Good morning.
My reading habits are a bit scattered. Most of the time, I scurry from newsletters (mainly for media industry news) to Reddit (for sports) and then to an app like The Athletic (for sports), then back to Reddit (for even more sports), and then back to my inbox for another pass at newsletters I subscribe to (for daily news, industry news, and maybe some long meandering reads or recommendations). I balance that with half-reading multiple books (non-fiction and fiction) at one time and also cherry-picking articles from a stack of New Yorker and New York Times Magazine issues.
Maybe that’s not so scattered. It seems that way though. I suppose, mainly, I feel as if I don’t read enough books anymore (like most people, I guess). It’s a funny feeling to have. My main ambition in life has been to become a novelist. But now I don’t really read that many novels anymore—or at least not as many as I used to. And when I do, I never really feel that satisfied. It’s hard to know whether that’s because I’m a) jealous of other writers; b) narrow in my tastes; c) have bad taste; d) simply lazy; or e) all of the above. I’m not sure any of us will figure it out. (The answer is probably e.)
At the end of the summer, I was preparing to visit my family on Long Island for about two weeks and then fly to Italy to stay there for about three weeks. Before I left, I was trying to decide what books to bring with me. I wanted novels that felt like stories—not the meandering plotless novels that I usually gravitate toward. Because I was going to Long Island, when I heard that Emma Cline’s new novel, The Guest, took place in the Hamptons I decided I had to pick that up. And, because it’d been over a year since I last read it and because I’m as obsessed with Long Island as Joyce was with Dublin, Faulkner was with the American South, and Shaun Brumder was with Orange County, I also decided to take The Great Gatsby.
I haven’t read most of Emma Cline’s work except for a few random short stories I’ve seen in The New Yorker. In fact, when she first broke out back in 2016 with her debut novel The Girls, I read about it in a New Yorker issue in a bathroom of a house I was renting in Napeague, which is in between Amagansett and Montauk just beyond East Hampton.
I was thirty at the time and, of course, my first reaction was, “Fuck this, she’s younger than me, has a novel out, and is getting written about in The New Yorker.” I’m probably not the best judge of other people’s work and my judgment is usually clouded, but her stories never really made much of an impression on me.
Overall, I think I liked The Guest. The prose was kind of featureless and bare but maybe that was the point. Even though the main character wasn’t likable and made terrible decisions, I felt compelled to keep reading. It reminded me of a blurb from Zadie Smith I’d read on the back of My Struggle, Volume 1 by Karl Ove Knausgaard: “There shouldn’t be anything remarkable about any of it except for the fact that it immerses you totally.”
The book is about a twenty-two year old woman named Alex who is living with an older man out in the Hamptons. She ends up being cast aside and, instead of going back to New York City to face a man from her not so distant past, cons and insinuates her way into a variety of situations within the world of the wealthy on the South Fork of Long Island.
The Guest takes place over a short period of time (one of my favorite structures) and is episodic in nature (also one of my favorite structures). It is at times sexy, disturbing, tense, mundane, evocative, and bland. Maybe that range of qualities explains why I was engrossed with it. I’m not quite sure. The ending was a cop out and a let down, but I still felt like I had to recommend it to my fiance’s twenty-six year old sister. It will probably be an HBO show at some point (The Girls is supposedly already being adapted for TV), but they’re going to have to add a little more violence or drama into the adaptation. Plenty of good roles to be had though.
As for The Great Gatsby, it’s still a classic. There’s not much new to say about it other than that it is maybe somehow still slightly underrated for a book that has probably some of the best sentences ever written in the English language. Here’s a few to jog your memory:
“For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.”
“Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
“At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”
“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
“When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again.”
“And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
Each of those lines is wonderful to read aloud. And each one, no matter how many times I read it, makes me feel something very deeply. The last one, especially, makes me think of a long ferry ride I took from New York City to Martha’s Vineyard where I watched the entirety of Long Island go by, for the first and maybe only time in my life, from the water of the Sound. For a moment, maybe as I was passing Sound Beach or perhaps Southold by sea, I could glimpse that old island that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes.
And The Great Gatsby has always been kind of a weird book. It’s barely a novel—a “glorified anecdote” as H.L. Mencken once said. The errors that made their way into the novel, like Gatsby saying he’s from the Midwest but calling San Francisco the Midwest, are fascinating. The novel’s overall shape is a kind of half-hearted framed narrative (Nick telling the story of his summer with Gatsby, Nick, and Daisy) that then has several other narratives nested within it (Nick relaying Jordan telling him the story of how Daisy and Gatsby knew each other, which Gatsby had told her; Nick telling the reader Gatsby’s full back story, which Gatsby had told him). None of these structures or devices feels especially intentional; more as if it all miraculously came together, woven through and bound by the wonderful language.
Reading these two novels back-to-back made for a nice double feature about the fabulously wealthy people who inhabit Long Island, their emptiness and callousness, and those outsiders who aspire to enter their world but never truly will.
See you next week.