A Year in Reading: Marisa Silver

Re-reading is a great way to check in on who I have become. I’ll pick up a book I remember adoring a quarter of a century ago to find myself either irritated by stylistic indulgence I once found so deep or enraptured by complex sentences I once struggled to parse. This year’s re-reading was more an affirmation that my predilections lie on a continuum. I spent a few weeks back in the world of Denis Johnson and found myself especially re-loving Angels and his smart, canny essays in the collection Seek. Carson McCullers’s hard, heartbreaking, cuttingly precise The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Reflections in a Golden Eye were sneaky roundhouse punches once more. They flattened me. And then there was the double-take: I picked up the re-issue of Judith Rossner’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar that I remembered only as a titillating morality tale and a cultural catch phrase that embodied the retrograde idea that date rape is the woman’s fault. But reading it this time, I discovered a chillingly astute portrait of a sharp-edged, confused young woman wrestling with her libidinal yearnings in the wake of the sexual revolution. Goodbar is lurid to be sure, but it gets under the skin of its protagonist as well as any novel I admire and it unsettled me because of its nervy emotional accuracy, and precisely because of its queasy sexual politics. It makes readers question their knee-jerk impulse to distance themselves from the protagonist’s wreckage by blaming her. Somehow I missed all that when I was a sex obsessed fifteen year old trolling for the dirty parts.

Marisa Silver is the author of two previous novels, The God of War and No Direction Home, and two story collections, Alone With You and Babe in Paradise. Her new novel, Mary Coin, inspired by Dorothea Lange's 'Migrant Mother' photograph, has just been published. She lives in Los Angeles.