What I Read in 2024
I wrote this up to record my impressions of this year’s book-reading. I know, I know, the year’s not over. Maybe I’ll add to it. I enjoyed all these books quite a lot. (Two of these I edited for publication but that’s not going to stop me from including them here!)
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My Father’s Diet by Adrian Nathan West (And Other Stories, 2022). Adrian Nathan West, who was born in the United States, has a way of describing the rural and suburban areas of the United States that is quite unlike any other writer. No one who had remained living continuously in the United States for the past three decades could describe its built environments with this degree of disgust and precision. A devastating, hilarious, but also kind of sad novel.
Molly by Blake Butler (Archway Editions, 2024). A brave and unique memoir of great depth. This got a good deal of press; I don’t have anything original to add, but I appreciated the author’s honesty and his thoroughness.
The Backwards Hand by Matt Lee (U of Minnesota P, 2023). I saw this book on social media and became interested in it. It is a wide-ranging hybrid work of memoir and cultural analysis, probing cultural understandings of disability and monstrosity. The author was born with a rare congenital defect limiting the range of motion in his hands. Reading this work enlarged my understanding of the range of forms that disability can take. I am still thinking about some of the ideas it silently raises.
Troll by Dave Fitzgerald (Whiskey Tit, 2022). I’m pretty sure what I got out of this book may not be what other readers get out of it—there’s a lot going on here. A funny, disturbing, at times disgusting debut novel teeming with insight into the deleterious social effects of smarter-than-you, edgier-than-you criticism. For me, the most fascinating thing this novel does well is to show how connoisseurship in an age of media saturation can be a dead end.
Border Districts and Last Letter to a Reader by Gerald Murnane (And Other Stories, 2017, 2021). This was the year I became Murnane-pilled, as they say. I think what appeals to me about him and his work, as much as or more than anything else, is the force and strength of his conviction in his own imaginary worlds (landscapes, images), and the way that that conviction seems to find its realization in a grammar and a syntax that are as plain and cold as they are impeccable.
Innocence in Extremis by John Hawkes (Burning Deck Press, 1986). I loved this as much as, or more, than any Hawkes book I’ve yet read. There are an economy and a concentration and a unity of material here that I’ve found lacking in those of his books that I’ve read (The Cannibal, The Lime-Twig, Travesty, Whistlejacket) and those that I’ve attempted to read before stalling quickly out (The Beetle Leg, The Passion Artist). One might describe it as a historical novel or simply one set in the past (the late 19th century). As seems to be the case as often as not in Hawkes, the milieu of the novel is (quasi-)aristocratic and patrician, with horses and equestrianism playing an outsize role here (see also: The Lime-Twig, Whistlejacket). But the real theme of the novel is as usual carnality, carnality, carnality.
Shy of the Squirrel’s Foot: A Peripheral History of the Jargon Society as Told through Its Missing Books by Andy Martrich (U of N Carolina P, 2024). My reading of this work was the occasion for me to reflect (again) on the astonishing career and publishing output of Jonathan Williams (1929–2008), founder, editor, designer, and publisher of The Jargon Society. Ever since my first encounter via interlibrary loan with one of the Jargon Society’s books twelve years ago (it was Patagoni (1971) by Paul Metcalf), I have marveled at how those books came to be and how they came to be possessed of such elegance and uniqueness, instantly recognizable as apart from the rest of the other books in the library. A lot of that has to do with Jonathan Williams’s penchant for bold and colorful (and very tastefully selected) decorative motifs that figure on the jackets and in the pages of the books. Some of it has to do with the support of private donors, friends of the press, and the National Endowment for the Arts. And not a little has to do with subscribers. Just two choice quotes: “The world is a mare’s nest of interlocking details … so dense and so extensive that it is unlikely that any hierarchy, any ranking of things can finally survive the glorious welter of particularities. Hence it is the function of attention to isolate for a moment the single, luminous detail” (Thomas Meyer, as quoted by Martrich on page 1). And: “From Jargon’s inception, [Jonathan] Williams had emphasized preservation as being of personal importance to him as ‘the custodian of snowflakes,’ an ethic articulated by his impulse ‘to protect the Margins, because that’s where I live’.”
Daybook by Nathan Knapp (Splice, 2024). I have raved (tersely, though) about this book on social media. It is “outstanding — one of the strangest, most exciting & poignant books I have read in some time,” I said. Much of it seems to unfold in a dream, or, rather (and if I’m remembering right), some of it does unfold in a dream but while slipping in and out of waking narrative consciousness, the doubt and confusion of a world suddenly glimpsed and vanished lingering here and there. Somehow the entirety of this monologue seems to unfold in a twilight atmosphere of monochrome light (the cover photograph is most apt, but also probably shapes my perception of the text). A novel it may be, but I also read it as a brave and powerful confession. I found it impossible not to identify with some of its evocations of childhood. The late twentieth century of that time seems so far away.
Kruitzner by Harriet Lee (Empyrean Series, 2024). I discovered this bizarre and baroque but thrilling novel while researching Klosterheim, Thomas De Quincey’s somewhat Gothic novel of 1832. De Quincey had read Kruitzner with great admiration in his youth and he never ceased to admire it. It is an important precursor to Klosterheim, as both novels turn on events in central Europe during the Thirty Years’ War and unfold in a cloak-and-dagger style. Byron too read it as a boy and admired it enough to adapt it into a play. In my opinion, the tortuous, litote-addled style of Lee’s prose somewhat prefigures that of Henry James. I hope that this edition helps readers enjoy an author and a novel they wouldn’t have known of otherwise. [Link]
The Adventures of Lady Egeria by Anonymous (“W. C.”, 1585), edited by Steven Moore (Empyrean Series, 2024). The “first supernatural horror novel in English literature.” Extremely violent, but crafted in an idiom that is indebted to John Lyly. It was a great honor to edit this book with Moore, who served as editor for Dalkey Archive Press and managing editor for the Review of Contemporary Fiction from the late 1980s to the mid 90s (and is of course also the author of The Novel: An Alternative History in two vols.). [Link]
Hind’s Kidnap by Joseph McElroy (Harper & Row, 1969). I attempted to reread this and have stalled out some forty or eighty pages short of the midpoint. I am a miserable rereader of long novels, even if they are among my favorite, or most fondly remembered, books. Am I still rereading it presently, or have I aborted my attempt? Who can say. What I love about this book is the way that the narration is structured to reflect the main character’s totalizing obsession (a cold kidnap case) in almost every paragraph. It’s one of the most baroque and intricate novels I know.