A return

It’s early summer, but today is the first rainy day in I don’t know how long, and I’m meant to have a German lesson this afternoon but I can’t bear to go over the passive voice or relative clauses, so I am here, writing. Yesterday’s clothes are strewn on the floor and at the foot of the bed (I write to you from bed) all our whites are hung over a clothes rack and sort of trembling in the breeze coming through the open window. I can hear the bins downstairs being ‘organized’ and the building’s trash being redistributed into its proper order by our Hausmeister, whose every crash and bang of indignation drifts up here to chastise me for mixing paper with the plastic recycling. There are wedding chores I could be doing, but just like German grammar, today I can’t bear to.

It’s been two years since I paused writing this newsletter. When I began writing it, it was the middle of the deepest part of the pandemic, and I was profoundly lonely and unhappy. I began writing because I’d worked with books for six years, and missed talking to people about them every day when I was stuck inside, locked down, in quarantine. I still miss it, even though I’m less lonely now, and far happier, and talk about books just about every day with lots of people, my partner and my friends and my students.

Now seems like as good a time as any to begin doing something with this space again, but I suppose in a slightly different way this time. A few years ago, I thought this newsletter might be a sensible way to ‘monetize’ what I was writing when I was in desperate need of money. But I quickly realized that turning my writing into ‘content’ is miserable. Exhausting for all concerned – readers and writers. And also a way of skirting the real issue: that we have lost publication after publication in the last five years, that rates have gone down and steadily down, and that there is so much writing which once would have been published and adequately remunerated, which no longer has a home for those who want to make it. Suffice to say, it makes me sad, and I don’t think that the newsletter-industrial-complex is a great alternative let alone a solution to that problem. So whatever this will be from now on, it will be ‘occasional-to-very infrequent’ and it will all be free. But it will still mostly be about books.

I’m also coming out of a very intensive period of writing – a new novel, Elegy, Southwest, which will be out early 2025. The semester being over and my head being free of that project, I’ve found that I’ve begun reading incredibly differently. I also have the whole summer ahead of me in which to create into a vacuum, or ‘play’, and enjoy ‘being between teaching contracts’, or otherwise unemployed.

When I was writing the new novel – I began in late 2020, in fits and starts, and then worked on it intensively and obsessively from the summer of 2021 through to March of this year – I developed a reading affliction. I rarely wanted to read anything new, anything topical, anything that was part of the conversation, or included in a list, or mentioned in a review. I wanted old books, and I wanted work in translation, and that was it. There were some exceptions – I read Either/Or by Elif Batuman last summer, and really admired it, much more so than The Idiot, but it did leave me with the queasy sense of having engaged with ‘the times’ once I was finished. I basically concluded that I needed a little cocoon in which I could pretend that I wasn’t making a product for a marketplace. This was something I didn’t think about too much when I was a bookseller because I couldn’t get away from what was selling and popular and timely even if I’d tried, but there’s something about the long duration of book publishing which makes any attempt to engage in the zeitgeist an impossibility. An anxiety-inducing one. My first novel – a product of thinking I did between 2015-2018 – was published in 2020 and 2021. Not only was the literary landscape different then, but I was a completely rearranged person.

So the things I was reading for most of the time I haven’t been writing – and the books that really stuck with me – were often ‘old’ (Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard, Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, Wings of the Kite-Hawk by Nicolas Rothwell, Other People’s Houses by Lore Segal, Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman) or translated into English from another language (The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernandez, An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura, Linea Negra by Jazmina Barrera, The Book of Mother by Violaine Huisman). Or both. The point I’m getting at is that this was a period of reading for writing, both to protect my own interiority so that writing could be achieved, and books which fed into the mood and themes and ideas of my project. It’s not, I guess, the kind of reading anybody does when they don’t write professionally.

And then, within weeks of sending the manuscript to my agent, everything changed. I was free again. There was one insane evening after I finished teaching my class at Columbia when I went to Book Culture and bought four hardbacks, two of which were ~600 pages, and couldn’t actually fit them in my bag and so had to hold them in a bundle to my chest in the standing room crush of the 1 train home. I wanted all the new stuff I couldn’t face while I’d been working. And it felt like having my brain spring-cleaned, or at least decluttered of the novel I’d been writing. I read and loved When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, Life is Everywhere by Lucy Ives, Reverse Cowgirl by McKenzie Wark, Biography of X by Catherine Lacey, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley, The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker, After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz, and Fassbinder: Thousands of Words by Ian Penman. I also read two extremely long hardbacks I deeply enjoyed but which I don’t as yet quite have my head around what I think of them in an intellectual sense – Collected Works by Lydia Sandgren and The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis (which I felt so weirdly compromised about reading that I actually shushed my partner at a friend’s book launch at P&T Knitwear when he pointed to a stack displayed near the window and told somebody I was reading it. Long story short, I loved B.E.E. as a teenager and then disavowed him in university, and hadn’t ever thought I’d read another book of his, until this new one proved me wrong).

I also began reading again in the manner that’s most natural to me – vociferously and widely and leaving at least as many books half-finished or abandoned as those I complete, not even because they were bad or uninteresting but just because my mood changes (ie, I was reading Independent People by Halldor Laxness in January and February, which consists of some of the most gorgeous prose I’ve ever come across, but once it got warm and I finished my novel I just didn’t pick it up again. By contrast there were several vaguely environmentally-concerned feelingsy books I’d been recommended by people who don’t quite have a handle on my literary tastes which I found so appallingly written and poorly conceived that after 50 pages I condemned them all to the Little Free Library bin in the park across the street. Won’t name them, it wouldn’t be polite).

I’m not quite sure what I’m reading now, or what I’m reading for. I finished Jon Fosse’s Trilogy this morning, which I was reading because we went last night to see a new opera adapted from the book at the Berlin Staatsoper (the opera was…fine? The book is a lot better). I’m halfway through This is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor, and after I finished the Fosse this morning I began August Blue by Deborah Levy. I also have three books sitting hopefully beside me on the bed, which I feel a strong, unexpected desire to re-read after a long time having elapsed in each case – The Castle by Kafka (which I must have read when I was 15), 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (third year of university, I remember buying it at Berkelouw Books on Oxford Street and then taking it to a cliff overlooking Coogee Beach in Sydney where I stubbornly insisted on sitting even though it was the middle of winter and windy), and Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (maybe 9 years ago, when I was still a fresh-faced and wide-eyed baby to New York, judging from the bookmark it might have been one of the first things I bought with my staff discount after I started working at McNally Jackson). The chance of finishing them or getting through them in the next few weeks: not sure. Next Friday our families begin to fly in, then friends, and really, who knew that weddings required so much faffing and planning and organizing. But the sun has come out now, and I have 45 minutes until German lessons begin, so I will leave you here, and throw leggings on, and go for a run down to the water where the other night I saw a hedgehog scuffling through the long grasses, and then come back and try again to get my head around the passive voice and relative clauses.