What’s Michael Lithgow Reading?

I have a few books on the go — Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is first-person from the perspective of an AI robot friend (Klara) for a young girl, set in some unspecific time in the future. The young girl who suffers from a serious illness has a complicated life, and Klara must struggle to make sense of the complications. In particular, it is her relationships with her mother, with “friends”, and with her one true friend that Klara struggles to understand. Partly what makes this story so compelling is Klara’s observational clarity. In so many ways, the indifferent logic of Klara’s presumably binary/Boolean brain gives Klara an unfiltered sort of lucidity largely missing from the humans encountered. It’s as if each human Klara observes has blinders rooted in past trauma, emotion, unresolved tensions. Ishiguro seems to exploring the naïve and perhaps innocent potentials of a mathematically based intelligence. (I have not finished
the novel yet, so we’ll see what else comes up… ). I loved Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986), and I’ve been working on a writing project that explores human relations with AI cognition, so it was a natural pick-up. The writing is beautiful.

I am also reading anna moschovakis’ participation (2022). I saw her at a reading in
Edmonton and was utterly compelled. Emerging from the intellectual racetrack and socially accelerated milieux of the New York/Brooklyn arts scene, the story is as much intellectual rumination as it is a narrative unfolding in times and spaces. The first-person narrator works three jobs to stay afloat, and in between participates in two reading groups called Love, and Anti-love through which relationships and connections form, change, unravel, self-destruct and vanish. The structure is fragmented–chapters are short and individually titled. The form shifts: narrative prose, chat dialogue, poetry, Madlib inspired news reports, random notes, sketches. The writing is sharp in observation, intelligence and wit. Reading moschovakis feels like being in the eye of the storm of an American intellectual, literary zeitgeist filled with anxiety and doubt about what is real, what has worth, what are the limits of relationship, and what is left to care about. It also feels like a modulated cry from a faraway land – far away, that is, from Alberta’s ‘rural advantage’ conservatism and anti-intellectualism. Refreshing, confounding, vitalizing.

And finally, I’ve just picked up Gerald Murnane’s Stream System, a collection of short
fiction that is popping open all kinds of doors and windows in my writing brain. I stumbled on Murnane’s work in the old school way of chance encounter on the shelves of a used book store. I had never heard of Murnane, but now know he is a postmodern literary giant, one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, someone challenging perceptions of what writing is, what it can do, how it can do it and why. Like many postmodern texts, the writing’s self-consciousness can challenge expectations of pleasure at times, but even when it does, soon enough it becomes compelling in its own strange ways opening up, as I say, new possibilities for what language, story and writing can do. I’ve become a fan and am lucky to have stumbled on the book.