14 Comments
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Adam Fleming Petty's avatar

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone hating Lethem so violently before! I’d be fascinated to know why

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Chris Jesu Lee's avatar

"Violently"?? Haha. I just find him really boring. And I like his contemporaries, like Chabon and Franzen and Eugenides. It's hard to pinpoint why exactly.

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Anne Kadet's avatar

The problem with City on Fire is that it was boring.

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Naomi Kanakia's avatar

Nice to finally see what's in this _City on Fire_ book that I heard so much about and never read

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Chris Jesu Lee's avatar

The services I provide

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Pete Tosiello's avatar

chris have you read A Fortunate Age

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Chris Jesu Lee's avatar

No, I'd never heard of it, but thanks for bringing to my attention! It seems like a novel I'll have very strong feelings about, whether for good or for ill. The best kind of book.

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Pete Tosiello's avatar

i agree, it's sort of like The Emperor's Children on steroids, except entirely concerned with white women who went to oberlin (i absolutely love it)

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Scott Spires's avatar

Oh wow, "The Emperor's Children" ... I hated it too, also in a fun way! Murray Thwaite is basically Noam Chomsky without the linguistics (all he's got is the critique of foreign policy, which doesn't make him a genius, though people treat him as one). Bootie was a potentially interesting character but frustratingly underdeveloped. Messud missed a chance with Julius - what must it have been like growing up gay and Vietnamese in small-town Michigan? - but she doesn't tell us. The writing style was offputting and overblown: I remember a scene where characters take two pages to say goodbye and arrange to meet, which could have been handled in one sentence. And the NYC claustrophobia of the book is pervasive!

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Chris Jesu Lee's avatar

Yes, I got the sense that the extent of Murray's expertise was "Maybe we went too far in Kosovo."

Julius seemed like a precursor to Jude from A Little Life since Jude is also a mixed-race gay man who often gets involved with abusive and violent men. I wonder if Yanagihara read this book before or if this type of character is just a trope. I didn't even bother to mention that Julius is half-Vietnamese because it doesn't even matter in the story.

"Offputting" is a good way to characterize the writing. Did you catch all the many references to breasts? It seemed like the tendencies of a pervy male author. Bootie's cousin-lust for Marina is also just presented without any internal conflict on his part as if it were totally a socially acceptable thing to do.

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Scott Spires's avatar

I don't remember the breasts, but novels of this type often indulge in unnecessary corporeality, as if to say "see, intellectuals have bodies too!"

Also, the 9/11 section was a real damp squib - about as apocalyptic as a heavy traffic jam.

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Quiara Vasquez's avatar

Nooooooooooooooooo I wanted to hear your withering takedown of "A Little Life" ;___;

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Mia Milne's avatar

I lost touch with an old friend who contacted me out of the blue at the beginning of the year to see if I'd read A Little Life with her. This was a wild request but I'm glad I did it. I only vaguely knew the book was controversial. Yanigahara does have amazing prose. The first part of the book really had me. As a whole, I was very disappointed in it. It was mesmerizing but that fell apart, for me, when I took a step back from it. I understand why people both love and hate it.

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Moravagine's avatar

Once again confronted with the fact that Substack novelists are all middlebrow authoritarians, vigorously demanding we read the same way for the same things

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