Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Nov. 17-23

Isn't it kinda so kooky crazy that I liked Wicked?

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary for paid subscribers only. The Sunday Dispatch details what I’ve been watching, reading, playing, and listening to over the past week. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my writing career, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. You can also follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

Fran Magazine Fall Sale

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Residency over

the sky on our last night in Port Townsend

On Monday night, right before midnight, we made it back to our apartment after a travel journey that began at 9am out west. Any week that starts on a Tuesday is immediately destabilizing to me — thanks again to Phil for cover this week’s Wednesday magazine — and despite not actually being behind on anything of note, I felt like I was playing catchup the whole rest of the week, jogging along side time as it passed me by.

Yesterday I went into Manhattan for errands and coffee with a new friend, and the journey home took an hour and a half. I don’t live an hour and a half away from Manhattan; the trains were slow and unpredictable. We stopped and started a dozen times. I had a box of Melonas in my bag (mango-flavored — yum!) and I was worried they were going to melt in the time it took me to get back to a freezer where they could sit for a few hours.¹ I was lucky enough to snag a seat on the subway, so mostly I read through the final 60ish pages of Vigdis Hjorth’s If Only, which sat by the wayside most of the week while I pretended to be busier than I actually was, otherwise succumbing to stress and deadlines and all the things I mostly try to ignore when I am on residency.

I wrote last week that I think Hjorth is one of the finest novelists of our time, and though If Only is a new English translation, it’s one of her older novels — less refined, more chaotic, slightly repetitive. What I admire about her novels, some of which seem more autobiographical than others, is that way in which she depicts having to attend to the bureaucracy of one’s life while also going completely nuts. If Only tells the story of a writer and academic named Ida who becomes obsessed with another academic, somewhat hilariously named Arnold Bush, after they have an affair during a conference. Arnold is not especially charming or handsome or kind or wealthy; he is kind of a domineering creep, but she can’t get enough of his bad vibe. Over the course of the next several years, they engage in an extended flirtation/affair/relationship that comes to ruin both of their lives. Ida changes her mind about Arnold every other paragraph. She knows, viewing her life in the third person, that this is not a good idea, she is above this, it’s stupid, it’s needless, etc., but we don’t live our lives in the third person, and therefore she’s forced to admit that subjectively, whatever, she needs him, even though he is pretty awful. (So is she, for what it’s worth.)

The novel moves quickly over a long stretch of time, in part because Hjorth’s style is short and clipped. Children grow. Vacations are taken. Ida and Arnold write — together, separately. They have a lot of sex, much of it described in a kind of clipped and funny Scandinavian sort of way. The open precision of the prose allows for imagination to take over. The train chugged along, annoying me and frustrating me and worrying me over popsicles, but I read and thought, “these two are so stupid; this is kind of like if Annie Ernaux was really slaying.” When the book ended — accomplishing the rare aesthetic feat of having the last sentence go all the way to the bottom of the last page of the book — I was stunned. That’s it? It was over? There wasn’t more? I was so sick of these people, but the second the book ran out of pages, I missed them. The train lurched forward. I was only two stops away from home.