversations with Friends in a day, the way I did with Normal People. Her stuff is compulsively readable. The “plots” are really just the interactions among 20something Dubliners, and her social observations come from the inside. She’s in the thick of it. Also, it’s interesting: there’s no subtext. She doesn’t do that. She just describes what happens. Sometimes you get a glimpse of the interior life, but her prose is kind of flat, surface-level, which – interestingly enough – makes it all the more moving. The final pages of Normal People, for example, made me cry.

— Midnight in the Century, by Victor Serge. Victor Serge’s novel – but really not a novel – about being arrested by Stalin in 1933, and sent into exile. Serge was an insider, a revolutionary, who moved BACK to Russia after the Revolution so he could be a part of it. And he saw early – late 20s – almost before anyone else – what was happening, that a Strong Man had arisen, and that something was being unleashed that could not be UN-unleashed. Serge remained a staunch Socialist, but he was one of the first who called out what was really going on, and he was a VICTIM of the purges, and was hounded, chased, arrested multiple times, fled, etc. because of this regime. His work is essential. I’m almost done with it.

— Divorcing, by Susan Taubes. Never read this before and it’s blowing me away. Her tone is confessional but chilly – hot AND cold, avant-garde and impressionistic. The knowledge of the author’s suicide – right after the book was published – makes the reading experience eerie. It’s sad. This is an amazing book. Taubes was married to a fairly famous man, and this is the story of their divorce. Taubes was an immigrant from Hungary: her family fled with Hitler’s rise to power, they felt the threat to Hungary (boy, were they right). She was displaced, she was 10 when she came to America. So this is the story of a divorce, but it is also an immigrant story. Seriously: this was an unfairly ignored book, unfairly forgotten. It feels pretty major. It was resurrected by New York Review Books Classics. I highly recommend it.

— Another friend has hit it out of the park with a deeply researched piece about the rumor that John Wayne had to be “restrained by six security guards” when Sacheen Littlefeather took the stage at the Oscars in Marlon Brando’s place. The rumor about Wayne has been around since the early ’80s and was recently resurrected because the Academy finally apologized to Littlefeather last month for the treatment she received. Farran is not whitewashing Wayne’s attitude to the event, but she doesn’t believe the rumor, and she used her critical thinking skills, her research abilities, AND reached out to Scott Eyman – who wrote the celebrated biography of John Wayne – to ask about it (Eyman hadn’t included the “six security guards” incident in his book. There’s a reason why.) Anyway: Farran’s essay is more than worth your time. It’s real investigative journalism.