Little Oracles

S02:E06 | Little Reviews: Books About Bonding (feat. Kristen Arnett, Claire Oshetsky, & Yuri Herrera)

• allison arth • Season 2 • Episode 6

Share episode

It's Little Reviews time, and today we're talking about bonds, and bonding, and the links we have to what we love and what we've lost. We're digging into three books today:

A NOTE ON CONTENT & SPOILERS
I highly encourage you to look into content warnings for every book I discuss before you pick it up; we want reading to be safe for everyone. <3

I refuse to spoil plot, but I do talk about what you can glean from the book jacket, authorial and narrative choices, formal elements, and my overall impressions and takeaways. If you're wary of getting spoiled on *anything,* then maybe bookmark this episode and come back when you've read the books herein.

Take care, keep creating, and stay divine!

Resources

IG: @littleoracles

[Intro music]

Hey everybody, and welcome to the Little Oracles podcast, an oracle for the everyday creative. I’m Allison Arth.

What’s going on, folks? I hope you’re having a good day, week, month, life. [laughs] So this week, I’ve got some Little Reviews, little book reflections in my signature, micro-review style, and I’ve collected a trio of books that circle this concept of bonds, and bonding, and those links we have to what we love and what we’ve lost. As always, before we get into it, I just wanna say: look up content warnings for anything that we talk about here on the podcast, because reading should be safe and enjoyable for you, and I just want you to be prepared any time you pick up a book. But, that said, without further jujubes and jitterbugs, let’s get into the Little Reviews.

First up, I wanna talk about a book that was a bit of a hitch for me — [laughs] I know, starting out on a stinky note, [laughs] but– but hear me out: I wanna talk about With Teeth by Kristen Arnett — whom you might know from her other really highly-acclaimed novel, Mostly Dead Things, which I’ll review at some point down the line. But today, it’s With Teeth.

So, this novel is a family drama; it’s a story about motherhood, about embodiment and identity; and it’s a nice descendant of the infamous Bad Seed narrative — and if you’ve never seen that movie, check it out; it’s a classic of the psychological horror school of cinema — but back to the book: I think Kristen Arnett is a very sharp, very clever writer who really thrives when she’s diving into her characters’ interior lives, and she has this great way of compressing her characters into these tight, kind of airless situations that aren’t particularly harrowing or perilous or melodramatic, really, but they’re emotionally charged and close — you know, that interpersonal powder-keg kind of thing.

And With Teeth is really no exception to that: we’ve got taut, emotional situations in small spaces — and that includes, in this case, our point-of-view character’s internal monologue — and I appreciated all of those qualities in this book; they’re really pretty well done.

But for some reason, I felt like the stakes, overall, were just a little bit lax, to the point that I don’t know if I could tell you what actually happened in the third act of this book, you know what I mean? [chuckles] And not to say that remembering a plot is the marker of whether a book is good — you know, for me, a lot of times, I can’t recount plots play-by-play, but I remember the feeling a book gave me, or I remember the experience of reading it, and that brings me joy or dread or whatever; it rekindles some kind of tender or visceral feelings toward the story or the characters or the language or whatever it is that caught me.

But with this one, while I was reading it, I was kind of distracted, because I was busy placing it on this spectrum of, like, “parenthood askew” books — books like Chouette by Claire Oshetsky, which I’m gonna talk about next; and Nightbitch by Racel Yoder (which I really liked); and The Need by Helen Phillips (which I really loved); and The Push by Ashley Audrain (which I did not love). And I think that act of real-time comparison shopping, [chuckles] if you will, means I’m not super enthralled or excited about what’s in front of me. So, while I enjoy Kristen Arnett’s work on the whole, With Teeth, for me, was just a little too toothless. [laughs] And, you know, if you’ve read it, if you love it, gimme a shout over on Instagram at little oracles; I’d love to hear about your thoughts and your experience with this one because it just didn’t hit for me.

So now let’s talk about Chouette by Claire Oshetsky; as I said, this is a “parenthood askew” novel that feels like a folktale in its inciting event and its cast of characters, and, honestly, I see parallels with The Vegetarian by Han Kang, which was one of my favorite books of 2022 — and I’ll link the episode where I talk about that book in the show notes, in case you wanna listen back to that — as well as Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss, and even (and I’m crossing the media lines here) Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s amazing, amazing gallows comedy show Fleabag. And I draw these connections because our Chouette narrator, whose name is Tiny, like the other women and girls at the center of their respective media that I just mentioned, Tiny is constantly dismissed and undermined and directed and, yes, even gaslit.

So my micro-micro-review of this book over on Instagram was: “the mayhem of motherhood whipstitched to a tale of bodily autonomy, broken trust, and deepest instinct,” and I think that pretty much sums it up, [laughs] though I also want to shout-out the writing itself, which is angular, and kind of stilted, and it’s in the present tense, which is odd, and, I think most remarkably, it’s in the vocative — and by that I mean Tiny is almost always addressing our titular character, Chouette, which cultivates this really strange, kind of, oratorical tension, like our narrator is delivering a speech or a sermon or an augury, and that tension is only underscored by the fact that Tiny, who is an orchestra musician, is almost always also hearing various classical and orchestral pieces, both in her head, and diegetically, too. And all of this kinda coalesces into this overall feeling and tone of gravitas and import. It’s– it’s just unlike anything I’ve read in a really long time, [chuckles] and, honestly, it’s probably gonna make my top reads of 2023 list, but you’ll just have to stay tuned to find out if that comes to pass.

And, finally, turning to another apogee for me: The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera, in translation by Lisa Dillman, and one of our ABC picks for the month of June. So lemme tell it to you straight [laughs]: I ate this book up; I dog-eared, like, every page; it was just that juicy, you know what I mean? [laughs] This is a neo-noir story with plenty of those delectable noir elements, from the words on the page to the ethically ambivalent narrator to the omnipresent pall of disillusionment.

And I loved Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World when I read it a few years ago, so I was prepared to love this book, too, and boy howdy, did it deliver [laughs]: the language is crisp and tight and stark, in that Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett way; the characters are trapped in their nihilism and in their crumbling town, which has been stricken by this hemorrhagic plague; and our narrator floats between these warring crime-family factions as a fixer, so he’s solely focused on solving problems he didn’t create, including the central issue of the novel, which has to do with mistaken intent, and displaced aggression, and familial loyalties.

And, honestly, there’s so much to unpack in this tiny little novel — it’s just 101 pages long — everything from its stance on the erosion of ethics in the absence of social pressure, to the multiplicity of the self, to the commodification of bodies, and the fact that it's guised as this genre piece — you know, this noir fiction — is just [chuckles] the icing on the proverbial cake for me personally; using trope and expectation to tell a story that’s really about the falterings and failings of humanity is just chef’s kiss for me.

And I definitely want to recognize that the sharpness of this prose, and the way it hits like The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon, is in part due to the skills of translator Lisa Dillman, whose name really gives me a jolt when I see it, because she’s translated lots of work I’m obsessed with. And, you know, translation is just so fascinating to me; like, how it operates in that liminal space where denotation and connotation commingle — it’s just so incredible to inhabit this, like, hybrid role of amanuensis and interpreter, and Lisa Dillman is an absolute powerhouse in that arena.

So, anyhow, I can’t recommend The Transmigration of Bodies highly enough, really; 10 out of 10, no notes. [laughs]

And that’s the episode! Thanks for listening, and for nerding out about books with me. If you like what we’ve got going on here on the Little Oracles podcast, leave a review or rating wherever you listen, and share an episode with somebody; it’s a nice thing to do. [laughs] I invite you to follow along on Instagram (at) little oracles and the blog at little oracles dot com for more big book energy and creativity content. And, as always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine.

[Outro music]