The Road to Tender Hearts

Annie Hartnett
2025
Rating: 6

Disclaimer: I participated in Hartnett’s fiction-writing workshop, but that has not influenced my review.

The Road to Tender Hearts has generated enthusiastic responses from readers and critics. It was named a book of the year by Lithub and NPR, and the New York Times selected it for a “great road trip novels” list.

It’s a funny family road trip novel with what Lit Hub called a high body count; lots of people die in accidents: cars, gas explosions, drownings, murders. Hartnett has a confident grasp of plot, character development, and jokes. It was fun to read.

Tender Hearts pulls off the trick of being a light-hearted comedy, but also a white-knuckle ride. I found myself frequently worried about the characters, who are all vulnerable and have been through terrible things. There were many passages in the book where I was anxious about their fates.

I had two minor quibbles with the book. First, the many fatalities slightly strained credibility and pulled me out of the story a bit. The plot, character development, and writing in general were solid enough that it did not need all of the casualties.

There is one exception to my “maybe too many people died” position. Maybe the funniest scene in the book involves an alligator. I won’t spoil it by revealing the details, but it might have been even funnier if the gator had eaten someone. Regardless, it was very funny as-is, and I will continue to chuckle about it for years to come. I don’t know that I would say the alligator alone justifies reading the book, but maybe it justifies the whole book. Or maybe I’m just too into alligators.

(Tangentially, this is the only book that might also be worth buying just for the prologue, in which Hartnett describes a series of wild shit that befell or nearly befell her family after they moved into a new house. Gah!!)

The other quibble — again, a minor — is the book’s dabbling with magical realism, specifically moments where inanimate objects talk. A cat, which is not inanimate, also is endowed with language skills. I wouldn’t say these elements harmed the story, but I’m not sure they added much or needed to be there. I felt like if inanimate objects were going to talk, that needed to tie into the story more, somehow.

Buy the book here.

And you can check out Annie’s workshop (which I found to be helpful) here.

Typee

Herman Melville
1846
Rating: 6

How did I come across this book? I don’t remember. I read … ah yes, I watched a documentary about the 19th century American whaling industry on either Amazon or Netflix, and portions of it were about the whaling ship that was destroyed by a sperm whale, which inspired a non-fiction account which inspired Moby Dick. The documentary said that the novel was based on Melville’s experiences in Tahiti after he jumped ship, and may have mentioned an insurrection. It sounded exciting, and I was curious. Moby Dick is one of my favorite books.

I thought it was mostly a good read. It was held together as a story by the tension that ran throughout concerning what the indigenous people were going to do with Melville’s character. They are alleged to be cannibals.

On top of this is another mystery: the fate of the character, Toby, who jumped the whaling ship to live on the island.

Because I knew it was autobiographical to an extent, I wondered throughout which elements were true and which were embellished. My impression based on the background reading I’ve done (not much / wikipedia and a couple other items) is that it is mostly a true account.

It’s pretty shocking that it was published when he was 26, and it made him an overnight success.

The main criticism I have is that the book is arguably more of an ethnography than a novel, and as an ethnography it’s constrained by the language barrier between Melville and the locals.

Also left hanging is the question of why the tribe he tucks in with wanted to keep him as a prisoner. They treat him well, but they prevent him from leaving them. Why? Maybe there was no way for Melville to know.

Some of the passages and details were a bit slow-going, but I’m pretty quick to put a book down if I get bored, and I was able to stick with Typee without much of a problem.

Yesterday’s Burdens

Robert Coates
1933
Rating: 2

I put this down after about 10 pages because of a lengthy passage of dull landscape writing. Because it has now been a long-ish time since I’ve read a novel that I loved, I’m being more ruthless.

Changing Planes

Ursula Le Guin
2003
Rating: 4

I put this book down at page 43 because it seems to be more of a collection of (fictional) ethnographies of alien cultures that were not interesting enough to read on their own, or to read a dozen of them if that’s all the book has to offer. There was no plot and no character development that I was able to detect. Presumably some of that happens as the book progresses but the twee thumbnail sketches of the Hvenkis and the Veksis and the Annous didn’t do it for me.

Fish Tales

Nettie Jones
1983
Rating: 3

Fish Tales draws from an interesting or even spicy millieu, and the author’s own life, but for the most part does not work as a novel. It is clogged with various sex acts, drug use, and conversations that do not come together into a plot or a story. There is also very little in the way of character development. There is a kind of descent the protagonist experiences, but it feels like this happens at a great distance, despite the first-person narration.

It’s an autobiographical novel, and Jones deserves credit for writing it, but I wonder if it would not have worked better as a memoir. The epilogue Jones appended to the FSG re-issue, in which she recounts her years as a struggling author, professor, and woman, was much more interesting than the novel.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Anita Loos
1925
Rating: 5

I found this book to be readable and occasionally amusing. I also am not quite sure what to make of it. It was a significant commercial success when it was published, and it was praised by greater writers of the era, which is puzzling to me. The writers and readers who liked it must have connected with the author’s wit and eye for social satire, but to the extent that that’s the case, the book has maybe not aged that well. The critical reviews were mixed.

There is not much going on in terms of plot or character development or language or descriptions of place. There is only a vista into the lives of the Roaring 20s’ financial and creative elite, and the machinations of the gold-digging protagonist.

Some of this was attributable to the circumstances of its writing, it was serialized in Harper’s Bazaar, so Loos would write a chapter, send it off, and then start plotting out the next chapter, with no eye to an overarching story. It’s episodic and picaresque. Which is not to say it’s dull, particularly if you are curious about that decade.

Its fans call it a send-up or a lampooning of society’s pillars, and maybe that’s fair. The introduction to my edition says that it fell out of favor in the 70s, and most of the friends I’ve mentioned it to did not know that the film was based on a novel. (Now I want to see the film.) The introduction also calls it “an examplar of literary modernism and a withering attack modernism itself.” Not sure I see that.

Loos made it pretty clear that she had contempt for her protagonist who, in the novel, is a gold-digging rube and a crook. The intentional misspellings wore a bit thin after a while. In short, the novel violates many modern tenets of modern fiction writing.

Loos claims that the inspiration for the book was a train trip with some film honchos from New York to L.A. There was a blonde actress in their party who apparently got a lot of attention from the dudes. So, in the book, blondes are stupid and treacherous, and so are the men who like them. It’s pretty bleak.

Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimananda Ngozi Adichie
2006
Rating: 4

The pacing was a bit too slow on this one for me. Parts of it were interesting, but not enough to stick it out. One of the problems may have been too much exposition.

Beasts of No Nation

Uzodinma Iweala
2005
Rating: 5

Beasts of No Nation is a first-person narrator novel about a child soldier named Agu in an unnamed African country.

It’s depiction of Agu’s subjective experiences as he is torn from his family and forced to fight and to commit a long list of atrocities and warcrimes is effective and compelling. The use of the first-person narrator makes a lot of sense in that regard.

Overall, however, while the book was engaging generally, it felt slight in some ways, and not just because it’s only 142 pages. Maybe, I’m just riffing, the issue was the lack of narrative tension. For the overwhelming majority of the book, bad things happen to Agu, who is passively victimized. He wants, presumably, to be reunited with his family, and to be freed from the trials of his life as a child soldier, but that is not much of an element in the story.

Most of the book is concerned with Agu’s reactions to and thoughts about his various ordeals, at the expense of a broader/larger plot, although there was enough of a plot to keep me reading.

And while Beasts does the thing that it does well, what it does not do is develop Agu fully as a person. We get only a narrow slice of his subjectivity, although that slice is vivid and moving. Agu has no distinguishing characteristics.

I’m also not certain that there was as much of an arc as there should have been for his character. He is worn down physically, emotionally, and spiritually by what he’s subjected to, but I did not get the sense from the book after one read that much thought was given to how this slide into hell was manifested. Typically something like this is demonstrated by establishing a routine for the character, and then showing how the external circumstances impact that routine.

I suspect it was intentional, but maybe one problem I had with the story was the lack of specific details. The entirety of the narrative takes place in this kind of ethereal, abstract interiority. It could have felt more anchored to the times and places it described.

Little effort was put into describing his life pre-abduction, the book kicks off as he is being inducted into the guerilla army. Later there is a flashback or flashbacks detailing his life in his village, although these are cursory. Part of me wondered if the narrative would have been more effective if it had been more linear. Like his losses would have been more powerfully felt if we knew what the losses were.

Quibbles aside, I’m glad I read it, and if it is not an epic, searing representation of the tragic consequences of child warriors, it is at a minimum an affecting one.

Visitation

Jenny Erpenbeck
2008
Rating: 2

Made it 20 pages into this book and put it down. I’ve learned that overly-long descriptions of landscapes, of bathroom wallpaper, or in this case backyard gardens bore the shit out of me and feel like torture to read.

It was also very heavy on exposition, and seemed to brim with details that were not interesting and did not seem to advance the characters, themes or plot. It read like details for the sake of details.

Mrs. Palfrey At The Claremont

Elizabeth Taylor
1971
Rating: 7

There’s some very good writing in this novel, and it’s a well-paced if very conventional story. It’s set in the late 60s, in a hotel with a number of senior citizens who live there permanently. It’s frequently amusing, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. It feels like an extremely English novel, pre-globalized England, which reflects the era in which it was written. In that sense reading it felt a bit like an escape, there was something exotic about it.

It’s also a challenging book to read in some respects, in that it’s about the indignities of aging. It is frequently bleak and frosty. Rife with rude, bitchy turns from friends and family alike. It will not make you feel great about growing old.

I’m glad I read it though, I enjoyed it and would recommend it if you’re in the mood for something English, funny, and somewhat sad.

Dept. of Speculation

Jennifer Offil
2014
Rating: 7

My brain is shattered by the election, my attention span is greatly diminished. Partly for this reason, I grabbed Dept. of Speculation to read on a trip to LA. It’s 177 pages, and there’s a good amount of white space on the pages.

It was in fact a fast and breezy read, finished it in 2 sittings. Fortunately, it was also a fun book to read, it was soothing too in these dark times.

It’s not a very visual book, there are not brilliantly observed details (although there are some nice ones), there are no sweeping landscapes, but the protagonist’s voice and worldview made the book worth it.

It’s not particularly transgressive in its themes, story, or formal approach to story-telling, but its sparkling wit more than compensate for any lack of technical or artistic risk-taking.

I don’t really have much in the way of criticism, I just kind of got swept into the tale and enjoyed it; I had no complaints along the way, and wasn’t reading it through an analytical framework.

One observation, and I don’t know how helpful of meaningful it is, is that the story could have been longer and bigger. It’s crazy for me to pick up a book because I wanted a quick read, and to then turn around and say that it was too quick of a read.

Offil intersperses throughout the books a number of quotes from various luminaries; sometimes these spoke more directly to what was happening in the protagonist’s life, other times it seemed to me that they quotes or paraphrasings were somewhat random, but if they were random they didn’t really detract from the story. Sometimes the curating was quite adept and funny.

I walked away from the book feeling like it was an easy one to write, but more likely is that it somehow looked like its effects were easy to achieve but actually were not easy to achieve; that the book masks the skill it took to write.

I think at some point I might come back to it and read it again. It’s an odd compliment to pay to a novel, but there was something soothing about it, maybe due to the fact that it was published in 2014, before our fascist political moment.

The Last of Mr. Norris

Christopher Isherwood
1935
Rating: 8

The Last of Mr. Norris is the first of two novels that comprise The Berlin Stories. I vaguely remember reading Down There on a Visit and really liking it, so I gave this one a go. It’s set in a rich milieu, Berlin in the run-up to the Nazis seizing power, and it more than does the period justice.

It’s an interesting, well-structured plot, the characters are complex, colorful, funny, pathetic, and I found myself getting attached to them over the course of the book.

The approach to the era’s politics was pitch-perfect and even-keeled; it’s not really a political thriller; the strife and the terror play out on the margins for much of the story, although it doesn’t shy away from the period’s particulars.

Anyway, it’s a great book, I recommend it highly.

Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson
1981
Rating: 5.5

I made it 95 pages into this short novel but am putting it down, despite the fact that it’s packed with astonishing language.

The reason I’m putting it down is — I can’t emphasize how subjective this is — I feel it gets bogged down in descriptions of interiors at the expense of plot. I struggled for similar reasons with Possession.

Related, but maybe separate, is that, while some of the writing was among the best I’ve read in a novel, it could also at times be quite dense, which is probably an effect Robinson was striving for. So, maybe I just don’t have the attention span for this book, and if you have more of an attention span than I do (you probably do), you should ignore my gripes about it.

Despite the fact that I’m putting it down, I am really glad that I gave it a whirl, no regrets, because I feel like some of those sentences are going to stay with me for the rest of my life.

My Search for Warren Harding

Robert Plunket
1983

My response to this book was a bit less enthusiastic than most of the reviews I’ve read. My main complaint is that I bought it and read it because everyone raved about how funny it was. I laughed once. This is very subjective, of course, enough people who have read more than I have and are probably smarter in general have described it as funny that I must be in a minority.

I almost put it down around page 200, during a Hollywood celebrity party scene that I thought was pretty flat. I think that would be a hard scene to write well, a party populated with actual celebrities, and Plunket did not write it particularly well.

The novel, which was based on Henry James’s “The Alpern Papers,” for me, may have had some pacing problems. The protagonist’s mission, the central plot line, is to acquire the correspondence between Warren G. Harding and his lover, who is an old lady living in LA. I wondered if maybe too much of the plot centered on a cast of characters, and their dramas, that did not figure into the effort to snatch the Harding papers.

More likely, the issue was not that the novel was overly digressive (which a number of reviewers liked about the book) but that the digressions were not particularly entertaining. There were a few plot cul-de-sacs that detracted from the narrative momentum. A few scenes and characters that dangled and did not fit into the story in a meaningful way.

Rebekah Kinney, the mistress, is an afterthought in the story, it might have helped to develop her more, and work her into the story more than Plunket did. There are a few tossed-off flash-back scenes about her time with Harding, but they come early in the book and are fairly brief.

It is not a novel of vivid details or beautiful sentences.

What keeps the novel going is the narrator’s sensibility (“arch”). His withering commentary is the book’s main course, but there were points where the insults, the cruel judgements, the stereotypes stopped being funny, or interesting. The novel is comprised almost exclusively of a deeply unhappy closeted man punching down. I don’t mean to imply that protagonists need to be likable, or that it’s not OK to write racist, homophobic protagonists … I don’t know, maybe it’s a challenge to make that type of person the protagonist in a first-person novel.

It may also have been the case that the characters were somewhat flat because we were seeing them only or primarily through the (flawed) narrator’s eyes.

It’s one of those books where the story behind the book — how it went out of print and then was rediscovered, the author’s biography, how it remained influential among a small but famous crowd — is more interesting than the book itself.

The book did have things going for it, or I wouldn’t have finished it. I don’t know that I would call it funny, but it was witty, and the concept is a good one, the premise. A gay Harding scholar mucking around in 1980s Hollywood.

At the end of the day, I’m glad it’s out there, and that it brought the writer a measure of fame and success, and I’m glad I read it.

Dancing Lessons for The Advanced in Age

Bohumil Hrabal
1964

This one-sentence novella was, in my opinion, complete garbage. There’s a 30-page introduction which I’m guessing explains its merits, which were utterly lost on me, but I did not have the patience to read the introduction after finishing the book.

There’s no arc, no development of story or character, it is just a rambling, stream of consciousness recounting of moments in the narrator’s life. The writing was OK, maybe a bit better than OK, but generally the sentences did not have any kind of a wow factor.

Do not recommend.

A Shining

Jon Fosse
2023
Rating: 3

This was not much of a book and felt pretty dialed-in. It’s short, under 100 pages, but it was either too short, or too long. The language is very repetitive, as our the thoughts of the protagonist. An observation is made, and then challenged, and then re-made, and then re-challenged, in the same repeating pattern, ad nauseum.

It had the beginning of an interesting premise: man gets stuck in woods and decides to just wander into the woods, and weird shit happens, but the book did not bring this premise to life. The language is very plain … yeah, that’s kind of the jist of it. Do not bother reading this book.

My Phantoms

Gwendoline Riley
2021
Rating: 7.5

I really liked this book. Its primary strength lay in its evocation of the damaged psyches of the narrator’s parents. The things Riley writes about why the parents say the things they say, and act the way they act, and do the things they do, were remarkable. It read like the narrator had been through extensive therapy, and spent a lot of time reflecting on her parents, and as a result made observations about their agendas and motivations that went well beyond insights that would be derived from just casual, every-day observation.

I would say that the book is a worthy read solely for that reason. However, while the writing is mostly somewhere between competent and good, there were a few sentences, more toward the front of the book, that were pretty mind-blowing, “I could never hope to write sentences like that” good writing. So, that’s an added bonus.

The plot is unremarkable, but it’s not a plot-driven book, and the plot does what it needs to do.

It was interesting that Riley doesn’t say much about the protagonist, Bridget. Bridget serves mostly as the first-person camera, observing the parents’ peccadillos. However, we get glimpses of Bridget, mostly via the way she interacts with her mother. The daughter is not a particularly sympathetic character, and exhibits some of the mother’s toxic vibes, the point being perhaps that Bridet’s childhood experiences have damaged her and made her the somewhat broken person that she is.

Anyway, a great read, I recommend it.

Bright Lights, Big City

Jay McInerney
1984
Rating: 8

Had not ever read this novel, and The Odeon is one of my favorite restaurants in New York, so I felt that it was time to give it a go. I went into it with somewhat low expectations, but it’s a very good book. At a number of points I came across passages where I felt the caliber of the writing was beyond what I’m capable of, which is simultaneously exhilerating and depressing. What comes through again and again is McInerney’s plain, raw talent as a writer, the bastard.

The plot moved along quickly, it was a breezy read, and it was full of funny and keen observations about life in the city, and about the people around him, and about the magazine he worked at as a fact checker.

I had only two criticisms, and they were pretty minor. The first is that it felt like the story would have benefited from being a bit longer; a couple of the relationships in the book felt like they needed or could have benefited from having more meat on the bone.

I also found the writing about his relationship slash former relationship with his ex-wife to have been merely acceptable rather than great.

As usual I went into the novel cold, I prefer to read them that way, because that’s the way they are meant to be read. I read after the fact that the 3 major plot points were all taken from his life. It is a very autobiographical book, but that doesn’t detract from it in any way.

I could see myself re-reading it at some point in the future and would definitely recommend it.

I Served the King of England

Bohumil Hrabal
1971
Rating: 8

In 1997, an 83 year old man who apparently was trying to feed some pigeons outside, fell from the fifth floor of a hospital in Prague and died. The man was Bohumil Hrabal, the Czech novelist and poet. I didn’t learn how he met his end until after I finished reading his novel, I Served the King of England, but when I read that about him on the back of that novel, it made sense that that’s how he would meet his end. The last phase of the novel’s protagonist’s life is spent taking care of four animals.

I believe it is at least as good, and most likely better than its most obvious comparator, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It’s a picaresque novel; frequently funny, but also moving, and is crammed with great writing and imagery. I hate to use the word sparkles, but the book sparkles.

In its opening phases the protagonist — I believe we only get his last name, Ditie, which is German, which is significant in the story — works as a busboy in a series of hotel restaurants. There was one point where for five pages, I wondered if I could get through an entire novel of him being a busboy in different hotel restaurants, but the novel proceeds to take some wild and unexpected turns.

Possesion

A.S. Byatt
1990
Rating: 4

It was painful for me to put this novel down after 180 pages, because Byatt is clearly a genius, but I could not bare a single additional page of the correspondences between the two 19th Century poets who are among the novel’s main characters.

The novel bounces back and forth between contemporary England (and the United States) and the 19th Century, and in this 19th century strand of the narrative, some of it is epistolary, and these epistolary passages were excruciatingly tedious reading. If there were just a few passages of these epistolary exchanges with, say, a maximum length of six or even eight pages, I would have suffered through them, because the rest of the book is so good, but as I waded into an overly-wordy series of letters between the two poets, I got curious and wondered how many pages of the drek I had ahead of me, and flipping through discovered that it was 4o pages of these exchanges, which were as much fun to read as eating chalk.

The language in the letters displays a mastery of that period, but the thing is, that period was perhaps overly verbose. At least her characters were. Not only did it take too long to say things via these pens, but the things that they were talking about were not exciting, and they were not interesting. I couldn’t stand it.

The other quibble I had with Possession, and this was an entirely forgivable and minor quibble, is that Byatt seemed at points to get carried away with descriptions of interiors. Make no mistake, she has a real gift for and command of the lexicon of interior design and furnishings, but it felt at a few points like this description became an end to itself rather than a means.

At some point maybe I will try another novel by her.

There is a reasonable chance that you will be less irritated by the epistolary passages in the novel than I was, my friend who read it years ago said he loved the letters, and if you like or can merely abide the letters, the rest of the book is solid gold, so you shouldn’t necessarily rule this book out based on my experience. If you’re thinking about it, try to find that 40 page section of the book, and start reading through it, and if you’re not bothered by the rhythms of that section, you should buy the book.

Aside from truly top shelf descriptive writing about interiors and flora, I also really did enjoy the way that Byatt developed her characters. I liked the types of things she said about them. These passages were rich and thought-provoking but also fun and breezy.