The New Yorker Fiction

Full archives on access for the rest of the summer.

Take note!

I just finished The Cheater's Guide to Love on my lunch break. I'm not a huge Diaz fan but this story got me inspired for my own writing, how it kept going and taking the reader to new places she/he didn't expect. (At least for me.)

It was repulsive and funny and thought-provoking and somehow touching, too, all at once.

Devika's 2014 List (opportunity)

Kim, thank you for getting us back here.

I DID mention sumreading, but only as a fond memory of the past. Just looking back at this year, there have been so many moments where I have looked at my life (look at your life! look at your choices!) and felt definitely out of control of the situations in which I have found myself.

Teaching -- as Camila can attest, I'm sure -- is among some of the hardest, most draining, most rewarding, most under-appreciated endeavors that we can take on as people! Teaching in urban settings is all of these things on steroids. It is, in this country, also a profession that has been culturally devalued to such a degree that the community of educators that I get to work with is a community that inherently struggles to give and receive love, that lacks trust, and, because of various experiences, has grown a quiet sense of despondency about life and about work.

In many ways, this year, I have lost touch with who I am and what it is that I want for myself or to establish a sense of purpose. There are going to be so many opportunities this summer, while here in India (after two years away), to connect once again, more steadily, with that self. I'm so excited to honor my needs and wants and commit myself to following that old Shakespearean adage into the school year: "To thine own self be true."

My summer reading list, with some comments

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
(My roommate in Baltimore, Phoebe, and Nathan, both, have been pushing this book hard. It is an amazing read and I am moving super slowly through it to savor it. Excerpts to follow soon. Definitely see why it's one of the "Great American Novels".)

The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities For Moving From Theory to Practice in Urban Schools, Jeff Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell
(Denis, my TFA mentor coach lifesaver and friend, has helped me push myself to make the most of this first year... and he lives by this book. For more from Andrade-Duncan, check out this ted talk about roses growing from the concrete, and deconstructing schools as seats of oppressive pedagogies, and allowing them to become havens for critical thinking and student empowerment).

The God of Small Things, Arundathi Roy
(Nathan has two books that I've given him for assigned reading. The other is Chimimanda Ngozi Adiche's Americanah. Anyone on this blog who's yet to read BOTH books -- you should read at least one. They are among the most important books of my reading life, if we can call it that. I'm rereading this one, just because.)

Any more would be overwhelming, I think. I'm also doing some intensive LSAT preparation, beginning tomorrow. We can add the Powerscore guides to the LSAT to this list, but I thought that would be rather depressing, so just unofficially, that's on the docket as well.

Kim, I'm so excited for you to be incubating this "idea" for a novel this summer!!! I am of course down to read anything you've written and are ready to share. I'm super excited for you and for this baby of an idea to grow into something great and complicated and powerful! Know that you have all of our support :~)


I hope that you all are doing well in your respective corners of the globe, that the summer months, though they mean something different now than they did before, still offer you lots of quiet moments of reflection, and gentle relaxation.

Vic and Bryan, I know you're both rocking summer internships,  and I hope these are fruitful from an intellectual perspective and a personal one. Emily -- are you still a paralegal? Still studying for the LSAT? I hope whatever you're doing that it is bringing you lots of joy. Camila - are you still going to be a little engine that could? Or are you taking your teaching skill(z) elsewhere? Sophie my dear, you're always in my thoughts. I can't wait to see you in New Haven, and I've been carrying a letter that's meant for you, that I didn't know where to send.

Kim my dear, you're the very best (of the... best) for bringing me back here.

Infinite thanks.

Better posts to follow, and that too, about language in the aforementioned books. Language is indeed everything, Kim! It so, so, so, so is.

LOVE YOU ALL.
Devika
"Ms. B"

Kim's 2014 List

It's a gloomy day in NYC this morning, June 5, 2014, and for the past few hours I've been sitting at my desk reading over the feedback from my latest story for my Sackett Street workshop (a.k.a. not working). In doing so, I started researching some history on my instructor and her book, and from there wound up in the vast universe of virtual bookstores. (Turns out Amazon and B&N can be just as dangerous to my unstable and overflowing bookshelf as The Strand, though not nearly as exciting to explore.*) In five, maybe ten minutes I had already picked three new books to read, and when thinking of my own "summer reading list," remembered "Sum-Reading"! Also, last weekend Devika came to stay for a day in Rehoboth and reminded me of the blog and how it used to exist. I can't believe none of us posted at all last year! Alas, two years later, I'm bringing "Sum-Reading" back from the dead.

I really miss everyone on this blog, whoever may still be here: Bryan, Devika, Camila, Sophie... Victoria? Emily? This blog hasn't proven to be the best way of keeping in touch in the past, but I just re-read a number of our posts and I felt a visceral connection to all of you, more powerful than a Facebook update or newly posted pictures. Bryan smelling "the faintest hint" of Burberry cologne at a fast food restaurant and being convinced that his mind had willed him to "selectively" smell it because he wanted to be reminded of Thomas... until realizing, actually, someone was wearing it just a few feet away. Emily listening to 93.9 on Sunday mornings, wishing she were born in the 40s so she could have been a teenager at the height of Beatles mania. Devika's notes from India, how Hamid's description of "nostalgia as crack cocaine" in The Reluctant Fundamentalist resonated with her thoughts of family there. All our observations on writers and on what we were reading! (Not to mention my overly-verbose posts... eek.)

I hope we can find a way to contribute here and reconnect this summer. I'm busier than I ever was in the past (as we all are) which may make it difficult to read and post often, but even if we all have one or two notes during the summer, that would be enough. A passage even that struck you. One of my old creative writing professors used to start class off with each of us bringing in a line, a paragraph, a song lyric, that intrigued us from the past week. I would love to see what you guys come up with.

I also, after my Sackett workshop last night (pic below from my instructor Dina's rooftop, a lovely place to workshop stories, until it gets dark, haha), finally, for the first time ever, feel like I might have a novel of my own brewing. An idea worth committing to and getting started on. So maybe I'll post some notes or excerpts on that here... would be amazing to get your guys' feedback, careful readers and writers that you are!

Without further ado, my list:

1) Half a Life, Darin Strauss (I'm about halfway through this already)

2) Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose

3) A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, Dina Nayeri 

4) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers

5) The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides

6) No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy

7) In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez

As always, this list may expand or contract as time passes. But I'm looking forward to delving in, and to seeing what you decide to delve into too.

This week's inspiration comes from a Susan McCabe essay I read on Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art." The villanelle, as McCabe describes, is a form, "tellingly imitative of the obsessional behavior of mourners with their need for repetition and ritual as resistance to 'moving on' and their inevitable search for substitutions." The quote that follows somehow manages to encapsulate both a new way to look at one of my favorite poems, as well as a new way to think about what the practice of writing, and of reading, mean to me:

"We are ultimately left not with control, but with the unresolved tension between mastery and a world that refuses to be mastered; we are left with language."

That's why I read, at least, and probably why I write. Language is everything, and it seems I'm only recently beginning to appreciate something Devika has known forever. ;-)

Hope you're all in for an amazing summer!

Love,
Kim

*Given Amazon's recent behavior towards Hachette, I'm boycotting them and have decided to order today's new books from B&N. Which, did you guys know they offer same-day delivery for free in Manhattan? Win.

Sophie's List

Hello!

Devika has graciously invited me to join your book club. Thank you for having me!

My tentative booklist for this summer:

Fiction

Open Secrets, Alice Munro (finished)

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy (finished)

Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro

Transparent Things, Vladimir Nabokov

The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

Nonfiction, essays, and literature
Game Change, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (finished)

Better, Atul Gawande

What the Dog Saw, Malcolm Gladwell

Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke (rereading)

Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber

Is Paris Burning?, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert Caro

The Welfare State Reader, ed. Christopher Pierson and Francis Castles

(Admittedly, this is a requirement for grad school. But it’s a great compilation, and I think I will be compelled to share thoughts on many of the essays, so I’m including it on this list.)

I'm still in the market for a great biography and an interesting read in urban, development, or behavioral economics, if anyone has suggestions.

Cheers,

Sophie

Thoughts on Franzen's "Freedom"

There is a point in Freedom during which Patty, one of the two most central characters, reads Tolstoy's War and Peace in a period of three or four days of solitude in a log cabin. She's struck by the great expanse of time Tolstoy covers, and how long those days felt. It was like she had lived a whole lifetime.

This particular passage stood out to me particularly because I was engaging in a similar relationship with Freedom, which tells the story of the lifespan of an entire family, enveloping nearly three full generations and touching on a fourth, and which I read in about four days. A critic of the novel in The Guardian wrote that he didn't think Franzen was hubristic enough to be actually comparing his own work to that of Tolstoy, but I'm not so sure. Not having read War and Peace, I can't say whether it's fair of him to do so, either.

The very obviously deliberate choice of title places the entire book under the lens of a concept which at first does not seem central to the story, but which then becomes unavoidably pressing on the reader's mind somewhere in the middle of the book after a patch of passages which include a disproportionate use of the words "freedom" and "liberty." And this is a book very much about timeless problems, but which is also very much a book for its time. Questions of freedom are addressed in terms of everything from relationships and career to American imperialism and environmental politics. It even explores the concept of debt and financial obligation as a system of morality (a la David Graeber) via a son, Joey, who views every act of support from his parents as a debt to be repaid. That understanding of their relationship ultimately becomes untenable in a situation in which Joey must simply ask his father for help in a manner which he will certainly not be able to repay. 

Perhaps this was especially apparent because of my predilection against the term "freedom," but what I think Franzen's story ultimately and most powerfully articulates (in terms of the concept of liberty itself) is the essential emptiness of the term. Once we leave a romantic relationship which we had always felt was constraining us, we are free of particular limitations but fall into the restraints of other realities. "We always have a choice," we are told, and it's true to an extent - but we are also limited not only by the circumstances, or by the decisions of others, but also by our own dreams, our goals, our abilities, and by the paths we desperately wish to take but cannot. "Mistakes Were Made" is the title of Patty's therapy-assigned autobiography. The refusal to take the full responsibility or blame for all of the suffering endured by herself and her loved ones is at once reprehensible, understandable, and noble. By narrating the story from each of the character's perspectives we learn that the sometimes seemingly unforgivable actions made by the Berglunds are just the desperate efforts of trapped individuals. Freedom is the story of a family struggling to come to terms with those limitations, and the stories they tell themselves to understand the decisions they've made. With humor and tragedy, Franzen narrates that story without a single unifying "point" or "purpose." It is simply the complicated story of the life of a family. Free from the sentimentality and manipulative emotionality that I remember so strongly in Jonathan Safran Foer's books, Franzen managed to sadden and uplift me with the very real beauty of the struggle of loving one another, and ourselves.

An Awakening

You know those books with catchy titles or interesting covers, ones you haven't read, perhaps have only seen in your friend's hands or at the library? And you go through the next several years thinking about such a book that you've never read, and know nothing about, until finally you pick it up and quite simply do the deed, and read it from cover to cover? 

The West Windsor - Plainsboro High School Reading Guide for the tenth grade had listed Kate Chopin's The Awakening on its 2006-2007 list. I know half of my peers read the book, in large part because it was one of the shorter ones on the list. I, on the other hand, read Uncle Tom's Cabin and Walden, and quite frankly was not too too much the better for it. So The Awakening, with its catchy title and blue, serene, almost transportive cover, very much piqued my interest. I saw it from across the classroom and never really forgot about it. The story was supposedly about a woman coming into her own...something. Her own self? By way of her awakened sexuality, I later decided, after finishing it last week. 


Perhaps the most fascinating notion is that this book was written in the 1890s. Two centuries ago, Edna Pontellier was breaking barriers, and being flighty, and FEELING and searching for  feelings that would release her pent up desires and satisfy her hunger. I can think of a lot of women coming of age in the 20th century, and even in the 21st century,  who are yet to reach such heights. 


Maybe some of you have already read this book, so the synopsis I give will be short: Edna Pontellier is a married woman,  who lives in New Orleans with her husband and two children. The family vacation on Grand Isle, with other créole families who hail from New Orleans. There, staying as a guest in one of Madame Lebrun's cottages, Edna meets and falls in love with the proprietor's son, Robert. Upon her return to New Orleans, Edna realizes (as do those around her) that she's changed; she's unable to stay confined to the bourgeois routines that she previously engaged in during her passive pre-love existence as a boring housewife. Ultimately, she decides she is unable to strike a balance between honoring her children's needs, and her role as a wife, and her desire to be with Robert, who loves her back. 


This book surprised me with its charming, yet careful, plot construction and was somehow rather suspenseful. The dialogue wasn't heavy at all; the characters were rather terse with each other, and for once, a nineteenth century book seemed to realistically capture dialogue, without rendering it overwrought and verbose. This book seemed so modern that I kept checking the inside cover to remind myself that it was, in fact, written in the 1890s. Edna quickly becomes a relatable character to the 21st century reader. She's originally from Kentucky, though her husband is of French stock and is a native Louisianan; classic outsider, vacationing in the company of those she doesn't intuitively understand. There are allusions, I feel, to the idea of French séduction, and Robert is described as being such an innocent, compulsive séducteur, even though he appears to have shed that identity by the time we see him at the end of the book.  


Throughout the book, Edna has a recurring flashback to a memory of herself as a young girl, eschewing church services one Sunday morning, and walking "diagonally across a big field" with bluegrass that stood taller than she was; "she threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one beats the water." 


Edna's summer at Grand Isle is in fact reminiscent of this moment -- she is transported back to her youth because of a great many concurrent events. Robert teaches her how to swim. Edna is gently falling in love with Robert, and she only realizes it when he is leaving her, and the island, to pursue his luck at business success in Mexico. And when he checks out of Grand Isle, she mentally checks out of her marriage. When she returns to New Orleans, she's "walking through the green meadow again, idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided." She sends her children off to be with their paternal grandmother in the countryside, and stops taking house calls, something that offends her friends and her husband. She even picks up and moves to another house, a smaller house around the block from the Pontellier residence, and she means to stay there. And her return to the ocean, the book's final image, her ultimate inability to reconcile her role as a wife and mother and her role as a lover, serves as the ultimate destination for her wandering soul. 


M. Pontellier is an interesting character in all of this. He senses his wife's changed behavior, but his presence in her life is entirely peripheral. Until this particular summer, he still managed to control much of her existence, in part due to her submissive, if not indifferent, approach to married life. His wife's awakening appears to him to be a disease. 


It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier's mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalance mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world. 


Another moment in the book that I really loved was when Edna goes to visit  her perhaps most shrewd, knowing friend, Madame Reisz, a spinster and piano player who lives in relatively humble quarters in New Orleans, and who also vacationed on the island with the Pontelliers. Madame R knows that Robert loves Edna, and that Edna loves Robert, and guards this secret well. One fine day, when Edna goes to visit her, she discovers Robert at her friend's apartment. And after speaking with him and observing him, she reflects on what has happened between them. 


She recalled his words, his looks. How few and meager they had been for her hungry heart! A vision -- a transcendentally seductive vision of a Mexican girl arose before her. She writhed with a jealous pang. She wondered when he would come back. He had not said he would come back. She had been with him, had heard his voice and touched his hand. But in some way he had seemed nearer to her off there in Mexico. 


Have you guys felt this? I know I have. Separation does make the heart grow fonder. But Edna's life-changing meanderings through the most raw parts of herself are a direct response to Robert's parting. His return, of course, could never live up to what she expected it to be. But it was surprising to me that I felt her experience as if it were mine -- that sensation that someone's return has resulted in the loss of an idea of what their return would bring, or perhaps a loss of that ideal version of the person that would have returned, in a perfect world. And then this loss requires a certain mourning. This reflection on distance and intimacy was fascinating to read as part of a character's musings. 


This book is only 200 pages, and I was entirely consumed by it. I'm so glad I took the plunge and read it! I think it's a book that has a required re-read in it, perhaps in the next five years. For those of you who haven't read it, DO. And if anyone's read The Awakening, do comment on what you thought of it, sumreaders would love to hear your take.


D

The Invisible Circus

(... or, The Elusive Beauty of Jennifer Egan's Writing--somewhat a "circus" in itself.)

The Invisible Circus was Jennifer Egan's first novel, published in 1995. Approaching it after reading A Visit from the Goon Squad, for which Egan won the Pulitzer in 2011 and the National Book Critics Circle Award, you can sense the beginnings of a great writer in Circus, but yet something is missing. Admittedly, I felt that way after Goon Squad as well--there were parts that I adored and many that I felt were unnecessary or, worse yet, uninteresting.

Hence why I say Egan's writing is somewhat a "circus" in itself because there are parts where, like at the circus, you marvel at her astonishing mastery of prose and others where you are left rather puzzled, uncomfortable, maybe even frightened (not that that's a bad thing). The Invisible Circus, to sum it up as succinctly and haphazardly as IMDB does (it was adapted into a film in 1999), is about "A teenage girl who travels to Paris in the 1970s trying to find out about her sister's suicide, and falls in love with her dead sister's boyfriend." And eww, they casted Cameron Diaz. I think at times it felt as if Egan was struggling with maintaining the reader's attention by dragging us along this plot where the teenage girl/protagonist, Phoebe, wanders dangerously all over Europe to find clues to her sister's death, which we've known all along was a suicide. Further, I did not feel connected to the main character enough to empathize with her struggle, and became rather annoyed with her foolish behavior instead. Such as, taking acid in Paris, or following a man into his home in Amsterdam and nearly getting raped, or oh yeah, the falling in love with her dead sister's boyfriend who is thirty and engaged and uhm, was her dead sister's boyfriend. It was especially annoying because she started out as a sensible character who was just so obsessed with her sister that she started to mimic her behavior (and her sister was borderline crazy, which was obvious to everyone else, and the reader). 

Still, I can't say enough for Egan's writing. She literally could have suspended most present action and necessary things like plot, conflict, whatever, and I probably would have still read it through. It's like finding a spider web on every page--in a good way. Her language is impeccable and always unique, such as when she describes prostitute's legs like "bruised fruit." Egan frequently employs ever-so-brief insights that leave lasting impacts, such as a character's claim, "I think irony may be one of those things you either can't see at all or can't see anything but."

The moments that really shone were when she would explore the family dynamics of the main characters. Phoebe was a young girl when her sister, Faith, died, and it was only a few years before that that their father passed away from leukemia. Phoebe, Faith, and their brother Barry had uniquely interesting relationships with their father; Faith was clearly his favorite and the apple of his eye, and Phoebe and Barry simply tried to keep up, get his attention anyway they can. Thus it was especially tragic for Faith when he passed away; the light went out for her. I've excerpted one of my favorite scenes to share with you guys:

Two or three months after their father died, Barry had decided one Saturday to clear out a basement storeroom for an inventing workshop. Their father's paintings crowded the little room: hundreds of canvases, many painted in the last months before he died. Nearly all the paintings were of Faith. Barry decided to throw them away.

He stacked a first load into an enormous cardboard box and dragged it out to the street. Faith was outside, trimming beds of ivy with a large pair of clipping shears. Phoebe slumped beside her on the warm brick path, twirling ivy stems like propellers and letting go, watching them fly for a second. 

"What's in the box?" Faith asked when Barry came toiling along the driveway.

"Some old stuff of Dad's."

Faith went to the box, still holding her shears, and looked inside. She pulled out one of the paintings, a portrait of herself in the backyard. In the picture she was smiling. "Bear, what are you doing with these?"

"Throwing them out."

Faith seemed confused. She'd hardly been able to eat, and the shears looked heavy and dark in her hand. "Put them back," she told him.

"There isn't room."

"Put them where they were, Bear. Back in the basement."

"I'm throwing them out!"

"They were Dad's!" Faith cried.

Barry pushed past her, dragging the box behind him over the pavement. It made a loud scraping sound.

"Stop it!" Faith cried. "Just--give them to me."

But something had happened to Barry. "I want them out," he hollered. "I'm sick of these things!" There were tears on his face. He seized a painting from the box and threw it into the street. There was Faith, face-up on the concrete. She shrieked as if she'd felt the impact. Barry took a second painting and tried to break it with his hands. Phoebe ran at her brother and held his arms, but he shook her off easily, pulled three paintings from the box and hurled them as far as he could. Two rolled in cheerful somersaults before toppling over. Barry was a fierce, wiry boy, and he moved quickly. Portraits of Faith soon littered the street: pastels, watercolors, wet-looking oils.

Faith was sobbing. She waved the shears in Barry's face. "Stop it," she screamed, "or I'll kill you!"

Barry paused. He looked at the shears, then smiled. He broke the painting over his knee. Faith plunged the shears into her own thigh.

Then everything stopped. Barry's face went so white Phoebe thought at first that her sister had killed them both. There was a long, almost leisurely pause when none of them moved, when the day tingled around them.

Then everything happened at once: Faith sank to the ground. Barry tore off his t-shirt and tied her leg in a tourniquet. Phoebe pounded wildly on the door of their neighbor, Mrs. Rose, who ferried them to Children's Hospital in her clattering station wagon. There were shots, stitches and lots of questions. It was a game, they'd all insisted--instinctively, without plan or discussing among them--a game that had gone too far.

It had always seemed to Phoebe, looking back, that on that day something shifted irreversibly among the three of them. As Faith lay in the emergency room, bleached from loss of blood, Phoebe saw in her sister's face a kind of wonderment at the power of what she had done. It was spring 1966. That fall Faith would start high school, and within a year would be immersed in what had become, in retrospect, the sixties. But when Faith and Barry fought, none of this had happened yet. Faith was thirteen, wearing green cotton pants. She knew nothing of drugs. Even the first of so many boyfriends had not yet crossed their threshold.

After the fight Barry kept out of Faith's way. He would watch her from a distance, following her movements with his dark eyes. He was afraid of her. And Faith, after that day, no longer seemed frightened of anything.

---

So there you have it, a taste of The Invisible Circus. I won't make it my pick for you guys to read... if you're going to read Egan, I still suggest Goon Squad instead. But I might start reading her other acclaimed novel, Look at Me, next.