Most exciting book I read in 2019
Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet. Carson is a poet and thinker after my heart. No pretensions. She speaks in her own, forceful, spontaneous, complicated voice. Her unfolding essay in Eros explores the development of a new sense of self in ancient times as a response to the innovation of a written alphabet in archaic Greek. It goes on to examine the phenomenon of Eros in Plato—in writing and in life. Carson’s erudition as a classicist, as a reader of Sappho and other archaic lyric poets, is matched only by her insight and passion for ideas.
I say with great chagrin that I once had an extended, uncomprehending entanglement with Plato’s “Phaedrus,” the focal subject of Carson’s look at Plato and Eros. In my first year of teaching, as a graduate student, I was expected to teach “rhetoric” to two classes of very green freshmen. Hard as this may be to understand, I had never studied Plato, rhetoric, or pedagogy. (My undergraduate major in philosophy, unbelievably, did not include much of the Greeks.) The Freshman English course director gave us graduate assistants a rhetoric textbook in which the “Phaedrus” was the featured unit. I have bits of memory of those semesters as an unprepared teacher; fear, shame, the grit to make enough sense of it all to teach my students something of value, however modest. I don’t think I told any lies, but the whole enterprise felt like one. How eager I am to revisit the rich texts I was unprepared to understand in my youth.
New Novels
This subject calls for book-length treatment, and I hardly consider myself well-read or expert enough to undertake that, but I’ll pause to say that I am continually disappointed by contemporary fiction. I pick up so many highly touted novels that are indistinguishable in voice, tarted up by sexualization or other sensationalism of their story lines, longer than they should be, presented as literary fiction but essentially released by publishers as middle-brow potboilers.
I don’t read exhaustively or systematically, and I am uttering this generalization more as a cry of frustration than a considered analysis. I would love to know more about the feedback loop that is sustaining this model: writers writing to satisfy publishers; publishers soliciting/editing books to fit unspoken criteria for easy marketing and better sales; a market of readers who basically want a voyeur’s experience rather than a literary one; critics who aren’t critics.
It’s so interesting to read reader reviews on the big book sales websites: raves and pans, with not too much in between. The pans are often by people who just don’t get it, or for whom it’s the wrong subject matter or the wrong take on the subject matter. The raves often have an aura of being from the writer’s inner circle, as do the cover blurbs. (How else does an unknown writer climb the ladder of fame and fortune? Maybe there’s an oversupply of new fiction. It’s of course terribly hard to get attention.) As with considering purchase of a toaster or vacuum cleaner, I look for comments with some nuance, comments that spell out particulars of analysis. (Not of the plot; spare us.) There is useful information to be found here when there is argument rather than gush.
