middleagedmiddlechild.

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.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark is another novel I discovered thanks to The Guardian‘s list of 100 best novels in English. It is a novel just short enough to make you wish it were longer & just relatable enough to make you think it’s autobiographical. The title character, a teacher at a Scottish day school for girls, is just enigmatic enough to amuse you and just wrong-headed enough to shock you–she has a strange (& apparently not uncommon) fascination with fascist leaders in the 30s. Miss Brodie is in her prime, as she is quick to tell her students, particularly her “set” of favorites, whom she keeps an eye on even after they progress to the high school level of her school. It’s a great novel about the allure & danger of a great-souled person, about the power & limitations of friendship, and about the ways we live on in the lives of others, for better or for worse.

The Voices of Adriana by Elvira Navarro is a sneaky & surprising little novel. A novel in three parts, each of which has its own focus & angle & narrative approach. Part 1 focuses on the narrator Adriana navigating a new normal for her widower father as he recovers from his stroke and enters the world of online dating. Part 2 focuses on the home of her childhood & summers, not her parents’ home but that of her grandparents–further out in the country, deeper into religious faith, richer in the stories & legends of the Spanish Civil War. Part 3 curates the varied voices of the narrator, her mother, and her grandmother, sometimes contradictory, sometimes upset at what they are being made to say. The Voices of Adriana rewards a slow & adventurous reader. It reminded me of The Crying of Lot 49, another masterful novel that gets more curious and less certain (for this reader) as the novel progresses.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. A story that opens with a stark choice, a woman deciding to leave her husband & job & life for a religious community in a desolate landscape. It happens to be the landscape of her childhood, which brings up childhood cruelties & childhood acquaintances in dramatic ways. Years & silences bring horrors both relatable & fantastic– a once-bullied classmate & a plague of mice (really), among other things. I was ready for this one, a thoughtful novel that takes meditation & memory seriously, a deeply emotional novel that isn’t strident or loud in its depths, and finally, a novel that provides resolutions that are earned & believable, if not utterly rosy.

True Failure by Alex Higley. First of all, a novel that is universal in its look at early middle-age, at pre-parenthood marriage, at nearly-meaningful adult work, at the allure of fame, at the horror of living hand-to-mouth in the upper reaches of middle class. Higley centers his novel on Ben, a recently-fired early-30s shlub with indie-rock tastes & middle-America dreams — namely, reality-show fame, if not wealth. His long-shot dream draws in several people: his wife Tara a would-be painter currently running a daycare center from their home, a reality-show bigwig Marcy currently seeking a deliberate but subtle way to get fired, Marcy’s interns, a super of one of their apartment buildings, etc. and special guest star Mariska Hargitay (!/?). I loved to see how this one unfolded, how love frustrates & finds a way here.

Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein. What Wicked does for The Wizard of Oz, Epstein attempts to do for Oliver! the musical &/or Oliver Twist, the classic novel. The antisemitism of the time is a fact of Epstein’s novel rather than a disappointing shortcoming of characterization. Hatred of Jacob Fagin (given a first name for the first time in any incarnation of his story) is specific to the haters, not a response to stereotypes Fagin embodies. Epstein begins with a retelling of a scene you’d know, namely, Fagin’s meeting Oliver in the presence of Nan & the Artful Dodger. From there, she fleshes out this character’s deep backstory, his East London neighborhood, his own apprenticeship, and his limited set of choices in / for life. Haunted by the ghost of his hanged thief father & the real menace of his one-time pupil-in-crime Bill Sikes, Fagin wins our empathy, and Epstein affords him a resolution that makes a kind of not-entirely-rosy yet hopeful sense.

Two books by Raj Tawney. Independent bookstores have their charms. Cool selection, cooler staff, and personal connections. Dallas’s Deep Vellum Publishing has been a huge part of my reading since 2014, and Deep Vellum Bookstore naturally followed. Recently, they asked me to host a conversation with independent author Raj Tawney. For my narrative nonfiction juniors, his memoir Colorful Palate: A Flavorful Journey Through a Mixed American Experience really hit a sweet spot. Besides loving how disarming it is in its stories of ethnicity, family, they felt like it was tonally unique. Each chapter wraps up with a recipe, but not necessarily with a happy resolution. Tawney is honest about how human our family relationships are — he understands tension as evidence of love rather than as an obstacle to it. More importantly, they admired how, chapter by chapter, he was able to honor each member of his family on their own terms, to center each relationship as a reflection and a part of himself. And Tawney demonstrates that, like all of us, he is more than the sum of those familial parts. He also has a novel called All Mixed Up, a middle-school level novel about identity, friendship, and the challenges of growing up in a post 9/11 world.  My favorite part of this one was the frankness of the friendship: These middle-school boys are still boys but are there for each other in ways that can inform a life. In this book too, Tawney constructs & honors full-contact relationships with family, sometimes family that disagree with us, family that disappoint us, family that challenge & frustrate us. I’d highly recommend either book — and I’d probably start with Colorful Palate, for how it inspired me to think of the fullness of my family, to be grateful for the wide array of love that has fed me throughout my life.

Somehow I ended up reading a ton of things this month, as always mostly fiction, a good gender balance, but not as much in translation as I usually do.

PG Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning. A truly silly, truly delightful, absolutely enjoyable comic novel. I have heard great things about Wodehouse, and I am glad that I started with this one, apparently a late novel of his. The interplay between the upper class twit Wooster & his always-capable butler Jeeves was, as advertised, subtle & funny. There were just enough silly misunderstandings to keep you reading from chapter to chapter, and the resolution presages Seinfeld’s sitcom rules: No hugging, no learning. Highly recommend the audiobook.

Kate Williams, Tell the Machine Goodnight. I had expected this one to be pretty creepy, given the set-up: A device that kinda reads your life and makes future-focused life rules, based on some algorithmic robot thinking. Williams’ first example of this machine guidance begins with innocuous things like “Eat more honey” and shifts quickly to jarring what-could-this-mean things like “Amputate the outermost digit of your index finger.” There’s a really tender & complicated mother-son-divorced dad relationship at the center, driven by various regrets & struggles. Not as tech-focused as the title & cover would suggest. A really human book.

J. Niimi, 33 1/3 series: REM Murmur. I love this series, each of which focuses on a single album. When you’re a fan of an album, you know a lot about it–sometimes the introductions to these things are rehashes of things / interviews familiar to you. AND when you’re a fan of an album, you cherish a curated deliberate return to it. In this case, the author offers great insight into the production & recording of specific tracks, and she meditates on her own experience with the album & the early 80s. Parts of this book feel quite obviously padded, or maybe it’s fairer to say that they feel quite academically wonky. But it was worth a return to REM, a band I’ve written about here before.

Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons. I have avoided this author, because of the breezy & “quirky” movie adaptation of The Accidental Tourist. I’ve been missing out. This novel takes place on a single day (with welcome & enjoyable flashbacks offering context) in the life of a middle-aged woman & her husband traveling to a friend’s husband’s funeral. There are bumps along the way in this relatable accessible everyday novel, each of which is the result of the varieties of love. Sometimes we love in a hurry, we love on impulse, we love because others are watching, we love to recapture something we’re afraid of losing. The couple leaving for the funeral, Maggie Moran and her husband Ira, make it home from the funeral, and they make it home with a kind of life & wisdom they didn’t have when they left. Loved this one.

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India. I first encountered this novel as homework in grad school. Forster crafts human interaction with great precision & skill; some readers like my professor felt he crafts these interactions with great empathy. It’s a story of culture clash & cultural divides focusing on upper class Brits & educated Indians. When I read it for the first time, I was frustrated by the limits of the cast of characters (all of whom seemed to me overly refined, polite, cultural-norm-bound). But I don’t expect I would have been receptive to a novel that aimed for a kind of novel written by Forster that purported to examine, say, the lives of the poor or of that took a deep dive into Hindu faith & belief. It is a novel that thrives in ambiguity & mystery, in distance & separation.

Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. Probably the funniest, most thoughtful book about Jewishness & doubt & doubles that I’ve read since Philp Roth’s Operation Shylock, which I wrote about here. Ferris centers the action on Paul C. O’Rourke, doctor of dentistry, a Red Sox fan living in NYC with a thriving practice, a very present ex-girlfriend, and a troubling online double. This double posts in his name a series of claims about the Ulms, a millenia-old hiding-in-plain-sight tribe of nonbelievers. The Ulms, according to the online O’ Rourke have suffered persecution analogous to yet worse than that of the Jews. As reviewers note, the conspiracy parts read like Pynchon; the funny parts read like Eggers; the Jewish history parts read like Roth; and the whole thing is a creation that is Ferris’s alone. I have a couple of quibbles, but the last fifty pages are about as good as any novel I’ve read lately.

Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. I remember now what unites this month’s reading–it’s The Guardian‘s list of the 100 best novels. I mean, who cares if they really are the best ever? It’s just helpful to have a list sometimes to narrow things down. In this case, I would have never come across Taylor’s novel, even though it’s published by NYRB, whose novels I purchase in half price on the spine logo alone. This one is a perceptive & at times heart-breaking novel about old people & fellowship. The Claremont is a hotel mostly occupied by elderly tenants comfortable enough to afford it, healthy enough to live on their own, but separated enough from family to have nowhere else to go. The hours pass slowly. The days even more slowly. Errands are invented & painstakingly rendered by Taylor, as tender reminders of how empty a life is without family, without friends, without something to make meaning. The title character Mrs. Palfrey, a new tenant at the Claremont, has the emptiest of days until a kind of meet-cute brings her to Ludovic Meyer, an aspiring poor writer young enough to be her grandson. In fact, to save face with her tenants at the Claremont, Mrs. Palfrey lies, saying that Ludo is her grandson. I won’t spoil the utterly believable complications & subtle kindnesses Taylor creates in this novel, but I will say that it is true without being depressing, hopeful without being naive.

Johannes Anyuru, Ixelles. Ixelles is a region in Belgium, not a personal name. While this novel was centered on a single mystery (who killed Mio?) impacting a single family (Ruth & her son Em) and a single compelling piece of new evidence (a compact disc with a mysterious voice), I had to keep reminding myself that Anyuru’s project was bigger & deeper. What is the immigrant experience like in Europe? What stories do we live by? Which stories can we shape, and to what end? What fences us in, and how can we find escape & safety & home outside those fences, those families, those communities? You do find out whodunnit, and you do emerge with a mature sense of where this family might go next, thanks to the voice on the compact disc. And it is about a whole lot more than that too.