My thoughts on two books in one! I started reading The Novelist by Jordan Castro (thanks to @softskullpress for sending it to me) and it heavily referenced The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, which I had on my shelves and had been meaning to read. I decided to put down The Novelist and read The Mezzanine first, and then picked back up The Novelist after.

Now maybe I did a bit of a disservice to Castro with that. The Novelist clearly pays tribute to The Mezzanine. Both novels take place over the span of a workday - the former the workday of, obviously, a novelist, and the latter of an office worker. Both look deeply into the mind of the narrator, with many random tangents to ruminate on various topics in depth.

The Mezzanine had me laughing out loud a lot. I even read parts out loud to my husband which I truly never do. I can see why it is a much admired modern classic. It made copious use of footnotes, which were fun at first but did take me out of the reading flow a bit - for a short book, it took me a relatively long time to get through.

In The Mezzanine, the narrator puzzles over the exact wear patterns and circumstances that have resulted in the shoelace from each shoe breaking just two days apart. What is different between his right vs. left shoe that made one of the laces last two extra days? Is it the way he ties the shoes? In The Novelist, unfortunately the narrator ponders about the difference between each side of his butt as he wipes his poop. Is it the way he is wiping? I honestly wish I was kidding. I wasn’t sure if this section was supposed to be funny or satire or what it was supposed to do, but this section was not for me.

The Novelist takes place in the modern day. The distractions of the internet are prominent. Some parts rang very true for me. The way the narrator talks to his dog, and the self doubt the narrator faces… however other parts (like the poop scene) felt like they were trying to hard to be a different book. I also think another novel I read somewhat recently, No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, does a better job of capturing the disorienting precipitousness that is being on the internet today. It also didn’t feel prose-y, like I would expect a novel by a poet to feel, like for example something by Ocean Vuong. I did like how Jordan Castro appears in the novel as a character. That was fun.

These were an interesting duo of books. If you want to read just one, I’d go with The Mezzanine (and I think Castro would agree). If you’d rather read metafiction set in the current day, and haven’t read the Lockwood, you might like The Novelist. Yeah, reflecting more on my experience now, I don’t think it’s totally fair to compare the inspiration to the inspired. I’m just a random reader so it feels like I’m not qualified to judge writers who actually put things down on the page. But, at the end of the day, when the narrator of The Novelist laments that his novel cannot compare to The Mezzanine, I tend to agree.

Speaking of the inspired/the inspiration, two other books mentioned in The Novelist have made appearances in other books I’ve read recently. Kierkegaard with Either/Or, and Woodcutters by Bernhard. Kierkegaard features prominently in Either/Or by Elif Batuman (a recent fave), and Woodcutters was also referenced in the novel I finished today - Writes and Lovers by Lily King. I like to read the books that are inspiring the writers I’m reading, so I’ll probably pick those up soon.