Motion Sickness by Lynne Tillman

The first book I have finished reading in 2025 is also a book I spent too many days trying and failing to read in (late) 2024…

I read and absolutely adored Lynne Tillman’s Weird Fucks about a year or so ago, and though I didn’t rush out to read another of hers, I very much planned and wanted to for a while…

When selecting from my way too big selection of unread books in my London home (my tiny, cramped, London apartment … my small, inconsequential London hovel … however you want to imagine it … my luxurious mid-century, mid-floor, mid-height flat … we can call it whatever we want…  my gentrifier’s paradise … my postgraduate graveyard … my current dosshouse … the place I lay my head … the place I lay my theramin … anything, we can call it anything)-

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When selecting from my big selection of unread books for my (nearly-done) 9-week trip to Canada this winter, I thought the unread Tillman was probably a good shout. Sadly, it wasn’t…

I’ve got a few days left in miserable North America until I am back in miserable London, but isn’t everywhere miserable, especially in the bit of winter after the fun parts are gone..?

I’m both miserable about leaving but would also be miserable if I was staying…

Though there are exciting potential futures back in London (I’ve got gigs coming up – I’ve got one next week instead in Wanstead… I’ve got one in Bethnel Green next month… I’ve got others), I don’t know if I do want to be where most of the people I know are… I think I do prefer to be where no one I know is, because I’m still a little sad and I sometimes feel lonely when I’m not alone and I do like to keep moving and I don’t like to be in one place for very long…

This is an urge shared with the narrator-protagonist of Lynne Tillman’s Motion Sickness, which is about an American bouncing around Europe and the Mediterranean…

It is, then, a book of an American moaning about flannering about, travelling and not really having a good time… the narrator is reading lots and doing lots of socialising and some shagging, though not a lot, like in Weird Fucks…

It’s a much longer book than that other text, yet it doesn’t really have the energy or the excitement or the detail to accommodate the extra pages…

The narrator moves between Amsterdam, Istanbul, Tangier, London, Paris, Tuscany, Venice, travelling sometimes with friends and sometimes alone…

she meets other Americans (one of whom ends up murdered in murky circumstances)…

She travels around Tuscany with some boring English men, neither of whom she hooks up with, though she does hook up with a Yugoslavian guy who is obsessed with her…

She is offered marriage by a Turkish guy who doesn’t actually seem to like her that much…

She meets people in one place and then runs into them in other places, she coincidentally meets people who know other people that she knows elsewhere, even finding the errant absent husband of a pregnant friend on the other side of the continent…

(Throughout, she writes – though rarely sends – many postcards…)

Sadly, though, all of the characters she meets merge into one, as do the meaningful details of all of the places she visits…

She recounts the plots of the novels she’s reading (much like this blog) but doesn’t usually offer much of an analysis (much like this blog)…

Literature is considered more reference and jumping off point than it is something to be treated with thought…

She talks about The Quiet American, about Ripley’s Game, about The Portrait Of A Lady, amongst many other things…

She visits the Picasso Museum in Barcelona and doesn’t comment on it being an incredibly underwhelming museum…

She visits palaces and museums all over the continent and doesn’t seem to have any opinions about which are more and which are less interesting…

She works on a former refugee’s memoirs in Barcelona briefly and then travels on…

All of the places and people she encounters aren’t really very well differentiated, meaning the book kinda fails as both character study[/IES] but also as travel writing…

The reader – at least I didn’t – doesn’t feel… within… or excited by or … or … or … or … or possessed by any of the places Tillman visits, and though perhaps the intention of this (if this is intentional) is to evoke the blunt ennui of the depressed, perpetual, traveller who is unable to ever find a meaningful home, it felt instead like Motion Sickness is a failure of description, rather than a successful depiction of boredom…

Maybe though, this is just me not being in the right moment or life stage to appreciate the text… (I have a small baby and basically zero disposable income for the next few months (I spent too much money shipping a dog (my dog) internationally))…

Maybe I would have found a text about constant travel and meeting new people and occasional frissons of desire more exciting if I were reading it not now, days before an intercontinental trip with a baby and a dog and a legal life partner…

But I don’t necessarily think that’s right, as I have enjoyed picaresque texts in non-picaresque moments of life and have enjoyed texts about staid placidity when living hard and free…

I don’t think that the idea of solo travelling with an open heart and an open fly is necessarily something I’m unable to engage with at this point in my life, but maybe it is…

I am unlikely to be doing any weird, lengthy, travelling for a long time (or not, who knows?), as while my baby is tiny, I won’t be travelling for even multiple days at a time with just him and the dog… We’ll have some nice day trips, yes, but I’m not going to disappear around the Mediterranean with a baby for a month in 2025, but maybe I will next year, economics depending. I suppose it will all come down to economics in the end, travelwise…

But I want to travel, yes, though I’m not desperate to. I don’t need to. Not right now. And hopefully I won’t need to before I can afford to.

Yes.

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Motion Sickness was a disappointment, then, yes, it was a disappointment for me..

And maybe maybe maybe maybe there is an excellent book in there, had it been trimmed, polished, cut to a similar length to Weird Fucks…

But I don’t know… maybe Motion Sickness is excellent and it’s just me with my boring baby brain and wife life who’s unable to enjoy it…

But more than anything, it reminded me of the late Jack Kerouac writing I read over a decade ago, when the magic was gone, the sparkle wasn’t there… but maybe it was there and I just couldn’t see it.

Maybe, maybe not.

I don’t know.

Onwards into 2025!