WELLNESS by Nathan Hill
It is a big, ambitious novel about all the different people we inhabit in a lifetime. Some are in the same suit of armor; others are reinventing themselves repeatedly. This is the story of Elizabeth and Jack, their childhoods, courtship, parenting, careers, and marriage within the framework of contemporary American hyperbole and self-reflection. There’s much to admire in Hill’s ability to write with such intimacy and care about so much that is misunderstood about living. Loved it!
Favorite line(s): Beyond all the poetry, beyond all the songs, love is this, my dear: it’s an expansion of the self. It’s when the boundaries of the self spread out to include someone else, and what used to be them now becomes you.
“That sounds kind of nice.”
It certainly feels nice! It feels quite wonderful, to identify some quality within another person—their charisma, their charm, their temperament, their point of view their knowledge, their resources, their loos—you see this thing that they have and you want to have it too. And so the boundaries of the self ooze toward them, like an amoeba, like that blob from the movie about the blob. You glom on to them and surround them and subsume them, until you fully incorporate and digest this other person slowly over the course of many months.
“You’ve suddenly made it sound not so nice.”
You identify a thing you like in someone else, and you pull it within the conceptual borders of your own self. And the subjective experience of this process, the delusion the mind serves up to explain it, this is what we’ve given the name “love.”
HORSE by Geraldine Brooks
Lexington is a Civil War-era racehorse at the center of this novel. Theo, an art history student living in Georgetown, retrieves an oil painting of the horse from his neighbor’s garbage in 2019. Around the same time, a zoologist finds the skeletal remains of Lexington in the attic of the Smithsonian. So successful a racehorse was Lexington that his owner had the painting commissioned in the 1850s, and his bones were kept after his death to understand his unique physique. In Lexington’s early years, his trainer is given the horse instead of a year’s wages so that if Lexington proves a winner, the trainer might be able to purchase his son back from enslavers. This is pre-Civil War Kentucky. Jarret, the son, takes over training Lexington and is bartered back and forth for his skills, and eventually, both trainer and horse are sold. Brooks uses Horse as a metaphor for race and ownership of humans and animals. Throw in betrayals and several plot twists, and Brooks has written a historical thriller with the necessary mysterious threads woven up through modern-day.
Favorite line(s): Jarret shaded his eyes against the dazzle of the frost-crusted ground. He often wished the horse could see the place they’d come to. Even in the dead of winter, Woodburn was a magnificient prospect: four thousand acres of rolling fields marked off by neat fences and stone walls, containing what must be some of the richest soil in the world. In the nearest field, the farm’s large flock of Southdown sheep—seven or eight hundred—clustered together for warmth. In the far field, fat Durham cattle stood apart, all facing into the wind, attentive as an audience attending a concert. Mature trees, bark lacquered black, fingered upward. The twigs formed fine black traceries against the white sky. They reminded Jarret of pencil lines on snowy canvas.
MARTYR! By Kaveh Akbar
I loved this book. Akbar is a poet; this is his first novel, hopefully not his last. Cyrus is two years sober and a dabbling poet in his 20s when he decides to write a book about Martyrs. Why? He wants to believe in something and someone. His ambivalence about everything in his life begs the question of what a purposeful life truly means? What kind of death makes the dead person’s life more relevant? Cyrus’s mother supposedly died on an Iranian jetliner shot out of the sky by U.S. Navy missiles. His father moved them from Tehran to Indiana to work his whole life on a chicken farm. Were they martyrs? Interiority in action is Akbar’s superpower as a writer. He moves us along through Cyrus’s thought processes with poetry and conviction and with an eye toward the end. What are we as humans, if not the writer of our own stories?
Favorite line(s): “I don’t have one piece of my brain for romantic love and one for narcotic love and one for family and one for art. It all washed together. Tintoretto makes me think of my youngest boy. O’Keeffe makes me think of my oldest. Right now Roya makes me think of lavender. Of Sarah Vaughan’s ‘Solitude.’ And also this song from my childhood, ‘Ha Trang.’ Which also makes me think of my wife! Which is fucked up,” she laughed. Cyrus laughed too.
“I think I get that,” he said, “the mess of it.”
“I think you do too,” Sang replied.
They sat there quietly for a time, watching. Cyrus’s foot pounded. He felt angry, confused, sick—but also a little excited. Which confused him….Cyrus once read an anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another. It was an attractive idea.
lavender. Of Sarah Vaughan’s ‘Solitude.’ And also this song from my childhood, ‘Ha Trang.’ Which also makes me think of my wife! Which is fucked up,” she laughed. Cyrus laughed too.
“I think I get that,” he said, “the mess of it.”
“I think you do too,” Sang replied.
They sat there quietly for a time, watching. Cyrus’s foot pounded. He felt angry, confused, sick—but also a little excited. Which confused him….Cyrus once read an anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another. It was an attractive idea.