Three Books that Will Transport You

I’m going through a phase lately where almost everything reminds me of “Adam’s Curse,” by William Butler Yeats. The poem is about how our most worthwhile pursuits—things like art, love, and beauty—often seem to demand a measure of toil. Or, as a woman in the poem wistfully puts it, how “we must labour to be beautiful.” The speaker reflects that “I strove / To love you in the old high way of love.” He sounds tired from the effort.

Then I read my colleague Hanif Abdurraqib’s gorgeous essay about our collective longing for inconvenience, in which he discusses a friend who “wants to fall in love the old-fashioned way,” meaning without using a dating app. I thought immediately, “The curse!” Abdurraqib’s point, though, appears to be that the curse might be a blessing in disguise, or at least that our attempts to outrun the curse might be more cursed than the curse itself. (Yeats, proto-friction-maxxer that he seems to be, might agree: the poem ends on the image of a “hollow moon,” an emblem of empty, unsatisfying escapism if there ever was one.)

So when I was asked, by this newsletter’s editor, to recommend some “transporting” summer reads, I wanted, in the spirit of the curse, to highlight a few books whose transports can’t be separated from their “inconvenient” qualities: unconventionality, abstruseness, even unresolved emotional pain. I hope you love them in the old high way of love.

“Orbital,” by Samantha Harvey

Harvey’s novel centers on a group of six astronauts living in an international space station, hundreds of miles above Earth. No crisis hits, aliens don’t attack, the fuel supply is fine. Rather than a conventional setup-climax-dénouement plot, we get eerily domestic moments aboard the shuttle, affecting scraps of the characters’ memories, some of the most dazzling descriptions of light I’ve ever read—imagine Dante’s “Paradiso” with a secular overlay, as if space were simultaneously the seventh heaven and Earth’s untended back yard—and a sense of being out of history and time (“the whipcrack of morning arrives every ninety minutes,” Harvey writes). The novel—an astonishing work of humanism sheathed in an escapist premise—should be required reading for every faux-utopian tech stooge who wants to loot the planet so their A.I. systems can displace and replace people. (Not that I’m mad about it!)

“The Sense of an Ending,” by Frank Kermode

My editor recommended this book to me after I pitched her a somewhat convoluted essay idea. She thought Kermode’s formal analysis of delay and catharsis in classic literary texts might be useful. Not only was it highly useful (I abandoned the essay idea), it was thrilling, dense, complex, absorbing—and a real struggle to get through. I had to sit for a long time with individual sentences, in part because they demanded to be reality-tested against my own perceptions and in part because that’s what it took for me to understand them. Such deep concentration caused me to lose track of my surroundings—a true escape.