Preface
I’ve had a shitty reading year. Many of the books I’ve read I haven’t liked, and the ones that were good I couldn’t get into. Equally frustrating has been the increasing poverty of literary discourse, which has become the playing ground of pseuds and opportunists, acting as though the Woke Literary Establishment, unable to distinguish aesthetics from morality, is preventing them from publishing the next Lolita instead of some unnecessary Instagram novel about infidelity. The people decrying The State of Literary Culture are among those strangling it. I try to keep in mind that a good half of infighting and “analysis” within artistic fields amounts to NYU grads calling Ivy League grads “elite,” but goddamn.
Rather than participate further, I decided to put together a reading list of fiction by legit authors that is fun, lighthearted, and middle-brow, perfect for spring. If you can’t enjoy Sally Rooney because she’s a fake Marxist and/or everything wrong about the literary establishment, then you don’t pass the vibe check for these recs. (If you don’t like her prose, that’s fine; you can stay.) These are books for people looking to have a good time.
Short stories
George Saunders, “Sea Oak”
Ottessa Moshfegh has made her name as the dark comedy writer, but she really owes a large debt to Saunders, who really pulls out the dark comedy in late-stage capitalist life. (Fair warning: his works can be a little “zany.”) This story centers on a dead grandma who comes back to life as an angry ghost and forces her grandson, a himbo stripper, to get his life together.
Ottessa Moshfegh, “Bettering Myself”
Everyone recs My Year of Rest and Relaxation but sleeps on Moshfegh’s short stories. “Bettering Myself” opens her short story collection, Homesick for Another World, on a perfectly Moshfegh note: with her narrator, a teacher at a Catholic school, throwing up in the school bathroom from drinking too much the night before. The short story was clearly the kernel for MYRR but I think a stronger piece overall.
Sally Rooney, “Mr. Salary”
What I like about this story is that it condenses what normally plays out over 250 pages in a Rooney novel into a short story: the single question of whether the characters are gonna fuck. I won’t spoil it.
Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes
Murakami is an uneven writer—his novels either work formally or are good—but his short stories, though they lack the same depth of his novels, are much tighter pieces of writing. They also are less likely to wax in the stark loneliness of male existence as, say, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and instead explore a lot more warmth and humor. The Elephant Vanishes has some darker stories, but on the whole, it’s a good time. If you haven’t read any Murakami, you need to, and Elephant Vanishes isn’t a bad starting point (though Norwegian Wood, a much sadder novel, is probably the best starting point).
I’ll also say that Murakami is a good audiobook listen because his prose is so simple; if you didn’t know, Spotify Premium now includes 15 hours of audiobook listening per month, so I’d check it out.
Donald Barthelme, “The School” (scroll down)
Back when I taught, I used “The School” as a quick example of literary postmodernism. In place of a plot is the accumulation of details—none of them particularly clarifying but adding to the absurdity of the endeavor of storytelling. Barthelme’s story also captures the playful quality of postmodernism without its difficulty. The story is about a class of young students and the mysterious deaths plaguing them.
Novels
Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Cycle
These four books are too long to say that the vibes are all good, and the first book wasn’t really my thing. (The second book, however, is so good.) But if there was ever a series of books written for the girls and gays, it’s this one. It follows the friendship between two women from girlhood to adulthood. Though it has a central mystery—one woman vanishes suddenly—there’s no real plot holding the book together. Instead, the series is mainly just juicy neighborhood gossip. It works well because it isn’t like normal people gossip, but melodramatic Italian gossip and antics:
He fell on the ground and in a frenzy began sticking handfuls of dirt in his mouth. I had to hold him tight, say that I loved him, wipe the dirt out of his mouth with my fingers.
Compulsively readable after the first book.
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Another story of a terrible teacher. For the record, I was sometimes okay at teaching—though a student evaluation did say, and I quote:
i used to laugh when you would make grim commentaries because they’re funny and i thought you were choosing to look at the given situation in a twisted way. i’m beginning to think there is no off switch, you have no choice but to think this way and you truly are a man with No Escape
Miss Jean Brodie is similarly self-obsessed. From Wikipedia: “[She] gives her students lessons about her personal love life and travels, promoting art history, classical studies, and fascism.” This short novel unwinds the story of her firing through a vaguely whodunnit narrative.
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
As I wrote before, A Visit from the Goon Squad has been dismissed in recent years as Obamacore, but its overall message is one of earned optimism, which is a crucial difference. The book is a collection of interweaving short stories that together form a novel. The stories go in so many different directions that the novel is impossible to summarize, but the possibility of art as a redemptive force runs through much of the work. The stories are sometimes deeply poignant and other times comedic, and the result is deeply life-affirming. For what it’s worth, this book was my students’ favorite in my American lit survey course.
N.B. It does include a 90-page chapter told in PowerPoint (which is so touching that it has made me tear up), so it’s really best to read this one in physical form instead of an ebook.
Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
I have zero memory of this book besides that it’s about a sex addict who goes to Sex Addicts Anonymous to hook up with women and I remember thinking it was funny. Seems likely!
Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle
Full disclosure: I haven’t finished this book yet, but Beatty’s follow-up novel, The Sellout, is also good. Beatty is an amusing figure because, despite winning a Man Booker Prize, he was frequently excluded from all those post-BLM “Read More Black Writers” campaigns. The reason, I think, is Beatty is a really, really funny writer—probably the funniest writer alive—but his sense of humor is a little too out of pocket and nobody quite knows what to do with it. It’s sometimes unclear, particularly for white readers, if you’re in on the joke, should be in on the joke, or are the joke. (Beatty invents more racism than Cum Town.) Again, not far enough into The White Boy Shuffle to provide a good synopsis, but to give you a sense of its off-kilter humor, the protagonist gets famous for writing a book titled Watermelanin.
Anyway, as always, you can’t go wrong with Vonnegut (well, Player Piano would be a misstep for this list) and I also liked Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, despite Smith’s later disavowal of it.
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The point of this list, ultimately, is to find something to read that you’ll enjoy. Good literature doesn’t have to be serious.
Hope you have a good time,
Daniel
PS: I turned off comments on Substack. The nature of the platform means that some genuine freaks who do not pass the vibe check stumble across my posts. If you’d like to talk, feel free to email or DM. I’m arguably very friendly.