A Year in Reading: Garth Greenwell

Three of the books that most moved me in 2022 were memoirs of art and education. Darryl Pinckney’s Come Back in September is a masterpiece, maybe my book of the year. It took me 20 pages or so to get used to its loose, associative, sometimes impressionistic style, with sudden leaps in time and figures drifting in and out unintroduced; once I did, I was entranced. Much of the book centers on Elizabeth Hardwick, who was Pinckney’s teacher at Columbia and became a central figure in his life. The glimpses we get of 1970s American literary royalty—Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin—are delicious; equally wonderful are the portraits of Pinckney’s friends, from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Lucy Sante. But the book’s centerpiece is Hardwick: her brilliance and generosity, her anxiety and imperiousness, her heavy drinking, matched glass for glass by her student. (Pinckney’s struggles with addiction are a subtle but constant undertow.) Very few books bring you so close to life, or convey so vividly the experience of being young and brilliant, surrounded by youth and brilliance, persecuted by “the panic of being.” What feels like a formal innovation is the way the past is constantly perforated with glimpses of the present. Pinckney shows us the scene of writing, often to excuse himself for failing to get up to check a fact, or to let in the voice of his partner, the poet James Fenton. At one point, he tells us he has had to get up and leave the room, holding his head in shame at his past self. I can’t say how much I loved this book, or how deeply it moved me.

I’ve long admired the American pianist Jeremy Denk; his Ligeti/Beethoven and c. 1300 – c. 2000 are among the rare albums that permanently change the way you hear. This year brought his first book, Every Good Boy Does Fine, a kind of autobiography in piano lessons. It’s among the best books I’ve ever read about music. Denk is a MacArthur Genius Award winner, but also an actual genius; many musicians, like many athletes, are unable to talk compellingly about their work, but Denk’s insights into the music he plays are little fireworks of pleasure. More than that (and also like Come Back in September), this is one of the great books I know about education. Denk’s portraits of his piano teachers, from childhood to his graduate work at Indiana University with the Hungarian-born György Sebők, are funny, agonizing, and profoundly attuned to the very tenuous and fraught relationships between students and teachers, and to the grace that can somehow, if one is very lucky, make those relationships transformative.

A project on Philip Roth sparked an obsession with the great American painter Philip Guston, with whom Roth became friends in the aftermath of Portnoy’s Complaint and the fury that greeted Guston’s return to figuration in paintings that are now seen as among the glories of postwar American art. As part of that obsession, I read Night Studio, a memoir by Guston’s daughter, Musa Mayer. It’s in many ways a devastating book, an account of a childhood spent really without parents, with both her father and her mother single-mindedly fixated on Guston’s art. And yet the book never feels like a settling of accounts; it’s never vindictive. Mayer’s portrait of her father is frank and unsparing, but also loving, filled with wonder at his genius and admiration for the brutal way he drove himself. Her childhood was a trial but also, one feels, a privilege, surrounded by art and artists at precisely the moment when the art world’s center of gravity shifted from Europe to New York.

In poetry, the other book of the year for me was Jay Hopler’s Still Life. Hopler, who died this year, somehow found it in himself to write a book about dying that is impossibly full of life. The poems are funny, terrified, grateful, alert to beauty; they filled me with wonder. I also loved Sandra Lim’s bracingly disconsolate, beautiful The Curious Thing, and Jos Charles’s A Year & other poems, incendiary poems of mind and body.

In fiction, the standouts were three books by writers I’ve long meant to read. John McGahern’s The Dark is a novel about the impossibility of exorcising one’s love for a terrible father. It includes some of the most extraordinary and devastating writing of sex I’ve ever read. Its characters do monstrous things, but none of them is a monster. It struck me like a revelation. I immediately got all of McGahern’s other books, though I’ve found I have to read him slowly; I need weeks to assimilate one book before moving on to the next. I’ve read three of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels now, and have admired them all, but my favorite so far is A Game of Hide and Seek, a beautiful book about childhood and the irrecoverable past. And Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters is a hard, bitter, extreme little book that is somehow full of humanity. It has a brilliant narrative device: a cat bite that may or may not be rabid serves as a kind of tow line pulling us through the novel. I’ve seldom read a book with so much nastiness that manages never to disdain its characters. Extraordinary.

Among new books, favorites included Rivka Galchen’s marvelous take on the historical novel, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch; Yiyun Li’s exploration of childhood friendship and authorship, The Book of Goose; Elizabeth McCracken’s funny and elegiac The Hero of This Book; and Lan Samantha Chang’s The Family Chao, which achieves in its final scenes a rare depthlessness.

Finally, four favorite reads of 2022 are books coming out in 2023: Johannes Lichtmann’s hilarious and sad Calling Ukraine, Brandon Taylor’s devastating The Late Americans, Catherine Lacey’s stunningly ambitious Biography of X, and Idra Novey’s moving novel of art-making and homecoming in fractured America, Take What You Need.

More from A Year in Reading 2022

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