A few notes on books read and liked by me this year--

Good Behaviour / Molly Keane – A intensely compressed family saga set among the decadent and inbred Anglo-Irish gentry, written in a rich and loamy English in which every sentence flashes with a mica-like brilliance--

--this is chiefly a novel about sexual humiliation of an extravagantly horrible but comic variety and of the terrible revenge that those upon whom it is inflicted can wreak.

Lose Your Mother / Saidiya Hartman – Interweaving memoir, travel writing, & history in the most unexpected ways, this is a reckoning with America’s slaveholding past by a daughter of the African diaspora who finds no consolation or simple answers in her visit to the Gold Coast--

--only a sense of the continuing outrage of slavery and a conceptualization of history akin to Benjamin’s “messianic time” in which slaves are not remote figures of the past but our living contemporaries, their sufferings still to be redeemed and answered for.

I relished Balzac’s rapacious, gourmandizing eye for human folly in all its permutations in Lost Illusions, his sure charting of the meteoric ascents and descents of his characters on the wheel of fortune--

--whose capricious turnings seem increasingly synchronized as the novel progresses with the boom and bust cycles of early capitalism.

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis / Bassani -- Rather a workout, with its spiraling, paragraphs-long, sinuously Proustian sentences with refinements embedded inside refinements.

The novel is an act of mourning, a conjuration of a dead world that restores to each of its lost inhabitants their vivid human particularity, a kaddish perhaps, but a grave, classical decorum tempers the obsequies it conducts, its lacrimae rerum implied, foreshadowed.

Micol, the object of the narrator’s unrequited erotic obsession, turns out to be one of the more dazzling female figures of mid-twentieth-century European fiction, nothing at all like Dominique Sanda’s inert Barbie doll in De Sica’s insipid, lachrymose film version.

Mercurial, sexually free, intellectually adventurous, a kind of Rahel Varnhagen with a flapper streak, she is nonetheless a figure grievously hemmed in, entrapped not only by the Italian racial laws but also by her family’s class privilege, its etiolated antiquarianism--

--its remoteness not only from the Ferrara’s goyim but also from its Jewish merchant class, and of course by the garden of the novel’s title.

Melinda Cooper’s Family Values is as brilliant as everyone says, a landmark book of our era that shows how neoliberalism functions in the U.S. primarily by subjecting citizens to the fiscal and moral discipline of the heteronormative, patriarchal family.

The book is particularly expert in the way it dissolves the tidy oppositional categories of the traditional family and capitalism/neoliberalism and social conservativism to show each operates synergistically with the other.

But one of its great virtues its grim, relentless account of how U.S. social movements from the Great Society to the present day were assimilated by neoliberalism, inflected with its logic, and deployed for ends that severely constricted their original emancipatory promise.

Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here is a late modernist novel with an scrupulous integrity and originality of language that tells of the seemingly irreconcilable forces of sex and politics in the lives of three Black Caribbean women.

It is a desperately needed riposte to the bourgeois political novels of Naipaul, Didion, and others of their ilk, in which revolutionary ferment in the Caribbean and Central America is portrayed as a playground for decadent Eurotrash types and other exponents of radical chic--

--(who ought to be at home, presumably, engaged in solitary contemplation of the existential futility of man’s fate) and in which the actual participants are mostly nameless, anonymous myrmidons, ignorant armies that clash by night.

In Brand's novel, revolution—the overturning of an unjust order—is a desperate bid for survival, for life, on the part of its characters, no less necessary for the savage counterrevolutionary reprisals it incurs and the failure in which it almost always results.

Stuart Jeffries’s accessible group bio of the Frankfurt School (Grand Hotel Abyss), Mark Mazower’s virtuosic history of interwar Europe (Dark Continent), Eric Weitz’s deft portrait of Weimar culture (Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy)--

--and Eugene Lunn’s probing study of Brecht, Lukács, Adorno, and Benjamin (Marxism and Modernism) were excellent companion texts to One-Way Street, Walter Benjamin’s jittery and disquieting essay sequence of the modernist urban street.

I was also grateful to Winter Garden, Beryl Bainbridge’s Cold War caper, which started me back reading after a long period of pandemic reading paralysis.

Written in some of the cleanest, sharpest sentences in English fiction, this comic novel is filled with many of Bainbridge’s typical plausible implausibilities, that strong sense of the uncanny so characteristic of her novels, and a kind of barely restrained lunacy.

No one without BB’s sure grip on reality could write prose like this, which whips and snaps along so cleanly and satisfyingly, pruned of all excrescences.

Even if you aren’t sympathetic to a Marxist treatment of politics, The Retreat from Class by the late, lamented Ellen Meiksins Wood--a Marxist to the bitter end--will give you a jolting, reinvigorated understanding of concepts such as democracy, capitalism, and class.

She is a forceful writer & polemicist—you can almost hear the bam-bam-bam as she makes her points—and though the book is completely open to the charge of class reductionism (among other criticisms), the case for a class-centered politics has probably never been so bracingly made.