“Look Alive Out There” by Sloane Crosley

After a brief foray into Sloane Crosley's novel-writing, I'm back to her essays, which is where I started (with I Was Told There'd Be Cake). And this one was every bit as good as that first one. In fact, it was so equivalently good that I can't help but wonder if I was mistaken about her second book of essays. (I didn’t like the second one as much. Looking back now, I have decided surely I was wrong.)

In reading this book, my consistent experience was an amalgamation of fun and of wondering just exactly how one person can get herself into so many unique situations. Biting off way more than she could chew in a decision to climb a volcano in Ecuador? Check. Playing herself in a cameo on Gossip Girl? Check. Depending on hippie pot-smoking swinger neighbors to keep from starving to death while house-sitting? Check, check and check. I assume it all really happened, though. At least mostly.

My only real complaint about Look Alive Out There: on page 122, during the story "The Grape Man," Crosley mentions "a glossy photo book called Designing with Books." Like, how to decorate your house (or at least your bookshelves) with books, right? Like, basically, bookshelf porn (but classy), right? So of course I immediately stop reading and pick up my phone and Google "designing with books book." And what does the AI summary tell me? "There is no single book titled Designing with Books." Ugh! I did, however, find Books Make a Home and Elements of Timeless Style, both of which are currently heading my way, so hopefully those will help me scratch that itch.

“Severance” by Ling Ma

Weekend before last, we had the opportunity to go to a cute little bookshop in Atlanta's Ponce City Market: Posman Books. I guess there were more customers in the store than I prefer, but the shelves were full of lots of good books, along with fun bookish appurtenances. As we browsed, the title Severance caught my eye (along with the cover's pretty pink color!), and I wondered if the book had anything to do with the Apple TV show that has so baffled me (it doesn’t). But then I ended up standing there and reading the entire prologue in the store, oblivious to anything going on around me. And I did not want to stop reading. 

But by the time I actually sat down to read the book several days later, I had already forgotten what I learned from the prologue, so I just had to start over again. And weirdly, I did not find it so compelling the second time around, which made me worry for the rest of the book. But now, having reached the end, I've decided that this was just an effect of re-reading the prologue after having read it so recently.

This is the story of Candace Chen, a young-ish Chinese-American woman living in New York City in 2011 and working in a publishing consulting firm (specifically, the Bible production division). But it's also the story of her childhood, from the age of four when her parents immigrated to the US without her, to the age of six when she moved to the US to join her parents, to her older, teen-aged years and the loss of her parents. AND it's the story of a devastating global pandemic and its aftermath. 

It was, of course, the pandemic part of the book that stood out to me the most. In fact, this book brought back so many not-so-fond memories of 2020 that this fact blows my mind: Severance was published almost two years before the term "COVID-19" even existed. How could this book NOT have been based on our real-life pandemic? Yeah, maybe the fictional pandemic was fungal instead of viral, but it even originated in China. Quarantines, travel bans, wearing masks, working from home, arguments over the ethics of allowing people to mass together to protest . . . it's like Ling Ma was predicting the future. 

Was anyone else a little unsatisfied with the ending? Kind of like this one?

“What We Can Know” by Ian McEwan

I haven't read all of Ian McEwan's books, and he has written quite a few of them (like, enough that I may not get around to reading them all), but a new one is kind of an event. So when I heard about What We Can Know, I pre-ordered it without really knowing anything about the story. When the book arrived, I spent a moment reflecting on the cover (is that a mirror pictured? I wondered if the title could have been continued with "about ourselves." But as I read, I decided that didn't apply). 

I'm not quite sure whether going in blind was a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe if I'd known a bit about where the plot was heading, I would have been quicker at finding my bearings. As it was, I was continually distracted by how weirdly like a David Mitchell book this seemed to be. Even weirder, I wasn't really enjoying it (which I don't think has ever happened to me before with David Mitchell. Or with Ian McEwan. Except maybe with Saturday). 

The majority of the Mitchell-ness came from the timeline (although the characters and the setting fit right in as well). The narrator, Tom, is an academic and a university professor whose area of expertise is the famous poet Frances Blundy. It's said that in 2014, Blundy wrote a poem as a gift for his wife's Vivien's birthday. He recited it at her dinner party, gave her the only copy, and then no one ever saw or read it again. In 2119, the mysterious poem still eludes the world, and it is Tom's holy grail.

Yeah, that's right, I said 2119 (which seems to me like a very David Mitchell plot point). And the world is no longer the world as we know it (there's Mitchell again). It was uncomfortably different: not different enough to be a fantasy, but different enough to be depressing. But somewhere around the time that Tom and his quasi-estranged wife Rose were digging holes, I started to get into it. 

There are two different timelines (one for Tom and Rose, one for Blundy and Vivien), thus two different groups of characters. And I think what I will remember most about this book was the way one of the main characters goes through the sad and depressing ordeal of watching her husband disappear into early-onset dementia. It's a particular kind of loss, when the body is still present but the person you loved no longer exists. (New fear unlocked, by the way.) But before his disappearance, she had this to say about him: "What's so lovely is that basically, in a quiet way, he's simply glad he exists. Whatever the difficulty, the baseline isn't disturbed. Then that line becomes mine too." A worthy aspiration if ever there was one. And I also want to remember this gem, as one of the characters explained why she kept a journal: "...most of life is oblivion. To rescue fragments of the past would be to claim a bigger existence."

Do you want to know what I decided about the title in the end? I'll try to explain it without any spoilers. Basically, Tom knows all that it's possible to know about Frances Blundy (which is a lot, given his life in the Information Age; a multitude of his papers have been preserved, along with myriad emails and text messages). Despite that, there were multiple layers to Blundy's story that Tom could never have uncovered from Blundy alone, despite his deep scholarship.