It’s been a really good reading year. Giving up social media was easier than I thought it would be, and giving up most news outlets was too. If my December 2024 screen time totals can be trusted, those choices freed up … well, they freed up more time than I care to admit. So I’ve had a better reading year than I can remember.

This month, I locked in on two living authors I had never read before — Cynthia Ozick and Sarah Perry.

What I liked immediately about Cynthia Ozick were two things. First, she crafts stories with what felt like a brisk pace; also, she favors soon-to-be-discarded or recently forgotten characters, which she treats with candor & humor.

Her novella Antiquities was the first of hers I read. In it, a well-born & well-educated man is enlisted by the trustees of a barely surviving academy to write part of that institution’s history. Our narrator, retired from an illustrious legal career, finds it difficult to record any history except for the recent & ongoing history of (a) his quarrels with the surviving geezers in this home / academy and (b) his disappointments with his son, an aspiring Hollywood producer (emphasis on aspiring). Then the narrator remembers Ben-Zion Elefantin, a Jewish former classmate. The bits & pieces of this student’s story bring up difficult memories of anti-Semitism at the school & in his own biases & assumptions & lapses in kindness way back then. The story never gets published / compiled; the academy shuts down. And we are left mining these antiquities of memory.

Her novel The Puttermesser Papers reads like several novellas — in fact, pieces of it were published in The New Yorker. And what loopy, varied, utterly complete & tragicomic pieces. We are with Ruth Puttermesser from her childhood through to her death at the hands of a rapist / robber. As the only Jewish woman in a law firm, she endures the most frankly acknowledged glass ceiling; as a mostly single woman, she endures one nearly-available lover (or would-be lover) after another; a bookish woman, she models (and almost succeeds in finding happiness) her life after George Eliot. Most entertaining to me was a passage in which Ruth conjures somehow by near-accident a female golem, who assists Ruth in becoming the mayor of NYC. Some of the stories are hilarious; each is heart-breaking in its own way, given how this character is forced to a knife fight of a life armed with only what she is, namely, a puttermesser (that is, a butter knife).

Her novel The Messiah of Stockholm … oh my goodness, these posts are getting really long. I’d return to what I said from the beginning, namely, that Ozick enlivens soon-to-be-discarded characters. Lars Andemening is not the messiah — he is the son (so he thinks) of forgotten, murdered-by-Nazis novelist Bruno Schulz. Lars, a low-level literary reviewer at a not-exemplary journal, a twice-divorced orphan with few connections to friends or family, can channel his father’s vision. He spends each afternoon dreaming through Schulz’s lens. Until a bookseller finds a person who claims to have a lost work by his father — and the person claims to have the same father as Lars. It is a puzzle of identity and a reckoning with cultural loss caused by the Shoah. Suspenseful & surprising, and highly thoughtful & entertaining.

What I liked immediately about Sarah Perry were two things. First, she crafts stories about thoughtful people in thought-full relationships with one another, usually on opposite sides of a thought; also, she looks unblinkingly at how friendships can be complex & hurtful not despite the love in them but because of the love within them.

I read Enlightenment first. a novel set in Essex. In a small city there, Thomas Hart writes a regular column in the small newspaper. Grace Macaulay is a motherless friend decades younger — Thomas is in church on the day that she is born, in the service in which his father brings the infant Grace. Who vomits on Thomas. That Thomas is gay and falls into a lovely friendship with a thoughtful man causes some unbearable tension; that Grace falls for not-quite-the-right-boy offers hope and tension. Thomas suffers makes which … well, I still can’t tell if it’s a betrayal on his part. I’m leaving out the big thread uniting this decades-long narrative — astronomy. It opens with the approach of the Hale Bopp comet in 1997 and is driven by the discovery of an amateur female astronomer who might have been the first to see a comet, and it culminates in 2017 with the viewing of the long-awaited comet. The highs & lows of this novel are huge. And it resolves well, if not in the perfect way we want.

Then I read her earlier novel The Essex Serpent,. I think I would have preferred to read this one first, but this order didn’t ruin anything. This novel is set in Essex too, but in the 1890s. Like Enlightenment, this action centers … scratch that. I was going to say that it centers on faith, but faith is actually one part of the twin orbit of faith & reason. These forces revolve around one another with dramatic & enjoyable conversations about / against each force, conversations between erudite, passionate, three-dimensional people. Cora Seaborne, a scarred & smart recent widow, takes her (probably autistic) son & dependable lady servant Martha to Essex to search the marshes for fossils & bones. A family friend recommends that she look up the country parson Will Ransome, a strong & caring man with three kids and a loving wife. Cora & Will take an immediate liking to one another, and their children take an immediate liking to the respective other families. Perry fleshes out an encyclopedic world — beggars, fishermen, doctors, politicians, landscapes, cityscapes, family, friendship. And a mythical monstrous serpent that seems to haunt Essex. It’s, like Enlightenment, a story about love & idea(l)s, about loving idea(l(s. I cannot recommend this novel enough, a novel that like Enlightenment offers just enough reality to make it hurt, and just enough hope to make you happy for the world Perry creates.

I also read Tom Lake by Anne Patchett in a joyful rush of two days. It’s a kiss & tell novel in the best way. As a way to kill time during the pandemic, a mother recalls to her three grown daughters her summer of love, a brief success treading the boards as Emily in a summer stock version of Our Town. It’s a lovely what-if novel, if you’re young; if you’re not as young as you once were, it’s a lovely thank-goodness novel about the choices & consequences of our lives, including those that others would want us to do over. I … I’m not sure that you can appreciate the novel fully if you don’t know Wilder’s play. In fact, it’s a great novel about life imitating the art that imitates life.

Somehow I powered through two books about great-souled people creating lasting change. Willa Cather’s O, Pioneers! surprised me with its loving portrait of the complexity of “frontier” life, in this case, Nebraska around the 1890s. Cather shapes the difficulty of that landscape & that kind of living by centering our focus on Alexandra Bergson, a risk-taking & thoughtful daughter of a Swedish immigrant. Her vision doesn’t always align with that of her brothers, who begrudgingly follow her advice, which makes them comfortable & rich. Cather navigates the messiness of small-town life, of social & familial power, and of romantic love. Louis Auchin­closs’s The Rector of Justin surprised me in its thorough portrait of a headmaster of an elite boys school before, during, and immediately after the wars. Auchin­closs centers the story on a would-be minister Brian new to Justin Martyr school, someone that might be objective about the headmaster Rev. Francis Prescott but who, like most people, finds himself entralled by him. Brian becomes the confidant & the story-curator of several people near & some dear to Prescott. An early review notes that Auchincloss, an attorney by day, assembles a multivoiced narrative that is in effect a set of witnesses for the prosecution and the defense of Prescott. I’m a teacher at a pretty elite school (not as elite as Justin Martyr), and I was really taken with how Auchincloss brought out the class-specific, history-specific, faith-specific humanity & complexity of this headmaster, his students, his colleagues, and last of all his family. Again, two fantastic novels about great-souled people shaping a world out of love & determination.