81 – Girls Like Girls
I abandoned Steph’s Story, a Life Is Strange novel, after about fifty pages. It read like a fifteen year old trying to lecture me on social progression using only the lens of their limited counterfeited life experience. It read like all vaguely self-satisfied internet scoldings, in other words. I really didn’t want to abandon it, because I love Life is Strange. I don’t know if I’ve ever said that before. But honestly, while I do love social themes and meaningful critique of norms in a book, they have to be competently delivered. I’m way, way too old to be moved by the outraged moralising of eight-year olds on TikTok.
I wasn’t expecting much from Girls Like Girls, which is the novelization of a music video of a song. It happens to be a song I like very much though, and so I thought ‘Let’s give it a go, how bad can it be?’
It turns out – none. None bad. Girls Like Girls is the Life is Strange novel I wanted. Don’t get me wrong – it has nothing to do with Life is Strange, but it feels like a story that could have been told in the periphery of Arcadia Bay. It is the vibe, the aesthetic, the spirit of Life is Strange transplanted into a novel about a music video about a song. It’s far from a flawless book – the writing is pretty simplistic, the characters not especially well drawn except for the protagonist, and the storyline is predictable to the point of cliché. But it channels something magical, and I found it to be absolutely wonderful.
Coley is seventeen years old, forced to move to a small town she’s never visited after the death of her mother. She moves in with her father, who she doesn’t know very well and who seems to be unsure of how to handle this new relationship with his estranged daughter. Coley is alone, bereft of friends, until she meets Sonya. Sonya is a Cool Girl, and hangs with the Cool Kids, and she invites Coley along to a party. Coley is sad and vulnerable. Sonya is overwhelmingly concerned about her public persona. They’re both in love, but too uncertain of themselves to do anything about it, until they’re not.
This isn’t Max and Chloe or Alex and Steph. There’s no supernatural power here or great stakes. What Girls Like Girls feels like is the story of background characters in Haven Springs. It feels like a vignette of what it means to have intense feelings in a subdued suburban setting. Where it differs from Life is Strange as a whole is that it’s also a story that contains within it the promise, and execution, of a happy ending. It makes you earn its happy ending – there’s a lot of trauma expressed on the page – but it delivers its finale with a catharsis that is joyful.
A little treasure of a book. I will be reading the next Hayley Kiyoko book with great interest.
82 – Eileen
Otessa Mosfegh writes some weird-ass books. My Year of Rest and Relaxation was good enough for me to add some of her other books to my wishlist, and Eileen gradually made its way up my TBR list until I fed it gradually into my bewildered and not exactly appreciative eyes.
‘This is the story of how I disappeared’, writes the protagonist, who begins by outlining the tragic contours of a desperately sad and miserable life. Eileen occupies herself with the thrill of shoplifting and tracing out the happy imaginary trysts she has with one of the guards at the prison where she works. This is preferable to the depressing and constrained life she has at home with her alcoholic father. This is what counts for her existence until Rebecca enters the picture. Rebecca is everything Eileen isn’t and Eileen finds herself drawn into Rebecca’s orbit. With alarming consequences.
The novel is a character study, more than anything else, of how a humdrum life can still be the casing for extraordinary activities, and how even the most mundane of settings can trigger outlandish actions. Eileen is a portrait in self-loathing – something she doesn’t really acknowledge in the telling – up until she is finally goaded into having a life worth living. The narration – from an Eileen old enough to understand her younger self – is light on recrimination but heavy on judgement. It comes across as the kind of review many of us would likely give of our younger selves. ‘Why on Earth did you think that was all you could settle for?’.
Mosfegh’s books are all odd, coming at the story from unusual angles and with unpredictable velocity. The narrative beats are stochastic with all the synchopated regularity of a tap-dancer having a seizure. They’re worth reading – that much isn’t in doubt – but each and every one is a hard sell on a conceptual level. Eileen is worth reading, I’m just not sure I can articulate why.
83 – Nefertiti
Ancient Egypt is genuinely a fascinating setting for a novel – much of it so shrouded in uncertainty because of how spotty the historical record is. People forget sometimes just how old Egypt is – Cleopatra is closer in time to the moon landings than she is to the creation of the pyramids. It’s bananas just how much time is soaked up in the desert.
Nefertiti takes advantage of this by carving an effective story around the title character – one of the Egyptian queens that is said to have ascended to the role of Pharoah. She and her husband (Amenhotep) are thought to be responsible for converting much of Egypt from a polytheistic panethon to a form of early monotheism – that of the worship of Aten, the disc of the sun. Michelle Moran, the author of the book, takes a slim archaeological record and constructs a story that centres much of the development of ancient Egypt around a remarkable woman. A legendary beauty, but also a first-rate political schemer. In her ambitions, and her growing paranoia, she is aided by her sister Mutnodjmet – a younger woman who doesn’t seek power, but rather only wants to live a happy life away from the royal court that plagues her. It’s a story of the cost of ambition in a world where the religious observances awarded to the Pharoah are more about political expediency than they are actual cult worship. The religion constructed around the rulers of Egypt is as much a prison as it is a palace.
It’s historical fiction, but light on actual history. It’s a character study that is somewhat cynical in how it makes Nefertiti into what’s needed for the story, rather than having the story act as a vehicle for Nefertiti. But it’s also an enjoyable read that encapsulates a lot of court drama and delivers it in a sort of diet ‘Game of Thrones’ fashion. Most of the book is about power struggles of an almost modern tenor, but the vivid backdrop of Egypt is just that – a backdrop. I did have a good time with the book, but I don’t feel like I know anything more than I did before I started reading it. That’s something of a black mark on a book that purports to tell the story of one of history’s more enigmatic characters.
84 – A Visit from the Goon Squad
Despite the complete tonal inconsistency between the books, I consider a Visit from the Goon Squad to be a kind of lighter spiritual cousin to House of Leaves. It has many of the same features, being a narrative within a narrative within other lightly connected narratives. It contains long, self-referential parodies of academia. It plays with form and function, with one chapter being replaced with what is essentially printouts from a Powerpoint slide show. It’s not as violently transgressive as House of Leaves. It’s not as weirdly unsettling. It’s a story about the compromises of middle age, more than anything else, and the places where it deviates from standard linear storytelling are at the interfaces between characters. That’s as opposed to HoL when the normal linear storytelling is the infrequent form of the interfaces. Still, the books resonate.
A Visit from the Goon Squad also one of those books that begs you to hate it because it is so widely considered to be ‘meritorious’. Some books just rub you up the wrong way by being adored. Or at least, they do for me. While I have hundreds of counter-examples, I still sometimes subconsciously cleave to the idea that anything popular can’t really truly be good (I know, it’s a rubbish opinion that survives no interrogation) and anything truly lauded is rarely worth reading. That at least is a less rubbish opinion that can survive robust critique – most of the things we think of as great are only thought of as such because of convention. Most classics are rubbish. Don’t @ me.
A Visit from the Goon Squad is good though, like someone wrote a novel exclusively through the lens of short stories. In fact, I’m not sure it really does count as a novel. But also, I’d be reluctant to tag it as an anthology. It’s somewhere in the liminal space between – neither one nor the other, but somehow superimposing itself on your brain as both. That’s something underscored by its occasional dalliances with other forms of expression (for example, the aforementioned Powerpoint presentation). It hangs together well though because it’s an exploration of a tightly connected series of themes, within a loosely interwoven personal network of characters, all revolving around the premise of lives touching, and being touched by, the rebellious spirit of punk rock.
Turns out, not all ‘worthy’ book suck. I know, I’m as surprised as anyone.
85 – The Outside
Space. Check. Spaceships. Check. Overwhelmingly powerful AI systems worshiped like gods by a credulous civilization? Check. Cthulhu monsters on the periphery of human understanding, drawn to the warmth of humanity’s brief candle through its flirtations with unholy technology? Check.
Man, The Outside really does have it all. Lovecraft meets Luke Skywalker. The Matrix meets polytheistic superstition. It’s a proper banger of a premise, and it’s all handled well – but that’s sort of the problem with the book. It’s handled well. It’s not a novel that is really capable of living up to its own promise. There is so much stuffed into the worldbuilding that it doesn’t leave much room for the story to breathe. It’s a kitchen sink novel, so overfull that even the water can’t make it to the plug-hole.
That might not be a deal-breaker in a book with this much going for its worldbuilding, but it’s also surprisingly tentative for something that makes such a big swing. It feels like it never really manages to separate itself from the tropes that so obviously influenced it. Even the introduction of a reasonably nuanced protagonist (Yasira, who is gay and autistic, and my word doesn’t Ada Hoffman want to make you aware of it) doesn’t shift the book into genuinely new territory. It reads like many books you have undoubtedly read before. That’s no damning critique – it’s certainly enjoyable enough in that frame, and I’ll be reading the followups in the fullness of time. Sometimes though it feels like novels of this kind just need someone to come along and remove one piece of extraneous baggage so the suitcase can properly close. The Outside is one of those books, but there are certainly many worse sins that an author can commit especially if there are sequels to give the premise room to grow.