Our grab bag of gorgeous reviews this week includes Sam Thielman on Lisa Hanawalt’s I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex, B. McClay on Chad Harbach’s The Brightness, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s on Claire-Louise Bennett’s Kiss Kiss, Bye-Bye, James Wood on Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Will and Attention, and Jac Jemc on K Ming Chang’s Needlemouth. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.
I probably laughed hardest at the eroticized version of the PBS host Mister Rogers (he takes off more than just his loafers and cardigan), but the reader is spoiled for good gags. Sometimes Hanawalt’s perspective veers into the horrifying, and the transition from Richard Scarry to Extremely Scary can be shocking. She imagines letting a guy take off not her clothes but her skin and muscles; he’s only satisfied when he saws apart her femur.
Her self-depictions alternate between a pink bird, a green, Muppety monster and (briefly, literally) a butt hole. Hanawalt’s jokey vignettes and colorful animal drawings belie a very serious narrative precision. Horses and Sex is not a book of short stories, but ‘memoir’ feels too narrow to encompass its long sections of text and silent pages of loose sketches punctuated by striking, Hockney-esque paintings and beautifully composed photographs.
She is telling a story, but not the story her earnest cartoon avatar says she’s telling; in fact, the author’s depictions of events often contradict her character’s assessments of them. Hanawalt uses her considerable gifts to describe parts of herself she might prefer to obscure or hide. And yet her openness and authenticity feel carefully calibrated: Lisa cheerfully tells the reader that most of her relationship with Adam is ‘none of your business.’ Whatever lessons Lisa learns about sexual liberation and its discontents she learns from Juniper, who is going through it too, and is just as frail and emotionally volatile as the author.
But whereas Lisa’s endless introspection—the I Can’t Stop Thinking part of the book’s title—often brings her to tears, Juni has avoided self-knowledge altogether. She’s just a little horse.” –Sam Thielman on Lisa Hanawalt’s I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex (The New York Times Book Review) “Throughout The Brightness, characters dismiss ambitious realist novels, whether historical or contemporary in concern, as ‘not exactly the news about how we live’ or as bland, ‘mashed-potato realism.’ The middlebrow realist is a master technician, a superb replicator of experience, but neither more nor less than this. These statements—coming as they do in the pages of a large, enjoyable novel that could be called quasi-historical and even accused of having a ‘whole boring “plot” ‘—begin to suggest a preoccupation with whether such novels are worth anyone’s time.
The existence of the book says yes; the characters within it say maybe. They are about just and unjust ostracism, the delicacy of one’s reputation, who gets away with things and who doesn’t. They understand that human relationships and human interiority both exist within a world, and this world constrains not only what people do but what they can even regard as possible.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
