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Harrison's Novellas Are Perfect

7/10/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Writers get embarrassed sometimes in talking about how much fun writing can be, but drafting is often really enjoyable. Often, you're tumbling in the dark, and you don't know where the story is going to lead.
Karen Russell,
Author of Swamplandia!
Born July 10, 1981

K. Russell

My Book World

Harrison, Jim. The Summer He Didn’t Die. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2005.

These three novellas, each one striking for its individuality, are immensely satisfying. The longer-than-a-story-but-shorter-than-a-novel format seems to be perfect for each narrative. My favorite character in The Summer He Didn’t Die, the title novella, is Berry, a child who is born with alcohol fetal syndrome. She is mute but indicates by her actions, quick and sprite-like, how she shall act upon the world and its many rules. Most of the action is of her family (excepting her wayward mother) evading Michigan’s children’s protective agency and depositing their lives over the border in Canada so that Berry can live out her life in peace. Republican Wives, hilarious for its verisimilitude (uncannily written for a male writer), takes readers inside the minds of three different women, friends since childhood, who have been hoodwinked for the last time by a man (also a college acquaintance) with whom they have all had affairs (mostly at different times). Tracking tells the story of an author who outlines his literary career and personal life, from feckless yet ardent college boy to a grandpa, finally finished with world travel and content to be near his grown children and grandchildren. The collection is a great testament to the novella form in which it is just the right length to tell each one of these stories.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone

A Writer's Wit: Amélie Nothomb

7/9/2020

It's while writing that suddenly a point of view appears: “So, that's what I really thought about this thing.” Then it feels part of me.
Amélie Nothomb, Author of Soif
Born July 9, 1966

A. Nothomb

TOMORROW: My Book World | Jim Harrison's The Summer He Didn't Die

A Writer's Wit: Erin Morgenstern

7/8/2020

I like to call it nighttime brain: the way your mind seems to function on a different frequency than it does during daylight hours—which can be good or bad but also can lead to unexpected epiphanies or experiences that wouldn't be the same at any other time of day.
Erin Morgenstern, Author of The Starless Sea
Born July 8, 1978

E. Morgenstern

FRIDAY: My Book World | Jim Harrison's The Summer He Didn't Die

A Writer's Wit: Jill McCorkle

7/7/2020

By limiting or denying freedom of speech and expression, we take away a lot of potential. We take away thoughts and ideas before they even have the opportunity to hatch. We build a world around negatives—you can't say, think, or do this or that.
Jill McCorkle, Author of Life After Life
Born July 7, 1957

J. McCorkle

FRIDAY: My Book World | Jim Harrison's The Summer He Didn't Die

The Poisonwood Bible: Stunning and Timeless

7/3/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
Author of The Yellow Wallpaper
Born July 3, 1860

C. Perkins Gilman

My Book World

Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.

In 1959, a Baptist minister, his wife, and his four daughters, leave their Bethlehem, Georgia home for a year of service to the Congo in Africa. The mother, Orleanna, opens the novel with a long lens; we learn right away she will lose one of her daughters, and so we read on patiently to see how such an event will unfold. Of course, we sort of forget, and we’re shocked when the youngest, Ruth May, is killed by a poisonous snake much later in the story after we have come, like her mother, to love her.

This expansive novel is divided into seven books, always a sign of what will be a sprawling narrative. Each book opens with a chapter narrated by Orleanna, the frazzled mother who dares not rile the ire of her preacher husband. The remaining chapters of each book are narrated alternatively by each one of the daughters: Rachel, a light-haired blonde, probably born about 1945, who has visions of high fashion and easy living in her life—having not much use for her father’s strict evangelical life; the twins, Leah and Adah, one a healthy adherent of her father’s ways (for a while), the latter injured before birth and who limps yet has a brain equal to her twin sister’s. The former will eventually marry a Congo native; Adah will return to Atlanta and become a doctor. Before her demise, Ruth May, the youngest, is a sprite, a child with her own language, her own worldview, a darting derring-do that will eventually serve to take her life.

Each chapter then widens our view of their village in the Congo as it survives an historical upheaval: one popular but revolutionary leader being killed within three months of his election, and the return to office of a corrupt man who will conspire with the West (mostly America) to spend thirty-five years amassing great wealth while his countrymen and women survive (or don’t) lives of poverty. One additional character, Mother Nature, or her evil sister, makes life at the least difficult, at the most, a disaster of magnificent proportions. In what feels like the climax, a giant wave of ants marauds their Congolese village, and its inhabitants must survive by, among other things, climbing trees until the rampage has passed. When this family returns to their house and accompanying buildings, they find only bones left where their chickens once roosted. The house is spotless, as if cleaned by a squad of maids. At this point, Oleanna gathers her three remaining children and abandons her husband. Now this is not as easy as it sounds. She has always served Nathan and his god with blind faithfulness, but now she sees that he is not well (think heart of darkness) and must save her remaining three daughters. Only she is not even able to do that. Rachel marries a South African man of questionable character (and three more men in serial monogamy). Leah marries her native. Adah returns to Georgia with her mother. It is a family broken in so many ways it takes an entire book to portray how. Oh, and the title? The poisonwood tree is an apt name because of the substance it oozes; its bible an apt metaphor for the despoliation of one family. A stunning, timeless read.

NEXT TIME: My Book World | Jim Harrison's The Summer He Didn't Die

A Writer's Wit: Tao Lin

7/2/2020

If I don't like someone and I start reading their stuff, it seems like my brain will just automatically start criticizing everything that's there. It's really hard to read a book without having all this outside information telling you what to think about it.
Tao Lin, Author of Taipei
Born July 2, 1983

T. Lin

TOMORROW: My Book World | Tobias Wolff's Novel Old School

A Writer's Wit: Genevieve Valentine

7/1/2020

Most of my writing takes place at a cramped desk in a cramped apartment, so whenever I get to write on a train or make notes on a road trip, it has an entirely different cadence. And I can remember specific writing sessions while on a train through beautiful countryside in a way I can remember almost nothing else.
Genevieve Valentine,
Author of The Girls at the Kingfisher Club
Born July 1, 1981

G. Valentine

FRIDAY: My Book World | Tobias Wolff's Novel Old School

A Writer's Wit: Christopher Priest

6/30/2020

If I could make Panther tough, mysterious, wily, and often at odds with his Avengers comrades, that was a character I'd find interesting.
Christopher Priest, Author of The Black Panther
Born June 30, 1961

C. Priest

FRIDAY: My Book World | Tobias Wolff's Novel Old School

Rule Follower or Skilled Manager?

6/26/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
We always look at the “Fortune 500,” and we say, men in power, but we don't look at the glass cellar as opposed to the glass ceiling and say, men also are the homeless, men are also the ones that are the garbage collectors. Men are also the ones dying in construction sites that aren't properly supervised for safety hazards.
Warren Farrell,
Author of The Boy Crisis
Born June 26, 1943

W. Farrell

My Book World

Murata, Sayaka. Convenience Store Woman. Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori. New York: Grove, 2018.

A compact book at 163 small pages, this novel is a more substantive read than one would think at first. The simple language that the narrator Keiko uses may lull the reader into thinking this will be a simple story. In a way, it is. This young Japanese woman who works in a convenient store shifts to a flashback about her childhood. There she reveals her odd personality, a certain problem with affect, in which she would like to cook and eat a beautiful little blue bird that has died, much to the horror of her mother. Then in primary school, when no teacher appears to break up a fight at recess, Keiko takes it upon herself to hit one of the boys on the skull with a spade. At that point, after getting into trouble, Keiko decides to become a little rule follower, making her, upon high school graduation, a perfect candidate for convenience store worker.

Keiko is unusually attuned to the store’s needs, both at the macro and micro levels—responding to the store’s needs the way a mother might respond to her children. Remaining single, without much apparent interest in sex, Keiko works part-time and sustains a secularly ascetic existence until she’s thirty-six. Then she meets a man, creating the novel’s conflict, and I won’t reveal the ending because it’s pretty odd and yet satisfying. I do have a question for the author. Keiko is often more skilled in managing the store than her male, mostly younger managers (eight of them in eighteen years). Why does her demonstrated competency (all her colleagues acknowledge her abilities) ever put her in a position to become a manager herself? Is this author Murata’s point, a comment on Japanese culture? Or is she more concerned with portraying people who happen not to fit the mold of ordinary citizens and how society treats such people?

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Tobias Wolff's Novel Old School

A Writer's Wit: Larry Kramer

6/25/2020

I came from Yale, where you get an extracurricular degree in self-importance because you went there. When AIDS happened, I was treated like an outcast. And I don't like that feeling.
Larry Kramer, Author of Faggots
Born June 25, 1935

L. Kramer

TOMORROW: My Book World | Sayaka Murata's Novel Convenience Store Woman

A Writer's Wit: Mercedes Lackey

6/24/2020

I try to use all of my senses when describing a setting, and try to think of everything that would impact a character in any given scene.
Mercedes Lackey, Author of Arrows of the Queen
Born June 24, 1950

M. Lackey

FRIDAY: My Book World | Sayaka Murata's Novel Convenience Store Woman

A Writer's Wit: Richard Bach

6/23/2020

Don't be dismayed by good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.
Richard Bach, Author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Born June 23, 1936

R. Bach

FRIDAY: My Book World | Sayaka Murata's Novel Convenience Store Woman.

Tolstoy's War with Art

6/19/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.
Tobias Wolff,
Author of The Night in Question
Born June 19, 1945

T. Wolff

My Book World

Tolstoy, Leo N. What Is Art? Translated from the Russian by Almyer Maude [sic] with an introduction by Vincent Tomas. Indianapolis: Sams, 1960 (1896).

I was assigned to read this book for a half-credit, pass-fail humanities class in college. There is little indication that I actually did so (a few underlined passages in Chapter Two). It seems like a challenging read for eighteen-year-olds who’ve had little exposure to argumentation or (unless they have studied art as children) art. In general, to summarize an often unclear thesis, Tolstoy seems to believe that art is a feeling that the artist would like to infect the watcher, listener, reader with.

He believes that high art is so only because it is heralded by the upper classes. Tolstoy goes on and on about how bad Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is, in part because Beethoven was deaf, and how could the composer possibly compose if he couldn’t hear? And besides, Beethoven is attempting to combine two arts: music and chorus (based on another’s lyric). Tolstoy abhors contemporary opera, Wagner in particular, again because it combines visual art, drama, music, singing, and more. When he uses the invective “filthy” to describe it, it seems he has a prejudice he can’t explain. In fact, he leaves a lot unexplained by way of sometimes poor or faulty logic, and by using terms he has defined to his own satisfaction. He asserts that beauty is not art. He asserts that the basis of art must be religious, i.e. Christian (I think).

However, Tolstoy does make a prescient remark when he argues that art (music, drawing, creative writing and more) should be taught to all children so that they may create art for all their lives, in order to enrich their lives and the lives of the people they love. That seems to be the most positive assertion that he makes, and, because many American school districts have abandoned the teaching of art, the result being a certain poverty, I believe he is right. The rest of this work seems like a highly subjective opinion he took fifteen years to develop; if he’d tried hard he probably could have done it in four or less.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman

A Writer's Wit: Sylvia Field Porter

6/18/2020

One of the soundest rules I try to remember when making forecasts in the field of economics is that whatever is to happen is happening already.
Sylvia Field Porter,
Author of Sylvia Porter's Money Book
Born June 18, 1913

S. F. Porter

TOMORROW: My Book World | Leo N. Tolstoy's What Is Art?

A Writer's Wit: Kerry Greenwood

6/17/2020

I don't steal stories. If I'm a plagiarist, so is Hitchcock. And Tolkien. And Shakespeare.
Kerry Greenwood, Author of Murder in the Dark
Born June 17, 1954

K. Greenwood

FRIDAY: My Book World | Leo N. Tolstoy's What is Art?

A Writer's Wit: Andy Weir

6/16/2020

A story in your head isn't a story. It's just a daydream until you actually write it down. So write it down.
Andy Weir, Author of The Martian
Born June 16, 1972

A. Weir

FRIDAY: My Book World | Leo N. Tolstoy's What Is Art?

Alison Smith Memoir Always Timely

6/12/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Well, isn't Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else—and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?
Djuna Barnes
Born June 12, 1892
Author of Nightwood

D. Barnes

My Book World

Smith, Alison. Name All the Animals. New York: Scribner, 2004.

If I had had the time, I would have read Name All the Animals in one sitting. In this memoir, the author begins benignly by sharing with readers in great detail how close she and her brother Roy are at ages nine and twelve, respectively, so close that their mother names them Alroy. Together, they explore an abandoned house in their neighborhood. And then, in a similar way to how it must shock the narrator and her parents, it shocks the reader to learn of Roy’s death at eighteen. The rest of the book covers several years following in which Alison finishes high school. She demonstrates how her family, good Catholics, avoid all the questions that should be asked and tackled. Alison develops an inner and outer world of her own making, all in aid of forgetting and yet commemorating her brother. In failing to grieve, however, she cuts herself off from most people until she meets one she can’t resist. Smith tells this harrowing story without sentiment but with all due regard for the truth. She structures it in such a manner that readers discover along with her how she must grow up, how she must proceed without Roy in her life.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Leo N. Tolstoy's What Is Art?

A Writer's Wit: Allan Gurganus

6/11/2020

I rise at six. Strong coffee helps me face the paper edition of The New York Times. It daily challenges my own capacity for faking anything deranged enough to sound true. I work till two p.m., unless I am in the throes of finishing something. I rewrite to be reread.
Allan Gurganus
Born June 11, 1947
Author of White People

A. Gurganus

TOMORROW: My Book World | Alison Smith's Name All the Animals

A Writer's Wit: Saul Bellow

6/10/2020

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow
June 10, 1915
Author of Herzog, Winner of National Book Award

S. Bellow

FRIDAY: My Book World | Alison Smith's Name All the Animals

A Writer's Wit: Patricia Cornwell

6/9/2020

I believe the root of all evil is abuse of power.
Patricia Cornwell
Born June 9, 1956
Author of Depraved Heart

P. Cornwell

FRIDAY: My Book World | Alison Smith's Name All the Animals

Cole Porter Letters Reveal a Vibrant Life

6/5/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink—and in drinking understand themselves.
Federico García Lorca, Spanish Poet
Born June 5, 1898

F. García Lorca

My Book World

Eisen, Cliff and The Letters of Cole Porter. New Haven: Yale, 2019.

If you are a fan of Cole Porter and his music, you will probably enjoy this collection of letters. Though some of them refer to his bisexuality, most of them pertain to his many professional and personal connections. Such communications illustrate many characteristics about Mr. Porter. One, he is a consummate professional, in spite of his propensity to play and play hard during vacations and between gigs on Broadway or Hollywood. He answers every bit of mail himself, except when he occasionally calls on his secretary to take care of something. He is a team player, important for anyone working in a collaborative arena like the theatre. Second, he is also fierce but polite about not doing anything musically that would (in his opinion) ruin a show. At the same time, when overpowered by those above him, he sometimes gives in, particularly, it seems, when the issue does not matter that much to him.

In a business that can be crass and cold at times, Porter is also very caring and thoughtful of everyone he comes in contact with. He sends thank you notes for the smallest favors, and, because he often runs short of money before he makes it big, he is generous with cash gifts and loans later in life. Third, his wit and sharp tongue are unmatched with regard to the social whirl of the 1930s through the 1950s. Though he wouldn’t dream of hurting anyone publicly, he does not mind getting off a zinger or two during a personal letter to a dear friend. Perhaps most interesting is how Porter shares some of his methods for songwriting:

In a related matter, of what compels him to accept a job or assignment, he says:

“My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer. If Feuer and Martin phoned me today and asked me to write a new song for a spot, I’d just begin thinking. First, I think of the idea and then I fit it to a title. Then I go to work on the melody, spotting the title at certain moments in the melody, and then I write the lyric—the end first—that way, it has a strong finish . . . I do the lyrics like I’d do a crossword puzzle. I try to give myself a meter which will make the lyric as easy as possible to write without being banal. On top of the meter, I try to pick for my rhyme words of which there is a long list with the same ending” (499).

A friend who travels with Porter in 1955 relates this story: “We were not stopped very long at the border. On the Spanish side, one of the soldiers came out with Cole’s passport in his hand, looked in the car, and said, ‘Cole Porter . . . Begin the Beguine!’ and kissed his fingers to the air, and began to sing the song. Cole’s music is known everywhere we go—even in the remote spots” (507).

I think that just about says it all about Cole Porter, his music, and how many fans he still has in the world!

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Alison Smith's Name All the Animals

A Writer's Wit

6/4/2020

This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.
Susan Jacoby,
Author of The Age of American Unreason
Born June 4, 1945

S. Jacoby

TOMORROW: My Book World | Letters of Cole Porter

A Writer's Wit

6/3/2020

Perfectionism is a dangerous state of mind in an imperfect world.
Robert Hillyer, Poet
Born June 3, 1895

R. Hillyer

FRIDAY: My Book World | Letters of Cole Porter

A Writer's Wit

6/2/2020

The desire for self-improvement is vital. There is no point in pushing children; they need to be the ones who want to learn new skills.
Tony Buzan, Inventor of Mind Mapping
Born June 2, 1942

T. Buzan

FRIDAY: My Book World | The Letters of Cole Porter

'Mules and Men' a Treasure Trove

5/29/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
I loathe heterosexual weddings. The wedding cake, the party, the champagne, the inevitable divorce two years later. It's just a waste of time in the heterosexual world, and in the homosexual world I find it personally beyond tragic that we want to ape this institution that is so clearly a disaster.
Rupert Everett
Born May 29, 1959

R. Everett

My Book World

Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men with a preface by Franz Boas, a foreword by Arnold Rampersad, illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias, and afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Part I consists of African-American folk tales that Hurston collects in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Florida. She begins in her hometown of Eatonville, primarily African-American. Amazing it is the number of times the word “mule” does appear in these tales, as if the beast is a metaphor for the “beasts” that white people take black men and women to be: though compliant, also stubborn, and intelligent. On the face of it, the tales might reflect a certain ignorance, but I think they simply reflect that slaves had to develop their own language because the whites refused to educate them in their own (if they themselves were versed well enough in English to do so).

Part II is about hoodoo (or voodoo), and Hurston heads for what she calls its capital, New Orleans, Louisiana. These passages are fascinating, as well. All throughout Hurston includes herself as a character. In order to retrieve the information she wants, she must become one of hoodoo’s adherents and spends much time and effort seeking to know its ways. She recreates for readers exact formulae for getting rid of one’s husband, for getting him back if she changes her mind, for many ways of dealing with one’s neighbors. Hurston never judges but fully participates, absorbing its, at times, headiness, as when she dizzies herself from dancing for forty straight minutes as part of a ceremony.

In his afterword Henry Louis Gates (PBS’s Finding Your Roots) identifies Hurston’s proper historical place in American literature. After having achieved a higher education and published seven important books, she is virtually ignored or denounced by leading black male literary figures during the time she should be receiving accolades (among them Richard Wright). This happens, in part, because she identifies herself in a more "conservative," Clarence Thomas-like stance, in which she refuses to be defined by white people. It takes Alice Walker’s landmark 1975 article in Ms. to resurrect Hurston and bring her to the fore of American literary studies. As happens to many whose ideas are published ahead of their time, Hurston’s work languishes for decades amid a poverty of thought. If only she had not been shunned, she might not have died amid a more corporeal sort of poverty at age sixty-nine.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | The Letters of Cole Porter