Reading Roundup for November 15th, 2024
Oates, Eggers, Bull City, and more.
As you sit down to read this missive (or stand in line somewhere, phone perilously close to nose in an effort to avoid eye contact with the coffee shop employee you embarrassed yourself in front of this week. “Enjoy!” She said; “You too!” you said. The burn mediocre humiliation is real), do so with this image in your head: your humble writer, sitting at his humble writing desk some three days before publication. I’ve just finished a small book by Dave Eggers (detailed below), after which I had a nap with one of our cats (the one who insists on being spooned). It is a surprisingly bright November morning, but there is no snow in Lincoln yet: the weather calls for rain. All my work for the day (deadlines included) has (somehow) been completed before noon. Desktop cleaned over the weekend, I am only surrounded by the small detritus of pens and notebooks that two days brings — which is to say, too many pens and notebooks.
Imagine me in this bright setting, and imagine me turning my mind toward the gruesome acts committed by a fictional serial killer some fifty years ago.
These are the joys and darknesses of being a work-from-home writer.
I see the tiniest bit of myself in Bobbie Gotteson. I mean, of course not the women-hating homicidal aspects of Bobbie Gotteson, nor the rambling madman parts. Not the vague desperation for minuscule fame; not even the strange queer dom/sub experiences, which I’ve never experienced but which I imagine must be comforting in times of uncertainty.
No, the part of Gotteson I relate to is his manic tendency toward avoidance.
There’s a scene in Joyce Carol Oates’ 1974 novel The Triumph of the Spider Monkey where her “protagonist”, a serial killer of young women, finds himself in the booth of a TacoBurger restaurant, trying to make sense of the LA Times article he’s been staring at for some time. The article describes – of course – the crimes Gotteson himself committed. But for the life of him he can’t put all the pieces together in such a way that he recognizes himself in the reportage. He cannot understand that everyone is on to him.
Oates presents Gotteson’s homicides as periods of profound dissociation: he doesn’t recall the finer details or even the motivations. Outside the incidents – in the courtroom where the novel ostensibly takes place – he struggles to acknowledge the events directly.
He doesn’t like to think about the bad things he’s done.
Who does?
The protagonist in Dave Egger’s short story-as-novella The Honor of Your Presence is likewise avoidant, only in the face of post-Covid isolationism. The story doesn’t need to be a Covid story — Helen Mahoney could be any stuck-in-her-ways craftsperson who rarely finds the desire to socialize. No, I suspect that Eggers was the one who needed it to be a Covid story — or to tell a Covid story.
Helen and her uncle Peter begin to crash parties with the invitations she designs for them. She carries an air of pessimism about being caught that perhaps could have been more pointedly about a reluctance to get sick. The book ends with a bit of a romantic-wish fulfillment optimism.
It’s over and you need to get back to living, the story seems to say. That optimism can be said to exist in most mid- and post-Covid short stories.
Likewise relatable.
I’ve been sitting on a handful of issues from Bull City Press’s Inch, a quarterly publication of micro-chapbooks (which you know appeals very much to me). I picked up two collections of poetry and a collection of fiction to test the waters on the project before diving into a subscription: Estaban Rodriguez’s A City is Always Near, Martina Litty’s The Wall Where You Leave Me, and the highlight for me, K-Ming Chang’s Bone House.
While there’s admirable — even stunning — work in all three of them, I fear that my enthusiasm over their format may eventually overshadow my memory of the writing itself. This means that they get tossed on the endless ‘re-read’ list for a second consideration and that I rate the quality of pieces and quality of concept in one:
Best new comic moment of the week:
MY AiPT REVIEW THIS WEEK:
I learned how exciting charters, by-laws, and membership restrictions can be in Avengers Epic Collection – Seasons of the Witch (short version: they aren’t); the book hits its highest highs by including issues of anything but the 1982-1983 Avengers.
via AiPT
One last image:
As you wrap up this column, picture me now: several days later (the morning before publication), and I am back at my humble little writing desk. It is still dark outside — daylight savings is a slow monster — and I’ve been up for a few hours, covetously drooling over the books I have started for next week’s installment of this column. I’m reading an old favorite of humorous literary criticism (read what you want to write), I’ve listened to half of a lovely little novel while I go on long walks and stain furniture. There’s a hefty pile of One Story I’ve been meaning to get through, as well as some —gasp— tabletop RPG rulebooks I’ve gotten off the shelf and placed on the desk in a way that suggests that I want to read them, but by no means have I committed to that Herculean task.
I hope, having read this, you find time to sit at your own humble desk (literally or emotional), and engage in a gorgeous bit of unnecessary pondering.
Loves,
Colin