July 2023: superlatives for the rest of it

I had an enormous reading month in July, and I’ve actually written about a lot of it already: Love Your Library, 3 More Calvinos, this month’s Great Reread and American Classics posts, 2 International Booker Prize Shortlisters and a full review of Bournville have taken care of most of July’s titles! Here’s what’s left. (FYI, I’m going to be a bit mean about the novels I’m reading for my thesis. If you are writing 80,000 words on something, you are allowed to be snide about its weaknesses.)

most unnecessary plot points: Walsingham; or, the Pupil of Nature, by Mary Robinson (1797). Read for my PhD. A sentimental picaresque in which the nearly 500 pages of tribulation suffered by our hero because of (directly or indirectly) his rival in love and fortune, his cousin Sir Sidney Aubrey, is negated in the final two chapters by the revelation that Sidney is actually a woman. There’s a lot of fun to be had in picking out the cross-dressing and the queer readings (especially if you know the spoiler from the start, which you should), but good Lord, Walsingham futzes around a lot, trying to save people from highway robberies and evictions and generally just getting arrested himself. (He must get arrested at least three times over the course of the novel—I should go back and count.) Like Tom Jones if Tom Jones weren’t funny.

most unnecessary misunderstanding: The Natural Daughter, by Mary Robinson (1799). You know when you’re watching a movie and the protagonist is caught in some compromising situation like, idk, they’re standing over a dead body holding a pair of pruning shears, and the antagonist(s) are all like “aha! YOU are the killer!” and actually our hero-/ine was just doing some pruning and stumbled over the body and the cause of death wasn’t stabbing-with-garden-shears anyway but they don’t EXPLAIN any of this, they just meekly go to jail and start working on their appeal, and you’re screaming “JUST TELL THEM THE HEDGE NEEDED SOME WORK” at the screen? The Natural Daughter is like that, but for “dead body”, read “illegitimate baby”, and for “pruning shears”, read “basic human decency”. A better novel than Walsingham, but wildly stressful.

best freebie: Death of Mr. Dodsley, by John Ferguson (1937). I was buying this with three other books, all of which were 2-for-1 except this one, but the chap at the till rang it through as a freebie anyway. It’s one of the newest British Library Crime Classics and towards the “absolutely solid” end of their list. (I think some aren’t as good as others, but I’ve had good luck with them so far.) I can barely remember the minutiae of the plot now, but it’s to do with the murder of an antiquarian bookseller and one of the crucial clues involves the timing of a drunk’s encounter with a policeman on the night of the murder. (Or was he really drunk??! That is the question.) There are also some chapters set in the Houses of Parliament during a vote, which is fun.

best argument for the legitimacy of the “literary canon”: Vancenza; or, the Dangers of Credulity, by Mary Robinson (1792). (There’s no good cover photo for this because all available editions are either part of an eight-volume Selected Works or hideous print-on-demand designs.) Most of the time I am fairly against the idea of a static and objective literary canon, but when I read a novel like Vancenza for work purposes it becomes very obvious why, exactly, Jane Austen is such a big deal. Imagining what she could have done with this material, you can see more easily when there’s paint-by-numbers characterisation, interpersonal dynamics that aren’t maximised or elaborated, hackneyed moral lessons (the subtitle is “the Dangers of Credulity”, draw your own conclusions) or preposterous plotting (the dénouement relies upon barely-averted incest and insta-death). It is not just a function of the period: lots of novels in the 1790s and 1800s were like this, but by no means all. Austen wrote the initial draft of Pride and Prejudice around this time even though it wasn’t published until 1814. Mary Robinson deserves more critical attention (obviously I think this or I wouldn’t be working on her), but it’s not because Vancenza is an unjustly ignored masterpiece.

most frustratingly almost-there: Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel (2022). My first birthday book! On Goodreads, my friend Kendall asked me what I thought of it, and I said (edited for clarity): “Basically, I think it’s a very capable execution of a not very groundbreaking concept. SJM knows how to make readers feel things, it’s one of her greatest writerly assets, so you either don’t notice or don’t mind until it’s all over, but I thought the sections told from Gaspery’s and Olive’s perspectives constituted the core of the novel, and it would have been more satisfying and had more depth if those had been our only two perspective points.” I still think this. Time travel is a notoriously difficult subject for fiction and SJM actually does rather well at making it her own, but Gaspery and Olive are clearly the centres of the story. The metatextual stuff about surviving a pandemic, and about being on a book tour promoting your book (about surviving a pandemic) when a pandemic hits was brilliant. More of that, less of the Edwardian wilderness guy and the obviously-a-callback-to-the-novel-before-this-one-but-if-you-haven’t-read-that-this-won’t-mean-much-to-you, please.

most obscurely frustrating: The Rabbit Hutch, by Tess Gunty (2022). This category looks a lot like the previous one but it isn’t, because I know pretty much what made Sea of Tranquility work and not work, and the most I can figure out about The Rabbit Hutch is that it wasn’t very effective for me. I think the fundamental problem is that I didn’t believe in Blandine. I didn’t buy her: not her alleged intellectual brilliance, not her troubled past in the foster system, not her obsession with Catholic female mystics. What was presented was presented capably, but there should have been more there there. Her emotional affair with her high school theatre director was the one thing that did ring true, and its absolute verisimilitude made it all the clearer that most of Blandine’s backstory and character felt constructed, deliberately quirky.

most painfully honest memoir: The Archaeology of Loss, by Sarah Tarlow (2023). Tarlow is an archaeology professor whose academic husband, Mark, chose to take a fatal overdose of pentobarbital while the rest of the family was out of the house, rather than continue to live with a progressive neurological disorder that no one could diagnose or cure. Her book about the experience of widowhood and the legacy of her life with Mark is at its most effective when she’s talking about the difficult emotions that arise in such circumstances. Mark was very far from a saint and her honesty about him—that he could be arrogant and unkind, that his illness made him particularly bad company, but that she also could have tried harder to keep him in the loop of their family life as he deteriorated—is breathtaking. I don’t think I’ve read another grief memoir that so entirely casts aside the notion that you must never acknowledge a lost loved one’s human failings. Because Tarlow has a background in archaeology, and specifically in death practices, there are some gestures towards tying her professional experience into her book; I was struck by the way she writes about caregiving in ancient societies and what we can tell of the lives of disabled Neolithic peoples from their gravesites. On the whole, though, the story doesn’t need this element, and it may have been a publisher’s idea. Tarlow’s unflinching perspective is the light of the whole thing.

What have you most (or least) enjoyed reading in July? And what are your plans for August (how are we there already)?!