And we’re back. Happy (lol) February (lol). I’ve spent much of the beginning of this year prowling and unsatisfied, stalking up and down the narrow hallway and familiar rooms of my apartment while the sleet falls outside and my mood spikes in new and annoying directions, sending endless skull emojis to that nasty, funny saving grace: the group chat. I like that even though many (most?) of us have multiple group chats they all seem to claim that definite article, the significance and priority of something singular. Group chats are where we sprawl around and show off our cleverest and meanest sides and I have a great time in every one of them. Some of these books were written pre-social media but they all have that group chat feel, the sense of your someones huddling in close and snickering.
Sneak back to the ur-group chat with BETWEEN FRIENDS: THE CORRESPONDENCE OF HANNAH ARENDT AND MARY MCCARTHY, two literary icons exchanging letters over twenty-six years. They deliver cutting judgments on acquaintances I don’t know between sharp philosophical tracts; they worry about US presidential elections; they explain what they’re doing, or what they want to do, with their books. McCarthy writes about three times as often as Arendt, and yet apologises more often for her tardiness — you can fill in the gaps of the friendship, the long dinners, the weeks at each other’s houses, the calls, Arendt throwing down a pen and reaching for the phone. There is an undeniable and thrilling thread of attraction that hums between them. This collection is voyeurism at its best, where you can pretend it’s teaching you something, where you can be swept up in its coursing flow.
(you might have to hunt for this one — there are a few copies on ebay. if you’re in Berlin, you can borrow mine)
THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS by Stephen Graham Jones features a group that has splintered, and the last fragments of messages between them are delivered by horrifying new icons: the deep shadow of an elk, appearing on your living room floor, in the corner of the room, in a town you ran away to. The book is about four friends who shot some elk they shouldn’t have shot, and what happens when the elk come looking. It’s group chat as horror and postcolonialism as horror, and there’s something particularly awful about tracing the fragments of connections that have broken, between friends, between families, between communities. There are moments of creeping suspense along with real slasher gore in here but the image that has stuck with me through the last few months is of a girl running by a frozen shore, and of a basketball shoot-out with more stakes than its players know.
(buy @ bookshop)
It’s fun to discover a Victorian classic you’ve never heard of. I am sure there are English literature advocates to whom LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET is a well-known and even obvious choice, and the copy I picked up in a secondhand bookshop by chance is an Oxford Classics edition: but I had never heard of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1862 sensation novel, and I surprised myself by having an incredible time with it. The action centres around Lady Audley, the young and bewitching new wife of rich widower Sir Michael Audley, and barrister Robert Audley, Sir Michael’s nephew, who suspects our Lady to be too good to be true. He’s correct! A murder mystery unravels with more-or-less predictable results (a couple of twists genuinely got me, with the caveat that I am easy to be Got), but my favourite thing about this novel was the very polite and apologetic way Lady Audley and Robert go about threatening each other, like a series of passive-aggressive work emails. That, and an unexpected romance that threw me backwards, gasping with delight.
(buy @ bookshop)
For the book that most thrilled and baffled me in recent months try Wang Shuo’s PLAYING FOR THRILLS, the 20th century classic of what is called “hooligan literature” (a genre name so compelling I suspect you don’t even need the rest of this rec). Fang Yan spends his days playing underground poker matches with his buddies, strolling around Beijing, drinking and eating and chatting up girls, caught up in a stream of conversation both slick and confusing. Then he comes under suspicion in the murder of an old friend from ten years ago, a period of time that he has lost entirely: he spends the book trying to work out what happened. My copy has lots of excited blurb comparisons to writers like Kerouac and Vonnegut, both misleading and faintly off-putting; actually, if you have to use a Western author comparison, I think Kafka would be a much more accurate choice, only if Kafka wasn’t, no offense, such a fuckin’ nerd. Playing For Thrills wanders in and out of dreams, of time, of neighbourhoods that might not exist anymore, clubs that have long closed down, shadowy officials and criminals and femme fatales who switch sides faster than you can track. Mostly I fell in love with Fang Yan, his easy swagger, his smart mouth, his tender habit of tears. Keeping his cool even as the years unravel around him.
(buy on ebay)
Holy shit did I love Eliza Clark’s BOY PARTS, which tells the story of casual sociopath Irina and the poor fools who fall into her path. Irina is a photographer obsessed with untangling men’s submissiveness in front of her camera lens; she’s deeply funny and unbelievably scary. Being let in her head for 300-odd pages feels like a privilege and also a dare, like sharing a messenger group with someone you want to impress and praying that she’ll never pay any attention to you. You very much do not want her to turn around and notice you, and watching her compatriots struggle to keep up with her is equal parts hilarious and nauseating. (Excerpts from a best frenemy’s blog are particularly awful/wonderful.) What I loved most about this brilliant debut was the way it explored a dominant and dangerous woman without losing sight of how dangerous it is to be a woman; men do bad things to Irina, fuck her up and fuck with her. It’s just that she’s always turning back, that she can let her fingers uncurl, consider her options, and strike.
(buy @ bookshop)
CONSIDER ALSO: David Tennant and Michael Sheen comparing their art; Mary McCarthy’s The Group, which I have written about extensively elsewhere; the carefully casual conversational frame of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a slim and brilliant novel; F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s letters to one another, which swing slightly more to the side of romance but still have deliciously gossipy qualities; patron saint of friendship Donna Tartt (The Secret History gang would never stoop so low as to have social media accounts despite having the biggest group chat energy of anyone in the world; Theo and Boris would communicate entirely in 🤣 and 🤪s, with a dash of 🤓); “I met the woman who I hadn’t seen in years/at a bar with lots of happy friends around her”, the happiest poem about divorce you’ll ever read; Sally Rooney’s instant messaging, of course; the worrying, teeth-grinding friendships in Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, which would maybe be better if left online; Unfriended, a horror movie set on Skype, because at this point, really, why not.