“What is life? What is real?” These questions asked by one of Yiyun Li’s narrators in Wednesday’s Child are apt examples of the kinds of unanswerable questions that fuel the narrative engines of most great stories.
As I search for an overarching theme among this month’s recommendations, I’m struck by the varied ways the following three books explore what it means to reckon with regret and loss in relation to our younger selves as well as the extent to which one life intertwines with others, much like the ripples in the image above.
Last month also marks a full year that I’ve been writing this Substack, and it feels appropriate that this post references several of last year’s reads. To those of you who have been subscribing and reading over the past year: thank you so much!
And if you haven’t yet subscribed, please consider doing so! It’s free! Only one email a month with a rundown of a few titles I found especially worthwhile in my past month’s reading! Here’s a handy button:
Without further ado, here are this month’s titles:
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
I’m leading off with this near-novella (clocking in at 134 pages in my Vintage edition) from 1980 because it reminds me so much of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, which was spotlighted in one of my most active posts of last year. Alice Munro also mentions it in her 1994 Paris Review “Art of Fiction” interview and wrote this essay about Maxwell’s influence on her work. An oft quoted line from the latter regarding this book: “I thought: so this is how it should be done. I thought: If only I could go back and write again every single thing that I have written.” High praise indeed!
The novel is presented by the narrator as a memoir, attempting to make sense of the murder of a tenant farmer fifty years earlier by the father of someone he knew and of his own action in the wake of the incident. In his own words, “This memoir—if that’s the right name for it—is a roundabout, futile way of making amends.” It takes place in a small Illinois town in the 1920s and gives a portrait of a rural white boyhood as richly observed as any in Munro’s rural Ontario or Haruf’s fictional town of Holt. Maxwell also makes some fascinating point-of-view moves—a dog plays a pivotal and arresting role as a character—and employs an unusual retrospective narrative structure.
This book also reminds me of “Then We’ll Make It Right,” an incredible story about children playing war games, written by Lydia Davis’s father, Robert Gorham Davis, published in The New Yorker in 1943. Lydia Davis reads and discusses the story with TNY fiction editor Deborah Treisman in this podcast.
Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li
Those of you with a taste for short stories and/or who enjoyed The Book of Goose, which I discussed in my February 4, 2023 post, will want to check out Yiyun Li’s new collection, which has been named a finalist for this year’s Story Prize. In this 2019 commencement address, Garth Greenwell mentions that Yiyun Li follows a personal rule of reading a book by a dead author for every book she reads by a living one. So, it feels fitting to discuss her book here in the context of not one but two deceased writers, though I fail to follow her rule in general.
Li’s stories are understated in the best ways, subtle in their shapes and excavation of character. This collection is heavily populated by mothers reckoning with grief and/or perceived failure or inadequacy as well as woman who are emphatically not mothers yet work as nannies and wet nurses. Often the latter imagine themselves as inconspicuous, though Li’s attention to them implies otherwise. This final line of one such story gives a sense of her lilting narrative touch and penchant for illuminating irony: “When she moved on to the next place, she would leave no mystery or damage behind; no one in this world would be disturbed by having known her.”
The title story in particular moved me deeply. It begins with the seemingly mundane inconvenience of a train delay that turns out to resonate profoundly with a recent tragedy in the protagonist’s life. The final story, “All Will Be Well,” stands out, too. At one level, the story is about an English professor who visits a salon far more often than she needs to because she’s drawn by her hairdresser’s story-telling. At another, it probes the nexus between real life and story, especially the value of stories for the times “when we didn’t know the answers.” A line from “Hello, Goodbye” gives voice to what I believe is one of the book’s central questions: “What blind courage had led her into motherhood?”
As an entrée to the collection, I highly recommend this November 1, 2022 reading of “All Will Be Well” by Jamil Jan Kochai and subsequent discussion with Deborah Treisman. (You can tell I’m a fan of The New Yorker: Fiction podcast.)
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Last but not least, The Waves is one of Virginia Woolf’s lesser-known and later novels, frequently cited as her most experimental. I read it in a week as an assignment for a generative hybrid writing workshop a friend I met at the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop hosted over Zoom during December and January. I had some trepidation going in, as in the past I struggled to get through both Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. While The Waves initially baffled and intimidated me, once I wrapped my head around its basic structural conceit, I was (pun intended) swept away by its astounding prose and high concept.
This is a book for which you may find it extremely helpful (as I did) to read some summaries and even some critical analysis before diving in. The book is divided into five longer chronological sections that focus on the lives of six friends, starting with childhood and progressing through old age. These sections use sequences of what is marked in the text with dialogue tags like “Bernard said,” but these more closely evoke stream-of-conscious monologues than speeches, dipping into a character’s thoughts, anxieties, and perceptions. These five longer sections are punctuated by very short (typically 1-3 page) descriptions that follow the sequence of a day in which the sun rises and eventually sets against a backdrop of crashing waves. The book does not have a conventional plot, though several touchstone events are repeatedly referenced and refracted through multiple characters’ perspectives.
The nearest literary reference point in my own reading background is the first three sections of The Sound and the Fury, all written in first-person stream-of-consciousness by three distinctive brothers. Unlike TSatF, however, The Waves doesn’t strongly distinguish the voice of one character to the next in terms of style, though their personalities are differentiated. This was a big part of why I struggled with it at first: I expected each voice to be stylistically distinct, and they are so clearly written not to be. Guided by Woolf’s central metaphor of the waves, I’ve come to think this choice is meant to reinforce the idea that, as much as we are unique and distinct, we are also very deeply influenced and connected with each other, albeit in ways we cannot neatly box up and describe from our finite individual perspectives.
In short, it’s a demanding but very rewarding read. If you like other works by Woolf, definitely add it to your bucket list of “To Read before My Wave Crashes and Breaks on the Shore.” And if you haven’t enjoyed Woolf’s work in the past, you might find this one refreshingly different from her more famous works.
As always, happy reading!
Warmly,
Jules