The summer of long books (The Name of the Rose, The Illuminaries, etc.) gave way to the fall of reading cool stuff and things that finally came up in my Libby queue. I’m glad that I’m getting back into the habit of tracking my reading, though.

Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach had been on half-price shelves frequently enough that I worried it was one of those novels that people purchased but didn’t finish. I finished it, quickly.

Within the opening pages, I was reminded of a novel that I really enjoyed–city setting, poor Irish family, young girl, etc. Those characteristics lingered through Manhattan Beach even as the setting shifted to the sea, even as the family’s fortunes improved, even after the young girl became a young woman. Anna Kendrick pays a visit with her father to the luxurious shoreside house of a handsome charismatic man that, like her father, thrives in the liminal space between polite society and gangster society. It’s an affecting opening, one that shows the deep pull that each man has on Anna and the deep pull that the sea has on her.

Egan moves Anna’s affections & fortunes briskly back & forth between these men, between these settings, between then (near the end of the Depression) and now (near the end of WWII). The set pieces, such as a trip to a Times Square jazz club, always feel authentic; the historical research, such as the fine details of military deep-sea diving, always feel essential to the internal life of the characters.

The secrets & desires of the main three characters are at the heart of the novel, and the secondary characters (an aunt that was a silent movie bit player, a mysterious man-behind-the-men mafioso) keep you alert to the ways that a character’s fate is in the hands of so many. It was, in short, a fully human, fully historical, fully suspenseful & satisfying novel.

Like many folk around the pandemic, I’ve read my fair share of minimalist books, and I’ve watched a lot of YouTube reflections on the practices & payoffs of severing yourself from things. It’s not easy for me. A huge part of my identity was formed around the content I consumed & curated, shared & gave. Music, books, movies, and now podcasts, were the main elements of my intellectual self–and of my material self. What is left when I sever ties or when I throw away these things? Abraham Joshua Heschel has an answer.

In The Sabbath (1951), Heschel offers a powerful argument for re-viewing this severing not as a loss but as a chance to rejuvenate. Each chapter is both scripturally rigorous and personally considerate. It’s a book that hits you in the heart & in the head, that offers wide gateways into thinking about opening up what the sabbath provides, in Heschel’s words, “the architecture of time”. The week doesn’t end with the sabbath; it culminates in the sabbath. Everything we do during the week is informed by, is nourished by, is made sacred in this much-needed, oft-misused time.

The Sabbath is not a lengthy book, but it’s one that I needed to read quite slowly, so poetic & elegant is the prose. It’s not a stuffy orthodox book, but it’s one that shows the vitality & gift of a cultural, spiritual inheritance. Representative quotation: “[…] the sabbath is not an occasion for diversion or frivolity […], but an opportunity to mend our tattered lives, to collect rather than to dissipate time. Labor without dignity is the cause of misery; rest without spirit, the cause of depravity” (17-18). Heschel offers the reader gems / challenges like that three or four times a page. It’s a dizzying & challenging work, one that guides the reader to interrogate their own values, their own choices, and the consequences of living so busily that we don’t let menuha (tranquility, serenity, peace and repose) in.

Álvaro Enrigue has written two novels that play with history. The first, Sudden Death, dazzled & delighted me with its deft bouncing between Old World & New World, between painting & poetry, between high art & low urges. In it, the tennis court becomes a central setting at a time when tennis was a game of rogues & royalty, a blood sport more akin to Fight Club than to the crisp uniforms & silent well-born audiences of today’s tennis courts. In its brutality & humor (& in its deliberate veering from / inspiration from the personages of Caravaggio & Quevedo), Sudden Death reminds the reader that the writing of history is, at its best, a righting of history–and not always what we would call an accurate one.

You Dreamed of Empires is equally profane & thoughtful, equally of Europe & Mexico (or more accurately, of what would become Mexico). Sudden Death‘s tennis games are replaced by …. well it depends on the word you’re most comfortable with. Diplomacy or ritual, conquest or evolution, dreams or naps, wills or visions, the ancient clean or the modern grit. Enrigue calls this novel an account of the birth of the modern world–November 9, 1519, the day that Cortes meets Moctezuma, or the day that Moctezuma hosts Coretes, or the day that Moctezuma fits Cortes into his schedule while he’s trying to manage the dissolution of a multi-tribe/nation/people alliance, or the day that Moctezuma gives Cortes hallucinogens to trip together.

Enrigue delights in anachronism (T.Rex Monolith playing in the background of a Tenochtitlan temple) and outright fantasy (Moctezuma dreaming the author himself centuries later writing the account of Moctezuma dreaming the author himself …). He delights in what Toni Morrison called Homeric fairness, where no monster is without his humanity, where no slave is without power, where Spaniards & indigenous people can’t stand the smell of one another and can’t shake the allure of one another. It’s a quietly feminist novel, one in which Cortes is referred to as El Malinche more often (I think) than Malintzin is referred to as La Malinche. And it’s got a heckuva ending.

If I’ve read Philip Roth before, I can’t remember — which is saying something, just having finished Operation Shylock: A Confession. The voice is a difficult one to forget. Utterly personal in tone, brashly direct in how it interrogates Jewishness, how it describes the / his male libido, how it invites you to laugh at serious things & take mockery seriously. The subtitle here should have been a greater key to the book than it was.

Not a novel–not something made up. Roth not only depicts himself as he is (late middle-aged, lauded but not Nobel’d, keenly aware of his weaknesses & talents, a diasporic Jew) but also constructs depicts a double Philip Roth who looks like PR, who knows PR’s entire personal & professional history, and who is busy with his own non-fiction, high-stakes world-building: soliciting help from well-known illuminaries such as Lech Walesa & the Pope as well as quietly influential figures working in & on behalf of the Mossad to get Jews out of Jerusalem, where the double-PR says they’ve never belonged, and back to Europe, which the double-PR says is much more their natural home.

The confession is not Roth’s alone. Roth recounts the confession of a former grad school acquaintance (in this case, an Egyptian professor) consumed with righteous anger over what Israel has done in Palestine, has done to Palestinians. He recounts the confession of a former anti-Semite, the former-nurse of the double-PR, who creates a kind of AA for recovering anti-Semites (the “real” Roth line edits his twelve steps). Roth observes a Jerusalem courtroom (show)trial, hoping to hear the confession of John Demjanjuk, a defendant denying that he is Ivan the Terrible.

There are briefcases full of money. There are mysterious phone calls. There is an apologia to a different strand of anti-semitism probably ever chapter. There are masked would-be kidnappers prowling under cover of the night. There is pathos & stupidity. There is a kind of Hebrew school lesson / subtle Mossad interrogation / protection scene. There’s a chunk about halfway through that summarizes & clarifies just how weird these true events you’ve read are. There is a Preface, explaining the still-ongoing legal facts of “the confession”; there is a closing note to the reader asserting, “This confession is false.”

I’m not making it sound funny enough. Or serious enough. Or timeless enough. Or timely enough. It was / is all those things, true or false.