The Maris Review, vol 111

This week's theme is fictional characters who are destined to write autobiographical fiction

What I read this week

Whistler by Anne Patchett

So damn charming, as always. Whistler is a deceptively simple story of family love told with absolute precision, just as Tom Lake was previously. How good Ann Patchett is at writing dialogue that gets at the heart of a relationship even in the more mundane details. How good she is at evoking tenderness, a quality I am not always seeking in fiction but one that feels like a warm bath when I find it executed well.

Whistler is a love story about a 53 year-old teacher and her long lost step-father but in the most wholesome way. This isn't porn, so don't go there.

Eddie Triplett was married to Daphne Fuller's mom for a brief time around 1980, and at the time he was her favorite adult – he inspired her and took her seriously and got her jokes. After the two of them survive of brutal car accident together, their bond grows deeper even as the marriage crumbles and they're lost to each other. And then one day in the present they run into each other at the Met, and they are able to reconnect and pick up where their relationship left off. Their conversations are the stuff of magic.

I hope this isn't a spoiler, but I kept waiting for Eddie to disappoint Daphne, or vice versa. But it simply doesn't happen. They face a number of challenges throughout the book, but one thing that doesn't change is how much they love each other. And they are all the more lovable for it.

The Au Pair by Teddy Wayne

Teddy Wayne is the master of depictions of toxic masculinity, especially in straight male writers. He's got an entire canon of sad men with literary aspirations including The Great Man Theory, Apartment, and now, The Au Pair. His latest tells the story of Steven Hammer, an author of literary fiction who lives in Brooklyn Heights (it was almost impossible for me not to picture Jonathan Safran-Foer) and who finds, when he and his wife hire a beautiful 24 year-old au pair named Astrid to take care of their two children, that his life begins to take on all of the beats and tropes of a crime novel.

Steven's debut was everywhere and made him a star, but a disappointing second book leaves him with the pretensions of a big fancy author but not the opportunities or the bank account. That's where Steven's wife, Lucy, comes in. Their marriage loveless, but she is a high-powered business lady and a good provider. She's always off on some big work trip, leaving Steven the house to manage and a small stipend for his troubles.

When their previous nanny dies on the job, it's up to Steven to hire someone new. Astrid is every mediocre man's cliched fantasy of what a nanny could be: a recent college grad from Norway who is young, nubile, blonde, competent, unknowable. And spoiler alert: she wants to fuck him, and she is great at it.

It's all a big beautiful male fantasy until Lucy dies under suspicious circumstances and Steven has to figure out what genre he is living in. Teddy does this so well, putting the "literary" in "literary crime novel" even as he critiques both genres on a meta level. It's a cool trick for such a page-turner.

Underrated Books

For last week's column at Lit Hub, I did something I've always wanted to do. It breaks my brain how often politicians and other hucksters who've "written" books suck up all of the air in the book coverage room when so many truly wonderful books get very little. So I asked a bunch of writer friends to send me a sentence or two on recently published books (within the past couple of years) that they loved, that they felt didn't get enough attention.

I got so many good responses that I didn't bother to add my own recommendations. But readers of this newsletter will know that I think Zinzi Clemmons's new essay collection should have been everywhere.

The Purge: Book Edition

The good news: we have found a new apartment and we will likely sign a lease today. The less good news is that the new apartment is a little smaller than our current one, which requires downsizing. I've packed up approximately 300 books to donate to our friend Pilot at the Rolling Library in Astoria.

Now I have to do the same for my clothing, which is gonna be even tougher...

Tough questions

When we are not talking about how cute our dog is, Josh and I talk about the state of trying to do creative work.

I think about this a lot because I did publishing outreach at Kickstarter for a while: I always thought of Kickstarter as a great alternative way to put movies or games or whatever into the world. But I never thought crowd funding should be the only way. Much like with newsletters: it's lovely that there are new avenues to allow writers to find audiences, but they are a poor substitute for institutional media platforms and the resources they provided. Anyhow, if anyone wants to start a new media company and hire me as their Books editor, I'm around... Lol.