Who's Afraid of Aphrodite Wolf?

This year I may have set a record for number of books started but not read all the way through. Normally, it's rare for me to pick a book that I can't hang with to the end, but within the last month I've returned at least three to the library unfinished. One of them I started twice and even got most of the way through before deciding it was a bit too gloomy for a love story. A couple of others had mythological themes that seemed promising at first but lost me for one reason or another.

I seem to have more problems finishing books written within the last few years than I do with earlier ones. I perceive this to be a reflection of the unsettled times we're living in, which somehow find their way into even the most innocuous of stories, tales of romance, adventure, and suspense. It's not a reflection on the capabilities of the writers, but more a problem with my thinking I'm getting one kind of book and finding I've gotten another. It's also been the case that I didn't finish a book (Jake Arnott's The House of Rumour) because the theme, though adeptly handled, was rather dark. (This I consider to be my own judgment and not the fault of the author.)

It's one thing to be topical and another to be memorable. Occasionally, one stumbles upon a book that seems to reflect the tenor of the times unflinchingly, and one comes away the better for it. The author performs a kind of alchemical magic on contemporary themes so that they are recognizable but transmuted, a remarkable sea change akin to Heart of Darkness morphing into Apocalypse Now. I've seen it in authors like Jane Smiley, Donna Tartt, Mark Helprin, and Ian McEwan, as well as in writers previously unknown to me whose works came back to haunt me later, like Lorrie Moore, Amor Towles, and David Mitchell. (Bark, anyone? Rules of Civility? The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet?)

If I were to name a mythological idea that seems common to many of these authors' recent works, I would mention some darkness around issues of Eros. Is that surprising? You may ask what that has to do with contemporary American/world affairs, which seem on the evidence to be caught up in much drier and more prosaic issues of power and money. I agree, but for whatever reason, content connected to a disturbed Eros crops up in many of the recent works of fiction I've seen. Of course, surface content often obscures latent content, in both life and fiction, and never does a theme appear in isolation. Eros and power, and Eros and money, in particular, tend to be quite combustible combinations.