Reading Roundup, September 2025
Oct. 9th, 2025 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoI'm cheating on this one—half of the last book was read during October, but, well, I've been too busy to type these up until now, so they're all going in together. :)
The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst
This novel tells the story of Nick Guest, a recently-graduated Oxford student who becomes a lodger in the London house of the Fedden family. Toby Fedden, his uni friend and crush, makes the connection—Toby’s parents, Gerald and Rachel, take Nick on as a guest to watch the empty home while they are on holiday. Nick’s new friendship with the troubled daughter, Catherine, paves the way to a longer-term living arrangement, and the result is a three-part story about 1980s British politics, touching on class, wealth, race, queerness, and scandal.
Nick is gay, an identity which forms a cornerstone of the book. Much of what we see is the result of his dating and sex life, and tension results from his tenuous status—he is out, and nominally accepted, but prejudice appears frequently. Nick is also from a middle class family, whereas the Feddens are used to luxury through Rachel’s family wealth, and most of their circle is similarly well-heeled. The other layer of complexity over all of this is that Gerald Fedden is an elected conservative MP, something which Nick finds glamorous and enjoys his proximity to, but which he’s not unaware presents some conflict with the gay spaces and men that he mingles with.
We see Nick develop, though I’m hesitant to call it maturation. He becomes more tightly wound up in the Feddens’ world until an inevitable crashing out, which reaffirms the impossibility of reconciling a queer middle-class life with a conservative wealthy one. But the plot, as much as it exists, is not the draw. The draw is Hollinghurst’s prose, which is at turns clever and beautiful. He’s a rich observer of personal character and class, which he uses together to construct incisive little details. This book is not a satire but that’s a close approximation of the resulting effect. The other clear heritage is Henry James, who is Nick’s academic obsession and thus an intentionally heavy presence in the text. The prose is really worth reading for, a deeply rewarding experience in language, phrasing, and vocabulary. But for all that it creates a mood or draws a scene, I think it obscures the narrative and emotional beats of the novel.
One of the big moments of the story is the appearance of Margaret Thatcher, who Gerald works with and reveres. The prose refers to her as the Lady, and her spectre hangs over the first two thirds of the book. When Nick finally meets her, at a party, he dances with her—one review that I read referred to this as a dance with the devil. But I found her underwhelming after all of that build, and Nick’s focus on her outfit and hair and the aesthetics of the party didn’t create much space for metaphor.
NB: Having now also read Mrs. Dalloway, I see the Thatcher scene as a direct reference and homage to the appearance of the PM and/or Sally née Seton at Clarissa Dalloway’s party. The most rigorous thing I could do is go back and reread the party bits in TLOB, but I’m separated from my book by a timezone and this won’t be happening. With all that said, maybe the intended effect of Thatcher’s appearance is to be underwhelming, as is the PM in Mrs. Dalloway. But if the inspiration is more from Sally, or as that one reader suggests, a dance with the devil, then I still think the scene falls down. The amount of foreshadowing suggests the latter.
I had a similar experience with the treatment of AIDS in The Line of Beauty, which we see kill a few characters including both of Nick’s boyfriends. The shock of the reveal of the second boyfriend’s illness is buried on first introduction by a timeskip and vagueness, of the polite rich-people variety. We eventually get to see that second boyfriend in his diminished state, and again the attention is to how his looks have gone, how his clothing no longer fits, and how his wealth fails to disguise this. I felt deeply affected by his illness! The prose is not vapid, and a reader who wants to feel the painful emotions which obviously exist in these characters can do so. But Nick is so remote from his feelings—at one point he cries and it’s nearly relegated to a background note—that the book is not asking you to engage with any feeling. If you wish to go through it by marking the tone of each mention of Gerald’s Montblanc fountain pen, that’s quite doable.
Now, I love clever little observations and enjoyed and noted down many instances of cool language, including each of those Montblanc references. But my ideal would have been a gradual increase in the centrality and necessity of the emotion, which I did not feel was achieved. What we have is a keen observation of an outside perspective on the Upper Class, one with a devotion to an older style of language but the more modern target of Thatcherism, and it’s a worthy inheritor to the position of e.g. Brideshead Revisited. (That comparison is incredibly common, and there are many top-level parallels. Not the Catholicism, though.) And perhaps I am not properly appreciating its delicacy, or am simply not calibrated for its emotional register. Detached POVs and focus on the surface level are both techniques that I use a lot in my own writing, and if they leave me a bit cold here, I think that I have to put it down to their execution across a 150k word/438 page story—in that amount of space, I guess I hope for that perspective to break down and show us the layer beneath more often, and more clearly, than I think this went for.
So I would firmly call this a good book, if a slightly long one for how much I got out of it. Any unevenness of feeling that I have about it is in wishing that it had fit in more, not to have done less of what was there. Nick is not the most likeable protagonist, but these hangers-on to wealth rarely are, and his qualities enable him to have more proximity for longer, which gives us access to so many different stages of excess. What’s interesting is how little the university friend Toby is around for any of this, and how much is done with Nick’s awkward role as part-guest, part-staff, and part-family. What’s there for those is all great, and the setting is vibrant. I think this really solidly falls into the literary category of my reading—the sort of book which needs attention and doesn’t strain itself to amuse you, but which has the writing quality to honor that attention.
Bunny, Mona Awad
This novel follows Samantha Heather Mackey, a 25 year old woman in her second and final year of a creative writing MFA program at a fictional elite American university. Her cohort is all women, but the other four students (the Bunnies) form a clique which Samantha both envies and reviles. Their instructors include the woman leading their writing workshop (who Samantha nicknamed Fosco after The Woman in White) and Samantha’s thesis advisor, nicknamed The Lion, a man who seemed to withdraw from her after mysterious incidents in her first year. Outside of her program, Samantha spends most of her time with a wild goth chick named Ava, and the novel creates tension through Samantha’s divided loyalties between her existing friendship with Ava and the new opportunity offered by invitations from the Bunnies.
I thought this novel was awful. Far and away the biggest reason for that was the prose. Awad’s style is polarizing—she’s descriptive, but her chosen structure is a heap of sentence fragments.
Coming after The Line of Beauty, I couldn’t find this more jarring. I tolerate modern styles just fine in nearly every case, but this came across as pretentious fanfic—aggressively, unignorably bad. And that’s an issue for the book’s conceit, because it’s a novel About Writing. Samantha and the Bunnies spend many scenes in writing workshops and giving feedback. We are constantly hit with comments about their writing which could be comments about this book:
The book’s prose is simply not good enough to transcend this and sell it as archly meta!
A decade ago, I was active in online fashion communities where posting pictures of your outfits was common. One pattern there was that a user would share a picture of their outfit and criticise it in their own post, to preempt critique by other users. No one else would want to repeat them, so all of the critique was framed by the wearer and others were implicitly forced to only compliment. The book reminded me of that: as though by putting these words into the mouths of her characters, Awad could preempt complaints about her writing. After all, she’s already aware of them, isn’t she? There’s no use repeating it.
We don’t actually see any of Samantha’s writing, either. Though the Bunnies and Fosco describe it (creepy, dark, etc.), we barely even get a sense of the content, let alone example prose. So when combined with Awad’s own choppy and pretentious prose, the effect is a very self-conscious and defensive one. This book is writing a cheque it cannot cash (to steal the metaphor from a nonny), and because it’s centrally about an MFA program, that’s fatal.
Some other criticisms, for fun:
This is a fantasy/horror book, supposedly. The fantasy is there. (Short summary: the Bunnies are capturing literal bunnies and using magic rituals to transform them into hot boys. Samantha also does this, subconsciously, to a swan and a stag.) But the horror of it all was completely lost on me because I was so busy boggling at the horror of the words on the page to be affected by their intended mood. This novel really wants to be a psychological thriller and bury its horror and fantasy under layers of unreliable narration so that readers have to question their perception… but instead of any of that, I was copy/pasting each new awful simile that was paired with the idea of words falling out of a character’s mouth. Even aside from my distraction by mockery, I think that this did not really deliver on the premise of body horror—compare it to The Locked Tomb books, which are a thousand times more horrifying. I elected not to read those within a few hours of going to bed, whereas I read Bunny in bed immediately before sleeping.
I was deeply disappointed with the resolution to the main conflict (Bunnies v. Samantha/Ava) being about sexual attraction to a man. In the end, the Bunnies physically fight each other, and kill Ava, because of Samantha’s stag-turned-hot-guy. Paired with the shallow early-aughts mean girl caricature that made up the Bunnies, the impression that I got was of some very under-examined internalized misogyny. I was shunted back to Not Like Other Girls discussions of 2014. Samantha’s final interaction with the Bunnies is to be pettily judgmental. I don’t need a feminist message to enjoy a book, but I am going to be turned off by a story which delights in its female main character getting to be bitchy towards the Wrong Type of woman.
The overall impression I would convey is that this book is messy. The main character is messy, the story is messy, and the prose is messy, so the message and intentions cannot help but also be messy. I did not find it the fun kind of mess.
The Guest Lecture, Martin Riker
Our protagonist, Abby, is a female Economics professor who has recently been denied tenure. Despite this career upset, she must complete a pre-existing commitment to deliver a guest lecture. This book takes place in the span of just one evening, the sleepless night before that guest lecture as she plans her talk with the help of her imaginary friend, John Maynard Keynes.
That premise is incredibly cute, but incomplete, and so I ultimately found the book dissatisfying after being excited by the summary. The key one is this: Abby’s introspection is fundamentally selfish in ways which make her petty, resentful, and unpleasant, and this is a distinctly intentional element of the character study, but one that creeps up to dominate the narrative by the end of the book, crowding out some of the compelling early elements.
I really enjoyed the first third of this. There, we are introduced to the conceit Abby uses, which is to guide us through her mental image of each room of her house as she workshops different phases of her speech from start to finish. What immediately becomes apparent is how much work Riker put into Abby’s academia—an academic himself, it's clear that he understands the need to sell this character’s professional work if we are to buy the central crisis of her being denied tenure. And he does a great job of it! I still find Abby’s thesis about Keynes, economics, and rhetoric the most interesting part of the book. Getting a mix of that, glimpses of her current life, and reflections on her past was a fun read. That is, the subjects weren’t light, but the construction was clever and I was impressed by it.
This balance begins to fail by the halfway point, collapsing entirely in the end. Abby’s anxiety, and then her self-obsession, start to run the story: we spend more time on her past and and current relationships, and the prose takes a turn for the experimental. Short sentence fragments pile up on one another to suggest a panicked inability to focus. Long sentence-paragraphs signal breathless anxiety spirals. Ricker even gives us a few jarring typesetting choices, or uses of white spaces, to really hammer this home. And the subject of all of this is Abby, but not really the Abby with a professorship: it is instead the Abby of undergrad, high school, and childhood. That Abby, Abby tells us, was even more awkward, self-conscious, and lonely. She was also more self-involved, pretentious, and callous. We are reassured of her change and improvement as she shares stories of being rude to an old high school friend or an undergrad mentor—it was only that she was so lonely and awkward. And, then, we return to the present to watch her demean her underachieving, unambitious husband.
See, this book is a character study, and Abby is not only an academic, but also a mother and a wife. Her daughter, Ali, and husband, Ed, are asleep beside her the whole time, dutiful companions to her guest lecture travel. The ultimate conclusion that Abby reaches is that she must reinvent her life and sense of self by building on her love for her family and the ways that it has made her a better person. Which—well. Is she?
Ed is a college boyfriend turned husband, adjunct professor, dedicated father, and community organizer. Though thinly-sketched, we know he is supportive of his wife and has put her career first. But now that that career hasn’t panned out, Abby displaces blame to him in an aggressive rant, where she wonders why he was not more ambitious, why he is so easygoing, why he can dare to say “we’ll figure it out” in the face of her tenure loss. Her resentment is strikingly out of proportion with his actions.
Perhaps I read too much into all of this—my closeness to the topic, some particularity of how I received the narration, kicking in inappropriately for what is after all a character study, and those needn’t be joyful. But Abby’s first person narration advertises its construction, and so I felt invited to critique that construction.
What I can’t settle on is whether this makes the book “bad.” I mean, in my subjective opinion. I don’t recommend it, based on how I felt the story moved away from its most interesting elements over its progression. I didn’t like the protagonist, though of course that alone doesn’t make a book bad. But mostly it’s that I don’t come away with a sense of what Riker was trying to achieve, and all of the key elements (experimental prose, flaws of the protagonist, growing away from the academic thesis) can come across quite differently depending on the light that you read them in. Perhaps the most accurate thing for me to say is that Riker did not sell me on a vision which would allow me to read this combination in its best light, and if it were a better book, I could have been sold.
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Clarissa Dalloway is the Late Victorian Ideal, grown middle-aged. It’s 1923, she’s in her early fifties, and she must prepare to host a high society party at her London home this evening alongside her husband, Richard Dalloway, who is some sort of minor conservative politician. Over the course of a single day (I’m sensing a theme: this, The Guest Lecture, and the Solstaad book from August), we follow her preparations which take her around London, where her life brushes up against so many others. The book flits between perspectives, picking up old friends of Clarissa’s but also strangers, including our deuteragonist, the young war veteran Septimus Warren Smith. We see the parallels and contrasts between different genders and classes in Interwar England.
The first thing a reader will note is Woolf’s prose. Her language is dense, with long paragraphs and heavy use of imagery. At its best, the effect is magical, but at its worst it’s impenetrable. I felt both ends of that spectrum during my read, and I had my best experience of the book when I read it most slowly—despite how short it is, I think this book needed about ten hours to read, given I wanted to appreciate it. But the reward is there, and my copy (a recent paperback of no value) ended up with underlines and comments on nearly every page.
Clarissa is the clear focus among all the perspectives, and though she was not my favorite character, she occupies that space well. She’s repeatedly described as a good hostess (to her chagrin), and that’s also true of her role in the book—she’s great at connecting us to a variety of interesting people. The POV is hard to pin down. I would mostly call it third limited which moves through characters, but there are occasional transitions through a separate, distinct narrator. And though we start with Clarissa and always return to her, we actually end outside of her, with a friend admiring her reappearance. It’s the sort of thing which should not work, especially without chapter breaks, and I deeply admire Woolf’s ability to carry it off.
My favorite major character is probably Septimus Warren Smith, who we meet only because he and his wife happen to be walking about London on the day that Clarissa and her guests are preparing for the party. Septimus dies before the end of the novel, throwing himself out a window, and his arc is one of war trauma (obviously), but also a really affecting critique of mental health treatment in the era, which is augmented by knowing even a bit of Woolf’s personal history.
One thing I was genuinely surprised by was just how textually queer Mrs. Dalloway ended up being. There is an early passage which mentions a crocus and it was so transparently lesbian that I stopped and reread it in disbelief. The f/f kiss that follows it didn’t shock me as much! Clarissa was romantically involved with her friend, Sally Seton, when both were in their twenties, and a sudden visit by another friend of that era triggers Clarissa’s reminiscence. And Septimus lives this in parallel—his grief for a former officer that he loved, Evans, is the focus of his PTSD, so that both of our leads are haunted by past queer romances that they can’t discuss with their current spouses. As mentioned, this pushes Septimus to end his own life, and though Clarissa certainly contemplates death, hers is more figurative—continuing to disappear into her society role. Her daughter seems to be inheriting that legacy, as well. The daughter has an intimate older female friend she will inevitably grow away from when she comes into society and marries.
My thoughts on this book are a bit more scattered than I would like, or than this book deserves. It was a good introduction to Woolf, and reading it has made me interested in reading more of her work, which has evaded me despite owning Orlando for years. I suggest a deliberate read-through, one with time for rereading sections over again, and though I cannot prescribe a “best” way of reading it, I can say that one gets a lot of mileage out of a beater paperback and a pencil, here.
The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst
This novel tells the story of Nick Guest, a recently-graduated Oxford student who becomes a lodger in the London house of the Fedden family. Toby Fedden, his uni friend and crush, makes the connection—Toby’s parents, Gerald and Rachel, take Nick on as a guest to watch the empty home while they are on holiday. Nick’s new friendship with the troubled daughter, Catherine, paves the way to a longer-term living arrangement, and the result is a three-part story about 1980s British politics, touching on class, wealth, race, queerness, and scandal.
Nick is gay, an identity which forms a cornerstone of the book. Much of what we see is the result of his dating and sex life, and tension results from his tenuous status—he is out, and nominally accepted, but prejudice appears frequently. Nick is also from a middle class family, whereas the Feddens are used to luxury through Rachel’s family wealth, and most of their circle is similarly well-heeled. The other layer of complexity over all of this is that Gerald Fedden is an elected conservative MP, something which Nick finds glamorous and enjoys his proximity to, but which he’s not unaware presents some conflict with the gay spaces and men that he mingles with.
We see Nick develop, though I’m hesitant to call it maturation. He becomes more tightly wound up in the Feddens’ world until an inevitable crashing out, which reaffirms the impossibility of reconciling a queer middle-class life with a conservative wealthy one. But the plot, as much as it exists, is not the draw. The draw is Hollinghurst’s prose, which is at turns clever and beautiful. He’s a rich observer of personal character and class, which he uses together to construct incisive little details. This book is not a satire but that’s a close approximation of the resulting effect. The other clear heritage is Henry James, who is Nick’s academic obsession and thus an intentionally heavy presence in the text. The prose is really worth reading for, a deeply rewarding experience in language, phrasing, and vocabulary. But for all that it creates a mood or draws a scene, I think it obscures the narrative and emotional beats of the novel.
One of the big moments of the story is the appearance of Margaret Thatcher, who Gerald works with and reveres. The prose refers to her as the Lady, and her spectre hangs over the first two thirds of the book. When Nick finally meets her, at a party, he dances with her—one review that I read referred to this as a dance with the devil. But I found her underwhelming after all of that build, and Nick’s focus on her outfit and hair and the aesthetics of the party didn’t create much space for metaphor.
NB: Having now also read Mrs. Dalloway, I see the Thatcher scene as a direct reference and homage to the appearance of the PM and/or Sally née Seton at Clarissa Dalloway’s party. The most rigorous thing I could do is go back and reread the party bits in TLOB, but I’m separated from my book by a timezone and this won’t be happening. With all that said, maybe the intended effect of Thatcher’s appearance is to be underwhelming, as is the PM in Mrs. Dalloway. But if the inspiration is more from Sally, or as that one reader suggests, a dance with the devil, then I still think the scene falls down. The amount of foreshadowing suggests the latter.
I had a similar experience with the treatment of AIDS in The Line of Beauty, which we see kill a few characters including both of Nick’s boyfriends. The shock of the reveal of the second boyfriend’s illness is buried on first introduction by a timeskip and vagueness, of the polite rich-people variety. We eventually get to see that second boyfriend in his diminished state, and again the attention is to how his looks have gone, how his clothing no longer fits, and how his wealth fails to disguise this. I felt deeply affected by his illness! The prose is not vapid, and a reader who wants to feel the painful emotions which obviously exist in these characters can do so. But Nick is so remote from his feelings—at one point he cries and it’s nearly relegated to a background note—that the book is not asking you to engage with any feeling. If you wish to go through it by marking the tone of each mention of Gerald’s Montblanc fountain pen, that’s quite doable.
Now, I love clever little observations and enjoyed and noted down many instances of cool language, including each of those Montblanc references. But my ideal would have been a gradual increase in the centrality and necessity of the emotion, which I did not feel was achieved. What we have is a keen observation of an outside perspective on the Upper Class, one with a devotion to an older style of language but the more modern target of Thatcherism, and it’s a worthy inheritor to the position of e.g. Brideshead Revisited. (That comparison is incredibly common, and there are many top-level parallels. Not the Catholicism, though.) And perhaps I am not properly appreciating its delicacy, or am simply not calibrated for its emotional register. Detached POVs and focus on the surface level are both techniques that I use a lot in my own writing, and if they leave me a bit cold here, I think that I have to put it down to their execution across a 150k word/438 page story—in that amount of space, I guess I hope for that perspective to break down and show us the layer beneath more often, and more clearly, than I think this went for.
So I would firmly call this a good book, if a slightly long one for how much I got out of it. Any unevenness of feeling that I have about it is in wishing that it had fit in more, not to have done less of what was there. Nick is not the most likeable protagonist, but these hangers-on to wealth rarely are, and his qualities enable him to have more proximity for longer, which gives us access to so many different stages of excess. What’s interesting is how little the university friend Toby is around for any of this, and how much is done with Nick’s awkward role as part-guest, part-staff, and part-family. What’s there for those is all great, and the setting is vibrant. I think this really solidly falls into the literary category of my reading—the sort of book which needs attention and doesn’t strain itself to amuse you, but which has the writing quality to honor that attention.
Bunny, Mona Awad
This novel follows Samantha Heather Mackey, a 25 year old woman in her second and final year of a creative writing MFA program at a fictional elite American university. Her cohort is all women, but the other four students (the Bunnies) form a clique which Samantha both envies and reviles. Their instructors include the woman leading their writing workshop (who Samantha nicknamed Fosco after The Woman in White) and Samantha’s thesis advisor, nicknamed The Lion, a man who seemed to withdraw from her after mysterious incidents in her first year. Outside of her program, Samantha spends most of her time with a wild goth chick named Ava, and the novel creates tension through Samantha’s divided loyalties between her existing friendship with Ava and the new opportunity offered by invitations from the Bunnies.
I thought this novel was awful. Far and away the biggest reason for that was the prose. Awad’s style is polarizing—she’s descriptive, but her chosen structure is a heap of sentence fragments.
So many bunnies. I do not believe my eyes. But they are there. Possibly they were always there. Hopping across the green. Dashing across my path and disappearing into a cluster of bushes. Tripping me up on the winding campus paths like so many soft, heavy stones. Each time I see one, I feel a little lash of fear and excitement in my gut. I recall the soft but heavy magic of the animal in my lap that night. Me drunkenly staring down into its twitching, leporine face. An upstairs window turning on, then off. Their little-girl voices warm and peltlike in my ears.
Coming after The Line of Beauty, I couldn’t find this more jarring. I tolerate modern styles just fine in nearly every case, but this came across as pretentious fanfic—aggressively, unignorably bad. And that’s an issue for the book’s conceit, because it’s a novel About Writing. Samantha and the Bunnies spend many scenes in writing workshops and giving feedback. We are constantly hit with comments about their writing which could be comments about this book:
They are dreary word puzzles I’m always too bored and annoyed to solve.
And then I feel like screaming JUST SAY IT. TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED. TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK THIS MEANS AND WHAT YOU DID WITH HIM EXACTLY.
The book’s prose is simply not good enough to transcend this and sell it as archly meta!
A decade ago, I was active in online fashion communities where posting pictures of your outfits was common. One pattern there was that a user would share a picture of their outfit and criticise it in their own post, to preempt critique by other users. No one else would want to repeat them, so all of the critique was framed by the wearer and others were implicitly forced to only compliment. The book reminded me of that: as though by putting these words into the mouths of her characters, Awad could preempt complaints about her writing. After all, she’s already aware of them, isn’t she? There’s no use repeating it.
We don’t actually see any of Samantha’s writing, either. Though the Bunnies and Fosco describe it (creepy, dark, etc.), we barely even get a sense of the content, let alone example prose. So when combined with Awad’s own choppy and pretentious prose, the effect is a very self-conscious and defensive one. This book is writing a cheque it cannot cash (to steal the metaphor from a nonny), and because it’s centrally about an MFA program, that’s fatal.
Some other criticisms, for fun:
This is a fantasy/horror book, supposedly. The fantasy is there. (Short summary: the Bunnies are capturing literal bunnies and using magic rituals to transform them into hot boys. Samantha also does this, subconsciously, to a swan and a stag.) But the horror of it all was completely lost on me because I was so busy boggling at the horror of the words on the page to be affected by their intended mood. This novel really wants to be a psychological thriller and bury its horror and fantasy under layers of unreliable narration so that readers have to question their perception… but instead of any of that, I was copy/pasting each new awful simile that was paired with the idea of words falling out of a character’s mouth. Even aside from my distraction by mockery, I think that this did not really deliver on the premise of body horror—compare it to The Locked Tomb books, which are a thousand times more horrifying. I elected not to read those within a few hours of going to bed, whereas I read Bunny in bed immediately before sleeping.
I was deeply disappointed with the resolution to the main conflict (Bunnies v. Samantha/Ava) being about sexual attraction to a man. In the end, the Bunnies physically fight each other, and kill Ava, because of Samantha’s stag-turned-hot-guy. Paired with the shallow early-aughts mean girl caricature that made up the Bunnies, the impression that I got was of some very under-examined internalized misogyny. I was shunted back to Not Like Other Girls discussions of 2014. Samantha’s final interaction with the Bunnies is to be pettily judgmental. I don’t need a feminist message to enjoy a book, but I am going to be turned off by a story which delights in its female main character getting to be bitchy towards the Wrong Type of woman.
The overall impression I would convey is that this book is messy. The main character is messy, the story is messy, and the prose is messy, so the message and intentions cannot help but also be messy. I did not find it the fun kind of mess.
The Guest Lecture, Martin Riker
Our protagonist, Abby, is a female Economics professor who has recently been denied tenure. Despite this career upset, she must complete a pre-existing commitment to deliver a guest lecture. This book takes place in the span of just one evening, the sleepless night before that guest lecture as she plans her talk with the help of her imaginary friend, John Maynard Keynes.
That premise is incredibly cute, but incomplete, and so I ultimately found the book dissatisfying after being excited by the summary. The key one is this: Abby’s introspection is fundamentally selfish in ways which make her petty, resentful, and unpleasant, and this is a distinctly intentional element of the character study, but one that creeps up to dominate the narrative by the end of the book, crowding out some of the compelling early elements.
I really enjoyed the first third of this. There, we are introduced to the conceit Abby uses, which is to guide us through her mental image of each room of her house as she workshops different phases of her speech from start to finish. What immediately becomes apparent is how much work Riker put into Abby’s academia—an academic himself, it's clear that he understands the need to sell this character’s professional work if we are to buy the central crisis of her being denied tenure. And he does a great job of it! I still find Abby’s thesis about Keynes, economics, and rhetoric the most interesting part of the book. Getting a mix of that, glimpses of her current life, and reflections on her past was a fun read. That is, the subjects weren’t light, but the construction was clever and I was impressed by it.
This balance begins to fail by the halfway point, collapsing entirely in the end. Abby’s anxiety, and then her self-obsession, start to run the story: we spend more time on her past and and current relationships, and the prose takes a turn for the experimental. Short sentence fragments pile up on one another to suggest a panicked inability to focus. Long sentence-paragraphs signal breathless anxiety spirals. Ricker even gives us a few jarring typesetting choices, or uses of white spaces, to really hammer this home. And the subject of all of this is Abby, but not really the Abby with a professorship: it is instead the Abby of undergrad, high school, and childhood. That Abby, Abby tells us, was even more awkward, self-conscious, and lonely. She was also more self-involved, pretentious, and callous. We are reassured of her change and improvement as she shares stories of being rude to an old high school friend or an undergrad mentor—it was only that she was so lonely and awkward. And, then, we return to the present to watch her demean her underachieving, unambitious husband.
See, this book is a character study, and Abby is not only an academic, but also a mother and a wife. Her daughter, Ali, and husband, Ed, are asleep beside her the whole time, dutiful companions to her guest lecture travel. The ultimate conclusion that Abby reaches is that she must reinvent her life and sense of self by building on her love for her family and the ways that it has made her a better person. Which—well. Is she?
Ed is a college boyfriend turned husband, adjunct professor, dedicated father, and community organizer. Though thinly-sketched, we know he is supportive of his wife and has put her career first. But now that that career hasn’t panned out, Abby displaces blame to him in an aggressive rant, where she wonders why he was not more ambitious, why he is so easygoing, why he can dare to say “we’ll figure it out” in the face of her tenure loss. Her resentment is strikingly out of proportion with his actions.
Perhaps I read too much into all of this—my closeness to the topic, some particularity of how I received the narration, kicking in inappropriately for what is after all a character study, and those needn’t be joyful. But Abby’s first person narration advertises its construction, and so I felt invited to critique that construction.
What I can’t settle on is whether this makes the book “bad.” I mean, in my subjective opinion. I don’t recommend it, based on how I felt the story moved away from its most interesting elements over its progression. I didn’t like the protagonist, though of course that alone doesn’t make a book bad. But mostly it’s that I don’t come away with a sense of what Riker was trying to achieve, and all of the key elements (experimental prose, flaws of the protagonist, growing away from the academic thesis) can come across quite differently depending on the light that you read them in. Perhaps the most accurate thing for me to say is that Riker did not sell me on a vision which would allow me to read this combination in its best light, and if it were a better book, I could have been sold.
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Clarissa Dalloway is the Late Victorian Ideal, grown middle-aged. It’s 1923, she’s in her early fifties, and she must prepare to host a high society party at her London home this evening alongside her husband, Richard Dalloway, who is some sort of minor conservative politician. Over the course of a single day (I’m sensing a theme: this, The Guest Lecture, and the Solstaad book from August), we follow her preparations which take her around London, where her life brushes up against so many others. The book flits between perspectives, picking up old friends of Clarissa’s but also strangers, including our deuteragonist, the young war veteran Septimus Warren Smith. We see the parallels and contrasts between different genders and classes in Interwar England.
The first thing a reader will note is Woolf’s prose. Her language is dense, with long paragraphs and heavy use of imagery. At its best, the effect is magical, but at its worst it’s impenetrable. I felt both ends of that spectrum during my read, and I had my best experience of the book when I read it most slowly—despite how short it is, I think this book needed about ten hours to read, given I wanted to appreciate it. But the reward is there, and my copy (a recent paperback of no value) ended up with underlines and comments on nearly every page.
Clarissa is the clear focus among all the perspectives, and though she was not my favorite character, she occupies that space well. She’s repeatedly described as a good hostess (to her chagrin), and that’s also true of her role in the book—she’s great at connecting us to a variety of interesting people. The POV is hard to pin down. I would mostly call it third limited which moves through characters, but there are occasional transitions through a separate, distinct narrator. And though we start with Clarissa and always return to her, we actually end outside of her, with a friend admiring her reappearance. It’s the sort of thing which should not work, especially without chapter breaks, and I deeply admire Woolf’s ability to carry it off.
My favorite major character is probably Septimus Warren Smith, who we meet only because he and his wife happen to be walking about London on the day that Clarissa and her guests are preparing for the party. Septimus dies before the end of the novel, throwing himself out a window, and his arc is one of war trauma (obviously), but also a really affecting critique of mental health treatment in the era, which is augmented by knowing even a bit of Woolf’s personal history.
One thing I was genuinely surprised by was just how textually queer Mrs. Dalloway ended up being. There is an early passage which mentions a crocus and it was so transparently lesbian that I stopped and reread it in disbelief. The f/f kiss that follows it didn’t shock me as much! Clarissa was romantically involved with her friend, Sally Seton, when both were in their twenties, and a sudden visit by another friend of that era triggers Clarissa’s reminiscence. And Septimus lives this in parallel—his grief for a former officer that he loved, Evans, is the focus of his PTSD, so that both of our leads are haunted by past queer romances that they can’t discuss with their current spouses. As mentioned, this pushes Septimus to end his own life, and though Clarissa certainly contemplates death, hers is more figurative—continuing to disappear into her society role. Her daughter seems to be inheriting that legacy, as well. The daughter has an intimate older female friend she will inevitably grow away from when she comes into society and marries.
My thoughts on this book are a bit more scattered than I would like, or than this book deserves. It was a good introduction to Woolf, and reading it has made me interested in reading more of her work, which has evaded me despite owning Orlando for years. I suggest a deliberate read-through, one with time for rereading sections over again, and though I cannot prescribe a “best” way of reading it, I can say that one gets a lot of mileage out of a beater paperback and a pencil, here.
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Date: 2025-10-16 06:29 pm (UTC)Poor Mrs Dalloway seems to be hit hard by its inclusion on various types of school reading lists. I liked it, but not until I found my pace with it, and students never have the luxury of doing so! But yes for the parts that I rushed through, the prose was all a blur.
Hollinghurst is good, if a bit wordy. But what quality of writing! He's worth trying something from, based on my impression here. I can't say the same for Bunny, but then, it does have its strong fans...