And Now! The Overlooked, Part 1
It's November (as if you weren't aware) and there've been way more books read than covered here by Corduroy Folk this year. Here's the start of the final-scramble, an attempt at giving some blinking, glancing attention to all the great books that've hit this year to which we haven't given enough time.
Here's what's fun about aging: the increasing embarrassment of coming to things later and later. I was lucky to catch certain comets when I was still a kid—read Wallace young enough, ditto Powers, ditto Moore and DeLillo and etc.—but there's all sorts of writers I'm only now getting to, here as I'm past 30. This isn't a problem, not by any stretch, as much as its cause for slight discomfort, and that absent wonder one does—what was I reading before instead of reading this?
I've talked up Nelson's short fiction before, and you for sure should be all over that work, but Bound, her latest, which came out this summer? Good lord these sentences are fantastic machines. This: "Her mother said nothing, but the silence was acquiring an interesting texture." Or this: "While he talked and clicked and scrolled, he realized he was inviting, or perhaps merely allowing, his mother-in-law to pity him." Or "And God was listening, it appeared; she rode bumping and pitching, sailing and banging, winding through the desert for many digressing miles." It's not just that the language is thickly gorgeous throughout: the depth of human understanding Nelson's got on display page after page is just damn near shocking. Bound was one of those books which I'd pick up and put down but which I could never put down enough to get let go of by the characters witihin. Oh, and if plot's significant: mother's death, orphaned daughter, old friend and connections, mothers and daughters. Feel silly? Good: no encapsulation of Bound will do it decent justice.
Before anything else, let's acknowledge that we all owe Barich our book dollars and reading energy simply because he wrote one of the best books ever: Laughing in the Hills (note: not one of the best sports books ever—there's no qualifier: the thing's one of the best, ever; it's rubbing shoulders and elbows with tall and hard classics—it's such a good read [if you don't have it, get it--it's really far better than you can even imagine]). As if that fact weren't enough to guarantee a readership, let's try this: Barich is a former NYorker writer, and now lives in Ireland and the states (he and Thomas Lynch, apparently, following the same track [Lynch's new book of poetry's great--don't know if we'll get into it deep here at Corduroy, but it's a fine book, a nice dose of formalism if that's the verse yr into]), and his latest book, Long Way Home, is subtitled On the Trail of Steinbeck's America, meaning: you should see this book and think: I want my own Charlie to travel with.
Here's what's cool and interesting: Barich's Long Way Home is the tale of him travelling just shy of 6000 miles across America in the autumn of 2008 (literally right up to the election), travelling as a native who now lives elsewhere, travelling as someone who has his serious doubts about the American experiment (like who doesn't; especially in the autumn of 2008, who didn't?). Here's what's awesome: by the book's end, Barich has found ample evidence to keep believing in America despite the closed-minded-ness of small towns, the brutal ugliness of strip malls, the casual stupidity that seems to always be festering somewhere, everywhere. "All across America, I encountered people who weren't threatened or cowed and still ardently believed in the bright promise of the future." In all sorts of cool ways, the ideal companion book for Long Way Home is not, actually, Steinbeck's Travel with Charlie, but Greil Marcus's Shape of Things to Come. Barich's book is a strong, frank reminder that America's an invention, and that machinery depends on each of us investing what we can, annually, daily, to the invention. It's a hopeful book, satisfying as hell, and as masterly written as anything you're likely to find.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
by Aimee Bender
Here's why I'm dumb: because I assume that everyone knows certain things. I believe everyone knows that the best snack is chips and salsa, and that everyone knows that the Minnesota Twins are the reason to care about baseball, and that the best music in the last decade has, yes, sure, been made by Wilco and Dylan and the National and the rest, but that the real best indie stuff's been made by un-/under-heralded bands like the Glands and Throw Me the Statue, and that the best way to watch the Wire is to just sit down and watch all the discs, back-to-back, until you've seen everything in one massive ingestion of brilliance.
And I assume people automatically purchase and consume art made by certain people. I assume everyone knows enough to go see whatever Christopher Nolan directs, for instance. I assume, equally dumbly, everyone knows enough to read anything by a handful of authors: Richard Powers, Lorrie Moore, Jorie Graham, Terrance Hayes, Lewis Hyde, Matthea Harvey…the list is actually pretty long on this one. Anyway, this is all sort of bullshitty preamble: I expect everyone already picked up The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake long ago, right when it came out. Why? Because nobody but Aimee Bender's writing about a character who can sense the emotion of whoever made her meal. Because nobody but Aimee Bender can write such California-y books and make them palatable: weird, dreamy, just a touch impossibly awesome but also dark, touching without being maudlin or syrupy. This is not a review, by the way: it's public service. You should be reading Bender. You've never read any Bender, you say? Good god, kid: get to work. Start wherever, go wherever. Like the best maps, you can go any direction you want through the land Bender's made.
