Having just returned from a week at Cape Cod with my family, I am happy to report that I have gotten started on some good summer reading, and hope you also are finding some time to relax!
As a literature professor whose primary area of focus is the Victorian novel, a genre known for complex narratives that often spanned multiple volumes, I admit to having a higher than average tolerance for really long books. Once I am drawn into a story, I am happy to spend plenty of time there. With long plane rides and hours of beach time in mind, I brought along Nathan Hill’s 700+ page novel The Nix (2016), a broadly satiric but also poignant story whose time frame alternates between the main narrator’s disappointing life in 2011, and his exploration, following his estranged mother’s arrest for attacking a presidential candidate, of his mother’s hidden past as a student radical in 1968. While it resembles other literary fiction in centering a male writer and literature professor as its protagonist, other narrative perspectives are provided by the mother, a vengeful student plagiarist, a self-destructive video game addict, an embittered Chicago cop, and a charismatic protest organizer, among others. I found the book’s focus on the riots surrounding the 1968 Democratic national convention to be particularly resonant in showing how the monolithic media narrative around student protesters shaped public opinion about their goals. The title refers to a Norwegian folktale about a nix, or house spirit, that seems to haunt the Midwestern family whose three-generation history is gradually unfolded and confronted.
On the somewhat lighter side, at least length wise, was Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (2022), a darkly comic murder mystery that combines the classic elements of a confined group of suspects in an isolated setting with a witty, self-referential narrator who offers ongoing commentary on the art of writing detective fiction. The gruesomely frozen bodies may remind you of Season Four of True Detective, but the voice has a chummy David Sedaris quality. This book also passed the important vacation test of being enjoyed by other family members when they ran out of their own reading material.
I am now part way through Kelli Jo Ford’s Crooked Hallelujah (2020), a moving exploration of the deep bonds among a family of Cherokee women in Oklahoma that begins in the 1970’s. The writing is both delicate and direct, with sharp insights about the complex nature of family relationships. There are many weeks of summer left, so I’d love to hear suggestions you may have about books you are enjoying!
Featured in Carleton Today, July 11, 2024