Thoughts.

I’ve had few reading experiences as varied as my experience with Ocean Vuong’s debut novel. It is apparent, immediately, from the first page, that the novelist is a poet.

I am writing because they told me never to start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.

There are so many moments of absolutely breathtaking prose throughout On Earth, moments that cannot be appreciated except on the physical page—which is to say: do not attempt this novel as an audiobook. It’s read by Ocean Vuong—but don’t. If you’re able to do physical, the words somehow hit harder and feel softer consumed as they were written.

There were sections of this book where the narrative was too fractured (for me) to appreciate. In those moments, I wished I understood poetry better as a form because if I did, I’m sure I’d love those sections, too. As it stands, I need enough form to discern shape, I need my sentences to begin and end, I struggle when they bleed into one another without either. Retrospectively, I suspect this says more about me than this novel’s failings.

But still, all of that said, at the end of this novel, all I could do was take a deep breath and appreciate its beauty. There is so much beauty and poetry in these pages, enough to fill a book.

Favorite words.

There is so much I want to tell you, Ma. I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it. I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess what I mean is that sometimes I don’t know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like sound. I touch the world not as myself but an an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me?

We stopped the truck one time on the side of a dirt road and sat against the driver door, facing a meadow. Soon our shadows on the red exterior shifted and bloomed, like purple graffiti. Two double-cheese whoppers were warming on the hood, their parchment wrappers crackling. Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth? What if the body, at its best, is only longing for body? The blood racing to the heart only to be sent back out, filling the routes, the once empty channels, the miles it takes to take us toward each other. Why did I feel more myself while reaching for him, my hand in midair, than I did having touched him?

Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof you’ve been ruined.

Because that’s what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.

They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.

I’m sorry I keep saying How are you? when I really mean Are you happy?

The door slammed and someone came home and low voices could be heard, the single lilt of a question as it rose, “How was it?” or “Are you hungry?” Something plain and necessary, yet extra, with care, a voice like those tiny roofs over the phone booths along train tracks, the ones made from the same shingles used for houses, except only four rows wide—just enough to keep the phone dry. And maybe that’s all I wanted—to be asked a question and have it cover me, like a roof the width of myself.

Thoughts.

I do not generally love novels described as “genre-blending”/”genre-bending” or “experimental.” I am not interested in sports (I bring novels to sporting events). I do not read self-help. And yet, Anelise Chen’s experimental novel blending elements of memoir, sports writing, and self-help dazzled me. The prose is accessible but gorgeous; the “reporting” on athletes and sports psychology is riveting; the narrative is emotionally taut. I loved this debut—I can’t wait to read whatever Chen writes next (yes, even if it’s a memoir told from the third-person perspective of a clam).

Favorite words.

To get to the conference, I take an airplane, a shuttle, then walk .21 miles to the hotel.
It is so exhausting to have to ferry around a body, a suitcase, and a head crammed with thoughts.

The only reason Ellen and I get together anymore is out of a sense of mutual obligation. After you’ve known someone enough years, it doesn’t matter if you even like them. Liking or enjoying their company is beside the point. They are a part of you, like a tattoo you can’t wish away.

Pessimists perform best when the world lets them down.

Bodies and what we do with them. The life of the body, the life of the mind. When there isn’t a balance between these two lives, things go wrong. Our well-being is such a complex mechanism of weights and pulleys.
For example, in recent years, I’ve noticed that whenever friends write to me, they tend to include a few sentences about what they’re doing for exercise. They probably think it’s an easy way to relate to my research. They say things like—”If I don’t exercise I feel off-kilter,” or “I like to get my ass kicked.” The crazier the person’s life is or has recently been, the more they need their ass kicked.

Those times when I would be brave enough to make the trek and swim in the pool undisturbed, completely free, I would feel both immense gratitude and immense loneliness all at once. It was beautiful and unshareable, and I wondered if it was beautiful because it was unshareable. Sharing it with someone would have fragmented a moment of pure perception. On the other hand, perhaps it was only beautiful because I was sharing it with an ideal, hypothetical other. This other person would undoubtedly find this sort of thing beautiful, and therefore I did, too. But since that hypothetical other person was not there, I was really just sharing the moment with myself, divided or projected.

Goals are relevant only if they manage to establish a proper distance between ability and desire, encouraging intrinsic motivation. Note that a goal is not the same as a want. Most children do not have a goal when they start a task.

Both the doctor and Alain’s best friend Dubourg believe Alain’s lethargy is caused by lack of will. They call Alain “mediocre” and then “spineless.” For these goal-oriented optimists, minor obstacles are like temporary problems to be solved as you travel from one point to another point. For the goal-less pessimist, however, there is just terrain. Where should I walk to? When a goal-oriented optimist does not act, he very well may be spineless. But when a goal-less pessimist does not act, he is simply making a rational choice.
For instance, when the doctor says to Alain that life is good, Alain replies: “Good for what?” The doctor is unable to answer this very simple question.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca believed we’d all be less angry if we lowered our expectations and demanded less from life. Anger, he believed, was caused by the disappointment that occurs when reality doesn’t conform to one’s expectations. Of his pupils, only the rich would throw a fit over a spilled cup of wine. The wise, on the other hand, understood that fortune was fickle and promised nothing. “No promise has been made for ever this hour,” Seneca once told a grieving mother who’d lost her son. “Stop pretending like death is a weird anomaly, and won’t ever happen to us.” (I paraphrase, but that’s the general idea.)

Thoughts.

There is something incredibly refreshing about a novel that does not concern itself with beginnings and endings, a novel that so resoundingly eschews “plot.” And, of course, I imagine Zambra’s response to this observation would be something like: poetry is plotless, as is life; plot is the fictitious construction of the novelist (which, curiously, begs the question: does Zambra consider himself a novelist?). Whatever Zambra is—whichever artificial genre the market shoehorns Chilean Poet into—the prose is great. I would have spent hundreds of pages more meandering with Gonzalo and Vicente.

Favorite words.

He didn’t want to look at her that way, and yet, at the same time, a certain sense of authority emerged in his head, as if sleeping with someone, or having slept with them, meant you acquired the right to look coldly at their body.

People say that’s what happiness is—when you don’t feel like you should be somewhere else, or be someone else. A different person. Someone younger, older. Someone better. It’s a perfect and impossible idea, but still …

She was incapable of sleeping without pills, but sometimes she decided not to take them so she could remember what she was like, who she really was, like a nearsighted person who decides to leave her glasses on the night table and feel her way through the whole day.

Favorite words.

But we never mourned. If anything we performed a new version of ourselves, hysterically non-racist in any direction and negating difference wherever possible. Suddenly there were just Germans, no Jews, no guest workers, no others. And yet we never granted them the status of human beings again, or let them interfere with our take of the story, down to that ugly heap of stones they put up in Berlin to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. Have you seen that, Dr. Seligman? I mean, seriously, who wants to be remembered like that? Who wants to be remembered at the receiving end of violence?

… I have not reached the point yet where I find satisfaction in letting my father down. I reached that point years ago with my mother, but with a mother it makes hardly any difference. It’s not like you will ever be free from her love, from that animal-like affection that would follow its children to the darkest of dens. The kind of love that finds excuses for Marc Dutroux and Harold Shipman. It’s like the slime my mother covered me in before forcing me into this world, and the idea that I was once part of her flesh still fills me with dread. Her love was always too much, too embarrassing, too indiscreet. A father’s love can’t be compared to that. There’s an element of choice in it—it’s something you can win and, of course, something you can lose.

I told him about how I sometimes follow strangers. I don’t remember how I came up with the idea, but I guess something fascinated me about how much power you can gain by overstepping those small boundaries. Most people would be terrified if you suddenly stared in through their windows, and that’s not even illegal—just like following them is mostly within the law. I just think that most perversions are born out of a sense of insignificance, Dr. Seligman. And telling Jason all about them was like a fun way to try them out, another way of leaving myself behind. And it’s quite easy to follow someone.

… it’s one of my many flaws, Dr. Seligman, that I cannot imagine other people’s unhappiness. I felt so violated by society all my life that I refused those people who lived by its rules the right to be unhappy. I always wanted them to smile themselves to death for supporting those institutions and limitations that had made everything so difficult for me, for thinking that as long as you tick all the boxes and follow all the rules, flowers will be growing out of your ass until the end of time. I didn’t want them to be allowed to talk about their pain, I wanted them to suffer from their own stupidity …

But the body others see is never the body we see …

Thoughts.

I am not an “event” person. Birthdays, weddings, holidays—even weekends: I’m not up for whatever it is you’re planning. There’s too much anticipation. The delivery on return is always subpar, and the experience of the actual day is never as good as you’d hoped. I’m of the opinion that the best days are always ordinary Tuesdays.

In that spirit, I also hate twist endings. Or endings presaged by too much hype or mystery. The monster at the end of the book is never as terrifying as you imagined (except, of course, for in The Monster at the End of This Book). So, I had my qualms going into Mike Meginnis’ Drowning Practice. The premise is this:

One night, everyone on Earth has the same dream—a dream of being guided to a watery death by a loved one on November 1. When they wake up, most people agree: after Halloween, the world will end.

The novel asks: What matters given impending apocalypse?

For all 400 pages of Drowning Practice, I dreaded the end of the story, even as I fell in love with the characters. Meginnis set himself up for failure from page 1 with a this-will-be-climactic premise. Would the world actually end? Would it end the way the dreamers dreamt it would? Would it feel like an apocalypse? Would Mott and Lyd survive? Would the “why” of the end of the world be answered?

Without spoiling anything, I will say this: Meginnis nailed it. This ending is one of the best I’ve read—satisfying and imaginative and way better than an ordinary Tuesday.

Favorite words.

“It must be nice to care about nature.”

“I’ve tried, several times,” said Mott. “And I can’t. But you’re right. The canyon is nice.”

“It isn’t nice,” said Lyd. “That’s what I like about it.”

“It’s … indifferent?”

“I’m not sure that’s right, either. People are indifferent, the land isn’t. It’s not even land, it’s just us, looking at the earth that makes it real.”

“Sometimes it seems like you both think that novels are the only beautiful things in the world. That’s not the case. Everybody else doesn’t secretly wish they could do what you do.”