A Year of Reading 2024: Fiction
Anna Kavan didn't make the cut but I promise I read some women too guys
“Going into 2024, I hope to pay more attention to books from small presses, non-anglophone books, and experimental literature.” Bold words from 2023! Did I meet these goals? Two out of three, I’d say, and none to the extent I might have, partly because my recreational reading slowed to a crawl and occasionally flatlined once grad school started. Still, I think I was able to move out of the dead-white center of Western Canon into an outer ring.
But the Western Canon itself ain’t what it used to be either. Nowadays, I feel more and more that it no longer exists as a cohesive, socially influential, entity; relatedly, books are always dropping in and out of it based on changing tastes. Does anyone without a pacemaker and a subscription to The American Conservative actually read Saul Bellow these days?1 Meantime, not Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov but the Dostoevsky novella White Nights has become unexpectedly popular on BookTok, while seemingly unpromising texts like the Odyssey and Antigone have been granted new life in translations and interpretations by writers like Anne Carson and Emily Wilson.
Which is not to say that reading has been democratized. I suspect many people on BookTok came across White Nights the way I did, on one of the attractive endcap display stands at Indigo for Penguin’s Little Black Classics series, a nifty way to repackage old content for new customers. A Guardian article also points out that the novella’s length makes it easily digestible, convenient as a way to meet an annual reading goal; there’s the scent of cash in all this. And as the insane publicity blitz around any new Rooney book shows, the publishing industry is in thrall to the same economies, hierarchies, and trend-chasing habits as Hollywood. All three of the categories I mentioned last year are still marginalized, but the villain to blame is now less Harold Bloom than market logic.
In April I read Pedro Páramo, a 1955 book by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo that’s quite well-known in the Spanish-speaking world but has had much less crossover success than works like A Hundred Years of Solitude or Hopscotch—all the more odd since reading this book in one feverish, rapturous sitting is what inspired García Márquez to start writing his. This, like many of my favourite books, is very much an exercise in mood. It begins with a narrator going to a desert town to meet his father for the first time, but this soon crumbles apart into the narrated memories of the town’s residents, who live in a kind of stupefied and absolute subservience to the semi-mythic local boss, Pedro Páramo himself. Does it make sense to praise a book for “crumbling apart,” to savour it precisely for its depiction of paralysis and immobility, to delectate a dry-as-bone prose style that sometimes makes you feel like you’re suffering from heat stroke? Whether it does or not, all these descriptions apply to this strange, oneiric masterpiece.
One of the people influenced by Pedro Paramo is the author of another one of my favourite reads of the year, By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño. This you should read in one feverish sitting, because it’s an extended monologue. Whose? A Chilean priest, failed poet, lifelong literary critic, and collaborator with the murderous Pinochet regime called Father Urruti, who’s on his deathbed, narrating his life to an off-page confessor in a logorrheic flow of defensive explanation. What energizes this novel and incites Bolaños savage wit is that you can feel that he hates Urruti for being a huge dork and a bad poet nearly as much as he hates him for being a collaborator, invective that makes some stretches sing and spark like an overheating bandsaw, like the long passage where Urruti alternates the overthrow of the Allende regime and a recitation of the Greek classics he was brushing up on at the time. But us culture vultures are a bit more like Father Urruti than we’d like to admit, aren’t we? Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!
It’s appropriate at the mid-point of this list to mention Dante’s Purgatorio. Despite the often boring allegory and translational difficulties, I keep returning to Dante because I respond to his vision of individuals’ fates as embedded in a wider societal derangement, such that our lonely destinies take their shape, for good or bad, in a greater collective story. And Purgatory, as the translator Dorothy Sayer notes, is by consensus the most moving of the three parts of the Divine Comedy, because it’s so human: the gargoyles of Inferno are now replaced by sinners patiently labouring towards their salvation. Sayer also points out that Purgatory is the only one of the three domains steeped in the rhythms of day and night, of earthly time. Both politically and artistically, I’ve become more sensitized to how perilous and heroic the stop-start journey towards healing is for us wounded and vulnerable souls, something Dante reflects and honours here.
Of course, whatever the future holds, we still very much live in Hell right now, and what the postmodern leviathan Gravity’s Rainbow is “about” is about how we built it ourselves. This book’s inciting plot, involving military-industrial espionage in the last months of WWII, quickly breeds dozens of subplots and backstories sliced every which way stylistically and narratively. Its hundred-odd characters doggedly pursue their projects across the face of a mutilated Europe, but as the narrative progresses we start to recognize a historical net of interlocked processes, ranging from the advance of polymer science to Germany’s genocide of the Herero people to the finessing of Pavlovian conditioning techniques, that is ineluctably gathering all these diverse conspiracies towards a singular outcome: zero hour, a rocket launch, an annihilating blast of light, and then—? It helps that Pynchon’s command of tone is marvelous; reading him is like watching a pro baller sink shot after shot after shot.2
But I’d like to end this list with something delightful, Donald Barthelme’s collected Sixty Stories. Barthelme is known as the consumate postmodernist just as John Cheever is known as the consumate suburban realist, but neither should be confused with the more annoying practicioners of their genres; Barthelme will make you thrill to smart-ass irony as Cheever makes you thrill to adulterous WASPs. And while I don’t love all his stories, many are perfect miniatures: verbal experiments imbued with verbal gracefulness and a simultaneously urbane and good-hearted sensibility. If you’ve read enough boring stuff written, in Elif Batuman’s words, “as if reading were some arduous weight-loss regime, or a form of community service,” you may swoon to a passage like this one from “The Rise of Capitalism”:
My neighbour continues to commit suicide, once a fortnight. I have his suicides geared into my schedule because my role is to save him; once I was late and he spent two days unconscious on my floor.
Susan Sontag once wrote in a notebook that her three lifelong themes were “China,” “Women,” and “Freaks.” To begin the new year in a spirit of hopefulness, here’s three books I’d like to read in 2025:
—The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun (China!)
—My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (Women!)
—Do Everything in the Dark by Gary Indiana (Freaks!)
Onward and upward!
The answer is yes—I do.
Like last year’s Moby Dick, this is a book enriched for me by the experience of reading it as part of my book club, where we have the tradition of setting aside a big book for our summer read.