This was a year of short stories, of picking up a book around midnight, when common sense dictated I should have been asleep, and refusing to set it down until two or three, at which point there was basically no hope of salvaging the following morning. This year was too hectic for grand scopes and labyrinthine plots. If I was lucky, those few evening hours in which I got to read wiped out the detritus of the workday, replacing them with voices and characters that scattered at the sound of my phone’s alarm. For a while I’ve thought that short stories, more so than other forms, are perfectly suited to adult life, if only because they accomodate the low-level amnesia of the stressed. The chronically busy person reads Alice Munro, say, and gets her brief hit of human frailty, which she then takes with her to the post office, or the doctor, or dinners packed with relatives.
I needed dependably good work, in other words, which is why, back in May, I picked up the latest Rivka Galchen book, American Innovations, on the morning it came out. (On Kindle, mind. I haven’t camped out for anything since I was young enough to hoard Transformers.) In 2010, just before the end of my post-college underemployment, The New Yorker released its 20 under 40 list, which included several authors I was already a little bit obsessed with. I read through the entire collection in the space of a week, envying the skills on display in the entries by Karen Russell and Wells Tower, among others. But it wasn’t until I got to “The Entire Northern Side was Covered with Fire,” Galchen’s perfect tale of a pregnant writer whose husband has left her, that I felt too dazed to go through with my schedule of planned errands and tasks. Written in the looping, contradictory sentences of a very smart person in shock, the story is tragic and wry, unveiling the deceptions of the narrator’s husband through a series of confessions by her friend. When I was finished, I felt embarrassed that I hadn’t heard of this writer, who understood with a rare clarity how the mind tries to reckon with turmoil.
That piece, with slight modifications, appears in American Innovations, as do several other examples of first-class work. A remarkable thing about the collection is how well it captures the messiness at the heart of civilized life. In “The Region of Unlikeness,” a woman who befriends two odd, pretentious strangers comes to realize, after hearing one of them detail his eccentric view of space-time, that one or perhaps both of her new friends are painfully, incurably disturbed. In “Wild Berry Blue,” a woman meets a gyro shop worker who looks exactly like her dead father, inspiring reflections on “the vast distances between nuclei and electrons.” In all the book’s stories, the mysteries of science and philosophy, of meticulously organized attempts to find order in a baffling universe, are kin with garden-variety moments of unreality. They incite a sense that bewilderment is the sanest reaction to the world.
Of course, I read other things, too. These included Flying to America, a posthumous collection of characteristically wacked-out Donald Barthelme stories, as well as The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which can function as a bible for a certain kind of person. (I am that kind of person.) And I also read more stories by Barry Hannah, the freewheeling, half-drunk uncle I always wish I’d had. But none of these books, great though they were, occupied me in quite the way that American Innovations did. As one of the book’s characters puts it, “there’s your life, and then you get a glimpse of the vastness of the unknown all around that little itty-bitty island of the known.”
That island is where I live. That island is where all of us live. Let’s not kid ourselves about how far out we can see.
More from A Year in Reading 2014
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From where I’m sitting I can see the galleys of Maggie Nelson’s incredible The Argonauts, which will come out this spring from Graywolf, and Aaron Kunin’s brilliant, Cold Genius, just out from Fence. Chris Nealon’s Heteronomy, published by Edge, has been supporting me all fall. Nealon taps into the energies of popular culture without condescension or self-congratulation or (easy) irony; his poems are at once totally well-wrought and unaffectedly conversational; he is clear-eyed about the catastrophe of the present but refuses to descend into mere melancholy; he has no illusions about poetry’s practical power but he is not in love with — or particularly tortured by — its marginality; Nealon — an accomplished literary critic — neither disavows his learning or retreats into it. Please read this book with me because everybody who reads it gets to enter a meadow where we can dance and die together:
is this some kind of joke?
No, it’s not. These two have been fellating each other across the internet for the last couple of months. She’s thanked in the acknowledgements of his new book, then she reviews said book for the Los Angeles Review of Books, then he picks her book as his favorite books of the year and I’m sure if she gets a chance she’ll pick his book as her favorite book. I’m starting to get used to this logrolling. It’s what the internet is about. There’s no point in fighting it. Just recognize it for what it is and take every recommendation witha grain of salt.
Lerner and Kunin are also friends (per an old Believer interview). Hilarious. Doubt Lerner even read the Nelson or Kunin. “From where I’m sitting I can see the galleys…” Congrats on your ability to see!
Thank you! The meadow conceit is lovely and makes me eager to discover the rest of Nealon’s book.
I must also say I’m aghast at the crudeness, rudity, and absurd presumptiousness of the previous commenters. This whole series is a gift to readers, and a wonderful one, and it will be taken away from us, because who on earth would contribute again after responses like these?
I don’t think someone telling you to read their friends books is a gift. It’s PR. Don’t be so melodramatic. The people who are using this exercise to be thoughtful and recommending interesting books are being thanked; the logrollers are not, as they shouldn’t be. Ben Lerner’s recommending Maggie Nelson is the equivalent of Uncle Eddie’s handing his already half-drunk can of beer to Clark Griswold. “I bet you could use a cool one, huh?” “Now you’re talking.” That’s what kind of gift that is.
It’s a gift in the same sense a television advertisement is a gift.
In res: Wyatt’s comment
What is “rudity” supposed to mean? Is that a new alternative spelling for “rudeness”? And for “presumptiousness” – shouldn’t that be spelled “presumptuousness”?
Condescending to other commentators (particularly if they have a point which you don’t even address) by using fancy words usually works better if you use words that actually exist and if you spell them correctly.
Claudia,
The crudity rudiness of your commentarity is sickning!
All,
Newsflash, half of these year-end lists are PR for writers’ friends or their own publications. There’s no need to break out the fainting couch over this, it’s just a silly year-end exercise. Also, it’s possible to like a friend’s book in good faith. It isn’t, however, a “gift,” let’s be clear on that…
So far, Lerner gets the Matt Bell logroller of the year award, but we have yet to see Bell’s contribution, so until then, the champion holds the belt.
Wow, quick to the throat, aren’t we, and so witty! Rudity may have been a mistake, but it is fine by Webster’s online. Condescension was not what I intended, at least no more so than when my 4-year-old daughter angrily shouts at my 5-year-old son the most potent insult she knows: “You’re rude!” (She hasn’t learned yet how to mock style.) The comments here are unwarranted and unappreciated. They are self-congratulatory and mean, and completely out of the spirit of this series. These are the personal recommendations and reading experiences of authors. Truly, what does Mr. Lerner owe to you?
Would The Millions please offer some of our esteemed commenters a Year In Reading of their own? This is not a joke! I am really curious.
Or maybe you dumbasses could consider that having a personal relationship with the authors increases their impact?
Tom
Your question is incoherent. Learn how to properly write a sentence, dumbass.