Far From Brooklyn

Reader’s log, October 2024

In October, still seeking reading inspiration from the New York Times’ list of the best books of the 21st Century, I finally picked up and made my way (well, most of the way) through Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” and then shifted things up, picking up Honor Levy’s new collection of stories and a novella by Mexican-American author Yuri Herrera.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

This is an abysmal book. Granted much of it is well written (albeit oftentimes overwritten) on a sentence-by-sentence basis. But at heart the whole enterprise is false — fake characters with fake lives, fake aspirations and fake challenges. The descriptions of their jobs and careers are especially, atrociously fake, longeurs delving into the imagined work life of railroad engineers, stock traders, doctors, and college professors (yes, even the descriptions of the life of college teachers rings false, despite the fact that Franzen himself was a teacher at the college level). And amidst all this fakery are separate, even longer and more laughably fake longeurs about science, medicine, technology and human nature. All in a walloping 565-page package.

The worst thing about this book is probably the disdain with which Franzen views his characters: upright midwestern mothers; strict 1950s-style fathers; louche academics; suburban housewives. You name it, Franzen lampoons it, cruelly. He makes fun of people who make lots of money. He makes fun of people who don’t make much money. He makes fun of old people, young people and people in between. 

Max Watman, reviewing the book in late 2001 in the New Criterion, put it really well: “I am not sure if Jonathan Franzen is a misanthrope, but he demonstrates in his new novel, “The Corrections,” a dislike for his subjects that is sharp and unflinching. He humiliates these awful people in public and in private, shows us their social and intimate incapacities, and brings us internal monologues that reveal petty, selfish motivations.”

Yep.

Meanwhile, “The Corrections” is shot through with dopey conspiracy subplots about personality-bending tech and medicine, the kind of stuff that Thomas Pynchon has been boring us with for more than 60 years now. 

The book was so bad and long (and, full disclosure, I ditched it at page 425) that I came up with a literary theory: The excesses of the vast mega novels of the 90s and the 00s gave birth to their exact opposite: the mostly slender volumes of autofiction of the 2010s and 2020. It’s as if the writing community collectively thought to itself, enough. Enough with the dystopian concerns about the environment, technology, neurology, mass weaponry. We’ll leave that to the journalists and the philosophers and the scientists. We’ll just focus on our own existence, our observed reality. 

The ultra literate over-the-toppism of “The Corrections,” “Infinite Jest,” “White Teeth,” “Underworld,” etc. etc. etc., gave way to barely imagined, zero-plot fictions like Rachel Cusk’s “Outline,” Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” Teju Cole’s “Every Day Is for the Thief,” which for all their lack of event and even, in some cases, narrative tension, at least presented palpably real characterizations of real people.   

I was so shocked by the lack of reality in “The Corrections” that I went back to read, or reread, James Wood’s amazing essay, published in 2000, on the bloated novelists of the day, the essay in which he famously coined the phrase “hysterical realism” to describe the work of Zadie Smith (with swipes at Salman Rushdie, David Foster Wallace, and the grandaddys, DeLillo and Pynchon.) Wood’s essay is so brilliant, I can barely think of a thing to add to it, except this: It was published before “The Corrections” even appeared in print. In other words, it wasn’t merely descriptive but predictive of the crap that continued to be pumped out by top publishers in the 21st Century.

And now for the kicker: This bloated, overwrought, mean-spirited, fake piece of fiction-writing landed at No. 5 in the New York Times’ list of the best books of the 21st Century. I’m flabbergasted. I knew it was on the list (that was why I picked it up to read) but I hadn’t really noticed, until I typed this paragraph, that it placed No. 5. (It scored a bit lower on the readers’ poll, coming in at No. 26.) 

Perhaps if we give it another 24 years, this book’s value will be reconsidered.

My First Book by Honor Levy

The story of how Honor Levy tricksy-tricked her way into the attention of Giancarlo DiTrapano, the founder and owner of alt-publisher of Tyrant Books, is part charming and part horrifying: As a sophomore in college (Bennington, natch), she tweeted that she was writing her first book for Tyrant, and DiTrapano, essentially playing along, reached out to ask if, in fact, she did have anything to show him. As the story has it, she opened up a Google Doc and created a file named “My First Book.” And here it is today, a collection of short pieces, still with that cringey title.

Cringe is an essential element of “My First Book,” along with drugs, memes and comfortable wealth. These stories and texts are just about exactly what you would expect from a young woman who grew up in a well-off family in Los Angeles, attended Bennington and then settled in downtown Manhattan: There is plenty of recreational drug use, especially Adderall and other speedy concoctions, there are crushes and broken hearts, and there are twee story titles in all lower case letters, like “written by sad girl in the third person.”

(The lack of the article “a” in that story title is perfect, and unbearably cringey.)

But — but but but but — there is some really intensely good writing, too, in a voice that at times is truly unique. That voice is maximally referential, grabbing at brand names, song titles, internet memes, DSM phrases, mythology, history, literary theory, and more, and then spinning it all together in a referential word salad that manages to achieve originality from what you might expect to result in a cut-and-paste mess.

The very first story in the book, “Love Story,” is a stunner, building a cockeyed love story out of seemingly random citations. It’s a real portrait of real people: “If their two lips had met he would have tasted seed oils, aspartame lip gloss, and apple red dye 40 on her tongue. She would have tasted creatine, raw milk and slurs on his.” That’s really good! And though the boy and girl in this story are cringe-ily privileged and self-centered, their suffering is rendered in such an original (and yet referential!) way that Levy manages to elicit sympathy for them. Here is another sentence that really knocked me back: “He felt like he was dying, smothered by xenoestrogenic alienation, forced domestication, a lowering of testosterone, depopulation, the sun setting for the last time ever, a great ugliness, the end of history flashing before his eyes.”  

Not all the stories manage to achieve lift-off like that one. In fact, most of them do not, but there are at least three, “Love Story,” “Cancel Me,” and “Good Boys,” that are propulsively original in their telling, with high-speed name-and-brand-dropping, sentences of a sort that I have not encountered before. Other texts (I call them that as they are more like magazine pieces dusted with fictional confectioners’ sugar) are not as successful, but many are still interesting, somewhat contrary, or even conservative, takes on the zeitgeist-y issues that Gen Z is wrestling with: identity politics, cancel culture, consent, privilege, and even the concept of cringe.

A big question is whether this kind of writing can build to anything else. Could it sustain a full-scale novel? I’m skeptical. But then again I would never have expected to find such stroboscopic writing in a book titled, “My First Book.”

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera

This one really didn’t do it for me. It’s the story of a woman who leaves her village in Mexico in search of her brother, who has crossed into the U.S. That’s a relatively simple and reasonably appealing tale, but the telling is a mishmash of absurdism, noir, myth, and social satire. 

What’s lost in the mix is psychological believability. There are no real people in this book. 

The heroine, Makina, lives in a remote, impoverished village and yet is worldly and wise, tolerant and knowledgeable, attractive to men but as cool as James Bond under duress. She faces terrible dangers on her journey north, nearly drowning at one point and taking a bullet in her side in another. And yet in each case the effect on her is negligible: After struggling under the surface of the water, Makina simply decides to take it easy, recognizing “that it made no difference which way she headed, or how fast she went, that in the end she’d wind up where she needed to be.” Yeah, sure, that’s exactly what drowning feels like. Later, when she is shot, the bullet passes between two of her ribs, and yet it barely hurts and in fact it doesn’t bleed much. So, on she goes, as if a bullet wound were less of an inconvenience than a hangnail or a spec of dust in her eye. Straightaway she climbs a mountain pass, where she sees her first snowfall, which improbably sets her to thinking about the impermanence of human civilization. Again: yeah, sure, that’s exactly the kind of thing one thinks when first seeing snowfall with a fresh bullet wound in the chest.

For no particularly good narrative reason, Makina’s journey is essentially made possible by underworld figures who are only identified as Mr. Aitch or Mr. Double-U or Mr. P (and why some of these men are identified by letter and some by the spelled-out sound of the letter, I don’t know). We never learn what it is exactly that these criminal figures are up to—drug trafficking, human trafficking, cockfighting, god knows—nor do we ever find out how Makina, a village telephone operator, has come to win the confidence of a wide variety of apparently powerful men, or why they would bother to make her trip possible.

The story moves from stupidly non-credible to risible when Makina finally finds her brother, a discovery that involves absurd coincidences and spy-novel changes in identity. Also, we meet a cartoonish black character.

Throughout the book the narrative halts from time to time for trite social commentary. An example: At the point of finding her brother, Makina stops to observe a mass gay wedding. The ceremony has no relation to the story, nor any metaphorical point. And yet the action stops as Makina considers — and makes judgements! — about gay marriage. (No, she’s not against it, but she has to wonder why gay people would feel the need to get married, the way straight people do. We also learn that in the past, she has loaned clothing to her gay friends for pride parades. Who knew that remote Mexican villages with only one telephone were so woke as to have pride parades!) Again, to be clear, this has nothing to do with the story of Makina’s journey. It’s not a terribly long passage, maybe about a page, but this is book is barely novella length, not even 80 pages long, so even one page of rambling is a pretty significant chunk of text, at least as a percentage of the whole, and it makes it seem that the author is flailing, just looking for ways to fill space. 

The translation from the original Spanish is extremely distracting, featuring what are essentially made-up English words for Mexican slang. Characters don’t leave rooms, they “verse.” Far away is rendered as “yond.”  “Shuck” is the word for fuck. And so forth. I understand that translating slang is challenging, but these seem like bad choices. As I read, I kept marking words like “verse” and “bout” and “span” with questions — were these typos? (I think “span” was, actually.) Were they English words I hadn’t seen before? I didn’t learn until reading the translator’s note that these were considered decisions, buy I found them clunky and distracting, especially “verse,” which appears more than 20 times. I mean, come on, English has dozens of slangy ways of describing someone leaving a room: split, boogie, take off, quit, blow, skedaddle, scram, skip out, get out, etc. etc. 

As with two books that I read and wrote about last month, “A Brief History of Seven Killings” and “Hurricane Season,” I found myself thinking about exploitative creative works as I read the Herrera novella. This book has a lot of marks of poverty porn and “mexploitation.” Why did Makina’s journey require criminals (with criminal aliases) to be involved in the quest? Why was Makina subjected to so much suffering just to visit the U.S.? Yes, of course, poor migrants from Mexico and many other countries undergo hideously difficult journeys to get to the U.S., but Makina was simply visiting. Millions upon millions of Mexicans cross into the U.S. as tourists and businesspeople and shoppers and temporary workers every single year — and, like the author, tens or hundreds of thousands of them come north for education. Why create a story that essentially conforms to an American xenophobe’s expectations — a poor woman from a small town illicitly sneaking across the border, seemingly carrying drugs or some unknown item, all with the assistance of a criminal syndicate and a coyote—when all she wants to do is find her brother and make sure he’s OK?  

I imagine that Herrera’s goal might have been to create a sort of mythological figure, La Mujer Mexicana, an iron woman who can survive practically anything, who can take a bullet and barely feel the pain, a simple woman from a small village who nevertheless is alluring to crime bigwigs, who can repel a creepy guy on a bus by bending his finger back, a Mexican krav maga ninja. And, to extend the metaphor, I suppose the journey to America could be said to echo the classical motif of the visit to the underworld, crossing the River Styx, etc. etc. But the telling of the tale is so flat, the events recited almost by rote, the characterization so lacking, the narrative crutching along on coincidence, I’m sure I don’t know what the point of such allusions might be.

The book ends with a gigantic squawk of protest, as Makina, accosted by a policeman simply because she is brown, scrawls a diatribe against the exploitation of Mexicans by unthinking, rapacious Americans. The diatribe itself is actually affecting. I’ll reproduce it here in full:

“We are to blame for this destruction, we who don’t speak your tongue and don’t know how to keep quiet either. We who didn’t come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you’d never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else would we do. We the ones who are waiting for who knows what, We the dark the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians.” 

Well, that’s really good, sharp, vicious, painful stuff. The only problem is it that it feels jammed into the narrative — it comes out of the blue, unrelated to the character of Makina, such that she has a character, and not really related to her story.

Who knows? I’m a hypercritical reader. And I generally have little patience for books that don’t ring psychologically true. It may be that this narrative works for readers who are more open to, I don’t know, metaphorical fiction. With that in mind, here’s a review (from The Guardian) that is the polar opposite of my take. It’s hard to believe we read the same book!

But for me it was a fail.  

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Also read in October, albeit not 100% read: A book of essays by Jonathan Lethem, and James Wood’s “How Fiction Works,” neither of which really made much of an impression on me. I was so fired up by Wood’s takedown of hysterical realist novels (and I had read a lot of his other criticism, plus I was impressed by his first novel, written years ago) that I was interested to dig into his core principals about fiction, and the writing was fine and clear but the underlying ideas felt kinda pedestrian. As for the Lethem, I picked it up on the spur of the moment, I’m not sure why. He’s never been a favorite of mine (though I did really enjoy “Motherless Brooklyn”) and a lot of the book was devoted to defending the honor of genre writing, specifically sci-fi, which (sci-fi, I mean) I agree certainly can be powerful and artistic, but is that an argument that needs to made anymore? It seems like a settled point.

Photo credit: Great blue Turaco at Kibale Forest National Park, Uganda, by Giles Laurent, via Wikimedia Commons