My immediate, I’m-trying-be-pithy-here thought upon finishing Meg Wolitzer’s The Uncoupling (that novel that had someone on the internet compare the author to Jonathan Franzen, if only because that someone was miffed that Freedom was getting all the press!): “What did I just do to myself?”

The next thought that alit upon my addled brain: Everyone’ll be better off reading Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal instead. There are similar elements: A small and rather insular town, the heavy presence of the academe (one that makes it almost a character in itself), a school play mirroring the larger collective, and examinations of desire. But whereas Catton’s novel was an inebriating marvel—the risks it took with the prose, with the storytelling! and  how dare it just skewer desire!—Wolitzer’s is an unapologetically trite, uneasily moralistic parable about uninteresting people afflicted with a sudden, enchantment-induced abstinence. That is: Wolitzer’s the kind of book that, upon its conclusion, compels you to simply look out your window and tearfully reflect on how many hours you’d lost to a terrible, terribly mediocre book. (See Immediate Response #01).

I sat patiently up to the sixtieth page, growing more and more bored by the second—how many ways can you insist that two people love each other even if (gasp!) they’re in their forties, and that this magical sex-strike just ruined everything? how many lackluster, unworthy-of-book-space characters (armed with their sex-lives-that-were) are you going to introduce us to? And then I realized I was being a complete idiot and just skimmed to the end. Where, lo and behold, the townspeople arrive at epiphanies and voice them publicly, on stage!—and the spell lifts and people can start bonking each other again! (It’s not Disney, goddammit!) And don’t forget the mysterious nomad who’s been—wink to the reader!—doing this for years. Hurray for magical Greek plays! Goddamnitall.

I’m not even going to spend another minute on this book. I’m just going to lie down now, and try not to send this paperback stabby glances from across the room.

There is only so much unwarranted and unrewarding absurdity a mind can take, John Irving. I expect you to know that, I expect you to be skilled at toeing that fine line between the ridiculousness that turns when you least expect it and plain lack of sense. I know this, because I have known you since I was eight? nine?—since I first unearthed my mother’s tattered, yellowing paperback of The World According to Garp under my bottom-bunk bed (where, it seemed, all the good books were—I found an as-abused Fahrenheit 451 there, too). And you’ve always made me believe in, say, bears living in an abandoned hotel, sneaking out once in a while to practice its act on a unicycle. Or in the towering of one Jenny “Sexual Suspect” Fields as she decides to bear a son from a wounded and barely conscious soldier, in the heartache of her son down the road: Tailgating a parked car that bore his wife and his wife’s lover, the ensuing literal emasculation, the death of one child, the half-blinding of another. There were absurd things in our natural lives, the lucky among us would be caught in peculiar and most extraordinary circumstances—and you gleefully pointed all these out. And, always: There was generosity in your telling, there was heart in each story.

I found very little of those, of what I love you for, in your In One Person. You had your vision: A bildungsroman of a bisexual man, one who grew up in the 60s fraught with the agony of having “the wrong crushes” on the wrong kinds of people. Billy Abbott was a recognizable, rather undeniable, John Irving hero. You made him curious about the world, and attuned to—and later on, caught in—its secrets. You gave him a New England town and a New England prep school with all its wrestling tropes and wintry, abandoned bleachers, and the off-site promise of coeds. You gave him an origin he would not fully understand for a while; you gave him a zany family—each member more eccentric, more symbol-laden than the last: an absent father known only by a photograph and a handful of stories, a mother who prompted lines in town plays, a grandfather who shone in women’s roles; an Amazon-like librarian with small, girlish breasts, a beautiful boy in school with finely corded shoulders, an as-peculiar girl in town to be the best of friends with. This was the John Irving model.

I’ve always maintained that with the kind of hodge-podge your surround yourself with, the various setups made for complicated hilarity and eventual tenderness: To a lesser writer, the juggling act alone would crush him. But you’ve always managed to make all that potential mess work—the seamless manipulation of the narrative!—all the while staying true to the misfits that people your story. You knew how to make a character real, you knew how to make credible the absurd situations they steep themselves in—you knew you needed to take your time with them, that you needed to be generous both to these figures on paper and to the reader who’d spend time with them.

You didn’t quite succeed with this one. You peopled your novel with rich characters, but you could not do right by them, the way you always did in other climes, other times. Instead of allowing your brand of strange circumstances, the kind of off-kilter decisions Irving characters seem to have armed themselves with—these were too ham-fisted and, thus, stifled them. It was just a string of absurdities—one ridiculous revelation after another that had no pay-off—that had no sense, in the way you’ve always succeeded in making sense of the oddest things.

You have never made me so aware of how stretched credibility was in your novels; you’ve never made me chafe at the suspension of disbelief necessary to reading your brand of realism. One example of many: You truly expected me to nod meekly, I suppose, at the fact that Billy Abbott grew up surrounded by transgender individuals—including [I mean, really now?!] the father he never knew? That he had a crush on his stepfather was compelling—that he found himself fascinated by the town librarian with the small, girlish breasts even more so. I approved of a grandfather wowing the town—if not continually risking their ire—by marvelously playing women in theater productions. I knew that there had to be that one, unreachable boy—that one, far-too-beautiful boy—he had to fall in love with; plus the girl he loved, but not quite in the same way. But for all of them to reveal themselves transgender down the line? To have them die of AIDS (or, worse, of shame) one after the other? And for all this to be revealed in the last fifty pages, not unlike a patronizing pat on the reader’s head: “Of course, you see, it’ll only make sense this way!” You are a better, more generous writer than this, a more skilled manipulator of narrative. (And, please, don’t get me started on your complete lack of focus—your willingness to jump forwards and backwards in time to hammer down a point known only to you. You’ve always dwelled, and we all loved you for that—why couldn’t you stay still?)

You are not supposed to be the kind of old friend I’ve been forced to mutter, “Are you fucking kidding me?” over and over whilst I am in your company—and after years of nothing. Goddammit all to hell and back, John.

I bought Sarah MacLean’s One Good Earl Deserves a Lover ten minutes before the bookstore closed for the Easter break—it was, quite obviously, a panic buy. It’s the second book in her Rule of Scoundrels series, the first of which [A Rogue by Any Other Name] was also my first MacLean read. I found that one to be competent, but not particularly remarkable. I bought One Good Earl anyway, because, ya know, there are far worse long-weekend-companions than competent books.

Quite an un-stellar introduction, sure, but I’ll cut to the chase and say that One Good Earl Deserves a Lover is the first romance in a long, long, far-too-long time that had me floored; it’s the best historical romance I’ve read in recent memory (or, judging by my Goodreads, in a year or so)—it’s one of the most affecting books, no matter the genre, that I’ve ever spent a handful of hours with. It had me muttering, over and over, “Oh man, you’re a good book”—and almost despairingly; I would look up to P., who I’d shooed away early on and complain, “This is such a good book!”

The premise is all-too-familiar, albeit with the necessary specificity. Lady Philippa Marbury is betrothed to a simple, decent-enough man—but Pippa, of an enquiring mind, simply needs to know what’s in store for her in the marriage bed. (And, you know, this could all have fallen into mere lip service, but I believe Pippa—I believe her single-minded determination to know things, and to know them based on empirical truth. Or, in this case, on research.) She’s a scientist; she believes in process and fact—she believes, most of all, in knowing things, in certainty. Marriage—which is coming up in two weeks, mind you—happens to be a big black hole of information; there’s very little literature on hand, there’s very little source of useful advice in her circle.

What’s a scientist to do but proposition a man known to be a morals-evading scoundrel, one with quite a reputation with women—a man who, by all accounts, would successfully fulfill Pippa’s need for research? Enter Cross, a partner in the dastardly-named Fallen Angel, exclusive gaming hell. He’s the accounts guy, the man who’s chosen to translate his skill with the numbers (card-counting, anybody?) into balancing the books. All you need to know, for now, is that he’s this hot ginger. Okay, then.

At this point, the novel may well have slotted itself more firmly into the formula. But. One of the things I liked best about this novel was that it was inconspicuously trope-busting. You expect one thing to happen—haven’t I read too much of that premise?—but the characters step up and become credible people, with rational beyond-the-romantic-formula decisions, and turn the tropes topsy-turvy. Case in point: When Pippa storms the gaming hell (well, the door was open, she points out) and propositions Cross to help with research (not with the act itself, mind you), we fully expect the hero, scoundrel that he is, to accept. Because that’s the sort of thing that happens all the damned time in RomanceLandia.

But Cross says no, calls it mad—calls her mad, and shoos her away. Because that’s the sort of thing one does, scoundrel or no, when one’s got common sense—and when the lady doing the propositioning—mere research or no—is the sister-in-law of one’s business partner. And though I was left wondering what would happen next, how MacLean could manipulate these two into an actual relationship—never mind the sexy times, you see—Pippa stays true to her plan, to her quest, and finds alternative ways to get the knowledge that she so direly needs: She finds a prostitute to talk to.

The credibility of the characters was a big plus—a much-needed antidote to the arbitrariness that abounds in romance novels. And MacLean, almost despite her characters’ deeds and decisions, found a way to bring the two together—and in a manner that makes absolutely perfect sense. That [rare] respect accorded to this natural development of the relationship—to the not-so-simple process of falling in love, and that MacLean manages to highlight the sheer inevitability of it!—that’s what makes One Good Earl work. That is what makes it competent, even impressive.

But what has me whining about what a good book it was—what had me hugging the book to my chest as the rest of the Easter-stilled world looked on: Pippa and Cross. MacLean’s treatment of their reluctant friendship and partnership, and their inevitable loving (in that order) brought to the fore what Pippa was—and here’s Cross seeing that for himself, and finding himself fascinated then enamored by her—even if, all the while, he’s still trying to figure out how exactly that happened to him. It’s how Pippa opened herself up to the possibility of love—something she’d always eschewed because it didn’t make sense to her. It’s how Cross relents little by little, beginning from when he realizes what a curious creature Pippa was—up to when he looks forward to the little fascinations she delivers unknowingly—and all the way to the HEA.

* * *

There’s this scene, very early on in the book—after Pippa invites Cross to be her research partner, after Cross soundly rejects the idea: When I read it, a little ache bloomed right at my ribcage (it happens with the best books) and I found myself rubbing the spot—in much the same way, I’d soon learn, that dear Pippa Marbury herself would. At this point, we already knew the peculiarity of Pippa, how eccentric and strange she’s always been in the world she moves around in. But we’ve hardly had a glimpse into the loneliness of that position—and this small exchange reminded us. Pippa spoke plainly, she didn’t draw attention to herself, she was very matter-of-fact. Which made it all the more heart-squeezy. And it gave Cross the first cue for his relenting—it made Cross first look at her as more than a curiosity, but something to be drawn to; something more than a little strange and far too steely, something quite unlike anything he’s ever encountered before. And it made yours truly a gooey ninny:

“It’s because I am odd.” And then she looked up at him with those enormous blue eyes, and said, “I can’t help it.”

* * *

I am all out of steam; this post is one long happy-flail. The second paragraph is all you need to know from me about this book, really; everything else is just an elaboration. Sure, there’s more: Family secrets; the intricacies of running an exclusive gaming hell versus one of the lower dens; sex scenes that, logistically (harhar) speaking, are  much more chaste than most of the releases these days but has, nonetheless, has me fanning myself like crazy. You know. All those special, amazeballs things.

Anyway. The first book in the series—the one that was competent but not particularly affecting—is in my bag right now as I type this. This weekend, I set aside Irving and Wolitzer for good, and it’s MacLean’s A Rogue by Any Other Name who’ll be holding my hand as the rest of the week storms the gates. I’ll be reading it with the knowledge that the book that followed it simply restored my faith in the genre.

[Is someone making a list of cover art that do great disservice to the book’s content? If so, could you please add this horrendous cover for Eros? We’ve got rudimentary vector images of a man standing on the neck of a very disinterested woman, while ‘splosionz happen beyond them and a fleet of fighter jets plop on the foreground. Magic, guys!]

*

#33 of 2013 • Eros by Helmut Krausser;
- Translated from the German by Mike Mitchell.

As short a note as I can make this; it’s been a while since I read Eros, and my opinion of it hasn’t gotten better over time. I hasten to add that it’s not terrible—I am, at the very least, glad (and a little proud) that I read this, as it demanded more from me than the books I’ve tended to gravitate toward lately. But whatever promise it offered fizzled. It was not bad, it wasn’t mediocre—but it could have been really good. For me.

Krausser’s Eros is supposed to be an examination of desire and obsession. We have a dying recluse eager to share his tale to the world—but through the novelist-for-hire’s filter—and that tale centers around the torch he’s carried for decades for a precocious-as-a-child, politically-thrown-about-as-a-woman Sofie. And I was willingly seduced into Alexander’s story: He was too romantic a figure to resist, the hermit with much wealth and power at his disposal, which all this time he’d siphoned into caring for Sofie. You’re intrigued: What’s his deal? Why Sofie? What kind of love is this, one so constant? And, most importantly, does he get the girl?

As children in the Second World War, they’re thrown with each other—the air raids go off, and the townspeople hustle into the bunkers, and Alex and Sofie climb into a bed and sleep away the bombs. And Alex, young Alex, falls in love—and oh, so intensely: “Sometimes, when I was sleeping next to her, I stole a strand from her loose hair and played with it, so gently that she didn’t notice. I put it in my mouth and chewed on it, imagining it was her lips.” And then, and then: “At some point during the summer of 1944 she started wearing two plaits instead of one, and sometimes wore her hair loose. It was . . . indescribable. That hair, a dark firefall, a molten mass, I would have given everything—everything!—to run my fingers through it, to have a taste of the girl, nothing else was important, you could have shown me thousands of similar creatures or even brought them to me, she was the one I wanted, no one else, only her, and wholly, entirely, with everything.” And Alex never tires, he keeps on loving her.

I hummed love songs, silent love songs the words of which I’ve forgotten, sang to myself for nights on end, never tiring of praising my love in song, it was just as it ought to be and I dreamed the whole of Germany had exploded and just we two were lying, buried alive, somewhere in the last warmth of ashes, the air was used up and I gave her my last breath in one long kiss—that kind of stuff, I take nothing of it back, it was right and it was marvelous.

However, the rest of the story falters for me after this shared childhood (under extraordinary, rather fraught circumstances)—all that beautifully worded genesis of love. Alex and Sofie are separated—Sofie insists later on that what crush he had was never reciprocated—and yet Alex persists. His own story—of how he came to survive the war, of how he built himself back up and amassed his wealth and power—was told only if it was relevant for his search for and his care for Sofie. Though I still liked that detail—the story, after all, was his desire for Sofie, everything else was superfluous—ultimately, the story failed to convince. I could not believe that Alex kept his ardor for Sofie alive, I could not care for people whose narratives eventually failed their initial potential. And then: The injection of politics. I, too, was never convinced of Sofie’s involvement in anything—I don’t think much of her, obviously, and because of this, I can’t think much of Alex either. The novel descends into political commentary, Sofie painted as a forever-child dipping her toes into a milieu she can never understand, and is thus always a victim of—and we have Alex traipsing in the background like a silent fairy godmother, making it all work for her.

Krausser, it seemed, had no idea what to do with this desire he’d skillfully assembled in its first, too-swiftly-passing pages. (To argue that obsession is an inherently empty venture, in light of the noncommittal-ness of majority of the book, would simply be making excuses for it.) Basically, lazily: This is not the desire I signed up for.

1

Leaving—and its twin attendants: staying away, and the tease of return—is the damnably rich near-imperative of Filipino life. One that, unfortunately, has been mined only to raise high the Filipino immigrant experience as social commentary—as both battle-cry for our ilk and a take-it-or-leave-it message against the rest of the world—and almost always a sentimental capturing of a truth of the Filipino way of life. I leave/left/will leave the Philippines for a better life for me and for my family—this is the new tenet of the provider pulling luggage in his wake. I will always straddle two identities: that of the land that bore me and of my adopted country—this is the old standby of the expatriates in stories, who tend to gaze at their own navels darker in sheen than the rest of the country they’ve shuttled themselves into.

Lysley Tenorio, then, is godsend to this latest literary preoccupation. His debut collection of short stories Monstress—well received far and wide for its startling storytelling and its insight into a subset of immigrant America—proves that debates about the necessity of Filipino-ness in Filipino literature can rightly be rendered moot, so long as story is king. The usual clincher—What makes you and your story Filipino?—does not take precedence over the immediacy of the story one needs to tell well; the kerfuffle that does nothing but distract is, at last, duly sacrificed before the altar of good fiction.

The noticeable ambivalence to questions of nationality is what allows Tenorio’s short stories to freely focus on the outliers that people his stories. Race and sense of place, the politics of leaving and of staying gone-too-long—are relegated to simply being among the many circumstances that make life a pain in the ass to live. The country one was born in is simply an inherent part of one’s character—one that, via Tenorio, willfully shuns preeminence. Yes, itt’s the color of one’s hair, the tinge one’s skin takes in high summer, the hardness of one’s consonants—the fact that, at a certain era, one couldn’t enter a bar through the front door. And it’s up there alongside figuring how to kiss someone onscreen for the first time, after a career of having “gouged, bitten, clawed, stabbed”; alongside watching one’s grandfather scoop chicken liver from the sidewalk, glimpsing the white on the crown amid the haphazardly applied dye; alongside learning how to make a habit of hiding in the garage as a child, waiting for one’s too-young, too-beautiful sister to return from her date with a no-good asshole.

2

Q: It’s fairly natural to have the culture—or your family’s memories of it—rub off on you. How was the dynamic within your family?

TENORIO: We left the Philippines when I was seven months old, and I grew up mostly in San Diego, Southern California. I don’t know if I could have done what they did, packed up in your late thirties or mid-forties and just start over. My parents were brave and smart and gutsy; and they were wildly successful at it. We helped them in certain ways, but they made their own lives here—there.

Q: I’m generalizing, but a big reason why people go to the States, or anywhere, is to have “a better life.” And when you suddenly announce to your parents, “By the way, I’m going into the arts!”—that’s not exactly textbook “better life” around these parts.

TENORIO: I’m really lucky with my family. I knew, growing up, that a lot of parents of Filipino kids were really invested in their education. But mine were really laid back. I think they figured if I wasn’t getting in trouble, then I was okay. They let me do what I want. I don’t think I would have been a writer if they hadn’t been as hands-off. My father would have loved for me to go to law school, I know that. But they didn’t pressure me. But I have to say I never made that announcement. So that’s probably why I got away with it. [Laughs.] But, you know, had my father been alive—because by the time I started writing seriously, my father had passed away—maybe he would’ve been concerned. Especially since I was just moving around the country, going from fellowship to fellowship, wherever I could get support for my writing. He might have been a little worried. But my mother—even if she was worried, I think she knew that I was okay.

Q: (That’s because you’re the bunso [youngest].) So, how many times have you been back?

TENORIO: Well, we came back when I was seven years old, for about a month; then I came back when I was twenty-seven—and then now. (I haven’t been back very much.) Yeah, I’m the youngest of five, and I feel like a lot of the culture or maybe some of the personality of the Philippines—I think I got a lot of that from my family.

Q: I think this kind of passing-on also lends to how subtle and almost deliberately downplayed whatever message on Filipino-ness there is in your stories. Nationality seems almost incidental to your characters. It’s something that concerns them when they think about it, sure—but they’re still, primarily, human beings trying to deal with all the crazy, curveball things you have to deal with as human beings.

TENORIO: That was my hope for it. I appreciate anyone who reads the book, and I appreciate anyone who might read the book will see it as a group portrait of Filipinos or Filipino-Americans. For me, it’s not. I mean, I don’t mean for the book to be anthropology or sociology. It’s impossible. How can eight stories about lepers and faith healers and The Beatles represent a group? So, to me, they’re individuals who are just trying to make their way into the world, while caught in some very strange circumstances. A lot of those circumstances are rooted in the tangle between the Philippines and the West.

Q: Those strange circumstances—I think you tend to double-damn your characters. Which is a gutsy thing. Sure, they’re strangers in an even stranger land, which poses its own set of challenges—but they also have to deal with, say, being a leper, or taking care of Mom when she goes on one of her benders. And it’s the latter bits you focus on, have the characters focus on. In many ways, that’s what seems to matter to you, to your characters.

TENORIO: Hey, thanks, I appreciate that. And I understand how fiction—how writing—can be overtly political, and be useful and be very meaningful that way. But although that’s one of my interests, too, I don’t think it would be one of my strengths. So I’d rather have that message just be yet another one of the givens of their lives that sometimes comes to the foreground, sometimes not. They have other things to deal with, like the new American patient in the leper colony or the opportunity to make it big in Hollywood. For a writer, for me, that’s material that’s more fun. And I have to keep myself entertained to write.

Q: And otherwise, it’s just social commentary hiding under the guise of fiction.

TENORIO: Yes, and that’s what I was doing when I started writing in college. It was literally like Immigrant of the Week Tragedies. This week, I’ll talk about the Mexican experience; next week, I’ll try the Chinese experience.

3

Immigrant-of-the-Week stories, the tales in Lysley’s debut Monstress are not. Which is enough to ensure that Monstress is on its way to being competent, if conscientious, literature. But Monstress is damn-good literature because it takes care to pause for silences, nestled as they are in the minute pockets between sensationalism. One of the strongest, most haunting scenes in the collection involves one mother, firmly of the old world, binding her dead transsexual son’s breasts—the son who had debuted his new identity on television a la Jerry Springer, parading himself for all the world to see. And all while her other son, the one alive, the one still truly a son to a mother’s thinking—cradles his brother’s corpse in assistance, and in apology. The mother she chants, winding elastic around her dead son’s strange new torso, “Ang bunso ko.”

These are stories that respect the craft; respect the truth about people and their foibles, even within the slow and careful revelations. Monstress succeeds because of poignancy amid a strangeness that is nonetheless familiar or comforting to all its outcasts and outliers, immigrants or otherwise; the stories are earnest, they’ve got a tenderness that disarms the reader in the best possible way. It’s just damn good writing, is what it is—the kind that can have you slowly shaking your head and muttering “Jesus, Mary, and all the saints” under your breath.

Arguably the hippest story in the collection is “The Help,” about a group of ragtag adolescent boys, charged by an airport terminal guard all but obsessed by the Grand Dame of Philippine Politics to beat up The Beatles. Beyond the doomed-from-the-start planning (as one may surmise, it doesn’t bode well to have one’s mastermind have a house tattooed with images of The Beauteous Mrs. Marcos) and its madcap execution—not to mention the story’s near-overwhelming nod to kitsch—“The Help” shines because it, too, takes care to find the quiet within its characters. Our narrator gazes at his nominal uncle mooning over a poster of Imelda and goes, “I thought that this might be love, that if something could change you so much, then maybe, in the end, it was worth fighting for, even if your weren’t going to be loved back.” And, much later, our narrator sets loose what just might encapsulate the reverse side of the diaspora experience—that of those left behind: One’s mother going away, meaning: She left us. “I thought leaving,” says the narrator, “was a terrible thing, the saddest of acts, something you do to the people you love.” And there’s the turn, you’ve got to tell yourself, that sweet necessary turn.

4

Q: There’s a tenderness to your stories that disarms. On the one hand, you have all these sensational characters, caught in the grip of melodrama—and true to the martyr role in every soap opera, they suffer quietly and with dignity. And then the story—it turns.

TENORIO: I definitely think that’s something I’m going for. I think these moments of dramatic pause, or where characters do something that on the surface may be shocking against a backdrop of relative quiet—I think that helps generate, for the sake of the story, good tension. But I also think it’s true. For all the melodrama of the Philippine culture, it’s not melodramatic to us. It feels like the ordinary and the everyday. To contextualize something this way, though—I think that makes it more real, more true.

5

Ask Lysley how and why he began writing, on what drew him into the craft in the first place, and he’ll say, matter-of-factly: “Because I felt like it was something I’d be good at.” And later, “I realized that a Creative Writing class was the only thing I cared about.” Later still, with a verbal nudge, Lysley Tenorio will almost sheepishly say that he is working on a novel—Lysley, on the expansiveness, on the luxury of the new form: “The thing that is most liberating is also the most daunting”—and Lysley will say that he “always thought that the stories in [Monstress] are a little strange. I’m hoping I have that same kind of strangeness.”

Strangeness comes in different forms. There are faith healers and charlatans plying their trade, struggling in a time of waning belief. There are young boys, tasked to care for their flawed mothers, as they construct an elaborate life of fantasy. There are lepers who roam freely in an island, though one turns her face away before a stranger who refuses to accept the undoing of his own skin. And then there’s simply being two men, refusing to dwell on the distance between themselves and home—two men in a land that’s tolerant at best and hostile at worst—men who attempt to figure out how to remain whole, how to love and how to love secretly and what to do when a little of that love seeps out and refuses to remain anonymous, how to battle the loneliness and at the same time use it as a protective mantle.

“Save the I-Hotel”—the most accomplished, most finely tuned, and most in-possession-of-gravitas story in the collection tells us at one point: “Fortunado had never struck a person before—but there were ties in his life he wondered what it might be like, and now he knew: the force of everything you are in a single gesture at a single moment; the hope that it will be enough and the fear that it won’t. No different from a kiss.”

6

Over lunch—before the questions—Lysley Tenorio tells his host that he was born in Olongapo. The city in his mouth compels you to think, Balikbayan. He dabs at his mouth after a bite from his sandwich and he asks his host, “Have you ever been there?” It’s a simple, un-weighted conversational gambit, something to break the stillness of a cavernous room prepared for a half-hour with a magazine. His lunchtime companion answers in the negative, offers that he’s been in Tarlac, which is not a ways off. After his meal, Lysley Tenorio stands up and asks, “Is it okay if I brush my teeth first? I just—” And the two other people in the room with him, relieved, wave him off, assure him, “Yes, of course,” in chorus.

7

Things not to ask the writer-expatriate (one touted, in seeming threat, as the New Voice of the Filipino Immigrant Experience): What do you think of “sense of place,” and have you lost yours, and did you have one to being with, and are you trying to find it in your fiction? Where is home? Why are the lepers in you story driven to touch one another? Should your firm handshake recall the old-world (the this world) fathers with their rough hands? Should your unerringly polite questions, offered to keep the ball rolling, mirror chirpy mothers who croon bunso to all and sundry? Will you ever come back? Why does the star of many a B-movie Reva Gogo allow herself to be used as a cash cow by the near-deluded, too-hopeful man she loves? What’s the ratio, among your characters who have left, of those who wish to return and those who want to keep on going? Are you partial to adobo? Do you believe “adobo” or “sinigang” or “taho” or “balut” should be italicized in text? What did your home in San Diego smell like, growing up? Do you recognize smells from your childhood walk-up in the streets of Manila? Ditd you live in a walk-up, are there walk-ups in San Diego? Can you spot a Filipino in an unspeaking crowd? Do you realize that your clear, heavy baritone will make everyone you meet in this country stutter, eloquent or no, reminding them that unlike you, English will never be their first language?

You can, however, ask the writer-expatriate when he left the Philippines—Lysley Tenorio was seven months old—and you ask the writer-expatriate how many times he’s been back. “I haven’t been back very much,” Lysley Tenorio will tell you—and you nod in encouragement, and you do not look for regret or apology or self-censure in his voice.

(You will, however, find comfort at the oddness of this man’s name: Lysley, or Leslie to the rest of the world. There’s a Filipino spelling, if there ever was one. “It’s a strange name,” Lysley will acknowledge when you ask him about it—and there’s the apology in his voice. “My siblings did it, they named me. It’s kind of a cruel joke.”)

Do not, most of all, ask if he wishes that the line from “L’Amour, CA” could distill the politics of departure and remaining—if it could serve as a literary credo in place of the trend of social commentary that manages to be self-aggrandizing and empty at the same time—the line that goes: “Somewhere, Isa is fine without us; here, we are fine without Isa. And this is the truth I don’t want to know: that the ones who leave and the ones who get left keep living their lives, whatever the distance between.”

Let me open with some rather alarming news: I have bought forty-three books, so far, this year—and April’s just begun; I am, however, quick to defend myself by saying most of them were unearthed from secondhand bookstores and sale bins. I don’t know how this compares to my buying of the previous years—I don’t like to face the music, you see—but I am panicking about it more this time around. Why do I keep buying books at a time when I am least predisposed to actually reading them? How awkwardly—how unnaturally—I seem to be reading lately!

My brain has atrophied, I self-diagnose. And I am quick to heap the blame, if prodded; after all, surely I can’t be accountable for my own inability to respond to the provocations of literature? The heights of marrow-sucking the past couple of months of weekdays have reached are close to convincing my poor brain [my even more wretched soul!] that it’s best for everyone involved if whatever intelligent faculties I pride myself on having simply find a shadowy corner to mewl in. The weekends are too delicious a respite—naps must be made, people must be loved, secondhand bookstores to trawl, inihaw to fill my belleh. And naps must be made. What books I crawl toward are designed to send me into a purely visceral paradise—or, you know, books that are, simply home: Romance novels by old standbys like Mary Balogh.

The inevitable victims of this restlessness, of my reading malaise: Sontag and Irving. I haven’t opened Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover for about a week now, despite my initial excitement. It’s been too exhausting, too rich for what my heavily damaged faculties (hah!) can accommodate. Its history-and-romance was a lure, as was its brand of story-telling. Set mostly in Naples, right beneath the shadow of Vesuvius, the novel (so far) tracks the life—but mostly the sentiments—of The Cavaliere, or the Sir John William Hamilton who authored the treatise mentioned above. I was drawn to the science-of-its-time, I was convinced I could love a book about a man who loved a volcano and all its volatilities above all else. I wanted it lush, and I wanted it sprawling—but only if that expansiveness concerned the inner life, as this novel has been (despite The Cavaliere’s gaze repeatedly wandering to Vesuvius, yearning for plumes of smoke). And I wanted prose that consumed.

This is The Volcano Lover on the Cavaliere: “His is the hyperactivity of the heroic depressive. He ferried himself past one vortex of melancholy after another by means of an astonishing spread of enthusiasms.” On acute sadness: “He was waiting for catastrophe. This is the corruption of deep melancholy, that its sense of helplessness reaches out to include others, that it so easily imagines (and therefore wills) a more general calamity.” On a happiness that must eventually come: “Nothing can match the elation of the chronically melancholy, when joy arrives. But before being allowed to arrive, it must lay siege to the weary heart. Let me in, it mews, it bellows. The heart must be forced.” And, of course, on reading: “If he doesn’t know what to do with his hungry eyes, he has that other, always adjacent interior: a book.”

My abandonment of John Irving’s In One Person is more disappointing. (In many ways, I am not at all surprised that the Sontag got the better of me.) John Irving has always been an old friend—I will always love The World According to Garp, and I say that having read it three times. I grew up with Irving, him being one of my mother’s old standbys. And it’s a little hurtful that trying out Irving on my own this time around, we just couldn’t hit it off. In One Person is Irving’s take on male bisexuality. Sexuality inherently intrigues me (this is not odd, no?)—and the promise of the Irving treatment (madcap yet heartfelt) guaranteed success.

But I’ve been finding In One Person tedious. There’s no remarkable strangeness to the characters, the situations they find themselves in aren’t so out-of-this-world (that is, there are no bears in their houses, for one). The generosity I’ve come to expect from Irving has been checked in this novel. I do like it, I do; but it’s not an Irving I am loving. It’s rather normal—and it’s not normalcy that I run to Irving for.

Irving and Sontag join the growing list of books that I have set aside due to myriad reasons and excuses: I cannot wait for “the flat affect” to turn (as with Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?); I grow weary of reading a book for someone else (as with Philip Hoare’s The Whale and Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way); I am not at all compelled, mostly because it seems too easy to fall into (as with Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood); I am too aware that I cannot give this book the attention and the heart it deserves (as with Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage); I figured a friend could read it better than I could in my state (as with Lars Iyer’s Exodus). There’s definitely more, if I care to rouse myself from my bed and look about me for the books strewn everywhere—left, most probably, at the place where I decided, “No more, not now.” [I see you, Richard Yates’ A Good School, there on your perch on the coffee table, right beneath the bucket of wilted flowers.]

But I soldier on. I pick up one book, I pick up another.

[Just typing all that out makes my brain cringe.]

I’m fairly certain that Georges Simenon’s The Engagement got the worst of my readerly angst. When a month had passed and I hadn’t even made half the 130 pages—despite the occasional gems I’d come across—the gameplan was simply to bludgeon the novella into submission. It wasn’t so much a hate-read—although I had plenty reason to do so: Poor unfortunate soul with no agency to speak of has bad stuff happen to him—as a read to preserve my pride: I will not bow down, you slim book! (Ultimately—well, at a hundred pages, methinks, I just skimmed and bleeghk-ed my way to its sorry, wholly unsatisfying conclusion.) So: No, I don’t think Simenon and I get on very well—I mean, we could get along much better than this—and this is the second novel of his I’ve read and (gulp) there’s still two more of him in my shelves. Beats me what I’ll do with those two.

Then again, the Simenon was the only book I truly hated—or, you know, found near impossible to read and commit to (and let go of, for a time). At the start of the month, I strayed from my usual genres with Seroks by David Hontiveros and Elmer by Gerry Alanguilan—two different books and two different responses evoked, but at least neither was absolutely terrible. Hah.

The Hontiveros started out really promising for me, offering a confident world-building and rationale that I rarely see in this country’s speculative fiction (or whatever it’s called by the kids these days): It’s a world of clones, and what do third world countries do but offer clones of clones? I liked how it was gritty, still, and with just the touch of kitsch—a perfect tone to the roster of seroks templates based on the DNA of an action star, at different phases in his career. I liked how it was past ethical arguments, and just dove into the lives these sentient clones-of-clones could possibly lead. I was very excited for this–until it all sort of just fizzled out. Every chapter (or story?) began with a wonderful premise, lured you in with stories you could actually get behind and commit yourself to. But then every chapter (or story) let me hanging: They reached a plateau where anything could happen, and then they just ended. Every single time. Every chapter was an eventual letdown. All that potential unrealized for my poor disappointed nerd-heart.

The Alanguilan (a graphic novel) was bizarre, and I loved almost every attention-grabby panel of it. See: Chickens had, overnight, developed sentience. And so begins a long struggle to be recognized as human beings, with the same rights accorded to everyone else. We have chicken gangs and chicken political groups; chicken movie stars and chicken writers. Chickens everywhere! We even have inter-species coupling—whose logistics I’d rather not linger on right now. It’s a nice allegory about any faction fighting to be recognized—there are the usual macro-conflicts like friendships, and demanding to be treated decently against a spectrum of discrimination; and then there are existential dilemmas within every chicken. A particular sub-story I like concerns one of the original “turned”—bred as an elite fighting cock, what’s a chicken to do in this new world that demands an avoidance to our baser instincts? It’s a clever tale, and I like how it doesn’t acknowledge how silly the premise is. Chickens just got smarter, ya know, and this is their story. Deal with it. (Sadly, this is not the first time I have spoken so extensively of fowl.)

The one book I’m actually quite thankful for—and consider me surprised—is House of Holes by Nicholson Baker. I won’t even try speculating on its literary merit—or wondering why this “book of raunch” even exists—but, dammit, it’s been a while since I was so engaged with a book. Basically: I idly picked up Baker one late afternoon, then I found myself bringing it with me to a begrudgingly-eaten dinner, and then before midnight announced itself, I’d closed the book. I was just—oh god, I’m sorry—completely sucked in. It was bizarre and ridiculous and surreal and completely nonsensical; and I can’t remember reading a book that was so solidly irreverent toward sex. I laughed, I squick-ed, and I did a lot of grimacing—I also, imagine that, found myself pulling for the characters, as they implicated themselves in one ridiculous sexual caper after another. Sure, at the end of it, I had to blink dazedly at my walls, wondering what the hell happened to me—but I miss being so into a book, I miss reading a book that I just couldn’t let go of—couldn’t even think of not finishing before the day ended. Good times, Baker.

* * *

And I don’t really know how to end this, except that I know—through articulating all this here, imagine—that there’s a deep restlessness in me, and the books I’m reading have suffered—or that I have suffered not-so-good books less ably. But I’m working on it: I finished reading Eros by Helmut Klausser over the weekend, started on How Should a Person Be? ny Sheila Heti and The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag. So, please: Consider me hopeful; cooperate, Universe.

The last lines I marked in The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath:

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.

I am, I am, I am.

* * *

On February, I spent an entire day with The Bell Jar, the book that my gut had (for years and years) warned me away from. [Too close to home, after all, this story of a girl so full of promise—one who, as the novel opens, is at the cusp of something materially impressive. Bah.] And on that day I was camped out at a coffee shop, armed with my usual pile of books—that day I reached for the Plath because it was the Plath that called—the trepidation was on a keener intensity. [A snapshot from those February days: Me stumbling out of our office building, right at the wane of the afternoon, to sit on an ant-ridden curb—and just to breathe.]

I was afraid of this book, of what it could trigger. All throughout my reading, I’d do spot-checks on myself, not unlike gauging an internal, emotional temperature: Is this triggering old beasts in me? Do I feel like throwing myself out the window of my thirty-fourth-floor apartment? Or, more typically, do I want to crawl into bed immediately and not crawl out for weeks? That is: I wondered if this was making me sad, and if that sadness was the pitch-black kind—the kind from which the crumbling of my nineteenth year began, the kind that struck me in 2010 and had me planning a vengeance that involved other people’s guilt at my untimely but not unprovoked demise, the kind that has me running from my desk gasping for breath.

Yes, I had (still have, sometimes) all that, but no, this book didn’t push. Thank fucking goodness.

I wrote “Yes, Miss Greenwood!” beside the passage: “But I wasn’t sure, I wasn’t sure at all. How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, would descend again?” Because I know that’s precisely the hand I’ve been dealt by good ol’ evolution and genetics. This pitch-black beast lies in wait; I carry it with me. The kind of shit I have can’t be cured—it just retreats once in a while, and in the in-between I build myself up so the damage lessens when it returns. It’ll come back—it has, I could chart this; I don’t know why or how or when—but it’ll rear its ugly head, and here’s a spike in the ever-present doldrums—you poor girl certified to carry a sadness all the fucking time—and now, here’s the mad rush of despair, brace yourself against the hopelessness and its handmaid guilt; it comes back.

I know myself susceptible, and I am as certain that good books sneak into the parts of me I can’t armor as sturdily. And so, for the longest time after reading Plath, all I could say about the experience was that I survived it. That no crippling, calcifying blackness stole over me—and that this would count among my greatest bibliophilic achievements. That, plainly speaking, The Bell Jar didn’t depress me, didn’t send me into a tailspin of existential angst-and-dread—so, fuck, yeah, Sasha, here’s a cookie!­

I was scared of what The Bell Jar could do. After all, right up there with love and science and goodness and beauty is my unflagging, deep, and abiding faith in books, my respect for their influence and for their power. What the good ones evoke in me runs the gamut, the simplest being the superficial (but no less effective) manipulations—say, like an well-crafted line that reminds you of a misstep in loving, or a scene that rings too true for comfort. And then there are books like A Lover’s Discourse and Madame Bovary and Jane Eyre, which you keep for as long as your bedside table stands; there are books that come at the right moments, like Darkness Visible, or even books that you never knew came at a perfect time, like Revolutionary Road or The Post-Birthday World; there are books that seemingly set the course of your life unbeknownst to you, books that can be unassuming like The Duchess or the heavyweights like good ol’ Harry Potter, books that you buy as a twelve-year-old only for them to resonate years and years later, like an eventual professor’s short story collection. There are books you seize to ward off an ache: Say, The Noontime Demon or The Emperor of Maladies—or, like in the summer of your seventeenth year, a book your mother hands you because she recognized a pain within you before you did, like The Beast.

Books are deceptively tidily-packaged keystones of great power—and, if you’re lucky (as I consider myself to be), years of reading will arm you with presentiments about what a protracted brush against that power might do [to] you. And I had that hunch with The Bell Jar. I’ve known everything there was to know about the novel before I read it, and every little thing was bad news for someone like me. Call it readerly superstition, call it a far-too-strong awareness of my own psychological  climate: I stayed away from Plath’s novel because it was about me.

And it was, in a way. I was Esther Greenwood. This novel, this was me at nineteen—some of it was me at twenty-one, then at twenty-three. But this was me, bottom-line, this was about me—every little bit of it. Esther going, “After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.” Esther’s beautiful parenthetical—haven’t I realized that I tend to say more in parentheses?—“(I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullaballoo.)” Esther gritting her teeth against slow erosions within her, knowing anything could set her off into tears, which were perpetually “brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.”

Once I closed the book, I went back to the little gauge in my soul. There was the usual hum that runs through you after a good and/or timely book. But beyond that: I felt strange—both superior and self-pitying; I looked at all the teenagers that swarmed that coffee shop, all those souls that would never ever need to be scared of a book like The Bell Jar—all for naught or otherwise.

And then I wondered if it would have struck its greatest, most soul-crushing blow—the blow of a book that transcends and matters—if I had read when I, too, was nineteen. When I was stuck in that bell jar for the first, decisive time (that is: knowing full well what was happening to me, but unable to do something about it), “blank and stopped as a dead baby”—when I was a girl waking to a world that had suddenly morphed into a bad dream? It’s all speculation at this point: What if this was more than just a good, well-timed read? What if this ought to have been one of those books that staggered me, a book that I’d keep always-near—so that whenever my arms unfurl, a palm would strike its cover?

That is: I know, after everything, that I need not have feared The Bell Jar. Oddly, it made me feel better. Not precisely catharsis, not exactly schadenfreude. There was an easing in me that was not unlike hope. Definitely like hope. And I had to wonder what could have happened if I had felt wisp of hope at nineteen, if I had read this at nineteen, if I realized I was Esther Greenwood then and if I use that knowledge to shake loose the beast.

Again, all speculation, so approximating moot.

[Ah, hope. I cannot quite explain the why nor the how.]

There’s the proverbial silver lining to having this kind of recurring darkness—[isn’t it cruel that dysthymia is such a beautiful word?] It comes back, sure, it always does—the bell jar descends around you; the pitch-black sadness steals over you and calcifies you, with only the occasional tremor reaching outward to remind you that somewhere inside all that morass, you’re still fighting; you’ll want to stay in bed for weeks on end, struggling against both the resignation and the guilt over that resignation. It comes back, not quite like clockwork, but often enough—embedded in you deep enough—for you to know that it will return when it gets the chance.

It comes back, because that’s how it is inside you. But for every time it came back, Sasha, it went away again. You were struggling, sometimes angrily, through every second—and pointedly ignoring the blessed relief you feel when you’re not doing so—and eventually, you rediscovered the hope numbed to embers inside you. And you goddamned fanned that hope because it’s shitty as hell not to, and that hope swelled and then it settle and made itself whole again; and it goddamned broke the bell jar (or, at least, batted it away)—it’s the kind of little-engine-that-could hope that makes you stand back from that ledge, that fucking wrenches you away from that filthy sidewalk and damn, girl, brush those ants off your pants.

Listen to the brag of your old heart, love: I am, it says—I am, I am, I am.

The “Currently Reading” counter on my Goodreads account has morphed into tally of bibliophilic failures; since the tail-end of January and all throughout February, the books themselves have been shuttling in and out of my bags, on top of desks both at work and at home, beneath my pillows, beside the bed, on the floor, and until recently—in the case of poor Simenon—where I keep my underwear. They’ve gone to and fro Quezon City and the heart of Manila, they’ve sat quietly inside my bag, beside computer cords and my make-up kit and chocolate bars, while I sat through meetings and had dinners both welcome and not. They’ve been opened, marked, closed, then set aside in favor of other books—a book about a defeated man, David Shields’ hysteria, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower novels, half a dozen (oh lord) romances.

It’s not like I haven’t been reading. And, given the evidence, it’s not like I haven’t read anything that stings—something I’ve been twaddling on and on about recently. Then again, some of the books I have read of late offer that emotional ache—it’s a physical ache that blooms at the very center of your chest and spreads outward, right to the tips of your fingers. Other books are simply to pass the time with—something to distract. (Which is not to say that this cheapens the experience; I truly believe that some books slink toward you under that banner alone.)

Some failures are more understandable than others: I’m resigned to no longer reading Swann’s Way at a set timeframe, and with an internet full of strangers who intimidate me with of their natural affinity for Proust. I don’t think I’m the kind of person who reads Proust—not even one translated by Lydia Davis. The past months haven’t been conducive to long paragraphs about nothing, or about choice French things. Augh.

The inability to barrel through the Simenon, however, confounds me. It’s so slim—and, on the assumption that it’s good literature, it ought to be intense, concentrated reading. But the Simenon—which I ambled through okay enough when I first started reading it—has lost what urgency it might have had, in the face of my neglect.

The Munro, I suppose, was just wishful thinking. After my hysterical ode to the short story, you’d think the Munro—considered by many her best, and I’ve already long devoted myself to her work—would be a breeze. But I hardly read a page. (Here’s the best time to feel like a fraud, Sasha, don’t you think?) I’m almost afraid to keep on trying with this one; I know in my gut that I’ll like these stories, that they’re good. And forcing them on myself won’t help anyone, not at all.

And Padgett Powell’s novel-in-questions—well, I don’t think I ever thought of it as a novel. I don’t care for how it imagines itself as a novel. It’s just a bunch of questions—some nonsensical, some overwhelmingly twee, some earnest in a trying-too-hard kind of way—that, when I feel like, I answer. I even thought of doing a series over at my Tumblr of my responses to the book’s questions—how else to “read” an interrogative mood, after all—but even the lure narcissism and self-indulgence failed.

The reader in me that insists on order wants to be done with the Simenon and the Powell, if only for the sake of saying, “Hell yeah, that’s finally that.” And, being all-too-familiar with the void of listless reading, I’m almost afraid of starting out with a new agenda—of letting a natural reading flow in the coming days—without having finished at least those two. They’d be casting a pall over the reading that will follow, I just know it. Which is to say: I may just be fucked.

There remains a Sasha-shaped clearing on my bed; it’s the debris from the stillness of hours devoted to one book alone—there are (the leavings of lunch:) empty soda cans and bags of potato chips, an ashtray and a hollowed pack of cigarettes, a cellphone guiltlessly ignored. That is: I’ve finished reading Stephen King’s The Dark Tower—meaning, the seventh and last book; meaning, all of it. I can’t remember the last time I was so consumed by someone else’s world for months. The last time I had something constant to turn to, a much-needed something to get lost in.

Someone asked me recently if I had trouble finding my place in the world upon booklessness—that moment or so after turning the last page, and all the words and their attendant worlds settle inside you and here comes the realization that: There—you’re done with this book, you’ll never ever read this for the first time ever again. Probable futures loom before you, most vivid is having to spend the necessary days with books unfortunate enough to follow, books you can’t even let in just yet—but you have to read, that’s what you do, you keep on reading. I don’t know why I didn’t answer his question directly. “Yes, I do,” would have done just fine, no?

* * *

I’d have you see the like this; I’d have you see them very well. Will you? They are clustered around Suzie’s Cruisin Trike, embracing in the aftermath of their victory. I’d have you see them this way not because they have won a great battle—they know better than that, every one of them—but because now they are ka-tet for the last time. The story of their fellowship ends here, on this make-believe street and beneath this artificial sun; the rest of the tale will be short and brutal compared to all that’s gone before. Because when ka-tet breaks, the end always comes quickly. Say sorry.

To the Dark Tower, the Childe Roland came, and we sang all their names.

(Or: A manifesto on the short story as form, despite my own misgivings)

There’s been a lot of hullaballoo around the interwebz about the state of the short story. Curiously and gratifyingly, the two more famous ones—the New York Times’ rah-rah for the form that set my Twitter feed abuzz a week ago, and Laura Miller’s (recent) scathingly condescending retort—don’t offer anything about short fiction’s death, or non-death. Both are about the form’s popularity among a reading public that, by habit and/or taste, tends to overlook it. (I guess this is a good thing, as we hear enough of that kind of twaddle about the novel—undoubtedly, it seems, the short story’s much cooler older brother. It’s twaddle that, I think, just distracts us from actual reading.)

So, fine, yay, the short story’s not dead. Then again, it’s never been dead. It’s been neglected, it’s been laughed at, it’s been coddled and tolerated—most of the time it’s been passed over because, to quote many a reader, “Short stories are just not my thing.” Shrug. Occasionally, short fiction shines beyond its little conclave of devotees—and the outside world begrudgingly accepts these samples, as an established city might open its gates to seeming barbarians. And the acceptance is always despite the form: Oh, look at this amazing piece of literature, and it’s short fiction! Shrug, again.

But the short story has never gone away—mostly because, I think, no one’s bothered to organically initiate a lynching—which means it can’t contrive the comeback that will knock our socks off. (The flashiness thing, just not its style, man.) And it will never go away, because what short stories are very good at is simply existing, despite not having the Life—the humanity-saving gravitas—assigned so capriciously to the Novel. The short story is, because most of the time people leave it be. And it’s fucking thrived anyway. (An argument, I’m the first to point out, could be made for literature in general.)

Anyway. My friend Nash and I were talking about this earlier today, in exasperated whispers in a crazy-and-crazier workplace, as I rather uncharacteristically offered my two cents about the ruckus on my schizophrenic Twitter account [samples: 01, 02, 03]. And in that pocket of sanity Nash and I made for ourselves, I articulated something that I suppose I’ve figured out for myself long ago—one I suppose I can only draw out now because I’m both so fucking frustrated and fangirly-thrilled that we’re even getting our panties in a bunch. Over the short story—of all things to mind! (The grizzled short story is blinking its eyes against the glare of the spotlight: “What the hell are you looking this way for?” it asks, whilst trying so very hard not to smooth down its cowlick.)

Basically: What marks the short story as a form, as a tradition, is its inherent strangeness—which has translated, over the years, into sheer uncoolness. The short story has never, and will not likely ever, reach the exalted status of the Novel—which, at least, provokes those aforementioned nauseating conversations about its mortality. (Not to mention the badge of honor it’s shaped itself into being; why doesn’t anyone ever reach for The Great [Country of Origin] Short Story?]

We’ve looked toward the short story as the runt trying to play grown up, and halfheartedly at that—only at the insistence of the people who admire it, write it, or need to sell it. It’s just not cool, and it’s difficult to boot. The worse ones feel even more of an affront than bad novels—at least the latter have the grace to give us meat. The best ones sap us of response: All that emotion, all that effort, into so condensed and concentrated a package—Why the hell didn’t I read a novel instead?

The short story is something that even seasoned readers are loathe to poke, as though they sense that the form has never figured itself out beyond the boundaries it has set for itself. Poor thing. And lord, don’t even get them started on the average-of-ten-headed-hydra that is the short story collection or anthology. Off the top of my head: There are good parts in novels/novellas—but in collections, there are bad stories, and there may be worse scenes in each. With collections, you have to consider unevenness—you have to consider discreteness and unity at the same time.

(A side note: Undoubtedly, to my mind, the form bears a pathetic existence compared to the novella, whose length—whose matter-of-fact awkwardness—gives it a charm with which to pull people in. The novella has the sensibilities of the short story, but the expansiveness of the novel. Or the other way around. Or it’s a long short story, or a very slim novel. The novella, basically, tricks us by straddling two made-finite-by-tradition forms. It’s the best of both worlds. Well done, novella, four for you.)

Yes, approaching the short story—reading it, writing it, seeing it in a bookstore and wondering if one should buy it—requires a specialized sensibility. One that takes into account length, degree of expansiveness or concentration, its standing amid a pre-packaged collective, and the fact that it’s not a novel. What the hell do you do with a short story anyway? (The answer, forevermore in Sasha Land: You deal with it.)

(Another question I pose to The Great Literary Tradition: Where we ever comfortable talking about a single short story as one would talk about a novel or a novella or a poem? I suppose marketing has a hand in this: Who sells individual short stories? Give the public some heft, by Jove. But how would the greater discourse be if we figure this out? Lots of blogs out there dissect short fiction piecemeal, and rightly so. Maybe we’re wrong to be critical of short stories lumped together. Maybe we should just hold them up against the light, one by one, with the care, energy, and attention they demand.)

And in that parenthetical, I suppose, is why I’m mad about short stories. I mean, what I love about the form is precisely what constrains it: Its specificity, and the care it insists on drawing from both the writer who writes it and the reader who reads it, thinking, “What the hell did I get myself into and why is it so satisfying?” It’s an intellectual and emotional challenge for both roles. It’s something to admire. It manages to sprawl through careful distillation and painstakingly administered revelations; it succeeds by navigating through the morass that is language, by employing the narrative-as-ethics of the essay, by caring for the character as deeply (and sometimes, in a better, more clever way) as the novel which has built itself up by its raison d’être of championing humanity despite the occasional foibles that can make humanity so sucky.

And its range, its hair-tearing range, despite the little-engine-that-could character that’s been pushed toward it (one that I know I’m doing, too, in this post that’s gotten way out of hand)! There are tricksters like Lydia Davis, who type up an elaborate sentence as a title and an add-on phrase as the text body itself. There are the gruff macho men that startle you with tenderness, as with Raymond Carver and Richard Yates. There are the doyennes, whom one can imagine to calmly sip tea at their porches as they excruciatingly yet gracefully cram whole lifetimes into twenty-pagers—like Alice Munro, who else? There are the girls with the chip on their shoulders, like Lorrie Moore; there are those who dissent either through twee-poignancy or false bravado, like Miranda July or Joan Silber or Simon Van Booy (this seems to be in vogue these days). There are the short story writers no one reads—like Harold Brodkey or Wilfrido Nolledo. And then there’s Chekhov. (Hah.)

And yet, what I can hate about the form is precisely that specialized sensibility it will always demand from me. I am, for example, a reader who prefers to polish off books in one sitting, a reader who wants to be devoured by sweeping tales or the emotional grip of volume and heft. And I am an impatient reader—and contrary to how the short story’s been touted for our ilk: Having me sit down with something, only to know that it will end too soon, sends alarms of deep and abiding frustration within me, too.

Yeah, I’m a confused duck. That I’m reading short stories at all—that I can pledge by them—is probably enough of an indication. But fuck me, right, short fiction? (Short fiction grumbles in response; it’s getting grumpy. It does that, in my head, especially when it sees that I’ve tangled myself in circular arguments. Right now, it’s barking at me to git and get off its goddamned property.)

The thing is, children: The short story will persist, and our attitude toward it will endure. The novel may die, resurge, die again, get resurrected endlessly by its legion detractors and champions; the essay will toy with medium and length and preoccupation and ethical standards; the novella will always be the special little snowflake it’s grown comfortably into; poetry will keep curdling our blood with its beauty, its inscrutability, and its conceit that it’s the best form for thought-and-soul that ever will be. And the short story will be in a corner, nursing a warmed beer, brooding over an overflowing ashtray, trying so obviously and awkwardly not to meet anyone’s eye for fear that it might seem too needy—and it’ll be there in that complicated metaphor of a corner forever. And, kids—we’ll all just have to deal with it.

Last January and all throughout the start of this month, I spent a couple of calm-before-the-storm days with Lowell Lake, the martyr of his own hapless (even bewildered) making and the contra-hero of A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis. In neat encapsulation: “There was a sense of dwindling, like a slow leak in a balloon, as if all the vigor was slowly going out of their existence, all the light from the sky, all the color from the world, all the good thoughts from Lowell’s head.” And lest you think there’s something spectacular in this disintegration, Davis is quick to repeatedly disabuse you of that notion; for example: “His life wasn’t breaking up. On the contrary, it failed to show the smallest fissure in its bland and seamless surface.” [The voice in my head grimaces and goes: Now there’s actually something to envy you for—good on you, Lowell Lake.]

Now, lest we think that Lowell is the unfortunate victim of the people around him or of conspiring circumstances—not quite. Because dear Lowell seems to have a remarkable ability of bumbling into things—he made the disastrous move to New York because of a joke he found too awkward to take back—and to basically “damn himself out of his own mouth.” Indeedy, a lot of the following seems to happen to him:

It was the instant when his life had suddenly poised itself on an idle remark, and the hinge of fate had opened—a small moment, an utterly insignificant fragment of time that could have passed as swiftly as turning a page in a book, but instead it had changed his life forever.

It took a while (amazingly), but I couldn’t quite pull for Lowell Lake. Oh, yes, I pushed for the similarities because I often need comfort from pathetic fictional characters—and, occasionally, yes, our circumstances would converge on his pages (woe is me)—but Lowell Lake is just so pathetic. He’s this walking, proactive invitation for small but far-reaching disasters. And he knows this, mind you; then again, even if you catch Lowell looking in bewildered askance at his life, he never actually does something about it. Because he knows that he did this to himself—even the way the people around him treat him—and he’s simply resigned that there’s nothing he can do to fix shit.

A few miles away across the East River was the apartment he could never get used to, the job where he had nothing to do, the dozen or so people he knew slightly and cared about not at all: a fabric of existence as blank and seamless as the freshly plaster wall he passed. Soon his wife would return from New Jersey. Soon everyone would be back, and things would go on much as they had before. From the street outside came the sound of laughter and shouting, bottles breaking, voices droning in the warm air, and children playing far past their bedtime. It all meant nothing whatever to Lowell. Standing in the parlor of a house no longer his, listening to the voices of people whose lives were closed to him forever, contemplating a future much like his past, he realized that it was finally too late for him. Everything had gone wrong, and he had succeeded at nothing, and he was never going to have any kind of life at all.

What saves this book, however, from being a schadenfreude-y misery porn-pot of squick is the humor. God, Davis knows how to poke fun at his creations in a way that makes the reader think, “Hells, we’re all in this together,” and then, “Oh, sod it.” It’s so goddamned sad, but it’s so freaking funny at the same time. That’s what made Lowell’s plight so bearable. Davis is all dry wit, and damn do I love ‘em dry.

Lowell Lake, however, finds something—a greatly tangible something—that imbues his life, at long last, with much-needed purpose and direction: This crumbling behemoth of a mansion in a rundown area of Brooklyn. He sets out to renovate it, driven by god-knows-what. Thankfully for the narrative, his reaction to this welcome fissure is to cast an ambivalent eye toward everything else that’s wrong with his life—his marriage, his job, most of his goddamned life.

And you’re practically begging Davis to give the guy a break, because he deserves it. Let this house be Lowell Lake’s redemption, please; give the guy a reason to live beyond mere for-the-point-of-existence, please! [The voice, though, at the back of your head: “Ah, but darling, this is Lowell Lake—Lowell Lake, who tried to escape his marriage through a 200-mile car chase with his parents prior the wedding—Lowell Fucking Lake. Think this through, ducky.”] Still: Fun times, y’all.

Done. I have no idea what just happened to me—what happened, period. All throughout, I kept telling myself it was difficult to surrender to this book, not only because I couldn’t understand why it was saying what it was trying to say, but also because I couldn’t trust it fully. Surprise, surprise: In Shields’ begrudgingly provided afterword to “his” manifesto: “This book contains hundreds of quotations that go unacknowledged in the body of the text… Your uncertainty about whose words you’ve just read is not a bug but a feature.” [Bet that really hurt, having to say it so baldly, and because of legal constraints, too.] So, at least, there’s that.

I seem to be behaving, thus far, this 2013, when it comes to amassing books. Fine, that’s still quite a number up there—and I have obviously rediscovered my fanaticism for good ol’ Steve—but they all came from the trusty, national secondhand bookstore that is Booksale. That is: The consolation is, my wallet didn’t burn as brightly. Because, you know, we really need less wallet-burning around these here parts. Yeah. Anyway, here’s a quick rundown of what I bought, and the respective feeble rationalizations for each purchase:

• The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs, which I’ve read (and spectacularly failed at telling you about. I bought this one because amassing useless information—and pouncing on people armed with them—fills me with untold glee.
• Nothing But You: Love Stories from the New Yorker, edited by Roger Angell. I randomly pulled this one out of a library shelf in college, and reading it made the then-freshman in Creative Writing that is me go, “Hey. Yeah, I can be part of this whole writing business, look at this, look at these beauties.”
• Wizard and Glass by Stephen King, which I’m currently reading. Because.
• Fine, let’s lump all the Steves here: Wolves of the Calla (Book 5), The Dark Tower (Book 7), and one The Dark Tower graphic novel and one of The Stand, which really scares me because this means I’ll have to start hunting for really cheap copies of the other issues—all the other issues!—at secondhand bookstores and hot damn I am already poor dammit dammit dammit.

* * *

Two weekends ago, I donned a frilly pink dress and put a ton of product on my dandelion hair—P., meanwhile, shook off the dust from his barong—for a friend’s wedding. Characteristically, we were late for the ceremony itself; the surprise: we were too early for the reception. And so, on a whim that began with a sheepish suggestion and ever-widening grins, P. and I trudged our way along roughly the length of Roxas Boulevard, in and out side streets, giggling the curious stares of people we passed by—and went into a secondhand bookstore. Later, we snuck out of the wedding and caught another secondhand bookstore, much farther, that was about to close for the night. Note that this was a day after we’d done pretty much the same thing in another part of the city, sans wedding wear that time around. It was a blissful weekend, beeping work phone notwithstanding. It was one of the best weekends—I was exhausted, and it was because of good people, books, and the kind of love that makes you glad your heart can ache.

* * *

And here’s a list of the books I read in January. I won’t go into detail, as I’ve obviously talked about them enough in the past month. Ah, January, you have kept me sane, and made me like myself more, in the smallest ways. The year is off to a good start—I can confidently say that because 2012 was such a crap year for reading and blogging, that anything could be an improvement.

When I was a kid growing up at my grandparents’ house, I inherited-by-default the encyclopedias my mother and her sisters used—Grolier’s The Book of Knowledge, with their covers of deep read and cream-darkened-into gold. The spines were littered with silverfish, and their weight in my spindly hands, their smell, the pages already yellowed and dotted with foxing—those were Books. I cut my teeth on those babies, pored over them whenever reading needed to be done. I read them because it felt like the most natural thing in the world—I read them in the room abandoned by aunts all grown up, the same room where I read my great-grandmother’s romance novels.

The volume bearing a six-pager on Greco-Roman mythology was much abused in my years of handling; these books gave me the abridged versions of classics like Lorna Doone and The House of the Seven Gables; I remember a chapter that taught one how cheese was made. Before the age of Google, I used these musty books for reference, even though they were woefully out of date—I clearly remember one entry saying quite chirpily, “Maybe one day, we can even go to the moon!” These were my jam, dammit. [Google brings me one ping out of the vastness of the internet; if this is to be trusted, then the 1935 books means my grandparents used these as reference. Hot damn.]

I never had the Encyclopedia Britannica—they were too expensive; we used books from 1935 for reference, go figure—but I do remember I’d spot them at a friend’s house (one time, in the living room of a mah jong buddy of my grandmother’s) and I’d always envy, and I’d always scorn how they looked so unused and un-riffled through. Sure, someone probably pulled them out when homework needed doing, but what about reading the encyclopedia for fun—how come none of these fortunate souls ever thought of that?

One A.J. Jacobs did, and he read the entirety of Encyclopedia Britannica on a whim. That is: He wanted to be the smartest man in the world, if not a man who would have regained a child’s confidence of being the smartest boy in the universe. Lark alert.

Reading the Britannica is like channel surfing on a very highbrow cable system, one with no shortage of shows on Sumerian cities.

I had so much fun with The Know-It-All, as evidenced by all the mad giggling I did in the train and the hapless quoting of all the dorktastic nuggets I’d discovered…

* * *

Well, the above is an awesome example of how a post one could be proud of could simply fizzle out under the stress of Real Life, haha. That is, I started this draft right after I read the book—which was amazing and fun and full of useless information, which is exactly the sort of thing I like spending my time with, and also full of deeply human things, like the life one can lead when one is surrounded by ridiculously intelligent and go-getter people and also when one very badly wants babies to impart all that useless information to, and wee! And I’ve kept trying to go back to the draft above, but then Real Life has always had this pesky tendency to kick all your well-meaning plans to up your self-worth right in the balls. Okay. That’s the explanation I’m going with. Toodles.

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of others?

She laid the book down open beside a few others. She wanted to think, to let it await her. She would go back to it, read again, read on, bathe in the richness of its plates.

An astonishingly beautiful quote about reading—although only the first line applies to my experience with the book whence it came. Yes: I have given up on Light Years, after a too-long struggle—brought on by the weight of the book’s reputation and, consequently, the fact that I wanted to prove something to myself. (That, what? I’m enlightened—illuminated!—enough to appreciate this little wonder?) I’m sorry, Richard Ford and all you great writers and esteemed readers who swear by this book—but I didn’t find Light Years and James Salter’s relentless lyrical gymnastics to be worthy substitutes for all that is good and holy in this wee world of ours.

* * *

What makes Light Years such a classic, I’ve been told, is that it best displays James Salter’s status as a formalistic master. This is the book that shows you how it’s done—this is a skillful manipulation of the English language, Sasha. However, Salter’s storytelling is precisely the crux of my problem with his book: His painstaking form rendered his story unreadable. The people in these pages were unformed, never whole to me—just impressions wrought by broad strokes of lush prose.

Oh, there were moments of clarity here and there. That is: Once in a while, the impenetrable shroud that is this book’s language deigns to lift to let this poor reader in. I especially loved—mostly because it made me hopeful!—this scene early on in the novel where Nedra asks her husband if he was happy. And Viri goes: “Was he happy? The question was so ingenuous, so mild. There were things he dreamed of doing that he feared he never would. He often weighed his life. And yet, he was young still, the years stretched before him like endless plains.” But before Viri can respond to his lovely wife, truths about this marriage—about Nedra—hits him:

Her instinct, he knew, was sharp. She had the even teeth of a sex that nips thread in two, that cut as cleanly as a razor. All her power seemed concentrated on her ease, her questioning glance. He cleared his throat.

“Yes, I suppose I’m happy.”

Silence. The traffic ahead had begun to move.

And that’s the kind of volatility—of that ever-fascinating rumble beneath the surface of the seemingly-mundane—that I wanted from this book. That is: I wanted to feel like there was something at stake—like in the scene above. That way, I could commit to the text. I could commit to the story Salter has been at pains to tell me; I could actually know these people I’m reading about. I could actually read as though every page wasn’t a test of my intelligence, of my due appreciation of the art and craft of writing.

* * *

Notes, dated January 10: I don’t know who put this on my radar, but it’s the kind of book I swore by when I was seventeen. I’ve waited years to own this book. When I finally had a copy to call my own, I began reading, only to set it aside, telling myself it wasn’t the right time. That was nearly two years ago. Let’s try this again, shall we?

Notes, dated January 12: I’m about seventy pages in at the moment; already Light Years feels like a bitter reminder of the literary preoccupations I had in college: When I was much younger and, thus, had more promise—when I could write what I wanted to write, and I did it well, I believed so hard that I did it well. James Salter feels now like something I idolized then. (Feel old yet, darling?)

Notes, dated January 14: Have been reading the Salter still, and it’s slow going. The painstaking prose rather feels like Nedra and Viri—and the host of characters that sashay in and out of their lives—are living under glass. Which only estranges them. Maybe I’ve expected too much from this book? I’ll soldier on.

Notes, dated January 16: My relationship with Salter’s book has become quite dismal. I open to the page I left off, and have no idea who the people are. I spend my time with it rereading what I just read, giving up and then hunting for the good parts to quote (oh, and there are many), and then feeling guilty and telling myself to read right.

Notes, dated January 22: Please see what you can do with Salter. You two haven’t been getting along, have you—aside from the occasional turn of phrase plucked from this novel whose prose Ford and many others have touted proxy-goodness? Maybe it’s this book, and maybe it’s me—maybe I’m no longer the kind of reader—the kind of person? the kind of girl?—who falls head over heels in love with writers like Salter and novels like Light Years. Now there’s a potentially depressing thought.

Notes, dated January 23: This is Light Years’ last chance. If nothing happens, it is time to put you to rest. I commit myself to you, tonight, you damned book, and if I am not starry-eyed by midnight, you are retiring to the shadowed corner of my shelves.

[And lines upon lines of beautiful prose lifted from the book, jotted down almost regrettably. That odd guilt in realizing that you’re only reading something to get quotes, never mind that at least you have that one consolation.]

* * *

Basically: I wanted a book. And Salter’s Light Years hardly ever felt that way for me.

Hello, kids; it seems I have survived Monday and all the blues that naturally come with it, and then some. Had one book in my bag today, keeping me company through the commute to and from the office, and during lunchtime—a slim beauty published by my old friend NYRB Classics: A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis. [Plus points that it's not a doorstopper--not to mention that I just brought one book with me. I'm certain this is not the first time I've picked a book to read because it didn't strain my back.] The novel is touchingly introduced by Jonathan Lethem, who knew Davis—was friends with Davis, who considered Davis a great influence in not only his writing but the very fact that Lethem writes. It’s a refreshing introduction to a writer I know nothing about—and it’s blessedly free from the zeal Richard Ford exhibited when he hard-sold the fuck out of Light Years. This introduction actually makes me want to read the book that follows, not cower in fear of it.

So far, I’ve found A Meaningful Life rather pleasant, surprisingly funny (in a grunt-to-self kind of way), if cringingly relevant: Our hero, Lowell Lake, had gone to New York to become a great writer; instead he’s been stuck in a dead-end job at a plumbing-supplies weekly for years now: “His job wasn’t temporary and things weren’t going to get any better–not that they were going to get any worse, barring some unforeseen catastrophe like atomic warfare or mental illness, but they weren’t going to get any better.” Lowell’s married to a lovely girl, but the first few pages—upon Lowell’s waking—we find that glimmer of unease, of distaste, wafting from Lowell, toward the not-quite-awake human being in his bed. [Later on, there's this disturbing and unavoidably hilarious chase scene--Lowell's parents running after him for two hundred miles, as Lowell had balked right before the wedding.] I mean, you can’t help but pull for this guy–this is a man that’s gotten himself in pretty tough situations, usually because of an awkwardness of his own making, and the awkward penguin in me can’t help but commiserate.  Here’s its opening paragraph:

Lowell Lake was a tall man, rather thin, with thin sandy hair and a distant, preoccupied though amiable disposition, as though the world did not reach him as it reaches other men and all the voices around him were pleasant but very faint. His attention was liable to wander off at any time and he was always asking people to repeat things. He gave the impression that people bored him, although not in a bad way: Actually, they seemed to lull him. He was frequently discovered half-asleep at his desk, gazing vacantly out the nearest window.

Yeah, I feel you, Lowell. The blurb promises: “He will make good on everything that’s gone wrong with his life, and he will even murder to do it.” And that, I think, is precisely the kind of happy ending I need in my life right now. [Insert clap of thunder here.]

And then there’s Wizard and Glass–I left it behind because it is quite chunky book, and it will have to stay at home for the rest of the workweek. Anyway, this past weekend, in between pockets of Awesome, I’ve been sneaking peeks at Roland and his posse. That is, during cigarette breaks and stare-downs with an evil cat, I’ve been traipsing along Kansas with Roland the Gunslinger and his ka-tet, Eddie the former junkie, Susannah the former schizophrenic, Jake the former dead, and Oy the dog-raccoon. [Yes, I held out admirably—I began the fourth book six days after finishing the cliffhanger of a third book. I considered it my reward for having survived the past workweek. Don’t remind me that people had to wait six years, haha.]

I’ve survived Blaine the Pain (as well as some genuinely head-stomper riddles), and I’ve just begun the major flashback to Roland’s young years—something, I’ve heard, that’s been divisive among fans of the series. And I understand—it’s primarily impatience for me, not to mention a deep conflict: I want nothing more than to latch on to the ka-tet as they trudge to the Dark Tower; then again, I’ve been suffering my need to know who the hell Roland is, and what sort of life he lead before he began this quest. But cursory whining aside, I’ll keep reading. As if I cannot.

Yep, I soldier on, Evil Workweek, and I’ll read on, too–because that’s what one needs to do. I’ll read on until the next amazing weekend, until Real Life calls and promises that it will be awesome—until, dare I say, I’m closer to what idea of the Dark Tower I have, until I make good with a smidgen of what I obsessively think’s gone hokey with Real Life. Later, all!

I am begrudgingly saying goodbye to my weekend—an amazing weekend that has involved one of my favorite people, a blessed silence from my office-issued phone, an unhealthy amount of Tetris, some good eating (including a way-past-midnight run for some mango crepe), and what-reading-I-can in the midst of all that awesome.

I’m checking in tonight, though, to tide me over in the blogging department; here’s a picture-heavy post of a stunning art book I read a couple of days ago: The Art of Romance: Mills & Bon and Harlequin Cover Designs—and some whining at the end. Below, some of my favorites (don’t ask me what my standards are) from the book:

It got really painful in the end, no? Anyway. To be a killjoy about this visually stunning baby: For all the oohs and aahs it delivers, the book nonetheless feels like a missed opportunity. There’s a woefully short token introduction written by the editors, Joanna Bowring and Margaret O’Brien, which describes Mills & Boon’s beginnings as a free-for-all publisher: Gaining much traction and popularity during the Second World War, taking its cue from all the women-in-the-workforce who suddenly need something to take them away from the drudgery of work and at-home (not to mention, hello, the actual war), and basically just dipping in and out of the trends as time wore on. And, of course, there’s some talk about the awesomeness of the genre—I do admit to the little squee when I realized there’s no condescension when it talks about the genre’s popularity and overall appeal; it’s all just matter-of-factly stated.

For a book that’s focused on such a big player in romance, there’s very little of how Harlequin was instrumental to the growth of the industry, if it was at all; a good retrospective would have been nice. There’s a nod to some of the tropes employed—sure, if only in the context of the cover art; plus a teensy little glimpse into how our attitude toward sexuality has evolved, but, again, it’s discussed in how people can now kiss on the covers of paperbacks and whathaveyou. Authors are mentioned in the introduction, some books are quoted and summarized, cover aesthetics are given a cursory rundown (with a cross-reference to the featured covers to come).

The introduction itself is great—but it becomes a little bleep when you realize that’s all the background you’ll get. Because then it’s on to a gallery of choice covers from the 1930s to the early 2000s—each sample disappointingly short of detail and back story. Yes, there’s the cover itself, there’s the author and the date it was published. Occasionally, the cover artist is mentioned. But that’s it. A scan of the cover, and all those paltry details we could’ve gotten from the cover itself.

I would have appreciated a more sprawling examination of the art. Basically, I wanted more information about the covers themselves and the books they clothed. Because that’s what this book seems to forget: The relationship between the physicality of the book and what they held within their pages. Tell me more about this book! Tell me the provenance of this cover—what influences did this style draw from, does it have anything to do with what’s inside, why the hell does Sylvia Sark’s Take Me! Break Me! have a lion on its cover stalking two star-crossed lovers! More covers from the 90s onward would have helped—that’s a lot of wtfuckery gone unexplored here.

Dost the lady demand too much? Sigh. This is a great volume to have in a romance-reader’s shelf, in an art-lover’s stack of coffee table books. But I wanted it to be an invaluable book—and a little more effort, a lot more digging through the stacks, a lot more reading of the actual books featured, would have made it thus.