stuff i read 6 Sep 2022

[tabacoychanel]

Tana French, In the Woods (2006) (Dublin Murder Squad #1) “If she had hurt me, I could have forgiven her without even having to think about it; but I couldn’t forgive her for being hurt.” “I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of everything I loved. When I couldn’t find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself. Now it seems obvious, of course, that even a strong person has weak spots and that I had hit Cassie’s full force, with all the precision of a jeweler fragmenting a stone along a flaw.” likeadeuce warned me that the narrator is very off-putting and he is! He totally is! He has some self-destructive tendencies that were difficult for me to read about because I identified so hard with them. He deliberately ruins the only good thing in his life—his relationship with his partner—and loses her, and also mucks up the case so the murderer walks free. The line that hits me hardest is actually when Rob is ignoring Cassie’s calls to his cell, and she rings his landline and he hangs up on her. And all she is doing is trying to warn him about a work-related thing so he’s not blindsided by their boss when he walks into work the next morning! But Rob can’t untangle his personal relationship with Cassie from his work relationship, so he hangs up on her without letting her finish. And his roommate overhears and says, “She doesn’t deserve that.” His roommate is a total pill—hitherto our sympathies have 100% resided with Rob and against the roommate—and she has historically been jealous of how much of Rob’s time and attention is wrapped up in Cassie. But at this moment you the reader are like, Omg she’s absolutely right! Cassie DID NOT deserve that! Rob sucks and he doesn’t deserve shit, I hope he spends the rest of his life alone.

Tana French, The Likeness (2008) (Dublin Murder Squad #2) “This was the first time I had felt like my real opponent wasn’t the murderer but the victim: defiant, clenching her secrets white-knuckle tight, and evenly, perfectly matched against me in every way, too close to call.” I don’t know how French is going to top this but I’m tearing through her entire back catalog double-quick on the off chance that she does. This book was perfection and I loved it without reservation. Years ago Cassie Maddox went undercover to bust a drug gang. Now a girl who is her spitting image has been murdered and found with an ID matching Cassie’s undercover identity. Cassie, who thought she had left her Undercover days behind for good, reluctantly agrees to one last job: She is going to infiltrate the house where the victim lived with four other grad students in order to finger the murderer. Saying “they lived together in a house” makes it sound like they were roommates, when it would be closer to the truth to say they were a hippie commune. The house itself takes on such thematic significance it’s a character in its own right, and when the friendships are dissolved by the events of the book the house likewise burns down (arson). At one point Cassie openly admits she has bollocksed up the case “because I had wanted to be Lexie Madison more than I wanted to solve her murder.” Who can blame her? Who wouldn’t want what Daniel, Abby, Justin, Rafe and Lexie had, the contentment and companionship that wanted for nothing? When Daniel says “In all my life, these are the only four people I have ever loved” it is left ambiguous whether Cassie-as-Lexie counts as one of “these” four people or not. What Cassie wants above all is that effortless sense of belonging. She thought she had it with her ex-partner, but then he dumped her and she’s still reeling from the breakup. When she’s flat on her ass after an emotional gut punch her first instinct is still “I wanted Rob, damnit.” At her lowest point she actually dials Rob’s number. Cassie’s arc is learning to let go of that desire for effortless belonging, which involves both letting go of her attachment to Rob and her attachment to the murder suspects. She does it, but it comes at a hefty cost. I don’t think I’m misreading the narrative when I sense a wistfulness for a type of relationship that our society, as currently constituted, doesn’t leave space for. Cassie’s yearning for what those kids had in that house was real and justified. When they say that the endings of stories should be both surprising and inevitable…..they are talking about this story. Tana French knocks it out of the PARK. My favorite passage:

But some people take care of their own, no matter what that turns out to mean. “No copies,” Frank said. “you’ll be fine.” “When I said you’re a lot like Daniel,” I said, “that wasn’t an insult.” I saw the flicker of something complicated in his eyes as he took that in. After a long moment, he nodded, “Fair enough.” “Thanks, Frank,” I said, and closed my hand over the tape. “Thank you.”

Kate Mangino, Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home (2022) Crying for a good 50% of the time I’m reading this. It’s a really thoroughly researched book that articulates with words what I feel intuitively about shouldering the lion’s share of the domestic labor. What I feel is: Not great. What I feel is: My time is not valuable, and the things I consider important are not given weight. I am literally disappearing as a person beneath a pile of caretaking duties. But I’ll be damned if I can see how to get from here to there. I think I picked up this book just so I could feel more sorry about myself tbh I ask myself every day if it’s unendurable why am I enduring it. I do think the delineation between recurring routine tasks (laundry) vs intermittent tasks (lawn mowing) was a useful one, since obviously there’s a lot more flexibility with the latter. I think we’ve all seen the viral comic that illustrates the mental load of being the Household Manager right? In the book Mansion interviews a sociologist who breaks down the cognitive labor of any given household task into four discrete categories: 1) anticipating needs, 2) identifying options, 3) making decisions, and 4) monitoring outcomes. Generally one partner takes ownership of Steps 1, 2, and 4 and brings the other partner in only to make the actual decision.

Tana French, Broken Harbor (2013) (Dublin Murder Squad #4) “Whether it’s true or not, you have to believe that somewhere along the way, somehow, most people get what they deserve.” “There isn’t any why. If Dina was right, then the world was unlivable. If she was wrong…if the world was sane and it was only the strange galaxy inside her head that was spinning reasonless of any axis, then all of this was because of me.” This is one of French’s weaker offerings but I should disclose I had an ARC of Nona the Ninth right there that I was itching to tear into, and I still opted to finish this book first. There is a thread of anti-capitalist sentiment in French’s work that comes to the fore here, and I was all in favor of that, but French’s bread-and-butter is still plumbing the detective’s emotional trauma by solving the crime, and the two were just not tightly enough entwined here. Michael Kennedy has the highest solve rate in the Dublin Murder Squad, which he attributes not to genius but to ironclad control cultivated over a lifetime. When his mentally unstable sister shows up on his doorstep the same week the case of the decade lands in his lap, cracks begin to appear in Kennedy’s control.

Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth (2022) (The Locked Tomb #3) “Camilla and Palamedes were loved by Nona,” he said. “Pyrrha was loved by Nona. It’s finished, it’s done. You can’t take loved away. We loved you too. Palamedes and Camilla loved you.” Everyone always talks about how scary it is to take the leap of faith that is loving someone, but in a lot of ways it makes you more vulnerable to let yourself be loved. This is the key to the mystery of who Nona is. Who Nona is is of course secondary to why Nona is the way she is. Nona has no memories and one superpower: She loves people and they love her back. The number of times she goes bounding up to Camilla or Palamedes or Pyrrha (her caretakers) to tell them she loves them, I honestly lost count. She loves her friends, she loves her teacher’s dog, she loves various commissioned officers in the guerrilla resistance group Blood of Eden. She loves the big green Resurrection Beast that hangs in orbit and is driving every necromancer on the planet slowly insane. This book is, like the first two, heartbreaking and also a nonstop rollercoaster ride. It delivered all the Cam & Pal content my heart desired, which is a lot because Cam & Pal are by far my favorites. I am happy to report that the book delivers even if you are not primarily here for Cam & Pal & Sixth House nerdery! Alright we need to talk about Ianthe, who has a small but pivotal role in Nona. The reason Ianthe Tridentarius is extremely off-putting but admirably consistent in her own way is, she gives zero fucks about anyone except her sister and she doesn’t care who knows it. She’s transparent about not caring. I think the reason John Gaius makes such a compelling villain is that he openly pursues the goal of being loved right? Why else did he move heaven and earth to surround himself with Lyctors? And his vision—a good portion of Nona is dedicated to John’s villain origin story—i don’t even disagree with his macro goals. I too hate trillionaires. I just think it’s dishonest of John to demand everybody love him and otoh lie and obfuscate about things of material interest to the people who love him. So that’s what happening thematically without hopefully being too spoilery plotwise. My main takeaway is it’s not as cohesive as Harrow (thematically) or Gideon (plotwise) but it’s a damn good book that I could not put down, and also please do not ask me to be objective about a book where Camilla calls Palamedes by his given name for the first and last time.