Neil Serven

A sloppy list of the books that I enjoyed reading in 2023:

1. The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
2. Either/Or, Elif Batuman
3. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
4. Relentless Melt, Jeremy P. Bushnell
5. My Education, Susan Choi
6. I Meant It Once, Kate Doyle
7.  Dirtbag, Massachusetts, Isaac Fitzgerald
8. Nothing Special, Nicole Flattery
9. Tinkers, Paul Harding
10. The Price of Salt, or Carol, Patricia Highsmith
11. Cherry, Mary Karr
12. The Dinner, Herman Koch
13. In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado
14. A Burning, Megha Majumdar
15. Brother and Sister Enter the Forest, Richard Mirabella
16. Lunch Poems, Frank O’Hara
17. The Words, Jean-Paul Sartre
18. Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth, Chris Ware
19. Weather, Jenny Offill
20. The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner
21. Loitering With Intent, Muriel Spark
22. Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner

I read 50 books in all–a high number for me–including seven re-reads. The year was remarkably busy in other respects, as I started a new job in July, completed the first draft of a novel, and published four pieces (two essays, a review, and a flash fiction), with a longer story due to come out next year. It feels like I end every year wishing to be able to make writing a more integral part of my life, but this year it feels like I genuinely made that happen. I look forward to keeping it going.

But to Evelyn, death was its own uncanny presence. It showed up like a clown in a horror film, it rendered you ridiculous, it could make any word a last word, even if that last word was sponge. All you could do was laugh at it. 

Sometime earlier this year my friend Soren posted that it was Varnish Day at the casket factory near where she lives, and that it sounded like the beginning of a Tom Waits song. I commented that I wanted to use the line as the first line of a story.

That’s what I did, and now it’s been published at Monkeybicycle. With immense thanks to Soren for the inspiration and to editor James Tate Hill for giving it a lovely home.

At Esquire, Isaac Fitzgerald (Dirtbag Massachusetts) writes a love letter to the paperback, noting that their durability and affordability make for a flexible, versatile reading experience:

But a paperback is built for adventure. Paperbacks are light, and—as already mentioned numerous times in this essay—foldable. If you forget one at the bar or by the swimming hole, you will not mourn, for the book will be found by somebody else, and if you haven’t finished it before you lose it, don’t worry—you can buy a new one for the price of a drink or two, not an entire meal.

A thing we have noticed since we acquired the bookstore is that carrying both used and new books means we see a wider range of customers. Our town is by no means wealthy, so one thing we like is the ability to have cheaper used options available for customers who only have a few dollars to spring on a book. When I am out and about I try to keep a small paperback with me for idle times like when I am waiting for a takeout order—a small one fits in my hoodie pocket, and I feel like my time is more richly spent getting in a couple pages of a novel then scrolling mindlessly on my phone.

But publishing seems to be getting away from mass-market fiction, even the genres. There was a time when the shelves in the mystery and science fiction sections of chain stores were cut to accommodate the old-fashioned John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell-sized mass-market paperback. Now publishers are tending toward trade-paper-sized titles even for genre writers like Ruth Ware or Louise Penny, and the cheap newsprint mass-market seems to be going extinct.

That doesn’t necessarily change my ability to read in public, apart from the need for bigger pockets. But it does affect the customer for whom we try to provide affordable books. Pricing has consequently soared as well—both due to the higher-quality paper and the seeming inflation that Amazon has caused. Publishers can inflate prices knowing that the largest retailer for books is going to discount them heavily as a loss leader. They’ve essentially taken a side against independent booksellers by default.

Paul Harding won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his debut novel, Tinkers, published in 2009. A slim volume from Bellevue Literary Press with a humble design, it caught a lot of people in the book business by surprise; the New York Times had never bothered to review it before the announcement was made.

I hadn’t known anything about Harding’s career, so when I googled him, I initially thought I had landed on a different Paul Harding, because Google called him a musician. It turns out that Harding was the drummer for Cold Water Flat, a shoegazey band formed by three classmates at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I know that they got some airplay on WFNX in the 90s, particularly the song “Magnetic North Pole,” and I am pretty sure they opened for Belly once, a show I regretted missing at the time. (CWF’s lead singer was Paul Janovitz, brother of Buffalo Tom’s Bill Janovitz.)

So Paul Harding gets added to my library collection of Boston-area literary drummers, joining David Ryan (The Lemonheads, Animals in Motion), Freda Love Smith (The Blake Babies, Red Velvet Underground), and Chris Gorman (Belly, Indi Surfs).

I am halfway through Tinkers, a lovely story of remembrance about a son and his father. Harding’s descriptions of objects are made with the care of a museum curator.

Paul Janovitz passed away earlier this year.

Here’s “Magnetic North Pole”:

Like Frédérique, my classmate seemed to have a sense of style and grace that the rest of us lacked. You might have thought he had traveled to Europe, or that his parents allowed him a little wine with dinner. His pen was a high-end metal ball-point instrument that rested in the crook of his right hand. He confidently looped his lowercase o’s and didn’t fret about his ascenders reaching the line overhead. Curves where the rest of us made sharp angles. All rules tossed to the street, yet everything connected in a light line and looking like it belonged.

I’m very happy to be making my first appearance at Literary Hub with an essay about handwriting and affectation when you are young, with excerpts from Fleur Jaeggy and Thomas Mann. Thanks to Emily Firetog for giving it a home.

I had a random memory of enjoying the book Short Season by Scott Eller as a kid. It’s about a youth baseball player named Brad, who’s a very good hitter but a terrible fielder. His older brother Dean, on the same team, is a great fielder but lousy hitter, and often bails out Brad in the outfield by covering fly balls hit near him. When Dean quits the team without explanation, it leaves Brad in dismay and looking for answers.

I know I had the book in mind when I was writing my own baseball stories (beginning with “Where the Sun Don’t Shine” at Atticus Review) a few years ago, and I know I had also been reading Jim Shepard around that time, and that the voice that gave life to his football story “Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak” was something I tried to replicate with my wiseacre teenage characters.

Going down an internet rabbit hole, I discovered that Scott Eller was a joint pseudonym used by Shepard and William Holinger, who apparently wrote not only Short Season but a number of other children’s books with sports narratives.

This blew my mind, and while I haven’t read Short Season in decades, there is something I recall about the story’s tone—even as it was written for a juvenile audience, without the swears and sardonicism—that has stayed with me that absolutely makes me think of Shepard. The fact that I wrote while influenced by both versions of the same writer, at much different stages of his career, without knowing it at the time is astounding to me.

There’s been conversation on Twitter over the past week about this essay by Ottessa Moshfegh that appeared on The Paris Review blog for its Home Improvements series. She talks about her father buying her a once-foreclosed house in Providence for a paltry sum; it is soaked with the stench of cigarette smoke, “a layer of nicotine varnish that made everything sepia and gross” and renders the place uninhabitable. She tears the walls apart to get rid of the smell. Then the previous owner—the one who defaulted on his mortgage—shows up, lights a cigarette, and looks around without saying hello before he starts to cry.

Those who take issue with the piece criticize it as “poverty porn,” a writer using one stranger’s unfortunate circumstances as a subject for art. There’s been a greater regard of late for how people of limited means are portrayed, a concern with turning them into conceits. The sentences that surround the man’s breakdown don’t reach for sentiment: “It was horrible. It was heartbreaking. It was so bad. I looked at my dad. He made no expression. There was nothing to say or to do.”

The essay also contains a lot of the gaze that I have come to expect from Moshfegh, eager to make us look at the dirt, almost to the point of fetishizing warts. When she writes about her next-door neighbor, “an elderly lady from Portugal who spoke almost no English and yet complained to me about all the dogshit in my backyard while bragging about the tomatoes in her garden, which looked exactly like her breasts beneath her housedress, heavy and sliding,” it seems a needless reach, a gleeful slander at someone who doesn’t have the means or eloquence to speak for herself.  

Defenders seem to appreciate the essay’s honesty. Moshfegh never hides that she is writing from a place of privilege, and doesn’t level to a false apology. She actually says sorry to the man in the end, and you wonder if it’s a sorry of regret, or sympathy, or embarrassment. There’s no reason it can’t be a mix of all three.

I have never cared for where Moshfegh’s lens looks in her fiction—there seems to be a spitefulness in how she turns subjects over to inspect their patheticness—but there’s an additional, ethical angle at play when the work is nonfiction and the characters are real. The writer has a responsibility not to embarrass their subject, and in particular not to use their advantages to do so. It seems that much of the objection to the essay is seated in a feeling that Moshfegh has abdicated that responsibility.

I’m not sure I share that sentiment—the author seems to make quite clear that she is aware of where she comes from and knows how she is making out at the expense of another person. She even shares the amount her father paid for the house. Perhaps the unfairness being scrutinized is not about money and class power but about writing itself. The ability to tell a story and put it into words is one that not everyone has. Very few people have the real chance to get published in The Paris Review. Are we always wrong to use that privilege to claim the sad moments in the lives of less-writerly people for our art? Was Moshfegh’s language not gentle enough to make this move? That’s a fair criticism, but one, I think, more about style than circumstance.

To me it feels that the privilege of writing doesn’t invite us to cast our lenses downward, but that downward cast is often unavoidable. We are casting a film when we write, deciding who is worthy of mention and who is not. We decide what quotes to write down. We make permanent the decisions of others. That kind of privilege is gigantic and so inherent to the practice of writing that I don’t see how it can be removed. To be a writer and pretend you are on the same plane as your subject is worse, an act of condescension, of cruelty.

I enjoyed Dan Kois’s New Yorker celebration of those iconic surrealist Vintage Contemporaries covers by Lorraine Louie that defined the era of paperback fiction in the 1980s and ‘90s.

From the 1984 début of those first seven books, the Vintage Contemporaries design attracted immediate attention. It felt perfectly of the moment, a snapshot of the mid-eighties. If you’re a book collector of a certain age you can close your eyes and see it now. The author’s name in a box at the top, white print against a boldly colored block. (The font is a modification of Kabel, a German typeface from 1927.) A dot-matrix rectangle floating to the left. The orb in the bottom left-hand corner. The illustration in the center, often a collage, with the slight uncanniness of computer graphics.

And the title, in all caps, each letter casting a shadow on the page. 

Even with a range of authors represented—Raymond Carver, Joy Williams, Barry Hannah, Jay McInerney—it’s hard not to associate the VC covers with a certain type of book: vaguely experimental, a little dreamy and waggish. Kois is introduced to the series through Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, noted for taking place across one office worker’s expansive ride up an escalator.

It also must have done wonders for discovering authors, knowing that they all belonged to this curated club. If you liked Carver’s stories, perhaps you’ll like Hannah’s Airships. And the design likely spurred a collector’s impulse among those who were more than casual readers.

The popularity of BookTok and similar social-media trends seems to encourage a return to appreciating design and the book as an object. Perhaps that will influence decisions on book design going forward, if it hasn’t already.

Selin is often left having to explain herself throughout much of the The Idiot—especially to Ivan, who seems to enjoy breaking apart her sentences, willfully misinterpreting her for kicks. Then, in the natural way of young adult exploration, she overexplains to the point of sounding ludicrous. “I like words,” she tells a professor who’s interviewing her because she’s trying to get into a seminar. “They don’t bore me at all.”

At the Ploughshares blog, I wrote about Elif Batuman’s 2017 novel The Idiot, and the ways in which the novel reveals the capacity for language to betray us. I had a lot of fun writing this one.

R.I.P. Charles Simic. Thinking about Edna, how her name just belongs.