Selection Bias no. 5: Domestic realism

And we're back.

Dear friends,

It’s been a while. Three years, in fact, since I last sent out one of these things. Long enough for my previous newsletter distributor, TinyLetter, to close up shop, forcing me to migrate over here, to where all the cool kids are, on Substack. So, welcome to my new newsletter, same as the old newsletter.

For me, the point of this newsletter has always been, simply, to have a way of connecting with you all, outside of the flattening mediums of social media, in a medium that’s more my style and pace. And that’s still all I intend this newsletter to be moving forward. I’m reviving it simply because it’s been too long and because I’ve missed writing these (and because a few of you asked me recently if I was ever going to send out another one, which I take to mean that they were not wholly unappreciated).

I’m not even going to attempt to pick up where we left off and reflect on the entire period that has passed since my last letter. Too much has happened, both personally and globally. But here’s a letter reflecting on the last year or so.

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The year of the home

I’ve always taken a special liking to novels about circumstances much like my own, whatever my present circumstances may be. In my years in academia, I had a soft spot for campus novels, like On Beauty, The Idiot, The Secret History, and Stoner. As I transitioned into tech, I was immediately drawn to books providing a more literary perspective on the industry, like Uncanny Valley and Lurking. These are not the only kind of stories I ever want to read, but there’s definitely a distinct desire within me, like the opposite of escapism, that again and again pulls me towards such books. Often, what I want to get out of a book is precisely not to be whisked away to some other world. What I want is to have my known world rendered in more vivid detail.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that, over the past year, many of my most cherished books have been works of domestic fiction, or novels of the home – because this past year, for me, has been the year of the home. I moved to Ottawa, and started making a home in a new city; we bought a house, and were introduced to the pleasures and anxieties of homeownership; I became a Canadian citizen, and officially claimed a new home country. I continued the endless grind of working from home. More than I care to admit, I didn’t leave the house. I felt the boundaries of my world shrink to the boundaries of my home, but at the same time felt them shift and expand, as I remade my home in a new place.

In a way, it’s been nice. I’ve always been something of a homebody, and this transition into a life of increased domesticity just feels like part of the natural transition into middle age. It has allowed me to reconnect with the importance of certain values, like those of family and putting down roots in a place, and to relish in the joys of certain pleasures, like those of cooking and spending a lot of time with our cats.

But domestic life also comes with a narrowing, or at least the risk of a narrowing, of one’s concerns and horizons. Or so it has with me. The flip side of connecting more deeply with home has been a distancing from the wider world outside of it. I suppose it’s just a fact of attention, that you can’t focus more on one thing without focusing less on others. But as I’ve moved further into this stage of my life, I’ve more acutely felt this ever-present tradeoff. (Indeed, it strikes me as part of the reason I wanted to revive this newsletter: to tip the scales and feel a little more connected to far-off friends.)

What I’ve appreciated about all the domestic fiction I’ve been reading is that it’s reminded me that there is nothing small or insignificant about a life centered on the home. In one sense, these are novels where nothing much happens, novels comprised of the quotidian dramas of human relationships, novels about ordinary people simply carving out a life for themselves. But in a deeper sense, they are novels where everything of most importance happens, novels concerned with the very stuff of life, novels that articulate better than anything else I’m aware of the moral texture of actual lived experience. It’s not so much that these books make me feel that life should be limited to the home, as that they show that such a life is not in fact limiting – that there’s a full life to be found even within these smaller spheres.

It’s a thought I’m holding with me as I head into 2024, which with any luck will be a little less homebound, as I strive to strike the right balance of things in my life. We’ll see how it goes. In the meantime, here’s a list of the best domestic fiction I’ve come across lately:

• Tessa Hadley has got to be the best writer I’d never heard of before last year. I suppose she’s precisely the kind of author I go in for: she writes perfect sentences, and she’s an acute observer of human behaviour and desire. I don’t really need much more than that. So far I’ve read her Accidents in the Home and The Past, but honestly she’s one of those writers where it feels like she can’t write a bad book, so I’d recommend anything you can find with her name on it. (And if you’re just looking to get your toes wet, this short story published in the New Yorker last year is not a bad start.)

• Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss was a lovely surprise, a witty and moving novel by another author I knew nothing about. It feels to me like what would happen if Sally Rooney wrote Fleabag.

• Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus was yet another pleasant discovery. I picked it up more or less randomly, after seeing it on the staff recs shelf at my local bookstore and then seeing that Lauren Groff (another one of my faves, who’s also written some excellent domestic fiction) loves this book so much that she’s read it every year since her early twenties. High praise for a novel published in 1980 that I had never heard any mention of before. And the novel did not disappoint, being one of the best depictions I’ve ever read of the subtle and lasting influence of love over our lives.

• Lastly, and perhaps most representatively, last year I finally got around to reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch all the way through to the end. (Years ago I had inexplicably stopped reading midway through, despite thinking the whole time that this was one of the most pleasurable novels I had ever read.) I feel silly saying this, because everyone says this is the greatest novel ever written, but it really does feel like the greatest novel ever written.

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Another year of magical listening

A big part of why I fell off of writing these newsletters is because for the past several years I’ve been focused on a different creative outlet – my podcast, The Year of Magical Listening, which just wrapped up its fourth season. Over the past year, I feel like I finally got into a good rhythm with the show, releasing roughly an episode a month, which feels like the right pace for what I want the show to be, which is really just an excuse for me to sit with whatever music I find most fascinating and share that with whoever cares to listen. I’m not even sure I’d be happy if the show became anything more that, because what I love most about it is having something in my life that I do simply for its own sake, without any greater expectations of it.

The other thing I love about the show is that it serves as a handy highlight reel of the music that has mattered most to me over time. If you missed this last season, it was a good one, full of music that surprised me, that moved me, and that got me moving, and I really have no other music from the past year to recommend beyond these twelve artists, songs, and albums:

• John Prine, the best singer-songwriter I had never heard

• the Vancouver punks of White Lung

• the Boston emo kids of Future Teens

• Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn’s Pigments, a synesthetic opus

• Jeremy Dutcher’s Motewolonuwok, a Wolastoqey masterpiece

• the oozy club music of Shygirl’s Nymph

• the woozy hip hop of Billy Woods and Kenny Segal’s Maps

• Ghanaian-American bangers from Amaarae

• the tender reappearance of Sufjan Stevens

• Catherine Christer Hennix’s Solo for Tamburium, seventy-eight minutes of infinite space

• Caroline Polachek’s “Pretty In Possible”, a pop song that defies all expectations of what a pop song must be

• Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Psychedelic Switch”, the pop song that was my most streamed song of the year.

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The rest of the year’s best

I’ll round things out with a rundown of the other things I loved most over the past year, which I couldn’t so neatly fit within a narrative of my life:

• “Is there a sane way to use the internet?”: This episode of Search Engine (a podcast I do not regularly listen to), a conversation with Ezra Klein (a podcaster I listen to all too regularly), was a refreshing and illuminating discussion of why the internet sucks, what’s made it that way, and what we can do to push back. The conversation does have the flavour of telling me a lot of things that I already believe, but I know that it also resonated with several other people I shared it with, and so it might resonate with you too.

• I was so pleased that 2023 saw the return of Eleanor Catton, with her novel Birnam Wood, which was a rollicking good read. Catton writes plot better than most anyone else, but what I really love about her is how deftly she understands and portrays human psychology. A must read.

• Yet again, the books that taught me the most about Canada this year were comic books: first, Kate Beaton’s Ducks, a memoir about the Alberta oil sands and so much more; and second, Chris Oliveros’s Are You Willing To Die For the Cause?, on the complicated history of the Front de libération du Québec.

• I’m sure like many of you, I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about Palestine and Israel over the past few months. No amount of reading or thinking is sufficient to cope with the scale of this tragedy and its intractable complexities, but two things that I’ve found particularly powerful were Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, a nonfiction novel that beautifully and heartbreakingly conveys the lived texture of occupation in the West Bank, and this wide-ranging interview with journalist–illustrator Mona Chalabi on Longform, which wasn’t even supposed to be a discussion of Palestine but ended up being one of the frankest discussions I’ve heard.

• The most distinctive author I discovered this past year was Benjamín Labatut. He writes what I want to call “science fiction”: poetic imaginings of the lives of the leading figures of twentieth-century science, that weave together fact and fabrication to create a seamless, beguiling whole. I loved both his When We Cease To Understand The World and The MANIAC, and I can’t wait to see what he writes next.

• Lastly, the two things that kept me laughing more than anything else throughout the year were two podcasts: Normal Gossip, the podcast where two people gossip about people they don’t know, and If Books Could Kill, the podcast where two people gossip about bestselling nonfiction books.

Okay, I’ll leave things there. And I’ll try not to let it be so long until my next newsletter goes out, if only so that my next newsletter does not turn out to be so long.

Till next time,

W