A HOT MESS

It's been balls hot in Boston these past few days - this east coast heat wave has made me into a great big sweatball. Good thing I've been cooling off at pools and eating vegan ice cream by the quart. I've been wanting to write about the hot mess that was the Pulitzer's decision to give Jennifer Egan the award in fiction writing for "A Visit From The Goon Squad." The book is okay. It tries... really hard. Sometimes it works (dialogue is pretty excellent), sometimes it doesn't (I read an entire chapter in PowerPoint presentation, from the perspective of a kid... whose relationship with her father is one of the more interesting things to come out of the book. But still.. PowerPoint?). It can be funny, and it's certainly easy to read, but there's not much in the afterwards - I didn't linger on, and I don't think about it the way I do with other coming of age stories. Which brings me to two books that I'm incredibly fond of, and whose authors tackle the issues of adult transitions with much more style and passion than Egan can muster.

1. "The Emperor's Children."  I remember reading this when I was studying abroad in Paris and being amazed at how beautiful Messud's writing was, in its honesty. I don't think she means for us to wholly sympathize with her protagonists, but rather acknowledge how hard it is to be unsure of yourself in your 20s and 30s - what it's like for an ingenue to turn average, and the ugly desperation that sometimes follows to perserve former adulation. It's also about the pettiness of  intellectuals and those that inhabit that world: the kind of people that call themselves artists, who define themselves solely by their perceived social roles.  Weird how I find myself so inexplicably drawn to this book because I'm sure if I met these characters in real life I would hate them. But I guess that's what books let you see: the motives and complexities of people that you don't normally interact with. 

2. "Three Junes." I rarely do this with contemporary authors, but I actually bought Glass' novel "The Whole World Over" just to read more of her prose. Both novels are so good - Glass is subtle in her observations, compelling, and I hate to sound like a fangirl, but so wise. She brings out the sap in me, in the best possible way. As a reader, she makes me take pause at the decisions her characters make and the way they attempt to carry themselves through difficult situations. The issues she tackles, too, are really fascinating: how we see ourselves and how others create alternative images, and how death affects us. "Three Junes" intersects the lives of several New Yorkers dealing with modern evils: AIDs, cancer, isolation. 

There you have it folks - two reads to put ahead of Egan's "Goon Squad." Get to it.

xoxo, 

t