Chuck Greaves' 3 favorite reads in 2024

McCarthy was (and the tense still pains me), for my money, among the greats of American letters, and The Passenger demonstrates why with every paragraph. "Western watched the tender and he blew on the tea and sipped it and he watched the lights moving along the causeway like the slow cellular crawl of waterdrops on a wire." You can pull three or four sentences like that off of every page -- sentences that are quintessentially McCarthyesque in their spare and elegant brilliance. At the center of it all stands Bobby Western, who, like another iconic Bobby (Dupea, from the Bob Rafelson film Five Easy Pieces), has eschewed a life of culture and intellect-- in Western's case, as a promising young physicist -- for a more authentic and hardscrabble existence as a New Orleans-based salvage diver. His exploration of a sunken airplane in the Gulf of Mexico kicks the story into gear, and what follows is, essentially, a 380-page character study of a man running from a murky past that includes his incestuously-close relationship with a sister (more below) who may well be among the world's greatest mathematicians. A brooding, compelling, and deliciously-crafted novel.

This is a companion novel to The Passenger, and consists entirely of a nearly 200-page dialogue between Alicia Western, a brilliant (and floridly hallucinating) young mathematician living on the razor's edge of madness, and "Dr. Cohen," the stolid psychiatrist tasked with understanding and treating her in the novel's eponymous psychiatric hospital to which Alicia has voluntarily committed herself. Temporally, the novel takes place before the events of The Passenger begin, and so serves as a kind of prequel to Alicia's brother Bobby's story, although the novels intertwine in a way that suggests they probably began life as a single door-stopper -- a kind of conjoined twin the success of whose cleavage one might debate. In any event, Stella Maris is a case study in sparkling dialogue -- a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game in which the patient's (and therefore the author's) brilliance leaves the doctor, and the reader, delightedly struggling to keep up. Dark themes of incest and suicide lurk beyond the margins, but the overall result is a textbook on using dialogue to confect one of the more compelling characters in contemporary fiction. Simply magnificent.

A kind of cultural Zelig, Jann Wenner has observed, followed, and eventually helped lead (by, for example, founding the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame) the evolution of rock & roll music from the Acid Test/Grateful Dead era of his Bay Area youth, through his publication and half-century stewardship of Rolling Stone magazine, to his ultimate incarnation as a zillionaire political mover-and-shaker, first-name hobnobbing with the likes of Bill and Hillary, Michelle and Barak. This kiss-and-tell memoir invites us to witness that journey first-hand, and to spend candid time with the likes of John and Yoko, Paul and Linda, Mick, Bruce, Bette, Bono, and pretty much the entire known universe of mononymous musical superstardom. And for those of a more belletristic bent, the journey's sidekicks include Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and a sprawling cast of writers and photographers who, under Wenner's often drug-fueled tutelage, proved that music journalism could be big business indeed. Be forewarned, however, that narcissism and name-dropping abound; but forgiving these flights of self-indulgence, Like a Rolling Stone is, for those (ahem) of a certain age, a literary mixtape of our life's musical soundtrack.