For the Enjoyment, the Sentences, the Fear, the Laughter, the Grace
by Tess Crain
Having read, last year, with a certain stringent intensity, I tried to be more omnivorous and relaxed about my choices in 2019. Perhaps because of this, I’m not sure which books were the best. Here are five, however, ranging from the second to the twenty-first century in origin and including both fiction and nonfiction, that made a singular impression—all also share a probing interest in the human relationship to scale.
1. For the enjoyment: Chemistry (2017) by Weike Wang
Many of the books I read this year impressed me and many I enjoyed, but Chemistry was significant for both. Wang holds a kaleidoscope up to the eye, revealing the varicolored pattern of life’s facets: love, self, family, friendship. The result is a debut with the clarity and complex symmetry of an ice crystal. Science serves as metaphor—chemistry is both what the protagonist studies and has with her former labmate—without being reduced to it. The narrator is droll without being cynical, smart yet open, and empathic, but not indulgent toward herself. For the ultimate litmus test, while reading after Thanksgiving dinner beside a blazing woodstove, this book kept me rapt.
2. For the sentences: Henderson the Rain King (1959) by Saul Bellow
Of all Saul Bellow’s characters, Eugene Henderson was, the author said, most like himself. Superficially, this seems strange. A Protestant millionaire and hobbyist pig farmer, Henderson shares little demographically with his Jewish immigrant creator. Yet Bellow was known as a man of immense spirit, a character, full of desire—and inside Henderson, a voice growls: “I want, I want, I want.” What the mantra means, he has no idea, but it drives him from Connecticut to folkloric Africa to investigate. Although a novelist with a history of racist and sexist soundbytes writing about primal urges raises reasonable questions, what crosses Abrahamic lines can cross others, too—I read Rain King on the recommendation of my mother, who decades later still recalled that powerful inner chant: “I want, I want, I want.” And where Bellow’s force haunts, his language buoys. Take Henderson reckoning with the multitudes of humanity:
Being in point of size halfway between the suns and the atoms, living among astronomical conceptions, with every thumb and fingerprint a mystery, we should get used to living with huge numbers. In the history of the world many souls have been, are, and will be, and with a little reflection this is marvelous and not depressing. Many jerks are made gloomy by it, for they think quantity buries them alive. That’s just crazy. Numbers are very dangerous, but the main thing about them is that they humble your pride.
As Philip Roth wrote, Henderson is that “undirected human force whose raging insistence miraculously does get through.”
3. For the fear: The Three-Body Problem (2006, trans. 2014 by Ken Liu) by Cixin Liu
There is a moment in The Three-Body Problem when a man finds himself on a desolate plain. The sun has plummeted with peregrine swiftness below the horizon, plunging the planet into an unearthly darkness. That he cannot tell whether he is, after all, on earth adds another shiver of the uncanny. For several days, the sun rises and falls regularly. Then one night, two shooting stars tag the sky with silver scare quotes. In the morning, the man wakes to discover that the sun simply has not risen…. This is merely one section of Cixin Liu’s sweeping work of hard science fiction, the first in a trilogy. Environmental, political, and social narratives combine with physics to create a harrowing depth. To anyone who views little as axiomatic besides certain relationships between numbers, however, the novel offers a special existential terror. There are certain situations—car crash, violent assault—in which you suddenly believe you might die at any second; in these moments, death becomes real, not a concept but a box to check on the form of your life. Three-Body incurs this on a cosmic scale. Momentarily, you can imagine that the universe has no underlying pattern or laws, however elusive—that tomorrow, you might wake to total and unending chaos.
4. For the laughter: True Story (2nd century, trans. 2018 by Paul Turner) by Lucian
Written in the second century, True Story is often considered the earliest known science-fiction story, a parodic romp through space and time that suggests Gulliver’s Travels had a fling with The Odyssey and Star Wars. Embroiled in interplanetary combat, the narrator describes a force of fifty thousand “windjammers,” whose “method of propulsion is as follows: they wear extremely long nightshirts, which belly out like sails in the wind and send them scudding along like miniature ships through the air. Needless to say, their equipment is usually very light.” Later, he and his companions blunder into the Elysian Fields and live for several months among the Greeks. Awash with honey, milk, and wine that brings no hangover, with flora to shame Dante’s Eden, the divine island is not without human comedy: Homer recites only his own poetry, Ajax Major is in court-mandated therapy with Hippocrates, and Socrates holds discussion groups “surrounded by a group of extremely attractive young men”—the local administration “had often threatened to banish him from the island if he did not stop talking shop and ruining the atmosphere of the party with his peculiar brand of irony.” In his introduction to the text, translator Paul Turner writes that he took “certain liberties” to render the “liveliness,” “irreverence,” and “down-to-earth realism” of the original. As far as humor goes, the choice seems well-made.
5. For the grace: Discourse on the Method and The Meditations (1637-1641, trans. 1995 by F. E. Sutcliffe) by Rene Descartes
Besides laying the foundation of Western philosophy, in his Discourse and Meditations Rene Descartes is charmingly strange, treats other cultures with rare largesse, and soothes the rawness of life with rigorous logic. In his Third Meditation, “Of God; That He Exists,” he also made me, a skeptical agnostic, briefly imagine the possibility of a higher power. In existential inverse to The Three-Body Problem, Descartes’s argument made God—not the aged patriarch but some larger benevolence—appear conceivable. Ultimately, I don’t believe either version of reality, but for a moment, while one book made me glimpse the frightening possibility of nothingness, the other filled me with a transcendent sense of meaning, joy, and solace.
Tess Crain is a graduate of the NYU Creative Writing Program, where she served as a Goldwater Fellow. Her writing has appeared in the New Republic. She lives in New York City.
