The Maris Review, vol 43
This week I veer into personal essay territory in a book review (sorry!) and I give the finger to Substack.
What I read this week
A Gorgeous Excitement by Cynthia Weiner
I'm embarrassed to tell you exactly how much this novel is my shit. Way back in the early aughts when I was in my early 20s, I lived in a converted 2-bedroom apartment in the far east section of Manhattan's Upper East Side, and I frequented all of the mostly generic bars that were in the neighborhood (how the hell did I ever stay out past midnight and still get to work ready to go at 9am?).
My favorite by a long shot was Dorrian's, where the drinks were reasonably priced, the bartenders friendly, the bouncers liked hugs, and the people-watching phenomenal. It was a social world that I made my own even though I, a Jew from suburban New Jersey who'd gone to public school, didn't quite fit in. I got to know the cream of the crop of NYC's nepo babies in the most superficial way, doing Jaeger shots with preppies wearing Nantucket reds. I felt like an anthropologist. So it was fitting that I became a little obsessed with the crime that had rocked the Dorrian's crowd 20 years before: the murder of 18 year-old Jennifer Levin by the popular and entitled Robert Chambers.
I was a dumbass, to put it mildly. I bought a used copy of the Linda Wolfe true crime book Wasted: The Preppie Murder, and watched the TV movie starring Billy Baldwin and Lara Flynn-Boyle with a theme by Chris Isaak. Wicked Games, indeed. I became a preppie murder expert, not because I was turned on by violent crime, but because I remembered the tabloid headlines from childhood and couldn't believe I had access to this world that felt like a TV show (By 2007 I moved downtown and my Dorrian's obsession officially ended.)
So suffice to say, I knew I needed to read Cynthia Weiner's novel the minute it was announced. Weiner was a peer of Robert Chambers and Jennifer Levin, and she's written a novel with some name and detail changes, but it is very much about the Dorrian's that I once knew. It's the story of Nina Jacobs, an Upper East Sider who is waiting out the summer before going off to college, and who develops a big fat crush on the bad boy Robert Chambers character. Nina fits in more than I ever did or could, but she still has to deal with the casual antisemitism of Manhattan's most elite teenagers. She is still an outsider, an observer, even as she yearns for a bigger role in the story. She doesn't know how lucky she is to have just been a peripheral character until much later. A Gorgeous Excitement takes its name from Freud's description of cocaine, which doesn't quite factor in how it feels when the hangover hits.
Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su
Girl sees blob on the street outside of a bar. Girl takes blob home and turns blob into a man named Bob, a good-looking one. It's a classic Making Mr. Right-Frankenstein story, or as Vi Liu, the narrator, says, "I don't know why my first thought... is to Build-a-Bear myself a friend."
It's fascinating to try to figure out what Vi (and thereby the author) wants that blob to become, to mean, to do; it could truly be anything, which is the magic of speculative fiction. Vi is an aimless college dropout, working the front desk at a mid-level hotel and looking at her phone too frequently to be of much use to guests in need of assistance. She's just broken up with her college boyfriend, who sounds like a real chode, and her family is a little worried about her. As Bob starts to become more and more human-ish, the possibilities for what he could become are endless, but Vi's world, even with Bob in it, remains small. It's a bold constraint for the scope of the novel, to have Bob act fairly rationally rather than leaning into the zany and uncanny, and for Vi's life as Dr. Frankenstein not to be too different from her average day. This narrative choice provides more opportunity for self-reflection than for action, and it's a joy to get into Violet's head in all of its droll and cynical misery.
Please bear with me
I have almost no regrets having switched from Substack to Ghost as my newsletter platform, especially today with their flagship publication posting truly abhorrent drivel about what does and doesn't qualify as a Nazi salute.
But (yes there is a but) the transition didn't go as smoothly as I'd hoped it would: all paid subscribers had their subscriptions canceled. Gah! Long story short: the wonderful people at Ghost have been talking me through it and have given all of my paid subscribers comp subscriptions, but now I've got to go through and manually change these subscriptions in Stripe and in Ghost to get back on track, and it's a lot of work. I'm happy to be here and happy to have switched, but if you're having any problems with your subscription please let me know? Really excited to get back on track and to talk about books and book-related gossip with you.
Being Jewish in America is really weird now
New releases, 2/25
Big day for new releases. Unclear why. Although last year I said that too many good books were coming out in March, so maybe this time publishers are trying to get ahead?
Crush by Ada Calhoun
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
From last week's issue:
Here is the book on the war in Gaza that I've been waiting for. Omar El Akkad's nonfiction debut (I was a big fan of American War) is a short and tight and pointed piece of writing, stylish but not too stylish, with a moral clarity at its center that cuts through like a laser. Westerners, he says, like to think of ourselves as the good guys, the underdogs, the protagonists in the great big story of the world. But there is so much we have to ignore in order to believe it.
In an appeal to common sense and rationality El Akkad lays bare the mental gymnastics one has to do to be a good liberal in America, the excess of rationalizing one must do to see some violence as "necessary," to view the decimation of a people and a place as "complicated."
Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
Maya and Natasha by Elyse Durham
True Failure by Alex Higley
The Talent by Dan D'Addario
Notes on Surviving the Fire by Christine Murphy
Back After This by Linda Holmes
Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell by Paul Lisicky
Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp
What You Make of Me: A Novel by Sophie Madeline Dess
