Dear readers,
It’s your old correspondent, Molly. When I last tiptoed through your inbox it was early spring. The earth was a tepid crust, clocks had recently sprung forward, and I possessed not one but two brains! (Because I was pregnant. The child is now external, as well as healthy and adored.)
It is a joy to be back in touch with you. Below are two books that, while not technically “thrillers,” did recently thrill me.
—Molly
“Vectors,” by James Richardson
Aphorisms and micro-essays, 2001
Obsession turns even the gentlest reader into a tyrant and a spendthrift: I’ve now purchased three copies of “Vectors” for people whose opinion of it I cannot live without. The book is a collection of 500 aphorisms and “10-second essays” by the poet James Richardson. They are sequenced with great élan so I would not wish to isolate just one; instead, here are two in a row:
178.
If you say All is well, I believe you. If I say All is well, I’m abbreviating.
179.
Every life is allocated 100 seconds of true genius. They might be enough. If we could just be sure which ones they were.
The aphorism is a terrifying form to master or even attempt. How do you render an idea irreducible without veering into the hostile territories of banality or glibness? How do you discuss Big Topics (desire, death, friendship, mercy, anger, suffering, secrets) briefly without rendering them miniature?
If anyone reading operates a motel, you could try placing copies of “Vectors” in all the bedside tables to see what happens to your Yelp reviews. Only good things, probably. Perhaps amazing things.
Read if you like: Michael Gizzi, Lydia Davis, Mary Ruefle, Anne Carson
Available from: Copper Canyon press
“Us Fools,” by Nora Lange
Fiction, 2024
Great American Novels are still being published in 2024 and here is one of them. “Us Fools” could have issued only from a small press (this one, Two Dollar Radio, is a family-run enterprise out of Ohio). If it had been processed and extruded by one of the “Big Five” publishers, the novel would have been minimized into a low-fat tale of sisterhood or the Midwest or regeneration or class or education instead of a banquet including everything listed above.
It is narrated by the younger and saner of two sisters growing up on a farm in Illinois in the 1980s. The girls are overworked, underfed, exposed to things edifying (Ovid, Melville) and not (their parents’ sex life, heavy machinery, secondhand menthol smoke, debt collectors, “The Sally Jessy Raphael Show”).
As with forced plants, these adversarial growing conditions have interesting outcomes. The older sister, Joanne, is impulsive, clever and handy, with a “delightfully unformulaic face.” Bernadette, the younger, is a watchful archivist of her sister’s wild life and times, following Joanne from padded institutional rooms to a 10-by-40 trailer in Alaska. When someone asks why she’s so devoted to her sibling, Bernadette replies: “I’m never bored with her. Which was to say, in her presence I’m never bored of myself.” Good answer.
Read if you like: Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbe’s “Lost Girls,” Jane Campion, Vanessa Veselka, Zadie Smith
Available from: Two Dollar Radio or your local bookstore
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The post Molly Recommends Small Takes on Big Ideas, and a Novel of Sisterhood appeared first on New York Times.