Last week, I went outside.
I’ve been going outside for months — I have a dog who needs walkies, not to mention the protests and grocery shopping and running in the park — but last week I did something that, dare I say, felt new: I took a walk around my neighborhood then went to my local coffee shop. I sat outside, at a table in the street, and wrote for an hour.
Gods, I missed sitting outside to work. And I missed walking around to get my brain flowing. I am a peripatetic (“a learned fruit, wandering through the snow”) soul by nature and I wrote 1500 words in an uninterrupted hour at this café and that’s the best writing I’ve done since the pandemic hit.
I’m not trying to rush us into reopening when, clearly, NOW IS NOT THE TIME. If anything, I feel even more precious about the experience because I’m not convinced it will stay available to me as we move through the rest of the year. I’m glad that I felt safe enough to do that, that my neighbors were respectful enough to all wear their masks / stay far enough apart when sipping their caffeine, that it was a nice day (not yet too hot, a nice breeze). And I am convinced, as is apparently the rest of the world, that America has proved once and for all that we are a backwards cesspit of a country by being so incapable of passing the marshmallow test that, as a country, we basically ate the second marshmallow before they even finished explaining the test.
Please wear a mask. Please take care of your neighbors. And remind those who won’t do so that it is not a ‘right’ to go about life with wanton disregard for the rest of us, despite what their C- understanding of American Government might lead them to otherwise believe.
Anyway. While we’re all cautiously tiptoeing outside and/or sweltering by the window and/or panicking about the future, how about some books to read?
Catherine Lacey, Pew
[release date: July 21]
I am a Catherine Lacey fan from way back. So believe me when I tell you: this is her best book yet.
The epigraph quotes Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and Lacey definitely grapples with the central issue of that story in Pew, but she does it with shades of Shirley Jackson and Flannery O’Connor. An unnamed narrator wakes up on a church pew in a small Southern town. They are indeterminately gendered and of indeterminate racial identity — and they don’t speak. The town takes them in, calling them Pew. But Pew’s presence in the town is an unsettling one, a disturbing one, because people are not equipped to handle silence. To handle uncertainty. Anger, mistrust, and fear build up in the town as the calendar hurtles towards a festival of some kind.
Now, if you’re familiar with Le Guin and Jackson in particular, I bet you’re already starting to put together what Lacey is up to. All I’ll say is this: you will be surprised. You will be stymied in the same ways the townsfolk are. It is a masterful trick by a writer who is quickly cementing her legacy as, well, a master.
This was a powerful read in February; it is an even more presciently powerful one in July. Also, if you pre-order it from your local indie (or bookshop.org) before July 15, check out this neat thing Catherine’s doing in lieu of a book tour!
Rion Amilcar Scott, The World Doesn’t Require You
I’m wrapping up my time with Selected Shorts this week and I was very glad to get to this book under the wire. It’s a collection of stories, loosely ‘linked’ by the fact that they all take place in the town of Cross River, Maryland — Scott’s fictional town, born out of the only successful slave revolt in American history. Some stories have recurring characters, some just fill in the scope of the town; all of them are doing something magical.
This is, it turns out, Scott’s second book of stories set in Cross River (I’ve ordered Insurrections) but it is a fantastic introduction. The first story sets the slightly-surreal tone for the book: God, it seems, lived among humans in Cross River and sired a bunch of children. It… probably wasn’t God, but Scott basically treats this like a Greek myth and that sense of a thin difference between our world and this one is a delightful balancing act. He deepens this later on in the collection talking about Riverbeat (a new genre of music) and several stories about slave-robots who ultimately rise up and overthrow their racist masters.
Don’t be alarmed: it’s not like the book is suddenly sci-fi when you didn’t expect it to be, and don’t think that my highlighting the magical realism elements of the book implies that the book is meant to make you think of Marquez and Colson Whitehead. Scott is also delivering visceral reality in these stories. And the novella at the end is a home-run worthy of reading in a single long afternoon.
Sanaë Lemoine, The Margot Affair
A debut novel about a young French girl, the daughter of an actress, who upends everything in her life when she tries to get her father — a married high-ranking member of the French government — to publicly acknowledge her and her mother.
So much of this book is things that you might find familiar: the coming-of-age narrative, the young-person-meddling narrative, the cool prose. But Lemoine does something incredible here by making it all feel fresh and new. I was absolutely riveted by this book and I think that’s due not to the plot (which is engaging, if also absolutely [and purposefully] predictable) so much as it is the exceptional writing. I was in Margot’s head, in ways that sometimes were uncomfortable (as it always is to be in the head of a teenager) but also that felt wonderfully all-encompassing. I saw Paris through her eyes, I saw her interactions through her eyes, and was convinced of them. She is such a thoroughly well-wrought character that you never once feel like you know more than she does, even if you believe by virtue of hard-won age that you know better.
The book is also sumptuous without ever feeling overwrought. There’s so much food that Lemoine put the recipes online! (She worked in cookbooks for a while, which helps explain this, I think.) The wine, the sex, the food, the misty streets — I felt like I was walking around Paris with it in my bones, even though it’s a city I’ve only been to three times (and not in a decade). Lemoine doesn’t reinvent any wheels; she just wrote a great freakin’ novel.
Don’t really know what to say. She was sleeping like this when I turned around and… welp. She’s still sleeping like this.
Never a dull moment.
Okay team. Busy day ahead, gotta get to it. I’m seeing a play(!!!) done live from London in a few hours, I’ve got short stories to read, and oh yeah the world remains very intense.
But I think I’m gonna have a treat for you all in a little bit — some music that you can’t get anywhere else. Stay tuned for that.
xo
D