dual personalities

Every few years, I (daughter #2) decide to read a number of acclaimed and/or recommended contemporary novels in quick succession. This is usually a bad decision, but for some reason I feel a need to know the current state of fiction. Long story short: disappointing. And yet, long story long, I have a lot to say!!

I will write here about various themes and takeaways so that you might choose to avoid the work of reading these (award-winning!!!) tomes. Several of them were, like my previous reading material, 400+ pages long! I plan to end on a positive, note, though, because I successfully landed on a wonderful palate cleanser and treat. A quick rundown:

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (2013)
Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here (2019)
Elizabeth Strout, Tell Me Everything (2024)
Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was (2024)
Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021)
Daniel Mason, North Woods (2023)
Amor Towles, Table for Two (2024)
Amor Towles, Rules of Civility (2011) (re-read)

To start with the negative, Same As It Ever Was joins seemingly so many contemporary novels in representing the hardships of the modern mother. This novel truly repeated, over and over again, that the young mother was “having a hard time,” even though she boasts various privileges that make life (and certainly parenting) easier. (I put “having a hard time” in quotation marks because I literally mean that sentence was repeated ad nauseam.) Though I found the particulars of this character’s “hardships” grating, it was actually the hand-wringing tone of it all that was so frustrating. It reminded me of Elizabeth Strout’s first “pandemic novel” (Oh William!) in which Lucy Barton actually wrings her hands nonstop. (In Tell Me Everything, it is somehow still pandemic-esque in Maine, and Lucy hasn’t really calmed down.) Both Lucy and the protagonist of Lombardo’s novel are constantly wondering if their children like them, while unapologetically behaving in ways that don’t exactly merit being liked (by their inexplicably-devoted husbands, friends, or children).

Kevin Wilson’s novel is not really worth mentioning — it bordered on a “beach read.” That said, this odd novel about the nanny of children who spontaneously combust is the only contemporary work I read last year in which someone has the experience of loving children unconditionally, 24 hours a day, even when it is hard to care for them. How lovely that it isn’t their mother (deceased, of course) or stepmother, but a nanny!

I did enjoy Cloud Cuckoo Land, in spite of its slow start and the challenge of learning three+ different timelines and narratives. I gave it credit for its relentless love of libraries, language, and literature, and its optimism about people and the world broadly (even with a climate activist/terrorist plotline!). Of course, these were the qualities that were semi-derided by a New Yorker review, which, more interestingly, linked Doerr and Donna Tartt: both authors won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in 2015 and 2014, respectively. My critique of Doerr’s novel was that it was almost absurdly clever, and as it careened toward its conclusion, I knew it was going to wrap up into a neatly-tied bow. This guy really tried hard with the novel, and it showed. But whereas Doerr seemed invested in justice (poetic and otherwise) as well as redemption, Tartt concludes that good and bad actions are basically all relative, and that individuals should simply do what makes them happy. We can explain away all our sins. I hate to admit it, but I was legitimately shocked. I did not love the main character enough to feel happy about how The Goldfinch ended.

I knew that Daniel Mason’s North Woods, which is apparently based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notebooks and is based in western Massachusetts, would drive me nuts. And it did. While the novel, which spans several centuries, was well-researched in ecology and nature (tree spores! fungi! beetles!), its treatment of people was a little too cute. Spinster sisters, prison pen pals, true crime reporters. Sure. But you know I felt a line was crossed when the author spent a section on fictionalized versions of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. I could tell you exactly which notebook entries of Hawthorne’s were referenced, which short story of Melville’s was ripped off — and I didn’t appreciate it. If I want to enjoy literary (and even scientific!) scenes of bucolic Massachusetts forests, I can (and will!) return to Henry David Thoreau.

Doerr, Tartt, and Mason clearly did their research for their novels, and it showed. It was all a little too effortful. By contrast, Amor Towles is capable of writing a smart character who is well-read and quick-witted, without showing off how well-read and quick-witted he is. Accordingly, both Table for Two and Rules of Civility were such a pleasure to read. And you know what’s funny? Walden is a bit of a plot point in one of the novel’s central relationships: she says it’s her desert island book; he reads it with pencil in hand; he leaves it behind at the relationship’s conclusion. Throughout all this, it comes naturally that the narrator shares how Thoreau’s writing applies to the scene at hand:

There is an oft-quoted passage in Walden, in which Thoreau exhorts us to find our pole star and to follow it unwaveringly as would a sailor or a fugitive slave. It’s a thrilling sentiment–one so obviously worthy of our aspirations. But even if you had the discipline to maintain the true course, the real problem, it has always seemed to me, is how to know in which part of the heavens your star resides.

But there is another passage in Walden that has stayed with me as well. In it, Thoreau says that men mistakenly think of truth as being remote–behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the reckoning. When in fact, all these times and places and occasions are now and here. In a way, this celebration of the now and here seems to contradict the exhortation to follow one’s star. But it is equally persuasive. And oh so much more attainable.

I don’t regret reading a number of misses — it just reminds me who I am. I read these novels and I think, these must be for people who are deeply confused. Life is hard, and they don’t know why. They are happy to hear that other people think life is hard. They have neither a pole star, nor a sense of the now and here. And I like to think: I have both.