Dear readers,
I pulled an old favorite novel from the shelf recently, and a ghost fell out. Not an actual ectoplasm but a small cream-colored card, the lost artifact of a summer fling with a glamorous Spaniard whose chaotic charms were never meant to last past August. (Reader, I ended it at a busy crosswalk and was on the subway back to Brooklyn before the next light changed: over, as they say, in a New York minute.)
Perhaps you are a better caretaker of your personal library — and your seasonal romances gone by — than I. But any fan of stoop sales and secondhand bookshops knows what it is to pick up a novel riddled with hand-drawn margin notes or ancient A.T.M. receipts, all the impenetrable detritus of some stranger’s lived-in life.
Most times, that kind of mess will at least net you a modest discount. There can also be something magical, though, about these bits of literary flotsam: a whole world of small mysteries and secret histories contained in a scrawled title-page dedication or a cryptic doodle.
And there’s an enduring lure, too, in revisiting a long-ago love affair, as the main characters in this week’s newsletter picks do. Whether that’s strictly advisable, mis amores, is another story.
—Leah
“My Ex-Life,” by Stephen McCauley
Fiction, 2018
The phrase “guilty pleasure” has no business being applied to reading (unless, of course, your pleasure is “Mein Kampf”), so perhaps it’s better to call McCauley’s novels a form of self-care.
He’s the kind of writer whose stories you sigh and sink into, a plushie beanbag for the soul. It doesn’t take long to pick up the bitter-but-mostly-sweet plot of “My Ex-Life,” in which Julie, a careworn 50-something with a cluttered Victorian on the Massachusetts coast, a lingering marijuana habit and a recalcitrant (is there any other kind?) teenage daughter, teeters on the all-done-but-the-paperwork phase of her second divorce.
Enter, through the magic manipulations of fiction, her long-ago first husband, David. Now a college-prep consultant for the overweening offspring of the Bay Area elite, he’s also been recently dumped and is facing the loss of his rent-controlled carriage house in San Francisco.
So he agrees to a visit — allegedly to help 17-year-old Mandy find her way academically, but really to sort through the unresolved mess he and Julie left nearly three decades ago.
The fact that David is immutably, indisputably gay precludes any idea of a romantic rekindling, though there are myriad other intrigues on deck, not limited to Julie’s eccentric roundelay of Airbnb guests, several feckless exes and a handsome, predatory love interest for Mandy.
For all its plot machinery, “My Ex-Life” mostly plays out like an old album by one of David’s beloved 1960s French chanteuses, rescued from Julie’s attic: winsome and charmingly episodic, with a lingering wisp of melancholy.
Read if you like: Knickknacks, Noël Coward, postcard vacation towns along the Eastern Seaboard.
Available from: A Flatiron paperback, or a divorce lawyer’s freebie shelf.
“Kiss of the Wolf,” by Jim Shepard
Fiction, 1994
Life keeps throwing loops at Joanie Mucherino. Abandoned by her shiftless husband, she’s struggling to stay afloat on a teacher’s salary, raise her young son, Todd, and not succumb too much to neighborhood pity. (“Even now I get looks, like I’m walking around with a sign that says, I’m alone, I’m unhappy, don’t be mean to me.”)
So when her attention wanders on the drive home from Todd’s confirmation party — an awkward affair featuring sad antipasto and a distracted phone call from his dad — and she inadvertently kills a man, it feels like one disaster too many; she panics and flees the scene, with Todd in the passenger seat.
Except it turns out that Tommy, the guy she ran over, isn’t many degrees removed from her tight-knit Italian American enclave. His parents are acquaintances of hers, and he was involved in some kind of shady business with Bruno Minea, a local car salesman whose (mostly) unrequited love for Joanie is a fan he’s flamed since they were kids.
Bruno is also possibly a complete psychopath, or at least dangerously unbothered by certain moral guardrails. And Todd, steeped in altar-boy Catholic guilt over the accident and still desperately missing his dad, becomes more like a small overheated teapot waiting to crack every day.
Shepard, a stalwart of the short-story pages of Esquire and The New Yorker, spins his taut little noir of a novel with black humor and colloquial verve: “Kiss of the Wolf” reads like a “Sopranos” subplot fed through a Raymond Carver filter, and that is almost entirely a compliment.
The ending, as abruptly as it comes, is a humdinger, too, obscuring the line between wolves and sheep until the last paragraph. (The fact that my thrifted copy features an inscrutable hand-drawn note from Shepard himself, “For Amanda, in honor of our three hours together”? That’s just gravy.)
Read if you like: Sausage and peppers, the Coen brothers movie “Miller’s Crossing,” assigning DSM-5 traits to everyone you know.
Available from: Harcourt, or darker shoulders off the interstate.
Why don’t you …
Parse the layers of Ling Ma’s wry, dreamlike “Los Angeles,” in which a wealthy housewife whiles away her indolent days with 100 live-in ex-boyfriends? (“101 burgers at Umami Burger, 101 admission tickets to the Getty, 101 Golden Milks at Moon Juice.”)
Ponder permanent celibacy after picking up Sara Manguso’s bruising marriage novel “Liars”?
Stream “45 Years,” the gorgeous and devastating Charlotte Rampling-Tom Courtenay drama based on a David Constantine story? Because it is never too late to be usurped by a first love (even, or especially, a dead one).
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