Judging a Book By Its Lover

by Lauren Leto

  ESSENTIALOGRAPHY

  Less Than Zero

  Drugs and prostitution drive the story of a group of young Beverly Hills scenesters.

  Five words: Too wealthy twentysomethings’ ennui experiment.

  American Psycho

  Perennial favorite of every well-dressed, slightly psychotic male who thinks autoerotic asphyxiation is actually kinda hot, this transgressive novel describes the life of a character who is Mr. Perfect Businessman by day and a serial killer by night.

  Five words: Don’t trust too pretty men.

  Imperial Bedrooms

  Follow-up to Less Than Zero with older incarnations of many of its characters; Ellis gives readers a glimpse into an L.A. casting call.

  Five words: American Apparel revelations; falls flat.

  DETAILS

  Ellis publicly proclaimed exactly what was on your mind when J. D. Salinger died. He tweeted, “Yeah!! Thank God he’s finally dead. I’ve been waiting for this day for-fucking-ever. Party tonight!!” You were never a fan of Ellis until this moment. Seemingly inappropriate to the uninitiated, it was in fact exactly the kind of sentiment Salinger would have expressed himself.

  American Psycho was the only book your fratty friend bothered to bring to college; he’d get drunk and read aloud the particularly gross parts. Completely missing the critique of superficiality, materialism, and hedonism, he strove to someday own suits and watches as glamorous as Patrick Bateman’s.

  Ellis modeled Patrick Bateman after his abusive father and has publicly remarked that his desire to succeed probably came from the need to “prove something to Daddy.”

  Ellis also has observed that younger women are much bigger fans of his work than older women: once a young woman in her twenties had him sign two copies of American Psycho and then whispered to him, “This book taught me how to masturbate.” You can claim the same, naturally.

  Ellis’s fictional world is fluid: characters from one book pop up in another. Sometimes even characters from his friends’ books make appearances. Most notably: Jay McInerney’s drug-and-sex-addicted protagonist Alison Poole from the novel (and rumored roman à clef) Story of My Life is sexually assaulted by Patrick Bateman in American Psycho and is a girlfriend to the main protagonist in Glamorama. Alison Poole is based on Rielle Hunter, lover and baby mama of John Edwards; she once dated McInerney.

  Ellis delivered this opinion of David Foster Wallace after his erstwhile competitor and colleague’s suicide: “The journalism is pedestrian, the stories scattered and full of that Mid-Western faux-sentimentality and Infinite Jest is unreadable.” Blame his bitterness on sore feelings in light of Updike’s public statement that Ellis’s books were noteworthy only as evidence of a generation’s moral bankruptcy.

  How to Fake Like You’ve Read Sarah Vowell

  BASICS

  A bubbly, nasally voice is the most defining characteristic of this nonfiction author, who is probably talking on NPR as you read this.

  ESSENTIALOGRAPHY

  The Wordy Shipmates

  The adventures of the first settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

  Five words: New York Times: epic pan.

  Assassination Vacation

  Offbeat examination of the execution of American presidents told through a road trip (or as she reverentially called it, a “pilgrimage”) to all the assassination spots.

  Five words: New York Times: lukewarm review.

  Unfamiliar Fishes

  Freewheeling history lesson about Hawaii’s tourist highlights.

  Five words: New York Times: beyond condescending.

  DETAILS

  To understand Sarah Vowell is to have heard her voice. She was the voice of Violet in the Disney movie The Incredibles. She’s consistently described as an “NPR darling.” Her boss is Ira Glass of This American Life. Fans call her hyperarticulate. Critics call her grating. One of her biggest critics, Virginia Heffernan at the New York Times, observed that she writes like she talks. It might be refined in oral performance but it doesn’t translate well into print.

  Her nonfiction books are preoccupied with historical trivia, which readers are bound to find either trite or engrossing. Fans of Vowell are likely faking their seemingly expansive historical knowledge as much as you’re faking your literary mastery with the help of this book. Ask them about their interest in the French Revolution to see their faces fall flat. Similarly, you’re screwed if they want to initiate a dialogue on differences between Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road and Young Hearts Crying.

  You most admire Vowell for her open admission that she cuts her own hair to avoid having to talk to a hairstylist. Being elitist is so cumbersome. Also, she doesn’t drink coffee, which is weird. If you told me that she didn’t drink liquor as well, I would have to insist that she must not write her own books because I have no idea how to write without one or the other.

  How to Fake Like You’ve Read Alice Munro

  BASICS

  Short-story writer who presumably took her own experiences as an unhappy Canadian homemaker as fodder for her fiction. At the center of her stories, almost invariably, is a Canadian housewife, consumed with her household but unthanked by her family and stymied in her aspirations.

  Influenced by: Every review of Munro mentions that she is our generation’s Chekhov but she often brings up Eudora Welty as an influence.

  ESSENTIALOGRAPHY

  Dance of the Happy Shades

  Munro’s first published collection of short stories, in which she introduced her oft-recurring discontented small-town female character.

  Five words: “Red Dress,” required pre-prom reading.

  The View from Castle Rock

  A fictionalized account of true events from Munro’s personal life and ancestral family history.

  Five words: Storified memoir; family tree ponderings.

  Too Much Happiness

  Short stories that present a macabre twist on the classic Munro housewife protagonist.

  Five words: “Men carry nothing; women all.”

  DETAILS

  If you’re ever caught having only partially read one of her books, take comfort in Munro’s belief that one should inhabit the world the book presents and wander at will rather than read the entire thing from start to finish.

  Munro, with her first husband, used to own a bookstore and work the cash register. Her now-ex-husband still owns the bookstore in British Columbia, called Munro’s Bookstore. Before being published, she would hide her attempts at writing as if they were shameful journal entries, for fear she’d be mocked by readers.

  She refers to a short story as a “chunk of fiction.” Her abrupt endings make you think of them more as chunks with jagged edges. Once in Paris I was walking down a street and a large, dense object fell from God knows where and onto my head. I lifted my hand to brush it off and looked at the writhing creature I had struck onto the ground. It was a (small) rat, struggling to get back onto its feet. The intensity with which I freaked out, rubbing my hair all around my head to make sure I had gotten all of the possible debris the rat carried with it out while screaming, “A rat! A rat!” in English to passing Parisians who seemed to not understand what had just happened to the crazy American girl—that’s how Munro endings can feel. Like an inexplicable moment you just got pulled through, that no one nearby saw happening.

  If you have ever wondered how Munro so fully grasps and succinctly captures the plight of the small-town homemaker, you need look no farther than her own path as a writer for an explanation. housewife finds time to write stories, read the headline in her local newspaper when it was discovered that she had been published.

  How to Fake Like You’ve Read William Faulkner

  BASICS

  The touchstone of Southern Gothic fiction, this novelist and onetime poet changed contemporary American literature for the better.

  Influence by: Faulkner’s biggest influence was his great-grandfather Colonel William Clark Falkner (the “U” was added in s
ubsequent generations), whose life supplied the template for several of Faulkner’s characters (and who was also a writer himself). It is said that as a child Faulkner once proclaimed, “I want to write like my great-grandaddy.”

  ESSENTIALOGRAPHY

  The Sound and the Fury

  Connected stories from four different points of view, all detailing the downfall of Caddy Compson.

  Five words: Dilsey saved all their asses.

  Light in August

  Another pregnant girl, another Yoknapatawpha County backdrop.

  Five words: Overstated symbolism of Joe Christmas.

  As I Lay Dying

  Dead mother’s sons carry her coffin to her final resting place.

  Five words: “My mother is a fish.”

  DETAILS

  You can joke about the time in college a fellow student compared As I Lay Dying to the film Weekend at Bernie’s. Faulkner’s novel revolves around the harrowing journey a family must take to deliver the casket bearing their deceased mother, Addie, to its final resting place. The student used the repeated references to the putrid smell of Addie’s rapidly decaying body to expose a major oversight in the campy antics of Weekend at Bernie’s.

  Whenever someone compliments you for correctly connecting the dots in a complicated situation, sarcastically mention that you’re a big Faulkner fan. Faulkner readers are often left with the feeling that they’ve been suddenly and abruptly thrown into the lives of ten different characters. People who don’t like Faulkner are typically too ADD to stay with the arduous narratives, shifting points of view, and long sentences. Faulkner’s advice to those who can’t understand his points even after rereading two or three times was to “read it four times.”

  Most of his novels take place in a fictional Southern district named Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner drew detailed maps of how it was laid out in his mind. Yoknapatawpha is pronounced pretty phonetically: yahk-na-paw-TAW-fa. The word comes from a portmanteau Faulkner created of the Chickasaw words “split land.” The first work in which Yoknapatawpha County appeared was Sartoris, which revolved around Colonel John Sartoris, a character modeled after the great-grandfather mentioned above. Colonel Falkner had built the railroad that Faulkner’s father worked on as a conductor throughout his life. Faulkner one-upped them both by creating a whole town.

  Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner had an ongoing feud that was rooted, fundamentally, in their different writing styles. Faulkner accused Hemingway of never using a word that would make a man open a dictionary and Hemingway retorted that big words aren’t necessary for big emotions. Their work converged when Faulkner contributed to the screenplay of the film adaptation of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. The famous line “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together—and blow,” is all Faulkner.

  How to Fake Like You’ve Read Toni Morrison

  BASICS

  The figurehead of contemporary African-American literature, Toni Morrison is the go-to favorite for anyone who gets their political enlightenment through Oprah.

  ESSENTIALOGRAPHY

  Sula

  A town is united through its hatred for one inhabitant, Sula, but after her death the townspeople revert to discordant lives. Most of the story revolves around Sula’s friendship with and estrangement from another woman and the interracial relationships that she carries on with no regard for social mores.

  Five words: Lesson isn’t hate harmonizes, right?

  The Bluest Eye

  Heart-wrenching tale of incest, alcoholism, rape, death, and every other thing that makes life shit.

  Five words: “Wicked people love wickedly.”—Claudia

  Beloved

  Mother and daughter escape slavery only to find themselves haunted by the ghost of the mother’s murdered daughter.

  Five words: Repression manifests in perceived freedom.

  DETAILS

  Toni Morrison famously called Bill Clinton “the first black president”—qualifying his background (single-parent household, poor, Southern) as “black.” As a result, she was limited to labeling Barack Obama “the man for the time” when she endorsed his candidacy for president over Hillary Clinton.

  Morrison’s birth name was Chloe Ardelia Wofford, which she changed to Chloe Anthony Wofford at age twelve when she converted to Catholicism. While at Howard University, friends began calling her “Toni,” the name of a popular hair permanent at the time.

  Morrison had her fair share of ill fortune in the wake of her Nobel Prize triumph: her house burned down shortly after the award presentation but not soon enough that she hadn’t already deposited the prize money in a retirement fund she couldn’t touch. Morrison was the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. On her feelings about winning the Nobel: “I felt blacker than ever. I felt more woman than ever.”

  Morrison purposely avoids plots involving much confrontation between whites and blacks because she feels that too much of black literature already deals with conflict between the races. To her, the black community is insular and worthy of her novels’ primary focus.

  You can bring up Sula whenever some girl says, “It’s much easier for me to be friends with guys than girls.” Sula was Morrison’s 1971 attempt to illuminate a deficiency of female protagonists in contemporary literature. In Sula, Morrison consciously created a novel with two female friends at its center. Decades after the release of Sula, Morrison noted that the decision to focus on female relationships was becoming a conventional one, “and it’s going to get boring. It will be overdone and as usual it will all run amok.” You can say Sex and the City is the best example of this concentration on female relationships run amok, per Morrison’s prediction.

  How to Fake Like You’ve Read Haruki Murakami

  BASICS

  Japanese novelist who redefined Japanese literature by blending it with Western themes, among them absurdism and existentialism. His love of jazz music and popular culture punctuates his writing, as characters often listen to carefully selected tracks and several works are titled after songs. Murakami used to run a jazz club and owns over seven thousand vinyl records.

  ESSENTIALOGRAPHY

  Kafka on the Shore

  This “riddle as story” follows the intersecting lives of two characters: Kafka, a young boy who has run away from home, and Nakata, a mentally impaired man who can talk to animals.

  Five words: Oedipal themes and raining fish.

  Norwegian Wood

  Western-pop-culture-addled recollections of a thirty-seven-year-old Japanese man’s time in college and various dramatic love triangles.

  Five words: Crazy girl always gets attention.

  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

  Self-actualization occurs for a slacker when his quiet life is disrupted by his runaway cat.

  Five words: Existentialist plot; goal is self-discovery.

  DETAILS

  Don’t confuse Haruki Murakami with Takashi Murakami—both are prolific and beloved by the intelligentsia. Takashi, however, is an artist—most celebrated for establishing “Superflat” as a painting technique. Superflat is the melding of anime with incisive messages on the superficiality of modern culture.

  Murakami claims he never read Japanese literature while in school: “If I’d read Japanese literature,” he says, “I would have had to talk about it with my father, and I didn’t want that.” You can adopt this excuse for why you never picked up William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway.

  You could describe the inverted dynamic of Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as unrelatable characters with a relatable sentiment in the former versus relatable characters with an unrelatable sentiment in the latter.

  Murakami attributes his decision not to have children to the fact that he lacks the sort of confidence his “parents’ generation had after the war that the world would continue to improve.” Repeat that at a holiday dinner when your mother is needling you on when you’re going to give her some grandkid
s.

  He’s an avid runner—such an avid runner in fact that he titled his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and once said that he wanted his epitaph to read “At least he never walked.” If you’re an indolent type you can say you aspire to Bukowski’s “Don’t try” inscription.

  How to Fake Like You’ve Read Philip Roth

  BASICS

  The modern characterization of the Jewish American man springs from much of this novelist’s work.

  Philip Roth was inspired by his own life. He is best known for protagonists who are thinly veiled stand-ins for the author himself. (His first wife also appears in several of his stories, including My Life as a Man, in which a scheming girlfriend tricks the protagonist into marrying her by purchasing urine from an impoverished pregnant woman to fake a positive pregnancy test.)

  ESSENTIALOGRAPHY

  Goodbye, Columbus

  His National Book Award–winning first work, a collection of stories about young Jewish Americans struggling to find their identity in the 1950s.

  Five words: Librarian meets Jewish American Princess.

  Portnoy’s Complaint

  This tale of adolescence put Roth on the map as an obscene and comedic writer, thanks particularly to a masturbation scene involving a raw liver (which puts anything from American Pie to shame).

  Five words: “Fucked my own family’s dinner.”

  American Pastoral

  Pulitzer Prize–winning reflection on 1960s America through the eyes of Roth’s favorite protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman.

  Five words: The Swede’s Merry isn’t merry.

  DETAILS

  “Wee-quake” is how to pronounce the neighborhood Roth hails from—the spelling is Weequahic. This working-class area’s influence plays an important role in much of his work.

  The two authors whom you would love to get a drink with or have over for dinner have to be Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. These two, who were close friends, carried on a lengthy correspondence, much of which was mutually congratulatory and wonderfully inappropriate, as in this excerpt from Bellow to Roth: “If I had been interviewed by an angel from the Seraphim and Cherubim Weekly I’d have said, as I actually did say to that crooked little slut [from People magazine], that you’re one of our best and most interesting writers.”