Usually when I’m finding a theme for this newsletter I hunt for the common thread in two books I’ve enjoyed and then go looking for more; sometimes it just falls right into my lap. Over the past couple of months excellent book after excellent book has turned out to be about an artist, about not so much their craft but the sharpness of a pair of eyes looking out and trying to make something new. The artists in these books are more or less talented, they have their own obsessions and intrigues, they use paint or pencil or plaster. In my Masters we talked a lot about ekphrasis and its detailed pleasures, but these novels often leave the final artwork veiled and unclear while its maker walks around, surveying it from all angles, clicking their teeth and satisfied.
Frances Cha’s IF I HAD YOUR FACE is about four women living in the same building in Seoul; one of them, Miho, is an artist, building intense and devoted sculptures of the woman who scooped her out of poor obscurity and introduced her to the glittering world of South Korea’s upper class, and then left her there to fend for herself. But all four women are busy creating. Cha’s heroines are making babies, making faces, making moves, in glittering prose that I gulped through. IF I HAD YOUR FACE is deeply invested in womanhood and the construction of womanhood; as you’d expect from the title, it is especially focused on plastic surgery and the concept of beauty in ways that felt new and fascinating to me, moving swiftly beyond the old boundaries of debate. There’s a thin layer of violence that slides under the surface of this novel—bubbling up in explosions and tiny ripples, self-imposed or other, a woman dragging another by her hair or beautiful Kyuri using her pretty mirror to check she isn’t dribbling after a meal—and class and patriarchy are not just pervasive but invasive, storming into rooms and threatening lives. But what I loved most about Cha’s novel is its reckless euphoria, the wild hope and love for other women, catching your best friend’s hand and running all the way home.
(buy @ bookshop)It’s a shock to discover that Jessie Redmon Fauset’s PLUM BUN was published in 1928; it feels distinctly modern. Two sisters are born to a quiet and happy home in Philadelphia; Angela, beautiful and headstrong, takes after her light-skinned mother, while Virginia looks more like her father, with the result that at a young age Angela discovers the pleasurable, dangerous allure of passing and moves into a realm her sister cannot access. Fauset’s approach to passing is nuanced and complicated; Angela’s mother, too, enjoys passing, in what is described as her “weakness and its essential harmlessness”, and it is only as Angela starts spending more and more of her time passing that we see the harm it wreaks on her sister, her community, herself. Eventually Angela and Virginia will both go to New York, Angela to pursue art school and her airy certainty that fame awaits, Virginia finding love in Harlem, and as Angela climbs higher and higher in white circles the trap closes around her. I love Fauset’s dizzying detail, her steadfast resistance to anything reductive (A novel without a moral, reads PLUM BUN’s subtitle), her romances, her sly humour. And the book’s last line is sheer effervescent pleasure.
(buy @ bookshop)I am hard to sell on vignettes. My tastes have been shaped for better or worse by the verbose plots of 18th and 19th century literature and short moody sections tend to leave me suspicious, so when they capture me, as Jamie Marina Lau’s PINK MOUNTAIN ON LOCUST ISLAND captured me — holy shit! Monk lives in an unnamed city’s Chinatown with her disinterested and disagreeable father. An encounter with a literary-certified Cool Boy seems to promise escape, until in the funniest and most on-point eyeroll at masculinity I’ve read in a while Monk’s boyfriend and father become fascinated with each other and team up to run a long-form art con. PINK MOUNTAIN ON LOCUST ISLAND is an affective experience. It feels like watching youtube videos of sunsets in cities you’ve never been late at night, when your own home is dark and humming around you; it feels like finding strange quirks and glitches of music on an unknown soundcloud. The language is slow and confident, striping the book in nighttime hues of sunset pinks and carpark oranges, and Monk, “the ranger of Chinatown”, moves through it with an open bag of crisps, a lazy stroll, a canny wide-eyed gaze. I love her, and this book, so much.
(buy @ bookshop)I know it seems ridiculous to recommend a book by Toni Morrison as though you might not have heard of her, but given that previously I’ve forced you to read recs for both Dickens & Hemingway it feels fair to announce that TAR BABY blew the top of my head clean off. Swimming with romance and tension and distrust, TAR BABY is the story of Jadine, a beautiful Sorbonne graduate and model funded by her aunt and uncle’s wealthy white employers, and Son, a poor runaway from Florida who we first meet sinking out at sea. No one writes like Morrison; every sentence is dazzling while leading you further and further into the drum march of its plot, a dense nest of POVs each as complicated and singular as the next, and the fallout of this book feels at once mythical, like watching archetypes throw shadows up against some great wall, and deeply personal. Morrison wrote this just before Beloved and you can feel her flexing her fingers towards horror; there are ghost riders around every corner and the lush Caribbean island where most of the novel’s action takes place is rotting underfoot. And the love story thrumming at Tar Baby’s heart—Son with his “hands large enough to sit down in”, Jadine who “to the end of her life… never heard a reference to Little Red Riding Hood without a tremor”—is full of romantic grandeur, sexy specificity. There are scenes here I will never forget: a sketch session on a beach, a steady “Hi”, a rowboat in the fog.
(buy @ bookshop)CONSIDER ALSO: Jane Eyre’s unbelievably emo sketches, a true masterpiece of Sad Girlism (and of course Rochester goes fuckin nuts for them); a song I was obsessed with when I was sixteen; Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo, and also “as if God/were Rembrandt or maybe Ingmar Bergman”; Raven Leilani’s Luster, already recced in an earlier newsletter; the ongoing deep eroticism of Lucy Liu painting; Dorian, although tbh I prefer the tweet.