Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino: What Even Is a Human?

A few weeks ago, I got to hear Marie-Helene Bertino read from the short story that became the basis for her novel, Beautyland. The passages she read were quirky, silly, and really really funny**. I immediately picked up the novel, excited to read more and expecting something along the lines of (but much, much better than) the 1999 movie The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human (if you know this movie, we should be friends).

It is like that movie in a cursory sense -- the idea here is that Adina, who we follow through her whole life, is reporting back to her alien race on the foibles and factualities of humans. Adina makes friends, experiences loneliness, strives, struggles, and reports it all back to her own folks via an enchanted fax machine. 

What I did not expect from this novel is how profound, insightful, often very sad, and skillfully rendered it is.*** As the story unfolds, there is a constant juxtaposition of the "oh, humans are so silly and absurd and funny" with "oh, humans are so cruel and awful and how do they even get through this life?"

The gimmick of Adina being non-human and observing human foibles begins as a way for her to report objectively -- though often very humorously (I was getting Nate Bargatze Washington's Dream sketch vibes for a while) -- about we silly humans. But of course, this can't last. Adina becomes more human than human (with apologies to Rob Zombie) and experiences heartbreak and loneliness and deep emotional pain so much so that, Adina begins to wonder not what makes humans human, but what allows humans to KEEP BEING human. 

Whenever I'm faced with a book that affects me deeply, as this one did, my instinct is just to gush and gush and gush. And I'm exercising every ounce of self-control not to do that here. But I'll tell you this: I really did love this quite a bit and it left a massive mark on me. It's an example of a book that I read at exactly the right time and place -- a piece of reading serendipity you can't ever create on purpose or reproduce again once it's happened. This book is an example of why I love reading. It's like a runner's high -- it's rare, but when it hits, it's absolutely the best feeling in the world. 

**Human beings, Adina faxes, did not think their lives were challenging enough so they invented roller coasters. A roller coaster is a series of problems on a steel track. Upon encountering real problems, human beings compare their lives to riding a roller coaster, even though they invented roller coasters to be fun things to do on their day off.

***Anyone questioning whether god exists need only consider the brevity of a dog's life span. If there was a god, let alone a benevolent one, dogs would have life spans similar to parrots. We'd have to provide arrangements for them in our wills. We wouldn't have to see their muzzles fill with gray at age four. We'd never have to find them in the morning turned to stone. 

Shelf Lives, Vol 2: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

(To read an introduction to Shelf Lives, and the first "issue" about Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche's Americanah, click here.)

It's bonkers to me that this photo is nearly 15 years old. Look how young and bro-ish I look? 😅 (If you've never met me IRL, just take my word for it: This is Young Bro-ish Greg.) This photo is from 2011. I "posed" for it for a Book Riot piece in which contributors were asked to write about a favorite book. This photo is basically the culmination of three years of me talking about Infinite Jest nonstop to anyone who would listen, and many who wouldn't, or stopped listening and walked away mid-sentence. 

And but so, it's probably not a shocker that Infinite Jest is the second entry in this Shelf Lives series. Here's this book's story: In the fall of 2008, I got a text from my then-girlfriend-now-wife. It said something like "I just saw David Foster Wallace died. Didn't you like that guy?" 

Yep, David Foster Wallace had died (he died by suicide Sept. 12, 2008). And yes, I really did like that guy. But I was a DFW bandwagon fan. I'd only stumbled upon his work a few years prior, when somebody gave me a copy of Consider the Lobster. I was floored. I didn't know writing could do what writing was doing in these essays -- to surround a topic from all angles, to turn something inside out, examine it, and put it back together with words, and to make it so immensely readable you just can't look away, whether he's writing about if lobsters feel pain or the Adult Video News Awards. So then I read just about everything else he'd written -- even the terrible, impenetrable short stories, like "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," which DFW himself admitted later he'd crossed the line between reader enjoyment and reader aggravation. But I loved them anyway. I loved how he wrote. I loved his intellect. I loved his fart jokes. 

But I held off reading Infinite Jest. At that point, as we arrive in the fall of 2008, it'd been 12 years since he'd published a novel, and I told myself when news of something new of his was imminent, I'd finally read this thousand-page tome. Then he killed himself. And nothing new would be forthcoming (though of course, something did: The Pale King -- a sad facsimile of a DFW novel). So I read Infinite Jest. 

I expected it to be brilliant. It's brilliant. And impossibly sad, in light of DFW's death.

Reading Infinite Jest to me is significant not just because it's the best work by my favorite writer, but also because, while I read it, I wrote about books on the internet for the first time. To keep me motivated in my reading (Infinite Jest is brilliant, have I mentioned that? But it's also really difficult), I started a web log, or "blog" for brevity's sake -- at that time, a new and growing form of content creation. My blog was called Choad vs. Infinite Jest and I wrote about my progress through the novel and whatever else was on my mind. It was very raw and, now looking back, very cringe-worthy. (Side note: If you didn't think I was bro in my late 20s to early 30s already, let me explain the blog's title: "Choad" was my fraternity nickname in college. It comes from Beavis & Butthead. When I started the blog, it never occurred to me at all that anyone other than people I knew would be reading this thing. Or that 17 years later, I'd be writing about it and linking to it.)

When people ask me if they should read Infinite Jest, my answer is always along the lines of  "Yes, by all means. But prepare to be frustrated." (A bookstore colleague who tried to read it on my recommendation began calling it "Infinite Rest" because every time she picked it up to read, she'd fall asleep within five minutes.) The novel disorients you on purpose for more than 200 pages, until you finally get your bearings and settle in. Sure, I understand why that can be off-putting. And I know fans of David Foster Wallace generally and this novel in particular have become somewhat of a punch line these days. That's fine by me. Punch away. I unashamedly love it. 

So here we are, 17 years after reading Infinite Jest, and not only is this edition of the book (which is, strangely, a paperback, but with the hardcover's art. I don't remember, even, where I got it) still on my shelf, I have another as well -- a 20th anniversary "collector's edition" with a forward by Tom Bissell. Every year, I tell myself it's time for an Infinite Jest re-read. But I haven't done it yet. I'm not worried about a re-read affecting my memory of reading it the first time, or whether the novel "holds up." I just haven't done it. But if there were any book on my shelf that is screaming for a reread, Infinite Jest is it. 

Who's in?  

2025 updated photo

Ron Currie Is Back, Let's Celebrate! (Or, a Peek Inside the Reviewer's Mind)

Ron Currie's 2009 novel Everything Matters! blew me away -- it's a story about a kid who knows the exact moment he's going to die. I was so amazed how Currie made that conceit work through a full, satisfying, and really smart read.

When I sat down to write a review of Currie's new novel, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, for the Chicago Review of Books, I first went back to my reading journal to remind myself about some of the details of why I'd loved Everything Matters!. That idea of killing a character or foreshadowing a character's death, but keeping a reader engaged was front and center in what I'd written when I'd read it 15 years ago. So that felt like a natural entry point to the review, since Currie basically does that again here! 

But it didn't all go smoothly. I wrote two drafts of the review in which I called the idea of killing your character in the title the "Titanic Trick," a not to how we all sat through that three-hour movie even though we knew the boat was going to sink and Jack was going to die. I couldn't make it work through the whole review, though. Turns out it was too cute by half, and I was struggling with the piece for a solid week before just deciding to kill that darling and start over. Within an hour, I had the whole thing nearly done -- same idea, just not calling it something stupid. Lesson learned. Killing your darlings is important.  

And so, kudos to Currie for making the "Titanic Trick" (haha, resurrected darling!) work not once, but twice in Babs Dionne. It's a truly fantastic novel -- a favorite of 2025 so far for sure. I hope you'll take a second to check out my CHIRB review here:

I've loved everything Currie's written -- he's a writer who just makes sense to me. My brain absorbs his sentences quickly and with very little friction. Some writers you just connect with. He's one for me, and I couldn't have been more excited that he was back after eight years with this novel. 

Definitely check out his other novels, if you haven't read him. After Everything Matters!, 2013's Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (the best all-time novel that refers to a nicotine patch in the title) reads like autofiction but isn't (or is it?), and 2017's The One-Eyed Man, a novel about very troubled times, is likely as relevant today as it was then. (His 2007 debut God Is Dead I realized as I'm writing this I haven't actually read yet. I'll need to fix that soon.) 

More Than Words, by John Warner: Pushing Back Against Our AI Overlords

Like Amazon, avocados, and Colleen Hoover novels, my reflexive reaction to any conversation about generative AI is to wince and turn away. I don't teach writing myself, but I work for a nonprofit literary arts organization whose whole mission is to teach writing (StoryStudio, shout out!), and for that reason I'm terrified of generative AI. I'm also angry at tech bros like Sam Altman who used copyrighted material to train his large language model, ChatGPT. And I'm worried AI is a shortcut for so many youths these days who don't seem to need too much convincing to take shortcuts (old man yells at cloud!).

Because it's so distasteful, I've largely avoided going much deeper than surface-level knowledge about generative AI. The extent of my experience with ChatGPT is the one time I asked it to give me a list of 1990s grunge band names. What it gave me was so hilariously bad (Mudstain! Soggy Flannel! Gravel Gaze!), I've never been back. AI may be stupid, but it's still ubiquitous, and so still very concerning.

So John Warner's new book More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI is a soothing balm; a book that will help demystify AI and gently talk you off the ledge. If you're a Chicago book person, you're probably familiar with Warner. He writes as the Biblioracle in the Sunday Chicago Tribune (as books coverage has dwindled, his column remains a stalwart). He also writes about books and writing in a terrific companion Substack titled The Biblioracle Recommends.

More Than Words truly meets the moment in terms of explaining what AI is, what it is not, and most importantly, how writing can and will still thrive in the age of AI. 

Warner writes: "Writing is thinking. Writing involves both the expression and exploration of an idea, meaning that even as we're trying to capture the idea on the page, the idea may change based on our attempts to capture it. Removing thinking from writing renders an act not writing."

There is a lot to love in this book, but that quote to me is the central takeaway. Though what ChatGPT does *resembles* writing, of course, what ChatGPT does IS NOT writing. What ChatGPT does is placing tokens in syntactically correct order. Writing requires thought. And more thought. And pain. And then some more thought. Despite its name, artificial intelligence does not think. So artificial intelligence does not write. 

Further, what ChatGPT does is DEFINITELY not creating art. Art requires feeling. And obviously, AI has none. "What I want to say about writing is that it is a fully embodied experience," Warner writes. "When we do it, we are thinking and feeling. We are bringing our unique intelligence to the table and attempting to demonstrate them to the world, even when our intelligences don't seem too intelligent." 

How to teach writing in the age of AI, how to pushback (resist?!) against the most nefarious uses of AI, and maybe even some positive use cases for AI (if we're careful) related to writing are all discussed in this book, as well. 

I needed this book badly and I can't recommend it more highly to you if you care about books and writing, as well. 

Halfway Through the Knausgaard-verse

Reading Karl Ove Knausgaard brings with it a heightened level of nose-crinkling cringe when I tell some of my much younger colleagues what I'm reading. I find it hilarious, but never has my book taste been more sus to them than when I tell them I'm reading an old white Norwegian dude whose books have no plot. 

Last week, after I finished the third book in the six-volume My Struggle series, I found a way to put these terrific books in their terms: These books are to middle-aged (sometimes pretentious) white dudes what Ali Hazelwood and Emily Henry are to them: Pure reading enjoyment! You don't have to completely understand it. It is what it is. And the heart wants what the heart wants. They're not tempted to rush out and buy copies of Knausgaard's books, but at least they get it a little bit now. 

And but so, I started this 3,600-page series with a whole bunch of  questions in mind: What makes these books so popular? Why are writers from Zadie Smith to Jonathan Lethem besotted with these novels? How do readers pull themselves through these long books with no ostensible plot? What is so "compulsively readable" (as many of the blurbs breathlessly point out), exactly, about an irascible middle-aged Norwegian writer telling us about his kid's birthday party or traveling to see his grandparents or so much else that's so mundane any writing teacher would tell the writer to cut it?

I think part of the answer to all these questions is that against all odds, Knausgaard is relatable. He struggles with every day life. He struggles with trying to be a good person when it's so much easier not to be. He struggles simply being a person in the world populated with other people with whom he has trouble connecting, getting along with, or even tolerating. 

You can still like people and like these books, but having at least a streak of curmudgeon in you may enhance your enjoyment of these books. Despite my outward sunny disposition and consistent optimism (LOL), you may be surprised to learn that sometimes People (not individual persons, but People collectively) get under my skin. 

And that brings me to Philip Roth, perhaps the most famous curmudgeonly writer of them all. One thing that drew me to these books is how much I love Philip Roth's novels. Roth's writing is as detailed, insightful, and profound as anything I've ever read. Roth and Knausgaard are similar this way. Even when nothing is happening, and nothing is happening frequently in Knausgaard, reading them is still a delight. 

But to reiterate, don't read Knausgaard if you need plot. There ain't none. Each book has an overarching theme (death, love, boyhood) and each book includes frequent long scenes that feel like plot (the 50-plus-page birthday party that kicks off the second book, for instance), but the only real overarching action is Knausgaard continuously ramming his skull into the brick wall of life.

These aren't books I read 100 pages at a time. I dip in and out slowly and read until I get tired. I think that's the only way. But yes, here at the halfway point of the Knausgaard-verse, I'm encouraged and excited to keep going. Who's with me? 😅