This Week In Books: “Joan Didion’s Favorite Books from the Library of Joan Didion”
“As it now turns out, there is no likely future for goats making spider silk.”
Dear Reader,
I’ve been reading this very good novel called O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker, originally published in 1991 to great acclaim I guess and recently reissued by Scriber in the US, all French of flap and deckled of edge, with blurbs on it like Ali Smith saying that it’s “one of the best least-known novels of the twentieth century.” Maggie O’Farrell gives the introduction, telling us that she used to work at a newspaper and part of her job was to decipher Elspeth Barker’s handwritten book reviews, which were submitted by mail. When O’Farrell couldn’t figure out a word, she had to call Barker on the phone for clarification. The calls were peppered with recitations of Greek verse and would end abruptly following statements like “the pig’s gotten into the kitchen.” This basically seems like what it would be like to communicate with Janet, the star of O Caledonia—it’s Barker’s only novel and so highly autobiographical that her lack of further output may indicate an only-one-story-to-tell situation. Or, maybe she stopped writing novels because this one begins with the highly autobiographical main character being murdered at sixteen, which you have to respect in terms of self-abnegation, but probably implies a not strictly healthy approach. Like, it’s ok to stop after that.
And it’s got great paragraphs. As I was saying the other day, I am an aficionado of the paragraph. Here’s one:
On summer afternoons, when Hector and Vera thought that she was on the cricket pitch, a place she feared, she slipped away through the rhododendron jungle to the mossy silent path which led to the old hen house. The hens had all escaped long ago. Rab the hero dog had slaughtered most of them. He was condemned to wear a bloody corpse slung around his neck—primitive aversion therapy. Now and then a solitary Rhode Island or a snowy Leghorn would emerge from the bushes, peer about, squawk in horror, and retreat. No one cared. The flock of hens had been another of Vera’s attempts to introduce some element of gentle domesticity to the unyielding landscape of the glen, and like her orchard it had not prospered. However, the dank shadows of the hen house, its rotten lichened timbers and shafts of sunlight, received Janet’s taciturn presence and gave her sanctuary. Here she spent the long afternoons reading, and copying her favorite poems into an exercise book. Sometimes she would go farther up the path and come to the wide grassy clearing where the two gaunt old swings, tall and angular as guillotines or gallows, dominated the slope; there, with minimal effort, it was possible to soar to great heights, the steep bank falling away beneath, the blank pine branches against the blue sky rushing outstretched to embrace her. The scent of the pines, the throb of the wood pigeons, the shearing glissade of the circular saw at the distant wood mill and the perfect arc of the swing, as it rose and sank and rose again, lulled her into a trance of happiness. One day, as she swung, she watched a pheasant lead her brood of chicks through the long fine grass. Suddenly the mother bird sank low to the ground, the little ones ran straggling and cheeping towards her, and a great shadow fell across them, across Janet too, as she whirled around and around, unwinding from the twisted chains of the swing. A huge eagle was passing slowly above her, impervious and purposeful, its wings scarcely beating. It drifted on up the glen until in the distance it spanned the rift between the hills, a creature greater than its landscape.
A creature greater than its landscape!! Right.
So I’ll be taking next week off from the books newsletter for Thanksgiving, but here’s a list of some cool books of 2022 to tide you over.
—Dana
1. “Departures” by Nawal Arjini, The Nation
Nawal Arjini reviews Michelle de Kretser’s Scary Monsters (Catapult).
In life, as in Michelle de Kretser’s novels, Australians are always traveling. If they’re not in New York or London or flooding the perimeter of Asia, you’ll find them in the bush or on the reef. It’s a settler colony whose inhabitants remain a bit unsettled. At the same time, prospective migrants from across the Indian and Pacific oceans line up at embassies or are shunted to brutal island detention facilities, where they await the dim possibility of a new Australian life. Successive governments have expressed only vicious disdain for the migrants accumulating offshore: Don’t you know you’re supposed to want to leave?
Michelle de Kretser, once an editor of the Lonely Planet travel guides, has spent the last decades writing novels about globalization from two perspectives: that of the person who can afford to travel and that of the person who is forced to move. In her latest book, Scary Monsters, she deepens this divide and makes it literal, with the two halves of her narrative printed inversely so that, depending on how you hold the book, either the tourist section or the migrant section comes first…
2. “Whose Trans Realism?” by Kay Gabriel, The Yale Review
Kay Gabriel writes about Imogen Binnie’s Nevada, recently reissued by FSG.
Here’s something I remember about Nevada. A couple years after the now-defunct Topside Press first published Imogen Binnie’s novel in 2013, a lot of young trans writers I knew called it a book that made them want to write. I remember a website, Have You Read Nevada, where you could download a free PDF of the book. I remember half a dozen conversations where a young woman said the book helped her transition, and many more where someone spoke about gifting the book to a friend they suspected might do the same. I remember the trend of referring to that type of person as a “James H.,” in reference to the Walmart clerk in the titular state whom the novel’s protagonist, Maria Griffiths, tries and fails to force into a gender epiphany. I remember feeling sort of superior to the trend at the time, and I also remember loaning out my copy to shy, awkward people who seemed like they wanted permission for something. In retrospect, this feverish exchange feels a little youthful. But it remains notable that a funny-dark punk novel about a fuckup bookseller on a doomed road trip put trans life in conceptual reach for a lot of people…
3. “Was I What You Wanted Me to Be?” by Laura Miller, Slate
Laura Miller reviews new books about Prince, including Nick Hornby’s Dickens and Prince (Riverhead) and Hilton Als’s My Pinup (New Directions).
…Hornby is able to point out that both Prince and Dickens were, from an early age, preternaturally productive, compulsive creators… Both men had hard-knock childhoods in which they sometimes felt unwanted, and these experiences marked them for life. Hornby believes that this made them acutely conscious of situations in which they were being ripped off. (Prince battled his record company and Dickens advocated for copyright protections, which were nearly nonexistent in his time.) Were they driven by a need to prove themselves to a cold world, or simply by the galvanic force of their talent? Either way, Hornby identifies with their lack of “perfectionism,” by which he means not the imperative to “make things objectively perfect,” but rather “the act of doing things over and over again until you’re sick of them”...
…The Prince that New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als celebrates in My Pinup, a long essay about the artist, bears no resemblance to the fanatical workhorse Hornby admires. An often cryptically personal text, My Pinup occasionally addresses the late artist directly, and Als is entitled to this. He met Prince, apparently to research a profile that was never written, and Prince was taken enough by Als to suggest the writer move to Paisley Park so the two men could collaborate on a book together. Als wisely demurred, realizing that “if I went to Minneapolis I would never come back.”
4. “A Friendly Face” by Sevgi Soysal, Words Without Borders
An excerpt from Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn (Archipelago), originally published in 2003 and translated by Maureen Freely.
In the half-finished apartment building right across from her, there were always two plainclothes policemen on guard. Staring right at her, every time she opened her curtains. In the end it gave her strength, to watch them watching her. To wonder what they made of their pointless job, and where they found the patience. To have to sit there, staring at her curtains, day after day, for months on end—this was a sentence not much different from Oya’s. Their unfamiliar faces had unsettled her at first, but by the month’s end, she’d grown used to them. She’d peek through the curtains now and again, to see if they were still on the job. It made her feel less lonely, to know that they were there.
5. “Goodbye to All That” by Hannah Gold, The Baffler
6. “At the Joan Didion Estate Sale” by Sophie Haigney, The Paris Review
Hannah Gold and Sophie Haigney go to Joan Didion’s estate sale.
[Gold:] When the auction of Joan Didion’s possessions, to be held this week, was announced in August, the press coverage thrummed with ecstatic anticipation. Fans were encouraged to “Drop Everything!” for “a chance to come as close as possible to the famed writer.” There was no one quite like Didion, the critic and novelist who embodied California style and New York precision—and now her devotees could see, perhaps even own, a pair of her legendary sunglasses. In October, the New York Times published a selection of items from the auction, noting that, for some fans, “buying something—anything—from Ms. Didion’s estate amounts to owning a piece of her life.” Among the items included, the Times notes in a very loud parenthetical, is the drop-leaf dining table at which Didion’s husband, John Dunne, died of a heart attack in 2003. Crassly, an image of the table with the estimated price to own this piece of Didion’s life is included immediately below. (It is predicted to sell for $1,000–$1,500).
[Haigney:] The third lot, described as “Joan Didion’s Favorite Books from the Library of Joan Didion,” a grouping even the auctioneer seemed dubious about, sold for $26,000. I have that edition of Robert Lowell, I kept thinking, looking at the photos as the bids climbed and climbed, though of course the point is that I don’t: that’s the whole logic of this ordeal, that it’s not my Lowell but hers. A portrait of her looking sad and waiflike, up next, sold for $110,000. Her Celine sunglasses, estimated to sell for $400–$800, went for $27,000.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The End of the World Review to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.