Dear readers,
Long before I realized some of Teddy Roosevelt’s exploits ought to make me squirm, I spent many deliriously happy hours at the Museum of Natural History. Those dioramas! Those tableaux morts! Right after “namer of crayon hues,” the job of positioning dead animals just so seemed like one of the most glamorous vocations out there, an opportunity to freeze Mother Nature herself and examine every last bit of what she was up to.
The novels I write about here remind me of my favorite displays. Both capture extremely precise moments in American history: Miami on the eve of the Bay of Pigs, a California peopled by aging hippies in 1984 who dread Reaganite belt-tightening. Best of all, no animal remains were harmed.
—Joumana
“Mice 1961,” by Stacey Levine
Fiction, 2024
Strange things are going on near Reef Way. Jody and Mice are orphaned half sisters, crushed by the death of their mother and terrified of losing each other. Still, that’s no reason for Jody to be so nasty to Mice, who is forbidden from leaving the house during the day for fear of aggravating her albinism, or for Mice to assault Jody with gnomic questions that would drive even a sphinx bananas.
Our window onto them is Girtle, who has insinuated her way into keeping house for the sisters in exchange for a place to sleep (behind their lint-colored couch). She is an oddball herself, one curiously attuned to the mechanics of storytelling. I wonder how she would feel knowing that “Mice 1961” was among this year’s Pulitzer finalists.
Figurative language is a privilege that some authors abuse, but Levine’s is a marvel. Consider Mice’s “milkscape” of skin and her “bobbing, electrostatic moon of hair,” which Jody uses a fork to rake through. In a scene of panic, Girtle notes that her own limbs are as “dense and still as butter sticks.” Later, during a romantic moment, “a storm of a kiss blew in.”
The climax arrives at an extended neighborhood potluck, with hand-wringing (and dubious information shared) about communists, and a deadly pet named Khrushchev. The dialogue is so deranged — a compliment, I swear! — that it reads like the kind of script girls might invent for their Barbies during a sleepover. “I’ll live a long time because I eat fruit,” chirps a neighbor named Millie. “When I hear loud voices my heart beats hard,” says another. Millie responds, “My heart beats hard when I see a dead dog.”
I knew going in that this novel would be weird, that the sisters’ relationship would be extra freaky and that the action would culminate in a party. I didn’t expect that it would also play around with the idea of narrative itself. Throughout, Girtle frets over locating the story’s “helper,” a bland interloper who might charge into the sisters’ lives in a deus ex machina to — what? Liberate Mice from her local bullies? Get Jody a nerve pill? As more time goes by with no helper in sight, you come to believe that the true underwire of the story is Girtle herself.
Read if you like: “Daria,” Jell-O salad, Peter Brooks.
Available from: I purchased my copy from City Lights online the day the Pulitzers were announced, and it arrived in no time.
“Vineland,” by Thomas Pynchon
Fiction, 1990
“Vineland” opens with so suitable an overture you will instantly know whether its humor is for you. I will summarize it thus:
Zoyd Wheeler, a former hippie (funny), is preparing for his annual pantomime of insanity to be aired on local TV (funnier), which involves his dressing up in a frock and wig, revving a chain saw and engaging in transfenestration (still funnier!), to ensure he can continue receiving a government subsidy for people with emotional disturbances.
All that slapstick gives way to a more sobering reality. Zoyd and his daughter, Prairie, are scraping by in their Northern California enclave, and neither has recovered from the disappearance and betrayal of Prairie’s mother. Zoyd’s fiercest opponent is Brock Vond, a fed with potent sexual allure who wooed Zoyd’s wife away from her family, and who seems poised to torture Zoyd even more. Also: The year is 1984, and if Reagan wins re-election, Zoyd’s pretty sure his disability checks will disappear.
Prairie, as levelheaded as a teenager working in a Buddhist pizza joint could be, stumbles upon a key to her mother’s history at a wedding. Soon enough, she is barreling toward a reunion with the parent she hasn’t seen since she was little.
When “Vineland” came out, reviewers had the temerity to dismiss it as “a breather between biggies.” That is ridiculous. It may not be as imposing or overtly ontological as some of Pynchon’s better-known works, but it is a fast-acting pleasure agent with an unmistakable political bent. Allegedly this book inspired Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, slated for release in September, so now is an ideal moment to read it.
Read if you like: P.T.A., martial arts, vegetarian pizza.
Available from: Your local anarchist bookstore, or even a capitalist one.
Why don’t you …
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Fall in love with Oum Kulthum in the pages of “I Loved You for Your Voice”?
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Marvel at Eleanor Catton’s blending of astrological divination and gold prospecting in her Booker-winning novel, “The Luminaries”?
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Accompany Kathy Acker to Haiti via, fittingly, “Kathy Acker Goes to Haiti”?
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