What I'm Reading

A recent roundup

What I’m Reading is a monthly feature of So Much Stuff, offering brief excerpts from contemporary novels and story collections you’ll want to add to your TBR pile.

If you’ve read any of my work, you know I’m a fan of stories about difficult relationships—about love, loss, and failed aspirations—and these four well-reviewed books definitely fit that bill. But they also range from dark to harrowing, so in this post-election countdown to an uncertain new year, I’m a little hesitant to suggest you add them to the top of your TBR pile, let alone your holiday gift list. Then again, the writing’s pretty dang good, so I leave it up to you.

My cat, Poppy, leans toward Garth Greenwell’s powerful What Belongs to You and, in terms of a favorite, so do I. Set in Bulgaria, this raw and wrenching story of an American teacher’s involvement with a charismatic hustler is probably the darkest of the bunch. Here are the opening lines:

That my first encounter with Mitko B. ended in a betrayal, even a minor one, should have given me greater warning at the time, which should in turn have made my desire for him less, if not done away with it completely. But warning, in places like the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture, where we met, is like some element coterminous with the air, ubiquitous and inescapable, so that it becomes part of those who inhabit it, and thus part and parcel of the desire that draws us there.

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Susan Minot’s Don’t Be a Stranger, is another tale of erotic obsession. Set on the more familiar streets of lower Manhattan, it details writer and divorced single parent Ivy’s headlong fall into love with the much younger Ansel, a rising musician just out of jail after doing time for selling drugs.
Here’s a snippet:

Music took on a new power. It seemed now a thing spinning out of the darkness at her like a meteor. It had always been there, in the sky, like the moon, beautiful, loved, basked in when luminous. As a teenager she had, as teenagers do, played music continually, playing records over and over again, always turning on the radio.

Ansel Fleming’s voice hit a particular new frequency in her.

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Mostly taking place amid the pandemic, Michael Cunningham’s Day, is an intimate portrayal of marriage and other familial relationships told from multiple points of view. I read this bittersweet and engaging novel in just over a day, and this one’s the mildest on a scale of Why do you always read such sad books?
Here are the opening paragraphs:

This early, the East River takes on a thin layer of translucence, a bright steely skin that appears to float over the river itself as the water turns from its nocturnal black to the opaque deep green of the approaching day. The lights on the Brooklyn Bridge go pale against the sky. A man pulls up the metal shutter of his shoe repair shop. A young woman, ponytailed, jogs past a middle-aged man who, wearing a little black dress and combat boots, is finally returning home. The occasional lit-up window is exactly as bright as the quarter moon.

Isabel, who has not slept, stands at her bedroom window, wearing an XXL T-shirt that reaches to the middle of her thighs. The ponytailed woman jogs past the man in the dress as he fits his key into the lock of his lobby door. The shoe repair man pulls up the steel grate, preparing to open his shop. Why does he open so early, who could possibly need shoes repaired at five A.M. ?

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I’m just sixty pages into Amy Stuber’s collection, Sad Grownups—a title I obviously couldn’t resist! But so far I’m finding these stories, filled with sharp humor and varying from contemporary realism to speculative in form, to be both affecting and surprising. Here’s the opening of “Camp Heather”:

At sixty, Heather started working at a religious camp. No one else wanted the job, which involved monitoring boys who’d been sent by their parents to a place in southern Missouri that was supposed to, through insistence, deprivation, and repetition, turn them into Jesus people.

“You don’t look like a Heather,” the woman in the office told Heather when she walked in with her resume printed on a piece of paper, something she was sure most people didn’t do anymore.

“All the Heathers are old now,” Heather said. “None of us look like Heathers anymore.”

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Find all four books at the links below. Happy reading!

What Belongs to You
Don’t Be a Stranger
Day
Sad Grownups

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