Hi, all. I’m deep in a writing pit, with little mental energy left for non-book writing, but I’m feeling the irrepressible urge to try to get people to read some contemporary novels I think are extremely good, so here we are.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to write about the first book that I think is very good, which is The Visitors by Jessi Jezewska Stevens. It’s a novel of ideas that is funny, touching, and philosophically astute. It’s about, among other things, gnomes, recessions, and the uses and abuses of abstraction. It’s one of the most exciting pieces of new fiction I’ve read in years, and I really urge you to read it.
The other book I urge you to read is Lillian Fishman’s utterly brilliant and stunning debut novel, Acts of Service. It is great—and especially urgent at this moment, when sexual stodginess and conservatism of the worst kind is ascendent. I reviewed it in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jul/22/acts-of-service-by-lillian-fishman-review-a-sex-masterpiece
Finally, a book I don’t think you should read is Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel, Lapvona. I reviewed it here; I did not like it very much: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jul/06/lapvona-by-ottessa-moshfegh-review-a-grim-fairytale
Back to my writing cave now!
---Initially, Fishman’s narrator is herself an aspiring ascetic. A young barista adrift in Brooklyn, Eve is concerned by the various evils of modern life – capitalism, sexism, environmental degradation – but remains unsure what, if anything, she can do about them. “My friends and I were raised without real religion and without a comparable ethics of living through which to filter our beliefs and ambitions,” she reports. “We were encouraged to care deeply about the state of our world but our ability to affect it personally was very much in doubt.” ---
That's about as far as I got in the review. Fishman is hot. And she's indulging her hotness and defending that as "an intellectual". There was something new in that once.
The culture of asceticism is an indulgence of American suburbanites who've moved to the big city, displacing people who grow up in a world of moral ambiguity not as an idea but a fact of life. A wise man once wrote: "I know a few dudes doin' life bids in jail/And they way smarter than the white kids in Yale".
To say the same in my own words: if art were about morality, killers wouldn't know how to dance.
Smart sexy narcissists are good in bed, and minor artists at best.