And this year, the stack is absurd.
January began by finishing last year’s books: Joan Didion’s most excellent The White Album, which followed Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Discovering the holes in one’s literary history is fascinating: I must be the only member of my generation that didn’t read Didion in college. Or high school, as one of my children did. Didion takes the personal essay and marries it to the memoir in a style that is so wholly her own that it simply takes your breath away. The New Journalism meets modern California. An added bonus: you just happen to be watching Season Three of Amazon’s Goliath, starring Billy Bob Thornton, and the plot revolves around water use in California’s Central Valley. Didion was writing about this in the late 1960s.
The move to Clifford Thompson’s What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues could not have been more timely. Thompson bravely took on the 2016 election and decided to examine what happened to race relations in America through the lens of Joan Didion. A perfect choice, as Didion’s New Journalism did what no journalist had done before: inserted themselves into their non-fiction writing. No longer was the voice that of the detached observer; now the feelings and experiences of the writer were, for the first time, allowed to enter into the narrative. As a writer and man of color in America, Thompson looked around after the election and simply began to question everything. He took his incredulity several steps further and courageously sought out voters for the current president to find out their side of the story. His travels, interviews, and questioning of everything, including his own viewpoint, paint a portrait of an America that may no longer be as recognizable as it once was. Or was it? That’s the complexity that Thompson steadfastly tackles.
When it comes to books, I am not a quitter. It’s the Capricorn in me. I push and push, and might give up for a while, but I always come back. Last year’s literary version: The Bolter (Osborne). This year’s? Mrs. Osmond by John Banville. A Christmas 2018 gift from a dear friend, I started it last winter and quickly tired of the oh-so-19th century language, multiple dictionary-requiring vocabulary words, and slow progress of the protagonist, Isabel Osmond (née Archer) through the various European capitals that took her away from her recently crumbled marriage. Where was she going? What was she doing? I happily put it down. And then, this year, I picked it up. And how glad am I that I did. First off, some context: Banville brilliantly picks Isabel up after she’s been left off by her creator, Henry James, in the Portrait of a Lady. My mistake? I didn’t honor this context. Also, I’ve never read any James (another hole). As I continued, I slowly started to see the genius of what Banville had done: he had elevated fan fiction to an art form.
Oh, an honorable mention has to go to Nick and Nora. In my family, The Thin Man is required cinematic viewing every New Year’s Eve. Completely by accident I discovered another hole: I had somehow missed the 2012 publication of Return of the Thin Man, two novellas that Hammett wrote for the two Thin Man cinema sequels, After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man. These do not disappoint: witty, acerbic and charged with those trademark Nick-and-Nora quips, The Return of the Thin Man was the perfect way to ring in the new year.
