The Maris Review, vol 58
In which I rave about a few friends and their books while plugging my own
We're getting down to the wire
What I read this week
UnWorld by Jayson Greene
Jayson is an old friend. When I first met him he was a full-time music writer, the kind who could convey a sense of excitement, even wonder, about whatever was striking his fancy – from classical music to hip hop. I had been telling him forever to write a book! The world needed more writers who were tremendously smart yet easy to read.
And then tragedy struck and he and his wife Stacy lost their two year-old daughter, Greta, in a freak accident. His memoir about the loss, Once More We Saw Stars, is as much about hope as it is about grief. It is not the book I had hoped he would write, of course, but it is stunning.
Since then Jayson got his MFA in fiction from Bennington, and now we're just starting to see Jayson becoming the writer he was always meant to be. Next week he publishes his debut novel, UnWorld, and it's what I've been waiting for this whole time. It's one of those lean and fast paced books that is also brimming with ideas, eccentricities
When Unworld opens it appears to be a realistic novel about grief. Anna and Rick have lost their teenage son, Alex, and they are as annihilated as you might imagine. But only a few pages in, when Anna disables the AI in her car so she can drive it herself, we understand that the story is a speculative one, that we're being brought into a world that doesn't seem so far away where the AI shit has hit the AI fan. Jayson has built a whole new world in which people have the ability to create AI uploads of themselves to help them process their memories. Made me think of all of those sad people trying to get ChatGPT to be their therapist. When we first meet Anna, she and her upload Aviva are both struggling with the loss of Alex in their own distinct ways.
Rather than offering long explanations about how or why this upload stuff works, Jayson just gives us the pertinent details to further the narrative. There is jargon galore in UnWorld, as we see especially when Jayson writes from the perspective of Cathy, an academic who teaches Applied Personhood Theory, but we are not asked to understand it. I haven't asked Jayson about this, but in my head I'm imagining he compiled a bible, stacks and stacks of writing that function as building blocks of this fictional world, even though he includes very little of it in this book. So what we get instead is a winnowed down backstory that accedes to the current action of the novel, and in this way Jayson constructs metaphors for grief and memory that come at us quickly and effectively. There's hardly a chance to catch your breath, which is how I imagine the experience of extreme loss feels.
Murder Takes a Vacation by Laura Lippman
In which Muriel Blossom finally gets to be the main character in her own story. The story begins when Mrs. Blossom, the 68 year-old former assistant to PI Tess Monaghan and a recent lottery winner, decides to spend some of her winnings on a cruise down the Seine with her lifelong best friend, Elinor.
I don't know about you, but at this moment I could really, really fucking use a luxurious cruise down the Seine. Muriel arrives a week early to experience the culture of Paris as she wants to. Muriel's long deceased husband hadn't been much of an appreciator of music or art, so what an escapist joy it is to watch a woman who's lived modestly all her life be able to enjoy beauty and even spoil herself. This is the future we want.
And who better to take us on this journey than Laura Lippman, a murder book pro who creates characters (or, in this case, shows a character in a new light) who jump off the page. The intrigue arrives when a potential love interest Muriel had encountered at the Baltimore airport before their transcontinental trip turns up dead before the ship even sets sail. Are all of the people she then meets on the boat who they say they are? That's for Muriel to figure out in a plot as colorful as and intricate as a Joan Mitchell painting, Muriel's favorite.
On Writing Through It
Last weekend I had the privilege of watching Kate McKean, literary agent extraordinaire and proprietor of Agents and Books, launch her own book about book publishing. She opened by reading from a part of Write Through It that I really needed to hear, all about how publishing a book is not gonna change you dramatically, if at all. Most writers don't become rich and famous, most still have day jobs (if only I were so lucky to have a day job!). But you do it to for personal fulfillment, to connect with readers, to say your piece. I already knew this part, and wrote about it, but a few weeks before my book launch it was helpful to hear it again. If you read this newsletter I know you know – you can scroll down to the bottom of each one and see just how many books get published each week.
Then Kate chatted with Emily Gould, who is already killing it as the new proprietor of Dinner Party. It's so funny because Emily, along with many audience members (hi!), is an experienced writer and author who has seemingly seen it all yet still had a lot of questions about how publishing works – or doesn't (I met Emily in the aughts when we were both editorial assistants at publishers). I loved Kate's takeaway of the conversation from her most recent newsletter post:
In conversation with Emily, whose books I love and you should go buy and read, I found that a lot of my answers to her questions were ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. No surprise to long-time readers. But not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯as in I don’t know the answer and/or there is no answer but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in terms of I am giving this worry/question/event/outcome up to the universe. It’s on his little hands there, and he’s letting it fly away.
I think people are always looking for solid answers for how to publish a book successfully and think if they follow a certain script they'll get specific results. But publishing is a very shruggy industry, with few definitive answers and a lot of different paths and "it depends..." Embracing the uncertainty is the only way to stay sane, I think. Thanks for the real talk, Kate.
That said...
It's a tour!
Come out and see me in July? Tour dates are below, with more info at my website.
New releases, 6/10
Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly by Jeff Weiss
Write Through It: An Insider's Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life by Kate McKean
Audition by Pip Adam
Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream by Megan Greenwell
The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains by Pria Anand
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser
Foreclosure Gothic by Harris Lahti
An Exercise in Uncertainty: A Memoir of Illness and Hope by Jonathan Gluck
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by VE Schwab
Actress of a Certain Age by Jeff Hiller
So Far Gone by Jess Walter
Homework: A Memoir by Geoff Dyer