SUCKER PUNCH: Essays, apt title...on several levels

SUCKER PUNCH: Essays
SCAACHI KOUL
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook edition, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The long-awaited follow-up from one of the most original and hilarious voices writing today.

Scaachi Koul’s first book was a collection of raw, perceptive, and hilarious essays reckoning with the issues of race, body image, love, friendship, and growing up the daughter of immigrants. When the time came to start writing her next book, Scaachi assumed she’d be updating her story with essays about her elaborate four-day wedding, settling down to domestic bliss, and continuing her never-ending arguments with her parents. Instead, the Covid pandemic hit, the world went into lockdown, Scaachi’s marriage fell apart, she lost her job, and her mother was diagnosed with cancer.

Sucker Punch is about what happens when the life you thought you’d be living radically changes course, everything you thought you knew about the world and yourself has tilted on its axis, and you have to start forging a new path forward. Scaachi employs her signature humor and fierce intelligence to interrogate her previous belief that fighting is the most effective tool for progress. She examines the fights she’s had—with her parents, her ex-husband, her friends, online strangers, and herself—all in an attempt to understand when a fight is worth having, and when it's better to walk away.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Author Koul's funny. Not innocently amusing, funny. She's written before this (One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter) about her immigrant-to-Canada parents and her ongoing battles with their traditional expectations versus her Canadian ones. She had, then, a bit about her elaborate wedding...now it's about her pandemic experience, her mother's health crisis, the collapse of her marriage after that astonishing wedding...and something that's never been dealt with in her life, let alone her prose, before: she was sexually assaulted.

I do not know, or know of, a single solitary woman who does not have a story about her body being at the minimum threatened with sexual violence. Reading about it is, it seems, a means of creating solidarity and permission to say out loud that it's happened to you, like the very public #MeToo movement that's been bringing crimes to light that men are just as glad to have swept under the rug.

A proper millennial, Author Koul does her level-best to spin these facts of her life as...not funny, really, but sources or wry humor as she goes about coping with her wounds from them. I think a lot of women love to read these stories as a way to get perspective on the pain in their own lives. I'm aware of the reality and the awfulness of abuse in intimate relationships. It's not fun, and I myownself am not a fan of it as a topic for humorous coping.

Her other coping mechanism is rage. Full-throated, loudly expressed rage. That one I know from the inside; I do not think it is beneficial, nor appropriate, to valorize is as Author Koul does, while using humor to defuse its painful and destructive consequences on everyone...literally everyone...around her.

This is from my own experience: Go get counseling. Stay in counseling the rest of your life. Nothing will remove the rage. Work towards ways to minimize its footprint in your life, and the lives of those around you.

Three stars because it's trenchant and timely.

WELLNESS, a truly moving, involving, deeply-felt trip inside Commitment with a capital "C"

WELLNESS
NATHAN HILL
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A witty and poignant novel about marriage, middle age, tech-obsessed health culture and the bonds that keep people together

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the '90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago's thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit.

Fast-forward twenty years to married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter cults disguised as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook wars, and something called Love Potion Number Nine. For the first time Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize one another, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The struggles that all who form, and sustain, the heavy bonds of matrimony are everfreen plots because most of us have some experience of them. It doesn't matter how much you love each other, it matters how committed you each are to the friendship you share with your chosen partner. Love ebbs and flows, common interests wax and wane, people grow and change, and what makes couple-stories so endlessly interesting is how they are shown managing...or not...these deeply familiar challenges.

It is absolutely clear to me that Author Hill, in his second novel after the startlingly assured The Nix, has honed his craft to a sharp edge. He doesn't shy away from the difficult or the painful parts of commitment. The hateful, hurtful things people say when they are in a deeply enmeshed relationship are both unique and common. There is a certain kind of dynamic in US couples of different socioeconomic backgrounds that's central to this book. We are taught that ours is a classless society, but it is not. The wealth of one family is always a weapon in the couplehood of one its members; a more effective one when the other partner is not from equal wealth.

That bludgeon goes both ways, of course. After a child is born, dynamics change, often for the worse, as incompatible parenting goals are a major cause of divorce. In this story, the couple...a daughter of wealth and privilege, a psychologist, and a deeply wounded soul who feels shackled and devalued by her working class artist husband...are twenty years into a commitment neither can remember why they made.

It absolutely does NOT help that they're living in a surveillance-capitalist society that valorizes getting and spending, when neither has a set of core values instilled from solid bases in love to resist these relentless pressures. It is obvious Author Hill has little use for facile patching-up life hacks or quick-fix lifestyle gurus. He dedicates a lot of space to social media's machiavellian algorithm driven effects. (Coulda been less for all of me, but hey...) The thesis is, however, what good is hacking or fixing stuff too fragile and hollow to last? Your old marriage is not delivering the same thrills...move on, get something new and better.

Right?

Not necessarily. Not even desirably. Open your mind to the possibility that just maybe your life doesn't need to be fixed. Maybe instead your relationship to your life needs to be recalibrated, reassessed, revalued. This being a message I resonate with, I found the read compelling and involving.

Does learning to make the best of it mean settling? Mean getting less out of life? Or is it instead the way to find deeper, more important ways of being who you are inside this long-term commitment to yourself, and your partner, to be well and truly together?

Wellness is that endlessly relatable journey, set in a time where even asking that kind of question isn't encouraged by anything around us. Anyone in a couple, past or presnt, ongoing or ending, will find a lot of deeply interesting details to muse over. A lot of richly textured background to admire, even envy. A lot of deep and scary emotions to batten on from the safe remove of fiction.

I'd rate this the full five of five were it not for what felt to me like the author's rather-too-evident need to overshare. A funny thing to say in a review of a novel about intimacy, I know, but I'm left a bit overfamiliar wuth his opionons of the self-help/new-age/quick-fixery. A couple times, okay; after a while, what is this really about, Author Hill?

I'm highly recommending this read for all partners in a long-term relationship to load onto the /kindle this #Booksgiving. It is manna from heaven to feel seen in stressful times; family "Togetherness" is rough any time, but now...? Bring some independent comfort with you this Yule.