Tom Lutz's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Almost every one of the hundreds of books I’ve read in the last few years was published in 1925, and The Polyglots was among the most fascinating.

Gerhardie is rarely read now—although republished by NYRB Classics—but at the time, he was widely hailed as a genius: Graham Greene, Isaiah Berlin, and Evelyn Waugh are said to have spent their college days walking around with copies of his books; Greene said Gerhardie was “the most important new novelist to appear in our young life.”

The Polyglots has a Rabelaisian level of goofy mayhem and a Tristram Shandy-like wry understatement, with large ladlefuls of Kafka and Wodehouse. The blasé, amoral hero wanders from Russia’s far east and then onto Harbin, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Cairo, and elsewhere in a rambunctious picaresque journey peopled with eccentrics of every stripe.

As he wrote to his publisher in 1931, when his star was already fading, “Sophistication, cynicism, and the like, which still cling to me, I don’t know why, have not endeared me to anyone.” But for me, his sophistication and cynicism were exhilarating.

Another 1925 gem, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was written, Anita Loos said, because she couldn’t get H.L. Mencken’s attention on a cross-country train trip because he was besotted by a blonde starlet-to-be.

One of the savviest, most pointed, and cosmopolitan takes on sex and gender from the period or from any period, really. It is, like the movie adaptation with Marilyn Monroe, pure fun and games at one level and trenchant commentary at another, but the book is that much smarter and more trenchant and therefore, much funnier.

Loos was one of the most successful screenwriters of her day, and she brings those skills to bear, but she has superb dexterity as a prose stylist and an almost uncanny knack for comic timing.

Nobody likes Ernest Hemingway these days, but In Our Time is one of the great novels, not just of this remarkable year but of the twentieth century.

Hemingway was a terrible human being, as far as I can tell, and the majority of his work is terrible, too: I challenge anyone to read Across the River and Into the Trees, for instance, without becoming nauseous. It is perhaps the worst single book ever written by a prominent American author.

But this first book is brilliant, and although often seen as a collection of short stories, it is a collage-like novel, the stories punctuated with paragraph-long vignettes, bits of what we now call flash fiction, all of it put together with a jeweler’s skill and precision.

It is more complex (and more elegant) than the experimental form of his mentor Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. And it was considerably more accessible (and again more elegant) than The Making of Americans by his teacher Gertrude Stein.