LISA BORST
Lisa Borst lives in New York and works at N+1. We asked Lisa to share 5 of her favorite books.
I got really into David Foster Wallace right after he died, when I was in early high school. A lot of it went straight over my head, even though in some ways he’s the perfect young people’s writer (a friend makes a compelling case that Infinite Jest is a YA novel). But A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again really did something for me, maybe because they were the first time I seriously read nonfiction, at least beyond, like, Dave Barry’s humor anthologies. For one thing they just functioned as a primer to an entire world of art and ideas (I just looked at my old copy and found a piece of marginalia next to the word “Hegel”: “look this up”). Even more than that, the writing suggested entirely novel methodological possibilities: I was amazed to learn that you could write about stuff like TV and sports and your own self-conscious anxieties with such humor, intellectual authority, and frankly insane vocabulary and syntax. It’s probably for the best that magazine writers are by and large no longer trying to imitate DFW, but I still have a soft spot for this kind of goofy, intelligent maximalism.
I read a lot of queer theory in college, possibly at the detriment of reading other kinds of things. (Nonacademic life has taught me a lot about lesbians, but not really enough about, for example, the history of economics.) The landmark writer for me was Eve Sedgwick, whose funny, generous, radically stylish work Tendencies—mostly written during or in response to the AIDS epidemic—illuminated the possibilities of integrating literary criticism with a committed political life.
A pretty rudimentary theory of fiction I have is that novels, for the most part, ought to work on three registers: the individual, the social, and the political-economic. With some experimental exceptions, my favorite novels have narrators with distinctive interior voices; they situate those characters within friend groups or workplaces or communities, exploring how power or desire can circulate through an intimate group; and they place those communities within larger political orders, forcing characters to come in tension with systems. (Often, when I read fiction submissions that don’t quite work, it’s because one of these axes is missing.) Alongside Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (another major book for me), Another Country by James Baldwin is maybe the most successful novel I’ve read at hitting all three counts: its characters are as lifelike, contradictory, and messy as anyone I know, and they do the things real people do—go to parties, get stoned, argue, lay around and have sex with each other because they’re bored. And somehow within these mundanities emerge all the unspeakable realities of American racism and homophobia and misogyny.
I first read Mythologies by Roland Barthes in an introductory media studies class in college, and at the time I remember feeling bewildered about why we were reading these baroque descriptions of French cars and soap. I wanted more obviously political reading material: where was the feminism! The militant Marxism! Now I can see that Mythologies basically laid the foundation for everything I like to read: it’s hyper-focused and descriptive, dilating on everyday subjects that inevitably end up really rewarding semiotic inquiry; it’s as attuned to its own contemporaneity as you could ever hope for; and its operating premise is a kind of funky, roving associativeness that I still seek out in fiction and criticism. (Also, it’s not not Marxist.) For a while, during the worst months of the pandemic, I had a ritual where I would get a little stoned and read one or two Mythologies chapters very, very slowly, just sitting with these luxuriant sentences about midcentury French stuff. That’s the best reading experience I’ve had in a while.