First chapters and Yellowface reviewed
Plus our current reads and latest pod news
Feeling daunted by the sheer number of books there are to read? For a while now I’ve cultivated the habit of reading the first chapter of any book that comes my way. More often than not the books still go onto the TBR, but I find I have quite a different relationship with that TBR having read a bit. It turns books from strangers into friends and I have a better sense of which ones I want to turn to when I do have a reading gap.
I work just down the road from the flagship Waterstones in Piccadilly. I used to find this store so big and full of books as to be overwhelming but that’s before I discovered the secret which is not to go to more than one floor. If you stick to just the one you can appreciate what a well-stocked treasure trove it is, with the odd red sofa to curl up on.
A current favourite spot is the Piccadilly end of Fiction (floor 1), where they have their indy publishers section. A red leather sofa, a coffee table, it’s the perfect place to sit and sample a few first chapters - this week here’s what I read. Don’t forget to drop me a line and let me know what you’ve been reading.
First chapters
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
What’s it about? Dederer considers how audiences respond to the work of artists ‘whose behaviour disrupts our ability to understand the work on its own terms’, Roman Polanski being one example, Woody Allen another. In the context of a world where the American public elected a man president who openly bragged of his ability to grab women by the pussy, where is the place for Dederer’s concerns that Woody Allen slept with his partner’s 21 year old daughter, or the fact that Polanski raped a 13-year old girl. Yet Chinatown remains a masterpiece and Annie Hall a work of comic genius.
First line: ‘It all began for me in the rainy spring of 2014, when I found myself locked in a lonely - okay, imaginary - battle with an appalling genius.’
How was the first chapter? I had to firmly resist the temptation to fold a few top corners (my way of marking pages that have things I want to come back to). I love a good essay, particularly when written by middle-aged women whom I can relate to but at the same time appreciate because they are cleverer and more interesting than me. Dederer writes specifically about various problematic cultural figures but considers more broadly the changing context and evolving sense of what is and is not tolerable. I was hooked by the end of the first chapter.
Desire to read on after chapter 1: I read chapter 2, and then, reader, I bought it
The Librarianist by Patrick DeWitt
What’s it about? Firstly, I didn’t know Patrick DeWitt had a new book out, did you? I was such a fan of The Sisters Brothers, his darkly comic Western that was shortlisted for the Booker a few years back. But then I hated his last, French Exit. I finished it, but those are hours of my life I’ll never get back. In fairness, French Exit was a farce, and I do not and never have liked farce. So I was intrigued by this one, and the cover is pure catnip to a reader, a yellow library card. It tells the story of Bob Comet, an elderly man living alone who was once a librarian and generally prefers novels to people. One morning he meets an elderly woman and escorts her back to the senior centre where she lives. Looking for a slightly less aimless existence he starts. volunteering at the centre and gradually we start to learn the events of his life.
First line: ‘Bob liked Maria instantly.’
(Ok, I’ll give you the second line too.) ‘She seemed sly to the world’s foolishness, something like a cat’s attitude of critical doubtful was, but she also beheld a cat’s disposition of: surprise me.’
How was the first chapter? I was completely drawn in and very much wanted to know what happened next.
Desire to read on after chapter 1: Strong, but - reluctantly - I put this one back for another day.
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
What’s it about? ‘A masterfully constructed counter-factual epic novel chronicling the life, times and secrets of a notorious artist.’
First line: ‘The first winter she was dead it seemed every day for months on end was damp and bright - it had always just rained, but I could never remember the rain - and I took the train down to the city a few days a week, searching (it seemed) for a building I might enter and fall from, a task about which I could never quite determine my own sincerity, as it seemed to me the seriousness of anyone looking for such a thing could not be understood until a body needed to be scraped from the sidewalk.’
How was the first chapter? I loved Lacey’s previous novel Pew, but that was a much shorter book. At the first sentence of this my instinct was to snap the book shut and run but as I kept reading I did sink into the style and was increasingly intrigued by the premise - the protagonist (male or female, I couldn’t quite tell, and this sort of ambiguity is a hallmark of Lacey’s work - is trying to preserve the memory of their dead wife, a famous artist, and honour her wishes that no biography be written about her. When an unauthorised biography comes out the main character feels compelled to respond with their own ‘true’ version of her story
Desire to read on after chapter 1: I enjoyed the intellectual exercise, my own tired brain having to shift up a gear. I enjoy books that stretch and challenge me but at the end of a long day if I’m honest this felt slightly effortful. People I trust have recommended this highly, though, so perhaps I’ll come back another day and read chapter two!
Review
If you’d asked a hundred pages in to Babel what I thought of author R.F. Kuang I would have said she knows how to write a thumping page-turner. Sadly, for me, the second half of that overlong book was a real disappointment, with paper-thin characters all hammering home the same unsubtle point. Also, for a fantasy novel it was very thin on the elements I generally expect from the genre. And yet there was much in it that I liked, and so I was keen to read something else by her.
Yellowface is a literary thriller set in the publishing world. June is a young author but her debut met with only very modest success and her follow-up is in the doldrums. Meanwhile her college friend Athena is a literary star, churning out bestsellers seemingly effortlessly, and benefiting in turn from lavish publicity and marketing spends that all but guarantee success. Drawing on her Chinese heritage Athena also fulfils the publishing industry’s desire to showcase diversity and inclusion leaving June, as a plain and simple white American, feeling that she is the one who is marginalised. She has complicated feelings, then, towards her friend which get even more complicated when Athena chokes to death on a pancake. And wait, what’s this on her desk? The unfinished manuscript of her latest book? Could June perhaps finish it - honouring her memory of course - and publish it as her own?
What can you say about a novel that so cleverly and deftly skewers not only the publishing industry, but the book reviewing and blogging culture that surrounds it? I loved so much about this book, mainly the moral complexity as June endlessly justifies her actions. Anyone familiar with the furore surrounding Jeanine Cummins and her novel American Dirt (the book was a highly lauded bestseller picked up by Oprah’s book club and championed as a literary sensation before doubts began to creep in about Cummins right to tell this particular story) will recognise the parallels with June’s theft of Athena’s text. The novel considers the essential question of whether fiction writers can tell stories that are not their own. Kuang also shines a spotlight on the commercial imperatives that drive publishing, and the way authors are vulnerable to public opinion on social media. With Babel I grumbled that aside from her protagonist all Kuang’s characters were paper-thin. Here she turns that into a strength as the spotlight remains on June throughout. And it’s so full of delicious asides and comments on the present-day literary landscape you read it with a hugely enjoyable sense of recognition.
I was ultimately completely dazzled by this book, in which Kuang demonstrates that no matter how the publishing industry wants to package her up, she is firmly in control of her own narrative. I have been struggling to put what I felt about it into words and was heartened by NPR’s review, which begins: ‘Every once in a while there is a novel that enters the literary zeitgeist and requires discourse — but it feels like there is nothing that can be written or said that will ever do it justice. This is the feeling R.F. Kuang's new novel Yellowface evokes.’ [As an aside, I wrote my review before looking online to see what the professional critics had to say - Keishel Williams writing for NPR beautifully articulated some of the things I’ve been trying to sum up here leaving me in a June Hayward kind of situation where you might find it hard to believe I didn’t lift my own ideas from hers.] Kuang describes the novel as primarily ‘a horror story about loneliness in the publishing industry’. It is that, but brilliantly, wonderfully, so much more. Perfect for the beach, perfect for book club, perfect for discussion, perfect for anytime.
Notes
• Don’t miss this utterly charming (if very cosy) film, Hello, Bookstore. Would that I could be as wise and gentle a reader as Matt Tannenbaum.
• I always enjoy my friend Charles Pignal’s podcasts, but think he particularly comes into his own when he chats to biographers. This two-part episode with D.T. Max, biographer of David Foster-Wallace, was a fascinating delight.
• Are you threading? I thought this Guardian article summed it up nicely. At the moment it all feels very cosy and charming (and ad-free) - dip in to enjoy it quick because nothing gold can stay. I thought I’d use it as a place to keep my reading log, so if you’re curious about what I read as I read it, that’s the place to find out: https://www.threads.net/@bookclubreviewpodcast
Latest pod
Join us as professional book-recommender and Bibliotherapy queen Ella Berthoud helps us figure out how to overcome life’s essential problems (if you’re a reader, that is), namely how to cope with all the books there are in the world, what to do when you feel stuck in a reading rut, and the ultimate question, if you’ve started a book you’re not enjoying, should you finish it? We’re also diving into Ella’s latest project, Fiction Prescriptions, a pack of cards with reading recommendations to soothe your soul and offer a cure for modern life, from Ageing through to Boredom via Hangovers and Procrastination.
Currently reading
What Laura is reading
Laura followed in Kate’s footsteps this week, reading Rumer Godden’s Black Narcissus, the 1939 classic of nuns running amok in the Himalayan foothills. Simply put, she loved it.
What Kate is reading
I just finished Watch Us Dance by Leïla Slimani (trans. Sam Taylor), the follow on to The Country of Others, which Laura and I both read and loved for book club (our pod episode on it here). With high expectations from The Country of Others, Watch us Dance did not let me down. Slimani is such an accomplished writer with Tolstoy’s ability to slip effortlessly from character to character and somehow convey in short fragments everything about a person and what makes them tick. I think the only reason it hasn’t popped up on summer reading lists left right and centre is that not enough people have read it yet. But I’m expecting to see it on the end of the year lists for sure, it’s a fantastic book. I’m now happily absorbed in Monsters by Claire Dederer, which has provoked many fascinating conversations so far.