A Year in Reading: Alexander Chee
My husband just took a moment now before bed to read to me from page 250 of Alejandro Varela’s The Town of Babylon. And it is an incredible page. The narrator is describing why his hometown of Babylon, Long Island makes him uneasy, despite what would seem like improvements to the town ever since he grew up there, 20 years before. It’s a riff from the narrator that moves into a meditation on the way American history created the American present, and it has a sort of music to it that binds all of this up in a song on the page, a kind of fugue for forgotten homelands and dreams. I listened as I don’t think I’ll get suck of it—this was one of my favorite novels this last year, and I felt a thrill when he was selected for the National Book Award long list and short list.
This page is near the end of
