Kristen Roupenian, Cat Person and Other Stories ***

The story "Cat Person" was a viral sensation when it appeared in The New Yorker back in 2017. It's the story of a tentative courtship that leads to a bad date or worse depending on your interpretation. The fact that it was published at the height of the #MeToo movement in a magazine whose readership skews older than the protagonists probably accounts for the controversy it engendered.

Most of Roupenian's stories deal with the constant shifting of power in relationships, especially in the early stages where each person is unsure about how to interpret the others' actions and insecure about what they want. She captures this dance beautifully, but I often found the narrative uninteresting. 

My favorite story was "The Matchbox Sign" with its portrayal of a married couple dealing with the wife's unexplained illness.

Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary *** 1/2

Did you like The Martian? If so, then you'll like Project Hail Mary. It has the same nerdy smart-ass narrative voice, the same lone-guy-solving-science-problems plot, and the same concern for accurate hard sci-fi. I really think Weir should have made Project Hail Mary the second book in a series: The Martian's astronaut Mark Watney would make more sense in every way than the junior high-school teacher Ryland Grace.

The scientific challenge is far more consequential than the one in The Martian. The fate of all humanity is at stake. An alien organism is gobbling up energy from the Sun. An international research mission heads to the nearest star that appears to have evaded the organism. Only our intrepid narrator survives the trip, and he is just recovering his memory of the mission's purpose when he encounters an alien spaceship apparently on a similar expedition.

There are three major storylines:

• Research into the existence and properties of the alien organism Astrophage, with the goal of finding a "cure" to eliminate it from our solar system
• Learning to communicate and collaborate with the other intelligent alien species
• Designing the spaceship and planning the mission

I've listed the storylines in order of plausibility, or perhaps I should say ease of suspending disbelief. The success rate for Grace's jerry-rigged experiments is too high, and I felt that he ignored the Astrophage problem for too long while learning to communicate with the alien, but these nits didn't undermine my enjoyment of the story. On the other hand, the flashbacks to mission planning on Earth are entirely unbelievable, starting with the teacher being given a central role in the project over literally every other scientist and astronaut in the world. Project Hail Mary would be far better if Weir found a more realistic way to convey the necessary backstory.

Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves ***

Strangers to Ourselves presents five case studies of people struggling to cope with mental illness. Aviv is most interested in how people's understanding of their condition affects their sense of identity and the course of their lives. How is your experience different if you attribute your distress to a chemical imbalance versus a spiritual crisis?

The stories identify various potential sources of mental anguish, such as repressed trauma, chemical imbalance, societal pressures, or religious experiences, and shows how they offer at best a partial "explanation" of the person's behavior. However, individuals typically latch on to one or another of these factors to incorporate into their personal identity, and their choice impacts the type of treatment they receive. For example, Naomi comes to believe that "the ruling elite" were targeting undesirable elements of society such as her and her (Black) children, and since racist elements do in fact exist, doctors initially diagnosed her as righteously angry rather than paranoid and psychotic.

The topic is fascinating and important, and Aviv clearly empathizes with her subjects. However, her journalistic writing style is at odds with her desire to present people's experience with mental illness from the inside. She describes her subjects' behavior and reasoning in a flat "just the facts" manner and seems reluctant to make explicit conclusions (perhaps because explicit diagnoses are what cause problems in the case studies). I would have appreciated a more imaginative account of each person's "reasoning" coupled with a more forceful set of arguments for a phenomenological approach to what William James calls the "unclassified residuum" of their experience.

Patrick McCabe, Poguemahone ** 1/2

A 600-page novel in verse by an author known for his intense stories about the Irish underclass. Poguemahone is about a pair of Irish siblings living in a London squat in the 1970s, along with the colorful (and haunted) characters surrounding them.

It's an entertaining enough story, but it is not enhanced by the poetic form. Most of the content is straightforwardly narrative and would work better as prose.

The Guardian pull-quote on the cover compares Poguemahone to Ulysses, presumably because McCabe is an Irish author experimenting with the form of a novel, but a better comparison is Fight Club, which may constitute a spoiler. 

Lewis Menand, The Free World *** 1/2

The subtitle of The Free World is "Art and Thought in the Cold War." The preface suggests a book similar to Postwar but for cultural changes rather than political ones, and therefore centered in the United States rather than Europe. 

This book is about a time when the United States was actively engaged with the rest of the world... the twenty years after the end of the Second World War. ... This is not a book about the "cultural Cold War" (the use of cultural diplomacy as an instrument of foreign policy), and it is not a book about "Cold War culture" (art and ideas as reflections of Cold War ideology and conditions). It is about an exceptionally rapid and exciting period of cultural change...

This description is misleading. First of all, most of the postwar cultural changes got started in the period between the wars, so it feels like the book covers most of the 20th century. Secondly, very few of the changes came about because of the geopolitical situation: American "active engagement" with the rest of the world was not due to the Cold War but more due to the European refugees who came here during the Second World War.

The Free World is filled with unique perspectives on familiar and unfamiliar stories, but comes across as a hodgepodge. It takes effort from the reader to discern the through-line for the subjects covered in each chapter. As Adam Gopnik said in his review, "the reader can never anticipate, beginning a chapter, where it will go."

For example, Chapter 7, "The Human Science," starts with the short section about how "the Cold War and decolonization were coterminous. They are the duck-or-rabbit of postwar world history." The next section covers Claude Lévi-Strauss and the development of structuralism, followed by an account of the Museum of Modern Art's blockbuster photography exhibition The Family of Man (1955), which seques into an introduction of the post-structuralist critic Roland Barthes.

The most prominent theme in Menand's account is the increased insularity of art and ideas. Structuralism interprets human behavior based on contrasts within a conceptual system; existentialism rejects the idea of objective essences; abstract art highlights the possibilities of the medium rather than attempting to connect to the external world; New Criticism and Deconstruction see works of literature as self-contained, self-referential aesthetic objects. At least this is a theme I found -- Menand doesn't explicitly make the connection.

The Free World is a type of book that frustrates me. It contains many insights that I'm likely to absorb into my worldview (e.g. "The purpose of a magazine's editorial content is the same as the purpose of a television show's entertainment content: it is to pick out a demographic for advertisers"), but I'll never be able to find them due to Menand's discursive style.

Iris Murdoch, The Bell ****

A small community of lay people live at an English estate just outside the gates of an abbey of cloistered nuns. A young wife and a matriculating college student visit at an exciting time: the abbey will soon get a new bell, to replace the medieval one that was lost long ago under legendary circumstances. The young visitors stir up turmoil within the apparently tranquil community.

The Bell would be an excellent novel to read in a college English class. It takes place over a short period of time, almost entirely on the grounds of Imber Estate, with a small cast of characters. Its themes and symbols are very near the surface, ripe for discussion. There's the bell, of course, but also birds (starting with one that Dora rescues from the floor of the train) and the literal boundary between the spiritual realm and the secular world (a building in the abbey wall in which one half of each room is outside and the other half inside of the enclosure, with a grille and gauze screen between).

The first chapter, with Dora's train ride to Imber, could stand on its own as a short story while also introducing one of the key conflicts. I loved the descriptions of the Estate and its grounds, except for a few too many "rights" and "lefts"; the setting was peaceful and clearly drawn. Only a few of the characters got proper development, though.

The Bell is the first Iris Murdoch book I've read. It's an early one: her fourth novel. Its story of people in a self-satisfied community struggling with their desires reminded me vaguely of John Updike with a British gloss.

George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain ****

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a textbook of sorts for a college writing workshop. It includes seven stories from 19th-century Russian authors (three Chekhov, two Tolstoy, one each from Turgenev and Gogol), each followed by discussion notes and associated writing exercises. It strikes a perfect balance between literary criticism and writing advice.

Saunders advocates a bottom-up approach to writing, focusing on the details of the language and on individual moments rather than coming to the task with a predefined structure or point to make.

We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he wanted to express, and then he just, you know, expressed it. That is, we buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same.
The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and beautiful and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.

The very helpful exercises involve constant revision and attention, with the style and characters and themes emerging through the process. Saunders admits at one point that the "moment of supposed triumph [when he discovered his authorial voice] was also sad" because it wasn't like the voices he'd set out to emulate from the masters. In his analysis of the stories, he often imagines the author ending up with a different, fuller story than the one he started to write.

The seven classic stories are... fine. I have to admit that most of them don't speak to me as deeply as they speak to Saunders. He draws many excellent general lessons from his close readings, but I was less than fully engaged with the details.

The one story that did captivate me was Chekhov's "Gooseberries," which just happens to be the story to which the book title refers. Its richness, complexity, and ambiguity landed with me in a way the others didn't. Is it moral to be happy when your happiness depends on others' misfortune?

Saunders suggests that when we read stories –– or even an instructional book like this one ––we pretend to accept the position and views of the author "to see if there might be something in it." At the end, the reader or student "snaps out of it, disavows the [author/]teacher's view, which is starting to feel like a set of bad-fitting clothes anyway, and goes back to her own way of thinking." This view sounds quite similar to my long-proclaimed penchant for "trying on" different worldviews, which like Saunders I consider to be a moral exercise.