Getting Around to It

Nina Sankovitch
Nina Sankovitch
Published in
4 min readOct 6, 2024

by, and cross-posted from, George Menz

Seems like every new post on here starts with me apologizing for not posting more often. I don’t know to whom I’m supposed to be apologizing, because I don’t know who really gives a damn if I post here or not, but having started something I guess you could conclude that I’m obliged to carry it through, in spite of frustration, boredom, or apathy. I don’t know if you’d apply that logic to all situations regardless of the consequences involved, but I suppose it’s an acceptable rule of thumb. Lately I’ve read, without posting about it, a few more books. I’ve done other things, too, including attending my brother’s wedding in the Adirondacks the second weekend of September, applying for numerous summer internships which will hopefully turn into job opportunities after I graduate, and starting work on a couple of student organizations. But it’s the reading I’ll focus on.

First and heftiest was My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay by Peter Handke, an author I’ve previously read and enjoyed but haven’t posted about. My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay is considered his magnum opus and a turning point in his career; it runs to over a thousand pages in the original German printing, but the English edition I read, whether due to a concise translation or font size or margins, is under five hundred pages. Nonetheless, it’s an expansive novel by the standards of its genre: what my friend Charlie Clateman calls “procrastination literature,” novels about authorial stand-ins failing to write their own novels, novels which (in some sense) narrate the process of their own creation. Handke’s countryman Thomas Bernhard provides a few examples; William Carlos Williams did something similar at one point. It’s an experiment also taken up by Lower East Side macho-man Jordan Castro in The Novelist, a book whose single-entendre title does nothing to disguise the utter lack of ideas within.

My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay is in some sense a work of paradox: an expansive, ambitious novel about an author failing to write an expansive, ambitious novel. Instead of encountering the dense interconnections that one sees in the mammoth systems novels that characterized postmodern literature in America in the latter decades of the previous century (and still finds its defenders, mostly, I will admit, among white men who refuse to accept a shift in expectations among readers), one gets the sense that Handke was, like Beckett in The Unnamable, writing to stave off the dread that comes from arriving at silence. The book starts as a kind of personal narrative with digressions, introduces a number of supporting characters who receive their own brief sketches, and then, in the final stretch, launches into a near-future dystopia scenario where all the nations of Europe descend into a civil war that seems largely theoretical from the perspective of the narrator’s cozy Paris bainlieue. The narrator-protagonist is, like Handke, a former law student turned author, of mixed German and Slovenian descent, but their biographical details diverge in some key aspects. He also shares a name with the protagonist of Handke’s earlier A Moment of True Feeling: is this perhaps the same character, decades on? Maybe, maybe not.

The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte is quite the opposite; far from being hermetic, internal, and reflective, it’s a book which grabs the reader’s attention and keeps it through violence, mystery, and the allure of esotericism. It’s been compared to Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, but does far more than that book (which spat in the face of popular hunger for conspiracy narratives and supernatural thrills) in attempting to court a mainstream audience. Like the author’s earlier The Flanders Panel, it answers the question: what if Dan Brown a) knew anything at all about history, art, or religion and b) could actually write? I ate it up in a matter of days, again like The Flanders Panel. Illustrations and diagrams throughout help readers track the protagonist’s progress in the mystery.

I listened to an NPR interview with Rick Moody from around the time The Ice Storm came out, in which he bemoans how many authors of what are essentially mass-market thrillers are able to acquire a sheen of respectability by including allusions to highbrow, semi-esoteric subjects (he cited The Alienist by Caleb Carr and The Secret History in particular). The Club Dumas certainly falls into this category, into which I would also assign much of the output of David Mitchell and even (to an extent) my beloved Tom McCarthy. I suppose you could see it as your proverbial spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, but it could also be balsamic vinegar on top of ice cream, making you think you’re consuming something more sophisticated than what’s really there.

Lastly, the book which actually lends this post its title: The Kept by James Scott, which I have had on my “to-read” list since I read a review of it in the New York Times when it first came out ten years ago. I was sixteen then, and perhaps if I’d read it at the time I would have had an entirely different reaction. Things being what they are, I quite enjoyed the book, which feels like a more tender and at the same time brutal take on classic western tropes, set in the snowy reaches of western New York State at the turn of the century. In some respects it’s similar to what I’ve read of Paul Lynch. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like Scott has published much since. I can relate.

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