Recent reading

[troisoiseaux]

The one book I finished this week was The City We Became by N.K Jemisin, which is a love letter to New York City and a middle finger to H.P. Lovecraft. (When not literally interdimensional tentacle monsters, the novel's Lovecraftian horror is embodied as racism and gentrification.) A friend of mine has been bugging me to read this book for ages, and my first week in NYC for a summer internship seemed like an appropriate time to do so.

In a world where particularly "alive" cities - São Paulo, Hong Kong, London, Lagos - are embodied by human avatars, New York splinters into six when its main avatar (and the city itself) is attacked by cosmic horrors, turning a handful of everyday New Yorkers into the avatars of the city's boroughs. Brooklyn is a rapper turned lawyer turned city councilwoman; the Bronx is an older Lenape woman, a veteran of the American Indian Movement and Stonewall; Queens is a young Indian immigrant in New York for grad school and an internship she hopes will turn into a H1B visa; Manhattan can't remember who he was before he arrived in the city but he's all slick smiles and sharp edges; Staten Island is the sheltered daughter of an abusive cop. They need to harness their newfound powers and work together (easier said than done) to save the primary avatar, and their city, from an interdimensional threat - the Enemy - that is both impossible to comprehend and far too easy to recognize.

This is a deeply unsubtle book - although, hey, some things are worth being blunt about - and sometimes the details feel piled-on for the sake of piling it on. (Like, not only did Staten Island/Aislyn's mother have to give up her dream of studying piano at Juilliard when she got pregnant and married Aislyn's abusive father, but it turns out she didn't actually miscarry the son that Aislyn's father had always wanted, she secretly got an abortion in the hope of still following her dream and then felt so guilty about it that she chose to give up anyway?? And none of this was particularly relevant to anything else??) I liked the city-magic more than the people-magic, both in the sense of the borough-avatars channeling their borough-specific-powers, and the Enemy weaponizing the cityscape (rather than individual people) against them; the monstrous Starbucks shops were probably my favorite. On the non-magical side, I really enjoyed the interactions between Bronca (the Bronx) and Brooklyn.

Of the metaphorical stack of books I have in progress, I'm almost done with This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 debut novel and pseudo-autobiography. I suspect I'm going to skim rather than read the last couple of chapters, because my patience for Amory Blaine (and Fitzgerald) is quickly running out. Was Eleanor Savage literature's first manic pixie dream girl?

Comments

[kore]

In his forties Fitzgerald annotated his own copy of the Eleanor section in TSOP with "This is so funny I can't even bear to read it."

[troisoiseaux]

I've been reading this book with various relevant Wikipedia pages open, and I guess the reason that Eleanor is Like That is because she was based off of Fitzgerald's mentor's youthful love rather than one of Fitzgerald's actual girlfriends? So... literally a manic pixie dream girl.

The one thing I'm really curious about is where Amory's three-week drinking binge after Zelda Rosalind broke up with him - ended only by the literal Prohibition - falls on the scale of pure fiction vs. Fitzgerald's life with the serial numbers filed off.

[kore]

Oh, he totally lost it after Zelda finally dumped him, yeah. He went on an epic bender when she returned his ring IIRC and went back home to St. Paul to his mother's house and holed up in the attic to rewrite what became TSOP!....very recursive, except I feel Amory never could have written anything. Fitzgerald killed him off in WWII in the first draft of the book, lol.)

(Because I am defensive of Zelda, she didn't marry him after it became a best-selling novel, how could she have? The book was published March 26 and they were married April 3. She responded to his renewed confidence and actually publishing a novel and doing something rather than pressing her to marry him because he didn't want to be rejected. When Fitzgerald rewrote the book he also added a great deal about Zelda in Rosalind, including phrases from her letters, which he would continue doing all his life. Wagner-Martin is flat out wrong, Zelda's family was well off for a small Southern town but definitely did not have a ton of servants. Zelda didn't do any housework because she was her mother's spoiled darling. She was not the archetypal Southern belle, if she had been, Scott wouldn't have married her. The stuff he wrote later about them not loving each other was decades later when they were both very bitter.)

(Tl;dr Team Zelda ever since my mother gave me her hardback copy of Mitford's biography when I was like ten)

Some favourite biographical tidbits I remember:

Fitzgerald was reprimanded for sitting down on the job while hammering at that railway job. He also didn't own a pair of overalls.

He wrote to Hemingway, "This Side of Paradise: A Romance and a Reading List. The Sun Also Rises: A Romance and a Guide Book."

His pal Shane Leslie who delivered the first draft to Max Perkins said something like, "It has literary value. When he is killed in the War of course it will have commercial value."

Scott didn't just use Zelda's words -- he inserted the whole letter from Sigourney Fay into his typescript, the actual page, different typeface signature and all. Shane Leslie noticed he did it and didn't call him out publicly on it, but said he shouldn't have done it. It wasn't exactly plagiarism -- Scott just seemed to have the idea that if he ran across good material, it was his, because he was a great writer. He used to ask people if they had interesting stories and paid them a flat fee if he thought they were usable in fiction.

He called TSOP "The Collected Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald" because it wove a lot of his earlier writing together -- poems, thoughts on books, short stories, even the short play about Rosalind. ("Mirroring Rosalind's materialistic relationship with Amory, Sayre initially ended her relationship with Fitzgerald due to his lack of financial prospects and his inability to support her accustomed lifestyle as an idle Southern belle." Damn who wrote this bullshit on Wiki anyway? It's really distorted and biased.)

[kore]

(ZELDA FITZGERALD, IDLE SOUTHERN BELLE. That is really a mischaracterization for the angels to weep over.)

[kore]

Anyway THANK YOU FOR COMING TO MY TED COMMENT ON F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

[troisoiseaux]

WONDERFUL. INCREDIBLE. THANK YOU SO MUCH.

[kore]

LOL Aww glad you liked it! I am always worrying that when I go off it's just annoying.

[troisoiseaux]

I am literally always delighted by your TED Comments.

[kore]

//BLUSH

[sabotabby]

I loved The City We Became and was relieved because I started and abandoned something similar, and I'm glad Jemisin wrote a better version of the story I wanted to write.

[troisoiseaux]

Anthropomorphized countries are a concept I've seen played with a lot, but cities are a new one for me!

[chelseagirl]

The City We Became was the first book I bought, during lockdown, from an indie that's actually a block from me. It took over a month to arrive, having gotten stuck in transit somewhere states away. I wonder if that's significant? ;-) (After that, they opened for pickup, even though you couldn't go in, so I bought from them that way.) I enjoyed it but I think it may not have been the best time to read it, being in an actually dystopic NYC?

[troisoiseaux]

Oof, that's why I avoided re-reading Station Eleven during lockdown-- I haven't lived in Toronto since high school but it still felt Too Specific for comfort.

[chelseagirl]

Oh yes, could definitely see that.