MANLY MAN’S BOOK CLUB (Part II) Ladies’ Edition
As promised last week, I wanted to suggest another five books for young men who might be struggling with developing a habit of reading good books. I’ve seen a few similar projects posted on social media in the past year, but mostly these titles veer into the school of the “classical Western canon,” which I find fairly boring. The books that follow might not be in the recent publication section of the bookstore, but I’ve tried to pick some titles you might not necessarily anticipate while still trying to remain in the general contemporary category. There are a lot more familiar titles by writers I admire like Virginia Woolf and Elena Ferrante that do not appear on this list but who should be in the wheelhouse of any well-read Manly Man.
For this week, we have:
I was attracted to this novel because I had read comparisons to Kent Haruf. Like Haruf, Hulse writes with an understated lyricism, which suits her quiet, landscape-aware novel. But Hulse’s debut novel is a hell of a lot more than Americana pastiche. Her work is distinguished by powerful but plainspoken wisdom that belongs to a writer at the height of their career rather than at the beginning. The novel is about a widower named Wes Carver who returns to his small Montana town to come to terms with what it means to live in the wake of his wife’s death. But it also explores the legacy of having suffered an act of violence, specifically the past experiences Wes had when he worked as a corrections officer in a local prison and was taken hostage and tortured during a prison riot. The injuries he sustained during this ordeal destroyed his ability to play the fiddle and ruined his prospects as a talented musician. It’s a hard-hitting but emotionally sensitive book and sits squarely between being a literary and thriller novel. Her follow-up called Eden Mine is also worth your time.
H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald
Some of my favorite nonfiction pieces wrestle with other books that have preceded it. Helen MacDonald leans into that technique hard with her memoir of falconry, which not only explores her familial connections to the practice but also engages in a close reading with T.H. White’s classic The Goshawk. MacDonald writes movingly about her relationship to nature and the particular and strange love we can develop for animals. But what makes any memoir stand out is its ability to make the author’s obsessions your own, and she does this stunningly well. By being immersed in her expansive knowledge of falconry, we access the marvelous variety of what it means to live in the natural world with astonishment and attention. This is an excellent companion book to last week’s nonfiction recommendation, Indian Creek Chronicles by Pete Fromm.
Moshfegh has an unerring talent for making her reader uncomfortable. Eileen does this with a vengeance. Set in a noirish 1964, the novel is the first-person story of an alienated young woman named Eileen Dunlop. Her days are spent in a drably fatalistic boys’ juvenile detention unit where she works cheerlessly as a secretary; her nights are no less an imprisonment, living with her abusive father, a disabled cop. Like much of Moshfegh’s other work, the narrator languishes in the perpetual dirt of shame, and you can feel the abjectness coming through the prose in the same way you can in someone like Celine or Dostoevsky. But there’s a dark energy emanating from the center of Eileen. We see it come fully into play when a seductive psychiatrist named Rebecca Saint John turns up, setting off a confusing play of sexual and psychological tension that leads to revelations about the boys’ prison and the true nature of evil. Moshfegh is willing to go into the depths of human malice in a way that few others are, and the result is stark and memorable. I’m pretty sure that if the creator of Mr. Tom Ripley himself, Patricia Highsmith, were alive to read these books, she’d be duly impressed and beat down the door to write Moshfegh’s next blurb.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
This is probably the most mainstream of this week’s picks. Mandel’s Station Eleven became one of those books everyone who wanted to be in the know had to be reading. It seemed to hit too at the apex of America’s obsession with the dystopian subgenre of speculative fiction, which certainly had a role in popularizing it. But aside from the factor of social context, it’s also just a damn good book. It also gives bonus points if you dig the idea that a post-apocalyptic world might in many respects be a return to something not that different than pre-Enlightenment Europe. What remains most memorable to me about the novel, however, is its unwillingness to cede hope even in the collapse of civilization. In the age of AI, it might sound corny or naïve, but Mandel affirms the enduring role that art plays in the formation of the human mind and the improvement of the human soul. Mandel is one of the more interesting contemporary mainstream writers because her books are not carbon copies of one another. Any of her books could have easily made this list. I came very close to recommending The Glass Hotel, which is improbably a page-turning novel based on the Bernie Madoff embezzlement scheme, of all things.
I had heard about Cline’s first novel, The Girls, when it first came out because it was one of those buzzy books that showed up in a lot of online literary venues. It had an interesting set up with its allusion to the Manson family, but when I picked up a copy, I just couldn’t get much purchase, so when I heard that Cline had another novel out, you couldn’t exactly situate me in the “dying to read it” category. But a few trusted friends had said that her sophomore effort was the real deal, so I needed to check it out. I’m glad I took their advice. The Guest is a claustrophobic and tense novel about a young woman named Alex who lives on a razor’s edge among the wealthy and bored. She is a mistress, a conwoman, a casual vandal of priceless art, and above all, a survivor. This isn’t a Gatsbyesque tale of the performance of the American Dream; it is a decent into a world of consumption and self-obsession, tuned up to a pitch so extreme that it feels like it could shatter glass. Cline continually applies pressure, resulting in a book that might provoke a trip to the doctor for a Xanax prescription. It reminded me of another great, brief novel about a woman living on the precipice of self-destruction, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays. It features the same, kinetic style and a sense that havoc might come screaming through the middle of the plot at any moment. But Cline herself has named in interviews another surprising but fascinating influence on The Guest. She credits John Cheever’s story “The Swimmer” as an inciting idea for her novel. Regardless, it’s a sharp and biting novel that is never shy or unsure of its authority.
Great list. Loved the Cline novel especially.