Books of the Month: May 2018
Troubling Love, by Elena Ferrante. Like many others, I read all four of the Napoli novels by Elena Ferrante. Like Troubling Love, they troubled and entranced me simultaneously. Ferrante’s depiction of a lifelong friendship between two women in the Napoli novels–if friendship is the right word– a friendship that covered five decades of life and love and hate and hardship, will be with me always. People talk about the beauty of Ferrante’s writing, but I don’t find it beautiful. I do find it mesmerizing, though, to the extent that I stood outside the door of Magers & Quinn on the day the fourth and final novel came out, waiting to buy it and devour it. She is an unsparing writer who writes with a kind of calm brutality. Nothing slips by her. Such is the case with Troubling Love. It’s a slender novel about a daughter trying to unravel the mystery of her mother’s death, and by extension, the mystery of her own childhood. This novel reads like a dream/nightmare, and I couldn’t put it down.
Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng. Damn. This is a hell of a novel. I was instantly absorbed into the lives of this Shaker Heights community and its denizens. Ng writes with such clarity about every one of her people, no matter who they are, weaving issues of class and race into the powerful themes of the book in such a way that I empathized with everyone. That’s not an easy task. You know what else is an inordinately difficult task? To write in the third person omniscient (in which you’re inside the heads of everyone) and pull it off, the way Ng does, seemingly without effort. And her portrayal of Mia, the photographer artist at the core of every scene, was astonishing in its powerful take on what drives an artist and her art. I loved this book.
Long Way Down, by Jason Reynolds. Jason Reynolds can do no wrong in my eyes. He’s changing the world, one book and one speech at a time, and Long Way Down is no exception. The structure of the book is cool –it takes place in a single elevator ride from the 13th floor to the lobby of the building in which the main character lives–and it’s told in near-verse. Few words, huge power. This novel shook me up and made me want to reach into its world and wrap my arms around everyone, living and dead, who is given a voice here.
What I Leave Behind, by Alison McGhee. Yup, this is my own book. While on book tour for this new novel, about a sixteen year old boy named Will who works in a dollar store and is trying to figure his way through some tough times, I’ve had to re-read it. Much to my surprise and relief, this hasn’t been a soul-damaging experience. Maybe because it’s such a brief, poem-like book, and maybe because readers are responding to it straight from the heart, which is how I wrote it. Here are a few of the things they’ve said on Goodreads. 1. I can’t believe a book this small managed to touch my heart so completely. 2. Will’s compassion and kindness ripped my heart out. 3. . . . a beautiful look at trauma, what to do when you feel powerless in the world, and how to do more than just move forward. 4. One of the most profound, poignant books I’ve read in a while. Very few books make life feel so real and precious.
Looking for Alaska, by John Green. This is my third John Greene novel, and when I finished it I decided to read everything else he’s written. The man deserves his bestselling and critically acclaimed status. The way he gets straight to the heart of the matter, the matter being life and its big questions in the face of tough situations, especially in his brilliant dialogue, is the way I wish we all were, all the time, in real life. His people are so real and so lovable, and they care so much about each other. Hilarious, painful, heart-opening.
Old men who hold their wives’ handbags for them as they put on their coats. Young fathers who hold their toddlers’ hands as they cross the street. The girl who jumps up to open the door for the woman using the walker. The cafe manager who keeps a water bowl outside, filled with cool water, for passing dogs. The man with the truck who goes up and down the rural road, plowing out his elderly neighbors. Everyone waving goodbye, tears in their eyes, as the ones they love disappear into the airport, like in the movie Love Actually*. The movie Love Actually. A note left in a poetry box, thanking the “poem attendant” for “all the good poems.” A carful of grinning men chattering in Spanish, pulling over to the side of a snowy road and pushing the young woman’s car out of the ditch. The world is full of sweetness. When I need to remind myself of that, which is often, in these days of bewildering cruelty and greed by our elected employees, this is one of the poems I recite to myself. 
Last week my water filter leaked into the storage bin where my youngest’s childhood mementoes are kept. I brought it upstairs and spread her things out to dry. Onesies, footie pajamas, overalls with ripped-out knees. Her high school graduation cap. Notebooks filled with book reports and drawings and journal entries. Cards she’d written to me, mostly construction paper drawings along with I love you mom. The arc of eighteen years spread out on the kitchen table and counters. The tiny quilt I made for her before she was born and which she wore to literal shreds was damp, and I picked up the strands and held them to my heart.
I. My new novel, What I Leave Behind, out on May 15, stars 16-year-old Will. Will is one of those charming people that everyone loves – maybe because he’s naturally cool, but probably because he’s fundamentally kind. He knows how to make lonely people feel less lonely, for example his socially-awkward boss Tom at Dollar General. He knows how hard life can be –he lost his dad to suicide a few years ago and his childhood friend was recently assaulted—but instead of turning inward to his own pain and sorrow Will tries to make the lives of those around him better.
Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah. I listened to Trevor Noah read his memoir aloud to me as my tiny little car and I cruised along the highways of Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma. What a wonderful book. Noah was born to a black South African woman and a white British father in South Africa – his birth was literally a crime back in the waning days of apartheid, hence the title of the memoir. Like Sherman Alexie’s You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, this book is as much an homage to his fierce, brilliant, take-no-shit mother as it is his own story. Listening to Noah talk about race, class, the city vs. the townships, and his coming of age on the mean streets of both made me think about my own country and upbringing. This book is by turns hilarious, enraging, enlightening, and always utterly absorbing. Highly recommend – and if you’re an audio fan, get the audio version. Noah is an uncanny mimic. 
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, a novel by Mohsin Hamid. Such a poignant, bittersweet, moving novel this is. It’s been kicking around on my bookshelves for a couple of years now, because even though I knew it was a novel, every time I looked at it I would tilt my head and think How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia? Just doesn’t sound like a novel. And because I don’t care about getting filthy rich in rising Asia (or anywhere else for that matter), it stayed on the shelf. But once I finally cracked the cover and began reading, wow. Structured like the get rich quick self-help books that are apparently wildly popular in Asia, with each chapter heading a different aspect of how to get rich, the book charts the life of one unnamed man. We follow him from early childhood in rural Pakistan (I’m assuming, because the country, like the main character, is never named) to old age in a sprawling, tentacled, ever-growing city, every step of the way alighting, like a hummingbird, on the various aspects of his life and longings that never change. A delicate, painfully-wrought, beautiful book. I loved this novel and will now seek out Hamid’s other books. Highly recommend.
The House Without Windows: And Eepersip’s Life There, a novel by Barbara Newhall Follett. Reading this brief novel was an experience unlike any I’ve had before when reading. The author, who was born in 1914 and vanished at the age of thirty, was eight years old when she wrote the novel and twelve when it was published. After reading 
You know those maps where you fill in all the states you’ve been to? The only one missing from mine is Alaska (I don’t count the time that I landed at the Anchorage airport on my way to China). I’ve been to all the lower 48 states, most of them multiple times, because road trips are big in my life. The earth is a living being beneath the tires, rising and falling, sweeping west and shrinking east. Most of the time I’m solo, like last week, when I drove 2089 miles in three days. When I get tired, or when it gets dark, I tuck my old tiny car behind a semi for comfort. Truckers sometimes get a bad rap, and once in a while it’s justified, but for the most part they drive their trucks way more safely than most people drive their cars. 
Alison McGhee 