Literature has to grab me in two main ways: emotion and ideas. Either I need to feel empathy for the characters involved or I need to be intrigued by the ideas (political, scientific, philosophical) presented. Ideally, both, but recently I’ve been reading a series of books that seem to be one or the other.

Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett, exemplifies the first. Framed in a constricted venue ( a family farm during the COVID lockdown) the novel explores its 57 year old protagonist’s recollections of her youthful love affair with a soon-to-be famous movie star. Patchett is an excellent storyteller, with a superb sense of place, and the novel is a powerful exploration of why good girls go for bad boys. Ultimately , it’s unsatisfying though, because I never got a solid sense of how the protagonist was changed by the experience (except to run solidly away from it the rest of her life—her husband Joe is an absolute cliche of decency and mundane reliability). This sense of stasis—one might even say pointlessness—is exaggerated by the story’s detachment from the worldwide events surrounding their nice little cherry farm. Patchett several times refers to “the world burning outside”, as conveyed by safe distance by the TV news. She embraces this detachment, a false sense of safety I could not relate to. Seems like the entire year of 2020, the fire was licking at our door, and no amount of garden-fresh vegetables or homemade cherry pie could make it feel like less of a prison.

Sleepwalking, by Dan Chaon, and Candy House, by Jennifer Egan, both deal with the effects of technology in the near future. In Sleepwalking, the protagonist makes his way through the world as an errand boy for a shadowy and violent organization, surrounded by ecological devastation, smart drones, and all sorts of DNA manipulations and multiple progeny. Ironically, the novel carries more emotional heft than one might expect, due to the protagonist’s desperate search for tangible human connection. It’s by no means assured, or cliched.

I’m only two-thirds of the way through Candy House, a loosely linked series of stories. Some are set as early as the mid-sixties, some close to a century later where everyone’s memories have been uploaded to the internet. The ideas presented are fascinating, especially the way Egan extrapolates our current loss of privacy to an ultimate loss of privacy, that of our own thoughts. So far, though, I haven’t emotionally connected with the characters because no single story arc is followed long enough to allow me to do so. Egan’s too clever by half writing style also distracts. The whole novel is like a bunch of Black Mirror episodes. Of course, Black Mirror is one of my all time favorite TV shows, but I don’t know how much emotional resource this book will maintain in the long term.

I’ve written both ways.

My first novel, Wrong Highway, is more a personal tale. It’s definitively rooted in the 1980’s, and my protagonist, Erica is shaped by that cultural environment. However she is preoccupied with her own family and personal crises. She lives in the Long Island suburbs—New York City is a distant star radiating an intriguing energy. Her husband Ethan’s Wall Street job is an arcane mystery. Politics don’t even register.

My second novel, It’s Always 9/11, is deeply political, but politics as reflected through the perceptions and experiences of a particular family. Otherwise, I’d just be pulling stories from the headlines or my dystopic imagination and it wouldn’t register as true, as something we could all go through. Emotional resonance is really important to me. I want the book to linger in reader’s hearts, not just tickle their heads.