I was hoping to get to Book 14 this month, but it was enough of an effort making it this far, and I’m still basically on track. Here are three quite different books: a thinky Bildungsroman by a Black cultural critic, an exuberant if sometimes messy biography that’s not just about a Black trans icon but written by one too, and a cool but engaging dissection of marital breakdown (sorta?) by an Asian-American writer whose most recent book just made the Booker Prize longlist.
Great Expectations, by Vinson Cunningham (2024): I have seen virtually no buzz about this, which is perhaps less odd in the British literary scene; superficially, it’d seem to be of mostly American interest, as it’s about a young Black man working on Obama’s first presidential campaign. But given that I also read American literary blogs and criticism, and Cunningham is a New Yorker staff writer, the relative silence from that quarter is surprising. Maybe it’s because, despite what it’s about, this isn’t any kind of roman à clef, or even really any kind of a political novel. There is an obstinate lack of determination to it that helps it feel real, as in Hustvedt or King; or rather a sense of hidden, murky determination. Cunningham’s passive protagonist, David, describes attending a lecture given by Cornel West: “The deeper effect… was the perception of an attractive simplicity at work in the world. Behind the veil of unscrutinized appearances was a grand, comprehensible unity. At bottom, all times were the present and all people the same.” This is the kind of unifying, totalising impulse I recognise, with some chagrin, in my own critical and intellectual responses: only connect, only connect. In the novel there is a slowly growing, tacit sense of connections that we might or might not know how to read: Biblical resonance, literary symbolism, the interpretation of paintings, the effects of money and upward mobility, the complex socioeconomic negotiations and manoeuvres of the American “mannered classes”. (The first few chapters really hammer home how Obama became a contender through the early donations of Black élites—bankers and hip-hop stars—money which in turn caused his stock to rise among political journalists. Average people, Cunningham suggests, really just followed the crowd, which is normal for politics but intriguingly punctures the Messianic image that white liberals, in particular, seem to like projecting onto Obama.)
It is, in other words, the kind of novel you might expect from a critic, which I mean in both a good way—if no unambiguous argument is being made, there are nevertheless a lot of rich threads to pull on—and a bad one. If Cunningham wanted to write more criticism, which is his day job, no one was stopping him, but fiction makes different demands and he often refuses to meet them. As a portrait of what it’s like to work on a presidential campaign, the final season of The West Wing is more engrossing and convincing; as a riff on the themes of mentorship, morality and self-delusion that its title homage suggests, there is a plot development near the book’s end that makes some sense of this, but even that doesn’t feel like something that has actually been driven at by the preceding events. There’s a depressing inevitability to what happens, but David’s consciousness of it is so vague and unformed that it reinforces Cunningham’s tendency to just gesture at thematic coherence instead of pinning it down. David himself observes, in what could serve as the book’s own epigraph, “I was interested less in the campaign’s plot than in how I was supposed to interpret it. Less in its details than in its coded total meaning.” But you can’t—in my opinion—interpret something without paying close, sustained attention to its details. Maybe this took the wrong form and should have been a memoir or creative nonfiction, cultural criticism or a series of essays. I rather enjoyed reading it, but it makes for an odd novel. Source: local library #LoveYourLibrary
Marsha: the Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, by Tourmaline (2024): This is the first full-length biography of the icon of Black queer and trans life that was Marsha P. Johnson, a whirlwind street queen who has become most famous for throwing the first brick on the night of the Stonewall Riots. (Actually—and even better—it was probably a shot glass.) Marsha’s legacy has been zealously protected and promoted through the work of contemporary artist Tourmaline and others over the past twenty years; this is a culmination of that work. This kind of reclamation is important for LGBTQIA+ folks and the cishets alike. Marsha was a trailblazer of ideas that seem like relative commonplaces to us now: living your truth, being unapologetically yourself, found family, community models of solidarity and care. She nursed uncounted friends with HIV/AIDS, constantly offered vulnerable street kids a place to stay and clothes off her back, and defined the queer community in New York for three decades. People who are now celebrities, like RuPaul, were nurtured by the world of drag performance and club culture to which Marsha was foundational. We live, to a large extent, in the world Marsha made possible.
With my scholarly hat on, I have to note that the editors have served the book ill by choosing not to do direct referencing. Direct referencing is a citation practice whereby any quote from or use of a source is followed by a superscript number, which is linked to a numbered list at the back of the book (or, in some cases, a note at the bottom of the page) that gives full publication information for the source, including a page number if it’s a book or journal article. The back of Marsha does contain a “Notes” section, arranged by chapter, but instead of being pegged directly to sentences in the text, there are discursive paragraphs of sources for “when I wrote about [x]” and “when I discuss [y]”. This makes some sense as a strategy for readers who might find a more traditional referencing style off-putting. On the other hand, proper citation is not élitist; not doing it actually makes source-tracking harder, which is also an accessibility issue. Sources themselves are nicely varied, including documentary footage, interviews, primary archival sources, and critical works, although for historical context—particularly in the early chapters—Tourmaline often uses online articles and essays; a few more in-depth, book-length treatments of the history would have lent some ballast.
I want to finish with something else, though: the empathy with which Tourmaline discusses Marsha’s personality and testimony, encapsulated in one particular example. Marsha somewhat notoriously gave an interview in 1989 in which she got facts of the Stonewall uprising incredibly wrong, errors which have been used by some historians to diminish her role in events. (The best example is that, though witnesses, participants and historians agree the date of the riot was June 28, Marsha says in this interview that it was August, and also her birthday.) Tourmaline reads this instability of memory as a likely side effect of Marsha’s physical and mental illnesses, of which she’d had several by this time, but also offers another angle, one both generous and perceptive: Marsha’s memory was confused, but the fact that she remembered Stonewall as a birthday party illuminates for us the “life-giving, raucous, celebratory energy” of that moment. We can understand the spirit of Stonewall better by embracing Marsha’s testimony, not dismissing it; it might contradict facts, but it says something about the emotional reality of that night that the facts simply cannot say. She argues passionately for a historiography that allows for the mess, chaos, and “madness” of a revolutionary moment to be embraced, “honor[ing] Marsha’s incoherence as a powerful way of understanding history”. That’s exactly right. Source: gift from a friend
A Separation, by Katie Kitamura (2017): This feels enough like Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk—which left me totally cold—to make me wonder why it works for me when Levy didn’t. Both follow young-ish non-Greek women who are temporarily in Greece, in an environment that’s both vaguely menacing and obviously over-interpreted. Someone (let me know if it was you!) wrote of A Separation that the word “imagination” and its cognates occur over and over in it, something like forty times. So clearly that’s one important aspect of this book: our nameless narrator’s ability to imagine, mostly accurately but on the basis of surprisingly little evidence, what the interpersonal dynamics of the people around her might be, and how her estranged husband might have comported himself while he was at the hotel from which he has very recently vanished. It’s also been compared to Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which, again, is a perfectly logical comp to a book I liked a lot less than this. Why?
Maybe because the other things that are really important in this book are infidelity and bereavement. Christopher, the husband, has cheated throughout their five-year marriage with a variety of women; the narrator pretends, “for all our sakes”, that he’s only had three mistresses, but she knows it’s been many more. This knowledge comes to the reader slowly. The narrator certainly doesn’t start out by telling us, although it might clarify why Christopher has asked her to keep their separation a secret (something we find out, conversely, early on). Her sense of loss filters very, very gradually into our consciousness and hers: initially, she seems absolutely indifferent to the pain and betrayal he’s inflicted upon her, and as she’s in a new relationship, we believe her self-presentation. Only as the book progresses do we realise that, of course, there is grief about the death of a marriage even if both people know it’s right, and of course this book is about what it feels like to lose something irreparably. That thematic interest resonates in Christopher’s professional work—he’s a non-specialist nonfiction writer working on a book about grieving and mourning rituals, and has allegedly come to Greece to interview professional mourners known as “weepers”—and in hers: she is a translator, and the idea of fidelity is discussed in relation to language as well as love. (Yes, yes: classic Literary Fiction Jobs.)
About 3/4 of the way through the book, Christopher’s body is found on the roadside, skull caved in by a rock. Maybe what I like about A Separation is that it does tie itself to the real world: to the incoherent humiliation of a dead body’s half-open eye and gaping mouth; to the half-buried, not-fully-available-to-the-touristy-outsider’s-comprehension dynamics of the fishing village where the hotel is located, whose inhabitants set the countryside on fire the previous summer in an escalation of a feud between farmers over stolen livestock; to combinations of emotions that don’t easily coalesce into nameability, like when the narrator eats dinner with the hotel receptionist, Maria, with whom Christopher has of course slept, and finds herself oscillating between pity, exhaustion, irritation, and a kind of wonder. Levy and Cusk don’t really do that; their characters live in a vaguely defined half-light that seems less real the more auto-fictional it gets. Kitamura’s world is both more uneasy and more recognisable. Source: local library #LoveYourLibrary
Have you read any of these? If you’re doing 20 Books of Summer, how’s it going?
Elle Thinks 
