Episode 2: Claire Messud's family archives; our first Canon, or Can It?; and #FridayReads has some Wu-Tang Clan fans
Welcome back. . .
We’ve launched! Thank you, listeners, for getting this podcast off to a delightful start. From today on, we’ll share one episode each week, on Fridays, but we couldn’t resist releasing our first two episodes back to back. (If you haven’t listened to Episode One yet, here it is, complete with A.J. Jacobs talking about a Revolutionary (War) way of life, and our first Pop! Goes the Culture feature about adaptations — who knew there was a ballet of Lolita?)
Books On Tap
My second interview is with the sublime Claire Messud, whose novel This Strange Eventful History was longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. Messud and I discuss the pitfalls, and even some pleasures, of writing about family, since History is based on her own family members, from the 1920s through the early 21st century.
#FridayReads
This week’s shoutouts go to Marcy Dermansky (and Alyssa Harad’s #FlowerReport), JCLSTweets in Oregon (Those Wu-Tang fans), School District 42 in British Columbia, and Paul Riches.
Canon, Or Can It?
So many readers love Jane Austen as an author unreservedly, and the same goes for Emma as a novel. But in today’s “Canon or Can It?” Bethanne deliberates on whether or not the book belongs in the canon.
Six Recs
Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, The Round House by Louise Erdrich, and Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders.
Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.
The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.
Tell me what you’re reading on X, Threads, or comment on this post.
All titles mentioned in this episode:
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud, Coming to My Senses by Alyssa Harad, Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky, The Red Car by Marcy Dermansky, Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, The Lost Dumpling by Kirstin Hepburn, Be You, Mandu! by Kirstin Hepburn, Star Trek: Strangers from the Sky by Margaret Wander Bonanno, Emma by Jane Austen, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, The Round House by Louise Erdrich, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, and Amy Heckerling’s 1995 film Clueless.
Thank you so much for being part of this readerly community. Share your #FridayReads on X, Threads, or Substack!
The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.
Episode Transcript:
Hello readers, welcome to my new show, The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. This is a podcast where we'll dive into the hottest book world trends, address some of the great, or not so great classics, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. BP: Hello readers! Welcome to my new show, The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. This is a podcast where we'll dive into the hottest book world trends, address some of the great, or not so great, classics, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode, but first, I had the chance to sit down with author Claire Messud recently about her newest book, This Strange Eventful History.
It's a novel based on her own family. Here we are in conversation discussing the best way to portray your kin, good and bad.
BP: So you haven't written about your family before, correct?
CM: No.
BP: So, did you feel as you were writing, moments of betrayal and moments of honor?
CM: You know, there's always the question that to write about anything that comes close to one's life and to people in one's life is a betrayal in the sense that I couldn't write this book when my parents were alive, but I think for me, it's a book written out of love and compassion, and one of the reasons I think I couldn't have written it at, I mean, there are lots of reasons why I couldn't have written it at 28 or 35, but one of them is that I think I was, I couldn't see them clearly because I was bound up in it. In that familial relation and the complexities of that and the frustrations of trying to make my separate self and my own life and, you know, my oppressive, demanding parents and all of those things. And, you know, you reach a point where, I feel as though I have huge compassion for both of them and for, and for the Denise character for, for my aunt as well, and huge compassion and, and love and tenderness.
BP: There's so many things that are difficult about this one, and not least of which is the multiple voices and the multiple tenses. I didn't, if I were a better, interviewer, maybe I would have gone and found it and said, okay, this is the pattern I see, but there's a lot going on and a lot of choices to be made. And I'm sure some of the choices were made by the voices themselves.
CM: Right.
BP: But talk to me about the process of how those choices happened; things that surprised you or challenged you particularly.
CM: Yeah. I almost can't reconstruct properly how the choices were made, but in each case, the choices came to seem. Which is, I mean, to me, at least organic, right. And inevitable. When I'm starting a new project, there's always this time in which it feels uncertain. It does this have its own organic form or does it feel inevitable? And sometimes that takes a long time and sometimes it doesn't happen and you have to abandon ship. And sometimes you abandon ship, you know, fairly far along. That's only happened, you know, once or twice, but for, for this book, some of the beginning sections, the sections that occur before I, the author, was born, that are fully historical, they were shaped by evidence. I think I mentioned the other day, you know, there's my grandfather's memoir that he wrote by hand and then there are family letters. And my father, for example, there's a section in the 1950s. It's about Francois studying in the United States. My father did come to study in the United States and I don't have his letters home, but I have all his family's letters to him from that time. And so it would have seemed, given that I have almost no other letters from the 1950s, it would have seemed crazy not to kind of go with that. And so things, you know, certain things that are actually factually true that, you know, my grandfather was working for a company that was, you know, making exploratory oil digs in the Sahara, that was the fact. At that time, he took a trip to visit the oil wells. I know that from the letters that they were sending at the time.
BP: And those people weren't alive, so you also didn't have the same feelings of care as you might've had with someone who's still living.
CM: Right. Certainly. Yes. I mean, it's an interesting question. You know, that question about writing abou,t fictionalizing people, who are real people. And I certainly don't, I would not have embarked on this project, if both the grandparents generation and parents generation were still living. As I think I said the other day, I mean, for me, this is a project written out of love. But still, it is not something that the beloved people that they were would have welcomed.
BP: So many of us never find out about our parents. We never find out about who they were before or during, or any of it. We don't see them as sons and daughters. We don't see them as young people with dreams and disappointments. We don't see them as adults who are sometimes frustrated and sometimes amazed. I think that is a really interesting part of it. And again, I don't want to, um, lose what you were going to say about these characters being fictional, but I definitely want to hear more about seeing the 360, if you will, of these people, because, and this is one of the other things I was going to ask about, we get it since you go through the deaths at the end. So we really get the full, it's not just, oh, here's some delightful, uh, anecdotes from letters. It's, you know, these are people who were born and lived and died.
CM: I'm aware that there's a good bit of death in the novel. But I think we have a culture that doesn't so readily accept that it's part of life. That was one of the things about my French family, I think, is that they were very sort of old school 19th century that way. That's in the novel too. Chloe's sort of surprised that death is in the home, that when somebody dies, they aren't sort of whisked away. It’s like a 19th century novel, you know, the dead person is in the bedroom and, and for days, you know, but that, that seems to me a very important experience for me to have had. And, and I really do believe it's part of life and it isn't something separate. And that sense of the shape of a life or the arc of a life or the meaning of a life. When I was young, when I was 20, I imagined, because I read novels all the time, I imagined that lives had a meaningful arc.
BP: Just like characters, right?
CM: Yeah, yeah.
BP: In any case, I need to let you go. You have a lot going on. Take care.
BP: Thank you, Claire, for joining us today. You can find This Strange, Eventful History wherever books are sold.
BP: Now, let's jump into some of the books that you all have been reading this past week in our segment, Friday Reads. So I created #FridayReads 15 years ago because I was really curious about seeing what other people were reading. And the great thing is I found other people have the same kind of curiosity. So this time around, I've got a batch of Friday Reads. Tweets or Xs or whatever we're calling them. And I've got Jordan, my producer here, to help me sort through them. Jordan, how are you doing?
JA: I am doing wonderfully.
BP: Excellent, excellent. So, what's up first? Who's on first?
JA: Um, I don't know who's on second. I don't know if I got that right. Up first is a post from Marcy Dermansky saying, “You're back Bethanne ! #FridayReads and #FlowerReport were my favorite parts of Twitter, but I haven't grown used to the new name and only check the site sporadically.” So somebody's happy that you're back on X with Friday Reads.
BP: You know, uh, I want to say that #FlowerReport is also one of my favorite memes, but Alyssa Harad, who began that hashtag is on a different social now and has written about the world of the senses. Coming to My Senses was her book, out from Penguin.
And I love that Marcy combined both hashtags in a single tweet because Marcy is a favorite, favorite writer. You have to read Bad Marie, you have to read The Red Car, there's so many books that you should read of Marcy's. But anyway it's great to see her and it's great to see that some of us are managing to find a way on, you know, basically what is a hell site these days.
And just by negotiating through people we trust, hashtags we trust, staying away from the crazy political fray. So I'm glad to see Marcy, too.
JA: And then up next we've got from @JCLStweets, which is a Jackson County library in, Oregon. They're saying they're here for a timely satire. So they had to take Yellowface by R.F. Kuang home for the weekend.
I think I chose the JCLS Friday Reads tweet mostly because of their fantastic bio. Your favorite library Twitter. Wu Tang Aficionados, French Fry Enthusiasts. 15 branches located on Shasta, Takelma, and Latgawa land. And I thought, this is the most personality full library system I've seen in a long time. So really great to have them in the Friday Reads feed. And also, they're choosing an intriguing book, Yellowface. I do know that other people have problems with it, but let me tell you, it's one of the more interesting books about American book publishing that's come out in the past couple of years. So I say, check it out. Glad JCLS is reading it.
JA: And I'm glad JCLS is proving that having fun still isn't hard as long as you have a library card! And then up next, we've got School District Number 42, which is, I believe, a school district in British Columbia. They say in this week's Friday Reads, Highland Park Elementary English language learners teacher Leah Kimura and Grade 5 student Addison Ha recommend The Lost Dumpling and Be You, Mandu! by Kirstin Hepburn for Asian Heritage Month.
BP: These books look so fun and there are dumplings in so many world cuisines, um, not just Asian cuisines, but all over the place, and how sweet is this photo that they've shared as well of, the teacher, Ms. Kitamura and the student Addison Ha. They really look like a delightful pair. It would be great if they did Friday Reads every week. Shout out!
JA: Awesome. And then we've got one last one from Paul Riches. And I love this one in particular because we've got a vintage Kindle. Looks like an original Kindle. I'm very impressed with the longevity on that device. Paul says, his Friday Reads is reading Star Trek: Strangers from the Sky by Margaret Wander Bonanno.
BP: You know, Paul, whose last name I actually don't know how to pronounce, even though we've been following each other on Twitter for probably 15 years now. What I will say about this is he has been one of the most faithful Friday Reads tweeters all along and always includes his own little Friday Reads graphic. He reads lots of sci fi, fantasy, always something that is making him happy, intriguing him. So Paul, here's to you. Never stop. I cannot wait to see what you're reading next week. And as someone said a while back, it must be like Christmas for you, Bethanne, every Friday to get all of these tweets. And it is! Even sometimes there's hundreds of them, sometimes there's a few dozen, sometimes there's thousands. It's changed a lot, and it depends on how much I'm tweeting, Jordan, but I always love to see the regulars like Paul come back.
Now let's get into our first ever Canon or Can It. Today we have Jane Austen's Emma. Will Austen's novel live on in the literary canon, or will we simply have to can it forever?
Our girl's got game. She's pretty, smart, and has a comfy trust fund. Not much is wrong with her 20 something life, unless you count her widowed father, but that just strengthens her role as a daddy's girl. Of course, I'm describing Emma Woodhouse, one of literature's longest running famous heroines, the star of Jane Austen's fourth book.
So many readers love Austen as an author unreservedly, and the same goes for Emma as a novel. It's been adapted more times than the bodice of a Georgian era spinster. It makes me wonder, from the baby face duo of Alicia Silverstone and Brittany Murphy, to our modern ‘It’ girls, Anya Taylor Joy and Mia Goth, does this story of friendship, love, and meddling belong in our contemporary notions of the literary canon?
Or should we simply can it?
You just heard me paraphrase Jane Austen in a way that will make some J Knights, yes, they really call themselves that, swoon on their sheslongs. The actual opening lines of the novel read like this. Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence, and had lived nearly 21 years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. She's beautiful, wealthy, and smart. She's also entitled, nosy, and arrogant. Although convinced she'll never marry, Emma still indulges in a massive crush on one Frank Churchill.
And before you say any ‘huzzahs’ for Miss Woodhouse, remember, she was convinced she'd never marry because she didn't need to, being entitled and cosseted and indulged. She doesn't have real feminist convictions any more than she has any real credit cards in her own name, much like your grandmother in the 1970s. Oh, as if! Jane Austen was into realism, but historical context is all, y'all.
And in conclusion, may I Please remind you that it does not say RSVP on the Statue of Liberty.
Emma has the world at her feet. Success has been so easy for her. I'm quoting lyrics from the 1980s by the Human League, but I'm also chortling along with Austin. Who's best quality as an author is that she's always in on the joke, and there's always someone who has everything backwards, whether that's Mrs. Bennet, or Anne Elliot, or even Captain Wentworth in Persuasion. Just because Emma successfully set up her governess, Miss Harriet Taylor, with Mr. Weston, doesn't mean that her matchmaking between her newest friend and project, poor Miss Smith, will find happiness with Mr. Elton, especially when that hunky farmer Robert Martin's in the picture.
Worse, Emma's dear friend Mr. Knightley pitches a fit when he learns about her interference. And that makes our Miss Woodhouse sulk. So much that she nearly misses the misplaced feelings Harriet Taylor has for Mr. Knightley. And the burgeoning heat between dream girl Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill.
“That cow!”
We can imagine Emma muttering. Now, here's what really stirs my Pimm's cup about this whole novel. Mr. Knightley supposedly challenges snobbish Emma's notions of class consciousness, saying it's all a construct and uttering twaddle about hunky farmer Martins having more true gentility than Kate Middleton ever did.
Wait, that's just me. But the point stands. Knightley lectures Emma about social class, then proceeds to fall right in line with the status quo. We all know the end of Emma. Three marriages between Knightley and Emma, Harriet and Robert, And Jane and Frank. Oh, a fabulous day. Within the lines they stay, noble to noble, peasant to peasant, nouveau riche to nouveau riche.
Ugh. Can it. Double ugh. I'm being as deceitful as Emma on an errand at the Milliner's trying to overhear hot goss about Jane Fairfax. Of course, I'm not going to can Emma. I'm going to can on the book. And here's why. As none other than Sir Walter Scott said in his review, yes, book reviews have been around for hundreds of years, dear listeners, the novel was part of a trend.
A trend toward fiction about real people and their many, many flaws. In other words, just as we love Emma as a bossy babe, we love Emma the novel for its pratfalls and acknowledgement that human nature rarely changes. Especially when even the lowest on the totem pole in this comic novel have a place to sleep and food to eat.
Welcome back to Six Recs. This week I'm going to be telling you about Greater American Novels. At least they're my Greater American Novels. You may disagree. As usual, I'm going to try to give you six recommendations in three minutes, and my producer Jordan is going to time me. Are you all set, Jordan?
All right, we're rolling.
All right, the first one is The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honoré Fanonne Jeffers, and this is a very long novel. It's completely worth every single one of its, I believe, 900 pages, 900 plus. It's a new version of our country's history. It is fictional, but still, it's a new way of talking about the United States that acknowledges all of its peoples from the very beginning.
The next one up is a favorite of mine for 2024. It's Long Island Compromise by Taffy Broder Net, and it's a little ungainly in a few spots, but it upends the traditional family saga in the United States. Move over Jonathan Franzen. Broder Net has done an amazing job with this story about a large Jewish, well, not large, but a, a large-ish Jewish family. They have a large estate on Long Island and you will never ever guess the ending. It's really quite something.
But next, I'm giving a classic because we have to give props to the goat. That is Toni Morrison's Beloved. And it is, she is the goat, and this is her masterwork, I believe, all the more so because the astonishing experimental novel is based on gut wrenching historical truth. If you haven't read it already, you have to read it. If you have read it already, read it again. There's so much in Beloved. It's, it's truly a masterwork, as I said. Um, and I shouldn't use master work in talking about Morrison, I should say. It is the work of a Maestra or the work of an incredible, incredible novelist who's one of America's greatest.
Next is Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. She may be one of Morrison's best successors. and in this novel, the Climactic Moment where violence and kindness intertwine, it's never going to leave me. It's almost like the title. You know, unburied in between sing and sing. It's really a fantastic book. We are so lucky to have Ward.
The Roundhouse by Louise Erdrich. Some people prefer The Beet Queen or Love Medicine. I love The Roundhouse. And I believe it is a triumph of symbolism, mystery, and family loyalty. It's about indigenous people, again, in Minnesota, where Erdrich lives and runs Birchbark Books. All power to the novelists who own and run bookstores. The Roundhouse, you will never forget it. Another book. You will never guess the ending of, even though it's not technically a mystery.
Finally, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. I wish that Saunders wrote more long fiction, but at the moment, we'll have to be content with this many voiced, multiple perspective account of one man, yes Abraham Lincoln’s, deepest grief as he mourns his dead son in a very historic Washington, D. C. graveyard. But the bardo, which of course is a Tibetan concept about a place where souls go after death, really contrasts with the 19th century atmosphere and historical setting. Saunders is experimental in the best way. He has so much compassion for every character he writes. Please go out and buy a copy of it now. In fact, buy all of these.
So, Six Recs Greater American Novels. How did I do Jordan?
You came in at just about three minutes and 48 seconds.
Okay. So, I did not, I did not, you know, make it under three, but I think that's pretty good.
So that just about does it for us. Thanks for joining me for this episode of The Book Maven: A Literary Revue, hosted and produced by me, Beth Ann Patrick. Produced by Christina McBride. Engineering by Jordan Aaron. Our booking producer is Lauren Stack.
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