writing between continents
or: what I did on my unplanned-not-allowed-off-the-plane layover in Japan
Genevieve Reads Things has been on the struggle recently, for ironic reasons—basically, I’ve been reading too much, between work, work trips, and life, to sit down and write about it.
But now I’m on a plane to Cape Town, entering hour 14 (maybe?) of transit across the world and passing through so many time zones I can’t keep them straight, and naturally there’s no better time to think about the three books I’ve read over the last few weeks. Two I absolutely loved, one bucked all the conventional wisdom Goodreads could give me, and one left me cold. All were by young female authors; all made me think about what it is to come of age; what that process means; if it ever actually stops or just takes on different forms as we age into different arenas of our life.
The books are, in the order I read them, Conversations with Friendsby Sally Rooney, an Irish writer (read the New Yorker profile of her here); the short-story collection You Know You Want This, by Kristen Roupenian, who you may know from the viral “Cat Person” short story, also in The New Yorker (until I started Genevieve Reads Things, I did not realize how much my life orbited around The New Yorker; it is the sun and I the moon); and Sweetbitter, by Stephanie Danler.
I’ll start with the last, because I honestly loved it, and that floored me. Sweetbittercame out in 2016, and it has one of those “Lana Turner at a soda counter” origin stories—Danler was a high-end server in New York City for years, and while serving at a fancy restaurant, she told a regular customer, a publishing bigwig, that she’d written a novel; it was scooped up in a huge two-book deal; initially, it sold fine—more on that in a sec; now there’s a successful Starz TV adaptation giving it a renewed boost.
I’ll be upfront and say literally everyone I know who read Sweetbitter(that I’ve talked to about it) HATED it. It is the rare book where I picked it up thinking, “Now I’ll get on the train and be able to talk wisely about how overrated this was.”
But to me it wasn’t. I don’t know—I feel like I’m probably wrong here, guys, because I am one against the tide, but I thought it was a profoundly, PROFOUNDLY well-written and lyrical exploration of the moment in one’s life when one begins to develop taste, in all the varied meanings of that term. Danler leans into the idea of Tess, her protagonist, learning physically to taste things while working at a fancy restaurant—wine, oysters, bitter winter greens, olives—while always playing into the larger idea of life-taste, what you want in your life and what you don’t; what you like for yourself and what you come to realize isn’t working. You begin to learn, simultaneously, how to articulate your tastes, and how to speak yourself into being by so doing.
The sections set in the restaurant are breathless and stressful and involving; Danler perfectly evokes the glamor and camaraderie and transitory nature of it all (I will honestly never forget the moment when Tess falls down the set of precarious stairs, or when she screws up cleaning plates and drops a butter knife on a princess-y patron’s silk dress). That said, the ending is bad. And that’s my guess as to why SWEETBITTER makes such a soft impression on folks; when you close the cover, you’re left with the weakest parts of it, the cookie-cutter plot beats hastily put into place in ways that feel inauthentic to the world and characters Danler’s established. But everything up to that, and particularly the “Summer” and “Autumn” segments, made Sweetbittermy favorite novel I’ve read in maybe the last year? Again, I AM PROBABLY WRONG, but if you heard bad things and weren’t giving this one a chance for that reason, give it a chance.
Also, am I finally old enough and removed enough from my own “coming-of-age in NYC in the early 2000s” experiences that I can enjoy fictionalized versions of same without measuring myself against them? APPARENTLY YES; not sure how I feel about that.
Moving on, Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, in contrast to Sweetbitter, had a banger of an ending—if a character can make you this mad, the author’s doing something right. Conversationsis much slighter and perhaps less ambitious than Danler’s debut; Rooney is interested in a microcosmic exploration of relationships and how they impact our process of identity differentiation—how we try out different versions of ourselves on other people to figure out who we are. It’s set in Dublin, but feels universal; my favorite parts take place on a trip to France (as opposed to Tana French and Karen Marie Moning, whose novels are so intimately steeped in Ireland that they’ve had me yearning for a Dublin trip since forever).
Frances, the main character and narrator of Conversations, is part of a performance poetry (But not slam? TIL: this is a thing) duo with her best friend and ex, Billie. After a show, the two young women find themselves woven into the lives of Melissa and Nick, an older couple of artists who have made good but have (naturally) failed to find happiness. The plot doesn’t go where you think it will at any point, but it doesn’t blow your mind with unexpected twists, either. It’s really about the ways people make bad decisions when they’re young, and how sometimes those bad decisions can show you who you are, or paint the way to who you’re going to be. The dialogue is AMAZING; the inner monologue very true, if frustrating. There’s some good examinations of class privilege. I feel like I’m maybe not selling it as much as I want to—it’s good, but in its precise anthropological focus, it can get a bit unsettling … part of the time I felt like I was hanging over Rooney’s shoulder, spying on her life, and I finished unsure how I felt about that.
I knew exactly how I felt about You Know You Want This, the “Cat Person” short-story collection, and that was: not good. It doesn’t help that we start with the weakest material (the opening story is maybe my least favorite in the whole book, followed close on its heels by … two more of my least favorites) and stack the better stories toward the end. It also doesn’t help that Roupenian keeps diverting to the supernatural in ways that feel salacious rather than provocative. She’s so good at writing about contemporary social mores; “Cat Person” and “Good Guy” – which, true to the title, dissects the myth of that self-proclaimed figure – offer a wonderful duo and pivot for the book, but this doesn’t characterize the collection as a whole, which too often literalizes its metaphors in ways that fail to make the reader work and/or prompt conversation. That said, there’s a story toward the start, “Look at Your Game, Girl”, in which a young woman has a run-in with a predator that’s not quite anything … and it changes her whole life anyway. That’s what I wanted more of here; these small violences – like the misogynistic name-calling in “Cat Person” – that we don’t we can comment on (“too minor; who cares”) even as they haunt us deeply.
The length of this newsletter reminds me that I’ve got to write more often, and I’m striving to do that; in the meantime, if you know anyone who might enjoy these meanderings, feel to forward, share, and/or subscribe here.
I’m on Instagram posting pictures of all the random places my plane stopped here, and on Twitter (sporadically) here. I always read a lot in South Africa, and some big books besides—last year, I plowed through The Goldfinch, and the year before that, A Little Life. This year, I packed Black Leopard, Red Wolf, so here’s to a celebration of that immersion very soon.