Purposeful Exclamation Point

Have I already read my favorite book of the year?

As a big fan of tennis and chaotic bisexuals, I cannot think of a movie more served right down the middle of the court to me than Challengers. I even went to a movie theater to see it, which happens so rarely in our streaming age. A landmark movie in athletic horniness, but not porniness, it was nice to see it communally so we could all ooh and ahh together. It should be added to the canon of best sports movies that show the gradual rises and falls of life through the metaphor of The Big Game. Briefly, here are some reasons you should see Challengers if you haven’t yet:

• Everyone in this movie is manipulative, and as someone who as a rule always tries to root for the most ruthless person in a work of art, it was hard to and on a favorite character.

• Zendaya is such a magnetic star, like a young Julia Roberts. You can’t take your eyes off of her, unless…

• There’s so much sexual tension among all the characters, but it’s most fascinating to see it play out in a friendship between two men. It helps that they’re both so cute, and big ears are finally having a moment, baby!

• The scene pictured above is a banger, and it’s really for all of us who used to stay up late to watch MTV Undressed.

• The tennis is actually pretty good, and the ways it’s shown are fascinating. Occasionally the viewer is from the point of view of the players, sometimes the racquet, and sometimes even the ball.

• Is it a queer movie? It’s up for debate!

• No movie has ever better appreciated a thigh. It could have been called Thigh Anxiety.

• The score is better than caffeine. The Oscar-winning Ross and Reznor do it again!

• It’s a movie for grown folks about complicated people with no superheroes or explosions! Please see it so we get more of them.

THE LIBRARY IS OPEN

Martyr!

Kaveh Akbar (2024)

As you can see, the exclamation point is part of the title. And it’s not a musical. This book has so many things about it that normally make me roll my eyes a little when I’m reading. Sigh. It’s partially a Brooklyn novel, the narrator tries to save himself through poetry and is very self-serious about art, and there are several dream sequences. The explanation is also pretty dour and there’s meditations on addiction, war, and suicide - perhaps not a surprise for a book called Martyr! with an exclamation point. Imagine my surprise when the whole package came together to be my favorite book of the year so far.

Cyrus is an Iranian-American who ended up in Indiana after he and his father immigrated there from Tehran many years earlier. Their decision was informed by the tragic fact that Cyrus’s mother was among the 290 passengers killed when the United States military shot down Iran Air flight 655, believing it to be an enemy aircraft. There were no survivors, and Cyrus’s life was changed forever. Now he’s a medical actor in an Indiana college town with his fledgling writing career not going anywhere fast. He begins a poetry project about martyrdom, partially motivated by the quest to assign some sort of meaning to his mother’s death. When he discovers the works of an Iranian performance artist are taking place in New York, he makes a pilgrimage to confront her to try to make sense of his own art and where he fits in the world, if anywhere at all. There’s also some clever sleight of hand with the plot that caught me off guard, and we love that.

The above description does not account for how delightful and weird this novel is. There’s humor and life on every page. The themes are serious but never so heavy that you don’t enjoy the ride. And the poetry excerpts from the book within a book are lovely interstitials. Regular readers of this newsletter may wonder if there are queer elements to the story? You bet. Though hero’s journey frames itself as one man’s search for the meaning of death, the novel itself ends up being a beautiful, funny, sad exploration of the meaning of life.

Read it if you like: parts absolutely made for Shoreh Aghdashloo to play them, the coolest wartime job description you’ll ever read, books that seem like they’re about nothing but end up being about everything, self-deprecating humor, excellent books you think might be too depressing.

Good Material

by Dolly Alderton (2024)

Continuing the theme of great books with descriptions that sound less than ideal for my personal reading taste, allow me to introduce you to Good Material. It’s about a 1. devastating breakup of a 2. straight couple, and 3. one of them is a comedian. But so many people in my orbit were singing its praises that I threw it on the hold list at the Philly Free Library, and after a short wait: voila! I got it and devoured the 400+ pages in just a few sittings. Good thing, too. It would have been a shame if a title like Good Material ended up being bad material.

London 2019. Andy and Jen were a great couple. All of their friends loved being around them, and things were getting very serious, maybe even headed towards marriage. Then one day Jen doesn’t love Andy anymore, and Andy never saw it coming. The novel is about Andy, a struggling comedian, trying to put the puzzle of why Jen left him together so he can figure out how to reverse course and get the love of his life back. We hit rock bottom with Andy, but we also see all that he has going for him: good friends, a new dating life, family that loves him, a good sense of humor, a future where he loves himself again. And the novel has two endings so that we get to hear all sides of the story, but I don’t want to give away too much.

This novel is for anyone who ever had a breakup - an anti-rom com. I couldn’t imagine that I had much in common with the characters in this book, but so many aspects of the breakup experience mapped perfectly onto my own harrowing, humiliating experiences - the kind that we can look back upon and laugh at now. But only after a couple of years of healing the ego. None of these characters is perfect, especially the protagonist, but that’s what makes this novel so great. It feels so real, so effortlessly and actually funny, that it reminds you how we’re all resilient even when confronting our lowest points.

Read it if you like: Nick Hornby, quirky side characters, Fates and Furies lite, BritBox, books that are ripe for adaptation.

Great Expectations

by Vinson Cunningham (2024)

I was on the OFA team for President Obama in 2012, and before then I volunteered for his campaign in 2008. I was in charge of gathering volunteers for the legal team with the goal of having one legal professional to watch over every poll station in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. We were guarding against any untoward behavior from the other side, and we couldn’t imagine a more cynical or sophisticated operation that the opposition. I wish I could go back and talk to that version of me, that sweet summer child so optimistic about political movements and naive enough to believe that things could only move forward - it was just a matter its velocity.

Aaaanyway, I took notice of this book because it takes place on the presidential campaign of an unnamed, charismatic Black Senator from Illinois. We see the campaign through the eyes of David, who spent 18 months on the trail after stumbling into a job at the highest levels of decision-making and fundraising. The novel goes off on many tangents about religion, fathers, and economics, but it’s at its best when it hits the recognizable beats of the famous campaign. The manic preacher, the famous speeches, the HOPE. Our protagonist grows up on the trail, learning that high ideals and optimism aren’t always met with happy endings. Your faith is yours to keep, but others can certainly bend and break it.

One of my favorite new podcasts is Critics at Large by the New Yorker, a weekly podcast that explores a theme with movies, tv, books, and more through the eyes of critics. When they did their recent episode on the Coming of Age novel and its evolution, I realized that one of the hosts was the author of this book. So, it’s no surprise that this novel was featured as a new kind of coming of age novel that tries to explain the world through one man’s journey through very modern politics. It lands somewhere squarely between Roman à clef and Bildungsroman. Semi-autoficiton? He was cagey about that, but regardless, the thoughts of this character were sticky enough to be lodged into my mind still.

Read it if you like: Game Change with more philosophy, hopeful politics, lots of tangents, the New Yorker, the American Dream.

LIGHTNING ROUND

Pretty bleak, but why are the suburbs becoming ground zero for the spread of anti-trans hate? It’s worth meditating on so we can fix it.

What are some of the best queer films of the past couple of decades?

Why is culture obsessed with the gay liar archetype?

Until next time…happy reading!