Dear readers,
Apparently, I was one of the last to learn that they don’t teach cursive anymore, at least not in New York City public schools. Maybe I am silly to mourn it; like milkmen and landlines, some things naturally see themselves out.
Even my own longhand tends to cramp now when I try to write anything more substantial than a grocery list, the weakling muscles of a lost habit turning my words sloppy and serial killer-ish. (Beloved birthday-card recipients, please believe me! It’s an expression of love, not a ransom note.)
Still, I miss the intimacy of analog communication; the low-stakes thrill of a voice unfiltered by Times New Roman or (sigh) Comic Sans. And the two selections in this week’s newsletter, while typeset like any other respectable novel, feel like book-length letters to me: chatty, confiding and charmingly digressive, like dispatches from an inordinately smart and waggish pen pal.
—Leah
“Landscape With Traveler,” by Barry Gifford
Fiction, 1980
Gifford is probably best known for his 1989 novel “Wild at Heart,” which David Lynch adapted into the cult film of the same name. (Together, they also wrote the screenplay for the director’s loamy 1997 neo-noir “Lost Highway.”)
Now in his late 70s, Gifford’s become a torchbearer, too, for a certain idea of fading American bohemia, a romantic figure wreathed in beatnik bops and nicotine. And there’s a zingy on-the-road energy to “Landscape With Traveler,” whose subtitle, “The Pillow Book of Francis Reeves,” evokes the classical Japanese form of zuihitsu (“random jottings”).
Its loose collection of musings and anecdotes, though, feels even less formal than that, a scrappy-rascal picaresque. And our Mr. Reeves is one happy hedonist: A child of the Depression seemingly untouched by any passing rain cloud, he wafts through a life he finds both charmed and charming, from his free-range Baton Rouge boyhood to a breezy post-college stint in the Navy and a middling dance career in Manhattan.
Along the way, he enthusiastically beds many men and a smattering of women, without too much concern for love or money. But Francis is no sybarite dummy; he has as many thoughts on Christopher Isherwood’s biography of Rama Krishna and the seasonal pleasures of Gustav Mahler as he does on orgies (overrated) or the bus to Fire Island (delightful, with a pack of toasted almonds and a cocktail).
Read if you like: Dance belts, moody Viennese composers, speculating on the sex lives of your Greatest Generation neighbors.
Available from: A Vintage Contemporaries paperback or, one hopes, the archival lost-and-found bins at Port Authority.
“The Hero of This Book,” by Elizabeth McCracken
Fiction, 2022
“I don’t write autofiction. I don’t even know what it is, though it sounds like it might be written by a robot, or a kiosk, or a European.”
That explanation (or evasion) arrives early on in “The Hero of This Book,” meant to mark the meta spot. And yet here is the Texas-dwelling, Boston-born 50-something writer and professor Elizabeth McCracken, relaying the story of a Texas-dwelling, Boston-born 50-something writer and professor who sounds very much like — but is not! — Elizabeth McCracken.
It’s August of 2019 (“This was the summer before the world stopped”), and Not-Elizabeth has landed alone in London to grieve the recent loss of her 83-year-old mother, Natalie, revisiting some of their shared memories there.
She wanders through a Rothko exhibit at the Tate, unmoved by nonfigurative modern art, and seeks more familiar comfort in a local production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” She eats bad Anglo-Saxon sandwiches (oh, the food crimes covered by the phrase “cheese and cress”) and ponders the peculiarities of her late parents’ lives.
It’s Natalie, though, who plays the main muse here, a bright spark plug of a woman stricken at birth by cerebral palsy but otherwise unsinkable. McCracken recalls the details of her mother’s feet, too small and oddly shaped for standard ladies’ department-store wear; her endless curiosity and her penchant for plays and estate sales and what she called her “perambulations,” whether by crutch or by motorized scooter.
If “Hero” is a love letter and a eulogy to all that, it is also, McCracken keeps reminding us in frequent fourth-wall-breaking asides, still fiction. Eventually, she does spell out at least part of what makes it so: The narrator on the page is single and childless, unlike McCracken, who shares two offspring with her novelist husband, Edward Carey. She also has a real-life sibling, a very nice brother.
Both Elizabeths, though, share the wry, piquant voice of the author of “Bowlaway,” “An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination,” and several other wonderful books that are each, in their own ways, about the same truism that McCracken tucks toward the end of this one: “Your family is the first novel that you know.”
Read if you like: Thames walks, writers on writing, brutally honest TripAdvisor reviews.
Available from: Ecco, or maybe a good grief group.
Why don’t you …
Delve deeper into Francis Reeves’s freewheeling 1970s New York via Andrew Holleran’s classic gay-liberation novel “Dancer From the Dance,” reissued by Harper Perennial last year with a new introduction by Garth Greenwell?
Further your forensic inquiry of what it means to be (or have) a mom via Elena Ferrante’s 2006 novel “The Lost Daughter” — or stream the itchy, excellent 2021 film adaptation?
Take your McCracken bite-size, via her lovely 2010 short story “Property”? It’s funny and sad and makes weirdly perfect use of the word “psoriatic.”
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