This
year, I was faced with a number of familiar names in the play-in round. I’d read Alison Espach’s previous book, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance at the end of 2023, which I might have enjoyed more if I wasn’t reading it in the wake of my brother’s premature death. Miranda July was a guest at my MFA a dozen years ago and two of her books were assigned reading. I enjoyed her odd work of CNF, It Choose You but found myself frustrated with the shallowness of No One Belongs Here More than You where she seemed more willing to go for the joke than to do difficult honesty. Only Manguso is an author I’ve never encountered before.
The organizers of this year’s tournament labeled the play-in ruond, “the (crisis in the) marriage plot” which seems a fair account of the books in this round.
Going in the order that I put the books in my illustration, I’ll start with Manguso’s Liars, the story of a marriage falling apart. It had the feel of raw autobiography and after I finished, I googled and sure enough Manguso’s marriage had collapsed before she read the book. Alas, despite the impliciti promise of the title, the only liar of the book was the philandering husband, and to be honest, a book in which the narrator’s spouse is the clear bad guy really didn’t seem interesting to me. It would have been much better to have had the narrator herself at least exhibit some self-deception about her husband instead of making the husband an obvious mistake from the beginning.
The Wedding People starts in a dark place. The protagonist, Phoebe Stone has arrived in a New England hotel planning to kill herself in the wake of her failed marriage. It turns out that the rest of the hotel has been booked for a wedding and is filled with the titular wedding people, including a somewhat tyrannical bride who is more than a little upset that not only is there a stranger in her hotel, but that this stranger intends to kill herself. As it turns out (and this isn’t much of a spoiler because it’s near the start of the book), Phoebe changes her mind (although after taking an overdose of cat tranquilizers) and ends up improbably subbing for the maid of honor of the wedding who cancels her arrival at the last moment. The darkness disappates to be replaced by a gentle comedy which was just what I needed to be reading in the weeks after the 2024 election.
Finally, there’s All Fours, a novel with a polarizing effect on readers with people either loving or hating the book. It’s getting a lot of buzz and has already been commissioned as a TV miniseries, but I have to say that I found the book unsatisfying. Maybe it’s because I’m not the right reader, although I think more weirdness might have helped it turn into something better.
So my pick for what should advance is The Wedding People.
My judgment on the judgment
Hannah Pearl Utt really liked Liars, which to me seemed the weakest of the batch. I did agree that Manguso had some astute observations in the discrepancy between the labors of men and women in marriages. And I found The Wedding People more than just a pleasant palate cleanser of a novel. I had expected that if we had disagreed, she would pick All Fours, which makes this more than a little bit of a surprise for me going forward.
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