Books I Read July 4th, 2022

I know I been behind on shit but I been doing a lot of shit you don’t know about. Also, I wrote this article about the inspiration for Philip Marlowe.

Boston Adventure by Jean Stafford – The daughter of impoverished insane provincial parents discovers the stultifying madness of Boston high-society. Stafford is very smart and very mean and can’t stop being either for the span of a paragraph and it kind of steps on the narrative.    

Snow Angels  by Stewart O’Nan – Growing up in the 90s you kind of got the sense that the pinnacle of high literature were books by whiny middle-aged white dudes about their parents getting divorced in suburbia. I think this was a lot of the reason I was such a resolute fan of genre stuff at that point in my life, I just got so fucking sick of reading lists of artifacts in childhood bedrooms, and uncomfortable sexual revelations from unhappy men. Anyhow, Snow Angel admittedly resembles the above but more working class and less self-indulgent, a tautly sketched, sincerely felt depiction of love’s power to wound. Good stuff. 

Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes – The hippest mod in 60s London fights racist fascism. Energetic and fun.

Bedlam: An Intimate Journey Into America's Mental Health Crisis by Kenneth Paul Rosenberg – I kinda already knew how fucked our mental health system is but there’s some interesting stuff here, particularly about how the capitalist influence on the psychiatric pharmaceutical industry has meant that very little research goes into finding drugs to treat severe mental health issues.  

Ashe of Rings by Mary Butts – In WWI Britain, a precocious young woman grapples with a loveless mother, self-destructive lover, and a patronymic supernatural demesne. In theory I quite enjoyed Butts’ use of fantasy as a medium to explore personal and societal concerns. The writing is complex if uneven, and it was fun to imagine an alternate reality in which the genre grew up around more relatable tropes than Tolkien’s staid love of rural England and a bloodless Christ. But it was also one of those self-indulgent books where the protagonist is really obviously the author, and the romance in question a thinly veiled reworking of some previous relationship, the whole text obviously intended as a missive to an unfaithful partner. I guess I liked it less than I’d have liked.