Blog - www.richardjespers.com

Egan's 'Candy House' Is Sweet

9/30/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Actually, I love trying to figure out why certain books become hits while others, which may be just as good, have trouble finding an audience.
Jay Asher
Author of Thirteen Reasons Why
Born September 30, 1975

J. Asher

My Book World

Egan, Jennifer. The Candy House: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2022.

This nonlinear novel, similar to Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, is at once fascinating and thrilling, yet challenging to grasp—for me, anyway. As with a roller coaster ride, one must climb aboard and suffer whatever curves come your way. Her title seems to be derived from the following:

Nothing is free! Only children expect otherwise, even as myths and fairy tales warn us: Rumpelstiltskin, King Midas, Hansel and Gretel. Never trust a candy house (125).

The narrative, which begins in 2010, ventures freely into the mid-2020s and back, centers around children born in the 1980s. One Bix Bouton—akin to a real life Steve Jobs—develops a technology he dubs Own Your Unconscious which, to borrow text from the dust jacket, “allows you to access every memory you’ve ever had, and to share your own in exchange for access to the memories of others.” Like Facebook, from a slightly earlier period, OYU seduces a large portion of the world’s population into its powers. Always be careful what you wish for, Egan’s title seems to caution us, because you might not like what you ultimately wind up with. This idea of knowing all of your thoughts is just like sighting a candy house. You won’t always be able to trust what you find inside.

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Heidi Hayes Jacob
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Peter Ackroyd
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Thor Heyerdahl
FRI: My Book World | Ann Patchett's The Dutch House

Sedaris: Always a Carnival

9/23/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Propaganda is that branch of lying which often deceives your friends without ever deceiving your enemies.
Walter Lippmann
Author of America Tomorrow: Creating the Great Society
Born September 23, 1889

W. Lippmann

My Book World

Sedaris, David. A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020). New York: Little, 2021.

Much like Sedaris’s first journal, this one contains a mixture of “Dear Diary” items along with jokes people tell him, along with long anecdotes about people he knows, along with a certain political polemic (which I love), and more, like overheard conversations in public places. If I were teaching creative writing, I would lift portions of both of Sedaris’s diaries to demonstrate how writers can mine their own diaries for topics or scenarios for other works.

In the early part of his first diary, Sedaris is a poor writer. In this one, he is somewhat more solvent and becoming more so all the time. Now, the man is so busy with readings and lectures, he’s always on a plane, and the airport world alone must offer up some of his richest observations. His dated entries from all around the world show a man who is interested in people, what makes them tick, what makes them say the things they do. Not that he always understands, but he is curious enough to record some of the ridiculous, confounding, or even wise things they say to him. Overheard conversations. How his day has gone, if he’s at home in one of two or three dwellings he owns in England or France. How the day has gone for his husband, Hugh. Jokes. Yes, plenty of jokes people take pride in telling him at one of his readings as he is signing books.

“A guy finds a genie who grants him three wishes, adding that everything the man gets, his wife will get double. ‘Great,’ the guy says, and he wishes for a big house. Then he wishes for a car. Finally, he says, ‘Okay, now I want you to beat me half to death” (211).

“It’s night, and a cop stops a car a couple of priests are riding in. ‘I’m looking for two child molesters,’ he says.
The priests think for a moment. ‘We’ll do it!’ they say” (445).

Sedaris’s title is derived from this tidbit dated March 23, 2013, London: Frank and Scott went to an Indian restaurant the other night and took a picture of the menu, which offered what is called “a carnival of snackery” (289). Indeed, that’s what this book is, and the delightful thing is it doesn’t cost you one calorie to consume!

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Myrtle Reed
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Elmer Rice
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Elizabeth Gaskell
FRI: My Book World | Jennifer Egan's The Candy House

'Homesickness' Yields Great Stories

9/2/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
A “good” family, it seems, is one that used to be better.
Cleveland Amory
Author of The Best Cat Ever
Born September 2, 1917

C. Amory

My Book World

Barrett, Colin. Homesickness: Stories. New York: Grove, 2022.

This collection contains ten phenomenal stories, mostly set in Ireland. From one about a man who shoots someone in self-defense to a forty-pager about a professional soccer (futbol) player deciding what to do with his life once his career is over, these stories are vibrant with life. What do I mean? They reveal real people in real situations, often ending quietly, with barely a whimper—like most events in our own lives. Yet we recall such situations over and over again with great delight.

Coming Next:
9/20 TUES: AWW | Elise Broach
9/21 WEDS: AWW | Janet Burroway
9/22 THURS: AWW | David Riesman
9/23 FRI: My Book World | David Sedaris's A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020)

Sylvia Plath's Life: A Red Comet

8/26/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
It’s sad, the time in your life when you can really wear clothes is also the time when you oughtn’t to be wearing any.
Christopher Isherwood
Author of The Berlin Stories
Born August 26, 1904

C. Isherwood

My Book World

Clark, Heather. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. New York: Knopf, 2020.

This impressive biography of the famed poet may be the most comprehensive literary biography I’ve ever read. Clark, who took more than ten years to write this book, utilizes a broad range of sources, including Sylvia Plath’s diaries, letters (some never before seen), journals, and poems. Clark also includes the story of Plath’s famous poet husband, Ted Hughes. It would be like telling the story of one conjoined twin without including the other; that is how inextricably woven their lives are, right up to Plath’s infamous suicide, in 1963. The acknowledgement page and Clark’s notes section are filled with other sources, she having visited England to conduct research as well as interviews, and having combed U.S. libraries from coast to coast.

The book reads more like a novel, achieving a fiction-like narrative arc. We learn of Plath’s early childhood, the loss of her father, her dominating but generous mother. We learn of Plath’s education, particularly her four years at the prestigious Smith College. We learn of her creepy attempt at suicide, almost succeeding, when her near-dead body is discovered in a crawl space beneath the family home, her electroshock therapy at a draconian institution in Massachusetts. We cross the Atlantic where Plath continues her education at Cambridge University, where she meets her match intellectually as well as future husband, Ted Hughes. This narrative continues to build as we learn of her struggle to cope with a male dominated literary life in London. She is alternately elated and deflated as some of her work is accepted with accolades and “her best work” rejected by the likes of the New Yorker as well as prestigious English journals. It would have been a mistake for her to eschew her British education because the Brits seem, at times, more open to her raw style than the Americans.

We live through the Plath-Hughes tempestuous marriage and become acquainted with their two children. Plath’s death comes with fifty pages to go. It is the climax, all right, but it is not the end of Plath’s story. All throughout the biography Clark intersperses lines from Plath’s and Hughes’s work to demonstrate not only biographical elements but fascinating literary observations, as well. But even Plath’s death is deconstructed in such a way that we may understand it differently from earlier biographies (Anne Stevenson’s “famously negative” one, for example). With twenty-twenty hindsight, we see that Plath’s suicide (as many are) is mere minutes away from being another failed attempt. Plath is always, in the damp English climate and because she runs herself ragged, having bouts of a cold or the flu. As a result she takes a number of OTC medications, as well as a merry-go-round of prescription drugs, including antidepressants, sedatives to sleep, other drugs to wake her up so she can work—all of these interacting horribly as a perfect storm to help end her life (some experts understand that those particular antidepressants may have intensified her depression before finally kicking in).

And it isn’t as if she doesn’t try to live. She consults doctors and psychiatrists galore. She corresponds with an American psychiatrist across the Atlantic. She fights like hell to stay out of British psychiatric wards because she is terrified she will be subject to shock therapy again, which she believes, has altered her brain and her life forever. For fans or nonfans alike this biography is a must-read. It generously takes all we knew about Plath before, all the research that has come earlier, and adds or even convincingly contradicts a great deal of the old. I can’t see any biographer attempting to top it for a long time to come. Indeed, the book may finally put her story to rest alongside her grave atop a lonely spot near where her husband grew up at Heptonstall—a simple granite marker worn down now by nearly sixty years of inclement weather.

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Mary Shelley
WEDS: AWW | Eldridge Cleaver
THURS: AWW | Jesse Kellerman
FRI: My Book World | Colin Barrett's Homesickness: Stories

Ms. Brodie Still Sharp As a Tack

8/19/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
A cynic is just a man who found out when he was about ten that there wasn't any Santa Claus, and he's still upset. Yes, there'll be more war; and soon, I don't doubt. There always has been. There'll be deaths and disappointments and failures. When they come, you meet them.
James Gould Cozzens
Author of By Love Possessed
Born August 19, 1903

J. G. Cozzens

My Book World

Sparks, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999 (1961).

If one has seen only the movie version of this book, a fine work in its own right that premiered in 1969 with the inimitable Maggie Smith starring in the main role, one might be lulled into thinking the book to be quite similar. One would be wrong. This short novel set in 1930s Edinburgh, Scotland, impresses me as being an extended prose poem about an intelligent and nonconformist teacher who is yet rather naïve. Brodie eschews the prescribed school curriculum to lecture her female pupils concerning a wide variety of cultural and artistic topics, and yet when she also embraces the likes of fascist leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler, she reflects either a certain naivete or an intellectual dullness. The word “prime” or phrases containing that word appears more than thirty times throughout these brief pages; the phrase “crème de la crème” more than five. Both have a rather fatuous ring to them, “prime” referencing Miss Brodie’s heightened sense of her own refinement and knowledge, and “crème de la crème” indicating the girls she has rather commandeered to follow her—not just for the year they are in her class but for their entire lifetimes: they are the “Brodie set.”

Spark’s structure is an omnisciently meandering one in which she may speak of one child in her adult future, one dying prematurely, another becoming a nun. Very lightly Sparks inserts that the year is 1931 or 1937 or that Ms. Brodie is now forty-three. One knows where one is at all times as if the novel were a sort of hologram. Young Sandy is the only pupil who sees through Jean Brodie’s ways, and early on readers learn that she will bring Brodie down. In the last scene of the film, a wounded Brodie who has been released from her teaching position because of Sandy’s actions screams the word “Assassin!” after her beloved Sandy, but the book ends rather quietly when readers visit Sandy upon her adult position in a nunnery. When asked about her childhood influences, she simply says, “There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime” (137).

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Erin Foster
WEDS: AWW | Howard Zinn
THURS: AWW | Nadine Stair
FRI: My Book World | Heather Clark's Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Career of Sylvia Plath

Young Mungo: A Child Is Abused

8/12/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
I hate those men who would send into war youth to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Author of The Circular Staircase
Born August 12, 1876

M. R. Rinehart

My Book World

Stuart, Douglas. Young Mungo: A Novel. New York: Grove, 2022.

Think about the worst things that happen to you before you turn sixteen. None of the disasters most people experience are as bad as what young Mungo faces in his squalid life in Glasgow, Scotland. And as readers, we live it with him, the mother who both loves and neglects Mungo, the bright sister who has a chance to escape the “housing estate” where they all live in a certain squalor, the bully older brother who tries to toughen up Mungo so that he can survive this life without a father. The mother, whose intentions are not entirely clear, because she is often drunk, sends young Mungo on a weekend trip with two known sex offenders, one old and one in his twenties. This is the strand of the story that perhaps grabs our attention most. In alternating chapters, author Stuart seamlessly weaves this story with Mungo’s falling in love with a neighbor boy his age. The scenes in which they engage are some of the most authentic I believe I’ve ever read concerning adolescent love. Mungo is Protestant, and his friend James is Catholic. Their differences threaten to tear them apart at several points. Mungo’s appellation is no accident. He is named after Saint Mungo, and he is often called to the front of a classroom to read aloud about the myths of Saint Mungo. His favorite myth is the one in which Saint Mungo brings a robin back to life. It is this motif that is reflected later on in young Mungo’s own story, but I’ll let readers discover it for themselves as they devour this important novel about who the weak and the strong really are.

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Ted Hughes
WEDS: AWW | Herta Müller
THURS: AWW | Nicole Krauss
FRI: My Book World | Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

The Tedium of Suffering

8/5/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Conversation . . . is the art of never appearing a bore, of knowing how to say everything interestingly, to entertain with no matter what, to be charming with nothing at all.
Guy de Maupassant
Author of "The Necklace"
Born August 5, 1850

G. de Maupassant

Price, Reynolds. The Promise of Rest. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Price has created what, at times, seems like a tedious novel. And frankly, in one sense it is. The story of a young man suffering a slow death, from AIDS, is both tedious and yet breathlessly fleeting. Millions of lovers (in the parlance of that era) and family members (those who didn’t shrink from caring) in real life have experienced the same tedium that Price re-creates here, and yet once you begin the journey of Wade’s slow demise, you don’t want to leave him behind. Even though this story is over twenty-five years old, it seems transcendent, timeless. Wade’s mother and father who’ve separated. His lover, Wyatt, who kills himself. Wyatt’s sister, Ivory, her quiet yet affirming love for Wade. All of Wade’s aunts and uncles. Secrets! Oh, my, this novel is loaded with them, none of which I shall divulge, but all of them are woven together to create a narrative marking an era that has never really ended—merely shunted aside.

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Philip Larkin
WEDS: AWW | Suzanne Collins
THURS: AWW | Alex Haley
FRI: My Book World | Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo

Amy Tan: Author of Opposites

7/29/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Certainly almost everything we do and think is colored in some way by memes, but it is important to realize that not everything we experience is a meme. If I walk down the street and see a tree, the basic perception that's going on is not memetic.
Susan Blackmore
Author of Ten Zen Questions
Born July 29, 1951

S. Blackmore

My Book World

Tan, Amy. The Opposite of Fate. London: HarperCollins, 2003.

The Opposite of Fate is a joy to read, I would venture, whether you’re a Tan fan or not. The celebrated author modestly shares her wisdom with readers. Wisdom derived from her childhood, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Wisdom derived from a life marred with tragedy (family deaths, physical violence, and murder of a friend). Wisdom derived from her relationships, family and friends alike. Wisdom derived from her courage to try new things (from joining a rock band made up of other famous writers to escaping from a dangerous flood while camping near Lake Tahoe to traveling to China with her mother). Wisdom derived from her trial-and-error career in writing (as most writing careers may be). Wisdom about medicine as she suffers through a long (and undiagnosed) bout of Lyme disease. The book is composed of essays arranged in thematic sections, and some anecdotes or fragments tinkle like little bells of remembrance from one essay to the next, but you don’t mind the repetition because it demonstrates how interrelated all the parts of her singular life are. I wish I’d read it when it was published, but it is still a valuable document in understanding one of our most important American authors.
Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Rose Tremain
WEDS: AWW | Steven Millhauser
THURS: AWW | Helen Thomas
FRI: My Book World | Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest

Bite-Sized Poems Are Good for the Soul

7/22/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Life's sharpest rapture is surcease of pain.
Emma Lazarus
Author of The New Colossus
Born July 22, 1849

E. Lazarus

Summerfield, Ellen, Ed. Bite-sized Poems: An Anthology. Oregon: Independently Published, 2021.

This carefully curated and edited volume of poetry might be the beginning classroom teacher’s dream for teaching poetry. Summerfield, herself a poet, brings together over forty indeed brief poems (one as short as nine words but packed with meaning). Not only does she guide readers lovingly through each poem with thoughtful exegesis but she also provides at the end of each presentation references to YouTube and PBS readings of the poem or a poet’s website so that the curious persons might read on. However, not to limit the book’s appeal to an educational setting alone, it stands alone as one poet’s generous interpretation of a group of disparate but equally enchanting poems—each one a delicious chocolate lifted from the front cover of bite-sized delights: Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Bertolt Brecht, as well as Edna Kovacs and Gwendolyn Brooks, make up just a few of the poets whom she anthologizes.

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Aldous Huxley
WEDS: AWW | Elizabeth Hardwick
THURS: AWW | Malcolm Lowry
FRI: My Book World | Amy Tan's The Opposite of Fate

Her Name Forever

7/15/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Fearlessness is like a muscle. I know from my own life that the more I exercise it the more natural it becomes to not let my fears run me.
Arianna Huffington
Author of On Becoming Fearless...in Love, Work, and Life
Born July 15, 1950

My Book World

Pellegrino, Charles. Her Name, Titanic: The Untold Story of the Sinking and Finding of the Unsinkable Ship. New York: McGraw, 1988.

I’ve been a fan of the Titanic’s story since I was a child. I read every magazine article, every book I could find on the subject—even as an adult I collected books. I watched every film, fiction or documentary. This book, though dated now in some ways, does combine two strands: 1) the eyewitness details left behind by those who were there to witness the sinking: passengers, crew members, children—always the more interesting narrative, to me. Pellegrino also unveils the thread of how oceanographer Robert Ballard locates the Titanic’s remains and visits them in a, for the time (1987), innovative “submarine” equipped with cameras.

The most astounding part of Ballard’s story seems to be that he is so overcome with emotion on seeing the pristine quality of certain artifacts left behind—china, passenger shoes, and other memorabilia—that he has no desire to lift any of it for souvenirs. Rather, he disguises the exact GPS location from journalists and the world, so that the site might remain what it has been since it all came to rest in the icy North Atlantic floor in 1912, and that is a place of memorial. Of course, other parties do locate the ship and make a commercial venture of it, but Ballard’s stance must be the higher ground, in a manner of speaking.

Coming Next:
TUES: AWW | Ethan Canin
WEDS: AWW | Cormac McCarthy
THURS: AWW | Sarah Waters
NEXT FRI: My Book World | Ellen Summerfield's Bite-Sized Poems: An Anthology

'Weird Pig' Talks

7/8/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
I am prepared to believe that a dry martini slightly impairs the palate, but think what it does for the soul.
Alec Waugh
Author of A Spy in the Family
Born July 8, 1898

A. Waugh

My Book World

Foreman, Robert Long. Weird Pig. Cape Girardeau: SEMO P, 2020.

Reading this book is almost like perusing a graphic novel except, as with most reading, readers must imagine the cartoon images themselves. And it may be less scary that way, for Foreman tackles the satirizing of some tough subjects. Industrial farming, something about which a pig (if it could talk . . . and this one does) would have something to say. Creative writing and the publishing business—awash in their own absurdities. Gun violence—a germane topic right now. The character Weird Pig is basically an asshole, but for some reason, we like him and some of his antics. Why? He may give voice to some of our own discontent, some of our own worst impulses either to straighten out society or blast it all to hell. And eventually, Weird Pig does get his in the end, so you wouldn’t want to like him too much.

COMING NEXT:
MON: STRUCTURES OF THE WORLD PHOTOGRAPHY
TUES: AWW | Pablo Neruda
WEDS: AWW | Wole Soyinka
THURS: AWW | Isaac Bashevis Singer
FRIDAY: My Book World | Charles Pellegrino's Her Name, Titanic

England: Island of Last Hopes

7/1/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Discouragement seizes us only when we can no longer count on chance.
George Sand [Amantine Dupin]
Author of Middlemarch
Born July 1, 1804

G. Sand

My Book World

Olson, Lynne. Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War. New York: Random, 2017.

This book ostensibly is about the United Kingdom and its role in World War II, but its story is so inextricably woven with the war on the continent, as well as U.S. involvement, that it becomes a much larger tale. Author Olson writes history in an absorbing fashion by doing two things. She, of course, follows and reports the facts (spending ten years writing this book), but she also unfurls the story with a narrative flair sometimes missing from history books. She achieves the latter by developing major and minor characters so that they are three-dimensional. For example, with regard to some major players—Belgium, Holland, France, and Norway—she helps readers become acquainted with both the strengths and weaknesses of its leaders: Queen Wilhelmina of Holland, Leopold III of Belgium, de Gaulle of France—as they take refuge in London for the duration.

While relating the story of Nazi cruelty and the utter depravity of war, Olson stops to tell “little” stories: that one Czech citizen, Madlenka Korbel, one day grows up to be Madeleine Albright. That fifteen-year-old Audrey Kathleen Ruston, living with her mother in Arnhem, Holland, the site of a major conflict, is so emaciated at the end of World War II that she barely weighs ninety pounds. Nutrition will always be a problem for the girl who is to become actor Audrey Hepburn. Olson quotes Hepburn: “I still feel sick when I remember the scenes . . . . It was human misery at its starkest—masses of refugees on the move, some carrying their dead, babies born on the roadside, hundreds collapsing with hunger” (387). These are the sorts of details that make this book a pleasure to read.

One other thread is particularly poignant, that of Brigadier General John Hackett, “Shan,” originally from Australia but serving the UK. He is paratrooper who is shot down and injured as part of the Arnhem conflict. He is taken in by three Dutch unmarried sisters—Ann, Mien, and Cor de Nooij—and nursed back to health for many months until he can return to England. He is so moved by their love and care and their courage that in years to come, he returns to Arnhem again and again; likewise, he and his wife open their home to the sisters in the UK for future visits. They become family. This chapter is titled “I Was a Stranger and You Took Me In.” It is just one of the many moving stories interlaced with the UK’s status as the “last hope island” of the war. I’m delighted I found time to read this book.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Robert Long Foreman's Weird Pig

Young Gay Man Is 'Railroaded'

6/24/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you. Never excuse yourself.
Henry Ward Beecher
Author of Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Born June 24, 1813

H. W. Beecher

My Book World

Woodruff with His Horse

Crawford, Phillip, Jr. Railroaded: The Homophobic Prosecution of Brandon Woodruff for His Parents’ Murders. Kindle: CreateSpace, 2018.

Full disclosure: I won this Kindle version of Crawford’s book by way of a goodreads.com giveaway. I am providing this review because I do believe it is a narrative worth reading.

This brief book is reminiscent of absorbing feature articles I’ve read in Texas Monthly—stories of true crime set in the Lone Star State. As a gay man who has lived in Texas for over fifty years, I felt drawn to this case I’d never heard of before. Woodruff is a nineteen-year-old boy charged with murdering his parents in their home. Crawford displays a fine grasp of the tenuous legal situation for gays in Texas, and he sets up the facts of the case for readers to see that Brandon Woodruff is wrongly prosecuted and convicted. At the very least the teen should be given a fair trial.

Throughout the book Crawford makes clear, among others, certain facts. A Texas Ranger from Austin is assigned the case, rather than a local or regional official. This Ranger conducts a smear campaign against Brandon because of his participation in a gay social life and for appearing in legitimate pornographic movies, “evidence” that has nothing to do with the case but which prejudices the jury. The Ranger also fails to take advantage of information that does exist, for one, cell phone records that would indicate Brandon is not anywhere near the location at the time of the murders. By such evidence alone, he could not possibly have committed the murders. While some guilty parties never show any emotion when hearing the news of loved one’s murders, reliable witnesses testify that Brandon loves his parents, particularly his father, who has a sympathetic view of his son’s homosexuality—and he is beset with grief from the beginning. Brandon’s sister, who is more temperamentally bent toward anger and violence against their parents than Brandon, is never fully investigated. What about her whereabouts on the night of the murder? Her phone records? A party or parties who might have committed the murders on her behalf? One suspect, an ex-friend of Brandon’s who is vehemently homophobic, lies to Ranger Collins, and Collins conveniently never puts the ex-buddy on the stand at the trial. The Texas Ranger takes the easy way out all around, and Brandon Woodruff, now nearing age thirty-six, still remains in prison, a long life-term ahead of him.

If readers want to help Brandon Woodruff’s cause, they can go to the website freebrandon.org to donate and/or sign a petition to be sent to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. This is a wrong that must be righted and soon. Thanks to Phillip Crawford, Jr. for documenting this case in such a decisive manner.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Lynne Olson's Last Hope Island: Britain, Occupied Europe, and the Brotherhood That Helped Turn the Tide of War

'Swing Time' Swings on a Star

6/17/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Imagine if Reconstruction had actually honored the citizenship of four million freed people—provided the education, political autonomy, and economic wherewithal warranted by their and their ancestors’ hundreds of years of free labor. If, instead of continually re-fighting the Civil War, we had actually moved on to rebuilding a strong, viable South, a South where poor whites, too—for they had been left out as well—could gain access to proper education. Imagine.
Carol Anderson
Author of White Rage
Born on June 17, 1959

C. Anderson

My Book World

Smith, Zadie. Swing Time. New York: Penguin, 2016.

I often make marginal notes throughout a novel I read, but I allowed this one to wash over me instead, primarily because I couldn’t put it down. Swing Time is, in part, a showbiz novel because the narrator, following college, gains employment as a personal assistant for an American pop star ten years her senior, the single-named Aimee. But first readers must learn of this nameless narrator’s early life in London in which her best friend (at the time) is also biracial (her mother black, her father white, whereas the situation is reversed for her friend, Tracey). She and Tracey meet in dance class, and Tracey’s “pig nose” is highlighted numerous times in the beginning so that one never forgets what Tracey is like, both her looks and her demeanor. She is a slovenly, take-no-prisoners, strong-willed female whom the narrator admires, at least to a point. Though Tracey winds up with the “real” career in show business as a dancer, it is the narrator who, for a decade, at least, derives some status by way of a well-paid and exciting career.

The novel makes a big leap when the setting moves from the UK to Africa, where pop star Aimee decides to build a school for children. The narrator is then dragged into a milieu for which she is unprepared. I admire the way in which Smith seamlessly advances the novel with a back-and-forth movement from era to era, from location to location, chapter by chapter, until readers arrive once again at the present day (2018) of cell phones and social media, phenomena lacking during the girls’ childhoods of the early 1980s. The narrator commits one great sin involving her boss, Aimee, and loses her job. She then returns to London to catch up with her mother, a feminist, who has never been the nurturer her father was. A great read that explores contemporary treatment of race, fame, family, and friendship.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Phillip Crawford, Junior's Railroaded: The Homophobic Prosecution of Brandon Woodruff for His Parents' Murders

Whitman Adored, Examined

6/10/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
Saul Bellow
Author of Herzog
Born June 10, 1915

S. Bellow

My Book World

Doty, Mark. What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life. New York: Norton, 2020.

This alternately erudite and yet expressive book is enjoyable on a number of levels. If readers are acquainted with both Doty’s prose and poetry, they know that not a word is out of place or mischosen in any way. Doty’s book is divided into five parts each exploring a facet by which readers might find a way into Walt Whitman’s era, his life, and his poetry. It might be used as a textbook for teaching Whitman, at least as an ancillary source. I am now inspired to go to my shelves and reach for that volume of Whitman, whose work I have only touched the surface of. Intertwined with Doty’s exegeses of Whitman’s work are bits and pieces of Doty’s own life and how, as his title suggests, Whitman’s life and work have influenced him.

I have only one complaint, and that is with W. W. Norton. I’m not a copyeditor, and I don’t look for typographical errors when I read, but at least ten jumped out at me, from subject-verb agreement to putting a space between text and an em dash to repeating two words in a row that should not be repeated. One sentence had the verb agreeing with the object of the preposition instead of the actual subject. Pages 45, 106, 115, 134, 150, 154, 174, 231, 254, 269—in case others should like to find them for themselves. These errors are not the responsibility of the author. Shame on Norton—the last independent press in America. To say the least, the company has done better.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Zadie Smith's Swing Time

Novel Provides Glimpse of the Old West

6/3/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
I worked in Harrods as a sales girl and I was so lazy, I just sat on my arse all day. Now I have huge respect for shop girls. It was boring, so I tried to shoplift things, but we'd always get our bags checked.
Susannah Constantin
Author of
Born June 3, 1962

S. Constantin

My Book World

Turner, Nancy E. These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901. A Novel. New York: Harper, 1998.

This book has remained unread on my shelf a long time, I think, in part, because I would always be put off by the apparent poverty of the title. It belies the intelligence of the narrator and story she has to tell. Set in mostly late 1880s of the Arizona Territories, the novel relates itself in the form a diary, a twenty-year period in the life of a young woman, the man she marries, their children, and almost all related family members. While the frontier adventures are exciting (some unique and some exactly like those found in earlier books), the novel may be limited by two factors. One is the author’s use of first person. Readers mostly receive Sarah Prine’s take on things, a bright but uneducated (for a while) youth. The other may be the form of using a diary. Both features seem to limit the amount or kind of information a novel can tell. On the other hand, the author makes good use of both methods to tell this tale of a young woman faced with many pioneer-like challenges: extremes in weather, battles with natives, sexism, childbirth, premature deaths in the family, and more. It offers a personal touch the third person might not. The diary format strengthens the female point of view which may be lost or obscured by male writers of similar historical fiction or literature. I still believe shelf appeal might have been increased by at least straightening out the grammar of the title. How about These Are My Words?

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Mark Doty's What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life.

A Writer's Wit: Walt Whitman

5/31/2022

My America is still all in the making. It’s a promise, a possible something: it’s to come: it’s by no means here. Besides, what do I care about the material America? America is to me an idea, a forecast, a prophecy.
Walt Whitman
Author of Leaves of Grass
Born May 31, 1819

W. Whitman

FRIDAY: My Book World | Nancy Turner's These Is My Words

Author Loves His Tulip

5/27/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.
John Barth
Author of Lost in the Funhouse
Born May 27, 1930

J. Barth

My Book World

Ackerley, Joe Randolph. My Dog Tulip. With an introduction by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. New York: NYRB, 1999 (1965).

A man in his sixties when he writes this book, Ackerley tells the story of his beloved Alsatian or German Shepherd, Tulip. I began the book thinking Tulip’s story would be broader in context, but I was wrong. A large middle section involves Ackerley’s attempts to mate Tulip properly with another Alsatian. In minute detail, and in a way that only the British can do, he writes delicately about an indelicate subject: Tulip’s female parts and how they operate every time she is on heat (a term he deems crude but still uses). A swelling this, and dripping that. But overall, the book is an unsentimental portrait of what according to Ackerley is an extraordinary Alsatian bitch whom he loves very much.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Nancy Turner's These Is My Words

Rosshalde: Story of a Child

5/20/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
A working definition of fathering might be this: fathering is the act of guiding a child to behave in ways that lead to the child's becoming a secure child in full, thus increasing his or her chances of being happy and fruitful as a young adult.
Clyde Edgerton
Author of Walking Across Egypt
Born May 20, 1944

C. Edgerton

My Book World

Hesse, Hermann. Rosshalde. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Bantam, 1956 (1914).

Spoiler: This novel is primarily about the death of a young child, a son named Pierre. But it is also about the death of a family, how a husband and wife drift apart and divide their love between two sons, the elder “belonging” to the wife and Pierre belonging to his father. But there isn’t much belongingness for any of the family members. The book overall is about the end of their life together at the estate called Rosshalde, an expansive property, a mansion, that seems to have a life of its own. An enchanting but sad read.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip

Highsmith's Diaries and Notebooks

5/13/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Take it from someone who fled the Iron Curtain: I know what happens when you give the Russians a green light.
Madeleine Albright
Author of Fascism: A Warning
Born May 13, 1937

M. Albright

My Book World

Von Planta, Anna, ed. Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks. With an introduction by Joan Schenkar. New York: Liveright, 2021.

This more than fifty-year compendium of Highsmith’s 8,000 pages of diary and notebook entries is a stunning read—particularly if you savor the voyeuristic practice of reading someone’s private thoughts. Her diary entries are brutally honest about everything from her current girlfriend(s) with whom she is madly in love to resentments toward her mother, estranged father, and stepfather. Though bright enough to graduate from Barnard, she never quite masters the art of achieving a meaningful love relationship; her tone seems the same for fifty years. I can’t understand why this relationship has failed. And yet, I believe she does know why: her profession requires much alone time, which is not compatible with a needy lover.

Her notebooks, on the other hand, are about her current and proposed works, sometimes a poem here and there. She also talks business. About her agent(s), once her sales go international. Her publishers. Friendships, lasting ones at that, with a broad range of writers. Strong female writers (mostly part of a lesbian group of professionals) mentor Highsmith on how to navigate the heady waters of being a single woman sometimes writing about being queer. Early on, when she is young, she has sex and “love” relationships with a few men, but none of them is every satisfying.

What may be most fascinating is to watch how her life and living influence particular books. The Ripley series of five novels has such an authentic, European backdrop because besides being multilingual, Highsmith lives in Europe much of her life. Still, having been born in Fort Worth, Texas, she does return there to visit once her parents move back from New York. Yet she harbors deep resentments against her abusive mother, who lives to be ninety-five (PH nearly perceives it as a punishment), and, because of her own health problems, fails to visit upon her mother’s own funeral. A sad but triumphant ending for a triumphant but oft-times sad and lonely life. If readers have time, it is well worth theirs to read these 1,000 pages, especially if they’re curious about the writer who authored Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series of five novels, a total of thirty-two books.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hermann Hesse's Rosshalde.

Latinos Love Kissing Stories: Bésame Mucho

5/6/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment . . . . Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it.
Martha C. Nussbaum
Author of Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach
Born May 6, 1947

M. C. Nussbaum

My Book World

Manrique, Jaime, ed. With Jesse Dorris. Bésame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction. New York: Painted Leaf, 1999.

On my shelf for a long time, I finally took this collection down and enjoyed most of the stories very much. Among the best, I believe, are Manrique’s “Señoritas in Love,” “What’s Up, Father Infante?”, a gripping story by Miguel Falquez-Certain, and “Ruby Díaz” by Al Luján. The entire collection blends together a beautiful chorus of gay Latino voices, from South America to New York to California. So much that the non-Latino community has to learn what gay Latino men face with regard to their families, their communities, and their relationship to the Roman Catholic Church. They face immense pressures to conform to cultural norms, even more so than the Anglo population, I would dare say. Kudos to these men for sharing their stories by way of lively and enlightening fiction. It never dates.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Anna Van Planta, Ed. of Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995

Meridian of Blood Still flows

4/29/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.
Humphrey Carpenter
Author of J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography
Born April 29, 1946

H. Carpenter

My Book World

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian: Or The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage, 1985.

It might be that McCarthy brings to fruition that which Hemingway and Fitzgerald could not—due not only to publishing constraints concerning swear words and graphic violence but also the reins the authors may have held tight on themselves. The makings of complete literary honesty were there via Hemingway’s forthright sentences, at times extended to paragraph length (with little inner punctuation) and Fitzgerald’s fortitude in portraying the brutality of capitalism’s clutches on early twentieth-century America. But in this novel, McCarthy returns to the latter half of the nineteenth century of the West to extend his page-long sentences lyrically to rival the two authors mentioned before. And he does so in a way that somewhat softens the inherent mayhem of this novel.

At first, I had some difficulty in following the plot: that a sixteen-year-old Tennessean (the kid) ventures to the Southwest to see what’s in store for him there. The kid is tough, though, and becomes tougher as time passes. He joins a band of men who seek to scorch the earth of natives and anybody else with dark skin (the N word, due to Twain’s use of it in his books, seems to be used without restraint by these characters). But as the book shifts from one episode of killing to another across this physical and moral wasteland, I sense that the narrative is largely impressionistic. I am reminded of Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage—the wildly episodic nature of war—for that’s what this book is about, the White Man’s war to tame the West and all its human and animal critters.

Other than superficial features, the characters, as such, show little traditional development, but that may be McCarthy’s intent. These killers act as a single body, it would seem. In fact, little tolerance for the individual exists here. You act with the others, or you are fighting for your own life. And as an impressionistic work can be dreamlike in which a figure returns to you dream after dream, these characters keep running into each other, regardless of the miles and days or months between them. They can’t seem to remove themselves, if they should desire to, from this wanton way of life or death. And in most cases, it is the latter that guides them through their days heading toward McCarthy’s oft-cited orange sunset or that blood meridian.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Jaime Manrique & Jesse Dorris's Bésame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction

Kicked Out of Your Country

4/22/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita . . . . “I am come Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
Julius Robert Oppenheimer
Author of Uncommon Sense
Born April 22, 1904

J. R. Oppenheimer

My Book World

Batsha, Nishant. Mother Ocean Father Nation: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2022.

I received this book by entering a goodreads.com giveaway sponsored by the publisher, Ecco (HarperCollins). A galleys edition, this book is scheduled to be released June 2022, so it may be subject to revision depending on its prepublication reception.

The novel is set in a nameless South Pacific Island in the 1980s. Said island is occupied by “Nativists” and “Indians.” When a military coup occurs, putting the Nativists in power, life becomes challenging for the Indians (their ancestors plopped there several generations earlier). The natives claim that Indians have stolen all the jobs, the property that should be theirs. From the Indian perspective, they themselves have worked industriously as farmers and merchants to better their lives, and have gained a certain amount of wealth. One family is split apart, when the only daughter, Bhumi, two years into her university career on the island, must escape to the United States to begin a new life. This leaves her brother, Jaipal, and her parents behind. Their father is an alcoholic who owns his own small grocery, and their mother is a strong but quiet woman nearly worn down by her husband’s abuse. Jaipal’s life is complicated by the fact that he is gay, against which there exists an official stricture. If he is to meet anyone, he gathers with others of his ilk in “hotels” (largely abandoned one must assume) at night with no lights, only their widening irises as they become accustomed to the dark (nice metaphor). Bhumi’s life in northern California is no picnic either. She applies for asylum with the U.S. government but will hear nothing for months and months. In the meantime, to support herself as a would-be student (she audits classes) she works as a nanny for an Indian family. Even so, the woman who hires her is condescending, and the child she must care for is a brat. She ultimately leaves. To tell how the plot is resolved would be to spoil the ending, which is a realistic yet satisfying one.

Nishant Batsha’s writing is commendable, combining excellent plotting in which there is little or no coincidence; most events seem to lead by way of a natural cause and effect to the next event. His characterization is satisfying, he releasing more and more information about characters as time passes. Readers have a sense of what they look like, who they are. He tackles the subjugation of one group by another (hinting of a genocide to come if the last 50,000 Indians do not leave the island when ordered to) with sensitivity and warmth. It provides a certain resonance for our own times, consider what Russia is doing in Ukraine, and what has happened to people of color in our own country for centuries. I wish Mr. Batsha good luck with Mother Ocean Father Nation. It is a new must-read.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Cormac McCarthy's Novel, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

'The American' Never Changes

4/15/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
Dogmatizing about punctuation is exactly as foolish as dogmatizing about any other form of communication with the reader. All such forms depend on the kind of thing one is doing and the kind of effect one intends to produce.
Henry James
Author of The American
Born April 15, 1843

H. James

My Book World

James, Henry. The American. With an introduction by R. P. Blackmur. New York: Dell, 1960 (1877).

Sorry to say, but this is the first book of Henry James that I have read. I expect to read others. Set mainly in Europe, the novel concerns the American character, under much scrutiny in the nineteenth century. Briefly, Christopher Newman, thirty-six, takes great advantage of his earned wealth as a canny businessman to travel the world, beginning with Paris. He is offered the opportunity to join a financially failing aristocratic family by marrying a young widow whose first marriage was arranged by her parents. After being smitten with this woman, Newman is then forbidden to marry her by her mother and brother. It may or may not have anything to do with a deep dark family secret. But the rest of the narrative is more or less how Newman comes to terms with not getting what he wants, having his heart broken, as we say.

The book’s language seems fresh, even now, almost 150 years after publication. James reverts to no clichés. His narration is a rich mixture of the American, the British, and French idiom. His characters’ names seem symbolic but not obvious: Newman (from a new country); Mrs. Bread (a servant who spends a lifetime nurturing the woman Newman is to marry); Bellegarde (nice guard, the family “guarding” their wealth, their name, their history). James may depend a bit too much on coincidence, in that often a character who has disappeared for a number of chapters seems to appear out of nowhere, particularly, when Newman leaves Paris for London and there runs into a young woman and her father who are present in the early part of the novel. This incident could occur, but it seems unlikely, yet as readers we buy it by way of the author’s convincing method. Although Newman is brash, he’s brash in his own manner, not being subject to stereotype, and his character does become transformed throughout the novel. By observing the best and worst of European and American cultures, he comes to see himself lodged in a larger context. He accepts the fact that with regard to this one event, losing his fiancée to a convent, he cannot control his life. Wealth means little, an ineffective salve for his eternal ache.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Nishant Batsha's Novel, Mother Ocean Father Nation

Freya: An Independent Woman

4/8/2022

A WRITER'S WIT
The artist who really creates something creates it forever, but the scholar is at the mercy of expanding knowledge and changing habits of thought.
C. M. Bowra
Author of The Romantic Imagination
Born April 8, 1898

C. M. Bowra

My Book World

Quinn, Anthony. Freya. New York: Europa, 2017.

This novel, full of twists and turns, could perhaps, only have been written by a Brit—someone trained in reading and writing wordsmithing-worthy work. The plotting is superb. Characterization sparkling. Quinn gives readers the proper clues, subtle though they may be, and astute readers store them away and can say (or not), I knew it. I knew it was him. Two young women, the titular Freya and Nancy, meet at Oxford during WWII and develop a lasting friendship. But it is not an easy alliance. They both date the same Oxford boy who eventually marries his second choice of the two, Nancy. Freya realizes he is a scoundrel, but her friend can’t see it, not at first. There is a pattern of betrayal among these three characters, each deception crescendoing into a climax that may blow your bobby socks off. Spoiler: Only one false note seems to prevail and that is Freya, in the end, realizes she loves her friend, not in a platonic manner, but as a lover. This does not come out of nowhere; Quinn does subtly, perhaps too subtly, drop breadcrumb clues along the way, but there seems to be no inner struggle for Freya, no clues to the character herself that she could be a lesbian.

Others might argue that the author does inform. After all, Freya puts career ahead of all; she wishes not to marry (while having lots of sex with men) or have children; she blasts off into her life in any direction she wants with little regard for family or friends. She only has one other physical relationship with a woman, and it is in the context of a drunken orgy in which any woman might have sex with another woman. Again, very subtle. And perhaps it is as it should be. The period is late 1940s to late 1960s, a time of awakening, an explorative era in which women, even adventurous ones like Freya, may not know who they are inside and must be whacked up the side of the head by life itself to understand who they are.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Henry James's The American