Currently physically on my bedtable: William Kennedy,
Ironweed
Paula Danziger,
This Place Has No Atmosphere
Carson McCullers,
Member of the Wedding
F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Tender Is the Night
Jack Kerouac,
On the Road
17 March 2001
John Magus,
The Magus
I don't care that it was 650 pages long and Fowles to boot. No book
that's not Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow should take me nearly
two weeks to read. My brain hurts. I need to decompress before I can say anything
about this. Except I think I'll read On the Road now instead of Light
in August because my mind needs an eensy little break. I wish I had In
Cold Blood or The Haunting of Hill House around.
11 March 2001
Richard Peck,
A Year Down Yonder
Not as good as A Long Way from Chicago, just more stories--good
ones--about Grandma. This won and not The Wanderer?
1 March 2001
Jerry Spinelli,
Wringer
I read this on my lunch hour in Barnes & Noble. I like Spinelli's
themes--I've only read this and Maniac McGee--but am I missing anything
by only giving him a fast skim? I don't think so.
28 February 2001
Edith Wharton,
House of Mirth
Wharton loved those ironic titles.
24 February 2001
Richard Peck,
A Long Way from Chicago
Not the annoying, agenda-driven artificiality of Are You in the House
Alone? or the depressing Remembering the Good Times but wheee! a
return to the style he used for Blossom Culp, a character I relearned to love
when I reread Ghosts I Have Been in the past few years. I thought the
epilogue was going to be cloyingly oversentimental--actually the pro- and epilogue
threaten the book's dignity as those of "Saving Private Ryan" do--but
it didn't. Or maybe I am cloyingly oversentimental, because I wept a few tears
without shame.
23 February 2001
Booth Tarkington,
The Magnificent Ambersons
17 February 2001
Jean Little,
Kate
Little messed up her own time. In Look Through my WIndow, Kate spends
a Christmas with Emily (because they're quarantined with chicken pox) and then
the following summer, Emily's mother is pregnant. Since Kate begins with
the resulting child, Louisa, at seven months old, then Kate must therefore
begin sixteen months after Look ended. So when, toward the end of Kate,
Kate refers to the immediately previous Christmas as being the one she spent
with Emily having chicken pox. I hurled the book away from me. That wasn't as
bad as Richard Adams saying, in Tales from Watership Down, that rabbits
laugh, even though he made it perfectly clear in Watership Down that
they do not, but it was pretty bad.
16 February 2001
James Dickey,
Deliverance
13 February 2001
Elizabeth Bowen,
The Death of the Heart
The only passage that really struck me as beautiful prose was in the second
sentence, "...down which swans in slow indignation swam"; but the
whole book was gorgeous. And painful. And whoever wrote "The Breakfast
Club" read it, because Alison Reynolds summarizes it in a line: "When
you grow up, your heart dies. It's unavoidable; it just happens."
12 February 2001
Jane Smiley,
The Age of Grief
9 February 2001
Vladimir
Nabokov, Lolita
8 February 2001
Carson McCullers,
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Depressing, yes; and I bet Ayn Rand (I'll have got her out of my system in
another few days) would have hated for not showing the heroic in man, or perhaps
she wouldn't've seen the heroism or appreciated the realism. But it was gorgeously
written, and hey, a post-Faulkner southern novel without incest!
4 February 2001
Nevil Shute,
On the Beach
I wrote this to an online book discussion:
A few years ago I picked up a Recorded Books Inc. production of A Town Like Alice. (RBI does unabridged, high-quality audio books.) I don't remember where I'd heard about the title, but from the backmatter I thought it was going to be a tale of courage and survival of the mostly-British spouses and children who, after their men had left their civilian jobs in Malaysia and gone off to fight WWII, were death-marched around the peninsula and starved in camps etc. That's how about a quarter of the book was, ending with the lead woman (who was not married and of course had no children) pushed for the troops to allow them to live like the Malaysians, to live in a village and grow their own rice and just not be marched around picking up dysentery etc. The rest of it was Not Like That.
During their marching around, an Australian man they encounter does them a service, which offends their captors, so he is brutally flogged and left for dead. Very sad.
Then the war's over. Wheee. The lead woman goes home to England to discover she's been left an inheritance by an old uncle who leaves it in trust for her until she's 35 (since young women are so flighty). She uses some of the money to return to Malaysia and dig a well for the village in which they eventually were allowed to live, since the villagers saved her life and those of the other women and children. One of the villagers says oh by the way that Australian man did not die.
All of this, btw, is told through the medium of letters to her trustee, who is your basic British solicitor, male, threescore years and ten, while she is in her mid-20s. Meanwhile, the Aussie has won some money in Oz and come to England to look for the woman and finds the trustee and thus the Aussie and the woman are reunited in Oz and, surprise surprise, they're in love.
Remember, the narrative device is the letters from a young woman to her solicitor. He's a nice guy and the two are friendly, but the narrative device strains credibility from the outset and then, with a scene of first seduction, is shot to hell. No woman in 1950 tells her bazillion-year-old white-haired solicitor about her sex life.
Then the rest--half--is about how the pair settle in some pissant settlement in NW Oz and want to make it a town like Alice (Springs), with businesses and leisure activity, so the second half of the book is this paean to capitalism as the woman realizes there're all these kangaroos for the taking to be made into shoes, and she can hire young women to work in the factory and if she builds an ice-cream parlor next to the factory she can marry them all off and get all their wages back by selling sundaes. Or something.
No, I have no idea why I listened to the whole thing. But I did. And decided that I hated Nevil Shute.
Then I learned that he wrote a post-Armageddon book called On the Beach. I'm a sucker for apocalyptic fiction, or some of it. The first I can remember is Empty World by John Christopher (who wrote the wonderful Tripods trilogy). In it, almost every human dies and certainly all of them over 18. Then I read The Stand. And I'm sure I've read others that escape me now (I don't read a lot of sf or horror, so I probably haven't read many).
Oh yeah, another: Earth Abides by George Stewart, which I came across by seeing it listed as a lot of people's favorite favorite favorite book ever. I was also looking at Objectivism webpages at the time (I go through phases of self-loathing for ever having fallen under Ayn Rand's thrall). It would be a good book for Objectivists, because after 100 years of almost humanlessness, the planet, or at least North America, is suffering for want of human husbandry. Which is ridiculous; the planet would rejoice if it didn't have to deal with our abuse. A fast read by the pool one day, a minus.
The other day I borrowed Shute's On the Beach from the 'brary. (I don't remember what brought it to my forebrain--oh yeah, the Modern Library readers' list, maybe.) I didn't know whether I would dislike it for being like A Town Like Alice or for being like Earth Abides. Either way I figured it wouldn't stand a chance.
I liked it.
It was published in 1957 and set in 1963; Shute died in ï60. I think Shute's purpose with this book was two-fold. Various characters occasionally serve as foils for direct authorial pedagogy, and on one of these occasions someone talks about how people's having attended to real news in papers instead of fluff might have alerted them to the real problems going on. So one purpose was to encourage pacifism or at least arms reduction. The other is an examination of people who know they're going to die but have some time to adjust to it.
The novel opens at the turn of the year, 12 months after a war in the northern hemisphere--Sino-Russian and Russian-NATO plus a few other countries who have enough bombs to make everyone else retaliate. It's set in Melbourne (on the southern coast of Australia) and scientists figure that in about nine months, radiation poisoning will have spread that far south and they'll all die. There is no radio communication from the northern hemisphere at all, and Darwin (on the north coast) recently has gone also. So Melbourne waits, knowing that Tasmania and Christchurch will live another few weeks after Melbourne and then everything will be dead.
Shute skims over a few valid points, like wouldn't folks from the north of Oz rush the south to live a little longer, and how, with everyone knowing they're going to die, enough supply lines are maintained so there's not chaos and starvation. For the former, he says people realize that fleeing is pointless, as well as difficult as there's no oil (Oz imports all its oil). For the latter, perhaps in ï57 Melbourne was still rural or had enough hinterland that it could feed itself with vegetables and milk and eggs and mutton, though I wonder about wheat, and people tried to live and work normally, for sanity's sake.
I confess that I don't know anything about the world's arsenal in 1957. One thing that struck me is the scientists' further prediction that the world would be inhabitable again in only five years. We never knew how long nuclear winter would last, and I pray we never do, but I remember estimates ranging from 50 to 500 and more years. So that read to me as either naive or hopeful or there not having been as much destructive force in 1957 as in 1984.
Quibbles with the book: The sexism, given its 1957 date and author, I expected. A more serious issue is that, George Stewart-like, Shute and his characters seem not to mind that in addition to ourselves, humans have wiped out all the flora and fauna too. When someone takes a submarine up to the northern coast, through the periscope everything looks normal so possibly in Shute's world, radiation doesn't affect flora.
No one wondered whether the planet would become as lifeless as Mercury. No one ever debated whether cockroaches would come upon on two feet and have a civilization while the Statue of Liberty poked up from the sand. These quibbles of mine might have been Shute's point, that everyone focused on the time left and kept sane by not dwelling on a future that would unravel without them.
31 January 2001
Elizabeth Cody
Kimmel, In the Stone Circle
26 January 2001
Joan Aiken,
Lady Catherine's Necklace
25 January 2001
Edith Wharton,
The Age of Innocence
Why do Newland and May Archer name their first son Dallas instead of Welland,
when every other firstborn son is given his mother's birth name?
25 January 2001
Linda Berdoll,
The Bar Sinister
21 January 2001
E.L. Doctorow,
Ragtime
This is just super.
16 January 2001
James Joyce,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
13 January 2001
James Baldwin,
Go Tell It on the Mountain
9 January 2001
Anne Lamott,
Crooked Little Heart
I can admit when I'm wrong and I was wrong about Crooked Little Heart. No: I was wrong in my expectation that I would hate Crooked Little Heart. I was right that it was extremely autobiographical, which was a very bad thing in Hard Laughter and just as thinly disguised here but not as much wishful thinking.
Her mother said one of the things she loved about Lank was that you could still see his baby self--the animal self, the dreaming self, the self that didn't have language, the self that was fluid. (57)
I announced the other day that I was on page 17 and unthrilled. The first scene that started me thinking that maybe this would be okay happened on pp 61-63, the last dance of seventh grade. Elizabeth on the trampoline is also superb.
Lamott is still clumsy, clumsier than the other novelists with autobiographical evidence in their work whom I like. I know from Bird by Bird that she's a big believer in writing stuff, or taping it, to index cards and carrying a stack around with you so you don't forget stuff and so you can pin them to the wall and be inspired by them later. Here's a bit she just couldn't fit in any better way but couldn't bear to leave out. Remember, James is a struggling writer.
"Fiber adds bulk to the stool," read one piece of newsprint taped to an index card, "and among Finns stool tends to be three times larger than among New Yorkers."
"Honey," she asked [...] "How on earth will you use this?"
He raised his head slowly to see what she was reading.
"Writing," he said rather primly, is a very mysterious process." (83)
Also there are clumsinesses with editing. Both Elizabeth and Rosie remember a poem Andrew recited to them ("James James Morrison Morrison"), but Lamott tells us twice in 100 pages that Rosie remembers the poem and no editor caught the redundancy.
Lamott tosses out the occasional great line, like their family being something you'd get at a garage sale (284), but she can't leave out her newfound God stuff either. That might be one thing, but she betrays what I see as her hypocrisy as well: the things that Rae used to call friendships and sunset still look like friendships and sunsets to Rosie but Rae now calls them Jesus. Jesus is a convenient excuse for Lamott-read-Rae: when Rae tells Elizabeth she hates Rosie's current tennis opponents, Elizabeth (only superficially tolerant of the Christianity) asks her how Jesus feels about her hating these young girls, and Rae says, "Oh, he hates them too." Rae's attitude is one Lamott has shown in her Salon columns, and isn't it convenient to have such a plastic god. That isn't Jesus's fault but that of those who interpret his teachings to suit themselves. Charming.
I am certain that Lamott's initial inspiration for the book is this image:
At an outdoor café on the water, watching the ferries and sailboats, silent brown pelicans gliding by on powerful wings, he put his chair next to hers and his arm around her shoulders, and they sat quietly together. A stranger watching them, noting their dark clothes, their closeness, Elizabeth's handsome dignity, Lank's cherubic compassion, might have assumed that they were a quiet and creative couple, one who had just buried a cavernous pocket of grief. (293)
And if it wasn't, Lamott shouldn't've written it as if it were. She's as transparent as John Fowles in the train with his own character in The French Lieutenant's Woman, but at least Fowles was honest enough to say "Here I am" and make it a part of the plot (with the character becoming annoyed at the scrutiny of a stranger).
Oh, and the bit at the end with Elizabeth and Rosie at the tidepools reminds me of Gretel Ehrlich's Match to the Heart. Ehrlich wrote that recovering from being struck by lightning in Wyoming. She wrote of walks on the beach (she stayed with her parents in California) with her dog (who'd also been affected by the blow) and exploring tide pools and contemplating how very close to death she had come. When she came to the UConn Co-op for a reading and signing, I asked if the tidepool exploration, physical and philosophical, had been deliberate: between ocean and dry land, between life and death. She was, pardon the term, thunderstruck, because she had never considered that but realized the truth of it when I mentioned it. (We talked for a long time and afterward she told Suzy--the general books coordinator and my personal book purveyor--"I enjoyed talking to the woman in the red dress.")
Overall, I liked it.
6 January 2001
Lois Lowry,
Gathering Blue
Jo and Thomas and Kira are artists of vision and hope as well as of voice wood
and cloth. I had problems with the Giver's transmission of memory and how a
person's death would release the memories, as happened with Rosemarie and the
Giver. I'm glad Lowry allowed us to fill in the blanks of how the three's happier
vision could lead to a happier future.
3 January 2001
E.L. Konigsburg,
Silent to the Bone
When I started this in Curious George Goes to Wordsworth, I didn't know if
I would like it. About ten pages in, I liked it a lot. Smart kids who like words
and names and solve their own situations better than grown-ups can.
2 January 2001
Janet Lewis,
The Wife of Martin Guerre
Not as much of a fictionalization, a fleshing out, of the story of Bertrande
de Rols as I expected, but good.
1 January 2001
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