je lis trop: plots in 1996
february essay on the stories published twenty-seven years ago, corrupted arm deals, small-town seduction, Fight Club, and Italian bliss
What was happening in 1996? I wouldn’t know much about it. I was only born that year, on a February day my mom describes as extremely cold and bright. I have no exciting family stories, no details to add to this fact. Seems strange. Almost self-centered.
During the past couple of years, I started paying closer attention to when, exactly, the books I held in my hands, were published. Not only for context. I was looking for books written around the time I was born. Those years are a blind spot; I have more knowledge of recent times or the years back back back in history, long before even my parents were born. The question is, what were the plots like in 1996? What were the stories? What was the mood? Every year is a vast fabric of interests and directions, impossible to contain within the bounds of a single reflection. Instead of interrogating the whole, here’s what I decided to ask: what can the books from my personal library tell me about 1996?
“Some real things have happened lately.” It is the first line in Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted, published in 1996. For a while, the only thing I knew about the book was that in one of the Friends episodes, Rachel was reading it. She brought the book to the beach and read it on the porch (and wore a dress with illustrated palm trees while doing it). Didion’s books are not beach-reading material, at least for me. It could work if you associate summer, beach, and sun with a suffocating atmosphere. In other words, it could work if the beach for you is not an entirely happy place.
The Last Thing He Wanted is a head-spinning political thriller focusing on the events in 1984. We meet an American journalist Elena McMahon, who, for reasons unclear, decides to walk off her job covering the presidential election. Gradually, she starts moving into shady transactions associated with her father. Her father is an arms dealer, I should mention. This should be his last deal. But he’s sick, and he can’t do it on his own. I do not know why she got involved in her father’s business of guns, these dangerous deals, and corrupted movements. How come certain things happen, as if against one’s will? What triggers them? This is one of the most important themes of the story.
In her 1996 interview with Salon, Joan Didion said: “I wanted to do a very, very tight plot, just a single thread—you wouldn’t even see the thread and then when you pulled it at the end everything would fall into place.” The novel moves at incredible speed. I’ve never seen such speed in the pages of the book, speed created not by plot but by language. The plot is not entirely clear; the language is. It continually raises the stakes. There are many repetitions, and out of them, a rhythm emerges, which can easily be recognized as Didion-esque.
Moving on, Siri Hustvedt’s The Enchantment of Lily Dahl was also published in 1996. The protagonist is a nineteen-year-old Lily Dahl, who works in a small town café and is a starting actress. Lily is infatuated with a painter Edward whose hotel room windows are in front of her house. She observes him daily; she wants to understand what a renowned figure from New York is doing in this small town. She wants to seduce him, too. And there are side characters who want, in turn, to seduce Lily. They are giving out cryptic hints and are constantly creeping her (and me) out.
The Enchantment of Lily Dahl is a sultry story with dark undercurrents. What is going on in this small town, full of gossip? Why are its inhabitants so bizarre? Can we trust Lily? Dealing with her own whims, with her neighbors, customers, fellow actors, and Edward (who is kind of central to this story but also isn’t), Lily goes to some dark places. It might not be Elena McMahon’s gun deal, but it is quite chilling. And it’s a good book for anyone who isn’t thrown off guard when a seemingly normal story turns into something creepy.
(For those who have never read any Siri Hustvedt, I would recommend starting with What I Loved—an electrifying, intelligent novel, written seven years later. I see The Enchantment of Lily Dahl as a twisted, playful (but not frivolous) younger sister of What I Loved.)
Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club was published in 1996, too. I’d seen the movie, and I knew that David Fincher’s imagery would influence my reading experience. I opened the first page in a café, with the ‘90s music above my head and the evening descending into a thick purple fog. I was strangely susceptible to the atmosphere of Fight Club. The protagonist deals with insomnia. He searches for relief in support groups for illnesses he does not have and pities his own obsession with a meticulously crafted life, meticulous furniture, and its hold on him. People can be chained by their lovely nests. And then he meets Tyler, an eccentric figure who helps him find an outlet for despair: fight clubs.
Tyler arranging logs on the beach, the protagonist wishing for the plane to crash, his mouth shining brilliantly with blood at the Microsoft brief—it is all one persuasive hallucination. “Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer.” I was pondering this when I noticed a man with bulging eyes, sitting nearby. He was in the company of Italian friends, looking at me sideways, chilling to the bone. Do you remember Fred from Courage the Cowardly Dog? That man looked like him, only had fewer teeth. (The pilot for the cartoon aired in February 1996, by the way.) Not long after, I closed the book, drank the rest of the cranberry tea in bigger gulps, and left.
I finished the rest of the book on the train to Krakow, surrounded by the aroma of sandwiches and the chatter of people. Some were friendly while some were reenacting their worst behavior of the sixth grade. Some others were shushing them. In the meantime, the protagonist of Fight Club was threatening his boss, getting heavily injured, setting up fight clubs all over the country, and heading straight to grand self-destruction, which was the goal all along. The ending has one of my favorite sentences: “We just are.” Not special, not trash. That’s it. By 1:00 am, the story was over, I had reached my destination, and I knew that I should probably pause my explorations of 1996. For a while.
My personal library has painted a pretty menacing landscape. Reading these books one after another could be too much to take. Is there a possibility for something warmer, less violent? There’s a book called Under the Tuscan Sun, written by Frances Mayes. I don’t have it in my library, but I’m considering it. It’s about a woman restoring an abandoned villa in Tuscany, Italy, and discovering beauty on every corner. This reminds me of a bus trip I had when I was sixteen. We were passing a handful of countries and somehow, once we entered Italy, the atmosphere changed. It happened quite literally upon crossing the border. I saw fairytale views: sun-drenched fields, tiny raindrops on the windows, and delicious greenness everywhere. Even cars seemed to move in a jubilant way. For a single moment, all my expectations were justified. It doesn’t matter that the trip afterward wasn’t entirely smooth; that trip wasn’t flawless. But sometimes, such moments emerge, moments that match the most luxurious descriptions you see in books, and you can’t call them anything less but perfect. Reaching Italy was this. I’ve been longing to experience the feeling with a book. Not sure if this one will do, but it’s worth taking a chance.