What to Read This Summer

A few weeks into my freshman year of college, I received in the mail a Penguin Classics paperback copy of “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes. It had been sent to me by my father. This was weird, because I couldn’t picture him in a mall—there were two main bookstores in my home town and both were in the mall—nor at the post office, so how the story of a minor noble imagining impossible adventures made its way to me was itself impossible to imagine. I set the book aside as a curiosity. A few weeks after that, my impractical and dreamy father died of a heart attack. The font of that copy of “Don Quixote” was tiny as footnotes or as asterisked medical warnings, and this augmented my impression of the book as a site of necessary veiled knowledge, and of hopeful mystery. The first time I finished the book, I felt, above all, that I had spent so much time with these characters, and now it was over, and I would miss them very much.

As it turned out, the self-proclaimed knight errant Don Quixote and his servant Sancho Panza aren’t characters one misses—they are always around. Even if you’ve never read the book, you recognize them on street corners, in line at grocery stores, and even in history. When I was eighteen, it seemed obvious to me that Don Quixote, charismatic and unfettered by ordinary reality, was a hero, and that it was essential to see the world not as it is but as it ought to be.

Later, it seemed equally obvious to me that Quixote—who gets out of paying what he owes, who is unwaveringly unaware of the damage he so often causes to people he thinks he is saving, who envisions a world in which he is superior to most everyone else—was an incidental monster of sorts, even if a tender and appealing one. Sancho’s advice, so often mocked, is, at times, really pretty wise; he receives more unjust blows than his master; and, when pressed, he can tell a credibly incredible story as well as the best of them; Sancho was the unrecognized hero.

But it was so sad when Don Quixote renounces his delusions.

And then—

And later—

And so on . . .

I’ve needed the sometimes irritating companionship of Cervantes’s imagined men over the years; they mumble about how certainty is (obviously) for fools, and enchantment is ubiquitous, and that one shouldn’t place too much value on how things end.

I don’t believe in spirit animals, but, if forced to choose one, I would name the ugly buzzard that was, for probably too much of my childhood, my favorite character in fiction. The Everpresent Wordsnatcher is “a large, unkempt, and exceedingly soiled bird who looked more like a dirty floor mop than anything else,” as described by Norton Juster in “The Phantom Tollbooth,” his magnificently imagined 1961 novel about the extraordinary adventures of an ordinary boy named Milo. During a particularly dangerous stretch of his journey, Milo suggests that he and his fellow-travellers pause until morning. “They’ll be mourning for you soon enough,” the Wordsnatcher butts in, kicking off a malicious marathon of wordplay that tickled and inspired my fourth-grade brain. The character is many obnoxious things—a pathological interrupter, a hygiene nightmare—but it is also an inveterate punster, and for that it still gets the freest of passes from me.

Like millions of other fans, I have read and reread Juster’s classic—the acknowledged “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” of its era—more times than I can remember, marvelling at the author’s delirious sense of play. It was the book I checked out from the library more times than any other; the book that it always pained me to finish, in much the same way that it pained Milo to conclude his journey; and the book that I purchased a few years ago in a handsome Leonard S. Marcus-annotated 2011 hardcover edition, telling myself that my own two children would read it someday, though likely not until after I’d plowed through it a few more times myself. The puns might be for the birds, but truly, they’re for all of us.

When I worked at The Cut, there was a genre of news item we referred to as “niche drama”: an Instagram scrapbooking community riven by plagiarism accusations, a scandal over snacks at a hippie preschool—that sort of thing. Such stories offered the voyeuristic pleasure of entering insular worlds, encountering their often mystifying behavioral codes and meeting the eccentrics who populated them.

“In the Freud Archives,” by Janet Malcolm, is niche drama elevated to art. First published as a book in 1984 (and including previous reporting for this magazine), it recounts a tale of social and intellectual beef among Freud scholars and psychoanalysts. I had come to Malcolm’s work via my college interest in photography; her first book, “Diana and Nikon,” collects her early writing on that subject. I did not read “In the Freud Archives” until a few years after graduation, but in the time since then, whenever I’m reporting, it’s never been far from my mind. For one thing, that’s because the book is so good: Malcolm’s ability to penetrate the world of psychoanalysis, her close reading of its texts, and her deftly rendered character studies combine to create something that’s engrossing and (quietly) very funny. But I also think of “In the Freud Archives” so often because it’s a cautionary tale. After its publication, one of Malcolm’s subjects—the loudmouth upstart scholar Jeffrey Masson—sued for defamation.

His case ultimately hinged on five quotations that Malcolm didn’t have on tape, three of which she’d taken down in a notebook that she later misplaced. Every time my voice-recorder app freezes, every time a notebook isn’t where I thought I left it, my mind goes to “In the Freud Archives.” This is, by any rational standard, insane: I should be so lucky to get quotes juicy enough that someone would bother suing over them. (One of Malcolm’s disputed passages had Masson describing himself as an “intellectual gigolo.”) But, more than the actual fear of legal trouble, what the book represents for me is an encapsulation of Malcolm’s great themes: the inevitable perils of trying to understand and represent other people, and the power struggles intrinsic to such fields as psychoanalysis or journalism. It’s a reminder to only do work you’d be willing to defend under oath.

My first encounter with Cormac McCarthy was “Suttree,” his fourth novel and, now that I’ve read most of the rest of them, my favorite. This took place about a decade after it was published. I was a junior in college, and one of my roommates, an athlete who’d turned book-serious after a year off, was reading the Vintage Contemporaries edition. He made a notecard for each fancy word, with the definition on the back. Sometimes, when we were all hanging out, just being idiots, he’d run through them for effect. “Rictus.” “Flitch.” “Incruent.” “Littoral.” “Hortatory.” “Alembics.” “Anthroparians.” “Grumous.” “Cimmerians.” “Cuspidine.”

When it was my turn with the paperback that summer, I girded for some heavy going. I was entering a phase of favoring what you, or at least I, might call hard books. Joyce, Pynchon, Barth. Who can say where the pretentiousness yielded to honest enthusiasm, but it did. Anyway, “Suttree,” being a Cormac creation, had its share of elaborate sentences and possibly highfalutin metaphysics, to which I was especially susceptible at that time and may be less so now, but what really grabbed me (as it has many others—not saying I’m alone here) was the lowdown humor—the bar talk, the greasy characters, and misbegotten capers. If I’d been a notecard kind of guy, I might have kept a log just of the greetings. “What say Sut.” “Look what’s loose.” “How’s your hammer hangin?”

Cornelius Suttree is a taciturn and, in some way, broken man in Knoxville, who’s just out of jail and down on his luck. He has turned away from his wealthy upbringing, and his wife and child, to live in a houseboat and make a go of netting catfish and carp in the Tennessee River. The novel is episodic, with a tricky structure and a shambling kind of plot. I was especially smitten right off the hop by the dialogue, which, if I can breezily assess an entire body of work, a year after the author’s death, may really be the most exquisite thing about it, notwithstanding the grumous alembics and flitchy rictuses.

You aint goin to believe this.

Knowin you for a born liar I most probably wont.

Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.

What?

I said somebody has been . . .

No. No. Hell no.

The following year, for my senior thesis, I tried to write a novel, in which a broken-in-some-way young protagonist holes up in a boathouse and hauls lobster traps and runs into trouble with some rough characters from City Island. The teacher who graded it, the writer Russell Banks, whom we also lost last year, deemed the prose “pedestrian.” One didn’t need a notecard to understand that. Or remember it.

Last year, I found myself with an opportunity that was, in the context of my season of life, more precious than diamonds: I was pregnant, with a two-year-old, and was packing up my apartment to move, two weeks before my due date; glimmering before me was a work trip to Thailand, where e-mails sent in New York during the day would not reach me during my waking hours. Most important, I had forty-eight hours that I could spend completely alone, doing whatever I wanted, before I had to return home. The No. 1 thing I wanted to do was be of no use whatsoever, and the No. 2 thing I wanted to do was read. I manically and desperately solicited book suggestions from friends and strangers. I needed the perfect novel, I told them; I needed something that would transport me mentally the way I was transporting myself physically, that would evacuate me away from hyperfunctional bourgeois domesticity in 2023 Brooklyn. I wanted total surrender, sensory absorption, uncontrollable emotional attachment—a reality within the book which superseded anything around me. In the midst of so much real and incipient parenting, I wanted to read like I was a child.

Despite maintaining a mile-long mental roster of books that I want to read and haven’t, I wasn’t sure how many books out there were left that would do this to me. Then a friend recommended Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove.” I’d neglected McMurtry; having grown up in Texas, I’d felt, incorrectly, that I’d somehow always been reading him. I fell into the novel the way a stone disappears down a well. A journey of former Texas Rangers north from the Mexico border to Montana, a grand quest that unstitches its own mythology with every line, the book had me spellbound, obsessed with the characters, who felt realer to me than my own self: Call and Gus, bristlingly human and noble because they aren’t; brilliant Deets, scrappy Janey, magnificent Clara. I gasped and sobbed and clutched the book when it was over. I was so thankful for the reminder that reading can still be like this, that the realm of the unread always holds, somewhere, the exact thing I’m looking for, whatever it is.

When I was asked to contribute an entry about a book that has influenced me, my first thought was to reach for something like Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady,” or maybe Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Line of Beauty.” These selections would have been sincere: “Portrait” was one of the first books to teach me how content and form can reflect and bolster each other in a novel; “Beauty” gave me a sense of literature’s unparalleled ability to portray how simultaneously awful and alluring the recent past can be. Still, when I pondered it a beat longer, I realized that I had to be fully honest here: if we were talking about a book that has truly affected me deeply, the only real choice was one by Norma Klein.

Klein, a New York native who died suddenly in 1989, when she was only fifty, published more than two dozen novels in her relatively brief career, many of which were aimed at a young-adult readership. In the manner of the Y.A. genre, her writing often features teen protagonists who are going through some kind of life crisis—a breakup, a friendship conflict, parental divorce or injury—but to think about her books as plot-based would be to sell them short. What most distinguishes her novels, instead, is their realistic, almost meandering quality, as if capturing the texture of life itself.

Like the work of her more well-known friend and fellow-novelist Judy Blume, some of Klein’s writing has been banned for its frank treatment of teen sexuality. When I was a young reader, this element of titillation was likely the first thing that led me to sneak her books from my older sister’s shelf and read them in secret, but I don’t think titillation was Klein’s aim. What I’m guessing she wanted was to present her young protagonists as fully and sensitively rendered subjects—sexual, yes, but also psychological and intellectual.

It’s hard to pick just one, but if I were to start with Klein I’d maybe choose “My Life as a Body” (1987), which, like many of her novels, takes place on New York’s Upper West Side, and as such has the flavor of peak-era Woody Allen (in a good way). Augie Lloyd is a tall, awkward, and brilliant high-school senior who is certain she’s just “a neuter, a brain, a weed,” and not made for sex or love. This changes when she is asked to tutor Sam Feldman, a new kid in her class who finds himself in a wheelchair after a devastating car accident, and the two begin an affair. All of this might sound overwrought and maudlin, but I promise you it’s not. It’s funny, sympathetic, and very good at depicting the disappointments and excitements of high-school sex, as Augie discovers that living a life of the mind doesn’t preclude living a life of the body. Also, don’t let the Y.A. designation fool you: this book is a great read for everyone. In fact, someone should really reissue it. McNally Editions or NYRB Classics, write me?

In graduate school, I remember hearing a story about a young scholar who was told that they wrote “too well” for serious academic work. Probably apocryphal, but the point of this cautionary anecdote was that questions of style, wit, or form were less important than the substance of our insight. Yet I’ve always been drawn to scholars who toy with expectations for scholarly writing, offering hybrid models that toggle between soft intimacy and sober detachment, and few books have dazzled me like Carolyn Kay Steedman’s “Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives,” originally published in 1986. Steedman is a historian specializing in labor and class; her book is a bracing, careful depiction of everyday life on the social fringes of twentieth-century England. But she vividly embodies this experience by sharing stories, some drawn from her mother’s upbringing in the nineteen-twenties, others recalled from her own childhood in the fifties. Steedman reads her mother’s sensibility (and her own, austere, childhood horizons) through critical, historical lenses that neither of them comprehended at the time. They were just trying to survive the world outside their door, as well as one another. It’s not an admiring or sympathetic view of her mother—some of it is quite withering—but she writes movingly of the structures and forces that made her who she was, reckoning with how the cascading disappointments of her mother’s life found shape in a political orientation steeped in bitter resentment. “She lived alone, she died alone,” Steedman writes, “a working-class life, a working-class death.”

“Read with the mind-set of a carpenter looking at trees,” Terry Pratchett once wrote, and before I set about the carpentry of writing, with the dawning freakout of each new deadline, one of the books I return to most often is Cynthia Ozick’s “The Puttermesser Papers.” The book, a kind of urban picaresque following a sardonic, hyper-intellectual New York lawyer through her career, violent demise, and even afterlife, is the product of an astoundingly ambitious and patient creative process. It was initially published episodically, including in The New Yorker, over the course of two decades, with the main character aging alongside Ozick herself. The result is a wild delight: a work of magical-realist, jet-black comedy, steeped in Jewish mysticism, starring one of New York’s great literary heroines, and rendered in dazzling, lapidary prose.

Soon after we meet Ruth Puttermesser (the name, Ozick tells us, is meant to evoke the German for “butter knife”), she resigns from a white-shoe law firm, where her gender and Jewishness furnish a deadpan view of the blueblood leadership’s politely veiled prejudices (“They were benevolent because benevolence was theirs to dispense,” Ozick writes), and takes a new role at the New York City Department of Receipts and Disbursements, in the bowels of a Kafkaesque sendup of city government. Puttermesser is insatiably, stubbornly intellectual: a woman, from her school years, “looking to solve something, she did not know what.” The character’s vision of Heaven evokes Borges’s Library of Babel, a space for infinite reading where she yearns to study “Roman law, the more arcane varieties of higher mathematics, the nuclear composition of the stars, what happened to the Monophysites, Chinese history, Russian, and Icelandic.” (The actual heaven she ultimately enters is, in keeping with the book’s acid sensibility, less idyllic.)

Puttermesser, and the book, serve as a eulogy for a lost strain of deep knowledge and thoughtful discourse. Ozick’s lament for the waning space afforded to big, thorough thinkers feels surprisingly timely in the era of TikTok. Nobody particularly wants Puttermesser’s naked intellectualism, nor her knowledge of the world and her roots in it: not her married lover, who walks out on her after she chooses Plato over sex, and not her dysfunctional colleagues in city government. In a dazed state of pique, she performs an ancient Hebrew ritual and creates a golem, who serves as both daughter and life coach, turning the book, briefly, into a madcap buddy comedy, and culminating in an unhinged plotline in which Puttermesser, relying on the golem’s designs, becomes mayor of an idealized, reformed New York.

This, and a succession of other capers, end in disillusionment. The golem becomes unsustainably horny, bedding much of, and ultimately bringing down, Puttermesser’s administration; Puttermesser’s one deep romantic relationship comes undone as the pair becomes enmeshed in an unhealthy pantomime of the love life of George Eliot; a Russian émigré cousin turns out to be no martyr but a crass hustler. Ozick is fixated on the encroachment of imposters and charlatans. These figures, and others representing societal decline—Puttermesser is ultimately violently murdered—suggest a darkly current world view, in which truth is in short supply and justice is ephemeral. (“Do and undo, till nothing’s true,” Ozick writes, in an epigraph that she presents as a translated ancient proverb but which is, in a sly meta-joke, actually invented.)

Ozick, who is ninety-six, is a singular voice as both an essayist and novelist, and often unsung in discussions of the male-dominated tradition of great American writers, despite her influence. David Foster Wallace, among others, cited her as an inspiration; his annotated copy of “The Puttermesser Papers” included a studied list of Ozick’s ornate word choices: “pullulating,” “pleonasm,” “telluric”! Ozick’s legacy, always obscured by sexism, has been further complicated by ugly, marginalizing statements about the Palestinian people made in the early aughts. That context, especially against the backdrop of the present agony of Palestinians, creates painful dissonance with her work’s wounded humanism—and, ironically, underscores the urgent need for it. (“ ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ is a glorious, civilizing, unifying sentence, an exhortation of consummate moral beauty, difficult of performance, difficult in performance,” she conceded, in one of her essays.)

“The Puttermesser Papers” is not glib. Its nihilism is juxtaposed with an aching belief in the power and beauty of the human mind, which Ozick seems to find all the more potent in the face of humanity’s inevitable downfalls. The impermanence of life and pleasure “is the heart and soul of everything in our lives. It makes ambition. It makes tragedy. It makes comedy,” Ozick said, in a 1997 interview about the book. “That is why mortality dominates our lives and also makes us write. Because we’re writing against that doom.”