For me, the most affecting stories are those that are leavened with a sardonic sensibility. Italo Calvino, one of my favorite writers, notes “th[e] particular connection between melancholy and humor,” speaking of how great writing “foregrounds [with] tiny, luminous traces that counterpoint the dark catastrophe.” I’ve always veered toward the great literary comic writers—from Cervantes to Laurence Sterne to Pynchon, with a particular reverence for Nabokov. For me, there is no greater exposition of the underbelly of love and madness than Lolita; of artistic obsession than Pale Fire. Nabokov believed that the best writing places the reader under a spell, enchanting them with the magic of words — and I concur!
I wrote...
Someday Everything Will All Make Sense
By
Carol LaHines
What is my book about?
Someday Everything Will All Make Sense follows Luther van der Loon, an eccentric professor of medieval music at a New York University, as he navigates the stages of grief after his 62-year-old mother chokes on a wonton from a Chinese take-out. Luther invokes the American justice system against the restaurant whose “sloppy methods” he blames for his mother's death. He faults himself for failing to perform the Heimlich, a maneuver so simple that a child of six or seven could execute it. Luther finds redemption in music as he plans the annual symposium for his oddball group of early music colleagues. Slowly, and with the help of his girlfriend, Cecilia, Luther gropes toward resolution. Fans of Confederacy of Dunceswill appreciate the maladroitness of the protagonist and the dark humor woven into the narrative.
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The Books I Picked & Why
A Confederacy of Dunces
By
John Kennedy Toole
Why this book?
The hyperintelligent and dysfunctional 30-year-old protagonist of this novel lives with his mother in New Orleans and is obsessed with all things medieval. He has picaresque adventures in the French Quarter. The novel is laugh-out-loud funny and yet poignant—something I strive for as a writer of tragicomedy. My novel is similarly steeped in a place—those grieving engage in a process of cementing associations to the lost loved one, and those referents are often tied to the shared spaces they inhabited together.
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The Magic Kingdom
By
Stanley Elkin
Why this book?
Eddy Bale becomes a crusader for children after the death of his own young son and decides to take a group of terminally ill children to Disneyland for a holiday. The antic hyperbolic tone of the narration is utterly at odds with the grave subject matter and the novel is as hilarious as it is heartbreaking.
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Slaughterhouse-Five
By
Kurt Vonnegut
Why this book?
In this iconic semiautobiographical war novel, the narrator struggles with how to recount his experiences during the bombing of Dresden, adopting the guise of the time-traveling Billy Pilgrim to tell his story. Decades on, the novel is as timely and poignant as ever; a forerunner of the trauma narrative; a book that, better than any other I can think of, conveys what it is like to suffer from PTSD—events so horrifying that one can only “cope” (if that is the right word) by means of psychic feints and dissociative logic. The novel is supremely funny; the author has a gift for underscoring horror with pellucid description.
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Oblivion: Stories
By
David Foster Wallace
Why this book?
DFW’s hyperbolic virtuosity is on display in this collection of stories about fakery, imposterdom, trauma, and the nature of consciousness, of which Good Old Neon, the monologue of a salesman who traffics in fakeries, is the showstopper. DFW knew depression well as he did psychopharmacology and rehab and our mental health apparatus—his work is imbued with the details of these worlds and he conveys possibly better than any other what it is like to be trapped in a depressed, quizzical mind. The collection is a moving and hilarious tour-de-force.
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Mostly Dead Things
By
Kristen Arnett
Why this book?
This book is a more recent addition to the oeuvre of grief tragicomedy. In the novel, a third-generation taxidermist deals with the aftermath of her father’s suicide. The details are hilarious—lots of minutia about the family business—but the book is also heartbreaking, as Jessa tries to hold herself and her family together in the wake of her father’s sudden demise. The novel, both morbid and irreverent, tackles themes of death, preservation, and how we honor those who have passed.
