My Favorite Posts

I have published nearly 700 posts since I began Vertigo in January 2007. So if you are looking for a place to start, I suggest these fourteen posts, which are among my favorites.

Dodge Rose (2016), the first novel by Australian writer Jack Cox, is a linguistic tour de force that kept me reading and Googling into the wee hours. It’s one of those rare books that will absorb and reward all the reader participation that you might want to put into it. As soon as I finished it, I started reading it again—partly to see just how much I had missed the first time and partly to admire Cox’s deft, Joycean handling of language. And what I discovered during my second reading is that there is a second, hinted-at narrative completely hidden within the novel of Dodge Rose and her family.  Dodge Rose turns reading into a contact sport. Start here.

One of my favorite novels is Carlos Fuentes’ The Hydra Head (1978), a complex and sinister spy story that involves Mexican petro-politics and the Arab-Israeli conflict. It somehow marries his love of Shakespeare and the noir novels and films of the 1930s and 40s. Start here.

In fiction, when someone is known only by the name of the place they came from, it’s often a sign that they will never be anything but an outsider wherever else they go. And that’s the case with the woman known only as Reno, the protagonist in Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (2013). I had mixed reactions to Kushner’s novel, but it contains some of the best writing I’ve ever read about the 1970s New York City art scene. Start here.

Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) is a novel in which black anger and its sharp rebuke to white culture act as a time bomb carefully tucked within a very entertaining noir comedy.  When Reed wrote Mumbo Jumbo there was no immediate precedent for the wide range of imagery he embedded in his text, nor for the diverse, quirky roles his images play, so it’s very much a ground-breaking image/text novel. Start here.

The narrator of Esther Kinsky’s luscious, elegiac novel River (2017) is an unnamed woman who is living in a very liminal part of urban East London that edges up against Tottenham Marshes and the River Lea. Alone and apparently jobless, she spends her time exploring and mentally mapping her environs in an effort to find her own “provisional existence.” The book includes wonderful photographs by the author. Start here.

Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) is a powerful book-length prose poem about the struggle to find and maintain a moral position, to stave off loneliness and hopelessness, and to not fall prey to the blinding “American optimism” (she’s quoting Cornel West here), even as the rage of American racism grinds on. Start here.

Lying just beneath the surface of Javier Marias’s novel Thus Bad Begins (2016) is the troubling ethos and guilty conscience of post-Franco Spain. I thought I had this novel all worked out until just before the end, when Marías dropped two bombshells that changed everything. And instantly I began to recognize and track some of the little breadcrumbs that he had dropped along the way and which I had overlooked, thinking they were insignificant. Like a great magician, Marías had me looking in the wrong direction all along. Start here.

Great, long novels are something the reader inhabits for days, like a visit to a foreign country where the history and the customs and the social mores are different and take time to untangle. Even the sins may be different there. Chronicle of the Murdered House by the Brazilian novelist Lúcio Cardoso is just such a novel. Originally published in 1959 in Portuguese, this addictive book waited nearly sixty years before being translated into English (2016). Start here.

And then there are really short novels. Reading Robert Pinget’s 94-page long Passacaglia (1978), I knew I was falling under the spell of one of those works of unsettling originality whose profundity was initially elusive and indescribable. Even as the story became more and more fractured, I found myself succumbing to Pinget’s writing, to his beautiful phrasing and masterful control of voice and pace. Start here.

Who owns words? Can you inherit them? Do you have a special responsibility for words that have been written “to” you? These are just some of the questions raised by Joseph McElroy’s 1998 brief, rich novel The Letter Left to Me (1988). McElroy’s peculiar dedication is to precisely describe that which is inherently imprecise. And that is what makes reading Joseph McElroy a delight and a perpetual adventure. Start here.

Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s is a a wonderfully poetic and sometimes puzzling novella by William H. Gass about a self-described “old maid” who reads poetry to rise above the “brute dullness” of her Iowa farm life. It first appeared with beautiful photographs that seemed to have been custom-made for the story. But when it was published a second time, the photographs had disappeared. What happened? For the answer, start here.

Like a nautilus, the plot of Gabriel Josipovici’s The Cemetery in Barnes spirals around itself, hiding its inner, central core. The main character in The Cemetery in Barnes is a professional translator, a man whose life is comprised of habits, which include wearing a jacket and tie when he sits down to work in the privacy of his own home. On one page he lives in London, then in an apartment in Paris, while on the next page he lives in an old farmhouse in the Black Mountains in Wales. Throughout this brief novel, time and place and his two wives seem to change between one paragraph and the next. Some sentences are repeated, then full paragraphs are repeated, sometimes with minor variations. Josipovici is using repetition to fold time back on itself, and in doing so addresses the very question and puzzle of our existence. Start here.

If you’re up for a longer read, I wrote a series of six posts about the Red Riding Quartet (1999-2002) of novels by David Peace. The Quartet is a series of four linked novels that uses aspects of the detective novel and the police procedural. The books are ostensibly about the police hunt for the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, who brutally murdered at least two dozen women across a swath of northeast England from 1969 to 1983. But the real story is one of police corruption, police brutality, and police cover-ups. Whenever Peace looks deeply into the heart of evil, he finds an obscene poetry, and, in a manner worthy of Baudelaire or Dostoevsky, he gives villainy and madness a variety of lyrical literary forms. Much of the Quartet is written in explosively compressed dialogue, which provides minimal clues to the reader as to who is speaking and, often, what is being discussed. Nevertheless, the Quartet is utterly compelling reading. The page count may suggest a long-distance run, but this is reading as if running at a sprint.  Start here.

If you are up for a book that is really challenging but really rewarding, try John Trefry’s novel Plats. There are pronouns in Plats—I, you, she, hers, yours—but are there any characters? Plats is ostensibly about Los Angeles, Venice, the Pacific Ocean, freeways, apartment buildings and such, but geography is just a setting for a book that is about “transitional moments,” “the atmospheric theatrics of vapor,” and events like “movement suites.” Plats repeatedly asks us to use the infinite plasticity of our own imaginative processes to try to visualize the impossible. Plats might be something you read just for the pleasure of reading Plats. There’s nothing like it. Start here.