I remember a woman, a researcher from Brazil, who took my hand and said our shared name was for strong women who thought what they wanted and were good at school, remember when the tall man brought me a little tamed mouse, somehow carried from Colombia through customs in his handkerchiefed pocket. As I read The Cat’s Table, the latest novel from Michael Ondaatje, it these strangers I think of, who first built my ideals of beauty and independence and passion.

In his sixth novel, Ondaatje writes of the people we meet as children, the people who direct our gaze even late in our lives. The main character, a Sri Lankan boy also named Michael (who the author admits shares many experiences and similarities with himself, but calls fictional) narrates from adulthood the three weeks where he and his two friends learned “our lives could be large with interesting strangers.”

In 1954, he boards an ocean liner bound for England. For those three weeks, he eats at the cat’s table, the 76^th, placed farthest from the captain’s, among a vibrant group of characters—a flamboyant pianist who has “hit the skids,” a silent tailor whose ever-present red scarf hides a serious wound, a retired ship dismantler, and the two boys, Ramadhin and Cassius, who would become his companions for this journey, whose friendship would follow him far into his life.

This novel, part coming-of-age story, part mystery, part elegy for lost friends, takes place on the Oronsay, a ship resurrected from history and from Ondaatje’s previous novel, Anil’s Ghost, which becomes a sort of microcosmic circus for the three boys navigating its maze. Michael meets a wild array of passengers—a cultured thief (the Ondaatje staple), a high-security prisoner, a gracious, tentative scholar who becomes a teacher to him and his friends—and through the eyes of his eleven year old self, weaves each of their stories into a larger, sometimes diffuse but never disjointed, narrative about how we become what it is we become.

The structure of the narrative keeps even restless readers from feeling constrained to the ship, as Michael floats from 1954 to present and to many years in between, finding those he’s lost touch with, detouring to break our hearts with the short life of Rahmadhin and giving us both the tragedy of his failing heart and the redemption and loss in Michael’s marriage to Rahmadhin’s sister.

Here, as in his 1992 Man Booker Prize winning novel, The English Patient, Ondaatje’s prose is, sentence by sentence, some of the most luminous, remarkable writing I’ve read. He writes with a musicality that is never over-studied, that can brighten the dim corners of a place like a flare, or can break across the page with such force that I have to read that page, that paragraph, that sentence again and again, before I set the book down to breathe.

With equally steady hand, Ondaatje paints the “lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, that smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut (a throat-catching odor), and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall” and a storm the boys are caught in that “pulled the air out of our mouths. We had to turn our heads away from its rush in order to breathe, the wind buckling like metal around us … Lightening lit the rain in the air above us, and then it was dark once more. A loose rope was slapping at my throat. There was only noise.”

While arguably Ondaatje’s most accessible novel, as the only one narrated in first person, The Cat’s Table retains that essential mystery Ondaatje is known for, like Miss Lasqueti, the spinster who carries pigeons in her coat and tosses her thrillers overboard when they fail to be more interesting than her secretive life. It is in this woman, in the thieving count, in the silent daughter of a convict, in the mysteries that drift like smoke through our grasps at closure, that we find the familiar Ondaatje, the author who delights in lovely hands, a twist of the mouth, the hints of inner, unexplained lives.

The narrative can be dizzying at times, but it works because Michael’s young self is naturally skeptical and self-aware. Having been “trained into cautiousness” at boarding school, he keeps a log of strange and interesting occurrences aboard the Oronsay. And yes, the never-ending new acquaintances can be tricky to remember by name, though Michael’s careful observance of their habits makes them easy to recall. Some of the characters are briefly sketched, and serve as background details to an already colorful group of people, but we see the author’s careful hand reflected in that of the botanist, Mr. Daniels, who is transporting an Asian garden across the two seas, whose collection of exotic plants amazes even the skeptical Cassius.

This “field of colors,” loudly crowded betel leaf, snapdragon, star fruit, pencil trees, black calabash, even strychnine blossoms, eventually becomes not only a gathering place where the members of the cat’s table eat together before the journey’s overcast end, but also a vibrant image of the parti-coloured variety of the strangers—some lovely, some fragile, some dangerous—who the boys watch with unblinking stares.

In the decades after this voyage, Michael admits “It would always be strangers like them, at the various cat’s tables of my life, who would alter me,” and it’s this realization, this recognition of my own strangers that keep this story blooming in my head.

Related Posts:

• Molly McArdle: The Last Book I Loved, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth
• Elizabeth Bastos: The Last Book I Loved, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

was of all the Rommelys and all the Nolans. She had the violent weaknesses and passion for beauty of the shanty Nolans. She was a mosaic of her grandmother Rommely’s mysticism, her tale-telling….She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie’s secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk.

There are books I love and books I fall in love with, books that catch me up in their language and envelop me in the world of their story, and books that do all that and also stay, books that lodge themselves inside me. I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as its narrator describes Francie, a collage of experience and inheritance, and I am in love with it.

When I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I read about my grandparents, born in New York to Irish immigrants just a year after the book closes. I read about myself, a girl from a city who loved to look at trees from her apartment window and read as if her life depended on it. I read about the Williamsburg streets that I walk down today, then populated with pickle barrels and rag pickers. I read about women who have sexual lives, whose sexuality affects every aspect of their experience, whether they feel plain desire or mere curiosity, the fear of pregnancy or a longing for children, a weary awareness of unwanted attention or the terrifying reality of violence. I read about shame and class and loving people who hurt you as well as themselves.

It’s not a flashy book, though it is often beautiful, and it’s unafraid to tell you what it thinks. Betty Smith has no mercy to spare for the condescending doctor who talks about Francie like she isn’t there (“I know they’re poor but they could wash.”), or the patronizing teacher who informs her that her family’s story is sordid, unfit for consumption. But there is nothing romantic about the Nolan family’s poverty: it is grueling and it degrades. The grandchild of immigrants, Francie, 11 and then, ultimately, 17, feels a curious mixture of hatred and pride for the conditions she lives in. She tries so hard to escape them and when she finally does, she takes a last walk through the streets of her childhood.

The way it was now was the way she wanted to remember it.

No, she’d never come back to the old neighborhood.

Besides, in years to come, there would be no old neighborhood to come back to. After the war, the city was going to tear down the tenements and the ugly school where a woman principal used to whip little boys, and build a model housing project on the site; a place of living where sunlight and air were to be trapped, measured and weighed, and doled out so much per resident.

She has no illusions about the unloveliness of the soon-to-be-demolished school, of whipped children, but she also has no affection for the future project, with its precise stipends of air and light, that will be built in its place. This is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn at its best—when it is ambivalent: Francie’s complicated relationship to the geography of her childhood, to a beloved father crippled by alcohol, to a mother who loves her brother best, to familial obligation, to her own body. Her grandmother reveals the value of these tugs of war when she explains why children should both believe in Santa Claus and also later discover he isn’t real: the glut of hope and then its loss “fattens the emotions and make them to stretch.” Both are necessary, belief and cynicism, and it will teach them to survive.

Everything happens. People are born and die, people get married and others don’t, people have kids, people take kids, abortions are offered, periods arrive, school is taken up and put on hold, jobs are acquired and lost, money is painstakingly saved and spent. (Did I mention there’s a serial killer? There is also a serial killer.) Most of all, there is Francie herself, so often brave and stoic and unapologetically literary. How can you not love a girl who writes in her journal, “Am I curious about sex?” The narrator goes on, “She studied the last sentence. The line on the inner edge of her right eyebrow deepened. She crossed out the sentence and rewrote it to read: ‘I am curious about sex.’” This book is so intensely about being a woman, being poor, being alive, and I have not read another one with its breadth or accuracy.

There is a beautiful passage toward the end of the novel, when Francie and her brother go up to their tenement’s roof on New Year’s Eve and they look out over their neighborhood. Francie sees “at the end of their street, the great Bridge that threw itself like a sigh across the East River,” and says aloud, “There’s no other place like it.”

“Like what?

“Brooklyn. It’s a magic city and it isn’t real.”

“It’s just like any other place.”

“It isn’t! I go to New York every day and New York’s not the same….It’s like—yes—like a dream.”

Brooklyn’s magic, for Francie, is as dreamlike as her grandmother Rommely’s Santa Claus, even though it’s “a dream of being poor and fighting.” Francie’s Brooklyn is all belief and cynicism, hope and loss, and it has fattened and stretched her heart and made it strong. Though she leaves it behind, Francie is better for having lived there.

Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is not dreamlike—it is thoroughly real. Still, it’s the kind of story Francie’s grandmother would take up and tell, the kind of story that makes the heart bigger, the kind of story that sticks. It’s not always the subtlest of novels, but it’s one of the wisest. I am always carrying it with me.

Related Posts:

• Lydia Melby: The Last Book I Loved, The Cat’s Table
• Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth
• Elizabeth Bastos: The Last Book I Loved, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

…and that bleak corner where a lamp shines, and winds swirl, a paper, fog, I see the great discouraged face of myself and my so-called love drooping in the lane, no good…ah and who said I was great—and supposing one were a great writer, a secret Shakespeare of the pillow night? Or really so—a Baudelaire’s poem is not worth his grief—his grief—(It was Mardou finally said to me, “I would have preferred the happy man to the unhappy poems he’s left us,” which I agree with and I am Baudelaire, and love my brown mistress and I too leaned to her belly and listened to the rumbling underground).

Yeah. He wishes.

Or maybe it’s just me. The above passage from The Subterraneans, like most of Kerouac’s prose, reminds me why I love literature and long to create my own. So be it if that means I merely wish to type.

In the most recent Fiction Issue of The Atlantic, I read an essay titled “Don’t Write What You Know,” wherein Bret Anthony Johnston contradicts the usual workshop advice, champions instead Imagination, and says, “Stories aren’t about things. Stories are things.” And, “Stories aren’t about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions.” Along with being the reluctant “King of the Beats,” Kerouac was also arguably the King of Writing What You Know, as I’ve read all of his books and can’t think of one that isn’t largely based on his own experience. But I can understand why John Clellon Holmes said that this “Neanderthal with a typewriter” was the most imaginative writer he’d ever known: it’s precisely Kerouac’s ability to create stories that are things, that are actions unto themselves. And he pulls it off again and again by staying true to his emotions—writing them as and how they come, with no apologies except perhaps to angels and his mother (“O the pain of telling these secrets which are so necessary to tell, or why write or live”)—and by giving his characters their due regard. It also doesn’t hurt to use words like “handsapockets,” “deepwell,” “shnuffling,” “ploop,” “slippy,” “leching,” “enwomaned,” “malely,” “mindswum,” “blooping,” “meekened,” and “hightingled,” all of which Microsoft underlines in jaggedy red, much to my delight.

Like most of Kerouac’s novels, I don’t love The Subterraneans for its plot, but for its breathless prose, delicious existential suffering, and larger-than-life characters. In On the Road, we have the yea-saying Dean Moriarty, crackling and cackling with energy while also practically undulating with sexual bravado. In The Dharma Bums, Japhy Ryder is a lumberjack elfin bodhisattva, scrambling up steep Matterhorn and dumbfounding Kerouac’s Ray Smith with the sudden knowledge (though he realizes it might not actually be true, which doesn’t sap his knowledge of any conviction) that “it’s impossible to fall off a mountain.” In The Subterraneans, Kerouac gives us a rare heroine instead of hero, Mardou Fox, whom he wanted for

the way she imitated Jack Steen that time on the street and it amazed me so much… [her] showing the walk (among crowds) the soft swing of arms, the long cool strides, the stop on the corner to hang and softly face up to birds with like as I say Viennese philosopher—but to see her do it, and to a T, (as I’d seen his walk indeed across the park), the fact of her—I love her but this song is … broken—but in French now … in French I can sing her on and on….

These people are alive. They are not devices to propel the plot along. They are the plot. And the man describing them—be he Sal Paradise, Ray Smith, or Leo Percepied—is too, his great dramatic conflict rooted in love, for at times he loves these people so much he wants to become them. At others he simply wants to worship them. But in both respects he deems himself a failure. It is impossible to love anything worthy of love, enough. I realize now while writing these words that this very impossibility is the common thread connecting all of Kerouac’s writing. His intense love—the mother of all emotions, the source to which all emotions can be traced back—drips from every sentence. That’s why people who try mimic Kerouac’s prose so often fail. It isn’t just about syntax and punctuation, or lack thereof. It’s the emotion he conveys with what often seems childlike simplicity. Such emotion must exist in great literature, which, if it speaks to the Human Condition, must focus on the humans and what they mean to each other, how they love and hate and sometimes become angels—holy—or, in Kerouac’s case when alcohol’s involved, maniacs.

The Subterraneans, like my most beloved of his novels, Big Sur, focuses in large part on the narrator’s alcoholism. There are significant hints at the same disease in The Dharma Bums, and in all three books the tortured protagonist is able to go long stretches without a drop (stretches in which he writes and hikes, and lounges happily with loved ones), but once the stuff touches his tongue, he cannot stop until his body forces him to. In The Subterraneans we watch Leo forsake Mardou time and again for just another drink, abandoning her slack-jawed in taxis she can’t pay for. The next day he remembers the man he’d become and his bones ache with shame. He feels monstrous and mean. But soon he will do it again. Soon he will lose her. The retrospective narrator knows this, can see it coming but can’t stop it. He still recalls in touching detail the look of hurt shock on her face as he slammed the taxi door and went whooping back into the bar.

Poor Mardou. Those two words appear many times throughout The Subterraneans. She depends on regular psychoanalysis to keep from cracking up, and yet she is the sane one in this lost-love story. Leo is the bad guy, as alcoholics tend to be, but the story is filtered through his memory and sincerest remorse, so we sympathize with them both. And though Kerouac gives away the ending early on, this novel is a page-turner—not because you want to see what happens next (though it’s partly that), but because you want to see where each sentence leads and how it gets there. There are few “good stopping places” in this book, as many of the sentences don’t even end, or at least not with periods. But the dash-riddled prose pulls you along just as feverishly as Kerouac must have typed it, so it’s like you’re a part of it. You’re a part of the action, as it were. A witness to the thing.

Related Posts:

• Lydia Melby: The Last Book I Loved, The Cat’s Table
• Molly McArdle: The Last Book I Loved, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth
• Elizabeth Bastos: The Last Book I Loved, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

This man will paint other abandoned mansions,
And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly lettered
Storefronts on the edges of small towns.
Always they will have this same expression,

The utterly naked look of someone
Being stared at, someone American and gawky,
Someone who is about to be left alone
Again, and can no longer stand it.

There are many such times when I wish I this book were with me. The poems are chiseled out of plain language, soaked in warm light, and radiate wisdom. Although deeply felt, the writing is never sentimental. For example, when Hirsch writes about meeting his old football coach, dying of cancer, he turns the poem to his memory of the coach’s love for well-drilled execution of plays:

And I remembered the game in my senior year
When we met a downstate team who loved hitting
More than we did, who battered us all afternoon
With a vengeance, who destroyed us with timing
And power, with deadly, impersonal authority,
Machine-like fury, perfect execution.

Hirsch allows the tenor of this metaphor to remain unstated, so that we realize, as the passion of these final lines builds, that the cancer is doing to his body what the other team did to them. This kind of subtle, crafty turn away from raw feeling is also the key to one of the very best poems in the collection: “Special Orders.” It begins starkly: “Give me back my father…” and by the seventh line the poet is overwhelmed: “I don’t understand this uncontainable grief.” Yet, just at this moment of utter nakedness, the poem turns back to consideration of what the father actually did in running a container business: for whatever anyone needed, he would “sketch you a container for it.” Here the poem ends, having—paradoxically—contained the grief that was uncontainable.

Many poems in this collection dance at the edge of emotional nakedness—yet not always painfully. The world is also there to enjoy and praise. In “Wild Gratitude,” Hirsch plays with his cat and recalls Christopher Smart’s long and wonderful poem to his own cat Jeoffry: “the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving Him.” The simple life of cats, seen through the lens of the “wild gratitude” of Christopher Smart, opens the author to the holiness of the quotidian:

And only then did I understand
It is Jeoffry—and every creature like him—
Who can teach us how to praise—purring
In their own language,
Wreathing themselves in the living fire.

Hirsch is an American poet who, perhaps more than any other, has incorporated the sensibility of Eastern European poetry, especially that of Czesław Miłosz. He is a writer engaged with the world, and committed to communicating its mystery, its pain, and its capacity to evoke wonder. The language is clear and precise, yet the writing does not lack experimental touches. “Mergers and Acquisitions” takes us in a single sentence of twenty-five lines on a breakneck journey through the failures of contemporary capitalism, and ends in a surprising finish of reflective understanding: “there is something else that drives us… some unprotected desire, / greed that is both wound and knife, / a failed grief, a lost radiance.” And of the new poems presented here, “Dark Tour” is uniquely structured as a series of haikus, each set in a different city, each tracking the stages of a relationship.

In another new poem, “The Case Against Poetry,” the poet finds himself explaining Plato’s critique of literature to other poets, only to be distracted from his endeavor by the view:

night deepened in old windows,
swallows gathered on a narrow ledge
and called to the vanishing twilight,
and a beggar began to sing in the street.

Plato, with his focus squarely set on unchanging Forms, might not have been convinced. But Czesław Miłosz, who placed poetry on the side of the vanishing particular, would have been proud. Edward Hirsch’s The Living Fire carries on this tradition of the saving and praising powers of clear, well-honed language. So, even if they are not always in your bag, these are poems you will carry with you.

Related Posts:

• Lydia Melby: The Last Book I Loved, The Cat’s Table
• Molly McArdle: The Last Book I Loved, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth
• Elizabeth Bastos: The Last Book I Loved, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

White Teeth, Zadie Smith’s debut novel, published on January 27^th, 2000, begins in 1975 and ends at the moment when 1999 became 2000. The plot concludes on a sort of narrative precipice, with enough uncertainties and unfinished bits to induce extreme millennial panic in the calmest of readers. Smith crafts storyline after storyline, and once she reaches the midnight countdown, she lets each one fly off on its own velocity, like unmanned garden hoses spouting water all over the yard. Can we blame her for not tying up loose ends? Time was supposed to dictate the terms of the Y2K bug nobody could control time. Even though Smith has complete control over the temporal aspect of her novel–when to begin it, when to end it–she doesn’t go so far as to make a prediction, not even a fictional one. Rather, she lays the groundwork for about a dozen potential resolutions, doing so with an audacity that can often only be found in debut novels.

White Teeth might be the definitive millennial novel, if only because of the sheer amount of stuff in it. It bowls itself over with broad genealogies and garbled histories. It crackles with paranoid energy, and it overloads information in the most charming of ways. Smith plays the clever seamstress, weaving together the threads between mothers and daughters, fathers, sons and distant great-great-grandfathers, only to take the end results and rend them, Penelope-style.

In profiles of Smith at the time of White Teeth’s release, most journalists paid attention to her youth in relation to her novelistic scope, but twelve years later, I see Smith’s accomplishment as less the result of youthful zeal than that of just plain zeal. To read White Teeth one needs energy; to have written White Teeth must have necessitated unbelievable amounts of caffeine and nerve. It’s important to pay attention to the discrete elements Smith pulls together by both her writing skill and her sheer force of will: religious fundamentalism, adolescent awkwardness, British pubs mouldering in suburban obscurity, the morality of scientific experiments, the difficulties of being a twin.

The novel encompasses wide swathes of time and a tall family tree. Irie is the daughter of Archie, a bumbling, affable war veteran, and Clara, a Jamaican ex-Jehovah’s Witness. Samad, a Bengali scientist manqué and Alsana, his prearranged bride, have produced identical twin offspring Millat and Magid. These two sets of kin generate three generations worth of drama: Millat, the cool kid, joins an Islamic activist group whose name, the Keepers of the Eternal Victorious Islamic Nation, begets the unfortunate acronym KEVIN; Magid, the consummate nerd, works with a geneticist who creates a divisive “FutureMouse”; Irie, not quite nerdy and not quite cool, wavers crucially between the two brothers. None of this fits well into a synopsis, and this is why I love it.

I want debut novels to be indescribable. I don’t want debut novels to fit into a single-sentence précis. Alex Carnevale, who runs the audiovisual stimulus website This Recording, expresses his desires for debuts in this way: “Above all things a first novel should be (1) lascivious, (2) impossible, and (3) autobiographical.” White Teeth is not exactly lascivious (though there are a couple of carnal moments) and Smith herself has denied the novel’s purported autobiography, stating in an interview that, “none of my family appear in White Teeth in any obvious way.”

But the novel is impossible, and what characterizes the sense of its impossibility is its focus on the immigrant experience. This experience is as literal as Samad and Alsana’s moving from Bangladesh to London, or as figurative as Clara’s crossing over from Jehovah’s Witness to agnostic. As Smith writes, “This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune.” Characters are forever transgressing borders: riding a bus from a run-down neighborhood to a posh one, escaping from one island to another, moving from an atheist England to pious Bangladesh and back, changing spiritual outlooks simply by taking a plane ride in the middle of the night.

I’m not an immigrant. The country where I was born is the country in which I live now. Even when I studied abroad in the Czech Republic, my inability to speak the native language wasn’t of much consequence, and on the metro it would have been impossible to distinguish me from any native Praguer. It isn’t difficult for me to cross borders because of my blue-and-gold passport cover, because of my white skin, because of my nativity, because of whatever.

So I look to novels like this one in order to gain some kind of understanding. White Teeth elucidates immigration for those who have never had to immigrate; it constantly evokes the queasiness I imagine occurs every time someone moves from the familiar to the foreign. The novel’s multiplicity of voices, both in the various dialogues and the omniscient narration itself (Smith introduces a young outcast couple as such: “Ryan was red as a beetroot. And Clara was as black as yer boot”), stretches the plot’s orbit so it can encompass more people, more places, more stuff. Smith’s writing does the impossible because it acknowledges borders, then swings them wide open. The bold lines become perforated. The distances between Bangladesh and England and Jamaica are nothing.

As I read, I felt that familiar tingle of Y2K fear. Why? That millennial anxiety should have come pre-digested, the way birds and wolves deliver dinner to their babies. I should have read the story and chuckled at the doomsday prophecies, but I didn’t. Twelve years ago Zadie Smith whipped up a tale about a strange possibility: that the new millennium would render every person an immigrant in a new and unexplored time. The border between 1999 and 2000 seemed uncrossable. We all ended up crossing it, but reading White Teeth took me back twelve years, when I was only ten and I watched that stupid ball drop, the countdown ticking toward zero, ever so slowly.

Related Posts:

• Lydia Melby: The Last Book I Loved, The Cat’s Table
• Molly McArdle: The Last Book I Loved, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Elizabeth Bastos: The Last Book I Loved, Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

A culture existed in 1666 that was used to hardship and illness. “It is folly to love an infant,” the townspeople tell the book’s main character, Anna Frith, when she so publicly grieves the death of her son. There are disgorge-the-contents-of-your-belly descriptions of mine accidents, the smeared-face stonings of supposed witches, death rattles, “surrounded in her own gore” descriptions of birth rooms, and child-drownings. This book is not for the brittle. It is horrific, but it is not horror. It is human life, really graphic. As I’ll admit I have done, people don’t just drop off food and skedaddle when they hear of a neighbor’s illness. Back in 1666 they come in, sit by the bed, and wipe the spittle from the fitful hollowed-out lips of their friends. Imagine. I’ve got no kit for such a thing, no “whisket” from which Anna dishes out oatcakes, salves, and cotton for the tending of wounds.

I think that’s why I liked it so much. Most of us live in a brittle world in which we have learned to recoil at suffering. We are at a remove from death and birth, from the slimy, the wet, and the phlegmy. We are at a remove from the muck with which our not so distant relatives were well acquainted: sickness, the frailty of the body, the truth of how much we need each other. Frequently, we don’t deal with life well when it raises it’s head menacingly, mockingly, grotesquely, as it sometimes still does. It’s fucking scary when someone gets sick; call in the professionals, and hie ye to ye therapist.

At least half of the book’s length is devoted to how to get healing roots or worts out of the ground, and how to care for “buboes,” the revolting sores that reveal themselves on a plague victim’s groin or neck. There were no doctors or grief counselors. It would be your neighbor lancing your wound with a hot poker, or making you vervain tea with her grandmother-knowledge. I wouldn’t want this–it’s medieval. But I would like half of Anna Frith’s courage. It’s a feminist tale, in that Anna grows greater than her place in history would have her be. She defies her minister and Puritan law, and comes to believe, atheistically, that, as we said in the ‘80s: Shit Just Happens. Plague is no act of God, it is nature, red in tooth and claw. Luckily, nature is also the newborn lamb, suckling, and gamboling.

And “When Shit Happens,” what makes Anna great for us moderns is that she does not turn her gaze from the swellings and the oozings of her fellows’ rheumy eyes, or from the ewe’s “red flower” as she births a breeched lamb. She does what she can with what she has in her whisket.

Related Posts:

• Lydia Melby: The Last Book I Loved, The Cat’s Table
• Molly McArdle: The Last Book I Loved, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth

But then I read Committed, her follow-up and improvement on Eat, Pray, Love, a thoughtful interrogation of marriage across cultures. I devoured her lectures on Ted Talks as well as her earlier long-form stories on the Coyote Ugly Saloon and La Grande Randonnée, a dream vacation I hope to take one day. In building backwards from Eat, Pray, Love, I discovered just how major an anomaly that book has become. Gilbert had made her career in journalism writing for GQ, writing for a certain kind of high-brow men’s journalism—she hardly seems the type to fall over at the chance to eat spaghetti and meditate in an ashram. (And hardly someone who could only be played by that grande dame of casually girlish womanhood, Julia Roberts.)

The strain throughout all of Gilbert’s writing, the one that really defines her style and substance, is the exploration of wanderlust. Nowhere is this clearer or more deliciously readable than in The Last American Man, Gilbert’s portrait of Eustace Conway. When you first learn that Conway is casually greeted and frequently referred to as “Davy Fuckin’ Crockett,” you know you’re far away from Italy, India, and Indonesia. Conway wears buckskin clothes and carries a bowie knife; he has trained himself to hunt, fish, and live off the land. He has accumulated over 1,000 acres of pristine wilderness to call his own, a sanctuary for a natural, unadorned life. You could call it an affect, except he puts his whole heart and body into committing to this way of life. He is the anti-Gilbert; a journeyman who lives for the journey itself. Gilbert (and the reader) are entranced by his story, but also quietly concerned about its cost. Conway is wildly charismatic and friendly, and Gilbert’s totally charmed by him. Yet even when he gives her a big hug of welcome, she stops to think, “This guy likes me, but he doesn’t really need me.” Meeting a figure who is genuinely impersonal, even as he pushes himself towards physical, intellectual, and moral perfection, poses a quandary for the reader. Given how impassioned he is, isn’t it a waste for Conway to be so alone? Where is his congregation, his family, his perfect partner?

The problem, Gilbert illuminates, isn’t that Eustace Conway needs to settle down. It’s that settling down would fundamentally change who he is. Gilbert sketches a droll personal profile for him that captures this quandary perfectly:

“Lonely heart who makes fire with two sticks, eats squirrel brains, quotes Faulkner, crosses continents on foot or horseback, understands Navajo jokes, swings through trees during lightning storms, kayaks across the Arctic, builds homes without the use of nails, climbs sheer cliffs, makes honey and envisions altering the very destiny of humankind SEEKS SAME. SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY.”

She adores his commitment to his cause, and so do we, and unfortunately that means that to stay adored, he must stay solo. If her memoir had instead been titled Eat, Pray, Live this may well have been our final impression of Gilbert as well. Gilbert’s revised memoir, ending with self-reliance instead of new found romance, would have been a radical portrait of the cost that people must pay to self-actualize and to reach their fullest potential. But instead, the first two parts only serve to enable the third; Gilbert rides off into the sunset of literary fame with her dreamy Brazilian husband, carried on the back of her blockbuster hit, while Eustace Conway, the luminous and lonely figure of her writing past, continues his journey on Turtle Island. Perhaps if The Last American Man had been her big hit, Gilbert would’ve stayed behind, too.

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• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth

It was 1985, the beginning of what Paul Simon called “the days of miracle and wonder.” Week after week bombs went off in airplanes, offices, and city streets. Each month brought another serial killer, another daycare sex scandal, another disaster with “details at 11.” And each night, on a growing number of TV channels, I learned that Coke had a new formula and that Elvis had been sighted, somewhere.

Fleeing the madness, I sat in my small hovel in the tropics, reading, reading. In the abundant free time given to Peace Corps volunteers, I plowed through Plato and Dante, Chaucer and War and Peace. I polished most of Thomas Hardy and all of Proust. But I remained in despair; no one else understood the madness. Then one day in the Peace Corps office, someone handed me a new novel, White Noise.

The opening scene described a college campus, parents dropping off students. It seemed pedestrian until I read that the narrator chaired the Department of Hitler Studies. I was hooked. A few days later, I contemplated sending Don DeLillo a letter saying simply, “Thank you for White Noise.”

This darkly funny book is set in a college town but its domain is the new media landscape, a rapidly expanding wasteland of cable TV, tabloid truth, and what DeLillo calls “the cults of the famous and the dead.” In DeLillo’s America, fear is common currency. “Terrifying data is now an industry in itself,” he notes. “Different firms compete to see how badly they can scare us.” Shopping is the national pastime. Simulation jousts with reality, and the “Info Age” clutters the American mind with drivel. Meanwhile, in the background, the TV spews.

“The TV said: ‘Until Florida surgeons attached an artificial flipper.’”

Reading on in my tropical library, I marveled at this merciless send-up of the land I’d left behind. Fulfilling Ezra Pound’s dictum, “the artist is the antenna of the race,” DeLillo saw how the glut of information was changing everything. Even language was awash in nonsense and non-sequiturs which his narrative inserts at random: Dacron, Orlon, Lycra Spandex.

After two years in the tropics, I returned to Reagan’s America. The end of my exile had less to do with a book than with another Peace Corps volunteer to whom I’m still married. Back home, I gave White Noise to everyone I knew, but no one seemed to get it. Too dark. Too cynical. Too depressing.

Over the years, I began to think of White Noise as a period piece. Then last month, I re-read it. Twenty-seven years after it won the National Book Award, White Noise remains a full frontal assault on the way we live now.

The book’s centerpiece, a huge toxic cloud that forces a mass evacuation, could have been the Deepwater Horizon spill. Like that catastrophe, DeLillo’s nightmare unfolds daily, adding fresh menace. Rumors trump hard news, experts pontificate while others warn of Armageddon. Angry people look in vain to the government, while the media soon labels the disaster “The Airborne Toxic Event.” Viewed through DeLillo’s dark glasses, the disaster and its media coverage define contemporary anxiety and denial better than any op-ed piece ever could.

DeLillo’s take on television seemed exaggerated in 1985, but the steady stream of trivia and endless replays of the latest disaster or shooting are standard fare now. For most people, DeLillo notes, “there are only two places in the world, where they live and their TV set.” White Noise’s surreal landscape, so much like our own, proves equally prescient in lampooning our fascination with guns, our fear of death, and the pills we pop to soothe our cluttered minds.

In the early 1980s, the American media took a quantum leap in power and proliferation. Amid the cacophony of voices, alarm became the best way to get attention, and so the bells began their incessant tolling. They are tolling still.

As if nothing had changed, other American novelists continued to spin tales of romance or family dysfunction. But one singular book captured the cultural climate as few novels ever have. Read in exile, White Noise soothed me. I was not alone. This madness was real. A generation later, our mediascape has only grown more manic, more fear-mongering. More than ever, America embodies White Noise’s closing scene–a small child madly pedaling his tricycle through traffic on an expressway. “The American mystery deepens.” DeLillo wrote. And twenty-seven years later, I can still say, “Thank you for White Noise.”

Related Posts:

• Lydia Melby: The Last Book I Loved, The Cat’s Table
• Molly McArdle: The Last Book I Loved, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth

I was told this as though it is impossible for mature adults to be vulnerable. We just don’t do that. It’s not allowed. And that really, truly, made me sad. The idea is that you have to put away your inner turmoiled feelings and keep them to yourself in order to be the right kind of person. That disturbs me.

And that’s why the last book I loved was The Cow, a book of poetry by Ariana Reines. I loved how strongly the poems seem to run in the opposite direction of what we’re told is “good writing,” and good being-an-adult, for that matter. In an article she wrote about her book, Reines said that she wanted to “write poems that an educated person would feel embarrassed to read, poems that sound like Goth girls with feelings.” I think that’s kind of an awesome idea. There’s this opposing idea right now (or maybe always), that the sorts of emotions felt by teenage girls are not real emotions. They don’t count. In fact, we discount many expressions of emotion, ones that seem too strong, or too messy, or too lurid and cliché. If somebody writes about emotions in that way, we say it is bad writing. We cringe, we are embarrassed, we turn away from it. But why should we?

What’s so great about The Cow is that it is full of shit. Literally. It is full of grotesque, messy physical descriptions of the slaughtering of cows. It is also full of grotesque, messy descriptions of human bodies, and of human emotions. And it’s also beautifully and lyrically written. There’s a line in the poem “Rendered” that says, “Where is a living thing not itself. Is her shit any less her?” And guess what: women shit, and they sweat, and they smell bad, and they have emotions that are messy and uncomfortable. I know that’s part of being me. It’s part of what living is.

And here’s the thing: it’s ok for men to be physically gross. They can fart and they can be fat and hairy and it’s okay. Right now it’s not okay for women to do and be those things, but I think it could become okay. That’s because almost anything that is typically seen as masculine can be accepted and thought of as the correct mode for all people. It’s not the same for feminine things. I think we’re still a long way from accepting the messy, gross emotions that people have. And that’s because emotions belong to teenage girls. They’re feminine. They’re weak. We distrust them.

This probably matters to me so much right now because I’m struggling to become a writer myself, and to understand what that means, and how I should do it. And at the same time, I’m in a new city struggling with making new friends and learning how to get close to people all over again. I feel a little bit like my experience is negated by the vast pantheon of serious male authors whose works I’m making my way through. I’ve read a lot of current literature, and I like a lot of it, too. There are just some parts of myself that I don’t see there.

But in The Cow Reines pulls all of these rejected things back into the picture. We have to wallow in shit and wallow in feelings. It’s a gorgeous, sensual experience, meaning that you feel the poems in your body. Your senses are engaged. But it’s not pretty, and it’s not delicate. It’s feminine in a different way, in a dirty, honest way. It makes me want to make a new best friend. Somebody who can talk shit with me. Somebody I can show my vulnerable underbelly to, and maybe they’ll show me theirs back.

Related Posts:

• Lydia Melby: The Last Book I Loved, The Cat’s Table
• Molly McArdle: The Last Book I Loved, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth

Sacred moments like these deserve recognition. And since there is less time with every passing moment to fill the gaps in my reading, I’ve made it a point to choose with great care what to read. This selection process, increasing in importance since marriage, and still more necessary with a daughter due in a few months, has become an official holiday for me: New Book Day. (Superior, more clever title pending.)

With a stack of books in my arms, I search around the house for my wife: she is at the computer reading the news, or brushing her hair over the sink, or buttering a slice of toast in the kitchen. I ask her if she knows what day it is. At first, she would rack her brain, trying to figure out if she forgot a birthday or an event from our courtship marked for remembrance. But by now, she knows; she rolls her eyes and exclaims, “New Book Day!” with all the mock enthusiasm she can muster. She’s not as much of a reader as I am, but I don’t hold it against her. After all, reading is just one way to get your kicks, to live a full life, to suck the marrow of human experience.

The New Book Day ceremony takes place as soon after finishing the last book as possible, and proceeds as follows:

1. Pour a tall glass of wine (either white, very cold and very dry, or a mellow red) or water or hot tea or coffee and proceed to where your books are located.
2. Grab 5, 6, 10, 15, 27, however many (unread) titles off your shelves or off the pile of books in the corner of your living room as you feel you might want to devote yourself to.
3. Read a bit of each until you find the one you cannot put down.
4. Retreat to your reading spot and read, remembering at all times that the thing you hold in your hands is a great gift: you are Prometheus, and you are about to discover a beautiful fire that will make your heart more full (or less empty, depending on your perspective) than it already is, than you ever thought, hoped, dreamed it could be.

For step #2, I usually have some vague expectation of what I will get out of each book; usually, as in the cases of Ulysses and War and Peace, these expectations turn out to be, in retrospect, completely incorrect, naïve and even a bit arrogant. But it is a literary diet that I am constructing, and I try to find a book that I believe will give me what I need at that given moment of my life. (Wouldn’t it be nice to know, without a doubt, what one really needs, at least once?)

I keep track of the date on which I finish each book; or, as it were, the date of each New Book Day. Looking through the reading list for 2011, I try to spot the book whose Page 1 sparked the most excitement. On the 21^st of July, I finished Volume III of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. That night (my wife and I were living as expats in Buenos Aires then) I started Ulysses.

I’d passed over James Joyce’s infamous masterpiece on many a New Book Day, intimidated no doubt by the book’s reputation. Many people read (the many) essays written about Ulysses before reading the actual book; I am certain that many people also never read it from beginning to end. Maybe it’s because Joyce veterans instruct newbies to start with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Dubliners. For a while I figured this would be the prudent course of action, but soon I got to thinking it was probably just procrastination, avoiding the inevitability of failing to understand this monster of 20^th century art. But that night, reading the first sentence (“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed” – just typing that quotation gets me giddy, tickles the laughing muscles of my face) for probably the fiftieth time, I knew I would never be prepared for my first reading of Ulysses.

I dove right in that night, stayed up way too late considering I had to wake up for work early the following morning, but I felt such a thrill speeding through that first chapter, and then I got to the second chapter, where Stephen Dedalus declares that God is “a shout in the street,” and I had to stop and digest what I’d read. Joyce, as master stylist, blew me away. I laughed at lines he might have meant for me to laugh at, I laughed in amazement at points, thinking, Wow, this is really good. All the while, things flew over my head, but I loved every word, known or unknown (my vocabulary probably expanded by a good 5% in those two weeks), because my heart understood then how lucky we are as sentient, soul-possessing creatures to be able to communicate in this profound manner with people we will never physically meet, the majority of them gone from the world, as I and everyone else will be some day.

I saved the final section, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, for a bus ride home from the office one night. Internally I prayed for traffic to be slow so I would have ample time to finish the chapter in one sitting, without interruption. Luckily, there is always traffic in Buenos Aires at six in the evening. I reached the “…yes I said yes I will Yes,” with a lump in my throat, heart throbbing, and her last “Yes” remains the only word that my mind can find to describe what Ulysses made me feel for three weeks, that still permeates tiny moments of my everyday life. In this sense, a great work of art is like a second soul that attaches itself to you as you engage mentally and spiritually with the work, and which, by the end, has detached a piece of itself to leave as a gift, especially for you.

I love books; I love literature; I love that stories are concomitantly made up and truer (when they are pulled off perfectly) than anything that has ever happened. And aside from the individual love between a reader and a certain book–which by psychic extension is love between a writer and each of his readers–I find, residing at the core of any “good” work of art, the larger, unconditional love of humanity for humanity, and for all that the universe entails. And it is love, because if there were no love to begin with, there’d be no art. And yet, look at all the books.

Shouldn’t we celebrate every occasion on which we decide to discover that again?

Related Posts:

• Lydia Melby: The Last Book I Loved, The Cat’s Table
• Molly McArdle: The Last Book I Loved, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Sarah Simpson: The Last Book I Loved, The Subterraneans
• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth