5 Book Reviews You Must Read This Week ‹ Literary Hub

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Our five-alarm fire of fabulous reviews this week includes Patrick Cottrell on Tracy O’Neill’s Woman of interestPhillip Maciak on Emily Nussbaum’s Keyword sunAnthony Domestico on Michael Notts Thom Gunn: A cool queer lifeLauren LeBlanc on Olivia Laing’s The garden against timeand Meara Sharma about Rosalind Brown’s Practice.

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“O’Neill takes the subgenre to a new level by writing a memoir that is at once an investigation, a noir with a femme fatale, and a darkly humorous tale of what happens when you meet the person who has everything and yet nothing to do with your life. Woman of interest is searching, but more attuned to language and paranoia than others in its genre … Although O’Neill’s memoir is essentially about her mother in Korea, the titular woman who is at its center, we also get a glimpse of the other mother in a delightfully melancholy retelling of O’Neill’s upbringing by her adoptive family in New England … Instead of the redemptive gestures of a traditional adopted child memoir, Woman of interest offers something darker, colder, more tense and ultimately unique and transcendent.”

–Patrick Cottrell on Tracy O’Neill’s Woman of Interest: A Memoir (BOMB)

“The book traces the evolution of reality TV as a genre from the early hidden-camera shows of the 1950s to the sprawling empires of today, giving us insights into the difficult production of these shows, their divided reception, and the melancholy biographies of some of the thousands of people who appeared on these shows only to reemerge as strange, broken mutant versions of themselves, no longer TV characters but certainly not the people they were before. Nussbaum has spent much of her career arguing for the importance and seriousness of television, even its status as an art form.

Reality TV puts their thesis to the test: Sure, The Sopranos is art, but Real Housewives? It’s an old argument, a hackneyed one even, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still come up. Nussbaum, as always, proves the seriousness of her subject by simply taking it seriously. She pays attention not only to the reality show’s cultural footprint, but also to its kitschy specificity, Keyword sun! delivers a sometimes grim, sometimes joyful account of how television can not only reflect real life, but also create it … The story she tells in Keyword sun! is a film about lofty cinematic ambitions compromised by hundreds of gradual slip-ups and brazen betrayals over the generations. The cumulative actions by which documentary as a form has been “sullied” in this way, sometimes cowardly and sometimes credulous, make for a gripping tale of decadence and decay. Rise and fall at the same time.”

–Phillip Maciak on Emily Nussbaum’s Cue the Sun: The invention of reality TV (The New Republic)

“Thom Gunn was the great rhapsode of risk. In a 1961 love letter to gay San Francisco, the poem’s speaker looks out from afar at the drunken revelers and hungry cop cars in the dark streets below: “By the ever-returning lights, I see / Endless possibilities, / The crowded, the broken, and the unfinished! / I would not lessen the risk” … And yet, although he loved the dizzying experience of risk, Gunn equally loved the serenity of balance. Although he wrote about hot things – sex, drugs, ecstasy of all kinds – his style was one of controlled coolness … Touch is required of the lover as well as the poet. Here risk and balance, sex and poetry come together. Touch is required of the biographer, too. Gunn knew this – and he knew that not all biographers possessed the requisite gift.

Fortunately, Gunn’s own biographer Michael Nott has this gift. The virtues of Thom Gunn: A cool queer life are many: a total command of Gunn’s life; a clear, if hardly idolatrous, affection for his subject; and a genuine critical hand. Nott manages to shape a compelling life out of his vast material – the book runs to over seven hundred pages… Despite these sad bookends, Nott shows that Gunn’s life was to a large extent one of improvisation and daring: improvisation necessitated by suffering and a liberating impulse based on a series of enduring commitments.”

–Anthony Domestico on Michael Notts Thom Gunn: A cool queer life (The Confuser)

“Gardening is an immediate way of making an indelible impression not only on a house but on yourself. You discover dignity in the dirt by leaving something in better condition than you found it. For Laing, who led a largely unsettled life until she was 40, gardens were ‘a way of making myself feel at home wherever I lived.’ She explores these themes through skilful research and her own experiences in this charming and rambling book… beyond an examination of gardens literally fertilized by the blood, sweat and tears of others, Laing considers the loftier aspirations of gardens as paradise.

Of course she ends up in Eden, the first and idealised garden to which many who carry the legacy of displacement wish to return… Laing maps the ghosts of the gardens and sacred places destroyed by war… What makes this compelling book more than a detailed diary of gardening and its troubled history is Laing’s insistence on Jarman’s idea that ‘paradise haunts gardens’… It is up to gardeners working with the fragile world we live in to commit themselves to work worthy of a utopia, even if it all might end in ashes.”

–Lauren LeBlanc on Olivia Laing The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise (The Boston Globe)

“Such remarks, delivered in Brown’s austere but sternly attentive prose, represent the true joys of Practice. For rather than writing an essay on Shakespeare’s poetry, everything – literally everything – is imbued with the distilled, perceptive quality of poetry. The book argues that a special kind of mindfulness is to be found in the space of possibility that precedes writing, in the way of wanting to write – to the extent that its tingling latency becomes its own vivid and particularly sensitive orientation to the world, its own vital way of being. …

Practice beautifully illustrates a tension at the heart not just of the love of reading, but of love at large. In the beginning, we all want to “be the poem.” And to some extent, we are what we read, we are who and what we have loved – they all leave their mark, their various inscriptions. But we are also not what we have read or loved. We are who we are, and a text or a person or an object is a text or a person or an object. The paradox is shot through with aching longing – don’t we all want something we cannot quite achieve?”

–Meara Sharma on Rosalind Brown’s Practice (Los Angeles Book Review)