brief book reviews

found myself accidentally only reading books by women early in the summer so decided to continue this theme and do some kind of "brat summer" but for literary fiction. it went well and i enjoyed it.

girls, visions and everything by sarah schulman (seal press): found this in a little free library and felt like it looked interesting. this is a 3rd-person, presumably autofictional novel about a 20-something jewish lesbian living in new york city in 1984. the protagonist is an acolyte of jack kerouac and frequently opines for an on the road style life in a way that made me laugh in how it contrasts with the general 'problematic' vibe people have about young male lovers of the 'ouac. the story is mainly a straightforward love story but full of rumination on and fear of settling down, which results in an interesting, bleak, comedic ending. but the majority of the story consists of little character sketches in her social circle - endearing drug dealers, avant garde actors, other writers - and detached discussion of gentrification, racism, and homophobia. felt surprised by how contemporary a lot of the political discourse felt (which speaks to how 'behind' the mainstream is) - she capitalizes the B in Black, she gets mad that her stories are rejected for describing characters as 'fat', she worries about the looming reelection of reagan, and so on. enjoyed the way she writes about the protagonist's burgeoning relationship throughout the book and the minor, engaging intimacies they share. felt confused at times by the number of characters with generic names who do and say similar things. felt like the scenes intended to show off the crazy artsiness of her social group were uninteresting in a predictable and embarrassing way, but there were only a few of these. overall very much enjoyed it and found myself feeling frequently impressed by some insightful, well-executed line, observation, or stylistic effect. would highly recommend.

earth angel by madeline cash (clash books): a collection of short stories. a couple read as relatively straightforward cultural commentary by way of near-future dystopia, but with an emphasis on character and relationships that i found enjoyable and engaging. enjoyed the more 'literary' nature of these stories compared to those in my first book (the two authors are friends, or something, as i understand it), with the higher level of ambiguity, detachment, and experimentation; the book's best stories imo are when there's room for ambiguity, strangeness, and comedy, like the story about hitting her sister's leg with a sledgehammer, or the longer, more 'normal literary fiction' stories about complicated characters navigating love. i also enjoyed the more minimal tone and style, reminiscent more of the traditional early tao lin-type alt lit which has always appealed to me. to continue comparing the two books in a minor way, i found it interesting that the first and last stories in my first book were the most engaging, but in earth angel, the opposite is true: the first story is a short, vague, more expressionistic vignette, and the last story is a boring, self-referential riff on autofiction. i think the book would have benefited from either drastically more or drastically less self-referentiality. as it is it feels a little less cohesive as a collection than it could have been, but overall would recommend. feeling optimistic about cash's future stories.

this should be written in the present tense by helle helle (soft skull): a short, bleak, scandanavian novel about a weird anxious person moving to a new small town and navigating various relationships. enjoyed the minimal style and emphasis on daily minutiae, clothing, and food, and the sparse background/context for the story. also enjoyed the emphasis on exploring femininity through consumption/shopping/image - i don't think i've ever read a book that explores the realistic avoidance behavior of just buying things as clearly as this, and this does it well and consistently, sometimes to comedic effect, sometimes to sad tragic effect. enjoyed the descriptions in general, emphasis on clothing/materials, awkward conversations, and detached nature of the narrator in contrast with her relationships with others. didn't like that the penultimate line is the title of the book, which, combined with the seemingly nonsequitur turn of the narrator getting into writing (presumably writing this book) and last-minute shift in style, made the ending disappointing. overall would highly recommend.

the beans of egypt, maine by carolyn chute: found this in a little free library somewhere and felt interested in it based on the title and description. a style and voice-heavy novel about the Bean family, a large, poverty-stricken, insane, fecund family living in a rural, shitty area of maine. greatly enjoyed the style and narrative quirks (such as words in ALL CAPS for youthful emphasis), the strong emphasis on dialect and setting (logging trucks, houses without electricity, etc), and strange, evocative, poetic imagery.  enjoyed the progression of characters from children to adults and the interesting, depressing inter-generational commentary this allows for. greatly enjoyed the overall bleak, fucked up-edness of the whole thing; often found myself alternately shaking my head/cringeing and laughing out loud. would highly recommend - possibly the best book i've read in a long time.

conversations with friends by sally rooney: a novel seemingly about a young woman in a major city sleeping with a married man; lost my copy somehow, unsure where it went, maybe read 30% of it. very much enjoyed the detached tone and the emphasis on the narrator describing and being aware of her own emotions and bodily movements, using phrasing that felt impressively concise, accurate, and evocative, but felt like the story overall was uninteresting and straightforward. would enjoy reading other books by her, maybe, or finding my copy of this book and finishing it.

the book of x by sarah rose etter (two dollar radio): read the first and last pages and felt thankful i didn't bother reading any of the other pages. there you go. that's a good snarky review. how does that make you feel

drive your plow over the bones of the dead by olga tokarczuk: technically a murder mystery with some elements of european small village life and long rants about astrology. feels "quirky" in the same way that the author sporting polish dreadlocks feels "quirky." didn't really keep my interest.

alphabetical diaries by sheila heti: a collection of excerpts from heti's personal diaries presented in alphabetical order, with each chapter corresponding to a letter of the alphabet. enjoyed reading the first two chapters and seeing the interesting juxtapositions, repetition, contradiction, and recurring characters, but didn't feel sustained enough interest to read the whole thing. felt vaguely disappointed in learning (i think via back cover synopsis or somewhere else in the book) that the collection was extensively edited and 'worked on' by the author instead of just being a raw alphabetized dump of her diary entries -- this, i feel, is antithetical to the project's whole concept as found art and further makes me feel disinterest in finishing the book.

end of brat summer (literary fiction edition)

dandelions by yasunari kawabata: a short, unfinished novel that was originally published serially in a magazine. mostly consists of a protracted dialogue between a woman and her soon-to-be son-in-law after they've committed the daughter/fiancée to an insane asylum. really enjoyed the unhinged and uncomfortable turns in the conversation, the subtle sexual tension between the two characters, and the way long flashbacks are unceremoniously woven into the story. enjoyed the classic kawabatan themes of talking about flowers, intergenerational tension, exploration of domesticity and sensuality, and people traveling to interesting areas in japan. unironically enjoyed the temporal inconsistencies (noted by the translator in a footnote) due to its unfinished state, felt like it could have been an intentionally surreal choice and be expanded upon. one of my top 4 kawabata novels, i think, along with snow country, wild geese, and thousand cranes.

follow the brush by tyler dempsey (self-released): a generally themeless, grab-bag collection of short stories and nonfiction. some stories are very 'experimental', silly, donald barthelmian pieces, some are very straight forward mini-essays, and some are standard 'serious' internet flash fiction fare. i think dempsey is best when he plays it straight and earnest, and i would enjoy, i think, a memoir in flash kind of collection from him. some of the zanier fiction stuff is fun but feels a little too undisciplined to really land for me. would have enjoyed the book more if it had a consistent theme or mood as opposed to being an eclectic mix of what he's done recently, but i think the project was borne out of him writing exclusively while on the toilet and then self-released, so it also makes sense for it to be kind of loose and playful instead of striving toward a larger stylistic statement; as far as i can tell dempsey has been exploring many different kinds of writing and releasing very different kinds of books instead of working toward solidifying a more specific voice, so i'd be interested in seeing him take on a more ambitious project that refines what he does well. overall i enjoyed it and support him in self-releasing it (and sending me a copy) and seemingly having fun making a book end-to-end. i would recommend, but you can't buy it anymore, so fuck you all, eat my shit and go to hell. just kidding. he'd probably send you a pdf if you asked. made myself laugh imagining including a line here talking shit about tex's typesetting of this book (i recommended tex to tyler).

the third realm by karl ove knausgaard: the third of what i think is a 5-book series about a sort of biblical apocalypse set in modern day. generally a big fan of his writing, and greatly enjoyed the previous books in this series. this book however is more or less a 'mirror image' of the first book, the morning star, in that it's basically the same chapters/stories but told from different perspectives. as such plotwise there is little overarching development until about halfway through the book, and i felt disinterested in the characters themselves to want to read the material i was already familiar with from their perspectives. found myself growing weary of the more expositional "i put coffee in my mug, slurped it down, and went out into the hall, closing the door behind me" style, likely due to the lack of newness in the story. also noticed more annoyingly redundant scenes of characters thinking something, then explaining that something to another character, then possibly explaining it yet again to another character, or something, which made random parts drag on needlessly. felt slightly embarrassed reading the passages describing a black metal concert and frustrated by the big plot 'reveal' feeling obvious early on then being very slowly dragged out. surprised by how many negative emotions i experienced while reading it relative to his other books, even the other books in this series. the second half picked up a little, i felt. curiously-constructed series.

the flowers of buffoonery by osamu dazai: i've read and enjoyed two of his other novels in translation. this one was just translated last year (apparently more have just been translated); this is my favorite of the three i've read so far. this is a very short novel about a guy who fails at a double suicide, but the text is maybe 50% asides by the author talking about how he feels like a hack. enjoyed the simple, clever plot, the small cast of entertaining characters, and the subversive style, and the ending a lot. excellent book. would highly recommend.

Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War by Rick Claypool (Anxiety Press): i have read and enjoyed two other novels by rick claypool and enjoyed them to a great degree despite what felt like straightforward prose and some needless emphasis on action sequences. i liked that they are inventive, psychedelic, and astoundingly bleak for sci-fi, a genre i read as a kid but have generally avoided as an adult. this is another action-packed sci-fi like the others, but it impressed me with its new and expert emphasis on style. i like its humor-leaden minimalism, repetition, fun use of ALL CAPS, and focus on mundanity/humanity/shittiness (despite being about mutants on the moon who puke knives and etc.) i also appreciated his commitment to absurdity despite its earnest preoccupations, and both are cranked up to an impressive, insane degree. a truly strange, endearing, phenomenal book that i recommend to everyone.

brief book reviews

i was in a bad place in many ways for a very long time, so hadn't been prioritizing reading or writing reviews, but i have read a few books since the fall. i also wrote some reviews that are supposed to come out in beyond the last estate, so i haven't included them here. you can add 3-4 books to this list, mentally, if you are trying to keep tabs on my reading habits.

 

holy cow by david duchovny (farrar, strauss, and giroux): a really stupid (derogatory), short novel by the guy from x-files. checked it out from the library partially because i liked the cover and partially because i was curious to see if it was any good. this is a brief, 'comedic' adventure story about a few farm animals trying to travel to different countries to escape being eaten (the cow wants to go to india, the pig to israel, the turkey to...turkey). full of bad farm puns, dated slang to make fun of teen girls (the cows say "amazeballs" at some point), and weird jewish stereotypes (although the most interesting scene is when the pig decides to get circumcised). feels comically "un-politically correct" in an old-fashioned, "hollywood humor" sort of way (e.g. unfunny, relies on tropes/stereotypes, generally mean-spirited, lazy). felt bothered by the internal logic inconsistencies (the cow doesn't know what tv is, calling tvs "box gods", but also makes frequent references to pop culture, including tv and movies) and by the core plot being a lazy, childlike premise (they don't eat cows in india so the cow wants to go to india). relies heavily on the post-modern affect of referencing the writing and editing of the novel for long passages and several barely-motivated decisions to move through the plot. not very good, but mercifully short and relatively snappy. thinking on it now, i'm unsure what the 'purpose' of a book like this is. i liked the ~4 drawings by natalya balnova a lot, though. wouldn't recommend.

woman world by aminder dhaliwal (drawn and quarterly): saw this on the staff recs shelf at the library and wanted to 'expand my horizons'. this is series of mostly disconnected 1-2 page comic strips set in a near future where there are no men. there is a slight subplot about a character pining after someone who is already in a relationship and a child being obsessed with a dvd copy of paul blart: mall cop. the humor felt blisteringly dated and bad (cf. paul blart jokes), and sometimes the attempt at a pun is so brutally stretched that the result is nearly nonsensical (e.g. the sperm bank is 'maxed out', meaning they are 'out of sperm from people named max'). also felt like the attempts at pro-trans messaging is weirdly crammed in/lipservicey and inconsistent with the world building/other aspects of the story (only female sexed babies are born, but also there are still trans women, but also the semen supply is limited from the reserves when men were still around). enjoyed making my wife read various pages to upset her with how bad it was. would not recommend.

house of hunger by uzodinma okehi (self-released): uzo manically messaged me about several things, including asking to trade books, and has since accused back patio press of being run by a racist cabal of nyc writers or something because he convinced himself some shitpost tweets were about him (many people have believed this to varying degrees with varying results); i feel like he enjoys being annoying and mischaracterizing what people say to him because of some sort of victim complex or to stoke engagement, which i don't respect. anyway, this is a very short narrative about a guy going to college in iowa city and feeling horny and alienated. the style is very heavy on comma-heavy list-like descriptions and flashes/snatches of action/conversation to propel the brief narrative, i think to intentionally evoke a sort of graphic novel/action movie flow, since the protagonist is an illustrator who wants to make an action movie. enjoyed the characters that are more fleshed out, like the movie auteur who gets addicted to mario 64, but most of the characters are zero dimensional, existing only to deliver one line of dialogue or entertain one single thought. the impression i got is that there is a lot of story in the author's head that didn't make it to the page, making the female characters confusingly interchangeable and more or less nonexistent, and some of the long impressionistic sketches of scenery/buildings unengaging/unclear. thought it was interesting that, while presumably autofiction, the most direct exploration of the racist manipulation of men by women in the text comes from a sort of monologue from a random south asian guy over the phone who we know nothing about, and not from the protagonist's own specific experience, which is stated as the fulcrum of the story despite only being alluded to a couple of times. enjoyed the culminating scene being a terrible blowjob. enjoyed the pointlessness of each chapter being titled "house of hunger". overall felt confusingly short and underdeveloped despite what i thought was an interesting/promising premise and setting. felt mixed on the style/presentation. felt impressed by the poor-quality printing, seemingly worse than print on demand books. slightly curious to read his other, longer book, but not that curious. would recommend if you get it for a good deal; seemed fine. would not recommend interacting with him on twitter.

diaries of an oxygen thief by anonymous (simon and schuster): bought this used because i had read a publisher's weekly article about how it was an 'indie hit,' which actually ascribed its success to 1) the author receiving 1,000 free copies of the book from his friend, 2) the author being a marketing executive able to quit his job to focus on selling the book in new york city for over a year, and 3) the alluring cover; it went on to sell 10s of thousands of copies and was rereleased by simon and schuster. this is a short, repetitive, annoying, protracted, frustrating novel about a rich loser guy who breaks women's hearts and then later has his heart broken, kind of, barely, not really, by a woman. lots of space is spent hyping up its own narrative and culminating event which was, ultimately, severely underwhelming, uninteresting, and confusingly written; the 'comeuppance' the book hinges on appears to be that the woman tells her friend that the protagonist has a small penis in a public setting, and they try to photograph him looking upset in a bar. overall a very poorly balanced, poorly edited, poorly executed story. severely would not recommend. 

the lone ranger and tonto fist fight in heaven by sherman alexie: a collection of interlinked short stories that sort of read like a novel in that they mostly follow the same characters (though sometimes from different perspectives) through different stages in life. focused on family, native american identity, alcoholism, and life on the reservation vs. the big city. really enjoyed it in general - the dialogue, the setting, the themes, and characters - but laughed at some of the heavy handed similes/metaphors used to evoke/emphasis native americanness, e.g. things like (i'm making this up) "his smile felt like a promise, an occupation, a treaty." enjoyed the moments where absurd irreality is simply stated for interesting effect (e.g. (making this up) "i slept for 400 years"), not quite in a dramatic metaphorical way, but a sort of wry, defeated way. enjoyed the emphasis on basketball as a throughline. felt mixed emotions about how some of the stories are written with "MFA"-style attempts at different voices/affects, and disliked when the prose veered into the more melodramatic framing. checked wikipedia and saw that the screenplay for the movie smoke signals, which i like, was very, very, very loosely based on the characters in this collection (and written by alexie). would recommend both the book and the movie.

molly by blake butler (archway editions): never read/enjoyed much by blake aside from his chicken essay in the pets anthology; i remember starting 300,000,000 and feeling disinterested in the writing style. this is a memoir about his first wife, the poet molly brodak (i have only read a few poems by her), committing suicide, and as such has been the topic of prolonged literary discourse. in terms of the actual content, i found it to read overall moderately self-aggrandizing and thoroughly, consistently critical of/angry toward molly in an off-putting way. felt like it reads like a slow mystery thriller about an evil, lying wife who sucks and you should hate. i think it's fine he wrote the book, and support him in writing it however he wants (enjoyed the inclusion of the suicide note and other details), but i was surprised by how aggressively anti-molly it reads almost from the beginning and how uncharitable it is toward her despite frequently proclaiming love and admiration for her (or her work ethic, mainly). this is expecially contrasted with how quick he is to only performatively slap himself of the wrist when it comes to examining his end of their relationship. for example, his own infidelity early on is addressed in a short passage or two and he emphasizes that he had already resolved to be better before he was found out, and he glibly claims to not have a gambling problem despite admitting to frequently screaming and breaking things in a blind rage whenever he loses a bet, etc. meanwhile he spends a long time slowly examining the minutiae of any given time molly possibly lied to him and what it says about how terrible of a person she was. it feels difficult to critique these aspects of the book without the criticism being viewed as a moral or personal judgement but i do feel like it affects the narrative and structure of the book in a negative way; considered that if this were a novel written entirely about made-up people, it would feel like a very obvious attempt at writing an unreliable narrator. my most common complaint about autoficition(/memoir) is a lack of introspective honesty despite in-text and/or metatextual claims otherwise, which i feel applies here as well. however, my real complaint is that the book is simply written in a style i don't really find engaging, and that it is very poorly edited, in terms of its often redundant and awkward syntax and also in terms of plain copy editing, e.g. the same exact needlessly complex multi-line simile is copy and pasted, verbatim, twice, in the span of a page and half (including in the 2nd edition). i relatedly found the dependence on showy but generally meaningless and clunky similes distracting, and found myself becoming overly critical of the writing the more i encountered them, e.g. getting mad that he describes a feeling as if he had a "black stone in [his] stomach" and dismissively asking myself "what does the color of the stone impart to this feeling? what if it was a blue stone?" i was also surprised by the number of awkwardly artless cliches and expressions (such as 'spill the beans'), primarily because of how overwrought the similes and vocabulary tend to be otherwise (blake rarely "says" anything but frequently "iterates" things, etc.; my father in law read most of the book while visiting and once frustratedly moaned "i get it, you got a degree in writing!"); i found the resulting style confusing, frustrating, and unstimulating. i also want to note that i have found people oppose my off-handed critiques of the writing/editing by saying they would consider it understandably difficult to write, let alone line edit, a long, personal narrative of loss like this, ie. "imagine being put in the position of giving editorial feedback on someone's description of finding their wife's corpse, of course you wouldn't suggest a lot of changes." i understand this feeling but also don't think it holds any merit if we're trying to make good, worthy books, which i otherwise assume blake would argue in favor of. ultimately i would classify the book as the kind that depends on its premise/idea more than its execution, which is a kind of book i don't like much, and so the book's draw for me simply becomes one of bleak voyeurism. wouldn't recommend.

my first book by honor levy (penguin randomhouse): i vaguely remember reading (and not being gripped by) her story on tyrant, and have mostly only been aware of her due to discourse about/reviews of this book and its emphasis on 'terminally online' internet culture; wanted to read the book to see what all the hubbub was about (assumed it would be better than people were saying). aside from the first and last stories, however, which i assume is intentionally sequenced to bookend with the aforementioned 'online' effect, the book felt relatively straightforward, grounded in mostly irl scenes or relatively older internet experiences (e.g. 'internet girl' discusses using the internet in like 2004), and only casually references memes and contemporary pop culture/internet stuff -- instagram is mentioned a couple times, a story talks about a lot of people being 'cancelled,' caitlyn jenner is mentioned a few times, there's a brief critical discussion of facetuning, etc. i disliked how the bulk of the stories read like mid 2010s personal essays (note: on 1storypod, honor mentions being very excited when she learned about 'creative nonfiction', so this makes sense), with nearly every story relying on quoting a definition of some term from a website or providing a shallow survey of a topic in a very plain, essayistic format that i do not care for; i angrily laughed out loud when reading some later story that actually reads like a near-future scifi short story for 3 pages before it launches into a multipage history of an aztec god to reaffirm the fragmented essay conceit. the other stories mostly revolve around a few recurring (i assume) autobiographical themes (e.g. problematic college boys who go to greece and are mean to/impregnate college girls) or exploring the aforementioned ideas related to using the internet but with a very straightforward criticality (which helps reinforce the feeling of a personal essay in almost every story) instead of exploring any social/moral/narrative ambiguity or subverting much of anything style- or narrative-wise; i found little of the internet stuff to be truly insightful or accomplish much, aside from the first story (a sort of twitter snapshot slang-forward fairytale) and the final story, "pillow girls", which i consider a great, well-executed piece of ambiguous and subversive social commentary (despite illogically taking place in a dystopian near future yet, also, somehow, the year 2016)). i also didn't like the reliance on frequent slam poetry-style free word association, like (making this up) "we broke up, we broke down, we broke everything we touched", which to me feels lazy and melodramatic. enjoyed the stories that seem to go off on a narrative tangent by the end and never resolve the main plot and would have enjoyed more of this (could be billed as a comment on something something attention span and the internet). felt confused by the sequencing and composition of the collection in general. felt vaguely convinced that this would have become a NYT bestseller if it had been edited/promoted as a collection of experimental-ish essays instead of stories. would recommend.

the exploding tree by kevin richard white (anxiety press): kevin is a curmodgeony short story writer from philly who used to host the no edit podcast, which i  enjoyed (and was on 1-2 times). these stories seem to be deeply in the vein of carver/cheever/yates/other 'serious'/bleak mid-century writers; most of the stories revolve around alcoholism and domestic problems, often consisting almost entirely of stilted dialogue between two unhappy characters (usually a romantic couple). enjoyed some of the exotically dark/bleak ideas, such as the story about the amputee and the one about the alcoholic parents driving to the horse races, but some of the others kind of blur together. the dialogue-heavy presentation made it sometimes difficult to understand the context for a given scene and i found some of the phrasing hard to parse due to their reliance on (i assume) certain vocal inflection or emphasis that isn't easily included in a written story. enjoyed the articulation of some of the bleak observations/ideas that the characters entertain but didn't enjoy some of the prose itself, which leans toward a little dramatic and serious, which makes sense given the subject matter, but feels like it's trying to emulate a style more than innovate. enjoyed some brief passages for their sense of dark whimsy, which was unexpected and promising. noted that all of these stories have been published online before, which i don't like, but can't really articulate why. also disliked that the cover image seems ai-generated. would recommend.

the satanic verses by salman rushdie: listened to an interview with rushdie on a podcast and he said something about how the fatwah against him due to this book has unfairly given it an air of austerity and religious seriousness despite being whimsical and humorous, so i checked it out from the library. a very long, wordy, post-modern, whimsical novel about two indian men who survive a plane crash and one sort of becomes a devil and the other an angel, or something (i don't really know the full plot, having only read 1/5 of the book). definitely a 'humorous' book with an emphasis on post-modern narrative play, mixed up vocabulary/register, pop culture/political references/satire, and extensive wordplay. felt unable to really get into it due to how long and self-indulgent everything is, with every scene/dialogue spanning pages and pages. i did laugh out loud at one joke, but otherwise felt like it was trying too hard to be clever and witty. felt like it seems 'good' in its execution and is probably worth finishing, but i didn't have the stamina for it. would recommend.

septology by jon fosse: have read and enjoyed several books by fosse before and started a ~15 person book club online to read this book. i think maybe 6 people finished it very quickly, 6 people didn't read a single page, and 3 people gave up toward the end (i am one of the 3). enjoyed the book club twitter groupchat while it was active but felt disappointed in myself for not being a better host or being able to finish the book (my life had fallen apart, generally, at this time). generally enjoyed the book but found the (infamous, intentional) repetition to eventually wear me down. enjoyed the moments where he is able to capture/create a sense of anxiety about something going wrong without things going wrong (usually). enjoyed the descriptions of foods and various humorous scenes (the dog shitting, the guys talking about delirium tremens, the name of the cafe). didn't enjoy some of the reliance on various 'traumas' to create tension. enjoyed some of the religious rambling and discussions of art. enjoyed reading it at the beginning knowing that it uses a very limited vocabulary -- felt excited every time a good word (like 'shit' or 'piss') was used. felt like i was able to enjoy it despite not finishing it in the way you can enjoy a piece of ambient music. would recommend.

awful people by scott mitchell may (death of print): traded books with scott based on reading praise of this book by people whose opinion i value. this is a novel told mostly in interview format about some kind of government agency investigating some kind of supernatural incident involving a woman in the center of some kind of love triangle thing. very reminiscent of david foster wallace with its conspiracy/government agency plot, intentionally mixed registers, rambling dialogue, and wordplay (lots of instances of characters breaking apart/riffing on common expressions). read about half of it and got distracted, didn't finish. not very excited by dfw-styled novels like this, but i understand their appeal when writing them. seemed fine if that's what you're looking for.

the rainbow by yasunari kawabata: have enjoyed several novels by kawabata. this one wasn't translated until last year for some reason. overall enjoyed it, similar in many regards to his other novels: lots of scenes of aristocratic people quietly suffering family drama, walking through fancy gardens, and talking about flowers. enjoyed the moments of soap opera-level dramatic reveals mixed in with insanely dark and cutting observations/meditations on death. enjoyed the 'light touch' he brings to certain themes and narrative arcs, where the 'point' is clear but not overwrought. felt like the structure/focus was a little inconsistent, in that the book sort of changes 'main characters' 2/3rds of the way in. felt like there was some needless, distracting repetition that i assume is related to the novel having been serialized originally - would have enjoyed a snappier, better-edited version. not my favorite by him but has some good moments. enjoyed that the first line is about the eponymous rainbow.