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A fun collection of short stories that does not attempt to be more than that (cf. the number of collections that feel the need to interconnect). Williams seems to love a neat conceit built around wordplay, but the highlights here are the ever-so-slightly heartbreaking ones - a skywritten proposal, a shipping forecast gone awry - which really make the most of the form, ending before the ending, leaving you with the ambiguous uneasy feeling in your stomach as you wonder what happens next.
A poetry collection that traces the events and cast of characters across a London house party. A lot to like here, that transcends the context I am lacking. Some lovely reflections on being young and finding your place.
The conceit of a 200-odd-page email, unbroken, as a novel is fun, as is the typography that puts me in mind of Rebecca Watson’s Little Scratch. Goodlord unfortunately ends up going in a pretty similar direction tonally and narratively as Little Scratch, which is not an incorrect direction, nor one that should be discouraged, but a shame when it already feels so in debt formally. The constant referral to the email’s recipient by name also delightfully recalls Second Place by Rachel Cusk (oh Jeffers!), so I am well-disposed towards it. I will look forward to seeing what Ella Frear gets up to hence.
Where do you draw the line between a novel and a collection of inter-connected short stories? Wherever it is, Universality is certainly straddling it. It does, I suppose, form a cohesive narrative across its chapters, but with each one written from different characters’ perspectives and indeed formal styles. I do enjoy the shifting sands on which it’s written, even if I’m less convinced by its conclusion. But I enjoy the ambiguity of it.
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Broadly readable for the most part, but with a real tail-off towards the end. Never fully convincing from the off, though - perhaps a problem with being involved in the stand up industry, the set-up, characters, and overarching narrative don’t really ring true. Yes, there are terrible men in stand up (and, to be honest, a brief moment where I wondered whether one of the characters was an avatar for a specific one I know), but this reads too closely to a fanfic of what it must be like from the outside. There’s an amount of fiction-as-wish-fulfillment in it, every character too broadly drawn and every plot contrivance too perfect. I’m no one to suggst that Raeside isn’t allowed that for herself, but it doesn’t make it interesting. A shame.
I must confessed I missed the apparent virality of The Feminist, the opening short story in Tony Tulathimutte’s debut collection, but I can’t say it surprises me in hindsight. It fits in that Cat Person vein, something that allows everyone to confront the horrors of straight white men online whilst patting themselves on the back for being better than them. It’s interesting, then, how Tulathimutte uses that as a seed for the remaining stories, each building on that in some way thematically and narratively to implicate all of us in the same base, repulsive instincts. There’s some formal experimentation, which is fun, and one story (no spoilers) has such a beautiful example of a narrative trick that I genuinely laughed out loud on a train at the gumption of it all. Very excited for more.
A precision-strike on the late millenial class, so targeted in its observations but so general in its reach. I am almost entirely the people described here. I enjoy the trappings of what I imagine high taste to be, the minimalism, the combining technology and creativity, the wanting to move to Berlin (which, I genuinely nearly did circa the age of 27), and all of that. The social circles that expand and contract, the places and times spent with those circles, the nagging feeling that there must be more meaning. Latronico takes all this and pours it into a never-named couple living initially in Berlin and then moving around, the prose efficient but still drolly humourous. Beyond the generational satire, though, is a small but magnified observation that has stuck with me since: I miss when Instagram was just peoples’ lunches and holiday photos. When I deleted Facebook and abandoned Twitter (2017 and 2022, respectively), I retreated into Instagram because it wasn’t full of links to doom-laden articles, videos of atrocities, political snark. It was about the people underneath. And now, as I idly doomscroll through Instagram stories, it’s the same thing. Maybe something will replace it. Maybe it’s a sign of great privilege that I can live my life not having to care on an intense level about these things going on in the world around me. But in just 120 pages, Latronico absolutely nails the kind of person I am and my cohort is. (Sidenote: in its opening chapter, Perfection uses a special edition of In Rainbows on vinyl being on display as a specific marker of a certain type of person/couple, but it must be assumed he is thinking of the bright, vibrant colours of the standard edition, rather than the greyscale charcoal drawings of the limited discbox edition. I hate that this is a thing I am commenting on here).
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Oh man. This had been on my list for a while, but moved considerably up in response to starting Neverland by Vanessa Kisuule which was not quite the book I was expecting - whilst that more used the idea of discussing the art vs. the artist as a launch pad for talking about how hero worship takes on a life outside of the art, I wanted to read something more specifically delving into art vs. artist and what is to be done about, as Monsters’ subtitle asks, great art by “bad” people. My investment in this: I have eschewed art I loved by people who turned out to be bad. I am also a big fan of someone whose name gets thrown around a lot in this arena and whose guilt I, to be honest, think is questionable but nonetheless feel a certain discomfort around enjoying as a result. Dederer is a fascinating, thoughtful writer who takes neither prisoner nor easy answer. Monsters is a book of much nuance, so to distill it would do it a disservice, but I think it’s fair to say that it tips its hand towards the side of the art still being worth enjoying, though not without caveat. There’s a really interesting conclusion to be drawn around how this fits with our inescapable model of capitalism and consumerism, which has left me with a lot to think about. The whole thing delves into a rich tapestry of different approaches, different types of “bad” people, and the idea of the stain that spreads out wider and backwards, re-colouring the art in unimaginable ways. It is hard to watch Manhattan in the same way as it is Annie Hall. It is difficult to listen to The Suburbs in the same way as you did before. That doesn’t, I think, necessarily make it wrong. So why do I still cut out some art but not others? Why does it feel more right to want to not consume JK Rowling or Louis C.K., compared to others? I have spent so many years thinking about this, and whilst it doesn’t necessarily crystalise every thought I had, (and while it does crystalise a whole bunch of other thoughts I hadn’t begun to consider) Monsters is as comprehensive a text as you could hope for, written with grace and humour. A high recommendation.
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The annual tradition continues, thank you Mum. The platonic ideal was still the one like 4 years ago with a good short story, and I refuse to believe it’s just because I’m 31 now.