www.richardjespers.com
  • Home
  • Books
  • Journals
  • Blog

The Men in Bosworth's Life

6/30/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
If people retreat into private life, if critics grow quieter, if cynicism becomes endemic, the corruption will slowly become more brazen, the intimidation of opponents stronger. Laws intended to ensure accountability or prevent graft or protect civil liberties will be weakened. If the president uses his office to grab billions for himself and his family, his supporters will feel empowered to take millions. If he successfully exerts power to punish enemies, his successors will emulate his methods.
The Atlantic, March 2017
​David Frum
Born June 30, 1960
Picture
D. Frum

My Book World

Picture
Bosworth, Patricia. The Men in My Life: A Memoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan. New York: HarperCollins, 2017.
 
For the same reasons I enjoyed reading her biography Montgomery Clift years ago, I sucked down Patricia Bosworth’s memoir of her own life. She is not afraid to search out and write the truth of any situation and do it with dignity and empathy for involved parties. Because for about a decade she is an actor, she becomes acquainted with Montgomery Clift personally, and she approaches her subject with honesty and a certain kindness. The same can be said for her book: all of the members of her family are loved ones, but they are also, at times, bad actors who undermine her life. Her father is a narcissistic alcoholic attorney, a closeted homosexual (according to her mother) whose love is not entirely unconditional; he profoundly affects Patricia’s life when he commits suicide. Her mother is a published novelist (Strumpet Wind) whose career stalls and becomes an ambitious stage mother who plays on all Patricia’s insecurities: Patricia’s actions and achievements are never good enough. The relationship that affects Bosworth the most, perhaps, is her brother, Bart.
 
When they are young they establish a special bond, with even their own form of Pig Latin which their parents cannot understand; they share that language for many years until Bart ceases to think it appropriate. A particularly effective tool peppered throughout the book are her continued conversations with Bart’s ghost. Eerie how she makes it seem as if he’s still alive as he advises her. In his teens, her brother is attracted to males and has sex with a couple of them, including a friend at an exclusive boys’ boarding school. There, after they are discovered together, the friend commits suicide, an act from which Bart never recovers. He, too, eventually kills himself before reaching the age of twenty-one. Bosworth’s father and brother are not the only men she writes about in her page-turner; she outlines in detail her love (and sexual) relationships with several different men, including two husbands.
 
She reminisces about her acting career in which she appears on Broadway with the likes of Daniel Massey and Elaine Stritch. The highlight of this period may be when she appears with Audrey Hepburn in a film, The Nun’s Story. Nonetheless, in spite of Bosworth’s success on the stage, she comes to the realization that she can no longer bare her soul in that manner but must establish a writing career instead. And glad we are that she does. Bosworth’s book—taken from her diaries, her notes, but most of all her remembrances—is a stunning read.
 
[I’m still amazed in this day and age how a book produced by one of the top companies in the country can make it through all that scrutiny with a typo:
 
“I was able to slip into the wings just as Bobby begain [sic] belting out ‘I Believe in You,’ the signature number” (350).
 
How many copyeditors overlooked this error and how many times? How many times did the author or her staff herself read the galleys? Amazing.]

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

0 Comments

William Trevor's Final New Yorker Story

6/26/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses twenty years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.
​Lev Grossman
Born June 26, 1969
Picture
L. Grossman

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​
**June 26, 2017, William Trevor, “The Piano Teacher’s Pupil”: Compression is the primary gift of this story in which a woman, Elizabeth Nightingale, takes on a new young pupil whose genius she detects immediately. ¶ Soon after, following each boy’s lesson, Nightingale notices that little items begin to disappear: a snuff box, a porcelain swan, an earring, among a host of others. The thefts compel her to recall others more significant: the sixteen years she has given to a lover who would not leave his wife, the life she sacrifices for her father because he has given his to her. A master can break all the rules—no dialogue, perhaps too much exposition or telling—but Trevor does so with impeccable taste and grace. By story’s end we both adore and pity Miss Nightingale.

NEXT TIME: My Book World
0 Comments

Going Without Can Be Tough

6/23/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.
​David Leavitt
​Born June 23, 1961
Picture
D. Leavitt

My Book World

Picture
​Hijuelos, Oscar. Thoughts Without
     Cigarettes: A Memoir
.
New York:
     Gotham, 2011.

I made few annotations in this book largely because I found it so engrossing I didn’t want to stop to write a note. I’ll do that another time. Mr. Hijuelos is a unique character among writers, among human beings. He is a Cuban-American who suffers a disease in childhood that takes him away from his family for such a long period that he forgets much of the Spanish he’s learned. He suffers his entire life because he cannot fully communicate with his own mother whose English is poor. He suffers from his own self-deprecation, turning down Donald Barthelme’s offer to help Hijuelos enter the graduate writing program at Iowa University. He is also stunned when he later wins highly touted awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Hijuelos shares all the pain and sorrow that other writers may suffer: loss of his father, the slings and arrows of racism (in a very odd twist because of his blond hair and light skin, not being dark enough for some, too Latino for others), initial failures as a fledgling writer. But if he suffers, he also experiences particular joys: being told by those who should know that he has a unique talent, a two-year grant that allows him to live and write in Rome, serious relationships with three different women. Perhaps the title, Thoughts Without Cigarettes, is prescient of his death in 2013. His father died in his mid-fifties of an apparent heart attack. At the age of sixty-two, Hijuelos would drop dead from the same while playing tennis. If he quit smoking the series of cigarettes he’d begun to consume in his youth, it probably did not help him. Sad. It seems that he was a writer’s writer in that he never wrote for fame, often lived from hand to mouth for his art, was not even that impressed with the accolades once the initial euphoria passed because he knew deep down that he once again had to sit his ass in a chair and write, not to make a living, but to make sense of his life.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction

0 Comments

Very PRIZE-WORTHY

6/19/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
When I read a book, I like to be surprised. I don't want to read the same genre formula that I've read a hundred times before. 
​Chet Williamson
Born June 19, 1948

Picture
C. Williamson

New Yorker Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​here to edit.
PictureChristoph Niemann
​***June 19, 2017, Andrew Sean Greer, “It’s a Summer Day”: Arthur Less, a middle-aged American novelist, is flown to Turin, Italy, by the committee of a literary award, to attend the ceremony where he will or will not be awarded the top prize. ¶ Greer’s character, Less, is more by way of his burning wit (too many brilliant examples, like emeralds, to list here). The story is about an underrated writer (by himself as much as critics) who is only attending this ceremony to avoid the wedding of his former lover, Freddy. The story is peppered with bits of backstory about an earlier partner who has won a Pulitzer. Less seems to be among the right crowd, all right, but his ego is not quite buying it, when he delivers credit to his novel’s translator: 

“Less begins to imagine (as the mayor doodles on in Italian) that he has been mistranslated. Or, what is the word? Supertranslated? His novel given to an unacknowledged genius of a poet (Giuliana Senino is her name) who worked his mediocre English into breathtaking Italian. His book was ignored in America, barely reviewed, without a single interview request by a journalist (his publicist said, ‘Autumn is a bad time’), but, here in Italy, he understands he is taken seriously. In autumn, no less” (60). 
What any fine story does, by way of the specific, is to universalize the world, helping fellow human beings understand what it is like to have any part of us, but artistic endeavor in particular, held up to scrutiny by our peers. Greer’s new book, Less, (of which this story exists as the third chapter) is out in July.
Illustrated by Christoph Niemann

NEXT TIME: My Book World
0 Comments

Some Sleepy time Advice

6/16/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.
​Deb Caletti
Born June 16, 1963

Picture
D. Caletti

My Book World

Picture
​Huffington, Arianna. The Sleep Revolution:
      Transforming Your Life, One Night at a

      Time.
New York: Harmony, 2016.
 
I’m not sure why I stayed through to the end on this one. Huffington does provide interesting anecdotes as well as convincing arguments as to why contemporary life (with at least a hundred-year history) does not allow for good sleep habits—including the introduction of devices into our lives. Yet when one reads through her bibliographic notes, one sees many of the sources are more popular-culture in nature rather than hard science. Or if she does cite a strong source, she fails to build a case for its importance. When speaking of dreams, for example, she quotes from an e-mail she’s received from Mary Hulnick, “chief creative officer of the University of Santa Monica, who teaches dream incubation” as part of a “Spiritual Psychology course” (159). Hmmm. Even so, the book managed to hold my attention to what I believe the climax of the book may be, which is Huffington’s discussion of how lack of sleep affects athletic performance. She uses a number of top professional athletes, among scientific sources, to build her case. The rest of the book is a quiet recap of what has come before: sleep is right up there with diet and exercise. In fact, Huffington asserts, the other two don’t mean a thing unless you get the zzzzzs as well, and I would tend to agree with her.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

0 Comments

Showing and Telling

6/12/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
Men who pass most comfortably through the world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts.
​Harriet Martineau
​Born June 12, 1802
Picture
H. Martineau

New Yorker Fiction 2017

***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​here to edit.
PictureOrtiz
***​June 5 and 12, 2017, Curtis Sittenfeld, “Show Don’t Tell”: Ruth Flaherty, early forties, graduate of a writing MFA program at a prestigious Midwestern university, narrates this engaging story. ¶ Sittenfeld captures perfectly the ambiance of what it is like to be accepted into a graduate department of writers, only a fraction of whom are better than the rest: both the cattiness and genuineness of typewritten crits; food that is either hoarded or wasted; competition for fellowships not quite generous enough to live on, only enough to keep from starving as you teach undergrads (ugh) how to write fiction. As Ruth, the only person remaining sober at an after-party thrown for a famous grad of their program, drives this man to the airport following his reading, he apprises her of the “narcissism of small differences”:

“‘Freud stole the concept from an English anthropologist named Ernest Crawley. It explains the infighting among groups whose members have far more in common than not. I’ve always thought that if any two students in the program were co-workers at a big company, they’d become close friends. They’d be thrilled to find another person who cares about what they care about, who thinks about things instead of just sleepwalking. But when you’re in the program there’s such an abundance of kindred spirits to choose from that those same two people might be mortal enemies’” (70).
​When Ruth finally arrives home she learns that she has won one of the four coveted fellowships that will finance her second year—$8,800 (1998)—and at one in the morning she screams near her open mailbox. The only person to share Ruth’s joy is a woman she hates, a fifty-five-year-old Lorraine, who, very mother-like, emerges from her door, and gives Ruth a hug. ¶ If you’ve been thrown in with writers anywhere, you’ve perhaps lived this story. If you’re only thinking of doing so, then this story may just convince you that every minute spent would be worth your time. Sittenfeld’s first collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It, comes out in 2018; her most recent novel, Eligible, was released in April.
Photograph by Carlos Javier Ortiz

NEXT TIME: My Book World
0 Comments

A River That Divides

6/9/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
A really interesting life has embraced everything from the most magnificent exultation to the depths of tragedy. I would say that's tremendous experience—but I wouldn't say enjoyment is an accurate summary of it!
​Marcia Davenport
​Born June 9, 1903
Picture
M. Davenport

New Yorker Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​
PictureCarlos Javier Ortiz
***June 5 and 12, 2017, Will Mackin, “Crossing the River No Name”: Some ​Navy seals in Afghanistan, in 2009, set out to ambush a group of Taliban. ¶ In this rich story the narrator relates two flashbacks, one rather lengthy, which seamlessly portray the complexities of wars and those intrepid souls who fight them. The author creates character more by interior shots and with zingy names such as Hugs and Cooker than by things visual. He creates character when the narrator encounters a vision of the Virgin Mary in a near-drowning situation. The narrative’s climax may occur when Hal, the Big Kahuna, disappears beneath the surface of a river that appears on no map, that virtually disappears in different seasons. Is Hal alive or not? The narrator apparently does not know because even though Hal is his best pal, he must carry out a mission of war. This story—with its rich imagery and figurative language—is the sort I love most, one that carries me into a world I would never encounter first-hand, nor want to, but with great skill Mr. Mackin snatches me up and returns me safely to my seat when he has finished with me. If I were awarding four stars it would receive five. The author’s debut collection, which I can’t wait to read, will come out in March 2018.
Photograph by Carlos Javier Ortiz.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2017

0 Comments

All That Is Clean

6/5/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
A WRITER'S WIT
In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.
​Federico García Lorca
​Born June 4, 1898
Picture
F. Lorca

New Yorker​ Fiction 2017

​***—Excellent
**   —Above Average 
*      —Average ​​
** June 5 and 12, 2017, Sherman Alexie, “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest”: In this compressed story a pious woman named Marie toils as a motel maid for many decades of her sixty-two years. Alexie’s memoir, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me comes out this month.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue 2017
0 Comments
    AUTHOR
    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

    See my profile at Author Central:
    http://amazon.com/author/rjespers


    Richard Jespers's books on Goodreads
    My Long-Playing Records My Long-Playing Records
    ratings: 1 (avg rating 5.00)


    Archives

    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011



    Categories

    All
    Acting
    Actors
    African American History
    Aging
    Alabama
    Alaska
    Aldo Leopold
    Andy Warhol
    Arizona
    Arkansas
    Art
    Atrial Fibrillation
    Authors
    Authors' Words
    Barcelona
    Biography
    Blogging About Books
    Blogs
    Books
    California
    Cancer
    Cars
    Catalonia
    Colorado
    Cooking
    Creative Nonfiction
    Culinary Arts
    Deleting Facebook
    Ecology
    Education
    Environment
    Epigraphs
    Essays
    Feminism
    Fiction
    Fifty States
    Film
    Florida
    Georgia
    Grammar
    Greece
    Gun Violence
    Hawaii
    Heart Health
    Historic Postcards
    History
    Humor
    Idaho
    Iowa
    Journalism
    LGBTQ
    Libraries
    Literary Biography
    Literary Journals
    Literary Topics
    Literature
    Maine
    Massachusetts
    Memoir
    Michigan
    Minnesota
    Mississippi
    M K Rawlings
    Musicians
    Nevada
    New Hampshire
    New Mexico
    New Yorker Stories
    Nonfiction
    North Carolina
    Novelist
    Ohio
    Pam Houston
    Parker Posey
    Photography
    Playwrights
    Poetry
    Politics
    Psychology
    Publishing
    Quotations
    Race
    Reading
    Recipes
    Seattle
    Short Story
    South Carolina
    Spain
    Susan Faludi
    Teaching
    Tennessee
    Texas
    Theater
    The Novel
    Travel
    Travel Photographs
    True Crime
    #TuesdayThoughts
    TV
    U.S.
    Vermont
    Voting
    War
    Washington
    Wisconsin
    World War II
    Writer's Wit
    Writing


    RSS Feed

    Blogroll

    alicefrench.wordpress.com
    kendixonartblog.com
    Valyakomkova.blogspot.com

    Websites

    Caprock Writers' Alliance
    kendixonart.com

    tedkincaid.com
    www.trackingwonder.com
    www.skans.edu
    www.ttu.edu
    www.newpages.com
    www.marianszczepanski.com
    William Campbell Contemporary Art, Inc.
    Barbara Brannon.com
    Artsy.net
WWW.RICHARDJESPERS.COM  ©2011-2025
                    BOOKS  PHOTOS  PODCASTS  JOURNALS  BLOG