A Hopeful Addiction

Recent books that justify a restless itch to read

Those who know me know that I’m a serial reader—I always have a book going. This is something that’s usually noted approvingly by people trying to be nice, though I’m not sure that’s warranted. I sometimes feel I read books the way other people smoke cigarettes or drink coffee—or wine: to fill time or absorb restlessness. (Exercise, which might also fall into this category, seems more obviously beneficial.) Few of the books I read seem memorable; actually, they sometimes all seem to run together. Every once in a while, though, I come across something so deeply pleasurable that it makes me remember why I do it and keeps me going.

Over the holidays, I happened to have two such experiences in a row. I belatedly read a novel I had picked up weeks earlier: a rack-sized paperback edition of Michael Connelly’s 2021 thriller The Dark Hours, which pairs his longtime protagonist Harry Bosch with his recently minted L.A. detective Renee Ballard (they first collaborated in the 2017 police procedural The Late Show). I don’t know Los Angeles nearly as well as, say, Robert Parker’s Boston or Ed McBain’s New York, but I always feel like I’m in assured hands with Connelly. Still, beyond the setting and characters, it’s the sheer narrative drive of The Dark Hours, like other Connelly novels, that leads me to turn to them again and again. They’re simply entertaining. Which is no mean feat.

I then followed this up with a book I’ve been coveting for months, and received as a Christmas gift: the George Saunders short story collection Liberation Day. I first discovered Saunders, a bit belatedly, a decade ago with his short story collection The Tenth of December—in addition to that book, I also recommend his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), which deals with the death of the 16th president’s grief over the death of his son Willie. The Tenth of December contained what I regard as one of the greatest stories I’ve ever read: “The Semplica Girls Diaries,” first published in The New Yorker (“Semplica” is a nonsense word; it came to Saunders, who worked as a technical writer, in a dream.) Saunders fiction frequently wanders into the realm of science-fiction, and this story is set in a near future in which a loving father seeks to please a petulant daughter with what we gradually realize is a truly monstrous cultural practice. That this gradual revelation is coupled with laugh-out-loud humor adds to the story’s remarkable texture. But “The Semplica Girls Diaries,” with its breathtaking moral clarity, is finally about the mystery of empathy: where it comes from, how it emerges, and how, in an irredeemably corrupt world, it manages to affect others.

The title story of Liberation Day revisits this territory but reverses the perspective, giving us the point of view of the oppressed rather than the oppressor. But once again, nothing in Saunders world is ever simple. The bad people are not without their good qualities; the social justice activists overreach, with tragic results for themselves and others. Yet there’s never any doubt here, or in any Saunders story, about his fundamental alignment with those on the short end of the societal stick, whether in a modern office or a surreal amusement park. (Another recommendation: the wonderfully zany 1996 collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, whose title story is another classic.) Even when we know they’re wrong in what they say and what they do, like the fretful mother “The Mom of Bold Action,” we can’t help but like these people because Saunders is so damn humane. Especially this woman, an incorrigible writer of hilarious mental narratives, whose mind wanders as she waits for her child to respond to her summons:

“‘The Son Who Failed to Reply.’ Once upon a time, there was a son who, when called, failed to reply. Was he deliberately ignoring her? Because pre-adolescent? Was he masturbating yet? Was that her business? The mother faithfully checked underwear/sheets for signs of masturbation, so that, as needed, she could let him know, in her quiet way, that everyone, even famous people, even our great, historical—

“A Time for Oneself.” George Washington, twelve years of age, lay on his bed …. (And it goes from there.)

“The Mom of Bold Action” makes a series of disconcerting swerves before it ends on a mild note—milder than I liked when I finished it. Except that I’ve kept thinking about the story ever since.

Saunders’s story “Sparrow,” which clocks in at under ten pages, narrates the life of a mousy woman who falls in love, narrated in a small-town third-person collective voice. “Please don’t let this end badly,” I said aloud to myself when I was halfway through it. I won’t tell you the ending; my point is to indicate the depth of my emotional investment in the story. Saunders does that to you.

Liberation Day ends with a very short story that packs a powerful punch, “My House.” It seems to be about the vagaries of the real estate business but is marked by a stunning reversal strongly reminiscent of O. Henry stories like “The Gift of the Magi” (remember that one? About the poor couple who buy each other gifts)?

From there it was on to a somewhat less arresting, but still satisfying, experience: the latest by Jane Smiley, A Dangerous Business (the business in question that of being a woman). Smiley loves playing with literary history. Her masterpiece, A Thousand Acres (1991), is a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear set on a midwestern farm. Ten Days in the Hills rewires Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1350) in contemporary Hollywood. The inspiration for A Dangerous Business—for the protagonist no less than the author—is Edgar Allan Poe’s marvelous prototype for the modern detective, C. Auguste Dupin, famously featured in his short stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Detective.” Smiley’s self-appointed detective, a sex worker in antebellum Monterey, California, teams up with a friend to investigate the murders of women in the town when local officials show no interest in investigating (quite a premise, no?). The plot lacks that narrative drive of Connelly, but the sense of local color is very strong.

Smiley’s sense of humor shines through in another one of her classics, her sendup of academic life in Moo (1995). But the king of American academic satire is Richard Russo, whose Straight Man (1998) I re-read recently and found every bit as funny the second time around. I’m still in a laughing mood because my prospective daughter-in-law gave me another undiscovered gem, Wake Up, Sir!, a romp in the vein of P.G. Wodehouse, one that weaves Judaism, alcoholism, and queer life into its Anglo-Saxon framework.

We need books like these. They help us feel less crazy—crazy in the urge to read, less crazy in the lives we lead. So I’m not quite ready to kick the habit.