Dear readers,
Anyone who is bad at meditating will be familiar with the tension that obtains when you try to force serenity. Nothing could be more aggravating than being told to relax — especially when you’re issuing the order yourself.
In lieu of attempting to clear my head through more direct means, I’ve been gravitating toward contemplative novels and poetry this spring. Two of them below, for your consideration.
—Molly
“Judgement Day,” by Penelope Lively
Fiction, 1980
First, the place. Laddenham is a country village in England The time is 1980-ish. Light industry is booming and new houses are going up to capture prosperous overspill from London.
The drama of “Judgement Day” revolves around a volunteer committee for restoring a local church. Members include a vicar with a lurid fantasy life, a clever and stifled housewife, a sorrowful retired accountant and a blowhard. Despite the fact that nobody present has any interest in ecclesiastical architecture, the meetings are hot with petty slights, indignant stares, fragile alliances and hostile incursions.
Having overlooked this little novel in previous Penelope Lively adventures, it might now be my favorite — for its clever plot, comfiness and density of humorous and/or devastating insights. And for a very fine use of punctuation, too. Admire the following passage, wherein a mother watches her young kids at a picnic:
The bodies of children, Clare thought, have the same grace as plants: They sprawl and reach and bend, they help themselves to the atmosphere, to light and warmth and nourishment. They neither posture nor contrive; they are unconcerned: They are a delight to the eye.
Read if you like: Tessa Hadley, Sally Rooney, Margaret Drabble, the 1945 David Lean film “Brief Encounter.”
Available from: A good library or bookstore.
“Gone Gone,” by Todd Meyers
Nonfiction, 2025
In a rare example of blurb accuracy, one of the endorsements printed on this book likens its writing to the ethereal melting of “snowflakes on your tongue.” That comment gets at the genre puzzle of “Gone Gone,” which I read as a combination of poetry and field notes about the opioid crisis, while the author, Todd Meyers, describes it as “essay and ethnography,” and the back cover as “creative nonfiction” and “medical anthropology.” All would seem correct. Good luck to the brave librarians tasked with determining a shelf for this marvel!
In tender and photographic prose, Meyers documents and dilates upon the lives of three people (or characters?) — their loves, jokes, overdoses, shoplifting convictions, childhoods, joys, losses. Over the past two decades we’ve seen a great deal of excellent reporting and fiction on the mass casualty event that is opioid addiction; this is the first account I’ve found that must be respirated rather than read. Effortlessly intricate.
Read if you like: “How to Stop Time: Heroin From A to Z,” by Anne Marlowe; “Vectors,” by James Richardson; Sarah Manguso’s “The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend”; Annie Ernaux.
Available from: Duke University Press.
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