Reading post: Jesmyn Ward in September

September is now truly over, so it's time for a reading post. In September I decided to read books by Jesmyn Ward (b. 1977). She is a highly praised young American writer, has won all sorts of awards, and I'd thought about reading her for a long time. Why hadn't I? Because her books sounded so depressing. 

I tell myself I want to stay up to date with Black literature, and then I read a description of one of Ward's novels and I think, oh, maybe another time.

I mean, she sounds good: "lyrical," "dazzling." But she writes about characters in really desperate situations. So I dither and postpone. But -- a new development -- she has three books on the NY Times list of the 100 best books of the 21st century so far. I decided that September was the time to read Jesmyn Ward.

• Salvage the Bones (2011). Beautifully written, this is the story of a poor Black family in southern Mississippi and how they experience Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The book's 12 chapters each describe one day, including the 10 days before Katrina hits and one day after the waters subside. The main character, Esch, 15, realizes she's pregnant on Day 2. Her dad is an alcoholic, her mom died after giving birth to Junior, now age 7. She has two older brothers, Randall, 17, and Skeetah, 16, who's in love with his pit bull, China, who gives birth on Day 1. And therein lies the problem with the book, for me. I can handle reading about the hardscrabble poverty, the rapes... it's all awful, but the characters are vivid and interesting and you care about them. But the dog stuff, oh my god. I understand that the dogs are symbolic, but I couldn't handle it. China's puppies die, horribly, one by one. There's a dog fight. Around Day 6, I almost gave up. The hurricane stuff is good, a lot of the book is really good. It ends well (except for the dogs, again). But the dog stuff ruined it for me. Unbearable. Should come with a trigger warning.
  
  
• Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). This is a less successful novel than Salvage the Bones, and if it hadn't been for those dogs, I'd say I liked the earlier book better. Sing is the story of another family: grandparents (Pop and Mam), their troubled daughter Leonie (and their murdered son Given, now a ghost), Leonie's white husband Michael, and their two kids, Jojo who's 13 and Kayla who's 2 or 3. Much of the book is about a road trip Leonie and the kids take to pick up Michael, who's been in prison for three years. Pop was imprisoned in the same place many years ago, and there's a subplot about a boy he befriended there, Richie, who is now a ghost. The story is told from three perspectives: Jojo's, Leonie's, and Richie's. I think part of the problem with the book is that Leonie is a mess. Every time she took over the story I wanted to close the book so I didn't have to "listen." Jojo, on the other hand, is a sympathetic character. So, Sing has strengths, but on the whole I was disappointed. It's all so jumbled, especially the ghosts. Not enough character development, other than Jojo. Leonie is so awful, and Mam is a little too woo-woo. Too many loose ends -- what was wrong with Kayla? Too much misery for any of it to have an impact. Oh, and we have to watch a goat being killed. I really didn't care for this novel.
  
  
• Men We Reaped (2013). I was very interested to read this book, which isn't a novel but rather a memoir of five Black men in Ward's life who died young. I've heard that it's harrowing but worth it, and anyway, I like memoirs. But both local copies were checked out, and they remained checked out all month. So I'll read this in October (it's "in transit," will probably arrive in a day or two).
  
  
• Let Us Descend (2023). Because I couldn't get Men We Reaped, I reluctantly tried Ward's most recent novel, which follows a young woman, Annis, as she descends into the hell of slavery. I was expecting to hate this book and planned to read only a chapter or two. Instead, it wasn't bad. I liked Annis and cared about what would happen to her. And I've started to be interested in how writers deal with the subject of slavery. What is the best, most effective, most meaningful way to write about it? It can't just be Uncle Tom's Cabin over and over -- but then what? One thing Ward does is to introduce a mysterious "spirit," Aza, who sometimes helps Annis, a little, when she asks. I made sense of this by comparing it to how someone might try to talk to God, ask God for help, be disappointed when not much help is forthcoming. But in the last third of the book or so, the dialogue between Annis and Aza takes over the book, and I was left wondering what on earth was going on. One reviewer (in the Guardian) thought this was where the book came alive, but for me it was where the book fell apart. The ghosts and magic realism were my least favorite aspect of Sing, Unburied, Sing too. I'm not opposed to those things in fiction in general, but I don't think they're Ward's strong point.
  

What's the verdict? I am not, at this point, a big Jesmyn Ward fan. She writes well and I expect that I will look at reviews of her future books with interest. But whether or not I actually read the books, hmm. Might or might not. I don't know. I really didn't enjoy the animal torture porn. Likewise, I didn't get much out of her weird ghosts and spirits. I don't understand what she's trying to do with them. A New York Times reviewer said the spirit Aza "sounds as if she is making up her own mythology as she goes," and that's also how I felt about the ghosts in Sing. Like, what is this sh--? 

I'm glad I finally made the effort to read her, and I'm still looking forward to reading Men We Reaped. But Ward probably isn't going to be one of my favorite writers. On the other hand, she's fairly young. She still might write something amazing...

POST-NOTE: It's October 11th and I finished reading Men We Reaped about an hour ago. Now THAT is a good book. It's sad, terribly depressing, but I thought it was worth it. It earned its misery, it wasn't gratuitous. I read a stupid review of the book on Goodreads by someone who felt Jesmyn Ward hadn't "processed" her grief enough before writing it. "I've lost several family members as well, so I do understand," the clueless person went on. I looked at her little photo: a white person, obviously. Which is not to say that white people can't lose several family members and feel grief, but Men We Reaped is about more than that. It's about losing one young Black man after another (they ranged in age from 19 to 32) for stupid reasons that all circle back around to the way Black people are treated in this country, especially in Mississippi, which is almost 38% Black -- that's a higher percentage than any other state. This isn't the kind of grief you "process." Ward doesn't apologize for some of the behaviors that got the young men in trouble, such as drug use, but she explains clearly how it all happens. The dead-end jobs (after all the decent factory jobs were outsourced overseas), the lack of support for Black students in schools, for crying out loud the defective crossing gate arm because no one cares about fixing them in rural Mississippi...

OK, I've revised my opinion of Jesmyn Ward. I am going to go on reading her, but I'm especially interested in any other nonfiction she may write in the future. Men We Reaped is a very good book.

Other reading this month...

On a walk one evening I found Stay True by Hua Hsu in a little free library. It's about his years as a Berkeley undergrad and his friendship with Ken, who is then senselessly murdered. Their friendship reminded me so much of my Berkeley days. Even though I started at Cal in 1979, two years after Hsu was born, Berkeley is Berkeley and the Berkeley dorms are still standing. I lived in Unit 1 and Hsu lived in Unit 3, but I know those dorms. It's kind of an odd memoir, a bit meandering, but I really liked it. He takes some rhetoric classes (my major) and makes fun of them, which I enjoyed. His perspective on the Asian experience(s) at Cal is interesting. Just overall a cool, though odd, book.

Then...

In an article in the New Yorker from 13 years ago called "Why You Should Read W. G. Sebald," which I happened to reread this month, the author, Mark O'Connell, mentions another writer who is something like Sebald, Geoff Dyer, implying that Dyer imitates Sebald. Apparently Dyer responded by pointing out that he started publishing before Sebald did, and that both of them were actually influenced by the writings of Thomas Bernhard. 

Geoff Dyer? Thomas Bernhard? I pursued this line of thought. Our branch library had one of Dyer's books, White Sands, a sort of offbeat travel book. I happily consumed it, and then I got The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings out of the main library. That was a more difficult book, referring to all sorts of writers and musicians and artists that I wasn't familiar with, going on and on about Nietzsche. And yet it was full of gems too. I love the section on books we read as we get older vs. books that make more sense when we're younger. Talking about reading long nonfiction works, which I often do these days...

It's always time well spent, reading whoppers like these. You learn so much. The problem is how little of that 'much' is retained after finishing them. 'Little' is sometimes a euphemism for nothing.

And...

That's the other thing about the process of knowledge absorption as you get older. You can't get it all on one plate, in a single helping. You have to read about the same events, slog through the same subjects, in multiple whoppers... Knowledge has to be laid down in the brain in overlapping and criss-crossed layers. You need the underlay before you can have the carpet and then---then you can abandon the analogy because it's completely unsustainable. Everything has gradually to become a kind of sediment in the brain, its ocean floor---a place so dark and mysterious that the fish aren't even really fish, just creatures without eyes or brains, flattened by the dead weight of water-knowledge pressing down on them.

I thought this was a wonderful, goofy description of what it's like to read when you're older. I've read so many great books the last ten years, feel like I've gained so much from reading them, and yet, when I try to explain what I got out of any particular book, I'm stumped. Or all I can remember is maybe a line or two from the jacket cover, the blurb. So why did I have to read the whole book, why couldn't I just read the blurb? Well, something happens when you read the whole book, more of those "overlapping and criss-crossed layers" are laid down in your brain. Little by little, you're more knowledgeable about the world, while at the same time you get stupider and stupider because you're getting older and your brain is leaking bits of knowledge right and left.

I plan to go on reading Dyer. He's a lot of fun, although I don't quite see the connection with Sebald. 

Moving on to the Austrian author Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989), no Boulder libraries had anything by him, but the Longmont library obligingly supplied Wittgenstein's Nephew (1982). And here, yes, I can see the influence he had on Sebald. The narrator of this book -- Bernhard himself, since this is a sort of memoir (but also sort of a novel) -- is a crabby, depressed middle-aged man who seems like someone W. G. Sebald might include in one of his novels. But I don't think he'd have the crabby, depressed middle-aged man narrate, he'd have his narrator encounter the crabby, depressed middle-aged man and perhaps listen to him for a while before moving on...

Wittgenstein's Nephew is the oddest book. Thomas Bernhard was in real life friends with Paul Wittgenstein, whose father was actually Ludwig Wittgenstein's cousin, not brother. Anyway, Paul was about 25 years older than Bernhard, but Bernhard was in very poor health his whole life and died in his 50s, so perhaps the age difference didn't matter much. Bernhard was tubercular and Paul was insane, so they were both always in and out of hospitals. The book begins when they're both hospitalized but then does not seem to follow any pattern of organization, it just meanders along, crabbily, for 100 pages and then stops, when Paul dies. 

He lies, as they say, in the Central Cemetery in Vienna. To this day I have not visited his grave.

I may or may not read more of Thomas Bernhard. Probably I will (though I will have to request his other books from Prospector). Have to be in the right mood, though.

So that was September. Now, what about October, the spooky month? After some thought I decided I am going to read Kafka. Yes, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), the German-speaking Czech Jewish weirdo with his own adjective: Kafkaesque. I've read "The Metamorphosis," long ago in high school, and that's it. I figure if I don't do it now, I may never do it, and October seems like a great time to read books that have been compared to nightmares. Of course I will also try to read some ghost stories.