“Time of all things / is most variable,” James Schuyler writes in “Await.” For me, time felt particularly variable this year. Days passed as if they were months; weeks passed as if they were seconds. Nothing like having a newborn to make time feel like taffy.
2025 was largely a year of rereading for me. For various essays, I returned to Muriel Spark, Robert Frost, and Thomas Pynchon. For pleasure, I dipped back into The Stories of John Cheever and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy. For my son, I read, and reread, and rereread, Jon Klassen’s brilliant and macabre I Want My Hat Back. (I gasped when reading that board book’s conclusion for the first time. Subsequent readings haven’t really lessened the shock.)
“Weirdly, it all / keeps moving somehow,” Schuyler writes in another poem, and I did find time to read new stuff as well. I reviewed some books that I loved: Frances Wilson’s Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel, Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow, and Anthony Giardina’s Remember This. For many of my favorites, though, my enthusiasm remained private. Here are some books that I greatly admired and didn’t get the chance to write on.
Helen Garner’s How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978-1998 (Pantheon, $40, 832 pp.)
Garner is an exceptionally strong novelist, but her particular style of writing—astringent and funny, attuned to the self and to the world—is perhaps most perfectly suited to the diary form. Back in 2019, I recommended the first volume of the Australian writer’s diaries. Now the whole thing, twenty-years’ worth, has been published, and it’s marvelous. In an introduction, Leslie Jamison describes How to End a Story as “a blend of pillow talk, bar gossip, and eavesdropping on therapy.” Every page contains a memorable passage or three. There’s portraiture, as in this entry on the late Australian broadcaster and man of letters Clive James: “I heard that Clive James, in London, has taken up with a woman twenty years younger, with whom he is learning to tango. Imagine! A passionate dancer hidden all these years inside that brain on legs, now unexpectedly set free.” There’s critical insight, as in this distillation of Jane Austen’s genius: “She never tells you anything about the appearance of her characters. As if they were moral forces. I love it.” And, again and again, there are short, perfect physical descriptions, as in this entry on a lowly piece of yard equipment: “My lovely cheap new sprinkler. On low pressure, a bud of water, then as I open the tap further, a hollow onion; then a wide fountain.” Garner is up there with Virginia Woolf as one of the greatest diarists I’ve ever read.
Joy Williams’s The Pelican Child (Knopf, $27, 176 pp.)
Williams’s stories often take place, or seem to take place, in the run-down places of the world: gross motels, dingy diners, Florida. But then at some point, more often at several points, the run-down places of the world begin to pulsate with transformation: time gives way to Time, the self becomes unmoored, grace and damnation seem open possibilities, mystery and reality are shown to be one and the same. The Pelican Child, which collects twelve of Williams’s previously published stories, is Williams at her disorienting best. The book is full of hauntings of various kinds: the ghost of a Russian mystic in “George & Susan,” a lost son in “Chaunt,” a dead father in “Nettle.” Things are weird in The Pelican Child. Animals sometimes talk. Realism gives way to parable, then parable to realism. Time and language become slippery. As Williams writes in one story, “It was now dusk, that time when all the possibilities seemed to shift a little. The day had transported its living burdens through their appointed rounds and soon would come the night.” American fiction has no better explorer of the dusk that is and the night that is to come than Joy Williams.
John Haskell’s Trying to Be (FC2, $18.95, 124 pp.)
What is Trying to Be trying to be? Sometimes, it’s trying to be art criticism, as in a dizzying opening essay that considers Francis Bacon, Diego Velázquez, and Pablo Picasso, each mirroring and refracting the other in complicated ways. At other times, it’s trying to be a phenomenological study of dance, examining how this art form can become a discipline in “paying attention,” grounding us in the moment and “connecting [our] shifting intention from what had happened a second ago to what was happening now.” At still other times, it’s trying to be a family memoir—as in a beautiful extended essay on Haskell’s late aunt, a college professor whose quiet life of romantic, religious, and intellectual questing serves as a model for Haskell’s own “process of becoming a person.” This essay, and the book more generally, suggest that being is in large part a matter of style, a way of holding the self that we learn from others. The lack of a direct object in the title, Trying to Be, is partly the point. For Haskell, being is both imitation and improvisation, the search for a style that is never finally and fully achieved.
Rosanna Warren’s Hindsight (W. W. Norton & Company, $26.99, 96 pp.)
Readers of Commonweal might remember Warren’s “‘Concerning ceremonies,’” published in the magazine’s centennial issue. That remarkable poem appears in Warren’s remarkable seventh collection. “Poussin, 1650,” one of several ekphrastic poems in Hindsight, has a striking opening: “I like him looking through me. It’s not about / describing. And the way he grips / the portfolio so I can’t see / the drawing: you have to deserve / the view.” Warren herself excels at describing, with her painterly touches of color (“we drive east into the spruce-silhouetted dawn / watching the sky stain slowly raspberry as the molten / copper disk of sun floats up over the highway”) and her condensed evocations of our political moment (“Angry signs slashed the shadows. Wrecked cars / stacked in yards, tilting fences, sheds / pledged revenge”). But her poems, like Poussin’s self-portrait, are at their strongest when they don’t just look at but look through: through time and the self and the reader to the harms we have done to our world and ourselves and others. “I could have // seen you better, I / know that now,” the speaker says in the book’s title poem. Like the best poetry and the best painting, Hindsight looks back at us, challenging us to see things—the natural world in which we live; the pandemic during which much of this book was written; our personal pasts; our collective futures—better, with more honesty and care.
A. S. Hamrah’s Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019-2025 (n+1, $23, 528 pp.)
Hamrah’s criticism is always smart and occasionally brutal. He describes Gary Oldman as “a showboat stuck in a canal. Whatever he finds himself in is too small. He doesn’t appear in movies, he gets lodged in them.” Here he is on American Fiction (2023): “Its unclever title is an example of the film’s basic strategy, which is to take the material that might offend people, material that was in fact designed to offend people, and update it for a world that demands to not be offended.” And here is the opening of his review of The Color Purple (2023): “I’m troubled by writers who never ask themselves, ‘What if I didn’t do this?’” (Spoiler: he didn’t like the movie.) Though there are several excellent longer essays in this new collection, Hamrah’s genius lies in the super-compressed, one-or two-paragraph reviews he has written for years for n+1 and The Baffler. The capsule review is to the critic as the sonnet is to the poet: a pressurized form that can seem restrictive but, in the right hands, becomes liberating.
Dan Sinykin’s and Johanna Winant’s Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, $24.95, 288 pp.), Carlo Rotella’s What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics (University of California Press, $24.95, 224 pp.), and Edward Mendelson’s The Inner Life of Mrs. Dalloway (Columbia University Press, $25, 152 pp.)
I won’t rehearse the many things threatening higher education right now. It’s easy to despair, but these three books give some grounds for optimism. Both Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century and What Can I Get Out of This? offer defenses of literary studies as well as practical advice for those of us who teach it, while The Inner Life of Mrs. Dalloway presents a many-angled reading of Woolf’s masterpiece that emerges from the decades Mendelson has spent discussing the novel in seminar and lectures. Sinykin and Winant convincingly argue that close reading isn’t just an intellectual but also a social and ethical practice:
Someone has invited you to think with them: whoever wrote the text under consideration. Allow something about the text to matter to you. Write about what matters to you. You enter the conversation in good faith and invite a third: your reader. Each makes themself vulnerable to misunderstanding. But the reward, if it works, is intellectual community.
In her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Woolf talks about “the difficult business of intimacy” that occurs when we take up a poem or a novel and read. These three books argue—and demonstrate by example—that the intimate business of reading, despite its many and increasing difficulties, is well worth it.
