Fantastic Metropolis

Only a quarter of what I read in any given year is newly published, and most of that is utterly forgettable, which means that my list of the year’s best new work is necessarily partial in every sense of the word. While lists are inherently bossy creatures, I’d like to think that the one I’ve assembled here will be received as more confessional than domineering.

Samuel R. Delany is probably most responsible for having given me the idea that the interview is an interesting genre in its own right rather than a mere vehicle for advancing the work done in other genres (even if good interviews often involve discussion of such work). The best interviews I’ve read from the year 2001: Annemarie Jagose, “The Evolution of a Lesbian Icon”, an interview of Laura Doan anent the latter’s Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture, gives us a fresh look at sexology and English couture before and after the Radcliffe Hall obscenity trial; and Laura Miller’s “Romance and other myths,” an interview of Kelly Link anent the latter’s Stranger Things Happen.

Published diaries come in many flavors. The only newly published (in this case, newly reissued) diary I read this year was My Blue Notebooks (Quality Paperback Books), an exemplar of the gossipy, name-dropping variety, where the reader is given the pleasure of seeing the names of Colette, Rachilde, Cocteau, and Milhaud all on the same page. Author Liane de Pougy was a dancer, courtesan, and (by marriage) Rumanian princess. In one of my favorite passages, the author reports that she asked her friend the Duke of Oporto why his ears, cheeks, nose, and fingers were covered with “thousands of tiny pricks and scratches.” She says that he replied that he was raising rats “to send to old Countess X” on Easter Day, hidden in a basket of flowers as revenge for saying “very nasty things” about his mother, Queen Pia, and his brother, King Carlos, and himself. “A prince’s revenge! A courtly pastime!” Liane pronounces this plot (without revealing whether it was in fact carried out). While this kind of diary just can’t compare to the edgy, self-conscious productions of writers of the caliber of Violette le Duc, My Blue Notebooks does have its moments.

This year yielded a bumper crop of political essays, but I nevertheless seem to have found critical and academic essays of the greatest interest. I was stirred by Josh Lukin’s “’This Sense of Worthlessness’: Ideals of Success in Philip K. Dick’s Humpty Dumpty in Oakland” (New York Review of Science Fiction April, 2001) and alarmed by Mary Poovey’s “The Twenty-First Century University and the Market: What Price Economic Viability” (differences 12, 1 [Spring, 2001]). Lynn Keller’s “’Just one of/the girls:—/normal in the extreme’: Experimentalists-To-Be-Starting Out in the 1960s” (differences 12,2 [Summer 2001]) fascinated me with its exploration of how “experiences of conflicted, precarious, or undecided social and aesthetic positioning pushed” poets Fanny Howe, Kathleen Fraser, and Rosmarie Waldrop, who felt “a powerful necessity behind the pursuit of innovation,” “increasingly to explore the betweennesses in and of language.” And finally, Jeff VanderMeer’s long essay on Angela Carter, speaking to my own experience of reading Carter, offers a long perspective for viewing the body of Carter’s fictional work—thereby creating a larger space for it than the literary world has so far afforded.

For the best new nonfiction book, I recommend philosopher Kelly Oliver’s Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (University of Minnesota Press), a work that brilliantly challenges the Hegelian slave-master foundation of most postmodern thinking about identity, subjectivity, and othering, and that proposes a model that avoids grounding identity in hostility towards others.

I don’t read a lot of new poetry, but I did happen upon a new book by poet Leslie Scalapino published in 2000, R-hu (Atelos, Berkeley, California). I love the way Scalapino runs her poetry into her essays, blurring the lines between the two and the way she frequently talks about what she’s doing (suggesting that for Scalapino, it is nearly impossible to “break frame”). As she writes: “One-line paragraphs as run-on poems that have a shape/structure where the inside of oneself and the outside are together—is the ‘form’ that occurs as the reading. It’s trying to make the interior (one’s) utterly free, not even there.” (71)

I found most of the new short fiction I read this year either unambitious or near-misses. The exceptions that stood out for me were Alex Irvine, “The Sea Wind Offers Little Relief” (Starlight 3); Holly Wade Matter, “Memorabilia” (Bending the Landscape: Horror); James Patrick Kelly, “Undone”; Terry Bisson, “The Old Rugged Cross” (Starlight 3); and Nancy Jane Moore, “Three O’Clock in the Morning” (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 8).

2001 was an unusually strong year for the short fiction collections of women. I recommend: Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen (Small Beer Press); Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Music at Long Verney (Counterpoint); Lydia Davis, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (McSweeney’s Books); Nina Berberova, The Tattered Red Cloak and Other Stories (New Directions); and Nalo Hopkinson, Skin Folk (Warner Aspect).

For new novels, I recommend: Maureen F. McHugh, Nekropolis (Eos/HarperCollins), which dialogues with Tanith Lee’s The Silver Metal Lover in writing that constantly evokes a multitude of emotional states our language has never learned to name but which are unerringly delineated in the author’s powerfully spare prose; Geoff Ryman, Lust (Flamingo/HarperCollins), an ambitious book (with a disappointing ending) that masterfully deploys Kafkan narrative strategies to create a non-Kafkaesque story; Karen Joy Fowler, Sister Noon (Putnam), which revolves around a character almost as fantastical and mysterious as Fowler’s earlier Sarah Canary; and Fanny Howe, Indivisible (Semiotext(e) Native Agents series—actually published in 2000), which—to quote the novel itself—can be characterized as the kind of story “that glides along under everything else that is happening, and this kind of story only jumps out into the light like a silver fish when it wants to see where it lies in relation to everything else.”

In the category of Best New Ghost Story, I’d like to recommend the elegant and imaginative The Others. I like films that aren’t spoiled for me when I figure out the basic storyline very early, and this was one of them.

And finally, in the category of Best Diva, I confess that this was the year I discovered Laurell K. Hamilton’s blissfully trashy Anita Blake series. Maybe this infatuation is a Girl Thing, and undoubtedly the series savors of “do-me feminism” (for which my patience is ordinarily scant), but for an impossible, demanding, and irrational series character who can literally get away with murder, Anita is the gal for me. Who am I to resist the bevy of beautiful boys constantly surrounding her? Surely no female writer has ever instigated me to imagine so many different male backsides and swathes of hair through the course of reading any single novel…