Omit what's best

On concentrating on the year's most affecting books as opposed to buzzy lists

Housekeeping:

Since my first newsletter, I published an interview with Elizabeth Strout at Oprah Daily. Literary Hub’s round up of the best reviewed fiction books of 2022 featured an excerpt from my Boston Globe review of Elif Batuman’s terrific novel EITHER/OR. I’ve also written about Jessica Grose’s nonfiction book SCREAMING ON THE INSIDE for the Boston Globe. As someone who has spent the whole week home with sick children, I’m pleased that they’ve made it their lead book review this weekend. This is a slim and accessible book that should be read by folks who are not parents. The unsustainability of American motherhood is everyone’s problem. This isn’t just a book for mothers.

On “best of the year” coverage:

Despite the evidence in the paragraph above, this is a tricky time to publish book criticism. Roundups and listicles are generally impossible to avoid, but at this time of year, you’re staring down a lot of shopping lists labeled “best of” lists. [Full disclosure: I participate in this annual tradition and this year contributed to a forthcoming “best books” list. I’m not saying that I’m above this practice!] The “best of” lists serve different purposes and definitely connect readers with books, but I want something quirkier (that goes beyond typical book reviews) to accompany rankings and lists. This could come in the form of essays that solidly unpack precisely how one book or another illuminated a moment of this specific year. How do books address an event that happened or build on another book that was once relevant but is now stale or outdated? Which books click with one another or bristle against one another and should be bought as a pair or stack. I’ll take that list.

Or just tell me about an obsession you chased down over the year. The Millions attempts to do this with their “A Year in Reading” columns. The writer Adam O’Fallon Price wrote about his devotion to Iris Murdoch for the Millions. This deep dive is quite welcome and reminds me that I need to make time to finally read Murdoch. I love an essay grounded in offbeat, hot takes that don’t have anything to do with the word “best.” 

Avoiding superlatives, in December 2020, I wrote an essay about my year in reading. This seemed like a snowball pitch to my editor at the NY Observer, but 2020 was an uncommon year. The well trod territory took on new meaning when many readers lost their desire to read or their attention span thanks to the pandemic, ongoing violence against Black lives in America, and the 2020 presidential election. Through writing that piece, I saw exactly how books loomed in my mind during a year fraught with caustic, shocking realities and hard decisions. Books helped me process those things during a time of great isolation. There’s something incredible about the fact that a solitary activity (reading, writing) can create a vast network of feeling and connection. For me, in 2020, the book that made the biggest impact on my year of reading was May Sarton’s JOURNAL OF A SOLITUDE. In 2021, it was Honoree Fanonne Jeffers’ THE LOVE SONGS OF W.E.B. DuBOIS. In 2022, I couldn’t resist the pull of Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton books. 

Sure, the very notion of saying that one book encapsulated my year or that ONE book or author resonated above all others smacks of a mentality wrapped around binary thinking that makes me break out in hives. But as I try to tell my oldest daughter who finds opinion writing overwhelming because there is simply too much to write about, just make a decision and write about one thing. If you find that it’s impossible to cut yourself off, then keep going, but just start with one thing. You can write about one thing without having to say that it’s the best. We erase any subjectivity when we apply these labels that aren’t necessarily fair or true. Calling something the best is a personal assessment applied writ large. This is different from crucial books people should read or books that upend the way we look at the world. That’s where I’d like to steer the “year end” conversation.

For me, Strout’s central character Lucy cracked open a problem I find in contemporary fiction. Authors are too often seized with a compulsive need to offer excessive description of characters. Perhaps taking E.M. Forster too much to heart, they are terrified of flat characters and consequently clutter the lives of their characters. This makes me think about a junk drawer; surely this could reveal a lot about a life but when I’m too busy separating one thing from another, I lose sight of what this actually tells me about someone. The work becomes tedious. This isn’t a mystery, it’s a mess. 

As I get older, I’m more comfortable with mystery than I am with mess. This is another way of saying that I’ve lost my interest in drama. Maybe I’ve finally learned that there’s no way to fully understand other people. It’s not that I’ve given up. I’ve merely accepted that my dogged efforts for closure or complete understanding can be a fruitless project. Maybe I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than sorely disappointed. As much as lists subtly coax me to believe that organizing information is a solution to our problems—a means of complete understanding or a path to arrive at a final statement—I crave something more open ended. Turns out that, even when it exists, closure is deeply overrated. 

Why Lucy Barton?

I wasn’t expecting to drop everything and become borderline obsessed with Elizabeth Strout, but isn’t it a delight to surprise yourself? Lucy Barton offered me a different way to think about fiction. She is a deceptively simple character in a deceptively simple collection of books (not a series, but that’s another essay!). Written in sparse language that’s often direct, it could be easy to write off Elizabeth Strout. This would be a horrible mistake. I came to LUCY BY THE SEA after my mother told me that she read it in less than two days. She added that it was cathartic. Given that “boring” was the one word synopsis I’d given to a series of unfinished and waterlogged novels stashed in tote bags at the neighborhood pool, I was willing to try. The jacket’s Homer-esque sea and yellow typeface also lured me to its pages. 

From its opening, I lurched back to March 2020, confused and stunned by what seemed like hyperbole in the news. Like Lucy, I too remember stark details about the final times I went somewhere or saw someone. Her clear memory, muddled only by emotion, mirrored my own experiences of that time. There were the first decisions to not hug a friend, the last haircut, the news about the first friend who died of Covid. Enough time had passed that I felt ready to circle back to that time in our lives. After so much time spent coping, I realized how easy it could be to forget those early days. Both impulses are correct: we needed to set those memories aside, but we need to preserve those days as they were instead of imbuing them with the knowledge we gained. Strout stood in for a wise friend who might tell me to snap out of my nostalgia. This stern act of kindness is also the work of effective fiction.

Rather than frustrate me, the book swept me up in its improbability. Long divorced couples weathering lockdown together? In a rented home by the sea in Maine? I would have yearned for such a fantasy retreat (minus hanging out with an exes) in April 2020, moored as I was in our two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. But I saw this movement as a mental shift as well. We were never going to know ourselves the same way again. Of course Lucy and her ex-husband ended up in Maine. It’s almost similar to the way that our dreams toss us far afield with various people from different points in our lives. Our subconscious is reconciling the disarray of a life well lived. I could accept this fantasy because my dreams do this work every single night. Ever since Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures that followed, my dream life involves my being in one odd place and needing to get back home. It’s a journey that is perpetually waylaid by chance encounters and distractions. Like Lucy, William, and all of us existentially, I’ve known what it’s like to feel exiled. It’s been a constant feeling since 2005. The rented house in Maine is more than a bourgeois trapping. It’s a state of mind. 

The book is knotted with family secrets and confrontations. Lucy draws us into her confidence, but also shares something deeper, her misgivings. Her fear. Her desire that runs counter to reason–namely, how did she end up back with William? These admissions come to us with a haze of complicated emotion. Strout doesn’t shy away from conflict, but she doesn’t dredge up these details to reach a point or settle a score. She does it to raise the temperature of the room and shift the atmosphere in our minds and hearts. This work changed me and my expectations of character development. 

I accepted every improbable thing in this book and hung onto the verbal ticks that reveal the lingering traces of Lucy’s abused childhood. A writer, Lucy is keenly aware of the power of words. This doesn’t keep her from needing to confirm in so many words the fact of what sits in her line of vision—or outside it for that matter. This book, for me, reassured me that, yes, what we all endured was real. The loss, the unexpected gains, the ongoing negotiation to find stable ground was true. What I loved about this book is the way that the human spirit finds a way to keep yearning even when it seems like the world has stopped and even the concept of the world appears to be in question. Rather than use character development to reveal the truth about someone, Strout somehow uses it to show you how much we both know and never know anyone. 

Eager to stay in the world of these entanglements and questions, I worked backward from LUCY BY THE SEA to then read MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON then OH WILLIAM!, and ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. I also listened to the stage adaptation of MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON. Here I was, several books into the world of a collection of characters and still fascinated. Somewhere in the thick of all of this, I recognized that Strout’s genius rests in the fact that she intentionally leaves it to the reader to piece together the disparate pieces of these lives and hold their incongruous pieces together with care. This is a puzzle we can’t fully piece together-–and that’s so like life. I keep hearing people say that these books are slight, but I see them as instructive. She’s not laying claim to a finite world. My empathy for others grows when I accept how much I don’t know about anyone. I learn to meet them where they are. This is how I feel about Lucy and her contemporaries.

Through these books, I’ve witnessed rejection and reconciliation, silence and an outpouring of words. Nothing fits in a pattern. I keep reading because the rhythm of these books helps me accept the fractured nature of modern life. Lucy is a reminder that people can be polished and successful, but still carry the chill of a child who never fully knew warmth. I take more time and look less at the details. I pay more attention to behavior and take a long look at things. I’m suspicious of easy conclusions or what smacks of a complete portrait. I don’t want novels that leave me feeling like I’d been told what to feel. I don’t want a neat ending. I don’t even really care about plot. What matters most to me is latching onto a voice that fascinates and challenges me. I’m still unraveling how this works and finding a way to describe it when I see it. 

December marks an arbitrary end to a period of time which we’ve all accepted as a universal way to organize our lives. I’m not being pretentious; I’ve internalized into my bones the very idea of December with its festivals of lights and gifts, the songs and busy cheer that both lifts me up and sends me under a blanket. The annual “best of” lists could occur every 18 months, six months, five years, or something else altogether. Don’t feel pressure to beat yourself up for the books you haven’t read or things you haven’t achieved. There’s really no need to take stock unless you want to do so. When it’s cold and everyone’s sick at home, thinking about the books that stood out this year is a nice distraction from the unfinished books at my bedside. That said, now I’d like to make my way back to the books with another mug of tea.